The Confessions of Marcus Hutchins, the Hacker Who Saved the Internet
At 22, he single-handedly put a stop to the worst cyberattack the world had ever seen. Then he was arrested by the FBI. This is his untold story.
At around 7 am on a quiet Wednesday in August 2017, Marcus Hutchins walked out the front door of the Airbnb mansion in Las Vegas where he had been partying for the past week and a half. A gangly, 6’4″, 23-year-old hacker with an explosion of blond-brown curls, Hutchins had emerged to retrieve his order of a Big Mac and fries from an Uber Eats deliveryman. But as he stood barefoot on the mansion’s driveway wearing only a T-shirt and jeans, Hutchins noticed a black SUV parked on the street—one that looked very much like an FBI stakeout.
He stared at the vehicle blankly, his mind still hazed from sleep deprivation and stoned from the legalized Nevada weed he’d been smoking all night. For a fleeting moment, he wondered: Is this finally it?
But as soon as the thought surfaced, he dismissed it. The FBI would never be so obvious, he told himself. His feet had begun to scald on the griddle of the driveway. So he grabbed the McDonald’s bag and headed back inside, through the mansion’s courtyard, and into the pool house he’d been using as a bedroom. With the specter of the SUV fully exorcised from his mind, he rolled another spliff with the last of his weed, smoked it as he ate his burger, and then packed his bags for the airport, where he was scheduled for a first-class flight home to the UK.
Hutchins was coming off of an epic, exhausting week at Defcon, one of the world’s largest hacker conferences, where he had been celebrated as a hero. Less than three months earlier, Hutchins had saved the internet from what was, at the time, the worst cyberattack in history: a piece of malware called WannaCry. Just as that self-propagating software had begun exploding across the planet, destroying data on hundreds of thousands of computers, it was Hutchins who had found and triggered the secret kill switch contained in its code, neutering WannaCry’s global threat immediately.
This legendary feat of whitehat hacking had essentially earned Hutchins free drinks for life among the Defcon crowd. He and his entourage had been invited to every VIP hacker party on the strip, taken out to dinner by journalists, and accosted by fans seeking selfies. The story, after all, was irresistible: Hutchins was the shy geek who had single-handedly slain a monster threatening the entire digital world, all while sitting in front of a keyboard in a bedroom in his parents’ house in remote western England.
Still reeling from the whirlwind of adulation, Hutchins was in no state to dwell on concerns about the FBI, even after he emerged from the mansion a few hours later and once again saw the same black SUV parked across the street. He hopped into an Uber to the airport, his mind still floating through a cannabis-induced cloud. Court documents would later reveal that the SUV followed him along the way—that law enforcement had, in fact, been tracking his location periodically throughout his time in Vegas.
When Hutchins arrived at the airport and made his way through the security checkpoint, he was surprised when TSA agents told him not to bother taking any of his three laptops out of his backpack before putting it through the scanner. Instead, as they waved him through, he remembers thinking that they seemed to be making a special effort not to delay him.
He wandered leisurely to an airport lounge, grabbed a Coke, and settled into an armchair. He was still hours early for his flight back to the UK, so he killed time posting from his phone to Twitter, writing how excited he was to get back to his job analyzing malware when he got home. “Haven’t touched a debugger in over a month now,” he tweeted. He humblebragged about some very expensive shoes his boss had bought him in Vegas and retweeted a compliment from a fan of his reverse-engineering work.
Hutchins was composing another tweet when he noticed that three men had walked up to him, a burly redhead with a goatee flanked by two others in Customs and Border Protection uniforms. “Are you Marcus Hutchins?” asked the red-haired man. When Hutchins confirmed that he was, the man asked in a neutral tone for Hutchins to come with them, and led him through a door into a private stairwell.
Then they put him in handcuffs.
In a state of shock, feeling as if he were watching himself from a distance, Hutchins asked what was going on. “We’ll get to that,” the man said.
Hutchins remembers mentally racing through every possible illegal thing he’d done that might have interested Customs. Surely, he thought, it couldn’t be the thing, that years-old, unmentionable crime. Was it that he might have left marijuana in his bag? Were these bored agents overreacting to petty drug possession?
The agents walked him through a security area full of monitors and then sat him down in an interrogation room, where they left him alone. When the red-headed man returned, he was accompanied by a small blonde woman. The two agents flashed their badges: They were with the FBI.
For the next few minutes, the agents struck a friendly tone, asking Hutchins about his education and Kryptos Logic, the security firm where he worked. For those minutes, Hutchins allowed himself to believe that perhaps the agents wanted only to learn more about his work on WannaCry, that this was just a particularly aggressive way to get his cooperation into their investigation of that world-shaking cyberattack. Then, 11 minutes into the interview, his interrogators asked him about a program called Kronos.
“Kronos,” Hutchins said. “I know that name.” And it began to dawn on him, with a sort of numbness, that he was not going home after all.
Read the whole story on Wired
Large chunks of a Chinese rocket missed New York City by about 15 minutes
A week ago, China launched the newest version of its largest rocket, the Long March 5B, from its southernmost spaceport. The launch proceeded normally and represented another success for China as it seeks to build a robust human spaceflight program. Over the next few years, this rocket will launch components of a modular space station.
Notably, because of this rocket’s design, its large core stage reached orbit after the launch. Typically during a launch, a rocket’s large first stage will provide the majority of thrust during the first minutes of launch and then drop away before reaching an orbital velocity, falling back into the ocean. Then, a smaller second stage takes over and pushes the rocket’s payload into orbit.
However, the Long March 5B rocket has no second stage. For last week’s launch, then, four liquid-fueled strap-on boosters generated most of the thrust off the launch pad. After this, the core stage with two YF-77 main engines pushed an experimental spacecraft into orbit before the payload separated.
This left the large core stage, with a mass slightly in excess of 20 tons, in an orbit with an average altitude of about 260km above the Earth. Because the perigee of this orbit was only about 160km above the planet, the core stage was slowly drawn back toward the planet as it interacted with the planet’s upper atmosphere.
This is a rather large object to make an uncontrolled return to Earth. According to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and keen observer of satellites, this is the largest vehicle to make an uncontrolled reentry into Earth’s atmosphere since 1991, when the Soviet Salyut 7 space station broke up over Argentina.
Engines likely survived
The core stage is estimated to have a mass of about 21 tons, including extra fuel on board, but it’s not clear how much of the rocket survived its interaction with the atmosphere. Although he did not have access to a detailed model of debris, McDowell estimated that at the very least, dense components of the rocket’s engines would have survived.
“I would not be surprised if several bits with masses of the order of 100 to 300kg hit the surface,” he told Ars. “I would be a bit surprised if anything as big as 1 metric ton did.”
The US Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron confirmed that the core stage re-entered Earth’s atmosphere at 11:33am ET (15:33 UTC) on Monday at a location over the Atlantic Ocean. At this point, the core stage would have been at an altitude of 80km and rapidly descending toward Earth. McDowell said there were some reports emerging about possible debris found downrange in Cote d’Ivoire.
It is perhaps worth noting that before it entered Earth’s atmosphere, the core stage track passed directly over New York City. Had it reentered the atmosphere only a little bit earlier, perhaps 15 to 20 minutes, the rocket’s debris could have rained down on the largest metro area in the United States.
China has previously shown a disregard for debris from its rocket launches, however. It frequently launches rockets from pads surrounded by land. This has led to debris from first and second stages falling on villages in the country.
It is not clear whether future launches of the Long March 5B rocket will continue to send its core stage into an unstable orbit or if this was a one-off instance during the rocket’s test flight. Certainly this will be discouraged, at the very least, by other nations.
Article via Arstechnica
Twitter employees can work from home forever, CEO says
Twitter’s new policy comes as businesses across the nation are struggling to adapt to social distancing guidelines.
Twitter will allow employees to work from home for as long as they want.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told his employees Tuesday that many of them will be allowed to work from home in perpetuity, even after the coronavirus pandemic ends, according to a company spokesperson.
“Opening offices will be our decision,” the spokesperson said. “When and if our employees come back, will be theirs.”
In an email, first obtained by BuzzFeed News, Dorsey said it was unlikely that Twitter would open its offices before September and that all in-person events would be canceled for the remainder of the year.
The company will assess its plans for 2021 events later this year.
“We were uniquely positioned to respond quickly and allow folks to work from home given our emphasis on decentralization and supporting a distributed workforce capable of working from anywhere,” the spokesperson said.
“The past few months have proven we can make that work,” she said. “So if our employees are in a role and situation that enables them to work from home and they want to continue to do so forever, we will make that happen. If not, our offices will be their warm and welcoming selves, with some additional precautions, when we feel it’s safe to return.”
Twitter’s new policy comes as businesses across the nation are struggling to adapt to social distancing guidelines and rethinking how they will operate in a post-pandemic world.
Workers weigh safety and their job in early reopen states
Major tech companies such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft were early to move to a work-from-home model and have also been the most cautious in planning for moving employees back into the office.
Google has told employees that the vast majority of them will work from home until 2021, though some will return in the early summer. Facebook will similarly start to reopen offices after the July 4 weekend but will let employees who are able to work from home do so until next year.
The long-term work-from-home policies of these companies stand in stark contrast to much of the rest of the country, where states are slowly easing lockdown restrictions. Governors in several states, including California, where Twitter, Facebook and Google are based, have already started a phased reopening of their economies.
Article via NBCNews
5 exercises to offset too much sitting
Article via CNN
It’s another day of self-isolating, which means it’s potentially another day of sitting indoors restlessly taking yet another Zoom meeting.Prolonged sitting is an unavoidable reality for many. And with lots of us spending more time inside, as the pandemic continues, it’s inevitable that we’re spending even more time being sedentary. The irony is that we’re staying home to protect our health, but all that added sitting is putting our health at risk in other ways.In addition to being a risk factor for many life-threatening cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, excessive sitting can lead to depression, chronic pain and increased risk of physical injury, according toresearch. That’s why it’s important for us to become aware of our sitting habits and do what we can to counteract them.
The poor posture problem
Poor posture is the most recognized, tangible problem associated with too much sitting. Many of us know, all too well, how our sitting posture contributes to neck and back pain while limiting our ability to move our shoulders and spine. Simple, passive stretches, like standing and raising your arms overhead, can provide immediate relief of tension and help break up long bouts of sitting, but they don’t create long-term posture changes. Only exercises that address the muscular dysfunction from poor sitting posture will strengthen weakened muscles and inhibit overactive ones to truly counteract the impact of too much sitting.
The two most common posture issues associated with sitting are Upper-Crossed Syndrome and Lower-Crossed Syndrome. Upper-Crossed Syndrome is characterized by slumping shoulders due to a dysfunctional combination of over- and underactive muscles in your chest, neck and shoulders. Lower-Crossed Syndrome, which usually goes hand in hand with its upper-body counterpart, creates issues of tension and weakness in your core, back and hips. To provide both instant relief and restore muscle function, the five exercises below include a combination of instant-gratification, feel-good stretches with posture-correcting exercises.
No more aches and pains
Practice the first three stretching and mobilizing exercises throughout your day to break up long bouts of sitting. Ideally, try to get up from sitting at least once per hour to stretch. Do the last two strengthening and mobilizing exercises daily to make lasting, positive changes to your overall posture. Many of my professional athlete clients do them as part of their daily warm-ups.You’ll notice that specific breathing instructions are included with all the exercises. That’s because your diaphragm, your primary muscle of respiration, attaches to both your rib cage and your spine. Consequently, how you breathe has a significant impact on the overall position of your ribcage and spine, which, in turn, creates your body posture. Important note: Consult your physician before starting any new exercise program. Use caution and stop if you feel any pain, weakness or lightheadedness.
Supported warrior one with hip flexor release
This move stretches out tight hip flexors and compressed side waist muscles from too much sitting.Place your left hand lightly on top of a chair or desk, and move your right foot back so that your left leg is in a short lunge position. Drop your back heel and point your toes out slightly. Bend your front knee to align above your ankle, keeping your back leg straight. Inhale as you lift your right arm up and over your head. Exhale as you side bend to the left, feeling your left lower ribs rotate inward. Avoid arching your lower back. Press the front of your right hip forward to release your right hip flexors. Hold for three long, deep breaths. Repeat on the other side.
One-arm doorframe stretch
This stretch provides relief of tension in your chest muscles and the front of your shoulders that come from slumping in a seated position.Standing and facing an open doorway, place a forearm on the doorframe with your elbow bent to 90 degrees at shoulder height. Your upper arm should be parallel with the floor. Rotate your body away from your arm until you feel a stretch in the front of your chest. Hold for three long, deep breaths, keeping your back neutral and lower ribs down. Repeat on the other side.As a variation, if you have a narrow enough doorway, you can stretch both sides at once by placing both forearms on either side of the doorframe. Instead of rotating your body, step one foot through the doorway until you feel a stretch.
Supported windmill twist
This exercise relieves the upper-body rigidity caused by a static sitting posture. The twisting motion, coordinated with your breathing, promotes mobility of your rib cage and thoracic spine while opening up the chest, side waist muscles and low back.Standing and facing a desk or counter, sit back slightly into a shallow squat position, then hinge from your hips to bend over and place your left forearm down on the desk or countertop.
Keeping your knees bent with your hips and low-back neutral, inhale as you reach your right arm forward and rotate from your shoulder, mid-back and rib cage to twist open to the right, reaching your hand upward. Hold for three breaths, using your respiration to facilitate the twist. Focus your inhalations on the open side of your rib cage (the side you’re turning to) and exhalations on the opposite side, where you can use side waist muscles to internally rotate your ribs and enable further rotation of your rib cage and mid back. Unwind and practice the rotation to the left from the same starting position with your right forearm down.
Wall angels
Wall Angels, also known as scapula (shoulder blade) wall slides work to strengthen your back muscles to counteract the overactive muscles in the front of your body that pull you into a slouched position while seated.Stand with your back against a wall, keeping your feet hip distance about 6 to 8 inches from the wall. Bend your knees slightly to use some leverage from your legs and core to help push your entire back into the wall with your lower back as flat as possible. Rest the back of your head against the wall, directing your gaze forward.
Raise your arms up to shoulder height, bending your elbows to 90 degrees with your shoulders, elbows and backs of your hands against the wall. Inhale as you slide your hands and elbows up the wall until you start to feel like it’s difficult to maintain the touch points of your back, head, shoulders, elbows and hands against the wall. Exhale as you slide your arms back to 90 degrees.Repeat this motion through five long, deep breaths. With every exhale, concentrate on moving your lower ribs in, back and down while also pulling the base of your shoulder blades down. Even though this exercise may feel difficult and awkward to hold, making you think you aren’t accomplishing much, you should find that when you move away from the wall you’ll notice an increased freedom of shoulder movement, reduced thorax stiffness and increased rib mobility.
Breathing bridge
This positional breathing exercise strengthens your diaphragm, core and glutes while releasing your hip flexors to establish an optimal rib cage and pelvis position for better overall posture.This is the starting position all of my athletes use to train their breathing and set their posture. Begin on your back with your knees bent and feet on the floor, hip distance apart. Place a foam yoga block, foam roller or rolled towel between your legs to engage your inner thighs and avoid your hips externally rotating and knees splaying out. Place your hands on your lower ribs so you can feel them moving in and out horizontally with each phase of your breath. You want to avoid upward movement of your rib cage while breathing, and you shouldn’t feel any stress or tension in your jaw, neck or shoulders.
Exhale fully, drawing your lower ribs in toward each other, feeling your core turn on and your ribcage move downward. At the end of that exhale, without breathing in yet, tuck your tailbone, flattening your low back and lifting your hips approximately 3 or 4 inches off the floor. Avoid arching your low back. Maintaining the bridge posture, inhale, trying to expand your ribs out to the sides.Hold this position using the strength of your core and glutes, taking five long, deep breaths, focused on horizontal rib movement. Repeat for a total of two sets of five breaths.Adding these five simple exercises to your daily routine will help improve your posture, reduce neck pain and backaches and boost your overall health and wellness.
L.A. County jail inmates try to get COVID-19 to be set free
A group of L.A. County jail inmates intentionally tried to infect themselves with the novel coronavirus, hoping that they would then be set free. The scheme was discovered by a trustee inmate and recorded on video that was released by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. Read the full article: https://lat.ms/3cmufeE
A man drove over 500 miles to deliver N95 masks to his sister who is a nurse
Joshua Yajcaji, 30, drove over 500 miles to bring his older sister protective equipment to the hospital where she works.
Alexis Schulman, 34, is a nurse — among the health workers who are on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic. Like many working in hospitals, Schulman and her colleagues were tight on their supply of protective gear. On its website, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls shortages in protective gear for health care personnel “a tremendous challenge to the US healthcare system.”
Yajcaji wanted to help — so he encouraged Vivint Solar, the company where he works, to donate 395 N95 masks to Cone Health’s Green Valley Campus in High Point, North Carolina, where Schulman works. The hospital is dedicated to treating Covid-19 patients.
The masks were initially bought to protect the workers at Vivint Solar. But after learning that simple face coverings would suffice for its workers as they installed solar panels, the New Jersey-based company decided to donate them to those more in need.
“My sister being in that hospital swayed my mind a bit, but for that hospital to change to a strictly Covid hospital made me make that decision,” Yajcaji told CNN.
A simple FedEx delivery would have been quick and easy, but instead, Yajcaji and his lifelong friend, Corey Vafiadis, set out at 3 a.m. last Thursday to drive 530 miles to North Carolina.
“I haven’t seen my sister in years,” Yajcaji said. “To personally bring it down with something to bring us together (let’s me) show personally I’ll always be there for her.”
Schulman knew that her brother was coming, thanks to a little birdie named mom — but that didn’t make the gesture any less heartfelt, she said.
“I wasn’t surprised. He always does things for people and giving the shirt off his back to make sure they’re taken care of,” Schulman told CNN. “Three hundred and fifty masks mean we can be well protected for another several weeks.”
After Yajcaji passed on the box of masks to his sister, the siblings shared a socially distanced hug. And then Yajcaji and his friend hit the road again to drive back 530 miles to New Jersey.
While the 1,060-mile round trip was long and tiring, Yajcaji said he would do it all over again if he could.
“My sister is my life,” he said. “She’s always been a caring person and now that she found her career as a nurse, she can’t shut up about it. She’s found a real passion for it.”
Photo Credit: Courtesy Joshua Yajcaji
A woman was caught on camera masturbating while half-naked in a Chinese IKEA store prompted stricter security
The two-minute pornographic clip shows the unidentified woman wearing just a white shirt as she pleasures herself in various sections of the store.
As other shoppers walk by, the woman initially sat on a chair, touching herself as she thrust her butt toward the camera.
She then sat on a bed with her legs spread wide — at one point seeming to catch the eye of some guys walking past — before taking off her shirt in a more secluded spot in the store.
After going viral, the X-rated footage was soon scrubbed from Chinese social media — but with interest so high, even the Swedish furniture giant’s response got 9 million views, according to Agence France-Presse.
With nobody wearing a face mask, it is also assumed that the pornographic clip was filmed before the coronavirus outbreak, which brought China to a standstill from late January. The pandemic had forced IKEA to temporarily close stores around the world, including all 50 in its second-biggest market, the United States.
“This woman is so brave, I don’t understand, [she’s] just doing it in broad daylight,” read one Weibo post that gained more than 8,000 likes.
“There are so many people around, I just don’t understand,” another wrote.
It is not the first explicit video to cause a stir on China’s tightly controlled social media platforms, AFP noted.
A Beijing branch of the Japanese clothing chain Uniqlo became infamous in 2015 after a clip of a couple having sex in one of its changing rooms went viral.
Police arrested five people, including the young couple in the video, over the matter, while Uniqlo firmly denied that it was a publicity stunt.
The clip “severely violated socialist core values,” the Chinese Cyberspace Administration said at the time.
via: https://nypost.com/2020/05/11/ikea-masturbation-incident-forces-company-to-tighten-security/
Photo Credit: asiawire
Nurse dies two weeks after rushing without N95 mask to save coronavirus patient
A Los Angeles nurse succumbed to coronavirus just two weeks after rushing without an N95 mask into an infected patient’s room to save his life, according to a report.
Celia Marcos, 61, was only protected by a surgical mask when she gave chest compressions to a man who stopped breathing at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Marcos texted her niece about how she was the “one right in front of his face,” knowing that she’d likely exposed herself to the virus, according to the report.
“Celia was called to a COVID-19 isolation room while wearing only a surgical mask — not the required N95 respirator, gown, face shield, and booties that her hospital should have given her for her protection,” said Nina Wells, who is the president of the SEIU 121RN, a Southern California nurses union, in a statement to the newspaper.
Colleagues said that Marcos had known that going to obtain PPE would waste valuable time that could potentially save the patient’s life, the outlet reported.
“The hospital wasn’t giving us appropriate PPE — the N95s were locked,” a nurse told the outlet.
Three days later, Marcos fell sick with the virus and later told her family that she developed pneumonia in both lungs, the outlet reported.
Marcos, who was previously healthy, went into cardiac arrest as she battled the virus, requiring resuscitation of her multiple times, the newspaper reported.
She died on April 17, just two weeks after she put her life at risk to save the patient, according to the report.
“It’s just too painful for everybody, what happened to her,” her colleague told the outlet.
The hospital has denied that Marcos didn’t have the proper PPE to treat the patient.
“Despite these efforts, and our commitment to following all guidelines, we still lost one of our own to this terrible virus, and we feel this loss very deeply,” the hospital said in a statement to the newspaper.
Photo Credit: facebook
Mount Sinai nurse who sounded the alarm about an inadequate supply of PPE by posting a photo of her colleagues wearing trash bags for gowns was called a “piece of s–t” and told to “shut the f–k up” by a top rep in her own union, emails show
Diane Torres, 33, a registered nurse at Mount Sinai West Hospital who posted the now viral photo on Facebook, was begging for supplies and information back in February but was continually rebuffed by hospital management, emails she sent to her union reps show.
By mid-March, Torres was infuriated by the continued lack of gear and that she wasn’t receiving adequate help from the union, so she posted the photo of her colleagues wearing the makeshift, Hefty-fashioned protective garb.
“NO MORE GOWNS IN THE WHOLE HOSPITAL,” Torres, a mom of three, wrote in the post.
When Torres’s picture got out and made it on the front page of The Post, New York State Nurses Association boss Terry Alaimo slammed her in an email to multiple union members and claimed her outcry was baseless.
“Diane is full of shit and has no F–king [idea] what is really going on… Tell Diane to shut the f–k up and if she has an issue to call me. She is not helping and I am sure she is not working. She is a useless piece of sh-t,” Alaimo, a NYSNA area director for the Mount Sinai System, wrote in the email obtained by The Post.
“Feel free to share,” Alaimo wrote at the end of the email.
Torres, who’s been toiling on the frontlines of the crisis for the last two months and previously served as an elected union delegate, said, “How dare she?”
“I’m useless because I’m trying to do whatever I can to help us? Because I’m afraid, because I’m concerned for my coworkers, for myself, for my family members?” Torres railed.
“They were angry at me because I was trying so hard. How could someone be so angry at me and hate me so much for trying to do the right thing during such difficult times?”
Torres claims she was given a single mask, gown and face shield that she was forced to use for the entire shift, even as she treated non-COVID patients in her acute rehabilitation unit.
“Prior to COVID, everything that comes into contact with the patient that’s contagious cannot leave that room and cannot be used on anyone else. Every piece that you’re wearing needs to be thrown out, it was never made or meant to be reused,” Torres said.
But once the pandemic hit, Torres had to take off the gear, hang it up, and then put it back on repeatedly as she switched between COVID and non-COVID patients, which put her and patients at risk, Torres said. She sent photos to The Post from March 26 showing her gown hanging up as she made rounds between patients.
“We became ‘unknown’ vectors of the virus and are spreading it to those we were suppose [sic] to keep healthy,” Torres told a union rep back on March 18, text messages show.
Mount Sinai Hospital said in a statement that Torres’s allegations are “not accurate” and “anyone moving from COVID to non-COVID always had to replace PPE to ensure no patients or areas were contaminated” and they “always follow CDC guidelines and policies.”
She added it was a “constant battle” to get supplies and when she requested them, she had to give an explanation as to why she needed it.
Alaimo, who earned $162,870 last year in her role according to public records, also asked about the “absolute minimum PPE” nurses needed, even as a slew of healthcare workers were getting sick and dying from the virus, messages from Alaimo show.
“Can someone let us know what you think is the absolute minimum PPE you can work with at the beginning of each shift and we will forward to them,” the message reads.
NYSNA spokesperson Carl Ginsburg downplayed Alaimo’s comments as just a “feud between two people” and said the remarks “in no way characterizes the relationship between NYSNA and its nurse members.”
Ginsburg further noted Alaimo’s comments about PPE were related to guidelines “made permissible” by the Centers for Disease Control, which lowered the PPE bar to “crisis-level” as a result of the pandemic’s magnitude.
But Torres said pointing fingers did not keep her or her colleagues safe. She believes the death of nurse manager Kious Kelly, who died on March 24, could’ve been prevented if he had proper PPE when the virus first struck. His sister previously echoed those same comments to The Post.
Ginsburg said there continues to be a lack of adequate PPE and hospitals, along with local and federal governments, need to do more to protect healthcare workers, especially as an inevitable second wave of the virus looms in the future.
In a statement, Mount Sinai Hospital said they “have always provided the proper PPE to our staff and strictly followed the CDC guidelines.”
“The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated countless lives and families and while our heroes on the frontlines continue to save lives, we will continue do everything in our power to ensure they are protected and supported as best we possibly can,” the hospital statement said.
via: https://nypost.com/2020/05/11/nurse-who-complained-about-lack-of-ppe-told-to-shut-the-f-k-up/
Photo Credit: Matthew McDermott
Photos of armed protesters in North Carolina carrying a rocket launcher, shotguns, and pistols while ordering food at a Subway restaurant are trending
Travis Long/The News & Observer
- Photos of armed protesters ordering sandwiches at a Subway restaurant in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Saturday quickly started to trend over the weekend.
- The protesters marched through Raleigh’s downtown streets to oppose the state’s stay-at-home orders, which it started easing Saturday.
- The armed protest came after others around the country, including a demonstration inside Michigan’s Capitol.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Photos of a group of nearly a dozen armed protesters parading through downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, on Saturday afternoon quickly started to trend.
Travis Long, a photojournalist for The News & Observer, tweeted the photos he took of protesters carrying shotguns, pistols, and an AT-4 anti-tank rocket launcher into a Subway restaurant.
The protesters marched to oppose the state’s stay-at-home orders, which it started easing on Saturday as the state entered phase one of the reopening process, The News & Observer reported.
The photos were widely shared in the US and even given the meme treatment after an Ohio woman digitally replaced the weapons with sandwiches.
The protesters organized on a Facebook group called Blue Igloo, according to The News & Observer. The Facebook page called the protest an “opportunity for First and Second Amendment supporters to get together, meet people with commonalities and get some exercise while we’re all wasting away at home.”
When a member of the demonstration entered the Subway restaurant, he asked if they could come inside and order and said they weren’t trying to scare anyone, according to a livestream of the march reviewed by The News & Observer.
North Carolina had nearly 15,000 COVID-19 cases and over 550 deaths as of May 10, according to Johns Hopkins.
The armed protest is not the first to spark conversation and criticism. A similar demonstration in Michigan’s Capitol on April 30 also drew widespread attention.
via: https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/xandr/photos-armed-protesters-north-carolina-204704216.html
Photo Credit: currently.att.yahoo.com