U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Tuesday said the United States will investigate the recent purported leak of classified documents until the source of them was found.
Reuters has reviewed more than 50 of the documents, labeled "Secret" and "Top Secret," that first appeared on social media sites in March and supposedly reveal details of military capabilities of some U.S. allies and adversaries.
Reuters has not independently verified the documents' authenticity.
"We will continue to investigate and turn over every rock until we find the source of this and the extent of it," Austin said during a press conference at the State Department.
Austin, the first senior U.S. official to comment on the leak, said the Pentagon was aware that documents had been posted dated Feb. 28 and March 1, but was not sure if there were other documents that had been online before.
"These are things that we will find out as we continue to investigate," Austin added.
Investigators are working to determine what person or group might have had the ability and motivation to release the intelligence reports. The leaks could be the most damaging release of U.S. government information since the 2013 publication of thousands of documents on WikiLeaks.
Some of the most sensitive information is purportedly related to Ukraine's military capabilities and shortcomings and one document mentions the small number of Western special forces troops in the country.
The U.S. Department of Justice has opened a criminal investigation into the disclosure of the documents.
Some national security experts and U.S. officials say they suspect that the leaker could be American, given the breadth of topics covered by the documents. More theories could develop as the investigation progresses, they said.
Group of Seven (G7) advanced economies will consider how best to help developing countries introduce central bank digital currencies (CBDC) consistent with appropriate international standards, Japan's top currency diplomat Masato Kanda said on Tuesday.
The move will be among key themes of G7 discussions that Japan chairs this year, as part of efforts to address challenges the global community face from fast-moving digital technology, he said.
"We have to address risks from the development of CBDC by ensuring factors such as appropriate transparency and sound governance," Kanda, vice finance minister for international affairs, told a seminar in Washington.
"As a priority of this year, the G7 will consider how best to help developing countries introduce CBDC consistent with appropriate standards, including the G7 public policy principle for retail CBDC," he said.
Outside the G7, China has been leading the pack on issuing a digital currency. G7 central banks have set common standards toward issuing CBDCs as some proceed with experiments.
Kanda said the rapid innovation of digital technology provides various benefits but also fresh challenges such as cyber-security, the spread of misinformation, social and political divides, and the risk of destabilising financial markets.
The collapse of crypto exchange FTX last year "was a serious wake-up call" for policymakers to create regulation across borders, he said.
"For crypto assets, there are a bit of diverging views among countries. But consensus is definitely that we need more regulation, particularly after the FTX shock," Kanda said.
Another priority of this year's G7 talks will be to address debt vulnerabilities of some middle-income countries, said Kanda, who is among policymakers gathering in Washington for the spring International Monetary Fund (IMF) meetings this week.
Kanda said it might be "a bit difficult" to see concrete results for countries like Zambia, Ghana and Ethiopia, when asked what the accomplishments for debt talks could be this week.
"For Sri Lanka, hopefully we can have progress," with a plan to launch a creditor's committee on Thursday initiated by Japan, France and G20 chair India, Kanda said.
Documents obtained by America First Legal Foundation (AFLF) suggest that the Biden White House was involved in the FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s home in Florida by way of a “special access request,” calling into question statements by Biden administration officials that the White House did not interfere and did “not get involved.”
Specifically, the AFLF documents call into question the Biden administration’s claim that the Office of Inspector General (OIG) of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) made a “referral” to the FBI over the purportedly classified documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence without any involvement from the White House.
“New NARA records obtained through America First Legal’s investigation into the circumstances surrounding the Mar-a-Lago raid further confirmed that the FBI obtained access to these records through a ‘special access request’ from the Biden White House on behalf of the Department of Justice (DOJ),” AFLF said in a statement.
The FBI executed a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence on Aug. 8, 2022, to retrieve purportedly classified documents that Trump said he had declassified using presidential powers.
In the immediate aftermath of the raid, Biden administration aides were cited in media reports as saying they were “stunned by the development and learned of it from Twitter.”
Days later, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that “the president was not briefed, was not aware of it, no. No one at the White House was given a heads-up” about the raid.
Biden and other White House officials found out about the search of Trump’s property through public reports, she insisted.
“We learned about this just like the American people did,” she said.
But AFLF said in a letter to NARA Acting Archivist Debra Steidel Wall (pdf) that Biden administration assertions that the White House had no knowledge about the search “is surprising given the evidence showing that the FBI obtained access to these records through a special access request from the Biden White House on behalf of the Department of Justice.”
Trump has accused the White House of having prior knowledge of the raid and alleged that the DOJ and FBI had carried out a politically motivated attack against him.
The Epoch Times has reached out to the DOJ, NARA, and the White House for comment but did not receive a reply by publication.
NARA ‘Not Been Involved’?
In correspondence to Congress, NARA said that after it became aware of classified information in 15 boxes of presidential records provided by Trump in January 2022, its staff communicated with DOJ and then were not involved in the investigation.
The Archives said in a letter (pdf) to Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio) that in January 2022—months before the FBI raid—NARA had referred the issue of the Trump documents to the DOJ and since then it “has not been involved in the DOJ investigation or any searches that it has conducted.”
Yet the documents obtained by AFLF suggest otherwise.
“Notably, despite the Archives’ claim that it had ‘not been involved in the DOJ investigation,’ the documents show that the Archives’ official responsible for administering all access requests for Presidential records, John Laster, was involved in preparing the 15 boxes for FBI review as late as August 23, 2022,” AFLF wrote in its letter to Wall.
In the letter to NARA staff (pdf), Wall said that the DOJ had asked Biden to request that NARA provide the FBI with access to the 15 boxes and that on April 11, 2022, the White House Counsel’s Office formally transmitted that request.
“At issue was the request of the White House, on behalf of the Department of Justice (DOJ), that NARA provide the FBI with access to the 15 boxes, so that the FBI and others in the Intelligence Community could examine them,” Wall wrote.
no longer requires people to be vaccinated against Covid in order to enter its buildings.
In a companywide email sent to employees Tuesday, which was viewed by CNBC, Google VP of global security Chris Rackow said “vaccines will no longer be required as a condition of entry to any of our buildings.”
“Last month marks three years since the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic,” Rackow wrote in his memo. “We put in place emergency measures such as our Covid-19 vaccine policy to keep everyone safe, but now the world is in a very different place. Most people today have some level of immunity against COVID-19, case rates and hospitalizations have stabilized for many months now, and governments all around the world — including the U.S. — are ending emergency declarations, lifting restrictions and ending vaccination mandates.”
In December 2021, Google told employees that they must comply with vaccine policies or they’d face losing pay and then eventually losing their job, citing rules for government contractors. Then, in February, ahead of asking employees to come back to offices and the U.S. appeals court deciding that rule’s legal standing, the company relaxed policies around requiring vaccines for employment, as well as other rules around testing, social distancing and masks.
However, it still required employees to be vaccinated to enter company sites.
Several hundred Google employees at the time signed and circulated a manifesto opposing the company’s Covid vaccine mandate, arguing leadership’s decision will have an outsized influence in corporate America. It also noted outbreaks kept happening at Google offices among vaccinated employees while those who declined to declare their vaccination status were still banned from offices and other gatherings including off-sites, summits and team events.
In his email, Rackow encouraged employees to remain up to date with their Covid vaccines going forward, “just as we encourage everyone to get a flu shot every year,” adding that the vaccines have been “critical” to keeping Google employees safe in the workplace.
The mandate change comes after President Joe Biden signed a bill Monday to end the national emergency declared during the Covid pandemic that has been in place for more than three years. In January, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Covid remains a global health emergency, though weekly Covid deaths have dropped 70% since the peak of the first massive omicron wave in February 2022. However, deaths started increasing again in December as China, the world’s most populous country, faced its largest wave of infection yet.
The mandate change also comes as Google has struggled to get employees back into physical offices and as the company has begun downsizing its real estate amid broader cost-cutting efforts. A CNBC report last month showed Google plans to ask cloud employees and partners to share desks at the division’s five largest locations, which include New York and San Francisco.
Google declined to comment.
Read the full memo below:
“Last month marks three years since the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic. We put in place emergency measures such as our Covid-19 vaccine policy to keep everyone safe, but now the world is in a very different place. Most people today have some level of immunity against Covid-19, case rates and hospitalizations have stabilized for many months now, and governments all around the world — including the U.S. — are ending emergency declarations, lifting restrictions and ending vaccination mandates.
Based on this, we’re now lifting our global vaccine policy. This means that vaccines will no longer be required as a condition of entry to any of our buildings. Those with existing accommodations will receive an email with further guidance.
Covid-19 vaccines have been a critical part of our overall strategy to keep Googlers safe, especially in the workplace. They also have the benefit of reducing the risk of severe disease if you get infected and have helped to protect vulnerable members of our community. We encourage everyone to remain up to date with their Covid-19 vaccines going forward, just as we encourage everyone to get a flu shot every year.
We’ll continue to follow all local regulations and will maintain our cleaning and ventilation standards in the office, and we ask that you do your part by monitoring your health and staying home if you feel sick.
We’ve come through an extraordinary time, which called on us to adapt and come together in ways we couldn’t have imagined. I am proud and grateful for the resilience you’ve all shown as we navigated so much uncertainty—for our company and the world—over the past few years.
Thank you again for everything you do to keep your colleagues and communities safe.
Horizon’s Tepezza was approved in all thyroid eye disease patients in 2020, but payers had other ideas, and the IGF-1R antibody is currently only reimbursed in those with severe disease. New data released yesterday could change that, witha postmarketing trialshowing that Tepezza reduced proptosis – the characteristic eye bulging seen in TED – in patients with mild disease. The point is important: Horizon estimates that around 20,000 US patients are diagnosed with acute TED each year, whereas around 70,000 have the chronic form. Questions remain, principally whether these data actually will prompt payers to broaden coverage, particularly since a six-month course of Tepezza typically costs over $300,000, SVB analysts write. The 25% placebo responder rate seen in the intent-to-treat analysis is also an eyebrow-raiser. These are all future considerations for Amgen, which agreed to buy Horizon late last year for $28bn – assuming FTC clearance is granted. Evercore ISI analysts point out that Tepezza sales need to hit $4bn+ for Amgen to break even on the deal, ramping up from the current $2bn run rate. And competition is looming from Viridian, which is due to report phase 2 data in chronic TED later this quarter.
Phase 4 trial (NCT04583735) data
Endpoint
Population
Tepezza
Placebo
p-value
Reduction in proptosis (primary endpoint)
Intent-to-treat
2.41mm
0.92mm
0.0004
Per protocol
2.44mm
0.69mm
0.0006
Proptosis response rate
Intent-to-treat
62%
25%
0.0134
Per protocol
63%
7%
0.0008
Proptosis response defined as reduction of at least 2mm. All data at 24wks. Source: company release.
After two decades of losses and "hundreds of millions of dollars" invested in Chicago,Walmart is shuttering four unprofitable stores in the metropolitan area, reducing its store footprint by half in the crime-ridden city.
"The simplest explanation is that collectively our Chicago stores have not been profitable since we opened the first one nearly 17 years ago – these stores lose tens of millions of dollars a year, and their annual losses nearly doubled in just the last five years," Walmart wrote in a press release.
Indeed, Walmart has soured on Chicago - the Democratic stronghold that went from a once beautiful metro area into an absolute hellhole. According to Walmart, the decision came after considerable investment in the town.
"Over the years, we have tried many different strategies to improve the business performance of these locations, including building smaller stores, localizing product assortment and offering services beyond traditional retail. We have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the city, including $70 million in the last couple years to upgrade our stores and build two new Walmart Health facilities and a Walmart Academy training center."
That said, the company hasn't lost all faith in the city but is willing to take a loss with the four remaining stores:
"The remaining four Chicago stores continue to face the same business difficulties, but we think this decision gives us the best chance to help keep them open and serving the community."
It sure wouldn't be good PR if Walmart left the metro area entirely.
Earlier this year, former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) lost her bid for re-election because of her inability to address the out-of-control crime wave.
Although Walmart didn't explicitly state why its stores were unprofitable, one can only assume that the city's 'soft-on-crime' policies were a contributing factor, as professional shoplifting rings count Chicago as a top-10 city to hit.
In a separate report, Whole Foods in San Francisco closed its flagship store on Tuesday morning because of soaring thefts.
Walmart and other retailers closing stores not just in Chicago but other big cities is a warning sign for Democratic mayors who can't get crime under control will face an exodus of businesses.
Hours before the announcement, Democrats picked Chicago to host the 2024 Democratic National Convention.
There appears to be "some" confusion at the Fed, or perhaps just a rising tide of politically-motivated dissent.
One day after NY Fed president John Williams, the man who sparked a revolt at the most important regional Federal Reserve bank for being too clueless, said that he doesn't think rate hikes are behind the "issues" at failed banks, and even more idiotically, just hours after saying this morning that he doesn't think bank failures will be a "big negative" for the US economy, another Fed president - this time the Fed's extremely political Chicago Fed president - who previously served as Obama's chief economist (and whose ascent to the top of the Chicago Fed was marred in yet another Fed scandal), refuted everything Williams said earlier when he warned that the Fed should exercise “prudence and patience” in raising interest rates further as central bankers assess just how much last month’s banking turmoil will contribute to tighter lending conditions.
"Given how uncertainty abounds about where these financial headwinds are going, I think we need to be cautious," Goolsbee said Tuesday in prepared remarks for an Economic Club of Chicago event. “We should gather further data and be careful about raising rates too aggressively until we see how much work the headwinds are doing for us in getting down inflation.”
Translation: it's time to pause the Fed's rate hikes (which effectively would mean the end of the tightening cycle) and assess the damage the Fed has already unleashed.
Goolsbee, the Fed’s newest policymaker whose highly politicized appointment as head of the Chicago Fed saw big internal dissent as well as two opposing votes, and whose job may have been a political favor catalyzed by intervention from his headhunting wife, is even more remarkably a voter on monetary policy this year and is now the first official to signal that he may support holding rates where they are at the Fed’s May 2-3 meeting — though he stopped short of explicitly endorsing a pause.
Unlike Goolsbee, who is viewed as the Biden admin's most dedicated plant at the Fed now that Lael Brainard has been shifted to the Treasury, most Fed officials have emphasized that even amid the uncertainties created by the bank crisis, the Fed has more work to do to bring inflation down to its 2% target (to avoid confusion, these are the same clueless hacks and career academics who two years ago said inflation was transitory).
Echoing analyses by Goldman and others, the Chicago Fed chief said that inflation and labor market data came in “surprisingly strong” at the end of 2022 and beginning of this year, but the knock-on effects of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse in March and the resulting financial-market stress may help the Fed in its campaign to cool the economy.
While Goolsbee was careful to say that the Fed should still prioritize its mission to bring down elevated price pressures, he said that signs are emerging that banks are pulling back on lending, helping the Fed. Almost as if the Fed precipitated the bank failure to enable it to achieve its economic slowdown mission faster.
“We’ve been tightening financial conditions to bring inflation down, so if the response to recent banking problems leads to financial tightening, monetary policy has to do less,” he said.
According to Goolsbee, that contraction could equal somewhere between 25 to 75 basis points of tightening, which not coincidentally is exactly what Goldman calculates last week; Goldman of course is the same bank that has also been pushing for a rate hike pause to "assess" the economic damage before resuming hikes again later in the year.
Goolsbee’s emphasis on watching credit conditions differ from that of his even dumber colleagues who insist that the Fed needs to do more to tame prices (the same prices which are soaring thanks to the Fed's inaction in 2021), recession and credit crunch be damned.
Goolsbee's most prominent foil is another Wall Street muppet, formern Goldman staffer and upward failing Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari, who said last month that though it’ll take a while to see the full effects of the banking fallout, the Fed still has more work to do to lower inflation, and may have to hike rates all the way until 6%.
New York Fed President John Williams, a permanent voter on the Federal Open Market Committee, said Tuesday at a separate event that one more rate increase is a “reasonable starting place” for officials.
Goolsbee also nodded to the standoff in Congress about raising the country’s debt limit. “Moments of financial stress are a particularly bad time to take actions that could ignite a financial crisis on their own like, say, defaulting on U.S. Treasuries in a fight over the debt limit,” Goolsbee said.
