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NZ Herald
06-08-2025
- Politics
- NZ Herald
Trump threatens federal takeover of Washington DC after attack on Doge worker
Trump's Truth Social post was accompanied by an image of a young person smeared in blood, sitting shirtless on the ground. Police have arrested a 15-year-old boy and girl from Maryland and charged them with unarmed carjacking, the department said in a news release. Two other people familiar with the details of the case, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the suspects are being held at the city's youth detention centre. The attack is the latest seemingly random assault on a federal staffer in Washington, intensifying scrutiny of the nation's capital from Congress and the White House. In June, 21-year-old congressional intern Eric Tarpinian-Jachym was killed in crossfire near the District's convention centre. He was a rising senior at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, working for Republican Representative Ron Estes of Kansas. No one has been charged in his death. Trump and a Republican Congress have cast the Democratic-led capital as a place ruined by liberal policies. The office of Mayor Muriel Bowser (Democrat) declined to comment yesterday. Year to date, violent crime is down 26% in the District compared with 2024, according to DC police data. Yesterday, Trump called for children as young as 14 to be prosecuted as adults, adding that he may have 'no choice' but to take over the city. 'Perhaps it should have been done a long time ago, then this incredible young man, and so many others, would not have had to go through the horrors of Violent Crime,' he wrote about Sunday's (Monday NZT) incident. 'If this continues, I am going to exert my powers, and FEDERALIZE this City. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!' Focus on crime Trump posted on Truth Social soon after US Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro visited the White House. Pirro, the top federal prosecutor for the nation's capital, said she spoke with Trump about DC crime. In a video posted to her X account, she said: 'Our job is to get guns off the street, drugs off the street, take care of those individuals who are threatening, carjacking other people and make this city safe and clean again. That's just what we're going to do. And if you don't buy into it, you're going to have to deal with us.' Tim Lauer, a spokesperson for Pirro, declined to comment on the Coristine case, saying it was not handled by the US Attorney's office. Lauer also declined to confirm whether Pirro had flagged the case to Trump during their meeting. Under DC law, the attorney-general's office prosecutes most juvenile crime. The US Attorney for DC - the federal prosecutor in charge of most adult criminal cases in the District - has the power to charge 16- and 17-year-olds as adults if they are accused of certain violent crimes, including murder, rape, armed robbery and burglary. DC Attorney-General Brian Schwalb (D) said he could not comment on specific cases but called the incident 'disturbing'. 'No one who lives in, works in, or visits DC should experience this; it is horrific and disturbing,' he said in a statement. 'I cannot comment on specific cases, but know that when [the Metropolitan Police Department] brings us cases with sufficient evidence of juveniles who have broken the law and hurt people, we will prosecute them and ensure they face consequences for their actions.' A spokesman for the office also declined to provide information about the case, citing juvenile confidentiality laws. The incident The attempted carjacking occurred at about 3 am local time in the 1400 block of Swann Street Northwest, a residential, tree-lined area. According to police, the teens approached Coristine and one other person, who were 'standing next to their vehicle', then 'demanded the vehicle and assaulted one of the victims'. During the assault, a police cruiser 'pulled into the block causing the suspects to flee', the police department said. One of the victims was treated on the scene. It was not a targeted attack, a police spokesman said. Earlier this year, Coristine moved into new roles as a senior adviser at the State and Homeland Security departments, raising concerns among some diplomats and others about his potential access to sensitive information and the growing reach of his tech billionaire boss into America's diplomatic apparatus. Coristine, who is now working at the Social Security Administration, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Push for control Trump has long derided the capital as a 'dirty, crime-ridden death trap' and pledged to turn it around. This spring, he ordered the creation of the 'DC Safe and Beautiful Task Force,' a vehicle for his long-held fixations on quality-of-life issues in the city, including homelessness encampments and graffiti, and his broader mission to ramp up deportations and arrests nationwide. At an executive order signing, Trump said 'somebody from Doge was very badly hurt' and said DC will have to 'straighten their act out in the terms of government and in terms of protection, or we're going to have to federalise and run it the way it's supposed to be run'. Democrats have long controlled every branch of local government, though DC officials wield limited power. Congress can nullify local laws and can give the president's administration control of much of the city's public safety apparatus. DC won limited self-government in 1973 when Congress passed the Home Rule Act, giving residents the power to elect their own mayor and city council.
NBC News
03-07-2025
- Politics
- NBC News
Congressional intern killed in Washington shooting
A 21-year-old intern at a congressman's Washington office was fatally shot Monday in the city after gunmen opened fire on a group of people, authorities said. Eric Tarpinian-Jachym was not the intended target of the shooters who got out of a vehicle at 7th and M streets northwest and started firing at around 10:28 p.m., the Metropolitan Police Department said. Also hit was a woman and a 16-year-old boy, who survived, police said in a statement. Tarpinian-Jachym was unconscious when first responders arrived, and he died at a hospital on Tuesday, the police department said. U.S. Rep. Ron Estes, R-Kansas, said that he and his wife Susan were sending their condolences. Tarpinian-Jachym was a senior at University of Massachusetts at Amherst who was majoring in finance with a minor in political science, his office said. 'I will remember his kind heart and how he always greeted anyone who entered our office with a cheerful smile,' Estes said in a statement. 'We are grateful to Eric for his service to Kansas' 4th District and the country,' he said. 'Please join Susan and me in praying for his family and respecting their privacy during this heartbreaking time.' The vehicle that the shooters used has been found, police said, but no arrests have been announced. Police said that 'multiple suspects' fired at a group of people. The police department said it is offering a reward of up to $25,000 for information that leads to arrest and conviction of those responsible. The department offers that reward for each homicide in the district.
BBC News
14-02-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
How a computer that 'drunk dials' videos is exposing YouTube's secrets
Estudio Santa Rita YouTube is about to turn 20. An unusual research method is unveiling statistics about the platform that Google would rather keep secret. YouTube may not seem secretive. It's public facing. You can watch an endless stream of content from now until your dying breath. There's been a mountain of research about the platform, unpacking everything from the commodified economy that surrounds it to the radicalising effects of its algorithm. But the picture goes blurry when you start asking simple questions. For example: how much YouTube do we all watch? Google, which owns YouTube, is quiet about that and many other details. In February, the company revealed that people who access YouTube on their TVs collectively watch one billion hours a day, but total numbers for the platform are an enigma. Estimates say YouTube has around 2.5 billion monthly users – almost one in three people on Earth – and the average mobile app user watches something like 29 hours a month. With that, let's try some back-of-the-napkin maths. If we make a few assumptions, and say that monthly viewing average for app users can be applied across all YouTube users on both the website and television, we can multiply 2.5 billion by 29 hours. This would tell us that humanity consumes something like 8.3 million years of videos on YouTube every month. Over 12 months, that adds up to almost 100 million years, hundreds of times longer than the sum total of human history. How many YouTube videos are there? What are they about? What languages do YouTubers speak? As of 14 February 2025, the platform's will have been running for 20 years. That is a lot of video. Yet we have no idea just how many there really are. Google knows the answers. It just won't tell you. Experts say that's a problem. For all practical purposes, one of the most powerful communication systems ever created – a tool that provides a third of the world's population with information and ideas – is operating in the dark. In part that's because there's no easy way to get a random sampling of videos, according to Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the US. You can pick your videos manually or go with the algorithm's recommendations, but an unbiased selection that's worthy of real study is hard to come by. A few years ago, however, Zuckerman and his team of researchers came up with a solution: they designed a computer program that pulls up YouTube videos at random, trying billions of URLs at a time. University of Massachusetts at Amherst/ BBC You might call the tool a bot, but that's probably over selling it, Zuckerman says. "A more technically accurate term would be 'scraper'," he says. The scraper's findings are giving us a first-time perspective on what's actually happening on YouTube. In its 20 years of operation, YouTube has shaped entire generations' sensibilities and redefined global culture. Surveys show YouTube is the most popular social media site in the US by far, with 83% of adults and 93% of teenagers among its patrons. It's the second-most-visited website on Earth by most estimates, topped only by itself. But as the platform enters its third decade, the most basic facts about YouTube are still a closely guarded secret. A Google spokesperson shared a blogpost about the platform's recommendation algorithm, but declined to comment on the statistics and other issues mentioned in this story. For now, YouTube's mysteries continue. Unusual methods "It's extremely difficult to get a grasp on what's going on inside social media platforms, because while the companies that operate them do make certain public disclosures, those disclosures are fragmentary and often somewhat misleading," says Paul Barrett, deputy director of the New York University Stern Center for Business and Human Rights. "I think there's an instinct at Google that it's not in their interest to emphasise just how gargantuan YouTube is, how titanic the number of users, how phenomenal the amount of content. Google doesn't want to be seen as influential as it really is." But Zuckerman and his colleagues found a way to peek behind the curtain. YouTube URL's have a standard format. With a few exceptions, the addresses begin with " and end with a unique string of 11 characters. Gangnam Style's identifier is 9bZkp7q19f0, for example. So, the researchers wrote a program that basically generates 11 random characters and checks if there's a corresponding video. When the scraper finds one, it downloads it. Zuckerman says you can think of it like a pesky teenager, punching in random numbers for prank calls after dipping into his parent's liquor cabinet. Estudio Santa Rita "If I wanted to know how many valid phone numbers there are in New York's 212 area code, I could just dial 212 and seven random numbers to see if somebody answers. I'd probably get cursed out a lot if I did it enough, but eventually I'd gather enough data to figure it out," Zuckerman says. "That's what we did with YouTube. The thing is, YouTube has 18.6 quintillion potential numbers, so you have to dial a few billion before someone picks up." So, Zuckerman's lab let the scraper drunk dial YouTube, over and over again, until it put together a big enough data set. To collect the first 10,016 videos they gathered for their initial study, the scraper tried more than 18 trillion potential URLs. It took almost 1.87 billion bad guesses for every real video it found. If you did that work yourself, spending three seconds on each try, it would take an average of 178 years before you landed on a single video. When the researchers analysed their findings, the results challenged the prevailing narrative about what YouTube actually is. The first question was simple. How many videos have people uploaded to YouTube? Google used to release that statistic in the early days, back when YouTube had something to prove. When Google first acquired the platform in 2006, around 65,000 videos were uploaded every day. More recently the company says more than 500 hours are uploaded per minute, but it's tight-lipped about the number of videos. Zuckerman and his colleagues compared the number of videos they found to the number of guesses it took, and arrived an estimate: in 2022, they calculated that YouTube housed more than nine billion videos. By mid 2024, that number had grown to 14.8 billion videos, a 60% jump. For many, YouTube brings to mind the faces of bright-eyed influencers vying for money and fame, or professional content creators like MrBeast or Joe Rogan. But the researchers then took a subset of the videos and had human reviewers watch each one to answer a series of questions about what they saw. For the most part, they didn't find the work of professionals. University of Massachusetts at Amherst/ Yun Sun Park/ BBC Only 0.21% of the videos they analysed featured any kind of monetisation, such as a sponsorship or an advertisement in the video itself. Less than 4% of the videos included a call to action like YouTube's famous invitations to like, comment and subscribe. Those with some kind of set or background design accounted for 14% of videos, while only 38% had undergone any form of editing. More than half of the videos had "noticeably shaky" camera work. Only around 18% of videos we're judged to have high quality sound, and the sound quality varied significantly almost 85% of the time. More than 40% had just music, and no speech. About 16% of videos in the sample were primarily still images. The top YouTubers attract audiences in the hundreds of millions, but the researchers estimated the median number of views for a YouTube videos is just 41, and 4% of videos haven't been watched a single time. About 74% of videos have zero comments. Around 89% have no likes. Typical YouTube videos aren't just getting little attention it seems, they're also very short. They assessed that the median YouTube video is only 64 seconds long, and more than a third of videos are less than 33 seconds long. YouTube once sold itself as a tool for regular people. The company's early slogan was "broadcast yourself". But today, YouTube suggests it's more of a service for people to watch the work of professional creators. In his annual letter at the start of 2025, YouTube's chief executive Neal Mohan said the company's mission is still to "give everyone a voice" – but most of the message was a discussion about how "YouTubers are becoming the start-ups of Hollywood" and "YouTube is the new television". This narrative misses a critical piece of the picture, says Ryan McGrady, the senior researcher in Zuckerman's lab, who participated in the scraping project. YouTube is a free service that was built from the ground up by a private company, and it could be argued that Google should be able to run the platform as such. But when you examine how people are actually using YouTube, it looks less like TV and more like infrastructure, McGrady says. "Most of us imagine YouTube as this place where millionaires give away prizes in a Squid-Game-style contest," he says. "But when you want to have a conversation about YouTube and its place in our society, we need to look at the ways it's used, not just the ways it's consumed." YouTube is one of the internet's de facto repositories, the first place many of us go when we have videos we want to post or store online. It's also a place where local authority meetings are broadcast, for example, providing a vital opportunity for public accountability in ways that weren't possible before it existed. It isn't just a "platform", McGrady says, it's a critical piece of infrastructure, and that's how it should be regulated. "For companies that own so much of our public sphere, there are some minimum expectations we should have about transparency." Google is dealing with more regulatory pressure than ever before. The company has faced multiple cases across the globe accusing it of running illegal monopolies in several industries. Google has lost several of them, and is currently fighting a number of other antitrust lawsuits. More like this: • The ghosts of India's TikTok • Google just updated its algorithm. The internet will never be the same • The riddles humans can solve but computers can't But YouTube has escaped much of the scrutiny that's challenged its biggest social media competitors, according to Barrett of New York University. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk make frequent, loud pronouncements about how they do business and what's happening on their platforms. "Google, in contrast, has largely stayed out of the crossfire by choosing a strategy of being much quieter, a strategy I'd say has largely worked for them," he says. "Social media is an anomaly when it comes to how little companies need to explain themselves if you compare it to other industries like finance, or agriculture or even broadcasting," Barrett says. "But social media companies are fundamental players not just in mass communication but in all matters of political and civic life." The most important thing to understand is the inner workings of YouTube's algorithm, a system that has astronomical power over the distribution of information all over the world, Barrett says. But simple details about what happens on the platform are important as well. "It would be very valuable to know all of the facts that are currently so shrouded and unavailable. They are the building blocks of doing deeper research," he says. "It only takes you so far, but you've got to start someplace. The more basic information we have to assess, the healthier the public debate about the role of social media in society will be." * Thomas Germain is a senior technology journalist for the BBC. He's covered AI, privacy and the furthest reaches of internet culture for the better part of a decade. You can find him on X and TikTok @thomasgermain. -- For more technology news and insights, sign up to our Tech Decoded newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights to your inbox twice a week. For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram. Internet Technology Innovation Features
