The art scene in the Democratic Republic of Congo is vibrant and flourishing, but talented local artists still struggle for international recognition. VOA’s Anita Powell takes us to the studios of some of Kinshasa’s top talents, including 25-year-old art sensation Eddy Kamuanga Ilunga.
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Month: April 2018
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is set to testify publicly Tuesday before a group of U.S. senators after apologizing for the way his company handled data for millions of users.
He is due to appear before a joint hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate Commerce Committee, and on Wednesday will go before House lawmakers.
Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley said users “deserve to know how their information is shared and secure,” and that he wants to explore with Zuckerberg ways to balance safety with innovation.
Zuckerberg met privately with lawmakers in Washington on Monday and released written testimony saying the social media network should have done more to prevent itself and the data of its members from being misused.
“We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake. It was my mistake, and I’m sorry,” Zuckerberg said.Zuckerberg was called to testify after news broke last month that personal data of millions of Facebook users had been harvested without their knowledge by Cambridge Analytica, a British voter profiling company that U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign hired to target likely supporters in 2016.
WATCH: Video report on Facebook Data Breach
Cambridge Analytica connection
Prior to 2016, Facebook allowed a British researcher to create an app on Facebook on which about 200,000 users divulged personal information that was subsequently shared with Cambridge Analytica. The number of affected Facebook users multiplied exponentially because the app also collected data about friends, relatives and acquaintances of everyone who installed it.
Cambridge Analytica said it had data for 30 million of Facebook’s 2.2 billion users.
On Capitol Hill, U.S. lawmakers signaled they want action, not just contrition, from social media executives.
“If we don’t rein in the misuse of social media, none of us are going to have any privacy anymore,” the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee, Bill Nelson of Florida, told reporters after meeting privately with Zuckerberg Monday.
Meanwhile, Facebook announced it is starting to notify tens of millions of users, most of them in the United States, whose personal data may have been harvested by Cambridge Analytica.
New cyber firewalls
The social media giant is also empowering all its users to shut off third-party access to their apps and is setting up cyber “firewalls” to ensure that users’ data is not unwittingly transmitted by others in their social network.
For years, Congress took a largely “hands-off” approach to regulating the internet. Some analysts believe that is about to change after the Facebook data breach, as well as a cascade of revelations about Russian cyber-meddling.
“At this point in time, it’s really up to Congress and the federal agencies to step up and take some responsibility for protecting privacy, for regulating Facebook as a commercial service which it clearly is,” Marc Rotenberg, president of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, told VOA. “We’ve gone for many years in the United States believing that self-regulation could work — that Facebook and the other tech giants could police themselves, but I think very few people still believe that.”
Facebook users in Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines, were especially exposed to recent data privacy breaches due to high user numbers and the popularity of an app at the core of the problem, analysts believe.
According to Facebook figures, the data of 1.175 million users in the Philippines may have been “improperly shared” with London-based voter profiling firm Cambridge Analytica. That estimate is the second highest, single-country total after the United States. Indonesia ranks third at around 1.1 million people exposed to data breaches. Vietnam was ninth with 427,000.
Filipinos had also enjoyed a personality quiz app that spread fast due to the sharing of results, said Renato Reyes, secretary general of the Bagong Alyansang Makabaya alliance of social causes in Manila. The app is suspected as a source of Cambridge Analytica data.
In Vietnam, where the media outlet VnExpress International estimates 64 million of the country’s 92 million people use Facebook, younger people like the outlet to show off, technology specialists say. Indonesians use it to communicate for free across their 13,000 islands, some impoverished.
The Silicon Valley social media giant said that beginning April 9 it would add a News Feed link for users to see what information they have shared on which apps.
“I think we are in a position to demand an explanation directly from the officials at Facebook considering that we are the second highest country in net exposure,” Reyes said.
Why Southeast Asia?
Data from about 87 million users worldwide may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica, Facebook says.
Southeast Asia faced exposure because a rise in the number of “affordable” mobile phones has expanded consumption of news on social media, said Athina Karatzogianni, associate professor in media, communication and sociology at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom.
Total smartphone shipments in emerging Southeast Asia came to about 100 million last year, according to the market research firm IDC.
In parts of the subcontinent, people rely on Facebook as an easy, free means to share news and images with family or friends across long distances, said Lam Nguyen, country manager with IDC.
App sharing in the Philippines
Filipinos worry that Cambridge Analytica’s parent company crunched the results of the personality quiz app to grasp voter psychology for targeted advertising on behalf of political campaigns, Reyes said. It may have taken the Philippine 2016 election as a “laboratory” for the U.S. presidential race later that year, he said.
Cambridge Analytica says independent research contractor GSR “licensed data” from no more than 30 million users and that no information was used for the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The organization took legal action against GSR.
“The use of personal data in order to influence the outcome of elections is really a cause for concern,” Reyes said.
The Philippine National Privacy Commission has required Facebook to give updates on controlling against any further risk, the commission said Friday. Any data leaked would have arisen from use of University of Cambridge academic psychologist Aleksandr Kogan’s personality quiz app, it said.
Facebook rage in Vietnam
In Vietnam, Facebook took off about 11 years ago along with emerging wealth, including access to other foreign goods and services.
A lot of people use Facebook to show off travel photos, said Phuong Hong, communications director with an app developer in Ho Chi Minh City. Such elaborate public posting exposes users to information harvesting, she said.
“In Vietnam, people (are) more open and they don’t as much realize the impact if they publish all their information on social channels,” she said.
“Just some highly well educated people who already know about the after effects will try to limit it by themselves, but most of young, from 14 to 25, and even older people 25 to 40, they just go to that site, create an account and just follow to what Facebook asks for to fill in the information,” she added.
Facebook users in Vietnam may remember a breach four years ago that let phone numbers and e-mails find their way to marketers, Nguyen said.
“When the (Cambridge Analytica) story came to light, I think a lot of Facebook users here in Vietnam were kind of like ah, OK, so now it comes to light, but we already know our personal data have been breached a couple of years ago already,” he said.
Vietnam’s national defense and diplomatic officials met last week to discuss “internet security” with an eye toward Facebook, VnExpress International said.
Indonesia, Facebook discuss ‘abuse’
In Indonesia, the communications minister met the Indonesian Facebook public policy head April 5 to discuss any “abuse” of user data, the Ministry of Communication and Informatics said on its website.
The number of Indonesian Facebook users had reached 130 million in January, 6 percent of the world total.
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Government and other scientists are proposing a new way to define Alzheimer’s disease basing it on biological signs, such as brain changes, rather than memory loss and other symptoms of dementia that are used today.
The move is aimed at improving research, by using more objective criteria like brain scans to pick patients for studies and enroll them sooner in the course of their illness, when treatments may have more chance to help.
But it’s too soon to use these scans and other tests in routine care, because they haven’t been validated for that yet, experts stress. For now, doctors will still rely on the tools they’ve long used to evaluate thinking skills to diagnose most cases.
Regardless of what tests are used to make the diagnosis, the new definition will have a startling effect: Many more people will be considered to have Alzheimer’s, because the biological signs can show up 15 to 20 years before symptoms do.
“The numbers will increase dramatically,” said Dr. Clifford R. Jack Jr., a Mayo Clinic brain imaging specialist. “There are a lot more cognitively normal people who have the pathology in the brain who will now be counted as having Alzheimer’s disease.”
He led a panel of experts, working with the Alzheimer’s Association and the National Institute on Aging, that updated guidelines on the disease, published Tuesday in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association.
About Alzheimer’s
About 50 million people worldwide have dementia, and Alzheimer’s is the most common form. In the U.S., about 5.7 million have Alzheimer’s under its current definition, which is based on memory problems and other symptoms. About one-third of people over 70 who show no thinking problems actually have brain signs that suggest Alzheimer’s, Jack said.
There is no cure – current medicines such as Aricept and Namenda just temporarily ease symptoms. Dozens of hoped-for treatments have failed, and doctors think one reason may be that the studies enrolled patients after too much brain damage had already occurred.
“By the time that you have the diagnosis of the disease, it’s very late,” said Dr. Eliezer Masliah, neuroscience chief at the Institute on Aging.
“What we’ve realized is that you have to go earlier and earlier and earlier,” just as doctors found with treating cancer, he said.
Another problem: as many as 30 percent of people enrolled in Alzheimer’s studies based on symptoms didn’t actually have the disease – they had other forms of dementia or even other medical conditions. That doesn’t give an accurate picture of whether a potential treatment might help, and the new definition aims to improve patient selection by using brain scans and other tests.
Better tests
Many other diseases, such as diabetes, already are defined by measuring a biomarker, an objective indicator such as blood sugar. That wasn’t possible for Alzheimer’s disease until a few years ago, when brain scans and spinal fluid tests were developed to do this.
They measure certain forms of two proteins – amyloid and tau – that form plaques and tangles in the brain – and signs of nerve injury, degeneration and brain shrinkage.
The guidelines spell out use of these biomarkers over a spectrum of mental decline, starting with early brain changes, through mild impairment and Alzheimer’s dementia.
What to do?
People may be worried and want these tests for themselves or a family member now, but Jack advises: “Don’t bother. There’s no proven treatment yet.”
You might find a doctor willing to order them, but spinal fluid tests are somewhat invasive, and brain scans can cost up to $6,000. Insurance usually does not pay because they’re considered experimental outside of research. A large study is underway now to see whether Medicare should cover them and when.
Anyone with symptoms or family history of dementia, or even healthy people concerned about the risk can consider enrolling in one of the many studies underway.
“We need more people in this pre-symptomatic stage” to see if treatments can help stave off decline, Masliah said.
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Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is shutting down his Facebook account as the social media giant struggles to cope with the worst privacy crisis in its history.
In an email to USA Today, Wozniak said Facebook makes a lot of advertising money from personal details provided by users. He said the “profits are all based on the user’s info, but the users get none of the profits back.”
Wozniak said he’d rather pay for Facebook.
“Apple makes money off of good products, not off of you,” he said.
In an interview late Monday in Philadelphia with The Associated Press, Wozniak said he had been thinking for a while of deleting his account and made the move after several of his trusted friends deleted their Facebook accounts last week.
It’s “a big hypocrisy not respecting my privacy when (Facebook CEO Mark) Zuckerberg buys all the houses around his and all the lots around his in Hawaii for his own privacy,” Wozniak said. “He knows the value of it, but he’s not looking after mine.”
A British data mining firm affiliated with Donald Trump’s Republican presidential campaign gathered personal information from 87 million Facebook users to try to influence elections. Facebook, based in Menlo Park, California, has announced technical changes intended to address privacy issues.
Zuckerberg has apologized, and Facebook’s No. 2 executive, Sheryl Sandberg, has said she’s sorry the company let so many people down.
Zuckerberg will testify on Capitol Hill on Tuesday and Wednesday about the company’s ongoing data privacy scandal and how it failed to guard against other abuses of its service.
Wozniak said he doesn’t believe in the current system that Facebook can fix its privacy issues, saying he doesn’t think Facebook is going to change its policies “for decades.”
Wozniak said Apple Inc., based in Cupertino, California, has systems and policies that in many cases allow people to choose whether to share certain data. He said he doesn’t foresee Apple not allowing the Facebook app to be bought or downloaded on its phones but said he does not make those decisions for the company.
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Landfills around the world are getting overloaded with waste, much of it hazardous and slow to decompose. As it becomes increasingly difficult to find new places for discarded unwanted items, people around the world are looking for ways to re-use as much stuff as possible before throwing it away. Designers are embracing the trend and are increasingly using recycled materials in their new creations.
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In the span of only a few years, printing of tri-dimensional objects has gone from toys to buildings, and 3D printers can now print with any material – from plastic and metal to concrete, so printing houses is gaining popularity. The first in Europe is a small office building, 3D-printed in Denmark. VOA’s George Putic has more.
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Across the globe—“the selfie” has become a social media phenomenon. While it’s considered bad manners in some places, there’s a venue in Los Angeles where it is welcomed at all times. Genia Dulot visited the brand new Selfie Museum there.
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Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday promised to open the country’s economy further and lower import tariffs on products including cars, in a speech that comes amid rising trade tensions between China and the United States.
Xi also said China would raise the foreign ownership limit in the automobile sector “as soon as possible” and push previously announced measures to open the financial sector.
“This year, we will considerably reduce auto import tariffs, and at the same time reduce import tariffs on some other products,” Xi said at the Chinese Boao Forum for Asia in Hainan province.
The comments sent U.S. stock futures, the dollar and Asian shares higher.
They come amid rising trade tensions between China and the United States following a week of escalating tariff threats sparked by U.S. frustration with China’s trade and intellectual property policies.
Xi said that China will take measures to sharply widen market access for foreign investors.
China will also speed up opening of its insurance sector to foreign investors, Xi said.
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In war-torn Afghanistan, honey is regarded as a traditional cure-all but for one schoolgirl, the sticky commodity has also created sweet opportunities to work and own a business in a country where few women do so.
Three years ago, Frozan, now 19 years old, obtained a small loan, bought two beehives and learned about apiculture from Hand in Hand International, a non-governmental organization that focuses on poverty.
The bees collected nectar from flowers growing near her home in the Marmul district in the northern Balkh province. Their first harvest produced about 16kg (35lb) of honey, which enabled Frozan to pay back her loan and still have money left over.
She now has 12 beehives and last year collected 110kg of honey, which earned her 100,000 Afghanis ($1,450) in a country where GDP per capita is only about $600.
“The village I live in is a traditional village and women are not allowed to work outside,” says Frozan, who goes by one name. “But when I started beekeeping I realized that it’s an easy task. I told the people about beekeeping and then they accepted it.”
Since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, the lives and status of women in society have improved significantly. But traditions, insecurity and recently a decline in international donors, have slowed progress.
A Human Rights Watch report, quoting government officials, says 85 percent of the 3.5 million children who don’t go to school are girls. Only 37 percent of adolescent girls are literate compared with 66 percent of adolescent boys.
Frozan is now in her final year of school and would like to study economics and grow her business, goals that may now be possible for her and her three siblings thanks to her income stream.
She says looking after tens of thousands of bees can easily be done between studies and household chores and her father, Ismail, who is a farmer like much of Marmul’s population, supports his daughter’s enterprise.
“It has been my dream to have a daughter who could find a job like this and make a future for herself,” he says.
Every few weeks, Ismail takes the fresh honey to Mazar-i-Sharif, the provincial capital, more than 50km away, where it’s sold to shops and consumed mainly by local customers.
While industry data is scant, local media citing government officials say Afghanistan’s honey production has risen in recent years, hitting 2,000 tons in 2015. Several varieties such as acacia, almond flower, and basil are now available.
However, infrastructure constraints mean most of this honey never leaves Afghanistan.
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Iran unified the country’s official and open market exchange rates, state media said, after its currency, the rial, plunged to an all-time low on Monday on concerns over a return of crippling sanctions.
The U.S. dollar jumped in a day from 54,700 rials to 60,000 rials in the open market in Tehran on Monday. A dollar was worth 36,000 rials in mid-September.
After an emergency cabinet meeting, Iran’s First Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri was quoted by the state media as saying that from Tuesday the price of the dollar would be 42,000 rials in both markets, and for all business activities.
Iran has long been trying to unify its open market rate, used for most commercial transactions, with the official rate, which is a subsidized rate that is only available to government departments and some importers of priority goods.
Jahangiri said from Tuesday the government would not recognize any rate but the official rate, and “it would be illegal to trade dollars with an unofficial rate.”
U.S. sanctions lifted under Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers in 2015 will resume unless U.S. President Donald Trump waives them again on May 12. Trump has effectively set that as a deadline for European powers to fix what he called “the terrible flaws” of the deal.
President Hassan Rouhani warned on Monday that Trump will regret it if he pulls out of the nuclear deal.
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A jawbone fossil found on a rocky English beach belongs to one of the biggest marine animals on record, a type of seagoing reptile called an ichthyosaur that scientists estimated at up to 85 feet (26 meters) long – approaching the size of a blue whale.
Scientists said on Monday this ichthyosaur, which appears to be the largest marine reptile ever discovered, lived 205 million years ago at the end of the Triassic Period, dominating the oceans just as dinosaurs were becoming the undisputed masters on land. The bone, called a surangular, was part of its lower jaw.
The researchers estimated the animal’s length by comparing this surangular to the same bone in the largest ichthyosaur skeleton ever found, a species called Shonisaurus sikanniensis from British Columbia that was 69 feet (21 meters) long. The newly discovered bone was 25 percent larger.
“This bone belonged to a giant,” said University of Manchester paleontologist Dean Lomax.
“The entire carcass was probably very similar to a whale fall in which a dead whale drops to the bottom of the sea floor, where an entire ecosystem of animals feeds on the carcass for a very long time. After that, bones become separated, and we suspect that’s what happened to our isolated bone.”
Fossil collector Paul de la Salle, affiliated with the Etches Collection in Dorset, England, found the bone in 2016 at Lilstock on England’s Somerset coast along the Bristol Channel.
“The structure was in the form of growth rings, like that of a tree, and I’d seen something similar before in the jaws of late Jurassic ichthyosaurs,” he said.
Ichthyosaurs swam the world’s oceans from 250 million years ago to 90 million years ago, preying on squid and fish. The biggest were larger than other huge marine reptiles of the dinosaur age like pliosaurs and mosasaurs. Only today’s filter-feeding baleen whales are larger. The blue whale, up to about 98 feet (30 meters) long, is the biggest animal alive today and the biggest marine animal ever.
The researchers estimated the new ichthyosaur at 66 to 85 feet long (20 to 26 meters).
It appears to have belonged to an ichthyosaur group called shastasaurids. Because the remains are so incomplete, it is unclear whether it represents a new ichthyosaur genus or is a member of a previously identified genus, said paleontologist Judy Massare of the State University of New York College at Brockport.
The research was published in the journal PLOS ONE.
This story was written by Reuters.
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A fossil finger bone dating back about 90,000 years that was unearthed in Saudi Arabia’s Nefud Desert is pointing to what scientists are calling a new understanding of how our species came out of Africa en route to colonizing the world.
Researchers said on Monday the middle bone of an adult’s middle finger found at site called Al Wusta is the oldest Homo sapiens fossil outside of Africa and the immediately adjacent eastern Mediterranean Levant region, as well as the first ancient human fossil from the Arabian peninsula.
While the Nefud Desert is now a veritable sea of sand, it was hospitable when this individual lived – a grasslands teeming with wildlife alongside a freshwater lake.
Our species first appeared in Africa roughly 300,000 years ago. Scientists previously thought Homo sapiens departed Africa in a single, rapid migration some 60,000 years ago, journeying along the coastlines and subsisting on marine resources, said anthropologist Michael Petraglia of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany.
This fossil of an intermediate phalanx bone, 1.2 inches (3.2 cm) long, suggests our species exited Africa far earlier.
“This supports a model not of a single rapid dispersal out of Africa 60,000 years ago, but a much more complicated scenario of migration. And this find, together with other finds in the last few years, suggests … Homo sapiens is moving out of Africa multiple times during many windows of opportunity during the last 100,000 years or so,” Petraglia said.
The discovery also shows these people were moving across the interior of the land, not coastlines, Petraglia added.
Numerous animal fossils were discovered, including hippos, wild cattle, antelopes and ostriches, University of Oxford archeologist Huw Groucutt said. Bite marks on fossilized bones indicated carnivores lived there, too.
Stone tools that hunter-gatherers used also were found.
“The big question now is what became of the ancestors of the population to which the Al Wusta human belonged,” Groucutt said.
“We know that shortly after they lived, the rains failed and the area dried up. Did this population die out? Did it survive further south in Arabia, where even today there are mountainous areas with quite high rainfall and coastal regions which receive monsoonal rains?” Groucutt added. “Or did the drying environment mean that some of these people were ‘pushed’ further into Eurasia, as part of a worldwide colonization?”
The research was published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
This story was written by Reuters.
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Brazil’s government has been told that development projects, including hydropower dams, in protected areas can no longer go ahead without the prior approval of lawmakers.
Last week’s ruling by the supreme court followed the use by the government in recent years of the controversial “provisional measure”, a legal instrument that allowed the president to approve projects by reducing the size of protected areas.
Campaigners said the decision should ensure the country’s forests and reserves, including the Amazon rainforest, were better protected.
“This decision puts an end to a spree of provisional measures in the name of environmental de-protection,” said Mauricio Guetta, a lawyer at Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), an advocacy group.
In recent years, the government has used the measure to open up protected areas for controversial projects, including building two of Brazil’s largest hydropower dams – the Jirau and Santo Antonio – in the Amazon.
The use of the measure to shrink protected areas with immediate effect had brought “irreversible consequences, irreversible damage to the environment,” Guetta told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.
The eight-judge bench ruled unanimously that using the provisional measure to reduce the size of protected areas for any reason was unconstitutional.
It followed a lawsuit in which the court heard the measure had been used in 2012 to allow trees in six protected areas of the Amazon to be felled to make way for five hydropower dams.
“The (provisional measure), later converted into law, reduced the level of environmental protection by deactivating due legislative process,” supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes said in a statement.
The court said the ruling would not affect the five hydropower plants in question because the provisional measure had already been enacted in law, and some are operating.
Guetta said the ruling meant any changes to protected areas must be first approved by law, and local communities should be properly consulted about projects planned on their land.
“The government has been trying to reduce by more than 1 million hectares the area under conservation in the southern part of Amazonas state. Now this initiative is officially vetoed because of the supreme court’s decision,” he said.
Environmentalists say increasing swaths of land, including the Amazon forest, are being felled for grazing and cropland, and for development projects.
Deforestation in the Amazon fell in the August 2016 to July 2017 monitoring period for the first time in three years, although the 6,624 square kilometers (2,557 square miles) cleared of forest remains well above the low recorded in 2012 and targets for slowing climate change.
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Apple on Monday said it had achieved its goal of powering all of the company’s facilities with renewable energy, a milestone that includes all of its data centers, offices and retail stores in 43 countries.
The iPhone maker also said nine suppliers had recently committed to running their operations entirely on renewable energy sources like wind and solar, bringing to 23 the total number to make such a pledge.
Major U.S. corporations such as Apple, Wal-Mart and Alphabet have become some of the country’s biggest buyers of renewable forms of energy, driving substantial growth in the wind and solar industries.
Alphabet’s Google last year purchased enough renewable energy to cover all of its electricity consumption worldwide.
Costs for solar and wind are plunging thanks to technological advances and increased global production of panels and turbines, enabling companies seeking to green their images to buy clean power at competitive prices.
“We’re not spending any more than we would have,” Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president for environment, policy and social initiatives, said in an interview. “We’re seeing the benefits of an increasingly competitive clean energy market.”
Renewable energy projects that provide power to Apple facilities range from large wind farms in the United States to clusters of hundreds of rooftop solar systems in Japan and Singapore. The company has also urged utilities to procure renewable energy to help power Apple’s operations.
Encouraging suppliers to follow suit in embracing 100 percent renewable energy is the next step for Apple. The suppliers that pledge to use more clean energy know they will have “a leg up” against competitors for Apple’s business, Jackson said.
“We made it clear that, over time, this will become less of a wish list and more of a requirement,” she said.
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Last October, Jason Aldean was in a Las Vegas hospital visiting some of the victims injured in a mass shooting at a country music festival a week earlier.
On that Sunday afternoon, the country star turned to his longtime manager, Clarence Spalding.
“He looked at me and said, ‘This will be the hardest thing I ever do,'” Spalding recalled. “And it was.”
Aldean, the reigning Academy of Country Music’s entertainer of the year with a new album out this Friday, has built his career and reputation on his live shows that entertain tens of thousands every year. He had returned to meet face-to-face with those who had survived a terrible trauma during his performance at the festival, which had left him with lingering feelings of guilt.
In one room, a woman was still in a coma as he stood by her bed. Aldean recorded a message on her cell phone, promising to bring her to a show when she got better. Those moments in those hospital rooms were heavy with emotion, Spalding said.
“Jason would walk in and somebody who had been shot in the arm, leg, face or wherever would just start crying because it was such an emotional thing to see him,” Spalding said.
Aldean was onstage when the gunman started shooting with high-powered weapons at the fans from hotel room window across the street from the outdoor Route 91 Harvest Festival. That night in October, 59 people were killed and hundreds more injured in what has become the nation’s deadliest mass shooting in modern history.
The Macon, Georgia-born star has been singing about small-town, working class life since he started in Nashville two decades ago, and said he now feels a connection to the survivors of another recent shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida.
“Unless anybody has witnessed anything like that or been a part of it, it’s really hard for people to really understand where you’re coming from on that stuff,” Aldean said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “It’s like the kids from the school in Florida, that shooting. I get it, man. I understand how they are feeling.”
About 40 members of his band and crew, as well as his pregnant wife, Brittany, were all there at the festival. Spalding said two of their tour buses were shot, as well as their lighting board and stage. Aldean’s bass player found a bullet fragment in his bass guitar.
The aftermath for Aldean has been complicated. He said he felt thankful that his family, crew and friends weren’t injured, but also guilt for all the people who were there because they wanted to see him play. And then he felt anger and disbelief.
“You start doing that thing, like, ‘Man, did that really happen? It seems so crazy,'”‘ Aldean said. “You just sit there and relive it a thousand times a day.”
His recovery was helped by talking with his wife and his band and crew about what they experienced. And then he met those survivors.
“Going back to the hospital, going back to Vegas and seeing those people. Seeing some of the strength they were having. People laid up in the hospital and smiling and laughing and just being glad they were alive. That sort of stuff helped me to look at it in a different view,” Aldean said. “Those people are here and pushing on.”
Two months to the day after the shooting, Aldean’s son, Memphis, was born and finally Aldean found some relief from the spiraling thoughts in his head.
“Really to me, he just gave me something else to focus on. Something else to think about on a daily basis,” Aldean said.
And although other country musicians have spoken out about the need for gun control since the shooting, Aldean has avoided wading into the political debates about guns. “It’s a no-win situation,” Aldean said. “I think no matter what you say, whether you’re for gun control or not, I mean, you’re setting yourself up to be crucified in the public eye or in the media.”
However, Aldean, who is a gun owner, said there are flaws in the nation’s laws regarding gun ownership that need addressing.
“It’s too easy to get guns, first and foremost,” Aldean said. “When you can walk in somewhere and you can get one in 5 minutes, do a background check that takes 5 minutes, like how in-depth is that background check? Those are the issues I have. It’s not necessarily the guns themselves or that I don’t think people should have guns. I have a lot of them.”
But his concern is that these tragedies are just used as fodder for the political arguments that have dominated any discussion about gun control.
“Nobody is looking at what the actual issue is and really how to come to an agreement and make a smart decision,” Aldean said.
This Friday, Aldean is releasing his eighth studio album, “Rearview Town,” which he had been working on all throughout last year in between touring. It features his bluesy new single, “You Make It Easy,” which was co-written by Florida Georgia Line, as well as “Drowns the Whiskey,” a duet with Miranda Lambert. Aldean said the title track appealed to him as a metaphor for his own life.
“‘Rearview Town’ just kind of says you’re sort of putting some of the things that have kind of weighted you down and been on your shoulders,” Aldean said. “You’re putting that behind you and you’re moving on and looking forward to everything in store.”
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On the eve of an expected grilling by U.S. lawmakers, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg once again apologized for inadequately protecting the data of millions of social media platform users and highlighted steps the firm is taking to prevent a repeat.
In multiple interviews with news media outlets and in prepared remarks to be delivered on Capitol Hill, Zuckerberg on Monday acknowledged that the tools Facebook provides to promote human interconnectedness were exploited for ill or nefarious purposes.
“It was my mistake, and I’m sorry,” Zuckerberg said in testimony released ahead of Tuesday’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees and Wednesday’s appearance before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
“I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here,” Zuckerberg added.
Zuckerberg was called to testify after news broke last month that personal data of millions of Facebook users had been harvested without their knowledge by Cambridge Analytica, a British voter profiling company that U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign hired to target likely supporters in 2016.
Prior to 2016, Facebook allowed a British researcher to create an app on Facebook on which about 200,000 users divulged personal information that was subsequently shared with Cambridge Analytica. The number of affected Facebook users multiplied exponentially because the app also collected data about friends, relatives and acquaintances of everyone who installed it.
Cambridge Analytica said it had data for 30 million of Facebook’s 2.2 billion users.
On Capitol Hill, U.S. lawmakers signaled they want action, not just contrition, from social media executives.
“If we don’t rein in the misuse of social media, none of us are going to have any privacy anymore,” the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee, Bill Nelson of Florida, told reporters after meeting privately with Zuckerberg Monday.
Meanwhile, Facebook announced it is starting to notify tens of millions of users, most of them in the United States, whose personal data may have been harvested by Cambridge Analytica.
The social media giant is also empowering all its users to shut off third-party access to their apps and is setting up cyber “firewalls” to ensure that users’ data is not unwittingly transmitted by others in their social network.
For years, Congress took a largely “hands-off” approach to regulating the internet. Some analysts believe that is about to change after the Facebook data breach, as well as a cascade of revelations about Russian cyber-meddling.
“At this point in time, it’s really up to Congress and the federal agencies to step up and take some responsibility for protecting privacy, for regulating Facebook as a commercial service which it clearly is,” Marc Rotenberg, president of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, told VOA. “We’ve gone for many years in the United States believing that self-regulation could work — that Facebook and the other tech giants could police themselves, but I think very few people still believe that.”
This story was written by Michael Bowman, Ken Bredemeier contributed.
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Pakistan launched a nationwide polio vaccination drive this week to try to reach 38.7 million children and eradicate the paralyzing and potentially deadly virus in one of the last countries where it is endemic.
Nearly 260,000 volunteers and workers fanned out across Pakistan in an effort to vaccinate every child below the age of five in a week-long campaign, Pakistan’s national coordinator on polio, Mohammad Safdar, said.
“We’re really very close to eradicating the disease,” Safdar told Reuters, appealing to the people to cooperate with the door-to-door effort.
Pakistan is one of only three countries in the world, along with Afghanistan and Nigeria, that suffers from endemic polio, a childhood virus that can cause paralysis or death.
In 2018, Pakistan has had just one polio case, reported last month, Safdar said. The number of cases has steadily declined since 2014 when 306 were reported. Last year, there were only eight cases, he said.
Efforts to eradicate the disease have been undermined by opposition from the Taliban and other Islamist militants, who say immunization is a foreign ploy to sterilise Muslim children or a cover for Western spies.
In January, gunmen killed a mother-and-daughter vaccination team working in the southwestern province of Baluchistan, where the year’s only case so far was later reporter.
Three years earlier, 15 people were killed in a bombing by the Pakistani Taliban outside a polio vaccination center in Baluchistan.
Polio teams working on Monday were undeterred.
“Yes we feel threatened, but our work is like this,” said Bilquis Omar, who has served on a mobile vaccination team for the past six years in the southern port metropolis of Karachi.
“We are working for the children,” she said.
Aziz Memon, who heads the Rotary Club’s PolioPlus program that funds many of the immunization teams, said this year the drive was also making a renewed effort to reach migrants who come back and forth from Afghanistan.
“Mission number one is to get to zero cases and eradicate polio,” Memon said.
A country must have no cases for three consecutive years in order to be considered to have eradicated polio by the World Health Organization.
Pakistan has to contend with extra suspicion of immunization drives because of the 2011 U.S. special forces raid inside the country that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, architect of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States in 2001.
A Pakistani doctor was accused of using a fake vaccination campaign to collect DNA samples that the CIA was believed to have been using to verify bin Laden’s identity. The doctor remains jailed in Pakistan, convicted of waging war against state.
This story was written by Reuters.
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