Category: government

While such incidents are “historically rare,” they add that more recently,this incident follows “widespread open dissent”

It comes after at least three people were shot dead when protesters clashed with security forces in new unrest over the death of Mahsa Amini. s Amini was detained in Tehran by morality police for allegedly not covering her hair properly. The 22-year-old Iranian Kurd died in custody on 16 September, three days after her arrest. Her death has sparked an unprecedented wave of protest across the country.

Saturday’s TV news bulletin at 21:00 (17:30 GMT) was interrupted with images which included Iran’s supreme leader with a target on his head, photos of Ms Amini and three other women killed in recent protests. e of the captions read “join us and rise up”, whilst another said “our youths’ blood is dripping off your paws”.

The interruption lasted only a few seconds before being cut off.

Thanks to Nodsnarb and ttyler (long-time Slashdot reader #20,687) for sharing the story.

Biden is on track to deploy a series of measures, including new regulations on emissions from vehicle tailpipes, power plants and oil and gas wells, the officials said.

In pushing more executive action, Mr. Biden is trying to make up for the compromises his party made on climate measures to pass the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes the largest single American investment to slow global warming. Democrats had to scale back some of their loftiest ambitions, including by agreeing to fossil fuel and drilling provisions, as concessions to Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, a holdout from a conservative state that is heavily dependent on coal and gas. Gina McCarthy, the White House climate adviser, said that regulatory moves, combined with the new legislation and action from states, could help Mr. Biden meet his promise to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent, compared to 2005 levels, by the end of the decade. The climate bill, she said, was “a starting point.”

“The president has not chosen to just look at Congress, he’s chosen to recognize that he has presidential authorities and responsibilities under the law to keep moving this forward,” she said. “And he’s going to continue to use those.” […] Ms. McCarthy noted the E.P.A. still has “broad authority” to regulate emissions from electricity generation. She also said the government is forging ahead with new regulations on soot and other traditional air pollutants, which will have the side benefit of cutting carbon emissions…. Mr. Biden has the executive authority to issue regulations through federal agencies, and under the Clean Air Act of 1970 can establish rules to address air pollution.

The river provides water across seven states and in Mexico and helps feed an agricultural industry valued at $15 billion a year. Cities and farms are anxiously awaiting official estimates of the river’s future water levels that will determine the extent and scope of cuts to their water supply. That’s not all. In addition to those already-agreed-to cuts, the Bureau of Reclamation said Tuesday that states had missed a deadline to propose at least 15% more cuts needed to keep water levels at the river’s storage reservoirs from dropping even more. For example, officials have predicted that water levels at Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, will plummet further. The lake is currently less than a quarter full. “The states collectively have not identified and adopted specific actions of sufficient magnitude that would stabilize the system,” Touton said.

Unfortunately, this leaves doctors unable to see their notes on patients, and the mental health trusts that provide care “across the country will be left unable to access patient notes for weeks, and possibly months.”

Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust has declared a critical incident over the outage, which is believed to affect dozens of trusts, and has told staff it is putting emergency plans in place. One NHS trust chief said the situation could possibly last for “months” with several mental health trusts, and there was concern among leaders that the problem is not being prioritised.

In an email to staff, Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust chief executive Nick Broughton, said: “The cyberattack targeted systems used to refer patients for care, including ambulances being dispatched, out of hours appointment bookings, triage, out of hours care, emergency prescriptions and safety alerts. It also targeted the finance system used by the trust…. An NHS director said: “The whole thing is down. It’s really alarming…we’re carrying a lot of risk as a result of it because you can’t get records and details of assessments, prescribing, key observations, medical mental health act observations. You can’t see any of it…Staff are going to have to write everything down and input it later.”

They added: “There is increased risk to patients. We’re finding it hard to discharge people, for example to housing providers, because we can’t access records.”

“‘Weeks’ is an unreasonable period,” argues Slashdot reader Bruce66423, wondering why it couldn’t be resolved with a seemingly simple restore from backups?

And Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University, warns the Guardian that “Even if it was ransomware … that doesn’t mean data was not stolen.”

The reaction among crypto investors was largely characterized by surprise, and an acknowledgement that trading on insider information (considered by some to be A-OK in private markets) is rampant in the space. “Bro they are prosecuting insider trading on NFTs. we’re all fucked,” said one pseudonymous user in reply to a tweet about the case by Steven Zheng, director of research at The Block. “This is pretty shocking. I can’t imagine any NFT or DeFi developer doesn’t somehow profit from insider trading,” said another.

Of course, not every NFT investor sees this kind of activity as acceptable. Traders themselves first brought Chastain’s activity to light in September using blockchain records. A pseudonymous NFT trader, who goes by Zuwu, pointed out those trades, which were easily traceable to Chastain’s publicly-known Etheruem address.

Unlike Chastain, other NFT traders involved in potential insider trades are often too careful to leave traces. When they do, blockchain sleuths are quick to uncover those signs of unsavory behavior and call them out — a recent phenomenon that attempts to bring some justice to an otherwise permissive market.

As a result, that surprise move by the U.S. Department of Justice has NFT traders wondering what’s on the horizon for this largely unregulated industry. “Insider trading is a pretty common problem in the NFT space, especially in the case of hyped-up NFT collections as lots of stuff on the market is being driven by FOMO,” Fedor Linnik, an NFT trader and creator, told Motherboard.
The article also explores the question of whether the NFT marketplace falls under same restrictions as stock trading, with a professor of securities law calling it “somewhat misleading” to label this an “insider trading” case.

Even to call it a wire fraud case is a stretch, the professor tells them, adding “If it goes to a jury they will wonder why they should care whether someone traded jpegs ahead of them being moved around on a webpage.”

Meanwhile, AVWeb reports:
According to a Reuters report, the impetus for the shift came from an ongoing audit by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Office of the Inspector General. The IG said so-called Urban Air Mobility vehicles present the FAA with “new and complex safety challenges….”

In a written response to a request for clarification, an FAA spokesperson told AVweb:

“The FAA’s top priority is to make sure the flying public is safe. This obligation includes our oversight of the emerging generation of eVTOL vehicles. The agency is pursuing a predictable framework that will better accommodate the need to train and certify the pilots who will operate these novel aircraft.
“Our process for certifying the aircraft themselves remains unchanged. All of the development work done by current applicants remains valid and the changes in our regulatory approach should not delay their projects. As this segment of the industry continues to grow, we look forward to certifying innovative new technologies that meet the safety standards that the public expects and deserves.”

For one, wages make up only a small part of their earnings. And they have broad latitude in how they account for their businesses and investments. Their incomes aren’t defined by a tax form. Instead, they represent the triumph of careful planning by skilled professionals who strive to deliver the most-advantageous-yet-still-plausible answers to their clients. For them, a tax return is an opening bid to the IRS. It’s a kind of theory….

We counted at least 16 other billionaires (along with hundreds of other ultrawealthy people, including hedge fund managers and former CEOs) among the stimulus check recipients. This is just how our system works. It’s why, in 2011, Jeff Bezos, then worth $18 billion, qualified for $4,000 in refundable child tax credits. (Bezos didn’t respond to our questions.) A recent study by the Brookings Institution set out with a simple aim: to compare what owners of privately held businesses say they earn with the income that appears on the owners’ tax returns. The findings were stark: “More than half of economic income generated by closely held businesses does not appear on tax returns and that ratio has declined significantly over the past 25 years.”

That doesn’t mean business owners are illegally hiding income from the IRS, though it’s certainly a possible contributor. There are plenty of ways to make income vanish legally. Tax perks like depreciation allow owners to create tax losses even as they expand their businesses… “Losses” from one business can also be used to wipe out income from another. Sometimes spilling red ink can be lots of fun: For billionaires, owning sports teams and thoroughbred racehorses are exciting loss-makers. Congress larded the tax code with these sorts of provisions on the logic that what’s good for businesses is good for the economy. Often, the evidence for this broader effect is thin or nonexistent, but you can be sure all this is great for business owners. The Brookings study found that households worth $10 million or more benefited the most from being able to make income disappear….

In the tax system we have, billionaires who’d really rather not pay income taxes can usually find a way not to. They can bank their accumulating gains tax-free and deploy tax losses to wipe out whatever taxable income they might have. They can even look forward to a few thousand dollars here and there from the government to help them raise their kids or get through a national emergency.
This system also means it’s much harder to catch underreported income on the tax returns of the wealthy, the article points out. And with so many legal deducations, it’s also hard to prove the low incomes really exceed what the law allows. Even then, the wealthy can still hire an army of the best tax lawyers to make their case in court.

And now thousands of auditors have left the agency — and have not been replaced. The end result? “Audits of the wealthy have plummeted.

“Business owners have still more reason to be bold….”

Kaspersky is a well known provider of anti-virus software, and has conducted investigations into a range of nation-state hacking incidents. It calls itself the world’s largest privately-owned cybersecurity company on its website. It says it protects over 400 million users and 240,000 companies. […] For Friday’s update of the list, the FCC said it relied on findings by the Department of Homeland Security and an executive branch interagency body called the Committee for the Assessment of Foreign Participation in the United States Telecommunications Services Sector.

“When the government obtains someone’s emails or other digital information, users have a right to know,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said in a release. “Our bill ensures that no investigation will be compromised, but makes sure the government can’t hide surveillance forever by misusing sealing and gag orders to prevent the American people from understanding the enormous scale of government surveillance, as well as ensuring that the targets eventually learn their personal information has been searched.”