WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Pentagon is tracking a suspected Chinese spy balloon which has been flying over the United States, U.S. officials said on Thursday, a spy-movie like intelligence collection method that recalls the lengths to which Beijing and Washington are willing to go to spy on each other amid increased tensions.

“Clearly the intent of this balloon is for surveillance,” a senior U.S. defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said.

The official said that Washington had been tracking the balloon since it entered U.S. airspace a couple of days ago, including by observing it with manned U.S. military aircraft.

Senior U.S. military leaders considered shooting down the spy balloon over Montana but eventually recommended against it because of the potential safety risk from debris.

Google parent Alphabet warns that more cuts are coming in its four-quarter earnings report.

Leonardo Munoz/VIEWpress

• Google warned that more cuts could be coming in its 2022 Q4 earnings report. 
• It expects to spend $500 billion to reduce office space and up to $2.3 billion in severance packages.
• The cuts come just weeks after Google announced that its laying off 12,000 employees. 

Google just warned that more cuts could be on the way after a year when it’s already slashed jobs and other spending.

Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat of its parent company, Alphabet, didn’t detail the possible cuts in the company’s fourth-quarter earnings report, but what she telegraphed was clear.

“We have significant work underway to improve all aspects of our cost structure in support of our investments in our highest growth priorities to deliver long-term, profitable growth,” she said. 

Alphabet’s possible cuts come just weeks after Google announced that it will lay off 12,0000 employees as part of its measures to trim costs amid challenging economic conditions.

And the cost-cutting hint comes after big tech companies like Meta and Twitter laid off thousands of workers and eliminated lavish perks in an effort to save money, signaling that more cuts loom across the tech industry.

Meanwhile, Google could be paring back its office footprint even further than it already has, the company said.

Google said that it expects to incur costs in 2023 of $500 million to reduce office space. And as for job cuts, the company said it expects to pay between $1.9 billion to $2.3 billion in employee severance packages in just the first quarter alone.

CEO of Alphabet and Google Sundar Pichai in Warsaw, Poland on March 29, 2022.

Mateusz Wlodarczyk/NurPhoto via Getty Images

 

• Alphabet said in its Q4 earnings press release that it will begin disclosing investments in AI. 
• The move signals the increasing importance of AI to the search giant. 
• Q4 earnings showed a slowdown in revenue growth from the previous year. 

Google parent company Alphabet announced in its Q4 earnings report that it will make a change in how it discloses its investments in artificial intelligence going forward.

Whereas previously its DeepMind AI research division was buried within the “Other Bets” category, it will be reported as part of Alphabet’s corporate costs, reflecting its increasing use across the entire company in areas like Google Services and Google Clouds. 

“As AI is critical to delivering our mission of bringing our breakthrough innovations into the real world, beginning in January 2023, we will update our segment reporting relating to certain of Alphabet’s AI activities,” the press release states. 

Alphabet’s latest move signals to the market that it’s are serious about investing in the rapidly advancing space. Google has been under pressure by OpenAI and its ChatGPT product, which can respond to queries with human-language responses based on information its gathered from around the web. 

Investors will be eyeing how the search giant responds to the challenge, as OpenAI investor Microsoft plans to integrate the chatbot technology into its Bing search engine, Information reported. It will also incorporate the technology into its Azure cloud offerings so developers can take advantage of the AI technology. Microsoft already offers another OpenAI service, the code-writing tool Codex, through GitHub. 

Breaking out its investments in particular projects offers transparency to investors, who can see the exact financial performance of Alphabet’s various projects. Alphabet revealed Google Cloud and YouTube’s financial performance for the first time in 2020, for instance. 

In this Jan. 22, 2020 file photo, David Xol-Cholom of Guatemala hugs his son, Byron, at Los Angeles International Airport as they reunite after being separated about one-and-half years ago during the Trump administration’s wide-scale separation of immigrant families.

AP Photo/Ringo H.W. Chiu

• The Department of Homeland Security says nearly a thousand migrant children are still separated.
• Nearly 4,000 kids were taken from their families at the US-Mexico border between 2017 and 2021.
• The Biden administration set up a task force in 2021 to reunite the families separated under Trump.

Nearly a thousand — or one out of every four — children separated from their parents at the US-Mexico border by the Trump administration have yet to reunite with their families, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

The DHS’s Family Reunification Task Force released a statement and fact sheet on Thursday detailing how many migrant children have been reunited and how many are still left without their families.

The task force said it identified 3,924 migrant kids who were taken from their families between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021, under the Trump administration’s “zero-tolerance” border policy.

Out of those separated children, 2,926 have been reunited as of February 1, 2023, the Family Reunification Task Force said. The Family Reunification Task Force said it had reunited 600 children with their families, and the rest were reunited before the task force was established in February 2021.

The data leaves 998 migrant children who are still separated from their families.

The task force said that part of what has made it so difficult to reunite migrant families is that the Trump administration kept “patchwork at best” records of how many children were even taken in the first place. 

The Council on Foreign Relations has reported that unaccompanied children are typically placed in group homes, foster care, or other long-term facilities while they await their reunions. 

The reunification process can be an uphill battle at times because “The number of new families identified continues to increase, as families come forward and identify themselves,” according to the fact sheet.

But the task force said it “will not stop until all the separated families are afforded the opportunity for reunification.”

Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota gives a thumbs-down during a vote to adjourn in the House chamber during the third day of elections for Speaker of the House at the US Capitol Building on January 5, 2023 in Washington, DC.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

• House Republicans removed Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar from one of her committees on Thursday.
• The party-line vote struck at least a pair of GOP members as a dumb move.
• The dejected duo called it the “stupidest vote” and panned leadership for making Omar a “martyr.”

Two disillusioned House Republicans unloaded on their vengeful leadership for inadvertently making a hero out of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar by publicly stripping her of a high-profile committee assignment in what one deemed the “stupidest vote in the world.” 

The not-so-private condemnation of Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s campaign to remove Omar from the House Foreign Affairs panel happened after Republicans clinched the retaliatory strike on a party-line vote of 218-211. 

As they rode the elevator away from the House floor, congressional newspaper Roll Call reported that Foreign Affairs Committee GOP member Ken Buck and Republican Rep. Mike Simpson reflected on what had just transpired and decided it was a boneheaded move.

After Buck decreed it the “stupidest” political move, Simpson said the expulsion would probably make the Minnesota Democrat into a “martyr.” 

After airing their grievances, the pair reportedly asked those around them “not to let leadership know their thoughts.”

Buck and Simpson’s offices did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.

The polarizing ouster only fell into place after McCarthy won over a handful of Republicans who had voiced objections to the effort — including Republican Reps. Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Victoria Spartz of Indiana — by promising to reform internal punishment procedures moving forward. 

Incensed Democrats like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York denounced the entire process as hypocrisy writ large. 

 “Don’t tell me that this is about a condemnation of anti-Semitic remarks, when you have a member of the Republican caucus who has talked about Jewish space lasers, and also elevated her to some of the highest committee assignments in this body,” Ocasio-Cortez said on the floor, referring to Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. “This is about targeting women of color in the United States of America.”

Randy Andy/Shutterstock

• Monthly housing costs in San Francisco have declined by 14.8% since their peak in October 2022, Redfin said in a report.
• One agent said that mass layoffs and lower stock prices could mean that home prices have further room to fall.
• However, housing inventory still remains “scarce” in the Bay Area as competition heats back up.

One city has emerged as an unlikely place where recent buyers are saving the biggest amount of money on their monthly housing payments: San Francisco. 

While the Bay Area is well-known for its notoriously high housing costs, recent homebuyers in San Francisco have been benefitted the most from falling mortgage rates and softening demand. Monthly housing costs have dropped from more than $9,800 at the peak of the market in October 2022 to around $8,500 today. That 14.8% decline is the most significant between the 50 largest metro areas and more than double the national average over the same time, a new report from Redfin details.

“We’re in a sweet spot where prices and rates have dropped enough to make a meaningful difference in housing payments but there’s still less competition than there has been for the last few years,” Angela Langone, a Redfin agent who works the San Jose market, said in a statement. 

But it’s not all gravy for new Bay Area homeowners. Overall, the median home price in San Francisco was still $1.28 million in December 2022. To Langone, this shows that home prices still have room to fall considering that remote work has made it so homebuyers don’t often have to consider their commute to an office when they purchase a home. 

One factor that could push home prices lower is the high volume of layoffs that are impacting the tech industry, Langone added. For instance, companies like PayPal, Salesforce, and Google have collectively laid off tens of thousands of employees since the beginning of the year. 

Another reason why Langone believes home prices will continue to drop is that the stock market is still facing headwinds from high interest rates. The Nasdaq Composite Index, which is primarily made up of tech stocks, has lost more than 4% of its value over the last six months, which has left some homebuyers — particularly tech workers who typically get lucrative stock bonuses — with less money for down payments. 

Layoffs and lower stock prices have also helped drive down the cost of housing in other tech hubs like Seattle and San Jose, Redfin’s report shows. For example, the median monthly housing payment in Seattle declined by 12.1% between October 2022 and December 2022, or from more than $5,100 per month to around $4,500. In San Jose, the median housing cost declined from $9,000 to about $8,100 per month, representing a greater-than 10% decline over that period. 

Looking ahead, Langone said she is encouraged by the fact that “a lot of Bay Area house hunters are starting to tour homes and make offers again.” However, inventory levels continue to be an issue as new listings “remain scarce,” she said.

The financial ratings giant Morningstar has failed to follow through on promises to eradicate anti-Israel bias from its corporate ratings system and is still blacklisting companies that work with Israel.

Morningstar subsidiary Sustainalytics—which rates companies based on Environmental, Social, and Corporate (ESG) governance guidelines—placed at least two companies on its investment watchlist for their work with Israel’s security sector: Motorola Solutions and Elbit Systems, both of which provide counterterrorism surveillance technology that helps the Jewish state combat terrorism, an issue that is taking on renewed importance as Israel faces a new wave of Palestinian violence.

Sustainalytics has faced accusations that it promotes the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which wages economic warfare on Israel, by downgrading companies that work with Israel. Media attention on the issue, including a series of reports by the Washington Free Beacon, forced Morningstar to announce a sweeping number of reforms that it claimed would combat anti-Israel bias. But several months after this announcement, Middle East experts and former U.S. officials are concerned that Sustainalytics is penalizing companies for the work they do to prevent terrorism in Israel. Sustainalytics’s ratings serve as a guide to investors concerned about social issues, and any company placed on its watchlist can suffer as a result.

“The events of this past year confirm that Morningstar’s ESG ratings subsidiary, Sustainalytics, is infected with systemic hostility to the State of Israel,” Elan Carr, who served as the State Department’s special envoy for monitoring and combating anti-Semitism during the Trump administration, told the Free Beacon. “The ratings giant continues to discriminate against companies that do business in Israel by giving them heightened ‘controversy’ ratings or even worse, by placing them on ‘watchlists’ for human rights abuses.”

These so-called abuses and controversies, Carr said, “consist of nothing other than providing services to residents of disputed territories or supplying Israel with life-saving anti-terrorism technologies. In attempting to drive investments away from Israel-related companies, Morningstar has joined the global BDS campaign, whose aims are to delegitimize and economically suffocate the Jewish state. There is a word for this sort of pernicious discrimination: Anti-Semitism.”

While Morningstar said last year that it initiated a company-wide process to eradicate anti-Israel bias, Motorola Solutions and Elbit Systems remain on the watchlist for their work with Israel’s security sector, according to an analysis reviewed by the Free Beacon that summarized Morningstar and Sustainalystics’s updated ratings.

Motorola Solutions provides counterterrorism surveillance technology to prevent terrorists from infiltrating both Israel’s security barrier and Jewish communities in the West Bank. Elbit Systems provides similar counterterrorism surveillance technology for the security barrier and also makes drones that the Israeli Defense Forces use for pinpoint strikes against Palestinian terrorists.

“Morningstar says Motorola has a human rights problem because its technology is used to track Palestinian movements. What the company leaves out is that the technology is tracking the movement of Palestinian terrorists attempting to infiltrate Jewish areas, like the terrorists who murdered the Fogel family back in 2011,” said Richard Goldberg, a former White House National Security Council official who serves as a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank. “Morningstar’s position is that Motorola should withdraw its operations and let terrorists stab more Jewish children to death.”

Goldberg, who was one of the first analysts to expose alleged anti-Israel bias at the company, said Sustainalytics continues to bolster the BDS movement as it tries to penalize companies for working alongside Israel.

“Since we know Morningstar’s watchlist is used as an explicit do-not-invest list, we know Morningstar is engaged in a clear-cut Israel boycott, which is basis enough for states with anti-BDS laws to divest and end their contracts,” Goldberg said. “How many lives have been saved thanks to Motorola and Elbit providing critical counterterrorism technologies?”

A Morningstar spokeswoman would not answer Free Beacon questions about why these two companies remain flagged. “We’ve done our initial reassessment,” the spokeswoman said. “Moving forward in this process depends on hiring an external expert to review our research assumptions.”

The spokeswoman also directed the Free Beacon to a statement on Morningstar’s website discussing the way in which it is addressing concerns about anti-Israel bias. Information on this site claims that ESG Risk Ratings have been assigned to 140 Israel-based companies out of more than 15,000. The majority, it says, are rated “medium risk or lower.” Just 0.2 percent of the companies reviewed were “flagged for involvement in an Israeli-Palestinian conflict area,” according to the company.

To combat allegations of deep-seated anti-Israel prejudice at Sustainalytics, Morningstar hired an outside law firm, White & Case, to conduct an in-depth review of the company’s ratings products. That report, published in May 2022, “made recommendations to tighten processes and procedures to strengthen our objectivity, transparency, and consistency,” according to Morningstar. “We’re making those changes and committed to additional actions that we believe will make our research better and strengthen its transparency, consistency, and objectivity.”

White & Case came under fire in late 2022 for sponsoring events featuring speakers who advocated labeling Israel an apartheid state, the Free Beacon reported.

The post Morningstar Hasn’t Followed Through on Promise to Eradicate Anti-Israel Bias From Ratings System appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Freshman congressman Juan Ciscomani (R., Ariz.) will deliver an official Spanish-language response to President Joe Biden’s Feb. 7 State of the Union.

“While Democrats’ woke politics would have you believe the worst in our nation, Juan and his family are a shining reminder of what we look like at our best,” Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) said of Ciscomani’s response.

News of the speech comes as Latino voters are increasingly turning toward Republicans. Hispanics in Florida played a crucial role in Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R.) blowout reelection win last year. Forty percent of Latinos are “concerned about Democrats embracing socialism,” the Washington Free Beacon reported, with the same percentage saying the made-up progressive term “Latinx” offends them.

“I’m humbled and honored by the opportunity to deliver the Spanish response to the State of the Union address,” Ciscomani said in a press release. “My message will be simple and straightforward: The American Dream is a dream worth fighting for.”

Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders will deliver Republicans’ English-language response.

The post Republicans Will Have Spanish Response to State of the Union appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Local Florida school officials are instructing teachers to hide classroom libraries out of fear that the books may contain “pornographic” material inappropriate for their students, warning that the existence of such content could be a crime in the state.

School officials told the Washington Post that they’re advising teachers to take extreme measures after Gov. Ron DeSantis (R.) signed into law House Bill 1467, which mandates that classroom books be “age-appropriate” and free from “harmful materials” such as porn. Teachers have been clearing their entire book collections or wrapping them in paper to hide books.

Teachers complain that they don’t have enough information on what books would violate the law, and one asked for a list of “specific” books that would violate the new law against pornography.

“The bill does not name specific books to ban, nor a system in which to vet the books,” a third-grade teacher told the Independent. “It does, however, come with a fear-mongering threat of a class three felony, which could cause a teacher to lose not only their teaching certificate, but their right to vote as well.”

It is unclear why identifying inappropriate books for young children is presenting such a challenge. Nine out of 10 of the American Library Association’s top banned books for 2021 were challenged for containing “sexually explicit” content. Book titles that have been the most contested in recent years in “library, school, and university materials” include Gender Queer, which “features depictions of masturbation, period blood, and confusing sexual experiences,” according to the New York Times, and This Book is Gay, which details “the ins and outs of gay sex“

DeSantis says the law is about transparency for parents, who should know what materials are being shown to their children.

“In Florida, our parents have every right to be involved in their child’s education,” DeSantis said. “We are not going to let politicians deny parents the right to know what is being taught in our schools. I’m proud to sign this legislation that ensures curriculum transparency.”

This is not just a problem in Florida—the Washington Free Beacon in July reported on a Maine father who was issued a “criminal trespass notice” from his child’s school after he took it upon himself to identify pornographic books in its library.

Though teachers claim they are at risk of felony charges if an inappropriate book is found in their classroom, there is no mention of criminal charges in House Bill 1467.

The post HIDE THE PORN: Florida Schools Warn Teachers To Cover Classroom Libraries Due to DeSantis Law appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.