UNITED STATES
Video shows storm situation
A video taken by a meteorologist in South Dakota and posted to social media on Wednesday shows 20 seconds of a drive through a heavy blizzard. A thick gray fills the view in the footage as Matthew Dux, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Sioux Falls, drives down a road, street lights, road signs and other vehicles only appearing at close quarters. “It is not great at all out there!” Dux wrote on Twitter in a post accompanying the video, which he said was taken south of the Sioux Falls airport. “Far too many people on the roads. No lights on, driving way too fast.”
UNITED STATES
Hack ‘impacting’ governments
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday said that a sprawling cyberespionage campaign made public earlier this month is “impacting” state and local governments. The hacking campaign, which used tech company SolarWinds as a springboard to penetrate federal government networks, was “impacting enterprise networks across federal, state and local governments, as well as critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations,” CISA said in a statement on its Web site.
UNITED STATES
Ivanka helps at church
White House adviser Ivanka Trump on Tuesday helped load boxes of food into vehicles at a South Florida drive-through food distribution event for those in need. “Merry Christmas,” Trump said as she hauled a black box into a vehicle’s trunk in the parking lot of the King Jesus Ministry in Miami-Dade County, WSVN reported. One driver in the line, Karla Fuentes, told the Miami television station that she had gotten to the church more than 12 hours earlier to get in line for the food and slept in her vehicle. “It’s a big help for my house, for my neighbor,” Fuentes said. “We can share with everybody.” Another food recipient, Vivian Lopez, said she had lost her job because of the COVID-19 pandemic. “We are living really hard times,” Lopez said. The food giveaway is not too far from where Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, recently bought property on Indian Creek Island near Miami, an area referred to as “Billionaires Bunker,” according to news reports.
AUSTRALIA
Pete Evans banned
Facebook yesterday banned celebrity chef Pete Evans, saying that he repeatedly spread misinformation about COVID-19. With more than 1 million social media followers, Evans has promoted theories about the pandemic and vaccines alongside diet advice, including the palaeolithic diet, earning him the nickname “Paleo” Pete. Facebook said that it would not “allow anyone to share misinformation about COVID-19 that could lead to imminent physical harm” or falsehoods about vaccines. “We have clear policies against this type of content and we’ve removed Chef Pete Evans’ Facebook Page for repeated violations of these policies,” the company said in a statement. Evans’ page on Instagram — a Facebook-owned platform — with 278,000 followers was still active and included posts that encouraged Sydney residents to defy public health officials and refuse to get tested for the virus. Evans wrote on Instagram that he was glad to be “one of the catalysts for a conversation” about freedom of speech and described the science around the pandemic as “BS.”
Thousands gathered across New Zealand yesterday to celebrate the signing of the country’s founding document and some called for an end to government policies that critics say erode the rights promised to the indigenous Maori population. As the sun rose on the dawn service at Waitangi where the Treaty of Waitangi was first signed between the British Crown and Maori chiefs in 1840, some community leaders called on the government to honor promises made 185 years ago. The call was repeated at peaceful rallies that drew several hundred people later in the day. “This government is attacking tangata whenua [indigenous people] on all
The administration of US President Donald Trump has appointed to serve as the top public diplomacy official a former speech writer for Trump with a history of doubts over US foreign policy toward Taiwan and inflammatory comments on women and minorities, at one point saying that "competent white men must be in charge." Darren Beattie has been named the acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, a senior US Department of State official said, a role that determines the tone of the US' public messaging in the world. Beattie requires US Senate confirmation to serve on a permanent basis. "Thanks to
UNDAUNTED: Panama would not renew an agreement to participate in Beijing’s Belt and Road project, its president said, proposing technical-level talks with the US US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Sunday threatened action against Panama without immediate changes to reduce Chinese influence on the canal, but the country’s leader insisted he was not afraid of a US invasion and offered talks. On his first trip overseas as the top US diplomat, Rubio took a guided tour of the canal, accompanied by its Panamanian administrator as a South Korean-affiliated oil tanker and Marshall Islands-flagged cargo ship passed through the vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. However, Rubio was said to have had a firmer message in private, telling Panama that US President Donald Trump
‘IMPOSSIBLE’: The authors of the study, which was published in an environment journal, said that the findings appeared grim, but that honesty is necessary for change Holding long-term global warming to 2°C — the fallback target of the Paris climate accord — is now “impossible,” according to a new analysis published by leading scientists. Led by renowned climatologist James Hansen, the paper appears in the journal Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development and concludes that Earth’s climate is more sensitive to rising greenhouse gas emissions than previously thought. Compounding the crisis, Hansen and colleagues argued, is a recent decline in sunlight-blocking aerosol pollution from the shipping industry, which had been mitigating some of the warming. An ambitious climate change scenario outlined by the UN’s climate