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Verizon Communications Inc. wants to attract teens and millennials who are more used to watching videos on their mobile phones than on a TV in a living room. Yahoo! Inc., which is spinning out its main Web business, has been investing heavily in online-video content.

So it’s probably not a coincidence that executives at the largest U.S. wireless carrier were chattier than usual this week when asked the question: Would Verizon be interested in buying Yahoo’s Internet assets?

Chief Executive Officer Lowell McAdam and Chief Financial Officer Fran Shammo, using similar language, both said within the past two days that Verizon would look at a Yahoo deal "if it made sense," instead of declining to comment. 

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The right has all the advantages, just as the devil has all the best tunes. Conservatism appeals to our selfishness and fear, our desire and self-interest; they neatly nurture and then harvest the inherent and incubating individualism. I imagine that neurologically the pathway travelled by a fearful or selfish impulse is more expedient and well travelled than the route of the altruistic pang. In simple terms of circuitry I suspect it is easier to connect these selfish inclinations.

This natural, neurological tendency has been overstimulated and acculturated. Materialism and individualism do in moderation make sense.

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Washington (CNN)Ohio Gov. John Kasich says he won't "sit silent" and watch the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion get "ripped out" as Republicans work to repeal the law.

Kasich said 700,000 Ohio residents now receive care who did not before Obamacare became law, including "a third of whom have mental illness and need to be treated or drug treatment, which is a problem throughout the country."

So is Donald Trump secretly recording conversations or not?

On May 12, just three days after he fired James Comey as the FBI director, President Donald Trump tweeted this: "James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!"Like many of Trump's tweets, this one immediately came to dominate the political conversation. Did he actually have a secret recording system in the White House? If not, why say it? And, like many of Trump's tweets, it produced a chain reaction of events that backfired on Trump. The threat -- I guess that's the best way to describe what Trump did -- of the existence of recordings spurred Comey to pass along memos he had written detailing his conversations with Trump to a friend, with the express goal of them being leaked and, hopefully, triggering a special counsel to be appointed.

Instagram makes it easy for strangers to find photos of children, and its algorithm is built to identify users’ interests and push similar content. Investigations by The Wall Street Journal and outside researchers have found that, upon recognizing that an account might be sexually interested in children, Instagram’s algorithm recommends child accounts for the user to follow, as well as sexual content related to both children and adults.

That algorithm has become the engine powering the growth of an insidious world in which young girls’ online popularity is perversely predicated on gaining large numbers of male followers.&nbsp;

Instagram photos of young girls become a dark currency, swapped and discussed obsessively among men on encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram. The Journal reviewed dozens of conversations in which the men fetishized specific body parts and expressed pleasure in knowing that many parents of young influencers understand that hundreds, if not thousands, of pedophiles have found their children online.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;

What's your first and last name? Your education and work experience? Do you have recommendations? And are you willing to be a suicide attacker or would you prefer to be a fighter for ISIS?

Germany's interior minister said he believes data in the documents -- described by European media as the names and personal data of tens of thousands of possible ISIS recruits -- could allow authorities to prosecute people who joined ISIS and then returned to their home countries.

If they did not hear from him, they would know that he is dead."

psychologists report finding what they were looking for: a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popula

r music

the words “I” and “me” appear more frequently along with anger-related words, while there’s been a corresponding decline in “we” and “us” and the expression of positive emotions.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government plans to fine social media networks such as Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. if they fail to combat hate speech, as German officials accuse media companies of being too slow to take action.

he sees Mr. Obama as a kind of philosopher president, a rare breed that can be found only a handful of times in American history. “There’s John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Quincy Adams, then Abraham Lincoln and in the 20th century just Woodrow Wilson,” he said.

To Mr. Kloppenberg the philosophy that has guided President Obama most consistently is pragmatism, a uniquely American system of thought developed at the end of the 19th century by William James, John Dewey and Charles Sanders Peirce.

Pragmatism maintains that people are constantly devising and updating ideas to navigate the world in which they live; it embraces open-minded experimentation and continuing debate. “It is a philosophy for skeptics, not true believers,”

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol issued subpoenas on Thursday to four major social media companies — Alphabet, Meta, Reddit and Twitter — criticizing them for allowing extremism to spread on their platforms and saying they have failed to cooperate adequately with the inquiry.

In letters accompanying the subpoenas, the panel named Facebook, a unit of Meta, and YouTube, which is owned by Alphabet’s Google subsidiary, as among the worst offenders that contributed to the spread of misinformation and violent extremism.

The committee sent letters in August to 15 social media companies — including sites where misinformation about election fraud spread, such as the pro-Trump website TheDonald.win — seeking documents pertaining to efforts to overturn the election and any domestic violent extremists associated with the Jan. 6 rally and attack.

For months, I have been documenting the incredible virality of bizarre AI-generated image spam on Facebook, now commonly referred to as “AI slop,” and Meta’s seeming complete apathy toward moderating this type of spam.&nbsp;

My investigation reveals that the AI images we see on Facebook are an evolution of a Facebook spam economy that has existed for years, driven by social media influencers, guides, services, and businesses in places like India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam, where the payouts generated by this content, which seems marginal by U.S. standards, goes further

The spam comes from a mix of people manually creating images on their phones using off-the-shelf tools like Microsoft’s AI Image Creator to larger operations that use automated software to spam the platform. I also know that their methods work because I used them to flood Facebook with AI slop myself as a test.&nbsp;

Younger Americans die earlier and live in poorer health than their counterparts in other developed countries, with far higher rates of death from guns, car accidents and drug addiction, according to a new analysis of health and longevity in the United States.

The panel called the pattern of higher rates of disease and shorter lives “the U.S. health disadvantage,” and said it was responsible for dragging the country to the bottom in terms of life expectancy over the past 30 years. American men ranked last in life expectancy among the 17 countries in the study, and American women ranked second to last.

“This is not the product of a particular administration or political party. Something at the core is causing the U.S. to slip behind these other high-income countries. And it’s getting worse.”

The pound slid below $1.20 for the first time since October’s flash crash, after reports that U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May will signal&nbsp;plans to quit the European Union’s single market to regain control of Britain’s borders and laws.

“Even if the pound recovers somewhat in London, it seems as though the realities of a hard Brexit are still not fully priced in,”

May’s speech isn’t the only approaching Brexit milestone. The Supreme Court is set to rule this month whether May or Parliament carries the power to invoke the exit, although few see the process being derailed either way.

On bad days, when his employer made some excuse for not paying him his paltry daily wage, Ram Yadav’s main meal used to be dry chapatis, with salt and raw onion for flavour. Sometimes he just went hungry. For a ragpicker like him, one of the thousands of Indians who make a living bringing in plastic waste for recycling, eating in a cafe or restaurant was the stuff of fairytales.

Opened in October by the Ambikapur municipal corporation, the cafe is designed both to encourage awareness about the need to collect and remove plastic waste and to give a meal to anyone – ragpicker, student or civic-minded individual – who does so. The tagline? “More the waste, better the taste.”

Most Indian cities are struggling with huge amounts of unsegregated waste. There are few effective waste-management systems, and according to the country’s environment ministry the country generates approximately 25,000 tonnes of plastic waste every day – only about 14,000 tonnes of which are collected.

Joe Biden delivered remarks in Tulsa to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the city’s race massacre. The president emphasized the importance of acknowledging the lives and livelihoods lost in the massacre, which resulted in the death of at least 300 African Americans and the destruction of 35 blocks of Black real estate. “For much too long, the history of what took place here was told in silence, cloaked in darkness,” Biden said. “My fellow Americans, this was not a riot, this was a massacre.”

The administration formally ended the Trump-era “remain in Mexico” policy that forced thousands of asylum seekers from Central America to wait in Mexico while the US to process their cases. The program w as paused in January. In a memo sent to agency leaders today, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the policy did not “adequately or sustainably enhance border management.”

Human rights groups are calling on the Biden administration and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to put an end to a digital surveillance program that keeps tabs on nearly 100,000 immigrants.

the oft-repeated notion that it took World War II to end the economic nightmare of the ’30s: If a global war was needed to return the economy to full employment then, what is going to save us today?

While the war helped the recovery from the Depression, the economy was improving long before military spending increased. More fundamentally, the wrenching wartime experience provides a message of hope for our troubled economy today: we have the tools to deal with our problems, if only policy makers will use them.

Starting in the mid-1930s, Hitler’s aggression caused capital flight from Europe. People wanted to invest somewhere safer — particularly in the United States. Under the gold standard of that time, the flight to safety caused large gold flows to America. The Treasury Department under President Franklin D. Roosevelt used that inflow to increase the money supply.

or nearly a century, a wooden tower has loomed over the prairie town of Andrew in western Canada, rising from the rolling landscape land like a lone sentinel. Built during the agricultural boom of the early 20th century, the grain elevator – and six others that stood nearby – once bore testament to the town’s prosperity.

Andrew is no stranger to loss: over the years, jobs and residents have slowly dwindled. But when its last remaining grain elevator was slated for demolition, the community battled hard to win a stay of execution. “Trying to save this thing was like praying to God,” said Dave Cuthbert, a resident. “You were never certain if your voice was being heard.”

In the 1930s there were nearly 6,000 towers; now fewer than a thousand remain. The destruction, in many ways, mirrors the broader decline of rural communities in western Canada.

Indigenous fire practitioners have warned that Australia’s bush will regenerate as a “time bomb” prone to catastrophic blazes, and issued a plea to put to use traditional knowledge which is already working across the top end to reduce bushfires and greenhouse gas emissions.

“A lot of areas will end up regenerating really strongly, but they’ll return in the wrong way. We’ll end up with the wrong species compositions and balance.

As Australia comes to terms with this season’s catastrophic fires, Indigenous practitioners like Costello are advocating a return to “cultural burning”.

One great theme of the post-2008 financial world is that money is a social construct, a way to keep track of what society thinks you deserve&nbsp;in terms of goods and services.

15 years ago it was easier to think that money was an objective fact. Money is a kind of stuff, you might have thought, stuff with some predictable value that you can exchange for goods and services, and you can acquire a quantity of it and then you own that money and&nbsp;can use it&nbsp;however you like to buy things.&nbsp;

Russia’s foreign reserves consist, in the first instance, of a set of accounting entries. But in a crisis the accounting entries don’t matter at all. All that matters are relationships, and if your relationships get bad enough then the money is as good as gone.

For more than a year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made a point of stoking fears about China. He’s told U.S. lawmakers that China “steals” American technology and played up nationalist concerns about threats from Chinese-owned rival TikTok.

Meta has a growing problem: The social media service wants to transform itself into a powerhouse in hardware, and it makes virtually all of it in China.So the company is racing to get out.

Facebook has hit walls, say three people familiar with the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations.