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The Biden administration will pause its program to send Americans free at-home COVID-19 tests this week, blaming Congress for failing to fund further rounds of shipments.

Americans who have yet to request all 16 of their free tests through the federal portal have until Friday to place their orders.

"Ordering through this program will be suspended on Friday, September 2 because Congress hasn't provided additional funding to replenish the nation's stockpile of tests," the Department of Health and Human Services says on the page.

Since ordering opened up in May for a third round of free COVID-19 tests, the U.S. Postal Service has been allowing households across the country to request up to three orders of free tests, for a total of 16 tests.

Through the website, a senior administration official says the federal government has distributed more than 600 million free tests to date. The remaining stockpile of tests is being held back until later this year, in preparation for a "new rise in infections and more acute need."The official said federal health authorities "will expeditiously resume distribution of free tests," if Congress comes through with more funding.

The Biden administration also opened up orders in June for at-home tests specifically designed to work with a smartphone application accessible for Americans who are blind or have limited vision.

However, citing "a significant increase in demand" for the tests, the department says those accessible tests are too now "temporarily out of stock."

Back in January, the Biden administration had contracted for up to 500 million free at-home tests to be shipped nationwide from several manufacturers.

A request from the White House to fund this and other continuing COVID-19 response efforts has been stalled for months in Congress, prompting warnings from federal health officials of "significantly diminished domestic testing capacity" as manufacturers shutter their supply lines.

Other federal efforts to cover free COVID-19 testing are also now winding down.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Operation Expanded Testing, which provided free lab tests to places like schools and shelters, will stop offering the service at the end of the year. A program from the Health Resources and Services Administration to reimburse providers for giving testing to uninsured Americans lapsed in March, "due to a lack of sufficient funds."

For people with private insurance or Medicare Part B coverage, plans are still required to cover up to eight tests per month through the end of the public health emergency. The current declaration is due to expire in October, though the Biden administration is expected to renew the emergency for at least another few months beyond that date.

A growing share of Americans have turned to at-home rapid tests, which the Food and Drug Administration now says needs up to three separate tests to rule out some SARS-CoV-2 infections. A feared winter surge of the virus could bring about more than a million hospitalizations and 181,000 deaths in the worst-case scenario, modelers say.

But in the wake of little movement on Capitol Hill towards funding the Biden administration's COVID-19 efforts, White House officials say they have begun working to transition some parts of the response to the private market.

Government distribution of an COVID-19 antibody drug – Eli Lilly's bebtelovimab – is already ending this month, after the FDA recently amended its emergency use authorization to allow the treatment to be sold commercially.

"One of the things we've spent a lot of time thinking about in the last many months, and we're going to continue this work, and you'll hear more from the administration on this, is getting us out of that acute emergency phase where the U.S. government is buying the vaccines, buying the treatments, buying the diagnostic tests," Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House's top COVID-19 official, told an event hosted by the Chamber of Commerce Foundation earlier this month.

Healthcare industry officials say early formal talks are expected to begin this week with the Biden administration on the topic.

"We need to get out of that business over the long run," Jha said.

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is asking that parents of children separated at the U.S.-Mexico border undergo another round of psychological evaluations to measure how traumatized they were by the Trump-era policy, court documents show.

The request comes in a lawsuit filed by migrants seeking compensation from the government after thousands of children were taken from parents in a policy maligned as inhumane by political and religious leaders around the world. Settlement talks with attorneys and the government broke down late last year.

Justice Department attorneys are also reserving the right to have a psychologist examine the children who were separated, if necessary. The evaluations are routine in emotional-damages claims, but these cases are unusual because the government’s role in traumatizing parents and children by the separations has been well documented.

“President Biden called the Trump family separations criminal and a moral stain on the nation, but now his administration is hiring doctors to try and claim the families didn’t suffer all that much,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project and a lawyer for plaintiffs in the effort to compensate migrants.

Government attorneys argued that the migrants “allege that their mental and emotional injuries are ongoing and permanent in nature” and that their injuries are directly related to the government’s policy. They say it is necessary for the government to have its own opportunity to examine them.

The requests came in two cases filed by 11 families. There are nearly two dozen similar cases pending in other courts, and some have already submitted to government-requested psychiatric evaluations.

But the parents have already sat for hourslong depositions in which they recounted what happened in detail. Government investigators have said children separated from their parents showed more fear, feelings of abandonment and post-traumatic stress symptoms than children who were not separated.

Some children believed their parents had abandoned them or had been killed. For some, the mental trauma caused physical symptoms, like chest or heart pain, according to a 2019 report from the inspector general’s office in the Department of Health and Human Services.

Parents studied by Physicians for Human Rights, a nonprofit collective of doctors that works to document human rights violations, exhibited suicidal thoughts and suffered a raft of problems including nightmares, depression, anxiety, panic, worry and difficulty sleeping.

Biden administration officials have decried the Trump-era policies. Biden, a Democrat, said during his presidential campaign the policies were “an outrage, a moral failing and a stain on our national character.”

Justice Department attorneys acknowledge in court documents that parents have already undergone multiple mental health evaluations but say an adult-psychology expert found it was necessary to get another opinion, according to court documents.

“It is standard practice for plaintiffs alleging severe emotional injury to be examined by the opposing party’s expert,” federal attorneys wrote. They point to a similar southern Florida case in which a father and child agreed to the same examination and say it’s “well within” what’s considered appropriate.

An examination would take about eight hours, four hours for clinical interviews and four hours of emotional and trauma testing, federal attorneys wrote. It would not be invasive and would happen at an agreed-upon place and time. The previous evaluations were done by experts chosen by the parents’ lawyers.

The two sides had been negotiating a settlement, but then Biden said that families of separated children deserve some form of compensation. An early proposal of $450,000 per person was reported and was heavily criticized by Republicans. When asked about the proposed figure, Biden said: “That’s not going to happen.”

Talks ended shortly after. The settlement talks had also included discussion of granting the families legal U.S. residency and providing counseling services.

There is a separate legal effort to reunite other families, and there are still hundreds who have not been brought back together. The Biden administration has formed a reunification task force that has reunited roughly 600 families.

Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy meant that any adult caught crossing the border illegally would be prosecuted for illegal entry. Because children cannot be jailed with their family members, families were separated and children were taken into custody by Health and Human Services, which manages unaccompanied children at the border. No system was created to reunite children with their families.

According to the government watchdogs, Trump administration leaders underestimated how difficult it would be to carry out the policy in the field and did not inform local prosecutors and others that children would be separated. They also failed to understand that children would be separated longer than a few hours, and when that was discovered, they pressed on, the watchdogs said.

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Celona’s Certified 5G LAN Specialist (C5S) course is designed to deliver comprehensive knowledge of the functions and capabilities for private LTE/5G wireless technology

CUPERTINO, Calif., Sept. 19, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Celona, the industry’s innovator of 5G LAN solutions, announced that is has partnered with Certified Wireless Network Professionals (CWNP) to sponsor the first private cellular wireless certification course developed by subject matter experts to teach and validate 5G LAN basics to enterprise network professionals.

Celona’s certified 5G LAN specialist (C5S) course, hosted by CWNP, provides learners with a vendor-neutral introduction to emerging private LTE/5G solutions and technologies. The C5S certification from Celona is valid for three years.

Ideal for wireless network engineers, architects, decision makers and technology advisors from both the IT and telecom industries, the free, six-hour online course and exam ensures attendees have a solid understanding of the fundamental concepts for private spectrum options, LTE/5G cellular wireless technology benefits, and new generation of application / use case drivers requiring deterministic connectivity on enterprise wireless.

To date, professionals in more than 150 countries have achieved CWNP certifications, enabling them to make wireless LANs more cost-effective, reliable, and secure.

“Because CWNP is widely recognized as the industry standard for Wi-Fi certification, network professionals have always looked to us to provide domain expertise and world-class education on the latest technologies and deployment practices,” said Tom Carpenter, CTO of CWNP.

“While we are committed to remaining vendor independent, we believe our partnership with Celona, a technology pioneer in the private cellular wireless space, will help address exciting new developments in 5G LANs that are poised to change how network professionals think about, design and deploy enterprise wireless networks going forward.”

Story continues

Celona’s 5G LAN Specialist (C5S) certification educates attendees about a wide range of private cellular operations and technologies such as:

• Distinguishing factors between 5G LANs and Wi-Fi LANs

• Technical considerations for deploying 5G LANs

• Business needs that 5G LANs satisfy, distinct from Wi-Fi

• 5G radio access network features and capabilities

• The terminology and concepts used in 5G LANs

• Private cellular spectrum framework (e.g. CBRS in the United States)

• Shared spectrum and regulatory requirements in various countries

• End user device selection given business and technical use cases

• The use and administration of physical and embedded SIMs (eSIM)

• Private LTE/5G integration within existing enterprise L2/L3 infrastructures

• The differences between indoor and outdoor deployments
  

Celona’s certified 5GLAN specialist course is available today and has been made available to CWNP community members at no cost. Enterprise network professionals can register for a free community membership at CWNP.com and start their certification track.

ABOUT CELONA
Celona, the enterprise 5G company, is focused on enabling organizations of all sizes to implement the latest generation of digital automation initiatives on enterprise wireless. Taking advantage of dynamic spectrum sharing options such as CBRS in the United States, Celona’s 5G LAN solution is designed to accelerate the adoption of private cellular wireless by enterprise organizations and their technology partners. For more information, please visit celona.io and follow Celona on Twitter @celonaio.

ABOUT CWNP
CWNP is the industry standard for vendor-neutral enterprise wireless certification and training. CWNP’s entry-level to expert certifications prepare IT professionals to specify, design and manage enterprise wireless networks. CWNP has certification holders in more than 150 countries and authorized training partners around the globe. For more information, please visit cwnp.com and follow CWNP on Twitter @CWNP.

MEDIA CONTACT
David Callisch
Celona, Inc.
callisch@celona.io
+1 (408)504-5487

CNN  — 

A lack of hard intelligence inside North Korea is curtailing the United States’ ability to determine Kim Jong Un’s intentions as the hermit kingdom fires a barrage of powerful missile launches, according to senior administration officials.

The accurate tests have caused administration officials to grow concerned that Kim is set to oversee his nation’s seventh nuclear test.

So far, President Joe Biden has responded to the historic level of provocation by sending a US aircraft carrier to the region. The US and South Korea performed live-fire missile tests of their own and, in an urgently arranged telephone call with Japan’s prime minister, Biden vowed to coordinate on a “longer-term response” to the increasingly belligerent North.

White House officials have declined to detail any analysis or assessment that sheds light on why there has been a rapid increase in escalatory action, citing an inability to talk publicly about classified intelligence. But two senior US officials familiar with the matter acknowledged a central issue in divining the dictator’s motives is a lack of hard intelligence altogether.

“We have quite a good picture on the state of North Korean conventional and missile capabilities. What’s much harder is the intentions component, where, of course, collection is a bigger problem,” said Chris Johnstone, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former director for East Asia on the National Security Council under Biden.

“Since so much of what North Korea does is driven by the leader himself, you really have to get inside his head, and that’s a hard intelligence problem.”

North Korea has long been isolated and largely shuttered from the rest of the world, a reality that has become even more acute in accurate years due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The North lacks the widespread use of technology that not only facilitates economic and societal advances, but also provides critical windows and opportunities to glean information for the intelligence services of the US and its allies.

That leaves the White House without the type of information that could help predict when precisely a test may occur or allow for greater insights into Kim’s thinking as Biden works to calibrate an approach that avoids escalation.

“It’s difficult to know what is inside his mind and how he makes his decisions,” John Kirby, the strategic communications coordinator for the National Security Council, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. “Our ability to divine intelligence out of Pyongyang is fairly limited. So, it’s hard to know what’s prompting this. But what we do know is he’s continuing to try and Boost his program, his capabilities.”

The intelligence community “knows a fair bit about his inner circle, a fair bit about how decisions are made,” Johnstone said. “But at the end of the day, it really is him. And when the circle is so small – and they don’t leave the country – it’s a pretty hard target.”

The latest missile launches mark the 24th time that North Korea has conducted missile tests this year, the highest annual tally since Kim took power in 2011.

Sanctions applied by the past three administration have done little to stop Kim’s march toward a viable nuclear weapon, even as they have left the country deeply isolated and many of its people impoverished. Diplomacy has similarly failed to yield much progress in halting a weapons program that North Korea says it will never abandon.

The Biden administration’s attempts to directly engage Pyongyang – delivered through a variety of channels, both direct and indirect – have been met with silence, according to officials. While the White House is confident its messages seeking diplomacy without preconditions “anytime, anyplace” have been received by Kim, he has yet to respond.

“We remain prepared to engage in serious and sustained diplomacy,” a US official said. “It is unfortunate that the DPRK has not responded to our outreach.”

Another underground nuclear test – potentially timed near November’s midterm elections – would amount to an attention-grabbing move that US officials have been bracing for over the past several months, beginning in the Spring when intelligence showed new activity at one of the country’s nuclear sites around the time of Biden’s first presidential visit to Asia.

White House aides said they were prepared to respond, including through adjustments to the US military posture in the region and the deployment of strategic assets. Yet the test didn’t come during Biden’s trip, underscoring the limits of US intelligence in predicting exactly when or why North Korea may test its advanced weapons.

“Anytime people start speculating on what North Korea might or might not do, they tend to have their expectations confounded one way or another,” national security adviser Jake Sullivan said at the time.

US officials and outside analysts anticipate the US isn’t likely to get much warning of a nuclear test. US military and intelligence agencies assess North Korea could be ready to resume underground nuclear testing at any moment, largely based on satellite imagery showing above-ground preparations at its Punggye-ri test site appear to be complete.

The country’s rainy season is now over, opening up the roads to the site. What’s not clear is whether North Korea has placed nuclear material in any of the underground tunnels at the site.

“The country is dried out the test site looks really well rebuilt to my eye. It’s really at this point probably a political choice for them,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a weapons expert and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. “I think when they are technically ready and politically ready, we’ve got all the warning we’re gonna get.”

Officials believe the missile and nuclear tests serve a practical purpose, beyond simply sending a message to the US and its allies in the region, which allow the North to further refine its systems as it works toward the ultimate goal of a nuclear-tipped missile that can reach the US mainland. Testing ever-more-powerful weapons also enhances Kim’s stature inside North Korea.

“What concerns us is whatever happens in these launches – how far they go and whether they succeed or fail – he learns. And he is able to Boost his ballistic missile capabilities with every subsequent launch. So that’s of concern to us,” Kirby said.

Lewis cautioned against memorizing too much into individual ballistic missile tests. The primary motivation for North Korea, he said, is technical development – “especially the short-range ones where I think they’re no longer testing the missiles, they’re testing the crews.”

Other analysts believe the spate of missile tests is better understood as a response to Kim’s domestic woes.

“North Korea has had a very difficult period during Covid, essentially shutting off the country entirely, including to China. The food situation isn’t great,” Johnstone said. “The external enemy is part of what he uses to sustain his position.”

Still, determining precisely why North Korea is testing missiles at any particular moment has proved an enduring challenge for US administrations stretching back decades. For Biden and his top national security aides, deciphering North Korea’s intentions as it accelerates its weapons testing has proved difficult and administration officials are candid that previous efforts to assign motivation to Pyongyang’s actions have later been proved wrong.

“The North Koreans almost always have reasons for what they do. And our track record of understanding those ahead of time is not always so great,” one US official familiar with North Korea policy said.

Biden and his team have scoffed at the prospect of staging a high-profile meeting with Kim akin to the three summits former President Donald Trump convened with the dictator. Instead, they have said a meeting between the two leaders would come only after extensive preparatory diplomacy between officials on both sides and with an express purpose.

At the same time, Biden also rejected the “strategic patience” approach adopted by his onetime boss, former President Barack Obama, seeking instead a phased approach in which North Korea gives up parts of its program in exchange for sanctions relief.

Biden administration officials quietly acknowledge that their North Korea policy is not expected to trigger progress on the intractable nuclear challenge, administration sources said. But they also entered office expecting North Korea was not going to engage diplomatically quickly due to a tumultuous few years of back and forth with the US under Trump and the effect of Covid.

Some officials are now beginning to consider how the Biden administration could approach the distinct foreign policy challenge in the second half of Biden’s term, sources said, though neither the President nor his senior-most aides have indicated a desire to make the issue a top priority.

“Our position on diplomacy and dialogue has not changed,” said State Department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel when asked if the Biden administration would consider re-evaluating their North Korea policy given the accurate missile tests.

If there is one silver lining to Pyongyang’s accurate provocations and the threat of a possible nuclear test, Johnstone said, it is that the common threat has helped the United States more smoothly navigate the historically contentious relationship between Japan and South Korea. And it could accelerate a debate in Japan about doubling its defense spending to 2% of its GDP, he said.

Asked what policy levers the Biden administration has at its disposal to try to curtail Pyongyang’s nuclear program, Lewis was succinct: “None.”

“When North Korea did not have nuclear weapons, there were interesting choices to be made about how to entice and or pressure them to not build some,” Lewis said. “Convincing North Korea to provide up nuclear weapons that it already has is a totally different game.”

As the US has moved in what one official called “a clear and calibrated” way with its critical allies in the region over the course of the last several days, one central player remains largely unseen: China.

With US-China tensions reaching new heights over the last several months, substantive communications between key US officials and their Chinese counterparts have remained largely on ice, according to several senior US officials. Any Chinese absence as US officials grapple with Kim’s motives creates a particularly acute challenge given the country’s role as a central interlocutor between the US and its allies and North Korea.

Sullivan directly addressed the issue during a four-and-a-half hour meeting with China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi in June, officials said. He pointed to North Korea as a primary area where the countries could cooperate, even amid the strained relations.

Sullivan “made very clear that we believe this is an area where the United States and China should be able to work together,” a senior administration official said.

But just this week China demonstrated a lack of desire to work with the US on curbing North Korea’s provocations. China’s representative at the UN cast the accurate missile launches as a result of US aggressions in the region during a UN Security Council meeting.

White House officials believe the timing of a seventh nuclear test could also be dictated by political machinations inside China. Multiple officials noted they were closely watching the period immediately after the conclusion of the Communist Party’s congress later this month.

One official noted it was unlikely Kim would seek create a significant geopolitical crisis moment as Chinese President Xi Jinping moves toward his third term.