The CIA has a secret, undisclosed data repository that includes information collected about Americans, two Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee said Thursday. While neither the agency nor lawmakers would disclose specifics about the data, the senators alleged the CIA had long hidden details about the program from the public and Congress. Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico sent a letter to top intelligence officials calling for more details about the program to be declassified. Large parts of the letter, which was sent in April 2021 and declassified Thursday, and documents released by the CIA were blacked out. Wyden and Heinrich said the program operated “outside the statutory framework that Congress and the public believe govern this collection.” There have long been concerns about what information the intelligence community collects domestically, driven in part by previous violations of Americans’ civil liberties. The CIA and National Security Agency have a foreign mission and are generally barred from investigating Americans or U.S. businesses. But the spy agencies’ sprawling collection of foreign communications often snares Americans’ messages and data incidentally. Intelligence agencies are required to take steps to protect U.S. information, including redacting the names of any Americans from reports unless they are deemed relevant to an investigation. The process of removing redactions is known as “unmasking.” “CIA recognizes and takes very seriously our obligation to respect the privacy and civil liberties of U.S. persons in the conduct of our vital national security mission,” Kristi Scott, the agency’s privacy and civil liberties officer, said in a statement. “CIA is committed to transparency consistent with our obligation to protect intelligence sources and methods.” The CIA released a series of redacted recommendations about the program issued by an oversight panel known as the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. According to the document, a pop-up box warns CIA analysts using the program that seeking any information about U.S. citizens or others covered by privacy laws requires a foreign intelligence purpose. “However, analysts are not required to memorialize the justification for their queries,” the board said. Both senators have long pushed for more transparency from the intelligence agencies. Nearly a decade ago, a question Wyden posed to the nation’s spy chief presaged critical revelations about the NSA’s mass-surveillance programs. In 2013, Wyden asked then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper if the NSA collected “any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans.” Clapper initially responded, “No.” He later said, “Not wittingly.” Former systems administrator Edward Snowden later that year revealed the NSA’s access to bulk data through U.S. internet companies and hundreds of millions of call records from telecommunications providers. Those revelations sparked worldwide controversy and new legislation in Congress. Clapper would later apologize in a letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee, calling his response to Wyden “clearly erroneous.”

Why are you assuming that your guests’ shoes are dirtier than your floors?

What makes the likes of Kirstie Allsopp insist that millennials are financially inept? They inflate the cost of young people having fun.

During a Hudson city council meeting on Tuesday, Mayor Craig Shubert expressed concern that ice fishing could lead to prostitution.

Elon Musk’s brain-chip company Neuralink has been accused of subjecting monkeys to “extreme suffering” during years of gruesome experiments.

Veep writer, Georgia Pritchett’s autobiography reveals US president’s Irish mother wrote poems calling for God to ‘rain blood’ on the English.

After a months-long test period, workers voted nearly unanimously in favor of the change.

Whether it’s beer, wine or liquor, alcohol can be a great way to relax with friends and family, enhance a meal, celebrate a special occasion and more.

An unidentified Oregon man was loading up his gun around 7am on Tuesday when he 'accidentally shot his brother after a black bear appeared on his property. (Gentle, unassuming Black Bear likey fled the sound of gunshots before continuing to snuffle around looking for unsecured dumpsters.)

Sometime in the next few weeks, the official death toll for the two-year COVID pandemic in the U.S. will reach one million. Despite being the wealthiest nation on the planet, the U.S. has continued to have the most COVID infections and deaths per country, by far, and it has the highest per capita death rate of any wealthy nation. This is an unfathomable number of people dead, yet, mass media are downplaying it. Despite an empathetic New York Times headline in May 2020 of “U.S. Deaths Near 100,000, an Incalculable Loss,” and using its entire front page to print names of some of the deceased. As Luppe B. Luppen noted on Twitter, the newspaper’s more recent headline was the cruel and callous “900,000 Dead, but Many Americans Move On.” The Times is not alone; several large mainstream publications, in complicity with politicians of both major political parties, have been beating a death knell of a drum for getting “back to normal” for months. The effect is the manufactured consent to normalize mass death and suffering—to subtly suggest to Americans that they want to move on. News media are helping to shape public opinion in order for business to return to the very circumstances that have created this ongoing crisis. A return to normal will allow profits to be reaped by people working relatively safely from their homes (the target audience of many news organizations’ advertisers) at the expense of people working or studying in person who are more vulnerable.

The BBC has pulled a documentary about a cryptocurrency entrepreneur from television schedules at the last minute after the Guardian raised questions about some of its central claims. The programme, called The Crypto-Millionaire and due to be broadcast at 7.30pm on Wednesday night, was to tell the story of Hanad Hassan, a 20-year-old from Birmingham who said he had become incredibly wealthy by trading cryptocurrencies. The programme claimed he had turned a $50 (£37) investment at the start of 2021 into $8m (£5.9m) by the end of the year – suggesting he had made an astonishing investment return of almost 16,000,000% in just nine months. An accompanying BBC website article entitled “Birmingham’s self-made crypto-millionaire giving back” also displayed Hassan’s £30,000 BMW and his city centre flat, while describing how he “decided he was going to become a millionaire while he was still a teenager”. The documentary, due to be broadcast on BBC One in the West Midlands, followed Hassan as he distributed money to food banks in Birmingham, supposedly funded by a charitable cryptocurrency he set up himself. The Guardian asked the BBC if it was confident in his claimed financial returns and questioned why the programme’s promotional material did not mention that Hassan’s cryptocurrency Orfano was abruptly shut down in October, with many unhappy investors claiming they were left out of pocket as a result.

After a decade of flooding the market with cheap fossil fuels, investors have cut back on production.

Chappelle threatened to move his '$65 million' business out of town if affordable housing was built.

Anna Leporskaya’s Three Figures sent for restoration after guard doodled on it with a ballpoint pen on his first day

I could've really used 'Baby Alicia Is Dying' when I was 12

The government has indefinitely shelved its bid to overhaul religious freedom laws, leaving one of the Coalition's central 2019 election commitments hanging in uncertainty. After a marathon sitting of the House of Representatives, where proposed laws passed in the dawn hours of this morning, the government failed to bring the matter on for debate in the Senate, where the bill was set for a second showdown today. Coalition sources have confirmed the government is all but guaranteed not to bring it back for debate when the Senate next sits in March. That is because the government does not want further debate about religious freedoms to hijack its plans to sell a pre-election budget. The religious discrimination bill put before the lower house this week was a much-watered down version of what the government had initially proposed. Even so, several moderate Liberals said they were concerned with parts of the bill that remained, as well as a separate amendment introduced at the same time to protect school students based on their sexual orientation but not their gender identity. In the early hours of this morning, five Liberal MPs joined Labor and the crossbench to vote against the government and extend protections for transgender school students. In the wake of that defeat the government turned to religious groups to consult on the future of the contentious laws. The religious discrimination bill itself remains unchanged, but some religious groups have been adamant they do not support the transgender student protections passed alongside it. Assistant Minister to the Attorney-General Amanda Stoker said the amended bill was flawed. "It's not what the government designed," Senator Stoker said. "It's not what we thought had got the balance right." Conservative government members and some religious groups are advocating for the bill to be formally dumped. The Australian Christian Lobby said removing exemptions that allowed schools to discriminate against trans students "completely undermined" the bill. "[The exemptions] have enabled faith-based schools to teach their religion and conduct their schools according to their faith values," ACL director Wendy Francis said. "The loss of this protection would outweigh any benefits that could be obtained by the religious discrimination bill. "With the amendments so damaging to religious freedom, the government should immediately withdraw the bills." Senator Eric Abetz, a conservative member of the government, said he was "currently minded to encourage the government to withdraw the bill". The government had proposed to strike out existing laws allowing students to be expelled over their sexuality, a move supported by groups such as the Christian Schools Association (CSA). But extending that to gender identity created extra complications, Christian schools and the government argued. The CSA feared protections for transgender staff and students could hinder religious schools in teaching their faith, and raised issues around bathroom facilities and uniforms in single-sex schools, among other things. The government wanted that issue to be considered by the Australian Law Reform Commission and reported back on within the next 12 months. This morning government senators vowed to try and revert the changes, but within hours the Senate rejected bringing it on for debate, deferring it to a future date.

The ex-wife of jazz legend Miles Davis was years ahead of her time, only to disappear from the spotlight for decades

Last summer, at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an internal presentation on the coronavirus, which was leaked to the press, called the Delta variant of COVID-19 “as transmissible as chicken pox.” Although the claim was found to be overstated, it’s easy to see why researchers may have been predisposed to draw parallels between the two diseases. Both varicella-zoster—the proper name for the chicken-pox virus—and the coronavirus are spread through the air, and both can be contagious before any symptoms are evident. Both have relatively mild impacts on most children, with a higher risk of more serious effects in adults. The mostly apocryphal tales of “COVID parties”—which almost always turn out to be unintentional spreader events—descend from those of “chicken-pox parties,” where parents knowingly exposed their children to symptomatic peers. There was also a kind of wistfulness in the comparison. A vaccine for varicella received full approval from the Food and Drug Administration in 1995, and within a decade forty states and the District of Columbia added varicella as a required immunization for enrollment in public elementary schools. Today all fifty states enforce this mandate. (Medical and religious exemptions vary state by state.) Near-universal mandatory immunization against chicken pox virtually eliminated the disease in the space of a generation. This past October, a coronavirus vaccine for children aged five to eleven received emergency-use authorization from the F.D.A.; since then, a little more than eighteen per cent of eligible children in the U.S. have received the two shots required for vaccination, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation report. (The F.D.A. is reportedly close to authorizing a vaccine for children under five.) Several of the nation’s biggest cities are now mulling COVID-vaccine mandates for their public-school systems; New York’s Mayor, Eric Adams, has spoken in support of student mandates. But across large swaths of the U.S.—including in states such as Georgia, Indiana, Montana, Tennessee, and Texas, where COVID-vaccine mandates for state employees and health-care workers are banned—any large-scale immunization effort is a nonstarter.

From very early in the pandemic, it was clear that SARS-CoV-2 can damage the heart and blood vessels while people are acutely ill. Patients developed clots, heart inflammation, arrythmias, and heart failure. Now, the first large study to assess cardiovascular outcomes 1 year after SARS-CoV-2 infection has demonstrated that the virus’ impact is often lasting. In an analysis of more than 11 million U.S. veterans’ health records, researchers found the risk of 20 different heart and vessel maladies was substantially increased in veterans who had COVID-19 1 year earlier, compared with those who didn’t. The risk rose with severity of initial disease and extended to every outcome the team examined, including heart attacks, arrhythmias, strokes, cardiac arrest, and more. Even people who never went to the hospital had more cardiovascular disease than those who were never infected. The results are “stunning … worse than I expected, for sure,” says Eric Topol, a cardiologist at Scripps Research. “All of these are very serious disorders. … If anybody ever thought that COVID was like the flu this should be one of the most powerful data sets to point out it’s not.” He adds that the new study “may be the most impressive Long Covid paper we have seen to date.”

It was on Sunday afternoon, Jan. 30, driving in Ballard, that Dave Welding entered the world of car computers gone amok. He drives a 2016 Mazda hatchback. It turns out that about the same time, the same thing was happening to other local Mazda owners who had this in common: They drove a 2014 to 2017 model Mazda, and they had tuned into KUOW, 94.9 on the FM dial, the NPR station. That’s all it took. Somehow the signal the station sent to the modern HD Radio that’s part of the Mazda infotainment center had, as Welding puts it, “fried” a major component. That frying made the radios only play KUOW. No chance of catching a little classic rock or some Dori soliloquies. KUOW. Forever. Mazda headquarters says the problem was that KUOW “sent image files with no extension.”