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Buffalo Teens Killed in Car Crash Connected to TikTok Trend
The Kia Challenge is a concerning social media trend that sees participants attempting to hijack the namesake car using a USB cable. The edgy challenge has turned tragic as the aftermath of a failed attempt in Buffalo left four teenagers dead.
The Kia Challenge is/was a social media trend on the video-sharing app TikTok that instructed participants on how to steal a Kia using nothing more than a USB cable or phone charger. What could go wrong? Well, a car crash in upstate New York left four teenagers dead and one hospitalized may be tied to the viral trend.
According to reporting from Insider, six teens in Buffalo appear to have tried their hands at the Kia Challenge, where users are encouraged to hijack newer Kia models with a USB cable to start the ignition. The group of teens got into a car accident on Route 33 in Buffalo on October 24 that led to four deaths, one hospitalization and one relatively minor injury.
Buffalo Police commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said in a media briefing on Monday that this incident is connected to the Kia Challenge.
Italy to End Ban on Health Workers Not Vaccinated Against COVID
Italian doctors and nurses suspended from work because they are not vaccinated against COVID-19 will soon be reinstated, new Health Minister Orazio Schillaci said on Friday.
The move is motivated by a worrying shortage of medical personnel together with declining cases of COVID-19. The new government will also cancel fines imposed on all people aged over 50 who had not gotten vaccinated, he added.
Former prime minister Mario Draghi’s government made vaccination mandatory for teachers and health workers in 2021 and extended that to everyone over 50 in January this year.
A refusal resulted in a suspension from work without pay for public employees, while those aged over 50 faced fines of 100 euros ($99.5).
Justice Alito Discusses ‘Pretty Abysmal,’ ‘Disgraceful’ Free Speech Situation at Colleges, Law Schools
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito recently discussed the reality of free speech on college campuses and law schools, pointing to the disturbing culture surrounding the lack of free dialogue.
During a discussion at the Heritage Foundation, Alito was asked about the situation on college campuses, as well as law schools, regarding freedom of speech. He said it is “pretty abysmal,” “disgraceful” and “really dangerous for our future as a united, democratic country.”
“We depend on freedom of speech,” Alito said. “Colleges and universities should be setting the example, and law schools should be setting the example for the university because our adversary system is based on the principle that the best way to get at the truth is to have a strong presentation of opposing views. So, law schools should be free to speak their minds without worrying about the consequences, and they should have their ideas tested in rational debating.”
Amazon Quietly Gave $400,000 to Conservative Nonprofit That Opposed New Antitrust Legislation
Amazon quietly donated $400,000 to a conservative nonprofit last year as the group pushed back on antitrust bills being considered in Congress, according to documents reviewed by CNBC.
The Independent Women’s Forum received the six-figure contribution from the e-commerce giant in 2021, the same year the group wrote columns speaking out against bills that could strengthen antitrust enforcement.
Last February, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., introduced a bill that proposed to increase the budget of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission, both of which have looked into whether big technology companies compete fairly.
Days later, the Independent Women’s Forum published a column with the headline “Sen. Klobuchar’s New Bill: A Dangerous Signal for Big Tech.” In the article, a director at the group, Patrice Onwuka, name-checks Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon, and suggests the type of legislation could hurt consumers and raves about the tech giants. “Big Tech is tremendously beneficial to consumers, small businesses, students and voters,” Onwuka wrote.
‘No Plans’ to Mandate COVID Vaccine in Minnesota Schools
Minnesota’s health commissioner won’t seek to require COVID-19 vaccination for school attendance, even if federal authorities add it to the recommended pediatric immunization schedule.
A statement Thursday by the Minnesota Department of Health clarified the state’s position, following last week’s vote by the federal Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to add the COVID-19 vaccine to the schedule. While the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has yet to sign off on the recommendation, several states had already announced their intentions.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul Calls on Parents to Remask Their Children
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-N.Y.) on Wednesday urged parents in the state to prepare for the colder weather months and remask their toddlers to protect them from respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infections.
“We’re not mandating this, but we’re saying, parents, you know, you got other kids, you got kids in school, preschool and you got a baby at home, you really might just want to take these extra precautions,” Hochul said at a news conference on Oct. 26.
The Democrat governor stated RSV “does hit younger children,” arguing the practice of wearing masks has been normalized by now and children are “socialized to the idea” anyway.
Hochul failed to mention that since the COVID-19 pandemic and the government’s enforcement of mask mandates, numerous medical professionals and studies have indicated that masking children does more harm than good.
Shanghai District Orders Mass COVID Testing, Lockdown
China’s largest city of Shanghai is ordering mass testing Friday of all 1.3 million residents of its downtown Yangpu district and confining them to their homes at least until the results are known.
The demand is an echo of measures ordered over the summer that led to a two-month lockdown of the entire city of 25 million that devastated its economy, prompting food shortages and rare confrontations between residents and the authorities.
At the start of the lockdown, authorities said it would last just days but then kept extending the deadline.
Strict measures have been imposed across the country, from Shanghai in the east to Tibet far to the west, where anti-lockdown protests have also been reported.
Elon Musk Now in Charge of Twitter, CEO and CFO Have Left, Sources Say
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is now in charge of Twitter, CNBC has learned.
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and finance chief Ned Segal have left the company’s San Francisco headquarters and will not be returning, sources said. Vijaya Gadde, the head of legal policy, trust and safety, was also fired, The Washington Post reported.
The billionaire tweeted “the bird is freed” in an apparent reference to the takeover being completed.
Advocacy Group Calls on Regulators to Investigate ByteDance’s Plans to Use TikTok to Surveil U.S. Citizens
Public Citizen, a prominent progressive advocacy group, has sent a letter to 10 legislative leaders, the Federal Trade Commission and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to inquire about a Forbes report revealing that a team at TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, planned to monitor the physical location of specific U.S. citizens.
“Unauthorized location monitoring is one of the most invasive and insidious data practices imaginable,” wrote Public Citizen president Robert Weissman. “From this information, it can be determined where we live, where we work, where we pray, what type of healthcare we seek and much more.”
The Forbes report, which relied on internal TikTok and ByteDance materials, found that in at least two cases, ByteDance’s Internal Audit and Risk Control department had planned to collect TikTok data about the location of U.S. citizens who had never been employed by the company. It was not clear from the materials whether data about these citizens were ever actually collected.
Public Citizen is now asking the government entities to use their full investigatory authority to determine “[e]xactly what individually targeted surveillance practices ByteDance and/or TikTok have employed, considered employing or developed the capacity to undertake.”
Some TikTok Users Are Receiving $167 Checks Over Data Privacy Violations — and Google and Snapchat Could Be Next
This week, TikTok users across the country who created videos on the app before September 30, 2021, began receiving payments between $27.84 and $167.04 following a $92 million class-action data privacy settlement with the social media platform.
The largest checks went to short- and long-term residents of Illinois, where TikTok was sued for violating the state’s strict biometric data laws by collecting and implementing facial recognition data into its algorithms without user consent.
Not everyone who uses TikTok in the U.S. is getting a check because a comparable federal law doesn’t currently exist. But the lawsuit “asserted a variety of common law and other types of claims” in state and local courts to maximize the number of people who could get a payout, Katrina Carroll, a founding partner at Lynch Carpenter LLP and one of the case’s co-lead prosecutors, tells CNBC Make It.
Up to 89 million people qualified to submit a claim, according to the settlement.
This isn’t the first time TikTok has come under fire for exploiting user privacy: In 2019, it agreed to pay $5.7 million to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations of illegally collecting and storing the personal information of minors.
‘Media Literacy’ Advocates Push to Create Savvier Consumers of News and Information
The Instagram headline was pithy and alarming: “Head of Pfizer Research: COVID Vaccine is Female Sterilization.” And the report, from a murky source, could have had real-world consequences, coming in 2020, just as the U.S. rolled out the first vaccines to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
That made the story a perfect tool for an educator trying to teach high school students how to separate fact from fiction — a survival skill in a culture drowning in a tsunami of information.
Jamie Gregory told the 12th-graders in her seventh-period journalism class to examine the article. But, using lessons from a nonprofit called the News Literacy Project, they understood the best way to get to the truth was not to read deeply into the suspect story but to check it by shifting away to other sources.
Gregory is one of a growing number of teachers, librarians, counselors and other educators who are teaching students media literacy — skills like discerning advertising from unpaid content, recognizing the difference between news and commentary and separating unbiased sources from those with ties to industry or political groups.
