(WASHINGTON) — Two years into the war on Ukraine, the economic sanctions against Russia leveled by the Biden administration are working, according to Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, but she said there is more to do.
“We’re working with 30-plus other countries all around the globe, to work together to do everything we can to deny President Putin what he needs in terms of equipment and technology to fuel his war machine,” Raimondo told ABC News on Friday.
“Is it working? Yes. Have we done enough? No. We got to get up every single day and ask ourselves what more can we do,” she said. “We know what’s working because continually, we see there’s been real impact. It’s harder for [Russia] to get access to spare parts, semiconductors, drones, technology, etc. They’re still doing it. But, we have definitely slowed down their effort in a meaningful way.”
On Friday, the Biden administration, including the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, leveled more sanctions against Russia.
The sanctions limit U.S. equipment from getting in the hands of the Russians — and the administration has to get creative when it comes to which companies they sanction.
“We have to deny them everything,” Raimondo said. “It’s not just the parts and the drones and the satellites, but it’s equipment that they might want to get their hands on to make their own parts or supplies. So … that’s what makes this so hard. Putin and Russia are expert criminals. They’ve been doing this for decades, so they figured out ways around our controls.”
She said at one point Russians were “confiscating” breast pumps for their semiconductors to put them into military equipment.
“They’ll stop at nothing,” she said, adding the Commerce Department is “relentlessly vigilant” on the issue.
Two years into the war she said she has been “blown away” by the “immeasurable courage” of Ukrainian officials.
She said she has had Zoom meetings with her Ukrainian counterpart in which they have been from a “bunk, on the frontlines of combat.”
“We take our energy from their courage and we’re in it to win it with them until the end,” she said.
(NEW YORK) — A student at the University of Colorado – Colorado Springs who is accused of gunning down two people in a dorm room had an AK-47-style assault rifle and a handgun in his car when he was arrested, according to prosecutors.
Nicholas Jordan was arrested on Monday and charged with two counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of his roommate, Samuel Knopp, and Celie Rain Montgomery, who were found shot dead on Feb. 16, according to the Colorado Springs police.
Knopp, 24, was a registered student at the school while Montgomery, 26, was not currently registered, police said.
Prosecutors described Jordan, 25, as a relatively new student in the process of withdrawing from UCCS.
A motive for the murders is not clear.
As Jordan appeared in court in person for the first time on Friday, the judge ruled the arrest warrant and affidavit to be unsealed.
A status conference has been scheduled for March 15.
President Joe Biden meets with Yulia and Dasha Navalnaya on Feb. 22, 2022. — @POTUS/X
(WASHINGTON) — The Biden administration on Friday announced more than 500 sanctions on Russia, its “enablers,” and its “war machine” as the world marks two years since Russia attacked Ukraine.
This is the largest single tranche since the start of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, administration officials said.
“Today, I am announcing more than 500 new sanctions against Russia for its ongoing war of conquest on Ukraine and for the death of Aleksey Navalny, who was a courageous anti-corruption activist and Putin’s fiercest opposition leader,” President Joe Biden said in the statement released by the White House. “These sanctions will target individuals connected to Navalny’s imprisonment as well as Russia’s financial sector, defense industrial base, procurement networks and sanctions evaders across multiple continents. They will ensure Putin pays an even steeper price for his aggression abroad and repression at home.”
“We are also imposing new export restrictions on nearly 100 entities for providing backdoor support for Russia’s war machine,” Biden continued. “We are taking action to further reduce Russia’s energy revenues. And I’ve directed my team to strengthen support for civil society, independent media, and those who fight for democracy around the world.”
Later Friday, Biden gave brief remarks on the two-year anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine war as he welcomed governors to the White House.
“Putin believed he could easily bend the will and break the resolve of free people of Ukraine,” Biden said. “That he could roll into Ukraine, and he would roll over them. Two years later, he remains wrong.”
“The people of Ukraine remain unbowed and unbroken in the face of Putin’s vigorous onslaught. This is due to their sheer bravery and sacrifice, but it’s also due to us,” Biden continued as he highlighted the U.S. role in building an international coalition to support Ukraine.
But Biden said Congress must do its part by passing additional aid and criticized Speaker Mike Johnson for not taking up a Senate-passed foreign aid bill before the House left for a two-week recess.
“The clock is ticking,” Biden said. “Brave Ukrainian soldiers and civilians are dying. Russia has taken Ukraine territory for the first time in many months. But here in America, the speaker gave the House a two-week week vacation. They have to come back. They have to come back get this done.”
The sanctions, to be rolled out by the Treasury Department and State Department, include additional measures intended to punish the Kremlin for its role in the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, officials said.
Following a meeting on Thursday with Navalny’s widow and daughter in San Francisco, Biden previewed the action, saying his administration would be “announcing sanctions against Putin, who is responsible for his death, tomorrow.”
Regarding Navalny, the State Department said it is sanctioning three individuals tied to Russian Penal Colony IK-3: the prison warden, regional prison head and deputy director of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia.
On Thursday, a high-level State Department official described the pending sanctions as “crushing.”
“Some of them will be targeted at folks directly involved in Navalany’s death. The vast majority of them though are designed to further attrite Putin’s war machine — to close the gaps in the sanctions regime that he has been able to evade,” Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland said speaking at an event in Washington.
Many of the measures will take aim at Russia’s defense sector, including a number of entities already sanctioned by the U.S.
Those imposed as punishment for Navalny’s death in a remote Russian prisoner target individuals thought to have played a part in his detention and demise, officials added.
Throughout Russia’s war on Ukraine, the U.S. has sought to weaken Moscow’s military by targeting its economy — limiting its ability to import key technology to fuel its defense-industrial complex, reduce the value of its exports, and cut Russia off from the international banking system.
Despite the historic effort, Russia’s economy has grown over the last two years due in part to the country’s steady trade with partners like China and India. The Kremlin has also managed to keep its arsenals stocked, resorting to sourcing some weapons from Iran and North Korea — two countries that are also heavily sanctioned by the West.
“[Vladimir Putin] and his tricksters have found a lot of ways to evade sanctions,” Nuland conceded. “That is why when you see this package that we’re going to launch in a couple days, it is very heavily focused on evasion, on nodes and networks and countries that help evade — willingly or otherwise — and on the banks that support and allow that kind of evasion.”
Nuland also predicted the administration would also impose additional penalties tied to Navalny’s death in the future.
“I anticipate as time goes on we will be able to put forward more and more sanctions on folks directly responsible for Navalny’s death,” she said.
The U.K. announced its own sanctions against six Russian officials on Wednesday.
“History is watching. The failure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will not be forgotten,” said Biden on Friday. “Now is the time for us to stand strong with Ukraine and stand united with our Allies and partners. Now is the time to prove that the United States stands up for freedom and bows down to no one.”
(NEW YORK) — Old images of African Americans picking cotton remind many of the oppression suffered by generations of Black slaves before the Emancipation Proclamation. For Black Americans in particular, their history with this famous crop, that helps clothe the world, is complicated.
Now Julius Tillery, a Black cotton farmer in North Carolina, is working to turn cotton’s painful story with Black Americans into an affirmation of the economic progress that his community has achieved over the years.
“If I don’t create a new history for us, it will always be a bad history,” Tillery told ABC News. “So I think it’s really important that the work I do to help and foster a better idea around cotton is important. We have to remember, cotton wasn’t the oppressive thing. Cotton is just a plant, and it’s a magical plant at that. It was people that were oppressive and made us work like machines.”
Tillery owns several hundred acres of farmland and has been teaching other farmers how to survive in a global economy.
The 37-year-old said it is important for him to see the Black farming community grow.
“It’s not many of us. We’re basically… extinct,” he said. “It’s less than 100 Black cotton farmers in the whole country.”
Outside of his advocacy, Tillery started a side business, Black Cotton, in 2016. He promotes other cotton farmers across the South. The business has created and sold home décor, jewelry, and accessories handmade with cotton. The tagline for the company is: Cotton is Our Culture. Let’s Grow Together.
The company also has partnered with shoemaker and clothing line Vans, which purchased 10,000 pounds of cotton from Black Cotton two years ago. Vans produces streetwear, including a T-shirt with a cotton flower logo that uses cotton from the company.
Vans said it plans to buy more cotton from Black Cotton this year.
Tillery said that he sometimes gets remarks from people who wonder how, as a Black man, he could be a cotton farmer. He said that he sees his work as a way for the community to grow.
“I’m a fifth-generation cotton farmer, and I emphasize that because that means five generations of free men decided to do this work,” he said.
(LONDON) — Instead of sending a deluge of troops into Avdiivka to overpower the Ukrainians holding the frontline city, Russian forces earlier this month instead began sending in just a few soldiers at a time.
Two or three Russians would storm Ukrainian positions within city, followed about a half-hour later by two or three others. In those increments, they began to overpower the Ukrainian positions “step by step,” according to Andrii Teren, a Ukrainian commander.
“We had the impression that these groups have no end, every 20 or 30 minutes we faced assaults,” Teren told Reuters earlier this week. “That’s why it became so difficult for our infantry.”
The difficulties Teren described echoed those described by other Ukrainian frontline commanders. He said he didn’t have enough personnel. Nor did he have enough shells if the Russians kept up their slow-rolling attack. He said they simply “exhausted” his troops.
As Russia’s war in Ukraine hits the two-year mark on Saturday, Russia is again on the attack, striking cities along the frontline. Those attacks are coming as international aid for Kyiv has slowed, meaning Ukrainian weapons stockpiles are growing ever smaller.
“Russian forces have intensified attacks across several points of the front line within the last week, likely intended to stretch Ukrainian forces,” The United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense said Wednesday.
Russia’s Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said Russian forces had taken complete control of Avdiivka, touting it as a strategic breakthrough. While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy acknowledged his forces had withdrawn, he said the move had been a tactical one.
“Saving our lives is also, in my opinion, the right decision,” he said of the withdrawal on Feb. 17 in Munich. “Then there will be recovery, they will wait for the proper weapons, which were simply insufficient.”
The loss of Avdiivka came after months of Ukrainian officials raising alarms about the military’s dwindling stockpile. The U.S. has supplied at least $44.9 billion to Kyiv, but if Congress doesn’t pass a new aid package by late spring or early summer, the situation in Ukraine could become dire, U.S. officials told ABC News.
As of Dec. 2023, the United Kingdom had pledged some £7.1 billion, or about $9 billion, for military assistance, according to a government report. The European Union had also pledged about €5.6 billion, or about $6.1 billion, which included funding for weapons.
But funding pledges for ammunition and weapons have become scarcer as the war has worn on. The European Council earlier this month approved €50 million in aid for the besieged nation, although that money was earmarked not for munitions but for funding the Ukrainian government, allowing it to pay for salaries and services.
The critical situation now described by Zelenskyy and other Kyiv leaders is a far cry from the way the country’s military began the second year of the war. Ukrainian forces last spring launched a long-anticipated counteroffensive, in which they attempted to push back into Crimea, the southern peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014.
The counteroffensive initially had a slowly building momentum. It led to some gains near Donetsk, although it brought heavy Ukrainian casualties and it wasn’t successful in cutting off Russia’s land bridge to southern Ukraine.
What followed was a fall and winter of intense frontline fighting that further cut into Ukrainian stockpiles.
Russia also continued its long-range missile and drone strikes on residential areas. It launched early-morning assaults on Kyiv and Kharkiv, striking malls, apartment buildings and infrastructure.
But another year of hard fighting hasn’t seemed to soften the resolve of either Zelenskyy or Russian President Vladimir Putin.
As with last year, Zelenskyy is still vowing to fight until “every inch of Ukrainian land” is returned from Russian control.
Putin and other Kremlin officials also continued to appear unwavering, although there was at least one high-profile instance of a challenge from Putin’s inner circle in the war’s second year.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of the paramilitary Wagner Group and a longtime Putin ally, led a chaotic one-day armed rebellion. He sent his forces toward Moscow in June, but later ordered them to turn back. Two months later, Prigozhin was killed in a plane crash.
Earlier this month, longtime opposition politician Alexei Navalny became the latest Kremlin critic to die suddenly. He had been transferred to an Arctic prison, where he died of unknown causes, according to prison officials. The Kremlin rejected international calls for an independent postmortem exam.
The U.S. will impose “crushing” new sanctions on Russia, including measures to punish the Kremlin for Navalny’s death, officials said.
“Make no mistake,” U.S. President Joe Biden said last week. “Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death.”
“This tragedy reminds us of the stakes of this moment,” he added. “We have to provide the funding so Ukraine can keep defending itself against Putin’s vicious onslaughts and war crimes.”
ABC News’ Will Gretsky, Patrick Reevell, Tom Soufi-Burridge, Joe Simonetti, Edward Szekeres, Anne Flaherty, Luis Martinez, Shannon K. Crawford, Justin Gomez and Yulia Drozd contributed to this story.
(KYIV, Ukraine) — Almost two years into Russia’s invasion, with Moscow’s losses estimated by Kyiv at more than 300,000 soldiers, the Ukrainian authorities launched a project called “Want To Find” to help Russian citizens find information about their relatives who went to fight in Ukraine.
The launch came as a followup to the “Want to Live” project, a hotline offering the Russian soldiers a way to surrender.
Since that launch in September 2022, operators of the project received more than 32,000 and 260 Russian soldiers were admitted as prisoners of war, according to the organization. Some even joined the so-called Russian Volunteer corps, which is fighting against Russian forces alongside the Ukrainian army.
The number of requests soared in autumn 2022, during the announcement of a mobilization in Russia and successful Ukrainian counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region and Kherson, and in spring last year when the Ukrainian authorities were announcing the much-anticipated counteroffensive.
That’s when many Russians started to reach out to the Want To Live project in search of their relatives who went to war and never returned, according to Vitaliy Matvienko, the spokesperson of the I Want To Live project.
“People, mostly women, called and asked whether we knew something about their husbands or sons, whether they were captured or killed. Because the Russian authorities didn’t provide them any information,” Matvienko told ABC News.
Since last summer, they’ve got more than 3,000 such requests and decided to launch a separate Telegram bot for processing them.
Through it, the customers provide all the data they have — names, photos, any distinguishing features the person has like tattoos or scars. The operators on the Ukrainian side run this data through several databases and tell them whether the person is killed, captured or there’s no information at all.
Irina Krynina, 37, is one of those who managed to not only find her husband via the bot, but also help others to do the same.
Her husband Yevgeniy, 34, had been running a successful funeral business in Krasnoyarsk, Russia. In September 2022, during the massive mobilization announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Yevgeniy was summoned to the military recruitment center.
“I was against it. I was against the war. I told him not to go,” Irina told ABC. “I had a suspicion he will be sent to Ukraine. But he didn’t believe me because of the propaganda he watched on TV and decided to join the army.”
After a month spent in a training camp in Omsk, Yevgeniy and other Russian troops were sent to the occupied Crimea and then to Kherson as it was liberated by the Ukrainian forces.
“He called me and told me to stop watching Russian TV,” Irina recalled. “He said, ‘Everything they show is completely untrue.'”
The last time Irina heard from her husband was June 9, 2023.
“I knew he was sent to Bakhmut, Donetsk region, and I freaked out. I knew it was hell there,” Irina recalled.
When after a while communication didn’t resume she started looking for information about Yevgeniy’s whereabouts. “I came to the recruitment center, but they told me — who are you? we’re not going to tell you anything.”
Then Irina decided to do online research and discovered a video on social media showing her husband being captured by Ukrainian troops. But even that wasn’t enough evidence for the Russian authorities to confirm him as a prisoner of war.
“The Russian ministry of defense told me that doesn’t mean anything and they are still consider him missing,” she said.
So Irina contacted the Want To Live project. In three days the Ukrainian side confirmed Yevgeniy was in captivity, so Irina took on a challenge and went to Ukraine to meet her husband.
“To hide from the Russian authorities I designed a whole legend,” she told ABC News. With her two little kids, Irina went to Antalya, Turkey, a popular holiday destination for many Russians. Then they flew to Istanbul and Chisinau, Moldova, where Ukrainian representatives met her and escorted to Kyiv.
“When I finally met Yevgeniy he was shocked,” Irina said. “He didn’t expect me to look for him and moreover come this far to meet him.”
While Yevgeniy remains in captivity and is weighing whether he wants to go back to Russia, Irina settled down in Kyiv with her kids and set up her own nongovernmental organization, called Step In, to help other Russians search and bring back home their relatives who invaded Ukraine. The NGO is basically helping the Ukrainian Want To Find project to process the requests, organize calls between the POWs and their relatives or even receive parcels for them, according to the Geneva Conventions.
“It’s a very useful humanitarian project. Firstly, people in Russia find out at least something about their relatives,” Matvienko explained. “Once we received a request about a soldier and found out that his body was actually repatriated to Russia half a year before that. That is, he was killed, Russia got his body, but never notified the family.”
Secondly, Matvienko said, the project prompts the Russian citizens to pressure their own authorities and demand social protection. Wives of Russian soldiers often stage protests demanding exchange of prisoners.
Finally, both projects, I Want To Live and I Want To Find, are aimed at preventing more Russians from joining the army and also facilitating the exchange of prisoners of war, Matvienko added.
“According to the Geneva Conventions, the swaps should take place after the fighting ends. So the very fact they take place now is a huge achievement,” he said.
More than 3,000 Ukrainian soldiers have already been returned in exchange for nearly the same amount of Russians.
(WASHINGTON) — Months before they’re set to begin, law enforcement is already planning a massive effort to protect the presidential nominating conventions set for this summer, according to a new federal bulletin.
The Republican and Democratic gatherings – the signature gatherings of the 2024 presidential election – would make attractive targets for would-be attackers or anyone else interested in causing disruptions that might embarrass or endanger the events, or worse, in front of massive in-person and television audiences, analysts at the Department of Homeland Security have concluded.
The confidential DHS analysis, obtained by ABC News, lays out a menu of potential online and real-world attacks in an effort to help law enforcement agencies identify “potential threats” during the “build-up and execution” of the political conventions. With less than six months to go before the Republicans gather in Milwaukee and the Democrats meet in Chicago, law enforcement and security personnel are strategizing and planning, the document says.
“Nation-state and non-state threat actors may view these events as an opportunity to influence or disrupt the U.S. political process using hostile or violent disruption tactics on a national media stage,” according to the Feb.12 DHS bulletin.
Not only are the conventions “widely publicized,” the analysis notes, the threat landscape spans far wider than the event sites: from potential cyber attacks, to information warfare, to “physical threats” and attempts at inciting violence.
The new assessment comes as the partisan environment seethes with hostility and division, multiple wars are being waged overseas, and law enforcement eyes the risk of political violence ahead of an election unlike any other in modern American history.
“Our current environment is a tinderbox – and you never know which match is going to land and light a fire. So, whether it’s a parade celebrating the Super Bowl – or a major political convention – we don’t know where the threat might come from, or who might do it, but we know it’s coming – so we’ve got to expect the unexpected and prepare for all of it,” said Elizabeth Neumann, a DHS assistant secretary during the first years of Trump’s presidency and now an ABC News contributor.
“The level of preparations for this election are unlike any I’ve seen in the past, and that’s because the threat level is unlike it’s ever been before – for a variety of reasons,” said John Cohen, the former intelligence chief at the Department of Homeland Security and now an ABC News contributor. “We consider this a perfect storm from a threat perspective, because there’s multiple factors contributing to such volatility in the current threat environment.”
In mid-July, the 2024 Republican National Convention will be gaveled into session in the battleground state of Wisconsin, which played a pivotal role in the 2020 loss of then-President Donald Trump. According to the polls, Trump will likely be his party’s nominee once again, and would be declared as such at the Milwaukee event.
A month later, the Democrats will convene on the shores of Lake Michigan in their party’s historic bastion of Chicago, the hometown of former President Barack Obama. It is a city that holds a critical if not always flattering position in the history of presidential elections. Notably, the 1968 Democratic convention in the Windy City deteriorated into violence outside the hall and a near-riot inside as a result of tensions over the Vietnam War and protests over the party’s nomination process.
The 2024 race has so far been marked by increasingly toxic rhetoric, and the intermingling of inflammatory campaign trail hyperbole and courtroom theatrics, as Trump faces four criminal trials in which he maintains his innocence. In addition, hate speech, misinformation and disinformation are running rampant on social media and in real life, and rapidly evolving technology remains vulnerable, experts say. Meanwhile, the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine continue on.
“The country is polarized, people are angry, people view those who hold opposing views as the enemy, there is distrust in government institutions, and in particular, in the election process itself. And in some cases, we have seen this anger and distrust of government materializing into violence,” Cohen said – with foreign adversaries seeking to “exploit” contentious wedge issues in America to achieve their own objectives.
“High-profile public figures and elected officials – that makes it an attractive target – and law enforcement has to deal with a broad range of cyber, physical and information operation-related threats,” Cohen said.
These will be the first national conventions since the COVID-19 pandemic upended 2020’s plans for large in-person nominating events. It will also be the first since the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks at the U.S. Capitol, which grew out of a Trump rally dedicated to his bogus claims that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen.
Now, law enforcement is combating a more diffuse threat spectrum further enabled by the internet and advancement of artificial intelligence – and they’re gaming out how to thwart any would-be attack on this summer’s iconic political conventions.
The confidential bulletin warns to watch out for “potential cyber threats” surrounding the conventions, including “violent extremist, foreign terrorist organization, nation-state or state-sponsored actors, or cybercriminals attempts to disrupt or collect on the event,” including through “social engineering” like phishing attempts. Cyber techniques could also be used to “disrupt” communications and command and control infrastructure, the analysis said.
“Physical threats” also loom over the conventions, the analysis warned. Bad actors could try to pass as authorized “security partners” – and possibly attempt to “purchase, steal or acquire” explosives meant to target convention sites.
“Attempts to attack U.S. interests,” though perhaps nowhere near Milwaukee or Chicago, could also be planned “in conjunction” with convention events, the bulletin said.
Violent actors could plan to attack “critical infrastructure” associated with the convention venues – with potential targets including commercial or government facilities, political campaigns, emergency services, food and agriculture, energy, communications and transportation.
And there are other ways of exploiting the gatherings from outside the arena. Beware of “increased supply of narcotics or human trafficking activity to regions hosting” the conventions, the bulletin said.
The analysis also warns of the danger posed by information warfare of cyber actors sowing “disinformation,” and foreign adversaries’ messaging and attempts to influence, sway or disrupt elections.
“We’re seeing a security community trying to be agile – for a threat that’s very agile,” Neumann said.
Wisconsin’s House Delegation has asked the federal government for $75 million to cover security costs during each convention – a $25 million bump up from what host cities have typically received.
Security preparations have been long underway for what state and local law enforcement officials believe will be an “all hands-on deck” event with little precedent in recent Wisconsin history, the lawmakers wrote in a joint letter last March.
As many as 4,500 additional police officers from multiple agencies could be brought in to meet Milwaukee’s security demands during the week of the convention, Jeff Fleming, Milwaukee’s director of communications, told ABC.
In gaming out security plans for that week, Milwaukee’s Democratic Mayor Cavalier Johnson has underscored the range of factors to consider, Fleming said. Input from the Secret Service, drawing insights from their shelved 2020 DNC hosting plans – and, critically, the political climate in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“It’s not just Jan. 6, you know – we’re also coming out of the George Floyd-related protests, where urban police departments in general had a great deal of exposure to passionate demonstrations,” Fleming said. “I think it has been a continuous learning process, for all law enforcement across the country, on best practices in managing demonstrations, and protecting people and property along the way.”
The city plans to designate a protest space near the convention center and a parade route should demonstrators wish to march, Fleming said.
When Chicago law enforcement found out their city would host the DNC, they sprang into prep mode immediately, Chicago Police Department Superintendent Larry Snelling said during a recent speech.
“We started training right away,” Snelling said. “We had about a year to prepare. That’s not a lot of time.”
“It’s going to be a massive, high resource security effort – not only at the conventions themselves, but all around them,” Cohen said. “What concerns law enforcement officials is, we’re very good at dealing with the threats of yesterday. We’re only learning now how to deal with the threats of today.”
(WASHINGTON) — As the tax filing season gets underway, taxpayers in some states will have a new way to file online available to them in “the coming days,” the IRS said this week.
Direct File, the free site for filing federal tax returns directly through the IRS, will be open for new users in 12 states during unspecified windows of time, before becoming widely available to taxpayers in those states in mid-March, according to the IRS.
The IRS has already launched its filing site to some federal government workers in a testing phase.
With this pilot program, the IRS says it is trying to provide a free alternative to taxpayers so they can use the government website for online filing instead of paying to do so with a commercial company.
According to the IRS, the website explains tax concepts and has customer support representatives available via chat to answer basic tax law questions in English and Spanish.
The agency created the platform with funds from the 10-year 2022 Inflation Reduction Act that included $80 billion for IRS improvements.
Here’s how Direct File works and how taxpayers can use it:
Who is eligible?
Direct File will be available to taxpayers who in 2023 lived in these 12 states: Arizona, California, Florida, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming.
Additionally, taxpayers in those states need to qualify depending on their income type and amount. For example, taxpayers with wages of more than $200,000 or independent contractors won’t be able to use the site. The type of health insurance the taxpayer purchased might also restrict them from using the platform.
When does it become available to taxpayers?
The platform will be available to the taxpayers in those 12 states in the coming days, IRS said in a news release.
There’s no specific date and time for when Direct File will be open to new users in those 12 states, instead it will be available for “short, unannounced windows of time.” The state of the platform will be displayed on top of the website. The platform will be available to the wider public in mid-March, according to the IRS.
This is part of the testing phase to see how the site will work with a bigger volume of users, the IRS said.
The agency is supposed to start with a smaller testing group and the simplest characteristics, said Nina E. Olson, the executive director of the nonprofit Center for Taxpayer Rights. That’s how platforms in the private sector had started, too, she said.
Currently, 1200 government employees are using the site to file their taxes as part of the testing, according to the updates on the IRS website.
What kind of taxes is the site for?
Direct File can be used only for federal taxes. State taxes must be filed separately through a different platform. However, the site will guide the taxpayers living in Arizona, California, Massachusetts or New York to a state-supported platform and transfer their information to file the state returns. These states were selected because they chose to partner with the agency, according to the IRS website.
How to use it?
Direct File is a website, so taxpayers don’t need to install a special software or application.
To start with, taxpayers have to sign up with the IRS identity verification tool, ID.me, with which users say they have had issues.
According to Olson, the issues with ID.me are government wide and not specific to the IRS. The testing phase should also help identify why some taxpayers get turned away when trying to sign up, so that can be addressed later, she said.
If the taxpayer misses the window when Direct File is open, they can still sign up for ID.me and check the site for the next window.
The site has a step-by-step guide on how to track the progress of the return, the IRS said. Once they start the return, the taxpayers can come back to the platform anytime during the season and continue working on their returns — even if the site is closed for new users.
The agency’s Direct File is voluntary. The other paid or free alternatives are still available for taxpayers.
A similar site should have been created decades ago but this is a move in the right direction, Olson said.
President Joe Biden meets with Yulia and Dasha Navalnaya on Feb. 22, 2022. — @POTUS/X
(WASHINGTON) — The U.S. has announced more than 500 sanctions on Russia, its enablers, and its war machine on Friday as the world marks two years since Russia attacked Ukraine.
This is the largest single tranche since the start of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion, administration officials said.
“Today, I am announcing more than 500 new sanctions against Russia for its ongoing war of conquest on Ukraine and for the death of Aleksey Navalny, who was a courageous anti-corruption activist and Putin’s fiercest opposition leader,” President Joe Biden said in the statement released by the White House. “These sanctions will target individuals connected to Navalny’s imprisonment as well as Russia’s financial sector, defense industrial base, procurement networks and sanctions evaders across multiple continents. They will ensure Putin pays an even steeper price for his aggression abroad and repression at home.”
“We are also imposing new export restrictions on nearly 100 entities for providing backdoor support for Russia’s war machine,” Biden continued. “We are taking action to further reduce Russia’s energy revenues. And I’ve directed my team to strengthen support for civil society, independent media, and those who fight for democracy around the world.”
The sanctions, to be rolled out by the Treasury Department and State Department, include additional measures intended to punish the Kremlin for its role in the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, officials said.
Following a meeting on Thursday with Navalny’s widow and daughter in San Francisco, President Joe Biden previewed the action, saying his administration would be “announcing sanctions against Putin, who is responsible for his death, tomorrow.”
Earlier Thursday, a high-level State Department official described the pending sanctions as “crushing.”
“Some of them will be targeted at folks directly involved in Navalany’s death. The vast majority of them though are designed to further attrite Putin’s war machine — to close the gaps in the sanctions regime that he has been able to evade,” Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland said speaking at an event in Washington.
Many of the measures will take aim at Russia’s defense sector, including a number of entities already sanctioned by the U.S.
Those imposed as punishment for Navalny’s death in a remote Russian prisoner target individuals thought to have played a part in his detention and demise, officials added.
Throughout Russia’s war on Ukraine, the U.S. has sought to weaken Moscow’s military by targeting its economy — limiting its ability to import key technology to fuel its defense-industrial complex, reduce the value of its exports, and cut Russia off from the international banking system.
Despite the historic effort, Russia’s economy has grown over the last two years due in part to the country’s steady trade with partners like China and India. The Kremlin has also managed to keep its arsenals stocked, resorting to sourcing some weapons from Iran and North Korea — two countries that are also heavily sanctioned by the West.
“[Vladimir Putin] and his tricksters have found a lot of ways to evade sanctions,” Nuland conceded. “That is why when you see this package that we’re going to launch in a couple days, it is very heavily focused on evasion, on nodes and networks and countries that help evade — willingly or otherwise — and on the banks that support and allow that kind of evasion.”
Nuland also predicted the administration would also impose additional penalties tied to Navalny’s death in the future.
“I anticipate as time goes on we will be able to put forward more and more sanctions on folks directly responsible for Navalny’s death,” she said.
The U.K. announced its own sanctions against six Russian officials on Wednesday.
“History is watching. The failure to support Ukraine at this critical moment will not be forgotten,” said Joe Biden on Friday. “Now is the time for us to stand strong with Ukraine and stand united with our Allies and partners. Now is the time to prove that the United States stands up for freedom and bows down to no one.”
(NEW YORK) — According to a new study published in Nature Neuroscience, researchers at Trinity College in Ireland used blood tests to measure certain biological markers and specialized brain images to discover that long COVID patients with brain fog had more permeability or “leakiness” of their blood-brain barrier – offering the first biological evidence that this symptom may be due to underlying changes in the brain.
“A lot of long COVID symptoms, especially brain fog, are often written off as ‘oh that’s all in your head’ but this study is suggesting an actual biological mechanism behind it,” Dr. Leah Croll, neurologist and assistant professor at Temple University, told ABC News. “Knowing this is real can be very validating for people who experience this symptom.”
While this study is small, it could help inform ongoing research to better understand how to diagnose and treat long COVID that impacts millions of Americans. There is currently no test or treatment for this condition that can be disabling to those who have it.
In the study, researchers selected 32 patients who had COVID-19 in March or April of 2020 to undergo specialized brain imaging called a dynamic contrast-enhancing MRI – 10 had recovered from COVID-19, 11 had long COVID, and 11 had long COVID with brain fog. They found that the brain images showed more permeability or “leakiness” of the blood-brain barrier in patients who had long COVID with brain fog compared to the other groups. They also conducted cognitive tests and showed that six of the participants with brain fog had mild-to-moderate cognitive impairment and specifically showed problems with recall, executive functioning and word finding.
The researchers also measured blood markers of inflammation and blood clotting, and some markers related to the blood-brain barrier in 76 people who were hospitalized with an acute COVID-19 infection in March and April of 2020. It revealed that patients who specifically said they had brain fog with their acute infection had a statistically significant increase in a marker that is indirectly associated with blood-brain barrier dysfunction. Researchers say these findings suggests that inflammation impacting the blood-brain barrier may contribute to people experiencing brain fog with both acute and long COVID, but brain imaging was not done on the patients with an acute infection in the study.
There are limitations of the study. It was only done with a few people at one hospital in Ireland in the first stages of the COVID-19 pandemic before vaccines were available, so it may not be generalizable across all people who currently have long COVID, but it does provide new insights. More research is needed to confirm this finding and understand the implications of it, but experts say it may help researchers as better tests and treatments are developed for long COVID in the future.
“Right now, we’re beginning to understand the biological underpinnings of COVID-related brain fog. Gaining that understanding is the vital first step we need to advance future research.” Croll said. “I am hopeful that we are on a path towards effective tests and treatments, one study at a time.”
Dr. Jade A Cobern, board-certified physician in pediatrics and preventive medicine, is a fellow of the ABC News Medical Unit.
