Updated 2:56 PM ET, Mon October 25, 2021
(CNN)As a historic “bomb cyclone” winds down on the West Coast, computer forecast models are hinting at a possible autumn nor’easter on the East Coast starting Tuesday.
Updated 2:56 PM ET, Mon October 25, 2021
(CNN)As a historic “bomb cyclone” winds down on the West Coast, computer forecast models are hinting at a possible autumn nor’easter on the East Coast starting Tuesday.
Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/25/weather/weather-news-noreaster-bomb-cyclone-forecast-wxn/index.html
“The airlines will verify vaccination status in same way they have been, and will continue to do, with pre-departure negative Covid test results,” a senior Biden administration official told reporters Monday.
Those under the age of 18 will be exempted from these requirements, in large part due to the limited availability or authorization of Covid-19 vaccines for children across much of the world. Children aged 2 or older will be required to have a negative Covid test prior to their flight.
The U.S. first outlined the impending international travel rules for fully vaccinated individuals in mid September.
“We have taken the deliberate step of taking this time to ensure implementation goes as smooth as possible, particularly with something this wide ranging,” a second senior administration official told reporters on Monday.
The rules also include an exemption for people hailing from a country with limited vaccine availability, which the Biden administration is defining as a place where less than 10 percent of the population is fully vaccinated “due to lack of vaccines,” according to one senior administration official. There are roughly 50 countries that fall under that threshold, including much of Africa.
However, that official added that unvaccinated individuals who qualify will have to demonstrate a “specific, compelling” reason for traveling to the U.S. and test negative one day prior to their flight. Any child traveling with an unvaccinated adult will also have to show proof of a negative test within that same window.
Unvaccinated U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents will also have to show proof of a negative test one day prior to boarding, down from three days. Fully vaccinated individuals will continue to have three days to get tested.
There are a handful of other narrow exceptions to the vaccination requirement, such as for foreign nationals who had severe allergic reactions to a prior Covid-19 vaccine dose.
U.S-bound travelers will also have to submit information to airlines, such as working phone numbers and email addresses, to allow health officials to conduct contact tracing if travelers have been potentially exposed to the coronavirus.
The announcement of the new rules comes days before President Joe Biden’s planned trip to Europe for a set of summit meetings with other global leaders, as well as Pope Francis.
The U.S. is also scheduled to reopen land and ferry crossings to fully vaccinated travelers the same day as the air travel rules, Nov. 8. The borders have been closed to non-essential, discretionary travel since March 2020 and in recent months had become a major source of frustration within the Canadian government and among U.S. elected officials representing communities along the northern border.
Source Article from https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/25/biden-international-travel-vaccianted-flyers-517073
The U.S. expressed alarm on Monday over an apparent military coup in Sudan, shortly after the Biden administration’s special envoy for the Horn of Africa was in the country encouraging cooperation between civilian and military leaders of Khartoum’s transitional government.
Thousands of protesters took to the streets after reports emerged that the country’s Prime Minister Abdallah Hamdok was detained, with some reports suggesting the leader was put under house arrest, in addition to reports of detention of other senior government officials.
“The US is deeply alarmed at reports of a military take-over of the transitional government. This would contravene the Constitutional Declaration and the democratic aspirations of the Sudanese people and is utterly unacceptable,” U.S. Special Envoy Jeffrey Feltman said in a tweet.
“As we have said repeatedly, any changes to the transitional government by force puts at risk U.S. assistance.”
The U.S. has provided an estimated $377 million in humanitarian assistance for fiscal year 2021, making it the single largest donor of such aid.
White House Deputy Spokesperson Karine Jean-PierreKarine Jean-PierrePatience with Biden wearing thin among Black leaders Democrats brush off risks of paring down spending package Fed imposes tougher rules on financial trades amid scandal MORE told reporters aboard Air Force One on Monday morning that the U.S. rejects “the actions by the military and call for the immediate release of the prime minister and others who have been placed under house arrest.”
She added that “the actions today are in stark opposition to the will of the Sudanese people and their aspirations for peace, liberty, and justice. The United States continues to strongly support the Sudanese people’s demand for a democratic transition in Sudan and will continue to evaluate how best to help the Sudanese people achieve this goal.”
Sudan’s top general early Monday morning reportedly announced the dissolution of the transitional civilian-military government, the Sovereign Council, a two-year-old government established in the wake of a popular revolution that overthrew the 30-year military dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir.
The head of the military, Gen. Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, reportedly said on national television that disputes between political factions prompted the military to intervene, which he said would run the country while setting up a technocratic government until elections can be held in July 2023.
“The Armed Forces will continue completing the democratic transition until the handover of the country’s leadership to a civilian, elected government,” he said, according to The Associated Press.
The general’s announcement was met with criticism by Sudan’s Ministry of Information, the AP reported. It called Burhan’s speech an “announcement of a seizure of power by military coup.”
The European Union’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, issued a statement on Monday condemning the detention of Sudanese Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok and other members of the civilian leadership and called on the military to “immediately release those they have unlawfully detained.
“The actions of the military represent a betrayal of the revolution, the transition, and the legitimate requests of the Sudanese people for peace, justice and economic development,” Borrell said.
United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres echoed calls for the release of Hamdok and other civilian government leaders.
“I condemn the ongoing military coup in Sudan. Prime Minister Hamdok & all other officials must be released immediately. There must be full respect for the constitutional charter to protect the hard-won political transition. The UN will continue to stand with the people of Sudan,” he tweeted.
The apparent coup comes just hours after Feltman, the U.S. special envoy for the Horn of Africa, met with political and military leaders of Sudan’s transitional government and expressed support for the continued transition to a full, civilian-led government.
A readout of a meeting between Feltman and Hamdok said that the U.S. side expressed support for “preserving the democratic [civilian] transition process, leading to free and fair elections in which the Sudanese people choose their representatives at the end of the transitional period.”
The readout said Feltman had a joint meeting with Hamdok and the general, Al-Burhan, as well as other top civilian and military leaders.
The U.S. was deeply invested in Sudan’s transition from a military dictatorship to a democracy, removing the country from a list of state sponsors of terrorism in 2020 after Khartoum renounced support or ties to designated terrorist organizations, established itself as a partner in counterterrorism and provided compensation to victims of terrorist attacks that Sudan had been alleged to have aided and abetted.
The removal of the sponsor of terrorism designation also coincided with a pronouncement by Khartoum’s transitional government that it would establish relations with Israel, part of the group of Muslim- and Arab-majority countries signing the Abraham Accords, normalization agreements with Israel that were fostered by the Trump administration.
The 2019 revolution and overthrow of the Bashir government was viewed as a monumental victory for the will of the popular people in Sudan. But the transition from military rule to a completely democratic, civilian-led government stalled over political fighting.
Protesters had continued to take to the streets over the inaction of the transitional government and in September, civilian government leaders said they foiled an attempted military coup by Bashir loyalists.
Morgan Chalfant contributed to this story.
This story was updated at 11:16 a.m.
Source Article from https://thehill.com/policy/international/578258-us-deeply-alarmed-by-reports-of-military-takeover-in-sudan
Emissions rise from Duke Energy’s coal-fired Asheville power plant in Arden, N.C., in 2018.
Charles Mostoller/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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Emissions rise from Duke Energy’s coal-fired Asheville power plant in Arden, N.C., in 2018.
Charles Mostoller/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Despite a world economy that slowed significantly because of COVID-19, the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached a new record last year, putting the goal of slowing the rise of global temperatures “way off track,” according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
The United Nations body said Monday that carbon dioxide had risen by more than the 10-year average in 2020 to 413.2 parts per million, despite a slight decrease in emissions due to the coronavirus pandemic. Methane and nitrous oxide, two other potent greenhouse gases, also showed increases, the WMO said in the latest issue of its Greenhouse Gas Bulletin.
The report comes ahead of next week’s international climate meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, known as the Conference of the Parties, or COP, which is meant to take stock of global progress toward cutting emissions. The Biden administration is also struggling to save its Clean Electricity Performance Program, an effort that aims to reduce U.S. emissions to about half of 2005 levels by the end of the decade.
Together, the U.S., China and the European Union are responsible for more than 40% of global carbon emissions.
“At the current rate of increase in greenhouse gas concentrations, we will see a temperature increase by the end of this century far in excess of the Paris Agreement targets of 1.5 to 2 C above preindustrial levels,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said.
“We are way off track,” he said.
Taalas said the last time the Earth had a comparable level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 3 million to 5 million years ago, when the average global temperature was 2 to 3 Celsius hotter and the sea level was 10 to 20 meters (32 to 65 feet) higher than today.
The WMO says that only half of human-emitted carbon dioxide is absorbed by oceans and land ecosystems. The other half remains in the atmosphere, and the overall amount in the air is sensitive to climate and land-use changes. Because carbon emissions increased in the last decade, even though there was a decrease last year due to reduced economic activity, atmospheric levels continued to increase progressively from the accumulation.
Source Article from https://www.npr.org/2021/10/25/1048960283/greenhouse-emissions-reached-record-levels-in-2020
Authorities in Illinois said on Monday they had identified another victim of John Wayne Gacy, who was convicted of killing 33 young men and boys in the 1970s.
Francis Wayne Alexander, a North Carolina man who moved to Chicago, would have been 21 or 22 when Gacy killed him some time between early 1976 and early 1977, the Cook county sheriff, Tom Dart, told reporters.
In a statement, Alexander’s sister, Carolyn Sanders, thanked the sheriff’s office for giving the family some level of “closure”.
“It is hard, even 45 years later, to know the fate of our beloved Wayne,” Sanders said. “He was killed at the hands of a vile and evil man. Our hearts are heavy, and our sympathies go out to the other victims’ families … We can now lay to rest what happened and move forward by honoring Wayne.”
Alexander’s remains were among 26 sets police found in the crawl space under Gacy’s home just outside Chicago. Three victims were found buried on Gacy’s property and four others whom Gacy admitted killing were found in waterways south of Chicago.
In 2011, Dart’s office exhumed the remains of eight victims buried without police knowing who they were. Dart called on anyone who had a male relative disappear in the Chicago area in the 1970s to submit DNA.
Within weeks, the sheriff’s office announced it had identified one set of remains as those of William Bundy, a 19-year-old construction worker.
In 2017, the office identified a second set as those of 16-year-old Jimmy Haakenson, who disappeared after he phoned his mother in Minnesota and told her that he was in Chicago.
The details of Alexander’s life in Chicago are sketchy. He first moved to New York and then to Chicago, where he was married for about three months before a divorce in 1975.
According to the sheriff’s office, the last known record of Alexander’s life was a traffic ticket received in Chicago in January 1976 – a year in which he earned little money.
How he crossed paths with one of the most notorious serial killers in American history is a mystery, as authorities say all they know is that “Alexander lived in an area that was frequented by Gacy and where other identified victims had previously lived”.
Alexander was identified when the sheriff’s department teamed up with a non-profit, the DNA Doe Project, which uses genetic information to locate relatives of dead people who have not been identified.
The organization compared the DNA profile from the unidentified victim’s remains to profiles on a genealogy website. That led it to Alexander’s family, and Alexander’s mother and half-brother provided DNA for comparison.
Between the genetic testing, financial records, postmortem reports and other information, investigators were able to confirm that the remains were Alexander’s.
The submission of DNA from people who suspected Gacy might have killed their loved ones has helped police solve at least 11 cold cases that had nothing to do with Gacy, who was executed in 1994.
It has also helped families find loved ones who while missing were alive, including a man in Oregon who had no idea his family was looking for him.
Source Article from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/oct/25/serial-killer-john-wayne-gacy-victim-identified-francis-wayne-alexander
Facebook has spent the past few years fighting the label of a monopoly, which many lawmakers and academics say is appropriate for a platform of its scale.
But among its ranks, Facebook employees acknowledge the vast power of the platform with details that could fuel ongoing and future antitrust lawsuits. The FTC recently filed an amended complaint alleging Facebook illegally maintained monopoly power in personal social networking services after a judge threw out its initial claims.
According to a report from Politico, 78% of American adults and nearly all teens in the U.S. use Facebook’s services. Even though competitors like TikTok and Snap have made progress with teen users, Facebook and Instagram continue to maintain a stronghold on activities like connecting with others on common interests and sharing photos and videos, according to a survey of users last year.
And once they sign up, few actually leave the platforms, Facebook’s own research reportedly shows.
In a 2018 presentation reviewed by Politico, employees wrote that despite “Facebook-the-company” doing only “okay” with teens around the world, “we do have one of the top social products — with growing market share — almost everywhere.”
Facebook spokesperson Christopher Sgro told Politico that, “Far from supporting the government’s case, the documents presented to Facebook firmly reinforce what Facebook has always said: We compete with a broad range of services for people’s time and attention, including apps that offer social, community, video, news and messaging features.”
This story is developing. Check back for updates.
WATCH: The messy business of content moderation on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube
Source Article from https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/25/facebook-whistleblower-documents-released-shares-under-pressure.html
WASHINGTON (AP) — Pivotal Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin appears to be on board with White House proposals for new taxes on billionaires and certain corporations to help pay for President Joe Biden’s scaled-back social services and climate change package.
Biden huddled with the conservative West Virginia Democrat and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer at the president’s Delaware home on Sunday as they work on resolving the disputes between centrists and progressives that have stalled the Democrats’ wide-ranging bill. A person who insisted on anonymity to discuss Manchin’s position told The Associated Press the senator is agreeable to the White House’s new approach on the tax proposals.
What had been a sweeping $3.5 trillion plan is now being eyed as $1.75 trillion package. That’s within a range that could still climb considerably higher, according to a second person who insisted on anonymity to discuss the private talks.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that even at “half” the original $3.5 trillion proposed, Biden’s signature domestic initiative would be larger than any other legislative package with big investments in health care, child care and strategies to tackle climate change.
“It is less than what was projected to begin with, but it’s still bigger than anything we have ever done in terms of addressing the needs of America’s working families,” Pelosi said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Democrats are working intensely to try again to wrap up talks on the measure so the president can spotlight his administration’s achievements to world leaders at two overseas summits on the economy and climate change that get underway this week.
Biden met with Manchin and Schumer, D-N.Y., at the president’s home in Wilmington after Democrats missed last week’s deadline to resolve disputes. Biden has said he’d like to see a $2 trillion package and they are trying again this upcoming week to reach agreement.
It’s unclear what level of the new taxes Manchin would support, but he generally backs the White House proposals, according to the person who insisted on anonymity to discuss Manchin’s position. Neither person insisting on anonymity was authorized to discuss the negotiations by name.
The White House said the breakfast meeting was a “productive discussion” about the president’s agenda. The talks appeared to last for hours, but no decisions were announced. The Democrats “continued to make progress,” the White House said in its post-meeting statement.
Resolving the revenue side is key as the Democrats insist the new spending will be fully paid for by the various taxes.
Manchin and another Democrat, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have almost on their own halted Biden’s proposal from advancing. With Republican opposition and an evenly split 50-50 Senate, Biden has no votes to spare, and the two Democratic senators have insisted on reducing the size of the enormous package and pressed for other changes.
One key debate has been over the revenues to pay for the package, after Sinema rejected an earlier plan to reverse the Republican-led 2017 tax cuts and raise rates on corporations earning more than $5 million a year and wealthy Americans earning more than $400,000, or $450,000 for couples.
Instead, the White House is considering a tax on the investment incomes of billionaires — fewer than 1,000 of the wealthiest Americans with at least $1 billion in assets. It also has floated a 15% corporate minimum tax that is designed to ensure all companies pay what Biden calls their “fair share” — ending the practice of some big-name firms paying no taxes.
Democrats initially planned that Biden’s package would contain $3.5 trillion worth of spending and tax initiatives over 10 years. But demands by moderates led by Manchin and Sinema to contain costs mean its final price tag could well be less than $2 trillion.
Disputes remain over far-reaching investments, including plans to expand Medicare coverage with dental, vision and hearing aid benefits for seniors; child care assistance; and free pre-kindergarten.
Pelosi, D-Calif., said on CNN that Democrats were still working to keep in provisions for four weeks of paid family leave but acknowledged that other proposals such as expanding Medicare to include dental coverage could prove harder to save because of cost.
Pelosi reiterated that about 90% is wrapped up and said she expected an agreement by week’s end, paving the way for a House vote on a separate $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill before next Sunday, Oct. 31, when a series of transportation programs will lapse. The Senate approved over the summer the package of road, broadband and other public works projects, but the measure stalled in the House during deliberations on the broader Biden bill.
Manchin, whose state has a major coal industry, has opposed Biden’s initial climate change proposals, which involved a plan to penalize utilities that do not switch quickly to clean energy. Democrats are now also compiling other climate change strategies to meet Biden’s goal of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% by 2030.
Democrats were hoping Biden could cite major accomplishments when he attends a global conference in Scotland on climate change in early November after attending a summit of world leaders in Rome.
Sen. Angus King, a Maine independent who caucuses with Democrats, said the expected cuts to the clean energy provisions in the spending bill were especially disappointing.
“If we’re going to get the rest of the world to take serious steps to remedy this problem, we’ve got to do it ourselves,” King said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Pelosi insisted that Democrats had pieced together other policies in the spending bill that could reduce emissions. “We will have something that will meet the president’s goals,” she said.
Democrats also want to make progress that could help Democrat Terry McAuliffe win a neck-and-neck Nov. 2 gubernatorial election in Virginia.
Rep. Ro Khanna, a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, maintained that his caucus will not budge on supporting the infrastructure bill before Oct. 31 if there is no agreement on the broader package, which would be passed under so-called budget reconciliation rules.
“The president needs the reconciliation agreement to go to Glasgow,” Khanna, D-Calif., said on “Fox News Sunday.” He added: “That’s what is going to deal with climate change, that’s what’s going to hit his goals of 50% reduction by 2030. I’m confident we will have an agreement.”
___
Associated Press writer Alan Fram contributed to this report.
Source Article from https://apnews.com/article/joe-manchin-joe-biden-nancy-pelosi-wealth-tax-congress-132c737a5a2fb5ea1931df2344f55567
On Sunday, a landslide occurred along State Route 70 near Tobin, Calif., on the Butte-Plumas County line, forcing the closure of the highway. The area was within the burn scar of the Dixie Fire, which burned nearly a million acres this year.
Source Article from https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/10/25/atmospheric-river-record-rain-california/
Oct 25 (Reuters) – Facebook employees have warned for years that as the company raced to become a global service it was failing to police abusive content in countries where such speech was likely to cause the most harm, according to interviews with five former employees and internal company documents viewed by Reuters.
For over a decade, Facebook has pushed to become the world’s dominant online platform. It currently operates in more than 190 countries and boasts more than 2.8 billion monthly users who post content in more than 160 languages. But its efforts to prevent its products from becoming conduits for hate speech, inflammatory rhetoric and misinformation – some which has been blamed for inciting violence – have not kept pace with its global expansion.
(Also Read: Australian publisher calls government on Facebook)
Internal company documents viewed by Reuters show Facebook has known that it hasn’t hired enough workers who possess both the language skills and knowledge of local events needed to identify objectionable posts from users in a number of developing countries. The documents also showed that the artificial intelligence systems Facebook employs to root out such content frequently aren’t up to the task, either; and that the company hasn’t made it easy for its global users themselves to flag posts that violate the site’s rules.
Those shortcomings, employees warned in the documents, could limit the company’s ability to make good on its promise to block hate speech and other rule-breaking posts in places from Afghanistan to Yemen.
In a review posted to Facebook’s internal message board last year regarding ways the company identifies abuses on its site, one employee reported “significant gaps” in certain countries at risk of real-world violence, especially Myanmar and Ethiopia.
The documents are among a cache of disclosures made to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and Congress by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former Facebook product manager who left the company in May. Reuters was among a group of news organizations able to view the documents, which include presentations, reports and posts shared on the company’s internal message board. Their existence was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
Facebook spokesperson Mavis Jones said in a statement that the company has native speakers worldwide reviewing content in more than 70 languages, as well as experts in humanitarian and human rights issues. She said these teams are working to stop abuse on Facebook’s platform in places where there is a heightened risk of conflict and violence.
“We know these challenges are real and we are proud of the work we’ve done to date,” Jones said.
Still, the cache of internal Facebook documents offers detailed snapshots of how employees in recent years have sounded alarms about problems with the company’s tools – both human and technological – aimed at rooting out or blocking speech that violated its own standards. The material expands upon Reuters’ previous reporting on Myanmar and other countries, where the world’s largest social network has failed repeatedly to protect users from problems on its own platform and has struggled to monitor content across languages.
Among the weaknesses cited were a lack of screening algorithms for languages used in some of the countries Facebook has deemed most “at-risk” for potential real-world harm and violence stemming from abuses on its site.
The company designates countries “at-risk” based on variables including unrest, ethnic violence, the number of users and existing laws, two former staffers told Reuters. The system aims to steer resources to places where abuses on its site could have the most severe impact, the people said.
Facebook reviews and prioritizes these countries every six months in line with United Nations guidelines aimed at helping companies prevent and remedy human rights abuses in their business operations, spokesperson Jones said.
In 2018, United Nations experts investigating a brutal campaign of killings and expulsions against Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslim minority said Facebook was widely used to spread hate speech toward them. That prompted the company to increase its staffing in vulnerable countries, a former employee told Reuters. Facebook has said it should have done more to prevent the platform being used to incite offline violence in the country.
Ashraf Zeitoon, Facebook’s former head of policy for the Middle East and North Africa, who left in 2017, said the company’s approach to global growth has been “colonial,” focused on monetization without safety measures.
More than 90% of Facebook’s monthly active users are outside the United States or Canada.
LANGUAGE ISSUES
Facebook has long touted the importance of its artificial-intelligence (AI) systems, in combination with human review, as a way of tackling objectionable and dangerous content on its platforms. Machine-learning systems can detect such content with varying levels of accuracy.
But languages spoken outside the United States, Canada and Europe have been a stumbling block for Facebook’s automated content moderation, the documents provided to the government by Haugen show. The company lacks AI systems to detect abusive posts in a number of languages used on its platform. In 2020, for example, the company did not have screening algorithms known as “classifiers” to find misinformation in Burmese, the language of Myanmar, or hate speech in the Ethiopian languages of Oromo or Amharic, a document showed.
Former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen testifies during a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing entitled ‘Protecting Kids Online: Testimony from a Facebook Whistleblower’ on Capitol Hill, in Washington, U.S., October 5, 2021. Matt McClain/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo
These gaps can allow abusive posts to proliferate in the countries where Facebook itself has determined the risk of real-world harm is high.
Reuters this month found posts in Amharic, one of Ethiopia’s most common languages, referring to different ethnic groups as the enemy and issuing them death threats. A nearly year-long conflict in the country between the Ethiopian government and rebel forces in the Tigray region has killed thousands of people and displaced more than 2 million.
Facebook spokesperson Jones said the company now has proactive detection technology to detect hate speech in Oromo and Amharic and has hired more people with “language, country and topic expertise,” including people who have worked in Myanmar and Ethiopia.
In an undated document, which a person familiar with the disclosures said was from 2021, Facebook employees also shared examples of “fear-mongering, anti-Muslim narratives” spread on the site in India, including calls to oust the large minority Muslim population there. “Our lack of Hindi and Bengali classifiers means much of this content is never flagged or actioned,” the document said. Internal posts and comments by employees this year also noted the lack of classifiers in the Urdu and Pashto languages to screen problematic content posted by users in Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan.
Jones said Facebook added hate speech classifiers for Hindi in 2018 and Bengali in 2020, and classifiers for violence and incitement in Hindi and Bengali this year. She said Facebook also now has hate speech classifiers in Urdu but not Pashto.
Facebook’s human review of posts, which is crucial for nuanced problems like hate speech, also has gaps across key languages, the documents show. An undated document laid out how its content moderation operation struggled with Arabic-language dialects of multiple “at-risk” countries, leaving it constantly “playing catch up.” The document acknowledged that, even within its Arabic-speaking reviewers, “Yemeni, Libyan, Saudi Arabian (really all Gulf nations) are either missing or have very low representation.”
Facebook’s Jones acknowledged that Arabic language content moderation “presents an enormous set of challenges.” She said Facebook has made investments in staff over the last two years but recognizes “we still have more work to do.”
Three former Facebook employees who worked for the company’s Asia Pacific and Middle East and North Africa offices in the past five years told Reuters they believed content moderation in their regions had not been a priority for Facebook management. These people said leadership did not understand the issues and did not devote enough staff and resources.
Facebook’s Jones said the California company cracks down on abuse by users outside the United States with the same intensity applied domestically.
The company said it uses AI proactively to identify hate speech in more than 50 languages. Facebook said it bases its decisions on where to deploy AI on the size of the market and an assessment of the country’s risks. It declined to say in how many countries it did not have functioning hate speech classifiers.
Facebook also says it has 15,000 content moderators reviewing material from its global users. “Adding more language expertise has been a key focus for us,” Jones said.
In the past two years, it has hired people who can review content in Amharic, Oromo, Tigrinya, Somali, and Burmese, the company said, and this year added moderators in 12 new languages, including Haitian Creole.
Facebook declined to say whether it requires a minimum number of content moderators for any language offered on the platform.
LOST IN TRANSLATION
Facebook’s users are a powerful resource to identify content that violates the company’s standards. The company has built a system for them to do so, but has acknowledged that the process can be time consuming and expensive for users in countries without reliable internet access. The reporting tool also has had bugs, design flaws and accessibility issues for some languages, according to the documents and digital rights activists who spoke with Reuters.
Next Billion Network, a group of tech civic society groups working mostly across Asia, the Middle East and Africa, said in recent years it had repeatedly flagged problems with the reporting system to Facebook management. Those included a technical defect that kept Facebook’s content review system from being able to see objectionable text accompanying videos and photos in some posts reported by users. That issue prevented serious violations, such as death threats in the text of these posts, from being properly assessed, the group and a former Facebook employee told Reuters. They said the issue was fixed in 2020.
Facebook said it continues to work to improve its reporting systems and takes feedback seriously.
Language coverage remains a problem. A Facebook presentation from January, included in the documents, concluded “there is a huge gap in the Hate Speech reporting process in local languages” for users in Afghanistan. The recent pullout of U.S. troops there after two decades has ignited an internal power struggle in the country. So-called “community standards” – the rules that govern what users can post – are also not available in Afghanistan’s main languages of Pashto and Dari, the author of the presentation said.
A Reuters review this month found that community standards weren’t available in about half the more than 110 languages that Facebook supports with features such as menus and prompts.
Facebook said it aims to have these rules available in 59 languages by the end of the year, and in another 20 languages by the end of 2022.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Source Article from https://www.reuters.com/technology/facebook-knew-about-failed-police-abusive-content-globally-documents-2021-10-25/
Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/25/us/abandoned-children-texas-apartment/index.html
“It is going to be very, very tough this summit. I am very worried because it might go wrong and we might not get the agreements that we need and it is touch and go, it is very, very difficult, but I think it can be done,” he said on Monday.
Source Article from https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59016075
The Facebook Papers are a set of internal documents that were provided to Congress in redacted form by Frances Haugen’s legal counsel. The redacted versions were reviewed by a consortium of news organizations, including The Washington Post.
The trove of documents show how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has, at times, contradicted, downplayed or failed to disclose company findings on the impact of its products and platforms.
The documents also provided new details of the social media platform’s role in fomenting the storming of the U.S. Capitol.
Read more from The Post’s investigation:
Key takeaways from the Facebook Papers
How Facebook neglected the rest of the world, fueling hate speech and violence in India
Have a question about the Facebook Papers? Ask The Post.
Source Article from https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/25/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-whistleblower/
(CNN)Four years after White supremacists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, for the “Unite the Right” rally, a civil trial starting Monday will decide whether organizers had predetermined the event would turn violent. Dozens were injured and one person died in the chaos surrounding the rally.
Source Article from https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/25/us/charlottesville-unite-the-right-rally-civil-trial/index.html
WASHINGTON (AP) — Pivotal Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin appears to be on board with White House proposals for new taxes on billionaires and certain corporations to help pay for President Joe Biden’s scaled-back social services and climate change package.
Biden huddled with the conservative West Virginia Democrat and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer at the president’s Delaware home Sunday as they work on resolving the disputes between centrists and progressives that have stalled the Democrats’ wide-ranging bill. A person who requested anonymity to discuss Manchin’s position told The Associated Press the senator is agreeable to the White House’s new approach on the tax proposals.
What had been a sweeping $3.5 trillion plan is now being eyed as $1.75 trillion package. That’s within a range that could still climb considerably higher, according to a second person who requested anonymity to discuss the private talks.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that even at “half” the original $3.5 trillion proposed, Biden’s signature domestic initiative would be larger than any other legislative package with big investments in health care, child care and strategies to tackle climate change.
“It is less than what was projected to begin with, but it’s still bigger than anything we have ever done in terms of addressing the needs of America’s working families,” Pelosi said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Democrats are working intensely to try again to wrap up talks on the measure so the president can spotlight his administration’s achievements to world leaders at two overseas summits on the economy and climate change that get underway this week.
Biden met with Manchin and Schumer, D-N.Y., at the president’s home in Wilmington after Democrats missed last week’s deadline to resolve disputes. Biden has said he’d like to see a $2 trillion package and they are trying again this upcoming week to reach agreement.
It’s unclear what level of the new taxes Manchin would support, but he generally backs the White House proposals, according to the person who requested anonymity to discuss Manchin’s position. Neither person requesting anonymity was authorized to discuss the negotiations by name.
The White House said the breakfast meeting was a “productive discussion” about the president’s agenda. The talks appeared to last for hours, but no decisions were announced. The Democrats “continued to make progress,” the White House said in its post-meeting statement.
Resolving the revenue side is key as the Democrats insist the new spending will be fully paid for by the various taxes.
Manchin and another Democrat, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have almost on their own halted Biden’s proposal from advancing. With Republican opposition and an evenly split 50-50 Senate, Biden has no votes to spare and the two Democratic senators have insisted on reducing the size of the enormous package and pressed for other changes.
One key debate has been over the revenues to pay for the package, after Sinema rejected an earlier plan to reverse the Republican-led 2017 tax cuts and raise rates on corporations earning more than $5 million a year and wealthy Americans earning more than $400,000, or $450,000 for couples.
Instead, the White House is considering a tax on the investment incomes of billionaires — fewer than 1,000 of the wealthiest Americans with at least $1 billion in assets. It also has floated a 15% corporate minimum tax that is designed to ensure all companies pay what Biden calls their “fair share” — ending the practice of some big-name firms paying no taxes.
Democrats initially planned that Biden’s package would contain $3.5 trillion worth of spending and tax initiatives over 10 years. But demands by moderates led by Manchin and Sinema to contain costs mean its final price tag could well be less than $2 trillion.
Disputes remain over far-reaching investments, including plans to expand Medicare coverage with dental, vision and hearing aid benefits for seniors; child care assistance; and free pre-kindergarten.
Pelosi, D-Calif., said on CNN that Democrats were still working to keep in provisions for four weeks of paid family leave but acknowledged that other proposals such as expanding Medicare to include dental coverage could prove harder to save because of cost.
Pelosi reiterated that about 90% is wrapped up and said she expected an agreement by week’s end, paving the way for a House vote on a separate $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill before next Sunday, Oct. 31, when a series of transportation programs will lapse. The Senate approved over the summer the package of road, broadband and other public works projects, but the measure stalled in the House during deliberations on the broader Biden bill.
Manchin, whose state has a major coal industry, has opposed Biden’s initial climate change proposals, which involved a plan to penalize utilities that do not switch quickly to clean energy. Democrats are now also compiling other climate change strategies to meet Biden’s goal of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% by 2030.
Democrats were hoping Biden could cite major accomplishments when he attends a global conference in Scotland on climate change in early November after attending a summit of world leaders in Rome.
Sen. Angus King, a Maine independent who caucuses with Democrats, said the expected cuts to the clean energy provisions in the spending bill were especially disappointing.
“If we’re going to get the rest of the world to take serious steps to remedy this problem, we’ve got to do it ourselves,” King said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Pelosi insisted that Democrats had pieced together other policies in the spending bill that could reduce emissions. “We will have something that will meet the president’s goals,” she said.
Democrats also want to make progress that could help Democrat Terry McAuliffe win a neck-and-neck Nov. 2 gubernatorial election in Virginia.
Rep. Ro Khanna, a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, maintained that his caucus will not budge on supporting the infrastructure bill before Oct. 31 if there is no agreement on the broader package, which would be passed under so-called budget reconciliation rules.
“The president needs the reconciliation agreement to go to Glasgow,” Khanna, D-Calif., said on “Fox News Sunday.” He added: “That’s what is going to deal with climate change, that’s what’s going to hit his goals of 50% reduction by 2030. I’m confident we will have an agreement.”
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Associated Press writer Alan Fram contributed to this report.
Source Article from https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-business-bills-delaware-nancy-pelosi-132c737a5a2fb5ea1931df2344f55567
A “bomb cyclone” in the Pacific is dumping extreme rain and several feet of snow on California. The wild weather follows a summer of extreme drought and wildfires, and it could bring flooding, mudslides and debris flow to the parched and wildfire-scarred Golden State.
The term “bomb cyclone” refers to the rapid intensification process – “bombogenesis” – that forms it. Such storms occur when pressure in the central region of the storm descend by at least 24 millibars (an atmospheric pressure measurement) in 24 hours, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The bomb cyclone has merged with a Category 5 “atmospheric river” – giant flowing trains of moist air in the sky.
Atmospheric rivers, like hurricanes and tornadoes, are rated based on their potential for damage; a Category 5 is the strongest, or “most hazardous,” bringing the chance for gusty winds, flooding, debris flow and mudslides, according to the California Department of Water Resources.
The National Weather Service (NWS) in Sacramento issued numerous warnings on Sunday (Oct. 24) concerning extreme rainfall, flooding and debris flows. In some regions, rainfall may reach into the double digits in inches.
Lots of rain on the radar this morning. That won’t be changing, heavy rain and strong winds are expected for today. Debris flows possible on recent burn scars and roadway flooding will be likely. #CAwx pic.twitter.com/EzddtRTzC4
— NWS Sacramento (@NWSSacramento) October 24, 2021
Flash flood watches are in effect for most of Central and Northern California, The Washington Post reported. Last week, Sacramento received its first rainfall since March 19, ending a 220-day streak without a drop. Now, the region is forecast to receive more than half a foot of rain.
The Pacific Northwest and Northern California may see near-tornado or hurricane-force winds gust up to 60 mph (97 km/h), along with waves crashing on the shoreline at up to 20 feet (6 meters) high.
The Bay Area is expected to face a deluge at least through Monday (Oct. 25); Oakland may experience record water levels in an atmospheric column (known as Precipitable WATer value or PWAT); and 5 to 8 inches (12 to 20 centimeters) of rain may fall in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.
Regions that previously faced severe wildfire, such as those hit by the Dixie and Caldor fires, are already receiving reports of debris flows, and flash floods are possible in regions of Sacramento that had fires as long ago as 2018, according to the NWS.
A bomb cyclone has merged with a Category 5 ‘atmospheric river’. (NOAA)
It’s unusual for a storm like this to happen so early in the season, according to The Washington Post. That left emergency responders little time to plan, as they were still battling the wildfires that had plagued California for much of 2021.
Those fires also raise the risk of catastrophic flooding and mudslides. That’s because after a fire, soil that would normally soak up rainfall can be as water-repellant as pavement, according to NWS. As that water tumbles downhill, it can also fuel erosion and pick up ash, sand, silt, rocks and burned vegetation, according to NWS. Wildfire burns begin to heal once regrowth happens.
But “the early timing of such a major storm means that the 2021 burn scars have had very little opportunity yet for vegetation recovery,” Amy East, a research geologist with the US Geological Survey in Santa Cruz, wrote in an email to The Washington Post.
“The Dixie Fire is still smoldering, and that area is showing only the very beginning of plant regrowth.”
This article was originally published by Live Science. Read the original article here.
Source Article from https://www.sciencealert.com/a-bomb-cyclone-had-merged-with-an-atmospheric-river-to-batter-california
Check out what’s clicking on FoxBusiness.com.
Facebook’s bias is showing — again.
The tech giant’s employees have consistently pushed to suppress or de-platform right-wing outlets such as Breitbart, despite objections from managers trying to avoid political blowback, a scathing report by the Wall Street Journal revealed.
The internal debates — captured in message-board conversations reviewed by the publication — fuel new concerns that the platform is treating news outlets differently based on political slant.
Of special focus in the report was Breitbart, which employees have targeted to remove from the News Tab function, especially amid protests following George Floyd’s death by Minneapolis police last year.
FILE – In this March 2018, file photo, the logo for Facebook appears on screens at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York’s Times Square. (AP Photo/Richard Drew / AP Newsroom)
After a staffer asked about removing Breitbart, a senior researcher responded, “I can also tell you that we saw drops in trust in CNN 2 years ago: would we take the same approach for them too?” he wrote.
By 2020, Facebook had begun keeping track of “strikes” for content deemed false by third-party fact-checkers. Repeat offenders could be suspended from posting. Escalations came more frequently against conservative outlets, according to the report.
The report is the latest in a series of bombshell revelations from whistleblowers about the social media colossus’ craving for profits over the needs of its users.
Employees were told in recent days to brace for more disclosures.
FACEBOOK FACING FLACK OVER CENSORING POSTS
Nick Clegg, the vice president of global affairs for Facebook, told workers that “we need to steel ourselves for more bad headlines in the coming days, I’m afraid,” in a Saturday memo obtained by Axios.
The new scoops were expected to come Monday from a number of news outlets that were given leaked material by Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen but an embargo on the information collapsed Friday and more devastating reporting on the company’s internal workings could be released any time.
The story that broke the embargo on Friday involved a new whistleblower who told the Securities and Exchange Commission that Facebook routinely dismissed concerns about hate speech and the spread of misinformation over fears it would hinder the company’s growth.
The whistleblower, who testified under oath and whose name has not been released, told the SEC in 2017 that Facebook execs discouraged attempts to fight misinformation and hate speech during the Trump administration because it would hold back the company’s growth — and because they were afraid of the consequences from the president and his allies.
The whistleblower, like Haugen, a member of the social network’s “integrity team,” said Tucker Bounds, a Facebook communications official, dismissed hate speech as a “flash in the pan” and said even though “some legislators will get pissy,” the company is “printing money in the basement.”
A person who worked at Facebook at the time told The Post that the comments from Bounds sound accurate.
“That’s how Tucker talks,” the former employee said. “The Tucker quote, as much as I disagree with it, really does reflect the attitude during 2017.”
Clegg in his memo encouraged employees to stay positive amid the news developments.
“But, above all else, we should keep our heads held high and do the work we came here to do,” he said in the memo, adding that Facebook made significant investments in encouraging the vote and boosting vaccination rates.
“The truth is we’ve invested $13 billion and have over 40,000 people to do one job: keep people safe on Facebook,” he said, according to the Axios report.
The flood of exposés that blew the lid off Facebook’s inner workings began with a series of reports dubbed the “Facebook Files” in the Wall Street Journal based on data supplied by Haugen in early September.
FACEBOOK RESTRICTS EMPLOYEE ACCESS TO SOME INTERNAL DISCUSSION GROUPS
On Oct. 3, Haugen revealed her identity in an interview on CBS News’ “60 Minutes.”
“The thing I saw at Facebook over and over again was there were conflicts of interest between what was good for the public and what was good for Facebook,” Haugen said on the news program.
“Facebook, over and over again, chose to optimize for its own interests, like making more money,” said Haugen, 37.
She left the tech giant in May after her unit that sought to address misinformation on the platform was dismantled, and she copied thousands of pages of internal documents to have as evidence to back up her claims.
Several days after the interview on “60 Minutes,” Haugen told a Senate panel Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has faced no accountability over his actions and that lawmakers should make sure he does.
“There are no similarly powerful companies that are as unilaterally controlled [as Facebook],” she told the senators. “The buck stops with Mark. There is no one currently holding Mark accountable but himself.”
“As long as Facebook is operating in the dark, it is accountable to no one and it will continue to make choices that go against the common good,” she said.
Other material linked by Haugen to media outlets showed that Facebook downplayed or ignored Instagram’s caustic effects on teenagers’ mental health despite being aware of the damage through internal research.
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Haugen also said Facebook exempted popular users from some content moderation rules and failed to crack down on drug cartels and human traffickers.
“The documents I have provided to Congress prove that Facebook has repeatedly misled the public,” said Haugen in testimony to the Senate Commerce Committee’s consumer protection subcommittee. “I came forward at great personal risk because I believe we still have time to act.”
Source Article from https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/facebook-employees-tried-to-suppress-conservative-news-outlets-report-shows
FARMINGTON, Mo. – The National Weather Service’s St. Louis office has confirmed a tornado touched down Sunday evening in Missouri’s Lead Belt.
Alerts from the NWS around 8:30 p.m. Sunday reported an observed tornado in Farmington, moving northeast at approximately 45 miles per hour. By 9:10 p.m., the NWS confirmed other tornadoes near Fredericktown and St. Mary.
Fire officials in Farmington report significant damage on the southern part of town.
“Significant damage” also was reported in St. Mary in the immediate aftermath. That cell moved across the Mississippi River toward Chester, Steeleville, and Coulterville in Illinois.
Farmington is located about 75 miles southwest of St. Louis
This is a developing news story. FOX 2 will have more information on this story as it becomes available.
Source Article from https://fox2now.com/news/missouri/confirmed-tornado-strike-in-farmington/
Democrats are also increasingly eager to deliver the bipartisan legislation to Mr. Biden’s desk before elections for governor in Virginia and New Jersey on Nov. 2, to show voters the party is making good on its promise to deliver sweeping social change. And a number of transportation programs will lapse at the end of the month without congressional action on either a stopgap extension or passage of the infrastructure bill, leading to possible furloughs.
The legislation is expected to include a one-year extension of payments to most families with children, first approved as part of the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief plan, as well as an increase in funds for Pell grants, support for home and elder care, and billions of dollars for affordable housing. It would also provide tax incentives to encourage use of wind, solar and other clean energy.
While aides cautioned that details were in flux, the plan is also expected to address a cap on how much taxpayers can deduct in state and local taxes, a key priority for Mr. Schumer and other lawmakers who represent higher-income residents of high-tax states affected by the limit.
But negotiators on Sunday were still haggling over a number of outstanding pieces, including the details of a federal paid and medical leave program — already cut to four weeks from 12 weeks — Medicaid expansion and a push to expand Medicare benefits to include dental, vision and hearing. With Mr. Manchin pushing for a $1.5 trillion price tag, Democratic officials are urging for him to accept more spending in order to avoid dropping other programs.
A framework has yet to emerge. No final decisions have been made on the plan — which is expected to include education, child care, paid leave, anti-poverty and climate change programs — and negotiations are continuing. But even with a scaled-back version, passage of the bill is no guarantee.
Mr. Biden raised the prospect of an $800 voucher to help grant access to those benefits, but he said during a CNN town hall event on Thursday that he believed Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema both had reservations about the program. Talks are also continuing with moderate Democrats in both chambers over a proposal that would help lower the cost of prescription drugs.
While Ms. Sinema has refused to embrace increasing either the corporate or individual tax rates, she has privately committed to enough proposals that would fully fund up to $2 trillion in spending. The details of those specific proposals, however, remain unclear.
Ms. Sinema and Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, have spoken repeatedly about a number of alternatives that would ensure that corporations and wealthy people pay more in taxes without addressing those rates, according to an aide, some of which Ms. Warren had initially proposed earlier this year.
Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/24/us/politics/biden-manchin-schumer-spending-bill.html