(NewsNation) — A teenager campaigning for Raphael Warnock, the Democratic senator running to keep his seat in the Dec. 10 Georgia runoff election, was shot and injured Thursday night.

The teen was transported to a local hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries, NewsNation affiliate WAVY reports.

The teen was campaigning in Savannah for Warnock and at the front door of a residence when the suspect, 42-year-old Jimmy Paiz, allegedly fired a shot through the closed door and striking him, the Savannah Police Department said.

This combination of photos shows, Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, Aug. 3, 2021, left, and Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker speaking in Perry, Ga., Sept. 25, 2021. (AP Photo)

Police identified and located Paiz at the residence. He has been charged with aggravated assault and aggravated battery. It was not immediately clear on Friday afternoon whether Paiz had a lawyer to represent him.

“I am saddened to learn about this incident,” Warnock said in a statement emailed to The Associated Press. “I am praying for the victim and their family and wish them a full recovery.”

Warnock faces Republican challenger Herschel Walker in the fast-approaching Georgia Senate runoff election, which was required after neither candidate was able to garner the necessary 50% of votes cast in the general election. Warnock did, however, have around 36,000 votes more than Walker on Nov. 8.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The Kremlin says US refusal to recognise Moscow’s annexed territories in Ukraine is hindering any potential settlement and EU members agree on Russia oil price cap

• See all our Ukraine war coverage

US president, Joe Biden, said on Thursday that he was prepared to speak to Russian president Vladimir Putin if he was looking for a way to end the war but that Putin had not yet indicated that. President Putin is open to talks on a possible settlement in Ukraine but the refusal of the United States to recognise annexed territories as Russian is hindering a search for any potential compromise, the Kremlin said.

European Union member states have agreed to put a $60 a barrel price cap on Russian oil after Poland, which was holding out, gave the green light to the deal. In an effort to reduce the Kremlin’s income from fossil fuels, the EU has agreed to limit the amount that can be paid for seaborne oil to diminish Moscow’s ability to finance its war in Ukraine.

Up to 13,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed since Russia invaded in February, according to Kyiv’s presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak. At certain points in the war, Ukraine said that between 100 and 200 of its forces were dying a day on the battlefield, making Podolyak’s estimate seem conservative. Speaking to Ukraine’s 24 Kanal, Podolyak said they were official figures from Ukraine’s general staff.

Three people were killed and seven wounded in Russian shelling of the southern Ukrainian region of Kherson over the past 24 hours, the regional governor said.

Russian-installed authorities in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region said that they would start evacuating some people with reduced mobility from the Russian-occupied town of Kakhovka, on the east bank of the Dnieper River. The evacuations were set to start on Saturday, they said in a Telegram post on Friday.

Germany is aiming to deliver seven Gepard tanks that had been destined for the scrap pile to Ukraine this spring, adding to 30 of the air-defence tanks that are already being used to fight against the Russian army, Der Spiegel magazine reported on Friday.

Russian troops in Ukraine are deliberately attacking the country’s museums, libraries and other cultural institutions, according to a report issued by the US and Ukrainian chapters of the international writers’ organisation PEN.

The Finish prime minister, Sanna Marin, has called for Europe to build its own defence capabilities in the wake of the war in Ukraine, saying that without US help Europe is not resilient enough.

The International Atomic Energy Agency hopes to reach an agreement with Russia and Ukraine to create a protection zone at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant by the end of the year, the head of the UN atomic watchdog was quoted as saying. The nuclear plant, Europe’s biggest, provided about a fifth of Ukraine’s electricity before Russia’s invasion, and has been forced to operate on backup generators a number of times, Reuters reported.

The United States is reportedly working with two Middle Eastern countries to shift advanced Nasams air defence systems to Ukraine in the next three to six months. Kyiv received two of the eight approved deliveries of Nasams in early November.

Russia tested a new missile defence system rocket, its defence ministry said. The missile was launched from the Sary Shagan testing range in Kazakhstan. Other than saying the test was successful, the ministry gave few other details.

The chief economic adviser to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, has called on BP to exit Russia entirely after the fossil fuel firm was offered a £580m dividend by the oil giant Rosneft. Oleg Ustenko has written to BP’s chief executive, Bernard Looney, to demand the British company cuts ties with the state-controlled Russian firm nine months after announcing its intention to leave the country.

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Elon Musk’s Twitter is leaning heavily on automation to moderate content, doing away with certain manual reviews and favoring restrictions on distribution rather than removing certain speech outright, its new head of trust and safety told Reuters.

Twitter is also more aggressively restricting abuse-prone hashtags and search results in areas including child exploitation, regardless of potential impacts on “benign uses” of those terms, said Twitter Vice President of Trust and Safety Product Ella Irwin.

“The biggest thing that’s changed is the team is fully empowered to move fast and be as aggressive as possible,” Irwin said on Thursday, in the first interview a Twitter executive has given since Musk’s acquisition of the social media company in late October.

Her comments come as researchers are reporting a surge in hate speech on the social media service, after Musk announced an amnesty for accounts suspended under the company’s previous leadership that had not broken the law or engaged in “egregious spam.”

The company has faced pointed questions about its ability and willingness to moderate harmful and illegal content since Musk slashed half of Twitter’s staff and issued an ultimatum to work long hours that resulted in the loss of hundreds more employees.

And advertisers, Twitter’s main revenue source, have fled the platform over concerns about brand safety.

On Friday, Musk vowed “significant reinforcement of content moderation and protection of freedom of speech” in a meeting with France President Emmanuel Macron.

Irwin said Musk encouraged the team to worry less about how their actions would affect user growth or revenue, saying safety was the company’s top priority. “He emphasizes that every single day, multiple times a day,” she said.

The approach to safety Irwin described at least in part reflects an acceleration of changes that were already being planned since last year around Twitter’s handling of hateful conduct and other policy violations, according to former employees familiar with that work.

One approach, captured in the industry mantra “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach,” entails leaving up certain tweets that violate the company’s policies but barring them from appearing in places like the home timeline and search.

Twitter has long deployed such “visibility filtering” tools around misinformation and had already incorporated them into its official hateful conduct policy before the Musk acquisition. The approach allows for more freewheeling speech while cutting down on the potential harms associated with viral abusive content.

The number of tweets containing hateful content on Twitter rose sharply in the week before Musk tweeted on Nov. 23 that impressions, or views, of hateful speech were declining, according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate – in one example of researchers pointing to the prevalence of such content, while Musk touts a reduction in visibility.

Tweets containing words that were anti-Black that week were triple the number seen in the month before Musk took over, while tweets containing a gay slur were up 31%, the researchers said.

Irwin, who joined the company in June and previously held safety roles at other companies including Amazon.com and Google, pushed back on suggestions that Twitter did not have the resources or willingness to protect the platform.

She said layoffs did not significantly impact full-time employees or contractors working on what the company referred to as its “Health” divisions, including in “critical areas” like child safety and content moderation.

Two sources familiar with the cuts said that more than 50% of the Health engineering unit was laid off. Irwin did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the assertion, but previously denied that the Health team was severely impacted by layoffs.

She added that the number of people working on child safety had not changed since the acquisition, and that the product manager for the team was still there. Irwin said Twitter backfilled some positions for people who left the company, though she declined to provide specific figures for the extent of the turnover.

She said Musk was focused on using automation more, arguing that the company had in the past erred on the side of using time- and labor-intensive human reviews of harmful content.

“He’s encouraged the team to take more risks, move fast, get the platform safe,” she said.

On child safety, for instance, Irwin said Twitter had shifted toward automatically taking down tweets reported by trusted figures with a track record of accurately flagging harmful posts.

It also was restricting hashtags and search results frequently associated with abuse, like those aimed at looking up “teen” pornography. Past concerns about the impact of such restrictions on permitted uses of the terms were gone, she said.

The use of “trusted reporters” was “something we’ve discussed in the past at Twitter, but there was some hesitancy and frankly just some delay,” said Irwin.

“I think we now have the ability to actually move forward with things like that,” she said.

As if the GOP does not have enough problems — they now have Mike Lindell. As Palmer Report has already laid out, the pillow expert is determined to be the next head of the Republican National Committee.

That’s the small news. That’s right. Since Lindell announced his candidacy, the GOP has received even more bad news. One would not have thought it possible. Lindell has implied that if he doesn’t win, he might not accept the election results. Oh my. This is getting good, is it not?

Lindell was actually asked that question. Would he accept the results if he is the loser? Now one would expect any normal candidate to answer simply “Yes.”

But this is Mike Lindell we are dealing with. “Normal” is not a part of his vocabulary. “That’s a pretty good question,” Lindell answered, undoubtedly causing national groans of consternation from many a republican all across the country.

“If there’s any computer used,” Lindell went on, “I would question any election which used a computer.” Republicans — what have you gotten yourselves into? This is definitely not a good answer and one which pretty much promises to give the GOP a headache.

Lindell won’t commit to accepting the results of his own party’s election? What on earth is the GOP going to do about him? Most likely — nothing. Because they can’t. Lindell can run if he wants to.

I personally do not think Lindell has the votes to win. But the paranoid pillow peddler sees deep-state people everywhere, and the GOP has to get used to the fact that for Lindell, some of their own may indeed be a part of said deep state.

So, get your popcorn ready because Lindell’s back, and this time it is Republicans to whom he’s giving the headache. I do not know how this shapes up, but for the GOP, it’s just one more problem in a sea of unending crazy.

The post The RNC’s Mike Lindell nightmare just got even uglier appeared first on Palmer Report.

U.S. President Joe Biden does not intend to speak to his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, about ending the Ukraine war as conditions for such discussions currently do not exist, the White House said on Friday.

“We’re just not at a point now where talks seem to be a fruitful avenue to approach right now,” national security spokesperson John Kirby told reporters.

His comment underscored the chasm between Ukraine and its main backer and Russia on negotiations more than nine months into the war ignited by Putin’s invasion that has killed tens of thousands, uprooted millions and destroyed cities and towns.

As part of a multi-pronged international campaign to curb Russia’s ability to wage war, the Group of Seven (G7) nations and Australia on Friday said they had agreed a $60 per barrel price cap on Russian seaborne crude oil.

The G7 and Australia said in a statement the cap would take effect on Dec. 5 or very soon thereafter. It aims to reduce Russia’s income from selling oil, while preventing a spike in global prices.

European Union governments, which have resolved their differences over the cap, will now need to formally approve it over the weekend.

The chair of the Russian lower house’s foreign affairs committee, Leonid Slutsky, told Tass news agency the EU was jeopardising its own energy security with the cap.

Kyiv says peace talks are only possible if Russia halts its attacks and withdraws from all Ukrainian territories it seized.

But the Kremlin said the West must recognise Moscow’s declared annexation in September of “new territories” before any talks with Putin.

“The president of the Russian Federation has always been, is and remains open to negotiations in order to ensure our interests,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

State Department spokesman Ned Price said the United States would continue providing military assistance to Ukraine with the aim of forcing Russia into genuine peace talks.

Mykhailo Podolyak, a political adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, told Reuters that Russia’s offers of talks were “an illusion”.

There was an “absolute consensus” among Western states, he said, that there could be no direct talks with Putin and that any negotiations with Moscow could be held only if it pulled out all its troops.

Ukraine and allies fear any ceasefire without a total withdrawal would let Russian forces recover from a string of losses and regroup.

Peskov said Russia would not pull out of Ukraine. He added that the search for ways to end the war was hindered by the U.S. refusal to recognise Russia’s territorial annexations.

Biden has not spoken directly with Putin since the Feb. 24 invasion. In March, he branded Putin a “butcher” who “cannot stay in power”. However, he has signalled in recent weeks that Washington would like to entice Putin onto a diplomatic off ramp, after months of battlefield losses.

Putin told German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in a phone call that the Western line on Ukraine was “destructive” and urged Berlin to rethink its approach, the Kremlin said.

In Berlin’s readout on the call, Scholz’s spokesperson said the chancellor had condemned Russian air strikes on civilian infrastructure and called for a diplomatic solution to the war “including a withdrawal of Russian troops.”

Putin has said he has no regrets about launching what he calls a “special military operation” to disarm and “denazify” Ukraine. Ukraine and the West say Putin has no justification for what they cast as an imperial-style war of occupation.

Some contacts have been sustained between the sides. A deal that partially lifted a Russian naval blockade of Black Sea ports has allowed some grains shipments out of Ukraine, and another agreement on Russian fertilizers is in the works.

Several large prisoner of war swaps have occurred. Zelenskiy said on Friday that Russia had released 1,331 detainees so far.

But the fighting has persisted unabated in Ukraine’s east and south.

With winter tightening its grip, Western countries are working to boost aid to help Ukraine withstand Russian missile and drone attacks.

In the east, the town of Bakhmut is now the main target of Moscow’s artillery attacks.

Three people were killed and seven wounded in Russian shelling of the Kherson region over the past 24 hours, the regional governor said on Friday.

The regional capital of Kherson – recaptured in mid-November – and other parts of the region were bombarded 42 times in the same period, Governor Yaroslav Yanushevych said.

Meanwhile, Russian-installed officials in Donetsk said three people died on Friday after Ukrainian forces shelled the eastern Ukrainian city.

Reuters could not independently confirm battlefield reports.

In a grisly development, several Ukrainian embassies abroad received packages containing animal eyes, Ukraine’s foreign ministry said on Friday.

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It’s remarkable how many Republican political figures are still trying to use the Trump playbook, and they still can’t figure out why they’re getting nowhere with it. What they don’t get is that the Trump playbook never really worked for Donald Trump to begin with.

Trump proved himself a highly ineffective campaigner in 2016, pandering to the same base over and over instead of trying to expand his base, and he only “won” for reasons that had nothing to do with him. Yet Republican candidates still copycat his ineffective campaign approach.

Once in office, Trump tried fending off criminal probes by tweeting controversial things, which didn’t help him; instead he only survived due to the built in protections of the office. Yet Republicans still think they can fend off grand jury testimony and such by tweeting things.

Part of this may be that the mainstream media is still pushing the narrative that Trump is a uniquely effective campaigner who has strategically fended off all criminal probes. That’s ratings driven fiction. But some Republican politicians still seem to believe the media hype.

Now that Trump’s 2024 “campaign” has quickly turned out to be a punchline, and even the media is starting to admit Trump is about to be indicted, we’ll see if Republican politicians finally figure out that the “Trump playbook” was always a dud, and abandon it.

But if the Republicans want to keep nominating Trump-like candidates such as Dr Oz and Kari Lake, and if Republican office holders want to keep trying to thumb their noses at grand jury subpoenas and such, they’re welcome to face the consequences of such stupid behavior.

The post The GOP still hasn’t figured out that Donald Trump’s playbook is empty appeared first on Palmer Report.

Qualys researchers demonstrated how to chain a new Linux flaw with two other two issues to gain full root privileges on an impacted system.

Researchers at the Qualys’ Threat Research Unit demonstrated how to chain a new Linux vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-3328, with two other flaws to gain full root privileges on an affected system.

The vulnerability resides in the snap-confine function on Linux operating systems, a SUID-root program installed by default on Ubuntu.

The snap-confine is used internally by snapd to construct the execution environment for snap applications, an internal tool for confining snappy applications. 

The CVE-2022-3328 is a Snapd race condition issue that can lead to local privilege escalation and arbitrary code execution.

“In February 2022, Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU) published CVE-2021-44731 in our “Lemmings” advisory. The vulnerability (CVE-2022-3328) was introduced in February 2022 by the patch for CVE-2021-44731).” reads the post published by Qualys.

“The Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU) exploited this bug in Ubuntu Server by combining it with two vulnerabilities in multipathd called Leeloo Multipath (an authorization bypass and a symlink attack, CVE-2022-41974 and CVE-2022-41973), to obtain full root privileges.”

The experts chained the CVE-2022-3328 flaw with two recently discovered flaws in Multipathd, which is a daemon in charge of checking for failed paths.

Multipathd runs as root in the default installation of several distributions, including Ubuntu.

The two vulnerabilities in the Multipathd are:

• CVE-2022-41974 (CVSS 7.8) – The device-mapper-multipath allows local users to obtain root access, exploited alone or in conjunction with CVE-2022-41973. Local users that are able to write to UNIX domain sockets can bypass access controls and manipulate the multipath setup. This issue occurs because an attacker can repeat a keyword, which is mishandled when arithmetic ADD is used instead of bitwise OR. This could lead to local privilege escalation to root.
• CVE-2022-41973 (CVSS 7.0) – The device-mapper-multipath allows local users to obtain root access, in conjunction with CVE-2022-41974. Local users that are able to access /dev/shm can change symlinks in multipathd due to incorrect symlink handling, which may lead to controlled file writes outside of the /dev/shm directory. This could be used indirectly for local privilege escalation to root.

“Successful exploitation of the three vulnerabilities lets any unprivileged user gain root privileges on the vulnerable device. Qualys security researchers have verified the vulnerability, developed an exploit and obtained full root privileges on default installations of Ubuntu.” Qualys added.

The FAQ section included in the advisory confirms that the vulnerability is not remotely exploitable.

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Linux)

The post A new Linux flaw can be chained with other two bugs to gain full root privileges appeared first on Security Affairs.

(NewsNation)  — The future of President Joe Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan is headed to the Supreme Court, and the justices agreed to hear oral arguments as soon as February. But the hold on student loan cancellation means many borrowers are in a state of uncertainty before a decision is made.

“That is incredibly fast for this court,” NewsNation’s Joe Khalil said Friday on “Morning in America.”  “Remember they have to take up hundreds of cases every single term … it is an indication of how important this case is when it comes to how many people it’s going to impact.”

The plan has faced several legal challenges since it was rolled out this fall. Critics say Biden’s administration lacks the authority to wave student debt and that only Congress has the power to do so. Biden says those with outstanding student loan debt are now waiting in legal limbo.

Here’s what we know about the status of loan repayment and potential forgiveness:

When do payments start?

The student loan payment pause has been extended until either the U.S. Department of Education is allowed to move forward with Biden’s student debt relief program or the litigation of that program is resolved.

Payments will restart 60 days after whichever of those outcomes happens first, according to the Education Department’s website.

If the debt relief program hasn’t taken effect and the litigation is still unresolved by June 30, 2023, then payments will start again 60 days from that date. Borrowers will receive a notification from the Department of Education before their payments are expected to resume.

What about interest?

The relief suspended loan payments with 0% interest and stopped collections on defaulted loans.

Most borrowers’ will resume paying their loans at the same interest rate they were before the pause took effect. Exceptions include those who consolidated their loans during the pause, according to the Department of Education.

Borrowers can check their interest rate through their loan servicer.

Do I need to do anything by Jan. 1?

No. The extended pause will happen automatically.

As a result of ongoing litigation, the education department no longer is accepting applications for student loan forgiveness. It will hold on to applications that were received before the submission period closed.

Will I need to reapply for forgiveness if it’s implemented?

The most up-to-date information on the education department’s website says those seeking loan forgiveness would have until Dec. 31, 2023 to apply, although the department isn’t currently accepting applications.

If you’ve already applied for debt forgiveness, the education department will hold on to your application.

Because information about the relief program is still evolving, Biden has encouraged borrowers to sign up for notifications through the Department of Education’s website so they are alerted when updated information is available.

Norwegian chess world champion Magnus Carlsen and online platform Chess.com on Friday urged a U.S. federal court to toss a $100 million libel suit brought against them by U.S. teenage grandmaster Hans Niemann, whom Carlsen has accused of cheating.

Chess.com executive Daniel Rensch and Carlsen said in their filings that Niemann is an “admitted” cheater who failed to identify any defamatory statements by them in his lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Missouri.

“After years of trying to curate a reputation as the bad boy of chess, plaintiff Hans Niemann wants to cash in by blaming others for the fallout from his own admitted misconduct,” Carlsen’s filing said.

Niemann’s lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Niemann, 19, said in his lawsuit that the defendants are “colluding to blacklist” him from professional chess and that he has been shunned by tournament organizers since five-time world champion Carlsen, 32, accused him of cheating at the Sinquefield Cup in St Louis, Missouri in September.

Carlsen’s surprise defeat and unusual decision to immediately withdraw from the tournament set off a flurry of speculation in the chess world that Carlsen believed Niemann had cheated.

Rumor erupted into scandal later that month when Carlsen resigned after one move in a match against Niemann during an online tournament. Carlsen then released a statement saying he believed Niemann had cheated “more – and more recently – than he has publicly admitted.”

Chess.com, an internet chess server, banned Niemann after the first match against Carlsen and later published a report saying he had likely cheated more than 100 times in online games.

Niemann has admitted to cheating in online chess matches when he was 12 and 16 years old but has denied ever doing so in during tournaments involving prize money. Tournament organizers say they have not found any evidence that Niemann cheated.