WASHINGTON — The federal government spent up to $267 million of your money to study and counteract so-called “misinformation” since President Biden took office in January 2021 — as President-elect Donald Trump vows to bar official use of the term . The funds doled out to universities, nonprofits and private companies spiked from $2.2 million in 2020, the final full year of Trump’s first term, to a staggering $126 million in 2021 before tapering off — even as leading US public health officials were imposing mandates they later admitted had no scientific basis — the taxpayer-transparency group OpenTheBooks said in a report released Friday. The findings were released by the group, which was founded by Republican budget hawks, as Trump’s Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) looks for areas to trim wasteful spending, and after Trump himself pledged to ax the terms “misinformation” and “disinformation” from the federal lexicon. OpenTheBooks does not account for the cost of in-house efforts by the Biden White House and various executive branch agencies to fight purportedly incorrect speech, including by pressuring social media companies to censor content. Proponents of fighting alleged “misinformation” argue that it’s in the public’s interest to weed out incorrect claims — with Biden personally accusing social media companies of “killing people” by platforming posts critiquing the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021, as anti-“misinformation” spending surged. Opponents of speech-policing argue it both violates the First Amendment and prevents vigorous debate and competing narratives that allow for a more full understanding of issues of public concern. Critics also note that much of what is initially deemed “misinformation” later turns out to either gain broad evidentiary support or outright confirmation, such as the theory that COVID-19 leaked from a Chinese lab that was doing risky US-funded “gain of function” research. Another example is the fact that mandated masks, vaccination, social distancing and economic shutdowns were largely ineffective due to evolving COVID variants or significant side-effects and unintended social consequences. At the same time, the Biden administration was colluding with big tech platforms to police Americans’ free speech online — leaning on Facebook, Twitter and other sites to yank even light-hearted or satirical posts about the pandemic . Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg issued a belated mea culpa in August 2024, telling House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) in a letter that “senior Biden administration officials, including the White House, repeatedly pressured” his company to wrongly “censor” COVID content. Some government diktats, such as the requirement that people remain six feet apart, actually had no specific evidentiary justification, former federal infectious disease chief Dr. Anthony Fauci later admitted. More than two-thirds of the “misinformation” research grants flowed from the Department of Health and Human Service and focused primarily on COVID-19, but also touched on other areas such as climate change. Other big spenders included the National Science Foundation ($65 million), the State Department ($12 million), the Pentagon ($2.9 million) and the Justice Department ($1.7 million). Universities reaped COVID windfall The OpenTheBooks report includes links to federal grant award documents that includes the term “misinformation” and found that major universities raked in millions, particularly by focusing on COVID-19-related issues such as vaccine hesitancy. “Federal spending records show at least $127 million tax dollars funding anti-misinformation efforts directly related to COVID-19 for a variety of activities,” the report read, “from on-the-ground advocacy working to dispel vaccine misinformation, to scientific studies on how supposed “misinformation” is spread online.” The top identified recipient was the City University of New York, which received more than $3.6 million, including nearly $3.3 million from the Department of Health and Human Services for research beginning in September 2022 on how people with mental health disorders can be steeled against “misinformation” with “online attitudinal inoculation.” “Informed by inoculation theory, attitudinal inoculation leverages the power of narrative, values and emotion to strengthen resistance to misinformation and reduce hesitancy and is well-suited for low-information audiences and ideologically polarized or conspiratorial groups,” read’s CUNY’s description of the project, due to end in August 2025. “The proposed research project will leverage the infrastructure of ... a large and geographically diverse community-based US cohort, to tailor and test the effectiveness of a brief digital attitudinal inoculation intervention to increase vaccination among adults with anxiety or depression symptoms.” An additional $328,000 went to CUNY in August 2022 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study how alleged “misinformation,” including about climate change and COVID-19, spreads on social media. “Understanding how information flows and its impact on human behavior is important for determining how to protect society from the effects of misinformation, propaganda and fake news,” reads the description of the research, due to end in July 2025. “The research has two main goals: First, it will spot and predict opinion trends and identify users’ polarization on topics of broad interest to society (eg, climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic). Second, it will track information propagation to understand its role in shaping opinion trends and identify the factors that are important for its spread and adoption.” The NSF also handed over $5 million to George Washington University to focus on “misinformation” aimed “at members of expert communities” including “misinformation-driven harassment campaigns [that] have particularly large impacts on those at the forefront of efforts to accurately inform the public, including journalists, scientists, and public health officials.” AnotherNSF grant, of $14 million, went to the University of Michigan for an “American National Elections Study” that homed in on “the spread of misinformation, support for political violence, affective polarization, racial conflict, and threats to the legitimacy of our electoral institutions.” The University of Pennsylvania was awarded more than $2.3 million in September 2022 for “investigating and identifying the heterogeneity in COVID-19 misinformation exposure on social media among black and rural communities to inform precision public health messaging.” That research, running through 2027 seeks to “develop strategies to detect trusted and accurate ‘signals’ amidst dynamic misinformation ‘noise.'” The cash windfall for “misinfo” experts came as leading US public health officials were spreading false narratives of their own. Fauci, now retired, admitted to a House committee earlier this year that COVID-era restrictions like maintaining six feet of distance and masking young children lacked any scientific basis. “It sort of just appeared. I don’t recall,” Fauci said in a January transcribed interview with the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic about the social distancing mandate imposed on federal agencies, businesses and schools. “Just an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data or even data that could be accomplished.” “At the time, 4,000, 5,000 people a day were dying,” Fauci said in a June hearing before the same committee about masking mandates, before admitting: “There was no study that did masks on kids.” Librarian escape room, ‘slandering’ Trump One way the government fought “misinformation” was through funding an online “escape room” run by librarians, according to the federal records. The University of Washington was awarded a $249,691 grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services in September 2021 to “deploy a tested escape room prototype in 10 public libraries” and to “co-design camps around Black Lives Matter and fandom to demonstrate use of the design kit for creating interest-driven escape rooms.” “By building and deploying an online escape room hosted by librarians, the grant will improve libraries’ capabilities to address misinformation through innovative educational programming,” the description says. At least one of the grants focused specifically on how Trump — who controversially promoted use of the drug hydroxychloroquine during the pandemic and rarely wore a mask, while saying others were free to do so — allegedly fueled distrust “thus making [people] more vulnerable to misinformation generally.” George Washington University received a $199,516 NSF grant in May 2022 for a two-year project “to study how populist politicians distorted COVID-19 pandemic health communication to encourage polarized attitudes and distrust among citizens, thus making them more vulnerable to misinformation generally.” The proposal says “focus is on four countries — Brazil, Poland, Serbia and the US — all led by populist leaders during the pandemic.” OpentheBooks derided that expenditure as a “brazen instance” of spending being used for “slandering” Trump. Other major university recipients of funds included Wake Forest University, which received more than $2.8 million, and the University of Texas, which got nearly $2.2 million. Defense and tech industry also among recipients An array of companies also received federal grants for “misinformation” projects. The Department of Health and Human Services awarded $300,000 to Melax Technologies for “real-time surveillance of vaccine misinformation from social media platforms using ontology and natural language processing technologies.” HHS granted $299,964 to Gryphon Scientific for “systematic understanding and elimination of misinformation online.” And the Department of Homeland Security awarded $1,205,826 via the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to defense contractor Guidehouse from 2023 to 2024 for “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation analysis.” Guidehouse had previously produced a report that touched upon “the public’s perception of [FEMA’s role in the COVID-19 crisis.” The technology not-for-profit Meedan received an award for $5.7 million from the National Science Foundation in September 2021 for a three-year project titled, “Fact champ fact-checker, academic and community collaboration tools, combating hate, abuse and misinformation with minority-led partnerships.” Trump team looks to trim Trump announced shortly after his Nov. 5 election victory that Musk, the billionaire owner of X and chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, would lead an extra-governmental effort to identify cost savings — after the president-elect himself vowed to dismantle federal efforts to police alleged “misinformation” in his second term. It’s unclear how much of the pending grant money could be clawed back — and grants already were tapering downward after peaking in 2021, with just $18.4 million in new “misinformation”-related awards identified in 2024. In a policy video released shortly after launching his campaign in November 2022, Trump said, “The censorship cartel must be dismantled and destroyed — and it must happen immediately.” “Within hours of my inauguration, I will sign an executive order banning any federal department or agency from colluding with any organization, business, or person, to censor, limit, categorize, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens,” Trump said . “I will then ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as ‘mis-‘ or ‘dis-information’. And I will begin the process of identifying and firing every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship — directly or indirectly — whether they are the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the FBI, the DOJ, no matter who they are.”
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“The air traffic control tower, the departure lounge — just a few metres from where we were — and the runway were damaged,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said on the social media platform X. He added that he and UN colleagues were safe. “We will need to wait for the damage to the airport to be repaired before we can leave,” he said. UN spokesperson Stephanie Tremblay later said the injured person was with the UN Humanitarian Air Service. Our mission to negotiate the release of @UN staff detainees and to assess the health and humanitarian situation in #Yemen concluded today. We continue to call for the detainees' immediate release. As we were about to board our flight from Sana’a, about two hours ago, the airport... pic.twitter.com/riZayWHkvf — Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (@DrTedros) December 26, 2024 Israel’s army later told The Associated Press it was not aware that the WHO chief was at the location in Yemen. The Israeli strikes followed several days of Houthi launches setting off sirens in Israel. The Israeli military in a statement said it attacked infrastructure used by the Iran-backed Houthis at the international airport in Sanaa and ports in Hodeida, Al-Salif and Ras Qantib, along with power stations, asserting they were used to smuggle in Iranian weapons and for the entry of senior Iranian officials. Israel’s military added it had “capabilities to strike very far from Israel’s territory — precisely, powerfully, and repetitively”. The strikes, carried out over 1,000 miles from Jerusalem, came a day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said “the Houthis, too, will learn what Hamas and Hezbollah and Assad’s regime and others learned” as his military has battled those more powerful proxies of Iran. The Houthi-controlled satellite channel al-Masirah reported multiple deaths and showed broken windows, collapsed ceilings and a bloodstained floor and vehicle. Iran’s foreign ministry condemned the strikes. The US military has also targeted the Houthis in recent days. The UN has said the targeted ports are important entry points for humanitarian aid for Yemen, the poorest Arab nation that plunged into a civil war in 2014. Over the weekend, 16 people were wounded when a Houthi missile hit a playground in the Israeli city of Tel Aviv, while other missiles and drones have been shot down. Last week, Israeli jets struck Sanaa and Hodeida, killing nine people, calling it a response to previous Houthi attacks. The Houthis also have been targeting shipping on the Red Sea corridor in what it says is an act of solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. The UN Security Council has an emergency meeting on Monday in response to an Israeli request that it condemn the Houthi attacks and Iran for supplying them with weapons.
Shares of Vanguard S&P Mid-Cap 400 ETF ( NYSEARCA:IVOO – Get Free Report ) saw unusually-high trading volume on Thursday . Approximately 29,547 shares traded hands during trading, a decline of 51% from the previous session’s volume of 59,876 shares.The stock last traded at $106.53 and had previously closed at $106.74. Vanguard S&P Mid-Cap 400 ETF Price Performance The firm has a 50-day moving average of $109.56 and a 200 day moving average of $104.80. The company has a market capitalization of $2.08 billion, a PE ratio of 7.55 and a beta of 1.11. Institutional Trading of Vanguard S&P Mid-Cap 400 ETF Large investors have recently made changes to their positions in the stock. International Assets Investment Management LLC boosted its holdings in Vanguard S&P Mid-Cap 400 ETF by 147,691.7% in the third quarter. International Assets Investment Management LLC now owns 768,517 shares of the company’s stock worth $81,178,000 after purchasing an additional 767,997 shares during the last quarter. Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management Co. boosted its stake in shares of Vanguard S&P Mid-Cap 400 ETF by 4.4% in the 2nd quarter. Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management Co. now owns 368,093 shares of the company’s stock worth $36,481,000 after buying an additional 15,439 shares during the last quarter. LPL Financial LLC grew its holdings in shares of Vanguard S&P Mid-Cap 400 ETF by 0.4% in the second quarter. LPL Financial LLC now owns 313,602 shares of the company’s stock worth $31,081,000 after acquiring an additional 1,290 shares during the period. Envestnet Asset Management Inc. increased its position in Vanguard S&P Mid-Cap 400 ETF by 2.1% during the second quarter. Envestnet Asset Management Inc. now owns 259,203 shares of the company’s stock valued at $25,690,000 after acquiring an additional 5,273 shares during the last quarter. Finally, Raymond James & Associates lifted its holdings in Vanguard S&P Mid-Cap 400 ETF by 7.5% in the third quarter. Raymond James & Associates now owns 192,080 shares of the company’s stock valued at $20,289,000 after acquiring an additional 13,456 shares during the period. About Vanguard S&P Mid-Cap 400 ETF The Vanguard S&P Mid-Cap 400 ETF (IVOO) is an exchange-traded fund that is based on the S&P Mid Cap 400 index. The fund tracks a market cap-weighted index of mid-cap US companies. IVOO was launched on Sep 9, 2010 and is managed by Vanguard. Featured Stories Receive News & Ratings for Vanguard S&P Mid-Cap 400 ETF Daily - Enter your email address below to receive a concise daily summary of the latest news and analysts' ratings for Vanguard S&P Mid-Cap 400 ETF and related companies with MarketBeat.com's FREE daily email newsletter .
DOZENS of channels have disappeared from boxes in the last 12 months - and an expert warns more are likely to follow. UK broadcasting giants including Sky and Virgin have oversaw huge shifts in 2024 with the continued growth of streaming. Big closures this year include the end of several music channels, with The Box, 4 Music, Kiss, Kerrang and Magic disappearing in June. The Box had been on air for 32 years. At the start of the year, entertainment channel E! went off air in the UK . Numerous shopping and international channels have also gone. And a big chunk of old SD (standard definition) channels closed on satellite too to make way for HD (high definition) only, including BBC, ITV and Channel 4. As a result, Sky and Virgin Media have embraced so-called FAST - free ad-support TV - that are beamed into homes via the internet. There have been a huge expansion in FAST channels this year as a free alternative to Netflix, Prime and other streaming giants. Even the traditional big players in broadcasting are taking a more streaming first approach, with ITV making Corrie and Emmerdale available on ITVX first every morning ahead of their evening slot on ITV1. Meanwhile, Freeview is preparing for an internet-based TV future, launching Freely earlier this year which can work without an aerial. An industry expert told The Sun that more channel closures are likely in 2025 and beyond as the trend continues. "This is inevitable, more broadcasters will cull broadcast/linear TV channels as viewers are flocking to streaming services," Paolo Pescatore from PP Foresight said. "The big TV switch off is around the corner, with all programming set to be delivered via the internet. "Viewers are now spoilt for choice with how and where they watch the TV shows they love across a range of connected devices. "To respond, broadcasters need to be prepared and work more closely with telecom providers to ensure a seamless experience for users." Analysis by Jamie Harris, Assistant Technology and Science Editor at The Sun CBBC and BBC Four are big names at risk for 2025. The BBC announced in 2022 that the pair would disappear as traditional linear channels in a few years and go digital only via iPlayer. When Channel 4 announced the closure of The Box and other music channels it owned in January, the broadcaster hinted that more could come. At the time the company said it was proposing to "close small linear channels that no longer deliver revenues or public value at scale, including the Box channels in 2024 and others at the right time". So which could the "others" be? It really depends what Channel 4 considers "small" but its other channels include More4, E4, E4 Extra, Film4 and 4Seven.India News | Sukhbir Badal Recalls Close Personal Relation His Father and Manmohan Singh Shared
Iranian President To Visit Moscow For Talks In January
Lautaro Martinez ended a near two-month goal drought as Inter Milan closed to within one point of Serie A leaders Atalanta by sweeping aside Cagliari 3-0. Martinez had gone eight matches since last finding the back of the net against Venezia on November 3 but after Alessandro Bastoni opened the scoring in the 54th minute, the Argentina international struck in Sardinia. The Inter captain took his tally against Cagliari to 10 goals in as many games after 71 minutes before Hakan Calhanoglu capped an excellent night for the visitors from the penalty spot a few moments later. Inter’s fifth-successive league victory led to them temporarily leapfrogging Atalanta, who reclaimed top spot but saw their lead cut to a single point following a 1-1 draw at Lazio. Gian Piero Gasperini’s side were grateful for a point in the end after falling behind to Fisayo Dele-Bashiru’s first-half strike, only drawing level with two minutes remaining thanks to Marco Brescianini. Lautaro Valenti’s last-gasp strike condemned rock-bottom Monza to a 10th defeat in 18 matches as Parma edged a 2-1 victory, while Genoa defeated Empoli by the same scoreline.Our community members are treated to special offers, promotions and adverts from us and our partners. You can check out at any time. More info Relieved Michael van Gerwen reckons he had to survive some CRAP to make it past Brendan Dolan and reach the next round of the World Darts Championship . The Dutch star played in patches against the Northern Irishman before sealing a 4-2 win. At times, it was vintage Van Gerwen and the clinical edge of a three-time champion. On other occasions, it was not sparkling and shabby as he offered up some opportunities to Dolan. Van Gerwen knows he needs to step it up and explained: “It was tough, it was really hard, it was a really difficult game. Everyone could see Brendan never gives up and I knew that. I had to try and punish him at the right moments and I wasn’t capable. I can only blame myself for that. I was so glad that the last double went in. “After 1-1, I thought I played two good sets, but then I let him slip away with a few things. The fifth set was absolute crap and you are not allowed to do that because he is a fighter and never gives up. You don’t want to put yourself in trouble and I nearly did. “You have to keep performing and believe. There is still a lot of work to do, but I know I am capable of doing it. I’m through. There’s no easy games. “Joe Cullen said to me in the practice room the other day: Mike, you have a good draw. I said: I have Brendan, he beat Gary Anderson and Gerwyn Price last year. Everyone knows I have had a hard year and I have to battle from a big distance far behind. But I’m capable of it.”