Month: June 2021

Categories
Entertainment

Mark Ronson and Grace Gummer Are Engaged

Mark Ronson and Grace Gummer Are Engaged

In the latest celeb news that shock us, Mark Ronson becomes Meryl Streep’s new son-in-law! The musician is engaged to Meryl’s daughter, actress Grace Gummer. After the couple sparked engagement rumors last month, Mark casually confirmed the news during his The FADER revealed Podcast with the words: “I got engaged last weekend.” Although he didn’t mention Grace by name, he raved about her “stupid” first kiss. “There’s a badge for that somewhere. There’s a first kiss, a very worn Hallmark first kiss badge. But no, it was forever, it will be engraved. It’s still my record. ”

Mark and Grace first started dating in 2020 and have kept their romance pretty much under wraps ever since. They last sparked engagement rumors when Grace was seen on a casual outing in London on May 23 with a diamond ring on her left hand. Grace was previously married to musician Tay Strathairn in 2019 before finalizing their divorce in August 2020.Mark was previously married to actress Joséphine de La Baume from 2011 to 2018.

Categories
Health

Alzheimer’s Drug Is Bonanza for Biogen, Most Seemingly at Taxpayer Expense

Alzheimer’s Drug Is Bonanza for Biogen, Most Likely at Taxpayer Expense

In addition to the United States, Biogen has asked regulators in Australia, Brazil, Canada, the European Union, Japan and Switzerland to review the drug.

The U.S. approval is a crucial victory for a company that has been counting on Aduhelm to make up for stalled or declining revenue from its other products. Competitors last year introduced generic versions of Biogen’s multiple sclerosis drug, Tecfidera, causing the company to miss out on hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from what had been its top-selling product.

The approval “completely transforms” Biogen, said Brian Skorney, an analyst at Robert W. Baird & Company, who is projecting that the drug will generate $7.5 billion in revenue in 2025. “This changes it from a declining revenue company to a growth company,” he said, and, in so doing, “opens up a bit of Pandora’s box” in terms of pricing and reimbursement.

While only patients with mild cognitive decline were enrolled in the clinical trials, the F.D.A. approved the drug for anyone with Alzheimer’s, a much broader group of patients than many experts were expecting.

Just how lucrative the drug will be for Biogen will depend on how many patients it can reach — and in what circumstances, and for how long, insurers are willing to pay for it.

Dr. Steve Miller, the chief clinical officer at the insurer Cigna, said on Monday that he expected his company and most of its peers would pay for the drug only for patients with mild cognitive symptoms and higher-than-normal levels of the protein amyloid in their brains.

“There’s just no data that more advanced patients will benefit,” he said.

Dr. Miller said he was disappointed that the F.D.A. had made so many patients eligible. “You’re leaving the tough decision-making about who should be covered to the individual payers,” he said.

Categories
World News

Outages at Reddit and international information websites together with FT, New York Occasions and Bloomberg

Outages at Reddit and global news sites including FT, New York Times and Bloomberg

Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian.

Jerod Harris | Getty Images

Reddit and global news sites like the Financial Times, New York Times and Bloomberg experienced intermittent outages Tuesday morning that left some users unable to access the sites.

Some visitors to the UK and US websites received an “Error 503 Service Unavailable” message.

Amazon, Twitter, PayPal, Spotify, Twitch, the BBC and The Guardian were also reportedly affected. Tech site The Verge is using an open Google Doc to cover the story, even though they forgot to turn off editing.

Initial reports of the outage began around 6 a.m. ET, but the sites were mostly back online to users an hour later. However, some websites, including the UK government website, gov.uk and the New York Times, experienced slow load times and graphics issues.

US cloud computing service provider Fastly said on its website at 5:58 a.m. ET that it is investigating a technical problem. At 6:44 am ET, Fastly said the problem had been identified and “a fix will be implemented”. At 8:41 a.m. ET, Fastly said the problem was resolved. Fastly stock lost 1.6% in pre-trading hours after the default began. At one point it was down about 3%.

Fastly operates a content delivery network. A CDN is a network of servers and data centers around the world that enables the transfer of assets necessary to load Internet content such as HTML pages, JavaScript files, images, and videos.

The infrastructure that underlies much of the Internet is operated by relatively few companies. If either of them has a problem, it can lead to widespread global outages affecting billions of people.

“That happens when half of the internet relies on Goliaths like Amazon, Google and Fastly for all servers and web services,” said Gaz Jones, technical director of digital agency Think3, in a statement. “The entire internet is dangerously aimed at just a few players.”

When Amazon’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services, ran into a problem in 2017, some of the world’s largest websites across the US east coast went offline for hours. In 2019, Cloudflare, another CDN company, had an issue that lasted about an hour and affected sites like the chat service Discord and the dating site OKCupid.

Toby Stephenson, chief technology officer for IT and cybersecurity firm Neuways, agreed that the incident “underscores the dependence of many of the world’s largest websites on content delivery networks.”

“Because there are so few of these CDN services, these outages can happen from time to time,” he said. “Using these CDNs to deliver content to readers makes these sites usually fast and responsive, but on that occasion they were left with an egg in their face. The tech backends of these large sites are probably fine, but they are Front ends that cannot be accessed and content cannot be transferred because the network has failed. “

Categories
Politics

Biden Administration Strikes to Unkink Provide Chain Bottlenecks

Biden Administration Moves to Unkink Supply Chain Bottlenecks

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration on Tuesday planned to issue a swath of actions and recommendations meant to address supply chain disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic and decrease reliance on other countries for crucial goods by increasing domestic production capacity.

In a call on Monday evening detailing the plan to reporters, White House officials said the administration had created a task force that would “tackle near-term bottlenecks” in construction, transportation, semiconductor production and agriculture.

The officials also outlined steps that had been taken to address an executive order from President Biden that required a review of critical supply chains in four product areas where the United States relies on imports: semiconductors, high-capacity batteries, pharmaceuticals and their active ingredients, and critical minerals and strategic materials, like rare earths.

“This is about making sure the United States can meet every challenge we face in the new era,” Mr. Biden said in February, when he signed the order.

The review has been governmentwide, the officials said: Cabinet members were ordered to provide reports to the White House within 100 days. The move was intended to address concerns about supply chain resiliency and long-term competition with China.

The Department of Health and Human Services, for instance, will use $60 million from the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief bill to develop technologies to increase domestic production of active ingredients in key pharmaceuticals. The Interior Department will work to identify sites where critical minerals could be produced in the United States. And several agencies will work on creating supply chains for new technologies that will reduce reliance on imports of key materials.

The Biden administration also signaled that it was prepared to use trade policy to bolster domestic supplies of key minerals and components. As part of that effort, the Office of the United States Trade Representative said it would establish a so-called strike force that could propose actions against overseas companies deemed to be engaged in unfair trade practices.

The Commerce Department will evaluate whether to investigate the global trade of neodymium magnets under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. The Trump administration wielded that law to impose tariffs on foreign steel and aluminum, after concluding that domestic production of those materials was essential for national security.

As part of his plans to address climate change, Mr. Biden wants Americans to drive millions of new electric vehicles and get more of their energy from renewable sources like wind and solar power. But experts have long pointed out that the shift to cleaner energy will require vast supplies of critical minerals, many of which are currently produced and processed overseas.

Most of the world’s lithium, a key ingredient in the batteries that power electric vehicles, is mined in Australia, China, Chile and Argentina. China dominates global production of rare earth minerals such as neodymium, used to make magnets in wind turbines. It has also largely cornered the market in lithium-ion batteries, accounting for 77 percent of the world’s capacity for producing battery cells and 80 percent of its raw-material refining, according to BloombergNEF, an energy research group.

The United States lags far behind other countries in manufacturing many clean energy technologies, leaving it heavily reliant on imports.

The Biden administration has vowed to bring back more of that manufacturing and mining, but progress has been slow. In the United States, companies are racing to unlock lithium supplies in states like Nevada and North Dakota, though those efforts face opposition because of their environmental effects. The country also has only one mine that produces rare earth minerals, in Mountain Pass, Calif.

As part of its announcement on Tuesday, the Biden administration said it would work to identify new domestic sites where such critical minerals could be mined with environmental safeguards, asking Congress to increase funding for a mapping program at the U.S. Geological Survey.

The Energy Department announced that it would offer loans for companies that could sustainably refine, process and recycle rare earths and other materials used in electric vehicles. The agency on Tuesday will also release a plan to develop a domestic supply chain for lithium-ion batteries.

The Energy Department has $17.7 billion in authority to issue loans under the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program, which Congress created in 2007 and used in 2010 to support the electric-vehicle manufacturer Tesla in its early days. In its announcement, the agency said it would seek to offer loans to manufacturers of advanced battery technology that established factories in the United States. It also announced a new policy in which future funding of new clean-energy technologies would require recipients to “substantially manufacture those products in the United States.”

Semiconductors — a key component in cars and electronic devices — were also another key research area for officials, though they did not describe immediate plans to increase production. A global semiconductor shortage has forced several American auto plants to close or scale back production and sent the administration scrambling to appeal to allies like Taiwan for emergency supplies. Instead, the 100-day review report said Congress should support a $50 billion investment in domestic semiconductor manufacturing and research.

The findings are partly a push for the president’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan, which could fund some of the research and job training to bring American workers up to speed on producing advanced technologies like semiconductors.

The effort comes as the Senate is poised to pass a huge industrial policy bill to counter China’s rising influence, a rare bipartisan development as lawmakers suddenly embrace an enormous investment in semiconductor manufacturing, artificial intelligence research, robotics, quantum computing and a range of other technologies.

Categories
Health

Vaccine journey offers? Russia plans packages to revive tourism business

Vaccine travel deals? Russia plans packages to revive tourism industry

Tourists walk along Red Square in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow on November 6, 2020.

ALEXANDER NEMENOV | AFP | Getty Images

With Russia’s coronavirus shot Sputnik V sluggishly received among its own citizens, Russia is considering launching travel packages for Covid vaccinations for tourists.

Russian state news agency Tass quoted one of the country’s tourism industry leaders as saying that “vaccination prices” were ready, but that visas and entry requirements for foreign visitors were holding them back.

“The product is ready, but the issues of visa support and legal entry for foreigners who want to get the Russian vaccine have yet to be resolved,” Andrei Ignatyev, president of the Russian Union of Travel Industry (RUTI), told Tass.

The price of a three-week vaccination rate for foreigners will be anywhere from $ 1,500 to $ 2,500, excluding the airline’s expense, Ignatyev added.

Vaccine prices seem to have the blessing of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Speaking at the International Economic Forum (SPIEF) in St. Petersburg last week, Putin asked the government to examine the possibility of offering paid Covid vaccinations to foreign visitors to Russia.

Russia is keen to revitalize its tourism industry to end the Covid pandemic. Like other countries around the world, last March Russia introduced entry restrictions for almost all foreigners (with the exception of some workers), bringing tourism to a standstill. Since then, entry restrictions have been relaxed if visitors present negative Covid tests before traveling.

Immunization tourism could prove popular for people in countries struggling to get their own immunization programs off the ground. The Times of India reported last month that a Delhi-based travel agent was offering a 24-day package tour to Russia that included two shots of the Sputnik-V vaccine and a 21-day interval to allow sightseeing between vaccinations.

Slow domestic recording

Russia was the first country in the world to approve a coronavirus vaccine – its own Sputnik V – last August, but despite its rapid approval and rollout, domestic uptake of vaccination has been sluggish.

According to data compiled by Our World In Data, only 9% of the adult population are fully vaccinated so far, placing Russia behind Brazil, India, Turkey and Mexico in terms of vaccination progress.

Target market

In Europe, according to Our World In Data, over 23% of adults are now fully vaccinated. Russia will therefore look for potential vaccination tourists in the distance, said Ignatiev.

“The countries of Africa and Latin America have shown great interest in such a tourist product throughout the vaccination campaign in Russia, and RUTI has received such inquiries,” he added, according to Tass.

In late May, President Putin announced Russia would not make Covid vaccines compulsory for its citizens and said people should recognize the need to vaccinate for themselves. He also stressed that the vaccine was safe; According to peer-reviewed results from its late-stage clinical study published in February in the medical journal The Lancet, Sputnik V was found to be 91.6% effective in preventing the development of Covid-19.

“I would like to emphasize again and appeal to all of our citizens: think carefully, remember that the Russian vaccine – practice has already shown that millions (of people) have used it – is currently the most reliable and safest. ” “Said Putin. “In our country, all the conditions for a vaccination are in place.”

A poll published in March by the Russian electoral center Levada found that 62% of people did not want to receive the vaccine, with the greatest reluctance noted among 18-24 year olds.

Categories
Health

Biogen CEO says $56,000 yearly for Alzheimer’s drug is ‘honest,’ guarantees to not hike value for at the very least four years

Biogen CEO says $56,000 annually for Alzheimer’s drug is 'fair,' promises not to hike price for at least 4 years

Michel Vounatsos, CEO of Biogen, told CNBC Monday that the list price of $ 56,000 per year for the company’s FDA-approved Alzheimer’s drug aducanumab was “fair”.

However, the Massachusetts-based biotech has vowed not to increase the price of the drug, which it marketed under the Aduhelm name, for the next four years, Vounatsos said.

The price of the drug reflects “two decades without innovation” and will also allow Biogen to continue investing in its pipeline of drugs for other diseases, he said in an interview with CNBC’s “Power Lunch”. He added that the company works closely with the federal health insurance program Medicare, as well as with private insurers.

Biogen’s shares rose up to 60% on Monday after the Food and Drug Administration announced it approved the company’s drug for the disease. It’s the first drug approved by U.S. regulators to slow cognitive decline in people with Alzheimer’s, and the first new drug for the disease in nearly two decades.

Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that slowly destroys memory and thinking skills. The Alzheimer’s Association estimates that more than 6 million Americans live with it. According to the group, this number is expected to rise to almost 13 million by 2050.

The FDA’s decision was eagerly awaited. The drug is also expected to generate billions in revenue for the company offers new hope to friends and families of patients living with the disease.

Biogen said Monday that aducanumab’s list price is $ 56,000 a year, which was higher than the $ 10,000-25,000 price some analysts had expected. The expenses for the patient depend on their health insurance.

When asked if the company expects patient pressures on price to drop, Vounatsos found that the disease and other forms of dementia cost the US over $ 600 billion annually and patients $ 500,000 annually.

It is time to “invest” in treatment, he added.

Categories
Entertainment

She Was Deeply Moved by Refugees’ Tales. So She Advised Them in Music.

She Was Deeply Moved by Refugees’ Stories. So She Told Them in Song.

Diana Jones is known as a singer-songwriter of uncommon empathy, an astute observer of the human condition whose heart goes out to those who suffer and are oppressed.

Since her 1997 debut, Jones has crafted indelible narratives from the point of view of, among others, a battered woman who contemplates turning a gun on her abuser and of a coal miner trapped underground while writing what would prove to be his last letter to his wife.

Released overseas last year, her latest project, “Song to a Refugee” (due Friday), lends compassion to the struggles of immigrants fleeing terror and persecution in their homelands.

Produced with David Mansfield, whose uncluttered Neo-Appalachian arrangements deepen the pathos of her lyrics and vocals, Jones’s record is an inadvertent concept album. It evolved rapidly, after a bout of writer’s block, during a flurry of songwriting triggered by the horrors she witnessed in news stories from the United States border with Mexico and beyond.

“I was trying to make sense of what was happening, first of all for myself,” Jones, 55, explained. She was speaking by phone from her home in Manhattan’s West Village, describing her response to daily accounts of the treatment of immigrants, most of them people of color.

“At the same time, I felt this responsibility to report on what was happening,” she added. “I wanted to boil things down to one small voice because the more personal something is, the harder it is to look away.”

Jones, who was adopted at birth and raised on Long Island, N.Y., comes by her empathy naturally. “I was always searching for something, a face or a home, anything to connect with,” she said of her early pursuit of her family of origin. “I was also without a home when I was 15 years old. I never lost sight of what it means to have food to eat and a roof over my head. I have gratitude for physical safety every day.”

Her latest project received unexpected early encouragement from someone with a very different background: the actress Emma Thompson. The two women met, coincidentally, in Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, where they struck up a conversation about their mutual commitment to human rights. Shortly afterward, Jones wrote “I Wait for You,” a song about a mother from Sudan who seeks asylum in England, hoping to be reunited with her children eventually.

Thompson had served on the board of the Helen Bamber Foundation, a British organization originally established to care for Holocaust survivors that now serves victims of human trafficking and other atrocities.

“It’s the people to whom we owe nothing, as Helen Bamber said, whose treatment reveals our humanity, our spirit, the quality of our social fabric,” Thompson wrote in an email. “I have an adopted son, a refugee from Rwanda, and what is most important to say about him is that his joining the family made us all immeasurably richer in every way.”

The folk singer and activist Peggy Seeger, who appears on the album, said the power of Jones’s album is in its ability to paint vivid portraits. “It’s so easy to discount, when you see so many refugees, the individual story — and these are individual stories,” she said of the 13 songs on the album. “Diana’s record is a relentless hammering home of how we ignore a huge body of people who are living through the results of human cruelty and insanity.”

Backed by Mansfield on mandolin and fiddle, the song “Where We Are” is narrated by the older of two brothers who were taken from their parents and detained at the border of the United States and Mexico: “My brother is a baby, he doesn’t understand at all/Freedom, there’s freedom outside the chain-link wall.”

“We Believe You,” the album’s centerpiece, was inspired by congressional testimony from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, detailing the dehumanizing conditions she observed at the border.

I believe your eyes are tired of crying
and all the reasons you said you came here for
I believe you lost your mother and your father
and there ain’t no sleeping on a concrete floor

Jones intones this lament in an unadorned alto, her words cradled by the tender filigrees of Richard Thompson’s electric guitar. Steve Earle, Thompson and Seeger take turns singing the stanzas that follow, only to return to bear witness alongside Jones on the song’s final verse and chorus.

As Jones explained, “It’s important that we have people in our lives who believe us, especially for traumatized people — people who, in this case, are being demonized or ‘othered’ for wanting a safe haven and, eventually, a home.”

Written from the underside of history, “Song to a Refugee” finds Jones steadfastly siding with the oppressed, much in the spirit of Woody Guthrie’s “Dust Bowl Ballads.” One of the most powerful things about the record is how, on tracks like “I Wait for You” and “Mama Hold Your Baby,” the voices of migrant women are centered. Talking about her protagonist in the song “Ask a Woman,” Jones asks, “What must it be like for a mother to have to pick up her baby and start walking to another border, through deserts and with no safety at all?”

“Being a refugee,” Thompson wrote, “simply underlines and exacerbates the areas where all women are already challenged — not being heard, not being educated, not being paid, not having power.”

Jones wrote and recorded the material for “Song to a Refugee” when President Donald Trump was in office. But the nightmarish realities the album evokes speak as poignantly today.

“This is such a big problem that it has to be dealt with in small ways,” Seeger said, referring to the global migration crisis. “But the small ways are not small. This is not a small album.”

Categories
Politics

U.S. recovers $2.3M in bitcoin paid

U.S. recovers $2.3M in bitcoin paid

A sign warns consumers on the avaliability of gasoline at a RaceTrac gas station on May 11, 2021, in Smyrna, Georgia.

Elijah Nouvelage | AFP | Getty Images

WASHINGTON – U.S. law enforcement officials said Monday they were able to recover $2.3 million in bitcoin paid to a criminal cybergroup involved in the crippling ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline.

“Today we turned the tables on DarkSide,” Lisa Monaco, Department of Justice deputy attorney general, said during a press briefing, adding that the money was seized via a court order.

Alongside Monaco, FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate explained that agents were able to identify a virtual currency wallet that the DarkSide hackers used to collect payment from Colonial Pipeline.

“Using law enforcement authority, victim funds were seized from that wallet, preventing Dark Side actors from using them,” Abbate said.

The FBI declined to say precisely how it accessed the bitcoin wallet, citing the need to protect tradecraft.

But Elvis Chan, assistant special agent in charge, told reporters that even foreign-based cybercriminals like DarkSide typically use American infrastructure at some point in the course of a crime. When they do, it gives the FBI a legal window to recover the funds.

DarkSide operates as a “ransomware as a service” business model, which means its hackers develop and market ransomware hacking tools, and sell them to other criminal “affiliates” who then carry out attacks.

It is still unclear who DarkSide’s affiliates were in the Colonial Pipeline attack.

Deputy U.S. Attorney General Lisa Monaco announces the recovery of millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency from the Colonial Pipeline Co. ransomware attacks as she speaks during a news conference with FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate and Acting U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of California Stephanie Hinds at the Justice Department in Washington, June 7, 2021.

Jonathan Ernst | Reuters

Last month DarkSide launched a sweeping ransomware assault on Colonial Pipeline. The cyberattack forced the company to shut down approximately 5,500 miles of American fuel pipeline, leading to a disruption of nearly half of the East Coast fuel supply and causing gasoline shortages in the Southeast.

Ransomware attacks involve malware that encrypts files on a device or network that results in the system becoming inoperable. Criminals behind these types of cyberattacks typically demand a ransom in exchange for the release of data.

Colonial Pipeline paid nearly $5 million ransom to the hackers, one source familiar with the situation confirmed to CNBC. It was not immediately clear when the transaction took place.

The FBI has previously warned victims of ransomware attacks that paying a ransom could encourage further malicious activity.

The government has stopped short of moving to ban ransomware payments altogether, out of concern that it would have little impact on whether or not companies pay ransoms and simply discourage them from reporting attacks.

The public announcement was part of a broader effort to counter the private sector’s longstanding reluctance to publicly report cyberattacks and involve the government in its responses.

“The message here today is that [if you report the attack], we will bring all of our tools to bear to go after these criminal networks,” Monaco said.

Officials stressed the advantages to be gained by companies that report cyber breaches quickly to the FBI.

“Victim reporting not only can give us the information we need to have an immediate real-world impact on the actors … it can also prevent future harm from occurring,” Abbate said.

“The private sector also has an equally important role to play and we must continue to take cyber threats seriously and invest accordingly to harden our defenses,” Colonial Pipeline CEO Joseph Blount said in a statement Monday evening.

“As our investigation into this event continues, Colonial will continue its transparency in sharing intelligence and learnings with the FBI and other federal agencies,” he said.

After the attack by DarkSide, President Joe Biden told reporters that the U.S. did not currently have intelligence linking the group’s ransomware attack to the Russian government. Although, the assault is believed to have originated from a criminal organization in Russia. 

“So far there is no evidence from our intelligence people that Russia is involved although there is evidence that the actor’s ransomware is in Russia, they have some responsibility to deal with this,” Biden said on May 10. He added that he would discuss the situation with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The two leaders are slated to meet in Geneva on June 16.

The Kremlin has denied that it launched cyberattacks against the United States.

“The President’s message will be that responsible states do not harbor ransomware criminals, and responsible countries must take decisive action against these ransomware networks,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters in advance of the summit.

The Biden administration is also putting pressure on the private sector to shore up its defenses against ransomware.

“All organizations must recognize that no company is safe from being targeted by ransomware, regardless of size or location,” wrote Anne Neuberger, deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology, in a June 2 memo.

“To understand your risk, business executives should immediately convene their leadership teams to discuss the ransomware threat and review corporate security posture and business continuity plans to ensure you have the ability to continue or quickly restore operations,” she added.

At the same time, the White House is grappling with how to modernize cybersecurity protocols and banking laws to respond to cryptocurrency and its growing role in financial crimes, from ransomware to corruption.

The prevalence of cryptocurrency in crimes like ransomware attacks has also drawn the attention of lawmakers on Capitol Hill. 

“We have a lot of cash requirements in our country, but we haven’t figured out, in the country or in the world, how to trace cryptocurrency,” Missouri GOP Sen. Roy Blunt said Sunday on the NBC program “Meet the Press.”

“You can’t trace the ransomware — the ransom payment of choice now. And we’ve got to do a better job here,” he added.

Categories
World News

In Guatemala, Harris Tells Undocumented to Keep Away From U.S. Border

Kamala Harris dio un mensaje claro en Guatemala: ‘no vengan’

GUATEMALA CITY – During her first trip abroad as Vice President, Kamala Harris said the United States would step up its investigation into corruption and human trafficking in Guatemala while sending a clear, blunt message to undocumented migrants hoping to reach the United States: “Don’t ! Come.”

Ms. Harris issued the warning during a trip that was an early but crucial test for a Vice President currently in charge of the complex challenge of breaking a cycle of migration from Central America into a region plagued by corruption, violence and poverty invested.

While President Biden campaigned to lift some of the Trump administration’s border restrictions and allow migrants to seek asylum at the U.S. border, Ms. Harris reinforced the White House’s current stance that most of those crossing the border should , would be turned away and would instead need to find legal recourse or protection in the vicinity of their home country.

In discussions about corruption with the Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, who was criticized for his political agenda and the persecution of corruption fighters, she did not shy away from harsh language.

“We will try to eradicate corruption wherever it exists,” said Harris, adding that the government will support an anti-corruption unit in the attorney general’s office in Guatemala that has been criticized by Mr Giammattei. “That was one of our highest priorities in terms of focus that we set here after the President asked me to take on this topic of focus on this region.”

Mrs Harris, whose own ambitions for the presidency are clear, has been tapped by Mr Biden to invest in Central America to deter the weak from the dangerous journey north. Mr Biden was criticized by Republicans and some moderate Democrats during the early months of his tenure for the rising number of unaccompanied minors converting along the US-Mexico border.

But the Biden administration has continued to use a Trump-era rule to reject most adult migrants, sparking backlash from human rights groups.

Rachel Schmidtke, the Latin America attorney for Refugees International, an immigrant-friendly group, said in a statement Monday that the organization was concerned.

The Vice President’s top aides have tried to differentiate her role from the political landmine of border management, instead saying her focus is on working with overseas governments to strengthen the Central American economy and create more opportunities for people who are now To flee to the United States see states as their best option.

Ms. Harris announced new steps in the effort on Monday. The Biden government will deploy homeland security officers to Guatemala’s northern and southern borders to train local officials – a tactic similar to previous governments’ migration deterrence tactic. The State Department and Justice Department will also set up a task force to investigate corruption cases linked to Guatemala and the United States while training Guatemalan prosecutors.

“We had a very frank conversation about the importance of an independent judiciary,” said Ms. Harris. “We had a conversation about the importance of a strong civil society.”

For his part, Mr Giammattei described the allegations against him as “misinformation”.

He also said that during a meeting with Ms. Harris, he again asked the Biden government to temporarily exempt some Guatemalans from deportation by providing safeguards that normally apply to those fleeing natural disasters or war, and referring to hurricanes who hit Central America last year. When he questioned Ms. Harris in front of reporters on the matter, she did not respond directly.

The Biden administration also outlined a $ 48 million investment in entrepreneurship programs, affordable housing and agricultural businesses in Guatemala, part of a four-year plan of $ 4 billion to invest in the region. Ms. Harris last month announced the commitment of a dozen private companies, including Mastercard and Microsoft, to develop the Central American economy.

But hanging over these programs is how to ensure that US aid goes to those who need it most, not just the contractors recruited by the United States or Guatemalan officials.

In 2019, Guatemala identified a United Nations-backed anti-corruption body called Cicig, which worked with Guatemalan prosecutors to bring cases of corruption but was also accused by conservatives in the country of having a political agenda.

Ricardo Zúñiga, Mr Biden’s special envoy for Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, described such independent anti-corruption bodies as “very successful efforts”. However, Ms. Harris’ team did not say that Guatemala needed an independent body to investigate corruption.

“The point is that there is no specific model,” said Mr. Zúñiga. “It’s about supporting the people within government or within the institutions, mainly judicial authorities, who have the will and the ability to move these cases forward.”

Ms. Harris made a point in her opening remarks to focus on encouraging potential migrants to stay closer to their homes while they apply for entry into the United States and await responses. Days beforehand, their top assistants announced that they would be building a new center in Guatemala where people in Central America can find out about asylum protection or refugee status instead of traveling to the US border.

“Most people don’t want to leave the place where they grew up. Your grandmother. The place where they prayed. The place where their language is spoken is familiar to their culture, ”said Ms. Harris. “And when they leave, there are usually two reasons: either they are fleeing damage or they simply cannot meet their basic needs.”

In Chex Abajo, a mountain village 255 miles from Guatemala City, where Ms. Harris was speaking, Nicolás Ajanel Juarez said that despite promises made by various American presidents, his community was unable to cater for such necessities.

The village of indigenous corn farmers embodies the daunting task the Vice President faces. Mr. Juárez, a member of the local leadership, said many of the 600 residents watched their homes blow away in two cyclones. Profits from corn harvests are no longer reliable as climate change has prolonged the dry season.

Many families in the village depend on remittances from relatives in the United States. Those whose standard of living has been raised by US wages have larger cement and iron houses marked with stars and American flags. The main street in the village is called Ohio because of the many migrants who have found work in landscaping in the state.

Mr Juárez, who crossed the border three times in the past two decades, said migration to the United States will continue until community members have stable jobs.

“It would be best if aid could come direct rather than through the government because it will be lost there,” Juárez said against the music played for a nearby ceremony commemorating a member of the community who lived in two years ago entered the United States and died. “Politicians don’t know because they don’t come here to see people’s needs with their own eyes.”

After meeting with Mr. Giammattei, Ms. Harris met a group of women who have organized development programs for indigenous communities or organized training courses for those looking to acquire business skills.

Before that, however, she recognized the symbolic weight of being the first female vice president and making Guatemala her first overseas destination in that office. While a group of protesters with signs against Ms. Harris’ visit stood near an entrance to the military airport, a number of families, including many women, stood by another fence hoping to catch a glimpse of the Air Force II landing in To catch Guatemala.

“As far as I can influence because of my gender and the fact that I am the first, I welcome that,” said Ms. Harris, adding, “You may be the first to do it, but make sure you do it is not. “the last.”

Pedro Pablo Solares contributed the coverage from Guatemala City.

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Health

Learn how to Rearrange Your Submit-Pandemic ‘Friendscape’

How to Rearrange Your Post-Pandemic ‘Friendscape’

It requires daily or weekly attention to maintain foreground friends, so there are necessarily a limited number of slots (four to a maximum of six). Some of these can be filled in by your romantic partner, parent, sibling, or child. Since they are in the foreground, foreground friends are the ones who have the greatest impact on your health and wellbeing, for better or for worse.

What are the hallmarks of good foreground friends? First and foremost, they make you feel better about the world and about yourself. They are there for you, listen to you, and while they don’t always agree with you, they get you. There is a sense of reciprocity and reciprocity in terms of help and commitment. And most of all, you basically enjoy being with them, just as they enjoy being with you.

People who don’t belong in your foreground are the ones who don’t seem really pleased when something good happens to you and show a touch of glee when something goes wrong. Another clue is that they are boastful, self-righteous, error-prone, or mischievous in conversation – or keep bringing the conversation back to themselves. And stay away from anyone who is not defending you, when someone else is slandering you or worse, intruding on you.

Susan Heitler, psychologist and author of The Power of Two, which examines friendship in the context of marriage, cautioned that you should also look to yourself when making decisions about who to populate your post-pandemic world: ” Maybe it’s you, not necessarily the other person, who makes the relationship “asymmetrical” and unsatisfactory.

You cannot have good friends if you are not a good friend yourself. Do you only report when you want something or have nothing better to do? Are you the one who is argumentative or always talking about yourself? Do you say or do things to lessen your friend’s joy? Are you too demanding? Prejudicial? Emotionally unavailable?

Of course, nobody is always a perfect friend. We all have our less-than-admirable moments. But a solid and good friendship is one in which the two of you are able to handle willful and unintentional offenses.

“It’s not the lack of conflict that determines the success of a relationship,” says Mahzad Hojjat, a professor of psychology who studies friendship at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. “This is how the conflict is resolved.”