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Donald Trump vetoed a series of brutal attack ads in the 2020 election campaign, including one that targeted Joe Bidens behavior towards women, because he was afraid of opening his own can of worms.

Biden has been criticized for touching and hugging women in ways widely deemed inappropriate, behavior he has said was not meant to be disrespectful and complaints to which he said he would listen respectfully. In early 2020, he faced a claim that he sexually assaulted a former aide. He forcefully denied it.

Trump famously boasted he was allowed to grab women by the pussy. He has been accused of sexual harassment or assault by no fewer than 25 women. He forcefully denies all such claims. But some have landed him in court and his former attorney Michael Cohen was convicted of violations of campaign finance law over hush money payments made to women before the 2016 election.

The news site Axios reported on Monday night on campaign ads it said were considered by Trump but which proved so far-fetched even he vetoed them.

One, titled Predator, showed Kamala Harris, Bidens running mate who is now the first woman to be vice-president, saying: I know a predator when I see one.

The clip included quotes from Tara Reade, the former aide who accused Biden of assault, and Lucy Flores, a former Nevada state politician who in 2019 told CNN Bidens behaviour towards women including her was disqualifying.

But Trump never wanted to run the predator or womens-style ads against Biden, Axios reported an unnamed campaign source as saying, because he was afraid he was going to open up his own can of worms. Axios said a second unnamed source confirmed the story.

The ads finished with a logo for Parscale Strategy. Brad Parscale was eventually ousted as campaign manager. In a familiar development to those who follow Trumps business dealings, Axios said Trump did not pay for the ads he rejected. Axios also said Parscale attended the ad viewing sessions, often [sitting] so close it bothered the president.

Trump faces a defamation lawsuit from E Jean Carroll, a writer who says he raped her in a department store changing room in the 1990s. Stormy Daniels, an adult film star and director who says she had sex with Trump in Nevada in 2006, also sued for defamation. Trump denies both accusations but reimbursed Cohen for expenditure including a $130,000 payment to Daniels shortly before the 2016 election.

According to Axios, among other ads nixed by Trump were one focusing on Bidens health and one that mocked Don Lemon, a CNN anchor, over his coverage of protests against structural racism which gripped the US last summer.

Trump was reported to have said of the Lemon ad: God, thats brutal, but I dont know if we can put it up. Lemon is African American. The ad shows his face gradually whitening, as he becomes a clown.

Trump lost the election by 306-232 in the electoral college a result he called a landslide when it was in his favor over Hillary Clinton and by more than 7m ballots in the popular vote. He refused to concede defeat and pursued baseless claims of electoral fraud in court, losing almost all such cases.

Trump is now in Florida. In Washington on Tuesday, his second impeachment trial will begin. He is charged with inciting an insurrection, the 6 January attack on the US Capitol. Shortly before the deadly riot, at a rally near the White House, he told supporters to fight like hell to overturn his election defeat.

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Trump vetoed ads attacking Biden's record on women to avoid can of worms report - The Guardian

Its with heavy hearts that we write this letter. We believe that all of us, no matter which side of the political spectrum we happen to be on, want a country where our children and loved ones can thrive.

We believe that, if we took the time to look closely, wed find that most of us have a great deal in common.

But we are currently living in a time when our very lives have been politicized to the point where the divisions between us sometimes seem unbridgeable and possibly beyond repair.

These differences become especially apparent when we try to talk across our divides about the recent election.

We know that facts these days after being called into question so often have lost some of their power to persuade, but unless we can agree on a certain set of reality-based assumptions, we will be lost to one another.

So in response to questions being raised about our current political climate, we would like to offer some facts.

Some folks are asking, for example, why it is OK for Hillary Clinton to say the 2016 election wasnt fair, while Donald Trump is criticized for saying the same thing about the 2020 election, with 75 million Americans to back him up.

Here are the facts:

Back in 2016, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 2.9 million votes.

Nevertheless, she conceded the election to Donald Trump when he was declared the winner on Nov. 9 because by that date he had received the requisite number of electoral college votes (304).

In 2020, for a second time, Trump lost the popular vote. It is true that he earned the votes of 75 million Americans. But Joe Biden won over 81 million votes, the most of any presidential candidate in U.S. history. Biden then went on to earn the number of electoral college votes needed to win the election (306).

In spite of this, however, Trump has to this day refused to declare Biden the winner.

In addition, while Clinton honored the peaceful transition of power that stands as one of the benchmarks of a functioning democracy, Trump has insisted that the election was stolen and has used everything in his power to block that transition, including inciting his followers to raid the U.S. Capitol, a reckless insurrection that left 5 people dead and over 100 Capitol officers injured.

That assault was a wound to our national psyche that still festers weeks later and will (to say the least) prove challenging to heal.

Another question being raised has to do with impeachment. If Trump was not convicted after his first impeachment hearing, does this mean he was not impeached? The answer is no.

Here are the facts. The impeachment process has two parts. The House votes to impeach, after which the Senate conducts a trial and decides whether to convict.

This process was established by our Constitution as a way of providing checks and balances in the event of presidential overreach.

The House has now voted twice to bring articles of impeachment against Trump for high crimes and misdemeanors, specifically for abusing the powers of his office.

Regardless of whether the Senate votes to convict, those impeachment judgments will stand. Donald Trump will remain the only U.S. president who has been impeached twice, an indelible stain on his record and on his legacy.

A third question being raised concerns voter fraud. Perhaps, some suggest, the Capitol riots might not have happened if the courts had allowed voter fraud evidence to be heard.

This is possibly the point of greatest contention, the belief on the part of Trumps followers that the election was rife with voter fraud.

Again, here are the facts. William Barr, Trumps Attorney General, said in no uncertain terms that no evidence of widespread voter fraud was found in the 2020 election.

In multiple instances there were over 60 hearings across the country the former presidents lawyers brought cases to the courts claiming voter fraud, and one by one these cases were dismissed or found to be without merit due to lack of evidence.

Judges appointed by Trump dismissed these cases. The justices on the Supreme Court, three of whom were appointed by Trump himself, dismissed claims of fraud. The top election security official (a Republican) declared the election the most secure in American history. The truth is that no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election has ever been produced.

And here is the last, most important fact.

Joe Biden has been chosen in a fair election as our 46th president. Americas strength comes from our ability to work together to knit together a landscape of diverse people into one nation.

E pluribus unum: out of many, one.

The task is not easy, but its worth doing.

For all our sakes, we need to try.

Karen Elias, a Democrat, and Kathy Ebeling, a Republican, are both retired local educators who are eager to find ways, in this difficult time, to find common ground and work toward unity.

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Out of many, one | News, Sports, Jobs - The Express - Lock Haven Express

Katherine Maher, the Wikimedia Foundation's CEO, will step down as of April 15, she tells Axios, leaving the nonprofit in a vastly stronger position than she found it when she joined in 2014.

Why it matters: Wikipedia is growing to become the most global and trusted source of knowledge in the world. Its base of active editors is rising, its number of women editors has increased by 30% just in the past year, and it has upgraded not only its website but also its app, which is now available for feature phones as well as smart phones.

Financially, the Wikimedia Foundation now has an endowment of more than $90 million, and has doubled its annual budget to an estimated $140 million in 2021.

Between the lines: One area that Wikimedia has been particularly successful is in garnering trust. That's also an area the news media could use some pointers.

What's next: The Wikimedia Foundation board has created a committee to search for Maher's successor. Maher tells Axios that she hopes the next leader will "come from the future of knowledge" by which she means Africa, the Indian subcontinent, or Latin America.

Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect that the Wikimedia Foundation has an endowment of more than $90 million.

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Exclusive: The end of the Maher era at Wikipedia - Axios

The Michaelmas daisy is an innocuous purple flower that grows in fields in the American northeast, and for some reason, an image of it is suddenly getting millions of hits a day. A picture of this perfectly normal flower hosted on Wikipedia is currently responsible for 20 percent of the traffic on one of Wikiemdias data centers.

We've noticed today that we get about 90M hits per day from various ISPs in India, a post on PhabricatorWikimedias collaboration platformsaid. These are very strange, as they come from wildly different IPs, follow a daily traffic pattern, so we are hypothesizing there is some mobile app predominantly used in india that hotlinks the above image for e.g. a splash screen. We need to investigate this further as this kind of request constitutes about 20 percent of all requests we get in EQSIN for media.

EQSIN is the name of a Wikimedia data cluster in Singapore. For more than six months, 20 percent of the traffic to that server were requests to look at the daisy. Wikimedias data is public and a chart showing daily requests to access the picture of the flower show a clear trend. Before June 8, the flower had pretty low numbers. On average, the flower gets a few hundred views. On June 9, the number jumps to 2,154. On June 10, it hit 15,037. By June 30, it had more than 15 million daily hits.

Chris Albon, director of Machine Learning at Wikimedia, pointed out that weird trend on Twitter. One reply pointed out that the huge upsurge in requests to see the flower coincided with India banning TikTok and several other Chinese apps. India banned TikTok on June 29, 2020. The flower was already getting more views than normal before then, but it did experience a huge surge in popularity after the ban.

After the TikTok ban, clones of the app flourished in India and some of the people investigating the mystery are speculating that one of these new apps is accessing the flower picture. It is most likely an app, given the header information above and also based on some other connection attributes, one investigator said. The question is which app though as some of us have gone through the popular apps in India but haven't been able to identify which app it is. It is also possible that the code was embedded in some app and that it requests the image but does not display it.

After several days of investigation, the Wikimedia team tracked down the app and confirmed that it was, indeed, a mobile app. I just wanted to share that we have identified the app and will update this task tomorrow, an investigator said. And yes, it was a mobile app.

Wikimedia hasnt yet revealed the name of the app and, according to its data reports, EQSIN is still getting hammered for requests to see the pretty purple daisy.

Wikimedia did not immediately respond to Motherboards request for comment.

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Why Is This Flower on Wikipedia Suddenly Getting 90 Million Hits Per Day? - VICE

Wikipedia now has its own Universal Code of Conduct, a first-of-its-kind document that will create a global set of community standards for addressing negative behaviour on the site.

The code is the result of recommendations that were made as part of 2018 global consultation with Wikipedia communities called the 2030 Movement Strategy, Amanda Keton, General Counsel of the Wikimedia Foundation told indianexpress.com over an email query. The global consultation included 200-plus salons, which are community-organised regional gatherings, spread across 50 countries with over 2,000 Wikipedia community members being involved.

Before this new universal code, there was no consistent way of addressing harassment on the platform and the incidents were addressed on a case by case basis, and varied project by project, she pointed out.

Keep in mind that Wikimedia is made up of more than 300 language Wikipedias and other related projects such as Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata, the new code will apply a standard protocol and consistent framework to deal with harassment across all of these projects and Wikipedias, according to the company.

While some of the projects like English Wikipedia followed more established standards for harassment, others were not as far along in their journey, according to Keton. The universal code will try and solve this challenge.

Wikimedia also felt that given how various tactics are used to spread misinformation in the current internet era, it was important to enhance our mechanisms and establish new measures for dealing with deliberate attempts to add false information on the site, she said.

Our new universal code of conduct creates binding standards to elevate conduct on the Wikimedia projects, and empower our communities to address harassment and negative behaviour across the Wikimedia movement. Through this effort, we can create a more welcoming and inclusive environment for contributors and readers, and a more representative source of knowledge for the world, Katherine Maher, CEO of the Wikimedia Foundation, said in a statement.

Wikimedia says the new code is transparent, only 1600 words long, and not opaque as community standards tend to be with other tech companies. The goal of this code is to define harassment and unacceptable behaviour.

The codes distinguishing standards include delinating harassment on and off the projects for all Wikipedia participants, preventing the abuse of power and influence to intimidate others, combating deliberate introduction of false or inaccurate content and provide consistent enforcement process and shared responsibility between the Foundation and volunteer communities.

The code also explains the reasons why it was adopted, stating that it defines a minimum set of guidelines of expected and unacceptable behaviour. Further, this code will apply to everyone who interacts and contributes to online and offline Wikimedia projects and spaces, including new and experienced contributors, functionaries within the projects, event organisers and participants, employees and board members of affiliates and employees and board members of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Wikipedias universal code also expands on what will constitute harassment on the platform. For instance, around insults the code explains that these may refer to perceived characteristics like intelligence, appearance, ethnicity, race, religion (or lack thereof), culture, caste, sexual orientation, gender, sex, disability, age, nationality, political affiliation, or other characteristics.

Even repeated mockery, sarcasm, or aggression constitute insults collectively, according to the code.

It further adds that trolling which is defined as deliberately disrupting conversations or posting in bad-faith to intentionally provoke, will come under harassment.

Further, doxxing or disclosure of personal information, sexual harassment of any kind, threats be it physical or those which call for unfair and unjustified reputational harm, or intimidation by suggesting gratuitous legal action to win an argument or force someone to behave the way you want, are all defined as harassment. It notes that hounding someone over their work in the projects will also be considered harassment.

While Wikimedia has announced the Universal code, it still needs to evaluate how local and regional Wikipedia projects will enforce the new standards. This will be part of the next phase of the codes implementation, explained the spokesperson.

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Wikipedia has a new Universal Code of Conduct to deal with harassment, misinformation - The Indian Express