What happened
Venezuela yesterday raised the death toll from last week’s powerful earthquakes to 1,719 people, with another 5,034 injured and 15,866 displaced. The numbers are expected to keep rising. Among the missing are more than 100 Venezuelans who arrived in La Guaira on a U.S. deportation flight hours before the back-to-back quakes struck, The Associated Press said. The government-run hotel where they were brought for medical screenings and ID cards collapsed. 

Who said what
The 146 Venezuelans on the deportation flight from Miami included 19 women and seven children, according to Human Rights First’s ICE Flight Monitor. Venezuela’s repatriation agency showed one family a list of 32 survivors from the flight, but most are believed to have died, Reuters said. Relatives “have questioned why deportees were taken there and why their phones and documents were withheld, complicating efforts to find and identify them.”

What next?
The search for survivors “was growing increasingly desperate” yesterday, five days after the quakes, The New York Times said. “Frustration is growing” with Venezuela’s “U.S.-backed government” and what critics call its “slow and inept” response, NPR said. Venezuela’s “thousands of police and army troops” have been “slow to arrive” and hindered rescue efforts by “demanding government permits from doctors and rescue workers.”

What happened
A federal judge in Manhattan yesterday sentenced self-exiled Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui to 30 years in prison for financial fraud. Guo was convicted in 2024 after transforming himself from wealthy Beijing insider to U.S.-based anti-Communist crusader with prominent conservative allies and a luxury lifestyle. U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres said he had “preyed on people seeking to bring democracy to China,” causing more than 1,000 supporters “substantial financial and emotional harm.”

Who said what
“The reason I came to the U.S. is to destroy” the Chinese Communist Party, Guo said in court yesterday. “Guo did not lead a movement; he led a criminal enterprise,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Ryan Finkel countered. 

Guo fled China in 2015 amid an anti-corruption crackdown. “By 2017, he was a member of Mar-a-Lago” and quickly “built political and business connections with some powerful people” in President Donald Trump’s orbit, notably Steve Bannon, The New York Times said. Bannon (pictured above with Guo) was arrested aboard Guo’s yacht in 2020 for allegedly defrauding investors, though “Trump eventually pardoned him.” Bannon “has repeatedly called for Guo’s freedom,” The Wall Street Journal said.

What next?
Trump faces “calls from Guo’s supporters to pardon him” but also “Beijing’s long-running demand to hand him over,” the Journal said. Despite “Guo’s political alliances, a presidential pardon appears unlikely,” the Times said. 

If a hacker steals your password, you can create a new one, but if someone gains access to your fingerprint or iris data, you can hardly replace your fingers or eyes. A new study has offered a technique that would allow users to “update” their biometric information, potentially improving online safety.

Concern about the security of using biometrics instead of passwords has grown this month amid reports that scammers could extract close-ups of fingerprints from social media photos, “enhance them with AI” and use them to gain access to accounts or commit other cybercrimes, said Moneywise. It “sounds like the stuff out of spy novels or ‘Mission Impossible,’” said Vyas Sekar, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, to CBS News. But in “theory, it’s possible, especially if people are posting high-resolution images.”

According to a study in the International Journal of Computational Vision and Robotics, “irreversible identity theft” can be “largely avoided” by allowing users to “reset” their biometrics, said TechXplore. The method is “similar to changing a password,” said Knowridge Science Report. Rather than storing a person’s original fingerprint or other biometric information directly, it transforms their data into a protected version “difficult to reverse-engineer.” The data is then “further scrambled and compressed” into a secure digital version.

In this form, a person’s identity can be verified, but the original biometric data is hidden. If the protected version is ever compromised, it can be “cancelled and replaced,” said Knowridge Science Report. Even if hackers gained access to the stored information, the user would not be permanently exposed.