Israeli authorities said a pair of Palestinian attackers went on a stabbing rampage in a town near Tel Aviv, killing at least three people and wounding four others before fleeing in a vehicle.
Billionaire will likely take over as platform’s CEO for a few months after completing takeover, CNBC says
The chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, billionaire Elon Musk, reportedly plans to run Twitter for a few months after completing his $44 billion acquisition of the social media giant.
Musk will likely take the helm at Twitter temporarily, replacing CEO Parag Agrawal, CNBC reported on Thursday, without identifying its sources. Twitter’s stock rose on the news, rising 2.6% to $50.36, even as the broader market cratered with its biggest declines in two years.
The report might answer questions about the future of Twitter’s leadership under new ownership. Musk has vowed to restore freedom of speech to the platform and has indicated a lack of confidence in the company’s board of directors, saying none will have a paycheck from Twitter if his takeover goes through.
Agrawal was promoted to CEO at Twitter less than six months ago, replacing co-founder Jack Dorsey. Reuters reported last month that Musk had lined up a new chief executive to run the company, although that person wasn’t identified. Agrawal told employees last month that Twitter’s future policies and plans are uncertain under new ownership.
The takeover raised concerns among Twitter employees, media outlets and President Joe Biden’s administration that Musk will ease censorship of speech on the social media platform. Some Twitter staffers were distraught about the deal, suggesting that the buyer is a “racist demagogue” who will take the company in the “wrong direction.”
Musk, who ranks as the world’s richest person with a fortune estimated at $246 billion, told reporters on Thursday that he’s not worried about employees leaving the company because of the takeover. “It’s a free country,” he said, adding that anyone who doesn’t feel comfortable can leave of their own accord.
Investment adviser Gary Black suggested last month that Musk could add billions of dollars in value to Twitter by paring the company’s workforce. Cutting staffing by 10% would provide enough savings to underpin $10 billion in financing for the buyout, he said.
A public filing on Thursday showed that Musk had lined up more than $7 billion in equity commitments from friends and other investors who want to participate in the acquisition. Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison pledged $1 billion. CNBC said even Dorsey may get involved in the deal.
TEOTEPEQUE, El Salvador, May 05 (IPS) – After working on the family farm, Carlos Salama comes home and plugs his cell phone into a socket via a solar-powered electrical system, a rarity in this rural village in southern El Salvador.
If the U.S. scraps the constitutional right to abortion, human rights advocates warn that repressive governments across the globe could use it to justify crackdowns on their citizens.
The US government has no right to tell its citizens what the truth is, the senator says
Due to its long track record of disinformation, the US government has no right to tell the American people what the truth is, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul has stated.
During a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Paul grilled Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas over the ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ his agency is setting up to help social media platforms filter out ‘fake news.’
“Here’s the problem: we can’t even agree what disinformation is,” the Republican Senator pointed out. “You can’t even agree if it was disinformation that the Russians fed information to the Steele dossier.”
He was referring to the controversial and largely dismissed report that relied on info from anonymous sources to allege collusion between the Donald Trump campaign and Moscow ahead of the 2016 presidential election in the US.
“If you can’t agree to that, how are we ever going to come to an agreement on what is disinformation, so that you can police it on social media?” Paul wondered.
“Do you know who the greatest propagator of disinformation in the history of the world is? The US government!” he insisted.
In order to back his claim, the Senator mentioned several examples of false information being deliberately spread by Washington over the past decades.
Among them were the so-called Pentagon Papers, which revealed that the US government had been misinforming the public about the scale of its military operations during the Vietnam War. The documents were officially declassified in 2011, but the media had been reporting on them since 1971.
Paul also mentioned “George W. Bush and the weapons of mass destruction,” referring to American claims that Saddam Hussein’s regime had been in possession of WMD, claims that were used by the US to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but were never confirmed by findings on the grounds.
His other example was the Iran–Contra affair, which saw top US officials secretly organizing the sale of weapons to Iran in violation of an arms embargo between 1981 and 1986 in order to obtain money to fund the Contras insurgent group in Nicaragua.
“I mean, think over all the debates and disputes we’ve had over the last 50 years in our country. We work them out by debating them. We don’t work them out by the government being the arbiter,” the Senator said.
“I want you to have nothing to do with speech… You think the American people are so stupid they need you to tell them what the truth is?” Paul added.
The creation of the Disinformation Governance Board was announced in late April. According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the new body would help counter disinformation, which is being spread by “foreign states such as Russia, China and Iran,” and by human traffickers operating on the US-Mexico border, among others.
The DHS gave assurances that it won’t be targeting US citizens. But critics were quick to nickname the board ‘The Ministry of Truth,’ after a fictional organization from George Orwell’s iconic dystopian novel ‘1984’.
