Author: KnowledgeHippo
With Stuart A. ThompsonStuart Thompson collected and analyzed data on thousands of Facebook posts for this article.On the morning of January 6, 2021, Christopher Blair’s fake news empire was humming.Mr Blair was earning up to $15,000 in some months posting fake stories on Facebook about the Democrats and the election, reaching millions of people each month.But after a crowd of Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol, his growing business came to an abrupt halt. Facebook appeared to recognize its own role in fomenting an insurgency and tweaked its algorithm to limit the spread of political content, fake and otherwise. Mr.…
The once-conquering F1 team Mercedes-AMG Petronas is in a quagmire.It is a distant fourth in the Formula 1 constructors’ championship, and most of its race results this year have been in the bottom half of the top 10.”We have to accept that we are the fourth fastest team at the moment,” George Russell, one of the team’s drivers, said earlier this month at a media session after the Miami Grand Prix. “Lap times don’t lie, the championship doesn’t lie, here we are. We are fighting for the P5 to P8 area week in, week out at the moment.”Mercedes won a…
People who paid nearly $1,400 for an annual Disneyland pass will start getting checks in the mail this month from a $9.5 million settlement of a class-action lawsuit that accused Disney of misleading customers into believing the program had “no blackout dates “.More than 100,000 people who bought the Dream Key annual pass between August 25 and October 25, 2021, will each receive about $67.41, a small fraction of what they paid for the pass. The payments were supposed to start arriving by mail or online by mid-June, according to the settlement agreement.The lawsuit was filed in November 2021 by…
Iran and Sweden swapped prisoners on Saturday, breaking a standoff that brought relief to families but concern over Sweden’s decision to free the first Iranian official convicted of crimes against humanity.Iran has released Johan Floderus, 33, a European Union diplomat and Swedish national who was arrested in April 2022 in Tehran, as well as Saeed Azizi, a dual national who was arrested in 2023, the Swedish prime minister said.”I am happy to announce that Johan Floderus and Saeed Azizi are now on a plane bound for Sweden and will soon be reunited with their families,” Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson said…
Former Sen. Heidi Heitkamp sat in her second-floor office at the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics, preparing to appeared on a television newscast Friday afternoon when three pro-Palestinian protesters wearing masks and sunglasses stormed in and ordered her out of the building.Ms. Heitkamp, the institute’s director and the only staff member left in the building, refused to go, slowing an apparent attempt to occupy the building, the latest tactic in protests over the Israel-Hamas war. position on the University of Chicago campus and across the country.”They were desperate for me to leave,” Ms. Heitkamp recalled. “I told them, ‘I’m…
Lynn Conway, a pioneering computer scientist who was fired by IBM in the 1960s after telling managers she was transgender despite her major technological innovations – and who received a rare formal apology from the company 52 years later – died on 9 June in Jackson. Mich. It was 86.Her husband, Charles Rogers, said she died at a hospital of complications from two recent heart attacks.In 1968, after leaving IBM, Ms. Conway was one of the first Americans to undergo gender reassignment surgery. But she kept it a secret, living in what she called “stealth” for 31 years out of…
Ask a Grand Prix driver if Monaco deserves its place on the Formula 1 calendar and the answer will usually be yes.This is even if the Grand Prix can often be less than exciting. The track is so narrow and the cars so big that drivers can rarely pass or overtake each other. At the Formula E race there in April, drivers were able to overtake almost 200 times in their smaller cars. In last year’s Grand Prix there were 22 overtakings, which can make the race a walking one.Compared to 30 years ago, the cars are about three feet…
A new law in Florida that allows doctors to perform C-sections in outpatient birthing centers has raised serious safety concerns among medical specialists, who say the procedures carry a small but real risk of life-threatening complications and should not be performed. are performed outside hospitals.The proposed new facilities, to be called advanced birth centers, would not be able to quickly mobilize additional staff, equipment and expertise if complications suddenly arise, as a hospital would, critics noted.”A pregnant patient who is considered low-risk one moment may suddenly need life-saving care the next,” said Dr. Cole Graves, president of the Florida region…
“Making It Work” is a series about small business owners trying to weather the tough times.While many people may conjure up romantic visions of a Montana ranch—vast valleys, cold streams, snow-capped mountains—few understand what happens when the cattle leave those pastures. Most of them, it turns out, don’t live in Montana.Even here, in a state with nearly twice as many cows as people, only about 1 percent of the beef purchased by Montana households is raised and processed locally, according to estimates by consulting firm Highland Economics. As with the rest of the country, many Montanans instead eat beef as…
The Group of 7 summit that concluded on Saturday went remarkably smoothly by the standards of a gathering where the leaders of major powers come together. That was a measure of the anxiety leaders feel about worsening trends in Ukraine, the Middle East, China and their own political future.There was a row over the use of the word “abortion” in the announcement, sparked by the host, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, but this was seen as a gesture to her home constituency. On important issues of geopolitics, there was little that divided the group.President Biden may appear politically vulnerable and…