Real estate for sale signs are seen in front of homes that were foreclosed along Catanzaro Way October15, 2007 in Antioch, California. The San Francisco Bay Area zip code 94531, Antioch, California, has experienced a spike in home foreclosures with a reported 271 homes repossessed between January and August of this year. Antioch has also seen the biggest decline in home prices since May of this year with prices dropping 15 percent. California ranks third behind Ohio and Michigan in foreclosures
Justin Sullivan/Getty
A rise in housing inventory will accelerate a 15% to 20% plunge in home prices over the next year, according to Panthenon Macro.
The firm said as existing home sales continue to fall, a rise in supply “will accelerate the speed” and “the depth of the decline.”
Higher monthly mortgage payments suggest “that a meaningful recovery in sales is still miles away,” Pantheon said.
A 15% to 20% decline in home prices is likely as housing supply rises and consumers continue to feel the squeeze of higher monthly mortgage payments, Pantheon Macro said in a Wednesday note.
Existing home sales fell for the 10th straight month in November, down 7.7% to 4.09 million. That’s below consensus estimates of 4.20 million, and represents a cumulative decline of 37% since January.
“The scale of the collapse in demand over the past year is enough by itself to drive home prices lower from here, but a rise in supply will accelerate the speed of adjustment and, potentially, the depth of the decline,” Pantheon economist Kieran Clancy said.
Driving the lack of consumer demand for homes is higher mortgage rates, which have doubled from about 3% at the start of the year to more than 6% today. Clancy estimates that monthly mortgage payments for a median-priced existing single family home are up 53% year-over-year, supporting Pantheon’s view that “a meaningful recovery in sales is still miles away.”
“House prices have much further to fall from here,” he said, highlighting that a seasonally adjusted home price measure found that single family existing home prices dropped 1.4% in November.
“The bigger picture is that both the NAR and Realtor measures of existing home prices have been trending lower for several months now, but remain extremely elevated by past standards, both in level terms and as a ratio to disposable incomes,” Clancy said.
“We look for a further 15% to 20% decline in prices over the next year, bringing the ratio of home prices to disposable incomes back in line with its long run average,” he added.
There are no read receipts for Slack correspondence.
Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Slack does not use read receipts, so you can’t tell if someone has read a message you sent.
Slack does indicate whether you’ve read messages, though, which helps you keep track of what you’ve read and what you haven’t.
You can change the way Slack tracks read messages on the desktop in the Preferences menu.
For many people, Slack is an indispensable communication tool that keeps teams in close contact thanks to a combination of group chats and instant messages.
The service might seem like a natural place for read receipts, but Slack does not have any — you can’t get any indication of whether someone else has read a message you sent.
But Slack does make it possible for you to keep track of whether you’ve read specific messages, and that is often just as important.
Does Slack have read receipts?
Slack does not have read receipts. In other words, the app doesn’t include any way to let you know if recipients have read or seen your message, whether in group chats, channels, or in direct messages. Of course, this is something of a double-edged sword; not only can’t you tell if another user has seen your message, no one else can see if you have gotten to their messages yet, either.
How to manage what Slack marks as read
Even though Slack doesn’t have read receipts, it does track whether you have read messages or not, and you can control exactly how this works — but only on the desktop version of Slack. This level of control isn’t available on Slack for mobile devices.
To manage how Slack marks your messages as read, click your account icon at the top right of the app window and then choose Preferences. In the Preferences menu, click Mark as read.
You can control aspects of how Slack tracks which messages you have read.
Dave Johnson
Then, in the When I view a channel section, choose the option you prefer:
Start where you left off and mark the conversation as read. When you choose a conversation, it places you at the last message you read but marks the entire thread as read.
Start at the newest message and mark the conversation as read. When you choose a conversation, it places you at the newest message in the thread you read but marks the entire thread as read.
Start at the newest message but leave the unseen messages unread. When you choose a conversation, it places you at the newest message in the thread you read but leaves the unread messages in the thread marked as unread.
Quick tip: If you want to mark a message as unread so you can more easily get back to it and take action on it or respond to it later, right-click the three-dot More actions menu atop a message and choose Mark as unread.
Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Bill Gates are pouring money into brain-computer-interface startups.
David Ryder/Getty Images, Patrick Pleul/Getty Images, Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Tech moguls like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates are investing in brain-implant startups.
They’re “always intrigued by things that could change the game,” an investor said.
Brain scientists say brain-computer-interface research has made exciting progress in recent years.
The idea of connecting computers directly to our brains is moving from fantasy to reality, and some of the richest and most powerful men are pouring money into the space, chasing a vision that the technology could one day upend healthcare — and everyday life as we know it.
Through their venture-capital funds, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates both recently backed the Brooklyn, New York, startup Synchron, which has tested its brain stent in seven humans.
Elon Musk has become the public face of the brain-computer-interface (BCI) industry with his headline-grabbing claims about the potential of his startup Neuralink, even as experts stress that his company’s neural techniques are ordinary, at best.
Peter Thiel, a billionaire cofounder of PayPal, invested last year in Utah’s Blackrock Neurotech, an older BCI startup that has said it hopes to apply for Food and Drug Administration approval soon.
BCIs have been around for roughly 50 years, but until recently, the technology was largely relegated to lab studies and one-off experiments. (More than a decade ago, people wearing BCI caps were already playing pinball using only their minds.) Over the past several years, BCIs have moved from the clinic into people’s heads, homes, and lives, becoming true assistive devices.
Synchron has developed what is perhaps one of the sleekest, most minimally invasive BCIs: It’s a tiny stent fitted with mind-reading electrodes that is ferried up through a key blood vessel to sit next to and communicate with the area of the brain that we use to produce voluntary movements. Synchron’s chief commercial officer told Insider that its device could commercially launch in a few years, if clinical research went well.
“Every single day, there’s some fabulous, new, really powerful insight,” Christopher Moore, a neuroscientist and associate director of Brown University’s Carney Institute for Brain Science, said. “It’s just a treat to be a part of this field right now.”
While today’s research is focused chiefly on using these brain implants in the heads of patients with serious medical conditions like total paralysis, or imagining ways to treat diseases like Parkinson’s, the possibilities for linking brains with computers extend far beyond healthcare. That long-term potential has caught the attention of tech billionaires like Musk, Gates, and Bezos.
“Elon, Gates, and Bezos are always intrigued by things that could change the game,” Robert Nelsen, a biotech investor at Arch Venture Partners who’s invested in Neuralink and Synchron, said in an interview.
Brain implants are moving from fantasy to reality
Philip O’Keefe uses his Synchron Stentrode to operate a computer with his mind.
Paul Burston, The University of Melbourne
A brain-computer interface cuts out the intermediary between your computer and your mind.
By recognizing predictable brain signals, BCIs essentially read your thoughts to achieve concrete actions, like clicking a mouse. That’s how Philip O’Keefe, an Australian who was implanted with Synchron’s device in 2020, uses his BCI to play games online, exchange WhatsApp messages, and turn the lights on and off at home.
O’Keefe has ALS, a degenerative condition that makes it hard for him to use his fingers and hands, but he now has no problem using his mind to get around online.
“Whatever you can do on a computer, I can do,” O’Keefe recently told Insider using his BCI. “At this stage, I am a bit slower than you would be, but there is the ability to do almost anything — if I want to.”
Learning how to use the tech takes months of training, during which both the BCI and the person using it learn to reliably perform and interpret key thoughts: Click here; move there.
The possibilities of BCI aren’t limited to computer clicks or mechanical movements, though.
BCIs are also being developed to diagnose brain issues and treat conditions including depression through deep brain stimulation. They could also help unlock secrets to how our brains work, giving scientists a chance to peer inside our heads and look at our neural circuitry in real time.
“People are reading out brain-area activity patterns and detecting epilepsies before they can hit,” Moore, the Brown neuroscientist, said. “There’s a clear, human, clinical application coming.”
There are also applications beyond healthcare, such as video games, security, and creating more-powerful soldiers.
BCI industry captures the imagination of tech moguls
Kevin Dietsch / Staff / Getty Images
The BCI industry has attracted investment from a who’s who of tech moguls, including Musk, Gates, Bezos, Thiel, and Vinod Khosla. While most of these billionaires invest in other biotech ideas, tech moguls have an outsize presence in BCI, which remains a niche part of biotech.
No BCI startup has gone public, and most of their fundraising rounds have been modest compared with larger and more-mature biotechs.
The computing element of BCI is also an “obvious bridge” between computers and medicine for people with a tech background, Arch’s Nelsen said. The data from BCI research projects can easily appeal to executives more used to looking at computer code than interpreting biology experiments.
“People think of the brain as the most advanced computer out there,” Kurt Haggstrom, Synchron’s chief commercial officer, said in an interview. “What tech person is not going to want to learn and be able to tap into it and understand how it works?”
The emperor has pants but no shirt — yet
Despite the excitement, Moore said BCIs couldn’t collect data capturing the full spectrum of what our brains do. BCIs are focused almost exclusively on electrical signals that are firing in the brain. But there are many components to how our brains work that are not measured through BCIs and remain critical to brain function and how our thoughts create behaviors.
“It’s not that the emperor has no clothes,” Moore said. “OK, the emperor has pants.”
While BCIs can observe, interpret, and even adjust what the neurons firing in our brain are doing, they don’t capture the whole complex picture of all the dynamic, nonelectrical (and still poorly understood) cellular networks in our heads that may have an effect on how we process information and behave — everything from what happens inside our blood vessels to how specialized cells called astrocytes communicate.
BCI is “obviously a huge part of the puzzle,” Moore said, adding: “But think of all the potential dynamics we could record in these other systems in the brain.”
You can block a sound on TikTok by “hiding” videos that use it.
SOPA Images/Getty Images
If you want to see fewer videos with a particular background sound, you can tell TikTok to block videos that use that sound.
Tap and hold a video and choose “Hide videos with this sound” in the More menu beside “Not interested.”
You’ll see fewer videos with this sound, and you can repeat this process each time you hear the sound to block the sound more frequently.
It’s no secret that certain sounds and songs appear in a lot of TikTok videos — they become popular, trendy, and videos which feature them ripple across the app like a fad. That’s great if you like the sound in question, but if it’s annoying or you’re simply over it, it can be frustrating if TikTok’s algorithm keeps serving you videos featuring that soundtrack. The solution? You can block certain sounds on TikTok.
How to block a sound on TikTok
When you encounter a video that has a sound you don’t like and would like to block, do this:
1. Tap and hold the video that is playing the sound you want to block.
2. In the pop-up menu, tap More to the right of Not interested.
3. Tap Hide videoswith this sound.
You can tell TikTok to show you fewer videos with a particular sound using the popup menu.
Dave Johnson/Insider
While this informs TikTok that you want to see fewer videos with this sound, it doesn’t immediately block all videos using this soundtrack. Instead, it makes it somewhat less likely that you’ll be served a video with this sound — the exact reduction depends on TikTok’s algorithm, the specifics of which TikTok doesn’t disclose. Each time you see a video with this sound, though, you can repeat these steps to further reduce how often you’ll see these videos.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was making his way to Washington on Wednesday for a summit with President Joe Biden and an address to a joint session of Congress in his first known trip outside the country since Russia’s invasion began in February.
The highly sensitive trip is taking place after 10 months of a brutal war that has seen tens of thousands killed and wounded on both sides of the conflict, along with devastation for Ukrainian civilians. It also comes as U.S. lawmakers are set to vote on a year-end spending package that includes about $45 billion in emergency assistance to Ukraine and as the Pentagon prepares to send Patriot surface-to-air missiles to the country to defend itself.
Zelenskyy headed abroad after making a daring and dangerous trip Tuesday to what he called the hottest spot on the 1,300-kilometer (800-mile) front line of the conflict, the city of Bakhmut in Ukraine’s contested Donetsk province. He praised Ukrainian troops for their “courage, resilience and strength” as artillery boomed in the background.
In a statement Tuesday night, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Biden looks forward to the visit and that the address to Congress will demonstrate “the strong, bipartisan support for Ukraine.”
“The visit will underscore the United States’ steadfast commitment to supporting Ukraine for as long as it takes, including through the provision of economic, humanitarian, and military assistance,” she said.
U.S. and Ukrainian officials have made clear they don’t envision an imminent resolution to the war and are preparing for fighting to continue for some time. Biden has repeated that while the U.S. will arm and train Ukraine, American forces will not be directly engaged in the conflict.
Biden and Zelenskyy first discussed the idea of a visit to Washington during their most recent phone call, on Dec. 11, and a formal invitation followed three days later, said a senior U.S. administration official, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the visit. Zelenskyy accepted the invitation on Friday and it was confirmed on Sunday, when the White House began coordinating with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to arrange the congressional address.
The White House consulted with Zelenskyy on security for his departure from Ukraine and travel to Washington, including the risk of Russian action while Zelenskyy was briefly out of the country, the official added, declining to detail the measures taken to safeguard the Ukrainian leader. The official said the U.S. expected Russia to continue its attacks on Ukrainian forces and civilian infrastructure targets despite the trip.
The tranche of U.S. funding pending before Congress would be the biggest American infusion of assistance yet to Ukraine — even more than Biden’s $37 billion emergency request — and is meant to ensure that support flows to the war effort for months to come.
On Wednesday, the U.S. was also set to announce that it will send a major package of $1.8 billion in military aid to Ukraine that will for the first time include a Patriot missile battery and precision guided bombs for its fighter jets, U.S. officials said.
The aid signals an expansion by the U.S. in the kinds of advanced weaponry it will send to Ukraine to bolster its air defenses against what has been an increasing barrage of Russian missiles in recent weeks. The package will include about $1 billion in weapons from Pentagon stocks and $800 million in funding through the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, officials said.
The decision to send the Patriot battery comes despite threats from Russia’s Foreign Ministry that the delivery of the advanced surface-to-air missile system would be considered a provocative step and that the Patriot and any crews accompanying it would be a legitimate target for Moscow’s military.
It’s not clear exactly when the Patriot would arrive on the front lines in Ukraine, since U.S. troops will have to train Ukrainian forces on how to use the high-tech system. The training could take several weeks, and is expected to be done in Germany. To date, all training of Ukraine’s forces by the U.S. and its Western allies has taken place in European countries.
The visit comes at an important moment as the White House braces for greater resistance when Republicans take control of the House in January and give more scrutiny to aid for Ukraine. GOP leader Kevin McCarthy has said his party’s lawmakers will not write a “blank check” for Ukraine.
Biden and Zelenskyy frequently have talked by phone as the White House arranges new tranches of military assistance for Ukraine. The calls have been mostly warm, with Biden praising Ukraine for remaining steadfast against the Russians and Zelenskyy thanking the U.S. president for support.
The one exception was a June phone call soon after Biden notified Zelenskyy that an additional $1 billion package was headed to Ukraine. Zelenskyy didn’t miss a beat in ticking off the additional assistance he said Ukraine needed.
That irked Biden, who underscored to Zelenskyy the American people’s generosity. But the brief moment of tension hasn’t caused any lasting difficulty, according to officials familiar with the episode.
Pelosi, who visited Zelenskyy earlier this year in Kyiv, encouraged lawmakers to be on hand for Wednesday evening’s session.
“We are ending a very special session of the 117th Congress with legislation that makes progress for the American people as well as support for our Democracy,” Pelosi wrote Tuesday in a letter to colleagues. “Please be present for a very special focus on Democracy Wednesday night.”
Later at the Capitol she said of Ukrainians, “They are fighting for democracy for all of us.”
Russia’s invasion, which began Feb. 24, has lost momentum. The illegally annexed provinces of Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia remain fiercely contested.
With the fighting in the east at a stalemate, Moscow has used missiles and drones to attack Ukraine’s power equipment, hoping to leave people without electricity as freezing weather sets in.
In a video released by his office from the Bakhmut visit, Zelenskyy was handed a Ukrainian flag and alluded to delivering it to U.S. leaders.
“The guys handed over our beautiful Ukrainian flag with their signatures for us to pass on,” Zelenskyy said in the video. “We are not in an easy situation. The enemy is increasing its army. Our people are braver and need more powerful weapons. We will pass it on from the boys to the Congress, to the president of the United States. We are grateful for their support, but it is not enough. It is a hint — it is not enough.”
For his part, Putin on Tuesday hailed the “courage and self-denial” of his forces in Ukraine — but he did so at a ceremony in an opulent and glittering hall at the Kremlin in Moscow, not on the battlefield.
At the Kremlin ceremony, Putin presented awards to the Moscow-appointed heads of the four illegally annexed regions of Ukraine. In a video address honoring Russia’s military and security agencies, he praised the security personnel deployed to the four regions, saying that “people living there, Russian citizens, count on being protected by you.”
Putin acknowledged the challenges faced by the security personnel.
“Yes, it’s difficult for you,” he said, adding that the situation in the regions is “extremely difficult.”
___
Castillo reported from Kyiv, Ukraine. AP writers Lolita C. Baldor, Tara Copp and Aamer Madhani in Washington and Andrew Katell in New York contributed to this report.
___
Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine: https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
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When the January 6th Committee referred Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro to the Department of Justice for prosecution for contempt of Congress, the DOJ promptly indicted them; Bannon has since been sentenced to prison and is appealing, while Navarro is still awaiting trial. But when the committee referred Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino for prosecution on the same charge, the DOJ waited a long time and then stated that it wouldn’t be charging them for contempt at this time.
This raised questions about why. Clearly, the DOJ isn’t afraid to indict people for contempt of Congress in general. So why were Meadows and Scavino at least temporarily let off the contempt hook? Some speculated that it was because they had provided substantial but incomplete cooperation, and that might have made it more difficult for the DOJ to get a conviction at trial. This was opposed to Bannon and Navarro, who provided no cooperation with the committee at all.
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But now the January 6th Committee’s executive summary has revealed an interesting tidbit. The language in the report reveals that the committee thinks Meadows and Scavino may have avoided being criminally charged because they’re cooperating with the DOJ against Donald Trump. As legal expert Andrew Weissman notes, this same language reveals that the committee doesn’t know whether Meadows is cooperating with the DOJ – but does seem to suspect that he is.
It’s important to understand the distinction here. Meadows and Scavino failed to fully cooperate with the January 6th Committee. But if they have since gone on to fully cooperate with the DOJ, this would mean that the DOJ has two key inside witnesses for nailing Donald Trump on election-related charges. This would sharply increase the odds of Trump being convicted at his eventual criminal trial.
In general the DOJ tries to avoid publicly revealing this kind of cooperation for as long as possible, largely to strategically keep criminal targets from knowing who’s flipped on them until it’s too late for them to do anything about it. So if Meadows and/or Scavino have flipped on Trump, the DOJ isn’t likely to let it be known until Trump is indicted.
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2022 was a landmark year for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Our newsroom published more investigations on a greater variety of topics than ever before. Some of these projects were based on new leaks, others responded to unfolding global news events, and many dug deeper on patterns and topics that emerged from ICIJ’s years of reporting on the world of offshore finance.
Key to all these efforts was ICIJ’s model of global collaboration to uncover corruption, abuses of power and grave harms inflicted in every corner of the world. We worked with journalists from more than 60 different countries this year, leveraging and expanding our trusted network of frontline reporters to bring local expertise to investigations of global consequence.
It’s also been a landmark year for ICIJ’s mission of using data and technology to put the power of our work in the hands of citizens around the world and publishing information in the public interest.
Here’s a recap of ICIJ’s biggest stories of the year.
Newly sanctioned Russians’ hidden wealth uncovered in ICIJ leaks
This year, ICIJ finished updating the Offshore Leaks Database with data extracted from the 11.9 million records that make up the Pandora Papers. The database allows the public and regulators to explore companies and people that use (and sometimes abuse) offshore havens and uncover connections beyond what reporters have published.
As the most expansive leak of tax haven files in history, the Pandora Papers was the most complex dataset that the organization has ever analyzed. Each of the offshore service providers included in the files required a unique approach to extract and standardize information that was released inthreeinstallments. The ICIJ team identified and structured beneficial ownership information by company and jurisdiction to make data from more than 25,000 offshore entities records easy to explore.
A groundbreaking resource that was first developed almost a decade ago, the Offshore Leaks Database contains information from five different leaks of financial records that ICIJ has investigated. Now boasting information on more than three-quarters of a million people and companies behind secret offshore structures with links to more than 200 countries and territories, it is a go-to tool for international research on offshore companies, foundations and trusts.
Ericsson List exposes corporate corruption in a war zone
When ICIJ sent questions about the findings to Ericsson, the company did not respond but instead made a shocking public admission that it may have paid bribes to ISIS. Despite the attempted damage control, the Ericsson List triggered dramatic upheaval for the company that continues nearly a year later. Its share value plummeted, the company was accused of breaching a previous billion-dollar settlement for international bribery by the U.S. Justice Department, multiple government agencies opened probes, and shareholders and terrorism victims sued.
ICIJ and 14 news organizations investigated a first-of-its-kind leak that shed new light on China’s mass detention of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. The Xinjiang Police Files, first obtained by German scholar Adrian Zenz, include thousands of images and documents from public security bureaus in Xinjiang, including thousands of mugshots of detainees, provide an unprecedented view of the militarized nature of China’s mass internment camps.
The Xinjiang Police Files included thousands of mug shots of Uyghur men, women and teenagers. Image: Xinjiang Police FIles
The files also exposed China’s intense monitoring and intrusive checks on a European Union human rights delegation back in 2018. The investigation built on the China Cables, ICIJ’s previous reporting on Beijing’s wide scale campaign against Muslim minorities and the country’s high-tech surveillance and predictive policing.
Following up on previous reporting on the secretive trade of art and artifacts in the offshore world, ICIJ reporters and media partners spent 2022 scouring for antiquities allegedly stolen from countries around the globe and then sold to the wealthiest Western museums and art collectors.
An investigation by ICIJ, Finance Uncovered and the Washington Post examined the billionaire Lindemann family’s relics collection, which was once described as “one of the greatest collections of Southeast Asian art in private hands.” Reporters found that pieces that appeared in archival magazine photographs of the family’s mansions matched artifacts on the Cambodian government’s list of most wanted missing cultural treasures — including ancient Khmer sculptures that were edited out of an Architectural Digest magazine spread.
ICIJ also broke news of the largest seizure of antiquities in the history of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the largest museum in the U.S., and other efforts by law enforcement to repatriate looted artifacts. The confiscated works provide rare glimpses into the notoriously unregulated high-end art market.
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Founded centuries ago, the honorary consul system was meant as a lifeline for countries unable to afford foreign embassies but has since broadened into a mainstay of international relations, embraced by a majority of the world’s governments.
ICIJ teamed up with ProPublica and 59 global media partners to investigate the under-the-radar diplomats, who have repeatedly surfaced in leaked documents and scattered news reports on wrongdoing and scandal around the world. The Shadow Diplomats investigation identified at least 500 current and former honorary consuls who have been accused of crimes or embroiled in controversy — the majority while they held their posts. That includes scores of honorary consuls who reportedly tried to use their status to advance illicit activity such as terrorism financing, arms dealing and drug trafficking, or evade law enforcement. Others have spread pro-Kremlin sentiment around the world, supporting Russian President Vladimir Putin amid his most controversial military and political campaigns, including the invasion of Ukraine.
After the publication of the first stories, authorities in four countries announced action to correct breakdowns. In Finland, the protocol chief at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said he was unaware that some consuls had been convicted of tax fraud, bribery and environmental crimes. The ministry is planning to conduct a review this month. “These crimes … must now be investigated in more detail,” Mika Koskinen told local journalists.
Cross-border crime, corruption and secrecy
This year, ICIJ also investigated regional stories based on smaller-scale leaks with local partners.
Offshore enablers of an arms-dealer: A set of documents from one of Panama’s most prestigious law firms, ARIFA, leaked to ICIJ following the publication of the Pandora Papers told the story of how of a controversial former arms dealer was able to keep his offshore companies active in Panama despite being on the Interpol’s most-wanted list. Carlos Cardoen had reportedly built weapons for the Chilean military during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, and had been indicted by U.S. authorities for crimes related to selling more than $200 million worth of cluster bombs to Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq during its bloody war with Iran. ICIJ partnered with CIPER and LaBot on the investigation.
Kinahan drug cartel: ICIJ partnered with Irish and African media outlets to investigate leaked documents detailing the business activities of a brutal Irish drug cartel, members of which were newly sanctioned by the U.S. this year. Our reporting uncovered previously unknown links between the gang and companies in Panama and Dubai, Emirati authorities and intermediaries, the world of professional boxing and more. One cache of documents revealed how the drug cartel godfather, Christopher Kinahan Sr., masqueraded as a humanitarian flight consultant in bids to buy old military aircraft, and included remarkable pictures of the photo-wary crime boss meeting with international businesspeople and participating in an aviation conference hosted by the World Food Program.
WASHINGTON (AP) — An 800-page report set to be released by House investigators as soon as Wednesday will conclude that then-President Donald Trump criminally plotted to overturn his 2020 election defeat and “provoked his supporters to violence” at the Capitol with false claims of widespread voter fraud.
The resulting Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection of Trump’s followers threatened democracy with “horrific” brutality toward law enforcement and “put the lives of American lawmakers at risk,” according to the report’s executive summary.
“The central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, who many others followed,” reads the report from the House Jan. 6 committee. “None of the events of January 6th would have happened without him.”
The committee’s eight chapters of findings will largely mirror nine hearings this year that presented evidence from more than 1,000 private interviews and millions of pages of documents. They tell the story of Trump’s unprecedented campaign to overturn his defeat and his pressure campaign on state officials, the Department of Justice, members of Congress and his own vice president to change the vote.
A 154-page summary of the report released Monday detailed how Trump, a Republican, amplified the false claims on social media and in public appearances, encouraging his supporters to travel to Washington and protest Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential election win. And how he told them to “fight like hell” at a huge rally in front of the White House that morning and then did little to stop the violence as they beat police, broke into the Capitol and sent lawmakers running for their lives.
It was a “multi-part conspiracy,” the committee concludes.
The massive, damning report is a culmination of four years of a House Democratic majority that has spent much of its time and energy investigating Trump and that is ceding power to Republicans in two weeks.
Democrats impeached Trump twice — both times he was acquitted by the Senate — and investigated his finances, his businesses, his foreign ties and his family. But the 18-month Jan. 6 probe has been the most personal for the lawmakers, most of whom were in the Capitol when Trump’s supporters stormed the building, interrupted the certification of Biden’s victory and tried to hunt them down.
While the lasting impact of the probes remains to be seen — most Republicans have stayed loyal to the former president — the committee’s hearings were watched by tens of millions of people over the summer. And 44% of voters in November’s midterm elections said the future of democracy was their primary consideration at the polls, according to AP VoteCast, a sweeping national survey of the electorate.
“This committee is nearing the end of its work, but as a country we remain in strange and uncharted waters,” said the panel’s chairman, Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, at a meeting Monday to adopt the report and recommend criminal charges against Trump. “We’ve never had a president of the United States stir up a violent attempt to block the transfer of power. I believe nearly two years later, this is still a time of reflection and reckoning.”
The “reckoning” committee members are hoping for is criminal charges against Trump and key allies. But only the Justice Department has the power to prosecute, so the panel sent official referrals recommending the department investigate the former president on four crimes, including aiding an insurrection.
While its main points are familiar, the Jan. 6 report will provide new detail from the hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents the committee has collected. Transcripts and some video are expected to be released as well over the coming two weeks before Democrats give up House control. Republicans take over the House on Jan. 3, when the panel will be dissolved.
“I guarantee there’ll be some very interesting new information in the report and even more so in the transcripts,” Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., told CBS’ “CBS Mornings” on Wednesday.
The summary of the report describes how Trump refused to accept the lawful result of the 2020 election and plotted to overturn his defeat. Trump pressured state legislators to hold votes invalidating Biden’s electors, sought to “corrupt the U.S. Department of Justice by attempting to enlist Department officials to make purposely false statements” and repeatedly, personally tried to persuade Vice President Mike Pence to upend democracy with unprecedented objections at the congressional joint session, it says.
The report also presents some additional evidence to back up some of the most explosive testimony in the hearings. Much of that testimony was from former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who told of Trump’s disregard for supporters who had weapons as he gave his fiery speech in front of the White House that morning and his desire to go to the Capitol afterward. Security officials would not let him go, several witnesses told the panel, leading to an angry exchange in the presidential SUV after the speech. Trump was irate, the witnesses said.
“The Committee’s principal concern was that the President actually intended to participate personally in the January 6th efforts at the Capitol, leading the attempt to overturn the election either from inside the House Chamber, from a stage outside the Capitol, or otherwise,” the report says.
Trump has slammed members of the committee as “thugs and scoundrels” as he has continued to falsely dispute his 2020 loss.
The report will give minute-by-minute detail, as did one of the panel’s hearings, of what Trump was doing — and not doing — for around three hours as his supporters beat police and broke into the Capitol. Trump riled up the crowd at the rally that morning and then did little to stop his supporters for several hours as he watched the violence unfold on television inside the White House.
Lawmakers point out the evidence about Trump’s actions they still do not have from that time, including call logs, entries in the official daily diary or calls to any security officials.
“President Trump did not contact a single top national security official during the day. Not at the Pentagon, nor at the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the F.B.I., the Capitol Police Department, or the D.C. Mayor’s office,” the report says.
There is also a lack of official photographs of the president in those hours.
“President Trump appears to have instructed that the White House photographer was not to take any photographs,” the committee wrote in its summary, citing an interview with chief White House photographer Shealah Craighead.
The report is expected to extensively detail the committee’s interviews with multiple aides and associates of the former president — including some of his closest confidants, most of whom testified that he would not listen to anyone who told him he’d lost the election and that he declined for hours on Jan. 6 to try to stop the violence.
The panel also raised questions about whether some aides were pressured by Trump or his remaining allies not to be forthcoming during their interviews with the committee.
An office building of the International Committee of the Pink Cross (ICRC) in Donetsk was struck by shelling this week as the war in Ukraine rages on for a 10th month, according to officials.
Fox Information Electronic could not instantly achieve the ICRC for remark on the extent of the injury triggered or which side is considered to have levied the strike, however no a person was claimed killed or injured in Monday’s attack.
“The shell, which landed in the yard of the ICRC business in Donetsk late Monday, was the 3rd incident impacting the broader Purple Cross relatives in the latest times,” the ICRC said in a statement.
Red Cross workers embrace each and every other right after a resupply mission to inhabitants who can’t leave their homes in Kharkiv, Ukraine, March 22, 2022.
On Sunday, two persons had been killed and many many others wounded soon after an ICRC-supported hospital in Donetsk was also hit with a strike.
A volunteer with the Ukrainian Crimson Cross crisis response crew in Kherson was also killed for the duration of shelling very last week, the assertion added.
“The ICRC strongly condemns the outcomes of the hostilities on our place of work and phone calls for respect of the humanitarian place,” ICRC explained. “Less than global humanitarian legislation, events have an obligation to get all feasible safeguards to steer clear of harming civilians and damaging civilian objects, together with humanitarian facilities.”
Pink Cross workers load materials into a car or truck in advance of likely for a mission in Kharkiv, Ukraine, March 24, 2022.
(Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Periods)
Fox Information could not promptly ensure the place of the assault Monday, however Russian condition-owned media noted that the strike occurred in the Kalinins’kyi district in the metropolis of Donestk, found in the coronary heart of the location.
The U.K. Defense Ministry on Wednesday assessed that Ukrainian forces have repelled Russian troops and pushed the front strains more east toward the regional cash town.
Weighty battling carries on all over the village of Pisky, about six miles from the metropolis of Donetsk, in what is regarded as “contested territory.”
The metropolis of Donetsk sits in the Donbas location wherever Russian-backed and self-declared Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics have engaged in armed conflict with the Ukrainian authorities given that 2014.
Crimson Cross staff get there to supply help to inhabitants in Japanese Kharkiv, Ukraine, March 23, 2022.
In the lead-up to his invasion, Russian President Vladimir Putin identified the two breakaway locations in eastern Ukraine as “impartial” from Kyiv in advance of he then annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in September.
If Ukrainian troops are equipped to repel Russian forces back into the city of Donetsk, it will be the very first time they will have received traction across the Donbas traces since the war started 10 months ago.
Caitlin McFall is a Reporter at Fox Information Digital masking Politics, U.S. and Entire world news.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Ahead of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s visit to Washington on Wednesday, the Biden administration said it would provide another $1.85 billion in military aid to Ukraine, including the Patriot air defense system that the Ukrainian leader has said his country urgently needs to fend off Russian attacks.
FILE PHOTO: U.S. soldiers stand next to the long-range air dfence system Patriot during Toburq Legacy 2017 air defence exercise in the military airfield near Siauliai, Lithuania, July 20, 2017. REUTERS/Ints Kalnins
Here’s what you need to know about the Patriot:
The Patriot, which stands for Phased Array Tracking Radar for Intercept on Target, is a theater-wide surface-to-air missile defense system built by Raytheon Technologies Corp and considered one of the most advanced air defense systems in the U.S. arsenal.
The system was first used in combat during the 1991 Gulf War, with batteries protecting Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Israel, and later used during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
It is a mobile system that usually includes powerful radar, a control station, a power generator, launch stations and other support vehicles.
The system has different capabilities depending on the type of interceptor used.
The PAC-2 interceptor uses a blast-fragmentation warhead, while the newer PAC-3 missile uses more advanced hit-to-kill technology.
The system’s radar has a range of over 150 km (93 miles), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) said in 2015.
A newly produced single Patriot battery costs over $1 billion, with $400 million for the system and $690 million for the missiles in a battery, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.
Raytheon has built more 240 Patriot systems and they are currently used by 18 countries, including the United States. The system has been in high demand in the Middle East because of the threat posed by Iran to the region.
According to Raytheon, the system has intercepted more than 150 ballistic missiles in combat since 2015.
Ukraine has said it needs more air defense systems to protect against the barrage of missile and drones strikes from Russian forces.
So far, the United States has provided a pair of National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS) to Ukraine.
While the Patriot system is designed to intercept threats like aircraft and ballistic missiles, it can also shoot down the “kamikaze” drones Russia has frequently sent to hit Ukrainian critical infrastructure. But it would be an extremely expensive way to destroy drones that only cost thousands of dollars.
Officials and experts have said that while the Patriot system is likely to save lives from incoming missiles, it probably won’t change the trajectory of the nearly 10-month conflict since it is a defensive system.
It will be several months before Ukraine can deploy the Patriot on the battlefield.
U.S. officials have told Reuters that the Patriot system will first arrive in Germany, where Ukrainian troops will learn how to use them.
The training can take months, with each system requiring dozens of troops to operate.
Ukraine will then have to decide how and where to deploy the system without it being destroyed by Russian forces. Russia has said the Patriot missile defense system would be a legitimate target for Russian strikes.
