(Reuters) – Three former U.S. snowboarders sued their former coach, the national snowboarding federation and the U.S. Olympic Committee on Thursday alleging sexual abuse that was covered up by the two sporting bodies, court documents showed.

Rosey Fletcher, Erin O’Malley and Callan Chythlook-Sifsof sued former coach Peter Foley, U.S. Ski and Snowboard (USSS), and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) in U.S. District Court for the central district of Los Angeles.

The suit alleges Foley exploited his position of trust with the athletes to “coerce sexual acts through force, manipulation, emotional abuse, intimidation, and retaliation”.

“Foley’s abuse was reported to executives of the USSS and the USOPC on numerous occasions by multiple athletes who were coached by Foley, yet no action was taken,” said the suit, which seeks an unspecified amount of money damages.

The lawsuit alleges Foley committed widespread sexual misconduct, all of which was unwanted and non-consensual.

Reuters could not ascertain if Foley had a legal representative. An attorney who previously represented Foley did not respond to a requests for comment.

The USOPC did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit, while a spokesperson for USSS said on Thursday a statement was forthcoming.

Former Olympic snowboarder Chythlook-Sifsof first raised the allegations in February last year in a series of Instagram posts.

Foley strongly denied the allegations, telling reporters at the Winter Olympics in China last February that, “I was totally surprised by the allegations. I vehemently deny the allegations.”

USSS placed Foley on a leave of absence before firing him a month later.

The U.S. Olympic Committee said at that time it had followed protocol and reported the allegations to the U.S Center for SafeSport, which handles reports of sexual abuse within the Olympic movement.

SafeSport said in an email on Thursday: “The Center does not comment on matters to protect the integrity of its investigative process.”

Fletcher won a bronze medal at the 2006 Games in Turin and also competed at the 1998 and 2002 Winter Games. Chythlook-Sifsof made the 2010 Olympic team in Vancouver and O’Malley was a national team member in the 1990s.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A suspected Chinese spy balloon has been flying over the United States for a couple of days, U.S. officials said on Thursday, in what would be a brazen act just days ahead of a planned trip to Beijing by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Fighter jets were mobilised but military leaders advised President Joe Biden against shooting the balloon out of the sky for fear debris could pose a safety threat, advice Biden accepted, U.S. officials said.

The United States took “custody” of the balloon when it entered U.S. airspace and had observed it with piloted U.S. military aircraft, one of the officials told reporters on condition of anonymity.

The incident recalls the lengths to which Beijing and Washington have been willing to go to spy on each other amid rising tensions between the superpowers.

“The United States government has detected and is tracking a high-altitude surveillance balloon that is over the continental United States right now,” Pentagon spokesperson Brigadier General Patrick Ryder told reporters.

“The balloon is currently traveling at an altitude well above commercial air traffic and does not present a military or physical threat to people on the ground.”

Blinken is expected to travel to China next week for a visit agreed to in November by Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping. It was not clear how the discovery of the spy balloon might affect those plans.

The Chinese foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

U.S. officials brought up the issue with their Chinese counterparts through diplomatic channels in Beijing and in Washington. “We have communicated to them the seriousness with which we take this issue,” a U.S. official said.

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate intelligence committee, said the spy balloon was alarming but not surprising.

“The level of espionage aimed at our country by Beijing has grown dramatically more intense & brazen over the last 5 years,” Rubio said on Twitter.

His fellow Republican, Senator Tom Cotton, called for Blinken to cancel his trip.

Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said he would request a “Gang of Eight” briefing, referring to a classified national security briefing for congressional leaders and Republican and Democratic leaders of the intelligence committees. The Biden administration briefed Gang of Eight staff earlier on Thursday and has offered additional briefings, a U.S. official said.

The news broke as CIA Director William Burns was speaking at an event at Washington’s Georgetown University, at which he called China the “biggest geopolitical challenge” currently facing the United States.

Relations between China and the United States have soured in recent years, particularly following then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August, which prompted dramatic Chinese military drills near the self-ruled island.

Since then, Washington and Beijing have sought to communicate more frequently and prevent ties from worsening.

U.S. military leaders considered shooting down the balloon over Montana on Wednesday but eventually advised Biden against it because of the safety risk from debris, the official told reporters.

The Billings, Montana, airport issued a ground stop as the military mobilized assets including F-22 fighter jets in case Biden ordered the balloon be shot down.

“We wanted to make sure we were coordinating with civil authorities to empty out the airspace around that potential area,” the official said.

“But even with those protective measures taken, it was the judgment of our military commanders that we didn’t drive the risk down low enough. So we didn’t take the shot.”

The official said the current flight path would carry the balloon over a number of sensitive sites, but did not give details. Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana is home to 150 intercontinental ballistic missile silos.

A separate U.S. official said the spy balloon had been tracked near the Aleutian Islands and Canada before entering the United States.

Officials declined to say how high the balloon was flying but acknowledged it was operating above civilian air traffic and below “outer space.”

Such balloons typically operate at 80,000-120,000 feet (24,000-37,000m), well above where commercial air traffic flies. The highest-performing fighter aircraft typically do not operate above 65,000 feet, although spy planes such as the U-2 have a service ceiling of 80,000 feet or more.

Craig Singleton, a China expert of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said that such balloons had been widely used by the United States and Soviet Union during the Cold War and are a low-cost intelligence gathering method.

Spy balloons have flown over the United States several times in recent years, but this balloon appeared to be lingering longer than in previous instances, an official said.

“Currently, we assess that this balloon has limited additive value from an intelligence collection perspective, but we are taking steps nevertheless to protect against foreign intelligence collection of sensitive information,” the official said.

Singapore-based security analyst Alexander Neill said while the balloon was likely to provide a fresh irritant to China-U.S. ties, it was probably of limited intelligence value compared to other elements China’s modernising military has at its disposal.

“China has its own constellation of spy and military satellites that are far more important and effective in terms of watching the U.S., so I think it is a fair assumption that the intelligence gain is not huge,” said Neill, who is an adjunct fellow at Hawaii’s Pacific Forum think-tank.

Honduras and the United Nations launched on Thursday a humanitarian aid plan aiming to reach more than 2 million of the Central American country’s most vulnerable people, the groups said.

The plan requires some $280 million in funding to help those hit by recent crop failures caused by drought, historic flooding from tropical storms and insecurity caused by drug trafficking and gangs, the United Nations said in a statement.

The funds will come from the Honduran government, humanitarian organizations and other donors, it said, adding the plan would be presented later this month in Geneva in the hope of attracting support from other countries.

Nearly 100 projects will be funded under the plan this year, including food supply and crop restoration programs, assistance to deportees and internally displaced people as well as health and water access programs.

Humanitarian need has risen in Honduras in recent years, aggravated by the rising cost of living, natural disasters and violence, the United Nations said, with 74% of Hondurans living in poverty and 3.2 million people in need of aid.

Among the more ambitious hopes for Pope Francis’ visit to South Sudan this week is that it will give a jolt to a peace process aimed at ending a decade of conflict that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Government forces loyal to President Salva Kiir and opposition forces that back First Vice President Riek Machar signed a deal in 2018 that committed the two sides to sharing power and forming a unified national military.

But implementation of that agreement has been slow and violence between rival communities has continued to flare up.

Here are details about the conflict and efforts to resolve it:

War broke out in South Sudan in December 2013 two year after the country gained its independence from Sudan.

The conflict was triggered by infighting within the ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) following Kiir’s decision that July to sack Machar as vice president.

The resulting war was fought along largely ethnic lines. Kiir comes from South Sudan’s largest ethnic group, the Dinka. Machar comes from the second largest, the Nuer.

Civilians on both sides were targeted on the basis of ethnicity, according to human rights groups. A U.N commission said in 2016 that ethnic cleansing was taking place.

The war dashed the hopes that accompanied South Sudan’s independence in 2011 following more than two decades of armed struggle against the Khartoum government in the north.

By one estimate in 2018, the previous five years of war caused about 400,000 deaths, either as a direct result of conflict or indirectly from factors like disease or reduced access to health care.

Since then, routine bouts of fighting have continued to kill and displace large numbers of civilians.

There are 2.2 million internally displaced people in South Sudan and another 2.3 million have fled the country as refugees, according to the United Nations.

Famine was briefly declared in parts of South Sudan in 2017. More than two-thirds of the population now needs humanitarian assistance as a result of the conflict and natural disasters like three years of unprecedented floods.

The peace deal signed in September 2018 was dubbed a “revitalized” version of a 2015 agreement that had collapsed the following year. Machar was reinstated as first vice president under intense diplomatic pressure.

The accord called for a unity government, the integration of Machar’s forces into the national military and accountability for crimes committed during the war.

In 2019, Pope Francis famously knelt to kiss the feet of Kiir, Machar and three other vice presidents in Rome as he appealed to them to respect the deal.

Since then, armed violence by the signatories has fallen signicantly, the United Nations said last year, and some provisions of the accord have been successfully implemented.

But international donors have complained about the government’s slow progress in unifying the various factions of the military into a single unit, writing a new constitution and standing up a court to try war crimes.

Last August, the government delayed elections originally slated for 2022 by two years. The SPLM in December nominated Kiir as its candidate and voted to revoke Machar’s membership.

Meanwhile, violence between smaller ethnically-based militias has repeatedly flared in different parts of the country, often triggered by disputes over grazing areas, water and other resources.

U.S. customs authorities said palm oil products made by Sime Darby Plantation <SIPL.KL> were no longer produced with forced labour, in a sign that a two-year import ban on the Malaysian firm will soon be lifted.

Goods made by Sime Darby Plantation, the world’s largest palm oil company by land size, have been blocked by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) from entering the United States since December 2020 over suspected abusive labour practices.

In response, Sime Darby Plantation appointed an ethical trade consultancy to audit its facilities, and last year set aside about $20 million to compensate current and former migrant workers who paid recruitment fees to secure jobs at the firm.

In a notice published for public inspection on the U.S. Federal Register website on Thursday, CBP said it had now “determined that the products were no longer being mined, produced, or manufactured wholly or in part with the use of convict, forced, or indentured labor by Sime Darby Plantation”, citing additional information it had received.

The CBP did not specify what evidence it had received or whether the ban on the firm’s imports had been lifted. The agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Sime Darby said it was aware of the U.S. notice.

“We are optimistic that the tremendous strides we have made in bolstering the quality of life for our workforce will soon be recognised by the CBP and that we will be allowed to resume exports to the United States,” a spokesman said in an email to Reuters.

Shares of Sime Darby Plantation eased 0.5% on Friday morning.

Sime Darby Plantation is among eight Malaysian firms that have been banned by the United States in the past four years over forced labour allegations.

Malaysia in 2021 announced a government plan to eliminate abusive practices such as debt bondage, unhygienic dormitories for workers, and excessive overtime, by 2030.

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I’d like to congratulate CNN for its most dramatic achievement yet. As you know, Nielson tracks the number of viewers for all television networks. And according to Nielson, for the week of January 16 though January 22, CNN reached for the stars and at last found rating success.

Just kidding. CNN may have reached for the stars, but they took a fall on the way up. The most important age group of viewers for political networks is the 25-54 year old democratic. And CNN managed to harness a grand total of 93.000 viewers in that demographic. Astonishing. It looks like Licht is doing a good job. (sarcasm.)

Perhaps you wonder why I give Licht such a hard time.It’s because I want CNN to succeed. I want that very much. And, in my humble opinion, he’s made CNN worse, not better. And to back that up, I like to show evidence.

I’d also like it if Licht managed to make one good decision, and that isn’t happening anytime soon, I don’t think. But what IS happening is Bill Maher. Licht has decided to air Maher’s show on CNN. This will happen on Friday nights at 11:30 PM, which practically screams that nobody will watch.

Wouldn’t it be nice if CNN actually had a CEO who knows what in the heck they’re doing? I know it’s not easy. But it does seem like if there is a bad decision to be made, Licht will make it. In the meantime, CNN’s hour of 9:00 PM is still vacant. It isn’t surprising. Licht has done a lot of reshuffling, but he appears reluctant to take chances on new faces.

I imagine Licht is not long for the job. The bottom line ALWAYS is the most important thing. If the station’s ratings continue to get worse — and I do not see how they could get much worse — at some point, one has to think that the problem may not be the network but the decision-maker. The decision maker who, for some inexplicable reasons, refuses to make many decisions.

The post CNN sinks to an all new low appeared first on Palmer Report.

Susan Walsh/AP; Mike Cohen/Getty Images for The New York Times

• Bill Gates told the BBC he does not think traveling to Mars is a good use of money.
• “You can buy measles vaccines and save lives for $1,000 per life saved,” Gates explained.
• He also said he thinks Elon Musk has had a positive impact through Tesla even though it’s not philanthropic.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said he’d rather pay for life-saving vaccines than spend money going to Mars, commenting on how his priorities differ from one of the other richest men on Earth.

Gates made the comments in an interview with the BBC published Thursday in which journalist Amol Rajan asked the billionaire if he would encourage Tesla founder Elon Musk to join the “club of megaphilantropists,” referencing Gates, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos.

“Yeah, I think someday he’ll be a great philanthropist,” Gates said of Musk. “Obviously things like Tesla are having a positive impact even without being a form of philanthropy. But at the end of the day, I don’t think — other than going to Mars a few times, which might cost a little bit — I don’t think he’ll want to spend it on himself.”

Gates added he thinks eventually Musk will become a philanthropist “using his ingenuity.”

After a follow-up question from Rajan, Gates also said in his view going to Mars is not a good use of money.

“It’s actually quite expensive to go to Mars,” he told the BBC. “You can buy measles vaccines and save lives for $1,000 per life saved, and so it just kind of grounds you, as in: ‘Don’t go to Mars.'”

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the nonprofit founded by Gates and his ex-wife Melinda French-Gates, has put billions of dollars towards researching, developing, and delivering vaccines to the world’s poorest countries. The foundation says it has spent billions on efforts to eradicate polio worldwide, including by expanding access to vaccines.

Gates, along with French-Gates and Buffett, also founded the Giving Pledge, through which some of the world’s wealthiest individuals have promised to give away most of their wealth.

Musk, who is often ranked the world’s richest person, also signed the pledge in 2012. Last year, Musk made a $5.7 billion charitable donation in Tesla shares to the Musk Foundation, which he launched with his brother, Kimball Musk, in 2002. The foundation distributed about $160 million in 2022, according to Bloomberg.

Musk has previously said it is difficult to find “ways to donate money that really make a difference.” In 2021, a Vox report concluded Musk had donated 0.05% of his wealth to charity.

Gates and Musk have publicly disagreed in the past, including on COVID-19, how to address climate change, and space travel.

Musk and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A suspected Chinese spy balloon has been flying over the United States for a couple of days, U.S. officials said on Thursday, in what would be a brazen act just days ahead of a planned trip to Beijing by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

The incident recalls the lengths to which Beijing and Washington have been willing to go to spy on each other amid rising tensions between the superpowers.

Fighter jets were mobilised but military leaders advised President Joe Biden against shooting the balloon out of the sky for fear debris could pose a safety threat, advice Biden accepted, U.S. officials said.

The United States took “custody” of the balloon when it entered U.S. airspace and had observed it with piloted U.S. military aircraft, one the official told reporters on condition of anonymity.

“The United States government has detected and is tracking a high-altitude surveillance balloon that is over the continental United States right now,” Pentagon spokesperson Brigadier General Patrick Ryder told reporters.

“The balloon is currently traveling at an altitude well above commercial air traffic and does not present a military or physical threat to people on the ground.”

Blinken is expected to travel to China next week for a visit agreed to in November by Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping. It was not clear how the discovery of the spy balloon might affect those plans.

The Chinese foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, the top Republican on the Senate intelligence committee, said the spy balloon was alarming but not surprising.

“The level of espionage aimed at our country by Beijing has grown dramatically more intense & brazen over the last 5 years,” Rubio said on Twitter.

Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said he would request a “Gang of Eight” briefing, referring to a classified national security briefing for congressional leaders and Republican and Democratic leaders of the intelligence committees.

The news broke as CIA Director William Burns was speaking at an event at Washington’s Georgetown University, at which he called China the “biggest geopolitical challenge” currently facing the United States.

Relations between China and the United States have soured in recent years, particularly following then U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan in August, which prompted dramatic Chinese military drills near the self-ruled island.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, while traveling to the Philippines, convened a meeting of senior Pentagon officials on Wednesday to discuss the high-altitude balloon incident.

U.S. military leaders considered shooting down the balloon over Montana on Wednesday but eventually advised Biden against it because of the safety risk from debris, the official told reporters.

The Billings, Montana airport issued a ground stop as the military mobilized assets including F-22 fighter jets in case Biden ordered the balloon be shot down.

“We wanted to make sure we were coordinating with civil authorities to empty out the airspace around that potential area,” the official said.

“But even with those protective measures taken, it was the judgment of our military commanders that we didn’t drive the risk down low enough. So we didn’t take the shot.”

The official said the current flight path would carry the balloon over a number of sensitive sites, but did not give details. Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana is home to 150 intercontinental ballistic missile silos.

A separate U.S. official said the spy balloon had been tracked near the Aleutian Islands and Canada before entering the United States.

Officials declined to say how high the balloon was flying but acknowledged it was operating above civilian air traffic and below “outer space.”

U.S. officials brought up the issue with their Chinese counterparts through diplomatic channels in Beijing and in Washington.

“We have communicated to them the seriousness with which we take this issue,” the first official added.

Craig Singleton, a China expert of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said that such balloons had been widely used by the United States and Soviet Union during the Cold War and was a low-cost intelligence gathering method.

“The timing of this incident is curious, coming only days before Secretary Blinken’s planned travel to Beijing,” he said.

Spy balloons have flown over the United States several times in recent years, but this balloon appeared to be lingering longer than in previous instances, the official said.

“Currently, we assess that this balloon has limited additive value from an intelligence collection perspective, but we are taking steps nevertheless to protect against foreign intelligence collection of sensitive information,” the official said.