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UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson killed in shooting outside of New York City hotel – CBS News


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UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was fatally shot Wednesday morning outside a Midtown Manhattan hotel, according to the NYPD. A United Healthcare spokesperson told CBS News the incident occurred during the company’s investors conference.

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Israel’s Netanyahu takes stand in corruption trial as war in Gaza grinds, neighboring Syria’s dictator falls

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Tel Aviv, Israel — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the stand Tuesday in his long-running trial for alleged corruption, setting off what’s expected to be a weekslong spectacle that will draw unwelcome attention to his legal woes as he faces an international arrest warrant for war crimes and the fighting in Gaza continues. It is the first time a sitting Israeli prime minister takes the stand as a criminal defendant, an embarrassing milestone for a leader who has tried to cultivate an image as a sophisticated and respected statesman.

Upon starting his testimony, Netanyahu said “hello” to the judges. One judge told him he had the same privileges as other witnesses and could sit or stand as he chose.

“I waited eight years for this moment, to say the truth,” Netanyahu said, standing at a podium in a packed Tel Aviv courtroom. He called the charges against him “an ocean of absurdness” and promised his version would cut through the prosecution’s case.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu testify in his corruption trial in Tel Aviv
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears before the District Court in Tel Aviv to testify for the first time in his corruption trial, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Dec. 10, 2024.

Chaim Goldberg/Flash90/Pool/Anadolu/Getty


Netanyahu appeared at ease as he began telling his version of events and shared personal details about his life that he might hope would shape the judges’ perception of him. He said he used to lose sleep over media coverage but learned it had no meaningful bearing — in contrast to the prosecution’s attempts to paint him as image-obsessed.

He said he smoked cigars but could hardly finish them because of his workload, but hated champagne. One case revolves around him receiving a “supply line” of cigars and champagne from billionaire associates.

His lawyer asked that he be allowed to receive notes while testifying to help ensure he can continue running the country.

Netanyahu will answer during his court appearances to charges of fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes in three separate cases.

He is accused of accepting tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of cigars and champagne from a billionaire Hollywood producer in exchange for assisting him with personal and business interests. He is also accused of promoting advantageous regulation for media moguls in exchange for favorable coverage of himself and his family.

Netanyahu, 75, denies wrongdoing, saying the charges are a witch hunt orchestrated by a hostile media and a biased legal system out to topple his lengthy rule. His testimony caps years of scandals that have swirled around him and his family.

The testimony, set to take place six hours a day, three days a week for several weeks, will take up a significant chunk of Netanyahu’s working hours, prompting critics to ask if he can capably manage a country embroiled in a war on one front, containing the fallout from a second, and keeping tabs on other potential regional threats, including from Iran or the recent fall of longtime dictator Bashar al-Assad in neighboring Syria.

Netanyahu, in his testimony, said he could “find a balance” between both commitments.

Dozens of people gathered outside of the court in Tel Aviv, some protesting against Netanyahu, including family members of hostages held in Gaza, and also a group of his supporters. A banner draped in front of the court read: “Crime Minister.”

Under Israeli law, indicted prime ministers are not required to step down. But the charges against Netanyahu cleaved deep divisions in Israel, with protesters demanding he resign and former political allies refusing to serve in government with the Israeli leader, triggering a political crisis that led to five elections in less than four years beginning in 2019. He overcame the political tumult only two years ago by striking an agreement with smaller right-wing parties that had long languished on the edges of Israeli politics, to form the country’s most far-right government ever.


Netanyahu sworn in as Israeli prime minister amid corruption charges trial

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Netanyahu’s supporters view the charges as the result of the justice system’s bias and overreach, while his opponents have accused him of prolonging the raging war in Gaza in a bid to distract from, if not delay his own court proceedings. Netanyahu launched the war on Gaza’s Hamas rulers immediately after they carried out their brutal Oct. 7, 2023 terror attack on Israel, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 others hostage.

Despite the pressure, the polarizing Netanyahu has rejected calls to step down and has used his position as prime minister to lash out at law enforcement, media and courts.

An Israeli court rejected a request by Netanyahu’s lawyers to reduce the expected testimony hours, as well as several other requests to delay its start, which they said were necessary because of the prime minister’s busy schedule and the country’s significant challenges. A verdict isn’t expected until 2026 at the earliest and Netanyahu will have the option to appeal at the Supreme Court.

The court has spent months hearing prosecution witnesses in the three cases, including some of Netanyahu’s once closest aides who turned state witnesses. The prosecution has tried to portray the prime minister as an image-obsessed leader who broke the law to improve his public perception.

The most damaging case against Netanyahu involves an influence-peddling scandal in which two of his formerly closest aides have testified against him on suspicions of promoting regulation worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Israel’s Bezeq telecom company. In return, Bezeq’s popular news site, Walla, allegedly provided favorable coverage of Netanyahu and his family.

Netanyahu is also alleged to have offered a newspaper publisher legislation that would weaken his paper’s main rival in return for more favorable coverage.

Moreover, the prime minister is accused of accepting nearly $200,000 in champagne and cigars from Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan and in exchange, he allegedly operated on Milchan’s behalf on U.S. visa matters, tried to legislate a generous tax break for him and sought to promote his interests in the Israeli media market.

Netanyahu’s testimony could further tarnish his image at a complicated time for Israel’s longest-serving leader. His popular support dropped after the Hamas attack in October 2023, with the public blaming his leadership for failing to prevent the assault, and if elections were held today polls suggest he would struggle to form another new government.

Israel is still fighting Hamas in Gaza with no end in sight, despite heavy international pressure to wind down the war, as well as pressure from the families of hostages still held in Gaza and their supporters to bring their loved ones home.

The Israeli leader, along with his former defense minister, also faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for war crimes charges related to the war in Gaza, which his office has dismissed as “absurd and false actions and charges.”



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YouTube algorithms consistently push eating disorder and self-harm content to teen girls, new study finds

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Anna Mockel was 14 and suddenly obsessed with losing weight. It was spring 2020, and she had just graduated eighth grade remotely. Housebound and nervous about the transition to high school that coming fall, she sacrificed innumerable hours that COVID lockdown summer shuffling between social media apps.

Anna spent a lot of time on YouTube “not searching for anything in particular,” just watching what popped up in her feed. She remembers the spiraling thoughts started when she’d watch videos featuring girls who were a bit older and invariably skinny. The more Anna watched, the more these videos would clog her feed, and the more determined she was to look like the girls in the videos.

As she clicked and tapped, YouTube’s “Up Next” panel of recommended videos started morphing from content featuring skinny girls to “how-tos” on losing weight. Diet and exercise videos began to dominate Anna’s account. As she kept watching, she says, the content intensified, until her feed was flooded with videos glorifying skeletal-looking bodies and hacks for sustaining a 500-calorie daily diet. (Adolescent girls are recommended 2,200 in daily caloric intake.) 

“I didn’t know that that was even a thing online,” Anna says of the eating disorder content recommended to her. “A lot of it just came up in my feed, and then I gravitated towards that because it’s what was already going on for me.”

Anna copied what she saw, restricted her diet and began losing weight at an alarming pace. At 14, she says that she was aware of eating disorders but “didn’t connect the dots” until she was diagnosed with anorexia. Over the next years, she would endure two hospitalizations and spend three months at a residential treatment center before beginning her recovery at age 16.

Now 18 and a high school senior, she asserts that social media, YouTube in particular, perpetuated her eating disorder. 

“YouTube became this community of people who are competitive with eating disorders,” she says. “And it kept me in the mindset that [anorexia] wasn’t a problem because so many other people online were doing the same thing.”

Now, new research confirms this content was served to Anna intentionally. A report released Tuesday by the Center for Countering Digital Hate asserts that when YouTube users demonstrate signs of being interested in diet and weight loss, almost 70% of the videos pushed by the platform’s algorithms recommend content that likely worsens or creates anxieties about body image.

What’s more, the videos average 344,000 views each—nearly 60 times that of the average YouTube video—and come embroidered with ads from major brands like Nike, T-Mobile and Grammarly. It’s unclear whether the companies are aware of the ad placements.

“We cannot continue to let social media platforms experiment on new generations as they come of age,”  says James P. Steyer, Founder and CEO of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit dedicated to educating families about online safety. 

He says these platforms are designed to keep viewers’ attention even if that means amplifying harmful content to minors. 

The report, titled “YouTube’s Anorexia Algorithm,” examines the first 1,000 videos that a teen girl would receive in the “Up Next” panel when watching videos about weight loss, diet or exercise for the first time.

To collect the data, CCDH’s researchers created a YouTube profile of a 13-year-old girl and carried out 100 searches on the video-sharing platform using popular eating disorder keywords such as “ED WIEIAD” (eating disorder, what I eat in a day),  “ABC diet” (anorexia boot camp diet) and “safe foods” (a reference to foods with few or no calories). The research team then analyzed the top 10 recommendations YouTube’s algorithm pushed to the “Up Next” panel.

The results indicated that almost two-thirds (638) of the recommended videos pushed the hypothetical 13-year-old user further into eating disorder or problematic weight loss content; one-third (344) of YouTube’s recommendations were deemed harmful by the CCDH, meaning the content either promoted or glamorized eating disorders, contained weight-based bullying or showed imitable behavior; 50 of the videos, the study found, involved self-harm or suicide content.

“There’s this anti-human culture created by social media platforms like YouTube,” says Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate. “Kids today are essentially reeducated by algorithms, by companies teaching and persuading them to starve themselves.”

Ahmed says the study illustrates the systemic nature of the issue, that YouTube, owned by Google, is violating its own policies by allowing this content on the platform.

YouTube is the most popular social media site among teens in the US, ahead of TikTok and Instagram, according to Pew Research Center. Three quarters of U.S. teens say they use the platform at least once a day. YouTube does not require a user to create an account to view content.

The Social Media Victims Law Center, a Seattle-based law firm founded in response to the  2021 Facebook Papers, has filed thousands of lawsuits against social media companies, including YouTube. More than 20 of those suits allege that YouTube is designed to be intentionally addictive and perpetuate eating disorders in its users, particularly among teen girls.

The law firm connected 60 Minutes with a 17-year-old client. Her experience mirrors that of Anna. 

“YouTube taught me how to have an eating disorder,” says the 17-year-old, whose lawsuit accuses YouTube of knowingly perpetuating anorexia. She says she created a YouTube account when she was 12. She’d log on to watch dog videos and gymnastics challenges and cooking tutorials. Then, she says, she started seeing videos of girls dancing and exercising. She’d click. YouTube recommended more videos of girls doing more extreme exercises, which turned into videos of diets and weight loss. She kept watching; she kept clicking.

She says her feed became a funnel for eating disorder content, a stream of influencers promoting extreme diets and ways to “stay skinny.” She spent five hours a day on YouTube, learning terms like “bulimia” and “ARFID” (Avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder). She learned what it meant to “purge” and “restrict” food; she became deeply concerned about caloric intake and her BMI (body mass index.) 

When she was in seventh grade, she stopped eating. She was diagnosed with anorexia shortly after, and over the next five years, she says she’d spend more time out of school than in it. Now a junior in high school, she’s been hospitalized five times and spent months at three residential treatment centers trying to recover from the eating disorder.

“It’s just taken my life away pretty much,” she reflects.

Asked why algorithms are employed not to protect young users but to intentionally recommend eating disorder content, YouTube declined to comment.

The video sharing site says it “continually works with mental health experts to refine [its] approach to content recommendations for teens.” In April 2023, the platform expanded its policies on eating disorders and self-harm content, adding the ability to age restrict  videos that contain “educational, documentary, scientific or artistic” disordered eating or that discuss “details which may be triggering to at-risk viewers.” Under this policy, these videos may be unavailable to viewers under 18.

YouTube has taken steps to block certain search terms like “thinspiration,” a word used to find footage of emaciated bodies. However, the CCDH study found that such videos still appear in the “Up Next” panel. And users learn that by subbing in a zero for the letter “O” or an exclamation point for the letter “I,” these terms are still searchable on YouTube. One video noted in the report as glorifying skeletal body shapes had 1.1 million views at the time of the analysis; it now has 1.6 million.

As part of the research, CCDH flagged 100 YouTube videos promoting eating disorders, weight-based bullying or showing imitable behavior. YouTube removed or age-restricted only 18 of those videos.



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U.S. “fondness for tall SUVs and pickups” compounding risks for pedestrians in crashes, IIHS study finds

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Researchers at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety who looked back at data on more than 200 vehicle-pedestrian crashes in the U.S. say Americans’ preference for large, tall vehicles is compounding the risks of serious injury to pedestrians associated with higher-speed crashes. The authors of the IIHS study conclude that the size of many American vehicles means serious pedestrian injuries are more likely in crashes when compared to the expected risks on the roads in Europe, where vehicles are generally smaller. 

IIHS researchers analyzed 202 crashes involving a vehicle and at least one pedestrian aged 16 or older between 2015 and 2022 in four states, “to generate an estimate for the link between injury outcomes and impact speed,” with information about the front-end height of the vehicles being used additionally “to examine the moderating effect of” the vehicle’s size on the outcome for the pedestrians.

“A small increase in crash speed can really ramp up the danger to a pedestrian. Our fondness for tall SUVs and pickups in the U.S. has intensified that effect,” IIHS President David Harkey was quoted as saying about the study’s findings.

Pickup Truck Strikes Pedestrian in Woodside
A member of the NYPD Collision Investigation Squad gathers evidence at the scene of a crash in which a pickup truck struck a pedestrian, sending the victim to the hospital in critical condition, March 9, 2024.

Jeff Bachner/NY Daily News/Getty


While it was already understood that more speed at the point of impact increases risks to pedestrians struck by vehicles, the IIHS said the new study was carried out to provide, “an updated estimate of pedestrian injury risk at different severity levels” based on the evolving design of vehicles on U.S. roads today.

“As expected, impact speed strongly predicted injury risk, and hood leading edge height significantly increased the risk of pedestrian injury overall as well as the potency of impact speed for serious injuries,” the IIHS said.

While the study found no significant change in risk to pedestrians based on the weight of the vehicles involved, the IIHS said that, “in general, higher vehicle front ends increased the likelihood of both moderate and serious pedestrian injuries.”

For example, it said that when a median-height pickup, with a front end about 13 inches higher than most cars, hits a pedestrian at 27 mph, there’s a 83% chance of moderate injury and a 62% chance of serious injury, compared to 60% and a 30% respectively if the vehicle involved in the crash is a median-height car.

“Although SUVs are a growing share of the market in Europe, the passenger vehicle fleet there has long been dominated by cars. In contrast, the majority of passenger vehicles on U.S. roads today are SUVs or pickups,” IIHS senior statistician Sam Monfort, the lead author of the study, was quoted as saying by the institute. “These choices have very real consequences for pedestrian safety.”

“Speed increases have a more pronounced effect when taller vehicles are involved” in a crash, the organization said. “For example, as crash speed increases from 15 mph to 35 mph, the risk of a serious injury goes from 9% to 52% when a median-height car is involved. With a median [height] pickup, the risk shoots up from 11% to 91%.”


Why pedestrian deaths are rising in the U.S.

04:43

Previous research by the IIHS published in 2022 found that drivers of bigger vehicles were more likely to hit pedestrians while making turns than drivers of cars, and another IIHS study published last year that pickups, SUVs and vans with hoods higher than 40 inches at the front edge were about 45% more likely to cause pedestrian fatalities in crashes than cars and other vehicles with lower, sloping hoods.

Despite the concern over the impact of larger vehicles in U.S. pedestrian crashes, however, data showed 2023 saw the first overall year-on-year decline in pedestrian deaths from vehicle accidents in about four years, since the COVID-19 pandemic. The number of pedestrians killed on U.S. roads in 2023 dropped 5.4% compared to the previous year — which saw a 40-year high — but it was still 14.1% higher than the number of deaths recorded in 2019, before the pandemic, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association.



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