Daily Archives: August 2, 2022

The advertising slowdown is dinging Big Tech – TechCrunch

Posted: August 2, 2022 at 3:24 pm

After Snaps poorly received Q1 digest and ahead of this weeks string of earnings reports from the largest U.S. tech companies, we wondered whether the advertising market is in trouble. Not that most folks associate Microsoft or Apple with advertising the way they may with Alphabet or Meta, but the majors Amazon and Apple included have ads businesses of material size, meaning that the ad market impacts each of them.

(That ads are considered to be a lackluster business model for smaller companies and startups speaking loosely but are a huge revenue source for platform companies says something interesting about competition inside of the technology industry. But perhaps thats a topic for another day.)

Now, with three of the five majors having reported their Q2 results, how are their advertising results faring?

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

The question ripples into other areas of the economy: Tech companies generate huge incomes from hosting advertisements, but with companies as far afield as Netflix working hard to bolster their subscription incomes through ads, the question of advertising performance is not idle and impacts trillions of dollars of corporate value.

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Vergecast: Instagram’s risky week and Big Tech earnings – The Verge

Posted: at 3:24 pm

Every Wednesday and Friday, The Verge publishes our flagship podcast, The Vergecast, where our editors make sense of the weeks most important technology news. On Fridays, Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel, editor-at-large David Pierce, and managing editor Alex Cranz discuss the week in tech news with the reporters and editors covering the biggest stories.

The show starts with the biggest news from the week Instagram and the controversy around the changes to its app. On our Wednesday show, we discussed Instagram head Adam Mosseris response to criticism of the changes and overall direction to make the app feel more like its competitor TikTok. The following day, Instagram walked back its changes, with Mosseri saying we definitely need to take a big step back and regroup. Todays episode walks through the whole story.

The rest of the show focuses on the quarterly earnings of some big tech companies Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Spotify, and Comcast and what that info may mean for their future products.

Listen here or in your preferred podcast player for the full discussion.

Stories discussed in this episode:

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Vergecast: Instagram's risky week and Big Tech earnings - The Verge

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CDC Collaboration With Big Tech on COVID-19 Misinformation a Threat to 1st Amendment Rights: Legal Advocacy Group – The Epoch Times

Posted: at 3:24 pm

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) wassued by America First Legal (AFL) to compel the release of records regarding correspondence between the federal public health agency and social media companies during the COVID-19 pandemic. AFL, a legal nonprofit run by former Trump administration officials, recently obtained documents showing that the CDC worked with big tech companies to flag and censor posts deemed as COVID-19 misinformation.

Gene Hamilton, vice president and general counsel of AFL, told The Epoch Times that seeing [then-press secretary] Jen Psaki at the White House podium last year, admitting that they were actively collaborating with social media companies to combat what the administration deemed as misinformation was great cause for alarm.

During a July 2021 press conference, Psaki said: Were regularly making sure social media platforms are aware of the latest narratives, dangerous to public health that we and many other Americans are seeing across all of social and traditional media. And we work to engage with them to better understand the enforcement of social media platform policies.

AFL immediately submitted requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for all records related to the collaboration, according to Hamilton. He wasnt surprised to have received no records from the goodwill of the Biden administration, despite the legal obligation to do so.

So, we sued them, he said.

More than a year later, Hamilton said that we finally have some of the very first records that establish precisely what Jen Psaki was talking about at the White House podium. He described the records received thus far to be incredibly illuminating because they actually show what the White House said was happening. Prior to this, no one had direct evidence of the collaboration, he said.

For example, Facebook provided the CDC with $15 million dollars worth of ad credits to be used to support the agencys COVID-19 messaging on the social media platform. According to AFL, the non-monetary gift could be in violation of the Antideficiency Acts limitation on voluntary services (31 U.S.C. Section 1342).

AFL suspects many, many more records to come, according to Hamilton.

And as time goes on, we are anticipating massive implications for the federal government and for the social media companies, he said.

According to Hamilton,there are many examples in the 286-page productionof the CDC flagging explicit posts on Twitter and Facebook that they viewed as being misinformation.

There are also examples of the federal government engaging in regular BOLO [Be on the Lookout] calls where they would coordinate, collaborate, and talk about things that they deemed as misinformation, he said.

Following a May 28 BOLO meeting, an email from CDC Digital Media Branch Chief Carol Crawford requested that those in attendance of the meeting please do not share outside your trust and safety teams.

The documents also show that the CDC was working with the Census Bureau in this effort, Hamilton noted. The CDC was collaborating with the bureau to leverage their infrastructure to identify and monitor social media for vaccine misinformation, according to one email.

Hamilton said that its absolutely shocking that federal government agencies engaged in this kind of conduct.

We have a First Amendment for a reasonthe federal government cannot get around requirements of the First Amendment by merely directing a private entity to violate it, he said.

Hamilton issued a warning to the U.S. public: We are at a point in our society where we have evidence of the federal government dictating what is truth and what is not truth to private companies.

The Biden administration fully expected the private companies involved to enforce the governments standard of truth upon the American society, he said.

And this is a level of power thats inconsistent with the Constitution and our founders vision for the limited role of the federal government in the United States, Hamilton said. Not only is it appalling, but its anti-American.

The general counsel said, The average American sitting at home needs to understand that this is just one example of this happening.

Hamilton said it has been made clear that the governments ability to deem what constitutes misinformation and disinformation is a substantial threat to the American people. And as a result, Americans should have every reason to suspect that this is occurring in other areas, too.

The federal government and these social media companies are acting complicit with one another in determining what is and is not truth; its the kind of thing that you would see in a totalitarian society.

CDC and White House officials didnt respond to requests for comment by press time.

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J.M. Phelps is a writer and researcher of both Islamist and Chinese threats.

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What is a leap second? And why does Big Tech want to alter time? – Grid

Posted: at 3:24 pm

What unites Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and the U.S. government? Advocating for the end of leap seconds blink-and-youll-miss-it adjustments to timekeeping that compensate for wobbles in the Earths rotation.

Scientists have added an extra second 27 times since 1972 to keep atomic clocks in sync with astronomical time. Tech companies hate the practice because it can wreak havoc on precise technological systems that are much better at telling time than humans are at least until we insert an extra second. Past additions of leap seconds have caused parts of the internet to go down for hours.

On Monday, Facebooks parent, Meta, kicked its opposition to the leap second into high gear with a blog post calling to abolish the practice, with Amazon and Microsoft also joining the cause. At best, Meta argues, it corrupts data and crashes websites. Every leap second is a major source of pain for people who manage hardware infrastructures, wrote Meta engineers Oleg Obleukhov and Ahmad Byagowi.

I wouldnt be sad to see leap seconds go away, said John Graham-Cumming, chief technology officer at Cloudflare, one of the companies that has experienced disruption from the addition of leap seconds.

Amazon and Microsoft did not respond to requests for comment.

Atomic clocks, which underlie international time standards, count time by measuring the natural vibration of cesium atoms, said Elizabeth Donley, chief of the Time and Frequency Division of the U.S. governments National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Before the advent of atomic clocks in the 20th century, time was measured by the length of solar day, an approach that draws from astronomy. But given the slightly irregular axis tilt and rotation of the Earth, there can be variations between atomic time (Coordinated Universal Time or UTC) and astronomical time, known as Universal Time or UT1.

In short, time is weird and arbitrary.

Every once in awhile, those systems are reconciled with a leap second which only occurs on June 30 or Dec. 31, and is announced beforehand. What it looks like, practically, is the clock turning from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 before hitting normal midnight, 00:00:00.

Metas blog post highlighted one potential twist that could be coming in the future: The negative leap second. It would help compensate for Earths faster-than-expected rotation in recent years. Essentially, the worlds clocks would jump from 24:59:58 on the appointed day to 00:00:00 skipping one second entirely.

The impact of a negative leap second has never been tested on a large scale; it could have a devastating effect on the software relying on timers or schedulers, the Meta post argues.

A leap second, whether positive or negative, that does not exist in the programming of computers can cause them to crash. Thats part of the reason people were so worried about Y2K as the year 2000 approached. At that time, many computer programs denominated years using only the last two digits, meaning that 2000 and 1900 would look like the same year. While that concern was overblown, the same issues around denominating time is what lies behind criticism of leap seconds.

Over time this became more and more of a problem with digital networks because technology just became so much more dominant in our society and so now over the past 10 years, when theyre added, theyve caused a lot of failures in various websites and computer systems, said Donley. Thats a big motivation to address them.

Its not hypothetical or hyperbole. A leap second change triggered outages at Reddit in 2012 and downtime at Foursquare, LinkedIn and Yelp over the years. The most recent leap second occurred in 2015.

The addition of leap seconds can cause glitches if its not accounted for properly in a software system, Donley said. You can have disagreement between the actual time of nodes of the network, for example, or different web pages, she added. That can cause failures. And given the updated second comes in at midnight UTC, which, that could be in the middle of the day on the West Coast of the U.S. or Hawaii.

For its part, Meta has started smearing leap seconds, either slowing down or speeding up the clock of its Time Appliance, which is the timekeeping infrastructure of the company over a 17-hour period, dividing the additional second across that span to make it more digestible for computers.

We had an outage in the middle of the night on the first day of the year because of leap seconds, said Graham-Cumming, whose employer, Cloudflare, helps provide security and accessibility to millions of websites. Leap seconds tend to get introduced at midnight on January the first and so we had an outage and saw systems failing.

He was not surprised to see Meta come out against leap seconds, given its large network and massive server farms. But David Finkleman, the former chief technical officer of the U.S. Space Command, said the recent post from Meta is incomplete and tendentious.

Every scheme to mitigate leap second corrections has its own anomalies in this case, installing unique software, he said. And killing the leap second could create big problems for scientists who study space, he said, because their precise measurements of stars, galaxies and other objects depend on aligning human time with astronomical time to point their telescopes at the right targets.

Correction for Earth rotation is very important, and smearing is also not synchronous with Earth rotation, Finkleman said. Those who despise the leap second have not learned to accommodate it correctly.

Donley said that while there is significant agreement among governments about eliminating leap seconds, with the notable exception of Russia, no change is imminent. Getting rid of the practice would require various internet and time standards bodies to reach an agreement on doing so and on what would come next.

Its pretty much almost everybody, said Donley. The way that it all works is by consensus. We make baby steps to try to stop the procedure. Its been under discussion over and over and over and over again for probably nearly as long as [leap seconds] have been in existence.

That takes, well, time.

The Consultative Committee for Time and Frequency, a global timekeeping standards body, is expected to vote in November on a resolution to halt the use of leap seconds by or before 2035.

Its not clear how many, if any, leap seconds will need to be inserted before then anyway hopefully none, said Donley. Because the rate of insertion of them has dropped and the difference between UTC and the new UT1 is heading toward zero right now.

Thanks to Alicia Benjamin for copy editing this article.

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Big Tech’s Ban on Alex Jones Fans the Flames of His Conspiracy Theories – Reason

Posted: at 3:24 pm

In 2018, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his website, Infowars, were banned by YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Apple for violating these platforms' hate speech policies.Four years later, the largest social media platforms have prevented the promotion of a documentary about him as well.

Private companies are well within their rights to make the content moderation decisions they deem appropriate. Jones' belief system, which his millions of listeners must find compelling on some level, is predicated on the idea that there's some kind of totalitarian world government lurking in the shadows, either attempting to seize control or already in control of us. It's from this logic that Jones' skepticism of major tragedies and events stems. He has suggested, for instance, that 9/11 and the Sandy Hook school shooting might have been pre-orchestrated, designed by those in charge, and he subsequently faced defamation lawsuits from the parents of some of the shooting victims. Big Tech, the media, and each presidential administrationexcept Trump'sare all frequent targets of Jones' unrestrained ire and boundless grievances.

But when Big Tech firms uniformly decline to platform anything Jones-related, they may be fueling the flames of his paranoia. As the old saw has it, just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

I went to the movie premiere ofAlex's War last Saturday ahead of its release date, which is today, and walked away with a heightened appreciation for Jones' charisma but stronger disdain for his shoddily substantiated theories. Though he's forcefully asserted that the 2020 election was stolen from former President Donald Trump, Jones has provided meager evidence to back such claims up, and even admitted in the Q&A afterward that his stolen-election beliefs were somewhat pre-formed. But that didn't stop him from assembling with his acolytes at the Georgia Capitol where results were being certified, and at the January 6 rally in Washington which turned violent. (Jones left prior to the breach of the Capitol building.)

Still, when Big Tech platforms suppress Jones, and the work of those interested in Jones, like Alex's Wardirector Alex Lee Moyerwho made the Sundance and SXSW rounds via her first documentary, which explored the world of incelsthey lend credibility to his conspiracy theories and increase the illicit appeal of his views to the audiences who continue to seek him out, who may in fact be enchanted by the heightened allure.

For example, Instagram blocked Moyer and team from doing paid promotions for the documentary; TikTok removed theAlex's Wartrailer because it contained or promoted "hateful behavior"; Google Ads said the trailer was in violation of its policies, too, and warned Moyer not to try again; Meta said the trailer could not be promoted due to "inauthentic behavior or violations of our Advertising Policies and Community Guidelines," but failed to specify what those violations entailed.

These tech platforms are well within their rights to deplatform or suppress whoever they want; they deliberately set community standards, which are consented to by users, and sometimes, in content moderators' eyes, transgressed by conspiracy-mongers like Jones. But by deplatforming both Jones and those who critically engage with his ideas, they're unintentionally hyping his beliefs. By making them illicit, platforms are implying that they're dangerous, rather than laughable or uninteresting. Jones' whole point is that there are shadowy figures in power that are subjugating and manipulating us; he, like Trump, fixates on media malfeasance and double standards, which is a compelling message to his roughly 5 million followers (as of 2016, though such numbers are hard to pin down, especially as his feeds have been whack-a-moled out of existence). That message is plausibly made more compelling if Jones can lodge a fresh grievance against Big Tech.

There's no reason to believe such censorship will snuff Jones out. It may, in fact, do the opposite. He's a shrewd businessman, successfully hawking supplements ("Super Male Vitality" drops!), bulletproof vests, and other doomsday-prep materials; he maintains a huge audience; he's been on Joe Rogan's show repeatedly (which has outraged some Spotify employees); he's the subject of a new documentary. He knows how to parlay controversy into earned media for his kooky theories, and the result may be the very opposite of what those who would deplatform him are trying to achieve.

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Climbing Lived Up To The Olympics. Now What? – Climbing – Climbing Magazine

Posted: at 3:23 pm

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It doesnt seem like that long ago when the 2019 World Championships concluded in Hachioji, Japan, and climbing fans around the world were presented with their first cohort of Olympic qualifiersSlovenias Janja Garnbret, Team USAs Brooke Raboutou, and Canadas Sean McColl among the earliest to earn Olympic berths. It also doesnt seem like that long ago when fans were embroiled in debatesheated, at timesabout the pros, cons, and complexity of the Olympics proposed Combined format, which was to conjoin Speed, Boulder, and Lead disciplines into a single successive event. How could we forget the Czech Republics Adam Ondra describing the combining of the three disciplines as a circus back then and denigrating speed climbing by calling it an artificial discipline? Understandable, emotions were high, and so too were the Olympic stakes.

Yet, at the same time, now that climbings Olympic debutwhich took place officially one year ago this weekis in the rear-view mirror, it feels like the Tokyo Olympics took place in a wholly different era. That three-discipline Combined format from Tokyo seems to be gone forever, replaced by a format for the 2024 Olympics in Paris that will combine just two disciplines (Boulder and Lead) and leave the Speed discipline as its own separate entity. Also, everyone knows that the Tokyo Olympics were originally scheduled for the summer of 2020 but postponed for a year due to the COVID-19 pandemicand rife with ultra-stringent restrictions and mitigation strategies. Hopefully such widespread COVID disruptions of life and leisure are gone forever too. See, it already kind of feels like the Tokyo Olympics were not a fairly recent happening, but some intriguing rarity thats annotated in a history textbook.

Whether the Tokyo Olympics feel recent or long ago, theres no denying that they changed climbing. On a base level, they brought more eyes to the sport than ever before. (Some reports indicate that the Tokyo Olympics were watched by more than three billion people.) Amid that, the Tokyo Olympics recalibrated what it means to be a competition climbing superstar. Consider that in the early 2000s, competition climbers received coverage almost exclusively from endemic media outlets like, well, Climbing. Compare that to the media entities that reported on the Olympic journeys of Janja Garnbret, Brooke Raboutou, and othersNPR, CNN, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, ESPN, etc. For lack of a better word, the Olympics made competition climbing mainstream news in a way the sport and its athletes had never been before.

Before Janja Garnbret, Martina ufar Potard Ruled The Comp World

As an extension of all that big media coverage, the Tokyo Olympics popularized competition climbings various disciplines. Its probably too early to gauge any long-term metrics, but a quick Google search shows a heckuva lot of articles from this past year in the vein of Yahoos What the Hell is Speed Climbing? The Tokyo Olympics are solely responsible for such widespread curiosity. And shortly after the Tokyo Olympics, writer Michelle Bruton noted in Forbes that interest [in climbing] has spiked to an all-time high.

But all of that is a more panoramic view of how climbing has changed over the past year, gazing outward rather than inward. What about the Tokyo Olympics climbers themselves? It might sound a bit extreme to play a game of Where are they now? after just one year, but theres also no better time than this one-year anniversary to look at how the field of competitiors has changed and grown.

From a global perspective, the biggest star to emerge from the Tokyo Olympics was also the biggest star heading into themSlovenias Janja Garnbret. In fact, Garnbrets greatest Olympic accomplishment was likely that she was able to be so heavily favored in the media before the Gamesalmost to an unfair degreeand still deliver on all the hype. Other competitors likely would have caved under such pressure, and there would not have been any shame in that. But Garnbret managed to harness the immeasurable expectations into something magicalthe first-ever womens Olympic gold medal in climbing, and the third-ever gold medal for a Slovenian woman at a summer Olympics.

In this year following the Tokyo Olympics, we have seen that such an immaculate gold-medal performance came with a price. After taking part in the first Boulder World Cup of the current 2022 season, Garnbret chose to take a hiatus from competition climbing, specifically citing the physical and mental toll the Olympics had taken on her. But she returned for the start of the Lead World Cup season in late-June, seemingly mentally refreshed and per formatively better than ever. So far Garnbret has won every Lead World Cup of the 2022 season and is widely considered to be the greatest competition climber ever. Suffice to say, she has continued to crush since the Tokyo Olympics.

Another Tokyo Olympian who is currently performing better than ever on the World Cup circuit is Team USAs Brooke Raboutou. Since placing fifth at the Olympics, Raboutou has stood on three Boulder World Cup podiums and two Lead World Cup podiums. Whats particularly compelling is that Raboutou is inching closer and closer to Garnbret in results. Case in point: At this years Lead World Cup in Villars, Raboutou earned a silver medal, narrowly beaten in the final round by Garnbret.

South Koreas Chaehyun Seo has followed a similar trajectory, improving greatly since advancing to the finals at the Tokyo Olympics. Once considered a specialist in the Lead discipline, Seo has broadened her skill setparticularly this seasonand advanced to the final round multiple times in Boulder World Cups. The fact that Seo is only 18 years old makes heralong with Garnbret and Raboutouone of the early favorites for qualifying for the forthcoming 2024 Olympics. The same could be said for Team USAs Colin Duffy, also 18 years old, who followed up his appearance in the Tokyo Olympics last summer by historically earning gold medals in both the Boulder and Lead World Cups at Innsbruck this year.

As much as Garnbret, Raboutou, Seo, and Duffy made the Tokyo Olympics a jumping-off point for newfound success, other competitors made the Tokyo Olympics the ultimate conclusion. In particular, Great Britains Shauna Coxsey and Japans Akiyo Noguchi retired from elite-level international competition following the Tokyo Olympics. After years of being ready, years of preparation, off-seasons spent fighting to get to the start line, years of harnessing the desire, the determination and the belief, it feels so wrong to admit I no longer want to do competitors, Coxsey, who had battled several injuries in the lead-up to the Olympics, revealed at one point.

Noguchis retirement was noteworthy because she earned a bronze at the Tokyo Olympics, proving that she was still in her performative prime when she chose to gracefully exit. Noguchi had also made a World Cup podium the year before the Tokyo Olympics, and she had been one of the competitors to pose the biggest challenge to Janja Garnbret throughout the 2019 Boulder seasonwhich Garnbret eventually swept.

But Noguchis retirement from the competition scene also left a figurative void for the Japanese team. To many fans, Noguchi was viewed as the longtime athlete-leader of Team Japan and a savvy veteran that helped guide the teams teenage rising starsAi Mori, Natsuki Tanii, and others. Whether Noguchi has continued to aid and mentor the young members of Team Japan in retirement is unknown, but it is generally accepted that no other national squad has the elite depth that the Japanese team has. Many expect one of Noguchis mentees, 25-year-old Miho Nonaka (who earned the silver medal at the Tokyo Olympics) to assume the athlete leadership role in Noguchis absence. If this seasons World Cup results (i.e., medals) are any indication, the Japanese Team has managed to handle the void left by Noguchi just fine.

Still, a majority of the Olympian climbers have not necessarily surged to even greater heights or faded into retirement over the past year. Instead, they are currently residing in a nebulous spaceoften due to circumstances out of their control or simply bad luck. For example, Canadas Sean McColl suffered a shoulder injury at one of this years World Cups in Salt Lake City and has not participated in a competition since then. Also, Team USAs Nathaniel Coleman, silver medalist at the Tokyo Olympics, revealed hes dealing with a bum finger and has not taken part in any World Cup since April. Germanys Jan Hojer admitted to dealing with some finger injuries last year and is yet to take part in any World Cup this season; his last elite-level international competition was the 2021 World Championships nearly a year ago.

Yet, the most significant injury is likely that of Alberto Gins Lpez, since he is the competitor who won gold in the mens division at the Tokyo Olympics. Currently dealing with a tweaked finger of his own, Gins Lpez took part in four World Cup this season but has been absent from the circuit since May to rehab the finger.

Additionally, Austria Jakob Schubertthe bronze medalist from the Tokyo Olympicshad his participation in the 2022 World Cup season altered when he contracted COVID shortly before the start of the Chamonix World Cup in early July. Almost thought I can get around Covid, Schubert wrote on Instagram, but no, it now got me as well.

Adam Ondra and several other athletes have also had their current World Cup season disrupted by positive COVID tests promptly after World Cup events. Its presumed that Ondra and most other competitors in the upper echelon of the current World Cup circuit will at least make some attempt to qualify for the next Olympics, although most are staying tight-lipped about specific Olympic plans and goals at this juncture.

Above all else, the Tokyo Olympics gave everyone a roadmap for the Olympic and post-Olympic frenzy; we now know what kind of hype to expect in the lead-up and the wane. We know there will be Highs and Lows, promotion and puffery, fun and funkiness for all involved. And, lest you think that we have a lot of downtime until the hype ramps up for those 2024 Olympics, lets conclude with the fact that their Olympic qualification pathway begins next seasonapproximately one year from now. In other words, its almost time to do it all again.

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Heres something nearly 80% of Utahns can agree on another Olympics – Deseret News

Posted: at 3:22 pm

Utahns really seem to want another Olympics.

A whopping 79% of Utahns approve of the Winter Games coming back to the state, according to the latest Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll, while only 16% disapprove, and just 5% werent sure how they felt about hosting again.

That is incredibly strong. Wow, said Fraser Bullock, a leader of the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City who is now president and CEO of the Salt Lake City-Utah Committee for the Games bidding for the 2030 or 2034 Winter Games.

Jason Perry, director of the University of Utahs Hinckley Institute of Politics, said Utahns across the board back the bid because of the success of the 2002 Winter Games, deemed superb by the late IOC President Jacques Rogge during the Closing Ceremonies held at the U.s Rice-Eccles Stadium.

In a world where people are so divided about everything, they are united on the Winter Olympics. Regardless of age, gender, party or political affiliation, Utahns want the Olympics back, Perry said. There is an Olympic spirit that has not gone away.

Salt Lake City is competing for the 2030 Winter Games against two other cities that also have previously hosted a Winter Games, Sapporo, Japan, and Vancouver, Canada. Just over half of the residents in both Sapporo and Vancouver have backed bidding for another Olympics in recent surveys.

In Utah, the new poll found 44% strongly approve of bidding again, with 35% saying they somewhat approve. Only 8% strongly disapprove of trying to bring back the Winter Games, with another 8% saying they somewhat disapprove.

The poll was conducted for the Deseret News and the University of Utahs Hinckley Institute of Politics by Dan Jones and Associations July 13-18 of 801 registered voters in Utah. The statewide survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.46 percentage points.

The results track with past polling done by the states Olympic Exploratory Committee in 2017 that put support for bidding again at 89%, and by the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, which measured it at 82% before selecting Salt Lake City a year later to bid on behalf of the United States for an unspecified Winter Games.

The new numbers come on the heels of pushback by the IOC over some of the U.S. response to Beijing hosting the 2022 Winter Games despite Chinas human rights record that appears to make choosing Salt Lake City for 2030 already a difficult pick because the 2028 Summer Games are in Los Angeles even more of a long shot.

And IOC President Thomas Bach has also made it clear that naming the 2034 host city will have to wait until after his term ends in 2025. Theres been speculation that the IOC Executive Committee would advance its picks for both the 2030 and the 2034 Winter Games to the contract negotiation stage set to start this December.

Those developments mean its now likely to be several more years before Utahns know whether the Olympics are returning.

Bullock said Utahns dont seem to be deterred by the back-and-forth over the bid.

Even though there is uncertainty around us potentially hosting in 2030 or 2034, or the timing of awards, we still see strong support, he said, noting, too, that support is still incredibly resilient despite the COVID-19 pandemics impact on both last winters Beijing Games and the 2020 Summer Games in Tokyo that were delayed a year.

The bid committee plans to start reaching out to Utahns this fall, through events set up by the communities with venues from 2002 that have remained in use in anticipation of another Winter Games, like the sliding track and ski jumps at the Utah Olympic Park near Park City and the Utah Olympic Oval speedskating track in Kearns.

Meanwhile, work continues on the bid details the IOC would require for the contract negotiation stage, which include thousands of pages of plans. Bullock and other bid leaders are also staying engaged with U.S. and international sports officials, recently attending the World Athletics Championships in Oregon.

What we want to signal to the IOC is were fully prepared, were a bid that they can count on, he said. Anything can happen in bidding. Dynamics can change very, very quickly. More preparation is better, so we are committed to being fully prepared with a complete bid, even in advance of when its required.

The bid is expected to cost less than $2 million, money thats coming from private sources. The plans being pulled together for an event with a $2.2 billion price tag also without using tax dollars are intended to show that Salt Lake is not only ready, but ready ahead of schedule to host in 2030 also cover a 2034 Winter Games, Bullock said.

We will follow the IOCs lead and see what happens late this year. Then, based on that decision, well make whatever decisions are necessary after that, he said when asked what would happen to the bid effort if Salt Lake City ends up out of the running for 2030.

I still strongly believe that well be awarded either 30 or 34. We are one of the best cities in the world to host a Games, for all the reasons we all know about, whether its compact Games, whether its the unified support, whether its excellent economics or just the love of the Games in Utah, Bullock said.

Chris Karpowitz, co-director of Brigham Young Universitys Center for the Study of Elections and Democracy, said most Utahns arent paying much attention to the ups and downs of the Olympic bid, given other more pressing concerns in their daily lives such as inflation.

And if the 2030 bid is not successful, having to wait a few more years to find out about 2034 could put new pressures on the bid over growth-related issues like air quality, water scarcity and housing prices, even though the poll shows the effort is starting now from a pretty good place, he said.

I think what these results suggest is a widespread base of support for the idea of the Olympics coming back to Utah, Karpowitz said. I think it suggests some residual pride in the success of 2002 and some forward-looking excitement as well about the possibility of the world coming to Utah again.

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Kamari Graham named Special Olympics Athlete of the Year – USA TODAY

Posted: at 3:22 pm

Kamari Graham, a sophomore from Homestead, Florida,was named the 2022 USA TODAY High School Sports Awards Special Olympics Athlete of the Year during the live show on July 31.

The USA TODAY High School Sports Awards is the largest high school sports recognition program in the country. More than 800 athletes were honored and winners for 29 sports and other special awards were announced during the show, which was hosted by former NFL tight ends Rob Gronkowski and Vernon Davis.

Grahamnot only has an intellectual disability, but at a young age suffered injuries from a firework accident that left him without his left hand. A participant in Special Olympics since attending Homestead Middle School, Grahamparticipates in multiple sports and was instrumental in the team winning an FHSAA state championship in Unified flag football. He then helped Homestead becomea two-time national champion, catching a key touchdown pass in the semifinals of the 2022 USA National Games in Orlando.

Homestead represented Florida at the Games and brought home a gold medal.

Grahamis also a leader in the classroom, serving asVice President of his school's Unified Club.

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A year after Olympic defection, Belarusian sprinter dreams of 2024 Paris Games – Reuters

Posted: at 3:22 pm

Aug 1 (Reuters) - One year ago, sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya's life was upended when she refused to board a plane back to her native Belarus after being kicked out of the Tokyo Olympics by her team.

What began as a controversy over Tsimanouskaya's entry in the 4x400 metres relay snowballed into a defection that became one of the biggest stories of the Games and highlighted the pressure Belarusian athletes face for challenging authority.

Forced out by her national team after criticising coaches for entering her in an event that was not her customary distance, Tsimanouskaya feared for her safety if she returned to Belarus and sought refuge in Poland.

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She is in the process of receiving Polish citizenship and the necessary documents to compete at national team level there.

The 25-year-old also wants another chance to compete at the Olympics and hopes to run at the 2024 Paris Games in the 200m, the event she had been set to run the day after Belarus removed her from the team.

"I'm disappointed that I didn't compete in the distance I had prepared for," Tsimanouskaya told Reuters in a video interview from her home in Warsaw.

"But I'm not losing hope. I'm still training here. I dream of going back to the Olympics and this time run my distance and show decent results."

Tsimanouskaya has only been able to run in lower-level meets as she awaits citizenship and says she misses elite competition.

"I'm grateful to Poland for having let me enter some competitions," she said. "But as an athlete who competed at the Olympics, it was tough to realise that I now was running at competitions with children."

Belarusians and Russians are currently barred from competing at international athletics meets because of Moscow's actions in Ukraine.

Tsimanouskaya became a symbol of resistance in Belarus, where opposition figures and those critical of the authorities have been prosecuted, jailed or fled since mass protests against leader Alexander Lukashenko in 2020.

The protests, followed by a violent crackdown on demonstrators, erupted after Lukashenko seized a sixth presidential term in an election that observers say was rigged. He denies electoral fraud.

"I didn't go to the Olympics to represent Lukashenko's authority," she said. "I went to the Olympics to represent Belarus. And for me, Belarus does not equal Lukashenko or the authorities."

Tsimanouskaya is slowly building a new life for herself in Poland, where she plans to study and hopes to one day open a gym with her husband Arseni, a fitness trainer.

She has also had her share of disappointments.

In addition to being sidelined from international athletics as a Belarusian national, Tsimanouskaya said some who had pledged their support since her defection had not followed through.

"I don't see myself as a hero, but maybe my actions will serve as an example for someone," she said.

"Over time, my life has started to fall into place. I'm continuing my career and making plans for the future. It shows that people shouldn't be afraid."

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Reporting by Reuters; Editing by Peter Rutherford

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Final Call for Submissions for the 2022 AYF Olympics Ad Book – Armenian Weekly

Posted: at 3:22 pm

WORCESTER, Mass.The AYF-YOARF Central Executive and Worcester Steering Committee have announced an extension for the 2022 AYF Olympics Ad Book.

The deadline to submit an ad has been extended to Monday, August 8th at 11:59 PM ET.

The AYF Olympics Ad Book is the single largest fundraiser of the organizations calendar year and has become a memorable keepsake for all who appreciate the tradition that is the AYF Olympics. Inside the AYF Olympics Ad Book, one can find dedicated pages in memory of a loved one, numerous advertisements and encouraging messages from proud grandparents.

The AYF Olympics Ad Book will be readily available throughout the highly anticipated long weekend in Worcesterthe home of the first AYF chapter, Aram. The Worcester community will be hosting its first AYF Olympics since 1974.

The AYF stands strong in its 89th year with the financial contributions and moral support of generous alumni and community members. Help sustain this tradition and consider placing an ad to ensure the financial well-being of the AYF so that it is comfortably able to hold a full schedule of programs in 2022 and beyond.

All donations are tax deductible.

Founded in 1933, The Armenian Youth Federation is an international, non-profit, youth organization of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF). The AYF-YOARF Eastern United States stands on five pillars that guide its central activities and initiatives: Educational, Hai Tahd, Social, Athletic and Cultural. The AYF also promotes a fraternal attitude of respect for ideas and individuals amongst its membership. Unity and cooperation are essential traits that allow members of the organization to work together to realize the AYFs objectives.

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Final Call for Submissions for the 2022 AYF Olympics Ad Book - Armenian Weekly

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