While it appears that giant Amazon has lost a tax battle in Seattle, it might win the “big game,” with its billionaire owner Jeff Bezos considering buying an NFL team. Amazon poured nearly $1.5 million into last week’s Seattle city council elections, aiming to defeat politicians who supported a tax on big business that Amazon and other big companies oppose.

Democratic presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders accused Amazon of trying to buy the council.

Well, the lobbying didn’t work anyway.

Only two of the seven candidates endorsed by Amazon and other companies emerged as winners.

One of the winners was Kshama Sawant, a self-described socialist and Amazon’s fiercest critic on the council.

The backstory is that last year, the Seattle city council voted to levy a new tax on large businesses of about $275 per employee, calling it a “head tax.” The tax was designed to raise at least $45 million a year to build more affordable housing and help support a homeless population.

However, less than a month later, Amazon and other Seattle businesses succeeded in pushing local leaders to repeal the tax…CLICK for complete article

In 2017, Saud al-Qahtani–advisor to the Saudi Crown Prince–was rather active on social media.

In one Twitter post, he stated: “Does a pseudonym protect you from #the_black_list? No 1) States have a method to learn the owner of the pseudonym 2) the IP address can be learned using a number of methods 3) a secret I will not say.”

While it should be understood that once you put something out on social media, it’s there for anyone to use against you. But it’s quite another thing when the threat is coming from a figure who served as director the Saudi Federation for Cyber Security and Programming, legal advisor and a media consultant for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).

That’s who Saud al-Qahtani was when he made his Twitter debut.

And what he was talking about in his 2017 tweet was a campaign to harass and target dissidents of the regime. To that end, he started the hashtag “#The_Black_List” in which he called on Saudis to suggest online critics to target. Now, just one week after Twitter management decided to stop all political advertising, two former employees and their handler were charged by the US government for espionage. For Saudi Arabia…CLICK for complete article

Grandma trying to rap was one of the most shared TIkTok videos this year, but her late-start career might not get off the ground. The U.S. government is about to investigate the app for “national security risks”. Grandma herself may not be a national security risk, but her data–and the data of hundreds of millions of others–could be a goldmine for Beijing. Or, it could just be another case of America crying wolf in the middle of an all-out tech war.

For those unfamiliar with it, the app allows users to create, upload and share videos up to 15 seconds long using various editing tools and effects that enable lip-syncing and a number of other filters….CLICK for complete article