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Month: May 2024
Changes from Visa mean Americans will carry fewer credit, debit cards
new york — Your wallet may soon be getting thinner.
Visa on Wednesday announced major changes to how credit and debit cards will operate in the U.S. in the coming months and years.
The new features could mean Americans will be carrying fewer physical cards in their wallets, and will make the 16-digit credit or debit card number printed on every card increasingly irrelevant.
They will be some of the biggest changes to how payments operate in the U.S. since the U.S. rolled out chip-embedded cards several years ago. They also come as Americans have many more options to pay for purchases beyond “credit or debit,” including buy now, pay later companies, peer-to-peer payment options, paying directly with a bank, or digital payment systems such as Apple Pay.
“I think (with these features) we’re getting past the point where consumers may never need to manually enter an account number ever again,” said Mark Nelsen, Visa’s global head of consumer payments.
The biggest change coming for Americans will be the ability for banks to issue one physical payment card that will be connected to multiple bank accounts. That means no more carrying, for example, a Bank of America or Chase debit card as well as their respective credit cards in a physical wallet. Americans will be able to set criteria with their bank — such as having all purchases below $100 or with a certain merchant applied to the debit card, while other purchases go on the credit card.
The feature, already being used in Asia, will be available this summer. Buy now, pay later company Affirm is the first of Visa’s customers to roll out the feature in the U.S.
Fraud prompts changes
Some of Visa’s new features are in response to online-payments fraud, which continues to increase as more countries adopt digital payments. The company based in San Francisco, California, estimates that payment fraud happens roughly seven times more often online than it does in person, and there are now billions of stolen credit and debit card numbers available to criminals.
Other new elements are also in response to features that non-payments companies have rolled out in recent years. The Apple Card, which uses Mastercard as its payment network, does not come with a printed 16-digit account number and Apple Card users can request a fresh credit card number at any time without having to dispose of the physical card.
Visa executives see a future where banks will issue cards where the 16-digit account number, if the new cards come with them, is largely symbolic.
Soon, fingerprints can approve transactions
Among the other updates unveiled by Visa are changes to tap-to-pay features. Americans will be able to tap their credit or debit cards to their smartphones to add the card to mobile wallets, instead of using a smartphone’s camera to scan in a card’s information, or tap the card to their smartphones to approve a transaction online. Visa will also start implementing biometrics to approve transactions, similar to how Apple devices use a fingerprint or face scan to approve transactions.
The features will take time to filter down to the banks, which will decide when or what to implement for their customers. But because the banks and credit card companies are Visa’s customers, and issue cards with the Visa label, these are features that the financial institutions have been asking for.
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Vatican moves to adapt to hoaxes, Internet
VATICAN CITY — The Vatican on Friday overhauled its process for evaluating alleged visions of the Virgin Mary, weeping statues and other seemingly supernatural phenomena that have marked church history, putting the brakes on making definitive declarations unless the event is obviously fabricated.
The Vatican’s doctrine office revised norms first issued in 1978, arguing that they were no longer useful or viable in the internet age. Nowadays, word about apparitions or weeping Madonnas travels quickly and can harm the faithful if hoaxers are trying to make money off people’s beliefs or manipulate them, the Vatican said.
The new norms make clear that such an abuse of people’s faith can be punishable canonically, saying, “The use of purported supernatural experiences or recognized mystical elements as a means of or a pretext for exerting control over people or carrying out abuses is to be considered of particular moral gravity.”
The Catholic Church has had a long and controversial history of the faithful claiming to have had visions of the Virgin Mary, of statues purportedly weeping tears of blood and stigmata erupting on hands and feet evoking the wounds of Christ.
When confirmed as authentic by church authorities, these otherwise inexplicable signs have led to a flourishing of the faith, with new religious vocations and conversions. That has been the case for the purported apparitions of Mary that turned Fatima, Portugal, and Lourdes, France, into enormously popular pilgrimage destinations.
Church figures who claimed to have experienced the stigmata wounds, including Padre Pio and Pope Francis’ namesake, St. Francis of Assisi, have inspired millions of Catholics even if decisions about their authenticity have been elusive.
Francis himself has weighed in on the phenomenon, making clear that he is devoted to the main church-approved Marian apparitions, such as Our Lady of Guadalupe, who believers say appeared to an Indigenous man in Mexico in 1531.
But Francis has expressed skepticism about more recent events, including claims of repeated messages from Mary to “seers” at the shrine of Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina, even while allowing pilgrimages to take place there.
“I prefer the Madonna as mother, our mother, and not a woman who’s the head of a telegraphic office, who sends a message every day at a certain time,” Francis told reporters in 2017.
The new norms reframe the Catholic Church’s evaluation process by essentially taking off the table whether church authorities will declare a particular vision, stigmata or other seemingly divinely inspired event supernatural.
Instead, the new criteria envisages six main outcomes, with the most favorable being that the church issues a noncommittal doctrinal green light, a so-called “nihil obstat.” Such a declaration means there is nothing about the event that is contrary to the faith, and therefore Catholics can express devotion to it.
The bishop can take more cautious approaches if there are doctrinal red flags about the reported event. The most serious envisages a declaration that the event isn’t supernatural or that there are enough red flags to warrant a public statement “that adherence to this phenomenon is not allowed.”
The aim is to avoid scandal, manipulation and confusion, and the Vatican fully acknowledged the hierarchy’s own guilt in confusing the faithful with the way it evaluated and authenticated alleged visions over the centuries.
The most egregious case was the flip-flopping determinations of authenticity by a succession of bishops over 70 years in Amsterdam about the purported visions of the Madonna at the Our Lady of All Nations shrine.
Another similar case prompted the Vatican in 2007 to excommunicate the members of a Quebec-based group, the Army of Mary, after its founder claimed to have had Marian visions and declared herself the reincarnation of the mother of Christ.
The revised norms acknowledge the real potential for such abuses and warn that hoaxers will be held accountable, including with canonical penalties.
The norms also allow that an event might at some point be declared “supernatural,” and that the pope can intervene in the process. But “as a rule,” the church is no longer in the business of authenticating inexplicable events or making definitive decisions about their supernatural origin.
And at no point are the faithful ever obliged to believe in the particular events, said Argentine Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, the head of the Vatican doctrine office.
“The church gives the faithful the freedom to pay attention” or not, he said at a news conference.
Despite the new criteria, he said the church’s past decision-making on alleged supernatural events — such as at Fatima, Guadalupe or Lourdes — remains valid.
“What was decided in the past has its value,” he said. “What was done remains.”
To date, fewer than 20 apparitions have been approved by the Vatican over its 2,000-year history, according to Michael O’Neill, who runs the online apparition resource The Miracle Hunter.
Neomi De Anda, executive director of the International Marian Research Institute at the University of Dayton, said the new guidelines represent a significant and welcome change to the current practice, while restating important principles.
“The faithful are able to engage with these phenomena as members of the faithful in popular practices of religion, while not feeling the need to believe everything offered to them as supernatural as well as the caution against being deceived and beguiled,” she said in an email.
Whereas in the past the bishop often had the last word unless Vatican help was requested, now the Vatican must sign off on every recommendation proposed by a bishop.
Robert Fastiggi, who teaches Marian theology at the Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, Michigan and is an expert on apparitions, said at first glance that requirement might seem to take authority away from the local bishop.
“But I think it’s intended to avoid cases in which the Holy See might feel prompted to overrule a decision of the local bishop,” he said.
“What is positive in the new document is the recognition that the Holy Spirit and the Blessed Mother are present and active in human history,” he said. “We must appreciate these supernatural interventions but realize that they must be discerned properly.”
He cited the biblical phrase that best applies: “Test everything, retain what is good.”
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English fishing village told to boil water after a parasite outbreak
LONDON — A scenic fishing village in southwestern England was under instructions to boil its tap water for a third day on Friday after a parasite sickened more than 45 people in the latest example of Britain’s troubled water system.
Around 16,000 homes and businesses in the Brixham area of Devon were told to boil water after cryptosporidium, a microscopic parasite that causes diarrhea, was found in the water. At least 46 cases of cryptosporidiosis have been confirmed and more than 100 other people have reported similar symptoms, the U.K. Health Security Agency said. Symptoms can last more than two weeks.
Sally Dart, who runs a housewares shop near Brixham Harbor, said people in town first began feeling ill two weeks ago during a pirate festival.
“No one was checking the quality of the water, and we’ve all got sick and it’s stupid,” she said.
South West Water’s Chief Executive Susan Davy apologized for the outbreak and said technicians were working around the clock to identify and fix the problem that may have come from a pipe in a cattle pasture.
“I am truly sorry for the disruption and wider anxiety this has caused,” Davy said. “I know on this occasion we have fallen significantly short of what you expect of us.”
The crisis is unrelated to Britain’s larger ongoing water woes but emblematic of an aging system in distress.
Water companies have been under fire for more than a year to stop frequent sewage overflows into rivers and oceans that have literally caused a stink, sickened swimmers, polluted fishing streams and led to an outcry from the public to clean up their act.
An environmental group this week reported that 70,000 sewage releases spilled for a total of 400,000 hours along England’s coast last year. More than a quarter were within 3.2 kilometers of a swimming spot, Friends of the Earth said in its analysis of government data.
Clean water advocates have blamed the problems on Britain’s privatization of the water system in 1989. They say that companies have put shareholders ahead of customers and not spent enough to update outdated plumbing systems.
Thames Water, the largest of the companies, is on the brink of insolvency and its leaders have said it faces the risk of being nationalized after shareholders refused to inject more cash.
Earlier this week, in another sign of problems, millions of gallons of raw sewage were pumped into England’s largest lake. After a fault caused pumps to fail, backup systems then pumped human waste into Lake Windermere, a UNESCO World Heritage site, for 10 hours, the BBC reported.
The cryptosporidiosis outbreak is hardly the first time South West Water has encountered problems, according to authorities.
The company is facing charges in Plymouth Magistrates’ Court alleging 30 offenses for illegal water discharges or breaches of environmental permits between 2015 and 2021, the Environment Agency said.
The recent outbreak appears to come from a damaged air valve in a pipe that runs through a field where cows graze that is close to a reservoir, said Laura Flowerdew, a spokesperson for South West.
With word out about the outbreak, Dart said her business is down by about a third and other merchants complained about a loss of income as warmer weather arrives and a holiday weekend is just a week away.
“I would say it’s quiet and it shouldn’t be at this time of year,” Dart said.
A primary school was forced to close Thursday because it didn’t have clean drinking water. The water company is providing free bottled water at three locations and has increased compensation to customers from 15 pounds ($19) to 115 ($145).
Paul Hunter, a professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia, said it’s likely more people will become ill with cryptosporidiosis in coming days or weeks because of a lag in the incubation period.
“Even if they have stopped all new infections by now, you would expect to see further cases for at least 10 days to two weeks,” he told the BBC.
Anthony Mangnall, a Conservative member of Parliament from the area, said residents are likely to have to boil water for another week. He said he was concerned with the water company’s response to the outbreak and vowed to hold it accountable.
“They have been slow to act and communication with customers has been very poor,” Mangnall said. “This has certainly undermined trust in our water network.”
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Dabney Coleman, actor who specialized in curmudgeons, dies
new york — Dabney Coleman, the mustachioed character actor who specialized in smarmy villains such asd the chauvinist boss in “9 to 5” and the nasty TV director in “Tootsie,” has died. He was 92.
Coleman died Thursday at his home in Santa Monica, his daughter, Quincy Coleman, said in a statement to The Associated Press. She said he “took his last earthly breath peacefully and exquisitely.”
“The great Dabney Coleman literally created, or defined, really — in a uniquely singular way — an archetype as a character actor. He was so good at what he did it’s hard to imagine movies and television of the last 40 years without him,” Ben Stiller wrote on X.
Coleman’s delivery drew fans
For two decades Coleman labored in movies and television shows as a talented but largely unnoticed performer. That changed in 1976 when he was cast as the incorrigibly corrupt mayor of the hamlet of Fernwood in “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” a satirical soap opera that was so over the top no network would touch it.
Producer Norman Lear finally managed to syndicate the show, which starred Louise Lasser in the title role. It quickly became a cult favorite. Coleman’s character, Mayor Merle Jeeter, was especially popular and his masterful, comic deadpan delivery did not go overlooked by film and network executives.
A six-footer with an ample black mustache, Coleman went on to make his mark in numerous popular films, including as a stressed out computer scientist in “War Games,” Tom Hanks’ father in “You’ve Got Mail,” and a firefighting official in “The Towering Inferno.”
He won a Golden Globe for “The Slap Maxwell Story” and an Emmy Award for best supporting actor in Peter Levin’s 1987 small screen legal drama “Sworn to Silence.” Some of his recent credits include “Ray Donovan” and a recurring role on “Boardwalk Empire,” for which he won two Screen Actors Guild Awards.
In the groundbreaking 1980 hit “9 to 5,” he was the “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot” boss who tormented his unappreciated female underlings — Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton — until they turned the tables on him.
Opposite Dustin Hoffman in “Tootsie,” he was the obnoxious director of a daytime soap opera that Hoffman’s character joins by pretending to be a woman.
Coleman’s obnoxious characters didn’t translate quite as well on television, where he starred in a handful of network comedies. Although some became cult favorites, only one lasted longer than two seasons, and some critics questioned whether a series starring a lead character with absolutely no redeeming qualities could attract a mass audience.
Underneath all that bravura was a reserved man. Coleman insisted he was really quite shy.
“I’ve been shy all my life. Maybe it stems from being the last of four children, all of them very handsome, including a brother who was Tyrone Power-handsome. Maybe it’s because my father died when I was 4,” he told The Associated Press in 1984. “I was extremely small, just a little guy who was there, the kid who created no trouble. I was attracted to fantasy, and I created games for myself.”
As Coleman aged, he began to put his mark on pompous authority figures, notably in 1998’s “My Date with the President’s Daughter,” in which he was not only an egotistical, self-absorbed president of the United States, but also a clueless father to a teenager girl.
Abandons law school to act
Dabney Coleman — his real name — was born in 1932 in Austin, Texas. After two years at the Virginia Military Academy, two at the University of Texas and two in the Army, he was a 26-year-old law student when he met another Austin native, Zachry Scott, who starred in “Mildred Pierce” and other films.
“He was the most dynamic person I’ve ever met. He convinced me I should become an actor, and I literally left the next day to study in New York. He didn’t think that was too wise, but I made my decision,” Coleman told the AP in 1984.
Twice divorced, Coleman is survived by four children and five grandchildren.
“My father crafted his time here on earth with a curious mind, a generous heart, and a soul on fire with passion, desire and humor that tickled the funny bone of humanity,” Quincy Coleman wrote in his honor.
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Heatwave shatters Southeast Asia records in April
The effects of recent extreme weather in Southeast Asian countries are far-reaching, from school closures to drought and health advisories. While climate change is part of the problem, this year it was made worse by the cyclical weather pattern called El Nino. VOA’s Chris Casquejo explains.
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Annual rich list says Paul McCartney is Britain’s 1st billionaire musician
LONDON — Paul McCartney is a billionaire Beatle.
According to figures released Friday, the former member of the Fab Four is the first British musician to be worth 1 billion pounds ($1.27 billion).
The annual Sunday Times Rich List calculated that the wealth of the 81-year-old musician and his wife, Nancy Shevell, had grown by 50 million pounds since last year thanks to McCartney’s 2023 Got Back tour, the rising value of his back catalogue and Beyonce’s cover of the Beatles’ “Blackbird” on her “Cowboy Carter” album.
A “final” Beatles song, “Now and Then,” was also released in November and topped music charts in the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries. Surviving Beatles McCartney and Ringo Starr completed a demo track recorded in 1977 by the late John Lennon, adding in a guitar recording by George Harrison, who died in 2001.
The newspaper estimated 50 million pounds of the couple’s wealth is due to Shevell, daughter of the late U.S. trucking tycoon Mike Shevell.
McCartney ranked 165th overall on the newspaper’s respected and widely perused list of the U.K.’s 350 richest people. The top spot went to Gopi Hinduja and his family, who own the banking, media and entertainment conglomerate Hinduja Group and are worth an estimated 37 billion pounds ($47 billion).
Other entertainment figures on the list include “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling, whose fortune is estimated at 945 million pounds ($1.2 billion), and singer Elton John, estimated to be worth 470 million pounds ($597 million).
King Charles III ranked 258th with an estimated wealth of 610 million pounds ($775 million). The king’s fortune includes the large inherited private estates of Sandringham in England and Balmoral in Scotland. The total does not include items held in trust by the monarch for the nation, such as the Crown Jewels.
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Kosovar’s sculptures transform roof of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gigantic metal sculptures made by Kosovo-born artist Petrit Halilaj adorn the rooftop of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in an ode to a childhood affected by war. Garentina Kraja has the story. Camera: Vladimir Badikov
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Australian researchers say enzyme could help lower lower CO2
SYDNEY — Australian scientists say they have discovered how an enzyme “hidden in nature’s blueprint” could help develop climate-resilient crops able to remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
An Australian study, by researchers from Australian National University and the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, focuses on a type of bacteria researchers call “tiny carbon superheroes.”
Cyanobacteria, a type of algae-like bacteria also called blue-green algae, are found in fresh and coastal waters, as well as oceans. They are commonly known for their toxic blooms in lakes and rivers.
Through the process of photosynthesis, Australian scientists say, they capture about 12% of the world’s carbon dioxide each year.
Their study says a carbon dioxide-concentrating mechanism in cyanobacteria lets them turn atmospheric carbon dioxide into sugars for cells to eat more quickly than most standard plants and crops.
Until now, the Australian team was unaware how critical an enzyme in cyanobacteria, called carboxysomal carbonic anhydrase, was to the process. The study says the mystery of how the enzyme maximizes the cyanobacteria’s ability to extract atmospheric carbon dioxide has been solved.
Ben Long, a senior lecturer in molecular plant biology at Australia’s University of Newcastle and is the study’s lead author.
He told VOA that the aim is to engineer crops that can absorb more greenhouse gases.
“We are actually interested in utilizing this CO2-concentrating mechanism from cyanobacteria, which we know is a remarkably efficiently system for capturing CO2 and we want to engineer that into plant cells to make plant cells able to capture CO2 far more effectively and efficiently,” Long said.
The research says that engineered plants that are more efficient at capturing carbon dioxide could increase crop yield, making global food systems that are more resilient to climate change.
Long says the findings should be part of international efforts to reduce greenhouse gases.
“Every technology has to be brought to bear to try to reduce CO2 emissions and reduce CO2 in the atmosphere and I think to date we have not really focused much on those potential biological applications to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Long said.
The study has been published in the journal Science Advances.
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Scholar called ‘Putin’s brain’ attacked on Chinese internet
Washington — Aleksander Dugin, a Russian nationalist ideologue and strong supporter of President Vladimir Putin, has been bombarded with attacks on Chinese social media, where netizens criticized and mocked his Russian expansionist views that had once included the dismembering of China.
Two years after Putin launched an invasion of Ukraine, pro-Russia sentiment has been prevalent on Chinese internet.
But the backlash against Dugin has revealed a less mentioned side of what has so far appeared to be a cozy alliance between Beijing and Moscow — hostility between Chinese nationalists and their Russian counterparts, the result of centuries of territorial disputes and political confrontations that Beijing has been reticent about displaying publicly in recent decades.
On May 6, Dugin opened an account on two of the most popular Chinese social media apps Weibo, China’s X, formerly known as Twitter, and Bilibili, a YouTube-like video site.
In the first video posted on both Weibo and Bilibili, Dugin greeted the Chinese audience and praised Beijing’s economic and political achievements in recent decades.
In the same video, he also criticized an article published in April in The Economist by Feng Yujun, director of Russian and Central Asian studies at Fudan University in Shanghai. Feng said in the article that Russia will inevitably lose the Ukraine war.
Dugin countered that Feng and some Chinese people underestimated Russia’s “tenacity and perseverance.”
The video was quickly condemned by Chinese citizens, who posted comments such as “Russia must lose,” which received thousands of likes.
“This is an extremist who is extremely unfriendly to China and has made plans to dismember China,” another message posted by a Weibo user named “Zhixingbenyiti” said.
Dugin, 62, was born in Moscow. In the 1980s, he became an anti-communist dissident.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he began to promote Russian expansionism. He believes that Moscow’s territorial expansion in Eurasia will allow it to counter Western forces led by the United States.
In his 1997 book, Foundations of Geopolitics, Dugin wrote that dismembering China was a necessary step for Russia to become strong. People within Putin’s inner circle have reportedly shown interest in Dugin’s writing, which gave rise to his nickname “Putin’s brain.”
However, Dugin’s attitude toward China has changed significantly in recent years. In 2018, he visited China for the first time. In a speech at Fudan University, he praised China’s economy, culture and leadership in the fight against colonialism.
He also changed his previous support for containing China and said in a speech that China and Russia could work together to “form a very important and non-negligible containment/pull effect” on Western powers.
Dugin is now a senior fellow at Fudan University’s China Institute and one of the columnists for China’s nationalist news organization, Guancha.
Before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Dugin said in a column that the alliance between China and Russia would “mean the irreversible end of Western hegemony.”
Philipp Ivanov, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, told VOA that “Dugin is an opportunist. As the Ukraine war dramatically accelerated the alignment between China and Russia, his position started to change, resulting in his current attempt to engage with China’s intellectual and broader community.”
Ivanov also thinks Dugin’s influence on the Kremlin has been exaggerated.
Since joining Chinese social media, Dugin has gained more than 100,000 followers on Weibo and 25,000 followers on BiliBili. He has published fewer than five posts on Weibo, but nearly every one of them has more than 1,000 comments, most of which criticized him.
Under a post in which Dugin supported Putin on his fifth presidential term, people responded with comments such as “Russia is about to lose the war” and “The gates of hell are waiting for you.”
Wang Xiaodong, China’s most influential nationalist scholar, shared a Weibo post he made two years ago criticizing Dugin and Chinese pro-Russian groups.
“Introducing Dugin’s ideas is not because I worry that the Kremlin will implement his ideas; He has the intention but not the strength! I just want to tell the Chinese people how some Russians, including elites in the powerful departments, view China. Do we Chinese need to risk our lives for them?” the post read.
Ivanov was not surprised by the attacks on Dugin on the Chinese internet.
“While Chinese netizens may support Putin’s anti-Western/anti-US agenda, they are skeptical or outright negative about Russia’s assault on an independent country’s sovereignty and Russian expansionism, nationalism and chauvinism (which Dugin represents),” he told VOA in an email.
He said the history of China-Russia relations is predominantly about confrontation, competition and mistrust.
Among the attacks on Dugin, many netizens also brought up former Chinese territories that Russia occupied in the past 200 years.
“For the sake of ever-lasting friendship between China and Russia, please return Sakhalin and Vladivostok,” one Weibo comment posted by “lovejxcecil” read.
Although China has not been involved in the war, the Russia-Ukraine war has been a hot topic on the Chinese internet.
According to Eric Liu, a former Weibo censor, Dugin’s joining the platform undoubtedly brought more traffic to Weibo. However, it also means that Weibo needs to invest more resources in censorship to prevent him from making remarks that Beijing considers sensitive.
“He is a foreigner. He has no idea about China’s ‘political correctness’ or where the boundaries are,” Liu said. “This risk will have to be taken care of by Weibo, which brought him in.”
On Thursday, Dugin posted on Weibo that China and Russia could achieve “anything” together. His comment section has been turned off.
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US arrests American and Ukrainian in North Korea-linked IT infiltration scheme
WASHINGTON — U.S. prosecutors on Thursday announced the arrests of an American woman and a Ukrainian man they say helped North Korea-linked IT workers posing as Americans to obtain remote-work jobs at hundreds of U.S. companies.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said the elaborate scheme, aimed at generating revenue for North Korea in contravention of international sanctions, involved the infiltration of more than 300 U.S. firms, including Fortune 500 companies and banks, and the theft of the identities of more than 60 Americans.
A DoJ statement said the overseas IT workers also attempted to gain employment and access to information at two U.S. government agencies, although these efforts were “generally unsuccessful.”
An earlier State Department statement said the scheme had generated at least $6.8 million for North Korea. It said the North Koreans involved were linked to North Korea’s Munitions Industry Department, which oversees development of the country’s ballistic missiles, weapons production, and research and development programs.
An indictment filed in federal court in Washington last week and unsealed on Thursday said charges had been filed against Christina Marie Chapman, 49, of Litchfield Park, Arizona; Ukrainian Oleksandr Didenko, 27, of Kyiv; and three other foreign nationals.
A Justice Department statement said Chapman was arrested on Wednesday, while Didenko was arrested on May 7 by Polish authorities at the request of the United States, which is seeking his extradition.
The State Department announced a reward of up to $5 million for information related to Chapman’s alleged co-conspirators, who used the aliases Jiho Han, Haoran Xu and Chunji Jin, and another unindicted individual using the aliases Zhonghua and Venechor S.
Court records did not list lawyers for those arrested and it was not immediately clear whether they had legal representation.
The head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Nicole Argentieri, said the alleged crimes “benefited the North Korean government, giving it a revenue stream and, in some instances, proprietary information stolen by the co-conspirators.”
The charges “should be a wakeup call for American companies and government agencies that employ remote IT workers,” she said in the statement.
It said the scheme “defrauded U.S. companies across myriad industries, including multiple well-known Fortune 500 companies, U.S. banks, and other financial service providers.”
The DoJ said Didenko was accused of creating fake accounts at U.S. IT job search platforms, selling them to overseas IT workers, some of whom he believed were North Korean. It said overseas IT workers using Didenko’s services were also working with Chapman.
Didenko’s online domain, upworksell.com, was seized Thursday by the Justice Department, the statement said.
The DOJ statement said the FBI executed search warrants for U.S.-based “laptop farms” – residences that hosted multiple laptops for overseas IT workers.
It said that through these farms, including one Chapman hosted from her home, U.S.-based facilitators logged onto U.S. company computer networks and allowed the overseas IT workers to remotely access the laptops, using U.S. IP addresses to make it appear they were in the United States.
The statement said search warrants for four U.S. residences associated with laptop farms controlled by Didenko were issued in the Southern District of California, the Eastern District of Tennessee, and Eastern District of Virginia, and executed between May 8 and May 10.
North Korea is under U.N. sanctions aimed at cutting funding for its missile and nuclear weapons programs and experts say it has sought to generate income illicitly, including through IT workers.
Confidential research by a now-disbanded U.N. sanctions monitoring panel seen by Reuters on Tuesday showed they had been investigating 97 suspected North Korean cyberattacks on cryptocurrency companies between 2017 and 2024, valued at some $3.6 billion.
The U.N. sanctions monitors were disbanded at the end of April after Russia vetoed renewal of their mandate.
A research report from a Washington think tank in April said North Korean animators may have helped create popular television cartoons for big Western firms despite international sanctions.
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Protesters disrupt Google conference over Israel AI contract
Protesters disrupted Google’s annual conference this week over the tech giant’s deal providing artificial intelligence and other services to the Israeli government. Matt Dibble reports from Mountain View, California. Camera: Matt Dibble.
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Kenya conference showcases technology to help people with disabilities
In Africa, about 15% of the population faces disability challenges despite advancements in technology. Limited infrastructure and high cost of assistive tech create barriers to digital access, leading to exclusion. A conference in Nairobi this week aims to help change that. Mohammed Yusuf reports.
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Webb telescope uncovers merger of two massive black holes from early universe
CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA — The Webb Space Telescope has discovered the earliest known merger of black holes.
These two gigantic black holes and their galaxies consolidated just 740 million years after the universe-forming Big Bang. It’s the most distant detection ever made of merging black holes, scientists reported Thursday.
One black hole is 50 million times more massive than our sun. The other is thought to be similar in size, but is buried in dense gas, which makes it harder to measure.
Until now, astronomers weren’t sure how supermassive black holes got so big.
The latest findings, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, suggest mergers are how black holes can grow so rapidly — “even at cosmic dawn,” said lead author Hannah Ubler of the University of Cambridge.
“Massive black holes have been shaping the evolution of galaxies from the very beginning,” Ubler said in a statement.
Launched in 2021 as the eventual successor to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, Webb is the biggest and most powerful observatory ever sent into space. A joint U.S.-European project, the infrared observatory surveys the universe from a location 1.6 million kilometers from Earth.
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TSMC says no damage to its Arizona facilities after incident
TAIPAI, TAIWAN — Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC said Thursday there was no damage to its facilities after an incident at its Arizona factory construction site where
a waste disposal truck driver was transported to a hospital.
Firefighters responded to a reported explosion Wednesday afternoon at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company plant in Phoenix, the Arizona Republic reported, citing the local fire department.
TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker whose clients include Apple and Nvidia, said in a statement none of its employees or onsite construction workers had reported any related injuries.
“This is an active investigation with no additional details that can be shared at this time,” it added.
TSMC’s Taipei-listed shares pared earlier gains after the news and were last up around 0.8% on Thursday morning. TSMC last month agreed to expand its planned investment by $25 billion to $65 billion and to add a third Arizona plant by 2030.
The company will produce the world’s most advanced 2 nanometer technology at its second Arizona facility expected to begin production in 2028.
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Take a stroll through the US president’s backyard
General public gets to visit White House grounds in spring and fall
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Fewer US overdose deaths reported last year, but experts still cautious
NEW YORK — The number of fatal overdoses in the U.S. fell last year, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data posted Wednesday.
Agency officials noted that the data is provisional and could change after more analysis, and that they still expect a drop when the final counts are in. It would be only the second annual decline since the current national drug death epidemic began more than three decades ago.
Experts reacted cautiously. One described the decline as relatively small and said it should be thought of as part of a leveling off rather than a decrease. Another noted that the last time a decline occurred — in 2018 — drug deaths shot up in the years that followed.
“Any decline is encouraging,” said Brandon Marshall, a Brown University researcher who studies overdose trends. “But I think it’s certainly premature to celebrate or to draw any large-scale conclusions about where we may be headed long term with this crisis.”
It’s also too soon to know what spurred the decline, Marshall and other experts said. Explanations could include shifts in the drug supply, expansion of overdose prevention and addiction treatment, and the grim possibility that the epidemic has killed so many that now there are basically fewer people to kill.
CDC Chief Medical Officer Dr. Debra Houry called the dip “heartening news” and praised efforts to reduce the tally, but she noted that “there are still families and friends losing their loved ones to drug overdoses at staggering numbers.”
About 107,500 people died of overdoses in the U.S. last year, including American citizens and noncitizens who were in the country at the time they died, the CDC estimated. That’s down 3% from 2022, when there were an estimated 111,000 such deaths, the agency said.
The drug overdose epidemic, which has killed more than 1 million people since 1999, has had many ripple effects. For example, a study published last week in JAMA Psychiatry estimated that more than 321,000 U.S. children lost a parent to a fatal drug overdose from 2011 to 2021.
“These children need support” and are at a higher risk of mental health and drug use disorders themselves, said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which helped lead the study. “It’s not just a loss of a person. It’s also the implications that loss has for the family left behind.”
Prescription painkillers once drove the nation’s overdose epidemic, but they were supplanted years ago by heroin and more recently by illegal fentanyl. The dangerously powerful opioid was developed to treat intense pain from ailments such as cancer but has increasingly been mixed with other drugs in the illicit drug supply.
For years, fentanyl was frequently injected, but increasingly it’s being smoked or mixed into counterfeit pills.
A study published last week found that law enforcement seizures of pills containing fentanyl are rising dramatically, jumping from 44 million in 2022 to more than 115 million last year.
It’s possible that the seizures indicate that the overall supply of fentanyl-laced pills is growing fast, not necessarily that police are whittling down the illicit drug supply, said one of the paper’s authors, Dr. Daniel Ciccarone of the University of California, San Francisco.
He noted that the decline in overdoses was not uniform. All but two of the states in the eastern half of the U.S. saw declines, but most Western states saw increases. Alaska, Washington and Oregon each saw 27% increases.
The reason? Many Eastern states have been dealing with fentanyl for about a decade, while it’s reached Western states more recently, Ciccarone said.
Nevertheless, some researchers say there are reasons to be optimistic. It’s possible that smoking fentanyl is not as lethal as injecting it, but scientists are still exploring that question.
Meanwhile, more money is becoming available to treat addiction and prevent overdoses, through government funding and legal settlements with drugmakers, wholesalers and pharmacies, Ciccarone noted.
“My hope is 2023 is the beginning of a turning point,” he said.
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