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Former Twitter executives said a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was suppressed because of concerns about Russian meddling. Also in the news: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is scheduled to travel Thursday to quake-hit provinces amid ongoing criticism that the government’s response has been too slow. We look at how K-12 schools are struggling to recover pandemic learning losses.
????????♀️ I’m Nicole Fallert, Daily Briefing author. Check out these Black-owned businesses you can support this Black History Month.
Now, here we go with Thursday’s news.Takeaways from the Hunter Biden laptop hearing
The House hearing Wednesday into Twitter’s brief suppression of a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop outlined the queasiness of former executives to block links to the article and provided a bare-knuckle arena for partisan lawmakers to debate allegations against President Joe Biden.
The background: Former Twitter executives told the House Oversight and Accountability Committee the company blocked links to the New York Post story in October 2020 because of similarities to the posting of leaks from hacked Democratic computers before the 2016 election.
The executives called the 24-hour suppression a mistake and said it was difficult to judge between contentious and dangerous speech during a campaign. But Republican lawmakers argued Twitter’s decision could have thrown the election to Biden rather than former President Donald Trump.
The laptop has become a focal point of Republican investigations because it contains a trove of documents and pictures about Hunter Biden. The first accusation in the New York Post story is that vice president Biden pressured Ukraine to fire its prosecutor general for investigating Burisma, a company that employed Hunter Biden.
Democrats called the hearing “silly” and a „bizarre political stunt“ because Twitter is a private company free to make its own decisions about what to publish. Democrats also questioned the basic allegations against Biden stemming from the laptop as “categorically false.”
???? Keep reading our takeaways from the hearing.Deaths in Turkey, Syria earthquake surpass 16,000
The search for survivors grew more desperate, the homeless problem more acute and the death toll rose Thursday as rescuers labored to find signs of life amid the rubble of Monday’s earthquakes and aftershocks that laid waste to a wide swath of Turkey and Syria.
