It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Saturday, October 12, 2024
Alexei Navalny wrote he knew he would die in prison in new memoir
By AFP October 11, 2024 Prominent Russian dissident Alexei Navalny believed he would die in prison, according to his posthumous memoir entitled 'Patriot' which will be published on October 22 - Copyright AFP/File Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV
Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, who was President Vladimir Putin’s top political opponent before his death in February, believed he would die in prison, according to his posthumous memoir which will to be released on October 22.
The New Yorker published excerpts from the book Friday, featuring writing from Navalny’s prison diary and earlier.
“I will spend the rest of my life in prison and die here,” he wrote on March 22, 2022.
“There will not be anybody to say goodbye to … All anniversaries will be celebrated without me. I’ll never see my grandchildren.”
Navalny had been serving a 19-year prison sentence on “extremism” charges in an Arctic penal colony.
His death on February 16 at age 47 drew widespread condemnation, with many blaming Putin.
Navalny was arrested in January 2021 upon returning to Russia after suffering a major health emergency from being poisoned in 2020.
“The only thing we should fear is that we will surrender our homeland to be plundered by a gang of liars, thieves, and hypocrites,” he wrote on January 17, 2022.
The excerpts capture the loneliness of imprisonment, but also a touch of humor.
For instance, on July 1, 2022, Navalny outlined his typical day: wake up at 6:00 am, breakfast at 6:20 am and start work at 6:40 am.
“At work, you sit for seven hours at the sewing machine on a stool below knee height,” he wrote.
“After work, you continue to sit for a few hours on a wooden bench under a portrait of Putin. This is called ‘disciplinary activity.'”
The book, entitled “Patriot,” will be released by US publisher Knopf, which is also planning a Russian version.
“It’s impossible to read Navalny’s prison diary without being outraged by the tragedy of his suffering, and by his death,” wrote New Yorker editor David Remnick.
In the last excerpt published in the magazine, dated January 17, 2024, Navalny responds to the question asked to him by his fellow inmates and prison guards: why did he return to Russia?
“I don’t want to give up my country or betray it. If your convictions mean something, you must be prepared to stand up for them and make sacrifices if necessary,” he said.
Small Quebec company dominates one part of NHL hockey: jerseys
By AFP October 12, 2024 An employee works on a jersey at SP Apparel in Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec; the Canadian firm makes jerseys for all 32 NHL teams
- Copyright AFP Sebastien ST-JEAN
Anne-Marie PROVOST
As a sport that involves men colliding at high speeds, bare-knuckle brawls, and a fair number of players with missing front teeth, ice hockey is not commonly linked to high fashion.
But SP Apparel, a Canadian company based east of Montreal that makes the jerseys worn by all 32 National Hockey League (NHL) teams, says superior material and meticulous craftmanship have kept it at the top of the game.
“It’s like haute couture,” Steve Berard, president of the company with 260 employees in the city of Saint-Hyacinthe in Quebec province, told AFP.
SP Apparel has been making jerseys for the NHL for 50 years, through nearly half the league’s 107-year history.
For the last 25 years, it has also made the uniforms for all national ice hockey teams competing at the Olympics.
Being based in a hockey-mad nation, which has consistently produced many of the sport’s top stars, has helped SP Apparel retain its primacy in hockey apparel, Berard said.
But the quality of the product is paramount, he stressed.
“These are not jerseys made on a production line,” Berard said. “There are 90 pieces to assemble, with different colors and materials.”
– Brutal wear and tear –
The company says its products are made to withstand particularly brutal wear and tear.
So, while there are a few industrial machines like laser fabric cutters at its 9,000-square meter (97,000-square foot) factory, seamstresses with simple sewing machines do the assembly work.
An NHL jersey is worn only five to 20 times on average. That depends partly on the individual player’s amount of ice time, and partly on his style of play in a sport where fights can involve grabbing or even tearing an opponent’s jersey.
The company estimates that it makes 300,000 to 500,000 units per year, including hockey jerseys and socks, as well as the uniforms it makes for major junior Canadian Hockey League and baseball teams (but not those in the major leagues).
During past Winter Olympics, SP Apparel sent tailors on site to make any repairs or adjustments required during the Games.
Tania Berlinguette, SP Apparel’s executive director, told AFP the company also accommodates “special requests for certain players,” notably Pittsburgh Penguins star Sidney Crosby.
“We make his socks slightly larger because his calves are a little bigger than average,” Berlinguette said.
– ‘Through our hands’ –
Staff said the most popular jersey on the factory floor belongs to the Vegas Golden Knights, with fine detailing that nods to a knight’s mesh armor, and the words “Always Advance. Never Retreat” on the inner collar.
Lyne Gagne, who has worked at SP Apparel for 35 years and now oversees a department responsible for a jersey’s final detailing, said the work has changed considerably over the years.
Jerseys are now “much more adapted to the players’ movements,” she said.
“They used to be straight cut, with big sleeves, with five to 10 pieces. Now they hug the body and the material is different,” she said.
The predominance of SP Apparel’s jerseys at hockey’s highest levels is a “source of pride” for employees, she told AFP.
“When you watch a hockey game, you know that the jersey has passed through our hands.”
Nobel prize a timely reminder, Hiroshima locals say
By AFP October 12, 2024 Around 140,000 people died when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945
- Copyright AFP Philip FONG
Kyoko HASEGAWA
Just like the dwindling group of survivors now recognised with a Nobel prize, the residents of Hiroshima hope that the world never forgets the atomic bombing of 1945 — now more than ever.
Susumu Ogawa, 84, was five when the bomb dropped by the United States all but obliterated the Japanese city 79 years ago, and many of his family were among the 140,000 people killed.
“My mother, my aunt, my grandfather,and my grandfather all died in the atomic bombing,” Ogawa told AFP a day after the survivors’ group Nihon Hidankyo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Ogawa himself recalls very little but the snippets he garnered later from his surviving relatives and others painted a hellish picture.
“All they could do was to evacuate and save their own lives, while they saw other people (perish) inside the inferno,” he said.
“All nuclear weapons in the world have to be abandoned,” he said. “We know the horror of nuclear weapons, because we know what happened in Hiroshima.”
What is happening now in the Middle East saddens him greatly.
“Why do people fight each other? …hurting each other won’t bring anything good,” he said.
– ‘Great thing’ –
On a sunny Saturday, many tourists and some residents were strolling around the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park to the bomb’s 140,000 victims.
A preserved skeleton of a building close to ground zero of the “Little Boy” bomb and a statue of a girl with outstretched arms are poignant reminders of the devastation.
Jung Jaesuk, 43, a South Korean primary school teacher visiting the site, said the Nobel was a “a victory for (grassroots) people.”
“Tension in East Asia is intensifying so we have to boost anti-nuclear movement,” he told AFP.
Kiyoharu Bajo, 69, a retired business consultant, decided to take in the atmosphere of the site after the “great thing” that was the Nobel award.
With Ukraine and the Middle East, the world “faces crises that we’ve not experienced since the Second World War in terms of nuclear weapons,” he told AFP.
The stories told by the Nihon Hidankyo group of “hibakusha”, as the survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known, “have to be known to the world,” he said.
He said he hopes that the Nobel prize will help “the experiences of atomic bomb survivors spread further spread around the world” including by persuading people to visit Hiroshima.
– Future generations –
Kiwako Miyamoto, 65, said the Nobel prize was a “great thing, because even some locals here are indifferent” to what happened.
“In Hiroshima, you pray on August 6, and children go to school”, even though the date is during summer vacation, she told AFP.
“But I was surprised to see that outside Hiroshima, some people don’t know (so much about it)” she said.
She said that like many people in Hiroshima, she personally knows people whose relatives died in the bombing or who witnessed it.
With the average age among members of the Nihon Hidankyo over 85, it is vital that young people continue to be taught about what happened, added Bajo.
“I was born 10 years after the atom bomb was dropped, so there were many atom bomb survivors around me. I felt the incident as something familiar to me,” he said.
“But for the future, it will be an issue.”
Buried Nazi past haunts Athens on liberation anniversary
By AFP October 12, 2024 Traditionally attired women carry a Greek flag on Acropolis hill during the liberation commemoration
- Copyright AFP Philip FONG
Hélène COLLIOPOULOU
A brass sculpture of a naked man being garrotted, a monument evoking prison bars and a sign are the only hints this sleepy central Athens street once housed the Gestapo’s headquarters.
As Athens marks 80 years since its liberation from Nazi Germany in World War II this weekend, historians lament that this modest memorial is typical of the lack of attention paid to one of the most horrific periods in Greece’s history.
In the basement below where a cosmetics store stands today, Adolf Hitler’s secret police would beat, maim and torment their opponents, with thousands of resistance members arrested, tortured and killed during the Nazi occupation of 1941-44.
“In another European country this place would be a museum,” Menelaos Charalampidis, a historian of the time told AFP by telephone.
Across Greece, 250,000 people died as a result of famine during the Nazi occupation, including some 45,000 in Athens and Piraeus, the capital’s major port nearby.
More than 86 percent of Greece’s Jews were deported to be exterminated in the Holocaust.
To bring this dark chapter of the capital’s history to light, Charalampidis launched Athens History Walks, an initiative preserving locations where the Nazi occupation left its mark.
“Places of remembrance of this difficult period in Athens are not highlighted enough, and for some major events there are not even any monuments,” he said.
For example, there is no monument to the famine’s many victims, the historian noted — an omission which may have to do with what happened after Greece was freed.
– A ‘traumatised society’ –
Greece annually commemorates October 28, 1940, when its strongman leader Ioannis Metaxas refused Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini’s ultimatum to surrender or face invasion.
Yet scant attention is paid to October 12, 1944, when Greece’s foremost resistance group ELAS marched through Syntagma Square in central Athens to the applause of hundreds of thousands of people.
That historic moment marking Greece’s freedom from the Nazi yoke was soon overshadowed by violence and clashes between the communist ELAS and British-backed royalist government for control of the country.
The ensuing 1946-1949 civil war saw the communists defeated and led to decades of political turmoil.
“The civil war in Greece, as in Spain, deeply traumatised society, making it impossible to deal with certain events of the past and move forward as a society,” said historian Tasoula Vervenioti.
“If we don’t deal with our past, we run the risk of losing our places of remembrance,” she warned.
This year, the Athens city council urged the public to take part in a series of conferences and exhibitions to “honour those who fought for democracy and freedom”.
“We are keeping memories alive so that younger people can learn and determine their future with strength and vigour,” the city’s socialist Mayor Haris Doukas said in a statement.
– ‘Loss of memory’ –
Charalampidis argued that because the Greek resistance effort was mainly by the left, successive conservative governments that followed the civil war had little interest in celebrating it.
It was not until 1982, after the country’s first socialist government came to power following decades of conservative rule, that the main left-wing portion of Greece’s ‘national resistance’ was officially recognised by parliament.
Taboos over the authorities’ actions during the civil war have also stifled historical research into the era.
In 2017, the left-wing government of Alexis Tsipras created a special Directorate for the History of the Greek Police to investigate, among other issues, collaboration with the Nazis.
But some files have still not been integrated into the Greek national archives, meaning that regular access is not guaranteed, experts say.
“We have a major problem in Greece concerning the upkeep of archives and our historical culture,” Charalampidis said.
“Governments are not interested in it and so there is a loss of memory despite our important history.”
The Anti-Money Laundering Megaminds Report finds that 70 percent of experts warn the fight against money laundering is failing. This comes from the anti-money laundering (AML) automation company Strise.
Is the fight against money laundering failing? Most AML professionals agree that current measures are inefficient, citing outdated legacy systems, fragmented data, and overwhelming false positives as major obstacles. One expert emphasised that “relying on outdated technology is like bringing a knife to a gunfight” calling for urgent modernisation of AML infrastructure.
By synthesising over 60 hours of in-depth conversations from The Laundry podcast, one of the industry’s leading podcasts on money laundering, the report details the output from artificial intelligence systems used to identify critical trends shaping the future of AML and financial crime prevention.
What are the top threats in financial crime?
Experts warn of rising threats, including cyber-enabled financial crimes, sophisticated sanctions evasion techniques using decentralised finance (DeFi), and the expansion of professional money laundering networks. Emerging technologies are making financial crimes more complex and harder to detect.
Emerging technologies
The report provides insights on the effectiveness of sanctions, the inefficiency of current AML systems, and the transformative potential of emerging technologies like AI and machine learning.
Pioneering the use of AI in financial crime intelligence
The AML Megaminds Report is an authoritative, data-backed resource that is both forward-thinking and practical, according to Marit Rødevand, CEO & co-founder of Strise and The Laundry host. Rødevand adds: “This report is a game-changer. By using AI to weave together the experiences and insights of over 80+ financial crime professionals, we’re offering a uniquely holistic view of the industry’s most critical challenges and opportunities. It’s an invaluable tool for anyone involved in financial crime prevention, and we’re proud to be at the forefront of this innovation.”
Is the industry suffering from sanctions fatigue?
While sanctions remain a vital tool, 40 percent of experts believe they are not fully effective. Many questioned their long-term impact and pointed to issues such as “sanctions fatigue” and the potential for driving illicit activities further underground. Others, however, highlighted success stories such as the freezing of Russian oligarchs’ assets, showcasing the importance of better-targeted sanctions and stronger enforcement.
Companies must also invest in the best available systems. Here regulatory pressure is the primary driver for making financial crime prevention a priority at the senior management level. The threat of significant fines and reputational damage compels boards to focus on compliance and crime prevention initiatives.
What are the main solutions for tackling financial crime?
Reframing financial crime as a public health issue could allow governments to allocate resources similarly to how they handle pandemics, with emergency powers to freeze assets, force cooperation from private entities, and impose mandatory reporting for suspicious activities. Other solutions include mandating the use of AI for all financial institutions, traditional banking secrecy laws, or creating public beneficial ownership registries with blockchain verification.
Rødevandcontinues: “Financial crime impacts every facet of society, and we can no longer afford to operate in silos. This report is not only a synthesis of expert opinion but a catalyst for change. We can’t keep doing the same things and expect different results. The inefficiency identified by the majority of experts signals that it’s time for a paradigm shift in how we approach AML efforts.”
TD Bank to pay more than $3 bn to US in money-laundering case
TD Bank has agreed to pay $3 billion in penalties for failing to adequately monitor money laundering by drug cartels, US officials say - Copyright GETTY IMAGES/AFP SPENCER PLATT
Canada’s TD Bank has agreed to pay more than $3 billion in penalties for failing to adequately monitor money laundering by drug cartels, US officials said Thursday.
TD Bank, the 10th largest bank in the United States, has pleaded guilty to multiple felonies including violating the Bank Secrecy Act and conspiracy to commit money laundering, Attorney General Merrick Garland said.
“TD Bank created an environment that allowed financial crime to flourish by making its services convenient for criminals,” Garland said at a press conference.
“Our anti-money laundering laws dictate that a bank that willfully fails to protect against criminal schemes is also a criminal,” Garland said. “That is what TD Bank was.”
Garland said that between January 2014 and October 2023, TD Bank failed to monitor $18.3 trillion in customer activity, allowing three money laundering networks to transfer over $670 million through TD Bank accounts.
Under the settlement, TD Bank will pay $1.8 billion to the Justice Department and another $1.3 billion assessed by the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).
Criminal investigations into individual employees at TD Bank were “active and ongoing,” Garland said.
Internet Archive reels from ‘catastrophic’ cyberattack, data breach
A massive cyberattack and data breach hits the Internet Archive - Copyright AFP Stefani REYNOLDS Anuj CHOPRA
The Internet Archive, an online repository of web pages, was offline Thursday after its founder confirmed a major cyberattack that exposed the data of millions of users and left the site defaced.
The assault on the San Francisco-based nonprofit, claimed by a shadowy group that experts described as a pro-Palestinian “hacktivist,” lays bare the perils of cybersecurity breaches ahead of the November 5 US presidential election.
Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive’s founder and digital librarian, acknowledged a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks — aimed at disrupting a website or server — since Tuesday and said the organization was working to upgrade security.
The assault led to the “defacement of our website” and a breach of usernames, emails and passwords, Kahle wrote on X, formerly Twitter, late Wednesday.
In a new post early Thursday, Kahle said the attackers had returned, knocking down both the Internet Archive’s main site and its “Open Library,” an open source catalogue of digitized books.
The Internet Archive’s data “has not been corrupted,” he wrote in a subsequent post.
“We are working to restore services as quickly and safely as possible,” he added.
On Wednesday, users reported a pop-up message claiming the site had been hacked and the data of 31 million accounts breached.
“Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and is constantly on the verge of suffering a catastrophic security breach?” said the pop-up, apparently posted by the hackers.
“It just happened. See 31 million of you on HIBP!”
HIBP refers to site called “Have I been Pwned,” a site that allows users to check whether their emails and passwords have been leaked in data breaches.
In another post on X, HIBP confirmed that 31 million records from the Internet Archive had been stolen, including email addresses, screen names and passwords.
– ‘Rising’ threat –
Kahle did not respond to a request for comment about the scale of the data breach.
A hacker group called “SN_BLACKMETA” claimed responsibility for the attack on X.
“The Internet Archive has and is suffering from a devastating attack,” the group wrote on the platform Wednesday.
“They are under attack because the archive belongs to the USA, and as we all know, this horrendous and hypocritical government supports the genocide that is being carried out by the terrorist state of ‘Israel.'”
In a threat advisory in July, Radware, a cybersecurity solutions provider, described the group as a “pro-Palestinian hacktivist with potential ties to Sudan” and possibly operating from Russia.
Radware called the group a “rising cyber threat” with a “strong ideological stance and a strategic approach to cyber warfare.”
The Internet Archive, a nonprofit that is not known to have any ties to the US government or Israel, was founded in 1996 and advocates for a free and open internet.
It operates a web archive called the Wayback Machine, which has captured snapshots of millions of internet pages.
Like other archival sites, the Wayback Machine is a crucial resource for fact-checkers, who use it to trace deleted web pages and ensure that the evidence cited in articles is permanently available to readers.
It can also be used to document changes made to online content over time and helps researchers and scholars find historical collections that exist in digital formats
‘Sleeper agent’ bots on X fuel US election misinformation, study says
By AFP October 10, 2024 Researchers analyzed accounts that shared posts favoring Republican candidate Donald Trump, while targeting Democratic nominee Kamala Harris
- Copyright AFP Mauro PIMENTEL
Anuj CHOPRA
Hundreds of apparent pro-Russian bot accounts on X are pushing US election misinformation and amplifying false narratives about Democratic contender Kamala Harris, a research group said Thursday, calling them “sleeper agents” for having evaded detection for years.
The findings by the Washington-based American Sunlight Project (ASP) demonstrate how bot-like activity plagues X, previously called Twitter, despite pledges by billionaire owner Elon Musk to crack down on the digital manipulation.
ASP analyzed nearly 1,200 accounts, a long-standing network that generated more than 100 million posts as of July, including pro-Kremlin propaganda, content favoring Republican nominee Donald Trump, and misinformation about Harris’s campaign.
The accounts, some of which have escaped detection and moderation on the site for as long as 15 years, retweeted such content within seconds of its posting, indicating bot activity, the group said in a report shared with AFP ahead of its public release.
“We were not surprised to find another pro-Russian bot network, but we were shocked to learn that some of the accounts in the sleeper agent network have been active for more than a decade,” Nina Jankowicz, the group’s co-founder and chief executive, told AFP.
Jankowicz, the former Department of Homeland Security disinformation chief, called on X to take down the network, which has seen an uptick in “abusive and false content” targeting Harris.
One account created in 2020 promoted the falsehood that Harris had admitted that she will be a “puppet” of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky if elected president.
It also touted the unfounded claim that the White House was pushing for regime change in Lebanon, taking advantage of Israel’s recent attacks on the militant group Hezbollah.
– Data restrictions –
Another account created in 2011 shared a post by Musk — who has endorsed Trump and courted criticism for amplifying political falsehoods through his influential personal account — that pushed the debunked narrative that migrants were being imported into the United States to manipulate the November 5 election.
Hundreds of accounts in the network are not attributable to real social media users, with some creating fake personas using images from stock photo websites such as Shutterstock, ASP said.
To disguise their objectives and more easily “inject themselves into larger X/Twitter conversations,” some accounts regularly shared content about subjects such as sports and cryptocurrency, the report said.
It was not possible to determine the precise entity behind the pro-Russian accounts.
With data restrictions imposed by X since Musk purchased the company in 2022 for $44 billion, it was also difficult to assess their exact reach.
Researchers are now required to pay a hefty fee for access to its API, which allows third-party developers to gather the social platform’s data.
“If researchers had data access restored, more of such activity would likely be visible,” the ASP report said.
– ‘Platform manipulation’ –
Bots and other automated accounts, researchers say, are a cornerstone of the Kremlin’s efforts to spread misinformation, in some cases supplanting state media accounts which have been restricted across several countries since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
X did not reply to AFP’s request for comment.
Ahead of his purchase of the platform, Musk pledged to “defeat the spam bots or die trying.”
But bot activity remains entrenched on the platform, a report from Australia’s Queensland University of Technology said last year, after an analysis of about one million posts.
The platform has gutted trust and safety teams and scaled back content moderation efforts, making it what researchers call a hotbed for misinformation.
“Despite the fact that Musk has an avowed goal of ridding his platform of bots, we’ve found that they persist on X, even coming from networks that are likely state-affiliated,” said Jankowicz.
“This is behavior that is fairly easy to identify, and yet this multi-billion dollar corporation has not cracked down on these accounts that violate its platform manipulation and spam policies.”
X says ‘alert’ to manipulation efforts after pro-Russia bots report
By AFP October 11, 2024 Disinformation researchers say bot-like activity plagues X
- Copyright AFP/File Alain JOCARD
X was “alert” to any platform manipulation attempts, the Elon Musk-owned site told AFP Friday, following a report that hundreds of apparent pro-Russian bot accounts were amplifying US election misinformation.
In a study shared exclusively with AFP earlier this week, the Washington-based American Sunlight Project (ASP) said it found nearly 1,200 accounts on X that pushed pro-Kremlin propaganda, content favoring Republican nominee Donald Trump, and misinformation about Democratic contender Kamala Harris.
ASP called them “sleeper agents” as some of the accounts had escaped detection and moderation on the site –- previously known as Twitter — for as long as 15 years and retweeted content within seconds of its posting, indicating bot activity.
“Our safety team remains alert to any attempt to manipulate the platform by bad actors and networks,” an X spokesman said in a statement.
“We have a robust policy in place to prevent platform spam and manipulation, and we routinely take down accounts engaged in this type of behavior.”
Without directly addressing ASP’s findings, the spokesman added that in the first half of 2024, the platform had suspended more than 460 million accounts under its manipulation and spam policy.
Nina Jankowicz, ASP’s co-founder and chief executive who is the former Department of Homeland Security disinformation chief, has called on X to take down the pro-Russian network that was pushing out “abusive and false content” targeting Harris.
Musk — who has endorsed Trump ahead of the November 5 presidential election –- has also courted criticism for amplifying political falsehoods through his influential personal account on X, which has over 200 million followers.
Among the accounts analyzed by ASP was one created in 2020 that promoted the falsehood that Harris had admitted she will be a “puppet” of Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky if elected president.
It also touted the unfounded claim that the White House was pushing for regime change in Lebanon, taking advantage of Israel’s recent attacks on the militant group Hezbollah.
Ahead of his purchase of the platform in 2022 for $44 billion, Musk pledged to “defeat the spam bots or die trying.”
But apparent bot activity remains entrenched on the platform, according to several disinformation researchers, including a report last year from Australia’s Queensland University of Technology that analyzed about one million posts.
From Tesla to Trump: Behind Musk’s giant leap into politics
By AFP October 11, 2024 Tesla CEO Elon Musk jumps on stage as he joins former US president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump during a campaign rally - Copyright AFP TIMOTHY A. CLARY Alex PIGMAN
With his no-holds-barred embrace of Donald Trump, Elon Musk is not only backing the former president’s bid to return to the White House but also signaling his own ambition to command the world stage on his terms.
At a recent Trump rally in Pennsylvania, the world’s richest man bounded onto stage with pogo-like energy, sparking a torrent of memes on social media and driving engagement on X, the platform he owns.
The following day, Musk leaned into his provocative persona during an interview with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, laughing that Vice President Kamala Harris had not faced assassination attempts and expressing concern about his own future.
“If (Trump) loses, I’m fucked,” Musk quipped, still chuckling.
Musk is “all-in” for the former president as the US election enters its final stretch.
He’s poured tens of millions of dollars into the campaign and is positioned for a key role in a second Trump administration, where the former president has said he will be tasked with ripping up government bureaucracy and firing civil servants.
Observers point to various factors behind Musk’s hard turn to the right.
Some highlight his upbringing in apartheid-era South Africa, suggesting it influences his views on immigration and demographic change.
Musk frequently argues, without evidence, that an influx of undocumented immigrants threatens US democracy, echoing the “Great Replacement” theory prevalent among many whites in his childhood South Africa.
“The white South African nightmare in the 1980s, hanging over everything, was that one day Black people would rise up and massacre whites,” wrote essayist Simon Kuper in the Financial Times.
More recent personal experiences also appear to have shaped Musk’s politics.
In 2022, his daughter Vivian, then aged 18, legally changed her name and gender.
Musk later claimed his child was “killed” by the “woke mind virus” instilled at an elite California school, marking a significant hardening of his political stance.
Musk’s business interests may also help explain his allegiance to Trump.
His companies operate in highly regulated industries and have frequently clashed with authorities.
Tech analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group suggests that in a Trump White House, Musk might even “be in charge of his own oversight, giving him the potential power to do anything he wanted.”
– X at your service? –
The billionaire’s influence extends beyond his wealth.
Musk uses his X account, with more than 200 million followers, to amplify misinformation and controversial narratives that align with Trump’s campaign messaging.
The platform’s light-touch content moderation allows Trump-backed distortions and lies to thrive that might be restricted on other social media sites.
“It’s very different to have a figure like Musk who owns a social media platform, versus him just being out there as his own individual,” said Sophie Bjork-James, assistant professor of anthropology at Vanderbilt University.
“Musk is helping to mainstream these racist conspiracy theories and bring in mainly white men who may either be disengaged or former political liberals.”
In a recent get-out-the-vote initiative, Musk’s America super PAC, a political action committee, promised to pay $47 to anyone who gets a registered swing-state voter to sign a petition supporting free speech and the right to bear arms.
“Easy money,” Musk posted about the potentially multi-million-dollar effort.
– ‘King of the world’ –
Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, summarized Musk’s political toolkit: “Musk’s influence is money, his super PAC and X. He’s not shy about using all three to push Trump — and even push misrepresentations and falsehoods that help Trump.”
For supporters, Musk’s political involvement is an extension of his successful track record with companies like SpaceX, which now plays a central role in the US space program.
“In almost every case, Musk’s innovations paralleled things the government was trying to do, but he did it better,” Youngstown State University political science professor Paul Sracic told the Washington Examiner.
But Musk’s political stance is affecting public perception of his businesses.
Mark Hass, an Arizona State University professor who has advised major corporations, noted that driving a Tesla is no longer “the first choice if you want to demonstrate your environmental bona fides, because of his association with Trump.”
As the 2024 election approaches, Musk’s political evolution represents a new force in American politics: a tech titan with vast wealth, media influence and authoritarian leanings, Hass added.
His actions in the coming weeks could significantly affect both the election outcome and the future landscape of politics.
Musk could become a “king of the world,” said Hass.
Internal TikTok documents show prioritization of traffic over well-being
TikTok faces a ban in the United States if it continues to be owned by China-based ByteDance - Copyright AFP/File Alain JOCARD
TikTok teams identified harmful effects of its platform on young users but limited preventive measures so as to avoid a drop in traffic, according to internal documents revealed Friday by a US public radio station.
The documents, mentioned in a subpoena issued by the Kentucky attorney general, are part of a lawsuit filed by 13 states and Washington D.C., accusing TikTok of harming young users’ mental health.
The papers reveal TikTok’s awareness of its platform’s appeal and its recommendation algorithm, which offers a seemingly endless chain of short videos.
One unnamed TikTok executive noted the need to be “cognizant” of the app’s impact on “sleep, and eating, and moving around the room, and looking at someone in the eyes.”
Kentucky Public Radio reconstructed the internal communications before a state judge ordered the documents removed from the public record.
The lawsuit claims TikTok’s research found that after viewing 260 videos, a user likely became addicted to the platform.
The company’s studies also correlated “compulsive usage” with negative mental health effects, including “loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety.”
While TikTok has implemented features to limit young users’ screen time, including parental controls and a one-hour timeout, the documents suggest ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, did not seek to improve these tools despite knowing their limited effectiveness.
A TikTok project manager wrote, “Our goal is not to reduce the time spent” on the platform.
In response, TikTok called the publication of sealed court information “highly irresponsible.”
“Unfortunately, this complaint cherry-picks misleading quotes and takes outdated documents out of context to misrepresent our commitment to community safety,” it said.
The state lawsuits come as the popular video-snippet sharing app faces a ban in the United States if it remains owned by China-based ByteDance.
The US government alleges that TikTok allows Beijing to collect data and spy on users. It also says TikTok is a conduit to spread propaganda. China and the company strongly deny these claims.
Supercharged hurricanes trigger ‘perfect storm’ for disinformation
False accusations of the US government waging 'weather warfare' spread in the run-up to Hurricane Milton slamming into Florida, fueling a spate of tornadoes
- Copyright AFP/File CHANDAN KHANNA
Manon JACOB
Monster hurricanes slamming the United States in recent weeks have triggered a torrent of misinformation, with politicians and social media users reviving conspiracy theories about weather manipulation ahead of the November 5 presidential election.
False accusations of the government waging “weather warfare” spread online with social media posts claiming the storms were “deliberately deployed against red states” likely to vote for Republican Donald Trump.
“We are in a geoengineering ‘meltdown’ perpetrated by Globalists who want to ‘control’ the whole of humanity,” said one post on X.
Rumors also focused on the Alaska-based High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), which was formerly run by the US military, and cloud seeding, despite a lack of evidence linking the technologies to the formation of large storms.
The wave of falsehoods emerged after Helene became the deadliest hurricane to hit the US mainland since 2005’s Katrina, and Milton quickly followed, making landfall in Florida on October 9.
Both storms ravaged entire neighborhoods, forcing widespread evacuations and causing massive power outages.
Ethan Porter, a professor and researcher at The George Washington University Misinformation/Disinformation Lab, said some people are using misinformation “as a convenient way to express their political beliefs.”
He said the focus is less on the details, but rather the underlying message — “that neither science nor government should be trusted, that climate change isn’t real, and that somehow, Democrats are responsible for the unfolding catastrophe.”
Pro-Trump Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene has repeatedly told her followers that the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration authorizes programs that “control the weather.”
Methods such as cloud seeding can help increase rain and snow in localized areas, but they cannot create storms like Helene.
Experts told AFP it is concerning that politicians are engaging with such narratives.
“This is coming at a time of real political tension,” said Callum Hood, head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate.
“The social media landscape is a friendlier place for hate and disinformation than it has been in a long time, particularly on X.”
University of Miami professor Joseph Uscinski, who researches why people believe in conspiracy theories, agreed: “We have members of Congress who are pushing ideas that this is real, when, in fact, it’s not.”
– ‘Scary world’ –
The situation highlighted the sharp divide over climate change, as scientists warned that supercharged storms were the result of warmer ocean temperatures.
Storms, also amplified by warmer air, show a potential to impact inland areas as well as coastal regions that have historically been in the path of destruction.
“Hurricane Helene showed us that it is not (only) the coast we have to worry about. A hurricane with a lot of moisture passing through a mountainous area — such as Asheville — is a bad combination,” Jayantha Obeysekera, director of the Sea Level Solutions Center at Florida International University, told AFP.
Nature Conservancy chief scientist Katharine Hayhoe said weather control narratives help defer the responsibility of curbing emissions.
She worries such logic brings a false sense of security and comfort for people trying “to make sense of what is rapidly becoming a very scary world.”
These conditions create “a ‘perfect storm'” for disinformation, Hayhoe said, highlighting how disbelief can further delay action on the ground or prevent proper resilience and mitigation plans against a warming climate.
“It moves us in exactly the opposite direction from where we need to be going,” she said.
Kessler Foundation 2024 Survey highlights key strategies for hiring and supporting workers with disabilities in the hospitality industry
Supervisors share impressions related to recruiting, hiring, and providing workplace accommodations and effectiveness of those methods
Kessler Foundation
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Several key takeaways from the survey were outlined by industry experts (from left) Andrew Houtenville, PhD, Professor of Economics and Research Director, UNH-IOD and Kessler Foundation’s John O’Neill, PhD, Director, Center for Employment and Disability Research and Elaine E. Katz, MS, CCC-SLP, Senior VP, Center for Grants and Communications.
East Hanover, NJ – October 11, 2024 – A new Kessler Foundation survey of supervisors in the hospitality industry – focused on restaurant and traveler accommodations – has revealed critical insights into the recruitment, support, and accommodation of workers with disabilities. The findings, released today in a special live Zoom webinar, offer actionable takeaways for employers looking to diversify their workforce and enhance workplace inclusion. Key points revealed that proactive recruitment, effective partnerships, and targeted accommodations are critical to fostering a diverse and inclusive workforce.
Several key takeaways from the survey were outlined by industry experts Andrew Houtenville, PhD, Professor of Economics and Research Director, UNH-IOD and Kessler Foundation’s John O’Neill, PhD, Director, Center for Employment and Disability Research and Elaine E. Katz, MS, CCC-SLP, Senior VP, Center for Grants and Communications.
"Proactively recruiting workers with disabilities leads to greater job success, with 50% of successfully performing employees having been recruited through intentional efforts," said Dr. Houtenville, adding, "Partnering with disability organizations and state vocational rehabilitation agencies is an effective hiring strategy, with 84% of companies finding these partnerships successful in filling positions."
The speakers noted that providing workplace accommodations is a key factor in helping employees with disabilities perform effectively in their jobs. "Workplace accommodations, such as flexible schedules and assistive devices, play a critical role in the success of employees with disabilities, and most can be provided with little to no cost,” explained Dr. O’Neill.
"Flexible work schedules are the most commonly offered accommodation, with 91% of companies making them available automatically or upon request for all employees," agreed Dr. Houtenville. Barriers to providing workplace accommodations included perceptions of the high cost of accommodations, coworker attitudes, and complicated or no processes in place to request accommodations. These answers suggest the need for improved training on how to provide low-cost accommodations in the workplace. “In fact, most workplace accommodations can be provided without any direct expense, and those that do involve a cost typically incur a one-time median expense of $300, according to the Office of Disability Employment Policy,” he added. Training supervisors on accessible hiring and accommodation processes is essential, agreed Katz, “Yet only 52% of supervisors feel very confident in their understanding of how to provide accommodations."
In final remarks, Katz asserted, “As the hospitality industry continues to grow and faces a shortage of workers, understanding how to effectively integrate people with disabilities into the talent pool is essential for building an inclusive and diverse workforce.”
About the Institute on Disability at the University of New Hampshire The Institute on Disability (IOD) at the University of New Hampshire (UNH) was established in 1987 to provide a university-based focus for the improvement of knowledge, policies, and practices related to the lives of persons with disabilities and their families. For information on the NIDILRR-funded Research and Training Center on Disability Statistics, visit ResearchOnDisability.org.
About Kessler Foundation Kessler Foundation, a major nonprofit organization in the field of disability, is a global leader in rehabilitation research. Our scientists seek to improve cognition, mobility, and long-term outcomes, including employment, for adults and children with neurological and developmental disabilities of the brain and spinal cord including traumatic brain injury, spinal cord injury, stroke, multiple sclerosis, and autism. Kessler Foundation also leads the nation in funding innovative programs that expand opportunities for employment for people with disabilities. For more information, visit KesslerFoundation.org.
