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Pope Francis remains in ‘critical condition’ with signs of early kidney failure

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(NewsNation) — Pope Francis had a “peaceful night” Saturday after receiving blood transfusions and high levels of oxygen to treat his double pneumonia, the Vatican said Sunday, but remains in “critical condition.”

Blood tests showed early kidney failure but he remains alert, responsive and attended Mass, the Vatican said, as the 88-year-old pontiff battles a complex lung infection.

Francis took to social media to express his gratitude to supporters, writing, “I’ve recently received many messages of affection, and I’ve been particularly struck by the letters and drawings from children. Thank you for your closeness, and for the consoling prayers I have received from all over the world.”

The pontiff, who entered the papacy at age 76 in 2013, is being treated at Gemelli Hospital in Italy where he was initially admitted for bronchitis on Feb.14.

He has missed Sunday Mass in back-to-back weeks after suffering a severe and prolonged respiratory crisis requiring oxygen.  

Though not on a ventilator, Francis is struggling to breathe and is keeping his movement limited, according to officials. Still, he remains alert, sitting upright, working and joking, though a bit more fatigued than the day before. 

The pope also received blood transfusions after tests revealed thrombocytopenia, a condition of abnormally low levels of platelets in the blood. 

Doctors said their biggest concern now is the risk of germs that could enter his bloodstream and cause sepsis, a life-threatening infection. 

His medical team says he’s expected to return to the Vatican, which may be unsurprising, as he has said previously that the position of pope is a lifelong commitment. 

Despite his illness, Francis mentioned the war in Ukraine, saying “Tomorrow (Feb. 23) will be the 3rd anniversary of the large-scale war against Ukraine. A pain. And shameful occasion for the whole of humanity,” going on to call for the “gift of peace in all armed conflicts around the world.” 

Doctors said he will stay hospitalized at least through next weekend. 

A mass for the pope in his native city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, is expected at 9:15 a.m. Sunday. 

The Associated Press contributed to this report


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Trump Revels in Mass Federal Firings and Jeers at Biden Before Adoring CPAC crowd

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Donald Trump

OXON HILL, Md. — President Donald Trump said Saturday that “nobody’s ever seen anything” like his administration’s sweeping effort to fire thousands of federal employees and shrink the size of government, congratulating himself for “dominating” Washington and sending bureaucrats “packing.”

Addressing an adoring crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference just outside the nation’s capital, Trump promised, “We’re going to forge a new and lasting political majority that will drive American politics for generations to come.”

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The president argues that voters gave him a mandate to overhaul government while cracking down on the U.S.-Mexico border and extending tax cuts that were the signature policy of his first administration.

Trump clicked easily back into campaign mode during his hour-plus speech, predicting that the GOP will continue to win and defy history, which has shown that a president’s party typically struggles during midterm elections. He insisted of Republicans, “I don’t think we’ve been at this level, maybe ever.”

“Nobody’s ever seen anything like this,” Trump said, likening his new administration’s opening month to being on a roll through the first four holes of a round of golf — which he said gives him confidence for the fifth hole.

Trump has empowered Elon Musk to help carry out the firings, and the billionaire suggested Saturday that more might be coming.

“Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,” Musk posted on X, which he owns. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”

Later, an “HR” email was sent to federal workers across numerous agencies titled “What did you do last week” and asking that recipients “reply with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.” It cautioned against sending classified information, and gave a deadline of Monday at 11:59 p.m. ET.

Trump also said during the speech that he’d carry out harsher immigration policies. But those efforts have so far largely been overshadowed by his administration’s mass federal firings. He announced that one entity with a workforce that had been significantly reduced, the U.S. Agency for International Development, would have its Washington office taken over by Customs and Border Protection officials.

“The agency’s name has been removed from its former building,” he said.

The president also repeated his previous promises to scrutinize the country’s gold depository at Fort Knox.

“Would anybody like to join us?” he asked to cheers from the crowd at the suggestion that administration forces might converge on the complex. “We want to see if the gold is still there.”

But Trump also devoted large chunks of his address to reliving last year’s presidential race, jeering at former President Joe Biden and mispronouncing the first name of former Vice President Kamala Harris — his Election Day opponent — gleefully proclaiming, “I haven’t said that name in a while.”

He went on to use an expletive to describe Biden’s handling of border security, despite noting that evangelical conservatives have urged him not to use foul language.

Trump had kinder words for Chinese President Xi Jinping, saying “I happen to like” him, while saying, “we’ve been treated very unfairly by China and many other countries.”

On the sidelines of the conference, Trump met with conservative Polish President Andrzej Duda amid rising tensions in Europe over Russia’s war in Ukraine. After he took the stage, Trump saluted Duda and another atendee, Argentine President Javier Milei.

Trump called Duda “a fantastic man and a great friend of mine” and said “you must be doing something right, hanging out with Trump.” He noted that Milei was “a MAGA guy, too, Make Argentina Great Again.”

Poland is a longtime ally of Ukraine. Trump upended recent U.S. policy by dispatching top foreign policy advisers to Saudi Arabia for direct talks with Russian officials that were aimed at ending fighting in Ukraine.

Those meetings did not include Ukrainian or European officials, which has alarmed U.S. allies. Trump is meeting on Monday at the White House with French President Emmanuel Macron and Thursday with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Trump also has begun a public tiff with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whom the U.S. president called a “dictator” while falsely suggesting that Ukraine started the war — though on Friday Trump acknowledged that Russia attacked its neighbor.

Trump told the CPAC crowd, “I’m dealing with President Zelenskyy. I’m dealing with President Putin” and added of fighting in Ukraine, “It affects Europe. It doesn’t really affect us.”

Zelenskyy has said Trump is living in a Russian-made “disinformation space.”

For much of the time since Russia invaded in February 2022, the United States, under Biden, pledged that Ukraine would play in any major effort to end the fighting, vowing “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.” Trump’s administration has dispensed with that notion, as the Republican president has accelerated his push to find an endgame to the war.

“I think we’re pretty close to a deal, and we better be close to a deal,” Trump said Saturday.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt subsequently told reporters that Trump and his team were focused on negotiations to end the war and “the President is very confident we can get it done this week,” though such a tight timeline seems difficult.

Leavitt is one of three administration officials who face a lawsuit from The Associated Press on First- and Fifth-Amendment grounds.

The AP says the three are punishing the news agency for editorial decisions they oppose. The White House says the AP is not following an executive order to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.

Later, Trump hosted a formal dinner at the White House for governors from around the country who were in Washington for a meeting of the National Governors Association. Trump said Republicans and Democrats can always call him and joked that he might address Democratic concerns first.

“Let us all recommit ourselves to strengthening America and making it something even more special than it has been,” Trump said. “And we’re going to be one united nation, and maybe together, this is going to be easier if we start uniting.”

The president, who wore a tuxedo and bow tie, was accompanied by first lady Melania Trump, who had her own tuxedo but no tie. Trump told those gathered that his wife helped organize the event.

“She worked very hard on making sure everything was beautiful,” he said to applause.

Trump also said he’d give a tour of the Lincoln Bedroom after the meal to anyone who wished to see it.

“I think maybe it’s like the most important room in the whole country,” he said. “The most important bedroom definitely.”

—Weissert reported from Washington.


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Elon Musk Draws Ire Telling Federal Employees to Justify Their Jobs Over Email or Resign

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Elon Musk Joins President Trump For Signing Executive Orders In The Oval Office

Elon Musk caused alarm among federal employees and drew ire over an email sent on Saturday requesting that employees summarize their work for the week, and warning on social media that a failure to do so would be taken as a resignation.

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The email—which boasted the subject line “What did you do last week?”—was sent from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to workers in various government departments, including the FBI, the State Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Veterans Affairs Department, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), according to the New York Times. “Please reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished this week and cc your manager,” the email read, telling employees to respond by midnight on Monday.

In a post shared on his social media platform X, Musk, the head of the newly-created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), said: “Consistent with President Donald Trump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week. Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” However, there was no mention of resignation in the email sent to employees.

TIME has reached out to the White House for comment and clarification.

Read More: This Obscure Office Is at the Center of Elon Musk’s Efforts to Harness Federal Data

The OPM email spearheaded by Musk has drawn anger from advocates, unions, and government officials.

Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), released a statement against the emails.

“It is cruel and disrespectful to hundreds of thousands of veterans who are wearing their second uniform in the civil service to be forced to justify their job duties to this out-of-touch, privileged, unelected billionaire,” Kelley said. He went on to add that the AFGE would “challenge any unlawful terminations” of federal employees.

Doreen Greenwald, president of the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), which represents employees from 37 different departments and offices, said in a statement that the email “should be called out as completely un-American,” according to CNN.

“NTEU’s members are professional civil servants and will not back down to these blatant attempts to attack a vital resource for the American public,” she said.

Read More: The Major U.S. Companies Scaling Back DEI Efforts as Trump Targets Initiatives

Republicans have shown varying levels of support and criticism over Musk’s directive. On Sunday’s episode of ABC’s This Week, Republican Rep. Mike Lawler of New York was asked to share his reaction to the email and Musk’s comment that failing to respond would be tantamount to a resignation. 

Lawler said: “I don’t know how that’s necessarily feasible. Obviously, a lot of federal employees are under union contract.”

He then went on to show his support for Musk’s efforts to downsize the government.

“There’s no question, as the Department of Government Efficiency moves ahead, what they are seeking to do is ensure that every agency and department is effectively and efficiently doing their job,” Lawler told host Martha Raddatz. “The task at hand for Elon Musk and DOGE, at the direction of President Trump, is to find efficiencies and savings, and make sure that our federal workforce is doing their jobs.”

Also appearing on This Week, fellow Republican and the former Governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, said that Musk’s survey is a “complete overstep.”

“As with everybody’s employment, things vary from week to week,” Christie said. “From a management perspective, you can see what a clown car this is right now.”

Republican Presidential Nominee Former President Trump Holds Rally In Butler, Pennsylvania

Meanwhile, during an appearance on CBS’ Face the Nation, Utah Republican Senator John Curtis said: “If I could say one thing to Elon Musk, it’s please put a dose of compassion in this. These are real people, real lives, mortgages. It’s a false narrative to say we have to cut and we have to be cruel to do it.”

Appearing on the same show, Maryland Democrat Senator Chris Van Hollen also shared his perspective. “There’s no article in the Constitution that gives Elon Musk that authority,” he said. “The actions he’s taking are illegal, and we need to shut down this illegal operation.”

Musk appeared to address the mounting criticism early Sunday, via posts on X. He stated that the email responses should take “less than 5 mins” and that many “good responses” from employees have already been received. “These are the people who should be considered for promotion,” he said.

The DOGE leader also called the highly-discussed email “a very basic pulse check.” He then proceeded to conduct a poll on his X account, in which he asked: “Should all federal employees be required to send a short email with some basic bullet points about what they accomplished last week?” The poll received over 1.2 millions responses, with 70.6% voting yes.

Musk’s actions came soon after President Trump posted on his own social media platform, Truth Social, on Saturday that Musk should be “more aggressive” in his efforts to downsize the federal government—a goal that has already led to mass layoffs and the ceasing of many government contracts.

In a response sent on X, Musk said of Trump’s feedback: “Will do, Mr. President!”

Read More: Kash Patel, Trump’s Pick for FBI Director, Is Confirmed by Senate

According to an NBC report, Trump’s newly-confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel told FBI employees in an email to “pause any responses” to Musk’s directive, expressing that they will go through their own performance review process.

“The FBI, through the Office of the Director, is in charge of all our review processes, and will conduct reviews in accordance with FBI procedures,” the message from Patel reportedly read.

And Patel is seemingly not alone. An email said to be from the State Department leadership to its employees had a similar message: that leadership would respond to the OPM email on behalf of the department, and they would evaluate their own employees.

Department heads from the Pentagon, the IRS, FEMA, and NOAA, are also reportedly seeking guidance before they instruct their employees to respond, according to emails obtained by ABC News.


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Weekend Beacon 2/23/25

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Last week I was in Austin and stopped into the LBJ Presidential Library, which is definitely worth a visit. It’s got the presidential limo, a replica Oval Office, and even the suit Johnson wore when John F. Kennedy was shot. Of course Johnson was in the car behind JFK. How convenient!

Speaking of which, Dominic Green returns to the Weekend Beacon with a review of Louis Ferrante’s Borgata: Clash of Titans: A History of the American Mafia: Volume 2 of the Borgata Trilogy.

“Ferrante is a fluid raconteur. Even his picture captions are gripping: ‘Johnny Dio socks a photographer during a break at the Rackets Committee.’ His clashing titans are the Kennedy brothers, Jack and Bobby, and the criminal fraternity headed in Florida by Santo Trafficante, in Louisiana by Carlos Marcello, and in Chicago by Sam Giancana. The road to Dallas begins with Bobby Kennedy using the McClellan Committee (a.k.a. the ‘Rackets Committee’) to launch his political career by taking down Jimmy Hoffa, the more than necessarily mobbed-up president of the Teamsters union. Hoffa backed Nixon in the 1960 presidential elections. The mafia bosses backed JFK, funneling ‘millions of dollars’ into the West Virginia primary and, it seems, fixing the Illinois vote in 1960 (‘gross and palpable fraud,’ said the Chicago Tribune).

“‘It’s rather like watching the Borgia brothers take over a respectable north Italian city,’ Britain’s prime minister Harold Macmillan said when the Kennedy brothers arrived in Washington, D.C.

“Jack appointed Bobby as attorney general, even though Joseph Kennedy Sr.’s string-pulling had failed to win Bobby a spot at Harvard Law and Bobby had never fought a case in court. Bobby built up a ‘hit list’ of 2,300 mobsters, beefed up the Justice Department’s racketeering section by 400 percent, and mobilized every possible branch of the federal government against the Mob. ‘That rat bastard, son-of-a-bitch,’ Giancana reportedly ranted to Trafficante, ‘we broke our balls for him and gave him the election, and he gets his brother to hound us to death.’

“Bobby Kennedy, a ‘little fart’ in Sen. Lyndon Johnson’s estimation, wanted to make a big noise. He cut corners in his zeal. In April 1961, INS agents grabbed Carlos Marcello, put him and a companion on a plane and flew them to Guatemala. Expelled to El Salvador, they were put onto a bus and dumped in a jungle in Honduras. They staggered 17 miles to the nearest human settlement in ‘silks suits and alligator shoes,’ guided most of the way by two local boys with machetes. Aided by a bribe to the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, and possibly by Sen. Russell Long of Louisiana, Marcello returned to the United States more than somewhat peeved.”

But peeved enough to pull the trigger? Release those files!

If you ask James Erwin, our belief in such conspiracies was driven by Oliver Stone’s movies. But films have always held sway over the culture, he explains, dating all the way back to Birth of a Nation.

“In 1915, when movies were not two decades old, Wilson screened D.W. Griffith’s silent epic The Birth of a Nation in the White House, the first film to be played there. A giant leap forward in the language of cinema, The Birth of a Nation was a Lost Cause paean to the Ku Klux Klan. Klansmen were portrayed as a noble and chivalrous brotherhood protecting white women from the predations of their freed slaves who had turned to drink, rape, and political corruption with wicked alacrity in the absence of slavery.

“‘It’s like writing history with lightning,’ the president reportedly remarked after the screening. ‘My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.’

“Ironically, neither the quotation nor the events depicted in the film were ‘terribly true.’ The sentiment, however, was correct. Cinema has the unique power to burn a striking impression on the psyche of popular audiences far more effectively than any academic like Wilson could have dreamed. Making a historical film, biopic, or period piece is writing history with lightning, and the product is certain to dazzle the imaginations of viewers far more than any rigorously researched tome. The Birth of a Nation proved so influential that the Ku Klux Klan, which had largely been stamped out in the 1870s, was refounded in 1915 and counted some six million members by its peak in the early 1920s.

“As fewer and fewer Americans read books, movies continue to grow in their influence over public perceptions of history. Much as news consumption has moved from print to screen, historical pedagogy will be shaped more by Hollywood productions than rigorous literature. Film is simply too compelling an art form for the written word to compete.”

You know what film is not compelling? Captain America: Brave New World. Our John Podhoretz has a few thoughts to share.

“The movie can’t decide if Sam is being made to feel less-than by our evil white supremacist culture, given that Sam is black—or whether he’s exhausted because he feels like he must represent all underrepresented people, because he’s black. All I’m saying is, he’s black, and that’s pretty much all the movie is saying about Sam Wilson, who appears to have two friends and no family and no backstory and is of absolutely no interest as a character. The original Captain America, Steve Rogers, had a wonderful backstory in which he was a 90-lb. weakling genetically engineered during World War II into a giant hunk of a guy who only agreed to the tampering to help save his country but found himself relegated to being a show pony in patriotic pageants. Apparently only white guys get good backstories.

“If Sam weren’t as good as Steve Rogers, that would be evidence he was only chosen to carry the shield because he was black. Now, in one sense, that would be fine, no? I mean, if Sam is there to represent the marginalized people in our society, then he was a diversity hire—and what would be wrong with that in the eyes of Hollywood’s liberal culture? After all, Hollywood literally casts roles by putting out casting calls and saying which parts need to be ‘diverse.'”

Another failure “is how the movie also requires some knowledge of the Marvel TV show called Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which featured a Black Lives Matter-inflected plot. We learn in that series that there was a black Captain America before Sam. He was a black soldier named Isaiah Bradley who drank the serum that transformed Steve Rogers a decade later, during the Korean War. But because he was black, see, he was thrown in prison for 30 years because he couldn’t be allowed to exist by the racist country that was created in 1619.

“I’m sure this all makes sense to Ta-Nehisi Coates, but then, so does licking the undersole of a Hamas boot. Bradley is released from prison at the end of that TV series and becomes part of the plot in this movie. He is mind-controlled into taking a shot at the president, but very specifically mind-controlled, in that he’s supposed to miss. Man, that mind control is specific and accurate! In any case, what he’s doing in this picture and why makes no sense unless you watched the 2021 show. Which I hope you didn’t, because Falcon and the Winter Soldier was very, very bad and not worth your time even if you were a Chinese person in Wuhan who had been soldered into your apartment.”

It takes super-human skill to put together a show like Saturday Night Live, week in and week out for 50 years. But that is exactly what Lorne Michaels has done. Alexander Larman reviews Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live by Susan Morrison.

“Morrison uses a structure that sometimes makes the book feel like the longest New Yorker article you’ve ever read (and, at over 600 pages, this is long). She supplies sharp, pointed vignettes of a typical week’s preparations for the show, which Jonah Hill is down to host, as we go behind the scenes into sketch ideas, prima donna antics from the cast, and Michaels’s autocratic power over everything that is broadcast live on the night. Then there are flashbacks to lengthier chronological sections from Michaels’s early career as a gag writer for shows like Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, which made Goldie Hawn’s name but failed to make his, to his success with SNL, early disillusionment that eventually led to him quitting the show after five years, and then a triumphant return and success in making the brand a consistently beloved—if not always artistically top-drawer—one.

“It is an inevitability that the early sections, which include a fantastically annoying, drugged-up John Belushi, a smarmy and self-assured Chevy Chase, and a near-catatonically laid-back Bill Murray, feature the strongest characters and the most arresting vignettes. We learn that Michaels’s stock advice to joint-smoking, coke-snorting colleagues was to ‘rotate your drugs’ and that the famous Lennon-McCartney story, in which the two nearly appeared live on the show in 1975 to collect the check for $3,000 that the producer solemnly offered on air for the Beatles to perform, was only partially true. They considered heading down to 30 Rockefeller Plaza the following week, but the show was on hiatus then, meaning that the opportunity for a once-in-a-lifetime reunion was never possible.

SNL today is a safer, less risky environment for writers and performers alike, which may also have taken some of the seat-of-your-pants thrills out of the show. It is taken as a given that staffers will attend therapy, and they are advised to meet their shrinks on Monday afternoons, when it is also expected that they will discuss their stressful and demanding work with Michaels. Although the producer is, naturally, a liberal, he has also strived to make the show as apolitical as possible—including famously inviting Donald Trump to host in 2015—and pushes back against criticism by saying, ‘On whatever side, if there’s idiocy, we go after it. We can’t be the official organ of the Democratic Party.’ He reminds the performers that ‘we’ve got the whole country watching—all fifty states.'”

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SECURITY AFFAIRS MALWARE NEWSLETTER ROUND 34

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Security Affairs Malware newsletter includes a collection of the best articles and research on malware in the international landscape.

You’ve Got Malware: FINALDRAFT Hides in Your Drafts  

Telegram Abused as C2 Channel for New Golang Backdoor  

Infostealing Malware Infections in the U.S. Military & Defense Sector: A Cybersecurity Disaster in the Making  

Analyzing ELF/Sshdinjector.A!tr with a Human and Artificial Analyst  

An Update on Fake Updates: Two New Actors, and New Mac Malware  

FortiSandbox 5.0 Detects Evolving Snake Keylogger Variant  

XLoader Executed Through JAR Signing Tool (jarsigner.exe)  

SPYLEND: The Android App Available on Google Play Store: Enabling Financial Cyber Crime & Extortion  

Cluster Analysis and Concept Drift Detection in Malware

LAMD: Context-driven Android Malware Detection and Classification with LLMs

Improving Cyber Defense Against Ransomware: A Generative Adversarial Networks-Based Adversarial Training Approach for Long Short-Term Memory Network Classifier

DeceptiveDevelopment targets freelance developers  

Meet NailaoLocker: a ransomware distributed in Europe by ShadowPad and PlugX backdoors  

Earth Preta Mixes Legitimate and Malicious Components to Sidestep Detection

StaryDobry ruins New Year’s Eve, delivering miner instead of presents

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, malware)


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Security Affairs newsletter Round 512 by Pierluigi Paganini – INTERNATIONAL EDITION

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A new round of the weekly SecurityAffairs newsletter arrived! Every week the best security articles from Security Affairs are free in your email box.

Enjoy a new round of the weekly SecurityAffairs newsletter, including the international press.

Lazarus APT stole $1.5B from Bybit, it is the largest cryptocurrency heist ever
Apple removes iCloud encryption in UK following backdoor demand
B1ack’s Stash released 1 Million credit cards
U.S. CISA adds Craft CMS and Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog
Atlassian fixed critical flaws in Confluence and Crowd
Salt Typhoon used custom malware JumbledPath to spy U.S. telecom providers
NailaoLocker ransomware targets EU healthcare-related entities
Microsoft fixed actively exploited flaw in Power Pages
Citrix addressed NetScaler console privilege escalation flaw
Palo Alto Networks warns that CVE-2025-0111 flaw is actively exploited in attacks
Russia-linked APTs target Signal messenger
Venture capital firm Insight Partners discloses security breach
OpenSSH bugs allows Man-in-the-Middle and DoS Attacks
U.S. CISA adds SonicWall SonicOS and Palo Alto PAN-OS flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog
Juniper Networks fixed a critical flaw in Session Smart Routers
China-linked APT group Winnti targets Japanese organizations since March 2024
Xerox VersaLink C7025 Multifunction printer flaws may expose Windows Active Directory credentials to attackers
New XCSSET macOS malware variant used in limited attacks
Dutch Police shut down bulletproof hosting provider Zservers and seized 127 servers
New Golang-based backdoor relies on Telegram for C2 communication
Pro-Russia collective NoName057(16) launched a new wave of DDoS attacks on Italian sites
whoAMI attack could allow remote code execution within AWS account
Storm-2372 used the device code phishing technique since August 2024

International Press – Newsletter

Cybercrime

Amsterdam police dismantle digital criminal network; 127 servers taken offline 

Another Lizard Arrested, Lizard Lair Hacked 

X Phishing | Campaign Targeting High Profile Accounts Returns, Promoting Crypto Scams 

StaryDobry ruins New Year’s Eve, delivering miner instead of presents  

How Phished Data Turns into Apple & Google Wallets  

US Army soldier pleads guilty to AT&T and Verizon hacks  

Thailand ready to welcome 7,000 trafficked scam call center victims back from Myanmar

B1ack’s Stash Releases 1 Million Credit Cards on a Deep Web Forum

Malware

You’ve Got Malware: FINALDRAFT Hides in Your Drafts  

Telegram Abused as C2 Channel for New Golang Backdoor  

Infostealing Malware Infections in the U.S. Military & Defense Sector: A Cybersecurity Disaster in the Making  

Analyzing ELF/Sshdinjector.A!tr with a Human and Artificial Analyst  

Training Approach for Long Short-Term Memory Network Classifier

Hacking

whoAMI: A cloud image name confusion attack

Xerox Versalink C7025 Multifunction Printer: Pass-Back Attack Vulnerabilities (FIXED)

How Hackers Manipulate Agentic AI with Prompt Engineering        

Palo Alto Networks tags new firewall bug as exploited in attacks  

Bybit Confirms Record-Breaking $1.46 Billion Crypto Heist in Sophisticated Cold Wallet Attack

Intelligence and Information Warfare

Multiple Russian Threat Actors Targeting Microsoft Device Code Authentication  

Earth Preta Mixes Legitimate and Malicious Components to Sidestep Detection 

Signals of Trouble: Multiple Russia-Aligned Threat Actors Actively Targeting Signal Messenger

Backdoored Executables for Signal, Line, and Gmail Target Chinese-Speaking Users  

Spanish spyware startup Mollitiam Industries shuts down

DOGE Now Has Access to the Top US Cybersecurity Agency    

Meet NailaoLocker: a ransomware distributed in Europe by ShadowPad and PlugX backdoors  

Weathering the storm: In the midst of a Typhoon  

We need a new doctrine for Cyberdefence  

Cybersecurity

EFF Sues OPM, DOGE and Musk for Endangering the Privacy of Millions  

Protecting Global Data Privacy: The Urgent Need for Encryption Safeguards

X is reportedly blocking links to secure Signal contact pages      

Qualys TRU Discovers Two Vulnerabilities in OpenSSH: CVE-2025-26465 & CVE-2025-26466 

Nearly 10% of employee gen AI prompts include sensitive data 

Signals of Trouble: Multiple Russia-Aligned Threat Actors Actively Targeting Signal Messenger  

Apple Removes Cloud Encryption Feature From UK After Backdoor Order  

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, newsletter)


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What Happens to the Leadership of the Catholic Church When a Pope Is Sick or Incapacitated?

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Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican on Sept. 30, 2020.

VATICAN CITY — While the Vatican has detailed laws and rituals to ensure the transfer of power when a pope dies or resigns, they do not apply if he is sick or even unconscious. And there are no specific norms outlining what happens to the leadership of the Catholic Church if a pope becomes totally incapacitated.

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As a result, even though Pope Francis remains hospitalized in critical condition with a complex lung infection, he is still pope and very much in charge.

Still, Francis’ hospital stay is raising obvious questions about what happens if he loses consciousness for a prolonged period, or whether he might follow in Pope Benedict XVI’s footsteps and resign if he becomes unable to lead. On Monday, Francis’ hospital stay will hit the 10-day mark, equaling the length of his 2021 hospital stay for surgery to remove 33 centimeters (13 inches) of his colon.

His age and prolonged illness has revived interest about how papal power is exercised in the Holy See, how it is transferred and under what circumstances. And it points to the legislative loophole that currently exists in what to do if a pope gets so sick that he can’t govern.

The Vatican Curia

Francis may be in charge, but he already delegates the day-to-day running of the Vatican and church to a team of officials who operate whether he is in the Apostolic Palace or not, and whether he is conscious or not.

Chief among them is the secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin. Other Vatican functions are proceeding normally, including the Vatican’s 2025 Holy Year celebrations.

What happens when a Pope gets sick?

Canon law does have provisions for when a bishop gets sick and can’t run his diocese, but none for a pope. Canon 412 says a diocese can be declared “impeded” if its bishop — due to “captivity, banishment, exile, or incapacity” — cannot fulfil his pastoral functions. In such cases, the day-to-day running of the diocese shifts to an auxiliary bishop, a vicar general or someone else.

Even though Francis is the bishop of Rome, no explicit provision exists for the pope if he similarly becomes “impeded.” Canon 335 declares simply that when the Holy See is “vacant or entirely impeded,” nothing can be altered in the governance of the church. But it doesn’t say what it means for the Holy See to be “entirely impeded” or what provisions might come into play if it ever were.

In 2021, a team of canon lawyers set out to propose norms to fill that legislative gap. They created a canonical crowd-sourcing initiative to craft a new church law regulating the office of a retired pope as well as norms to apply when a pope is unable to govern, either temporarily or permanently.

The proposed norms explain that, with medical advancements, it’s entirely likely that at some point a pope will be alive but unable to govern. It argues that the church must provide for the declaration of a “totally impeded see” and the transfer of power for the sake of its own unity.

Under the proposed norms, the governance of the universal church would pass to the College of Cardinals. In the case of a temporary impediment, they would name a commission to govern, with periodical medical checks every six months to determine the status of the pope.

“At first, the promoting group was accused of imprudently choosing topics that were too sensitive and controversial,” said one of the coordinators, canon lawyer Geraldina Boni.

But then, “a widespread consensus formed,” she told The Associated Press. Even Francis’ own canon lawyer, Cardinal Gianfranco Ghirlanda, acknowledged some sort of norms were necessary if the pope “incurably, then irreversibly, lost consciousness or otherwise the ability to perform human acts.”

“The problem is, who declares that the pope is in a situation where he cannot govern?” he told Italian daily Il Giornale in 2022.

Ghirlanda largely backed the crowd-sourcing initiative’s idea, proposing a committee of medical experts to determine if the pope’s condition is irreversible. If they confirm it is, the Rome-based cardinals would be summoned to declare the pope cannot govern, triggering a conclave.

What about the letters?

Francis confirmed in 2022 that shortly after he was elected pope he wrote a letter of resignation, to be invoked if he became medically incapacitated. He said he gave it to the then-secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, and said he assumed Bertone had delivered it to Parolin’s office when he retired.

The text is not public, and the conditions Francis contemplated for a resignation are unknown. It is also not known if such a letter would be canonically valid. Canon law requires a papal resignation to be “freely and properly manifested” — as was the case when Benedict announced his resignation in 2013.

In 1965, Pope Paul VI wrote letters to the dean of the College of Cardinals hypothesizing that if he were to become seriously ill, the dean and other cardinals should accept his resignation. The letter was never invoked, since Paul lived another 13 years and died on the job.

What happens when a Pope dies or resigns?

The only time papal power changes hands is when a pope dies or resigns. At that time, a whole series of rites and rituals comes into play governing the “interregnum” — the period between the end of one pontificate and the election of a new pope.

During that period, known as the “sede vacante,” or “empty See,” the camerlengo, or chamberlain, runs the administration and finances of the Holy See. He certifies the pope’s death, seals the papal apartments and prepares for the pope’s burial before a conclave to elect a new pope. The position is currently held by Cardinal Kevin Farrell, the head of the Vatican’s laity office.

The camerlengo has no role or duties if the pope is merely sick or otherwise incapacitated.

Likewise, the dean of the College of Cardinals, who would preside at a papal funeral and organize the conclave, has no additional role if the pope is merely sick. That position is currently held by Italian Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, 91.

Earlier this month, Francis decided to keep Re on the job even after his five-year term expired, rather than make way for someone new. He also extended the term of the vice-dean, Argentine Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, 81.


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The Mob Wanted Kennedy Dead. But Did They Do the Unthinkable?

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Tell me what you think about Lee Harvey Oswald, and I’ll tell you how you vote. Every year since 1963, Gallup has polled Americans on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In the weeks after Kennedy’s killing, less than 30 percent of Americans believed that Oswald acted alone and 52 percent believed that “others were involved in a conspiracy.” In the 2023 poll, those numbers were 29 percent and 65 percent.

Only 20 percent of those who did not attend college believe that Oswald was a lone assassin; 73 percent of them believe in a conspiracy. Republicans align with this, 25 percent versus 71 percent. Independents line up with Republicans, 25 percent versus 68 percent. College graduates, who now constitute nearly half the population, are twice as likely to believe that Oswald acted alone (41 percent), but a clear majority (57 percent) believes in a conspiracy. Democrats agree with them, 39 percent versus 55 percent. Only among the fifth of Americans with postgraduate degrees are the conspiracists in a minority (44 percent).

Exactly 50 percent of the smart set believe that Oswald did it alone. Not all postgrads are liberals, but most liberals are postgrads. They were also more likely to believe it when federal agencies and the media told them that a man can become a woman and that COVID-19 came from bats in a wet market. They were more likely to believe that Donald Trump is a Russian plant, that Hunter Biden is innocent, that Joe Biden was not senile, and Kamala Harris is not a halfwit. They now believe that USAID was doing just fine before Elon Musk looked at the books.

On the Kennedy assassination as on much else, liberal Democrats live in an epistemological bubble. They departed from the American consensus on Oswald after 2013—just as affluent liberals and their informational environment were parting company with reality. So you are not necessarily mad if you doubt the official explanation for JFK’s killing. You are not necessarily a conspiracy theorist, either, though it should be said that while not all JFK assassination theorists are conspiracy theorists, all conspiracy theorists are JFK assassination theorists. None of them have theories about the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley.

If not Oswald alone, then who and how? Borgata: Clash of Titans advances an unofficial explanation: The Mob did it.

This is the second volume in Louis Ferrante’s “Borgata Trilogy,” a history of the American Mafia. Mr. Ferrante knows his subject. An erstwhile employee of the Gambino crime family, he served eight-and-a-half years for robberies and hijackings before he sank to writing books. His first volume, Rise of Empire, described how the American Mafia stayed close to its roots in the feudal and post-feudal societies of Sicily and southern Italy, while also becoming distinctively American. Over the first half of the 20th century, the Mafia rose from a fragmented and local concern into a corporation that combined the monopolistic mentality, and tightly enforced hierarchies and terms of membership, of a medieval guild, with the freebooting, flexible, and infinitely ambitious spirit of 20th-century American capitalism.

Clash of Titans describes the trouble that came with success. Like The Apogee in John Julius Norwich’s “Byzantium” trilogy, or Pax Britannica in Jan Morris’s eponymous trilogy, Clash of Titans is the centerpiece of a triptych. The pace slows as the hinge of the grand narrative turns. Key scenes take on the detail of portraiture. Evidence is assayed, motives are assessed, and considered conclusions are advanced: “Dickie Palatto died in mysterious circumstances; he drowned in three feet of water, which might not have been odd if he was only two feet tall.”

Ferrante is a fluid raconteur. Even his picture captions are gripping: “Johnny Dio socks a photographer during a break at the Rackets Committee.” His clashing titans are the Kennedy brothers, Jack and Bobby, and the criminal fraternity headed in Florida by Santo Trafficante, in Louisiana by Carlos Marcello, and in Chicago by Sam Giancana. The road to Dallas begins with Bobby Kennedy using the McClellan Committee (a.k.a. the “Rackets Committee”) to launch his political career by taking down Jimmy Hoffa, the more than necessarily mobbed-up president of the Teamsters union. Hoffa backed Nixon in the 1960 presidential elections. The mafia bosses backed JFK, funneling “millions of dollars” into the West Virginia primary and, it seems, fixing the Illinois vote in 1960 (“gross and palpable fraud,” said the Chicago Tribune).

“It’s rather like watching the Borgia brothers take over a respectable north Italian city,” Britain’s prime minister Harold Macmillan said when the Kennedy brothers arrived in Washington, D.C.

Jack appointed Bobby as attorney general, even though Joseph Kennedy Sr.’s string-pulling had failed to win Bobby a spot at Harvard Law and Bobby had never fought a case in court. Bobby built up a “hit list” of 2,300 mobsters, beefed up the Justice Department’s racketeering section by 400 percent, and mobilized every possible branch of the federal government against the Mob. “That rat bastard, son-of-a-bitch,” Giancana reportedly ranted to Trafficante, “we broke our balls for him and gave him the election, and he gets his brother to hound us to death.”

Bobby Kennedy, a “little fart” in Sen. Lyndon Johnson’s estimation, wanted to make a big noise. He cut corners in his zeal. In April 1961, INS agents grabbed Carlos Marcello, put him and a companion on a plane and flew them to Guatemala. Expelled to El Salvador, they were put onto a bus and dumped in a jungle in Honduras. They staggered 17 miles to the nearest human settlement in “silks suits and alligator shoes,” guided most of the way by two local boys with machetes. Aided by a bribe to the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, and possibly by Sen. Russell Long of Louisiana, Marcello returned to the United States more than somewhat peeved.

The bosses wanted to undo the Cuban revolution of 1959 and recover their offshore assets. So did the CIA. Their discreet collaboration ended, at least officially, on JFK’s orders after the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion. This completes the upstage shadows: betrayed Cubans, betrayed mobsters, deniable CIA and FBI freelancers such as David Ferrie and Guy Banister doing deniable things with undeniably bad people.

“If the mob and the government worked together in a plot to kill Fidel Castro, why then should it shock us that they worked together to take out who they believed was another mutual enemy?” Ferrante asks. It shouldn’t. If it does, that’s because Hollywood, and especially the Godfather movies, have cast a sepia shroud over the sordid, murderous reality of the Mafia.

Not all of the whispers from upstage are hearsay, as when Marcello is reported as saying in 1962 that killing Bobby Kennedy would not be enough: “What good dat do? You hit dat man and his brother calls out the National Guard. No, you gotta hit de top man.” An FBI wiretap caught mob associate Willie Weisberg telling Philadelphia don Angelo Bruno that he wanted to kill the president: to “stab and kill the fucker” in the White House.

J. Edgar Hoover may have been right when he called Lee Harvey Oswald a “lone nut.” You had to be a nut, or a communist, to defect to the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. You had to be lonely to want to come back. But loneliness and nuttitude are not motives. All the other lone nuts had a motive. James Earl Ray, a white Southerner, shot Martin Luther King because he opposed civil rights. Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian, shot Robert F. Kennedy because Kennedy supported Israel. John Hinckley shot President Reagan because he wanted to impress Jodi Foster. Mark David Chapman shot John Lennon because he wanted to emulate Holden Caulfield. We don’t yet know Thomas Matthew Crooks’s motive for trying to kill President Trump in August 2024. It’s about time we did.

We don’t know Oswald’s motive. One reason is that Jack Ruby shot him two days after JFK’s assassination. Another is that although Oswald was interrogated for 12 hours, Ferrante writes, “no audio, video, or stenographic recordings were made.” This is “an extremely odd omission for an investigation into one of the most important and consequential murders in human history.” Also odd is that during his disturbed adolescence in New Orleans, Oswald lived with and worked for Charles “Dutz” Murret, who was Carlos Marcello’s bookmaker, and joined the Civil Air Patrol as a cadet, which is how he came to be photographed with David Ferrie, a captain in the Patrol. Small world.

We know more about Jack Ruby. The Warren Commission concluded there was no “significant link between Ruby and organized crime.” Yet Ruby was a career criminal from Chicago. An FBI informant since 1959, with links to Marcello and Trafficante and their men, Ruby went to Dallas for Sam Giancana as a “mafia-police” liaison. Ferrante, more expert in these matters than Earl Warren, observes, with italics for emphasis, that “the mafia does not allow men to maintain close ties to the police unless the men are corrupting the cops on behalf of the mob.”

Ruby ran bars and strip clubs in Dallas. The local police were regulars. It is inexplicable that Ruby, an “armed mobster with a criminal record who had absolutely no valid reason to be anywhere” near Oswald, was able to wander around the Dallas police station for hours without being challenged or thrown out. Actually, it is explicable. Ferrante finds it obvious that Ruby was granted access to the police station by a police officer. It is hard to disagree. Ferrante also adduces the 100-plus tipoffs that the FBI received in the week after Kennedy’s killing, linking Oswald and Ruby, and Ruby and David Ferrie. Ferrie admitted his ties to Marcello, but denied he knew Oswald, though a photograph shows them together.

It is possible that Oswald acted alone. It is possible that he believed he was acting alone, but wasn’t. It is possible that he realized this before he too was murdered. It is possible that he knew something but not everything about the involvement of other parties, which is why he declared himself to be the “patsy” when he was arrested. The penumbra of possibilities and associations around the JFK killing is unique. Nothing like it attends the murders of Gandhi, MLK, RFK, or John Lennon. Mr. Ferrante avoids overstepping his facts.

What we can say with certainty is that Ruby, a middle-ranking mobster, got into the police station with Oswald, whose interrogation left no record and whose pre-assassination activities remain obscure. We can also say that Oswald and Ruby were highly likely to have known each other and that both were, as we now say, already “known to the authorities.”

We are accustomed to hearing “known to the authorities” whenever a terrorist carries out an atrocity. We are also accustomed to learning that the authorities knew the perpetrator not just as a criminal, but also as an informant. We have become accustomed to the idea that, as the interwar theorists of airpower once said, “the bomber always gets through.” This has corroded our trust in the police, and especially in the security agencies which offer a deal—your privacy for your safety—only to fail to keep up their end.

People were more innocent about these things in 1963. You can see why those in charge of the agencies would have seen keeping it that way as in the national interest. You can also see, as the failure to intercept the 9/11 attacks showed, that interagency competition and general incompetence allow disasters to happen, regardless of what the authorities know beforehand. This failure in turn leads to the most common kind of cover-up, the covering of the posterior.

America was not the same after JFK’s killing. Things were never the same for the Mafia, either, after the 1960s. Frank Sinatra retired, standards of dress declined, and the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act of 1970 gave the federal agencies an instrument that RFK, who was two years dead by then, had always wanted. But RFK had lost his taste for hunting the mob after his brother’s murder. In a further oddity, he did not push for “any investigation into his brother’s death.”

Nicholas Katzenbach, who served as JFK’s deputy attorney general and President Johnson’s attorney general, wondered if that was because “Bobby was worried that there might be some conspiracy, and that it might be his fault. … It might very well have been that he was worried that the investigation would somehow point back to him.” Shades of Michael Corleone at the end of Godfather II, brooding alone by the dark waters where his brother was shot.

Borgata: Clash of Titans: A History of the American Mafia: Volume 2 of the Borgata Trilogy
by Louis Ferrante
Pegasus Books, 432 pp., $29.95

Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal contributor and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.

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Lorne’s Prime Time

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In a season five episode of the estimable sitcom 30 Rock, itself based on the goings-on of a network television show closely modeled on Saturday Night Live, the writer and producer Aaron Sorkin makes a cameo as himself. Introduced to Tina Fey’s ever-acerbic head writer Liz Lemon, Sorkin demands they execute his signature walk-and-talk power move, as she excitedly lists the various award-winning films and television shows that he has been involved in. There is, however, one exception. When she mentions the name of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, a Sorkin-created drama that purported to go behind the scenes on a show equally closely modeled on SNL, Sorkin simply says, “Shut up”—a nod to the series’s swift cancellation after a single season, Sorkin’s sole show not to be renewed.

The reasons for Studio 60’s failure have been much-discussed, and after its star Matthew Perry’s death, many have even suggested it is an overlooked and underrated masterpiece ripe for reassessment. (Others note, correctly, that 30 Rock, which launched at the same time in 2006, was lucky not to be scrapped after initially struggling in its ratings: The Emmy awards it received save it.) Yet perhaps the key reason for Studio 60 failing to connect with its audience is that the long-running behemoth that is Saturday Night Live—which, far from coincidentally, celebrates its 50th anniversary this year—is so much more interesting a proposition, both on-screen and off, that no drama about its operation can ever match the real thing for impact.

New Yorker articles editor Susan Morrison has purportedly written a biography—somehow, unbelievably, the first—of SNL creator Lorne Michaels, but it is impossible to separate the now 80-year-old writer and producer from the show that remains his most lasting achievement, despite the legions of other shows and plays and films he has been responsible for—most notably Wayne’s World and The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. It is the topical comedy that made Michaels’s name when it first launched in the ’70s, and, despite occasional hiccups and disappointments, it continues to be essential viewing, with every new host and musical guest and breakthrough appearance eagerly dissected in the media. If you want proof, just look at Nate Bargatze’s instant classic 2023 sketch, “Washington’s Dream,” which immediately went viral and lifted Bargatze’s career onto another plain altogether.

Still, there will always be naysayers, and, as Morrison writes early on, “Michaels likes to say that everyone in the entertainment business has two jobs: their actual job and figuring out how to fix SNL.” Amusingly, this even included the ever-reclusive writer J.D. Salinger. When he died in 2010, letters were found in which the Catcher in the Rye author opined about the show’s shortcomings. Michaels, although he is far from deaf to criticism, is also aware that SNL’s longevity speaks to its own success. Little wonder that Conan O’Brien is quoted as saying, “In my experience, all conversations, no matter how they begin, inexorably become about Lorne. You could ask me, Stephen Hawking, Ziggy Marley, and former Prime Minister Theresa May our opinions on the single-payer healthcare plan, and within six minutes we’d be riffing on Lorne trying to buy flip-flops on St. Barts.”

Michaels rejoices in a variety of nicknames from his regular collaborators, some more pointed than others. Morrison lists them, complete with those responsible, perhaps in case she is ensuring they never work in this town again: “the Godfather (Chris Rock, Will Forte), Jay Gatsby (Bernie Brillstein), Obi-Wan Kenobi (Tracy Morgan), the Great and Powerful Oz (David Spade, Kate McKinnon), Charles Foster Kane (Jason Sudeikis), a cult leader (Victoria Jackson), Tom Ripley (Bill Hader), Machiavelli, and both the Robert Moses and the Darth Vader of comedy (Bruce McCall).” Gatsby, Ripley, Kane: all men who reinvented themselves to successful, and ruthless, effect, just like the character born Lorne Lipowitz to a middle-class Canadian family in 1944, who became the ultimate East Coast arbiter of intellectual, satirical taste.

Yet the portrayal of Michaels that emerges here is far from unaffectionate, in large part because of his cooperation and the access he gave its author. Morrison also notes that, when people speak of him, “The tone is a mixture of affection, reverence, fear, and sometimes a lick of derision. The people he’s hired are grateful for the opportunities he’s given them, but his encouragement can turn to aloofness overnight. He lives a mogul’s life, and the power he wields is intimidating.”

Morrison uses a structure that sometimes makes the book feel like the longest New Yorker article you’ve ever read (and, at over 600 pages, this is long). She supplies sharp, pointed vignettes of a typical week’s preparations for the show, which Jonah Hill is down to host, as we go behind the scenes into sketch ideas, prima donna antics from the cast, and Michaels’s autocratic power over everything that is broadcast live on the night. Then there are flashbacks to lengthier chronological sections from Michaels’s early career as a gag writer for shows like Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, which made Goldie Hawn’s name but failed to make his, to his success with SNL, early disillusionment that eventually led to him quitting the show after five years, and then a triumphant return and success in making the brand a consistently beloved—if not always artistically top-drawer—one.

It is an inevitability that the early sections, which include a fantastically annoying, drugged-up John Belushi, a smarmy and self-assured Chevy Chase, and a near-catatonically laid-back Bill Murray, feature the strongest characters and the most arresting vignettes. We learn that Michaels’s stock advice to joint-smoking, coke-snorting colleagues was to “rotate your drugs” and that the famous Lennon-McCartney story, in which the two nearly appeared live on the show in 1975 to collect the check for $3,000 that the producer solemnly offered on air for the Beatles to perform, was only partially true. They considered heading down to 30 Rockefeller Plaza the following week, but the show was on hiatus then, meaning that the opportunity for a once-in-a-lifetime reunion was never possible.

SNL today is a safer, less risky environment for writers and performers alike, which may also have taken some of the seat-of-your-pants thrills out of the show. It is taken as a given that staffers will attend therapy, and they are advised to meet their shrinks on Monday afternoons, when it is also expected that they will discuss their stressful and demanding work with Michaels. Although the producer is, naturally, a liberal, he has also strived to make the show as apolitical as possible—including famously inviting Donald Trump to host in 2015—and pushes back against criticism by saying, “On whatever side, if there’s idiocy, we go after it. We can’t be the official organ of the Democratic Party.” He reminds the performers that “we’ve got the whole country watching—all fifty states.”

Morrison’s scrupulously researched and wholly engrossing book may be a demanding read, but it’s worth the effort by anyone with a serious interest in comedy. It’s not especially amusing, perhaps surprisingly, but what it lacks in humor it makes up for in penetrating psychological insight into a man who has made his life, work, and fortune in understanding what it takes to make people laugh, even if, as Morrison writes, “Being cool was almost as important to Michaels as being funny.” He may never be mentioned in the same breath as his rock star friends Paul Simon and Mick Jagger, but this definitive account of a man and his life’s work leaves the reader in little doubt that, like Gatsby, he is worth the whole damn bunch put together.

Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live
by Susan Morrison
Random House, 656 pp., $36

Alexander Larman is a journalist, historian, and author, most recently, of Power and Glory: Elizabeth II and the Rebirth of Royalty (St. Martin’s Press).

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Pope Francis’ health ‘looking very serious’: Vatican reporter

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(NewsNation) — When EWTN Global Catholic TV Network Vatican correspondent Colm Flynn last saw Pope Francis, the Holy Father was “in good spirits” but visibly “struggling to catch his breath.”

Flynn pointed to the Pope’s compromised lungs — part of his right lung was removed in his youth after a bout of pneumonia — and advanced age as potential cause for concern.

“Things are looking very serious here in the Eternal City today,” Flynn said Saturday on “NewsNation Prime.”

Flynn last saw the Pope on Wednesday, Feb. 12, just two days before he was admitted to the hospital.

The Vatican said in a Saturday statement that the 88-year-old is in “critical condition” after suffering a long asthmatic respiratory crisis that required high flows of oxygen.

  • Pope Francis autographs a bottle of bourbon held by Kentucky Catholic priest Rev. Jim Sichko at the Vatican on May 1, 2024. (Courtesy Vatican Media via AP)

He also received blood transfusions after tests showed low platelet counts associated with anemia, the Vatican said in a late update.

“The Holy Father continues to be alert and spent the day in an armchair although in more pain than yesterday. At the moment the prognosis is reserved,” the statement said.

While it’s not Pope Francis’ first health scare, Flynn said the general feeling in Rome is that this one might be his last.

“This time, there is a feeling that it’s more serious, because that press conference that they held yesterday at the Gemelli Hospital, that was the first time that his doctors, his own personal doctors, spoke to us journalists,” Flynn said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.


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