Elon Musk says that Twitter is close to becoming cash-flow positive after making sharp layoffs and working to lure advertisers back to the platform.\n\n“I’d say we’re roughly breakeven at this point,” Musk said Wednesday, during a live interview with the BBC recorded on Twitter Spaces.\n\nMusk has pushed to make more money at Twitter to recoup his multibillion-dollar investment in the company. As part of this income-generation drive, Twitter has sought to make more money from subscriptions, charging users $8 a month to get access to Twitter verification marks and for the ability to edit tweets, among other features.\n\nMusk said that Twitter will start removing blue checks from accounts without a subscription to the company’s paid Twitter Blue service next week.\n\nDuring the interview, Musk said that “almost all” advertisers have resumed buying ads on the platform, after several hit pause on Twitter advertising following Musk’s acquisition of the app.\n\nMusk purchased Twitter for $44 billion in late October after a drawn-out legal battle with the company. He has since sought to radically overhaul the platform, including its content moderation policies.\nThis has spooked many product placers, with half of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers now estimated to have left the platform since Musk took over.\n\n“Depending on how things go, if current trends continue, I think we could be ... cashflow-positive this quarter, if things keep going well,” Musk said.\n\nBrands were concerned about the app failing to tackle hateful posts in the wake of the $44 billion deal, which was completed in October 2022.

Twitter revenues plumment in recent months.

Half of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers have left the platform

Elon Musk, Twitter’s most important shitposter, has added the company to his business empire after months of legal skirmishes, according to CNBC, The Washington Post, and Insider. The acquisition was confirmed in an SEC filing from the company on Friday morning, noting it’s delisting $TWTR from the New York Stock Exchange. He celebrated by firing executives. Musk fired Parag Agrawal, who succeeded Jack Dorsey as Twitter CEO, and chief financial officer Ned Segal, both of who were in the building at the time and escorted out by security, according to Reuters. Vijaya Gadde, the company’s policy chief whom Musk had publicly criticized, was also ousted. Sean Edgett, the general counsel, is gone, too, The New York Times reports. (Bloomberg says security escorted him out, as well.) Chief customer officer Sarah Personette was not among the executives fired but announced she resigned on October 28th with a tweet thread posted the following Tuesday. In it, she mentions, “I do believe the new administration understands the importance of holding up the standards of GARM.”\nThe execs were in line for handsome payouts for their trouble, Insider reports: Agrawal $38.7 million, Segal $25.4 million, Gadde $12.5 million, and Personette, who tweeted yesterday about how excited she was for Musk’s takeover, $11.2 million. However, a subsequent report from The Information indicated Musk has said they’re fired “for cause” in an attempt to block them from receiving those payouts. It’s unclear what this may mean for Personette.

Twitter acquisition was confirmed in an SEC filing.

It’s been five months since Elon Musk took over Twitter after a long-drawn out, tumultuous negotiating period. There has been a lot of controversy since he positioned himself at the helm of the social media platform, including massive layoffs, allowing too-long tweets, and altering the algorithm to make his Super Bowl tweets rank higher. He closed the deal to acquire Twitter on Oct. 28, after paying his original officer price of $54.20 a share for a grand total of approximately $44 billion. He fired some of the company’s top executives almost immediately, including CEO Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal, and chief legal officer Vijay Gadde. Soon after, he began to lay off staff members to remove around half of the 7,500-strong workforce. Twitter value drops to half of Musk’s acquisition price. Now, it appears that Twitter is facing financial challenges. Changes since Musk’s takeover have resulted in more hate speech, issues in acquiring blue check verification, and problems with the app’s features. According to Zoe Schiffer, managing editor of Platformer, a tech news website, the billionaire sent an email to Twitter employees admitting that the company has been through radical changes which were necessary. Musk also reportedly acknowledged that the platform was previously about four months from running out of money. Per Schiffer, the value of Twitter is now half of what Musk paid for it. “Current grants are based on a $20b valuation,” she tweeted, although Musk says he is hopeful of eventually getting a valuation of $250 billion. Advertisers concerned about their brand have left the platform, leading to plummeting revenues for the company in recent months.


Last month, Gwyneth Paltrow stood trial in Utah where a man named Terry Sanderson accused her of causing him severe injury when she allegedly crashed into him while they were both skiing at the luxurious Deer Valley ski resort.\n\nShe ultimately won the trial after Sanderson was determined to be "100 percent at fault" for the 2016 ski crash. The proceedings garnered lots of attention, and now, weeks later, Paltrow has taken to Instagram to comment on what happened.\n\nHer post featured a video of falling show, a photo of an extravagant living room, another photo of snow, and one of a whiskey bottle, all apparently taken during the time she spent in Utah for the trial.\n\nHer post featured a video of falling show, a photo of an extravagant living room, another photo of snow, and one of a whiskey bottle, all apparently taken during the time she spent in Utah for the trial.\n\nHer captioned seemed to confirm this – she wrote "Last weeks of March; storms of varying kinds, a beautiful place to lay my head, cold therapy of the most natural kind, and a whisky discovery."\n\nThe last weeks of March were when the trial took place. "Storms of various kinds" could refer to both the snowstorms in the area and the media storm the trial caused.\n\nMany of her followers also understood her post to be a reference to her days in court.

The jury sided with Paltrow, ruling that Sanderson was at fault.

Gwyneth Paltrow\'s ski crash trial came to an end Thursday when a jury sided with the actor, saying she was not at fault for a 2016 collision at Utah’s Deer Valley Resort that injured a retired optometrist.\n\nTerry Sanderson sued Paltrow for $300,000, alleging that reckless skiing caused her to run into him from behind on Feb. 26, 2016. Sanderson said he suffered four broken ribs, a concussion and lasting brain damage that affected his daily life and personal relationships.\n\nPaltrow, who has repeatedly denied running into Sanderson, countersued for $1 and her legal fees.\n\nThe trial went on for more than a week. The jury deliberated for just a few hours before deciding that Sanderson, not Paltrow, was at fault.\n\nHere’s a timeline of the events that led up to the court case, and memorable moments from trial.\n\nSanderson filed a lawsuit on Jan. 29, 2019, saying that Paltrow was skiing "out of control" when she hit him from behind, knocked him down, and then landed on top of him. He said after the collision, the actor got up and skied away and did not offer any help.\n\nHe was initially seeking more than $3.1 million but amended it to $300,000.\n\nSanderson said it took him three years to file the suit because his legal team could not come to a resolution after meeting with Paltrow and her attorney.

Gwyneth Paltrow was skiing at the Deer Valley Resort when she collided with retired optometrist, Terry Sanderson.

Gwyneth Paltrow\'s attorneys asked the daughter of a man suing the actor-turned-lifestyle influencer over a 2016 ski collision about missing GoPro camera footage that they called "the most important piece of evidence" at trial Thursday.\n\nSteve Owens, Paltrow\'s attorney, asked one of the man\'s daughters, Polly Grasham, about emails exchanged with her father about the mysterious footage and the possibility that the lawsuit was filed against Paltrow because she was famous.\n\nThe GoPro footage has not been found or included as evidence for the trial.\n\n"I\'m famous ... At what cost?" Terry Sanderson, the 76-year-old retired optometrist suing Paltrow, wrote in the subject line of an email to his family after the crash.\n\nSanderson is suing Paltrow for more than $300,000 in damages, claiming that she skied recklessly into him on a beginner run at Deer Valley Resort seven years ago, breaking his ribs and leaving him with a concussion. Paltrow has claimed Sanderson caused the crash and countersued for $1 and attorney fees.\n\nThe trial took on an increasingly personal note on the third day of proceedings when Sanderson\'s daughter and a neuropsychologist testified about his declining health.\n\nSanderson\'s attorneys tried to persuade jurors that the collision had changed the course of their client\'s life, leaving him brain-impaired and damaging his relationships with loved ones.\n\nPaltrow\'s attorneys questioned whether Grasham and neuropsychologist Dr. Alina Fong could say with certainty that Sanderson\'s downturn wasn\'t a result of aging or documented, pre-crash conditions.

Paltrow's attorney asked Sanderson about the possibility of the lawsuit being a result of Paltrow's fame.

Actress Gwyneth Paltrow appeared in a Park City courtroom on Tuesday for the start of a trial over a 2016 skiing crash in Utah.\n\nPaltrow is accused of crashing into Terry Sanderson, causing several serious injuries and then abandoning him, while they were both skiing on a beginner run at Deer Valley Resort seven years ago.\n\nThe trial is being live streamed on YouTube.\n\nSanderson, a retired optometrist, filed the lawsuit in 2019, three years after the collision on the mountainside. Since then, he has alleged that the accident left him with a brain injury, four broken ribs and emotional damage. Sanderson also claimed Paltrow left the scene without giving him her name, contact information or calling for help.\n\nLawrence Buhler, an attorney for Sanderson, began opening arguments stating, "Distracted skiers cause crashes. Defendant Gwyneth Paltrow knew that looking up the mountain and to the side while skiing down the mountain was dangerous."\n\nPaltrow\'s attorney Stephen Owens told the jury that Sanderson\'s claims that the actress bolted from the mountain after ramming into him were totally fabricated.\n\n"We believe it to be utter B.S.," Owens said.\n\nHe also told the jury that the burden of proof in the case rested on Sanderson\'s legal team and not on the actress.\n\n"You\'re going to feel sorrow for [Sanderson] but that\'s not why you\'re here. You\'re here to figure out if someone negligently crashed into someone or if no one did," he noted.\n\n"Skiing comes with inherent risks," he added.

Actress Gwyneth Paltrow appeared in a Park City courtroom on Tuesday for the start of the trial over the 2016 skiing crash in Utah.

Accuser Terry Sanderson was determined to be "100% at fault"


The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank continues to reverberate, hitting bank stocks, revealing hidden stresses, knocking on to Credit Suisse, and setting off a political blame-game.\n\n\nWhy the $212bn tech-lender abruptly collapsed, triggering the most significant financial crisis since 2008, has no single answer. Was it, as some argue, the result of Trump-era regulation rollbacks, risk mismanagement at the bank, sharp interest rate rises after a decade of ultra-low borrowing costs, or perhaps a combination of all three?\n\nFederal investigations have begun and lawsuits have been filed and no doubt new issues at the bank will emerge. But for now, here are the main reasons experts believed SVB failed.\n\nThe Vermont senator Bernie Sanders argues that the culprit was an “absurd” 2018 law, supported by Congress and signed by Donald Trump, that undid some of the credit requirements imposed under the Dodd-Frank banking legislation brought in after the 2008 banking crisis.\n\nDodd-Frank required that banks with at least $50bn in assets – banks considered “systemically important” – undergo an annual Federal Reserve “stress test” and maintain certain levels of capital as well as plans for a living will if they failed.\n\nSVB’s chief executive, Greg Becker, argued before Congress in 2015 that the $50bn threshold (SVB held $40bn at the time) was unnecessary and his bank, like other “mid-sized” or regional banks, “does not present systemic risks”.\n\nTrump said the new bill went a “long way toward fixing” Dodd-Frank, which he called a “job-killer”.

The U.S. government announced a plan late Sunday meant to shore up the banking industry.

Interest rates rise after a decade of ultra-low borrowing costs.

On Wednesday, Silicon Valley Bank was a well-capitalized institution seeking to raise some funds.\n\nWithin 48 hours, a panic induced by the very venture capital community that SVB had served and nurtured ended the bank’s 40-year-run.\n\nRegulators shuttered SVB Friday and seized its deposits in the largest U.S. banking failure since the 2008 financial crisis and the second-largest ever. The company’s downward spiral began late Wednesday, when it surprised investors with news that it needed to raise $2.25 billion to shore up its balance sheet. What followed was the rapid collapse of a highly-respected bank that had grown alongside its technology clients.\n\nEven now, as the dust begins to settle on the second bank wind-down announced this week, members of the VC community are lamenting the role that other investors played in SVB’s demise.\n\n“This was a hysteria-induced bank run caused by VCs,” Ryan Falvey, a fintech investor at Restive Ventures, told CNBC. “This is going to go down as one of the ultimate cases of an industry cutting its nose off to spite its face.”\n\nThe episode is the latest fallout from the Federal Reserve’s actions to stem inflation with its most aggressive rate hiking campaign in four decades. The ramifications could be far-reaching, with concerns that startups may be unable to pay employees in coming days, venture investors may struggle to raise funds, and an already-battered sector could face a deeper malaise.

SVB invested in technology companies (startups).

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) is shut down by regulators.

Stefan Kalb was in the middle of a meeting around 1 p.m. on Thursday when a fellow company executive sent him a panicked Slack message: "Do you know what\'s happening at SVB?"\n\nKalb, the CEO and co-founder of Seattle-based food management startup Shelf Engine, had been following news of a bank run at Silicon Valley Bank. Droves of depositors were attempting to pull out as much as $42 billion from the bank on Thursday alone, as fear spread that the bank was teetering on the brink of collapse.\n\nThe bank seemed to be on firm financial footing on Wednesday. The following day, it appeared to be under water.\n\nFor Shelf Engine, a 40-person startup founded in 2015 that uses artificial intelligence to help grocery stores reduce food waste, this was a big problem.\n\nNot only did Silicon Valley Bank help the company process checks and payments, but millions of dollars of the startup\'s cash was locked up in the bank.\n\nKalb sprung into action. He and his team quickly opened an account at JPMorgan Chase and attempted to wire transfer every last penny out of Silicon Valley Bank.\n\n"Unfortunately, our wire was not honored and our money is still at Silicon Valley Bank," Kalb, 37, said in an interview on Friday. "We woke up this morning hoping the money would be in that JPMorgan bank account, and it was not."

Executive sends panicked Slack message about Silicon Valley Bank (SVB)


On Wednesday, Silicon Valley Bank was a well-capitalized institution seeking to raise some funds.\n\nWithin 48 hours, a panic induced by the very venture capital community that SVB had served and nurtured ended the bank’s 40-year-run.\n\nRegulators shuttered SVB Friday and seized its deposits in the largest U.S. banking failure since the 2008 financial crisis and the second-largest ever. The company’s downward spiral began late Wednesday, when it surprised investors with news that it needed to raise $2.25 billion to shore up its balance sheet. What followed was the rapid collapse of a highly-respected bank that had grown alongside its technology clients.\n\nEven now, as the dust begins to settle on the second bank wind-down announced this week, members of the VC community are lamenting the role that other investors played in SVB’s demise.\n\n“This was a hysteria-induced bank run caused by VCs,” Ryan Falvey, a fintech investor at Restive Ventures, told CNBC. “This is going to go down as one of the ultimate cases of an industry cutting its nose off to spite its face.”\n\nThe episode is the latest fallout from the Federal Reserve’s actions to stem inflation with its most aggressive rate hiking campaign in four decades. The ramifications could be far-reaching, with concerns that startups may be unable to pay employees in coming days, venture investors may struggle to raise funds, and an already-battered sector could face a deeper malaise.

Wall Street is worried about what may be next to topple following the second- and third-largest bank failures in U.S. history, and stocks are swinging sharply Monday as investors scramble to find someplace safe to park their money.\n\nThe S&P 500 was virtually unchanged in morning trading, but only after tumbling 1.4% at the open. The sharpest drops were again coming from banks. Investors are worried that a relentless rise in interest rates meant to get inflation under control are approaching a tipping point and may be cracking the banking system.\n\n\nThe U.S. government announced a plan late Sunday meant to shore up the banking industry following the collapses of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank since Friday.\n\nThe most pressure is on the regional banks a couple steps below in size of the massive, “too-big-to-fail” banks that helped take down the economy in 2007 and 2008. Shares of First Republic plunged 78%, even after the bank said Sunday it had strengthened its finances with cash from the Federal Reserve and JPMorgan Chase.\n\nHuge banks, which have been repeatedly stress-tested by regulators following the 2008 financial crisis, weren’t down as much. JPMorgan Chase fell 0.7%, and Bank of America dropped 3.7%.\n\n“So far, it seems that the potential problem banks are few, and importantly do not extend to the so-called systemically important banks,” analysts at ING said.

The U.S. government announced a plan late Sunday meant to shore up the banking industry.

Shares in banks all over the world have plummeted in recent days as fears that the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) could precipitate a wider crisis in the sector.\n\nThe speed at which market jitters have spread across the world have forced bank executives and regulators to move with unprecedented swiftness: US authorities guaranteed all deposits in SVB – and smaller bank Signature – 48 hours after it collapsed. Just hours after Credit Suisse’s share price plunged on Wednesday, the Swiss central bank stepped in with a $54bn loan.\n\nWhile there’s nothing new about a financial emergency, these crises – and their resulting responses – are unique in having been accelerated by a frenzy of social media chatter that has fuelled the panic.\n\n‘It was a bank sprint, not a bank run’\nA bank run occurs when customers lose faith in an institution’s ability to look after their money, and large numbers withdraw their deposits all at once. As more people withdraw their funds, the likelihood of the bank being able to cover the withdrawals falls, leading more customers to pile in and demand the return of their money.\n\n“If you see a bomb disposal expert running down the street, don’t ask them what’s happened, just try to keep up,” writes Daniel Davies, the managing director of Frontline Analysts, in the Financial Times.\n\nRumours around a bank’s solvency can build up for months or years before it leads to a run. Or it can happen in a matter of hours.

Shares in banks all over the world have plummeted.

Hysteria and fear spread that the SVB was collapsing.


Stefan Kalb was in the middle of a meeting around 1 p.m. on Thursday when a fellow company executive sent him a panicked Slack message: "Do you know what\'s happening at SVB?"\n\nKalb, the CEO and co-founder of Seattle-based food management startup Shelf Engine, had been following news of a bank run at Silicon Valley Bank. Droves of depositors were attempting to pull out as much as $42 billion from the bank on Thursday alone, as fear spread that the bank was teetering on the brink of collapse.\n\nThe bank seemed to be on firm financial footing on Wednesday. The following day, it appeared to be under water.\n\nFor Shelf Engine, a 40-person startup founded in 2015 that uses artificial intelligence to help grocery stores reduce food waste, this was a big problem.\n\nNot only did Silicon Valley Bank help the company process checks and payments, but millions of dollars of the startup\'s cash was locked up in the bank.\n\nKalb sprung into action. He and his team quickly opened an account at JPMorgan Chase and attempted to wire transfer every last penny out of Silicon Valley Bank.\n\n"Unfortunately, our wire was not honored and our money is still at Silicon Valley Bank," Kalb, 37, said in an interview on Friday. "We woke up this morning hoping the money would be in that JPMorgan bank account, and it was not."

Hysteria and fear spread that the SVB was collapsing.

Another Bay Area bank was affected Monday by uncertainty in the financial markets following the failure of Silicon Valley Bank on Friday.\n\nStock in San Francisco-based First Republic Bank sank nearly 62% Monday and shares of other regional banks suffered losses, reportedly. First Republic has 86 locations across the country. Its Midpeninsula offices include two in Menlo Park and one each in Los Altos, Mountain View, Palo Alto and Redwood City.\n\nOn Sunday, regulators seized Signature Bank in New York after it failed.\n\nBut a San Jose State University professor of finance and accounting does not see the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank as signs of a coming crisis.\n\n"I don\'t think it is a huge contagion issue," said assistant professor Matthew Faulkner. "It\'s more toward an isolated incident."\n\nOver the weekend and Monday, top federal officials including President Joseph Biden appeared to be getting ahead of the issue.\n\nBiden sought to ease American\'s fears by making all deposits held by Silicon Valley Bank customers available regardless of the amount of their deposits, federal officials said over the weekend.\n\nThat includes businesses who must pay their employees and their bills, officials said.\n\n"Americans can have confidence that the banking system is safe," Biden said Monday morning. "Your deposits will be there when you need them."\n\nInvestors will not be protected, Biden said. According to the president, they took a risk and "that\'s how capitalism works."\n\nTaxpayers will not be on the hook for the losses.

Regulators seized Signature Bank in New York on Sunday.

Silicon Valley Bank attempted to raise $2.25 billion from investors.

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank continues to reverberate, hitting bank stocks, revealing hidden stresses, knocking on to Credit Suisse, and setting off a political blame-game.\n\n\nWhy the $212bn tech-lender abruptly collapsed, triggering the most significant financial crisis since 2008, has no single answer. Was it, as some argue, the result of Trump-era regulation rollbacks, risk mismanagement at the bank, sharp interest rate rises after a decade of ultra-low borrowing costs, or perhaps a combination of all three?\n\nFederal investigations have begun and lawsuits have been filed and no doubt new issues at the bank will emerge. But for now, here are the main reasons experts believed SVB failed.\n\nThe Vermont senator Bernie Sanders argues that the culprit was an “absurd” 2018 law, supported by Congress and signed by Donald Trump, that undid some of the credit requirements imposed under the Dodd-Frank banking legislation brought in after the 2008 banking crisis.\n\nDodd-Frank required that banks with at least $50bn in assets – banks considered “systemically important” – undergo an annual Federal Reserve “stress test” and maintain certain levels of capital as well as plans for a living will if they failed.\n\nSVB’s chief executive, Greg Becker, argued before Congress in 2015 that the $50bn threshold (SVB held $40bn at the time) was unnecessary and his bank, like other “mid-sized” or regional banks, “does not present systemic risks”.\n\nTrump said the new bill went a “long way toward fixing” Dodd-Frank, which he called a “job-killer”.

Interest rates rise after a decade of ultra-low borrowing costs.


Shares in banks all over the world have plummeted in recent days as fears that the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) could precipitate a wider crisis in the sector.\n\nThe speed at which market jitters have spread across the world have forced bank executives and regulators to move with unprecedented swiftness: US authorities guaranteed all deposits in SVB – and smaller bank Signature – 48 hours after it collapsed. Just hours after Credit Suisse’s share price plunged on Wednesday, the Swiss central bank stepped in with a $54bn loan.\n\nWhile there’s nothing new about a financial emergency, these crises – and their resulting responses – are unique in having been accelerated by a frenzy of social media chatter that has fuelled the panic.\n\n‘It was a bank sprint, not a bank run’\nA bank run occurs when customers lose faith in an institution’s ability to look after their money, and large numbers withdraw their deposits all at once. As more people withdraw their funds, the likelihood of the bank being able to cover the withdrawals falls, leading more customers to pile in and demand the return of their money.\n\n“If you see a bomb disposal expert running down the street, don’t ask them what’s happened, just try to keep up,” writes Daniel Davies, the managing director of Frontline Analysts, in the Financial Times.\n\nRumours around a bank’s solvency can build up for months or years before it leads to a run. Or it can happen in a matter of hours.

UBS took over Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse in a rushed takeover.

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank continues to reverberate, hitting bank stocks, revealing hidden stresses, knocking on to Credit Suisse, and setting off a political blame-game.\n\n\nWhy the $212bn tech-lender abruptly collapsed, triggering the most significant financial crisis since 2008, has no single answer. Was it, as some argue, the result of Trump-era regulation rollbacks, risk mismanagement at the bank, sharp interest rate rises after a decade of ultra-low borrowing costs, or perhaps a combination of all three?\n\nFederal investigations have begun and lawsuits have been filed and no doubt new issues at the bank will emerge. But for now, here are the main reasons experts believed SVB failed.\n\nThe Vermont senator Bernie Sanders argues that the culprit was an “absurd” 2018 law, supported by Congress and signed by Donald Trump, that undid some of the credit requirements imposed under the Dodd-Frank banking legislation brought in after the 2008 banking crisis.\n\nDodd-Frank required that banks with at least $50bn in assets – banks considered “systemically important” – undergo an annual Federal Reserve “stress test” and maintain certain levels of capital as well as plans for a living will if they failed.\n\nSVB’s chief executive, Greg Becker, argued before Congress in 2015 that the $50bn threshold (SVB held $40bn at the time) was unnecessary and his bank, like other “mid-sized” or regional banks, “does not present systemic risks”.\n\nTrump said the new bill went a “long way toward fixing” Dodd-Frank, which he called a “job-killer”.

In 2018 a law was passed for banks to not be required to have a $50bn safety capital.

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) abruptly collapsed


\n\nViolence has erupted in cities across the US on the sixth night of protests sparked by the death in police custody of African-American George Floyd.\n\nDozens of cities imposed curfews, but many people ignored them, leading to stand-offs and clashes.\n\nRiot police faced off with protesters in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and LA, firing tear gas and pepper bullets to try to disperse crowds.\n\nPolice vehicles were set on fire and shops were looted in several cities.\n\nThe country is experiencing the most widespread racial turbulence and civil unrest since the backlash to the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968.\n\nThe outpouring of anger began last Tuesday after a video showed Mr Floyd being arrested in Minneapolis and a white police officer continuing to kneel on his neck even after he pleaded he could not breathe and fell unconscious.\n\nMore than 75 cities have seen protests, with streets only days ago deserted because of coronavirus full of demonstrators marching shoulder to shoulder. Some US officials have warned of protest-connected virus outbreaks.\n\nThe Floyd case has reignited deep-seated anger over police killings of black Americans and racism. It follows the high-profile cases of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Eric Garner in New York and others that have driven the Black Lives Matter movement.\n\nFor many, the outrage also reflects years of frustration over socio-economic inequality and discrimination, not least in Minneapolis itself, where George Floyd died.\n\n

BLM protests are expected in dozens of towns and cities by the weekend.

Riot police face off with protesters, firing tear gas and pepper bullets.

\n\nBlack Lives Matters protesters in Bristol have pulled down a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston.\n\nDemonstrators attached a rope to the Grade II-listed statue on Colston Avenue on Sunday before pulling it to the ground as crowds cheered. They then jumped on it and rolled it down the street before pushing it into Bristol Harbour.\n\nThe historian David Olusoga compared the action to the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. However, the home secretary, Priti Patel, urged the police to respond. She told Sky News: “I think that is utterly disgraceful and that speaks to the acts of public disorder that have actually now become a distraction from the cause in which people are protesting about.”\n\nSupt Andy Bennett, of Somerset and Avon police, said his force was carrying out an investigation into criminal damage.\n\nHowever, Bennett told the BBC he understood that Colston was “a historical figure that’s caused the black community quite a lot of angst over the last couple of years”, adding: “Whilst I am disappointed that people would damage one of our statues, I do understand why it’s happened, it’s very symbolic. \n\n“You might wonder why we didn’t intervene and why we just allowed people to put it in the docks – we made a very tactical decision, to stop people from doing the act may have caused further disorder and we decided the safest thing to do, in terms of our policing tactics, was to allow it to take place.”\n\n

Black Lives Matters protesters in Bristol pulled down a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston.

\n\nIn the nearly three weeks since videos surfaced of George Floyd's death at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, thousands have participated in the Black Lives Matter protests. In Los Angeles, Athens, Tel Aviv, Sydney, and Mexico City, protestors have left their homes and taken to the streets amid the coronavirus pandemic to honor Floyd, to stand against racism, and to demand justice for others killed by the police. Here are powerful photos from those protests, from multi-lingual signs to Compton Cowboys on horseback.\n\nTo support the Black Lives Matter movement, you can also donate your travel rewards points to groups fighting for racial justice and spend your money at Black-owned bookstores and Black-owned restaurants throughout North America.\n\nDemonstrators honor George Floyd at the site of his murder on June 3. After 13 days of around-the-clock demonstrations, the city of Minneapolis met protestors' demands and announced plans to disband their police department, focusing instead on community-led initiatives. \n\nDutch protestors gathered on and around the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam to march in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter protests around the world. The Democrats 66, a political party in the Netherlands, is currently calling for a ban on police chokeholds within their own police forces.\n\nSparked by Floyd's murder, protestors gathered in Paris last week with signs that read “Justice pour Adama.” Adama Traoré was a Malian-French man who died in police custody in 2016, in the Paris suburb of Beaumont-sur-Oise.

Videos of George Floyd's death at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was released.

\n\nThousands of protesters gathered in Washington, D.C., on Saturday for its largest demonstration yet over George Floyd’s death in police custody, a capstone on a defining week for a city — and nation — that has grappled with widespread outrage over racial injustice, police brutality and the politics accompanying them.\n\nDemonstrators from about a dozen separate protests marched along normally bustling thoroughfares toward the White House through a large swath of downtown cordoned off by police, in what was D.C.'s largest assembled crowd since the Women’s March against President Donald Trump after his inauguration in 2017.\n\nOfficials expected the city to swell with some 100,000 to 200,000 protesters, Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy said at a news conference Friday. Protests began early Saturday afternoon near the U.S. Capitol and Lincoln Memorial before coming together near the White House.\n\nLarge protests also took place across the U.S. and in major cities overseas, including London, Paris, Berlin and Sydney, Australia, according to the Associated Press.\n\nMeanwhile, Floyd was remembered in his small hometown of Raeford, N.C., where hundreds of mourners lined up to pay their respects to the African American man killed by a white Minneapolis police officer 12 days ago.\n\nWhile the initially fiery protests have calmed in recent days after being overshadowed by episodes of violence and looting in cities across the country, including Washington, the anger among protesters over Floyd’s death hasn’t subsided.\n\nMany D.C. marchers, like Angel Ughiovhe, say they’ve come back to protest every day because “enough is enough.”\n\n

Thousands of protesters gathered in Washington, D.C. for the largest demonstration yet over George Floyd’s death in police custody.


After months of waffling, lawsuits, verbal mudslinging, and the near miss of a full-blown trial, Elon Musk now owns Twitter.\n\nOn Thursday night, Mr. Musk closed his $44 billion deal to buy the social media service, said three people with knowledge of the situation. He also began cleaning the house, with at least four top Twitter executives — including the chief executive and chief financial officer — getting fired on Thursday. Mr. Musk had arrived at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters on Wednesday and met with engineers and ad executives.\n\nThe closing of the deal, which followed months of drama and legal challenges as Mr. Musk changed his mind about buying the company, sets Twitter on an uncertain course. Mr. Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” has said that he wants to make the social media platform a more freewheeling place for all types of commentary and that he would “reverse the permanent ban” of former President Donald J. Trump from the service. Mr. Musk’s open approach to speech on Twitter could exacerbate long-simmering issues of toxic content and misinformation, affecting political debates around the world. Early tests will come within days, when Brazil elects its president and American voters go to the polls on Nov. 8 for the midterm elections. Twitter said it would prohibit misleading claims about voting and the outcome of elections, but that was before Mr. Musk owned it.

Twitter reinstates banned user accounts.

At least four top Twitter executives, including the CEO and CFO, are fired.

Less than a week after Elon Musk finally gave in and paid full price for Twitter, his attempts to remake the platform are already descending into an entirely predictable clown show. Watching him begin to reshape content moderation and launch a poorly considered monetization scheme would be entertaining if their potential effects weren’t so dire, with consequences for Twitter’s employees and users, and potentially the broader society. \n\nOriginally reported Sunday by The Verge, a plan to charge verified users to get or keep their blue checks was expected to cost $20 a month. But after widespread backlash on the platform and a poll tweeted by Musk ally Jason Calacanis, in which nearly 82% of users responded that they wouldn’t pay anything for verification, those plans appear to have changed.\n\nBy Tuesday afternoon, Musk had posted a thread on the platform outlining his plan to charge $8 a month instead — part of an overhaul of Twitter’s existing Blue service.\n\nAlong with the coveted blue check, Twitter Blue subscribers will be able to post longer video and audio clips. They will also have half as many ads in their feeds and be able to get around paywalls from news publishers “willing to work” with the platform, and their tweets will get priority in replies, mentions and search results.\n\nIt should come as no surprise that such a plan could have a number of drawbacks.

A poll tweeted by Jason Calacanis showed that 82% of Twitter users wouldn’t pay for verification.

Twitter has begun laying off sizable chunks of the company, the first major move by Elon Musk since his acquisition of the company was completed last week.\n\nTwitter told employees in an email sent Thursday evening and seen by NBC News that the company would notify staffers by email about their employment.\n\n“We recognize that this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but this action is unfortunately necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward,” the email said.\n\nThe firings immediately prompted a class action lawsuit against Twitter for allegedly failing to give a 60-day warning of mass layoffs.\n\nIt had been widely reported that Musk planned to slash the company\'s 7,500-person payroll after he finalized his $44 billion acquisition late last week. He immediately dismissed CEO Parag Agrawal, as well as Twitter’s chief financial officer and its head of legal, public policy and trust and safety upon taking over the company.\n\nA Twitter employee said Thursday\'s email was the first communication staff members had received from Twitter since the acquisition Oct. 27.\n\n"It\'s total chaos, house melting down, everyone looking towards this email," the employee said.\n\nAccording to the email from Twitter, staff members will get notices either through their company email accounts — if they still have jobs — or their personal email accounts if their "employment is impacted."\n\nWorries about layoffs began to emerge before the buyout transaction was complete, but Twitter\'s general counsel urged employees not to dwell on rumors before Musk took ownership.

Lawsuits filed against Twitter for allegedly failing to give 60-day warning of mass layoffs

Musk proposed a plan to charge verified users $20 a month for verification.


\n\nHackers were able to access personal data of 143 million Equifax customers.\nHow did it happen?\n\nMuch is still unknown. But it came down to a flaw in a tool designed to build web applications, the company said in a press release this week. And Equifax admitted it was aware of the security flaw a full two months before the company says hackers first gained accessed to its data.\n\nSome of the information hackers had access to includes names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and some driver\'s license numbers.\n\nThe tool is called Apache Struts, and it\'s used by many large businesses and government organizations. Equifax used it to support its online dispute portal -- where Equifax (EFX) customers go to log issues with their credit reports. The flaw allowed hackers to take control of a website.\n\nA cybersecurity arm of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, US-CERT, "identified and disclosed" the Apache Struts flaw in March, Equifax said in a statement.\n\nAnd the company\'s security department "was aware of this vulnerability at that time, and took efforts to identify and to patch any vulnerable systems."\n\nYet, according to the company, hackers exploited the flaw months later.\n\nEquifax has said it discovered the data breach on July 29. On Friday, it said it waited until it "observed additional suspicious activity" a day later to take the affected web application offline.\n\nAnd on August 2 Equifax contacted Mandiant, a professional cybersecurity firm, to help the company assess what data had been compromised.\n\n

Hackers took control of Equifax's website.

\n\nIf you\'re an American with a credit history -- and at least 143 million are -- you probably already know your Equifax data, including at least your name, social security number, birthdate, and home address, may have been stolen.\n\nWho\'s to blame?\n\nAccording to an unsubstantiated report by equity research firm Baird, citing no evidence, the blame falls on the open-source server framework, Apache Struts. The firm\'s source, per one report, is believed to be Equifax.\n\nApache Struts is a popular open-source software programming Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework for Java. It is not, as some headlines have had it, a vendor software program.\n\nIt\'s also not proven that Struts was the source of the hole the hackers drove through.\n\nIn fact, several headlines -- some of which have since been retracted -- all source a single quote by a non-technical analyst from an Equifax source.\n\nNot only is that troubling journalistically, it\'s problematic from a technical point of view. In case you haven\'t noticed, Equifax appears to be utterly and completely clueless about their own technology. Equifax\'s own data breach detector isn\'t just useless: it\'s untrustworthy.\n\nAdding insult to injury, the credit agency\'s advice and support site looks, at first glance, to be a bogus, phishing-type site: "equifaxsecurity2017.com." That domain name screams fake. And what does it ask for if you go there? The last six figures of your social security number and last name. In other words, exactly the kind of information a hacker might ask for.\n\nEquifax\'s technical expertise, it has been shown, is less than acceptable.\n\n

Equifax's advice and support site looks to be a bogus, phishing-type site.

\n\nThe Equifax data breach that leaked information on the now-145 million people was caused by a vulnerability in Apache's Struts system. Trouble is, the software provider supplied a patch back in March that should have eliminated that vulnerability. But Equifax's former CEO (who suddenly retired last week) told the House Energy and Commerce Committee that a single IT technician was at fault for the whole thing after they failed to install the patch.\n\nWhile speaking to the committee (video below), former CEO Richard Smith outlined the company's normal procedure for new patches: Have a technician install it and then scan the system for any remaining vulnerabilities. Apparently, both the human and computer steps failed.\n\nAs Smith outlines in his written testimony (PDF), the Department of Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT) sent Equifax (alongside many other companies) a notice on March 8th, 2017 about the vulnerability in certain versions of Apache Struts. Equifax sent out an internal mass-email, which should have required its internal IT team to fix the vulnerability within 48 hours, but that didn't happen. An automatic scan for vulnerabilities on March 15th also failed to indicate that Equifax was using a Struts version that had the vulnerability.\n\nBased on Equifax's postmortem investigations, the hacker that exploited this exact weakness likely first used it to pry into Equifax on May 13th, and then continued until July 30th, and Equifax's security tools were none the wiser.

Automatic scan on March 15th failed to detect vulnerability.

\n\nThe blows keep coming for Equifax (NYSE:EFX) as shares continue to tumble and the Federal Trade Commission announced plans to open an investigation into the credit reporting company Thursday after the company went public with its massive security breach last week, putting 143 million American’s personal data at risk.\n\nIn case you missed all drama, here’s a timeline of events, involving one of the biggest security breaches of all time.\n\nMid-May through July 2017 – This is the time frame in which Equifax says hackers gained unauthorized access to its data.\n\nThursday, July 29 – Equifax discovers the hack and immediately stopped the intrusion.\n\nTuesday, August 1 & Wednesday, August 2– Three top executives from Equifax sell nearly $2 million worth of company stock.\n\nThursday, September 7 – Equifax officially alerts the public about the cybersecurity incident and provides a dedicated website for consumers to check if they were affected. Later on that night, the company also issues a statement saying the three executives “had no knowledge that an intrusion had occurred at the time they sold their shares.”\n\nFriday, September 8 –Shares of Equifax shed more than 13% of their value in trading. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tears into the company on social media for trying to push customers to give up their right to sue.\n\n\n.@Equifax is forcing you to give up your right to join a class action against the company if you want their credit protection product. pic.twitter.com/anu0SE58wg\n\n— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) September 8, 2017\n


\n\nThe Panama Papers are an unprecedented leak of 11.5m files from the database of the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm, Mossack Fonseca. The records were obtained from an anonymous source by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The ICIJ then shared them with a large network of international partners, including the Guardian and the BBC.\n\nWhat do they reveal?\nThe documents show the myriad ways in which the rich can exploit secretive offshore tax regimes. Twelve national leaders are among 143 politicians, their families and close associates from around the world known to have been using offshore tax havens.\n\nA $2bn trail leads all the way to Vladimir Putin. The Russian president’s best friend – a cellist called Sergei Roldugin – is at the centre of a scheme in which money from Russian state banks is hidden offshore. Some of it ends up in a ski resort where in 2013 Putin’s daughter Katerina got married.\n\nAmong national leaders with offshore wealth are Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan’s prime minister; Ayad Allawi, ex-interim prime minister and former vice-president of Iraq; Petro Poroshenko, president of Ukraine; Alaa Mubarak, son of Egypt’s former president; and the prime minister of Iceland, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson.\n\nAn offshore investment fund run by the father of British prime minister David Cameron avoided ever having to pay tax in Britain by hiring a small army of Bahamas residents to sign its paperwork.

President Barack Obama addressed the massive leak of documents during a press conference about business tax reform.

\n\nReports published this week on the secretive industry that banks and lawyers use to hide the financial holdings of some of the world’s top leaders and billionaires brought a powerful global response, including the resignation of one prime minister, while the White House and U.S. agencies reacted more cautiously.\n\nPresident Barack Obama addressed the massive leak of documents, which led to the reporting, on Tuesday during a press conference about business tax reform.\n\n“There is no doubt that the problem of global tax avoidance generally, is a huge problem,” the president said. The president also noted in his remarks that the problem is not unique to other nations. “There are folks here in America who are taking advantage of the same stuff. A lot of it is legal, but that’s exactly the problem,” the president added. “It’s not that they’re breaking the laws, it’s that the laws are so poorly designed that they allow people, if they’ve got enough lawyers and enough accountants, to wiggle out of responsibilities that ordinary citizens are having to abide by.”\n\nThe Justice Department, which is investigating alleged corruption in the world’s top soccer body, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), said it may focus more on the financial dealings raised in the reporting based on the documents.\n\n

The Justice Department is investigating alleged corruption in the world’s top soccer body, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA).

\n\nIcelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson resigned on Tuesday, after documents leaked from a Panama-based law firm revealed that his wife possesses a secret offshore account worth millions of dollars.\n\nThe money is housed in a shell corporation called Wintris, which had bought bonds in Icelandic banks. So when Iceland\'s financial sector collapsed in 2008, Wintris became a creditor to those banks. In 2013, Gunnlaugsson became the prime minister, having run partly on a promise to get tougher with Iceland\'s remaining foreign creditors.\n\nSo what Icelandic voters didn\'t know when they elected him in 2013, but have learned with this week\'s "Panama Papers" revelations, is that Gunnlaugsson\'s own wife was secretly one of the creditors he\'d promised to crack down on — an enormous and undisclosed conflict of interest.\n\nWhen the truth came out this week, it led to mass protests on Monday calling for Gunnlaugsson\'s resignation. He stepped down the next day.\n\nWhat happened in Iceland shows the political power of the Panama Papers, but it also shows the degree to which the political turmoil from the 2008 financial crisis is, in some ways, still ongoing in that country.\n\nWhat\'s more, if Gunnlaugsson\'s resignation leads Iceland to schedule new elections soon, that vote could end up empowering a radical political party called the Pirate Party, a left-libertarian amalgam that\'s obsessed with transparency and direct democracy.\n\n

Mass protests on Monday called for Gunnlaugsson's resignation.

\n\nA network of secret offshore deals and vast loans worth $2bn has laid a trail to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.\n\nAn unprecedented leak of documents shows how this money has made members of Putin’s close circle fabulously wealthy.\n\nThough the president’s name does not appear in any of the records, the data reveals a pattern – his friends have earned millions from deals that seemingly could not have been secured without his patronage.\n\nThe documents suggest Putin’s family has benefited from this money – his friends’ fortunes appear his to spend.\n\nThe files are part of an unprecedented leak of millions of papers from the database of Mossack Fonseca, the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm. They show how the rich and powerful are able to exploit secret offshore tax regimes in myriad ways.\n\nThe offshore trail starts in Panama, darts through Russia, Switzerland and Cyprus – and includes a private ski resort where Putin’s younger daughter, Katerina, got married in 2013.\n\nThe Panama Papers shine a particular spotlight on Sergei Roldugin, who is Putin’s best friend. Roldugin introduced Putin to the woman he subsequently married, Lyudmila, and is godfather to Putin’s older daughter, Maria.\n\nA professional musician, he has apparently accumulated a fortune – having been placed in ostensible control of a series of assets worth at least $100m, possibly more.\n\nRoldugin appears to have been picked for this role because of his lesser profile. He has denied in documents to bank officials in Switzerland and Luxembourg that he is close to any Russian public figures.

Roldugin has denied that he is close to any Russian public figures.

\n\nIceland’s embattled prime minister, Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson, has become the first major casualty of the Panama Papers, stepping aside from his office amid mounting public outrage that his family had sheltered money offshore.\n\nWhat was planned as a mass protest in Reykjavik on Tuesday evening turned to muted satisfaction as demonstrators vented their anger following revelations that Gunnlaugsson once owned – and his wife still owns – an offshore investment company with multimillion-pound claims on Iceland’s failed banks.\n\n“We were hoping parliament would be dissolved,” said Steingrimur Oli Einarsson, a fish oil trader, one of a few hundred to brave a freezing northeasterly wind on parliament square in downtown Reykjavik.\n\n“Of course we’re happy the prime minister has stepped down. But we are not satisfied with who is taking over from him, and with the fact that the government itself is still there.”\n\nGunnlaugsson’s office said in a statement that he was not resigning, but “handing over the office of prime minister for an unspecified time” to Sigurður Ingi Jóhannsson, the agriculture and fisheries minister.\n\nGunnlaugsson was “very proud” of his success resurrecting Iceland’s economy after the 2008 financial crisis, the statement said, and “especially proud of his government’s handling of ... the creditors of the failed Icelandic banks”.\n\nOutside parliament, Sigrin Eiroksdottir, a pre-school teacher, said the occasion “doesn’t really feel like any kind of victory. There is so much still to put right in this country in terms of ethics, of how the world looks at us.”\n\n

Iceland's Prime Minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson steps down amid public outrage over his family's offshore investments.


\n\nGustavo Petro’s upcoming inauguration on August 7 as Colombia’s first left-wing president confirms an unmistakable trend in Latin American politics: Only five years after right-leaning leaders occupied presidential palaces in much of the region—including Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico—leftist candidates have won the vast majority of national elections and now govern all of the region’s major countries except Brazil, where former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva holds a comfortable lead less than 100 days ahead of the presidential election.\n\nThis “new pink tide” appears even more dominant than its predecessor in the 2000s that brought to power leaders like Argentina’s Cristina Kirchner, Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. However, comparing the two cohorts reveals more differences than similarities.\n\nFirst, Latin American leaders in the mid-2000s enjoyed a commodity boom and, by the end of the decade, a significant U.S. interest rate reduction, which created an ideal macroeconomic environment for the region. These leaders were popular thanks to their increased public spending, and generally won reelection or succeeded in picking their successors.\n\nBy contrast, today’s leaders face a perfect storm of rising U.S. interest rates, geopolitical instability and limited fiscal space after a devastating pandemic that hit Latin America particularly hard. They must be the bearers of bad news, and thus generally suffer lower approval ratings. Given that the dominant political sentiment in Latin America today is—and will likely remain—anti-incumbent, the second pink tide will most likely be much shorter-lived than the first.

Chilean President Gabriel Boric, 36, takes office in March as the country's most progressive leader in half a century.

“Our region can do more,” 11 former presidents and former foreign ministers from Latin America recently wrote in an open letter to current heads of state, underlining that regional integration was “more necessary than ever.” They have a point.\n\nAs the age of hyperglobalization is ending and regionalization is back in vogue, Latin America remains one of the least economically integrated regions in the world. Regional cooperation has been extremely limited due to profound ideological differences between leaders over the past years. Two examples symbolize the striking disconnect: Despite a shared border and numerous common challenges, the heads of state of Brazil and Argentina have not been on speaking terms for most of the past three years. Secondly, the president of Mexico has not visited South America at all since coming to power in late 2018. Now that the second pink tide has reached all major countries in the region and Bolsonaro is on his way out, many see a window of opportunity for greater regional unity. \n\nHowever, the past two weeks suggest that even with leftist leaders occupying presidential palaces in the vast majority of countries in the region, broader policy coordination and regional integration will not come easily.

\n\nFrom Mexico in the north to Chile in the south, the region\'s constantly see-sawing political map once again resembles that of the early 2000s, when a so-called "pink tide" of left-leaning governments washed over it.\n\nBut analysts say this time is different: the trend is driven by pragmatism rather than ideology.\n\n"It\'s not because Latin Americans are becoming more leftist. I don\'t think there\'s any evidence to support that," analyst Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue told AFP.\n\nIn their most recent election cycles, Latin American countries have resoundingly dethroned incumbent parties on the right and center-right of the political spectrum.\n\nHonduras, Bolivia and Argentina are among those to have turned their backs on the right, while Colombia in June elected its first leftist president despite a deep-rooted mistrust, as elsewhere in the region, of anything with perceived links to "communism."\n\nMany voters were jolted leftward by economic troubles and the devastating effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\nVoters across the globe felt ignored, even denigrated, by the political establishment as poverty and inequality deepened.\n\n"It is more of a rejectionist trend than anything else... people looking for an alternative," said Shifter of the recent string of leftist victories.\n\n"It just so happens that we are in that moment in Latin America where a lot of the governments that are being rejected are of the right or the center right."

Economic crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic have reached Latin America.

While many had long proclaimed the death of the Pink Tide, the ouster of Bolivian President Evo Morales in 2019 was in some ways a nail in the coffin. The far-right government of Jeanine Áñez that followed unleashed the military on protesters, killing 30, persecuted those associated with the Morales government, threatened to privatize state industry, and disastrously mishandled the Covid-19 crisis. Yet just 12 months later, the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) returned, this time with Morales’s former finance minister, Luis Arce, at the helm. With him, the commitment to a progressive agenda, albeit financed through expanding extractivism, has returned.  \n\nBy that time, Alberto Fernández had entered office in Argentina, ending a neoliberal reprise under Mauricio Macri. In Chile and Colombia, mass protests against inequality, neoliberalism, and repression at the hands of right-wing governments had begun to rattle the status quo. While six of the 11 countries that had elected left-leaning governments during the first 15 years of the 21st century remained in conservative hands, a new Left surge was building. \n\nSince 2018, voters in eight countries have chosen the Left. For Colombia and Mexico, these elections marked their first national left government of the 21st century; for Honduras, a previous shift to the left was cut short. Yet these groundbreaking wins are muddied by the outsized influence of the United States in these countries, largely because of Washington’s preoccupation with its domestic issues of immigration and drugs.

Far-right government of Jeanine Áñez unleashed military on protesters, killing 30.

Anti-incumbent sentiment is the dominant political sentiment in Latin America


Microsoft has finally commented on the rumblings about the $10 billion investment into the OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, after rumors have been swirling for weeks about this colossal financial deal. While Microsoft didn’t confirm the actual financial figure in the press release on Monday, they did announce the partnership between the two companies would be extended.\n\nThis recent investment is the third phase of the financial commitment from Microsoft. Previous investments were made in 2019 and 2021 into the AI startup.\n\nWe’re going to look at how artificial intelligence will change how Microsoft competes with Google, Apple and other tech giants—and how Q.ai can help you keep abreast of the changes.\n\nMicrosoft finally confirmed a new multi-year investment in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, in a press release on January 23. When we last wrote about Microsoft’s investment in ChatGPT, it was reported by Semafor that the tech giant was looking to invest an additional $10 billion into the startup. The official release doesn’t confirm or deny the rumored dollar figure, as they only commented on continuing the partnership.\n\nMicrosoft noted how they were committed to turning Azure into an AI supercomputer for the entire world. Microsoft Azure is the exclusive cloud provider for every tool under the OpenAI banner.\n\nJust as a quick reminder, ChatGPT is the chatbot released late last year by OpenAI, a company that Elon Musk and Sam Altman originally founded. This revolutionary tool reported one million users at the beginning of December after being out for about a week.

Musk has incorporated a new business called X.AI Corp.

When ChatGPT came out in November, it took the world by storm.\n\nWithin a month of its release, some 100 million people had used the viral AI chatbot for everything from writing high school essays to planning travel itineraries to generating computer code.\n\nBuilt by the San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, the app was flawed in many ways, but it also sparked a wave of excitement (and fear) about the transformative power of generative AI to change the way we work and create.\n\nChatGPT, which runs on a technology called GPT-3.5, has been so impressive, in part, because it represents a quantum leap from the capabilities of its predecessor from just a few years ago, GPT-2.\n\nOn Tuesday, OpenAI released an even more advanced version of its technology: GPT-4. The company says this update is another milestone in the advancement of AI. The new technology has the potential to improve how people learn new languages, how blind people process images, and even how we do our taxes.\n\nOpenAI also claims that the new model supports a chatbot that’s more factual, creative, concise, and can understand images, instead of just text.\n\nSam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, called GPT-4 “our most capable and aligned model yet.” He also cautioned that “it is still flawed, still limited, and it still seems more impressive on first use than it does after you spend more time with it”

ChatGPT or GPT-3.5 has been released by OpenAI.

Alibaba says it will launch its own ChatGPT-style tool, becoming the latest tech giant to jump on the chatbot bandwagon.\n\nThe Chinese behemoth said it was testing an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot internally. It did not share details of when it would launch or what the application would be called.\n\n“Frontier innovations such as large language models and generative AI have been our [focus] areas since the formation of DAMO in 2017,” an Alibaba (BABA) spokesperson told CNN in a Thursday statement, referring to an acronym for the company’s research arm that focuses on machine intelligence, data computing and robotics.\n\n“As a technology leader, we will continue to invest in turning cutting-edge innovations into value-added applications for our customers as well as their end-users.”\n\nAlibaba’s Hong Kong-listed shares ticked up 1.4% on Thursday morning.\n\nCompanies around the world are racing to develop and release their own versions of ChatGPT, the application that allows users to automatically write essays or pass tests.\n\nThe tool is built on a large language model, which is trained on vast troves of data online in order to generate compelling responses to user prompts. Experts have long warned that these tools have the potential to spread inaccurate information.\n\nThis week, Google (GOOGL) and Chinese search engine giant Baidu (BIDU) both unveiled plans to launch similar services of their own.\n\nGoogle’s tool, named “Bard,” will roll out to the public in the coming weeks, while Baidu’s bot, called “Wenxin Yiyan” in Chinese or “ERNIE Bot” in English, will launch in March.

Alibaba announces plans to launch its own ChatGPT-style tool.

Under intense pressure to compete with ChatGPT — the buzzy AI chatbot that has become a viral sensation — Google announced on Monday that it’s releasing its own “experimental conversational AI” tool, called “Bard.” The company also said it will add new AI–powered features to Google search.\n\nGoogle will first give Bard access to a group of trusted external partners, according to a company blog post on Monday; it said it plans to give the public access “in the coming weeks.” What the public will have access to starting this week are search results that sometimes show AI-generated text, especially for complex queries.\n\nWhile Google has for years used AI to enhance its products behind the scenes, the company has never released a public-facing version of a conversational chat product. It seems that the breakaway success of ChatGPT — the AI conversation tool created by the startup OpenAI that can auto-generate essays, poetry, and even entire movie scripts, and which amassed 100 million users just two months after it launched — has nudged Google to make this move. Google’s announcement comes a day before Microsoft is expected to announce more details on plans to integrate ChatGPT into its search product, Bing (Microsoft recently invested $10 billion in ChatGPT’s creator, OpenAI).\n\nSince ChatGPT came out, Google has faced immense pressure to more publicly showcase its AI technology.

Google has faced immense pressure to more publicly showcase its AI technology since ChatGPT’s release.

Microsoft\n plans to release software to help large companies create their own chatbots similar to ChatGPT, CNBC has learned.\n\nIn the two months since startup OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public, it has become a hit, impressing people with its ability to spit out comments on a wide variety of topics and in many styles. UBS analysts said last week that it’s on track to reach 100 million monthly active users more quickly than video-sharing app TikTok.\n\nMicrosoft is seeking to capitalize on the attention in multiple ways. The company provides the cloud-computing back end for ChatGPT, and in January Microsoft said it had invested billions of dollars in OpenAI. Microsoft has also been working to incorporate OpenAI technologies into its own products. On Tuesday, Microsoft announced that it is augmenting Bing, its search engine, and Edge, its internet browser, with ChatGPT-like technology.\n\nIn addition, Microsoft plans to announce technology for companies, schools and governments to create their own bots with ChatGPT, according to a person briefed on the matter, who asked not to be named while discussing private plans. Microsoft imagines helping clients launch new chatbots or refine their existing ones with the new technology, which could suggest responses for call-center agents to use during customer service conversations, the person said.\n\nThe underlying artificial intelligence model of ChatGPT cannot currently provide substantial answers about anything that happened after 2021, because it hasn’t been trained on recent information.

Microsoft plans to release software to help large companies create their own chatbots similar to ChatGPT.


“Our region can do more,” 11 former presidents and former foreign ministers from Latin America recently wrote in an open letter to current heads of state, underlining that regional integration was “more necessary than ever.” They have a point.\n\nAs the age of hyperglobalization is ending and regionalization is back in vogue, Latin America remains one of the least economically integrated regions in the world. Regional cooperation has been extremely limited due to profound ideological differences between leaders over the past years. Two examples symbolize the striking disconnect: Despite a shared border and numerous common challenges, the heads of state of Brazil and Argentina have not been on speaking terms for most of the past three years. Secondly, the president of Mexico has not visited South America at all since coming to power in late 2018. Now that the second pink tide has reached all major countries in the region and Bolsonaro is on his way out, many see a window of opportunity for greater regional unity. \n\nHowever, the past two weeks suggest that even with leftist leaders occupying presidential palaces in the vast majority of countries in the region, broader policy coordination and regional integration will not come easily.

11 former presidents and foreign ministers from Latin America wrote an open letter to current heads of state, emphasizing the need for regional integration.

\n\nFrom Mexico in the north to Chile in the south, the region\'s constantly see-sawing political map once again resembles that of the early 2000s, when a so-called "pink tide" of left-leaning governments washed over it.\n\nBut analysts say this time is different: the trend is driven by pragmatism rather than ideology.\n\n"It\'s not because Latin Americans are becoming more leftist. I don\'t think there\'s any evidence to support that," analyst Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue told AFP.\n\nIn their most recent election cycles, Latin American countries have resoundingly dethroned incumbent parties on the right and center-right of the political spectrum.\n\nHonduras, Bolivia and Argentina are among those to have turned their backs on the right, while Colombia in June elected its first leftist president despite a deep-rooted mistrust, as elsewhere in the region, of anything with perceived links to "communism."\n\nMany voters were jolted leftward by economic troubles and the devastating effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.\n\nVoters across the globe felt ignored, even denigrated, by the political establishment as poverty and inequality deepened.\n\n"It is more of a rejectionist trend than anything else... people looking for an alternative," said Shifter of the recent string of leftist victories.\n\n"It just so happens that we are in that moment in Latin America where a lot of the governments that are being rejected are of the right or the center right."

Economic crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic have reached Latin America.

\n\nWhen Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (or Lula) won the Brazilian presidency in November 2022 by a slim 1.8% margin, Latin America’s leftward swing seemed complete. For the second time this century the region experienced a so-called “pink tide.”\n\nHowever, most polls indicate that the current shift is more of an anti-incumbent movement than it is a lasting ideological realignment. Put simply, conservative governments failed to deliver sufficient growth and were punished accordingly by voters.\n\nThe window of opportunity for a more concerted regional articulation built around common political goals may be narrow, but it is also one of the faster paths to better economic results.\n\nRegional Integration\n\nTake the Mercosur trading bloc comprised of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay (Venezuela is currently suspended, the remaining eight South American countries are associated members, while Mexico and New Zealand are observer members): it aims to establish full free trade and movement across the region and encompasses a territory of over 19.9 million sq. km (an area 15% larger than Russia and more than double that of the US). Though still an imperfect customs union and relegated to marginal status during the tenure of Lula’s predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, Mercosur delivered a combined GDP of over $5 trillion in 2022, making the bloc the world’s fifth largest economy.\n\nOther regional economic integration mechanisms include the creation of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac) in 2010, the Union of South America (Unasur) in 2008, and the Latin American Integration Association (Aladi) in 1980.\n\n

In the past conservative governments failed to deliver sufficient growth.

\n\nDramatic elections in Brazil, Chile and Colombia brought leftist governments into power across much of Latin America in 2022, capping the region\'s second "pink tide" in two decades.\n\n However, their struggles amid stubborn economic headwinds suggest the wave may have crested. An anti-incumbent streak that lifted the left could soon swing major elections the other way.\n\nTo have the same staying power as the left-wing renaissance at the turn of the century, governments will need to reignite economies that have frustrated voters and investors alike during a decade of mostly mediocre growth.\n\nChilean President Gabriel Boric, 36, took office in March as his country\'s most progressive leader in half a century and its youngest ever. But setbacks including the rejection of a new constitution have dented his popularity and forced concessions to the center, including swapping some of the youthful cohort in his cabinet for more experienced establishment figures.\n\nColombia also swung sharply to the left with June\'s election of Gustavo Petro, a 62-year-old former guerrilla vowing to tackle inequality with tax and land reforms. He has shored up fiscal concerns with the former, but spooked investors with a proposed ban on new oil and gas exploration and second-guessing of central bank policy.\n\nBrazilian President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, 77, who narrowly beat incumbent Jair Bolsonaro in October, is a holdover from the region\'s first pink tide, when a commodity boom helped him finish his 2003-2010 presidency with record approval.\n\nHowever, corruption scandals and economic mismanagement under his chosen successor tarred Lula\'s legacy.

Colombia elects Gustavo Petro, a 62-year-old former guerrilla.


Another Bay Area bank was affected Monday by uncertainty in the financial markets following the failure of Silicon Valley Bank on Friday.\n\nStock in San Francisco-based First Republic Bank sank nearly 62% Monday and shares of other regional banks suffered losses, reportedly. First Republic has 86 locations across the country. Its Midpeninsula offices include two in Menlo Park and one each in Los Altos, Mountain View, Palo Alto and Redwood City.\n\nOn Sunday, regulators seized Signature Bank in New York after it failed.\n\nBut a San Jose State University professor of finance and accounting does not see the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank as signs of a coming crisis.\n\n"I don\'t think it is a huge contagion issue," said assistant professor Matthew Faulkner. "It\'s more toward an isolated incident."\n\nOver the weekend and Monday, top federal officials including President Joseph Biden appeared to be getting ahead of the issue.\n\nBiden sought to ease American\'s fears by making all deposits held by Silicon Valley Bank customers available regardless of the amount of their deposits, federal officials said over the weekend.\n\nThat includes businesses who must pay their employees and their bills, officials said.\n\n"Americans can have confidence that the banking system is safe," Biden said Monday morning. "Your deposits will be there when you need them."\n\nInvestors will not be protected, Biden said. According to the president, they took a risk and "that\'s how capitalism works."\n\nTaxpayers will not be on the hook for the losses.

Shares in banks all over the world have plummeted.

CEO & co-founder of startup "Shelf Engine" attempts to wire transfer their money out of SVB

Stefan Kalb was in the middle of a meeting around 1 p.m. on Thursday when a fellow company executive sent him a panicked Slack message: "Do you know what\'s happening at SVB?"\n\nKalb, the CEO and co-founder of Seattle-based food management startup Shelf Engine, had been following news of a bank run at Silicon Valley Bank. Droves of depositors were attempting to pull out as much as $42 billion from the bank on Thursday alone, as fear spread that the bank was teetering on the brink of collapse.\n\nThe bank seemed to be on firm financial footing on Wednesday. The following day, it appeared to be under water.\n\nFor Shelf Engine, a 40-person startup founded in 2015 that uses artificial intelligence to help grocery stores reduce food waste, this was a big problem.\n\nNot only did Silicon Valley Bank help the company process checks and payments, but millions of dollars of the startup\'s cash was locked up in the bank.\n\nKalb sprung into action. He and his team quickly opened an account at JPMorgan Chase and attempted to wire transfer every last penny out of Silicon Valley Bank.\n\n"Unfortunately, our wire was not honored and our money is still at Silicon Valley Bank," Kalb, 37, said in an interview on Friday. "We woke up this morning hoping the money would be in that JPMorgan bank account, and it was not."

SVB depositors pull out up to $42 billion from the bank.

President Biden says customers of U.S. banks should have confidence that their money will be there when they need it, as he seeks to limit the damage done by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and other problems. He also promised accountability for leaders and investors of banks that fail.\n\nBiden\'s words didn\'t prevent anxiety over the banking emergency from hammering stock prices of financial institutions on Monday morning. The pain was particularly acute for regional and middle-sized banks.\n\nThe banking emergency has prompted federal regulators to take extraordinary actions to close two banks and guarantee all their deposits.\n\nBecause of those actions, Biden said, "every American should feel confident that their deposits will be there if and when they need them."\n\nCompanies with accounts at the collapsed banks "can breathe easier, knowing they\'ll be able to pay their workers and pay their bills," Biden said. "Their hardworking employees can breathe easier as well."\n\nBiden spoke from the White House at 9 a.m. ET Monday, just 30 minutes before the New York stock market opened. But one hour into trading, a number of banking stocks were down.\n\nMany eyes are on First Republic Bank, the San Francisco institution whose clients include tech companies and wealthy investors. The bank\'s stock plummeted below the $20 mark early Monday — one week after it closed at $122.\n\nBank of America and Wells Fargo also saw their stock prices slip, both of them falling by 4% or more in the first hour of trading.

Stock prices of financial institutions suffer when the New York stock market opened.


In the summer of 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden faced allegations of hypocrisy and flip-flopping after he strongly condemned the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and remove federal constitutional protections for abortion access.

Speaking on June 24, Biden described Roe as the correct decision as a matter of constitutional law, an application of the fundamental right to privacy and liberty in matters of family and personal autonomy, and he called the decision to overturn it a tragic error and the realization of an extreme ideology.

However, many observers — both to the left and right of Biden on the ideological spectrum — contrasted such remarks, in 2022, with what they presented as Biden's very different stance on the abortion rights landmark, four decades ago.

On June 24, one Facebook user published a viral post which contained a screenshot of an article by the London Independent, with the headline Biden voted to overturn Roe v Wade in 1982... and the caption Wonder how those protesting the Supreme Court decision feel about this. Chances are they are the same people that voted for Biden.

In recent years, the same core claim — that Biden once voted in favor of effectively overturning Roe and returning abortion policy to the states and the U.S. Congress — has featured in news articles by the The New York Times, Fox News, and the New York Post.

That claim is accurate, although Biden did vote against an identical proposal just one year later. Our rating is True.

A viral Facebook post claimed that Biden voted to overturn Roe v. Wade in 1982.

\n\nNovember 8, 2016: Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. During his presidency, he appointed three conservative judges to the court - Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — solidifying a conservative majority.\n\nJune 27, 2016: In its strongest defense of abortion rights in 25 years, the court strikes down Texas rules forcing clinics to meet hospital-like standards and doctors to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals.\n\nDecember 1, 2021: Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization was brought to the Supreme Court, a case dealing with a Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks. Upholding Mississippi's ban would mean overturning Roe.\n\nMay 2, 2022: A Politico report details a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion indicating the Court would overturn Roe v. Wade. The news set off protests and rallies across the country.\n\nJune 24, 2022: The court ruled 6-3 to uphold Mississippi's law, with the decision to overturn Roe a 5-4 vote. Chief Justice John Roberts joined the conservative justices in the decision to uphold Mississippi's law, but urged a concurring opinion concerning Roe. The decision is expected to lead to abortion bans in roughly half the states in the nation.\n\n

June 27, 2016: Supreme Court strikes down Texas rules forcing clinics to meet hospital-like standards and doctors to have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals.

December 1, 2021: Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization brought to the Supreme Court, a case dealing with a Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks.

\n\nFor decades, the legal battle over abortion focused on the U.S. Supreme Court and its guiding document, the U.S. Constitution.\n\nNow, with Roe v. Wade overturned, the legal spotlight has shifted to the states, where abortion supporters and opponents must contend with 50 different constitutions that, in many places, guarantee rights more broadly than their federal counterpart.\n\nThe legal chaos has already begun. In a half-dozen states and counting, lawsuits argue that new restrictive abortion laws are in violation of state constitutions.\n\nSo, too, the stakes have grown for ballot measures scheduled this year to amend those constitutions, whether to protect the right to an abortion or eliminate it.\n\n"For anyone who thought, \'Oh, Roe v. Wade is done and now this whole thing is over\' — I have bad news," Mary Ziegler, an abortion law expert at the University of California Davis, tells NPR. "This is just going to be an even more complicated chapter that we\'re entering into."\n\nAnd experts say the uncertainty could continue for years to come, given the relative ease of amending state constitutions and the judicial elections in many states that can result in rapid changes to a court\'s ideological makeup.\n\nIn the days since the Dobbs decision, abortion rights organizations have filed lawsuits challenging state courts to find a right to abortion in at least four states, including Utah, Kentucky, Idaho and Mississippi. (Some other active legal challenges, including lawsuits in Wisconsin, Louisiana and Texas, do not ask judges to evaluate the constitutionality of abortion rights.

Abortion rights organizations have filed lawsuits challenging state courts in at least four states.

Biden did vote in favor of effectively overturning Roe in 1982, but voted against an identical proposal one year later.


Musk proposed a plan to charge verified users $20 a month for verification.

Elon Musk, Twitter’s most important shitposter, has added the company to his business empire after months of legal skirmishes, according to CNBC, The Washington Post, and Insider. The acquisition was confirmed in an SEC filing from the company on Friday morning, noting it’s delisting $TWTR from the New York Stock Exchange. He celebrated by firing executives. Musk fired Parag Agrawal, who succeeded Jack Dorsey as Twitter CEO, and chief financial officer Ned Segal, both of who were in the building at the time and escorted out by security, according to Reuters. Vijaya Gadde, the company’s policy chief whom Musk had publicly criticized, was also ousted. Sean Edgett, the general counsel, is gone, too, The New York Times reports. (Bloomberg says security escorted him out, as well.) Chief customer officer Sarah Personette was not among the executives fired but announced she resigned on October 28th with a tweet thread posted the following Tuesday. In it, she mentions, “I do believe the new administration understands the importance of holding up the standards of GARM.”\nThe execs were in line for handsome payouts for their trouble, Insider reports: Agrawal $38.7 million, Segal $25.4 million, Gadde $12.5 million, and Personette, who tweeted yesterday about how excited she was for Musk’s takeover, $11.2 million. However, a subsequent report from The Information indicated Musk has said they’re fired “for cause” in an attempt to block them from receiving those payouts. It’s unclear what this may mean for Personette.

After months of waffling, lawsuits, verbal mudslinging, and the near miss of a full-blown trial, Elon Musk now owns Twitter.\n\nOn Thursday night, Mr. Musk closed his $44 billion deal to buy the social media service, said three people with knowledge of the situation. He also began cleaning the house, with at least four top Twitter executives — including the chief executive and chief financial officer — getting fired on Thursday. Mr. Musk had arrived at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters on Wednesday and met with engineers and ad executives.\n\nThe closing of the deal, which followed months of drama and legal challenges as Mr. Musk changed his mind about buying the company, sets Twitter on an uncertain course. Mr. Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” has said that he wants to make the social media platform a more freewheeling place for all types of commentary and that he would “reverse the permanent ban” of former President Donald J. Trump from the service. Mr. Musk’s open approach to speech on Twitter could exacerbate long-simmering issues of toxic content and misinformation, affecting political debates around the world. Early tests will come within days, when Brazil elects its president and American voters go to the polls on Nov. 8 for the midterm elections. Twitter said it would prohibit misleading claims about voting and the outcome of elections, but that was before Mr. Musk owned it.

At least four top Twitter executives, including the CEO and CFO, are fired.

Musk originally offered to buy Twitter for $44 billion in April ($54.20 per share), a deal that Twitter ultimately accepted. Musk in May put the takeover "temporarily on hold" because of a dispute over the number of fake or spam accounts that Twitter claimed to have. Twitter said that fake accounts represented less than five percent of users, but Musk was not convinced. In July, Musk decided he no longer wanted to buy Twitter and attempted to call off the purchase, claiming that Twitter did not comply with its contractual obligations and that he was not provided with the relevant business information that he requested. Twitter in turn filed a lawsuit to force Musk to go on with the sale, accusing him of trashing the company, disrupting its operations, and destroying stockholder value. Musk\'s decision to offer to continue on with the purchase comes ahead of a trial that was set to begin on October 17. With Musk once again on board, it is probable that the acquisition will go through, provided he does not change his mind again.

Twitter filed a lawsuit to force Musk to go on with the sale.

Twitter has begun laying off sizable chunks of the company, the first major move by Elon Musk since his acquisition of the company was completed last week.\n\nTwitter told employees in an email sent Thursday evening and seen by NBC News that the company would notify staffers by email about their employment.\n\n“We recognize that this will impact a number of individuals who have made valuable contributions to Twitter, but this action is unfortunately necessary to ensure the company’s success moving forward,” the email said.\n\nThe firings immediately prompted a class action lawsuit against Twitter for allegedly failing to give a 60-day warning of mass layoffs.\n\nIt had been widely reported that Musk planned to slash the company\'s 7,500-person payroll after he finalized his $44 billion acquisition late last week. He immediately dismissed CEO Parag Agrawal, as well as Twitter’s chief financial officer and its head of legal, public policy and trust and safety upon taking over the company.\n\nA Twitter employee said Thursday\'s email was the first communication staff members had received from Twitter since the acquisition Oct. 27.\n\n"It\'s total chaos, house melting down, everyone looking towards this email," the employee said.\n\nAccording to the email from Twitter, staff members will get notices either through their company email accounts — if they still have jobs — or their personal email accounts if their "employment is impacted."\n\nWorries about layoffs began to emerge before the buyout transaction was complete, but Twitter\'s general counsel urged employees not to dwell on rumors before Musk took ownership.

Lawsuits filed against Twitter for allegedly failing to give 60-day warning of mass layoffs


\n\nMore than 50 people have died and dozens more were missing on Thursday, as heavy flooding in Germany and Belgium turned streams and streets into raging torrents that swept away cars and caused houses to collapse.\n\nRecent storms across parts of western Europe made rivers and reservoirs burst their banks, triggering flash floods overnight after the saturated soil couldn’t absorb any more water.\n\n“I grieve for those who have lost their lives in this disaster,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said during a visit to Washington, expressing shock at the scope of the flooding. “We still don’t know the number. But it will be many.”\n\nShe pledged that everything would be done to find those still missing, adding, “’Heavy rain and flooding’ doesn’t capture what happened.”\n\nAuthorities in the North Rhine-Westphalia state said at least 30 people had died, while 19 deaths were reported in Rhineland-Palatinate state to the south. Belgian media reported eight deaths in that country.\n\nAmong the worst-hit German villages was Schuld, where several homes collapsed and dozens of people remained unaccounted for.\n\nRescue operations were hampered by blocked roads and phone and internet outages across the Eifel, a volcanic region of rolling hills and small valleys. Some villages were reduced to rubble, as old brick and timber houses couldn’t withstand the sudden rush of water, often carrying trees and other debris as it gushed through narrow streets.\n\nKarl-Heinz Grimm, who had come to help his parents in Schuld, said he had never seen the small Ahr River surge in such a deadly torrent.\n\n

Germany's federal government approved a package of emergency flood aid to help western regions recover from the flooding.

\n\nStorms caused heavy flooding across parts of western and central Europe overnight, with one man missing after being swept away by a raging stream in eastern Germany.\n\nFirefighters resumed their search for the man in Joehstadt, in Saxony state, on Wednesday morning [July 14]. German news agency dpa reported that he had been trying to secure his property from rising waters when he disappeared.\n\nHof county near the eastern border with the Czech Republic issued a disaster alert late Tuesday as basements filled with water, trees were uprooted and some areas lost power overnight. Germany’s DWD weather service said the region saw 80 liters (more than 21 gallons) of rain per square meter in the space of 12 hours.\n\nIn Hagen, firefighters had to rescue several drivers whose vehicles had become stuck in a flooded underpass. Videos on social media showed streets in the western city knee-deep in water and others buried by landslides.\n\nResidents in the nearby town of Erkrath were warned not to shower or use their washers as the sewage system was overloaded by rain.\n\nThe neighboring Netherlands and Belgium were also hit by flooding.\n\nWater authorities in the southern Dutch province of Limburg warned that the heavy rainfall will turn streams into dangerously fast-flowing torrents and urged the public to stay away from them.\n\nBoat owners were advised to steer clear of the Maas river due to strong currents and debris being washed downstream.\n\n

Hof county near the eastern border with the Czech Republic issued a disaster alert.

\n\n“In some areas we have not seen this much rainfall in 100 years,” Andreas Friedrich, a German weather service spokesman, told CNN. He added that “in some areas we’ve seen more than double the amount of rainfall which has caused flooding and unfortunately some building structures to collapse.”\n\nShocking images of the devastation in Germany and Belgium showed entire villages underwater, with cars wedged in between collapsed buildings and debris. The Netherlands and Luxembourg have also been affected by the extreme rainfall.\n\nIn Germany, at least 105 people have been killed across two western states. In the hard-hit district of Ahrweiler, in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, authorities told CNN that 1,300 people remained unaccounted for.\n\n“There is no end in sight just yet,” Ulrich Sopart, a police spokesman in the city of Koblenz, told CNN. He said that authorities are hopeful that they will be able to revise down the number of missing people as the rescue operation continues and phone lines are restored.\n\n”Our hopes are that some people might have been registered as missing twice or even three times – if for example a family member, a work colleague or a friend has registered a person as missing,” Sopart said.\n\n”Also, [in] some places phone lines are still down and reception is difficult. We do hope that people will get in touch with a relative, work colleague or friend to let them know they are fine,” he said.\n\nA dam along the river Rur in the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia broke Friday night, according to the regional government.

1,300 people remain unaccounted for in the district of Ahrweiler.

Building structures collapsed in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg.

Communities in Germany, Belgium, and The Netherlands are reeling after extreme July rainfall swamped parts of Western Europe. Some of the worst-hit areas saw as much as two months of rain within 24 hours—enough to break precipitation records, push rivers to new heights, and trigger devastating flash floods.

Nighttime downpours on July 14-15, 2021, proved especially damaging. Many people were asleep when the most intense rain fell, and they were caught off guard as rivers raged, dams failed, and floodwaters inundated homes. News media estimated that 196 people were killed by flooding and thousands more were injured. Hundreds of people are still listed as missing.

On July 18, 2021, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured this image of flooding along the Meuse and Roer rivers. As water levels rose, nearly 5,000 people were forced to evacuate from Roermond, a city in The Netherlands near the border with Germany. A dam breach on the Roer contributed to the extensive flooding.

While it will take some time for experts to analyze whether this event was influenced by human-caused global warming, scientists have amassed data showing that warming has led to more intense and frequent downpours in many parts of the world. Some researchers and meteorologists have also suggested that warming may be changing the jet stream in ways that make atmospheric blocking patterns—like the one that prolonged these downpours—more likely.

Human-caused global warming and climate change occur worldwide.