A little more than 20 years after he was murdered in Laramie, Wyoming, the remains of Matthew Shepard were laid to rest Friday at Washington’s National Cathedral. Shepard was openly gay, and the aftermath of his brutal killing helped drive change in the United States to include sexual orientation when prosecutors press hate crime charges. Arash Arabasadi reports from Washington.
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From: MeNeedIt
Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News Channel personality who made a rocky transition to softer news at NBC, was fired from her morning show Friday after triggering a furor by suggesting it was OK for white people to wear blackface at Halloween.
“‘Megyn Kelly Today’ is not returning,” NBC News said in a statement. The show occupied the fourth hour of NBC’s “Today” program, a time slot that will be hosted by other co-anchors next week, the network said.
NBC didn’t address Kelly’s future at the network. But negotiations over her exit from NBC are underway, according to a person familiar with the talks who wasn’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Bryan Freedman, an attorney for Kelly, said in a statement that she “remains an employee of NBC News and discussions about next steps are continuing.” He did not elaborate.
$20 million a year
Kelly is in the second year of a three-year contract that reportedly pays her more than $20 million a year.
The show’s cancellation came four days after she provoked a firestorm for her on-air comments about blackface as a costume.
“But what is racist?” Kelly said Tuesday. “Truly, you do get in trouble if you are a white person who puts on blackface at Halloween or a black person who puts on whiteface for Halloween. Back when I was a kid, that was OK, as long as you were dressing up as, like, a character.”
Critics accused her of ignoring the ugly history of minstrel shows and movies in which whites applied blackface to mock blacks as lazy, ignorant or cowardly.
Kelly apologized to fellow NBC staffers later in the day and made a tearful apology on her show Wednesday. She did not host new episodes of “Megyn Kelly Today” as scheduled Thursday and Friday.
Awkward start at softer news
Kelly, 47, made her debut as a NBC morning host in September 2017, taking over the 9 a.m. slot at “Today” and saying she wanted viewers “to have a laugh with us, a smile, sometimes a tear and maybe a little hope to start your day.” She did cooking demonstrations and explored emotional topics.
She largely floundered with that soft-news focus, and a pair of awkward and hostile interviews with Hollywood figures Jane Fonda and Debra Messing backfired. Kelly briefly found more of a purpose with the eruption of the #MeToo movement.
She made news when interviewing women who accused President Donald Trump of inappropriate behavior and spoke with accusers of Harvey Weinstein, Bill O’Reilly, Roy Moore and others, as well as women who say they were harassed on Capitol Hill.
Time magazine, which honored “The Silence Breakers” as its Person of the Year, cited Kelly as the group’s leader in the entertainment field. The episode with Trump accusers had more than 2.9 million viewers, one of her biggest audiences.
Lower ratings
But strains continued behind the scenes. Kelly last month publicly called for NBC News Chairman Andrew Lack to appoint outside investigators to look into why the network didn’t air Ronan Farrow’s stories about Weinstein and allowed Farrow to take the material to The New Yorker.
And her ratings have been consistently down from what “Today” garnered in the 9 a.m. hour before Kelly came on board. In its first year, Kelly’s show averaged 2.4 million viewers a day, a drop of 400,000 from the year before.
The latest controversy may have tipped the balance. Both NBC’s “Nightly News” and “Today” did stories on her blackface comment, and weatherman Al Roker said Kelly “owes a big apology to people of color across the country.”
A former corporate defense attorney, Kelly made her name at Fox News discussing politics in prime time. During the first GOP debate in 2015, she asked Trump about calling women “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.” Trump later complained about her questions, saying, “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.”
Fox News baggage
Although Kelly may have attempted a fresh start at NBC, she couldn’t always escape her baggage.
Many of her former Fox News Channel viewers were upset by her perceived disloyalty in leaving and her clashes with Trump during the campaign. At the same time, her former association with Fox caused some NBC colleagues and viewers to regard her with suspicion.
While at Fox, Kelly cultivated a reputation for toughness and a willingness to challenge conservative orthodoxy. Her private testimony about former Fox News chief executive Roger Ailes’ unwanted sexual advances a decade ago helped lead to Ailes’ firing.
She also created controversy with her stance on race. In 2013, while an anchor at Fox, Kelly addressed the ethnicity of Santa Claus by saying: “For all you kids watching at home, Santa just is white.”
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From: MeNeedIt
Far-right extremists have ramped up an intimidating wave of anti-Semitic harassment against Jewish journalists, political candidates and others ahead of next month’s U.S. midterm elections, according to a report released Friday by a Jewish civil rights group.
The Anti-Defamation League’s report says its researchers analyzed more than 7.5 million Twitter messages from Aug. 31 to Sept. 17 and found nearly 30 percent of the accounts repeatedly tweeting derogatory terms about Jews appeared to be automated “bots.”
But accounts controlled by real-life humans often mount the most “worrisome and harmful” anti-Semitic attacks, sometimes orchestrated by leaders of neo-Nazi or white nationalist groups, the researchers said.
“Both anonymity and automation have been used in online propaganda offensives against the Jewish community during the 2018 midterms,” they wrote.
Billionaire philanthropist George Soros was a leading subject of harassing tweets. Soros, a Hungarian-born Jew demonized by right-wing conspiracy theorists, is one of the prominent Democrats who had pipe bombs sent to them this week.
The ADL’s study concludes online disinformation and abuse is disproportionately targeting Jews in the U.S. “during this crucial political moment.”
“Prior to the election of President Donald Trump, anti-Semitic harassment and attacks were rare and unexpected, even for Jewish Americans who were prominently situated in the public eye. Following his election, anti-Semitism has become normalized and harassment is a daily occurrence,” the report says.
The New York City-based ADL has commissioned other studies of online hate, including a report in May that estimated about 3 million Twitter users posted or re-posted at least 4.2 million anti-Semitic tweets in English over a 12-month period ending Jan. 28. An earlier report from the group said anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. in the previous year had reached the highest tally it has counted in more than two decades.
For the latest report, researchers interviewed five Jewish people, including two recent political candidates, who had faced “human-based attacks” against them on social media this year. Their experiences demonstrated that anti-Semitic harassment “has a chilling effect on Jewish Americans’ involvement in the public sphere,” their report says.
“While each interview subject spoke of not wanting to let threats of the trolls affect their online activity, political campaigns, academic research or news reporting, they all admitted the threats of violence and deluges of anti-Semitism had become part of their internal equations,” researchers wrote.
The most popular term used in tweets containing #TrumpTrain was “Soros.” The study also found a “surprising” abundance of tweets referencing “QAnon,” a right-wing conspiracy theory that started on an online message board and has been spread by Trump supporters.
“There are strong anti-Semitic undertones, as followers decry George Soros and the Rothschild family as puppeteers,” researchers wrote.
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From: MeNeedIt
Facebook says it has removed 82 pages, accounts and groups linked to Iran from its service and from Instagram for spreading misinformation.
The company says the accounts were targeting U.S. and U.K. citizens and typically represented themselves to be American or British citizens, posting about politically charged topics such as race relations and opposition to President Donald Trump.
Facebook said Friday that a manual review of the accounts linked them to Iran. Facebook has traditionally relied heavily on automated checks to detect misinformation and other bad behavior on its service.
The company has already disclosed that it found and removed similar activity originating in Iran in August.
The removals come less than two weeks before the U.S. midterm elections.
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From: MeNeedIt
U.S. stock market indexes fell sharply in Friday’s early trading, but saw losses ease later in the day.
At one point the S&P 500 and the Dow were down by two percent or more, while the NASDAQ was off by 3.5 percent at one point.
Investors worried about faltering growth, rising interest rates, trade tensions, and weak profit outlook for major tech firms, including Amazon and Google’s parent company.
By afternoon, losses moderated with the S&P off by 1.3 percent, the Dow down six-tenths of a percent, and the NASDAQ sliding 1.9 percent.
Key European indexes dropped about one percent.Earlier in Asia, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was off a bit more than one percent, while Japan’s Nikkei moved down four-tenths of a percent.
The market turbulence comes at the same time as U.S. unemployment is low, and reports show growth and consumer confidence are strong.
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From: MeNeedIt
Top trade officials from 12 countries and the European Union on Thursday vowed to reform World Trade Organization rules in the face of U.S. actions that threaten to paralyze the body and address some of Washington’s complaints about Chinese subsidies.
The officials, meeting in the Canadian capital Ottawa, said they shared a “common resolve for rapid and concerted action” to address challenges to the WTO.
“The current situation at the WTO is no longer sustainable. Our resolve for change must be matched with action,” the officials said in a communique issued after their daylong meeting ended.
The United States and China, which are locked in an escalating tariff war that is threatening the WTO’s foundations, were not invited to the meeting to discuss reform ideas, but Canadian Trade Minister Jim Carr said he would report outcomes to them and try to persuade them to join the reform effort.
Carr acknowledged that no WTO reforms could proceed without a buy-in from the world’s two largest economies.
“They should listen because we’re making good arguments,” Carr told a news conference after the meeting, adding that the group’s proposals would ultimately serve U.S. and Chinese interests.
The officials from Canada, the European Union, Japan, Brazil, Mexico, Australia and seven other countries agreed to meet again in January 2019 to review progress from their discussions.
They were short on specifics of their proposals, but called for urgent action to unblock the appointment of new judges to the Appellate Body of the WTO’s dispute settlement system, which they said puts the functioning of the entire body at risk, causing rules enforcement to grind to a halt by the spring of 2019.
The statement did not refer directly to U.S. actions to block such appointments over longstanding complaints that many past appellate rulings have exceeded the judges’ authority, unfairly favoring China and some other members.
“Our number one priority is getting dispute settlement back on track. What good is there to have rules if they cannot be enforced?” said one participating minister who spoke on condition of anonymity.
U.S. President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to pull out of the 23-year-old trade body, with roots that date back to the end of World War II, if it does not “shape up” and treat the United States more fairly.
At the Ottawa meetings, Carr said “there was no blaming, there was no shaming” of the United States and the group agreed to consider “alternative” ways to settle disputes, including mediation.
The trade officials also said they recognize “the need to address market distortions caused by subsidies and other instruments,” a reference to complaints by the United States and some other Western economies that current WTO anti-subsidy rules fail to capture all the ways China’s government supports its industries and state enterprises.
The statement said the officials were concerned with WTO members’ track record in complying with subsidy notification requirements and called for stronger monitoring and transparency of countries’ trade policies.
The member group also vowed to “reinvigorate” the WTO’s long-stalled negotiating function, calling for talks to curb fisheries subsidies to be completed in 2019.
Mexico’s Deputy Economy Minister Juan Carlos Baker said world leaders would have a chance to press the United States, China and other nations twice next month — at an Asia-Pacific summit and a meeting of leaders of the G-20 group of nations.
“We are going to waste no opportunity whatsoever in terms of political events. … I am sure that we will use these occasions to speak about what we’re doing,” he said in an interview.
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From: MeNeedIt
Major U.S. stock indexes made strong gains in Thursday’s trading after some upbeat profit reports by major companies.
The Nasdaq composite posted its biggest daily gain since March, as Microsoft’s upbeat earnings spurred a rebound in technology names and investors snapped up oversold shares. The Nasdaq added 209.94 points, or 2.95 percent, to 7,318.34, a day after it confirmed a correction and registered its biggest decline since 2011.
The Dow Jones industrial average rose 401.13 points, or 1.63 percent, to 24,984.55, while the Standard & Poor’s 500 gained 49.47 points, or 1.86 percent, to 2,705.57. Both moved back into positive territory for the year.
In Europe, France’s key index jumped 1.6 percent, while German and British stock prices made smaller gains.
Variety of gainers
The latest round of good U.S. results came from a variety of companies, including Ford Motor Co., Visa Inc., Whirlpool Corp. and Twitter Inc., and offered relief after the earnings season began slowly and stumbled further on sluggish outlooks from manufacturers and chipmakers.
Stocks have sold off recently amid worries about rising interest rates, growing trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies, China’s slowing economy and the fading impact of the recent U.S. tax cut on company profits.
In a further sign that economic growth is moderating, U.S. business spending on equipment appeared to have remained slow in September and the goods trade deficit grew as rising imports outpaced a rebound in exports.
Lower prices
But the recent sell-off has also made stocks a bit cheaper. The S&P 500’s valuation fell to a 2½-year low of 15.3 times profit estimates for the next 12 months from 15.8, according to trading and data business Refinitiv.
Results from S&P 500 companies have pushed up third-quarter profit growth estimates to 23.6 percent from 21.8 percent in the last 10 days. But forecasts have trimmed fourth-quarter growth estimates to 19.4 percent from 19.9 percent, according to I/B/E/S data from Refinitiv.
Some information for this report came from Reuters.
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From: MeNeedIt
British regulators slapped Facebook on Thursday with a fine of 500,000 pounds ($644,000) — the maximum possible — for failing to protect the privacy of its users in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
At the same time, European Union lawmakers demanded an audit of Facebook to better understand how it handles information, reinforcing how regulators in the region are taking a tougher stance on data privacy compared with U.S. authorities.
Britain’s Information Commissioner Office found that between 2007 and 2014, Facebook processed the personal information of users unfairly by giving app developers access to their information without informed consent. The failings meant the data of some 87 million people was used without their knowledge.
“Facebook failed to sufficiently protect the privacy of its users before, during and after the unlawful processing of this data,” said Elizabeth Denham, the information commissioner. “A company of its size and expertise should have known better and it should have done better.”
The ICO said a subset of the data was later shared with other organizations, including SCL Group, the parent company of political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, which counted U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign among its clients. News that the consultancy had used data from tens of millions of Facebook accounts to profile voters ignited a global scandal on data rights.
The fine amounts to a speck on Facebook’s finances. In the second quarter, the company generated revenue at a rate of nearly $100,000 per minute. That means it will take less than seven minutes for Facebook to bring in enough money to pay for the fine.
But it’s the maximum penalty allowed under the law at the time the breach occurred. Had the scandal taken place after new EU data protection rules went into effect this year, the amount would have been far higher — including maximum fines of 17 million pounds or 4 percent of global revenue, whichever is higher. Under that standard, Facebook would have been required to pay at least $1.6 billion, which is 4 percent of its revenue last year.
The data rules are tougher than the ones in the United States, and a debate is ongoing on how the U.S. should respond. California is moving to put in regulations similar to the EU’s strict rules by 2020 and other states are mulling more aggressive laws. That’s rattled the big tech companies, which are pushing for a federal law that would treat them more leniently.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video message to a big data privacy conference in Brussels this week that “we have a lot more work to do” to safeguard personal data.
About the U.K. fine, Facebook responded in a statement that it is reviewing the decision.
“While we respectfully disagree with some of their findings, we have said before that we should have done more to investigate claims about Cambridge Analytica and taken action in 2015. We are grateful that the ICO has acknowledged our full cooperation throughout their investigation.”
Facebook also took solace in the fact that the ICO did not definitively assert that U.K. users had their data shared for campaigning. But the commissioner noted in her statement that “even if Facebook’s assertion is correct,” U.S. residents would have used the site while visiting the U.K.
EU lawmakers had summoned Zuckerberg in May to testify about the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
In their vote on Thursday, they said Facebook should agree to a full audit by Europe’s cyber security agency and data protection authority “to assess data protection and security of users’ personal data.”
The EU lawmakers also call for new electoral safeguards online, a ban on profiling for electoral purposes and moves to make it easier to recognize paid political advertisements and their financial backers.
From: MeNeedIt
A new artificial intelligence program could make land borders across Europe more secure. When a pilot program begins next month, an avatar – called i-Border-Control – will help police guard several border crossings within the 26-nation, European Schengen Area. The technology was introduced this weekend (October 20) at a science festival hosted by Manchester Metropolitan University. VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports.
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From: MeNeedIt
When Washington’s $500 million Museum of the Bible held its grand opening in November 2017, attended by Vice President Mike Pence, there were questions even then about the authenticity of its centerpiece collection of Dead Sea Scrolls.
Now the museum has been forced to admit a painful truth: Technical analysis by a team of German scholars has revealed that at least five of the museum’s 16 scroll fragments are apparent forgeries.
The announcement has serious implications not only for the Bible Museum but for other evangelical Christian individuals and institutions who paid top dollar for what now seems to be a massive case of archaeological fraud.
Jeffrey Kloha, chief curator for the Museum of the Bible, said in a statement that the revelation is “an opportunity to educate the public on the importance of verifying the authenticity of rare biblical artifacts, the elaborate testing process undertaken and our commitment to transparency.”
The scrolls are a collection of ancient Jewish religious texts first discovered in the mid-1940s in caves on the western shore of the Dead Sea in what is now Israel. The massive cache of Hebrew documents is believed to date back to the days of Jesus. With more than 9,000 documents and 50,000 fragments, the entire collection took decades to fully excavate.
Most of the scrolls and fragments are tightly controlled by the Israeli Antiquities Authority. But around 2002, a wave of new fragments began mysteriously appearing on the market, despite skepticism from Biblical scholars.
These fragments, they warned, were specifically designed to target American evangelical Christians, who prize the scrolls. That appears to be exactly what happened; a Baptist seminary in Texas and an evangelical college in California reportedly paid millions to purchase alleged pieces of the scrolls.
Also eagerly buying up fragments was the Green family — evangelical Oklahoma billionaires who run the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores and who famously sued the Obama administration on religious grounds, saying they didn’t want to pay to provide their employees access to the morning-after pill or intrauterine devices.
The Greens are the primary backers of the Museum of the Bible and went on an archaeological acquisition spree in the years leading up to the museum’s opening. In addition to the alleged Dead Sea Scrolls fragments, the Greens ran afoul of the Justice Department, which said they had acquired thousands of smuggled artifacts looted from Iraq and elsewhere. The family agreed last year to return those artifacts and pay a $3 million fine.
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From: MeNeedIt
Several possessions of the late physicist’s Stephen Hawking will be included in an upcoming auction at Christie’s, the famed auction house.
Included among the items belonging to the iconic scientist will be one of his wheelchairs, one of five copies of his Cambridge University Ph.D. thesis “Properties of Expanding Universes,” and a script from one of his appearances on the television show “The Simpsons.”
At age 22, Hawking was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, just as he was beginning his doctoral work at Cambridge.
Thomas Venning, head of books and manuscripts at Christie’s, said Hawking was so despondent over the diagnosis that he “gave up his studies for a time.”
Hawking, however, returned to school, Venning said, and his thesis “was the fruit of his reapplying himself to his scientific work.” Hawking kept his thesis beside him for the rest of his life, according to Venning.
Hawking was one of the few scientists who have reached celebrity status. He is probably best known for his best-selling book “A Brief History of Time” and for his appearances on “The Simpsons.”
His daughter Lucy said the auction gives “admirers of his work the chance to acquire a memento of our father’s extraordinary life in the shape of a small selection of evocative and fascinating items.”
The physicist’s children hope to preserve his scientific archive.
The Associated Press reports that Christie’s is handling negotiations to hand over the archive to British authorities in lieu of inheritance tax.
Hawking’s items will be featured in a science sale that also includes papers by Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein.
Hawking’s items will be on display for several days in London, beginning October 30.
Hawking died in March at age 76.
From: MeNeedIt
The World Health Organization is closely watching the Ebola outbreak in Congo where the number of cases has risen to 185 since the outbreak started in August. One of the challenges for health workers fighting highly infectious diseases like Ebola is spending time in HazMat suits. They can be unwieldy and incredibly hot, but new technology could solve one of those problems. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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From: MeNeedIt