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Meta adds parental controls for Quest, Instagram

Meta is adding new parental control features for its Quest virtual reality headsets and updating control features in Instagram, the company announced Tuesday. 

A new Parent Dashboard for Quest will give guardians more control over approving teen users’ purchases and access to viewing Quest usage. In order for parents to link to their teen’s account, the teen must initiate the process and both the parent and teen have to agree, according to the announcement. 

The tools will give guardians the ability to approve teen’s downloads or purchases of apps that are blocked by default based on age rating. Teens 13 and older will also be able to submit an “Ask to Buy” request that parents can approve or deny from the Oculus mobile app. 

The new controls will also let guardians block specific apps and view all the apps their teen owns, and receive “purchase notifications” that alert them to new purchases. 

The feature will also let guardians view the headset screen time from the Oculus mobile app, view their teen’s list of Oculus friends and block “Link” and “Air Link” to prevent their teen from accessing content from their PC on their Quest headset. 

On Instagram, guardians will now be able to send invitations to their teens to initiate supervision tools. In the past, only teens could send the invitations. 

The expanded supervision tools let guardians set specific times during the day or week when they would like to limit their teen’s use of Instagram. 

With the update, guardians will also have access to more information about when their teen reports an account or post, including who was reported and the type of report. 

For users who already have supervision set up on Instagram in the U.S., the updates are now available. The tools will expand this month to the U.K., Japan, Australia, Ireland, Canada, France and Germany, and Meta plans to roll the features out globally before the end of the year, according to the announcement. 

Instagram will also roll out “nudges” for teen users on Instagram. The “nudge” notification will encourage them to switch to a different topic if they have repeatedly been looking at the same type of content on the explore page. 

The nudge will exclude certain topics that may be associated with appearance comparison. 

Source: TEST FEED1

Pride month marred by rising anti-LGBTQ hate

Pride Month celebrations across the country are playing out against a backdrop of growing threats to the LGBTQ community from conspiracy theorists and far-right extremist groups, and the results have already turned violent.

On Saturday, 31 members of a white supremacist group called the Patriot Front were arrested in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where they allegedly planned a riot to disrupt a Pride event.

Those arrests came hours before a group of Proud Boys, the far-right militia, disrupted a children’s book reading in San Lorenzo, Calif., given by a local drag queen who is also a social worker.

Baptist ministers in Idaho and Texas have gone viral in recent weeks for calling on the government to execute gay people.

And three people were assaulted as they left a Pride event in Salt Lake City last week, while flags celebrating Pride were vandalized along a major arterial in Boise

The vitriol and bloodshed come after a decade of stunning advancements for LGBTQ rights, as more Americans accept and embrace marriage equality and as more states adopt anti-discrimination legislation. Just over a decade ago, fewer than half of Americans favored same-sex marriage; today, 70 percent do. Acknowledgement of the community has also broadened. The vast majority of MLB teams now offer specific Pride celebrations at home games.

Experts who follow the national conversation over LGBTQ rights say the growing acceptance of gay and lesbian people has forced opponents to target a new minority group — the transgender community.

“This is fundamentally an anti-trans movement that has come to target other parts of the LGBTQ coalition,” said Sasha Issenberg, author of “The Engagement,” a book detailing the history of the fight for same-sex marriage rights. “Even before the Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that gay and lesbian couples had the right to marry, those on the losing side of those cases accepted their defeat, and redirected much of the infrastructure developed over two decades to fight same-sex unions towards issues related to gender identity.”

Conservative legislatures across the country have passed measures barring trans people from the bathrooms that conform to their gender identity, and from girls’ and women’s sports. In some states, legislatures and governors are working to block access to gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors.

“As recently as 2004, the Republican Party was using gay marriage as a wedge issue,” said Melissa Michelson, a political scientist at Menlo College and the author of several books about the LGBTQ community and public opinion. “They can’t do that anymore because people generally support gay marriage. So they’re looking for a new wedge issue, and transgender people are not nearly as supported. People feel very uncomfortable about transgender people, so Republicans are able to use them as a wedge issue. And they’re doing it with fear.”

Many of the threads connecting fear of and violence against transgender people rehash common slurs once used against gays and lesbians.

The pastors who called for executions repeated disproven tropes about pedophilia. The Proud Boys who broke up the book reading accused the drag queen, Panda Dulce, of grooming children. A conservative agitator affiliated with the group Turning Point USA published videos accusing parents who attended the Pride parade in Los Angeles of grooming their own children.

“The terrain on trans matters resembled the marriage landscape when it emerged as a national issue in the 1990s. Public opinion was overwhelmingly opposed to recognition and state laws were unformed, which permitted anti-LGBT forces to regain the front foot in the culture wars,” Issenberg said.

Those attacks mirror conspiracy theories pushed by believers of the QAnon cult, which accuses prominent Democrats and members of the media of being complicit in a global ring of child sex traffickers. Those falsehoods, spread by online influencers, inspired a man to enter a Washington-area pizza restaurant in 2016 with an AR-15-style rifle, firing three shots; no one was injured.

Some of the same people who spread hate against the LGBTQ community have connections to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection and former President Trump’s failed efforts to hold on to power.

The conservative agitator in Los Angeles was also present at the Trump rally that led to the insurrection, according to videos he published on Twitter. And leaders of the Proud Boys were charged last week with seditious conspiracy in connection to the Capitol riot.

“It’s all part of the same hard right authoritarian movement in the country,” said Michael Edison Hayden, a senior investigative reporter at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “This synergy between social media culture and the mobilization of extremists is really scary, and it shows how easily it can spill over into something much bigger than” the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The influencers responsible for stoking hate are careful to cloak their messages in innuendo, Hayden said.

“You will never hear any of these people propose any particular thing,” he said in an interview. “What they want to do is stoke a mob, and what we’re seeing is the mob.”

The number of hate crimes specifically targeting LGBTQ people has risen in recent years, according to statistics published by the FBI. At an event at the White House last month marking International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia, President Biden cited both the progress made in recent years and the ongoing violence.

“We continue to witness disturbing setbacks and rising hate and violence targeting LGBTQI+ people in the United States and around the world,” Biden said. “This is wrong.”

Though most hate crimes are not reported to law enforcement, one in five of those that were reported in 2020 had been committed because of an offender’s sexual orientation bias, the FBI said in October, and one in 40 were because of the offender’s gender identity bias.

“This is a logical reaction to when you dehumanize people. When you dehumanize the transgender community, when you say they are monsters and a danger to children, people are going to think they have to neutralize that threat,” Michelson said. “It just takes one guy or one small group of people to decide, ‘This threat is so serious, I need to do something.’”

Source: TEST FEED1

Why a bipartisan data privacy proposal faces an uphill battle

A new bipartisan data privacy proposal is facing an uphill battle amid opposition from privacy hawks and business groups.

Supporters of the current draft of the American Data Privacy and Protection Act (ADPPA) will have their work cut out for them trying to appeal to both sets of critics during a House hearing Tuesday.

Groups on both sides of the spectrum have praised the fact that any bipartisan legislation on this issue has come out as a breakthrough, signaling that there is some appetite to fashion the bill into something that can pass through Congress.

The discussion draft, proposed by Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) and Reps. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), comes after years of partisan disagreements and false starts.

The legislation would set national standards for how companies can obtain and manage data, compelling firms covered by the bill to minimize collecting data not needed for their businesses to function.

It would also tighten rules on what data can be collected on minors and allow all Americans to opt out of targeted advertising. The wide ranging bill is almost certain to be revised before being presented for a markup or vote, meaning that any section or standard could ultimately be changed.

The draft takes a new approach to the two issues that have long divided lawmakers trying to get a framework passed: whether individuals should be able to sue over violations and whether a federal framework should supercede the various state-level initiatives that have popped up over the last few years.

The draft proposal includes a private right of action, but with some limitations. Individuals would only be able to sue companies four years after the bill is enacted and would have to check with officials before filing cases. If government prosecutors, the Federal Trade Commission or state attorneys general decide to take up their case, individuals would not also be able to sue.

The ADPPA would for the most part preempt the state privacy laws that have been advanced in the absence of federal action, but would leave some exceptions for rules covering a list of topics including civil rights, data breach notifications and facial recognition technology.

The inclusion of a private right of action, no matter how limited, has drawn opposition from business groups.

A draft of a letter from the Chamber of Commerce calling the draft “unworkable” was circulated last week but has not been delivered to any congressional offices at this time and could be rewritten before getting to that point.

“We support a national data privacy law, but remain concerned about the impact of the introduction of a private right of action and are engaging with the bill sponsors on this and other issues,” Jordan Crenshaw, vice president of the Chamber’s Technology Engagement Center, said in a statement to The Hill.

Whether the Chamber, long a powerhouse in Washington, will be able to persuade lawmakers to vote against the bill at this point is unclear.

“The Chamber’s standing with Congress is at an all-time low,” a congressional aide familiar with the privacy talks told The Hill. “They have lost allies and influence in Congress very fast with policy and strategic blunders like this. This letter only guarantees their members who sign are cut out of privacy negotiations.”   

Groups representing business interests have also raised concerns about the exceptions to the ADPPA’s preemption of state legislation.

“The American Data Privacy and Protection Act fails a central requirement of any good federal privacy law: to create a national privacy standard,” Carl Szabo, vice president and general counsel of NetChoice, a tech-focused trade group that counts Amazon, Facebook and Google among its members. 

“As it stands, the bill leaves a fractured and complex national privacy environment – making it nearly impossible for Americans to know how their data is treated as they travel between states or visit different websites,” Szabo added.

Backers of the ADPPA will also have to win over critics who say it does too little in the face of an increasingly complex online ecosystem.

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), who has led several privacy bills in the Senate, albeit partisan ones, wrote a letter to the three lead sponsors earlier this month urging them to shift the burden of data privacy from consumers to companies by including a corporate duty of loyalty in the legislation.

“We can no longer reasonably expect that consumers understand what information they are handing over to providers or even how it is being used,” he wrote. “Collection and tracking technologies and techniques have become more sophisticated than most users can understand and, even when they can, users are often helpless to stop them.”

Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), whose role as the chair of the Senate Commerce Committee makes her a key player in privacy negotiations, has also called for a duty of loyalty.

Cantwell has also circulated her own privacy proposal which, according to a copy obtained by The Hill, includes a stronger private right of action.

Outside observers have also raised concerns that the draft legislation could be doing too little.

Vuk Janosevic, CEO of the privacy software firm Blindnet, told The Hill that while it’s a positive that there is a proposal at the federal level, the bill falls short on how many companies it applies to and relies too heavily on letting users opt-out of data collection instead of having them opt-in.

“It’s great that we have something, truly, because today we have nothing,” he noted. “That said, I think this truly falls short behind a lot of other regulations.”

Despite opposition from both business groups and privacy advocates, there appears to be agreement across the board that simply getting a federal proposal with concessions on both sides is a big first step.

“It’s the first bipartisan bicameral comprehensive federal privacy bill that’s been put out there, period,” said Alex Brown, a partner at the law firm Alston & Bird that has been closely tracking privacy bills for the American Bar Association. 

“This draft is interesting because it shows that a lot of negotiation has taken place and there’s a good bit of compromise that’s happened specifically on private right of action and state preemption,” he added.

Source: TEST FEED1

Taking the helm at the Coast Guard

Adm. Linda Fagan, the new leader of the Coast Guard and the first woman in American history to head a military service, was, by her own account, not the most impressive cadet while coming up in the Coast Guard Academy.   

“When I went over for the interview” — for her current position earlier this year with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks — “one of them asked: ‘Hey, did you ever think as a cadet you could be here interviewing to be commandant?’ I laughed. I was like, I was kind of an unremarkable cadet, I was just kind of average academically. … It was a means to an end to serve as an officer,” Fagan told The Hill in a recent interview.  

Those means have culminated in her position as the 27th leader of the Coast Guard, a role made official earlier this month in a change-of-command ceremony in Washington, D.C.  

President Biden, who spoke at the ceremony and swore Fagan in as commandant, said when Austin offered Fagan’s name as his recommendation for the job, he replied, “What in the hell took you so long?” 

Biden called Fagan “part of a generation of pioneer women in the force.”  

Fagan, who had served as the Coast Guard’s vice commandant since last June, reached the highest position in the service after a lengthy and impressive career that saw her serve on all seven continents and become both the longest serving active-duty marine safety officer and the first woman promoted to four stars.  

At 16, she announced her intent to enter the Coast Guard Academy, which she did in 1981, six years after the first female sailors were allowed there.   

Following her commissioning in 1985 — one of only 16 women to graduate the academy that year — her first assignment was aboard the Polar Star, the nation’s only heavy icebreaker. That first deployment almost didn’t happen when the ship’s executive officer was hesitant over Fagan being the only woman on his crew. 

She went on to command the Coast Guard’s operations in the Pacific, as well as its Atlantic area, and work as deputy director of operations for the U.S. Northern Command headquarters, among other top assignments.   

Fagan takes the helm of the Coast Guard during a tumultuous period of history.   

In the past two years alone, the service has worked a vast range of missions, including the COVID-19 response, humanitarian aid following natural disasters such as hurricanes, assisting other nations in their maritime security efforts and enforcing drug and fishing laws. The service has also responded to migrants fleeing Cuba and Haiti and worked to ensure safe passage of ships for global trade to avoid further disruption of supply chains.  

“We have never been more relevant [in] national security, homeland security,” Fagan said.  

But all those lines of effort require talent, a necessity highlighted in Fagan’s speech at the change of command ceremony, where she said her highest priority as commandant “will be to transform our talent management system.”   

Speaking to The Hill later, she said Coast Guard leadership has “an aggressive agenda in front of us” and “all options are on the table” to posture the organization for the future.  

“We are not unique as a military service, all of the services are in a competition for talent, [and] we’re competing with public and private companies,” she said. “If we don’t adequately recruit members into the service, the state-of-the-art equipment we’re getting will be unable to conduct front-line missions.”

The Coast Guard is made up of about 42,000 active-duty, 7,000 reserve and 8,700 civilian personnel, in addition to 21,000 auxiliary volunteers.  

Though the Coast Guard’s demographics have changed significantly since she first entered the service, one figure that stands out to Fagan is this: 40 percent of the incoming class at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., is female, but women only make up 15 percent of the active-duty force.  

Though each individual’s circumstances are different, often “it’s family pressure at that mid-grade point … with the rigid moves that are required that make it hard for people to stay in,” Fagan said.  

She said leadership is “stepping into the details of work” to try to remedy that, with one possibility to find a way for personnel to take time off from the Coast Guard somewhere in the middle of their careers, when many prioritize family.  

“Some of this flexibility will hopefully get people past that one- or two-year point where they’re just really challenged and prioritize family, and then allow them to continue to serve,” she said.  

“Policies that are good for retention for women are just good for retention across the board,” including minorities as well, Fagan added.  

The topic of being a parent while in the Coast Guard has come under national scrutiny after one former academy cadet, Isaak Olson, formally challenged the school’s policy barring parents from attending. Olson filed a lawsuit in December against the school for expelling him after it determined he had a child. 

While the four other military service academies have eliminated their parental bans — a measure passed in the latest defense authorization bill forbade them — the Coast Guard Academy is under the authority of the Department of Homeland Security, not the Department of Defense (DOD), making it unaffected by the new law.  

Fagan said she is aware of that conversation and conceded there must be a discussion internally, but she does not have a sharp view on whether “we need to look at amending that.”  

The DOD has also been pressured over whether it will protect access to abortion for service women with the likelihood that the Supreme Court will soon overturn Roe v. Wade — pressure that has seen the Army and Air Force change policies to make leave for such a procedure easier.   

Asked whether the Coast Guard plans to follow suit, Fagan said she has not yet been part of that conversation but expects she will be soon.   

“As we recruit for talent, retain for talent, we generally look to be aligned with DOD counterparts,” she said. “But again, [it’s] just part of a policy conversation that we’re just stepping into, and I don’t know where we’ll end up with it.”  

For now, Fagan is focused on the first whirlwind weeks as a service head. Over the weekend, she traveled to Southeast Asia to attend the 2022 Shangri La Dialogue in Singapore, visiting Coast Guard units along the way.  

“It’s really a kind of journey that plays out a day at a time, a week at a time, a year at a time and you come up on the other end of it and all of a sudden you’re sitting in the corner office,” she said of her 37 years. “When I walked in here on Thursday, it’s like, ‘Oh, alright.’ I haven’t fully internalized it yet.”

Source: TEST FEED1

5 things to watch in Nevada, South Carolina primaries 

Republican voters in South Carolina will decide on Tuesday whether to show the door to two GOP House members over their past criticism of former President Trump, while Nevada Republicans appear poised to hand a victory to his preferred Senate candidate. 

The nominating contests in South Carolina and Nevada have drawn significant national attention, in no small part because of the former president’s deep involvement in several key races. Two other states, Maine and North Dakota, are also set to hold primaries on Tuesday. 

Here are five things to watch for in this week’s primaries. 

Does Trump suffer more high-profile defeats? 

Trump is facing two tests of his influence in South Carolina, where a pair of Republican members of Congress who broke with him over the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol are facing primary challengers backed by the former president. 

In the state’s 1st Congressional District, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) is going head-to-head against state Rep. Katie Arrington, who has placed Trump’s endorsement at the center of her campaign. Mace, a first-term representative, was among the handful of GOP members of Congress who criticized Trump in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot.  

Likewise, Rep. Tom Rice (S.C.), who was among the 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach Trump for his role in the riot, is facing off against Trump-backed state Rep. Russell Fry in the primary to represent South Carolina’s 7th District.  

For now, Mace appears on track to notch a comfortable win in the primary. A poll conducted by Basswood Research for the Republican group Winning for Women Action Fund last month showed Mace leading Arrington 44 percent to 24 percent, though another 28 percent were undecided.  

Rice, meanwhile, is facing a larger field of primary challengers and is trailing Fry in the polls. Still, Fry’s lead doesn’t appear to be big enough to clinch the nomination outright. A candidate in South Carolina must win more than 50 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff.  

How decisive is Laxalt’s victory in Nevada? 

Former state Attorney General Adam Laxalt is the Republican to beat in Tuesday’s Senate primary in Nevada.  

He not only has Trump’s endorsement, but he also has gotten a boost from a group aligned with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). Polling shows him with a double-digit lead over his nearest GOP rival, political newcomer Sam Brown. 

But the question is whether Laxalt can win broader support than his Trump-endorsed counterparts in other hotly contested Senate races if he does indeed take on Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) in November. 

While several of Trump’s preferred candidates have pulled off primary wins this year, they haven’t always done so decisively. In Ohio, for instance, author and venture capitalist J.D. Vance won less than one-third of the primary vote while still capturing the nomination.  

In Pennsylvania, where Trump endorsed celebrity physician Mehmet Oz, the GOP Senate primary was so close that it required a recount before being decided. 

Given that Nevada is home to one of the year’s most competitive Senate races, it’s worth watching to see just how unified Nevada Republican voters are in the lead up to the general election campaign. 

Does Bernie Sanders score a surprise victory? 

Just days before Nevada’s June 14 nominating contests, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) weighed in on the Democratic primary for the state’s ultra-competitive 1st Congressional District, backing a progressive challenge to five-term Rep. Dina Titus. 

Titus was already facing a tough primary. But Sanders’s endorsement of progressive Amy Vilela adds another variable in the race and signals the latest attempt by the Democratic Party’s left flank to flex its muscles in nominating contests nationwide.  

Sanders isn’t the only high-profile progressive to back Vilela in the race. She also has the endorsements of former Ohio state Sen. Nina Turner and Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), a member of the “squad,” the group of progressive House members. 

If Titus pulls off a win on Tuesday, it will almost certainly be seen as a surprise victory for progressives. But it could also carry big implications for November.  

While Nevada’s 1st District previously heavily favored Democrats, the redistricting process has left it significantly more competitive, giving Republicans another pickup opportunity in their push to reclaim the House majority later this year. 

Does a blue-wave Democrat come back in South Carolina? 

Former Rep. Joe Cunningham (D) successfully flipped South Carolina’s 1st District from Republican hands in 2018 only to lose it again two years later. Now, he’s hoping to come back, this time as the Democratic nominee for governor. 

Five candidates are vying for the Democratic nomination to take on Gov. Henry McMaster (R) in November, but Cunningham’s main rival is state Sen. Mia McLeod, the first Black female candidate for South Carolina governor.  

While Cunningham has frequently pointed to his successful effort to win a Republican-held House seat in 2018 to argue that he’s the candidate with the best shot of ousting McMaster this year, McLeod has cast her campaign as a new direction for the party, arguing that candidates like Cunningham have failed for years to make lasting gains in South Carolina. 

Whoever emerges from the Democratic primary is still likely to face an uphill battle in November. South Carolina hasn’t elected a Democrat to the governor’s mansion since 1998, and McMaster remains popular within the state. 

Democrats are also facing a tough election year nationally, making the task of flipping a solidly Republican state blue all the more difficult. 

What do Nevada and South Carolina say about Black and Latino voters? 

The primaries in South Carolina are set to test the motivation of one of the Democratic Party’s most reliable voting blocs: Black voters. 

Black voters make up roughly 60 percent of the Democratic electorate in the state. And while South Carolina tilts strongly in favor of Republicans statewide, it’s worth watching whether Black voters come out in force in Tuesday’s primaries.  

In Nevada, meanwhile, the focus will be on Latino voters, a bloc that was once seen as reliably Democratic but has shifted to the right in recent years. In 2020, for instance, Trump won 35 percent of the Latino electorate compared to 29 percent in 2016.  

While primary turnout is often a poor indicator of general election turnout, the primaries in Nevada could offer some hints about where the electorate stands ahead of November, when the big question will be whether Republicans will continue to expand their support among Latino voters or if the GOP’s 2020 gains were a one-off.

Source: TEST FEED1

Jan. 6 panel delves into Trump’s motives with eye to DOJ

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on Monday sought to establish a key element of its public case against former President Trump — that he knew his claims of election fraud had little merit or likelihood of success but sought to overturn the election anyway.

Pulling back the curtain on the internal machinations of the 2020 Trump campaign, the panel showed testimony from official after official who worked both on the campaign and in the administration who said the former president was repeatedly advised that his claims of widespread election fraud were unsupported by evidence.

Trump’s mindset in pursuing his baseless claims will be a fundamental part of the select committee’s investigation. Showing he knew he was acting on fraudulent claims as he led efforts at the state and federal level to remain in power could demonstrate his culpability not just to the public, but to the Department of Justice for potential criminal proceedings.

Jeff Robbins, a former federal prosecutor and congressional investigative counsel, said the committee has presented the type of evidence that law enforcement typically seek out in building a criminal case, working to establish that Trump knew he lost the election but fought the results anyway and profited off the bogus claims with lucrative fundraising efforts.

“The first piece of what the committee was doing was trying to make Americans understand just how serious this is,” Robbins said. “The second piece of it is directed, I think, in effect at the Justice Department.”

“That’s the kind of evidence that in an ordinary case would leave a prosecutor salivating with the knowledge that there was evidence up, down and sideways of corrupt and dishonest intent,” he said.

Testimony from Monday showed that Trump had been given legal advice that his claims were baseless, including from his own attorney general, William Barr, who said such claims were “completely bogus and silly and usually based on complete misinformation.”

“It was like playing whack-a-mole,” Barr said of the various unsubstantiated theories of widespread fraud in a taped deposition before the committee shared Monday.

“I told him that the stuff that his people were shoveling out to the public was bullshit, I mean, that the claims of fraud were bullshit,” he said in another clip.

The committee also laid out the way Trump was able to raise millions off his false election claims, raising some $250 million for a supposed election defense fund.

“It’s clear that he intentionally misled his donors, asked them to donate to a fund that didn’t exist, and use the money raised for something other than what he said. Now, it’s for someone else to decide whether that’s criminal or not. That’s not the purview of a legislative committee,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), the member of the panel who walked through the bulk of evidence during Monday’s hearing, told reporters afterwards.

Several members of the committee in addition to Lofgren have made clear that they want to see the Justice Department seriously scrutinize whether Trump broke the law in the effort to undermine the election that also drove his supporters to attack the Capitol last year.

While the panel believes it has collected damning evidence about Trump, it will likely be Attorney General Merrick Garland and other Justice Department leaders who decide whether to take the unprecedented step of prosecuting a former president.

Monday’s hearing didn’t offer a smoking gun that Trump knew there was no fraud and was aware he was misleading the public. But it hammered home again and again that he was warned against claiming victory and that he was told his fraud claims were repeatedly debunked.

“My recommendation was to say that votes are still being counted. It’s too early to tell, too early to call the race,” former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said in a video clip from his prior deposition shared by the committee.

“I don’t recall the particular words. He thought I was wrong. He told me so. And … he was going to go in a different direction.”

By laying out what it hopes to be a compelling public case, the select committee is seeking to convince both the Justice Department and voters of Trump’s wrongdoing.

“I would like to see the Justice Department investigate any credible allegation of criminal activity on the part of Donald Trump or anyone else,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who sits on the select committee, said in a Sunday interview with ABC’s “This Week.”

“The rule of law needs to apply equally to everyone,” Schiff said. “And there are certain actions, parts of these different lines of effort to overturn the election, that I don’t see evidence the Justice Department is investigating.”

But even with the testimony from Trump’s own allies that they had urged the former president not to pursue his claims, it could be challenging for investigators to prove that he did not sincerely believe he won the election when he followed the advice of lawyers who were willing to indulge him.

Some of the testimony indicated a schism in the campaign, with attorney Rudy Giuliani encouraging Trump at first to call the election for himself and later to wage a battle based on claims of election fraud.

“There were two groups, my team and Rudy’s team. I didn’t mind being part of ‘Team Normal,’  ” Stepien told the committee, saying he did not believe the tactics encouraged by Giuliani were “honest or professional.”

Barr would later say he was disturbed by Trump’s focus on “sensational” claims surrounding issues with voting machines.

“And I was somewhat demoralized because I thought, boy, if he really believes this stuff he has, you know, lost contact with — with it — he’s become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff,” Barr said.

Then-acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue said Trump was unswayed as the department batted down his claims.

“Sir, we’ve done dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews. The major allegations are not supported by the evidence developed,” Donoghue said he told Trump.

“This gets back to the point that there were so many of these allegations that when you gave him a very direct answer on one of them, he wouldn’t fight us on it, but he would move to another allegation,” he said.

At a Monday press conference on gun trafficking, Garland declined to comment on any of the evidence that has emerged in the select committee’s hearings but confirmed he is following the public phase of the panel’s investigation.

“I am watching and I will be watching all of the hearings,” Garland said. “And I can assure you that the Jan. 6 prosecutors are watching all of the hearings as well.”

Mychael Schnell contributed.

Source: TEST FEED1

Particulate pollution is reducing global life expectancy by more than two years: analysis

Particulate air pollution is reducing life expectancy by 2.2 years globally compared to a hypothetical world that meets international health guidelines, a new report has found.

Worldwide exposure to fine particulate patter — PM 2.5, or particles with a diameter of 2.5 microns or less — has an impact on par with that of smoking, more than three times that of alcohol use and unsafe water, according to the University of Chicago’s 2022 Air Quality Life Index.

The life expectancy effect of this type of pollution amounts to six times that of HIV/AIDS and 89 times that of conflict and terrorism, researchers observed.

“It would be a global emergency if Martians came to Earth and sprayed a substance that caused the average person on the planet to lose more than two years of life expectancy,” Michael Greenstone, index co-creator and an economics professor at the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute, said in a statement.

“This is similar to the situation that prevails in many parts of the world, except we are spraying the substance, not some invaders from outer space,” Greenstone added.

PM 2.5 poses such a threat that the World Health Organization (WHO) recently decreased what it deems to be a safe level of exposure from 10 micrograms per cubic meter to 5 micrograms per cubic meter, the authors noted.

Despite the fact that the economy incurred significant losses during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, average PM 2.5 pollution remained largely unchanged from the year before, the researchers stressed. Meanwhile, growing evidence has emerged that even low levels of air pollution can damage human health, the authors added.

These circumstances led the WHO to change its guidelines, bringing about 97.3 percent of the global population within the unsafe realm, according to the report.

The worst impacts of PM 2.5 exposure are visible in South Asia, where more than half of the total life burden of pollution occurs worldwide, the researchers found.

Residents of the region are projected to lose about five years off their lives on average if countries maintain today’s high levels of pollution. Since 2013, about 44 percent of the global rise in pollution has come from India, according to the study.

Like South Asia, 99.9 percent of Southeast Asia is experiencing unsafe levels of pollution — with rates increasing in a single year by as much as a quarter in some areas, the researchers found.

Residents of the Mandalay, Myanmar; Hanoi, Vietnam; and Jakarta, Indonesia regions, which are suffering the greatest impacts, are expected to lose three to four years from their life expectancies on average, the authors noted.

More than 97 percent of Central and West Africa is considered unsafe by the WHO’s recent guidelines, with the researchers determining that those residents in the most polluted areas could lose as much as five years from their lives average.

If China began meeting the WHO guideline, residents there could gain 2.6 years of life expectancy on average, according to the study. The authors acknowledged, however, that China has made significant progress, with particulate pollution levels falling by almost 40 percent between 2013 and 2020 — and by about 9 percent from 2019 to 2020 alone. 

Although strong enforcement measures have helped reduce particulate pollution in both the U.S. and Europe, about 92.8 percent of the former and 95.5 percent of the latter fail to meet the WHO’s new guideline, the authors found.

In the U.S., average particulate pollution level was slightly above the WHO guideline of 5 micrograms per cubic meter, at 7.1 micrograms per cubic meter, while that of Europe was 11.2 micrograms per cubic meter.

By meeting the revised WHO guideline, American life expectancy would improve on average by 2.5 months, while that of Europeans would improve by 7.3 months.

Integrating the new guidelines into the Air Quality Life Index provides “a better grasp on the true cost we are paying to breathe polluted air,” the index’s director, Christa Hasenkopf, said in a statement.

“Now that our understanding of pollution’s impact on human health has improved, there is a stronger case for governments to prioritize it as an urgent policy issue,” Hasenkopf added.

Source: TEST FEED1

Harris to convene privacy experts to talk stakes of Roe v. Wade

Vice President Harris is slated to meet with privacy, constitutional law, and technology experts to discuss what is at stake if the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion ruling is overturned by the Supreme Court. 

A White House official said the discussion on Tuesday will focus on real-world implications should the landmark ruling be overturned, touching on topics such as privacy, contraception, and in vitro fertilization.

Participants in the latest meeting include the New York University (NYU) School of Law professors Peggy Cooper Davis and Melissa Murray, Harvard Law School professor Glenn Cohen, UC Irvine School of Law professor Michele Bratcher Goodwin, University of Michigan Law School professor Leah Litman. 

The Brennan Center for Justice and Ms. Magazine’s Jennifer Weiss-Wolf will also participate in the meeting with Harris. 

“The Vice President has spent her career fighting for women, and as Vice President, she has continued to be a forceful advocate of protecting women’s reproductive rights, and the right to privacy,” the White House said in a statement. “Over the last several weeks, the Vice President has convened faith leaders and health care providers to hear about what their communities are experiencing and to discuss how to chart the path forward.” 

“Tomorrow’s engagement is a continuation of the Vice President’s work convening a broad coalition to protect the health, safety, and wellbeing of women,” the statement added. 

The White House has been quietly preparing for a Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade, a consequential decision expected to come this month that will create immediate pressure to respond following the leak of a draft opinion in early May that showed a majority of justices had voted in favor of banning abortion on the federal level.

Harris has slammed the possibility of overturning the landmark ruling, adding that women’s rights are at stake.

“Roe v. Wade in its power has protected a woman’s right, her right to make decisions about her own body for nearly half a century,” Harris said during a speech last month. “If the court overturns Roe v. Wade, it will be a direct assault on freedom, on the fundamental right to self-determination to which all Americans are entitled.”

Source: TEST FEED1