Neither Trump, no Harris : Jeff Bezos Against All

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It was late September when senior news and opinion makers of The Washington Post flew into Miami for a periodic meeting with Jeff Bezos, the newspaper’s billionaire owner.
During their visit — which included a working lunch at Bezos’ home on an exclusive island in Biscayne Bay and dinner at a nearby restaurant — David Shipley, The Post’s opinion editor, and Will Lewis, The Post’s chief executive and publisher, discussed plans for the future of the newspaper’s opinion section. The election, less than 45 days away, loomed large.

By the end of the meeting, according to four people familiar with it who spoke on condition of anonymity to relay private conversations, it appeared to Mr. Shipley and Mr. Lewis that Mr. Bezos had reservations about The Post endorsing either candidate in the presidential race. But they also thought he was open to persuasion.
Bezos’ ultimate decision, to end The Post’s decades-long practice of endorsing presidential candidates, exploded into public view on Friday, drawing criticism from reporters, editors and readers, along with an unusual rebuke from the legendary Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

It came after additional discussion between Bezos and the two Post leaders, Shipley and Lewis, who privately made a case not to abandon the tradition so close to an election. The editorial board had already drafted an endorsement of Vice President Harris, though Mr. Bezos did not read it before his decision, Lewis said in a statement on Saturday.

The decision by Bezos had been in the making for weeks. It is not clear what motivated his final determination or its timing. Bezos has clashed repeatedly with Harris’s electoral opponent, former President Trump, who for years has been openly hostile to him on social media. In 2019, Amazon sued the Trump administration, blaming Trump’s animosity toward Bezos for its loss of a $10 billion cloud computing contract.

Amazon’s Bezos also founded Blue Origin, his aerospace company, still compete regularly for lucrative government contracts. Blue Origin executives met with Trump on Friday, and the company has a $3.4 billion contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to build a lunar lander.

A spokeswoman for The Post said Friday that ending presidential endorsements was a “Washington Post decision.” In his statement on Saturday, Mr. Lewis added that, as publisher, he does not believe in endorsements.

It’s the latest in a series of events that have rocked The Post this year.

In June, its executive editor, Sally Buzbee, abruptly left her role, rather than take a new position running a division focused on social media — a so-called “third newsroom” after news and opinion. Buzbee had clashed with Lewis over whether The Post should cover an update in a British case related to Mr. Lewis’s involvement in the cleanup of a phone-hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.
The decision to abandon presidential endorsements at the The Post followed news that the owner of The Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, had quashed presidential endorsements.

In the weeks after Mr. Bezos met with Mr. Shipley and Mr. Lewis, members of the Washington Post’s editorial board, who write editorials for the newspaper, including endorsements, assumed that The Post would be giving their stamp of approval to Ms. Harris. Two of them had drafted the endorsement, which was awaiting a final sign-off.
It never came.

Instead, on Friday, Mr. Shipley joined the editorial board via video for a regular meeting at 11 a.m. in an eighth-floor conference room at The Post’s headquarters, according to two people who attended. He announced the new endorsement policy without much enthusiasm, one said.

#Harris #Trump #Amazon #Bezos

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Shipley tried to explain: He said The Post was no longer going to tell people how to vote, a posture that would reflect the paper’s independent bona fides, the two people said. Several of the board members asked for space to write dissenting statements signed under their own names, together or separately. The meeting ended without a resolution on how they should convey their disagreement.

The announcement was sent to the entire newsroom around noon. Lewis said in the memo that The Post was returning to a prior policy of not making endorsements, trusting readers to “make up their own minds.” The Post has issued endorsements in every presidential election since 1976, when it gave its stamp of approval to Jimmy Carter, though it abstained in 1988. It endorsed Biden in the last cycle.

The decision, which was reported by NPR before Mr. Lewis sent his email, generated near-instantaneous blowback. Within minutes, Martin Baron, the former Post editor featured in the movie “Spotlight,” posted on X that it amounted to “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.” Robert Kagan, an editor at large who has written for The Post for more than two decades, dashed off a quick resignation email to Shipley at 12:56 p.m.

In an interview, Mr. Kagan said that, in his view, the decision not to endorse a candidate was “clearly a sign of pre-emptive favor currying” with Trump, the Republican nominee for president.

“The Post has been emphasizing that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy,”

Kagan said.

“And so this is the election, this is the time when we decided that we’re neutral?”

By 1 p.m., top Post editors were fielding questions from their colleagues about the decision. Matt Murray, The Post’s executive editor, was asked in a meeting about election coverage why the newspaper was ending its endorsements for president but continuing to recommend candidates in other elections, according to a person familiar with the matter.

So far this year, The Post has endorsed candidates in House and Senate races in Virginia and Maryland.
On Slack, the messaging app used by The Post, employees reacted to a sudden deluge of readers looking for information on the non-endorsement. Vineet Khosla, The Post’s chief technology officer, instructed Post employees to prevent The Post’s experimental artificial intelligence tool from responding to reader questions about the decision, according to
screenshots obtained by The New York Times.

“Let’s block it,”

Mr. Khosla wrote, essentially calling a halt to A.I. responses on the topic.

A spokeswoman for The Post said in a statement that it would have been “irresponsible to serve our audience with an AI-generated response summary based off of one article” about the decision not to endorse.
In a 4 p.m. news meeting, Murray fielded more questions — before a larger audience than usual, he noted, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times.

He said that he hadn’t been involved in the decision because the newsroom was independent of the Opinion department. He added that he had only found out on Thursday night. But, seeking to reassure newsroom employees, he said,

“What this newsroom does is supported up to the very top of this company.”

Later in the evening, Woodward and Bernstein weighed in. In a statement, they said that — although they respected the independence of The Post’s editorial board — the decision “ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy.”

By the end of the day, The Post’s opinions department had made its voice heard. In a dissenting editorial, 18 Post opinion columnists signed their names to a column calling the decision not to endorse a “terrible mistake.”

Ann Telnaes, The Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, captured the angst more concisely. On Friday evening, she posted her latest cartoon, a rectangular block covered entirely with a swath of foreboding gray paint strokes.

#Harris #Trump #Amazon #Bezos

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Tech moguls kiss the ring: meetings at Mar-a-Lago, $1 million donations

Top executives in the technology industry have long been a target of Donald Trump’s vitriol. As he prepares to return to the White House, they’re lining up to gain favor with the president-elect. Some come bearing checkbooks.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai was scheduled for a sit-down with him on Thursday. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg made a $1 million donation to the Trump inauguration committee. And Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, who also committed $1 million for the inauguration through Amazon, is said to be planning to sit down with the president next week.

#USA #zuckerberg #trump #amazon

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Amazon Cancels Some Inventory Orders From China After Tariffs

Amazon.com Inc. has canceled orders for multiple products made in China and other Asian countries, according to a document reviewed by Bloomberg and people familiar with the matter, suggesting the company is reducing its exposure to tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump.

The orders for beach chairs, scooters, air conditioners and other merchandise from multiple Amazon vendors were halted after Trump’s April 2 announcement that he planned to levy tariffs on more than 180 countries and territories, including China, Vietnam and Thailand, the people said. The timing of the cancellations, which had no warning, led the vendors to suspect it was a response to tariffs.

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment. The company identified international trade disputes as a risk factor in its annual report released in February.

“China-based suppliers provide significant portions of our components and finished goods,”

the company said.

#Tariffs #Amazon

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🌍 Google and Amazon at War With Israel

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💻 When Google and Amazon negotiated a major $1.2bn cloud-computing deal in 2021, their customer – the Israeli government – had an unusual demand: agree to use a secret code as part of an arrangement that would become known as the “winking mechanism”.

🕵️ The demand, which would require Google and Amazon to effectively sidestep legal obligations in countries around the world, was born out of Israel’s concerns that data it moves into the global corporations’ cloud platforms could end up in the hands of foreign law enforcement authorities.

📂 Like other big tech companies, Google and Amazon’s cloud businesses routinely comply with requests from police, prosecutors and security services to hand over customer data to assist investigations.

🤫 This process is often cloaked in secrecy. The companies are frequently gagged from alerting the affected customer their information has been turned over.

⚖️ This is either because the law enforcement agency has the power to demand this or a court has ordered them to stay silent.

🇮🇱 For Israel, losing control of its data to authorities overseas was a significant concern. So to deal with the threat, officials created a secret warning system: the companies must send signals hidden in payments to the Israeli government, tipping it off when it has disclosed Israeli data to foreign courts or investigators.

🔐 The strict controls include measures that prohibit the US companies from restricting how an array of Israeli government agencies, security services and military units use their cloud services.

📝 According to the deal’s terms, the companies cannot suspend or withdraw Israel’s access to its technology, even if it’s found to have violated their terms of service.

⚠️ Israeli officials inserted the controls to counter a series of anticipated threats. They feared Google or Amazon might bow to employee or shareholder pressure and withdraw Israel’s access to its products and services if linked to human rights abuses in the occupied Palestinian territories.

🏢 Microsoft, which provides a range of cloud services to Israel’s military and public sector, bid for the Nimbus contract but was beaten by its rivals.

💬 According to sources familiar with negotiations, Microsoft’s bid suffered as it refused to accept some of Israel’s demands.

🕰️ As with Microsoft, Google and Amazon’s cloud businesses have faced scrutiny in recent years over the role of their technology – and the Nimbus contract in particular – in Israel’s two-year war on Gaza.

#google #amazon #intelligence #services #nimbus #microsoft

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📜 However, according to the Israeli government documents detailing the controls inserted into the Nimbus agreement, officials concluded they had extracted important concessions from Google and Amazon after the companies agreed to adapt internal processes and “subordinate” their standard contractual terms in favour of Israel’s demands.

💸 Leaked documents from Israel’s finance ministry, which include a finalised version of the Nimbus agreement, suggest the secret code would take the form of payments – referred to as “special compensation” – made by the companies to the Israeli government.

📑 Israeli officials appear to have acknowledged this, documents suggest. Their demands about how Google and Amazon respond to a US-issued order “might collide” with US law, they noted, and the companies would have to make a choice between “violating the contract or violating their legal obligations”.

📭 Neither Google nor Amazon responded to the Guardian’s questions about whether they had used the secret code since the Nimbus contract came into effect.

🚫 Israeli officials also feared a scenario in which its access to the cloud providers’ technology could be blocked or restricted.

⚙️ In particular, officials worried that activists and rights groups could place pressure on Google and Amazon, or seek court orders in several European countries, to force them to terminate or limit their business with Israel if their technology were linked to human rights violations.

📡 Provided Israel does not infringe on copyright or resell the companies’ technology, “the government is permitted to make use of any service that is permitted by Israeli law”, according to a finance ministry analysis of the deal.

📘 Both companies’ standard “acceptable use” policies state their cloud platforms should not be used to violate the legal rights of others, nor should they be used to engage in or encourage activities that cause “serious harm” to people.

🧠 However, according to an Israeli official familiar with the Nimbus project, there can be “no restrictions” on the kind of information moved into Google and Amazon’s cloud platforms, including military and intelligence data.

☁️ The terms of the deal seen by the Guardian state that Israel is “entitled to migrate to the cloud or generate in the cloud any content data they wish”.

🔍 Last month, when Microsoft cut off Israeli access to some cloud and artificial intelligence services, it did so after confirming reporting by the Guardian and its partners, +972 and Local Call, that the military had stored a vast trove of intercepted Palestinian calls in the company’s Azure cloud platform.

🕊️ Notifying the Israeli military of its decision, Microsoft said that using Azure in this way violated its terms of service and it was “not in the business of facilitating the mass surveillance of civilians”.

#google #amazon #intelligence #services #nimbus #microsoft

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