After Grilling an NIH Scientist Over COVID Emails, Congress Turns to Anthony Fauci
Former National Institutes of Health official Anthony Fauci has faced many hostile questions from members of Congress, but when he appears before a House panel on Monday, he’ll have something new to answer for: a trove of incendiary emails written by one of his closest advisers.
In the emails, David Morens, a career federal scientist now on administrative leave, described deleting messages and using a personal email account to evade disclosure of correspondence under the Freedom of Information Act. “I learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after I am foia’d but before the search starts, so I think we are all safe,” Morens wrote in a Feb. 24, 2021, email. “Plus I deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.”
The pressure is on as Fauci himself prepares to appear on June 3 before a House subcommittee exploring the origins of COVID-19. The NIH, a $49 billion agency that is the foremost source of funding in the world for biomedical research, finds itself under unusual bipartisan scrutiny. The subcommittee has demanded more outside oversight of NIH and its 50,000 grants and raised the idea of term limits for officials like Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an NIH component, from 1984 to 2022.
In a May 28 letter to NIH Director Monica Bertagnolli, the subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), said the evidence “suggests a conspiracy at the highest levels of NIH and NIAID to avoid public transparency regarding the COVID-19 pandemic.”
The Era of ChatGPT-Powered Propaganda Is Upon Us
China, Iran, Russia, and others are using OpenAI tools for covert influence operations, according to the company. In a blog post on Thursday, OpenAI said it’s been quick to react, disrupting five operations in the last three months that had tried to manipulate public opinion and sway political outcomes through deception.
The operations OpenAI shut down harnessed AI to generate comments and articles in different languages, make up names and bios for fake social media accounts, debug code, and more.
OpenAI continues to flex its commitment to safety and transparency, but not everyone is buying it. Some have argued, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman himself, that highly advanced AI could pose an existential threat to humanity.
Stuart Russell, a leading AI researcher and a pioneer of the technology, previously told Business Insider that he thinks Altman is building out the technology before figuring out how to make it safe — and called that “completely unacceptable.”
Momentum Grows for Total Ban on Phones in Schools
New York Governor Kathy Hochul is planning to introduce a bill banning smartphones in schools, the latest high-profile effort in a national push to improve online safety, mental health and academic performance for children. “I have seen these addictive algorithms pull in young people, making them prisoners in a space where they are cut off from human connection, social interaction, and normal classroom activity,” Hochul told the Guardian newspaper in an interview Thursday.
The governor plans to officially bring up the bill later this year, aiming for it to be addressed in New York’s next legislative session starting in January. If passed, students would be permitted only to carry simple “flip phones” capable of texting but without internet access.
The movement to regulate children’s online activity — at least while they’re in school — is gaining traction nationwide. New York’s proposed bill, part of a broader campaign by the governor to tackle mental health, includes two other bills aimed at safeguarding children’s privacy online and limiting their access to certain social network features.
States like Florida have passed strict rules banning student cellphone use and blocking social media during class, with some districts extending the ban to the entire school day. Other states, including Minnesota, Hawaii, Illinois, New Mexico, South Carolina and Nevada, have proposed similar bills. Maryland and Vermont passed their “Kids Code” bills earlier this year despite opposition from social media companies.
New Mexico Judge Grants Mark Zuckerberg’s Request to Be Dropped From Child Safety Lawsuit
A New Mexico judge on Thursday granted Mark Zuckerberg’s request to be dropped from a lawsuit that alleges his company has failed to protect young users on its social media platforms from sexual exploitation.
The case is one of many filed by states, school districts and parents against Meta and its platforms over concerns about child exploitation. Beyond courtrooms around the U.S., the issue has been a topic of congressional hearings as lawmakers and parents are growing increasingly concerned about the effects of social media on young people’s lives.
In New Mexico, Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Meta and Zuckerberg late last year following an undercover online investigation.
While granting Zuckerberg’s request, Judge Bryan Biedscheid dismissed Meta’s motion seeking to dismiss the state’s claims, marking what Torrez described as a crucial step for the case to proceed against the social media giant.
As for Zuckerberg, Biedscheid said he wasn’t persuaded by the state’s arguments that the executive should remain a party to the New Mexico lawsuit, but he noted that could change depending on what evidence is presented as the case against Meta proceeds.
Mastercard’s Controversial Digital ID Rollout in Africa
The purpose of Community Pass is to enable a digital ID and wallet that’s contained in a “smart card.” Launched four years ago, the program — which Mastercard says, in addition to being based on digital ID, is interoperable, and works offline — targets “underserved communities” and currently has 3.5 million users, with plans of growing that number to 30 million by 2027.
According to a map on Mastercard’s site, this program is now being either piloted or has been rolled out in India, Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, and Mauritania, while the latest announcement is the partnership with the African Development Bank Group in an initiative dubbed, Mobilizing Access to the Digital Economy (MADE).
The plan is to, over ten years, make sure 100 million people and businesses in Africa are included in digital ID programs and thus allow access to government and “humanitarian” services.
Given how controversial digital ID schemes are, and how much pushback they encounter in developed countries, it’s hard to shake off the impression that such initiatives are pushed so aggressively in economically disadvantaged areas and communities precisely because little opposition is expected.
Former TIAA Employees Sue Over Termination and Denial of Religious Exemption to COVID Vaccine Mandates
The Carolina Journal reported:
Former employees of the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America are suing their former employer over being terminated from their jobs after failing to comply with the company’s COVID-era vaccine mandate.
The plaintiffs have filed suit against TIAA, a financial retirement service company with locations in North Carolina, alleging violation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act among other complaints.
Plaintiff Noelle Sproul worked as an attorney in TIAA’s legal department for several years before being terminated on May 2, 2022. She was also appointed as a managing director in the legal department of Nuveen LLC, a subsidiary of TIAA.
TIAA issued a mandate in 2021 for all employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19. In the months subsequent to the mandate, Sproul submitted exemptions for both medical disability and for an exemption on the grounds of religious accommodation pursuant to TIAA policy. Appeals of the exemptions were later denied.
Congress’s Online Child Safety Bill, Explained
It’s tough to feel an urgency about something that progresses in slow motion. Bear with me, though, because it is time, once again, to care about the Kids’ Online Safety Act, otherwise known as KOSA, a federal bill that was designed to protect children from online harms.
The bill has been hanging around in Congress in some form since 2022 when Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) introduced their bipartisan response to a series of congressional hearings and investigations into online child safety. While KOSA’s specific provisions have changed in the years since the central goal of the legislation remains the same: legislators want to make platforms more responsible for the well-being of kids who use their services and provide tools to parents so that they can manage how younger people use the internet.
The dangers posed to minors by the internet have long been simultaneously a real threat and a moral panic. It’s a political issue that has bipartisan support, while also appearing to be extremely difficult to govern without infringing on First Amendment protections.
Nvidia Set to Overtake Apple as World’s Second-Most Valuable Company
Nvidia (NVDA.O) could soon surpass Apple to become the world’s second-most valuable company, as the kingmaker behind the AI revolution takes on the iPhone maker that has ruled Wall Street for decades.
The reliance of virtually all artificial intelligence applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT on Nvidia’s high-end chips has helped the stock nearly triple in value over the past year to $2.72 trillion.
