What is going on with Intel's GPU program? The chatter is negative but what is really happening?
Read more ▶
The post Why is Intel’s GPU program having problems? appeared first on SemiAccurate.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. won applause at the Libertarian National Convention by criticizing government lockdowns and deficit spending, and saying America shouldn't police the world.
It made me want to interview him. This month, I did.
He said intelligent things about America's growing debt:
"President Trump said that he was going to balance the budget and instead he (increased the debt more) than every president in United States history—$8 trillion. President Biden is on track now to beat him."
It's good to hear a candidate actually talk about our debt.
"When the debt is this large…you have to cut dramatically, and I'm going to do that," he says.
But looking at his campaign promises, I don't see it.
He promises "affordable" housing via a federal program backing 3 percent mortgages.
"Imagine that you had a rich uncle who was willing to cosign your mortgage!" gushes his campaign ad. "I'm going to make Uncle Sam that rich uncle!"
I point out that such giveaways won't reduce our debt.
"That's not a giveaway," Kennedy replies. "Every dollar that I spend as president is going to go toward building our economy."
That's big government nonsense, like his other claim: "Every million dollars we spend on child care creates 22 jobs!"
Give me a break.
When I pressed him about specific cuts, Kennedy says, "I'll cut the military in half…cut it to about $500 billion….We are not the policemen of the world."
"Stop giving any money to Ukraine?" I ask.
"Negotiate a peace," Kennedy replies. "Biden has never talked to Putin about this, and it's criminal."
He never answered whether he'd give money to Ukraine. He did answer about Israel.
"Yes, of course we should,"
"[Since] you don't want to cut this spending, what would you cut?"
"Israel spending is rather minor," he responds. "I'm going to pick the most wasteful programs, put them all in one bill, and send them to Congress with an up and down vote."
Of course, Congress would just vote it down.
Kennedy's proposed cuts would hardly slow down our path to bankruptcy. Especially since he also wants new spending that activists pretend will reduce climate change.
At a concert years ago, he smeared "crisis" skeptics like me, who believe we can adjust to climate change, screaming at the audience, "Next time you see John Stossel and [others]… these flat-earthers, these corporate toadies—lying to you. This is treason, and we need to start treating them now as traitors!"
Now, sitting with him, I ask, "You want to have me executed for treason?"
"That statement," he replies, "it's not a statement that I would make today….Climate is existential. I think it's human-caused climate change. But I don't insist other people believe that. I'm arguing for free markets and then the lowest cost providers should prevail in the marketplace….We should end all subsidies and let the market dictate."
That sounds good: "Let the market dictate."
But wait, Kennedy makes money from solar farms backed by government guaranteed loans. He "leaned on his contacts in the Obama administration to secure a $1.6 billion loan guarantee," wrote The New York Times.
"Why should you get a government subsidy?" I ask.
"If you're creating a new industry," he replies, "you're competing with the Chinese. You want the United States to own pieces of that industry."
I suppose that means his government would subsidize every industry leftists like.
Yet when a wind farm company proposed building one near his family's home, he opposed it.
"Seems hypocritical," I say.
"We're exterminating the right whale in the North Atlantic through these wind farms!" he replies.
I think he was more honest years ago, when he complained that "turbines…would be seen from Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard… Nantucket….[They] will steal the stars and nighttime views."
Kennedy was once a Democrat, but now Democrats sue to keep him off ballots. Former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich calls him a "dangerous nutcase."
Kennedy complains that Reich won't debate him.
"Nobody will," he says. "They won't have me on any of their networks."
Well, obviously, I will.
I especially wanted to confront him about vaccines.
In a future column, Stossel TV will post more from our hourlong discussion.
COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
The post RFK Jr. Pays Lip Service to the Debt While Pushing Policies That Would Increase It appeared first on Reason.com.
An astonishing discovery was made over the weekend at a Trump rally: the Kool-Aid doesn't always take.
At least this was the case with one "America first" Republican, who initially sided with Russia's Vladimir Putin, but actually listened to reason when journalist Adam Mockler explained why the United States is better off supporting Ukraine. — Read the rest
The post Shocker: MAGA man actually changes his mind at a Trump rally (video) appeared first on Boing Boing.
Britain's signals intelligence spy chief raised eyebrows this week with warnings that Russia is coordinating both cyberattacks and physical acts of sabotage against the West. There's evidence to back her claims—and the West may be returning the favor. Coming soon after FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that China is targeting American infrastructure, it looks like the world is not only fracturing once again, but that the hostile blocs are engaged in covert warfare.
"We are increasingly concerned about growing links between the Russian intelligence services and proxy groups to conduct cyberattacks as well as suspected physical surveillance and sabotage operations," Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) Director Anne Keast-Butler told an audience at the United Kingdom government-sponsored CyberUK 2024 conference. "Before, Russia simply created the right environments for these groups to operate, but now they are nurturing and inspiring these non-state cyber actors in some cases seemingly coordinating physical attacks against the West."
Keast-Butler, whose agency is comparable to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), also called out China, Iran, and North Korea as cybersecurity dangers. But naming Russian officials as being behind "physical attacks" raises the stakes. Sadly, her claims are well-founded.
"A 20-year-old British man has been charged with masterminding an arson plot against a Ukrainian-linked target in London for the benefit of the Russian state," CBS News reported last month. That wasn't an isolated incident.
"In April alone a clutch of alleged pro-Russian saboteurs were detained across the continent," The Economist noted May 12 in describing what it called a "shadow war" between East and West. "Germany arrested two German-Russian dual nationals on suspicion of plotting attacks on American military facilities and other targets on behalf of the GRU, Russia's military intelligence agency. Poland arrested a man who was preparing to pass the GRU information on Rzeszow airport, the most important hub for military aid to Ukraine. Britain charged several men over an earlier arson attack in March on a Ukrainian-owned logistics firm in London whose Spanish depot was also targeted."
The GCHQ chief's warnings coupled with reality on the ground are alarming in themselves. Worse, they come after FBI Director Christopher Wray issued similar cautions in April about China.
"The PRC [People's Republic of China] has made it clear that it considers every sector that makes our society run as fair game in its bid to dominate on the world stage, and that its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic and break America's will to resist," Wray told the Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats in Nashville, Tennessee.
Wray clarified that, by "infrastructure," he meant "everything from water treatment facilities and energy grids to transportation and information technology."
If that doesn't make you want to check that your pantry is stocked and that the water filter and generator are in working order, nothing will.
Of course, in war of any sort, the implication is that both sides are involved in conflict. Western intelligence officials are loud in their warnings about foreign threats, but less open regarding just what their own operatives might be doing in Russia, China, and elsewhere. Still, there's evidence that this is hardly a one-sided war, shadowy though it may be.
In June 2022, The New York Times reported that Ukraine's defensive efforts relied heavily on "a stealthy network of commandos and spies rushing to provide weapons, intelligence and training." In addition to Americans, the story noted, "commandos from other NATO countries, including Britain, France, Canada and Lithuania, also have been working inside Ukraine."
American journalist and combat veteran Jack Murphy goes further, claiming the CIA, working through an allied spy service "is responsible for many of the unexplained explosions and other mishaps that have befallen the Russian military industrial complex." The targets include "railway bridges, fuel depots and power plants," he adds.
And if you wonder who blew up Nord Stream 1 and 2, well, so do a lot of people. Russia was initially accused, but it didn't make a lot of sense for the country's forces to destroy pipelines that generated revenue and fed western dependence on Russian natural gas. Since then, Denmark and Sweden have closed inconclusive investigations, journalist Seymour Hersh blamed American officials, and a report by Der Spiegel and The Washington Post placed responsibility on a rogue Ukrainian military officer.
Taken all together, the warnings from Keast-Butler and Wray, as well as acts of sabotage and arrests of foreign agents suggest that fears of a wider war resulting from Russia's continuing invasion of Ukraine may miss the point; the war could already be here. People looking for tanks and troops are overlooking cyber intrusions, arson, bombings, and other low-level mayhem.
"Russia is definitely at war with the West," Oleksandr Danylyuk of the Royal United Services Institute, a British defense and security think tank, told NBC News earlier this week.
Russian officials seem to embrace that understanding, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov commenting in March that the invasion of Ukraine, originally referred to by the euphemism "special military operation," is now more serious. "It has become a war for us as the collective West more and more directly increases its level of involvement in the conflict," he said.
Fortunately, a shadow war of the sort around us is less destructive than open military conflict, especially when the hostilities involve nuclear-armed powers. It's far better that spies hack the email accounts of government officials, as happened in the case of a Russian cyberattack on Germany's ruling Social Democrats, than that cities burn. But civilians still must live with the consequences of combatants attempting to do each other harm—particularly when the harm is to infrastructure on which regular people rely.
So, welcome to the world of global shadow war. Try to not become collateral damage.
The post World War War III May Already Have Started—in the Shadows appeared first on Reason.com.
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.
Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.
In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:
This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund.
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.
Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.
In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:
This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund.
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.
Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed.
In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online speech, content moderation and internet regulation, Mike and Ben cover:
This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund.
Moscow Marge angrily displayed a MUGA (Make Ukraine Great Again) hat yesterday as she announced her upcoming motion to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson. And although she thought the cute stunt would own the Speaker and the bipartisan Congress members who passed the Ukraine aid bill, instead her prop went up for sale to give even more aid to Ukraine. — Read the rest
The post Oops! Marjorie Taylor Greene stunt backfires after she trolls Speaker Johnson — MUGA hats now on sale to help Ukraine (video) appeared first on Boing Boing.
Early on a June morning in 2023, my colleagues and I drove down a bumpy dirt road north of Kyiv in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Armed Forces were conducting training exercises nearby, and mortar shells arced through the sky. We arrived at a vast field for a technology demonstration set up by the United Nations. Across the 25-hectare field—that’s about the size of 62 American football fields—the U.N. workers had scattered 50 to 100 inert mines and other ordnance. Our task was to fly our drone over the area and use our machine learning software to detect as many as possible. And we had to turn in our results within 72 hours.
The scale was daunting: The area was 10 times as large as anything we’d attempted before with our drone demining startup, Safe Pro AI. My cofounder Gabriel Steinberg and I used flight-planning software to program a drone to cover the whole area with some overlap, taking photographs the whole time. It ended up taking the drone 5 hours to complete its task, and it came away with more than 15,000 images. Then we raced back to the hotel with the data it had collected and began an all-night coding session.
We were happy to see that our custom machine learning model took only about 2 hours to crunch through all the visual data and identify potential mines and ordnance. But constructing a map for the full area that included the specific coordinates of all the detected mines in under 72 hours was simply not possible with any reasonable computational resources. The following day (which happened to coincide with the short-lived Wagner Group rebellion), we rewrote our algorithms so that our system mapped only the locations where suspected land mines were identified—a more scalable solution for our future work.
In the end we detected 74 mines and ordnance scattered across the surface of that enormous field, and the U.N. deemed our results impressive enough to invite us back for a second round of demonstrations. While we were in Ukraine, we also demonstrated our technology for the State Special Transportation Service, a branch of the Ukrainian military responsible for keeping roads and bridges open.
All our hard work paid off. Today, our technology is being used by several humanitarian nonprofits detecting land mines in Ukraine, including the Norwegian People’s Aid and the HALO Trust, which is the world’s largest nonprofit dedicated to clearing explosives left behind after wars. Those groups are working to make Ukraine’s roads, towns, and agricultural fields safe for the Ukrainian people. Our goal is to make our technology accessible to every humanitarian demining operation, making their jobs safer and more efficient. To that end, we’re deploying and scaling up—first across Ukraine, and soon around the world.
The remnants of war linger long after conflicts have died down. Today, an estimated 60 countries are still contaminated by mines and unexploded ordnance, according to the 2023 Landmine Monitor report. These dangers include land mines, improvised explosive devices, and shells and artillery that didn’t explode on landing—all together, they’re known as explosive ordnance (EO). More than 4,700 people were killed or wounded by EO in 2022, according to the Landmine Monitor report, and the vast majority of those casualties were civilians. Today, Ukraine is the most contaminated place in the world. About a third of its land—an area the size of Florida—is estimated to contain EO.
In humanitarian mine-clearing work, the typical process for releasing EO-contaminated land back to the community hasn’t changed much over the past 50 years. First a nontechnical survey is conducted where personnel go out to talk with local people about which areas are suspected of being contaminated. Next comes the technical survey, in which personnel use metal detectors, trained dogs, mechanical demining machines, and geophysical methods to identify all the hazards within a mined area. This process is slow, risky, and prone to false positives triggered by cans, screws, or other metal detritus. Once the crew has identified all the potential hazards within an area, a team of explosive-ordnance-disposal specialists either disarm or destroy the explosives.
Unexploded ordnance lies by the road in a Ukrainian town near the war’s front lines. John Moore/Getty Images
Most deminers would agree that it’s not ideal to identify the EO as they walk through the contaminated area; it would be much better to know the lay of the land before they take their first steps. That’s where drones can be literal lifesavers: They take that first look safely from up above, and they can quickly and cheaply cover a large area.
What’s more, the scale of the problem makes artificial intelligence a compelling part of the solution. Imagine if drone imagery was collected for all of Ukraine’s suspected contaminated land: an area of more than 170,000 square kilometers. It takes about 60,000 drone images to cover 1 km2 at a useful resolution, and we estimate that it takes at minimum 3 minutes for a human expert to analyze a drone image and check for EO. At that rate, it would take more than 500 million person-hours to manually search imagery covering all of Ukraine’s suspected contaminated land for EO. With AI, the task of analyzing this imagery and locating all visible EO in Ukraine will still be a massive endeavor, but it’s within reason.
“Today, our technology is being used by several humanitarian nonprofits detecting land mines in Ukraine.”
Humanitarian demining groups are slow to adopt new technologies because any mistake, including ones caused by unfamiliarity with new tech, can be fatal. But in the last couple of years, drones seem to have reached an inflection point. Many government agencies and nonprofit groups that work on land-mine detection and removal are beginning to integrate drones into their standard procedures. Besides collecting aerial imagery of large areas with suspected hazards, which helps with route planning, the drones are prioritizing areas of clearance, and in some cases, detecting land mines themselves.
After several years of research on this topic during my undergraduate education, in 2020 I cofounded the company now known as Safe Pro AI to push the technology forward and make deployment a reality. My cofounder and I didn’t know at the time that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 would soon make this work even more vital.
I became interested in land-mine detection while studying geological science as an undergraduate at Binghamton University, New York. Through my work in the Geophysics and Remote Sensing Laboratory run by Timothy de Smet and Alex Nikulin, I got involved in a project to detect the PFM-1, a Russian-made antipersonnel land mine also known as the butterfly mine due to its unique shape and because it’s typically scattered by aircraft or artillery shells. Afghanistan is still contaminated with many of these mines, left behind more than 40 years ago after the Soviet-Afghan War. They’re particularly problematic because they’re mostly made of plastic, with only a few small metal components; to find them with a metal detector requires turning up the equipment’s sensitivity, which leads to more false positives.
In 2019, we trained a machine learning model by scattering inert PFM-1 land mines and collecting visual imagery via drone flights in various environments, including roads, urban areas, grassy fields, and places with taller vegetation. Our resulting model correctly detected 92 percent of PFM-1s in these environments, on average. While we were pleased with its performance, the model could identify only that one type of land mine, and only if they were above ground. Still, this work provided the proof of concept that paved the way for what we’re doing today. In 2020, Steinberg and I founded the Demining Research Community, a nonprofit whose goal is to advance the field of humanitarian mine removal through research in remote sensing, geophysics, and robotics.
Over the next few years, we continued to develop our software and make contacts in the field. At the 2021 Mine Action Innovation Conference in Geneva, we heard about a researcher named John Frucci at Oklahoma State University who directs the OSU Global Consortium for Explosive Hazard Mitigation. In the summer of 2022, we spent two weeks with Frucci at OSU’s explosives range, which has more than 50 types of unexploded ordnance. We used our drones to collect visual training data for many different types of explosives: small antipersonnel mines, larger antitank mines, improvised explosive devices, grenades, and many other dangerous explosive things you never want to encounter.
To develop our technology for real-world use, Steinberg and I cofounded Safe Pro AI and joined Safe Pro Group, a company that provides drone services and sells protective gear for demining crews. Going into this work, we were aware of many academic proposals for new methods of EO detection that haven’t gotten out of the lab. We wanted to break that paradigm, so we spent a lot of time talking with demining personnel about their needs. Safe Pro Group’s director of operations in Ukraine, Fred Polk, spent more than 200 days last year talking to deminers in Ukraine about the problems they face and the solutions they’d like to see. In light of those conversations, we developed a user-friendly Web application called SpotlightAI. Any authorized person can log on to the website and upload their imagery from a commercial off-the-shelf drone; our system will then run the visual data through our AI model and return a map with all the coordinates of the detected explosive ordnance.
We don’t anticipate that the technology will replace human labor—personnel will still have to go through fields with metal detectors to be sure the drones haven’t missed anything. But the drones can speed up the process of the initial nontechnical survey and can also help demining operators figure out which areas to prioritize. The drone-based maps can also give personnel more situational awareness going into an inherently dangerous situation.
“Drones can be literal lifesavers: They take the first look at a minefield safely from up above.”
The first big test of our technology was in 2022 in Budapest at a Hungarian Explosive Ordnance Disposal test range. At that time, I was at Mount Okmok, a volcano in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, doing field work on volcanology for my Ph.D., so Steinberg represented Safe Pro AI at that event. He told me via satellite phone that our model detected 20 of the 23 pieces of ordnance, returning the results in under an hour.
After Budapest we made two trips to Ukraine, first to field-test our technology in a real-world minefield environment and then for the 2023 U.N. demonstration previously described. In another trip this past March, we visited minefields in eastern Ukraine that are currently being demined by nonprofit organizations using our SpotlightAI system. We were accompanied by Artem Motorniuk, a Ukrainian software developer who joined Safe Pro Group in 2023. It was incredibly saddening to see the destruction of communities firsthand: Even after the front line has moved, explosive remnants of war still hinder reconstruction. Many people flee, but the ones who stay are faced with difficult decisions. They must balance essential activities such as farming and rebuilding with the risks posed by pursing those activities in areas that might have land mines and explosive ordnance. Seeing the demining operations firsthand reinforced the impact of the work, and listening to the demining operators’ feedback in the field helped us further refine the technology.
We’ve continued to improve the performance of our model, and it has finally reached a point where it’s almost as good as an expert human in detecting EO on the surface from visual imagery, while performing this task many times faster than any human could. Sometimes it even finds items that are heavily obscured by vegetation. To give it superhuman capabilities to peer under the dirt, we need to bring in other detection modalities. For example, while we originally rejected thermal imaging as a stand-alone detection method, we’re now experimenting with using it in conjunction with visual imaging. The visual--imagery-based machine learning model returns the detection results, but we then add a thermal overlay that can reveal other information—for example, it might show a ground disturbance that suggests a buried object.
The biggest challenge we’re grappling with now is how to detect EO through thick and high vegetation. One strategy I developed is to use the drone imagery to create a 3D map, which is used to estimate the vegetation height and coverage. An algorithm then converts those estimates into a heat map showing how likely it is that the machine learning model can detect EO in each area: For example, it might show a 95 percent detection rate in a flat area with low grass, and only a 5 percent detection rate in a region with trees and bushes. While this approach doesn’t solve the problem posed by vegetation, it gives deminers more context for our results. We’re also incorporating more vegetation imagery into our training data itself to improve the model’s detection rate in such situations.
To offer these services in a scalable way, Safe Pro AI has partnered with Amazon Web Services, which is providing computational resources to deal with large amounts of visual imagery uploaded to SpotlightAI. Drone-based land-mine detection in Ukraine is a problem of scale. An average drone pilot can collect more than 30 hectares (75 acres) of imagery per day, roughly equal to 20,000 images. Each one of these images covers an area of 10 by 20 meters, within which the system must detect a land mine the size of your hand and the color of grass. AWS allows us to utilize extremely powerful computers on demand to process thousands of images a day through our machine learning model to meet the needs of deminers in Ukraine.
One obvious way we could improve our technology is by enabling it to detect buried EO, either by visually detecting disturbed earth or using geophysical sensors. In the summer of 2023, our nonprofit experimented with putting ground-penetrating radar, aerial magnetometry, lidar, and thermal sensors on our drones in an attempt to locate buried items.
We found that lidar is useful for detecting trenches that are indicative of ground disturbance, but it can’t detect the buried objects themselves. Thermal imagery can be useful if a buried metal item has a very different thermal signature than the surrounding soil, but we typically see a strong differential only in certain environments and at certain times of day. Magnetometers are the best tools for detecting buried metal targets—they’re the most similar to handheld metal detectors that deminers use. But the magnetic signal gets weaker as the drone gets farther from the ground, decreasing at an exponential rate. So if a drone flies too high, it won’t see the magnetic signatures and won’t detect the objects; but if it flies too low, it may have to navigate through bushes or other terrain obstacles. We’re continuing to experiment with these modalities to develop an intelligent sensor-fusion method to detect as many targets as possible.
Right now, SpotlightAI can detect and identify more than 150 types of EO, and it’s also pretty good at generalization—if it encounters a type of land mine it never saw in its training data, it’s likely to identify it as something worthy of attention. It’s familiar with almost all American and Russian munitions, as well as some Israeli and Italian types, and we can make the model more robust by training it on ordnance from elsewhere. As our company grows, we may want to fine-tune our algorithms to offer more customized solutions for different parts of the world. Our current model is optimized for Ukraine and the types of EO found there, but many other countries are still dealing with contamination. Maybe we’ll eventually have separate models for places such as Angola, Iraq, and Laos.
Our hope is that in the next few years, our technology will become part of the standard procedure for demining teams—we want every team to have a drone that maps out surface contamination before anyone sets foot into a minefield. We hope we can make the world safer for these teams, and significantly speed up the pace of releasing land back to the communities living with remnants of war. The best possible outcome will be if someday our services are no longer needed, because explosive devices are no longer scattered across fields and roads. In the meantime, we’ll work every day to put ourselves out of business.
This article appears in the May 2024 print issue.
Even if somehow, someway you thought Donald Trump had "good policies," I don't see how you deny that he's a moron. Not just the stupidest President ever — that's kind of a given — but one of the stupidest adults you'd ever actually meet. — Read the rest
The post I challenge you to find a person stupider than Trump appeared first on Boing Boing.
The House of Representatives passed a $95 billion military spending package over the weekend, including $59 billion in weapons purchases in three separate bills. The aid package had been held up because some Republicans opposed more aid to Ukraine. Those concerns melted away after this month's Iranian-Israeli clashes.
The Senate already passed a similar $95 billion package two months ago, so the new House spending bills should pass the Senate and make it to President Joe Biden's desk quickly. The House package also includes a fourth "national security" bill with measures that the Senate has not voted on, including the forced sale of TikTok and new economic sanctions on Iran and Russia.
"Today, members of both parties in the House voted to advance our national security interests and send a clear message about the power of American leadership on the world stage," Biden declared in a statement after the legislation passed.
The White House advertised these bills as an aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and friendly nations in the Indo-Pacific region, such as Taiwan. But the bulk of the money will go directly into the American military-industrial complex. The package includes $29.5 billion to replenish stockpiles of American weapons given to Ukraine, Israel, and Indo-Pacific allies as well as another $29.5 billion for the development, production, and procurement of new weapons.
The wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East have burned through stockpiles of American ammunition and missiles faster than they can be replaced, and American factories will have trouble keeping up even if more money is thrown at them.
Some non-American weapons manufacturers are also poised to rake in taxpayers' money from the aid package. The U.S. government will spend $5.2 billion on Israel's Iron Dome, Iron Beam, and David's Sling defense systems, produced by an Israeli company, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. And the Indo-Pacific bill loosens rules for spending Defense Production Act money on British and Australian companies. The United States, Britain, and Australia are working together on the AUKUS submarine project.
Supporters of the aid package have claimed that Ukraine and Israel are fighting so that American troops don't have to. But the bills themselves make it clear how much heavy lifting the U.S. military is already doing in these wars. They include $11.3 billion to support an American military buildup in Europe, and $2.4 billion for American military operations in the Middle East.
U.S. forces have bombed the Houthi movement that is threatening Israeli shipping in the Red Sea, shot down most of the Iranian missiles and drones en route to Israel, and flown surveillance drones over Gaza in order to provide intelligence to the Israeli army.
The United States is at risk of getting dragged further into these conflicts, as the Biden administration has been having trouble controlling its proxies. Israel bombed an Iranian consulate without consulting with Washington, leading to last week's Iranian-Israeli dustup. Meanwhile, Ukraine has refused U.S. calls to stop attacking inside Russian territory.
While pumping money into the wars, the package also provides aid to people that the wars have made homeless. The bills allot around $9 billion to refugee aid and other humanitarian relief, on the condition that none of the money is spent on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the Palestinian refugee organization that Israel has accused of supporting Hamas. (The agency, for its part, has accused Israel of torturing its employees into confessing alleged Hamas ties.)
And as usual, the spending package includes a hodgepodge of unrelated or only vaguely related items: $98 million for the Department of Energy to produce nuclear isotopes, $250 million for the World Bank's emergency response fund, $75 million for Middle Eastern border agencies fighting drug smuggling, and $390 million for the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help nonprofit organizations defend their facilities from terrorism.
The legislative package was designed to prevent either Democratic or Republican dissidents from derailing it. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R–La.) broke the aid package apart into three separate bills, then put them back together again after they passed. That way, votes against aid to Ukraine did not count against aid to Israel, and vice versa.
It was a compromise between the Biden administration, which wanted to send Ukraine and Israel aid together, and Republicans, who wanted to vote on aid to Israel separately. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and CIA Director Bill Burns have personally lobbied Johnson over the past two months, according to CNN, as Ukrainian troops have lost ground to Russia.
Johnson appealed heavily to conservative Christian feelings about Israel when trying to sell Republicans on the package. "Of course, for those of us who are believers, it's a Biblical admonition to stand with Israel," he told Newsmax on Friday.
The Ukraine-focused bill passed 311–112, with unanimous Democratic support and some Republican support. Many Democrats cheered and waved Ukrainian flags during the vote. Johnson snapped at them: "We should only wave one flag on the House floor, and I think we know which flag that is."
The Israel-focused bill passed 366–58, with the vote mixed across party lines. Although Democrats have led criticism of Israel's treatment of Palestinians and Republicans have traditionally taken a hawkish pro-Israel line, a few Republicans took a stand against spending taxpayers' money on the Israeli military.
"If Congress wants to send money to Israel, then we should defund the United Nations first," Rep. Matt Gaetz (R–Fla.) said on social media. "I have concerns about all deficit spending when sending money to any country, even if that country is a great ally or under attack."
The libertarian-leaning Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.), who is now supporting an effort to oust Johnson, told Fox News that the military spending package was Johnson's "third betrayal" of his base, after helping pass an omnibus spending bill and reauthorize mass surveillance.
"He's the uniparty speaker now," Massie said.
The post Democrats and Republicans Unite To Give Weapons Manufacturers $59 Billion appeared first on Reason.com.
Banning TikTok for real this time: On Saturday, the House passed bills that will send large sums of aid to Israel ($26 billion), Ukraine ($60 billion), and Taiwan ($8 billion), as well as a long-gestating measure to force the divestiture of the video app TikTok.
Now the legislation will need to be approved by the Senate and signed into law by President Joe Biden.
The TikTok ban will probably be challenged. "This is an unprecedented deal worked out between the Republican Speaker and President Biden," declared Michael Beckerman, TikTok's head of public policy, in a memo to the company's American staff. "At the stage that the bill is signed, we will move to the courts for a legal challenge."
China's internet regulator/censor, the Cyberspace Administration, has taken note of the movement on the TikTok bill, which would either ban the Chinese-owned company from operating in the U.S. or force sale of the app to an American owner within a tight timeframe. Forcing divestiture presents a few problems, namely that the proprietary algorithm and source code would likely fail to convey with the purchase, making the app…practically useless.
Not to be outdone by American lawmakers, China's government on Friday ordered that the Meta-owned WhatsApp and Threads be pulled from Apple's app store over "national security concerns" (of course). "A person briefed on the situation said the Chinese government had found content on WhatsApp and Threads about China's president, Xi Jinping, that was inflammatory and violated the country's cybersecurity laws," reports The New York Times. WhatsApp is used minimally compared to WeChat (owned by Chinese company Tencent). But for Apple—which anticipated this to some degree, and already started shifting its supply chain overseas after having been quite conciliatory to the Chinese Communist Party for many years—to be caught in the crosshairs is a harbinger of more to come.
This type of justification can always be found if one looks hard enough—and China's censors certainly do. But beware the coming internet wars, and the use of the American TikTok ban as justification for all manner of crackdowns.
Free and open internet? "A Russian opposition blogger, Aleksandr Gorbunov, posted on social media last month that Russia could use the move to shut down services like YouTube," argues The New York Times' David McCabe. "I don't think the obvious thing needs to be stated out loud, which is that when Russia blocks YouTube, they'll justify it with precisely this decision of the United States," said Gorbunov.
Xi's regime in China and Vladimir Putin's regime in Russia, of course, feel quite comfortable taking whatever cheap shots they can at U.S. lawmakers; if they want to crack down on internet freedoms, they can and will, no excuse necessary. But the TikTok bill is certainly escalatory, and it undermines America's longstanding rhetorical commitment to a free and open internet—or the internet as a "global free-trade zone," in the words of former President Bill Clinton.
Scenes from New York: Today is my birthday! And on Saturday, I went out with friends (including a grand total of three babies, who were shockingly well-behaved) to eat crab in Chinatown. After that we went to an event in a basement on East Broadway where the books attempted to teach my toddler that rules are for breaking! Marginally better than Ibram X. Kendi's children's books, but not by much.
In response to "horrific" scenes of antisemitic harassment at and around campus, the Orthodox Rabbi at Columbia/Barnard sent a WhatsApp message to more than 290+ Jewish students this morning recommending that they go home until it's safe again for them on campus: pic.twitter.com/uqAntEICLv
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) April 21, 2024
Scientific American doesn't cover the Cass Review -- "cass report" and "cass review" net zero Google hits -- but instead, the week after its release, it publishes an interview with an activist who believes kids should have full medical automony and that interpreting scientific… https://t.co/C7C19zxYKT
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) April 21, 2024
The post China's Retribution appeared first on Reason.com.
When GOP leaders tried pushing more Ukraine aid through the House, Moscow's loudest MAGA mouthpiece, Marjorie Taylor Greene, tossed an extremely suspect word salad demanding Kyiv roll over for Putin's oppressive ethnic policies before getting a cent.
As Politico reported, MTG's noxious amendment said: "No funding shall be made available to Ukraine unless restrictions on ethnic minorities', including Hungarians in Transcarpathia, right to use their native languages in schools are lifted." — Read the rest
The post Kremlin Krazy: Marjorie Taylor Greene tweet is straight from Putin's propaganda playbook appeared first on Boing Boing.
In addition to finally passing long-delayed and much-needed military assistance to Ukraine, the House of Representatives today also enacted the REPO Act. That law gives the president the authority to confiscate $6 billion in Russian government assets currently frozen in the United States, and transfer them to Ukraine, in order to assist that country in resisting Russia's brutal war of aggression.
The Senate will almost certainly pass the REPO Act, as well, and President Biden seems certain to sign it and act on it. While $6 billion isn't all that much relative to the costs of the war, hopefully this US action will incentivize our European allies to confiscate the nearly $300 billion in Russian state assets currently frozen under their jurisdiction.
I have long advocated this idea, which is overdue. In a November post, I outlined the case for it, and addressed a number of objections, including claims that confiscation would violate the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, sovereign immunity arguments, arguments that confiscation is unfair to the people of Russia, and fears that it would set a bad precedent deterring foreign investment in the US.
Here's an excerpt:
There is a staggering $300 billion in frozen Russian state assets located in Western nations backing Ukraine…. To put this figure in perspective, it's worth noting that the total amount of US aid to Ukraine from February 2022 through July 31, 2023 was about $77 billion. The European Union, individual European states, and Canada, gave approximately $165 billion during the same period…. The $300 billion in frozen assets is equal to some two years of total Western assistance to Ukraine at the current pace of spending!…
[I]n the US the private property of foreigners is protected against confiscation by the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, which requires the government to pay "just compensation" if it takes "private property." Most European nations have similar constitutional protections for private property rights, as does the European Convention on Human Rights.
But the Fifth Amendment and its European analogues do not offer the same kind of blanket protection to the property of foreign governments. This distinction undermines claims by some critics that uncompensated seizure of Russian state assets would violate the Takings Clause and similar constitutional guarantees in Europe. It also mitigates concerns that confiscating Russian government assets would create a dangerous slippery slope. Private property rights of foreigners would remain protected by constitutional guarantees….
Oona Hathaway argues that confiscating Russian state assets would violate sovereign immunity. I think the Tribe report offers compelling responses to this argument (pp 60-64).
In addition, I am not convinced that sovereign immunity is actually a just principle that we have a duty to obey. It is in fact a perversion of justice, enabling rulers to escape accountability for violating human rights and other injustices they perpetrate. It was a mistake to read it into the US Constitution. It is equally a mistake to allow it to be a principle of international law. Some laws are so deeply unjust that we have no duty to obey them. The law of sovereign immunity is one such case.
At the very least, sovereign immunity should not be permitted to shield authoritarian states like Putin's regime from having their assets confiscated in order to combat their wars of aggression, mass murder of civilians, and other large-scale human rights violations. Such rulers no more deserve sovereign immunity than Mafia bosses….
The post House Passes REPO Act Giving President Authority to Confiscate Russian Government Assets in the US and Transfer them to Ukraine appeared first on Reason.com.
President Joe Biden came into office promising to get American troops out of "forever wars." Tonight, in his State of the Union address, he offered a vision of indefinite U.S. involvement in conflicts around the world.
In April 2021, speaking about the war in Afghanistan, the president railed against those who believe that "withdrawal would damage America's credibility and weaken America's influence in the world. I believe the exact opposite is true." Tonight, Biden attacked skeptics who "want us to walk away from our leadership in the world."
He began his speech with a plea for more U.S. military aid to Ukraine, arguing that "the free world is at risk, emboldening others who would do us harm to do what they wish." Later, Biden announced sweeping plans for U.S. involvement in Gaza.
While the U.S. military will build a new port in Gaza to deliver food to Palestinians—and, the president promised, "no U.S. boots will be on the ground"—the Biden administration will continue to arm the Israeli military campaign that Biden said "has taken a greater toll on innocent civilians than all previous wars in Gaza combined."
The Biden administration has transferred weapons to Israel at the American taxpayer's expense, and is providing targeting intelligence to the Israeli military. "Creating stability in the Middle East also means containing the threat posed by Iran," Biden added, touting his airstrikes on Yemen.
That air campaign has thrown a wrench into Yemen's peace talks—which, ironically, the Biden administration brokered a couple years before.
Biden positioned himself as a peace dove during the 2020 presidential debates, and one of his first major decisions in office was to go through with a long-planned U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. "It's time to end the forever war," the president announced in an April 2021 speech, rejecting an "approach where U.S. exit is tied to conditions on the ground."
"We have to have clear answers to the following questions: Just what conditions require to—be required to allow us to depart?" he asked in that speech. "By what means and how long would it take to achieve them, if they could be achieved at all? And at what additional cost in lives and treasure?"
Today, Biden answered those questions: The wars will continue for the foreseeable future.
The post Biden Touts More Forever Wars, Breaking His 2021 Promises appeared first on Reason.com.
Why can't we apprehend both of them at the border? Yesterday, both President Joe Biden and his presumed opponent in November, former President Donald Trump, arrived at the southern border for a whole lot of politicking and very little actual problem solving.
Media outlet after media outlet described it as a "split-screen" showdown. The New York Times described it as a visit "pitting the president's belief in legislating against his rival's pledge to be a 'Day 1' dictator." All right.
"A very dangerous border—we're going to take care of it," said Trump upon arrival. Biden has "the blood of countless innocent victims" on his hands, Trump added, citing the recent murder of Laken Riley—an Augusta University nursing student believed to have been killed by Jose Antonio Ibarra, an illegal immigrant from Venezuela, while running on trails at the University of Georgia.
"The United States is being overrun by the Biden migrant crime. It's a new form of vicious violation to our country," Trump said, leaning hard into fear-based messaging.
Biden, on the other hand, blamed Republicans in Congress for sinking deals that would attempt to handle the crisis at the border and kept meekly calling for bipartisan compromises. "Join me," Biden said to Trump—in what the Times described as an "olive branch"—"or I'll join you" in passing the bipartisan border deal that Trump recently lambasted, leading Senate Republicans to turn on the legislation.
If at first you don't succeed, try…an executive order? He's no border dove, though: Biden is reportedly mulling an executive order to majorly crack down on asylum seekers, forcing more rigorous entry standards and deportations for those who do not meet the updated criteria. Section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act extends latitude to presidents to block certain categories of entrants if deemed "detrimental to the interests of the United States." This would allow him to bypass Congress entirely.
Ironically, Section 212(f) was how Trump instituted the Muslim ban back in 2017. It's dark horseshoe theory that Biden is now considering sidestepping Congress and using the same provision. It's almost as if actual checks and balances would be helpful here, and setting cogent policy in the first place, as opposed to sweeping executive orders to attempt to bandage long-festering problems.
The number of border crossings has reached record levels. December saw almost 250,000 arrests by Border Patrol, a number which fell by more than half in early January due to Mexican immigration authorities stepping up to the plate. The top five nationalities being apprehended are currently Mexicans, Venezuelans, Guatemalans, Honduras, and Colombians, but people from all over the world are now attempting to cross the border as well—including Chinese migrants (the fastest-growing group of border-crossers).
Whether it's Biden's pointless "join me!" pleas, designed to make the media fawn all over him, or Trump calling illegal border-crossers "fighting-age men"—as if they're creating some sort of militia as opposed to seeking work as, like, dishwashers and roofers—nothing good happened at the border yesterday, and the situation got no closer to being resolved.
Scenes from New York: A little before 4 a.m. Thursday morning, an A train conductor was attacked—his neck slashed, as he stuck it out the window to make sure the train was cleared to leave—at the Rockaway Avenue station in Brooklyn (a few stops before mine).
By rush hour Thursday morning, train crews were boycotting the safety conditions they must work under and calling straphangers' attention to attacks on transit workers. For those of us trying to take the A to work (like me, to film a documentary for Reason), it was a massive inconvenience, as trains operated with severe delays. But safety on the subways has gotten intolerably bad: Year over year, NYPD reports a 13 percent increase in crime within the subway system, and an 11 percent increase in assaults specifically. Last week, a man was shot and killed on the D train. In January, a man was shot and killed on the No. 3. Merely 1,000 of the city's 6,500 subway cars are equipped with surveillance cameras; meanwhile, the Metropolitan Transit Authority has installed bright yellow barriers at the Washington Heights stop to deter criminals from pushing people onto the tracks as part of a new pilot program—which would be terribly expensive to actually scale and wouldn't solve many categories of subway-system crime (like yesterday's neck slashing).
As for the conductor in question, he received 34 stitches and nine sutures and thankfully survived.
Make them a buddy cop duo and call it a day https://t.co/p8fo42hSWk
— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) March 1, 2024
"He wants to now replace the court with something else…"@mcmoynihan, @MattWelch, and @kmele on Keith Olbermann's meltdown over Supreme Court hearing Trump immunity case.
Watch & subscribe: https://t.co/Y12z2uKGMbhttps://t.co/8SsT7CZI2P
— The Megyn Kelly Show (@MegynKellyShow) February 29, 2024
The post Border Pageantry appeared first on Reason.com.
A Russian defector is assassinated in Spain. The Chinese government offers bounties for dissidents who take refuge in foreign countries. The Canadian government fingers Indian officials for murdering a Sikh activist in British Columbia. What do these incidents have in common? They represent acts of "transnational repression," a form of authoritarianism that reaches across national frontiers and has becoming disturbingly common in recent years.
"More than 20 percent of the world's national governments have reached beyond their borders since 2014 to forcibly silence exiled political activists, journalists, former regime insiders, and members of ethnic or religious minorities," finds a Freedom House report released in February. "According to the new data, 25 countries' governments were responsible for 125 incidents of physical transnational repression in 2023 alone, including assassinations, abductions, assaults, detentions, and unlawful deportations."
Last year enjoyed the dubious distinction, the report adds, of featuring the first documented cases of transnational repression by Cuba, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, El Salvador, Myanmar, Sierra Leone, and Yemen. Well, it's only fair that every regime gets an opportunity to terrorize a critic or political opponent in another country, instead of leaving all the fun to the year's main culprits: Russia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Turkmenistan, and China.
Along those lines, recent weeks saw the assassination of Maksim Kuzminov, the Russian helicopter pilot who defected to Ukraine in 2023 in protest of his country's invasion of that nation. Russian media reported that military intelligence issued a kill order for Kuzminov, which, it seems, was carried out.
"Kuzminov, who was reportedly living in Spain under a false identity, was found dead in the Spanish town of Villajoyosa, near Alicante, on Feb. 13. Police said attackers shot the former pilot six times before running him over with a car," reports Politico. "Sources in Spanish intelligence services…believe Moscow hired hitmen from outside Spain to carry out the assassination."
China's overseas efforts are broader and more overt in their efforts to target dissidents.
"Fox Hunt is a sweeping bid by General Secretary Xi to target Chinese nationals whom he sees as threats and who live outside China, across the world," FBI Director Christopher Wray charged in a 2020 speech. "Hundreds of the Fox Hunt victims that they target live right here in the United States, and many are American citizens or green card holders."
Chinese officials threaten dissidents' family members who remain in China, but also pressure those overseas through "police stations" covertly established in foreign countries and intended to convey the impression that the regime reaches everywhere. U.S. officials busted one such outpost in New York City last spring.
China's government has a fixation on veterans of Hong Kong's democracy movement, offering bounties of $1 million H.K. ($127,730 U.S.) in December for assistance with the capture of dissidents who sought overseas refuge.
India's government, for its part, stands accused by Canadian officials of orchestrating the June killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar. Accused of terrorism by India in pursuit of a Sikh homeland, Nijjar had a bounty on his head and was shot dead outside a temple in British Columbia.
Just months later, U.S. officials claimed to have thwarted a similar attempt on American soil against Sikh separatist leader Gurpatwant Singh Pannun.
Last year was a busy year for international thugs and assassins, it appears. But if we go back just a bit further, we find other incidents, such as the gruesome 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi Arabian agents in Istanbul, or the botched but lethal attack the same year on Sergei Skripal in the U.K. by Russian agents using the Novichok nerve poison (one of the Putin regime's favorite calling cards). There is a frightening abundance of examples from which to choose.
"Between 2014 and 2023, Freedom House has recorded a total of 1,034 direct, physical incidents of transnational repression committed by 44 origin-country governments in 100 target countries," observes Freedom House. "The governments of China, Turkey, Tajikistan, Russia, and Egypt rank as the most prolific perpetrators of transnational repression overall since 2014. China's regime on its own accounts for 25 percent of all documented incidents of transnational repression."
Part of the problem, unmentioned by Freedom House, is that relatively free democratic governments can compound the problem with their own misbehavior. While Canada, the U.S., and their allies aren't known for poisoning overseas dissidents (at least, not as a matter of course that they want publicized), they do sometimes bend laws to target inconvenient people in other countries. The U.S. federal government, aided by its British allies, has tormented journalist Julian Assange for years with arrest and extradition efforts over what Amnesty International describes as "politically motivated charges" under the Espionage Act. His "crimes," points out the Freedom of the Press Foundation, are "things journalists at news outlets around the country do every day."
That sets a precedent on which authoritarian government can seize.
"National security laws of other countries, including the US and the UK, also have extraterritorial effect," sniffed China's Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning when challenged on arrest warrants and bounties for Hong King dissidents residing in other countries. The scope of China's actions extend way beyond those of any western government in reach and severity, but she had a point.
"It's clear that governments are not being deterred from violating sovereignty and targeting dissidents living abroad," commented Freedom House's Yana Gorokhovskaia of events documented in the recent publication. "Democracies must ensure that the perpetrators of these brutal acts face real consequences. Otherwise, the use of transnational repression is likely to spread."
That's true. But if officials in relatively free countries are serious about deterring overtly authoritarian regimes from spying on, blackmailing, assaulting, kidnapping, and killing people who've taken refuge across national borders, they have to refrain from anything that even slightly resembles such behavior themselves. The end of transnational repression begins at home.
The post Report Finds Rise in Governments Targeting Dissidents Overseas appeared first on Reason.com.
Since April 2022, the US has admitted some 200,000 or more Ukrainian migrants under the Uniting for Ukraine (U4U) program, which enables US citizens and legal residents to sponsor Ukrainians fleeing Russia's brutal invasion to live and work in the United States for up to two years (I am myself a sponsor for two Ukrainian families). Although the program has many virtues and has been highly successful, the two-year time limit has been a major downside, from the beginning. Many of the Ukrainians will need a permanent refuge. And giving it to them will also enable them to contribute more to our economy and society.
Yesterday, the Biden Administration began a program under which U4U participants can apply for "re-parole." Those whose applications are accepted would be allowed to live and work legally in the US for an additional two years.
This is a step in the right direction. The war in Ukraine shows little sign of ending anytime soon. And many of the refugees may be unwilling or unable to return even after the fighting stops (e.g.—because their former homes have been destroyed by the Russian military). Past refugee crises show that it is often impossible and undesirable to force everyone to return to their original homes, even after the fighting is over.
But the re-parole process does have some downsides. One is that the relevant forms and application process seem unduly complicated, and some aspects of the system are unclear. For example, I cannot figure out whether the two-year extension is tacked on to the end of the original two years, or whether it begins as soon as USCIS accepts an application (in the latter case participants may end up with less than four years total). The filing fees are also hard to determine, though they seem to be $575 per person, if I understand the USCIS website correctly. That goes well beyond any plausible administrative expenses and is a considerable burden for the many parolees who lost everything in the Russian invasion and may be employed at working-class jobs today. At the very least, the fees should be lowered.
In addition, the extension, like the original U4U program, is a matter of executive discretion. What Caesar giveth, he or his successor could taketh away—a very real danger, given the prospect of Donald Trump returning to the White House. It is not entirely clear whether the president could unilaterally strip U4U parolees of their status before their term ends. At the very least, the president could simply let the term expire and refuse to renew it.
Despite such limitations, the re-parole system is a useful step. Otherwise, many U4U participants will see their residency and work rights expire in 2024 or 2025. But, like the earlier grant of a right to apply for TPS status, this is not a substitute for giving Ukrainians permanent residency rights. Congress must pass an adjustment act to do that; I outlined the case for doing so here. There is in fact a bipartisan Ukrainian Adjustment Act proposed by several members of Congress. But it doesn't seem likely to pass this year. Similar adjustment acts should be adopted to cover Afghans, Venezuelans, and others in similar straits, who fled war and oppression, entered the US through the use of presidential parole power, and now face arbitrary time limits on their residency and work rights.
If you are a U4U participant or a sponsor who needs help with the re-parole process, please let me know and I will see if I can get answers to your questions.
I have made inquiries with government officials and other experts to try to clear up some of the uncertainties noted above. If I learn anything useful, I will update this post.
The post Biden Administration Lets Migrants Who Entered Under Uniting for Ukraine Apply to Stay in the US For Another Two Years appeared first on Reason.com.
Přihlásit se