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Business

Washington Publish, Reuters and Los Angeles Occasions Seek for New Prime Editors

Vox, the flagship of Vox Media, has two high-profile vacancies: Editor-in-Chief and Senior Vice President. Both jobs will be filled by Lauren B. Williams, one of the relatively few black women to have run a large general interest media company. In November, she announced that she was heading to a startup, Capital B, a website targeting black communities nationwide. Vox Media has limited its search for the next Vox editor to three finalists, said two people with knowledge of the matter who were not empowered to publicly discuss it.

HuffPost will likely not name its next editor until after it completes its sale to BuzzFeed, a deal that was announced in November. Jonah Peretti, who will be the managing director of the combined companies, is leading the search with Mark Schoofs, editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News.

HuffPost hasn’t had an editor-in-chief since Lydia Polgreen, a former New York Times deputy editor-in-chief who ran the site for three years, left Spotify in March for podcasting company Gimlet Media. A BuzzFeed spokesperson said the search involved “a strong pool of diverse candidates.”

A number of other outlets are on the alert. Since December Wired, Condé Nast’s tech-oriented magazine, has been looking for a replacement for its editor-in-chief Nicholas Thompson, who is leaving as the Atlantic’s chief executive. Leading candidates for the wired job include Nilay Patel, 40, editor-in-chief of The Verge, a Vox Media website, and Megan Greenwell, 37, editor of Wired.com, according to three people with search skills.

Anna Wintour, Condé Nast’s Chief Content Officer, has the final say on the election. A Condé Nast spokesman declined to comment on the details of the search.

As members of the emerging generation of journalism refine their résumés, watch a possible change at the New York Times as its editor-in-chief Dean Baquet approaches the newspaper’s usual 66-year retirement age for editors and top executives. Mr Baquet turned 64 in September and there have been numerous promotions among the newspaper’s editors lately.

Categories
Politics

Leaders in Congress Meet in Search of Stimulus and Spending Offers

Ahead of Tuesday’s meeting, Mr McConnell pointed to the forked plan as he continued to urge lawmakers to ditch the two items and approve a tight package of funds to distribute vaccines, unemployment benefits and aid to schools and small businesses. After months of insisting that full liability coverage was a “red line” for another package, Mr. McConnell reiterated that he was ready to drop demand if Democrats agree to give up their top priority as well.

“We all know that the new administration will ask for another package,” McConnell said at a weekly press conference. “It’s not that we won’t have another opportunity to discuss the benefits of liability reform and state and local government in the near future.”

Even if the four leaders reached an agreement, it would most likely face hurdles from some simple lawmakers as Republicans scrub the prospect of spending billions of dollars in taxpayers’ money and Democrats argue that an agreement is less than 1 trillion Dollars would not be enough.

Some lawmakers are also running a pressure campaign to include direct payments for all working Americans in the stimulus agreement. Two Senators, Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri and Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, have threatened to uphold the government’s broader funding bill if Congress fails to ensure that Americans receive payments of $ 1,200 per adult and $ 500 per child received under the economic stimulus measure.

In a letter sent to heads of state and government, liberal lawmakers, led by representatives Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Ro Khanna and Katie Porter of California argued that such payments are “an essential part of any Covid relief package.” They pushed for direct payments of at least $ 2,000 and unemployment benefits for at least six months, including improved fringe benefits, which expired earlier this year.

“We have had this issue of direct payments on the table for months and are ready to consider various amounts,” said Ms. Jayapal. “There is absolutely no reason why we can’t make the direct payments and get the Senate to take them out.”

The White House has expressed its support for another round of direct payments, and Mr Mnuchin has included a $ 600 stimulus check in its most recent offer to Ms. Pelosi. But the Democrats were considering this $ 916 billion proposal because it failed to revive the additional unemployment benefits that lapsed in the summer.

“I’m not going to say whether that’s a red line or not,” said White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany as he urged President Trump to approve a stimulus package with no direct payments. “We hope that there is a deal there that the president can then examine and support.”

Catie Edmondson reported from Washington and Ben Casselman from New York.

Categories
Health

Google search panels deal with misinformation about Covid vaccines

Google logo of the American multinational technology company at Googleplex, the corporate headquarters complex of Google and its parent company Alphabet Inc.

Alex Tai | SOPA pictures | LightRocket | Getty Images

LONDON – Google launched new bulletin boards in search results on Thursday to counter false claims about the coronavirus vaccines.

The internet giant said in a blog post that the feature would first be rolled out in the UK, where people started vaccinating people with the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech.

The feature will be rolled out in other countries once they start approving vaccines.

Google has been updating its platforms for several months with features that display Covid-related data from governments and health agencies such as the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control to combat misinformation about the virus.

The YouTube video sharing service launched so-called knowledge panels on the virus back in March and is said to have been viewed 400 billion times. YouTube updated its guidelines in October to remove videos that made false claims about coronavirus vaccines.

A screenshot with Google’s new knowledge boards on coronavirus vaccine search results.

Ryan Browne | CNBC

It’s not clear how effective bulletin boards are in preventing internet users from believing misinformation about coronavirus. Fake conspiracy theories about the disease have spread like wildfire across social media platforms this year.

Tackling misinformation about the vaccines will be a mammoth task for tech giants like Google, Facebook and Twitter as governments around the world seek to immunize people against the disease.

Last week, Facebook announced it was removing false claims about Covid vaccines. This is part of his policy on posts that could result in “imminent physical harm”. Twitter has yet to say whether it will ban such posts.

Aside from introducing new features, Google announced on Thursday that it was earmarking $ 1.5 million to fund fact-checking research and create a hub for journalists to give them access to “scientific expertise and research updates.” to facilitate vaccines.