World

Republican hopes for a sweeping rebuke of President Joe Biden in congressional elections failed to materialize with both parties picking up seats following a campaign fought against a backdrop of stubbornly high inflation and fears for US democracy.

Republicans needed one seat to wrest control of the evenly-divided Senate but by early Wednesday the only one to change party hands went to the Democrats, with John Fetterman, a burly champion of progressive economic policies, triumphing in Pennsylvania.

In the House of Representatives, early results suggested Republicans were on track to wrest control from Democrats — but only by a handful of seats, a far cry from their predictions.

Top Republican Kevin McCarthy — who hopes to be the lower chamber’s next speaker — struck an upbeat note as he addressed supporters in the early hours, telling them: “It is clear that we are going to take the House back.”

But Senator Lindsey Graham, a top Trump ally, bluntly conceded to NBC that the election is “definitely not a Republican wave, that’s for darn sure.”

With Biden’s favorability ratings hovering in the low 40s and Republicans pounding him over inflation and crime, many pundits had predicted a drubbing that would have raised new questions on whether America’s oldest-ever president, who turns 80 this month, should run again.

The president’s party has traditionally lost seats in midterm elections — and all eyes have been on a handful of Senate races including in Georgia, Nevada, Arizona and Wisconsin. 

In Pennsylvania — one of the election’s highest-profile races — Fetterman limited campaign appearances as he recovered from a stroke that impeded his speech but he still edged out Mehmet Oz, a celebrity doctor endorsed by Donald Trump.

“This campaign has always been about fighting for everyone who’s ever been got knocked down that ever got back up,” the two-meter (six-foot-eight) Fetterman, clad in his trademark hoodie, told a rally in Pittsburgh.

– Florida swings right –

On a night of close contests, one of the most decisive wins was for rising Republican star Ron DeSantis, who won by a crushing margin in Florida, cementing his status as a top potential White House candidate in 2024.

DeSantis, who has made a name in Florida by railing against Covid mitigation measures and transgender rights, was projected to have won by up to 20 points against a folksy former governor, four years after squeaking by in his longtime swing state.

“We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob,” DeSantis told a victory rally, using a derisive term for social justice campaigners.

“Florida is where woke goes to die,” he said.

But if the 44-year-old views his victory as a mandate for the White House in 2024, he will likely face a stiff challenge from another Florida resident — former president Trump, who has teased an “exciting” announcement on November 15.

Among other races, Maura Healey will make history as the first openly lesbian governor in the United States and in New York, where recent polls gave Democrats a scare, Governor Kathy Hochul fended off a Republican challenge.

– Trump again alleges fraud –

Trump, who is facing criminal probes over taking top secret documents from the White House and trying to overturn the 2020 election, returned to his playbook of airing unsubstantiated claims of fraud.

In Arizona, Trump and his chosen candidate for governor, Kari Lake, alleged irregularities after problems with voting machines.

Officials in the most populous county of Maricopa said about 20 percent of the 223 polling stations experienced difficulties related to printers but that no one was denied the right to vote.

Biden has warned that Republicans pose a dire threat to democracy with more than half their candidates repeating Trump’s debunked claims of cheating in the 2020 election.

In the runup to the vote, an intruder espousing far-right beliefs broke into the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and bludgeoned her husband with a hammer. 

In his closing pitch, Biden vowed that Democrats would defend pensions, health care and the freedom to have an abortion, after a Supreme Court transformed by Trump rescinded the right to choose.

Voting in Phoenix, Kenneth Bellows, a 32-year-old law student, said runaway inflation is “hurting Americans who are just trying to get by.”

“We don’t need any of the crazy woke rhetoric that’s going on right now. What we really need is focusing on everyday kitchen-table politics, to make sure taxes are low,” he said.

But at a restaurant serving up soul food in Pittsburgh, Lasaine Latimore, 77, said Democrats were best placed to help people.

“I just want my medical insurance and more money for dental and glasses,” she said.

A Republican victory could scuttle Biden’s legislative agenda, with Congress scuttling his ambitions on climate change and scrutinizing the billions of US dollars to help Ukraine fight Russia.

Hackers have followed through on a threat to leak sensitive medical records stolen from a major Australian health company that counts the country’s prime minister among nearly 10 million customers.

Medibank told investors that a “sample” selection of customer data was posted on a “dark web forum” on Wednesday after it refused to pay a ransom demand.

The data included names, birth dates, passport numbers and information on medical claims for hundreds of customers who were separated into “naughty” and “nice” lists. 

Some on the “naughty” list had numeric codes that appeared to link them to drug addiction, alcohol abuse and HIV infection. 

For example, one record carried an entry that read: “p_diag: F122”. 

F122 corresponds with “cannabis dependence” under the International Classification of Diseases, published by the World Health Organization. 

Medibank is Australia’s largest private health insurer and the hack is likely to include some of the country’s most influential and wealthy individuals.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he himself was a Medibank customer and that the attack was a “wake-up call” for corporate Australia.

– Potential Russian link –

The perpetrator of the hack has not yet been publicly identified. 

But the Australian Federal Police’s Justine Gough said it was the work of a “criminal or criminal groups” that could be operating outside the country.

Sanjay Jha, chief scientist at the University of New South Wales’s Institute for Cyber Security, said it was difficult to attribute any attack to a single group.

However, he told AFP it carried some of the hallmarks associated with a Russian hacker group called REvil — which has previously targeted everything from Brazilian meat company JBS to Lady Gaga.

“The pattern matches the behaviour in parts. So that is why there is a serious indication it could be them selling the data,” Jha said.

A defunct REvil website has been redirecting traffic to the dark web forum where the Medibank data was leaked.

REvil — an amalgam of ransomware and evil — was the subject of a US$10 million reward from US authorities before being reportedly dismantled by Russia this year. 

JBS Foods, one of the largest beef producers in the world, paid REvil a ransom of US$11 million in 2021.

Jha said the hackers could now look to sell the sensitive data to blackmailers and other scammers.

– ‘Scumbags’ and ‘crooks’ –

The hackers also uploaded what they said were a series of messages sent to Medibank in the days before the leak. 

“We will do everything in our power to inflict as much damage as possible for you, both financial and reputational,” one message from the hackers read. 

Hundreds of millions of US dollars have been wiped off Medibank’s market value, with the company’s share price down more than 20 percent since October, when news of the leak first emerged.

Troy Hunt, a cyber security expert working for Microsoft, wrote on Twitter that the breach was “about as bad as we feared it would get”. 

The Medibank hack followed an attack on telecom company Optus in September that exposed the personal information of some nine million Australians.

Jha said the enormous Medibank and Optus data breaches could make it easier to carry out cyber attacks on different systems in the future. 

“A lot of credentials have been stolen in recent months,” he said. “That makes the job of attackers easier — they can go and try other systems with millions of credentials.” 

Australia’s assistant treasurer Stephen Jones said the perpetrators were “scumbags” and “crooks”.

“We shouldn’t be giving in to these fraudsters,” he told local media.

As Medibank tried to contain the leak, it was also staring down the barrel of a potentially costly class action lawsuit.

An Australian man has been sentenced to 129 years in a Philippine jail as part of a child sexual abuse case involving victims as young as 18 months, a prosecutor said Wednesday.

It was the second conviction for Peter Gerard Scully, who is already serving a life sentence for an initial batch of charges involving the rape and trafficking of girls.

The Philippines has become a global hotspot for child sex exploitation, helped by poverty, English fluency and high internet connectivity in the country, experts warn.

“I hope this sends a very strong message to all abusers, all human traffickers, that crime really does not pay,” Merlynn Barola-Uy, a regional prosecutor in the southern city of Cagayan de Oro, told AFP. 

A Cagayan de Oro court handed down the sentence on November 3 after Scully and his three co-accused entered into a plea bargaining agreement.

They had been charged with 60 offences, including trafficking, child pornography, child abuse and rape.

Scully’s girlfriend, Lovely Margallo, was sentenced to 126 years in jail. Two others were given sentences of more than nine years.

Victims and their families have accepted the terms of the agreement and consider it a “sweet victory”, according to a statement posted on the regional prosecution office’s Facebook page. 

“They all want to put closure to this dark phase of their lives and move on,” the statement reads.

– ‘Big victory’ –

Victims included an 18-month-old baby girl and a child whose body was found buried under the floor of a house rented by Scully, Barola-Uy said.

“This is a big victory, not only for us prosecutors in the Department of Justice, but more importantly this is a big victory for the victim-survivors,” she said.

Barola-Uy said the youngest victim was now in grade two at school while others were adults.

Scully was arrested in 2015 in Malaybalay, another southern Philippine city, after fleeing from Australia in 2011. 

He had come to the Philippines to escape fraud charges in his home country.

He then set up a cybersex business, filming teenage girls from impoverished families as he had sex with them or used sex toys, investigators said previously.

The videos were allegedly sold to customers in Germany, the United States and Brazil.

Barola-Uy said Scully and his girlfriend meted out “extreme kinds of abuses” to their seven victims. 

“They were very graphic, they were very brutal,” she said.

Most of the people who pay to view these types of sex videos are abroad, with potentially thousands of children being abused, often with their parents’ consent, authorities say.

The United Nations Children’s Fund said in 2021 that the Philippines is one of the top global sources of child sex abuse materials.

From the woods at the edge of Bakhmut, a besieged Ukrainian city in the Donbas region, a soldier shouts: “Postril!”

The signal — meaning “fire!” in Ukrainian — sends a huge orange fireball spitting from a 130mm field gun and blows away the surrounding vegetation.

In highly choreographed movements, five soldiers quickly remove the smoking hot empty cartridge and replace it, allowing for another “Postril!”.

These soldiers are part of the Ukrainian army’s 93rd brigade. Their targets are the Russian positions across the Bakhmut frontline.

Fighting has raged for four months around this eastern city, which is still held by Ukrainian troops but surrounded by Moscow’s forces.

“We are covering our infantry and chasing out the enemy’s artillery units. Right now, we are working a lot more than usual,” said artilleryman Dmytro, 25.

After the war started, his unit was given M-46 Soviet field guns, also called M1954 for the year they were introduced during a parade in Moscow’s Red Square. 

The massive weapon weighs about eight tons (16,000 pounds), with a gun tube of about eight metres (26 feet) and a 37-kilometre (22-mile) range. 

– ‘Welcome to hell’ –

“We came here because that’s where the enemy is pushing the most,” said Dmytro, pearls of sweat rolling down his face. “It seems that they slowed down since we started shooting.”

“There are times where we start shooting at 5:00 am and stay here through the whole night… We have two artillery units and we swap every day and a half,” he explained. 

After three consecutive shots, the unit pauses for a moment in the sun.

The mix of professionals and mobilised men drink coffee and smoke cigarettes around a fire. 

Some sport patches saying “welcome to hell” or “we are Ukraine” on their camouflage combat gear.

This close to the frontline, the noise of mortar and artillery shells is nearly constant and there is little time for anything more than brief periods of respite.

“Shooting non-stop for half an hour is tiring,” Dmytro said.

“We will rest when the war is over.” 

– ‘Adrenaline’ –

For Dmytro, the hardest part is unloading shells from the trucks, “especially when we get 50-60 boxes”.

When it comes to shooting, “adrenaline makes everything easier” the soldier said.

His unit receives new coordinates of a Russian position they need to strike, so the sergeants jump up from their brief break and run towards their half-hidden field gun. 

“Ready!” shouts Oleksandr, the unit’s observer. 

They remove the camouflage cover and re-load the M-46. 

One soldier gives the coordinates to the shooter, who triggers the control system. 

The long tube rises, aims about thirty kilometres away and fires. 

After the shot, there is no need for the brigade to leave, unlike units that operate on shorter ranges closer to the front.

“We were never spotted by the Russians,” said Oleksandr, visibly satisfied.

Dmytro says he avoids thinking about being a target for enemy artillery. 

“We only think about the best way to reach our target and after that, we just sit and wait for the next target,” he said. 

As for fighting with an old Soviet weapon, the brigade makes the best of it. 

“Clearly, usually, anyone wants the most modern weapon,” said Oleksandr.

But another member of the unit, smiling as he looks at the M-46, said: “But this baby makes us happy!”

Russia is moving detained US basketball star Brittney Griner to a penal colony, her lawyers said Wednesday, drawing a sharp rebuke from the White House.

Griner, convicted for possession of a small quantity of cannabis oil, was transferred out of a detention center on November 4, her legal team said.

She “is now on her way to a penal colony,” lawyers Maria Blagovolina and Alexander Boykov said in a statement.

They said that Russia generally sends notifications of transforming prisoners by mail, taking up to two weeks.

“We do not have any information on her exact current location or her final destination,” they said.

Griner’s case has drawn outrage in the United States, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken reaching out to Russia to propose a deal to free her despite soaring tensions over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated that the United States had put forward a “substantial offer” to Russia to resolve her case.

“Every minute that Brittney Griner must endure wrongful detention in Russia is a minute too long,” Jean-Pierre said in a statement.

“As the administration continues to work tirelessly to secure her release, the president has directed the administration to prevail on her Russian captors to improve her treatment and the conditions she may be forced to endure in a penal colony.”

Griner, a two-time Olympic basketball gold medalist and Women’s NBA champion, had been in Russia to play for the professional Yekaterinburg team during her off-season from the Phoenix Mercury Women’s National Basketball Association side.

She said the cannabis in vape cartridges was to treat pain from her sporting injuries, but Russia does not allow medical marijuana use.

Reports have suggested that Griner and another American jailed in Russia, Paul Whelan — a retired US Marine arrested in December 2018 and accused of spying — could be traded for Viktor Bout, a famed Russian arms trafficker serving 25 years in prison on a 2012 conviction.

President Joe Biden’s agenda hung in the balance early Wednesday as a predicted Republican wave failed to materialize in congressional elections fought against a backdrop of stubbornly high inflation and fears for US democracy.

Tuesday’s election saw a clearer verdict in races for states’ governors with rising Republican star Ron DeSantis winning by a crushing margin in Florida, cementing his status as a top potential White House candidate in 2024.

Democrats suffered disappointment in Ohio as writer J.D. Vance, a Trump-endorsed chronicler of working-class white life, won a Senate seat that was already in Republican hands.

But in House races, one Ohio Republican conceded defeat to a Democrat and two Democratic congresswomen in Virginia seen as at risk survived challenges, although a third seat in the eastern state flipped.

The election is “definitely not a Republican wave, that’s for darn sure,” Senator Lindsey Graham, a top Trump ally, told NBC News.

Senator Ted Cruz, who had previously forecast a “red tsunami,” still predicted Republicans would win both chambers but said, “It hasn’t been as big of a wave as I’d hoped it would be.”

The president’s party has traditionally lost seats in midterm elections, with Republicans roaring back after the first two years of both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

With Biden’s favorability ratings hovering in the low 40s and Republicans pounding him over inflation and crime, many pundits predicted major losses — which would raise new questions on whether America’s oldest-ever president, who turns 80 this month, should run again.

All eyes are on a handful of Senate races including in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona and Wisconsin, with a single seat enough to swing control of the Senate — now evenly divided and controlled by Democrats only through the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris.

– Florida swings right –

On a night of close contests, one of the most decisive wins was for DeSantis, who has made a name in Florida by railing against Covid mitigation measures and transgender rights. 

He was projected to have won by up to 20 points against a folksy former governor, four years after squeaking by in his longtime swing state.

“We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob,” DeSantis told a victory rally, using a derisive term for social justice campaigners.

“Florida is where woke goes to die,” he said.

But if the 44-year-old views his victory as a mandate for the White House in 2024, he will likely face a stiff challenge from another Florida resident — Donald Trump.

The former president went to the polls teasing an announcement next week of a potential new White House run, telling reporters that November 15 “will be a very exciting day for a lot of people.”

“I think if he runs, he could hurt himself very badly,” Trump separately told Fox News, of DeSantis.

Among other gubernatorial races, two solidly Democratic states, Massachusetts and Maryland, elected Democrats to succeed popular moderate Republican incumbents.

In Massachusetts, Maura Healey will make history as the first openly lesbian governor in the United States.

And in New York, where recent polls gave Democrats a scare, Governor Kathy Hochul fended off a Republican challenge.

– Trump again alleges fraud –

Trump, who is facing criminal probes over taking top secret documents from the White House and trying to overturn the 2020 election, has returned to his playbook of airing unsubstantiated claims of fraud.

In Arizona, expected to be one of the closest states, Trump and his chosen candidate for governor, Kari Lake, alleged irregularities after problems with voting machines.

“When we win, and I think we will within hours — we will turn this around, no more incompetency,” Lake — whose Democratic rival took an early lead — told supporters gathered at a luxury ranch in the Phoenix suburbs.

Officials in surrounding Maricopa County said about 20 percent of the 223 polling stations experienced difficulties related to printers but that no one was denied the right to vote.

Biden has warned that Republicans pose a dire threat to democracy with more than half their candidates repeating Trump’s debunked claims of cheating in the 2020 election.

In the runup to the vote, an intruder espousing far-right beliefs broke into the San Francisco home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and bludgeoned her husband with a hammer. 

In his closing pitch, Biden vowed that Democrats would defend pensions, health care and the freedom to have an abortion, after a Supreme Court transformed by Trump rescinded the right to choose.

Voting in Phoenix, Kenneth Bellows, a 32-year-old law student, said runaway inflation is “hurting Americans who are just trying to get by.”

“We don’t need any of the crazy woke rhetoric that’s going on right now. What we really need is focusing on everyday kitchen-table politics, to make sure taxes are low,” he said.

But at a restaurant serving up soul food in Pittsburgh, Lasaine Latimore, 77, said Democrats were best placed to help people.

“I just want my medical insurance and more money for dental and glasses,” she said.

If both the House and Senate flip, Biden’s legislative agenda would be paralyzed as Republicans launch aggressive investigations and oppose his spending plans.

That would raise questions over everything from climate policies, which the president will be laying out at the COP27 conference in Egypt this week, to Ukraine, where some Republicans are reluctant to maintain the current rate of US military support.