World News Roundup

INTERNATIONALARAB TIMES, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 21, 2016

10

Media

Zuckerberg speaks at summit

Facebook fi xing fakenews issue with CEOLIMA, Peru, Nov 20, (Agencies): Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg urged world leaders meeting in Peru on Saturday to help get more people online to improve global living standards while separately an-nouncing new measures to cut down on fake news stories on the social network that some suggest could have helped sway the US presidential election.

The Facebook founder took on the role of an evan-gelist for “connectivity” as he spoke at an Asian-Pa-cifi c trade summit, lamenting that half the world has no access to the online world and is being deprived of its economic potential as well as advances in science, education and medicine. He urged leaders to work with his company and others to close that gap.

“If we can connect the 4 billion people who aren’t con-nected we can lift hundreds of millions of people out of pov-erty,” Zuckerberg said as he addressed business and gov-ernment leaders at the 21-na-tion Asia-Pacifi c Economic Cooperation Forum.

But as he was promoting the benefi ts of the online world in the speech, he took to his Fa-cebook page to address one of the downsides of the internet:

the rapid dissemination of bogus news stories on so-cial networks.

Zuckerberg said in a post late Friday that his com-pany was taking measures to curb what he said was a “relatively small” percentage of deliberately false stories. The measures include developing new tools to detect and classify “misinformation” and to make it easier for users to report the material.

He said the company also is looking into the pos-sibility of working with established fact-checking or-ganizations to evaluate content and into the feasibility of warning labels for stories fl agged as false.

Critics have complained that a surge of fake news stories on Facebook may have swayed some voters to back President-elect Donald Trump. The company said on Monday that it was clarifying its advertising policy to emphasize that it won’t display ads — thus cutting revenue — for sites that run information that is “illegal, misleading or deceptive, which includes fake news.” That followed a similar step by Google, which acknowledged that it had let a false article about the election results slip into its list of recommended news stories.

“The bottom line is: we take misinformation seri-ously,” the Facebook CEO said in his post. “Our goal is to connect people with the stories they fi nd most meaningful, and we know people want accurate infor-mation.

Zuckerberg’s comments came after President Barack Obama, who is also attending the APEC sum-mit, and others have been sharply critical of the spread of fake news online.

In a news conference Thursday in Berlin, Obama called bogus stories disseminated on Facebook and other social media platforms a threat to democracy. The president decried “an age where there’s so much active misinformation and it’s packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television.”

Zuckerberg called the problem “complex, both technically and philosophically.” It is also sensitive issue for a company that does not want to censor con-tent such as legitimate political satire that some people fi nd offensive. Facebook sees itself not as a traditional publisher, but as a facilitator of global communica-tion.

It was that lofty vision of the company that was on display as Zuckerberg spoke at the APEC forum.

Zuckerberg

A photographer stops to capture the early morning ground fog on the National Mall in Washington on Nov 19. (AP)

Charges expected in death of congressman’s grandson

Chicago looks to tougher gun lawsCHICAGO, Nov 20, (Agencies): On a recent evening on Chicago’s southwest side, an all-too-familiar scene unfolds: within sight of the Windy City’s iconic downtown high-rises, dozens of police offi cers swarm. A 21-year-old man has been shot outside his home.

All of a sudden, a deafening scream pierces the silence: the man’s family has just learned he has been declared dead at the hospital.

Chicago — the Midwestern stomp-ing grounds of Al Capone, the ruthless mobster who left a trail of blood in the Roaring 1920s — is grappling once again with a gun violence problem and a soaring murder rate.

There have been more than 670 murders in Chicago from January to mid-November, according to police — a 56 percent jump in just one year. The city is on track to end 2016 with the most killings since 1998.

On Friday night, the grandson of Il-linois congressman Danny Davis was fatally shot in the head — over a pair of shoes, police said.

The nation’s third largest city is strug-gling to fi gure out how to stem the free fl ow of bullets and blood, and is hoping new, tougher gun laws are the answer.

“I have seen too many lives torn apart. Too many parents lose a child,” Chicago’s police chief Eddie Johnson said at a recent public forum.

“As a Chicagoan, I’m ashamed, be-cause we could do better.”

Johnson and his state lawmaker allies want to reduce the number of shootings by stiffening jail sentences for those re-peatedly arrested for gun offenses.

The police department says that a hard core of 1,400 recidivist gun of-fenders — many of them gang mem-bers or drug dealers — are fueling

much of the violence.“We’re beyond frustrated,” said An-

thony Guglielmi, a police department spokesman. “You could reduce the vi-olence in the city by 40 percent just by keeping people in jail for crimes they have committed.”

The new draft bill is headed for the Illinois state legislature in the next few weeks, where there are indications of bipartisan support.

It would ask judges to sentence re-peat gun offenders at the higher end of the three-year to 14-year guideline range. Judges who hand down lighter sentences would need to offer a written explanation of their reasoning.

Despite a tough national climate for passing gun control measures, the bill’s authors are hopeful that Illinois will be different.

One reason is that the state’s Re-publican governor Bruce Rauner has already agreed to tougher gun laws.

Earlier this year, he signed a bill to increase penalties for gun traffi cking from nearby Wisconsin and Indiana — border states with more permissive gun laws.

Another reason is that this latest sentencing law would not impose strict mandatory minimums, something leg-islators and gun-rights advocates have opposed.

“Illinois can be a real trend-setter here,” said state representative Mi-chael Zalewski, a Democrat who sup-ports the measure.

Republican state lawmaker Michael Connelly has also offered cautious support, saying, “We have to do some-thing.” But offi cials admit that tougher gun laws cannot fi x the deeper prob-lems at the root of the violence.

Alicia Means, 42, lives in the strug-

gling Marquette Park neighborhood on the city’s southwest side.

When she hears the sounds of gun-shots, she says, she and her children drop to the fl oor inside their home, just in case a stray bullet pierces the walls.

Life was not always this way. Grow-ing up, she said her neighborhood was “nice and clean... People cared about other people’s children.” But the hous-ing crisis and Great Recession took a toll on the streets around her, where there are now a number of abandoned homes.

“Change has been mainly no em-ployment, no resources, people los-ing their homes... no way to pay their bills,” Means said.

Alex Kotlowitz has heard all of this before, having spent decades studying Chicago’s economically-challenged neighborhoods. His book “There Are No Children Here” takes an unblinking look at growing up poor in Chicago.

“There are a lot of reasons why there is violence in what is a fairly concen-trated part of the city,” Kotlowitz said, citing historic socio-economic factors and trauma from past bloodshed.

But he says longer jail terms are not the answer for predominantly African-American communities that “have faced longer and longer sentences in every crime imaginable.”

Meanwhile, Chicago police said charges could be announced soon in the fatal shooting of the Illinois con-gressman’s grandson following an ar-gument over a pair of basketball shoes.

Offi cer Michelle Tannehill said two juveniles are in custody and are considered suspects in the killing of 15-year-old Javon Wilson, who was shot in the head at his home in Chicago on Friday. Wilson is the grandson of longtime U.S. Rep. Danny Davis.

Focus

In this Nov 18, photo, police clear a scene at 5600 South Princeton Ave, after Javon Wilson, 15, was shot and killed in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago. The high school sopho-more was the grandson of US Rep

Danny Davis, D-Ill. (AP)

Davis Greenberg

Sentences expected to set pattern: One man convicted of plotting to fi ght for the Islamic State group in Syria got 35 years in prison. Another got off easy with only time served plus probation.

It fell to US District Judge Michael Davis to mete out justice in the long-running case, which targeted a group of young male friends in Minnesota’s large Somali community who prosecutors say helped radicalize each other, watching hours of violent propaganda videos, including beheadings and burnings.

Some friends made it to Syria. These nine, whom Davis considered to be nothing less than a “terrorist cell” that needed to be stopped, were caught.

Davis’ spectrum of sentences is expected to set the pattern for other Islamic State-re-lated terrorism cases across the country — only about half of 110 have been resolved, according to Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University School of Law.

He provided some “much needed” ration-ale behind his decisions, too, Greenberg said. He partly followed a standard legal pattern in which defendants who cooperate get less time and those who don’t get the harshest sen-tences, she said. But Davis made it clear early on that he wanted to take a nuanced approach due to the age range — 19 to 22 — treating defendants individually and looking for al-ternatives to incarceration when appropriate. He even traveled to Germany to meet with a noted deradicalization expert.

“The message he’s sending is we can do intervention and here’s how to do it. We’ve been waiting for it for a long time. ... This is really taking the lead nationally,” she said.

The defendant Davis considered most amenable to rehabilitation, Abdullahi Yusuf, 20, was sentenced to time served, 21 months. Abdirizak Warsame, 21, got 2- years with credit for 11 months served. Both men cooperated with the investiga-

America

A Mexican national looks through the United States-Mexico border fence during Opening the Door Of Hope/Abriendo La Puerta De La Esparana at Friendship

Park in San Ysidro, California, on Nov 19. (AFP)

tion and testifi ed against the group despite strong pressure from within their com-munity. Davis said he’ll personally keep close watch over their 20 years’ supervised

release. (AP)

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Florida surfer dies fulfi lling dream:

A Florida surfer who dreamed of riding Southern California waves has died doing what he loved.

Dana Brown, 60, was paddling near the Huntington Beach pier near sunset on Nov 6 when he was slammed into a pier pillar.

He was underwater for several minutes before other surfers saw him and towed him to shore, according to a GoFundMe page set up to help pay for his funeral expenses.

He died at a hospital four days later.Brown lived in a van with his father,

George.Racheal Katz met them about four years

ago in Cocoa Beach, Florida. “Dana and his dad were innocent,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “You don’t see innocent people any more, and you defi nitely don’t fi nd innocent 60-year-olds.”

Brown, who wore a long white beard, was deeply religious and wouldn’t surf on the Sabbath, she said. He took care of his ailing father, bathing, feeding and reading to him.

“When his dad got sick, he spent prob-ably every day with him,” Katz said. “Dana carried him in and out of that van every day. He didn’t want him in any kind of an adult caring facility.”

His father’s death in March dealt Brown emotional and fi nancial blows, and he spent many weekends at his father’s gravesite, according to the GoFundMe page. (AP)