Musk orders Twitter staff to work day and night on ‘blue tick’ charge | Financial Times
▻https://www.ft.com/content/ad4efd13-3e9e-4e76-968e-6d27b2c9346a?segmentId=2fbd1a9a-c8e3-7947-12ce-2a70795f5
Elon Musk has ordered Twitter staff to work round the clock to implement a charge on users to keep their verified “blue tick”, as the new owner of the social media company seeks to stamp his mark on the business.
The renewed push into subscription revenues comes as Twitter braces itself for a potential backlash from advertisers, as Musk considers loosening content moderation controls. On Monday, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), a marketing industry group set up by the World Federation of Advertisers, warned Musk that keeping the platform free of inappropriate material was “non-negotiable”.
Advertising made up more than 90 per cent of Twitter’s revenues in its last reported figures as a public company. Before Musk’s arrival, efforts were made to persuade users to pay $4.99 a month to subscribe to Twitter Blue, which enables them to access exclusive features including an edit button.
Musk is said to want to increase the pricing of Twitter Blue and make it a condition of having a verified profile, signified by a blue tick next to a user’s name, on the social media platform. Hundreds of thousands of Twitter users have been verified, including big brands and corporate accounts, as well as celebrities and journalists. However, Twitter Blue is only available to users in the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand at the moment.
Employees at Twitter have been working “24/7” to deliver Musk’s vision for verification, said two senior staff members. One person added that teams were told it was of the “utmost gravity”.
Musk said in a tweet on Sunday that “the whole verification process is being revamped right now”.
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.
One person familiar with Musk’s thinking ahead of completing the $44bn purchase of the social media site said several pricing options had been discussed, including $9.99 and $14.99 a month, adding that different groups of users could be asked to test pricing models.
]]>Patrick Le Lay, le patron qui a fait de TF1 la première chaîne de France, est mort à 77 ans
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/disparitions/article/2020/03/19/patrick-le-lay-le-patron-qui-a-fait-de-tf1-la-premiere-chaine-de-france-est-
Breton et revendiquant souvent sa fierté de l’être, dur en affaires, parfois brutal dans ses rapports professionnels, fidèle en amitié, Patrick Le Lay est mort mercredi 18 mars à l’âge de 77 ans. Entre la fin des années 1980 et le début des années 2000, ce fils de professeur de mathématiques de Saint-Brieuc (Côtes-d’Armor) aura régné sur le paysage audiovisuel français à la tête d’une chaîne, en l’occurrence TF1, qui dépassait parfois 40 % de part de marché. A l’annonce de son décès, Martin Bouygues, patron du groupe TF1, a réagi : « J’avais avec Patrick Le Lay des liens de confiance et d’amitié. C’est lui qui a été l’artisan de la privatisation de TF1. C’était un homme de conviction parfois rude mais toujours attentif aux autres. C’est quelqu’un que j’aimais profondément. »
]]>Louis Garrel, la #honte_du_cinéma, soutient les cinéastes pédophiles
Louis Garrel qui joue chez Violanski après avoir apposé sa signature sur la pétition le défendant en juin 2010, joue également dans le dernier Woody Allen.
Piétiner les femmes et les victimes de viol ne dérange pas l’acteur français qui a décidé de faire carrière chez les pédophiles.
▻http://www.allocine.fr/article/fichearticle_gen_carticle=18688260.html
Plus de 75 employés américains de Hachette se sont mis en grève alors que l’éditeur s’apprête à publier les mémoires du réalisateur Woody Allen sur le sol américain. Selon Deadline, ce mouvement s’inscrivait en soutien « à Ronan Farrow, Dylan Farrow et aux survivants d’agression sexuelle ».
(…)
Les mémoires de Woody Allen, titrés Apropos of Nothing, sortent pour l’instant aux Etats-Unis le 7 avril et en France, selon les informations du Figaro, le 29 avril chez Stock. Le cinéaste a tourné un nouveau film, Rifkin’s Festival, avec Christoph Waltz, Louis Garrel et Sergi López, …
▻https://twitter.com/kabarkoff/status/1235669524902539268
75 plus employees of Hachette are standing in solidarity with @ronanfarrow, @realdylanfarrow and survivors of sexual assault and walked out of the Hachette offices today in protest of Woody Allen’s memoir. #HachetteWalkout #LittleBrownWalkout
]]>Piotr Pavlenski, portrait d’un agitateur forcené converti au « kompromat »
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2020/02/14/piotr-pavlenski-portrait-d-un-agitateur-forcene-converti-au-kompromat_602963
Le performeur russe, à l’origine de la diffusion de vidéos ayant poussé Benjamin Griveaux à retirer sa candidature à la Mairie de Paris, utilise les mêmes méthodes que les services russes pour discréditer les opposants : l’art du « dossier compromettant ».
Devant un parterre d’étudiants en droit réunis à Paris, en décembre 2019, Piotr Pavlenski clamait que « l’art politique est un art » qui exige d’« agir pour forcer l’appareil d’Etat à se démasquer ». « Pour cela, expliquait-il, l’artiste utilise les mêmes instruments que ceux dont use le pouvoir. » Il est passé aux travaux pratiques en préparant la mise à mort du candidat La République en marche (LRM) à la Mairie de Paris, Benjamin Griveaux, avec la technique, bien connue en Russie, du kompromat (ou « dossier compromettant »).
En publiant une vidéo vieille de deux ans attribuée à l’ancien secrétaire d’Etat en train de se masturber, Piotr Pavlenski, 36 ans dans quelques jours, n’a rien fait d’autre, en effet, que d’imiter les services de sécurité russes, qui font « tomber » quelques-unes de leurs cibles en diffusant des vidéos intimes, souvent tournées à leur insu. Vladimir Poutine y a eu lui-même recours. Alors chef des services de sécurité russes (FSB, ex-KGB), il avait utilisé ce procédé pour écarter en 1998 le procureur Iouri Skouratov, chargé d’enquêter sur la corruption dans l’entourage et la famille de Boris Eltsine. Une vidéo diffusée à la télévision montrant les ébats du magistrat avec deux prostituées avait suffi. Puis ce fut le tour de plusieurs opposants d’être victimes de kompromat.
]]>À Marseille, le candidat LREM dérape face à un journaliste : « Je vais te mettre la tête dans le cul »
▻https://www.lefigaro.fr/elections/municipales/a-marseille-le-candidat-lrem-derape-face-a-un-journaliste-je-vais-te-mettre
Malgré les gros câlins de Macron, les LaRem toujours très subtils) n’arrivent pas vraiment à se détendre.
À Marseille, le candidat LREM dérape face à un journaliste : « Je vais te mettre la tête dans le cul »
Yvon Berland, qui avait perdu ses nerfs à la suite d’un article des Échos, s’est excusé, reconnaissant une réaction « disproportionnée ».
]]>Pourquoi George Soros et sa fondation quittent la Hongrie
▻https://www.franceinter.fr/monde/pourquoi-george-soros-et-sa-fondation-quittent-la-hongrie
George Soros, en 2017 à Bruxelles © AFP / Olivier Hoslet / POOL
Le milliardaire américain d’origine hongroise George Soros a annoncé mardi qu’il suspendait les activités de sa fondation destinée à mener des programmes d’enseignement pour les réfugiés. La fondation déménage également ses locaux de Budapest à Berlin.
La fondation de #Georges_Soros ne donnera plus de cours aux réfugiés hongrois : mardi, l’Université d’Europe centrale (CEU), implantée à Budapest, a annoncé qu’elle ne reconduisait pas ses modules d’enseignement destinés aux réfugiés, ni ses activités de bourses de recherche financées par l’UE sur les politiques migratoires.
« Nous suspendons ces programmes dans l’attente d’une clarification de notre situation fiscale et juridique », explique un communiqué de l’organisation. En cause, une taxe de 25% sur les organisations qui « soutiennent l’immigration ». Adoptée en juin dans le cadre d’un ensemble de lois anti-immigration, elle entre en vigueur ce vendredi.
]]>Israeli minister planned eviction of West Bank Bedouin 40 years ago, document reveals
Now agriculture minister, then settler activist, Uri Ariel was already planning in the 1970s the eviction of Bedouin living east of Jerusalem that is taking place now in Khan al-Ahmar
Amira Hass Jul 12, 2018 2:57 AM
▻https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-document-reveals-the-eviction-of-bedouin-was-planned-40-years-ago-
Forty years ago Uri Ariel, now agriculture minister, was already planning the eviction of Bedouin living east of Jerusalem. This emerges from a document signed by him titled, “A proposal to plan the Ma’aleh Adumim region and establish the community settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim B.”
The document outlines a plan to turn some 100,000 to 120,000 dunams (25,000 to 30,000 acres) of Palestinian land into an area of Jewish settlement and develop it as a “Jewish corridor,” as he put it, from the coast to the Jordan River. In fact, a large part of the plan has been executed, except for the eviction of all the area’s Bedouin.
Now the Civil Administration and the police are expediting the demolition of the homes of the Jahalin in Khan al-Ahmar. This is one of approximately 25 Bedouin communities in the area that have become a flagship of the Bedouin resistance in the West Bank’s Area C against the efforts by the Israeli occupation to uproot them, gather them in a few compounds adjacent to Area A, and impose a semi-urban lifestyle on them.
The boundaries of the area that Ariel sets for his plan are the Palestinian villages of Hizme, Anata, Al-Azariya and Abu Dis to the west, the hills overlooking the Jordan Valley to the east, Wadi Qelt to the north and the Kidron Valley and Horkania Valley to the south. “In the area there are many Bedouin involved in the cultivation of land,” he writes, contrary to the claims voiced today by settlers that the Bedouin only recently popped up and “took over” the land.
But Ariel has a solution: “Since the area is used by the military and a large part of the industry there serves the defense establishment, the area must be closed to Bedouin settlement and evacuated.”
This document, exposed here for the first time, was found by Dr. Yaron Ovadia in the Kfar Adumim archives when he was doing research for a book he’s writing about the Judean Desert. Ovadia wrote his doctorate about the Jahalin tribe.
“Since [the area] is unsettled, it is now possible to plan it entirely,” Ariel wrote, about an area that constituted the land reserves for construction, industry, agriculture and grazing for the Palestinian towns and villages east of Bethlehem, Jerusalem and Ramallah. “Arab urban/rural settlement is spreading at an amazing pace along the route from Jerusalem eastward, and this linear spread must be stopped immediately.”
His solutions: to build urban neighborhoods that will become part of Jerusalem and to “administratively close the area of the Arab villages by means of an appropriate plan.” This administrative closure by an appropriate plan can be discerned in the reality perpetuated by the Interim Agreement of 1995, which artificially divided the West Bank into Areas A and B, to be administered by the Palestinians, and Area C, which covers 60 percent of the West Bank, to be administered by Israel. That’s how Palestinian enclaves were created with limited development potential within a large Jewish expanse.
Ariel’s plan was apparently written between late 1978 and the beginning of 1979, and he said that as far as he recalls, it was submitted to Brig. Gen. Avraham Tamir, the IDF’s head of planning. “We have been living for three years in the existing settlement at Mishor Adumim,” writes Ariel, referring to a settlement nucleus that was established in 1975 and was portrayed as a work camp near the Mishor Adumim industrial zone. Even before Ma’aleh Adumim was officially inaugurated, Ariel was proposing to build “Ma’aleh Adumim B,” i.e., Kfar Adumim, which was established in September 1979.
Some Jahalin families were indeed evicted from their homes in 1977 and 1980. In 1994, expulsion orders were issued against dozens more, and they were evicted in the late 1990s, with the approval of the High Court of Justice. But thousands of Bedouin and their flocks remained in the area, albeit under increasingly difficult conditions as firing zones, settlements and roads reduced their grazing areas and their access to water. From the early 2000s the Civil Administration has been planning to evacuate the Bedouin and forcibly resettle them in permanent townships.
It’s tempting to present Ariel’s 40-year-old suggestions as an example of the personal and political determination that characterizes many religious Zionist activists and was facilitated by the Likud electoral victory in 1977. But it was Yitzhak Rabin’s first government that decided to build a 4,500-dunam industrial zone for Jerusalem in Khan al-Amar. In 1975 it expropriated a huge area of 30,000 dunams from the Palestinian towns and villages in the area and built a settlement there disguised as a work camp for employees of the industrial zone.
In a study (“The Hidden Agenda,” 2009) written by Nir Shalev for the nonprofit associations Bimkom – Planners for Planning Rights and B’tselem, he notes that the Housing and Construction Ministry’s Jerusalem district director when Ma’aleh Adumim was first being built in 1975 said that the objective behind it was political – “to block the entrance way to Jerusalem from a Jordanian threat.” But since the objective was political, it was clear that he wasn’t referring to a military threat, but to demographic growth that would require additional construction.
The planning for Ma’aleh Adumim actually began in Golda Meir’s time in the early 1970s; at the time, minister Israel Galili advised Davar reporter Hagai Eshed that it would be best if the press didn’t deal with this “exciting and interesting” issue, “because it could cause damage.” Both the Meir and Rabin governments considered the planned settlement to be part of metropolitan Jerusalem. Moreover, during Rabin’s second government, the period of the Oslo Accords, Bedouin were evicted, in the spirit of Ariel’s proposal.
Perhaps the most crucial move was actually made in 1971, when under that same government of Meir, Galili and Moshe Dayan, military order No. 418 was issued, which made drastic changes to the planning apparatus in the West Bank. The order removed the rights of Palestinian local councils to plan and build. As explained in another study by Bimkom (“The Prohibted Zone,” 2008) this prepared the legal infrastructure for the separate planning systems – the miserly, restrictive system for the Palestinians and the generous, encouraging one for the settlements. This distorted planning system refused to take into account the longtime Bedouin communities that had been expelled from the Negev and had been living in the area long before the settlements were built.
The settlement part of Ariel’s proposal succeeded because it was merely a link in a chain of plans and ideas had already been discussed when the Labor Alignment was still in power, and which were advanced by a bureaucratic infrastructure that had been in place even before 1948. Today, under a government in which Ariel’s Habayit Hayehudi party is so powerful, the open expulsion of Bedouin is possible. But the expulsion of Palestinians in general is hardly a Habayit Hayehudi invention.
]]> Le financier George Soros transfère 18 milliards à sa fondation
▻https://www.rtbf.be/info/monde/detail_le-financier-george-soros-transfere-18-milliards-a-sa-fondation?id=97393
Le légendaire financier américain George Soros, 87 ans, a transféré une grande partie de sa fortune à sa fondation, créée en 1984 pour promouvoir la démocratie, les droits de l’homme et la liberté de la presse.
. . . .
Open Society Foundations (OSF) a reçu 18 milliards de dollars de M. Soros, grand donateur du parti démocrate américain, a indiqué à l’AFP une porte-parole. « Cette somme reflète un processus en cours de transfert des actifs » de M. Soros, « qui prévoit de laisser la vaste majorité de sa fortune à Open Society Foundations », a-t-elle souligné. Cette donation fait d’Open Society Foundations la deuxième plus riche ONG aux Etats-Unis après la Fondation Bill et Melinda Gates, qui dispose de 40 milliards de dollars
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