With a symbolic act, the relatives of Jesenia Murillo, her two daughters, and Orlando Medina said goodbye to them on the outskirts of the Cauca River, after the rescue agencies confirmed that the car in which they were traveling on January 12 could not be extracted from the tributary.
The Administrative Department of Risk Management of Antioquia indicated that the vehicle, which fell into the river on the El Cangrejo sector in the municipality of Betulia, could not be removed “due to adverse conditions.”
(You may be interested in: Video: Family in Medellín had to leave their house escorted by the Police)
Although Firefighters, Army, Police, Devimar, and the family were present at the site to get the car out, the force of the river, the current, the strong suction and the sedimentation did not allow it to be recovered.
“Technical report from the National Navy warns that the lives of operational personnel were being endangered. The vehicle is 97% buried due to sedimentation. The decision to end operations was made at the PMU in common agreement between entities and family”, the Dagran pointed out.
It should be remembered that the vehicle had an accident on the night of Wednesday, January 12, falling into the Cauca River. Five people were traveling in it, of which only one managed to get out of the vehicle without injury.
(Also read: First episode of air quality in Medellin begins on February 14)
The family came from the municipality of Andagoya (Chocó) and was on their way to their place of residence, in San Pedro de Urabá, Antioquia.
With sadness, we inform that due to adverse conditions, the car that fell into the Cauca River on the El Cangrejo sector in Betulia, with Jesenia Murillo, her two daughters, and Orlando Medina cannot be extracted. With a symbolic act, the relatives said goodbye to their loved ones. pic.twitter.com/xaVDruUpak
From that moment, the search began for Jesenia Murillo Bonilla and her daughters, Thaira Cristina Parra Murillo, 10 years old, and Thailen Parra Murillo, 5 years old, in addition to the driver, identified as Orlando Medina.
The only survivor of the incident was Cristian Parra, father of the minors who were missing, and who in recent days thanked the efforts of all the people who joined the search.
RFA welcomes Carolyn Bartholomew as new board chair
January 27, 2022
Washington, D.C. — Radio Free Asia (RFA) today announced that Carolyn Bartholomew, a member of RFA’s board of directors, will serve as its Chair. Bartholomew, a Commissioner on the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission and its current Chairman, succeeds Ambassador Karen Kornbluh, who announced that she would be stepping down from the board after serving a tenure that began in 2014. Bartholomew was unanimously approved at the January meeting of RFA’s board of directors.
“Carolyn brings a deep knowledge base of China and Asia, as well as valuable experience serving on nonprofit and commercial boards,” said RFA President Bay Fang. “RFA will benefit immeasurably from her forward-thinking expertise. I could not be more thrilled to work with her and our board to achieve RFA’s goals and congressionally-mandated mission.”
“It’s an incredible honor to serve as RFA’s board chair,” Bartholomew said. “I have long admired RFA for its incisive brand of journalism that provides accountability and accurate information for millions in Asia who are in desperate need of a free press. I’m grateful for this opportunity to take over from the outstanding Karen Kornbluh and pledge to work tirelessly to help this organization, which just marked its 25th anniversary, be best positioned for the challenges that lie ahead.”
Bartholomew joined RFA’s board in Fall 2021, along with Asia policy expert Michael J. Green, the senior vice president for Asia and Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and veteran journalist Keith Richburg, the Director of the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong. Prior to her service on the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, Bartholomew held senior-level positions in Congress, including on key committees overseeing Asia foreign policy and funding foreign aid, and congressional leadership, as a long-time counsel, legislative director, and chief of staff. She has particular policy expertise on U.S.-China trade relations, security issues, and human rights, and has led efforts on the promotion of human rights and strengthening civil society in countries around the world. In addition, Bartholomew brings almost two decades of experience on nonprofit and corporate boards.
Ambassador Kornbluh and Ambassador Ryan Crocker both departed RFA’s board of directors after serving tenures that began in 2014 and 2013 respectively. They served until June 2020 and were reinstated in January of 2021. Michael Kempner, Founder, President and CEO of public relations firm MikeWorldWide (MWW), whose tenure began in 2014 and was reinstated in January 2021, remains on RFA’s board. RFA celebrated its 25th-anniversary last fall when its first broadcast in Mandarin Chinese was aired in 1996.
About RFA
Radio Free Asia is a private, nonprofit corporation broadcasting and publishing online news, information, and commentary in 9 East Asian languages to listeners who do not have access to full and free news media. RFA’s broadcasts seek to promote the rights of freedom of opinion and expression, including the freedom to “seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” RFA is funded by an annual grant from USAGM.
It’s a key part of President Joe Biden’s plans to fight major ransomware attacks and digital espionage campaigns: creating a board of experts that would investigate major incidents to see what went wrong and try to prevent the problems from happening again — much like a transportation safety board does with plane crashes.
But eight months after Biden signed an executive order creating the Cyber Safety Review Board it still hasn’t been set up. That means critical tasks haven’t been completed, including an investigation of the massive SolarWinds espionage campaign first discovered more than a year ago. Russian hackers stole data from several federal agencies and private companies.
Some supporters of the new board say the delay could hurt national security and comes amid growing concerns of a potential conflict with Russia over Ukraine that could involve nation-state cyberattacks. The FBI and other federal agencies recently released an advisory — aimed particularly at critical infrastructure like utilities — on Russian state hackers’ methods and techniques.
“We will never get ahead of these threats if it takes us nearly a year to simply organize a group to investigate major breaches like SolarWinds,” said Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat who leads the Senate Intelligence Committee. “Such a delay is detrimental to our national security and I urge the administration to expedite its process.”
Biden’s order, signed in May, gives the board 90 days to investigate the SolarWinds hack once it’s established. But there’s no timeline for creating the board itself, a job designated to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
In response to questions from The Associated Press, DHS said in a statement it was far along in setting it up and anticipated a “near-term announcement,” but did not address why the process has taken so long.
Scott Shackelford, the cybersecurity program chair at Indiana University and an advocate for creating a cyber review board, said having a rigorous study about what happened in a past hack like SolarWinds is a way of helping prevent similar attacks.
“It sure is taking, my goodness, quite a while to get it going,” Shackelford said. “It’s certainly past time where we could see some positive benefits from having it stood up.”
The Biden administration has made improving cybersecurity a top priority and taken steps to bolster defenses, but this is not the first time lawmakers have been unhappy with the pace of progress. Last year several lawmakers complained it took the administration too long to name a national cyber director, a new position created by Congress.
The SolarWinds hack exploited vulnerabilities in the software supply-chain system and went undetected for most of 2020 despite compromises at a broad swath of federal agencies and dozens of companies, primarily telecommunications and information technology providers. The hacking campaign is named SolarWinds after the U.S. software company whose product was exploited in the first-stage infection of that effort.
The hack highlighted the Russians’ skill at getting to high-level targets. The AP previously reported that SolarWinds hackers had gained access to emails belonging to the then-acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf.
The Biden administration has kept many of the details about the cyberespionage campaign hidden.
The Justice Department, for instance, said in July that 27 U.S. attorney offices around the country had at least one employee’s email account compromised during the hacking campaign. It did not provide details about what kind of information was taken and what impact such a hack may have had on ongoing cases.
The New York-based staff of the DOJ Antitrust Division also had files stolen by the SolarWinds hackers, according to one former senior official briefed on the hack who was not authorized to speak about it publicly and requested anonymity. That breach has not previously been reported. The Antitrust Division investigates private companies and has access to highly sensitive corporate data.
The federal government has undertaken reviews of the SolarWinds hack. The Government Accountability Office issued a report this month on the SolarWinds hack and another major hacking incident that found there was sometimes a slow and difficult process for sharing information between government agencies and the private sector, The National Security Council also conducted a review of the SolarWinds hack last year, according to the GAO report.
But having the new board conduct an independent, thorough examination of the SolarWinds hack could identify inconspicuous security gaps and issues that others may have missed, said Christopher Hart, a former National Transportation Safety Board chairman who has advocated for the creation of a cyber review board.
“Most of the crashes that the NTSB really goes after … are ones that are a surprise even to the security experts,” Hart said. “They weren’t really obvious things, they were things that really took some deep digging to figure out what went wrong.”
