Are Post Offices, Social Security Closed on Christmas Eve?
On 12/24/20 at 12:01 AM EST
On Christmas Eve, many businesses and federal offices, including the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) and the offices for the Social Security Administration (SSA), are either closed or will operate on a modified schedule. Christmas Eve is not a regularly scheduled holiday. While the president has the authority to grant leave it is usually announced just before the Christmas holiday, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) explains. All executive departments and agencies of the Federal Government shall be closed and their employees excused from duty on Thursday, December 24, 2020, the day before Christmas Day.
HEADLINES & GLOBAL NEWS
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Dec 23, 2020 08:35 PM EST
The Treasury Department and Iowa State University are working together in dealing with a breadth of a security problem known as the SolarWinds Russian hack. It is named after a Texas-based company used as a staging ground for an espionage campaign so widespread that specialists say we re only starting to comprehend who was affected and what was stolen. The Treasury aims to know how many senior officials email accounts were watched. Iowa State has neutralized servers to check whether hackers got in.
More likely, tens of thousands of private organizations and remarkably every primary government agency have been working anxiously to see whether they ve been affected by the supposed Russian hacking campaign and, if so, how much access the hackers had. Experts say it looks like the largest Russian hack campaign in the US
The November 3 Election Is a Mess. What Should Be Done?
There do seem to be two contested Americas.
One America, which has an iron grip on the establishment media narrative is acting as if, in the infamous words of Chris Krebs, “the election was the most secure in American history.” This statement being a non-sequitur and said shortly before the U.S. Government was confronted with a “grave risk” from the Solar Winds issue, potentially the biggest cyber-attack in years. Having lived intimately through the chaos of the Sony Breach in late 2014, the Communist Chinese rampage through the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, and other key events of cyber history going back to Agent BTZ and the Cyber Riot in Estonia, I’m quite familiar with what really goes on behind the curtain inside the U.S. Government in such complex events. It’s far from the way Mr. Krebs chose to describe the situation.
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Late December is when many Americans rush to spend any money left in their Flexible Spending Accounts â those workplace plans funded during the year to pay medical expenses. The stimulus package, which President Trump signed Sunday, will give these workers a temporary reprieve.Â
One of the many provisions in the stimulus package allows those who have FSAs to roll over the remainder of their accounts from 2020 to 2021 and from 2021 to 2022. The same rules apply to Dependent Care FSAs, which are similar plans that benefit an employeeâs dependents, such as a young child or an elderly parent.Â
Workers could set aside up to $2,750 in pretax funds for individuals in Health FSAs and up to $5,000 per family, also before taxes, for dependent care FSAs in 2020. Under normal circumstances, the use-or-lose provisions in these plans generally require that the money be spent by year-end or be forfeited.Â