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Meta is trying out new tools on its Instagram platform to combat the sexual extortion of teens, including a feature that will automatically blur photos containing nudity in direct messages.
The social media company announced in a blog post Thursday that new features, including the auto-blur technology, are part of a campaign to fight sexual scams and make it tougher for criminals to contact teens.
“This feature is designed not only to protect people from seeing unwanted nudity in their DMs, but also to protect them from scammers who may send nude images to trick people into sending their own images in return,” the company said.
Meta also owns Facebook and WhatsApp but the nudity-blur feature won’t be added to those platforms.
Sexual extortion, or sextortion, happens when one person coerces another person into sending explicit photos of themselves, and then threatens to make those images public unless the victim pays money or engages in sexual favors. One recent case involves two Nigerian brothers who pleaded guilty Wednesday to sexually extorting teen boys across the country, including one 17-year-old in Michigan who took his own life.
In another case, a 28-year-old former Virginia sheriff’s posed as a teen online in order to obtain nude pics from a 15-year-old girl in California whom he sexually extorted and kidnapped at gunpoint, after driving across country, killing her mother and grandparents and setting their home on fire.
The nudity protection feature will be turned on by default globally for teens under 18. Adult users will get a notification encouraging them to activate it.
A series of warnings will appear on Instagram accounts, urging users to be careful about sending explicit photos and chatting with someone you don’t know.
Meta Platforms
In addition to the automatic blurring of images, a warning will appear giving users the option of whether or not they want to view the image. They’ll also have the option to block the sender and report the chat.
For users sending direct messages with nudity, a message will appear on screen reminding them to be cautious when sending “sensitive photos.” They’ll also be informed that they can unsend the photos if they change their mind, but that there’s a chance others may have already seen them.
To stop scammers and sexual predators from connecting with young people, the company says it is also expanding current restrictions, including not showing the “message” button on a teen’s profile to potential sextortion accounts, even if the two accounts are connected.
Children’s advocates applauded Meta’s move on Thursday, saying the features introduced appear encouraging.
“We are hopeful these new measures will increase reporting by minors and curb the circulation of online child exploitation,” John Shehan, the senior vice president at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, said in Meta’s blog post.
BISBEE, Ariz. — Boots dusty, lungs heaving, Dr. John Wiens searched the boulders of a desolate Arizona mountaintop for the last survivors of a 3-million-year-old lizard population — then said the words that both confirmed his life’s work and broke his heart.
“They’re not there,” he said. “It seems like the species is now extinct.”
Yarrow’s spiny lizards may be extinct in the Mule Mountains of Arizona after living there for 3 million years.
Chance Horner / CBS News
The loss of plant and animal species on Earth is happening at a speed never seen in human history, according to the United Nations. That includes the likely extinction of the lizards Wiens has studied for 10 years — the population of Yarrow’s spiny lizards found in the Mule Mountains of southern Arizona.
“There’s a lot of species on Earth, and we’re going to lose a lot of them because of climate change,” said Weins, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona. “It’s catastrophic.”
Riding the elevator to extinction
Over the last 3 million years — a million years longer than humans have been around — the Yarrow’s spiny lizards in the Mules adapted to live in cool mountain climates called sky islands.
Because the desert floor below is too hot, the lizards were essentially marooned at higher elevations, as if on an island, and cut off from other Yarrow’s populations in southern Arizona and northern Mexico.
These lizards were also easy to find in the wild, unlike many other species. They would often sun themselves on large rock outcroppings. That behavior allowed Wiens and his colleagues to regularly count their population to see how they were affected by a warming climate.
In 2014, the team could not find any lizards below 5,700 feet. Up to that elevation the temperature in the mountains had gotten too hot. In 2021-22, they returned to the Mules to count lizards in the same spot. They were gone.
“They’re dying at lower elevations,” he said.
At that point, the lizards could only be found living much higher, at 7,100 feet, a cooler elevation. In a scientific paperWiens and his colleagues calculated the rate at which the lizards were dying, concluding that it is among the fastest rates ever recorded.
But because the highest peak in the Mules is 7,700 feet, the Yarrow’s spiny lizards were quickly running out of elevations with cooler air. Based on its calculated rate of decline, and with nowhere else to go, Wiens projected the lizards would go extinct here by 2025 — a phenomenon that scientists call riding the “elevator to extinction.”
In March of this year, a survey trip into the mountains with CBS News proved his hypothesis correct, one year ahead of schedule. Wiens could no longer find any lizards, though it will take several more trips before rendering a conclusion.
“It seems like the species is now extinct, this distinct lineage that’s been separated for about 3 million years,” he said. “This is what the future is going to look like. This is climate-related extinction.”
According to Krista Kemppinen, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity, who did not participate in Wiens’ research, the implications are dire for other species in the Sonoran Desert, where the Mules are located, as they may already be at the upper threshold of how much heat they can tolerate.
“The region is really like a ticking time bomb when it comes to climate change,” she said.
Wiens concluded the number is likely far higher in a more recent research paper, he published in Global Change Biology. He estimates that 3 to 6 million species will be threatened with extinction in the next 50 years, driven heavily by climate change, which will make it too warm for many species to survive.
“As human beings, in the developed world, we all sort of have some responsibility for this,” Wiens said.
While the distinct 3-million-year-old population of Yarrow’s lizard species is presumed extinct in the Mule Mountains, its distant relatives still exist in other mountainous locations in Arizona and Mexico — though many are also in decline.
Still, across the country, 1,700 plants and animals are listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Actwhich provides resources to help protect the species and their habitat.
The act is widely viewed as an environmental success story. Some high-profile species on the list include:
The California condorthe largest flying bird in the U.S., with about 90 adults remaining in the wild.
The massive North Atlantic right whalewhich roams the Atlantic Ocean; all that’s left are 250 individuals.
Still, the Endangered Species Act only covers a fraction of the species at riskin part because the process of listing a species can be long, bureaucratic and political.
“It can take on average 12 years, when legally it should only take two,” Kemppinen said.
Not enough time for the Yarrow’s spiny lizards of the Mule Mountains.
David Schechter is a national environmental correspondent and the host of “On the Dot with David Schechter,” a guided journey to explore how we’re changing the earth and earth is changing us.
House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi said she believes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “should resign,” criticizing the Israeli leader’s aggressive response in Gaza to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, and saying Netanyahu has been an obstacle to peace “for years.”
Pelosi made the remarks in an interview with Irish public broadcaster Raidió TelefÃs Éireann during a visit to Ireland. Democrats, including President Biden, have grown increasingly critical of Netanyahu’s leadership as Israel continues its assault on Gaza.
“We recognize Israel’s right to protect itself,” Pelosi told the Irish outlet. “We reject the policy and the practice of Netanyahu. Terrible. What could be worse than what he has done in response? First of all, the exposures. His intelligence person resigned — he should resign. He’s ultimately responsible.”
Asked if Netanyahu is a “block” to peace, Pelosi said “he has been for years.”
“I don’t know whether he’s afraid of peace, incapable of peace, or just doesn’t want peace,” Pelosi said. “But he has been an obstacle to the two-state solution, I emphasize the word, ‘solution.'”
Pelosi also recently called on the Biden administration to halt weapons transfers to Israel.
Pelosi isn’t the only prominent Democrat calling for new leadership in Israel. Last month, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said Netanyahu has “lost his way,” and called for elections to choose a new government.
Like most Democrats, Pelosi initially expressed strong support for Israel as it responded to Hamas’ brutal Oct. 7 terror attack and kidnapping of Israeli citizens. But reports and images of civilian death and despair in Gaza, and Netanyahu’s unwillingness to scale back the attacks, have prompted increasing tensions between the U.S. and Israeli leadership. An increasing number of Americans say Mr. Biden should encourage Israel to cease its actions in Gaza.
The Senate on Tuesday advanced a foreign aid package that provides an additional $26.4 billion to Israel, after the House approved the $95 billion in foreign aid in the form of four individual bills over the weekend.
A Douglas DC-4 airplane carrying two people crashed Tuesday in the Alaska city of Fairbanks, authorities said.
The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement that a Douglas C-54, which is a model of the Douglas DC-4, was carrying two people when it crashed southwest of Fairbanks International Airport at about 10 a.m. local time (2 p.m., ET).
The aircraft went down in the area of the Tanana River, Alaska State Troopers said in a news release. Multiple agencies were responding and the public was asked to avoid the area.
The circumstances of the crash were not immediately known. The FAA and National Transportation Safety Board are investigating, the FAA said.
In a statement provided to CBS News, a spokesperson for Fairbanks International Airport acknowledged “the ongoing situation involving the Douglas DC-4 aircraft crash on the Tanana River near Kallenberg Road,” which is located about 15 miles southwest of the airport.
The spokesperson said the airport was “actively cooperating” with law enforcement.
The Douglas DC-4 was first manufactured in the late 1930s as a military aircraft, according to the Aviation Safety Network, and can carry several dozen passengers.
Faris Tanyos is a news editor for CBSNews.com, where he writes and edits stories and tracks breaking news. He previously worked as a digital news producer at several local news stations up and down the West Coast.
On the outskirts of Chongqing, western China’s largest city, sits a huge symbol of the country’s glut of car factories. It’s a complex of gray buildings, nearly a square mile in size. The thousands of employees who used to work there have moved on. Its crimson loading docks are closed.
The facility, a former assembly plant and engine factory, had been a joint venture of a Chinese company and Hyundai, the South Korean giant. The complex opened in 2017 with robots and other equipment to make gasoline-powered cars. Hyundai sold the campus late last year for a fraction of the $1.1 billion it took to build and equip it. Unmown grass at the site has already grown knee high.
“It was all highly automated, but now, it is desolate,” said Zhou Zhehui, 24, who works for a rival Chinese automaker, Chang’an, and whose apartment looks down on the former Hyundai complex.
China has more than 100 factories with the capacity to build close to 40 million internal combustion engine cars a year. That is roughly twice as many as people in China want to buy, and sales of these cars are dropping fast as electric vehicles become more popular.
Last month, for the first time, sales of battery-electric and plug-in gasoline-electric hybrid cars together surpassed those of gasoline-powered cars in China’s 35 largest cities.
Dozens of gasoline-powered vehicle factories are barely running or have already been mothballed.
The country’s auto industry is near the start of an E.V. transition that is expected to last years and eventually claim many of those factories. How China manages that long change will influence its future economic growth, since the auto sector is so big and could transform its work force.
The stakes are great for the rest of the world, too.
China, the world’s largest car market, became the largest exporter last year, having passed Japan and Germany. China’s auto sales abroad are exploding.
Three-quarters of China’s exported cars are gasoline-powered models that the domestic market no longer needs, said Bill Russo, an electric car consultant in Shanghai. Those exports threaten to flatten producers elsewhere.
At the same time, China’s electric vehicle companies are still investing heavily in new factories. BYD and other automakers are expected to introduce more electric models at the opening of the Beijing auto show on Thursday.
Electric car sales in China are still growing. But the pace of growth has halved since last summer, as consumer spending has faltered in China because of a housing market crisis.
“There is a slowdown trend, especially for pure electric vehicles,” said Cui Dongshu, secretary general of the China Passenger Car Association.
China also has overcapacity in electric vehicle manufacturing, although less than for gasoline-powered cars. Price cutting for electric vehicles is common. Li Auto, a fast-growing Chinese manufacturer, reduced its prices on Monday. Tesla did the same a day earlier. BYD, the industry leader in Chinamade cuts in February. Volkswagen and General Motors have also lowered E.V. prices in China this year.
Automakers with factories close to China’s coast are exporting gasoline-powered cars. But many of the endangered factories are in cities deep inside the country, like Chongqing, where high transport costs to the coast make it too expensive to export.
Almost all of China’s electric cars are assembled at newly built factories, which qualify for subsidies from municipal governments and state-directed banks. It’s cheaper for automakers to build new factories than to convert existing ones. The result has been enormous overcapacity.
“The Chinese auto industry is experiencing a revolution,” said John Zeng, the director of Asia forecasting at GlobalData Automotive. “The old internal combustion capacity is dying.”
Sales of gasoline-powered cars plummeted to 17.7 million last year from 28.3 million in 2017, the year that Hyundai opened its Chongqing complex. That drop is equivalent to the entire European Union car market last year, or all of the United States’ annual car and light truck production.
Hyundai’s sales in China have plunged 69 percent since 2017. The company put the factory up for sale last summer, but no other automaker wanted it. Hyundai ended up selling the land, the buildings and much of the equipment back to a municipal development company in Chongqing for just $224 million, or 20 cents on the dollar.
The municipal company said this year, while seeking insurance on the site, that it did not have a new tenant.
Other multinational automakers have reduced output in China. Ford Motor has three factories in Chongqing that have been running at a tiny fraction of their capacity for the past five years.
Hyundai is one of the very few automakers, mostly foreign, that have halted production entirely at some locations, although the company still has three factories in China.
“There doesn’t seem to be a concerted effort to shut down excess capacity, but more of a shift from foreign owned to Chinese owned,” said Michael Dunne, a former president of General Motors Indonesia.
The longstanding benchmark is that car factories should run at 80 percent of capacity, or more, to be efficient and make money. But with new electric car factories opening and few older factories closing, capacity utilization across the entire industry fell to 65 percent in the first three months of this year from 75 percent last year and 80 percent or more before the Covid-19 pandemic, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics.
Without a big burst of exports last year, the industry would have operated even further below full capacity.
Chinese manufacturers, many of them partly or entirely owned by city governments, have been reluctant to reduce output and cut jobs. Chang’an, a state-owned carmaker, has a factory just a 20-minute walk down pink-bougainvillea-lined lanes from the former Hyundai complex. The factory’s many acres of parking were completely full of unsold cars on Sunday.
Cities that are particularly dependent on gasoline-powered car production, like Chongqing, face a jobs dilemma. Assembling electric vehicles requires considerably fewer workers than making gasoline-powered cars, because E.V.s have much fewer components.
Workers with strong technical backgrounds, particularly in roboticscan easily and quickly find jobs if they’re laid off, autoworkers in Chongqing said in interviews. But semiskilled workers — including those who are older and have not taken training courses to develop their abilities — are now finding it more difficult to obtain work.
Mr. Zhou said that when he applied for his job at Chang’an, “it was a fierce competition.”
Still, it is extremely hard to find unemployed former Hyundai workers in Chongqing these days, even in the neighborhood of the former factory.
Most factory workers in China are migrants who grew up in rural areas and have few connections to the communities where gasoline-powered cars have been built. So they can easily move to other cities or industries when they lose jobs.
Yet a tinge of gloom hangs over the car industry in Chongqing, as demand slows and less skilled workers have fewer opportunities to earn overtime pay. Hyundai’s signage is still visible in many places at its former factory, but a large shadow on the front gate shows where an optimistic slogan used to hang: “New Thinking, New Possibilities.”
Finally! It’s here. I’m thrilled to share this year’s draft guide with everyone. I don’t remember who first referred to it as “The Beast,” but I use that moniker as motivation to make sure this annual primer lives up to the nickname — and I don’t think I’ve let you down this year.
Every NFL prospect is a puzzle. And it is a scout’s job to find the puzzle pieces to create as clear a picture of each player as possible. Those puzzle pieces include everything from the player’s physical traits to his mental makeup to the details of his upbringing — and everything in between.
That’s precisely how I attack this draft guide. Over the last 18 months, I’ve collected as many puzzle pieces as I could dig up, through countless hours of tape study and conversations with prospects, scouts and other sources.
With NFL-verified testing information for more than 1,900 prospects and tons of background information and analysis on hundreds of those players, I hope everyone views “The Beast” as the most comprehensive resource guide out there for the 2024 NFL Draft.
Special thanks to Chris Burke and our team of editors, as well as our design team, who helped make this year’s draft guide a reality.
“The Beast” is published as a PDF. Download it at the link below using the password: *TH3*B3A$T*2024*
(Notes: The password can be entered manually or copied and pasted. Include all of the asterisks, including those at the beginning and end of the password.)
Also, please subscribe to “The Athletic Football Show,” which will have the draft — and all that follows it heading into the NFL season — covered from every angle.
(Illustration: Eamonn Dalton and Ray Orr / The Athletic; photos via Getty Images)
As protests over the Israel-Hamas war have erupted at U.S. universities in recent months, student journalists have been reporting daily on campus debates over free speech, university investments and America’s involvement in the conflict.
Some student newspapers’ editorial boards have offered assessments of their campus disputes. They have opined on how administrators are responding to protesters and defended the rights of students to speak out. They have been particularly vocal about the threats of harassment and doxxing, which they have argued were stifling free speech on campus.
Here are a few of the editorials that have been written by student newspapers in the last couple of weeks as tensions have escalated at several campuses.
The editorial board at the Columbia Daily Spectator published an editorial just hours after Nemat Shafik, the university president, called the police onto campus last week to empty an encampment of pro-Palestinian demonstrators. More than 100 students were arrestedcausing an uproar among the school community.
In the strongly worded editorial, published on April 18 and titled “Is Columbia in crisis?”the students on the editorial board wrote that the school administration had “failed to genuinely engage with its students, faculty, and staff,” and that the university was slowly becoming a “space of distrust, suppression, and fear.”
By inviting the New York Police Department onto the campus, and allowing the police to arrest over 100 students, Dr. Shafik, who goes by Minouche, had disrupted campus life and infringed “on her supposedly paramount principle of safety,” the board wrote.
The board also criticized the administration for its congressional testimony last week before the Republican-led House Committee on Education and the Workforce: “Shafik and her fellow administrators were all too willing to succumb to pressure from representatives, essentially conflating pro-Palestinian campus activism with antisemitism and repeatedly condemning the words and actions of both students and faculty to appease committee members.”
Speaking directly to school officials, the editorial board added: “You must confront your failure to fulfill your duty of protecting and representing your students and their concerns. Otherwise, you will further marginalize, endanger, and distance your students, indefinitely trapping Columbia in its self-inflicted crisis.”
The University of Michigan
The Michigan Daily’s editorial board this month discussed the rising tensions on campus as school officials tried to clamp down on pro-Palestinian protests and calls for divestment from Israel.
In March, about 100 student protesters at Michigan disrupted a university event and protested the school’s investment in companies they said were profiting from Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. The police in Ann Arbor, Mich., cited three students, according to The Michigan Daily.
A few days later, the university president, Santa Ono, along with the Board of Regents, released a draft of a Disruptive Activity Policywhich restricted activities that disrupted the “free flow of persons about campus” or university operations.
In an editorial, “Santa Ono, don’t silence student voices,” The Michigan Daily board wrote that the “campus is becoming a pressure cooker” and that “the more the University clamps down on student voices, the louder and more impassioned they will become.”
Cornell University
The editorial board of The Cornell Daily Sun last week endorsed calls for Cornell to divest from arms manufacturers directly involved in the Israel-Hamas war.
“The Sun wholeheartedly endorses the pro-side of both questions and joins the call for Cornell University to divest from arms manufacturers directly involved in what the International Court of Justice has called a ‘plausible’ genocide,” the editorial board wrote. “Cornell should in no way support a war that has been waged with callous disregard for civilian lives.”
“It’s time for Cornell to lead the way, call for a cease-fire and pull our money out of investments in potential war crimes,” it added.
Harvard University
The Harvard Crimson reported on Monday that the Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee, a student organization, had been suspended for the rest of the spring term after the group held a rally on Friday to support the protesters at Columbia. The university said the group ran afoul of campus protest guidelines.
On Tuesday, the Crimson’s editorial board denounced that decision.
“On a campus where, from the start, administrators did too little too late to protect pro-Palestinian speech, this feels like suppression,” the editorial board wrote. “Whatever the impetus, the decision will be taken as a paranoid response to events at Columbia and elsewhere.”
“Student groups aren’t above the rules. But the rules aren’t above the good of this campus. Harvard must choose the latter,” it added.
The University of Southern California
Administrators at the University of Southern California drew national attention on April 16 when they canceled the graduation speech of this year’s valedictorian. The student, Asna Tabassum, had faced criticism from two campus groups because she had expressed pro-Palestinian views on social media. The school said that the decision was driven by security concerns related to “the intensity of feelings” over the conflict in the Middle East.
Three days later, the editorial board of The Daily Trojan, the student newspaper, demanded that Ms. Tabassum be allowed to speak.
The board wrote: “As USC boasts of its Arab American Heritage Month celebrations, the decision to select a Muslim student as valedictorian should be a testament to the University’s commitment to equity. But as soon as that student was found to have a view that was not palatable to some, the University’s efforts proved to be performative.”
A few paragraphs later, the board wrote: “The University claims it is not breaking any laws or guidelines by preventing Tabassum from speaking, but it is committing an act possibly even more egregious: breaking students’ trust. After failing to stand by Tabassum as she faced online vitriol and instead caving to the interests of those perpetuating that hate, it’s clear the University does not support even its best students if the decision could cause a stir.”
“That the University would deny its highest-performing student a time-honored tradition out of fear she may speak up calls into question the integrity of the education we all chose to pursue here.”
University of California, Los Angeles
On Sunday, the editorial board at the Daily Bruin, the student newspaper at the University of California, Los Angeles, also rebuked the cancellation of Ms. Tabassum’s commencement speech.
“The decision to characterize Tabassum’s valedictorian speech as a threat to public safety is an overreach on behalf of the administration,” the editorial board wrote. “Even if safety were to be a legitimate concern for USC, deploying the necessary security force at commencement should not be an issue.”
“For the administration to censor Tabassum in order to prevent any tensions from arising during commencement only puts the university in murky waters,” the board added. “The safety concern is nothing more than the anticipation of hecklers over Tabassum’s stance on the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, citing a pro-Palestinian link on Tabassum’s social media.”
The bill would be a major boost for Ukraine, where troops are fighting Russia with dwindling stores of munitions. It was stalled for months by Republican lawmakers, which had prompted a wave of concern in Kyiv and across Europe that the U.S. would turn its back on Ukraine.
“What this aid means, in the most simple terms, is guns and bullets,” my colleague Marc Santora, who has been reporting from Ukraine since the beginning of the war, told us.
He said it would also provide “a much-needed boost for the morale of both Ukrainian soldiers on the front and civilians living under the threat of near-nightly Russian drone and missile bombardments.”
The breakthrough in Congress is also a boost for Bidenwho has spent months pledging support for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. The bill gives him a push at a time when his credibility and U.S. leadership have been questioned on the world stage.
What’s next: The first significant U.S. military aid for Ukraine in 16 months could arrive quickly. “Most military analysts think that it will take a month or two before we see it really change the dynamic on the front,” Marc said.
High tech warfare: For the U.S. military, the war has been a testing ground for new A.I. tools and other rapidly evolving technologies. The question remains whether the high tech will be enough to help turn the tide of the war as the Russians appear to have regained momentum.
A tabloid publisher testified against Trump
Donald Trump sat through a bruising session in court yesterday. The judge questioned his lawyer’s credibility and a key witness pulled back the curtain on what prosecutors said was a conspiracy to influence the 2016 election.
“To me, he’s looked far angrier yesterday and today than he did during all of last week, during jury selection,” said my colleague Jonah Bromwich, who is reporting from the courtroom.
In the pivotal stretch of testimonyDavid Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer, described a 2015 meeting with Trump and his fixer, Michael Cohen. He said the men had asked him what he and his magazines could do “to help the campaign.” That statement supports the prosecution’s argument that they were aiding Trump’s campaign, not just protecting his reputation.
The legislation overrides a ruling by the Supreme Court that deemed the plan unlawful. The law describes Rwanda as “a safe country” for refugees, after judges ruled that is not. The government says the policy will be a deterrent, especially to people who try to cross the English Channel on flimsy boats. Yesterday, at least five people died while trying to cross the Channel.
Rishi Sunak, Britain’s prime minister, said the first flights to deport asylum seekers would not depart until June or July. Legal experts say the plan is deeply flawed, and rights groups have vowed to fight any attempts to send asylum seekers to Rwanda.
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Community canteens in China cater to seniorsoffering huge plates for just a dollar or two. But in these tough economic times, they have grown popular among penny-pinching young professionals.
The portions are often so generous that they can be stretched out over several meals, and diners can often be seen packing away dishes they haven’t finished.
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A.I. comes to India’s elections
For a glimpse of where artificial intelligence is headed in election campaigns, look to India, the world’s largest democracy, where voters are casting ballots until June 1.
Some campaigns have deployed A.I. avatars of candidates. An A.I.-generated version of Prime Minister Narendra Modi shows him addressing voters directly, by name. Workers in Modi’s party send out video messages to voters that can be automatically generated in any of India’s dozens of languages.
As the technology races onto the political scene, there are few guardrails to prevent its misuse. Some experts worry that voters will have a difficult time distinguishing between real and synthetic messages.
The bill reforms and extends a portion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act known as Section 702 for a shortened period of two years, instead of the full five-year reauthorization first proposed. The change was made to sway GOP critics.
The vote on final passage was 273 in favor to 147 opposed.
Skepticism of the government’s spy powers has grown dramatically in recent years, particularly on the right. Republicans have clashed for months over what a legislative overhaul of the FISA surveillance program should look like, creating divisions that spilled onto the House floor this week as 19 Republicans broke with their party to prevent the bill from coming up for a vote.
However, some of the original opponents signaled their support for the new plan late Thursday.
“The two-year timeframe is a much better landing spot because it gives us two years to see if any of this works rather than kicking it out five years,” said Rep. Chip Roy, a Texas Republican. “They say these reforms are going to work. Well, I guess we’ll find out.”
The fight over FISA
The legislation in question would permit the U.S. government to collect, without a warrant, the communications of non-Americans located outside the country to gather foreign intelligence. The reauthorization is tied to a series of reforms aimed at satisfying critics who complained of civil liberties violations against Americans.
But far-right opponents have complained that those changes did not go far enough. Among the detractors were some of Johnson’s harshest critics, members of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus, who have railed against the speaker the last several months for reaching across the aisle to carry out the basic functions of the government.
To appease some of those critics, House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, plans to bring forward next week a separate proposal that would close a loophole that allows U.S. officials to collect data on Americans from big tech companies without a warrant.
“All of that added up to something that I think gave a greater deal of comfort,” Roy said.
Though the program is technically set to expire April 19, the Biden administration has said it expects its authority to collect intelligence to remain operational for at least another year, thanks to an opinion earlier this month from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which receives surveillance applications. But officials say that court approval shouldn’t be a substitute for congressional authorization, especially since communications companies could cease cooperation with the government.
First authorized in 2008, the spy tool has been renewed several times since then as U.S. officials see it as crucial in disrupting terror attacks, cyber intrusions and foreign espionage. It has also produced intelligence that the U.S. has relied on for specific operations.
But the administration’s efforts to secure reauthorization of the program have repeatedly encountered fierce, and bipartisan, pushback, with Democrats like Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon who have long championed civil liberties aligning with Republican supporters of former President Donald Trump, who in a post on Truth Social on Wednesday stated incorrectly that Section 702 had been used to spy on his presidential campaign.
“Kill FISA,” Trump wrote in all capital letters. “It was illegally used against me, and many others. They spied on my campaign.” A former adviser to his 2016 presidential campaign was targeted for surveillance over potential ties to Russia under a different section of the law.
A specific area of concern for lawmakers is the FBI’s use of the vast intelligence repository to search for information about Americans and others in the U.S. Though the surveillance program only targets non-Americans in other countries, it also collects communications of Americans when they are in contact with those targeted foreigners.
In the past year, U.S. officials have revealed a series of abuses and mistakes by FBI analysts in improperly querying the intelligence repository for information about Americans or others in the U.S., including about a member of Congress and participants in the racial justice protests of 2020 and the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.
Those violations have led to demands for the FBI to have a warrant before conducting database queries on Americans, which FBI director Chris Wray has warned would effectively gut the program’s effectiveness and would also be legally unnecessary given that the information in the database has already been lawfully collected.
“While it is imperative that we ensure this critical authority of 702 does not lapse, we also must not undercut the effectiveness of this essential tool with a warrant requirement or some similar restriction, paralyzing our ability to tackle fast-moving threats,” Wray said in a speech Tuesday.
An amendment that would have required officials to obtain a warrant before searching Americans’ communications in the 702 database failed in a dramatic tie vote before the bill came up for final passage.
In his final letter to his wife before he vanished on Mount Everest a century ago, George Mallory tried to ease her worries even as he said his chances of reaching the world’s highest peak were “50 to 1 against us.”
The letter, digitized for the first time and published online Monday by his Cambridge University alma mater, expressed a mix of optimism, exhaustion and the difficulties his expedition encountered on their quest to be the first party to conquer the peak.
“Darling I wish you the best I can – that your anxiety will be at an end before you get this – with the best news,” he wrote to Ruth Mallory on May 27, 1924 from Camp I. “It is 50 to 1 against us but we’ll have a whack yet & do ourselves proud.”
British mountaineers George Mallory is seen with Andrew Irvine at the base camp in Nepal, both members of the Mount Everest expeditions 1922 and 1924, as they get ready to climb the peak of Mount Everest June 1924. It is the last image of the men before they disappeared in the mountain.
/ AP
It remains a mystery whether Mallory, who once famously said he wanted to conquer Everest “because it’s there,” and climbing partner Andrew Irvine reached the summit and died on the way down or never made it that far. Mallory’s body was found 75 years later far below the peak, but Irvine’s has never been located.
A BBC World Service news report from May 4, 1999 stated: “An expedition to Mount Everest has found the body of the famous British climber, George Mallory, who disappeared 75 years ago a short distance from the summit. The team said they spotted the corpse protruding from the snow about 600m below the top of Everest. Mallory’s name tag was on the clothing and a rope was still round his waist.”
The first documented ascent came nearly three decades later when New Zealander Edmund Hillary and Nepalese Sherpa Tenzing Norgay scaled the mountain on May 29, 1953. In 1963, Jim Whittaker became the first American to reach the summit. “There was no feeling of exhilaration, no feeling of ‘Boy, we pulled it off.’ We were just hanging on to life,” Whittaker told CBS News on the 50th anniversary of his ascent. “And I knew we were out of oxygen. You’re in the death zone. If you don’t get down, you die.”
Magdalene College posted Mallory’s letters online to mark the centenary of his ill-fated attempt to stand atop the world. The collection, which had previously been available to researchers, also includes letters he wrote from the battlefront in World War I and correspondence he received from others, including his wife.
The only surviving letter his wife wrote from England during the expedition was sent as his party sailed toward Bombay. It recounts a recent snowstorm, how her bank account was overdrawn and how she fell off a ladder before telling him how much she missed him.
“I know I have rather often been cross and not nice and I am very sorry but the bottom reason has nearly always been because I was unhappy at getting so little of you,” Ruth Mallory wrote on March 3, 1924. “I know it is pretty stupid to spoil the times I do have you for those when I don’t.”
In his final six-page correspondence to his wife, addressed to “My dearest Ruth,” George Mallory speaks of trials and triumphs as the party slowly made its way up the mountain, setting up higher camps and then retreating to lower elevation to recover.
“This has been a bad time altogether,” Mallory wrote 12 days before he was last seen alive. “I look back on tremendous efforts & exhaustion & dismal looking out of a tent door and onto a world of snow & vanishing hopes – & yet, & yet, & yet there have been a good many things to set on the other side.”
Mallory said he had a nagging cough “fit to tear one’s guts” that left him sleepless and made climbing difficult. He described a near-death plunge into a crevasse when he failed to detect it beneath a blanket of snow.
“In I went with the snow tumbling all around me, down luckily only about 10 feet before I fetched up half-blind & breathless to find myself most precariously supported only by my ice ax somehow caught across the crevasse & still held in my right hand,” he said. “Below was a very unpleasant black hole.”
Mallory said only one member of the party remained “plum fit” and they planned to rest up for two days before pushing for the summit, which was expected to take six days.
Mallory and Irvine were last seen alive June 8, 1924 when they were said to be still going strong some 900 feet beneath the 29,035 feet summit. Mallory’s body was found at 26,700 feet.
A group of mountaineers who tried in 2007 to reconstruct Mallory’s ascent were unable to determine if the pair made it to the top.
“I still believe the possibility is there they made it to the top, but it is very unlikely,” said Conrad Anker, who participated in a documentary recreating the climb and who had discovered Mallory’s body in 1999.
This is an undated photo provided by Magdalene College Cambridge on Monday, April 22, 2024 of part of the final letter that mountaineer George Mallory wrote to his wife before he vanished on Mount Everest a century ago.
/ AP
“It has been a real pleasure to work with these letters,” said Magdalene College archivist Katy Green in a statement. “Whether it’s George’s wife Ruth writing about how she was posting him plum cakes and a grapefruit to the trenches – he said the grapefruit wasn’t ripe enough – or whether it’s his poignant last letter where he says the chances of scaling Everest are ’50-to-one against us’, they offer a fascinating insight into the life of this famous Magdalene alumnus.”
In Mallory’s final letter to his wife, he says, “the candle is burning out & I must stop.” He signs off: “Great love to you. Ever your loving, George.”
Video shows Florida authorities wrangling a large alligator that wandered onto the MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa.
Footage released by the base on Monday shows what military officials described as their “newest toothy Airman” as it was being reined in by two Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officers. In the clip, gator tried to break loose multiple times.
Alligator wrangled at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida.
MacDill Air Force Base via Storyful
Photos from the base also showed the animal resting underneath a wheel of one of their aircraft. After capturing it, the nearly 10-foot-long gator was moved to a “more suitable environment” and relocated to the Hillsborough River, the commission said, according to CBS affiliate WTSP.
An alligator was seen resting underneath an aircraft at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. It was later relocated to a river.
MacDill Air Force Base
Officials with the base said the commission believed this alligator strayed away from its home because of another enormous alligator named Elviswho’s known for his 12-foot length and who roams the area. In 2018, Elvis was described as an “absolute monster” and “like a freaking dinosaur” in a video of him walking across a golf course at the base.
