Chinese food blogger fined for cooking and eating great white shark ...

A Chinese food blogger has been fined £15,000 ($18,500) after posting a video of her illegally buying, preparing and eating a six-foot long great white shark.

The blogger, who goes by the name Tizi, posted the video on Chinese social media site Douyin last year. In it she is seen posing next to the dead shark outside a shop before later slicing it in half and cooking it over an open fire and then sautéing it in a wok.

Police began investigating the influencer, who has almost eight million followers on her channel, in August last year after the viral clip “sparked outrage among many Chinese viewers”, CBS News reported.

According to an official statement from authorities in Nanchong, a city in Sichuan province, the blogger, who is identified only by the name Jin, was found to have violated China’s wild animal protection law after the shark was identified as a great white from tissue samples. Two other individuals involved in catching and selling the animal were also arrested.

Insider previously reported that Tizi has posted videos of other extreme-eating challenges – known as mukbang videos – including eating crocodiles and ostriches.

According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), great white sharks are considered a vulnerable species, with a “high risk” of extinction in the wild.

They are also legally protected in China, said Insider, and illegal possession of one can lead to a prison term of between five and ten years.

China imposed “a total ban on the buying, selling, and consumption of wild animals”, added the Independent, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic “to prevent activities scientists say may have caused the deadly coronavirus.

“This has also led to a crackdown on viral binge-eating videos,” added the news site.

Hitler's toilet seat up for auction | The Week UK

Adolf Hitler’s toilet seat is expected to fetch around £15,000 at an upcoming auction. A US soldier grabbed the curious keepsake from the Nazi leader’s private bathroom in his holiday home in the Bavarian Alps. And now his family has decided to cash in on the toilet seat at an auction in Maryland. The auction company said: “One can scarcely imagine the plotting the tyrant undertook while contemplating the world from atop this perch.”

Duck surfs to Instagram fame

A surfing duck has become an Instagram sensation after realising that it can catch some waves and make its way into the beach without having to paddle. The duck, who is eight months old, has become a popular sight in Rainbow Bay on the Gold Coast, Australia and has his own Instagram account, @rainbowbayduck.

Fish gets lodged in man’s throat

A doctor has removed an 18cm fish from a man’s throat following a fishing accident in Colombia. When the man was dealing with a fish he had caught, a second fish bit his line. He placed the first fish in his mouth while he reeled in the second fish. Unfortunately, it lodged itself in his throat. When he arrived at hospital, doctors removed the 18cm fish from the man’s oesophagus.

The bodies of Russian soldiers are piling up in Ukraine, as Kremlin ...

Lviv, Ukraine (CNN) — The first warm, sunny days of spring in the southern Mykolaiv region are ushering in a grim new reality: the smell of the dead.

As the frost melts and ground thaws, the bodies of Russian soldiers strewn across the landscape are becoming a problem.

In his nightly video address on Saturday, Vitaly Kim, the region’s governor, called on local residents to help collect the corpses and put them in bags, as temperatures rise to above freezing. “We’re not beasts, are we?” he implored residents, who have already lost so many of their own in this war.

Mykolaiv was among the first regional capitals to be attacked after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine on February 24. After pushing into the urban center, Russian troops have been forced out by Ukraine’s military, leaving a trail of blackened combat vehicles and tanks in their wake. But the battle for the city, a cornerstone in Russia’s westward quest along the Black Sea coast to Odesa, is still raging and it’s unclear how long Ukrainian forces will be able to fend off the assault.

A burned-out Russian combat vehicle, the letter Z emblazoned on its door, east of Mykolaiv city on March 10. Scott Peterson/Getty Images

Referring to them as “orcs”— the evil, monstrous army in J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” — Kim said that the Russians had retreated and left their colleagues’ charred bodies behind on the battlefield. He sent CNN pictures of the abandoned corpses, adding: “There are hundreds of them, all over the region.”

The governor has called for the bodies to be placed into refrigerators and sent back to Russia for identification through DNA testing. But, a month into the war, it is still unclear how or if the remains of soldiers are being repatriated to Russia, where reports about the death toll have largely been silenced. The country has cracked down on any information about the realities of the bloody war, restricting access to Western media reports, as well as the social networks Twitter and Facebook, in Russian territory.

“Do you know they have brought a cremation chamber with them? They’re not going to show the bodies to their families. They’re not going to tell the mothers that their children died here.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky

Exactly how many Russian troops have been killed in Ukraine remains a mystery. The official line from Russia’s defense ministry was 498 military personnel until Monday, when pro-Putin Russian tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda published a report updating the toll to 9,861. The figure, which was attributed to the ministry and later retracted by the paper — which claimed it was hacked — has not been confirmed by the Kremlin, whose spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Tuesday told CNN: “As far as the numbers are concerned, we agreed from the very beginning that we do not divulge the information.”

That number tallies with information shared with CNN by US and NATO officials, who gave a recent estimate that Russian casualties range from between 3,000 and 10,000. Ukrainian officials have claimed the toll is even higher, at more than 15,000. CNN has been unable to verify the overall number of Russian deaths.

One of the most searing, early images of the war in Ukraine was of a dead Russian soldier, his face and body obscured by a dusting of newly fallen snow. The picture, shot by New York Times photojournalist Tyler Hicks, captured the anonymity of the more than 150,000 Russians sent to fight their neighbors — and the anxiety of Russian families desperate to find out any information about their fate.

Snow covers the body of a dead Russian soldier near a highway outside Kharkiv, Ukraine, a day after the invasion began. Tyler Hicks/The New York Times/Redux

The Ukrainian government has claimed that the Russian army sent mobile crematoriums to burn their own dead. “The Russian people dying here, nobody is counting them, people dying in this war. Do you know they have brought a cremation chamber with them? They’re not going to show the bodies to their families. They’re not going to tell the mothers that their children died here,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told reporters in a briefing on March 3.

On the same day, Ukrzaliznytsia, the state-owned Ukrainian Railways, said in a statement on its website that it had provided Ukraine’s armed forces with 20 refrigerated cars for the removal of dead Russian soldiers from several areas, including Odesa. Just 72 hours later, Ukrzaliznytsia’s chairman posted a message on his personal Telegram channel saying that Russia never came to load them. “For the sake of ‘victorious’ propaganda, they are ready to deprive mothers of even the opportunity to bury the bodies,” Oleksandr Kamyshin wrote.

Ukraine’s government said it is still waiting to receive a request from Russian authorities for the repatriation of the bodies of those killed. The Ukrainian deputy prime minister said the issue of collecting and identifying the bodies had been discussed in a meeting between Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal and the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Peter Maurer, on Thursday. But the ICRC has not confirmed whether it is assisting Ukraine in the return of Russian remains to their home country, which is provided for under international law.

Hints at the scale of Russia’s troop losses have begun to emerge in videos and reports. On March 18, the Belarus service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a US-funded media organization, published images of Russian ambulance convoys appearing to arrive at field hospitals in southern Belarus, near Ukraine’s border, and reported that morgues in the area were overflowing. A March 21 report by English-language Ukrainian media outlet The Kyiv Independent followed a Ukrainian emergency response unit digging up Russian soldiers buried in unmarked communal graves in Rusaniv, a village east of the capital — left in a heap without identification documents or IDs.

The deserted corpse of a Russian soldier lying on a road in Sytniaky, Ukraine, on March 5. Anastasia Vlasova/Getty Images

Russian state media reports have stuck to the 498 figure and few funerals have been documented in the country, where censorship of the war has been taken to an extreme with a new law criminalizing reporting contradicting the Kremlin. In the absence of information about Russia’s dead, Ukrainians have been trying to fill in the gaps.

A website and Telegram channel established by the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs, aimed at Russian families, publishes a steady stream of photos of dead soldiers and captured young men, sometimes alongside their identity cards. The name of the site, 200rf.com, is a grim nod to Gruz-200, or Cargo-200, a military code word that came into use in the 1980s during the war in Afghanistan, used by the Soviets for the bodies of soldiers placed in zinc-lined coffins for transport.

Viktor Andrusiv, an adviser to Ukraine’s internal affairs minister and the creator and coordinator of the channel, also known as “Look for Your Own,” said he launched the initiative to help Russian families track down information about their soldiers. “We are not making war against the Russian people. And I don’t think they should suffer because of their regime, which lies to them and says everything is good, no one is dying,” he told CNN. “It’s a way for us to bring them some truth.”

“The problem with Russian bodies is really huge. It’s thousands of them. Before the war, the weather was cold, it was okay but now we have problems … I actually don’t know what we will do in the next weeks.” Viktor Andrusiv, founder of 200rf.com

But identifying dead Russian soldiers has been a difficult task. Andrusiv said only 30 have been found on the Telegram channel by their relatives, who scan through gruesome images of those killed in action for clues about whether their loved ones are alive or dead. Ukrainian forces send Andrusov images of deserted bodies, but they’re often unrecognizable and have no documents on them.

“It’s very difficult to identify the dead because normally they don’t have documents with them, normally the commanders take their documents and put them in some boxes. Normally they die in this fire, in shelling. And you cannot identify the metal ‘dog tags,’ where their number is written, it gives us no information about the person,” Andrusiv said.

And as March turns to April, and temperatures climb to around 60 degrees Fahrenheit, the problem is getting worse.

“The problem with Russian bodies is really huge. It’s thousands of them. Before the war, the weather was cold, it was okay but now we have problems because Russians don’t want to take the bodies,” Andrusiv said. “I actually don’t know what we will do in the next weeks with their bodies.”

Russia's mobilization is mired in problems, with anger on the front ...

CNN —

Russia’s first mobilization since World War II may be complete, but the deployment of thousands of soldiers to the battlefields of Ukraine is generating dissent and protest on the front lines – and back home.

With the Russian government touting that at least 50,000 of the recently drafted are now in Ukraine, a long list of complaints is emerging: Lack of leadership from mid-ranking officers, tactics that lead to heavy casualties, non-existent training, promised payments not received.

There are also logistical difficulties, as reported by soldiers, their families and Russian military bloggers: Insufficient uniforms, poor food, a lack of medical supplies.

And there are discipline issues, with some families complaining their men face charges of desertion and are being held in basements in occupied Ukrainian territory.

The Astra Telegram channel – a project of independent Russian journalists – reported that 300 mobilized Russians are being held in a basement in Zaitsevo in the Luhansk region for refusing to return to the front line, quoting their relatives.

One woman said her husband had told her: “New people are constantly brought in. They are in a large basement in the House of Culture in Zaitsevo. They feed them once a day: one dry ration to share between 5-6 people. They constantly threaten them.”

Astra reported it had the names of 42 people of those detained. It also cited relatives in identifying seven basements or detention facilities in Luhansk and Donetsk for soldiers.

It quoted the wife of one detained soldier as saying: “My husband and 80 other people are sitting in the basement; they were stripped naked in order to confiscate their phones, but one person, fortunately, hid the phone.”

Astra said the men were arrested after retreating from the town of Lyman and then refusing to return to the line of fire.

CNN is unable to verify the existence or location of detention centers for men refusing to fight.

Military training of Russians called up for military service under the country's partial mobilization is seen in Rostov, Russia on October 21, 2022. Arkady Budnitsky/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

There are widespread complaints about incompetent or non-existent leadership.

Russian military bloggers – some of whom have hundreds of thousands of followers – have been bitterly critical of senior officers.

“Do we have generals capable of replacing those who have been sacked? Does anyone know one? I don’t,” asked Vladen Tatarskiy, who has more than half-a-million subscribers. “One idiot is rotated for another. One fails, another fails, the third seems more harmless.”

In a bold note of dissent, soldiers of the 155th Brigade of the Russian Pacific Fleet Marines wrote to their regional governor saying they’d been thrown into an “incomprehensible battle” in the Donetsk region.

“As a result of the ‘carefully’ planned offensive by the ‘great commanders’, we lost about 300 men, dead and wounded, with some MIA over the past 4 days,” the letter said. It was published by a Russian military blogger and widely circulated.

One prominent military blogger claimed the 155th and another unit “lost twice as many men in Pavlivka” – in Donetsk region – “as during the two Chechnya wars.”

In a rare acknowledgment of criticism, the Russian Defense Ministry retorted that losses did “not exceed 1% of the combat strength and 7% of the wounded, a significant part of whom have already returned to duty.”

But the reported debacle around Pavlivka is not an isolated incident.

Kateryna Stepanenko, who tracks the Russian military at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, says: “We have seen many complaints about unprepared mobilized men who were committed to the Svatove-Kreminna frontline [in Luhansk], which is currently one of the combat-heavy positions for Russian forces.”

Protests back home

As soldiers relay their plight back home, their complaints are being amplified by wives and mothers through social media and in direct appeals to regional authorities.

Stepanenko says the “most common complaints from these families are lack of information from the Ministry of Defense on the whereabouts of their loved ones, delayed payments, and lack of supplies.”

Last week, video emerged from TV Rain, a Russian media outlet that now operates in exile, of servicemen’s relatives gathered at a military base in the city of Boguchar in Voronezh region, many complaining that they’d not heard from husbands or sons since early October.

In another video posted on the social network vk.com on Monday, a group of women in Voronezh said their husbands and sons were on the front line without commanders, without water, necessary clothing or weapons.

One woman, Lyudmila Agarkova, said her son had told her that very few of his battalion had survived. “They literally crawled out from under the corpses,” she said.

Appealing to the governor of Voronezh for help, the women say their men “were not trained, they were taken to the firing range just once, they had no combat experience.”

They also complain that they can’t get answers, with one saying: “We are a few minutes away from the military commissariat. None of the staff ever gets in touch, they completely ignore us.”

A Russian serviceman addresses reservists at a gathering point in the town of Volzhsky in the Volgograd region, Russia, on September 28. Stringer/Reuters

A video posted on YouTube shows a dozen women reportedly from Sverdlovsk region, some with young children, appealing for help for recruits from the 55th brigade reportedly hiding out near Svatove in Luhansk. The families say their men have been threatened with military tribunals but argue they should not have been on the front line at all.

One woman says her son had called, saying they were “left without any command, without ammunition, hungry and cold, they are all ill.”

“They ended up there without any professional training,” says another woman, whose 41-year old husband was mobilized.

“They don’t get paid. They are not assigned to any military unit. Where to look for them, whom to ask, we don’t know.”

Occasionally, local authorities do respond. The military commissar of the Vladimir region, Yuri Gusarov, responded to relatives who said their men “were sent to the front near Svatove without proper equipment and training.”

“Our military units have weapons, body armor, clothes, water, hot meals. Deliveries of aid from the Vladimir region are regular, communication with the commanders is maintained,” the military commissar replied.

More often than not, the families don’t get a response.

Journalist Anastasia Kashevarova, whose Telegram channel has more than 200,000 subscribers, said she’d received hundreds of messages from relatives of fighters. “Groups are abandoned without communication, without the necessary weapons, without medicines, naturally without artillery. No one knows who is on their right, who is on the left, who is in the rear,” she posted.

“Instead of being listened to, they are threatened with punishment, a tribunal, and sent back to the front line with four magazines of ammunition and a grenade launcher with a few shots.”

CNN reached out to relatives of men in the 55th brigade from Tomsk and confirmed that they had met the local military command. But a day later, one woman texted: “Apologies, but our lips have been sealed.”

A volunteer uses his mobile phone as he sits on the top of a destroyed Russian armoured vehicle in the recently liberated town of Izium, in Ukraine's northeastern Kharkiv region, on September 27, 2022. Zohra Bensemra/Reuters

The moderator of one Telegram channel for families told CNN that mothers and wives often fear “repressive retribution” against their loved ones if they speak out. The moderator, who CNN is not identifying for their safety, said that at the local level “some authorities are already calling them ‘deserters,’ without investigating why they were sent to Ukraine without training, equipment or command on the front line.”

But complaining can come at a price. Olga Kuznetsova, a resident of Arkhangelsk, was found guilty of “discrediting the Russian Armed Forces” after collecting signatures against mobilization. She was fined 15,000 rubles ($250).

Training deficit

Western officials say the Russian war machine is struggling to assimilate tens of thousands of largely inexperienced recruits.

The UK’s Ministry of Defense said last week that “Russia is probably struggling to provide military training for its current mobilization drive and its annual autumn conscription intake. Newly mobilized conscripts likely have minimal training or no training at all. Experienced officers and trainers have been deployed to fight in Ukraine and some have likely been killed in the conflict.”

Ukrainian intelligence has reported that the Russian military is speeding up the graduations of cadets but Stepanenko says that “while these cadets may be more familiar with military craft, it’s hard to say how effective they will be in combat.”

Ukrainian officials acknowledge that Russia’s mobilization has put more men into battle, pulling Ukrainian troops in different directions. But they say new recruits are being thrown into battle with no preparation.

Serhii Hayday, head of the Ukrainian Regional Military Administration in Luhansk, said last week that near Svatove, raw conscripts had advanced in waves.

“They die, and the next ones go forward. Every new attack is accompanied by the fact that the Russians are trampling their dead.”

As winter sets in, the need for accommodation and supplies for troops far from home base is even more critical.

Natalia Ivanova posted on the VKcontact page of a regional official that her husband’s unit was kept waiting for hours outside, before the deployment was canceled. “Now everyone is sick, with a temperature!” she said.

Stepananeko points to instances of protests among newly mobilized troops yet to be sent to Ukraine – principally over pay – “with two notable examples being in Chuvashia and Ulyansk.”

Video emerged earlier this month of dozens of men in Chuvashia, a republic in central Russia, angry that they had not received the 195,000 rubles promised in a decree signed by President Vladimir Putin.

Unofficial Telegram channels said the whole unit had subsequently been placed under house arrest.

Across Russia, relatives of the mobilized are also chasing unpaid compensation, for example, for buying uniform when it was not issued, with CNN finding many such posts on local government social media.

Dozens of mobilized men in Kazan region protested due to poor conditions at their training ground and a lack of water, food and firewood for heating. In one video, a man is heard demanding that washing machines are installed. Then, he said, they “would be happy to be in the mud every day from morning to evening.”

It’s too early to make a full assessment of the impact of Russia’s mobilization of more than 300,000 men. That’s double the number of men involved at the start of the Ukrainian invasion and would help plug gaps in units degraded by nine months of conflict.

But the caliber of these troops, leadership in the field and a logistics chain that has never excelled do not bode well for the Russian army.

Stepanenko thinks it’s possible “that more reports of deaths or lack of payments may upset more Russians – both those who are pro-war and those who are only involved in the war because of mobilization.”

For the moment, mobilization has not brought Putin’s special military operation any closer to its stated goals.

Indeed, in chunks of regions annexed with such fanfare by Russia in September, the Ukrainian flag is being raised again.

Tim Lister Katharina Krebs Anastasia Graham-Yooll

The battle of narratives on Iran is being fought on social media | CNN

Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in the Middle East newsletter, a three-times-a-week look inside the region’s biggest stories. Sign up here.

Abu Dhabi, UAE CNN —

As anti-government protests enter their third week in Iran, the Islamic Republic has imposed a near total blackout of independent information coming out of the country.

A fierce battle to control the narrative is now being fought online, where supporters and opponents of the government alike are taking to social media to tell their version of the truth and, in some cases, go beyond the truth.

With access to Twitter blocked in Iran, that battle is primarily being fought outside the country.

“It is normal for people to rush to social media when protests break out… It has happened in Iran and the Arab world,” said Marc Owen Jones, an associate professor at Qatar’s Hamad Bin Khalifa University who specializes in digital disinformation. “But the scale here seems quite substantial.”

Protests aren’t new to Iran, and neither are internet blackouts. What’s changing, say experts, is the sophistication of those trying to get their message across.

The protests started following the death of 22- year-old Mahsa Amini after she was detained by the Islamic Republic’s “morality police,” sparking outrage among Iranians who took to the streets to demand more freedoms.

A hashtag with her name has garnered 52 million tweets, said Jones, who has analyzed pro- and anti-regime activity on Twitter. Some of those tweets, he said, suggest there may be coordinated manipulation campaigns at play, possibly including bots.

Bots are social media accounts controlled by software, not real people, that are designed to promote certain topics.

He told CNN that an analysis of those tweeting the hashtags associated with the protests showed “a striking number of new accounts created” since the protests started.

Of the 108,000 accounts in a sample using #OpIran, another hashtag associated with the protests, he found that around 13,000 were created in September, while the average number of accounts created per month in the sample was only 500. Most of the September accounts were created in around 10 days following Amini’s death, he said.

“It’s quite rare to see this amount of new online mobilization of accounts that then subsequent and continuously engage in tweet activity,” he said, adding that while this indicates manipulation, it isn’t conclusive evidence of it.

I want to share some of the iconic imagery and music from the protests in Iran and around the world. Singer Shervin Hajipour's song "Baraye" brings up grievances such as the economy and a lack of women's rights in his country. It has now been removed from Hajipour's account. pic.twitter.com/WZOmh7CPUR — Becky Anderson (@BeckyCNN) October 3, 2022

Asked to comment on the matter, Twitter referred CNN to its policy of “taking robust and proactive action against violating content” where evidence of coordinated inauthentic activity is detected.

The creation of new accounts “is a repeated hallmark of dis- and misinformation actors… [who] participate in the conversation to push a narrative,” said Steph Shample, a non-resident scholar with the Middle East Institute’s Cyber Program. Content from such accounts is not trustworthy, she said.

Maziar Bahari, editor of IranWire, a pro-reform activist outlet, says there are many ways to verify content on social media, “but in a chaotic, angry situation it’s impossible to expect every member of the public to try and fact check, especially if those exaggerated reports have roots in the reality.”

Bahari said there have been several cases of fake news successfully being portrayed as reality from both sides. “After every protest, the government shows confiscated firearms from archives or taken from common criminals and attributes it to their critics,” he told CNN. There are also cases of social media users exaggerating reports of killings and sexual violence by the security forces, he said.

The harm comes “more when important public figures, such as politicians or educators, retweet the false narratives of controlling countries and their politicians,” said Shample.

Any account on any social media platform that is successfully posting pro-Iranian government material while most of the country is cut off from those services is suspect, she said. “It is very, very dangerous to take things at face value anymore.”

So, who’s behind all the Twitter activity around #MahsaAmini?

Since Twitter is blocked in Iran, Jones suggests that the large Iranian diaspora may be mobilizing to keep her story alive, but other interests may also be at play.

“We also know there are a number of people with stakes in trying to see regime change in Iran, from right-wing hawks in US and Israel, to the MeK,” he said, referring to Mujahideen-e-Khalq, an Albania-based Iranian dissident group. “The MeK certainly have been active in social media manipulation prior to the [death of] Mahsa Amini.”

Shample suggests that the government itself could be behind some of the anti-regime tweets in an effort to track those who support the movement.

The war of narratives between opposing parties on social media isn’t new. Twitter regularly removes accounts it says are tied to the Iranian government that engage in coordinated manipulation. Last year, Facebook removed hundreds of fake accounts linked to a troll farm in Albania that it said were linked to the MeK. The group was removed from the US terror list in 2012.

Facebook describes troll farms as a “physical location where a collective of operators share computers and phones to jointly manage a pool of fake accounts as part of an influence operation.”

Neither the MeK, which also goes by the name People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, or the Iranian foreign ministry respondedto CNN’s requests for comment.

The Iranian government has time and again blamed foreign conspiracies aimed at spreading false news about the situation in Iran. But Bahari says the disinformation and foreign exploitation of the protests don’t discredit a movement that has genuine demands for change.

“Disinformation has existed as long as movements have existed,” he said. “But the advent of social media means that [it] can spread more quickly… when movements are popular and have roots in people’s aspirations for change, disinformation is just a nuisance.”

The digest

OPEC+ agrees on a 2 million bpd cut in oil output, defying US pressure

OPEC+ on Wednesday agreed on a 2 million barrel per day output cut, defying a pressure campaign by the US for the cartel not to make such a drastic reduction. The cut was the biggest since the Covid-19 pandemic and was twice as much as analysts had expected.

Background: The Biden administration had launched a pressure campaign this week in a last-ditch effort to dissuade Arab allies from slashing oil production. Officials had been lobbying their counterparts in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to vote against such a move. Some of the draft talking points framed the prospect of a production cut as a “hostile act.”

Why it matters: A cut in oil production would cause US gasoline prices to rise at a precarious time for the Biden administration , just five weeks before the midterm elections. Requests for a production rise by the US earlier this year were largely rebuffed by Arab oil producers.

Saudi prince has immunity in Khashoggi killing lawsuit, say lawyers

Lawyers for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), who is facing a US lawsuit over the 2018 killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, told a court on Monday the crown prince’s appointment as prime minister last week ensured him immunity from prosecution, Reuters reported.

Background: Khashoggi was killed and dismembered by Saudi agents in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in an operation US intelligence believe was ordered by MBS. The crown prince denied ordering Khashoggi’s killing but acknowledged later it took place “under my watch.” The lawsuit was filed jointly by Khashoggi’s fiancé Hatice Cengiz and a human rights group founded by Khashoggi.

Why it matters: The court had asked the US Department of Justice to express a view on whether MBS had immunity, setting an Oct. 3 deadline for a response. After the prince’s appointment as prime minister last week, the department said on Friday it was seeking a 45-day extension to prepare its response to the court “in light of these changed circumstances.”

Iranian American, 85, held in Tehran for six years, leaves Iran

Baquer Namazi, an 85-year-old Iranian American who was jailed in Iran on spying charges, arrived in Muscat on Wednesday after Tehran allowed him to leave for medical treatment, an Omani government said on Twitter.

Background: Namazi, a former official with the UN children’s agency UNICEF, holds US and Iranian citizenship and was one of four Iranian Americans, including his son Siamak, detained in Iran in recent years or barred from leaving the country. Namazi was convicted in 2016 of “collaboration with a hostile government” and jailed for 10 years. Iranian authorities released him on medical grounds in 2018 and closed his case in 2020, commuting his sentence to time served. However, they had effectively barred him from leaving until Saturday.

Why it matters: Iranian Americans, whose US citizenship is not recognized by Tehran, are often pawns between the two nations, now at odds over whether to revive a fraying 2015 pact under which Iran limited its nuclear program in return for sanctions relief. Iran is also grappling with the biggest show of opposition to its clerical authorities since 2019.

Around the region

أنتش وأجري النسخة الأصلية 😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/LzAQjoGU13 — Hassan (@Iim_resistance) September 29, 2022

Egypt’s own Michael Jackson is making waves on social media. But this inadvertent pop star calls himself ‘Wegz of the poor,’ referring to an Egyptian rapper.

A young Egyptian man from a modest family has shot to fame in the Arab world after unexpectedly reviving Michael Jackson’s legacy 13 years after the popstar’s death. His quirky Cairene touch had the video go viral across the region.

In a short TikTok clip, Cairo resident Haytham Ahmed was seen imitating Michael Jackson’s performance in “Smooth Criminal,” mirroring his dance moves with hand gestures and an upbeat singing tune. Ahmed was filmed on the roof of what is reportedly a building in Cairo’s Sheraton district.

Ahmed said in a TV interview that the video was filmed spontaneously early in the morning by his friend.

Ahmed’s lyrics are barely comprehensible to English or Arabic speakers. Despite that, his passionate mimicking of Jackson proved popular.

Hend Sabry, a renowned Egyptian actress, imitated Ahmed’s performance on her own Tiktok account, which got around 1.5 million views.

Photo of the day

Abbas Al Lawati Nadeen Ebrahim
Abbas Al Lawati
Nadeen Ebrahim

Food stamp cuts, holidays stress food banks

Jake Grovum

Pew/Stateline Staff Writer

The %245 billion cut in food stamp benefits will affect about 48 million Americans

For those who help the hungry%2C 2013 is looking a lot like the years since the recession began

15%25 of all Americans are considered %22food insecure%2C%22 and many of those people don%27t use food stamps

Food banks across the country are bracing for what has become an annual occurrence during this season: a spike in demand as millions of Americans struggle to put holiday meals on their tables.

For those who help the hungry, 2013 is looking a lot like the years since the recession began—with the added challenge of a $5 billion cut in food stamp benefits, which took effect Nov. 1. About 48 million Americans will be hit by the reduction in the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP), which will subtract $36 per month for a family of four. Total benefit amounts vary by state.

"Nobody's been able to catch their breath," said Ross Fraser of Feeding America, a nationwide network of 200 food banks that supplies 63,000 agencies around the country. "Everyone's scared to death about these SNAP cuts."

Bad timing

As advocates for the hungry tell it, the reduction in food stamp benefits — the result of an expiration of a temporary boost enacted in 2009 — couldn't have come at worse time.

The Great Recession has already stretched food banks' ability to help the 15% of all Americans who are considered "food insecure," according to an Agriculture Department report. Many of those people do not use food stamps.

Many food banks are holding extra food drives, or asking companies to make special seasonal donations – turkeys, for example. Others food banks just buy more food; one reported buying 50% more this month compared to October.

The cut in food stamp benefits will only increase the demand.

Enrollment in food stamps is almost three times what it was in 2000, but that hasn't lessened the dependence on food banks. Since 2006, the number of Americans receiving aid from food pantries and similar services is up almost 50%, according to Feeding America.

A survey by the nonprofit Food Bank for New York City found that almost half of its food pantries and soup kitchens were forced to turn visitors away at some point last year, with 83% blaming a lack of food. At the same time, the group said their ranks shrank during the recession, with 247 of its partners closing since 2007.

In Indiana this year, lawmakers approved using state funds to pay for the processing of deer meat donated by hunters across the state. This was the first year the state chipped in to pay for the processing in an attempt to boost donations. In the past, hunters or processors covered the cost.

That led to a welcome infusion of meat donations to the state's food banks, supplementing the normal fare comprised largely of canned vegetables and other non-perishables, said Jake Bruner of the Hoosier Hills Food Bank in Bloomington, Ind.

Those additional donations were well-timed. Hoosier Hills has already distributed more than 3.2 million pounds of food this year, Bruner said, more than in 2011 or 2012.

"Some pantries are serving thousands of people a week," he said.

Perishables move

The spike in demand has led to an unexpected benefit: In the past, fresh food and produce often lingered on shelves so long it went bad. Now, that's not a concern.

"A lot of those are fairly rural counties," Bruner said of the areas his food bank serves. "We're seeing agencies, a mom-and-pop food pantry, being able to take full bins of bananas and distribute them quickly."

In Fort Smith, Ark., near the Oklahoma border, the River Valley Food Bank is nearing the end of its own record-setting year, having distributed more than 8 million pounds of food in 2013, compared to 6.7 million last year.

The reason for the jump is a mix of still-increasing demand and the bank's ability to store more food, said its director, Ted Clemons. "When you can distribute 8 million pounds and the pantries are still taking that food, that shows there is a demand," he said.

Unlike past years, the food bank didn't receive any donated turkeys this year. So River Valley held a one-day "turkey drive" last week. Halfway through Friday's effort, Clemons, reached by phone while out collecting turkeys, said they'd already collected more than 300, with a goal of 800 for the day.

Still not enough

But even the most robust food banks aren't able to fill the need, a fact that was true even before the recent food stamp cuts. By Feeding America's estimate, the benefit cuts will cost 1.9 million meals for low-income Americans next year—more than half the number of meals the organization distributes in a given year.

Even at Washington, D.C.'s Capital Area Food Bank, which moves 45 million pounds of food each year from its 100,000-square-foot facility a few miles from the U.S. Capitol, organizers know they can't feed everybody who is hungry.

The facility covers parts of Virginia and Maryland, along with the nation's capital itself, where almost one in four residents is on food stamps. In preparation for the holidays, the food bank bought 50% more food this month than it did in October. Two weeks ago, it received a donation of 1,000 turkeys from a grocer.

"It would be great to put ourselves out of business," Page Crosland, director of media and events at the food bank, said last week. "But I don't see that happening."

Famed Roman shipwreck reveals more secrets

Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

The famed Antikythera shipwreck appears bigger than believed, loaded with antiquities

The shipwreck yielded bronze statues and the enigmatic Antikythera mechanism a century ago

Ship likely sank when a storm blew it against an underwater cliff

Marine archaeologists report they have uncovered new secrets of an ancient Roman shipwreck famed for yielding an amazingly sophisticated astronomical calculator. An international survey team says the ship is twice as long as originally thought and contains many more calcified objects amid the ship's lost cargo that hint at new discoveries.

At the Archaeological Institute of America meeting Friday in Seattle, marine archaeologist Brendan Foley of the Woods Hole (Mass.) Oceanographic Institution, will report on the first survey of Greece's famed Antikythera island shipwreck since 1976. The ancient Roman shipwreck was lost off the Greek coast around 67 BC,filled with statues and the famed astronomical clock.

"The ship was huge for ancient times," Foley says. "Divers a century ago just couldn't conduct this kind of survey but we were surprised when we realized how big it was."

Completed in October by a small team of divers, the survey traversed the island and the wreck site, perched on a steep undersea slope some 150 to 230 feet deep in the Mediterranean Sea.

The October survey shows the ship was more than 160 feet long, twice as long as expected. Salvaged by the Greek navy and skin divers in 1901, its stern perched too deep for its original skin-diver discoverers to find.

The wreck is best known for yielding a bronze astronomical calculator, the "Antikythera Mechanism" widely seen as the most complex device known from antiquity, along with dozens of marble and bronze statues. The mechanism apparently used 37 gear wheels, a technology reinvented a millennium later, to create a lunar calendar and predict the motion of the planets, which was important knowledge for casting horoscopes and planning festivals in the superstitious ancient world.

A lead anchor recovered in a stowed position in the new survey shows that the ship likely sank unexpectedly when "a storm blew it against an underwater cliff," says marine archaeologist Theotokis Theodoulou of Greece's Ephorate (Department) of Underwater Antiquities. "It seems to have settled facing backwards with its stern (rear) at the deepest point," he says.

Scholars have long debated whether the ship held the plunder of a Roman general returning loot from Greece in the era when the Roman Republic was seizing the reins of the Mediterranean world, or merely luxury goods meant for the newly built villas of the Roman elite. The last survey of the shipwreck was led by undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau, whose documentary Diving for Roman Plunder chronicled that 1976 effort, which appears to have excavated the ship's kitchen.

The October survey team watched the 1970s documentary to help orient themselves to the wreck site. "They didn't have the diving technology that we now have to do a very efficient survey," Theodoulou says.

Along with vase-like amphora vessels, pottery shards and roof tiles, Foley says, the wreck also appears to have "dozens" of calcified objects resembling compacted boulders made out of hardened sand resting atop the amphorae on the sea bottom. Those boulders resemble the Antikythera mechanism before its recovery and restoration. In 2006, an X-ray tomography team reported that the mechanism contained at least 30 hand-cut bronze gears re-creating astronomical cycles useful in horoscopes and timing of the Olympic Games in the ancient world, the most elaborate mechanical device known from antiquity until the Middle Ages. "The (objects) may just be collections of bronze nails, but we won't know until someone takes a look at them," Foley says.

The survey effort, headed by Aggeliki Simossi of the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities,will continue for the next two years. The international survey team will look in two different locales for ancient shipwrecks in that time, while Greek antiquities officials ponder further exploration. An amphora recovered from the wreck will also have its inner walls tested for DNA traces of the regular cargo, such as wine, once carried by the vessel.

Recovery of whatever cargo remains with the wreck, now covered in sand, presents a technically difficult, but not impossible, challenge for marine archaeologists.

"Obviously there are a lot of artifacts still down there, but we will need to be very careful about our next steps. This ship was not a normal one," Theodoulou says.

Coronavirus update: US deaths pass 16K; Britain's Johnson out of ICU

There was good and bad news Thursday as the world continued to deal with the impact of the coronavirus.

The United States has surpassed 16,000 deaths as cases continue to increase, while almost 25,000 people have recovered nationwide.

Confirmed cases in the U.S. exceeded 465,000. The death toll was nearing 6,000 one week ago, but there have been nearly 2,000 deaths in each of the last two days, according to the Johns Hopkins University data dashboard.

In more positive developments, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is out of intensive care, and U.S. stocks surged to their best week since 1974 despite mind-numbing jobless numbers.

And a significant encouraging sign: A University of Washington health research center dropped its estimated U.S. death total from the coronavirus, placing the likely toll by August at about 60,000.

Worldwide, there were 1.6 million confirmed cases and more than 95,000 deaths.

Our live blog is being updated throughout the day. Refresh for the latest news, and get updates in your inbox with The Daily Briefing. More headlines:

• The US has a shortage of face masks amid coronavirus pandemic.A USA TODAY investigation shows why.

•A bridge between life and death: Most COVID-19 patients put on ventilators will not survive

• Are you homeschooling during coronavirus quarantine? Moms, teachers share ideas and advice.

• A side of toilet paper to go? Some restaurants are serving up more than meals during coronavirus crisis.

• Authorities say fake cops are taking advantage of coronavirus travel restrictions to illegally stop drivers.

• Support these brands: Here are 20 retailers that are giving back during the pandemic

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson out of ICU

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was moved out of an intensive care unit where he was being treated for coronavirus to a regular hospital ward, his office said in a statement Thursday, as the condition of Britain's leader continues to improve.

The statement from Downing Street said Johnson, 55, is receiving "close monitoring during the early phase of his recovery." Earlier, the prime minister's spokesman said Johnson had a "good night" in the hospital and was in stable condition and "improving."

Johnson is being cared for in St Thomas' Hospital in central London. He was diagnosed with COVID-19 on March 26 and still had a cough and fever 10 days later. He was admitted to the hospital Sunday and to its ICU on Monday.

Johnson's wife, Carrie Symonds, is pregnant and also suffered symptoms consistent with the virus. Earlier this week, Symonds tweeted that she was feeling stronger and "on the mend."

– Kim Hjelmgaard

Deaths could fall short of projections; summer vacations 'in the cards'

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Thursday he’s cautiously optimistic the steady rise in U.S. deaths could soon “turn around and that curve not only flatten, but (start) coming down.” Last week Fauci and the White House task force estimated U.S. deaths from the virus at 100,000 to 240,000.

“I believe we are going to see a downturn in that, and it looks more like the 60,000," Fauci said on the "Today" show. That number matches an updated estimate published by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, an independent global health research center at the University of Washington. The total would also match U.S. deaths from a severe influenza season two winters ago.

Fauci, asked on "CBS This Morning" whether Americans would be taking summer vacations, going to baseball games and holding family get-togethers, replied: "It can be in the cards."

Best week for stocks since 1974

U.S. stocks advanced Thursday, capping their best week in more than four decades after the Federal Reserve said it would provide $2.3 trillion in loans to households, local governments and businesses in another effort to shield the economy from the coronavirus pandemic.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 285.80 points to close at 23,719.37 in a shortened holiday week. U.S. financial markets will be closed in observance of Good Friday.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index gained 1.5% to end at 2,789.82. It climbed 12% for the week, its best weekly gain since 1974. The broad index has jumped more than 20% in the past two and a half weeks, driven by massive amounts of aid promised by governments and central banks for the economy and markets.

– Jessica Menton

Donald Trump: Help coming for airlines

Talks are underway with U.S. airlines, already promised a $50-billion chunk of the federal stimulus package, to deliver more aid to them as they endure a dearth of passengers in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, President Donald Trump said Thursday.

Trump led off his daily White House briefing by saying talks will be going on through the weekend to craft more help for beleaguered airlines, which would be consulted.

"It is moving along quickly. The airline business has been hit very hard, as everyone knows." Trump said. "We will be position to do a lot to help them."

-- Chris Woodyard

Mnuchin: US could be back in business next month

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Thursday that parts of the economy could reopen by May. Asked by CNBC host Jim Cramer if he thought the economy could be "open for business" in May, Mnuchin replied, "I do ... as soon as the president feels comfortable with the medical issues, we are making everything necessary that American companies and American workers can be open for business."

Guidelines issued by President Donald Trump, effective through April 30, recommend that people not gather in groups of 10 or more, not go to restaurants or bars and limit their activities outside the home.

– Nicholas Wu

Unemployment claims near record as layoffs continue to surge

More than 6.6 million Americans filed unemployment benefit claims for the first time last week, the Labor Department said Thursday, reflecting another surge in layoffs and an economy that has continued to shut down to minimize further contagion from the coronavirus. The previous week’s record 6.65 million jobless claims total was revised up by 219,000 to a new all-time high of 6.86 million. That brings the total over the last three weeks to almost 16.8 million claims.

Economists had estimated that 5.5 million workers filed initial claims last week, according to a Bloomberg survey. The seasonally adjusted jobless rate was 5.1% for the week ending March 28.

“There are reasons to think this is only the beginning,” says economist Jesse Edgerton of JPMorgan Chase.

– Paul Davidson

Air pollution enhances chances of dying from COVID-19, study says

Residents of areas with high levels of air pollution have a much greater chance of dying from COVID-19, a Harvard University study found.

Based on the notion that many of the underlying health conditions that enhance the risk of dying from the coronavirus are the same that are affected by long-term exposure to air pollution, researchers looked at about 3,000 counties encompassing 98% of the U.S. population.

They discovered that an increase of just one microgram per cubic meter of fine particulate matter was linked to a 15% increment in the COVID-19 death rate.

"The study results underscore the importance of continuing to enforce existing air pollution regulations to protect human health both during and after the COVID-19 crisis,'' the report concludes.

Dems block $250B for small businesses, cite needs of hospitals

An effort by Senate Republicans to replenish an emergency fund for small businesses hurt by the coronavirus crisis was blocked by Democrats, who called it a "political stunt" that failed to consider hospitals and other pressing needs. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., had proposed legislation boosting the popular Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) by another $250 billion on top of the $349 billion Congress approved last month as part of the $2.2 trillion pandemic response known as the CARES act.

But when it came up Thursday on a voice vote, Maryland Democratic Sens. Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen objected, effectively blocking it. The bill "was not negotiated so it won’t get done," Cardin said.

– Christal Hayes and Ledyard King

Struggling college students to get billions in aid

The Education Department is dispersing roughly $6.3 billion in emergency aid to colleges, meant to help students struggling financially due to the coronavirus outbreak, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said Thursday.

The money comes through the CARES Act that passed Congress last month, which is meant to prop up the floundering economy through the virus’ disruptions.

It’s unclear when students will receive the funds, and it will be up to colleges to distribute the money to students as they see fit. The money can be used for course materials, food, housing, health care and similar expenses, the department said.

The federal government has also suspended federal student loan payments and set the interest rate on these loans to zero through September.

– Chris Quintana

New York has another deadliest day, but hospitalizations continue decline

New York state hit a daily high with 799 deaths Wednesday, bringing the state death toll to more than 7,000, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said. But Cuomo added that hospitalizations and intensive care unit admissions continue to slide, indicating that the outbreak's curve is flattening in his state. Almost half the U.S. deaths have occurred in New York. And as he does at all his daily news conferences, he urged residents to remain vigilant.

"It's only been 18 days since we closed down New York," he said. "It seems like a lifetime."

Attorney General Barr calls lockdowns 'draconian'

Attorney General William Barr called the restrictions in effect in many states to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus "draconian," and said Wednesday they should be revisited next month. Asked by Fox News host Laura Ingraham about the balance between religious freedoms and the need to protect people, Barr said the federal government would be "keeping a careful eye" on states' use of broad powers to regulate the lives of their citizens.

Officials, Barr said, should be "very careful to make sure ... that the draconian measures that are being adopted are fully justified and there are not alternative ways of protecting people."

– Nicholas Wu

Studies suggest virus spread in New York came from Europe

The coronavirus began spreading in New York in February and came to the area via travelers from Europe, new research suggests. Two separate teams of scientists studying the genetics of the virus came to similar conclusions: People were spreading the virus weeks before the first confirmed case in New York.

"We know with certainty that these were coming from European strains," Adriana Heguy, director of the Genome Technology Center at NYU Langone Health, told USA TODAY.

The first case of the new coronavirus confirmed in New York came on March 1. On Jan. 31, President Donald Trump said he would restrict entry to the United States from those traveling from China. On March 11, Trump said he was restricting travel from Europe.

– Ryan W. Miller

Dozens of American Airlines flight crew members test positive

The unions that represent commercial pilots and flight attendants say dozens of them who work for American Airlines have tested positive for the coronavirus, and they need better protection.

One hundred of the airline's flight attendants had COVID-19 as of Saturday, the Association of Professional Flight Attendants said. In a statement, Julie Hendrick, AFPA's new president, said the union has been pushing American since January for protective measures for front-line workers.

On Thursday, Capt. Dennis Tajer, spokesman for the union that represents American Airlines pilots, told USA TODAY that 41 of them have tested positive for the virus.

Because flight crews could be vectors for the virus, Tajer said they should "receive 'first responder' status and priority for protective equipment.''

– Rasha Ali and Jayme Deerwester

Meat processing plant has 80-plus positive tests

A Smithfield Foods pork processing plant in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, will temporarily close for cleaning after more than 80 employees tested positive for the coronavirus. The Virginia-based company said it would suspend operations in a large section of the plant Saturday, then completely Sunday and Monday to sanitize and install physical barriers to “enhance social distancing.”

The union representing workers at the plant, which employs about 3,700, said the number of confirmed infections is more than 120.

There has been no evidence that the coronavirus is being transmitted through food or its packaging, according to the Department of Agriculture.

IMF chief warns of worst recession since Depression

The head of the International Monetary Fund said Thursday the coronavirus pandemic will push the global economy into the deepest recession since the Great Depression, and the poorest countries will fare the worst. That marks a dramatic turnaround to what was on track to be a year of economic growth.

Three months ago, the IMF projected income growth per capita for 160 countries. Now the organization expects more than 170 nations will see per capita income diminish. Emerging markets and low-income nations across Africa, Latin America and much of Asia are at high risk, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said.

“With weak health systems to begin with, many face the dreadful challenge of fighting the virus in densely populated cities and poverty-stricken slums, where social distancing is hardly an option,” Georgieva said.

African countries have sounded the alarm about a lack of access to medical equipment that may leave them vulnerable to the virus.

Virus could be ticket to freedom for some elderly inmates

The coronavirus pandemic has forced prison officials to confront difficult questions about who gets to spend the rest of their days outside prison walls. Attorney General William Barr has ordered the Bureau of Prisons to move vulnerable inmates to home confinement. The elderly – most at risk of getting sick and dying of the virus – have been the fastest-growing population in federal and state prison systems, in part because of lengthy mandatory sentences. Now worried families and advocates want them released.

“People change. People age out of crime, especially violent crime. That’s a young man’s game,” said Kevin Ring, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums.

– Kristine Phillips

Another potential coronavirus vaccine, this time without the deep injection

Another trial is underway to test the safety of a possible vaccine for the coronavirus, and those who fear needles may be in luck: It uses a skin-deep shot that would feel like a small pinch instead of a deep jab. The trial aims to give 40 healthy volunteers in Philadelphia and Kansas City, Missouri, two doses of the potential vaccine, INO-4800, four weeks apart.

Similar to another clinical trial that began testing for safety in Seattle last month, the potential vaccine does not rely on using the virus itself. Inovio Pharmaceuticals' trial, instead, injects a piece of synthetic DNA with a section of the virus' genetic code. The Seattle trial relies on messenger RNA. After the shot, volunteers are given a brief electrical pulse that allows the synthetic DNA to more easily enter the body.

Dozens of other potential vaccines are being developed around the world, but it could be more than a year to 18 months before a vaccine is widely available, public health officials have said.

– Ryan W. Miller

Italian PM: COVID-19 could break EU; Italy may soon ease lockdown

The European Union could collapse if it fails to come together over financial challenges presented by the coronavirus, Italy's prime minister said. Giuseppe Conte and some other EU leaders are pressing more frugal members of the bloc to issue so-called "corona bonds" – sharing debt that all EU nations would help to pay off. The Netherlands is among nations that have opposed the plan.

"If we do not seize the opportunity to put new life into the European project, the risk of failure is real," Conte told the BBC.

Conte also said Italy may start to gradually ease the world's most restrictive national lockdown. The number of new COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths have started to decline across the country in recent days. Italy has reported more than 17,000 deaths, the most of any nation, and almost 140,000 confirmed cases.

More coronavirus news and information from USA TODAY

• Does COVID-19 have new symptoms? We checked the facts, and it's true.

• Your coronavirus questions, answered: How many people have recovered? Do I need to wear gloves, too? Does UV light kill COVID-19?

• Take a (virtual) field trip:Go to Jamaica, Walt Disney World, Georgia Aquarium and more.

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• Black people are overwhelmingly dying from coronavirus. Nobody knows why.

• Is coronavirus spreading 'quickly' on gas pumps: Here are the facts.

More coronavirus news from USA TODAY

Contributing: The Associated Press

Miracle or hype? News reports often inflate cancer drugs' success

Liz Szabo

USA TODAY

Breakthrough. Game changer. Miracle drug.

The media often use terms like these when reporting on new cancer drugs, even when the drugs are unproved, according to a report published online Thursday in JAMA Oncology.

Researchers searched news stories on Google for the words "cancer drug" and over-the-top terms such as "home run," "groundbreaking" and "marvel." They found 94 news stories from 66 outlets published from June 21 to June 25 after the conclusion of a major cancer conference. News sources ranged from leading newspapers and TV stations to small trade publications.

While some new immune therapies put a fraction of patients into long-term remission, none have been proved to definitively cure patients, study co-author Vinay Prasad said.

Most new cancer drugs extend survival by only a few months, said Prasad, an assistant professor at the Knight Cancer Institute at the Oregon Health and Science University.

Hyping new cancer drugs "feeds into this mentality the newest thing has got to be the best thing," Prasad said. While newer often means better when it comes to cellphones or computers, that's not necessarily the case with cancer drugs. Prasad said the hard reality of cancer is that, for many tumors, "our treatments are just not that great yet."

Half of the drugs in the news reports he studied hadn't been approved by the Food and Drug Administration, which requires manufacturers to provide evidence that treatments are safe and effective. In 14% of stories, the drugs being praised hadn't yet been tested on humans.

"It's always inappropriate to say that something is a 'breakthrough' or 'game changer' based on work in animals," Prasad said. "It would be like doing a news story about someone who's bought a lottery ticket, talking about how much money he plans to win."

Media hype came from a variety of sources.

More than half of the excessive praise came from journalists themselves, while 27% came from doctors; 9% from health experts; 8% from patients; and 1% from a member of Congress, researchers found.

If cancer researchers "start patting ourselves on the back and hailing every small, marginal drug as a game changer, it will take away some of our motivation to do better," Prasad said. "We should set the bar high and really earn it and try to find a drug that is truly great. That's what our patients expect."

Hyping new therapies can mislead patients, giving them false hope that new treatments will save their lives, said Tim Turnham, executive director of the Melanoma Research Foundation, who wasn't involved in the new study.

With so many superlatives — and so little context — "it's difficult for patients to parse out what’s new and exciting and what's not likely to help them very much," Turnham said.

The new study leaves some key questions unanswered, said Lisa Schwartz, a professor of medicine at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice in New Hampshire.

Researchers focused only on news stories about cancer drugs that contained 10 key words; they didn't look at cancer stories without these terms. So it's impossible to know whether sensationalist reporting on cancer accounts for a majority of coverage or just a fraction, said Schwartz, whose research focuses on communicating health news to the public.

Still, few doubt that the hype exists.

The National Institutes of Health was criticized last month when it put out a press release celebrating a "landmark study" on high blood pressure that had not yet been peer-reviewed. Many physicians said they were frustrated that the press release — which claimed to offer "life-saving" information to patients — was short on meaningful details.

The hype around new treatments — most of which carry high price tags — often starts with the marketing juggernaut that accompanies medical conferences, said Karl Stark, president of the board of the Association of Health Care Journalists, who oversees health coverage at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

While medical journals have strict standards about what researchers can claim, drug makers have no obligation to follow these rules when writing press releases. "It's the Wild West in these press releases," said Gary Schwitzer, publisher of HealthNewsReview.org, which evaluates medical coverage and press releases. Many inflate drugs' benefits but spend little to no time on side effects.

Virtually everyone touched by the health care industry has an incentive to hype medical progress, Turnham said. Scientists and universities, which face stiff competition for research grants, benefit from the publicity. Journalists face pressure to sensationalize stories to boost their ratings or Web traffic, Turnham said.

Few journalists have formal medical training. Figuring out which claims are too good to be true is a skill that typically takes years to hone.

Reporters today face greater pressures than ever before, Schwitzer said. Media organizations have spent years shrinking their staffs, while asking remaining employees to do more with less.

For its part, the health journalist association tries to raise the quality of medical coverage, both through educational sessions as well as online newsletters, Stark said. Schwitzer regularly teaches workshops at these conferences. Schwitzer listed "seven words you shouldn't use in medical news" — including three singled out by the authors of the new study — in a blog post originally published in 2000.

"Hype causes harm," Schwitzer wrote in a post Thursday . "Let the evidence speak for itself. Good evidence doesn't need the sugar coating."

Gingrich: GOP really doesn't want to repeal Obamacare

Jayne O'Donnell

USA TODAY

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich doesn't think Obamacare should be repealed, and congressional Republicans who say they want to repeal it really don't want to either, he told a Washington, D.C. health conference Wednesday.

Instead, he thinks more minor parts of the law that aren't working will be addressed because the core parts of the law have broader support than is often acknowledged.

House and Senate GOP leaders will soon start getting things done on a bi-partisan basis, Gingrich predicted, and he said they have been hampered by a far less cordial dynamic with the White House than when he led the House.

"Congress will get a lot done on a bi-partisan basis but that's a very different question than how you work with the president'," said Gingrich, who served in the House for 20 years until he resigned under an ethics cloud in 1999. "You cannot compare my relationship with Bill Clinton with Boehner's relationship with Obama."

During his bid for the Republican nomination for President in 2012. Gingrich said he had helped save Medicare from bankruptcy with the budget measure known as the "sustainable growth rate" formula. This reduced payments to physicians to balance the budget. Gingrich's boast was premature because Congress has passed legislation for 17 years known as the "doc fix" that overrides the SGR cuts.

"You can't cut reimbursements if you don't find a way to cut costs," he said.

Congress, under pressure from physician groups, appears poised to pass the first permanent "doc fix" as part of a broader Medicare overhaul. Thursday, the House passed the legislation overwhelmingly and it now must be voted on by the Senate. The bill moves Medicare more towards paying for quality over quantity when it comes to medical treatment and continues funding for the Children's Health Insurance Program.

Gingrich, who runs a consulting firm with 10 employees and writes books, has favored alternatives to Medicaid financing over the years, especially block grants to states to control costs. He has represented health care clients but insists he's never acted as a lobbyist.

He told the 2015 World Health Care Congress that existing problems with Medicaid, namely its high cost and challenges some patients have finding doctors, could be better addressed by states. His preference would be to "voucherize it," giving money to the poor to buy their own healthcare, which he says would be cheaper over time.

"Having insurance with no doctor may not be any better than having a doctor with no insurance," he said. "If you know you don't have a solution, it's better having 50 states working on it."