In North Dakota, the Keystone pipeline remains idled, after the TC Energy company — formerly known as TransCanada — said a rupture this week spilled over 380-thousand gallons of crude oil in a rural wetland. The spill came as the Environmental Protection Agency moved to roll back Obama-era regulations meant to prevent toxic heavy metals from coal ash from leaching into groundwater.
Victims are spread across at least 20 countries on five continents, sources close to the investigation told Reuters.
![WhatsApp says a vulnerability in the app let phones be infected with spyware with a missed in-app call alone [Patrick Sison/AP]](https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2019/11/1/764dcca9bfcb40c0a2f304555c0b4628_18.jpg "US allies' government officials hacked via WhatsApp: Report")
Senior government officials in multiple countries allied with the United States were hit earlier this year with hacking software that used Facebook Inc’s WhatsApp messaging system to take over users’ phones, according to people familiar with the company’s investigation.
Sources familiar with WhatsApp’s internal investigation into the breach told the Reuters news agency that a “significant” portion of the known victims are high-profile government and military officials spread across at least 20 countries on five continents.
Many of the nations are US allies, the people said.
The hacking of a wider group of top government officials’ smartphones than previously reported suggests the WhatsApp cyber-intrusion could have broad political and diplomatic consequences.
Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group was the target of a lawsuit filed by WhatsApp on Tuesday. The Facebook-owned firm alleged that NSO Group built and sold a hacking platform that exploited a flaw in WhatsApp-owned servers to help clients hack into the mobile phones of at least 1,400 users between April 29, 2019, and May 10, 2019.
The total number of WhatsApp users hacked could be even higher. A London-based human rights lawyer, who was among the targets, sent Reuters photographs showing attempts to break into his phone dating back to April 1.
While it is not clear who used the software to hack officials’ phones, NSO has said it sells its spyware exclusively to government customers.
Some victims are in the US, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Mexico, Pakistan and India, said people familiar with the investigation. Reuters could not verify whether the government officials were from those countries or elsewhere.
Some Indian nationals have gone public with allegations they were among the targets over the past couple of days; they include journalists, academics, lawyers and defenders of India’s Dalit community.
NSO said in a statement that it was “not able to disclose who is or is not a client or discuss specific uses of its technology.” Previously it has denied any wrongdoing, saying its products are only meant to help governments catch groups involved in violent campaigns and criminals.
Cybersecurity researchers have cast doubt on those claims over the years, saying NSO products were used against a wide range of targets, including protesters in countries under authoritarian rule.
Citizen Lab, an independent watchdog group that worked with WhatsApp to identify the hacking targets, said on Tuesday at least 100 of the victims were civil society figures such as journalists and dissidents, not criminals.
John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, said it was not surprising that foreign officials would be singled out as well.
“It is an open secret that many technologies branded for law enforcement investigations are used for state-on-state and political espionage,” Scott-Railton said.
Prior to notifying victims, WhatsApp checked the target list against existing law enforcement requests for information relating to criminal investigations, such as violent campaigns or child exploitation cases. But the company found no overlap, said a person familiar with the matter. Governments can submit such requests for information to WhatsApp through an online portal the company maintains.
WhatsApp has said it sent warning notifications to affected users earlier this week. The company has declined to comment on the identities of NSO Group’s clients, who ultimately chose the targets.
SOURCE: REUTERS NEWS AGENCY
In Los Angeles, protesters interrupted JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon Wednesday as he appeared at a forum on the campus of UCLA, chanting “Jamie Dimon, the world’s on fire,” and unfurling banners calling on the bank to end its investments in coal, oil and gas. The Rainforest Action Network reports JPMorgan Chase invested nearly $200 billion in fossil fuel projects after the Paris climate agreement was reached in late 2015.
On Capitol Hill, 50 youth climate activists with the Sunrise Movement occupied the offices of California Senator Dianne Feinstein and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday, demanding meaningful action on climate change. Organizer Claire Tacherra-Morrison said in a statement, “Democratic leadership is failing to treat this like the emergency that it is. Business-as-usual is killing us.”
Platform’s CEO says ‘reach’ of social media raises ‘significant risks’ to politics, raising pressure on Facebook to act.
![Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, said he believed political reach should be earned, not bought [File: Toby Melville/Reuters]](https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2019/10/31/4089a28512034ee98041aceff7b6d333_18.jpg "Twitter bans political advertisements from its platform")
Twitter has announced a ban on all political advertising from its service, saying on Wednesday that social media companies give advertisers an unfair advantage in proliferating highly targeted, misleading messages.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted the change, declaring that the company had realised “paying for reach” on Twitter, Facebook and other platforms had “significant ramifications” for civic discourse.
The majority of money spent on political advertising in the United States goes to television ads.
Twitter’s policy will start on November 22 with the full policy published by November 15.
Some exceptions will be allowed, including advertisements in support of voter registration.
“We believe political message reach should be earned, not bought,” said Dorsey, on his personal Twitter account.
“While internet advertising is incredibly powerful and very effective for commercial advertisers, that power brings significant risks to politics, where it can be used to influence votes to affect the lives of millions,” he added.
“Internet political ads present entirely new challenges to civic discourse: machine learning-based optimisation of messaging and micro-targeting, unchecked misleading information, and deep fakes,” said Dorsey. “All at increasing velocity, sophistication, and overwhelming scale.”
Eric Ham, a political analyst and author of The GOP Civil War, told Al Jazeera the move would have ramifications across the world.
“This is huge,” Ham said. “Not only for the business and social media communities but more importantly for the political landscape in the US and across the globe. We are talking about a major vehicle for getting out one’s message now being closed off completely.”
The decision drew a swift response from the Trump campaign, which said in a statement posted to Twitter that the ban was a “very dumb decision.”
Ham said Twitter’s move was likely to increase pressure on Facebook.
It has already been under fire in the US and UK over the use of millions of people’s user data in political campaigns to create highly targeted advertising.
On Wednesday, the social media firm agreed to pay a fine of 500,000 British pounds ($643,000) to the UK regulator for its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which was linked to the 2016 Brexit referendum. The now-defunct company had also worked on political campaigns in other countries around the world.
In October, Facebook said that it would not fact-check ads by politicians or their campaigns, which could allow them to lie freely.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Congress last week that politicians have the right to free speech on Facebook, angering those who support stronger controls on what politicians can say online.
The issue flared up again in September when Twitter, along with Facebook and Google, refused to remove a misleading video advertisement from US President Donald Trump‘s campaign that targeted former Vice President Joe Biden, a leading Democratic presidential candidate.
In response, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, another presidential hopeful, ran an advertisement on Facebook taking aim at its CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The ad falsely claimed that Zuckerberg endorsed Trump for re-election, acknowledging the deliberate falsehood as necessary to make a point.
Critics have called on Facebook to ban all political ads.
Dorsey also urged legislators and regulators to work harder to develop new laws governing social media.
“We need more forward-looking political ad regulation (very difficult to do). Ad transparency requirements are progress, but not enough,” he tweeted. “The internet provides entirely new capabilities, and regulators need to think past the present day to ensure a level-playing field.”
Facebook on Wednesday reported a profit of more than $6b in the three months ending in September, as revenue climbed by 28 percent.
SOURCE: Al Jazeera and news agencies
In the United States, many people have to choose between financial insecurity or saving their own lives.
The cost of nearly every major brand name drug is on the rise and as a result, millions of Americans are having trouble paying for their prescription medication.
This includes Type 1 diabetics, for whom insulin is a life-saving drug.
“For somebody like me, it’s like the oxygen you breathe. It is like the oxygen you and I breathe, except for me, I have to pay $340 a vial for that oxygen,” says Quinn Nystrom, from T1International, a global advocacy organisation for diabetics. Nystrom is one of at least 1.2 million Americans with Type 1 diabetes, an auto-immune disease that has no cure.
Between 2012 and 2016 alone, the price of insulin nearly doubled, forcing many Americans to search for other routes to access it.
We follow a caravan of Type 1 diabetics as they cross the border into Canada, where insulin is about one-tenth of the cost of the drug in the US.
“It’s not just a bunch of people whining and crying about the price of insulin. There is a true impact,” says Nicole Smith-Holt, whose son died less than a month after ageing off her health insurance, because, she believes, he could not afford to pay for his insulin and started rationing the drug. “My family was destroyed by this. I lost my child. I will never have my son back … Ultimately, the system failed Alec.”
We made multiple interview requests to the top three insulin manufacturers, but none of them agreed to an interview. Sanofi sent a statement and included a congressional testimony by its External Affairs Executive Vice president.
We also meet Jackie Trapp who has a rare form of blood cancer called Multiple Myeloma, which doesn’t respond to traditional cancer treatments. Instead, she has to take a speciality drug to keep her cancer stable. Despite having insurance and taking advantage of multiple assistance programmes this vital drug costs her between $15,000 and $22,000 a year.
“Drugs don’t work if we can’t afford to take them,” Trapp says.
Fault Lines investigates what’s behind the skyrocketing costs of prescription medication, and how the hefty price tag is costing lives.
With the recent tax cut and spending increases, the national debt continues to demand ever-larger interest payments.
![The fiscal health of the United States has decreased markedly in the Trump era, though the economy continues to grow [Carlos Jasso/Reuters]](https://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2019/10/25/81428ca8865c4d7d8eac3aa784219e51_18.jpg "US government's annual budget deficit balloons to $984bn")
The United States government ended fiscal year 2019 with the largest budget deficit in seven years, as gains in tax receipts were offset by higher spending and growing debt service payments, the US Department of the Treasury said on Friday.
The figures reflect the second full budget year under US President Donald Trump, a Republican, and come at a time when the country has an expanding tax base – with strong economic growth and an unemployment rate currently near a 50-year low.
The budget deficit widened to $984bn, which was 4.6 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP).
The deficit for the previous fiscal year – which runs through the end of September – was $779bn, with a deficit-to-GDP-ratio of 3.8 percent. Total revenue increased by four percent but outlays rose by 8.2 percent.
The deficit reached a peak of $1.4 trillion in 2009 as the administration of former US President Barack Obama and Congress took emergency measures to shore up the nation’s banking system during the global financial crisis and provide stimulus to an economy in recession.
The annual budget deficit had been reduced to $585bn by Obama’s second term in 2016, but Republicans in Congress during that time criticised the Democratic president for not reducing it further.
Since then, the budget deficit has jumped due in part to the Republicans’ overhaul of the tax system. In the short term, that sharply reduced corporate tax income revenues and was accompanied by an increase in military spending.
By the end of fiscal year 2019, corporate tax payments were up five percent. Customs duties, which have been boosted by the Trump administration’s trade war with China and others, were up 70 percent year-on-year.
There was also higher spending on defence, healthcare and Social Security programmes. The US has an ageing population, and economists have warned that the cost of mandatory spending on Social Security and Medicare will become fiscally unsustainable.
Earlier this year, the US Congress passed a two-year budget deal backed by Trump that would increase federal spending on defence and other domestic programmes.
Some of the widening of the deficit came from more spending on interest payments on the national debt, as borrowing has increased over the past year.
For September, the US government recorded an $83bn surplus, a 31 percent drop from the same month last year – when quarterly tax estimate payments typically augment receipts by a significant amount.
When accounting for calendar adjustments applied to the whole year, the adjusted deficit was $1 trillion.
In Washington, a presidential impeachment inquiry has overshadowed prospects of a looming government shutdown – which will occur on November 21 if funding for federal operations is not approved by then.
We feature more highlights from the five-hour grilling of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg this week on Capitol Hill, where Michigan Congressmember Rashida Tlaib said she feared that far-right hate groups were using Facebook event pages to incite violence against Muslims and other minorities — including death threats directed at her office. Tlaib asked to be seen not only as a Congresswoman, but also as “a mother that is raising two Muslim boys in this pretty dark time in our world.” Meanwhile, California Congressmember Katie Porter pinned Zuckerberg down on Facebook’s privacy policies. “You are arguing in federal court that in a consumer data privacy lawsuit, in which your own lawyers admit that users’ information was stolen, that the plaintiffs fail to articulate any injury,” Porter said. “In other words, no harm, no foul. Facebook messed up, but it doesn’t matter. Is that your position?”
Former vice president and 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden on Thursday reversed a pledge not to accept the help of Super PACs. A Biden campaign spokesperson said the move was necessary to counter a barrage of attack ads from President Trump. A spokesperson for Bernie Sanders’s campaign — which opposes Super PACs — slammed Biden’s move, saying: “Joe Biden has spent his campaign promising elite donors that nothing will fundamentally change for them, and he has made clear to fossil fuel and pharmaceutical donors that he will be their ally.”
The Trump administration’s top student loan official said Thursday he will resign his position at the Education Department and will work for the cancellation of nearly $1 trillion in federally-administered student loan debt. A. Wayne Johnson says he’ll promote a plan that would forgive up to $50,000 for anyone with federal student loans, worth about $925 billion. He told the Wall Street Journal, “We run through the process of putting this debt burden on somebody … but it rides on their credit files — it rides on their back — for decades. The time has come for us to end and stop the insanity.”
His high-profile resignation came as a federal judge on Thursday held Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in contempt of court for violating an order to stop collecting student debt for people who were defrauded by the for-profit chain Corinthian Colleges. The court ruled DeVos ignored the rights of more than 60,000 former students who were granted relief from the federal government after Corinthian Colleges collapsed in 2014 amid government scrutiny of its fraud and predatory lending. Under Thursday’s contempt of court ruling, DeVos will face no jail time and her Education Department will be fined $100,000.
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