COVID hiked NYC mortality rates in 2020 more than 1918 Spanish flu

 COVID-related deaths had a greater impact on the city’s mortality rates in 2020 than the Spanish flu pandemic had on 1918 death rates, alarming new statistics released by the city’s Department of Health revealed.

The recently compiled stats show the COVID-19 pandemic pushed the city’s 2020 mortality rate to 241.3 deaths per 100,000 population — while the mortality rate in New York City in 1918 — at the height of the flu pandemic — was 228.9 per 100,000.

As mortality rates rose, life expectancy in the city dropped in 2020 to 78 years — 4.6 years less than it was in 2019, the report said.

Overdose deaths rose 42.2% during the same time period, as fentanyl continues to ravage the city.

Between 2011 and 2020, deaths due to accidental overdose increased by 227.8%, officials said.

“The pain and trauma experienced by our city is still very real to so many of us,” Health Commissioner Dr. Ashwin Vasan said in a Friday statement on the 2020 deaths.

“New Yorkers’ lifespans are falling, on top of years of relative flattening before COVID, and that cannot continue,” he asserted, calling a reversal of collapsing life expectancy rates in New York City “the great challenge of our time.”

DOH said the pandemic reversed years of progress made in helping New Yorkers live longer while exacerbating racial inequities. 

COVID-related deaths had a greater impact on the city’s mortality rates in 2020 than the Spanish flu pandemic had on 1918 death rates.

REUTERS

Life expectancies for black New Yorkers fell to a startling 73 years in 2020 when it was 78.5 just one year earlier.

For Latinos, the number shrank to 77.3, down six years from 2019.

For white New Yorkers, life expectancy fell to 80.1, three years less than it was in 2019.

The inequalities also widened along class lines.

Between 2011 and 2020 residents in wealthier neighborhoods — like Manhattan’s Chelsea, Upper East Side, and Greenwich Village — had a life expectancy a full decade more than people living in Brownsville, Brooklyn, the Rockaways, Central Harlem, and Morrisania in the Bronx.

When adjusted for age, the 2020 death rate in areas with very high poverty was 1.8 times the rate of neighborhoods with low poverty rates.

Life expectancies for black New Yorkers fell to a startling 73 years in 2020 when it was 78.5 just one year earlier.

Paul Martinka

The death rate in Brownsville was 1,282.9 deaths per 100,000 in 2020 — 3.5 times higher than it was in Greenwich Village the same year. 

The DOH stats said heart disease remained the top killer in 2020 for all New Yorkers, with COVID in second and cancer in third.

But when separated by gender, the top killer for men in 2020 was COVID.

COVID was also the leading cause of premature deaths for those under 65 in 2020.

In the wake of the stunning report, Vasan said the DOH is “putting every ounce of ourselves” into increasing life expectancy in the city.

https://nypost.com/2023/04/07/covid-hiked-nyc-mortality-rate-in-2020-more-than-1918-spanish-flu/

US national security documents with Ukraine, China secrets turn up in ‘nightmare’ leak

 Classified documents that seem to detail US national security secrets related to Ukraine, the Middle East and China have emerged online in what one intelligence official called a “nightmare” sequence of events. 

The latest leak, revealed by the New York Times on Friday, comes on the heels of the Pentagon announcing earlier in the day that it is investigating photos that supposedly expose highly classified plans for a spring military offensive by Ukrainian forces. 

The new batch of documents surfaced on the message board website 4chan, Twitter, Telegram and other websites Friday afternoon. 

The new trove of material also includes secret briefing slides on China, the Indo-Pacific military theater, the Middle East and terrorism, the New York Times reported. 

More material related to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine also appeared on social media sites Friday.

One new leaked document is a map that purports to show the status of fierce fighting currently underway in the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, according to the New York Times

The Post also discovered five new documents posted on the social media platform Telegram that reportedly shows Ukrainian air defense positions, combat equipment numbers and maps of the combat situations in Kharkiv and southern Ukraine.

The latest leak supposedly exposes highly classified plans for a spring military offensive by Ukrainian forces.

AFP via Getty Images

 A senior intelligence official told the New York Times that the leak is “a nightmare for the Five Eyes” — the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, which share intelligence.

More than 100 documents have escaped the hands of the intelligence community, according to the report, which quotes an anonymous analyst describing the documents released this week as potentially the “tip of the iceberg.”

The first batch of sensitive material was posted on Telegram Thursday by pro-Russian accounts. 

At least five photos of slides and maps were posted, with three of them labeled “Secret” and another listed as “Top Secret” according to a review by The Post.

AP

At least five photos of printed presentation slides and maps were posted, with three of the photos labeled “Secret” and one labeled “Top Secret,” according to a review by The Post.

A fourth image shows no visible classified markings.

US officials told The Post Friday the photos show real slides, but some of the information appeared to have been edited.

The Kremlin-aligned accounts appear to have altered estimated casualties in the plans, saying Russia had lost between “16k-17.5k” forces in the conflict so far while between “61k-71.5k” Ukrainian troops had been killed in action.

“We are aware of the reports of social media posts, and the Department is reviewing the matter,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said Friday, before the new leaked documents surfaced.

Friday evening, after the additional documents surfaced, the Pentagon spokeswoman said the matter had been referred to the Department of Justice.

“The Department of Defense is actively reviewing the matter, and has made a formal referral to the Department of Justice for investigation,” Singh said.

https://nypost.com/2023/04/07/classified-us-national-security-docs-turn-up-in-nightmare-leak/

House Oversight Committee subpoenas big banks for Biden financial records

 The House Oversight Committee has subpoenaed four major financial institutions in its probe of Hunter Biden’s business deals, the panel’s chairman confirmed Friday — while accusing Democrats of trying to scare potential witnesses off testifying

Bank of America, Cathay Bank, JPMorgan Chase, and HSBC have received subpoenas related to the panel’s investigation into the Biden family’s global influence-peddling scheme, Fox News first reported. 

Mervyn Yan, a former business associate of first son Hunter Biden, has also been subpoenaed for his financial records, according to the report. 

Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) accused the committee’s ranking Democrat, Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) of leaking the bank subpoena news in an attempt to “thwart cooperation” from others.

“[Oversight Democrats] have again disclosed Committee’s subpoenas in a cheap attempt to thwart cooperation from other witnesses,” Comer tweeted after the subpoena news broke.

“No one should be fooled by Ranking Member Raskin’s games. We have the bank records, and the facts are not good for the Biden family,” he added. 

Raskin sent a letter to Comer on Thursday claiming Democrats on the committee were being kept in the dark about information collected by Republicans on the panel. 

The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed 4 major financial institutions in its probe of Hunter Biden’s business deals.

REUTERS

“It has been nearly three months since you assumed responsibility of the Committee, and in that time, I have grown increasingly alarmed by your efforts to shield information from Committee Democrats, including information collected as part of your investigation into members of the President’s family,” Raskin wrote.

“I am also troubled by your apparent public misrepresentations about certain investigative steps Committee Republicans have taken in this matter — a probe you have deemed your ‘top priority’ in the 118th Congress,” he added. 

Biden family financial records obtained by Comer through the committee’s subpoena power last month revealed President Biden’s daughter-in-law Hallie to be a “new” family member seemingly involved in Hunter’s overseas business interests. 

The bank records show Hallie Biden, the widow of the president’s late son Beau Biden, received $35,000 in two transfers in 2017 from Biden family associate Rob Walker, who was wired $3 million on March 1, 2017, from State Energy HK Limited, a firm affiliated with CEFC China Energy.

Rep. James Comer accused Rep. Jamie Raskin of leaking the bank subpoena news in an attempt to “thwart cooperation” from others.

Rod Lamkey – CNP/Sipa USA

Comer noted at the time that the bank records don’t include the first names of all Biden family recipients, meaning there may be others involved in addition to Hunter, Hallie and first brother James Biden. 

The Kentuckian isn’t the only investigator with interest in the Biden family’s banking records.

In 2019, Delaware US Attorney David Weiss, who is handling the Justice Department’s federal criminal investigation of Hunter Biden, subpoenaed JPMorgan Chase for the now-53-year-old’s transactions involving the Bank of China, according to nonprofit website Marco Polo. 

The order sent by Weiss to JPMorgan Chase bank asked for the records of any international financial transactions over the previous five years involving Hunter and James Biden, as well as Hunter’s former business partners Devon Archer and Eric Schwerin, according to documents obtained by the watchdog.

The subpoena was issued by Weiss on May 15, 2019, when Joe Biden was a presidential candidate, and five weeks after Hunter allegedly left his infamous laptop in a Delaware repair shop.

https://nypost.com/2023/04/07/house-oversight-committee-subpoenas-banks-for-biden-financials/

Clearview AI Scraped Billions Of Facebook Photos For Facial Recognition Database

 Facial recognition firm Clearview has built a massive AI-powered database of billions of pictures collected from social media platforms without obtaining users' consent.

In late March, Clearview AI CEO Hoan Ton-That told BBC in an interview that the company had obtained 30 billion photos without users' knowledge over the years, scraped mainly from social media platforms like Facebook. He said US law enforcement agencies use the database to identify criminals. 

Ton-That disputed claims that the photos were unlawfully collected. He told Bussiness Insider in an emailed statement, "Clearview AI's database of publicly available images is lawfully collected, just like any other search engine like Google."

However, privacy advocates and social media companies have been highly critical of Clearview AI. 

"Clearview AI's actions invade people's privacy which is why we banned their founder from our services and sent them a legal demand to stop accessing any data, photos, or videos from our services," a Meta spokesperson said in an email to Insider. 

Ton-That told Insider the database is not publicly available and is only used by law enforcement. He said the software had been used more than a million times by police. 

"Clearview AI's database is used for after-the-crime investigations by law enforcement, and is not available to the general public. Every photo in the dataset is a potential clue that could save a life, provide justice to an innocent victim, prevent a wrongful identification, or exonerate an innocent person."

According to critics, using Clearview AI by the police subjects everyone to a "continuous police line-up."

"Whenever they have a photo of a suspect, they will compare it to your face," Matthew Guariglia from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told BBC. He said, "It's far too invasive."

The AI-driven database has raised privacy concerns in the US to the point where Sens. Jeff Merkley and Bernie Sanders attempted to block its use with a bill requiring Clearview and similar companies to obtain consent before scraping biometric data.

In 2020, the American Civil Liberties Union sued Clearview AI, calling it a 'nightmare scenario' for privacy. The ACLU managed to ban Clearview AI's products from being sold to private companies but not the police. 

Clearview AI is a massive problem for civil liberties. The easiest way to prevent Clearview AI from scraping photos from your social media accounts is to not be on social media. Alternatively, if you wish to maintain a social media presence, ensure that the images you post are not publicly accessible on the web. 

https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/clearview-ai-scraped-billions-facebook-photos-facial-recognition-database

New bipartisan bill aims to tie doc pay to inflation amid industry concerns

 A new bipartisan House bill seeks to tie physician payment rates to inflation as doctor groups have implored lawmakers to overhaul the federal pay process. 

The Strengthening Medicare for Patients and Providers Act (PDF), introduced Thursday, aims to address concerns amid the industry that Medicare payments have not kept pace with financial challenges such as inflation.

Doctor groups have sought in recent years to persuade Congress to make changes to the Physician Fee Schedule to make the payment rule more favorable.

“I am deeply concerned about the impact the outdated Medicare physician payment rate is having on health care access for my constituents,” said Rep. Raul Ruiz, M.D., D-California, one of the bill’s lead sponsors and a doctor himself. “That is why I am announcing legislation that will move us away from a system where every year seniors’ access to care is threatened due to uncertainty over potential cuts.”

Data compiled by the American Medical Association showed that after adjusting for inflation in practice costs, Medicare payments to physicians declined 26% from 2001 through 2023. 

If the legislation becomes law, it would transition to a single conversion factor equal to the percentage increase in the Medicare Economic Index, which is the impact of inflation on physician office costs and wage levels. 

Concerns over the level of doctor pay have been brewing since the onset of the pandemic. 

Lawmakers referenced the recent March 2023 report from the Medicare Trustees that said Congress needs to step in to bolster physician payments. Another recent report from the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission recommended linking payments to the Medicare Economic Index for the 2024 coverage year. 

Some physician groups have lauded the introduction of the bill. 

“Medical practices are in no way immune to record inflation, staffing shortages and across the board cost increases,” said Anders Gilberg, senior vice president of government affairs for the Medical Group Management Association, in a statement. “This legislation would allow Medicare to more accurately reflect the impact of the broader economy on practices’ financial stability.”

This is the latest effort by physician groups to lobby Congress to update the physician payment system. In 2022, several groups sought congressional intervention to forestall a 4.4% cut to doctor payments for this year. 

An end-of-year spending package decided to instead install a 2% cut to payments for 2023 and bump it to 3.25% in 2024. 

https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/providers/new-bipartisan-bill-aims-tie-doc-pay-inflation-amid-industry-concerns

Leverage cell self-destruction to treat brain tumors

 Glioblastoma is the most common type of brain tumor in adults. The disease is 100% fatal and there are no cures, making it the most aggressive type of cancer. Such a poor prognosis has motivated researchers and neurosurgeons to understand the biology of tumors with the goal of creating better therapies.

Dominique Higgins, MD, PhD, an assistant professor in the Department of Neurosurgery, has heeded the call. Higgins and a team of researchers at Columbia University have found that glioblastoma tumor cells are particularly sensitive to ferroptosis -- a type of cell death that can be triggered by removing certain amino acids from the diet.

"First, we found that when we take away certain amino acids in animal models that the glioblastoma cells are more likely to die by ferroptosis," said Dr. Higgins. "Secondly, we found that removing these amino acids makes our drugs a lot more effective at inducing ferroptosis in cancer cells."

Their findings were published in Nature Communications.

Ferroptosis is an iron-dependent type of "programmed cell death" or a biological process that causes cells to "self-destruct" on command. Our bodies don't need to kill cells unless absolutely necessary, so the process is tightly controlled by certain biological mechanisms. However, researchers are only now beginning to comprehend the process because ferroptosis was recognized only a decade ago.

"The recent discovery of ferroptosis adds to the excitement of it all," said Higgins, who is a member at the UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. "It is really a rapidly growing body of research, and we are finding that it's a very important for a lot of biological processes, and not just in cancers."

Every cell has certain safety features to keep it from going through ferroptosis in an unpredictable way. Two amino acids, cysteine and methionine, are critical for preventing the process from starting in cells. We typically pick up these amino acids through our diet.

Therefore, Higgins' research team decided to focus their efforts on these components.

By depriving animal models of cysteine and methionine through a customized diet, they found that the glioblastoma cells were significantly more likely to die via ferroptosis. They also found that the diet made their chemotherapy drugs more apt at initiating programmed cell death, meaning that very low doses were able to achieve a more potent effect than before. Ultimately, the animal models had improved survival after going on the diet.

"Now, we need to find a way to eliminate those components through dietary needs, while still maintaining energetic requirements that a patient may have, especially a cancer patient, who has different requirements than the average patient," said Higgins.

Having proven that the diet is effective in animal models, Higgins is working with colleagues at UNC Lineberger to develop a clinical trial for patients with glioblastoma. He plans to put patients on the diet prior to surgery to understand how it effects the body and the tumor. Once he removes the tumor from the brain, he will analyze it to see how well the tumors responded to the diet.

This type of diet has also shown to be very effective in sarcoma, lung cancers, and pancreatic cancers, so there is hope that this diet can be used to put some extra umph behind chemotherapy and/or surgery to remove tumors throughout the body.

Higgins is also working with Shawn Hingtgen, PhD, professor of pharmacoengineering and molecular pharmaceutics in the UNC Eschelman School of Pharmacy and associate professor in the Department of Neurosurgery, to study the brain's response to treatment in a more natural setting.

Hingtgen is the overall grant PI for Project Brainslice, a multi-institutional effort to test neurological therapies using tumor samples grown on slices of brain tissue. Higgins maintained that this is a better way to study treatment response than simply observing it in a plastic dish.

Project Brainslice is just one of the many different research tools that researchers have at their fingertips here at UNC's School of Medicine.

"We have a lot of different research tools unique to UNC, and it is one of the main reasons that I wanted to come to UNC," said Higgins, who joined UNC Neurosurgery in the fall of 2022. "Just in terms of the ability to study a clinical problem in an accurate animal model, it is one of the few places in the country that has like an established setup to do that."

Journal Reference:

1. Pavan S. Upadhyayula, Dominique M. Higgins, Angeliki Mela, Matei Banu, Athanassios Dovas, Fereshteh Zandkarimi, Purvi Patel, Aayushi Mahajan, Nelson Humala, Trang T. T. Nguyen, Kunal R. Chaudhary, Lillian Liao, Michael Argenziano, Tejaswi Sudhakar, Colin P. Sperring, Benjamin L. Shapiro, Eman R. Ahmed, Connor Kinslow, Ling F. Ye, Markus D. Siegelin, Simon Cheng, Rajesh Soni, Jeffrey N. Bruce, Brent R. Stockwell, Peter Canoll. Dietary restriction of cysteine and methionine sensitizes gliomas to ferroptosis and induces alterations in energetic metabolism. Nature Communications, 2023; 14 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-36630-w

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/04/230407094232.htm

Minnesota man gets 2 years in prison for laser strike on jet

 A federal judge in Wisconsin sentenced a Minnesota man on Friday to two years in prison for aiming a laser at a Delta Air Lines jet in 2021, an act that prosecutors said disrupted the pilots' efforts to land and putting passengers in “incredible danger.”

James Link, 43, of Rochester, Minnesota, pleaded guilty in January.

Laser strikes on planes and helicopters hit a record in the U.S. in 2021. Pilots reported 9,723 incidents, a 41% jump over the year before, according to Federal Aviation Administration figures. The FAA said it handed out $120,000 in fines in 2021. Violators like Link can also face up to five years in prison.

According to the U.S. attorney’s office in Madison, the pilots of the Delta flight from Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, to Minneapolis on Oct. 29, 2021, reported that their cockpit was lit up three times by a bright blue laser while they were at an altitude of 9,000 feet (2,700 meters) just west of River Falls, Wisconsin. At the time, air traffic control had just instructed them to change runways, which required them to plot a new course to the Minneapolis airport.

“The laser strikes caused a major distraction in the cockpit as they were not able to look at their iPads to brief the new approach,” prosecutors said in a statement.

The pilots were eventually able to chart the new path and land safely, the statement said.

“The first officer did not suffer any disruption to his vision, but the captain said that vision in his right eye was affected for several hours after this event,” prosecutors said.

Air traffic control called a Minnesota State Patrol aircraft, which flew to River Falls. The State Patrol aircraft was also struck by a blue laser. The pilots spotted the suspect and worked with River Falls police, who found Link with a blue laser on his person.

At sentencing, U.S. District Judge William Conley remarked on Link’s extensive criminal record, which included numerous domestic assaults. He also said the behavior was similar to a 2017 arrest when Link shined a flashlight in the eyes of the arresting officer.

“Judge Conley called aiming a laser at an aircraft incredibly dangerous and reckless, and in this case forced the Delta pilots to focus on their temporary blindness which put everyone on the aircraft in incredible danger,” the statement said.

https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/DELTA-AIR-LINES-INC-49285/news/Minnesota-man-gets-2-years-in-prison-for-laser-strike-on-jet-43453879/