The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down the decades-old Roe v. Wade decision, which said women have a constitutional right to have an abortion. States will now decide whether to permit the procedure; it’s expected that roughly half could do so. VOA’s Laurel Bowman reports.
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Month: June 2022
US Theater Skips Plan to Fast Forward Through Disney Same-Sex Kiss
A movie theater owner in the western U.S. state of Oklahoma said the theater never carried out a plan to fast forward through a same-sex kiss in a newly released Disney/Pixar film.
The theater had posted a warning sign about the kiss and its intention to fast forward through the brief kissing scene in Lightyear, part of the Toy Story franchise.
The sign said that management found out about the kiss between two women after booking the film, adding that, “We will do all we can to fast-forward through that scene, but it might not be exact.”
Instead, the owner of the theater in Kingfisher told local television station KOCO 5 that the plan to interrupt the film was never executed in any of the showings of the film.
Some countries have banned the film because of the kiss.
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NASA’s Artemis Program Gases Up
NASA’s next moon mission scores a win despite another setback. Plus, South Korea launches one of its own rockets to space, and the UK readies what it hopes will be its first domestically launched satellites. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space
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US Health Officials Ban Juul E-Cigarettes Tied to Teen Vaping Surge
Federal health officials on Thursday ordered Juul to pull its electronic cigarettes from the U.S. market, the latest blow to the embattled company widely blamed for sparking a national surge in teen vaping.
The action is part of a sweeping effort by the Food and Drug Administration to bring scientific scrutiny to the multibillion-dollar vaping industry after years of regulatory delays.
The FDA said Juul must stop selling its vaping device and its tobacco- and menthol-flavored cartridges. Those already on the market must be removed. Consumers aren’t restricted from having or using Juul’s products, the agency said.
To stay on the market, companies must show that their e-cigarettes benefit public health. In practice, that means proving that adult smokers who use them are likely to quit or reduce their smoking, while teens are unlikely to get hooked on them.
The FDA noted that some of the biggest sellers like Juul may have played a “disproportionate” role in the rise in teen vaping. The agency said Thursday that Juul’s application didn’t have enough evidence to show that marketing its products “would be appropriate for the protection of the public health.”
Juul said it disagrees with the FDA’s findings and will seek to put the ban on hold while the company considers its options, including a possible appeal and talking with regulators.
In a statement, the FDA said Juul’s application left regulators with significant questions and didn’t include enough information to evaluate any potential risks. The agency said the company’s research included “insufficient and conflicting data” about things like potentially harmful chemicals leaching from Juul’s cartridges.
“Without the data needed to determine relevant health risks, the FDA is issuing these marketing denial orders,” Michele Mital, acting director of the FDA’s tobacco center, said in the statement.
The agency has granted some e-cigarette applications. Since last fall, the agency has given its OK to tobacco-flavored e-cigarettes from R.J. Reynolds, Logic and other companies.
But industry players and anti-tobacco advocates have complained that those products account for just a tiny percentage of the $6 billion vaping market in the United States.
Regulators repeatedly delayed making decisions on devices from market leaders, including Juul, which remains the best-selling vaping brand although sales have dipped.
Last year, the agency rejected applications for more than a million other e-cigarettes and related products, mainly due to their potential appeal to underage teens.
The American Lung Association called Thursday’s decision “long overdue and most welcome,” and cited Juul for stoking youth vaping.
E-cigarettes first appeared in the U.S. more than a decade ago with the promise of providing smokers a less harmful alternative. The devices heat a nicotine solution into a vapor that’s inhaled, bypassing many of the toxic chemicals produced by burning tobacco.
But studies have reached conflicting results about whether they truly help smokers quit. And efforts by the FDA to rule on vaping products and their claims were repeatedly slowed by industry lobbying and competing political interests.
The vaping market grew to include hundreds of companies selling an array of devices and nicotine solutions in various flavors and strengths.
The vaping issue took on new urgency in 2018 when Juul’s high-nicotine, fruity-flavored cartridges quickly became a nationwide craze among middle and high school students. The company faces a slew of federal and state investigations into its early marketing practices, which included distributing free Juul products at concerts and parties hosted by young influencers.
In 2019, the company was pressured into halting all advertising and eliminating its fruit and dessert flavors. The next year, the FDA limited flavors in small vaping devices to just tobacco and menthol. Separately, Congress raised the purchase age for all tobacco and vaping products to 21.
But the question of whether e-cigarettes should remain on the market at all remained.
The FDA has been working under a court order to render its decisions; anti-tobacco groups successfully sued the agency to speed up its review.
FDA regulators warned companies for years they would have to submit rigorous, long-term data showing a clear benefit for smokers who switch to vaping. But all but the largest e-cigarette manufacturers have resisted conducting that kind of expensive, time-consuming research.
While Juul remains a top seller, a recent federal survey shows that teens have been shifting away from the company. Last year’s survey showed Juul was the fourth-most popular e-cigarette among high schoolers who regularly vape. The most popular brand was a disposable e-cigarette called Puff Bar that comes in flavors including pink lemonade, strawberry and mango. That company’s disposable e-cigarettes had been able to skirt regulation because they use synthetic nicotine, which until recently was outside the FDA’s jurisdiction. Congress recently closed that loophole.
Overall, the survey showed a drop of nearly 40% in the teen vaping rate as many kids were forced to learn from home during the pandemic. Still, federal officials cautioned about interpreting the results given they were collected online for the first time, instead of in classrooms.
The brainchild of two Stanford University students, Juul launched in 2015 and within two years rocketed to the top of the vaping market. Juul, which is partially owned by tobacco giant Altria, still accounts for nearly 50% of the U.S. e-cigarette market. It once controlled more than 75%.
On Tuesday, the FDA also laid out plans to establish a maximum nicotine level for certain tobacco products to reduce their addictiveness. In that announcement, the agency also noted that it has invested in a multimedia public education campaign aimed at warning young people about the potential risks of e-cigarette use.
your ads here!US Advisory Panel Recommends Stronger Flu Shots for Seniors
An advisory panel for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended Wednesday that people ages 65 years and older choose higher-dose flu shots or ones that include an ingredient to boost immune response.
The CDC commonly adopts the recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, but in the past it has not advised older adults to get a particular flu shot.
The CDC says older people are both at a higher risk for more serious illness from the flu and tend to have a lower protective immune response.
The advisory committee said that while its preference is for the higher-dose shots or adjuvanted flu vaccines, if one of those options is not available, people age 65 and older should still be vaccinated with a standard flu vaccine.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press.
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US Expanding Monkeypox Testing
The United States is expanding its capacity to test for monkeypox by shipping tests to five commercial labs.
The Department of Health and Human Services said Wednesday the effort will “dramatically expand testing capacity nationwide and make testing more convenient and accessible for patients and health care providers.”
Health care providers will be able to start using the labs to test for monkeypox by early July, the agency said.
As of Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said there have been 142 reported monkeypox infections in the United States since the first in mid-May.
More than 30 countries where monkeypox is not endemic have reported cases.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters
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Nearly 1 in 5 Adults Who Had COVID Have Lingering Symptoms, US Study Finds
Nearly 1 in 5 American adults who reported having COVID-19 in the past are still having symptoms of long COVID, according to survey data collected in the first two weeks of June, U.S. health officials said Wednesday.
Overall, 1 in 13 adults in the United States have long COVID symptoms that have lasted for three months or more after first contracting the disease and that they did not have before the infection, the data showed.
The data was collected June 1-13 by the U.S. Census Bureau and analyzed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Long COVID symptoms include fatigue, rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath, cognitive difficulties, chronic pain, sensory abnormalities and muscle weakness. They can be debilitating and last for weeks or months after recovery from the initial infection.
The CDC analysis also found that younger adults were more likely to have persistent symptoms than older adults.
Women were also more likely to have long COVID than men, according to the study, with 9.4% of U.S. adult women reporting long COVID symptoms compared with 5.5% of men.
The survey found nearly 9% of Hispanic adults have long COVID, higher than non-Hispanic white and Black adults, and more than twice the percentage of non-Hispanic Asian adults.
There were also differences based on U.S. states, with Kentucky and Alabama reporting the highest percentage of adults with long COVID symptoms, while Hawaii, Maryland and Virginia reported the lowest, according to the survey.
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‘Black Death’ Likely Originated in Central Asia, Researchers Say
The Black Death, a plague that killed up to 60% of people in western Eurasia from roughly 1346 to 1353, likely originated in the Tian Shan mountains of central Asia, new research shows.
Scientists recovered two genomes of an ancient strain of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, from human remains buried in two 14th-century cemeteries in Kyrgyzstan. The strain is the ancestor of the microbes that caused the Black Death.
“The origin of the Black Death has been one of the most widely debated topics not only in medieval history, but I perhaps will not exaggerate if I say that it has been one of the most debated topics in history, period,” said historian and study co-author Philip Slavin of the University of Stirling.
There are many competing theories, he said, “but without ancient DNA, you wouldn’t be able actually to confirm one of those theories.”
Researchers reconstructed an ancient Y. pestis genome for the first time in 2011 using samples from a burial ground in London. Since then, a handful of additional Black Death genomes from western Eurasia and many more from modern Y. pestis strains carried by rodents and their parasites — the natural reservoirs of plague — also were sequenced.
But even with the new data, “it was still quite clear to us that this kind of research was not really telling us much about where it all started and when it all started,” said Maria Spyrou, a biologist at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and first author of the new study.
Spike in deaths
The wellspring of the Black Death wouldn’t be found in a European grave. But Slavin thought that two cemeteries near Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan looked promising. Based on tombstone inscriptions, the area saw a spike in deaths between 1338 and 1339. Some of those deaths were blamed on an unknown “pestilence.”
The researchers extracted and sequenced genetic material from seven teeth from seven individuals buried at the cemeteries. Human teeth are crisscrossed by a dense network of blood vessels, making them one of the best places in which to look for the centuries-old DNA of blood-borne pathogens like Y. pestis. Three of the seven individuals had plague DNA in their teeth, allowing researchers to reconstruct the genome of the strain that killed them.
In a genetic family tree of the plague, the new strain sits right at base of what Spyrou called an “explosion of genetic diversity” — a dramatic radiation of new strains including the ones that caused the Black Death. The origin strain’s closest modern cousins are carried by marmots in the surrounding Tian Shan area, so it seems to have developed locally.
“It started most likely in this Tian Shan region of central Asia,” said Spyrou. “But I don’t want to claim that we have found, I don’t know, a patient zero or outbreak zero, because this is almost impossible using the archaeological record.”
Sharon DeWitte, an archaeologist at the University of South Carolina, was excited by the results, but she noted that there’s still a small chance the Black Death reached central Asia from elsewhere.
“Yersinia pestis can travel pretty far without accumulating any genetic variation,” she said. “But that being said, there’s strong evidence that that general area was the origin.”
Why, how did it spread?
Finding where the Black Death began is a major step toward understanding why and how it spilled over from animals to humans and spread so catastrophically in the 14th century. Slavin suspects trade was an important factor.
“This community was situated right at the heart of long-distance trade routes known as the Silk Road,” he said. They were “extremely cosmopolitan, very multinational, very multiethnic, and [had] lots of geographic mobility.”
Graves contained pearls from the Pacific and Indian oceans, silks from China or Uzbekistan and shells from the Mediterranean, said Slavin.
Climate could also have been involved, said Spyrou and DeWitte. Future studies of historical climate events in central Asia could help explain the pandemic’s timing and spread. More ancient plague genomes from Asia also would help, but Slavin noted that finding similar archaeological sites or collections isn’t as straightforward as it sounds.
Plague still kills people every year. Because it evolves fast and jumps from animals to humans, it’s important to understand the conditions that make it dangerous and monitor it closely, according to DeWitte. And studying past pandemics can offer lessons for the present, too.
“The Black Death is basically a natural experiment where we are gathering a huge amount of data about the human populations affected, the animals that might have been involved, the bacterium that was involved, and climate conditions,” said DeWitte. “And I think all that’s really important in terms of building resilience for populations moving forward so that we don’t actually suffer from the worst possible outcomes of pandemic disease.”
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Polio Found in London Sewage, But Risk of Infection Considered Low
Risk of infection from the disease, which causes paralysis in children in under 1% of cases, was low because of high vaccination rates
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Microsoft: Russian Cyber Spying Targets 42 Ukraine Allies
Coinciding with unrelenting cyberattacks against Ukraine, state-backed Russian hackers have engaged in “strategic espionage” against governments, think tanks, businesses and aid groups in 42 countries supporting Kyiv, Microsoft said in a report Wednesday.
“Since the start of the war, the Russian targeting [of Ukraine’s allies] has been successful 29 percent of the time,” Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote, with data stolen in at least one-quarter of the successful network intrusions.
“As a coalition of countries has come together to defend Ukraine, Russian intelligence agencies have stepped up network penetration and espionage activities targeting allied governments outside Ukraine,” Smith said.
Nearly two-thirds of the cyberespionage targets involved NATO members. The United States was the prime target and Poland, the main conduit for military assistance flowing to Ukraine, was No. 2. In the past two months, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Turkey have seen stepped-up targeting.
A striking exception is Estonia, where Microsoft said it has detected no Russian cyber intrusions since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24. The company credited Estonia’s adoption of cloud computing, where it’s easier to detect intruders. “Significant collective defensive weaknesses remain” among some other European governments, Microsoft said, without identifying them.
Half of the 128 organizations targeted are government agencies and 12% are nongovernmental agencies, typically think tanks or humanitarian groups, according to the 28-page report. Other targets include telecommunications, energy and defense companies.
Microsoft said Ukraine’s cyber defenses “have proven stronger” overall than Russia’s capabilities in “waves of destructive cyberattacks against 48 distinct Ukrainian agencies and enterprises.” Moscow’s military hackers have been cautious not to unleash destructive data-destroying worms that could spread outside Ukraine, as the NotPetya virus did in 2017, the report noted.
“During the past month, as the Russian military moved to concentrate its attacks in the Donbas region, the number of destructive attacks has fallen,” according to the report, “Defending Ukraine: Early Lessons from the Cyber War.” The Redmond, Washington, company has unique insight in the domain due to the ubiquity of its software and threat detection teams.
Microsoft said Ukraine has also set an example in data safeguarding. Ukraine went from storing its data locally on servers in government buildings a week before the Russian invasion — making them vulnerable to aerial attack — to dispersing that data in the cloud, hosted in data centers across Europe.
The report also assessed Russian disinformation and propaganda aimed at “undermining Western unity and deflecting criticism of Russian military war crimes” and wooing people in nonaligned countries.
Using artificial intelligence tools, Microsoft said, it estimated “Russian cyber influence operations successfully increased the spread of Russian propaganda after the war began by 216 percent in Ukraine and 82 percent in the United States.”
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US Considering Limiting Nicotine in Cigarettes
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is proposing a limit on the amount of nicotine allowed in cigarettes with an aim to make it easier for people to quit using them and to prevent young people who experiment with cigarettes from becoming addicted.
The proposed limit appeared Tuesday among a number of actions the Biden administration is considering.
The FDA said more than half of adults who smoke cigarettes make a serious attempt at quitting each year, but that most fail because of the addictiveness of cigarettes.
“The goal of the potential rule would be to reduce youth use, addiction and death,” the agency said.
“Nicotine is powerfully addictive,” FDA Commissioner Robert Califf said in a statement. “Making cigarettes and other combusted tobacco products minimally addictive or non-addictive would help save lives.”
Some information for this report came from Agence France-Presse and Reuters
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Civil Jury Finds Bill Cosby Sexually Abused Teenager in 1975
Jurors at a civil trial found Tuesday that Bill Cosby sexually abused a 16-year-old girl at the Playboy Mansion in 1975.
The Los Angeles County jury delivered the verdict in favor of Judy Huth, who is now 64, and awarded her $500,000.
Jurors found that Cosby intentionally caused harmful sexual contact with Huth, that he reasonably believed she was under 18, and that his conduct was driven by unnatural or abnormal sexual interest in a minor.
The jurors’ decision is a major legal defeat for the 84-year-old entertainer once hailed as “America’s Dad.” It comes nearly a year after his Pennsylvania criminal conviction for sexual assault was thrown out, and he was freed from prison. Huth’s lawsuit was one of the last remaining legal claims against him after his insurer settled many others against his will.
Cosby did not attend the trial or testify in person, but short clips from a 2015 video deposition were played for jurors in which he denied any sexual contact with Huth. He continues to deny the allegation through his attorney and publicist.
Jurors had already reached conclusions on nearly every question on their verdict form, including whether Cosby abused Huth and whether she deserved damages, after two days of deliberations on Friday. But the jury foreperson could not serve further because of a personal commitment, and the panel had to start deliberating from scratch with an alternate juror on Monday.
Cosby’s attorneys agreed that Cosby met Huth and her high school friend on a Southern California film set in April of 1975, then took them to the Playboy Mansion a few days later.
Huth’s friend Donna Samuelson, a key witness, took photos at the mansion of Huth and Cosby, which loomed large at the trial.
Huth testified that in a bedroom adjacent to a game room where the three had been hanging out, Cosby attempted to put his hand down her pants, then exposed himself and forced her to perform a sex act.
Huth filed her lawsuit in 2014, saying that her son turning 15 — the age she initially remembered being when she went to the mansion — and a wave of other women accusing Cosby of similar acts brought fresh trauma over what she had been through as a teenager.
Huth’s attorney, Nathan Goldberg, told the jury of nine women and three men during closing arguments Wednesday that “my client deserves to have Mr. Cosby held accountable for what he did.”
“Each of you knows in your heart that Mr. Cosby sexually assaulted Miss Huth,” Goldberg said.
A majority of jurors apparently agreed, giving Huth a victory in a suit that took eight years and overcame many hurdles just to get to trial.
During their testimony, Cosby attorney Jennifer Bonjean consistently challenged Huth and Samuelson over errors in detail in their stories, and a similarity in the accounts that the lawyer said represented coordination between the two women.
This included the women saying in pre-trial depositions and police interviews that Samuelson had played Donkey Kong that day, a game not released until six years later.
Bonjean made much of this, in what both sides came to call the “Donkey Kong defense.”
Goldberg asked jurors to look past the small errors in detail that he said were inevitable in stories that were 45 years old and focus on the major issues behind the allegations. He pointed out to jurors that Samuelson said “games like Donkey Kong” when she first mentioned it in her deposition.
The Cosby lawyer began her closing arguments by saying, “It’s on like Donkey Kong,” and finished by declaring, “Game over.”
Huth’s attorney reacted with outrage during his rebuttal.
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Elon Musk’s $44 Billion Twitter Deal Gets Board Endorsement
Twitter’s board has recommended unanimously that shareholders approve the proposed $44 billion sale of the company to billionaire and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, according to a regulatory filing Tuesday.
Musk reiterated his desire to move forward with the acquisition last week during a virtual meeting with Twitter employees, though shares of Twitter remain far below his offering price, signaling considerable doubt that it will happen.
Shares rose about 3% to $38.98 before the opening bell Tuesday, far short of the $54.20 per-share that Musk has offered for each share. The company’s stock last reached that level on April 5 when it offered Musk a seat on the board before he had offered to buy all of Twitter.
In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission detailing on Tuesday detailing a litter to investors, Twitter’s board of directors said that it “unanimously recommends that you vote (for) the adoption of the merger agreement.” If the deal were to close now, investors in the company would pocket a profit of $15.22 for each share they own.
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Investors Coping With Cryptocurrency Plunge
“I’m in a cryptocurrency chat group at work,” software engineer Adam Hickey of San Diego, California told VOA.
Over the last few days, Hickey said, members of the group have been writing things like, “Bloodbath” and, “Are we still good?”
“It shook me, honestly,” he admitted. “I just had to stop looking at my balance. At one point, months ago, my investment in crypto had tripled. Now I’m down 40%.”
Hickey is far from alone. Serious and casual investors across the United States have seen the value of their investments in the publicly available digital asset known as cryptocurrency shrink dramatically in recent months, with steep plunges recorded in just the last week.
The value of bitcoin, the most popular form of cryptocurrency, has dropped more than 70% since its peak in November of last year, erasing more than 18 months of growth and causing many investors to wonder if this is the bottom, or if the worst is still to come.
“I have to remind myself that when I got into bitcoin in 2017, it was more of something I just kind of hoped would be the next Amazon.com,” Hickey said. Like many others, Hickey dreamed cryptocurrency could be a way to get rich in the long-term, or at least would be a part of his retirement savings.
“I’ve always seen it as a long-term investment. Still, this is the most nervous I’ve been about it,” he said. “You hear people on social media saying this is all a Ponzi scheme. Now I’m having thoughts like maybe those warnings are right – that the people pushing bitcoin so hard are the ones who bought it at the earliest low prices. Of course they want people to buy and drive the value back up. It’s good for them, but is it good for me?”
Getting in
Those skeptical of cryptocurrency point to its lack of regulatory oversight from government as a major reason for concern, making it susceptible to scams and wild price fluctuations.
“I’ve always seen it as a highly speculative investment,” said Marigny deMauriac, a certified financial planner in New Orleans, Louisiana. “This isn’t something any individual should have the majority of their wealth in unless they’re looking to take a significant amount of unnecessary risk.”
“I tell my clients to stay clear of investing any significant portion of their wealth in cryptocurrency, or any other highly speculative investment type,” deMaruiac told VOA. Many of the most ardent cryptocurrency supporters, however, invest precisely because it isn’t tied to governments as traditional currencies are. Digital currency’s demonstrated capacity for meteoric rises is a big part of its appeal.
Steve Ryan, a self-employed poker player living in Las Vegas, Nevada, began investing in digital currency nearly a decade ago. “I’ve been in it for so long, I understand this stuff much better than your average person who only read about it on the internet a year or two ago,” he said.
Ryan invested on the advice of entrepreneurial friends; back when a single bitcoin sold for only a couple of hundred dollars as opposed to the tens of thousands they sell for today.
“Most of my money is in crypto, and I wish I had kept more in there rather than selling some of it,” he told VOA. “Even after this downturn, I’d be a multimillionaire had I kept it all in.”
Losing value
U.S. inflation at 40-year highs has caused the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates, sending jitters throughout financial markets. At the same time, some Americans have lost their appetite for riskier investments.
Many have sold their cryptocurrency holdings and reinvested in safer, more stable assets. At the end of last week, the value of one share of bitcoin dropped below $18,000 from a high late last year of more than $64,000. The total crypto market value dropped from a peak of $3.2 trillion to below $1 trillion.
“I’m definitely worried today,” Ryan said on Saturday as bitcoin reached its lowest point since December 2020.
Still, Ryan maintained he still believes in bitcoin.
“I’m worried because we’ve got a war going on in Europe, huge amounts of inflation, we’re trying to recover from the impacts of a pandemic, and governments might try to regulate bitcoin,” he said. “But I’m not worried about bitcoin itself – I think it’s as solid as ever. That’s how cycles work and this could prove to be one of the best times in history to get into crypto.”
Casual cryptocurrency investors may not be so sure, but many seem willing to hold on to what they have in the hopes of a rebound. “Of course, when it rose to over $60,000, I had big dreams that I could earn enough money to go on a big trip or to make a down payment on a property,” said Joe Frisard, a semi-retired resident of Atlanta, Georgia.
The downturn has lowered Frisard’s ambitions, he acknowledged, but he still planned on hanging on to the cryptocurrency he hadn’t already sold when it was closer to its peak. “I’ve lost a good bit of money in the stock market, too,” he said, “but I’m not looking to dump my stocks. They’re a long-term investment and I see bitcoin in a similar way.”
Weathering the storm
Gordon Henderson, a retired collegiate marching band director from Los Angeles, California, is also not panicking.
“I’m much more concerned about my stocks in my retirement fund than in my relatively small crypto holdings,” he said. Henderson remembers his father, at age 69 in 1987, converting his retirement fund to cash before a recession temporarily decimated the stock market.
“He was pretty proud of his timing,” Henderson recalled, “but in reality, he would have ended up with eight times more money if he had weathered the storm and kept his money in the stock market for another two decades. That’s how I look at cryptocurrency. I’ll hang onto it and maybe it will pay for college for my kids. If not, I was prepared for the loss.”
Colin Ash, an urban planner in New Orleans, Louisiana, has owned bitcoin for years, but said he thinks of it as “a fun gamble.”
“Of course, I wish I would have timed it perfectly and sold it all at the peak,” he said, “but it’s not realistic to think you can ever do that with any kind of investment. I think of it as something separate from the rest of my money. If something comes of it in the long run, then great. If not, at least I already sold some and paid off some debt.”
For Hickey in San Diego, as well as many other investors, the key is to not invest more than you can afford to lose, particularly with an asset as speculative as cryptocurrency.
“Under the current circumstances, with everything falling so far down, I’ve decided to halt my weekly recurring purchase of bitcoin,” he said. “I think I’m done investing for now.”
He paused for a moment, and then said, “Now, that’s kind of hard, because if you want to make money you should buy low and sell high. Bitcoin prices are low, so I’ll probably be back in before you know it.”
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Oscar-Winning Director Paul Haggis Arrested in Italy on Sexual Assault Charges
Oscar-winning Canadian screenwriter and director Paul Haggis is under house arrest in southern Italy on charges of sexual assault and aggravated personal injury, accusations that Haggis denies, his lawyers said on Monday.
“Mr. Paul Haggis was detained on Sunday with an emergency measure issued by the Brindisi prosecutors and is now under house arrest in Ostuni. He will be questioned by Thursday by a judge who will have to decide whether or not to confirm the detention,” his Italian lawyer Michele Laforgia told Reuters.
Haggis was charged with forcing a young non-Italian woman to have sexual intercourse against her will the course of two days in Ostuni, Italy, public prosecutors in Brindisi said in a statement on Sunday.
“Under Italian Law, I cannot discuss the evidence. That said, I am confident that all allegations will be dismissed against Mr. Haggis,” Haggis’ personal attorney Priya Chaudhry said in a statement.
Both lawyers said Haggis was pleading innocent and would cooperate with authorities.
“A young foreign woman was forced to seek medical care” following the sexual relations, the prosecutors said in the statement.
They said that on Sunday after the non-consensual relations that man accompanied the woman to Brindisi airport, where she was left despite her “precarious physical and psychological conditions.”
An investigative source told Reuters the unidentified young woman will be questioned in the coming 10 days in what is known in Italy as an evidentiary incident, setting out evidence for a possible future trial.
Haggis, 69, wrote “Million Dollar Baby” and co-wrote and directed “Crash,” both of which he won an Oscar for.
In 2018 he denied accusations of sexual misconduct made by four women, including two who accused him of rape.
Haggis was in Ostuni to hold several masterclasses at the Allora Fest, a new film event being launched by Los Angeles-based Italian journalist Silvia Bizio and Spanish art critic Sol Costales Doulton that is set to run from June 21 to June 26.
The Allora Fest said they “learned with dismay and shock the news,” adding that the festival’s directors “immediately proceeded to remove any participation of the director from the event.”
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BTS Break Sparks Debate on Activism, Military Exemptions
The surprise announcement by BTS last week that they were taking a break to focus on members’ solo projects stunned their global fanbase, shaking their label’s stock price and leaving many questions about the K-pop supergroup’s future.
HYBE, the company behind the band, denied the group was taking a hiatus — a word used in a translation of the group’s emotional dinnertime video announcement. In the days since, band members have remained active on social media, continuing the stream of posts, photos and assurances that the band wasn’t breaking up.
Despite the immediate impacts — HYBE’s stock initially dropped more than 25% and has yet to fully recover — several factors may still affect BTS’ future. One is looming military enlistment for older BTS members, as well as how engaged the group and their devoted fans, known as ARMY, will continue to be in social issues.
In 2020, at the height of BTS’ success, the South Korean government revised the country’s military law that requires able-bodied South Korean men to perform approximately two years of military service. The revised law allows top K-pop stars — including Jin, the oldest member of BTS — to defer their military service until they turn 30 if they’ve received government medals for heightening the country’s cultural reputation and apply for the postponement. All BTS members meet the criteria as recipients of government medals in 2018.
“Obviously, there’s a looming military enlistment so they might have thought it’d be good to do something individually before it’s too late and that’s why I think military enlistment was the biggest factor,” said Lee Dong Yeun, a professor at Korea National University of Arts.
There have been calls — including from South Korea’s former culture minister — for an exemption for BTS because of their contribution to heightening South Korea’s international reputation. But critics say that such an exemption would be bending the conscription rules to favor the privileged.
Jin, 29, is expected to enlist this year unless he receives an exemption.
Military enlistment of members has always been a headache for HYBE; BTS once accounted for 90% of the label’s profit. Currently, the group makes up 50%-60% of the label’s profit according to a report from eBest Investment & Securities.
The eBest report noted that the rapid stock plunge might have resulted from an “anticipation that the activities as the whole group might be uncertain after being discharged from the military.”
HYBE has been attempting to diversify its portfolio by debuting new K-pop bands, making online games, and rolling out Korean language tutorials.
As the most successful K-pop band to date with hits like “Dynamite” and “Butter,” BTS has for years commanded tremendous attention on social media and with each new music release. They recently performed several sold-out shows in the United States, became the first K-pop act to get a Grammy Award nomination, released an anthology album, “Proof,” and channeled their global influence with an address at the United Nations and a trip to the White House to campaign against hate crimes directed at Asians.
“Once you achieve success like BTS achieved success, then it means there’s a constant expectation to continue doing something that is connected to what you’ve already done, where you’ve already been. In the most recent releases that BTS has brought out, also we can see how they continually reflect back on where they have been,” said CedarBough Saeji, professor of Korean and East Asian Studies at Pusan National University.
She said Tuesday’s announcement signaled the band’s intention to figure out “where they are going for themselves without interference from other people” and “being able to choose their own path forward as artists.”
Last week’s announcement also leaves in doubt the group’s social justice efforts, which have included vocal support for the Black Lives Matter movement and anti-violence campaigns. BTS’ legions of fans have embraced the causes, matching a $1 million donation to Black Lives Matter after George Floyd’s death.
But the group has faced mushrooming questions about why it isn’t as vocal about discrimination in their own country.
A leading South Korean newspaper recently published a column in which the author mused why South Korea, despite having BTS — “the ambassador of anti-discrimination and human rights” — has struggled to enact an anti-discrimination law for 15 years.
“It’s an irony,” the writer said. “South Korea needs their force for good.”
The country’s lack of an anti-discrimination law has led to unfair treatment against women and foreigners, among others.
Jumin Lee, the author of the book “Why Anti-Discrimination Law?” told the Associated Press that there’s a dire need for the anti-discrimination law in the country.
“South Korea is in essentially the same situation legally as America’s Jim Crow South. Equal protection exists as a constitutional concept, but there is no implementing legislation that allows the government to force private businesses to comply,” Lee said. “What that means in practice is that if I’m a business owner, I could post a sign on my door tomorrow that says, ‘no gays’ ‘no blacks’ or ‘no old people,’ and absent extraordinary intervention by the Constitutional Court, there’s very little the law can do to stop me.”
Lee recently expressed disappointment in the band for not speaking up about the important domestic issue.
“BTS and their business folks know that speaking up in the U.S. is profitable but doing the same back home would be more trouble than it’s worth. So, they don’t,” tweeted Lee after the band’s visit to Washington.
Despite that, Lee said the band’s silence is understandable, stating that BTS would be met with “indifference at best and hostility at worse” from politicians if they did speak up.
Some South Korean celebrities like singers Harisu and Ha:tfelt have been speaking out on touchy subjects such as the anti-discrimination law and feminism, despite backlashes.
After speaking out about the 2014 sinking of the Sewol ferry, which killed 304 people in one of the country’s worst disasters, Cannes-winning actor Song Kang-ho and director Park Chan-wook were blacklisted by the administration of the ousted President Park Geun-hye, noted Areum Jeong, a scholar of Korean pop culture.
“So, although many idols might be politically conscious, they might choose not to discuss social issues,” Jeong said.
Several BTS members said during last week’s announcement that they were struggling with the group’s successes and having trouble writing new songs.
“For me, it was like the group BTS was within my grasp until ‘On’ and ‘Dynamite,’ but after ‘Butter’ and ‘Permission to Dance,’ I didn’t know what kind of group we were anymore,” member RM said. “Whenever I write lyrics and songs, it’s really important what kind of story and message I want to give out but it was like that was gone now.”
While that clouds what BTS’ next steps might be, Saeji said their continued candor was necessary because of how much the group has impacted their fanbase.
“They’re meeting the fans with that same honesty and saying to them, ‘You had my help when I needed it. And now I need my help,’” she said. “‘I need to be on my own. To think for myself, to know what I want to write a lyric about, to understand my own mind, to become inspired on my own.’”
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South Korean Pianist, 18, Wins Van Cliburn Competition
An 18-year-old from South Korea has won the 16th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, one of the top showcases for the world’s best pianists.
The competition held in Fort Worth, Texas, ended Saturday night with Yunchan Lim becoming the competition’s youngest winner of the gold medal. His winnings include a cash award of $100,000 and three years of career management.
The silver medalist was Anna Geniushene, a 31-year-old from Russia, and the bronze medalist is Dmytro Choni, a 28-year-old from Ukraine.
Lim told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that he’ll discuss with his teacher what the next move for his career should be.
“I am still a student and I feel like I have to learn a lot still,” Lim said. “This is a great competition and I feel the burden of receiving this great honor and award so I will just push myself to live up to the honor I received today.”
The competition was founded in 1962 in honor of the celebrated pianist Van Cliburn, who lived in Fort Worth. Cliburn, who died in 2013 at age 78, played for U.S. presidents, royalty and heads of state around the world. He is best remembered for winning the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958, at the height of the Cold War.
The competition is traditionally held every four years. This year’s competition was originally scheduled for last year but was postponed due to the pandemic.
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Magnitude 6.0 Earthquake Shakes Central Taiwan Coast
A magnitude 6.0 earthquake shook Taiwan on Monday morning. There were no immediate reports of damage or injuries.
The quake struck at 9:05 a.m. at a depth of 6.8 kilometers (4.2 miles) in Hualien county, halfway down the east coast of the island, Taiwan’s Central Weather Bureau said.
It was felt across most of the island of 24 million people including to the north in Taipei, the capital. It was also felt across the Taiwan Strait in mainland China’s Fujian province, Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said.
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New York Pushes to Get Fired Workers Vaccinated, Rehired
New York City is making a push to give city workers fired earlier this year for not getting the COVID-19 vaccine a chance to get their old jobs back — if they get fully vaccinated.
In February, Mayor Eric Adams fired more than 1,400 workers who failed to comply with the vaccine mandate put in place by his predecessor, Bill de Blasio.
Just short of 600 unvaccinated non-Department of Education workers are receiving a letter with details, and DOE employees are expected to receive a letter later in the summer, a city spokesperson said, adding that 97% of workers are vaccinated and that the goal has always been “vaccination rather than termination.”
The development was first reported by the New York Post.
It wasn’t clear how many workers would be affected and a timeline for returning to work was not disclosed.
The mandate required vaccinations as a workplace safety rule. In March, Adams was the target of criticism for exempting athletes and performers not based in New York City from the city’s vaccine mandate, while keeping the rule in place for private and public workers.
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Swimming—FINA Votes to Restrict Transgender Participation in Elite Women’s Competition
Swimming’s world governing body FINA on Sunday voted to restrict the participation of transgender athletes in elite women’s competitions and create a working group to establish an “open” category for them in some events as part of its new policy.
Transgender rights has become a major talking point as sports seek to balance inclusivity while ensuring there is no unfair advantage.
The decision, the strictest by any Olympic sports body, was made during FINA’s extraordinary general congress after members heard a report from a transgender task force comprising leading medical, legal and sports figures.
The new eligibility policy for FINA competitions states that male-to-female transgender athletes are eligible to compete only if “they can establish to FINA’s comfortable satisfaction that they have not experienced any part of male puberty beyond Tanner Stage 2 (of puberty) or before age 12, whichever is later.”
The policy was passed with a roughly 71% majority after it was put to the members of 152 national federations with voting rights who had gathered for the congress at the Puskas Arena.
“We have to protect the rights of our athletes to compete, but we also have to protect competitive fairness at our events, especially the women’s category at FINA competitions,” said FINA President Husain Al-Musallam.
“FINA will always welcome every athlete. The creation of an open category will mean that everybody has the opportunity to compete at an elite level. This has not been done before, so FINA will need to lead the way. I want all athletes to feel included in being able to develop ideas during this process.”
The issue of transgender inclusion in sport is highly divisive, particularly in the United States where it has become a weapon in a so-called “culture war” between conservatives and progressives.
The new FINA policy also opens up eligibility to those who have “complete androgen insensitivity and therefore could not experience male puberty.”
Swimmers who have had “male puberty suppressed beginning at Tanner Stage 2 or before age 12, whichever is later, and they have since continuously maintained their testosterone levels in serum (or plasma) below 2.5 nmol/L.” are also allowed to compete in women’s races.
Female-to-male transgender athletes (transgender men) are fully eligible to compete in men’s swimming competitions.
Advocates for transgender inclusion argue that not enough studies have yet been done on the impact of transition on physical performance, and that elite athletes are often physical outliers in any case.
The debate intensified after University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas became the first transgender NCAA champion in Division I history after winning the women’s 500-yard freestyle earlier this year.
That followed New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard becoming the first transgender athlete to compete at the Olympic Games in Tokyo last year.
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American Actor Helps Ukraine, Gets In Touch With His Heritage
American actor and director Liev Schreiber says events in Ukraine didn’t impact him much before the Russian invasion. Due to the war, he became deeply involved in charity work and rediscovered the Ukrainian part of his heritage. VOA’s Tatiana Vorozhko reports.
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