BLETCHLEY, England — The British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Thursday said that under a new agreement “like-minded governments” would be able to test eight leading tech companies’ AI models before they are released.
Closing out the two-day artificial intelligence summit in Bletchley Park on Thursday, Sunak announced the agreement signed by Australia, Canada, the European Union, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Singapore, the U.S. and the U.K. to test leading companies’ AI models.
“Until now the only people testing the safety of new AI models have been the very companies developing it. That must change,” said Sunak to a room full of journalists.
“Like-minded governments and AI companies have today reached a landmark agreement. We will work together on testing the safety of new AI models before they are released… it’s made possible by the decision I have taken along with Vice President Kamala Harris for the British and American governments to establish world leading AI safety institutes with public sector capability to test the most advanced frontier models.”
Sunak said the eight companies — Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Google, Google DeepMind, Inflection AI, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral AI and Open AI — had agreed to “deepen” the access already given to his Frontier AI Taskforce, which is the forerunner to the new institute. The access is currently given on a voluntary basis, though under its Executive Order, the U.S. government has put binding requirements to hand over certain safety information.
Sunak also announced further details of an agreement reached with countries yesterday to establish an international advisory panel on frontier AI risks.
Modeled on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it will be formed from representatives from the 28 countries attending the summit. The British government said it would provide secretariat support for it.
The panel will also support academic Yoshua Bengio in producing a “State of Science” report into the risks and capabilities of frontier AI. The report will not make policy recommendations, but is designed to inform international and national policy making. It will be published ahead of the next safety summit in South Korea in the first half of next year.
LONDON — Elon Musk sat down with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in London’s Lancaster House on Thursday night for a chat that veered closer to “love-in” than interview.
In the lavish gold-trimmed room where Theresa May gave one of her most famous Brexit speeches, the tech tycoon and British PM were joined by an audience that included Cabinet ministers, tech execs and — somewhat improbably — the American rapper will.i.am.
Here’s what we learned as the conversation unfolded:
Elon thinks you won’t need to work
The world’s richest man predicted a “future of abundance” from advances in AI models.
“There will come a point where no job is needed,” Musk said. “You can have a job if you want to have a job … but the AI will be able to do everything. I don’t know if that makes people comfortable or uncomfortable.”
Sunak, who will be out of a job himself after the next U.K. election if current polls are correct, laughed along nervously.
Rishi should leave the journalism to the pros
The format was meant to be Sunak interviewing Musk — but the PM’s lengthy questions diverged into listing his own achievements and heaping praise onto the tech tycoon.
“You’re known for being such a brilliant innovator and technologist,” the PM gushed, during one attempt to get a question out.
Rishi loves Big Tech
Sunak sees the AI Safety Summit as a key part of his legacy, and has been cozying up to leading AI lab founders over the last six months. This event was no different, with the PM taking his chance to list his pro-tech and pro-investment policies and to heap praise on Musk, who owns Tesla, SpaceX and X.
“It’s been a huge privilege and pleasure to have you here,” the British prime minister told Musk as they left the stage.
The love-in was mutual
Musk can play down the provocateur shtick and dial up the charm when he needs to.
He ticked every box for Sunak, praising London as a destination for AI companies, hailing the AI Safety Summit’s achievements and — crucially — backing Sunak’s decision to invite China to the Bletchley Park event, which has angered some lawmakers in the U.K. Conservative Party.
“Thank you for inviting them,” Musk said. “Having them here is essential. If they’re not participants, it’s pointless.”
AI is your new best friend … or worst enemy
It wasn’t just Sunak and Musk building a friendship on Thursday night. Musk predicted that humans more generally will make deep friendships with AI once the technology becomes intelligent enough.
But in the parts of the discussion where they debated the risks of frontier AI models, Musk called for a “referee” and an “off switch” built-in to models to “throw it into a safe state.”
Sunak also said AI-generated misinformation would be a “real issue” in elections taking place next year, including in the U.K. “Probably,” he added teasingly, given the election could yet be pushed to January 2025.
Musk, whose own social media platform has been plagued by misinformation, said he wanted to make X as “accurate as possible and as truthful as possible.”
Most news organizations seem eager to sweep last week’s negligent coverage of the Gaza hospital explosion under the rug, moving on from the low moment covering the Israel-Hamas war without admitting any mistakes.
While The New York Times and BBC — both of which faced enormous scrutiny for their coverage of the blast — have in recent days issued mea culpas, the rest of the press has remained mum, declining to explain to their audiences how they initially got an important story of such great magnitude so wrong.
On Monday, I contacted the major news organizations that amplified Hamas’ claims, which immediately assigned blame to Israel for the blast that it said had left hundreds dead. Those organizations included CNN, the Associated Press, Reuters, Al Jazeera, and The Wall Street Journal.
Did these outlets stand by their initial reporting? Was there any regret repeating claims from the terrorist group? Since the explosion, one week ago Tuesday, Israel and the U.S. have assessed that the rocket originated in Gaza, not Israel. Additional analysis from independent forensic experts, including those contacted by CNN, have indicated that the available evidence from the blast was inconsistent with the damage one would expect to see from an Israeli strike.
But if there was even a morsel of contrition from news organizations that breathed considerable life into Hamas’ very different version of events, it hasn’t been shown. A spokesperson for The WSJ declined comment. Meanwhile, spokespeople for the AP and Al Jazeera ignored my inquiries.
Reuters, which initially reported that Israel had struck the hospital, citing a “civil defense official,” stood by how it covered the unfolding story, conceding no blunders in the process. A spokesperson told me that “it is standard practice for Reuters to publish statements and claims made by sources about news in the public interest, while simultaneously working to verify and seek information from every side.”
“We make it clear to our readers that these are ‘claims’ made by a source, rather than facts reported by Reuters,” the spokesperson for the wire service told me. “In the specific instance of the fast-breaking news about the attack on the hospital in Gaza, we added precise details and attribution to our stories as quickly as we could.”
CNN went even further. Not only did the outlet amplify Hamas’ claims on its platforms at the outset of the story, but its initial rolling online article definitively stated — with no attribution to any party — that Israel was responsible for the lethal explosion. The story was later edited, but the error was never acknowledged in a correction or editors’ note. While it is common for news outlets to update online stories as new information becomes available, when errors are made, standard practice is to acknowledge them in formal corrections. A CNN spokesperson declined to comment specifically on the online story when reached Monday.
In response to my larger inquiry on the network’s broader coverage, the CNN spokesperson pointed me to the forensic analysis it published over the weekend indicating the explosion was inconsistent with an Israeli strike. Like Reuters, CNN admitted no fault in its coverage of the blast.
Which makes what the BBC and The Times have done in recent days stand out. While the rest of the press has sought to move on from the journalistic fiasco, the British broadcaster and Gray Lady have charted a different course.
The BBC said in a statement posted online last week, “We accept that even in this fast-moving situation it was wrong to speculate in this way about the possible causes and we apologise for this, although he did not at any point report that it was an Israeli strike.”
And The Times published a lengthy editors’ note on Monday, confessing its early coverage “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified.”
“The report left readers with an incorrect impression about what was known and how credible the account was,” The Times added.
Bill Grueskin, a renowned professor at Columbia Journalism School, told me Monday that he believes that each outlet that gave credence to Hamas’ version of events should put out similar notes explaining to their audiences precisely how things went awry behind the scenes. (I should note that Grueskin didn’t believe that The Times’ note went far enough, questioning, among other things, why it took almost a week to issue its mea culpa.)
“The notes should be signed; they should provide a more detailed understanding of how their newsroom managed to not just get it wrong at the first moment but why it took so long to scale back; and they should be more explicit about what they got wrong since most readers can’t be expected to recall all the details,” Grueskin said.
Indeed, one of the crucial differences between newsrooms and less reputable, unreliable sources of information is that newsrooms issue corrections and accept fault when it occurs. When news organizations err, it is expected that they own up to their mistakes.
Grueskin pointed out, however, that “newsrooms often find it easier to correct a misspelled middle name than a collapse in verification standards on a major, breaking-news story.”
“It’s easier to address a simple, common mistake than one that goes to the heart of how a news organization is built to handle breaking news in a contested environment,” Grueskin added.
That might be true. But it doesn’t mean that it should be acceptable.
BRUSSELS — On a warm overcast afternoon in late September, Brussels’ digerati streamed into a cramped event space, just moments from the headquarters of the European Commission, to listen to the U.K.’s man of the hour.
Blonde and natty in a crisp white shirt and slim-fit navy suit, Matt Clifford — the British Prime Minister’s official representative for this week’s AI Safety Summit — ambled to the lectern with the smiling ease of someone who has delivered dozens of impromptu speeches.
The event, invitation-only and held under the Chatham House Rule, was just one leg of Clifford’s globetrotting, which has taken him from London to Washington and Beijing. These days, as he told POLITICO, he “can sleep anytime, anywhere.”
Clifford has been weaving across the planet to talk to top policymakers and tech barons about this week’s Bletchley Park summit, which will focus on severe risks like AI-aided cyberattacks and weapon design, and on which Rishi Sunak has pinned his hopes for a legacy. Many tech CEOs have known Clifford for years; presidents and prime ministers had better get up to speed.
A venture capitalist, chairman of the U.K.’s moonshot factory Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), and now an AI diplomat, 37-year-old Clifford has become one of the most influential people in British tech — just as post-Brexit U.K. scrambles to become a global beacon of AI rulemaking.
The politician’s techie
Clifford’s rise neatly maps onto the parabola of the U.K.’s tech industry: from curio, to jewel in the crown, to geopolitical tool. His debut came in 2011, just as then Prime Minister David Cameron was hitching his wagon to London’s burgeoning startup scene – dubbed the Silicon Roundabout.
A McKinsey consultant with degrees from Cambridge (medieval history) and MIT (computational statistics) Clifford yearned for a change, and a colleague handed him a report McKinsey had just published on the Roundabout recommending investment in nurturing tech founders.
Clifford jumped at the opportunity. He had grown up in Bradford — a northern English city scarred by deindustrialization — and taught himself to code because, he said, he “didn’t want to work in [fast food chain] Gregg’s.”
Together with fellow consultant Alice Bentinck, he founded Entrepreneur First (EF), an accelerator that invests in graduates to help them launch startups. EF would go on to build some of the U.K.’s most successful tech unicorns.
It also gave the duo an into attend the monthly breakfasts Cameron held in No. 10 with London’s tech grandees.
Clifford’s affability has helped him develop a network spanning from European startuppers to Silicon Valley heavy-hitters — LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, an ex-board member of OpenAI, sits on EF’s board and prefaced Bentinck’s and Clifford’s 2022 book “How to Be a Founder”.
“Matt is a Swiss Army knife type,” said Dom Hallas, head of British lobbying group Startup Coalition. “But he’s also just, like, a really nice guy.”
Alice Bentnick said that Clifford uses ChatGPT to write “storybooks” for his kids | Marco Bertorello/AFP via Getty Images
Bentnick, his EF co-founder, said that Clifford thinks up murder mystery games for colleagues to solve, and that he uses ChatGPT to write “storybooks” for his kids.
During the pandemic, as the British tech industry teetered on the brink, Clifford worked with Hallas and others to convince the Treasury to launch an emergency £250 million startup fund. “Whether it’s regulation, incentives, the crisis moments of the pandemic or the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Matt has been critical for facing those challenges,” Hallas said.
Clifford became the politician’s techie and the techie’s policy wonk. “He has cachet. He is very valued in the British tech community — which is in a way also why he’s valued by political people,” said Benedict Macon-Cooney, a chief strategist at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. But he is still a techie at heart. Clifford has taken a sabbatical from EF and plans to return after his summit work is wrapped up.
Building a British DARPA
After Boris Johnson triumphed in the U.K.’s 2019 general election, with tech-savvy enforcer Dominic Cummings in tow, Clifford started devoting more and more issues of his weekly newsletter, Thoughts in Between, to the subject of funding advanced science research.
He also launched a reading club focused on initiatives such as the Manhattan Project and the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing that managed to “achieve exceptional collective output.” That was hardly by chance: Cummings (whose blog was included in the reading group’s syllabus) had made no mystery of his grand plan to create a “British DARPA” devoted to funding ambitious science projects, and it looked like he would get his way.
When the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) was finally announced in 2021, Clifford would have had an easy case to make in his application for the chairmanship, to which he was appointed in July 2022: not only he had invested in technology companies for a decade, but he had written extensively about how exactly the research agency should work. [Full disclosure: Clifford also wrote about ARIA in a WIRED op-ed that I commissioned as an editor back in 2020].
“Most of my policy work came out of that newsletter,” Clifford said. “It had three main topics: geopolitics of technology, AI, and science funding and accelerating – all my ARIA conversations originally came out of writing, week in week out, about it.”
Writing about AI in the newsletter, which was well read amongboth techies and policymakers, might also have bolstered Clifford’s credentials for his current unpaid work on the summit. Likely, so did the fact he is on first-name terms with many Silicon Valley technologists building advanced AI systems. In late summer 2022, some six months before OpenAI launched its most powerful model, GPT-4, Clifford was offered an early demo that left him “mind blown.” (He declined to say exactly how he got the demo).
Clifford is enthusiastic about AI’s advantages, from better medicine to more efficient public services. But to reap those, he thinks, you first need to get the people on board — hence the summit.
“AI is not very popular with the public,” he said. “Therefore talking about safety is not to scare the public: it’s actually to reassure them so that we can capture the benefit.”
The summit’s own focus on tail risks, rather than present concerns such as AI-fuelled bias and disinformation, has sparked speculation that its agenda is inspired by effective altruism, a strand of utilitarianism popular in elite universities and Silicon Valley, some of whose adherents worry about evil, almighty AIs’ potential to kill off humankind.
Clifford does not count himself as an effective altruist, although he seems generally sympathetic to their cause, going as far as speaking at a global effective altruism conference in June. “I have a lot of respect for a lot of [effective altruists and their] work but I’ve always been too much of a virtue ethicist to go all-in,” he said. Indeed, during his talk at the effective altruism event, he recommended that attendees read “After Virtue” by Alasdair MacIntyre — a thinker whose worldview is hardly utilitarian.
Despite once being an “ardent remainer” and Sunak being a Brexiteer, Clifford and the PM enjoy a good rapport | Pool photo by Peter Nicholls via AFP/Getty Images
He pushes back on the idea that the summit has been captured by the “doomer narrative” espoused by some effective altruists. “Talking of killer robots — I don’t think that’s helpful at all,” he said. “[The summit] is much more about how we avoid a misuse that turns the public so much against AI that you get a chilling effect on adoption?”
Not a ‘political animal’
The call from No. 10 asking Clifford to help with the summit came at the end of a long stretch of AI-related work. In late 2022, he helped conduct a government review of emerging technologies where the U.K. could have a crack at setting standards: Clifford put special emphasis on AI, which seems to have influenced Sunak’s thinking.
A few weeks later, in March 2023, he was appointed to help build the U.K.’s task force focused on advanced AI, or frontier models, and in May he orchestrated the meeting between Rishi Sunak and the CEOs of AI labs OpenAI, DeepMind and Anthropic, all of which are now on the summit’s invitation list.
Despite once being an “ardent remainer” and Sunak being a Brexiteer, Clifford and the PM enjoy a good rapport, which Hallas said first became apparent when the two were on stage together at Treasury Connect, a conference then-Chancellor Sunak organized in 2021.
Politics rarely seems to factor into Clifford’s actions. “I’m not really a political animal,” he said. “My entire career I’ve been thinking about how to use technology as a source of leverage to make the world better.”
But over the past few years, and especially over the past few weeks, he has learned how to talk to politicians, and to win them over. “Politicians value that — being a successful entrepreneur, being a successful investor — I know what it takes to make technology work for people,” he said. “My starting point is: how do we get things done?”
Big tech companies are continuing a turnaround from last year, as Alphabet, Microsoft and Snap kicked off earnings season with strong sales results for the quarter ended in September.
Google parent company Alphabet on Tuesday reported quarterly sales of $76.69 billion, up 11% from the same period in the prior year. The company also posted profits of $19.69 billion for the quarter.
Meanwhile, Microsoft posted 13% year-on-year sales growth to $56.5 billion, also beating expectations. Microsoft’s quarterly profits hit $22.3 billion, up 27% from the year-ago period.
Snapchat parent Snap on Tuesday reported a return to sales growth in the September quarter, after two consecutive quarters of declining sales. The company reported revenue of nearly $1.2 billion, an increase of 5% from the same period in the prior year and ahead of analysts’ projections. The company reported a net loss of $368 million.
The strong results come after Microsoft, Alphabet, Snap and other tech companies carried out mass layoffs and other cost cutting moves over the past year following a difficult 2022 when advertisers and other clients cut back on their spending due to concerns over the macroeconomic environment.
Despite beating Wall Street’s sales expectations, shares of both Alphabet (GOOGL) and Snap (SNAP) each dipped around 5% in after-hours trading following the reports, although Snap’s quickly regained some ground. Microsoft (MSFT) shares gained around 4% in after-hours trading.
“Q3 tech season has been quite strong thus far,” Tejas Dessai, research analyst at investment fund GlobalX said in a statement. “These numbers clearly defy concerns of near term economic weakness looming.”
Google’s advertising business generated quarterly revenue of $59.6 billion, up from $54.5 billion in the prior year. YouTube ads, meanwhile, garnered some $7.9 billion in revenue, up roughly 12% year-over-year.
YouTube Shorts, the company’s TikTok competitor, hit a milestone 70 billion daily views last quarter, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said on a call with analysts Tuesday afternoon.
Google’s cloud business, however, reported revenue of $8.41 billion — missing analysts’ estimates.
Jesse Cohen, a senior analyst at Investing.com, attributed Alphabet’s after-hours stock fall to the “relatively weak performance in its Google cloud platform, which is at risk of falling further behind [Microsoft’s] Azure and [Amazon’s] AWS.” Still, despite taking a hit in 2022 amid a broader tech sector downturn, shares for Alphabet have climbed roughly 56% since the start of 2023, beating the tech-heavy Nasdaq index.
Google’s report comes as the tech giant is in the antitrust hot seat. US prosecutors officially opened a landmark antitrust trial against Google last month with sweeping allegations that the company engaged in anticompetitive behavior to maintain its dominance over search. (As the legal showdown rages on, Google has continued to deny allegations that it operated illegally.)
Google also confirmed last month plans to lay off hundreds of staffers in its recruiting division, as it continues cost cutting efforts in some areas. These more targeted layoffs came after Alphabet in January cut around 12,000 jobs — about 6% of its workforce.
Still, Google has signaled that it remains committed to investing heavily in generative artificial intelligence technology. Last month, Google rolled out a major expansion of its Bard AI chatbot tool.
“As we expand access to our new AI services, we continue to make meaningful investments in support of our AI efforts,” Pichai said on the call. “We remain committed to durably re-engineering our cost base in order to help create capacity for these investments, in support of long-term sustainable financial value.”
Microsoft’s recent investments in AI technology helped boost its sales in the September quarter, especially in its key cloud division. Sales from Microsoft’s “intelligent cloud” business — its biggest revenue driver — grew 19% from the year-ago quarter to $24.3 billion.
Revenue from the company’s “productivity and business processes” business, which includes LinkedIn and Office commercial and consumer products, also grew 13% year-over-year to $18.6 billion.
“Microsoft is firing on all cylinders and AI is clearly driving growth,” Cohen said in a research note following the company’s report. “The results indicated that artificial intelligence products are stimulating sales and already contributing to top and bottom-line growth.”
But economic jitters among consumers appear to still have some impact on the company’s bottom line. Devices revenue, which includes sales of laptops, tablets and Xbox consoles, decreased 22% year-over-year, despite a 3% sales increase in the overall “more personal computing” segment. Ongoing concerns about a potential economic slowdown could continue to weigh on the company as it heads into the crucial holiday device sales season.
The report is Microsoft’s first since the company closed its $69 billion acquisition of “Call of Duty” maker Activision Blizzard earlier this month. While the deal didn’t factor into this quarter’s results, it’s expected to supercharge the company’s gaming business.
“Microsoft now controls 30 game studios and some of the most well-known games across the industry,” Edward Jones analyst Logan Purk said in a research note earlier this month. “With a massive cloud network and now a compelling library of games, Microsoft has a leg up on peers” in gaming, he said.
Following the Activision takeover, “we’re looking forward to one of our strongest first-party holiday [game] lineups ever, including new titles like Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3,” CEO Satya Nadella said on an analyst call Tuesday. The company said it expects roughly $400 million of operating expenses in the fourth quarter to come as a result of the acquisition.
Snap said its sales growth was driven in part by its ongoing efforts to revamp its advertising technology, following changes to Apple’s app tracking policies that took a hit to the business models of Snapchat, Facebook and other platforms.
“We are focused on improving our advertising platform to drive higher return on investment for our advertising partners, and we have evolved our go-to-market efforts to better serve our partners and drive customer success,” CEO Evan Spiegel said in a statement.
Snap also reported that it now has 406 million daily active users, up 12% compared to the year-ago quarter. And time spent watching Spotlight — Snapchat’s TikTok clone — grew 200% year-over-year, according to the company.
The company also recently announced that it had reached more than 5 million subscribers to its Snapchat+ subscription program, a key effort to diversify its revenue.
Snap said Tuesday that its chief operating officer, Jerry Hunter, plans to retire. Hunter, who spent seven years at the company, will step down from his role as of the end of the month, but will remain at the company until July 1, 2024, to support the transition.
The company noted that some advertisers temporarily paused their spending following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war. Because of the “unpredictable nature” of the war, Snap declined to provide formal guidance for the fourth quarter, but said its internal forecast assumes year-over-year quarterly revenue growth between 2% and 6%.
An off-duty pilot who was riding in the cockpit of an Alaska Airlines flight en route to San Francisco on Sunday is facing dozens of attempted murder charges after he tried to shut down the plane’s engines mid-flight, authorities say.
The suspect, identified as Alaska Airlines pilot Joseph D. Emerson, 44, attempted to cut off fuel to the engines but the quick action of the aircraft’s captain and first officer kept the engines from failing completely, the airline said, adding Emerson was subdued by the flight crew.
The flight was forced to divert to Portland, Oregon, where the suspect was taken into custody by the Port of Portland police, the port said in a statement.
Emerson has been charged in Oregon with 83 felony counts of attempted murder, 83 counts of reckless endangerment and one count of endangering an aircraft, booking records show.
Authorities do not believe the incident was an act of terrorism or ideologically motivated violence, a law enforcement source familiar with the investigation told CNN’s Josh Campbell. The source noted the suspect may face additional federal charges.
Here’s what we know.
After taking off from Everett, Washington, on Sunday, Alaska Airlines Flight 2059 – operated by regional carrier Horizon Air – reported a “security threat related to an off-duty Alaskan Airlines pilot, identified as Captain Joseph Emerson, who was traveling in the flight deck jump seat,” the airline said in a statement.
Pilots will sometimes ride in a cockpit “jump seat” when traveling in their official capacity or commuting between airports.
While in the cockpit, Emerson had tried to shut down both of the Embraer 175’s engines by pulling its fire extinguisher handles, the airline said.
“The fire suppression system consists of a T-handle for each engine; when pulled, a valve in the wing closes to shut off fuel to the engine,” Alaska Airlines said in a statement to CNN. “After they are pulled, some residual fuel remains in the line.”
The airline said the quick reaction of the crew to reset both handles helped restore the flow of fuel and prevent the engines from cutting out.
“Our crew responded without hesitation to a difficult and highly unusual situation, and we are incredibly proud and grateful for their skillful actions,” the airline said in a statement.
The plane was at cruise altitude when the incident occurred, Capt. Mike Karn, senior manager of flight security for American Airlines, said in a memo circulated at his airline.
The flight crew detained the suspect and the plane was diverted to Portland International Airport, the Port of Portland said in a statement.
“I think he’s subdued,” one of the plane’s pilots can be heard saying in air traffic control audio recorded by LiveATC.net. “Other than that, we want law enforcement as soon as we get on the ground and are parked.”
Once the flight landed in Portland around 6:30 p.m., the suspect was taken into custody by Port of Portland police officers, the port said.
No injuries were reported on the flight, the FBI said.
All passengers were later able to fly to San Francisco with a new crew and aircraft, the airline said, noting it is “reaching out to each of them individually to discuss their experience and check-in on their well-being.”
Emerson has been detained at the Multnomah County Detention Center as both the FBI and the Port of Portland police investigate the incident, authorities said.
The FBI’s Portland field office confirmed its investigation in a statement Monday and assured travelers there is “no continuing threat related to this incident.”
The Federal Aviation Administration also said it is supporting local law enforcement in the investigation.
The FAA said it has briefed other airlines on preliminary details of the incident and informed carriers the incident is not related to “current world events” – apparently referring to the war in the Middle East between Israel and Hamas.
Passengers describe their emergency landing
Two passengers on the flight told CNN that the airline crew maintained a calm environment on the plane as the incident played out.
Aubrey Gavello, one of the passengers, said she didn’t realize something was wrong until a flight attendant announced over the loudspeaker that the plane needed to land immediately.
“We didn’t know where we were landing and we didn’t know what was wrong. But (the flight attendant) assured us we were safe,” Gavello said on “Laura Coates Live” Monday night.
Later, the pilot informed passengers through the loudspeaker that there had been a “disturbance in the cockpit,” said Alex Wood, who was seated at the front of the plane. Wood said he was wearing headphones and slept through the incident.
“I was right by the cockpit, but nothing woke me up. Nothing was loud enough, nothing was rambunctious enough to wake me up,” Wood said.
After the plane landed, about five police officers boarded the plane and escorted the suspect off the aircraft, Gavello recalled. She noted the suspect was calm and cooperative and had his hands secured by zip ties.
“Props to the Alaska crew for keeping everyone calm,” Gavello said.
“It was all handled super well,” said Wood.
The pair said they didn’t realize the gravity of the situation Monday, when they woke to news headlines about the suspect trying to shut down the plane engines.
“I’m honestly grateful that we didn’t know anything when they rebooked us and got us on a second plane,” Gavello said. “I don’t know if I would have felt comfortable doing that if we had all the information.”
Emerson’s neighbor, Ed Yee, told CNN it was “very shocking” to hear of the suspect’s alleged actions.
“He seems like a really nice guy. Nothing abnormal about him,” Yee said.
Emerson has worked in aviation for at least two decades, according to information shared by Alaskan Airlines.
He first joined the Alaska Air Group in 2001 as a first officer with Horizon. In 2012, Emerson left Horizon and joined Virgin America as a pilot.
After Alaska Airlines acquired Virgin America in 2016, Emerson became a first officer with Alaska and worked about three more years to become a pilot for the airline, according to the airline statement.
“Throughout his career, Emerson completed his mandated FAA medical certifications in accordance with regulatory requirements, and at no point were his certifications denied, suspended or revoked,” Alaska Airlines said in a statement.
FAA records show Emerson held an Airline Transport Pilot certification with ratings to fly the Airbus A320, Boeing 737, Canadair Regional Jet, and De Havilland Dash 8. He did not hold a certification to fly the ERJ 175, those records indicate, the type of airplane in use during Sunday’s incident.
I was on vacation and hanging out quietly in the hotel room with my friend when, out of nowhere, she screamed “Zoo Pals are back!”
We immediately tried to buy some. But to our misfortune, they were sold out. For days we refreshed the page to see if they were back in stock. Sure enough, I got my Zoo Pals a few weeks later.
I’m almost embarrassed to share that Zoo Pals are paper plates that feature the bright, adorable faces of animals like pigs, turtles, ducks and whales. Each plate has one main section and two subsections for the animal’s ears or feet. In 2014, Hefty, the maker of Zoo Pals, discontinued them.
As a child, Zoo Pals were a game-changer. That meant broccoli didn’t have to, God forbid, touch my chicken nuggets, and theyalso provided a special area for dipping the nuggets in ketchup. And I had an incentive to finish my plate so I could see my Zoo Pal’s face again.
As an adult, I no longer have such needs.But $6.99 was a small price to pay for a walk down memory lane.
Adults are increasingly shelling out for relics of their youth and for items, ranging from flip phones to film cameras to Tamagotchis, that evoke a late 20th-century or turn-of-the century nostalgia. That demand has created a treasure-trove of sales in particular for toys and products, like my Zoo Pals, originally geared to children.
Toy recipients ages 18 and up — also known as “kidults” — represented about 17% of total toy sales in the United States for the 12 months ending in June 2023, according to data consumer research group Circana shared with CNN. That’s up four percentage points from 2021 and up a whopping eight percentage points from 2019.
In total, toy sales for adults increased by $1.7 billion to $6.4 billion from June 2021 to June 2023, according to Circana data.
The trend of adults buying toys for themselves is relatively new, but longing for the glory days of childhood is not. So how come adults lately have been willing to spend so much money on toys to relive the past?
The pandemic drove more people to revisit their youth
Adults started purchasing more toys for themselves after the pandemic began. Covid ushered in heightened levels of anxiety and it caused people to think about dying more, explains Krystine Batcho, a licensed psychologist who teaches at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York.
Both factors are associated with “greater nostalgia,” said Batcho, whose research focuses on the psychology of nostalgia. Batcho created the Nostalgia Inventory, a survey that’s been widely used to assess what makes someone more inclined to feel nostalgic.
For instance, her research and other research she’s studied point to millenials and members of Gen Z being in life stages that are prime for feeling nostalgic. “The transition away from childhood and adolescence to adulthood entails a bittersweet conflict between the desire to grow into independence and the desire for the carefree innocence and security of childhood,” she said.
And, in general, people become more nostalgic during difficult times and in threatening circumstances, Batcho added.
During the pandemic, as people were looking for ways to entertain themselves at home or in small groups they turned to social media for ideas, Juli Lennett, Circana’s toy industry advisor, told CNN. That helped fuel an increase in purchases for games, puzzles, collectibles, trading cards, building sets and more, she said.
“Consumers found like-minded toy consumers and tribes formed around certain toy categories and brands. It continues to this day,” Lennett said.
In 2021, Lego launched an entire product line designed for adults that can be found under the “Adults Welcome” section of its site. “In a world of distractions, LEGO Sets for Adults offer a focused, hands-on, mindful activity. A creative recharge. A zone of zen. A place to find your flow,” a post on Lego’s site states.
Mattel Inc.’s American Girl doll line has also seen an influx of purchases made by kidults over the past few years, “and it continues to grow in popularity,” Jamie Cygielman, the president of American Girl, told CNN.
That started to take off in 2021 when American Girl re-released six of the original dolls the company had produced to celebrate its 35th anniversary. The dolls, priced at $150, began to sell out the first day they were listed online, said Cygielman. More than half of those purchases “were women purchasing for themselves, not for a child,” she said based on a subsequent survey American Girl conducted.
“So we started really leaning into it a bit more,” she said. That meant re-releasing more dolls and doll outfits adults grew up with as well as adding more alcoholic beverages and food items that appeal to adults to its in-store café menus.
“Any given day as you walk into our café, you’ll see tables of young adults with not a child in sight,” said Cygielman. Many of them come there to celebrate birthdays and bachelorette parties, often with their dolls sitting in clip-on chairs beside them.
Most recently, American Girl re-released two doll outfits that were originally sold in 1999.
TikTokers and Instagramers had a field day seeing those and rushed to post about it.
Since American Girl creates individual stories featuring historical eras like the Colonial period or World War II to complement the dolls they sell, users on social media started posting things like, “We need an American Girl doll who went to college in 2016.”
The TikTok account that posted that request, @inbloombyemily, received nearly 200,000 likes on her video where she described the doll’s story and curated outfits and accessories which included a Svedka bottle of strawberry lemonade vodka.
American Girl hasn’t seized the opportunity to actually make most of the dolls the memes capture, said Cygielman.
“It’s a sincere form of flattery, but we don’t necessarily want to author it ourselves,” she said. “We’re still laser-focused on our core customer, which is that young girl and her caregiver gift giver.”
As for the kidult trend, there are some signs that it could slow, Lennett said.
“As consumers have less money in their wallets due to macroeconomic conditions, they are spending less on discretionary categories like toys,” she said. “If the conditions continue, we can expect a pullback in toy spending for adults.”
But Batcho, the psychologist, notes that nostalgia can be healthy in hard times.
“Nostalgic memories remind people of better times and can encourage them to seek solutions and move toward a more optimistic future,” she said. “Nostalgia has also been found to increase a sense of meaning and purpose in life. By strengthening social connectedness and feelings of belonging, nostalgia counteracts loneliness.”
Even though the darkest days of the pandemic are, for the most part, in the rearview mirror there’s still “a nostalgic longing for the security and stability of pre-pandemic life,” Batcho said.
Rite Aid, which had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, is now preparing to shed almost 100stores nationwide as part of its restructuring efforts.
The first tranche of stores to be sold — both leased and owned — is located in nine states, according to A&G Real Estate Partners, which is advising the drug store chain on its real estate portfolio. The states include California (17 stores), Maryland (4), Michigan (16), New Jersey (8), New York (17), Ohio (4), Oregon (2), Pennsylvania (17), New Hamphire (2) and Washington (10), Alabama (1), Idaho (1).
The writing has been on the wall for some time for Rite Aid, the third-biggest standalone pharmacy chain in the US, as the entire drug store retail sector struggles to compete with Amazon and big-box chains like Walmart, Target and Costco moving deeper into the space and offering more customer-friendly alternatives to the nationwide pharmacy chains.
Compounding its problems were legal troubles stemming from accusations of filing unlawful opioid prescriptions for customers.
Rite Aid is in much worse financial shape than its competitors. Over the past six years, Rite Aid has tallied nearly $3 billion in losses.
While it has secured $3.5 billion in financing and debt reduction agreements from lenders to keep the company afloat through its bankruptcy, Rite Aid said it would accelerate store closures and sell off some of its businesses, including prescription benefit provider Elixir Solutions. Bankruptcy could also help resolve the company’s legal disputes at a vastly reduced cost.
As it reevaluates its portfolio of stores, these are the Rite Aid locations that are currently up for sale:
SEC Alabama Ave. & Pike St. in Monroeville, Alabama
920 East Valley Blvd in Alhambra, California
571 Bellevue Road in Atwater, California
3029 Harbor Blvd. in Costa Mesa, California
139 North Grand Ave. in Covina, California
20572 Homestead Road in Cupertino, California
24829 Del Pradoin Dana Point, California
7859 Firestone Blvd. in Downey, California
8509 Irvine Center Drive in Irvine, California
15800 Imperial Hwy. in La Mirada, California
30222 Crown Valley Pkwy. in Laguna Niguel, California
4046 South Centinela Ave. in Los Angeles, California
499 Alvarado St. in Monterey, California
1670 Main St. in Ramona, California
1309 Fulton Ave. in Sacramento, California
901 Soquel Ave. in Santa Cruz, California
19701 Yorba Linda Blvd. in Yorba Linda, California
25906 Newport Road in Menifee, California
1600 North Main St. in Meridian, Idaho
5808 Ritchie Hwy. in Baltimore, Maryland
5 Bel Air South Pkwy. in Bel Air, Maryland
728 East Pulaski Hwy. in Elkton, Maryland
7501 Ritchie Hwy. In Glen Burnie, Maryland
35250 South Gratiot Ave. in Clinton Township, Michigan
36485 Garfield Road. in Clinton Township, Michigan
1900 East 8 Mile Road. in Detroit, Michigan
25922 Middlebelt Road. in Farmington Hills, Michigan
924 West Main St. in Fremont, Michigan
715 South Clinton St. in Grand Ledge, Michigan
3100 East Michigan Ave. in Jackson, Michigan
15250 24 Mile Road in Macomb, Michigan
1243 U.S. 31 South in Manistee, Michigan
15181 Telegraph Road in Redford, Michigan
320 N Main St. in Redford, Michigan
51037 Van Dyke Ave. in Shelby Township, Michigan
109 North Whittemore St. in St. Johns, Michigan
102 North Centerville Road in Sturgis, Michigan
9155 Telegraph Road in Taylor, Michigan
47300 Pontiac Trail in Wixom, Michigan
205-209 Main St. in Berlin, New Hampshire
Grove St. and Route 101 in Peterborough, New Hampshire
37 Juliustown Road in Browns Mills, New Jersey
1426 Mount Ephraim Ave. in Camden, New Jersey
1636 Route 38, Suite 49 in Lumberton, New Jersey
210 Bridgeton Pike in Mantua, New Jersey
108 Swedesboro Road in Mullica Hill, New Jersey
Route 33 and Robbinsville- Edinburg Road in Robbinsville, New Jersey
773 Hamilton St. in Somerset, New Jersey
1434 South Black Horse Pike in Williamstown, New Jersey
836 Sunrise Hwy. in Bay Shore, New York
452 Main St. in Buffalo, New York
15 Arnold St. in Buffalo, New York
901 Merrick Road in Copiague, New York
577 Larkfield Road in East Northport, New York
2 Whitney Ave. in Floral Park, New York
115-10 Merrick Blvd. in Jamaica, New York
2453 Elmwood Ave. in Kenmore, New York
3131 Hempstead Turnpike in Levittown, New York
700-43 Patchogue-Yaphank in Medford, New York
4188 Broadway in New York, New York
195 8th Ave. in New York, New York
1033 St. Nicholas Ave. in New York, New York
593 Old Town Road in Port Jefferson, New York
101 Main St. in Sayville, New York
65 Route 111 in Smithtown, New York
397 Sunrise Hwy. in West Patchogue, New York
120 South Main St. in New Carlisle, Ohio
Euclid & Strathmore in East Cleveland, Ohio
1204 Gettysburg Ave. in Dayton, Ohio
2323 Broadview Road in Cleveland, Ohio
981 Medford Center in Medford, Oregon
4346 N.E. Cully Blvd. in Portland, Oregon
2722 West 9th St. in Chester, Pennsylvania
5990 University Blvd. in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania
1709 Liberty Ave. in Erie, Pennsylvania
6090 Route 30 in Greensburg, Pennsylvania
301 Eisenhower Drive in Hanover, Pennsylvania
1730 Wilmington Road in New Castle, Pennsylvania
700 Stevenson Blvd. in New Kensington, Pennsylvania
350 Main St. in Pennsburg, Pennsylvania
5612 North 5th St. in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
2401 East Venango St. in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
LONDON — It is a multi-billion-dollar plan to build a metropolis in the Indo-Pacific which critics fear may one day act as a Chinese military outpost.
Now the vast Colombo Port City project has a new champion — former British Prime Minister David Cameron.
Cameron has been enlisted to drum up foreign investment in the controversial Sri Lankan project, which is a major part of Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative — China’s global infrastructure strategy — and is billed as a Chinese-funded rival to Singapore and Dubai.
Cameron flew to the Middle East in late September to speak at two glitzy investment events for Colombo Port City, having visited the waterside site in Sri Lanka in person earlier this year.
His spokesperson said the former PM had had no direct contact with either the Chinese government or the Chinese firm involved. But Cameron’s lobbying for the scheme has drawn severe backlash from critics, who say his activities will aid China in its geopolitical ambitions.
Former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith, who was sanctioned by Beijing for criticizing its human rights record, said: “Cameron of all people must realize that China’s Belt and Road is not about help and support and development, it’s ultimately about gaining control — as they’ve already demonstrated in Sri Lanka.
“I hope that he will reconsider the position he’s taken on this.”
Tim Loughton, another Tory MP sanctioned by China, said: “The Sri Lankan project is a classic example of how China buys votes and influence in developing countries and then sends the bailiffs in when those countries can’t keep up the payments.”
“Cameron should be working to help wean vulnerable countries off Chinese influence and debt rather than tying them in more tightly.”
At the roadshow
Dilum Amunugama, Sri Lanka’s investment minister who attended the investment events in the UAE last month, told POLITICO he believed Cameron was enlisted to convince Western investors to put their money into the project.
Amunugama was at two events where Cameron spoke — one in Abu Dhabi with an audience of 100, and one in Dubai with an audience of 300.
“The main point he [Cameron] was trying to stress is that it is not a purely Chinese project, it is a Sri Lankan-owned project — and that is the main point I think the Chinese also wanted him to iron out,” Amunugama said.
Cameron is in charge of drumming up investment into the Chinese-funded Colombo Port City project | Ishara S. Kodikara/AFP via Getty Images
The Sri Lankan minister said the decision to enlist Cameron “was taken by the Chinese company, not the government.”
Cameron’s office said his involvement was organized by the Washington Speakers Bureau, a D.C.-based agency that books guest speakers for corporate events.
His spokesperson said: “David Cameron spoke at two events in the UAE organized via Washington Speakers Bureau (WSB), in support of Port City Colombo, Sri Lanka.
“The contracting party for the events was KPMG Sri Lanka and Mr Cameron’s engagement followed a meeting he had with Sri Lanka’s president, Ranil Wickremesinghe, earlier in the year.
“Mr Cameron has not engaged in any way with China or any Chinese company about these speaking events. The Port City project is fully supported by the Sri Lankan government,” his spokesperson added.
The spokesperson declined to say how much Cameron was paid for his time. Cameron traveled to Sri Lanka in January and visited the development, but his office said that he did so as a guest of the president and that there was no commercial aspect to that trip.
Mired in controversy
The Colombo Port City project has been controversial since its inception.
It was unveiled in 2014 by China’s Xi and Sri Lanka’s then-president, Mahinda Rajapaksa. Three years later, Sri Lanka handed it over to Chinese control after struggling to pay off its debt to Chinese firms.
Multiple concerns have been raised about the project, including its environmental impact; U.S. warnings it could be used for money laundering; and fears that it will ultimately be used as a Chinese military outpost.
Analysts have warned repeatedly that China is using the project to extend its strategic influence in the region. Beijing has already used the nearby Hambantota port — also funded by Chinese loans — to dock military vessels.
The main developer behind the Colombo Port City Project, CHEC Port City Colombo Ltd, has pumped in an initial $1.3 billion. Its ultimate owner is the China Communications Construction Company, a majority state-owned enterprise headquartered in Beijing.
Golden era no more
As prime minister, Cameron and his Chancellor George Osborne famously heralded a “golden era” of U.K. relations with China. Since leaving office in 2016, the ex-PM has come under heavy scrutiny over his lobbying activities, including for the now-collapsed finance company Greensill Capital.
The ex-PM has come under scrutiny for his lobbying activities, including for the now-bankrupt company Greensill Capital | David Hecker/Getty Images
For a period Cameron was also vice-chair of a £1 billion China-U.K. investment fund. The U.K. parliament’s intelligence and security committee said this year that Cameron’s appointment to that role could have been “in some part engineered by the Chinese state to lend credibility to Chinese investment.”
Sam Hogg, a U.K.-China analyst who writes the “Beijing to Britain” briefing, said: “As the ISC pointed out, China has a habit of utilizing former senior-ranking politicians to give credibility to their companies and projects.
“At a time when the Belt and Road Initiative is under intense scrutiny ahead of its 10th anniversary next week, Cameron’s involvement will raise a few eyebrows.”
Luke de Pulford, executive director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, added: “We can’t have a situation where the EU and U.S. are so concerned about the Belt and Road Initiative that they’re pumping billions into alternative projects, while our own former PM appears to be batting for Beijing.”
Rite Aid filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Sunday, a casualty of a miserable environment for drug stores, exacerbated by its runner-up status to bigger chains and expensive legal battles for allegedly filling unlawful opioid prescriptions.
The bankruptcy was not a surprise. Its bigger rivals, CVS and Walgreens, are also facing many of the same problems. They, too, are closing stores as Amazon and big-box chains like Walmart, Target and Costco serve as more customer-friendly alternatives to nationwide pharmacy chains.
But Rite Aid is in much worse financial shape than its competitors and unable to weather the storm that has been beating down on the industry.On Thursday, it filed a notice to the US Securities and Exchange Commission saying it would be unable to file its latest quarterly financial report because it was looking at “strategic alternatives,” which is Wall Street speak for “considering bankruptcy.”
In that filing, the company said it expected its losses would increase significantly in the past quarter, which is saying something, considering it lost about three quarters of a billion dollars between March 2022 and March 2023 — and another $307 billion between March and May this year. Over the past six years, Rite Aid has tallied nearly $3 billion in losses.
At the beginning of June, the last time the company filed a financial report, Rite Aid had just $135.5 million of cash on hand -— and $3.3 billion in long-term debt, which exceeded the value of the company’s assets by nearly $1 billion. With rising interest rates, that debt wasn’t cheap to finance.
“It was always a matter of when, not if, Rite Aid would file for bankruptcy,” said Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData, in a note to investors. “The company has been deep in the red for the past six years.”
The company said in a statement it had secured $3.5 billion in financing and debt reduction agreements from lenders to keep the company afloat through its bankruptcy.
It said it would accelerate its pace of store closures and sell off some of its businesses, including prescription benefit provider Elixir Solutions. Bankruptcy could also help resolve the company’s legal disputes at a vastly reduced cost.
As part of the bankruptcy plan, Rite Aid appointed a new CEO, Jeff Stein, who will also serve as the head of restructuring and a board member. Stein, in the statement, said the company plans to remain in business.
“With the support of our lenders, we look forward to strengthening our financial foundation, advancing our transformation initiatives and accelerating the execution of our turnaround strategy,” he said. “In doing so, we will be even better able to deliver the healthcare products and services our customers and their families rely on -— now and into the future.”
Rite Aidhas had an interim CEO since January 2023.
Rite Aid’s losing battle against mounting debt was exacerbated by its legal troubles stemming from accusations of filing unlawful opioid prescriptions for customers.
The Department of Justice filed suit against the company in March, claiming that it knowingly processed “unlawful prescriptions for controlled substances.” That stands in violation of the False Claims Act and Controlled Substances Act. The government accused Rite Aid of missing “obvious red flags” when it filled the prescriptions for addictive pain killers.
When the US Justice Department filed its lawsuit, Attorney General Merrick Garland said the department would use “every tool at our disposal” to hold Rite Aid accountable for contributing to the opioid epidemic.”
Walgreens, CVS and others settled similar lawsuits over the past few years, but they remain in better financial shape and were largely able to weather the tens of billions of dollars owed to various government agencies in settlements.
More than half a million people have died from drug overdoses in the United States between 1999 and 2020, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Rite Aid is a distant third-largest nationwide standalone pharmacy chain in the United States — and the seventh largest pharmacy overall, when taking into account big box chains. It has more than 2,200 stores in 17 states.
It was offered a $17 billion lifeline in 2015 when Walgreens offered to buy the chain. But the deal was met with stiff scrutiny from US regulators who feared the combination would violate federal antitrust laws and reduce competition in the drug store market.
Ultimately, in 2017, the companies agreed to a smaller, $4.4 billion deal, in which Walgreens bought just under 2,000 Rite Aid locations, leaving Rite Aid diminished in stature and unable to compete at the scale of its bigger rivals.
— CNN’s Nathaniel Meyersohn and Juliana Liu contributed to this report
U.S. stocks are poised to rise on Monday ahead of a week of earnings and economic data releases, including quarterly reports from
Tesla, Netflix, and .
Elon Musk has made himself Europe’s digital public enemy No. 1.
Since Hamas attacked Israel on Saturday, the billionaire’s social network X has been flooded with gruesome images, politically-motivated lies and terrorist propaganda that authorities say appear to violate both its own policies and the European Union’s new social media law.
Now Musk is facing the threat of sanctions — including potentially hefty fines — as officials in Brussels start gathering evidence in preparation for a formal investigation into whether X has broken the European Union’s rules. Authorities in the U.K. and Germany have joined the criticism.
The tussle represents a critical test for all sides. Musk will be keen to fight any claim that he’s failing to be a responsible owner of the social network formerly known as Twitter — all while upholding his commitment to free speech. The EU will want to show its new regulation, known as the Digital Services Act (DSA), has teeth.
Thierry Breton, Europe’s commissioner in charge of social media content rules, demanded that Musk explain why graphic images and disinformation about the Middle East crisis were widespread on X.
“I urge you to ensure a prompt, accurate and complete response to this request within the next 24 hours,” Breton wrote on X late Tuesday.
“We will include your answer in our assessment file on your compliance with the DSA,” said Breton, who also wrote to Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg to remind him of his obligations under Europe’s rules. TikTok’s head Shou Zi Chew was also asked on October 12 to explain how his platform was dealing with misinformation and graphic content.
“I remind you that following the opening of a potential investigation and a finding of non-compliance, penalties can be imposed,” Breton said. Those fines can total up to 6 percent of a company’s global revenue.
In response, Linda Yaccarino, X’s chief executive, wrote to Breton Thursday to outline how the social media giant had responded to the ongoing Middle East conflict. That included removing or labelling potentially harmful content, working with law enforcement agencies and adding so-called “community notes,” or crowd-sourced fact-checks, to posts.
The heat on Twitter did not begin with the Hamas attacks. Ever since Musk bought the platform, he’s been hit by criticism that he’s failing to stop hate speech from spreading online.
X has cut back on its content moderation teams, in the spirit of promoting free speech; pulled out of a Brussels-backed pledge to tackle digital foreign interference; and tweaked its social media algorithms to promote often shady content over verified material from news organizations and politicians.
Musk has responded — via his social media account with 159 million followers — with jeers and attacks on his naysayers. But the latest uproar over content apparently inciting and praising terrorism has made it a surefire bet that X will be one of the first companies to be investigated under the EU’s social media rules.
In response to Breton’s demand, Musk asked the French commissioner to outline how X had potentially violated Europe’s content regulations. “Our policy is that everything is open source and transparent,” he added. In the U.K., Michelle Donelan, the country’s digital minister, also met with social media executives Wednesday to discuss how their firms were combatting online hate speech.
The probe is coming
In truth, an investigation into X’s compliance with Europe’s new content rulebook has been on the cards for months. Over the summer, Breton and senior EU officials visited the company’s headquarters in San Francisco for a so-called “stress test” to see how it was complying.
Under the EU’s legislation, tech giants like X, TikTok and Facebook must carry out lengthy risk assessments to figure out how hate speech and other illegal content can spread on their platforms. These firms must also allow greater access to external auditors, regulators and civil society groups that will track how social media companies are complying with the new oversight.
Investigations into potential wrongdoing under Europe’s content rules will likely involve months-long inquiries into a company’s behavior, the Commission taking a legal decision on whether to levy fines or other sanctions, and a likely appeal from the firm in response. Such cases are expected to take years to complete.
Within Brussels, the Commission has been compiling evidence of potential wrongdoing across multiple social media companies, even before the EU’s new content legislation came into full force in August, according to five officials and other individuals with direct knowledge of the matter.
The goal is to start at least three investigations linked to the Digital Services Act by early next year, according to three of those people. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions are not public and remain ongoing.
In recent days, Commission officials have been compiling evidence associated with Hamas’ attacks on Israel — much of which has been shared on X with little, if any, pushback from the company.
That content included verified X accounts with ties to Russia and Iran reposting graphic footage of alleged atrocities targeting Israeli soldiers. Some of these posts have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Other accounts linked to Hezbollah and ISIS have similarly posted widely with few, if any, removals.
It is unclear whether such footage will lead to a specific investigation into X’s handling of the most recent violent content. But it has reaffirmed the likelihood Musk will soon face legal consequences for not removing such material from his social network.
Combating violent and terrorist content requires “people sitting at a computer screen and looking at this and making judgments,” said Graham Brookie, senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which has tracked the online footprint of Hamas’ ongoing attacks. “It used to be that there were dozens of people that do that at Twitter, and now there’s only a handful.”
Steven Overly contributed reporting from Washington. This article has been updated.
Samsung warned that operating profit in the third quarter likely plunged 78% as it continues to contend with lower than usual demand for consumer devices.
The South Korean tech giant released earnings estimates Wednesday, forecasting operating profit of about 2.4 trillion Korean won ($1.8 billion) for the three months ended September. That compares with 10.85 trillion won ($8 billion) in the same period last year.
Revenue was also projected to drop 12.7% from a year ago.
That continues a dreary run for the electronics maker, which has reported major losses in recent months as global economic uncertainty weighs on consumers around the world, leading many people to hold on to their cell phones and laptops longer.
According to Counterpoint Research, “2023 is on track to be the worst year for global smartphone shipments in 10 years,” with shipments forecast to decline 6% to fewer than 1.2 billion units.
In major markets like North America, “consumers are hesitant to upgrade their devices,” the firm noted in an August report.
Samsung has already been feeling the effects. The firm’s operating profit plummeted 95% in the first quarter, following a record loss in its semiconductor business. It saw similar results in the second quarter.
After a historic supply shortage during Covid, the global semiconductor industry is now seeing a glut in some areas that has driven losses for Samsung, the world’s largest memory chip and smartphone maker.
According to consultancy Bain, “the semiconductor industry’s post-pandemic rebound boosted capacity to the extent that some foresee an oversupply.”
In a report last month, Bain suggested the trend was merely cyclical, attributing it to “normal” ups and downs in the industry.
Samsung has also told shareholders it anticipates a gradual comeback in global demand in the second half of the year.
This “should lead to an improvement in earnings driven by the component business,” it said in a July earnings statement.
“However, continued macroeconomic risks could prove to be a challenge,” the company cautioned.
Analysts believe a downturn in memory chips will also turn around, benefiting manufacturers like Samsung.
In a recent note to clients, Nomura analysts said they expected a recovery in the sector “to accelerate” through the rest of this year.
“The team expects memory prices to remain flat or slightly increase in [the third quarter], then show strong growth in [the fourth quarter],” the analysts wrote, maintaining a buy rating on Samsung’s stock.
The company’s shares climbed 3.5%in Seoul on Wednesday following its announcement.
A strike at General Motors’ Canadian plants is over less than a day after it started, according Unifor, the union that represents more than 4,000 autoworkers at the company.
The strike had begun 11:59 pm Monday when Unifor said GM had refused to agree to a deal similar to the one the union previously reached with Ford. That kind of deal is known as a pattern agreement.
The union said the company quickly gave in to union demands once the strike started.
“When faced with the shutdown of these key facilities General Motors had no choice but to get serious at the table and agree to the pattern,” said Unifor National President Lana Payne. “The solidarity of our members has led to a comprehensive tentative agreement that follows the pattern set at Ford to the letter.”
The union said strike actions are on hold to allow the membership to vote on the tentative agreement. The strike could resume if the rank-and-file members fail to ratify the deal.
But it’s uncertain whether it will win approval of membership. Only 54% of Unifor members at Ford voted in favor of the deal.
The Unifor strike occurred while GM as well as rivals Ford and Stellantis were already dealing with strikes by the United Auto Workers union. That strike had started September 15 against targeted facilities of each company. More than 25,000 UAW members are now on strike at the three companies, with nearly 10,000 of those at GM.
“This record agreement, subject to member ratification, recognizes the many contributions of our represented team members with significant increases in wages, benefits and job security while building on GM’s historic investments in Canadian manufacturing,” said GM’s statement.
Details of the Unifor deal were not immediately available. But the deal with Ford included a wage increase of 10% in the first year of the agreement, followed by a 2% and 3% increase over the next two years of the contract. It also restored the cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) to protect workers from rising prices.
The Ford agreement also returned to a pension plan — rather than just 401(k)-style retirement accounts — for Unifor members hired at Ford in recent years. And it converted temporary staff who work full-time shifts into permanent employees.
Autoworkers in both Canada and the United States used to all have COLA clauses in their contracts as well as traditional pension plans that pay retirees a set amount every month as long as they live. But the automakers got unions on both sides of the border to give up the COLA for all members and traditional pensions for new hires when the companies were in financial distress in 2007 through 2009.
Restoring those concessions have been a major negotiation demand of both Unifor and the UAW.
The Supreme Court declined on Tuesday to revisit the landmark First Amendment decision in New York Times v. Sullivan, rebuffing a request to take another look at decades-old precedent that created a higher bar for public figures to claim libel in civil suits.
The media world has for years relied on the unanimous decision in the 1964 case to fend off costly defamation lawsuits brought by public figures. The ruling established the requirement that public figures show “actual malice” before they can succeed in a libel dispute.
Despite being a mainstay in US media law, the Sullivan decision has increasingly come under fire by conservatives both inside and outside the court, including Justice Clarence Thomas, who said on Tuesday that he still wanted to revisit Sullivan at some point.
“In an appropriate case, however, we should reconsider New York Times and our other decisions displacing state defamation law,” Thomas wrote in a brief concurrence to the court’s decision not to take up the case. He said that the case, Don Blankenship v. NBC Universal, LLC, was a poor vehicle to reconsider Sullivan.
Just a few months ago, the conservative justice attacked the ruling in Sullivan in a fiery dissent in which he called it “flawed.” Thomas issued other public critiques of Sullivan in recent years, including in 2019, when he wrote that the ruling and “the Court’s decisions extending it were policy-driven decisions masquerading as constitutional law.”
The case at hand concerns Don Blankenship, a former coal baron who was convicted of a federal conspiracy offense related to a deadly 2010 explosion at a mine he ran, in what was one of the worst US mine disasters in decades. His sentence of a year in prison was one day less than a felony sentence.
“Blankenship himself admits this was a highly unusual sentence for a misdemeanor offense; he notes that he was the only inmate at his prison who was not serving a sentence for a felony conviction,” according to a lower-court opinion in the case.
During his unsuccessful 2018 US Senate campaign in West Virginia, a number of media organizations erroneously reported that he was a convicted felon, even though his conspiracy offense was classified as a misdemeanor.
Blankenship sued a slew of news outlets for the error, alleging defamation and false light invasion of privacy. Lower courts ruled against him, finding that the outlets did not make the statements with actual malice, the standard required by Sullivan.
Attorneys for Blankenship told the justices in court papers that the “damage was irreparable” since no felon has ever been elected to the Senate, and urged them to overturn the Sullivan decision.
“The actual malice standard poses a clear and present danger to our democracy,” they wrote. “New York Times Co. v. Sullivan and its progeny grant the press a license to publish defamatory falsehoods that misinform voters, manipulate elections, intensify polarization, and incite unrest.”
Attorneys for the media outlets urged the justices not to take up the case, arguing that it’s “as poor a vehicle as one could imagine to consider” questions related to Sullivan’s holding because, they said, the reporting mistakes were honest ones.
“There is good reason why the actual malice standard of New York Times has been embraced for so long and so often,” the media organizations told the justices. “At its essence, the standard protects ‘erroneous statements honestly made.’ While it permits recovery for falsehoods uttered with knowledge of falsity or with reckless disregard for the truth, it provides the ‘breathing space’ required for ‘free debate.’ A free people engaged in self-government deserves no less.”
Just last year the court declined to revisit Sullivan in a case brought by a not-for-profit Christian ministry against the Southern Poverty Law Center.
At the time, Thomas dissented from the court’s refusal to take up the case.
“I would grant certiorari in this case to revisit the ‘actual malice’ standard,” he wrote. “This case is one of many showing how New York Times and its progeny have allowed media organizations and interest groups ‘to cast false aspersions on public figures with near impunity.’”
In 2021, conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch also questioned the decision in Sullivan, writing in a dissent when the court decided not to take up a defamation case that the 1964 ruling should be revisited in part because it “has come to leave far more people without redress than anyone could have predicted.”
Misinformation has run rampant on Elon Musk’s social media platform X in the 48 hours since Hamas militants’ surprise attack on Israel, with users sharing false and misleading claims about the conflict and Musk himself pointing users to an account known for spreading misinformation.
Multiple users over the weekend shared a fake White House news release falsely claiming the US was sending billions of dollars in new aid to Israel in response. Accounts on X with hundreds of thousands of followers in total quickly spread the doctored White House press release after it appeared online on Saturday. Social media influencer Jackson Hinkle, who was among those shared the fake release, claimed it was a slap in the face to Ukraine, which has been pleading with Washington for more money to defend itself from Russia.
Musk himself added to the information chaos on Sunday by recommending X users follow the Israel-Hamas conflict by following an account known for spreading misinformation, including a fake report earlier this year of an explosion at the Pentagon.
Musk and Hinkle later deleted their posts. Musk later posted: “As always, please try stay as close to the truth as possible, even for stuff you don’t like.”
Elsewhere on X (formerly known as Twitter), an account impersonating the Jerusalem Post shared a bogus report that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been hospitalized. (The account was later suspended.)
CNN has requested comment from Musk and X on the posts related to the Israel-Gaza conflict.
A slew of mischaracterized videos and other posts went viral on the platform over the weekend.
One video that is purported to show Israel generals after being captured by Hamas fighter was viewed more than 1.7 million times by Monday. The video however actually shows the detention of separatists in Azerbaijan.
Another post viewed more than 500,000 times on X purported to show an airplane getting shot down with the hashtag #PalestineUnderAttack. The video is in fact a clip from the video game Arma 3, as was later noted in a “community note” appended to the post.
Community notes allow users on X to fact-check false posts on the platform. While notes were appended to both of these false posts, they often come after a false post has been viewed thousands – or in some cases millions – of times.
X has relied more heavily on community notes to moderate content since Musk laid off thousands of the company’s employees, including many responsible for detecting and addressing false claims, following his takeover of the platform last year.
Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, one of the government’s main cyber defense agencies, on Monday took to X to urge people not to spread unverified information. “[T]he rumor mill is overflowing,” the directorate wrote in Hebrew. The Anti-Defamation League also raised concerns in a statement Saturday about false and antisemitic claims being spread on the platform, including posts by a verified user falsely claiming that Israel helped to facilitate 9-11 on US soil, which have been viewed thousands of times.
The viral nature of the misinformation has alarmed experts on information operations, offering a fresh example of social platforms’ struggle to deal with a flood of falsehoods during a major geopolitical event.
“In times of war, social media becomes a propaganda battlefield; there is always an element of disinformation and exaggeration,” said Emerson Brooking, senior resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab. “Today, X is the main platform where this online battle plays out.”
Brooking said changes to X policy under Musk’s ownership have incentivized propagandists and scam artists. Any user can now purchase a “verification” checkmark on X by signing up for the platform’s $8 per month subscription program, and their posts are then boosted by the platform’s algorithm and eligible for monetization.
“Paid verification means that you cannot distinguish between a vetted journalist and a scam artist,” Brooking told CNN. “The for-profit ‘views’ system incentivizes accounts to impersonate news outlets and to post as frequently as possible, drawing from whatever source they can or just making things up.”
Twitter has long played a pivotal role in information sharing during conflicts, from the Arab Spring to the 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine, and during previous violence in Israel and Gaza.
Viral misinformation has always existed on the platform, but it has become particularly pronounced under Musk’s stewardship, experts say.
“In the past decade, every conflict has inevitably bred a digital “fog of war,” where both sides, and their supporters, try to use social platforms to spin the narrative in their favor,” Joe Galvin, a journalist who has specialized in open-source intelligence for more than a decade, told CNN Monday.
“The volume and reach of misinformation today, though, far exceeds what we saw in the early social media era conflicts, and is exacerbated by platforms like X, which has taken the guardrails off and allows the most egregious types of disinformation to run rampant,” Galvin said.
He said other platforms that have little or no guardrails including the social media messaging app Telegram are also hotbeds of misinformation, but X is unique given Musk’s behavior.
“Even the owner of X takes part in the chaos, promoting accounts that are known to spread falsehoods to his 150 million followers. The fact is that malicious users, state-backed and otherwise, have become better at spreading falsehoods, with more sophisticated networks being built and better technology – including AI – being used. The platforms are in a perpetual state of catch-up.”
Business leaders across the United States have expressed outrage and solidarity with Israel after the deadly surprise attack by Hamas.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said Sunday the bank stands with Israel, instructing employees there to work remotely for the foreseeable future, a person familiar with the matter told CNN, as Dimon pledged support for the people of Israel.
“This past weekend’s attack on Israel and its people and the resulting war and bloodshed are a terrible tragedy,” Dimon told all employees on Sunday in a memo obtained by CNN. “We stand with our employees, their families and the people of Israel during this time of great suffering and loss,” Dimon said.
JPMorgan has about 230 to 240 employees in Israel and has asked staff there to work from home for the near future, a person familiar with the matter told CNN. News of JPMorgan’s plans were previously reported by Bloomberg News.
Dimon said all of JPMorgan’s employees and all of those traveling in the region have been confirmed safe as of Sunday.
“We pray for their safety and for their families and loved ones going forward,” Dimon said. “The human cost of wars and terrorism are enormous, with too many lives lost and changed forever. We join together in our hope to one day see the end of violence and for there to be peace throughout the Middle East.”
Kathryn Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, told CNN in a statement on Monday: “New York City’s business community is reacting with the same grief and anger at these senseless acts of terrorism that we felt in response to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. For New Yorkers, this is personal.”
The Partnership represents more than 300 of New York City’s business leaders and companies that employ more than 1 million New Yorkers.
“Nothing can justify the premeditated violence that took place in Israel this weekend,” Wylde said.
The Business Roundtable, a trade group representing leading US CEOs, said Monday in a statement to CNN: “We join the US government and global community in condemning the horrific attacks on Israel and stand in solidarity with the Israeli people.”
“We extend our heartfelt condolences to the people of Israel and stand in solidarity with them as they battle the scourge of terrorism,” the Chamber said.
The business group added that it’s in touch with partners from the Israeli government and the Israel-America Chamber of Commerce to explore ways to provide humanitarian assistance.
Former President Donald Trump allegedly discussed potentially sensitive information about US nuclear submarines with a member of his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, following his presidency, ABC reported Thursday.
The member is Australian billionaire Anthony Pratt, sources told ABC. A source familiar with the matter confirmed to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Pratt, who had a close relationship with Trump when he occupied the Oval Office, was interviewed by the special counsel probing Trump’s retention of classified documents after leaving office. Another source told CNN’s Kristen Holmes that Pratt is on the list of potential witnesses for when the trial begins.
Sources told ABC that Prattallegedly went on to share the information he received from the former president during an April 2021 meeting with “more than a dozen foreign officials, several of his own employees, and a handful of journalists.”
ABC also reported that according to sources, a former Mar-a-Lago employee told investigations that he was “bothered” by the former president disclosing such information to someone who is not a US citizen. He added that he heard Pratt sharing potentially sensitive information minutes after his meeting with the former president, sources told ABC.
These allegations were not included in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump over his handling of classified documents. But the incident was reported to and investigated by Smith’s team, according to ABC.
A Trump spokesperson slammed ABC’s report, telling CNN that the claims “lack proper context and relevant information.”
“The Department of Justice should investigate the criminal leaking, instead of perpetrating their baseless witch-hunts while knowing that President Trump did nothing wrong, has always insisted on truth and transparency, and acted in a proper manner, according to the law,” the spokesperson said.
CNN has reached out to Pratt, who did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A spokesperson for Smith declined to comment.
Pratt allegedly told investigators that after he told Trump that Australia should buy submarines from the US, the former president went on to share how many nuclear warheads US submarines carry and “how close they can get to a Russian submarine without being detected,” sources told ABC. But Pratt told investigators that he was not shown any government documents, the sources said.
His company, Pratt Industries, opened a plant in Ohio while Trump was president. Trump attended the opening and praised the businessman in his remarks.
Another source told CNN’s Collins that during that visit, Pratt planned to unveil two plaques, an official one celebrating the plant’s opening in the US and a second one that he had told Trump about beforehand. The second plaque, which Pratt kept a secret until the day of the visit, read, “Make America and Australia Great Again.” But officials attending the plant’s opening quickly pulled it down and advised Pratt against the move, that source said.
CNN previously obtained an audio of a July 2021 meeting Trump had in his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club, during which the former president acknowledged that he held on to a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran. The audio, exclusively reported by CNN, was a critical piece of evidence in the special counsel’s indictment.
Trump is facing 40 counts in the classified documents case, including willful retention of national defense information and conspiracy to obstruct justice. It is one of four cases in which the former president has been indicted.
Trump, who is seeking to return to the White House and remains the GOP front-runner, asked the judge presiding over the case late Wednesday to delay the trial until after the 2024 elections. A similar request was previously denied.
This story has been updated with additional reporting.
