Tue: This Is the Real Cage Match Between Musk and Zuckerberg

Turkey Wants to Get A Head

A bronze head of Emperor Septimius Severus on display at a Copenhagen museum has become a bone of contention between the Danish museum and Turkey, which claims it was looted during an archaeological dig in the 1960s and wants it back.

After decades in the United States as part of a private collection that loaned it to New York's Metropolitan Museum, a statue of the Roman emperor, who lived from AD 145 to 211, was recently sent back to Turkey -- minus the head.

The statue was believed to have been stolen from a site in Turkey.

Turkish authorities say the missing head is in the Danish capital -- where it has been on display at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen for over 50 years.

But many Danish experts say they are not so sure.

"We are not convinced that the two things belong together. The documentation is at the moment not very strong, we have to compare breaks of the torso and the head," Glyptotek's director of collections Rune Frederiksen told AFP.



Whose Head Is It, Anyway?

When You Put Your Head Into the Mouth of the Lion, Expect to Get Bitten

Prominent investigative journalist Yelena Milashina has been badly beaten and had fingers broken by masked men as she travelled to a court in the Russian republic of Chechnya, colleagues say.

Ms Milashina has received death threats in the past from Chechnya's notorious leader, Ramzan Kadyrov.

She was travelling with a lawyer, Alexander Nemov, who was also attacked.

They had just arrived at the airport to attend a court verdict for a mother of three exiled Kadyrov critics.

Their car was stopped as they drove to the capital, Grozny, where Zarema Musayeva was later given a five-and-a-half-year jail term. She was detained by Chechen security forces in January 2022 in her flat in western Russia, on charges condemned as politically motivated.

"It was a classic kidnapping," Yelena Milashina told a Chechen human rights official in hospital in Grozny. "They pinned down then threw our driver out of his car, climbed in, bent our heads down, tied my hands, forced me to my knees and put a pistol to my head."

Her employer, Novaya Gazeta newspaper, said she had suffered an internal brain injury and had fingers broken. She also had her head shaved and her face doused in green dye.

Alexander Nemov was also injured. Rights group Crew against Torture posted an image showing a gash in his leg, which it said was presumably a knife wound.

Ms Milashina fled Russia for some time in February 2022 after Kadyrov called her a terrorist, adding that "we have always eliminated terrorists and their accomplices". She was attacked in 2020 alongside another lawyer, Marina Dubrovina.

Her investigative reporting detailing human rights abuses in Chechnya followed in the footsteps of two women who were murdered for their own brave work. In 2006 Novaya Gazeta colleague Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in Moscow, while her friend and campaigner Natalia Estemirova was abducted and shot in Grozny.

Ms Milashina told the BBC's Ukrainecast only last week that she was fully aware that Kadyrov and his entourage could "easily fulfil" the death threats he had issued.

"I'm kind of getting used to it because, several times almost every year, Kadyrov is passing threats to my address or the address of journalists of Novaya Gazeta... He behaves like [he's] the owner of the Chechnya region".

Is There a Ticking Debt Bomb?  We Don't Really Know.

The majority of low-income developing countries are today either already in or near debt distress. Meanwhile, the world’s two large economies, the US and China, are expected to see a jump in their public debt at higher levels than before the pandemic.

Ghana and Sri Lanka defaulted on their external debt in 2022, two years after Zambia did. Pakistan and Egypt are on the verge of a default. On June 30, Pakistan secured a tentative $3bn funding deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), promising it potential, short-term relief.

Global public debt levels remain high – at 92 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) at the end of 2022 – despite falling from the record levels seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, when they touched 100 percent of GDP at the end of 2020.

So, is the debt crisis a global contagion? Are low-income countries at a much higher risk than the others? Would countries be forced to accept tough conditions for bailouts? And what can richer countries and financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank do to ease the pain?

The short answer: The growing debt of poor countries is alarming but there is no evidence of a contagion that could trigger a global crisis. Yet. However, economists and debt-management experts say richer countries need to act fast to bring relatively new creditors, including China and the private sector, on board for debt restructuring deals for a quicker economic recovery and to avoid a repeat of the 1980s debt crisis that hobbled dozens of less-developed nations for years.

Is a global debt bomb about to explode?

Breaking News!  Fake News on Social Media

Burning cars, heavily armed police officers, thousands of demonstrators: the protests in France sometimes provide spectacular images that are of course also widely shared on social networks. But as is so often the case in such exceptional situations, much of the content shared is incorrect or misleading information.

For example, a widespread video on TikTok, among others, shows several cars apparently falling out of a parking garage and exploding when they hit the street. But these scenes were not recorded in France, nor were they riots: a reverse image search shows that the video was recorded in 2016 – in Cleveland, Ohio. And the context is also completely different: the recordings were made on the set of the action film “Fast and Furious 8”.

There are other examples of how films and series are used for disinformation in connection with the protests in France. For example, pictures of a police officer lying on the ground, his face covered in blood, were shared on Twitter. Among other things, users shared the picture with the demand to stop immigration and thus suggested that the alleged perpetrators were migrants. But even this picture was not taken in connection with the current protests.

Because these are also recordings of a professional film set: the alleged police officer is the French actor Raphael Sergio, as he confirmed to the French daily “Liberation”.

False posts about French riots spread online

This Is About as Close to Herd Resistance As We Can Get.   (Immunity Is a Fiction)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released new figures showing that about one in four Americans over the age of 16 had not been infected with COVID-19 as of the end of 2022.

The study, which was updated last week, estimated that 77.5% of Americans had antibodies from having COVID at least once.

Nearly all Americans ― 96.7% ― had COVID antibodies from previous infection, vaccination or both as of Nov. 15, 2022, the figures show.

Seroprevalence, the focus of the survey, estimates the percentage of people with antibodies against a virus in their blood.

The study was conducted on a sample of about 143,000 blood donors to help researchers determine how many Americans had been infected with COVID and/or been vaccinated against the virus and had antibodies. The research shows how those figures vary based on different racial groups and geography, among other things, for each quarter in 2022.

This Is the Real Cage Match Between Musk and Zuckerberg

Meta is poised to unveil a new app that appears to mimic Twitter — a direct challenge to the social media platform owned by Elon Musk.

A listing for the app, called Threads, appeared on Apple's App Store, indicating it would debut as early as Thursday. It is billed as a “text-based conversation app" that is linked to Instagram, with the listing teasing a Twitter-like microblogging experience.

“Threads is where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what'll be trending tomorrow,” it said.

Instagram users will be able to keep their user names and follow the same accounts on the new app, according to screenshots displayed on the App Store listing. Meta declined to comment on the app.

Threads could be the latest headache for Musk, who acquired Twitter last year for $44 billion and has been making changes that have unnerved advertisers and turned off users, including new daily limits on the number of tweets people can view.