(NewsNation) — Cities across the nation are preparing for protests and demonstrations following the anticipated release of body camera footage showing the beating of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols in Memphis.

Nichols died three days after a Jan. 7 traffic stop where he was allegedly beaten by police officers. Five Memphis police officers involved in the incident now face criminal charges.

Protesters in Memphis, as well as Chicago, New York City, Detroit, Portland, Washington D.C. and Dallas, are all planning their own demonstrations. Cites including Milwaukee, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Nashville, Seattle and Denver are also preparing for protests, NewsNation learned.

The police chief in Memphis has warned the footage in the body camera video is likely to spark outrage, and asked for protesters to remain peaceful. Nichols’ family echoed those comments.

“We want peaceful protests, that is what the family wants,” said Nichols’ stepfather, Rodney Wells. “We need to do this peacefully.”

From the White House, President Joe Biden is also preparing for demonstrations Friday night. He said in a statement, “Outrage is understandable, but violence is never acceptable.  Violence is destructive and against the law.  It has no place in peaceful protests seeking justice.”

In Georgia, where protests over the construction of a police training facility turned violent, 1,000 National Guard members are ready for deployment if needed.

Two dozen U.S. Senate Republicans warned Democratic President Joe Biden on Friday that they would not support increasing the federal debt ceiling without at least an equal amount of spending cuts to government programs or structural reform.

In a Jan. 27 letter, lawmakers supported legislation to require the U.S. Treasury to prioritize payments for the public debt, Social Security, Medicare, veterans benefits and military pay, if the government were to breach the current $31.4 trillion borrowing limit in coming months.

The lawmakers represent nearly half of the Senate’s 49 Republicans. A debt ceiling increase would require support from nine Republicans, 48 Democrats and three independents who caucus with Democrats to meet the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster rule for most legislation.

The one-page letter surfaced a day after Biden characterized Republicans as a party of “chaos and catastrophe” while criticizing their refusal to approve a debt ceiling increase without spending cuts.

The White House, which has repeatedly voiced opposition to debt ceiling negotiations, was not immediately available for comment.

The federal government neared its congressionally imposed $31.4 trillion borrowing limit on Jan. 19, and the Treasury Department warned it may not be able to pay bills past early June, at which point the world’s biggest economy could be at risk for default.

“It is the policy of the Senate Republican conference that any increase in the debt ceiling must be accompanied by cuts in federal spending of an equal or greater amount as the debt ceiling increase, or meaningful structural reform,” said the letter led by staunch conservative Senator Mike Lee of Utah.

“We do not intend to vote for a debt-ceiling increase without structural reforms,” added the lawmakers, who included Senate Republican Conference Chairman John Barrasso.

Lawmakers often use the term structural reform to refer to changes in Social Security and Medicare, respectively the U.S. retirement and healthcare programs for the elderly.

But the senators cited debt prioritization legislation as an acceptable reform. Such legislation, which hardline Republicans in the House of Representatives support, would direct the Treasury to make debt payments to avoid default and maintain benefits for the elderly, veterans and the military. Other federal programs could shut down.

The policy language used in the letter was part of a Senate Republican rules package adopted during the last Congress, according to a party conference spokesperson.

Brinkmanship could panic investors, potentially sending markets slumping and shaking the global economy. In 2011, a protracted debt-ceiling battle led to a downgrading of U.S. creditworthiness and years of forced domestic and military spending cuts.

On Tuesday, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said any solution to the debt ceiling debate would have to come from talks between Biden and House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Republicans control the House by a narrow margin, while the Senate is led by Democrats.

Biden and McCarthy have agreed to meet but nothing has been scheduled.

It was not clear whether the Senate Republicans notified McCarthy about their letter ahead of time. Neither McCarthy’s office nor Lee’s was immediately available for comment.

Colombia has made substantial progress on only three of 28 actions recommended by a regional human rights body to protect the right to protest after deaths during demonstrations in 2020 and 2021, the organization said on Friday.

The country was rocked by waves of protests during the administration of former President Ivan Duque, leading to dozens of civilian deaths, according to official figures, while advocacy groups say the number was significantly higher.

Victims’ families, their lawyers and human rights groups say many of the deaths were driven by heavy-handed policing.

After the protests, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) made 41 recommendations to protect Colombians’ right to demonstrate and tackle the underlying causes of their discontent.

In its first follow-up report on Friday, the IACHR examined progress on the 28 recommendations concerning the right to protest, finding that substantial compliance had been achieved on three, partial compliance on 14 and no compliance on 11.

The president’s office and IACHR Commissioner Julissa Mantilla said the two sides were committed to working together with civil society to advance the effort.

“We believe that the recommendations given by international human rights bodies have the potential to produce structural changes that allow us to guarantee non-repetition (of these events),” Foreign Vice Minister Laura Gil said in the statement.

The city of Memphis released a shocking video on Friday of the violent encounter between Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man, and the five police officers charged with murder in his beating death earlier this month.

The highly anticipated footage from police body-worn and dashboard cameras was posted Friday evening on the city’s YouTube site a day after the officers were charged with second-degree murder, assault, kidnapping, official misconduct and oppression.

The officers, all Black, had already been dismissed from the police department last Saturday following their Jan. 7 confrontation with Nichols during a traffic stop that led to him being severely beaten.

He succumbed to his injuries and died three days later while hospitalized.

Memphis police chief Cerelyn Davis and lawyers for Nichols’ family who watched the video with his relatives before it was released, warned in advance that the images were brutal and likely to cause outrage, while appealing to the public for calm.

“You are going to see acts that defy humanity,” Davis told CNN in describing the footage.

Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, representing Nichols’ family, said the last words on the video were Nichols crying out for his mother.

“No mother should go through what I am going through right now, no mother, to lose their child to the violent way that I lost my child,” Tyre Nichols’ mother, RowVaughn Wells, said on Friday.

The footage was likely to transform Nichols, the father of a 4-year-old described as an affable, accomplished skateboarder who recently enrolled in a photography class, into the next face of the U.S. racial justice movement.

Raised in Sacramento, California, Nichols moved before the coronavirus pandemic to the Memphis area, where he lived with his mother and stepfather and worked at FedEx, taking a break each day to come home for a meal prepared by his mother.

Nichols’ family and President Joe Biden have appealed for protests to stay peaceful in Memphis, a city of 628,000 where nearly 65% of residents are Black. Schools were scheduled to close early and Saturday morning events were canceled.

Biden spoke with RowVaughn Wells and Rodney Wells, Nichols’ stepfather, on Friday afternoon to express his condolences, the White House said, adding that it was coordinating with relevant government agencies in case protests turn violent.

Nichols’ death marked the latest high-profile instance of police officers accused of using excessive force in the deaths of Black people and other minorities in recent years. These have been publicly condemned as systemic racism in the U.S. criminal justice system.

Protests under the banner of the “Black Lives Matter” movement against racial injustice erupted globally following the May 2020 murder of George Floyd, a Black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for more than nine minutes.

Antonio Romanucci, another lawyer for Nichols’ family, told National Public Radio in an interview on Friday that Nichols was a strong supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement and “basically died for his own cause.”

U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland on Friday announced a federal civil rights investigation into Nichols’ death, while law enforcement agencies in some major cities, including New York, Atlanta and Washington, said they were preparing for possible protests following the video’s release.

Police have described the circumstances of Nichols’ arrest in vague terms. Even Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy, who sought the officers’ indictment, was circumspect when announcing the charges.

After Nichols was pulled over for reckless driving, “an altercation” ensued in which officers doused him with pepper spray, and Nichols tried to flee on foot, Mulroy said. “There was another altercation at a nearby location at which the serious injuries were experienced by Mr. Nichols.”

Davis said her department has not yet been able determine whether there was probable cause for the officers to pull Nichols over for reckless driving, a traffic stop which set in motion the violent events that followed.

Crump said the speed at which the criminal charges were brought against the officers – fewer than three weeks after Nichols’ death – should be a standard for police-involved killings.

In some other high-profile cases, such as the police killing of Laquan McDonald in Chicago in 2014, more than a year elapsed before the release of police video and the filing of charges.

“We want to proclaim that this is the blueprint going forward for any time any officers, whether they be Black or white, will be held accountable,” Crump said. “No longer can you tell us we got to wait six months to a year.”

Lawyers for the family also called on the police department to disband the special SCORPION unit focused on violent street crime to which at least some of the officers were assigned. Davis has said the department will review SCORPION and other specialized units.

Crump compared the encounter to the 1991 videotaped beating of Black motorist Rodney King by four police officers whose subsequent acquittal of criminal charges sparked days of riots in Los Angeles.

All five officers – Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr., and Justin Smith – were fired from the police force on Jan. 21 after an internal investigation found they breached multiple department policies, including use of excessive force.

Four of the officers have posted bail and have been released from jail, a CBS affiliate reported on Friday. A lawyer for Mills, Blake Ballin, said it might be another two weeks before the defendants make their initial court appearances.

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Microsoft warns customers to patch their Exchange servers because attackers always look to exploit unpatched installs.

Microsoft published a post to urge its customers to protect their Exchange servers because threat actors actively attempt to exploit vulnerabilities in unpatched installs. The IT giant recommends installing the latest available Cumulative Update (CU) and Security Update (SU) on Exchange servers 

“There are too many aspects of unpatched on-premises Exchange environments that are valuable to bad actors looking to exfiltrate data or commit other malicious acts.” reads the post published by Microsoft. “First, user mailboxes often contain critical and sensitive data. Second, every Exchange server contains a copy of the company address book, which provides a lot of information that is useful for social engineering attacks, including organizational structure, titles, contact info, and more. And third, Exchange has deep hooks into and permissions within Active Directory, and in a hybrid environment, access to the connected cloud environment.”

Threat actors can exploit vulnerabilities in unpatched installs to steal sensitive information contained in user mailboxes, gather intelligence on the target’s activity, or access the connected cloud environment.

After installing an update, administrators are recommended to perform some manual tasks, Microsoft recommends running Health Checker after installing an update to check for such tasks. Health Checker provides them with links to articles that provide step-by-step guidance.

The IT giant pointed out that mitigations are designed to provide temporary protection until an SU is available, however, they can become insufficient to protect against all variations of an attack, for this reason, it is essential to install applicable SU.

Below is the list of recommendations provided by the company:

• Be sure to always read our blog post announcements, noting known issues and recommended or required manual actions. For CUs, always follow our guidance and best practices, and for SUs, use the Security Update Guide to find relevant information.
• Be sure to review our update FAQ in the article Why Exchange Server Updates Matter.
• Use the Exchange Server Health Checker to inventory your servers and see which Exchange servers need updates (CUs or SUs), and if any manual action needs to be taken.
• Once you know what updates are needed, use the Exchange updates step-by-step guide (aka the Exchange Update Wizard) to choose your currently running CU and your target CU and get directions for updating your environment.
• If you encounter errors during update installation, the SetupAssist script can help troubleshoot them. And if something does not work properly after updates, have a look at the Update Troubleshooting Guide, which covers the most common issues and how to resolve them.
• Be sure to install any necessary updates for Windows Server and other software that might be running on your Exchange server(s).
• Be sure to install any necessary updates on dependency servers, including Active Directory, DNS, and other servers used by Exchange.

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Microsoft Exchange servers)

The post Patch management is crucial to protect Exchange servers, Microsoft warns appeared first on Security Affairs.

Over two dozen U.S. representatives on Friday called on top U.S. climate envoy John Kerry to urge the United Arab Emirates to withdraw its appointment of the head of its state oil company as president of the COP28 climate summit it will host this year.

The 27 Democratic members of Congress, led by California Congressman Jared Huffman, sent a letter to Kerry calling on him to persuade the future U.N. climate summit host to withdraw the appointment of Sultan Al Jaber, head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, who is charged with shepherding the next round of climate negotiations.

The lawmakers said the appointment jeopardizes the climate talks, which they say are already negatively influenced by the presence of fossil fuel lobbyists.

“It risks undermining the very essence of what is trying to be accomplished,” they wrote to Kerry.

“Furthermore, as some of us have urged future COPs should require any participating company to submit an audited corporate political influencing statement that discloses climate-related lobbying, campaign contributions, and funding of trade associations and organizations active on energy and climate,” they added.

On Jan. 12, Kerry congratulated the UAE on the selection of Jaber.

In an interview with Reuters last month, Kerry said having an oil state host the COP is a positive move because “it’s so important that you have an oil and gas producing nation step up and say we understand the challenge of the climate crisis.”

Al-Jaber, also UAE’s minister of industry and technology and its climate envoy, will help shape the conference’s agenda and intergovernmental negotiations to build consensus, his office said in a statement.

Campaigners and some delegates criticized COP27, saying fossil fuel producers had watered down emission reduction ambitions and benefited from sympathetic treatment from Egypt, a natural gas exporter and frequent recipient of Gulf funds.

A North Carolina man who faced criminal charges after claiming he had a bomb in his truck parked near the U.S. Capitol in 2021 pleaded guilty on Friday, the Justice Department said in a statement.

Floyd Ray Roseberry, 52, of Grover, North Carolina, pleaded guilty to one charge of threats to use explosives during a standoff with police that lasted four hours near the Library of Congress, the Justice Department said on Friday. Roseberry had earlier pleaded not guilty.

Roseberry faces a statutory maximum sentence of 10 years in prison. Judge Rudolph Contreras of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who accepted the plea, scheduled a sentencing for June 15, the Justice Department added.

During the incident in August 2021, Roseberry parked his vehicle on a sidewalk outside the U.S. Library of Congress and told an officer who approached him that he had a bomb while holding what appeared to be a detonator, according to police.

Police shut down streets and evacuated nearby buildings as they negotiated with Roseberry. The standoff paralyzed a swath of Washington for several hours.

Roseberry later surrendered to police, who said at the time that they found possible bomb-making materials, but no bomb, in the truck.

Roseberry, who had a history of mental illness, faced charges of using a weapon of mass destruction and making threats to use explosive materials.

He live-streamed his threats from his Facebook account. In the video, he said the “revolution’s on.”

“I’m ready to die for the cause,” he added.

Prosecutors said that he also stated that he was upset about the 2020 election results and demanded that President Joe Biden resign from office. He demanded to speak to Biden about several grievances, according to prosecutors.

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There are so many beautiful things about books I could not possibly list them all. One thing about books is they give us a chance to understand not just the characters within but the authors as well.

And right now, all I can think of is a particular author. He wrote several books, but his book “1984” is widely considered one of the best books ever written. And when I first heard about the following story, all I could think was: “Oh Orwell, how right you were.”

George Orwell. He was so ahead of his time. And he knew. He knew what we could become. Many children in the state of Florida are living in the world created by Orwell — warned about by Orwell.

I’ve often written about DeSantis. He’s corrupt as hell and wicked. And what he is doing right now is the sum of all of Orwell’s fears.

The location: Manatee County, Florida.

The who: teachers and librarians.

The what: books.

The where: their schools.

The victims: children.

The adults at the schools were told that “every book on their shelves was banned until otherwise notified.”

I am not making this up. And if they said no? If they refused? They are at risk of prosecution as felons. FELONS!! The books must be banned until “censors can vet them.” Orwell, Orwell — how right you were.

Children can no longer handle their books — their source of knowledge without — surveillance. He has turned the teachers — the librarians — the adults of Florida – into the “reading police.”

One can see in the eyes of DeSantis — nothing. Nothing at all. But one can sense how happy he’d be to prosecute someone. One can feel he is ITCHING to do just that. There is good news in all this. There are the courts.

For example, several students have hinted they plan to file suit against DeSantis for his banning of the African American studies AP class Palmer report told you about. If DeSantis keeps this up, the amount of litigation, he faces might exceed that of Trump.

I never thought we’d exist in the dark world Orwell wrote about. And now it’s happened. The good news is there are far more of us than there are DeSantis clones. And we will win this war against the reading police and right the wrongs Orwell was so passionate in warning us about.

The post This is what Orwell warned us about appeared first on Palmer Report.

One of the largest unions in the country won national attention last month when it declared it had won the support of a video game development studio’s employees to unionize. But weeks later, the union is now admitting defeat and canceling plans to hold a vote after employees criticized the labor group.

The Communication Workers of America in December celebrated its successful effort to convince a supermajority of workers at Proletariat, a studio belonging to video game developer Activision Blizzard, to unionize. After the union announced this week it had given up on plans to hold a unionization vote, it became clear that there were cracks in the union’s support, as Proletariat employees took to Twitter to explain that many developers were unconvinced by the union’s pitch.

The union blamed the studio’s management for the failed effort, accusing them of “confrontational tactics” such as holding meetings that “demoralized and disempowered the group, making a free and fair election impossible.”

But studio engineer Dan Ogles challenged the Communication Workers of America’s characterization of the unionization effort’s failure as the result of union-busting, saying “the union campaign was extremely contentious and divisive within the group of workers from the start.”

“Managers did not discuss unionization with their employees unless requested,” Ogles said. “There were no threats or attempts at intimidation that I’m aware of; if the CWA thought otherwise they could have filed a charge of Unfair Labor Practices, as they have done many times in other campaigns.”

Another Proletariat employee, Kat Dolan, told Axios the union’s accusations against the studio’s management were “laughably fabricated,” that meetings held by management were “neutral and supportive.” Dolan suggested it was the union’s failure to win over roughly 20 of her coworkers concerned about the union’s impact that doomed the unionization effort.

The post Union’s Attempt to Organize Video Game Developers Falls Flat appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.