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Month: May 2024
‘The Apprentice,’ about a young Donald Trump, premieres in Cannes
CANNES, France — While Donald Trump’s hush money trial entered its sixth week in New York, an origin story for the Republican presidential candidate premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday, unveiling a scathing portrait of the former president in the 1980s.
“The Apprentice,” directed by the Iranian Danish filmmaker Ali Abbasi, stars Sebastian Stan as Trump. The central relationship of the movie is between Trump and Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the defense attorney who was chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s Senate investigations.
Cohn is depicted as a longtime mentor to Trump, coaching him in the ruthlessness of New York City politics and business. Early on, Cohn aided the Trump Organization when it was being sued by the federal government for racial discrimination in housing.
“The Apprentice,” which is labeled as inspired by true events, portrays Trump’s dealings with Cohn as a Faustian bargain that guided his rise as a businessman and, later, as a politician. Stan’s Trump is initially a more naive real-estate striver, soon transformed by Cohn’s education.
The film notably contains a scene depicting Trump raping his wife, Ivana Trump (played by Maria Bakalova). In Ivana Trump’s 1990 divorce deposition, she stated that Trump raped her. Trump denied the allegation and Ivana Trump later said she didn’t mean it literally, but rather that she had felt violated.
That scene and others make “The Apprentice” a potentially explosive big-screen drama in the midst of the U.S. presidential election. The film is for sale in Cannes, so it doesn’t yet have a release date.
Variety on Monday reported alleged behind-the-scenes drama surrounding “The Apprentice.” Citing anonymous sources, the trade publication reported that billionaire Dan Snyder, the former owner of the Washington Commanders and an investor in “The Apprentice,” has pressured the filmmakers to edit the film over its portrayal of Trump. Snyder previously donated to Trump’s presidential campaign.
Neither representatives for the film nor Snyder could immediately be reached for comment.
In the press notes for the film, Abbasi, whose previous film “Holy Spider” depicts a female journalist investigating a serial killer in Iran, said he didn’t set out to make “a History Channel episode.”
“This is not a biopic of Donald Trump,” said Abbasi. “We’re not interested in every detail of his life going from A to Z. We’re interested in telling a very specific story through his relationship with Roy and Roy’s relationship with him.”
Regardless of its political impact, “The Apprentice” is likely to be much discussed as a potential awards contender. The film, shot in a gritty 1980’s aesthetic, returns Strong to a New York landscape of money and power a year following the conclusion of HBO’s “Succession.” Strong, who’s currently performing on Broadway in “An Enemy of the People,” didn’t attend the Cannes premiere Monday.
“The Apprentice” is playing in competition in Cannes, making it eligible for the festival’s top award, the Palme d’Or. At Cannes, filmmakers and casts hold press conferences the day after a movie’s premiere. “The Apprentice” press conference will be Tuesday.
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Study: Climate change key driver of record-low Antarctic sea ice
Paris — Climate change played a key role in last year’s record-low levels of Antarctic sea ice, a study published on Monday found, marking an abrupt shift from the growth seen in previous decades.
Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) found that human-caused global warming resulted in a once-in-2,000-year low in ocean surface around the continent blanketed by ice.
Compared to an average winter over the last several decades, the maximum extent of Antarctic sea covered by ice shrank by two million square kilometers — an area four times the size of France, the BAS said.
“This is why we were so interested in studying what climate models can tell us about how often large, rapid losses like this are likely to happen,” the study’s lead author Rachel Diamond told AFP.
Scientists, having analyzed 18 distinct climate models, found that climate change quadrupled the likelihood of such large and rapid melting events.
Understanding the cause of sea ice melt is complex as there are many variables — from ocean water to air temperature to winds — that can effect it, scientists say.
But determining the role of climate change is critical since ice formation has global impacts from ocean currents to sea-level rise.
Sea ice, which forms from freezing salt water already in the ocean, has no discernible impact on sea levels.
But when highly reflective snow and ice give way to dark blue ocean, the same amount of the Sun’s energy that was bounced back into space is absorbed by water instead, accelerating the pace of global warming.
Recovery unlikely
Unlike the Arctic, where sea ice has been declining since satellite records began in the 1970s, the melt trend in Antarctica is a more recent phenomenon.
Antarctic sea ice increased “slightly and steadily” from 1978 until 2015, according to the BAS.
But 2017 brought a sharp decline, followed by several years of low ice levels.
In the study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, BAS researchers also ran projections to see whether the ice would return.
“It doesn’t completely recover to original levels even after 20 years,” Diamond told AFP. That means “the average Antarctic sea ice may still stay relatively low for decades to come”, he added.
“The impacts… would be profound, including on local and global weather and on unique Southern Ocean ecosystems — including whales and penguins,” co-author Louise Sime said.
Previous studies by the BAS have shown that the abnormal melt has led to the deaths of thousands of emperor penguin chicks.
Reared on the ice sheets, they perished when they were plunged into the ocean before they had developed their waterproof feathers.
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Researchers use artificial intelligence to classify brain tumors
SYDNEY — Researchers in Australia and the United States say that a new artificial intelligence tool has allowed them to classify brain tumors more quickly and accurately.
The current method for identifying different kinds of brain tumors, while accurate, can take several weeks to produce results. The method, called DNA methylation-based profiling, is not available at many hospitals around the world.
To address these challenges, a research team from the Australian National University, in collaboration with the National Cancer Institute in the United States, has developed a way to predict DNA methylation, which acts like a switch to control gene activity.
This allows them to classify brain tumors into 10 major categories using a deep learning model.
This is a branch of artificial intelligence that teaches computers to process data in a way that is inspired by a human brain.
The joint U.S.-Australian system is called DEPLOY and uses microscopic pictures of a patient’s tissue called histopathology images.
The researchers see the DEPLOY technology as complementary to an initial diagnosis by a pathologist or physician.
Danh-Tai Hoang, a research fellow at the Australian National University, told VOA that AI will enhance current diagnostic methods that can often be slow.
“The technique is very time consuming,” Hoang said. “It is often around two to three weeks to obtain a result from the test, whereas patients with high-grade brain tumors often require treatment as soon as possible because time is the goal for brain tumor(s), so they need to get treatment as soon as possible.”
The research team said its AI model was validated on large datasets of approximately 4,000 patients from across the United States and Europe and an accuracy rate of 95 percent.
Their study has been published in the journal Nature Medicine.
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Cannes film follows Egypt feminists on brink of adulthood
Cannes, France — Filmmakers Nada Riyadh and Ayman El Amir spent so much time following an all-girl theatre troupe in a remote Egyptian village that at one point someone tried to sell them a house.
“He thought we were always there so we might as well live there,” Riyadh told AFP after the premiere of their documentary at the Cannes Film Festival.
“The Brink of Dreams” follows a group of teenage girls in rural southern Egypt over four years, between rehearsals, as they navigate the tough decisions that will determine their adulthood.
Majda dreams of studying theatre in Cairo, Monika wants to become a famous singer and Haidi is being pursued by the hottest guy in the village.
In their feminist street performances, they boldly rail against the patriarchy, challenging members of the crowd on issues such as self-fulfillment and early marriage.
But soon life takes over and the teenagers from Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority find themselves confronted with these concepts for real.
The camera discreetly captures conversations in the family shop, between a father and daughter, or two lovers, as neighbors and animals go about their daily lives.
“In the beginning there was a lot of people always looking at the camera. Everybody was self-conscious,” said Riyadh.
But “once the trust had been built between them and us, we had that chance to blend in.”
Riyadh said the documentary, which is screening in a sidebar section of the festival, was driven by her and co-director Amin discovering the troupe in 2017.
The film “is intentionally feminist in every way but I think it was also dictated by what this inspiring group of women was already doing,” she said.
It’s “mind-blowing because they’re demanding answers about very important things and opening a dialogue with everybody in their community.”
Co-director Amin said the main challenge was editing down 100 hours of footage to tell this coming-of-age tale and convey a seldom seen side of Egypt.
“Most mainstream films in Egypt tell stories about living in gated compounds and shopping in malls,” Amin said.
“It’s very rare to see stories that take place in the south outside of Cairo or Alexandria and see girls like those girls on screen.”
The documentary has a French distributor, but the filmmakers also hope to show the film widely in Egypt, including in the rural south.
Until then, six of the actors in the film got to attend the Cannes premiere, after a last-minute rush to get them their first passports and visas on time.
Monika, the aspiring singer, has two children now. But on the red carpet, the DJ played the catchy song that she made with a popular Egyptian producer called Molotof for the film’s final credits.
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Companies trying to attract more smartphone users across Africa, but there are risks
Accra, Ghana — Anita Akpeere prepared fried rice in her kitchen in Ghana’s capital as a flurry of notifications for restaurant orders lit up apps on her phone. “I don’t think I could work without a phone in my line of business,” she said, as requests came in for her signature dish, a traditional fermented dumpling.
Internet-enabled phones have transformed many lives, but they can play a unique role in sub-Saharan Africa, where infrastructure and public services are among the world’s least developed, said Jenny Aker, a professor who studies the issue at Tufts University. At times, technology in Africa has leapfrogged gaps, including providing access to mobile money for people without bank accounts.
Despite growing mobile internet coverage on the continent of 1.3 billion people, just 25% of adults in sub-Saharan Africa have access to it, according to Claire Sibthorpe, head of digital inclusion at the U.K.-based mobile phone lobbying group GSMA. Expense is the main barrier. The cheapest smartphone costs up to 95% of the monthly salary for the poorest 20% of the region’s population, Sibthorpe said.
Literacy rates that are below the global average, and lack of services in many African languages — some 2,000 are spoken across the continent, according to The African Language Program at Harvard University — are other reasons why a smartphone isn’t a compelling investment for some.
“If you buy a car, it’s because you can drive it,” said Alain Capo-Chichi, chief executive of CERCO Group, a company that has developed a smartphone that functions through voice command and is available in 50 African languages such as Yoruba, Swahili and Wolof.
Even in Ghana, where the lingua franca is English, knowing how to use smartphones and apps can be a challenge for newcomers.
One new company in Ghana is trying to close the digital gap. Uniti Networks offers financing to help make smartphones more affordable and coaches users to navigate its platform of apps.
For Cyril Fianyo, a 64-year-old farmer in Ghana’s eastern Volta region, the phone has expanded his activities beyond calls and texts. Using his identity card, he registered with Uniti, putting down a deposit worth 340 Ghanaian Cedis ($25) for a smartphone and will pay the remaining 910 Cedis ($66) in installments.
He was shown how to navigate apps that interested him, including a third-party farming app called Cocoa Link that offers videos of planting techniques, weather information and details about the challenges of climate change that have affected cocoa and other crops.
Fianyo, who previously planted according to his intuition and rarely interacts with farming advisors, was optimistic that the technology would increase his yields.
“I will know the exact time to plant because of the weather forecast,” he said.
Kami Dar, chief executive of Uniti Networks, said the mobile internet could help address other challenges including accessing health care. The company has launched in five communities across Ghana with 650 participants and wants to reach 100,000 users within five years.
Aker, the scholar, noted that the potential impact of mobile phones across Africa is immense but said there is limited evidence that paid health or agriculture apps are benefiting people there. She asserted that the only beneficial impacts are reminders to take medicine or get vaccinated.
Having studied agricultural apps and their impact, she said it doesn’t seem that farmers are getting better prices or improving their income.
Capo-Chichi from CERCO Group said a dearth of useful apps and content is another reason that more people in Africa aren’t buying smartphones.
Dar said Uniti Networks learns from mistakes. In a pilot in northern Ghana designed to help cocoa farmers contribute to their pensions, there was high engagement, but farmers didn’t find the app user-friendly and needed extra coaching. After the feedback, the pension provider changed the interface to improve navigation.
Others are finding benefit with Uniti’s platform. Mawufemor Vitor, a church secretary in Hohoe, said one health app has assisted her to track her menstruation to help prevent pregnancy. And Fianyo, the farmer, has used the platform to find information on herbal medicine.
But mobile phones are no substitute for investment in public services and infrastructure, Aker said.
She also expressed concerns about the privacy of data in the hands of private technology providers and governments. With digital IDs in development in African nations such as Kenya and South Africa, this could pave the way for further abuses, Aker said.
Uniti Networks is a for-profit business, paid for each customer that signs up for paying apps. Dar asserted that he was not targeting vulnerable populations to sell them unnecessary services and said Uniti only features apps that align with its idea of impact, with a focus on health, education, finance and agriculture.
Dar said Uniti has rejected lucrative approaches from many companies including gambling firms. “Tech can be used for awful things,” he said.
He acknowledged that Uniti tracks users on the platform to provide incentives, in the form of free data, and to provide feedback to app developers. He acknowledged that users’ health and financial data could be at threat from outside attack but said Uniti has decentralized data storage in an attempt to lessen the risk.
Still, the potential to provide solutions can outweigh the risks, Aker said, noting two areas where the technology could be transformative: education and insurance.
She said mobile phones could help overcome the illiteracy that still affects 773 million people worldwide according to UNESCO. Increased access to insurance, still not widely used in parts of Africa, could provide protection to millions who face shocks on the front lines of climate change and conflict.
Back in Fianyo’s fields, his new smartphone has attracted curiosity. “This is something I would like to be part of,” said neighboring farmer Godsway Kwamigah.
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California Disneyland character, parade performers vote to join labor union
Anaheim, California — Disneyland performers who help bring Mickey Mouse, Cinderella and other beloved characters to life at the Southern California resort chose to unionize following a three-day vote culminating Saturday.
The Actors’ Equity Association labor union said in a statement Saturday that cast members for the parades and characters departments at Disney’s theme parks near Los Angeles voted by a wide margin for the union to become the bargaining agent for the group of roughly 1,700 workers.
An association website tracking the balloting among cast members indicated passage by 78.7% (953 votes) in favor and 21.3% (258 votes) opposed.
“They say that Disneyland is ‘the place where dreams come true,’ and for the Disney Cast Members who have worked to organize a union, their dream came true today,” Actors’ Equity Association President Kate Shindle said in a statement Saturday night.
Shindle called the workers the “front lines” of the Disneyland guest experience. The association and cast members will discuss improvements to health and safety, wages, benefits, working conditions and job security before meeting with Walt Disney Company representatives about negotiating the staff priorities into a contract, she said.
The union already represents theatrical performers at Disney’s Florida parks.
Barring any election challenges, the regional director of the National Labor Relations Board will certify the results within a week, the association said.
The NLRB did not immediately respond to an email from The Associated Press seeking confirmation or additional information about the vote.
The election took place on Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday in Anaheim, California, after workers earlier this year filed cards to form the unit called “Magic United.”
Parade and character workers who promoted unionizing said they love helping to create a magical experience at Disneyland but grew concerned when they were asked to resume hugging visitors after returning to work during the coronavirus pandemic. They said they also suffer injuries from complex costumes and erratic schedules.
Most of the more than 35,000 workers at the Disneyland Resort, including cleaning crews, pyrotechnic specialists and security staff, are already in labor unions. The resort includes Disneyland, the Walt Disney Co.’s oldest theme park, Disney California Adventure and the shopping and entertainment district Downtown Disney in Anaheim.
In recent years, Disney has faced allegations of not paying its Southern California workers, who face exorbitant housing costs and often commute long distances or cram into small homes, a livable wage. Parade performers and character actors earn a base pay of $24.15 an hour, up from $20 before January, with premiums for different roles.
Union membership has been on a decadeslong decline in the United States, but organizations have seen growing public support in recent years during high-profile contract negotiations involving Hollywood studios and Las Vegas hotels. The NLRB, which protects workers’ right to organize, reported more than 2,500 filings for union representation during the 2023 fiscal year, which was the highest number in eight years.
The effort to organize character and parade performers in California came more than 40 years after those who play Mickey, Goofy and Donald Duck in Florida were organized by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a union traditionally known to represent transportation workers.
At that time, the Florida performers complained about filthy costumes and abuse from guests, including children who would kick the shins of Disney villains such as Captain Hook.
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What happened in the UK’s infected blood scandal? Inquiry report due Monday
London — The final report of the U.K.’s infected blood inquiry will be published Monday, nearly six years after it began looking into how tens of thousands of people contracted HIV or hepatitis from transfusions of tainted blood and blood products in the 1970s and 1980s.
The scandal is widely seen as the deadliest to afflict Britain’s state-run National Health Service since its inception in 1948, with around 3,000 people believed to have died as a result of being infected with HIV and hepatitis, an inflammation of the liver.
The report is expected to criticize pharmaceutical firms and medical practitioners, civil servants and politicians, although many have already died given the passage of time. It’s also set to pave the way to a huge compensation bill that the British government will be under pressure to rapidly pay out.
Had it not been for the tireless campaigners, many of whom saw loved ones die decades too soon, the scale of the scandal may have remained hidden forever.
“This whole scandal has blanketed my entire life,” said Jason Evans, who was four when his father died at the age of 31 in 1993 after contracting HIV and hepatitis from an infected blood plasma product.
“My dad knew he was dying and he took many home videos, which I’ve got and replayed over and over again growing up because that’s really all I had,” he added.
Evans was instrumental in the decision by then-Prime Minister Theresa May to establish the inquiry in 2017. He said he just “couldn’t let it go.” His hope is that on Monday, he and countless others, can.
Here is a look at what the scandal was about and what the report’s impact may be.
What is the infected blood scandal?
In the 1970s and 1980s, thousands of people who needed blood transfusions, for example after childbirth or surgery, became exposed to blood tainted with hepatitis, including an as yet unknown kind that was later termed Hepatitis C, and HIV.
Those with haemophilia, a condition affecting the blood’s ability to clot, became exposed to what was sold as a revolutionary new treatment derived from blood plasma.
In the U.K., the NHS, which treats the majority of people, started using the new treatment in the early 1970s. It was called Factor VIII. It was more convenient when compared with an alternative treatment and was dubbed a wonder drug.
Demand soon outstripped domestic sources of supply, so health officials began importing Factor VIII from the U.S., where a high proportion of plasma donations came from prisoners and drug users who were paid to donate blood. That dramatically raised the risk of the plasma being contaminated.
Factor VIII was made by mixing plasma from thousands of donations. In this pooling, one infected donor would compromise the whole batch.
The inquiry heard estimates that more than 30,000 people were infected from compromised blood or blood products via transfusions or Factor VIII.
Missed chances
By the mid 1970s, there was evidence haemophiliacs being treated with Factor VIII were more prone to hepatitis. The World Health Organization, which had warned in 1953 of the hepatitis risks associated with the mass pooling of plasma products, urged countries not to import plasma.
AIDS, the biggest public health crisis since World War II, turned up in the early 1980s. Originally thought to be isolated to the gay community, it soon started appearing among haemophiliacs and those who had received blood transfusions.
Though the cause of AIDS — HIV — was not identified until 1983, warnings had been relayed to the U.K. government the year before that the causative agent could be transmitted by blood products. The government argued there was no conclusive proof. Patients were not informed of the risk and persisted with a treatment that put them in mortal danger.
Mistakes
The inquiry is expected to conclude that lessons from as early as the 1940s had been ignored.
Campaigners argue that since the 1940s it had been clear that heat killed hepatitis in another plasma product, albumin. They say authorities could have made Factor VIII safe before it was sold.
Evidence given to the inquiry suggested that authorities’ main objection was financial. Non-heated Factor VIII was prescribed by the NHS until late 1985.
Campaigners hope the inquiry’s core finding is that Factor VIII concentrates should never have been licensed for use unless heated.
Why now?
In the late 1980s, victims and their families called for compensation on the grounds of medical negligence. Though the government set up a charity to make one-off support payments to those infected with HIV in the early 1990s, it did not admit liability or responsibility and victims were pressured to sign a waiver undertaking not to sue the Department of Health to get the money.
Crucially, the waiver also prevented victims from suing for hepatitis, even though at that stage they only knew about their HIV infection. Years after signing, victims were told they had also been infected with hepatitis, mainly Hepatitis C.
There was no further group litigation until Evans, whose mother “crumbled” after his father’s death and who was called “AIDS boy” at school, brought a case claiming misfeasance in public office against the Department of Health.
Combined with political and media pressure, May announced the independent inquiry. It was, she said, “an appalling tragedy which should simply never have happened.”
Compensation
The government has accepted the case for compensation, with most estimates putting the final bill in the region of $12.7 billion. In October 2022, authorities made interim payments of 100,000 pounds to each survivor and bereaved partners.
The government is expected to announce different payments for different infections and address how and when bereaved families can apply for interim payments on behalf of the estates of people who have died.
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Blue Origin flies thrill seekers to space, including oldest astronaut
Washington — After a nearly two year hiatus, Blue Origin flew adventurers to space on Sunday including a former Air Force pilot who was denied the chance to be the United States’ first Black astronaut decades ago.
It was the first crewed launch for the enterprise owned and founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos since a rocket mishap in 2022 left rival Virgin Galactic as the sole operator in the fledgling suborbital tourism market.
Six people including the sculptor Ed Dwight, who was on track to become NASA’s first ever astronaut of color in the 1960s before being controversially spurned, launched around 09:36 am local time (1436 GMT) from the Launch Site One base in west Texas, a live feed showed.
Dwight — at 90 years, 8 months and 10 days — became the oldest person to ever go to space.
“This is a life-changing experience, everybody needs to do this,” he exclaimed after the flight.
Dwight added: “I thought I didn’t really need this in my life,” reflecting on his omission from the astronaut corps, which was his first experience with failure as a young man. “But I lied,” he said with a hearty laugh.
Mission NS-25 is the seventh human flight for Blue Origin, which sees short jaunts on the New Shepard suborbital vehicle as a stepping stone to greater ambitions, including the development of a full-fledged heavy rocket and lunar lander.
To date, the company has flown 31 people aboard New Shepard — a small, fully reusable rocket system named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space.
The program encountered a setback when a New Shepard rocket caught fire shortly after launch on September 12, 2022, even though the uncrewed capsule ejected safely.
A federal investigation revealed an overheating engine nozzle was at fault. Blue Origin took corrective steps and carried out a successful uncrewed launch in December 2023, paving the way for Sunday’s mission.
After liftoff, the sleek and roomy capsule separated from the booster, which produces zero carbon emissions. The rocket performed a precision vertical landing.
As the spaceship soared beyond the Karman Line, the internationally recognized boundary of space 100 kilometers above sea level, passengers had the chance to marvel at the Earth’s curvature and unbuckle their seatbelts to float — or somersault — during a few minutes of weightlessness.
The capsule then reentered the atmosphere, deploying its parachutes for a desert landing in a puff of sand. However, one of the three parachutes failed to fully inflate, possibly resulting in a harder landing than expected.
Bezos himself was on the program’s first ever crewed flight in 2021. A few months later, Star Trek’s William Shatner blurred the lines between science fiction and reality when he became the world’s oldest ever astronaut aged 90, decades after he first played a space traveler.
Dwight, who was almost two months older than Shatner at the time of his flight, became only the second nonagenarian to venture beyond Earth.
Astronaut John Glenn remains the oldest to orbit the planet, a feat he achieved in 1998 at the age 77 aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery.
Blue Origin’s competitor in suborbital space is Virgin Galactic, which deploys a supersonic spaceplane that is dropped from beneath the wings of a massive carrier plane at high altitude.
Virgin Galactic experienced its own two-year safety pause because of an anomaly linked with the 2021 flight that carried its founder British tycoon Richard Branson into space. But the company later hit its stride with half a dozen successful flights in quick succession.
Sunday’s mission finally gave Dwight the chance he was denied decades ago.
He was an elite test pilot when he was appointed by President John F Kennedy to join a highly competitive Air Force program known as a pathway for the astronaut corps, but was ultimately not picked.
He left the military in 1966, citing the strain of racial politics, before dedicating his life to telling Black history through sculpture. His art, displayed around the country, includes iconic figures like Martin Luther King Jr, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and more.
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Musk, Indonesian health minister, launch Starlink for health sector
DENPASAR, BALI, INDONESIA — Elon Musk and Indonesian Health Minister Budi Gunadi Sadikin launched SpaceX’s satellite internet service for the nation’s health sector on Sunday, aiming to improve access in remote parts of the sprawling archipelago.
Musk, the billionaire head of SpaceX and Tesla TSLA.O, arrived on the Indonesian resort island of Bali by private jet before attending the launch ceremony at a community health centre in the provincial capital, Denpasar.
Musk, wearing a green batik shirt, said the availability of the Starlink service in Indonesia would help millions in far-flung parts of the country to access the internet. The country is home to more than 270 million people and three different time zones.
“I’m very excited to bring connectivity to places that have low connectivity,” Musk said, “If you have access to the internet you can learn anything.”
Starlink was launched at three Indonesian health centers on Sunday, including two in Bali and one on the remote island of Aru in Maluku.
A video presentation screened at the launch showed how high internet speeds enabled the real-time input of data to better tackle health challenges such as stunting and malnutrition.
Asked about whether he planned to also invest in Indonesia’s electric vehicle industry, Musk said he was focused on Starlink first.
“We are focusing this event on Starlink and the benefits that connectivity brings to remote islands,” he said, “I think it’s really to emphasize the importance of internet connectivity, how much of that can be a lifesaver.”
Indonesia’s government has been trying for years to lure Musk’s auto firm Tesla to build manufacturing plants related to electric vehicles as the government wants to develop its EV sector using the country’s rich nickel resources.
The tech tycoon is scheduled to meet Indonesian President Joko Widodo on Monday, where he will also address the World Water Forum taking place on the island.
Communications Minister Budi Arie Setiadi, who also attended the Bali launch, said Starlink was now available commercially, but the government would focus its services first for outer and underdeveloped regions.
Prior to Sunday’s launch, Starlink obtained a permit to operate as an internet service provider for retail consumers and had been given the go-ahead to provide networks, having received a very small aperture terminal (VSAT) permit, Budi Setiadi told Reuters.
SpaceX’s Starlink, which owns around 60% of the roughly 7,500 satellites orbiting earth, is dominant in the satellite internet sphere.
Indonesia is the third country in Southeast Asia where Starlink will operate. Malaysia issued the firm a license to provide internet services last year and a Philippine-based firm signed a deal with SpaceX in 2022.
Starlink is also used extensively in Ukraine, where it is employed by the military, hospitals, businesses and aid organizations.
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Illness took away her voice. AI created a replica she carries in her phone
PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND — The voice Alexis “Lexi” Bogan had before last summer was exuberant.
She loved to belt out Taylor Swift and Zach Bryan ballads in the car. She laughed all the time — even while corralling misbehaving preschoolers or debating politics with friends over a backyard fire pit. In high school, she was a soprano in the chorus.
Then that voice was gone.
Doctors in August removed a life-threatening tumor lodged near the back of her brain. When the breathing tube came out a month later, Bogan had trouble swallowing and strained to say “Hi” to her parents. Months of rehabilitation aided her recovery, but her speech is still impaired. Friends, strangers and her own family members struggle to understand what she is trying to tell them.
In April, the 21-year-old got her old voice back. Not the real one, but a voice clone generated by artificial intelligence that she can summon from a phone app. Trained on a 15-second time capsule of her teenage voice — sourced from a cooking demonstration video she recorded for a high school project — her synthetic but remarkably real-sounding AI voice can now say almost anything she wants.
She types a few words or sentences into her phone and the app instantly reads it aloud.
“Hi, can I please get a grande iced brown sugar oat milk shaken espresso,” said Bogan’s AI voice as she held the phone out her car’s window at a Starbucks drive-thru.
Experts have warned that rapidly improving AI voice-cloning technology can amplify phone scams, disrupt democratic elections and violate the dignity of people — living or dead — who never consented to having their voice recreated to say things they never spoke.
It’s been used to produce deepfake robocalls to New Hampshire voters mimicking President Joe Biden. In Maryland, authorities recently charged a high school athletic director with using AI to generate a fake audio clip of the school’s principal making racist remarks.
But Bogan and a team of doctors at Rhode Island’s Lifespan hospital group believe they’ve found a use that justifies the risks. Bogan is one of the first people — the only one with her condition — who have been able to recreate a lost voice with OpenAI’s new Voice Engine. Some other AI providers, such as the startup ElevenLabs, have tested similar technology for people with speech impediments and loss — including a lawyer who now uses her voice clone in the courtroom.
“We’re hoping Lexi’s a trailblazer as the technology develops,” said Dr. Rohaid Ali, a neurosurgery resident at Brown University’s medical school and Rhode Island Hospital. Millions of people with debilitating strokes, throat cancer or neurogenerative diseases could benefit, he said.
“We should be conscious of the risks, but we can’t forget about the patient and the social good,” said Dr. Fatima Mirza, another resident working on the pilot. “We’re able to help give Lexi back her true voice and she’s able to speak in terms that are the most true to herself.”
Mirza and Ali, who are married, caught the attention of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI because of their previous research project at Lifespan using the AI chatbot to simplify medical consent forms for patients. The San Francisco company reached out while on the hunt earlier this year for promising medical applications for its new AI voice generator.
Bogan was still slowly recovering from surgery. The illness started last summer with headaches, blurry vision and a droopy face, alarming doctors at Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence. They discovered a vascular tumor the size of a golf ball pressing on her brain stem and entangled in blood vessels and cranial nerves.
“It was a battle to get control of the bleeding and get the tumor out,” said pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Konstantina Svokos.
The tumor’s location and severity coupled with the complexity of the 10-hour surgery damaged Bogan’s control of her tongue muscles and vocal cords, impeding her ability to eat and talk, Svokos said.
“It’s almost like a part of my identity was taken when I lost my voice,” Bogan said.
The feeding tube came out this year. Speech therapy continues, enabling her to speak intelligibly in a quiet room but with no sign she will recover the full lucidity of her natural voice.
“At some point, I was starting to forget what I sounded like,” Bogan said. “I’ve been getting so used to how I sound now.”
Whenever the phone rang at the family’s home in the Providence suburb of North Smithfield, she would push it over to her mother to take her calls. She felt she was burdening her friends whenever they went to a noisy restaurant. Her dad, who has hearing loss, struggled to understand her.
Back at the hospital, doctors were looking for a pilot patient to experiment with OpenAI’s technology.
“The first person that came to Dr. Svokos’ mind was Lexi,” Ali said. “We reached out to Lexi to see if she would be interested, not knowing what her response would be. She was game to try it out and see how it would work.”
Bogan had to go back a few years to find a suitable recording of her voice to “train” the AI system on how she spoke. It was a video in which she explained how to make a pasta salad.
Her doctors intentionally fed the AI system just a 15-second clip. Cooking sounds make other parts of the video imperfect. It was also all that OpenAI needed — an improvement over previous technology requiring much lengthier samples.
They also knew that getting something useful out of 15 seconds could be vital for any future patients who have no trace of their voice on the internet. A brief voicemail left for a relative might have to suffice.
When they tested it for the first time, everyone was stunned by the quality of the voice clone. Occasional glitches — a mispronounced word, a missing intonation — were mostly imperceptible. In April, doctors equipped Bogan with a custom-built phone app that only she can use.
“I get so emotional every time I hear her voice,” said her mother, Pamela Bogan, tears in her eyes.
“I think it’s awesome that I can have that sound again,” added Lexi Bogan, saying it helped “boost my confidence to somewhat where it was before all this happened.”
She now uses the app about 40 times a day and sends feedback she hopes will help future patients. One of her first experiments was to speak to the kids at the preschool where she works as a teaching assistant. She typed in “ha ha ha ha” expecting a robotic response. To her surprise, it sounded like her old laugh.
She’s used it at Target and Marshall’s to ask where to find items. It’s helped her reconnect with her dad. And it’s made it easier for her to order fast food.
Bogan’s doctors have started cloning the voices of other willing Rhode Island patients and hope to bring the technology to hospitals around the world. OpenAI said it is treading cautiously in expanding the use of Voice Engine, which is not yet publicly available.
A number of smaller AI startups already sell voice-cloning services to entertainment studios or make them more widely available. Most voice-generation vendors say they prohibit impersonation or abuse, but they vary in how they enforce their terms of use.
“We want to make sure that everyone whose voice is used in the service is consenting on an ongoing basis,” said Jeff Harris, OpenAI’s lead on the product. “We want to make sure that it’s not used in political contexts. So we’ve taken an approach of being very limited in who we’re giving the technology to.”
Harris said OpenAI’s next step involves developing a secure “voice authentication” tool so that users can replicate only their own voice. That might be “limiting for a patient like Lexi, who had sudden loss of her speech capabilities,” he said. “So we do think that we’ll need to have high-trust relationships, especially with medical providers, to give a little bit more unfettered access to the technology.”
Bogan has impressed her doctors with her focus on thinking about how the technology could help others with similar or more severe speech impediments.
“Part of what she has done throughout this entire process is think about ways to tweak and change this,” Mirza said. “She’s been a great inspiration for us.”
While for now she must fiddle with her phone to get the voice engine to talk, Bogan imagines an AI voice engine that improves upon older remedies for speech recovery — such as the robotic-sounding electrolarynx or a voice prosthesis — in melding with the human body or translating words in real time.
She’s less sure about what will happen as she grows older and her AI voice continues to sound like she did as a teenager. Maybe the technology could “age” her AI voice, she said.
For now, “even though I don’t have my voice fully back, I have something that helps me find my voice again,” she said.
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Patient with sickle cell disease offers hope to Ugandan community
mbale, uganda — Barbara Nabulo was one of three girls in her family. But when a sister died, her mother wailed at the funeral that she was left with just one and a half daughters.
The half was the ailing Nabulo, who at age 12 understood her mother’s meaning.
“I hated myself so much,” Nabulo said recently, recalling the words that preceded a period of sickness that left her hospitalized and feeding through a tube.
The scene underscores the lifelong challenges for some people with sickle cell disease in rural Uganda, where it remains poorly understood. Despite Nabulo’s knowledge of how the disease weakens the body, she spoke repeatedly of “the germ I was born with.”
Infections, pain, organ damage
Sickle cell disease is a group of inherited disorders in which red blood cells — normally round — become hard, sticky and crescent shaped. The misshapen cells clog the flow of blood, which can lead to infections, excruciating pain, organ damage and other complications.
The disease, which can stunt physical growth, is more common in malaria-prone regions, notably Africa and India, because carrying the sickle cell trait helps protect against severe malaria. Global estimates of how many people have the disease vary, but some researchers put the number between 6 million and 8 million, with more than 5 million living in sub-Saharan Africa.
The only cure for the pain sickle cell disease can cause is a bone marrow transplant or gene therapies such as the one commercially approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in December. Last week, a 12-year-old boy last week became the first person to begin the therapy.
Those options are beyond the reach of most patients in this East African nation, where sickle cell disease is not a public health priority despite the burden it places on communities. There isn’t a national database of sickle cell patients. Funding for treatment often comes from donor organizations.
A patient, a caregiver
In a hilly part of eastern Uganda that’s a sickle cell hot spot, the main referral hospital looks after hundreds of patients arriving from nearby villages to collect medication. Many receive doses of hydroxyurea, a drug that can reduce periods of severe pain and other complications, and researchers there are studying its effectiveness in Ugandan children.
Nabulo, now 37, is one of the hospital’s patients. But she approaches others like her as a caregiver, too.
After dropping out in primary school, she has emerged in recent years as a counselor to fellow patients, speaking to them about her survival. Encouraged by hospital authorities, she makes weekly visits to the ward that has many children watched over by exhausted-looking parents.
Nabulo tells them she was diagnosed with sickle cell disease at 2 weeks old, but now she is the mother of three children, including twins.
Such a message gives hope to those who feel discouraged or worry that sickle cell disease is a death sentence, said Dr. Julian Abeso, head of pediatrics at Mbale Regional Referral Hospital.
Some men have been known to divorce their wives — or neglect them in search of new partners — when they learn that their children have sickle cell disease. Frequent community deaths from disease complications reinforce perceptions of it as a scourge.
Health workers encourage testing
Nabulo and health workers urge openness and the testing of children for sickle cell as early as possible.
Abeso and Nabulo grew close after Nabulo lost her first baby hours after childbirth in 2015. She cried in the doctor’s office as she spoke of her wish “to have a relative I can call mine, a descendant who can help me,” Abeso recalled.
“At that time, people here were so negative about patients with sickle cell disease having children because the complications would be so many,” the doctor said.
Nabulo’s second attempt to have a child was difficult, with some time in intensive care. But her baby is now a 7-year-old boy who sometimes accompanies her to the hospital. The twin girls came last year.
Speaking outside the one-room home she shares with her husband and children, Nabulo said many people appreciate her work despite the countless indignities she faces, including unwanted stares from people in the streets who point to the woman with “a big head” — a manifestation of the disease in her. Her brothers often behave as if they are ashamed of her, she said.
Once, she heard of a girl in her neighborhood whose grandmother was making frequent trips to the clinic over an undiagnosed illness in the child. The grandmother was hesitant to have the girl tested for sickle cell when Nabulo first asked her. But tests later revealed the disease, and now the girl receives treatment.
“I go to Nabulo for help because I can’t manage the illness affecting my grandchild,” Kelemesiya Musuya said. “She can feel pain, and she starts crying, saying, ‘It is here and it is rising and it is paining here and here.'”
Musuya sometimes seeks reassurance. “She would be asking me, ‘Even you, when you are sick, does it hurt in the legs, in the chest, in the head?’ I tell her that, yes, it’s painful like that,” Nabulo said.
Nabulo said she was glad that the girl, who is 11, still goes to school.
The lack of formal education is hurtful for Nabulo, who struggles to write her name, and a source of shame for her parents, who repeatedly apologize for letting her drop out while her siblings studied. One brother is now a medical worker who operates a clinic in a town not far away from Nabulo’s home.
“I am very happy to see her,” said her mother, Agatha Nambuya.
She recalled Nabulo’s swelling head and limbs as a baby, and how “these children used to die so soon.”
But now she knows of others with sickle cell disease who grew to become doctors or whatever they wanted to be. She expressed pride in Nabulo’s work as a counselor and said her grandchildren make her feel happy.
“At that time,” she said, recalling Nabulo as a child, “we didn’t know.”
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Young women in Rio favela hope to overcome poverty, to play in ’27 World Cup
RIO DE JANEIRO — A 20-minute drive separates the historic Maracana Stadium from the Complexo do Alemao, the biggest complex of favelas in Rio de Janeiro and one of the most impoverished and violent.
One of its residents, 15-year-old football player Kaylane Alves dos Santos, hopes her powerful shots and impressive dribbles will allow her to cover that short distance to the stadium in three years to play for Brazil’s national team in the final of the 2027 Women’s World Cup.
That chance, once remote, became more realistic Friday when FIFA members voted to make Brazil the first Latin American country to host the Women’s World Cup.
Local organizers have suggested that both the opening match and the final are likely to be played at the 78,000-seat Maracana Stadium that staged the final matches of the 1950 and the 2014 men’s football World Cups.
Teenager dos Santos knows the hurdles for her to ever play for Brazil remain enormous — in 2027 or later. She doesn’t have a professional club to play for, she only trains twice a week, and her nutrition is not the best due to limited food choices in the favela.
Most importantly, she often can’t leave home to play when police and drug dealers shoot at each other in Complexo do Alemao.
Still, she is excited and hopeful about Brazil hosting the Women’s World Cup, resulting in a big boost to her confidence.
“We have a dream (of playing for Brazil in the Women’s World Cup), and if we have that chance it will be the best thing in the world,” dos Santos told The Associated Press this week after a training session in the Complexo do Alemao.
She and about 70 other young women in the Bola de Ouro project train on an artificial grass pitch in a safe region of the 3-square kilometers long community.
If not on the pitch, Dos Santos and her teammates will be happy enough just to attend games of a tournament they could only dream of watching up close until FIFA members voted for Brazil over the Germany-Netherlands-Belgium joint bid. The Women’s World Cup was played for the first time in 1991 and will have its 10th edition in 2027.
A five-time champion in men’s football, more than any other country, Brazil has yet to win its first Women’s World Cup trophy. By then, it is unlikely superstar Marta, aged 38, will be in the roster. Dos Santos and thousands of young female footballers who have overcome sexism to take up the sport are keen to get inspiration from the six-time FIFA player of the year award winner and write their own history on home soil.
As many female footballers experience in Brazil, dos Santos and her teenage teammates rarely play without boys on their teams. Until recently, they also had to share the pitch with 5-year-old girls, which didn’t allow the older players to train as hard as they would like.
“(The Women’s World Cup in Brazil) makes us focus even more in trying to get better. We need to be able to play in this,” said 16-year-old Kamilly Alves dos Santos, Kaylane’s sister and also a player on the team. “We need to keep training, sharing our things.”
Their team, which has already faced academy sides of big local clubs like Botafogo, is trained by two city activists who once tried to become players themselves.
Diogo Chaves, 38, and Webert Machado, 37, work hard to get some of their players to the Women’s World Cup in Brazil, but if that’s not possible they will be happy by keeping them in school.
Their nonprofit group is funded solely by donations.
“At first, basically, the children wanted to eat. But now we have all of this,” said Chaves, adding that the project began three years ago. “We believe they can get to the national team. But our biggest challenge is opportunity. There’s little for children from here, not only for the girls.”
Machado said the two coaches “are not here to fool anyone” and do not believe all the young women they train will become professionals.
“What we want from them is for they to be honest people, we all need to have our character,” Machado said. “We want to play and make them become nurses, doctors, firefighters, some profession in the future.”
The two dos Santos sisters, as do many of their teammates, believe that reaching the Women’s World Cup as Complexo do Alemao residents is possible. Brazil has more than 100 professional women’s football teams, with other players living in favelas, too.
But it won’t be easy.
“Sometimes I have to cancel appointments because of shootings, because there’s barricades on fire,” she said. “Sometimes police tell us to go back home, they say we can’t come down and point their guns to me, to my mother,” said Kamilly.
Her sister hopes the pair will overcome the violence, against the odds.
“I want to earn my living in football, fulfill all dreams,” Kaylane says. “And I want to leave the Complexo do Alemao. I want to make it happen.”
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Once a center of Islamic learning, historic Mali city mourns lack of visitors
DJENNE, Mali — Kola Bah used to earn a living as a tour guide in Mali’s historic city of Djenné, once a center of Islamic learning known for the sprawling mud-brick mosque that has been on the UNESCO World Heritage in Danger list since 2016.
The Grand Mosque of Djenné — the world’s largest mud-brick building — used to draw tens of thousands of tourists to central Mali every year. Now it’s threatened by conflict between jihadi rebels, government forces and other groups.
Bah says his income was enough to support his family, which now numbers nine children, and to pay for a small herd of cattle. But these days, few visitors come to the city, and he has been largely out of work. When he needs cash, he sells some of his cattle.
Speaking to The Associated Press outside his home in Djenné’s old town, Bah said locals believed the crisis would come to an end eventually, and that business would pick up as before.
“But the more time passed, the more this dream proved illusory,” he said. “Things are really difficult now.”
Djenné is one of the oldest towns in sub-Saharan Africa and served as a market center and an important link in the trans-Saharan gold trade. Almost 2,000 of its traditional houses still survive in the old town.
The Grand Mosque, built in 1907 on the site of an older mosque dating back to the 13th century, is re-plastered every year by local residents in a ritual that brings together the entire city. The towering, earth-colored structure requires a new layer of mud before the rainy season starts, or it would fall into disrepair.
Women are responsible for carrying water from the nearby river to mix with clay and rice hulls to make the mud used to plaster the mosque. Adding the new layer of mud is a job reserved for men. The joyful ritual is a source of pride for a city that has fallen on hard times, uniting people of all ages.
Bamouyi Trao Traoré, one of Djenné’s lead masons, says they work as a team from the very start. This year’s replastering took place earlier this month.
“Each one of us goes to a certain spot to supervise,” he said. “This is how we do it until the whole thing is done. We organize ourselves, we supervise the younger ones.”
Mali’s conflict erupted following a coup in 2012 that created a power vacuum, allowing jihadi groups to seize control of key northern cities. A French-led military operation pushed them out of the urban centers the following year, but the success was short-lived.
The jihadis regrouped and launched relentless attacks on the Malian military, as well as the United Nations, French and regional forces in the country. The militants proclaimed allegiance to al-Qaida and the Islamic State group.
Sidi Keita, the director of Mali’s national tourism agency in the capital of Bamako, says the drop in tourism was sharp following the violence.
“It was really a popular destination,” he said, describing tens of thousands of visitors a year and adding that today, tourists are “virtually absent from Mali.”
Despite being one of Africa’s top gold producers, Mali ranks among the least developed nations in the world, with almost half of its 22 million people living below the national poverty line. With the tourism industry all but gone, there are ever fewer means for Malians to make a living.
Anger and frustration over what many Malians call “the crisis” is rising. The country also saw two more coups since 2020, during a wave of political instability in West and Central Africa.
Col. Assimi Goita, who took charge in Mali after a second coup in 2021, expelled French forces the following year, and turned to Russia’s mercenary units for security assistance. He also ordered the U.N. to ended its 10-year peacekeeping mission in Mali the following year.
Goita has promised to beat back the armed groups, but the U.N. and other analysts say the government is rapidly losing ground to militants. With Mali’s dire economic situation getting worse, Goita’s ruling junta ordered all political activities to stop last month, and the following day barred the media from reporting on political activities.
Moussa Moriba Diakité, head of Djenne’s cultural mission which strives to preserve the city’s heritage, said there are other challenges beyond security — including illegal excavations and trash disposal in the city.
The mission is trying to promote the message that security isn’t as bad is it seems, he said, and also get more young people involved in the replastering ritual, to help the new generation recognize its importance.
“It’s not easy to get people to understand the benefits of preserving cultural heritage right away,” he said.
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Film director Rasoulof fled Iran on foot, newspaper says
London — Film director Mohammad Rasoulof made an “exhausting and extremely dangerous” walk across a mountainous borderland to avoid being jailed in Iran on national security charges, he told The Guardian newspaper.
Rasoulof said Monday he had fled Iran after a court sentenced him to eight years in jail, of which five were due to be served, over his new film “The Seed of the Sacred Fig.”
The leading Iranian filmmaker, often a target of the country’s authorities, told The Guardian in an interview published Friday that he had found shelter in Germany and was hopeful he could attend the film’s Cannes premiere next week.
The film tells the story of a judge’s struggles amid political unrest in Tehran.
Rasoulof told the U.K. newspaper that he had “no choice” but to leave, although he expects to return home “quite soon.”
“My mission is to be able to convey the narratives of what is going on in Iran and the situation in which we are stuck as Iranians,” said Rasoulof.
“This is something that I cannot do in prison.
“I have in mind the idea that I’ll be back quite soon, but I think that’s the case of all the Iranians who have left the country,” he said.
Rasoulof has already served two terms in Iranian jails over previous films and had his passport withdrawn in 2017.
Having decided to leave, Rasoulof told the newspaper he cut all communications via mobile phones and computers and made his way by foot on a secret route to a border crossing.
“It was a several-hour long, exhausting and extremely dangerous walk that I had to do with a guide,” he said.
After staying in a safe house, he contacted German authorities who provided him with papers that enabled him to travel to Europe.
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Bird flu found in western China as US combats cattle outbreak
BEIJING — Cases of bird flu have been confirmed among wild fowl in western China, the agriculture ministry said Saturday, as concerns grow over a U.S. outbreak infecting cattle.
Two counties in Qinghai province confirmed 275 cases of H5 influenza among dead Pallas’s gull and other wild birds, China’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs said in a notice on its website.
The ministry received a report on the cases from the China Animal Disease Control Center, and the national Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory confirmed the finding, the notice said.
The H5N1 outbreak among dairy cattle in at least nine U.S. states since late March has raised questions over whether it could spread to humans. No such cases have been reported.
The U.S. announced on May 11 that it would spend close to $200 million to fight the outbreak.
News of the China bird flu cases came as the nation’s anti-graft watchdog announced a corruption probe of the agriculture minister Saturday.
Tang Renjian, 61, is under investigation for “serious violations of discipline and law” by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection and National Supervisory Commission, CCDI said on its website.
The term is CCDI’s typical euphemism for corruption.
The notice gave no further details.
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Extreme heat scorches parts of north India; New Delhi on high alert
NEW DELHI — Parts of northwest India sweltered under scorching temperatures Saturday, with the capital, New Delhi, under a severe weather alert as extreme temperatures struck parts of the country.
India’s weather department expects heat wave conditions to persist across the north for the next few days and has put several states on high alert.
On Friday, parts of New Delhi reported up to 47.1 degrees Celsius (116 Fahrenheit). The nearby states of Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan also saw temperatures soar; they are likely to stay high over the next few days, said Soma Sen Roy, a scientist at the India Meteorological Department.
Roy cautioned people against going outdoors under the afternoon sun. He advised drinking plenty of water and wearing loose-fitting clothes. Those who are especially vulnerable, such as the elderly, should stay indoors, he said.
The extreme temperatures coincide with a six-week-long general election, with experts worried that the heat wave could increase health risks as people wait in long lines to cast their vote or candidates campaign aggressively in the outdoors. One minister fainted due to heat last month while addressing an election rally in Maharashtra state.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his main challenger, Rahul Gandhi of the opposition Congress Party, were expected to hold rallies in New Delhi later Saturday, as the city heads to the polls on May 25.
Satish Kumar, a 57-year-old rickshaw driver in the capital, said his work was suffering because of the heat. “People are not coming outside, [markets] are nearly empty,” he said.
Pravin Kamath, a 28-year-old who runs a cart selling cold drinks, complained that it was so hot he could hardly stand being outdoors. “But I must work. What can I do? I am poor, so I have to do it.”
The main summer months — April, May and June — are always hot in most parts of India before monsoon rains bring cooler temperatures. But the heat has become more intense in the past decade and is usually accompanied by severe water shortages, with tens of millions of India’s 1.4 billion people lacking running water.
A study by World Weather Attribution, an academic group that examines the source of extreme heat, found that a searing heat wave in April that struck parts of Asia was made at least 45 times more likely in some parts of the continent by climate change.
Climate experts say extreme heat in South Asia during the pre-monsoon season is becoming more frequent and the study found that extreme temperatures are now about 0.85 C (1.5 F) hotter in the region because of climate change.
At least 28 heat-related deaths were reported in Bangladesh, as well as five in India, in April. Surges in heat deaths have also been reported in Thailand and the Philippines this year, according to the study.
Extreme heat is fast becoming a public health crisis in India, with more than 150 people dying last year during heat waves. The government estimates nearly 11,000 people have died during heat waves this century, yet experts say such figures are likely a vast undercount.
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Mexico City taco stand earns Michelin star
MEXICO CITY — Newly minted Michelin-starred chef Arturo Rivera Martínez stood over an insanely hot grill Wednesday at the first Mexican taco stand ever to get a coveted star from the French dining guide and did exactly the same thing he’s been doing for 20 years: searing meat.
Though Michelin representatives came by Wednesday to present him with one of the company’s heavy, full-sleeved, pristine white chef’s jackets, he didn’t put it on: In this tiny business, which measures 3 meters by 3 meters, the heat is intense.
At Mexico City’s Tacos El Califa de León, in the scruffy-bohemian San Rafael neighborhood, there are only four things on the menu, all tacos, and all of which came from some area around a cow’s rib, loin or fore shank.
“The secret is the simplicity of our taco. It has only a tortilla, red or green sauce, and that’s it. That, and the quality of the meat,” said Rivera Martínez. He’s also probably the only Michelin-starred chef who, when asked what beverage should accompany his food, answers “I like a Coke.”
It’s actually more complicated than that. El Califa de León is the only taco stand among the 16 Mexican restaurants given one star, as well as two eateries that got two stars. Almost all the rest are pretty darn posh eateries.
In fact, other than perhaps one street food stand in Bangkok, El Califa de León is probably the smallest restaurant ever to get a Michelin star: Half of the 9.29 square-meter space is taken up by a solid steel plate grill that’s hotter than the salsa.
The other half is packed with standing customers clutching plastic plates and ladling salsa, and the female assistant who rolls out the rounds of tortilla dough constantly.
In a way, El Califa de León is a tribute to resistance to change. It has been doing the same four things since 1968.
Thousands of times a day, Rivera Martínez grabs a fresh, thinly sliced fillet of beef from a stack and slaps it on the super-hot steel grill; it sizzles.
He tosses a pinch of salt over it, squeezes half a lime on top, and places a soft round of freshly rolled tortilla dough onto the solid metal slab to puff up.
After less than a minute — he won’t say exactly how long because “that’s a secret” — he flips the beef over with a spatula, flips the tortilla, and very quickly scoops the cooked, fresh tortilla onto a plastic plate, places the beef on top and calls out the customer’s name who ordered it.
Any sauces — fiery red or equally atomic green — are added by the customer. There is no place to sit and at some times of day, no place to stand because the sidewalk in front of the business was taken over by street vendors hawking socks and batteries and cell phone accessories years ago.
Not that you really would want to eat inside the tiny taco restaurant. The heat on a spring day is overwhelming.
The heat is one of the few secrets Rivera Martínez would share. The steel grill must be heated to 360 Celsius. Asked how it felt to get a Michelin star, he said in classic Mexico City slang, “está chido … está padre,” or “it’s neat, it’s cool.”
The prices are quite high by Mexican standards. A single, generous but not huge taco costs nearly $5. But many customers are convinced it’s the best, if not the cheapest, in the city.
“It’s the quality of the meat,” said Alberto Muñoz, who has been coming here for about eight years. “I have never been disappointed. And now I’ll recommend it with even more reason, now that it has a star.”
Muñoz’s son, Alan, who was waiting for a beef taco alongside his father, noted “this is a historic day for Mexican cuisine, and we’re witnesses to it.”
It really is about not changing anything — the freshness of the tortillas, the menu, the layout of the restaurant. Owner Mario Hernández Alonso won’t even reveal where he buys his meat.
Times have changed, though. The most loyal customer base for El Califa de León originally came from politicians of the old ruling PRI party, whose headquarters is about five blocks away. But the party lost the presidency in 2018 and has gone into a steady decline, and now it’s rare to see anyone in a suit here.
And Hernández Alonso noted that his father Juan, who founded the business, never bothered to trademark the Califa name and so a well-funded, sleek taco chain has opened about 15 airy restaurants in upscale neighborhoods under a similar name. Hernández Alonso has been toying with the idea of getting the business on social media, but that’s up to his grandkids.
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