By a Biometrica staffer August proved to be a strong month for the gaming industry in the United States. To begin with, Atlantic City Casinos and racetrack sports betting outlets announced a 31% increase for the month in comparison to the same...
By a Biometrica staffer Alex Murdaugh, a prominent South Carolina lawyer, is set to turn himself in to law enforcement today, Sept. 16, according to his lawyers. Murdaugh allegedly arranged for a former client to kill him so that his surviving son...
By a Biometrica staffer Three former U.S. intelligence officers have agreed to pay more than $1.6 million to resolve federal charges of conspiring to violate hacking laws, the Justice Department announced on Sept. 14. Marc Baier, Ryan Adams, and Daniel Gericke worked for the...
By a Biometrica staffer At an annual meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) on Sept. 13, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland announced the results of Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta’s review of the use of monitors in civil...
By a Biometrica staffer On Sept. 8–9, U.S. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and Deputy Attorney General Lisa O. Monaco met remotely with G7 and EU Security Ministers, along with the Secretary General of INTERPOL, to discuss responding to the rapidly evolving...
By a Biometrica staffer Counterfeit coins are increasingly being sold online and via social media, targeting customers, a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) advisory warned on Thursday, Sept. 9. Per the report, investors and collectors are at risk of losing money in these purchases...
By a Biometrica staffer The latest report in the Cocaine Insights series, published by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the Europol takes a hard look at the trade in the illegal drug around the world, highlighting some of...
By a Biometrica staffer Three ex-NFL stars have pleaded guilty to healthcare fraud the Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a media release on Tuesday, Sept. 7. Clinton Portis and Tamarick Vanover, entered their pleas on Sept. 3 while Robert McCune did so...
By a Biometrica staffer In the course of the Labor Day weekend, five people were killed and dozens wounded in a spate of gun violence, CBS Chicago reported. This takes the total number of shootings in Chicago to more than 2,300 in 2021....
By a Biometrica staffer Healthcare workers in the U. S., hailed as heroes at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, have become — over the last several months — the targets of a disgruntled public. The hostility against workers administering Covid-19 vaccines...
By a Biometrica staffer Approximately 1,000 assaults occurred on federal officers during the Jan 6 Capitol insurrection, prosecutors recently said. A court filing highlighted that they had uploaded 2,900 videos from bodycams worn by police, with a total length of around 2,300...
By a Biometrica staffer The number of instances of individuals pointing lasers at pilots of aircrafts were at a record high, NBC reported recently. In 2020, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) reported 6,852 laser attacks, the most for any year since 2016. This is...
By a Biometrica staffer The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has bumped up to $5 million the reward for information that might lead to the apprehension of Jian Zhang, a man believed to be a key figure in illegal fentanyl trafficking in...
By a Biometrica staffer On Sunday, Aug. 29, the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, President Joe Biden declared a major disaster state in Louisiana as Hurricane Ida, a Category 4 hurricane with winds of up to 150 mph, made landfall in the...
By a Biometrica staffer July was a bumper month for gaming in Nevada, with casinos taking a total of $1.36 billion from patrons. This was the highest single-month revenue from gaming for the state since gambling was legalized back in 1931. The...
By a Biometrica staffer President Joe Biden met with chief executive officers (CEOs) from several companies including Apple, Google, and JP Morgan Chase at the White House on Wednesday, Aug. 25, and urged them to play their part in stepping up cybersecurity...
By a Biometrica staffer This past weekend, Chicago police noted six shooting-related deaths and at least 39 injuries in the city over the four-day period beginning in the evening of Friday, Aug. 20, and ending early in the morning on Monday, Aug....
By a Biometrica staffer In July, revenue at gambling establishments in the New Orleans area hit $52.1 million, an increase of nearly 46% when compared to the same period last year. Revenue for all of Louisiana's riverboat casinos, land casinos, and racinos...
By a Biometrica staffer Over the last couple of weeks, the American Gaming Association (AGA) and various states have been releasing their casino and gaming revenue figures for April–June 2021. According to the AGA’s tracker, 17 out of 25 states saw a...
By a Biometrica staffer Nearly half of all hospital executives said their systems were either forced or proactively shutdown in the last six months due to ransomware attacks, a study by IPSOS, sponsored by Philips and CyberMDX, published last week found. Of...
By a Biometrica staffer The U.S. government and intelligence community are keeping their focus on the events unfolding in Afghanistan after the country was swiftly taken over by the Taliban in the wake of the withdrawal of American troops from the country....
By a Biometrica staffer A move by the greyhound racing industry to have Florida's dog racing ban declared unconstitutional was rejected last week by a federal appeals court, Casino.org reported on Monday, Aug. 16. Once considered "the mecca of dog racing in...
By Aara Ramesh On Sunday, Aug. 16, as the world watched on in horror and shock, the capital of Afghanistan, Kabul, fell to the forces of the notoriously extremist Taliban, prompting the U.S.-endorsed president to flee the country and American operatives to...
By a Biometrica staffer Stop AAPI Hate, a national coalition, said it received 9,081 reports of hate incidents committed against the Asian Americans and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community since the Covid-19 pandemic began, i.e., between March 2020 and June 30, 2021. The...
By a Biometrica staffer In the first seven months of 2021, there were 44 law enforcement officers (LEOs) who were feloniously killed. That number is just two away from the 46 officers who were reported as being killed feloniously in all of...
By a Biometrica staffer On Tuesday, Aug. 10, the Senate passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a long-awaited, $1 trillion bipartisan bill, sending it onto the House for approval. All 50 Democrats voted in favor, joined by 19 Republicans. This is...
By a Biometrica staffer Monthly operator revenue at sportsbooks across the country came in at $318 million in June, the highest nationwide win rate for this year, and only the fourth time that the number has clocked in higher than $300 million...
By a Biometrica staffer The number of nursing home patients and staff infected with the Covid-19 virus rose sharply last week, at a time when the nation is reeling under the menace of the highly contagious delta variant and as total cases...
By Aara Ramesh As of Sunday, Aug. 1, Minnesota’s Healthy Start Act kicked in, allowing some incarcerated pregnant and immediately postpartum women to serve their sentences in halfway houses, rehab centers, and other similar community facilities, so as to encourage bonding between...
By a Biometrica staffer In a bid to improve the relationship between law enforcement and the community, and to help officers de-escalate tense but not necessarily criminal situations, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey announced on Tuesday, August 3, that the Alabama Law Enforcement...
By Deepti Govind It was just last Tuesday, July 28, that the House select committee formed to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol convened its first hearing. At that hearing, the entire nation heard the emotional testimony of four...
By a Biometrica staffer U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced its first Continued Presence (CP) resource guide on Friday, July 30, targeted at assisting federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement agencies nationwide with their human trafficking investigations and prosecutions. The CP...
By a Biometrica staffer It seems like every day brings a new cyber incident that compromises the personal data of thousands, if not millions, of Americans. Last week, we wrote about how K–12 schools became the favored target for malicious cyber actors...
By a Biometrica staffer In another sign of how seriously President Joe Biden is taking a recent swell in the number of cyberattacks on American entities, on Wednesday, July 28 the White House released a national security memorandum on “improving cybersecurity for...
By a Biometrica staffer Source: Screengrab from the UNODC report depicting global prison population by regions The total number of people held in prison has increased by over 25% since 2000, with an estimated 11.7 million persons detained in jails across the...
By a Biometrica staffer On Monday, July 26, the United States government said it will not be lifting existing travel restrictions due to concerns over the highly transmissible delta variant of Covid-19 and the rising number of coronavirus cases in the country,...
By a Biometrica staffer Last week, a coalition of researchers from organizations including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the UN’s World Health Organization, and the World Bank published a report in the medical journal Lancet, in which it was...
By a Biometrica staffer Experts and lawmakers across the country are sounding the alarm over what seems to be a cyber free-for-all on American businesses, infrastructure systems, and industries. President Joe Biden brought the subject up with the Russian government, and various...
By a Biometrica staffer Earlier this month, the Morgan County school system in West Virginia was hit by a cyberattack, presumably from a Russia-based group, in which the files and data seized are being held for a $70 million ransom. Though all...
By Aara Ramesh One of the largest civil suits in U.S. history took a turn towards resolution on Tuesday, July 21, when officials announced that a deal had been brokered in the 3,000 lawsuits filed by states, cities, counties, and other jurisdictions...
By a Biometrica staffer In a cybersecurity advisory released on Monday, July 19, the National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said Chinese state-sponsored cyber activity poses a major threat to U.S. and...
By a Biometrica staffer Earlier this month, officials released the 2020 edition of the annual audit of the Health Care Fraud and Abuse Control Program (HCFAC) that is jointly run by the Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Justice (DOJ). According...
By a Biometrica staffer Widely considered to be one of the least polarizing issues in politics, infrastructure has become the key priority of the Biden-Harris Administration’s agenda. Currently, there are three bills being discussed in the U.S. Congress — two in the...
By a Biometrica staffer On Wednesday, July 14, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Sen. Cory Booker, and Sen. Ron Wyden unveiled a draft of their bill to legalize marijuana at the federal level. The proposal seeks to remove the drug from the Controlled...
By a Biometrica staffer Multiple news sites began reporting on Tuesday, July 13, that REvil, the Russia-based group responsible for one of the largest ransomware attacks in history, had gone dark. There is no indication as of yet as to why the...
By a Biometrica staffer An undercover investigation in middle Tennessee ended in the arrests of 18 men accused of seeking illicit sex from minors, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said on Monday, July 12. The operation began on July 8 and...
By a Biometrica staffer A triple threat of record high temperatures, wildfires, and drought have set ablaze large swathes of the western United States, leading to electricity shortages, mass evacuations, smoke warnings, and the deaths of at least two firefighters. According to...
By a Biometrica staffer In a big win for those arguing for greater autonomy for consumers on how companies collect and use their personal data, this week, Colorado became the third state, after Virginia and California, to implement a sweeping piece of...
By Aara Ramesh According to a study released by the Mozilla Foundation on Wednesday, July 7, the video platform giant YouTube is continuing to push to users “disturbing and hateful” content that violates its own Community Guidelines, continuing the long-standing controversy over...
By Aara Ramesh On Tuesday, July 6, Governor Andrew Cuomo issued a first-of-its-kind executive order declaring the escalating gun violence in New York a disaster emergency. The new edict is just the first step in a broader seven-step plan outlined by the...