www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-03-31/coronavirus-in-sewage-portended-covid-19-outbreak-in-dutch-city

Dutch scientists were able to find the coronavirus in a city’s wastewater before Covid-19 cases were reported, demonstrating a novel early warning system for the pneumonia-causing disease.

The so-called SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is often excreted in an infected person’s stool. Although it’s unlikely that sewage will become an important route of transmission, the pathogen’s increasing circulation in communities will increase the amount of it flowing into sewer systems, Gertjan Medema and colleagues at the KWR Water Research Institute in Nieuwegein said on Monday.

They detected genetic material from the coronavirus at a wastewater treatment plant in Amersfoort on March 5, before any cases had been reported in the city, located about 50 kilometers (32 miles) southeast of Amsterdam. The Netherlands confirmed its first Covid-19 case on Feb. 27 and discovered health workers had fallen ill with the infection in a southern part of the country days later – a sign that it was spreading in the community.

Coronavirus Lurking in Feces May Reveal Hidden Risk of Spread

“It is important to collect information about the occurrence and fate of this new virus in sewage to understand if there is no risk to sewage workers, but also to determine if sewage surveillance could be used to monitor the circulation of SARS-CoV-2 in our communities,” Medema, the institute’s principal microbiologist, and co-authors said in a paper released ahead of peer review. “That could complement current clinical surveillance, which is limited to the Covid-19 patients with the most severe symptoms.”

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It’s the first report of detection of SARS-CoV-2 in sewage, they said.

Inspector General finds 29/29 FISA applications were faulty including one with 65 errors

More at: https://idahonews.com/news/nation-world/watchdog-finds-new-problems-with-fbi-wiretap-applications

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Justice Department inspector general has found additional failures in the FBI's handling of a secretive surveillance program that came under scrutiny after the Russia investigation, identifying problems with dozens of applications for wiretaps in national security investigations.

The audit results, announced Tuesday by Inspector General Michael Horowitz, suggest that FBI errors while eavesdropping on suspected spies and terrorists extend far beyond those made during the investigation into ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign. They come as the FBI has scrambled to repair public confidence in how it uses its surveillance powers and as lawmakers uneasy about potential abuses have allowed certain of its tools to at least temporarily expire.

The new findings are on top of problems identified last year by the watchdog office, which concluded that the FBI had made significant errors and omissions in applications to eavesdrop on former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page during the early months of the Russia investigation. Those mistakes prompted internal changes within the FBI and spurred a congressional debate over whether the bureau's surveillance tools should be reined in.

After the Russia report was submitted last December, Horowitz announced a broader audit of the FBI's spy powers and the accuracy of its applications before the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The watchdog office selected for review a subset of applications in both counterterrorism and counterintelligence investigations covering the period from October 2014 to September 2019. It found problems in each of the more than two dozen applications it reviewed, including “apparent errors or inadequately supported facts."

The audit examined how well the FBI was complying with internal rules that require agents to maintain a file of supporting documentation for every factual assertion they make in an application. Those rules, or “Woods Procedures," were developed in 2001 with a goal of minimizing errors in the surveillance applications, known by the acronym FISA.

Horowitz said in a letter to FBI Director Chris Wray that in four of the 29 FISA applications his office selected for review, the FBI could not locate any of the supporting documentation that was supposed to have been produced at the time the application was submitted.

Each of the 25 other applications it reviewed contained “apparent errors or inadequately supported facts," the inspector general said. In those instances, the facts stated in the applications were either not backed up any documentation or were inconsistent with the documentation.

The watchdog office said it found an average of about 20 issues per application, including one application with about 65 issues.

As a result, Horowitz wrote, “we do not have confidence that the FBI has executed its Woods Procedures in compliance with FBI policy, or that the process is working as it was intended to help achieve the ‘scrupulously accurate’ standard for FISA applications."

The inspector general's office did not make a judgment as to whether the mistakes it identified were “material” to the investigation or to the court's decision to authorize the wiretaps.

“No one was more appalled than the Attorney General at the way the FISA process was abused. This abuse resulted in one of the greatest political travesties in American history and should never happen again," Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said in a statement.

“However," she added, “FISA remains a critical tool to ensuring the safety and security of the American people, particularly when it comes to fighting terrorism."

170 foreign Central Banks can now sell US Treasury and mortgage backed securities directly back to the US Treasury instead of on the open market for at least 6 months

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fed-will-launch-new-lending-facility-for-foreign-central-banks-11585657885

WASHINGTON—The Federal Reserve said Tuesday it would launch a temporary lending facility that for the first time will allow foreign central banks to convert their holdings of Treasury securities into dollars, its latest bid to alleviate strains in global markets.

The program is designed to alleviate stresses in currency markets that had prompted more foreign central banks to sell their holdings of Treasurys. The Fed has been aggressively purchasing Treasury and mortgage securities to reduce market strains, and the latest move could reduce the supply of those securities hitting the market if foreign central banks can more easily exchange them for dollars.

The program could allow around 170 foreign central banks and other international monetary authorities that maintain accounts at the New York Fed and aren’t subject to U.S. sanctions to enter a lending arrangement called a repurchase agreement, or repo, in which borrowers temporarily exchange their Treasury securities for dollars.

“This facility should help support the smooth functioning of the U.S. Treasury market by providing an alternative temporary source U.S. dollars other than sales of securities in the open market,” the Fed said in a statement.

The repo facility for foreign central banks will be available beginning April 6 for at least six months.

The latest dollar-lending programs will complement separate tools the Fed has launched to lend dollars to 14 other central banks in Europe, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Brazil and Australia to ensure markets don’t run short of currency outside of the U.S.

The repo market shook the financial world in September when an unexpected rate spike choked short-term lending, spurring the Federal Reserve to intervene. WSJ explains how this critical, but murky part of the financial system works, and why some banks say the crunch could have been prevented. Il

Many business transactions abroad take place in dollars and foreign institutions also lend in the currency. The Fed used these “swap” lines aggressively in 2008 and 2009 during the financial crisis.

But the latest lending program goes beyond what the Fed employed during the financial crisis or the 2011-12 eurozone crisis by making available dollar funding to a far broader cohort of emerging-market reserve banks. It underscores the growing primacy of the dollar in global finance and the demands that has placed on the Fed to serve as a central bank to the world.

The new lending facility is likely to reach a much broader set of foreign central banks, especially those with acute dollar demands that don’t have Fed swap lines, including in India, China and Saudi Arabia.

While swap lines essentially allow the Fed to lend against the currencies of foreign central banks, the latest repo transactions offer these central banks loans against their holdings of U.S. Treasurys.

The latest facility should “serve a useful role to assist smaller emerging markets that need to monetize dollar assets to lean against excessive exchange-rate depreciation,” said analysts at Evercore ISI in a report Tuesday.

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It means the POTUS is in charge of the Fed now. The US Treasury will deal directly with foreign Central banks that rely on liquidity and a dollar that is an instrument that is used essentially worldwide.