White House, House GOP take aim at Big Tech, but see different targets
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden and Republican lawmakers last week launched yet another effort to confront thorny issues relating to Big Tech and social media platforms that have bedeviled previous administrations and Congress, but the path to progress this time around is just as murky.
In two high-profile opening salvos of the 118th Congress, the two sides showed how far apart they are starting. Aside from a glimmer of overlap on protections for minors and the market power of the big tech companies, the two sides aren’t offering much promise of legislation.
Biden used a Jan. 11 op-ed in The Wall Street Journal to call on Congress to pass federal data privacy legislation, especially to protect children, and prevent ads targeting them, modify U.S. law on social media content moderation policies, and change antitrust policy to bring more competition into the tech industry.
House Republicans took a different starting point, saying they wanted to first address what they perceive as social media bias against conservatives aided by pressure from federal officials. Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s office put out a statement the same day saying Biden’s op-ed failed to mention three key Big Tech issues for Republicans: censorship, free speech and bias.
—CQ-Roll Call
Kohberger told neighbor of prior DNA test, raising questions about how police found him
PULLMAN, Wash. — Bryan Kohberger told a fellow Washington State University graduate student living in the same on-campus housing complex that he submitted his DNA for consumer genetic testing to explore his ancestry, the neighbor told the Idaho Statesman.
Kohberger, 28, was a Ph.D. student in WSU’s criminal justice and criminology department. He now stands charged with four counts of first-degree murder and felony burglary in the killing of four University of Idaho students on Nov. 13.
Kohberger’s neighbor said the two became acquainted while crossing paths on the residential property a handful of times after they each moved there in August. The WSU Ph.D. student lives across from the apartment where Kohberger resided until recently, and he said the two traded cellphone numbers.
In their longest interaction, on the first Friday night of the fall semester, they spent about an hour chatting, the man said. The Statesman agreed to grant him anonymity over privacy concerns to publish his account of his exchanges with Kohberger, including that conversation — months before Kohberger was arrested.
—The Idaho Statesman
LAPD widens investigation into source of racist City Hall leak
LOS ANGELES — Information obtained by Los Angeles police from search warrants served on Twitter and Reddit has led detectives to additional investigative avenues as they work to uncover who recorded a meeting between three L.A. City Council members and a labor leader that was filled with racist and offensive comments, according to court documents and sources.
The LAPD’s Major Crimes Division focused at first on the identity and Internet Protocol addresses behind a Reddit account that posted the audio last year and a Twitter account that tipped off reporters and others to the existence of the recordings, according to a search warrant issued in October and obtained by The Times.
The warrant, according to law enforcement sources familiar with the investigation, is one of as many as half a dozen filed by detectives tasked with unmasking who is behind the recordings that plunged City Hall into protests over the racist remarks and provided a window into the backroom machinations of the city’s redistricting process.
The initial warrant served on Twitter led investigators to a second Twitter user, according to two sources not authorized to discuss the investigation. The sources said detectives are continuing to pursue subscriber information for additional IP addresses, which are unique numerical sequences that can identify specific devices.
—Los Angeles Times
In wide-ranging interview, Scholz discusses war in Ukraine, Germany's economic outlook
Chancellor Olaf Scholz said he’s sure Germany will avoid a recession this year, offering reassurance for Europe’s largest economy as it faces down Russia’s energy squeeze.
Germany is getting through the winter energy crunch in better shape than feared just a few weeks ago, and Scholz said that diversifying gas supplies has been critical in helping to keep the economy going.
“I’m absolutely convinced that this will not happen — Germany going into a recession,” Scholz said Tuesday in an interview with Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait. He also voiced confidence about smoothing over a dispute with the U.S. over climate subsidies and managing China’s emergence as a political and economic power.
A rapid pivot to new non-Russian energy sources and lower demand from unusually warm weather have all but eliminated the risk of blackouts this winter, offering a boost to the 64-year-old chancellor as he looks to maintain public support for Ukraine’s war effort and keep his three-party coalition in line.
—Bloomberg News
