The video-streaming site said in a blog post Monday that it will remove altered videos such as “deepfakes” and videos with patently false information, such as clips that report a living candidate is dead. It will also target videos that attempt to mislead the public about the voting or election process.

“We’ve increased our efforts to make YouTube a more reliable source for news and information, as well as an open platform for healthy political discourse,” Leslie Miller, YouTube’s vice president of government affairs and public policy, wrote in the blog post.

The moves come hours before voters in Iowa gathered to signal their support for presidential candidates in the Democratic field, the first tally of the 2020 primary season. Several primaries are scheduled for the coming weeks, including in strategically crucial states such as California and Virginia.

YouTube, a division of Google, has become a central advertising platform for candidates and source for voters seeking election information. But that has also brought bad actors who may willfully try to manipulate voters with incorrect information about hot-button political issues or even realistic-looking videos manipulated to give a false impression of a politician they oppose.

Last year, for instance, manipulated videos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), slowed to make her appear to be drunkenly slurring her words, were spread widely on social media, including YouTube, which removed them.

The dissemination of manipulated videos, in particular, has been a complicated topic in Silicon Valley heading into the 2020 presidential election amid a deeply divided electorate and the advancement of digital tools that make altering content easier than ever. Tech companies have formed special fact-checking teams and employed technical experts to help identify misleading or manipulated content.

Still, false narratives can spread quickly and effectively. Right-wing activists took to Twitter over the weekend to push claims of voter fraud in Iowa, including claims of voter registration inaccuracies, that went viral on the social media site.

“It’s a huge technical challenge to detect these kind of videos. We just don’t have very effective algorithms for finding digitally altered videos at this scale,” said Siwei Lyu, director of computer-vision lab at the State University of New York’s University at Albany and a member of the Deepfake Detection Challenge’s advisory group. “I applaud the effort, but we’ll have to see how this can be implemented in an effective way.”

Facebook last month said it removed videos it determined had been digitally manipulated by technologies such as artificial intelligence in a way that average users would not easily spot, including attempts to make the subjects of videos say words that they never did. But the policy did not appear to apply to doctored videos such as the Pelosi clip, which Facebook allowed to remain on the site. The social media site has been criticized for allowing content that is false as long as it is distributed by politicians or candidates – content it says should be up to voters to judge.

Social media sites Pinterest and Twitter last week also announced policies to combat election misinformation. Twitter users will be able to more easily flag content that contains false information about the process of voting, while Pinterest said it will proactively pull down such posts.

YouTube said such misleading videos represent less than 1% of what is watched in the United States But with well over 1 billion hours of content streamed daily globally, that could still represent tens of millions of hours. Election watchdogs have argued that YouTube, Facebook and other social media sites were central repositories in the efforts to manipulate the 2016 U.S. presidential vote and other global elections.

Google-parent Alphabet on Monday disclosed for the first time advertising revenue for YouTube since acquiring the site in 2006. While the $15 billion in annual sales doesn’t account for payouts the site makes to video creators, Wall Street analysts praised the company for its newfound transparency, which included cloud computing revenue.

Still, investors sent shares down nearly 5% in after-market trading, as Alphabet missed expectations on key metrics such as operating income and companywide revenue and advertising sales.YouTube says viewers are spending less time watching conspiracy-theory videos. But many still do.

In December, YouTube said its efforts to combat conspiracy theories and other debunked theories on its site had led to a reduction in how much time viewers spent watching such content. But its claims of a 70% drop in average time U.S. viewers were watching “borderline” content such as flat-Earth or medical-cure videos was tempered by a lack of underlying data.

Also included in YouTube’s ban are attempts to artificially boost numbers of likes, views or comments on videos and channels that impersonate others or try to conceal their connection to a government actor, the company said.

YouTube said it promotes videos that it determines are authoritative on a subject, which should marginalize content that may be misleading or erroneous.

One recent change affects ad-measurement companies — independent firms that monitor the performance of ads across Google, Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere. Last month, Google cut off those companies from analyzing a popular type of Google ad shown on iPhones and iPads. Instead, the company told advertisers to use its own measurement tools, something marketers have complained about in the past because they would rather trust neutral third parties.

The move focuses on ads that try to persuade people to install apps, a corner of the industry that generates billions of dollars a year in revenue for Google and other tech giants. One industry executive said the step was anticompetitive because Google is favoring its own services and unfairly elbowing out rivals. The person plans to complain to state attorneys general, who are investigating Google for potential antitrust violations. The person asked not to be identified discussing sensitive issues.

Google dominates search ads and, with Facebook, controls more than 60% of the broader digital ad market, according to one estimate. With data on billions of users, Google helps marketers target online messages and measure how many people clicked on ads and took other valuable actions, such as making purchases. The power of these offerings will be on show when parent Alphabet Inc. reports results after the market closes Monday.

The internet giant has been pressured for years to share more of this data with outside firms, so marketers can trust the metrics and easily compare how Google ads perform versus other providers. Access to this information is an emerging antitrust issue, especially in Europe, and Google has slowly opened up over the years.

But new privacy rules in California and Europe have raised the bar on what data companies are allowed to share. Google and other tech companies have responded by limiting the information that leaves their platforms. Apple Inc. has also cracked down on what can be shared for advertising.

Privacy laws have given Google “cover” to increasingly force advertisers to play by its rules, said Dina Srinivasan, a former ad-technology executive. “What we need in the U.S. is a privacy approach that solves competition problems and consumer privacy problems at the same time.”

Google executives have privately complained about being stuck in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. If the company shares less data, advertising rivals and partners shout antitrust. If it opens up, privacy advocates cry foul.

A spokesman said Google changed the approach to app-install ads because it’s hard to accurately measure the performance of these ads when iPhone users are logged out of their Google accounts. Letting external firms track ads in these cases would rely on techniques that “don’t provide users with appropriate choice, transparency and control,” the spokesman added. AdWeek reported the iPhone and iPad ad changes earlier.

Google told partners that the restrictions affect ads representing at least 40% of the money spent with Google to promote apps on iPhones and iPads, according to a person familiar with the situation. The Google spokesman said the “vast majority” of app ads on iPhones will not be affected, but declined to site specific numbers.

A similar dynamic is playing out in other parts of Google’s vast business. By the third quarter of 2020, the company plans to stop advertisers from pulling data about who clicks on their web banner and video ads out of Google’s system. Marketers have used this information for years to fine-tune their messages. Google already made this change in Europe and has said it would be applied globally. But complaints from some partners prompted Google to delay the change until later this year.

“Customers pushed back pretty hard,” said Ari Paparo, head of digital ad firm Beeswax and a former Google executive. “With the increasing emphasis on privacy, it seems inevitable that they will make this change despite the negative impact.”

Earlier this month, the Alphabet unit also said it would phase out cookies — bits of software code that let advertisers track users around the web and send them targeted ads. This approach has sustained a major part of the online marketing industry, and advertisers are scrambling to prepare.

This “will force ad-tech companies to re-imagine their businesses and advertisers to fundamentally shift the digital buying strategies they have been honing for 20 years,” said Brad Nunn, an executive at Media Assembly, part of ad agency MDC Partners Inc.

The Association of National Advertisers and the American Association of Advertising Agencies both decried the move, saying it could “choke off the economic oxygen from advertising that startups and emerging companies need to survive.”

Now, the public university is hiring a senior official from Cornell to lead what Virginia Tech calls the Innovation Campus – a $1 billion project in Alexandria near the site of the new Amazon headquarters in northern Virginia.

Lance Collins, 60, Cornell’s dean of engineering since 2010, will become vice president and executive director of the campus in August, Virginia Tech announced Monday.

From that position, Collins will be a key player in forging partnerships among academia, business and government as the campus takes shape. He grew accustomed to such challenges after helping to conceive and launch Cornell Tech.

That project, a collaboration between Cornell and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, is devoted to applied sciences and engineering. Its campus opened in 2017 on Roosevelt Island in New York. The parallels to Virginia Tech’s initiative are numerous.

“This new Innovation Campus is really going to be focused on technology development – particularly technology that’s relevant to society,” Collins said in a telephone interview. “That’s a very different mission than a traditional academic campus.” He said he was “thrilled to be taking on this role.”

Collins will arrive along with the first graduate students recruited for the project. Starting in the fall, they will take classes in computer science and computer engineering at Virginia Tech’s satellite in Falls Church while the campus is being developed in the Potomac Yard neighborhood of Alexandria. The 15-acre project site lies just south of Reagan National Airport.

Plans call for the first campus building to open in August 2024. The state is supplying $167.7 million for its construction. Within a decade, Virginia Tech expects to have up to 750 master’s degree students on the campus and hundreds more doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows. The campus expects to hire about 50 research and teaching faculty members.

Several universities in the Washington region already supply talent for technology companies, including the public University of Maryland at College Park and public George Mason University in northern Virginia.

But demand for a highly skilled workforce is likely to intensify as the tech industry grows. The Alexandria campus of Virginia Tech and an expansion of George Mason’s operations in Arlington were selling points in the campaign to lure Amazon to northern Virginia. Based in Seattle, the online retailer announced in November 2018 that it would build a second headquarters in Arlington. (Amazon founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Collins emphasized that the campus will not cater to just one company. “There will be strong ties with Amazon,” he said, “but I want to be clear: It won’t be an exclusive relationship. There are a lot of companies that are going to be interested in this campus, and we want to be open to all of them.”

Businesses will be partners, he said, but they won’t dictate what the campus does. “The faculty and the administration set the agenda,” he said. “There’s no question about that. That’s not even up for discussion. Otherwise, it’s not academia.”

Collins holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Princeton University and master’s and doctoral degrees in that discipline from the University of Pennsylvania. He will be a professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech.

In the search for a campus leader, said Virginia Tech President Timothy Sands, Collins stood out in part because he had helped Cornell ensure close ties between its main campus in Ithaca, New York, and Cornell Tech. Sands wants to forge a similar connection between Virginia Tech’s main campus in Blacksburg, which lies more than 200 miles southwest of Alexandria, and the Innovation Campus. A central issue, he said: “How do you make it feel like one university?”

Sands said he was also impressed by what Collins accomplished as dean of a premier engineering school with 230 faculty members and about 5,000 students.

Under Collins, Cornell recently erased the gender gap in a field historically tilted toward men: Half its undergraduate engineering students are now women. The engineering school also has expanded enrollment of students from underrepresented minority groups, including African Americans and Latinos.

“To see that he had done that there gave us optimism that he will be able to broaden the pool of talent coming into the pipeline in the Washington region,” Sands said. “That’s dearly needed.”

A Twitter representative did not comment on what specifically prompted the suspension, saying only that Zero Hedge was removed for violating the social media giant’s platform-manipulation policy. Twitter defines platform manipulation as “using Twitter to engage in bulk, aggressive, or deceptive activity that misleads others and/or disrupts their experience.”

But Zero Hedge’s founder, who uses the pseudonym Tyler Durden, wrote in a Friday afternoon post that he received a notice from Twitter saying he violated the platform’s rules against abuse and targeted harassment.

“It is news to us that this website has (ever) ‘engaged in the targeted harassment of someone,’ ” Durden wrote.

Bloomberg News reported that it received an email from Durden saying he believed the suspension was “unjustified, and likely motivated by reasons other than the stated ones.”

According to Durden, the suspension appeared to be related to a Zero Hedge post from earlier in the week titled “Is This The Man Behind The Global Coronavirus Pandemic?”

BuzzFeed News published an article Friday debunking the post, which promoted the discredited claim that the new coronavirus could have emerged from biological weapons research at a virology institute in Wuhan, the city where the outbreak began. Zero Hedge listed the name, photograph and contact information for a researcher at the institute, and it called on readers to “pay [him] a visit” if they want to “find out what really caused the coronavirus pandemic.”

The article, as well as other Zero Hedge posts making unfounded claims about the coronavirus, were shared thousands of times on social media.

Zero Hedge’s claims were part of a wave of posts, photos and videos that have emerged in recent weeks peddling misinformation about the rapidly spreading coronavirus, which has infected nearly 12,000 people around the world. More than 250 people have died from the virus, all of them in China.

Twitter, Facebook and Google have scrambled to curtail the misleading content, pledging to boost accurate information about the outbreak and crack down on users who promote falsehoods.

Experts have rejected the idea that the virus could be man-made or the product of biological weapons research.

“Based on the virus genome and properties, there is no indication whatsoever that it was an engineered virus,” Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, told The Washington Post this week.

Zero Hedge launched in 2009, mostly featuring news and commentary about financial markets from a libertarian perspective. In recent years, the blog has amplified right-wing conspiracy theories on a range of topics. In November, Zero Hedge erroneously reported that the head of Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company at the center of the current impeachment trial, had been “indicted” by Ukraine’s prosecutor general.

Human rights advocates in places like Sri Lanka, the Philippines, India and Brazil have long complained that the company has refused to acknowledge mounting evidence about the dangers of digital hate. As Facebook pursued world-changing growth, particularly in developing countries, it didn’t always have local staff there, or even employees who spoke the language. In Myanmar, a wave of online hate preceded a campaign of violence against the country’s Rohingya minority that led to thousands of deaths and the displacement of over 700,000 people. An independent report Facebook commissioned in 2018 found that it bore partial responsibility for fueling the conflict.

Immediately after taking the job, Sissons took a five-day trip to the country. “I was deeply, deeply aware of the criticism of Facebook’s inaction in Myanmar, and deeply aware of the struggles humankind is facing with the impact of social media,” Sissons told Bloomberg News earlier in her first press interview in her new role. “This is one of the greatest challenges of our time.”

Sissons work is part of a broader reckoning within the technology industry, which has been forced to reexamine its role in world conflicts. Several months before Facebook hired Sissons, Twitter Inc. brought on Cynthia Wong, a former researcher at Human Rights Watch, to be its human rights director. As with Facebook, Twitter never announced the hiring.

In discussions with more than a dozen people familiar with Facebook’s work on human rights, a picture emerges of a company that has been moving rapidly but, according to its skeptics, not always effectively. One Facebook employee, who asked not to be identified discussing private information, said its shortcomings have not always been the result of having too few people dedicated to human rights, but at times having so many people involved that they’re working at cross-purposes.

Human rights advocates outside the company acknowledge Facebook’s effort to hire experts, and say it has become far more responsive. But they worry that internal advocates like Sissons won’t be adequately empowered, and many are withholding praise until the company makes more concrete changes. “They are hiring people who have the right knowledge, experience and sensibility to tackle human rights problems,” said Matthew Smith, chief executive of Fortify Rights, a human rights group. “So far, though, that’s clearly not enough.”

Sissons’ human rights education started early. Her father was a prominent Australian historian who served in the occupation force of Hiroshima after World War II, then worked as an interpreter in the Australian-led tribunals of Japanese officials accused of war crimes. “My early childhood was completely taken up with discussions of war crimes, war criminals, the Second World War, and notions of justice,” she said.

After attending the University of Melbourne, Sissons spent time in East Timor, researched Middle Eastern issues and took several posts with the Australian diplomatic corps, including a frustrating stint answering phones at an Australian embassy in Egypt. “My Arabic wasn’t very good,” she confessed. “People would ring me up and shout at me about all kinds of things, and I would have to find a solution. ” Eventually, Sissons went on to work on her own high-profile tribunal as an independent observer of the trial of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, and she did stints at Human Rights Watch and the Australian diplomatic corps.

In 2011 Sissons switched her focus to the relationship between human rights and technology. She had been working in the Middle East, where the Arab Spring was just getting underway, and many people believed social media could shift the balance of power between citizens and oppressive regimes. It was a time of unmatched optimism about the potential of social media in political organizing.

The good feelings didn’t last. As early as 2014 there were credible reports emerging of coordinated incitement on Facebook against the Rohingya in Myanmar. The online abuse foreshadowed a wave of violence that began in earnest in 2016.

By the time Facebook began looking for a human rights director in 2018, the conventional wisdom on tech from a few years earlier had effectively reversed. The killings in Myanmar and elsewhere, coupled with Russian-led disinformation campaigns in Donald Trump’s presidential election, had darkened popular opinion. Companies that were accustomed to being revered were suddenly being accused of simultaneously squelching free expression and tolerating active manipulation of their platforms.

The tech industry’s first halting steps to control the flow of abuse initially won few fans. In an online essay in late 2018 Cynthia Wong, then senior internet researcher for Human Rights Watch, said it was time for a “moral reckoning” in Silicon Valley. “If regulators, investors, and users want true accountability, they should press for a far more radical re-examination of tech sector business models, especially social media and advertising ecosystems,” she wrote.

In some cases, the companies started hiring their critics. Twitter brought on Wong as its legal director of human rights in April 2019. The company declined to make her available for an interview, and said in a statement that it was “uniquely positioned to help activist and civic-minded people around the globe make their voices heard.”

Other attempts at reform were wholly unsuccessful. In early 2019 Ross LaJeunesse, then Google’s global head of international relations, saw Facebook’s posting for a human rights director, and used it to argue for the creation of a similar structure at his company. He failed, and left the company soon after. LaJeunesse, who is currently running for the U.S. Senate in Maine, now says tech companies can’t handle these issues on their own. “There has to be government oversight,” he said.

Sissons, who reports to Facebook’s head of global policy management Monika Bickert, has over the last several months been quietly incorporating human rights protections into Facebook’s policies, and making sure that people with human rights training are in the meetings where executives sign off on new product features. She said the company had made progress before she arrived, including the reform of its 2018 decision to begin removing misinformation in situations where it could lead to physical harm.

“There are now a lot of resources in place,” Sissons said. The challenge is to quickly identify local signs of trouble, then block or slow the spread of certain content, or take swift action against particular users. “We are testing continuously in crisis environments to try and predict what resources we’ll need,” she said, “and to ensure they’re in place.”

When Sissons went to Myanmar with Facebook she made a stop in Phandeeyar, a tech hub and community center in downtown Yangon. Jes Kaliebe Petersen, its CEO, said he’s been meeting with Facebook employees for years – he helped the company develop local community standards almost five years ago. But the encounters have calcified into a depressingly predictable routine. “They send a bunch of people who have never been here before, and they talk to us,” said Petersen. “And we never hear from them again.”

A spokesman for Facebook said it has held many introductory meetings at the request of local advocates, and argued the company has taken significant strides in the country. Besides hiring Sissons, it shut down hundreds of pages and accounts, including that of the head of Myanmar’s army, for spreading misinformation and hatred. It has hired a Myanmar head of public policy for the first time. And it assembled a team of 100 content moderators who speak Burmese. That group will be able to “support escalations” in other languages used in the country as well, Sissons said.

The company also set up an independent review board for thorny content moderation issues, and in an unusual step, commissioned independent human rights assessments of what happened in Myanmar and other trouble spots. In November 2018, it published a 60-page report on Myanmar from the nonprofit group Business for Social Responsibility, in full. “They deserve praise for putting it out there,” said Dunstan Allison-Hope the lead author of the report. “You don’t see that.”

But Facebook has never made the results of a similar assessment in Sri Lanka public, despite calls to do so. Sissons declined to say whether it had plans to publish those results. And there are currently no Facebook staff members working in Myanmar full-time – something that many advocates have called for. Representatives for Facebook say its staff based in Singapore and elsewhere are regularly in Myanmar, and that it has spent well over a year taking hundreds of meetings with people in the country.

One person who said he’d never gotten an invitation to meet with Facebook is Nickey Diamond, a local advocate working for Fortify Rights. Diamond said he has been the target of harassing posts from the government for years, and still faces a menacing atmosphere online. “They’re sharing my picture with the word ‘traitor’ in Burmese,” he said. “Every human rights defender is in the same situation.”

The broader problem Facebook is confronting-the vigilant monitoring of an ever-evolving social network used by 2.3 billion people-can seem almost impossibly daunting. The company now has content moderators examining posts in approximately 50 languages, Sissons said, a number that is unchanged from its count last April, and is fewer than half of the languages that Facebook actively supports.

Facebook has said only technological improvements can combat problems at scale. It has automated tools that scan for hate speech, as well as image recognition technology monitoring for obscene content regardless of language. About 80% of the posts that Facebook acts on for violating its hate speech policies are now first identified by its automated filters, up from about 24% a year earlier.

Soon, the challenges of monitoring the spread of abusive posts could become even more difficult. Facing pressure to increase user privacy, Facebook has prioritized private communications, meaning more content is encrypted so that even the company itself won’t know what it says. In those cases, Sissons said the company is working on tools that will look for patterns associated with problematic content, so it can either remove such messages or impede them from spreading so rapidly.

Facebook is aware of the scope of its challenges, said Rebecca MacKinnon, the director of Ranking Digital Rights, an online advocacy group. “Facebook is making an effort to engage. Whether that will make a difference in the real world, we’ll see,” she said. “They’re dealing with some problems that no one knows how to solve.”

When Sissons met with members of the Phandeeyar team last November in Myanmar, they came prepared with a handful of suggestions for actions Facebook should take before the national elections there, which are expected to take place later this year. While Phandeeyar staffers had been deeply engaged in the specifics for months, Sissons was still just getting her feet under her, and there wasn’t enough time in the hour-long meeting to get much resolution, said Phandeeyar CEO Petersen.

“There’s always lots of goals for improvements. Hopefully Miranda has a sound plan for how to get there,” he said. “The thing is, we don’t really have that much time.”

As survivors, heads of states and members of Jewish organizations gathered at the site where the Nazis systematically murdered more than 1.1 million people, a letter declaring that Jews are fake and part of the “Synagogue of Satan” was sent to synagogues in Seattle, Springfield, Virginia, and the District of Columbia.

Swastikas were painted on City Hall in Pendleton, Oregon, and a home in Boulder City, Nevada. Walls inside an apartment building in New York were marked with profanity-laced graffiti targeting Jews.

For the Anti-Defamation League, one of the oldest U.S. organizations that collects data on hate and anti-Semitism around the world, such incidents have become increasingly common in the United States – so much so that it launched a new online project this week to track them.

“We are doing this because anti-Semitic incidents are more prevalent nationwide and we felt it was essential to provide immediate and reliable data to the public,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the group’s chief executive and national director.

“This tool allows people, whether it’s the general public or journalists or students or law enforcement, to see the activity that has taken place, not just around the country but in localities potentially nearby,” he said.

The group collects information about anti-Semitic incidents from sources such as media reports, law enforcement and direct reporting at one of its 25 offices across the country. According to Greenblatt, the staff will investigate and validate the information it publishes as part of the new project.

“We are now using the tracker because the pace of incidents has grown so dramatically,” Greenblatt said.

In 2017, anti-Semitic incidents in the United States increased 57%, according to the group, the largest single-year increase the group has seen and the second-highest total in its history. In 2018, the overall number of incidents declined slightly but remained at near-historic levels, the group says.

The online activities of far-right and neo-Nazi groups have also spiked.

“This online activity is spilling out into the real world – not just through terrorist attacks, but brazen recruitment operations across campuses and other public spaces, providing contact information for whites to join local chapters of neo-Nazi groups and train for what they see as a pending race war,” said Rita Katz, executive director of the SITE Intelligence Group, a private firm that tracks online extremist activity.

In a December report, SITE found that the far right has had a presence on the Telegram messaging app since September 2016. But a majority of the 374 groups and channels sampled for the report were created on or after March 15, 2019, the date that a white supremacist killed 51 Muslims in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.

Katz noted that college campuses are “a recurring factor” in many of the incidents listed in the tracker.

“This is not surprising as we at SITE have been seeing neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups like Feuerkrieg Division, The Base, and Atomwaffen Division place special emphasis on flying campaigns at college campuses throughout the country,” she said.

Greenblatt said the tracker was critical in a charged environment in which people are worried that the government doesn’t appear to have a solution and fear that stereotypes and scapegoating of Jews are spread easily. But he said his group faces challenges – extremist violence often happens in cities where it does not have offices and most people don’t report incidents.

Adding to this is the realization that memories of the Holocaust are fading, and survivors and witnesses are dying.

“People forget the most horrible act of the 20th century that showed what can happen when hate goes unchallenged,” Greenblatt said.

The opportunity to become part of the Denla British School (DBS) family is here for Year 3 to Year 10 students who excel in Mathematics, Science, English, Thai, Music, Sport, and all-round abilities! Denla British School (DBS) is a premium international school that implements the Enhanced British Curriculum modelled on the top independent schools in the UK, and it offers scholarship opportunities at the “DBS Scholarship Day” for students of Year 3 to Year 10. Interested students and parents can learn more about this at the scholarship information session at DBS on Tuesday 4th February 2020 from 9.00-10.00 am. Then, on Saturday 7th March 2020, selected candidates will be invited to take the scholarship assessment at DBS.

Mr Mark McVeigh, Principal of DBS said that the strength of the DBS unique vision in the core areas of an Enhanced British Curriculum, Academic Excellence for All, Entrepreneurship and Creative Thinking, and  Community and Global Perspectives, has encouraged DBS students to develop significantly in all areas – clearly shown from academic and non-academic awards – and that is why DBS is being recognised as the international school that nurtures global leaders and entrepreneurs.

DBS Scholarship Day is one of the programmes that contribute to the vision of Academic Excellence for All, aiming to encourage students who excel in Mathematics, Science, English, Thai, Music, Sports, and all-round abilities, to enrol in DBS. DBS is a unique international school in Bangkok, which implements a UK independent school curriculum and its teachers are not only experienced, but are also 100% native English speakers (apart from Thai and Mandarin subjects). The curriculum of UK  independent schools is outstanding, with its Personalised Learning approach that concentrates on encouragement, and adapting the teaching method to each student, according to their skills and preferences. Approaches vary from specific teaching for each individual, to teaching in small groups, with teachers and their assistants supervising the entire process. The school is not only known for its academic excellence, but also encourages an all-round education so that children can explore and discover their own talents.

At the DBS Scholarship Day, there will be an academic examination using the UK education standard for all candidates. Additionally, scholarships for music and sports, will involve students taking auditions and exercises, and showing proven, recognised records of their abilities. And for those who have all-round abilities, the assessment for them will be a mixture of academic examinations and practical assessment.

When a student is awarded a DBS Scholarship, the school will nurture them so that they can access the world’s top universities using, for example, the Beacon Programme that is designed to cater for high attaining and greatly engaged learners. The programme values enthusiasm, creativity and passion, whilst facilitating additional opportunities to stretch and challenge students beyond the classroom. The Beacon Programme aims to further encourage excellent learning behaviour. It will involve practising problem solving, analysing, leading, communicating and logic, using lateral and critical thinking. The Beacon Programme encourages self-determination, self-direction, self-respect, and self-awareness. This will allow students to become independent learners who thrive in working outside of their comfort zones, and can adapt and participate in a rapidly changing society and economy.

Besides the Beacon Programme, DBS has launched other special programmes:

• A Comprehensive ESL programme – to ensure that every DBS student is able to access the British curriculum, encouraging a good mastery of the English language for all.
• The Accelerated Reader programme – to enable students to make excellent progress in their English language reading. Books are selected at an appropriate level for the individual, students answer questions to show that they have understood, and they can then move on to the next level at their own rate.
• The Y10 and IGCSEs programme – to ensure that the school has the right teaching team in place for the start of the IGCSEs, and that the curriculum reflects the necessary IGCSE course specifications. Plans will be put in place so that individual students receive guidance on which of the optional subjects to choose, apart from the core English, Maths and Science.
• The GL performance programme – assessments for English, Maths, and Science to measure against the world’s average. The Progress Test Series (PT Series) assesses students’ comprehension of the core subjects to identify which students need extra support and which will rise to more challenging targets. Results from GL Assessments help teachers to accurately plan for each student’s academic excellence.

There is also a Co-Curricular Activities (CCA) programme, where students spend time learning in an additional hour per day. DBS also initiates a Model United Nations programme – an advanced learning model based on the procedures at the United Nations, giving students the opportunity to debate, discuss, analyse ideas, and present to large groups of people. This is all very important in instilling leadership skills in accordance with the school’s vision, “Nurturing Global Leaders.”

“The DBS Scholarship Day is a special opportunity and the first step to being at the leading edge of the DBS community. It is open for application from today until 21st February 2020. Interested students and parents can attend the scholarship information session at DBS on Tuesday 4th February 2020 from 9.00-10.00 am. By Friday 28th February 2020, the school will announce the list of selected candidates who will be invited to take the assessment tests on Saturday 7th March 2020. The scholarship winners will be announced in the next week,” DBS Principal said.

Interested parents can fill in the form below

https://forms.gle/dYN9PM6XHRrWGrw2A

or contact 02 666 1933

Email: admissions@dbsbangkok.ac.th

German scientists and business leaders are working to create what they hope will be the first viable market for a carbon-neutral version of the kerosene that already powers most modern aircraft.

The science is still based on chemical reactions pioneered in Germany in 1925, but instead of converting coal and other fossil fuels like the oil-starved Nazis did during World War II, green kerosene is derived from water and actually pulls carbon dioxide out of the air during creation.

The process, which requires huge amounts of electricity generated from renewable resources to ensure carbon neutrality, fractures water into oxygen and hydrogen, which is then combined with carbon.

The project is being overseen by Bremen University, in a consummately German public-private research strategy that previously created the MP3. The German system, which the U.S is trying to emulate, aims to produce the green fuels required for sectors of the economy like aviation and heating that rely heavily on petroleum imports.

“Synthetic fuel is the only vision I can see right now to really become CO2 neutral in the conceivable future,” Deutsche Lufthansa AG Chief Executive Officer Carsten Spohr told a conference on sustainable aviation in the German capital in November.

While green kerosene releases carbon when burned, the process is neutral because it recycles greenhouse gas from the air and doesn’t require more fossil fuels to be taken from the ground.

The German flag carrier is working with the consortium to supply what it expects will be 5 percent of its fuel within five years. The non-fossil kerosene is being made at closely held Klesch Group’s Heide oil refinery near the North Sea, using renewable energy supplied by local wind farms.

Other countries, including Canada and the U.S., are already deploying Power-to-X technology to capture carbon dioxide and store it underground, but so far only in proof-of-concept ways that are too small to make a noticeable difference in the battle against climate change.

Carbon Engineering, a Canadian company partly funded by Bill Gates, has been producing “Air to Fuel” gasoline, diesel and kerosene since 2017, but not in major volumes due to costs, which are still several times more than petroleum-based products. The venture is one of a handful that Canada’s government is supporting in the race to curb surging aviation emissions by developing the most economical and environmentally friendly fuel possible.

But it’s Germany, where more than half of Europe’s 130 Power-to-X testing plants are located, that’s leading the charge. Public calls for action on climate change intensified following last year’s record-breaking droughts and heatwaves, withering crops and swelling support for the environmentalist Green Party.

While power generation and farming currently dwarf aviation’s around 2 percent of all human-caused greenhouse gases, skyrocketing emissions from air travel means the industry, which was exempted from the Paris 2015 climate agreement, will become the biggest single polluter if predicted cuts in other sectors materialize, UN data and projections show.

“We almost need a wartime footing to unlock the momentum and the significant state investment needed to catalyze the transformation of our socioeconomic systems,” Oliver said by phone from the U.K.

Indeed, Germany’s government is already working on a strategy for scaling-up its “green hydrogen” push to produce synthetic fuels at more competitive prices. If Lufthansa gets its way, that effort will include channeling more of the government’s aviation tax into the project.

Increasingly onerous regulations, demands from carbon-conscious customers and the spread of flight shaming are all adding to the pressure to develop cleaner fuels faster.

“All the technologies you need are currently deployed in other areas, so it’s just a question of making it practical and economical”

The social-engineering tactic, which started in teenage environmental activist Greta Thunberg’s native Sweden, contributed to a 4% decline in that country’s passenger numbers last year as more people opted to travel by electric train. Operators of rail networks across Northern Europe, already the world’s most advanced green economy, have been adding overnight routes to capitalize on the trend.

A study by Brussels-based Transport & Environment found that converting all aviation fuel to non-fossil kerosene with currently available technology would cost between three and six times more than traditional jet fuel. Even without factoring in rising taxes on air travel, that would lead to an increase in ticket prices of as much as 60%, the research group estimated.

But that’s not a deal-breaker, according to Ulf Neuling, a chemical scientist at the Hamburg University of Technology. Governments can help offset the added expense through subsidies, tax changes or other incentives and, unlike, biofuels, which turned out to be less environmentally friendly and affordable than once hoped, synthetic jet fuel is scalable, he said.

“All the technologies you need are currently deployed in other areas, so it’s just a question of making it practical and economical,” Neuling said. “It can be used in airplanes that are on order now.”

The amount of electricity needed for an electrolysis process that essentially recycles what’s already in the air is what makes these fuels relatively expensive-for now. Other hurdles to cranking up production include adding further strain to grids at a time when coal plants are being shuttered and electricity use for battery-powered cars is rising.

German engineers have pointed to a future of vast solar parks in North Africa that could produce green fuels at competitive cost, before they’re shipped to Europe. Building them would cost billions. And then there’s the nuclear option being floated by Rolls Royce Holdings Plc, which is a major maker of both aircraft engines and small, modular reactors based on designs used in military submarines.

Rolls Royce CEO Warren East said just last month that coupling reactors to electrolysis units would “provide a very competitive solution” to the price issue.

To be sure, not everyone is convinced such synthetic fuel is a cure-all for greenhouse-gas pollution, with some analysts suspecting that backers of the technology like Lufthansa and Air France-KLM are just trying to deflect criticism.

But previous proposals, such as biofuels and battery-powered engines, never got the full-throated support of a leader like Angela Merkel. The German chancellor dismisses calls from climate extremists like Thunberg to ban air travel altogether, saying a solution to the emissions problem is just around the corner.

“The potential of hydrogen for aviation is far from tapped,” Merkel told industry leaders last August. “We don’t want any restrictions on our mobility.”

Insurers covering Tesla’s directors and executives will foot the bill as part of a so-called derivative settlement, two people familiar with the accord said Wednesday, declining to be identified because they aren’t authorized to speak publicly about the deal.

Musk and the board were accused of duping investors in 2016 into backing the $2 billion buyout of the solar-panel installer, which was co-founded by Musk and his cousins. Critics of the deal called the acquisition a bailout of SolarCity and questioned the company’s corporate governance.

Pension funds that objected to the deal are likely to press ahead with a March trial against Musk over his alleged failure to disclose that SolarCity was in deep financial trouble when he urged shareholders to back the buyout.

The settling defendents are directors who were on the board in 2016: Brad Buss, Robyn Denholm, Ira Ehrenpreis, Antonio Gracias, Stephen Jurvetson and Kimbal Musk, according to a filing in Delaware Chancery Court. Since then, the composition of Tesla’s board has changed: Buss, the former chief financial officer of SolarCity, is no longer on the board, while Larry Ellison and Kathleen Wilson-Thompson joined the board in December 2018.

Tesla and Chairman Robyn Denholm didn’t respond to requests for comment on the partial settlement.

In earlier court filings, Tesla officials defended the directors’ work in reviewing the SolarCity deal, claiming that “both the process and the price of this acquisition were inherently fair to Tesla’s stockholders.”

The settlement comes as Tesla turns a corner with back-to-back reports of better-than-expected earnings, which have sent shares soaring. The stock climbed as much as 12% in early trading Thursday and was up 11% at 12:47 p.m. in New York.

The accord leaves Musk, Tesla’s largest shareholder, to battle alone against investors who complain the billionaire overpaid for SolarCity, and that directors rolled over instead of properly scrutinizing the deal. Judge Joseph Slights III will hear the case in Wilmington without a jury, which is normal in the Chancery Court. The trial is scheduled from March 16 to March 27, according to a filing.

Musk painted the SolarCity deal as a no-brainer that would combine the leading U.S. electric-car maker with what was then the largest provider of rooftop solar panels.

Tesla now has roughly 400,000 solar customers, one of the biggest U.S. renewable-energy portfolios. It ran into a stumbling block when Walmart sued last year, saying the company’s rooftop panel systems caused fires at stores and warehouses. The companies later reached a settlement.

Efforts to integrate SolarCity coincided with Tesla struggling to ramp up production of its all-electric Model 3 sedan, and that put the company under financial pressure, Musk acknowledged in emails unsealed as part of the investors’ suits.

In one email, Musk said he was forced to shift SolarCity workers to help with Model 3 production issues. If he hadn’t done that, Tesla would have faced bankruptcy, he said.He admitted in a pre-trial deposition that he probably wouldn’t make the same deal again.

“At the time I thought it made strategic sense for Tesla and SolarCity to combine. Hindsight is 20/20,” he said. “And if I could wind back the clock, you know, I would say I probably would have let SolarCity execute by itself; would have let Tesla execute by itself.”

The case is In Re Tesla Motors Inc. Stockholders Litigation, No. 12711, Delaware Chancery Court (Wilmington).