CBS News
U.S. Steel shares plummet amid questions over the fate of its merger with Nippon Steel
U.S. Steel shares plunged on Wednesday as Wall Street questioned whether its $14.1 billion deal with Japan’s Nippon Steel is at risk of derailing.
Shares of U.S. Steel plunged as much as 25% in afternoon trading after the Washington Post reported President Joe Biden is preparing to formally block the proposed acquisition. As of 2:35 p.m., shares of U.S. Steel were down $7.12, or 20%, to $28.48.
At an afternoon briefing, a White House official downplayed the Washington Post report, which cited three people familiar with the president’s plans. In a statement, the White House cited a process of review by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States, or CFIUS, a panel chaired by the Treasury Secretary.
“CFIUS hasn’t transmitted a recommendation to the President, and that’s the next step in this process,” a White House official stated.
—This is a developing story and will be updated.
CBS News
Human-elephant conflict is on the rise in Thailand | 60 Minutes
Thailand’s most revered animal — the wild Asian elephant — has now become one of the country’s biggest problems.
Decades of deforestation and overdevelopment of natural habitat is pushing wild elephants into farms and villages in search of food, increasingly with dangerous consequences.
Paweena Aekkachan lost her 54-year-old husband earlier this year when he ran out into their crop field in western Thailand to try and stop an elephant from eating their precious cassava. More than130 people have been killed by wild elephants in Thailand over the last six years.
Thai farmers and villagers have tried a variety of methods to stop these multi-ton beasts from rolling through: erecting electric fences, throwing firecrackers at them and digging trenches around their crop fields. None of them have been effective.
Elephant research as a potential solution
Dr. Josh Plotnik is working to solve that. Plotnik, a professor of animal behavior and cognition at Hunter College, CUNY in New York, spends summers studying wild elephants inside Salakpra Wildlife Sanctuary — a lush elephant paradise deep inside the country’s mountainous western forest complex. Here, 300 wild elephants roam freely.
He’s using years of research on elephant behavior to develop novel techniques to stop wild elephants from invading Thai crop fields and villages. He hopes that by understanding each elephant’s unique personality traits, scientists can help create harmony between the most sacred animal in Thailand and its people.
“I think people really need to understand how serious this problem could grow simply because you have an intelligent animal on both sides,” Plotnik said. “And if you have an intelligent elephant and an intelligent human trying to share limited resources, conflict is inevitable until we come up with better solutions to promote coexistence.”
Elephants’ long history in Thailand
Stopping a wild elephant is a challenge. It’s illegal to shoot even a charging elephant in Thailand, where elephants are not only protected – they’re a strong part of the country’s cultural identity.
Most people in Thailand are Buddhist — a religion in which elephants are considered sacred. Elephants have been seen as a symbol of power for Thai royalty and, historically, have even been used as a weapon of war.
A century ago, 90% of Thailand was covered in lush forests where over 100,000 wild elephants roamed. Their size and might made them ideal for Thailand’s lucrative logging industry, which ended up destroying more than half of their natural habitat. In 1989, logging was banned in Thailand after devastating flooding.
With elephants out of work, the government moved to find them new homes, including a national conservation center in northern Thailand where mahouts — or elephant handlers — tend to the elephants and veterinarians meet their medical needs.
Many were brought into tourism, an industry that pumps millions into the Thai economy.
Elephants hurting Thai farms
Today, only an estimated 4,400 wild elephants remain in Thailand. Their population is growing about 8% a year, forcing some of them into communities to look for food to supplement their hefty diets. Wild Asian elephants consume anywhere from 165-330 pounds of food a day.
Plotnik, who has been working to find a way for people and elephants to peacefully coexist, said for some villagers, elephants are like “bulldozers.”
“They do this on almost a nightly basis,” Plotnik said. “They come out of the sanctuary up to this electric fence area that’s protecting this cassava field and they make a decision: do I go in and munch on the cassava or do I go back into the protected area?”
Elephants can wipe out a farmer’s monthly income in a single night. Surveillance video shows elephants raiding farmer Weera Mannewong’s crops. He has been farming for nearly 20 years and said his income has been cut by nearly a quarter because of weekly elephant incursions. Mannewong is desperate to stop it.
Every night, he climbs a watch tower to look over his crops and patrols the edge of his fields for elephants, flashing a light from his truck or throwing firecrackers to scare them away. “It’s very dangerous, but I have to do it,” Mannewong said. “Otherwise they will damage all my crops.”
He’s seen elephants damage homes and cars, too. He also lost family to an elephant.
“Three people have been killed recently by elephants in my village , including my uncle,” Mannewong said.
The elephants occasionally invade homes at night. They also run along roads, sometimes raiding sugar cane trucks along the way.
The elephant warning system
American scientist Josh Plotnik is working with Thai veterinarian and wildlife researcher Boripat Siriaroonrat to innovate other solutions to the human-elephant conflict.
Six months ago, Siriaroonrat, along with a team of rangers and vets, put a massive tracking collar around the neck of Mango, a 20-year-old, 10,000-pound elephant — it’s part of a pilot program supported by the National Research Council of Thailand that Siriaroonrat hopes will eventually serve as a national elephant warning system.
60 Minutes traveled with Siriaroonrat to a small village to track Mango. He had come down from the mountains and into town looking for dinner, strolling through backyards and the main square, making his way past the local restaurant as locals stood by in amazement.
Five elephants have been tagged so far and a team tracks their movements at a command center run by the Department of National Parks in eastern Thailand.
Every day, Siriaroonrat gets elephant coordinates in his inbox.
“We can warn the people, you know, how far is this group of five elephants from their household, so they can be mentally, physically prepared,” Siriaroonrat said.
Warnings are sent from the command center to the phones of a village patrol.
“There’s photos of the elephant that they spotted at night, in which property and which owner,” Siriaroonrat said. “So they warn each family to look out for the elephant and the danger that might come with the elephants.”
Scientists work to resolve human-elephant conflicts
Siriaroonrat is also working with Plotnik to determine how learning more about elephant behavior may stop elephants like Mango from wandering into farms and villages.
Plotnik worries they’re nearing a breaking point in the human-elephant conflict.
“All we can do as scientists, conservationists is to try to find ways…to ensure that elephants have what they need while at the same time humans have what they need,” he said.
Plotnik, a professor of animal behavior and cognition at Hunter College, CUNY in New York, leads the only research team inside Thailand dedicated to understanding why elephants do the things they do.
Elephants are one of the most intelligent animals in the world, which means much of their behavior is learned, rather than instinctive. Their unique experiences create unique personalities and those differences, Plotnik believes, are the key in trying to understand how to help resolve the conflict.
“What we’re trying to do, that I think is unique, is focusing on the elephant,” Plotnik said. “If elephant behavior varies from one elephant to the next, is that something that might inform the development of new strategies that are targeted at specific personality traits, certain behavioral traits that these elephants are exhibiting that might be better or stronger long-term solutions that would prevent elephants from coming into crop fields?”
Plotnik realized how complex Asian elephant behavior can be 13 years ago. He’d placed a mirror in the middle of a field and watched to see what Lynchee, a 5-year-old, 2-ton elephant, would do. Instead of seeing herself as another threatening animal and attacking the mirror, Lynchee began checking herself out, showing a higher level of intelligence and self-directed behavior.
By that point, very little research had been done on wild Asian elephant behavior.
“Studying what’s going on inside an elephant’s mind requires you to do controlled experiments where you actually are interacting with the elephants up close. That’s really difficult to do in the wild,” Plotnik said.
He has spent the last five years leading a team of American and Thai researchers in long-term studies of wild Asian elephant behavior in Thailand’s Salakpra Sanctuary.
Their tests have evolved from seeing how elephants react to novel objects, like brushes and fire hoses in trees, to installing a puzzle box designed by a postdoctoral researcher on Plotnik’s team.
The puzzle box, made up of three metal boxes with three types of doors, has treats hidden inside. When the box was installed in the wild, some elephants were scared of it and ran away, while others seemed fascinated, but couldn’t quite figure it out.
Others tried using brute force to get in. A number of elephants solved at least one of the doors. One of them proved to be a genius, solving all three doors in less than two minutes.
Plotnik believes that like people, elephants show a huge range of persistence and innovation –a factor he thinks could be key in deterring the more tenacious elephants from raiding farms and villages. A flexible approach needs to be taken to dealing with the cognitively flexible species, he said.
Targeted Personality Device
Short of putting a growling predator in an elephant’s path, it’s hard to get one to retreat when it’s looking for food. So Plotnik’s team created a Targeted Personality Device with three components based on different senses.
Depending on the personality of the incoming wild elephant, the device will spray the odor of a tiger or human, send out a series of flashing lights and play the sound of a growling predator or someone yelling — creating a sensory overload to deter the invading elephant.
“So if an elephant is coming into a crop field regularly and the farmer and we as researchers can identify that elephant, we can say, ‘OK, that elephant has these particular personality traits. Let’s program this Targeted Personality Device based on those traits and hope that creates a situation where the elephant doesn’t want to go into the crop field any longer,'” Plotnik said.
By knowing what type of elephant they’re dealing with, scientists hope they can find the right way to scare the elephant away.
“They’re gonna be able to see, hear and smell a potential predator,” Plotnik said. “Enough to say, ‘This is not a good place for me to be.'”
CBS News
Who were the 2024 election’s “crypto voters”?
In last month’s election, one of the biggest winners was not on the ballot — it was in a crypto wallet.
During the 2024 campaign cycle, cryptocurrency companies contributed one-third of all direct corporate contributions to super PACs, or political action committees. And it paid off: 85% of the congressional candidates supported by the industry won their races.
One crypto executive told 60 Minutes the success was not just because of the enormous amount of money the industry spent on ads. It was also because people they described as “crypto voters” turned out to cast their ballots.
“I think those who don’t believe there are passionate people about crypto are not paying attention to how significant this industry is already, today,” said Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of Ripple, whose cryptocurrency XRP is one of the largest in the world.
Cryptocurrencies are digital assets that are not controlled by a country or financial institution. They run on a blockchain, a secure, decentralized virtual ledger that keeps track of every transaction.
Industry research shows that people who own cryptocurrency tend to be young, racially diverse, and see cryptocurrency as a way to gain more freedom over their financial lives. Overall, they agree that the industry needs clearer regulations and want candidates who are open to emerging technologies.
The voter base is growing and, apparently, up for grabs: While they support policies favorable to the industry, cypto voters don’t have a unified position on which party will best deliver them. Most industry research shows crypto owners are at an almost even split between support for the Republican and Democratic parties.
To help them make sense of which candidate to back, the advocacy organization Stand With Crypto assigns politicians grades based on statements they’ve made about the industry.
President-elect Donald Trump received an A grade. After calling bitcoin “a scam,” in 2021, Trump has since embraced the industry. In September, he announced his new cryptocurrency business, a new crypto platform called World Liberty Financial. This week, Trump announced he will appoint former PayPal Chief Operating Officer David Sacks as his “White House A.I. & Crypto Czar,” a move that highlights Trump’s desire to boost the crypto industry.
John Reed Stark, a former chief of internet enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission, is critical of crypto. He told 60 Minutes he owns no cryptocurrency but understands those who do.
“They have a mammoth distrust of financial institutions. And they love the edginess of the culture,” Stark said. “And I think those people do vote. And I think that’s another aspect of where these crypto PACs just executed a brilliant strategy, because they really tapped into that.”
Stark said the appeal of cryptocurrency traces back to the financial crisis and the lack of trust in institutions. But he maintains that cryptocurrency is dangerous.
“I think it’s fair to say, ‘I don’t trust institutions.’ I don’t either,” Stark said. “But that doesn’t mean let’s put a worse one in place.”
Whether or not voters knew the ins and outs of crypto is up for debate. The industry was not overt in making a crypto connection in its ads, regardless if they were for or against a candidate.
For example, Democrat Rep. Katie Porter in California had criticized cryptocurrency mining in a letter she co-signed with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a known crypto skeptic. When Porter then ran for Senate during this year’s primary, every negative ad attacking her was funded by crypto, according to the Washington Post. Some of those ads simply called her a “a fake,” a “liar” and a “bully.”
Overall in this year’s election, the crypto industry backed 29 Republicans and 33 Democrats. The biggest crypto industry super PAC that financed these candidates is called Fairshake, which was started, in part, by Ripple.
Fairshake spent $131 million on ads supporting pro-crypto candidates this election cycle, and it already has another $103 million to spend on pro-crypto candidates in the mid-term elections in two years. But none of the television ads that Fairshake put out and paid for this year mentioned crypto, including those against Porter.
Ripple CEO Garlinghouse told 60 Minutes that, even if Fairshake did not directly mention crypto, the commercials were still educating voters.
Stark was not so sure. “All of these elected officials were very clear in their supporting of crypto,” he said. “Whether people understood that or not, I don’t know.”
The video above was produced by Brit McCandless Farmer and edited by Scott Rosann.
CBS News
How classroom AI Khanmigo can help students in emotional distress
On an early morning in Hobart, Indiana, Abigail, a high school student studying chemistry, sat across from what could be the next big tech innovation in education.
Khanmigo, an AI platform designed by the educational nonprofit Khan Academy, is like Socrates in a laptop: it responds to questions with questions, imploring students to use their own knowledge to lead them to a fully understood, contextualized answer.
“I asked it… what are three examples of acids?” Abigail explained to 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper.
After providing more examples, Khanmigo listed different types of acid found in common, everyday beverages.
Then it asked, “Can you think of any household items that might contain acid?”
“Khanmigo leads you toward an answer, and it asks you a question in return to help you think it out,” Cooper told 60 Minutes Overtime.
Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, got an early look at the underlying technology behind OpenAI’s Chat GPT in 2022.
He told Cooper he had immediate concerns that it could be used to cheat, like writing essays for students. But he also saw incredible potential: an artificially intelligent tutor with “guardrails.”
“To support students, to give them more feedback… to support teachers for all this lesson planning and progress report writing that they spend hours a week doing,” Khan said.
Now, Khanmigo is being piloted in 266 school districts across the U.S., in grades three through 12.
Teachers use Khanmigo to create lesson plans, review essays, and plan classroom activities. Students use it to get help when they’re stumped on homework, fine tune their writing, or work on practice problems.
“I was interested in it from a journalistic standpoint, but also just from a personal standpoint,” Cooper told 60 Minutes Overtime.
“I have a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old. My 4-year-old is going to be starting kindergarten next year.”
Cooper told Khan an AI tutor that could help his son with math and science homework in higher grade levels would be a game changer.
“That’s our hope. Although I will say… a lot of parents are embarrassed if they forgot things… learn it alongside your kids,” Khan said.
One of Khanmigo’s unique features for teachers is a usage tool that allows them to see students’ dialogues with Khanmigo and an activity log.
When Khanmigo is asked a question in a chat or used to draft an essay in the “writing coach” application by a student, a teacher can see the actions they took, the time the actions occurred, and how long a student spent on a particular assignment.
“It does provide a window for adults to supervise children through their homework and through their workflow that hasn’t really existed in this way before,” Cooper told Overtime.
“And I think for some students, for some kids, that might feel intrusive.”
In an interview with 60 Minutes, students from Hobart High School said they have heard that sentiment from some of their classmates.
“Everything you type in it, it sends it to your teacher… and I think that’s something really scary for students,” a student said.
Peggy Buffington, the superintendent of Hobart High School’s district, believes that this kind of oversight can save lives.
“One of the pieces of feedback that we gave to Sal [Khan] was just that safety net. ‘What if there are students out there that are struggling with some emotional things? Maybe suicide ideation?'” she told Cooper.
At the school’s request, Khan Academy created a feature to detect if a student is talking about hurting themselves or others and then notify a teacher immediately. If necessary, a mental health counselor can intervene to provide help.
“Have you actually had instances where Khanmigo has sort of raised a red flag about a student’s emotional health?” Cooper asked.
Buffington said she had.
“You see a lot of that in writing… and then, instantly, the teacher sees that,” Buffington replied. “It’s just another level of awareness that perhaps we didn’t know a student was internalizing… it can save a life.”
Cooper told Overtime he spoke with Khan regarding concerns about privacy around that data.
“Obviously, this kind of information is very sensitive,” Cooper said.
Khan told 60 Minutes that Khan Academy will never sell data that is collected by Khanmigo, and they will only use it internally to make Khanmigo better.
“Anyone under 18… if someone’s talking about self-harm, or harming others, or seems to not be in a good place, or… they’re trying to write, say, an inappropriate story with the AI…. [we’re] flagging that to teachers [and] administrators, so that they can take action if needed,” Khan said.
Khanmigo is still a work in progress.
“There’s kinks to be worked out,” Cooper told Overtime.
Students at Hobart High School told 60 Minutes Khanmigo still makes mistakes, but Khan says it’s continuing to get better.
“There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle in this… I don’t think there’s any doubt that this is here already,” Cooper told Overtime.
“I think that the onus is on, certainly, tech companies to have ethics and guardrails in place.”
“But it’s also on parents to just be involved and be aware of what your kids are doing to the extent you can.”
Cooper said the potential benefits of the technology are obvious to him as a father of two young boys.
“An AI tutor that’s with them in their home, that’s with them in their school… that they can consult with and learn from… I mean, the potential of that is incredible.”
The video above was produced by Will Croxton. It was edited by Sean Kelly.