The Washington Post has seen at least 250,000 readers cancel their subscriptions after owner Jeff Bezos ended a decades-long tradition of endorsing presidential candidates, the newspaper reported late Tuesday.

Why it matters: That figure represents 10% of 2.5 million subscribers the paper had before Bezos announced the decision after the WaPo editorial boardhad drafted an endorsement of Vice President Harris, per the report.

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Driving the news:While WaPo has not publicly commented on how many ended subscriptions, the report cited two people familiar with the figures saying there had been a "huge spike in the number of subscribers looking to cancel online" from Friday, after WaPo CEO and publisher William Lewis announced the end of presidential endorsements.

The big picture: Bezos' decision prompted three of WaPo's 10-member editorial board to announce they're stepping down from the board with the intention of remaining at the paper in other roles.

• Editor at large Robert Kagan also resigned in protest and at least 21 opinion section columnists signed onto a statement saying their employer's "refusal to endorse a presidential candidate is a mistake."
• Bezos defended his decision in an op-ed Monday, writing that presidential endorsements "do nothing to tip the scales of an election" and that they "create a perception of bias."

Go deeper: Chaos erupts as newspapers axe endorsements

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) recently promised Jewish leaders that he would try later this year to pass a bill aimed at curbing antisemitism on college campuses, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: The bill would be Congress' most forceful response to the pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses across the country this spring, which sometimes led to the harassment of Jewish students.

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• However, critics argue the definition of antisemitism the legislation offers is overly broad.

Between the lines: A nonprofit group has spent about $5 million on an ad campaign blasting Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish lawmaker, for his inaction.

• Schumer has privately said he plans to attach the Antisemitism Awareness Act — making the federal government adopt a broad definition of antisemitism to enforce anti-discrimination laws — to a must-pass defense bill after the election, multiple sources told us.
• The bill passed the House overwhelmingly over the summer, but it has been a divisive issue in the Democratic Party, laying bare internal strife.
• The nonprofit group behind the ads, Florence Avenue Initiative, doesn't have to disclose its donors.

The big picture: Frustrations from pro-Israel groups have grown since the bill passed the House in May, repeatedly asking Schumer to get it through the Senate.

• Sources familiar with the discussions say they remain skeptical that Schumer will get the bill through the Senate this year, with one saying they will believe it when they see it.

Between the lines: Pennsylvania GOP Senate nominee Dave McCormick has used the Senate's inaction on the bill to attack Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and court Jewish voters.

• McCormick slammed Casey and Senate Democrats for leaving Washington this fall without passing the bill in a September op-ed for the New York Post.

In a tragic update to Monday's story, authorities have recovered the bodies of former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch and his teenage daughter Hannah. The Register reports: Italian divers are said to have found the billionaire father and his daughter, 18, inside one of the sunken vessel's cabins, according to The Telegraph. The capsized ship presently rests 49 meters below the surface, about half a mile from the coast. [...] Angela Bacares, Lynch's wife, was rescued at sea and is recovering. Canadian Broadcasting Company News has reported that the body of Recaldo Thomas, a Canadian-born man who resided in Antigua and served as the ship's cook, has been recovered. Other missing individuals have been identified by The Independent as: Christopher Morvillo, a lawyer who had represented Lynch and wife Neda Morvillo; Jonathan Bloomer, chairman of investment bank Morgan Stanley International and wife Judy Bloomer. The Register has published an obituary for Mike Lynch.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fortune reports that Crowdstrike "is enjoying a moment of strange cultural cachet at the annual Black Hat security conference, as throngs of visitors flock to its booth to snap selfies and load up on branded company shirts and other swag." (Some attendees "collectively shrugged at the idea that Crowdstrike could be blamed for a problem with a routine update that could happen to any of the security companies deeply intertwined with Microsoft Windows.") Others pointed out that Microsoft should take their fair share of the blame for the outage, which many say was caused by the design of Windows in its core architecture that leads to malware, spyware and driver instability. "Microsoft should not be giving any third party that level of access," said Eric O'Neill, a cybersecurity expert, attorney and former FBI operative. "Microsoft will complain, well, it's just the way that the technology works, or licensing works, but that's bullshit, because this same problem didn't affect Linux or Mac. And Crowdstrike caught it super-early." Their article notes that Crowdstrike is one of this year's top sponsors of the conference. Despite its recent missteps, Crowdstrike had one of the biggest booths, notes TechCrunch, and "As soon as the doors opened, dozens of attendees started lining up." They were not all there to ask tough questions, but to pick up T-shirts and action figures made by the company to represent some of the nation-state and cybercriminal grups it tracks, such as Scattered Spider, an extortion racket allegedly behind last year's MGM Resorts and Okta cyberattacks; and Aquatic Panda, a China-linked espionage group. "We're here to give you free stuff," a CrowdStrike employee told people gathered around a big screen where employees would later give demos. A conference attendee looked visibly surprised. "I just thought it would be dead, honestly. I thought it would be slower over there. But obviously, people are still fans, right?" For CrowdStrike at Black Hat, there was an element of business as usual, despite its global IT outage that caused widespread disruption and delays for days — and even weeks for some customers. The conference came at the same time as CrowdStrike released its root cause analysis that explained what happened the day of the outage. In short, CrowdStrike conceded that it messed up but said it's taken steps to prevent the same incident happening again. And some cybersecurity professionals attending Black Hat appeared ready to give the company a second chance.... TechCrunch spoke to more than a dozen conference attendees who visited the CrowdStrike booth. More than half of attendees we spoke with expressed a positive view of the company following the outage. "Does it lower my opinion of their ability to be a leading-edge security company? I don't think so," said a U.S. government employee, who said he uses CrowdStrike every day. Although TechCrunch does note that one engineer told his parent company they might consider Crowdstrike competitor Sophos...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

X is in conversations with sports leagues about producing more docuseries on the platform, CEO Linda Yaccarino told Axios.

Why it matters: The ambition comes as X seeks to win back ad dollars with its CEO and Elon Musk in attendance at the annual advertising confab.

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By the numbers: Sports is the number one conversation on X, Yaccarino said.

• About 70% of the conversation ahead of the Paris Olympics this summer is about women's teams, she added.

Driving the news: "The men's strong teams, strong leagues are I think magnets to draw the audience. And the women athletes on the platform, the fandom is just as ferocious," Yaccarino said Wednesday at Women's Sports House, hosted by Axios and Deep Blue Sports + Entertainment, in Cannes.

• "X wants to galvanize what's already authentically out there on our platform, bring those audiences together, feed the user base but also give opportunity for brands in this moment," she added.

Context: X has been investing in long-form video as a way to increase engagement on the platform and lure more ad dollars. The company announced in April that it plans to launch a TV app.

• X will exclusively stream "The Offseason," a six-episode docuseries about NWSL players funded by Alexis Ohanian's venture capital firm Seven Seven Six, the company announced on Tuesday.
• X exclusively premiered "All In: The Boston Celtics," a docuseries behind-the-scenes of the Celtics' NBA championship.
• X also will partner with NBCUniversal on distributing video of the Paris Olympics.

The big picture: Yaccarino's remarks came a few hours after Musk, the owner and chief technology officer of X, spoke on the Cannes main stage. She told Axios that Musk and her came to Cannes for the same reason.

• "It's set fact from fiction," Yaccarino said. "There's insatiable interest in our company, insatiable interest in Elon."
• Yaccarino said she was "happy" to talk with advertisers about brand safety, a concern among the community, but that she wanted to spend time pitching their new investments such as the docuseries.
• "The advancements that we've made in the product are so stunning," Yaccarino said. "What Elon was talking about is letting us earn the opportunity to ... deliver a return on investment in the places you want to put your advertisements."

What we're watching: Yaccarino previously said she expects X to be profitable in 2024.

• When asked about it, she said there is "so much momentum" but did not definitively confirm the financial expectations.

A third person was charged and stomped on by a cow elk in Estes Park, Colorado last week — an "unprecedented" third attack in eight days.

And while the first two victims were both children — an 8-year-old riding her bike and a 4-year-old playing at a park (both which Boing Boing covered last week) — the third person was an adult who was walking her dog right in the middle of town on Friday. — Read the rest

The post Yet another elk stomps on person in Estes Park — an "unprecedented" three attacks in 8 days appeared first on Boing Boing.