Tom Cruise’s latest action installment of “Mission: Impossible FALLOUT” follows operative Ethan Hunt, the daredevil spy on a mission impossible to save the world. VOA’s Penelope Poulou spoke with Cruise, inhabiting his character Ethan Hunt, along with the rest of the cast, about the powerful visuals and megastar’s mind-bending stunts that keep audiences on the edge of their seats for almost three hours.
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Month: July 2018
How Superheroes Are Changing The Way Hollywood Handles Diversity
Superheroes in comic books and American popular culture have become increasingly diverse, but fans and creators say more work needs to be done, especially on the big screen to fully represent American society. But Hollywood is already looking beyond the U.S. as it tries to capitalize on the popularity of superheroes. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee reports from Comic-Con about how far superheroes have come.
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Lebanon Considering Legalization of Cannabis
A Lebanese lawmaker has introduced a draft bill in parliament that would legalize the use of cannabis for medical purposes.
Speaking to the Associated Press, Antoine Habchi said he is proposing using the plant as alternative medicine to fight addiction and at the same time as a way to help Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley restore its economy and generate much needed income.
Habchi said that under the bill, cultivation would be tightly controlled.
However, it will likely take months of discussions before the draft bill would come to a vote.
Lebanon is the third largest cannabis producer in the world, after Morocco and Afghanistan, according to the United Nations.
Centered on the Bekaa Valley, known for narcotics production, Lebanon produces some of the finest quality cannabis, mostly processed into hashish.
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In Rural Malawi, Medical Tips Just a Phone Call Away
In Malawi, pregnant women and new mothers who live in remote villages are getting medical help thanks to a toll-free hotline and text messaging service known as “Chipatala cha pa Foni” or Heath Center by Phone. Run by the nonprofit VillageReach, the program connects expecting mothers in rural areas with health workers. More pregnant women are receiving prenatal care and birth planning thanks to the medical hotline, as Lameck Masina reports for VOA from Lilongwe.
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Court: Starbucks, Others Must Pay Workers for Off-Clock Work
Starbucks and other employers in California must pay workers for minutes they routinely spend off the clock on tasks such as locking up or setting the store alarm, the state Supreme Court ruled Thursday.
The unanimous ruling was a big victory for hourly workers in California and could prompt additional lawsuits against employers in the state.
The ruling came in a lawsuit by a Starbucks employee, Douglas Troester, who argued that he was entitled to be paid for the time he spent closing the store after he had clocked out.
Troester said he activated the store alarm, locked the front door and walked co-workers to their cars — tasks that he said required him to work for four to 10 additional minutes a day.
Starbucks said it was disappointed with the ruling. In a brief filed with the California Supreme Court, attorneys for Starbucks said Troester’s argument could lead to “innumerable lawsuits over a few seconds of time.” The U.S. Chamber of Commerce in a court filing also warned of the possibility of “significant liability” to businesses in the state.
A U.S. District Court rejected Troester’s lawsuit on the grounds that the time he spent on those tasks was minimal. But the California Supreme Court said a few extra minutes of work each day could “add up.”
Troester was seeking payment for 12 hours and 50 minutes of work over a 17-month period. At $8 an hour, that amounts to $102.67, the California Supreme Court said.
“That is enough to pay a utility bill, buy a week of groceries, or cover a month of bus fares,” Associate Justice Goodwin Liu wrote. “What Starbucks calls ‘de minimis’ is not de minimis at all to many ordinary people who work for hourly wages.”
Trivial and not trivial
The ruling also applies to tasks done before the workday begins, said Bryan Lazarski, an attorney in Los Angeles who handles wage claims against employers.
Lazarski said he expects the ruling to open the door to additional lawsuits by workers in similar situations as Troester. But he also expects lawsuits that “test the boundary of what this case says” to determine how much time spent doing work off the clock is enough to get paid.
The court in Thursday’s ruling said it was not closing the door on all claims by employers that the amount of additional work was too negligible.
“The court is saying, ‘We haven’t really drawn a line with regard to what is trivial and what is not trivial, but in this case, the time that the employee was not compensated was significant,'” said Veena Dubal, a labor law expert at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law.
Associate Justice Leondra Kruger wrote separately to say that there may be some periods of time that are “so brief, irregular of occurrence, or difficult to accurately measure or estimate,” that requiring an employer to account for them would not be reasonable.
She cited as examples a glitch that delays logging in to a computer to start a shift or having to read and acknowledge an email or text message about a schedule change while off the clock.
Tracking time
The federal court that threw out Troester’s lawsuit also said it would be hard for an employer to track the additional time that he worked. But Liu said employers could use technology for that or restructure employees’ work so they don’t have any tasks after they clock out.
Employers can also estimate the additional time, he said.
Troester appealed the U.S. District Court’s decision to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The appeals court asked the California Supreme Court to determine whether a federal rule permitting employers under some circumstances to require employees to work as much as 10 minutes a day without compensation applied under state law.
The lawsuit now returns to the 9th Circuit.
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Japanese City Fighting Off Would-Be Ninjas
The Japanese city of Iga is fighting off would-be ninjas after a news report suggesting the city wanted to hire the traditional assassins went viral.
The confusion began last week, when a reporter for National Public Radio in the United States said Japan was suffering from a shortage of workers because of declining birth rates.
The report quoted Sakae Okamoto, mayor of Iga, as saying the worker shortage had affected the city’s plans to build a second museum focused on the warriors.
Iga is famous for being the home of the powerful Iga ninja clan.
While the report mentioned that ninja performers could earn as much as $85,000, it did not say the city was looking to hire them.
The story was subsequently picked up on social media and other news outlets that failed to clarify the lack of jobs.
Iga city officials received 115 emails from would-be ninjas offering their services and asking when they could start. Other job requests were sent to the city’s ninja museum, the regional tourist board and a a local university.
The applications have come from around the world, including Italy, India, Ecuador and the U.S.
The ninja-centric city has posted a statement in several languages on its website stressing it was not hiring. But it took the opportunity to extol the virtues of its “splendid tourist attractions, including facilities about ninjas.”
Besides its first ninja museum, the central Japanese city also has several ninja costume rental shops and holds an annual ninja festival.
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Boxing Gym Challenges Parkinson’s Symptoms
Rock Steady Boxing NOVA gym opened in McLean, Virginia, outside Washington, D.C., last December. That was the good news for 75-year-old Neil Eisner, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s six years ago and finds boxing an effective way to fight back against the disease.
Rock Steady Boxing (RSB) was designed especially for people with Parkinson’s, a neurodegenerative disorder that leads to tremors and balance problems. Each exercise in the program focuses on a specific skill — one is combining punches on a bag to work on strength, another is crawling across the floor. Eisner says the exercises help him perform everyday tasks like moving around and getting in and out of bed.
Some strengthening exercises target vocal cords. “One of the things that’s interesting enough is [Parkinson’s patients] tend to have a [softer] voice. When you have that lower voice, and people can’t hear you, you don’t realize. So, he asks us to bring our voice clearly and more loudly,” Eisner said.
Becoming an RSB trainer
For personal trainer Alec Langstein, working with an older population is familiar. He understands their health issues and the need for them to stay active.
“My aunt has a gym in Westchester, New York, and she does a Rock Steady Boxing program there,” he said. “She invited me up to her gym to check out the program. She thought it would be a perfect fit for what I do. I helped out with a few classes, and it was just, I thought, an amazing program.”
The Rock Steady Boxing nonprofit was founded in 2006 by attorney Scott C. Newman, who was looking for ways to stay active after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s at age 40. Since then, more than 500 boxing programs have been introduced in the U.S. and around the world.
Langstein went to the organization’s headquarters to become an RSB-licensed trainer, and a few months later, he opened his Rock Steady Boxing NOVA gym.
“It’s a typical boxing program,” he explained. “They focus on balance, hand-eye coordination, reaction, footwork. There is some cognitive stuff because in boxing, certain numbers equal certain punches. So, when I yell certain numbers, you have to move and react at the same time. So, the brain and the body are working together. It’s also taking out the aggression some people may have out of having the disease.”
Improving quality of life
To understand how RSB can help Parkinson’s patients, physical therapist Danielle Sequira says it’s important to know what triggers the symptoms.
“Parkinson’s mainly affects the dopamine-producing cells in the brain. That leads to a lack or a loss of dopamine, which contributes to the movement difficulties,” she said.
While boxing and other exercises don’t cure the disease or stop the dopamine decline, they can improve the patient’s quality of life. Exercises can be modified for people with Parkinson’s, including those in wheelchairs.
“The research shows that exercise helps the brain use dopamine more efficiently,” Sequira said. “My goal usually, after I work with some of my patients with Parkinson’s, is to refer them out to get involved in an exercise program out in the community.”
The social effect
RSB seems to have helped Victoria Hebert reduce the symptoms of her Parkinson’s. She has a tremor in her left hand, and says certain situations trigger it.
“Being cold, being hot, or sitting with a crowd I’m not very comfortable with, I can’t help starting to shake. I end up having to sit on my hand just to keep it still,” she said.
But with this crowd, Hebert doesn’t feel the need to hide the disease. “These people have become very close in the four or five months we’ve been together.”
“That’s the big part of it, sharing experiences with others,” she added. “I have to say, it’s very embarrassing, but over eight years of time I’ve never met another person with Parkinson’s. Then, I came here, and it was like a whole class of 20, 25 people with it. It was kind of surprising to me, kind of surprising that I, myself, didn’t reach out to anybody before that.”
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Facebook Shares Sink; Further Growth Drops Expected
Social media giant Facebook, which has weathered storms about privacy and data protection, is now looking at cooler growth following a years-long breakneck pace.
Shares in Facebook plummeted 19 percent to close at $176.26 Thursday, wiping out $100 billion. It was believed to be the worst ever single-day evaporation of market value for any company.
The plunge came one day after the firm missed revenue forecasts for the second quarter and warned that growth would be far weaker than previously estimated.
Chief Financial Officer David Wehner warned Wednesday in an earnings call with analysts that revenue growth had already “decelerated” in the second quarter and would drop “by high single-digit percentages” in coming quarters.
At one point during the call, Facebook shares were trading down as much as 24 percent, an unprecedented drop for a large firm.
On the call, Jefferies & Co. analyst Brent Thill said that “many investors are having a hard time reconciling that deceleration. … It just seems like the magnitude is beyond anything we’ve seen.”
Facebook said the slowdown would come in part from a new approach to privacy and security, but also appeared to acknowledge the limits of growth in advertising, which accounts for virtually all its revenue.
Brian Sheehan, a Syracuse University professor of communication and advertising, said the weak forecast “made investors nervous about more basic long-term issues” with the huge social network, notably its diminished appeal to younger users.
“With or without privacy issues, investors are scared that Facebook’s interactions, particularly with those under 25, are falling,” Sheehan said.
For the second quarter, profit was up 31 percent at $5.1 billion; revenues rose 42 percent to $13.2 billion, only slightly below most forecasts.
User base still growing
Facebook reported its user base was still growing but not as fast as some expected. Monthly active users rose 11 percent to 2.23 billion — below most estimates of 2.25 billion.
Richard Windsor, a technology analyst who writes the Radio Free Mobile blog, said the new outlook should not be surprising.
“This is a direct result of scale as it becomes increasingly difficult to grow at such high rates when a company hits this size,” Windsor wrote.
Windsor added that Facebook is forced to hire more people to handle tasks such as filtering inappropriate content after discovering the limits of artificial intelligence.
“Weaknesses in AI are forcing [Facebook] to keep hiring humans to do the jobs that the machines are incapable of,” he said.
Brian Wieser at Pivotal Research Group said the company appears to have hit a “wall” on growth in advertising.
In a research note, he said Facebook’s outlook “suggests that while the company is still growing at a fast clip, the days of 30 percent-plus growth are numbered.”
Until Wednesday, Facebook shares had been at record highs as investors seemed to shrug off fears about data protection and probes into the hijacking of private information by the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook has invested heavily in “safety, security and privacy” after being rocked by concerns of manipulation of the platform to spread misinformation, warning of an “impact” on profitability.
Some analysts however said it was too soon to write off Facebook or its growth prospects, and that the company may have simply been warning of the worst-case scenario.
“The company has a track record of resetting revenue growth and expense expectations only to turn around and exceed those expectations the following quarter,” said Gene Munster of Loup Ventures. “We suspect Facebook is sticking with its historical playbook and will, in fact, beat these lower numbers.”
A positive view
Richard Greenfield of BTIG Research said he remained upbeat on Facebook despite the abrupt forecast shift.
“Facebook is actively choosing to make less money, deprioritizing near-term monetization to drive engagement to even higher levels,” Greenfield said in a note to clients.
Greenfield said he could “sense the fear/panic in investors’ voices” after the Facebook analyst call, but that he had maintained his outlook.
“Mobile is eating the world and Facebook is a core holding to benefit from that shift,” he said.
RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Mahaney said the drop creates a rare buying opportunity for Facebook shares.
“Facebook stills owns two of the largest media assets in the world [Facebook and Instagram] and the two largest messaging assets in the world [Messenger and WhatsApp],” Mahaney said in a note to clients, adding that he sees “no material change in marketer views of the attractiveness” of Facebook platforms.
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Taking a Jab at Parkinson’s
Rock Steady Boxing (RSB) is a fitness program designed for people with Parkinson’s, a neurodegenerative disorder that leads to tremors and balance problems. The Rock Steady Boxing nonprofit was founded in 2006. Since then, more than 500 boxing programs have been introduced in the U.S. and around the world. Faiza Elmasry visited an RSB gym in McLean, Virginia. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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Girl Scouts Stress ‘Girl Power’ in New Recruitment Efforts
As American women seek a larger role in politics, fairer wages and an end to sexual harassment, the Girl Scouts see an opportune time to show some swagger in promoting their core mission: girl empowerment.
They recruited Queen Latifah to narrate a video featuring famous former Girl Scouts — Venus Williams, Katie Couric and many more. And they indulged in a little bragging when Girl Scout alumna Meghan Markle married into Britain’s royal family.
“Life is always better with a Girl Scout by your side, and Prince Harry truly hit the jackpot,” enthused a post on Girl Scout Blog.
But the marketing campaign is about more than boasting. It’s also an effort to confront several high-stakes challenges, including reversing a long slide in membership, making the case for all-girl scouting after the rival Boy Scouts included girls and updating the organization’s curriculum for a new generation that expects more than cookies and camping.
“What’s happening in society as a whole makes it all the more important for girls to have every possible opportunity to learn that their voice and opinion matter, and to have the courage and confidence to become who they want to be,” said Megan Ferland, CEO of the Seattle-based Girl Scouts of Western Washington.
One major challenge, she said, is to puncture some of the myths and stereotypes that affect public perceptions.
“People hear ‘Girl Scouts’ and think, ‘Oh, those cute little girls that sell the cookies and make macaroni necklaces’ and that’s it,” Ferland said. “It is so much more than that.”
She cited activities such as robotics and rock climbing, a strong emphasis on community service and the iconic cookie sales, which she depicted in a recent newspaper essay as “the largest girl-run business in the world.”
The Boy Scouts decided last year to admit girls into all programs. But the Girl Scouts’ parent organization, Girl Scouts of the USA, will not follow suit by admitting boys.
“I believe with full conviction that Girl Scouts is the best leadership organization in the world for girls, and that is because we are girl-led and girl-centric,” said Violet Apple, CEO of Girl Scouts of Central Maryland.
The Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, as well as other youth organizations and sports leagues, have experienced membership declines in recent years, for reasons ranging from busy family schedules to the lure of online games and social media. The Girl Scouts say they now have about 1.76 million girls and 780,000 adult members — down from about 2.9 million girls and 900,000 adult volunteers in 2003.
Some recruitment efforts reflect the Girl Scouts’ pride in the diversity of their membership. For example, the organization over the past two years has created more than 240 new troops in low-income Los Angeles neighborhoods to serve several thousand girls from Hispanic, African-American, Korean and other communities.
Denise Nowack, who oversees the recruitment programs, said the Girl Scouts council in LA decided to cover basic first-year costs for the new troops, including membership fees and uniforms, to ease the financial burden.
Many other councils struggle to find enough adults to serve as volunteer troop leaders, leaving hundreds of girls on waiting lists.
“It’s really sad,” said Asha Menon, a troop leader for seven years in the Atlanta suburb of McDonough. “All these parents show up with kids who want to be in it — but they want another adult to take the lead.”
In Chicago, TV producer Craig Harris has tried — with minimal success — to persuade other men to join him as Girl Scout leaders. Harris started as a volunteer 14 years ago when his eldest daughter — now a confident college student — joined the Girl Scouts as a shy 5-year-old.
Harris’ 11-year-old daughter is active in the Girl Scouts, pursuing her interest in science.
“I lead a full career, but I’ve found ample time to be a volunteer,” Harris said. “My oldest daughter went all the way through, and I was there at every stage. It was invaluable time building those memories with her.”
Among the many mothers juggling work and Girl Scout duties is Audra Fordin, owner of an auto-repair business in New York City’s Flushing neighborhood. She is founder of an education initiative called Women Auto Know and leader of her teenage daughter’s troop.
Fordin is confident the Girl Scouts can maintain their stature as an all-girl institution even as the Boy Scouts make its programs available to boys and girls.
“Some girls may not feel as capable of doing the same things boys can do,” she said. “But when we come together in a group, we can accomplish whatever we want to do.”
Reeny Boutros, 18, of Wichita, Kansas, started Girl Scouts at age 5. She said the experience helped her develop the skills and confidence that recently earned her admission to Stanford University, with plans to major in computer science.
Boutros has received Girl Scouting’s highest honors — first earning the elite Gold Award, then being selected as one of 10 National Young Women of Distinction. She’s a technology whiz now, but recalled struggling with studies back in middle school.
“The badge work (with Girl Scouts) was one of the few academic recognitions I got,” she said. “I got exposed to archaeology, photography. It was a great way to boost my self-esteem.”
Boutros’ experience reflects the Girl Scouts’ push to engage girls in science, technology, engineering and math. There are a host of new STEM-related badges, and there’s a newly opened year-round camp in Dallas — the STEM Center of Excellence — that will offer K-12 STEM programs on a 92-acre campus.
But the best part of being a Girl Scout? “It’s always been camping,” she said. “You put your phones away and bond with nature — and just giggle uncontrollably with your friends.”
your ads here!WTO Chief: Global Economy Will Falter if Trade War Continues
The Director General of the World Trade Organization, Roberto Azevedo warns the global economy will run out of steam and millions of jobs will be lost if political leaders do not reach a negotiated settlement to end the trade war.
WTO reports there has been a significant rise in protectionist measures since mid-October, with countries imposing an average of 11 restrictive trade measures every month.
WTO chief, Roberto Azevedo says the major negative impacts resulting from trade restrictions should set off a few alarm bells.
“It threatens the recovery of the global economy. It threatens growth. It threatens jobs,” said Azevedo. “Our concern about anything is that this dynamic of an eye-for-an-eye or tit-for-tat or whatever you call it, it may be perceived as the new normal if countries begin to take this as a normal way of behaving.”
He says this would be very harmful for the global economy down the road. Azevedo says the trade war is not a technical issue. It is a political situation, which he says will have to be resolved by political means.
“So, leaders have to talk to themselves. At some point in time, they have to begin to listen to each other,” said Azevedo. “It is not only also about responding. It is not only about making threats to each other. At some point in time, the question is going to be—okay, so we have all these problems, how do we fix them?”
That process appears to have begun. During a meeting Wednesday at the White House, U.S. President Donald Trump and European Commission Chief Jean-Claude Juncker pulled back from the brink of an all-out trade war. They agreed to work together to lower tariffs.
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Former Trump Aide Omarosa Has ‘Explosive’ Book Coming
Former President Donald Trump aide and “Apprentice” contestant Omarosa Manigault Newman has a memoir coming that her publisher calls “explosive” and “jaw-dropping.”
The book is called “Unhinged.” Gallery Books announced Thursday that it will be released on Aug. 14.
Manigault Newman was a Trump ally who joined his administration in January 2017 as a White House communications director.
She had vowed that political foes would “bow down” to Trump. But she left after a year and spoke harshly of her experience, while denying reports she was fired. She said she was worried about the country and would never vote for Trump again.
The rare black woman in Trump’s administration, she has likened her departure to being freed from a “plantation.”
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German FA Boss Admits Mistakes in Ozil Affair but Rejects Racism Accusations
German Football Association (DFB) head Reinhard Grindel on Thursday said he should have made clearer that racism is unacceptable after midfielder Mesut Ozil quit the national team citing “racism and disrespect” over his Turkish roots.
Ozil, who plays for English Premier League club Arsenal, was widely criticized for having his photograph taken with Turkey’s authoritarian President Tayyip Erdogan in May.
Ozil and Ilkay Gundogan, a team mate of Turkish descent who also posed with Erdogan, were jeered by German fans in warm-up games before the World Cup in Russia.
Grindel rejected Ozil’s accusations of racism against the DFB but said he regretted the photograph had been misused to justify “racist words” but did not go into any details.
“In retrospect, as the president I should have clearly said what is obvious for me personally and for us as an association, namely that any form of racism is unbearable, unacceptable and intolerable,” he said in a statement.
The 29-year-old’s decision to quit has triggered a public debate in Germany about its relations with its largest immigrant community, with Ozil being a key member of the team that won the World Cup in 2014 and also being voted German Player of the Year a record five times through public ballots.
Some politicians and the leader of the Turkish community in Germany had called for Grindel to resign but there were others who said Ozil’s racism claims were out of place.
Earlier this week, a spokeswoman for Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Germany was a “cosmopolitan country” where people with migrant backgrounds were welcome and sport played a big role in integration. She added that Merkel valued Ozil as a “great” footballer.
But German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas questioned the debate by saying: “I don’t believe the case of a multimillionaire living and working in England gives much insight into the success or failure of integration in Germany.”
Erdogan has said the treatment of Ozil was racist and unacceptable.
Ozil said Grindel had blamed him for Germany’s group stage elimination from this year’s World Cup, their earliest exit from the tournament in 80 years, and considered him a German when the national team won but an immigrant when the side lost.
Grindel said the personal criticism had affected him.
“I feel even more sorry for my colleagues, the many volunteers and staff at the DFB to be mentioned in relation to racism,” he said. “I decisively reject this – both for me personally and for the association.”
He said he shared the DFB’s values of diversity, solidarity, anti-discrimination and integration and said that during his time at the DFB he had witnessed how football could help integrate people.
Grindel said the DFB would use the integration debate stoked by Ozil’s departure as an opportunity to redouble its integration efforts.
He also said the DFB would do a sports analysis on the team’s poor performance in Russia and added it hoped to win the bid to host the Euro 2024 tournament – for which Turkey is also bidding. UEFA will hold a meeting on Sept. 27 to choose between them.
your ads here!Google Launches Free Wi-Fi Hotspot Network in Nigeria
Google launched a network of free Wi-Fi hotspots in Nigeria on Thursday, part of its effort to increase its presence in Africa’s most populous nation.
The U.S. technology firm, owned by Alphabet Inc, has partnered with Nigerian fiber cable network provider 21st Century to provide its public Wi-Fi service, Google Station, in six places in the commercial capital Lagos, including the city’s airport.
Internet penetration is relatively low in Nigeria. Some 25.7 percent of the population made use of the internet in 2016, according to World Bank data.
The poor internet infrastructure is a major challenge for businesses operating in the country, which is Africa’s largest oil producer. Broadband services are either unreliable or unaffordable to many of Nigeria’s 190 million inhabitants.
“We are rolling out the service in Lagos today but the plan is to quickly expand to other locations,” Anjali Joshi, Google’s vice president for product management, told Reuters in Lagos.
The company said it aimed to collaborate with internet service providers to reach millions of Nigerians in 200 public spaces across five cities by the end of 2019.
It said it would generate cash from the service in Nigeria by placing Google adverts in the login portal. Google did not disclose the amount invested in the new Nigeria service.
The technology firm said it planned to share revenues with its partners to help them maintain and deploy the Wi-Fi service but did not disclose the expected advertising revenue split.
Nigeria is the fifth country to launch Google Station.
Similar services have been launched in India, Indonesia, Mexico and Thailand.
The service is aimed at countries with rapidly expanding populations. The United Nations estimates Nigeria will be the world’s third most populous nation, after China and India, by 2050.
“A lot of people who found data to be too expensive for them to use, are using it,” said Joshi. “In India, we have tens of millions of users, and close to a million in Mexico.”
Africa’s rapid population growth, falling data costs and heavy adoption of mobile phones has made it an attractive investment prospect for technology companies. But many do not disclose how profitable the continent’s markets are, or if they make the companies money at all.
Nigerian Vice President Yemi Osinbajo welcomed efforts to improve internet connectivity in a speech at a Google conference in Lagos on Thursday.
“Access to information means that the gap in equality and exclusion are bridged,” said Osinbajo who earlier this month met Google’s chief executive, Sundar Pichai, at the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters.
Last year, Google announced plans to train 10 million Africans in online skills within five years.
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Facebook Shares Dive on Weak Outlook, Weighing on Nasdaq
Facebook shares dived nearly 20 percent early Thursday after it signaled it expects weaker growth, pushing the Nasdaq decisively lower.
About 25 minutes into trading, the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index was at 7,840.20, down 1.2 percent, falling from Wednesday’s record close.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.6 percent to 25,572.77, while the broad-based S&P 500 dipped 0.3 percent to 2,838.03.
The Facebook results shifted the market’s attention from Wednesday’s pledge by President Donald Trump and European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker on trade that had boosted markets.
Investors fled Facebook after the social network reportedly sharply higher profit and revenue, but signaled it expects slower user growth, partly due to the effect of data privacy scandals.
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg also cautioned that profitability would be hit by additional spending to secure the network.
Other technology companies retreated, including Google parent Alphabet, Netflix and Amazon, which is scheduled to report results after the market closes Thursday.
Facebook was not the only company to fall after results. Ford sank 4.1 percent and Mattel shed 4.4 percent, while American Airlines climbed 3.7 percent.
In other developments, computer chip company Qualcomm advanced 4.5 percent as it dropped a $43 billion bid to acquire Dutch rival NXP on Thursday after failing to win approval from antitrust authorities in China.
US shares of NXP fell 5.6 percent.
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Einstein Was Right: Astronomers Confirm Key Theory
A consortium of astronomers said Thursday they had for the first time confirmed a prediction of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity by observing the gravitational effects of a supermassive black hole on a star zipping by it.
The German-born theoretical physicist had posited that large gravitational forces could stretch light, much like the compression and stretching of sound waves we perceive with the change of pitch of a passing train.
Researchers from the GRAVITY consortium led by the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics realized that they had a “perfect laboratory” to test Einstein’s theory with the Sagittarius A* black hole in the center of the Milky Way.
Black holes are so dense that their gravitational pull can trap even light, and the supermassive Sagittarius A* has mass four million times that of our sun, making it the biggest in our galaxy.
Astronomers followed the S2 star as it passed close to the black hole on May 19 at a speed in excess of 25 million kilometers (15.5 million miles) per hour.
They then calculated its velocity and position using a number of instruments and compared it with predictions made by Einstein that the light would be stretched by the gravity in an effect called gravitational redshift. Newtonian physics doesn’t allow for a redshift.
“The results are perfectly in line with the theory of general relativity” and are “a major breakthrough towards better understanding the effects of intense gravitational fields,” said the research team, whose findings are published in Friday’s issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics.
This is the first time observers have been able to measure such an effect.
The European Southern Observatory, whose Very Large Telescope in Chile was used to make the observations, had watched S2 pass by Sagittarius A* in 2016 but the instruments it was using then were not sensitive enough to detect the gravitational redshift.
“More than 100 years after he published his paper setting out the equations of general relativity, Einstein has been proved right once more — in a much more extreme laboratory than he could have possibly imagined,” said the ESO in a statement.
Astronomers already use another effect predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity — that a black hole can bend passing light. Called gravitational lensing, researchers have used it to peer behind black holes.
Astronomers hope they can make practical use of the latest confirmation of Einstein’s theory to track shifts in S2’s trajectory due to gravity, which could yield information on mass distribution around the black hole.
“I am always blown away by Einstein’s predictions, by the power of his reasoning which yielded this theory and which has never been faulted,” French astrophysicist Guy Perrin, a member of the GRAVITY consortium, told AFP.
Partnering with the Max Planck Institute in the consortium were French research institute CNRS, the Paris Observatory and several French universities along with Portugal’s CENTRA astrophysics center.
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Trump Accuses Twitter of Targeting Republicans, Offers No Evidence
U.S. President Donald Trump accused Twitter Inc on Thursday of restricting the visibility of prominent Republicans on its platform, without providing evidence, and he promised to investigate.
“Twitter ‘SHADOW BANNING’ prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once!” the Republican president wrote in a Twitter post.
The practice involves limiting the visibility of a user in search results, specifically in the auto-populated dropdown search box on Twitter.
Trump’s comments followed a Vice news report on Wednesday that Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and other Republicans including Donald Trump Jr’s spokesman were being “shadow banned.”
“The notion that social media companies would suppress certain political points of view should concern every American. Twitter owes the public answers to what’s really going on,” McDaniel wrote on Twitter.
Twitter did not have a comment on Trump’s tweet but a spokesperson said the company does not “shadow ban.”
“We are aware that some accounts are not automatically populating in our search box, and we’re shipping a change to address this,” the spokesperson said in a statement.”
Twitter said the technology used is based on user behavior not political views.
Twitter instituted a policy change on July 12 to increase the service’s credibility and reduce suspected fraud. That change cost its 100 most popular users about 2 percent of their followers, on average, according to social media data firm Keyhole.
The change cost former President Barack Obama 2 million followers by the morning after the change and singers Katy Perry and Justin Bieber each lost 3 million, The Washington Post reported, citing analytics company Twitter Counter.
The report said Trump’s account lost more than 200,000 of its 53 million followers.
Twitter shares, already lower in premarket trading after Facebook Inc’s disappointing earnings late Wednesday damped enthusiasm for technology and social media stocks, dipped a bit further and volume rose slightly after Trump’s tweet at 7:46 a.m. The stock was last down 3.2 percent.
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Study Suggests Your Dog Recognizes, Reacts to Your Feelings
Pet owners are always happy to share a memory about the time their dog responded to their distress by coming to them or trying to get their attention. But those seemed to just be stories, until new research in the journal Learning & Behavior found that dogs really do feel empathy toward their owners.
According to Ripon College psychology professor Julia Meyers-Manor, the research was inspired by her earlier work on empathy in rats.
“One of the challenges we face when we’re trying to study empathy is that the idea behind empathy is you are recognizing the emotional states of another individual and responding to it,” she told VOA.
The problem is you can’t tell why a rat would help another rodent. For example, it might help to free a trapped friend because the other rat is stressed, or the first rat might be just lonely or bored.
“I can’t make rats have an emotional state” for an experiment, said Meyers-Manor, “but I can ask humans to adopt an emotional state.”
Human actors
To help researchers find out if dogs recognize and react to others’ feelings, they asked humans to mimic behaviors that reflect different feelings.
Her lead study author, Emily Sanford of Johns Hopkins University, added, “People tend to think that dogs really care about their emotions, but we were interested in seeing if there was any scientific evidence to back that up.”
The researchers tested dogs’ prosocial reaction, or their willingness to help another, in a simple door-opening task. The owner sat in a small room with a clear door that the pups could easily push open. The owner was instructed to either pretend to cry or hum a tune. The dog was released into the adjacent room and videotaped to see whether it would push open the door to check on its owner.
When the researchers looked at which condition led dogs to open the door, Meyers-Manor said, “we found it was about equal between the dogs in the distressed, the crying condition, and in the dogs in the humming condition.” In other words, most of the dogs often opened the door regardless of what their owner was doing.
The real difference between the crying and humming conditions was seen in the amount of time it took for the dogs to act. The dogs whose owners appeared to be crying were much faster to check on them than those whose owners were humming. The speed of the dogs’ response was also predicted based on their bond with their owners.
‘Impossible task’
“There’s some research that says that when dogs are faced with a task they can’t solve, that they will direct their attention more to an owner whom they have a close bond with,” said Meyers-Manor. So they gave the dogs what’s called “the impossible task,” which places them in a room with both their owner and a stranger. They are shown an inaccessible treat and the researchers then time how long the dogs looked at their owner for help compared with the time it took to turn to the stranger.
Sanford said this was where individual differences appeared among dogs in the crying condition. “We actually found that dogs that gazed at their owners longer during the impossible task were faster to open the door during the prosocial helping task.”
A second way to predict how quickly a dog would open the door, if at all, was based on stress levels. The researchers collected physiological data and watched the dogs for signs of stress during the main task. Dogs who showed lots of stress behaviors like whining or excessive panting were less likely to push open the door.
“The dogs who opened [the door] were actually the dogs who are the most calm and collected,” said Meyers-Manor. “The dogs who were more distressed shut down. They showed lots of distress behaviors, but they couldn’t seem to get past that distress to open the door.”
Therapy dogs
About half of the dogs in this experiment were nationally certified therapy dogs. Although there was some sense that these trained pooches might respond more quickly than their untrained counterparts, this wasn’t borne out in the data.
“So certainly if you ask the therapy dog owners, I’m sure they would say, yes, their dogs are more empathetic than the average. But that’s not what our research says,” Meyers-Manor said.
James Serpell, director of the Center for Interaction of Animals and Society, agreed that therapy dogs aren’t necessarily more empathetic. “They don’t necessarily need to be any more friendly or empathic than any pet dog,” he told VOA. “They just need to not be aggressive or react violently when someone drops a crutch or something next to them.”
Whether they’re certified or not, this research demonstrates that our dogs do recognize our emotional states and respond to them.
As Sanford put it, “Your pet dogs are part of your family and they do feel feelings towards you. And if you are talking to them, they might not necessarily understand all the words that you’re saying, but they certainly understand the emotions behind them.”
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The Healing Properties of Pineapples
Brazilian researchers are developing an innovative process using pineapples to speed the healing process for skin wounds. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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Kentucky Drug Overdose Deaths up 11.5 Percent in 2017
Since 2011, a year when Kentucky was flooded with 371 million doses of opioid painkillers, state officials have cracked down on pain clinics, sued pharmaceutical companies and limited how many pills doctors can prescribe.
The result is nearly 100 million fewer opioid prescriptions in 2017 — and an 11.5 percent increase in drug overdose deaths.
That’s the sobering findings of a new report from the Kentucky Office of Drug Control Policy in a state on the front lines of the nation’s opioid epidemic. The report says 1,565 people died from drug overdoses in 2017, a 40 percent increase in the past five years.
Deaths attributed to prescription painkillers and heroin are declining. But other drugs have taken their place. Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, accounted for more than half of all the deaths. And methamphetamine has made a comeback, accounting for 360 deaths. That’s a 57 percent increase in just one year.
“We are in a crisis state,” Republican Gov. Matt Bevin said. “While we are putting money at it and while we are drawing attention to it, until we start to truly address this and look at underlying causes of these things and what is leading to this it is not going to be addressed.”
42,000 deaths in US in 2016
Nationally, opioids accounted for more than 42,000 deaths in 2016. States with the highest rates of drug overdose deaths that year were West Virginia, Ohio, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Kentucky, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Every year, Kentucky lawmakers have been passing more laws designed to address the opioid problem. They have increased penalties for heroin dealers. They have diverted more money to drug treatment programs. And they limited patients to a three-day supply of prescription painkillers unless a doctor gives them written permission for a larger amount.
State officials spent $500,000 to create 1-833-8KY-HELP, a hotline to connect people with treatment options. And they have spent thousands of dollars giving first responders naloxone, medicine that can reverse an opioid overdose.
Medicaid expansion helped
Anti-drug advocates celebrate those changes, but their celebration is tempered once a year when the new numbers come out detailing how many more people have died.
“Most of the things we do we realize are not going to take that immediate effect,” said Van Ingram, executive director of the Kentucky Office of Drug Control Policy. “It just never gets any easier.”
Many anti-drug advocates have credited the Affordable Care Act with helping people get treatment. The law, known as Obamacare, expanded the Medicaid program to give more than 400,000 Kentuckians health coverage. Many used that coverage to get drug treatment.
Bevin wants to require people in Kentucky’s expanded Medicaid population to get a job, go to school or do volunteer work to keep their coverage. He also wants to charge them small monthly premiums to model private insurance plans.
Critics have said the result will be fewer people on Medicaid with fewer treatment options. But Bevin’s plan would exempt people with substance abuse disorder from complying with the new rules. Those rules were supposed to go into effect July 1, but were blocked by a federal judge.
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US Toymaker Mattel to Layoff 2,200 Worldwide
Mattel, home of Barbie dolls and Hot Wheels, is cutting 2,200 jobs in order to save money after the closing of U.S. toy retail giant Toys R Us.
The toymaker said the cuts amount to 22 percent of its nonmanufacturing employees worldwide. Mattel has about 28,000 employees.
It also plans to sell factories in Mexico as part of a $650 million cost-saving plan.
Mattel’s stock fell nearly 9 percent to $14.85 in after-hours trading Wednesday, after dropping 1 percent during the regular trading day.
Mattel reported a loss of $240.9 million in the second quarter, bigger than the $56.1 million loss in the same period a year ago.
Revenues fell nearly 14 percent to $840.7 million, below the $863.1 million analysts had predicted.
Ynon Kreiz, who was named CEO in April, said Wednesday that he expects the negative impact of Toys R Us closing to subside by next year.
The toymaker has lagged behind its competitors in digital media, analysts say, and is trying to catch up with other brands that have spawned apps, movies and TV shows.
Kreiz said the company is working closely with other retailers and looking for more ways to sell its toys online.
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UN: HIV Infects 1 Teen Girl Every 3 Minutes
One girl between the ages of 15 and 19 is infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, every three minutes of every day, a United Nations report found.
The report, released Wednesday at the International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam, said teenage girls are bearing the brunt of the AIDS epidemic, largely due to gender inequality.
Henrietta Fore, head of the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF), called it a “crisis of health.”
“In most countries, women and girls lack access to information, to services, or even just power to say no to unsafe sex,” she said. “HIV thrives among the most vulnerable and marginalized, leaving teenage girls at the center of the crisis.”
The report said while there was significant progress in the battle against AIDS in other age groups, it is notably lacking among adolescents.
While AIDS-related deaths among all other age groups have been falling since 2010, those among children aged 15 to 19 have seen no reduction.
In 2017, 1.2 million 15- to 19-year-olds were living with HIV, three in five of them were girls, according to UNICEF.
Actress and activist Charlize Theron addressed the issue in her speech at the conference.
The AIDS epidemic is “not just about sex or sexuality,” she said. It is also about “the second-class status of women and girls worldwide.”
The solution, according to Angelique Kidjo, a UNICEF goodwill ambassador who contributed to the report, is education and economic empowerment.
“We need to make girls and women secure enough economically that they don’t have to turn to sex work,” she said. “We need to make sure they have the right information about how HIV is transmitted and how to protect themselves.”
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