Archive by Author

Watchdog presses NIH over foreign funding disclosures

The oversight office for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a report Tuesday that found a majority of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) grant recipients failed to meet federal requirements regarding foreign financial interests and support.

HHS’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) found that more than two-thirds of grantees — 69 percent — who conducted NIH-funded research failed to meet at least one federal requirement on disclosing foreign financial interests, and many also lacked oversight that would ensure the materials they submit to NIH are accurate and complete.

In one instance, the OIG found that NIH-funded investigators had failed to disclose grants they had received from the Chinese government.

The report stated it is the responsibility of grantees to ensure that foreign financial interests are disclosed. OIG found that grant recipients did not require their researchers to disclose grants, professional affiliations or participation in foreign government programs despite recent reminders from NIH to do so.

However, the report acknowledged that the recipients of certain grants may have been unaware that they were subject to specific federal requirements and many — nearly three out of four — lacked the training or guidance on disclosing foreign support.

As the OIG noted, NIH awarded $31 billion worth of grants in fiscal year 2020.

“The lack of full disclosure of investigators’ foreign financial interests and support limits grantees’ and NIH’s ability to perform reviews and ensure protection from potential undue foreign influence,” the report stated.

The OIG issued a series of recommendations to counteract this lack of disclosure including reviewing the training requirements of grant recipients during site visits and requiring researchers to certify that they have completed the requirements of their grants.

The oversight office also recommended that NIH advise grant recipients and issue reminders on their responsibilities regarding financial interests.

The Hill has reached out to NIH and HHS for comment.

Source: TEST FEED1

Biden to huddle with Murphy on Senate gun negotiations

President Biden is meeting with Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) on Tuesday to discuss ongoing negotiations among senators working to come to a consensus on gun violence-related legislation, the White House said.

It will be Biden’s first such meeting since the bipartisan talks on guns kicked off following the mass shooting at a Texas school.

“This morning, the President will meet with Senator Chris Murphy (CT) to discuss ongoing negotiations in the Senate on gun reform,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre tweeted.  

The meeting was expected to take place privately at the White House.  

Murphy is leading the gun talks for Democrats, while Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) is the lead Republican negotiator.  

The senators said Monday they were making progress but needed more time to reach an agreement following a meeting that also included Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.). 

The negotiators are exploring measures that would reform background checks and encourage states to adopt “red flag” laws.  

Cornyn said Monday that the negotiators were not considering bans on assault rifles or high-capacity magazines or raising the purchasing age for purchasing assault weapons from 18 to 21, despite Biden publicly pushing for those legislative solutions in a prime-time address last week.  

Still, the White House has viewed the ongoing negotiations with some optimism. Jean-Pierre told reporters on Monday that while officials were in regular contact with congressional offices about gun reform, they would give space for the negotiations to proceed.  

“We are encouraged and we think these incremental steps, these steps that they’re taking, this conversation that they’re having is very important for the moment,” Jean-Pierre said.

Biden’s decision to meet with Murphy is notable given the distance he has kept so far from the talks that began after an 18-year-hold opened fire on Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and killed 19 children and two teachers.  

Biden, himself a former senator, said last week he would meet with lawmakers on guns but the White House didn’t offer a timeline. 

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), who said last month he would only give Senate Republicans a short amount of time to agree on compromise legislation before putting bills crafted by Democrats to a vote, said Tuesday he was encouraging Murphy to keep the talks going. 

Source: TEST FEED1

Former Marine Trevor Reed calls for WNBA star Brittney Griner's release at rally

Trevor Reed, a former U.S. Marine who was recently freed after being detained in Russia for more than two years, called for Moscow to release WNBA star Brittney Griner at a Monday rally in Texas. 

Reed appeared at a rally that was hosted by Rep. Shelia Jackson Lee (D-Texas) and the local NAACP chapter in Griner’s hometown of Houston, Texas, affiliate KTRK-TV reported. 

“There is no justice in Russia,” Reed said at the rally, per a CNN report. “Brittney and Paul will not receive justice in Russia. They’re not going to receive a fair trial, they will not receive a fair investigation. They will be there as hostages until the United States gets them out.”

Reed also urged advocates to work with one another to call for the release of Griner and Whelan, saying that contacting state and federal lawmakers is the best option to demand action on this matter, CNN noted. 

“Write them, call them, annoy them, don’t leave them alone,” Reed said. “Tell them you want Brittney home and you want the rest of the Americans who are being wrongfully detained home, and you want it done now.”

Reed and his parents said they expected Griner would face more harassment in Russia because of her race and sexual orientation.

It has been nearly two months since Reed was released from Russian detainment as part of a prisoner exchange involving a Russian national jailed in the U.S. on drug trafficking charges.

The WNBA players union (WNBPA) has called on the Biden Administration to use every resource possible to bring Griner back to U.S. soil. Griner plays professionally for the WNBA’s Pheonix Mercury.

“There is so much heartbreak and hurt in our country right now. @POTUS, please use all available resources to get #BrittneyGriner home. We need something to rally around and build upon,” the union said in a tweet. 

Griner, whose case was recently classified as a “top priority” by the State Department, has been detained in Russia for the last three months after being accused by Moscow authorities of illegally having vape cartridges containing hashish oil with her at an airport. 

Griner’s manager, Lindsay Kagawa Colas, also said that the Olympic Gold medalist has been able to receive written communication and messages from family and loved ones during her over 100 days of detainment in Moscow.

Source: TEST FEED1

DC provides more access to vaccinations for upcoming school year

WASHINGTON (WDVM) — The mayor of Washington, D.C. and DC Health announced they are expanding access to families and their kids to get vaccinated for the upcoming school year.

The move is meant to make sure students are fully compliant with the law-required vaccinations to attend school.

Children should see their primary medical provider first, but if a family does not have a health care provider for their child, they can go to any pediatric clinic in any ward. The family can also reach out to the following facilities, according to a press release from Mayor Muriel Bowser’s office:

• School-based Health Centers: Families with students ages 4 and older will be able to visit any school-based health center for a vaccination-only appointment regardless of where the student is enrolled.
• District Mobile Medical Units: DC Health is also working with several community providers to place mobile units at schools, recreation centers, COVID-19 centers, and other community locations in all eight wards starting in August.
• Vaccine Exchange: Schools can use the vaccine exchange to request and coordinate on-site vaccination clinics with health providers.

In addition, DC Health said it will coordinate to help families who have children with no up-to-date vaccination status. Also, starting this week, the DC Health contact trace force will be mobilized to call families who are not up to date, and they will connect the families with service providers for further assistance.

If the students are not fully compliant with the required vaccinations, they are will not be allowed to attend school after the 20th day of admission.

DC Health also published a School Immunization Requirements Guide for parents or caretakers:

More information is available at the official DC.gov website.

Source: TEST FEED1

To battle deepfakes, our technologies must track their transformations

In the video record of the Ukraine war, a clumsy attempt to “deepfake” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky coexists alongside critical on-the-ground video evidence of abuses, pervasive misinformation for grift and attention, and Russian false flag operations. 

These scenes from the war provide a glimpse into a future where, alongside existing forms of manipulation and misattribution, deepfake technology — images that have been “convincingly altered and manipulated to misrepresent someone doing or saying something that was not actually done or said” — will be more readily employed. More false videos will be forged and the ‘liar’s dividend’ will be used to cast doubt on authentic videos. 

One set of solutions to these current and future problems proposes to better track where media comes from, what is synthesized, edited or changed, and how. This ‘authenticity and provenance’ infrastructure deserves close attention to its possibilities and preventative work on its risks. 

In January, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) led by the BBC, Microsoft, Adobe, Intel, Twitter, TruePic, Sony and Arm, proposed the first global technical standards for better tracking what content is authentic and what is manipulated. The specifications provide a way to follow the origins and changes to a piece of media content from capture on a camera to editing to distribution by major media outlets or on a social media feed. Companies are now starting to create tools based on these underlying standards. 

We must do more to make available authenticity infrastructure — what’s happening in Ukraine underscores this need. However, we must keep front and center global high-risk contexts and usages, critical human rights principles and potential risks — and that’s why we at WITNESS joined C2PA and led its Threats and Harms taskforce. 

The question must always be, how do we ensure these technical solutions for enhancing confidence in media help rather than harm? Based on nearly five years of working at the forefront of this issue, we identify four core issues: the need for anonymity and redaction, the role of platforms and opt-in signals, secure access in global contexts and the need to avoid abuse by governments.  

Building trust in content must allow for anonymity and redaction. A human rights documenter in Ukraine cannot be required to publicly share their name and exact location as a prerequisite for use. They must also be able to blur faces or create redacted versions of their media. Immutability and inability to edit are recipes for disaster. Lessons from platform policies around ‘real names’ tell us many people — for example, survivors of domestic violence — face similar circumstances that we should learn from. We support how the C2PA specifications focus on protecting privacy and don’t require identity disclosures, but we should be cautious of how implementation may compromise this. 

Platforms must likewise consider how they integrate these types of signals. Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and other platforms currently offer no ready consumer-oriented options to help viewers understand if videos or images are being decontextualized and misconstrued. They provide neither reverse image and video search that shows previous versions of media existing online nor signaling based on the C2PA specifications. However, turn to #Ukraine, and we see videos from years ago or different locations claimed as current, and audio remixed over different videos on TikTok. Increased transparency about how media is created and where it comes from is a critical aid to media literacy skills. 

Finally, the C2PA emphasizes that understanding a video’s origins and edits doesn’t tell you if the media is factually accurate or editorially reliable, and we agree. Any credential on content must be an aid to help make informed decisions, not a simplistic truth signal. We must always view these credentials through the lens of who has access in diverse global and security contexts. We cannot discredit a citizen journalist or ordinary person in a city under siege for not using tools like these, while we buttress the content of a mainstream journalist for a state-sponsored television channel that does use it. Their journalism can be foundationally unreliable even if their media is well-documented from a provenance point of view.  

In the United States, Sen. Rob Portman’s (R-Ohio) Deepfake Task Force Act proposes research around digital provenance, and responsible governments should consider how to use the C2PA and similar standards. But passing a ‘fake news’ or online safety law to mandate the usage of these technologies would be a terrible step in the wrong direction, undermining the necessity that the technologies are opt-in and non-coercive.

These standards will be abused and loopholes will be found by bad actors. Yet a partial solution is still a step in the right direction. At WITNESS we’ve led an initiative over the past four years focused on the increasing risk of deepfakes. The challenges of understanding what we see and hear will grow as the trends in improving digital fakery pile onto existing problems of misidentified and mischaracterized ‘shallowfakes’ — images that are selectively altered with photo and video editing tools.   

Emerging authenticity and provenance infrastructure can help address our growing crisis of belief in audiovisual media. Now the key is to uphold human rights values of equitable access to technology, freedom of expression and privacy. We need guardrails and watchdogs for technologies of trust. These tools will succeed or fail based on how they serve the most vulnerable people defending their truth in the streets of Ukraine or the hinterlands of many other conflict zones: They have the most to gain and the most to lose. 

Sam Gregory is the director of programs, strategy and innovation of WITNESS, a human rights organization with global experience working on how people in crisis ensure their videos are trustworthy and more evidentiary.

Source: TEST FEED1

3 officers on leave amid investigation into man's drowning in Arizona

Three Tempe, Ariz. police officers were placed on paid administrative leave after authorities said they did not intervene as a homeless man drowned in front of them late last month.

The officers had been speaking with Sean Bickings, 34, who was not being detained for any offense, when he voluntarily entered a lake and swam about 30 yards before telling officers he was in distress.

“I’m going to drown, I’m going to drown,” Bickings told the officers, according to a transcript of body cam footage released by police.

After one unnamed officer told Bickings he wasn’t drowning and encouraged him to grab onto a pylon attached to a nearby bridge, Bickings said he was unable to do so.

“Okay, I’m not jumping in after you,” an unnamed officer responded.

Bickings soon went under and did not resurface, police said in a statement.

The Tempe Police Department said it is conducting a death investigation, which could take “many weeks” as the agency waits for medical examiner and toxicology results. The Arizona Department of Public Safety will subsequently review the local police agency’s investigation.

Meanwhile, Tempe police asked the Scottsdale Police Department to conduct an administrative review of the response, which it said is expected to take several weeks. The Hill has reached out to Scottsdale police for comment.

Tempe police said officers had approached Bickings after receiving a call about an alleged fight between him and a companion, who identified herself as Bickings’ wife, according to the transcript. 

The agency said the duo had cooperated with the officers and denied that any physical argument had taken place, and that they were not being detained for any offense.

Bickings climbed a four-foot metal fence and entered the water after the officers told the couple they were running their names through an arrest warrant database, which police said is standard procedure. Police said they had found three outstanding arrest warrants, The Arizona Republic reported.

Tempe City Manager Andrew Ching and the city’s police chief, Jeff Glover, called Bickings’ death a “tragedy” in a statement.

The city government and police department are examining their water response protocols, the city said in a statement. The groups will also assess officers’ equipment needs and the placement of rescue equipment around bodies of water. 

The city added that it will release additional, edited body cam footage from all three of the main responding officers later this week. The city released a portion of one officer’s footage on Friday in accordance with Bickings’ mother’s stated wishes.

Source: TEST FEED1

Call to end inbound international flight testing is correct, for all the wrong reasons

Airline executives and travel industry leaders have asked the Biden administration to end mandatory COVID-19 testing for passengers on inbound international flights. They cite the impact that mandatory testing has had on the travel industry and the economy, discouraging people from abroad to fly into the United States. Although their request has merit, the reasons that they offer do not. 

Asking passengers to provide proof of a negative test within one day of their flights sounds like a way to keep infected people off of airplanes. Unless the tests are administered at airports by authorized personnel immediately prior to a flight, it is possible to misrepresent a test result for a person that is infected, even with all the requirements for virtual verification.

For Americans and residents set to return home to the United States, asking them to stay abroad for as many as two additional weeks, at their own expense, is something that most people will not find acceptable. For foreign visitors, denying them entry to the United States is also not in their own best interest, likely disrupting a vacation or business trip.

This means that the direction that most people will take is to find a way to report a negative test result, independent of their infection status. 

Then how can airlines keep infected people off airplanes? The simple answer, although not a popular one: they cannot.

If a person is asymptomatic, which as many as one-third of infections have proven to be, trying to stop them from taking a flight is near impossible.

If a person is infected and obviously symptomatic, they can and perhaps should be denied boarding, with an at-home test administered by airline personnel at the airport to determine their infection status. This is an option that airlines should have the ability to exercise at their discretion. 

So, what can travelers do to limit their risk of becoming infected on an international flight, or for that matter, on any flight? 

Being vaccinated and boosted (or double boosted if over 50 years of age) continues to provide the primary line of defense against severe disease. Wearing a quality N95 face mask throughout the flight continues to offer substantial risk reduction benefits (packing a straw to take a sip of water under a mask is a good idea). Mandates of any sort are not necessary. These guidelines are just smart protocols to follow for anyone seeking to reduce their risk of infection, or for many people, reinfection with a new variant. 

As the pandemic continues to move toward an endemic phase, people will continue to be at risk of infection. Anytime a person purchases an airplane ticket, they will need to accept the risk that comes with it, or simply choose to not fly. 

The number of air travelers is now over 90 percent of the levels seen in 2019, with several recent days exceeding 2.3 million travelers. Air travel is back with a vengeance. 

At the same time, airlines are facing unprecedented challenges. Jet fuel costs are at an eight year high, and airfares are climbing beyond pre-pandemic levels. Airlines are struggling to meet surging demand due to pilot shortages. Indeed, the biggest challenge to travelers may be finding an affordable seat on an airplane, something they have less control over, rather than remaining infection free once they find that seat, which they have measures that they can take to reduce their risk. 

The summer travel period is certain to be fraught with flight delays, flight cancellations and high airfares. Asking international travelers to provide proof of a negative COVID-19 test prior to boarding adds more fuel to an already chaotic air travel environment, without any measurable benefits.

Sheldon H. Jacobson, Ph.D., is a founder professor of Computer Science and the Carle Illinois College of Medicine at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He applies his expertise in data-driven risk-based decision-making to evaluate and inform public health policy.

Source: TEST FEED1

Harris to announce nearly $2B in private investment to help stem migration

Vice President Harris on Tuesday will tout $1.9 billion in new investments from the private sector to address root causes of migration driving people out of Central America.

The new commitments come from dozens of companies that will invest in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras to boost economic growth and expand opportunities for low-income and at-risk communities in those countries.

Among the new investments are $150 million from Gap Inc. to increase its sourcing in Central America to support more manufacturing jobs. SanMar, an apparel company, will invest an additional $500 million in the region that will support 4,000 additional jobs. Telecommunications company Millicom will invest $700 million in the region to boost broadband networks. And Visa will spend $270 million to increase its digital infrastructure in the area.

The investments, to be announced Tuesday in Los Angeles ahead of the Summit of the Americas, bring the total commitments secured from the private sector to $3.2 billion since Harris was tasked last year with addressing root causes of migration from the Northern Triangle region.

“The vice president believes that we need to not just offer an individual a job but address the full spectrum of needs and support individuals in the different facets of their lives,” a senior administration official said on a call with reporters. “And that’s what this project is all about: trying to help individuals move up the economic ladder and not just have a job but also have access to information technology, banking system, and infrastructure that creates that positive ecosystem.”

President Biden announced in March 2021 that Harris would be responsible for addressing the root cases of migration that helped drive record numbers of people to the U.S.-Mexico border last year.

In the time since, Harris has visited Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico, as well as the southern U.S. border. She has also rallied support from the private sector to increase economic opportunity. Violence and lack of financial security have led millions of people to flee the Northern Triangle in recent years in hopes of finding a better life in the U.S.

Harris will attend the Summit of the Americas this week in Los Angeles, meeting with other leaders on issues like migration, climate and promoting women-owned businesses. Biden is expected to sign a joint declaration with other attendees pledging to address migration.

Source: TEST FEED1

Chef José Andrés to testify before House panel on humanitarian crisis in Ukraine

Chef José Andrés is set to testify before members of the House Oversight Committee on Friday to discuss the humanitarian situation in Ukraine.

Andrés will speak at a virtual hearing by the Subcommittee on National Security on the effects of Russia’s invasion on Ukrainian civilians and how international aid organizations are trying to provide assistance, according to a hearing advisory. The advisory states 6.5 million refugees have fled Ukraine and 8 million have been internally displaced since Russian forces moved into Ukraine in late February. 

“Russian forces have unleashed indiscriminate violence against innocent civilians and forced millions of Ukrainians to flee their homes,” the advisory states. 

Andrés is the founder of World Central Kitchen, an organization that provides food to communities facing humanitarian and climate crises, according to its website. 

The advisory states the hearing will allow subcommittee members to hear recommendations on how the United States should continue supporting Ukrainians and can prepare for the “ripple effects” that the conflict may have on others around the world. Food prices have soared in the past few months as a result of the invasion, supply issues and the lingering COVID-19 pandemic. 

Andrés has repeatedly gotten involved in humanitarian aid in recent years, launching a project to reopen 400 restaurants closed during the pandemic and providing meals to communities in Kentucky devastated by a series of tornadoes. 

Humanitarian organization leaders like Christopher Stokes, the emergency coordinator for Ukraine for Doctors Without Borders, and Amanda Catanzano, the acting vice president for global policy and advocacy for the International Rescue Committee, will also testify Friday.

Source: TEST FEED1