Day: October 4, 2022

A Musk Retweet: Tesla CEO Says He’ll Pay $44 Billion to Buy Twitter

The tumultuous saga of Elon Musk’s on-again, off-again purchase of Twitter took a turn toward a conclusion Tuesday after the mercurial Tesla CEO proposed to buy the company at the originally agreed-on price of $44 billion. 

Musk made the proposal in a letter to Twitter that the company disclosed in a filing Tuesday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. It came less than two weeks before a trial between the two parties was scheduled to start in Delaware. 

In a statement, Twitter said it intends to close the transaction at $54.20 per share after receiving the letter from Musk. 

Trading in Twitter’s stock, which had been halted for much of the day pending release of the news, resumed late Tuesday and soared 22% to close at $52. 

Musk’s proposal is the latest twist in a high-profile saga involving the world’s richest man and one of the most influential social media platforms. Much of the drama has played out on Twitter itself, with Musk — who has more than 100 million followers — lamenting that the company was failing to live up to its potential as a platform for free speech. 

A letter from Musk’s lawyer dated Monday and disclosed by Twitter in a securities filing said Musk would close the merger signed in April, provided that the Delaware Chancery Court “enter an immediate stay” of Twitter’s lawsuit against him and adjourn the trial scheduled to start October 17. 

By completing the deal, Musk essentially gave Twitter what it was seeking from the court — “specific performance” of the contract with Musk, meaning he would have to go through with the purchase at the original price. The contract Musk signed also has a $1 billion breakup fee. 

Eric Talley, a law professor at Columbia University, said he’s not surprised by Musk’s turnaround, especially ahead of a scheduled deposition of Musk by Twitter attorneys starting Thursday that was “not going to be pleasant.” 

“On the legal merits, his case didn’t look that strong,” Talley said. “It kind of seemed like a pretty simple buyer’s remorse case.” 

If Musk were to lose the trial, the judge could not only force him to close the deal but also impose interest payments that would have increased its cost, Talley said. 

What did surprise Talley is that Musk doesn’t appear to be trying to renegotiate the deal. Even a modest price reduction might have given Musk a “moral victory” and the ability to say he got something out of the protracted dispute, Talley said. 

Neither Twitter nor attorneys for Musk responded to requests for comment Tuesday. 

Musk has been trying to back out of the deal for several months after signing on to buy the San Francisco company in April. Shareholders have already approved the sale, and legal experts say Musk faced a huge challenge to defend against Twitter’s lawsuit, which was filed in July. 

Musk claimed that Twitter undercounted the number of fake accounts on its platform, and Twitter sued when Musk announced the deal was off. 

Musk’s argument largely rested on the allegation that Twitter misrepresented how it measures the magnitude of “spam bot” accounts that are useless to advertisers. Most legal experts believe he faced an uphill battle to convince Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick, the court’s head judge, that something changed since the April merger agreement that justifies terminating the deal. 

Legal experts said Musk may have anticipated that he would lose. Things haven’t been going well for him in court recently, with the judge ruling more frequently in Twitter’s favor on evidentiary matters, said Ann Lipton, an associate law professor at Tulane University. The judge denied several of Musk’s discovery requests, Lipton said. 

It’s also possible that Musk’s co-investors in the deal were starting to get nervous about how the case was proceeding, she said. 

Musk’s main argument for terminating the deal – that Twitter was misrepresenting how it measured its “spam bot” problem – also didn’t appear to be going well as Twitter had been working to pick apart Musk’s attempts to get third-party data scientists to bolster his concerns. 

Mysteriously, neither Musk nor Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal have written anything about the deal on Twitter. 

If the deal does go through, Musk may be stuck with a company he damaged with repeated statements denouncing fake accounts, Susannah Streeter, senior markets analyst for Hargreaves Lansdown in the United Kingdom, wrote in an investor note. 

“This is an important metric considered to be key for future revenue streams via paid advertising or for subscriptions on the site, and his relentless scrutiny of Twitter’s figures over the last few months is likely to prompt questions from potential advertising partners,” she wrote. 

 

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Bird Flu Hits Colony of Endangered Penguins in South Africa

South African conservationists are on high alert after an outbreak of bird flu killed close to 30 penguins at one of the country’s most stable colonies and a popular tourist attraction.

The disease, formally known as avian influenza, is untreatable and has already killed more than 20,000 Cape cormorant birds since last year.

Boulders Penguin Colony, about a 40-minute drive from Cape Town’s city center, is home to about 3,000 African penguins — a significant number given there are only about 14,000 breeding pairs left on the planet.

Bird flu was identified in the colony in August.

Dr. David Roberts is a clinical veterinarian who works for the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds, an NGO which advises South African National Parks, the government entity that manages the colony. He said that, for now, tourists and beachgoers are still allowed.

“We don’t think there’s any extra threat caused by people visiting,” he said. “If there’s more of an outbreak, then other measures might be put in place.”

The disease is typically spread between birds by feces. Roberts said rangers are on the lookout for sick birds.

“Because this is an untreatable disease, we don’t take them in and give them medication, we’d rather euthanize them,” he said.

There are concerns that the bird flu could spread to ostriches and chickens, which would have dire economic implications.

As far as spreading to humans, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s website said illness in humans from bird flu virus infections are rare and have ranged in severity from no symptoms or mild illness to severe disease that resulted in death.

Roberts said the H5N1 strain present in South Africa has a low probability of being transmitted to mammals.

“It is a threat that we know is real and we’re concerned about that possibility but it’s a very low probability at the moment,” he said. “But we still encourage people not to interact with sick animals, sick birds or to interact with dead birds either.”

Roberts said if people do find sick, injured or dead birds they should find somebody who is trained to respond appropriately.

Azwianewi Makhado, the seabird specialist scientist at the Department of Fisheries, Forestry and the Environment, said the department has a bird security policy for any staff handling penguins in the colonies.

“Clothes that you wear when you enter the colony should be taken off as soon as you come out and should not be worn again,” Makhado said.

Authorities said they will post regular updates about the outbreak.

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Google Discontinues Translate Service in Mainland China

Google has ended its Google Translate service in mainland China, citing “low usage” of one of its flagship products by mainland China users.

The move surprised users, who said they first noticed not being able to access the function over the weekend.

“The Google Translate mobile app was also discontinued a year ago in 2021,” a Google spokesperson told VOA on Monday in response to a request for further details on the company’s decision.

The translation service had been available to mainland Chinese users since 2017.

While The Associated Press reported Monday that “it is not clear how many users were using Google Translate in China,” the South China Morning Post cited an international data tracking company’s figure of 53.5 million visits to the platform in the month of August alone.

AP noted that “the translation feature built into the Google Chrome browser also no longer functions for users in China.”

Wei Jingsheng, a leading Chinese dissident living in exile in the United States, told VOA in a phone interview Monday that in his view, Google has been trying to put on a “balancing act” — maintaining its reputation and credibility as a global internet giant operating around the world while finding a space to operate in the highly restrictive environment in China.

“It is safe to anticipate that the company is constantly under pressure from the Chinese government to meet its demands,” Wei told VOA.

“We don’t know what exactly lay behind Google’s decision to pull its translation service from China. Fifty-three-point-five million is not a small number,” he said, referring to the figured quoted by South China Morning Post.

Difficult foothold

Google said its mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” But as various media have reported, the California-based internet giant’s path to spreading its wings in mainland China over the past two decades has not been smooth.

The company pulled its search engine from the Chinese market in 2010 after the company became unwilling to abide by China’s censorship rules, AP reported on Monday.

Chinese platforms must “strictly” abide by Chinese authorities’ censorship rules and “censor keywords and topics the authorities deem politically sensitive,” AP said.

AP added that China later moved to block other Google services such as Gmail and Google Maps and noted that Google was not alone in being blocked or otherwise restricted. Chinese users are also not allowed to have Facebook accounts.

Media outlets including TechCrunch — which was the first to report Google’s shutdown of the translation platform — noted that Google’s decision came two weeks before the 20th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, scheduled to begin on October 16.

“The Chinese government has previously blocked Google services around major political events and politically sensitive anniversaries like that of the Tiananmen Square massacre,” the online publication of high-tech news said.

Google did not respond to VOA’s question about any potential connection between the translation service being discontinued and the Communist Party Congress.

Although China boasts the world’s largest internet market, when it comes to political topics, Chinese authorities are known to impose strict limitations as to what information Chinese citizens can access or have the freedom to discuss.

Official versions of political events like the upcoming Communist Party Congress are routinely disseminated from national media down to provincial, city, county, township and village levels through a vast network of state media.

Wei explained that Chinese citizens often turn to foreign sources to get a fuller picture of what goes on behind the scenes at the Congress and other news about their own country, due to a lack of trust in official media.

“They can just copy and paste foreign-language text” and get it translated into their native language with Google Translate, he said.

“People often feel that there’s better privacy protection when they use Google and other foreign companies’ products,” Wei added, since Chinese domestic companies are uniformly obligated to comply with government requests for user information.

State institutions taking notice

Although Google Maps and now Google Translate are not accessible to ordinary Chinese users, Chinese state institutions, including state media, have been paying attention to Google’s capacity.

On April 18, two months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, People’s Daily Online, one of China’s leading state media, posted on Weibo — a Twitter- and Instagram-like social platform — a China Central Television report that Google Maps provided satellite imaging of “all of Russia’s military and strategic assets with the highest definition.”

That post received 123,000 “likes,” and was reposted more than 5,200 times. A commentator under the name of “boyfriend of the nation” wrote, “Look everyone, this is what we will encounter later on.”

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Loretta Lynn, Coal Miner’s Daughter and US Country Music Queen, Dies 

Loretta Lynn, the Kentucky coal miner’s daughter whose frank songs about life and love as a woman in Appalachia pulled her out of poverty and made her a pillar of country music, has died. She was 90.

In a statement provided to The Associated Press, Lynn’s family said she died Tuesday at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee.

Lynn already had four children before launching her career in the early 1960s, and her songs reflected her pride in her rural Kentucky background.

As a songwriter, she crafted a persona of a defiantly tough woman, a contrast to the stereotypical image of most female country singers. The Country Music Hall of Famer wrote fearlessly about sex and love, cheating husbands, divorce and birth control and sometimes got in trouble with radio programmers for material from which even rock performers once shied away.

Her biggest hits came in the 1960s and ’70s, including “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “You Ain’t Woman Enough,” “The Pill,” “Don’t Come Home a Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind),” “Rated X” and “You’re Looking at Country.” She was known for appearing in floor-length, wide gowns with elaborate embroidery or rhinestones, many created by her longtime personal assistant and designer Tim Cobb.

Her honesty and unique place in country music was rewarded. She was the first woman ever named entertainer of the year at the genre’s two major awards shows, first by the Country Music Association in 1972 and then by the Academy of Country Music three years later.

“It was what I wanted to hear and what I knew other women wanted to hear, too,” Lynn told the AP in 2016. “I didn’t write for the men; I wrote for us women. And the men loved it, too.”

In 1969, she released her autobiographical “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” which helped her reach her widest audience yet.

“We were poor but we had love/That’s the one thing Daddy made sure of/He shoveled coal to make a poor man’s dollar,” she sang.

“Coal Miner’s Daughter,” also the title of her 1976 book, was made into a 1980 movie of the same name. Sissy Spacek’s portrayal of Lynn won her an Academy Award and the film was also nominated for best picture.

Long after her commercial peak, Lynn won two Grammys in 2005 for her album “Van Lear Rose,” which featured 13 songs she wrote, including “Portland, Oregon” about a drunken one-night stand. “Van Lear Rose” was a collaboration with rocker Jack White, who produced the album and played the guitar parts.

Born Loretta Webb, the second of eight children, she claimed her birthplace was Butcher Holler, near the coal mining company town of Van Lear in the mountains of east Kentucky. There really wasn’t a Butcher Holler, however. She later told a reporter that she made up the name for the purposes of the song based on the names of the families that lived there.

Her daddy played the banjo, her mama played the guitar and she grew up on the songs of the Carter Family.

“I was singing when I was born, I think,” she told the AP in 2016. “Daddy used to come out on the porch where I would be singing and rocking the babies to sleep. He’d say, ‘Loretta, shut that big mouth. People all over this holler can hear you.’ And I said, ‘Daddy, what difference does it make? They are all my cousins.'”

She wrote in her autobiography that she was 13 when she got married to Oliver “Mooney” Lynn, but the AP later discovered state records that showed she was 15. Tommy Lee Jones played Mooney Lynn in the biopic.

Her husband, whom she called “Doo” or “Doolittle,” urged her to sing professionally and helped promote her early career. With his help, she earned a recording contract with Decca Records, later MCA, and performed on the Grand Ole Opry stage. Lynn wrote her first hit single, “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl,” released in 1960.

She also teamed up with singer Conway Twitty to form one of the most popular duos in country music with hits such as “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man” and “After the Fire is Gone,” which earned them a Grammy Award. Their duets, and her single records, were always mainstream country and not crossover or pop-tinged.

The Academy of Country Music chose her as the artist of the decade for the 1970s, and she was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1988.

In “Fist City,” Lynn threatens a hair-pulling fistfight if another woman won’t stay away from her man: “I’m here to tell you, gal, to lay off of my man/If you don’t want to go to Fist City.” That strong-willed but traditional country woman reappears in other Lynn songs. In “The Pill,” a song about sex and birth control, Lynn writes about how she’s sick of being trapped at home to take care of babies: “The feelin’ good comes easy now/Since I’ve got the pill,” she sang.

She moved to Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, outside of Nashville, in the 1990s, where she set up a ranch complete with a replica of her childhood home and a museum that is a popular roadside tourist stop. The dresses she was known for wearing are there, too.

Lynn knew that her songs were trailblazing, especially for country music, but she was just writing the truth that so many rural women like her experienced.

“I could see that other women was goin’ through the same thing, ’cause I worked the clubs. I wasn’t the only one that was livin’ that life and I’m not the only one that’s gonna be livin’ today what I’m writin’,” she told The AP in 1995.

Even into her later years, Lynn never seemed to stop writing, scoring a multi-album deal in 2014 with Legacy Records, a division of Sony Music Entertainment. In 2017, she suffered a stroke that forced her to postpone her shows.

She and her husband were married nearly 50 years before he died in 1996. They had six children: Betty, Jack, Ernest and Clara, and then twins Patsy and Peggy. She had 17 grandchildren and four step-grandchildren.

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Artificial Intelligence Is New Weapon Against Australian Wildlife Smugglers

Australian scientists are harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence in the fight against wildlife trafficking.  

The technique uses 3-Dimensional X-rays at airports and post offices to detect animals being smuggled in luggage or the mail, and algorithms then alert customs officers.  

This technology uses artificial intelligence to identify the shapes of animals being trafficked.

Australia has a rich diversity of flora and fauna, which has fueled an illegal trade in wildlife.

The number of live animals seized by the Australian Border Force has tripled since 2017, according to official data.   Australian reptiles and birds are highly prized overseas.  

Exotic species, including snakes and turtles, are also brought into the country potentially bringing pests and diseases that could threaten farming industries and fragile native ecosystems.

“We are teaching computers to look for trafficked wildlife in both mail and traveler luggage pathways, said Vanessa Pirotta, a wildlife scientist at Macquarie University in Sydney. “The way in which we do that is we scan animals – dead animals in this case – and what we do is we scan that using 3D X-rays and then we produce a reference library.  So, lots of images with the animals presented in different ways so the computer can go, oh, okay, I have seen this animal before.  Oh, it looks slightly different, but I think that is a lizard.”

Australia is aiming to protect its biodiversity with a new plan announced Tuesday that aims to prevent future extinctions, updating an existing environmental policy. 

Among other things, the plan includes adding fifteen animals and plants to the endangered species list due in part to the Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20 and land clearing. The government intends to curb the impact of feral species, such as foxes and cats, that inflict untold damage on native wildlife, along with invasive weeds. The strategy also includes reserving almost a third of Australia for conservation to improve biodiversity. Dozens of countries, including France and Britain, have already set similar targets.

Australia is “the mammal-extinction capital of the world,” according to Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek, who says previous strategies to protect biodiversity have failed.

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 Three Scientists Win Physics Nobel for Quantum Information Research 

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Tuesday that three scientists won this year’s Nobel Prize in physics for “pioneering quantum information science.

The academy said Alain Aspect of France, John Clauser of the United States and Anton Zeilinger of Austria each carried out “groundbreaking experiments using entangled quantum states, where two particles behave like a single unit even when they are separated.”

Their work made it possible for the development of new technology, the academy said.

“Quantum information science is a vibrant and rapidly developing field,” said Eva Olsson, a member of the Nobel committee. “It has broad and potential implications in areas such as secure information transfer, quantum computing and sensing technology.”

The three scientists will split the $900,000 cash prize.

The Nobel Prize for medicine was announced Monday. The chemistry prize follows Wednesday, with the literature prize on Thursday and the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.

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