Several dictators are significantly overstating economic growth, according to research which looks at satellite images of countries at night. As Henry Ridgwell reports, economists have long questioned the reliability of data from autocratic regimes – including China.
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On Oct. 4, Elon Musk reversed himself and offered to honor his original proposal to buy Twitter for $44 billion — a deal he had spent the previous several months trying to wriggle out of. He posted a video of himself arriving at Twitter headquarters Wednesday, and Thursday evening new outlets announced the deal had been completed and Musk had fired at least two top Twitter executives.

If the case has your head spinning, here’s a quick guide to the major events in the saga featuring the billionaire Tesla CEO and the social platform.

January 31: Musk starts buying shares of Twitter in near-daily installments, amassing a 5% stake in the company by mid-March.

March 26: Musk, who has tens of millions of Twitter followers and is active on the site, says he is giving “serious thought” to building an alternative to Twitter, questioning the platform’s commitment to “free speech” and whether Twitter is undermining democracy. He also privately reaches out to Twitter board members including his friend and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

March 27: After privately informing Twitter of his growing stake in the company, Musk starts conversations with its CEO and board members about potentially joining the board. Musk also mentions taking Twitter private or starting a competitor, according to later regulatory filings.

April 4: A regulatory filing reveals that Musk has rapidly become the largest shareholder of Twitter after acquiring a 9% stake, or 73.5 million shares, worth about $3 billion.

April 5: Musk is offered a seat on Twitter’s board on the condition he amass no more than 14.9% of the company’s stock. CEO Parag Agrawal said in a tweet that “it became clear to us that he would bring great value to our Board.”

April 9: After exchanging pleasantries and bonding by text message over their love of engineering, a short-lived relationship between Agrawal and Musk sours after Musk publicly tweets “Is Twitter dying?” and gets a message from Agrawal calling the criticism unhelpful. Musk tersely responds: “This is a waste of time. Will make an offer to take Twitter private.”

April 11: Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announces Musk will not be joining the board after all.

April 14: Twitter reveals in a securities filing that Musk has offered to buy the company outright for about $44 billion.

April 15: Twitter’s board unanimously adopts a “poison pill” defense in response to Musk’s proposed offer, attempting to thwart a hostile takeover.

April 21: Musk lines up $46.5 billion in financing to buy Twitter. Twitter board is under pressure to negotiate.

April 25: Musk reaches a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion and take the company private. The outspoken billionaire has said he wanted to own and privatize Twitter because he thinks it’s not living up to its potential as a platform for free speech.

April 29: Musk sells roughly $8.5 billion worth of shares in Tesla to help fund the purchase of Twitter, according to regulatory filings.

May 5: Musk strengthens his offer to buy Twitter with commitments of more than $7 billion from a diverse group of investors including Silicon Valley heavy hitters like Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison.

May 10: In a hint at how he would change Twitter, Musk says he’d reverse Twitter’s ban of former President Donald Trump following the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, calling the ban a “morally bad decision” and “foolish in the extreme.”

May 13: Musk declares his plan to buy Twitter “temporarily on hold.” Musk says he needs to pinpoint the number of spam and fake accounts on the social media platform. Shares of Twitter tumble, while those of Tesla rebound sharply.

June 6: Musk threatens to end his $44 billion agreement to buy Twitter, accusing the company of refusing to give him information he requested about its spam bot accounts.

July 8: Musk says he will abandon his offer to buy Twitter after the company failed to provide enough information about the number of fake accounts.

July 12: Twitter sues Musk to force him to complete the deal. Musk soon countersues.

July 19: A Delaware judge says the Musk-Twitter legal dispute will go to trial in October.

August 23: A former head of security at Twitter alleges the company misled regulators about its poor cybersecurity defenses and its negligence in attempting to root out fake accounts that spread misinformation. Musk eventually cites the whistleblower as a new reason to scuttle his Twitter deal.

October 5: Musk offers to go through with his original proposal to buy Twitter for $44 billion. Twitter says it intends to close the transaction after receiving Musk’s offer.

October 6: Delaware judge delays Oct. 17 trial until November and gives both sides until Oct. 28 to reach agreement to close the deal.

October 20: The Washington Post reports that Musk told prospective Twitter investors that he plans to lay off 75% of the company’s 7,500 employees.

October 26: Musk posts a video of himself entering Twitter headquarters carrying a kitchen sink, indicating that the deal is set to go through.

October 27: In a message to advertisers, Musk says Twitter won’t become a “free-for-all hellscape.”  News organizations report the deal to buy Twitter has been completed.
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Elon Musk became Twitter Inc’s new owner on Thursday, firing top executives he had accused of misleading him and providing little clarity over how he will achieve the lofty ambitions he has outlined for the influential social media platform.

The CEO of electric car maker Tesla Inc TSLA.O has said he wants to “defeat” spam bots on Twitter, make the algorithms that determine how content is presented to its users publicly available, and prevent the platform from becoming an echo chamber for hate and division, even as he limits censorship.

Yet Musk has not offered details on how he will achieve all this and who will run the company. He has said he plans to cut jobs, leaving Twitter’s approximately 7,500 employees fretting about their future. He also said on Thursday he did not buy Twitter to make more money but “to try to help humanity, whom I love.”

Musk terminated Twitter Chief Executive Parag Agrawal, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal and legal affairs and policy chief Vijaya Gadde, according to people familiar with the matter. He had accused them of misleading him and Twitter investors over the number of fake accounts on the social media platform.

Agrawal and Segal were in Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters when the deal closed and were escorted out, the sources added.

Twitter, Musk and the executives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The $44-billion acquisition is the culmination of a remarkable saga, full of twists and turns, that sowed doubt over whether Musk would complete the deal. It began on April 4, when Musk disclosed a 9.2% stake in the San Francisco company, making him its largest shareholder.

The world’s richest person then agreed to join Twitter’s board, only to balk at the last minute and offer to buy the company instead for $54.20 per share, an offer that Twitter was unsure whether to interpret as another of Musk’s cannabis jokes.

Musk’s offer was real, and over the course of just one weekend later in April, the two sides reached a deal at the price he suggested. This happened without Musk carrying out any due diligence on the company’s confidential information, as is customary in an acquisition.

In the weeks that followed, Musk had second thoughts. He complained publicly that he believed Twitter’s spam accounts were significantly higher than Twitter’s estimate, published in regulatory filings, of less than 5% of its monetizable daily active users. His lawyers then accused Twitter of not complying with his requests for information on the subject.

The acrimony resulted in Musk giving notice to Twitter on July 8 that he was terminating their deal on the grounds that Twitter misled him on the bots and did not cooperate with him. Four days later, Twitter sued Musk in Delaware, where the company is incorporated, to force him to complete the deal.

By then, shares of social media companies and the broader stock market had plunged on concerns that the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes, as it seeks to fight inflation, will push the U.S. economy into recession. Twitter accused Musk of buyer’s remorse, arguing he wanted to get out of the deal because he thought he overpaid.

Most legal analysts said Twitter had the strongest arguments and would likely prevail in court. Their view did not change even after Twitter’s former security chief Peiter Zatko stepped forward as a whistleblower in August to allege that the company failed to disclose weaknesses in its security and data privacy.

On Oct. 4, just as Musk was set to be deposed by Twitter’s lawyers ahead of the start of their trial later in the month, he performed another u-turn and offered to complete the deal as promised. The Delaware judge gave him an Oct. 28 deadline to close the transaction and avoid the trial.

‘Chief Twit’

Since then, Musk has indulged the deal hype. He walked into Twitter’s headquarters on Wednesday with a big grin and carrying a porcelain sink, subsequently tweeting “let that sink in.” He changed his description in his Twitter profile to “Chief Twit.”

He also tried to calm fears among employees that major layoffs are coming and assured advertisers that his past criticism of Twitter’s content moderation rules would not harm its appeal.

“Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!” Musk said in an open letter to advertisers on Thursday.

Musk has indicated he sees Twitter as a foundation for creating a “super app” that offers everything from money transfers to shopping and ride hailing.

“The long-term potential for Twitter in my view is an order of magnitude greater than its current value,” Musk said on Tesla’s call with analysts on Oct 19.

But Twitter is struggling to engage its most active users who are vital to the business. These “heavy tweeters” account for less than 10% of monthly overall users but generate 90% of all tweets and half of global revenue.

Musk said in May he would reverse the ban on Donald Trump, who was removed after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, although the former U.S. President Donald Trump has said he won’t return on the platform. He has instead launched his own social media app, Truth Social.
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Elon Musk is telling Twitter advertisers he is buying the platform to “help humanity” and doesn’t want it to become a “free-for-all hellscape” where anything can be said with no consequences.

The message to advertisers posted Thursday on Twitter came a day before Musk’s deadline for closing his $44 billion deal to buy the social-media company and take it private.

“The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence,” Musk wrote, in an unusually-long message for the billionaire Tesla CEO who typically projects his thoughts in one-line tweets

He continued: “There is currently great danger that social media will splinter into far right wing and far left wing echo chambers that generate more hate and divide our society.”

The message reflects concerns among advertisers — Twitter’s chief source of revenue  that Musk’s plans to promote free speech by cutting back on moderating content will open the floodgates to more online toxicity and drive away users.

Friday’s deadline to close the deal was ordered by the Delaware Chancery Court in early October. It is the latest step in an epic battle during which Musk signed an April deal to acquire Twitter, then tried to back out of it, leading Twitter to sue the Tesla CEO to force him to conclude the deal. If the two sides don’t meet the Friday deadline, the next step could be a November trial that would likely lead to a judge forcing Musk to complete the deal.

But Musk has been signaling that the deal is going through by Friday, paying a visit to Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters Wednesday and changing his Twitter profile to “Chief Twit.”
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The United States is trying to make it easier for companies and organizations to bolster their cybersecurity in the face of growing attacks aimed at crippling their operations, stealing their data or demanding ransom payments.

Officials with the Department of Homeland Security and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) rolled out their new Cybersecurity Performance Goals on Thursday, describing them as a critical but voluntary resource that will help companies and organizations make better decisions.

“Really what these cybersecurity performance goals present is a menu of options to advance one’s cybersecurity,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters, describing the rollout as a “watershed moment” for cybersecurity.

“They are accessible, they are easy to understand, and they are identified according to the cost that each would entail, the complexity to implement the goal, as well as the magnitude of the impact that the goal’s implementation would have,” he added.

For months, U.S. officials have been warning of an ever more complex and dangerous threat environment in cyberspace, pushing the government’s “Shields Up” awareness campaign, driven in part by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine earlier this year.

They have also called attention to cyberattacks by Iran and North Korea, while warning that both nation states and non-state actors have increasingly been scanning and targeting U.S. critical infrastructure, from water and electric companies to airports, which were struck by a series of denial-of-service attacks earlier in October.

Private cybersecurity companies have likewise warned of a growing number of attacks against health care companies and education and research organizations.

While some bigger U.S. companies and organizations have been able to devote time, money and other resources to confront the growing dangers, U.S. officials are concerned that others have not.

In particular, CISA has worried about small to mid-sized businesses, along with hospitals and school systems, often described by officials as target rich but resource poor because they do not have the money or resources to defend systems and data from hackers.

Officials said the new guidelines, which focus on key areas like account security, training, incident reporting, and response and recovery, and come with checklists, are designed to ease the burden. The officials also said they anticipate the goals will change and evolve along with the threat.

The newly unveiled goals “were developed to really represent a minimum baseline of cyber security measures that if implemented, will reduce not only risk to critical infrastructure but also to national security, economic security and public health and safety,” said CISA Director Jen Easterly, calling them a “quick start guide.”

“[It’s] really a place to start to drive prioritized investment toward the most critical practices,” she said.

According to CISA, many of the new goals are already resonating, including with state and local officials running U.S. elections.

“We’ve been working with them to implement several of these best practices, as well as ensuring that they have the tools and resources and the capabilities to ensure the security and resilience of election infrastructure,” Easterly told reporters Thursday. “I’ve met with election officials even just over the past few days … and they all expressed confidence in particular in the cybersecurity across all of their systems.”

CISA also said Thursday that U.S. states and territories needing more help can take advantage of $1 billion in grants that are being made available over the next four years.

The grants, designed specifically to help protect U.S. critical infrastructure, were first announced last month.
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As the U.S. military considers China’s military strength in the Indo-Pacific region, the U.S. Navy is turning to driverless ships to multiply its forces. VOA’s Jessica Stone takes us along for a closer look at this military innovation. Camera: Keith Lane
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More frequent and severe droughts in Africa are hampering food production, especially in arid parts of the continent where farmers struggle to eke out a living. A water retention system developed in the U.S. is helping African farmers fight the trend and improve crop yields in drought-affected areas. Juma Majanga reports from Kibwezi, Kenya.  
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The Biden administration’s announcement earlier this month that it would ban the transfer of advanced U.S. semiconductor technology to China continues to reverberate through global markets. The ruling by the Department of Commerce affects not only U.S. firms that sell to China but any company whose products contain American semiconductor technology.

In mainland China, according to Bloomberg News, officials from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology have been summoning executives from domestic semiconductor manufacturers to assess how being deprived of high-tech manufacturing tools from overseas would impact their businesses. And companies that rely on imports of high-end semiconductors are assessing the viability of their businesses going forward.

In the U.S., semiconductor companies and other tech firms that count China among their largest single markets are facing potentially severe damage to their revenues. Other companies that manufacture tech products in China are having to recall U.S. employees because the ban also bars “U.S. persons” from supporting technology covered by the ban.

Internationally, large chipmakers, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and South Korea’s Samsung, as well as Netherlands-based ASML, which makes chip manufacturing equipment, are reassessing their business with China as they explore how deeply the new rules will cut into their sales.

“It really is reshaping the market,” said James Lewis, senior vice president and director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The Koreans, the Taiwanese and some American companies are really nervous about it. I mean, everyone’s asking, ‘What can I still sell to China?’ And in some cases, the answer is ‘nothing,'” he told VOA.

Targeting China’s military

The Biden administration has characterized the ban as a national security measure, saying that withholding highly sophisticated semiconductors from China will hamper the development of Chinese weapons and surveillance technology.

The trouble is that the same technology that goes into Chinese weapons systems is also necessary for other goods, including electric vehicles, an area in which China is significantly further advanced than the U.S.

It remains unclear precisely how U.S. authorities will enforce the ban. It primarily targets the most advanced chip technology available, meaning that “mature” chip technology — older and less sophisticated chips — will not be affected.

Where the U.S. draws that line, however, could determine whether Chinese businesses such as smartphone manufacturers and commercial aerospace companies are left alone or devastated.

‘Cold war’ tactic

Experts and pundits saw the imposition of the tough new ban as a dramatic escalation of the Biden administration’s efforts to keep China from being able to advance toward technological parity with the U.S.

Writing for the American news publication Foreign Policy, Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the move “looks increasingly drawn from the Cold War playbook.” He also noted that “the new restrictions, which will be fully implemented as soon as Oct. 21, go well beyond any previous measures by seeking to freeze China at a backward state of semiconductor development and cut Chinese companies off from U.S. industry expertise.”

In the Financial Times, U.S. national editor and columnist Edward Luce wrote that “Joe Biden this month launched a full-blown economic war on China.”

“His escalation … marks a final break with decades of U.S. foreign policy that assumed China’s global integration would tame its rise as a great power,” he added.

China reacts

Speaking at the start of the Chinese Communist Party’s five-year congress Sunday, during which he is expected to be named to an extraordinary third term as party leader, Xi Jinping did not address the ban directly. However, he did promise to step up investment in areas that would help his country achieve “technology self-reliance.”

“China will move faster to launch a number of major national projects that are of strategic, big-picture and long-term importance,” Xi said.

In a statement provided to VOA by the Chinese embassy in the U.S., spokesperson Liu Pengyu said that he was not aware of any specific meetings being held in China.

“I would like to note that what the U.S. is doing is purely ‘sci-tech hegemony.’ It seeks to use its technological prowess as an advantage to hobble and suppress the development of emerging markets and developing countries,” Liu said. “The U.S. probably hopes that China and the rest of the developing world will forever stay at the lower end of the industrial chain. This will disrupt the global supply chain and industrial chain, and the final result will hurt itself and others alike.”

Industry concerned

Semiconductor companies have reacted carefully to the Biden administration’s decision. Although they are acknowledging the government’s concerns, they are signaling frustration that they were neither given clear guidance about how the ban will be applied nor given an opportunity to consult with the Commerce Department before it was put into place.

In a statement provided to VOA, SEMI, a trade group representing the semiconductor industry, said that its members understand the United States’ national security concerns. In addition, it said, “We are currently evaluating the potential effects of the Commerce Department’s unilateral controls on the semiconductor industry in the U.S. and abroad. We plan to provide feedback to the government on these rules, as they were not previously published for public comment.”

“We believe it is vitally important that the U.S. government implements these rules in close collaboration with and input from our key international partners in order to limit unintended adverse consequences that could reverberate through the domestic supply chain of this critical industry.”
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More and more, people are installing video doorbells and surveillance cameras in and around their homes to protect against unwanted intruders. But while many consumers feel the devices provide some peace of mind, some observers are concerned that they trigger personal biases toward those captured on camera. VOA’s Julie Taboh has this report. Michelle Quinn contributed.
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Who said there is nothing new under the sun? 

One of the hottest innovations for the non-polluting generation of electricity is floating photo-voltaics, or FPV, which involves anchoring solar panels in bodies of water, especially lakes, reservoirs and seas. Some projects in Asia incorporate thousands of panels to generate hundreds of megawatts.

FPV got a head start in Asia and Europe where it makes a lot of economic sense with open land highly valued for agriculture.

The first modest systems were installed in Japan and at a California winery in 2007 and 2008.  

On land, a one-megawatt projects requires between one and 1.6 hectares.  

Floating solar projects are even more attractive when they can be built on bodies of water adjacent to hydropower plants with existing transmission lines. 

Most of the largest such projects are in China and India. There also are large-scale facilities in Brazil, Portugal and Singapore.

A proposed 2.1 gigawatt floating solar farm on a tidal flat on the coast of the Yellow Sea in South Korea, which would contain five million solar modules over an area covering 30 square kilometers with a $4 billion price tag, is facing an uncertain future with a new government in Seoul. President Yoon Suk-yeol has indicated he prefers to boost nuclear over solar power. 

Other gigawatt-scale projects are moving off the drawing board in India and Laos, as well as the North Sea, off the Dutch coast. 

The technology has also excited planners in sub-Saharan Africa with the lowest electricity access rate in the world and an abundance of sunshine. 

In countries that depend on a lot of hydropower, “there’s concerns around what does power generation look like during droughts, for example, and with climate change, we expect that we’ll see more extreme weather events. When we’re thinking about droughts, there is the opportunity to then have FPV as another renewable energy option in your toolkit essentially,” explained Sika Gadzanku, a researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. “So instead of depending so much on hydro, now you can use more FPV and reduce your dependence on hydro, during very dry seasons, to use your floating solar photovoltaics.”  

A one percent coverage of hydropower reservoirs with floating solar panels could provide an increase of 50 percent of the annual production of existing hydroelectric plants in Africa, according to a study funded by the European Commission.

Challenges

There are potential flotovoltaic hazards, however. A plant caught fire in Chiba prefecture in Japan in 2019. Officials blamed a typhoon for shifting panels one atop another, generating intense heat and possibly sparking the fire at the 18-hectare facility containing more than 50,000 floating solar panels at the Yamakura Dam.

The most significant barrier to wider adoption of the technology, at present, is the price. It is more expensive to construct a floating array than a similarly sized installation on land. But with the higher costs there are additional benefits: Due to passive cooling of water bodies, the floating panels can function more effectively than conventional solar panels. They also reduce light exposure and lower the water temperature, minimizing harmful algae growth.

That all sounded promising to officials in the town of Windsor in northern California’s wine country. Nearly 5,000 solar panels, each generating 360 watts of electricity, are now floating on one of Windsor’s wastewater ponds.

“They’re all interlinked. Each panel gets its own float. And they actually move quite well with wave action and wind action,” . You’d be surprised how they can kind of just suck up the waves and ride them out without breaking or coming apart,” said Garrett Broughton, the senior civil engineer for Windsor’s public works department.   

The floating panels are easy on the environment and Windsor’s budget, in which the wastewater plant’s electric bill was the town government’s largest

Town Council member Deborah Fudge pushed for the 1.78-megawatt project over an alternative of putting solar panels atop carports.

“They offset 350 metric tons of carbon dioxide yearly. And they also provide 90 percent of the power that we need for all of the operations for treating wastewater, for all the operations of our corporation yard and also for pumping our wastewater to the geysers, which, is a geothermal field, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) north,” Fudge told VOA. 

The town leases the floating panels from the company that installed them, which gives it a set price for electricity on a long-term contract, meaning Windsor is paying about 30 percent of what it previously spent for the same amount of power.

“It’s not like we’ve invested in something where we’re not going to get a payback. We’re getting a payback as we speak. And we’ll get a payback for 25 years,” said Windsor’s mayor, Sam Salmon. 

The floating systems are not intended to fully blanket bodies of water, allowing for other activities to continue, such as boating and fishing. 

“We do not assume the floating structure will cover the whole water body, it’s often a very small percentage of that water body,” NREL’s Gadzanku told VOA. “Even just from a visual perspective you don’t want to maybe see PV panels covering an entire reservoir.”

NREL has identified 24,419 man-made bodies of water in the United States as suitable for FPV placement. Floating panels covering little more than one-fourth the area of each these sites would potentially generate nearly 10 percent of America’s energy needs, according to the lab.

Among the sites is the 119-hectare Smith Lake, a man-made reservoir managed by Stafford County in Virginia to produce drinking water. It is also a site for recreational fishing adjacent to the U.S. Marine Corps’ Quantico base.  

“Many of these eligible bodies of water are in water-stressed areas with high land acquisition costs and high electricity prices, suggesting multiple benefits of FP technologies,” wrote the study’s authors. 

“It really is an option with a lot of proven technology behind it,” said Gadzanku.
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Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to Silicon Valley this week comes as the Biden administration is promoting more investment in technology but also enacting more restrictions on selling technology to businesses in China. Michelle Quinn reports.
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Elon Musk said Saturday his rocket company, SpaceX, would continue to fund its Starlink internet service in Ukraine, citing the need for “good deeds,” a day after he said it could no longer afford to do so.

Musk tweeted: “the hell with it … even though starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding ukraine govt for free.”

Musk said Friday that SpaceX could not indefinitely fund Starlink in Ukraine. The service has helped civilians and military stay online during the war with Russia.

Although it was not immediately clear whether Musk’s change of mind was genuine, he later appeared to indicate it was. When a Twitter user told Musk “No good deed goes unpunished,” he replied “Even so, we should still do good deeds.”

The billionaire has been in online fights with Ukrainian officials over a peace plan he put forward which Ukraine says is too generous to Russia.

He had made his Friday remarks about funding after a media report that SpaceX had asked the Pentagon to pay for the donations of Starlink.

SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment. The Pentagon declined to comment.
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