https://finance.yahoo.com/news/treasury-begins-special-measures-avoid-150732979.html

Treasury Taps Retirement Funds to Avoid Breaching US Debt Limit

(Bloomberg) – The Treasury Department is beginning the use of special measures to avoid a US payments default, after the federal debt limit was reached Thursday.

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The department is altering investments in two government-run funds for retirees, in a move that will give the Treasury scope to keep making federal payments while it’s unable to boost the overall level of debt.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen informed congressional leaders of both parties of the step in a letter on Thursday. She had already notified them of the plan last week, when she flagged that the debt limit would be hit Jan. 19.

Yellen reiterated that the period of time that the extraordinary measures will avoid the government running out of cash is “subject to considerable uncertainty,” and urged Congress to act promptly to boost the debt limit. Last week she said the steps wouldn’t likely be exhausted before early June.

The specific funds affected by the Treasury’s move are:

The Civil Service Retirement and Disability Fund, or CSRDF, which provides defined benefits to retired and disabled federal employees

The Postal Service Retiree Health Benefits Fund, or PSRHBF, which provides postal-service retiree health-benefit-premium payments. The fund is also invested in special-issue Treasuries

The two funds invest in special-issue Treasury securities that count under the debt limit. After the debt limit is increased, the three will be “made whole,” with participants unaffected.

EXPLAINER: What’s the Debt Ceiling, and Will the US Raise It?

It’s far from the first time the Treasury has resorted to these moves: Since 1985, the agency has used such measures more than a dozen times.

For the CSRDF, Yellen said that the Treasury is entering a “debt-issuance suspension period” starting Thursday and lasting through June 5. The Treasury will suspend additional investments credited to the fund and redeem a portion of the investments held by it, she said.

As for the PSRHBF, the Treasury will suspend additional investments of amounts credited to that fund, Yellen said.

Last week, Yellen had advised that the Treasury also anticipated tapping — this month — the resources of a third fund, the Government Securities Investment Fund of the Federal Employees Retirement System Thrift Savings Plan, which is a defined-contribution retirement fund for federal employees.

The so-called G Fund is a defined-contribution retirement fund for federal employees, and also invests in special-issue Treasury securities that count under the debt limit. Yellen’s letter on Thursday made no mention of the G Fund.

Yellen’s letter didn’t specify the amount of headroom under the debt ceiling that would be created by the extraordinary measures she listed.

The Treasury probably now has $350 billion to $400 billion of headroom available in all, said Gennadiy Goldberg, a senior US rates strategist at TD Securities. That, along with the influx of revenue that will come from individual income taxes due in April, should let the Treasury go until sometime in the July to August window without running out of cash, he said.

Other measures the Treasury has taken in the past to conserve headroom under the debt limit include suspending the daily reinvestment of securities held by the Exchange Stabilization Fund. That’s a special vehicle that dates back to the 1930s, over which the Treasury secretary has wide discretion.

The Treasury previously has also suspended issuance of state and local government series Treasuries. Those securities are a place where state and local governments can park cash, and they count toward the federal debt limit. Those governments need to invest in other assets when SLGS issuance is suspended.

–With assistance from Sydney Maki.

(Updates with analyst comment on Treasury’s headroom, in third paragraph from end.)

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Fury as 'neutral' South Africa announces 'immoral' joint wargames with Russia and China off its coast on anniversary of Putin's invasion of Ukraine

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11653917/amp/Fury-neutral-South-Africa-announces-immoral-joint-wargames-Russia-China.html

War games will take place off Durban between South Africa, China and Russia

South Africa has claimed it is 'neutral' and abstained in key Ukraine UN vote

Ruling ANC party has historic ties to Soviet Union during Apartheid

South Africa's government has finally shown its colours and sided with the dictators by inviting Russia and China for war games next month.

After months of placating Russia's butchery in Ukraine, Cyril Ramaphosa has ditched his supposed 'neutrality' to the war by hosting the naval drills off the country's east coast near Durban and Richards Bay from February 17 to 27.

The move is the strongest indication yet of the strengthening relationship between South Africa, whose governing ANC party is allegedly in the pocket of a sanctioned Moscow oligarch, and the anti-West authoritarian regimes of China and Russia.

The 'multinational maritime exercise' has been slammed by South Africa's leading Daily Maverick newspaper as 'immoral, stupid and impractical'.

Chinese and Russian warships are pictured taking part in joint naval drills in the East China Sea in December

Corruption plagues South Africa's leaders

South Africa has been battling financial scandals for decades and its former president Jacob Zuma has been charged with multiple counts of corruption.

He was jailed for refusing to testify to a high-level inquiry into massive state corruption that unfolded under his presidency.

He was forced to step down in disgrace by the ruling ANC in 2018 following mounting corruption allegations.

Ramaphosa himself has been facing calls to step down after a parliamentary report said he may have broken currency regulations by keeping undeclared sums of dollars at his farm.

Ramaphosa stands accused of stealing millions and hiding it at a game farm.

About $4 million in cash was stolen from Ramaphosa's Phala Phala game farm in Limpopo, and former intelligence officer Arthur Fraser has accused him of money laundering, kidnapping and corruption.

A probe concluded Ramaphosa may have committed serious violations and misconduct.

But Fraser is a well-known loyalist to Zuma and a faction of the ANC that wants Ramaphosa out.

The drills will take place around the first anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and bring more focus on the refusal of South Africa - a leading voice on its continent - to side with the West and condemn Russia's actions.

The announcement also comes days before Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov is due to visit South Africa and hold talks with South African counterpart Naledi Pandor.

The South African government said last year it had adopted a neutral stance over Ukraine and called for dialogue and diplomacy.

But the upcoming naval drills have led the country's main opposition party to accuse the government of effectively siding with Russia.

The South African government denies it has taken sides and has called for the end of the war in Ukraine.

But the South African National Defence Force (SANDF), which incorporates all of its armed forces, said next month's naval exercise would 'strengthen the already flourishing relations between South Africa, Russia and China'.

The aim of the drills was 'sharing operational skills and knowledge', the SANDF said.

The three countries also conducted a similar naval exercise in 2019 in Cape Town, while Russia and China held joint naval drills in the East China Sea last month.

South Africa, a key western partner, was one of several African countries to abstain in a United Nations vote last year condemning Russia's invasion.

The United States and European Union had hoped South Africa would support the international condemnation of Russia and act as a leader for other nations in Africa.

The countries that voted along with Russia against the resolution were Belarus, North Korea, Nicaragua and Syria.

The naval drills will take place off the country's east coast near Durban and Richards Bay from February 17 to 27

The Chinese naval frigate Binzhou takes part in a joint naval drills with Russian warships in December

South Africa and Russia share a long history, after the Soviet Union gave support to the ANC in its fight to bring down apartheid, the regime of repression against the country's black majority.

Apartheid ended in 1994 when the ANC won the first democratic elections in South Africa and Nelson Mandela became president.

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South Africa is also a member of BRICS, a bloc of emerging economies, alongside Brazil, Russia, India and China.

South Africa is seen by some as a token member of a group of economic powerhouses, and its government is desperate to stay part of the group which it believes provides a counter-balance to Western dominance.

South Africa has a $25billion share of the BRICS's New Development Bank and members have unlimited drawing rights if they need to stabilise their currencies.

With China and Russia's huge foreign currency reserves, South Africa is determined to keep the BRICS members happy for its own financial benefit.

In 2014, a mammoth $50billion deal was agreed between disgraced ex-president Jacob Zuma who is now facing corruption charges, and Russia's Rosatom energy company to build eight nuclear plants in South Africa.

Vladimir Putin has tried to invest in South Africa and the country has remained a muted ally despite the war

Cyril Ramaphosa has ditched his supposed 'neutrality' to the war by hosting the naval drills

The deal was eventually scrapped in April 2017 when a court ruled it was unlawful.

But it left a huge hole in the finances of the ANC, which has been plagued by corruption for decades.

Last year, it was revealed the biggest stake in the party's in-house investment company was the manganese miner, United Manganese of Kalahari, who donated around £500,000 to the ANC in the 2021-22 financial year.

The firm is owned in part by Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg's conglomerate Renova Group.

Vekselberg has an estimated fortune of nearly £8billion and his ties to Putin landed him with sanctions in March last year.

Experts have warned of Russia's increased military influence in Africa since it first annexed parts of Ukraine in 2014.

Improving relations with South Africa is central to the US effort of limiting Russian and Chinese influence.

The South African government drew more attention over its stance towards Russia in October when it allowed a $500million super-yacht owned by oligarch Alexey Mordashov to dock in Cape Town

The South African government drew more attention over its stance towards Russia in October when it allowed a $500million super-yacht owned by oligarch Alexey Mordashov to dock in Cape Town despite him being under US and EU sanctions.

The 57-year-old billionaire named in the Pandora Papers owns the Russian mining companies Nordgold and Severstal.

With a net worth of $13.2billion, Forbes ranked Mordashov as the 51st richest person in the world last year, but Western sanctions have sent the oligarch sinking in world wealth rankings as of this year.

'South Africa has no legal obligation to abide by sanctions imposed by the US and EU,' said Vincent Magwenya, spokesman for South Africa's president at the time. 'We have no reason to prevent their entry into South Africa.

'South Africa's obligations with respect to sanctions relate only to those that are specifically adopted by the United Nations. Currently, there are no UN-imposed sanctions on the particular individual.'

The South African government has also been accused of allowing another sanctioned Russian vessel to dock at a naval base near Cape Town in December.

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https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/102705

AI Passes U.S. Medical Licensing Exam

— Two papers show that large language models, including ChatGPT, can pass the USMLE

Two artificial intelligence (AI) programs including ChatGPT have passed the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE), according to two recent papers.

The papers highlighted different approaches to using large language models to take the USMLE, which is comprised of three exams: Step 1, Step 2 CK, and Step 3.

ChatGPTopens in a new tab or window is an artificial intelligence (AI) search tool that mimics long-form writing based on prompts from human users. It was developed by OpenAI, and became popular after several social media posts showed potential uses for the tool in clinical practice, often with mixed resultsopens in a new tab or window.

The first paper, published on medRxivopens in a new tab or window in December, investigated ChatGPT's performance on the USMLE without any special training or reinforcement prior to the exams. According to Victor Tseng, MD, of Ansible Health in Mountain View, California, and colleagues, the results showed "new and surprising evidence" that this AI tool was up to the challenge.

Tseng and team noted that ChatGPT was able to perform at >50% accuracy across all of the exams, and even achieved 60% in most of their analyses. While the USMLE passing threshold does vary between years, the authors said that passing is approximately 60% most years.

"ChatGPT performed at or near the passing threshold for all three exams without any specialized training or reinforcement," they wrote, noting that the tool was able to demonstrate "a high level of concordance and insight in its explanations."

"These results suggest that large language models may have the potential to assist with medical education, and potentially, clinical decision-making," they concluded.

The second paper, published on arXivopens in a new tab or window, also in December, evaluated the performance of another large language model, Flan-PaLM, on the USMLE. The key difference between the two models was that this model was heavily modified to prepare for the exams, using a collection of medical question-answering databases called the MultiMedQA, explained Vivek Natarajan, an AI researcher, and colleagues.

Flan-PaLM achieved 67.6% accuracy in answering the USMLE questions, which was about 17 percentage points higher than the previous best performance conducted using PubMed GPT.

Natarajan and team concluded that large language models "present a significant opportunity to rethink the development of medical AI and make it easier, safer and more equitable to use."

ChatGPT, along with other AI programs, have been showing up as the subject and sometimes as the co-author of new research papers focused on testing the technology's usefulness in medicine.

Of course, healthcare professionals have also expressed concerns over these developments, especially when ChatGPT is being listed as an author on research papers. A recent article from Natureopens in a new tab or window highlighted the uneasiness from would-be colleagues and co-authors of the emerging technology.

One objection to the use of AI programs in research was based on whether they can be truly capable of making meaningful scholarly contributions to a paper, while another objection emphasized that AI tools can't consent to be a co-author in the first place.

The editor of one of the papersopens in a new tab or window that listed ChatGPT as an author said it was an error that would be corrected, according to the Nature article. Still, researchers have published several papers now touting these AI programs as useful tools in medical education, research, and even clinical decision making.

Natarajan and colleagues concluded in their paper that large language models could become a beneficial tool in medicine, but their first hope was that their findings would "spark further conversations and collaborations between patients, consumers, AI researchers, clinicians, social scientists, ethicists, policymakers and other interested people in order to responsibly translate these early research findings to improve healthcare."

Primary Source

medRxiv

Source Reference: opens in a new tab or windowKung TH, et al "Performance of ChatGPT on USMLE: potential for AI-assisted medical education using large language models" medRxiv 2022; DOI: 10.1101/2022.12.19.22283643.

Secondary Source

arXiv

Source Reference: opens in a new tab or windowSinghal K, et al "Large language models encode clinical knowledge" arXiv 2022; DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2212.13138.

BREAKING: NHS Director confirms Hospitals lied about Cause of Death to create illusion of COVID Pandemic

https://expose-news.com/2023/01/17/how-uk-hospitals-manipulated-cause-of-death/

Before Covid, four types of pneumonia added together were the highest cause of death in the UK. In a newly implemented Medical Examiner System to certify deaths, the Medical Examiner was certifying all types of pneumonia deaths as covid-19 deaths, a former Director of End-of-Life Care has said.

On Saturday, Sai, a former NHS Director of End-of-Life Care, wrote a Twitter thread which, amongst other things, gave a personal account of the changes to the system of reporting deaths implemented in the NHS:

“When four different diseases [are] grouped and now being called covid-19, you will inevitably see covid-19 with a huge death rate. The mainstream media was reporting on this huge increase in covid-19 deaths due to the Medical Examiner System being in place.

“Patients being admitted and dying with very common conditions such as old age, myocardial infarctions, end-stage kidney failure, haemorrhages, strokes, COPD and cancer etc. were all now being certified as covid-19 via the Medical Examiner System.

“Hospitals were switching to and from the Medical Examiner System and the pre-pandemic system as [and] when they pleased. When covid-19 deaths needed to be increased, the hospital would switch to the Medical Examiner System.”

In addition, “hospitals were incentivised to report covid-19 deaths over normal deaths, as the government was paying hospitals additional money for every covid-19 death that was being reported,” Sai said. “I have no doubt in my mind, that the Government has planned the entire pandemic since 2016 when they first proposed the change to medical death certification.”

You can read Sai’s thread on https://twitter.com/TheOriginalSai/status/1614332319111970816 or Thread Reader App https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1614332319111970816.html. In the event it is removed from Twitter we have copied the thread below and attached a pdf copy at the end of this article. In the following, the number at the beginning of a paragraph relates to the number of the tweet within the thread.

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