US Department of Justice says company wrongly claimed law meant it could only hire citizens and permanent residents.
SpaceX, the rocket company owned by Elon Musk, has been sued by the United States government for allegedly discriminating against asylum seekers and refugees in its hiring practices.
SpaceX wrongly claimed that the company could only hire US citizens and permanent residents due to export control laws, dissuading asylum seekers and refugees from applying for jobs, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a statement on Thursday.
While SpaceX must comply with legal restrictions on the shipment of certain goods and technologies overseas, US law does not require companies to treat asylum seekers and refugees differently than citizens or green card holders, the DOJ said.
The justice department said it would ask the courts to impose civil penalties on SpaceX and seek backpay for asylum seekers and refugees who were deterred from applying for jobs or denied employment.
“Our investigation found that SpaceX failed to fairly consider or hire asylees and refugees because of their citizenship status and imposed what amounted to a ban on their hire regardless of their qualification, in violation of federal law,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the justice department’s Civil Rights Division said.
“Our investigation also found that SpaceX recruiters and high-level officials took actions that actively discouraged asylees and refugees from seeking work opportunities at the company. Asylees and refugees have overcome many obstacles in their lives, and unlawful employment discrimination based on their citizenship status should not be one of them.”
SpaceX did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Musk, one of the world’s richest people, founded SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of reducing the costs of space missions and facilitating future interplanetary travel.
US officials allege Tornado Cash facilitated $1bn in money laundering transactions for North Korea’s Lazarus Group.
The United States has charged two cofounders of the cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash with money laundering and other crimes a year after authorities banned the Russian-founded platform over its alleged support of North Korean hackers.
Roman Semenov and Roman Storm have been charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to commit sanctions violations, and conspiracy to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business, the US justice department said in a statement on Wednesday.
Storm, a naturalised US citizen, was arrested in Washington state on Wednesday. Semenov, a Russian national, has yet to be taken into custody.
Alexey Pertsev, a third cofounder, was arrested in the Netherlands in August last year on money laundering charges.
US officials have accused Tornado Cash, which was sanctioned by the US treasury last year, of facilitating more than $1bn in money laundering transactions and laundering hundreds of millions of dollars for the hacking outfit Lazarus Group, which has been implicated in funding North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme.
“While publicly claiming to offer a technically sophisticated privacy service, Storm and Semenov, in fact, knew that they were helping hackers and fraudsters conceal the fruits of their crimes,” US Attorney Damian Williams said.
“Today’s indictment is a reminder that money laundering through cryptocurrency transactions violates the law, and those who engage in such laundering will face prosecution.”
Separately, the US treasury announced sanctions against Semenov for his alleged support of Lazarus Group.
Crypto mixing services like Tornado Cash, which was launched in 2019, allow crypto users to conceal the origins of their funds by mixing various assets in exchange for a fee. Mixing services can be used by both ordinary users concerned about privacy and criminal actors seeking to hide ill-gotten gains.
Crypto advocates have strongly criticised the ban on Tornado Cash as an overreach that infringes on people’s legitimate expectations of privacy.
Brian Klein, a lawyer representing Storm, said he was disappointed that his client had been charged for helping to develop software “based on a novel legal theory with dangerous implications for all software developers”.
“Mr Storm has been cooperating with the prosecutors’ investigation since last year and disputes that he engaged in any criminal conduct,” Klein said. “There is a lot more to this story that will come out at trial.”
Semenov’s legal representatives could not be reached for comment. Pertsev’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The first co-defendants indicted alongside former US President Donald Trump this month over a campaign to overturn the 2020 United States election results in Georgia have surrendered at a jail in Atlanta.
Scott Hall, a bail bondsman and Republican poll watcher in Georgia’s Fulton County, and former Trump lawyer John Eastman surrendered on Tuesday morning to face the charges against them.
Prosecutors in the southern US state indicted Trump and 18 co-defendants last week, using a law typically associated with mobsters to accuse the group of plotting to “unlawfully change the outcome” of the 2020 vote.
Hall has been accused of being involved in a voting systems breach that prosecutors say took place in Coffee County, southeast of Atlanta, in early 2021, while Eastman is accused of being instrumental in a plan to keep Trump in power.
“I am here today to surrender to an indictment that should never have been brought,” Eastman said in a statement released through his lawyers on Tuesday morning, denying any wrongdoing in the case.
“I am confident that, when the law is faithfully applied in this proceeding, all of my co-defendants and I will be fully vindicated,” he said.
[Al Jazeera]
Georgia prosecutors have given the co-defendants until Friday to voluntarily surrender to the Fulton County Jail, where authorities will take their photographs, fingerprints and personal information.
Trump, who has denied any wrongdoing in the case, has said he plans to turn himself in on Thursday.
“Can you believe it? I’ll be going to Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday to be ARRESTED by a Radical Left District Attorney, Fani Willis,” the former president wrote on his Truth Social platform this week.
Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican Party’s 2024 presidential nomination, has repeatedly hit out against Georgia officials, accusing them of conducting a “witch hunt” that aims to derail his re-election bid.
The Georgia case marks the second indictment against Trump over 2020 election interference, and the fourth time he has been criminally charged so far this year.
He was indicted on federal election interference charges in early August, as well as on federal charges of mishandling classified documents in June. He also faces a state-level prosecution in New York linked to a hush-money payment made to a porn star.
Trump pleaded not guilty in the first three cases and is expected to do the same in the Georgia indictment, which came after a years-long investigation into efforts by Trump and his allies to alter the presidential election results in the state.
The probe was launched in January 2021 after Trump asked Georgia’s top election official to “find 11,780 votes” to turn the election in his favour after his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, had won.
The Georgia indictment accuses Hall, the bail bondsman, of taking part in a conspiracy to illegally access voter data in early January 2021.
CNN reported on Tuesday morning that Hall had signed a bond agreement earlier this week and “should be released after he is processed at the jail”. That bond agreement requires Hall to report to pre-trial supervision every 30 days.
Eastman, a former dean of Chapman University law school in Southern California, was a close adviser to Trump in the run-up to the January 6, 2021 riot at the US Capitol, where a mob of Trump supporters sought to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s election victory.
Eastman wrote a memo laying out steps Vice President Mike Pence could take to interfere in the counting of electoral votes while presiding over Congress’ joint session on January 6 in order to keep Trump in office.
The indictment also accuses Eastman and others of pushing to put in place a slate of “alternate” electors falsely certifying that Trump won, and of trying to pressure Pence into rejecting or delaying the counting of legitimate electoral votes for Biden.
John Eastman (left) gestures next to former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani at a rally in Washington, DC just before the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021 [File: Jim Bourg/Reuters]
The agreement set out strict rules for Trump’s behaviour in the lead-up to the trial, barring him from making any “direct or indirect thread” against those involved in the case, among other things.
“The Defendant shall perform no act to intimidate any person known to him or her to be codefendant or witness in this case or to otherwise obstruct the administration of justice,” the bond order reads.
Former president, who faces several court cases, claims he is so well known among the public, he does not need to participate.
Former United States President Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in the 2024 presidential election, has confirmed he will not join this week’s Republican primary debates.
Trump has for months suggested he would skip Wednesday night’s debate in the midwestern city of Milwaukee, arguing that he was well-known among the US public so it did not make sense to give his Republican rivals a chance to attack him.
On Sunday, a CBS poll showed he was the preferred candidate for 62 percent of Republican voters, with his closest rival Florida Governor Ron DeSantis at 16 percent. The other candidates in the party’s race for the nomination had less than 10 percent support.
“The public knows who I am & what a successful Presidency I had,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform, citing issues such as energy, border security and the military. “I WILL THEREFORE NOT BE DOING THE DEBATES!”
The New York Times reported last week that Trump had sat for a taped interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, which was expected to be posted online on Wednesday in a bid to upstage his rivals.
Trump’s absence from this week’s debate could leave DeSantis the focus of attacks from other candidates looking to position themselves as the primary alternative to the former president. Other candidates include former Vice President Mike Pence, Trump’s United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott.
The winner of the Republican nomination will take on Democratic President Joe Biden in the November 2024 election.
DeSantis’s campaign spokesperson, Andrew Romeo, said the Florida governor was looking forward to being in Milwaukee to share his vision for a possible presidency.
“No one is entitled to this nomination, including Donald Trump. You have to show up and earn it,” Romeo said on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Earlier this month, Trump was indicted in the state of Georgia on charges of racketeering and a string of election crimes after a two-year investigation into his efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat to Biden.
The former president also faces charges in three other cases in New York, Washington, DC, and Florida.
Trump has claimed he is the victim of a “witch hunt”.
The Georgia prosecutor has given Trump until August 25 to surrender himself to authorities.
The Category 4 hurricane is anticipated to make landfall in the Mexican state of Baja California before moving north.
The National Hurricane Center in the United States has issued its first-ever tropical storm watch for the southern tip of California as Hurricane Hilary approaches.
The watch, issued on Friday, indicates that tropical storm conditions — including rough seas, heavy rains and winds up to 117 kilometres per hour (73 miles per hour) — are possible within the next two days.
But the designation also makes history in California, a state which, despite its long coastline, has not seen a tropical storm strike in nearly 84 years.
“It is rare — indeed nearly unprecedented in the modern record — to have a tropical system like this move through Southern California,” Weather Channel specialist Greg Postel told CBS News.
Hurricane Hilary produced strong winds and high waters in Mexico’s Colima state on August 17 [Proteccion Civil Estatal Colima via X/Reuters Handout]
Hurricane set to hit Mexico
Currently a powerful Category 4 storm, Hilary has also prompted a hurricane warning along the Baja California peninsula in Mexico, where it is expected to make landfall on Saturday night into Sunday morning.
The cyclone strengthened rapidly on Thursday, reaching the second-highest category on the five-tier Saffir-Simpson scale by Friday. Meteorologists recorded sustained winds of 230km/h (145mph), some gusts going even higher.
In response to the approaching storm, the government of Baja California suspended classes, postponed sporting events and closed ports to small-vessel traffic along the affected area, as coastal waves reached heights of up to 7 metres (23ft).
Marina del Pilar, the state governor of Baja California, also called for residents in vulnerable areas to seek shelter elsewhere.
The hurricane warning extended from Punta Abreojos to Punta Eugenia, an area known for its wildlife refuge and fishing towns which juts into the Pacific Ocean around the midsection of the Baja California peninsula.
But the hurricane is projected to continue northwards to more densely populated areas. The US National Hurricane Center warned of possible flash flooding, along with other hazards.
“A dangerous storm surge is likely to produce coastal flooding along the western Baja California peninsula,” the centre explained. “The surge will be accompanied by large and destructive waves.”
Hurricane Hilary is projected to produce strong winds, heavy rain and storm surge as it approaches Mexico’s coastline [Proteccion Civil Estatal Colima via X/Reuters Handout]
A California rarity
By Sunday, Hurricane Hilary is projected to weaken to tropical-storm strength as it approaches the US-Mexico border. It is not yet clear whether the storm will make landfall.
Nevertheless, California cities like San Diego and Los Angeles are bracing for heavy rains and winds, with isolated areas expected to receive up to 25cm (10 inches).
California has a relatively sparse history with tropical storm systems. Cold currents travel south along its coast, making conditions unfavourable for tropical storms, and winds tend to push them westward.
“It has been a very long time since an actual intact tropical-storm-level tropical cyclone has made landfall anywhere in California,” climate scientist Daniel Swain said in a presentation on Wednesday, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.
The last time a tropical storm made landfall was in September 1939, when a tropical system called El Cordonazo struck near Long Beach, California, as part of a string of storms.
Newspapers put the death toll as high as 93 people as the storm caught many residents unaware. Some drowned in the Pacific. Others died as a result of the flooding, as El Cordonazo brought record rainfall.
More recently, California has experienced the remnants of cyclones, including 2022’s Hurricane Kay, which sent bands of rain into the state after weakening to a tropical storm.
But a direct hit remains a rarity in California, which recently emerged from a years-long drought as a series of atmospheric rivers walloped the state from late December through March.
Air force spokesperson Yuriy Ihnat says F-16 warplanes will not be part of Ukraine’s defence during the coming ‘autumn and winter’ period.
Ukraine has lobbied persistently to be provided with US-made F-16 fighter jets, but the warplanes will not be part of Ukraine’s defence against Russian forces during the coming “autumn and winter” months, a spokesperson for the air force said.
Ukrainian air force spokesperson Yuriy Ihnat said late on Wednesday night that his country had “big hopes” for the deployment of F-16s as part of the country’s defences against invading Russian forces.
“It’s already obvious we won’t be able to defend Ukraine with F-16 fighter jets during this autumn and winter,” Ihnat told a joint telethon broadcast by Ukrainian channels.
“We had big hopes for this plane, that it will become part of air defence, able to protect us from Russia’s missiles and drones terrorism,” Ihnat said.
Western allies were initially reluctant to provide Kyiv with advanced warplanes, fearing the provision of new fighter jets might trigger a direct confrontation between the US-backed NATO military alliance and Moscow.
That sentiment changed when US President Joe Biden signalled at the Group of Seven summit in May in Japan that training programmes for Ukrainian pilots in the operation of F-16s could begin.
Last month, Ukraine’s Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov said F-16 training would begin in Romania this month. The minister also said he hoped the training would not last longer than six months and the warplane would be in action by then.
Despite the announced training of pilots, neither the US nor other allies of Kyiv have yet announced a timeframe for the supply of actual F-16 planes.
Separately on Wednesday night, Zelenskyy said Kyiv would “significantly” increase drone production, stressing the importance of unmanned aerial vehicles in defending his country against Russia’s invasion.
I held a Staff meeting today. Everything we discussed in our combat brigades is now part of the work of the General Staff, officials, and the Staff. We are not only working with partners but also increasing Ukrainian production several times to meet the needs of our warriors. pic.twitter.com/miBShs4WnS
Recently back from visits to troops fighting on the front lines in the east of the country, Zelenskyy said troops “first ask about drones, electronic warfare, and military air defence”.
“Drones are the eyes and protection on the front line. Of different ranges, for different purposes. Drones are a guarantee that people will not have to pay with their lives when drones can be used,” he said.
Maui authorities have confirmed 106 deaths as painstaking recovery and identification work continues in the charred disaster zone.
A week after wildfires ravaged Hawaii’s resort town of Lahaina, search and rescue efforts on Maui island continue, with officials saying that the death toll has risen to 106.
“Currently, we have identified three individuals who are pending next of kin notification. At the time of this release, there have been 106 human remains recovered, awaiting identification,” the office of Maui County said in a statement on Tuesday.
“We offer our deepest condolences to the families who are beginning to receive notifications about their loved ones,” Mayor Richard Bissen was quoted as saying in the statement.
State Governor Josh Green warned on Tuesday that the death toll from last week’s inferno on the island of Maui – already the deadliest US wildfire in more than a century – would grow significantly, urging Hawaiians to gird for a number that could be two or three times its present level.
The US Department of Health and Human Services deployed a team of coroners, pathologists and technicians along with exam tables, X-ray units and other equipment to identify victims and process remains.
Officials said they had collected DNA samples from 41 people whose relatives were missing. The island’s police chief has said many of the bodies are so badly charred that they are unrecognisable, such was the ferocity of the blaze.
A charred boat lies in the scorched waterfront after wildfires in Lahaina, Hawaii [Mason Jarvi/Handout via Reuters]
“It’s going to be a very, very difficult mission,” Greene said. “And patience will be incredibly important because of the number of victims.”
The county said in a statement that Robert Dyckman, 74, and Buddy Jantoc, 79 were among the dead, the first people to be named. A further three victims have been identified, the county wrote, and their names will be released once they are identified.
Residents desperate to get back to check on the homes they fled have expressed frustration at bans that have prevented people from getting into the town of Lahaina.
Officials warned of the dangers of unstable buildings and potential airborne toxic chemicals in the area and said on Monday that one arrest for trespassing had been made.
More than 2,200 buildings were damaged or destroyed by fire, with a total of more than 3,000 buildings damaged by fire or smoke or both.
A police placard system that was supposed to let people back into Lahaina descended into chaos on Monday, when it was suspended an hour after starting.
Green, the state governor, warned against any attempt at a land grab in the town’s devastated remains, as locals fret that deep-pocketed developers might take advantage of people’s desperation and try to buy up plots that can be turned into luxury housing or more lucrative short-term rentals.
“Our goal is to have a local commitment – forever – to this community, as we rebuild,” he said.
“So we will be making sure that we do all that we can to prevent that land from falling into the hands of people from the outside.”
The exact cause of the blazes is being investigated and questions are being asked about authorities’ preparedness and response to the catastrophe.
Some fire hydrants ran dry in the early stages of the wildfire, and multiple warning systems either failed or were not activated.
A class-action lawsuit has been filed against Hawaiian Electric, the state’s biggest power firm, claiming the company should have shut off its power lines to lower the risk of fire.
Fani Willis, a Georgia district attorney, opened her investigation into Donald Trump based on the release of a recording of a January 2021 phone call between Trump and Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Trump suggested during the call that Raffensperger, a Republican and the state’s top elections official, could help “find” the votes needed to overturn his narrow loss to Democrat Joe Biden.
More than two years later, the indictment brought on Monday by a grand jury went far beyond that phone call, alleging a web of crimes committed by Trump and others.
Willis used Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, law to charge Trump and his associates for allegedly participating in a wide-ranging conspiracy to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.
Here’s a look at how the law works:
What is RICO and how does it apply to Trump, allies?
The federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act originated in 1970 as a tool to fight organised crime. The law enabled prosecutors to target people in positions of authority within a criminal organisation, not just lower-level people doing the dirty work.
But its use was never meant to be limited exclusively to organised crime.
Within a few years of the federal law taking effect, states began passing their own RICO laws.
The US Supreme Court noted in a 1989 opinion that the law was drafted “broadly enough to encompass a wide range of criminal activity, taking many different forms and likely to attract a broad array of perpetrators”.
Generally speaking, RICO laws allow prosecutors to charge multiple people who commit separate crimes while working towards a common goal.
What does Georgia’s RICO law say?
Georgia’s RICO Act, adopted in 1980, makes it a crime to participate in, acquire or maintain control of an “enterprise” through a “pattern of racketeering activity” or to conspire to do so.
It’s important to note that the alleged scheme does not have to have been successful for a RICO charge to stick.
An “enterprise” can be a single person or a group of associated individuals with a common goal.
“Racketeering activity” means to commit, attempt to commit – or to solicit, coerce or intimidate someone else to commit – one of more than three dozen state crimes listed in the law.
At least two such acts are required to meet the standard of a “pattern of racketeering activity,” meaning prosecutors have to prove that a person has engaged in two or more related criminal acts as part of their participation in an enterprise to be convicted under RICO.
The US Supreme Court has said that federal RICO allegations must show continuity, that is to say, a series of related underlying acts over an extended period, not just a few weeks or months. But the Georgia Supreme Court has made clear there is no such requirement in the state law.
Why use the RICO statute?
“I’m a fan of RICO,” Willis said during a news conference in August 2022 as she announced a RICO indictment against more than two dozen alleged gang members.
Willis has said jurors want to know all the facts behind an alleged crime and that a RICO indictment enables prosecutors to provide a complete picture of all the alleged illegal activity.
A narrative introduction allows prosecutors to tell a story that can include a lot of detailed information that might not relate to specific crimes but is relevant to the broader alleged scheme.
RICO charges also carry a heavy potential sentence that can be added on top of the penalty for the underlying acts.
In Georgia, it’s a felony conviction that carries a prison term of five to 20 years; a fine of $25,000 or three times the amount of money gained from the criminal activity, whichever is greater; or both a prison sentence and a fine.
What are the challenges in using the RICO statute?
J Tom Morgan used the Georgia RICO statute to prosecute a corrupt sheriff when he was the district attorney in DeKalb County, which neighbours Fulton County. He said one challenge is explaining to a jury what the RICO law is and how it works.
“Everybody knows what a murder case is, what a rape case is, what a theft case is. But RICO is not in the everyday vernacular,” he said. “You don’t see a RICO charge on a television show about crime.”
Does Willis have previous experience with RICO cases?
When Willis was an assistant district attorney in the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office, she was a lead prosecutor in a RICO case against a group of Atlanta public school educators in a cheating scandal. After a months-long trial, a jury in April 2015 convicted 11 former educators of racketeering for their roles in a scheme to inflate students’ scores on standardised exams.
Since becoming district attorney in January 2021, she has brought several RICO indictments against alleged gang members, including several high-profile rap artists.
Lawyer John Floyd, a nationally known RICO expert in Atlanta, helped Willis with the school cheating case. Soon after opening the investigation into potential illegal meddling in the 2020 election in Georgia, she engaged him to serve as a special assistant district attorney to help with any racketeering cases her office might pursue.
The United States judge overseeing Donald Trump’s election interference case has said she will limit the evidence the former president will be allowed to share from his trial but stopped short of granting the blanket ban prosecutors had sought.
During a court hearing on Friday, US District Judge Tanya Chutkan addressed concerns that Trump could release evidence on social media. She told his lawyers that the former president’s defence “is supposed to happen in this courtroom, not on the internet”.
She also cautioned that “arguably ambiguous statements” could be construed as intimidation or harassment of potential witnesses. “I will take whatever measures are necessary to safeguard the integrity of the case,” Chutkan said.
Prosecutors had sought a broad protective order barring the ex-president from sharing any details of the government’s evidence publicly, claiming that Trump — who regularly takes to social media to slam officials involved in the case against him — could use the details to influence witnesses.
But Trump’s defence lawyers had argued that a wide-reaching order would violate his right to free speech under the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
“Mr Trump, like every American, has a First Amendment right to free speech, but that right is not absolute. In a criminal case such as this one, the defendant’s free speech is subject to the rules,” Chutkan said during the hearing, as reported by CNN.
Chutkan agreed with Trump’s defence team on a looser version of a protective order for evidence in the case, but she largely sided with the prosecution on what sensitive materials should be protected.
She later officially approved a protective order that will allow Trump to share any records that are already in the public domain or that he obtained independently. He is not, however, permitted to share other kinds of materials such as those arising from the grand jury or items obtained through sealed search warrants.
“He is a criminal defendant. He is going to have restrictions like every single other defendant. This case is proceeding in the normal order,” Chutkan said. “The fact the defendant is engaged in a political campaign is not going to allow him any greater or lesser latitude than any defendant in a criminal case.”
Trump pleaded not guilty on August 3 in a Washington, DC, courtroom to four federal charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 US election that he lost to his Democratic rival, President Joe Biden.
He also faces state charges in New York over a hush-money payment to an adult film star and federal charges linked to accusations he mishandled classified government documents at his Florida estate.
Trump, who remains the frontrunner in the 2024 Republican presidential nomination race, has denounced all the cases against him as an effort to derail his re-election campaign.
“When you look at what’s happening, this is a persecution of a political opponent,” Trump said after his early August arraignment hearing in the election case. “This was never supposed to happen in America.”
Experts have said the 2020 election interference case marks the most significant of the three criminal indictments against Trump, with one expert calling it “probably the most significant legal case in the nation’s history”.
The indictment accuses Trump of pursuing “unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results” in an attempt to scuttle Biden’s 2020 victory.
The protection order
The legal battle over the proposed protection order had become an early flashpoint in the widely watched case.
When prosecutors proposed the order, they called the judge’s attention to a post on Trump’s Truth Social platform in which he said he would be “coming after” those who “go after” him.
They also accused Trump of objecting to their proposal because he wants to be able to use the government’s evidence to “try the case in the media rather than in the courtroom”.
The prosecutors had proposed a protective order barring Trump and his lawyers from disclosing materials provided by the government to anyone other than people on his legal team, possible witnesses, the witnesses’ lawyers or others approved by the court.
They also asked for stricter limits on “sensitive materials”, which would include grand jury witness testimony and materials obtained through sealed search warrants. In those instances, Trump could only be shown the documents, not get a copy himself.
Trump’s team, meanwhile, had asked for a more narrow order that would bar the public release only of the materials deemed “sensitive”, such as grand jury documents.
His defence lawyers wrote in court papers that the need to protect sensitive information “does not require a blanket gag order over all documents produced by the government”.
Meanwhile, prosecutors have indicated that they want the case to move to trial swiftly, and this week they proposed a January 2 trial date.
Trump responded to that on Thursday, writing on Truth Social that “such a trial, which should never take place due to my First Amendment Rights, and massive BIDEN CORRUPTION, should only happen, if at all, AFTER THE ELECTION” in November 2024.
During Friday’s court hearing, Chutkan said that the more anyone makes “inflammatory” statements about the case, the greater her urgency will be to move the case more quickly to trial to prevent the contamination of the jury pool.
These are the main developments as the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its 534th day.
Here is the situation on Friday, August 11, 2023.
Fighting
Ukrainian authorities ordered the evacuation of nearly 12,000 civilians from 37 towns and villages near the northeastern front line in the Kupiansk region as Russia ramps up efforts to recapture territory in the area that it had seized and lost earlier in the conflict.
The Russian army reported improved positioning of hits troops around Kupiansk, where Kyiv has reported increasing Russian attacks. Ukrainian military officials said they are facing intense combat on front lines near Kupiansk.
Ukraine’s foreign minister played down the possibility that his country’s slow-moving counteroffensive against Russian forces could dampen Western military support and force Kyiv into negotiations with Russia.
At least one person was killed and nine wounded in a Russian missile attack on the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia.
Ukrainian shelling killed one person and injured at least two in Russia’s border region of Bryansk. A civilian was also killed in a Ukrainian attack on the Russian-held town of Nova Kakhovka in southern Ukraine, Russian-appointed authorities said on Telegram.
Ukraine’s Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant lost connection to its last remaining main external power supply overnight and was switched to a reserve line, state power firm Energoatom said.
A Russian air attack destroyed a fuel depot in the western Rivne region of Ukraine.
Russia said it downed 13 Ukrainian drones seeking to attack the largest city in Russian-annexed Crimea, and the Russian capital Moscow.
Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged to continue military support to Kyiv but noted that his government will act “responsibly” to avoid a confrontation between NATO and Russia.
Peace
Last weekend’s Saudi-hosted talks to bring an end to Russia’s war on Ukraine was a “breakthrough” moment for Kyiv on the world stage, Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said. Officials from more than 40 countries – including China, India, Brazil, the United States, and European countries, but not Russia – took part in the talks, which were seen as an attempt by Kyiv to build a broader coalition of powers to support its vision of peace.
Politics
Russia’s prosecutor declared the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) an “undesirable” organisation, criminalising its work to document and investigate armed conflicts involving Russian forces.
Trade
Ukraine’s navy said a new temporary Black Sea “humanitarian corridor” had started working and that the first ships were expected to use it within days. Oleh Chalyk, a spokesperson for the Ukrainian Navy, said the corridor would be for commercial ships blocked at Ukraine’s Black Sea ports and for grain and agricultural products.
Russia said it planned to deliver a small amount of grain to African countries in the “near future” without charge. “We are talking about six countries and supply volumes from 25,000 to 50,000 tonnes, this is being worked out now,” Russian Agriculture Minister Dmitry Patrushev told journalists. Patrushev said Russia exported 60 million tonnes of grain last year and expected to export about 55 million tonnes this year.
Regional security:
Poland plans to move up to 10,000 additional troops to the border with Belarus to support the country’s border guard, amid the arrival of thousands of battle-hardened Russia’s Wagner mercenary forces in the neighbouring country in recent weeks.
Internationally wanted Riad Salameh resigned from the post he held for 30 years after corruption charges were filed against him in the wake of Lebanon’s economic collapse.
The United States, United Kingdom and Canada have placed sanctions on the former longtime governor of Lebanon’s central bank, Riad Salameh, who has been charged with corruption.
The countries announced the sanctions on Thursday, accusing Salameh of contributing to the breakdown of the rule of law in Lebanon through corrupt actions that enriched himself and his associates.
“Salameh abused his position of power, likely in violation of Lebanese law, to enrich himself and his associates by funneling hundreds of millions of dollars through layered shell companies to invest in European real estate,” the US Department of the Treasury said in a statement.
The sanctions also apply to the ex-governor’s brother Raja Salameh and his former assistant Marianne Hoayek. Washington and London also sanctioned Anna Kosakova, who has a child with Riad Salameh, and the US additionally chose to sanction his son Nady Salameh.
The sanctions freeze the assets of Riad Salameh and his associates and prohibit transactions between them and US citizens or businesses.
Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly said the sanctions send the message that the countries “will not tolerate the acts of significant corruption that have contributed to Lebanon’s economic collapse”.
Salameh has denied the corruption allegations and said he would challenge them, adding that some of his assets have already been frozen in previous investigations.
Tarnished legacy
The disgraced former governor of the central bank, known as Banque du Liban, left his post on July 31 after serving in the role since 1993. Once feted as a financial genius, Salameh now has a tarnished legacy due to the collapse of Lebanon’s banking sector and corruption charges at home and abroad.
In February, Lebanon charged him with embezzlement, money laundering and tax evasion.
In May, French and German authorities also issued warrants for his arrest, with Interpol red notices declaring him wanted by both countries on charges of money laundering.
In March of last year, France, Germany and Luxembourg seized assets worth 120 million euros ($135m) in an investigation into his wealth.
A European diplomatic source has said that Salameh will soon be tried in Paris.
Salameh has said he has been made a scapegoat for Lebanon’s crippling economic crisis.
Decades of corruption by state officials have led Lebanon’s currency to lose 98 percent of its value against the US dollar. Many people hold Salameh and his associates responsible, accusing them of mismanagement of the country’s economy.
Russia launched a wave of air attacks on Ukraine, using cruise and hypersonic missiles as well as Iranian-made drones, according to the Ukrainian air force. “In total, the enemy used 70 air assault weapons in several waves,” in the night from Saturday to Sunday, it said.
“Unfortunately, there are casualties and wounded among the civilian population. Residential buildings and other civilian infrastructure suffered destruction,” it added in a statement.
The Ukrainian air force said it shot down 30 of the 40 cruise missiles and all the Shahed drones. It did not specify which sites were hit by the missiles that got through air defences.
The Russian army, however, said it attacked “Ukrainian armed forces airbases around the settlements of Starokostiantyniv in the Khmelnytskyi region and Dubno in the Rivne region”.
Ukrainian officials, meanwhile, said at least two people were killed and four wounded in a Russian bomb attack on a blood transfusion centre in the city of Kupiansk in the eastern Kharkiv region.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hailed the West for its military support, saying Kyiv’s forces are seeing “significant results” from air defence systems supplied by the United States and Germany. These include the US-built Patriot and Germany’s IRIS-T.
Russian air defences were also at work on Sunday as Ukraine targeted two bridges on its occupied territory. Moscow-installed officials said Kyiv’s forces launched a missile attack near the Chonhar Bridge, damaging the overpass that connects southern Ukraine to the Russian-annexed Crimean peninsula.
Another Ukrainian attack on one of the three road links between Crimea and Russian-occupied parts of mainland Ukraine, near the town of Henichesk in the Kherson region, wounded a civilian and damaged a gas pipeline, Moscow-installed officials said. One civilian death was reported in the Russian-controlled Donetsk region after Ukrainian forces shelled a university there.
Russian air defences also brought down a Ukrainian drone near the city of Moscow, according to Mayor Sergei Sobyanin. The attack caused Moscow’s Vnukovo Airport to suspend operations briefly.
Diplomacy
A Ukraine-organised two-day peace summit in Saudi Arabia’s Jeddah has ended without any concrete action beyond a commitment to further consultations.
Andriy Yermak, the chief of staff to Zelenskyy, said the discussions had been very productive but did not give any details.
Russia did not attend. Its deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, said the meeting reflected the West’s “doomed efforts” to mobilise developing nations behind Zelenskyy.
Politics
In Kyiv, workers installed Ukraine’s trident of arms on the shield of a gigantic statue overlooking the capital after removing a Soviet hammer and sickle from the monument.
The operation to put the trident on the 62-metre-tall steel figure of a female warrior began last month, as Ukraine purges its public areas of reminders of Russian and Soviet rule. The statue is also set to be renamed “Mother Ukraine”.
We consider the impact as China’s export curbs on the chipmaking metals gallium and germanium take effect.
Semiconductor chips are a vital component used in devices including smartphones, electric cars, wind turbines and even missiles. They are now considered as crucial to economic production as oil.
The United States is worried China could use chip technology to further develop its military power. It unveiled export controls in October to prevent Beijing from getting the most advanced ones. That marked the start of tit-for-tat trade restrictions and upped their geopolitical rivalry.
In a recent move, China has begun to restrict the export of industry-critical materials.
Elsewhere, after the coup in Niger, millions of its citizens could pay the price of sanctions.
And can Egypt lure dollars back into its financial system?
Two members of the United States Navy have been arrested on charges that they provided military secrets to China, compromising national security.
Speaking at a press conference on Thursday, Assistant Attorney General for National Security Matt Olsen said his division would be “relentless” in pursuing accountability.
“Through the alleged crimes committed by these defendants, sensitive military information ended up in the hands of the People’s Republic of China,” he said.
Olsen added that China “stands apart” in the threat it poses to US security: “China is unrivaled in the audacity and range of its malign efforts to subvert our laws.”
The accused Navy service-members were identified as Jinchao Wei, also known by the first name Patrick, and 26-year-old Wenheng Zhao, who goes by Thomas.
The two sailors were involved in separate information-gathering operations while in the employment of the US Navy, according to the Department of Justice.
An aircraft takes off from the USS Essex, where Jinchao Wei served as a machinist [File: Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Matthew Freeman for the US Navy/Reuters]
For Wei, the alleged conspiracy began in 2022, when he served as a machinist’s mate aboard the USS Essex, an amphibious assault ship.
In February of that year, he started to communicate with a Chinese intelligence officer who sought information about the Essex and other ships in the US Navy, according to prosecutors.
They accuse Wei of sending dozens of technical manuals and blueprints to the Chinese intelligence officer, revealing weapons systems and other “critical technology” used on board the ships.
Wei also took photos and videos of military equipment, according to the Justice Department.
In one case, the Chinese intelligence officer asked for information about an upcoming maritime warfare exercise involving US Marines. “In response to this request,” prosecutors wrote, “Wei sent multiple photographs of military equipment to the intelligence officer”.
Wei was ultimately charged with conspiracy to send national defence information to China.
The case against Petty Officer Zhao, meanwhile, hinges on bribes he allegedly took in exchange for sharing sensitive military information he had access to through his US security clearance.
In August 2021, the Justice Department alleges that a Chinese intelligence officer approached Zhao under the guise of working as a maritime economic researcher, seeking investment information.
Zhao is accused of taking photos and recording videos on the intelligence officer’s behalf. Among the information transmitted were the plans for a large-scale military exercise in the Indo-Pacific region and the blueprints for a base in Japan.
The indictment said he received approximately $14,866 for the information.
The cases against the two men come at a time of heightened tension between the US and China, with both sides accusing the other of espionage.
In late January, for instance, a political uproar erupted in the US after an alleged Chinese spy balloon was spotted crossing North America, passing over sensitive military sites.
The Chinese government dismissed the aircraft as a civilian weather balloon, but US officials doubled down, saying in February it was “clearly for intelligence surveillance”.
The balloon was ultimately shot down over the Atlantic Ocean on February 4, an action the Chinese foreign ministry called “an obvious overreaction”. The ministry has since accused the US of flying its own spy balloons over Chinese airspace, an allegation the US, in turn, has denied.
But the tit-for-tat between the two countries — representing the two largest economies in the world — has only continued since.
In April, the US government arrested two men for running a “secret police station” in New York City, in order to engage in “transnational repression” of activists and dissidents. China has denied such covert police stations exist.
And in June, US media carried reports that China was preparing a secret eavesdropping facility in Cuba. Both Cuba and China slammed that allegation as slander.
But while US intelligence officials have called China the “leading and most consequential threat to US national security and leadership globally”, President Joe Biden predicted in May that a “thaw” would soon occur between the two countries. Diplomats from both sides have been meeting regularly.
Still, in Thursday’s announcement, Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen took a firm stance over the question of espionage.
“Make no mistake, as a department, we will continue to use every legal tool in our arsenal to counter that threat and to deter the PRC [People’s Republic of China] and those who aid it in violating the rule of law and threatening our national security,” he said.
Elon Musk has indicated his desire to transform X, the microblogging site formerly known as Twitter, into an “everything app”.
In a post explaining his decision to dump the Twitter name and bird logo last week, Musk said the rebranded platform would be expanded to offer “comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world”.
Musk’s plans appear to take inspiration from the Chinese super app WeChat.
WeChat, which combines social media, digital payments, internet browsing and more into a single app, has become a ubiquitous part of daily life in China since its launch by tech giant Tencent in 2011.
How did WeChat become a huge success?
WeChat was successful in China for a variety of reasons, but key among them was the timing of the launch.
In 2011, China only had 485 million internet users in a population of 1.3 billion people due to limited infrastructure and a large rural populous. The country also had limited credit card penetration, with many people relying heavily on cash. The highest denomination at the time was 100 renminbi, worth roughly $13.
Enter WeChat and similar rival apps that allowed users to access payment services and other features on their mobile phones. Chinese users could suddenly “leapfrog” the era of desktop broadband straight into smartphones and apps, said Kendra Schaeffer, Head of Tech Policy Research at Trivium China.
“[WeChat] filled a social economic contextual need. Simply picking that up and replicating it here isn’t necessarily going to work,” Schaeffer told Al Jazeera, referring to the chances of success for an “everything app” in the United States given the country’s very different internet landscape.
The US internet ecosystem in 2023 is much larger and more fragmented than China’s in 2011.
The market is also far more competitive. Musk’s super app will have to contend with the likes of TikTok, which wants to launch an e-commerce business in the US, and the ubiquity of Google Pay and Apple Pay after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Schaeffer said Musk will need to find a way to integrate a payment platform into his super app – the “secret sauce for success” – if he wants his app to succeed. This would free up users from clicking on third-party links, but such integration has so far eluded US developers.
“Chinese apps as a whole had figured something out and have executed on one particular thing that no US apps have ever done. None of the big US platforms have managed it, which is containing payment and shopping features in a social platform. We just haven’t succeeded at that,” Schaeffer said.
How was the Chinese government instrumental to WeChat’s success?
Super apps like WeChat have succeeded in part thanks to the support of the Chinese state – a powerful force that is difficult to match in a US or Western context.
Beijing has banned foreign platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and endorsed local apps like WeChat that lend themselves well to social control and government censorship.
Most Chinese government departments and local authorities operate WeChat accounts as a way to disseminate information – which recently included a call for citizens to join counter-espionage efforts and report suspicious activity.
“Few things survived the fad of Chinese digital transformation, but super-apps like WeChat integrate well with the state’s ambition of organising all aspects of the citizen’s life for political control,” Kitsch Liao, an assistant director of the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, told Al Jazeera.
What other challenges does Musk face?
Musk’s ownership of the social media platform once known as Twitter has been tumultuous.
After purchasing Twitter for $44bn last year, Musk fired more than three-quarters of the company’s employees and introduced changes to moderation that have been blamed for a rise in hate speech on the platform and an exodus of advertisers. The company’s subscription-based Twitter Blue service has struggled to attract subscribers, while the rebrand to X has been widely panned.
Last month, the billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX admitted the company’s advertising revenue had plunged about 50 percent and cash flow was negative, despite earlier predictions the company would break even by this year.
As Musk tries to take X to the next level, there are technical challenges to consider, too.
Musk will need to figure out how a presumably US-based super app would work on the back end, said Liao, including handling issues such as currency choice, consumer data protection and privacy – especially if the app were to operate on a global scale like Twitter.
US tech giants such as Meta and Google have already landed in hot water in the European Union over consumer data protection concerns and anticompetitive practices.
It is unclear whether Musk’s “everything app” would only launch in the US or take on multiple regions at the same time. WeChat has limited use outside China and has the advantage of only having to answer to one government in Beijing.
“It has not been made very clear amongst all these concerns that this is a promising or viable model for the more liberal and consumer-rights oriented Western markets,” Liao said.
Former US President Donald Trump has been criminally charged for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The four-count, 45-page indictment unsealed on Tuesday, charges Trump with conspiring to defraud the United States by preventing Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory and conspiring to deprive voters of their right to a fair election.
The former president has been ordered to make an initial appearance in federal court in Washington, DC, on Thursday. It marks the third time this year that Trump, who is the early frontrunner in the 2024 Republican presidential primary, has been charged in a criminal case.
Trump has said he did nothing wrong and has accused Special Counsel Jack Smith, who led the investigation against him, and the Justice Department of trying to harm his 2024 campaign.
Here is a look at the federal charges and what might happen next.
What is Trump charged with?
Trump is charged with four counts: conspiracy to defraud the US, obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy to prevent others from carrying out their constitutional rights.
The indictment is built around the words of Trump’s advisers, White House lawyers and others in the former president’s inner circle who repeatedly told him there was no fraud in the 2020 election. Yet, according to the indictment, Trump pushed fraud claims he knew to be untrue, pressured state and federal officials – including former Vice President Mike Pence – to alter the results and finally incited a violent assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in a desperate attempt to undermine democracy and cling to power.
The charge of conspiracy to defraud the US that Trump faces is punishable by up to five years in prison. It alleges that the government would have been a victim of fraud if he and at least six co-conspirators succeeded in overturning the election results on false pretences.
Prosecutors will need to prove that Trump took at least one “overt act”, or a clear step to advance a criminal scheme, according to legal experts. That could include a number of publicly-reported actions the former president took after his loss, including calling Georgia’s secretary of state and asking him to “find” enough votes to deliver Trump a win.
In the obstruction charges, the official proceedings refer to the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021, at which electoral votes were to be counted to certify Biden as the official winner.
The indictment alleges a weeks-long plot that began with pressure on state legislators and election officials to change electoral votes from Biden to Trump, and then evolved into organising fake slates of pro-Trump electors to be sent to Congress. The indictment says Trump and his allies also attempted to use the Justice Department to conduct bogus election-fraud investigations to boost his fake electors’ scheme.
As January 6 approached, Trump and his allies pressured his deputy Pence to reject certain electoral votes. And when that failed, the indictment says the former president directed his supporters to go to the US Capitol to obstruct Congress’s certification of the vote.
The obstruction of an official proceeding carries a penalty of up to 20 years in prison, while conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding also carries a similar sentence.
Those charges have been brought against hundreds of the more than 1,000 people charged in the January 6 riot, including members of the far-right Oath Keepers and Proud Boys groups.
More than 100 people have been convicted at trial or pleaded guilty to the offence.
What is the ‘conspiracy against rights’ charge?
Trump is also accused of violating a post-Civil War law that makes it a crime to conspire to interfere with rights that are guaranteed by the Constitution, in this case, the right to vote and have one’s vote counted.
It is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
The provision was originally part of a set of laws passed in 1870 in response to violence and intimidation by members of the Ku Klux Klan aimed at keeping Black people from the polls.
But it has been used over the years in a wide range of election fraud cases, including to prosecute conspiracies to stuff ballot boxes or not count certain votes. The conspiracy does not have to be successful, meaning the fraud does not have to actually affect the election.
The Justice Department won a conviction on the charge earlier this year in the case of Douglass Mackey, a far-right propagandist from Florida who was accused of conspiring with other internet influencers to spread fraudulent messages to supporters of then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in an effort to suppress the vote in 2016.
Was anyone else charged?
Trump is the only defendant charged in the indictment, which mentions six unnamed co-conspirators.
It is not clear why they were not charged or whether they will be added to the indictment at a later date.
Based on the descriptions, they appear to include Trump’s former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who called several state legislators in the weeks following the 2020 election to pressure them not to certify their state’s results; former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, who tried to get himself installed as attorney general so he could launch voter fraud investigations in Georgia and other swing states; and lawyer John Eastman, who advanced the erroneous legal theory that Pence could block the electoral certification.
In a statement, Giuliani’s adviser, Ted Goodman, accused the Biden administration of targeting Trump simply for “daring to ask questions” about the election.
There was no immediate comment from Clark and Eastman.
What happens next?
The case was filed in Washington’s federal court, where Trump is expected to make his first appearance on Thursday.
For more than two years, judges in that court – which sits within sight of the Capitol – have been hearing the cases of the hundreds of Trump supporters accused of participating in the January 6 riot, many of whom have said they were deluded by the election lies pushed by Trump and his allies.
Trump has signalled that his defence may rest, at least in part, on the idea that he truly believed the election was stolen. In a recent social media post, he said: “I have the right to protest an Election that I am fully convinced was Rigged and Stolen, just as the Democrats have done against me in 2016, and many others have done over the ages.”
But prosecutors have amassed a significant amount of evidence showing that Trump was repeatedly told that he lost.
Trump “was notified repeatedly that his claims were untrue – often by the people on whom he relied for candid advice on important matters, and who were best positioned to know the facts and he deliberately disregarded the truth”, the indictment says.
Trump is already scheduled to stand trial in March in a New York case stemming from hush-money payments made during the 2016 campaign and in May in a federal case in Florida stemming from classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
An updated indictment in the classified documents case that was unsealed last week added new charges involving accusations that Trump tried to get Mar-a-Lago surveillance footage deleted after it was requested by investigators.
Unlike in Florida, where Republicans have made steady inroads in recent years, Trump will likely face a challenging jury pool in overwhelmingly Democratic Washington, DC. Of the roughly 100 people who have gone to trial in the January 6 attack, only two people have been cleared of all charges and those cases were decided by judges, not juries.
A new law forces platforms like Google and Meta to negotiate commercial deals with Canadian news firms for content.
Meta Platforms has begun the process to end access to news on Facebook and Instagram for all users in Canada, it said on Tuesday, in response to a legislation requiring internet giants to pay news publishers.
The Online News Act, passed by the Canadian parliament, would force platforms like Google parent Alphabet and Meta to negotiate commercial deals with Canadian news publishers for their content.
“News outlets voluntarily share content on Facebook and Instagram to expand their audiences and help their bottom line,” Rachel Curran, Meta’s head of public policy in Canada, said. “In contrast, we know the people using our platforms don’t come to us for news.”
The office of Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge, who is in charge of the government’s dealings with Meta, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Canada’s legislation is similar to a ground-breaking law that Australia passed in 2021 and had triggered threats from Google and Facebook to curtail their services.
Both companies eventually struck deals with Australian media firms after amendments to the legislation were offered.
But on the Canadian law, Google has argued that it is broader than those enacted in Australia and Europe as it puts a price on news story links displayed in search results and can apply to outlets that do not produce news.
Meta had said links to news articles make up less than 3 percent of the content on its users’ feeds and argued that news lacked economic value.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had said in May that such an argument was flawed and “dangerous to our democracy, to our economy”.
A patient waits anxiously in the doctor’s office. The specialist walks in to inform them that they have been diagnosed with cancer. But there is good news. It has been discovered at an early stage. They have excellent prospects for a full recovery.
An artificial intelligence tool had analysed the patient’s entire medical history for red flags. Noticing several early indicators, it concluded that the patient had a high risk of developing cancer. So, the patient was sent for imaging tests.
The images were analysed by another AI program and were classified as indicative of early-stage cancer. Yet another platform screened the patient’s pre-existing conditions and associated prescriptions to help the doctor avoid medication combinations that could interact adversely. And still another AI system helped streamline administrative paperwork and improve the efficiency of appointment scheduling with specialists.
Right now, this image of AI seamlessly integrated into every aspect of healthcare is largely science fiction. But a number of researchers and companies are hoping to turn this into reality within a few years.
The emergence of generative AI platforms, such as ChatGPT, has turbocharged a global debate over the future of human-machine relations. These programmes can process and generate language-based content, and are interactive and understandable in ways that are more intuitive than previous generations of AI. People have also turned to platforms like ChatGPT for therapy.
While generative AI has led to a plethora of headlines, many cogs in the machine of modern medicine are becoming more intelligent by embracing a different kind of AI – one that could fundamentally transform healthcare but has also thrown up a complex set of questions that could define the future of the sector.
Can AI really help doctors foretell diseases? Can it also help make treatment better? What are the rules of this game? And what are the risks?
The short answer: AI has shown promise in diagnosing, predicting and potentially even treating a range of medical conditions, say leading scientists and entrepreneurs driving the technology. But it is early days. There have been – and will be – stumbles. And key technical limitations as well as ethical concerns remain unaddressed.
An AI-based camera being used to image a child with cerebral malaria [Business Wire/AP]
Not a new journey
Healthcare AI has been around longer than most might expect. In the 1970s, Stanford University first created an AI tool named MYCIN, which aimed to aid physicians in diagnosing and treating bacterial blood infections and meningitis. It used the available knowledge and ability of an expert in a certain domain as represented by if-then statements – functioning like an intelligent flowchart, where yes or no answers to the patient’s situation lead down a path to one among a set of predetermined responses.
Used for the limited purpose of asking patients for information and trying to diagnose the infection, MYCIN performed on par with bacterial disease experts. But this rules-based approach gave it little ability to learn.
The form and flexibility of healthcare AI have changed dramatically since MYCIN. There are now numerous types of AI being researched for various healthcare responsibilities. In the United States, from 2018 to 2019, the use of AI among life sciences organisations and healthcare providers more than doubled.
The pandemic has only accelerated that trend. Globally, 2021 saw investment in healthcare AI double over the previous year. Last year, the international medical AI market was valued at more than $4bn and is expected to grow by nearly a quarter annually over the next decade.
Much of the progress has been driven by machine learning, where AI aims to mimic the gradual methods by which human minds learn. Leading the show are artificial neural networks (ANNs) – with a multitude of nodes, connected like neurons and organised into layers. Each layer analyses information and performs operations before passing it forward to the next.
Ask a neural network to identify a tumour, for example, and the program might start by highlighting edges and gradients, helping “identify boundaries between the tumour and surrounding tissue,” says Nafiseh Ghaffar Nia, a PhD researcher at the University of Tennessee, who recently published an analysis of AI techniques in diagnosis and prediction.
As that information flows forward, subsequent layers would analyse features further in-depth, clocking the tumour’s irregular textures and growth patterns until the layers assemble all this information about complex tumour characteristics, like shape, size and arrangement, eventually diagnosing the growth as benign or malignant.
Because these ANNs can learn with less supervision, they have become a de rigueur approach for many medical applications, including cancer diagnosis, though many tools use a mishmash of AI techniques.
At the heart of it all is a clear set of medical goals that AI is being tested against, suggested Nigam Shah, the chief data scientist for Stanford Health Care. “Every AI gizmo that you look at will boil down to doing three things: classify, predict or recommend – in medical speak, diagnose, prognosticate or treat.”
A laboratory technician conducting AI-based cervical cancer screening at a test facility in Wuhan, in China’s central Hubei province, on June 15, 2023 [AFP]
The promise
The standout advantage that AI offers in diagnosis is medical imaging – it is good at pattern recognition.
At the end of the day, said Sanjeev Agrawal, the president of the Silicon Valley healthcare predictive analytics company LeanTaaS, it can be trained on a volume of image data that is several orders of magnitude more than any one human will ever analyse.
And neural networks have had considerable practice with imagery. In 2012, the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge – which evaluates algorithms for object detection – first saw a program correctly classify images better than a human observer.
Since then, AI has advanced to the point where it can tackle truly complex imaging problems. Agrawal points to Google AI platform DeepMind’s modelling of a human’s protein structure and folding as one of the highest accomplishments of such medical imaging tools. Modelling protein behaviour, as DeepMind has done, “is an imaging problem, but a three-dimensional imaging problem that human beings could never have figured out on their own”, said Agrawal.
Aside from imagery, AI can draw on other data recorded in a patient’s electronic health record to draw conclusions on how likely someone is to have a given disease.
Samira Abbasgholizadeh-Rahimi, a professor at McGill University, recently conducted a review of AI applications in primary healthcare. She told Al Jazeera that she has found AI to be particularly promising for diagnosing cardiovascular diseases, ocular conditions, diabetes, cancer, orthopaedic conditions and infectious diseases.
Predictive AIs are even more diverse in application. Researchers have found that AI could be leveraged to predict the likelihood of many conditions – such as Type-2 diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer’s and kidney disease – based on lifestyle, medical records, genetic factors and more.
And the past few months have seen significant breakthroughs in the use of AI to identify cancer risks. It can beat standard models in predicting breast cancer, research published in June showed. In January, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology unveiled an AI-based lung cancer risk-assessment machine. And in May, Harvard scientists showed that an AI tool could identify people with the highest risk of pancreatic cancer up to three years before an actual diagnosis.
That’s not all. In March, scientists at the University of British Columbia demonstrated that an AI program could predict cancer survival rates better than previous tools.
Likewise, AI can predict the potential toxicity and effects of various medications, helping streamline the process of testing them and bringing them to market.
But machine learning tools can also get it badly wrong.
Claudia da Costa Leite (L), professor of the Department of Radiology and Oncology, and Marcio Sawamura, the vice-director of the Radiology Institute of the Clinics Hospital, of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Sao Paulo in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on July 29, 2020, using a new AI-based platform to detect and diagnose COVID-19. Most such platforms failed [Nelson Almeida/AFP]
Failing the test
AI has the potential, at least in theory, to predict the severity of infections and model the spread of outbreaks. The COVID-19 pandemic saw an explosion of AI tools that promised to do just that. But the results were damning.
Two prominentreviews of nearly 650 AI-powered programs for COVID-19 diagnosis and treatment found none of them to be fit for clinical use. Other reviews of AI platforms for forecasting the spread of COVID-19 found them broadly ineffective – likely due, primarily, to issues with data availability.
Those outcomes represent a reality check on AI in healthcare – the tools to actually integrate it into the field of medicine are still nascent.
“Over 95 percent of AI” that Abbasgholizadeh-Rahimi studied in her review “were developed, pilot-tested, then never went to the implementation stage”, she said.
Central to the challenges confronting AI in medicine are three major limitations in the data used to develop it: paucity, access restrictions and quality.
For most AI to function, it needs to be trained on data that has been annotated by experts. Many diseases simply lack enough such data, though several techniques are being researched to reduce AI’s reliance on large sums of expert-annotated data.
Yet, even when there is data, it is not necessarily available to AI developers. Every patient, said Shah, has a medical history with numerous data points: checkups, readouts, diagnoses and prescriptions among others. However, various healthcare organisations – from hospitals to insurance and pharmaceutical companies – log different data points. Thus, medical data gets split and locked in different silos.
On an even larger scale, efforts to leverage AI to model and forecast the spread of the pandemic were hampered by opacity from countries about vital statistics such as infection rates and mortality. Organisations such as the Clinical Research Data Sharing Alliance – a consortium of universities, pharmaceutical firms, patient advocacy groups and nonprofit data-sharing platforms – are trying to push for change. But at the moment, the medical AI data-scape is one of the isolated islands adrift in calls for openness.
Lastly, even when data is present and available, there is the lingering difficulty of extracting quality from infrastructure often ill-designed to provide it. Electronic health records, a primary source of patient data, often offer much noise with the signal, said Abbasgholizadeh-Rahimi.
Noise can take many forms. It can be imaging data annotated in a way that makes it illegible to an AI platform. It can be data formatted or recorded in incompatible ways.
Yet, there are even deeper challenges and risks that AI in healthcare must overcome to emerge as a truly trustworthy partner of the medical community, experts point out.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law hearing on artificial intelligence, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, May 16, 2023 [Patrick Semansky/AP]
When the AI errs, who do you blame?
Datasets can be biased. Abbasgholizadeh-Rahimi’s analysis of primary healthcare AI research, for instance, found that sex, gender, age and ethnicity were rarely considered. Less than 35 percent of the programmes studied had sex-disaggregated data – datasets collected and tabulated separately for women and men.
Some ethnic groups can be underrepresented or incorrectly emphasised in datasets. Just two years ago, the US National Kidney Foundation and the American Society of Nephrology recommended dropping a racial bias in how blood creatinine was judged that caused the severity of many Black Americans’ kidney failure to be underestimated.
AI tools trained on such biased data and guidelines will likely perpetuate these biases, though Shah argues the “same data quality also affects human decision-making”.
Given the potential for bias and the black-box nature of proprietary neural networks, the medical AI space has seen a growing push for explainable AI or XAI. This movement aims to emphasise the importance of making the reasoning by which an AI tool arrives at a diagnosis, prognosis or treatment recommendations more transparent.
Many experts see explainability as inextricably intertwined with one of the most pressing ethical questions underlying medical AI today: Doctors make mistakes but when AI makes mistakes, who are we going to blame more – the AI or the doctor using it?
Understanding the train of thought behind an AI tool that advises a physician could inform the degree of responsibility each has.
Likewise, the medical AI space is grappling with balancing the responsibility of protecting patient data with the need for more data sharing.
This fear is not unfounded. In the US, the first half of 2023 saw 295 healthcare data security breaches, which have affected 39 million Americans. Cybersecurity breaches aside, healthcare companies have seen no shortage of scandals over sharing patient data improperly or without anonymity. In 2017, London’s Royal Free Hospital was embroiled in controversy over sharing the health data, alongside personal information, of 1.6 million patients, with Google’s DeepMind.
More recently, the US Federal Trade Commission fined popular mental therapy app BetterHelp $7.8m for sharing the information of 7 million consumers with third-party platforms for advertising.
There are no easy answers to privacy concerns. Shah notes that while people might not want to share their data, they are often eager to benefit from an AI trained on others’ data.
Researchers are also working to hone analytics approaches that allow AI tools to train on less of patients’ real-world data than these platforms currently need.
Amid the rapid innovation and spiking investment, this race between medical AI and the infrastructure that informs it could prove decisive in shaping the future of health systems.
At the moment, the infrastructure is playing catch-up. Only if it does can that potential cancer patient in the clinic count on AI truly making an intelligent, accurate and safe prediction.
Floods in Nova Scotia bring new difficulties to a country struggling with ongoing wildfires and extreme weather.
Two people who went missing amid a series of floods in eastern Canada are presumed dead, according to authorities in Nova Scotia.
Tim Houston, the premier of the Atlantic-facing province, confirmed the deaths on Monday after weekend storms brought heavy rainfall and rising waters to the region of Halifax, the province’s largest city.
“I extend my deepest sympathies to the families and friends of the two people who passed away following floods,” Houston said in a statement.
The floods take their toll as Canada grapples with a period of extreme weather, including a record-breaking fire season that continues to burn across the country.
The storms in Nova Scotia started on Friday, swamping parts of the maritime province with more than 25cm (10 inches) of rainfall in one day, the amount it typically receives in about three months.
A total of four people, including two children, went missing over the weekend when two separate vehicles were inundated by flood waters.
On Monday, Canadian police confirmed they had recovered the body of a 52-year-old man from Windsor, who was reported missing when his car became submerged.
They also found what they believe to be the remains of another missing person on the shore of a tidal area in a neighbouring county.
“I spoke with @TimHoustonNS today,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in a Twitter post on Saturday.
“We discussed the way Nova Scotians are always there for one another, the current flooding situation, and the federal assistance being provided — and I let him know that our government stands ready to provide additional assistance as needed.”
I spoke with @TimHoustonNS today. We discussed the way Nova Scotians are always there for one another, the current flooding situation, and the federal assistance being provided – and I let him know that our government stands ready to provide additional assistance as needed.
Provincial officials have also reported damage to infrastructure, including six bridges destroyed and 19 damaged. About 50 roads were also affected and repair efforts have been delayed in areas where there are still floodwaters.
Railroads connecting to the port of Halifax, the fourth largest in Canada, were also damaged.
Emergency responders continue to search for missing people.
Latest North Korean missile launches come amid warnings as US nuclear-armed submarine docks in South Korea port.
North Korea has fired several cruise missiles towards the sea to the west of the Korean Peninsula, South Korea’s military said, marking the second missile launch in apparent protest over the arrival of a nuclear-armed United States submarine at a South Korean port.
South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said on Saturday the launches were detected beginning at about 4am local time (19:00 Friday GMT).
“Our military has bolstered surveillance and vigilance while closely cooperating with the United States and maintaining a firm readiness posture,” the JCS said, according to South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency.
On Wednesday, North Korea fired two short-range ballistic missiles from an area near its capital, Pyongyang. They flew about 550km (341 miles) before landing in waters east of the Korean Peninsula.
The flight distance of those missiles roughly matched the distance between Pyongyang and the South Korean port city of Busan, where the nuclear-armed submarine, the USS Kentucky, made the first visit by a US nuclear-armed submarine to South Korea since the 1980s.
The distance which the missiles fired on Saturday travelled was not immediately released by the JCS.
The missile launches come as Seoul and Washington ramp up defence cooperation in the face of growing tensions with the North, including joint US and South Korean military exercises with advanced stealth jets and new rounds of nuclear contingency planning meetings.
North Korea’s defence minister Kang Sun-nam said the Ohio-class submarine’s deployment may have fallen “under the conditions of the use of nuclear weapons specified in the DPRK law on the nuclear force policy”, using an acronym for North Korea’s official name.
South Korea’s defence ministry on Friday described the deployment of the Kentucky and the nuclear contingency planning meetings between Washington and Seoul as “defensive response measures” to counter the North Korean threat.
South Korea’s defence ministry also said that any use of nuclear weapons by North Korea would prompt an “immediate and decisive response” resulting in the “end” of Kim Jong Un’s regime.
