Gang members wielding machetes and guns stand in formation in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in June.Raynald K. Petit Frere/Via Reuters
“A group of 17 US missionaries, including children, have been kidnapped by an armed criminal gang in Haiti.
The missionaries were on their way home from building an orphanage, according to a statement from Ohio-based Christian Aid Ministries, which sent out a message asking supporters to pray for its members.
The statement said the mission’s field director was working with the US embassy, and that the field director’s family and one other unidentified man had stayed at the mission’s base while everyone else visited the orphanage.
The kidnapping occurred between 8am and 10am on Saturday morning while some of the missionaries were travelling to Port-au-Prince’s Toussaint Louverture airport to return home to the US.” Read more at The Guardian
“On a cloudy evening in Nairobi, Berhan Taye is scrolling through a spreadsheet in which she has helped document more than 140 Facebook posts from Ethiopia that contain hate speech. There are videos of child abuse, texts of hate speech against different ethnic groups, and hours-long live streams inciting hatred. These posts breach Facebook community guidelines in any context. Yet for Taye and her colleagues, this is what Facebook’s news feed has looked like for years in Ethiopia.
Because there aren’t enough content moderators focused on Ethiopia, it has been up to Taye, an independent researcher looking at technology’s impact on civil society, and a team of grassroots volunteers to collect and then report misinformation and hate speech to Facebook.
It’s dangerous work – people who put out the hate speech are organized – so volunteers are anonymous. They spend hours watching violent live streams and collating hateful content. It takes a toll on their mental health.
Once they send their report over email it can take a week for Facebook to respond – if they’re lucky – and sometimes 70% of the content will be removed, according to Taye. In some situations, the big tech company has come back to the activists requesting translations of the content. ‘Over and over again, we’re seeing they’re actively failing every time,’ Taye says.
‘They’re not willing to invest in human rights, invest in resources, and in languages that are not making them money.’
Facebook disputes that it does not crack down on abuse with the same intensity outside the US, saying it spends $13bn globally to tackle this in work that involves 15,000 people across dozens of languages.
Researchers like Taye say that’s not enough.
In June, Facebook reported it had removed a network of fake accounts in Ethiopia targeting domestic users ahead of the country’s elections.
Taye, however, said she has been in conversations with Facebook since 2018 about the situation in Ethiopia, a country where there has been ethnic cleansing, where armed conflict is escalating, and where Facebook is a crucial platform for information.
Now, Taye is calling for Facebook to release any human rights impact assessment reports it may hold on Ethiopia.
Like many digital activists around the world, Taye and her colleagues have been urging Facebook for years to take seriously how its algorithm incites misinformation, hate-speech, and ethnic violence in non-English speaking regions.
It’s an issue Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen highlighted in her testimony to US congress at the beginning of October, when she said Facebook’s system of content ranking had led to the spread of misinformation and hate speech.
Content ranking works by using machine-learning models to remove or demote bad content, but it is only trained for certain types of content. Haugen said Facebook knows: ‘Engagement-based ranking is dangerous without integrity and security systems.’
She added the problem was far worse in regions where posts are in languages other than English. She said the ‘strategy of focusing on language-specific, content-specific systems for AI to save us is doomed to fail.’” Read more at The Guardian
Jeffrey Clark has resisted cooperating with the House select committee’s investigations. Photograph: Susan Walsh/AP
“Jeffrey Clark, a former top environmental lawyer at the Trump justice department accused of plotting with Trump to undermine the 2020 election results in Georgia and other states, is facing ethics investigations in Washington that could lead to possible disbarment, as well as a watchdog inquiry that might result in a criminal referral.
The mounting scrutiny of the ex-assistant attorney general, who led the justice department’s environment division for almost two years and then ran its civil division, was provoked by a report from the Senate judiciary committee whose Democratic chairman, Richard Durbin, has asked the DC bar’s disciplinary counsel to examine Clark’s conduct and possibly sanction him.
The panel’s exhaustive 394-page report followed an eight-month inquiry, and included voluntary testimony from former acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and his deputy, Richard Donoghue, revealing how Clark schemed privately with Trump about ways to pressure Rosen to help launch an inquiry into baseless charges of voting fraud in Georgia and other states that Joe Biden won.” Read more at The Guardian
“The Denver Art Museum is preparing to return four antiquities to Cambodia following a news media collaboration that reported the pieces are linked to a man charged with trafficking looted artifacts.
The four antiquities to be returned came to the museum through Douglas Latchford, who in 2019 was indicted by U.S. prosecutors after decades of alleged trafficking in looted artifacts from the Khmer Empire, which flourished in Southeast Asia a thousand years ago.
The Washington Post, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and other news organizations in the Pandora Papers collaboration began contacting museum officials about pieces in their collection linked to Latchford in June and followed up with a letter in September. The museum removed the four artifacts from its collection after receiving the letter from the news organizations seeking comment about the items.” Read more at Washington Post
“Over 100 million fully vaccinated people could be eligible for coronavirus booster shots by the end of the week.
A key F.D.A. advisory panel has concluded a series of votes to recommend boosters for all three coronavirus vaccines used in the U.S. — Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson. The F.D.A. and the C.D.C. have already authorized Pfizer boosters for older and at-risk Americans. Moderna and J.&J. are expected to be authorized next.
On Friday, the panel recommended boosters for all recipients of the J.&J. vaccine, a reflection of its lower efficacy. Many panel members made clear that they believed J.&J. recipients might benefit from the option of a Pfizer or a Moderna booster, something a top F.D.A. official said the agency was considering. Here’s what to know about the J.&J. boosters.
Many Americans have yet to get a single dose. Ten New Yorkers told The Times why they resisted — and why they changed their minds. In an Opinion essay, Zeynep Tufecki explored what we know about the unvaccinated.” Read more at New York Times
“The heart of President Biden’s climate agenda is in jeopardy.
A program to rapidly replace the nation’s coal- and gas-fired power plants with renewables is likely to be cut from the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion social and climate package because Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia opposes it. Manchin has personal financial ties to the coal industry and his state is one of the nation’s top producers of coal and gas.
Some House and Senate Democrats are switching to Plan B: a tax on carbon dioxide pollution. That faces its own set of political challenges, given the current rise in inflation and energy prices.
In other politics news, Republicans and Democrats have already raised record-breaking sums for the 2022 midterms. Democrats facing tough re-elections are trying to sell the party’s social and climate bill without knowing what pieces will survive and become law.” Read more at New York Times
“Police deputized a ‘band of white nationalist vigilantes’ during last year’s racial justice protests in Kenosha, Wis., where Kyle Rittenhouse fatally shot two people and injured a third, the lone survivor of the incident alleges in a new lawsuit.
Gaige Grosskreutz, 27, filed the lawsuit Thursday in federal court in Milwaukee, just weeks before Rittenhouse’s murder trial is set to begin. It marks the second major legal action against the city and county of Kenosha since the Aug. 25, 2020, riot where Rittenhouse shot three people: Grosskreutz, who lost a chunk of his biceps but survived; Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, who both died.
Rittenhouse, 18, whose trial is set to begin Nov. 1, faces homicide charges in both deaths and an attempted homicide charge for shooting Grosskreutz as well as a charge for being a minor in possession of a firearm. Rittenhouse has pleaded not guilty to all charges and his attorneys are expected to argue that he acted in self-defense.
Family of Anthony Huber, killed by Kyle Rittenhouse, files suit against city of Kenosha
Grosskreutz’s complaint names both the city and county, which oversee their respective law enforcement agencies, as defendants. Kenosha Police Chief Eric Larsen, Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth and former Kenosha police chief Daniel Miskinis are individually named as well. It seeks a jury trial as well as unspecified punitive and compensatory damages.” Read more at USA Today
“A federal lawsuit against the organizers of the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which has rattled hate groups and white supremacist leaders, goes to trial this month.
The suit already has helped to dismantle some of America's most well-known white supremacist groups, and it has financially crippled one leader of the so-called ‘alt-right,’ the white supremacist and nationalistmovement that came to prominence under President Donald Trump.
‘It's very stressful, and very costly,’ said Richard Spencer, one of the defendants in the lawsuit and the former de facto leader of the ‘alt-right,’ in an interview. ‘This level of pressure is definitely scary.’
Lawsuits have long been used to dismantle or bankrupt the engines of hate in the U.S., including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations and the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer.” Read more at USA Today
Only a handful of those arrested for violent acts during the Jan. 6 riot had ties to extremist organizations.
“During the siege on the U.S. Capitol, seemingly average citizens united in acts of brutality. Amid a flash of violence, seven men stood out.
Although strangers to one another, these men worked as if in concert while grappling with police officers barring entry to the building. One used an American flag to beat an officer being dragged down the Capitol steps.
The group was part of an angry pro-Trump mob roiling outside even as the violence inside the building was winding down. They are now co-defendants facing myriad felonies. ‘We never should have come here,’ one thought to himself on the evening of Jan. 6.” Read more at New York Times
“The Pentagon offered to pay the family of the 10 Afghan civilians killed in a mistaken U.S. drone strike in Kabul. The Pentagon also agreed to help relocate those surviving family members who want to move to the U.S.” Read more at New York Times
“Robert Durst has tested positive for the coronavirus just days after the real estate heir was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a close friend, his attorney told The Washington Post on Saturday.
Durst, 78, was reportedly placed on a ventilator shortly after his Thursday sentencing to life without parole for the 2000 murder of Susan Berman, 55, according to the Los Angeles Times, the first to report the story.” Read more Washington Post
“The county of Los Angeles is trying to force the widow of Kobe Bryant and other surviving family members of a fatal helicopter crash last year to submit to psychiatric examinations that could help the county prove a critical point in their legal dispute:
Did Vanessa Bryant and the others suffer emotional distress because photos of their dead relatives were shared by county fire and sheriff's department employees after the crash?
Or did their emotional distress stem only from the tragic crash itself?
The county contends it's the latter and is seeking a court order to compel these medical examinations as part its effort to defend itself from a lawsuit filed by Bryant last year after the NBA legend and their daughter died in that crash with seven others. Vanessa Bryant is suing the county for invasion of privacy and negligence, claiming county employees improperly shared photos of human remains from the crash site.” Read more at USA Today
“Jury selection starts in the state trial of three men accused of killing Ahmaud Arbery last year in Georgia. Arbery, 25, was jogging near Brunswick when he was chased down and fatally shot. Two of the suspects claimed they were conducting a citizen's arrest and acted in self-defense.” Read more at CNN
“Former President Donald Trump has been ordered to sit for a videodeposition in a case involving an alleged assault during a demonstration outside of Trump Tower. The case was filed by protesters who say Trump's then-head of security hit one of them in September 2015.” Read more at CNN
“Sophie Zhang, a Facebook whistleblower interviewed by CNN, will testify about the company before British lawmakers. She will appear before a joint committee on the country's draft online safety bill.” Read more at CNN
“LOS ANGELES (AP) — An 11th-hour deal was reached Saturday, averting a strike of film and television crews that would have seen some 60,000 behind-the-scenes workers walk off their jobs and would have frozen productions in Hollywood and across the U.S.
After days of marathon negotiations, representatives from the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and from the studios and entertainment companies who employ them reached the three-year contract agreement before a Monday strike deadline, avoiding a serious setback for an industry that had just gotten back to work after long pandemic shutdowns.
Jarryd Gonzales, spokesman for the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the studios and other entertainment companies in negotiations, confirmed the agreement to The Associated Press.” Read more at Boston Globe
“LOS ANGELES (AP) — Netflix said Friday that it had fired an employee for disclosing confidential financial information about what it paid for Dave Chappelle’s comedy special ‘The Closer,’ which some condemned as being transphobic.
The employee, who wasn't named, shared ‘confidential, commercially sensitive information outside the company,’ a Netflix statement said.
‘We understand this employee may have been motivated by disappointment and hurt with Netflix, but maintaining a culture of trust and transparency is core to our company,’ the statement said.
The statement said the information was referenced in a Bloomberg news article, which reported that Netflix spent $24.1 million on ‘The Closer,’ which first aired last week. The article also mentioned the lower budgets for a 2019 Chapelle special, a Bo Burnham special and the nine-episode hit ‘Squid Game.’” Read more at Boston Globe
“NASA embarked on a vast odyssey to study a group of asteroids that may help scientists better understand how life emerged on Earth.
A robotic explorer named Lucy (a nod to the 3.2 million-year-old skeleton that revealed secrets of human evolution) will meander through deep space to find new clues about the creation of our solar system. Over 12 years, Lucy’s four-billion-mile path across Jupiter’s orbit will bring her close to clusters of asteroids known as Trojan swarms — some of the solar system’s least understood objects.” Read more at New York Times