Findings from Facebook IQ research announced in a company news post indicate reliance on mobile is increasing for the upcoming holiday season, and mobile-first shopping is up 18% in the U.S. and 56% from 2015.
Because Facebook found 30% of mobile shoppers prefer to discover new products through video it is rolling out video for dynamic ads allowing marketers to upload product-level videos in dynamic ads instead of only static images through the Facebook API or the asset manager. It’s also introducing a new household audience targeting option that lets marketers deliver messages to family members in the same household to influence purchase decisions of products and services as well as new household measurement metrics.
In separate Facebook news, the platform has reached 2 billion monthly users, as reported by TechCrunch. The user figure compares to 1.5 billion for YouTube, 889 million for WeChat, 328 million for Twitter and an estimated 255 million for Snapchat. Facebook’s other platforms include 1.2 billion for messaging apps WhatsApp and Messenger, and Instagram recently passed 700 million users.
Made.com is an early adopter of Facebook’s new dynamic ads with video, and Airbnb and Netflix are both taking advantage of household marketing. Airbnb is interested in the new targeting because travel decisions are often made by multiple members of a household, said Alok Gupta, Data Science Manager, Airbnb, in the news post.
Facebook’s research on mobile-first shoppers found they are 1.72x more likely to get gift inspirations on Facebook and 2.51x more likely on Instagram. Facebook also found that parents were more than 50% of mobile-first shoppers last year and expects that trend to grow.
It was not clear where the attackers were on Tuesday night or how much support, if any, they had. It could not be determined whether the attack resulted in casualties.
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Elsewhere in Caracas, opposition members of Parliament said they were being besieged by armed government supporters.
Ernesto Villegas, Venezuela’s minister of communication and information, said on national television that President Nicolás Maduro had been briefed on “an act of violence” launched from a helicopter that belongs to a law enforcement agency.
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Mr. Villegas characterized the event as an “uprising against the republic, the Constitution.”
Mr. Maduro condemned the attack in a televised address, calling it part of a “coup plot.”
He said the assailants launched grenades, including one that did not explode, while a “social event” was taking place in the court complex. He said the gunmen shot from the helicopter into offices and then flew over the building. “They could have left several dozen deaths,” he said. The president said he had “activated the entire national armed forces to defend people’s right to serenity.”
Mr. Maduro said, “Sooner or later we will capture the helicopter and those who have committed this armed attack.” His remark suggested the assailants were at large and in control of the aircraft.
Venezuela has been rattled for weeks by protests against the government, some of which have turned violent. It has resorted to increasingly heavy-handed tactics, including torture, to beat back demonstrations, according to accounts by detained demonstrators and human rights activists.
The turmoil has created rifts in the governing party, most notably the defection of the attorney general, Luisa Ortega, who broke ranks with Mr. Maduro in March. She accused him of trampling on constitutional norms after the Supreme Court, which is packed with government loyalists, issued a ruling significantly weakening the powers of the opposition-dominated Parliament.
For more than two years, Venezuelans have been reeling from the country’s worst economic crisis in generations. The price of oil, which long bolstered the economy and paid for social programs, has plummeted. Inflation is at record levels, and supermarket shelves are empty.
Donald Trump is fundraising off of the latest “sting” video from dishonest conservative activist James O’Keefe. In a fundraising email from the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, the fundraising committee claims the video “raises questions” about “phony news stories” from CNN and that the network was attempting to “rile up their rabid liberal viewers, and take us down.”
The video in question highlights comments made by a CNN staffer with no involvement in CNN’s political coverage engaged in a casual conversation in which he says a “smoking gun” has not been uncovered yet in the numerous investigations into allegations that Trump’s presidential campaign possibly coordinated with Russia’s attempt to sway the election.
The video, as well as a Russia story that CNN published and later retracted, was seized by the White House and their allies in an attempt to prove “the media can’t be trusted.” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders urged Americans “to take a look at” O’Keefe’s video despite admitting that she didn’t know if “it’s accurate or not.”
In May 2015 the Trump Foundation, Donald Trump’s charitable organization, donated $10,000 to James O’Keefe and his organization, Project Veritas. Trump routinely used O’Keefe’s dishonest videos on the campaign trail, even mentioning the videos during a debate with Hillary Clinton.
O’Keefe has been arrested for the illegal methods he uses to obtain his videos and he was ordered to pay a $100,000 fine to the subject of one of his videos after O’Keefe’s deceptively edited video smearing a former ACORN employee led to his firing. This is not the first time O’Keefe has attempted to sting CNN, as he also once tried to embarrass a CNN correspondent by luring her to a “palace of pleasure,” and planning to then videotaping her in the boat with sex props strewn about.
Mr. Trump and his staff played a critical role in persuading House Republicans to pass health care legislation in May, with the president personally calling dozens of wavering House members. But the Trump team’s heavy-handed tactics have been ineffective in the Senate, and White House officials determined that deploying Vice President Mike Pence, a former congressman with deep ties to many in the Senate, was a better bet than unleashing Mr. Trump on the half-dozen Republicans who will determine the fate of the Senate bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.
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Mr. Trump, who is fond of telling friends he is a “closer,” became more involved over the past few days, reaching out to a few reluctant conservatives like Senators Mike Lee of Utah, Ted Cruz of Texas and Rand Paul of Kentucky, who emerged from an Oval Office meeting on Monday saying he was more optimistic about getting to a yes.
“The White House has been very involved in these discussions,” Mr. McConnell said in announcing that a vote on the bill was postponed until after the Fourth of July recess. “They’re very anxious to help.”
Yet over the past few weeks, the Senate Republican leadership has made it known that it would much rather negotiate with Mr. Pence than a president whose candidacy many did not even take seriously during the 2016 primaries. And some of the White House’s efforts have clearly been counterproductive.
Over the weekend, Mr. McConnell made clear his unhappiness to the White House after a “super PAC” aligned with Mr. Trump started an ad campaign against Senator Dean Heller, Republican of Nevada, after he said last week that he opposed the health care bill.
The majority leader — already rankled by Mr. Trump’s tweets goading him to change Senate rules to scuttle Democratic filibusters — called the White House chief of staff, Reince Priebus, to complain that the attacks were “beyond stupid,” according to two Republicans with knowledge of the tense exchange.
Mr. McConnell, who has been toiling for weeks, mostly in private, to put together a measure that would satisfy hard-liners and moderates, told Mr. Priebus in his call that the assault by the group, America First, not only jeopardized the bill’s prospects but also imperiled Mr. Heller’s already difficult path to re-election.
Mr. McConnell and “several other” Republican senators expressed their irritation about the anti-Heller campaign during the White House meeting, according to two people, one of them a senator, who were present.
The move against Mr. Heller had the blessing of the White House, according to an official with America First, because Mr. Trump’s allies were furious that the senator would side with Nevada’s governor, Brian Sandoval, a Republican who accepted the Medicaid expansion under the health law and opposes the Republican overhaul, in criticizing the bill.
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According to the senator, the president laughed good-naturedly at the complaint and signaled that he had received the message.
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A few hours later, America First announced it was pausing its advertising assault against Mr. Heller, insisting it was doing so because of his willingness to come to the White House meeting with Mr. Trump.
America First was founded by a group of Mr. Trump’s loyalists — many of them with deep connections to Mr. Pence, including Nick Ayers, a Republican consultant who is regarded as the vice president’s top political adviser. The group compared Mr. Heller to Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, and vowed a seven-figure advertising campaign against him.
Mr. Heller, the only Senate Republican who will face voters next year in a state carried by Hillary Clinton in 2016, is the top target for Democrats facing a Senate map with few opportunities in 2018. And there were already seven groups — a mix of health care advocacy organizations and more partisan Democratic efforts — on the air in Nevada assailing the Republican health care overhaul, according to a Republican ad buyer tracking the ad traffic.
Neither Mr. McConnell’s office nor his top outside political advisers were warned about an impending attack on one of their most endangered incumbents. “They didn’t check in with anybody,” said Josh Holmes, Mr. McConnell’s former chief of staff. “There was no clearing of channels, no heads-up, nothing.”
Republican senators across the ideological spectrum have indicated their unease with the health bill. But Mr. Trump has few ties with the group, and several Republicans who remain on the fence have tangled with Mr. Trump, either during the presidential campaign or since.
Top Trump lieutenants like Stephen K. Bannon, his chief strategist, who lobbied members on the House bill, have been all but sidelined. Mr. Priebus has also played a much diminished role.
Mr. Pence has been far more active in seeking out Republican senators. Seema Verma, Mr. Pence’s former adviser in the Indiana Statehouse and now a top administration health care official, has also been trying to reassure senators that their states will have flexibility on Medicaid under the bill, while Mr. Pence’s former chief of staff, Marc Short, now the White House legislative affairs director, has been quarterbacking the effort from his hideaway in the Capitol.
Until Tuesday’s meeting at the White House, Mr. Trump had spoken with only a few members of the Senate, according to an administration official. The pace was nothing like the dozens of calls he made to help pass the House’s health bill, aides said.
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A senator who supports the bill left the meeting at the White House with a sense that the president did not have a grasp of some basic elements of the Senate plan — and seemed especially confused when a moderate Republican complained that opponents of the bill would cast it as a massive tax break for the wealthy, according to an aide who received a detailed readout of the exchange.
Mr. Trump said he planned to tackle tax reform later, ignoring the repeal’s tax implications, the staff member added.
After the meeting, Mr. Trump played the role of cheerleader on Twitter, encouraging his weary Republican allies to keep working.
“I just finished a great meeting with the Republican Senators concerning HealthCare,” he wrote. “They really want to get it right, unlike OCare!”
50% of all website engagement is now from video, which means that brands are missing half of their attribution data to nurture and convert their users. This integration will allow marketers to track, automate, and manage all of their valuable video metrics.
“At HubSpot we’ve seen dramatic results when our customers combine video and marketing automation. This space is moving quickly and we’re excited that TwentyThree are pioneering video marketing automation as a category. We believe that TwentyThree will create impressive results for our customers going forward,” said Brad Coffey, Chief Strategy Officer, HubSpot
Using TwentyThree and HubSpot together, marketers can now:
Track and profile their video audience
Collect leads via gated video forms
Use powerful tools like, video email landing pages, to integrate video into email marketing and nurture flows
Integrate between the video marketing platform and marketing automation system
“TwentyThree has built a really deep integration that enables HubSpot users to use video marketing in new ways. For example by building audiences and segments using video”, said Al Biedrzycki, Principal Tech Partner Marketing Manager, HubSpot.
Early customers include Zendesk, Branch and Universal Robots, all of which have seen a significant impact on conversion rates, enhanced data, and increased lead-generation through video. Universal Robots increased their month-over-month lead conversion rate by 50% percent simply by using TwentyThree to convert viewers into leads.
“The 50% increase came with the same amount of traffic and the exact same videos — just by flipping a switch,” said Christian Johansen, the Digital Marketing Specialist at Universal Robots.
The video marketing automation release of TwentyThree is launched in correlation with the first ever conference on video marketing automation, featuring more than 15 speakers from HubSpot, Zendesk, Branch and EY; along with thought leaders like GrowthHackers’ Sean Ellis, Martech’s Scott Brinker and Forrester’s Nick Barber.
“The old marketing saying about not knowing which half of your marketing spend is going to waste is still uncomfortably true. Too often marketers count likes, shares and plays rather than the true performance of activities,” said TwentyThree CEO, Thomas Madsen-Mygdal.
“TwentyThree changes that by enabling detailed playback tracking and viewer profiling; through effective conversion tools within video players; and by integrating this data deeply into marketing automation flows.”
Learn more at www.vmaweek.twentythree.net
TwentyThree has offices in San Francisco and Copenhagen.
About TwentyThree
TwentyThree, The Video Marketing Platform, is the innovator in video marketing. Our video marketing platform is used by hundreds of leading digital marketers globally to run and optimize their video across social and inbound platforms. Our upcoming video marketing automation release is already increasing leadgen by 50% at early preview customers.
Contact Information
TwentyThree
Editorial Contact
Andrew Skinner
0044 207 221 1540 andrew@deliberate-pr.com
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The research, conducted by Dimensional Research, found that 96% of global marketer and agency employees surveyed claimed they faced challenges with mobile video – with difficulties in developing compelling creative being cited by 44% of them.
Finding properties to effectively deliver video was cited as the second biggest challenge by 35% of respondents. Finding the right properties and channels could also pose problems; 42% of respondents run mobile videos on six or more channels, while 17% run mobile videos on over 20 different channels.
Facebook was considered an important channel by 75% of respondents, followed by in-app advertising on other apps (69%), YouTube (66%), the company’s own app (20%) and Snapchat (18%). The ideal length for a mobile video was considered to be 15 seconds or less by 70% of those surveyed.
The broad range of metrics / KPIs used to measure performance of digital media, was also considered a major challenge. Respondents cited 15 different metrics/KPIs used, including Cost Per Install (CPI), Click Through Rate (CTR), Video Completion Rate (VCR) and Cost Per Completed Video (CPCV). Not one of these methods was used by more than half of those surveyed.
“This research shows that mobile marketers are dealing with a significant number of different metrics and KPIs for video, and an enormous range in the types of measurement,” said Diane Hagglund, founder and principal, Dimensional Research. “When you combine this with the fact that not even half can agree that any of these metrics is worth tracking, it clearly indicates a metric standardisation challenge for the industry.”
Although 55% of respondents are using three or more metrics / KPIs, 46% are still not satisfied at their ability to measure the success of their mobile video programmes.
“As a data-driven mobile growth solution, we see opportunities among the creative, channel and measurement challenges mentioned by the survey respondents,” said Moshe Vaknin, CEO and co-founder of YouAppi. “Along with our partners, we expect to roll out a range of solutions, which will enable our customers to overcome these challenges and utilise mobile video to grow their businesses while enhancing their customers’ experience.”
YouAppi’s OneRun platform combines machine learning with YouAppi’s proprietary predictive algorithms and cohort technology, to analyse the mobile content consumption patterns of over 1.5 billion users, claiming to convert data into profitable users.
Despite the challenges, well over 90% of YouAppi’s survey respondents believed the importance of mobile video will continue to increase in coming years.
Dimensional Research surveyed 218 global mobile marketer and agency employees in May and June 2017 for the study.
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It’s not surprising that President Trump was « very pleased » following the Supreme Court’s decision on Monday to partially reinstate the White House’s travel ban on refugees and citizens of six Muslim-majority countries. Two iterations of the controversial executive order prompted protests at airports and legal challenges, and both were thwarted by injunctions issued by federal courts. For a president short of significant political victories and surrounded by scandal, the high court’s announcement felt like a win.
Very grateful for the 9-O decision from the U. S. Supreme Court. We must keep America SAFE!
But it’s hardly a triumph. The Supreme Court decided to allow a limited version of the ban to come into effect — targeting the supposedly « terror-prone » countries of Iran, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Sudan — but it will hear arguments in the case in the fall.
Given that the executive order was framed as a temporary stopgap while the Trump administration revamped vetting procedures, the court may very well rule there is no longer a need for such a blanket ban. Other observers counter that the nature of the court’s unsigned opinion suggests its justices are seeking compromise and will be loath to take such a politically provocative act as scrapping the ban outright.
Moreover, the court made a significant exemption: It said the ban « may not be enforced against foreign nationals who have a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States. »
What does this mean in practice? « For now, if you have a relative here, have been hired by a U.S. employer or admitted to a U.S. university, you can still probably get a visa, » explained my colleague Matt Zapotosky. « But if you’re applying cold as a visitor or through the diversity visa program, you probably can’t. »
It is already extremely difficult to get a visa to the United States from most developing countries without the right family connections or justification, such as enrollment in an American university. As a result, the pool of people likely blocked by the current ban has shrunk drastically. Of course, refugees still remain frozen out — unfairly so, as I explained earlier.
Undoubtedly, the new status quo will throw up its own wrinkles and challenges. Who, for example, decides what a « bona fide relationship » is?
But whatever the case, it’s important to remember that the travel ban on its face makes very little sense. The two federal appeals courts that ruled against it said separately that Trump’s order was neither discriminatory toward Muslims nor necessary for national security, despite the White House’s continued insistence.
« There is no finding that present vetting standards are inadequate, and no finding that absent the improved vetting procedures there likely will be harm to our national interests, » the judges of the 9th Circuit wrote. « These identified reasons do not support the conclusion that the entry of nationals from the six designated countries would be harmful to our national interests. »
Not a single person has died in a terrorist attack on American soil carried out by a citizen from one of the six nations covered by the ban. Since the Refugee Act of 1980 set up a system for vetting refugees to the United States, no person accepted as a refugee has been implicated in a fatal terrorist attack. Critics of the order have also nitpicked in the past about the absence of other « terror-prone » nations in the ban’s purview, such as Pakistan, Afghanistan or even Saudi Arabia, whence 15 of the 9/11 attackers came. And, while Trump voices fear over foreign threats, he has been conspicuously quiet about the scourge of domestic terrorism within the United States.
Mourners at a memorial for the victims of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. (Amanda Voisard)
The broader point the ban’s opponents make is that singling out immigrants, tourists and refugees based on their country of origin will do little to keep the United States safe, while badly damaging the nation’s reputation abroad.
« Far from being foreign infiltrators, the large majority of jihadist terrorists in the United States have been American citizens or legal residents. Moreover, while a range of citizenship statuses are represented, every jihadist who conducted a lethal attack inside the United States since 9/11 was a citizen or legal resident, » concluded a recent report by the New America Foundation. « In addition about a quarter of the extremists are converts, further confirming that the challenge cannot be reduced to one of immigration. »
The judges of the 9th Circuit added that simply emphasizing the imperatives of national security can’t be a » ‘talismanic incantation’ that, once invoked, can support any and all exercise of executive power. »
The White House repeatedly points to the efforts of the Obama administration, which originally drew up this list of seven countries that required further scrutiny when vetting visa applications. But President Barack Obama never called for citizenship-based immigration bans and actively pushed for Syrian refugee resettlement in the face of heated domestic opposition.
The underlying impetus has always been Trump’s desire to make real a campaign promise for some kind of Muslim ban — « a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States, » as he put it in 2015. Taking into account the statements of both Trump and his allies before and after last year’s election, the 4th Circuit court had ruled that the executive order « in context drips with religious intolerance, animus and discrimination. »
The Supreme Court’s decision on Monday doesn’t strip away the moral validity of the arguments posed by the ban’s critics. And the court’s justices wrote « the relief we grant today » should enable the White House « to conclude its internal work and provide adequate notice to foreign governments within the 90-day life of [the order]. » If the Trump administration seeks to extend the ban well beyond the summer, it will be all the more clear that its motives aren’t quite as benign as it claims.
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But the budget office put Republicans in an untenable position. It found that next year, 15 million more people would be uninsured compared with current law. Premiums and out-of-pocket expenses could shoot skyward for some low-income people and for people nearing retirement, it said.
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The legislation would decrease federal deficits by a total of $321 billion over a decade, the budget office said.
Mr. McConnell, the chief author of the bill, wanted the Senate to approve it before a planned recess for the Fourth of July, but that looks increasingly doubtful. Misgivings in the Republican conference extend beyond just a few of the most moderate and conservative members, and Mr. McConnell can lose only two Republicans.
At least some of Ms. Collins’s concerns could be shared by Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, whose rural states would face effects similar to those in Maine.
“If you were on the fence, you were looking at this as a political vote, this C.B.O. score didn’t help you,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. “So I think it’s going to be harder to get to 50, not easier.”
He added, “I don’t know, if you delayed it for six weeks, if anything changes.”
Under the bill, the budget office said, subsidies to help people buy health insurance would be “substantially smaller than under current law.” And deductibles would, in many cases, be higher. Starting in 2020, the budget office said, premiums and deductibles would be so onerous that “few low-income people would purchase any plan.”
Moreover, the report said, premiums for older people would be much higher under the Senate bill than under current law. As an example, it said, for a typical 64-year-old with an annual income of $26,500, the net premium in 2026 for a midlevel silver plan, after subsidies, would average $6,500, compared with $1,700 under the Affordable Care Act. And the insurance would cover less of the consumer’s medical costs.
Likewise, the report said, for a 64-year-old with an annual income of $56,800, the premium in 2026 would average $20,500 a year, or three times the amount expected under the Affordable Care Act.
The budget office report was a major setback to Senate Republican leaders, but it was too early to declare the legislation dead, and turmoil in health insurance markets could still induce Congress to take action this year. Many people thought the House repeal bill was dead after Speaker Paul D. Ryan pulled it from the floor on March 24, but a slightly revised version was narrowly approved by the House six weeks later.
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Senator John Thune of South Dakota, a member of the Republican leadership, suggested that leaders would press forward with the Senate bill. He said that an argument could be made for delaying it “if you thought you were going to get a better policy,” but that that was not the case.
“This is the best we can do to try and satisfy all the different perspectives in our conference,” Mr. Thune said, adding that he did not think the politics would improve by waiting. “It’s time to fish or cut bait.”
The White House discounted the report, saying the budget office had “consistently proven it cannot accurately predict how health care legislation will impact insurance coverage.”
The Trump administration says the Senate Republican bill would not cut Medicaid because spending would still grow from year to year. But the Congressional Budget Office said that the bill would reduce projected Medicaid spending by a total of $772 billion in the coming decade, and that the number of people covered by Medicaid in 2026 would be 15 million lower than under current law.
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In 2026, it said, Medicaid spending would be 26 percent lower than under current law, and enrollment of people under 65 would be 16 percent lower. Beyond 2026, Medicaid enrollment would keep declining compared with what would happen under current law.
The Senate bill would make it much easier for states to obtain waivers exempting them from certain federal insurance standards, like those that require insurers to provide a minimum set of health benefits. The budget office said that nearly half of all Americans could be affected by these cutbacks in “essential benefits,” and that as a result, coverage for maternity care, mental health care, rehabilitation services and certain very expensive drugs “could be at risk.”
Before the budget office released its report, the American Medical Association had announced its opposition to the bill, and the National Governors Association had cautioned the Senate against moving too quickly.
The budget office’s findings immediately gave fodder to Democrats, who were already assailing the bill as cruel. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said Senate Republicans had been saying for weeks that their bill would be an improvement over the House bill, which President Trump had described as “mean.”
The budget office had found that under the House bill, the number of people without health insurance would increase by 23 million by 2026 — only slightly more than the 22 million projected for the Senate bill.
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“C.B.O.’s report today makes clear that this bill is every bit as mean as the House bill,” Mr. Schumer said. “This C.B.O. report should be the end of the road for Trumpcare. Republicans would be wise to read it like a giant stop sign, urging them to turn back from this path that would be disastrous for the country, for middle-class Americans and for their party.”
The criticism was not confined to the Democratic caucus. Mr. Johnson, one of five Senate Republicans who said last week that they could not support the bill as drafted, told a radio host that Senate leaders were “trying to jam this thing through.” He, too, suggested he would not vote even to begin debating the bill.
“I have a hard time believing I’ll have enough information for me to support a motion to proceed this week,” Mr. Johnson said later on Monday.
Beyond the number of Americans without insurance, the Senate bill’s $321 billion in deficit reduction is larger than the $119 billion that the budget office found for the bill that passed the House.
Earlier Monday afternoon, Senate Republican leaders altered their bill to penalize people who go without health insurance by requiring them to wait six months before their coverage would begin. Insurers would generally be required to impose the waiting period on people who lacked coverage for more than about two months in the previous year.
The waiting period was meant to address a notable omission in the Senate’s bill: The measure would end the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that most Americans have health insurance, but also require insurers to accept anyone who applied. The proposal is supposed to prevent people from waiting until they get sick to buy a health plan. Insurers need large numbers of healthy people, whose premiums help defray the cost of care for those who are sick.
Under one of the most unpopular provisions of the Affordable Care Act, the government can impose tax penalties on people who go without health coverage. Republicans have denounced this as government coercion.
The repeal bill passed by the House last month has a different kind of incentive. It would impose a 30 percent surcharge on premiums for people who have gone without insurance.
Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter on Monday that Republican senators were “working very hard to get there” but were not getting any help from Democrats.
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“Not easy! Perhaps just let OCare crash burn!” Mr. Trump wrote, reiterating his assertion that the Affordable Care Act would be doomed if Congress did not come to its rescue.
While the White House’s motivation in releasing the highly unusual statement is uncertain, it is possible that Mr. Trump or his advisers decided a public warning to Mr. Assad might deter another chemical strike.
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Any intelligence gathered by the United States or its allies — notably Israel, which keeps a robust watch on unconventional weapons in the Middle East — would by nature be classified. But any American president has absolute power to declassify anything he chooses to release.
Brian Hale, a spokesman for the director of national intelligence, referred questions to the White House. Marc Raimondi, a spokesman for the White House’s National Security Council, said, “We are letting the statement speak for itself.”
Nikki R. Haley, the American ambassador to the United Nations, made clear that the United States was taking the latest threat seriously. “Any further attacks done to the people of Syria will be blamed on Assad, but also on Russia Iran who support him killing his own people,” she tweeted late Monday.
Russia and Iran are both allied with the Assad government. Last week, after the United States downed a Syrian warplane that had dropped bombs near American-supported fighters battling the Islamic State, Russia’s Defense Ministry threatened to target any aircraft flown by the United States or its allies west of the Euphrates River valley.
Such a threat can cause an unintended showdown as competing forces converge on ungoverned areas of Syria. The collision has effectively created a war within a war.
Daryl G. Kimball, the executive director of the Arms Control Association, said that he had not heard of Syrian moves toward more chemical attacks, but that he suspected intelligence reports had prompted the statement. Rocket attacks using sarin gas, as in the April strikes, require considerable preparation that American intelligence might well have picked up, he said.
Mr. Kimball added that he did not recall such a precise, pre-emptive public warning against a foreign government regarding banned weapons “in at least the last 20 years.” More often, such matters are handled in private diplomatic or intelligence communications, he said.
Monday’s message appeared designed to set the stage for another possible military strike. After Mr. Assad allegedly used chemical weapons in April, the American military fired 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at the air base his government had used to launch the attack.
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The use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government has long been part of the clash between Mr. Assad and the United States.
In 2013, President Barack Obama’s intelligence agencies concluded with “high confidence” that Mr. Assad had carried out a devastating chemical attack that killed hundreds of Syrians, despite having been warned by Mr. Obama against crossing a “red line” by using chemical weapons.
But Mr. Obama stopped just short of ordering a military strike, instead opting to work with the Russian government to identify and destroy Mr. Assad’s cache of chemical weapons. Critics argued that the president’s failure to enforce his own “red line” had emboldened Mr. Assad.
They also warned that all of the chemical weapons could not be found and destroyed. Within two months of Mr. Trump’s taking office, images of another chemical attack spurred him to take the action that Mr. Obama had rejected.
NEW YORK — John McEnroe wants more anger in tennis.
Not the kind of racket-smashing, profanity-flying tantrums he threw as a player, when he could go from the sport’s best player to its baddest boy in the same service game.
« Those are the two greatest players that ever played in my opinion right now, Nadal and Federer, but I’m amazed that guys aren’t hungrier or angrier about sort of their lack of success, » McEnroe said. « I mean, these guys are tremendous and better than the guys for the most part, but not every single day. You’ve got to come at these guys with everything you’ve got. »
That helped fuel McEnroe’s rise to the top of tennis. While he says he’s always had a good relationship with Bjorn Borg, whom he considers probably his greatest rival, the hatred of losing to Jimmy Connors and Ivan Lendl lasted from the center court at Grand Slams to the locker room during senior exhibitions.
He thinks players now might get along too well with Federer, who won his record 18th Grand Slam at the Australian Open, or be too in awe of Nadal, who added his 15th at the French Open.
« And you don’t have to, like, disparage a guy, » McEnroe said, « you’ve just got to have this hunger and will to try to — when I played Connors for example, I tried to get myself to think like, ‘Am I trying as hard as this guy, do I want it as bad as him?’ And most of the time it feels like it wasn’t, but I tried to and it feels like that’s what you’ve got to do against these guys.
« You’ve got to bring everything you’ve got every single point or else they’ll just walk all over you, and it seems like a lot of the guys have, to some extent, have let that happen. »
Life after his tour career is the focus of McEnroe’s new book, « But Seriously, » in which he details the ups and downs of his many roles outside of tennis: frustrated actor, amateur musician, art collector, remarried husband, proud parent. He still plays some, but without the interest level in the U.S. to really do a senior tour right, he knows that at age 58, he’s close to that ending.
« When I feel pretty good, like there’s certain days, one out of three days, where I’ll feel pretty good physically and that elevates my game, » McEnroe said. « I try to feel good every time, but it doesn’t work out that way where things start clicking. So that’s something that’s more fleeting and frustrating, so that’s why, I mean that’s why you walk away from the sport in the first place. I didn’t feel like I could win a major anymore, so I just didn’t feel like I could keep playing, or that I wanted to keep playing when I really felt like I had no chance of winning. »
He was only 25 when he won the last of his seven majors. He’s since found entertainment opportunities through his friends on both coasts, though the game show and talk show he hosted were both short-lived. He’s stayed involved in tennis as a commentator, through his John McEnroe Tennis Academy in New York and a little coaching, helping guide Canadian Milos Raonic to the Wimbledon final last year.
Perhaps his own career would have been different had he played now. The top four on the men’s side are all 30 or over, and none is slowing down the way players did at that age when McEnroe played.
« They’ve got way more knowledge of how to recover, what to eat, how to train off the court as well as on the court, all those things, » McEnroe said. « It’s not like we had no idea, but it’s almost like a science now, so from that standpoint there’s no question I feel like I’d be different.
« And then the other obvious one, the amount of energy I wasted sort of complaining on line calls or whatever it is. They have this challenge system, so that’s sort of taken that out of the equation, so I think I would have been a 20 percent better player but probably quite a bit, even more than maybe 40 percent more boring, because you wouldn’t have had that whole thing. »
But he now appreciates his playing career more, as whatever frustrations he’s had in other pursuits in the years since have given him a perspective he didn’t have then.
« I don’t think there’s anything you do when you fail at it that you’re happy when it happens. I think the key is always to sort of learn from it, » he said. « If it helps you find your way or you head in a direction that’s better served, it’s OK. »
