“A $95 billion package with aid to both Ukraine and Israel passed the Senate on Tuesday night after the House’s various adjustments were approved in the lower chamber over the weekend. By a vote of 79 to 18, the Senate sent the package to President Biden’s desk, and he is expected to sign off on the additional foreign aid. It notably passed with more votes than the previous Senate-passed version had garnered in February. The package ultimately included aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, alongside measures requiring TikTok to divest from Chinese-owned ByteDance and to allow $5 billion in Russian assets held in U.S. banks to be transferred to Ukraine.” (04/23/24)
“The Philippines’ Securities and Exchange Commission has ordered Google and Apple to remove cryptocurrency exchange Binance from their app stores. In a press release out Tuesday, the regulator said it had sent letters to Google and Apple requesting [sic] the removal of applications controlled by Binance from the Google Play Store and Apple App Store, respectively. SEC Chairperson Emilio Aquino said the Philippine public’s continued access to Binance sites and apps ‘poses a threat to the security of the funds of investing Filipinos.’ The agency accused Binance of offering unregistered securities to Filipinos and operating as an unregistered broker, adding that this violates the country’s securities laws.” (04/23/24)
“The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday unveiled a rule extending mandatory overtime pay to an estimated 4 million salaried workers, going even further than an Obama-era rule that was struck down in court. The U.S. Department of Labor rule will require employers to pay overtime premiums to workers who earn a salary of less than $1,128 per week, or about $58,600 per year, when they work more than 40 hours in a week. The current salary threshold of about $35,500 per year was set by the Trump administration in a 2020 rule that worker advocates and many Democrats have said did not go far enough. The rule does not affect overtime requirements for workers who are paid hourly.” (04/23/24)
“The United Nations'[s] human rights chief on Tuesday called for an international investigation into mass graves discovered at two Gaza hospitals that Israeli forces recently assailed and destroyed, further imperiling the enclave’s barely functioning healthcare system. Volker Türk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said in a statement that he was ‘horrified’ by the discovery of mass graves at the Nasser and al-Shifa medical complexes, which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reduced to ruins. More than 300 bodies were reportedly discovered in the mass grave near the Nasser facility in Khan Younis, Gaza, and eyewitnesses said Israeli soldiers executed civilians during their two-week-long raid of al-Shifa last month.” (04/23/24)
“The underbelly of New York City’s tabloid media industry was laid bare in a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday. A famous publisher outlined a secret plan he had with Donald Trump and his personal lawyer Michael Cohen, calling it an ‘agreement among friends.’ Prosecutors questioned former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker for nearly three hours. He testified that the three worked to suppress negative stories about the candidate during his 2016 campaign. ‘This could be a very big story, so I believe that it should be removed from the market,’ Mr Pecker said he would advise the former president about killing certain articles. Mr Pecker’s testimony could prove critical for prosecutors as they seek to prove that Mr Trump tried to influence the election by quelling a story of an alleged affair. Mr Trump has pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records.” (04/23/24)
“A legal challenge over the British government’s role in allowing weapons to be sent to Israel can be heard at the High Court later this year, a judge said Tuesday. Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq and the U.K.-based Global Legal Action Network filed the challenge in December, calling for the U.K. to stop granting licenses for arms exports to Israel. They said they acted after Britain’s government ignored their written requests to suspend arms sales to Israel following the deadly Oct. 7 Hamas attack that triggered the Israeli-Hamas war. The case had been dismissed in February, but a High Court judge on Tuesday granted a judicial review hearing for it in October.” (04/23/24)
“UnitedHealth says files with personal information that could cover a ‘substantial portion of people in America’ may have been taken in the cyberattack earlier this year on its Change Healthcare business. The company said Monday after markets closed that it sees no signs that doctor charts or full medical histories were released after the attack. But it may take several months of analysis before UnitedHealth can identify and notify people who were affected. UnitedHealth did say that some screen shots containing protected health information or personally identifiable information were posted for about a week online on the dark web, which standard browsers can’t access.” (04/23/24)
“A Moscow court on Tuesday denied US journalist Evan Gershkovich’s appeal against the extension of his pre-trial detention in the espionage case that he and American authorities have rejected as false. Gershkovich, 32, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, has been in Moscow’s notorious Lefortovo prison for more than a year after he was arrested while on a reporting trip to Russia. He is the first Western journalist since the Soviet era to be arrested by Moscow on spying charges – accusations that he, his employer and the US government reject.” (04/23/24)
“Google fired around 20 workers for participating in protests against its $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government, according to an activist group representing the workers. In total, the company has now fired around 50 employees over sit-in protests held in Google offices last week that were part of yearslong discontent among a group of Google and Amazon workers over claims that Israel is using the companies’ services to harm Palestinians.” (04/23/24)
“Three million children in Haiti are in need of humanitarian assistance as continuing gang violence hampers aid delivery, the head of the UN children’s agency, Unicef, has said. Catherine Russell said the situation in gang-wracked Haiti was ‘catastrophic’ and growing worse ‘by the day.’ She told a meeting of the UN Security Council that in many areas essential services had collapsed. Meanwhile, a transitional presidential council has still not been sworn in. While Haiti has been blighted by gangs for years, the armed groups stepped up their attacks at the end of February when Prime Minister Ariel Henry travelled to Kenya to seal a deal for a multinational security force to be deployed to the Caribbean nation. Mr Henry was prevented from returning to Haiti as the gangs attacked the international airport, forcing its closure.” (04/23/24)
