Former White House physician Ronny Jackson has accused the Biden administration of ‘covering up’ Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, asserting that his “ability to think and reason is GONE!”
Following a physical exam last week, which the White House says found that Biden “remains a healthy, vigorous, 80-year-old male,” and is “fit for duty,” Jackson stated that Americans “learned nothing” from the announcement.
“Is he on ANY drugs to treat his mental decline? This exam was a JOKE. COVER UP!!” Jackson tweeted, noting that no cognitive test was undertaken.
“Trump had one, why not him? Biden’s ability to think and reason is GONE! He SHOULD NOT be President!!” Jackson, now a Republican Representative added.
In comments to Fox News, Jackson further stated “the majority of Americans can see that Biden’s mental health is in total decline,” adding that this “further confirms that this administration is still adamant about concealing the truth.”
“Everyone can see something is wrong – the cover-up needs to end,” Jackson urged.
Last week when Biden struggled to read a teleprompter and again appeared lost, Jackson called for him to be subjected to an immediate cognitive examination.
Prominent Democrats also continue to raise concerns about Biden’s age in advance of his decision on whether or not to run again for president in 2024, but are afraid to say so publicly, according to a report by Politico.
One officer was injured, and multiple spectators were set ablaze during an out-of-control street race in Austin, Texas.
Multiple 911 calls were received Saturday night at around 9 p.m. about cars and a crowd causing mayhem by blocking an intersection, setting off fireworks, and street racing in the downtown area, according to the Austin Police Department.
Several police vehicles were damaged after the unruly crowd began throwing fireworks, bottles, rocks, and pointing lasers at responding officers.
“One officer sustained a non-life-threatening injury, was treated at a local hospital, and was released,” according to the department.
Police arrested two people for evading arrest and are still investigating the incident.
A police cruiser is struck by a firework after a crowd at the takeover was able to repel the responding emergency vehicle back.Twitter/@aaroncrews
“APD is committed to stopping this conduct. Lawbreaking in this manner will result in enforcement and arrest. Our community’s safety is the #1 priority for APD,” the department wrote on Twitter.
In a video posted on social media of the lawless street race, also referred to as a takeover, a pickup truck was seen driving through fire while doing donuts at an intersection.
As the truck drove over the flames on the ground, a small explosion led to fire spewing toward a crowd of people who were briefly engulfed by the flames.
Multiple people in the video were seen on fire as they stripped off their clothes and ran for safety, as others attempted to pat them down while still cheering and laughing.
Their conditions are unknown.
In another video posted on Twitter, a massive crowd began pushing back a police cruiser by slamming on the vehicle’s hood, disregarding the emergency vehicle’s blaring lights and sirens.
The cop car reversed away from the disorderly crowd, and an unknown perpetrator through a firework that exploded on the vehicle’s hood.
The chaos didn’t end until nearly two in the morning after the crowd began to disperse.
Local Council Member Alison Alter voiced her outrage over the incident, saying she was put on hold by 911 for 28 minutes after she attempted to call to report the takeover, she told Austin American-Statesman.
Lack of staffing for 911 operators has been an issue in Austin, with the average hold time for calls being two and a half minutes, according to an October report by Fox News.
The rowdy crowd could be heard cheering, even after others were stripping down because their clothes were on fire.Instagram/oscarcruz.ss
The Austin Police Association took to social media, blaming lawmakers in Austin who “failed to make the right decisions & continue to defund, destroy, & demoralize public safety.”
Other Texas lawmakers who saw the chaos on social media began calling for a solution to stop these dangerous takeovers.
“God bless our brave men and women in blue! Especially those working in cities where they’re undervalued, underpaid and under attack, like in Austin,” State Rep. Jeff Leach wrote on Twitter.
An individual is seen on fire after flames shot out onto him from a pickup truck doing donuts over a fire in the middle of an intersection.Instagram/oscarcruz.ss
“We should come together as a community to figure out how to keep this from happening again, how to keep our community safe, and how to enable our law enforcement to respond in a quick and effective manner,” Rep. Vikki Goodwin wrote on Twitter about the Takeover.
Takeovers usually involve hundreds of people and multiple cars gathering in an unauthorized area like an intersection or interstate and blocking traffic while performing dangerous and chaotic stunts and activities.
President Biden has arrived in Ukraine on an unannounced visit, just ahead of the anniversary of the Russian invasion there.
The president touched down in Kyiv on the top secret visit Monday, meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky in a show of solidarity as the Ukrainian capital has been threatened by missile attacks from Russian forces.
Biden’s visit, his first since the war broke out, was kept secret.
“I am in Kyiv today to meet with President [Zelensky] and reaffirm our unwavering and unflagging commitment to Ukraine’s democracy, sovereignty, and territorial integrity,” Bidensaid in a statement.
“When Putin launched his invasion nearly one year ago, he thought Ukraine was weak and the West was divided. He thought he could outlast us. But he was dead wrong.”
New research has cast a harsh spotlight on digital discrimination stemming from the Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) use of algorithms and artificial intelligence — a key factor in disproportionate auditing of poor families and taxpayers of color. Earlier this week, the SenatequestionedPresident Biden’s nominee for IRS commissioner,Danny Werfel,about how an IRS algorithm targeted Black taxpayers for audit up to 4.7 times as often as other races. Amid controversy over billions of dollars in new IRS enforcement funding, Congress should recognize that letting computers decide whom to audit could destroy more lives than an army of newly hired IRS agents ever could.
Black taxpayers are between three and five times more likely to be audited than taxpayers of other races — a disparity that is largely driven by an IRS algorithm, according to a study published last month by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. The study, based on an analysis of IRS data, highlights an important development the agency would like to keep hidden: its escalating use of computer algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI) to drive its enforcement agenda without transparency or meaningful human supervision.
When confronted with this study at his confirmation hearing, Werfel committed to providing the Senate with a report on the offending algorithm within 60 days. That cannot be the end of congressional oversight into the IRS AI program. To prevent discrimination, Congress should mandate that the IRS set up effective and transparent safeguards on its use of AI to prevent biased algorithms from disproportionately targeting certain taxpayers.
Last year, the IRS received $45.6 billion in new enforcement funding on top of its annual budget. This has generated considerable uproar over how the agency will spend this windfall — most of which has focused on whether the IRS would use it to hire thousands of new revenue agents to harass individual taxpayers. That criticism misses the point: Like many businesses and governments, the IRS is more likely to spend its money on machine learning and data analytics than on thousands of human IRS agents.
Artificial intelligence helps auditors analyze transactions and spot patterns that can indicate potential fraud, using technology to help maximize revenue. But the rise of AI-driven decisionmaking by the IRS creates far greater perils than staffing up with human capital. Algorithms are often “black boxes,” and the reasons for the decisions they make can be difficult or impossible to determine. What’s more, the IRS shrouds its algorithms in the cloak of bureaucratic secrecy. Taxpayers may never know if their fates were determined by a computer with no effective human safeguards.
A simple example illustrates the point. In 2012, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) studied an IRS algorithm to determine whether taxpayers were entitled to relief for certain penalties. TIGTA’s report found that 89 percent of the time, a taxpayer should have had penalties removed, the IRS algorithm got it wrong and kept the penalties in place. This meant taxpayers were assessed severe penalties that the IRS never should have pursued. Even more disturbing, not a single one of these incorrect determinations was corrected by a human IRS employee — a 100 percent failure rate for human supervision of the algorithm’s decisions. But for the TIGTA investigation, nobody – least of all the affected taxpayers – would ever have known about the damage caused by the rogue IRS algorithm.
President Biden and other officials have promised that the extra IRS funding will not be used to audit taxpayers making under $400,000 a year. But what if an IRS algorithm decides that poorer taxpayers are a better target? For example, an algorithm reviewing IRS collection data may determine that low-income taxpayers are less likely to fight – and more likely to pay – tax assessments than wealthy taxpayers. It may then conclude that the IRS should audit more low-income taxpayers and fewer wealthy ones, to maximize the success rate.
The perverse result would be increased IRS audits of poor American families, which are already audited at five times the rate of all other taxpayers, according to an analysis of 2021 internal IRS reports. But because the algorithm is a “black box,” nobody – perhaps not even the IRS itself – would ever know that low-income families were being targeted regardless of the $400,000 limitation, until it is too late.
It is not enough to rely on assurances that the IRS is monitoring its AI program. Congress must exercise its oversight to ensure that the IRS does not rely on biased algorithms in deciding which taxpayers to target. Further, Congress must force the IRS to be transparent about how it uses AI in making enforcement decisions so that taxpayers can defend themselves from being harmed by a rogue IRS algorithm. Otherwise, thousands of new human IRS agents may turn out to be the least of our worries.
Robert J. Kovacev is a tax lawyer at Miller & Chevalier Chartered in Washington, D.C., and a former senior litigator at the U.S. Department of Justice, Tax Division.
The European Commission’s decision to sue Poland over its constitutional court rulings is making the European Court of Justice a de facto Supreme Court of Europe...
The European Commission has decided to challenge the Polish constitutional court over not only its assertion of the supremacy of the Polish constitution over European law, but also to question the appointment of three justices of the court as well as the election of the chief justice herself. This move escalates the rule of law dispute to a new level.
The European Commission is effectively arguing that Poland’s constitutional court has ceased to be an independent entity and is now a creature of the government.
The commission is taking an unprecedented step. It will be the first time the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has been asked to assess the functioning of a member state’s constitutional court and its verdicts. If the European court rules in favor of the commission, its ruling will have consequences that go way beyond the dispute over the observance of the principle of the rule of law in Poland.
It will mean that the ECJ has asserted its right to review the work of member states’ constitutional courts and to challenge their verdicts. In this way, the ECJ in Luxembourg would effectively become a Supreme Court of Europe able to interpret and adjudicate the constitutional laws of the member states.
The European Commission’s decision cannot but affect the political situation in Poland. Last Friday, President Andrzej Duda submitted the legislation passed by the Polish parliament on disciplinary procedures for judges for review by the constitutional court. The law was passed in order to change the very procedure objected to by the European Union so that the Commission would unblock Poland’s share of the EU Recovery Fund.
The Polish president’s move looks like a further delay to Poland’s access to its EU recovery fund allocation is inevitable, but the European Commission’s decision to question the credentials of the constitutional court complicates matters still further.
This is because it is more than likely that the ECJ will suspend the workings of the court, just as it did with regard to the Disciplinary Chamber of the Supreme Court. Or it may suspend the four justices whose appointments have been challenged, therefore making it impossible for the court to sit in full session until the ECJ has made a final ruling, a process that could take years.
The latest developments have not brought Poland any closer to unlocking EU funds and threaten a political conflict between Warsaw and Brussels that could lead to a chain reaction. The constitutional court could simply refuse to suspend its working and the ruling majority could opt for a full-scale confrontation with the European Commission, with the ruling conservatives going to the electorate, blaming Brussels, and accusing it of attempting to deprive Poland of its sovereignty.
Engineers atNational Gridhave enlisted the help of high-tech robots to lead the way with routine operation and maintenance activity at its interconnector sites.
The company has recently finished a trial using Boston Dynamics' Spot® robot to help with routine asset maintenance and fault detection across its UK interconnector converter sites including North Sea Link in Blyth.
The Spot robot is the size of a Labrador and walks and moves like man's best friend.\It uses the latest technology to search out issues or potential issues with equipment by using state of the art visual imaging, thermal imaging and acoustic imaging to find abnormalities as well as LiDAR for 3D scanning and mapping.
The machines are able to access areas human engineers can't while the asset is operational - potentially reducing outage times and improving the asset availability and safety for engineers.
Data is collected in the same way each time, looking out for hot spots and incipient faults that need extra attention.
The company's North Sea Link interconnector was among those taking part in the trial with robots spending three days at its converter site in Blyth, Northumberland.
During the trial, the robots were tested on how they perform at several converter station environments such as DC, AC and Valve Halls as well as outdoor compounds.
The results of the pilot are being reviewed to determine if this is something the company wants to invest in the future.
National Grid Interconnectors Operations Director Jon Davies said: "We are always looking at innovative ways to improve site safety and the availability of our assets. This trial has given us the chance to see whether using robots like this could be part of our maintenance programme in the future.
Interconnectors play a vital role in the UK's energy system and last month National Grid Interconnectors had their busiest January on record with 2.6 TWh of power transported across the five cables between the UK and our partner countries."
National Grid enlisted experienced robotics company Roboverse Reply to assist with the trials and if successful will look to roll the robots across its sites next year
Marek Matuszewski, Manager Roboverse Reply said: "National Grid's use of mobile robots, such as Spot, has the potential to be highly effective. These robots are able to capture data more accurately and regularly than humans, thanks to sensors with thermal vision or acoustic cameras that allow for early detection of issues. The Roboverse Reply team is pleased to have had the opportunity to collaborate with National Grid in conducting the first Proof of Value with the use of Boston Dynamics' Spot robot."
Astellas Pharma Inc. (TSE: 4503, President and CEO: Kenji Yasukawa, Ph.D., "Astellas") today announced the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) notified the company that it is extending the original priority review Prescription Drug User Fee Act (PDUFA) goal date for fezolinetant, an investigational agent for the treatment of moderate to severe vasomotor symptoms (VMS) due to menopause. Astellas was notified on February 17, 2023, that the FDA is extending the PDUFA goal date by three months, to May 22, 2023, to allow more time to complete their review.
