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Push for renewable energy sparks new environmental worries
According to the International Energy Agency, the world now invests almost twice as much in clean energy as it does in fossil fuels. But with that shift comes environmental risks related to the mining of critical minerals. VOA’s Jessica Stone looks at how nations are navigating the environmental challenges of creating a renewable future.
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Hong Kong welcomes new giant pandas gifted by Beijing
HONG KONG — Hong Kong welcomed a new pair of giant pandas gifted by Beijing on Thursday with a lavish ceremony, raising hopes for a boost to the city’s tourism.
An An and Ke Ke are the third pair of giant pandas to be sent to the city from mainland China since the former British colony returned to Chinese rule in 1997. Their arrival came after their new neighbor, Ying Ying, gave birth to twins last month and became the world’s oldest first-time panda mother on record.
With the addition of the new bears, the twins, and their father, Le Le, Hong Kong now houses six pandas.
Chief Executive John Lee on Tuesday said An An is a 5-year-old male panda who is agile, intelligent and active, while Ke Ke, a 5-year-old female, is good at climbing, cute and has a gentle temperament.
The new arrivals will undergo two months of quarantine and adapt to their new home at Ocean Park, a zoo and aquarium that has long been a favorite of residents and tourists. Lee expressed hope that the public could meet the new bears in mid-December.
In October, the government will invite residents to propose new names that showcase the pandas’ characteristics.
Tourism industry representatives are optimistic about the potential impact of housing six pandas, hoping it will boost visitor numbers in Hong Kong. Officials have encouraged businesses to capitalize on the popularity of the new bears and newborn cubs to seize opportunities in what some lawmakers have dubbed the “panda economy.”
Pandas are widely considered China’s unofficial national mascot. The country’s giant panda loan program with overseas zoos has long been seen as a tool of Beijing’s soft-power diplomacy. Giant pandas are only found in China’s southwest and their population is under threat from development.
But caring for pandas in captivity is expensive. A zoo in Finland agreed with Chinese authorities to return two loaned giant pandas to China more than eight years ahead of schedule because they were too costly for the facility to maintain amid declining visitors.
Hong Kong’s Ocean Park has been hosting pandas since 1999, when the first pair, An An and Jia Jia, arrived in the financial hub shortly after it was handed back to China.
Jia Jia, who died at 38 in 2016, is the world’s oldest-ever panda to have lived in captivity. The average lifespan for a panda in the wild is 18 to 20 years, while in captivity it’s 30 years, according to the Guinness World Records.
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Statue of American music legend Johnny Cash unveiled at US Capitol
Washington — Johnny Cash now stands among the most famous politicians, trailblazers and activists of American history as he became the first professional musician to be honored with a statue in the U.S. Capitol.
Congressional leaders from both parties and members of the Cash family were among the several hundred guests who gathered Tuesday for the unveiling of the statue. They shared their memories of a man who grew up on an Arkansas cotton farm and turned a love of music into a decades-long career that gave voice to the struggles and triumphs of everyday Americans.
“Some may ask: Why should a musician have a statue here in the halls of the great American republic?” House Speaker Mike Johnson said at the unveiling ceremony. “The answer is pretty simple. It’s because America is about more than laws and politics.”
Each state selects two statues to place within the Capitol. The Cash statue is the second new figure Arkansas has sent to replace two existing images that had represented the state at the U.S. Capitol for more than 100 years. Another statue depicting civil rights leader Daisy Bates was unveiled at the Capitol earlier this year. Bates mentored the nine Black children who desegregated Little Rock Central High School in 1957.
The state’s legislature in 2019 voted to replace Arkansas’ two prior statues, which depicted little-known figures from the 18th and 19th centuries, with Bates and Cash.
Known as the “The Man in Black,” Cash was a vivid storyteller who sang with a deep voice songs like “I Walk The Line,” “Ring of Fire,” “Jackson” and “A Boy Named Sue.” The statue depicts the singer with a guitar slung across his back and a Bible in his hand. Little Rock sculptor Kevin Kresse created the statue.
Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said artistic creativity is an important part of the country’s growth, and Cash’s “substance” and “swagger” inspired generations of artists from every genre imaginable. He quoted singers such as Bob Dylan and Snoop Dogg about Cash’s impact.
“He called Johnny Cash a real American gangster. That a compliment from Snoop Doggy Dogg,” Jeffries said as the audience laughed. “What a life, what a legend, what a legacy.”
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders led a group of Arkansas lawmakers at the ceremony. She said she grew up in a musical family where “after God and country, came Johnny Cash.” She noted how Cash struggled with addiction but went on to perform for prisoners and held a deep religious faith. She described him as a “hymn-singing Christian” who also experienced difficult times.
“When so much in today’s world is fake, Johnny Cash was very real,” Sanders said.
Cash’s daughter, Rosanne Cash, said her father would have viewed the statue “as the ultimate” honor in his life. She said her father’s hard upbringing instilled in him a strong work ethic and that he loved the idea of America as a place of dreams and refuge.
“This man was a living redemption story,” Rosanne Cash said. “He encountered darkness and met it with love.”
Cash was born in Kingsland, a tiny town about 100 kilometers south of Little Rock. He died in 2003 at age 71. His achievements include 90 million records sold worldwide spanning country, rock, blues, folk and gospel. He is among the few artists inducted into both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
Cash’s statue will be the newest added to the Capitol since one from North Carolina depicting the Rev. Billy Graham was unveiled in May.
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CrowdStrike executive apologizes to Congress for July global tech outage
WASHINGTON — An executive at cybersecurity company CrowdStrike apologized in testimony to Congress for sparking a global technology outage over the summer.
“We let our customers down,” said Adam Meyers, who leads CrowdStrike’s threat intelligence division, in a hearing before a U.S. House cybersecurity subcommittee Tuesday.
Austin, Texas-based CrowdStrike has blamed a bug in an update that allowed its cybersecurity systems to push bad data out to millions of customer computers, setting off a global tech outage in July that grounded flights, took TV broadcasts off air and disrupted banks, hospitals and retailers.
“Everywhere Americans turned, basic societal functions were unavailable,” House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green said. “We cannot allow a mistake of this magnitude to happen again.”
The Tennessee Republican likened the impact of the outage to an attack “we would expect to be carefully executed by a malicious and sophisticated nation-state actor.”
“We’re deeply sorry and we are determined to prevent this from ever happening again,” Meyers told lawmakers while laying out the technical missteps that led to the outage of about 8.5 million computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
Meyers said he wanted to “underscore that this was not a cyberattack” but was, instead, caused by a faulty “rapid-response content update” focused on addressing new threats. The company has since bolstered its content update procedures, he said.
The company still faces a number of lawsuits from people and businesses that were caught up in July’s mass outage.
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Former executive gets 2 years in prison for role in FTX fraud
new york — Caroline Ellison, a former top executive in Sam Bankman-Fried’s fallen FTX cryptocurrency empire, was sentenced to two years in prison on Tuesday after she apologized repeatedly to everyone hurt by a fraud that stole billions of dollars from investors, lenders and customers.
U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said Ellison’s cooperation was “very, very substantial” and “remarkable.”
But he said a prison sentence was necessary because she had participated in what might be the “greatest financial fraud ever perpetrated in this country and probably anywhere else” or at least close to it.
He said in such a serious case, he could not let cooperation be a get-out-of-jail-free card, even when it was clear that Bankman-Fried had become “your kryptonite.”
“I’ve seen a lot of cooperators in 30 years here,” he said. “I’ve never seen one quite like Ms. Ellison.”
She was ordered to report to prison on November 7.
Ellison, 29, pleaded guilty nearly two years ago and testified against Bankman-Fried for nearly three days at a trial last November.
At sentencing, she emotionally apologized to anyone hurt by the fraud that stretched from 2017 through 2022.
“I’m deeply ashamed with what I’ve done,” she said, fighting through tears to say she was “so so sorry” to everyone she had harmed directly or indirectly.
She did not speak as she left Manhattan federal court, surrounded by lawyers.
In a court filing, prosecutors had called her testimony the “cornerstone of the trial” against Bankman-Fried, 32, who was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
In court Tuesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon called for leniency, saying her testimony was “devastating and powerful proof” against Bankman-Fried.
The prosecutor said Ellison’s time on the witness stand was very different from Bankman-Fried, who she said was “evasive, even contemptuous, and unable to answer questions directly” when he testified.
Attorney Anjan Sahni asked the judge to spare his client from prison, citing “unusual circumstances,” including her off-and-on romantic relationship with Bankman-Fried and the damage caused when her “whole professional and personal life came to revolve” around him.
FTX was one of the world’s most popular cryptocurrency exchanges, known for its Superbowl TV ad and its extensive lobbying campaign in Washington before it collapsed in 2022.
U.S. prosecutors accused Bankman-Fried and other executives of looting customer accounts on the exchange to make risky investments, make millions of dollars of illegal political donations, bribe Chinese officials, and buy luxury real estate in the Caribbean.
Ellison was chief executive at Alameda Research, a cryptocurrency hedge fund controlled by Bankman-Fried that was used to process some customer funds from FTX.
As the business began to falter, Ellison divulged the massive fraud to employees who worked for her even before FTX filed for bankruptcy, trial evidence showed.
Ultimately, she also spoke extensively with criminal and civil U.S. investigators.
Sassoon said prosecutors were impressed that Ellison did not “jump into the lifeboat” to escape her crimes but instead spent nearly two years fully cooperating.
Since testifying at Bankman-Fried’s trial, Ellison has engaged in extensive charity work, written a novel, and worked with her parents on a math enrichment textbook for advanced high school students, according to her lawyers.
They said she also now has a healthy romantic relationship and has reconnected with high school friends she had lost touch with while she worked for and sometimes dated Bankman-Fried from 2017 until late 2022.
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Swiss police detain several people in connection with ‘suicide capsule’
GENEVA — Police in northern Switzerland said Tuesday that several people have been detained and a criminal case opened in connection with the suspected death of a person in a “suicide capsule.”
The “Sarco” capsule is presumably designed to allow a person sitting in a reclining seat inside to push a button that injects nitrogen gas into the sealed chamber. The person is then supposed to fall asleep and die by suffocation in a few minutes.
Exit International, an assisted suicide group based in the Netherlands, said it is behind the 3D-printed device that cost over $1 million to develop.
Swiss law allows assisted suicide so long as the person takes his or her life with no “external assistance” and those who help the person die do not do so for “any self-serving motive,” according to a government website.
A law firm informed prosecutors in Schaffhausen canton that an assisted suicide involving the Sarco had taken place Monday near a forest cabin in Merishausen, regional police said in a statement. They said that “several people” were taken into custody and that prosecutors opened an investigation on suspicion of incitement and accessory to suicide.
Dutch newspaper Volkskrant reported Tuesday that police had detained one of its photographers who wanted to take pictures of the use of the Sarco. It said Schaffhausen police had indicated the photographer was being held at a police station but declined to give a further explanation.
The newspaper declined to comment further when contacted by the Associated Press.
In an email, the Dutch Foreign Ministry told the AP that it was in contact with the newspaper and Swiss officials.
“As always, we cannot interfere in the legal process of another country. At the same time, the Netherlands stands firmly for press freedom. It is very important that journalists worldwide can do their work freely,” it said.
Exit International, the group behind the Sarco, said in a statement a 64-year-old woman from the U.S. Midwest — it did not specify further — who had suffered from “severe immune compromise” had died Monday afternoon near the German border using the Sarco device.
It said Florian Willet, co-president of The Last Resort, a Swiss affiliate of Exit International, was the only person present and described her death as “peaceful, fast and dignified.”
Dr. Philip Nitschke, an Australian-born trained doctor behind Exit International, has previously told the AP that his organization received advice from lawyers in Switzerland that the use of the Sarco would be legal in the country.
In the Exit International statement on Tuesday, Nitschke said he was “pleased that the Sarco had performed exactly as it had been designed … to provide an elective, non-drug, peaceful death at the time of the person’s choosing.”
The claims of Nitschke and Exit International could not be independently verified.
On Monday, Health Minister Elisabeth Baume-Schneider was asked in Swiss parliament about the legal conditions for the use of the Sarco capsule. She suggested its use would not be legal.
“On one hand, it does not fulfill the demands of the product safety law, and as such, must not be brought into circulation,” she said. “On the other hand, the corresponding use of nitrogen is not compatible with the article on purpose in the chemicals law.”
In July, Swiss newspaper Blick reported that Peter Sticher, a state prosecutor in Schaffhausen, wrote to Exit International’s lawyers saying any operator of the suicide capsule could face criminal proceedings if it was used there — and any conviction could bring up to five years in prison.
Prosecutors in other Swiss regions have also indicated that the use of the suicide capsule could lead to prosecution.
Over the summer, a 54-year-old U.S. woman with multiple health ailments had planned to be the first person to use the device, but those plans were abandoned.
Switzerland is among the only countries in the world where foreigners can travel to legally end their lives and has organizations that are dedicated to helping people kill themselves. But unlike others, including the Netherlands, Switzerland does not allow euthanasia, which involves health care practitioners killing patients with a lethal injection at their request and in specific circumstances.
Some lawmakers in Switzerland have argued that the law is unclear and have sought to close what they call legal loopholes.
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Ancient coastal city in Egypt feels impact of changing climate
Egypt’s second-largest city, Alexandria, lies in the Eastern Mediterranean, a top climate change hotspot that has dealt with record global air and ocean temperatures this year. Egypt-based photojournalist Hamada Elrasam presents scenes of everyday life that have been impacted by the changing climate phenomenon in the low-lying metropolis that has survived over two millennia, only to find itself on this century’s climate frontlines. Written in collaboration with Elle Kurancid.
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‘Short corn’ could replace the towering cornfields steamrolled by a changing climate
wyoming, iowa — Taking a late-summer country drive in the Midwest means venturing into the corn zone, snaking between 12-foot-tall green, leafy walls that seem to block out nearly everything other than the sun and an occasional water tower.
The skyscraper-like corn is a part of rural America as much as cavernous red barns and placid cows.
But soon, that towering corn might become a miniature of its former self, replaced by stalks only half as tall as the green giants that have dominated fields for so long.
“As you drive across the Midwest, maybe in the next seven, eight, 10 years, you’re going to see a lot of this out there,” said Cameron Sorgenfrey, an eastern Iowa farmer who has been growing newly developed short corn for several years, sometimes prompting puzzled looks from neighboring farmers. “I think this is going to change agriculture in the Midwest.”
The short corn developed by Bayer Crop Science is being tested on about 30,000 acres (12,141 hectares) in the Midwest with the promise of offering farmers a variety that can withstand powerful windstorms that could become more frequent due to climate change. The corn’s smaller stature and sturdier base enable it to withstand winds of up to 50 mph — researchers hover over fields with a helicopter to see how the plants handle the wind.
The smaller plants also let farmers plant at greater density, so they can grow more corn on the same amount of land, increasing their profits. That is especially helpful as farmers have endured several years of low prices that are forecast to continue.
The smaller stalks could also lead to less water use at a time of growing drought concerns.
U.S. farmers grow corn on about 90 million acres (36 million hectares) each year, usually making it the nation’s largest crop, so it’s hard to overstate the importance of a potential large-scale shift to smaller-stature corn, said Dior Kelley, an assistant professor at Iowa State University who is researching different paths for growing shorter corn.
Last year, U.S. farmers grew more than 400 tons (363 metric tons) of corn, most of which was used for animal feed, the fuel additive ethanol or exported to other countries.
“It is huge. It’s a big, fundamental shift,” Kelley said.
Researchers have long focused on developing plants that could grow the most corn but recently there has been equal emphasis on other traits, such as making the plant more drought-tolerant or able to withstand high temperatures. Although there already were efforts to grow shorter corn, the demand for innovations by private companies such as Bayer and academic scientists soared after an intense windstorm — called a derecho — plowed through the Midwest in August 2020.
The storm killed four people and caused $11 billion in damage, with the greatest destruction in a wide strip of eastern Iowa, where winds exceeded 100 mph. In cities such as Cedar Rapids, the wind toppled thousands of trees but the damage to a corn crop only weeks from harvest was especially stunning.
“It looked like someone had come through with a machete and cut all of our corn down,” Kelley said.
Or as Sorgenfrey, the Iowa farmer who endured the derecho put it, “Most of my corn looked like it had been steamrolled.”
Although Kelley is excited about the potential of short corn, she said farmers need to be aware that cobs that grow closer to the soil could be more vulnerable to diseases or mold. Short plants also could be susceptible to a problem called lodging, when the corn tilts over after something like a heavy rain and then grows along the ground, Kelley said.
Brian Leake, a Bayer spokesman, said the company has been developing short corn for more than 20 years. Other companies such as Stine Seed and Corteva also have been working for a decade or longer to offer short-corn varieties.
While the big goal has been developing corn that can withstand high winds, researchers also note that a shorter stalk makes it easier for farmers to get into fields with equipment for tasks such as spreading fungicide or seeding the ground with a future cover crop.
Bayer expects to ramp up its production in 2027, and Leake said he hopes that by later in this decade, farmers will grow short corn everywhere.
“We see the opportunity of this being the new normal across both the U.S. and other parts of the world,” he said.
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Jill Biden reveals $500 million plan that focuses on women’s health at Clinton Global Initiative
NEW YORK — First lady Jill Biden is unveiling a new set of actions to address health inequities faced by women in the United States, plans that include spending at least $500 million annually on women’s health research.
Biden was making the announcement Monday while closing out the first day of this year’s Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York.
The additional government spending will mainly come from the Department of Defense, which provides medical care to more than 230,000 active-duty military women and nearly 2 million military retirees, as well as their family members. The research will focus on why these women experience endocrine, hematological and other immunity-related disorders twice as often as men.
“Our nation is home to the best health research in the world, yet women’s health is understudied and research is underfunded,” Biden said at a separate event on Friday. “And we still know too little about how to effectively prevent, diagnose, and treat a range of health conditions in women, from heart disease to cancers.”
The commitment was among the largest of the more than 100 expected at the two-day meeting of political, business and philanthropic leaders gathering to address some of the world’s most pressing issues. Former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Clinton Foundation Vice Chair Chelsea Clinton have set this year’s theme as “What’s Working,” a way to look for potential solutions and effective programs in tumultuous times.
“You don’t look at a problem and say, ‘That’s impossible,’” Bill Clinton said in his opening remarks. “You don’t just throw up your hands. You roll up your sleeves.”
An example of that strategy came from the announcement that a wide-ranging group of 15 nonprofits, humanitarian aid organizations and other funders will join forces to address the humanitarian crisis in Sudan following more than a year of conflict.
The Coalition for Mutual Aid in Sudan — which includes The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Global Giving, Global Fund for Women, and The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee — will donate at least $2 million to mutual aid groups in the country by the end of the year. It also pledged to raise another $4.5 million for those groups within the next two years.
Patricia McIlreavy, president of the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, which has been representing the coalition, said that, while much more aid is needed, the collaboration and problem-solving of the group is an important step forward.
“It gets us started,” McIlreavy told The Associated Press. “And it models the behavior you want to see from others. If you wait until it’s the perfect opportunity, you’ve missed many of the opportunities that were good enough.”
World Food Program director Cindy McCain said earlier this month that “Sudan’s nearly a forgotten crisis” and that 25 million people there already face acute hunger. Last week, the top United Nations humanitarian official said fighting is escalating in the conflict that began in April 2023 when long-simmering tensions between Sudan’s military and paramilitary leaders broke out in the capital Khartoum and spread to other regions. The U.N. says more than 14,000 people have been killed and 33,000 injured.
“With ongoing impediments to a large-scale international aid response, Sudanese community groups have become the primary frontline responders and are currently the most effective means of reaching millions on the brink of starvation,” Patricia McIlreavy, president of the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, said in a prepared statement on behalf of the coalition. “With so many lives on the line, the imperative to support local aid efforts in Sudan has never been more urgent.”
The Center for Disaster Philanthropy says more than 12 million people have been forced from their homes in Sudan, creating what is now the world’s largest displacement and hunger crisis. The danger from the conflict has prevented most international aid agencies from delivering supplies to those in need.
Greg Milne, the Clinton Global Initiative CEO who convened a panel in April to raise awareness and support for the Sudanese people, said the new coalition is an example of what bringing organizations from varied sectors can do.
“We know strong, diverse partnerships can help address often overlooked and even dire challenges, and develop unexpected and innovative solutions,” he said.
Philanthropic leaders, including Bill Gates, World Central Kitchen founder Jose Andres, Open Society Foundations President Binaifer Nowrojee, and Rockefeller Foundation President Raj Shah will share information about their work during CGI, as will Prince Harry, who will discuss the launch of The Archewell Foundation Parents’ Network, which supports parents of children harmed online. In his Tuesday appearance, the Duke of Sussex will also address his work with the World Health Organization and others to reduce violence against children, an issue he and his wife Meghan outlined on a recent trip to Colombia.
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, Kosovo President Vjosa Osmani Sadriu, and Latvian President Edgars Rinkevics are set to address the conference, as are CEOs from Pfizer, Mastercard, IKEA, Pinterest, Sanofi and Chobani.
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California sues Exxon over global plastic pollution
NEW YORK — California and several environmental groups sued ExxonMobil on Monday and accused the oil giant of engaging in a decades-long campaign that helped fuel global plastic waste pollution.
Speaking at an event during Climate Week in New York City, California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the state sued Exxon after concluding a nearly two-year investigation that he said showed Exxon was deliberately misleading the public about the limitations of recycling.
“Today’s lawsuit shows the fullest picture to date of ExxonMobil’s decades-long deception, and we are asking the court to hold ExxonMobil fully accountable for its role in actively creating and exacerbating the plastics pollution crisis through its campaign of deception,” Bonta said in a statement.
The investigation mirrors California’s previous probes into the oil industry’s alleged efforts to mislead the public about climate change, which the state is also suing over, and continues a long-standing adversarial relationship between the state and Big Oil.
Once a major crude supplier, California’s oil production has been on a steady decline for almost four decades, with companies saying the regulatory environment there makes it a difficult place to invest.
Exxon rival Chevron Corp., meanwhile, a strong critic of California’s policies, said this year it plans to move its headquarters from the state where it was born to oil-friendly Texas.
A coalition of environmental groups including the Sierra Club appeared to join California’s legal battle, filing a related lawsuit in the same state court in San Francisco, raising similar allegations against Exxon.
Bonta, a Democrat, said his office specifically had sought information on Exxon’s promotion of its “advanced recycling” technology, which uses a process called pyrolysis to turn hard-to-recycle plastic into fuel.
He had said the technology’s slow progress was a sign of Exxon’s ongoing deception. He said he wants to secure an abatement fund and civil penalties for the harm inflicted by plastics pollution on California.
Exxon pushed back at the attorney general, arguing that solutions like advanced recycling work.
“Suing people makes headlines but doesn’t solve the plastic waste problem. Advanced recycling is a real solution,” said a spokesperson for ExxonMobil, adding that California has done “nothing to ‘advance’ recycling.”
Notre Dame Law School Professor Bruce Huber, who specializes in environmental law, said California may face an “uphill battle” with its lawsuit.
“The state’s primary claim relies on public nuisance, a notoriously murky area of law. It could be difficult for a court to grant California relief here without opening a Pandora’s box of other, similar claims,” he said.
Exxon is the world’s largest producer of resins used for single-use plastics, according to a report published last year by the Minderoo Foundation, with consultancies Wood Mackenzie and the Carbon Trust.
Reuters has reported on the enormous obstacles facing advanced recycling that the plastics industry touts as an environmental savior.
California’s lawsuit comes ahead of a final round of global plastic treaty negotiations set to take place in Busan, South Korea, at the end of the year.
In those talks, countries are split over whether the treaty should call for caps on plastic production, a position opposed by Exxon and the global petrochemical industry.
The United States last month said it supports a treaty designed around global plastic production cuts.
Environmental groups praised the lawsuit.
Christy Leavitt, Oceana’s plastics campaign director, said California’s lawsuit will “hold industry accountable and debunk the plastics recycling narrative that holds us back from real solutions.”
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Biden proposes banning Chinese vehicles from US roads with software crackdown
Washington — The U.S. Commerce Department on Monday proposed prohibiting key Chinese software and hardware in connected vehicles on American roads due to national security concerns — a move that would effectively bar nearly all Chinese cars from entering the U.S. market.
The planned regulation, first reported by Reuters, would also force American and other major automakers in the coming years to remove key Chinese software and hardware from vehicles in the United States.
The Biden administration has raised serious concerns about the collection of data by Chinese companies on U.S. drivers and infrastructure through connected vehicles as well as about potential foreign manipulation of vehicles connected to the internet and navigation systems. The White House ordered an investigation into the potential dangers in February.
The prohibitions would prevent testing of self-driving cars on U.S. roads by Chinese automakers and extend to vehicle software and hardware produced by other U.S. foreign adversaries including Russia.
“When foreign adversaries build software to make a vehicle that means it can be used for surveillance, can be remotely controlled, which threatens the privacy and safety of Americans on the road,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told a briefing.
“In an extreme situation, a foreign adversary could shut down or take control of all their vehicles operating in the United States all at the same time causing crashes, blocking roads.”
The move is a significant escalation in the United States’ ongoing restrictions on Chinese vehicles, software and components. Earlier this month, the Biden administration locked in steep tariff hikes on Chinese imports, including a 100% duty on electric vehicles as well as new hikes on EV batteries and key minerals.
There are relatively few Chinese-made cars or light-duty trucks imported into the United States. But Raimondo said the department is acting “before suppliers, automakers and car components linked to China or Russia become commonplace and widespread in the U.S. automotive sector… We’re not going to wait until our roads are filled with cars and the risk is extremely significant before we act.”
Nearly all newer cars and trucks are considered “connected” with onboard network hardware that allows internet access, allowing them to share data with devices both inside and outside the vehicle.
A senior administration official confirmed the proposal would effectively ban all existing Chinese light-duty cars and trucks from the U.S. market, but added it would allow Chinese automakers to seek “specific authorizations” for exemptions.
The United States has ample evidence of China prepositioning malware in critical American infrastructure, White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told the same briefing.
“With potentially millions of vehicles on the road, each with 10- to 15-year lifespans the risk of disruption and sabotage increases dramatically,” Sullivan said.
The Chinese Embassy in Washington last month criticized planned action to limit Chinese vehicle exports to the United States: “China urges the U.S. to earnestly abide by market principles and international trade rules, and create a level playing field for companies from all countries. China will firmly defend its lawful rights and interests.”
The proposal calls for making software prohibitions effective in the 2027 model year while the hardware ban would take effect in the 2030 model year or January 2029.
The Commerce Department is giving the public 30 days to comment on the proposal and hopes to finalize it by Jan. 20. The rules would apply to all on-road vehicles but exclude agricultural or mining vehicles not used on public roads.
The Alliance For Automotive Innovation, a group representing major automakers including General Motors, Toyota, Volkswagen and Hyundai, has warned that changing hardware and software would take time.
The group noted connected vehicle hardware and software are developed around the world, including China, but could not detail to what extent Chinese-made components are prevalent in U.S. models.
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Soyuz capsule with 2 Russians, 1 American from ISS returns to Earth
Moscow — A Soyuz capsule carrying two Russians and one American from the International Space Station landed Monday in Kazakhstan, ending a record-breaking stay for the Russian pair.
The capsule landed on the Kazakh steppe about 3 1/2 hours after undocking from the ISS in an apparently trouble-free descent. In the last stage of the landing, it descended under a red-and-white parachute at about 7.2 meters per second (16 mph), with small rockets fired in the final seconds to cushion the touchdown.
The astronauts were extracted from the capsule and placed in nearby chairs to help them adjust to gravity, then given medical examinations in a nearby tent.
Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub returned after 374 days aboard the space station; on Friday they broke the record for the longest continuous stay there. Also in the capsule was American Tracy Dyson, who was in the space station for six months.
Eight astronauts remain in the space station, including Americans Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who have remained long past their scheduled return to Earth.
They arrived in June as the first crew of Boeing’s new Starliner capsule. But their trip was marred by thruster troubles and helium leaks, and the U.S. space agency NASA decided it was too risky to return them on Starliner.
The two astronauts are to ride home with SpaceX next year.
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Cholera spreading in Sudan as fighting between rival generals shows no sign of abating
Cairo — Cholera is spreading in war-torn Sudan, killing at least 388 people and sickening about 13,000 others over the past two months, health authorities said, as more than 17 months of fighting between the military and a notorious paramilitary group shows no sign of abating.
The disease is spreading in areas devastated by recent heavy rainfall and floods especially in eastern Sudan where millions of war displaced people sheltered.
The casualties from cholera included six dead and about 400 sickened over the weekend, according to Sunday’s report by the Health Ministry. The disease was detected in 10 of the country’s 18 provinces with the eastern Kassala and al-Qadarif provinces the most hit, the ministry said.
Cholera is a fast-developing, highly contagious infection that causes diarrhea, leading to severe dehydration and possible death within hours when not treated, according to the World Health Organization. It is transmitted through the ingestion of contaminated food or water.
The disease is not uncommon in Sudan. A previous major outbreak left at least 700 dead and sickened about 22,000 in less than two months in 2017.
Sudan was plunged into chaos in April last year when simmering tensions between the military and a powerful paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces, exploded into open warfare across the country.
The fighting, which wrecked the capital, Khartoum, and other urban areas has been marked by atrocities including mass rape and ethnically motivated killings that amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, especially in the western region of Darfur, according to the United Nations and international rights groups.
It has killed at least 20,000 people and wounded tens of thousands others, according to the U.N. However, rights groups and activists say the toll was much higher.
The war also has created the world’s largest displacement crisis. More than 13 million people have been forced to flee their homes since the fighting began, according to the International Organization for Migration. They include over 2.3 million who fled to neighboring countries.
Devastating seasonal floods and cholera have compounded the Sudanese misery. At least 225 people have been killed and about 900 others were injured in the floods, the Health Ministry said. Critical infrastructure has been washed away, and more than 76,000 houses have been destroyed or damaged, it said.
Famine was also confirmed in July in the Zamzam camp for displaced people, which is located about 15 kilometers (10 miles) from North Darfur’s embattled capital of al-Fasher, according to global experts from the Famine Review Committee. About 25.6 million people — more than half of Sudan’s population — will face acute hunger this year, they warned.
Fighting, meanwhile, rages in al-Fasher, the last major city in Darfur that is still held by the military. The RSF has been attempting to retake it since the start of the year.
Last week, the paramilitary force and its allied Arab militias launched a new attack on the city. The military said its forces, aided by rebel groups, managed to repel the attack and kill hundreds of RSF fighters, including two senior commanders.
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Micro dramas shake up China’s film industry, aim for Hollywood
ZHENGZHOU, China — On a film set that resembles the medieval castle of a Chinese lord, Zhu Jian is busy disrupting the world’s second-largest movie industry.
The 69-year-old actor is playing the patriarch of a wealthy family celebrating his birthday with a lavish banquet. But unbeknownst to either of them, the servant in the scene is his biological granddaughter.
A second twist: Zhu is not filming for cinema screens.
“Grandma’s Moon” is a micro drama, composed of vertically shot, minute-long episodes featuring frequent plot turns designed to keep millions of viewers hooked to their cellphone screens — and paying for more.
“They don’t go to the cinema anymore,” said Zhu of his audience, which he described as largely composed of middle-aged workers and pensioners. “It’s so convenient to hold a mobile phone and watch something anytime you want.”
China’s $5 billion a year micro drama industry is booming, according to Reuters’ interviews with 10 people in the sector and four scholars and media analysts.
The short-format videos are an increasingly potent competitor to China’s film industry, some experts say, which is second in size only to Hollywood and dominated by state-owned China Film Group. And the trend is already spreading to the United States, in a rare instance of Chinese cultural exports finding traction in the West.
Three major China-backed, micro-drama apps were downloaded 30 million times across both Apple’s App Store and Google Play in the first quarter of 2024, grossing $71 million internationally, according to analytics company Appfigures.
“The audience only has that much attention. So obviously, the more time they spend in short videos, the less time they have for TV or other longer-format shows,” said Ashley Dudarenok, founder of a Hong Kong-based marketing consultancy.
The leader in the space is Kuaishou, an app that accounted for 60% of the top 50 Chinese micro dramas last year, according to media analytics consultancy Endata.
Kuaishou vice president Chen Yiyi said at a media conference in January that the app featured 68 titles that notched more than 300 million views last year, with four of them watched over a billion times.
Some 94 million people — more than the population of Germany — watched more than 10 episodes a day on Kuaishou, she said. Reuters was not able to independently verify the data.
Initial episodes on such apps are often free, but to complete a micro drama like “Grandma’s Moon,” which has 64 clips, audiences may pay tens of yuan.
Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok that is owned by internet technology firm Bytedance, is also popular with micro drama fans.
Alongside other major Chinese social media apps like Instagram-like Xiaohongshu and YouTube competitor Bilibili, it has announced plans to make more.
In the United States, micro drama platform ReelShort, whose parent company is backed by Chinese tech giants Tencent and Baidu, has recently outranked Netflix in terms of downloads on Apple’s U.S. app store, according to market researcher Sensor Tower.
“China discovered this audience first,” said Layla Cao, a Chinese producer based in Los Angeles. “Hollywood hasn’t realized that yet, but all the China-based companies are already feeding the content.”
‘Low-brow and vulgar’
Many popular micro dramas, including “Grandma’s Moon,” have narratives that revolve around revenge or Cinderella-like rags-to-riches journeys.
Tales of how circumstances at birth are deterministic and can only be changed by near-miracles have struck a chord with viewers at a time when upward mobility in China is low and youth unemployment high.
The micro dramas often “show people who one day are lower class and the next day become upper class — you get so rich that you get to humiliate those who used to humiliate you,” said a 26-year-old screenwriter known by her pen name of Camille Rao.
Rao recently left her poorly paid job as a junior producer in the traditional film industry for what she described as the more dynamic and less hierarchical world of micro dramas. She now writes and adapts scripts for the U.S. market.
“Social mobility is actually very difficult now. Many people perceive this as a social reality,” said Xu Ting, associate professor of Chinese language and literature at Jiangnan University.
This has fueled interest in stories about billionaires and wealthy families, she added: “Everyone desires power and wealth, so it is normal for these type of stories to be popular.”
In the U.S. market, by contrast, fantasy stories about werewolves and vampires are particularly popular, several creators told Reuters.
The boom in micro dramas in China has brought scrutiny from the Communist Party.
Between late 2022 and early 2023, the National Radio and Television Administration regulator said it organized a “special rectification campaign” during which it removed 25,300 micro dramas, totaling close to 1.4 million episodes, due to their “pornographic, bloody, violent, low-brow and vulgar content.”
As Chinese leader Xi Jinping promotes values such as loyalty to the Communist Party and heteronormative marriages, the state-owned China Women’s News outlet in April complained that some micro dramas “portray unequal and twisted marriage and family relationships as a common phenomenon” and “deviate from mainstream social values.”
In June, the government began requiring some creators to register micro dramas with NRTA. The regulator didn’t respond to Reuters’ questions for this story.
Key to the commercial success of these films are plot twists that keep people paying as they scroll while commuting or in line at a grocery store. Episodes often end with a hook — such as a boyfriend walking in on his partner with another man — and viewers have to pay for the next episode to find out what happened.
“The plot of these micro dramas is exaggerated,” said Zhu, the actor. “It has plot reversals, it’s nonsensical, so it catches people’s attention and a large audience wants to see them.”
Zhu is a lover of cinema and an avid fan of Ingrid Bergman in “Casablanca.” Like many of his colleagues in micro dramas, he thinks the genre has limited artistic value. “I see it as fast food: a longer drama is a kind of sumptuous meal, and a micro drama is fast food.”
But its dedicated viewers disagree. Huang Siyi, a 28-year-old customer service agent, said she enjoyed watching romantic micro dramas because “the acting is good and the male and female leads are good-looking.”
“It’s easy to be obsessed with micro dramas,” she said.
Explosive growth
Vertical filming and distribution through social media apps mean micro dramas can be made with small overhead costs. Budgets for such films range from between $28,000 and $280,000, according to market researcher iResearch.
In the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou, “Grandma’s Moon” is being made with a compressed budget and timeline. When Reuters visited the set in July, the filming day stretched until 2 a.m. The crew then moved to a new location and began shooting again at 7 a.m.
The show was shot in just six days, and Zhu, a muscular man with a wide smile and boundless energy, says he plays table tennis after hours to keep up with the young crew on set.
“We’d need to take two to three years to distribute one traditional TV series of film, but we only need three months to distribute a micro drama, saving us a lot of time,” said Zhou Yi, a showrunner at Chinese gaming giant NetEase, which also makes micro dramas.
As micro dramas gain in popularity, actors’ salaries have also grown. Leading roles used to pay $280 a day, said Zhu, adding that main actors in big productions can now make more than double the rate, though extras earn as little as $17 daily.
A retired railway employee who started acting in the 1970s in a theater troupe attached to the unit where he worked, Zhu now lives off his pension and occasional acting gigs.
Many Chinese micro drama producers have their eye on Western markets, where cultural exports from China have often struggled. NetEase last year started making productions for the U.S. that it distributes via an app called LoveShots; the made-for-export films aren’t typically available in China.
Micro dramas designed for the West are often made by production and acting crews in Los Angeles and shot on location. The scripts, which are in English, may also revolve around themes of wealth, cheating partners and miracles.
One of the latest micro dramas on LoveShots is about a woman who, after years of being paralyzed, miraculously regains her ability to move — and walks in on her husband cheating on her.
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US to propose ban on Chinese software, hardware in connected vehicles, sources say
Washington — The U.S. Commerce Department is expected on Monday to propose prohibiting Chinese software and hardware in connected and autonomous vehicles on American roads due to national security concerns, two sources told Reuters.
The Biden administration has raised serious concerns about the collection of data by Chinese companies on U.S. drivers and infrastructure as well as the potential foreign manipulation of vehicles connected to the internet and navigation systems.
The proposed regulation would ban the import and sale of vehicles from China with key communications or automated driving system software or hardware, said the two sources, who declined to be identified because the decision had not been publicly disclosed.
The move is a significant escalation in the United States’ ongoing restrictions on Chinese vehicles, software and components. Last week, the Biden administration locked in steep tariff hikes on Chinese imports, including a 100% duty on electric vehicles as well as new hikes on EV batteries and key minerals.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in May the risks of Chinese software or hardware in connected U.S. vehicles were significant.
“You can imagine the most catastrophic outcome theoretically if you had a couple million cars on the road and the software were disabled,” she said.
President Joe Biden in February ordered an investigation into whether Chinese vehicle imports pose national security risks over connected-car technology — and if that software and hardware should be banned in all vehicles on U.S. roads.
“China’s policies could flood our market with its vehicles, posing risks to our national security,” Biden said earlier. “I’m not going to let that happen on my watch.”
The Commerce Department plans to give the public 30 days to comment before any finalization of the rules, the sources said. Nearly all newer vehicles on U.S. roads are considered “connected.” Such vehicles have onboard network hardware that allows internet access, allowing them to share data with devices both inside and outside the vehicle.
The department also plans to propose making the prohibitions on software effective in the 2027 model year and the ban on hardware would take effect in January 2029 or the 2030 model year. The prohibitions in question would include vehicles with certain Bluetooth, satellite and wireless features as well as highly autonomous vehicles that could operate without a driver behind the wheel.
A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers in November raised alarm about Chinese auto and tech companies collecting and handling sensitive data while testing autonomous vehicles in the United States.
The prohibitions would extend to other foreign U.S. adversaries, including Russia, the sources said.
A trade group representing major automakers including General Motors, Toyota Motor, Volkswagen, Hyundai and others had warned that changing hardware and software would take time.
The carmakers noted their systems “undergo extensive pre-production engineering, testing, and validation processes and, in general, cannot be easily swapped with systems or components from a different supplier.”
The Commerce Department declined to comment on Saturday. Reuters first reported, in early August, details of a plan that would have the effect of barring the testing of autonomous vehicles by Chinese automakers on U.S. roads. There are relatively few Chinese-made light-duty vehicles imported into the United States.
The White House on Thursday signed off on the final proposal, according to a government website. The rule is aimed at ensuring the security of the supply chain for U.S. connected vehicles. It will apply to all vehicles on U.S. roads, but not for agriculture or mining vehicles, the sources said.
Biden noted that most cars are connected like smartphones on wheels, linked to phones, navigation systems, critical infrastructure and to the companies that made them.
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‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ scares off ‘Transformers’ for third week as box office No. 1
Los Angeles — It’s a three-peat for “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”
The Tim Burton legacy sequel to his 1988 horror comedy topped the North American box office charts for the third straight weekend with $26 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday.
It edged out the animated new release “Transformers: One,” which brought in $25 million. The Optimus Prime origin story from Paramount Pictures features the voices of Chris Hemsworth, Brian Tyree Henry and Scarlett Johansson.
“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” a Warner Bros. release with Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder returning as stars, has earned more than $226 million domestically in its three weeks after a monster opening of $110 million — the third best of the year — and a second weekend of $51.6 million.
Third place went to the James McAvoy horror “Speak No Evil,” which came in at $5.9 million in its second week for a total of $21.5 million.
On the whole, the box office was in a quiet phase that is expected to break when ” Joker: Folie à Deux ” dances its way onto the big screen on Oct. 4.
The year’s second-highest grosser ” Deadpool & Wolverine ” remained in the top 5 in its ninth weekend with another $3.9 million and a domestic total of $627 million. Only Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” has earned more.
The Demi Moore-starring, Coralie Fargeat-directed body horror “The Substance,” which made a splash at the Cannes Film Festival, brought in $3.1 million on limited screens in its first weekend for the sixth spot.
The Daily Wire movie “Am I Racist?” — in which conservative columnist Matt Walsh goes undercover as a “DEI trainee” — stayed in the top 10 after a fourth place finish last week, earning $2.9 million for seventh place and a two-week total of $9 million.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.
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“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” $26 million.
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“Transformers One,” $25 million.
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“Speak No Evil,” $5.9 million.
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“Never Let Go,” $4.5 million.
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“Deadpool & Wolverine,” $3.9 million.
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“The Substance,” $3.1 million.
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“Am I Racist?” $2.5 million.
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“Reagan,” $1.7 million.
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“JUNG KOOK: I AM STILL,” $1.4 million.
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“Alien Romulus,” $1.3 million.
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UN adopts pact promising to build ‘brighter future’ for humanity
United Nations, United States — The United Nations on Sunday adopted a “Pact for the Future” aimed at addressing sprawling 21st-century challenges ranging from conflict to climate change and human rights, despite last-minute objections from a group of countries led by Russia.
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who organized the “Summit of the Future,” had billed it as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to reshape human history by rekindling international cooperation.
As an opening act for the annual high-level week of the U.N. General Assembly, which begins Tuesday, dozens of heads of state and government gathered for the signing of the text.
In the adopted version, leaders pledged to bolster the multilateral system to “keep pace with a changing world” and to “protect the needs and interests of current and future generations” facing “persistent crisis.”
“We believe there is a path to a brighter future for all of humanity,” the document says.
The pact outlines 56 “actions,” including commitments to multilateralism, upholding the U.N. Charter and peacekeeping.
It also calls for reforms to international financial institutions and the U.N. Security Council, along with renewed efforts to combat climate change, promote disarmament, and guide the development of artificial intelligence.
The adoption of the text faced a brief delay when Russia’s deputy minister of foreign affairs, Sergey Vershinin, introduced an amendment emphasizing the “principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of states” and urging the U.N. to avoid duplicating efforts.
Russia’s objections were backed by allies Belarus, North Korea, Iran, Nicaragua and Syria, but its amendment was overwhelmingly dismissed in a motion to take no action.
During the negotiations phase, Guterres had urged nations to show “vision” and “courage,” calling for “maximum ambition” to strengthen international institutions that struggle to respond effectively to today’s threats.
But while there are some “good ideas,” the text “is not the sort of revolutionary document reforming the whole of multilateralism that Antonio Guterres had originally called for,” Richard Gowan of the International Crisis Group told AFP.
That sentiment was widely shared among diplomats, many of whom expressed frustration when discussing the ambition and impact of the text, describing it as “lukewarm,” “the lowest common denominator,” and “disappointing.”
“Ideally, you would hope for new ideas, fresh ideas,” said one diplomat.
The fight against global warming was one of the sticking points in the negotiations, with references to the “transition” away from fossil fuels having disappeared from the draft text weeks ago, before being re-inserted.
Despite the criticism, it is still “an opportunity to affirm our collective commitment to multilateralism, even in the difficult current geopolitical context,” one Western diplomat said, emphasizing the need to rebuild trust between the Global North and South.
Developing countries have been particularly vocal in demanding concrete commitments on the reform of international financial institutions, aiming to secure easier access to preferential financing, especially considering the impacts of climate change.
The text does indeed include “important commitments on economic justice and reforming the international financial architecture,” Human Rights Watch (HRW) commented, while also praising “the centrality of human rights.”
However, world leaders “still need to demonstrate that they are willing to act to uphold human rights,” said Louis Charbonneau, HRW’s U.N. director.
Regardless of its content, the pact and its annexes — a Global Digital Compact and a Declaration on Future Generations — are non-binding, raising concerns about implementation, especially as some principles — such as the protection of civilians in conflict — are violated daily.
“Our next task is to breathe life into them, to turn words into action,” Guterres urged on Saturday.
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Japan cracks down on bad-faith buyers as temple, shrine sales surge
SANBAGAWA, Japan — Benmou Suzuki’s dilapidated 420-year-old temple, located deep in the forest near a tiny Japanese mountain village, hardly looks like prized real estate.
Yet the monk was recently approached by two men, who said they were real estate brokers and wanted to know if he was interested in selling.
He suspects they weren’t really interested in the ornate building at the trailhead of a sacred mountain, but the special tax status that comes with running a religious property.
“There are people out there who want a temple, even a mountain temple like this. In fact, considering the value of the religious corporation status, this temple could fetch quite a lot of money,” said 52-year-old Suzuki.
As Japan’s population falls and interest in religion declines, there are fewer people to contribute to the upkeep of the country’s numerous temples and shrines. Suzuki’s Mikaboyama temple, for example, is located in Sanbagawa — an area a three-hour drive from Tokyo with only 500 residents and which also has three other Buddhist temples, one Shinto shrine and a church.
A surge in religious properties coming up for sale has Japanese authorities worried that prospective buyers are not interested in them for heavenly purposes. Rather they fear many are out to dodge taxes or possibly even launder money.
“It’s already a sense of crisis for us and the religious community,” said an official at Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs, which oversees religious sites.
Cases of temple or shrine properties being extensively repurposed have triggered public outrage. In Osaka, a temple sold in 2020 was later razed and dozens of graves were relocated to make way for a property development. In Kyoto, a case about a temple that was demolished and turned into a parking lot made headlines this year.
Owning a temple, shrine or church recognized as a religious corporation in Japan can confer sizeable tax benefits. Businesses under such corporations that offer religious services such as funerals do not have to pay taxes while other non-religious businesses also enjoy preferential tax rates. A wide range of undertakings are allowed from restaurants to hair salons to hotels.
Japan had about 180,000 religious sites with corporation status as end-2023, according to the agency’s data. The number of so-called inactive corporations — such as those with no religious events for more than a year — jumped by a third to more than 4,400.
When monks or priests die without a successor, the overseeing religious group will usually appoint someone to take over or voluntarily relinquish the site’s corporation status.
However, there are around 7,000 religious sites that operate independently of these groups and are considered easy to acquire, according to the agency and specialist brokers.
The cultural affairs agency said it has stepped up efforts to dissolve the corporation status of inactive religious sites to stop them from being targeted by dubious buyers.
And when big earthquakes hit, often damaging temples and shrines, agency officials visit religious groups in those areas, warning them about falling prey to such buyers.
Last year, 17 religious corporations were voluntarily dissolved and six were ordered to dissolve. The agency said the number would increase this year and next year as it ratchets up scrutiny.
It might seem easier for Japan to change its laws to more strictly control the criteria for purchasing religious sites. But the agency said the government is wary about amending laws related to religion as that could be seen as impinging on religious freedom which is guaranteed by Japan’s constitution.
Reuters checks of six websites specializing in brokering the sale of religious properties showed hundreds on the market. Most are only obliquely described online with brokers saying sellers prefer to conduct sales as privately as possible.
Osaka-based broker Takao Yamamoto told Reuters interest is surging. A religious corporation license alone can fetch 30 million yen ($210,000), he adds. Some religious sites, especially those with profitable graveyards, are advertised for millions of dollars.
“Anyone can buy independent sites as long as you have money…even foreigners can buy them. Recently, a lot of Chinese people are trying to buy them,” Yamamoto said.
For his part, Suzuki says he has no intention to sell Mikaboyama temple and is working on ideas to raise funds to maintain it. “Temples are places for local people to gather and forge connections. We just can’t get rid of them,” he said.
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Dolphins dying in Amazon lake made shallow by drought
TEFE, Brazil — The carcass of a baby dolphin lay on the sand bank left exposed by the receding waters in an Amazon lake that has been drying up during the worst drought on record.
Researchers recovered the dead animal on Wednesday and measured water temperatures that have been rising as the lake’s level drops. In last year’s drought, more than 200 of the endangered freshwater dolphins died in Lake Tefe from excessive water temperatures.
“We’ve found several dead animals. Last week, we found one a day on average,” said Miriam Marmontel, head of the dolphin project at the Mamiraua Institute for Sustainable Development.
“We’re not yet associating the deaths with changes in water temperatures, but with the exacerbation of the proximity between human populations, mainly fishermen, and the animals,” she said.
With branches of major rivers in the Amazon basin drying up in this year’s critical drought, the lake connected to the Solimoes River has shrunk, leaving less room for the dolphins in their favorite habitat.
The lake’s main channel is 2 meters deep and roughly 100 meters wide, and it is used by all the boat traffic, from canoes to heavy ferries, Marmontel said. Two dolphins were killed recently when boats ran into them in the shallow water.
“Nobody thought this drought would come so quickly or imagine that it would surpass last year’s drought,” fisherman Clodomar Lima said.
While the dolphin deaths are nowhere close to last year’s toll, the dry season has more than a month to go and water levels will continue to decline, the researcher said.
And it is not just the rare dolphin species that are suffering. Riverine communities across the Amazon are stranded by the lack of transport on waters too shallow for boats, and their floating houses are now on solid ground.
Even houses built on stilts over water are now high and dry a distance from the river shore.
Lake Tefe resident Francisco Alvaro Santos said it was the first time ever that his floating house was out of the water.
“Water is everything to us. It is part of our daily lives, the means of transportation for everyone who live here,” said Santos. “Without water we are nobody!”
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This US city is hailed as a vaccination success. Can it be sustained?
LOUISVILLE, Kentucky — On his first day of school at Newcomer Academy, Maikel Tejeda was whisked to the school library. The 7th grader didn’t know why.
He soon got the point: He was being given make-up vaccinations. Five of them.
“I don’t have a problem with that,” said the 12-year-old, who moved from Cuba early this year.
Across the library, a group of city, state and federal officials gathered to celebrate the school clinic, and the city. With U.S. childhood vaccination rates below their goals, Louisville and the state were being praised as success stories: Kentucky’s vaccination rate for kindergarteners rose 2 percentage points in the 2022-23 school year compared with the year before. The rate for Jefferson County — which is Louisville — was up 4 percentage points.
“Progress is success,” said Dr. Mandy Cohen, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But that progress didn’t last. Kentucky’s school entry vaccination rate slipped last year. Jefferson County’s rate slid, too. And the rates for both the county and state remain well below the target thresholds.
It raises the question: If this is what success looks like, what does it say about the nation’s ability to stop imported infections from turning into community outbreaks?
Local officials believe they can get to herd immunity thresholds, but they acknowledge challenges that includes tight funding, misinformation and well-intended bureaucratic rules that can discourage doctors from giving kids shots.
“We’re closing the gap,” said Eva Stone, who has managed the county school system’s health services since 2018. “We’re not closing the gap very quickly.”
Falling vaccination rates
Public health experts focus on vaccination rates for kindergartners because schools can be cauldrons for germs and the launching pad for community outbreaks.
For years, those rates were high, thanks largely to mandates that required key vaccinations as a condition of school attendance.
But they have slid in recent years. When COVID-19 started hitting the U.S. hard in 2020, schools were closed, visits to pediatricians declined and vaccination record-keeping fell off. Meanwhile, more parents questioned routine childhood vaccinations that they used to automatically accept, an effect that experts attribute to misinformation and the political schism that emerged around COVID-19 vaccines.
A Gallup survey released last month found that 40% of Americans said it is extremely important for parents to have their children vaccinated, down from 58% in 2019. Meanwhile, a recent University of Pennsylvania survey of 1,500 people found that about 1 in 4 U.S. adults think the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine causes autism — despite no medical evidence for it.
All that has led more parents to seek exemptions to school entry vaccinations. The CDC has not yet reported national data for the 2023-24 school year, but the proportion of U.S. kindergartners exempted from school vaccination requirements the year before hit a record 3%.
Overall, 93% of kindergartners got their required shots for the 2022-23 school year. The rate was 95% in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic.
Officials worry slipping vaccination rates will lead to disease outbreaks.
The roughly 250 U.S. measles cases reported so far this year are the most since 2019, and Oregon is seeing its largest outbreak in more than 30 years.
Kentucky has been experiencing its worst outbreak of whooping cough — another vaccine-preventable disease — since 2017. Nationally, nearly 14,000 cases have been reported this year, the most since 2019.
Persuading parents
The whooping cough surge is a warning sign but also an opportunity, said Kim Tolley, a California-based historian who wrote a book last year on the vaccination of American schoolchildren. She called for a public relations campaign to “get everybody behind” improving immunizations.
Much of the discussion about raising vaccination rates centers on campaigns designed to educate parents about the importance of vaccinating children — especially those on the fence about getting shots for their kids.
But experts are still hashing out what kind of messaging work best: Is it better, for example, to say “vaccinate” or “immunize”?
A lot of the messaging is influenced by feedback from small focus groups. One takeaway is some people have less trust in health officials and even their own doctors than they once did. Another is that they strongly trust their own feelings about vaccines and what they’ve seen in Internet searches or heard from other sources.
“Their overconfidence is hard to shake. It’s hard to poke holes in it,” said Mike Perry, who ran focus groups on behalf of a group called the Public Health Communications Collaborative.
But many people seem more trusting of older vaccines. And they do seem to be at least curious about information they didn’t know, including the history of research behind vaccines and the dangers of the diseases they were created to fight, he said.
Improving access
Dolores Albarracin has studied vaccination improvement strategies in 17 countries, and repeatedly found that the most effective strategy is to make it easier for kids to get vaccinated.
“In practice, most people are not vaccinating simply because they don’t have money to take the bus” or have other troubles getting to appointments, said Albarracin, director of the communication science division within Penn’s Annenberg Public Policy Center.
That’s a problem in Louisville, where officials say few doctors were providing vaccinations to children enrolled in Medicaid and fewer still were providing shots to kids without any health insurance. An analysis a few years ago indicated 1 in 5 children — about 20,000 kids — were not current on their vaccinations, and most of them were poor, said Stone, the county school health manager.
A 30-year-old federal program called Vaccines for Children pays for vaccinations for children who Medicaid-eligible or lack the insurance to cover it.
But in a meeting with the CDC director last month, Louisville health officials lamented that most local doctors don’t participate in the program because of paperwork and other administrative headaches. And it can be tough for patients to get the time and transportation to get to those few dozen Louisville providers who do take part.
The school system has tried to fill the gap. In 2019, it applied to become a VFC provider, and gradually established vaccine clinics.
Last year, it held clinics at nearly all 160 schools, and it’s doing the same thing this year. The first was at Newcomer Academy, where many immigrant students behind on their vaccinations are started in the school system.
It’s been challenging, Stone said. Funding is very limited. There are bureaucratic obstacles, and a growing influx of children from other countries who need shots. It takes multiple trips to a doctor or clinic to complete some vaccine series. And then there’s the opposition — vaccination clinic announcements tend to draw hateful social media comments.
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