REUTERS: Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian said on Friday (Jun 5) he has resigned from the board and sought to be replaced with a black candidate at the social network company.

The death of an unarmed African American, George Floyd, at the hands of police has triggered protests in the United States against racism and police brutality, while also reigniting the debate of diversity in America’s corporate boardrooms.

Many protesters and organizers in recent days have also sought to transform the outrage over Floyd’s death into a renewed civil rights movement, demanding reforms to America’s criminal justice system.

Internet entrepreneur Ohanian, who is married to American tennis player Serena Williams, also pledged US$1 million (S$1.395) to Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp, a campaign for legal awareness among youth.

“I will use future gains on my Reddit stock to serve the black community, chiefly to curb racial hate,” Ohanian said in a tweet.

WASHINGTON: Twitter Inc, Reddit and a group representing major internet firms backed two documentary film groups that have challenged the Trump Administration’s 2019 rules requiring nearly all US visitors to disclose social media user information from the prior five years.

In court papers filed on Thursday, the social media sites and the Internet Association, representing Facebook, Amazon.com, Alphabet and others, said the rules force foreign nationals “to surrender their anonymity in order to travel to the United States” and “chill a vast quantity of speech and associational activity.”

The Doc Society and the International Documentary Association filed suit in US District Court in Washington, DC, in December. They said they regularly collaborate with non-US filmmakers and warn that visitors must “consider the risk that a US official will misinterpret their speech on social media, impute others’ speech to them, or subject them to additional scrutiny or delayed processing because of the views they or their contacts have expressed.”

The latest filing comes amid an escalating feud between President Donald Trump and tech companies. Twitter on Friday hid a Trump tweet behind a warning for the first time. It came hours after Trump signed an executive order threatening Silicon Valley social media firms with new free speech regulations, after Twitter added a fact-checking tag to two previous tweets.

The State Department rules require disclosure of all social media handles used over the prior five years by US visa applicants, including ones under pseudonyms, on 20 platforms.

Applicants must disclose accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn, Myspace, Pinterest, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, Vine and Chinese sites Douban, QQ, Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, and Youku; Russian social network VK; Belgian site Twoo; and Latvian site Ask.fm.

The Justice Department has argued in court papers that “information gleaned from social media profiles can be used to determine activity, ties, or intent that would be grounds for visa denial, including criminal acts.”

The State Department says the rules were prompted by Trump’s 2017 order requiring heightened vetting of visa applications. It previously collected contact information, travel history, family information, and prior addresses.

The department receives more than 14 million applicants annually. The only travellers exempted from the social media rules are diplomatic and official travellers.

THIS is the stomach-churning moment a “disgusting” bloke uses a filthy train seat as a dining table while sitting cross-legged on the floor.

The sickening photo shows a man sitting on the floor as he digs in his takeaway meal while travelling on a service in Perth.

The passenger, dressed in jeans and a dark T-shirt, was spotted using the train seat as a table and a plate as he casually continued scrolling on his phone.

The disgusting image was posted on Facebook by The Bell Tower Times, on Monday.

The caption reads “Improvise, adapt, overcome. Don’t miss out on all those seat flavours”.

Facebook users were shocked someone would choose to eat their meal off a train seat.

“And when he’s finished he can choose any flavour chewy from under the seat,” one user said.

“Yum yum the taste of a**,” another one said.

One Facebook user said “Gotta love some eggs, bacon and bodily fluids in the morning.”

A comment reads “Nothing like a bit of butt salt as seasoning!” while another one says “Can’t wait to sit on his honey chicken on my way to the footy”

“I don’t like putting my arse on those seats, let alone eating my fricken beef rendang off them!” a comment reads.

“Perth Trains are great. I take my kids on them every time we are in Perth. Cheaper than the zoo..” another comment reads.

Previously a man was filmed cutting his toenails while on a busy Sydney train.

The barefoot passenger was spotted by a Reddit user who shared the sickening video of the man trimming his toenails, letting the clippings fall on the floor.

Many disgusted social media users said that unfortunately it wasn’t the first time they had seen something like this.

Last March, a woman was filmed weeing on a train and then wiping her soaked hand on the seats, after a night out in Sydney.

The video showing her squatting between the seats and laughing had gone viral at the time, with social media users calling her “feral” and “vulgar”.

In the southern Spanish city of Seville, the municipal water company has introduced a pilot scheme to produce electricity using methane from fermented oranges.

EMASESA, a member of Aqua Publica Europea (European Association of Public Water Operators), aims to achieve energy self-sufficiency for its EDAR Copero Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) in the city, an existing facility that already generates electricity from organic matter. The plan is to put surplus electricity into the grid by 2023.

“The project started as a result of EMASESA’s interest in achieving energy self-sufficiency in the urban wastewater treatment process,” the company’s CEO, Jaime Palop, told DW.

Oranges not only fruit

In this way, facilities such as the Copero WWTP, which consumed around 13 GWh/year in 2020, achieved levels of self-sufficiency close to 95%, the CEO said.  “The Copero WWTP, due to its treatment capacity, location and level of technology, can be a benchmark environmental center,” he added.

“EMASESA’s current challenge is to ensure that the success of the Copero WWTP is achieved in the other WWTPs,” he says, adding that the average self-sufficiency of the four large plants operated by EMASESA is around 70%.

The city collects 5.7 million kilos (126 million pounds) of the fruit deposited on the streets by the city’s 48,000 trees in winter and uses 35 tons (39 US tons) of it to generate clean energy to run EDAR Copero. The city council employs about 200 people to collect the fruit.

The 35 tons then go through a process of juice extraction for the generation of electric energy through biogas, while the peel is composted to become fertilizer used in farming. In the purification process, the organic matter in the wastewater is stabilized through anaerobic digestion that generates a methane-rich biogas (65%), which is used as fuel in cogeneration engines for the production of electricity, Palop explained.

The plant is expected to generate about 1,500 kWh, equivalent to the consumption of 150 homes. To achieve this, the city needs to invest €250,000 ($310,000).

Trials have shown that 1,000 kg will produce 50 kWh, enough to provide electricity to five homes for one day. If all the city’s oranges were recycled and the energy put back into the grid, 73,000 homes could be powered.

The region produces about 15,000 tons of the oranges, but much of the fruit from the region is exported to the UK, where it is made into marmalade.

Oranges for the circular economy

Seville has also implemented the organic waste collection system put in place by the urban waste management company Contenur, with 340 containers installed in the city and 340,000 electronic cards provided to the public.

A representative of the mayor told DW that the city aimed to encourage the selective collection of biowaste, increase the rate of recycling, raise public awareness of waste management and send less waste to landfill.

“This process consumes approximately 65% of the energy of the urban water cycle. Achieving self-sufficiency of WWTPs is a clear climate change mitigation action,” said Palop.

Seville collects 5.7 million kilos of the fruit deposited on streets by its 48,000 trees

Spain has launched a plan to switch its electricity system entirely to renewable sources by 2050 and fully decarbonize its economy soon after that.

Greenhouse gas emissions would be slashed by 90% from 1990 levels under the country’s draft climate change and energy transition law.

“EMASESA is in the process of drawing up a manual to encourage other companies in the water sector to increase gas production through codigestion of organic waste and to enable this action to be replicated in other companies and cities,” Palop said.

Bavarian radio station Bayern 3 found its name trending worldwide after a radio host took a dislike to the latest release by K-pop boy band BTS .

The group’s army of loyal fans took to social media accuse the station’s Matthias Matuschik of racism after he blasted the band’s cover of Coldplay’s “Fix You.”

What did the Bayern 3 host say about BTS?

Matuschik compared the band to the COVID-19 virus, describing them as “some crappy virus that hopefully there will be a vaccine for soon as well.”

“These little a**holes brag about the fact they covered ‘Fix You’ from Coldplay, this is blasphemy,” he said. “For this you will be vacationing in North Korea for the next 20 years!”

Sensing his comments might cause upset, Matuschik said his comments were not aimed at South Korea. “You can’t accuse me of xenophobia,” he said. “I have a car from South Korea. I have the coolest car ever.”

How have fans responded?

Matuschik’s comments have prompted accusations of racism, in particular regarding the comparison to the coronavirus. Since the pandemic emerged in China in late 2019, there has been an uptick in reports of racism or xenophobia against Chinese and other Asian people.

Hashtags like #Bayern3Apologize and #Bayern3Racist have started to appear on Twitter.

“At a time of anti-Asianness it’s not only deplorable but dangerous for someone like Matthias Matuschik to liken COVID to a South Korean group like BTS,” said one Twitter user. “This only incites hate, violence to Asians from various backgrounds.”

One fan account struck a similar note and took Bayern 3 to task for a statement appearing to defend the host. “What he said shouldn’t be tolerated,” it maintained.

A fan account for BTS member Jimin said the views expressed by were objectively racist.

“Expressing that these are only one’s opinions and passing accountability to people who took offense come from a racist mentality,” it said.

How the radio station responded

Bayern 3 defended their presenter and, while the station did concede he may have gone too far, it said this had not been his intention.

“It is the character of this show and also of the presenter to express his opinion clearly, openly and unvarnished,” the station said in a statement.

“In this case, he overshot the mark in his choice of words in an attempt to present his opinion in an ironically exaggerated manner and with exaggeratedly feigned excitement, and thus hurt the feelings of the BTS fans. But, as he assured us, this was in no way his intention. He only wanted to express his displeasure about the above-mentioned cover version.”

Who are BTS?

BTS, also known as the Bangtan Boys, are a seven-member K-pop band with a musical style that has evolved from hip-hop to include a wide range of genres.

The band has ascended to global stardom since their debut in 2013, with a string of sold-out shows in Los Angeles, Paris and London when concerts were last possible in 2019.

The group has even established itself in the world’s biggest music market, the notoriously impenetrable United States. The all-English single “Dynamite” entered the Billboard Hot 100 at number one last August, making BTS the first South Korean act to top the US chart.