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Escalating tension in the Middle East and surging U.S. bond yields set financial markets up for more turbulence,

Concacaf announced additional suspensions and undisclosed fines for Weston McKennie, Sergino Dest, Gerardo Arteaga and Cesar Montes.

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What will Respawn Entertainment replace Dive Trails with?

New York Yankees slugger Aaron Judge likely will avoid surgery on his ailing toe after the season

Twitter has been plunged into chaos in recent days, amid new “rate limits” and rules that actually stop people from using the site. The changes have been dramatic enough that they have led to speculation that they could be the thing to finally doom Elon Musk’s takeover of the social network. What are the ‘rate limits’? It is a somewhat technical term for a complex process that has a simple effect: users are rationed on how many tweets they can see. If people and the apps they use make too many requests too often – in this case for tweets – then the service will stop providing them. On Twitter, the new rate limits are different depending on what kind of user is on: someone who pays for the premium “Twitter Blue” service will get more than a normal user, for instance. They are also changing all the time, with the limit being increased recently. Twitter has long had rate limits, which ensure that malicious actors cannot send huge number of requests to the site and bring it down, for instance. But they would previously only have been hit by people using specific tools, since they were much higher. What happens when you hit the limit? Users will see a warning telling them they have received the rate limit. The site will then stop working properly, because it will refuse to load any more tweets. Why has it happened? The official explanation is that Elon Musk is concerned about how many artificial intelligence companies are scraping posts from Twitter in order to feed to their systems and teach them more about how to use language. In an attempt to stop that, Mr Musk placed the limits to make it harder for that scraping to happen. But there is no proof that is actually the case. The problems at Twitter may well be infrastructural issues caused by the site’s engineering, and its lack of staff, that have made it incapable of serving normal requests. Or it might be a mix of the two. There is no doubt that the site is being scraped, but rate limits of this kind are an unusual way of responding to it, and other sites that are being scraped have not needed to do the same thing. Are there other changes? The other major change instituted recently by Elon Musk is to ban people who are not signed into the site from seeing posts. This is ostensibly for the same reason, since it means that scrapers cannot just gather up posts from the site from the outside. It already means that some things about Twitter are not working as they used to. If someone sends a tweet within a messaging app, for instance, then the posts’ preview won’t show, since the app cannot access the tweet. Will this change how people use Twitter? Almost certainly. Much of Twitter’s value lies in its high-profile and high-commitment users: the celebrities, organisations and big brands who use it to post, and the engaged users who follow them. That is much of what sustains its place in culture, even as it gets fewer users than much bigger social networks such as Facebook. The recent changes have directly antagonised those users. Big organisations cannot rely on tweets as a way for anyone to see what they’re posting, since users have to be logged in; engaged users cannot rely on being able to use the platform, since they are set to be rate limited. What’s more, the recent changes could cause problems for advertisers, given how important it is for users to stay engaged and see their posts. Companies are already using Twitter less for advertising, as a result of other controversies, and that may just continue. Is this the end? Some people have been predicting an end to Twitter since long before Elon Musk took it over; when he did, those predictions got louder and more regular, but they have still been largely wrong. It appears that no matter what Mr Musk does, people keep logging on and using the site. That might well be largely due to network effects: the idea that the value really comes from the number of people using the platform, which also makes it very difficult to create a new one. People might be unhappy on Twitter, but the network effect means they might feel lonely or that they are missing out if they move elsewhere. But all of that doesn’t mean that this time around won’t be the end. Certainly the latest problems have the most obviously problematic effect, of forcing Twitter’s most engaged users to not use the app, which might finally encourage them to go elsewhere. In the end, the discussion is often based on the idea that there will be some big moment that causes everyone to leave Twitter, or for the app to die. In fact, social networks have tended to decline slowly before they are finally shut down; something that might already be happening on Twitter. What are the alternatives to Twitter? Again, people have been trying to replace Twitter for years, for reasons including everything from protests against its content management rules to opposition to its centralised nature. Attempts to create a new Twitter have only increased since Elon Musk took over the original one. But they have almost always failed to take off. Network effects and the relative maturity of Twitter as a platform mean that they have always faced a challenge, and never really met it. As such there are a number of alternatives to Twitter. Notable among them are Mastodon, which is decentralised and has become perhaps the most discussed new alternative, and Bluesky, an effort to build a new kind of Twitter that originally began with the company. But the most promising alternative might be about to launch. Meta is launching Threads this week, an app linked to Instagram that aims to allow people to post text updates that might have the might to actually take over from Twitter. What is happening to TweetDeck? TweetDeck also went down along with Twitter over the weekend. It’s unclear how the two are connected, though they happened at the same time. Now Twitter has announced that TweetDeck is coming back. But it comes with some changes, and the most notable of them is that people will have to pay for Twitter Blue to get access to it. Read More Twitter to stop TweetDeck access for unverified users Meta’s Twitter alternative Threads to be launched this week How Elon Musk finally broke Twitter – and why it might just be the start Twitter rival Bluesky halts sign-ups after huge surge in demand Twitter is breaking more and more Twitter rival sees huge increase in users as Elon Musk ‘destroys his site’

I’m lying on a white sandy beach in next-to-30-degree Caribbean heat in my best bikini.

The former number two official in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has offered a dire prediction about America’s future should Donald Trump or another like-minded Republican succeed in winning next year’s presidential election, according to a new book by a former Trump administration homeland security aide. In Blowback, author Miles Taylor recounts an October 2020 conversation he had with Sue Gordon, a 25-year US intelligence community veteran who served as the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence from 2017 to 2019, shortly after news broke that the FBI had disrupted a plot by Michigan-based right-wing extremists to kidnap Wolverine State governor Gretchen Whitmer. According to a copy of the book obtained by The Independent ahead of its Tuesday release, Taylor recalls how the news of the kidnapping plot prompted him to telephone Ms Gordon, who he says spent “decades” at the CIA monitoring foreign governments for signs of instability, and ask the former deputy DNI how America’s “democratic stability” would be impacted by a second term in the White House for Mr Trump or a “Maga successor”. Taylor said Ms Gordon’s reply came “in the language of a seasoned intelligence analyst” who speaks “based on data from sources in the field and the uncertainty level of information they don’t have”. He added that she told him how she would “assess with ‘low confidence’ that the United States reaches its three hundredth birthday” — the projected 2076 tricentennial anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence from Great Britain — in “any recognisable form”. “People don’t trust government institutions anymore or each other, and when the world gets tumultuous, they’re more open to authoritarianism,” she said. Continuing, Taylor writes that Ms Gordon told him her reason for pessimism about the long-term viability of the US as a functioning democracy stems from the follow-on effects of four more years of Donald Trump — or someone acting with the same malevolence towards governmental institutions — atop the US executive branch. He said she told him that she does not believe a “Next Trump” would successfully smash through “every democratic guardrail,” but would “stoke unprecedented division and set off a slow turn towards despotism” in the US by “attempting” to further erode democratic norms and bring nominally independent institutions under his or her thumb. “That process can take decades to unfold. If history is any guide, though, it might come suddenly to a head, with the literal pull of a trigger — and the odds of that happening in the not-too-distant future are historically high,” he wrote. Taylor, who was chief of staff at the Trump-era Department of Homeland Security for the first three years of Mr Trump’s administration but is better known as the formerly anonymous author of a New York Times op-ed about “resistance” to the then-president inside his own government, told The Independent in a phone interview that he fears a repeat of the January 6 attack on the Capitol — but worse — should Mr Trump lose next year’s presidential election. Echoing Ms Gordon’s prediction of a long-term breakdown of the American democratic system, Taylor said the possibility of “low-level civil conflict” touched off by Mr Trump or another Republican is “higher now than it even was in that post election period in 2020”. “The muscle memory for those extremist movements has now been solidified. The networks are closer. And ... since that time, many more people, otherwise kind of normal people in small town America, have really taken the stolen election lies, QAnon, and great replacement theory as gospel, and the polling shows that a majority of your everyday Republicans believe those lies,” he said. “Add to that the fact that the country is more armed now than at any point in its history ... it is a powder keg.” Taylor added that his fears of violence go beyond a repeat of what happened in Washington nearly three years ago, pointing to the aborted plot against Ms Whitmer, the Michigan governor, as an example of what could be in store for the future. He told The Independent that he feels “the conditions are very ripe” in the US for “that sort of low-level conflict” in many parts of the country. “This is not just a Washington, DC thing — I really think we could see something a good deal worse, and part of that could also happen if a Trump or a savvier successor is reelected. And that misuse of the justice system could foment that even more,” he said. Read More Man arrested near Obama home threatened other prominent lawmakers, officials say Three men jailed for at least seven years over plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer DoJ dragged feet over including Trump in Jan 6 probe over fears of appearing biased, report says Oath Keepers leader issues warning to Trump amid ex-president’s legal woes White House blasts Marjorie Taylor Greene’s criticism of efforts to aid US families GOP presidential hopeful lists conservative pool of Supreme Court picks Trump finally reveals how he thinks he could end Russia’s war in Ukraine in a day

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FRANKFURT High interest rates will keep a lid on the pace of bank lending in Europe this year

By Tommy Wilkes and Simon Jessop LONDON More than 30 investors have called on proxy advisor ISS to