Bad week in social media gets worse; Twitter hammered
NEW YORK — Cracking down on hate, abuse and online trolls is also hurting Twitter’s standing with investors.
The company’s stock plunged Friday after it reported a decline in its monthly users and warned that the number could fall further in the coming months. The 20.5 percent plunge comes one day after Facebook lost 19 percent of its value in a single day.
Twitter says it’s putting the long-term stability of its platform above user growth. That leaves investors seemingly unable to value what the biggest companies in the sector, which rely on their potential user reach, are worth.
Twitter had 335 million monthly users in the quarter, below the 339 million Wall Street was expecting, and down slightly from 336 million in the first quarter. That overshadowed a strong monthly user growth of 3 percent compared with the previous year.
The company said its monthly user number could continue to fall in the “mid-single-digit millions” in the third quarter.
Judge credits, faults administration on family reunification
SAN DIEGO — A U.S. judge commended the Trump administration Friday for reunifying families with their children after they were separated at the Mexico border but also warned that a better system must be put in place because hundreds of families have yet to be reunited.
U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw said the government gets “great credit” after reunifying more than 1,800 children 5 and over with parents or sponsors by Thursday’s court-imposed deadline.
He pointed out that many of the families were reunited while in custody then turned his attention to 431 children whose parents have been deported.
“The government is at fault for losing several hundred parents in the process and that’s where we go next,” the judge said.
Sabraw ordered the government and the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents the parents, to submit written updates every Thursday on still-separated families.
After decades of silence, nuns talk about abuse by priests
VATICAN CITY — The nun no longer goes to confession regularly, after an Italian priest forced himself on her while she was at her most vulnerable: recounting her sins to him in a university classroom nearly 20 years ago.
At the time, the sister only told her provincial superior and her spiritual director, silenced by the Catholic Church’s culture of secrecy, her vows of obedience and her own fear, repulsion and shame.
“It opened a great wound inside of me,” she told the Associated Press. “I pretended it didn’t happen.”
After decades of silence, the nun is one of a handful worldwide to come forward recently on an issue that the Catholic Church has yet to come to terms with: The sexual abuse of religious sisters by priests and bishops. An AP examination has found that cases have emerged in Europe, Africa, South America and Asia, demonstrating that the problem is global and pervasive, thanks to the universal tradition of sisters’ second-class status in the Catholic Church and their ingrained subservience to the men who run it.
Some nuns are now finding their voices, buoyed by the #MeToo movement and the growing recognition that adults can be victims of sexual abuse when there is an imbalance of power in a relationship. The sisters are going public in part because of years of inaction by church leaders, even after major studies on the problem in Africa were reported to the Vatican in the 1990s.
Next ‘Star Wars’ film to use unreleased Fisher footage
LOS ANGELES — Carrie Fisher is not done with “Star Wars” after all — Lucasfilm says unreleased footage of the actress will be used in the next installment of the “Star Wars” saga to draw her character’s story to an end.
The studio and writer-director J.J. Abrams announced Friday that footage of Fisher shot for 2015’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” will be used in the ninth film in the space opera’s core trilogies about the Skywalker family that includes Fisher’s character, Leia.
Filming is scheduled to begin Wednesday at London’s Pinewood Studios.
Mark Hamill, who plays Luke Skywalker, will also appear in the film, which for the moment is simply called “Episode IX.” It is scheduled to be released in December 2019.
Fisher died in December 2016 after she finished work on the middle installment in the trilogy, “The Last Jedi.” Director Rian Johnson opted not alter her storyline, leaving Leia’s fate to be handled by Abrams.
CBS looks into misconduct claims amid report on CEO Moonves
NEW YORK — CBS said Friday it is investigating personal misconduct claims after the company’s chief executive, Les Moonves, was the subject of a New Yorker story detailing sexual misconduct allegations.
The media company said independent members of its board of directors are “investigating claims that violate the company’s clear policies” regarding personal misconduct.
CBS Corp.’s stock fell 6 percent — its worst one-day loss in nearly seven years — as the reports of the misconduct allegations began to circulate around noon Friday, triggering investor concerns Moonves might be forced to step down. The CBS chief has been a towering figure in television for decades, credited with turning around a network that had been mired for years at the bottom ratings.
The New York-based company did not mention Moonves by name but said it issued a statement in response to the New Yorker article, which was published on the magazine’s website late Friday. The article was written by Ronan Farrow, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning story last year for the same magazine uncovering many of the allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein
The article says six women who had professional dealings with Moonves say he sexually harassed them between the 1980s and late 2000s. Four of the women described forcible touching or kissing during business meetings, it says, while two said that Moonves physically intimidated them or threatened to derail their careers.
