More than 50,000 people were killed in Brazil in 2015, which puts it on the list of the most murder-prone countries in the world. To protect themselves, Brazilians are crowd sourcing their safety, using cell phones to alert each other when violence breaks out. VOA’s Kevin Enochs.
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Category Archives: News
Worldwide news. News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different media: word of mouth, printing, postal systems, broadcasting, electronic communication, or through the testimony of observers and witnesses to events. News is sometimes called “hard news” to differentiate it from soft media
Rural US Areas Look at Innovative Ways to Connect to the Internet
More than 19 million Americans are still without home internet access…that according to the Federal Communication Commission. In Garrett County, Maryland, local leaders came up with an innovative plan to provide access to their community…VOA’s Lesya Bakalets reports on a creative approach to getting hard to reach customers on line.
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Trump Tax Overhaul Under Intensifying Fire as Congress Readies Bill
President Donald Trump’s plan for overhauling the U.S. tax system faced growing opposition from interest groups on Sunday, as Republicans prepare to unveil sweeping legislation that could eliminate some of the most popular tax breaks to help pay for lower taxes.
Republicans who control the U.S. House of Representatives will not reveal their bill until Wednesday. But the National Association of Home Builders, a powerful housing industry trade group, is already vowing to defeat it over a change for home mortgage deductions, while Republican leaders try to head off opposition to possible changes to individual retirement savings and state and local tax payments.
Trump and Republicans have vowed to enact tax reform this year for the first time since 1986. But the plan to deliver up to $6 trillion in tax cuts for businesses and individuals faces challenges even from rank-and-file House Republicans.
House and Senate Republicans are on a fast-track to pass separate tax bills before the Nov. 23 U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, iron out differences in December, send a final version to Trump’s desk before January and ultimately hand the president his first major legislative victory. Analysts say there is a good chance the tax overhaul will be delayed until next year.
The NAHB, which boasts 130,000 member firms employing 9 million workers, says the bill would harm U.S. home prices by marginalizing the value of mortgage interest deductions as an incentive for buying homes. The trade group wants legislation to offer a $5,500 tax credit but says it was rebuffed by House Republican leaders.
“We’re opposed to the tax bill without the tax credit in there, and we’ll be working very aggressively to see it defeated,” NAHB chief executive Jerry Howard told Reuters.
Republicans warned that the Trump tax plan is entering a new and difficult phase as lobbyists ramp up pressure on lawmakers to spare their pet tax breaks.
“When groups start rallying against things and they succeed, everything starts unraveling,” Senator Bob Corker, a leading Republican fiscal hawk, told CBS’ Face the Nation.
Anxiety in high-tax states
One of the biggest challenges involves a proposal to eliminate the federal deduction for state and local taxes (SALT), which analysts say would hit upper middle-class families in high income tax states such as New York, New Jersey and California. The states are home to enough House Republicans to stymie legislation.
The top House Republican on tax policy gave ground over the weekend, saying he would allow a deduction for some local taxes to remain.
“We are restoring an itemized property tax deduction to help taxpayers with local tax burdens,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady said in a statement.
But the gesture appeared to do little to turn the tide of opposition to SALT’s elimination.
“I’m not going to sign onto anything until the full package is fully analyzed by economists,” Representative Peter King of New York told the Fox News program Sunday Morning Futures. “The fact that we’re getting it at the eleventh hour raises real issues with me,” he added.
A lobby coalition representing state and local governments, realtors and public unions rejected Brady’s statement outright, saying the move would “unfairly penalize taxpayers in states that rely significantly on income taxes.”
House Republicans have also faced opposition from Trump and others after proposing to sharply curtail tax-free contributions to 401(k) programs and move retirement savings to a style of account that allows tax-free withdrawals, rather than the tax-exempt contributions that are popular with 401(k) investors.
House Republicans now say they could permit higher 401(k) contribution limits but continue to talk about tax-free withdrawals. “We will expand the amount that you can invest. But we’ll also give you an option to actually not be taxed later in life,” House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy told Fox News.
The current cap on annual 401(k) tax-free contributions is $18,000.
Corker said congressional tax committees seem to be falling short of their goal to eliminate $4 trillion in tax breaks to prevent the Trump plan from adding to the federal deficit.
“They’re having great difficulty just getting to $3.6 trillion,” said the Tennessee Republican, who has vowed to vote against tax reform if it increases a federal debt load that stands at more than $20 trillion.
Ohio’s Republican governor, John Kasich, told Fox News Sunday that spending on entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security should also be reviewed as part of the effort to pay for tax cuts.
“It may be separate from the tax bill, but it needs to happen,” Kasich said.
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Washington Abuzz Over Reported Charges in Russia Probe
Washington is abuzz over news reports a grand jury has approved the first charges stemming from the special counsel’s probe of Russian meddling in last year’s U.S. election. VOA’s Michael Bowman reports, the exact charges and who stands accused of wrongdoing could be revealed at any moment.
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Radio Pollution Creates Space Shield for Satellites
People are big polluters, on the land, in the sea and even in outer space, that can include anything from a hammer that floats away from the space station, to radiation from a nuclear weapons test in the atmosphere.
“This can range from little chips of paint all the way up to spent rocket bodies and things like that,” said Dan Baker, director of the Laboratory of Atmosphere and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “We’ve been trying to figure out how can we most effectively eliminate this debris without causing more of a problem.”
Space debris travels so fast, even an orbiting chip of paint can poke a hole in a satellite. But Baker says something tinier, and natural, is a bigger hazard: It’s the highly charged “killer electrons” of the magnetized zone above the earth called The Van Allen Belts.
“We’ve observed them to cause very significant problems for spacecraft,” Baker said.
Electro-magnetic planetary blanket
The doughnut-shaped Van Allen Belts around our planet protect life on earth from solar winds and cosmic rays. But their highly energetic charged particles can damage the circuitry in space stations, weather satellites and other machines that travel through that region of space.
Baker notes that “killer electrons” can also come from some human activities, like the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons.
“Back in the 1950s and especially in the 1960s, there were nuclear explosions that put huge amounts of radiation into space that caused many satellites to ‘die’ because of radiation damage,” he said. “And if that were to happen today, we know that there are over 1,400 satellites operating in space around the earth and all of those could be subject to very severe consequences.”
Most nations adhere to treaties that prohibit atmospheric weapon testing. But Baker says that’s no guarantee.
“What is worrisome to us from a political standpoint today is that there are nations, for example, North Korea and others, that may be thinking once again, and who may not be adherent to such treaties, that this might be an interesting way to mess with modern technology,” Baker said.
Mysterious space shield
Radiation particles in the Van Allen Belts already “mess” with modern technology. So when satellites must spend time in that region, they are built with thicker materials. That armor makes them heavier, and more expensive. Fortunately, spacecraft and satellites that orbit just under the Van Allen Belts don’t need this heavy shielding. Baker says that’s because, at the lower edge of the Van Allen Belts, the killer electrons abruptly stop.
He compares it to the shields that protected Captain Kirk’s ship, the Enterprise, from phasers and asteroids on Star Trek.
Scientists have known for years that something here on the earth creates an invisible bubble that clears killer electrons from the lower edge of the Van Allen Belts. Just what makes that shield has been a mystery.
But recently, Baker’s teams figured out its source. The “bubble maker” is very low frequency radio transmissions, also known as VLF. Militaries use VLF to communicate with submarines underwater. It turns out those radio waves also travel up, through the atmosphere, to the Van Allen Belts.
“So the VLF bubble is made up of these intense waves. These waves act to sort of scatter and scrub the inner part of the Van Allen Belts,” Baker said, admitting, “I would prefer that we not be messing with nature. However, in this particular case I would say that there is some evidence that this is beneficial.”
John Bonnell, a researcher at the University of California Berkeley’s Space Sciences Lab, agrees that VLF “pollution” is probably benign, and he points to the high-energy radiation emitted by lightning bolts as evidence.
“We’ve had natural clearing of the radiation Belts with lightning, for as long as we’ve had lightning. So in essence, you’ve had a long-running experiment that you can look at and say, ‘Well, if we’re going to do things on sort of a sporadic basis, whereas lightning’s been doing it daily for hundreds of millions of years, the likelihood of there being a bad side effect is pretty minimal,'” he said.
Bonnell says that discovering a man-made way to clear killer electrons from the Van Allen Belt does not mean we will soon create “shields up” devices that use magnetics or radio transmissions. At least, he says, we’re not making them yet.
“It’s a fascinating possibility and it’s a fascinating technology that could enable us in the future, to explore more of the solar system with people, with robots. And so it’s definitely something that people pick away at slowly over time,” he said.
Bonnell says scientists, engineers and astronomers have teamed up to make amazing discoveries about how to study, and travel through, outer space. And while the future shape of space exploration is a mystery, our new understanding about the man-made “pollution” that shields satellites may be an important part of it.
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For Spanish, Catalan Economies, No Winners in Standoff
Xavier Gabriel can take some credit if the tiny Catalan mountain town of Sort is one of the most famous in Spain.
He runs a lottery shop called La Bruja de Oro, or The Golden Witch, in a town whose name, aptly, means “Luck” in Catalan. Its fortune in having sold many prize-winning tickets has made it a household name and a successful online business.
But the crisis surrounding Catalonia’s push for independence has changed life for 60-year-old Gabriel. He joined more than 1,500 companies in moving their official headquarters out of the wealthy region in recent weeks. Their main fear: that they would no longer be covered by Spanish and European Union laws if Catalonia manages to break away, dragging their businesses into unknown territory.
“The time had come to make a decision,” said Gabriel, who employs 16 people and describes himself as a proud Catalan.
Hedging their bets
Like Gabriel’s, the vast majority of companies that moved their headquarters didn’t transfer workers or assets, such as bank holdings or production equipment. So far, it’s mainly a form of legal insurance. But as the political crisis escalates, the risk is that companies are deferring investments and hiring. There is evidence that tourists are holding off booking, perhaps frightened by images in the media of police crackdowns, street demonstrations and strikes.
And the situation risks getting worse before it improves: the central government’s decision Friday to take control of the region could spiral out of control if there is popular resistance, whether by citizens or local authorities like the Catalan police force.
“There is absolutely no doubt that the crisis is having a very damaging effect on the economy,” said Javier Diaz Gimenez, an economics professor at Spain’s prestigious IESE Business School.
Financial markets in Spain have so far fallen only modestly, reflecting investors’ apparent belief that the tensions will eventually be resolved. The Spanish government has called a regional election in Catalonia for Dec. 21 and could later consider revisions to the constitution that might placate some of the independence supporters.
But that could take some time, Diaz Gimenez says, given how confrontational both sides have been.
Banks leave
The list of businesses moving headquarters includes Catalonia’s top two banks, Caixabank and Sabadell, which are among Spain’s top five lenders. Then there is the Codorniu cava sparkling wine maker for which Catalonia is famous. Another well-known cava maker, Freixenet, is also planning to follow if the independence drive continues. Publishing giant Planeta, the world’s leading Spanish-language publisher and second biggest publisher in France, has also moved its official address out of Catalonia.
Caixabank says it suffered a moderate but temporary run on deposits because of the crisis, but said it has since recovered and was adamant the move was permanent.
Shares for Caixabank, Sabadell and some other companies have been volatile, falling after the Oct. 1 vote for independence and jumping sharply when they announced their decision to move headquarters.
Tip of the iceberg
Lottery shop owner Gabriel says ticket sales this month are up nearly 300 percent over last year, a rise he attributed to popular support for his decision to move his business.
Diaz Gimenez said the decisions to move headquarters, while not immediately affecting jobs, were “just the tip of the iceberg.”
“Plans to relocate firms or invest elsewhere are going to accelerate and some of it is going to go to, say, Poland, and it’s never going to come back,” he said.
“People that were thinking about investing in Spain and Barcelona are starting to think again,” he said. “It’s not just Catalonia. It’s the mismanagement by Spain, which is proving that it’s not a serious country because it cannot solve this thing.”
Spanish economy humming
The turmoil, ironically, comes just as Spain has been enjoying some of the fastest economic growth in Europe.
Its economy, the fourth-largest in the 19-country eurozone, grew by a hefty quarterly rate of 0.9 percent in the second quarter. The government has maintained its forecast for growth in 2017 at 3.1 percent, but revised its estimate for 2018 from 2.6 percent to 2.3 percent because of the political crisis. Moody’s credit rating agency has warned that a continued political impasse and, ultimately, independence for Catalonia would severely hurt the country’s credit rating.
Billions at stake
Tourism seems to be taking the biggest hit so far.
Experts say spending in the sector in Catalonia in the first two weeks of October — that is, following the independence referendum — was down 15 percent from a year earlier.
Tourism represents about 11 percent of Spain’s 1.1-trillion euro ($1.3 trillion) gross domestic product, with Catalonia and its capital, Barcelona, providing a fifth of that, being the most popular destinations for visitors.
Exceltur, a nonprofit group formed by the 25 leading Spanish tourist groups, expects growth in tourism this year to ease from an estimated 4.1 percent to 3.1 percent.
Reservations in Barcelona alone are down 20 percent compared with last year, it said. If the trend continues in the final three months of the year, it could lead to losses of up to 1.2 billion euros ($1.41 billion) in the sector, which in turn could affect jobs.
Analysts fear that the independence movement’s stated aim of continuing to create as much social and economic chaos for Spain as possible could exacerbate the situation. The Catalan National Assembly group has been openly talking about a boycott against Spain’s top companies and major strike activity.
“Spain, its tourism, everything is very dependent on image,” Diaz Gimenez said. “And this is just killing it.”
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Report: DeVos Considers Only Partial Debt Relief for Defrauded Students
The Education Department is considering only partially forgiving federal loans for students defrauded by for-profit colleges, The Associated Press has learned, abandoning the Obama administration’s policy of fully erasing that debt.
Under President Barack Obama, tens of thousands of students deceived by now-defunct for-profit schools had more than $550 million in such loans canceled completely.
But President Donald Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, is working on a plan that could grant such students only partial relief, according to department officials who were not authorized to publicly comment on the issue and spoke on condition of anonymity. The department may look at the average earnings of students in similar programs and schools to determine how much debt to wipe away.
Hints of new approach
If DeVos goes ahead, the change could leave many students scrambling after expecting full loan forgiveness, based on the previous administration’s track record. It was not immediately clear how many students might be affected.
A department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.
But the Trump team has given hints of a new approach.
In August, the department extended its contract with a staffing agency to speed up the processing of a backlog of loan forgiveness claims. In the procurement notice, the department said that “policy changes may necessitate certain claims already processed be revisited to assess other attributes.” The department would not further clarify the meaning of that notice.
Advocates: unjustified, unfair
DeVos’ review prompted an outcry from student loan advocates, who said the idea of giving defrauded students only partial loan relief was unjustified and unfair because many of their classmates had already gotten full loan cancellation. Critics say the Trump administration, which has ties to the for-profit sector, is looking out for industry interests.
Earlier this year, Trump paid $25 million to settle charges his Trump University misled students.
“Anything other than full cancellation is not a valid outcome,” said Eileen Connor, a litigator at Harvard University’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, which has represented hundreds of defrauded students of the now-shuttered Corinthian Colleges. “The nature of the wrong that was done to them, the harm is even bigger than the loans that they have.”
“Even more importantly, it is completely unfair that a happenstance of timing is going to mean that one student who’s been defrauded is going to have full cancellation and the next is not,” Connor said.
1990s regulation
A federal regulation known as borrower defense allows students at for-profit colleges and other vocational programs to have their loans forgiven if it is determined that the students were defrauded by the schools. That rule dates to the early 1990s. But it was little used until the demise of Corinthian and ITT for-profit chains in recent years caused tens of thousands of students to request that the government cancel their loans.
In the last few months of the Obama administration, the Education Department updated the rule to add protections for students, shift more financial responsibility onto the schools and prevent schools from having students sign away their right to sue a school.
That change was set to take effect in July, but DeVos has frozen it and is working on a new version. She argued that the Obama regulation was too broad and could cancel the loans of some students without a sound basis.
65,000 claims waiting
DeVos has come under criticism for delaying consideration of more than 65,000 applications for loan forgiveness under the borrower defense rule. The agency hasn’t approved a single claim since DeVos took office in February.
Jennifer Wang, an expert with the Institute of College Access and Success, said the Obama administration was providing full loan cancellations to students.
“It would be totally different from what was happening under the last administration,” Wang said. “It’s not equitable; it’s not fair for students. If she provides partial relief, it’s that she only cares what’s fair for schools and not students.”
Abby Shafroth, an attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, said the agency could be faced with lawsuits, especially from Corinthian students, whose classmates had received full forgiveness.
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On Climate Change, It’s Trump vs. Markets
At the 2015 Paris summit, world leaders pledged to take steps to avoid catastrophic climate change. This November in Bonn, Germany, U.N. negotiators will be back, working out the details of how to cut emissions of planet-warming gases. It is the first conference since President Donald Trump said the United States would withdraw from the agreement. That leaves questions about the direction of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. As VOA’s Steve Baragona reports, the answer is not straightforward.
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Artisans in Mali Hope to Bring Back an Ancient Fabric Style
Artisans in Mali are hoping that Bogolan, a traditional cotton fabric, will continue to fascinate Western fashion designers and provide jobs at home. VOA’s Teffera Girma Teffera and Bagassi Koura visited a small neighborhood in central Bamako where artisans are hard at work. Salem Solomon narrates.
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Asia Looks for Signals on Policy Ahead of Trump Visit to Region
It was one of Donald Trump’s very first actions as president: pulling the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, a free-trade deal he said was hurting the American worker.
The TPP was one of the centerpieces of former President Barack Obama’s so-called Asia “pivot,” an economic, political and military realignment toward a region seen as key to America’s future.
Nine months into his presidency, Trump’s decision to abandon the TPP remains perhaps the clearest evidence yet he intends to ditch the Asia pivot, or perhaps pivot there in his own way.
U.S. officials have not said whether they will unveil a similar, definitive policy to replace the pivot. But signs of a broader strategy could emerge next week when Trump leaves on his first trip to Asia as president.
WATCH: Asia Awaits Trump’s Regional Policy
Trump skipping regional summit
The trip will include stops in Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines. But it’s where Trump has chosen not to go that has attracted the headlines.
Though Trump is attending the ASEAN multilateral summit in the Philippines, reports have suggested he will head home a day before the annual East Asia Summit, a regional meeting that focuses on Southeast Asia.
The move risks sending the message that Southeast Asia is not a priority for Trump, said Abraham Denmark, a former top East Asia official at the Pentagon.
“The region will see that China is there, and the United States isn’t. And that will send a very stark message,” said Denmark, who is now at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington.
It isn’t the first time that a U.S. president has skipped the summit. Obama also stayed home in 2013 to deal with domestic budget negotiations that resulted in a government shutdown.
Then, too, the move sparked controversy.
Asian diplomats and heads of state talked about Obama’s absence in private circles for years, said Harry Kazianis, who focuses on Asia at the Center for the National Interest.
“Missing one conference doesn’t mean that America is leaving the Asia-Pacific or that China is outpacing us or anything like that. But it’s an extremely big deal, and they’re not going to forget it,” Kazianis said.
Regional influence
The move could add to concerns the U.S. is ceding regional influence to China, which intensified after Trump’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord as well as the TPP.
The TPP decision in particular sent shockwaves throughout Asia and threatened to fundamentally reshape the U.S. economic relationship with the region.
“You can make positive and negative arguments for the TPP — it was not a net-jobs creator for the U.S. — but it had great strategic value for the U.S.,” Kazianis said. “It was a marker. America was going to be there no matter what. That’s lost, and the Trump administration hasn’t found a formula to replace that.”
Adding to the uncertainty, Trump has also threatened to pull out of the free-trade agreement with South Korea, a longstanding economic and diplomatic partner of Washington.
North Korea
But much of Trump’s Asia tour is expected to focus on North Korea, which has dominated the bulk of U.S. foreign policy bandwidth during his first year in office.
Trump hopes to put more pressure on China, in particular, to persuade North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to make concessions on his nuclear and missile programs.
Trump has threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea if necessary to defend the U.S. and its allies, at times matching the inflammatory rhetoric typically only seen from the North.
During Trump’s trip, Asian diplomats are likely to try to convince the U.S. leader of the need to pursue diplomacy and reduce the level of rhetoric, said Michael Fuchs, a former deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs.
“War with North Korea is their worst nightmare,” Fuchs said.
But Trump will have plenty of time during the 12-day trip to lay out other priorities, and that can’t come a moment too soon for many.
“What our partners in Asia are looking for is not whether the Obama policy will continue,” Denmark said. “They’re looking for what is the Trump policy, what is America’s policy now.”
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Asia Awaits Trump’s Regional Policy
For much of President Barack Obama’s presidency, U.S. officials touted the so-called “Asia Pivot,” an economic, political and military realignment toward a region seen as key to America’s future. Nine months into the Trump administration, U.S. officials are taking a different approach to Asia. And, as VOA’s Bill Gallo reports, some are concerned the White House is signaling a lack of commitment to the region.
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Retailers Offer New Tools to Help Shoppers Find Clothes That Fit
Stores watching Amazon take a larger share of clothing sales are trying to solve one of the most vexing issues for online shoppers: finding items that fit properly.
The retailers are unleashing tools that use artificial intelligence to replicate the help a salesperson at a store might offer, calculate a shopper’s most likely body shape, or use 3-D models for a virtual fitting room experience. Amazon, which some analysts say will surpass Macy’s this year as the largest U.S. clothing seller, is offering some customers an Alexa-powered device that doubles as a selfie-stick machine and a stylist.
Retailers want to reduce the rate of online returns, which can be up to 40 percent, and thus make customers happier — and more likely to be repeat shoppers. And the more interaction shoppers have with a brand, the more the technology will learn about shoppers’ preferences, said Vicky Zadeh, chief executive of Rakuten Fits Me, a tech company that works with QVC and clothing startup brands.
“It’s all about confidence,” she said. “If they have the confidence to buy, they will come back to the retailer time and time again.”
The push is coming from big names like Levi’s and The Gap and startups like Rhone and Taylrd.
Levi’s new Virtual Stylist texts back and forth with online customers to offer recommendations, based on their preferences. Marc Rosen, Levi’s president of global e-commerce, said early tests show the chatbot is driving more browsers to become buyers.
Reliance on body shape
Rakuten Fits Me, which works with QVC and other companies, fine-tuned its fitting technology this summer and said its retail partners now offer garments that should fit shoppers’ body shapes when the customer first does the initial search. Shoppers provide three measurements — height, weight and age — and then it calculates a person’s most likely body shape, not size, to determine the fit for any garment and offer more accurate recommendations.
And Gap Inc. has an augmented reality app in collaboration with Google and startup Avametric that allows shoppers to virtually try on clothes. Shoppers enter information like height and weight and then the app puts a 3-D model in front of them. However, the tool only works on Google Tango smartphones.
Sebastian DiGrande, executive vice president and strategy and chief customer officer at Gap, said the augmented reality app had produced good feedback, but the company is still determining whether shoppers really want a virtual 3-D model.
Clothing brand Tommy Hilfiger similarly has built its mobile app around the camera and image recognition. It has an augmented reality feature enabling shoppers to see what the clothes look like on a virtual runway model — but not their own body type.
And men’s online clothier Bonobos, now owned by Wal-Mart, launched an app that offers customers a virtual closet to see items they bought and saved. The app is converting browsers to buyers at a faster rate, said Andy Dunn, founder of Bonobos.
Companies are smart to offer new tools, but many are too “gimmicky,” said Sapna Shah, principal at Red Giraffe Advisors, which makes early-stage investments in fashion tech.
“If it’s not Amazon, will brand-specific apps be the way for people to shop in the future?” she said. “How many apps are people going to have on their phone?”
And all the companies need to win over customers who prefer to touch and see things in person.
“It’s great that they’re busting their tail with all these apps, but I am skeptical,” said Doug Garnett of Portland, Oregon. Garnett said he buys some clothes online when he knows and understands the brands, but otherwise, “I really need to see them on my body before I act, and really prefer that to be in a store.”
Personalized offers
As Amazon dives further into fashion, it could use its base of data to spur trends and personalize offers for its customers. Its Echo Look features a built-in camera that photographs and records shoppers trying on clothes and offers recommendations on outfits. It works with its Style Check app, using machine learning and advice from experts. The potential: Learn shoppers’ styles and recommend outfits to buy. Amazon reportedly is exploring the idea of quickly fulfilling online orders for custom-fit clothing.
The company also reportedly acquired Body Labs, which creates true-to-life 3-D body models.
“We’re always listening to our customers, learning and innovating on their behalf and bringing them products we think they will love,” said Amazon spokeswoman Molly Wade. She wouldn’t comment on the prospect of custom-fit or the reports about Body Labs.
Steve Barr, the U.S. retail and consumer sector leader at consultants PwC, said that Amazon was trying for a curated experience based on massive data analytics. But he said he thought such an approach had limitations.
“No matter how great Amazon is with artificial intelligence and predictive behaviors,” Barr said, “they can’t put a red tab on a pair of a jeans or a swoosh on a pair of shoes.”
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Facebook Moves to Increase Transparency in Political Ads
Under pressure in advance of hearings on Russian election interference, Facebook is moving to increase transparency for everyone who sees and buys political advertising on its site.
Executives for the social media company said Friday they will verify political ad buyers in federal elections, requiring them to reveal correct names and locations. The site will also create new graphics where users can click on the ads and find out more about who’s behind them.
More broadly, Rob Goldman, Facebook’s vice president in charge of ad products, said the company is building new transparency tools in which all advertisers, even those that aren’t political, are associated with a page, and users can click on a link to see all of the ads any advertiser is running.
Users also will be able to see all of the ads paid for by the advertisers, whether those ads were originally targeted toward them.
3,000 Russia-linked ads
The move comes after the company acknowledged it had found more than 3,000 ads linked to Russia that focused on divisive U.S. social issues and were seen by an estimated 10 million people before and after the 2016 U.S. elections.
Facebook, Twitter and Google will testify in Congress Tuesday and Wednesday on how their platforms were used by Russia or other foreign actors in the election campaign. The Senate and House intelligence committees and the Senate Judiciary Committee are all holding hearings as part of their investigations into Russian election interference.
Facebook’s announcement comes a day after Twitter said it will ban ads from RT and Sputnik, two state-sponsored Russian news outlets. Twitter also has said it will require election-related ads for candidates to disclose who is paying for them and how they are targeted.
Federal election ad archive
Facebook’s Goldman said the company also will build a new archive of federal election ads on Facebook, including the total amount spent and the number of times an ad is displayed, he said. The archive, which will be public for anyone to search, would also have data on the audience that saw the ads, including gender and location information. The archive would eventually hold up to four years of data.
Goldman said the company is still building the new features. They plan to test them in Canada and roll them out in the United States by next summer ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.
“This is a good first step but it’s not at all the last step, there’s a lot to learn once we start testing,” Goldman said in an interview.
Facebook already had announced in September that the platform would require an advertiser to disclose who paid for the ads and what other ads it was running at the same time. But it was unclear exactly how the company would do that.
Heading off legislation
The moves are meant to bring Facebook more in line with what is now required of print and broadcast advertisers. Federal regulations require television and radio stations to make publicly available the details of political ads they air. That includes who runs the ad, when it runs and how much it costs.
It is also likely meant to head off bipartisan legislation in the Senate that would require social media companies to keep public files of election ads and try to ensure they are not purchased by foreigners. Though Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, a Democratic co-sponsor of the legislation, has said his bill would be “the lightest touch possible,” social media companies would rather set their own guidelines than face new regulation.
Facebook has responded swiftly to the attention it has received in recent months on Capitol Hill, boosting staff and lobbying efforts. The company has spent more than $8.4 million in lobbying Congress and the rest of the government through the third quarter of this year, according to federal records.
Some analysts have warned that policing such online election ads can be difficult. It’s one thing to enforce advertising rules for a print newspaper or a TV station, where real humans can vet each ad before it is printed or aired. But that is much more complicated when automated advertising platforms allow millions of advertisers, basically anyone with a credit card and internet access, to place an ad.
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First Charges Reportedly Approved in Russia Probe; Details Still Unclear
A U.S. federal grand jury has approved the first charges in an investigation of Russian influence on U.S. elections, according to several major news outlets.
The grand jury’s action, resulting from the probe led by special counsel Robert Mueller, was first reported by CNN on Friday evening. It quoted sources as saying anyone who was charged could be taken into custody as soon as Monday. The exact charges were unclear.
Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and NBC News subsequently issued similar reports. All the reports were attributed to unnamed sources.
President Donald Trump on Saturday visited his Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Virginia. He sent three tweets but they did not refer to the reports.
On Friday evening, the president did post a social media message linking to a New York Post story headlined: How Team Hillary played the press for fools on Russia.
White House officials have not commented on the president’s activities Saturday, but he was seen by VOA News exiting the north portico of the residence, clad in slacks, a windbreaker, what appeared to be white golf shoes and a baseball cap before entering a black vehicle for the 40-minute ride in the presidential motorcade to his private club along the Potomac River.
CNN said lawyers working on Mueller’s team were seen entering the federal courtroom in Washington, D.C., on Friday, where the grand jury meets to hear testimony.
Mueller has kept a tight lid on information about the probe, and a spokesman for Mueller’s office declined requests for comment on the media reports about the indictment.
Working since May
Mueller was appointed special counsel in May, shortly after the firing of then-FBI Director James Comey, to look into allegations that the Trump campaign might have colluded with Russia to win the election. He is also examining the possibility that the president may have tried to interfere with the Russia investigation.
The probe also is examining possible financial ties between Russian businesses and members of the Trump campaign, and foreign lobbying conducted by former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
In addition to Mueller’s probe, three congressional committees are conducting their own investigations into possible Russian influence on the election.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Friday told reporters it was “a pretty big waste” for the news media to investigate connections between Trump associates and Russia. Her comment was made in response to a question about Trump’s tweeting earlier in the day that it was “commonly agreed” there had been no collusion between his presidential campaign and Russia.
“It is now commonly agreed, after many months of COSTLY looking, that there was NO collusion between Russia and Trump. Was collusion with HC!” the president tweeted.
HC is a reference to Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state and Democratic nominee whom Trump defeated in last November’s presidential election.
VOA’s Marissa Melton contributed to this report.
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Weirdness, Few Tourists, Return to Key West After Irma
Things are weird, as usual, in Key West.
A pair of Vikings push a stroller full of stuffed chimps down Duval Street. A man with a ponytail swallows a steel sword. People dressed only in body paint and glitter wander and jiggle from bar to bar.
Fantasy Fest, one of Key West’s major tourist draws of the year, is in full swing. And that’s a relief for Florida Keys business owners trying to weather the economic storm that hit after Hurricane Irma battered the middle stretch of the tourism-dependent island chain.
Bucket list trip
The festivities have not disappointed Gary Gates from Buffalo, New York, who planned this “bucket list” trip 10 months ago with six friends.
“We were coming whether there was a hurricane or not,” the former NFL cameraman said. “I’ve never seen anything quite like this. To come down here and actually see people dressed in all kinds of costumes — or no costumes at all — was something that I needed to see.”
Gates flew into Key West and has not left during its annual 10-day festival of costume parties and parades, so he has not seen the devastation that lingers more than a month since Hurricane Irma made landfall Sept. 10 about 20 miles north of the city.
Middle Keys hit hardest
The mostly residential middle stretch of the island chain took the brunt of the hurricane’s 130-mph winds. The area is almost entirely brown, with debris piled alongside the highway and mangroves stripped bare. A stranded boat was christened the SS Irma with spray paint and offered “free” to drivers passing by.
But at opposite ends of the 120-mile-long island chain, tourist attractions in Key Largo and Key West escaped significant damage.
Dolphins Plus Bayside was ready for visitors three days after Irma’s landfall, but business has been down by half compared to last fall, said Mike Borguss, the third generation in his family to run the Key Largo attraction.
Some staff now live with friends or in temporary trailers parked outside their damaged homes, but the dolphins swim up to the water’s edge to check out new people toting cameras, and an adjacent hotel property is open for weddings and other events that had to be canceled elsewhere in the Keys because of Irma, said Art Cooper, Borguss’ cousin and curator at Dolphins Plus Bayside.
“The water’s pretty, the weather’s beautiful and we wish you were here,” Cooper said.
Tourism down significantly
Scott Saunders, president and CEO of Fury Water Adventures, estimated tourism in Key West has been about a third of what it was at this time last fall, even though the city’s hotels, restaurants, cruise ship operations and beaches quickly reopened after the storm.
“There’s no reason not to be doing everything we did last year,” Saunders said before one of his fleet’s sunset cruises. “We should be having that tourist base down here, but we haven’t had any.”
Jodi Weinhofer, president of the Lodging Association of the Florida Keys and Key West, blames news coverage of Irma, but not the hurricane itself, for the downturn.
“There was over a $100 million worth of negative press,” Weinhofer said.
Tourism big business in Keys
Tourism is a $2.7 billion industry in the Keys, supporting 54 percent of all jobs in the island chain, according to Monroe County’s Tourist Development Council.
Some jobs have been lost to Irma. Last week, Hawks Cay Resort on Duck Key, about 35 miles northeast of Irma’s landfall, let go 260 workers amid ongoing repairs. The Islamorada Resort Company said its four properties in the Middle Keys will be closed for renovations over the next six months.
But up and down the island chain, bars, marinas and mom-and-pop establishments able to reopen have been hiring laid-off workers and keeping people from moving away, Daniel Samess, CEO of the Greater Marathon Chamber of Commerce.
About 70 percent of roughly 35 hotels and motels in the Middle Keys are open, though those rooms mostly are filled by displaced residents and state and federal recovery workers. Officials plan to provide alternative housing and open those hotel rooms fully to tourists within the next two months, Samess said.
Final sweeps for debris in some parts of the Keys are scheduled Sunday, which also is the finale for Fantasy Fest. So far, the amount of broken tree branches and remnants of homes and belongings wrecked by Irma could fill over 133 Goodyear Blimps, according to Monroe County officials.
The cleanup will help create a good impression for visitors to Key West long before they arrive in the southernmost city in the continental U.S., said Key West Mayor Craig Cates.
“It’s a scenic cruise in your car coming down, and it’s very important that they get it cleaned up,” he said.
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At US Border, Dramatic Spike in Searches of Phones, Electronic Devices
U.S. border agents are searching nearly four times as many international travelers’ smartphones and other electronic devices as they did two years ago, expanding the use of a little-known search-and-seizure authority that has sparked fresh legal challenges from digital rights advocates and defendants in several criminal cases.
The content searches of electronic devices, conducted without a warrant or any individualized suspicion, spiked during the final year of the Obama administration but have continued to surge this year as the Trump administration has adopted extreme vetting of travelers entering the country.
In the first six months of fiscal 2017, which ended Sept. 30, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents searched the electronic devices of 14,993 arriving international travelers, according to the most recent CBP data.
CBP has not released data for all of 2017, but unofficial estimates put the number of searched devices at 30,000. That compares with 19,000 in 2016 and 8,500 in 2015.
‘Border search exception’
The searches are conducted under the so called “border search exception” to the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment. The amendment protects Americans’ rights against unreasonable searches and seizures without a warrant. But the U.S. border is a legal gray zone, where customs agents have long enjoyed legal authority to stop and search “any vehicle, beast or person” without a warrant.
Since the 2000s, the Department of Homeland Security has interpreted the border exception authority to include examinations of a host of electronic devices: cellphones, tablets, laptops, cameras and digital media players.
A 2009 CBP directive authorizes agents to examine electronic devices and to “review and analyze” their information “with or without suspicion.”
All travelers, whether U.S. citizens or foreign nationals, are subject to these searches. The CBP directive says privileged and other sensitive material, including legal communications, are not “necessarily exempt from a border search.”
Refusal to unlock and hand over a device may result in its “detention.”
Agents look at text messages, emails, photo albums and other personal data for evidence of terrorism links or criminal activity, such as child pornography.
CBP agents are allowed to seize devices and copy their content for on-site or off-site forensic tests, which can take weeks and sometimes months and yield personal data, sometimes in large quantities. In one case, a forensic test performed on a cellphone generated enough information to “fill 896 printed pages.”
Former Acting CBP Commissioner Jay Ahern, who signed the directive, called it “the broadest search authority anywhere in the world without a warrant.” He spoke at a Cato Institute criminal justice conference in Washington last week.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents operate under similar guidelines.
Numbers
CBP and ICE officials defend the practice, noting that the searches affect less than 1 in 10,000 international travelers and an even smaller number of U.S. citizens.
Last year, CBP processed more than 390 million international travelers at the country’s 238 ports of entry.
“It’s something we use in a very measured fashion when there is an indicator of concern,” Acting CBP Commissioner Kevin McAleenan, who is President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the agency, told a Senate panel Wednesday.
Search triggers range from a previous violation of a customs law to having a name that matches a person of interest in a U.S. national security database, according to the CBP form that agents hand to travelers whose devices are detained. Travelers may also be stopped at random.
McAleenan said the searches of electronic devices have yielded “very serious and significant information,” including “everything from national security concerns to child pornography to evidence of crimes to determinations of people’s admissibility status.”
Court challenges
But as border agents look at a larger number of people’s electronic devices for evidence of terrorism or other national security matters, privacy rights groups say the once-narrow border search authority is being too broadly interpreted for the digital age. The advocates are now challenging the government’s authority in court.
Last month, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) sued the acting heads of the Department of Homeland Security, CBP and ICE on behalf of 11 travelers whose devices were searched and, in some instances, seized over the past year.
The complaint alleges that the “warrantless and suspicionless searches” violated the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment on free expression and assembly and the Fourth Amendment on privacy.
The 11 plaintiffs include 10 U.S. citizens and one U.S. permanent resident. Among them are three journalists, a filmmaker, an artist, a NASA engineer and a former Air Force captain. Six are Muslims, one is a Haitian national and four are white Americans.
Examples of search and seizure
Their combined experiences shed light on an otherwise opaque system and show just how far border agents would go to scrutinize electronic devices.
In July, Nadia Alasaad was stopped at the Canadian border and forced to unlock her phone and hand it over to a customs agent even after she protested that she had photos of herself without a headscarf that she did not want any male agents to view.
Akram Shibly, a New York-based filmmaker, said his phone was searched in December 2016 and January 2017 as he crossed the U.S.-Canadian border.
During the first stop, he alleges, agents ordered him to fill out a form disclosing his mobile phone password and social media identifiers. The agents used the information to view his “cloud-based apps and content.” (CBP says agents are not allowed to view data that only resides in the cloud). During the second border encounter, Shibly claims, CBP agents used force to seize his phone after he refused to hand it over.
Jeremy Dupin, the Haitian journalist who is a U.S. permanent resident, was stopped twice in December 2016, once during a layover at the Miami International Airport, and a second time as he and his daughter tried to enter the U.S. from Canada.
According to the complaint, his phone contained “reporting notes and images, source contact and identifying information, and communications with editors.”
The complaint calls the examinations “an unprecedented invasion of personal privacy” and “a threat to freedom of speech and association.” It also cites a 2014 Supreme Court decision that declared warrantless searches of cellphones of arrested suspects unconstitutional.
Supreme Court
In Riley v. California, the Supreme Court rejected the government’s claim that searching a suspect’s cellphone was indistinguishable from searching his or her other belongings.
“We think that rationale holds just as true for the border context, where the privacy interests are so great that the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant,” ACLU lawyer Esha Bhandari said.
Unlike legal challenges raised against the government’s border search authority in criminal cases, none of the 11 plaintiffs named in the ACLU/EFF lawsuit is accused of any wrongdoing, noted EFF lawyer Aaron Mackey.
“This is one case where we’re trying to change the law, where we’re trying to get the courts to recognize that the practice that the CBP has been operating under and the previous decisions (in border exception cases) … were incorrect,” Mackey said.
Spokespeople for DHS, CBP and ICE declined to comment on the lawsuit.
Laura Donohue, director of Georgetown’s center on national security and the law, said electronic device searches run afoul of other constitutional guarantees as well, including the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
While courts have consistently upheld the government’s border exception authority, Donohue said, “The laws that we have focus on luggage and not digitalization.”
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New Gadgets We May (or May Not) Need
The ever expanding field of consumer technology just got several dozen new specimens, showcased at the Netherlands’ first Consumer Electronics Show. None are expected to spectacularly change our lives … but at least some of them may prove to be truly useful. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Trump Administration Shifts Persecuted Minority Aid Away From United Nations
The Trump administration announced a shift Wednesday in foreign aid funding for persecuted minorities. Vice President Pence told a global assembly of Christians the U.S. would instruct the State Department to stop funding United Nations programs for persecuted minorities, instead providing funding through USAID and other faith-based NGOs. VOA’s Katherine Gypson reports from Washington on the consequences of the administration’s decision.
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White House: Women Accusing Trump of Sexual Harassment are Lying
A White House spokeswoman said Friday that all of the women who have accused President Donald Trump of sexual harassment are lying, echoing the president’s statement last week that the accusations are “fake news.”
Sarah Sanders took a question during the White House briefing from a television reporter asking about the White House’s official position on charges by at least 16 women that the president has engaged in inappropriate behavior.
“Is it the official White House position that all of these women are lying?” asked Jacqueline Alemany of CBS News.
“Yeah, we’ve been clear on that from the beginning, and the president’s spoken on it,” Sanders answered.
The reporter asked the question after alluding to a number of other prominent men in the media who have lately been accused of harassment, such as movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, television host Bill O’Reilly, and journalist Mark Halperin, all of whom have lost jobs over the matter.
Last week Trump was queried over the accusations, in particular a subpoena issued by lawyers for a former contestant on his television show, Summer Zervos, who accused him of groping and kissing her during the taping of the show.
The president replied, “All I can say is, it’s totally fake news. It’s just fake. It’s fake. It’s made-up stuff, and it’s disgraceful, what happens, but … that happens in the world of politics.”
A year ago at a campaign rally, then-candidate Trump responded to accusations of sexual harassment by calling himself “a victim of one of the great political smear campaigns in the history of our country.”
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Report: US Grand Jury Approves First Charges in Russia Investigation
A U.S. federal grand jury has approved the first charges in an investigation of Russian influence on U.S. elections, a probe led by special counsel Robert Mueller.
A report late Friday from CNN quoted sources as saying anyone who is charged could be taken into custody as soon as Monday. The exact charges are unclear.
A spokesman for Mueller’s office declined CNN’s request for comment.
CNN said lawyers working on Mueller’s team were seen entering the federal courtroom in Washington, D.C., on Friday, where the grand jury meets to hear testimony.
Mueller has kept a tight lid on information about the probe.
Mueller was appointed special counsel in May, shortly after the firing of then-FBI director James Comey, to look into allegations that the Trump campaign may have colluded with Russia to win the election. He is also examining the possibility that the president may have tried to interfere with the Russia investigation.
The probe is also examining possible financial ties between Russian businesses and members of the Trump campaign, and foreign lobbying conducted by former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
In addition to Mueller’s probe, three congressional committees are conducting their own investigations into possible Russian influence on the election.
Botulism Pills, the CIA, the Mob and the JFK Assassination
Botulism pills. Conspiracy theories. What the government might have known and still won’t say about Lee Harvey Oswald.
The release of thousands of records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy hasn’t settled the best-known, real-life whodunit in American history. But the record offered riveting details of the way intelligence services operated at the time and are striving to keep some particulars a secret even now.
“The Kennedy records really are an emblem of the fight of secrecy against transparency,” said Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst at the private National Security Archive research group in Washington. “The ‘secureaucrats’ managed to withhold key documents and keep this long saga of secrecy going.”
The 2,800 records released on Thursday night include some that had dribbled out over the years but are getting renewed attention from being in this big batch.
Some highlights:
HOOVER, WORRIED
Just a few hours after Lee Harvey Oswald was killed in Dallas, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover dictated a memo saying the government needed to issue something “so we can convince the public” that Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy.
The memo was in the latest trove of Kennedy assassination files released late Thursday. The FBI director composed the memo on Nov. 24, 1963 — two days after Kennedy was killed and just hours after nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald in the basement of the Dallas police station.
Hoover said that the FBI had an agent at the hospital in hopes of getting a confession from Oswald, but Oswald died before that could happen. Hoover said he and a deputy were concerned about “having something issued so we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin.”
Hoover laments how Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, was considering appointing a presidential commission to investigate the assassination. Hoover said he suggested that the FBI give an investigative report to the attorney general complete with photographs, laboratory work and other evidence. That report, he thought, could be given to Johnson and he could decide whether to make it public.
“I felt this was better because there are several aspects which would complicate our foreign relations,” Hoover wrote. He said Oswald wrote a letter to the Soviet Embassy in Washington, which the FBI intercepted, read and resealed. Hoover said the letter had been addressed to the Soviet Embassy official “in charge of assassinations and similar activities on the part of the Soviet government. To have that drawn into a public hearing would muddy the waters internationally,” Hoover wrote.
Besides, Hoover said, the letter was unrelated proof that Oswald committed the murder.
LBJ’s THEORY
Everyone has their theories, including even President Lyndon B. Johnson. According to one document released on Thursday, Johnson believed Kennedy was behind the assassination of the South Vietnamese president weeks before his death and that Kennedy’s murder was payback, the newly released documents say.
U.S. Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms said in a 1975 deposition that Johnson “used to go around saying that the reason (Kennedy) was assassinated was that he had assassinated President (Ngo Dinh) Diem and this was just justice.”
“Where he got this idea from I don’t know,” U.S. Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms said in a 1975 deposition.
Diem and his brother were killed on Nov. 2, 1963 after a coup by South Vietnamese generals.
This isn’t the first time Johnson’s theory has been aired. He was also quoted in Max Holland’s book, The Kennedy Assassination Tapes, as saying that Kenney died because of “divine retribution.”
“He murdered Diem and then he got it himself,” Johnson reportedly said.
Kennedy’s position on Diem’s assassination is still debated, said Ken Hughes, a historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.
A month before Diem’s assassination, the south Vietnamese generals planning the coup told the CIA that they would overthrow the government if they could be assured that American aid would continue and Kennedy told them it would, Hughes said.
But a dispute remains over whether Kennedy insisted that Diem go unharmed or whether the president left it up to the South Vietnamese generals to decide what to do, said Hughes, who is writing a book on the subject.
One of the files that could shed light on that question is a CIA report on the U.S. government’s involvement in the Diem coup. The record was supposed to be released Thursday but was among the hundreds that Trump blocked from becoming public.
CASTRO, THE CIA AND A MOBSTER’S MISTRESS
A 1975 document described the CIA’s $150,000 offer to have Cuban leader Fidel Castro assassinated — but the mob insisted on taking the job for free.
The underworld murder-for-hire contract was detailed in a summary of a May 1962 CIA briefing for then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy. By then, the Kennedy White House had launched its unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and several assassination attempts against Castro had failed.
At least two efforts to kill Castro were made with CIA-supplied lethal pills and organized crime-made muscle in early 1961, according to the document. The CIA’s mob contacts included John Rosselli, a top lieutenant to Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana, who weren’t told but guessed the CIA was behind the offer. The pair, later victims of mob hits, said they want no part of any payment — but still, $11,000 in payments were made for expenses.
The mobsters came to the attention of the CIA a year earlier when Giancana asked a CIA intermediary to arrange for putting a listening device in the Las Vegas room of an entertainer he suspected of having an affair with Giancana’s mistress. The task was handed off to a private investigator named Arthur Balletti, who put the listening device in a phone in the hotel room. “The CIA reportedly did not know of the specific proposed wiretap.”
Told later about “everything,” Kennedy was “unhappy, because at that time he felt he was making a very strong drive to try to get after the Mafia.
“So his comment was to us that if we were going to get involved with the Mafia, in the future at any time, to ‘make sure you see me first.’”
The document was made public in 1997 and contained in an Associated Press report at that time.
STRANGE CALL
A British newspaper received an anonymous phone call about “big news” in the United States 25 minutes before President John F. Kennedy was shot in 1963, one file says.
A batch of 2,800 declassified documents includes a Nov. 26, 1963 memo from the CIA to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover about a call received by the Cambridge News on Nov. 22, the day Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Texas.
The memo from deputy CIA director James Angleton says the caller said “the Cambridge News reporter should call the American Embassy in London for some big news, and then hung up.” Anna Savva, a current Cambridge News reporter, said Friday there’s no record of the call. “We have nobody here who knows the name of the person who took the call,” she said.
The memo was released by the U.S. National Archives in July.
The phone call to the Cambridge News was first reported decades ago by Kennedy conspiracy theorist Michael Eddowes. In the 1980s, Eddowes, a British lawyer, claimed to have a CIA document mentioning the call. Eddowes, who died in 1992, wrote a book alleging that Kennedy’s assassin was not Lee Harvey Oswald but a Soviet impostor who took his identity. As a result of his efforts, the killer’s body was exhumed in 1981. An autopsy confirmed that it was Oswald.
Tech Companies Ready to Face Congress Over Foreign Interference in US Election
Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election nearly a year ago, there has been increasing scrutiny of how Russian-backed operatives used accounts on Facebook, Google and Twitter to try to influence its outcome.
Executives from those companies appear before at least three congressional hearings starting Tuesday, facing questions from lawmakers about what happened and how they plan to respond.
What happened on the internet companies’ services during the 2016 election “was the undermining of our political process,” said Ann Ravel, a lecturer at the University of California-Berkeley’s law school and a former chair at the Federal Election Commission, the federal agency that enforces campaign finance law.
The congressional spotlight on the internet marks a shift in how lawmakers and the public think of the global communications network, observers say.
View of the internet
For years, the internet was viewed as “an egalitarian force, basically giving voice to the voiceless,” said Nate Persily, a Stanford University law professor.
The 2016 election, with Russian-backed operatives reportedly placing political ads on social networks or posing as Americans talking about hot-button issues, changed that utopian view of the internet.
“We realized that once you allow anyone to speak to as many people as they want no matter when they want, that enables certain types of speakers who hold undemocratic speech,” Persily said.
On the streets of San Francisco, people interviewed echoed frustrations heard around the country that little is known yet about how and why Russian-backed actors used internet firms.
But some say tech companies should take responsibility for what happens on their services and play more of a monitoring role than they have done.
“Social media is accessible to everyone,” peer counselor Moinnette Harris said. “People can engage in it or put whatever they want on there, whether it’s true or false.”
Lia McLoughlin, a stay-at-home parent, said, “I think Facebook has a responsibility. … If you know that there’s something that is affecting our democracy, and if you have any idea that it might be fake, there is a reason to stand in there. It’s our democracy.”
Facebook and other companies share responsibility if their services were used by foreign agents, said Christian Simonetti, an administrative assistant. But any new rules or penalties the internet companies face should be done “without infringing on people’s democratic rights to express themselves,” he said.
Proposed legislation
Law lecturer Ravel said that congressional leaders and regulators should require that internet companies be transparent about who is using their services for political ads, something that billboards, TV stations and newspapers have to do.
In recent weeks, some of the companies have vowed to make changes in reaction to the scrutiny. Twitter and Facebook have said they will do more to make political advertisements more transparent.
Twitter also banned RT and Sputnik, two Russian-backed media companies, from advertising on its site.
But almost everyone agrees it would be harder to regulate — for the government and internet firms — so-called “issue-based ads,” which are about hot topics such as gun rights and gay marriage. Those ads may not be tied to a specific candidate or ballot measure.
Even harder would be fake Facebook or Twitter accounts created overseas but purporting to have been created by people living in a targeted community.
“There is currently no clear industry definition for issue-based ads,” Twitter said in a blog post.
How the U.S. navigates these issues will matter to the rest of the world, Ravel said.
“It’s important for the United States to be a leader to balance innovation we want from the internet for people to speak openly on the internet,” Ravel said, “yet to do something to prevent the intervention in the election.”
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US Economy Expands at 3 Percent Rate in Third Quarter
The U.S. economy expanded at a three percent annual pace in July, August and September, about the same pace as the prior quarter.
Friday’s Commerce Department data surprised economists, who thought damage from two hurricanes would cut growth to a lower level. The data show the world’s largest economy is now about 2.3 percent larger than it was at this time last year.
Stuart Hoffman of PNC bank says the “solid” growth data is likely to help corporate profits and reinforce the U.S. central bank’s determination to raise interest rates in December. Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute says the figures “overstate” growth, and he notes inflation is still below the Fed’s two percent target, making an interest rate hike unnecessary at this time.
Officials raise rates to fend off high inflation by cooling economic activity. Rates were slashed during the recession to bolster growth and employment.
Federal Reserve leaders gather Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington to debate interest rate policy. Most economists predict they will not raise rates until their next meeting in mid-December.
Next Friday, government experts will publish unemployment data for October. September’s rate was a low 4.2 percent.
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New Styles, Smarter Machines and Next-Generation Safety Highlight Tokyo Motor Show
Automakers from around the world take the stage this weekend at the 45th annual Tokyo Motor Show. Designers will showcase electronic cars with advanced artificial intelligence and at least one concept car with safety features for the world around it. Arash Arabasadi reports.
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