In Venezuela, a health crisis and the inability of many pregnant women to pay for medical exams and appointments is forcing a growing number of them to give birth outside a hospital. For VOA News, Adriana Núñez Rabascall in Caracas has the story. Video Editor: Cristina Caicedo Smit
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Month: July 2022
The lawyer for an Indiana doctor at the center of a political firestorm after speaking out about a 10-year-old child abuse victim who traveled from Ohio for an abortion said Thursday that her client provided proper treatment and did not violate any patient privacy laws in discussing the unidentified girl’s case.
Attorney Kathleen DeLaney issued the statement on behalf of Indianapolis obstetrician-gynecologist Caitlin Bernard the same day Republican Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said his office was investigating Bernard’s actions. He offered no specific allegations of wrongdoing.
A 27-year-old man was charged in Columbus, Ohio, on Wednesday with raping the girl, confirming the existence of a case initially met with skepticism by some media outlets and Republican politicians. The pushback grew after Democratic President Joe Biden expressed empathy for the girl during the signing of an executive order last week aimed at protecting some abortion access in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling overturning the constitutional protection for abortion.
Bernard’s attorney said the physician “took every appropriate and proper action in accordance with the law and both her medical and ethical training as a physician.”
“She followed all relevant policies, procedures, and regulations in this case, just as she does every day to provide the best possible care for her patients,” DeLaney said in a statement. “She has not violated any law, including patient privacy laws, and she has not been disciplined by her employer.”
Bernard reported a June 30 medication abortion for a 10-year-old patient to the state health department on July 2, within the three-day requirement set in state law for a girl younger than 16, according to a report obtained by The Indianapolis Star and WXIN-TV of Indianapolis under public records requests. The report indicated the girl seeking the abortion had been abused.
DeLaney said they are considering taking legal action against “those who have smeared my client,” including Rokita, who had said he would investigate whether Bernard violated child abuse notification or abortion reporting laws. He also said his office would look into whether anything Bernard said to the Star about the case violated federal medical privacy laws. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services would not say whether any privacy law complaints had been filed against Bernard, nor would Indiana University Health, where Bernard is an obstetrician. But the HIPAA Privacy Rule only protects most “individually identifiable health information,” the department’s website said.
The prosecutor for Indianapolis, where the abortion took place, said his office alone has the authority to pursue any criminal charges in such situations and that Bernard was being “subjected to intimidation and bullying.”
“I think it’s really dangerous when people in law enforcement start trying to launch a criminal investigation based on rumors on the internet,” Democratic Marion County Prosecutor Ryan Mears said.
Some Republicans who have backed stringent abortion restrictions imposed in Ohio after the Supreme Court ruling, including Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, initially questioned whether the story relayed by Bernard to the newspaper was real. After telling Fox News on Monday that there was not “a whisper” of evidence supporting the case’s existence, Yost said his “heart aches for the pain suffered by this young child” and his investigative unit stands ready to support police in the case.
On Thursday, Yost faced intense backlash for his public statements, including a claim that medical exceptions in the Ohio “fetal heartbeat” abortion ban would have allowed the girl to receive her abortion in the state.
Apparently in response, he released a “legal explainer” detailing the law’s medical exceptions. Abortion rights advocates and attorneys said the law’s medical exceptions – for the life of the mother, dire risks of bodily harm and ectopic pregnancies – would not have protected an Ohio doctor who performed an abortion for the girl from prosecution.
Bernard did not reply to email and text messages from The Associated Press seeking comment.
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Now that the United States has a patchwork of different abortion laws, women who can afford to travel are going to states where abortion is still legal. Others rely on employers to provide money for transportation. VOA’s Carolyn Presutti explains how that happens and what crimes that could introduce in some states. VOA footage by Saqib Ul Islam. Video editor: Bakhtiyar Zamanov.
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About 25 million children worldwide have missed out on routine immunizations against common diseases like diphtheria, largely because the coronavirus pandemic disrupted regular health services or triggered misinformation about vaccines, according to the U.N.
In a new report published Friday, the World Health Organization and UNICEF said their figures showed 25 million children last year failed to get vaccinated against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, a marker for childhood immunization coverage, continuing a downward trend that began in 2019.
“This is a red alert for child health,” said Catherine Russell, UNICEF’s executive director.
“We are witnessing the largest sustained drop in childhood immunization in a generation,” she said, adding that the consequences would be measured in lives lost.
While vaccine coverage fell in every world region, data showed the vast majority of the children who failed to get immunized were living in developing countries, including Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Nigeria and the Philippines.
Problem compounded by malnutrition
Experts said this “historic backsliding” in vaccination coverage was especially disturbing since it was occurring as rates of severe malnutrition were rising. Malnourished children typically have weaker immune systems, and infections like measles can often prove fatal to them.
“The convergence of a hunger crisis with a growing immunization gap threatens to create the conditions for a child survival crisis,” the U.N. said.
Scientists said low vaccine coverage rates have resulted in preventable outbreaks of diseases like measles and polio. In March 2020, WHO and partners asked countries to suspend their polio eradication efforts amid the accelerating COVID-19 pandemic. There have since been dozens of polio epidemics in more than 30 countries.
“This is particularly tragic as tremendous progress was made in the two decades before the COVID pandemic to improve childhood vaccination rates globally,” said Helen Bedford, a professor of children’s health at University College London, who was not connected to the U.N. report. She said the news was shocking but not surprising, noting that immunization services are frequently an “early casualty” of major social or economic disasters.
Dr. David Elliman, a consultant pediatrician at Britain’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, said it was critical to reverse the declining vaccination trend among children.
“The effects of what happens in one part of the world can ripple out to affect the whole globe,” he said in a statement, noting the rapid spread of COVID-19 and, more recently, monkeypox. “Whether we act on the basis of ethics or ‘enlightened self-interest,’ ” he said, children must be at the “top of our list of priorities.”
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Nick Barragan is used to wearing a mask because his job in the Hollywood film industry has long required it. So he won’t be fazed if the county that’s home to Tinseltown soon becomes the first major population center this summer to reinstate rules requiring face coverings indoors because of another spike in coronavirus cases.
“I feel fine about it because I’ve worn one pretty much constantly for the last few years. It’s become a habit,” said Barragan, masked up while out running errands Wednesday.
Los Angeles is the most populous county, home to 10 million residents. It faces a return to a broad indoor mask mandate on July 29 if current trends in hospital admissions continue, county health Director Barbara Ferrer said this week.
Requiring masks again “helps us to reduce risk,” Ferrer told Los Angeles County supervisors.
“I do recognize,” she added, “that when we return to universal indoor masking to reduce high spread, for many this will feel like a step backwards.”
Variants tough to stop
Nationwide, the latest COVID-19 surge is driven by the highly transmissible BA.5 variant, which now accounts for 65% of cases, with its cousin BA.4 contributing another 16%. The variants have shown a remarkable ability to get around the protection offered by vaccination.
With the new omicron variants again pushing hospitalizations and deaths higher in recent weeks, states and cities are rethinking their responses and the White House is stepping up efforts to alert the public.
Some experts said the warnings are too little, too late.
“It’s well past the time when the warning could have been put out there,” said Dr. Eric Topol, head of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, who has called BA.5 “the worst variant yet.”
Global trends for the two mutants have been apparent for weeks, experts said — they quickly outcompete older variants and push cases higher wherever they appear. Yet Americans have tossed off their masks and jumped back into travel and social gatherings.
And they have largely ignored booster shots, which protect against COVID-19’s worst outcomes. Courts have blocked federal mask and vaccine mandates, tying the hands of U.S. officials.
For months, the White House has encouraged Americans to make use of free or cheap at-home rapid tests to detect the virus, as well as the free and effective antiviral treatment Paxlovid that protects against serious illness and death.
On Tuesday, the White House response team urgently called on all adults 50 and older to get boosters if they haven’t yet this year and dissuaded people from waiting for the next generation of shots expected in the fall.
For most of the pandemic, Los Angeles County has required masks in some indoor spaces, including health care facilities, metro trains and buses, airports, jails and homeless shelters. The new mandate would expand the requirement to all indoor public spaces, including shared offices, manufacturing facilities, warehouses, retail stores, restaurants and bars, theaters and schools.
It’s unclear what enforcement might look like. Under past mandates, officials favored educating people over issuing citations and fines.
Troubling trends
While hospitalizations and deaths have remained well below earlier spikes nationally, the current trends are troubling. Last month, daily deaths were falling, though they never matched last year’s low, and deaths are now heading up again.
The seven-day average for daily deaths in the U.S. rose 26% over the past two weeks, to 489 on July 12. The coronavirus is not killing nearly as many as it was last fall and winter, and experts do not expect deaths to reach those levels again soon.
But hundreds of daily deaths for a summertime respiratory illness would normally be jaw-dropping, said Andrew Noymer, a public health professor at the University of California-Irvine. He noted that in Orange County, California, 46 people died of COVID-19 in June.
“That would be all hands on deck,” Noymer said. “People would be like, ‘There’s this crazy new flu that’s killing people in June.’ ”
Instead, simple, proven precautions are not being taken. Vaccinations, including booster shots for those eligible, lower the risk of hospitalization and death — even against the latest variants. But less than half of all eligible U.S. adults have gotten a single booster shot, and only about 1 in 4 Americans age 50 and older who are eligible for a second booster has received one.
“This has been a botched booster campaign,” Topol said, noting that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention still uses the term “fully vaccinated” for people with two shots of Moderna or Pfizer. “They haven’t gotten across that two shots is totally inadequate,” he said.
Noymer said if he were in charge of the nation’s COVID response he would level with the American people in an effort to get their attention in this third year of the pandemic. He would tell Americans to take it seriously, mask indoors and “until we get better vaccines, there’s going to be a new normal of a disease that kills more than 100,000 Americans a year and impacts life expectancy.”
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Texas sued the federal government on Thursday over new guidance from the Biden administration directing hospitals to provide emergency abortions regardless of state bans on the procedure that came into effect in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.
Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in the lawsuit argued the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services was trying to “use federal law to transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic.”
The lawsuit focused on guidance issued Monday advising that a federal law protecting patients’ access to emergency treatment requires performing abortions when doctors believe a pregnant woman’s life or health is threatened.
The guidance came after President Joe Biden, a Democrat, signed an executive order on Friday seeking to ease access to services to terminate pregnancies after the June 24 overturning of Roe v. Wade, which recognized a nationwide right of women to obtain abortions.
Abortion services ceased July 2 in Texas after the state’s highest court, at Paxton’s urging, cleared the way for a nearly century-old abortion ban to take effect.
HHS said the guidance from its U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services agency did not constitute new policy but merely reminded doctors of their obligations under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act.
But in the lawsuit filed in Lubbock, the Republican-led state of Texas argued that federal law has never authorized the federal government to compel doctors and hospitals to perform abortions and that the guidance was unlawful.
In a statement, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called it “unthinkable that this public official would sue to block women from receiving lifesaving care in emergency rooms, a right protected under U.S. law.”
About half the states are expected to move to restrict or ban abortions. Thirteen states, including Texas, had “trigger” laws on the books designed to snap into effect if Roe v. Wade was overturned.
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The World Health Organization is calling for action to stem the growing spread of deadly infections such as monkeypox and Ebola between animals and humans in Africa.
A new WHO analysis finds zoonotic outbreaks on the African continent have increased by 63% from 2012 to 2022 compared to the previous decade.
Globally, the WHO says more than 60% of human infectious diseases, and more than 75% of emerging infectious diseases, are caused by pathogens found in wild or domestic animals. It says those diseases sicken about one billion people and kill millions every year.
WHO’s regional director for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, said zoonotic diseases pose a severe threat in Africa. In the past decade, she said outbreaks of the animal-transmitted illnesses accounted for one in three confirmed public health events in the region.
“A deeper dive reveals that Ebola and similar hemorrhagic fevers constitute nearly 70% of these outbreaks,” she said. “The remainder include, among others, monkeypox, dengue fever, anthrax, and plague. Although there has been a notable increase in monkeypox cases since April this year, compared to the same period in 2021, the positive news is the numbers are still lower than for the 2020 outbreak peak.”
That year, the WHO recorded its highest ever monthly cases in the region. So far this year, the health agency has reported more than 2,000 suspected cases of monkeypox. Of those, only 203 have been confirmed. Most cases and deaths are among males, with an average age of 17.
Moeti noted infections originating in animals have been jumping to humans for centuries, but the risk of mass infections and deaths has been relatively limited in Africa.
“As rising urbanization encroaches on the natural habitats of the continent’s wildlife, and the demand for food from an especially fast-growing population burgeons, the risk is heighted,” she said. “The addition of improved road, rail, and airlinks, which remove the natural barrier that poor transportation infrastructure provided, opens the way for the spread of zoonotic disease outbreaks from remote to urban areas.”
Moeti said Africa cannot be allowed to become a hotspot for emerging infectious diseases. She said an “all-hands-on-deck” approach is needed to counter the threat.
She said experts in human, animal, and environmental health must work together with communities to prevent and control zoonotic outbreaks from spreading across the continent.
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Twitter appeared to be working again after a widespread outage earlier Thursday.
The site Downdetector.com, which logs service outages, reported it was the first such outage since February and impacted people in the United States, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, Italy and others.
Starting around 8 a.m. on the U.S. East Coast, many users received the message “Tweets aren’t loading right now. We are currently investigating this issue,” the social media company posted on its status page.
Twitter was known for outages when it was a new company, but as it grew, the problems became less common.
The U.S.-based firm is suing businessman Elon Musk for violating his recent $44 billion agreement to buy the company.
Twitter, Inc. stock was slightly down in early trading Thursday at $36.51 per share.
Some information in this report comes from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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The U.S. is getting another COVID-19 vaccine choice as the Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday cleared Novavax shots for adults.
Novavax makes a more traditional type of shot than the three other COVID-19 vaccines available for use in the U.S. — and one that’s already available in Europe and multiple other countries.
Nearly a quarter of American adults still haven’t gotten their primary vaccinations even this late in the pandemic, and experts expect at least some of them to roll up their sleeves for a more conventional option — a protein-based vaccine.
The Maryland company also hopes its shots can become a top booster choice in the U.S. and beyond. Tens of millions of Americans still need boosters that experts call critical for the best possible protection as the coronavirus continues to mutate.
For now, the FDA authorized Novavax’s initial two-dose series for people 18 and older.
“I encourage anyone who is eligible for, but has not yet received, a COVID-19 vaccine to consider doing so,” FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf said in a statement.
Before shots begin, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must recommend how they should be used, a decision expected next week.
Novavax CEO Stanley Erck told The Associated Press he expected the U.S. to expand use of the vaccine beyond unvaccinated adults fairly quickly.
Already, the FDA is evaluating it for those as young as 12, Erck said. Novavax also has submitted data on booster doses, including “mix-and-match” use in people who’d earlier received Pfizer or Moderna vaccinations.
The Biden administration has bought 3.2 million Novavax doses so far, and Erck said vaccinations should begin later this month.
Skeptic convinced
Sharon Bentley of Argyle, Texas, is one of the holdouts. Bentley was hesitant about the first COVID-19 vaccines, but then her husband volunteered for a Novavax trial, getting two doses and later a booster.
Her husband’s positive experience with a more tried-and-true technology “convinced me,” Bentley said, adding that she planned to tell some unvaccinated friends about the option.
The Novavax vaccine is made of copies of the spike protein that coats the coronavirus, packaged into nanoparticles that to the immune system resemble a virus. Then an immune-boosting ingredient, or adjuvant, that’s made from the bark of a South American tree is added and acts as a red flag to ensure those particles look suspicious enough to spark a strong immune response.
Protein vaccines have been used for years to prevent hepatitis B, shingles and other diseases. It’s a very different technology than the dominant Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines that deliver genetic instructions for the body to produce its own copies of the spike protein. The lesser-used Johnson & Johnson option uses a harmless cold virus to deliver spike-making instructions.
Like the other vaccines used in the U.S., the Novavax shots have proved highly effective at preventing COVID-19’s most severe outcomes. Typical vaccine reactions were mild, including arm pain and fatigue. But the FDA did warn about the possibility of a rare risk — heart inflammation — that also has been seen with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
The Novavax vaccine was tested long before the omicron variant struck. But last month, the company released data showing a booster dose promised a strong immune response even against omicron’s newest relatives — preliminary evidence that several of the FDA’s scientific advisers called compelling.
Still, U.S. regulators are planning for a fall booster campaign using Pfizer and Moderna shots that better target omicron subtypes, and Novavax also has begun testing updated shots. Erck said the company could have updated doses available late in the year.
European regulators recently cleared the Novavax vaccine to be used as young as age 12, and several countries have authorized booster doses of its original vaccine.
Earlier manufacturing difficulties held up the vaccine, although Erck said those have been solved, and Novavax can meet global demand. Much of the company’s vaccine, including doses for the U.S., are being produced by the Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer.
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Cryptocurrencies use an enormous amount of energy, and as the industry grows rapidly, so do concerns about its impact on the climate. Matt Dibble has the story.
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“Succession” received a leading 25 Emmy nominations Tuesday, but the satirical drama about the rich and ruthless has a landmark rival in “Squid Game,” the first non-English language series to vie for television’s top honor.
“Squid Game,” a South Korea-set drama in which the poor are fodder for brutal games, earned a best drama nomination and 13 other bids for September’s Emmy Awards. “Succession” captured the best drama trophy and eight other awards when it last vied for Emmys, in 2020.
“Ted Lasso” was the top comedy series nominee with 20 bids and has the chance to earn its second consecutive best comedy trophy, as with academy voters proved undeterred by its sophomore season turn to the emotional dark side.
Other top nominees included the tropical resort-set anthology dramedy “The White Lotus,” which also received 20 nominations; the comedies “Hacks” and “Only Murders in the Building” with 17 bids each, and teenage dysfunction drama “Euphoria.” Its star, Zendaya, was crowned best actress in 2020 was nominated again.
The nominees for best drama series are: “Better Call Saul”; “Euphoria”; “Ozark”; “Severance”; “Squid Game”; “Stranger Things”; “Succession”; “Yellowjackets.”
The nominees for best comedy series are: “Abbott Elementary”; “Barry”; “Curb Your Enthusiasm”; “Hacks”; “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”; “Only Murders in the Building”; “Ted Lasso” and “What We Do in the Shadows.”
The nominees for best comedy series actress are: Rachel Brosnahan, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”; Quinta Brunson, “Abbott Elementary”; Kaley Cuoco, “The Flight Attendant”; Elle Fanning, “The Great”; Issa Rae, “Insecure”; Jean Smart, “Hacks.”
The nominees for actor in a comedy series are: Donald Glover, “Atlanta”; Bill Hader, “Barry”; Bill Hader, “Barry”; Nicholas Holt, “The Great”; Jason Sudeikis, “Ted Lasso” Steve Martin, “Only Murders in the Building”; Martin Short, “Only Murders in the Building.”
The nominees for drama series actor are: Jason Bateman, “Ozark”; Brian Cox, “Succession”; Lee Jung-jae, “Squid Game”; Bob Odenkirk, “Better Call Saul”; Adam Scott, “Severance” and Jeremy Strong, “Succession.”
The best drama series actress nominees are: Jodie Comer, “Killing Eve”; Laura Linney, “Ozark”; Melanie Lynskey, “Yellowjackets”; Sandra Oh, “Killing Eve”; Reese Witherspoon, “The Morning Show” and Zendaya, “Euphoria.”
The limited series nominees are: “Dopesick”; “The Dropout”; “Inventing Anna”; “The White Lotus”; “Pam & Tommy.”
The nominees for variety talk series are: “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah”; “Jimmy Kimmel Live”; “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”; “Late Night with Seth Meyers” and “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
Television Academy President Frank Scherma kicked off the nomination announcement by saying that a record number of shows had been submitted, which reflects that series production was an all-time high after being drastically reduced during the pandemic.
The Emmys once were dominated by broadcast networks and then cable, with the rise of streaming services changing the balance of power and perhaps the awards themselves. Netflix’s “Squid Game” joining the Emmy mix is the result of streaming’s global marketplace focus.
“The Crown,” which dominated the 2021 drama awards, wasn’t televised within the eligibility period and is sitting this year out.
The Emmy ceremony is set for Sept. 12 and will air on NBC, with a host yet to be announced.
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Twitter sued Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday to force him to complete the $44 billion acquisition of the social media company.
Musk and Twitter have been bracing for a legal fight since the billionaire said on Friday he was backing off of his April agreement to buy the company.
Twitter’s lawsuit opens with a sharply worded accusation: “Musk refuses to honor his obligations to Twitter and its stockholders because the deal he signed no longer serves his personal interests.”
“Having mounted a public spectacle to put Twitter in play and having proposed and then signed a seller-friendly merger agreement, Musk apparently believes that he — unlike every other party subject to Delaware contract law — is free to change his mind, trash the company, disrupt its operations, destroy stockholder value, and walk away,” the suit says.
Twitter filed its lawsuit in the Delaware Court of Chancery, which frequently handles business disputes among the many corporations, including Twitter, that are incorporated there.
As part of the April deal, Musk and Twitter had agreed to pay each other a $1 billion breakup fee if either was responsible for the deal falling through. The company could have pushed Musk to pay the hefty fee but is going further than that, trying to force him to complete the full $44 billion purchase approved by the company’s board.
“Oh the irony lol,” Musk tweeted after Twitter filed the lawsuit, without explanation.
‘Strong and compelling’ case
The arguments and evidence laid out by Twitter are “very strong and compelling” and likely to get a receptive ear in the Delaware court, which doesn’t look kindly on sophisticated buyers backing off of deals, said Brian Quinn, a law professor at Boston College.
“They make a very strong argument that this is just buyer’s remorse,” Quinn said. “You have to eat your mistakes in the Delaware Chancery Court. That’s going to work very favorably for Twitter.”
Musk alleged Friday that Twitter has failed to provide enough information about the number of fake accounts on its service. Twitter said last month that it was making available to Musk a “fire hose” of raw data on hundreds of millions of daily tweets.
The company has said for years in regulatory filings that it believes about 5% of the accounts on the platform are fake. Musk is also alleging that Twitter broke the acquisition agreement when it fired two top managers and laid off a third of its talent-acquisition team.
Twitter’s suit repeatedly emphasizes Musk’s contemplation of starting a Twitter competitor, an alternative option he sometimes aired publicly and sometimes privately to Twitter’s executives and board members. While the company has said it cooperated in providing the spam bot data he requested, the lawsuit suggests there was concern that disclosing too much “highly sensitive information” could expose Twitter to competitive harm if shared.
The biggest surprise for Quinn was how much evidence Twitter has — for instance, communications with Musk about whether to retain or lay off employees, as well as the billionaire’s own public tweets — to reject his arguments for backing out.
“They are marshaling many of Musk’s own tweets to hoist him on his own petard,” he said.
Tesla stock drops
When Musk offered to buy the company and take it private in mid-April, the board initially tried to block him by deploying a financial maneuver that would have made the acquisition prohibitively expensive.
By April 25, though, Twitter had reconsidered the offer, concluding that selling the company to Musk for $54.20 a share was in the best interest of shareholders. In a joint press release, Musk pledged to “unlock” the social media company’s potential by loosening restrictions on speech and rooting out fake accounts.
But his confidence didn’t last long. Tesla’s stock — Musk’s primary source of wealth — plummeted amid a broader stock market selloff in May, and Musk soon seemed less enthusiastic about owning Twitter.
Twitter’s suit calls Musk’s tactics “a model of hypocrisy,” noting that he had emphasized plans to take Twitter private in order to rid it of spam accounts. Once the market declined, however, Twitter noted that “Musk shifted his narrative, suddenly demanding ‘verification’ that spam was not a serious problem on Twitter’s platform and claiming a burning need to conduct ‘diligence’ he had expressly forsworn.”
Similarly, the company charges that Musk operated in bad faith, accusing him of requesting company information in order to accuse Twitter of providing “misrepresentations” about its business to regulators and investors.
Twitter’s lawsuit alleges that the company “has suffered and will continue to suffer irreparable harm” as a result of Musk’s contractual breaches that “cast a pall over Twitter and its business.”
Iran has arrested an internationally renowned filmmaker, several newspapers reported Tuesday, the third Iranian director to be locked up in less than a week as the government escalates a crackdown on the country’s celebrated cinema industry.
The arrest of award-winning director Jafar Panahi and wider pressure on filmmakers follows a wave of recent arrests as tensions escalate between Iran’s hardline government and the West. Security forces have detained several foreigners and a prominent reformist politician as talks to revive Tehran’s nuclear accord with world powers hit a deadlock and fears grow over the country’s economic crisis.
Panahi, one of Iran’s best-known dissident filmmakers, had gone to the prosecutor’s office in Tehran on Monday evening to check on the cases of his two colleagues detained last week, when security forces scooped him up as well, the reports said.
A colleague of Panahi, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisals, told The Associated Press that authorities sent him to Iran’s notorious Evin Prison to serve out a prison term dating back years ago.
In 2011, Panahi received a six-year prison sentence on charges of creating anti-government propaganda and was banned from filmmaking for 20 years. He was also barred from leaving the country.
However, the sentence was never really enforced and Panahi continued to make underground films — without government script approval or permits — that were released abroad to great acclaim.
Panahi has won multiple festival awards, including the 2015 Berlin Golden Bear for “Taxi,” a wide-ranging meditation on poverty, sexism and censorship in Iran, and the Venice Golden Lion in 2000 for “The Circle,” a deep dive into women’s lives in Iran’s patriarchal society.
The Berlin International Film Festival said it was “dismayed and outraged” to hear of Panahi’s arrest, calling it “another violation of freedom of expression and freedom of the arts.”
His detention came after the arrest of two other Iranian filmmakers, Mohamad Rasoulof and Mostafa al-Ahmad.
Authorities accused Rasoulof and al-Ahmad of undermining the nation’s security by voicing opposition on social media to the government’s violent crackdown on unrest in the country’s southwest.
Following the catastrophic collapse of the Metropol Building that killed at least 41 people in May, protests erupted over allegations of government negligence and deeply rooted corruption. Police responded with a heavy hand, clubbing protesters and firing tear gas, according to footage widely circulating online.
Rasoulof won the Berlin Film Festival’s top prize in 2020 for his film “There Is No Evil” that explores four stories loosely connected to the themes of the death penalty in Iran and personal freedoms under tyranny. In 2011, Rasoulof’s film “Goodbye” won a prize at Cannes but he was not allowed to travel to France to accept it.
Cannes sharply condemned the arrests of the three filmmakers and “the wave of repression obviously in progress in Iran against its artists.”
PEN America, a literary and free speech organization, said their detention marks a “brazen violation of their human right to free expression and speech.”
Several foreigners have also landed in Iranian prison in recent weeks, including two French citizens, a Swedish tourist, a Polish scientist and others, spurring concerns that Iran is trying to leverage them as bargaining chips in negotiations.
It’s a tactic Iran has used in the past, including in 2014 when authorities arrested Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian. He was released a year and a half later in a prisoner swap with the United States as the landmark nuclear accord took effect.
On Monday, the family of a Belgian humanitarian worker being held in Iran, Olivier Vandecasteele, appealed to Brussels to do “everything” to secure his release from Evin Prison. They said he was arrested in late February after working for more than six years in Iran to help its Afghan migrant community.
The Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the AP on Tuesday it had asked Iran for his release on “several occasions” and still had “no information on the reasons of his arrest.” It said the government was providing him with consular assistance.
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Nicktar Benedito, an artist in south-central Mozambique, has physical disabilities that have limited the use of his hands but honed his determination and empathy. Andre Baptista reports from Chimoio, capital of Manica province, in this story narrated by Carol Guensburg. Camera: Andre Baptista
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More than 1.8 billion people worldwide are at risk of severe floods, new research shows. Most reside in low- and middle-income countries in Asia, and four out of 10 live in poverty.
The figures are substantially larger than previous estimates. They show that the risk is concentrated among those least able to withstand and recover from flooding.
“I thought it was a valuable paper, indeed. Because this link between poverty and flood risk is kind of overlooked,” said hydrologist Bruno Merz, of the German Research Center for Geosciences, who was not involved in the study.
Flood risk assessments typically consider risk in monetary terms, which is highest in rich countries where more wealth is at stake. The new study focused on how flood exposure and poverty overlap.
Published in the journal Nature Communications, the study combined a global flood risk database with information on population density and poverty. The research focused on places where floods 15 centimeters deep or deeper happen at least once every 100 years on average.
The study found that nearly 90% of people at risk of severe flooding live in poor countries, not rich ones. More than 780 million flood-exposed people live on less than $5.50 per day.
The substantial overlap between high flood risk and poverty feeds into a vicious cycle that further concentrates flood protections in rich countries that have more resources to deal with floods in the first place, said flood risk researcher Jeroen Aerts of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Aerts was not involved in the study.
“It’s doing a cost-benefit analysis,” Aerts said. “Less money is going to poorer countries, because, of course, if the country is poorer, there are less dollars exposed.” Aerts said that this also happens within countries, which tend to invest in pricey flood protections for wealthy urban centers rather than for poorer rural areas.
The new estimate for global flood exposure is higher than some earlier ones. For instance, one previous study predicted that 1.3 billion people would be exposed to severe floods by 2050 — 500 million fewer than are exposed today, according to the new estimate. The authors attribute their higher number to their use of better data covering more regions at higher resolution and combining the risks from coastal, river and surface water floods.
The study did not consider protections, such as levees or dikes, in its assessment of flood exposure. This “distorts the picture,” Merz said, since some flood-prone populations are well-protected, such as those in the Netherlands.
Rather than undermining the study’s findings, Merz thought that this could mean that an even greater proportion of the people threatened by floods lives in poor regions.
“In many low-income countries, there is no flood protection, so people will be flooded by a small flood … that occurs on average every five years. On the other hand, in Europe, in North America, many of the areas are protected (from floods that happen once every) 100 years, 200 years or even higher. And so, this is not included,” he said.
Unprotected, poorer regions could thus shoulder an even greater share of the actual risks from flood exposure than the paper suggests.
The new result offers a snapshot of flood risk around the world as it is today, not a projection of how it will develop in the future. Climate change is projected to increase the frequency and intensity of floods in much of the world. And although early warning systems have decreased flood fatalities, including in resource-poor regions, population growth in flood-prone areas will also put more people at risk in the future, Aerts said.
“The exposure to natural hazards, exposure to flooding — it’s larger than previously investigated. And the majority of those exposed people live in a vulnerable, poor region,” Aerts said. “I think that’s the takeaway, I think, and maybe one sentence more: This means that investments in … flood adaptation should be targeted at those areas.”
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The U.S. space agency NASA released the set of the first full-color images from the James Webb Space Telescope Tuesday, a day after sharing a full-color picture of stars and galaxies deeper into the cosmos than ever seen before.
Watch here:
U.S. President Joe Biden said the telescope offered “a new window into the history of our universe.”
Tuesday’s images took weeks to render using data from the telescope. They show areas of the universe where researchers will focus future scientific inquiries.
The $10 billion telescope, the largest and most powerful ever launched into space, peers farther into the cosmos than any before it.
A peek into the past
Scientists describe the telescope as looking back in time. That is because it can see galaxies that are so far away that it takes light from those galaxies billions of years to reach the telescope.
“Light travels at 186,000 miles per second (299,000 meters). And that light that you are seeing on one of those little specs (in the picture) has been traveling for over 13 billion years,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, who attended Monday’s news briefing along with Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
The Webb telescope can see light that was created just after the Big Bang, the furthest humanity has peered into the past.
A successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb is about 100 times more sensitive than its 30-year-old predecessor. It is also able to use the infrared spectrum, while the Hubble used mainly optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.
The telescope is so precise, Nelson said, that scientists will be able to see the chemical composition of planets deep in space and determine if they are habitable or not.
“We are going to be able to answer questions that we don’t even know what the questions are yet,” he said.
Harris said the telescope would “enhance what we know about the origins of our universe, our solar system and possibly life itself.”
Into the cosmos
The telescope was launched December 25 from French Guiana in South America and traveled 1.6 million kilometers from Earth before beginning to capture images.
Biden said the telescope took a “journey 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) into the cosmos … along the way unfolding itself, deploying a mirror 21 feet wide (6.4 meters), a sunshield the size of a tennis court, and 250,000 tiny shutters, each one smaller than a grain of sand.”
Nelson said future images would peer even further back into the origin of the cosmos, looking about 13.5 billion years into the past.
Scientists will use the Webb telescope to study stars, galaxies and planets as far as the edges of the cosmos, as well as look at objects closer to us with a sharper view, including our own solar system.
Some information in this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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Citing the fast-spreading omicron BA.5 coronavirus subvariant that now makes up a majority of U.S. cases, the White House on Tuesday said it will ensure the availability of COVID-19 vaccines, boosters, treatments and testing to combat the disease.
“Currently, many Americans are under-vaccinated, meaning they are not up to date on their COVID-19 vaccines,” said Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at a news briefing Tuesday. “Staying up to date on your COVID-19 vaccines provides the best protection against severe outcomes.”
The subvariant, which the CDC says accounts for 65% of the variants circulating in the United States as of last week, reportedly could spread more easily despite vaccination or natural immunity.
U.S. President Joe Biden’s chief medical advisor, Dr. Anthony Fauci, speaking at the same briefing, said the subvariant does not cause a more severe illness or hospitalizations compared to other subvariants.
“Variants will continue to emerge. The virus circulates globally and in this country. We should not let it disrupt our lives, but we cannot deny that it is a reality that we need to deal with,” Fauci said.
The White House says it will focus on boosters, at-home testing, making good masks available and supporting people who are immunocompromised.
“We can prevent serious illness; we can keep people out of the hospital and especially out of the ICU. We can save lives, and we can minimize the disruptions caused by COVID-19. Even in the face of BA.5, the tools we have continue to work,” said Ashish Jha, the White House’s COVID-19 response coordinator.
“We are at a point in the pandemic where most COVID-19 deaths are preventable,” he said.
Some information in this report comes from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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Grieving Japanese paid their final farewells to former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe Tuesday.
Scores of everyday people lined up outside Tokyo’s Zojoji Temple to bring flowers and other tokens of respect for Abe, who was gunned down last Friday in the western city of Nara during a campaign rally. Many of the mourners cried as they bowed in prayer in front of the temple.
Zojoji Temple was the site of a private ceremony for the 67-year-old Abe that was limited to only his close friends and family. Abe’s casket was then removed from the temple and placed in a hearse for a long processional through downtown Tokyo to Kirigaya Funeral Hall for cremation with thousands of residents lined up along the route to wave their final goodbyes.
The hearse was slated to drive by several significant venues from Abe’s political career, including the prime minister’s official office, the Parliament building and the headquarters of his Liberal Democratic Party.
The suspected gunman in Abe’s assassination, 41-year-old Tetsuya Yamagami, was immediately seized after he shot the ex-prime minister was taken into custody.
Japanese news outlets say Yamagani, a former member of the country’s Self-Defense Forces, wanted to kill Abe because he believed him to be part of an unspecified religious group he blamed for his mother’s financial ruin.
The Unification Church, a global religious movement founded in South Korea in the 1950s by the late Reverend Sun Myung Moon, confirmed Monday that Yamagami’s mother was a member, but did not comment on any donations she may have made.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters, Agence France-Presse.
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Chinese authorities on Monday confirmed that a case of cholera had occurred in the central city of Wuhan where the outbreak of COVID-19 began before spreading globally. State media acknowledged that the case has sparked public worries in a society still coping with the COVID outbreak.
China’s official media Xinhua published the news on the front page of its website Monday evening local time, citing a public announcement issued by Wuchang district government’s center for disease control. Wuchang is a district with a little more than one million residents in the city of Wuhan and is home to Wuhan University where the case was reported.
The news item is no longer on Xinhua’s front page as of Tuesday morning local time, nor can it be found in the Local News section of the website, a category it fell under previously.
Wuhan University announced on Monday that a graduate student with gastro disease history was admitted at the university’s hospital on July 8 after experiencing fever, vomiting and diarrhea. The student has since been transferred twice, each time to a higher-level hospital, and is currently in quarantine, the university said.
The dormitory where the student stayed, as well as the lab where the student worked, had both been locked down beginning the evening of July 9, the university said. Three close contacts, including two roommates, and a third person who had dined with the student prior to the student’s hospitalization, have been quarantined.
Between the evening of July 9 and early morning the next day, 254 students who lived in the same dormitory building plus three dormitory building managers and 15 vendors have been tested. Potentially affected areas are temporarily locked down, relevant personnel have been quarantined “according to regulation” and have been given preventive medicine, the university said.
The university has also taken “environmental” samples of public areas of the dormitory building, dormitory rooms, bathrooms, waste disposal channels, and the building where the student worked. The areas have also been disinfected.
Staff at the hospitals who came into contact with the student have been tested.
The university reported that its hospital has treated 19 additional cases of diarrhea between July 1 and 10, and that tests for cholera were being performed.
The university said on Monday that up until July 10 evening local time, no other O1 or O138 strain, which was confirmed in the student, has been detected among 264 closely monitored individuals.
O1 and O138 are the only two strains of the cholera bacteria that cause outbreaks, according to the World Health Organization.
Cholera is only the second infectious disease classified by the Chinese government as Type A infectious disease, the other is plague. COVID-19, AIDS, Rabies, bird flu and malaria are among dozens classified as Type B, a less severe category.
The English-language Global Times, part of China’s state media, reported the Wuhan University case on Monday. The article quoted the university’s report that the patient was symptom-free after being treated and that the more than 200 students who lived in the same dormitory building all tested negative.
The report acknowledged that “While COVID-19 outbreaks are not over in China and the flu has hit provinces in South China, the newly found cholera case has sparked public worries [in China].” The same report also quoted a director at Wuhan University saying, “There’s no need for panic.”
Yang Zhanqiu, deputy director of the pathogen biology department at the university, was quoted by Global Times as saying that “with largely improved sanitary conditions and medical treatment, cholera in China has been under control since 2000 and only sporadic cases have been reported in recent years.”
According to the World Health Organization, cholera is an acute diarrheal infection caused by ingestion of food or water contaminated with cholera bacteria. WHO describes cholera as “an extremely virulent disease that can cause severe acute watery diarrhea.”
According to the WHO, it takes between 12 hours and 5 days for a person to show symptoms after ingesting contaminated food or water. Cholera affects both children and adults and can kill within hours if untreated.
Most people infected with cholera bacteria do not develop any symptoms, according to WHO, although the bacteria are present in their feces for 1-10 days after infection and have the potential to affect other people.
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The U.S. space agency is set to release the full set of the first full-color images from the James Webb Space Telescope on Tuesday, a day after sharing a full-color picture showing stars and galaxies from deeper into the cosmos than ever seen before.
During a news briefing at the White House Monday to unveil the first NASA image, U.S. President Joe Biden said the telescope was “a new window into the history of our universe.”
The $10 billion telescope, the largest and most powerful telescope ever launched into space, peers farther into the cosmos than any before it.
A peek into the past
Scientists describe the telescope as looking back in time. That is because it can see galaxies that are so far away that it takes light from those galaxies billions of years to reach the telescope.
“Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. And that light that you are seeing on one of those little specs (in the picture) has been traveling for over 13 billion years,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, who attended Monday’s news briefing along with Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
The Webb telescope can see light that was created just after the Big Bang, the farthest humanity has peered into the past.
A successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb is about 100 times more sensitive than its 30-year-old predecessor. It is also able to use the infrared spectrum, while the Hubble used mainly optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.
The telescope is so precise, Nelson said, that scientists will be able to see the chemical composition of planets deep in space and determine if they are habitable or not.
“We are going to be able to answer questions that we don’t even know what the questions are yet,” he said.
Harris said the telescope would “enhance what we know about the origins of our universe, our solar system and possibly life itself.”
Into the cosmos
The telescope was launched December 25 from French Guiana in South America and traveled 1.6 million kilometers from Earth before beginning to capture images.
Biden said the telescope took a “journey 1 million miles into the cosmos … along the way unfolding itself, deploying a mirror 21 feet wide, a sunshield the size of a tennis court, and 250,000 tiny shutters, each one smaller than a grain of sand.”
Nelson said future images would peer even farther back into the origin of the cosmos, looking about 13.5 billion years into the past.
Scientists will use the Webb telescope to study stars, galaxies and planets as far as the edges of the cosmos, as well as look at objects closer to us with a sharper view, including our own solar system.
Some information in this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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The U.S. space agency has released the first image from its new space telescope — a full color picture showing stars and galaxies from deeper into the cosmos than ever seen before.
During a news briefing Monday at the White House to unveil the NASA image, U.S. President Joe Biden said the telescope was “a new window into the history of our universe.”
The $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope, the largest and most powerful telescope ever launched into space, peers farther into the cosmos than any before it.
Scientists describe the telescope as looking back in time. That is because it can see galaxies that are so far away that it takes light from those galaxies billions of years to reach the telescope.
“Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. And that light that you are seeing on one of those little specs (in the picture) has been traveling for over 13 billion years,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, who attended Monday’s news briefing along with Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
The Webb telescope can see light that was created just after the Big Bang, the farthest humanity has peered into the past.
A successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, Webb is about 100 times more sensitive than its 30-year-old predecessor. It is also able to use the infrared spectrum, while the Hubble used mainly optical and ultraviolet wavelengths.
The telescope is so precise, Nelson said, that scientists will be able to see the chemical composition of planets deep in space and determine if they are habitable or not.
“We are going to be able to answer questions that we don’t even know what the questions are yet,” he said.
Harris said the telescope would “enhance what we know about the origins of our universe, our solar system and possibly life itself.”
The telescope was launched December 25 from French Guiana in South America and traveled 1.6 million kilometers from Earth before beginning to capture images.
Biden said the telescope took a “journey 1 million miles into the cosmos … along the way unfolding itself, deploying a mirror 21 feet wide, a sunshield the size of a tennis court, and 250,000 tiny shutters, each one smaller than a grain of sand.”
A larger unveiling of photos from the telescope will be released by NASA Tuesday at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
Nelson said future images would peer even farther back into the origin of the cosmos, looking about 13.5 billion years into the past.
Scientists will use the Webb telescope to study stars, galaxies and planets as far as the edges of the cosmos, as well as look at objects closer to us with a sharper view, including our own solar system.
Some information in this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
The red on beige sign outside La Torre shop advertises the kind of underwear earlier generations might have worn, mostly knickerbockers and girdles.
The shop — known as The Tower in English — has been a standard in Barcelona for more than 120 years, preserving a glimpse into the city’s past.
La Torre has withstood the relentless march of Starbucks, McDonald’s, and other international corporate chains which, critics say, have eaten up the souls of downtowns. Other period shops, cinemas or libraries have not been so fortunate and have been forced to close.
Campaigners in Spain are determined to safeguard a form of heritage which they say is increasingly under threat: the shop signs which advertise small businesses often run by families.
Described as the “Indiana Jones of the Lost Shop Signs” by the Spanish newspaper ABC, they advocate for everything from the Art Deco cinema signs, old-fashioned flashing Buy Easy signs and the ornate golden shoe shop signs.
The commercial signs outside shops that have long shaped the identity of cities, towns and villages are a part of our past, said volunteers from the Iberian Network in Defense of Graphic Heritage, a collective of about 50 projects across Spain.
Heritage
To most people, heritage sums up the idea of castles, priceless paintings, and royal jewels. But these campaigners contend that the urban landscape which most people inhabit every day is as much a part of our treasured past too.
Heritage legislation in Spain protects everything from cathedrals to castles to bullfighting but not shop signs – so far. So, campaigners must first convince local councils to protect these symbols of everyday life.
“We are against nostalgia because it says that the past is better than the present or the future. We want to preserve these shop signs because they represent something from the past that we can use to learn about for the future,” Alberto Nanclares, of the Iberian Network, told VOA in an interview.
Nanclares said the organization began in 2014 after the then government abolished a law which guaranteed cheap rents to companies, driving many small shops out of business. He said they plan to open a museum to show off the signs they have saved.
“It should be very popular because it will attract designers, architects, elderly people who want to see the past and people who want to take their grandparents to see the place where they grew up,” he added.
Laura Asensio is a graphic designer who has been working for an organization called Valladolid with Character. They hope to stop Valladolid, a northern Spanish, from becoming a bland version of many other cities across Europe.
Volunteers are mapping out the old shop signs which have been saved or at risk from being lost.
Asensio said she hopes to convince the city council to change local laws to preserve this part of the city’s heritage. A book will be published with photographs in December detailing this part of the city life for future generations.
“The reason we started this organization is to stop shop signs from being lost to globalization. All over Europe, city centers are being dominated by McDonalds, Zara, or Burger King,” she told VOA.
Laura Aseguradade, an interior designer, and member of the Iberian Network, said younger people may not appreciate the value of the architectural heritage of their own cities.
“But if you don’t value traditions and distinctiveness of your cities then Madrid ends up looking much like Barcelona or London with the same chains springing up due to globalization,” she told VOA from her home in Madrid.
“We are not against globalization, but the architectural heritage brings value to your city because it makes it different to other places which is important for tourism and the quality of life.”
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As the U.S. reels from a surge of recent mass shootings, some technologists are focusing on how to prevent casualties. VOA’s Julie Taboh spoke with a couple of entrepreneurs who have developed gun-detecting technologies.
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Shares of Twitter slid more than 6% in the first day of trading after billionaire Elon Musk said that he was abandoning his $44 billion bid for the company and the social media platform vowed to challenge Musk in court to uphold the agreement.
Twitter is now preparing to sue Musk in Delaware where the company is incorporated. While the outcome is uncertain, both sides are preparing for long court battle.
Musk alleged Friday that Twitter has failed to provide enough information about the number of fake accounts it has. However, Twitter said last month that it was making available to Musk a ” fire hose” of raw data on hundreds of millions of daily tweets when he raised the issue again after announcing that he would buy the social media platform.
Twitter has said for years in regulatory filings that it believes about 5% of the accounts on the platform are fake but on Monday Musk continued to taunt the company, using Twitter, over what he has described as a lack of data. In addition, Musk is also alleging that Twitter broke the agreement when it fired two top managers and laid off a third of its talent-acquisition team.
Musk agreed to a $1 billion breakup fee as part of the buyout agreement, though it appears Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and the company are settling in for a legal fight to force the sale.
“For Twitter this fiasco is a nightmare scenario and will result in an Everest-like uphill climb for Parag & Co. to navigate the myriad challenges ahead around employee turnover/morale, advertising headwinds, investor credibility around the fake account/bot issues, and host of other issues abound,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, who follows the company, wrote Monday.
The sell-off in Twitter shares pushed prices close to $34 each, far from the $54.20 that Musk agreed to pay for the company. That suggests, strongly, that Wall Street has serious doubts that the deal will go forward.
While the outcome of any protracted legal battle cannot be known, experts in the legal and business sectors believe Twitter likely has a stronger case.
Morningstar analyst Ali Mogharabi noted that, regarding the spam user count Musk is so focused on, Twitter has “for years explicitly stated in regulatory filings that the ‘below 5%’ spam count may not be accurate given that it is based on a sample and requires a lot of judgment.”
Given current market conditions, Mogharabi said, Twitter may also have a solid argument that the layoffs and firings of the past weeks represent “an ordinary course of business.”
“Many technology firms have begun to control costs by reducing headcount and/or delaying adding employees,” he said. “The resignations of Twitter employees cannot with certainty be attributed to any change in how Twitter has operated since Musk’s offer was accepted by the board and shareholders.
Tech industry analysts say Musk’s interlude leaves behind a more vulnerable company with demoralized employees.
“With Musk officially walking away from the deal, we think business prospects and stock valuation are in a precarious situation,” wrote CFRA Analyst Angelo Zino. “(Twitter) will now need to go at it as a standalone company and contend with an uncertain advertising market, a damaged employee base, and concerns about the status of fake accounts/strategic direction.”
The uncertainty surrounding Twitter could also lead advertisers to curtail their spending on the platform, Mogharabi said.
But “the drama” surrounding the deal, he added, “will also likely attract new users to the platform and increase engagement, especially given the upcoming midterm elections, which could convince advertisers to cut a bit less. In the long run, we think Twitter will remain one of the top five social media platforms for advertisers.”