Tucker Carlson Tries, and Fails, to Distance Himself From Buffalo Shooter’s Manifesto


Ryan Bort
Tue, May 17, 2022

Tucker-Carlson - Credit: (Photo by Janos Kummer/Getty Images)

Tucker Carlson has long promoted the idea of the “great replacement,” a racist conspiracy theory holding that white people are being systematically replaced by immigrants. The theory was present throughout the 180-page manifesto of the teenager who killed 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket on Saturday, leading to renewed scrutiny of the mega-popular Fox News host. Carlson addressed that scrutiny on Monday night, essentially arguing that anyone espousing white supremacist views should be able to do so without fear of criticism.

“Because a mentally ill teenager murdered strangers, you cannot be allowed to express your political views out loud,” he said. “That’s what they’re telling you. That’s what they’ve wanted to tell you for a long time, but Saturday’s massacre gives them a pretext and a justification.”



There isn’t any significant contingent of people responding to the Buffalo shooting by saying Carlson or anyone else shouldn’t be able to express their views. Carlson is merely mad that his critics are expressing their views, which is that Carlson is a racist, and that the work he’s done to mainstream the “great replacement” theory and the fact that the shooter’s manifesto is filled with it may not be totally coincidental. Go ahead and have a look at some of the uncanny similarities between what the shooter wrote and what Carlson has pushed on his show:

Carlson understandably had a difficult time distancing himself from the ideologies that inspired the shooter, so he instead focused on how the manifesto was “rambling” and “disjointed” and “paranoid.” He bashed the media for blaming “Trumpism” for the massacre, before circling back to the ludicrous idea that criticizing a popular cable news host for pushing unvarnished white supremacy to millions of Americans amounts to wanting to “suspend the First Amendment.”

Carlson wants everyone to be aware that the shooter’s manifesto contains ideas far more deranged than anything he’s uttered on his show. This is certainly true, but its operating principle is the white supremacist “great replacement” theory, which Carlson has helped lift out of the fringes and into the political mainstream. It clearly and catastrophically took hold in the shooter’s mind, which Carlson described on Monday as “diseased and disorganized.” The question he should probably be asking, and that Americans are plenty justified in asking themselves, is why the views of one of the influential figure in conservative media are so closely aligned with those of a mentally ill teenager who felt slaughtering 10 people at a supermarket was a righteous act.

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State Senator Who Backs White Nationalism Suggests Buffalo Shooting Was False Flag

Josephine Harvey
Mon, May 16, 2022, 

A Republican state lawmaker with ties to white nationalists suggested the racially motivated mass shooting at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket was staged by government agents.

“Fed boy summer has started in Buffalo,” Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogerswrote on Telegram. The first-term lawmaker has built a national profile among far-right extremists with incendiary rhetoric, diehard support for former President Donald Trump and an embrace of white nationalism.

Authorities said an 18-year-old white gunman traveled several hours on Saturday to a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, where he opened fire outside at a supermarket. Thirteen people were shot; 10 died. Most were Black.

The accused killer left a manifesto riddled with racist views and references to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory that white Americans are being replaced by people of color, according to The New York Times.

“Great replacement” rhetoric has been found in the online writings of several mass shooters, including the 2019 El Paso, Texas, gunman who killed 23 people at a Walmart, and the New Zealand shooter who massacred 51 people at two Christchurch mosques.

Rogers, along with Fox News personality Tucker Carlson and top House Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, has echoed “great replacement” ideologies herself.

“We Americans who love this country are being replaced by people who do not love this country,” Rogers tweeted in July. “I will not back down from this statement. Communists & our enemies are using mass immigration, education, big tech, big corporations & other strategies to accomplish this.”

In March, she drew bipartisan condemnation and was censured by the Arizona Senate over her violent rhetoric. In February, she spoke at the white nationalist America First Political Action Conference in Florida. During her address, she praised Nick Fuentes, a prominent white supremacist and Holocaust denier, as a “patriot.”

Fuentes is among the other extremists to have baselessly suggested the Buffalo attack was a false flag.

Livestreamed carnage: Tech's hard lessons from mass killings






BARBARA ORTUTAY, HALELUYA HADERO and MATT O'BRIEN
Tue, May 17, 2022,

These days, mass shooters like the one now held in the Buffalo, New York, supermarket attack don’t stop with planning out their brutal attacks. They also create marketing plans while arranging to livestream their massacres on social platforms in hopes of fomenting more violence.

Sites like Twitter, Facebook and now the game-streaming platform Twitch have learned painful lessons from dealing with the violent videos that often accompany such shootings. But experts are calling for a broader discussion around livestreams, including whether they should exist at all, since once such videos go online, they're almost impossible to erase completely.

The self-described white supremacist gunman who police say killed 10 people, all of them Black, at a Buffalo supermarket Saturday had mounted a GoPro camera to his helmet to stream his assault live on Twitch, the video game streaming platform used by another shooter in 2019 who killed two people at a synagogue in Halle, Germany.

He had previously outlined his plan in a detailed but rambling set of online diary entries that were apparently posted publicly ahead of the attack, although it's not clear how may people might have seen them. His goal: to inspire copycats and spread his racist beliefs. After all, he was a copycat himself.

He decided against streaming on Facebook, as yet another mass shooter did when he killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, three years ago. Unlike Twitch, Facebook requires users to sign up for an account in order to watch livestreams.

Still, not everything went according to plan. By most accounts the platforms responded more quickly to halt the spread of the Buffalo video than they did after the 2019 Christchurch shooting, said Megan Squire, a senior fellow and technology expert at the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Another Twitch user watching the live video likely flagged it to the attention of Twitch’s content moderators, she said, which would have helped Twitch pull down the stream less than two minutes after the first gunshots per a company spokesperson. Twitch has not said how the video was flagged. In a statement about the shooting Tuesday, the company expressed thanks “for the user reports that help us catch and remove harmful content in real time.”

“In this case, they did pretty well,” Squire said. “The fact that the video is so hard to find right now is proof of that.”

That was little consolation to family members of the victims. Celestine Chaney’s son, Wayne Jones, found out his mother had been killed when someone sent him a video screenshot from the livestream. Not long after, he saw the video itself.

“I didn’t find out, nobody knocked on my door like the usual process,” he said. “I found out in a Facebook picture that my mom was gunned down. Then I watched the video on social media.”

Danielle Simpson, the girlfriend of Chaney’s grandson, said she reported dozens of sites after the video kept appearing over and over in her Facebook feed and she worried that Chaney’s family would see them.

“I think I reported about 100 pages on Sunday because every time I got on Facebook it was either pictures or the video was right there,” she said. “You couldn’t escape it. There was nowhere you could go.”

In 2019, the Christchurch shooting was streamed live on Facebook for 17 minutes and quickly spread to other platforms. This time, the platforms generally seemed to coordinate better, particularly by sharing digital “signatures” of the video used to detect and remove copies.

But platform algorithms can have a harder time identifying a copycat video if someone has edited it. That's created problems, such as when some internet forums users remade the Buffalo video with twisted attempts at humor. Tech companies would have needed to use “more fancy algorithms” to detect those partial matches, Squire said.

“It seems darker and more cynical,” she said of the attempts to spread the shooting video in recent days.

Twitch has more than 2.5 million viewers at any given moment; roughly 8 million content creators stream video on the platform each month, according to the company. The site uses a combination of user reports, algorithms and moderators to detect and remove any violence that occurs on the platform. The company said that it quickly removed the gunman’s stream, but hasn’t shared many details about what happened on Saturday — including whether the stream was reported or how many people watched the rampage live.

A Twitch spokesperson said the company shared the livestream with the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a nonprofit group set up by tech companies to help others monitor their own platforms for rebroadcasts. But clips from the video still made their way to other platforms, including the site Streamable, where it was available for millions to view. A spokesperson for Hopin, the company that owns Streamable, said Monday that it's working to remove the videos and terminate the accounts of those who uploaded them.

Looking ahead, platforms may face future moderation complications from a Texas law — reinstated by an appellate court last week — that bans big social media companies from “censoring” users’ viewpoints. The shooter “had a very specific viewpoint” and the law is unclear enough to create a risk for platforms that moderate people like him, said Jeff Kosseff, an associate professor of cybersecurity law at the U.S. Naval Academy. “It really puts the finger on the scale of keeping up harmful content,” he said.

Some lawmakers have called for social media companies to further police their platforms following the gunman’s livestream. President Joe Biden did not bring up such calls during his remarks Tuesday in Buffalo.

Alexa Koenig, executive director of the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, said there's been a shift in how tech companies are responding to such events. In particular, Koenig said, coordination between the companies to create fingerprint repositories for extremist videos so they can't be re-uploaded to other platforms “has been an incredibly important development.”

A Twitch spokesperson said the company will review how it responded to the gunman’s livestream.

Experts suggest that sites such as Twitch could exercise more control over who can livestream and when — for instance, by building in delays or whitelisting valid users while banning rules violators. More broadly, Koenig said, “there’s also a general societal conversation that needs to happen around the utility of livestreaming and when it’s valuable, when it’s not, and how we put safe norms around how it’s used and what happens if you use it.”

Another option, of course, would be to end livestreaming altogether. But that's almost impossible to imagine given how much tech companies rely on livestreams to attract and keep users engaged in order to bring in money.

Free speech, Koenig said, is often the reason tech platforms give for allowing this form of technology — beyond the unspoken profit component. But that should be balanced "with rights to privacy and some of the other issues that arise in this instance,” Koenig said.

___

AP journalists Robert Bumsted and Carolyn Thompson contributed from Buffalo.

___

This story has been updated to clarify that all 10 of the people killed in the shooting were Black.

After Buffalo Shooting Video Spreads, Social Platforms Face Questions

Kellen Browning and Ryan Mac

Mon, May 16, 2022, 

In March 2019, before a gunman murdered 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, he went live on Facebook to broadcast his attack. In October of that year, a man in Germany broadcast his own mass shooting live on Twitch, the Amazon-owned livestreaming site popular with gamers.

On Saturday, a gunman in Buffalo, New York, mounted a camera to his helmet and livestreamed on Twitch as he killed 10 people and injured three more at a grocery store in what authorities said was a racist attack. In a manifesto posted online, Payton S. Gendron, the 18-year-old whom authorities identified as the shooter, wrote that he had been inspired by the Christchurch gunman and others.

Twitch said it reacted swiftly to take down the video of the Buffalo shooting, removing the stream within two minutes of the start of the violence. But two minutes was enough time for the video to be shared elsewhere.

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By Sunday, links to recordings of the video had circulated widely on other social platforms. A clip from the original video — which bore a watermark that suggested it had been recorded with a free screen-recording software — was posted on a site called Streamable and viewed more than 3 million times before it was removed. And a link to that video was shared hundreds of times across Facebook and Twitter hours after the shooting.

Mass shootings — and live broadcasts — raise questions about the role and responsibility of social media sites in allowing violent and hateful content to proliferate. Many of the gunmen in the shootings have written that they developed their racist and antisemitic beliefs trawling online forums like Reddit and 4chan, and were spurred on by watching other shooters stream their attacks live.

“It’s a sad fact of the world that these kind of attacks are going to keep on happening, and the way that it works now is there’s a social media aspect as well,” said Evelyn Douek, a senior research fellow at Columbia University’s Knight First Amendment Institute who studies content moderation. “It’s totally inevitable and foreseeable these days. It’s just a matter of when.”

Questions about the responsibilities of social media sites are part of a broader debate over how aggressively platforms should moderate their content. That discussion has been escalated since Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, recently agreed to purchase Twitter and has said he wants to make unfettered speech on the site a primary objective.

Social media and content moderation experts said Twitch’s quick response was the best that could reasonably be expected. But the fact that the response did not prevent the video of the attack from being spread widely on other sites also raises the issue of whether the ability to livestream should be so easily accessible.

“I’m impressed that they got it down in two minutes,” said Micah Schaffer, a consultant who has led trust and safety decisions at Snapchat and YouTube. “But if the feeling is that even that’s too much, then you really are at an impasse: Is it worth having this?”

In a statement, Angela Hession, Twitch’s vice president of trust and safety, said the site’s rapid action was a “very strong response time considering the challenges of live content moderation, and shows good progress.” Hession said the site was working with the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a nonprofit coalition of social media sites, as well as other social platforms to prevent the spread of the video.

“In the end, we are all part of one internet, and we know by now that that content or behavior rarely — if ever — will stay contained on one platform,” she said.

In a document that appeared to be posted to the forum 4chan and the messaging platform Discord before the attack, Gendron explained why he had chosen to stream on Twitch, writing that “it was compatible with livestreaming for free and all people with the internet could watch and record.” (Discord said it was working with law enforcement to investigate.)

Twitch also allows anyone with an account to go live, unlike sites like YouTube, which requires users to verify their account to do so and to have at least 50 subscribers to stream from a mobile device.

“I think that livestreaming this attack gives me some motivation in the way that I know that some people will be cheering for me,” Gendron wrote.

He also said he had been inspired by Reddit, far-right sites like The Daily Stormer and the writings of Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch shooter.

In remarks Saturday, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York criticized social media platforms for their role in influencing Gendron’s racist beliefs and allowing video of his attack to circulate.

“This spreads like a virus,” Hochul said, demanding that social media executives evaluate their policies to ensure that “everything is being done that they can to make sure that this information is not spread.”

There may be no easy answers. Platforms like Facebook, Twitch and Twitter have made strides in recent years, the experts said, in removing violent content and videos faster. In the wake of the shooting in New Zealand, social platforms and countries around the world joined an initiative called the Christchurch Call to Action and agreed to work closely to combat terrorism and violent extremism content. One tool that social sites have used is a shared database of hashes, or digital footprints of images, that can flag inappropriate content and have it taken down quickly.

But in this case, Douek said, Facebook seemed to have fallen short despite the hash system. Facebook posts that linked to the video posted on Streamable generated more than 43,000 interactions, according to CrowdTangle, a web analytics tool, and some posts were up for more than nine hours.

When users tried to flag the content as violating Facebook’s rules, which do not permit content that “glorifies violence,” they were told in some cases that the links did not run afoul of Facebook’s policies, according to screenshots viewed by The New York Times.

Facebook has since started to remove posts with links to the video, and a Facebook spokesperson said the posts do violate the platform’s rules. Asked why some users were notified that posts with links to the video did not violate its standards, the spokesperson did not have an answer.

Twitter had not removed many posts with links to the shooting video, and in several cases, the video had been uploaded directly to the platform. A company spokesperson initially said the site might remove some instances of the video or add a sensitive content warning, then later said Twitter would remove all videos related to the attack after the Times asked for clarification.

A spokesperson at Hopin, the video conferencing service that owns Streamable, said the platform was working to remove the video and delete the accounts of people who had uploaded it.

Removing violent content is “like trying to plug your fingers into leaks in a dam,” Douek said. “It’s going to be fundamentally really difficult to find stuff, especially at the speed that this stuff spreads now.”

© 2022 The New York Times Company

Ten Black people were murdered for merely being. 

Silly me, I thought they were the real victims

 | Opinion


Leonard Pitts Jr.
Tue, May 17, 2022, 2:10 PM·3 min read

Come and let us pity white people. They are the real victims here.

That, in essence, is the battle cry that’s powered much of American politics for the last 30 years, the last 15 in particular. It has echoed from the halls of government to the set of Fox “News” to the far-flung strands of the world wide web.

Poor white people. They are being overrun by caravans when not murdered by illegals or terrorized by Muslims or tyrannized by masks or oppressed by vaccinations or canceled by culture or lied to by media or lied upon by media or cheated by elections or blamed by Blacks or vexed by “Press 1 for English.”

Or replaced — evicted from their God-ordained preeminence by “others” who will be obedient voters for the liberal left. So says the so-called “Great Replacement Theory,” which originated in the fever swamps of white supremacy and now has a regular megaphone on Fox, courtesy of Tucker Carlson.

But that hasn’t been his message alone. It’s also been the message of New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, would-be Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, of conservatism as a whole, in response to a demographic shift first forecast years ago: that by 2050, people of color will constitute a majority of the population. Where some of us saw in that prediction change and challenge, they saw the gains to be made by fomenting white panic.

Thus, it was shocking and painful, but also predictable, that a stupid white boy with a stated belief in the replacement theory allegedly walked into a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, on Saturday and shot 10 Black people to death. Indeed, this was no more surprising than last year’s massacre of Asians in Atlanta, 2019’s massacre of Latinos in El Paso or 2015’s massacre of African Americans at a church in Charleston. Panicked people do terrible things.

But yes, come and let us pity white people. Many certainly pity themselves.

That’s how you get a country where Critical Race Theory is banned by law, but you can learn Great Replacement Theory by turning on Fox. Where voting keeps getting harder and gun ownership easier. Where Colin Kaepernick is unemployed, and Carlson is not.

Speaking of which, he addressed the shooting Monday on his show, somehow managing to blame “professional Democrats” without once mentioning the racist theory that he and the alleged shooter both happen to believe.

Garnell Whitfield Jr. was also on television that day. In a grief-tattered voice, he spoke of his family’s anguish at the loss of his 86-year-old mother, Ruth, who died in the shooting. “But we’re not just hurtin’,” he said. “We’re angry. This shouldn’t have happened. We do our best to be good citizens, to be good people. We believe in God. We trust Him. We treat people with decency and we love even our enemies. And you expect us to keep doing this over and over and over again. Forgive and forget. While the people we elect and trust in offices around this country do their best not to protect us, not to consider us equal, not to love us back.”

And suddenly, you knew he was speaking out of a bereft exhaustion that encompassed not just him and his family but all of us who have been betrayed by America and its dream. “What are we supposed to do with all of this anger,” he pleaded, “with all of this pain?”

The question resonated, as it has for years unending. And, as for years unending, no answer immediately presented itself.

But yeah, sure, let’s pity white people. Let’s never forget who the real victims are.

Pitts

Twitter Compares Cops' Treatment Of Buffalo Gunman With That Of Black Boy Accused Of Stealing Chips

Yolanda Baruch
Mon, May 16, 2022,


After 13 people were shot, including 10 who were killed, during the recent mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, people took to Twitter to criticize the police handling of the gunman.

Payton Gendron allegedly opened fire at the Tops Friendly Market in a predominantly Black neighborhood, The Independent reports.

Authorities said the 18-year-old arrived at the grocery store around 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, wearing tactical gear and a helmet while carrying an AR-15 and a camera to livestream the assault on Twitch, which the service later removed.

When police took Gendron into custody, pictures captured the calm interaction between the officer and gunman.

The New York Times reports that Gendron was held for a mental evaluation in 2021.

The Associated Press also notes that Gendron’s mental health possibly played a role in his racially motivated massacre.

Twitter immediately noticed the treatment Gendron received after the shooting.

People also compared the police treatment of Gendron with the treatment a young Black boy who was recently accused of stealing a bag of chips.

People resurfaced a tweet from 2018 that compared the media’s perception of Michael Brown and the Austin bombing suspect Mark Anthony Conditt.

Despite the media’s perception of the gunman, video footage showed up-close shots of his weapon with the N-word and the number 14 — a known white supremacist code — scrawled in white paint on the barrel of his gun, according to The Independent.

Gendron also described himself as a fascist, white supremacist and anti-Semite. He allegedly regularly visited far-right platforms and message boards, including 4chan and Gab, that espoused white supremacist ideologies and conspiracy theories.

Buffalo police commissioner Joseph Gramaglia described the act as an “absolute racist hate crime,” CNN reports.

Fox News Is Already Using 'Violent' Video Games As Scapegoat For Mass Shooting
THAT AND MENTAL ILLNESS

Sisi Jiang
Mon, May 16, 2022

An image of the supermarket where a shooter opened fire.

Time is a flat circle. The year is 2022, and a Fox News anchor recently asked an on-air guest whether or not he believed that video games enable mass shootings.

On Saturday, an 18-year-old white man named Payton Gendron opened fire on a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. He killed 10 people and injured three, the majority of which were Black residents. After planning his crime over Discord, he drove 200 miles in full tactical gear and streamed the shooting on Twitch. Gendron has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder.

Fox News brought in Bernard Zapor to discuss the causes of mass shootings. Zapor was a former special agent for the firearms division of the Department of Justice and a current college instructor in criminal justice. The news anchor Jon Scott asked Zapor: “It seems like things have gotten so much worse since video games became so realistic and so violent. Have you done research or learned that video games tend to just desensitize people to the actual result of pulling a trigger?” He made no mention of the shooter’s 180 page manifesto about being a committed racist.

While Zapor wasn’t as eager to relitigate the video game controversies of the 1990s, his response wasn’t necessarily more coherent: “I think in terms of causation, what the information shows us is as we become more disfranchised as individuals, and groups, people leave a faith for example, the family units become smaller or more disconnected, we live further distances. We’re communicating through a medium that was never really intended for human beings, which is online. Or through texting. Or these kinds of things. We get separated as humans to have connections that build inner morality.” So there you have it, folks: It’s not Call of Duty. It’s actually your cell phones and your social media accounts that are chipping away at your reluctance to open fire on innocent people.

No, it isn’t. It’s about the Great Replacement Theory, a false belief that there is a concerted effort to eliminate the white majority. It turns out, if you give white supremacists easy access to guns and tell them that minorities are going to spell the end of your race, they sometimes decide to commit horrible acts of violence. But Fox News is not going to make that connection while they play a national role in stoking fear about ‘illegal immigration’ and the declining dominance of white Christians.

The tragedy at Buffalo is not the first time that video games were blamed for mass shootings. The most famous example was the 1999 Columbine shootings. The Chicago Tribune reported that the perpetrators were fans of the video game Doom, and “used it to get ready for their attack.” After the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Senator Joseph Lieberman said that young men like the shooter had a “hypnotic involvement with violent video games.” When asked about whether or not stronger gun control was the answer to gun violence, a Republican congressman said to NPR: “The biggest pusher of violence is, hands down, Hollywood movies, hands down, the video game market.” Fox News has previously written an article that connected first person shooter games with a gunman who attacked a Washington Navy Yard.

Despite politicians’ eagerness to find a plausible scapegoat for their own policy failures, major video game markets such as Canada, Europe, and Asia aren’t reporting hundreds of mass shootings every year compared to the United States.

The Department of Justice is currently investigating the Buffalo shooting as a hate crime.

SEE LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for EMOTIONAL PLAGUE 

Girlfriend: Dallas shooting suspect feared
Asian Americans

JAKE BLEIBERG and JAMIE STENGLE
Tue, May 17, 2022,

DALLAS (AP) — The girlfriend of a man arrested Tuesday in a shooting that wounded three women of Asian descent in a hair salon in Dallas’ Koreatown told police that he has delusions that Asian Americans are trying to harm him, an arrest warrant affidavit states.

Jeremy Smith faces three charges of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, police said. Smith is being held on $300,000 bond, according to jail records that do not list an attorney for him. In public records, his age is listed as both 36 and 37.

When asked at a news conference Tuesday if he considered the shooting an issue of racism, mental health or both, Dallas police Chief Eddie Garcia said it’s too early to tell.

“Right now, it’s an issue of hate. It’s a hate crime. However that manifests itself, I’m not here to say that. I can tell you that I know our community sees it as a hate crime. I see it as a hate crime and so do our men and women,” Garcia said.

Earlier Tuesday, the FBI said it has opened a federal hate crime investigation along with federal prosecutors in Texas and the U.S. Department of Justice’s civil rights division.

Police have said the shooting last Wednesday at Hair World Salon might be connected to two previous drive-by shootings at businesses run by Asian Americans. But Garcia said Tuesday that police are still investigating whether Smith, who is Black, was involved. The description of the suspect's vehicle was similar in all three shootings.

According to the affidavit, Smith’s girlfriend told detectives that he had been delusional about Asian Americans ever since being involved in a car crash two years ago with a man of Asian descent. She said he had been admitted to several mental health facilities because of the delusions.

Whenever Smith is around an Asian American, “he begins having delusions that the Asian mob is after him or attempting to harm him,” his girlfriend told police. She said he was fired for “verbally attacking” his boss, who was of Asian descent.

Garcia declined to comment on whether Smith has been diagnosed with a mental illness or whether Smith legally obtained the gun used in the shooting, saying both questions are still being investigated.

The shooting in Dallas occurred a few days before a white gunman killed 10 Black people Saturday at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, and a gunman who authorities said was motivated by political hatred for Taiwan killed one person and wounded five Sunday at a southern California church where mostly elderly Taiwanese parishioners had gathered.

Anti-Asian violence has risen sharply in recent years amid the pandemic of COVID-19, which was first reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

Last year, six women of Asian descent were among the eight killed in a shooting at massage businesses in and near Atlanta, heightening anger and fear among Asian Americans. In February, a man from Midland, 330 miles (531 kilometers) west of Dallas, pleaded guilty to federal hate crimes for an attack in 2020 on an Asian family because he believed they were Chinese and responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic.

The salon in Dallas where the shooting happened is in the heart of Koreatown, which is in a part of the city that was transformed in the 1980s from an industrial area to a thriving district with shopping, dining, markets, medical offices and salons.

Authorities have said a man dressed all in black opened fire in the salon, then drove away in a maroon minivan. Garcia said investigators found that a similar vehicle had been reported as involved in two other recent shootings. Someone opened fire in an April 2 drive-by near the salon and Garcia said a similar vehicle was also linked to a May 10 shooting about 25 miles (40 kilometers) southeast of there. No one was injured in either of those shootings.

Garcia said the suspect walked into the salon with a .22-caliber rifle and fired about 13 times. One woman was injured in her arm, one in her foot and another in her lower back, he said. They have all been released from the hospital and are recovering, according to police.

One of the women injured in the shooting spoke Monday night at a community meeting with police. Her arm in a sling, she said in Korean that she was worried about how she would continue to make a living.

“There are lives that have changed forever because of this,” Garcia said Tuesday.

Police Sr. Cpl. Soo Nam also addressed the reporters at Tuesday’s news conference, delivering a statement on the arrest in Korean for Texas-based Korean-language journalists in attendance. Garcia said the department has 10 officers who speak Korean.

Dozens of people had filled a room at the Korean Culture Center of Dallas on Monday evening for the town hall meeting with police on safety. At the meeting, Garcia had assured attendees that detectives were working nonstop on the case. Some attendees expressed thanks to police while others asked questions on what was being done to make the community safer.

John Lee, a board member and previous president of the Greater Dallas Korean American Chamber of Commerce, said he thought it was healing for attendees get reassurances from police. He noted some attendees “were more angry and let it be known and some were a little more appreciative."

“I think the emotions ran the entire gamut from anger to pain to fear to all of that,” Lee said.

___

Associated Press writer Jill Bleed in Little Rock, Arkansas, contributed to this report.

Mexican president slams U.S. embargo on Cuba as 'genocidal policy'


Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador attends 

news conference at a military base, in Apodaca


Tue, May 17, 2022

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Tuesday the U.S. economic embargo of Cuba was "genocidal policy," raising the stakes in a standoff with Washington over its treatment of the Communist-ruled Caribbean island.

Lopez Obrador, a leftist who has repeatedly called for the United States to end the embargo, said earlier in May that he would not attend the U.S.-hosted Summit of the Americas next month unless all countries in the region were invited.

Speaking at a regular government news conference, Lopez Obrador said the United States "looked bad" in how it was treating Cuba, and urged Washington to end the embargo.

"It's a genocidal policy," Lopez Obrador said.

Still, he welcomed moves by the U.S. government on Monday that will ease some Trump-era restrictions on the island and increase processing of U.S. visas for Cubans.

Lopez Obrador on Wednesday is due to meet with a U.S. delegation for the Summit of the Americas in which he plans to explain why Mexico wants all countries in the region to attend.

(Reporting by Kylie MadryEditing by Dave Graham)

PURE $PECULATION

Ben Bernanke Says He Doesn't See Value in Bitcoin

Stephen Alpher
Mon, May 16, 2022

Former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke told CNBC on Monday that he doesn't believe bitcoin (BTC) works as money, a store of value or digital gold.

"If bitcoin were a substitute for fiat money, you could use bitcoin to go buy your groceries," he said. "Nobody buys groceries with bitcoin because it’s too expensive and too inconvenient to do that." he added, noting how it would be impossible to price something like celery in bitcoin because there's too little stability in its value.

Occasionally known as "Helicopter Ben" for suggesting in 2002 that the Fed could simply drop money from helicopters to ward off deflationary conditions – a comment the cypherpunks who laid the groundwork for Bitcoin were no doubt well aware of – Bernanke addressed the digital gold case for bitcoin. "Gold has underlying use value," he argued. "You can use it to fill cavities. The underlying use value of a bitcoin is to do ransomware or something like that."

Turning to monetary policy, Bernanke, who was behind the original zero interest rate policy and quantitative easing, criticized the current Fed for not moving quickly enough to tighten monetary policy in the face of advancing inflation.

Under even a "benign scenario," Bernanke said he expects the economy to slow and unemployment to rise, even as inflation remains high. "You could call it stagflation," he said.

Luna Foundation Guard says its Bitcoin reserves are down to 313 from over 80,000, and it will use ‘remaining assets’ to pay back ‘smallest’ stablecoin holders

Taylor Locke
Mon, May 16, 2022, 8:09 AM·1 min read

The Luna Foundation Guard (LFG), an organization that supports the Terra ecosystem, shared a breakdown of its remaining assets on Monday.

Last week, Terra’s stablecoin UST began to crash far below $1, and its sister token Luna unraveled to nearly zero. Amid the chaos, many investors were wondering where LFG’s billions worth of Bitcoin went, which it originally obtained to defend UST’s peg.

Now, after days of silence, LFG shared that it has 313 Bitcoin left, down from its original 80,394 Bitcoin reserve. LFG also noted it has a few other assets, including UST, Terra and Avalanche.

LFG is “looking to use its remaining assets to compensate remaining users of $UST, smallest holders first,” it tweeted on Monday. “We are still debating through various distribution methods, updates to follow soon.”

Over the weekend, figures in the crypto community also suggested Terra disburse funds to “smallholders” impacted by the crash. Among them is Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

“Coordinated sympathy and relief for the average UST smallholder who got told something dumb about ‘20% interest rates on the US dollar’ by an influencer, personal responsibility and SFYL [or sorry for your loss] for the wealthy,” Buterin tweeted on Saturday.

He added that the “obvious precedent is FDIC insurance,” being “up to $250,000 per person.”

UST remains in the red, down 71% in the last week. It’s currently trading at 8 cents. Luna, down 100% in the last week, is worth nearly zero.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com


Crypto: Stablecoin storm spreads after billions of tether is cashed out


Brian McGleenon
Tue, May 17, 2022, 

A smartphone with Tether logo on it. Reuters/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

Crypto's stablecoin storm spreads as $7.6bn of USD tether is redeemed in the past week. The cashout looks likely to continue on Tuesday with impact on all major tokens including bitcoin.

On Tuesday the top two cryptocurrencies by market cap, bitcoin and ethereum, rallied 3% in 24 hours, with BTC at $30,667 and ETH at $2,091.

The cash-out of tether (USDT-USD) by crypto investors has escalated since the LUNA/UST crash last Wednesday.

The dramatic crash saw the algorithmic stablecoin UST terra, which had been pegged to the dollar one to one, fall to a low of $0.1.

A stablecoin is supposed to be a stable safe haven for investors to park their profits amid the volatility of the cryptocurrency market.

However, cryptocurrency investors now find they have nowhere to go amid signals of further volatility.

No stablecoin seems safe at the moment, and the only option is to hold blue-chip cryptos, such as bitcoin (BTC-USD) and ethereum, or cash out of the whole ecosystem into a traditional bank account.

The crisis deepens as ethereum, the second-biggest cryptocurrency by market cap, has fallen about 60% from its November record.

Read more: Crypto live prices

According to technical analyst John Roque of 22V Research, ethereum (ETH-USD) could drop another 80%.

Ethereum currently stands at $2,074, but Roque's downside target is around $420.

However, both bitcoin and ethereum have risen by around 3% in value in the last 24 hours, which would suggest wary cryptocurrency investors are parking their money in these blue chips until the current 'stablecoin' storm resides.

The market cap of tether has been dropping considerably since the blow-up of the USDT terra algorithmic stablecoin.

Tether's market cap has fallen from $85bn before the 'stablecoin storm', to a current value of $76bn

USDT, or tether, should not be confused with UST, called terra, which was the algorithmic stablecoin that crashed last Wednesday.

Unlike the UST terra algorithmic stablecoin, USDT tether is backed by US dollars as collateral.

However, its reserves are a point of controversy and only a fractional amount of the $4 of tether in existence may be redeemed for actual US dollars.

On Monday, the New York Supreme Court rejected Tether’s petition to block the public from receiving documents detailing the composition of its dollar reserves.

The recent crypto-market crisis involving stablecoins has caused industry experts to call for strong regulation, especially of stablecoins.

Read more: 'Crypto lobby groups are dictating terms in Washington'

Speaking to Yahoo Finance, London-based fintech investor Viktor Prokopenya said: “Regulation will bring transparency to the market and end bad practices. Like all young technologies - crypto is only about a decade old, the industry has to grow up and out of its existing ways.

"The recent collapse of terra and tether and other stablecoins have shown a lack of transparency and an ironic ‘instability’ in a supposedly more ‘stable’ cryptocurrency."

The news comes as the UK Treasury is en route to legalise the use of stablecoins.

Last month HM Treasury tweeted: "Economic Secretary John Glen announced today that stablecoins will be brought into UK payments regulation.

"This places the UK financial services sector at the forefront of technology, creating conditions for stablecoin issuers and service providers to operate and invest."

Luna Foundation Guard has now dumped $2.4 billion from its Bitcoin reserves in failed attempt to defend TerraUSD peg


Woohae Cho—Bloomberg via Getty Images

Christiaan Hetzner
Mon, May 16, 2022, 8:51 AM·3 min read

Luna Foundation Guard, the second largest known holder of Bitcoin, liquidated almost its entire reserves last week worth billions in a failed attempt to defend the Terra UST stablecoin peg.

Ever since the collapse of UST and its sister governance token Luna, designed to maintain the peg through an algorithmic process of manipulating the latter’s money supply, the entire crypto community wanted to know just one thing: what happened to LFG’s prodigious Bitcoin holdings?

“Where is all the BTC (Bitcoin) that was supposed to be used as reserves?“ asked Changpeng "CZ" Zhao, head of crypto platform Binance. “Shouldn’t those BTC be ALL used to buy back UST first?”

Chain analysis firm Elliptical tracked movements in LFG's Bitcoin, concluding they had all been shifted to centralized exchanges Binance and Gemini, where the trail promptly ran cold.

https://twitter.com/CryptoHarry_/status/1526130321942794240?s=20u0026t=9FoQrf42lfejQNhtB7Sj7Q

On Monday, the crypto community finally got an answer, when LFG posted an update to its 91,000-plus followers in a long Twitter thread.

Of the 80,394 Bitcoin worth $2.4 billion it held as of May 7th just prior to Terra losing its dollar peg, only 313 are still held in reserve.

The rest were liquidated between May 8th and May 10th, when Bitcoin traded between $31,000 and $35,000.

'Heartbroken about pain'

For investors in Bitcoin, this could be bullish as it removes uncertainty hanging over the price amid fears a whale as big as LFG would dump its holdings to defend the peg.

After LFG's Bitcoin holdings surpassed Elon Musk's Tesla earlier this month, only Michael Saylor's Microstrategy, with its 129,218 Bitcoin in reserves, was known to hold more.

On Monday, Bitcoin fluctuated around the $30,000 mark.

https://twitter.com/saylor/status/1525970665504907270?s=20u0026t=9FoQrf42lfejQNhtB7Sj7Q

For Luna holders, however, Monday’s update suggests there is little remaining value left in the project apart from roughly $65 million in Avalanche, another $12 million in Binance tokens and the remaining $9.4 million in Bitcoin.

Reserves totaled $93.4 million, according to the most recent information from LFG.

On Monday, Binance founder CZ said his platform had locked up, or "staked", about $12 million in UST to validate transactions on the Terra blockchain.

He said he would ask the Terra project team "to compensate the retails users first, Binance last, if ever," in order to make the bulk of small retail investors that lost money whole again.

For Do Kwon, whose wife recently received police protection, there was little left to do but claim neither he nor any affiliated institutions try to earn profits by selling Terra UST and Luna during the collapse.

The South Korean native had gained a reputation for hubris, mocking critics that pointed to fatal flaws in the construction of his algo stablecoin. Only two months ago, he boasted his creation would eliminate one of Terra UST’s competitors, Maker Foundation’s Dai.

“I am heartbroken about the pain my invention has brought on all of you,” the self-described “Master of Stablecoin” posted to Twitter on Saturday.

https://twitter.com/mrdistortion_/status/1524334361289629696?s=20u0026t=9BOB61eHSAha-ewaNRlDBA

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

CAPITALI$M IS NOT DEMOCRATIC

Goldman Sachs pushed staff to return to the office. Now the Wall Street bank is giving executives unlimited time off

Nicholas Gordon
Mon, May 16, 2022,

Goldman Sachs emerged as one of the strongest advocates of a post-pandemic return to the office this year, but the fight for talent could be forcing the investment bank to reverse course and offer employees more time away from their desks instead.

In an internal memo seen by the Financial Times, the investment bank said it would offer junior staff a minimum of two extra days off each year. But senior staff will get an even bigger perk—one more commonly associated with Silicon Valley than Wall Street.

Starting May 1 partners and managing directors at Goldman Sachs can “take time off when needed without a fixed vacation day entitlement,” the memo said, as the investment bank gingerly follows tech firms like Netflix and Salesforce in offering staff unlimited time off.

Goldman Sachs declined to comment for this article. But forcing staff to take time away from the office is quite a U-turn for the bank, which desperately tried to get its staff back in the office as pandemic restrictions eased in the U.S.

In February last year, Goldman CEO David Solomon called remote work an “aberration." A month later, Solomon told Fortune that “part of [Goldman Sachs’] secret sauce is that [younger staff] come together and collaborate and work with people that are much more experienced than they are" adding that “for Goldman Sachs to retain that cultural foundation, we have to bring people together.”

Yet the bank has struggled to get its workers to comply with its "cultural foundation." Only half of employees showed up on the first day Goldman reopened its New York headquarters on Feb. 1, after closing the office for a month due to an Omicron-driven surge of COVID cases. And there are signs that Goldman’s return-to-office mandate may be affecting the bank’s ability to retain talent.

Junior bankers have reportedly complained about the bank's drive to get people back at their desks, and some have started interviewing for roles at tech companies that offer more flexibility, including Netflix, Google and Facebook. According to a Harris poll conducted for Fortune in February, about 50% of U.S. workers would accept a lower salary in exchange for an unlimited leave policy.

Other Wall Street banks are also struggling to get their workers back in the office. In April, JPMorgan said that it would allow half its workforce to work in hybrid or fully remote settings, despite CEO Jamie Dimon's earlier criticism of work-from-home arrangements.

However, experts warn that an unlimited paid time off policy could backfire if an office culture discourages taking a vacation, as workers do not have clear expectations of how much breaktime they actually get.

Goldman Sachs appears to have accounted for that. According to the memo, the bank will mandate that all staff take a minimum of three weeks off per year by 2023, including at least one vacation of a minimum five consecutive days.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Intel shareholders rejected the company’s executive pay program—putting the CEO’s promised $180 million pay package on the line


Ting Shen—Bloomberg/Getty Images

Sophie Mellor
Tue, May 17, 2022

Intel shareholders voted against the company’s executive compensation program last week, which included part of a $178.6 million payout to CEO Pat Gelsinger, according to a regulatory filing published Monday.

Around 1.78 billion votes, making up around 54.2% of shareholders of the chip-manufacturing giant, were cast against the executive compensation, while 932 million votes were made in favor. Around 577 million votes abstained or were broker nonvotes.

The vote is advisory and won’t take immediate effect, but it indicates that a growing number of stockholders are pushing back on hefty executive compensation packages at Intel, which beat first-quarter results targets, but forecast lower growth for the second quarter. The vote also puts keener scrutiny on CEO Pat Gelsinger and his $43.5 billion plan to revive Intel, which includes a €33 billion European spending spree to expand Intel’s presence across the bloc and ease the semiconductor chip shortage.

The filing revealed that Alyssa Henry, an executive vice president at Square and 57th richest self-made woman, according to Forbes, was kept on Intel's board of directors by a narrow margin. While 1.36 million stockholders voted to keep her on as an Intel director, 1.34 million voted to kick her off—a rare close tally in a shareholder vote.

“We take our investors’ feedback very seriously, and we are committed to engaging with them and addressing their concerns,” Intel said in a statement to Fortune. The company added that it has taken specific steps to address investor questions and to clearly link pay to performance, but added that "there is clearly more work to do.”

The company also said, "Intel’s Board of Directors will work with Alyssa Henry to address the over-boarding concerns raised by stockholders."
Executive pay pushback

This isn’t the first time shareholders have voted against executive compensation packages in recent months. Shareholders at AT&T, Phillips, and General Electric all voted against hiking CEO pay and executive compensation packages after poor results this year.

Proxy votes against executive pay at S&P 500 companies became more common last year, according to a report by As You Sow, a shareholder advocacy group focused on ESG matters. After many companies released earnings with "questionable practices and metrics"—easing performance targets during the COVID-19 pandemic, for example—shareholders voted to push back on executive compensation at record numbers.

In 2021, a record 16 companies had the pay of their executives rejected by more than half of their investors—up from 10 in 2020 and seven in 2019, according to the report.

In Intel's case, Gelsinger, who took over as CEO in February 2021, was hired to turn the company around and return it to its former glory. In the hopes of beating out rival AMD, Intel has been shoring up the company's presence and manufacturing capabilities in the U.S. and Europe.

A lot is riding on this for Gelsinger. If all goes according to plan and Intel’s stock triples in five years, the new CEO would take home the entire $180 million pay package signed in 2021.

“The Compensation Committee believed that having 73% of the CEO’s new-hire equity awards contingent on achieving ambitious stock price growth was in the best interest of Intel and its stockholders,” Intel said in its proxy filing published in May 2022.

Gelsinger’s payout is far from guaranteed as things stand today. Intel's stock is trading lower than when Gelsinger took the helm, a situation that was not helped by the company’s first-quarter earnings report; Intel forecast its second-quarter revenue and profit would come in well below Wall Street expectations, citing weak demand in its largest market (PCs) and increased supply chain uncertainty due to COVID-19 lockdowns in China. Shares in Intel fell 4% on the news.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

JPMorgan shareholders vote disapproval of CEO Dimon's special payout



Tue, May 17, 2022
By David Henry

NEW YORK (Reuters) -In an unusual rebuke for Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co, shareholders on Tuesday clearly disapproved of the special $52.6 million stock option award directors gave him last year to stay on the job for at least five more years.

In an advisory say-on-pay referendum, only 31% of votes cast endorsed JPMorgan executive payments for 2021, according to a preliminary count announced at the company's annual meeting.

Because of the special award this year two major advisory firms, from which investors take their cue when voting, had recommended "no" votes on pay.

Institutional Shareholder Services Inc and Glass Lewis & Co criticized Dimon's options as lacking performance criteria for vesting.

In eight of the last 12 years JPMorgan had won approval from more than 90% of votes cast in its annual compensation ballots.

Dimon, 66, will keep the award, but such votes are closely followed as a test of investors' attitudes toward executive pay and what payouts they will tolerate.

Average support for pay packages at S&P 500 companies was 88.3% in 2021, down from 89.6% in 2020 and 90% in 2019, according to consulting firm Semler Brossy.

In response to the vote, JPMorgan directors pointed out through a spokesman the special award was extremely rare and the first for Dimon in more than a decade.

Directors said before the vote that the special award would not be recurring and "reflects the board's desire for him to continue to lead the firm for a further significant number of years."

The board said before the vote it made the award in consideration of Dimon's performance, his leadership since 2005 and "management succession planning amidst a highly competitive landscape for executive leadership talent."

If Dimon, a billionaire, keeps working at the bank for five years the options will vest, although he could still receive them if he leaves to work for the government or to run for public office.

Stock from the options must be held until 10 years after being granted.

The award was separate from Dimon's usual annual pay package, which was up 10% to $34.5 million for 2021.

The board prevailed in its recommendations on all other issues. All directors, including Dimon, were re-elected with more than 92% of the votes cast, according to preliminary figures.

Two shareholder proposals on fossil fuel financing received only 11% and 15% of votes cast, consistent with weak support recently for initiatives at Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo, as well as at big oil companies.

(Reporting by David Henry in New York. Additional reporting by Noor Zainab Hussain in Bangalore.Editing by Nick Zieminski and Chris Reese)