Twitter CEO Elon Musk has branded the New York Times “unreadable propaganda” after the newspaper refused to pay for verification. Earlier, Twitter began removing its iconic blue checkmarks from accounts that had received the badge before Musk’s subscription system was introduced.
Twitter announced last month that, as of Saturday, it would begin removing “legacy verified checkmarks” from accounts that were verified before Musk announced his subscription system last year. The New York Times declared on Thursday that it would not pay the $1,000 per month required of businesses, or reimburse its employees for signing up for Twitter’s $8 per month personal plan.
The New York Times’ @nytimes account lost its checkmark on Saturday, meaning its tweets will no longer show up in the ‘for you’ tab, the default timeline where Twitter users see content from accounts they follow.
Tweeting on Saturday, Musk suggested that the vanishing of Tweets from the Times would be no great loss for most users.
“The real tragedy of @NYTimes is that their propaganda isn’t even interesting,” the billionaire declared. “Also, their feed is the Twitter equivalent of diarrhea. It’s unreadable.”
“They would have far more real followers if they only posted their top articles,” Musk continued, adding that the “same applies to all publications.”
The New York Times is one of a number of US newspapers and news outlets boycotting the paid verification system. The White House is also refusing to pay for blue checkmarks for its staffers, according to a report by Axios on Friday.
Musk purchased Twitter for $44 billion last October, promising a host of reforms that would roll back the platform’s censorship policies and make it a “digital town square” for free and open debate.
While he has restored hundreds of previously banned accounts – including that of former US President Donald Trump – and relaxed Twitter’s content moderation rules, he has simultaneously struggled to boost the platform’s declining revenue.
Despite Musk rolling out paid subscriptions and firing around three quarters of Twitter’s staff, the company is currently worth half of what Musk paid for it last year, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Musk has previously clashed with the New York Times and suspended reporter for the paper, Ryan Mac, in December for sharing information about the billionaire’s whereabouts.
"Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not," Musk tweeted at the time.
In multiple tweets early on Sunday morning he said the publication was guilty of publishing boring 'propaganda' and said its feed was like 'diarrhea' because it put out too many tweets
The real tragedy of @NYTimes is that their propaganda isn’t even interesting
The Times' primary account has 54.9 million followers on Twitter and is the most prominent account thus far to lose its gold institutional verification.
For a business on Twitter to be verified with a gold checkmark it is required to pay $1,000 each month. For individual users the cost is $8 per month.
Musk extended his criticism of how the Times runs its Twitter feed to other publications as well. '[The Times] would have far more real followers if they only posted their top articles. Same applies to all publications,' he said.
He may have been referring to the way in which it posts dozens of times to its Twitter page every day. On Saturday its main account @nytimes put out around 80 tweets in a single day.
The tweets almost always contain links to stories on its website, a widely adopted practice among digital publications to direct traffic onto their sites.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has told US Secretary of State Antony Blinken that it is up to court to decide about the future of The Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich who was detained on espionage charges in Russia, the Russian foreign ministry said on Sunday after their telephone conversation.
"In light of the established evidence of the US national’s illegal activities, his future will be determined by court. The American embassy in Moscow was duly notified about his detention," the ministry said.
"In the context of the discussion of the issue of the detention of US national Gershkovich in Russia on suspicion of espionage, which was raised by the Secretary of State, Blinken’s attention was drawn to the necessity to respect the Russian authorities’ decision made in conformity with law and Russia’s international commitments," the ministry said.
"Lavrov stressed that Gershkovich had been detained red-handed when he was receiving secret data and was collecting data constituting a state secret acting under the guise of a journalist’s status."
The Russian top diplomat also told his US counterparts that it is inadmissible to fan hysteria around the journalist’s arrest. "It was stressed that it is inadmissible for Washington officials and Western mass media to stir up hysteria with an obvious aim of giving a political overtone to this case," the ministry said.
According to the ministry, Lavrov and Blinken also touched upon several other bilateral matters.
The call was initiated by the US side.
Lavrov and Blinken had a ten-minute meeting on the sidelines of the Group of Twenty meeting in New Delhi. According to the Russian minister, the meeting was quite constructive. The topics included the situation in the sphere of strategic stability in the context of the New START treaty and Ukraine.
The Public Relations Center of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said earlier that Evan Gershkovich, "acting at the behest of the American side, collected information constituting a state secret about the activities of an enterprise within Russia’s military-industrial complex."
The reporter was detained in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg. The FSB investigators opened a criminal case against the US citizen under Article 276 of the Russian Criminal Code ("Espionage"). On March 30, Moscow’s Lefortovo district court sanctioned Gershkovich’s arrest until May 29.
In light of this, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published a statement expressing deep concern for the safety of Gershkovich. According to the WSJ, Gershkovich covers Russia from his post at the newspaper’s Moscow bureau.
Washington should respect decisions made by the Russian authorities in accordance with the nation’s own laws and international obligations, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Sunday. The two discussed the arrest of Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich, who was charged with espionage in Russia earlier this week.
Gershkovich was “caught red handed” trying to obtain state secrets under the guise of journalism, Lavrov told Blinken in a phone call, the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement. Moscow also informed the US Embassy about his arrest “through an established procedure,” the statement added.
Russia considers it unacceptable that Washington officials and the US media are trying to hype this case and portray it as political, the foreign minister said.
Blinken “conveyed the United States’ grave concern over Russia’s unacceptable detention of a U.S. citizen journalist” and called for his immediate release, the State Department said in a statement, adding that the two officials also discussed ways of creating “an environment that permits diplomatic missions to carry out their work.” Moscow only noted that issues related to bilateral ties were discussed.
On Thursday, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) reported that it had detained Gershkovich as he was allegedly trying to obtain classified information about a defense plant located in the Russian Urals. The FSB also said he is now suspected of espionage, a crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
Following the arrest, the WSJ demanded that all Russian journalists and the country’s envoy be expelled from the US, saying it is the “minimum to expect” in this case. It also accused the administration of President Joe Biden of showing weakness, and called for a tougher response. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov ridiculed the WSJ’s demand as “absurd and wrong.”
A Silicon Valley Bank branch in San Francisco last month. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News)
Flush with cash from a booming tech industry, Silicon Valley Bank executives embarked on a strategy in 2020 to juice profits that quickly triggered an internal alarm.
In buying longer-term investments that paid more interest, SVB had fallen out of compliance with a key risk metric. An internal model showed that higher interest rates could have a devastating impact on the bank’s future earnings, according to two former employees familiar with the modeling who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe confidential deliberations.
Instead of heeding that warning — and over the concerns of some staffers — SVB executives simply changed the model’s assumptions, according to the former employees and securities filings. The tweaks, which have not been previously reported, initially predicted that rising interest rates would have minimal impact.
The new assumptions validated SVB’s profit-driven strategy, but they were profoundly misplaced. Over the past year, interest rates have climbed nearly five percentage points, the fastest pace since the 1980s. Meanwhile, the tech industry has entered a post-pandemic swoon, causing SVB’s elite clientele to withdraw cash far faster than bank executives had expected.
On March 8, the bank was forced to raise additional cash by selling securities at a $1.8 billion loss. That touched off panic among SVB clients, who staged one of the biggest bank runs in U.S. history. Fanned by social media, depositors tried to withdraw $42 billion in a single day. The next morning, the bank collapsed and federal regulators took control.
The episode shows that executives knew early on that higher interest rates could jeopardize the bank’s future earnings. Instead of shifting course to mitigate that risk, they doubled down on a strategy to deliver near-term profits, displaying an appetite for risk that set the stage for SVB’s stunning meltdown.
“Management always wanted to tell a growth story,” one former employee involved in the bank’s risk management said. “Every quarter, there was always this pressure to deliver earnings.”
The new revelations come as lawmakers and regulators review what a senior Federal Reserve official called a “textbook case of mismanagement” leading to the nation’s second-largest bank failure. Much of their focus will turn to the arcane world of managing interest-rate risk.
SVB’s new projections took effect last year and assumed that cash flow from deposits would stay consistent for longer, softening the projected bite of higher interest rates. Before changing the model, a 2 percent interest-rate hike would drop a measure of future cash flows by more than 27 percent; afterward, the hit was less than five percent, according to the bank’s securities filings.
Pushing for the change in assumptions was Dan Beck, SVB’s chief financial officer, according to one former employee, and it was approved by the bank’s Asset Liability Management Committee, which manages interest-rate risk, both former employees said. The change made several mid-level bank officials uncomfortable, one person said, though there was historical data on deposits to support it.
Efforts to contact Beck were unsuccessful, and lawyers representing him in a lawsuit didn’t respond to requests for comment. Efforts to contact Michael Kruse, who headed the bank’s Asset Liability Management Committee, according to the former employees, were also unsuccessful.
One of the former employees said changing assumptions about interest-rate risk were shared with federal and state regulators in late 2021 or 2022.
An official at the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation said it could not comment on “confidential supervisory information.”
Michael Barr, the Fed’s vice chair for supervision, testified to a Senate committee Tuesday that its supervisory team cited the bank for “ineffective board oversight” and “risk management weaknesses” in May. A Federal reserve spokesman declined to comment beyond those public statements.
SVB was a financial pillar of Silicon Valley start-ups, lending money to companies with untested business models but high potential for growth. As SVB prospered alongside the start-ups it aided, top executives increasingly thought of themselves as part of the industry they served and prioritized highflying returns, according to current and former employees. For a time, they succeeded: The stock price of SVB Financial Group, the bank’s holding company, tripled in less than two years as deposits grew at breakneck speed.
Greg Becker, SVB’s chief executive, was given to enthusiastic pronouncements on the prospects of start-ups and tech firms, even in recent downtimes. He saw himself as more venture capitalist than banker, according to some who know him.
“He thinks about taking some risks to make effective investments in companies, which is not how banks normally do them,” a longtime venture capitalist who often dealt with Becker said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships in the Silicon Valley finance world. “It’s fair to say he was more focused on the upside than risk management.”
A spokesman for Becker declined to comment for this article.
SVB’s rapid growth during the early years of the pandemic created several stresses. The bank had to invest a mountain of customer cash at a time of rock-bottom interest rates. To maximize its return, the company purchased longer-term mortgage and government-backed securities that pay higher interest than the bank passed on to its depositors, allowing it to show sparkling financial performance every quarter for two years.
In an apparent bet that interest rates would go down last fall, SVB sold for a profit the financial instruments it used to hedge against the risk of higher rates, according to a company presentation. Instead, the opposite happened: The Federal Reserve began to raise interest rates more aggressively last summer to tamp down inflation. That reduced the value of SVB’s securities portfolio, meaning the bank would take a loss if it had to sell.
“They thought they could never go wrong,” said a former bank official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal business practices, recalling an internal stress test in late 2018 or 2019 that showed SVB could lose at least a third of its deposits over two years. Executives directed that that model also be reworked. “If they see a model they don’t like,” the official said, “they scrap it.”
Kate Mitchell, a venture capitalist and chair of the SVB board’s risk committee, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
In an apparent bet that interest rates would go down last fall, SVB sold for a profit the financial instruments it used to hedge against the risk of higher rates, according to a company presentation.
Instead, the opposite happened: The Federal Reserve began to raise interest rates more aggressively last summer to tamp down inflation. That reduced the value of SVB’s securities portfolio, meaning the bank would take a loss if it had to sell.
“They thought they could never go wrong,” said a former bank official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal business practices, recalling an internal stress test in late 2018 or 2019 that showed SVB could lose at least a third of its deposits over two years. Executives directed that that model also be reworked. “If they see a model they don’t like,” the official said, “they scrap it.”
Kate Mitchell, a venture capitalist and chair of the SVB board’s risk committee, didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The behavior of customers depositing money is a key variable that banks use in developing risk models. One metric, closely tracked by banks and their examiners, estimates future cash flows and how sensitive they are to changes in interest rates. It was this metric, called the economic value of equity, that triggered a warning in mid-2020, according to the former employees.
SVB hired a consultant, Curinos, to review its interest-rate risk model, according to the former employees. The bank first disclosed the review of its model in May and finalized the change in the second quarter of 2022. But by the end of the year, SVB left out the economic value of equity — which it had reported for a decade — from its public interest-rate analysis.
Curinos declined to comment on whether it did any work for SVB, adding in a statement that the company works with banks and “routinely analyzes customer behavior to assess the likelihood that their balances will change based on different stimuli, such as interest rates.”
In catering to start-ups and tech companies, the bank had fewer customers than most banks its size. At the end of last year, 93.8 percent of SVB’s deposits were above Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. limits and thus uninsured, the highest proportion among large U.S. banks, according to S&P Global. That made it more exposed to the risk of customers pulling their money, some felt.
In April 2022, SVB parted ways with its chief risk officer of nearly six years, Laura Izurieta. The bank said that it “initiated discussions with Ms. Izurieta about a transition” in early 2022 and that she stayed on to help with “transition-related duties” until October. SVB didn’t disclose this until March 3, when a securities filing revealed it didn’t hire a new chief risk officer until late December.
Izurieta didn’t respond to requests for comment.
As late as July, Beck, the company’s chief financial officer, said on an earnings call that “we’re still well positioned to the upside for higher rates.” But pressure was mounting on SVB as interest rates rose faster than the company had expected.
When the company filed its quarterly earnings report the following month, it revealed that its long-term securities — accounting for about 45 percent of its total assets — had an unrealized loss of $11.2 billion, up dramatically from a $1.3 billion unrealized loss just six months earlier. Three months later, unrealized losses totaled nearly $16 billion.
Compounding SVB’s troubles, the bank was paying higher interest to keep customers from pulling their money while borrowing at higher rates.
By the end of 2022, SVB’s deposits were costing the bank almost twice as much as the median among a group of peers, according to Moody’s.
Some on Wall Street were also taking notice. Chris Kotowski, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co., downgraded SVB’s stock from buy to hold last September after the bank indicated its income from interest payments was under pressure.
“That just set the alarm bells off for me,” Kotowski said.
With SVB’s income squeezed by higher deposit and borrowing costs, investors soured on its stock, prompting executives to make their case to Wall street analysts.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. analysts hosted a webinar last November with Beck, SVB’s chief financial officer, who addressed investor concerns over nearly two hours, according to a research note the bank sent to clients. The analysts concluded that the downturn in deposits was manageable and SVB had ample liquidity without having to sell securities at a loss “even if a worst case scenario plays out.” As late as January, JPMorgan forecast a turnaround for SVB and recommended clients buy the stock.
A week before the bank failed, in its annual report to shareholders, SVB praised its top executives for an area of achievement: managing risk.
Becker, the CEO, had displayed “strong leadership of the continued evolution of risk management.” Beck, the CFO, was credited for “promotion of a strong risk culture.”
Saudi Aramco engineers and journalists look at the Hawiyah Natural Gas Liquids Recovery Plant in Hawiyah, in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia on June 28, 2021. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil, File)
Saudi Arabia said Sunday it will cut oil production by 500,000 barrels per day from May until the end of 2023, a move that could raise prices worldwide.
Higher oil prices would help fill Russian President Vladimir Putin's coffers as his country wages war on Ukraine and force Americans and others to pay even higher prices at the pump amid inflation fueled in part by that conflict.
It was also likely to further strain ties with the United States, which has called on Saudi Arabia and other allies to increase production as it tries to bring prices down and squeeze Russia's finances.
The Saudi Energy Ministry said the cuts would be made in coordination with some OPEC and non-OPEC members, without naming them. The cuts are in addition to a reduction announced last October that infuriated the Biden administration.
The ministry described the move as a “precautionary measure” aimed at stabilizing the oil market. The cuts represent less than 5% of Saudi Arabia's average production of 11.5 million barrels per day in 2022.
The earlier cuts — of some 2 million barrels a day — had come on the eve of U.S. midterm elections in which soaring prices were a major issue. President Joe Biden vowed at the time that there would be “consequences” and Democratic lawmakers called for freezing cooperation with the Saudis.
Both the U.S. and Saudi Arabia denied any political motives in the dispute, with each saying it was focused on maintaining a healthy market price.
Since those cuts, oil prices have actually trended down. Brent crude, a global benchmark, was trading at around $80 a barrel at the end of last week, down from around $95 a barrel in early October, when the earlier cuts were agreed.
Saudi Arabia's state-run oil giant Aramco recently announced record profits of $161 billion from last year. Profits rose 46.5% when compared to the company’s 2021 results of $110 billion. Aramco said it hoped to boost production to 13 million barrels a day by 2027.
The decades-long U.S.-Saudi alliance has come under growing strain in recent years following the 2018 killing of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S.-based journalist, and Saudi Arabia's disastrous war with the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.
As a candidate for president, Biden had vowed to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” over the Khashoggi killing, but as oil prices rose after his inauguration he backed off. He visited the kingdom last July in a bid to patch up relations, drawing criticism for sharing a fistbump with Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Saudi Arabia has denied siding with Russia in the Ukraine war, even as it has cultivated closer ties with both Moscow and Beijing in recent years, unnerving its longtime allies in Washington. Last week, Aramco announced billions of dollars of investment in China's downstream petrochemicals industry.
Since those cuts, oil prices have actually trended down. Brent crude, a global benchmark, was trading at around $80 a barrel at the end of last week, down from around $95 a barrel in early October, when the earlier cuts were agreed.
Saudi Arabia’s state-run oil giant Aramco recently announced record profits of $161 billion from last year.
Profits rose 46.5% when compared to the company’s 2021 results of $110 billion. Aramco said it hoped to boost production to 13 million barrels a day by 2027.
Tunggal putri Indonesia Gregoria Mariska Tunjung
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Tunggal putri Indonesia sukses mengharumkan Indonesia di Eropa, Gregoria Mariska Tunjung, tampil trengginas taklukkan wakil India, Shindu, pada final Spain Masters 2023 atau Spanyol Masters 2023, di Madrid, Spanyol.
Gregoria menjalani laga puncak turnamen level super 300 ini dengan menghadapi wakil India Pusarla Venkata (PV) Sindhu, hari Minggu, 02/04/2023.
Berlaga di Centro Deportivo Municipal Gallur, Madrid, Spanyol, Gregoria menang dua gim langsung dengan skor telak 21-8, 21-8 dalam tempo 29 menit.
Kemenangan dengan skor kembar ini membuat pemain asal Wonogiri, Jawa Tengah itu menorehkan gelar juara pertamanya dalam turnamen world tour BWF.
Selain itu, hasil ini menjadi kemenangan pertama Gregoria atas PV Sindhu setelah dalam tujuh laga sebelumnya selalu menelan kekalahan.
Gregoria tampil dengan tenang pada pertandingan yang menjadi pertemuan kedelapannya kontra ratu bulutangkis terkaya sejagat tersebut. Kali ini Gregoria bisa mengendalikan pukulan dan ritme sejak awal gim.
Berbekal keunggulan 11-7, poin Gregoria terus meroket berkat perolehan enam poin beruntun menjadi 17-7. Meski sudah unggul jauh, namun Gregoria tetap tenang dan enggan terburu-buru mematikan lawannya.
Sementara itu, Sindhu hanya bisa menambah satu poin yang datang dari kesalahan Gregoria, setelah pukulannya membuat kok jatuh bersebelahan dengan garis lapangan.
Setelah kehilangan satu poin, Gregoria lagi-lagi mencetak empat poin sehingga menyudahi perlawanan Sindhu dengan 21-8.
Gregoria masih mempertahankan konsistensinya pada gim kedua, dengan menikmati permainan dan sabar dalam memberikan reli-reli kepada Sindhu
Daya tahan Gregoria juga patut diacungi jempol karena mampu bermain secara sabar dan meladeni reli yang diberikan lawannya. Kesabaran tersebut menjadi keunggulan Gregoria, sehingga dia bisa meraih keunggulan secara efektif. Saat Gregoria mencapai interval dengan 11 poin, Sindhu masih tertinggal jauh hanya dengan mencatatkan tiga poin.
Situasi tersebut membuat Sindhu semakin tertekan dan justru menciptakan blunder. Dia kerap memaksa melakukan pengembalian yang sulit, yang justru berakhir dengan eror berupa pukulan yang melenceng dari lapangan.
Gregoria semakin menampilkan dominasinya di lapangan, bahkan kembali merebut poin beruntun sebanyak enam kali menjadi unggul 18-4.
Tak butuh waktu lama bagi Gregoria untuk mencapai match point terlebih dulu, sementara Sindhu masih terjebak dengan delapan poin dan tak punya peluang untuk mengejar ketertinggalan.
Satu poin penentu kemenangan Gregoria tercipta setelah Sindhu membuat kesalahan, ketika kok pengembaliannya justru membentur net, yang sekaligus menandai kemenangan perdana bagi wakil Indonesia atas Sindhu dari delapan pertemuan yang pernah dimainkan.
"Saya sempat flu di Swiss Open dan di Spain Masters ini paha saya mulai kencang ototnya, seperti tertarik. Tapi saya coba fokus berpikir satu-satu saja," ucap Gregoria.
Meski tampil dengan otot paha yang bermasalah, namun Gregoria tetap berhasil tampil luar biasa di sepanjang kejuaraan ini.
"Gelar juara ini untuk semua yang dukung saya sampai hari ini. Juara ini juga menjadi arti yang besar buat saya, saya sempat sangat terpuruk tapi Puji Tuhan bisa melewati itu dan bangkit lagi," ucap Gregoria.
Fakta terakhir dari penampilan Gregoria di final Spain Masters 2023 adalah sejarah baru yang diukir dalam kariernya. Pasalnya, ini jadi gelar juara pertama bagi Gregoria di ajang BWF World Tour.
