Facebook on Thursday took down Trump campaign ads against antifa that prominently featured a symbol used by Nazis to designate political prisoners, a spokesperson for the company confirmed to The Hill. From the report: "We removed these posts and ads for violating our policy against organized hate," Facebook said in a statement. "Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group's symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol." The ads featured an inverted red triangle, which was used by Nazis to identify political opponents including communists, social democrats and liberals at concentration camps.

The symbol was included in 88 ads run by pages for President Trump, Vice President Pence and "Team Trump" alongside text warning readers of "Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups" and asking them to sign a petition against antifa, a loose group of radical activists that use direct action to fight against fascism. Just the ads on Trump's page were seen as many 950,000 times before being taken down. The Trump campaign is defending using the image, calling it a "common Antifa symbol" in a statement to The Hill. The campaign directed The Hill toward shirts, stickers and posters on websites were users can upload whatever design they would like to. The most common symbol used to identify antifa is a black and red flag or three arrows inside a circle.

Republican Federal Communications Commissioner Mike O'Rielly said he's unsure whether his agency has the authority to carry out President Trump's executive order targeting tech firms' legal protections. From a report: Trump's order seeks to have the FCC craft regulations limiting the scope of legal immunity that online platforms have under federal law. All three commission Republicans would need to support such regulations for them to pass, as the FCC's two Democrats are certain to oppose them. In an interview Wednesday for C-SPAN's "The Communicators," O'Rielly told Axios he sympathizes with the president's claims that conservatives have been unfairly stifled online, but "what we do about that is a different story. I have deep reservations they provided any intentional authority for this matter, but I want to listen to people," O'Rielly said, later adding, "I do not believe it is the right of the agency to read into the statute authority that is not there."

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission voted on Tuesday to adopt auction procedures to provide up to $16 billion to areas that lack broadband service, including nearly 6 million unserved rural homes and businesses. From a report: The FCC voted to commence the auction on Oct. 29. Auction applicants will be required to offer voice and broadband services in unserved locations in exchange for receiving monthly payments over 10 years. The three FCC Republican commissioners approved the proposal, while the two Democrats dissented in part. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, a Republican, said Americans without access to high-speed internet "deserve access as soon as possible. They cannot afford to wait ... while we work to develop new, more granular broadband coverage maps" that will be used to award a subsequent $4 billion.

IBM CEO Arvind Krishna called on Congress Monday to enact reforms to advance racial justice and combat systemic racism while announcing the company was getting out of the facial recognition business. CNBC reports: "IBM firmly opposes and will not condone uses of any technology, including facial recognition technology offered by other vendors, for mass surveillance, racial profiling, violations of basic human rights and freedoms, or any purpose which is not consistent with our values and Principles of Trust and Transparency," Krishna wrote in the letter delivered to members of Congress late Monday. "We believe now is the time to begin a national dialogue on whether and how facial recognition technology should be employed by domestic law enforcement agencies."

IBM decided to shut down its facial recognition products and announce its decision as the death of George Floyd brought the topic of police reform and racial inequity into the forefront of the national conversation, a person familiar with the situation told CNBC. IBM's facial recognition business did not generate significant revenue for the company, the person familiar with the situation said, but the decision remains notable for a technology giant that counts the U.S. government as a major customer. The decision was both a business and an ethical one, the person familiar with the situation said. The company heard in the past few weeks concerns from many constituencies, including employees, about its use of the technology, the person added.

"Artificial Intelligence is a powerful tool that can help law enforcement keep citizens safe. But vendors and users of Al systems have a shared responsibility to ensure that Al is tested for bias, particularly when used in law enforcement, and that such bias testing is audited and reported," Krishna wrote. The letter was addressed to sponsors and co-sponsors of a sweeping police reform bill unveiled by Democrats Monday -- Black Caucus Chair Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA), House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), Sen. Corey Booker (D-NJ), Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY).

Following the rioting and looting from the death of George Floyd, Apple has a message for those who power on a stolen iPhone: "This device has been disabled and is being tracked. Local authorities will be alerted." Forbes reports: Apple CEO Tim Cook sent a message to his employees as those protests escalated, saying that "there is a pain deeply etched in the soul of our nation and in the hearts of millions. To stand together, we must stand up for one another, and recognize the fear, hurt, and outrage rightly provoked by the senseless killing of George Floyd and a much longer history of racism." Cook went on to say that "at Apple, our mission has and always will be to create technology that empowers people to change the world for the better. We've always drawn strength from our diversity, welcomed people from every walk of life to our stores around the world, and strived to build an Apple that is inclusive of everyone."

These words were being digested as the tech giant made the decision to close the majority of its U.S. stores for the safety of those staff and its customers, stores that had only just reopened after the COVID-19 shutdown. Apple has unsurprisingly become a favored target of looters, given the likely spoils on offer, and the decision was taken to remove stock from shop floors and shutter locations. It has long been known that Apple operates some form of proximity software that disables a device when it is taken illegally from a store. Until now, though, little had been seen of that technology in action. Well, thanks to social media, we can now see the message that greets a looter powering up their new device: "This device has been disabled and is being tracked," it says. "Local authorities will be alerted."

An anonymous reader quotes the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: It was a stunning accusation: Two days before the 2018 election for Georgia governor, Republican Brian Kemp used his power as secretary of state to open an investigation into what he called a "failed hacking attempt" of voter registration systems involving the Democratic Party. But newly released case files from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation reveal that there was no such hacking attempt.

The evidence from the closed investigation indicates that Kemp's office mistook planned security tests and a warning about potential election security holes for malicious hacking.

Kemp then wrongly accused his political opponents just before Election Day — a high-profile salvo that drew national media attention in one of the most closely watched races of 2018... The internet activity that Kemp's staff described as hacking attempts were actually scans by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that the secretary of state's office had agreed to, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Kemp's chief information officer signed off on the DHS scans three months beforehand.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution also reports that the Democratic party's only role was apparently forwarding an email about vulnerabilities to two cybersecurity professors at Georgia Tech, who then alerted authorities: Richard Wright, a Georgia Tech graduate and Democratic voter who works for a software company...found that he could look up other voters' information by modifying the web address on the site, a flaw confirmed by ProPublica and Georgia Public Broadcasting before it was fixed....An election security vendor for the state, Fortalice Solutions, later concluded, however, that there was no evidence that voter information had been accessed, manipulated or changed by bad actors...

While publicly denying Wright's claims about vulnerabilities, behind the scenes, Kemp's staff was working to correct them.... The secretary of state's firewall hadn't been set up to block access to the locations identified by Wright, according to a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent's report. Election officials then "set up safeguards to restrict access to the vulnerable areas" on the last two days before the 2018 general election... This type of weakness, called broken access control, is one of the 10 most critical web application security risks, according to the Open Web Application Security Project, an organization that works to improve software security.
In 2016 Kemp also accused the Department of Homeland Security of trying to breach his office's firewall.

But a later investigation revealed the activity Kemp cited "was the result of normal and automatic computer message exchanges," apparently caused by someone cutting and pasting data into a Microsoft Excel document.

Newly-elected politicians in Munich "have decided its administration needs to use open-source software, instead of proprietary products like Microsoft Office," reports ZDNet: "Where it is technologically and financially possible, the city will put emphasis on open standards and free open-source licensed software," a new coalition agreement negotiated between the recently elected Green party and the Social Democrats says. The agreement was finalized May 10 and the parties will be in power until 2026. "We will adhere to the principle of 'public money, public code'. That means that as long as there is no confidential or personal data involved, the source code of the city's software will also be made public," the agreement states...

Munich began the move away from proprietary software at the end of 2006... By 2013, 80% of desktops in the city's administration were meant to be running LiMux software. In reality, the council continued to run the two systems — Microsoft and LiMux — side by side for several years to deal with compatibility issues. As the result of a change in the city's government, a controversial decision was made in 2017 to leave LiMux and move back to Microsoft by 2020. At the time, critics of the decision blamed the mayor and deputy mayor and cast a suspicious eye on the US software giant's decision to move its headquarters to Munich. In interviews, a former Munich mayor, under whose administration the LiMux program began, has been candid about the efforts Microsoft went to to retain their contract with the city.

The migration back to Microsoft and to other proprietary software makers like Oracle and SAP, costing an estimated €86.1m ($93.1m), is still in progress today.

"We're very happy that they're taking on the points in the 'Public Money, Public Code' campaign we started two and a half years ago," Alex Sander, EU public policy manager at the Berlin-based Free Software Foundation Europe, tells ZDNet. But it's also important to note that this is just a statement in a coalition agreement outlining future plans, he says. "Nothing will change from one day to the next, and we wouldn't expect it to," Sander continued, noting that the city would also be waiting for ongoing software contracts to expire. "But the next time there is a new contract, we believe it should involve free software."

A bipartisan group of senators are sounding the antitrust enforcement alarm Friday over Facebook's newly announced acquisition of Giphy, a GIF-making and sharing website. The Verge reports: On Friday, Facebook announced that it would acquire Giphy for the reported price of $400 million. Giphy is one of the largest GIF sites on the internet and social media and messaging services like Twitter, Tinder, Slack and iMessage already have Giphy integrated into their apps. In a Friday blog post, Facebook said that half of Giphy's traffic comes from Facebook apps and that the gif website would be rolled into Instagram, a Facebook-owned product. In that same post, Facebook suggested that Giphy's core function as a GIF-sharing app across social media would not change and that developers would "continue to have the same access" to its services.

Still, that pledge hasn't quieted the growing chorus of congresspeople concerned over potential anti-competitive behavior from Facebook. In statements Friday, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Democrats Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) were skeptical of the deal. "Facebook keeps looking for even more ways to take our data," Hawley said in a statement to The Verge. "Just like Google purchased DoubleClick because of its widespread presence on the internet and ability to collect data, Facebook wants Giphy so it can collect even more data on us. Facebook shouldn't be acquiring any companies while it is under antitrust investigation for its past purchases." Democrats are planning to introduce a bill called the "Pandemic Anti-Monopoly Act" that would impose a moratorium on large mergers until the FTC "determines that small businesses, workers, and consumers" were "no longer under severe financial distress."

Economist Tyler Cowen and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov (now the chairman of the nonprofit Renew Democracy Initiative) co-authored an opinion piece this week in Bloomberg arguing that "a pandemic is providing a tragic preview of some of the conditions UBI was conceived to address."

Though they worry about the cost of such a program, "And, though there are some important qualifications, Covid-19 is making UBI look better..." Job creation during the pandemic is as slow as many UBI advocates feared. Even in health care, where one might expect employment to be rising dramatically in the midst of a pandemic, it is sluggish... In response to an unemployment level unseen since the Great Depression, the federal government has instituted cash transfers, which in some cases result in unemployment payments that are higher than wages. This is a radical experiment. It is being called stimulus, inaccurately, when it is a humanitarian program designed to tide people over during economic duress — and it draws explicitly upon UBI-like ideas.

In contrast, many European countries have been guaranteeing wages in the hopes of "freezing" the economy and then "defrosting" it when it is safe to return to work. Yet some recent U.S. estimates suggest there will be 3 new hires for every 10 layoffs caused by the pandemic, and furthermore 42% of the new layoffs will be permanent. (In post-pandemic America, there will be less need for waiters.) That suggests the American UBI-like strategy is likely to outperform the European approach, because the world is changing rapidly and labor will need to be reallocated accordingly...

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as well as Senator Mitt Romney have argued that UBI is an appropriate response to a pandemic, though Ocasio-Cortez favors making it permanent.... Covid-19 is illustrating that some aspects of a UBI may be more necessary and more workable than previously thought.
The New York Times also reported today that "three dozen influential figures at labor unions, think tanks and other progressive institutions have convened a weekly virtual meeting — known as the Friday Morning Group... one of several brainstorming-and-planning initiatives underway in Washington" to consider responses to new economic challenges, "including mainstream proposals like major new spending on public health and child care and less widely supported options like creating a universal basic income or offering a federal jobs guarantee."

Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, which represents more than a million health care workers, said she had briefed Democratic lawmakers in both the House and Senate about her organization's view that it was time to "change the rules of the economy for the long term," including a powerful expansion of the rights and employment benefits of lower-income workers.
And former Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris "has endorsed a plan called the Monthly Economic Crisis Support Act," writes an editor at the conservative and libertarian think tank the Heartland Institute, "which would send $2,000 per month to Americans who make less than $120,000 per year. Married couples would receive $4,000 per month, as well as $2,000 for each child... the checks would be sent for up to three months after the coronavirus crisis ends."

But that editor calls it "a preposterous plan," adding "is it such a logical leap to assume that some on the left are using the coronavirus crisis as an opportunity to introduce another 'temporary' welfare program...?"

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A proposed U.S. law would make it illegal for telecom providers to terminate Internet or phone service during the COVID-19 pandemic. The bill was submitted in the Senate today by Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). "Now -- as millions of Americans hunker down, work from home, and engage in remote learning -- would be the absolute worst time for Americans to lose a critical utility like Internet service," Merkley said in an announcement.

Separately, House Democratic leadership today unveiled a $3 trillion relief package that includes at least $4 billion for an "emergency broadband connectivity fund." That money, if approved, would be given to ISPs that provide discounts to low-income households and people who lose their jobs. Subsidies would be up to $50 a month for most low-income households and up to $75 for households in tribal areas. Another $1.5 billion would be allotted to Wi-Fi hotspots and other telecom equipment for schools and libraries. The relief package also includes a provision that "prohibits telephone and broadband service providers from stopping service to consumers unable to pay during the duration of the emergency," according to House Democrats.

DevNull127 shares a report from CBS News: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Monday that Congress might want to consider a guaranteed minimum income for Americans as part of the economic recovery from the coronavirus crisis. Her comments are the latest sign that Democratic lawmakers are seriously considering an idea that gained traction during the party's primary, thanks to the candidacy of Andrew Yang. Yang, an entrepreneur and philanthropist, promoted a universal basic income of $1,000 a month for every American during his presidential campaign. He ended his campaign in February, more than a month before the coronavirus crisis sent unemployment soaring. After President Trump signed the bill allowing direct payment to Americans, Yang said in a statement, "I'm pleased to see the White House adopt our vision of putting money directly into the hands of hard-working Americans. It's unfortunate to see this development take place under the current circumstances, but this is exactly what universal basic income is designed to do -- offer a way to ensure that Americans can make ends meet when they need it most." "We may have to think in terms of some different ways to put money in people's pockets," Pelosi said in an interview with MSNBC. "Let's see what works, what is operational, and what needs other attention. Others have suggested a minimum income, a guaranteed income for people. Is that worthy of attention now? Perhaps so."

In a letter to House Democrats earlier this month, Pelosi said she wanted "additional direct payments" to families in future bills. However, she did not provide any specifics on a plan or the amount of money Americans would receive.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) is calling on federal prosecutors to open a criminal antitrust investigation into Amazon, as laid out in a letter [PDF] released on Tuesday. From a report: In his letter to Attorney General William Barr, Hawley presses the Justice Department to open an investigation into Amazon's data tactics that were detailed in a report from The Wall Street Journal last week. In this report, the Journal outlined several instances in which Amazon employees peered into the sales data from independent sellers in order to develop its own competing, private label products.

"These practices are alarming for America's small businesses even under ordinary circumstances," Hawley wrote. "But at a time when most small retail businesses must rely on Amazon because of coronavirus-related shutdowns, predatory data practices threaten these businesses' very existence." After the Journal's report last week, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee wrote statements seeking clarification on whether a top Amazon official had "lied" to Congress about its data practices in a previous hearing. Last July, Nate Sutton, Amazon's associate general counsel, said that the company does not use third-party data to create its own products.

This week U.S. president Donald Trump suspended America's $900 million annual contribution to the World Health Organization. Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, called Trump's move a "crime against humanity...."

The Hill reports: "Every scientist, every health worker, every citizen must resist and rebel against this appalling betrayal of global solidarity," he added...

The American Medical Association (AMA) late Tuesday called Trump's decision a "dangerous step in the wrong direction" and urged him to reconsider. "Fighting a global pandemic requires international cooperation and reliance on science and data. Cutting funding to the WHO — rather than focusing on solutions — is a dangerous move at a precarious moment for the world," the AMA said in a statement. European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, meanwhile, said Wednesday that there was "no reason justifying" Trump's move...

And Bill Gates said in a tweet that halting funding to the WHO amid a world health crisis "is as dangerous as it sounds."

"Their work is slowing the spread of COVID-19 and if that work is stopped no other organization can replace them," the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist added. "The world needs @WHO now more than ever."
Agreeing with Bill Gates was 95-year-old former U.S. president Jimmy Carter. Newsweek quotes Carter's newly-released statement calling the WHO "the only international organization capable of leading the effort to control this virus."

The head of the United Nations also called the WHO "absolutely critical to the world's efforts to win the war against COVID-19."

While criticizing the WHO, this week an article in the Atlantic called president Trump's moves "a transparent effort to distract from his administration's failure to prepare for the COVID-19 pandemic." The Democrats speaker of the House added that Trump's decision "is dangerous, illegal and will be swiftly challenged."

But the science magazine Nature still published an editorial harshly criticizing Trump's attempt to defund the WHO. "[E]ven talk of doing so in the middle of a global health and economic crisis cannot be condemned strongly enough." They argue that withholding America's funds "will place more lives at risk and ensure that the world takes longer to emerge from this crisis... It is right that researchers, funders and governments have been protesting against Trump's decision, and they must continue to do so in the strongest terms."

And Newsweek also published the comments of the WHO's Director-General, who had this message for its critics. "[O]ur focus, my focus, is on stopping this virus and saving lives... This is a time for all of us to be united in our common struggle against a common threat, a dangerous enemy.

"When we're divided, the virus exploits the cracks between us."

Sen. Bernie Sanders ended his presidential campaign on Wednesday, clearing Joe Biden's path to the Democratic nomination and a showdown with President Donald Trump in November. From a report: Sanders first made the announcement in a call with his staff, his campaign said. "I wish I could give you better news, but I think you know the truth, and that is that we are now some 300 delegates behind Vice President Biden, and the path toward victory is virtually impossible," Sanders said in a livestream after the call. "So while we are winning the ideological battle and while we are winning the support of so many young people and working people throughout the country, I have concluded that this battle for the Democratic nomination will not be successful. And so today I am announcing the suspension of my campaign."

Sanders' exit caps a stunning reversal of fortune following a strong performance in the first three states that voted in February. The nomination appeared his for the taking until, on the last day of February, Biden surged to a blowout victory in South Carolina that set off a consolidation of moderate voters around the former vice president. The contest ends now as the country continues to grapple with the coronavirus pandemic, which halted in-person campaigning for both Sanders and Biden and has led many states to delay their primary elections."

In the era of big data, memes and disinformation, the Democrats are trying to regain their digital edge as the president and his loyalists dictate the terms of debate. From a report: The deceptively edited video that purported to show Joseph R. Biden Jr. endorsing President Trump's re-election bounced relentlessly around the internet, falsely painting the former vice president as too confused to know what office he was running for or whom he was vying to run against. The doctored video didn't originate with one of the extremist sites that trade in left-bashing disinformation. It was posted on Twitter by Mr. Trump's own social media director. [...] The video, based on a speech Mr. Biden gave earlier this month, registered five million views in a day before his campaign responded -- with statements to the press and cable interviews that largely focused on persuading Facebook to follow the example of Twitter, which had labeled the content "manipulated media." A direct social media counterattack, aides said later, would have risked spreading the damage. [...] As Mr. Biden closes in on his party's nomination, that digital mismatch underscores one of the Democrats' biggest general-election challenges: They are up against a political figure who has marshaled all the forces of the modern web to refract reality and savage his opponents. Yet they are starting from a deficit, struggling to regain their once-formidable online edge.

Now closing this technological divide has taken on deepening urgency, with public life shut down against the threat of the coronavirus. Already, Mr. Biden's allies have expressed anxiety about his ability to break into the national conversation around the pandemic as it reverberates from the president's daily briefings to social media feeds. If modern politics is increasingly digital politics, today even more so. In the three years since Hillary Clinton's humiliating 2016 defeat, the Democrats have been urgently scrambling to reorder the digital equation, an all-hands-on-deck effort that has drawn a range of new donors, progressive activists and operatives together with veterans of the tech-forward Obama campaigns and the old-line contributors and party regulars of the Bill Clinton era. So far, the Democrats and their allies have produced new apps to organize volunteers and register voters, new media outlets to pump out anti-Trump content and a major new data initiative to drive what the party hopes will be the biggest voter-mobilization effort in its history.

gavron writes: While most politicians are pro copyright maximalism and patent exclusivity, Elizabeth Warren's campaign just open-sourced a bunch of software and are proud of having used open source to save money, and build upon the shoulders of other giants. Way to go! "Our tech team worked hard to make getting involved with @ewarren's campaign as easy as possible," reads a tweet from @TeamWarren. "We leaned heavily on open source technology, and we want to contribute back. So we're open-sourcing some of our most important projects for anyone to use." The Warren for President Tech Team is open-sourcing the following projects:

-Spoke: Spoke is a peer-to-peer texting platform originally developed by MoveOn, with several forks under active development.
-Pollaris, our polling location lookup tool: While the DNC provides a polling locator interface with IWillVote.org, we wanted a polling place locator that integrated with our website and tools, so we built our own interface and API, using polling location data provided by the DNC and state democratic parties.
-Caucus App: Going into the Iowa caucuses, we wanted to give our supporters and precinct captains a way to quickly calculate delegates and report results from each precinct.
-Switchboard (FE and BE): [W]e built a piece of software that took new potential volunteers, or "hot leads," from our online channels and assigned them to state-based volunteer leads for personal follow up calls offering ways to get involved with the campaign. As it turned out, this also ended up being a great tool for event recruitment.
-Automated organizing email: Our Mobilization and Tech teams worked together to scale email outreach to the widest possible audience and free our incredible organizers from tedious manual tasks.
-Redhook: Campaigns run on data, and redhook is a tool that makes data happen. As a system, Redhook ingests web hook data and delivers it to Redshift/Civis in near real time.
-I90: This tool was not deployed during the campaign, but there was a need to make short links out of long complicated links moving forward. I90 does that.

You can read more about the projects and the team's efforts via this Medium post.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Virginia has become the first among the Southern US states to take on a goal for 100 percent carbon-free electricity. State governor Ralph Northam, an Army veteran and pediatric neurologist, issued Executive Order 43. The executive order detailed the state's plans to reach a zero CO2 energy goal by 2050. In September 2019, Northam also brought Virginia into the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), which is a carbon trading network that spans nine states. Before then, Northam's efforts to take these initiatives and to join the RGGI were thwarted. However, following the 2019 election, voters in the state changed the political climate in the state. This opened the opportunity to move forward with renewable energy-based efforts. Earlier this month, the state General Assembly passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA), which brought Northam's previously failed efforts into law. The House voted in favor 51 to 45 and the Senate voted 22 to 17.

Among the VCEA goals are to gradually reduce the use of fossil fuels until they are no longer a part of the state's electricity production. Instead, it will use 100 percent clean energy to power the state. In order to achieve this goal, Virginia has a four-part plan:

1. Join the RGGI and develop a cap-and-trade system. The states that are already using similar strategies and that are a part of the RGGI have experienced healthy economic effects overall. Moreover, the hope is that the addition of Virginia to a heavily supplied market will only boost competition. This is meant to drive the clean energy transition forward even faster.
2. Achieve 100 percent clean energy by 2050.
3. Keep power costs low and protect vulnerable and low-income communities.
4. Build rooftop solar, offshore wind, and power storage.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Nearly a month after ending his long shot Democratic presidential campaign, Andrew Yang launched on Thursday a nonprofit group focused on making the central ideas of his campaign a reality. The group, called Humanity Forward, will "endorse and provide resources to political candidates who embrace Universal Basic Income, human-centered capitalism and other aligned policies at every level," according to its website. The new group also plans to increase voter turnout in the 2020 election, with a particular focus on young Americans, Asian-Americans, independents and "individuals who have not been engaged in the political process," according to a release. Additionally, Yang, who is now a CNN political commentator, will launch a podcast in which he will "discuss new ideas to solve the greatest challenges of our time with" notable guests and "regular Americans" alike. Yang has also "committed to personally give $1,000 a month for an entire year to one donor to the new organization."

The Silicon Valley venture capitalist Keith Rabois, onstage in January at a tech conference, said his first choice for president was a Democrat, Pete Buttigieg. And, sure, it would be a close call for Joseph R. Biden Jr. over President Trump. But Bernie Sanders? The New York Times: At that, Mr. Rabois, who has been a top executive at or invested in LinkedIn, Square, Yelp and PayPal, balked. Speaking to the crowd, he drew the line at democratic socialism. (Mr. Buttigieg ended his campaign on Sunday night.) "I would certainly vote for Trump over Sanders," Mr. Rabois declared. When it comes to the 2020 Democratic primaries, with California poised to allocate hundreds of delegates this week on Super Tuesday, many tech leaders in Silicon Valley have a plea: Anyone but Sanders.

From venture capitalists to chief executives, the tech elite are favoring moderates like Mr. Buttigieg and Michael R. Bloomberg. And with Mr. Sanders, the independent senator from Vermont, leading the field in California and looking like the front-runner for the nomination, the tone among the leadership is growing more urgent. Few tech executives want to end up stuck choosing between Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump. Meanwhile, tech company workers are gathering en masse for Mr. Sanders. While Silicon Valley has long leaned blue, the chasm between centrist Democrats and an animated left wing has created uncertainty. And now two other things are happening. California Republicans see an opportunity. And a new moderate party in the state -- the Common Sense Party -- is rising.

The fight to contain the coronavirus entered an alarming new phase on Thursday as caseloads soared in Europe and the Middle East, and health officials in the United States and Germany dealt with patients with no known connection to others with the infection. From a report: The German and American cases raised the possibility that the virus could have begun to spread locally, or that infected people had spread it to others sequentially, making it virtually impossible to trace and isolate the origins. Either way, the cases, thousands of miles apart, underscored how quickly the virus was making its way around the globe after emerging in China. Japan's government closed all schools through March in an effort to combat the outbreak. Iran canceled Friday Prayers in major cities, a cornerstone ritual of the Islamic Republic. Saudi Arabia barred pilgrims from visiting Mecca and Medina.

President Trump announced that Vice President Mike Pence would lead the American effort to combat the virus, but the administration continued to send mixed messages. Public health officials warned of potentially "major disruptions," while Mr. Trump blamed Democrats and cable news channels for overstating the threat. Financial markets continued their weeklong declines. In the Middle East, concerns built about the growing severity of the outbreak in Iran, the source of infections in many other countries. The government said on Thursday that 245 people had been infected and 26 had died, but experts say there are probably many more cases. Several countries registered new infections that illustrated the diverse ways the pathogen could cross borders.