CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M;R&D

Elizabeth Holmes will start 11-year prison sentence on May 30 after losing her bid to remain free

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE

AP

yesterday

Elizabeth Holmes to start prison term May 30
A federal judge is allowing disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes to surrender for her prison term on May 30, after the Memorial Day weekend. Holmes was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison for defrauding investors in a blood-testing scam. (May 17)

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes will remain free through the Memorial Day weekend before surrendering to authorities on May 30 to begin her more than 11-year prison sentence for defrauding investors in a blood-testing scam.

U.S. District Judge Edward Davila set Holmes’ revised prison-reporting date after her lawyers proposed it in a Wednesday filing. It came after a federal appeals court late Tuesday rejected Holmes’ bid to remain out of prison while she attempts to overturn her January 2022 conviction on four felony counts of fraud and conspiracy.

The punishment also includes a $452 million restitution bill that Davila ordered Holmes to pay in a separate ruling issued late Tuesday.

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 Elizabeth Holmes loses latest bid to avoid prison and gets hit with $452 million restitution bill

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Holmes’ lawyers asked Davila to approve the May 30 prison reporting time to her two weeks to sort out several issues, including child care for her 1-year-old son William and 3-month-old daughter Invicta. Holmes had originally been ordered to begin her prison sentence on April 27, but won a reprieve with a last-minute legal maneuver that gave her more time with her children.

Holmes, 39, became pregnant with William shortly before the start of her high-profile trial in September 2021 and became pregnant with Invicta shortly after she was convicted of crimes that could have resulted in a prison sentence of up to 20 years.

The father of both children is William “Billy” Evans, whom she met after breaking up with her former romantic and business partner, Ramesh “Sunny,” Balwani, who began serving a nearly 13-year prison sentence last month in Southern California. Balwani, 57, was convicted for 12 felony counts of fraud and conspiracy committed while he was Theranos’ chief operating officer and living with Holmes.

In Wednesday’s filing, Holmes’ lawyers didn’t disclose the location of the prison that she has been assigned to serve her sentence. But they noted she has to prepare to travel outside of California, where she has been living in the San Diego area while free on bail. Davila has recommended that Holmes be imprisoned in Bryan, Texas.

When Holmes is finally incarcerated, it will bring down the curtain on a saga that cast a bright light on a dark chapter in Silicon Valley that brought her fame and fortune before her scandalous downfall.

After dropping out of Stanford University in 2003 to found Theranos while still a teenager, Holmes promised to revolutionize healthcare with a technology that she promised would be able to scan for hundreds of diseases and other potential problems with just a few drops of blood. The idea helped her raising nearly $1 billion from sophisticated investors that included Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who is owed $125 million under the restitution order.

But Theranos’ blood tests never came close to working the way Holmes had boasted with the support of Balwani, resulting in the company’s collapse and a tale that has been the subject of a book, “Bad Blood,” an HBO documentary, “The Inventor,” and a Hulu mini-series, ”The Dropout,” which won Amanda Seyfried an Emmy in the starring role.

Crypto rules get final approval to make Europe a global leader on regulation

AP
yesterday

An advertisement for Bitcoin cryptocurrency is displayed on a street in Hong Kong, on Feb. 17, 2022. The European Union's sweeping set of beefed-up cryptocurrency rules got final approval from member states on Tuesday, giving the bloc a global lead in regulating the freewheeling sector. The European Council adopted the package of rules, known as Markets in Crypto Assets, or MiCA, in the final step in the 27-nation bloc's legislative process. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung, File)

LONDON (AP) — The European Union’s sweeping set of beefed-up cryptocurrency rules got final approval from member states Tuesday, giving the 27-nation bloc a global lead in regulating the freewheeling sector.

The European Council adopted the package of rules — known as Markets in Crypto Assets, or MiCA — in the final step of the bloc’s legislative process. European Parliament lawmakers endorsed the rules in April, and they’re expected to start taking effect in phases starting in July 2024.

The tighter European scrutiny follows a spate of high profile crypto scandals including the collapse of trading firm FTX and the implosion of the TerraUSD stablecoin.

The rules are aimed at improving transparency and combating money laundering and will cover stablecoins — which are usually tied to a hard currency or a commodity like gold that make them less volatile than normal cryptocurrencies.

Other digital tokens as well as bitcoin-related services such as trading platforms and digital wallets are also subject to the rules, but not bitcoin itself.

“Recent events have confirmed the urgent need for imposing rules which will better protect Europeans who have invested in these assets, and prevent the misuse of crypto industry for the purposes of money laundering and financing of terrorism,” said Swedish Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson, whose country holds the rotating presidency of the European Council.

Under MiCA, which has been in the works since 2020, crypto companies will need approval to operate in the EU and be held liable if they lose investors’ assets. Authorities will compile a public list of “noncompliant” companies.

The rules, aimed at maintaining financial stability, include provisions to combat market manipulation and insider dealing. Companies issuing or trading crypto assets will have to disclose information on the risks, costs and charges that consumers face.

Major crypto companies will have to reveal how much energy they use. The massive amount of energy used in bitcoin mining to create new coins has stoked concern about crypto’s carbon footbprint.

The U.S. has made little progress in stepping up oversight of cryptocurrencies and digital assets, while the U.K. is considering feedback on proposed crypto regulations that it outlined last year.

Some European countries, like Germany, already have basic crypto regulations.

YouTube’s recommendations send violent and graphic gun videos to 9-year-olds, study finds

By DAVID KLEPPER

AP

yesterday

 The YouTube app is displayed on an iPad in Baltimore on March 20, 2018. YouTube is great at sending users videos that it thinks they'll like based on their interests. But new research shows the site's powerful algorithms can also flood young users with violent and disturbing content. The non-profit Tech Transparency Project created YouTube accounts mimicking the behavior of young boys with an interest in first-person shooter games. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — When researchers at a nonprofit that studies social media wanted to understand the connection between YouTube videos and gun violence, they set up accounts on the platform that mimicked the behavior of typical boys living in the U.S.

They simulated two nine-year-olds who both liked video games. The accounts were identical, except that one clicked on the videos recommended by YouTube, and the other ignored the platform’s suggestions.

The account that clicked on YouTube’s suggestions was soon flooded with graphic videos about school shootings, tactical gun training videos and how-to instructions on making firearms fully automatic. One video featured an elementary school-age girl wielding a handgun; another showed a shooter using a .50 caliber gun to fire on a dummy head filled with lifelike blood and brains. Many of the videos violate YouTube’s own policies against violent or gory content.

The findings show that despite YouTube’s rules and content moderation efforts, the platform is failing to stop the spread of frightening videos that could traumatize vulnerable children — or send them down dark roads of extremism and violence.

“Video games are one of the most popular activities for kids. You can play a game like ”Call of Duty” without ending up at a gun shop — but YouTube is taking them there,” said Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project, the research group that published its findings about YouTube on Tuesday. “It’s not the video games, it’s not the kids. It’s the algorithms.”

The accounts that followed YouTube’s suggested videos received 382 different firearms-related videos in a single month, or about 12 per day. The accounts that ignored YouTube’s recommendations still received some gun-related videos, but only 34 in total.

The researchers also created accounts mimicking 14-year-old boys; those accounts also received similar levels of gun- and violence-related content.

One of the videos recommended for the accounts was titled “How a Switch Works on a Glock (Educational Purposes Only).” YouTube later removed the video after determining it violated its rules; an almost identical video popped up two weeks later with a slightly altered name; that video remains available.

A spokeswoman for YouTube defended the platform’s protections for children and noted that it requires users under 17 to get their parent’s permission before using their site; accounts for users younger than 13 are linked to the parental account. “We offer a number of options for younger viewers,” the company wrote in emailed statement. ”... Which are designed to create a safer experience for tweens and teens.”

Along with TikTok, the video sharing platform is one of the most popular sites for children and teens. Both sites have been criticized in the past for hosting, and in some cases promoting, videos that encourage gun violence, eating disorders and self-harm. Critics of social media have also pointed to the links between social media, radicalization and real-world violence.

The perpetrators behind many recent mass shootings have usedsocial media and video streaming platforms to glorify violence or even livestream their attacks. In posts on YouTube, the shooter behind the attack on a 2018 attack on a school in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 wrote “I wanna kill people,” “I’m going to be a professional school shooter” and “I have no problem shooting a girl in the chest.”

The neo-Nazi gunman who killed eight people earlier this month at a Dallas-area shopping center also had a YouTube account that included videos about assembling rifles, the serial killed Jeffrey Dahmer and a clip from a school shooting scene in a television show.

In some cases, YouTube has already removed some of the videos identified by researchers at the Tech Transparency Project, but in other instances the content remains available. Many big tech companies rely on automated systems to flag and remove content that violates their rules, but Paul said the findings from the Project’s report show that greater investments in content moderation are needed.

In the absence of federal regulation, social media companies must do more to enforce their own rules, said Justin Wagner, director of investigations at Everytown for Gun Safety, a leading gun control advocacy organization. Wagner’s group also said the Tech Transparency Project’s report shows the need for tighter age restrictions on firearms-related content.

“Children who aren’t old enough to buy a gun shouldn’t be able to turn to YouTube to learn how to build a firearm, modify it to make it deadlier, or commit atrocities,” Wagner said in response to the Tech Transparency Project’s report.

Similar concerns have been raised about TikTok after earlier reports showed the platform was recommending harmful content to teens.

TikTok has defended its site and its policies, which prohibit users younger than 13. Its rules also prohibit videos that encourage harmful behavior; users who search for content about topics including eating disorders automatically receive a prompt offering mental health resources.

Child social media stars have few protections. Illinois aims to fix that

By CLAIRE SAVAGE

Shreya Nallamothu looks at her phone in Bloomington, Ill., on Tuesday, May 9, 2023. Illinois lawmakers aim to make their state what they say will be the first in the country to create protections for child social media influencers. Nallamothu, 15, raised her concerns to Illinois state Sen. David Koehler of Peoria, who then set the legislation in motion. 

(AP Photo/Claire Savage)

CHICAGO (AP) — Holed up at home during the pandemic lockdown three years ago, 13-year-old Shreya Nallamothu was scrolling through social media when she noticed a pattern: Children even younger than her were the stars — dancing, cracking one-liners and being generally adorable.

“It seemed innocuous to me at first,” Nallamothu said.

But as she watched more and more posts of kids pushing products or their mishaps going viral, she started to wonder: Who is looking out for them?

“I realized that there’s a lot of exploitation that can happen within the world of ‘kidfluencing,’” said Nallamothu, referring to the monetization of social media content featuring children. “And I realized that there was absolutely zero legislation in place to protect them.”

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Illinois lawmakers aim to change that by making their state what they say will be the first in the country to create protections for child social media influencers. Nallamothu, now 15, raised her concerns to Illinois state Sen. David Koehler of Peoria, who then set the legislation in motion.

The Illinois bill would entitle child influencers under the age of 16 to a percentage of earnings based on how often they appear on video blogs or online content that generates at least 10 cents per view. To qualify, the content must be created in Illinois, and kids would have to be featured in at least 30% of the content in a 30-day-period.

Video bloggers — or vloggers — would be responsible for maintaining records of kids’ appearances and must set aside gross earnings for the child in a trust account for when they turn 18, otherwise the child can sue.

The bill passed the state Senate unanimously in March, and is scheduled to be considered by the House this week. If it wins approval, the bill will go back to the Senate for a final vote before it makes its way to Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who said he intends to sign it in the coming months.

Family-style vlogs can feature children as early as birth and recount milestones and family events — the wholesome clips that Nallamothu had been initially scrolling through.

But experts say the commercialized “ sharenthood ” industry, which can earn content creators tens of thousands of dollars per brand deal, is underregulated and can even cause harm.

“As we see influencers and content creators becoming more and more of a viable career path for young people, we have to remember that this is a place where the law has not caught up to practice,” said Jessica Maddox, a University of Alabama professor who studies social media platforms.

She added that child influencers “are in desperate need of the same protections that have been afforded to other child workers and entertainers.”

The Illinois bill is modeled largely after California’s 1939 Jackie Coogan law, named for the silent film-era child actor who sued his parents for squandering his earnings. Coogan laws now exist in several states and require parents to set aside a portion of child entertainers’ earnings for when they reach adulthood.

Other states have tried to pass laws to regulate against potential child exploitation on social media without success. A 2018 California child labor bill included a social media advertising provision that was removed by the time it was passed, and Washington’s 2023 bill stalled in committee.

Across the Atlantic, France passed a law in 2020 that entitles child influencers under 16 to a portion of their revenue, as well as “the right to forget,” which means video platforms must withdraw the images of the child at the minor’s request. Parental consent is not needed.

Illinois’ own bill underwent several changes during the legislative session that watered down its reach, including stripping out a provision allowing child influencers to request deletion of content once they reached the age of 18, and requiring family vloggers to register their channels.

Still, Chicago-based Tyler Diers, the Midwest executive director of technology trade association Technet, which opposed the bill before the changes but is now neutral, said that when one state legislature takes up an issue, others tend to follow, “and oftentimes perfect what the first state did.”

Nallamothu emphasized that the Illinois bill isn’t aimed at “parents posting their kids on Facebook for their close family and friends,” or even a funny clip that went viral.

“This is for families who make their income off of child vlogging and family vlogging,” she said.

Many social media platforms — including Facebook, Instagram and TikTok — don’t allow children to have accounts until they’re at least 13 years old. But that hasn’t stopped them from appearing on social media. And the internet is littered with examples of children being showcased for financial gain — and the harm it has caused as a consequence.

In 2019, an Arizona mother was accused of torturing her seven adopted children for subpar performances in their popular YouTube series, Fantastic Adventures; a Maryland couple who posted “prank” videos of themselves screaming at their children and breaking their toys lost custody and were sentenced to five years of probation for child neglect.

Another YouTube couple filmed every step of their family’s process of adopting a young child from China with autism, only to eventually place him in a new home.

Chris McCarty, an 18-year-old college student who founded Quit Clicking Kids, an advocacy organization focused on protecting minors being monetized online, and who was the force behind the bill in Washington, noted that “this issue is not going away.”

“Once these kids start growing up, the true extent of the damage inflicted by monetized family channels will be realized,” McCarty said at a hearing for the Washington bill in February.

TikToker Bobbi Althoff is the mother of two little girls she lovingly refers to as “Richard” and “Concrete” to her 3.7 million followers. Althoff used to share her older daughter’s face and real name online, but stopped after people made rude comments about her.

“I kept thinking about my daughter growing up to read these things, and it really upset me because I hate reading things like that about myself,” she said.

When she shared her decision on Instagram, she lost thousands of followers and received backlash.

“A lot of people were supportive, but there were definitely a lot of people that were very strange about it,” Althoff said, describing how some viewers seemed to feel like “they had a relationship with my daughter... and wanted to keep seeing her grow.”

Although TikTok-famous tots are not quite old enough to reflect on their experiences, child reality TV stars of the last decade can offer comparable insight on how it feels to be on the other side of the camera.

Ohio-based Jason Welage enjoyed his time as a preteen on TruTV’s 2015 reality show Kart Life, which followed families in the world of go-kart racing. Now 20, Welage says some of the less pleasant aspects have followed him into adulthood.

“When you Google the show, the first clip that comes up on YouTube is me coming off the track and crying,” he said. “I still hear about it to this day.”

His parents funneled the $10,000 he earned on the show back into his racing, which can cost families up to $150,000 a year, according to his mother, Meghan, who, like her son, supports the child influencer legislation in Illinois and hopes similar laws will be implemented in other states or even federally.

For children appearing on social media or TV, “it’s definitely work for them,” she said. Her son “wanted to go play, but instead he had to go sit on a stool in our motorhome and do interviews.”

“There should be something to compensate the child for what they are going through or what they have to do,” she said.

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AP Staff Writer Elaine Ganley in Paris contributed to this report.

May 14, 2023

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Savage is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.

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AI presents political peril for 2024 with threat to mislead voters

By DAVID KLEPPER and ALI SWENSON

AP

May 14, 2023

- A booth is ready for a voter, Feb. 24, 2020, at City Hall in Cambridge, Mass., on the first morning of early voting in the state. Thanks to recent advances in artificial intelligence, tools that can create lifelike photos, video and audio are now cheap and readily available. AI experts and political scientists say these new programs will have significant implications for next year's U.S. elections. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Computer engineers and tech-inclined political scientists have warned for years that cheap, powerful artificial intelligence tools would soon allow anyone to create fake images, video and audio that was realistic enough to fool voters and perhaps sway an election.

The synthetic images that emerged were often crude, unconvincing and costly to produce, especially when other kinds of misinformation were so inexpensive and easy to spread on social media. The threat posed by AI and so-called deepfakes always seemed a year or two away.

No more.

Sophisticated generative AI tools can now create cloned human voices and hyper-realistic images, videos and audio in seconds, at minimal cost. When strapped to powerful social media algorithms, this fake and digitally created content can spread far and fast and target highly specific audiences, potentially taking campaign dirty tricks to a new low.

The implications for the 2024 campaigns and elections are as large as they are troubling: Generative AI can not only rapidly produce targeted campaign emails, texts or videos, it also could be used to mislead voters, impersonate candidates and undermine elections on a scale and at a speed not yet seen.

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“We’re not prepared for this,” warned A.J. Nash, vice president of intelligence at the cybersecurity firm ZeroFox. ”To me, the big leap forward is the audio and video capabilities that have emerged. When you can do that on a large scale, and distribute it on social platforms, well, it’s going to have a major impact.”

AI experts can quickly rattle off a number of alarming scenarios in which generative AI is used to create synthetic media for the purposes of confusing voters, slandering a candidate or even inciting violence.

Here are a few: Automated robocall messages, in a candidate’s voice, instructing voters to cast ballots on the wrong date; audio recordings of a candidate supposedly confessing to a crime or expressing racist views; video footage showing someone giving a speech or interview they never gave. Fake images designed to look like local news reports, falsely claiming a candidate dropped out of the race.

“What if Elon Musk personally calls you and tells you to vote for a certain candidate?” said Oren Etzioni, the founding CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, who stepped down last year to start the nonprofit AI2. “A lot of people would listen. But it’s not him.”

Former President Donald Trump, who is running in 2024, has shared AI-generated content with his followers on social media. A manipulated video of CNN host Anderson Cooper that Trump shared on his Truth Social platform on Friday, which distorted Cooper’s reaction to the CNN town hall this past week with Trump, was created using an AI voice-cloning tool.

A dystopian campaign ad released last month by the Republican National Committee offers another glimpse of this digitally manipulated future. The online ad, which came after President Joe Biden announced his reelection campaign, and starts with a strange, slightly warped image of Biden and the text “What if the weakest president we’ve ever had was re-elected?”

A series of AI-generated images follows: Taiwan under attack; boarded up storefronts in the United States as the economy crumbles; soldiers and armored military vehicles patrolling local streets as tattooed criminals and waves of immigrants create panic.

“An AI-generated look into the country’s possible future if Joe Biden is re-elected in 2024,” reads the ad’s description from the RNC.

The RNC acknowledged its use of AI, but others, including nefarious political campaigns and foreign adversaries, will not, said Petko Stoyanov, global chief technology officer at Forcepoint, a cybersecurity company based in Austin, Texas. Stoyanov predicted that groups looking to meddle with U.S. democracy will employ AI and synthetic media as a way to erode trust.

“What happens if an international entity — a cybercriminal or a nation state — impersonates someone. What is the impact? Do we have any recourse?” Stoyanov said. “We’re going to see a lot more misinformation from international sources.”

AI-generated political disinformation already has gone viral online ahead of the 2024 election, from a doctored video of Biden appearing to give a speech attacking transgender people to AI-generated images of children supposedly learning satanism in libraries.

AI images appearing to show Trump’s mug shot also fooled some social media users even though the former president didn’t take one when he was booked and arraigned in a Manhattan criminal court for falsifying business records. Other AI-generated images showed Trump resisting arrest, though their creator was quick to acknowledge their origin.

Legislation that would require candidates to label campaign advertisements created with AI has been introduced in the House by Rep. Yvette Clarke, D-N.Y., who has also sponsored legislation that would require anyone creating synthetic images to add a watermark indicating the fact.

Some states have offered their own proposals for addressing concerns about deepfakes.

Clarke said her greatest fear is that generative AI could be used before the 2024 election to create a video or audio that incites violence and turns Americans against each other.

“It’s important that we keep up with the technology,” Clarke told The Associated Press. “We’ve got to set up some guardrails. People can be deceived, and it only takes a split second. People are busy with their lives and they don’t have the time to check every piece of information. AI being weaponized, in a political season, it could be extremely disruptive.”

Earlier this month, a trade association for political consultants in Washington condemned the use of deepfakes in political advertising, calling them “a deception” with “no place in legitimate, ethical campaigns.”

Other forms of artificial intelligence have for years been a feature of political campaigning, using data and algorithms to automate tasks such as targeting voters on social media or tracking down donors. Campaign strategists and tech entrepreneurs hope the most recent innovations will offer some positives in 2024, too.

Mike Nellis, CEO of the progressive digital agency Authentic, said he uses ChatGPT “every single day” and encourages his staff to use it, too, as long as any content drafted with the tool is reviewed by human eyes afterward.

Nellis’ newest project, in partnership with Higher Ground Labs, is an AI tool called Quiller. It will write, send and evaluate the effectiveness of fundraising emails –- all typically tedious tasks on campaigns.

“The idea is every Democratic strategist, every Democratic candidate will have a copilot in their pocket,” he said.

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Swenson reported from New York.

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The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of misinformation at https://apnews.com/hub/misinformation and coverage of artificial intelligence at https://apnews.com/hub/artificial-intelligence

Repelled by high car prices, Americans are holding on to their vehicles longer than ever

By TOM KRISHER

AP

May 15, 2023

Mechanic Jon Guthrie inspects the underside of a 2014 Honda Ridgeline pickup truck at Japanese Auto Professional Service in Ann Arbor, Michigan. People are keeping their vehicles longer due to shortages of new ones and high prices. That drove the average U.S. vehicle age up to a record 12.5 years in 2023, according to S&P Global Mobility. (AP Photo/Tom Krisher)

ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) — With new and used cars still painfully expensive, Ryan Holdsworth says he plans to keep his 9-year-old Chevy Cruze for at least four more years. Limiting his car payments and his overall debt is a bigger priority for him than having a new vehicle.

A 35-year-old grocery store worker from Grand Rapids, Michigan, Holdsworth would probably be in the market for a vehicle within a few years — if not for the high cost. For now, it’s out of the question.

“You’re not going to get one for a price you can afford,” he said.

Holdsworth has plenty of company. Americans are keeping their cars longer than ever. The average age of a passenger vehicle on the road hit a record 12.5 years this year, according to data gathered by S&P Global Mobility. Sedans like Holdsworth’s are even older, on average — 13.6 years.

Blame it mainly on the pandemic, which in 2020 triggered a global shortage of automotive computer chips, the vital component that runs everything from radios to gas pedals to transmissions. The shortage drastically slowed global assembly lines, making new vehicles scarce on dealer lots just when consumers were increasingly eager to buy.

Prices reached record highs. And though they’ve eased somewhat, the cost of a vehicle still feels punishingly expensive to many Americans, especially when coupled with now much-higher loan rates.

Since the pandemic struck three years ago, the average new vehicle has rocketed 24% to nearly $48,000 as of April, according to Edmunds.com. Typical loan rates on new-car purchases have ballooned to 7%, a consequence of the Federal Reserve’s aggressive streak of interest rate hikes to fight inflation.

It’s all pushed the national average monthly auto loan payment to $729 — prohibitively high for many. Experts say a family earning the median U.S. household income can no longer afford the average new car payment and still cover such necessities as housing, food and utilities.

Used vehicle prices, on average, have surged even more since the pandemic hit — up 40%, to nearly $29,000. With an average loan rate having reached 11%, the typical monthly used-vehicle payment is now $563.

Faced with deciding between making a jumbo payment and keeping their existing vehicles, more owners are choosing to stick with what they have, even if it means spending more on repairs and maintenance.

Auto mechanics have been struck by the rising ages and mileages of vehicles that now arrive at the shop in numbers they’d never seen before.

“You see cars all the time in here with 250,000, 300,000 miles,” said Jay Nuber, owner of Japanese Auto Professional Service, a repair garage near downtown Ann Arbor, Michigan. “They haven’t been really having major work or anything. They’ve just been doing the (routine) service.”

It doesn’t mean that most owners of older vehicles are necessarily stuck with constant repair bills. One reason people can hold their vehicles for increasingly long periods is that auto manufacturing has improved over time. Engines run longer. Bodies don’t rust as quickly. Components last longer.

Yet the cost of buying either a new or used vehicle is leaving more people with essentially no choice but to keep the one they have.

“The repair-versus-buy equation changed,” said Todd Campau, an associate director with S&P. Even with rising repair costs, Campau said, it’s still typically more cost-effective to fix an older vehicle than to spring for a purchase.

The average vehicle age, which has been edging up since 2019, accelerated this year by a substantial three months. And while 12.5 years is the average, Campau noted, more vehicles are staying on the road for 20 years or more, sometimes with three or four successive owners.

In such cases, the third or fourth owner is getting a much older car than they would have in the past. Nearly 122 million vehicles on the road are more than a dozen years old, Campau said. S&P predicts that the number of older vehicles will keep growing until at least 2028.

Even with more durable vehicles able to last longer, all of this has created a boom time for auto shops. Through most of last year, Nuber’s Japanese Auto was overwhelmed with customers. It took up to three weeks to get an appointment, whether for repairs or the routine maintenance that older vehicles, in particular, require.

“The phone just kept ringing, and the cars just kept coming,” Nuber said.

It’s now at the point where some vehicle owners must decide whether to pay for a repair that costs more than their vehicle is worth. That’s where many of them draw the line, said Dave Weber, manager at Japanese Auto.

On Friday, Weber said, one customer needed rear brakes, wheel bearings and exhaust system repairs. The customer decided to do only half the repairs and wait until later to decide whether to sink more money into the aging vehicle.

“They patch them up and drive them for however long, until the next major repair,” Weber said.

S&P predicts that U.S. new vehicle sales will reach 14.5 million this year, from about 13.9 million last year. A big reason is that the supply at dealerships is finally growing. Automakers have also begun to restore some discounts that had long helped keep a lid on prices. The result is that many people who can afford to buy can now do so. It’s a trend that could slow the advancing age of the U.S. fleet and boost overall sales.

Still, no one is predicting a return to pre-pandemic annual sales of around 17 million anytime soon. Even with discounts, new-vehicle prices are likely to stay much higher than pre-pandemic levels for years to come.

As for Holdsworth, the Chevy Cruze owner, he plans to keep up with the scheduled maintenance on his car, especially routine oil changes. Even if he encountered a major repair, he thinks he’d probably pay for it.

Having bought his vehicle two years ago, Holdsworth has about two years of payments left. So his Cruze, too, may reach the 12.5-year-old national average.

“I’ll finish paying it off,” he said, “and drive it for a couple more years.”

Auschwitz museum begins emotional work of conserving 8,000 shoes of murdered children

By VANESSA GERA

May 15, 2023

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Elzbieta Cajzer, head of the museum's collections department, shows a collection of shoes that belonged to child victims of the former Nazi German death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau at the conservation laboratory on the grounds of the camp in Oswiecim, Poland, Wednesday, May 10, 2023. A two-year effort has been launched in 2023 to preserve 8,000 children’s shoes at the former concentration and extermination camp where German forces murdered 1.1 million people during World War II.

 (AP Photo/Michal Dyjuk)

OSWIECIM, Poland (AP) — In a modern conservation laboratory on the grounds of the former Auschwitz camp, a man wearing blue rubber gloves uses a scalpel to scrape away rust from the eyelets of small brown shoes worn by children before they were murdered in gas chambers.

Colleagues at the other end of a long work table rub away dust and grime, using soft cloths and careful circular motions on the leather of the fragile objects. The shoes are then scanned and photographed in a neighboring room and catalogued in a database.

The work is part of a two-year effort launched last month to preserve 8,000 children’s shoes at the former concentration and extermination camp where German forces murdered 1.1 million people during World War II. Most of the victims were Jews killed in dictator Adolf Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe.

The site was located during the war in a part of Poland occupied by German forces and annexed to the German Reich. Today it is a memorial and museum managed by the Polish state, to whom the solemn responsibility has fallen to preserve the evidence of the site, where Poles were also among the victims. The Germans destroyed evidence of their atrocities at Treblinka and other camps, but they failed to do so entirely at the enormous site of Auschwitz as they fled the approaching Soviet forces in chaos toward the war’s end.

Eight decades later, some evidence is fading away under the pressures of time and mass tourism. Hair sheered from victims to make cloth is considered a sacred human remain which cannot be photographed and is not subjected to conservation efforts. It is turning to dust.

But more than 100,000 shoes of victims remain, some 80,000 of them in huge heaps on display in a room where visitors file by daily. Many are warped, their original colors fading, shoe laces disintegrated, yet they endure as testaments of lives brutally cut short.

The tiny shoes and slippers are especially heartrending.

“Children’s shoes are the most moving object for me because there is no greater tragedy than the tragedy of children,” said Mirosław Maciaszczyk, a conservation specialist from the museum’s conservation laboratories.

“A shoe is an object closely related to a person, to a child. It is a trace, sometimes it’s the only trace left of the child.”

Maciaszczyk said that he and the other conservation workers never lose sight of the human tragedy behind the shoes, even as they focus on the technical aspects of their conservation work. Sometimes they are overcome by emotion and need breaks. Volunteers working with adult shoes in the past have asked for new assignments.

Elżbieta Cajzer, head of the Collections, said conservation work always turns up some individual details of those killed at the camp — suitcases, in particular, can offer up clues because they bear names and addresses. She expects that the work on children’s shoes will also reveal some new personal details.

They also open a window into a bygone era when shoes were a valuable good passed from child to child. Some have traces of mended soles and other repairs.

The museum is able to conserve about 100 shoes a week, and has processed 400 since the project began last month. The aim is not to restore them to their original state but to render them as close to how they were found at war’s end as possible. Most of the shoes are single objects. One pair still bound by shoelaces is a rarity.

Last year, workers conserving adult shoes found an Italian 100 lire banknote in a lady’s high-heeled shoe that was also imprinted with the name Ranzini, which was a shoe manufacturer in Trieste. The owner was likely Italian, but nothing else is known about her.

They also found the name of Věra Vohryzková on a child’s shoe. By coincidence, a museum worker had noticed that family name on a suitcase and the museum was able to piece together details about the family. Vera was born Jan. 11, 1939, into a Jewish Czech family and was sent to Auschwitz in a transport from the Theresienstadt ghetto in 1943 with her mother and brother. Her father, Max Vohryzek, was sent in a separate transport. They all perished.

Cajzer described the shoes as powerful testimony also because the huge heaps of shoes that remain give some idea of the enormous scale of the crimes, even though what is left is only a fraction of what was.

Before the SS men sent people into the gas chambers, they ordered them to undress and told them they were going into showers to be disinfected.

“We are able to imagine how many people came here, hoping that they would be able to put those shoes back on after a shower. They thought they would take their shoes back and keep using them. But they never returned to their owners,” Cajzer said.

In most cases, the shoes and other possessions were collected and the material used to help the Third Reich in its war effort. The 110,000 shoes in the museum’s collection — while massive — most likely came from only the last transports to the camp, Cajzer said.

The project’s cost of 450,000 euros ($492,000) is funded by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Foundation, to which Germany has been a key donor, as well as the International March of the Living, a Holocaust education program.

Both Cajzer and Maciaszczyk said that it is impossible to save the shoes forever, but the goal is to preserve them for more years to come.

“Our conservation today slows down these processes (of decay), but for how long, it’s hard to say,” Maciaszczyk said.

___

Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.

COMMODITY FETISH

Man indicted in theft of ‘Wizard of Oz’ ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland

By MARGARET STAFFORD

yesterday

A pair of ruby slippers once worn by actress Judy Garland in the "The Wizard of Oz" sit on display at a news conference on Sept. 4, 2018, at the FBI office in Brooklyn Center, Minn. Federal prosecutors say a man has been indicted by a grand jury on Tuesday, May 16, 2023, on charges of stealing a pair of ruby red slippers worn by Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz.” The FBI recovered the slippers in 2018. 

(AP Photo/Jeff Baenen, File)

A man has been indicted by a grand jury on charges of stealing a pair of ruby red slippers worn by Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz,” federal prosecutors in North Dakota say. The shoes were stolen in 2005 and recovered in a 2018 FBI sting operation, but no arrests were made at the time.

Terry Martin was indicted Tuesday with one count of theft of a major artwork, prosecutors announced Wednesday. The indictment did not provide any further information about Martin and online records do not list an attorney for him.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported that Martin is 76 and lives 12 miles south of the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. When reached by the newspaper, he said, “I gotta go on trial. I don’t want to talk to you.”

Janie Heitz, executive director of the museum, told The Associated Press she was surprised the suspect lived nearby but said no one who works at the museum knows him.

Garland wore several pairs of the ruby slippers during production of the 1939 musical, but only four authentic pairs remain. When they were stolen, the slippers were insured for $1 million but the current market value is about $3.5 million, federal prosecutors said in a news release.

The slippers were on loan to the Judy Garland Museum in the late actor’s hometown when someone climbed through a window and broke the display case, prosecutors said when they were recovered.

Heitz said she and the museum’s staff were “a little bit speechless” that someone had been charged nearly two decades after the slippers were stolen.

Over the years, several enticing rewards were offered in hopes that the slippers would turn up. Law enforcement offered $250,000 early in the case, and an anonymous donor from Arizona put up $1 million in 2015.

A pair of ruby slippers once worn by actress Judy Garland in the "The Wizard of Oz" are displayed at a news conference on Sept. 4, 2018, at the FBI office in Brooklyn Center, Minn. Federal prosecutors say a man has been indicted by a grand jury Tuesday, May 16, 2023, on charges of stealing a pair of ruby red slippers worn by Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz.” The FBI recovered the slippers in 2018. 

(Richard Tsong-Taatarii/Star Tribune via AP, File)

The road to the missing slippers began when a man told the shoes’ insurer in 2017 that he could help get them back. After a nearly year-long investigation, the FBI nabbed the shoes in Minneapolis in July 2018. At the time, the bureau said no one has been arrested or charged in the case.

On Wednesday, a summons was issued for Martin. An initial court appearance was set for June 1, and it will be via video. Terry Van Horn, spokesman for the U.S. Justice Department in North Dakota, said he could not provide any information beyond what was included in the one-paragraph-indictment.

The shoes are famously associated with one of the iconic lines in “The Wizard of Oz,” as Garland’s character Dorothy clicks her heels and repeats the phrase, “There’s no place like home.” They are made from about a dozen different materials, including wood pulp, silk thread, gelatin, plastic and glass. Most of the ruby color comes from sequins but the bows of the shoes contain red glass beads.

The three other pairs Garland wore in the movie were held by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Smithsonian, and a private collector.

When they were stolen, the slippers were on loan from Hollywood memorabilia collector Michael Shaw, who received an insurance payment seven years after the theft, according to the museum’s director.

Heitz said the museum staff hopes the slippers will return to Garland’s hometown after the legal case ends.

1,100-year-old Hebrew Bible sells for $38M at auction in New York

 

Sotheby's unveils the Codex Sassoon for auction, Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2023, in the Manhattan borough of New York. The 1,100-year-old Hebrew Bible that is one of the oldest surviving biblical manuscripts sold for $38.1 million, which includes the auction house's fee, Wednesday, May 17, 2023, in New York. (AP Photo/John Minchillo, File)

NEW YORK (AP) — A 1,100-year-old Hebrew Bible that is one of the world’s oldest surviving biblical manuscripts sold for $38 million in New York on Wednesday.

The Codex Sassoon, a leather-bound, handwritten parchment volume containing a nearly complete Hebrew Bible, was purchased by former U.S. Ambassador to Romania Alfred H. Moses on behalf of the American Friends of ANU and donated to ANU Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, where it will join the collection, Sotheby’s said in statement.

The manuscript was exhibited at the ANU Museum in March as part of a worldwide tour before the auction.

Sotheby’s Judaica specialist Sharon Liberman Mintz said the $38 million price tag, which includes the auction house’s fee, “reflects the profound power, influence, and significance of the Hebrew Bible, which is an indispensable pillar of humanity.”

It’s one of highest prices for a manuscript sold at auction. In 2021, a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution sold for $43 million. Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester sold for $31 million in 1994, or around $60 million in today’s dollars.

Mintz said she was “absolutely delighted by today’s monumental result and that Codex Sassoon will shortly be making its grand and permanent return to Israel, on display for the world to see.”

The Codex Sassoon is believed to have been fabricated sometime between 880 and 960.

It got its name in 1929 when it was purchased by David Solomon Sassoon, a son of an Iraqi Jewish business magnate who filled his London home with his collection of Jewish manuscripts.

Sassoon’s estate was broken up after he died and the biblical codex was sold by Sotheby’s in Zurich in 1978 to the British Rail Pension Fund for around $320,000, or $1.4 million in today’s dollars.

The pension fund sold the Codex Sassoon 11 years later to Jacqui Safra, a banker and art collector, bought it in 1989 for $3.19 million ($7.7 million in today’s dollars). Safra was the seller on Wednesday.

In Ancient Egypt, Severed Hands Were Spoils of War

Archaeologists offer a new explanation for one of the century’s grislier finds, “a carefully gathered collection of hands” in a 3,500-year-old temple.

Preserved, colored hands recovered from present-day Tell el-Dab’a, Egypt, discovered in 2011. They were likely buried during Egypt’s 15th dynasty, from 1640 B.C. to 1530 B.C.

Credit...Julia Gresky

By Franz Lidz
May 16, 2023

Aristotle called the hand the “tool of tools”; Kant, “the visible part of the brain.” The earliest works of art were handprints on the walls of caves. Throughout history hand gestures have symbolized the range of human experience: power, tenderness, creativity, conflict, even (bravo, Michelangelo) the touch of the divine. Without hands, civilization would be inconceivable.

And so the discovery in 2011 of the bones of a dozen right hands, at a site where the ancient Egyptian city of Avaris (today known as Tell el-Dab’a) once stood, was particularly unsettling. The remains were unearthed, most with palms down, from three shallow pits near the throne room of a royal palace. The hands, along with numerous disarticulated fingers, were most likely buried during Egypt’s 15th dynasty, from 1640 B.C. to 1530 B.C. At the time, Egypt’s eastern Nile Delta was controlled by a dynasty called the Hyksos, which means “rulers of foreign countries.”

Although the Hyksos were described by the Ptolemaic Egyptian historian Manetho as “invaders of an obscure race” who conquered the region by force, recent research has shown that they descended from people who had immigrated peacefully over centuries from southwest Asia, now Israel and the Palestinian territories. Eventually, a few rose to power as the Hyksos, basing their power in Avaris.

The Hyksos are widely believed to have introduced the Egyptians to the horse and chariot, glass-working and all sorts of weaponry, including battle axes and composite bows. A recent study published in the journal Nature proposes that the Hyksos had a custom known as the Gold of Valor, which involved taking the hands of enemy combatants as war trophies.

The ritual seems to have become standard practice in Egypt, with soldiers returning from combat and presenting the dismembered right hands of defeated foes to their pharaoh or military commander.

“The amputations were a safe means to count slain enemies,” said Manfred Bietak, an archaeologist at the Austrian Academy of Sciences who collaborated on the paper. “They also made the dead enemy incapable of raising his hand again against Egypt in the Netherworld.”

Tomb inscriptions and temple reliefs describe the gruesome public ceremony, but the new study, conducted by a German and Austrian research team and drawn from an analysis of skeletal remains, offers the first physical evidence of it.

“Painstaking work was done on the surgical nature of the amputations,” said Kara Cooney, a professor of Egyptian art and architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Flesh and nails are still attached to the hands, providing more information for a carefully gathered collection of hands.”

A carved relief in the temple of Ramses III at Medinet Habu in Egypt shows the collection of severed hands after a battle.

Credit...via Manfred Bietak

In 2011, the fragile appendages were hardened with an acetone-soluble glue so that they could be removed from the ground in a block of plaster cast. Poorly preserved, the hands could not be genetically sampled; Julia Gresky, a paleopathologist from the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, determined their biological sex using a noninvasive measure that compares the length of the index finger with the length of the ring finger.

“The ring fingers of males tend to be longer than their index fingers,” Dr. Gresky said. “The opposite is usually true for females.”

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Although some critics consider the tool simplistic and unreliable, Dr. Gresky is confident that at least 11 of the 12 hands were male. “Those 11 hands were large and robust,” she said. “The 12th was much smaller and possibly female. I’m quite optimistic that a woman was attached.”

Dr. Cooney notes that there are no records of women being soldiers in ancient Egypt. “This was a male sphere of action,” she said. However, Egyptian texts from the reign of Rameses III, from about 1186 B.C. to 1155 B.C., indicate that there were women in the Libyan Army.

All of the bones dug up in Avaris were fully formed but showed no signs of age-related degeneration, suggesting that the hands had belonged to individuals roughly between the ages of 14 and 30. Some Egyptologists had theorized that the dismemberment was a barbaric punishment for criminals, but Dr. Gresky said the location, level of care and perhaps the positioning of the severed hands argued for war trophies.

Salima Ikram, an Egyptologist at the American University in Cairo who was not involved in the project, said that the new analysis “raises interesting questions about the origins of traditions showing dominance over enemies, not only in Egypt, but throughout the ancient world.”
‘Fish in baskets’

The ancient Egyptians are venerated for their achievements in art, architecture, and technology. But their brutal tradition of maiming criminals and adversaries predates the Hyksos by more than a millennium. Perjurers were sometimes disciplined by slicing off their ears and noses; insurgents, by impaling the bodies at the ribs until death. The Narmer Palette, a ceremonial engraving that dates to the time of the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt about 5,000 years ago, shows the beheading and mutilation of what were apparently rival chieftains.

On one side of the palette, King Narmer holds a mace aloft in his right hand while with his left he yanks a kneeling captive by the hair. “The smiting motif would have been a public display of King Narmer’s power over his enemy, smashing the skull to bloody bits,” Dr. Cooney said.

On the reverse side, the king inspects rows of bound, decapitated corpses with their heads between their legs, and their castrated penises atop their heads. “Dismemberment was anathema to the ancient Egyptians, who wanted their bodies whole for a materialized afterlife existence,” Dr. Cooney said.

A relief in the mortuary temple of Rameses III, at Medinet Habu, shows the pharaoh standing on a balcony after a victory not far from heaps of his enemies’ severed phalluses (12,312, according to one translation of zealous army scribes) and hands (24,625). In the temple of Amun at Karnak, a chronicle of a 13th century B.C. battle details prisoners being brought back to the pharaoh Merneptah with “donkeys before them, laden with uncircumcised penises of the Land of Libya, with the hands of [every] foreign land that was with them, as fish in baskets.” If the tally of fatalities is to be believed, the Egyptians collected the penises of 6,359 uncircumcised enemy dead and the hands of 2,362 circumcised enemies. “The stink must have been awful, and thus the ‘fish in baskets’ comment,” Dr. Cooney said.

An overview of a dozen right hands in two pits in Hyksos-period temple in the ancient Egyptian city of Avaris.

Credit...Julia Gresky

The wrong hand

Except for especially heinous offenses such as robbing the tombs of pharaohs, the severing of hands was a rare punishment in ancient Egypt, which is why Dr. Bietak said it was unlikely that the hands found in Avaris were from criminals. But such severings were a relatively common theme in military scenes of the New Kingdom, which began in the 16th century B.C. and lasted for nearly 500 years.

Dr. Bietak, who has led excavations at Tell el-Dab’a since 1966, said that the Egyptians appear to have adopted the custom some 50 to 80 years earlier than the inscriptional and pictorial evidence. A relief in the temple of Ahmose I in Abydos features a pile of detached hands on the battlefield. Ahmose I was the king who conquered Avaris and defeated the Hyksos.

Were the Avaris hands severed from living victims or from the recently deceased? “When placed in the pits, the hands must have been soft and pliable enough to be stretched into a presentable position,” Dr. Gresky said. “This implies they were put there before rigor mortis set in or after it had passed.” Probably after, she said; the hands would have been collected and stored for some time before they were put in the pit. “If before,” Dr. Gresky said, “then the amputations took place just prior to or even during the offering ceremony.”

Dr. Gresky said the more likely scenario was that the hands were cut off roughly one to four days after death. She noted that the pits would have been visible from the palace throne room, indicating a public ceremony and buttressing the notion that the hands were spoils of war.

So why cut off the right hand? “The right is generally the dominant hand for activity — for writing, working, and fighting,” Dr. Cooney said. “Removing it from a living person is a method of imposing violent control and potentially leaving the living victim of such excision alive for all to see, a walking advertisement not to cross the powers-that-be.”

In the tomb of an army officer named Ahmose, son of Ibana, a narrative describes how after each skirmish with the Hyksos at Avaris and Sharuhen, he reported his new haul of enemy hands to the pharaoh, who rewarded him with the Gold of Valor. Dr. Bietak speculates that the showy regalia involved necklaces of golden beads and pendants in the shape of flies.

“Flies are in the thick of battle, they never give up, and keep returning to the fray, just as good soldiers should,” Dr. Ikram said. “Thus, comparing a warrior to a fly was a high compliment.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 16, 2023, Section D, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: To Victors, Severed Hands. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe