British star musician Elton John and the filmmakers of “Rocketman,” a feature film about his path to fame, have criticized a Russian distributor for removing gay and drug abuse scenes from the movie. Russia has a poor record on LGBT rights and a controversial law bans the promotion of “nontraditional sexual relationships” to minors. The artist’s Russian fans were disappointed with the cuts, recognizing that the LGBT community is still ostracized in the country. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports.
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Day: June 2, 2019
Congested Google servers in the eastern United States caused problems for users of Snapchat and YouTube on Sunday, with complaints on social media that the popular apps weren’t accessible.
Google acknowledged the issue, writing in a statement on its Cloud Platform status page that it was dealing with “high levels of network congestion in the eastern USA, affecting multiple services in Google Cloud, G Suite and YouTube.”
“Users may see slow performance or intermittent errors,” it said, adding that engineers had completed the first of two steps to restore normal operations.
Earlier in the day, social media users complained of trouble loading a slew of popular websites and apps.
“Google, YouTube, Snapchat, Shopify, all currently down. Is the internet melting?” asked one Twitter post.
Snapchat and Google-owned YouTube both acknowledged the server issue on their Twitter accounts.
Cloud computing is one of Google’s most lucrative services, but faces stiff competition from other technology companies like Amazon and Microsoft.
In March, the world’s largest social network, Facebook, blamed a “server configuration change” for a massive outage affecting its applications around the world.
The outage affected users for at least 12 hours in most areas of the world, with the biggest impact in North America and Europe, a tracking website said at the time.
Legendary New Orleans chef and civil rights icon Leah Chase has died. She was 96.
Her family released a statement Saturday saying the “unwavering advocate for civil liberties” and “believer in the Spirit of New Orleans” had died.
Chase put the Dooky Chase restaurant on the map by turning it into the first white-tablecloth establishment that catered to the black community. She also challenged New Orleans’ segregation laws by seating black and white patrons together.
In her seven-decade culinary career, Chase fed civil rights icons, presidents, legendary artists and common folk alike, introducing them to Creole cooking, which combines the flavors of France, Africa and Native America.
Her fans included the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, and musicians Ray Charles, Nat King Cole and Sarah Vaughn.
Chase recalled when she hosted Barack Obama at the restaurant while he was campaigning for president in 2008. She said she had to slap him down when he tried to add hot sauce to her dish. “Mr. Obama, you don’t put hot sauce in my gumbo,” Chase recalled in an interview with WWL-TV. “So I had to reprimand him.”
Chase was born in Madisonville, Louisiana, on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, on Jan. 6, 1923.
She married Edgar “Dooky” Chase Jr., a jazz trumpeter and band leader in 1945. She went to work at her father-in-law’s sandwich shop in New Orleans, where she convinced the family to expand the business, to make it more like the finer restaurants she had worked at in the city’s French Quarter.
The restaurant became a gathering place for leaders of the civil rights movement to discuss strategy, often with their white allies.
In 2005, when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city, the Dooky Chase restaurant was flooded, with 1.5 meters of water in the dining room for weeks. The damage was so extensive some thought it would never reopen. But it did two years later.
Leah Chase could be seen at the restaurant until a few months ago, greeting guests and overseeing the kitchen with the help of a walker.
“I love people and I love serving people. It’s fun for me to serve people. Because sometimes people will come in and they’re tired. And just a little plate of food will make people happy,” she said during a 2015 interview with The Associated Press.
Two years have passed since U.S. President Donald Trump announced the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate agreement on June 1, 2017. No other country has followed the U.S. lead, and momentum to fight global warming has continued. But the world remains short of the goal set in Paris to avoid catastrophic climate change. VOA’s Steve Baragona reports.
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While there’s no exact date set, an small cargo vessel called the Maxlimer is in final preparations for its first transatlantic voyage. But this ship is special because there won’t be anyone on board. It’s set to make the first ever transatlantic crossing by a U-S-V, an unmanned surface vehicle. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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The spelling and vocabulary contest known as the National Spelling Bee in the United States was inaugurated in 1925 with help of nine American newspapers.
While the winning elementary and middle school students had family names of Neuhauser, Bell, Lucas, Robinson, Hogan, Jensen and Randall in the contest’s first years, beginning in the 1980s, children from South Asian immigrant families, particularly India, have started gaining a solid footing among champions.
In fact, from 2008 until 2018, winners of every single year’s spelling bee hail from families of Indian heritage.
This year, the southern state Alabama’s 14-year-old Erin Howard was the lone non-Indian American who won the prestigious championship along with seven other kids, aged 12 and 13, all of whom came from Indian American families.
While some have expressed concern that the contest appears to be dominated by Indian Americans, the competition’s organizers don’t seem to be troubled.
“We are proud of the diversity of our participants and are delighted with the success of Indian-American students in our program,” Paige P. Kimble, executive director of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, tells VOA.
Writing for the Los Angeles Times, Shalini Shankar, professor of anthropology and Asian American studies at Northwestern University, herself a native of Mumbai, India, points out that “spelling bees have become a vital part of the Indian American experience.”
Shankar credits “a confluence of factors” that include “feel-good documentaries that inspired future spellers, a culture invested in competitive spelling and parental investment in a child’s educational success” to the persisting phenomenon of Indian-American students’ domination of the national spelling bee contests in the last decade.
According to the Spelling Bee’s official website, 11 million students across America, from grades one to eight (aged seven to 15), participated in spelling bee contests this year, a majority (65%) of them enrolled in public schools. The southern state of Texas so far boasts the most champions.
In addition to students who already live and study in the United States, Kimble says this year’s competition also had participants from Canada, Jamaica, Germany, The Bahamas, Ghana, Japan and South Korea.
Kimble tweeted that “the school bee winner is often the one who memorized a 450-word list. The regional winner is the one who memorized a 1500-word list; has broad knowledge of roots and patterns; and composure in applying knowledge to off-list words asked at the end of the bee.”
The Merriam-Webster unabridged online dictionary, “a dictionary of American English,” as Kimble puts it, serves as the official source where contest words are found.
Following its news report of the 2019 national competition that saw eight parallel winners, each bringing home a $50,000 cash prize (which they all reportedly indicated an interest in putting aside for their college education), The New York Times gave readers an opportunity to try out the paper’s own Spelling Bee contest, a step-up from the usual Crossword feature.
Kimble, the executive director of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, a non-profit organization under The E. W. Scripps Company, a Cincinnati, Ohio-based media conglomerate, says there is also a yearly Bee in the nation’s capital between members of the press and members of congress. Winner of the 2018 contest was a journalist writing for The Washington Post. In 1913, when the first such Bee took place, Congressman Frank B. Willis from Ohio [who went on to become the state’s governor] beat participating scribes in that “most American of showdowns.”
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Joyce Huang contributed to this report.
China says Washington bears the “sole and entire responsibility” for the breakdown in trade talks earlier this month and that Beijing won’t back down on matters of principle. In a defiant rebuttal of who is to blame, China released a white paper Sunday, arguing that it is the United States that has backtracked in the talks and that tariffs will not resolve the two country’s trade issues.
Since talks broke down earlier this month, Beijing has doubled-down, issuing its own tit-for-tat tariffs in response to Washington’s increase to 25% of a tax on $200 billion in Chinese goods. Beijing has also been stepping up anti-American propaganda through state media. On Friday, China’s Commerce Ministry announced the establishment of a “non-reliable entity list.”
That move was a response to Washington’s ban on the sale of American made goods to Huawei and 68 of its affiliates. The ban is expected to go into effect in less than 90-days.
Speaking at a press conference on Sunday, China’s vice minister of commerce Wang Shouwen said it was Washington, not Beijing that was backpedaling.
“If the U.S. side wants to use extreme pressure, to escalate trade friction, to force China to submit and make concessions, this is absolutely impossible,” he said. Wang is a member of China’s trade negotiating team.
Speaking to reporters, he said that by announcing a decision to raise tariffs earlier this month while talks were ongoing and then later launching procedures for tariffs to cover $300 billion more in Chinese goods, Washington had broken an agreement reached by President Donald Trump and Xi Jinping late last year in Argentina.
“During the consultations, China has overcome many difficulties and put forward pragmatic solutions. However, the U.S. has backtracked, and when you give them an inch, they want a yard,” he said.
In Argentina, Xi and Trump agreed to a temporary truce on raising tariffs. But there was no agreement to take that option off the table. Trump originally agreed to 90 days and later extended that period in early March citing progress in talks.
In early May, however, Trump Tweeted that talks were moving too slowly and accused Chinese negotiators of trying to renegotiate the text of the agreement.
That was one instance where the white paper argues that Washington backtracked, it also gives two other examples.
The white paper also said American negotiators “insisted on mandatory requirements concerning China’s sovereign affairs in the deal.” It was not clear what that refers to, but earlier reports have suggested that having an enforcement mechanism as part of a trade agreement between the two sides has long been a tough pill for Beijing to swallow.
In an April interview with CNBC, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that the countries had “pretty much agreed” on an enforcement mechanism, adding that both sides would set up “trade offices.”
It is unclear when the two sides may be able to resume talks, if at all. President Trump has said he is willing to meet with Xi later this month on the sidelines of Group of 20 Nations summit in Japan. China has yet to confirm the meeting.
When asked about it on Sunday, Wang said he did not have any information to provide.
One thing that is clear from the white paper is that China cares a lot about tariffs. The white paper said that one prerequisite for a trade deal is that the U.S. should remove all additional tariffs imposed on Chinese exports and keep demands for Beijing’s purchase of goods “realistic.”
The paper gave several examples of how tariffs are having an impact on the United States and not good for either country or the global economy, but those critiques have all been part of the robust debate that is ongoing in the United States and elsewhere.
In China, however, as Beijing struggles with a slowing economy, concerns about jobs and ballooning debt, authorities have clamped down on any reporting about the trade war that strays from the communist party’s narrative.
China has also stepped up anti-American propaganda, airing decades old movies about the Korean War, which Beijing fought alongside the North against international forces led by the United States.
The Global Times claims the trade dispute “reminds Chinese of the military struggles between China and the U.S. during the Korean War.” Some state media have called the trade war a “people’s war” and there have been suggestions Chinese consumers should boycott American goods. But the effort to stir up nationalist fervor is a risky one for Beijing, analysts note.
Too much public backlash could have an impact on stability and hurt investment as well, said Liu Meng-chun, director of the Chung-Hua Institution of Economic Research’s mainland China division in Taiwan.
“The reason why there are arising calls or nationalistic sentiment is because China is to a certain degree trying to reach a consensus in society and rally support behind the government so that the country can shoulder the consequences of the breakdown of the trade talks,” Liu said.
Hundreds of tornadoes and widespread floods have ravaged the U.S. Midwest and Great Plains states over the past couple of weeks. The flooding is breaking some weather records, and at least 38 people have been killed by tornadoes in the United States so far this year.
Blame climate change?
Scientists have been studying possible links between climate change and the frequency and ferocity of tornadoes.
Villanova University professor Stephen Strader says it is not yet clear how much influence the warming atmosphere and other changes have on these deadly storms.
In a VOA interview, the extreme weather scientist said, “We’re not there from a scientific standpoint, yet.” He said it does seem likely, but not certain, that we will see more severe weather of various kinds in the future.
Flooding
National Weather Service (NWS) meteorologist Andy Foster in Kansas City, Missouri, says there has been “major record flooding” across much of the central U.S.
He told VOA that heavy snow cover melted and combined with large amounts of rain from “multiple storm systems” saturated the ground and caused river flooding. Foster said when still more major storms brought “copious amounts” of rain, there was nowhere for the water to go, sparking flash floods in several states, inundating roads, towns and farmland.
Storms that led to flooding also included an unusual flurry of tornado activity.
Tornadoes
U.S. records show that destructive and deadly twisters are common during the spring months, particularly in an area called “Tornado Alley,” which covers several Midwestern states. The midsection of the United States is where cold air from the Rocky Mountains collides with warm, moist air flowing up from the Gulf of Mexico — prime conditions for tornadoes to form.
The mixture is part of the complex recipe for compact but powerful storms that tear roofs off buildings, toss huge trucks across farm fields, uproot trees and shred multistory brick buildings, all of which produce flying debris that can kill people.
Research scientist Harold Brooks says clusters of tornadoes occur every five or 10 years, but “the second half of May is going to go down as one of the busiest two-week periods on record.”
In a phone interview from the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma, Brooks said the clearest trend in the data is not more or stronger tornadoes, but more days each year with multiple storms.
Villanova professor Strader said scientists currently have a hard time predicting tornadoes even “a few hours before the event,” so making projections about how many deadly storms may erupt years or decades from now is a daunting task.
Saving lives
As the annual death toll from tornadoes dropped significantly from the 1920s to the 1990s, the value of predicting violent storms has become more apparent. Brooks and other experts say lives have been saved through better forecasting, improved building codes and more effective warnings.
Strader said those improvements “stalled out” in recent years, prompting officials to seek better ways to educate the public and communicate timely, effective warnings. He said some people stay in mobile homes and other vulnerable places even after they get warnings in time to move to shelter.
As a start, weather experts are teaming up with social scientists to craft warnings that people will heed to find safety, either in a sturdy building or other safe place, Strader said.
“We’re bridging the physical science with social scientists to really look at what we can do to continue to solve this tornado issue,” he said.
U.S. antitrust regulators have divided oversight of Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, putting Amazon under the watch of the Federal Trade Commission and Google under the Justice Department, the Washington Post said Saturday.
Amazon could face heightened antitrust scrutiny under a new agreement between U.S. regulators that puts the e-commerce giant under the watch of the trade commission, the newspaper reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
The development is the result of the FTC and Justice Department quietly dividing up competition oversight on both of the American tech giants, Amazon and Google, the newspaper said, adding that the FTC’s plans for Amazon and the Justice Department’s interest in Google were not immediately clear.
The news comes after Reuters and other media reported Friday that the Justice Department is preparing an investigation into Google in order to ascertain whether the company broke antitrust law in operating its online businesses.
Google said it had no comment on the report, while Amazon, the FTC and Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the report.
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Powerful magnets at a laboratory in Florida are allowing researchers to see the unseeable, understand the nature of things, and break the boundaries of scientific knowledge. Faith Lapidus has more on the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.
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