Category: National

CFPB says employee breached data of 250,000 consumers in ‘major incident’

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“This breach raises concerns with how the CFPB safeguards consumers’ personally identifiable information,” House Financial Services Chair Patrick McHenry said in a statement. “Republicans will ensure any bad actors are held accountable.”
CFPB spokesperson Sam Gilford said the bureau has referred the matter to the inspector general and is “taking appropriate action to address this incident.”
“The CFPB takes data privacy very seriously, and this unauthorized transfer of personal and confidential data is completely unacceptable,” Gilford said. “All CFPB employees are trained in their obligations under bureau regulations and Federal law to safeguard confidential or personal information.”
Agency staff told lawmakers they had learned of the breach on Feb. 14 in an email notifying them about the “major incident” that they sent on March 21.
The Wall Street Journal earlier reported the story.
Rep. Bill Huizenga (R-Mich.), chair of the Financial Services Committee’s investigations panel, asked for a briefing no later than April 25 on the “mitigation and remediation efforts, the scale of the breach, as well as efforts made to give the appropriate notifications” in a letter to Chopra Tuesday.
“My understanding is that the transfer of records could have possibly implicated more than 50 financial institutions’ sensitive information,” Huizenga wrote. “If these facts prove to be true, the effects could be widespread and injurious.”

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), the top Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, also pressed Chopra for details Wednesday in a letter requesting his own briefing by May 8.

Scott said the agency’s recent rule requesting small business lending data — including personally identifiable information — is “highly concerning given that the CFPB has provided limited insight to Congress into the CFPB’s data management practices and efforts to ensure the privacy of consumer and small business data.”
A spokesperson for Senate Banking Chair Sherrod Brown said the agency “followed protocols” by notifying congressional oversight committees.
“The CFPB has taken every step required of the agency, and any wrongdoers must be held accountable for misconduct,” Brown spokesperson Alysa James said.
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#CFPB #employee #breached #data #consumers #major #incident
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 20, 2023
Why China’s police state has a precinct near you

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Security agencies across Europe and the Americas are investigating more than 100 facilities that an advocacy organization exposed in September as overseas outposts of China’s security apparatus. In the U.S., that includes at least two others besides the one targeted this week.
“These secret police stations reveal the CCP’s blatant disregard and disrespect for the American rules and privacy,” said Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chair of House Foreign Affairs Committee, using the abbreviation for the Chinese Communist Party. McCaul urged the Biden administration to “root out these encroachments on U.S. sovereignty.”
Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chair of the House Select Committee on China, said in a statement Tuesday that the Chinese police outposts raise the risk of the U.S. becoming “a hunting ground for dictators.”
Here’s what we know about the network of Chinese police stations across the world:
It’s a sprawling network
The Spain-based nonprofit advocacy organization Safeguard Defenders published data from China’s Ministry of Public Security in September that revealed that Beijing had announced its “first batch” of “30 overseas police service stations in 25 cities in 21 countries.” By December, Safeguard Defender’s tally of such facilities had grown to more than 100 in countries including the U.S., Canada, Nigeria, Japan, Argentina and Spain.
The stations appear to provide civilian cover for Chinese government operations deemed too risky for official Chinese diplomats to pull off. They provide toeholds in neighborhoods with large ethnic Chinese and Asian communities — the Manhattan facility was in Chinatown — that allow those operatives to function with relative anonymity.
They’re a “perfect platform to advance operations that are favorable to Chinese government interests, including misinformation and disinformation,” said Heather McMahon, a former senior director at the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, which monitors the intelligence community’s compliance with the Constitution and relevant laws. Safeguard Defenders has reported that one of the purposes of these stations has been to “persuade” Chinese citizens who are implicated in crimes to return to China.

Authorities in at least five countries have confirmed that at least some of these are indeed Chinese government operations that violate laws barring the activities of foreign police personnel inside their borders. Investigations into other outposts are ongoing in countries including the United Kingdom, Japan and the Netherlands, but there have been no arrests of individuals connected with those operations.

It’s unclear how extensive the network is and whether the Safeguard Defenders’ report — and follow-up by individual governments confirming the existence of such outposts — has prompted Beijing to scale back the program to avoid detection.
The European offensive is underway, and embattled
Revelations about dozens of unlawful Chinese police facilities in Europe prompted Italian EU Parliament member Alessandra Basso to ask the European Commission in December if there was an EU-wide strategy “to close down these police stations and put an end to their activities.” The response: EU member states are on their own in probing “any alleged violation of their laws or … internal security occurring on their territory,” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said in a statement published last month.
EU governments are doing precisely that, with limited success. The German government revealed last month that Beijing was refusing to comply with Berlin’s demands for the shutdown of two unlawful Chinese police stations in the country. Greek police announced in December that they were investigating a similar operation in downtown Athens. Dutch media reported in October the existence of two unlawful Chinese police outposts, prompting denials from Beijing and a Dutch government pledge to probe those allegations. That same month the Irish government ordered the closure of a similar facility in Dublin.
But activists say that’s inadequate given the scale of the problem. Many European governments are clearly “not taking this issue seriously at all,” argued Safeguard Defenders Campaign Director Laura Harth.
Harth criticized the “absence of a strong and unified public message” from affected countries “on the illegality of these operations and the measures or investigations in place to counter these activities.”
Complicating the situation: Chinese law enforcement has legal footholds in Italy, Croatia and Serbia through deals that allow for “the stationing and deployment of Chinese police officers” in those countries. Those Chinese police deploy on joint patrols with local counterparts in areas that attract large numbers of Chinese tourists. But that declaration — signed by EU lawmakers from countries including Germany, France, Denmark and Estonia — urged EU countries to reconsider such agreements “with a country disrespecting human rights, the rule of law and democratic values.”
In the U.K., where at least three alleged Chinese police stations are reportedly operating, police investigations continue, Home Office Minister Chris Philp said Wednesday.
Alicia Kearns, a Conservative MP who chairs the House of Commons foreign affairs committee, said she is “exasperated that six months since this issue was first raised in the House, that members are still needing to ask the government why Chinese police stations are operating in at least three locations on U.K. soil.”
“These stations are a very real example of transnational repression being conducted by an authoritarian state, and the government must take action to shut down these stations immediately,” she added.
U.S. officials and policymakers have been worried about American outposts for awhile
Gallagher, the House China committee chair, held a press conference outside the now-abandoned Chinese police outpost in New York in February and warned of “at least two more on United States’ soil.” Safeguard Defenders has reported the existence of a second such facility in an unidentified location in New York City and another in Los Angeles.
FBI Director Christopher Wray told a Senate hearing in November that he was aware of such an operation in New York City and was “very concerned” about it. That culminated with the arrest Monday of Chinese nationals Lu Jianwang and Chen Jinping for conspiring to act as Chinese government agents.
That same day, the Department of Justice charged 44 individuals — including 40 members of China’s Ministry of Public Security and two officials from the Cyberspace Administration of China — with “transnational repression offenses targeting U.S. residents.” Those suspects “created and used fake social media accounts to harass and intimidate PRC dissidents residing abroad and sought to suppress the dissidents’ free speech,” said a DOJ statement published Monday.
It’s an issue north of the U.S. border, too
Safeguard Defenders has reported four such locations in the Toronto area, three in the Vancouver area and two more were found unlisted in the Montreal area. And allegations last month that Beijing meddled in Canada’s federal elections in 2019 and 2021 have made China’s potential malign activities in the country a hot-button issue.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have since begun a nationwide investigation into foreign interference following the report’s findings, including into the Wenzhou Friendship Society in British Columbia.
Canada, unlike the United States, doesn’t force foreign agents to register with the government. But amid growing calls for change following the recent bombshell reports of China’s alleged interference, Canada’s Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino announced that the Liberal government has started consultations running until early May to consider establishing its own registry system.
Beijing is in denial mode
Beijing denies that it operates unlawful overseas police outposts. Instead it insists it operates “service centers” where Chinese people residing abroad can “get their driver’s licenses renewed and receive physical check-ups,” the spokesperson for the U.S. embassy in Washington, D.C., Liu Pengyu, said in November.
On Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin called the U.S. allegations “slanders and smears … There are simply no so-called ‘overseas police stations.’”
The FBI is on the hunt for more such facilities
There are concerns on Capitol Hill that the existence of such outposts goes beyond just one location in Manhattan.
“Today’s arrests are only the tip of the iceberg,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla) tweeted on Monday.
The FBI is clearly not stopping at the arrests of Chen and Lu in New York City’s Chinatown. The agency has a dedicated transnational repression website where the public can report such unlawful activities.
“We’re increasingly conducting outreach in order to raise awareness of how some countries harass and intimidate their own citizens living in the U.S.,” the FBI said in a statement.
And the New York City and DOJ indictments Monday suggest that the authorities are closing in on any remaining Chinese unlawful police outposts.
Christopher Johnson, a former senior China analyst at the CIA, argued that the investigations simply need to be allowed to run their course.
The U.S. government should “not overly freak out about these police stations — where we discover them we should roll them up and prosecute,” said Johnson, now the head of the China Strategies Group political risk consultancy. “But there’s no need to paint [them] as an existential threat to U.S. freedom and democracy.”
Finding and shuttering these outposts is tricky
China’s unlawful police outposts aren’t easy to find.
Beijing positions them inside what appear to be legitimate businesses or organizations that provide them a front to conduct their operations. They operate discreetly and don’t advertise their actual purpose. Members of local communities who are aware of such facilities are hesitant to contact authorities for fear of possible Chinese government reprisals against them in the U.S. or against family members in China.
“I think there are definitely more, it’s just that they’re not listed on some public website,” said Human Rights Watch senior China researcher Yaqiu Wang.
Some in Europe hope the indictments in New York will help spur more action globally.
Reinhard Bütikofer, chair of the European Parliament’s China relations delegation, said Europe should “take advantage” of the opportunity that the U.S. action in New York offers to rally democracies together and “show China its limits.”
Erica Orden and Wilhelmine Preussen contributed to this report.

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#Chinas #police #state #precinct
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 20, 2023
Anatomy of a smashed window: Pezzola tells his Jan. 6 story

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“I should’ve stopped. I should’ve turned and went home,” he continued. “For some reason I felt I didn’t have total control of my actions.“
Pezzola took the stand Wednesday to fend off charges that he and four Proud Boys leaders plotted to forcefully derail the transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden. The seditious conspiracy charges he and his four codefendants face are the gravest leveled by prosecutors in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack.
Prosecutors are expected to cross-examine Pezzola Thursday and are sure to challenge many of the claims he made.
Pezzola is expected to be the final witness in a trial that has stretched more than four months and been marked by interminable delays, intense legal quarrels and high stakes testimony from cooperating witnesses and defendants. Alongside Pezzola, prosecutors have charged Proud Boys leaders Enrique Tarrio, Ethan Nordean, Joe Biggs and Zachary Rehl with joining the alleged seditious conspiracy.
Pezzola’s testimony, like the riot itself, was chaotic. He described feeling in mortal danger from police crowd-control measures, the resolve to face down the “enemy” that he drew from his military training, an intensifying fear that he might not live to see his wife and daughters, fury at police for lobbing flashbangs in the area of women in the crowd and an “autopilot” that he said took over just before he smashed the window.
Pezzola told jurors he had no inkling of any plan to topple the government and was irritated at his Proud Boys allies for diverting the group away from Trump’s speech that morning for a march to the Capitol. But when he arrived, he nevertheless made his way toward the front of the gathering mob — a decision he attributed to “car crash syndrome.”
“Why I moved over there was basically out of curiosity,” he said.

That’s when the rubber bullets started raining down, Pezzola said, including one that cut through the cheek of rioter Joshua Black, spraying blood all over the ground at the front of the police line. Though Pezzola said he considered the crowd to have been passive at that moment, video of the scene shows skirmishes along the police line, which officers positioned on a nearby overhang were witnessing with a birds eye view.

“It felt like being under sniper fire,” Pezzola said, adding, “In my mind, this is pretty much what I felt like combat would be like, being shot at by the enemy.”
Pezzola, who was right behind Black, said the barrage of less-lethal munitions aimed at the crowd infuriated him and he attempted to engage officers in an argument about the appropriate use of force. He also lunged to grab a shield from a nearby Capitol Police officer — which he said was meant for self-protection — but came away empty-handed. Eventually, the swell of the crowd knocked him down, he said, and in the chaos, he observed another rioter wrest a shield from the same officer, and Pezzola managed to grab the loose shield for himself.
Pezzola’s lawyer, Steve Metcalf, repeatedly asked Pezzola why he didn’t just turn around and leave amid the chaos. He said he refused to leave the Capitol grounds even after police began firing rubber bullets in his direction because his “military training” had conditioned him to “keep your eye on where the threat is coming from.”
“I’m pissed off Steve, that’s all I can really say,” Pezzola said. “The adrenaline is so high at that point. You’re on autopilot. I guess I’m just programmed to charge toward danger.”
Pezzola later added that he was particularly infuriated when he saw munitions landing in the crowd near women, and he repeatedly asked his lawyer to pause video of those moments so he could highlight women who were visible in the crowd to the jurors.
Pezzola would take the shield back to fellow members of the Proud Boys and pose for a picture before returning to the front of the mob, surging to the foot of the Capitol and destroying a window leading to the Senate wing of the building. That breach, which prosecutors have described as the first time the Capitol was breached by hostile actors since the war of 1812, came at the precise minute the Senate shut down its effort to certify the results of the election.
Pezzola said that when he got inside, he had no plan and no knowledge of the Capitol’s layout, so he basically wandered around and followed the crowd while taking pictures and videos. POLITICO recently identified footage of Pezzola encountering the evacuation of Sen. Chuck Grassley, who had been presiding over the Senate just moments before.
He would soon shoot a celebratory selfie video that prosecutors view as a key piece of evidence in the case. “Victory smoke in the Capitol, boys. This is fucking awesome,” he said in the video while smoking a cigar. “I knew we could take this motherfucker over [if we] just tried hard enough.” Pezzola told jurors he took the video because he wanted to say something “profound” on a day he believed would be “historic.”
Moments later, Pezzola joined the portion of the mob that chased Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman to the edge of the Senate chamber, where a standoff ensued. All told, Pezzola said he was inside the building for about 20 minutes, and he handed the shield back to a police officer as he exited.
Asked by Metcalf to characterize his actions, Pezzola called it, “A bad reaction to a bad situation.”
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#Anatomy #smashed #window #Pezzola #tells #Jan #story
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 20, 2023
KSP HOME (Pack of 1 Wall Mounted Bathroom Corner/Shelf/Rack/Storage Organizer – Bathroom Accessories (Material-Metal,Powder Coated Finish,Black) (1)

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Non-trace Sticker Removable Wall Adhesive Shower Caddy for Soap, Lotion, Shampoo, Conditioner, Soap, Razors.Material of corner bathroom
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April 20, 2023
The Kennedy campaign the Kennedys don’t want to see

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“Most American families, they never have any differences with each other. So when it happens with a family, it’s really huge news, like, everywhere,” the now-candidate Kennedy said to laughter from a standing-room crowd that packed the ballroom of the Boston Park Plaza hotel to see him.
“I have no ill will” toward any of them, he added.
Kennedy, if nothing else, is aware of the value of the family brand. Now 69, he opined at length about his famous forbearers, flashing old photos and brandishing his family name in one of his Uncle Ted’s old fundraising haunts as he peddled the type of anti-vaccine rhetoric his living relatives have disavowed. He drew parallels to his father in one breath and blasted government censorship and “corporate” media misinformation in another. He largely steered clear of Biden, who’s spoken at length of his deep regard for the Kennedy family and modeled his “cancer moonshot” after JFK’s initiative.
Kennedy said he chose Boston for his launch because of the time he spent here as a kid, but also because Massachusetts is Kennedy country.
Yet top Democratic operatives here, many of whom have worked for at least one Kennedy and in some cases remain close to the family, have publicly and privately pilloried him as a disgrace to his family whose views stand at odds with their values. His rally drew none of the state’s leading Democratic politicians.
“It’s a disservice to their long service and success in politics and antithetical to everything they stood for,” Boston-based Democratic consultant Mary Anne Marsh, who’s worked on Kennedy campaigns, said. “The movement Bobby Kennedy Jr. is involved in is not a Democratic one, capital ‘D’ or small ‘d’. It looks more like an effort to undermine Democrats.”
Kennedy joins self-help author Marianne Williamson in the Democratic presidential primary. Both poll far behind Biden in recent surveys. Still, Kennedy picked up 10-percent support in a Morning Consult survey from early April. And he earned the backing of 14 percent of Biden voters in a Suffolk University/USA Today poll released ahead of his Wednesday kickoff. Beyond that, he has some names he can rely on; not just his own but former Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), who introduced him on Wednesday at the Park Plaza Hotel.

Yet the brass band that played and the red, white and blue bunting that draped the balconies of the hotel ballroom belied any serious shot at real relevance for him.

With the absence of Kennedys — and Democrats — Kennedy surrounded himself on Wednesday with an eclectic mix of vaccine skeptics, independent voters and conservatives, several of whom had flown in from across the country and many of whom were fed up with what they characterized as a corrupt, dishonest federal government. Clad in Kennedy 2024 shirts and pins, they cast the Kennedy outcast as misunderstood, or unfairly ignored.
They waved signs that said “heal the divide” and punctured his rambling, two-hour speech with ear-piercing whistles.
Then, near the end, an emergency alarm blared telling people to evacuate.
Kennedy brushed it aside.
“Nice try,” he said, to a standing ovation.
Kelly Garrity and Sam Stein contributed to this report.
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#Kennedy #campaign #Kennedys #dont
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 20, 2023
Elon Musk Sells Tucker Carlson His Conservative Vision of Progress

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Even more than just a newsy exercise in political economy, however, the conversation with Musk is a reminder of how “progress,” an ideal usually associated with the American left, is in reality a value-neutral concept that can be advanced by anyone — although it obviously helps if you’re the richest man in the world.
The mantle of “progressive conservatism” is usually associated with the European right, which developed a technocratic pro-safety-net politics in reaction to the Industrial Revolution. Here in America, its historical tribune is still Teddy Roosevelt, whose populist views on trade and domestic policy paired with an almost religious belief in American expansion and dominance. Musk — who described to a stonily silent Carlson how he voted for President Joe Biden in 2020 and expressed his desire for “a normal person with common sense” as president, “whose values are smack in the middle of the country” — fits, if imperfectly, into that same lineage, combining a socially conservative politics, an eagerness to regulate industries he believes are dangerous and an unwavering belief in expansion at all costs.
Where Roosevelt’s private-sector bugbears were the industrial-age charnel houses of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Musk’s are much more ethereal: Namely, the alleged risk to civilization posed by the development of artificial intelligence.
Musk is not anti-AI — he just announced the founding of his own new company, X.AI, to produce competing products to OpenAI and Microsoft, which he views as too “woke” and developmentally reckless. He has, rather, a very specific existential fear. During the interview Musk described to Tucker the evolution of his now-defunct friendship with Larry Page, the Google co-founder, AI innovator and ardent transhumanist, saying that having “talked to him late to the night about AI safety” he’s concluded that Page was “not taking AI safety seriously enough,” and that he “seemed to … want some kind of digital superintelligence, basically a digital God.”
A brief pause to explain. Within the AI community, there is a fervent and ongoing debate about the hypothetical existence of an “artificial general intelligence,” or an AI agent so sophisticated that it surpasses human cognition. Many researchers think this is impossible. Many think that it’s possible, and desirable. Many think that it’s possible and will kill us all. What we do know for certain is that nothing like it currently exists, nor does any evidence that points to its possibility.
Musk is worried about it anyway. With a slew of his similarly-concerned fellow tech and business potentates, he signed an open letter last month calling for a six-month pause on advanced AI projects, and opened his interview with Carlson by calling for an entirely new regulatory agency to tackle AI risk. His view of AI as an existential threat, as speculative as it might be, leads him to the same conclusion of his fiercest critics on the left: That government should intervene to guide technological progress in a manner conducive to human values.
Where they differ, of course, is when it comes to what those values are. By now you are likely familiar with the broad outlines of the free-speech crusade that led Musk to purchase Twitter: Giving a black eye to the corporate censoriousness, doublespeak and policing of “misinformation” that once (allegedly) marked the platform. In Musk’s conservative vision of progress, unfettered AI development threatens humanity’s evolution and therefore must be regulated. But the lax approach to moderation on “nu-Twitter,” which some have said has given it a distinctly hostile character, is a necessary risk in creating the open-air marketplace of ideas necessary for humanity to thrive.

What does he mean by that? Well, there are the usual arguments about how unfettered free speech creates resilience, or makes society more democratic, or allows for the best ideas to naturally win out absent moderator interference. But those all have to do with … humans. And there’s another, way more out-there idea that Musk has about why censoring AI is a folly: That uncensored speech will make a hypothetical AGI safer, by virtue of “training” it on a data set that provides a more complete picture of humanity.

“This might be the best path to [AI] safety, in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe,” Musk explained. That’s why Musk advocates for a competitor to ChatGPT that would lack its speech restrictions and safety controls — the hypothetical “based AI” he proposed last month.
Like all questions about artificial general intelligence, or unicorns, or little green men, it’s impossible to answer whether an AI’s data set including every bit of racist invective @Groyper69420 has ever hurled at unsuspecting Twitter users will endear or depreciate humanity in its digital mind. But Musk’s belief that uncensored AI speech platforms will ultimately benefit humanity more than their currently-existing counterparts — aside from being consistent with his vision for the company he just purchased for $43 billion, and in which AI has its own role to play in the future — is aligned with his overall view of progress as a sort of survival of the fittest.
And on that biological-evolutionary note, at the very end of Musk’s conversation with Carlson the two discussed another pillar of his quest for humanity to reach the stars: How to reverse the world’s declining birth rates. “I’m sort of worried that civilization, you know, if we don’t make enough people to at least sustain our numbers or perhaps increase them a little bit, civilization is going to crumble,” Musk mused. “There’s the old question of, ‘Will civilization end with a bang or a whimper?’ Well, it’s currently coming to an end with a whimper in adult diapers, which is depressing as hell.”
Concern over falling birth rates has been one of the biggest policy issues for the nascent “pro-family” right — it’s a major project for American Compass, former Mitt Romney advisor Oren Cass’ heterodox conservative think tank, for example. Musk doesn’t have a policy prescription for this, aside from having as many babies of his own as possible. (One source told Insider that Musk explicitly expressed his preoccupation with “populating the world with his offspring,” one he shares with many, many centuries of ambitious oligarchs.)
But it’s maybe the most personal aspect of what adds up, over the course of the hour-long conversation, to a remarkably cohesive worldview. Humanity’s destiny is to transcend the surly bonds of Earth and colonize the stars, with the assistance of technology that works for us — and against censors, scolds and partisans like Mark Zuckerberg or the BBC, or hubristic rival technologists like Larry Page or OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
Musk is no reactionary, and progress is not the exclusive domain of the left. The man has a very distinct set of social and cultural beliefs that he seeks to propagate through his various technological and business endeavors. When the beliefs in question were, for example, the importance of clean energy, Musk was a hero to progressives. Now that it’s the social-media equivalent of a Hobbesian state of nature, or a pro-natalist attitude that many on the left view as retrograde or eugenicist, he’s a villain. But he continues to move in the same direction: Forward, toward a future that bearing his imprint will look like nothing what came before it.
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#Elon #Musk #Sells #Tucker #Carlson #Conservative #Vision #Progress
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 20, 2023
Volkswagen becomes first foreign carmaker to qualify for electric vehicle credit

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Volkswagen officials had said on Monday that they expected the ID.4 to qualify for the full federal tax credit of $7,500 but that the company was still awaiting the proper documentation from its battery supplier to submit to the Treasury Department.
Treasury confirmed the eligibility on Wednesday, and the ID.4 was officially added to the list of qualifying vehicles on the government’s fueleconomy.gov site.
The ID.4 is built in a factory in Chattanooga, Tenn. Production began in October — two months after President Joe Biden’s climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, added new domestic sourcing requirements to the EV tax credit.
All of the other 14 available EV models that qualify for the tax credit are from Tesla or one of the Detroit Big Three — Ford, GM or Stellantis. Some of those U.S.-made EVs are eligible for the full $7,500 credit, while others qualify for a half-credit of $3,750.
The IRA’s changes to the tax credit have rankled U.S. allies, especially in Europe, where government officials have objected to their auto brands being excluded from the tax incentive.
The initial list from Treasury also omitted vehicles from U.S.-based Rivian, which exclusively manufactures electric pickup trucks and SUVs. That company announced Wednesday that its 2023 R1T and R1S models comply with the tax credit’s criteria for critical minerals sourcing — but that most configurations of the vehicles fail to meet the government’s requirement that SUVs, pickups or vans cost $80,000 or less. (The limit is $55,000 for cars.)
Rivian said the tax credit might still be available, pending inclusion on the Treasury website, for buyers who previously locked in pricing below $80,000 but haven’t yet taken delivery. But those buyers would still have to meet the law’s income threshold, which cuts off buyers with adjusted gross incomes exceeding $150,000 to $300,000.

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#Volkswagen #foreign #carmaker #qualify #electric #vehicle #credit
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 20, 2023
UFO sightings are up, but no proof of aliens yet, Pentagon official says

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He said that approximately half of the reports of “unidentified aerial phenomena” have been prioritized for further review and to examine if enough data is available to resolve the cases.
But Kirkpatrick cautioned that many cases may remain unresolved due to a lack of hard data. He estimated 20 to 30 cases are halfway through his office’s analytical process with “a handful” of cases that have been peer-reviewed and closed.
“I will not close a case that I cannot defend the conclusions of,” Kirkpatrick said.
During his testimony, Kirkpatrick showed videos of two recently declassified cases of unidentified objects observed by U.S. military drones to demonstrate AARO’s analytic process. The first video, showing an apparently spherical object observed in the Middle East in 2022, remains unresolved for lack of data. A second sighting from South Asia this year was resolved pending a peer review after AARO’s analysis determined the object to be a commercial aircraft.
The more than 650 cases is an increase from an unclassified annual report issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in January. The DNI summary said 510 cases were cataloged through Aug. 30, 2022.
Concerns over incursions into U.S. airspace by unknown objects have gripped Washington in recent years, and Kirkpatrick’s office was established last July to spearhead the analysis of sightings. But he also sought to temper assertions that UFOs have a non-worldly explanation.
“I should also state clearly for the record that in our research, AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology or objects that defy the known laws of physics,” Kirkpatrick said.

“Only a very small percentage of UAP reports display signatures that could reasonably be described as anomalous,” he added. “The majority of unidentified objects reported to AARO demonstrated mundane characteristics of balloons, clutter, natural phenomena or other readily explainable sources.”

Kirkpatrick, however, made waves with a draft paper he co-authored with Harvard professor Avi Loeb last month that presents a theory that some recent objects that appear to defy physics could be “probes” from an extraterrestrial mothership.
No senators asked Kirkpatrick about the paper at Wednesday’s hearing, however.
Interest in his office spiked in February after a Chinese spy balloon traversed U.S. airspace, followed by shootdowns of several other unknown objects over U.S. and Canadian territory. Capitol Hill was also stirred up by revelations that previous Chinese balloons flew through U.S. airspace dating back to the Trump administration, but went undetected.
Pressed by the panel’s ranking Republican, Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa, Kirkpatrick said his office hasn’t seen evidence that unexplained events under its purview were caused by Russian or Chinese technology, but pointed to “concerning indicators” that foreign capabilities could be at play.
“Are there capabilities that could be employed against us in both an [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] and a weapons fashion? Absolutely,” Kirkpatrick said. “Do I have evidence that they’re doing it in these cases? No, but I have concerning indicators.”
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#UFO #sightings #proof #aliens #Pentagon #official
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 20, 2023
Why violence has broken out in Sudan – video explainer

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Sudan has been gripped by intense violence after clashes broke out between the country’s military and its main paramilitary force, in fighting that threatens to destabilise the wider region. The power struggle has its roots in the years before a 2019 uprising that ousted the dictatorial ruler Omar al-Bashir, who built up formidable security forces that he deliberately set against one another. Guardian journalist Zeinab Mohammed Salih explains the origins of the conflict, and what’s next for the east African country
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

April 20, 2023
Alito extends reprieve for abortion pill access, maintaining status quo for 2 more days

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The justices are mulling whether a ruling from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals should go into effect or whether it should be blocked while further appeals proceed.
If allowed to take effect, the 5th Circuit’s April 12 ruling would suspend various policies the FDA has enacted since 2016 to make mifepristone more accessible — including telemedicine prescription, mail delivery, retail pharmacy dispensing and the approval of a generic version of the drug. The ruling also would scale back the approved “on label” use of the drug from 10 weeks of pregnancy to seven weeks — before many patients know they are pregnant.
The appeals court suggested its ruling was a middle-ground approach because it did not go along with a Texas federal judge’s order to suspend mifepristone’s registration altogether.
However, the FDA and the two drug companies that make mifepristone told the Supreme Court that the 5th Circuit’s ruling could amount to a nationwide ban of the drug because of lengthy delays in returning to labeling and protocols that have not been required for years.
Anti-abortion medical groups that are challenging the drug disputed that characterization, saying the ruling would reimpose important safety restrictions on the drug.
Alito acted single-handedly because he oversees emergency appeals from the 5th Circuit. It is not a clear signal about how Alito or the other justices will ultimately vote on whether to allow the 5th Circuit’s ruling to go into effect.
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#Alito #extends #reprieve #abortion #pill #access #maintaining #status #quo #days
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

April 20, 2023