Researchers in Europe and the U.S. say the use of social media among preteens and teenagers is on the rise, while internet companies, authorities and parents are slow to recognize its potentially harmful impact. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Nearly 4,000 companies and 170,000 people will descend on Las Vegas next week for CES, the massive consumer electronics show. For many small technology companies, the event is a big opportunity to raise their profile. VOA’s Michelle Quinn visits one San Francisco company to learn how they prepare for “the Super Bowl of conferences.”
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Social media giant Twitter has reiterated its stance that accounts belonging to world leaders have special status, pushing back against calls from some users for the company to ban U.S. President Donald Trump.
In a blog post Friday, Twitter said it would not block the accounts of world leaders even if their statements were “controversial” because of a need to promote discussions about public policy.
“Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate,” Twitter said.
It said such a move would also not silence a world leader, but it “would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.”
“Twitter is here to serve and help advance the global, public conversation. Elected world leaders play a critical role in that conversation because of their outsized impact on our society,” the post said.
The company has previously said that it considers whether a post is newsworthy and of public interest before deciding whether to remove it.
Twitter did not specifically mention Trump in its statement. The debate over Trump’s tweets grew on Wednesday, when he tweeted that he had a “much bigger” nuclear button than North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Critics said the tweet violated Twitter’s ban against threats of violence.
Last month, Twitter began enforcing new rules to remove “hateful” content on the network, including posts that promote violence.
The company said Friday that it reviews all tweets, including those of world leaders. “We review tweets by leaders within the political context that defines them, and enforce our rules accordingly,” the statement said.
A White House spokeswoman said she did not expect there to be any White House comment on the Twitter statement.
Pete Heinlein at the White House contributed to this report.
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Chances that a fix to a major microchip security flaw may slow down or crash some computer systems are leading some businesses to hold off installing software patches, fearing the cure may be worse than the original problem.
Researchers this week revealed security problems with chips from Intel Corp and many of its rivals, sending businesses, governments and consumers scrambling to understand the extent of the threat and the cost of fixes.
Rather than rushing to put on patches, a costly and time-intensive endeavor for major systems, some businesses are testing the fix, leaving their machines vulnerable.
“If you start applying patches across your whole fleet without doing proper testing, you could cause systems to crash, essentially putting all of your employees out of work,” said Ben Johnson, co-founder of cyber-security startup Obsidian.
Flaws not ‘critical’
Banks and other financial institutions spent much of the week studying the vulnerabilities, said Greg Temm, chief information risk officer with the Financial Services Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, an industry group that shares data on emerging cyber threats.
The flaws affect virtually all computers and mobile devices, but are not considered “critical” because there is no evidence that hackers have figured out how to exploit them, said Temm, whose group works with many of the world’s largest banks.
“It’s like getting a diagnosis of high blood pressure, but not having a cardiac arrest,” Temm said. “We’re taking it seriously, but it’s not something that is killing us.”
Testing the patches
Banks are testing the patches to see if they slow operations and, if so, what changes need to be made, Temm said. For instance, computers could be added to networks to make up for the lack of processor speed in individual machines, he added.
Some popular antivirus software programs are incompatible with the software updates, causing desktop and laptop computers to freeze up and show a “blue screen of death,” researcher Johnson said.
Antivirus software makers responded by rolling out fixes to make their products compatible with the updated operating systems, he said. In a blog posting Friday, Microsoft Corp said it would only offer security patches to Windows customers whose antivirus software suppliers had confirmed with Microsoft that the patch would not crash the customer’s machine.
“If you have not been offered the security update, you may be running incompatible antivirus software, and you should consult the software vendor,” Microsoft advised in the blog post.
Government agencies also are watching. The Ohio Attorney General’s office is monitoring the situation, a spokesman said by email.
“Intel continues to believe that the performance impact of these updates is highly workload-dependent and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time,” the world’s No. 1 chipmaker said on Thursday in a release.
No significant patch impact
It cited Amazon.com Inc, Apple Inc, Alphabet Inc’s and Microsoft as saying that most users had seen no significant impact on performance after installing the patches.
The cloud vendors are among a group of firms that quickly patched their technology to mitigate against the threat from one of those vulnerabilities, dubbed Meltdown, which only affects machines running Intel chips.
Major software makers have not issued patches to protect against the second vulnerability, dubbed Spectre, which affects nearly all computer chips made in the last decade, including those from Intel, Advanced Micro Devices Inc, and ARM-architecture manufacturers, including Qualcomm Inc.
However, Google, Firefox and Microsoft have implemented measures in most web browsers to stop hackers from launching remote attacks using Spectre.
Governments and security experts say they have seen no cyber attacks seeking to exploit either vulnerability, though they expect attempts by hackers as they digest technical data about the security flaws.
One key risk is that hackers will develop code that can infect the personal computers of people visiting malicious websites, said Chris Wysopal, chief technology officer of cyber security firm Veracode.
He advised PC owners to install the patches to protect against such potential attacks. Computer servers at large enterprises are less at risk, he said, because those systems are not used to surf the web and can only be infected in a Meltdown attack if a hacker has breached that network.
Operating system protection
Microsoft has issued a patch for its Windows operating system, and Apple desktop users with the most recent operating system are protected. Google has said most of its Chromebook laptops are already protected and that the rest would be soon.
Apple said it planned to release a patch to its Safari web browser within coming days to protect Mac and iOS users from Spectre.
While third-party browsers from Google and others can protect Mac users from Spectre, all major web browsers for Apple’s iOS devices depend on receiving a patch from Apple.
Until then, hundreds of millions of iPhone and iPad users will be exposed to potential Spectre attacks while browsing the web.
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The Internet Association, a trade group representing companies such as Google parent Alphabet Inc and Facebook Inc, said on Friday it intends to join an expected lawsuit against a decision to roll back net neutrality rules.
Several states including New York, and public interest advocacy groups have said they intend to sue to stop the mid-December ruling by the Federal Communications Commission.
The approval of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s proposal in a 3-2 vote marked a victory for internet service providers such as AT&T Inc, Comcast Corp and Verizon Communications Inc, handing them power over what content consumers can access.
Democrats, Hollywood and companies such as Google parent Alphabet and Facebook had urged Pai, a Republican appointed by U.S. President Donald Trump, to keep the Obama-era rules barring service providers from blocking, slowing access to or charging more for certain content.
“The final version of Chairman Pai’s rule, as expected, dismantles popular net neutrality protections for consumers. This rule defies the will of a bipartisan majority of Americans and fails to preserve a free and open internet,” the Internet Association said in a statement.
The new rules give internet service providers sweeping powers to change how consumers access the internet but must have new transparency requirements that will require them to disclose any changes to consumers.
Internet Association members also include Airbnb, Etsy Inc, Amazon.com and several dozen online and social media companies.
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We’re celebrating the five most popular songs in the Billboard Hot 100 Pop Singles chart, for the week ending January 6, 2018.
Number 5: G-Eazy, A$AP Rocky & Cardi B “No Limit”
The new year gets off to a flying start in fifth place, where G-Eazy, A$AP Rocky, and Cardi B leap five slots with “No Limit.”
It ties A$AP Rocky’s best previous showing on the Selena Gomez hit “Good For You,” but it’s just another day at the office for Cardi B, who last year ruled the Hot 100 for three weeks with “Bodak Yellow (Money Moves).”
Number 4: Lil Pump “Gucci Gang ”
From here, things get quieter … in fact, they don’t move at all. Lil Pump holds at number four with “Gucci Gang.”
The teenage rapper says he’s giving up Xanax in 2018. He announced his intentions on Instagram on New Year’s Day. Lil Pump’s fondness for the anti-anxiety drug is well-known: After gaining one million Instagram followers, he celebrated with a Xanax-shaped cake.
Number 3: Camila Cabello Featuring Young Thug “Havana”
Camila Cabello and Young Thug tread water in third place with “Havana.” Camila drops her much-anticipated debut solo album on January 12 … and says she’s a bit nervous. Posting January 1 on Twitter, she wrote “It’s January 1. My album comes out in 12 days. Someone hold me!”
She welcomed the new year with a televised performance in New York City’s frigid Times Square.
Number 2: Post Malone Featuring 21 Savage “Rockstar”
Post Malone and 21 Savage remain in second place with their ex-champ “Rockstar.” Last week, a version featuring T-Pain and Joey Bada$$ leaked online … and it turned out to be the original mix. Joey says he co-wrote the song with Post Malone but there are no hard feelings … he’s earning songwriting royalties and promises more ghostwriting in 2018.
Number 1: Ed Sheeran & Beyonce “Perfect”
Ed Sheeran and Beyonce share the Hot 100 title for a third straight week with “Perfect.”
How did these two get together? It was Beyonce’s idea: She saw Ed’s 2014 performance on Jools Holland’s BBC show “Hootenanny”… and that YouTube clip inspired Beyonce to make her move.
Will their collaboration move out of first place next week? Join us in seven days and we’ll find out!
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Former U.S. President Barack Obama is set to make his first talk show appearance on Jan. 12, on the first episode of a new show featuring longtime late-night host David Letterman.
This will be Obama’s first on-camera talk show interview since he left the presidency Jan. 20, 2017. He has largely stayed out of the media spotlight since then.
Letterman’s show, titled My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, is his first project since he retired from the long-running Late Show with David Letterman in 2015. His new Netflix series is expected, as the title suggests, to feature high-profile guests for in-depth interviews, both in and out of the studio.
Obama is expected to appear on the first episode Jan. 12, and a new, 60-minute episode is expected monthly through the year.
Letterman is known for a dry wit, pointed questions, and attention to current events. In 2011, he became the target of a reported death threat by an Islamist militant after joking about the death of an al-Qaida leader, Ilyas Kashmiri, in a drone strike in Pakistan. Letterman also wisecracked about the death threat, blaming it on his late-night television rival, Jay Leno.
Other guests to appear on the monthly Netflix show include human rights activist Malala Yousafzai, music mogul Jay-Z, and comedy writer Tina Fey.
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The Golden Globes have always been the less serious stop in route to the Academy Awards — the boozy, bubbly awards show put on by a little-known group with sometimes confounding taste. But this year, a funny thing has happened: The Golden Globes mean something.
The 75th Golden Globes, to be presented in Beverly Hills, California, on Sunday night, will be the most prominent and public display yet for the “MeToo” movement that has swept through Hollywood and left a trail of disgraced men in its wake. What has long been, first and foremost, a star-studded primetime party may this Sunday take on the tenor of a protest rally.
Out of solidarity with the victims of sexual harassment and assault, many women have said they will be dressing in black for the Globes. It’s a plan that, on the red carpet and on the stage, will ensure the spotlight remains on the film industry’s endemic gender imbalances.
“That will be really powerful,” Allison Janney, a supporting actress nominee for the Tonya Harding tale “I, Tonya,” said earlier this week. “I will be in a black dress and be proud to be standing there with the other actresses.”
The Globes have traditionally been a celebration, a good time and, frequently, a punchline. But they have had their political high points as well, like last year’s speech by Meryl Streep, the Cecil B. DeMille recipient for lifetime achievement. She spoke forcefully against then President-elect Donald Trump, who the next morning responded that Streep was “overrated.”
This year’s recipient is Oprah Winfrey, who earlier called the fallout following the allegations against Harvey Weinstein “a watershed moment” for women.
Winfrey is among the hundreds of women in the entertainment industry who have banded together to form Time’s Up, an initiative to advocate for gender equality among studio and talent agency executives. It has also created a $14 million legal fund for victims of sexual harassment.
Time’s Up — whose members include many Globes attendees, including Reese Witherspoon, Gal Gadot and Emma Stone — unveiled itself Monday with full-page newspaper ads. But already there is fresh fodder for its cause.
The University of Southern California’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative released its latest findings Thursday on diversity in directing. By examining the top 100 films of 2017 in box office, researchers found that just 7.3 percent of the movies were directed by women. That’s an increase from 4.2 percent the year before, but still below the decade-ago high point.
“Diversity in the director’s chair is virtually nonexistent and gender in the executive ranks of major companies remains grossly imbalanced,” the study concluded.
That lack of change will be on display Sunday, too, where five men will compete for best director despite several potential nominees in Greta Gerwig (“Lady Bird”), Dee Rees (“Mudbound”) and Patty Jenkins (“Wonder Woman”). The category will be much watched when Oscar nominations are announced January 23.
Still, the Globes are starting to see some of the same criticisms on diversity that have trailed the Academy Awards in recent years. But unlike the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, which has revamped its 6,000-plus membership to make its ranks more inclusive, the same pressure hasn’t been applied on the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, an organization of about 90 largely unknown foreign journalists.
But the HFPA’s quirks have drawn increased scrutiny, including this year’s oversight of one of 2017’s most acclaimed comedies, Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon’s interracial rom-com “The Big Sick.” Also snubbed was “Girls Trip” breakout star Tiffany Haddish. Her co-star Jada Pinkett Smith last month took HFPA members to task for not taking “Girls Trip” seriously for its awards.
And then there’s the choice to slot in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” as a comedy, for the film and star Daniel Kaluuya. That provoked the Globes’ largest backlash, and helped make “Get Out” the most tweeted about nominee in the two weeks after nominations were announced in December, Twitter said Thursday.
“Get Out” is one of the favorites in the mix on Sunday, along with Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water,” which led all films with seven nods. Close behind is Steven Spielberg’s “The Post” and Martin McDonaugh’s “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” both with six nominations. One wildcard is Ridley Scott’s J. Paul Getty drama “All the Money in the World,” which landed three nominations, including one for Christopher Plummer. His performance was inserted at the last minute to replace Kevin Spacey, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by several men.
The top TV contenders are female-led dramas: HBO’s “Big Little Lies,” which Witherspoon stars in and produced, and the FX anthology series “Feud: Bette and Joan.”
More than ever before, though, the Globes seem to be worth arguing about. All of the turmoil could make Seth Meyers’ hosting gig a little trickier. Meyers will follow his late-night partner, Jimmy Fallon, whose Globes broadcast last year was watched by 20 million viewers on NBC, an eight percent increase.
“We don’t want this night to be a session where we’re just scolding everything that happened because it is really important for us to remember that great movies came out of this year,” Meyers said in an interview. “A lot of people, we’re realizing, worked really hard in environments that were not that conducive to working really hard. So the goal is to have people have a wonderful night and an enjoyable party in a year which everyone deserves it.”
But this year, many in Hollywood are wondering if they deserve something more than a party.
AP Entertainment Writers Ryan Pearson and Sandy Cohen contributed to this report.
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A true treasure overlooks the city of Kinshasa on top of Ngaliema Hill. An exhibition room of a few dozen square meters is too small to contain the 45,000 pieces that have been collected from across the Democratic Republic of Congo. But this is the temporary solution to keep some of this collection open to the public until a new and bigger museum, opens in 2018. Abdourahmane Dia has this report.
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The Consumer Electronics show opens this weekend in Las Vegas, Nevada. There are a host of new tech startups descending on the city, hoping to become the next big thing. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Defending champion Serena Williams has withdrawn from the Australian Open, saying she is not ready to return to tournament tennis.
The season’s first major starts Jan. 15 at Melbourne Park and seven-time Australian Open champion Williams will be missing it for the first time since 2011.
Williams was pregnant with her first child when she won here last year to collect her Open-era record 23rd Grand Slam singles title.
She gave birth to her daughter, Alexis, in September.
Abu Dhabi exhibition
Williams played in an exhibition tournament last week in Abu Dhabi and indicated after her loss to French Open champion Jelena Ostapenko that she might not make it to Melbourne.
“After competing in Abu Dhabi I realized that although I am super close, I’m not where I personally want to be,” Williams said in a statement released Friday by Australian Open organizers.
“My coach and team always said ‘only go to tournaments when you are prepared to go all the way.’ I can compete — but I don’t want to just compete, I want to do far better than that and to do so, I will need a little more time.
“With that being said, and even though I am disappointed about it, I’ve decided not to compete in the Australian Open this year.”
The 36-year-old Williams needs one more Grand Slam singles title to equal the all-time record held by Margaret Court, who won 24 titles before and during the Open era.
Murray out, too
Her withdrawal comes less than 24 hours after fellow former world No.1 Andy Murray withdrew from the men’s event with a chronic hip injury.
Several other stars, including top-ranked Rafael Nadal, six-time champion Novak Djokovic and 2014 winner Stan Wawrinka, also are dealing with injuries.
Williams last year beat sister Venus in the final, and later revealed she played the tournament despite knowing she was pregnant.
Australian Open tournament director Craig Tiley said Williams waited as long as she could before letting organizers know she wouldn’t be able to compete.
“I’ve been in constant contact with Serena and her team and know this is why she has pushed it and pushed it until the 11th hour to make her final decision,” Tiley said.
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Apple Inc. will release a patch for the Safari web browser on its iPhones, iPads and Macs within days, it said Thursday, after major chipmakers disclosed flaws that leave nearly every modern computing device vulnerable to hackers.
On Wednesday, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and other security researchers disclosed two major chip flaws, one called Meltdown affecting only Intel Corp. chips and one called Spectre affecting nearly all computer chips made in the last decade. The news sparked a sell-off in Intel’s stock as investors tried to gauge the costs to the chipmaker.
In a statement on its website, Apple said all Mac and iOS devices were affected by both Meltdown and Spectre. But the most recent operating system updates for Mac computers, Apple TVs, iPhones and iPads protect users against the Meltdown attack and do not slow down the devices, it added. Meltdown does not affect the Apple Watch.
Macs and iOS devices are vulnerable to Spectre attacks through code that can run in web browsers. Apple said it would issue a patch to its Safari web browser for those devices “in the coming days.”
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Michael Wolff, an American author, essayist and journalist, has written Fire and Fury, a book that portrays a chaotic initial year for the presidency of Donald Trump. What’s his background?
Michael Wolff
Age: 64
Early life: Wolff was born in New Jersey to a father who worked in advertising and a mother who was a newspaper reporter. He attended Columbia University in New York and worked as a copy boy at The New York Times while in school.
The journalist: Wolff published his first book of essays, White Kids, in 1979. He was most recently a media critic and columnist for USA Today, Hollywood Reporter, New York Magazine and, before that, Vanity Fair and Newser.
In 2011, he briefly was at the helm of AdWeek magazine, but left after less than a year.
The author: In 1997, he wrote the bestseller Burn Rate, about his early dotcom company Wolff New Media.
In 2004 he published Autumn of the Moguls, about the decline of mainstream media that would occur later in the decade.
He was perhaps best known for his 2009 biography of media mogul Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News.
Accolades: Wolff has won two National Magazine Awards, which recognize excellence in the magazine industry in both print and digital mediums.
One of the awards was for a series of columns he wrote from the Middle East at the start of the Iraq War in 2003.
Controversies: Wolff’s work has often drawn criticism from his fellow journalists as well as his subjects. Just before the publication of The Man Who Owns the News, Murdoch took issue with several parts of the book, just as U.S. President Donald Trump has over Wolff’s latest work.
In a 2004 cover story for The New Republic, reporter Michelle Cottle characterized Wolff’s writing by saying that “even Wolff acknowledges that conventional reporting is not his bag.” Rather, she said, “he absorbs the atmosphere and gossip swirling around him at cocktail parties, on the street, and especially during those long lunches.”
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Intel Corp shares fell nearly 2 percent Thursday as investors worried about the potential financial liability and reputational hit from recently disclosed security flaws in its widely used microprocessors.
The largest chipmaker had confirmed Wednesday that flaws reported by researchers could allow hackers to steal sensitive information from computers, phones and other devices. Apple Inc, Microsoft Corp and other software makers have issued patches to protect against the vulnerabilities.
Intel may be on the hook for costs stemming from lawsuits claiming that the patches would slow computers and effectively force consumers to buy new hardware, and big customers will likely seek compensation from Intel for any software or hardware fixes they make, security experts said.
“The potential liability is big for Intel,” said Eric Johnson, dean of Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management. “Everybody will be scrambling over the next few days to figure out just how big it is.”
Intel has said that the patches for the bugs would slow its chips down somewhat but that most users will not notice.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), the largest seller of cloud computing services, said in a statement it does not “expect meaningful performance impact for most customer workloads.”
Microsoft and Alphabet Inc’s Google both said in statements on their websites that they expect few performance problems for most of their cloud computing customers.
Financial repercussions
But the incident is likely to spur cloud companies to press Intel for lower prices on chips in future talks, said Kim Forrest, senior equity research analyst at Fort Pitt Capital Group in Pittsburgh, which owns shares in Intel.
“What [Intel’s cloud customers] are going to say is, ‘You wronged us, we hate you, but if we can get a discount, we’ll still buy from you,'” Forrest said.
Forrest also expects Intel will have to increase its chip development spending to focus on security.
Government agencies and security experts said they knew of no cyberattacks that had exploited the vulnerabilities.
Financial services firms were studying information on the vulnerabilities to determine how to best respond, said the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, a global industry group known as FS-ISAC that shares data on cyberthreats.
Banks and other firms are trying to understand what it will cost to respond to the issue, FS-ISAC said in an emailed statement.
“In addition to the security considerations raised by this design flaw, performance degradation is expected, which could require more processing power for affected systems to compensate and maintain current baseline performance,” FS-ISAC said. “There will need to be consideration and balance between fixing the potential security threat vs. the performance and other possible impact to systems.”
Lawsuit filed
Lawyers filed a lawsuit in San Jose, California, federal court on Wednesday that sought class-action status and compensation for people who had bought vulnerable Intel chips or computers that came with them already installed.
Intel did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday about the lawsuit.
While more lawsuits are expected, Intel’s biggest customers are likely to quietly seek compensation for any harm caused by the vulnerabilities, including costs to patch machines or replace microprocessors, Johnson said.
Legal experts said that consumers would have to prove concrete damages and harm to proceed with claims.
Intel shares fell 1.8 percent, following a 3.4 percent decline Wednesday.
Shares in rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc climbed 4.9 percent as investors speculated the No. 2 maker of microprocessors would woo customers away from Intel.
Still, researchers had said some of AMD’s chips had one of the two vulnerabilities disclosed on Wednesday, as do processors from ARM Holdings.
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For a second consecutive day, the White House press secretary on Thursday fielded a barrage of reporters’ questions about a forthcoming book that portrays a chaotic initial year for the presidency of Donald Trump.
Most people in the United States could “probably care less about a book full of lies,” responded Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who characterized Fire and Fury as “trash” and something “a fired employee wanted to peddle.”
That fired employee is Steve Bannon, who ran Trump’s presidential campaign in its final quarter of 2016 and was chief strategist in the White House for the initial seven months of his presidency.
Bannon is quoted extensively by author Michael Wolff in the 336-page book.
Asked whether Breitbart News should fire Bannon, who is executive chairman of the right-wing news and opinion website, Sanders replied, “I certainly think it’s something they should look at and consider.”
A lawyer for the president on Thursday sought to block publication of the book, contending it is defamatory and libelous and demanding that Wolff and his publisher, Henry Holt and Co., stop its release. It originally had been scheduled to be released Tuesday, but Wolff said Thursday that it now would arrive in bookstores Friday — four days early.
Charles Harder said his legal team was “investigating numerous false and/or baseless statements” made about Trump in the book that Wolff said came from more than 200 interviews he conducted during Trump’s successful election campaign and after the president took office a year ago.
Harder, the previous day, also sent a cease-and-desist letter to Bannon, demanding that he stop making defamatory remarks about Trump and his family.
On Thursday, Trump said, “He [Bannon] called me a great man last night, so he obviously changed his tune pretty quick.”
The White House said Trump was not trying to block anyone’s constitutional protection of freedom of speech through the legal threats.
“The president absolutely believes in the First Amendment,” Sanders responded to a reporter’s question at Thursday’s media briefing. “But as we’ve said before, the president also believes in making sure that information is accurate before pushing it out as fact when it certainly and clearly is not.”
In perhaps the most controversial passage in the book, Bannon is quoted as saying he thought it “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” that Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr.; the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, now a White House adviser; and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort met with Russians in the midst of the campaign at Trump Tower in New York.
The younger Trump had been promised by an intermediary for the Russians that he would be handed incriminating documents about Trump’s election challenger, Democrat Hillary Clinton, as part of Moscow’s effort to help Trump win, although Trump Jr. subsequently said no such damaging evidence materialized.
Within hours of the surfacing of excerpts from the book, Trump said in a statement Wednesday, “Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”
Trump said that Bannon was “only in it for himself” and “spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was,” at the same time that he had declared war on the media.
Bannon also is quoted as saying that Trump Jr. will “crack like an egg” under the pressure of the investigations into meddling by Russia in the last U.S. presidential election.
On Thursday, White House officials continued to attack Wolff’s credibility, accusing him of having a record of misquoting interview subjects and inventing scenarios.
“This is a practice he is used to doing,” said Sanders, describing Wolff’s latest book as “mistake after mistake after mistake.”
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New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is partially abandoning its “pay-what-you-wish” admissions policy that has made it an egalitarian destination for generations of art lovers.
Starting March 1, the museum will charge a mandatory $25 entrance fee to most adult visitors who don’t live in New York state.
Museum President and CEO Daniel Weiss announced the change Thursday.
Weiss says the extra money will help balance the Met’s $305 million annual operating budget.
Entrance will remain free for all children under 12 and pay-as-you-wish for students up to graduate school in New York and surrounding New Jersey and Connecticut.
The $25 fee will allow visitors to enter the Met over three consecutive days, instead of just one.
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YouTube star Logan Paul has stepped away from posting videos following an outcry when he uploaded images of what appeared to be the body of someone who killed themselves in a Japanese forest.
Paul took to Twitter on Wednesday to say he was suspending his video blog “for now” and “taking time to reflect.”
A petition on Change.org that demands his YouTube channel be deleted had been signed by more than 125,000 people by Thursday morning.
Paul created a furor when he posted a video of him in a forest near Mount Fuji showing what seemed to be a body hanging from a tree.
The video was viewed some 6 million times before being removed from Paul’s YouTube channel, a verified account with more than 15 million subscribers.
A storm of criticism followed despite two apologies, with commenters saying Paul seemed disrespectful and that his initial apology was inadequate.
In Paul’s initial apology, he said he had wanted to raise awareness about suicide and possibly save lives, and he denied his goal was to drive clicks to his social media content.
“I thought I could make a positive ripple on the internet, not cause a monsoon of negativity,” he said in his Twitter post.
“I don’t expect to be forgiven. I’m simply here to apologize,” he said on the more somber video apology uploaded on YouTube and Twitter late Tuesday. “None of us knew how to react or how to feel.”
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Aharon Appelfeld, a prolific Israeli novelist and Holocaust survivor whose works examined the lost world of European Jews and the new lives they pursued in Israel, died Thursday. He was 85.
Writing in Hebrew, the Romanian-born Appelfeld penned more than 40 books and was one of Israel’s most widely translated authors.
Appelfeld’s “Blooms of Darkness,” the tale of an 11-year-old boy hidden from the Nazis by a prostitute, won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in London in 2012. Appelfeld was also awarded the State of Israel Prize for Literature in 1983 and was a Man Booker International Prize finalist in 2013.
‘Our beloved writer’
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, on Twitter, expressed sorrow “about the passing of our beloved writer.”
Amos Oz, one of Israel’s most prominent novelists, said on Army Radio that Appelfeld shied away from graphic depictions of the Holocaust, choosing instead to describe its effect on the lives of his characters.
“Appelfeld never wrote about gas chambers, never wrote about executions, about mass graves, atrocities and experiments on human beings. He wrote about survivors before and after. He wrote about people who did not know what was about to happen to them and about people who already knew everything but hardly spoke about it,” Oz said.
“He didn’t want, or he was unable, to write depictions of the horrors — he said that too. They are beyond the ability of human language to express them. You have to approach them indirectly, tiptoeing from afar,” said Oz, once Appelfeld’s student in a kibbutz.
Escaped concentration camp
Appelfeld was a young boy when his mother was killed by the Nazis. He and his father were sent to a concentration camp in Transnistria in an area of Ukraine then under control of the German-allied Romanian forces. Age 10 at the time, he escaped and spent three years hiding in forests in Ukraine.
“I survived in the fields and forests. Sometimes I worked as a shepherd or taking care of broken-down horses,” he told The New York Times in 1986. “I lived with marginal people during the war — prostitutes, horse thieves, witches, fortune tellers. They gave me my real education.”
After the war, he immigrated to Israel — he learned Hebrew beforehand — and when he was 28 he discovered that his father had survived and they were reunited in Israel.
“Even though I spent time on kibbutzim that tried to change me, I did not change. I remained, basically, the Jewish refugee child who survived,” he said in an interview with Israel’s Haaretz newspaper in 2015.
American-Jewish author Philip Roth once described Appelfeld as a “displaced writer of displaced fiction, who made displacement and disorientation a subject uniquely his own.”
Works by Appelfeld translated into English include “Badenheim 1939” (1978), a tale set in a fictional Austrian resort on the eve of World War II, and “The Immortal Bartfuss”
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Coal-fired power plants release greenhouse gases into the air, causing pollution and contributing to climate change. But as much as 10 percent of the coal used in power stations could be replaced … by chicken waste. VOA’s Deborah Block has a report.
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Security researchers on Wednesday disclosed a set of security flaws that they said could let hackers steal sensitive information from nearly every modern computing device containing chips from Intel Corp., Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and ARM Holdings.
One of the bugs is specific to Intel but another affects laptops, desktop computers, smartphones, tablets and internet servers alike. Intel and ARM insisted that the issue was not a design flaw, but it will require users to download a patch and update their operating system to fix.
“Phones, PCs — everything is going to have some impact, but it’ll vary from product to product,” Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said in an interview with CNBC Wednesday afternoon.
Researchers with Alphabet Inc.’s Google Project Zero, in conjunction with academic and industry researchers from several countries, discovered two flaws.
The first, called Meltdown, affects Intel chips and lets hackers bypass the hardware barrier between applications run by users and the computer’s memory, potentially letting hackers read a computer’s memory and steal passwords.
The second, called Spectre, affects chips from Intel, AMD and ARM and lets hackers potentially trick otherwise error-free applications into giving up secret information.
The researchers said Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. had patches ready for users for desktop computers affected by Meltdown. Microsoft declined to comment and Apple did not immediately return requests for comment.
Daniel Gruss, one of the researchers at Graz University of Technology in Austria who discovered Meltdown, said in an interview with Reuters that the flaw was “probably one of the worst CPU bugs ever found.”
Specter a long-term issue
Gruss said Meltdown was the more serious problem in the short term but could be decisively stopped with software patches. Specter, the broader bug that applies to nearly all computing devices, is harder for hackers to take advantage of but less easily patched and will be a bigger problem in the long
term, he said.
Speaking on CNBC, Intel’s Krzanich said Google researchers told Intel of the flaws “a while ago” and that Intel had been testing fixes that device makers who use its chips will push out next week. Before the problems became public, Google on its blog said Intel and others planned to disclose the issues on January 9.
The flaws were first reported by The Register, a tech publication. It also reported that the updates to fix the problems could cause Intel chips to operate 5 percent to 30 percent more slowly.
Intel denied that the patches would bog down computers based on Intel chips.
“Intel has begun providing software and firmware updates to mitigate these exploits,” Intel said in a statement. “Contrary to some reports, any performance impacts are workload-dependent, and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time.”
ARM spokesman Phil Hughes said that patches had already been shared with the companies’ partners, which include many smartphone manufacturers.
“This method only works if a certain type of malicious code is already running on a device and could at worst result in small pieces of data being accessed from privileged memory,” Hughes said in an email.
AMD chips are also affected by at least one variant of a set of security flaws but that can be patched with a software update. The company said it believes there “is near zero risk to AMD products at this time.”
Google’s report
Google said in a blog post that Android phones running the latest security updates are protected, as are its own Nexus and Pixel phones with the latest security updates. Gmail users do not need to take any additional action to protect themselves, but users of its Chromebooks, Chrome web browser and many of its Google Cloud services will need to install updates.
The defect affects the so-called kernel memory on Intel x86 processor chips manufactured over the past decade, allowing users of normal applications to discern the layout or content of protected areas on the chips, The Register reported, citing unnamed programmers.
That could make it possible for hackers to exploit other security bugs or, worse, expose secure information such as passwords, thus compromising individual computers or even entire server networks.
Dan Guido, chief executive of cybersecurity consulting firm Trail of Bits, said that businesses should quickly move to update vulnerable systems, saying he expects hackers to quickly develop code they can use to launch attacks that exploit the vulnerabilities.
“Exploits for these bugs will be added to hackers’ standard toolkits,” said Guido.
Shares in Intel were down by 3.4 percent following the report but nudged back up 1.2 percent to $44.70 in after-hours trading, while shares in AMD were up 1 percent to $11.77, shedding many of the gains they had made earlier in the day when reports suggested its chips were not affected.
It was not immediately clear whether Intel would face any significant financial liability arising from the reported flaw.
“The current Intel problem, if true, would likely not require CPU replacement in our opinion. However the situation is fluid,” Hans Mosesmann of Rosenblatt Securities in New York said in a note, adding it could hurt the company’s reputation.
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