In other news, researchers say the code that Chinese hackers have been using to snoop was based on the NSA's own code.
Meanwhile, former National Security Council adviser Matthew Pottinger says Trump once offered Kim Jong-un a ride back to North Korea on Air Force One.
Finally, drug overdoses killed a record number of people last year. The coronavirus pandemic just made it worse.
People are “living in tents because they lost their spot in sober homes because they lost their job,” says Charlotte Bismuth, a former assistant district attorney in the New York County district attorney’s office who prosecuted the doctor who was New York City’s most prolific opioid prescriber. “It’s so much worse than it was when Covid began.”
Drug overdoses of all kinds killed nearly 84,000 people in the U.S. from August 2019 to July 2020. That’s 23% more than in the previous 12-month period, and the highest number of overdose deaths ever recorded in a single year. Opioids accounted for more than 61,000, or 73%, of those deaths.
Chelsi Cheatom, program manager at Trac-B Exchange, a Las Vegas-based safe-needle program, says she expected to see demand drop during the pandemic because of public transportation cuts and calls for people to shelter in place. The reality was the opposite: “We have a line outside of our door,” she says.