Monday, January 03, 2022

One Free Press Coalition's '10 Most Urgent' list, January 2022


Yahoo News Staff
Mon, January 3, 2022

Ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, the “10 Most Urgent” list for January 2022 focuses on the dire state of press freedom in China. Media outlets worldwide unite as the One Free Press Coalition to publish this list and draw attention to the most pressing cases of threats against journalists.

This past year, China continued to imprison and detain journalists without consequence, as well as weaponize surveillance and physically threaten journalists to censor them. According to CPJ’s 2021 census, China remains the world’s worst jailer of journalists for the third year in a row, with 50 behind bars. This year also marked a new concerning trend for the country, with the list including journalists held in Hong Kong for the first time since CPJ started collecting data in 1992.


Police officers take away Next Media chairman Jimmy Lai Chee-ying in 2014. (K. Y. Cheng/South China Morning Post via Getty Images)


Hong Kong media entrepreneur and democracy advocate Jimmy Lai Chee-ying is serving a 20-month prison sentence and awaiting trial on national security and fraud charges. If convicted, he could face a potential life sentence. Lai founded Next Digital Limited, a media company that published the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily and Next Magazine, which were both forced to close this year due to pressure and ongoing threats from authorities.


Zhang Zhan. (Amnesty International)

It has been over a year since the independent journalist was sentenced to four years in prison for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” after publishing videos critical of the government’s COVID-19 response. She has been on an ongoing hunger strike behind bars and is now in critically ill health.


Ilham Tohti, an outspoken scholar of China’s Turkic Uyghur ethnic minority, at his home in Beijing in 2013. (Andy Wong/AP)

Uyghur writer, blogger and scholar Ilham Tohti is serving a life sentence on charges of separatism. He is the founder of the Uyghur news website Uighurbiz, which was published in Chinese and Uyghur and focused on Uyghur rights and social issues, and has been denied freedom since 2014.


Veteran rights activist Huang Qi at his home in Chengdu in southwestern China’s Sichuan province in 2012. (Gillian Wong/AP)

Huang Qi, publisher of the human rights news website 64 Tianwang, is serving a 12-year sentence on accusations of “deliberately leaking state secrets” and “illegally providing state secrets to foreign countries.” He is critically ill and has been denied medical treatment, as well as denied visits and communication with his mother, who is dying of cancer.


Wan Yiu-sing. (RFA.org)

Wan Yiu-sing, an internet radio host and commentator who covers political issues in mainland China and Hong Kong for the independent internet radio channel D100, was arrested by Hong Kong police in February. Wan’s arrest came amid authorities’ crackdown on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. He is being held in detention while on trial for alleged sedition and money laundering and was hospitalized in February due to undisclosed health issues.


Sophia Huang Xueqin, a freelance journalist who wants to raise people's awareness of sexual harassment in China, in 2017. (Thomas Yau/South China Morning Post via Getty Images)

Chinese freelance journalist Sophia Huang Xueqin disappeared on Sept. 19, along with labor activist Wang Jianbin, one day before she was scheduled to board a plane to the United Kingdom to study abroad. On Sept. 27, it was reported that both had been detained for allegedly “inciting subversion of state power” and are being held under “residential surveillance at a designated location,” a form of extrajudicial detention.


Haze Fan. (International Federation of Journalists)

Haze Fan is a reporter and producer covering breaking business news in China for Bloomberg News, and despite no charges being brought against her, she continues to be held in pretrial detention for allegedly endangering national security.


Zhou Weilin. (RFA.org)

A reporter for Chinese-language human rights news website Weiquanwang, Zhou Weilin has published news and commentary on social media about labor issues and disability rights. Zhou is currently serving a sentence of three years and six months on charges of picking quarrels and provoking trouble, and he plans to appeal.


Gulmire Imin. (USCIRF)

Uyghur journalist Gulmire Imin is serving a 19-year, 8-month prison sentence on charges of separatism, leaking state secrets and organizing an illegal demonstration. In 2009, police arrested Imin, who wrote articles critical of the government that year, and she was one of several administrators of Uyghur-language web forums who were arrested after the 2009 riots in Ürümqi, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.


Gulchehra Hoja at the Women in the World Summit in New York in 2019. (Brendan McDermid/Reuters)

After joining Radio Free Asia in the U.S. in 2001, journalist Gulchehra Hoja was sent a “red notice” from China, banning her from returning home. Today, members of her family have been deliberately targeted with constant government surveillance and harassment and have endured numerous detentions in retaliation for her journalism and her work at Radio Free Europe, according to Gulchehra and the International Women’s Media Foundation. Following Gulchehra’s interviews with escapees, prison guards and other officials, she testified in May 2019 before the U.S. House of Representatives committee on the dangers of reporting on human rights.
Jailed Egyptian-Palestinian freed after more than 2 years in prison

AFP -



Egypt's prosecution ordered the release of Egyptian-Palestinian activist Ramy Shaath on Monday after almost two and a half years in detention, a judiciary source told AFP.

The source said that Shaath, the son of veteran Palestinian politician Nabil Shaath, "has been released by the prosecution". There were no further details.

His wife, French national Celine Lebrun, told AFP: "I heard about the decision but according to what I know he is not yet out."

She added that she would release a statement once he is confirmed to be free.

Lebrun was deported from Egypt shortly after her husband's arrest.

Earlier on Monday, prominent MP Mohamed Anwar Sadat had announced "an imminent decision to release" Shaath and deport him.

Shaath, 50, was a figure of the 2011 uprising in Egypt and the coordinator of the Egyptian chapter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.

He was arrested in July 2019 and faced charges of aiding a terrorist organisation.

In April 2020, he was placed on Egypt's terror list alongside 12 other people.

In December, five human rights groups called on French President Emmanuel Macron to pressure Egypt to release Shaath.

Macron had previously addressed his detention in a news conference in Paris with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in December 2020.

Egypt's space for dissent has been severely restricted since Sisi took office in 2014.

Rights groups say Egypt is holding some 60,000 political prisoners, many facing brutal conditions and overcrowded cells.

Egypt ranks in the lowest group on the Global Public Policy Institute's Academic Freedom Index.

The decision to release Shaath comes almost a month after an Egyptian court freed researcher Patrick Zaki whose detention in 2020 sparked international condemnation.

Zaki was freed on December 7 but still faced charges of "spreading false news", "harming national security" and "incitement to overthrow the state", among others.

He had been referred to trial in September before an exceptional state security court for an article containing excerpts from his personal diary recounting the discrimination faced by the country's Coptic Christian minority.

Amnesty International previously said Zaki had allegedly been tortured while being interrogated by national security officers, including using electric shocks and beating.

Zaki's detention also strained ties with Italy where he had been studying.

In a 2019 interview with the show 60 Minutes on US broadcaster CBS, Sisi said there were no political prisoners in Egypt.

The former army chief became president in 2014 after leading the military ouster of Islamist president Mohamed Morsi a year earlier.

bam/jsa/hkb

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M

Elizabeth Holmes found guilty on 4 counts of defrauding Theranos investors


·Reporter

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was convicted on three counts of criminal wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud Monday, with a jury unanimously finding her guilty of illegally fleecing investors out of millions of dollars through her startup blood diagnostics company. 

The jury deadlocked on three counts of wire fraud, and she was found not guilty on four counts of defrauding patients.

Holmes, 37, turned toward the judge and jurors as the judge's deputy read the verdict to the packed courtroom in San Jose’s federal district court. The former media darling, dressed in a gray skirt suit sat upright and poised flanked by two of her defense attorneys.

On eleven separate felony counts, each carrying a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, the jury found Holmes guilty on 3 of 9 counts of wire fraud and 1 of 2 counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Holmes’ sentence will be handed down by presiding federal judge Edward Davila at a later date. Under California law, felony convictions must be scheduled for sentencing within 20 days of a guilty verdict, though exceptions to that rule can apply.

Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes  and her family leave the federal courthouse after attending her fraud trial in San Jose, California, U.S. January 3, 2022.  REUTERS/Brittany Hosea-Small
Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and her family leave the federal courthouse after attending her fraud trial in San Jose, California, U.S. January 3, 2022. REUTERS/Brittany Hosea-Small

Holmes was free to leave the courthouse following the verdict.

The landmark case, one of the most closely watched in Silicon Valley history, establishes a new bar for the extent to which startup ventures and their founders who overhype the capabilities of their products and services can steer clear of the U.S. Justice Department’s scrutiny.

Representations made by startup founders like Holmes have not always attracted significant pressure from federal prosecutors, partially due to the typical agreements that multi-millionaire and billionaire investors attest to before they make their investments, attesting to their understanding of the highly speculative nature of such wagers.

However, Holmes was also accused of defrauding customers who paid for her company’s commercialized blood-testing service through its partnership with Walgreens. According to prosecutors, customers who spent money on the service, only to receive erroneous results, were also duped because Theranos’ tests were never reliable.

Six of the wire fraud charges (counts 3 -8) in the indictment against Holmes were based on multi-million dollar investments in Theranos made between 2013 and 2014. Two wire fraud charges (counts 10 & 11) were based upon payments made by Theranos customers in exchange for blood services, while an additional charge (count 12) pointed to a money transfer tied to Theranos’ advertisements of its services.

Each of two conspiracy charges separately alleged that between approximately 2010 and approximately 2015, Holmes conspired with her former boyfriend and Theranos COO Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani to defraud investors and patients. Balwani is facing a separate trial, scheduled to begin next year

Ag her time running Theranos from 2006 until it imploded in 2018 under legal and regulatory pressure. The charges however singled out particular investments totaling approximately $154 million made during the two years when Theranos was preparing for and rolling out its serviceA s in Walgreens stores.

The jury’s decision was based on testimony from more than 30 witnesses — including Holmes’ herself, who took the stand in her own defense — as well as arguments from each party's lawyers, and more than 900 exhibits introduced over the trial’s 15 weeks.

“Elizabeth Holmes was building a business and not a criminal enterprise,” Holmes’ attorney Kevin Downey told the jury in closing arguments.

In rebuttal, U.S. Assistant Attorney John Bostic painted a starkly different picture, telling jurors, “The disease that plagued Theranos was not a lack of effort, it was a lack of honesty.”

Alexis Keenan is a legal reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow Alexis on Twitter @alexiskweed.

Elizabeth Holmes: Silicon Valley's fallen star

Elizabeth Holmes's Silicon Valley star came crashing down under the pressure of fraud allegations 


Issued on: 04/01/2022

an Francisco (AFP) – Elizabeth Holmes's startup Theranos made her a multi-billionaire hailed as the next US tech visionary by age 30, but it all evaporated in a flash of lawsuits, ignominy and, finally, criminal charges.

The rise and fall of Holmes, who on Monday was convicted of defrauding investors of her biotech startup, is a heavily-chronicled saga that prompted a hard look at her methods but also the unseemly aspects of startup life.

In many ways Holmes fit the image of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, from her dark-colored turtleneck sweaters that evoked tech legend and Apple founder Steve Jobs to her dropping out of California’s elite Stanford University.

But much like in her trial, the fundamental question has been whether she was a true visionary who simply failed, as she claimed on the stand, or a skilled self-promoter who took advantage of a credulous context to commit fraud.

Her story begins in the US capital Washington, with her birth to a Congressional staffer mother and a father whose online biography says he was once an executive at Enron -- an energy company that collapsed in a massive fraud scandal.

She won admission to Stanford, and there began work on cutting-edge biomedical initiatives, founding in 2003 what would become Theranos when she was just 19.

Part of Holmes's ability to convince her backers was her apparent deep personal commitment -- she applied for her first patent while still in college and after dropping out, convinced her parents to let her use her tuition savings to build the company.

'Youngest woman self-made billionaire'


By the end of 2010 she had raised a whopping $92 million in venture capital for Theranos, which she pledged was developing machines that could run a gamut of diagnostic tests on a few drops of blood.

Over the next couple years she assembled what one news report called the "most illustrious board in US corporate history", including former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Shultz as well ex-Pentagon chief Jim Mattis.

"Sharp, articulate, committed. I was impressed by her. That didn't take the place of having the device prove itself," said Mattis in a surprise appearance on the stand.

Theranos hype kicked up another gear in 2014 and in the span of just over a year, a turtleneck-wearing Holmes appeared on the covers of Fortune, Forbes, Inc. and T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

Forbes gave her a $4.5 billion net worth in 2014, which was based on her half ownership of Theranos, and noted: "Youngest woman on Forbes 400; Youngest woman self-made billionaire."

This glowing coverage had an impact on Theranos investors like venture capitalist Chris Lucas who told Holmes's trial the Fortune article made him "proud we were involved, very proud of Elizabeth."

But there were some things that didn't end up in those glowing reports that gushed with statements like "Steve Jobs had massive ambition, but Holmes's is arguably larger."

Silicon Valley sexism?

For one, she personally put the logos of pharma giants Pfizer and Schering-Plough onto Theranos reports hailing its own blood-testing technology, which were then shared with investors.

That was done without the companies' permission and was a key piece of the prosecution's argument that she deliberately tried to inflate Theranos's credibility in order to win over backers.

She also kept secret the machines' failings and the fact that once Theranos began to do diagnostics on real patients, some of the tests were done using the same equipment sold to standard labs.

Ultimately though, it was a series of Wall Street Journal reports starting in 2015 — which Holmes tried to kill by appealing to the paper's owner and Theranos investor Rupert Murdoch — that set the company's collapse in motion.

Holmes's case also raised questions about why she was prosecuted, but not other tech CEOs who engaged in the "fake it until you make it" Silicon Valley method or other bad behavior.

Ellen Pao, the former CEO of Reddit and critic of tech industry discrimination, argued in a New York Times opinion piece that sexism bears some blame.

She noted that WeWork's Adam Neumann and Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick raised billions with hype, while there have been allegations of racism and sexism at Tesla and misleading claims about vaping from Juul's leaders.

Holmes "should be held accountable for her actions as chief executive of Theranos," Pao wrote.

But "it can be sexist to hold her accountable for alleged serious wrongdoing and not hold an array of men accountable for reports of wrongdoing or bad judgement," she added.

© 2022 AFP
PRIVATE FOR PROFIT
CEO who built new model for senior care resigns amid regulatory scrutiny

Eleanor Laise - 

The CEO who played a significant role in the dramatic expansion of government-funded home and community-based care for frail seniors has stepped down from the company she built as regulatory concerns continue to mount.

Maureen Hewitt resigned as chief executive of InnovAge Holding effective January 1, the Denver-based company announced Monday. InnovAge is the largest provider in the Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE), a Medicare- and Medicaid-funded service designed to meet all the healthcare needs of frail seniors while keeping them out of nursing homes.


The leadership shakeup comes amid regulatory setbacks that threaten to curtail InnovAge’s rapid growth. Federal and state regulators in late December suspended enrollment of new Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries at the company’s Colorado locations, saying InnovAge had failed to provide medically necessary services to PACE participants in the state. In Colorado, InnovAge failed to schedule or delayed scheduling services for patients and failed to follow up on specialists’ diagnoses and recommendations, among other issues, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said in a December letter to Hewitt. After the enrollment freeze, InnovAge withdrew its fiscal year 2022 guidance, and the company’s stock has since dropped roughly 40%.

The regulators’ findings in Colorado echo concerns raised by former InnovAge employees and patient advocates and reported by MarketWatch in November. InnovAge participants, which include some of the most fragile and medically complex seniors, often face long waits for medical appointments, difficulty accessing specialist care, and prescription delivery problems, former employees and others familiar with the company told MarketWatch.

The day after the MarketWatch article was published, InnovAge announced the appointment of Patrick Blair, a former home health company executive, as president. Blair has now succeeded Hewitt, becoming CEO and president, the company announced Monday. Hewitt is also stepping off of InnovAge’s board.

Regulatory issues come as industry groups push to expand home-based services.

Hewitt, who became InnovAge’s CEO in 2006, played a pivotal role in transforming InnovAge from a humble nonprofit organization into a for-profit corporation that had a Wall Street growth story. With private equity backing, InnovAge has rapidly increased its enrollment in recent years and has a high-profile board of directors that includes two former top Medicare officials.

But the company’s March 2021 initial public offering was quickly followed by regulatory issues, including a September enrollment suspension at InnovAge’s Sacramento location, based on problems similar to those cited by regulators in Colorado. Because Medicare and Medicaid pay PACE providers fixed monthly rates to cover participants’ healthcare needs, providers can profit by skimping on patient care, critics of for-profit PACE say. InnovAge says its approach improves care quality while reducing overuse of high-cost care settings.

InnovAge’s regulatory troubles come as some lawmakers and industry groups are pushing to further expand home and community-based services such as PACE that can help keep seniors out of nursing homes. More than 144,000 nursing home residents and staff members have died of COVID-19.

InnovAge is working with CMS and the Colorado Department of Health Care Policy and Financing to respond to the enrollment suspension and is evaluating options regarding its right to appeal the sanctions, the company said in late December.

“COVID has presented unique challenges to all providers, including PACE,” Blair said in a statement. “Still, it is a great care model. I know we can address the issues presented and return to a very constructive partnership with the California and Colorado programs.”

“I am very proud of what we accomplished at InnovAge,” Hewitt said in a statement. “I believe PACE is the best way to care for low-income seniors, and I know we have done a tremendous job for many thousands of participants and their families in the 15 years I have been privileged to lead the company.”
CRIMINAL CRYPTO CAPITALI$M
Indian Authorities Crack Down on Six Crypto Exchanges on Suspicion of Tax Evasion
Tanvir Zafar
Mon, January 3, 2022


Up to six cryptocurrency exchanges have come under the spotlight of India’s Directorate General of Goods and Services Tax Intelligence (DGGI) on the suspicion of tax evasion.

According to sources privy to the investigations, the DGGI is looking into the operations of some of the country’s biggest crypto service providers, including BTC and ETH trading exchanges like Coinswitch Kuber, BuyUCoin, CoinDCX, and UnoCoin.

The sources also revealed that the crackdown on the crypto traders has so far uncovered tax evasion to the tune of about Rs 70 crore, which is equivalent to $6.2 million.

WazirX First to be Investigated

Late last year, the Central Goods and Services Tax (CGST) Mumbai Zone, revealed in a tweet that its officers had detected massive Goods and Services Tax (GST) evasion perpetrated by one of India’s premier crypto service providers, WazirX.

In the tweet, CGST revealed that it had recovered Rs 49.2 crore, which is about $4.3 million, in cash, as GST, interest, and penalties, from Zanmai Labs, the parent company of WazirX

Authorities also stated that WazirX, which records almost $43B in trading volume annually, had also launched its own digital currency, the WRX, which can be used alongside the Rupee to carry out transactions on the platform but had failed to pay any GST on it.

WazirX collects commissions on every crypto transaction on its platform from both the buyer and the seller. Transactions using WRX, attract a commission of 0.1%, while transactions carried out using the rupee attract a commission of 0.2%.

However, DGGI investigators claim that the platform only paid out GST on commissions earned from rupee transactions but not from WRX transactions. Both the rupee and WRX transactions attract a GST of 18%.

But reacting to the raid on their offices, a representative of Zanmai Labs blamed India’s ambiguous tax regime for the ensuing confusion.

In a press release, the crypto exchange said:

We voluntarily paid additional GST in order to be cooperative and compliant. There was and is no intention to evade tax. That being said, we strongly believe that regulatory clarity is the need of the hour for the Indian crypto industry.
DGGI Warns of Further Action Against Crypto Service Providers

Chainanalysis’ Global Crypto Adoption Index puts India second in a list of 154 countries where crypto use is most prevalent, and the DGGI has hinted that it is not done with investigations into India’s booming crypto space, alluding that more raids were in the offing. Officials say that future crackdowns will include Non-Fungible Token (NFT) platforms and coin launches.

Speaking to the ANI news agency, a DGGI official said:

They are providing facilitation intermediary services for buying and selling of crypto coins. These services attract a GST rate of duty of 18% which all of them have been evading.

This article was originally posted on FX Empire

Event-Betting Platform Polymarket to Pay $1.4 Million U.S. Fine

Ben Bain
Mon, January 3, 2022

(Bloomberg) -- Polymarket, an online platform for betting on politics, economic indicators and other real-world events, will pay $1.4 million to settle U.S. regulators’ allegations it offered illegal trading and must “wind down” contracts people use to wager.

The firm, whose popularity surged during the pandemic, has been running an unregistered platform that lets people bet on the outcome of events since around June 2020, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said in a statement Monday. Polymarket didn’t admit or deny wrongdoing in the settlement.

“All derivatives markets must operate within the bounds of the law regardless of the technology used, and particularly including those in the so-called decentralized finance or ‘DeFi’ space,” Vincent McGonagle, the CFTC’s acting director of enforcement, said in the statement. The commission said that Polymarket received a “reduced” penalty for cooperating with the investigation.

Polymarket, operated by New York-based Blockratize Inc., said in a statement that in the wake of the settlement it will prematurely wind down three betting markets set to expire after Jan. 14 and refund people’s money. The company didn’t say how it planned to change its business to ensure it was complying with CFTC rules.

“An announcement on the future of Polymarket will be released in the coming days,” the firm said. “We are thrilled to put this settlement behind us, and are prepared and excited for the next chapter.”

For its part, the CFTC also didn’t specify the process for Polymarket listing new contracts that comply with its rules. Getting approval for binary options like the ones that the regulator says the firm was offering can be a lengthy and complicated process.

Instead of U.S. dollars, customers who want to make trades on Polymarket have to use USD Coin, a stablecoin backed by Coinbase Global Inc. The platform doesn’t take custody of money or digital tokens, and just displays existing markets live on the Ethereum blockchain.

According to the order settling the allegations, Polymarket must certify to the CFTC by no later than Jan. 24 that it has wound down all of its non-compliant contracts, and must make funds available for redemption by those who had bet in the market.




#HANDSOFFVENEZUELA
Venezuela Doubles Crude Oil Exports Defying U.S. Sanctions

Lucia Kassai
Mon, January 3, 2022


(Bloomberg) -- Oil exports from Venezuela doubled in December from a year earlier as the country raises production of revenue-generating hydrocarbons in defiance of U.S. sanctions.

Shipments averaged 619,000 barrels a day in December. The OPEC-founding member increased exports for a third straight month with the support of ally Iran, which boosted the supply of a key ingredient that aids production.

Output touched the crucial mark of 1 million barrels on a single day in December, state-owned oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA said. Production averaged 625,000 barrels a day during the entire month of November.

Exports are rising after benchmark Brent oil rose 50% last year, the largest gain since 2016, as global demand bounces back from the pandemic. The increase also comes at at time when the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies may boost supplies amid a tighter first-quarter surplus than initially expected.

Still, it’s unclear if the spike in shipments is sustainable because China, the biggest buyer of Venezuelan oil, continues to crack down on the energy sector. Private fuelmakers in the Asian nation are at the center of allegations of tax violations and non-compliance with environmental rules. There are already signs of problems. Supertankers laden with Venezuelan oil that have sailed to Asia end up floating off the coasts of Singapore and Malaysia for months waiting for Chinese buyers.

The U.S. amped up sanctions against the regime of President Nicolas Maduro in 2017, cutting off the South American nation’s access to U.S. refiners. Crippled by the move and with buyers in India and Spain also shunning its oil, Venezuela resorted to unorthodox tactics. It has been disguising and rebranding the oil in order to hide its origins and circumvent sanctions.
INSIDER TRADING
Chris Rokos and Partners Were Paid $1.2 Billion Before Hedge Fund Slid

Nishant Kumar
Mon, January 3, 2022

(Bloomberg) -- Billionaire Chris Rokos and his partners paid themselves 914 million pounds ($1.2 billion) just before their investors suffered a record year of losses.

Roughly 509.4 million pounds of that total went to Rokos himself for the year ending March 2021, the most since he started trading for his hedge fund firm, a filing with U.K.’s Companies House shows. A spokesman for Rokos Capital Management declined to comment.


The payout followed the 44% return that the macro trader generated in 2020, which helped lift his firm’s revenue by nearly four times to more than 1 billion pounds for the period, according to the filing. The $12 billion firm was on track to post a record loss last year, having slumped 25% through November.

Bond-market volatility in 2021 triggered by growing speculation that central banks would raise rates faster than expected to contain inflation hurt a group of high-profile macro traders including Rokos.

For all of 2020 through November of last year, Rokos investors made just about 8%, compared with a 19% gain for hedge funds on average, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The S&P 500, although not the best comparison, rose 46%.


The 2020 results, however, show the outsized compensation hedge fund managers stand to reap in a good year. Yet even as the industry mints billionaires at a heady pace thanks to stellar returns, investors who stick around hoping the performance will repeat often end up with mediocre gains -- if not losses.

Rokos, who co-founded Brevan Howard, earned $4 billion at that firm from 2004 to 2012. He has an estimated net worth of $1.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Climate change will bring more hurricanes to New York, other midlatitude cities, study finds


·Senior Climate Editor

A new study projects that more hurricanes will be coming to midlatitude regions, which include major population centers such as New York, Boston and Shanghai, because of climate change.

The study, published last week in the peer-reviewed British journal Nature Geoscience, finds that tropical cyclones — which are also known as hurricanes or typhoons — will expand from the tropical regions in which they are currently common. Due to global warming, the conditions that create hurricanes will become prevalent farther north in the northern hemisphere and farther south in the southern hemisphere.

Most of the world’s major cities are located in midlatitude regions, meaning that the more widespread hurricanes will have the ability to cause far more damage.

In a press release from Yale University, the article’s lead author, Joshua Studholme, a physicist in Yale’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, noted that hurricanes in the 21st century will appear in a wider range of latitudes than they have for the last 3 million years. “This represents an important, under-estimated risk of climate change,” he said.

An illustration of a hurricane approaching the United States.
A hurricane approaches the U.S. (Composite illustration via Getty Images)

The reason for the shift in hurricane latitudes has to do with the global wind pattern known as the Hadley cell, a circulation in which air flows poleward at a height of about 6 to 9 miles but returns toward the equator as it descends toward ground level. One effect of climate change is a decrease in the difference between surface temperatures near or far from the equator. Warming occurs more rapidly at higher latitudes because of feedback loops such as melting sea ice, loss of snow cover, and thawing permafrost, causing even more warming. However, air at higher altitudes actually warms faster in the tropics. Those changes mean the jet stream — which normally prevents hurricanes from flowing farther north in the northern hemisphere — is moving northward, allowing hurricanes to reach higher latitudes.

“Global warming causes the [Hadley] circulation to expand, and with it the jet streams move poleward,” study co-author Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told Yahoo News.

Areas in the increasingly at-risk regions have already begun to see some hurricanes make landfall. In 2020, Subtropical Storm Alpha made landfall in Portugal, the first time a subtropical or tropical cyclone had ever hit the Western European nation.

Studholme and colleagues from Yale, MIT, the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology in Russia and the University of Reading in England analyzed mathematical simulations of warmer climates from the Earth’s past and showed that tropical cyclones likely formed in the subtropics. That hasn’t been the case for the last 3 million years but probably will be again in the near future if temperatures continue warming. In addition to the wind damage and heavy rains from hurricanes, the risk of flooding from storm surges will be elevated as sea levels rise due to climate change.

A person stands looking at a ship that was washed ashore by a typhoon.
A ship washed ashore by Typhoon Trami in Yonabaru, on the island of Okinawa, Japan, in September 2018. (Kyodo News via Reuters)

“Some of the most populous seaside cities in the world — think New York, Tokyo, Shanghai and so forth — are not deep in the tropics,” Emanuel noted. “They’re a little bit further away. They always have had hurricanes, but very rarely. If they start getting more hurricanes, and if they’re stronger, and if they’re pushing water on top of an already elevated sea level, that’s going to be trouble for them.”

Average global temperatures have risen 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 Fahrenheit) in the last 150 years, which is faster than at any other time in recorded history. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the extent to which the Earth warms further in the next 80 years could vary by several degrees, depending on how much greenhouse gases that cause warming are emitted.

“The control over this is the temperature gradient between the tropics and the poles, and that’s very tightly linked to overall climate change,” Studholme told BBC News. “By end of this century, the difference in that gradient between a high emission scenario and a low emission scenario is dramatic. That can be very significant in terms of how these hurricanes play out.”

Study: Climate change is making typhoons more dangerous for Asia, and their ‘destructive power’ will double by the end of the century


·Senior Climate Editor

The “destructive power” of tropical storms in the Pacific Ocean, known locally as typhoons, could double by the end of the century, according to a new study.

The average typhoon could last around five hours longer, with average wind speed at landfall increased by 6 percent, and it would travel 50 percent further inland, according to the projections of researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area Weather Research Centre for Monitoring Warning and Forecasting in Shenzhen.

These changes would collectively make typhoons twice as damaging — and they already are well underway. Between 1979 and 2016, typhoons increased in duration by two to nine hours and penetrated 30 to 190 kilometers farther inland, the researchers found. The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Earth Science. Its findings are based on a scenario in which average global temperatures reach 3.7 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels by 2100, which is a likely outcome if greenhouse gas emissions remain high, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. So far, temperatures have risen by 1.2 degrees Celsius from that baseline.

The effects of these stronger storms are visible in recent Asian cyclones such as Typhoon Rai, which hit the Philippines on Dec. 16. On Monday, the Philippine government raised the number of confirmed deaths from Rai to 388. There are an additional 60 people still missing and an estimated 500,000 left homeless after winds or flooding damaged or destroyed 482,000 houses. 

Alona Nacua carries her son over debris from their house destroyed by Typhoon Rai in Cebu City, central Philippines, on Christmas Day.
Alona Nacua carries her son over the debris from their house destroyed by Typhoon Rai in Cebu City, Philippines, on Dec. 25. (Jay Labra/AP Photo)

Previous studies have found that higher average global temperatures, due to emissions of greenhouse gasses, are causing more intense storms, because warmer weather causes more evaporation. Other studies have concluded that storms from warmer seawater temperatures ramp up quicker.

“More Asian inland regions may be exposed to further severe typhoon-related hazards in the future as a result of climate change,” the lead author of the study, Francis Tam Chi-yung, a professor of Earth System Science at Chinese University of Hong Kong, told the South China Morning Post. The most affected areas will include major cities such as Hong Kong and Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi.

Hong Kong was hit by super-typhoons in 2017 and 2018, causing widespread damage from flooding and the impact of heavy wind, such as trees being toppled.

More than two years after Trump

tweeted a classified image of Iran, 

former officials are divided on fallout


·National Security Correspondent

On the morning of Aug. 30, 2019, then-President Donald Trump was receiving his daily intelligence briefing with a a select group of senior national security officials, including CIA Director Gina Haspel, national security adviser John Bolton and other top aides.

U.S. officials at the meeting were delighted. The previous day, Iran had attempted to launch a satellite into space, but the launch had failed spectacularly, with the rocket exploding on the pad.

Included in that morning’s briefing materials was a classified image, taken by satellite, of the botched rocket launch, showing extensive damage to the site.

The president was taken by the image. “Trump thought this was very neat, and asked if he could keep it,” said a former Trump administration official. “And after some hesitation, the intelligence briefer said, 'Yes.'"

Officials had been nervous about leaving the image with the president, according to the former official, who attended the meeting. “Gina [and other intelligence officials] may have said something like, ‘Well, don’t do anything with it, don’t show it to anybody.’ But I think he just blew them off. He said, ‘I just want to look at the picture.’”

About an hour later, Trump tweeted the picture.

Donald Trump
Then-President Donald Trump in June 2020. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Some officials worried that Trump’s decision to release the image compromised a key U.S. spy capability, potentially giving Iran a leg up in concealing its nuclear and missile programs. Now, with the U.S. and Iran embroiled in contentious indirect negotiations over salvaging the 2015 nuclear deal, from which the Trump administration withdrew in 2018 and Iran appearing to prepare for another satellite launch, officials and experts are still split on the fallout from Trump’s move.

“Any effort the U.S. or our allies are taking to disrupt or monitor” Iranian satellite launches “should have been held in the utmost secrecy,” said Michael Mulroy, who served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East from 2017 to late 2019.

The same technology used to propel satellites into orbit can be used to develop ballistic missiles, so top U.S. officials kept a close eye on these launches, worried that Tehran was aiming to develop weapons — including, in the future, nuclear ones — that could strike anywhere on Earth.

“Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than it was while in the [2015] agreement,” says Mulroy. “By some estimates, they could have one in a matter of months. This makes their efforts to develop a delivery system even more important.”

But during the Trump presidency, officials had difficulty getting the president’s attention on the subject. “It was simply not something, despite repeated efforts, I could get Trump to focus on strategically,” wrote Bolton in “The Room Where It Happened,” an account of his time in the Trump administration.

One thing is certain: President Trump’s decision to release the classified image was anything but conventional. Trump could not attach the photo to a tweet digitally, since the electronic devices some use to access their classified daily intelligence briefs are cut off from the open Internet. So Trump had an aide take a photo of the picture from the hard copy of Trump’s daily brief and post it online, according to the former Trump administration official.

Trump's move seemed designed to mock the Iranians and raise the specter of U.S. sabotage. “The United States of America was not involved in the catastrophic accident during final launch preparations for the Safir SLV Launch at Semnan Launch Site One in Iran. I wish Iran best wishes and good luck in determining what happened at Site One,” he tweeted in the text that accompanied the image.

U.S. presidents have unlimited authority to declassify information, but the decision to release this image from a U.S. spy satellite — without interagency discussion or first degrading the image quality, and on such an expedited timeline — was likely unprecedented, according to former officials. (Indeed, academic analysts, using commercially available imagery, had already exposed the failed launch before the president’s tweet.)

Michael Mulroy
Michael Mulroy, former assistant secretary of defense for international security assistance. (Monica King/courtesy U.S. Army)

Although U.S. spy satellites’ orbital paths are widely known — to adversarial intelligence services, academic researchers and amateur astronomers alike — images from these satellites are generally highly classified, as they reveal the satellites’ precise resolution capabilities, which are superior to commercially available technology, according to former officials.

The intelligence community was “extraordinarily unhappy” that Trump released the image, said the former Trump administration official, adding that a senior intelligence official called him after the tweet asking “what the f*** was going on” at the White House.

The tweet of the image was “incredibly stupid and ridiculous and damaging,” said a former senior official at the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the agency responsible for U.S. spy satellites.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence and National Reconnaissance Office did not return requests for comment.

Some Trump-era officials recall the president’s decision differently.

Trump brought up publishing the image at the morning intelligence meeting, said a former senior White House official who also attended the meeting. And while CIA Director Haspel and other intelligence officials were opposed to the idea, “they didn’t blow a gasket over it,” said the former official. In fact, this person recalled, the image was only classified at the “secret” level.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket
A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket is launched from Cape Canaveral, Nov. 13, 2020. (Joe Skipper/Reuters)

There was little pushback from top intelligence community and Pentagon officials about releasing the photo, according to multiple Trump administration officials. “There was no particular angst” about releasing the photo, said a former senior intelligence official.

“It wasn’t a crown jewel, by any stretch of it,” says the former senior White House official. And in any case, say Trump era officials, advances in commercially available satellite imagery meant that the picture that the president released wasn’t much better than what was widely publicly available.

Not so, says the former senior NRO official. The image Trump released was classified at the “top secret codeword” level — that is, the highest possible level of secrecy, said this former official. The image was taken by a KH-11 series reconnaissance satellite — among the most sensitive employed by the U.S. intelligence community, according to former officials.

The tweet cost “billions” in damage, estimated the former senior NRO official. “The gift that [the Iranians] were given was, ‘Oh, the Americans have this capability with this satellite series, now we know,’” said the former senior NRO official. “It’s because they saw the resolution” the satellite was capable of, added this official.

At the NRO, officials worried about what their platforms might now be missing, since Iran and other U.S. adversaries — newly aware of U.S. spy satellite powers — would likely change their behaviors. “It degraded our confidence in that capability to pick up things that we might otherwise have picked up,” said this former official.

Iranian protesters set a U.S. flag on fire
Iranian protesters outside the former U.S. Embassy in Tehran mark the 40th anniversary of the Iran hostage crisis. (Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images)

The image revealed U.S. spy satellite resolution capabilities that are three times better than the best commercially available imagery, says Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and expert on satellite imagery. “Mathematically, it’s not an order of magnitude better, but analytically, it was an order of magnitude better.”

Lewis found the image highly instructive. “As an outsider who tries to keep very close tabs on what the U.S. intelligence community is doing on the classified side,” the image “was a goldmine, and I learned a lot,” he says.

Lewis believes that the release of the image likely “had an impact on intelligence communities around the world.”

“I don’t want to exaggerate how bad it was,” says Lewis, who notes he is generally an advocate for greater government openness. “It’s not that the satellites stopped working. It’s just that it aids countries in deceiving those satellites.”

Lewis says Iran has introduced new measures to make satellite-based analysis of their launch activities more difficult, which he attributes to a mix of what the Iranians learned from the image released by Trump, as well as the increased public scrutiny from open source analysts like him. What precisely caused the change in Iranian behavior is “hard to disentangle,” Lewis says.

Some Trump administration officials dismissed the concerns about revealing the image as overblown.

“I also heard those whines and whimpers and clutching of pearls” from the intelligence community about the tweeted image, said a former senior administration official. “But I did not see any change [in spy satellite capabilities], or nobody gave me a convincing case of why that mattered.”

The former senior intelligence official chalked it up to “parochial concerns” at the NRO. “To be very blunt, NRO thinks any satellite imagery that is ever released anywhere is a big deal, whether it comes from them or anyone else,” said this former official.

Donald Trump
Then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump at a rally in Dallas, September 2015. (Tom Pennington/Getty Images)

But NRO officials were shocked — and too intimidated to speak up, recalled the former senior NRO official.

“It was almost like, you don’t want to bring the weight of the president” onto NRO “because you can see that he’s just gone with a flamethrower with the FBI and CIA,” said this former official. “And NRO was like, we just want to be left alone.”

The president’s actions were calculated, according to the former senior White House official. Trump said that the tweet will “get inside the Iranians’ head, whether [the explosion on the launchpad] was an accident or not,” said this former official. “He was pretty convinced he was going” to tweet the image, “and he did it.”

The former official denied that the explosion was the result of U.S. covert action. “The missile blew up; it wasn’t anything we did to it,” he said.

The Iranians “are extremely accident-prone right now” because they lack the funds to do the necessary upkeep on their space program, said the former senior administration official. “There are things that do just happen by accident.”

But others were less definitive about the explosion being accidental. “There was a lot of heartburn” over the tweet, says a former senior Pentagon official. “If you’ve had, generally speaking, covert action success, you need to keep it covert. Because that’s what made it a success.”

Kentucky workers who survived
tornado say candle factory should
have been closed that night


Producer

For Kyanna Parsons-Perez and Andrea Miranda, last Friday will be a night they’ll never forget. Despite tornado warnings, both were set to work the night shift at the Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory in southwestern Kentucky.

That night, both women were trapped for two hours after a monstrous tornado ripped through the production plant and the building collapsed.

“I just heard everybody screaming and yelling, ‘I’m going to die, we’re not going to survive.’ People were screaming for their family, kids, husband, wife. That’s all I heard. I was screaming for my family myself. There was a lot of suffering,” Miranda told Yahoo News.

Andrea Miranda takes a selfie.
Andrea Miranda had been working at the Mayfield, Ky., candle factory for two years. (Andrea Miranda)

Miranda, 21, moved from Puerto Rico to Kentucky two years ago in order to work at the candle factory — earning more there than she was while on the island. Parsons-Perez had just begun working at the production plant in early November.

“My faith, my faith helped keep me alive. My faith in God, my faith in that he won’t leave me,” Parsons-Perez, 40, said.

There were 110 people on the clock at the candle factory the night the tornado obliterated the plant, part of a string of violent twisters that tore tracts throughout the upper South. At least eight people died from the tornado at the Mayfield plant — including a co-worker who had been Miranda and Parsons-Perez’s close friend. “We’re very similar and to know I won’t see that face, that smile, or hear those sassy comments like ‘OK, girl,’ that’s so heartbreaking for me,” Miranda said.

A flattened car and a large field of debris at the destroyed Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory.
Emergency workers search through the rubble of the Mayfield Consumer Products candle factory on Saturday after it was destroyed by a tornado in Mayfield, Ky. (John Amis/AFP via Getty Images)

The workers question why they were in the factory that night as the threat of tornadoes was present throughout the region. The company’s spokesperson has said there “were regular drills and the employees went to the shelter, which is an interior part of that building,” but that the “tornado was of such rare size and strength” that the building was overpowered.

“I wish they would have said, because of the extreme weather, we’re not going to have to come in tonight. Then maybe Janine would still be here. Kayla would still be here,” Parsons-Perez added.

Miranda told Yahoo News she recalls asking management prior to that Friday if employees had to come in to work. She was told they should. Several factory workers spoke out, saying they were threatened with firing if they left their shifts early; the company has denied the allegations, which it called “absolutely untrue.”

“We’re heartbroken about this, and our immediate efforts are to assist those affected by this terrible disaster,” the Mayfield Consumer Products CEO said in a statement on the company website. “Our company is family-owned and our employees, some who have worked with us for many years, are cherished. We’re immediately establishing an emergency fund to assist our employees and their families.”

Kyanna Parsons-Perez at the candle factory.
Kyanna Parsons-Perez at work at the production plant. (Kyanna Parsons-Perez)

The Mayfield factory was the third-biggest employer in southwestern Kentucky, according to the Guardian, producing scented candles for Bath & Body Works and other major retailers.

Parsons-Perez said the workers in the Mayfield factory were overwhelmingly Black or Latinx.

“Boom. Everything came down on us. All you heard was screams. ... We have a lot of Hispanic people there — Puerto Rican, Mexican, Guatemalan. ... You can hear people screaming and praying in Spanish,” she recalled in another interview of the moment the building collapsed and the workers there became trapped.

“It was a tornado. I believe someone should be held accountable, but who do you hold accountable for something like this?” Parsons-Perez asked Yahoo News.

As the community of Mayfield continues to mourn the lives lost from the devastating destruction, Miranda and Parsons-Perez both hold on to the faith that helped them stay alive underneath the rubble.

“There’s a God up there looking and protecting us at all times, and I know everything will be better — maybe not tomorrow or the next day — but it will be OK. And we will be better than before the tornado happened,” Miranda said.

Both Miranda and Parsons-Perez have launched GoFundMe pages to help them rebuild after the disaster.