Google announced it will invest $10 billion in India in an effort to make the internet more “affordable and useful” to the more than one billion people living there. “This is a reflection of our confidence in the future of India and its digital economy,” CEO Sundar Pichai said in a statement Monday. The money, to be spent through a new Google for India Digitization Fund over the next five to seven years, will invest in India’s technology sector. FILE – Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks during a visit to El Centro College in Dallas, Oct. 3, 2019.”We’ll do this through a mix of equity investments, partnerships, and operational, infrastructure and ecosystem investments,” said Pichai. This new investment represents Google’s biggest commitment to India yet. These investments focus on increasing access to the internet throughout India, as well as aiding businesses with the transition to online operations. Much of this will be accomplished through a focus on using apps and new software platforms. Google aims to use this move to enlarge internet access beyond English and into more local languages throughout India. Google also hopes to use its investments for the public good, working to improve areas as broad as education, agriculture and health. “As we make these investments we look forward to working alongside Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi and the Indian government, as well as Indian businesses of all sizes to realize a shared vision for a Digital India,” Pichai said. “Our goal is to ensure that India not only benefits from the next wave of innovation but leads it.”
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Day: July 13, 2020
After a Paris auction house defied his requests and those of Nigerian authorities to halt the sale of artifacts over questions of provenance, a scholar says he’ll push harder for repatriating cultural treasures. “For those who think the story is over, it’s not. We are just beginning,” said Chika Okeke-Agulu, a Princeton University professor of African and American diaspora art, whose Twitter petition for #BlackArtsMatter has drawn thousands of supporters. Okeke-Agulu’s comments followed Christie’s June 29 auction, which included the sale of Nigerian artifacts, including two Igbo sacred statues. The pair sold to an anonymous buyer for $239,000, NigeriaIn mid-June, five activists dislodged a funeral pole at the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris, demanding its return to Africa. The activists face trial in September. Such demands have echoes that are both global and longstanding. Greece, for example, has fought for two centuries to reclaim the ancient Elgin marbles from Britain. ‘Complex debates’ Nigeria “was saddened” by the Christie’s sale, the lawyer representing the country’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments French President Emmanuel Macron speaks during the closing press conference at the G5 Sahel summit on June 30, 2020, in Nouakchott, Mauritania.Okeke-Agulu contends that Nigeria’s government needs to do more to halt the trade in stolen goods and reckon with “the sordid histories of collecting” during and after the colonial period. “There are legal instruments that can be applied to stopping the sale of illegal, illegally exported cultural property,” he said, adding that he expects Nigerian authorities “to pursue these objects much more robustly than they have done up until now.” Nigeria’s diplomatic approachAliyu L. Abdu, who directs Nigeria’s museums commission, told VOA in an email that its members appreciate “the strong protests expressed by concerned citizens such as Professor Chika Okeke to assert his cultural right as a member of a community whose cultural integrity and sensitivity (have) been violated by commercial interest.” But, he wrote, the government entity is “taking a more comprehensive approach,” using diplomatic and institutional channels for recovering Nigeria’s “cultural patrimony.” Abdu cited the Benin Dialogue Group as an example. The initiative aims to establish a museum in southern Nigeria’s Edo state capital, Benin City, that would reunite looted artworks now scattered around the globe. Representatives from Nigeria, including from the commission, are collaborating with museum directors and delegates from Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom. The group has “started the moves to identify and inventory thousands of Nigerian artifacts in European museums for repatriation through an agreeably mutual process,” Abdu wrote. “However, that angle does not substitute prompt reaction towards recovery of our stolen artifacts that has come to light. As long as Nigeria has noted, recorded and tracked the movements of objects exposed through Christie’s auction, the matter can no longer be denied or suppressed, so we shall continue our efforts of recovery through all available means, which happily are becoming more available.” Examining ethics of collecting Okeke-Agulu also has called on public museums that own looted African objects to come clean about where the objects came from and how they were obtained. American museums, like their European counterparts, are grappling with repatriation. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, wary of the provenance of some African items it received in a bequest, in 2014 contacted Nigeria’s museums commission. “When the commission confirmed that export documents had been forged, the MFA returned the (eight) works in question,” ARTnews magazine reported last summer. The same story noted that Maryland’s Baltimore Museum of Art – with more than 2,500 African works, including ancient sculptures and modern paintings – was creating a Cultural Property Working Group to assess the museum’s collection policies. The group had hoped to complete its recommendations by late this year, but it has been delayed by the pandemic, the museum told VOA in an email. In Okeke-Agula’s opinion, “negotiation about the status and ownership of these objects ought to begin sooner rather than later, and until there is a lot of pressure put on the institutions or the private collections that have them, they’re not going to do anything.” “It’s not a sprint,” he said of his campaign. “What I want to be associated with is a long journey, and as I said, we’re only beginning.” VOA Africa Division’s Jason Patinkin and Carol Guensburg reported from Washington, with additional reporting by Catherine Field in Paris.
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In Ghana and West Africa, organic food is growing in popularity as people try to stay healthy during the COVID-19 pandemic. But organic produce is not easily regulated, and some consumers are paying extra for unverified claims. Farmers across the region are creating their own system, with support from international bodies, to certify organic produce. Stacey Knott reports from Accra.Camera: Stacey Knott Produced by: Stacey Knott
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The United Nations said Monday that 690 million people across the planet were undernourished last year, and an additional 83- to 132 million are at risk this year due to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. “World hunger is still increasing — up by 10 million people in one year and 60 million in five years,” said Maximo Torero Cullen, chief economist at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which is one of five U.N. agencies that compiled the report on world hunger. “Over 2 billion people do not have regular access to safe, nutritious and sufficient food,” he added. Of that figure, about 746 million are severely food insecure and 1.25 billion are moderately food insecure. With nearly 13 million confirmed cases worldwide of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, infections are rising as food stocks in some parts of the world are already low. David Beasley, the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) executive director, speaks during a press conference in Seoul on May 15, 2018 after his recent visit to North Korea.“This is a critical time,” said David Beasley, the head of the World Food Program. “Nations must step up and reach deep in their pockets or we are going to have mass starvation and other significant issues.” The U.N. says the number of undernourished people rose by 10 million between 2018 and 2019. The report found that conflict, climate-related shocks and economic slowdowns are largely responsible for the deterioration in food production and accessibility. In Africa, some 250 million people are undernourished — the highest rate in the world at 19.1% — more than double the world average of 8.9%. While more than half the undernourished people in the world live in Asia — some 381 million — the percentage of the population is below the world average at 8.3%. The U.N. says that Asia has shown progress in reducing the number of hungry people, down by 8 million since 2015. Latin America and the Caribbean have seen a rise in hunger in the past few years, with the number of undernourished people increasing by 9 million between 2015 and 2019. While their rate of undernourishment is below the world average at 7.4%, there are still nearly 48 million people who are undernourished in the region. The report found that there has been some progress in tackling child stunting and low birth weight, but more needs to be done. If current trends continue, the U.N. says the world will not meet the goal of zero hunger by 2030, and could see the number of undernourished people surpass 840 million in the next decade. “The world is not on track to defeat malnutrition,” Torero Cullen said. “While there is some progress in child stunting and breastfeeding, children who are overweight is not improving and adult obesity is rising.” The report also found that 3 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet — which costs five times as much on average as a basic diet. “We must make healthy diets affordable and accessible for everyone,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement. Guterres said he plans to convene a Food Systems Summit next year. The U.N. says urgent action is needed to support a shift that makes healthy diets affordable to all and that is also sustainable for the planet.
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Свіжостворена компанія міжнародного злочинця коломойського і партнерів, що планує виробляти боєприпаси, зробила перші кроки. Орендувала приміщення і написала листа державному оборонному заводу “Артем”. Хоче викупити його устаткування та виробляти великокаліберні снаряди… замість держави. Навіщо це все і до чого тут закордонна фірма, яка прихопила $8 млн передоплати за устаткування
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Уши карлика пукина: личное оскорбление Меркель выльется для москвы новыми санкциями
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Видимость демократических процедур, на которой обиженный карлик пукин долгое время делал акцент, спустя 20 лет пребывания его у власти больше не имеет значения
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Экспорт российской нефти в Европу рухнул до минимума за 18 лет
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Ну надо же, ВОЗ допускает, что россия вернётся к ограничениям из-за пандемии. Мы уже и салют 2 раза провели и парад и голосование, а вирус победить так и не можем. При чем обвиняют граждан, что они не соблюдают дистанцию и меры предосторожности. Ну знаете не у всех есть возможность как у обиженного карлика пукина жить в бункере, когда бюджет на него выделяется по 100 млн ежедневно
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In a fresh attempt to scout out signs of previous life on Mars, the United States, China, and the United Arab Emirates are sending out spacecraft to Mars, starting this week.The unmanned spacecraft are also analyzing the area to prepare for future astronauts.The U.S. is sending a rover named Perseverance to gather rock samples, and it will likely not return for ten years.Each spacecraft must go over 482 million kilometers to reach Mars, after which they must leave Earth’s orbit and enter Mars’. The process of arriving alone takes at least six or seven months.The countries’ goal is to find out if Mars had any signs of previous microscopic life. As has been previously determined, Mars used to have bodies of water, so it’s possible the planet was also host to some type of life.In this illustration on June 16, 2020, NASA’s Perseverance rover uses its Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL) instrument to analyze a rock on the surface of Mars. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)“Robot missions over the past decade or so have shown that Mars is not a dead, alien place as we had concluded in the late 20th century. In fact it is a world peppered with old lake beds, dried out river channels and organic material,“ said Professor Ray Arvidson, of Washington University, St Louis. All three countries are sending out spacecraft in the same week because there is a period of only one month in every 26 months in which Mars and Earth are on the same side of the sun. When they’re on the same side of the sun, the time for travel can be reduced as much as possible. Only the U.S. has placed a spacecraft on Mars before.
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Mars is about to be invaded by planet Earth — big time. Three countries — the United States, China and the United Arab Emirates — are sending unmanned spacecraft to the red planet in quick succession beginning this week, in the most sweeping effort yet to seek signs of ancient microscopic life while scouting out the place for future astronauts.The U.S., for its part, is dispatching a six-wheeled rover the size of a car, named Perseverance, to collect rock samples that will be brought back to Earth for analysis in about a decade. “Right now, more than ever, that name is so important,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said as preparations went on amid the coronavirus outbreak, which will keep the launch guest list to a minimum. Each spacecraft will travel more than 300 million miles (483 million kilometers) before reaching Mars next February. It takes six to seven months, at the minimum, for a spacecraft to loop out beyond Earth’s orbit and sync up with Mars’ more distant orbit around the sun. Scientists want to know what Mars was like billions of years ago when it had rivers, lakes and oceans that may have allowed simple, tiny organisms to flourish before the planet morphed into the barren, wintry desert world it is today. “Trying to confirm that life existed on another planet, it’s a tall order. It has a very high burden of proof,” said Perseverance’s project scientist, Ken Farley of Caltech in Pasadena, California.In a clean room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, engineers observed the first driving test for NASA’s Mars 2020 rover Perseveranceo, Dec. 17, 2019. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)The three nearly simultaneous launches are no coincidence: The timing is dictated by the opening of a one-month window in which Mars and Earth are in ideal alignment on the same side of the sun, which minimizes travel time and fuel use. Such a window opens only once every 26 months. Mars has long exerted a powerful hold on the imagination but has proved to be the graveyard for numerous missions. Spacecraft have blown up, burned up or crash-landed, with the casualty rate over the decades exceeding 50%. China’s last attempt, in collaboration with Russia in 2011, ended in failure. Only the U.S. has successfully put a spacecraft on Mars, doing it eight times, beginning with the twin Vikings in 1976. Two NASA landers are now operating there, InSight and Curiosity. Six other spacecraft are exploring the planet from orbit: three U.S., two European and one from India. The United Arab Emirates and China are looking to join the elite club. The UAE spacecraft, named Amal, which is Arabic for Hope, is an orbiter scheduled to rocket away from Japan on Wednesday, local time, on what will be the Arab world’s first interplanetary mission. The spacecraft, built in partnership with the University of Colorado Boulder, will arrive at Mars in the year the UAE marks the 50th anniversary of its founding. “The UAE wanted to send a very strong message to the Arab youth,” project manager Omran Sharaf said. “The message here is that if the UAE can reach Mars in less than 50 years, then you can do much more. … The nice thing about space, it sets the standards really high.” Controlled from Dubai, the celestial weather station will strive for an exceptionally high Martian orbit of 13,670 miles by 27,340 miles (22,000 kilometers by 44,000 kilometers) to study the upper atmosphere and monitor climate change. China will be up next, with the flight of a rover and an orbiter sometime around July 23; Chinese officials aren’t divulging much. The mission is named Tianwen, or Questions for Heaven. NASA, meanwhile, is shooting for a launch on July 30 from Cape Canaveral. Perseverance is set to touch down in an ancient river delta and lake known as Jezero Crater, not quite as big as Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. China’s much smaller rover will aim for an easier, flatter target. To reach the surface, both spacecraft will have to plunge through Mars’ hazy red skies in what has been dubbed “seven minutes of terror” — the most difficult and riskiest part of putting spacecraft on the planet. Jezero Crater is full of boulders, cliffs, sand dunes and depressions, any one of which could end Perseverance’s mission. Brand-new guidance and parachute-triggering technology will help steer the craft away from hazards. Ground controllers will be helpless, given the 10 minutes it takes radio transmissions to travel one-way between Earth and Mars. Jezero Crater is worth the risks, according to scientists who chose it over 60 other potential sites. Where there was water — and Jezero was apparently flush with it 3.5 billion years ago — there may have been life, though it was probably only simple microbial life, existing perhaps in a slimy film at the bottom of the crater. But those microbes may have left telltale marks in the sediment layers. Perseverance will hunt for rocks containing such biological signatures, if they exist. It will drill into the most promising rocks and store a half-kilogram (about 1 pound) of samples in dozens of titanium tubes that will eventually be fetched by another rover. To prevent Earth microbes from contaminating the samples, the tubes are super-sterilized, guaranteed germ-free by Adam Stelzner, chief engineer for the mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. “Yep, I’m staking my reputation on it,” he said. While prowling the surface, Perseverance as well as China’s rover will peek below, using radar to locate any underground pools of water that might exist. Perseverance will also release a spindly, 4-pound (1.8-kilogram) helicopter that will be the first rotorcraft ever to fly on another planet. Perseverance’s cameras will shoot color video of the rover’s descent, providing humanity’s first look at a parachute billowing open at Mars, while microphones capture the sounds. The rover will also attempt to produce oxygen from the carbon dioxide in the thin Martian atmosphere. Extracted oxygen could someday be used by astronauts on Mars for breathing as well as for making rocket propellant. NASA wants to return astronauts to the moon by 2024 and send them from there to Mars in the 2030s. To that end, the space agency is sending samples of spacesuit material with Perseverance to see how they stand up against the harsh Martian environment. The tab for Perseverance’s mission, including the flight and a minimum two years of Mars operations, is close to $3 billion. The UAE’s project costs $200 million, including the launch but not mission operations. China has not disclosed its costs. Europe and Russia dropped plans to send a life-seeking rover to Mars this summer after falling behind in testing and then getting slammed by COVID-19. Perseverance’s mission is seen by NASA as a comparatively low-risk way of testing out some of the technology that will be needed to send humans to the red planet and bring them home safely. “Sort of crazy for me to call it low risk because there’s a lot of hard work in it and there are billions of dollars in it,” Farley said. “But compared to humans, if something goes wrong, you will be very glad you tested it out on a half-kilogram of rock instead of on the astronauts.”
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The son of Lisa Marie Presley has died. He was 27. Presley’s representative Roger Widynowski said in a statement Sunday to The Associated Press that she was “heartbroken” after learning about the death of her son Benjamin Keough. He is the grandson of the late Elvis Presley. TMZ reports that Keough died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound Sunday in Calabasas, California. “She is completely heartbroken, inconsolable and beyond devastated but trying to stay strong for her 11-year-old twins and her oldest daughter Riley,” Widynowski said in the statement. “She adored that boy. He was the love of her life.” Presley had Keough and actress Riley Keough, 31, with her former husband Danny Keough. She also had twins from another marriage. Nancy Sinatra tweeted her condolences to Presley, writing, “I have known you since before your mama gave birth to you, never dreaming you would have pain like this in your life. I’m so very sorry.”
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Українські шахтарі просять повернути Порошенка і “Роттердам+”! Шок!
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Черный период газпрома: дойная корова обиженного карлика отбрасывает копыта
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Блог про українську політику та актуальні події в нашій країні
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Десятки тысяч людей в Хабаровске и других городах Дальнего Востока, вышедшие против произвола московских властей и требующие отставки обиженного карлика пукина — это сильно
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НАТО признало Украину ключом к евро-атлантической безопасности
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Kelly Preston, who played dramatic and comic foil to actors ranging from Tom Cruise in “Jerry Maguire” to Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Twins,” died Sunday, husband John Travolta said. She was 57. Travolta said in an Instagram post that his wife of 28 years died after a two-year battle with breast cancer. “It is with a very heavy heart that I inform you that my beautiful wife Kelly has lost her two-year battle with breast cancer,” Travolta said. “She fought a courageous fight with the love and support of so many.” The couple had three children together. “Shocked by this sad news,” Maria Shriver said on Twitter. “Kelly was such a bright loving soul, a talented actress, and a loving mom and wife. My heart breaks for her family who have already known such sadness and grief.” Preston had a lengthy acting career in movies and television, starring opposite Kevin Costner in the 1999 film “For the Love of the Game.” In 2003, she starred in “What a Girl Wants” and as the mom in the live-action adaptation of “The Cat in the Hat.” The following year she appeared in the music video for Maroon 5’s “She Will Be Loved.” Russell Crowe tweeted that he met Preston “first in late ’92 I think,” adding, “In 1995 we auditioned together for Breaking Up, Salma Hayek got that gig.” Crowe said he hadn’t seen Preston much, “but when I did, she was always the same sparkly eyed gem.” She occasionally appeared in films with her husband, as they did in the box-office bomb “Battlefield Earth” in 2000. Preston and Travolta were married at a midnight ceremony in Paris in 1991 while the couple were expecting their first son, Jett. In January 2009, Jett Travolta, 16, died after a seizure at the family’s vacation home in the Bahamas. The death touched off a court case after an ambulance driver and his attorney were accused of trying to extort $25 million from the actors in exchange for not releasing sensitive information about their son’s death. Travolta testified during a criminal trial that ended in a mistrial and was prepared to testify a second time, but decided to stop pursuing the case and it was dismissed. He cited the severe strain the proceedings and his son’s death had caused the family. Both Preston and Travolta returned to acting, with Preston’s first role back in the Nicholas Sparks adaptation, “The Last Song,” which starred Miley Cyrus and her future husband, Liam Hemsworth. They had two other children, daughter Ella Bleu in 2000 and son Benjamin in 2010. Ella wrote on Instagram Sunday: “I have never met anyone as courageous, strong, beautiful and loving as you. Anyone who is lucky enough to have known you or to have ever been in your presence will agree that you have a glow and a light that never ceases to shine and that makes anyone around you feel instantly happy.” Travolta and Preston met while filming 1988’s “The Experts.” They last starred together in the 2018 film “Gotti,” with Travolta playing John Gotti and Preston playing the crime boss’s wife, Victoria. “Kelly’s love and life will always be remembered,” Travolta said on Instagram. “I will be taking some time to be there for my children who have lost their mother, so forgive me in advance if you don’t hear from us for a while. But please know that I will feel your outpouring of love in the weeks and months ahead as we heal.” Preston’s death was first reported by People magazine.
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