Why Some Experts Are Concerned About Threads’ Data Collection

Meta’s new text-based conversation platform Threads launched with a bang earlier this month, surpassing 100 million sign-ups less than a week after it became available to the public on July 5. 

But soon after the app—seen as a direct threat to Twitter, which recently became X— was released, users on Twitter began posting screenshots of Threads’ privacy policy published on Apple’s App store. Some pointed out the app’s terms of service give Meta permission to collect a trove of data, including information on user’s health, financial information, location, search history.

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Data privacy experts say that, though this level of data collection is not unique to Threads, users do risk handing over even more personal information to a company that already knows a lot about account holders. And as Meta looks towards turning Threads into a decentralized service, which would allow users to view Threads content across other apps and theoretically give them more control over their data, experts warn that the move could expand the company’s reach across the internet.

Meta’s deputy chief privacy officer, Rob Sherman has said that privacy policy on the App Store isn’t fully representative of the platform’s actual policy and said that users can “choose to share different kinds of data,” in a post on Threads on July 10. 

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“In general, Threads collects [the same data that] Facebook and Instagram do, which is much more information than is necessary for the app to function and much more information than is collected on Twitter or many of the other Twitter alternatives,” Calli Schroeder, Global Privacy Counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center told TIME in an email.

A review by TIME of Threads and X’s policies on Apple’s App Store shows that X collects much of the same information—such as browsing and purchase history—as Threads, though X’s privacy policy does not include the “sensitive information,” financial information, or health and fitness categories that Threads does. Threads’ privacy policy does not specify what information is considered sensitive.

Threads users require an Instagram account to sign up, which means many may already have the same data collected about them. Despite this, privacy experts still say users should be cautious about signing up for Threads.

Read More: The Best Twitter Alternatives if You’re Ditching X

“This information will most likely be used to create a more hyper-personalized and targeted experience on the app, shared with and sold to advertisers, or added to the already massive troves of personal data Meta has collected on individuals via its other platforms and outside sources,” says Schroeder. A Meta spokesperson told TIME over the phone that the company provides a number of controls for people to manage how their data is used for ads, such as ad preferences, and the “Why Am I Seeing This?” feature, which provides context about why users are being shown specific ads. 

Here’s what to know about Threads’ data collection policy and plans for decentralization. 

What data can apps access?

According to its listing on the Apple App Store, Threads can collect information about a user’s health, finance, contacts, search history, location, and other sensitive information via their digital activity. 

In his post on Threads, Meta’s Sherman said that users should consult Meta’s own privacy policies to best understand the data the app collects. “The labels are similar to the rest of our apps, including Instagram, in that our social apps receive whatever info (including the categories of data listed in the App Store) you share in the app. People can choose to share different kinds of data,” he said. “Meta’s privacy policy, and the Threads supplementary privacy policy, are the best resources to understand how Threads uses and collects data.”

Experts say that much of the information users agree to let the app collect is already available to companies—especially if they already use Meta’s other services like Facebook or Instagram. 

“Quite frankly, in terms of collection, this is par for the course for everybody,” says Jim Waldo, a professor at Harvard University whose research focuses on privacy.

Even so, Nazanin Andalibi, assistant professor of information at the University of Michigan, says that users concerned about privacy should still proceed with caution, and be wary of “going further into the Meta ecosystem” by signing up for a new app like Threads. 

People use different platforms differently, Andalibi says—for example, you might use Facebook to keep up with family, Instagram for friends, and Threads for work. While they might seem like separate worlds, the information you give to each app all goes back to the same company. 

“Now Meta knows who all your friends are and and who your family’s friends are and it can build social graphs around that to give it a lot of information,” adds Waldo. “If you use more and more of Meta’s apps, they get a fuller picture of your activity.”

Threads’ release in the E.U. is on hold amid regulatory uncertainty. The E.U.’s Digital Markets Act, passed last year, prevents large companies like Meta from sharing user data across multiple platforms. “We would have liked to offer Threads in the EU at the same time as other markets, and the app does meet GDPR requirements today,” Sherman wrote in a Thread, “But building this offering against the backdrop of other regulatory requirements that have not yet been clarified would potentially take a lot longer, and in the face of this uncertainty, we prioritized offering this new product to as many people as possible.”

Meta has come under fire for its handling of data privacy in the past. In May, the company was fined a record $1.3 billion for data privacy violations in the E.U. The company said it had been “singled out” and that it used the same legal mechanisms as thousands of other companies in the E.U. In the U.S. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has proposed an expansion of its 2020  consent order against Meta over its alleged misrepresentation of how much access app developers had to users’ private data. (Twitter recently protested its own FTC consent order around data practices, saying that the watchdog had made “unceasing demands.”)

In 2018, Facebook, which has since rebranded as Meta, disclosed that it had exposed the data of 87 million users of its Facebook platform to third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting group with ties to Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign. A year later, the company agreed to pay a record $5 billion penalty to the FTC, one of the largest regulatory penalties ever imposed by the U.S. government on a company. 

What do companies do with data?

Why does Threads want to know things like health and fitness or financial information? The answer has to do with advertising—the company’s bread and butter. Advertising revenue accounted for 97% of Meta’s overall revenue in 2022. 

Data collection allows the app to create a finely-tuned profile of users that could be shared with third-party services, many of which use the information to create hyper-targeted ads, Andalibi says. “All of these different insights or information about people separately can be very sensitive and consequential in certain contexts,” she says.“Imagine targeted advertising in the context of infertility, or someone with an eating disorder seeing ads about weight loss.” (Meta says it made updates to its privacy policy in 2022 that give users more control over the ads they see.)

Threads does not currently support ads, but a Meta source told Axios that it would introduce ads once its “user base reaches a critical mass”. 

Andalibi says there is no need for companies to access and store the data it does. Andalibi points to apps like Signal, which use encryption services to ensure user data is protected. “These are decisions that technology companies make—what data they collect, how they collect it, what they use it for, who they share it with, how long they keep it for,” she says. “It’s not an inevitable choice.”

Plans for decentralization 

Meta has shared that Threads would “soon” be compatible with ActivityPub, a user-centric software  that would give users the option to run their own servers, rather than just relying on Meta’s, known as decentralization. This tool could allow social media users to cross-post and interact with other platforms in what’s known as the “fediverse,” a group of social networks including Mastodon that allow users to communicate across platforms. This should give social media users control of their content, audience and data across platforms.   

“Our vision is that people using compatible apps will be able to follow and interact with people on Threads without having a Threads account, and vice versa, ushering in a new era of diverse and interconnected networks. If you have a public profile on Threads, this means your posts would be accessible from other apps, allowing you to reach new people with no added effort,” the company said in an announcement. 

In theory, this could give users further control over their data, as they’d be able to access Threads without downloading Meta’s platform. But what that means for the data the app is already collecting, and data on other platforms remains to be seen. (Meta told TIME that Thread’s supplementary privacy policy includes additional disclosures around how data is shared with third parties, to reflect the plan for Threads to eventually be interoperable with other apps.) The disclosures say that, even if users interact with Threads through a third-party service, Meta can still collect information about the third-party account and profile. 

“It’s not clear what’s going to happen to all of the data that was collected from profiles before that point,” Andalibi says. Schroeder notes that Meta could end up tracking Threads interactions across servers, widening its reach. “In a way, this could just expand Meta’s reach and ability to see everything people do across the internet,” Schroeder says.

Musk took a different approach earlier this year when he began an effort to start charging for access to Twitter’s application programming interface (API), which lets third-party developers and researchers access Twitter data.

Read More: She Built an App to Block Harassment on Twitter. Elon Musk Killed It

What options do users in search of stricter privacy protocols have? One of the biggest things users can do is simply stay off the app, a move Schroeder says could help put pressure on the company to make decentralization a priority.

“My guess is that Meta will have little incentive to follow through on their decentralization promise if they get mass early buy-in for Threads,” says Schroeder.  “Users may be able to push for decentralization if they refuse to sign up until Threads can be used outside current Meta platforms.”

source https://time.com/6299743/threads-data-collection-privacy/

How TikTok Changed the Meaning of a Million Followers

Alex Burriss and Roi Fabito, known online as Alex and Roi Wassabi, have been making videos for 17 years. As “O.G. YouTubers” who have amassed over 10 million subscribers since the platform’s early days, they’ve been attending VidCon, an annual convention for fans to connect with their favorite online personalities, for nearly a decade. Back in the day, they used to know the vast majority of the creator lineup at the conference. But when they attended the event in Anaheim, Calif., earlier this summer, that was far from the case. “Sometimes there’s a TikToker that’s apparently really popular, but I don’t know who they are,” says Burriss. “I’m sure they have great content, I just haven’t come across it.”

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That’s in large part because as the event has shifted to include more TikTokers than YouTubers, it’s had to face a new reality: the meaning of a follow on TikTok is not what it is, or once was—on YouTube or any other social platform.

Yes, there are the Charli D’Amelios and Alix Earles of TikTok—a tier of creators that has transcended the app with ubiquitous mainstream opportunities like Super Bowl commercials, reality TV shows, and six-figure brand collaborations. But the structure of TikTok’s app has also weighted virality like no other app before it—introducing more creators with high follower counts than ever before.

In fact, more than 39,000 accounts on TikTok now have at least 1 million followers, according to data from social media analytics provider Social Blade. That’s about 6,200 more than on YouTube and nearly 16,000 more than on Instagram. This has created a “fascinating subculture of influence,” says Brendan Gahan, Chief Innovation Officer at creative agency Mekanism. “Many creators have a dedicated following within their niche, but they remain anonymous to the wider world,” says Gahan, who sits on VidCon’s advisory board and has attended the conference since it began in 2010. 

At this year’s VidCon, Colin Rosenblum, whose “Colin and Samir” YouTube channel analyzes other creators and their content, had encounters with fans who themselves had millions of followers on TikTok, and whose content he had never come across. “It’s just interesting that you can have someone in your audience who has 10 million people who’ve said, ‘Yes, I would like to follow what they’re doing,’ and we follow this space and we don’t know who they are,” says Rosenblum.

How did TikTok so fundamentally change the meaning and value of a follower count? The answer has a lot to do with the rise of short-form content and the way the app has changed the nature of engagement, and it has major implications for the future of influencers and content creators.

The Impact of the TikTok “For You Page” 

Before 2022, TikTokers weren’t even on the lineup for VidCon, whose roots are squarely in the world of YouTube given its founding by YouTube “VlogBrothers” Hank and John Green. That year, after a two-year pandemic hiatus during which the popularity of TikTok sharply increased, TikTok also sponsored the event for the first (and, to date, only) time. But the arrival of TikTok creators has not been met with unanimous enthusiasm from attendees. Last year, TikToker Grace Africa, who has over 1 million followers, posted a TikTok in which she stood alone at a VidCon meet-and-greet, with not a single fan in sight.

Africa’s experience may reflect a side effect of changes wrought by TikTok’s “‘For You Page” (FYP), the app’s homepage that is hyper-curated to each individual. “On TikTok, who you follow hardly matters at all because of the default FYP comprised of algorithmically selected content versus a prioritization on follower count,” says Gahan. “Each piece of content has a chance to be seen and the best stuff can truly rise to the top.” That is different from other social platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, where “historically the big get bigger with newcomers left to pick up the scraps,” says Gahan. This is in part due to those platforms’ home page and algorithm formats tending to push already well-performing content, versus TikTok’s default FYP, which inundates users with newer content from creators they’ve never encountered, and often do not already follow.

“If you get rid of some of the creators on TikTok they’re going to be filled with more content because there’s just an influx,” says Rosenblum. “It makes the ‘For You Page’ the star of TikTok, oftentimes over the creators.”

This phenomenon has led to an oversaturation of successful creators coming from the TikTok platform, and simply too many creators for even the heaviest users of the app to be familiar with. “What it means to be a creator with a million followers means something very different than it used to four years ago,” says Gahan. “It’s inevitable that it’s less impactful just by the sheer number of creators since you’ve got your attention and the amount of eyeballs essentially split in half.”

Rosenblum and his partner Samir Chaudry, whose channel offers aspiring creators content about well-performing creators, have added two full-time writers and a Slack channel with dozens of contributors who keep track of the various parts of the internet for their newsletter The Publish Press.

For the VidCon team, it has meant having more creators on their radar than ever before. “The more platforms that come out and that have their own creator ecosystem, the more the creators that we just need to be aware of,” says Hickey. “Three or four years ago, we didn’t have thousands of TikTok creators that we had to go through.” 

At the conference, which is perhaps the best in-person reflection of what is happening with creators online, internet fame is not what it once was. “There are so many people that are quote-unquote famous and have large followings that when you put all of them in a room it can feel like no one is famous,” says Rosenblum.

A shift toward short-form content

But it’s not just the number of popular creators that has changed the meaning of a follow. The fast-paced, shorter-form content of TikTok, which tends to be consumed more passively as users scroll past it, has also contributed to a shift in creator-fan relationships. With the nature of YouTube’s long-form, often personable content, viewers tend to settle in to watch a video that may be as long as an episode of television.

YouTube viewers are also more inclined to experience a parasocial relationship, an intimate one-sided experience where the content makes them feel personally connected to the creator. Burriss recalls fans crying, shaking and not being able to speak when they met the duo at VidCon. “It’s a surreal connection because at first they know us, but we don’t really know them,” says Fabito.

Fans are just as eager to meet their favorite TikToker, says Sarah Tortoreti, SVP Marketing & Comms for VidCon, but the parasocial dynamic may be slightly different. “To them, they’re like Hollywood celebrities, even though they might not feel as though they have a true one-to-one relationship in the way that a lot of fans of O.G. YouTube creators do,” she says.

Engagement over follower count

For Rosenblum and Chaudry, reaching the 1 million subscriber milestone on their channel was a feat that took over 10 years to reach and one that was “a weight off of our shoulders.”

But it isn’t the end game. “The most important thing that we’ve come back to is building a brand over chasing follower count or over chasing views,” he says. “If we can make a consistent impact with a group of people, that’s how we’re going to build a long-term community and a long term business for ourselves.” Popular TikTokers may reach impressive numbers much faster than the duo did, but it doesn’t always translate into the same career prospects.

While follower count may open the door to opportunities, it is no longer the ultimate goal for creators. For those looking to partner with creators, such as social media marketers and conventions like VidCon, a creator’s engagement—a barometer of how much their followers interact with their content—is most significant. For many mid-tier and micro creators with followers in the thousands to hundreds of thousands, those engagement levels can be just as fruitful as large followings for more popular creators.

“Follower count alone does not show how rapid and engaged a community is,” says Gahan. “Somebody who’s able to tap even half of their audience and get that level of engagement and participation can have a robust and healthy community.”

Although many of these TikTokers may not be filling up rooms like Mr. Beast did at the 2022 VidCon, they still have an audience that includes eager fans hoping to engage with them in person. “We’re looking for them to have a fanbase that goes to these people over and over again versus just mindlessly scrolling,” says Tortoreti.

To Burriss and Fabito, who recently launched a new collaborative YouTube channel called SPICY FRUIT, the ability to evolve is also the key to their decades-long success as content creators and why they’ve even started making TikToks themselves. Now, TikTok is having a moment. In a few years, it may be another platform. “I have a lot of YouTube friends from the past that are like, ‘I miss the old ways,” says Burris. “But everything is going to change and nothing is forever. You’ve got to adapt.”

source https://time.com/6299379/tiktok-youtube-follow-count/

At Least 44 Dead After Suicide Bombing at Pakistan Political Rally

KHAR, Pakistan — A suicide bomber blew himself up at a political rally in a former stronghold of militants in northwest Pakistan bordering Afghanistan on Sunday, killing at least 44 people and wounding nearly 200 in an attack that a senior leader said was meant to weaken Pakistani Islamists.

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The Bajur district near the Afghan border was a stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban — a close ally of Afghanistan’s Taliban government — before the Pakistani army drove the militants out of the area. Supporters of hardline Pakistani cleric and political party leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman, whose Jamiat Ulema Islam generally supports regional Islamists, were meeting in Bajur in a hall close to a market outside the district capital. Party officials said Rehman was not at the rally but organizers added tents because so many supporters showed up, and party volunteers with batons were helping control the crowd.

Officials were announcing the arrival of Abdul Rasheed, a leader of the Jamiat Ulema Islam party, when the bomb went off in one of Pakistan’s bloodiest attacks in recent years.

Provincial police said in a statement that the attack was carried out by a suicide bomber who detonated his explosives vest close to the stage where several senior leaders of the party were sitting. It said initial investigations suggested the Islamic State group — which operates in Afghanistan and is an enemy of the Afghan Taliban — could be behind the attack, and officers were still investigating.

“There was dust and smoke around, and I was under some injured people from where I could hardly stand up, only to see chaos and some scattered limbs,” said Adam Khan, 45, who was knocked to the ground by the blast around 4 p.m. and hit by splinters in his leg and both hands.

The Pakistan Taliban, or TTP, said in a statement sent to The Associated Press that the bombing was aimed at setting Islamists against each other. Zabiullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Afghan Taliban, said on the social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, that “such crimes cannot be justified in any way.”

The Afghan Taliban’s seizure of power in Afghanistan in mid-August 2021 emboldened the TTP. They unilaterally ended a cease-fire agreement with the Pakistani government in November, and have stepped up attacks across the country.

The bombing came hours before the arrival of Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng in Islamabad, where he was to participate in an event to mark a decade of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, or CPEC, a sprawling package under which Beijing has invested billions of dollars in Pakistan.

In recent months, China has helped Pakistan avoid a default on sovereign payments. However, some Chinese nationals have also been targeted by militants in northwestern Pakistan and elsewhere.

Feroz Jamal, the provincial information minister, told The Associated Press that so far 44 people had been “martyred” and nearly 200 wounded in the bombing.

The bombing was one of the four worst attacks in the northwest since 2014, when 147 people, mostly schoolchildren, were killed in a Taliban attack on an army-run school in Peshawar. In January, 74 people were killed in a bombing at a mosque in Peshawar. n February, more than 100 people, mostly policemen, died in a bombing at a mosque inside a high-security compound housing Peshawar police headquarters.

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and President Arif Alvi condemned the attack and asked officials to provide all possible assistance to the wounded and the bereaved families. Sharif later, in a phone call to Rehman, the head of the JUI, conveyed his condolences to him and assured him that those who orchestrated the attack would be punished.

The U.S. Embassy in Islamabad also condemned the attack. In a post on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, it expressed its condolences to the families and loved ones of the victims killed in the attack..

Maulana Ziaullah, the local chief of Rehman’s party, was among the dead. JUI leaders Rasheed and former lawmaker Maulana Jamaluddin were also on the stage but escaped unhurt.

Rasheed, the regional chief of the party, said the attack was an attempt to remove JUI from the field before parliamentary elections in November, but he said such tactics would not work. The bombing drew nationwide condemnation, with the ruling and opposition parties extending condolences to the families of those who died in the attack.

Rehman is considered to be a pro-Taliban cleric and his political party is part of the coalition government in Islamabad. Meetings are being organized across the country to mobilize supporters for the upcoming elections.

“Many of our fellows lost their lives and many more wounded in this incident. I will ask the federal and provincial administrations to fully investigate this incident and provide due compensation and medical facilities to the affected ones,” Rasheed said.

Mohammad Wali, another attendant at the rally, said he was listening to a speaker address the crowd when the huge explosion temporarily deafened him.

“I was near the water dispenser to fetch a glass of water when the bomb exploded, throwing me to the ground,” he said. “We came to the meeting with enthusiasm but ended up at the hospital seeing crying, wounded people and sobbing relatives taking the bodies of their loved ones.”

—Riaz Khan reported from Peshawar. Associated Press writer Munir Ahmad contributed from Islamabad.

source https://time.com/6299489/suicide-bomb-pakistan/

What to Know About the U.S. Summer Uptick in Covid-19 Cases

An increase in the number of Covid-19 cases from the past few weeks could be indicative of a slight summer Covid-19 wave in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Hospital admissions, test positivity rates, and emergency department visits by people who have contracted the virus have all seen a national uptick since mid July, though numbers remain relatively low. 

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“U.S. COVID-19 rates are still near historic lows after 7 months of steady declines,” CDC spokesperson Kathleen Conley said in a statement to CBS News. “The U.S. has experienced increases in COVID-19 during the past three summers, so it’s not surprising to see an uptick.” 

Experts note, however, that there is still insufficient evidence that this rise will lead to a bigger outbreak, though it is something to watch. More than 144,000,000 vaccine doses have been distributed in the U.S., and some 56.4 million people have an updated booster dose. 

Research from the CDC also shows that most Americans have some level of protection against the virus, as 96% of blood donors over the age of 16 had antibodies from previous infection or vaccination. 

Here’s what to know about the uptick in cases. 

What does the CDC data show?

CDC data shows that hospital admissions related to Covid-19 had risen by 10.3% from July 9 to July 15, amounting to an increase of more than 7,000 hospitalizations across the U.S. The percentage of people diagnosed with the virus after an emergency room visit also rose over the past few weeks from around 0.5% in mid-to-late June to 0.78% on July 24th. 

Deaths due to Covid-19 remain around the same. Data from the last three weeks are still being updated, but the week of July 1 saw 494 Covid-related deaths, compared to the week of June 24 at 549.

But overall, charts tracking this information show that this summer’s current data is still on the lower end of the most recent surge, which happened this winter. 

The week of December 31, 2022 and January 7, 2023 saw hospitalizations at more than 44,000. Similarly, hospital admissions from July 2022 remained around that same 40,000 marker. That is compared to the highest rate of hospital admissions seen on the week of January 15, 2022, when some 150,000 people were in the hospital due to Covid. 

Some other countries have also seen an increase in cases

While the U.S. has seen a slight increase in cases, other countries have similarly shared concerns about a Covid-19 wave this summer.  

Officials in Japan say they’ve seen an increase in the number of Covid-19 cases increase fourfold from May to July, the Japan Times reports. They added that they could not predict the magnitude of the next Covid-19 wave, but cautioned people to be careful when meeting with people who may be more vulnerable to the virus.

Covid-19 also remains a serious risk in China, which experienced its own surge in cases earlier this year. The country eased their Covid-19 restrictions in December, causing a wave of infections this winter.

China’s second Covid-19 wave began in April 2023 and lasted until June. Forecasters predicted China would see anywhere from 11 million to 65 million cases of Covid-19 a week in June, but official stats about Covid-19 related deaths and infections are unclear as experts question the country’s official Covid-19 statistics.

source https://time.com/6299476/summer-uptick-covid-19-us/

African Leaders Leave Russia Summit Without Grain Deal or Path to End War in Ukraine

NAIROBI, Kenya  — African leaders are leaving two days of meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin with little to show for their requests to resume a deal that kept grain flowing from Ukraine and to find a path to end the war there.

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Putin in a press conference late Saturday following the Russia-Africa summit said Russia’s termination of the grain deal earlier this month caused a rise in grain prices that benefits Russian companies. He added that Moscow would share some of those revenues with the “poorest nations.”

That commitment, with no details, follows Putin’s promise to start shipping 25,000 to 50,000 tons of grain for free to each of six African nations in the next three to four months — an amount dwarfed by the 725,000 tons shipped by the U.N. World Food Program to several hungry countries, African and otherwise, under the grain deal. Russia plans to send the free grain to Burkina Faso, Zimbabwe, Mali, Somalia, Eritrea and Central African Republic.

Fewer than 20 of Africa’s 54 heads of state or government attended the Russia summit, while 43 attended the previous gathering in 2019, reflecting concerns over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine even as Moscow seeks more allies on the African continent of 1.3 billion people. Putin praised Africa as a rising center of power in the world, while the Kremlin blamed “outrageous” Western pressure for discouraging some African countries from showing up.

The presidents of Egypt and South Africa were among the most outspoken on the need to resume the grain deal.

“We would like the Black Sea initiative to be implemented and that the Black Sea should be open,” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said. “We are not here to plead for donations for the African continent.”

Putin also said Russia would analyze African leaders’ peace proposal for Ukraine, whose details have not been publicly shared. But the Russian leader asked: “Why do you ask us to pause fire? We can’t pause fire while we’re being attacked.”

The next significant step in peace efforts instead appears to be a Ukrainian-organized peace summit hosted by Saudi Arabia in August. Russia is not invited.

Africa’s nations make up the largest voting bloc at the United Nations and have been more divided than any other region on General Assembly resolutions criticizing Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Delegations at the summit in St. Petersburg roamed exhibits of weapons, a reminder of Russia’s role as the top arms supplier to the African continent.

Putin in his remarks on Saturday also downplayed his absence from the BRICS economic summit in South Africa next month amid a controversy over an arrest warrant issued against him by the International Criminal Court. His presence there, Putin said, is not “more important than my presence here, in Russia.”

source https://time.com/6299471/africa-leaders-russian-summit-grain-deal/

Judge Blocks Arkansas Law Allowing Librarians to Be Criminally Charged Over ‘Harmful’ Materials

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Arkansas is temporarily blocked from enforcing a law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors, a federal judge ruled Saturday.

U.S. District Judge Timothy L. Brooks issued a preliminary injunction against the law, which also would have created a new process to challenge library materials and request that they be relocated to areas not accessible by kids. The measure, signed by Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders earlier this year, was set to take effect Aug. 1.

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A coalition that included the Central Arkansas Library System in Little Rock had challenged the law, saying fear of prosecution under the measure could prompt libraries and booksellers to no longer carry titles that could be challenged.

The judge also rejected a motion by the defendants, which include prosecuting attorneys for the state, seeking to dismiss the case.

The ACLU of Arkansas, which represents some of the plaintiffs, applauded the court’s ruling, saying that the absence of a preliminary injunction would have jeopardized First Amendment rights.

“The question we had to ask was — do Arkansans still legally have access to reading materials? Luckily, the judicial system has once again defended our highly valued liberties,” Holly Dickson, the executive director of the ACLU in Arkansas, said in a statement.

The lawsuit comes as lawmakers in an increasing number of conservative states are pushing for measures making it easier to ban or restrict access to books. The number of attempts to ban or restrict books across the U.S. last year was the highest in the 20 years the American Library Association has been tracking such efforts.

Laws restricting access to certain materials or making it easier to challenge them have been enacted in several other states, including Iowa, Indiana and Texas.

Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin said in an email Saturday that his office would be “reviewing the judge’s opinion and will continue to vigorously defend the law.”

The executive director of Central Arkansas Library System, Nate Coulter, said the judge’s 49-page decision recognized the law as censorship, a violation of the Constitution and wrongly maligning librarians.

“As folks in southwest Arkansas say, this order is stout as horseradish!” he said in an email.

“I’m relieved that for now the dark cloud that was hanging over CALS’ librarians has lifted,” he added.

Cheryl Davis, general counsel for the Authors Guild, said the organization is “thrilled” about the decision. She said enforcing this law “is likely to limit the free speech rights of older minors, who are capable of reading and processing more complex reading materials than young children can.”

The Arkansas lawsuit names the state’s 28 local prosecutors as defendants, along with Crawford County in west Arkansas. A separate lawsuit is challenging the Crawford County library’s decision to move children’s books that included LGBTQ+ themes to a separate portion of the library.

The plaintiffs challenging Arkansas’ restrictions also include the Fayetteville and Eureka Springs Carnegie public libraries, the American Booksellers Association and the Association of American Publishers.

source https://time.com/6299466/judge-blocks-arkansas-law-allowing-librarians-to-be-criminally-charged-over-harmful-materials/

The UFO Congressional Hearing Was ‘Insulting’, a top Pentagon Official Says

WASHINGTON — A top Pentagon official has attacked this week’s widely watched congressional hearing on UFOs, calling the claims “insulting” to employees who are investigating sightings and accusing a key witness of not cooperating with the official U.S. government investigation.

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Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick’s letter, published on his personal LinkedIn page and circulated Friday across social media, criticizes much of the testimony from a retired Air Force intelligence officer that energized believers in extraterrestrial life and produced headlines around the world.

Retired Air Force Maj. David Grusch testified Wednesday that the U.S. has concealed what he called a “multi-decade” program to collect and reverse-engineer “UAPs,” or unidentified aerial phenomena, the official government term for UFOs.

Part of what the U.S. has recovered, Grusch testified, were non-human “biologics,” which he said he had not seen but had learned about from “people with direct knowledge of the program.”

A career intelligence officer, Kirkpatrick was named a year ago to lead the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, which was intended to centralize investigations into UAPs. The Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies have been pushed by Congress in recent years to better investigate reports of devices flying at unusual speeds or trajectories as a national security concern.

Kirkpatrick wrote the letter Thursday and the Defense Department confirmed Friday that he posted it in a personal capacity. Kirkpatrick declined to comment on the letter Friday.

He writes in part, “I cannot let yesterday’s hearing pass without sharing how insulting it was to the officers of the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community who chose to join AARO, many with not unreasonable anxieties about the career risks this would entail.”

“They are truth-seekers, as am I,” Kirkpatrick said. “But you certainly would not get that impression from yesterday’s hearing.”

In a separate statement, Pentagon spokeswoman Sue Gough denied other allegations made by Grusch before a House Oversight subcommittee.

The Pentagon “has no information that any individual has been harmed or killed as a result of providing information” about UFO objects, Gough said. Nor has the Pentagon discovered “any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”

Kirkpatrick wrote, “AARO has yet to find any credible evidence to support the allegations of any reverse engineering program for non-human technology.”

He had briefed reporters in December that the Pentagon was investigating “several hundreds” of new reports following a push to have pilots and others come forward with any sightings.

Kirkpatrick wrote in his letter that allegations of “retaliation, to include physical assault and hints of murder, are extraordinarily serious, which is why law enforcement is a critical member of the AARO team, specifically to address and take swift action should anyone come forward with such claims.”

“Yet, contrary to assertions made in the hearing, the central source of those allegations has refused to speak with AARO,” Kirkpatrick said. He did not explicitly name Grusch, who alleged he faced retaliation and declined to answer when a congressman asked him if anyone had been murdered to hide information about UFOs.

Messages left at a phone number and email address for Grusch were not returned Friday.

source https://time.com/6299432/the-ufo-congressional-hearing/

U.S. Announces $345 Million Military Aid Package for Taiwan

WASHINGTON — The United States has announced $345 million in military aid for Taiwan, in what is the Biden administration’s first major package drawing on America’s own stockpiles to help Taiwan counter China.

The White House said Friday the package would include defense, education and training for the Taiwanese. Washington will send man-portable air defense systems, or MANPADS, intelligence and surveillance capabilities, firearms and missiles, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.

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U.S. lawmakers have been pressuring the Pentagon and White House to speed weapons to Taiwan. The goals are to help it counter China and to deter China from considering attacking, by providing Taipei enough weaponry that it would make the price of invasion too high.

While Chinese diplomats protested the move, Taiwan’s representative office in the U.S. said the administration’s decision to pull arms and other materiel from its stores provided “an important tool to support Taiwan’s self-defense.” In a statement, it pledged to work with the United States to maintain “peace, stability and the status quo across the Taiwan Strait.”

Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense also expressed its appreciation in a statement that thanked “the U.S. for its firm commitment to Taiwan’s security.”

The package is in addition to nearly $19 billion in military salesof F-16s and other major weapons systems that the U.S. has approved for Taiwan. Delivery of those weapons has been hampered by supply chain issues that started during the COVID-19 pandemic and have been exacerbated by the global defense industrial base pressures created by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The difference is that this aid is part of a presidential authority approved by Congress last year to draw weapons from current U.S. military stockpiles — so Taiwan will not have to wait for military production and sales. This gets weapons delivered faster than providing funding for new weapons.

The Pentagon has used a similar authority to get billions of dollars worth of munitions to Ukraine.

Taiwan split from China in 1949 amid civil war. Chinese President Xi Jinping maintains China’s right to take over the now self-ruled island, by force if necessary. China has accused the U.S. of turning Taiwan into a “powder keg” through the billions of dollars in weapons sales it has pledged.

The U.S. maintains a “One China” policy under which it does not recognize Taiwan’s as an independent country and has no formal diplomatic relations with the island in deference to Beijing. However, U.S. law requires a credible defense for Taiwan and for the U.S. to treat all threats to the island as matters of “grave concern.”

Getting stockpiles of weapons to Taiwan now, before an attack begins, is one of the lessons the U.S. has learned from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Pentagon deputy defense secretary Kathleen Hicks told The Associated Press earlier this year.

Ukraine “was more of a cold-start approach than the planned approach we have been working on for Taiwan, and we will apply those lessons,” Hicks said. Efforts to resupply Taiwan after a conflict erupted would be complicated because it is an island, she said.

China regularly sends warships and planes across the center linein the Taiwan Strait that provides a buffer between the sides, as well as into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, in an effort to intimidate the island’s 23 million people and wear down its military capabilities.

Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, said in a statement that Beijing was “firmly opposed” to U.S. military ties with Taiwan. The U.S. should “stop selling arms to Taiwan” and “stop creating new factors that could lead to tensions in the Taiwan Strait,” Liu said.

source https://time.com/6299419/us-military-aid-taiwan/

Mega Millions Jackpot Climbs to $1.05 Billion

The Mega Millions jackpot climbed to an estimated $1.05 billion Friday night, only the fifth time in the history of the game that the grand prize has reached into the billions.

No one managed to beat the massive odds and match all six numbers for Friday’s estimated $940 million jackpot. The numbers drawn were: 5, 10, 28, 52, 63 and the gold ball 18.

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There have been 29 straight draws without a Mega Millions jackpot winner since the last grand prize ticket on April 18.

The $1.05 billion prize up for grabs in the next drawing Tuesday night would be for a sole winner choosing to be paid through an annuity, with annual payments over 30 years. Jackpot winners almost always opt for a lump sum payment, which for Tuesday’s drawing would be an estimated $527.9 million.

The potential jackpot is the fourth-largest in the game and the fifth over $1 billion, Mega Millions said in a statement early Saturday.

Although there were no jackpot winners, one ticket in Pennsylvania was worth $5 million and another in the state connected for $1 million. There also were $1 million winners in Arizona, California and New York, Mega Millions said.

It has been less than two weeks since someone in Los Angeleswon a $1.08 billion Powerball prize that ranked as the sixth-largest in U.S. history. The winner of the prize is still a mystery.

Lottery jackpots grow so large because the odds of winning are so small. For Mega Millions, the odds of winning the jackpot are about 1 in 302.6 million.

Winners also would be subject to federal taxes, and many states also tax lottery winnings.

Mega Millions is played in 45 states, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

source https://time.com/6299406/mega-millions-jackpot-climbs/

Cases of Tick-Borne Illnesses Are on the Rise. Some Experts Believe Climate Change is the Cause

(NEW YORK) — In 2022, doctors recorded the first confirmed case of tick-borne encephalitis virus acquired in the United Kingdom.

It began with a bike ride.

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A 50-year-old man was mountain biking in the North Yorkshire Moors, a national park in England known for its vast expanses of woodland and purple heather. At some point on his ride, at least one black-legged tick burrowed into his skin. Five days later, the mountain biker developed symptoms commonly associated with a viral infection — fatigue, muscle pain, fever.

At first, he seemed to be on the mend, but about a week later, he started to lose coordination. An MRI scan revealed he had developed encephalitis, or swelling of the brain. He had been infected with tick-borne encephalitis, or TBE, a potentially deadly disease that experts say is spreading into new regions due in large part to global warming.

For the past 30 years, the U.K. has become roughly 1 degree Celsius warmer (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) on average compared to the historical norm. Studies have shown that several tick-borne illnesses are becoming more prevalent because of climate change. Public health officials are particularly concerned about TBE, which is deadlier than more well-known tick diseases such as Lyme, due to the way it has quickly jumped from country to country.

Gábor Földvári, an expert at the Center for Ecological Research in Hungary, said the effects of climate change on TBE are unmistakable.

“It’s a really common problem which was absent 20 or 30 years ago,” he added.

Ticks can’t survive more than a couple of days in temperatures below zero, but they’re able to persevere in very warm conditions as long as there’s enough humidity in the environment. As Earth warms on average and winters become milder, ticks are becoming active earlier in the year. Climate change affects ticks at every stage of their life cycle — egg, six-legged larva, eight-legged nymph, and adult — by extending the length of time ticks actively feed on humans and animals. Even a fraction of a degree of global warming creates more opportunity for ticks to breed and spread disease.

“The number of overwintering ticks is increasing and in spring there is high activity of ticks,” said Gerhard Dobler, a doctor who works at the German Center for Infection Research. “This may increase the contact between infected ticks and humans and cause more disease.”

Since the virus was first discovered in the 1930s, it has mainly been found in Europe and parts of Asia, including Siberia and the northern regions of China. The same type of tick carries the disease in these areas, but the virus subtype — of which there are several — varies by region. In places where the virus is endemic, tick bites are the leading cause of encephalitis, though the virus can also be acquired by consuming raw milk from tick-infected cattle. TBE has not been found in the United States, though a few Americans have contracted the virus while traveling in Europe.

According to the World Health Organization, there are between 10,000 and 12,000 cases of the disease in Europe and northern Asia each year. The total number of cases worldwide is likely an undercount, as case counts are unreliable in countries where the population has low awareness of the disease and local health departments are not required to report cases to the government. But experts say there has been a clear uptick since the 1990s, especially in countries where the disease used to be uncommon.

“We see an increasing trend of human cases,” Dobler said, citing rising cases in Austria, Germany, Estonia, Latvia, and other European countries.

TBE is not always life-threatening. On average, about 10 percent of infections develop into the severe form of the illness, which often requires hospitalization. Once severe symptoms develop, however, there is no cure for the disease. The death rate among those who develop severe symptoms ranges from 1 to 35 percent, depending on the virus subtype, with the far-eastern subtype being the deadliest. In Europe, for example, 16 deaths were recorded in 2020 out of roughly 3,700 confirmed cases.

Up to half of survivors of severe TBE have lingering neurological problems, such as sleeplessness and aggressiveness. Many infected people are asymptomatic or only develop mild symptoms, Dobler said, so the true caseload could be up to 10 times higher in some regions than reports estimate.

While there are two TBE vaccines in circulation, vaccine uptake is low in regions where the virus is new. Neither vaccine covers all of the three most prevalent sub-types, and a 2020 study called for development of a new vaccine that offers higher protection against the virus. In Austria, for example, the TBE vaccine rate is near 85 percent, Dobler said, and yet the number of human cases continues to trend upward — a sign, in his opinion, of climate change’s influence on the disease.

In central and northern Europe, where for the past decade average annual temperatures have been roughly 2 degrees Celsius above pre industrial times (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), documented cases of the virus have been rising in recent decades — evidence, some experts say, that rising global temperatures are conducive to more active ticks. The parasitic arachnids are also noted to be moving further north and higher in altitude as formerly inhospitable terrain warms to their preferred temperature range. Northern parts of Russia are a prime example of where TBE-infected ticks have moved north. Some previously tick-free mountains in Germany, Bavaria, and Austria are reporting a 20-fold increase in cases over the past 10 years.

The virus’s growing shadow across Europe, Asia, and now parts of the United Kingdom throws the dangers of tick-borne disease into sharp relief. The U.K. bicyclist who was the first domestically acquired case of the disease survived his bout with TBE, but the episode serves as a warning to the region: though the virus is still rare, it may not stay that way for long.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story is part of a collaboration between The Associated Press and Grist exploring the intersection of climate change and infectious diseases.

source https://time.com/6299276/tick-borne-illnesses-climate-change/

Hulu’s Sleeper Hit This Fool Is One of the Funniest Shows on TV

Need a laugh? Unfortunately, it’s a fallow time for small-screen comedy, as concurrent SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes have put Hollywood productions on hold. Late-night shows and SNL have been on hiatus since May. Upcoming seasons of streaming favorites like Hacks and Big Mouth are indefinitely delayed. Abbott Elementary, Ghosts, and just about every other network sitcom has been pushed off the fall schedule. The good news is, there are plenty of funny shows already on streaming services (that you can enjoy with the blessing of the unions, which have yet to call for consumer boycotts). I don’t just mean moldy standbys like Friends and The Office. Hulu’s This Fool, which debuted last year, is one of the most consistently hilarious shows on TV. And its full, 10-episode second season arrives on the platform on July 28.  

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As in many classic sitcoms, the premise is simple. Co-creator and stand-up comic Chris Estrada stars as Julio Lopez, a 30-year-old South Central L.A. native still living at home with his mom (Laura Patalano) and grandma (Julia Vera) while working for a nonprofit, Hugs Not Thugs, that reorients ex-gang members for the straight world. His cousin Luis (Frankie Quiñones) happens to be a former gang member, who has just been released from prison after a long sentence. A nerdy kid who grew up to be a repressed, self-abnegating adult, Julio has nothing but bad memories of Luis, who used to bully him. But they’re forced into close proximity anyway, because Luis has nowhere to go but his aunt’s house and nothing to do but Hugs Not Thugs.

“This fool” is a term of grudging affection as well as a pejorative, and a similar mix of comical exasperation, tough love, and good-natured ribbing defines both the cousins’ relationship and the tone of the show. For Julio, who’s stuck in an on-again-off-again cycle with his longtime girlfriend, Maggie (Michelle Ortiz), and risks aging into a lefty crank like his boss, Minister Payne (the great Michael Imperioli), the incorrigible Luis is a well-timed shock to the status quo. And for Luis, Julio is a whiny pain in the ass who just might pester him into getting his life back on track. 

Estrada cleverly reverses their predicaments by the beginning of Season 2. Now, Luis has a job as a security guard at a men’s formalwear shop—and an unequivocally single Julio is also unemployed after Payne tries and spectacularly fails to peddle his sexual services to a couple of billionaire benefactors in exchange for a crucial donation to the perennially broke Hugs Not Thugs. At least he’s finally moved out of his mom’s house… and into the grimy, illegal garage apartment that Luis rents from a local character, Don Emilio (Ramón Franco). The neighbors are more bothered by Emilio’s rooster, whose crowing wakes them up at the crack of dawn.

The best comedies can be incredibly smart and gloriously stupid at once. This Fool strikes an ideal balance, grounding its central odd couple in the vividly specific dynamics of a working-class L.A. neighborhood where gangs and poverty persist, good jobs are hard to find, and cultural tensions can flare up between nonwhite communities as Black families live side-by-side with Latin American immigrants. Social consciousness is baked into the Hugs Not Thugs story line; this is a show about second chances. And the characters are richly observed, from Patalano’s obsessively frugal Esperanza to Luis, a reactive schemer whose soft center is always visible beneath his tough exterior thanks to a standout performance from Quiñones.

Instead of starting with an agenda and stirring in jokes, Estrada lets his commentary come out organically, through plots that reflect the daily absurdities of urban life and humor whose target is often the rich and amoral. Scenarios range from purposely banal (one Season 2 episode opens with a pair of white office drones puzzling over what to write in a retirement card for Esperanza, who’s cleaned their space for 23 years) to the borderline surrealism of an excellent two-part episode that finds Julio and Luis taken hostage in a bodega robbery. (Julio’s bored mom and grandma eventually show up to spectate.) The comedy is both gleefully, raunchily physical—the size of Payne’s, er, endowment is a running joke—and weirdly observant. “You look like you eat oven-baked chips,” one character scoffs at Julio, and he really does.

If the challenge of a debut season is to establish compelling characters, a vividly realized social world, and a distinctive voice while also moving the story along, then it’s in the follow-up that a show must prove its potential for longevity. Like Reservation Dogs and The Bear (to name two of the most acclaimed comedies of the current decade), This Fool uses its second season to capitalize on the character development it accomplished in the first, remixing the ensemble into new configurations, adjusting the backdrop, and devoting whole episodes to individual supporting players. Story lines focused on the cousins’ love lives can feel a little too familiar; the female characters could use some more depth. But when the show is in its sweet spot, with Julio and Luis and sometimes Payne busting each other’s chops and getting in their own way, it’s as funny as anything you’re likely to watch in this cursed year for comedy.

source https://time.com/6298208/this-fool-season-2-review/

The Misdirected Anger at Bob Iger Risks Seeing the Bigger Picture

Hollywood loves a good foil—but reality can be more complex than that.  

In recent weeks, actors and writers in Hollywood have deemed Disney CEO Bob Iger as a cartoon caricature of a pampered, out-of-touch movie mogul.

On July 25, Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston raged against Iger for “taking away our dignity and giving it to robots.” Days before, SAG president Fran Drescher called Iger an “ignoramus” who should be “locked behind doors.”

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Iger’s sin was that he attended the industry’s Sun Valley business retreat and then, while not directly involved in the strike negotiations, commented that “one has to be realistic about the business environment.” He further said that the actors and writers do need to be “compensated fairly based on the value that they delivered,” and cited the recent deal with the Directors Guild as a model.

While writers and actors are right to raise issues of fairness and accountability within the workplace, perhaps Iger is not the person who should be on the receiving end of their ire. For there is a larger system at work we must scrutinize—where tech giants reign supreme and are straining the traditional entertainment business model.

Today, the content producers are hardly a monolith but are actually a kaleidoscope of disparate players. Disney is just one of five major studios – the others being NBCUniversal, Paramount/CBS, Sony, and Warner Bros. The film studios are just one of many sets of ascendant Hollywood players who have overwhelmed the old studios in both power and money, ranging from the streaming giants such as Netflix, Amazon, and Apple, to showrunners including many big-name actor-producers and director-producers, to private equity players getting in on the action such as Apollo, Blackstone, and KKR.

The ire directed at Iger risks missing this broader picture. The streaming tech giants are disdainful of the actors and writers understandably demanding fair compensation. The actors need the streaming content viewership data and streaming residuals, but the streamers prefer to release only total subscription count and not show-by-show breakdowns; while the traditional business model of studios and TV networks have long trumpeted viewership through box office grosses and Nielsen ratings, sharing profit with creative talent. Legacy entertainment businesses like Disney have added offerings such as Disney+ that mirror those of the streamers, but Netflix has tens of millions more subscribers than Disney+, and Netflix produces about 400 original content titles annually while Disney merely produces about 15 theatricals and about 40 TV shows every year.

The writers and actors are right to raise issues of fairness regarding job displacement, intellectual property ownership, authorship credit, and streaming residual payments with the intrusive threats of AI. But ironically, by fanning the flames of the strike, some of these actors—who are conflicted because they double as showrunners and have their own production deals with the studios and streamers— are actually undercutting their own bargaining positions, as the studios will likely soon invoke force majeure to suspend many of the overly-generous deals that went to big-name showrunners during the heyday of the streaming wars and trim their content pipelines of gluttony. Some of these were deals worth upwards of a whopping $250 million and which amounted to very little, sometimes reportedly just to buy them off from working with a competitor. Furthermore, it is the showrunners themselves who will be making most decisions on how and when to integrate AI into the creative process, not the studios who merely fund and distribute their films.

Read More: ‘They Are Doing Bad Things to Good People’: Fran Drescher on Why SAG-AFTRA Is Striking

For years, Iger has always been a popular champion of creative talent. He melded the actors, directors, writers, and producers of the Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Fox universes seamlessly into Disney over two decades, and upon his return, instantly re-organized Disney to unravel his predecessor Bob Chapek‘s centralized bureaucratic control. Furthermore, Iger restored Disney’s reputation after it fell dramatically when Chapek capitulated to Florida’s Governor DeSantis on the “Don’t Say Gay” legislation.

These attacks on Iger are being exploited by ideologues and cynics, with some suggesting that Iger has already failed in his comeback and should be replaced after only six months. These spectators do not know much about genuine turnaround management. Returning CEOs have restored their companies to greatness over years, not weeks. Starbucks stock was down 48.5% one year after Howard Schultz returned to Starbucks in 2008, but after three years had returned 63%; likewise, after Michael Dell returned to Dell in 2007, the stock fell 17.3% a year into his tenure but Dell is now at least two times more valuable.  Meanwhile Steve Jobs, who returned to Apple in 1997 took three years for Apple’s stunning stock rebound of 403%. Iger’s last tour of duty shows he has the credibility and competence to deliver, with 600% total shareholder returns and 11 of the 12 top all-time box-office hits during his previous stint.

There was a time when all-powerful media titans showed a tin ear towards creativity. Hollywood mogul Samuel Goldwyn once complained, “Here I am paying big money to you writers and what for? All you do is change the words. If you want to send a message, send a telegram.” As much as the strikers nostalgically conjure up those ghosts from the past as foils, today’s media mosaic is far more complex. We believe Iger is genuinely grappling with unprecedented business challenges amidst tectonic industry shifts.

source https://time.com/6299181/bob-iger-hollywood-big-tech-essay/

A Russian Human-Rights Champion on Why Putin’s Soviet Propaganda Is So Dangerous

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

To appreciate the power of a myth, let’s take a quick visit to post-Soviet Russia.

In the weeks after Vladimir Putin came to power in early 2000, the new Russian president was enjoying a 77% job approval rating, a definite improvement from his 31% outlook just a few months earlier while he was biding time as then-President Boris Yeltsen’s prime minister inside a fast-unspooling regime. Putin had grand designs for his country, and his new constituents seemed to want to help him build his proverbial temple to Soviet nostalgia. Putin had watched in horror through the 1990s as democratic ideals came in fits and twitches after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He professed to be an agent of change, a steadying hand, a steward of the rebooted nation’s deep history. But Russia was coming out of an inflation tailspin of 85%, unemployment was stuck in the double digits, and the promises of reform were not making life much better. He didn’t have much room for error, and he knew it.

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The answer? Putin basically promised to Make Russia Great Again, and launched a concerted effort to invoke the nostalgia of the Soviet empire. 

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Putin has made no secret that he sees the end of the Soviet system as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” one that has been an animating tragedy that he’s been trying to undo over almost a quarter century leading that petrostate. To accomplish this, however, he needed to inspire—not his strongest suit as a stiff former KGB spook who famously has little time for pleasantries. But Russia’s grand history? That was something Putin could work with. So over the last two-plus decades, Putin has enmeshed Russia’s glory days, including its cruel Soviet era, with the present. As TIME’s then-editor Richard Stengel explained in an essay announcing Putin as our Person of the Year in 2007: “Russia lives in history—and history lives in Russia.”

The result has been a crude re-Stalinization of sorts, or a systematic rehabilitation of the brutal Soviet figure who led his colossus for 30 years until his death in 1953. The last time Russia’s most respected independent pollsters, Levada, asked about Joseph Stalin, a stunning 51% of respondents had positive views of him. That 2019 survey found just 15% of Russians offering negative views of the man who created the Gulag system that operated until 1987. An eye-popping 70% of Russians said Stalin’s contributions to the country’s history were a net positive. By contrast, Mikail Gorbachev, the first and last President of the Soviet Union who set in motion democratic reforms, enjoyed a 15% positive reaction when Russians were last asked about him in 2017. 

Much of that is thanks to Putin’s decades-long propaganda project, which has taken on new geopolitical urgency during the war in Ukraine, and now matters more than ever. 

“The majority of Russians still see their glory in the forcible restoration of the Russian Empire,” Oleksandra Matviichuk, who runs a major human rights group in Ukraine, the Center for Civil Liberties, tells TIME. “The success of Ukraine will provide a chance for the democratic future of Russia, because it will provide the push for people to reflect that maybe it’s not OK in the 21st Century to invade other countries and kill people to erode their identity. Maybe it’s better to find our glory in something else.”

Matviichuk visited TIME’s Washington Bureau this week, sitting alongside two other representatives of groups co-honored with a Nobel Peace Prize last year. One was Aleksandr Cherkasov, chairman-in-exile of Russian human rights organization Memorial, which researched Stalin’s systems, organized sites of remembrance for his victims, and documented the sins of the Soviet era as a warning against repetition. It was shut down by the state in 2021, right before the country invaded Ukraine.  Cherkasov says that the lessons he learned from ferreting out the truth should be applied now to try to dismantle Putin’s powerful propaganda effort to help Ukraine win the war. “Right now, we have a tremendous task ahead of us,” he says. “We understand that we need to work on the Soviet past, and it’s a very complex past. But we also have 35 years—which is half of the 70 years of the Soviet period—in the post-Soviet period, which is no less complicated.”

Adds Matviichuk, whose organization has documented 45,000 examples of war crimes Russia has committed in Ukraine—and counting: “Now, we are in the situation where Russia wants to return us to the past. But the future plays against Russia. That is why Russia will lose, sooner or later.”

She is right, at least when it comes to invented legends. Myths are fickle beasts. In a parallel reality of his creation, Putin is a popular and decisive leader determined to restore glory to Russia. In another reality—one closer attuned to the real world—Putin is presiding over a fragile autocracy that survives only because his pact with oligarchs allows them to share the spoils of a kleptocracy. (Oh, and nukes.)

“The propaganda has roots in the imperialistic culture of Russia,” says Matviichuk. “People in Russia still need to provide a reflection of their imperialistic culture.”

Thanks to an unmatched propaganda machine—described in detail by TIME’s Vera Bergengruen here—Putin has mostly prevailed in sparking that invented and often perverted memory, at least at home. (After his invasion of Georgia in 2008 fell flat, Putin learned the lesson of trying to spin on the cheap and he almost tripled the propaganda budget over the three years that followed. RT, a broadcasting effort masquerading as a news station, now spends $300 million annually for Russian-language pro-Kremlin programming.)

But Putin’s war in Ukraine may be testing that perceived glory more than at any time in living memory. New polling from Levada reveals the most pessimistic Russian population in 15 years; 58% believe that “hard times are yet to come,” and another quarter think they’re already there, according to polling released this month. Among the naysayers, almost half point to the invasion of Ukraine and the attenuating death tolls. One independent analysis puts the Russian death toll at almost 50,000. 

Still, 76% of Russians in the same poll said they trusted Putin. And when asked if the fighting in Ukraine was heading toward eventually ensnaring NATO, 60% answered in the affirmative last month, up 12 points from a year earlier.

All of which is why the trio of human rights leaders made the trek to Washington to meet with think tanks, administration officials, and journalists to make the case that helping to land a decisive win against Russia could reset not just Ukraine’s future, but could force a rethinking of what Russia looks like after Putin—a question the West is hesitant to reckon with. (TIME’s Brian Bennett has an assessment of the Nobel Laureates’ visit here.)

“Without justice, we have never sustained peace,” Matviichuk told us.

Left unsaid, of course was this: without truth, there can be no meaningful justice. And, at the moment, Soviet-style spin has gummed up the gears of that churn of accurate information to the point of evading accountability. We all think Putin is building a scaffolding to build and defend political power; he may actually be designing a system to evade any comeuppance at all. After all, if no one can agree to the facts of an offense, did the crime even take place? That’s a problem with big stakes not just for Russians, but for the whole Western world seeking stability in the region. As Cherkasov said in our conference room here in D.C.: “Houston, we all have a problem.”

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source https://time.com/6299212/a-russian-human-rights-champion-on-why-putins-soviet-propaganda-is-so-dangerous/

The U.S. Should Ditch AC and Use Middle Eastern Techniques to Cool its Cities

As heat waves break records across the U.S., more Americans are relying on air conditioning than ever before. Approximately 88% of all households in the country use air conditioning units, which have become essential for both comfort and health as temperatures rise. That compares to 77% of households having AC in 2001. 

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But with air conditioning comes both environmental and socioeconomic consequences. Air conditioning is believed to cause 1,950 million tons of CO2 emissions per year around the world, accounting for almost 4% of global carbon emissions. It’s also drive up electricity bills, making it unaffordable for some low income people, who are more likely to require emergency room visits due to extreme heat.

It doesn’t have to be like this, though. In hot climates around the world, people have been designing sustainable buildings to withstand extreme heat for hundreds of years, says John Onyango, a professor at the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture.

“In the U.S. we’ve been so used to feeding on cheap energy that we forgot to innovate,” says Onyango. “We have many techniques we can use to reduce heat, and we can actually borrow from what happens in the Middle East and look at Iran or look at Dubai and Turkey.”

Harnessing the wind to cool interiors

In some scorching cities, ancient forms are being used in modern construction.

In Masdar City in Abu Dhabi, a four-story building that serves as Siemens’s Middle Eastern headquarters was designed to cool itself without the use of air conditioning. It was one of the first buildings in the region to receive a LEED platinum certification from the U.S. Green Buildings council, meaning it is among the most sustainable buildings on the planet. The Siemens building, which was completed in 2014, includes traditional barajeel along with carefully shaped ceiling structures that allow for natural light while preventing overheating in the hot desert climate.

Barajeels have passively cooled buildings for centuries. These wind towers can lower temperatures by up to 50 degrees Fahrenheit depending on how they are designed and the levels of wind, according to Onyango. They work by funneling hot winds from outside to the lower floors of the building or even underground, where the air is cooled naturally. The cooled air is then released inside the building.

So long as there is wind flowing, the barajeel works without ever requiring electricity. Versions of these windcatcher systems can even be used in high rises, according to Onyango.

In tall buildings, wind can be funneled through chimney-like structures called chases, says Onyango. The air flowing through the chases is then cooled by the mass of the walls, and then brought back into the building.

Another way to significantly improve the ability of a building to cool itself is to use high domed-shaped roofs, says Amin Al-Habaibeh, a professor at the School of Architecture Design and the Built Environment at Nottingham Trent University.

“The advantage of having a dome structure is that part of the building will be in the sun, but the other side of the building will be in the shadow,” says Al-Habaibeh. 

This means that the heat from the sun will be naturally dispersed and less concentrated than in structures with flat roofs, he says. Using natural materials—like the stone and mud used to make homes in hot climates in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia—can help make buildings more sustainable and heat resistant, Al-Habaibeh says. In cities like Sana’a in Yemen and Djenné in Mali, many of these centuries-old, mud-based buildings are still used today. 

“These environmentally friendly materials would absorb moisture during the night and evaporate during the day creating a sort of natural cooling effect,” he says.

Energy-efficient construction materials

Unlike the production process for steel or concrete, the production of stone and mud bricks does not lead to large amounts of carbon emissions. In the U.S. these materials could be used as filler material to help pad the underlying structure of walls, says Onyango. 

However, all these building method remain unpopular in the U.S. due to a combination of lack of skilled workers to procure natural materials and the reluctance of building developers to pay the additional costs associated with traditional architecture. 

“These methods are cheaper in the long run, but in the short run they may look expensive,” says Onyango. Building developers may be unwilling to pay the extra costs associated with traditional materials and structural designs. However, in the long run, because the building owner will pay much less for air conditioning, owners would usually save money, says Onyango. 

But as temperatures climb, U.S. cities are going to have to make changes. Cities like Los Angeles and New York have gone to great lengths to repaint rooftops of existing buildings white over the last 15 years in an attempt to reduce heat. Others, like Miami, are planting new trees, which can help reduce temperatures by up to 10 degrees with enough foliage.  Borrowing techniques from cities long used to living in hot climates only make sense.

source https://time.com/6298837/hot-cities-middle-eastern-architecture/