China’s highest-profile entrepreneur has not appeared in a public setting since a late October forum in Shanghai where he blasted China’s regulatory system in a speech that put him on a collision course with officials, resulting in the suspension of a $37 billion IPO of Alibaba’s Ant Group fintech arm.

Facebook has complied with an order by Brazil's Supreme Court to block the accounts of a dozen top allies of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.

On Friday Brazil's Supreme Court fined Facebook 1.92m reais ($368,000; £280,000) for refusing to block worldwide access to the accounts - it had only agreed to block access to accounts that could accessed from Brazil - and a further 100,000 reais for each day it failed to comply.

Iowa officials counting the results coming in Monday from the caucusing app reported irregularities that required them to switch from the app to counting votes manually. Party officials said the "underlying data" put into the app was fine, but it is unclear as of yet how they know this or even what they consider "underlying data."

The Iowa Democrats were using an application made by a partisan progressive start-up named Shadow Inc., managed by a nonprofit investment company called Acronym. In a statement, Acronym distanced itself from Shadow.

They had an app that they knew was problematic. They used it anyway without properly testing their back-up plans, each stage of which have proved to take longer than usual.

The former vice president told an audience in Derry, New Hampshire, that coal miners could easily transition into programming jobs. "Anybody who can go down 300 to 3,000 feet in a mine, sure in hell can learn to program as well, but we don't think of it that way," he said.

"My liberal friends were saying, 'You can't expect them to be able to do that,'" Biden told his New Hampshire audience. "Gimme a break! Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program for God's sake."

The artwork depicts Batman throwing a Molotov cocktail against a backdrop of hot-pink words spelling out the new comic book’s tagline, “the future is young.” It was posted on DC Comics’ Twitter and Instagram accounts; both platforms are blocked in mainland China.

In the meantime, DC Comics’ Instagram has been flooded with criticism from people who support the Hong Kong protests or are angry that the company appears to have given in to Chinese political pressure.

“So now Batman loves money more than justice?” asked one commenter.

The joint call by the group ratchets up pressure on European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager to take further action against Google, the world’s most popular internet search engine, two years after she ordered it to stop favoring its own price comparison shopping service (CSS).

“We are approaching you (Vestager) because companies like ours are endangered by Google, which is artfully avoiding compliance with the law,” the companies wrote.

After gaming giant Activision Blizzard banned a pro gamer who expressed support for Hong Kong protesters, the company has taken heat on all sides. Players boycotted Blizzard games. Employees walked out of work. Lawmakers lambasted the company for caving to pressure from China.

Two days after the company announced that it would ban Hong Kong-based professional Hearthstone player Chung Ng Wai, Mitsubishi Motors Taiwan ended its sponsorship of Blizzard’s esports events, according to Erica Rasch, a spokesperson for Mitsubishi.

According to Blizzard’s most recent earnings report, the company made 12 percent of its quarterly revenue in the Asia Pacific market.

More than 40 states now use one or more of Amazon’s election offerings, according to a presentation given by an Amazon executive this year and seen by Reuters.

While it does not handle voting on election day, AWS - along with a broad network of partners - now runs state and county election websites, stores voter registration rolls and ballot data, facilitates overseas voting by military personnel and helps provide live election-night results, according to company documents and interviews.

Faced with a stark real-world test, though, Facebook appears once again to be erring on the side of letting misinformation circulate far and wide if a politician promotes it.

"If the claim is made directly by a politician on their Page, in an ad or on their website, it is considered direct speech and ineligible for our third-party fact checking program," the company added.

While the guideline used to say that ads "must not contain deceptive, false, or misleading content," the rule now prohibits ads "that include claims debunked by third-party fact checkers" or, in some circumstances, by third-party organizations "with particular expertise" in the matter.

Yesterday the UK government was forced to release a report describing the possible impact of the UK leaving the European Union without a deal at the end of October, which is looking increasingly possible. The plans had been codenamed Operation Yellowhammer.

Now it’s clear that civil servants, who are supposed to be impartial, expect there to be at least some harmful consequences of leaving the European Union without a deal. They predict that from day one the lorry flow rate through the Channel could roughly halve, for up to three months, with “significant disruption” for another three months.