Category: US

CNN
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An Iranian couple, both social media influencers, have been given lengthy prison sentences after a video emerged of them dancing in a main square in the capital Tehran.

In a video shared widely on social media, Astiyazh Haghighi, 21, is seen dancing without a headscarf with her fiancé Amir Mohammad Ahmadi, 22, in Azadi Square. The couple posted the video themselves.

Each was charged with “spreading corruption and vice,” and “assembly and collusion with the intention of disrupting national security,” receiving sentences of ten and a half years, according to activist group Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA).

However Mizan, a news agency affiliated with Iran’s judiciary, said each individual was sentenced to 5-year prison term on the charges of “assembly and collusion with the intention of disrupting national security.”

The two are accused of encouraging people to assemble and inviting them to riot in an Instagram post made on October 26, Mizan Online also said.

Judge Abolqasem Salavati presided over their case and meted out the sentences, along with a ban on posting videos on social media for two years and a ban on leaving the country for two years, according to HRANA.

Security forces first raided the couple’s home in the early morning hours of October 30, a source told CNN, and took them to interrogation and then later transferred them to prison.

Haghighi was initially sent to Evin prison’s Ward 209 but then transferred to Qarchak women’s prison where she is currently detained, HRANA reports. Both Haghighi and her partner are being denied access to a lawyer, it added.

Haghighi and Ahmadi each has close to a million followers on Instagram and also have separate YouTube channels with a total of more than half a million followers.

This comes after the country has been roiled in nationwide protests over the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young woman accused of flouting the country’s compulsory hijab laws. Iran has cracked down by executing protesters, accused of killing security forces, which critics say were the result of hasty sham trials.

Their lengthy sentences have been compared by critics to that of Sajjad Heydari, an Iranian man who notoriously beheaded his wife last year. Heydari, who killed his 17-year-old wife in February 2022, was sentenced to just eight years and two months in prison, according to the country’s semi-official Khabar Online website.

CNN
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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy did not walk away from his highly anticipated White House meeting on Wednesday with an agreement in hand to address the debt limit, but signaled optimism that both he and President Joe Biden can reach consensus “long before” the United States reaches default.

McCarthy and the president exchanged political jabs ahead of the meeting – preempting their negotiations with red lines relayed to the press and on social media. But emerging from the West Wing on Wednesday, the new House speaker had an unexpectedly hopeful tone as he underscored that he believes that they can come to an agreement, even though he remains entrenched in rejecting a key demand from the White House.

McCarthy told reporters after the meeting he informed Biden that the House would not pass a “clean” debt ceiling with no strings attached.

Asked what he offered the president, McCarthy said, “The only thing I heard for the last month was I’m not gonna negotiate with you. I just spent an hour sitting with the President in the Oval Office talking about what can we do on a debt ceiling. So, the first start is, okay, that’s different than what the last month was.”

The US hit the debt ceiling set by Congress in January, forcing the Treasury Department to start taking extraordinary measures to keep the government paying its bills and escalating pressure on Capitol Hill to avoid a catastrophic default later this year.

The White House and the new House GOP majority have been at odds over how to resolve a way to raise the debt limit, and while McCarthy called it “a good first meeting,” he also noted that they still “have different perspectives on this.”

“I think that at the end of the day, we can find common ground,” he added.

McCarthy said he told Biden he would like to come to an agreement “long before the deadline and we can start working on other things.” And a statement from the White House said Biden “underscored that he is eager to continue working across the aisle in good faith” and continue conversations with the speaker.

In the meeting, the White House statement said, the president “made clear” to McCarthy that it is a shared duty to not allow a default on the nation’s debt.

Following what was his first White House meeting since he won the speakership, McCarthy said he believes that a funding agreement could be reached for the next two years and that “you won’t see omnibuses anymore.”

“You’ll see the Senate and the House actually do what the American public has elected them to do,” he added.

The White House also said Biden “welcomes a separate discussion with congressional leaders about how to reduce the deficit and control the national debt while continuing to grow the economy.”

House Republicans have said that lifting the borrowing cap must be tied to spending reductions. And the White House, had previously countered that it will not offer concessions or negotiate on raising the debt ceiling.

The debt limit fight has been seen as an early test of McCarthy’s leadership, balancing competing demands from different factions of his conference amid a razor-thin majority. It’s also shedding light on how well McCarthy and Biden are able to work with one another.

Senate Republicans have indicated they will sit back and see how the House GOP maneuvers a way to raise the $31.4 trillion borrowing limit – before deciding if they need to insert themselves into the process.

Republicans face a political risk as they push to cut spending: If they propose cuts to popular government programs and services, they could face a public backlash.

McCarthy prepared for the White House meeting by consulting regularly with allies on and off the Hill, sources familiar with the preparation told CNN.

This week McCarthy and his House GOP allies have been hashing out initial demands, discussing steep cuts to domestic programs and a trim to defense spending – all the while steering clear of two programs to avoid voter blowback: Medicare and Social Security.

House Republicans had been hoping to strengthen their negotiating hand with the White House by uniting around a proposal, but finding conference-wide consensus on spending cuts has proved challenging.

The view from Republicans heading into Wednesday’s meeting was that it is still early and there are still months of negotiations ahead – meaning there’s plenty of time for McCarthy to lay out specifics. Still, leaders have also been aware they have to begin laying the groundwork with their members now.

While rhetoric in statements from McCarthy and the White House was relatively toned down following Wednesday’s meeting, both parties had used the last week to draw lines in the sand about the negotiations.

McCarthy’s position that cuts to Medicare and Social Security are not on the table in exchange for a debt ceiling increase has long drawn skepticism the White House.

And in a memo to “interested parties” dated Monday that was written by National Economic Council Director Brian Deese and Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young, Biden’s top economic advisers said the president intended to pose two questions to McCarthy on Wednesday: Whether McCarthy will commit to the US not defaulting on its financial obligations and when McCarthy and House Republicans will release their budget.

A day ahead of the meeting, the president suggested McCarthy was entering the talks from a weakened position, hampered by agreements he made with an unruly GOP conference.

Calling McCarthy a “decent man,” Biden nonetheless said he had been forced to cater to extremist Republicans in his quest to become speaker.

Biden said at a high-dollar fundraiser in Manhattan that McCarthy had to make commitments “that are just absolutely off the wall for the speaker of the House to make.”

Responding to the president’s fundraiser comments, McCarthy told reporters, “Apparently, he doesn’t understand … I’m looking forward to sitting down with the president, negotiating for the American public, the people of America, on how we can find savings. We’ve watched what the spending has done, we watched it brought us inflation, we watched the challenge that it happened. We’re looking forward to changing the course.”

This story has been updated with additional developments on Wednesday.

CNN
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OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced on Wednesday it is piloting a $20 monthly subscription plan that offers users priority access to the AI chatbot even during peak times.

The paid plan, called ChatGPT Plus, comes two months after the tool was released publicly and quickly went viral, thanks to its ability to generate shockingly convincing essays in response to user prompts.

Many people who wanted to test the tool have been locked out or joined the waitlist. Now, anyone who signs up for a subscription will benefit from faster response times, and priority access to new features and improvements.

The tool will remain free for the general public, however.

“We love our free users and will continue to offer free access to ChatGPT,” the company said in a blog post. “By offering this subscription pricing, we will be able to help support free access availability to as many people as possible.”

ChatGPT Plus will be made available first in the United States and other countries soon after, according to the company. OpenAI said it will begin inviting people from its waitlist in the weeks ahead. The company also said it is “actively exploring options for lower-cost plans, business plans, and data packs for more availability.”

“The preview for ChatGPT allowed us to learn from real world use, and we’ve made important improvements and updates based on feedback,” the company said in a statement to CNN.

Since it was made available in late November, ChatGPT has been used to generate original essays, stories and song lyrics in response to user prompts. It has drafted research paper abstracts that fooled some scientists. Some CEOs have even used it to write emails or do accounting work.

While it has gained traction among users, it has also raised some concerns, including about inaccuracies, its potential to perpetuate biases and spread misinformation, and the ability to help students cheat.

Earlier this week, OpenAI announced a new feature, called an “AI text classifier,” that allows users to check if an essay was written by a human or AI. The release came amid concerns the AI chatbot can help students and professionals generate convincing essays. The new tool, however, is “imperfect,” according to the company.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said the Fed will probably continue to hike rates for the foreseeable future to combat stubbornly high inflation.

Although inflation has come down significantly over the past several months, it’s still more than double the Fed’s target annual rate of 2%.

“I think it would be very premature to declare victory or think we really got this,” Powell said at a press conference. “The job is not fully done.”

Powell noted that the Fed continues to err on the side of caution on inflation. That means the central bank would rather hurt the economy too much to bring inflation down than take its foot off the rate-hike gas too soon and cause inflation to rise again.

“I continue to think that it is very difficult to manage the risk of doing too little, and finding out in six or 12 months that we actually were close but didn’t get the job done,” Powell said. “We have no incentive or desire to over-tighten, but if we feel we have gone too far … we have tools that would work on that.”

CNN
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People who live in a highly polluted area have a higher risk of depression and anxiety than those who live with cleaner air, a new study says.

The study, published Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, found that people who were exposed to higher amounts of multiple air pollutants for a long period – including particle pollution, nitrogen dioxide and nitrogen oxides – had an increased risk of depression and anxiety.

Particle pollution, also known as particulate matter, is the mix of solid and liquid droplets floating in the air, the US Environmental Protection Agency says. It can come in the form of dirt, dust, soot or smoke. Coal- and natural gas-fired power plants create it, as do cars, agriculture, unpaved roads, construction sites and wildfires.

Nitrogen dioxide pollution is most commonly associated with traffic-related combustion byproducts. Nitrogen oxides are also released from traffic, as well as the burning of oil, coal and natural gas.

The smallest particulate matter included in the new study, PM2.5, is so tiny – 1/20th of a width of a human hair – that it can travel past your body’s usual defenses.

Instead of being carried out when you exhale, it can get stuck in your lungs or go into your bloodstream. The particles cause irritation and inflammation and may lead to respiratory problems. Exposure can cause cancer, stroke or heart attack; it could also aggravate asthma, and it has long been associated with a higher risk of depression and anxiety.

For the new study, researchers looked at the records of 389,185 people from the UK Biobank, a large-scale biomedical database of half a million diverse volunteers. During the study period, 13,131 were diagnosed with depression and 15,835 were diagnosed with anxiety.

Those who lived in areas with higher pollution levels were at higher risk for depression and anxiety, even when the pollution levels were below UK air quality standards.

The risk of anxiety linked to PM2.5 pollution was stronger in men than in women.

The study can’t pinpoint the reason for the overall link, but others have found that exposure to air pollution may affect the central nervous system, causing inflammation and damaging the body’s cells.

Some air pollution, studies show, can also cause the body to release harmful substances that can hurt the blood-brain barrier, the network of blood vessels and tissues made up of closely spaced cells that protect the brain, and that may lead to anxiety and depression. But more research will be needed to fully understand this connection, because the neural basis for both anxiety and depression is not completely understood.

Other studies have found that pollution can affect the onset of anxiety and depression, said Dr. Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou, an associate professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health. She wasn’t involved in the new research but has done similar work on the association between air pollution exposure and depression.

“There have been several studies that show that air pollution is also associated with exacerbation. So for example, if there’s air pollution today and yesterday, then we see an uptake in our hospital admissions for these disorders,” Kioumourtzoglou said.

She and her colleagues have also found links with other neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

“The link between air pollution and the brain has now been pretty consistent in the literature,” Kioumourtzoglou said.

The limitations of the new research include a lack of information about other common air pollutants like ozone, carbon monoxide or sulfur dioxide.

“Not all air pollutants are created equal. Some are more toxic than others. And for certain diseases, there’s still a lot of work to be done,” Kioumourtzoglou said.

The study authors hope the research will encourage public policy-makers to do what they can to reduce exposure to pollution.

“Considering that many countries’ air quality standards are still well above the latest World Health Organization global air quality guidelines 2021, stricter standards or regulations for air pollution control should be implemented in the future policy making,” the authors wrote.