Locals in Dukinfield, Greater Manchester, were shocked today as the River Tame became covered in mysterious foam. Roads and cars were blanketed in white bubbles, carried by the wind. Resident Sam Pedder, expressed disbelief, saying it’s the worst he’s seen in 34 years. An Environment Agency spokesperson thanked the public for reporting the incident and is investigating the cause, suspected to be pollutants dumped upstream.

1K

In an article for Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), authors Jason Kelly, Aaron Mackey, and Joe Mullin argue that updates to the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) aren’t enough to fix its core First Amendment issues, which will endanger LGTBQ youth, young people seeking mental health information, and many other at-risk communities. EFF contends that “KOSA remains a dangerous bill that would allow the government to decide what types of information can be shared and read online by everyone.

It would still require an enormous number of websites, apps, and online platforms to filter and block legal, and important, speech.” In 2022, lawmakers were under extreme scrutiny by advocacy groups, including GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign, who believed KOSA would suppress critical resources for LGTBQ youth and restrict access to online communities. 

The newly revised KOSA bill is updated with a “duty of care” that requires platforms to “exercise reasonable care in the creation and implementation of any design feature” to mitigate harms to minors, which are outlined in the act, such as self-harm, eating disorders, substance abuse, among others. But EFF posits that because there is no case law defining “reasonable care,” platforms are put in legally compromising positions for hosting otherwise legal content on their websites, such as information about support groups for vulnerable and marginalized youth and suicide prevention resources. 

EFF maintains, “censorship is not the right approach to protecting people online, and that the promise of the internet is one that must apply equally to everyone, regardless of age.” 

Corporate outlets, such as the Washington Post and New York Times, have covered KOSA and its subsequent adjustments by lawmakers but have not examined the ambiguity of some of these updates and their implications, such as its “duty of care,” which EFF has called a “duty of censorship.”

For more information about this topic, see Steve Macek’s Project Censored recent Dispatch about KOSA and avram anderson and Shealeigh Voitl’s Dispatch about related legislation, including the EARN IT Act.

Source: Jason Kelley, Aaron Mackey, and Joe Mullin, “Don’t Fall for the Latest Changes to the Dangerous Kids Online Safety Act,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, February 15, 2024.

Student Researcher: Vincenzo Champion (City College of San Francisco)

Faculty Evaluator: Jennifer Levinson (City College of San Francisco)

Good morning. In today’s newsletter:

• Saudi Arabia prepares to abandon its oil price target

• China’s accelerating green transition

• How a Chinese billionaire’s Silicon Valley splurge caught the FBI’s eye

But first, China’s leaders have vowed to intensify fiscal support for the world’s second-largest economy, raising market expectations for more intervention just days after the central bank announced the biggest monetary stimulus since the pandemic.

The politburo, led by President Xi Jinping, pledged yesterday to “issue and use” government bonds to better implement “the driving role of government investment”. The comments come as analysts warn that China is in danger of missing its official economic growth target this year.

The politburo usually does not hold economic sessions in September, suggesting “an increased sense of urgency” about growing deflationary pressures, Morgan Stanley analysts said.

But they said China’s government did not yet appear to have reached a “whatever it takes” moment on the economy. Here’s more on the politburo’s statement and how markets reacted.

And here’s what else I’m keeping tabs on today:

• Economic data: Japan publishes August trade statistics and China reports industrial profit for the same month. On Sunday, Vietnam reports September inflation data and third-quarter GDP.

• Japan leadership vote: The Liberal Democratic party holds a leadership vote, in effect deciding the new prime minister. Here’s the crowded field to succeed current premier Fumio Kishida, who said last month he would not seek re-election.

How well did you keep up with the news this week? Take our quiz.

Five more top stories

1. Exclusive: Saudi Arabia is ready to abandon its unofficial price target of $100 a barrel for crude as it prepares to increase output. The prospect of Riyadh ditching its target is a sign that the kingdom is resigned to a period of lower oil prices, according to people familiar with the country’s thinking.

2. A company backed by Clayton, Dubilier & Rice and Hellman & Friedman, BlackRock and Singapore’s GIC is preparing one of the largest debt-fuelled dividend payouts in private equity history. Belron, the world’s biggest windscreen repair company, is in talks with lenders to raise €8.1bn through new bonds and loans to finance the €4.4bn dividend.

3. New York City mayor Eric Adams has been charged with fraud and bribery over an alleged long-running scheme to solicit cash and luxury travel from Turkish government officials and other wealthy foreign donors. The explosive charges mark the first criminal case in modern history against a sitting New York mayor.

4. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed yesterday that Israel would press on with its offensive against Hizbollah in Lebanon, casting doubts on a US-led diplomatic push for a ceasefire to prevent a full-blown war. Netanyahu spoke in New York, where he is due to address the UN General Assembly today.

5. Global companies have stepped off the sidelines in recent months to pursue blockbuster takeovers of rivals, with high-profile transactions such as Mars’s purchase of Kellanova and Verizon’s takeover of Frontier Communications spurring hopes of a dealmaking revival. While the overall number of deals sank to a nine-year low, bankers said boardroom sentiment had become more optimistic.

The Big Read

The scale and pace of China’s transition from fossil fuels has smashed international forecasts, exceeded Beijing’s own targets and put the rest of the world on notice. But to wean the country off coal, Chinese authorities need to push through a politically toxic shake-up of the electricity system, a long and thorny process that has already dragged on for decades.

We’re also reading . . . 

Graphic of the day

Could this radically shaped plane change the future of commercial flying by 2030? Inspired by the US Air Force’s B-2 stealth bomber, JetZero’s new aircraft promises to be both less noisy and more fuel-efficient.

Take a break from the news

We’re celebrating the 30th anniversary of our iconic Lunch with the FT with a free, pop-up newsletter. Receive our favourite Lunches from the archives in your inbox, featuring fresh insights from the interviewer. Join us for a weekly serving of Lunch starting this Sunday, until November.

Additional contributions from Gordon Smith and Tee Zhuo

An AFP staff photographer aimed to appease Hamas by speaking by video to a  “Day of Loyalty to the Palestinian Journalists” event organized by the terrorist group, the news agency’s global news director Phil Chetwynd told HonestReporting this week.

Journalists working for foreign media in Gaza have participated in Hamas’ annual loyalty event hosted by the terror group’s Government Media Office with the stated aim of aligning the media with Hamas’ agenda, an HonestReporting investigation revealed.

The exposure unveiled the disturbing relationship between Gaza’s rulers and the journalists tasked with covering them, calling into question their objectivity and the ethical standards of their media outlets — the Associated Press, AFP, Reuters, and The New York Times.

“Mohammed Abed is an award-winning staff photographer at AFP who has always worked according to the agency’s published rules and ethics charters,” Chetwynd said. “He did not attend the “Day of Loyalty to the Palestinian Journalists” event in 2021. However, he agreed to say a few words in a video, as the Hamas-controlled government press office effectively regulated media work in Gaza. In the video, he thanked the government press office in general terms for their support of journalists. We have journalists who work in many difficult locations around the world and in all these locations it is incumbent on them to maintain cordial and professional relations with the organization that controls the territory in which they work. It would be dishonest try to twist these anodyne words into a pledge of support for Hamas.”

While the AP and New York Times did not respond to a request for comment, a Reuters spokesperson defended the news agency’s journalists who participated in the Hamas event.

“We stand by our coverage of Gaza and our team, who operate within the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles,” the spokesman said.

However, those principles appeared to forbid joining an event organized by a terrorist organization to encourage loyalty.

“Customers across the world depend on us to provide them with reliable and objective news and information,” the principles state. “This means that we have a special need to safeguard our independence and integrity and avoid any bias which may stem from control by specific individuals or interests.”

Here are the highlights of our expose:

• AP’s staff photographer Hatem Moussa delivered a video address at Hamas’ 2014 Loyalty Day event. It appears that his message was displayed on the same screen as the message of Abu Ubaida, the terror group’s military wing spokesperson. It was also published in propaganda style by Hamas’ official news agency.

• AP’s photographer Fatima Shbair and AFP’s Mohammed Baba spoke in a promotional video for the 2021 event, in which they were also honored by Hamas for receiving international awards.

• Two journalists were honored in the 2021 event as Hamas media office’s “work partners:” Yasser Qudih, who infiltrated into Israel on October 7 and recently won the Pulitzer Prize with Reuters’ photography staff, and The New York Times’s photographer Samar abu Elouf, who recently won the prestigious Polk Award.

• At the 2022 event, two journalists were honored for serving on the judging panel of the Government Media Office’s media contest: Reuters cameraman Fadi Shanaa and AP’s Adel Hana, whom we exposed for teaching Hamas’ media courses.

• Other journalists were honored in 2021 and 2022 for winning international awards. These included Reuters photographer Ibraheem Abu Mustafa, who recently also won the 2024 Staff Photography Pulitzer, and AP photographer Khalil Hamra.

• In 2022, the terror group also gave monetary awards to two journalists who were exposed by HonestReporting for their infiltration into Israel and their links to Hamas — Hassan Eslaiah, who worked for AP and CNN, and Ashraf Amra who worked for Reuters.

Read our full story here: EXPOSED: Foreign Media Journalists in Gaza Participated in Hamas’ “Loyalty” Day

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