in this presentation we will enter a journal entry related to the payment of payroll taxes if we scroll up top we can see that we've already had the journal entry for recording the payroll expense and the payroll taxes the employer portion support accounting instruction by clicking the link below giving you a free month membership to all of the content on our website broken out by category further broken out by course each course then organized in a logical reasonable fashion making it much more easy to find what you need than can be done on a youtube page we also include added resources such as excel practice problems pdf files and more like quickbooks backup files when applicable so once again click the link below for a free month membership to our website and all the content on it for our pay period ending in august we made the transactions in september first now we're going to make the payment we're going to say that that happens on 9 15 in other words we have done the withholdings and process payroll on 9 1 and then we have to pay at some point in the future meaning we're going to pay off all these liabilities here we're going to have that happen on 9 15 note that these two journal entries were created from this one was created from our register this one created from our worksheet so those came from this tab if we scroll back over we have the payroll register here where we recorded our first journal entry which included the total earnings which was our payroll expense where's our total right there and then all the deductions for oast i hi social security medicare f it federal income tax group insurance union dues 401k ticket to the net check then our second journal entry had to do with the employer taxes and from this standpoint you can see that we basically paid the employees 28266 and we took from them all of this in terms of payroll taxes and we don't get to keep it therefore they're currently sitting in a liability then we had to include in our second journal entry our portion of the payroll taxes here those also need to be paid in the future so if we go back to our gl tab then now we're going to pay those out so that's going to be the goal here so when we think of our questions we can think well is cash affected we're going to say yeah cash is affected here's cash it's going to be going down because we're going to pay it but it's going to be our last account so i'm going to put it on the bottom and we're going to work with it last what we're going to do is pay off all these liabilities it's really helpful to be able to see the trial balance because then you can see what is in the liabilities so what we're going to do is just copy these so i'm going to copy the FICA the OASDI FICA and then the social security the FUTTA the SUTA the employer FIT payable all of these are our items we will have to pay they currently have credits in them we're going to debit them to make them go down so we'll copy those right click and copy and we're going to put those up top in B20 right click and paste one two three then we can go ahead and indent that if we choose which i'm going to choose to do so i'm going to highlight these items we're going to go to the home tab we're going to go to the alignment and increase the indenting then we're just going to put the amounts that need to be paid which will be just listed here these these are what we're going to pay that's that's what we owe so we can't use a journal entry note that i can't say this equals negative of that number which we may be tempted to do because when we post it then it'll create a circle reference so if you were thinking formulas would be good here that's good thought formulas generally are good but in this case we can't do it because it would create a circle reference when we post it so what we're going to do is just have to hard code these in here we're going to put them in the debit side here so these are going to be debits so for the fight guys just going to be 606 3.1 for the hi we're going to put this number which will be one four one seven point nine eight for the futa we're going to pick up the futa which is one two five point three eight and then for the suta we have the suta which is eight six seven point five six and then we'll just put the negative sum here so negative sum and we'll sum this up and that's what's going to be here now it shouldn't be going to oh we i missed one sorry about that we have one more the fit so here's the fit which is going to be eight five nine nine point one three then we can do the negative sum and it's going to be coming out of of course at this point cash so cash has a debit balance we're going to make it go down because we're paying cash for all the expenses or liabilities that we owe so we're going to copy this and that will be our credit in the b25 where we will say right click and paste one two three now i shouldn't have indented these because these are these are actually debits so i'm going to highlight these back home tab alignment and decrease the indenting and then this one is the one we want to indent home tab alignment increase indenting okay and then we'll put the credit over here which will just be the sum of these if we select them they add up to 17 73 15 but we want a negative so we'll use our negative sum the plug formula which is negative sum double click the sum function and highlight those cells to get that negative sum of negative or credit 17 73 15 then we're going to post these out so here's the 215 and note to do this we've already got the pains frozen so if they're not frozen and you want them frozen or else it's just a little bit more scrolling you go to cell d1 we're going to go to the view tab we're going to go to the windows group and freeze pains and then freeze pains so then we're going to scroll down i want to pick up this 215 here's 215 there on the journal entry here it is on the trial balance we're going to find it now in the general ledger it's going to be in the same order it's going to be the third liability account so we'll scroll to the right so here's our liabilities looking for 215 there we have it in as8 where we're going to say 915 the date now we're in a t8 where we will say equals scroll down just a bit and pick up that uh 606 3 10 bringing the balance down note the pattern here this one was uh employee portion of social security employer portion of social security then we paid it off so that's that'll be the pattern then we're going to go back down to the left side of the frozen pain scroll right we'll see that that has gone down to zero on the trial balance as well which is nice now we're looking for 220 here's 220 on the journal entry here it is on the trial balance we're going to scroll the right looking for 220 so here's 210 scrolling up by 215 there's 220 so we are here in aw aw 8 915 now we're on a x8 where we're going to say equals scroll down just a bit point to that 1417 98 and enter so same pattern here we got the employee portion the employee ur portion pulling the balance up to the sum of both of those then we paid it making it go down to zero we're going to go just to the left of um the brackets go right and scroll back down and that's back down to zero now we're on futa i think so here's futa uh 223 so we're going to scroll the right so we find 223 which is right here on the trial balance so it's like the middle like right in the middle of our liabilities so there's 210 there's 224 so it looks like it's above here 223 we're in ab7 where we will say 915 and then in bb7 we'll say equals scroll down just a bit and we're looking for futa so there it is and enter so now we've paid off futa notice these all look like accounts payable type of transactions they go up with a credit and then down with a debit we incur liabilities and then we pay them and then we're going to go right to the left of the frozen pains and scroll right scroll back down now we're looking for su ta su ta is 224 here it is on the trial balance if we scroll the right to find 224 to find su ta which is 224 scrolling down a bit here it is su ta we're on ba 21 9 oh is that right yeah that's right 915 tab now we're on bb 21 where we're going to say equals and we're going to point to that nine or 867 56 bring the balance down to zero scrolling just to the left of the frozen pains and going right just a bit we can see that that has now been brought down to zero which is what we expected and hoped for now we're going to go to 225 which is here on the trial balance we're going to scroll right till we find 225 so we're looking for there's 224 225 is up top so we're here in be 7 915 and then in bf 7 we're going to say equals and scroll down just a bit and we're picking up that fit and enter so that brings the balance back down to zero if we do it just to the left of the frozen pains and scroll right we have now brought that down to zero now we just need to post the cash so cash is here in uh in the journal entry it's going to be our first account favorite account on the trial balance although it's going down which we don't like but that's okay we have enough right now so we're going to go over here to 915 we're in al 7 and we're going to say equals and scroll down and pick up that 1773 15 and enter that brings the balance down from 571 733 89 by 1737 to 554 660 we scroll back to the trial balance we can see that that is also the balance on the ending trial balance and now we've paid off all these liabilities note that like when we pay off the accounts payable account there is no effect on net income from this journal entry in other words there's no income or expense accounts here they're all balance sheet accounts so it's just like the liability when we have a payable where we might purchase an expense where we would debit an expense and then credit the payable that's when the expense happened here it happened when we incurred the salaries expense and the payroll tax expense with these two journal entries and then we pay for the expense that we incurred prior to that that's what we do in any payable such as accounts payable such as these items that's typically what happens it's also could happen that we bought inventory for a payable like which isn't that could be a bit different but typically in essence what's happening is when we pay off the liability there's no effect on net income


Good afternoon and a very warm welcome to our IIEA webinar on censorship and free speech in the digital age. My name is Joyce O'Connor and I chair the digital group here at the IIEA. And it is my great pleasure to welcome our distinguished guest Gillian York, author and activist who's the director for international freedom of expression at the electronic frontier foundation who is based in Berlin. Gillian, you're very welcome. And we're delighted to have you join us today and thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to be with us. We appreciate it very much and we look forward to your presentation. Gillian will speak to us for around 20, 25 minutes, and then I'll go to your audience for questions and answers using the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen. I look forward to receiving your questions and would very much appreciate if you could give your name and affirmation when you send in your questions. We would encourage you to join the conversation on Twitter and our handle on Twitter is at IIEA. As is usual, our presentation today and the Q&A is on the record. Today's presentation is very timely. The current debate around hate speech and indeed disinformation has been well documented in the media. And here in Ireland, the proposed hate speech bill is currently going through the legislative processes. And today, as it happens, the first report on the emerging disinformation landscape in Ireland by the European Digital Media Observatory based in DCU is published. So you can see there's a lot of interest Gillian in what you're going to talk about. Gillian will outline how the internet transformed the ability of all citizens to contribute to public discourse, especially those living under authoritarian regimes. The internet, of course, has also facilitated the spread of harmful content such as disinformation and hate speech. And Gillian will take us on a journey from Silicon Valley to Tunisia to Cairo to Berlin, so as to trace the change from the early belief in maximizing free speech by the citizens and the big tech companies alike, to the policies of surveillance and control exercised by the platform and most governments. The issue of free speech is a much nuanced issue. And as Gillian York sees it, the central conundrum of social media is how to address hate speech based on her extensive research for her book on Silicon values, the future of free speech and violence capitalism, as well as her direct experience working with global rights activists who have experience of the internet and social media, she will give us a really good perspective. The internet, as I said, is both a critical organizing tool for democracy and freedom, as well as some people see it as a threatful environment and some would indeed say a vile environment. She will give us her unique perspectives and discuss how companies, platforms, democratic governments, as well as our territory and regimes are responding with increased censorship and moderation of the internet. Gillian's presentation highlights her insight into what is at stake when private companies make speech and censorship decisions that at times have for some been a matter of life or death. I argue that more protection of citizens is needed against the harnessing of our personal data. One commentator indeed has said, and I'm sure you've heard this before Gillian, that your insights make us all think twice about signing those terms and conditions that when we use their sites. We also assess the negative consequences that can result and explain how citizens can respond. As I said Gillian is the director for international for international freedom of expression at the electronic frontier foundation, a fellow at the international human rights at the European University at the arena, and a visiting professor at the College of European Natalin in Warsaw. Her work examines state and corporate censorship and its impact on culture and human rights with the focus on historically marginalized communities. She also works on the European policy and the impact of sanctions on the use of technology. And currently she's looking and working around three particular topics, social media and conflict, adult nudity and a decentralization of social media. Gillian, we look forward to your presentation. And thank you again for being with us. Thank you so much and thank you for that kind introduction. It's really sort of a perfect lead into what I'm about to speak about. So, I'll start just from the very beginning is I think that that's a great place to start. And I like to share just briefly how I got into this space, and how, how my views have been shaped over time while bringing in all of the history that we're about to speak about. And so about 15 years ago, I was living in Morocco and trying to begin a career as a writer and got involved with some activism, some advocacy campaigns through a group called global voices. That's really how I first learned about the ways in which the Internet was censored. I experienced briefly some internet censorship myself when I couldn't access the blogging platform that I was trying to use at the time. And then discovered in Morocco that a wide variety of speech was being censored by the government, mostly touching on religion criticism of the human rights record in the country, and criticism of the royal family, as well as a handful of other things. So that was really my entry into this. And that led me to the work that I ended up doing at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, where I was hired to work on a project called the OpenNet initiative. It doesn't exist anymore, but the website is still out there as are the three books that the project put out over the years. And the goal of that project was to create a survey of more than 65 countries and how they were controlling the internet. So I was focused with what they called filtering or what we more commonly know as censorship, and also eventually looked at things like surveillance and the cultural contexts in which this existed in those countries and that's what those three books are about. I'm happy to share that link if anyone is interested. I'm just managing this project managing the research and the way that it worked is that we actually had people testing in those countries to, you know, to technically run a test based on a list that had been created by academics to discover which websites were blocked. Obviously not going to get into detail here about the different countries, but there was kind of a through line through what we could see in Europe of course you had the blocking of child sexual abuse imagery which I think most of us would deem is an acceptable use of this tool. But across the world, there was kind of a spectrum between, you know, semi democratic countries and authoritarian countries. And typically went after were things like religions that were not that were that ran counter to the main religion of the country, criticism of the country's human rights record, sexual content nudity things like that, and at times social media. Now this was about, I think I started working there in 2007. And this was when social media, or at least web 2.0 was a brand new concept. And what we saw then were that some countries, the ones that I can recall up the top of my head that up notes for Turkey and Thailand. We're already blocking sites like YouTube or at least trying to block individual videos. And in these cases, the two that I clearly remember in Thailand, one of the cases involved a video that was critical of the king and specifically had accused him of something possibly false. In Turkey, it was jokes about at a Turk that were inappropriate and illegal under Turkish law. And so both of those governments went after YouTube and blocked it. And as a result that really changed the way that we that we researchers there and I think the way that governments looked at what was possible with respect to social media. Again, this was when it was brand new. Because these platforms didn't want to be blocked in these countries, they actually changed the technical dynamic to enable the governments to request that certain videos be removed or blocked, rather than having the governments block the site entirely. And so that was one thing one major shift that happened around that time that has really shaped the way that governments can interact with these companies so they can request information be removed or request information about users and these companies have entire departments to deal with that. So that was my first, my first, you know, awareness around this. The second thing came for me in about 2010 while I was still in that position, a young man, a blogger that I knew from Morocco contacted me and said that he was being censored by Facebook. Now, I wasn't really sure what he meant and thought how could a company censor someone it's a company it's not a government. But what we what we discovered was that his page which was calling for the separation of religion and state had indeed been, or sorry, religion and education, had indeed been removed by the platform. So I wrote about it and what happened after writing about it was that I ended up starting a relationship with Facebook that continues until this day, where we were able to raise these issues with them. And I started to see things a little bit differently, that although social media platforms were companies in some cases private in some cases, you know, public companies with shareholders, they nevertheless had an outsized impact on free expression and once you start looking at these things you start seeing everywhere I started researching and and reading and found that there are a lot of complaints along these lines. Now again this was 2010. So this was just before the Arab uprisings which is going to be the next, the next element of this talk. These companies were pretty small. They had really small staff. When people reached out to me from Facebook they use their real names I was able to find them the individuals on LinkedIn or find news articles about them. And all of the content moderation. I'm not even sure we really knew that term at the time, but all of the content moderation was done by humans with seemingly little consideration for how it might or might not scale. And at the time, most of it was also done in Silicon Valley so it was a very narrow field.  Of course in the research for my book I found that these teams were in fact mostly American, largely white. They were diverse in terms of gender surprisingly but nevertheless these people were making the rules for what the entire world could say. And so that brings me to the Arab uprisings. So just a couple years prior to the beginning of the Tunisian uprising. We saw the role that these platforms could potentially play in people fighting back against their governments in these movements. We saw it with Belarus and with Iran in 2009. But these were a little bit different, much smaller scale and a lot of the media criticism about them at least or about how social media played a role was that it was largely people outside of the country in the diasporas who were engaging on social media and reporting what was happening doesn't make it any less impactful but it was a much smaller scale let's say. But by 2010. People had in Tunisia and Egypt a lot of people at least had phones in their pockets. Twitter had enabled SMS to tweet so you could actually just send an SMS so you didn't have to have a data connection. And a lot of people had home internet. I can't remember the statistics but they were pretty high numbers at least. But when the Tunisian uprising started these companies really had no idea the central role that they would play people in Tunisia had been blogging for a long time and in fact I. I think one of the things that led to the election is that it was one of the countries to have the earliest blog network all the way back to the late 90s or early 2000s. But still, there was no real anticipation of what would happen. And next, and so when the Tunisian uprising spread to Egypt and then to other countries, I from my perspective because I was in touch with them at the time. Social media platforms are really taken aback by their own scale. They were surprised by how how important of a role that they played. People took to the streets on January 25, but there is one little backstory that I just like to share here because I think it really does illustrate the issue in November 2010 over American Thanksgiving weekend. I got CC on an email thread with some other advocates in the US saying that there was a page in Egypt, a really important page that had been taken down over that holiday weekend. And that page was actually the one that would eventually call for people to take to the streets on January 25, it was called we are all had said, so named after the young man who was killed by police in Alexandria that summer. It was Egyptians who are running the page and the reason that Facebook had removed it was that they'd broken a rule. They were not using their real names for safety reasons probably obvious safety reasons. And so we scrambled, we advocates scrambled to get Facebook on the line over a holiday weekend, we were actually able to reach some of the highest executives in the company who restored the page under certain conditions, and that's shared in my book but those conditions were basically that someone else stepped forward using their real name to administer the page. That page fortunately went back up and fortunately enabled people to to a call for this up. That, you know, was many years in the making of course but may not have been coordinated so well without Facebook and without Twitter. And the Egyptian government responded as people went on the streets on the 25th they blocked Facebook that day. The next day they blocked Twitter, you probably all know this story but the day after that they blocked the entire internet, with the exception of one isp. One ISP enabled people to continue. I remember stories of people gathering one apartment near Tahrir Square to use the internet there. There were mesh networks on the ground. There were people with SMS of course who could still call out of the country to get, you know, to tell stories and have their friends outside the country report them to media, etc. So not all hope was lost, and the platform still played an important role. They even responded to the internet. And Twitter put in place, I think they worked with Google to put in place something called speak to tweet that allowed people to call up and leave voice messages that would then become tweets. And so the companies were actually very responsive to what was going on in the ground and as I'm sure you might remember the narrative around all of this from media to academia and everywhere governments even the Obama administration, for instance, the narrative was that these platforms had in fact enabled revolution. In some ways that was true. It's hard to say without without this style of mass media, how well these messages would have spread. Of course we've always had protest, but in an authoritarian country where where gatherings are monitored where protests are banned or restricted. And so, early on before these governments were incredibly responsive to it. The platforms enabled people to at least figure out who each other were. It allowed information cascades to happen. And that's how I see what happened there. And so there was all of this hope after that. But I think in the next few years things very quickly turned and I think that's where we're where we're getting to next. And so while the world was seeing these platforms as a means to conduct political advocacy or even topple dictators, authoritarian countries and democratic countries alike, we're taking notes and figuring out how they needed to engage with platforms and where they needed to step into control them. And so in those ensuing years we did see a lot of these platforms blocked. We saw a lot more demands on them to remove certain content. We saw that SSL encryption HTTPS as you know it became more common and more popularized. We saw the ability of governments to block individual videos or individual pieces of content, Wayne, because it's, I'm not a technologist so I don't want to get this completely wrong but it's very difficult to block an individual piece of content over an SSL connection. And so the demands to the companies the back channels grew. And then after that what you had by I would say by 2014 at least you had government or you had companies publishing transparency reports, sharing for the most part what governments were demanding, how many pieces of content they were taking down and this to a large degree give users and you know and the public the media a better sense of what was happening but it wasn't all it wasn't all good and we're still struggling with that I'll come back to that when I talk about the Digital Services Act though. So, 2014, I mentioned as the point where transparency was becoming popularized. I see 2014 as a turning point for something else. And so I hope over the prior years I remember going to lots of conferences, a lot of talk about how these platforms would help. And then around 2014 three things happened, as I see it. One was there was a lot more pushback around harassment on these platforms and a lot more demand for platforms to do something about the growing sense of harassment that was occurring. There was a lot more pushback from what where I see it came seem to come from the US, but in fact, these were global conversations and there was a lot happening behind the scenes, organizing to try to figure out how to make this, how to make these platforms safer, particularly for women and other marginalized communities. This was the rise of the Islamic State 2014 was the year that James Foley the journalist from my home state of New Hampshire was beheaded by the Islamic State and that image spread across all of these platforms, and sort of shocked them into doing something about it. In that particular case, his family was able. I'm going to fail to remember the detail here but his family was able to advocate on the grounds of privacy that the videos and photos should be taken down, but curiously. The platforms actually allowed the still images to stay up when they were published by official news media, again, making the decision about who was official and who wasn't and doing that for the entire world. So we started to see this stratification happen over who could publish on these platforms when something was controversial. And the third thing which is probably obvious is the rise of the populism and specifically the rise of the far right, and the alt right in the US as it used to be called, and Trump, of course, and I think that that those three things all happening at once pushed a lot more pushed governments to democratic government sorry to be more responsive to these threats and to put more pressure on the companies. So around 2014 we started to see the Obama administration talking about these companies needing to do something about the rise of terrorism and then far right extremism. We saw more conversations happening in Europe around hate speech and the threat of populism. And of course, the conversations around harassment actually did push companies into action. There was a time that Twitter created the trust and safety council which was recently disbanded under the new musk administration, let's say at Twitter, but which for many years brought together a wide range of organizations from all over the world to have more of a say in Twitter's policies and to consult with the company. It wasn't all that although we're seeing you know more more misinformation and disinformation, more hate speech, more harassment more terrorism on these platforms. We were also seeing the platforms engaging more with civil society. At conferences that I attended they were there to listen to people's concerns. Some of them created user groups like Twitter's trust and safety council, or consultatory arrangements with different civil society groups, many of which were under NDAs, non disclosure agreements but nevertheless, which existed and allowed groups from all over the world to have an actual say or consultatory role in policy, and in how content moderation worked. At the same time, as these platforms are growing content moderation is becoming increasingly complex for them, because when you only have a million users let's say and that's still a pretty large number. It's not that hard to scale how content moderation works. It's always been. Well, until recently rather content moderation on the platforms was always a reactive role so you'd have a user report something that they saw that they believe violated the rules that would then go into a back end queue where a content worker either in Silicon Valley or at a third party companies somewhere else in the world would have to make a binary decision over whether that piece of content should stay up or come down. But as the platform scaled content moderation had to become more complex. On the one hand, they had to scale the number of human moderators that were working and so that of these companies wanting to save money started hiring third party firms in countries like the Philippines where they could access cheaper labor. It wouldn't be a few more years until that conversation would become would come to light a bit more about how problematic some of this was. They also had to institute algorithms or automated technologies that would identify certain content and either strike. Or at least identify it for the human moderators. And then there's also a diversification of the actual decision at the end of the process so whereas it used to be a leave up or take down binary decision companies, especially YouTube I believe pioneered a lot of this made other or created other ways of moderating content so whether it was demonetization or what we now call shadow banning what we now know to exist. We've always denied it for many years shadow banning of course being sort of hiding things from search or hiding them from your feed while still allowing them to exist. And so this became much more complex and much more opaque for the rest of the world. And I think that that's when a lot of the conversations in Europe really started in earnest because, although you know there was obviously a lot of awareness around the world over the issues with platforms, moderating speech or censoring speech. I think that this is around the time where the conversation kind of shifted into the problematic speech that platforms were hosting and how they weren't responding to it in the ways that they needed to. And so that's when Europe I think really started to play a bigger role. And what we've seen in the past few years is a range of different methods of trying to regulate speech. And so I believe that in Europe I've lived in Europe now for about eight years. And I believe that there is a really strong awareness amongst civil society here and amongst some governments at least of the fact that this is sort of a two sided problem that companies do have an outsized role that can be seen and that they do have the ability to censor even government officials as we've seen in Germany, or sorry at least politicians sorry. But also that there's, you know, a wide range of problematic speech that is enabled by the platforms and has obviously created huge problems for democracies. So, one of the first attempts I at least from my perspective is the Network Enforcement Act in Germany which holds companies liable for the speech that they that they host for hates for sorry for illegal mostly hate speech that they host. This is one method that's become really popular throughout the world and in some cases in a democracy like Germany can be fairly effective. It was criticized widely including by me when it first came out but it hasn't created the problems that we expected it to. In fact though I would say that it's, it's, it's been mildly useful. It's the issue with it of course is that it still puts the onus on the companies to know and determine what is hate speech under a given law. There's also been issues with the reporting. So when you use Twitter in Germany, for example, you can only report hate speech in the German language, which obviously in a country that has welcomed so many migrants over the past few years has made it really difficult for many of them who are targets of hate speech. But another issue around it is that the, the, the, the penalties on the company, rather than on the person engaging in hate speech and so prior to this law. Of course the government had to do or the judiciary rather had to do a lot more work to go after individuals but the individual be penalized and there's plenty of research that shows that individuals are more likely to be deterred if they're actually held liable for engaging in hate speech. When the company is the target they pay a fine and that's really it. Of course, I see this law as also being problematic and in the sense that it's been replicated in a bunch of countries that are less democratic than Germany and abused by governments to go after things that are not hate speech but rather things that they be illegal but are protected or otherwise protected speech. The Digital Services Act though is a really different approach. And I think that there's a lot of good in it. There's some negatives as well but I'll mostly focus on the good. So in one way it creates a fast track procedure for law enforcement to take on the role of trusted flaggers. So they can, they can they're basically given a fast track to be able to report things that are illegal. And so, you know, again, in democracy this is a good thing. It also preserves the EU system of limited liability for online intermediaries, which means that the platforms, unlike the American Enforcement Act platforms can't be held responsible for user content, as long as they remove content that they actually know to be so as long as they remove it when they're alerted to it. They're not responsible for proactively removing content and EFF sees this as a good thing and I think so it is most of civil society that we work with in Europe. What one other thing that the DSA does though that I'm really happy about is it has a strong emphasis on greater transparency and user rights. So it has requirements on platforms to explain their content curation algorithms in more detail in user friendly language and in all of the EU languages which is fantastic. I'd love to see that of course expanded to more languages but for now, great start. It also, you know, it aims to ensure that users can better understand content decisions which are often seen as arbitrary and how they can pursue a path of recourse reinstatement so appeals. So this is something that we've been focused on with, with a large group of civil society organizations from all over the world for a few years now in the Santa Clara principles for transparency and accountability and content moderation which I think eight groups and individuals first created and then we did another consultatory process with I think more than 50 organizations in 11 or so countries, and which we put out a new version of last year and you can see those at Santa Clara principles.org. And I think that's because we did bring those to the minds behind the DSA and believe that they were taken into account in in creating these transparency measures. There's a lot more there of course I feel like explaining the DSA is probably not the best use of my time right now. And it's also quite a complex set of a piece of legislation but I do see it as the right approach, looking at, you know, going. I'm going to check my time before I talk too much for how am I on time. You're doing okay. Yeah, great. Excellent. So yeah so going after harmful illegal speech, while also having limited liability for platforms when they do their job, and giving users more rights in the process and I think that this is a great model for how we can look at this globally. And just, you know, the negative side of the DSA is that it is just for Europe, and a lot of the people who are most impacted by bad content moderation decisions whether again a failure to take something down or a failure to keep it up are in other parts of the world where far less attention is given by these companies. And we see this disparity all the time, even just in the recent what's the word insurrection thank you in Brazil. There was a lot more attention paid to the same thing when it happened in the US but in Brazil, from what I've heard from my colleagues there the companies have not given a lot of a lot of resources to two people there who are very concerned about how platforms were utilized in organizing that. So that brings me to the three topics that I'm kind of thinking about at the moment there's a lot more. Or but I tried to narrow it down as three kind of examples of issues that are ongoing right now that I think that companies need to be more responsive to or are starting to be responsive to at least in one case. So one is the issue of conflict zones and extremism or terrorism. The Christ Church massacre a few years ago resulted in the creation of something called the Christ Church call, which works with the platforms very closely to ensure that they are being responsive to to terrorist content on the on their sites. This is by and large a good thing but one of the issues here that has been raised by a lot of civil society groups in which I've worked on a bit is that the use of on the platforms in this practice and the scale at which it's occurring makes it very difficult to determine what is in fact a piece of terrorist propaganda versus what is a journalist or a user documenting a war crime to put a really fine point on it. And these, these videos these images, the text have actually been used in war crimes tribunals there's an example of a few years ago, where a YouTube video was utilized in a case where a Libyan general was prosecuted in the week. And I use this example, because I think that without if the companies were doing a better job of preserving this content at least on their back end, I think we would see a lot more of these cases where this type of content is used to to aid in prosecutions, but what the companies are actually doing in many cases is disappearing the content. They're not simply, you know, penalizing it. They're throwing it down and essentially throwing it in the trash. And this creates an untenable situation for human rights workers who rely on these platforms sometimes in low bandwidth situations to quickly get content out sometimes even in a live stream format. So I think that that's one really strong example of a pertinent issue an ongoing issue where companies are in many ways under pressure by governments and therefore failing to, you know, to pay significant enough to tackle concerns of people working in conflict zones. One example, another very, very different example but I think it's actually an interesting one because it does have one of the same back end issues and I'll explain that in just a second. Adult nudity or nudity by large pornography all of it really sexual content. This is an interesting example because child sexual abuse imagery has long been dealt with by using automation it was one of the first content categories to have a fairly automated response. And this was through a tool called photo DNA. That allows companies to run, I'm going to explain this in very non technical terms, but basically allows companies to have something running on the back end that when a child sexual abuse image comes up on their platform, it can be matched to an image that's based by law enforcement, and then automate automatically taken down this means that the content workers don't have to see the image sometimes these images are of course, penis and traumatizing so that's a very good thing. And it also means that anything that's put into the database by law enforcement can then you know be rapidly taken down. Obviously this doesn't cover everything but it's a good tool. This tool was actually modified to be used for extremist content. So that's one of the issues.   Typically have banned most nudity from their platforms because it's easier. This is my perspective at least, because it's easier to take it all down then have to decide what is consensual, what is adult, etc. Now don't get me wrong, these are very hard problems. So AI can't easily detect between a 17 year old and 18 year old to use a blunt example. But at the same time, I think that it does restrict freedom of expression, whether we're talking about art or political protest or just someone wanting to share their body. So the Facebook over the meta, excuse me, the meta oversight board, which is the separate body created by meta or Facebook a few years ago to able these content decisions and has a board from all over the world with different backgrounds including lawyers technologists etc. So they're currently overturned meta's original decisions so their content moderation decisions in cases involving gender identity and nudity. So this is very specifically related to the issue of people who are transgender non binary being treated as as women or as female in these decisions, because of the fact that they have a certain body part. So basically what the oversight board has said is that it's unjust to to treat them, you know, to basically misgender them in these cases and identify them as women. And so this is sort of, you know, meta is now enabling change in their policy because of this. And basically, you know, it's, I think they're tackling a really difficult issue. And one that, you know, it's in due time for them to have taken this on I'm happy to answer more questions about it. I'm just aware of the time so I'll jump to my last thought and then kind of give a couple closing remarks. Decentralization is the other topic that I'm thinking of a lot and I won't get into this one as much because it's still very new topic and one where I think I'm still mulling a lot of this over in my head about how it works. And we've had decentralized platforms or at least I've known about them since social sorry decentralized social media platforms since around 2011 when a tool called diaspora came out for a bit and never really got popular. But the conversation started for me then, and that conversation being one of what if we all ran our own servers and what if we were the ones who decided what was allowed on social media platforms instead of, you know, these major companies and their shareholders. And these sites existed for this whole time sites like mastodon. And for those who aren't really familiar with them I can say that basically the way that this works is kind of like email with email you might have your employer's email you might not your friend might have Gmail another person might have I don't know Yahoo. I hope not but maybe they still have it. And you can all interact with each other, even though your emails on different servers. And it sounds really similar to that in that I can have a server you can have one that your employer has one, and yet they're all interoperable they can all interact across the different servers, and you can each have your own set of rules, just like email providers each have their own set of rules when it comes to spam. So, Elon Musk buying Twitter kind of created a really rapid rise in mastodon's popularity and I don't know the user growth stats but they're pretty incredible. And now people are kind of seeing these things as real possibilities, but from my perspective I think that they also raise new questions about what content moderation cannon should look like, because just as it's problematic from Mark Zuckerberg to make the rules about what I can say on his platform, I'm also not thrilled necessarily with the ideals or ideologies of some of the people who run these servers. I've actually seen. I've had lots of conversations with people that I work with, especially in the US, especially black communities in the US, who feel that they're being kind of tone police told not to talk about racism, and things like that by people who just want their servers to be happy and friendly. And so that's just one, you know one example that I'm seeing but you can see how this could create other issues, including for some of the issues that I talked about, such as you know not wanting people sharing things coming out of conflict zones like Syria. So I think that that kind of brings me to the conclusion and really the big question at stake with respect to hate speech but with respect to really all of these issues, which is who should decide. And obviously this is a question that we've been dealing with since the beginning of time or at least the beginning of thought around freedom of expression. But I think that, you know, there's something else at stake when it's private companies that make this decision, these decisions, because these companies have, you know, their primary motivator is money, and their primary currency is your data. And so there, that's what they're operating under. And when they're making content rules or content decisions they're not doing it with freedom of expression, or their users best interests in mind. They're not doing it while trying to raise their profits and also please everyone else. And so in some ways decentralized platforms could do a better job of this, but will they do a better job at regulating hate speech. I, you know I think that it's possible that a lot of servers could be conscientious about this, but at the same time how could they scale. And how can they respond. Well, how can they know all of the laws for one thing and German law and hate speech is pretty complex I've tried to look at it. But then, you know, Germany is just one country, how could they know all of the world's laws, and how can they make these decisions. And so I don't want to say that this is an intractable problem but rather I think it's one where we need all hands on deck. And that's not what we have right now right now we've got, and again I say this not insulting Europe, but I do see Europe making decisions for Europeans, while having an outsized impact now on platforms and on the entire world. And so I think it's really vital that we're also bringing people to into the discussion from other parts of the world who again, often have more at stake, the state, the stakes are a lot higher when you're living in, in a cultural context, where the threat of violence every day. Is real. And I'll kind of close with just a thought that I heard in a podcast yesterday, but from someone I know personally, and this podcast was talking about the Facebook oversight board and how some of the, the test runs around its creation were made. I was actually at one of these. There were seven different sessions that they did before the oversight board was was formalized. And in these sessions, they had people like me, lawyers. and psychologists. Given examples where we had to make a decision about a piece of content based on what we thought was right. And one of those examples and this was talked about in the podcast so I don't have to worry about non disclosure agreements was the phrase kill all men. Mark Zuckerberg talks about it and he says, Well, yeah, you know, we did, we did censor this but eventually we came to the understanding from you know these these consultations with people in the US and in Europe that kill all men was usually used as a, you know, just an expression of frustration and a form of punching up because men of course, you know, being dominant throughout the world. But there's a woman that I know, but I'm tired from Ethiopia who spoke in that in that podcast and said, Well, that, you know, in her context coming from Ethiopia, she doesn't really agree with that. And the reason is that the punching up punching down dynamic although she understands it of course and agrees with it in theory that in a conflict zone, or a politically hot zone even that the dynamics of what is punching up and what what is punching down shift rapidly. When you have two groups that are in conflict with each other, one might be in power one day one might be in power the next day. And for me that you know I've obviously I've thought of this before in some way but her comment really stuck with me. And because I think that that is the problem with enabling authorities to make these decisions without the without the, the input of global constituents. We live in a globalized world and while we don't have a form of global democracy that works for everyone I think that this is a point in time where we have to consider speech decisions and policies around speech as something that that needs to be personalized so I will close there because I think we've got plenty of time for for comments and questions. Thank you.


That guy from Staten Island growing up a Yankee fan was there an added level of excitement heading into the spring training 100% you know growing up a Yankee fan my dog's name is Jeter watched a ton of games growing up you got guys here like Tino Martinez Bernie Williams it's you know list goes on and on I mean you've got unbelievable talent here and it's just a it's a greater organization to be a part of is this different than some of the spring trainings that you've been a part of before yes and no I mean it's just a little different for me just because I feel like I grew up watching these guys and now you know putting on the pinstripes is it's pretty special to me with some injuries has that changed your approach at all for some people in the outfit has that changed your approach at all as far as what you're trying to do not really you know I'm just trying to play my game you know play hard and you know I bring a little bit different to what most guys bring a little speed factor and good defense and put the ball in play and you know whatever I can do to help the team win and you know try and go for 28 how do you feel as your spring has been going so far I think it's going pretty good I feel pretty good at the plate kind of made some adjustments this off season I feel like it's going you know I feel like I'm seeing the ball pretty good and my defense is there and speeds feels good so I'm healthy so I think that's that's the main part thanks for the time thank you


what did I miss go on does someone want to show me a phone and pictures and photos of trees okay all right well we'll save it for after or if you want to come up and you know answer some questions okay so we'll get started and then we'll go back to that later so good afternoon happy Thursday so just a few items at the top and then I'll be happy to take your questions so sadly as many of you know a United States Air Force CV 22B Osprey from the from Yokota Air Base Japan assigned to the 353rd special operations wing was involved in an aircraft mishap Tuesday Tuesday Eastern while performing a routine training mission off the shore of Yakushima Island Japan emergency personnel remain on scene conducting search and rescue operations the cause of this incident is currently under investigation our thoughts are with the unit and their families and we'd like to thank the government of Japan and the Japanese Coast Guard for all their assistance as a reminder Secretary Austin will travel this week to California December 1st and 2nd on Friday he will host the Australian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense Richard Marles and the UK Secretary of State for Defense Grant Shaps at Moffitt Field to discuss the Australia UK US Security Partnership or as you all know it AUKUS and this is on the campus of the DoD's Defense Innovation Unit and then later that day he will travel to see me valley to deliver a keynote address on Saturday at the 2023 Reagan National Defense Forum and shifting to the Middle East the United States remains encouraged by the humanitarian pauses that we're seeing in Gaza and we remain in close contact with our Israeli partners as you know on Tuesday the US airlifted 54,000 pounds of humanitarian assistance which included medical supplies warm clothing food and nutrition assistance to the people of Gaza we expect more aircraft carrying humanitarian assistance to come in the coming days and lastly tomorrow approximately 180 US Army soldiers from the 5th Corps 2nd Cavalry Regiment will join exercise brave partner in North Macedonia concluding on December 10th this US Army and Africa led exercise tests the regiment readiness on short notice enhancing interoperability and strengthening our NATO alliance the exercise also demonstrates our commitment to the Western Balkans aspirations for European integration emphasizing that no nation can face today's challenges alone and with that I'd be happy to take your questions Lita. Sabrina Japan has suspended its Osprey flights and has asked that the US also suspend some Osprey Osprey flights is there any move or any decision yet by the department to suspend pause or otherwise even slow down in that area flights of the Osprey until after even until after recovery operations are finished and has the department received an official request from Japan to do some sort of standout so I'm not tracking an official request receive here at the department we I've seen some of the comments that that you just referenced right now the Ospreys are still operating in Japan but at the time right now our focus on in terms of what just happened this earlier this week remains on search and rescue efforts so that's the priority of course and you know we're great we're of course eternally grateful for the government of Japan and their Coast Guard for helping in our search and recovery efforts. So is there no concern within the department that there are possibly problems within the Osprey that should be looked at before there's continued flow? I mean I would say as a department and of course the secretary values there's a true commitment to safety when it comes to any of our airmen operating any aircraft again I'm not going to get ahead of the investigation it's currently under investigation to see exactly what happened and so until that concludes if there are any if the investigation concludes that there need to be additional steps taken we'll make we'll certainly do that but at this time the investigation is underway on on what happened. There were eight personnel on board you know how many have been recovered versus how many are believed to have died. I don't have an update for you on recovery efforts just yet again we know that there are eight missing the search and recovery efforts are ongoing I hope that we will have more to share soon but at this moment I just I just don't. Do you have any updates on the five Somali attackers who were on the carney of the weekend and have you been able to find any link between the Somalis and the Yemeni Houthis? Do you mean the Mason? Sorry the Mason. That's okay. So in terms of connection let me take the second part of your question first so in terms of connection again we're still doing our assessments we're not we're not seeing one right now but if there is one we'd certainly of course you know let you know but at this time these five armed individuals that the Mason was able to interject as they were trying to flee from the Central Park remain in US custody. Yeah Laura can you tell us have there been any additional attacks on US troops in Iraq and Syria since Thanksgiving the last we were tracking was 73 I believe? Yes let me see here I just want to make sure yes so there was so we do have an update there was an attack on Tuesday so that was earlier this week so that brings the total attacks up to 74 attacks from October 17th until now we did not see as you just mentioned over the period of Thanksgiving and then over the last two days we did not observe any additional attacks on our troops. And where was the attack on Tuesday? That wasn't Syria? Were there any injuries? No injuries no damage to infrastructure if there are any injuries and again I know that we provide those updates I don't have any more updates to provide on additional non-series injuries but I'm not tracking that there were any injuries from that attack on Tuesday that happened. Drones, rockets? I would have to get back to you on that I just don't have that information in front of me. The drone that was shot down I think was it yesterday what type of drone was it I think it was an Iranian drone can you say what type of drone? It was an Iranian manufactured drone I believe that I believe that also there's more information that I think CENTCOM did put out on the drone but it was a drone that we know was headed in the general direction of the Carney and was engaged and because the commander of the ship obviously felt that it was a threat and so they did take it down but I think there's more information available online in terms of the type of drone that it was. Konstantin. On that topic can you say what the Carney used to down the drone missiles or guns? I would refer you to CENTCOM for more information I just don't have that. One other question can you say whether the Mason fired any weapons as part of its engagement with the ballistic missile on the are you I'm sorry are you talking about the event when from Wednesday or Tuesday no I'm not aware that the Mason did fire any weapons in regards to the ballistic missile again that that ballistic missile we know landed far away from from the ship I believe is at least 10 nautical miles away so I don't believe there was any need to to use any weapons yeah real thank you following up from the Osprey mishap in Japan so are you saying the Japanese government should not be worried about the safety of other other Osprey aircraft deployed to Japan? Well I'm not gonna speak for the Japanese government but what I can tell you as the US government and this department of course safety is our number one priority and of course we're concerned when any when there was any mishap which is why we have launched an investigation into what exactly happened to try and figure out more of the facts here at the in the immediate our focus is on search and recovery or search and rescue efforts for for our eight missing airmen but in terms of you know the comfort of the Japanese government I would refer you to them to speak to speak to that. So does the US military continue to operate Osprey Osprey as you did before this crash happened? Again as of right now we are still continuing to operate the Osprey aircraft we have a commitment to safety there is an investigation that is currently determining and looking into what exactly happened with this aircraft and the mishap should that investigation yield in results that require the department to change anything about the Osprey or to take additional steps we will certainly do that but at this time I'm not gonna get ahead of that investigation and its process. Yeah Fadi. Just have one clarification about this extra attack in in Syria. Did it happen this Tuesday or Tuesday last week? There was it was an attack this past Tuesday. Okay and then on the incident with the drone yesterday with the Karni the statement from Sancom mentioned one of the ships that the Karni was escorting was carrying what equipment military equipment to the region my understanding that this is not a government ship but are you able to say whether that shipment was going to Israel or somewhere else and maybe try to understand what actually happened in that incident? Sure all I know that is it's not a military ship it's a commercial vessel in terms of where it was going I don't have more information for you on that I would direct you to the Sancom team to answer more of those questions but yes the the Karni was escorting that ship as a matter of safety and to ensure you know international passageways obviously remain open but in terms of where that ship was bound for the Central Park I think that oh I'm sorry I'm getting I'm getting my own my own incidents confused here in terms of where that the Karni was escorting that commercial ship I just don't have more for you on where it was going and then lastly in terms of rules of engagement with with some of the UAV activity what is the threshold I mean obviously these incidents happening in international waters do you have information on how far out was the drone before it was shut down by the Karni? I don't have the exact measurements of how far it was from the Karni but of course a commander of a ship if he if he or she assesses that the drone or missile is a threat to that to that ship and the personnel in that ship they have the authority to shoot it down so I don't know that there's a threshold that needs to be met so much so is that the commander of that ship feels that it is under threat and therefore they must take action and respond in in in whatever is coming its way. The USS Karni shot down a drone that was quote heading towards it according to the statement we got yesterday in the Red Sea and then on Sunday the USS Mason at least one ballistic missile was heading towards it but these are not deemed the targets of these Houthi missiles so my question is if what makes these not considered targets what is the target why are these not being considered attacks like the attacks in Syria and Iraq because the Iranian proxies are missing there too? Well I don't know that we wouldn't say that these aren't attacks I mean they I mean we are of course taking action if we feel that they are a threat to us but in terms of intended target our initial assessments when it came to what the Mason took down and what the Karni took down our initial assessment is that the ships were not the intended target but they came close enough where at least the Karni felt the need that it had to engage the drone that was coming its way or headed toward in the general direction and I'm sorry I forgot you had another question in there that I'm I guess just to pinpoint it a little bit more if it's not the intended target then is it an attack or not an attack? Well again I refer you to the to the people who are launching these drones or missiles what their intended target is we can't really speak to that what we can speak to is the fact that our initial assessment and if that changes we would let you know but our initial assessment right now is that these ships are not the intended target if that changes and if we continue to go through our assessments and say you know we did another analysis and it did look like they were targeting the Karni we would of course let you know and adjust how we're talking about these but again it is up to the commanders of these ships if they feel that they are under attack or they're feel like their personnel are threatened to be able to respond and take action. A separate topic so President Biden met with Chinese President Xi earlier this month in San Francisco and they said that military to military communication would continue or would restart has Secretary Austin or anyone in the U.S. military been in contact with their Chinese counterparts since that meeting. I don't have anything to read out today we certainly welcome the conversation and that was something that you saw the president announce in San Francisco that mill to mill communications would start back up again but again until the PRC appoints the secretary's counterpart the secretary doesn't have someone to necessarily engage with just yet but of course we welcome mill to mill communications at the very high levels from the secretary to our lower levels and of course in the Indo-Pacific as well I'm gonna go to Ali. General Van Herk opened an investigation into alcohol consumption at North is secretary Austin aware of that investigation and is the Pentagon confident that drinking in the workplace has it not impacted national security. Yeah the secretary is aware of the investigation and I think it shows just how seriously the commander is taking this by immediately launching one and of course we are aware of the of the reports of allegations of alcohol being in the workplace again NORAD Northcom they continue their mission uninterrupted I'm not gonna get ahead of the investigation as it's ongoing now but we're certainly tracking it here. What is the DOD policy on alcohol consumption on duty? I would have to get back to you but I think you would probably guess that we're not supportive of alcohol consumption on duty while performing certain tasks but you know I'd have to get back to you on the exact policy yeah Tom. Do a quick follow-up please and you said earlier that the people are not tracking an official request from the Japanese government regarding last week if such a request does that come from to the Department of Defense or does that come through State Department such a request would you do you know? I don't know I think it could come through varying levels so. And my second follow-up thank you Annette my second follow-up is regarding the drill in North Macedonia is just the first time U.S. troops will be participating in NATO exercise in North Macedonia. Certainly not first time U.S. troops are participating in a NATO exercise I in North Macedonia I don't know I'd have to I can take that question okay great I'm gonna go to the phones and then we'll come back into the room. Howard Altman. Thanks is the Pentagon tracking an attack on a Houthi base in Yemen and if so do you know who might be behind it? I've seen the reports of an attack within Yemen I can tell you that it was not a U.S. military that conducted that. Do you know who might have been behind it? Jeff Schogel task and purpose. Thank you can the Defense Department confirm that one of the crew members from the missing from the Osprey the crashed has been recovered and pronounced dead and are the efforts right now still search and rescue or have they transitioned to recovery? Thanks Jeff for the question so I I've seen the reports I can't confirm what's being reported about a death what I can tell you is this is still a search and recovery search and I'm sorry sorry search and rescue mission for the eight that were on board that aircraft when we have more to share we certainly will do but again this is still a search and rescue mission. And last question from the phones Heather US and I. Thank you so much so this is the first time that CENCOM has actually or CENCOM or the DOD has said that the drones are Iranian made and I was just wondering what that tells the DOD about what the Houthis have in terms of drones and weapons that we've been seeing launched at near the US ships. Thanks Heather for the question so again when it comes to drones or other equipment I mean we have been very clear from the beginning that Iran equips funds supports trains various IRGC militia groups has supported the Houthis has supported Hezbollah so I think what you saw is us directly calling that out in a statement yesterday we have not shied away from doing that we've certainly done that again when we have taken our own defensive self-defensive strikes within Syria and Iraq we have said that we know that these are Iranian used IRGC used facilities that fund and support many of these militia groups so that was just us doing that again.  Two questions quick one on India another one on the Middle East as far as the US-India relations are concerned military to military now in the midst of two wars Ukraine Russia and Ukraine and also of course Israel and Hamas anybody or secretary or anybody in touch with the Indian Defense Minister or anybody in in connection of these two wars. As you know the secretary was just in the region it feels like three months ago but it was literally just I think three weeks ago the secretary was in India engaging with his counterparts of course world events came up and we put out detailed readouts of those meetings so he is you know of course regularly engaged with his Indian counterparts as recently as you know last month. And second as far as Israel's war against Hamas Hamas has been designated as the International Terrorist Organization but they have a political office in Doha and so did maybe even still today Taliban's so if anybody is talking to the Qataris or Doha people that why they still have the political office there and they are running this terrorist organization against innocent people around the globe including India or US or Israel among others and Qatar they are friends of our friends US friends India friends Israeli friends among others so and they the actors in this area still have not condemned these terrorist organizations. I think the actors in the region have certainly condemned the actions that Hamas took on October 7th and what you're seeing with Qatar is engagement and them working and and with the Egyptian government as well as of course with this administration to free hostages and to continue this enduring humanitarian pause that is happening right now. I don't have anything further to say about where they're located but I think we've been very definitive on the grotesque and disgusting actions that were taken on October 7th and I'll just say that yeah. Thank you. Nice of you magazine this morning reported that the IDF has been hitting what it describes as quote power targets in Gaza that includes high-rise complexes civilian homes in some cases without prior warning in order to quote according to their sources lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas not to collate locate with combatant with non-combatants excuse me because the department aware that the IDF has been using this tactic and has this issue come up in conversations between department officials and their counterparts in Israel. I'm not I'm sorry I'm not aware of this report that you mentioned or where it's being reported in the magazine. I think we've been very clear on our in all of our engagements that the secretaries had on a near daily basis basis with Minister Galant. He just had another call yesterday with Minister Galant that IDF operations that they are precise that they're targeting Hamas but let's be very clear and just to go off the last question Hamas is a terrorist organization that embeds deeply within civilian infrastructure and uses civilians as a way of shielding their operations so they are making it incredibly difficult for the IDF of course to conduct their own operations but in all of the secretaries calls and engagements with the Israelis we continue to of course emphasize that innocent lives that that they are taking into consideration any military operation civilian lives and innocent lives. It seems that reporting that one of the examples it's given in the article is that the IDF officials are instructed to find a building say a high rise that it has civilian inhabitants and if they find half a single floor of the building occupied by Hamas offices then it's a target wipe it out is that something the department condones again I have not seen this report that you're referencing I do not I'm not aware of this I think what I just said and I'm happy to reiterate it but we have been very clear when it comes to engagement and the need to protect innocent civilian lives but again finding and targeting any member of a terror network is going to be any challenge for any military especially when that network is operating in an urban environment like in Gaza so we're continuing our engagements with the Israeli government we're continuing to again support them in their operations against this terrorist organization but it isn't in all of our conversations and as you've seen in the readouts that we've put out the secretary continues to emphasize the need to uphold the law of armed conflict and protect innocent lives chris yeah we're gonna um you think uh the government of japan and in their coast guard but to clarify that this search and rescue effort is this being led by the u.s. military at this point yes okay yeah how many assets roughly do you have I don't have more on how many assets are being used for the search and rescue efforts it's ongoing again when we have more to share um I will certainly let you know but I don't have more to provide on that front yes in the back and then I'll come over here yeah thank you just a quick question so the house is voting today to freeze the six billion dollars in in funds that the u.s released for Iran earlier this year can you respond to what lawmakers are saying do you think the unfrozen money has emboldened Iran and its proxy groups in the Middle East especially considering all the clashes that we've seen I would say that's really a question for treasury and the state department but to my knowledge Iran hasn't been able to access those funds they're still remained uh frozen and or sorry uh they still remain intact and that they have not been able to be tapped into um again I'm not going to just comment on pending legislation uh and that's really something that I think treasury would be better to answer yeah and then I'll come and then last one over you thank you Japanese defense minister kihara has publicly stated that he has requested the u.s. military to halt operations of ospreys in japan while there hasn't been any official requests I was wondering has there been has that concern been communicated directly to this building through other informal channels yeah again I think I answered this but um appreciate the question haven't received a formal request that I that I'm aware of um again we are taking what happened the the mishap um of one of our aircraft extremely seriously um our focus right now is on search and rescue of the eight that are missing um there is an investigation I'm not going to get ahead of that investigation but when those results um you know are concluded if there's any action or additional action that needs to be taken we will certainly let you know but at this time our efforts are on uh of course you know thinking of these families who are missing their eight loved ones right now yeah and last question over here thank you Sabrina there are reports claiming that the white house has requested um the removal of restrictions on all categories of weapons and ammunition is Israel is allowed to access from us weapons stockpiles stored in israel itself so do you confirm uh that things and uh if so how that will affect providing weapons to Ukraine uh so I'm not exactly sure on the report or or what you're referencing but I think we've been very clear from this podium um and and again throughout this administration that um we are providing Israel with what it needs in its fight against a terrorist organization like Hamas we've provided the the contours of what we are providing which is ammunition uh precision guide immunizations and air defenses these are the requirements that the that the IDF needs when it comes to engaging um in its fight with Hamas in Gaza um in terms of Ukraine uh uh different different area of responsibility different war uh very different landscapes too um we continue to provide Ukraine with what we can on what's remaining from the presidential drawdown authority that we have um we are running low as you know that's why we requested a supplemental package um to that we submitted to the hill that has still not been passed um but the authorities that we're using to provide Ukraine with the weapons and capabilities and systems it needs are coming from presidential drawdown authorities what is real um and what we're providing to israel is coming mainly through fms and fmf um so israel is purchasing equipment so again we're going to continue to provide uh both countries with what it needs in in each of their uh areas of them fighting for their sovereign territory against an an aggressive neighbor um and we've had that long-term commitment to them um from the very beginning i mean you've seen the president you've seen the secretary uh committed to Ukraine for as long as it takes he but also feels like three months ago but just last week he was in kiv reassuring the ukrainians that the us is with them for the long haul and so i'll just i guess leave it on this note that we are um would hope that congress over these next few weeks not only pass a full-time appropriations but also passes our supplemental because we need to keep providing ukraine with what it needs on the battlefield we need to keep supporting israel and of course we are always looking to the indopacific um to to shore up what we need there okay great and i'll leave it at that sure i'm just saying that you saw the reports of an attack in san har or are you confirming an attack happened but the u.s. was not involved in it i've seen the reports out there um i can't confirm that the attack happened all i can tell you is that the u.s. military uh did not initiate any attack yeah thank you everyone have a good thursday


Have you ever wondered if day trading is for you? You may be out there thinking about day trading or maybe you're day trading right now and you're still not 100% certain if really day trading is for you. My name is Melissa Armo and I am Shoxwush and I teach my system and method how to day trade gaps and you could use gap trading for day trades or swing trades or long-term trades but I find the interesting thing about day trading is that there are so many people out there that are actively day trading and they don't even really know if day trading is for them and they don't put forth 100% effort into it. First things first, is day trading for you? It's not for everyone. Why? Because it takes a certain level of commitment. That commitment may be financial. That commitment may be time, time that you need to spend taking a course, learning. That commitment may be a certain period of time that you need to trade during the week, Monday through Friday. And also the commitment really that you're making if you decide that you wanna day trade is to yourself.   People act like they're interested in making money in the market. People say that they wanna make money in the market. People trade and do day trade and risk money in the market every day. Ultimately they lose. Some days they win, some days they lose but ultimately they're losing by the end of the year. And one is the reason for that because they're not 100% committed. They're not willing to do everything it takes to succeed. And what it takes to succeed really is a level of commitment but the level of commitment really is in your mind. So we were talking about this the other day in the trading room. It has to do with intention. And that's a whole different subject that I can lecture on at some point more in death in the future but in reference to the commitment part of it when your intention is to do something to succeed that really comes across. It comes across in your results. And again it isn't something that has to take weeks and months and days and years or a lot of money but it might for you. If your intention, if your commitment level is not spot on, is not pure, is not there then how do you expect to succeed? What I find very interesting about the people that day trade actively and most people that day trade actively is that a lot of them just kind of dip their toe in the water. They're half-assing it. That's the best way that I can use to describe it. They really are not 100% committed. They really don't wanna spend the money to risk in trades but they wanna make a lot.  People wanna just follow people's trades and trading rooms, do trials here or there, go to free webinars, watch lots of videos, read books and not really throw themselves into a strategy or system with the level of commitment that it is required to be successful. Really learning something, really grabbing hold of it, really getting the confidence and conviction in the market and in whatever system they decided to trade. Now for me, one thing that became so clear to me when I first started out was that I had to have a specific focus to what I was doing in the market and I happened to like gaps because the moves happened very quickly and the moves were big. So I liked the big moves and gaps and I liked the speed of the execution in the moves and the gaps when I found a good one. So I developed my own system to find what I call the good ones, the good golden gap every day that rates high.  You can reach out to me for more information on classes. If you wanna learn some other system, fine too. But the point is that if you are not committed to doing this, you're not gonna do well and I'm telling you, most people are not. It's very, very easy when I talk to people to understand why they're not successful. Like for example, when I talk to people and they're interested in the class or they call me or email me and they just can't make up their mind. They're just not sure, they just don't know. They're just not certain, they're on the fence. You know, most people really can be successful if they put their mind to it. It's that one piece that you are 100% in control of. You can decide that you wanna be successful in something. You may not be able to plan and say in demand from the universe that right now you're gonna be successful in this right now, this second today or tomorrow at six a.m. or whatever. But you can put out into the universe and manifest your own success by doing whatever is required and everything that's required in order to get there. And you'll find very often that it's not as much as you think. And that we as human beings as people that are on the planet who have high lofty goals, ideals, dreams, okay? Because for a lot of people, day trading is a dream. People often put big aspirations outside of their reach, like outside away from themselves. Like it's something that they can never, never achieve. As soon as you're willing to get over that hump and realize that this is something that you can achieve, if in fact you want to and you're willing to do everything required as necessary, then the only person that's stopping you from doing it and being successful and making money in the market and being a day trader and being a successful one is you. You're the only person that's stopping yourself from being successful.  So I'm gonna make it a big example here and say, if someone said to you, or your fairy godmother came up and said to you, in five years from now, you're going to make a million dollars in the stock market, day trading, would you do every single thing your fairy godmother told you to do from today until that five-year point? You probably would. I wouldn't know why you wouldn't. Chances are you would. But because there is no fairy godmother for you because there isn't someone saying, do this, this, this, this, this and on such and such a date and time, you're gonna have a million dollars with this much money or whatever. People don't proceed with the level of commitment that's required to be successful. If you move forward, if you move ahead and if you understand that by thinking this way, by having a pure intention, by keeping the goal at hand, by doing everything that's required and everything that takes the mental work, the time, the financial investment, all of it, by putting yourself out there and determining and deciding and saying, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna do everything it takes to be successful. I will make it. By even doing that, you're putting yourself head and shoulders above most people because a lot of people out there are actively trading, risking money in the market every day and losing and don't even believe that they can be successful and really trading is probably not for them. I think a lot of people will always trade the market and think and have the mentality of being a loser which is one of the reasons why the people that do well and the people that have a good system like me and the people that make a lot of money make so much because of the fact that there are so many people that have a negative attitude or low confidence level or don't know what they're doing or don't have the right focus and simply just are not cut out for day trading. I'm telling you that if this is something that you really wanna do, if this is your goal, if this is your dream, you can do it. You've gotta have the right attitude. In fact, it's just as important as having a good strategy. You won't be successful without a good strategy but you also won't be successful without a good attitude and part of that is believing that you can do it. If you are day trading and risking money in the market and you are not committed to doing everything that's required to be successful, chances are you're not gonna make it and it doesn't mean that it's impossible. It doesn't mean that it's hard. It just means that so many people wanna do this thing and so many people want the money, the profits that come from the market, so many people want this advantage to be able to day trade successfully, so many people want the money in specific stocks, whatever, buying, selling, so many people are going after the same thing that in order to give yourself an edge in order to be set apart, in order to be that small part of the percentage of people that make it and make a lot, you have to have the attitude that you're gonna win and you have to be committed to doing it and you'll find that very often, the commitment level, it takes less time and money than you think and you will see success faster if you just get on board with this idea and again, like I said earlier, day trading is in for everyone. It's not for people that are wishy-washy. It's really not for people who are not committed. One of the best decisions I ever made for the business, for the stocks wish and for my students, who people who come to me and I mentor is that I require people to do my class and learn my system before they join the line trading group. That is enormously beneficial to individual students and it has helped the business grow stronger by creating real people, individuals, to becoming strong traders and strong in reading gaps and the chart reading and that has enabled people to go off on their own. People don't need me, they can trade on their own. They don't need to be in the trading room with me but they know what they're doing and that really says a lot and it says a lot about my own level of commitment to wanting people to learn and wanting people to do well and wanting people to mirror the success that I've found by trading gaps. So if you have any questions, if you're interested in more information about my course, feel free to email me at melissa at thestockswish.com and have a great day, everyone.