Musk says he will bring back DOGE staffer who resigned after report of racist postings
Washington (AP): Elon Musk said on Friday he is re-hiring a staff member at the Department of Government Efficiency who resigned a day earlier after he was linked to social media posts that espoused racism.
Musk, in a post on his social media network X, said he would bring back Marko Elez after Vice President JD Vance called for him to be rehired. President Donald Trump later endorsed his vice president's view.
Marko Elez resigned Thursday after The Wall Street Journal linked the 25-year-old DOGE staffer to a deleted social media account on X that posted last year, “I was racist before it was cool” and “You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,” among other posts.
The account in September included a post that said, “Normalize Indian hate." The vice president's wife, Usha Vance, is the daughter of Indian immigrants.
Vance, in a post on Musk-owned X, said Elez should be brought back and blamed “journalists who try to destroy people.”
“I obviously disagree with some of Elez's posts, but I don't think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid's life,” Vance said.
“I'm with the vice president,” Trump told a news conference Friday.
A few hours later, Musk posted: “He will be brought back. To err is human, to forgive divine.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a message Friday confirming if Elez had been rehired. The administration earlier in the day had confirmed Elez' resignation.
The vice president said Elez should be fired “if he's a bad dude or a terrible member of the team.”
Elez did not respond to a message seeking comment Friday.
Elez was among two DOGE employees who were at the center of a controversy this week when they accessed the US Treasury Department's payment system, prompting a court challenge and a judge's decision to restrict their access.
In its report, The Wall Street Journal found a since-deleted account under the handle @nullllptr with a user described as an employee at SpaceX and Starlink, two of Musk's companies. The account previously went by the username @marko_elez.
Elez, in archives of his personal website, said he worked for SpaceX and on its Starlink satellites, and at X.
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4.4 magnitude quake hits northern Pakistan
Islamabad (PTI): A 4.4 magnitude earthquake jolted parts of north and northwestern Pakistan on Saturday, the second tremor to hit the country in as many days.
There were no immediate reports of casualties or damage.
The earthquake that struck at 9:30 am (local time) originated at a depth of 14 kilometres with its epicentre located 11 kms northeast of Burhan, Attock, according to the National Seismic Monitoring Centre, Islamabad.
Tremors were felt in parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as well as in Islamabad and Rawalpindi.
The Saturday morning quake came less than 24 hours after a 5.9 magnitude temblor struck parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Punjab provinces, with tremors felt in several cities, including Peshawar and Islamabad, on Friday.
The epicentre of that quake at 6:09 pm (local time) was in Afghanistan's Hindu Kush region at a depth of 101 kilometres.
Earthquakes are common in northern Pakistan due to its location in the Himalayas where the Indian and the Eurasian tectonic plates meet.
Earlier, a 5.6-magnitude earthquake hit Balochistan province on February 13 but no loss to life or property was reported there too. Its epicentre was 86 kms northeast of Khuzdar town of the province.
The quake was preceded on the same day by another tremor of magnitude 3.8 that struck 75 kms southeast of Khuzdar at a depth of 33 kms.
The worst quake the country suffered was in 2005, which killed about 74,000 people.
