Global News Today

MOVIES

— “Army of Thieves,” coming to Netflix on Friday, is set in a world where there are zombies but it’s (asterisk)not(asterisk) a zombie movie. This prequel to Zack Snyder’s “Army of the Dead” invites viewers to join a new Europe-trotting heist. The safecracker Dieter (played by Matthias Schweighöfer, who also directed) is just a small-time bank teller who is recruited by “Game of Thrones” alum Nathalie Emmanuel to pull off a series of robberies across the continent.

— If you missed Lin-Manuel Miranda’s joyous musical “In the Heights” in theaters earlier this summer (most people did) or during its limited time on HBO Max, worry not because the Jon M. Chu-directed adaptation is coming back to the streaming service on Thursday. Star Anthony Ramos, Noveck wrote, “eases into leading-man duties with warmth, humor and charm.”

— A new documentary tells the story of Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Nick Ut, the man who captured the horrors of the Vietnam War with a single black-and-white photo of a 9-year-old girl in 1972. Ut was only 21 at the time he took the “Napalm Girl” photo and after the fall of Saigon was transferred to the Los Angeles bureau of The Associated Press, where he would take many thousands of photographs — covering everything from the riots to celebrity trials — before his retirement in 2017 (after 51 years). Ut gets the chance to tell his own story in “From Hell to Hollywood,” available on VOD starting Oct. 26.

MUSIC

— Ed Sheeran always equals something interesting. The fourth full-length album from the singer-songwriter — titled “=” (and pronounced Equals) — is due Friday and he has a lot to cover, including his marriage, fatherhood and loss. “I see it as my coming-of-age record,” he said in a statement. The 14-track album includes the hits “Bad Habits” and “Shivers.”

— The War on Drugs are back this Friday after four years with the 10-track “I Don’t Live Here Anymore.” The title song is a shimmering, ’80s-influenced grand affair: “Is life just dying in slow motion/Or getting stronger every day?” sings the band’s frontman and guitarist, Adam Granduciel. But there’s versatility, too: The first single, “Living Proof,” finds the band vulnerable and restrained. The album is described as “an uncommon rock album about one of our most common but daunting processes — resilience in the face of despair.”

— The weather’s getting colder and the holidays are right around the corner. That can mean only one thing: Pentatonix with a new Christmas album. It’s only sort of true this time. “Evergreen,” the Grammy-winning a cappella group’s sixth holiday album, out Friday, is timed for winter but the two songs revealed so far aren’t especially Christmas-y: Jule Styne’s “It’s Been a Long, Long Time” and Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called To Say I Love You.” Perhaps they’ve run out of traditional songs, but they’re sure to add their vocal magic to anything Christmas-adjacent.

-AP-

Minnesota’s Congressional delegation on Monday is introducing a resolution to posthumously award the Congressional Gold Medal to pop superstar Prince, citing his “indelible mark on Minnesota and American culture,” The Associated Press has learned.

The medal is one of the nation’s highest civilian honors and past recipients include George Washington, the Wright Brothers, Rosa Parks, Mother Teresa, the Navajo Code Talkers, the Tuskegee Airmen and the Dalai Lama.

Prince, whose hits include “Little Red Corvette,” ″Let’s Go Crazy” and “When Doves Cry,” died April 21, 2016, of an accidental fentanyl overdose at age 57 at his Paisley Park estate in Chanhassen, Minnesota.

The legislation notes that Prince is “widely regarded as one of the greatest musicians of his generation,” with seven Grammy Awards, six American Music Awards, an Oscar for the score to “Purple Rain” and a Golden Globe.

It adds that he is a member of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, sold more than 150 million records worldwide and that “Purple Rain” was added by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry. The bill also puts into the Congressional record the glyph he used instead of his name for a time that Prince called “The Love Symbol.”

Under the rules, Congressional Gold Medals require the support of at least two-thirds of the members of both the Senate and House of Representatives before they can be signed into law by the president. The Prince legislation will be introduced in the House and Senate.

If the gold medal is approved and made, the bill asks that it be given to the Smithsonian Institution, which should make it available for display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture or on loan.

-AP-

UPS’ third-quarter results beat analysts’ expectations, as consumers are paying higher rates to have the package delivery company fulfill their shipping needs.

Shares rose 5% before the market open on Tuesday.

United Parcel Service Inc. earned $2.33 billion, or $2.65 per share for the period ended Sept. 30. That compares with $1.96 billion, or $2.24 per share a year ago.

Stripping out one-time items, earnings were $2.71 per share. That easily beat the $2.52 per share analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research expected.

In the U.S., revenue climbed 7.4% to $14.21 billion, helped by a 12% increase in revenue per piece. The performance was better than the $14.19 billion Wall Street was calling for. International revenue rose 15.5% to $4.72 billion, topping the $4.66 billion expected.

Revenue for the Atlanta-based company improved to $23.18 billion from $21.24 billion. This topped the $22.61 billion that analysts predicted.

-AP-

Bearing down on hugely popular social media platforms and their impact on children, the leaders of a Senate panel have called executives from YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat to face questions on what their companies are doing to ensure young users’ safety.

The Senate Commerce subcommittee on consumer protection is fresh off a highly charged hearing with a former Facebook data scientist, who laid out internal company research showing that the company’s Instagram photo-sharing service appears to seriously harm some teens.

The three executives — Michael Beckerman, a TikTok vice president and head of public policy for the Americas; Leslie Miller, vice president for government affairs and public policy of YouTube’s owner Google; and Jennifer Stout, vice president for global public policy of Snapchat parent Snap Inc. — are due to appear at a subcommittee hearing Tuesday.

“We need to understand the impact of popular platforms like Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube on children and what companies can do better to keep them safe,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., the subcommittee’s chairman, said in a statement.

The panel wants to learn how algorithms and product designs can magnify harm to children, foster addiction and intrusions of privacy, Blumenthal says. The aim is to develop legislation to protect young people and give parents tools to protect their children.

The video platform TikTok, wildly popular with teens and younger children, is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. In only five years since launching, it has gained an estimated 1 billion monthly users.

TikTok denies allegations, most notably from conservative Republican lawmakers, that it operates at the behest of the Chinese government and provides it with users’ personal data. The company says it stores all TikTok U.S. data in the United States. The company also rejects criticisms of promoting harmful content to children.

TikTok says it has tools in place, such as screen time management, to help young people and parents moderate how long children spend on the app and what they see. The company says it focuses on age-appropriate experiences, noting that some features, such as direct messaging, are not available to younger users.

Early this year after federal regulators ordered TikTok to disclose how its practices affect children and teenagers, the platform tightened its privacy practices for the under-18 crowd.

A separate House committee has investigated video service YouTube Kids this year. Lawmakers said the YouTube offshoot feeds children inappropriate material in “a wasteland of vapid, consumerist content” so it can serve ads to them. The app, with both video hosting and original shows, is available in about 70 countries.

A panel of the House Oversight and Reform Committee told YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki that the service doesn’t do enough to protect children from potentially harmful material. Instead it relies on artificial intelligence and self-policing by content creators to decide which videos make it onto the platform, the panel’s chairman said in a letter to Wojcicki.

Parent company Google agreed to pay $170 million in 2019 settlements with the Federal Trade Commission and New York state of allegations that YouTube collected personal data on children without their parents’ consent.

Despite changes made after the settlements, the lawmaker’s letter said, YouTube Kids still shows ads to children.

Snap Inc.’s Snapchat service allows people to send photos, videos and messages that are meant to quickly disappear, an enticement to its young users seeking to avoid snooping parents and teachers. Hence its “Ghostface Chillah” faceless (and word-less) white logo.

Only 10 years old, Snapchat says an eye-popping 90% of 13- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. use the service. It reported 306 million daily users in the July-September quarter.

The company agreed in 2014 to settle the FTC’s allegations that it deceived users about how effectively the shared material vanished and that it collected users’ contacts without telling them or asking permission. The messages, known as “snaps,” could be saved by using third-party apps or other ways, the regulators said.

Snapchat wasn’t fined but agreed to establish a privacy program to be monitored by an outside expert for the next 20 years — similar to oversight imposed on Facebook, Google and Myspace in privacy settlements in recent years.

-AP-

In March, as claims about the dangers and ineffectiveness of coronavirus vaccines spun across social media and undermined attempts to stop the spread of the virus, some Facebook employees thought they had found a way to help.

By altering how posts about vaccines are ranked in people’s newsfeeds, researchers at the company realized they could curtail the misleading information individuals saw about COVID-19 vaccines and offer users posts from legitimate sources like the World Health Organization.

The trove of documents shows that in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook carefully investigated how its platforms spread misinformation about life-saving vaccines. They also reveal rank-and-file employees regularly suggested solutions for countering anti-vaccine content on the site, to no avail. The Wall Street Journal reported on some of Facebook’s efforts to deal with anti-vaccine comments last month.

Typically, Facebook ranks posts by engagement — the total number of likes, dislikes, comments, and reshares. That ranking scheme may work well for innocuous subjects like recipes, dog photos, or the latest viral singalong. But Facebook’s own documents show that when it comes to divisive public health issues like vaccines, engagement-based ranking only emphasizes polarization, disagreement, and doubt.

To study ways to reduce vaccine misinformation, Facebook researchers changed how posts are ranked for more than 6,000 users in the U.S., Mexico, Brazil, and the Philippines. Instead of seeing posts about vaccines that were chosen based on their popularity, these users saw posts selected for their trustworthiness.

The results were striking: a nearly 12% decrease in content that made claims debunked by fact-checkers and an 8% increase in content from authoritative public health organizations such as the WHO or U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Those users also had a 7% decrease in negative interactions on the site.

“Is there any reason we wouldn’t do this?” one Facebook employee wrote in response to an internal memo outlining how the platform could rein in anti-vaccine content.

Facebook said it did implement many of the study’s findings — but not for another month, a delay that came at a pivotal stage of the global vaccine rollout.

Yet the need to act urgently couldn’t have been clearer: At that time, states across the U.S. were rolling out vaccines to their most vulnerable — the elderly and sick. And public health officials were worried. Only 10% of the population had received their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. And a third of Americans were thinking about skipping the shot entirely, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Despite this, Facebook employees acknowledged they had “no idea” just how bad anti-vaccine sentiment was in the comments sections on Facebook posts. But company research in February found that as much as 60% of the comments on vaccine posts were anti-vaccine or vaccine reluctant.

Even worse, company employees admitted they didn’t have a handle on catching those comments. And if they did, Facebook didn’t have a policy in place to take the comments down. The free-for-all was allowing users to swarm vaccine posts from news outlets or humanitarian organizations with negative comments about vaccines.

Instead, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on March 15 that the company would start labeling posts about vaccines that described them as safe.

The move allowed Facebook to continue to get high engagement — and ultimately profit — off anti-vaccine comments, said Ahmed of the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Internal Facebook research presented on March 24 warned that most of the “problematic vaccine content” was coming from a handful of areas on the platform. In Facebook communities where vaccine distrust was highest, the report pegged 50% of anti-vaccine pageviews on just 111 — or .016% — of Facebook accounts.

“Top producers are mostly users serially posting (vaccine hesitancy) content to feed,” the research found.

On that same day, the Center for Countering Digital Hate published an analysis of social media posts that estimated just a dozen Facebook users were responsible for 73% of anti-vaccine posts on the site between February and March. It was a study that Facebook’s leaders in August told the public was “faulty,” despite the internal research published months before that confirmed a small number of accounts drive anti-vaccine sentiment.

Earlier this month, an AP-NORC poll found that most Americans blame social media companies, like Facebook, and their users for misinformation.

-AP-

The number of new cases nationally has been plummeting since the delta surge peaked in mid-September. The U.S. is averaging about 73,000 new cases per day, less than half of the nearly 173,000 recorded on Sept. 13. And the number of Americans in the hospital with COVID-19 has plummeted by about half to around 47,000 since early September.

In Florida, Miami-Dade County’s mask mandate could be loosened by the end of October if the encouraging numbers continue, and nearby Broward County will discuss relaxing its requirement on Tuesday. The superintendent in metro Atlanta said he will consider waiving mask requirements at individual schools.

Still, there are some troubling indicators, including the onset of cold weather, which sends people indoors, where the virus can more easily spread.

With required mask use reduced in much of the U.S., the University of Washington’s influential COVID-19 forecasting model is predicting increasing infections and hospitalizations in November.

Also, COVID-19 deaths per day have begun to creep back up again after a decline that started in late September. Deaths are running at about 1,700 per day, up from close to 1,500 two weeks ago.

In sparsely populated Wyoming, which has one of the nation’s lowest vaccination rates, hospitals are coping with more patients than at any other point in the pandemic.

During a three-week stretch this month, rural hospitals in Minnesota were caring for more COVID-19 patients than those in the state’s major urban center, Minneapolis-St. Paul.

The strain on hospitals in Colorado forced a second county to reinstitute an indoor mask mandate last week, the Denver Post reported. Nearly 80% of COVID-19 patients in Colorado hospitals are unvaccinated.

-AP-

The National Weather Service has confirmed a strong tornado that thrashed the southwestern Missouri city of Fredericktown as strong storms that swept the state and into Illinois overnight damaged buildings and knocked out power, but left no serious injuries.

The National Weather Service confirmed an EF-3 tornado hit Fredericktown Sunday night, damaging homes, businesses and the main electrical substation that feeds power to the city of about 4,000. A tornado with that rating is considered strong, and wind speeds range from 136-165 mph (219-266 kph).

The tornado leveled a storage building in Fredericktown, officials said.

The weather service was also surveying damage from a suspected tornado at St. Mary, Missouri, about 55 miles southeast of St. Louis, that crossed the Mississippi River into Chester, Illinois. The damage included roofs torn from buildings and toppled trees and utility poles. Crews were also looking into whether the storms spawned tornadoes in rural areas in the northeastern corner of Kansas and throughout the northern half of Missouri.

In Chester, a city of about 8,700 across the Mississippi River from St. Mary, residents reported damage that included a tree falling onto one home and roof damage to a nursing home, said Larry Willis, a spokesman for the Randolph County Emergency Management Agency.

Willis said the nearby village of Bremen “took a direct hit” before the storm dissipated about a mile (1.6 kilometers) east of that community. In its wake, a large storage building in Bremen was destroyed, and Illinois Route 150 was closed due to downed power lines and power poles.

Forecasters are expecting more stormy weather later in the week. On Tuesday afternoon, parts of Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas could see severe storms, according to the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma. Forecasters said those storms could bring large hail, strong winds and isolated tornadoes.

-AP-

Sudan’s military seized power Monday, dissolving the transitional government hours after troops arrested the prime minister, and thousands flooded the streets to protest the coup that threatened the country’s shaky progress toward democracy.

Security forces opened fire on some of them, and three protesters were killed, according to the Sudan Doctors’ Committee, which also said 80 people were wounded.

The takeover, which drew condemnation from the United Nations, the United States and the European Union, comes more than two years after protesters forced the ouster of longtime autocrat Omar al-Bashir and just weeks before the military was supposed to hand the leadership of the council that runs the country over to civilians.

After the early morning arrests of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok and other senior officials, thousands demonstrated in the streets of the capital, Khartoum, and its twin city of Omdurman. They blocked streets and set fire to tires as security forces used tear gas to disperse them.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “strongly condemns the ongoing military coup d’état in Khartoum and all actions that could jeopardize Sudan’s political transition and stability,” said his spokesman, spokesman Stéphane Dujarric.

Sudan has suffered other coups since gaining its independence from Britain and Egypt in 1956. Al-Bashir came to power in 1989 in one such takeover, which removed the country’s last elected government.

Among those detained were senior government figures and political leaders, including the information and industry ministers, a media adviser to Hamdok and the governor of the state that includes the capital, according to the senior military official and another official. Both spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media.

-AP-

Associated Press writer Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations and Matthew Lee in Washington contributed.

Atlanta public school officials are offering a $3,000 bonus to try to recruit new teachers for additional virtual classes.

The district announced the hiring bonus recently amid a jump in the number of students seeking online instruction, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Atlanta Public Schools will also provide relocation and housing allowances for successful out-of-state candidates, according to the newspaper. Starting pay in the district for a first-year teacher with a bachelor’s degree is just over $49,000.

The new hires for the district’s virtual academy would start teaching in the second semester that begins in January. More than 1,600 students asked to switch from in-person instruction to virtual learning for that semester within weeks of the district’s decision last month to reopen the application process for online instruction. The window for those applications closed on Friday.

It’s not clear how many additional teachers the district will need. COVID-19 cases in its schools have dropped in recent weeks, so some students may choose to continue in-person classes. But the district has warned that it will have to resort to a lottery system for virtual instruction if it can’t find enough new teachers to meet the expected jump in demand.

-AP-