fortune--2020-02-04--Here’s why the Iowa results aren’t in yet

Monday evening’s Democratic caucus results were delayed due to what the Iowa Democratic Party called “quality checks” due to a reporting issue.
“We found inconsistencies in the reporting of three sets of results in addition to the tech systems being used to tabulate results,” party spokesperson Mandy McClure said in a statement. “We are also using photos of results and a paper trail to validate that all results match and ensure that we have confidence and accuracy in the numbers we report. This is simply a reporting issue, the app did not go down and this is not a hack or an intrusion.”
Des Moines County Democratic Chair Tom Courtney, meanwhile, blamed the delay on the new app that precinct chairs were given to tally and report the results, calling it “a mess.”
Courtney told reporters that issues in his county were so significant that he was going to bed and would address the results in the morning.
Linn County Auditor Joel Miller, who was in charge of a Cedar Rapids precinct, told the Associated Press that some app users were unable to get instructions on how to log in to the system.
The application, which was unveiled shortly before the caucuses, was believed by experts to be developed in connection with the Democratic National Committee, the Department of Homeland Security, and Harvard’s Defending Digital Democracy (D3P) project. But the actual creator of the app—and security precautions that went into its development—were not revealed by the Democratic National Committee.
(After publication—and the chaos of the Iowa caucus—sources clarified their previous statements. Harvard’s D3P project and the DHS were brought in to consult on general election security, but they did not specifically test or contribute to the development of the app used.)
Election security experts repeatedly expressed their worry about the app ahead of the caucus.
Gregory Miller, co-founder and COO of the OSET Institute, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group focused on open-source election technology, told Fortune last week that the app was “downright alarming and candidly suggested that some part or all of the Democratic Party operations are tone deaf to the current well-documented Internet voting risks.”
Miller said that the app had not been properly stress tested, and the New York Times reported Monday evening that some district chairs had been unable to open it on their phones. Miller, meanwhile, worried about the impact potential problems could have on future campaigns.
“Trust is the fulcrum of the stability of our democracy, and it is the product of two things: transparency and communication,” said Miller. “In the absence of those elements, it’s hard to establish trust.”
Candidates came out and spoke to their supporters and delivered speeches late Monday night without any reported results.
Many candidates, including Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) will likely be leaving Iowa tonight or early tomorrow for the President’s State of the Union speech Tuesday and the Senate vote on impeachment on Wednesday.
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—2020 candidates’ positions, and records, on economic issues that affect women
—Bernie Sanders wants the future of the far left to be female. Is that enough?
—Michael Bloomberg’s radical plan to cut prescription drug costs
—Just how regulated are our nation’s elections?
—Millions have been purged from voter rolls—and may not even realize it
Get up to speed on your morning commute with Fortune’s CEO Daily newsletter.


fortune--2020-02-04--Hong Kong reports its 1st coronavirus death, the 2nd outside mainland China

Toys , tech and cars : Supplies are running low for firms that depend on China imports

Hong Kong reported its first death in the coronavirus outbreak Tuesday, according to Cable TV, putting new pressure on leader Carrie Lam to contain its spread through the densely populated Asian financial hub.
The 39-year-old patient is only the second person outside of mainland China to die after contracting the new virus. According to earlier information released by the Hong Kong government, the patient had a pre-existing illness and was admitted to the hospital on Jan. 31.
He had traveled to Wuhan, the Chinese city at the epicenter of the outbreak, via high-speed rail on Jan. 21 and returned to Hong Kong two days later. Hong Kong’s Hospital Authority didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Hong Kong has 15 confirmed coronavirus cases and is on the front lines of the now-global battle to contain the illness, which has claimed more than 360 lives in mainland China since emerging in December. There have been 425 deaths globally, the vast majority in Hubei province, where Wuhan is located. Earlier this week, a 44-year-old died in the Philippines after contracting the virus.
The news emerged as Lam held a regular news briefing before meeting with the city’s Executive Council, one day after announcing further closures at ports of entry. She stopped short of completely sealing off the border.
The death will likely pile further pressure on Lam to shut the border with China—a demand of thousands of striking local medical workers—as deep distrust left over from months of violent anti-government protests fuel concerns she isn’t doing enough to stop the virus from spreading.
“Lam has no excuse but to tighten up the measures on border control, including stopping mainland travelers and mandatory quarantine for those Hong Kongers who returned from the mainland,” said opposition lawmaker Alvin Yeung. “We understand the mother of the deceased was also infected. That is to say there’s a risk of community spreading, hence actions must be taken now.”
Lam said Hong Kong is sourcing medical supplies globally and stocking hospitals was the first priority, after a shortage of surgical masks caused panic buying. She also said Hong Kong was working closely with authorities in neighboring Guangdong, a southern mainland province.
“The consequences yesterday were quite serious,” she told reporters of the strike’s impact on hospital services. “Critical operations have been affected.”
In addition to the partial border closure, her government’s efforts to ward off the outbreak include an extension of school holidays.
The coronavirus has rattled global markets, led airlines to cancel flights to and from China and seen millions on the mainland quarantined as Beijing and governments around the world struggle to contain its spread. The number of cases in China has topped 20,000.
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fortune--2020-02-04--Trump wins Republican Iowa caucus over token opposition

President Donald Trump has easily won the Republican caucus in Iowa, beginning an anticlimatic contest for his party’s nomination for a second term.
The Associated Press called the race at 7:25 p.m. Central Time, just 25 minutes after Iowans convened for the first presidential nominating events of 2020.
Trump had 97% of the GOP vote at the time of the call. Two challengers — former Massachusetts Governor William Weld and former Illinois Congressman Joe Walsh — each had about 1%.
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fortune--2020-02-04--Mobile app mishap during Iowa caucuses won’t hinder process, officials say

Iowa Democratic Party officials say an early issue with a mobile app designed to report results will not hinder the Iowa caucus process.
Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price said Monday that there were some reports from precinct officials that they couldn’t log into the app during the first-in-the-nation caucuses.
He said a team of troubleshooters is working to address any technical issues.
He added that the party has alternate ways for precincts to send in results, including a hotline.
“We’ve had an app before, but we’ve also had a hotline before, and folks have had the option to do that, and so we expect that we’ll be able to report the results in a timely manner this evening,” he said.
The app was designed to allow for the quick filing of results, and the issue appears to be the result of different PINs used for early testing and caucus night logins.
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—2020 candidates’ positions, and records, on economic issues that affect women
—Bernie Sanders wants the future of the far left to be female. Is that enough?
—Michael Bloomberg’s radical plan to cut prescription drug costs
—Fortune Explains: The debt ceiling
—Millions have been purged from voter rolls—and may not even realize it
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fortune--2020-02-04--A vaccine that looked promising for HIV doesn’t work

This is the web version of Brainstorm Health Daily, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the top health care news. To get it delivered daily to your in-box, sign up here.
Good afternoon, readers.
At this point, I think we’re all aware that the coronavirus is a matter of concern (but, for those of us lucky enough to be in a nation with a strong health infrastructure, not too much of a concern).
The World Health Organization and others are keeping track of the spread of this coronavirus, as well as the progress of containment and treatment that is crucial to the health and well-being of millions of people in the affected countries.
But there’s been some other news this week about other virus containment that is, frankly, upsetting. Clinical trials for a vaccine to treat HIV have been nixed after being found ineffective.
The study, in South Africa, had been touted as what could, eventually, become a pioneering light in the struggle against the scourge.
Alas, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) said on Monday that the trial wouldn’t come to fruition. It wasn’t unsafe, per se-but it also wasn’t effective. Don’t take it from me—those were the words the director of the NIAID Dr. Anthony Fauci issued in a written statement.
The news is an unfortunate reminder that though the new coronavirus strain is on everybody’s mind, it is far from the most devastating health issue facing the world. The new strain has reportedly led to the deaths of around 425 people to date with about 20,000 infected, per Chinese health officials. But HIV infects an average of 1.7 million people are newly infected with HIV every year.
That’s not to discount the nature of the coronavirus threat. Any public health concern should be taken seriously. But seeing these numbers today is a reminder to me that it’s important to look beyond the health crisis of the moment and, as always, to put things in perspective.
Read on for the rest of the day’s news.
Sy Mukherjee
sayak.mukherjee@fortune.com
@the_sy_guy
DIGITAL HEALTH
Broken genes and schizophrenia. A new study reported by the journal Nature attempts to bridge the complicated genetic gap of mental health illnesses and people's inherent biologies—specifically, amongst a specific racial group. Why is this important? Research into the science of mental illness (and illness in general) tends to exclude under-represented groups such as racial minorities, which can create a chasm when it comes to developing effective treatments. (Nature)
INDICATIONS
Gilead's foray into a coronavirus vaccine. The coronavirus story has been evolving minute to minute. On the vaccine development front, however, Gilead appears to have an early advantage (for now, anyways)—the company's experimental treatment for infectious diseases will be deployed in actual, real-life humans in Wuhan on a limited basis. Gilead is far from the only company or organization acting on this front. Here's a more detailed explication of the situation. (Fortune)
THE BIG PICTURE
A long-acting drug for knee pain got the Super Bowl treatment this past week. I spoke with former NFL star Solomon Wilcots ahead of yesterday's intense Super Bowl game. We didn't really talk sports, though—we focused on the marketing and advertising extravaganza called Radio Row which takes place the week leading up to the Super Bowl, and the various products (including pain treatments) which get promoted during that time. (Fortune)
REQUIRED READING
What you need to know about new IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, by David Z. Morris
Should your company take design more seriously?, by Nate Berg
The coronavirus plunge in China's markets, by Bernhard Warner
Sign up for other Fortune newsletters.


fortune--2020-02-04--Alphabet reveals YouTube’s revenue for the first time, distracting from the slowdown in its ads busi

Alphabet reveals YouTube’s revenue for the first time, distracting from the slowdown in its ads business

For the first time ever Monday, Alphabet released revenue numbers for YouTube, its video streaming service which raked in $15.1 billion in ads this year. The announcement tempered disappointment over slowing revenue for the company overall, as the company reported in its fourth quarter earnings, but not enough to keep Alphabet stock from slipping in after hours trading.
YouTube’s ad revenue represented 10% of the Alphabet’s overall business, and grew 36% year-over-year in 2019. The streaming service had the second highest growth rate of any of Alphabet’s businesses, placing as the runner-up to its suite of cloud computing services, Google Cloud Platform, which grew its revenue by 53% to $8.9 billion. This was also the first time Alphabet released revenue numbers for its cloud business.
Sundar Pichai, who took over CEO of Google’s parent company in December, said he was “really pleased” with the growth of both the cloud and YouTube and gave analysts a taste of what’s ahead for the streaming service.
Pichai said there’s “significantly more room” to monetize YouTube, on Monday’s earnings call, adding “a better commerce experience also is a big opportunity” for Alphabet.
The company’s disclosures come as the Alphabet tries to instill confidence in investors, after missing analysts’ fourth quarter revenue expectations, which sent the stock down more than 5%, trading at $1,407 per share, after the market closed Monday. The quarter represented Alphabet’s slowest growth rate of any quarter in the past four years.
“The excitement over new disclosures probably put a mask on the weakness—but it was not a good quarter on the top line at all,” said Brent Thill, analyst at Jefferies.
Alphabet reported $46.1 billion in revenue for the fourth quarter, falling short of the $46.9 billion of revenue analysts predicted. The company also missed revenue expectations for the year, reporting $161.9 billion compared to predictions of $162.8 billion.
Alphabet said YouTube had 20 million subscribers paying for YouTube Music and YouTube Premium—an ad-free bundle of YouTube and YouTube Music—and more than 2 million subscribers on YouTube TV, the company’s streaming live television service. The company also said it had a $3 billion annual revenue run rate for YouTube subscriptions and non-ad revenue.
Analysts were excited to have the new insights. “This is the best Google or Alphabet call I’ve been on since I’ve covered the company,” said Heather Bellini of Goldman Sachs. But Thill said the new numbers fell short of what he and others had expected from YouTube: $20 billion in revenue.
Regardless, he agrees with Pichai that the service has much room to grow. YouTube could add a limit to how much content is consumed for free to bump how much money the company can make off each user, for instance.
“I see incredible opportunity and so many levers that can drive higher users and growth per user or dollars per user,” he said. “The message is there’s a ton of runway.”
But that doesn’t calm the rising concern about the slowdown in Google’s core advertising business, for which the company gave little explanation. Facebook similarly reported a slow in its ads business last week, citing changes in regulations, privacy settings across services, as well as its own features meant to give users more control over their data.
“One quarter isn’t a trend,” Thill said. But “when you have two behemoth vendors in advertising show a major slowdown … you say, ‘Hold on, what’s going on here?”
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—Predicting the biggest tech headlines of 2020
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fortune--2020-02-04--Talk radio’s Rush Limbaugh has advanced lung cancer

Rush Limbaugh, a fixture of conservative talk radio for decades, told listeners on Monday that he has advanced lung cancer and may miss some broadcasts while he seeks treatment.
Limbaugh said during his show that the diagnosis was confirmed by two medical institutions on Jan. 20 after he “realized something was wrong” on the weekend of his birthday, Jan. 12.
IHeartMedia, the radio giant that airs his show, confirmed the news.
“Over his last 31 years on-air he has developed a deeply personal relationship with his listeners and he intends to remain on the air, being there with his audience,” IHeart Chief Executive Officer Bob Pittman and Chief Operating Officer Rich Bressler said in a joint statement. “We know millions of people nationwide join me and all of IHeart in wishing him a full recovery.”
Limbaugh, 69, said he thought about not disclosing his condition.
“I wish I didn’t have to tell you this and I thought about not telling anybody,” he said. “I thought about trying to do this without anybody knowing, because I don’t like making things about me.”
Limbaugh, whose show has been one of the highest-rated radio programs in the U.S. over the years, warned there would be days he couldn’t come to work because he would be undergoing treatment or reacting to medical care. The show has more than 20 million listeners and is broadcast on more than 650 affiliates, according to Nielsen data cited by IHeart.
“The worst thing that can happen is when there is something going on and you try to hide it and cover it up,” he said.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—2020 candidates’ positions, and records, on economic issues that affect women
—Bernie Sanders wants the future of the far left to be female. Is that enough?
—Michael Bloomberg’s radical plan to cut prescription drug costs
—Fortune Explains: The debt ceiling
—Millions have been purged from voter rolls—and may not even realize it
Get up to speed on your morning commute with Fortune’s CEO Daily newsletter.


fortune--2020-02-04--Coronavirus will take a bite out of Apple’s iPhone business. The question facing analysts: ‘How big?

Coronavirus will take a bite out of Apple’s iPhone business. The question facing analysts: ‘How big?’

In a note to investors on Monday, TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reduced his first-quarter iPhone shipment prediction by 10% to a range of 36 million to 40 million devices, due to the coronavirus outbreak. Kuo says his firm’s checks reveal a disruption in Apple’s supply chain that could extend into the second quarter, if coronavirus mitigation efforts don’t take hold.
Coronavirus, a highly contagious respiratory illness that was first discovered in Wuhan, China, has taken the lives of more than 360 people in China, as the number of confirmed cases has grown to more than 17,000 worldwide. To stop coronavirus, China has all but shut down areas most heavily affected by the outbreak. In response, companies have also closed, stopping production of their goods.
Over the weekend, Apple, which operates several stores across China, said it would close the retail stores and offices it operates in China until February 10.
But as Kuo’s note suggests, Apple’s exposure to coronavirus goes beyond retail. The company is heavily reliant upon China to manufacture iPhones, and workers not producing devices and shipping them worldwide will have a direct impact on Apple’s business.
What’s harder to quantify, however, is whether Kuo’s prediction on iPhone shipments is realistic or overblown. Fortune talked to several analysts on Monday to get their takes on what might happen if the coronavirus outbreak continues unabated.
Loup Ventures analyst Gene Munster is taking a very different position than Kuo. “I don’t think coronavirus will impact Apple shipments, given the company has a 3-5 weeks of iPhone inventory,” Munster says. But, the longtime Apple watcher cautions, each week of production shutdown beyond week four will reduce iPhone shipments by 8% on the quarter.
Meanwhile, 556 Ventures analyst William Ho is taking a wait-and-see approach to the impact of coronavirus on the iPhone. In terms of production, things appear to be going fine for Apple, he says, but unit sales may be a different story.
“All the consumer psychology of staying indoors in affected areas can contribute to a slowdown in sales,” Ho says. Whether that will play out, however, is unclear.
On the other hand, Forrester analyst Frank Gillett says it will take just seven days of “lost production” at Apple’s manufacturing facilities to cause a 10% reduction in iPhone shipments. While he couldn’t say whether Apple’s supply chain is getting hit that hard, he does believe coronavirus is a problem for the iPhone maker.
“Because the supply chain is so tightly coordinated and does air shipments, any closures will impact production pretty quickly,” Gillett says. “Unless they can work lots of overtime, it will be difficult to make up for the closures and any lost production.”
Timing is everything
IHS Markit analyst Wayne Lam agrees with Gillet’s perspective, saying “The situation in China is basically the worst possible from a manufacturing labor perspective.”
But the coronavirus outbreak’s timing might play to Apple’s benefit, Lam argues. Because it started around the Chinese New Year, Apple and its manufacturing partners were already planning a slowdown in production due to holiday gatherings.
There’s another timing issue might helpful Apple’s stem potential losses due to the coronavirus.
“Apple’s exposure may be mitigated thanks to seasonality,” Futuresource market analyst James Manning Smith says. And because Apple generates a much larger share of its annual sales in the fourth quarter compared to the first, the long-term impact on iPhone shipments could be less than they would be otherwise.
“Should the coronavirus outbreak be controlled in the coming months,” Manning Smith says, “Apple may be able to shift demand to another quarter and mediate any supply issues encounter in the first half.”
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—Predicting the biggest tech headlines of 2020
Catch up with Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily digest on the business of tech.


fortune--2020-02-04--Macy’s to shutter 125 more stores.

Macy’s to shutter 125 more stores.

The best movies that came out of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival

Macy’s will shutter another 125 of its namesake department stores as it attempts yet again to turn its business around. The goal: remake itself into a retailer equipped to survive today’s shopping landscape.
The company, which currently operates about 650 stores (including the Bloomingdale’s luxury chain) said on Tuesday that the locations on the chopping block have total annual sales of about $1.4 billion. The stores, which will be closed over the next three years, are in “lower tier malls.” Macy’s will also break from its traditional anchor spot in malls by trying out a concept called Market by Macy’s, which will feature new smaller store formats outside of the shopping centers.
To bolster profits, Macy’s also said it would cut about 2,000 corporate jobs, or 10% of non-store staff. That includes closing its Silicon Valley office and relocating that e-commerce staff to New York. The company is also dropping its dual-headquarters structure, closing its offices in Cincinnati and consolidating in New York, where the bulk of its top leadership works.
Macy’s earned praise for its efforts from Moody’s, which said in a research note that “Macy’s, like its major department store competitors, is working to accelerate change after a weak 2019.”
This is the retailer’s second round of store closures. In 2016, Macy’s shuttered 100 stores. This latest round of cuts is an admission by the U.S. largest remaining department store operator that many of its locations are not up to standard for shoppers today. Many Macy’s stores are poorly maintained, without any of the “fashion authority” look or feel that the company’s executives like to tout.
The news comes as Macy’s reported comparable sales fell about 0.8% in the fiscal year that ended on Saturday, a weak performance in a strong consumer environment. The numbers underscore how the company keeps losing market share: Macy’s rivals like T.J. Maxx, Target, Amazon, and Ulta Beauty have continued to thrive.
Macy’s will present the details of its turnaround plan, dubbed “Polaris,” on Wednesday at the New York Stock Exchange.
Jeff Gennette, Macy’s chief executive, had long defended the idea of having some stores be less spectacular while lavishing much more capital on its 150 best stores like Herald Square in Manhattan. Gennette argued that the weaker locations at least provide Macy’s with a presence in often underserved markets and acted as spokes in its e-commerce infrastructure.
But today, in a press release, the company acknowledged that the weaker stores were of limited value, saying “today’s shopper expects a consistent experience whenever and wherever they encounter Macy’s brand.” Target for one has thrived with a rolling program of store remodels that has led to consistency in the caliber of its stores.
Many of Macy’s problems can be tied to the fact that it is the product of a 2005 merger between Federated Department Stores and May Department Stores, which made it a true national player at a time department stores still tended to be regional.
But the purchase of Marshall Fields in the Midwest angered local shoppers for years, while other acquisitions led to having two Macy’s stores too close together in a given market, at times with very different layouts and looks.
The closings will leave Macy’s with about 500 stores. Bloomingdale’s has 40 stores, while the small-store Bluemercury beauty chain has some 170 locations.
As for the 161-year-old company’s plan to open the smaller Market by Macy’s stores, the rollout will begin Thursday in Dallas in strip centers, where rivals like Ulta, T.J. Maxx, Target, and Kohl’s are typically found. These locations will be about 15,000 square foot in size, about one-eighth the size of a regular Macy’s.
Such stores are no guarantee of success: Kohl’s has shrunk many of its stores yet it continues to struggle thanks to merchandise that doesn’t set it apart from competitors.
Meanwhile, Target has taken much market share away from traditional department stores by successfully launching new brands and retiring old tired ones. Target’s strategy has meant giving up billions in sales, something the likes of Kohl’s, J.C. Penney and Macy’s have been loath to do. Macy’s said on Wednesday it plans to build four $1 billion brands hoping to reignite interest in its products.
The company is also looking to generate more cash from its real estate, with its eye on bringing in $130 million in the new fiscal year by plans including selling off square footage it doesn’t need. (The company generated $1.6 billion from such transactions since 2016.)
Within three years, the company expects the reduced number of stores to bring in between $23.2 billion and $23.9 billion, compared to 2019’s $24.6 billion, suggesting Macy’s plans to be a leaner, nimbler and more profitable store chain.
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fortune--2020-02-04--Twitter will label, remove ‘deepfake’ videos under new policy

Twitter will start labeling, and in some cases removing, doctored or manipulated media that users share on the platform beginning next month.
The policy includes deepfake videos that have been edited using artificial intelligence or other advanced software to distort a person’s appearance or speech while appearing to be authentic, as well as other kinds of edited photos and videos that have been “substantially edited,” the company said Tuesday in a blog post.
In some cases, Twitter will label the video or photo so users know it has been doctored, but will let it remain on the social-media network. In other cases, when the content may “impact public safety or cause serious harm,” Twitter said the video or photo is likely to be removed.
Identifying and responding to manipulated media has become a matter of urgency for social media platforms as the 2020 U.S. presidential campaign is under way. There is concern that politicians, or bad actors from outside the established political system, might try to influence public opinion through misleading videos or photos shared on social media.
Twitter’s new “manipulated media” policy, which will take effect March 5, was released more than three months after the company announced it would research and ask the public about various options for handling doctored videos. The company said it settled on a system that looks at content in three ways:
Was the video or photo “significantly” altered?
Was it shared “in a deceptive manner”?
Is it a threat to public safety, or could it cause user harm?
If the answer to either of the first two questions is “yes,” then the media could be labeled with a warning to those who view it, and those who Like or retweet it. If Twitter deems the content could also pose real-world harm, it is likely to be removed, said Del Harvey, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, on a conference call with journalists.
Last May, a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was shared on Facebook that made it look as though the congresswoman was slurring her speech. Facebook Inc. elected to leave the video on the site despite calls from Pelosi and other politicians to take it down. Facebook eventually labeled the video as fake and cut its distribution, but took more than a day to do so, a delay Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg later called an “execution mistake.”
Under Twitter’s new policy, that same video would also be labeled because it was “significantly and deceptively altered,” said Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of site integrity. It wouldn’t have been removed.
Facebook has released its own policy on manipulated content since the Pelosi video. In Facebook’s case, the company will only remove content if it’s misleading and was created using “artificial intelligence or machine learning” technology. Otherwise, it can be fact-checked by the company’s third-party fact checkers, and may receive a label and limited distribution.
Twitter said its policy was written specifically so that it included doctored videos and photo regardless of the sophistication of the editing technology. That means Twitter may remove content that is harmful, even if it doesn’t fit the specific definition of a “deepfake.”
“Our focus on this policy is to look at the outcome, not how it was achieved,” Roth said.
Twitter and Facebook’s efforts to curb the spread of disinformation sometimes clash with their pledge to uphold free speech for global users. With the Pelosi video, both companies decided it didn’t cause a threat to user safety, but some critics argued it did and may have caused serious harm to Pelosi’s reputation. The congresswoman has since called Facebook “shameful” for its handling of misinformation.
“This new rule is not meant to be the final word on this issue,” Harvey said. “But it is an important new change that we will continue to iterate on and expand on as we identify other areas and issues that we need to make sure we can address.”
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fortune--2020-02-04--Buttigieg and Sanders lead as Iowa releases 62% of caucus results after delay

Clouded by doubts on a chaotic day-after, partial results of Iowa’s kickoff presidential caucus showed former Midwestern Mayor Pete Buttigieg and fiery progressive Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders leading the opening contest in the Democratic Party’s 2020 primary season.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, former Vice President Joe Biden and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar were trailing in the tally of State Delegate Equivalents, according to data released for the first time by the state Democratic Party nearly 24 hours after voting concluded. The results reflected 62% of precincts in the state.
While campaigns were eager to spin the results to their advantage, there was little immediate indication that the incomplete results eased the confusion and concern that loomed over the opening contest of the Democrats 2020 presidential primary season.
It was unclear when Iowa’s full results would be released.
During a private conference call with campaigns earlier in the day, state party chairman Troy Price declined to answer pointed questions about the specific timeline — even whether it would be a matter of days or weeks.
“We have been working day and night to make sure these results are accurate,” Price said at a subsequent press conference.
The leading candidates pressed on in next-up New Hampshire, which votes in just seven days, as billionaire Democrat Michael Bloomberg sensed opportunity, vowing to double his already massive advertising campaign and expand his sprawling staff focused on a series of delegate-rich states voting next month.
The party’s caucus crisis was an embarrassing twist after months of promoting the contest as a chance for Democrats to find some clarity in a jumbled field with no clear front-runner. Instead, after a buildup that featured seven rounds of debates, nearly $1 billion spent nationwide and a year of political jockeying, caucus day ended with no winner, no official results and many fresh questions about whether Iowa can retain its coveted “first” status.
Iowa marked the first contest in a primary season that will span all 50 states and several U.S. territories, ending at the party’s national convention in mid-July.
Campaigning in New Hampshire on Tuesday, Warren said she was “feeling good” about her performance in Iowa but questioned the state party’s plans to release partial results.
“I just don’t understand what that means, at least half of the data. I think they ought to get it together and release all the data,” she said.
The Sanders’ campaign told supporters that its internal monitoring showed him in the lead with nearly half the vote in. Sanders himself said late Monday, “Today marks the beginning of the end for Donald Trump.”
Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, essentially declared an Iowa victory.
“So we don’t know all the results, but we know by the time it’s all said and done, Iowa, you have shocked the nation,” he said before leaving Iowa. “By all indications, we are going on to New Hampshire victorious.”
Biden said he was “feeling good” and predicted the results would be close.
The party told campaigns Tuesday that the problem was a result of a “coding issue in the reporting system” that it said had since been fixed. It said it had verified the accuracy of the collected data and said the problem was not a result of “a hack or an intrusion.”
A Biden campaign representative objected to the party’s plan to release partial results before checking them against paper records, saying in the conference call that the plan didn’t address “growing reports” about problems on caucus night, such as precinct captains unable to get through on the phone to report results.
“The stories and the problems are just multiplying so presumably you’re going to have some way of addressing that and explaining to us as you release these partial results why you’re comfortable,” Biden campaign attorney Dana Remus said. “You need to have enough transparency that other people feel comfortable about it now and we’re just not there right now.”
Sanders adviser Jeff Weaver thanked party officials, and encouraged other campaigns not to undermine the party.
“Folks who are just trying to delay the return of this because of their relative positioning in the results last night, I think that’s a bit disingenuous,” Weaver said.
For the first time, the Iowa Democratic Party reported three sets of results: a tally of caucusgoers’ initial candidate preference; vote totals from the “final alignment” after supporters of lower-ranking candidates were able to make a second choice, and the total number of State Delegate Equivalents each candidate received.
The Associated Press will declare a winner based on the number of state delegates each candidate wins, which has been the traditional standard.
Early polling had suggested Sanders entered the night with a narrow lead, but any of the top four candidates — Sanders, Biden, Warren and Buttigieg — was positioned to score a victory. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who represents neighboring Minnesota, was also in the running, while outsider candidates including entrepreneur Andrew Yang, billionaire activist Tom Steyer and Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard lagged behind.
Sensing opportunity amid the chaos, Bloomberg’s campaign announced plans to double its national television advertising spending — which has already exceeded $100 million — as it expands its paid staff to more than 2,000 people.
Bloomberg is looking to next month, having decided to bypass Iowa’s contest and the three other states voting this month in favor of the delegate-rich states in March.
“After more than a year of this primary, the field is as unsettled as ever,” Bloomberg spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said. “No one has made the sale or even come close to it. Meanwhile, Mike is taking the fight to Trump every day, doubling down on the national campaign strategy we’ve been running from the beginning.”
Beyond 2020, the debacle invited fresh criticism about Iowa caucuses, a complicated set of political meetings staged in a state that is whiter and older than the Democratic Party. Many used the moment to question whether it was a quaint political tradition whose time had passed.
The party has tried to accommodate critics before, this year by promising to report three different data points about voters’ preferences, presumably improving transparency. But the new system created new headaches.
“I think Iowa is a dumpster fire,” said Dick Harpootlian, a South Carolina state senator and longtime Biden supporter, who served as an Iowa precinct captain for Biden on Monday.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—2020 candidates’ positions, and records, on economic issues that affect women
—Bernie Sanders wants the future of the far left to be female. Is that enough?
—Michael Bloomberg’s radical plan to cut prescription drug costs
—Fortune Explains: The debt ceiling
—Millions have been purged from voter rolls—and may not even realize it
Get up to speed on your morning commute with Fortune’s CEO Daily newsletter.


fortune--2020-02-04--Nevada Democrats dump app that caused Iowa’s caucus meltdown

For their state caucus later this month, Nevada Democrats had planned to use the same smartphone app as Iowa to report votes. But after Iowa Democrats experienced major problems with their app on Monday night, delaying the final results by at least a day, Nevada has decided to change course.
“We will not be employing the same app or vendor used in the Iowa caucus,” Nevada Democratic Party chair William McCurdy II said in a public statement on Tuesday.
Nevada’s reversal is just the latest in a string of problems that started in Iowa late Monday night, when many of precinct captains were unable use a new app to report vote results. The Iowa Democratic Party blamed the app, created by a company called Shadow, for the difficulties that sparked criticism about preparations for what is the nation’s first real test in the 2020 presidential race.
The IDP had declined to share much information about Shadow before the election, and the initial confusion surrounding the Iowa results led to baseless speculation that the app may have been hacked.
In a statement, the IDP said that while there was no indication of hacking, the results it received through the app didn’t match an independent check, and that though the app “was recording data accurately, it was reporting out only partial data.”
Shadow apologized on Twitter on Tuesday afternoon and echoed the IDP’s assessment, writing “the underlying data and collection process via Shadow’s mobile caucus app was sound and accurate, but our process to transmit that caucus results data generated via the app to the IDP was not.”
McCurdy, the Nevada party official, gave few details about what’s next for the state’s caucus, scheduled for February 22. He merely said that the Democratic Party “had already developed a series of backups and redundant reporting systems” to Shadow’s app and that his organization is “currently evaluating the best path forward.”
While Shadow said it had submitted its app for an independent security review, that review has not been made public. The Department of Homeland Security, which offers a number of free cybersecurity auditing services to elections systems, said that the IDP could have submitted the app for a review but chose not to.
“There’s no evidence that Iowa app was hacked or manipulated in any way, but that’s not the impression many voters were left with. The impression of insecurity can be just as damaging as insecurity itself,” said Jessica Brandt, head of policy and research at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan group that fights attempts to undermine democracy.
“Obviously our election officials need to be on high alert for actual intrusions, but they also need to guard against glitches and malfunctions that diminish confidence in the system despite it being sound,” she told Fortune. “Because those glitches generate exactly the kind of confusion that fuels conspiracy theories and misinformation.”
Last weekend, in two concurrent meetings of state election chiefs, secretaries of states met about how to combat election misinformation, fearing that it could shake voters’ confidence in the Democratic system.
On Tuesday, Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, a Republican and the state’s chief election official, declared his support for the Democrats moving slowly to get a full count. Iowa Democrats said they planned to release results of some votes sometime late Tuesday.
“The accuracy of the Iowa Democratic Party’s vote totals is much more important than the timeliness of releasing the results,” Pate wrote. “I support IDP while they take their time and conduct checks and balances to ensure the accuracy and integrity of the votes.”
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—What you need to know about new IBM CEO Arvind Krishna
—Coronavirus will take a bite out of Apple’s iPhone business. How big?
—Apple’s push into TV is “failing to resonate,” analyst says
—How marketers are increasingly using A.I. to persuade you to buy
—Predicting the biggest tech headlines of 2020
Catch up with Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily digest on the business of tech.


fortune--2020-02-04--The best movies that came out of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival

Buttigieg and Sanders lead as Iowa releases 62 % of caucus results after delay

You can see the mountains from just about everywhere in Park City, Utah, snowcapped and gleaming. Surrounded by rustic cabins, this tiny ski-resort town must be a deeply serene place to live year-round.
Of course, visiting for the 2020 Sundance Film Festival does not permit one to enjoy panoramic views and mountain solitude in any semblance of peace. But even as Hollywood descends on Park City, there’s still a strange clarity to the oxygen.
Somehow, the festival feels like a holy pilgrimage and rush-hour commute rolled into one. Even racing from screening to screening, it’s hard for even the most seasoned of industry folks not to breathe a little easier, away from their typical concrete jungles. To crib the title of a yesteryear premiere, Sundance is hustle but also flow.
For a festival that annually signals spring for independent cinema, this measure of calm amid the clamor can feel as restorative as the best movies that play there each year. And the finest of its 118 feature-length films did indeed restore, even as some shocked the system and others bucked it entirely.
The very best, Minari, is a tender and tremendously affecting tale of family, youth, and all-American struggle that plays out against the rural backdrop of ’80s Arkansas. At once sweeping and intimate, it follows a Korean-American family that shifts from the West Coast in order to start a small farm. To the unit’s hard-working patriarch, Jacob (Steven Yeun, The Walking Dead), nothing could be more important than this literal process of planting seeds and tending crops; it is the purest fulfillment of his American dream, and he is determined to seize it. To the rest of the family, including an impish grandmother (Youn Yuh-jung), life in Arkansas presents an unfamiliar set of obstacles they never asked for, from the surrounding evangelism to the decidedly isolated nature of their new existence. Writer-director Lee Isaac Chung, who drew from memories of his own upbringing, wisely gives domestic tensions—between Jacob and his wife, Monica (Han Yeri), as well as between the parents and their 7-year-old son David (Alan S. Kim), too young to grasp the gravity of a heart condition he was born with—space to organically develop and heighten. There’s wisdom, and humor, as well as unmistakable authenticity in his Minari.
Steven Yeun appears in “Minari” by Lee Isaac Chung. Courtesy of Sundance Institute
A24 will distribute Minari later this year; it’s one of the few titles at Sundance that seems primed to show up on the awards circuit, on its collective strengths as well as the terrifically moving performances by Yeun and Youn, particularly now that the independent box-office success of The Farewell and Parasite has vanished any misconceptions that a movie must be in English to resonate with a wide American audience. (The other is Ironbark, a handsomely tailored espionage drama starring Benedict Cumberbatch that Lionsgate and Roadside Attractions have acquired, in hopes it will land closer to his Imitation Game than his Current War.)
If Minari came into Sundance with a fair amount of buzz—and left it with more, earning double honors as the winner of both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award in the U.S. Dramatic Competition—the bigger A24 title that landed in Park City was Zola, based on a viral 148-tweet thread from 2015. Hailing from director Janicza Bravo and cowriter Jeremy O. Harris, the film is a strange, surreal beast that thoughtfully (if not entirely successfully) bakes the postmodern performativeness of its premise into the filmmaking.
Riley Keough and Taylour Paige appear in “Zola” by Janicza Bravo. Anna Kooris—Courtesy of Sundance Institute
It’s named for the dancer and waitress (Taylour Paige) who originally tweeted her account of the events depicted in the film, throughout which she’s plunged into a distinctly Floridian nightmare after agreeing to travel to Tampa with a stripper/sex worker (Riley Keough), her boyfriend (Nicholas Braun, Succession), and her pimp (a supremely menacing Colman Domingo). As Zola falls down a rabbit hole of guns, shady back rooms, and prostitution, Bravo’s narrative gambit becomes evident. Through Zola’s point-of-view retelling of these events, her grim ordeal is reclaimed as a candy-colored, sometimes hilariously out-there odyssey through the kind of beach-noir playground frequented by Spring Breakers director Harmony Korine. Zola falters two-thirds of the way through in a brief detour titled “Stefani,” in which Keough’s character suddenly grabs the mic to deliver her (fairly racist) side of events, through which Zola coaxed her into a life of illicit, soul-crushing crime. It’s fully a detour, and audiences never stack their sympathies away from Zola, which somewhat sinks Bravo’s bold exploration of how going viral entitles someone to decide the definitive version of events.
Zola‘s the most thematically loaded of a few films at Sundance that contemplated life in the age of social media and technology clattering along at a terrifying pace. In Spree, Joe Keery of Stranger Things plays an unhinged Lyft driver whose quest to go viral is so all-consuming he’s willing to kill for it. Even more brutally, Possessor—from Brandon Cronenberg, son of body-horror king David—works a kind of sick-puppy magic in its twisted fable of assassins who use cutting-edge medical technology to hijack other people’s bodies, pushing their consciousnesses aside and revealing themselves only when it’s time to strike. It remains to be seen whether Well Go USA (which has acquired the title) can avoid an NC-17 rating for this deeply gory, amoral thriller, which devolves into a psychoplasmic face-off between one killer (Andrea Riseborough) and the surprisingly cunning man (Christopher Abbott) whose shell she’s stolen.
Andrea Riseborough appears in “Possessor” by Brandon Cronenberg. Karim Hussain—Courtesy of Sundance Institute
Over in the mainstream, Miss Americana, the Taylor Swift documentary that opened Sundance this year (and brought the musician to town, ensuring all-out pandemonium for two miles in every direction), claims to offer an authentic, unguarded portrait of the world’s biggest pop star, but director Lana Wilson’s aim in the film (which is already available on Netflix) is a little more subversive than that. Instead, as the doc charts Swift’s jerky path through the media spotlight, it doubles as a fascinating, fairly unsettling look at the celebrity complex, how impossibly well-oiled we’ve demanded Swift be while simultaneously shaming her for any perceived superficiality.
The Nowhere Inn, essentially Miss Americana‘s tethered, is a narrative film directed by Bill Benz but frames itself as the meta-documentary creation of Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein, who’s making a movie about the real life of her best friend Annie Clark, a.k.a. avant-garde guitar goddess St. Vincent. It’s a wild, vertiginous treatise on fame splintering the self (much like St. Vincent’s recent album, Masseduction), and it packs in vicious satire, Invasion of the Body Snatchers references, some mind-melting instances of pop-star artifice colliding with reality, and Sundance’s single best cameo in Dakota Johnson as Clark’s camera-ready paramour. It’s too much, knowingly so, and one of the most audacious movies that was at the festival this year.
Annie Clark and Carrie Brownstein appear in “The Nowhere Inn” by Bill Benz. Minka Farthing Kohl—Courtesey of the Sundance Institute
Another that fits that category of “audacious” and will undoubtedly generate bigger headlines is Promising Young Woman, a devastating poison pill of a debut by writer-director Emerald Fennell (Killing Eve) that’s been marketed as a “delicious new take” on the revenge thriller. “Delicious” is the wrong word, unless you’re partial to arsenic and battery acid. Promising Young Woman is furious, righteously so; its protagonist, Cassie (Carey Mulligan), is a kind of vigilante striking back against the patriarchy, who by night entraps bad men into revealing their toxic, culturally enabled proclivity toward taking advantage of women. Then she makes them pay. A trauma in Cassie’s past is driving her, but she’s more incensed at the system than any one individual benefiting from it. Fennell’s film is stylish and sophisticated in execution, but—especially in its divisive, tonally tricky final third—lands like a sledgehammer to the skull.
In a Sundance record, of the festival’s 118 feature-length titles, 44% were directed or codirected by women, with 34% directed or codirected by a person of color. Perhaps needless to say, most of the releases that shook up this historically very white and very male festival were not by white male filmmakers.
From Verónica Chen’s ferocious High Tide—about a woman (Gloria Carrá) locked in a war of wills with contractors after she sleeps with the chief builder—to Pablo Larraín’s sensual head-trip Ema—about a dancer (Mariana Di Girolamo) whose high-wire existence is thrown into disarray after she returns a child she adopted—Sundance offered many portraits of women in the throes of crisis that teased out their complexity, and often their cruelty or weakness, with dazzling ingenuity.
It was a particularly fascinating experience, to say the least, to hear sharp intakes of breath around the theater throughout The Assistant, director Kitty Green’s quiet and quietly devastating look at a day in the life of an assistant to a Harvey Weinstein type. “That’s exactly what it was like,” one voice whispered during a scene in which the assistant, Jane (Julia Garner, note-perfect in a challenging role), carefully disposes of a needle—implied to be for a penis injection drug—left on the floor of the executive’s office. The Assistant paints a sobering picture of an industry in which those at the entry level are held to a code of soul-annihilating silence; for it to play to such fierce acclaim at Sundance, a roost Harvey Weinstein once ruled, felt like an important moment.
In more auteur-driven filmmaking, Josephine Decker’s Shirley packed an invigorating punch in its Sundance premiere. Conceptually, the film’s a daring provocation: Can audiences reimagine “The Lottery” author Shirley Jackson (Elisabeth Moss) and her husband, professor Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg), as mad geniuses all too eager to ensnare a young couple (Logan Lerman and Odessa Young) in psychosexual parlor tricks? Decker’s experimental choices behind the camera, especially when the camera draws maddeningly out of focus, work to bring the audience inside Jackson’s dark, twisted headspace; towering work from all four stars handily manages the rest.
Michael Stuhlbarg and Elisabeth Moss appear in “Shirley” by Josephine Decker, at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival. Thatcher Keats—Courtesy of Sundance Institute
A less roundly well-received but equally visionary work came from Blindspotting director Carlos López Estrada, whose Summertime merges magical realism with the hard-fought slam poetry of 25 young strivers in Los Angeles. Described as a love letter to Los Angeles, it delivers beautifully on that front—much more so than something like La La Land, which is out to lionize Hollywood as silver-screen myth more than it is to observe the real-life dreamers in and living around it. Estrada’s film is a gamble, and a special film, unfolding as a Slacker-esque reverie with a clear-eyed, hopelessly romantic vantage point from which it looks out over its characters—a young woman standing up to a homophobe on public transport, two aspiring rappers, a fast-food worker at his wit’s end—and offers them freedom to speak their truths.
In the “Midnight” category, especially, female and nonwhite filmmakers prevailed with stories that felt fresh, frightening, and sometimes revelatory. Relic, from Aussie debut filmmaker Natalie Erika James, was all three and the biggest surprise of Sundance for this writer. At first a standard haunted-house spooker in which a dementia-afflicted grandmother (Robyn Nevin) is assailed by forces her daughter (Emily Mortimer) and granddaughter (Bella Heathcoate) can’t even begin to comprehend, Relic quickly emerges as an emotionally specific, often terrifying feat of filmmaking on par with The Babadook‘s merging of the familial and phantasmagoric. In a cunning narrative and visual trick, James externalizes the grandmother’s dementia across the family’s quiet domicile, as forgotten rooms and corridors suddenly materialize, only to drift off moments later, inaccessible to all outside them—and possibly inescapable to anyone unlucky enough to have wandered inside. Relic‘s fiendishly shifting architecture and nestled examination of grief deserve to make it the year’s breakout horror title.
Justin Simien’s shaggy ’80s-horror romp Bad Hair, one of the most buzzy Midnight titles headed into Sundance, was also one of the few sophomore films to avoid that dreaded slump. (For example: Don’t look for Beasts of the Southern Wild helmer Benh Zeitlin to have left Park City in euphorically high spirits, given the big shrug of a reception his long-awaited follow-up, Peter Pan riff Wendy, received at its premiere.) Bad Hair could stand to trim 15 minutes, and perhaps will before Hulu releases it later this year (after acquiring the film for north of $8 million), but what Simien has delivered is an energetic, entertainingly daft sendup of cultural appropriation and assimilation that doubles as his love letter to camp classics like Cat People, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Thing. As a follow-up to his acclaimed social satire Dear White People, Bad Hair is surprising and successfully brings Simien into a different genre sandbox.
From left: Yaani King Mondschein, Elle Lorraine, and Lena Waithe in “Bad Hair” by Justin Simien. Courtesy of Sundance Institute
Amulet, another directorial debut (by actress Romola Garai), is a more acquired taste than, say, Relic, but its fractured-fairy-tale execution, skin-crawling imagery, and thematic interest in serving bad men their just deserts made it a neat fit in this year’s horror lineup. It’s an angry film, loudly so, and a visually complicated one in how it works warped visions of anatomy and bodily function into its unsettling, tone-bending payoff. It’s interesting to consider a work so intentionally unpalatable in relation to something like Blumhouse’s Run Sweetheart Run (written and directed by Shana Feste), a more mainstream instance of women turning the tables on the men who’d seek to control and contain them. Ella Balinska (Charlie’s Angels) stars as a twentysomething whose affluent date (Pilou Asbaek) turns out to be a real monster, misogyny personified, with the police and most everyone else in his pocket. That Feste’s engaged seriously with “social horror” as it applies to dating violence is commendable; one wishes her film struck a better balance between its genuinely creepy setup and the weirdly upbeat, go-girl feminism of its latter two-thirds.
It was a largely strong crop of narrative films at Sundance this year, even with a few disappointments in the mix. But then there was Netflix’s The Last Thing He Wanted, the closest thing to a full Park City wipeout that played. On paper, the talent assembled for this political thriller based on a Joan Didion novel should have made it a slam-dunk, from director Dee Rees (Mudbound) to stars Anne Hathaway, Ben Affleck, and Willem Dafoe. But its story is a bramble of convoluted plot points and florid, unconvincing dialogue.
Still, Netflix will survive, and that its wipeout stands out more at Sundance underscores what a dramatically sound year this was for the festival. From soul-stirringly romantic stories of Georgian dancers (And Then We Danced) to metaphysical morality plays (Nine Days), no two films were alike, and most enthralled both in the moment and by lingering after their credits rolled.
The title that’s become most entrenched in this writer’s mind was also the final one caught in Park City. Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always—from Beach Rats director Eliza Hittman—is a triumph of casting and careful, clever writing, but more than that it feels like a triumph of humanity at the movies. Following a young woman (Sidney Flanigan) and her cousin (Talia Ryder) as they leave Pennsylvania to abort an unplanned pregnancy at a New York City clinic, the film approaches their story with a compassion and quiet grace. As embodied, beautifully, by unknown actors, these characters feel achingly real, and the steps Hittman imagines for their journey bruise even if they remain rigidly within the margins of reality. That Hittman won the Sundance prize for neo-realism is exactly right; Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always—the title of which is revealed in a scene that hits like a steamroller—captures a modern American experience never seen on screen in quite so direct and emotionally truthful a manner. It hits theaters in March, from Focus Features, and it’s one of the movies people will be talking about for the rest of this year.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—Bombshell’s Charlize Theron and John Lithgow reflect on the film’s indelible impact
—HBO’s McMillion$ docuseries shows how cheaters scammed McDonald’s Monopoly game
—The Assistant director Kitty Green on capturing in-office power dynamics
—In the age of Twitter, seconds-long streaming delays can make or break live entertainment
—Taika Waititi on Kiwi humor, directing as Hitler, and why kids should see Jojo Rabbit
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fortune--2020-02-04--‘Significantly impacted’: World’s biggest brewers tally costs of coronavirus outbreak as beer sales

‘Significantly impacted’: World’s biggest brewers tally costs of coronavirus outbreak as beer sales suffer

Clubs, bars, and restaurants have been shutting in record numbers across China in the wake of the spreading coronavirus outbreak. To Western brewers who’ve tied their ambitious growth strategies to the beer-swilling habits of the Chinese, the costs are beginning to come into focus.
On Tuesday, Danish brewer Carlsberg, which markets beer under dozens of brands including Kronenbourg and Tuborg, said a segment of its China beer sales—those that typically come from the country’s many bars and restaurants—has been “significantly impacted” by the coronavirus outbreak.
Earlier, the world’s largest brewer, Anheuser-Busch InBev, was forced to close its brewery in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, which has been essentially sealed off while life elsewhere in China has been turned upside down.
AB InBev and Carlsberg join a long roll call of international companies whose businesses have been disrupted by an outbreak that has infected more than 20,000 people worldwide and killed more than 400.
Apple, Facebook, and Ford Motor Co. are among U.S. companies that have instituted employee travel bans to and from China to reduce risk of exposure to the virus, while Google is shutting down its offices in mainland China.
World’s biggest market
To Big Beer, the outbreak could have a huge significance.
China is the world’s largest beer market, bigger than the United States and Brazil—Nos. 2 and 3, respectively—combined. And it’s growing. China is so important to the big brewers that last September AB InBev listed in Hong Kong its Asia-Pacific unit in one of the biggest IPOs of the year.
Shares of Carlsberg and AB InBev are down 4.4% and 3.9%, respectively, since the coronavirus outbreak began roiling international markets in mid-January.
For Carlsberg, an extended virus-related shutdown would have a negative impact, the company acknowledged today. But, at the moment, Carlsberg chief executive Cees ’t Hart doesn’t want to make a “guesstimate.”
“The impact,” he said, “really depends on how long it lasts and how wide does it spread.”
He did describe the scene on the ground, where all nightclubs across China have been closed, as have more than half of restaurants.
Beer sales in shops and supermarkets were not as badly affected, but even there Carlsberg calculates that a “double-digit percentage” of these outlets are closed. “It impacts the whole country,” he said on a conference call with analysts after the company released annual results.
Carlsberg is the world’s third-biggest brewer. It operates a brewery in Huizhou, Guangdong, which is closed until Feb. 10, Hart said, in line with a request by authorities to extend the Lunar New Year holiday until then to help limit the risk of infection.
“We are monitoring the situation closely. The key focus currently is the safety of our employees. No infection among employees has been reported,” he said.
Beers sales going flat
Carlsberg’s 2019 results underlined the importance of the Chinese market to Western brewers at a time when many health-conscious Americans and Europeans are drinking less alcohol. On the flip side, beer faces new competitive threats from drinks like hard seltzers—alcoholic sparkling waters—and even from the legalization of the recreational use of marijuana in some U.S. states.
The big brewers are having to adapt to an increasingly complex marketplace with the growth of craft beers and a rise in demand for low-alcohol or alcohol-free drinks. Alcoholic drinks industry analyst IWSR said in December that hard seltzer is seeing a “meteoric rise” in the U.S. and predicted that sales in the U.S. will more than triple by 2023.
The Danish brewer said its revenue grew by 19% in China last year, thanks to Chinese beer drinkers going upmarket to higher-price brews and expansion from its western regional stronghold into big cities farther east.
By contrast, the volume of beer it sold in both Western and Eastern Europe was down. Globally, the company reported a 5% rise in revenue and a 24% rise in net profit in 2019.
Investors will have to wait until Feb. 12 to see if Dutch brewer Heineken reports any impact from the coronavirus outbreak and until Feb. 27 to hear from AB InBev.
In October, AB InBev, maker of Budweiser, Corona, and Stella Artois, stunned investors when it revealed weak sales in China and South Korea and lowered its profit target for the year, sending its shares down 10%.
Although the brewing giant put the Chinese weakness down to temporary factors, investors will be watching closely to see how the company performed in China in the fourth quarter and its outlook for 2020.
For the major brewers, a prolonged China hangover could sink any hope of growth this year.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—All of your questions on filing taxes in 2020, answered
—The health of the economy in nine charts
—Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s Sheila Patel on her 2020 outlook
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fortune--2020-02-04--Midwest college gift shop removes display of dolls of Black leaders that were hanging from a tree

This is the web version of raceAhead, Fortune’s daily newsletter on race, culture, and inclusive leadership. To get it delivered daily to your inbox, sign up here.
When you’re on the race beat, the news is rarely good.
Here’s the latest example: A gift shop on Michigan State University’s campus was forced to remove an array of felt dolls depicting prominent Black figures—Barack and Michelle Obama, Prince, and one which appears to be Harriet Tubman—because they had been displayed hanging from a tree. The dolls looked like they’d been lynched.
Except when confronted directly, the staff of the Wharton Center for Performing Arts, a center named for Clifton R. Wharton, a Black man and former Michigan State University president, just didn’t make the connection. Didn’t see it.
The school has issued an unalloyed apology and plans to offer bias-mitigation training to the Wharton staff (which is unlikely to work). This is more than just a Black History Month fail. It’s just one in a series of incidents at Michigan State which have made non majority-culture students feel unsafe. One Black student even reported that she found a toilet paper noose taped to her dorm room door.
A gift shop display at Michigan State University showed historical Black figures hanging from a tree-like rack. Courtesy of Krystal Rose Davis-Dunn
The incident has gotten me thinking about why cultural and social justice ignorance persists, particularly in the education ecosystem. Why don’t the big themes about history and power and inequality stick?
I found this case study by Katy Swalwell, an assistant professor of education at Iowa State University, to be a helpful start.
In “Mind the civic empowerment gap: Economically elite students and critical civic education,” Swalwell spent a semester studying students at an elite private school in their social studies classes to understand how they were absorbing the information about social justice, civic engagement, and inequality. The student body was 86% white and tuition was about $30,000 a year.
The social studies programs were varied, employing data and civic engagement exercises, and explored all sorts of issues, like those relevant to the LGBTQ+ community, incarcerated populations and beyond. They also presented information from a spectrum of perspectives including liberal and conservative. Yet, they were wholly unsuccessful in their primary goal of challenging the students to think more deeply about why inequalities exist. Overall, students were “fundamentally undisturbed” by the notion of systemic barriers, reports Swalwell.
“The majority of students saw their role as that of a ‘benevolent benefactor’ who simply needed to be generous and to do good deeds,” Swalwell said in the paper. “These kinds of responses maintain or even threaten to widen the civic empowerment gap by endorsing personally responsible or participatory models of citizenship.”
“I think [learning about injustice] can only help because we can reference it and sound really cool for saying it if people recognize it,” one student told Swalwell in an interview. “Otherwise, we can help educate people on the things we learned about that maybe they didn’t have the opportunity to learn about. Or, we just know it and that’s great for us. Either way there’s no downside to knowledge.”
Unless it’s not knowledge. What hit me in the Swalwell work was the inability of teachers to inspire students with wealth and power to think about their role in perpetuating inequality, or even caring about people who are different from them. If people don’t see lynching a doll of the first Black president as a problem, they’re not going to see any of the issues facing the Black community as a problem.
And that’s everybody’s problem.
“Regardless of their engagement, poor people have virtually no political power. The very wealthy are the ones with more political power and this gap is increasing,” Swalwell told Iowa State University News. “Research shows that the poor and middle class often only get what they want when their ideas align with very wealthy people.”
Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com
On Point
So, the Iowa caucuses didn’t go well I’ll let the pundits and the trolls do their thing, but from an inclusion perspective, the Iowa caucuses have never gone well. The uniquely messy process makes it nearly impossible for working people or anyone with health, age-related, or mobility concerns to participate. The state bars formerly convicted felons from voting in one of the most restrictive laws in the country. As a result, hundreds of thousands of Iowans are shut out, reports The Guardian. “When you know you can’t vote, you remove a certain segment of people from the political process,” says one voting rights advocate.
The Guardian
The Trump Administration’s travel ban now extends to Nigeria Nigerians will be hit the hardest. On February 22, Nigerians will no longer be able to get the visa necessary to permanently relocate to the U.S.; Nigerians are the largest group of immigrants from Africa, and largely the most successful. It feels personal: Over the last two years, 57% of Nigerians applying for work visas, known as B-visas, have been denied. “African immigrants in general and Nigerian immigrants in particular are among the most educated and successful immigrants in the United States,” said Frank Sharry, the executive director of the immigration advocacy group America’s Voice, in a statement.
Vox
Brooklyn Park to be named for LGBTQ+ civil rights activist Marsha P. Johnson Johnson is a long-overlooked legend, a trans woman who sparked the Stonewall Uprising, and founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, which worked to support homeless queer youth and sex workers. She died under mysterious circumstances in 1992. It will be the first park named for an openly LGBTQ+ person. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo made the announcement during a speech at a speech at a Human Rights Campaign gala.
NBC News
New study: YouTube funnels people to extremist videos More than 330,000 videos on some 350 YouTube channels were analyzed and labeled according to a system designed by the Anti-Defamation League—either verified news media, media, “alt-lite” intellectual dark web, or outright alt-right, promoting extremism, white supremacy, and a white ethno-state. Then they traced the authors of 72 million comments on two million videos to discover their online journey. The study found that more than 26% of people who watched and commented on alt-lite videos ultimately wound up on alt-rite site and commented there. The issue appears to be getting worse.
MIT Technology Review
On Background
Does Black History Month help or hurt? The debate on the merits of the month occur every year. This year, The Atlantic’s Melinda D. Anderson breaks down the pros and cons. Here’s the big one: It’s not the specialized month, it’s that schools don’t teach diversity and history as part of their core missions. And the whole thing stops with Martin Luther King. “If there is a concerted effort to approach Black History Month in new ways each year, then we can combat some of the issues of only highlighting certain movements, figures, and events,” says Raquel Willis, a writer and racial-justice activist in Atlanta—and example of an important voice who should be represented in this sort of journalism. “It shouldn’t have taken 20 years for me to learn about Audre Lorde, Bayard Rustin, and Marsha P. Johnson,” she says.
The Atlantic
Who died during the Chicago heat wave of 1995? Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Judith Helfand doesn’t bury the lede in her latest documentary, exploring why 739 mostly black, elderly, and poor Chicagoans died during the course of one week in the summer of 1995. COOKED: Survival By Zip Code, Helfand’s latest project for PBS, is unflinching in its assessment of what went wrong. Did they die of the heat or did they die of the social conditions? "Well, both,” says Steve Whitman, a Cook County epidemiologist who is interviewed in the film. “Even if they didn’t die that week they would have died too soon.” Primetimer’s Aaron Barnhart gives an in-depth review here, more on the film below.
COOKED film
How teacher diversity helps students of color This policy brief posits that moving away from a majority-white teacher workforce would bring three distinct benefits: Positive role-modeling, higher expectations for kids of color, and an inherent cultural sensitivity that would influence curriculum and instructional content. I would argue that white kids would benefit from all of the above, too.
Brookings Institute
Tamara El-Waylly produces raceAhead and manages the op-ed program.
Quote
"’White supremacy’ is a much more useful term for understanding the complicity of people of color in upholding and maintaining racial hierarchies that do not involve force (i.e slavery, apartheid) than the term ‘internalized racism’—a term most often used to suggest that black people have absorbed negative feelings and attitudes about blackness. The term ‘white supremacy’ enables us to recognize not only that black people are socialized to embody the values and attitudes of white supremacy, but we can exercise ‘white supremacist control’ over other black people."
—bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black


fortune--2020-02-04--Artificial Intelligence comes to Slurpees and Big Macs

This is the web version of Eye on A.I., Fortune’s weekly newsletter covering artificial intelligence and business. To get it delivered weekly to your in-box, sign up here.
Convenience store giant 7-Eleven revealed last week during the Re-Work A.I. conference in San Francisco that it had opened an experimental cashierless store in Dallas in November. Shahmeer Mirza, a 7-Eleven machine learning engineer, said people can pick up what they want and walk out, much like what shoppers can do at Amazon’s Go growing chain of cashierless stores.
Computer vision technology tracks what customers take and then, in theory, ensures that they’re charged.
Meanwhile, McDonald’s said that it’s testing kiosks at a small number of U.S. restaurants that let customers order Happy Meals and shakes by talking to a digital assistant. It’s part of a broader push by McDonald’s to incorporate advances in computers that understand language into its franchises and into its mobile apps, said German Parisi, director of applied A.I. for McDonald’s research and technology unit.
As Parsi explained, McDonald’s views A.I. “as a driving force” that can “improve the customer and employee experience.” Parsi joined McDonald’s when it bought the natural language processing startup Apprente in the fall, and he is now helping the company build a new A.I. lab in Mountain View, Calif.
For anyone waiting for 7-Eleven and McDonald’s to detail the financial rationale of their A.I. projects, this was not the time. They said little on stage about the cost or potential payoff. Instead, the companies took the opportunity to highlight their “wow, that’s cool” technology—just like Amazon, Google regularly do. But it will likely be years before 7-Eleven and McDonald’s A.I. bets pay off.
As Fortune has previously reported, consulting and analyst surveys indicate that most businesses are struggling with their A.I. projects and expect any significant financial returns to be years down the road. Moreover, in many cases, those payoffs are turning out to take far longer than initially expected.
One top data scientist from a major retailer told Fortune on the conference sidelines that it’s a big challenge for corporate data-crunching staff to convince the business-side that A.I. projects are worth it. Technologists have difficulty conveying the significance of A.I. to financial staff, who prefer business projects that increase revenue or profits in the short term.
Less tangible aspects of A.I.’s impact on a company—like helping it be perceived as technologically savvy, which can help with recruiting—are difficult for accountants to quantify.
Regardless, companies like 7-Eleven and McDonald’s, are making big A.I. bets. Although A.I.’s financial benefits are still debatable (at least in the short term), it’s clear that they don’t want to be left behind.
Jonathan Vanian
@JonathanVanian
jonathan.vanian@fortune.com
A.I. IN THE NEWS
Apple says ‘no’ to Project Maven. When Apple recently bought the A.I. startup Xnor.AI earlier this year, the iPhone-maker inherited the company’s work with the Pentagon’s Project Maven initiative, which encompasses the use of A.I. to analyze imagers collected by military drones. Now, tech publication The Information reported that Apple terminated the startup’s work with Project Maven, implying that Apple has no interest in pursuing lucrative military contracts like Amazon or Microsoft.
Facebook pays again for privacy lapses. Facebook paid $550 million to settle claims that the social networking giant violated Illinois law governing the collection of biometric data, Bloomberg News reported. The lawsuit alleged that Facebook stored images of people’s faces without their consent; the facial data was used to power the company’s A.I.-powered Tag Suggestions feature that could suggest the names of people in photos.
Intel nixes Nervana chips. Intel plans to phase out its Nervana Spring Crest computer chips used for data training in favor of chip technology offered by Habana Labs, which Intel bought in December for $2 billion, reported tech publication The Register. The article states that it’s “no doubt, a blow for the folks at Nervana,” which Intel bought in 2016 and pitched as key to the company’s A.I. chip efforts. Analyst Karl Freund of Moor Insights & Strategy wrote, "I suspect these customers pointed to Habana as the preferred platform that can compete with Nvidia."
Who needs a map? Facebook A.I. researchers developed a reinforcement learning system—in which computers learn through repetition—that could robots navigate spaces without requiring a digital map, MIT Technology Review reported. The research could be useful to creating more capable robots that can move autonomously without running into obstacles.“As ever, the team doesn’t know exactly how the AI learned to navigate, but a best guess is that it picked up on patterns in the interior structure of the human-designed environments,” the article said.
TELL ME ABOUT YOUR DATA
Multiple startups have recently emerged that are selling software and services that help companies label and annotate their data used to train A.I. systems. Fortune takes a look at the data-labeling startup Labelbox, which just received $25 million in funding. “Where the rubber hits the road is what does the data these A.I. systems are trained on look like?” Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang said. “Is that data biased? Is that data high quality? Does that data have noise? Is that data comprehensive?”
EYE ON A.I. RESEARCH
Deep learning in space. Researchers from the University of Oxford and Samsung’sA.I. unit published a paper describing how deep learning could benefit various scientific activities in space, including analyzing satellite imagery and improving spacecraft operations like communications and navigation. “As space devices become more affordable to launch and their hardware becomes more powerful to run non-trivial workloads, deep learning in space will continue to grow as a topic within mobile and embedded machine learning,” the authors wrote.
Helping drones understand what they see. Researchers with the German Aerospace Center, Technical University of Munich, and The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers published a paper and related dataset intended to help researchers create more capable A.I. software that can help drones analyze images in real-time. The researchers compiled and annotated 290 hours of video of scenes captured in the air that showed various events like floods, fires, mudslides, and traffic congestion. The authors said that the “proposed dataset serves as a new challenge to develop models that can understand what happens on the planet from an aerial view.”
FORTUNE ON A.I.
Founder of Google’s Moonshot Factory and Udacity makes a big new bet—By Jonathan Vanian
How marketers are increasingly using A.I. to persuade you to buy—By David Z. Morris
Privacy, bias and safety: On facial recognition, Berlin and London choose different paths—By David Meyer
After eight years, what did IBM’s outgoing CEO accomplish?—By Aaron Pressman
BRAIN FOOD
Warehouse party. The New York Times visited a German warehouse belonging to electrical parts manufacturer Obeta and saw advanced robots that were able to pick and sort objects blazingly fast. The robots, built by the startup Covariant, were outfitted with reinforcement learning technology, which allows them to “pick and sort more than 10,000 different items.” A day after the story published, the Times reported on the possible negative and beneficial effects of A.I. and advanced robotics to the workforce. Advances in A.I. have given rise to companies like Uber and Grubhub, that can use the technology to “monitor and control workers, while still maintaining a formal arms-length relationship that skirts federal employment status guidelines. Some of these issues are explored in this piece by The Atlantic, which probes a harrowing lawsuit and examines whether “Uber’s system—which uses algorithms to manage drivers’ ride loads—is a form of control that should designate it as an employer.”


fortune--2020-02-04--The U.S. may soon have the world’s oldest nuclear power plants

Bonnie Rippingille looked out at the wisps of steam curling from the Turkey Point Nuclear Power Plant across Biscayne Bay with a sense of dread. In December federal regulators approved Florida Power & Light Co.’s request to let the facility’s twin nuclear reactions remain in operation for another 20 years beyond the end of their current licenses. By that point they’ll be 80, making them the oldest reactors in operation anywhere in the world.
“That’s too old,” said Rippingille, a lawyer and retired Miami-Dade County judge who was wearing a blue print shirt with white sea turtles on it. “They weren’t designed for this purpose.”
With backing from the Trump administration, utilities across the nation are preparing to follow suit, seeking permission to extend the life of reactors built in the 1970s to the 2050s as they run up against the end of their 60-year licenses.
“We are talking about running machines that were designed in the 1960s, constructed in the 1970s and have been operating under the most extreme radioactive and thermal conditions imaginable,” said Damon Moglen, an official with the environmental group Friends of the Earth. “There is no other country in the world that is thinking about operating reactors in the 60 to 80-year time frame.”
Indeed, the move comes as other nations shift away from atomic power over safety concerns, despite its appeal as a carbon-free alternative to coal and other fossil fuels. Japan, which used to get more than a quarter of its electricity from nuclear power, shut down all its plants in 2011 after a tsunami caused a nuclear meltdown at three reactors in Fukushima. Only a handful have restarted while others that can’t meet stringent new standards are slated to close permanently. Germany decided that year to shutter its entire fleet by 2022 and is now having trouble meeting its ambitious climate goals. Other nations such as France and Sweden are allowing reactors to retire while they diversify into solar and wind power.
By contrast, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is poised to decide this year on requests by subsidiaries of Exelon Corp. to extend the life of two nuclear reactors at its Peach Bottom Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania, about 100 miles from Washington, and Dominion Energy Inc. to extend the life of two nuclear reactors at a power plant in Surry, Virginia.
Dominion has notified the commission it intends to ask permission to extend the life of two more reactors north of Richmond, Virginia. Duke Energy Corp. has said it plans to seek license extensions for its entire fleet of 11 nuclear reactors, starting with three in Seneca, South Carolina.
“There are economic benefits,” said Rounette Nader, Duke’s director of nuclear license renewal. “Continuing to operate our existing nuclear fleet is cheaper than replacing it.”
The nuclear industry has been buffeted by a wave of early reactor retirements in the face of competition from cheap natural gas and subsidized renewable power. Constructing a new nuclear plant—the only one being built in the U.S. is years behind schedule and over budget—can cost billions of dollars. Retrofitting an existing one is more likely to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars range.
“It just makes sense,” said Maria Korsnick, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, a Washington-based trade group that represents nuclear utilities. “I don’t think you should look at a plant just on calendar years, but rather the way that plant has been maintained, so many components have been replaced over the years. There is nothing magic about 80.”
Critics such as Edwin Lyman, a nuclear energy expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists, argue that older plants contain “structures that can’t be replaced or repaired,” including the garage-sized steel reactor vessels that contain tons of nuclear fuel and can grow brittle after years of being bombarded by radioactive neutrons. “They just get older and older,” he said. If the vessel gets brittle, it becomes vulnerable to cracking or even catastrophic failure. That risk increases if it’s cooled down too rapidly—say in the case of a disaster, when cold water must be injected into the core to prevent a meltdown.
Other concerns surround the durability of components such as concrete and electric cables, but an advisory board to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the independent government agency that gave Turkey Point the green light to operate into the 2050s, said those risks could be managed safely “without undue risk to the health and safety of the public.”
The commission’s decision doesn’t sit well with Philip Stoddard, a bespectacled biology professor who serves as the mayor of South Miami, a city of 13,000 on about 18 miles away from the Turkey Point plant. He keeps a store of potassium iodide, used to prevent thyroid cancer, large enough to provide for every child in his city should the need arise.
“You’ve got hurricanes, you’ve got storm surge, you’ve got increasing risks of hurricanes and storm surge,” said Stoddard, 62, from the corner office in a biology building on Florida International University’s palm-tree lined campus. All of this not only increases the likelihood of a nuclear disaster, it also complicates a potential evacuation, which could put even more lives at risk. “Imagine being in a radiation cloud in your car and you’re sitting there running out of gas because you’re in a parking lot in the freeway,” he said.
Gabriel Ignetti, a 72-year-old Miami resident and retired music teacher, views nuclear power as a lesser evil than climate change and welcomes extending the life of the plant. “We have a climate emergency,” he said, “and if you have a climate emergency you can’t say we are not going to use that tool.”
That’s a point backers also highlight to make the case for extending the lives of nuclear power plants. Nuclear energy provides about 20% of the nation’s electricity and about 55% of the nation’s carbon-free energy.
Climate change is also one of the main cases against extending the life of Turkey Point, said Kelly Cox, the general counsel for Miami Waterkeeper, a six-person environmental group that has joined with the Natural Resources Defense Council and Friends of the Earth to challenge the NRC’s approval in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. New data show sea level rise in the area reach as high as 4.5 feet by 2070, but regulators from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission didn’t take those updated figures into account, said Cox.
“They are going to be flooded,” Cox said. “If we are relicensing a major utility we need to be preparing for the impacts of sea level rise.”
Scott Burnell, a NRC spokesman, said the agency’s review process did take into account the most recent information available on sea level rise, but that “the projected rate of sea level rise and associated revisions in flood hazard are slow enough that the plants will have ample time to appropriately analyze and address possible future effects.”
Other concerns exist about the condition of the plant’s unlined earthen cooling canals, a unique system that sprawls over nearly six thousand acres. Salty water from the canals is leaking underground toward the Biscayne aquifer, the source of drinking water for about 3 million Floridians, at a rate of about a foot a day, Cox said.
Peter Robbins, a spokesman for Florida Power & Light Co., a subsidiary of NextEra Energy Inc., said the utility is addressing that problem using a series of pumps to decrease the salinity in the cooling canals. The main power plant and its critical component are elevated 20 feet above sea level and are protected by concrete and reinforced buildings designed to withstand hurricanes and floods.
“At the end of the day it’s a very clean, reliable source of electricity,” Robbins said. “More than anything we think this is a win for our customers. It helps keep their reliability high, it helps keep their bills low, and there are no greenhouse gases as part of nuclear.”
In the city of Homestead, not far from the Turkey Point plant, Brian Goodwin, a burly 52-year-old farmer, said he didn’t believe in climate change, but supports the reactors’ extension nonetheless. “I hope they build another one,” said Goodwin. “It’s good clean power.”
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