Good morning.
Elon Musk has completed his takeover of Twitter, taking control of the company and reportedly firing several top executives, including the chief executive, Parag Agrawal.
The world’s richest person plans to assume the role of chief executive at the social media group, on an interim basis at least, after completing his $44bn acquisition, on top of leading the electric carmaker Tesla and the spacecraft manufacturer SpaceX, Bloomberg is reporting this morning.
Shortly after taking the helm of Twitter, Musk reportedly ousted several senior figures, including Agrawal; Ned Segal, the chief financial officer; and Vijaya Gadde, the head of legal policy, trust and safety. Agrawal and Segal were in Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters when the deal closed and were escorted out, Reuters reported.
The completion of the deal caps a chaotic saga that began when the billionaire first announced his plans to purchase the company in April.
Why did Musk buy Twitter? He said in a statement: “The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is important to the future of civilisation to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence. That is why I bought Twitter. I didn’t do it because it would be easy. I didn’t do it to make more money. I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love.”
What will he do with the social media platform? Expect concerns about freedom of speech to be addressed, costs to be cut, revenues to be raised and bot accounts to be tackled. Oh, and Donald Trump might be allowed back on.
Biden sceptical of Putin claim to have no intention of using nuclear weapon
Joe Biden expressed scepticism yesterday about Vladimir Putin‘s comment that he had no intention of using a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, Reuters reports.
In a speech earlier in the day, the Russian president played down a nuclear standoff with the west, insisting Russia had not threatened to use nuclear weapons and had only responded to nuclear “blackmail” from western leaders.
“If he has no intention, why does he keep talking about it? Why is he talking about the ability to use a tactical nuclear weapon?” Biden said in an interview with NewsNation.
“He’s been very dangerous in how he’s approached this,” Biden said.
Putin and other Russian officials have repeatedly said in recent weeks that Russia could use nuclear weapons to protect its territorial integrity, remarks interpreted in the west as implicit threats to use them to defend parts of Ukraine that Russia claims to have annexed.
What else is happening in Ukraine? Here’s what we know on day 247 of the invasion.
Republican senator Tom Cotton brags in new book about ignoring Trump impeachment evidence
In January 2020, the rightwing Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton said he would vote to acquit Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial because, despite senators having “heard from 17 witnesses … and received more than 28,000 pages of documents”, Democrats had not presented their case correctly.
According to Cotton, the senators who sat through so much evidence would “perform the role intended for us by the founders, of providing the ‘cool and deliberate sense of the community’, as it says in Federalist 63”.
In a new book, however, Cotton boasts that he spent his time refusing to pay attention – pretending to read materials relevant to the president’s trial – but hiding his real reading matter under a fake cover.
He writes: “My aides delivered a steady flow of papers and photocopied books, hidden underneath a fancy cover sheet labeled ‘Supplementary Impeachment Materials’, so nosy reporters sitting above us in the Senate gallery couldn’t see what I was reading. They probably would’ve reported that I wasn’t paying attention to the trial.”
Is Cotton someone to watch? He is now among senators, governors and former members of the Trump administration jostling for position in the developing contest for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. Publishing a book is a traditional preparatory step.
In other news …
Fears are growing that Jair Bolsonaro could refuse to accept defeat in Brazil’s crunch election this Sunday after his son, a senator, claimed Brazil’s far-right president was the victim of “the greatest electoral fraud ever seen” amid unproven allegations of foul play.
Republicans have resurrected an old and tired battle cry before the US midterm elections. Over the last several weeks, Republicans have increased their spending on crime-related messaging, blanketing the airwaves with television ads that cast Democrats as “dangerously liberal” and “soft on crime”.
The Syrian intelligence officer at the centre of one of the most shocking acts of the civil war – the Tadamon massacre – is still working on a military base outside Damascus and has since been accused by colleagues of directing up to a dozen more mass killings.
Japan is looking into buying US-developed Tomahawk cruise missiles as it seeks to counter growing regional threats, including from North Korea, the government has said. Any purchase would probably prove to be controversial in a nation where the military is not officially recognised under its post-second world war constitution.
Stat of the day: Americans die younger in states run by conservatives, study finds
Americans die younger in conservative states than in those governed by liberals, a study has found. The authors wrote: “Simulations indicate that changing all policy domains in all states to a fully liberal orientation might have saved 171,030 lives in 2019, while changing them to a fully conservative orientation might have cost 217,635 lives.” The study was published on Plos One, “an inclusive journal community working together to advance science for the benefit of society, now and in the future”.
Don’t miss this: Get-rich-quick schemes drained my town’s wealth. At a Christian conference, their legacy lives on
Life Surge follows a long tradition of evangelists offering financial advice through the lens of morality and the supernatural, writes Josiah Hesse. The Iowa farming community I grew up in during the 80s and 90s was steeped in these institutions, which vampirically drained my family and community’s economic momentum. We were told that our financial success or failure was directly tied to our Christian morality. While we remained poor, my parents gave an estimated $100,000 to our church over many years. These teachings often find the most success in economically impoverished communities and developing countries.
… or this: ‘It’s become a real monster!’ How Britain fell for Halloween
When I first took my children out trick-or-treating in London – about 20 years ago – nobody was making much of an effort. As an American, I was disappointed; there were a few pumpkins on doorsteps, but the lack of enthusiasm for the whole enterprise was palpable. Most people seemed to have no idea it was Halloween. I watched one man chase the children who rang his bell down the road with a stick. It was the wrong sort of scary. Two decades later, Halloween is a very different holiday. Love it or loathe it, fright night is bigger than ever in the UK – and consumers are spending a scary amount.
Climate check: World close to ‘irreversible’ climate breakdown, warn major studies
The climate crisis has reached a “really bleak moment”, one of the world’s leading climate scientists has said, after a slew of major reports laid bare how close the planet is to catastrophe. One report, by the UN environment agency found there was “no credible pathway to 1.5C in place”. Collective action by the world’s nations is needed more now than at any point since the second world war to avoid climate tipping points, Prof Johan Rockström said, but geopolitical tensions are high. He said the world was coming “very, very close to irreversible changes … time is really running out very, very fast”.
Last Thing: Bumblebees get a buzz out of playing with balls, study finds
Bumblebees are associated with lives of work rather than play, but for the first time researchers have observed the insects playing with balls for enjoyment, just like people and dogs. A team of UK scientists watched bumblebees interacting with inanimate objects as a form of play and said the findings added to growing evidence that their minds are more complex than previously imagined. Lars Chittka, a professor of sensory and behavioural ecology at Queen Mary University of London, said bees were “a million miles from the mindless, unfeeling creatures they are traditionally believed to be”.
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