Month: June 2021

Categories
Health

Knowledgeable on U.S.-China competitors in vaccine diplomacy

Expert on U.S.-China competition in vaccine diplomacy

Workers unload boxes of the Sinopharm Covid-19 vaccine donated by China at Damascus International Airport in the Syrian capital on April 24, 2021.

Loua Beshara | AFP | Getty Images

The competition between the US and China could heat up on another front: Covid-19 vaccine diplomacy.

China has been a major supplier of Covid vaccines to much of the developing world, an effort some experts said could strengthen Beijing’s global influence and deepen its ties with other nations.

But a health policy and policy expert told CNBC on Thursday that the US is now catching up as the White House lays out plans to donate millions of doses of Covid vaccine overseas and President Joe Biden appears to want to do more.

“We will see China face a more formidable competitor,” Yanzhong Huang, Senior Fellow on Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations, told CNBC’s Squawk Box Asia.

In recent months, China has been “almost the only major player” sending Covid vaccines to other countries, said Huang, who is also a professor at Seton Hall University’s School of Diplomacy and International Relations.

This is especially true if India has stopped exporting vaccines to prioritize its domestic needs and Russia’s supply abroad remains very limited, he said.

Several reports have indicated that the US is stepping up its efforts to exchange Covid vaccines around the world.

Biden will reportedly announce in a speech at the G-7 summit on Thursday that the US will buy 500 million more doses of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine to share with COVAX, a global vaccine exchange initiative .

CNBC also reported Wednesday that the government is negotiating with Moderna to secure additional doses of vaccine to supply the world.

Origins of Covid-19

Relations between the US and China got off to a bumpy start under the Biden administration. The two sides have clashed on several issues, including the origins of the coronavirus, which was first discovered in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

Biden said last month he ordered a closer look at the origins of the pandemic, including whether the virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory. In response, China accused the US of a political “guilt game”.

Huang said the issue of the origins of Covid-19 is so politicized that it is likely to fuel further tension between the US and China if additional evidence emerges to the possibility that Covid-19 stems from a laboratory incident.

Without China’s cooperation, such evidence of “smoking weapons” may not be found, Huang said. In the West, however, the theory that the virus came from a laboratory has become an increasingly “credible, if not mainstream,” explanation for the origin of the pandemic, he said.

Categories
Entertainment

Loki: What Is the Significance of Kablooie Gum?

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At this point, we’ve gotten used to scouring Marvel movies and TV shows for even the smallest details that might hint at storylines to come. The first episode of Loki has plenty of these intriguing details, including the appearance of Kablooie gum. Is the gum just a throwaway moment, or does it have something more it’s hiding?

The first time we see a pack of Kablooie gum is when Agent Mobius is trying to gain the trust of a girl in 1549 France who is apparently the only witness to one of the crimes against the Time Variance Authority’s agents. First, he uses his tablet to make her laugh with a moving doodle of a stick figure, and then he asks her about her teeth, which are tinted blue as if she’s been eating blue candy. She hands him a pack of blue gum, which, the label says, is Kablooie gum in “Blooberrie” flavor. “Devil bearing gifts,” Mobius comments to his TVA colleague as he instructs him to run the gum through their system for any information. We see it again briefly in the end credits, where someone at the TVA is holding the pack of gum, now in a clear evidence bag.

It seems like an awful lot of emphasis to put on something that’s not actually important. By the end of the episode, we’re led to believe that the villain who has been killing the TVA agents and messing with the timeline is another Loki, which would then mean that he’s the one who gave the gum to the girl. There’s reason to believe that’s not the case, though.

Ever since WandaVision aired, theories about two Marvel villains have been floating around: Nightmare and Mephisto. Both of these theories get a boost in this episode: the reference to the “devil,” plus a lingering shot of a stained-glass window depicting the devil, seems like winks at Mephisto, while the actual cartoon character on the Kablooie gum pack looks an awful lot like Nightmare does in the comics. If a gum pack is actually the key to figuring out Loki‘s mysteries, well, it still probably isn’t the weirdest thing that’s happened in a Marvel story!

Categories
Politics

Bitcoin Is Truly Traceable, Pipeline Investigation Reveals

Bitcoin Is Actually Traceable, Pipeline Investigation Shows

When Bitcoin hit the market in 2009, fans touted the cryptocurrency as a secure, decentralized, and anonymous way to conduct transactions outside of the traditional financial system.

Criminals, often operating in hidden areas of the internet, flocked to Bitcoin to do illegal business without revealing their name or location. The digital currency quickly became just as popular with drug dealers and tax evaders as it was with contrarian libertarians.

But this week’s revelation that federal officials recovered most of the Bitcoin ransom paid in the Colonial Pipeline’s recent ransomware attack revealed a fundamental misconception about cryptocurrencies: they’re not as difficult to track as cybercriminals think they are.

On Monday, the Justice Department announced that it had tracked 63.7 of the 75 bitcoins – about $ 2.3 million of the $ 4.3 million – that Colonial Pipeline paid to the hackers when the ransomware attack took place the company’s computer systems had shut down, leading to fuel shortages and an increase in revenue for gasoline prices. Officials have since declined to provide any further details on how they precisely recovered the bitcoin, which was fluctuating in value.

Yet for the growing community of cryptocurrency enthusiasts and investors, the fact that federal investigators tracked the ransom as it moved through at least 23 different electronic accounts from DarkSide, the hacking collective, before accessing an account, showed that law enforcement grew with the industry.

That’s because the same properties that make cryptocurrencies attractive to cyber criminals – the ability to instantly transfer money without a bank’s permission – can be used by law enforcement agencies to track and track criminals’ funds at the speed of the internet confiscate.

Bitcoin is also traceable. While digital currency can be created, moved and stored outside the jurisdiction of a government or financial institution, every payment is recorded on a permanent fixed ledger called a blockchain.

This means that all Bitcoin transactions are open. The Bitcoin ledger can be viewed by anyone connected to the blockchain.

“It’s digital breadcrumbs,” said Kathryn Haun, former federal prosecutor and investor in the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. “There’s a path that law enforcement can follow pretty well.”

Ms. Haun added that the speed with which the Justice Department confiscated most of the ransom was “groundbreaking” precisely because of the use of cryptocurrencies by hackers. In contrast, she said, obtaining records from banks often requires months or years of searching through paperwork and red tape, especially when those banks are overseas based.

Given the public nature of the ledger, cryptocurrency experts said, all law enforcement agencies need to do is figure out how to connect the criminals to a digital wallet that holds the bitcoins. To do this, the authorities have likely focused on what is known as a “public key” and a “private key”.

A public key is the sequence of numbers and letters that Bitcoin holders use to transact with others, while a “private key” is used to keep a wallet secure. Tracking down a user’s transaction history was a matter of determining which public key they controlled, authorities said.

The seizure of the assets then required obtaining the private key, which is more difficult. It is unclear how federal agents got hold of DarkSide’s private key.

Justice Department spokesman Marc Raimondi declined to say more about how the FBI confiscated DarkSide’s private key. According to court documents, investigators accessed the password for one of the hackers’ Bitcoin wallets, but did not do exactly how.

The FBI didn’t seem to be relying on any underlying flaw in blockchain technology, cryptocurrency experts said. The most likely culprit was good old-fashioned policing.

Federal agents could have confiscated DarkSide’s private keys by infiltrating a human spy into DarkSide’s network, hacking computers that stored their private keys and passwords, or forcing the service holding their private wallet to do so to surrender them by warrant or other means.

“If they get their hands on the keys, they can be confiscated,” said Jesse Proudman, founder of Makara, a cryptocurrency investment site. “Just relying on a blockchain does not solve this fact.”

The FBI has partnered with several companies that specialize in tracking cryptocurrencies across digital accounts, according to officials, court documents and the companies. Startups with names like TRM Labs, Elliptic, and Chainalysis, tracking cryptocurrency payments and exposing possible criminal activity, have emerged as law enforcement agencies and banks seek to forestall financial crime.

Their technology tracks blockchains in search of patterns that suggest illegal activity. It’s similar to how Google and Microsoft tamed email spam by identifying and then blocking accounts that distribute email links across hundreds of accounts.

“Cryptocurrency allows us to use these tools to track funds and financial flows along the blockchain in ways we could never do with cash,” said Ari Redbord, general manager of legal at TRM Labs, a blockchain intelligence company who sells its analytics software to law enforcement agencies and banks. Previously, he was senior financial intelligence and terrorism advisor at the Treasury Department.

Several longtime cryptocurrency enthusiasts said recovering much of the Bitcoin ransom is a win for the legitimacy of digital currencies. That would help change Bitcoin’s image as a criminal playground, they said.

“The public is slowly being shown on a case-by-case basis that Bitcoin is good for law enforcement and bad for crime – the opposite of what many have believed in the past,” said Hunter Horsley, CEO of Bitwise Asset Management, a cryptocurrency company. Investment company.

In the last few months, cryptocurrencies have become more and more mainstream. Companies like PayPal and Square have expanded their cryptocurrency services. Coinbase, a startup that enables people to buy and sell cryptocurrencies, went public in April and is now valued at $ 47 billion. Over the weekend, a Bitcoin conference in Miami drew more than 12,000 attendees, including Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and former boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr.

As more and more people use Bitcoin, most of them access the digital currency in a way that mirrors a traditional bank, through a centralized intermediary such as a crypto exchange. In the United States, anti-money laundering and identity verification laws require such services to know who their customers are, thereby establishing a link between identity and account. Customers must upload an official ID when registering.

Ransomware attacks have taken a close look at unregulated crypto exchanges. Cyber ​​criminals are flocking to thousands of high risk areas in Eastern Europe that do not obey these laws.

After the attack on the Colonial Pipeline, several financial leaders proposed a ban on cryptocurrencies.

“We can live in a cryptocurrency world or a world without ransomware, but we cannot have both,” Lee Reiners, executive director of the Global Financial Markets Center at Duke Law School, wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

Cryptocurrency experts said the hackers could have tried to make their Bitcoin accounts even more secure. Some cryptocurrency holders go to great lengths to store their private keys for everything connected to the Internet in what is known as a “cold wallet”. Some people remember the sequence of numbers and letters. Others write them down on paper, although they can be obtained through search warrants or police work.

“The only way to preserve the truly invulnerable characteristics of the asset class is to memorize the keys and not have them written down anywhere,” said Mr Proudman.

Justice Department Mr Raimondi said the ransom seizure through the Colonial Pipeline was the federal prosecutor’s latest stabbing operation to recover illegally acquired cryptocurrency. He said the department had “many hundreds of millions of dollars of seizures of non-hosted cryptocurrency wallets” used for criminal activity.

In January, the Justice Department disrupted another ransomware group, NetWalker, which was using ransomware to extort money from communities, hospitals, law enforcement agencies and schools.

As part of that sting, the department received approximately $ 500,000 of the cryptocurrency from NetWalker that was collected from victims of their ransomware.

“While these individuals believe they are acting anonymously in the digital space, we have the ability and tenacity to identify and prosecute these actors to the fullest extent of the law and confiscate their criminal proceeds,” said Maria Chapa Lopez, then US Attorney for the Middle East District of Florida said when the case became known.

In February, the Justice Department announced that it had arrest warrants for the seizure of nearly $ 2 million in cryptocurrencies that North Korean hackers had stolen and debited from two different cryptocurrency exchanges.

Last August, the department also unsealed a complaint against North Korean hackers who stole $ 28.7 million in cryptocurrencies from a cryptocurrency exchange and then laundered the proceeds through Chinese cryptocurrency laundering services. The FBI traced the funds to 280 cryptocurrency wallets and their owners.

In the end, “cryptocurrencies are actually more transparent than most other forms of value transfer,” said Madeleine Kennedy, a spokeswoman for Chainalysis, the start-up that tracks payments in cryptocurrencies. “Certainly more transparent than cash.”

Categories
Health

Biden to Ship Thousands and thousands of Pfizer Vaccine Doses to 100 Nations

Biden to Send Millions of Pfizer Vaccine Doses to 100 Countries

WASHINGTON – President Biden, under pressure to aggressively address the global coronavirus vaccine shortage, will announce Thursday that his government will buy 500 million doses of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine and deliver them to about 100 countries next year The donation will be made by people familiar with the plan.

The White House reached the deal just in time for Mr Biden’s eight-day tour of Europe, which will be his first opportunity to assert the United States as world leader and to re-establish ties that have been badly frayed by President Donald J. Trump.

“We have to end Covid-19, not just at home we do, but everywhere,” Biden told American troops after landing at RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk, England. “There is no wall high enough to protect us from this pandemic or the next biological threat we face, and there will be others. It requires coordinated multilateral action. “

People familiar with the Pfizer deal said the United States would pay for the cans at a “not for profit” price. The first 200 million cans will be distributed by the end of this year, followed by 300 million by next June, they said. The doses will be distributed through Covax, the international vaccine exchange initiative.

Mr Biden is in Europe for a week to attend the NATO and Group of 7 summits and to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin in Geneva. He will likely use the trip to urge other nations to step up vaccine distribution.

In a statement Wednesday, Jeffrey D. Zients, White House official in charge of developing a global vaccination strategy, said Biden will “bring the world’s democracies together to resolve this global crisis, with America leading the way, the vaccine arsenal that will be of vital importance in our global fight against Covid-19. “

The White House is trying to highlight its success in fighting the pandemic – especially its vaccination campaign – and using that success as a diplomatic tool, especially as China and Russia are trying to do the same. Mr Biden has insisted that unlike China and Russia, who share their vaccines with dozens of countries, the United States will not attempt to extort promises from countries that receive US-made vaccines.

The 500 million doses are still well below the 11 billion the World Health Organization estimates to vaccinate the world, but well above what the United States has promised so far. Other nations have asked the United States to give up some of its ample vaccine supplies. In some African countries, less than 1 percent of people are fully vaccinated compared to 42 percent in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Global health advocates welcomed the news but reiterated their stance that it is not enough for the United States to simply give away vaccines. They say the Biden government needs to create the conditions for other countries to manufacture vaccines themselves, including transferring technology to make the cans.

“The world desperately needs new productions to produce billions more doses within a year, not just pledges to buy planned inadequate supplies,” Peter Maybarduk, director of the Citizens’ Access to Medicines Program, said in a Explanation. He added, “We have not yet seen a US government or G7 plan with the ambition or urgency to add billions more doses and end the pandemic.”

The Pfizer deal has the potential to open the door to similar agreements with other vaccine makers, including Moderna, whose vaccine, unlike Pfizer’s, was developed with US taxpayers’ money. In addition, the Biden government has negotiated a deal whereby Merck will help manufacture Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, and those doses may be available for use overseas.

The United States has already signed a contract to purchase 300 million doses of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, which requires two vaccinations to be distributed in the United States; the 500 million cans are on top of that, according to people familiar with the deal.

Biden in Europe

Updated

June 9, 2021, 8:50 p.m. ET

Neither Pfizer nor administrators would tell what the company is charging the government for the cans. Pfizer is also offering the Biden government the option to purchase an additional 200 million cans at cost to be donated overseas.

For Pfizer, the decision to sell so much of the supply to the Biden government for no profit is a significant step.

The vaccine accounted for $ 3.5 billion in sales for the first three months of this year, nearly a quarter of Pfizer’s total sales. By some estimates, the company made approximately $ 900 million in pre-tax income from the vaccine in the first quarter.

However, the company has also been criticized for disproportionately supporting wealthy nations, despite Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla promising in January to ensure that “developing countries have equal access to the rest of the world.”

The 200 million Pfizer cans the Biden government plans to donate accounts for about 7 percent of the three billion cans the company is expected to produce this year. Pfizer expects to deliver an additional 800 million doses to lower and lower middle income countries through other agreements with individual countries or Covax, a spokeswoman said.

For Mr Biden, the deal shows that his government is ready to intervene deeper in the treasury to help poorer countries.

Last week, Mr Biden said the United States would be distributing 25 million doses to countries in the Caribbean and Latin America this month; South and Southeast Asia; Africa; and the Palestinian Territories, Gaza and the West Bank.

These cans are the first of 80 million that Mr Biden intended to send abroad by the end of June; three quarters of these are sold by Covax. The rest will be used to address urgent and urgent crises in countries like India, the West Bank and Gaza Strip, government officials said. Many of the 80 million cans were manufactured by AstraZeneca and are still subject to a complex review by the Food and Drug Administration.

Mr Biden has also pledged to support a waiver of an international intellectual property treaty that would make it difficult for companies to refuse their technology. But European leaders are blocking the proposed exemption, and pharmaceutical companies are firmly against it. The World Trade Organization’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Council meets this week to review the derogation.

The president’s promise of vaccines for the world market comes as he prepares on Thursday for a meeting with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who has urged leaders to pledge to feed everyone in the world by the end of 2022 vaccinate. Mr Biden’s announcement is likely welcome news to Mr Johnson, whose critics have questioned where the money will come from to keep his promise.

“The truth is, world leaders have been stepping down the street for months – to the point where they ran out of streets,” Edwin Ikhouria, executive director for Africa at ONE Campaign, a nonprofit that dedicated to eradicating global poverty, said in a statement on Wednesday.

About 64 percent of adults in the United States are at least partially vaccinated, and the president’s goal is to increase that number to 70 percent by July 4th, following an accessibility strategy and incentives to reach Americans who have not yet received any injections.

Despite these efforts, there are unused doses of vaccine that could be wasted. Once thawed, cans have a limited shelf life and millions could expire within two weeks, according to federal officials.

Equal access to vaccines has become one of the most persistent challenges in containing the pandemic. Wealthier nations and private corporations have pledged tens of millions of doses and billions of dollars to sustain global supplies, but the disparities in vaccine allocations so far have been stark.

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organization, warned this week that the world is facing a “two-pronged pandemic” with countries short of vaccines struggling with virus cases even as better-served countries return to normal.

These lower-income countries will largely depend on wealthier ones until vaccines can be distributed and produced on a more equitable basis, he said.

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed the coverage from New York and Michael D. Shear from Plymouth, England.

Categories
World News

With a Ban on Navalny’s Group, Putin Sends a Message to Biden

With a Ban on Navalny's Group, Putin Sends a Message to Biden

MOSCOW – A court on Wednesday ruled the political movement of Aleksei A. Navalny as extremist, a notable broadside from President Vladimir V. Putin, who also sent a message to President Biden ahead of their meeting next week: Russian internal affairs are not up Discussion.

The judicial decision – almost certainly with the blessing of the Kremlin – seemed to push the resistance against Putin further underground after years of efforts by the Russian government to suppress dissenting opinions entered a new, more aggressive phase for several months. Under the law, Mr Navalny’s organizers, donors or even social media supporters could now face criminal prosecution and face jail terms.

The ruling increases the commitment of the Geneva summit to Mr Biden, who has promised to defend himself against Mr Putin’s violation of international norms. But the Russian President has said that while he is ready to discuss cyberspace and geopolitics with Mr Biden, he will not have talks about how he governs his country. The question is how much Mr Biden accepts these demands.

“The views on our political system can be different,” Putin told the heads of international news agencies last week. “Please give us the right to organize this part of our life.”

The June 16 Geneva meeting will come after months in which Mr Putin has dismantled much of what remains of Russian political pluralism – and made it clear that he would ignore Western criticism.

Mr Navalny was arrested in January after returning to Moscow after recovering from poisoning carried out by Russian agents last year, according to Western officials. Since then, thousands of Russians have been arrested during protests; opposition leaders have been imprisoned or forced into exile; Online media were branded as “foreign agents”; and Twitter and other social networks have come under pressure from the government.

“The state has decided to fight all independent organizations with total bombing,” said Nawalny’s anti-corruption foundation – one of the groups declared extremist on Wednesday – in a Twitter post anticipating the verdict.

The Kremlin denies having played any role in the campaign against Navalny and his movement and insists that Russia’s judiciary is independent. However, analysts and lawyers largely see the courts as subordinate to the Kremlin and the security services, especially in politically sensitive cases.

Mr Putin has already signaled that he will reject any criticism of the Kremlin’s handling of the Navalny case by claiming that the United States has no power to teach others. At Russia’s annual economic conference in St. Petersburg last week, Putin repeatedly referred to the January arrests of Capitol rioters in Washington when challenged over repression in Russia or its ally Belarus.

“Look at the sad events in the United States where people refused to accept the election results and stormed Congress,” Putin said. “Why are you only interested in our non-systemic opposition?”

The “non-systemic opposition” is the Russian term for factions that are not represented in parliament and that openly demand Putin’s impeachment. For years they were tolerated, even if they were closely monitored and often persecuted. The court’s ruling on Wednesday signaled that this era of tolerance is coming to an end.

Prosecutors harassed Navalny and other opposition activists, mostly on pretexts such as violating rules for public gatherings, laws unrelated to their political activities, or, more recently, anti-gathering regulations designed to limit the spread of the coronavirus.

Behind the scenes, according to Western governments and human rights groups, the Kremlin had gone further: murdering or expelling journalists, dissidents and leaders of the political opposition in exile. Mr Navalny only barely survived an attack with a chemical weapon last summer. In 2015, another opposition leader and former First Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, Boris Y. Nemtsov, was shot dead with a pistol. But officials denied any role in these actions.

The dissolution of Mr Navalny’s nationwide network marked a new phase in the fight against dissent through a formal, legal process to dissolve opposition organizations despite the country’s 1993 Constitution guaranteeing freedom of expression.

The Kremlin’s campaign against the opposition increased after Navalny returned from Germany in January, where he received medical treatment after the neurotoxin attack. Police arrested Mr. Navalny at the airport and a court sentenced him to two and a half years in prison for violating parole on conviction in a case of embezzlement alleged by a human rights organization to be politically motivated.

In power since 1999, either as Prime Minister or President, Mr Putin has gradually tightened the screws on dissent and opposition. In a long twilight of post-Soviet democracy during his rule, elections took place, the internet remained largely free, and opposition was tolerated to a limited extent. His system has been called “gentle authoritarianism”.

But prosecutors this spring demanded that the court outlaw Mr Navalny’s move by using a term that compares its members to terrorists without bothering to publicly argue that the nonprofits were, in fact, seditious organizations . The evidence was classified and the case was held behind closed doors in a Moscow courtroom.

A lawyer representing the organizations, Ivan Pavlov, who had access to the evidence but was not empowered to disclose it, said after a preliminary hearing that it was not convincing and that he would publish as much as the law allows . Within a few days, police arrested Mr. Pavlov on charges of divulging secret evidence in another unrelated case, in what looked like a warning to avoid an aggressive defense of Mr. Navalny’s organization. He faces up to three years in prison.

According to Russian legal experts, the anti-extremism law offers a lot of scope for comprehensive action against the opposition in the coming days or months, but it remains unclear how it will be enforced.

According to the law, the organizers of the group face prison sentences of up to 10 years for continuing their activities. Anyone who donates money can be punished with up to eight years in prison. Public comments such as social media posts in favor of Mr Navalny’s groups could also be prosecuted in support of extremists.

The case was directed against three non-profit groups, Navalny headquarters, the Anti-Corruption Fund and the Civil Rights Defense Fund. In a preliminary ruling last month, the court ordered the activities of some of these groups to be suspended.

Pending the final verdict, Mr. Navalny’s staff disbanded one of the groups, Navalny’s headquarters, which operated its network of 40 political offices, before the court had a chance to designate it as an extremist group. Mr Navalny’s staff said they hoped some offices would continue to operate as independent, local political organizations.

“Unfortunately, we have to be honest: it is impossible to work in these conditions,” said an adviser to Mr Navalny, Leonid Volkov, in a YouTube video, warning that continuing the operation would prosecute supporters of the opposition leader. “We are officially dissolving the network of Navalny offices.”

When they announced the case in April, prosecutors argued that Mr Navalny’s groups were in fact riotous organizations disguised as a political movement. In a press release, the prosecutor said that “under the guise of liberal slogans, these organizations are busy creating conditions for the destabilization of the social and socio-political situation”.

Since he is forbidden from founding a political party, Mr Navalny has worked for various non-governmental organizations instead. Despite relentless pressure from the Russian authorities, these groups have for years insisted on promoting an anti-corruption campaign that frustrated and embarrassed Mr Putin, and have often used social media to great effect.

Mr Navalny’s movement was the most prominent in Russia, openly calling for Mr Putin’s ousting through elections, and its supporters say the Kremlin is determined to crush those efforts before they can bear fruit.

Categories
Health

Covid Delta variant not speedy risk to U.S.

Covid Delta variant not immediate threat to U.S.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb told CNBC on Wednesday he believes enough Americans are fully vaccinated to delay the risk presented by the Delta Covid variant.

“The question is: Are there enough unvaccinated people that this could get into the population and start spreading more widely? I happen to think it’s unlikely that this is going to be a threat until the fall, perhaps,” the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner said on “Squawk Box.”

Gottlieb’s comments come as speculation grows that the U.K. could delay the lifting of all lockdown measures in England, set for June 21, due to the increasing prevalence of the Delta variant, which was first discovered in India.

The most severe cases involving the Delta variant appear to be in unvaccinated people or those who are only partially vaccinated, Gottlieb said. “It does seem to be a more dangerous variant. That said, two doses of the vaccine seem to be very protective.” 

“People who are fully vaccinated, I think, are pretty well protected against this new variant based on the accruing evidence,” added Gottlieb, who led the FDA in the Trump administration from 2017 to 2019. He’s now on the board of vaccine maker Pfizer.

On Tuesday, the White House’s chief medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, stressed the importance of Americans becoming fully vaccinated to protect against the Delta variant. Currently, Fauci said it accounts for more than 6% of the U.S. coronavirus infections that scientists have genetically sequenced.

The Delta variant, meanwhile, is becoming the dominant variant in the United Kingdom. The U.S. and U.K. now have around 53% of adults fully vaccinated against Covid. However, Gottlieb said England’s decision to delay the administration of second doses in order to give more people initial shots “probably opened the door to this spreading a little bit more widely.” 

At a White House briefing Tuesday, Fauci called out as examples Covid vaccines from Pfizer and AstraZeneca — which is used in the U.K. but not the U.S. — saying they were around 33% effective in protecting against the Delta variant after one dose. For Pfizer, that rose to 88% efficacy after the second shot, Fauci said, while AstraZeneca’s vaccine was 60% effective, according to the National Institutes of Health.

“It does appear that two doses of the vaccine are more important against these variants than they were against the old strain of the virus,” Gottlieb said.

Despite vaccination progress in the U.S., Gottlieb acknowledged there could be worrisome situations in the country involving the Delta variant. “If you have a community where there’s a lot of unvaccinated people and you have a super-spreading event with Delta … you could get an outbreak here.”

Covid cases in the U.S. continue to fall. The country’s seven-day average of daily new coronavirus infections is around 14,400, according to a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins University data. That’s about 17% lower than it was a week ago. It also represents an over 60% decline from roughly a month ago. The highest single day of new cases in the U.S. was 300,462 on Jan. 2.

Disclosure: Scott Gottlieb is a CNBC contributor and is a member of the boards of Pfizer, genetic testing start-up Tempus, health-care tech company Aetion and biotech company Illumina. He also serves as co-chair of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings’ and Royal Caribbean’s “Healthy Sail Panel.”

Categories
Politics

ProPublica tax leak investigation will probably be precedence, Lawyer Basic Garland says

ProPublica tax leak investigation will be priority, Attorney General Garland says

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland previously testified at a hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Funds for Commerce, Justice, Science and Allied Agencies on the proposed 2022 budget for the Department of Justice on June 9, 2021 in Washington, DC.

Susan Walsh | AFP | Getty Images

Attorney General Merrick Garland told lawmakers Wednesday that investigating the source of a massive taxpayer information leak behind an article by investigative news agency ProPublica will be one of its top priorities.

“I promise it will be at the top of my list,” Garland assured Senator Susan Collins, R-Maine, during a budget hearing before the Senate Grants Committee.

The former federal judge said he knew nothing at the moment but what he had learned from reading the long article that revealed that in recent years billionaires like Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, Tesla boss Elon Musk and businessmen Michael Bloomberg , Carl Icahn and George Soros paid no federal income taxes.

“Senator, I take this as seriously as you do. I remember very well what was President [Richard] Nixon did it in the Watergate period – making lists of enemies and punishing people by checking their tax returns, ”Garland said. “This is extremely serious business. People are of course entitled to a great deal of privacy with regard to their tax returns. “

The ProPublica article, which is expected to be the first in a series, did not reveal how the journalists obtained the tax records, and the outlet did not respond to a request for comment. The article said the research was based on “an enormous treasure trove of data from the Internal Revenue Service on the tax returns of thousands of the richest people in the country, covering more than 15 years.”

The article adds that the tax strategies used by the ultra-rich individuals quoted appeared to be perfectly legal. The investigation is said to “destroy the cornerstone of the American tax system: everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most.”

The outlet published a separate article defending its decision to publish the private records.

Tax information is generally confidential and those who disclosed the documents can be prosecuted.

Garland said he believed IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig was working on the matter.

“He said their inspectors were working on it, and I’m sure that means it will go to the Justice Department,” Garland said. “This was on my list of things to raise after I finished preparing for this hearing.”

Rettig said during a Senate Finance Committee hearing Tuesday that he shared “every American’s concern about the sensitive and private nature and confidentiality of information received by the IRS.”

Garland’s comments came as the Justice Department, acting on President Joe Biden’s orders, sought to move away from the aggressive tactics used against journalists and media organizations under former President Donald Trump and previous administrations.

On Saturday, the ministry said it would refrain from confiscating reporters’ records when investigating leaks, “in alteration of its longstanding practice.” Last month, Biden called this practice “simply wrong” even though his position had not yet been formalized as a guideline.

Also on Wednesday, Garland defended the Justice Department against criticism from the left that it was not moving fast enough to distance itself from the Trump administration.

On Monday, the ministry filed a controversial letter to effectively defeat a case against Trump by columnist E. Jean Carroll who claims Trump defamed her when he denied the rape. Senator Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., Asked Garland, “How does this come about.”

“Are these criticisms justified?” Leahy asked.

“I know the criticisms,” Garland replied. “The Justice Department’s role in making legal decisions is not to assist a previous or current government. Our job is to represent the American people. “

Sometimes, Garland said, “we have to make a decision about the law that we would never have made and that we strictly disagree with on political grounds.”

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Health

AstraZeneca Photographs Carry Barely Larger Danger of Bleeding Drawback, New Research Says

AstraZeneca Shots Carry Slightly Higher Risk of Bleeding Problem, New Study Says

People who received the Covid vaccine, made by Oxford-AstraZeneca, were at a slightly increased risk of developing a bleeding disorder and possibly other rare blood problems, researchers reported Wednesday.

The results of a study of 2.53 million adults in Scotland who received their first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine or the vaccine obtained from Pfizer-BioNTech were published in Nature Medicine. About 1.7 million of the shots were from the AstraZeneca vaccine.

The study found no increased risk of blood disorders with the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine.

The AstraZeneca vaccine is not approved in the United States, but it has been approved by the European Medicines Agency, the top drug agency in the European Union, as well as many countries outside the bloc. However, reports of rare coagulation and bleeding disorders in younger adults, some of which were fatal, led a number of countries to restrict the use of the vaccine to the elderly and a few to discontinue it altogether.

The new study found that the AstraZeneca vaccine was linked to a slight increase in the risk of a condition called immune thrombocytopenic purpura, or ITP, which can cause bruising in some cases but severe bleeding in others. The risk was estimated to be 1.13 cases per 100,000 people who received their first dose up to 27 days after vaccination. This estimate would be in addition to the typical pre-vaccine incidence in the UK, which has been estimated at six to nine cases per 100,000.

The condition is treatable, and none of the cases in vaccine recipients have been fatal, the researchers said. They stressed that the vaccine’s benefits far outweigh the low risk, noting that Covid itself is much more likely than the vaccine to cause ITP

However, the researchers also wrote that while the risks of the AstraZeneca vaccine are low, “alternative vaccines for those at low risk of Covid-19 may be warranted if supplies allow”.

It wasn’t surprising to find ITP in a few vaccine recipients, the researchers said, noting that the risk also increased slightly with those vaccinated against measles, mumps, and rubella, as well as those vaccinated against hepatitis B and flu.

In a comment published with the study, blood disease experts said ITP could be difficult to diagnose and that the possible association needed further analysis. But they wrote, “Still, the risk of vaccination-induced ITP appears to be far less at the suggested rate than the many risks associated with Covid-19 itself.”

The study in Scotland also found a very small increased risk of arterial clots and bleeding that may be associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine. However, the researchers said there wasn’t enough data to conclude that the vaccine has been linked to a rare type of blood clot in the brain called cerebral venous sinus thrombosis. Earlier this year, reports of these brain clots resulted in some countries suspending or restricting use of the vaccine.

The researchers said they couldn’t rule out a link to the brain clots, but there weren’t enough cases to analyze them.

The brain clots are “as rare as chicken teeth,” said Prof. Aziz Sheikh, lead author of the study from the University of Edinburgh, during a press conference.

Similar concerns have been raised about a rare condition associated with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which is approved in the US and other countries, particularly in younger women with brain clots and bleeding. Six U.S. cases, including one fatality, prompted federal health officials to order an interruption in use of the vaccine in April. The break was lifted after 10 days and the vaccine was reinstated with a label to warn consumers of the risk of clots and the availability of other vaccines. Several more cases were later identified and doctors were advised to avoid using heparin, a standard treatment, in these cases as it can make the condition worse.

The risk of clotting has led Denmark to reject the use of the AstraZeneca or Johnson & Johnson vaccines.

AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson’s vaccines both use so-called viral vectors to deliver genetic material into the recipient’s cells, and some researchers have suggested that the vectors can lead to the rare blood diseases. It is not known whether there is a connection.

The Scotland study authors said they did not know if their results on the AstraZeneca vaccine had any effect on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which they did not study.

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Entertainment

The Enduring Enchantment of Italian Composers’ Dramatic ‘Library Music’

The Enduring Appeal of Italian Composers’ Dramatic ‘Library Music’

One day in the summer of 2011, Lorenzo Fabrizi and a friend drove to an abandoned warehouse far outside Rome. The building’s manager, who said he bought it for around $ 100, let her in to see the contents: 10,000 vinyl LPs, by Fabrizi’s estimate. They were allowed to take as much as they wanted, said the owner; he brewed beer in the room and had no use for it.

Fabrizi was just beginning his career as a lover of rare records. This collection, previously owned by Radio Vaticana (the station owned by the Vatican), was undesirable by almost everyone in Italy at the time. But Fabrizi found something he’d never seen before: “library” music – obscure records with songs written directly for radio, television, or ad placement, in this case the lavish, string-laden, funk and jazz-informed arrangements Italian composers trained in classical music.

“When I started, there was no interest in this stuff,” Fabrizi said on a recent Zoom call from Rome, where he has been running the reissue label Sonor Music Editions since 2013. “They had printed 200, 300, 500, 1,000 copies, but they weren’t intended for stores or dealerships. They were only given to internal circles of music supervisors, journalists and people who worked on television. “

Sonor is one of several labels that have revived Italian classics from the European library genre in recent decades (in July, Nico Fidenco’s lost soundtrack for the 1977 film “Emmanuelle in America” and Sandro Brugnoli’s “Utopia” will be released). From the 1960s to the 1980s, there was a lot of money to be made with topics: TV and radio producers needed music for opening credits, action or love scenes, game show sequences or advertising. Well-trained composers had access to large ensembles and budgets, and the Italians in particular swung for the fences.

“You listen to a lot of this stuff and laugh because you think this was recorded on extremely expensive equipment, and there’s no way they thought this topic would work in a movie,” said Mike Wallace, a Collector in San Diego who produced a compilation of the works of the Italian composer Piero Umiliani in 2017. “It’s just too outside.”

The most recent album by producer and composer Adrian Younge “The American Negro” contains similar orchestral flourishes over crisp backbeats. “It was like asking classically trained musicians to do modern black music, but for Europe, so you would have these crazy orchestrations, but it still gets funky,” said Younge. “They had a lot more leeway because they weren’t making this music for a specific audience,” he added. “So if they needed something dramatic, they could just do the weirdest [expletive] and wouldn’t have to deal with someone who says, ‘This is not pop enough.’ “

Since it had no commercial life, the work of many talented composers was hidden for years. But in the late 1990s, labels like Easy Tempo began to reissue soundtracks and compilations of the Italian works. By adding these decade-old nuggets to the Venn diagram of hip-hop producers, record collectors, and fans of the short-lived lounge revival, it created a wave.

Ennio Morricone, the composer best known for his dramatic scores for the so-called “spaghetti westerns” such as “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”, was the greatest of this era of Italian music. But as collectors started digging up the recordings of Umiliani, Brugnoli and Alessandro Alessandroni, the source of talent from Italy seemed much deeper.

The rampant experimentalism of the Italian library catalog must also be examined in the context of its epoch. The late 1960s to early 1980s – known as “anni di piombo” or “years of leadership” – were full of turmoil between left, right-wing and neo-fascist demonstrators in Italy. “It was devastating,” said Fabrizi. “There were people who shot in the streets, clashes with the police.” While these composers were locked in studios, the fantastic sounds they made were like portals to another world.

In this tense atmosphere, Italy’s composers also listened to the music of black Americans. Classic rock of the era was influenced by innovators like Robert Johnson, Howlin ‘Wolf, and Chuck Berry; Boundaries were pushed by Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Charles Mingus; and funk and R&B simmered on labels like Stax and Motown. And then of course there were Blaxploitation movie soundtracks like “Shaft” and “Superfly”.

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“In the late 1950s to early 1970s, black music moved to the fore in cinemas. European composers, Italian composers took this sound and synthesized it with their classical teachings, ”said Younge. “And that created a musical palette that generations later inspired hip-hop producers trying to find the coolest samples. For many of us it became a treasure trove. “

For the character-based narratives of hip-hop, a genre built on finding loops from records few had heard, these compositions were practically begging. The prolific producer Madlib was one of the first to try an Italian library record for a large audience on his 2000 album Quasimoto “The Unseen”. Cut Chemist used a track from Alessandroni’s most famous release “Open Air Parade” on his 2006 LP “The Audience’s Listening”. When the Italians became known, a collectors arms race began.

“I was very obsessed with Morricone and started buying a lot of his records and then you find guys like Bruno Nicolai, Alessandroni, Riz Ortolani,” said Sven Wunder, 37, a musician from Stockholm, whose new album “Natura Morta “, Which appears on Friday, is one of the closest modern equivalents to the Italian library work. “It feels like every record freak ends up in the library at some point.”

Wunder’s first two albums, “Eastern Flowers” ​​and “Wabi Sabi” from last year, reflect the influence of Middle Eastern composers and Japanese jazz, but “Natura Morta” is a clear nod to the Italian library pool. It was mainly written during the pandemic and contains the sluggish rhythmic pulse of these 1970s classics, crowned by a 15-piece string section. (“It should be 16, but we didn’t get the right number of meters between all the players,” said Wunder about the socially distant recording session. “The double bass players had to leave.”

“Natura Morta”, which is sold and promoted in the USA by the Rappcats webshop by Eothen Alapatt (owner of the reissue label Now-Again Records) and the label Light in the Attic, is full of sensual flute, clinking Fender Rhodes solos and long melodies doubled on a 12-string guitar and harpsichord. It’s delicate, stirring music – and also something most independent artists would find difficult to afford in 2021. (It was created with the help of a grant from the Swedish government.)

Alapatt praised the album as an innovation: “They’ve been trying to figure out how to make it both homage and non-derivative.”

Most of the composers whose works Fabrizi has presented to new audiences are no longer alive and more music is being discovered; Sonor will release another Alessandroni soundtrack this summer. A major challenge, said Fabrizi, is in the business area. When larger labels consolidated their catalogs in the last few decades, the library works got lost in the mess.

“It’s insanely difficult” dealing with the major labels, he said, implying that library music is not a priority for them. “The problem is, they don’t know they own it. They don’t know because they don’t have the documents. They don’t have any original contracts. “

But collectors like Wallace find a thrill in the hunt for what’s buried in these vaults. “One thing that is very frustrating about this, but also really fun, is that we learn new things every day,” he said. “We know more than we did five years ago. We know more than last year. “

Categories
Politics

GM Tells White Home It Agrees to Tighter Emissions Guidelines

GM Tells White House It Agrees to Tighter Emissions Rules

General Motors on Wednesday told the Biden administration that it would agree to tighter federal fuel economy and tailpipe pollution rules, along the lines of what California has already agreed to with five other auto companies.

The move is a step by the nation’s largest automaker away from its position during the Trump administration, when G.M.’s chief executive officer, Mary Barra, asked President Donald J. Trump to relax Obama-era auto pollution rules.

President Biden is seeking to reinstate those restrictions as part of his efforts to cut climate-warming pollution, and he hopes to propose new draft auto pollution rules as soon as next month.

Ms. Barra stopped short of endorsing Mr. Biden’s desire to fully reimpose or strengthen the Obama-era auto pollution standards, which to date stand as the strongest policy ever imposed by the federal government to fight climate change. And she also asked the administration to augment the federal rules with provisions that would give incentives to auto companies that are investing in electric vehicles, although she did not specify what those incentives should be.

Just weeks after Mr. Biden’s election, Ms. Barra dropped her company’s support of the Trump administration’s efforts to nullify California’s rules on tailpipe emissions. And days after the new president’s inauguration, she announced that after 2035 her company would sell only vehicles that have zero emissions, a target in line with Mr. Biden’s pledge to cut the United States’ emissions 50 percent from 2005 levels by 2030.

This week, in a letter to Michael Regan, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Ms. Barra wrote, “G.M. supports the emissions reduction goals of California through model year ’26,” adding, “the auto industry is embarking upon a profound transition as we do our part to achieve the country’s climate commitments.”

The Obama-era climate rules, which G.M. sought to loosen, required automakers to build vehicles by 2025 that achieve an average fuel economy of 54.5 miles per gallon. The rules would have eliminated about six billion tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide pollution over the lifetime of the vehicles. Mr. Trump rolled back Mr. Obama’s standards from 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 to 40 miles per gallon and revoked California’s legal authority to set its own state-level standard.

California reached a separate deal with Honda, Ford, Volkswagen, BMW and Volvo under which they would be required to increase their average fuel economy to about 51 miles per gallon by 2026.

Ms. Barra said that her company would now support those standards at the federal level — alongside a program to give some form of credit or incentive to electric vehicle manufacturers like her own company.

Negotiations on the new auto pollution standards are ongoing alongside White House talks to reach a deal on infrastructure legislation, which Mr. Biden hopes will include generous spending on tax credits for electric vehicle manufacturers and consumers, as well as direct government investments in 500,000 new electric vehicle charging stations.

Nick Conger, an E.P.A. spokesman, said in an email that Mr. Regan had spoken this week with leaders from auto manufacturers and that the “conversations have been constructive as the agency moves forward on actions to address emissions from cars and light-duty trucks.”