The results of three recent separate studies are staggering, the oceans are filled with about 5 trillion bits and bobs of plastic debris. Now, one English sailing team is doing its part, skimming plastic off the ocean’s surface, bucket by bucket. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
…
Month: November 2017
President Donald Trump’s two-day stop in China saw the signing of $250 billion in deals between the world’s two biggest economies and the two countries aligning themselves closer in resolute opposition to North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.
But analysts say little new ground was broken on trade or North Korea, an issue that will continue to top President Trump’s agenda as he travels to Vietnam and attends the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit.
And the true test of the feel-good foundation forged during the meetings, analysts said, is likely to come in the days, weeks and months ahead.
Big deal?
By design, the $250 billion sum of the deals was meant to provide a sharp contrast to the $300-500 billion deficit that exists between the United States and China, something Trump called “horrible” before departing for his 12-day trip to Asia.
Chinese state media have kicked into overdrive hailing the visit as a huge success. Media reports have highlighted the tone of the meetings, repeatedly noting the total amount of the deals.
An editorial in the official China Daily Friday said, “Although the differences that had been pestering bilateral ties have not instantly disappeared, the most important takeaway from their talks in Beijing has been the constructive approach to these issue the two leaders demonstrated.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping has called the meeting “historic.”
“We will definitely write a new chapter in the U.S.-Chinese relations. We will definitely make a new contribution to realize a beautiful future for U.S.-Chinese relations,” Xi said at a banquet Thursday evening.
Whether the “historic” nature of the meetings will hold, however, remains in question.
Liao Qun, chief economist at China CITIC Bank International, said that the size of the deal shows trade takes priority above all else.
“Though the U.S. and China do not see eye to eye, both still compete on many geo-political issues, trade still remains at the top of their agenda. With closer trade relations, the U.S.-China relation will still make headway,” Liao said.
No guarantees
But not all agree with that assessment.
Some analysts said that despite Trump’s softer approach and “incredibly warm” feeling he expressed about his Chinese counterpart, the president is likely to be back to criticizing China again in a few months.
“The president likes deals, and he likes big numbers, but we’re not going to change something he doesn’t like, which is the big China trade deficit, without changing Chinese practices,” said Derek Scissors, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “China has to have a different approach to trade in the world than it does.”
Scissors said that more than the deficit, it is what is behind the numbers, such as the fact that Chinese state-owned enterprises never go out of business.
“Which means American goods and services can’t ever win in the China market,” he said.
WATCH: Trump Touts Excellent Progress in Beijing During Talks with Xi
Paul Haenle, director of the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy said we may have a case of misaligned assessments of how the visit has played out.
The Chinese leadership may think that they have done a lot to give President Trump face, with all of the pomp and business deals, and that that has put the relationship on solid footing, he said.
“But President Trump may go home to a domestic political environment where people are disappointed he hasn’t achieved more progress on the structural trade and economics issues (market access, more fair and reciprocal treatment for U.S. businesses, intellectual property rights, forced technology transfer, and Chinese unfair industrial policies) and North Korea,” Haenle said. “My concern is you may see a shift towards a much harder line coming from the U.S. administration. That will be a huge surprise to China and President Xi.”
Pretty small
The huge deals reached could create jobs in America and provide a small boost to exports, but the meetings did little to advance market access.
“Open markets are better for both sides. It is also better for China to open up its market. But China is not interested in opening markets,” said Christopher Balding, associate professor of finance at Peking University’s HSBC Business.
In a briefing with reporters Thursday after the two leaders issued a joint statement, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that “in the grand scheme of a $300- to $500-billion trade deficit, the things that have been achieved thus far are pretty small.”
“I mean, they’re not small if you’re a company, maybe, that has seen some relief. But in terms of really getting at some of the fundamental elements behind why this imbalance exists, there’s still a lot more work to do,” he said.
China has repeatedly pledged to do more to open its markets, and the Communist Party recently approved amendments to its charter that called for letting “the market play a decisive role in the economy. But progress has been slow and contradictory.
Earlier this year, China announced it would be allowing U.S. credit card companies to operate fully owned units in the country after years of stalling. However, several sources recently told Reuters that authorities are still pressing foreign credit card companies to form joint ventures with Chinese companies.
On Friday, China announced that it will raise the ownership limits in joint venture firms involved in securities, futures and fund markets. China’s Vice Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao said that ownership limits would be raised from 49 to 51 percent, allowing foreign companies to hold a majority stake.
No time frame for implementing the measures was given, but according to Reuters Zhu did say that all restrictions on equity holdings for the sectors would be removed in three years.
Analysts note that while it is still hard to say what else was discussed behind closed doors, on trade and North Korea, the ball is clearly in China’s court.
“Trump has put the onus on President Xi to solve the North Korea problem. This is why he said that if Xi wants something to happen, it will happen,” Balding said.
VOA’s Joyce Huang and Saibal Dasgupta contributed to this report.
…
Donald Trump warned that the stock market was a “big, fat, ugly bubble” just weeks before he was elected. A year later, Wall Street remains on a milestone-shattering run that the president has been eager to tout and tweet about.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 index, the broadest measure of the stock market, has notched 61 record highs and climbed about 21.3 percent in the year since Trump was elected.
That exceeds the S&P 500’s gain in the first-term election anniversaries of all but two presidents since World War II: George H.W. Bush (22.9 percent) and John F. Kennedy (27 percent), according to CFRA Research.
It also outpaces the market’s performance in the same postelection period of several other modern-era White House occupants, including Ronald Reagan (-3.3 percent), Bill Clinton (10.3 percent), George W. Bush (-22.1 percent) and Barack Obama (4.1 percent). But it trails the S&P 500’s gain in the first year after the second-term elections of Clinton (31.7 percent) and Obama (23.4 percent).
Initially a sell-off in Asia
The billionaire’s surprise electoral victory initially set off a steep sell-off in Asian markets. But by the end of the day on Nov. 9, 2016, global markets had steadied and the S&P 500 index closed sharply higher. The market’s rally continued for several weeks, driving the major U.S. stock indexes to record highs. This year, stocks have gradually moved higher, clocking new milestones for the indexes along the way.
Since Trump’s election, investors have been betting that the White House and a GOP-controlled Congress will have a clear pathway to cut taxes, relax regulations and enact other business-friendly policies, despite legislative stumbles that have delayed the administration’s efforts.
Strong corporate profits, revenue
Yet, the biggest driver of the market’s gains has been strong corporate profits, Wall Street analysts say.
“The most important thing that’s happened is we’ve had very good earnings seasons,” said JJ Kinahan, chief market strategist at TD Ameritrade. “Companies are making money. Earnings drive the market and earnings have been good.”
In recent weeks, more than 400 of the companies in the S&P 500 have reported their results for the July-through-September quarter, and they’ve been so much better than forecast that Wall Street has more than doubled its expectations for third-quarter earnings growth to 6.8 percent, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.
What’s more encouraging to many investors is that more companies than usual are also reporting higher revenue than analysts had forecast.
Stock prices tend to track corporate profits over the long term, so the better-than-expected earnings growth helps to validate the stock market’s record-setting run, at least somewhat.
Betting on growth
Investors have also continued to bet big on economic growth in the U.S. and worldwide as economies in Europe and Asia have bounced back, Kinahan noted.
Since Trump’s election, technology companies have led the way with a 39 percent surge. Banks and industrial and basic materials companies have also soared. Only phone company stocks are down from a year ago.
During the first presidential debate between Trump and his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in September 2016, Trump cautioned that the stock market was in bubble and that even a small increase in interest rates would bring the market “crashing down.”
That’s not happened, even though the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates twice this year and is expected to do so again next month.
‘Sailing along’ another year
Eight years into the bull market, many analysts expect stocks to keep climbing, at least for the next year. The global economy is improving, corporate profits are rising and inflation remains low but not so low that it makes economists nervous.
On average, the S&P 500 has continued “sailing along” for another year after a president’s first-term election anniversary, before declining 10 percent or more, said Sam Stovall, chief investment strategist at CFRA Research.
He notes that the shortest time was 36 days following Kennedy’s first election anniversary, while the longest stretch was nearly four years after Clinton was elected.
“Should history repeat, and there is no guarantee it will, this bull (market) could continue to surprise investors with its resiliency,” Stovall said.
…
Bicycle highways, urban farms and local energy hubs — just some of the ways that yesterday’s smokestack cities are turning into tomorrow’s green spaces.
The Urban Transitions Alliance (UTA), a network that brings together cities in Germany, the United States and China, launched this week to help members learn regeneration tricks from each other.
“What to do with your brownfield sites, how to transition with citizens in mind, create new jobs — these cities have a lot of challenges in common,” said Roman Mendle, Smart Cities program manager at ICLEI, an international association of local governments.
As up to 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions are generated in urban areas, cities have to play a leading role in addressing climate change.
Experts from more than 20 countries met in Essen, Germany, this week to launch the UTA and thrash out how post-industrial cities can reinvent themselves in plans that will be submitted to the U.N. climate talks in Bonn this week.
Essen, once a coal and steel city known as Germany’s “Graue Maus” (grey mouse) for its polluted air and waterways, has gained a reputation as a trailblazer for sustainability, becoming the European Commission’s European Green Capital 2017.
“There is a lot of know-how in Essen on how to transition from the age of carbon to a post-carbon world,” said Simone Raskob, Essen’s deputy mayor and head of its environment department.
“No city can do this by itself. There are a lot of challenges,” Raskob, who leads the European Green City – Essen 2017 project, told Reuters.
Experts praise Essen for cleaning up its waterways, creating green spaces and turning grimy industrial sites into dynamic cultural centers, such as the Zeche Zollverein, a towering UNESCO World Heritage site that arose from a disused coal mine.
To ease traffic congestion, Essen built Germany’s first bike highway, connecting with a 100-km (62-mile) regional network.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh, once a dynamo of U.S. heavy industry, has shifted from a fossil fuel-based economy, reinventing itself as a hub for green buildings innovation and clean energy.
The former steel city has been switching over to LED street lights, retro-fitting municipal buildings for energy efficiency and developing district energy initiatives.
The city will also host the largest U.S. urban farm: 23 acres (9 hectares) on a site where low-income housing once stood.
“One of the key things we have recognized is that becoming greener also brings economic benefits,” said Grant Ervin, Pittsburgh’s chief resilience officer.
Founding UTA members include districts of Beijing and Shijiazhuang in China; Buffalo and Cincinnati in the United States; and Dortmund in Germany.
…
An Australian museum has teamed up with computer giant International Business Machines to count the country’s native frog population, and they want amphibian enthusiasts to jump on board.
The Australian Museum and IBM say they developed the world’s first smartphone app especially designed to let users record and report frog calls, croaks and chirps — without disturbing them.
Australia has 240 named native species of frog, and the museum wants to use its FrogID app to identify what it believes are dozens more still ribbiting under the radar.
“One of the cool things about this is you can survey frogs just by listening,” said Jodi Rowley, the museum’s curator of amphibian and reptile conservation biology.
“It’s actually a lot more accurate than photos, and photos encourage people to handle or disturb frogs,” Rowley added. She noted that every frog species has a unique call.
While frog populations are in decline around the world, Australia’s frogs are especially vulnerable because of a combination of climate change, pollution, introduced species and urban development, the country’s Department of Environment and Energy says.
According to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act four frog varieties are extinct, five are critically endangered, 14 are endangered and a further 10 are considered vulnerable.
Scientists say the presence of frogs in an ecosystem is a sign of good environmental health, but the small amphibians are highly sensitive to changes in their habitat.
Rowley said she hopes campers, hikers and other serious nature lovers will help with the research, but she noted that even the humble backyard fishpond could provide valuable data.
“It might allow us to figure out which areas of suburbia are really good for frogs, why they are good and hopefully help create more frog friendly habitats in suburbia,” she said.
Rowley said amateurs who record previously unknown frog calls may even help discover a new type of frog or determine if any introduced species have gone unnoticed.
“All these things will help us — and help Australia — make sure that frogs don’t croak,” she said.
…
Former New York mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg is donating $50 million to help nations around the world shift from coal to combat pollution and climate change, expanding his funding outside the United States.
The project would start in Europe and expand into other countries later on, his charity, Bloomberg Philanthropies, said in a statement Thursday on the margins of U.N. climate negotiations among 200 nations in Bonn, Germany.
The European Climate Foundation, a non-governmental group, will be the leading partner in Europe, it said.
“Bloomberg’s announcement marks his first investment in efforts outside the U.S. to decrease reliance on coal and shift to renewable, cleaner energy sources,” Bloomberg’s charity said in a statement.
In the United States, Bloomberg has given $110 million to a Beyond Coal campaign to close mines since 2011.
“A growing number of European countries have made plans to go 100 percent coal-free, which sets a great example for the rest of the world — but coal still kills around 20,000 people in the European Union each year,” Bloomberg said in a statement.
Since 2011 nearly half of the U.S. coal-fired power plants, or nearly 260 plants, have closed.
The closures have continued this year despite President Donald Trump’s plan to pull out of the global Paris agreement for fighting climate change and instead promote jobs in the domestic fossil fuel industry.
…
The FBI has yet to gain access to data on Devin Kelley’s phone four days after the former airman killed 26 churchgoers in Texas in the deadliest mass shooting in the state’s history, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein said Thursday, blaming “warrant-proof encryption” for impeding criminal investigations.
The FBI’s San Antonio office sent Kelley’s encrypted phone to the bureau’s crime lab in Quantico, Virginia, earlier this week after agents were unable to unlock it, Christopher Combs, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s office in San Antonio, Texas, said Tuesday.
But Rosenstein, speaking at the BWI Business partnership organization in Maryland, said the FBI has been unable to access “the data inside because of encryption.”
“Nobody has a legitimate privacy interest in that phone,” Rosenstein said. “The suspect is deceased. Even if he were alive, it would be legal for police and prosecutors to find out what is in the phone.”
The FBI declined to say whether the bureau had been able to unlock the phone but unable to access its encrypted data.
Kelley killed 26 people and injured 20 others at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, on Sunday before turning the gun on himself.
The FBI has not identified the make or model of Kelley’s phone, but the Associated Press reported on Wednesday that it was an Apple iPhone.
Apple said on Wednesday that it “immediately” reached out to the FBI after “learning that investigators were trying to access a mobile phone.”
“We offered assistance and said we’d expedite our response to any legal process they send us,” Apple said in a statement.
Legal battle
Rosenstein said “strong encryption is good,” but he criticized technology companies for building devices and applications that make it difficult for law enforcement authorities even with a warrant to access encrypted data.
A 2016 legal dispute between the FBI and Apple over the bureau’s effort to gain access to the phone of San Bernardino mass shooter Syed Rizwan Farok fueled a national debate over privacy and public safety.
The FBI obtained a warrant to unlock the phone, but the data was encrypted and Apple refused to help the bureau gain access to the data.
The showdown ended after the FBI was able to open the device with the use of an unnamed third party.
FBI officials have long expressed frustration over increasingly sophisticated encryption technology that makes it harder for law enforcement to access devices and data.
In the first 11 months of the 2017 fiscal year, the FBI was unable to access the content of nearly 7,000 smartphones, more than half the total number of devices the bureau tried to access, FBI Director Christopher Wray said last week.
“And that’s a huge, huge problem,” Wray said. “It impacts investigations across the board — narcotics, human trafficking, counterterrorism, counterintelligence, gangs, organized crime and child exploitation.”
…
Chinese gaming and social media company Tencent Holdings Ltd. on Thursday flagged video games and ad sales as areas where it thinks it could help Snapchat owner Snap after acquiring a 12 percent stake in the U.S. firm.
Snap disclosed in a U.S. regulatory filing on Wednesday that Tencent recently bought 145.8 million of its shares on the open market, fueling investor speculation about how the two companies might work together.
The U.S. social media company has struggled since its March initial public offering to meet analyst expectations for user growth, and it is locked in fierce competition for users and ad dollars with Facebook Inc.
In describing its stake, Tencent, the world’s largest gaming company by revenue, implied a close relationship with Snap that could go beyond passive investing and involve assisting the U.S. company with strategy.
Investors treated Tencent’s new stake as an investment rather than a step toward an acquisition, while analysts viewed the move as potentially more beneficial for the Chinese company than for Snap.
Shares in Snap fell 4.3 percent on Thursday to $12.35, adding to a 14.6 percent loss in the previous session. Snap went public at $17 a share.
Morgan Stanley analysts late on Wednesday cut their rating on the stock to “underweight” because of competition from Facebook’s Instagram, which has introduced features that mimic Snapchat’s disappearing messages. A separate Morgan Stanley division was lead underwriter for Snap’s IPO.
Tencent’s shares do not have voting power and the company will not have a board seat. Snap said in its filing on Wednesday that Tencent notified it of the share purchases this month.
“The investment enables Tencent to explore cooperation opportunities with the company on mobile games publishing and newsfeed as well as to share its financial returns from the growth of its businesses and monetization in the future,” Tencent said in an emailed statement. It also referred to the potential for newsfeed ads.
Redesign plan
It was not immediately clear if Snap has the same plan.
The California-based company declined to comment beyond its filing, in which it said it was inspired by Tencent’s creativity and entrepreneurial spirit and grateful to continue a productive relationship.
Snapchat does not have a Facebook-style newsfeed, but said on Tuesday that it was planning a redesign that could include such a feature.
Last year, PepsiCo Inc’s Gatorade ran an interactive video game ad on Snapchat featuring tennis star Serena Williams.
Beyond that and a few similar examples, the app has not offered mobile games.
Analysts said Tencent has benefited from its social media apps for the phenomenal popularity of its smartphone games such as Honour of Kings, and will need the help of local networks to fuel overseas growth.
Honour of Kings, based on Chinese historical characters, is the top-grossing mobile game in the world. It became so popular that Tencent in July curbed play time amid reports of addiction among children.
Tencent also owns Epic Games, developer of League of Legends, which is the most popular computer game in the United States and Europe according to research firm Newzoo.
Banned in China
Like other U.S. social networks, Snapchat is banned in China, although videos originating there are visible on the network presumably because of technological workarounds.
It is unlikely Snap “would ever be allowed to establish a foothold in China even if their relationship with Tencent were deeper,” Brian Wieser, senior analyst at Pivotal Research Group in New York said in a client note.
The companies operate on different scales. Tencent’s holdings include messaging apps QQ and WeChat, both ubiquitous in China, and its market capitalization of $469 billion is among the largest in the world. Snap’s is $15 billion.
“The China market is in some ways more advanced in social media and messaging than the U.S. is,” said Rebecca Fannin, founder of Silicon Dragon, a website about China and California’s Silicon Valley.
“Tencent might have teams come in and work with them,” Fannin said.
Tencent has global aspirations and may be buying shares with that strategy in mind, said Lindsay Conner, a Los Angeles lawyer who has represented Chinese companies in the United States.
“They often invest in companies to have a seat at the table, to understand businesses better, to see where the leading edge is between technology and content, and to have an insight into technology they should adopt or license,” he said.
Tencent first became an investor in Snap in 2013. The total size of its investment has not been disclosed.
…
The outsourcing industry in the Philippines, which has dethroned India as the country with the most call centers in the world, is worried that the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) will eat into the $23 billion sector.
AI-powered translators could dilute the biggest advantage the Philippines has, which is the wide use of English, an industry meeting was told this week. Other AI applications could take over process-driven jobs.
The Philippines’ business process outsourcing (BPO) industry is an economic lifeline for the Southeast Asian nation of 100 million people. It employs about 1.15 million people and, along with remittances from overseas workers, remains one of the top two earners of foreign exchange.
“I don’t think our excellent command of spoken English is going to really be a protection five, 10 years from now. It really will not matter,” said Rajneesh Tiwary, chief delivery officer at Sutherland Global Services.
The Philippines, which was an American colony in the first half of the 20th century, overtook India in 2011 with the largest number of voice-based BPO services in the world.
“There’s definitely reasons to be concerned, because technology may be able to replace some of what could happen in voice,” Eric Simonson, managing partner of research at Everest Group, a management consulting and research firm, told Reuters.
AI, which combs through large troves of raw data to predict outcomes and recognize patterns, is expected to replace 40,000 to 50,000 “low-skilled” or process-driven BPO jobs in the next five years, said Rey Untal, president and chief executive officer of the IT & Business Process Association of the Philippines (IBPAP).
Contact centers make up four-fifths of the Philippines’ total BPO industry, which accounts for 12.6 percent of the global market for BPO, according to IBPAP.
U.S. is biggest customer
BPO firms in the Philippines list Citibank, JPMorgan, Verizon, Convergys and Genpact among their clients. While the United States remains the biggest customer for the industry, demand for BPO services from Europe, Australia and New Zealand is also growing.
The Philippines’ share of the global outsourcing pie, estimated to reach about $250 billion by 2022, is forecast by the industry to reach 15 percent by that year.
To get there however, the Southeast Asian nation must prove to the world it has more to offer than just a pool of English-speaking talent. BPO executives said the country has to take on high-value outsourcing jobs in research and analytics and turn the headwinds from artificial intelligence into an opportunity.
The key to staying relevant and ahead of the competition, they said, is to ensure workers are trained in areas like data analytics, machine learning and data mining.
“You will see in the next few years more automation coming in the way we do things in IT and the BPO industry, robotic processing, the use of chat bots,” Luis Pined, president of IBM Philippines, told Reuters.
“If we are ahead of the game, we will be at an advantage where people will give us more work, because we are cheaper and productive,” Pined said.
IBM Philippines divested its voice business in 2013.
IBPAP has projected a rise in the number of mid- and high-skilled jobs, or those that require abstract thinking and specialized expertise, which should bring the overall head count in the BPO sector to 1.8 million by 2022.
Augmenting the English language skills of the Philippines with technology will be a “game changer,” said Untal, the head of the association. “Who else can compete with us?”
…
Disguised Russian agents on Twitter rushed to deflect scandalous news about Donald Trump just before last year’s presidential election while straining to refocus criticism on the mainstream media and Hillary Clinton’s campaign, according to an Associated Press analysis of since-deleted accounts.
Tweets by Russia-backed accounts such as “America_1st_” and “BatonRougeVoice” on October 7, 2016, actively pivoted away from news of an audio recording in which Trump made crude comments about groping women, and instead touted damaging emails hacked from Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta.
Since early this year, the extent of Russian intrusion to help Trump and hurt Clinton in the election has been the subject of both congressional scrutiny and a criminal investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller. In particular, those investigations are looking into the possibility of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russians.
AP’s analysis illuminates the obvious strategy behind the Russian cyber meddling: swiftly react, distort and distract attention from any negative Trump news.
The AP examined 36,210 tweets from Aug. 31, 2015, to Nov. 10, 2016, posted by 382 of the Russian accounts that Twitter shared with congressional investigators last week. Twitter deactivated the accounts, deleting the tweets and making them inaccessible on the internet. But a limited selection of the accounts’ Twitter activity was retrieved by matching account handles against an archive obtained by AP.
“MSM [the mainstream media] is at it again with Billy Bush recording … What about telling Americans how Hillary defended a rapist and later laughed at his victim?” tweeted the America_1st_ account, which had 25,045 followers at its peak, according to metadata in the archive. The tweet went out the afternoon of Oct. 7, just hours after The Washington Post broke the story about Trump’s comments to Bush, then host of Access Hollywood, about kissing, groping and trying to have sex with women, saying, “when you’re a star, they let you do it.”
Within an hour of the Post’s story, WikiLeaks unleashed its own bombshell about hacked email from Podesta’s account, a release the Russian accounts had been foreshadowing for days.
“WikiLeaks’ [founder Julian] Assange signals release of documents before U.S. election,” tweeted both “SpecialAffair” and “ScreamyMonkey” within a second of each other on Oct. 4. “SpecialAffair,” an account describing itself as a “Political junkie in action,” had 11,255 followers at the time. “ScreamyMonkey,” self-described as a “First frontier.News aggregator,” had 13,224. Both accounts were created within three days of each other in late December 2014.
Twitter handed over the handles of 2,752 accounts it identified as coming from Russia’s Internet Research Agency to congressional investigators ahead of the social media giant’s Oct. 31 and Nov. 1 appearances on Capitol Hill. It said 9 percent of the tweets were election-related but didn’t make the tweets themselves public.
That makes the archive the AP obtained the most comprehensive historical picture so far of Russian activity on Twitter in the crucial run-up to the Nov. 8, 2016, vote. Twitter policy requires developers who archive its material to delete tweets from suspended accounts as soon as reasonably possible, unless doing so would violate the law or Twitter grants an exception. It’s possible the existence of the deleted tweets in the archive obtained by the AP runs afoul of those rules.
Earlier activity
The Russian accounts didn’t just spring into action at the last minute. They were similarly active at earlier points in the campaign.
When Trump reversed himself on a lie about Barack Obama’s birthplace on Sept. 17, declaring abruptly that Obama “was born in the United States, period,” several Russian accounts chimed in to echo Trump’s subsequent false claim that it was Clinton who had started the birther controversy.
Others continued to push birther narratives. The Russian account TEN_GOP, which many mistook for the official account of the Tennessee Republican Party, linked to a video that claimed that Obama “admits he was born in Kenya.” But the Russian accounts weren’t in lockstep. The handle “hyddrox” retweeted a post by the anti-Trump billionaire Mark Cuban that the “MSM [mainstream media] is being suckered into chasing birther stories.”
On Sept. 15, Clinton returned to the campaign trail following a bout with pneumonia that caused her to stumble at a 9/11 memorial service.
The Russian account “Pamela_Moore13” noted that her intro music was “I Feel Good” by James Brown — then observed that “James Brown died of pneumonia,” a line that was repeated at least 11 times by Russian accounts, including by “Jenn_Abrams,” which had 59,868 followers at the time.
According to several obituaries, Brown died of congestive heart failure related to pneumonia.
Racial discord also figured prominently in the tweets, just as it did with many of the ads Russian trolls had purchased on Facebook in the months leading up to and following the election. One Russian account, “Blacks4DTrump,” tweeted a Trump quote on Sept. 16 in which he declared “it is the Democratic party that is the party of slavery, the party of Jim Crow & the party of opposition.”
TEN_GOP, meanwhile, asked followers to “SPREAD the msg of black pastor explaining why African-Americans should vote Donald Trump!”
…
What’s Mark Zuckerberg’s biggest takeaway as he wraps up a year of travel to dozens of U.S. states? The importance of local communities.
To this end, Facebook’s CEO is announcing a program to boost small businesses and give people technical skills on and off Facebook. The move shows how intertwined Facebook has become not just in our social lives, but in entrepreneurs’ economic survival and growth. Facebook says 70 million small businesses use its service. Only 6 million of them advertise.
Called Community Boost, the program will visit 30 U.S. cities next year and work with local groups to train people in skills such as coding, building websites – and naturally, using Facebook for their business.
Zuckerberg says the effort is not just about Facebook’s business but its core mission.
Executives from Google, Facebook and Twitter faced anger from lawmakers last week over their platforms’ roles in Russian interference into the 2016 election. But for Silicon Valley, the biggest challenge lies ahead as tech companies look for ways to work with a U.S. Congress intent on closing legal loopholes before 2018 midterm elections.
Congressional scrutiny showed U.S. law has fallen behind the rapid growth of social media. Without rules governing paid political advertising on social media, foreign agents were free to post false or inflammatory material in an attempt manipulate public opinion. But lawmakers remain optimistic about the opportunity to learn from the past.
“If there is a place that has ever understood change, it’s Silicon Valley. It is based on disruption. It’s based on people taking risks,” Representative Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat, told VOA.
Greater transparency
Eshoo, whose congressional district covers part of Silicon Valley, has been a longtime advocate for greater transparency in the more traditional fields of TV and print political advertising.
“When citizens know who has paid for something, it has an effect on their thinking,” Eshoo said. “It doesn’t mean that there wouldn’t still be Americans that would like that divisive ad. But at least they’ll know where it comes from, and you can have a much clearer debate about who is saying what and what they are attempting to do.”
The HONEST Ads Act, a legislative proposal recently introduced in both houses of Congress, follows along those lines.
If passed, the bill would regulate online political ads under the same rules as broadcast advertisements, requiring companies to keep a public database storing those ads and providing information about their funding.
“Americans deserve to know who’s paying for the online ads,” Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a co-sponsor of the bill, said last month. “Even if the Russian interference hadn’t occurred, we should still be updating our laws. Our laws should be as sophisticated as those who are trying to manipulate us.”
“Creating a database like that is going to be hard and complicated and messy. It’s a good idea that’s going to have a tough execution,” Dave Karpf, a professor of political communication at George Washington University, told VOA.
Karpf said that while there are no perfect solutions, it’s important to recognize the tech companies for what they’ve become.
“Facebook and Google are media companies — they’re just different media companies then we’re used to seeing,” he said. “They’re not broadcasters, but they are information platforms. And they’re quasi-monopolies — even a benevolent monopoly is a bad thing for public discourse and public knowledge.”
But none of the social media heads would fully commit to support of the bill as it now stands during their congressional testimony, appearing instead to favor a self-policing approach.
Battling fake news
Addressing paid political advertisements on social media platforms is just one part of the puzzle. The 2016 election revealed a vast ecosystem of fake news that will be almost impossible to police.
“What’s an even greater problem is that the Russians and others are setting up sites to deliberately disseminate misinformation — false news, fake news, what have you — they are not identifying themselves as Russian-sponsored,” said Mark Jacobson, a professor at Georgetown University and co-author of an October 2017 report on Russian cybermeddling.
“This is the larger problem for Facebook and other social media companies — how to handle the deliberate disinformation — and I’m not so sure the solution is legislative,” Jacobson said.
Eshoo downplayed talk that these challenges signal a downturn for tech innovators, saying it’s time lawmakers, companies and citizens took on a shared responsibility.
“We need to do a much better job with this,” she said. “We’re going to need them to cooperate with us. I don’t think that there has to be a slugfest on this.” She said the social media companies need to tell Congress how, in terms of their engineering and their algorithms, they can best accomplish what lawmakers set forth.
…
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday that Janet Yellen has not said yet whether she plans to remain on the Federal Reserve board when her term as chair ends in February, but the administration is moving ahead with filling other vacancies.
There are three vacancies on the seven-member Fed board and there could be a fourth if Yellen decides to leave. Her term as a board member does not end until 2024.
In an interview on Bloomberg TV, Mnuchin said he had breakfast with Yellen on Wednesday from which he came away with the impression that she had not made a decision about her future at the Fed.
Last week, President Donald Trump announced he would nominate Fed board member Jerome Powell as the next Fed chairman, bypassing Yellen.
If Yellen did stay on the board, she would be only the second former chair to do so. Marriner Eccles, whose name is on the Fed’s headquarters in Washington, remained on the board for three years after he was not nominated for another term as chair by Harry Truman in 1948.
Mnuchin said the goal was to fill the vacancies quickly, but the administration did not necessarily see a need to pick someone with a PhD in economics for the vice chair position even though Powell will be the first person to lead the Fed without a degree in economics in nearly four decades.
“I think our priority is that we are going to fill these positions quickly. Our focus was on the chair,” Mnuchin said. “Now that we have resolved that issue, we are already looking at people for these positions. So I am comfortable we will have the jobs filled.”
Before Trump’s announcement last week, Yellen had declined to say what she might do if she was not tapped for a second term.
“I have said that I intend to serve out my term as chair, and that I’m really not going to comment on my intentions beyond that,” she told reporters in September.
…
Death definitely becomes this star.
Astronomers reported Wednesday on a massive, distant star that exploded in 2014 — and also, apparently back in 1954. This is one supernova that refuses to bite the cosmic dust, confounding scientists who thought they knew how dying stars ticked.
The oft-erupting star is 500 million light-years away — one light-year is equal to 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion kilometers) — in the direction of the Big Bear constellation. It was discovered in 2014 and, at the time, resembled your basic supernova that was getting fainter.
But a few months later, astronomers at the California-based Las Cumbres Observatory saw it getting brighter. They’ve seen it grow faint, then bright, then faint again five times. They’ve even found past evidence of an explosion 60 years earlier at the same spot.
Supernovas typically fade over 100 days. This one is still going strong after 1,000 days, although it’s gradually fading.
The finding was published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
“It’s very surprising and very exciting,” said astrophysicist Iair Arcavi of the University of California, Santa Barbara who led the study. “We thought we’ve seen everything there is to see in supernovae after seeing so many of them, but you always get surprised by the universe. This one just really blew away everything we thought we understood about them.”
The supernova — officially known as iPTF14hls — is believed to have once been a star up to 100 times more massive than our sun. It could well be the biggest stellar explosion ever observed, which might explain its death-defying peculiarity.
It could be multiple explosions occurring so frequently that they run into one another or perhaps a single explosion that repeatedly gets brighter and fainter, though scientists don’t know exactly how this happens.
One possibility is that this star was so massive, and its core so hot, that an explosion blew away the outer layers and left the center intact enough to repeat the entire process. But this pulsating star theory still doesn’t explain everything about this supernova, Arcavi said.
Harvard University’s astronomy chairman, Avi Loeb, who was not involved in the study, speculates a black hole or magnetar — a neutron star with a strong magnetic field — might be at the center of this never-before-seen behavior. Further monitoring may better explain what’s going on, he said.
Las Cumbres, a global network of robotic telescopes, continues to keep watch.
Scientists do not know whether this particular supernova is unique; it appears rare since no others have been detected.
“We could actually have missed plenty of them because it kind of masquerades as a normal supernova if you only look at it once,” Arcavi said.
Nothing lasts forever — not even this super supernova.
“Eventually, this star will go out at some point,” Arcavi said. “I mean, energy has to run out eventually.”
…
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross plans to completely divest from a shipping company that counts a Russian gas producer with ties to the Kremlin among its major customers.
A commerce department spokesman says Ross plans to sell all his shares of Navigator Holdings. That company ships products from Sibur, a Russian gas producer whose owners include two Russian oligarchs close to President Vladimir Putin and a businessman believed to be Putin’s son-in-law.
Details of the Ross stake in Navigator were revealed among the Paradise Papers leak of documents about offshore entities.
Critics have said Ross should not hold the stock given his public office. He has said that he disclosed his stake in reports filed with the government earlier this year and has done nothing wrong.
…
The European Commission said Wednesday it wants to cut emissions of carbon dioxide from cars by 30 percent by 2030 and boost the use of electric vehicles by making them cheaper and easier to charge.
The proposal stops short of imposing fixed quotas for emission-free vehicles and is more modest than goals already set out by some EU members. Still, European automakers said the commission’s targets were too drastic, and Germany’s foreign minister warned against the proposal.
Commission Vice President Maros Sefcovic insisted that the plan is the most “realistic” compromise between Europe’s ambitions to blaze trails on clean energy and the costs that the continent’s powerful car manufacturers will have to bear to overhaul workforces and production.
Current targets require automakers to achieve the average permitted emission for new models in the European Union of 95 grams of CO2 per kilometer for cars, or 147 grams for light commercial vehicles by 2021.
The new proposal foresees a further reduction of 15 percent by 2025 and 30 percent by 2030, compared to 2021 levels.
Car companies that fail to meet those targets face substantial fines of 95 euros ($110) per excess gram of carbon dioxide – per car. Automakers that manage to equip at least 30 percent of their new cars with electric or other low-emission engines by 2030 will be given credits toward their carbon tally.
The European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, an industry body, criticized the 2025 target, saying “it does not leave enough time to make the necessary technical and design changes to vehicles, in particular to light commercial vehicles given their longer development and production cycles.”
The lobby group also said the targeted cut of 30 percent by 2030 was “overly challenging” and called for a 20 percent reduction instead, saying that was “achievable at a high, but acceptable, cost.”
“The current proposal is very aggressive when we consider the low and fragmented market penetration of alternatively-powered vehicles across Europe to date,” the group’s secretary general, Erik Jonnaert, said.
Germany’s foreign minister wrote to the commission last week to say the new rules shouldn’t “suffocate” the ability of automakers to innovate.
In a letter obtained by The Associated Press, Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said all European countries benefit from the jobs the auto industry creates and warned that the time frame for emissions cuts “mustn’t be too restrictive.”
The letter caused friction within the German government, which is currently hosting a two-week United Nations meeting on implementing the 2015 Paris climate accord.
“The contents of this letter weren’t coordinated within the Cabinet,” a spokeswoman for Germany’s environment ministry, Friederike Langenbruch, told reporters in Berlin.
Germany is predicted to fall short of its own climate goals, in large part due to continued high emissions from coal-fired electricity plants and vehicle traffic.
The European executive’s plan also includes 800 million euros in funding for the expansion and standardization of electric charging stations Europe-wide.
Emerging nations pressed developed countries Wednesday to step up cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 to kick-start the Paris climate agreement, saying the rich were wrongly focused on 2030 goals.
“We came here needing to hit the accelerator, not the brakes,” Brazil’s chief negotiator Antonio Marcondes told Reuters on the sidelines of the November 6-17 negotiations in Germany on limiting global warming.
In 2015, almost 200 governments agreed on the Paris accord to end the fossil fuel era by 2100 and remained united last year in declaring action “irreversible” after Donald Trump, who has called man-made climate change a hoax, won the U.S. presidential election.
But that unity is fraying.
Under the Paris Agreement, most governments set targets for cutting emissions by 2030, with little focus on shorter-term milestones.
Brazil and nations including India, China and Iran now want to fill the gap with more action by 2020 to cut greenhouse gas emissions, especially by the rich, which have burned the most fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution.
“While action on [the] post-2020 period under the Paris Agreement has gained momentum, the discussions on pre-2020 actions have lagged behind,” India’s chief negotiator Ravi S. Prasad said this week.
Actions defended
Developed nations say they are acting. European Union officials pointed to proposals on Wednesday for tougher car emissions targets, including a credit system for carmakers to encourage the rollout of electric vehicles.
Nazhat Shameem Khan, chief negotiator for Fiji, which is presiding at the meeting, said: “Clearly, there is strong appetite for a constructive and focused discussion on pre-2020.
“I think it’s a generalized view … that there hasn’t been enough discussion” about what to do before 2020, she said.
Overall, she said, the talks, also working on a detailed rule book for the Paris Agreement, were advancing well and that the United States delegation was being “constructive and helpful.”
Trump said in June that he would pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, a process that will take effect in 2020, and instead promote coal and oil.
A pullout will isolate the United States since Syria, the only other nation outside the pact, said Tuesday that it would join.
Under the Paris Agreement, the period to 2020 is a gap partly because backers of the 2015 pact assumed it might take years for parliaments to ratify it. The deal entered into force in record time last November.
Camilla Born, of the E3G think tank, said the Paris Agreement was now a victim of its own success. “It’s right now to shine the spotlight on more action by 2020,” she said.
…
Wine producers in Argentina, renowned for its plush Malbecs, are furious over a tax proposal they say would crush exports and domestic sales as vineyards struggle after two of their lowest vintages in recent history.
The bill, unveiled last week by President Maurico Macri’s government, proposes a 10 percent tax on wine for consumers.
Argentine wine is not taxed, unlike beer, mineral water and sugary drinks.
Vineyards in Argentina, the world’s No. 6 wine producer and No. 10 exporter, have struggled to stay competitive internationally due to high labor, shipping and production costs.
While 70 percent of Argentine wine is consumed locally, much of it in the country’s famed cafes and steakhouses, years of double-digit inflation has cut domestic sales. Volatile weather ravaged crops for the past two seasons.
Producers say the tax would cripple them and hurt efforts to boost exports just as Macri seeks to open Argentina’s economy to the world after more than a decade of protectionism.
“When you don’t have a cost advantage in the domestic market, you cannot compete outside because you have a big chunk of your business here,” said Rafael Calderon, chief executive of Bodegas Bianchi, a winery based in Argentina’s top wine-producing province, Mendoza.
Businesses are generally happy with Macri’s tax reform proposal, which aims to slash corporate income taxes. It also aims to be revenue neutral in five years to avoid straining a wide fiscal deficit, so it added taxes on consumption. These included a 17 percent duty on champagne and a doubling in the tax on beer to 17 percent.
Open to Discussion
Macri told Reuters in an interview on Tuesday his government was willing to listen to wine producers’ concerns and said he wants Argentina to be a top wine exporter.
“We bet on the future of that industry,” he said. “We think we can substantially increase our wine exports in future years if we succeed to open markets because we compete with many other producers.”
Government officials, who will meet on Wednesday with the governor of Mendoza, have noted that alcoholic beverages in Argentina are taxed much lower than in other wine-producing countries like Chile, where domestic consumption is taxed at 20.5 percent.
Argentine producers are also angry about being lumped into the same category as beer, spirits and sugary drinks. They say wine has proven health benefits.
They note internal consumption fell 9.2 percent in 2016 from 2015 according to the National Institute of Viticulture.
Potentially adding to the sour grapes, Brazil’s Agriculture Minister has said the European Union is trying to negotiate access for European wines to the Mercosur trade bloc, which includes Brazil and Argentina.
Argentine wine producers had hoped for a lifeline from Macri to boost exports in the form of financing or subsidies.
“This is an industry the government should help to grow abroad. Nobody can do Malbec better than us,” said wine producer Esteban Baigun, director general of Codorniu Group in Latin America.
Baigun said his cost of goods shot up by 47 percent in the last year and it was cheaper to ship wine to China than truck it from Mendoza to Buenos Aires.
Together with other wine producers, he planned to ask the government to consider a gradual tax increase, delaying its start so the industry has more time to recover.
“We understand that we all need to contribute something, but they need to take the consideration that we are struggling,” Baigun said.
…
The Texas church massacre is providing a familiar frustration for law enforcement: FBI agents are unable to unlock the gunman’s encrypted cellphone to learn what evidence it might hold.
But while heart-wrenching details of the rampage that left more than two dozen people dead might revive the debate over the balance of digital privacy rights and national security, it’s not likely to prompt change anytime soon.
Congress has not shown a strong appetite for legislation that would force technology companies to help the government break into encrypted phones and computers. And the fiery public debate surrounding the FBI’s legal fight with Apple Inc. has largely faded since federal authorities announced they were able to access a locked phone in a terror case without the help of the technology giant.
As a candidate, Donald Trump called on Americans to boycott Apple unless it helped the FBI hack into the phone, but he hasn’t been as vocal as president.
Still, the issue re-emerged Tuesday, when Christopher Combs, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Antonio division, said agents had been unable to get into the cellphone belonging to Devin Patrick Kelley, who slaughtered much of the congregation in the middle of a Sunday service.
“It highlights an issue you’ve all heard about before. With the advance of the technology and the phones and the encryption, law enforcement is increasingly not able to get into these phones,” Combs told reporters, saying the device was being flown to an FBI lab for analysis.
Combs didn’t identify the make or model, but a U.S. official briefed by law enforcement told The Associated Press it was an Apple iPhone.
“We’re working very hard to get into that phone, and that will continue until we find an answer,” Combs said.
Combs was telegraphing a longstanding frustration of the FBI, which claims encryption has stymied investigations of everything from sex crimes against children to drug cases, even if they obtain a warrant for the information. Agents have been unable to retrieve data from half the mobile devices – more than 6,900 phones, computers and tablets – that they tried to access in less than a year, FBI Director Christopher Wray said last month, wading into an issue that also vexed his predecessor, James Comey. Comey spoke before Congress and elsewhere about the bureau’s inability to access digital devices. But the Obama White House never publicly supported legislation that would have forced technology companies to give the FBI a back door to encrypted information, leaving Comey’s hands tied to propose a specific legislative fix.
Bad idea, some believe
Security experts generally believe such encryption backdoors are a terrible idea that could expose a vast amount of private, business and government data to hackers and spies. That’s because those backdoor keys would work for bad guys as well as good guys – and the bad guys would almost immediately target them for theft, and might even be able to recreate them from scratch.
Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein took aim at Silicon Valley’s methods for protecting privacy during a speech last month, saying Trump’s Justice Department would be more aggressive in seeking information from technology companies. He took a harder line than his predecessors but stopped short of saying what specific steps the administration might take.
Washington has proven incapable of solving a problem that an honest conversation could fix, said David Hickton, a former U.S. attorney who now directs a cyber law institute at the University of Pittsburgh.
“We wait for a mass disaster to sharpen the discussion about this, when we should have been talking about it since San Bernardino,” he said. “Reasonable people of good will could resolve this problem. I don’t think it’s dependent on the political wins or who is the FBI director. It’s begging for a solution.”
Even so, the facts of the church shooting may not make it the most powerful case against warrant-proof encryption. When the FBI took Apple to court in February 2016 to force it to unlock the San Bernardino shooter’s phone, investigators believed the device held clues about whom the couple communicated with and where they may have traveled.
But Combs didn’t say what investigators hoped to retrieve from Kelley’s phone, and investigators already have ample information about his motive. Authorities in Texas say the church shooting was motivated by the gunman’s family troubles, rather than terrorism, and investigators have not said whether they are seeking possible co-conspirators.
Investigators may have other means to get the information they seek. If the Texas gunman backed up his phone online, they can get a copy of that with a legal order – usually a warrant. They can also get warrants for any accounts he had at server-based internet services such as Facebook, Twitter and Google.
In the California case, the FBI ultimately broke into the phone by paying an unidentified vendor for a hacking tool to access the phone without Apple’s help, averting a court battle.
The FBI has not yet asked Apple for help unlocking Kelley’s phone as it continues to analyze the device, according to the U.S. official, who was not authorized to discuss the case and did so on condition of anonymity. Another person familiar with the matter, who also spoke on condition of anonymity because of sensitivity of the discussions, said Apple contacted the FBI on its own to offer technical advice after learning from a Texas news conference that the bureau was trying to access the cellphone.
Former federal prosecutor Joseph DeMarco, who filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of groups that supported the Justice Department against Apple, said he was hopeful the case would spur fresh discussion. If not by itself, he said, the shooting could be one of several cases that prompt the Justice Department to take other technology companies to court.
“Eventually, the courts will rule on this or a legislative fix will be imposed,” he said. “Eventually, the pressure will mount.”
…
Struggling social media platforms Twitter and Snapchat are taking on new looks as the services seek wider audiences in the shadow of Facebook.
Twitter is rolling out a 280-character limit for nearly all its users, abandoning its iconic 140-character limit for tweets. And Snapchat, long popular with young people, will undergo a revamp in hopes of becoming easier to use for everyone else.
Both services announced the moves Tuesday as they look for ways to expand beyond their passionate but slow-growing fan bases.
Twitter has said that 9 percent of tweets written in English hit the 140-character limit. People ended up spending more time editing tweets or didn’t send them out at all. By removing that hurdle, Twitter is hoping people will tweet more, drawing more users in.
Waking up to the news Wednesday, Germany’s justice ministry wrote that it can now tweet about legislation concerning the transfer of oversight responsibilities for beef labeling.
The law is known in German as the Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz.
Munich police, meanwhile, said that “at last” they won’t need abbreviations to tweet about accidents involving forklift drivers, or Niederflurfoerderfahrzeugfuehrer.
In Rome, student Marina Verdicchio said the change “will give us the possibility to express ourselves in a totally different way and to avoid canceling important words when we use Twitter.”
Shakespearean skepticism
Others were not impressed, including at least one who quoted Shakespeare: “Brevity is the soul of wit.”
And, as Snap Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel noted, change does not come without risk.
“We don’t yet know how the behavior of our community will change when they begin to use our updated application,” he said. “We’re willing to take that risk for what we believe are substantial long-term benefits to our business.”
Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, did not provide details on the upcoming changes.
During the third quarter, Twitter averaged 330 million monthly users, up just 1 percent from the previous quarter. Snapchat added 4.5 million daily users in the quarter to 178 million, which amounts to a 3 percent growth. The company does not report monthly user figures.
Those numbers pale next to social media behemoth Facebook, which reported that its monthly users rose 16 percent to 2.07 billion.
“The one thing that we have heard over the years is that Snapchat is difficult to understand or hard to use, and our team has been working on responding to this feedback,” Spiegel said. “As a result, we are currently redesigning our application to make it easier to use.”
His comments came on a conference call with industry analysts after the company posted the lackluster user-growth numbers and revenue that fell well short of Wall Street expectations. Snap’s stock was bludgeoned Wednesday, falling 16 percent to $12.70 in early-morning trading. The Venice, California, company went public in March at $17 a share.
Expanding the base
Snapchat needs to grow its user base beyond 13-to-34-year-olds in the U.S., France, the U.K. and Australia, Spiegel said. This, he said, includes Android users, people older than 34 and what he called “rest of world” markets.
Meanwhile, Snap said Wednesday that Chinese internet company Tencent had acquired a 10 percent stake in the company. Tencent runs the WeChat messaging app, as well as online payment platforms and games. Earlier this year, Tencent bought a 5 percent stake in Tesla Inc.
As for Twitter, the move to 280 characters was begun as a test in September.
“People in the experiment told us that a higher character limit made them feel more satisfied with how they expressed themselves on Twitter, their ability to find good content, and Twitter overall,” said project manager Aliza Rosen in a blog post.
The expansion to 280-character tweets will be extended to all users except those tweeting in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, who will still have the original limit. That’s because writing in those languages uses fewer characters.
The company has been slowly easing restrictions to let people cram more characters into a tweet. It stopped counting polls, photos, videos and other things toward the limit. Even before it did so, users found creative ways to get around the limit. These include multipart tweets and screenshots of blocks of text.
Twitter’s character limit was created so that tweets could fit into a single text message, back when many people were using texts to receive tweets. But now, most people use Twitter through its mobile app; the 140-character limit is no longer a technical constraint but nostalgia.
…
As U.S.-backed forces made their final push into the city of Raqqa to liberate what had once been the Syrian capital of the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate, they faced a problem.
Not only were the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) holding IS fighters — some captured and some who had surrendered — they were also encountering many Syrians who, for various reasons, had collaborated with or worked for the terror group.
In the end, against their initial instincts, the U.S.-backed forces let many of them go.
“[The SDF] was pressured and convinced by the civil council, the civil leadership, in that part of Syria, who listened to the tribal leaders,” said Major General James Jarrard, commander of the special operations joint task force for Operation Inherent Resolve.
Just how many IS followers or collaborators from the areas in and around Raqqa were ultimately freed is unclear — officials with Operation Inherent Resolve have not been able to provide any numbers.
As worrisome as the prospect of their release might sound, coalition officials are not concerned, assuring anyone who asks that the local IS fighters and supporters are not likely to cause trouble.
“A lot of those that were captured that were local Syrians have been turned over to their tribal leadership,” according to Jarrard, who briefed reporters last week. “The SDF leadership feels comfortable that the tribal leadership and the tribal code in northeast Syria will make sure that they maintain control of those individuals.”
Tracking IS fighters, collaborators
But perhaps more critically, other protections have been put in place.
“What we did do with the SDF, is we did take all of those members and we enrolled them biometricaly, so that we are able to track them into the future,” Jarrard said.
The collection of biometric information from those who fought for or worked with Islamic State in Raqqa is just a small part of a much wider effort encompassing other areas once under the terror group’s control.
The goal is to make sure those affiliated with IS are not able to go undetected and find ways to unleash terror and havoc, whether in Iraq and Syria or the West.
The collected information commonly includes fingerprints, photos, DNA samples and even retinal scans, and not just from Syria. Iraqi forces and U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in Iraq have also been gathering biometric data.
Some of the biometric information is already available to forces on the ground, who can use hand-held scanners, slightly larger than a big mobile phone, to take readings from suspects to see if they are already in the IS database.
But officials and observers in the United States, Europe and the Middle East acknowledge it is a massive undertaking, and that gaps remain.
“IDPs [internally displaced persons] who end up in camps on the Kurdish side and suspects held by Kurdish authorities are all getting put onto a biometric database,” according to Belkis Wille, a senior Human Rights Watch researcher who has spent time in the region.
“On the Iraqi side, I have not seen it happening to the broader population and have not heard about it with regard to ISIS suspect detainees yet, but have heard it talked about many times as in the plans,” she added, using an acronym for the terror group.
Iraqi officials told VOA in July that they were “working on the mechanism” for sharing biometric data with their coalition partners, admitting there was no timeline for when a solution might be found.
Overcoming obstacles
The coalition, too, admitted there were obstacles.
“We are working to enable them [Iraqi officials] to better manage biometric information, to re-establish some capability that was here before that no longer is,” Canadian Armed Forces Brigadier General D.J. Anderson, then director of the coalition’s partner force development liaison team, said at the time.
There are also concerns about ensuring that everyone who might need access to the biometric data can get it, with European officials especially keen on speeding up the process.
“In a world where we see more people traveling with false documents, counterfeit documents, we need to inject much more biometrics,” European Union Counterterrorism Coordinator Gilles de Kerchove said during a visit to the U.S. in June.
“I would like to see if fingerprints are collected in Mosul or in Raqqa that it be shared in real time with the border guard at the external border of the European Union,” he added.
Interpol, the international police organization with more than 190 member countries, has been trying to help.
Interpol officials say it has shared information on more than 18,000 foreign fighters through its I-24/7 global communications network, some of which includes biometric information. And it is working to increase the amount of biometric data currently available.
Watching for returning foreign fighters
That additional biometric information cannot come soon enough for some European officials, worried about the steady tide of refugees from Syria and Iraq, even though there are no indications that the long-feared wave of returning foreign fighters will ever materialize.
“We have, however, identified an increase in the number of wives and children who are willing to return,” said Friedrich Grommes, head of the international terrorism directorate at Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND), during a recent visit to Washington.
“This upward trend will probably increase in the months to come,” he added.
German officials say they have already used whatever biometric information is available to confirm the identities of family members of foreign fighters who may be seeking entry into Germany.
There are also growing fears some foreign fighters, terrorist operatives and their family members may be getting some sophisticated help.
“We see a lot of relationships between organized crime and terrorism, not ideologically but from old friendships sometimes,” said Dutch National Counterterrorism Coordinator Dick Schoof. “Organized crime is a facilitator for weapons, for transport, for fraud documents, for identity theft.”
And while most of the more than 5,000 would-be jihadists who left Europe are not expected to attempt a return — a feat made more difficult with a tightening of the Turkish-Syrian border — counterterror officials believe there are plenty of reasons to remain concerned.
“Quantity may not be the story,” U.S. National Counterterrorism Director Nicholas Rasmussen said this past July at the Aspen Security Summit.
“If I’m sitting in western Europe in a security service or a law enforcement organization, I’m very, very concerned about even a small number of foreign fighters from my country who come back from the conflict zone with a whole new set of skills, a whole new set of contacts, perhaps even specialized skills that go into areas of mass destruction.”
…
German bureaucrats — notorious for their ability to create lengthy tongue twisters consisting of one single word — are celebrating the doubling of Twitter’s character limit.
Twitter announced Tuesday it’s increasing the limit for almost all users of the messaging service from 140 to 280 characters, prompting a mix of delighted and despairing reactions.
Waking up to the news Wednesday, Germany’s justice ministry wrote that it can now tweet about legislation concerning the transfer of oversight responsibilities for beef labeling.
The law is known in German as the Rindfleischetikettierungsueberwachungsaufgabenuebertragungsgesetz.
Munich police, meanwhile, said that “at last” they won’t need abbreviations to tweet about accidents involving forklift drivers, or Niederflurfoerderfahrzeugfuehrer.
Government spokesman Steffen Seibert made clear he’ll keep it short, quoting Anton Chekhov: “Brevity is the sister of talent.”
…
To learn more about how stars are formed, astronomers look at light coming from deep space that illuminate events that happened billions of years ago. Cosmic dust, vapor in the earth’s atmosphere and light pollution can obscure that vision, but scientists at NASA found a way around all this by placing a sophisticated infrared telescope aboard a high-flying aircraft. VOA’s George Putic has more.
…
Microsoft and the U.N. Refugee Agency have partnered to teach about two dozen young refugees from around East Africa how to code and develop software. For VOA, Lameck Masina has the story from the Dzaleka refugee camp in central Malawi.
…