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In what some are calling “vaccine diplomacy,” China is offering its vaccines to dozens of poorer nations around the world. But concerns over safety and efficacy, as well as a dearth of publicly available data also means many are suspicious. (March 2)

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• SpaceX’s first engineers lived on a remote Pacific island to prepare the company’s earliest rocket for launch.
• In the first year that SpaceX was on the island, food shipments sometimes failed.
• So one day, hungry engineers refused to work until a helicopter brought chicken and cigarettes.
• Visit the Business section of Insider for more stories.

In SpaceX’s earliest days, its rocket engineers lived on a remote Pacific island, where they occasionally ran out of food.

On that island, called Omelek, the team was racing to build a launchpad and set up the company’s Falcon 1 rocket.

Journalist Eric Berger, who works as the space editor at Ars Technica, describes those early days of Elon Musk’s rocket company in his new book, Liftoff, which will be published Tuesday. Berger’s telling of SpaceX’s beginnings is packed with anecdotes that have never been previously reported – such as Elon Musk’s first encounter with a Pop-Tart, a rocket launch attempt thwarted by salty ocean spray, and an island mutiny staged by hungry workers in 2005.

HarperCollins Publishers

SpaceX engineers were living and working on Omelek, part of the Marshall Islands’ Kwajalein Atoll, because that’s the spot the company chose to escape the US Air Force. The Air Force had indefinitely delayed the company’s efforts to launch from California. But the US Army, which oversaw the atoll, was friendlier to SpaceX’s plans. Being close to the equator also made it easier to reach orbit.

However, during that first year on the island, Berger writes, “logistics were poor.” Supply deliveries were often delayed, and the workers sometimes went without food.

So one day in the fall of 2005, tensions boiled over into mutiny. The employees went on strike to force an emergency supply drop, and were eventually quelled with chicken wings and cigarettes.

‘We were just wild animals on the island, waiting for food’

Trump called the corruption case against Nicolas Sarkozy a “rigged hoax” and claimed that the former French leader was being treated “very unfairly.”

Aung San Suu Kyi is charged with two more offences, as the security forces again use tear gas and stun grenades against peaceful protesters. Also: the former president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, is found guilty of corruption and influence peddling; and Donald Trump hints at a new bid for the White House.

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Elizabeth Conley/Reuters

• Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hit back at Sen. Ted Cruz after the Texas Republican mocked her during his CPAC speech. 
• Ocasio-Cortez again criticized Cruz for fleeing his home state during the recent electrical grid collapse. 
• The two lawmakers have feuded since the New York Democrat accused Cruz of helping incite the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot. 
• Visit the Business section of Insider for more stories.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hit back at Sen. Ted Cruz after the Texas Republican mocked her during a recent speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference. 

The two lawmakers have publicly feuded since the New York Democrat accused Cruz of helping incite the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riot by voting against the certification of the 2020 election and feeding the right’s lies about the election results.

Ocasio-Cortez added to the widespread criticism Cruz faced after he fled his home state and flew to Cancun, Mexico with his family during his state’s severe winter storms and electrical grid collapse last month. The congresswoman led fundraising efforts for Texas storm victims, raising $5 million for non-profit organizations, and flew to the state to meet with those affected by the crisis. At least 58 Texans were killed by hypothermia, carbon monoxide poisoning, and other accidents during what may be the most costly disaster in the state’s history. 

Cruz flew back to Texas after his trip provoked widespread backlash and his aides published photos of him handing out bottled water to needy constituents. 

“I don’t care what Cruz said at CPAC,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted Sunday night, “but I do care that it appears Texas was just a layover stop for him between Cancun and Orlando to drop a pack of water into someone’s trunk and abandon his constituents again as they get slammed with $16,000 electrical bills.”

During his CPAC speech last Friday, the senator made light of his Mexican scandal and mocked Ocasio-Cortez’s concerns about her personal safety during the Capitol siege. The 31-year-old second-term congresswoman has received an unusual number of death threats and accused Cruz of “trying to get me killed.” 

“We’re gathered at a time where the hard left, where the socialists control the levers of government, where they control the White House, where they control every executive branch, where they control both houses of Congress. Bernie is wearing mittens, and AOC is telling us she was murdered,” Cruz said at CPAC. 

    

More than 86,000 people died from drug overdoses last year in US – a massive increase of just over 24 percent #DrugoverdosesinU.S.

Russian diplomats forced to use hand-pushed railway cart to get home from North Korea – Deltaplex News  Deltaplex News

 “crime in puerto rico” – Google News

Police say a 14-year-old boy was robbed inside a Bronx laundromat. (Credit: NYPD)

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Peter Suciu

Technology, Americas

It seems like everyone keeps getting more and more scam calls about car insurance, student loan debt, or tax issues.

In November, the United States Department of Justice (DoJ) announced that the owner and operator of an India-based call center was sentenced to prison for scamming U.S. victims out of millions of dollars. The forty-four-year-old based operator will spend upwards of twenty years in prison and was ordered to pay restitution of nearly $8.8 million to victims of his crimes.

“The long arm of federal law enforcement was key to bringing this con artist to justice,” said U.S. Attorney Ryan K. Patrick of the Southern District of Texas in a statement.

“Across the globe, U.S. law enforcement is chasing and dismantling these schemes,” Patrick added.

However, the question is whether the U.S. efforts to chase and dismantle are actually doing enough? Judged by the volume of calls most Americans continue to get, it would seem the DoJ is facing a proverbial Hydra—where if you cut off on head, two more grow back in its place. 

Just a month after the DoJ’s announcement, The New York Times reported that police in New Delhi arrested more than fifty individuals who were involved in a call-center scheme. In this particularly insidious operation, the scammers preyed on American victims and said that their assets were being seized by U.S. law enforcement agencies and they faced arrest or could choose an “alternative dispute resolution” that included the transfer of the money through their bank accounts, Bitcoins or Google gift cards.

While efforts have been made to inform and educate the American public, some 4,500 Americans still fell for the scam and officials estimate the crime ring made more than $14 million in a two-year period.

The rise in some nefarious operations has grown because India has become one of the primary locations of international call centers. More than 1.2 million people are employed in the industry, and while much of it is legitimate, criminals have adapted it towards a number of criminal efforts. Some involve emailing would-be victims with links to websites that install malware—but it is the so-called “robo-calls” that seem to be most ubiquitous and potentially dangerous as these target those who don’t typically use computers such as the elderly and those in the lower income brackets.

Will Biden Act?

President Joe Biden named Rohit Chopra to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, after previously serving as a deputy at the consumer agency. He has worked on student loan issues and helped secure funding for individuals who were unlawfully targeted by debt collectors. However, it remains unclear if the CFPB would work closely with the DoJ and Federal Communications Commission to crack down on robo-calls and other telemarketing scams. For now, it seems that the Biden administration will do little if anything to combat these calls.

Perhaps phone scams might seem like a problem that doesn’t fall into the purview of the White House—but it should and actually it does, at least in a roundabout fashion. For one, the Biden Administration could put pressure on India to do more. After all, while New Delhi has stepped up efforts it certainly isn’t enough. A threat to withhold financial aid to India could be a good start.

The administration has made efforts to address income inequality in this country, to combat systemic racism and to solve the college debt problem. Those are all noble issues to resolve, but these phone scams deserve attention as well—for one they are impacting the very Americans that can afford it the least.

Technology to the Rescue

If the administration doesn’t act, a question should be asked as to how the calls can be stopped by the phone companies?

“Technology can be employed to stop these calls and limit the ability to spoof numbers,” said technology industry analyst Rob Enderle, principal at the Enderle Group.

“There just hasn’t been much of an incentive to fix the problem,” Enderle told The National Interest. “You could crowdsource reporting, you could use the same kind of Deep Learning AI that Deep Instinct uses to look for this behavior and block it almost immediately, but without the incentives to make this happen, it isn’t getting done.”

However, the problem may not be the low effort required and the potential return on investment (ROI).

“This is simple market economics,” added Jim Purtilo, associate professor of computer science at the University of Maryland. “The calls continue since their value to phone scammers still outweighs their cost. It takes millions of calls to find a single victim, but for the most part those calls are free, so even a small scam brings pure profit. The dialing and screening is entirely automated, as is the hand off to some sweatshop worker with the menial task of completing a con.”

However, technology could still play a role in lowering the volume of the calls.

“Software to manage this work flow is pretty easy to create, and unsurprisingly this is all done over the Internet,” Purtilo told The National Interest. “We’re all happy when internet-based phone services make our lives simpler; for example, we can get voice mail routed to an email address, even with speech-to-text so we can read the note, not just hear recorded audio.”

That API (application programming interface) lets innovative entrepreneurs offer these services is the same one that lets someone automate sketchy activities, complete with forged Caller ID to make it look like Aunt Barbara is calling, added Purtilo.

The issue is still that almost none of these calls originate domestically.

“Those would be far easier to localize to a source and close,” said Purtilo. “Instead, the majority originate internationally in order to dodge domestic regulations and reduce the cost of labor. Once a call crosses that border there is little ability to reach back and discover actionable information.”

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He regularly writes about military small arms, and is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on <a href=”http://Amazon.com” rel=”nofollow”>Amazon.com</a>.

Image: Reuters.

 The National Interest

FBI set up an undercover sting operation to catch Richard Holzer.

Watch live on February 25 at 10 a.m. ET: Acting House Sergeant-at-Arms Timothy Blodgett and acting U.S. Capitol Police Chief Yogananda Pittman are testifying at a House subcommittee hearing on security failures during the January 6 siege.

Capitol security officials have blamed federal agencies for poor communication in the days leading up to the riot. Five people died and more than 140 law enforcement officers were hurt in the attack.