After net neutrality: Brace for internet ‘fast lanes’
NEW YORK (AP) — Now that federal telecom regulators have repealed net neutrality, it may be time to brace for the arrival of internet “fast lanes” and “slow lanes.”
The net neutrality rules just voted down by the Federal Communications Commission prohibited such “paid prioritization,” as it’s technically known. That’s when an internet provider such as Verizon or Comcast decides to charge services like YouTube or Amazon for faster access to users. Firms that decline to pay up could wind up in bumper-to-bumper slow lanes.
The Associated Press queried seven major internet providers about their post-net-neutrality plans, and all of them equivocated when asked if they might establish fast and slow lanes. None of the seven companies — Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Charter, Cox, Sprint and T-Mobile — would rule out the possibility. Three said they had “no plans” for paid prioritization, and a few declined to answer the question at all.
By contrast, several of these firms promised not to block or slow down specific internet sites and services, two other practices prohibited by the expiring net-neutrality rules. (Those rules won’t formally end until sometime in early 2018.) Any such move could set off a public uproar and might even trigger an antitrust investigation.
Here are the net-neutrality promises from the country’s biggest wireless and cable companies.
8 Americans, 2 Swedes, 1 Canadian dead in Mexican bus crash
CANCUN, Mexico (AP) — Driver negligence and speed caused a bus crash in southern Mexico that killed eight Americans, two Swedes, one Canadian and a Mexican tour guide as they traveled from cruise ships to visit nearby Mayan ruins, officials said Wednesday.
Quintana Roo state prosecutors said a preliminary manslaughter investigation indicated the driver lost control of the bus and when he tried to get back on the narrow highway, the bus flipped, struck a tree and landed in vegetation along the roadside.
“Due to a lack of care the driver lost control of the bus’ steering to the right, leaving the asphalt,” state prosecutor Miguel Angel Pech Cen said at a news conference. He said evidence found at the scene indicated the driver was going too fast.
The state government said that in addition to the 12 people killed, three Canadians, four Brazilians, four Americans and two Swedes had to be hospitalized for treatment of injuries. The two Swedes were transported to the United States for treatment. Seven other people were slightly injured in Tuesday’s accident and returned to their cruise ship.
By Wednesday afternoon, only four tourists — one Brazilian and three Americans — remained in local hospitals, the state prosecutor’s office said.
Cardinal Law, disgraced figure in church scandal, dead at 86
VATICAN CITY (AP) — Cardinal Bernard Law, the disgraced former archbishop of Boston whose failure to stop child molesters in the priesthood triggered the worst crisis in American Catholicism, died Wednesday in Rome at age 86.
Law, who spent the final years of his career leading an important basilica in Rome and continued to wield considerable influence inside the Vatican, had been sick and was recently hospitalized.
Law was once one of the most important figures in the U.S. church, serving in one of its most visible and storied posts. From 1984 until he resigned under pressure 18 years later, he was spiritual leader in Boston, the nation’s fourth-largest archdiocese, with 1.8 million Catholics.
In 2002, though, The Boston Globe began a series of stories that revealed that Law and his predecessors had transferred child-molesting priests from parish to parish without alerting parents or police — a scandal later chronicled in the Oscar-winning film “Spotlight.”
Within months, Catholics around the country demanded to know whether their bishops had done the same. And the scandal quickly spread overseas, to Ireland, Belgium, Chile, Australia and beyond.
Israel, US team up to block UN vote on Jerusalem
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel is intensively lobbying countries around the world to oppose a U.N. resolution criticizing President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Israeli officials said Wednesday.
Thursday’s vote in the U.N. General Assembly will indicate whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has succeeded in his efforts to drum up new pockets of support in the developing world, as well as the extent to which Israel and the U.S. are — or are not — alone on the question of Jerusalem.
The Palestinians have turned to the General Assembly after the U.S. vetoed a resolution this week in the Security Council calling on Trump to rescind his decision. While General Assembly votes, unlike Security Council resolutions, are not legally binding, they serve as a barometer of international sentiment on key issues.
The U.S. and Israel are both placing great weight on Thursday’s vote. U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley threatened U.N. member states with possible retaliation if they support the resolution, saying Trump takes the vote “personally” and the U.S. “will be taking names.”
Trump went even further, telling reporters at a Cabinet meeting in Washington that opponents were likely to face a cutoff in U.S. funding. “For all these nations, they take our money and then vote against us,” Trump said. “We’re watching those votes. Let them vote against us. We’ll save a lot. We don’t care.”
Urban killings rise in clusters as many areas grow safer
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — When she started an urban farm in one of Indianapolis’ roughest neighborhoods, retired chemist Aster Bekele wanted to teach at-risk kids how to garden, and maybe sneak in a little science.
Then the city’s homicide rate started soaring, with most of the killings happening around the community center where Bekele and the teens tended their vegetables, chickens and compost piles. After her own son was killed last summer, she found herself teaching a different lesson: how to deal with death.
A few miles away, another rough neighborhood was experiencing a change — equally dramatic but just the opposite. The Fountain Square section near downtown, which once saw nearly as many killings as Bekele’s area, was transforming into one of the city’s safer spots thanks to an influx of affluent people drawn to its hip restaurants, bicycle trails and art festivals.
The contrast illustrates an Associated Press analysis of homicide data that showed some large cities seem to be getting safer and more dangerous at the same time. Slayings in Chicago, St. Louis and Indianapolis are becoming concentrated into small areas where people are dying at a pace not seen in years, if ever. Around them, much of the rest of the city is growing more peaceful, even as the total number of homicides rises.
“There’s two different worlds,” said Anthony Beverly, who grew up in Indianapolis and now runs an organization called Stop The Violence. “Downtown is just popping. … We struggle.”
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Of 9,000 dead in Mosul, a third slain by US alliance, Iraqis
MOSUL, Iraq (AP) — The price Mosul’s residents paid in blood to see their city freed was 9,000 to 11,000 dead, a civilian casualty rate nearly 10 times higher than what has been previously reported. The number killed in the nine-month battle to liberate the city from the Islamic State group marauders has not been acknowledged by the U.S.-led coalition, the Iraqi government or the self-styled caliphate.
But Mosul’s gravediggers, its morgue workers and the volunteers who retrieve bodies from the city’s rubble are keeping count.
Iraqi or coalition forces are responsible for at least 3,200 civilian deaths from airstrikes, artillery fire or mortar rounds between October 2016 and the fall of the Islamic State group in July 2017, according to an Associated Press investigation that cross-referenced independent databases from non-governmental organizations.
Most of those victims are simply described as “crushed” in health ministry reports.
The coalition, which says it lacks the resources to send investigators into Mosul, acknowledges responsibility for only 326 of the deaths.
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Palestinian girl praised as hero after confronting soldiers
NEBI SALEH, West Bank (AP) — The curly haired Palestinian teenager is seen walking up to two Israeli soldiers standing near the entrance of her house, and she can be heard telling them to leave. She then pushes and kicks both soldiers who casually fend off the blows.
Then she slaps one soldier hard in the face.
Now, the 16-year-old girl from the village of Nebi Saleh is being celebrated by Palestinians as a hero and symbol of a new generation after confronting the two soldiers in a melee caught on a video that has been widely watched.
In Israel, the soldiers’ decision not to react to the seeming provocation by Ahed Tamimi, a blonde firebrand, has stirred a debate about deterrence and drawn allegations that the army was humiliated.
Three days after the Friday confrontation, amid an uproar in Israel, Tamimi was arrested from her home in a pre-dawn raid and now faces charges of attacking soldiers.
