An organ transplant surgeon from New York is planning a third trip to Ukraine, where he has been working with doctors to help patients caught up in Russia’s war on Ukraine. The surgeon, Dr. Robert Montgomery, is also working to raise money to buy medical equipment for a hospital in Lviv. Iryna Solomko has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. VOA footage by Pavlo Terekhov.
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Month: April 2023
US Invests in Alternative Solar Tech, More Solar for Renters
The Biden administration announced more than $80 million in funding Thursday in a push to produce more solar panels in the U.S., make solar energy available to more people, and pursue superior alternatives to the ubiquitous sparkly panels made with silicon.
The initiative, spearheaded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and known as Community solar, encompasses a variety of arrangements where renters and people who don’t control their rooftops can still get their electricity from solar power. Two weeks ago, Vice President Kamala Harris announced what the administration said was the largest community solar effort ever in the United States.
Now it is set to spend $52 million on 19 solar projects across a dozen states, including $10 million from the infrastructure law, as well as $30 million on technologies that will help integrate solar electricity into the grid.
The DOE also selected 25 teams to participate in a $10 million competition designed to fast-track the efforts of solar developers working on community solar projects.
The Inflation Reduction Act already offers incentives to build large solar generation projects, such as renewable energy tax credits. But Ali Zaidi, White House national climate adviser, said the new money focuses on meeting the nation’s climate goals in a way that benefits more communities.
“It’s lifting up our workers and our communities. And that’s, I think, what really excites us about this work,” Zaidi said. “It’s a chance not just to tackle the climate crisis, but to bring economic opportunity to every zip code of America.”
The investments will help people save on their electricity bills and make the electricity grid more reliable, secure, and resilient in the face of a changing climate, said Becca Jones-Albertus, director of the energy department’s Solar Energy Technologies Office.
Jones-Albertus said she’s particularly excited about the support for community solar projects, since half of Americans don’t live in a situation where they can buy their own solar and put in on the roof.
Michael Jung, executive director of the ICF Climate Center agreed. “Community solar can help address equity concerns, as most current rooftop solar panels benefit owners of single-family homes,” he said.
In typical community solar projects, households can invest in or subscribe to part of a larger solar array offsite. “What we’re doing here is trying to unlock the community solar market,” Jones-Albertus said.
The U.S. has 5.3 gigawatts of installed community solar capacity currently, according to the latest estimates. The goal is that by 2025, five million households will have access to it — about three times as many as today — saving $1 billion on their electricity bills, according to Jones-Albertus.
The new funding also highlights investment in a next generation of solar technologies, intended to wring more electricity out of the same amount of solar panels. Currently only about 20% of the sun’s energy is converted to electricity in crystalline silicon solar cells, which is what most solar panels are made of. There has long been hope for higher efficiency, and today’s announcement puts some money towards developing two alternatives: perovskite and cadmium telluride (CdTe) solar cells. Zaidi said this will allow the U.S. to be “the innovation engine that tackles the climate crisis.”
Joshua Rhodes, a scientist at the University of Texas at Austin said the investment in perovskites is good news. They can be produced more cheaply than silicon and are far more tolerant of defects, he said. They can also be built into textured and curved surfaces, which opens up more applications for their use than traditional rigid panels. Most silicon is produced in China and Russia, Rhodes pointed out.
Cadmium telluride solar can be made quickly and at a low cost, but further research is needed to improve how efficient the material is at converting sunlight to electrons.
Cadmium is also toxic and people shouldn’t be exposed to it. Jones-Albertus said that in cadmium telluride solar technology, the compound is encapsulated in glass and additional protective layers.
The new funds will also help recycle solar panels and reuse rare earth elements and materials. “One of the most important ways we can make sure CdTe remains in a safe compound form is ensuring that all solar panels made in the U.S. can be reused or recycled at the end of their life cycle,” Jones-Albertus explained.
Recycling solar panels also reduces the need for mining, which damages landscapes and uses a lot of energy, in part to operate the heavy machinery. Eight of the projects in Thursday’s announcement focus on improving solar panel recycling, for a total of about $10 million.
Clean energy is a fit for every state in the country, the administration said. One solar project in Shungnak, Alaska, was able to eliminate the need to keep making electricity by burning diesel fuel, a method sometimes used in remote communities that is not healthy for people and contributes to climate change.
“Alaska is not a place that folks often think of when they think about solar, but this energy can be an economic and affordable resource in all parts of the country,” said Jones-Albertus.
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Dame Edna Creator Barry Humphries Dies in Sydney at 89
Tony Award-winning comedian Barry Humphries, internationally renowned for his garish stage persona Dame Edna Everage, a condescending and imperfectly-veiled snob whose evolving character has delighted audiences over seven decades, has died. He was 89.
His death in a Sydney, Australia, hospital, where he spent several days with complications following hip surgery, was confirmed by his family.
“He was completely himself until the very end, never losing his brilliant mind, his unique wit and generosity of spirit,” a family statement said. “With over 70 years on the stage, he was an entertainer to his core, touring up until the last year of his life and planning more shows that will sadly never be.”
Humphries had lived in London for decades and returned to native Australia in December for Christmas.
He told The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper last month that his physiotherapy had been “agony” following his fall and hip replacement.
“It was the most ridiculous thing, like all domestic incidents are,” Humphries said of his fall. “I was reaching for a book, my foot got caught on a rug or something, and down I went.”
Humphries has remained an active entertainer, touring Britain last year with his one-man show “The Man Behind the Mask.”
Dame Edna’s roots
The character of Dame Edna began as a dowdy Mrs. Norm Everage, who first took to the stage in Humphries’ hometown of Melbourne in the mid-1950s. She reflected a postwar suburban inertia and cultural blandness that Humphries found stifling.
Edna is one of Humphries’ several enduring characters. The next most famous is Sir Les Patterson, an ever-drunk, disheveled and lecherous Australian cultural attache.
Patterson reflected a perception of Australia as a Western cultural wasteland that drove Humphries along with many leading Australian intellectuals to London.
Humphries, a law school dropout, found major success as an actor, writer and entertainer in Britain in the 1970s, but the United States was an ambition that he found stubbornly elusive.
A high point in the United States was a Tony Award in 2000 for his Broadway show “Dame Edna: The Royal Tour.”
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese paid tribute to the celebrated comedian.
“For 89 years, Barry Humphries entertained us through a galaxy of personas, from Dame Edna to Sandy Stone,” Albanese tweeted, referring to the melancholic and rambling Stone, one of Humphries’ most enduring characters. “But the brightest star in that galaxy was always Barry. A great wit, satirist, writer and an absolute one-of-kind, he was both gifted and a gift.”
British comedian Ricky Gervais tweeted: “Farewell, Barry Humphries, you comedy genius.”
Piers Morgan, British television personality, tweeted: “One of the funniest people I’ve ever met.”
“A wondrously intelligent, entertaining, daring, provocative, mischievous comedy Genius,” Morgan added.
Actor, writer, painter
The multi-talented Humphries was also a respected character actor with many stage and screen credits, an author of novels and an autobiography, and an accomplished landscape painter.
John Barry Humphries was born in Melbourne on Feb. 17, 1934. His parents were comfortable, loving and strait-laced, and must have wondered about their eldest son, whom they called Sunny Sam. His mother used to tell him to stop drawing attention to himself.
Before he had finished at the prestigious Melbourne Grammar School, Humphries was more interested in art and secondhand bookshops than football. At 16, his favorite author was Kafka and later said he “felt a little foreign.”
He spent two years at Melbourne University, where he embraced Dadaism — the subversive, anarchic and absurdist European art movement.
His contributions included “Pus In Boots,” waterproof rubber boots filled with custard, and on the performance art side, getting on a tram with an apparently blind accomplice whom Humphries would kick in the shins while yelling “Get out of my way, you disgusting blind person.”
In 1959, he settled in London and was soon working in Peter Cook’s comedy venue The Establishment. He played Sowerberry in the original London production of “Oliver!” in 1960 and repeated the role on Broadway. He appeared with Spike Milligan and William Rushton in “Treasure Island.”
Humphries, with New Zealand artist Nicholas Garland, created the Barry McKenzie comic strip for the satirical magazine Private Eye in 1964.
When the strips came out as a book, the Australian government banned it because it “relied on indecency for its humor.” Humphries professed delight at the publicity and implored authorities not to lift the ban.
By then Humphries’ drinking was out of control. In Melbourne in late 1970, he was charged with being drunk and disorderly. He finally admitted himself to a hospital specializing in alcoholism for the treatment that would turn him into a lifelong abstainer.
In 1972 came the first Barry McKenzie film — financially supported by the Australian government, despite the earlier ban. It was savaged by the critics, largely because they trembled at what the world’s first film to feature beer induced vomiting would do to Australia’s image overseas.
But it was a popular success and a sequel two years later included then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam knighting Edna, who was McKenzie’s aunt.
Married four times, Humphries is survived by his wife Lizzie Spender, four children and 10 grandchildren.
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Calling Beer Champagne Leaves French Producers Frothing
The guardians of Champagne will let no one take the name of the bubbly beverage in vain, not even a U.S. beer behemoth.
For years, Miller High Life has used the “Champagne of Beers” slogan. This week, that appropriation became impossible to swallow.
At the request of the trade body defending the interests of houses and growers of the northeastern French sparkling wine, Belgian customs crushed more than 2,000 cans of Miller High Life advertised as such.
The Comité Champagne asked for the destruction of a shipment of 2,352 cans on the grounds that the century-old motto used by the American brewery infringes the protected designation of origin “Champagne.”
The consignment was intercepted in the Belgian port of Antwerp in early February, a spokesperson at the Belgian Customs Administration said on Friday, and was destined for Germany. Belgian customs declined to say who had ordered the beers.
The buyer in Germany “was informed and did not contest the decision,” the trade organization said in a statement.
Frederick Miller, a German immigrant to the US, founded the Miller Brewing Company in the 1850s. Miller High Life, its oldest brand, was launched as its flagship in 1903.
According to the Milwaukee-based brand’s website, the company started to use the “Champagne of Bottle Beers” nickname three years later. It was shortened to “The Champagne of Beers” in 1969. The beer has also been available in champagne-style 750-milliliter bottles during festive seasons.
No matter how popular the slogan is in the United States, it is incompatible with European Union rules which make clear that goods infringing a protected designation of origin can be treated as counterfeit.
The 27-nation bloc has a system of protected geographical designations created to guarantee the true origin and quality of artisanal food, wine and spirits, and protect them from imitation. That market is worth nearly 75 billion euros ($87 billion) annually — half of it in wines, according to a 2020 study by the EU’s executive arm.
Charles Goemaere, the managing director of the Comité Champagne, said the destruction of the beers “confirms the importance that the European Union attaches to designations of origin and rewards the determination of the Champagne producers to protect their designation.”
Molson Coors Beverage Co., which which owns the Miller High Life brand, said in a statement to The Associated Press that it “respects local restrictions” around the word Champagne.
“But we remain proud of Miller High Life, its nickname and its Milwaukee, Wisconsin provenance,” the company said. “We invite our friends in Europe to the U.S. any time to toast the High Life together.”
Molson Coors Beverage Co. added that it does not currently export Miller High Life to the EU and “we frankly don’t quite know how or why it got there, or why it was headed for Germany.”
Belgian customs said the destruction of the cans was paid for by the Comité Champagne. According to their joint statement, it was carried out “with the utmost respect for environmental concerns by ensuring that the entire batch, both contents and container, was recycled in an environmentally responsible manner.”
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Did the AI-Generated Drake Song Breach Copyright?
A viral AI-generated song imitating Drake and The Weeknd was pulled from streaming services this week, but did it breach copyright as claimed by record label Universal?
Created by someone called @ghostwriter, Heart On My Sleeve racked up millions of listens before Universal Music Group asked for its removal from Spotify, Apple Music and other platforms.
However, Andres Guadamuz, who teaches intellectual property law at Britain’s University of Sussex, is not convinced that the song breached copyright.
As similar cases look set to multiply — with an uncanny AI replication of Liam Gallagher from Oasis causing buzz — he spoke to AFP about some of the issues being raised.
Did the song breach copyright?
The underlying music on Heart On My Sleeve was new, only the sound of the voice was familiar, “and you can’t copyright the sound of someone’s voice,” Guadamuz said.
Perhaps the furor around AI impersonators may lead to copyright being expanded to include voice, rather than just melody, lyrics and other created elements, “but that would be problematic,” Guadamuz added.
“What you’re protecting with copyright is the expression of an idea, and voice isn’t really that,” he said.
He said Universal probably claimed copyright infringement because it is the simplest route to removing content, with established procedures in place with streaming platforms.
Were other rights breached?
An AI-generated impersonator may be breaching other laws.
If an artist has a distinctive voice or image, this is potentially protected under “publicity rights” in the United States or similar image rights in other countries.
Bette Midler won a case against Ford in 1988 for using an impersonator of her in an ad. Tom Waits won a similar case in 1993 against the Frito-Lays potato chips company.
The problem, said Guadamuz, is that enforcement of these rights is “very hit and miss” and taken much more seriously in some countries than others.
And streaming platforms currently lack straightforward mechanisms for removing content seen as breaching image rights.
What comes next?
The big upcoming legal fight is over how AI programs are trained.
It may be argued that inputting existing Drake and Weeknd songs to train an AI program may be a breach of copyright, but Guadamuz said this issue was far from settled.
“You need to copy the music in order to train the AI and so that unauthorized copying could potentially be copyright infringement,” he said.
“But defendants will say it’s fair use. They are using it to train a machine, teaching it to listen to music, and then removing the copies,” he said. “Ultimately, we will have to wait and see for the case law to be decided.”
But it is almost certainly too late to stem the flood.
“Bands are going to have to decide whether they want to pursue this in court, and copyright cases are expensive,” said Guadamuz.
“Some artists may lean into the technology and start using it themselves, especially if they start losing their voice.”
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US Supreme Court Upholds Abortion Pill Access for Now
The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday preserved access to the abortion drug mifepristone while a lawsuit challenging the use of the drug plays out in lower courts.
The high court issued a brief on Friday evening granting emergency requests from the Biden administration and the drug’s manufacturer, Danco Laboratories, to continue to allow women to access the drug. The ruling puts on hold a preliminary injunction from a federal judge in Texas, who earlier this month ordered restrictions on the abortion drug.
Two justices on the nine-member court — conservatives Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito — dissented from the decision.
The court had set a deadline for itself of midnight Friday to either approve the Biden administration’s request — to keep the drug available while the administration challenges a lower court ruling — or allow limited access to the drug to take effect.
The lower court ruling in question was issued April 7 by a federal judge in Texas after a coalition of anti-abortion groups and doctors argued the U.S. drug regulator, the Food and Drug Administration, improperly approved mifepristone in 2000 and did not fully assess its risks and benefits.
The ruling, which strictly limits availability of the drug, was appealed, and while an appeals court halted a portion of the ruling that would have invalidated the FDA approval, it left the limits on the drug’s availability in place.
The case is expected to be further appealed and could eventually end up being decided by the Supreme Court. Friday’s high court ruling makes it likely that access to mifepristone will continue at least into next year as the appeals play out.
Used in half of all abortions in US
Mifepristone is used in about half of all abortions nationwide. It has been used by as many as 5 million women since it was first approved in 2000, and major medical organizations say it has a strong safety record. The drug is also commonly used to help manage miscarriages.
Currently, the drug can be used by women to end pregnancies in the first 10 weeks, without a surgical procedure. It is available through the mail without an in-person visit to a doctor.
At the time the lower court ruling was made restricting access to the drug, President Joe Biden said in a statement the judge substituted his own judgment for that of the FDA, the expert agency responsible for approving drugs.
Biden said if the ruling is allowed to stand, “there will be virtually no prescription approved by the FDA that would be safe from these kinds of political, ideological attacks.”
Fight follows reversal of Roe v. Wade
The judge who made the ruling, U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, was appointed by former President Donald Trump, as were the judges on the appeals court that maintained limits on the availability of the drug.
The fight over mifepristone comes after the conservative majority on the Supreme Court last year overturned the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide. The court ruled it is now up to individual states to decide whether abortion should be legal or not.
The FDA has in recent years made it easier to use mifepristone, including in 2016 approving its use to 10 weeks of pregnancy, up from seven, and in 2021 allowing it to be distributed by mail in states that allow access.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
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US-China Competition in Tech Expands to AI Regulations
Competition between the U.S. and China in artificial intelligence has expanded into a race to design and implement comprehensive AI regulations.
The efforts to come up with rules to ensure AI’s trustworthiness, safety and transparency come at a time when governments around the world are exploring the impact of the technology on national security and education.
ChatGPT, a chatbot that mimics human conversation, has received massive attention since its debut in November. Its ability to give sophisticated answers to complex questions with a language fluency comparable to that of humans has caught the world by surprise. Yet its many flaws, including its ostensibly coherent responses laden with misleading information and apparent bias, have prompted tech leaders in the U.S. to sound the alarm.
“What happens when something vastly smarter than the smartest person comes along in silicon form? It’s very difficult to predict what will happen in that circumstance,” said Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk in an interview with Fox News. He warned that artificial intelligence could lead to “civilization destruction” without regulations in place.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai echoed that sentiment. “Over time there has to be regulation. There have to be consequences for creating deep fake videos which cause harm to society,” Pichai said in an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” program.
Jessica Brandt, policy director for the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative at the Brookings Institution, told VOA Mandarin, “Business leaders understand that regulators will be watching this space closely, and they have an interest in shaping the approaches regulators will take.”
US grapples with regulations
AI regulation is still nascent in the U.S. Last year, the White House released voluntary guidance through a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights to help ensure users’ rights are protected as technology companies design and develop AI systems.
At a meeting of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology this month, President Joe Biden expressed concern about the potential dangers associated with AI and underscored that companies had a responsibility to ensure their products were safe before making them public.
On April 11, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, a Commerce Department agency that advises the White House on telecommunications and information policy, began to seek comment and public input with the aim of crafting a report on AI accountability.
The U.S. government is trying to find the right balance to regulate the industry without stifling innovation “in part because the U.S. having innovative leadership globally is a selling point for the United States’ hard and soft power,” said Johanna Costigan, a junior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis.
Brandt, with Brookings, said, “The challenge for liberal democracies is to ensure that AI is developed and deployed responsibly, while also supporting a vibrant innovation ecosystem that can attract talent and investment.”
Meanwhile, other Western countries have also started to work on regulating the emerging technology.
The U.K. government published its AI regulatory framework in March. Also last month, Italy temporarily blocked ChatGPT in the wake of a data breach, and the German commissioner for data protection said his country could follow suit.
The European Union stated it’s pushing for an AI strategy aimed at making Europe a world-class hub for AI that ensures AI is human-centric and trustworthy, and it hopes to lead the world in AI standards.
Cyber regulations in China
In contrast to the U.S., the Chinese government has already implemented regulations aimed at tech sectors related to AI. In the past few years, Beijing has introduced several major data protection laws to limit the power of tech companies and to protect consumers.
The Cybersecurity Law enacted in 2017 requires that data must be stored within China and operators must submit to government-conducted security checks. The Data Security Law enacted in 2021 sets a comprehensive legal framework for processing personal information when doing business in China. The Personal Information Protection Law established in the same year gives Chinese consumers the right to access, correct and delete their personal data gathered by businesses. Costigan, with the Asia Society, said these laws have laid the groundwork for future tech regulations.
In March 2022, China began to implement a regulation that governs the way technology companies can use recommendation algorithms. The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) now supervises the process of using big data to analyze user preferences and companies’ ability to push information to users.
On April 11, the CAC unveiled a draft for managing generative artificial intelligence services similar to ChatGPT, in an effort to mitigate the dangers of the new technology.
Costigan said the goal of the proposed generative AI regulation could be seen in Article 4 of the draft, which states that content generated by future AI products must reflect the country’s “core socialist values” and not encourage subversion of state power.
“Maintaining social stability is a key consideration,” she said. “The new draft regulation does some good and is unambiguously in line with [President] Xi Jinping’s desire to ensure that individuals, companies or organizations cannot use emerging AI applications to challenge his rule.”
Michael Caster, the Asia digital program manager at Article 19, a London-based rights organization, told VOA, “The language, especially at Article 4, is clearly about maintaining the state’s power of censorship and surveillance.
“All global policymakers should be clearly aware that while China may be attempting to set standards on emerging technology, their approach to legislation and regulation has always been to preserve the power of the party.”
The future of cyber regulations
As strategies for cyber and AI regulations evolve, how they develop may largely depend on each country’s way of governance and reasons for creating standards. Analysts say there will also be intrinsic hurdles linked to coming up with consensus.
“Ethical principles can be hard to implement consistently, since context matters and there are countless potential scenarios at play,” Brandt told VOA. “They can be hard to enforce, too. Who would take on that role? How? And of course, before you can implement or enforce a set of principles, you need broad agreement on what they are.”
Observers said the international community would face challenges as it creates standards aimed at making AI technology ethical and safe.
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US Targeting China, Artificial Intelligence Threats
U.S. homeland security officials are launching what they describe as two urgent initiatives to combat growing threats from China and expanding dangers from ever more capable, and potentially malicious, artificial intelligence.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced Friday that his department was starting a “90-day sprint” to confront more frequent and intense efforts by China to hurt the United States, while separately establishing an artificial intelligence task force.
“Beijing has the capability and the intent to undermine our interests at home and abroad and is leveraging every instrument of its national power to do so,” Mayorkas warned, addressing the threat from China during a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.
The 90-day sprint will “assess how the threats posed by the PRC [People’s Republic of China] will evolve and how we can be best positioned to guard against future manifestations of this threat,” he said.
“One critical area we will assess, for example, involves the defense of our critical infrastructure against PRC or PRC-sponsored attacks designed to disrupt or degrade provision of national critical functions, sow discord and panic, and prevent mobilization of U.S. military capabilities,” Mayorkas added.
Other areas of focus for the sprint will include addressing ways to stop Chinese government exploitation of U.S. immigration and travel systems to spy on the U.S. government and private entities and to silence critics, and looking at ways to disrupt the global fentanyl supply chain.
AI dangers
Mayorkas also said the magnitude of the threat from artificial intelligence, appearing in a growing number of tools from major tech companies, was no less critical.
“We must address the many ways in which artificial intelligence will drastically alter the threat landscape and augment the arsenal of tools we possess to succeed in the face of these threats,” he said.
Mayorkas promised that the Department of Homeland Security “will lead in the responsible use of AI to secure the homeland and in defending against the malicious use of this transformational technology.”
The new task force is set to seek ways to use AI to protect U.S. supply chains and critical infrastructure, counter the flow of fentanyl, and help find and rescue victims of online child sexual exploitation.
The unveiling of the two initiatives came days after lawmakers grilled Mayorkas about what some described as a lackluster and derelict effort under his leadership to secure the U.S. border with Mexico.
“You have not secured our borders, Mr. Secretary, and I believe you’ve done so intentionally,” the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, Republican Mark Green, told Mayorkas on Wednesday.
Another lawmaker, Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, went as far as to accuse Mayorkas of lying, though her words were quickly removed from the record.
Mayorkas on Friday said it might be possible to use AI to help with border security, though how exactly it could be deployed for the task was not yet clear.
“We’re at a nascent stage of really deploying AI,” he said. “I think we’re now at the dawn of a new age.”
But Mayorkas cautioned that technologies like AI would do little to slow the number of migrants willing to embark on dangerous journeys to reach U.S. soil.
“Desperation is the greatest catalyst for the migration we are seeing,” he said.
FBI warning
The announcement of Homeland Security’s 90-day sprint to confront growing threats from Beijing followed a warning earlier this week from the FBI about the willingness of China to target dissidents and critics in the U.S.
and the arrests of two New York City residents for their involvement in a secret Chinese police station.
China has denied any wrongdoing.
“The Chinese government strictly abides by international law, and fully respects the law enforcement sovereignty of other countries,” Liu Pengyu, the spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, told VOA in an email earlier this week, accusing the U.S. of seeking “to smear China’s image.”
Top U.S. officials have said they are opening two investigations daily into Chinese economic espionage in the U.S.
“The Chinese government has stolen more of American’s personal and corporate data than that of every nation, big or small combined,” FBI Director Christopher Wray told an audience late last year.
More recently, Wray warned of Chinese’ advances in AI, saying he was “deeply concerned.”
Mayorkas voiced a similar sentiment, pointing to China’s use of investments and technology to establish footholds around the world.
“We are deeply concerned about PRC-owned and -operated infrastructure, elements of infrastructure, and what that control can mean, given that the operator and owner has adverse interests,” Mayorkas said Friday.
“Whether it’s investment in our ports, whether it is investment in partner nations, telecommunications channels and the like, it’s a myriad of threats,” he said.
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Supreme Court Set To Decide on Abortion Pill Access
The Supreme Court is facing a self-imposed Friday night deadline to decide whether women’s access to a widely used abortion pill will stay unchanged or be restricted while a legal challenge to its Food and Drug Administration approval goes on.
The justices are weighing arguments that allowing restrictions contained in lower-court rulings to take effect would severely disrupt the availability of the drug, mifepristone, which is used in the most common abortion method in the United States.
It has repeatedly been found to be safe and effective, and has been used by more than 5 million women in the U.S. since the FDA approved it in 2000.
The Supreme Court had initially said it would decide by Wednesday whether the restrictions could take effect while the case continues. A one-sentence order signed by Justice Samuel Alito on Wednesday gave the justices two additional days, without explanation.
The justices are scheduled to meet for a private conference Friday, where they could talk about the issue. The additional time could be part of an effort to craft an order that has broad support among the justices. Or one or more justices might be writing a separate opinion, and asked for a couple of extra days.
The challenge to mifepristone, brought by abortion foes, is the first abortion controversy to reach the nation’s highest court since its conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade 10 months ago and allowed more than a dozen states to effectively ban abortion outright.
In his majority opinion, Alito said one reason for overturning Roe was to remove federal courts from the abortion fight. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,” he wrote.
But even with their court victory, abortion opponents returned to federal court with a new target: medication abortions, which make up more than half of all abortions in the United States.
Women seeking to end their pregnancies in the first 10 weeks without more invasive surgical abortion can take mifepristone, along with misoprostol. The FDA has eased the terms of mifepristone’s use over the years, including allowing it to be sent through the mail in states that allow access.
The abortion opponents filed suit in Texas in November, asserting that FDA’s original approval of mifepristone 23 years ago and subsequent changes were flawed.
They won a ruling on April 7 by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, revoking FDA approval of mifepristone. The judge gave the Biden administration and New York-based Danco Laboratories, mifepristone’s maker, a week to appeal and seek to keep his ruling on hold.
Responding to a quick appeal, two more Trump appointees on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the FDA’s original approval would stand for now. But Judges Andrew Oldham and Kurt Englehardt said most of the rest of Kacsmaryk’s ruling could take effect while the case winds through federal courts.
Their ruling would effectively nullify changes made by the FDA starting in 2016, including extending from seven to 10 weeks of pregnancy when mifepristone can be safely used. The court also said that the drug can’t be mailed or dispensed as a generic and that patients who seek it need to make three in-person visits with a doctor. Women also might be required to take a higher dosage of the drug than the FDA says is necessary.
The administration and Danco have said that chaos will result if those restrictions take effect while the case proceeds. Potentially adding to the confusion, a federal judge in Washington has ordered the FDA to preserve access to mifepristone under the current rules in 17 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia that filed a separate lawsuit.
The Biden administration has said the rulings conflict and create an untenable situation for the FDA.
And a new legal wrinkle threatens even more complications. GenBioPro, which makes the generic version of mifepristone, filed a lawsuit Wednesday to preemptively block the FDA from removing its drug from the market, in the event that the Supreme Court doesn’t intervene.
For now, the Supreme Court is only being asked to block the lower-court rulings through the end of the legal case. But the administration and Danco have a fallback argument if the court doesn’t agree. They are asking the court to take up the challenge to mifepristone, hear arguments and decide the case by early summer.
The court only rarely takes such a step before at least one appeals court has thoroughly examined the legal issues involved.
The New Orleans-based 5th circuit already has ordered an accelerated schedule for hearing the case, with arguments set for May 17.
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South African Artist’s Play Puts African Role in WWI Center Stage
A man paces a 50-meter stage doing breathing exercises. Crew members chatter while putting together final touches to the set, as a pianist rehearses.
Acclaimed South African artist William Kentridge’s play “The Head & The Load” is almost ready for its much-awaited African debut.
“Being able to show it at home feels very important,” Kentridge told AFP of the show, which centers on African porters who, at the call of their colonial masters, hauled arms, cannons and supplies for European forces during World War I.
The production made its international debut in London in 2018 but has never been shown on African soil.
That is set to change on Friday as, after delays caused by coronavirus pandemic, the piece is set to premier at the Joburg Theatre in Johannesburg.
“This piece is about a hidden history, a history that was deliberately hidden,” Kentridge, 67, said as the cast took their places for a final dress rehearsal on Thursday night.
About one million African soldiers, porters and laborers are believed to have taken part in the 1914-18 conflict, according to the United Nations cultural agency, UNESCO.
More than 150,000 of them died.
“I think a starting place of the project was an ignorance, and an annoyance at my own self at my own ignorance,” the artist said. “I thought I knew the First World War.”
‘Troubles of the neck’
“The Head & The Load” takes its name from a Ghanaian proverb — “The head and the load are the troubles of the neck”. At the rehearsal, the words are projected in enormous white text onto the stage.
But it takes a brief explanation, and a moment of reflection, to better understand their meaning.
“There’s… a physical load that the people are carrying, there’s a historical load of how we got here, and there’s a psychic load of how does one keep this history in one’s head,” Kentridge said.
Renowned for his animated films of shape-shifting charcoal drawings, the thickly eye-browed artist described the show as “a very wide drawing… moving in three dimensions”, combined with silhouettes, “added text and a great deal of music.”
Choreographer Gregory Maqoma said he looked forward to performing for a home audience.
The production aimed at “fulfilling” a void for “those who never made it back home,” he said.
Among them was a distant relative of the show’s co-composer, 35-year-old, Thuthuka Sibisi, who said one of his ancestors died on board the SS Mendi, a British steamship that sank in the Channel in February 1917.
The vessel was taking more than 600 mostly black South African soldiers to the front in France.
“The role and responsibility here is to… reconsider what we think is history” Sibisi said.
“The Head & The Load” runs at the Joburg Theatre from April 21 to May 6.
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UN’s Weather Agency: 2022 Was Nasty, Deadly, Costly and Hot
Looking back at 2022’s weather with months of analysis, the World Meteorological Organization said last year really was as bad as it seemed when people were muddling through it.
And about as bad as it gets — until more warming kicks in.
Killer floods, droughts and heat waves hit around the world, costing many billions of dollars. Global ocean heat and acidity levels hit record highs and Antarctic sea ice and European Alps glaciers reached record low amounts, according to the United Nations’ climate agency’s State of Global Climate 2022 report released Friday.
While levels have been higher before human civilization, global sea height and the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and methane in the air reached highest modern recorded amounts. The key glaciers that scientists use as a health check for the world shrank by more than 1.3 meters (51 inches) in just one year and for the first time in history no snow survived the summer melt season on Switzerland’s glaciers, the report said.
Sea level is now rising at about double the rate it did in the 1990s, WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a news conference. Oceans can rise another half a meter to a meter (20 to 39 inches) by the end of century as more ice melts from ice sheets and glaciers and warmer water expands, he said.
“Unfortunately these negative trends in weather patterns and all of these parameters may continue until the 2060s” despite efforts to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases because of the pollution already spewed, Taalas said. “We have already lost this melting of this glaciers game and sea level rise game. So that’s bad news.”
Last year was close to but not quite the hottest year on record, ranking fifth or sixth hottest depending on measuring techniques. But the past eight years are the hottest eight years on record globally. The world kept that warm despite the rare third year of a La Nina, a natural temporary cooling of parts of the Pacific Ocean that changes weather worldwide.
The United Kingdom, France, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg, Italy, Germany, Switzerland and New Zealand had their hottest years on record.
Global heat and other weather records go back to 1850.
“In 2022, continuous drought in East Africa, record breaking rainfall in Pakistan and record-breaking heat waves in China and Europe affected tens of millions, drove food insecurity, boosted mass migration, and cost billions of dollars in loss and damage,” Taalas said.
China’s heat wave was its longest and most extensive in that country’s record with its summer not just hottest on record but smashing the old record by more than 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit), the 55-page report said.
Africa’s drought displaced more than 1.7 million people in Somalia and Ethiopia, while Pakistan’s devastating flooding — which put one-third of the nation under water at one point — displaced about 8 million people, the report said.
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Minneapolis Mayor Signs Law Allowing Islamic Call Five Times a Day
Muslims in Minneapolis can now hear their call to prayer broadcast five times a day from mosques around the city, thanks to a new law. From Minneapolis, Mohamud Mascadde has the story, narrated by Salem Solomon.
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Twitter Drops Government-Funded Media Labels
Twitter has removed labels describing global media organizations as government-funded or state-affiliated, a move that comes after the Elon Musk-owned platform started stripping blue verification checkmarks from accounts that don’t pay a monthly fee.
Among those no longer labeled was National Public Radio in the U.S., which announced last week that it would stop using Twitter after its main account was designated state-affiliated media, a term also used to identify media outlets controlled or heavily influenced by authoritarian governments, such as Russia and China.
Twitter later changed the label to “government-funded media,” but NPR — which relies on the government for a tiny fraction of its funding — said it was still misleading.
Canadian Broadcasting Corp. and Swedish public radio made similar decisions to quit tweeting. CBC’s government-funded label vanished Friday, along with the state-affiliated tags on media accounts including Sputnik and RT in Russia and Xinhua in China.
Many of Twitter’s high-profile users on Thursday lost the blue checks that helped verify their identity and distinguish them from impostors.
Twitter had about 300,000 verified users under the original blue-check system — many of them journalists, athletes and public figures. The checks used to mean the account was verified by Twitter to be who it says it is.
High-profile users who lost their blue checks Thursday included Beyoncé, Pope Francis, Oprah Winfrey and former President Donald Trump.
The costs of keeping the marks range from $8 a month for individual web users to a starting price of $1,000 monthly to verify an organization, plus $50 monthly for each affiliate or employee account. Twitter does not verify the individual accounts, as was the case with the previous blue check doled out during the platform’s pre-Musk administration.
Celebrity users, from basketball star LeBron James to author Stephen King and Star Trek’s William Shatner, have balked at joining — although on Thursday, all three had blue checks indicating that the account paid for verification.
King, for one, said he hadn’t paid.
“My Twitter account says I’ve subscribed to Twitter Blue. I haven’t. My Twitter account says I’ve given a phone number. I haven’t,” King tweeted Thursday. “Just so you know.”
In a reply to King’s tweet, Musk said “You’re welcome namaste” and in another tweet he said he’s “paying for a few personally.” He later tweeted he was just paying for King, Shatner and James.
Singer Dionne Warwick tweeted earlier in the week that the site’s verification system “is an absolute mess.”
“The way Twitter is going anyone could be me now,” Warwick said. She had earlier vowed not to pay for Twitter Blue, saying the monthly fee “could (and will) be going toward my extra hot lattes.”
On Thursday, Warwick lost her blue check (which is actually a white check mark in a blue background).
For users who still had a blue check Thursday, a popup message indicated that the account “is verified because they are subscribed to Twitter Blue and verified their phone number.” Verifying a phone number simply means that the person has a phone number and they verified that they have access to it — it does not confirm the person’s identity.
It wasn’t just celebrities and journalists who lost their blue checks Thursday. Many government agencies, nonprofits and public-service accounts around the world found themselves no longer verified, raising concerns that Twitter could lose its status as a platform for getting accurate, up-to-date information from authentic sources, including in emergencies.
While Twitter offers gold checks for “verified organizations” and gray checks for government organizations and their affiliates, it’s not clear how the platform doles these out.
The official Twitter account of the New York City government, which earlier had a blue check, tweeted on Thursday that “This is an authentic Twitter account representing the New York City Government This is the only account for @NYCGov run by New York City government” in an attempt to clear up confusion.
A newly created spoof account with 36 followers (also without a blue check), disagreed: “No, you’re not. THIS account is the only authentic Twitter account representing and run by the New York City Government.”
Soon, another spoof account — purporting to be Pope Francis — weighed in too: “By the authority vested in me, Pope Francis, I declare @NYC_GOVERNMENT the official New York City Government. Peace be with you.”
Fewer than 5% of legacy verified accounts appear to have paid to join Twitter Blue as of Thursday, according to an analysis by Travis Brown, a Berlin-based developer of software for tracking social media.
Musk’s move has riled up some high-profile users and pleased some right-wing figures and Musk fans who thought the marks were unfair. But it is not an obvious money-maker for the social media platform that has long relied on advertising for most of its revenue.
Digital intelligence platform Similarweb analyzed how many people signed up for Twitter Blue on their desktop computers and only detected 116,000 confirmed sign-ups last month, which at $8 or $11 per month does not represent a major revenue stream. The analysis did not count accounts bought via mobile apps.
After buying San Francisco-based Twitter for $44 billion in October, Musk has been trying to boost the struggling platform’s revenue by pushing more people to pay for a premium subscription. But his move also reflects his assertion that the blue verification marks have become an undeserved or “corrupt” status symbol for elite personalities, news reporters and others granted verification for free by Twitter’s previous leadership.
Twitter began tagging profiles with a blue check mark starting about 14 years ago. Along with shielding celebrities from impersonators, one of the main reasons was to provide an extra tool to curb misinformation coming from accounts impersonating people. Most “legacy blue checks,” including the accounts of politicians, activists and people who suddenly find themselves in the news, as well as little-known journalists at small publications around the globe, are not household names.
One of Musk’s first product moves after taking over Twitter was to launch a service granting blue checks to anyone willing to pay $8 a month. But it was quickly inundated by impostor accounts, including those impersonating Nintendo, pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Musk’s businesses Tesla and SpaceX, so Twitter had to temporarily suspend the service days after its launch.
The relaunched service costs $8 a month for web users and $11 a month for users of its iPhone or Android apps. Subscribers are supposed to see fewer ads, be able to post longer videos and have their tweets featured more prominently.
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TikTok CEO Tries to Ease Critics’ Security Concerns
The CEO of TikTok tried to calm critics’ fears about the security of his company’s app during an appearance Thursday.
Shou Chew was asked at a TED2023 Possibility conference if he could guarantee Beijing would not use the TikTok app, owned by the Chinese tech company ByteDance, to interfere in future U.S. elections.
“I can say that we are building all the tools to prevent any of these actions from happening,” Chew said. “And I’m very confident that with an unprecedented amount of transparency that we’re giving on the platform, we can, how we can reduce this risk to as low as zero as possible.”
Chew made the comments in Vancouver at the TED organization’s annual convention, where artificial intelligence and safeguards were discussed.
U.S. lawmakers and officials are ratcheting up threats to ban TikTok, saying the Chinese-owned video-sharing app used by millions of Americans poses a threat to privacy and U.S. national security.
U.S. lawmakers have grilled Chew over concerns the Chinese government could exploit the platform’s user data for espionage and influence operations in the United States.
U.S. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy tweeted in March, “It’s very concerning that the CEO of TikTok can’t be honest and admit what we already know to be true — China has access to TikTok user data.”
U.S. Representative Michael McCaul, chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee, was even more blunt in February, telling the committee, “Make no mistake, TikTok is a national security threat. … It’s a spy balloon in your phone.”
He was referencing a Chinese surveillance balloon that drifted across the United States in early February before being shot down off the southeastern U.S. coast.
Several governments, including Canada and the U.S., have banned the TikTok app from government-issued smartphones, citing concerns the Chinese government could exploit the platform’s user data for espionage and influence operations in the United States.
Chew says TikTok has never stored data from Americans on servers in China.
“All new U.S. data is already stored in the Oracle Cloud infrastructure. So it’s in this protected U.S. environment that we talked about in the United States,” he said. “We still have some legacy data to delete in our own servers in Virginia and in Singapore. Our data has never been stored in China.”
“It’s going to take us a while to delete them, but I expect it to be done this year,” he said.
Chew also emphasized TikTok’s efforts to moderate content. When asked how many people are reviewing content posted to the platform, Chew said the numbers and cost are huge.
“The group is based in Ireland and it’s a lot of people. It’s tens of thousands of people,” Chew said. “It’s one of the most important cost items. And I think it’s completely worth it.”
Speaking to a TED conference dominated by discussions of artificial intelligence, Chew said a lot of moderation on TikTok is done by machines.
“The machines are good, they’re quite good, but they’re not as good as you know, they’re not perfect at this point. So you have to complement it with a lot of human beings today,” he said.
VOA’s Masood Farivar contributed to this report.
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Good, Bad of Artificial Intelligence Discussed at TED Conference
While artificial intelligence, or AI, is not new, the speed at which the technology is developing and its implications for societies are, for many, a cause for wonder and alarm.
ChatGPT recently garnered headlines for doing things like writing term papers for university students.
Tom Graham and his company, Metaphysic.ai, have received attention for creating fake videos of actor Tom Cruise and re-creating Elvis Presley singing on an American talent show. Metaphysic was started to utilize artificial intelligence and create high-quality avatars of stars like Cruise or people from one’s own family or social circle.
Graham, who appeared at this year’s TED Conference in Vancouver, which began Monday and runs through Friday, said talking with an artificially created younger self or departed loved one can have tremendous benefits for therapy.
He added that the technology would allow actors to appear in movies without having to show up on set, or in ads with AI-generated sports stars.
“So, the idea of them being able to create ads without having to turn up is – it’s a match made in heaven,” Graham said. “The advertisers get more content. The sports people never have to turn up because they don’t want to turn up. And everyone just gets paid the same.”
Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, a nonprofit organization that provides free teaching materials, sees AI as beneficial to education and a kind of one-on-one instruction: student and AI.
His organization is using artificial intelligence to supplement traditional instruction and make it more interactive.
“But now, they can talk to literary characters,” he said. “They can talk to fictional cats. They can talk to historic characters, potentially even talk to inanimate objects, like, we were talking about the Mississippi River. Or talk to the Empire State Building. Or talk to … you know, talk to Mount Everest. This is all possible.”
For Chris Anderson, who is in charge of TED – a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization whose mission is to spread ideas, usually in the form of short speeches – conversations about artificial intelligence are the most important ones we can have at the moment. He said the organization’s role this year is to bring different parts of this rapidly emerging technology together.
“And the conversation can’t just be had by technologists,” he said. “And it can’t just be heard by politicians. And it can’t just be held by creatives. Everyone’s future is being affected. And so, we need to bring people together.”
For all of AI’s promise, there are growing calls for safeguards against misuse of the technology.
Computer scientist Yejin Choi at the University of Washington said policies and regulations are lagging because AI is moving so fast.
“And then there’s this question of whose guardrails are you going to install into AI,” she said. “So there’s a lot of these open questions right now. And ideally, we should be able to customize the guardrails for different cultures or different use cases.”
Another TED speaker this year, Eliezer Yudkowsky, has been studying AI for 20 years and is currently a senior research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in California. He has a more pessimistic view of artificial intelligence and any type of safeguards.
“This eventually gets to the point where there is stuff smarter than us,” he said. “I think we are presently not on track to be able to handle that remotely gracefully. I think we all end up dead.”
Ready or not, societies are confronting the need to adapt to AI’s emergence.
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Biden Announces More Funds to Fight Climate Change
President Joe Biden announced plans Thursday to increase U.S. funding to help developing countries fight climate change and curb deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest.
During a virtual meeting of the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, Biden urged his counterparts to be ambitious in setting goals to reduce emissions and meet a target of limiting overall global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
“We’re at a moment of great peril but also great possibilities, serious possibilities. With the right commitment and follow-through from every nation … on this call, the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees can stay within reach,” Biden said.
The countries that take part in the forum account for about 80% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and global gross domestic product, according to the White House. Thursday’s meeting was the group’s fourth under Biden’s presidency.
Biden announced a U.S. contribution of $1 billion to the Green Climate Fund, which finances projects on clean energy and climate change resilience in developing countries, doubling the overall U.S. contribution.
“The impacts of climate change will be felt the most by those who have contributed the least to the problem, including developing nations,” Biden said. “As large economies and large emitters, we must step up and support these economies.”
Biden also announced plans to request $500 million over five years to contribute to the Amazon Fund, which works to combat deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, and related activities. A senior administration official said Biden’s team would have to work with Congress to secure that funding.
“Together, we have to make it clear that forests are more valuable conserved than cleared,” Biden said.
Brazil welcomed the pledge.
“It is obviously a great achievement, both for what it means to have the United States contributing to a fund like the Amazon Fund and for the volume of resources to be contributed,” Brazil’s Environment Minister Marina Silva said at a news conference.
Biden’s announcement comes during a week of tension between the U.S. and Brazil after the latter’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva called for Western powers to stop supplying arms to Ukraine and said Washington was encouraging the fighting between Ukraine and Russia. He later toned down his comments and condemned Russia’s violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
Biden, who has made fighting climate change one of his top policy priorities, has set a goal of reducing U.S. emissions 50%-52% by 2030 compared with 2005 levels.
This month, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed sweeping emission cuts for new cars and trucks through 2032 in an effort to boost electric vehicles. Biden encouraged leaders from the group to join a collective effort to spur zero-emission vehicles and to reduce emissions from the shipping and power industries.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced a new European Union-led initiative to develop new global targets for energy efficiency and renewable energy alongside the International Energy Agency, in time for a global summit on climate change in November.
“These targets would complement other goals, such as the phaseout of unabated fossil fuels and the ambitious goals for zero-emission vehicles and ships,” she said at the meeting.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on rich countries to reach net-zero emissions by 2040, a decade before the goal set in the Paris climate agreement, and developing countries to hit that milestone by 2050.
He also called for OECD countries to phase out coal by 2030 and 2040 in all other countries and end all licensing or funding — public and private — of new fossil fuel projects.
Developing countries have resisted setting specific timelines for these reductions.
The countries and entities that make up the Major Economies Forum: Argentina, Australia, Canada, Chile, China, Egypt, the European Commission, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Nigeria, Norway, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Britain and Vietnam.
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Twitter Begins Removing Blue Checks From Users Who Don’t Pay
This time it’s for real.
Many of Twitter’s high-profile users are losing the blue check marks that helped verify their identities and distinguish them from impostors on the Elon Musk-owned social media platform.
After several false starts, Twitter began making good on its promise Thursday to remove the blue checks from accounts that don’t each pay a monthly fee to keep them. Twitter had about 300,000 verified users under the original blue-check system—many of them journalists, athletes and public figures. The checks began disappearing from these users’ profiles late morning Pacific time.
High-profile users who lost their blue checks Thursday included Beyonce, Pope Francis and former President Donald Trump.
The costs of keeping the marks range from $8 a month for individual web users to a starting price of $1,000 monthly to verify an organization, plus $50 monthly for each affiliate or employee account. Twitter does not verify the individual accounts to ensure the users are who they say they are, as was the case with the previous blue check doled out during the platform’s pre-Musk administration.
Celebrity users, from basketball star LeBron James to “Star Trek’s” William Shatner, have balked at joining — although on Thursday, James’ blue check indicated that the account paid for verification. “Seinfeld” actor Jason Alexander pledged to leave the platform if Musk took his blue check away.
‘Anyone could be me’
“The way Twitter is going anyone could be me now. The verification system is an absolute mess,” Dionne Warwick tweeted Tuesday. She had earlier vowed not to pay for Twitter Blue, saying the monthly fee “could [and will] be going toward my extra hot lattes.”
On Thursday, Warwick lost her blue check.
After buying Twitter for $44 billion in October, Musk has been trying to boost the struggling platform’s revenue by pushing more people to pay for premium subscriptions. But his move also reflects his assertion that the blue verification marks have become undeserved or “corrupt” status symbols for elite personalities, news reporters and others granted verification for free by Twitter’s previous leadership.
Twitter began tagging profiles with blue check marks about 14 years ago. One main reason for doing so was to provide an extra tool to curb misinformation coming from accounts impersonating people. Most “legacy blue checks,” including the accounts of politicians, activists and people who suddenly find themselves in the news, as well as little-known journalists at small publications around the globe, are not household names.
One of Musk’s first product moves after taking over Twitter was to launch a service granting a blue check to anyone willing to pay $8 a month. But it was quickly inundated by impostor accounts, including those impersonating Nintendo, pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Musk’s businesses Tesla and SpaceX, so Twitter had to suspend the service days after its launch.
The relaunched service costs $8 a month for web users and $11 a month for users of Twitter’s iPhone or Android apps. Subscribers are supposed to see fewer ads, be able to post longer videos and have their tweets featured more prominently.
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K-Pop Star Moon Bin Found Dead at Home
Moon Bin, a singer from South Korean boy band Astro, was found dead at his home in Seoul, his management agency said Thursday.
The 25-year-old was reportedly found by his manager who went to the singer’s home Wednesday evening because he wasn’t responding to contacts. Police are investigating his death but have so far found no signs of foul play, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency. Officials at Seoul’s Gangnam district police station did not respond to calls for comment.
Moon Bin’s management agency, Fantagio, confirmed his death in a statement, saying that he “suddenly left us and became a star in the sky” and that fellow artists and company staff were mourning him with “very deep sadness and shock.”
Fantagio said Moon Bin’s funeral will be held “as quietly as possible,” with the attendance mostly limited to family, close friends and colleagues, based on the wishes of his relatives.
‘Always bright’
Moon Bin began his music career in 2016 as a member of the six-member boy band Astro, which debuted shortly after the singers appeared in a TV reality show. The group quickly found success in South Korea and Japan and was listed on Billboard’s top 10 list of new K-pop groups that year, with the magazine praising them for their “bright, synthpop sound that won over K-pop lovers from around the world.”
According to Billboard, Astro had seven albums on the magazine’s World Albums Chart with Moon Bin as a member, peaking at Number 5 in 2017 with “Dream Part.02.”
Fans flooded Moon Bin’s social media accounts with comments expressing grief and shock over his death, which came months after he renewed his contract with Fantagio along with four other Astro members.
“It’s hard to believe,” radio host Jang Seong-kyu wrote on Instagram. “We only met several times over broadcasts, but whenever we met, Moon Bin was always bright and expressed immense love for his family. I can’t imagine the pain he was going through.”
Moon Bin had also performed as a member of the duo Moonbin & Sanha with Astro bandmate Yoon San-ha. Indonesian event promoter Lumina Entertainment on Wednesday announced the cancellation of the duo’s performance in Jakarta due to “unforeseen circumstances beyond our control.”
Helix Publicity, a U.S.-based public relations agency that has represented Moonbin & Sanha, issued a statement on Twitter that it was “absolutely heartbroken.”
“Sending our thoughts, prayers, and deepest condolences to Moon Bin’s family, friends, loved ones, and to AROHA who always cheered for him and supported him,” it said, referring to the name that Astro’s fans call themselves.
Moon Bin entered the entertainment industry as a child actor and landed a role in the 2009 TV series “Boys Over Flowers,” which was hugely popular in Asia. His sister, Moon Sua, is also a K-pop artist, a member of the girl band Billlie.
Stars’ deaths prompt questions
Several South Korean singers and actors have died by suicide in recent years, which has touched off soul-searching about harsh competition in the fast-growing entertainment industry, an abusive online culture and failure by management to address the mental health problems of their stars.
Last week, 26-year-old actress Jung Chae-yull was found dead at her home. Her agency did not say what caused her sudden death.
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Maiden Voyage of SpaceX’s Starship Meets Fiery End
SpaceX’s giant week meets a fiery end. But company officials still say the launch of Starship was a success. Plus, the European Space Agency sets sail for Jupiter’s icy moons. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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Scientists, Regulators Race to Eliminate ‘Forever Chemicals’
The U.S. government and state legislators are ramping up efforts to limit the use of toxic chemicals known as PFAS (pronounced pee-fas) in everyday products and to regulate levels in drinking water. But as VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias found out, scientists are going a step further by exploring ways to fully eliminate the so-called “forever chemicals.”
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SpaceX Giant Rocket Explodes Minutes After Launch from Texas
SpaceX’s giant new rocket blasted off on its first test flight Thursday but exploded minutes after rising from the launch pad and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico.
Elon Musk’s company was aiming to send the nearly 400-foot (120-meter) Starship rocket on a round-the-world trip from the southern tip of Texas, near the Mexican border. It carried no people or satellites.
The plan called for the booster to peel away from the spacecraft minutes after liftoff, but that didn’t happen. The rocket began to tumble and then exploded four minutes into the flight, plummeting into the gulf. After separating, the spacecraft was supposed to continue east and attempt to circle the world, before crashing into the Pacific near Hawaii.
Throngs of spectators watched from South Padre Island, several miles away from the Boca Chica Beach launch site, which was off limits. As it lifted off, the crowd screamed: “Go, baby, go!”
The company plans to use Starship to send people and cargo to the moon and, eventually, Mars. NASA has reserved a Starship for its next moonwalking team, and rich tourists are already booking lunar flybys.
It was the second launch attempt. Monday’s try was scrapped by a frozen booster valve.
At 394 feet and nearly 17 million pounds of thrust, Starship easily surpasses NASA’s moon rockets — past, present and future. The stainless steel rocket is designed to be fully reusable with fast turnaround, dramatically lowering costs, similar to what SpaceX’s smaller Falcon rockets have done soaring from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Nothing was to be saved from the test flight.
The futuristic spacecraft flew several miles into the air during testing a few years ago, landing successfully only once. But this was to be the inaugural launch of the first-stage booster with 33 methane-fueled engines.
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Through the Lens: Climate Cange Thaws World’s Northernmost Research Station
NY-AALESUND, NORWAY — At the world’s northernmost year-round research station, scientists are racing to understand how the fastest-warming place on Earth is changing – and what those changes may mean for the planet’s future.
But around the tiny town of Ny-Aalesund, high above the Arctic circle on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, scientific data is getting harder to access. And sometimes it’s vanishing before scientists can collect it.
Scientists hoping to harvest ice cores are finding glaciers inundated by water. Research sites are getting harder to reach, as earlier springtime melt leaves the ground too barren for snowmobile travel.
Researchers have been studying the polar region for decades — with Ny-Aalesund’s weather records going back more than 40 years. But their work has become vitally important as climate change ramps up. That’s because what happens in the Arctic can impact global sea levels, storms in North America and Europe, and other factors far beyond the frozen region.
While the Arctic is warming about four times faster than the rest of the world, in Svalbard temperatures are climbing even faster — up to seven times the global average.
Last summer was the hottest on record. August temperatures in Ny-Aalesund were on average 5.1C degrees, about 0.5C warmer than normal for the month.
Polar bear sightings in Kongsfjord over the past four years have been higher than ever before, as the animals are left hungrier due partly to the loss of their sea ice hunting grounds and are more often prowling nearby islands in search of food as eight watchmen take turns patrolling the perimeter of Ny-Aalesund for polar bears.
Resting harbor seals alongside nesting seabird colonies are drawing the hungry carnivores closer, said Joanna Sulich, a biologist with the Norwegian Polar Institute and Polar Bears International.
“For many researchers who are studying those birds, it’s something of concern,” Sulich said.
Within the last decade, four buildings have been damaged by thawing permafrost, and last year Kings Bay SA, the state-owned company that manages the town, had to close down a laboratory where scientists processed samples from fish snow and ice due to thaw cracking its foundation.
Bracing against wind gusts up to 15 meters per second (34 miles per hour), a team of scientists pitched camp this month on the Holtedahlfonna icefield, a 3-hour snowmobile drive from Ny-Aalesund riven with dangerous crevasses.
The team hoped to drill 125 meters into Dovrebreen glacier, hoping to collect two ice cores for studying 300 years of climate records – part of an effort by the non-profit Ice Memory Foundation to collect and preserve ice cores from melting glaciers around the world.
The team was shocked when the drill, at only 25 meters deep, suddenly sloshed into a massive pool of water.
“We did not expect such a huge water flux coming out from the glacier, and this is a clear sign of what is happening in this region,” said expedition leader Andrea Spolaor. “The glacier is suffering.”
On a snowfield a kilometer south of Ny-Aalesund, the chemist Francois Burgay filled plastic test tubes with snow, looking for chemical signals from marine algae blooms which travel from the ocean to the atmosphere and are deposited with the snow.
Once these signals are identified, he hopes scientists will be able to use them to understand how Arctic waters have changed in the past, and project how they might change in the future.
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