AFP USA

Tech giant Meta has rolled back restrictions around topics such as gender and sexual identity, a sweeping move advocacy groups fear will fuel hate speech.The change coincides with the company’s shock announcement on Tuesday that it was ending its third-party fact-checking program in the United States and adopting a crowd-sourced model to police misinformation similar to the Elon Musk-owned X.The latest version of Meta’s community guidelines said its platforms — which include Facebook and Instagram — would now permit users to accuse people of “mental illness or abnormality” based on their gender or sexual orientation.The updated version also struck out previous restrictions on referring to women as “household objects or property,” Black people as “farm equipment” and transgender or non-binary people as “it.””We’re getting rid of a number of restrictions on topics like immigration, gender identity and gender that are the subject of frequent political discourse and debate,” Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, wrote in a blog post.”It’s not right that things can be said on TV or the floor of Congress, but not on our platforms.”But advocacy groups quickly voiced concern that the policy shift threatened the safety of marginalized communities.”Removal of fact-checking programs and industry-standard hate speech policies make Meta’s platforms unsafe places,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, president of the advocacy group GLAAD.”Without these necessary hate speech and other policies, Meta is giving the green light for people to target LGBTQ people, women, immigrants, and other marginalized groups with violence, vitriol, and dehumanizing narratives.”Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, in a video announcing the changes, claimed the previous restrictions on immigration and gender were “just out of touch with mainstream discourse.””What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it has gone too far,” Zuckerberg said.The move comes just weeks before Donald Trump returns to the White House with his Republican Party also back in control of Congress after fiercely attacking social media speech restrictions during the election campaign.Gender identity issues were also a key line of attack by Trump and Republicans against their Democratic opponents.After the move was announced on Tuesday, CyberWell, a nonprofit focused on combating online antisemitism, denounced the “systematic lowering of the bar” by Meta on policies against hate speech and harassment.”This change particularly undermines the safety of all marginalized communities,” CyberWell executive director Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor said in a statement.

Two US astronauts who have been stuck for months on the International Space Station (ISS) said Wednesday they have plenty of food, are not facing a laundry crisis, and don’t yet feel like castaways.Veteran astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams arrived at the ISS in June aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, and were due to spend only eight days on the orbiting laboratory.But problems with the Starliner’s propulsion system prompted NASA to change plans, with a return flight now scheduled for late March at the earliest.Williams said spirits were still high despite the unexpectedly long stay in space.”It’s just been a joy to be working up here,” he said during a call with NASA officials.”It doesn’t feel like we’re cast away,” he added. “Eventually we want to go home, because we left our families a little while ago but we have a lot to do while we’re up here.”Wilmore chuckled while offering reassurance about food supply.”We are well fed,” he said.Laundry requirements are also not comparable to Earth, he explained. “Clothes fit loosely up here. It’s not like on Earth where you sweat and it gets bad. I mean, they fit loosely. So you can wear things honestly, for weeks at a time, and it doesn’t bother you at all,” he said. After the propulsion problems developed, NASA ultimately decided to return the spacecraft to Earth without its crew, and to bring the two stranded astronauts back home with the members of the SpaceX Crew-9 mission.Crew-9’s two astronauts arrived at the ISS aboard a Dragon spacecraft in late September, with two empty seats for Wilmore and Williams. The plan was for all four to return home in February 2025.But the return was postponed last month when NASA announced that Crew-10, which would relieve Crew-9 and the stranded pair, would now launch no earlier than March 2025, and both teams would remain on board for a “handover period.”According to those timelines, Wilmore and Williams are scheduled to spend more than nine months in space.”When we get home, we’ll have lots of stories to tell,” Williams said. 

A prolonged dry spell combined with strong winds has created the “perfect conditions” for Los Angeles wildfires to rage out of control, even though experts say it’s too soon to pinpoint exactly how much climate change contributed.At the same time, perennial debates over suburban sprawl and forest management are intensifying, spurred by political mudslinging from incoming President Donald Trump and his close ally Elon Musk.”We see these fires spread when it is hot and dry and windy, and right now all of those conditions are in place in southern California,” Kristina Dahl, vice president for science at Climate Central, told AFP. “The clearest climate signal for those three conditions is with the temperature,” she added.While it’s not yet known what started the blazes, “human-caused climate change is intensifying the heat that drives wildfires, increasing temperatures in southern California up to two-degrees Celsius (3.6F) since 1895,” Patrick Gonzalez, a climate change scientist at the University of California, Berkeley told AFP.2024 is set to be named the hottest year on record for both the United States and the world, capping a decade of unprecedented heat.- ‘Widening’ fire season -Although wildfire activity can vary greatly from year to year, short-term extreme weather conditions helped create the “perfect conditions” for the rencent blazes, said wildfire scientist Maria Lucia Ferreira Barbosa of the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology.Last year’s El Nino weather system brought heavy rains that fueled excessive vegetation growth in the first half of 2024. But the second half of the year was marked by drought across southern California, setting the stage for what scientists call “precipitation whiplash,” another potential hallmark of climate change that turned the region into a tinderbox.Low humidity — combined with strong, dry Santa Ana winds blowing inland — further parched the already desiccated shrublands.Small embers can also be carried by the wind to ignite new areas, explained Rory Hadden, Professor of Fire Science at the University of Edinburgh. This can quickly overwhelm firefighters “and can also make escape challenging as visibility is reduced,” he added.”The ongoing wildfires in California are unprecedented, in the sense that they are dramatic for this time of the year,” said Apostolos Voulgarakis, an atmospheric scientist at Imperial College London, adding that research shows the state’s fire season is “widening” as a consequence of climate change.Attribution studies, which use statistical modeling to measure humanity’s impact on climate, will be needed to determine the precise culpability of human-driven warming on the current fires. However, scientists broadly agree that rising temperatures are making such fire-prone conditions more frequent. A recent UN Environment Programme report found a potential global increase in extreme fires by up to 14 percent by 2030, 30 percent by 2050, and 50 percent by the end of the century.- Prescribed burns and political feuds – As more people move into wildfire-prone ecosystems — partly driven by housing costs in safer coastal areas — the danger to lives and property only grows.Dahl noted that this dynamic is especially visible in places like Lake Tahoe, which has attracted newcomers, resulting in a marked growth in what is called the “wildland-urban interface.”Forest management is also under scrutiny. The United States long practiced aggressive fire suppression before gradually embracing prescribed burns — a tactic supported for centuries by Native American tribes. California treats about 125,000 acres (50,000 hectares) of wildlands each year with controlled burns, but it isn’t clear if that’s sufficient, and the state’s patchwork of regulations governing land under state, federal or private jurisdictions pose challenges to scaling it. In the political arena, Musk took to X to slam “nonsense regulations” he believes hamper more active fire prevention, while Trump labeled Gavin Newsom “the incompetent governor,” highlighting how the growing number of disasters is increasingly fueling ideological battles.

A member of the Japanese yakuza criminal underworld pleaded guilty to handling nuclear material sourced from Myanmar and seeking to sell it to fund an illicit arms deal, US authorities said Wednesday.Yakuza leader Takeshi Ebisawa and co-defendant Somphop Singhasiri had previously been charged in April 2022 with drug trafficking and firearms offenses, and both were remanded.He was then additionally charged in February 2024 with conspiring to sell weapons-grade nuclear material and lethal narcotics from Myanmar, and to purchase military weaponry on behalf of an armed insurgent group, prosecutors said.The military weaponry to be part of the arms deal included surface-to-air missiles, the indictment alleged.”As he admitted in federal court today, Takeshi Ebisawa brazenly trafficked nuclear material, including weapons-grade plutonium, out of Burma,” said Acting US attorney Edward Kim, using another name for Myanmar.”At the same time, he worked to send massive quantities of heroin and methamphetamine to the United States in exchange for heavy-duty weaponry such as surface-to-air missiles to be used on battlefields in Burma.”Prosecutors alleged that Ebisawa, 60, “brazenly” moved material containing uranium and weapons-grade plutonium, alongside drugs, from Myanmar.From 2020, Ebisawa boasted to an undercover officer he had access to large quantities of nuclear materials that he sought to sell, providing photographs of materials alongside Geiger counters registering radiation.During a sting operation including undercover agents, Thai authorities assisted US investigators in seizing two powdery yellow substances that the defendant described as “yellowcake.””The (US) laboratory determined that the isotope composition of the plutonium found in the Nuclear Samples is weapons-grade, meaning that the plutonium, if produced in sufficient quantities, would be suitable for use in a nuclear weapon,” the Justice Department said in its statement at the time.One of Ebisawa’s co-conspirators claimed they “had available more than 2,000 kilograms (4,400 pounds) of Thorium-232 and more than 100 kilograms of uranium in the compound U3O8 — referring to a compound of uranium commonly found in the uranium concentrate powder known as ‘yellowcake’.”The indictment claimed Ebisawa had suggested using the proceeds of the sale of nuclear material to fund weapons purchases on behalf of an unnamed ethnic insurgent group in Myanmar.Ebisawa faces up to 20 years imprisonment for the trafficking of nuclear materials internationally.Prosecutors describe Ebisawa as a “leader of the Yakuza organized crime syndicate, a highly organized, transnational Japanese criminal network that operates around the world (and whose) criminal activities have included large-scale narcotics and weapons trafficking.”Sentencing will be determined by the judge in the case at a later date, prosecutors said.

Dozens of evacuated Los Angeles residents stared incredulously at the thick cloud of black smoke blotting out the sun, scarcely able to believe the scale of the wildfires, and fearing that their homes could be destroyed next.They have gathered above Santa Monica Canyon, near the upscale Pacific Palisades neighborhood where devastating flames first broke out among multi-million dollar mansions on Tuesday.Residents continue to evacuate, or return briefly to collect their belongings.Gusts are still so strong that expensive Teslas and Alfa Romeos rock on their tires. A police car with a megaphone orders bystanders to “leave the area now.””You got the ashes to worry about in your lungs. You got your life to worry about with these 80- to 100-mile an hour gusts,” Sarahlee Stevens-Shippen told AFP.”We’ve just been in panic mode.”The 69-year-old retiree has lived here since the 1970s.Clad in a mask, she returned to her home at dawn to retrieve a few cherished possessions that she had been unable to gather in her hurry to flee the night before.”When I saw the glow of the fire coming over the mountain yesterday about eight o’clock, I took off,” she said.The flames had “already jumped the coast highway nearby and some palm trees were catching on fire,” she recalled.During the night that followed, at least two more substantial fires broke out to the north of the Los Angeles urban sprawl, in Altadena and the San Fernando Valley.Two people are confirmed to have died so far. Tens of thousands have evacuated their homes. And authorities warn that the danger is far from over, with treacherous windy conditions set to remain until later in the week.”This has been a shock that is still sinking in. But we’re in survival mode, so we’re just grabbing certain necessities and getting out,” said Stevens-Shippen.- ‘Never imagined’ -Carrying a large blue plastic bag stuffed full of clothes, Martin Sansing also emerges from the canyon. A television producer, he and his wife have just fled their four-bedroom villa.When Sansing bought the home for $1.6 million 15 years ago, he thought this neighborhood below the mountains that surround Los Angeles would be safe.”We’re in a pretty urban area. We’re not like, on a hill or anything like that,” he said.”I never imagined we would be affected.”Every fall and winter, California is swept by hot, dry Santa Ana winds. For firefighters, these are a nightmare, as they greatly increase the risk of fires spreading.This week, their strength reached an intensity not seen in more than a decade, meteorologists say.To compound the disaster, South California is experiencing a very dry winter, which makes vegetation more flammable. And there is a surplus of brush and shrubs, thanks to the two previous, unusually wet winters.”It’s hard not to think it’s unrelated to what’s happening on the planet,” said Sansing, 54.”These things seem to be more frequent and more intense.”- ‘So fast’ -At an evacuation center a few miles (kilometers) away, Arlinda Henderson is still trying to come to terms with what has happened.The Pacific Palisades resident has lived in her home with her husband since 1984. Over those four decades, she has experienced evacuations, but never anything of this severity.”This time was different — the fire just came down the hill so fast because of the wind,” she said.”I’d never seen anything like it.”The former flight attendant only had time to grab a few family photos and her pet cat before leaving her home — perhaps for the final time.”I think our house is gone. I’ve tried calling home, and I’ve tried a couple of neighbors. It’s just not ringing,” sighed the 76-year-old.She fears that her home insurance will refuse to continue to cover her against wildfires if she rebuilds in the neighborhood.”I can’t believe LA is surrounded” by wildfires, she said.

A-list actors, musicians and other celebrities were among the tens of thousands of people affected by terrifying wildfires tearing through Los Angeles on Wednesday.The entertainment capital was besieged by out-of-control blazes burning on multiple fronts, with Hollywood events including a glitzy awards show and a Pamela Anderson film premiere cancelled as firefighters battled nearby flames whipped up by hurricane-force winds.Hundreds of homes were destroyed in the swanky Pacific Palisades area, a favorite spot for celebrities where multimillion-dollar houses nestle on beautiful hillsides, while another inferno devastated parts of Altadena, to the east.Mandy Moore, the singer and “This Is Us” actress, told followers on Instagram she had fled with her children and pets from the path of the Altadena fire. “Trying to shield the kids from the immense sadness and worry I feel. Praying for everyone in our beautiful city. So gutted for the destruction and loss. Don’t know if our place made it,” she wrote.Emmy-winning actor James Woods posted a video on X showing flames engulfing trees and bushes near his Pacific Palisades home as he got ready to evacuate, and shortly afterwards said all the fire alarms were going off.”I couldn’t believe our lovely little home in the hills held on this long. It feels like losing a loved one,” Woods said.”Star Wars” star Mark Hamill told his followers on Instagram that he had fled his Malibu home on Tuesday.”Evacuated Malibu so last-minute there were small fires on both sides of the road as we approached PCH,” he wrote, referring to the Pacific Coast Highway, a scenic road that connects seafront settlements.Hamill said he and his wife Marilou York, along with a pet dog, had gone to their daughter’s Hollywood home to escape what he dubbed the “most horrific fire since ’93.”- Premieres cancelled -Meanwhile, several major Hollywood events were abruptly called off due to the disaster.The annual Critics Choice Awards gala, which honors the year’s best in film and television and is attended by dozens of A-list stars, was postponed from this Sunday to January 26.Anderson’s premiere for “The Last Showgirl” was scrapped due to the unfolding disaster, while Paramount also cancelled a glitzy red-carpet screening of the Robbie Williams musical film “Better Man.”Netflix pulled the plug on a press conference for its Golden Globe winner “Emilia Perez.”A live announcement to unveil this year’s Screen Actors Guild nominations was abandoned on Wednesday morning, in favor of a simple press release.Filming of Los Angeles-based shows such as “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Hacks” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live” was paused. And the Universal Studios theme park was closed for the day due to the extreme winds and fire conditions.- ‘Burn’ -Steve Guttenberg — star of 1984 comedy “Police Academy” — was among those helping get people out of Pacific Palisades as the fire began spreading on Tuesday.The “Cocoon” actor expressed frustration at how some of those fleeing the blaze had abandoned their cars on one of the only roads in and out of the ritzy neighborhood.”If you leave your car… leave the key in there so a guy like me can move your car so that these fire trucks can get up there. It’s really, really important,” he told a live television broadcast.Reality TV personalities Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt from “The Hills,” an MTV show that ran until 2010, said they had lost their house after evacuating.”I’m watching our house burn down on the security cameras,” Pratt wrote on Snapchat.

US Federal Reserve officials raised concerns in December that the fight against inflation may have “stalled” in recent months, and weighed the likely impact of Trump’s trade policies, according to minutes of the meeting published Wednesday.The central bank voted 11-to-1 last month in favor of cutting interest rates by a quarter point and signaled a slower pace of cuts ahead, raising concerns that interest rates may have to remain higher for longer. The decision was taken against the backdrop of a small uptick in inflation over the last few months of the year, moving the Fed’s favored inflation gauge away from its long-term target of two percent.At the same time, growth has remained robust and the labor market relatively resilient, reducing the pressure on the Fed to cut rates swiftly. The Fed’s decision to cut rates to between 4.25 and 4.50 percent was not unanimous — an unusual occurrence — with Cleveland Fed president Beth Hammack voting to leave rates unchanged.During the meeting, “several” members of the Fed’s rate-setting committee raised concerns that the “disinflationary process may have stalled temporarily or noted the risk that it could,” the Fed said in minutes of the meeting published on Wednesday.”Almost all participants judged that upside risks to the inflation outlook had increased,” it added.  Fed officials were also concerned about how to model the likely impact of changes to trade and immigration policy pledged by Donald Trump on the inflation fight — although they did not refer to the Republican president-elect by name. Trump’s team has pledged to impose sweeping tariffs on goods entering the United States and to deport millions of undocumented workers, leading many economists to predict inflation could be higher than previously predicted, and growth lower. Trump and his economic advisors have challenged those assumptions, insisting that his policies will be both disinflationary and pro-growth.”Recent higher-than-expected readings on inflation, and the effects of potential changes in trade and immigration policy, suggested that the process could take longer than previously anticipated,” the Fed said. Some officials chose to factor assumptions about trade and immigration into their economic forecasts, while others chose not to do so, and some refused to say whether or not they did. A few participants also said it “might be difficult to distinguish more persistent influences on inflation from potentially temporary ones, such as those stemming from changes in trade policy.”Futures traders see a roughly 95 percent chance that the Fed will keep its key lending rate unchanged at the next rate decision later this month, according to data from CME Group.

Several senior US Federal Reserve officials raised concerns in December that the fight against inflation may have “stalled” in recent months, according to minutes of the meeting published Wednesday.The central bank voted 11-to-1 last month in favor of cutting interest rates by a quarter point and signaled a slower pace of cuts ahead, raising concerns that interest rates would have to remain higher for longer. The decision was taken against the backdrop of a small uptick in inflation over the last few months of the year, moving the Fed’s favored inflation gauge away from its long-term target of two percent.At the same time, growth has remained robust and the labor market relatively resilient, reducing the pressure on the Fed to cut rates swiftly. The Fed’s decision to cut rates to between 4.25 and 4.50 percent was not unanimous — an unusual occurrence — with Cleveland Fed president Beth Hammack voting to leave rates unchanged.During the meeting, “several” members of the Fed’s rate-setting committee raised concerns that the “disinflationary process may have stalled temporarily or noted the risk that it could,” the Fed said in minutes of the meeting published on Wednesday.”Almost all participants judged that upside risks to the inflation outlook had increased,” it added.  Fed officials were also concerned about how to model the likely impact of changes to trade and immigration policy pledged by Donald Trump, although they did not refer to the president-elect by name. Some chose to factor some assumptions into their economic forecasts, while others chose not to do so, and some refused to say whether or not they had. Trump has pledged to impose sweeping tariffs on goods entering the United States, and to implement a policy of mass deportation of undocumented workers, leading many economists to predict inflation could be higher than previously predicted, and growth lower. Trump and his economic advisors have challenged those assumptions, insisting that his policies will be disinflationary and pro-growth.During their rate discussions, a few participants said it “might be difficult to distinguish more persistent influences on inflation from potentially temporary ones, such as those stemming from changes in trade policy that could lead to shifts in the level of prices.”Before the minutes were published, futures traders assigned a probability of around 95 percent that the Fed would keep its key lending rate unchanged at its next rate decision later this month, according to CME Group.

Mexico’s president took a swipe at Donald Trump on Wednesday, saying that the United States should be called “Mexican America,” after Trump’s vow to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”At her regular morning press conference, Claudia Sheinbaum displayed a 17th-century world map showing North America as “Mexican America.”Pointing out that the Gulf of Mexico was the name recognized by the United Nations, she turned the tables on Trump, saying: “Why don’t we call it (the United States) Mexican America?””It sounds nice, doesn’t it?””He talked about name, we too are talking about the name,” she said, while assuring that she expected to have “good relations” with the incoming US president.Trump, who will be sworn in for a second term on January 20, said Tuesday he planned to rename the Gulf of Mexico “the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful ring.””It’s appropriate. And Mexico has to stop allowing millions of people to pour into our country,” he said.He also claimed that Mexico was run by drug cartels, to which Sheinbaum responded that “in Mexico, the people rule.”In the run-up to his return to office, Trump has repeatedly lashed out at Mexico, threatening to impose stiff tariffs on imports from one of the United States’ biggest trading partners unless it halted the flow of illegal migrants and drugs across the border.He has also revived a threat from his first term to designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorist groups.

People living all over Los Angeles were urged Wednesday to conserve water after hydrants ran dry as major wildfires erupted around the city.Firefighters battling out-of-control blazes struggled with supplies in the ritzy Pacific Palisades area of the city, utility managers said, blaming an unprecedented challenge to the city’s reserves.Massive tanks supplying water to the area ran dry overnight as dozens of hoses were attached in an almost fruitless effort to save homes in a blaze that has leveled around 1,000 buildings.”We have three large water tanks, about a million gallons each,” Los Angeles Department of Water and Power chief executive Janisse Quinones told reporters.”We ran out of water in the first tank about 4:45pm yesterday, we ran out of water on the second tank about 8:30pm and the third tank about 3am this morning.”That’s where the hydrants went dry.”Quinones said more water was being pumped to the area to help keep the hydrants flowing, but the size of the supply lines and the fact that water had to be pumped uphill was complicating matters.”I need our customers to really conserve water, not just in the Palisades area, but the whole system, because the fire department needs the water to fight the fires,” Quinones said.”We’re fighting a wildfire with urban water systems, and that is really challenging.”Quinones said residents in certain areas should boil their tap water because of low supplies and pollution.”Because we’re pushing the water system so hard, our water quality is decreasing. So we’re going to be issuing a boil water notice this morning, and that will extend for about 48 hours,” she said.”The water quality is low. We have a lot of ash in the system, and so please, if you’re going to be drinking water, you need to boil the water.”Four major fires were burning around Los Angeles. Two people are known to have died, with a large number of people badly hurt, officials said.Tens of thousands of people have been ordered to evacuate their homes, and firefighters are stretched extremely thin fighting blazes that remain entirely uncontrolled.