Known as the largest education, and research complex in the world, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC is a collection of 19 museums that house more than 140 million unique items. It’s no wonder it’s been called “the nation’s attic.” But there’s a novel addition to the venerable complex — a smart new technology that interacts with visitors. VOA’s Carolyn Presutti introduces us to the Smithsonian’s newest resident.
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Month: July 2018
The fossilized skeleton of a ferocious Tyrannosaurus Rex dinosaur will be on exhibit next year in the new fossil hall at the Museum of Natural History in Washington. Excavated in Montana, it is one of the largest and most complete T-rex skeletons ever discovered. The dinosaur, called the Nation’s T-rex, will become part of a larger showcase that explores billions of years of life on earth. VOAs Deborah Block takes us on a sneak peak.
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The fossilized skeleton of a ferocious Tyrannosaurus Rex dinosaur will be on exhibit next year in the new fossil hall at the Museum of Natural History in Washington. Excavated in Montana, it is one of the largest and most complete T-rex skeletons ever discovered. The dinosaur, called the Nation’s T-rex, will become part of a larger showcase that explores billions of years of life on earth. VOAs Deborah Block takes us on a sneak peak.
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Facebook announced several new hires of top academics in the field of artificial intelligence Tuesday, among them a roboticist known for her work at Disney making animated figures move in more human-like ways.
The hires raise a big question — why is Facebook interested in robots, anyway?
It’s not as though the social media giant is suddenly interested in developing mechanical friends, although it does use robotic arms in some of its data centers. The answer is even more central to the problem of how AI systems work today.
Today, most successful AI systems have to be exposed to millions of data points labeled by humans — like, say, photos of cats — before they can learn to recognize patterns that people take for granted. Similarly, game-playing bots like Google’s computerized Go master AlphaGo Zero require tens of thousands of trials to learn the best moves from their failures.
Creating systems that require less data and have more common sense is a key goal for making AI smarter in the future.
“Clearly we’re missing something in terms of how humans can learn so fast,” Yann LeCun, Facebook’s chief AI scientist, said in a call with reporters last week. “So far the best ideas have come out of robotics.”
Among the people Facebook is hiring are Jessica Hodgins , the former Disney researcher; and Abhinav Gupta, her colleague at Carnegie Mellon University who is known for using robot arms to learn how to grasp things.
Pieter Abbeel, a roboticist at University of California, Berkeley and co-founder of the robot-training company Covariant.ai, says the robotics field has benefits and constraints that push progress in AI. For one, the real world is naturally complex, so robotic AI systems have to deal with unexpected, rare events. And real-world constraints like a lack of time and the cost of keeping machinery moving push researchers to solve difficult problems.
“Robotics forces you into many reality checks,” Abbeel said. “How good are these algorithms, really?”
There are other more abstract applications of learnings from robotics, says Berkeley AI professor Ken Goldberg. Just like teaching a robot to escape from a computerized maze, other robots change their behavior depending on whether actions they took got them closer to a goal. Such systems could even be adapted to serve ads, he said — which just happens to be the mainstay of Facebook’s business.
“It’s not a static decision, it’s a dynamic one,” Goldberg said.
In an interview, Hodgins expressed an interest in a wide range of robotics research, everything from building a “compelling humanoid robot” to creating a mechanical servant to “load and unload my dishwasher.”
While she acknowledged the need to imbue robots with more common sense and have them learn with fewer examples, she also said her work in animation could lead to a new form of sharing — one in which AI-powered tools could help one show off a work of pottery in 3-D, for example.
“One thing I hope we’ll be able to do is explore AI support for creativity,” she said.
For Facebook, planting a flag in the hot field also allows it to be competitive for AI talent emerging from universities, Facebook’s LeCun said.
Bart Selman, a Cornell computer science professor AI expert, said it’s a good idea for Facebook to broaden its reach in AI and take on projects that might not be directly related to the company’s business — something that’s a little more “exciting” — the way Google did with self-driving cars, for example.
This attracts not just attention, but students, too. The broader the research agenda, the better the labs become, he said.
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Boeing has received a $3.9 billion contract to build two 747-8 aircraft for use as Air Force One by the U.S. president, due to be delivered by December 2024 and painted red, white and blue, officials said on Tuesday.
The Pentagon announced the decision on Tuesday, saying Seattle-based Boeing’s previously awarded contract for development work had been expanded to include design, modification and fielding of two mission-ready presidential 747-8 aircraft.
The contract followed the outlines of the informal deal reached between Boeing and the White House in February. That agreement came after President Donald Trump objected to the $4 billion price tag of a previous Air Force One deal, complaining in a Twitter post that “costs are out of control” and adding “Cancel order!”
The White House said in February the new deal would save taxpayers more than $1.4 billion, but those savings could not be independently confirmed.
Air Force budget documents released in February for fiscal year 2019 disclosed a $3.9 billion cost for the two-aircraft program. The same 2018 budget document, not adjusted for inflation, showed the price at $3.6 billion.
The Boeing 747-8s are designed to be an airborne White House able to fly in worst-case security scenarios, such as nuclear war, and are modified with military avionics, advanced communications and a self-defense system.
A congressional official briefed on Tuesday about the deal indicated it was little changed from the informal agreement reached in February, calling for two 747-8 aircraft to be built for $3.9 billion and delivered by December 2024.
Trump told CBS in an interview that aired on Tuesday that the new model Air Force One would be updated on the inside and have a different exterior color scheme from the current white and two shades of blue dating back to President John F. Kennedy’s administration.
“Red, white and blue,” Trump said. “Air Force One is going to be incredible. It’s going to be the top of the line, the top in the world. And it’s going to be red, white and blue, which I think is appropriate.”
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Prototypes? Passe. Fashion company Betabrand saw that knitwear was a hot style in sneakers and wanted to quickly jump on the trend for dressier shoes. It put a poll up on its website asking shoppers what style they liked, and based on that had a shoe for sale online in just one week.
What web shoppers saw was a 3-D rendering — no actual shoe existed yet. Creating a traditional prototype, tweaking the design and making a sample would have taken six to nine months, and the company might have missed out on the interest in knit.
“The web attention span is short,” said Betabrand CEO Chris Lindland. “So if you can develop and create in a short time, you can be a real product-development machine.”
Shoppers looking at the shoe online could examine the peekaboo detail or check out how the sole was put together, as they would from photos of a real product. They don’t get the actual shoes instantaneously — they have to wait a few months. But the use of digital technology in designing and selling means hot trends are still getting to people far faster than under the old system.
“Retailers and brands who are embracing this are going to be winners of the future,” said David Bassuk, managing director of consulting group AlixPartners. “This is flipping the business model on its head.”
It’s a big cultural change for clothing makers. For decades, the process meant designers sketched ideas on paper, a design got approved, and the sketches went to a factory that created prototypes. Designers and product developers made tweaks and sent prototypes back and forth. Once a final version was approved, it was sent to the factory to be copied for mass production. Getting something from design to a store could take at least a year.
Now, some companies have designers sketching on high-resolution tablets with software that can email 3-D renderings of garments with specifications straight to factories, as better technology makes the images look real and the pressure to get shoppers new products swiftly intensifies. The goal is to reduce to six months or less the time it takes to get to store shelves.
Even chains like H&M, which once set the standard for speed by flying in frequent small batches, are realizing that’s not fast enough. H&M, which has seen sales slow, is starting to digitize certain areas of its manufacturing process.
For clothing makers and retailers, the shift means design decisions can happen closer to when the fashions actually hit the shelves or website. That means less guessing so stores aren’t stuck with piles of unsold clothes that need to be discounted.
The 3-D technology is used in just 2 percent of the overall supply networks, estimates Spencer Fung, group CEO of Li & Fung, which consults with more than 8,000 retailers including Betabrand and 15,000 suppliers globally. But he believes that will change as retailers begin prioritizing speed and realize that cutting down on design time and prototypes saves money.
“You can actually essentially create an entire collection before you even cut one garment,” said Whitney Cathcart, CEO of the Cathcart Technologies consulting firm. “So it reduces waste, it reduces lead times, it allows decision making in real time, so the entire process becomes more efficient.”
Fung imagines a scenario where a social media post with a celebrity in a red dress gets 500,000 “likes.” An alert goes to a retailer that this item is trending. Within hours, a digital sample of a similar dress is on its website. A factory can start to produce the dress in days.
“Consumers see it and they want it now,” says Michael Londrigan of fashion college LIM in New York. “How do you bring it to market so you don’t miss those dollars?”
Nicki Rector of the Sonoma Valley area in California bought a pair of Betabrand’s Western-style boots last summer based on the 3-D rendering.
“It looked real,” said Rector, who examined the images of the heel and the insoles. She didn’t worry about buying off a digital image, reasoning that if you’re buying online you can’t really know how something’s going to fit until you put it on your feet. She said knowing it was designed from customer input also helped make the wait OK.
Betabrand has sold 40,000 pairs of shoes priced from $128 to $168 over the past year, all from digital renderings, and plans to add 15 to 20 such projects this year.
At a Levi Strauss & Co. research and development facility in San Francisco, designers use programs that offer the look of a finished garment and let them make changes like adding pockets quickly, rather than requiring a new prototype. When they’re set, they can send a file to the factory for mass production. Using digital samples can shorten the design time to one week or less from an eight-week timeframe, Levi’s says.
Few companies are yet selling directly to shoppers off digital renderings like Betabrand, and are instead showing them to store buyers or to factories rather than using traditional samples.
Xcel Brands uses them for its own brand of women’s tops and for the company’s Judith Ripka jewelry line. The company, which also makes clothes for Isaac Mizrahi and Halston, will start using them for other brands within the year. CEO Robert D’Loren hopes to start putting 3-D samples on its website next year.
Tommy Hilfiger has an interactive touchscreen table where buyers can view every item in the collection and create custom orders. And Deckers Brands, the maker of Ugg boots, is using digital renderings of the classic boot in 10 colors, eliminating the need for 10 prototypes for store buyers. That helps reduce cost and increases speed.
Using digital designs also mean the exact specifications for different Levi’s design finishes can be uploaded to a machine that uses lasers to scrape away at jeans. No need to teach employees how to execute a designer’s vision, in a minute and a half the lasers have given the jeans the exact weathered look that took workers wielding pumice stones twenty minutes to half an hour.
“Thirty years ago, jeans were only available in three shades — rinse, stonewash and bleach,” said Bart Sights, head of the Levi’s Eureka lab. “Our company now designs 1,000 finishes per season.” Such a long lead time “pushes production and creation too far away.” Levi’s latest technology alleviates this issue, he said.
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The London fashion world didn’t know quite what hit it when Alexander McQueen’s disheveled models staggered down the runway at his 1995 “Highland Rape” show, their Scottish-inspired clothing ripped to expose breasts and nether regions.
It was exactly the reaction that McQueen, then in his 20s and subsisting on fast food and unemployment checks, was seeking. “I don’t want a show where you come out feeling like you’ve just had Sunday lunch,” he said at the time. “I want you to come out either feeling repulsed or exhilarated.”
McQueen would go on to provoke, repulse, inspire and exhilarate — often simultaneously — until he was 40, when he tragically took his life.
How did a taxi driver’s son from working-class London make the unlikely journey to the top of the fashion world, and what made him end it all at the height of his powers?
For filmmakers Ian Bonhote and Peter Ettedgui, the two questions proved irresistible. Their resulting documentary, McQueen, opens this week.
Fashion is a compelling subject for documentaries; few subjects are so enticingly visual. But the challenge is always to peel away the well-polished, and well-guarded, facade.
“The fashion world is a bubble,” said Ettedgui, who wrote and co-directed the film. “They don’t necessarily take kindly to outsiders coming in and revealing their secrets.”
Candid interviews
The filmmakers approached close to 200 sources, Bonhote said. Finding footage was painstaking work, but they were fortunate to secure key parts of McQueen’s most dramatic runway shows, along with some strikingly candid interviews with the designer — a rarity at fashion shows.
They also found some valuable archival footage, including some private footage that McQueen and his associates captured for fun, trying out a new camera as they traveled to Paris for the designer’s new, high-profile post at Givenchy in 1996. They looked like grinning kids taking their parents’ car for a spin.
The filmmakers were also able to convince some key McQueen family members to speak, namely his older sister, Janet, and her son, Gary, a designer himself who worked for his uncle. And they interview some of McQueen’s former colleagues, though not all. Sarah Burton, who succeeded McQueen at his namesake label, doesn’t appear.
At the heart of the film, though, is McQueen’s work and the way his bracing talent reverberated through the fashion establishment. Watching now, one can almost feel the gasps in the audience as the designer places model Shalom Harlow on a revolving platform in a plain tulle dress in his show No. 13, then has two robots spray yellow and black paint on her as she turns and turns. It was a mesmerizing effect that brought McQueen himself to tears.
Film’s divisions
The film is divided into chapters, each focusing on a particularly influential McQueen show. The first, Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims in 1992, was originally his final project at Central Saint Martin’s, the well-known London fashion school.
Even getting to the school was unlikely. The young Lee McQueen (he reverted to his middle name, Alexander, later because it sounded posh) was supposed to become “a mechanic or something,” but he was obsessed with drawing clothes. His mother encouraged him to knock on doors on Savile Row for an apprenticeship, and there, he became a superb craftsman.
Isabella Blow, a prominent fashion figure, bought up his entire Jack the Ripper collection and helped him make his way. But it’s clear that, as an associate says: “No one discovered Alexander McQueen. Alexander McQueen discovered himself.”
At first, there was no money. A friend describes how the two went to McDonald’s after a major show, dropped the food on the floor, but had to pick it up and eat it because they couldn’t afford to buy more.
Things changed radically when luxury conglomerate LVMH hired McQueen for Givenchy. But McQueen didn’t just sit back and enjoy his financial windfall — he poured it back into his own label. back home. It was a time of enormous pressure; McQueen says in one interview that he produced an astounding 14 collections in a year.
For a man often called the “bad boy” or “enfant terrible” of fashion, there was much else to learn about McQueen, the filmmakers say. Among the things that surprised them: his sheer technical craftsmanship, and a constantly developing business savvy.
‘Tender at times’
They were also struck by how McQueen’s personality contrasted with the myth. “He had this reputation for being abrasive, punk,” said Ettedgui. “But what we see in the archive is McQueen with friends, with his parents, even his beloved dogs, being very human and very tender at times.”
At the end of his life, two deaths devastated McQueen. Blow took her life in 2007 — we see him at her funeral, looking destroyed. And in early 2010, McQueen’s beloved mother died. Only days later, on the eve of her funeral, the designer killed himself.
The filmmakers can only speculate why McQueen, who struggled with drug addiction, took his life. “Fashion does come with a very unique set of pressures,” said Ettedgui. But, he added, “people we spoke to said, ‘Don’t try to make him a victim, because ultimately the person who put the most pressure on McQueen was McQueen.”
Bonhote also noted the designer’s ambivalence about the world he had chosen, clearly expressed in shows like his famous 2001 Voss, in which he forced the assembled fashion world to literally stare at itself for long minutes into a mirrored cube — which in turn represented an insane asylum.
“To some degree, he was always a misfit in the world he found himself in,” Bonhote said.
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Time and effort have gone down the drain for Steve Gould, who is scrambling to find new customers for his gin, whiskey and other spirits since the United States has taken a tough stance on trade issues.
Before the European Union retaliated against new U.S. tariffs with taxes of its own, Gould expected revenue from the EU at his Golden Moon Distillery in Colorado to reach $250,000 or $350,000 this year. Now he’s concerned that European exports will total just $25,000. Golden Moon already saw an effect when then-candidate Donald Trump made trade an issue during the 2016 campaign. Gould lost one of his Mexican importers and an investor, as overseas demand for small-distiller spirits was growing.
“We’ve lost years of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars in building relationships with offshore markets,” says Gould, who’s hoping to find new customers in countries like Japan.
President Donald Trump’s aggressive trade policies are taking a toll on small U.S. manufacturers. The president has imposed tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum imports from most of the world, including Europe, Mexico and Canada, driving up costs for companies that rely on those metals. And he has slapped 25 percent taxes on $34 billion in Chinese imports in a separate trade dispute, targeting mostly machinery and industrial components so far. Trump’s tariffs have drawn retaliation from around the world. China is taxing American soybeans, among other things; the European Union has hit Harley-Davidson motorcycles and Kentucky bourbon; Canada has imposed tariffs on a range of products — from U.S. steel to dishwasher detergent.
More businesses could be feeling the pain as the trade disputes escalate — the administration on Tuesday threatened to impose 10 percent tariffs on thousands of Chinese products including fish, apples and burglar alarms. And China responded with a tariff threat of its own, although it didn’t say what U.S. exports would be targeted.
Small businesses are particularly vulnerable to tariffs because they lack the financial resources larger companies have to absorb higher costs. Large companies can move production overseas — as Harley-Davidson recently announced it would do to escape 25 percent retaliatory tariffs in Europe. But “if you’re a small firm, it’s much harder to do that; you don’t have an international network of production locations,” says Lee Branstetter, professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College.
Shifting manufacturing away from items that use components that are being taxed is also harder since small businesses tend to make fewer products, he says. And if tariffs make it too expensive to export to their current markets, small companies may not be able to afford the effort of finding new ones.
Small-business owners have been growing more confident over the past year as the economy has been strong, and they’ve been hiring at a steady if not robust pace. But those hurt by tariffs are can lose their optimism and appetite for growth within a few months.
“They have narrow profit margins and it’s a tax,” says Kent Jones, an economics professor at Babson College. “That lowers their profit margins and increases the possibility of layoffs and even bankruptcies.”
Yacht company
Bertram Yachts is one company finding it trickier to maneuver. The U.S. has put a 25 percent tariff on hundreds of boat parts imported from China, where most marine components are made. And European countries have imposed a 25 percent tariff on U.S.-made boats. Last year, Bertram exported about a third of its boats, with half going to Europe.
“We have been squeezed on both sides,” says Peter Truslow, CEO of the Tampa, Florida-based boat maker.
Truslow doesn’t know how the tariffs will affect the company’s sales and profits, but dealers he’s spoken to in Europe have already gotten cancellations on boats that run into the millions of dollars. Bertram plans to try to build up its strong U.S. business and seek more customers in countries that aren’t involved in trade disputes with the U.S., including Japan and Australia.
Still, the company’s growth and job creation stand to slow. “It’s probably going to be more about a reduction in hiring than it is about layoffs,” Truslow says.
The ripples are being felt across the industry, says Tom Dammrich, president of the National Marine Manufacturers Association trade group. He estimates there are about 1,000 manufacturers, almost all small or mid-size businesses, and says some parts can only be bought from China.
Metal fabrication
Matt Barton’s metal fabrication company, which makes custom replacement parts for farm equipment, outdoor signs and people who race hot rods, is paying its suppliers up to 20 percent more for metals than it did a year ago.
Prices had soared as much as 40 percent months ago amid expectations of U.S. tariffs on aluminum and steel. They have since steadied, but are expected to remain high for three to six months. Barton’s Pittsboro, Indiana-based company, The Hero Lab, is absorbing part of the increases. Some racing customers are still delaying orders.
“What they budgeted to cost $1,000 now is now $1,200 or $1,500,” Barton says. “They’re pushing their orders back four to six weeks, waiting for a few more paychecks to come in.”
Cheese maker
Jeff Schwager’s cheese company, Sartori, is selling products to Mexico at break-even prices because of that nation’s retaliatory 25 percent tariff. Twelve percent of the Plymouth, Wisconsin-based company’s revenue comes from exports, which is the fastest-growing segment of the business.
Sartori and its Mexican importer are each absorbing half the costs of the tariff. Schwager, the CEO, doesn’t see leaving the Mexican market as an option.
“If you lose space on the grocery store shelf, or you’re taken out of recipes in restaurants, that takes years to get back,” he says. He hopes the trade dispute can be resolved and tariffs rolled back.
Flatware maker
But some small manufacturers believe they can benefit from a trade dispute. Greg Owens, president of flatware maker Sherrill Manufacturing, says if his competitors in China are hit by U.S. tariffs, he could see revenue increase.
“They would have to raise the retail price, which would allow us to raise our prices,” says Owens, whose company is located in Sherrill, New York. In turn, Owens says, that would allow “long overdue” raises for workers and upgrades to capital equipment.
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An entire generation has been born since Nelson Mandela’s 1990 release from a South African prison, where he spent almost three decades for his anti-apartheid activism.
Ndaba Mandela wants to make sure those young people understand his grandfather’s role – and his values – in fighting for racial equality and later in trying to heal divisions as South Africa’s first black president.
“That is the very reason why I wrote this book,” Ndaba Mandela says of “Going to the Mountain” (Hachette). His goal with the memoir – released last month, in time for Wednesday’s 100th anniversary of the late leader’s birth – is to show the elder Mandela “not as this huge, great icon” but as a supportive grandfather figure they might relate to.
The 35-year-old shared views of his grandfather – who died in late 2013 at age 95 – both in the book and in a recent visit to VOA headquarters here. Ndaba describes him as “courageous” and “fearless” in his quest to end South Africa’s white minority rule, but says that commitment came at great personal cost.
“That is a man who went against the system, who sacrificed his family, sacrificed his own life for the greater good of his people,” Ndaba tells VOA, alluding to his grandfather’s 27 years in detention.
It’s a complicated, extended family, given Mandela’s three marriages and five children. Ndaba’s father was Makgatho Mandela, “the Old Man’s second son by his first wife, Evelyn Ntoko Mase,” he writes, using a term of affection.
Mandela was imprisoned while that son grew up and became a street hustler in Soweto. Ndaba says his own childhood was chaotic and impoverished, with his parents caught up in alcohol and sometimes fighting bitterly.
“A lot of the time, I would eat at my neighbors’ house, you know, when my parents couldn’t afford to get dinner for me,” he says. “… By any standard, I grew up in a broken home.”
In 1989, 7-year-old Ndaba met his grandfather at Victor Verster Prison, from which the leader was freed several months later. The boy was 11 when he moved in with Mandela and his staff in a house in Johannesburg’s Houghton suburb. He would spend much of the next two decades there – being cared about, and then caring for, the Old Man.
Subtitled “Life Lessons From My Grandfather,” the book explores the older man’s motivations and approaches.
Among those lessons:
“Nonviolence is a strategy,” Ndaba writes, quoting the Old Man. His grandfather subscribed to Gandhi’s strategy “of noncooperation and peaceful but unstoppable resistance. … He was a judicious leader who understood the power of doing the right thing until it overwhelms the wrong thing.”
Education is essential. Nelson Mandela “valued education because it was something that was stripped away” from blacks, says Ndaba, who admits he himself at one point “didn’t perform well at school” and had “a rocky adolescence.” Like his grandfather, he went on to earn a college degree.
Weeks after becoming president in 1994, Mandela established what became the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, donating about a third of his presidential salary every year, his grandson writes. As the elder man had told parliament, “The emancipation of people from poverty and deprivation is most centrally linked” to quality education.
Respect your heritage. The phrase “going to the mountain” refers to ceremonial circumcision – a monthlong rite of passage for young men in the Xhosa ethnic group. Ndaba was almost 21 when he underwent cutting and related psychological and spiritual testing. It was a turning point in his relationship with his grandfather, who then “expected critical thinking and welcomed civilized disagreements,” he writes. “… From the time I was a kid, I knew I could depend on him. This is when he knew he could depend on me.”
Don’t expect change all at once. When Ndaba eventually realized that his grandfather had orchestrated his parents’ separation and also kept them away from him, he writes, “I struggled to forgive him.”
Ndaba’s mother, Zondi, was already gravely ill when he learned that she had HIV/AIDS. She died of its complications in 2003, though a family press release attributed her death to pneumonia.
Ndaba writes that Mandela tried to address the country’s AIDS epidemic in 1991 by promoting safe-sex education, but backed off when accusations that he was “encouraging promiscuity” threatened his political prospects. When Ndaba’s father succumbed to the same disease in early 2005, Mandela called a press conference “to announce that my son has died of AIDS.”
“It’s impossible to overstate what this meant to the millions of people who live in fear of seeking help or disclosing their HIV status and to the millions more people who loved them,” writes Ndaba Mandela, now an ambassador for UNAIDS, the United Nations effort to curb the disease.
Show leadership through service. Mandela was a man of “integrity, humility,” one who “dived into public service,” his grandson says. “A leader is not someone who says, ‘Look at me, I’m the best’ – a leader is there to serve.”
For Ndaba, service comes through Africa Rising, a nonprofit that he and cousin Kweku Mandela formed in 2009 to improve the continent’s socioeconomics. “We need to empower young Africans,” he says, “to give them a heightened sense of pride and confidence in being African.”
This report originated in VOA’s English to Africa Service.
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Grinding poverty and climate change are pushing communities in West
Africa’s Sahel region into the arms of extremist groups like Boko Haram, but providing people with clean energy could help slow that trend, said a top international official.
Rachel Kyte, CEO of Sustainable Energy for All, set up by the United Nations, learned on a trip to Niger this month how women and girls are being recruited by Islamist militants who offer them work, food and other essentials.
Kyte, who serves as the U.N. secretary-general’s special representative on energy access, said Boko Haram “is moving into the provision of basic social services.”
At the same time, in impoverished Niger, recurring and more intense drought “is absolutely punishing,” she said.
The Islamist group is based in northeast Nigeria but active in other West African states.
Kyte said villagers need better ways to grow crops to feed their families and boost incomes to make them less susceptible to the extremists targeting them.
U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed, who visited Niger with Kyte, last week spelled out the links between climate change stresses and regional insecurity in remarks to the U.N. Security Council.
In rural Niger, where only about 1 percent of people have access to electric power, supplying cheap and green energy — mainly from the sun — could make a difference, Kyte said.
Irrigation, cold storage
For example, solar pumps could drive simple, efficient irrigation systems, and installing small-scale local grids could power cold storage, enabling villagers to process their crops and earn more money, she noted.
“It just became very, very clear that without energy, there’s no way to improve incomes — without energy, it’s going to be difficult to bring productivity into the rural economy,” Kyte said in an interview from New York after the visit,
organized by the United Nations and the African Union.
In addition, equipping hospitals and clinics with solar systems in both cities and rural areas could reduce patient infections and increase the number of operations for common problems like fistula by supplying reliable power, Kyte said.
Solar energy could be a way to “beat back and build the resilience of a community to climate change, but also beat back violent extremism,” while “lifting up women and girls whose situation there is just dire,” she added.
Kyte urged government donors and international development banks to think about how access to clean, modern energy enables people to get sufficient food and medical treatment, and earn a decent living.
In a place like Niger, having electricity can be a decisive factor in whether people leave their homes and head north to Europe seeking a better life, she added.
It can also reduce the financial need for poor families to marry their daughters off early.
“This is about using aid money and development finance … to start building a different value proposition for these people that is something that will allow them to stay where they come from, and would allow girls to be part of that economic future,” she said.
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Vivendi’s Universal Music Group (UMG) will launch a new division in Nigeria as part of efforts by the world’s largest music label to expand into Africa’s most populous nation and the wider region.
The music entertainment group said on Tuesday its new strategic division, Universal Music Nigeria, will operate from Nigeria’s commercial capital Lagos.
Nigerian music, much like its Nollywood film industry, is popular across much of Africa. Nigerian music artists have popularized the Afrobeat musical genre and gone on to sign record deals, sell out concerts and work with international artists to increase the global reach of African music.
Music revenue in Nigeria – mostly derived from sales of mobile phone ringtones – grew 9 percent in 2016, year-on-year, to reach $39 million and is expected to rise to $73 million by 2021, auditing firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) said last year.
Sipho Dlamini, Managing Director of Universal Music South Africa and sub-Saharan Africa said that the Nigeria division will focus on developing artists and musicians from West Africa countries, particularly Nigeria, Ghana and Gambia.
“Our Nigeria team will support, nurture, and help develop artists, while creating opportunities for new talent from the region to reach the widest possible audience,” said Dlamini.
UMG said the new division will work alongside the label’s existing operations in Ivory Coast and Morocco.
Universal Music Nigeria also plans to open a recording studio in Lagos, which would be the label’s second fully purposed studio in Africa alongside another in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Nigeria’s music industry faces an array of challenges ranging from the lack of proper legal structures, to piracy and difficulties in distributing and monetizing content.
The country’s arts, entertainment and recreation sector contributed 0.29 percent to real GDP in the first quarter of this year, the statistics office said.
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Astronomers are still finding moons at Jupiter, 400 years after Galileo used his spyglass to spot the first ones.
The latest discovery of a dozen small moons brings the total to 79, the most of any planet in our solar system.
Scientists were looking for objects on the fringes of the solar system last year when they pointed their telescopes close to Jupiter’s backyard, according to Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institute for Science in Washington. They saw a new group of objects moving around the giant gas planet but didn’t know whether they were moons or asteroids passing near Jupiter.
“There was no eureka moment,” said Sheppard, who led the team of astronomers. “It took a year to figure out what these objects were.”
They all turned out to be moons of Jupiter. The confirmation of 10 was announced Tuesday. Two were confirmed earlier.
The moons had not been spotted before because they are tiny. They are about one to two kilometers across, said astronomer Gareth Williams of the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center.
And he thinks Jupiter might have even more moons just as small waiting to be found.
“We just haven’t observed them enough,” said Williams, who helped confirm the moons’ orbits.
The team is calling one of the new moons an “oddball” because of its unusual orbit. Sheppard’s girlfriend came up with a name for it: Valetudo, the great-granddaughter of the Roman god Jupiter.
Valetudo is in Jupiter’s distant, outer swarm of moons that circles in the opposite direction of the planet’s rotation. Yet it’s orbiting in the same direction as the planet, against the swarm’s traffic.
“This moon is going down the highway the wrong way,” Sheppard said.
Scientists believe moons like Valetudo and its siblings appeared soon after Jupiter formed. The planet must have acted like a vacuum, sucking up all the material that was around it. Some of that debris was captured as moons.
“What astonishes me about these moons is that they’re the remnants of what the planet formed from,” he said.
Telescopes in Chile, Hawaii and Arizona were used for the latest discovery and confirmation.
Galileo detected Jupiter’s four largest moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, in 1610. The latest count of 79 known moons includes eight that have not been seen for several years. Saturn is next with 61, followed by Uranus with 27 and Neptune with 14. Mars has two, Earth has one and Mercury and Venus have none.
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Kurt Cobain’s daughter said on Tuesday the United States should overcome its taboo about mental health and addiction, almost a quarter of a century after her rock-star father took his own life.
Frances Bean Cobain was speaking in Ireland at the launch of a new exhibition of the Nirvana frontman’s belongings. Cobain died in 1994 at age 27 from a self-inflicted gunshot while struggling with heroin addiction.
“There is an association that is shameful and it shouldn’t be,” said Frances Bean, who has also struggled with addiction.
“It’s taboo … despite the fact that it is present in our society every single day. And I think that in Europe it is a little less taboo, I think in America it is very, very frowned upon,” she told Reuters.
Frances Bean, Cobain’s sister Kim, and mother, Wendy O’Connor, attended the opening of the exhibition at the Museum of Style Icons in Newbridge, 50 km (30 miles) southwest of Dublin.
From his sketches and drawings to clothing and a car, “Growing Up Kurt Cobain” displays dozens of Cobain’s personal items, some of them never seen before by the public.
Fans of Cobain, who popularized grunge rock in the early 1990s, can see the striped green sweater he wore in the video for Nirvana’s 1991 hit “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and his MTV Video award for the same song.
The singer’s childhood drawings of cartoon characters, handwritten lyrics and powder-blue 1965 Dodge Dart car are also on display.
“It felt like the right time to show who Kurt really was as a child growing up. To go back to his roots of being a child, where he was happiest,” Cobain’s sister Kim Cobain said.
The small museum in County Kildare held the exhibition in part because its owner knows Cobain’s family. The museum also has outfits worn by the likes of Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and Grace Kelly on display, and has previously hosted exhibitions dedicated to Michael Jackson and Prince.
Asked about what Cobain would have made of the current political climate in the United States, Frances Bean said she would like to think he would have taken a stand.
“The violation of basic human rights that seems to be a prevalent in our country right now … I would like to believe that Kurt wouldn’t have stood for that or accepted that,” she said.
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Twitter suspended at least 58 million user accounts in the final three months of 2017, according to data obtained by The Associated Press. The figure highlights the company’s newly aggressive stance against malicious or suspicious accounts in the wake of Russian disinformation efforts during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign.
Last week, Twitter confirmed a Washington Post report that it had suspended 70 million accounts in May and June. The huge number of suspensions raises questions as to whether the crackdown could affect Twitter’s user growth and whether the company should have warned investors earlier. The company has been struggling with user growth compared with rivals like Instagram and Facebook.
The number of suspended accounts originated with Twitter’s “firehose,” a data stream it makes available to academics, companies and others willing to pay for it.
The new figure sheds light on Twitter’s attempt to improve “information quality” on its service, its term for countering fake accounts, bots, disinformation and other malicious occurrences. Such activity was rampant on Twitter and other social media networks during the 2016 campaign, much of it originating with the Internet Research Agency, a since-shuttered Russian “troll farm” implicated in election disruption efforts by the U.S. special counsel and congressional investigations.
Twitter declined to comment on the data. But its executives have said that efforts to clean up the platform are a priority, while acknowledging that its crackdown has affected and may continue to affect user numbers.
Twitter has 336 million monthly active users, which it defines as accounts that have logged in at least once during the previous 30 days. The suspensions do not appear to have made a large dent in this number. Twitter maintains that most of the suspended accounts had been dormant for at least a month, and thus weren’t included in its active user numbers.
Following the Post report, which caused Twitter’s stock to drop sharply, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal took to Twitter to reassure investors that this number didn’t count in the company’s user metrics. “If we removed 70M accounts from our reported metrics, you would hear directly from us,” he tweeted last Monday.
Shares recovered somewhat after that tweet. The stock has largely been on an upswing lately, and more than doubled its value in the past year.
Twitter is taking other steps besides account deletions to combat misuse of its service, working to rein in hate and abuse even as it tries to stay true to its roots as a bastion of free expression. Last fall, it vowed to crack down on hate speech and sexual harassment, and CEO Jack Dorsey echoed the concerns of critics who said the company hadn’t done enough to curb such abuse.
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Democratic lawmakers joined scores of scientists, health providers, environmental officials and activists Tuesday in denouncing an industry-backed proposal that could limit dramatically the scientific studies the Environmental Protection Agency considers in shaping protections for human health.
If adopted by the Trump administration, the rule would allow an EPA administrator to reject study results in making decisions about chemicals, pollutants and other health risks if underlying research data is not made public because of patient privacy concerns or other issues.
Opponents said the move would throw out the kind of public-health studies that underlie enforcement of the Clean Air Act and other landmark environmental controls, since the studies drew on confidential health data from thousands of individuals.
Democratic Rep. Paul Tonko of New York said the proposed rule was “a thinly veiled campaign to limit research … that supports critical regulatory action.”
The rule was proposed by then-Administrator Scott Pruitt before his resignation earlier this month amid mounting ethics scandals.
At the public hearing Tuesday, opponents outnumbered supporters.
It “enables the public to more meaningfully comment on the science” behind environmental regulation, said Joseph Stanko, a representative of industry trade groups and companies affected by what he said were increasingly stringent air-pollution regulations.
Backers have expressed their own worries about how the broadly written rule would apply to confidential trade secrets. Ted Steichen of the American Petroleum Institute said his group supports the initiative to “enhance transparency while ensuring privacy.”
Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, D-Ore., said the EPA proposal was the latest version of years of “transparency” legislation for EPA that Congress had rejected. She called it “an administrative attempt to circumvent the legislative process.”
New York state officials and representatives of public and private universities were among others speaking against the proposal.
Opponents also included community health practitioners who had taken time off their jobs to speak at the hearing.
Researcher Pam Miller, who works with Alaska Native communities affected by toxins, said she traveled from Anchorage to speak at the meeting. Hospital nurse Erica Bardwell came from nearby Arlington, Virginia.
Health workers “care about patients and won’t surrender their confidentiality. Which means studies won’t get done,” Bardwell said after her testimony.
“Which is the point” of the proposal, Bardwell added.
Critics said the policy shift is designed to restrict the agency from citing peer-reviewed public-health studies that use patient medical records that must be kept confidential under patient privacy laws.
Such studies include the Harvard School of Public Health’s landmark Six Cities study of 1993, which established links between death rates and dirty air in major U.S. cities. That study was used by EPA to justify tighter air-quality rules opposed by industrial polluters.
While Pruitt introduced the proposal, the EPA is continuing the steps toward its formal adoption under the new acting administrator, former Pruitt EPA deputy Andrew Wheeler.
In an email, EPA spokesman James Hewitt indicated Tuesday that Wheeler wanted to balance transparency and privacy concerns.
“Acting Administrator Wheeler believes the more information you put out to the public the better the regulatory outcome. He also believes the agency should prioritize ways to safeguard sensitive information,” Hewitt said.
The proposal is open for public comment through mid-August before any final EPA and White House review.
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An iceberg that has drifted perilously close to a remote Greenland village is so big it can be seen from space.
The European Space Agency released an image Tuesday showing the giant iceberg just off the coast of Innaarsuit in northwestern Greenland.
Dozens of residents were evacuated to higher ground last week due to concerns that the 11 million-ton iceberg could break apart, creating high waves that could wash away coastal buildings.
The image captured July 9 by ESA’s Sentinel-2 satellites also shows several other large icebergs in the vicinity.
Separately, Greenland broadcaster KNR published a video taken by a resident showing a time lapse of the huge iceberg drifting past the village. KNR reported that strong winds and elevated tides moved the iceberg northward, away from the harbor, over the weekend.
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Billionaire Bill Gates and Estée Lauder Cos chairman emeritus Leonard Lauder on Tuesday said they will award $30 million over three years to encourage development of new tests for early detection of Alzheimer’s disease.
For Microsoft co-founder Gates, launch of the Diagnostics Accelerator program follows an announcement in November of a personal investment of $50 million in the Dementia Discovery Fund, a venture capital fund aimed at bringing together industry and government to seek treatments for the brain-wasting disease.
The effort, Gates said, was fueled in part by his personal experience with family members struggling with Alzheimer’s.
The most common form of dementia, Alzheimer’s affects nearly 50 million people worldwide and is expected to rise to more than 131 million by 2050, according to Alzheimer’s Disease International.
Gates and Lauder provided seed money for the diagnostics collaboration through the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF), which was founded by Lauder. They will be joined by other philanthropists, including the Dolby family and the Charles and Helen Schwab Foundation.
Funding provided through the initiative will be open to scientists and clinicians globally working in academic settings, charities and biotechnology companies.
As a philanthropy vehicle, the ADDF Diagnostics Accelerator venture will invest in riskier projects that may not have immediate commercial return, the group said in a statement.
Drugmakers have poured billions of dollars into scores of failed attempts to produce a treatment that can arrest the ravages of Alzheimer’s, a fatal disease that robs people of their memories and ability to care for themselves.
Many experts believe drug trials have failed in part because treatments were tested in people whose brains were already too damaged to benefit. They argue that drugs need to be tested early, before the disease has caused noticeable declines.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has said that it would consider Alzheimer’s drug trials based on biological markers rather than clinical symptoms, paving the way for drugs to be tested far earlier in the disease process. Currently, a brain scan or spinal tap are the chief ways used to confirm a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, although the most conclusive test remains an autopsy.
In a blog post announcing his investment, Gates painted a picture of a future where diagnosing Alzheimer’s would be “as simple as getting your blood tested during your annual physical.”
“Research suggests that future isn’t that far off,” Gates said.
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Desk jockeys in eye-wateringly tight spandex will blur the line between fantasy and reality this week as they invade San Diego for the world’s largest celebration of pop culture fandom.
The 49th Comic-Con International will revel in movies, TV and — yes — comic books, as fans in pitch-perfect monster, alien and manga costumes swelter in the southern Californian heat over five surreal days.
Where fandom abounds, controversy is never far behind. And the big bone of contention this year is Disney’s decision not to bring its Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) to Comic-Con, despite a record-breaking year with Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War and Ant-Man and the Wasp.
“It’s going to be an interesting year this year,” said SyFy Wire editor-in-chief Adam Swiderski in a video preview of the Wednesday to Sunday get-together at the city’s harborfront convention center.
“A lot of the big players like Marvel, Star Wars and Game of Thrones, who dominated past cons, aren’t going to be there, which gives other properties an opportunity to step into the spotlight.”
Since its humble beginnings in 1970 as the Golden State Comic Book Convention, a gathering of a few dozen geeks who swapped superhero magazines, Comic-Con has exploded in popularity.
Each July, it attracts around 130,000 cosplayers, movie executives, sci-fi fans and bloggers to a feast on all manner of panels, screenings and other attractions.
‘Scare Diego’
Described by Rolling Stone as the “Super Bowl of people who don’t like watching the Super Bowl,” Comic-Con’s beating heart is the 6,500-seat Hall H, where a cornucopia of stars hawk their latest work.
Devotees have been known to wait for days to be among the first to get into the sprawling arena, taking turns with family members and other fans for toilet breaks and sleep.
New Line Cinema and Warner Bros. kick off proceedings Wednesday with “Scare Diego,” where fans will enjoy insights into It: Chapter Two and the frankly terrifying-looking The Nun.
The convention has traditionally persuaded most of the big studios to turn up for detailed presentations of their highly anticipated slates of upcoming movies — but not this year.
Disney is presumably saving its biggest treats for its own biennial D23 fan convention, and Universal’s segment is dedicated to just two movies — M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass and David Gordon Green’s Halloween.
Elsewhere, Paramount brings its spinoff Transformers film Bumblebee and Fox has a Deadpool 2 celebration and preview for its Predator reboot.
Sony presents Venom, and the animated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, neither of which are considered part of the MCU, although Marvel was part of the production team.
That cedes the center stage to Warner Bros., which is expected to pull out all the stops in its two-hour Saturday spot.
The schedule is kept tightly under wraps, but insiders say there will almost certainly be thrills and spills from Aquaman, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the new Fantastic Beasts movie and Shazam!
‘Crazy busy’
“This is a fun room. It’s going to be crazy busy for Warner Bros., like it always is,” said James Riley of the SDConCast podcast.
“But without the pull of the evening Marvel panel to generate such a fervor for the line … we have a feeling this is actually going to be an easy day to get into Hall H.”
The television side of the Comic-Con gets increasingly bigger as the stars follow the voluminous torrent of cash into TV productions funded on a scale never seen before.
This year’s Hall H is expected to be more notable than ever for its small-screen content, despite the absence of HBO’s big-hitters.
“Several other networks will be showing off new and returning series in a hope to cut through the cluttered landscape and maintain, or possibly grow, viewership,” said Lesley Goldberg of The Hollywood Reporter.
AMC has the pick of the convention with a debut appearance from Better Call Saul alongside a 10th anniversary reunion panel for Breaking Bad and a discussion on acclaimed graphic novel adaption Preacher.
The Walking Dead, the most successful show in U.S. cable television history, is back ahead of season nine, expected to debut in October, and there is a panel for its sister show, Fear the Walking Dead.
Other studios plying their TV wares include YouTube Originals and Fox, while SyFy stages what promises to be an emotional farewell to the Sharknado franchise.
Marvel’s movie people might be largely absent, but the studio boasts numerous panels and other event for its TV output, including Cloak & Dagger, Iron Fist and Marvel’s Avengers: Black Panther’s Quest.
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