Israel qualifies for Eurovision final amid protest about its participation

WASHINGTON : An Elon Musk aide was mistakenly given clearance to make changes to the US Treasury Department’s highly sensitive payments system containing millions of Americans’ personal information, a department official said Tuesday.
The admission came in a sworn statement to a federal judge amid heated criticism that the 25-year-old employee of billionaire Musk had editing rights to a system that handles trillions of dollars in government payments.
The employee, Marko Elez — who had no federal government status — resigned Friday after being linked to a racist social media account, only for Musk to announce that he was being reinstated.
President Donald Trump has tasked Musk with taking an axe to government spending as the leader of a new agency called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
The sworn statement, seen by AFP, says that Elez was supposed to gain read-only access to the system, under the supervision of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, the Treasury Department section that manages payments and collections.
“On the morning of February 6, it was discovered that Mr. Elez’s database access to SPS on February 5 had mistakenly been configured with read/write permissions instead of read-only,” said the statement from Joseph Gioeli, an official from the payments section.
SPS stands for Secure Payment System.
An initial investigation showed all of Elez’s interactions with the SPS system occurred within a supervised session and that “no unauthorized actions had taken place,” the official added.
Elez gained access through a Treasury Department laptop computer, triggering an uproar among critics of the Trump administration and worries about the safety of Americans’ personal data.
DOGE has no statutory standing in the federal government — which would require authorization from Congress — and neither Musk nor his aides are civil servants or federal employees.
Elez was one of two DOGE workers who gained access to the sensitive Treasury payments system.
A confidential internal assessment reported by US media warned the Treasury Department that this access represented an “unprecedented insider threat risk.”
Before he resigned, a court order forced Elez back to read-only permission for the payments system as Democratic lawmakers and citizen advocacy groups warned about the dangers to national security and the economy because of the data he could access.
Another member of the DOGE team, Thomas Krause, also submitted a sworn statement to the same judge on Tuesday, stating that he was employed by the Treasury on January 23 as an unpaid “Senior Adviser for Technology and Modernization.”
He was later delegated the duties of “Fiscal Assistant Secretary,” but said “I have not yet assumed the duties.”
Krause is listed in the Treasury Department’s organizational chart under this title.
“Although I coordinate with officials at USDS/DOGE, provide them with regular updates on the team’s progress, and receive high-level policy direction from them, I am not an employee of USDS/DOGE,” he said in his statement, adding that the department’s team within the Treasury consisted of himself and Elez.

KABUL: The Daesh group claimed Wednesday a suicide bombing of a bank in north Afghanistan which killed five people a day earlier, saying it was targeting Taliban government employees collecting salaries.
Violence has waned in Afghanistan since the Taliban surged back to power and ended their insurgency in 2021, but the Daesh group frequently stages gun and bomb attacks challenging their rule.
On Tuesday police in the northern city of Kunduz said a suicide attack in front of a bank killed five people — including civil servants — and wounded seven others.
The Daesh propaganda wing said Wednesday a “suicide bomber” had “detonated his explosive vest” as “Taliban militia members gathered outside a public bank to collect their salaries.”
The group previously claimed responsibility for a similar bombing in March 2024, outside a bank in the southern city of Kandahar — considered the spiritual heartland of the Taliban movement.
Daesh said it had targeted “Taliban militia” members outside the bank. Taliban authorities said only three people had been killed in last year’s incident, but a hospital source put fatalities far higher at 20.
The Taliban government has declared security its highest priority since returning to power and analysts say they have had some success quashing Daesh with a sweeping crackdown.
But the group remains active — targeting Taliban officials, visitors from abroad, and foreign diplomats.
There are frequently discrepancies between the casualty tolls given by Taliban authorities and those reported by officials on the ground, and attack sites are routinely shut down by security forces.
In December, Daesh claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing which killed the Taliban’s government minister for refugees, Khalil Ur-Rahman Haqqani, in the capital Kabul.