Nothing says Halloween like a visit to a pumpkin patch where selections range from cute to specimens so gigantic, they arrive by truck. Titi Tran has this report from Orange County, California.
Camera: Titi Mary Tran
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Month: October 2021
A popular new music app uses artificial intelligence to “democratize” how musicians of all skill levels learn and play music. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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Britain’s Queen Elizabeth has pulled out of the COP26 conference in Glasgow next week after she was advised by doctors to rest, Buckingham Palace said on Tuesday, in a blow to the United Nations climate summit.
A palace source said the decision to not attend had been taken as a “sensible precaution” and to let everyone know in advance. The queen remains in good spirits and wants COP26 to be a success, the source added.
“Following advice to rest, The Queen has been undertaking light duties at Windsor Castle,” Buckingham Palace said.
“Her Majesty has regretfully decided that she will no longer travel to Glasgow to attend the Evening Reception of COP26 on Monday, 1st November.”
The 95-year-old queen, the world’s oldest and longest-reigning monarch, stayed overnight in hospital last Wednesday after undergoing “preliminary investigations” for an unspecified but not COVID-19 related ailment.
She carried out her first official engagement since the hospital stay earlier on Tuesday, holding two virtual audiences to welcome the new ambassadors to Britain from South Korea and Switzerland.
Elizabeth, who is queen of 15 other realms including Australia, Canada and New Zealand and next year celebrates 70 years on the throne, is known for her robust health and still carrying out many public duties.
News of the cancellation is likely to raise concerns about her health. She was recently overheard saying she was irritated by world leaders who talk about climate change but do nothing to tackle it.
The queen had been due to attend an evening event next Monday at the conference where world leaders will meet including U.S. President Joe Biden, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
Britain has cast the United Nations COP26 climate conference which begins in Glasgow on Oct. 31 as the last big chance to slow rising temperatures, and hopes to persuade leaders to adopt tougher climate targets.
However Johnson said on Monday it was “touch and go” as to whether COP26 would succeed in securing the requirements needed to limit the rise in the average global temperature to 1.5 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
The queen will deliver an address to the assembled delegates via a recorded message, the palace added. Elizabeth’s son and heir Prince Charles and his eldest son Prince William are still due to attend.
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s independent advisory committee is meeting Tuesday to consider giving emergency approval to the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 5 to 11.
While it is considered rare for younger children to become seriously ill or die from COVID-19, FDA vaccines chief Dr. Peter Marks told the panel Tuesday that 1.9 million children in the 5 to 11 age group have tested positive and 8,300 have been hospitalized in the United States. Of those hospitalized, one-third needed intensive care and nearly 100 died.
If the children’s dose of the vaccine is approved as expected, officials say they hope it will help close a major gap in the U.S. vaccine campaign that has worried parents, educators and public health leaders.
Last week, the White House said it has already obtained enough vaccine for all 28 million children in the United States who would become eligible, and established a network of pediatricians, pharmacies and other health care providers to quickly distribute the shots.
Pending FDA approval, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s independent advisory committee is expected to consider the proposal next week.
Moderna vaccine
In a related development, U.S.-based pharmaceutical company Moderna said a clinical trial shows that a low dose of its COVID-19 vaccine is safe for children between 6 and 11 years of age.
The company says it inoculated more than 4,700 children with its two-dose vaccine about 28 days apart, with each shot about half the strength given to adults. Preliminary results show the antibody levels in the children were at the same level as those seen in young adults who received a full dose.
Moderna says the children suffered mild side effects such as fatigue, headache, fever and pain at the injection site. The number of test subjects was too small to detect any rare side effects such as myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart, which has been detected mostly among boys and young men who received either the Moderna or the Pfizer vaccine.
The study has not been published by any peer-reviewed journal, but Moderna says it will soon present its findings to the FDA and other global drug regulators.
Some information for this report came from the Associated Press and Reuters.
The niece of Japanese Emperor Naruhito, Princess Mako, married a commoner Tuesday, relinquishing her royal status following a heavily scrutinized, controversial four-year engagement.
The Japanese Imperial Household Agency issued a statement announcing the marriage of Mako to Kei Komuro, both 30 years old.
The couple broke with tradition by foregoing the usual rituals and ceremonies of royal weddings, including a reception, while Mako also refused the one-off payment of about $1.3 million typically made to royal women who leave the imperial family to marry.
The couple had been classmates at Tokyo’s International Christian University when they announced their engagement in 2017, saying they intended to marry the next year.
But shortly after the announcement, a dispute involving money Komuro’s mother, a widow, had received from a former suiter surfaced and the wedding was postponed. Komuro wrote a lengthy statement explaining the situation, and but it is still unclear if the dispute has been fully resolved.
Komuro spent the last three years at law school in New York City, where The New York Times reports tabloid newspapers documented everything from his hairstyle to the food trucks where he bought his lunch.
At a news conference, the former princess addressed the controversies, gossip and mixed public opinion about the relationship, saying, “I am very sorry to the people who had trouble (with our marriage). Also, I feel gratitude towards people who cared and quietly worried about me, or people who were not misled by the non-factual information and still continued to support me and Kei.”
The couple expressed their love for one another, and Mako said, “As we go on with our lives, I think there will be different difficulties. But as we have in the past, we will work together and continue to move on together.”
The couple plans to live in New York City.
Some information for this report was provided by The Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse
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U.S.-based pharmaceutical company Moderna says a clinical trial shows that a low dose of its COVID-19 vaccine is safe for children between 6 and 11 years old.
The company says it inoculated more than 4,700 children with its two-dose vaccine about 28 days apart, with each shot about half the strength given to adults. Preliminary results show the antibody levels in the children were the same levels as those seen in young adults who received a full dose of the vaccine.
Moderna says the children suffered mild side effects from the vaccine such as fatigue, headache, fever and pain at the site of the injection. The number of test subjects was too small to detect any rare side effects such as myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart, which has been detected mostly among boys and young men who received either the Moderna or the Pfizer vaccine.
The study has not been published by any peer-reviewed journal, but Moderna says it will soon present its findings to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and other global drug regulators. The FDA is meeting Tuesday to review an application by Pfizer and its German-based partner, BioNTech, to offer its vaccine for children between 5 and 11 years old.
In a related development, Reuters is reporting that the African Union will purchase up to 110 million doses of the Moderna vaccine. The AU will receive 15 million doses before the end of the year, with another 35 million doses arriving in the first quarter of 2022 and up to 60 million in the second quarter.
The purchase was facilitated by the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden, which is deferring delivery of 33 million doses it had purchased from Moderna to give the AU an opportunity to negotiate with the company.
“This is important as it allows us to increase the number of vaccines available immediately,” AU coronavirus envoy Strive Masiyiwa said in an email, according to Reuters. “We urge other vaccine producing countries to follow the lead of the (U.S. government) and give us similar access to buy this and other vaccines.”
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has extended the coronavirus health rules for cruise ships until January 15, 2022. The current regulations, which were first imposed in March 2020 and include a requirement for ships to sail with at least 95 percent of passengers and crew fully vaccinated, were set to expire on November 1.
The CDC says when the current regulations expire in January, it will shift to a voluntary program for cruise ship operators to detect and control the spread of COVID-19 on their vessels.
In Hong Kong, chief executive Carrie Lam announced Tuesday that the city will tighten its coronavirus travel restrictions to bring it more in line with mainland China.
Lam told reporters the government will cancel most of the quarantine exemptions granted to certain groups of visitors coming from overseas and the mainland, with the exception of cross-border truck drivers. Diplomats, airline crews, business executives and airline crews are currently exempt from the city’s mandatory 14-to-21 day hotel quarantine period, one of the tightest restrictions in the world.
Lam defended the tightened restrictions, saying they are necessary to give authorities in Beijing the confidence to resume quarantine-free travel between the mainland and Hong Kong,
But a leading regional financial industry group, the Asia Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, said Monday that Hong Kong’s strict zero-COVID policy and quarantine requirements for international travelers is eroding the city’s status as a global financial hub.
Some information for this report came from the Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse.
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Coal-rich Australia unveiled a much-delayed 2050 net zero emissions target Tuesday, in a plan that pointedly dodged thorny details or near-term goals ahead of a landmark UN climate summit.
Widely seen as a climate laggard, Australia is one of the world’s largest coal and gas exporters.
For the last eight years, its conservative government has resisted action to reduce emissions, routinely approving new coal projects and peddling skepticism about climate change.
Under domestic and international pressure, Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Tuesday announced a shift in approach and acknowledged the “world is changing,” Australians want policy that “does the right thing on climate change”, he said, adding the phenomenon “is real, it’s happening. We understand it and we recognize it.”
Just how Australia will get to net zero by 2050 carbon emissions remains unclear, with the government refusing to release its modeling.
The plan would invest US$15 billion in low-emission technologies over the next decade, but it also leans heavily on unproven technologies and carbon offsets, which critics deride as an accounting gimmick.
And Morrison was keen to stress he was not dropping long-running support for the country’s lucrative fossil fuel industry.
“It will not shut down our coal or gas production or exports,” Morrison told a press conference. “It will not cost jobs, not in farming, mining or gas.”
While backing away from demands for more ambitious 2030 targets, Morrison said he expects Australia to “meet and beat” the previously agreed goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions 26-28 percent on 2005 levels.
He said Australia was now projected to cut emissions 30-35 percent by 2030.
“That is something we actually think we are going to achieve. The actions of Australia speak louder than the words about us,” he added.
‘Sold a pup’
The announcement comes just days before Morrison departs for next month’s United Nations COP26 climate summit in Glasgow.
Australia’s reluctance to act had been criticized by close allies such as the United States and Britain, as well as Pacific island neighbors that are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
The coalition government has also found itself increasingly out of step with Australians’ attitudes as they suffered a series of climate-worsened droughts, bushfires and floods.
A 2021 poll by the Lowy Institute think tank found 78 percent of Australians back a 2050 net zero target, while 63 percent support a national ban on new coal mines.
The country’s greatest natural tourist drawcard, the Great Barrier Reef, has been badly damaged by waves of mass coral bleaching as ocean temperatures rise.
Mark Kenny, a professor at the Australian Studies Institute in Canberra, said domestic and international pressures had made it “more and more unviable for the coalition to cling to its essentially denialist position.”
But Kenny warned Australia’s announcement amounted to little more than a shift in rhetoric for the resource-reliant nation.
“This commitment is not significant in reality. I think if the world takes this seriously, they have been sold a pup,” he told AFP.
Tuesday’s 2050 commitment trails behind more ambitious announcements from Australian states and corporations, including mining giant Rio Tinto.
Australia’s major coal customers such as India and China have already indicated they will phase out thermal coal, and technological advances have made the future of metallurgical coal — used to make steel — increasingly uncertain.
Ahead of the 12-day Glasgow summit, the UN says more than 130 countries have set or are considering a target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, a target it says is “imperative” to safeguard a livable climate.
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Production of the movie that Alec Baldwin was making when he shot and killed a cinematographer last week has been officially halted, but producers of the Western described the move as “a pause rather than an end.”
In an email to crew members, the movie’s production team confirmed that work on “Rust” has been suspended at least until the investigation is complete. The team said it is working with law enforcement and is conducting its own internal safety review. The production company is also offering grief counseling.
The sheriff’s investigation continued Monday. The team said that it could not respond to comments made in news reports or on social media. The email suggested that production could resume at some point.
“Although our hearts are broken, and it is hard to see beyond the horizon, this is, at the moment, a pause rather than an end,” the email read.
‘Cold gun’
Moments before the shooting, Baldwin was explaining how he was going to draw the revolver from his holster and where his arm would be positioned, court records show.
The actor had been told that the gun was safe to use for the rehearsal of a scene in which he was supposed to pull out the weapon while sitting in a church pew and point it at the camera, the records said.
Cameraman Reid Russell told a detective that he was unsure whether the weapon was checked before it was handed to Baldwin, and he did not know why the gun was fired.
The camera was not rolling when the gun went off and killed cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, Russell told authorities, according a search warrant affidavit released Sunday.
Authorities said Friday that the assistant director, Dave Halls, had handed the weapon to Baldwin and announced “cold gun,” indicating it was safe.
When asked about how Baldwin treated firearms on the set, Russell said the actor was safe, citing a previous instance when Baldwin made sure a child actor was not near him when a gun was being discharged.
Statements by director
The affidavit released Sunday also included statements by director Joel Souza, who was standing behind Hutchins and was wounded.
It detailed the moments before the shooting and showed that there was turmoil on the set the day of the shooting. Several members of the camera crew walked off the production in a dispute over payment and lodging, Russell said, and he was left with a lot of work to do. Only one camera was available to shoot, and it had to be moved because the light had shifted and there was a shadow.
Souza said he was focused on how the scene would appear on camera. He said he recalled hearing the phrase “cold gun” before the shooting, the affidavit said.
He said the scene did not call for the use of live rounds. After a lunch break, Souza said he was not sure if the firearm had been checked again. Souza was looking over Hutchins’ shoulder when he heard the gunshot, according to the affidavit.
Previous concerns
On Sunday, a crew member who worked with Halls on another project said she had raised safety concerns about him in 2019.
Maggie Goll, a prop maker and licensed pyrotechnician, said in a statement that she filed an internal complaint with the executive producers of Hulu’s “Into the Dark” series in 2019 over concerns about Halls’ behavior on set. Goll said in a phone interview Sunday that Halls disregarded safety protocols for weapons and pyrotechnics and tried to continue filming after the supervising pyrotechnician lost consciousness on set.
Halls has not returned phone calls and email messages seeking comment.
The fatal shooting and previous experiences point to larger safety issues that need to be addressed, Goll said, adding that crew member safety and well-being were top issues in recent contract negotiations between a union that represents film and TV workers and a major producers’ group.
“This situation is not about Dave Halls. … It’s in no way one person’s fault,” she said. “It’s a bigger conversation about safety on set and what we are trying to achieve with that culture.”
The film’s chief electrician, Serge Svetnoy, blamed producers for Hutchins’ death in an emotional Facebook post on Sunday. Svetnoy said he had worked with Hutchins on multiple films and faulted “negligence and unprofessionalism” among those handling weapons on the set. He said producers hired an inexperienced armorer.
Safety measures
Since the shooting, other production crews have stepped up safety measures.
Jeffrey Wright, who has worked on projects including the James Bond franchise and the upcoming movie “The Batman,” was acting with a weapon on the set of “Westworld” when he learned of the shooting Thursday at a New Mexico ranch.
“We were all pretty shocked. And it informed what we did from that moment on,” he said in an interview Sunday at the Newport Beach Film Festival.
“I don’t recall ever being handed a weapon that was not cleared in front of me — meaning chamber open, barrel shown to me, light flashed inside the barrel to make sure that it’s cleared,” Wright said. “Clearly that was a mismanaged set.”
Actor Ray Liotta agreed with Wright that the checks on firearms are usually extensive.
“They always — that I know of — they check it so you can see,” Liotta said. “They give it to the person you’re pointing the gun at. They do it to the producer. They show whoever is there that it doesn’t work.”
Baldwin, who is known for his roles in “30 Rock” and “The Hunt for Red October” and his impression of former President Donald Trump on “Saturday Night Live,” has described the killing as a “tragic accident.”
Car rental company Hertz says it will buy 100,000 electric cars from Tesla.
Hertz interim CEO Mark Fields said the Model 3 cars could be ready for renters as early as November, The Associated Press reported.
Fields said the reason for the move was that electric cars are becoming mainstream, and consumer interest in them is growing.
“More are willing to try and buy,” he told AP. “It’s pretty stunning.”
All of the cars should be available by the end of 2022, the company said. When all are delivered, they will make up 20% of the company’s fleet.
Hertz, which emerged from bankruptcy in June, did not disclose the cost of the order, but it could be valued at as much as $4 billion, according to some news reports.
The company said it plans to build its own charging station network, with 3,000 in 65 locations by the end of 2022 and 4,000 by the end of 2023. Renters will also have access to Tesla’s charging network for a fee.
Tesla stock jumped as much as 12% on the news
Some information in this report came from The Associated Press.
The U.S. State Department plans to establish a bureau of cyberspace and digital policy in the face of a growing hacking problem, specifically a surge of ransomware attacks on U.S. infrastructure.
State Department spokesperson Ned Price said a Senate-confirmed ambassador at large will lead the bureau.
Hackers have struck numerous U.S. companies this year.
One such attack on pipeline operator Colonial Pipeline led to temporary fuel supply shortages on the U.S. East Coast. Hackers also targeted an Iowa-based agricultural company, sparking fears of disruptions to Midwest grain harvesting.
Two weeks ago, the Treasury Department said suspected ransomware payments totaling $590 million were made in the first six months of this year. It put the cryptocurrency industry on alert about its role fighting ransomware attacks.
“Belfast”, a film drama by acclaimed actor and director Kenneth Branagh, chronicles the beginnings, in 1969, of the thirty-year political and sectarian violence in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles. Penelope Poulou reports.
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In Gaza and Syria, journalists and activists feel Facebook censors their speech, flagging inoffensive Arabic posts as terrorist content. In India and Myanmar, political groups use Facebook to incite violence. All of it frequently slips through the company’s efforts to police its social media platforms because of a shortage of moderators who speak local languages and understand cultural contexts.
Internal company documents from the former Facebook product manager-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen show the problems plaguing the company’s content moderation are systemic, and that Facebook has understood the depth of these failings for years while doing little about it.
Its platforms have failed to develop artificial-intelligence solutions that can catch harmful content in different languages. As a result, terrorist content and hate speech proliferate in some of the world’s most volatile regions. Elsewhere, the company’s language gaps lead to overzealous policing of everyday expression.
This story, along with others published Monday, is based on former Facebook product manager-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen’s disclosures to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which were also provided to Congress in redacted form by her legal team. The redacted versions received by Congress were obtained by a consortium of news organizations, including The Associated Press.
In a statement to the AP, a Facebook spokesperson said that over the last two years the company has invested in recruiting more staff with local dialect and topic expertise to bolster its review capacity globally.
When it comes to Arabic content moderation, in particular, the company said, “We still have more work to do.”
But the documents show the problems are not limited to Arabic. In Myanmar, where Facebook-based misinformation has been linked repeatedly to ethnic violence, the company’s internal reports show it failed to stop the spread of hate speech targeting the minority Rohingya Muslim population.
In India, the documents show moderators never flagged anti-Muslim hate speech broadcast by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s far-right Hindu nationalist group because Facebook lacked moderators and automated filters with knowledge of Hindi and Bengali.
Arabic, Facebook’s third-most common language, does pose particular challenges to the company’s automated systems and human moderators, each of which struggles to understand spoken dialects unique to each country and region, their vocabularies salted with different historical influences and cultural contexts. The platform won a vast following across the region amid the 2011 Arab Spring, but its reputation as a forum for free expression in a region full of autocratic governments has since changed.
Scores of Palestinian journalists have had their accounts deleted. Archives of the Syrian civil war have disappeared. During the 11-day Gaza war last May, Facebook’s Instagram app briefly banned the hashtag #AlAqsa, a reference to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City, a flashpoint of the conflict. The company later apologized, saying it confused Islam’s third-holiest site for a terrorist group.
Criticism, satire and even simple mentions of groups on the company’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations list — a docket modeled on the U.S. government equivalent — are grounds for a takedown.
“We were incorrectly enforcing counterterrorism content in Arabic,” one document reads, noting the system “limits users from participating in political speech, impeding their right to freedom of expression.”
The Facebook blacklist includes Gaza’s ruling Hamas party, as well as Hezbollah, the militant group that holds seats in Lebanon’s Parliament, along with many other groups representing wide swaths of people and territory across the Middle East.
The company’s language gaps and biases have led to the widespread perception that its reviewers skew in favor of governments and against minority groups.
Israeli security agencies and watchdogs also monitor Facebook and bombard it with thousands of orders to take down Palestinian accounts and posts as they try to crack down on incitement.
“They flood our system, completely overpowering it,” said Ashraf Zeitoon, Facebook’s former head of policy for the Middle East and North Africa region, who left in 2017.
Syrian journalists and activists reporting on the country’s opposition also have complained of censorship, with electronic armies supporting embattled President Bashar Assad aggressively flagging dissident posts for removal.
Meanwhile in Afghanistan, Facebook does not translate the site’s hate speech and misinformation pages into Dari and Pashto, the country’s two main languages. The site also doesn’t have a bank of hate speech terms and slurs in Afghanistan, so it can’t build automated filters that catch the worst violations.
In the Philippines, homeland of many domestic workers in the Middle East, Facebook documents show that engineers struggled to detect reports of abuse by employers because the company couldn’t flag words in Tagalog, the major Philippine language.
In the Middle East, the company over-relies on artificial-intelligence filters that make mistakes, leading to “a lot of false positives and a media backlash,” one document reads. Largely unskilled moderators, in over their heads and at times relying on Google Translate, tend to passively field takedown requests instead of screening proactively. Most are Moroccans and get lost in the translation of Arabic’s 30-odd dialects.
The moderators flag inoffensive Arabic posts as terrorist content 77% of the time, one report said.
Although the documents from Haugen predate this year’s Gaza war, episodes from that bloody conflict show how little has been done to address the problems flagged in Facebook’s own internal reports.
Activists in Gaza and the West Bank lost their ability to livestream. Whole archives of the conflict vanished from newsfeeds, a primary portal of information. Influencers accustomed to tens of thousands of likes on their posts saw their outreach plummet when they posted about Palestinians.
“This has restrained me and prevented me from feeling free to publish what I want,” said Soliman Hijjy, a Gaza-based journalist.
Palestinian advocates submitted hundreds of complaints to Facebook during the war, often leading the company to concede error. In the internal documents, Facebook reported it had erred in nearly half of all Arabic language takedown requests submitted for appeal.
Facebook’s internal documents also stressed the need to enlist more Arab moderators from less-represented countries and restrict them to where they have appropriate dialect expertise.
“It is surely of the highest importance to put more resources to the task to improving Arabic systems,” said the report.
Meanwhile, many across the Middle East worry the stakes of Facebook’s failings are exceptionally high, with potential to widen long-standing inequality, chill civic activism and stoke violence in the region.
“We told Facebook: Do you want people to convey their experiences on social platforms, or do you want to shut them down?” said Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian envoy to the United Kingdom. “If you take away people’s voices, the alternatives will be uglier.”
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The battle to stem climate change may be lost as new information indicates the Amazon rain forest is turning from a carbon sink – or area that absorbs CO2 – into a source of carbon dioxide, the World Meteorological Organization warns.
The latest edition of the WMO’s Greenhouse Gas Bulletin reports emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide once again broke all records last year.
The U.N. agency’s report warns the concentrations of these greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere are driving climate change. It says carbon dioxide, the single most important greenhouse gas, accounts for approximately 66 percent of the warming effect on the climate.
The secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, Petteri Taalas, says about half of CO2 emissions remains in the atmosphere for centuries. He says the other half is taken up by oceans and land ecosystems.
He says it is not clear for how much longer forested areas, often referred to as the lungs of the Earth, will continue to act as effective carbon sinks.
“We have already seen some alarming indications that, for example, Amazonian rain forest ecosystem, which used to be a major sink of carbon, has become now a source of carbon, which is alarming,” Taalas said. “And this is related to deforestation in the area and also changes in local climate because of this deforestation.”
Oksana Tarasova, who heads the WMO’s Atmospheric and Environment Research Division, says the WMO only now is revealing this new finding because it has taken nine years of observation to gather the measurement data set needed to understand the changes taking place. She says not all of the Amazon forest is turning from a carbon sink to a net producer of carbon.
“So, the Western part of the Amazonia still continues to work as a carbon sink at this point. But we do not know for how long that will continue this way,” Tarasova said. “We are making the measurements there and keeping our track on what is happening there. … I would take the whole Amazonia as a whole that is seen that it is a sink, but its capacity is substantially reduced.”
Meteorologists say climate change negotiators at an upcoming conference in Scotland must take concrete action and make concrete pledges to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
They say setting carbon neutral targets will not work in stemming climate change. They also warn the world is heading toward a temperature rise of 2.5 degrees Celsius by the end of this century. This, they say, is far more than the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 to two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
The U.S. technology giant Microsoft says that the same Russia-backed hackers responsible for the 2020 SolarWinds breach of corporate computer systems is continuing to attack global technology systems, this time targeting cloud service resellers.
Microsoft said the group, which it calls Nobelium, is employing a new strategy to take advantage of the direct access resellers have to their customers’ IT systems, hoping to “more easily impersonate an organization’s trusted technology partner to gain access to their downstream customers.”
Resellers are intermediaries between software and hardware producers and the eventual technology product users.
In a statement Sunday, Microsoft said it has been monitoring Nobelium’s attacks since May and has notified more than 140 companies targeted by the group, with as many as 14 of the companies’ systems believed to have been compromised.
“This recent activity is another indicator that Russia is trying to gain long-term, systematic access to a variety of points in the technology supply chain and establish a mechanism for surveilling — now or in the future — targets of interest to the Russian government,” Microsoft wrote in a blog post.
“Fortunately, we have discovered this campaign during its early stages, and we are sharing these developments to help cloud service resellers, technology providers, and their customers take timely steps to help ensure Nobelium is not more successful,” the company said.
Microsoft said Nobelium had made 22,868 attacks since July but had only been successful a handful of times. Most of the attacks have targeted U.S. government agencies and think tanks in the United States, followed by attacks in Ukraine, the United Kingdom and in other NATO countries.
A U.S. government official downplayed the attacks in a statement to The Associated Press, saying, “The activities described were unsophisticated password spray and phishing, run-of-the mill operations for the purpose of surveillance that we already know are attempted every day by Russia and other foreign governments.”
Washington blamed Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence agency for the 2020 SolarWinds hack, which compromised several federal agencies and went undetected for much of last year. Russia has denied any wrongdoing.
Some information for this report comes from AP and Reuters.
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Health care activists in Cameroon are visiting homes, markets and farms this month, encouraging women to get free screenings for breast cancer. The central African state says the number of women diagnosed with breast cancer has risen sharply over the past year because many women delayed screenings for fear of COVID-19 infections. The push to increase screenings is part of this year’s breast cancer awareness month in October.
Civilians, mostly women, visit various neighborhoods in Yaoundé asking people to go to hospitals for free breast cancer screening.
Each group of a dozen people includes medical staff members, representatives of healthy living organizations, cancer patients and their family members.
Among those participating is 24-year-old Amin Ruth Tabi of the Noela Lyonga Foundation, a Cameroon-based NGO. The foundation’s main objective is giving hope to persons who have lost hope either due to frustration, stress or ill health.
Tabi says she wants to stop people from dying from breast cancer.
“Every female seven to ten days after menstruation is supposed to conduct a breast self-examination to look for abnormal nodules, redness, fluid coming from the nipples, orange skin appearance on the breast because breast cancer is treated well and quickly when it is noticed at an early stage,” she said.
Cameron’s Health Ministry said several thousand women came out in at least 11 towns including the capital Yaoundé, the commercial capital Douala and the English-speaking western towns of Kumba, Buea, Limbe, and Bamenda Kumbo.
Claudette Mani, 36, says she was diagnosed with breast cancer in December 2020. She says thanks to prompt medical intervention and assistance from NGOs, her life was saved.
“I was so isolated, I was so weak, looked very bad and I felt like it was the end of the world,” she said. “At first just from my looks you will know that I have a problem, but now I am healthy, strong, and looking good. They [humanitarian groups] brought in doctors, educated us on how to feed ourselves, how to do exercises, to stay strong, eliminate the fact from our heads that we have this breast cancer and be focused on our dreams.”
Cameroon’s Association of Cancer Patients says breast cancer patients suffer from prejudices. Family members often think breast cancer is some sort of divine punishment for wrongdoing. The association says because of either illiteracy or lack of financial means, families abandon members diagnosed with breast cancer.
Cameroon’s Health Ministry says screening programs with mammography can lead to earlier diagnosis, and that coupled with effective treatment, will lead to reductions in breast cancer mortality.
Cameroon reports that in 2019, 3,000 of the 5,000 patients diagnosed with breast cancer died. In 2020, the number of breast cancers diagnosed rose to over 7,000 with close to 5,000 deaths.
Professor Paul Ndom is president of Cameroon’s National Committee for Cancer Prevention.
Ndom says many people neglect going to hospitals for consultation because breast cancer is not painful at its early stages. He says people at high risk of developing breast cancer are women who smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol, women who are not physically active and women who refuse to visit hospitals for fear they will be exposed to COVID-19 infections.
Ndom said the government of Cameroon subsidizes treatment for people diagnosed with breast cancer.
The October Breast Cancer Awareness month campaign was launched by the American Cancer Society and Imperial Chemical Industries to encourage women to get regular screening for breast cancer. The month-long activities educate women to reduce their breast cancer risks, be screened and seek medical attention if a suspicious lump is detected.
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Former Facebook data scientist turned whistleblower Frances Haugen plans to answer questions Monday from lawmakers in the United Kingdom who are working on legislation to rein in the power of social media companies.
Haugen is set to appear before a parliamentary committee scrutinizing the British government’s draft legislation to crack down on harmful online content, and her comments could help lawmakers beef up the new rules. She’s testifying the same day that Facebook is set to release its latest earnings and that The Associated Press and other news organizations started publishing stories based on thousands of pages of internal company documents she obtained.
It will be her second appearance before lawmakers after she testified in the U.S. Senate earlier this month about the danger she says the company poses, from harming children to inciting political violence and fueling misinformation. Haugen cited internal research documents she secretly copied before leaving her job in Facebook’s civic integrity unit.
The documents, which Haugen provided to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, allege Facebook prioritized profits over safety and hid its own research from investors and the public. Some stories based on the files have already been published, exposing internal turmoil after Facebook was blindsided by the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot and how it dithered over curbing divisive content in India, and more is to come.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has disputed Haugen’s portrayal of the company as one that puts profit over the well-being of its users or that pushes divisive content, saying a false picture is being painted. But he does agree on the need for updated internet regulations, saying lawmakers are best able to assess the tradeoffs.
Haugen told U.S. lawmakers that she thinks a federal regulator is needed to oversee digital giants like Facebook, something that officials in Britain and the European Union are already working on.
The U.K. government’s online safety bill calls for setting up a regulator that would hold companies to account when it comes to removing harmful or illegal content from their platforms, such as terrorist material or child sex abuse images.
“This is quite a big moment,” Damian Collins, the lawmaker who chairs the committee, said ahead of the hearing. “This is a moment, sort of like Cambridge Analytica, but possibly bigger in that I think it provides a real window into the soul of these companies.”
Collins was referring to the 2018 debacle involving data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica, which gathered details on as many as 87 million Facebook users without their permission.
Representatives from Facebook and other social media companies plan to speak to the committee Thursday.
Ahead of the hearing, Haugen met the father of Molly Russell, a 14-year-old girl who killed herself in 2017 after viewing disturbing content on Facebook-owned Instagram. In a chat filmed by the BBC, Ian Russell told Haugen that after Molly’s death, her family found notes she wrote about being addicted to Instagram.
Haugen also is scheduled to meet next month with European Union officials in Brussels, where the bloc’s executive commission is updating its digital rulebook to better protect internet users by holding online companies more responsible for illegal or dangerous content.
Under the U.K. rules, expected to take effect next year, Silicon Valley giants face an ultimate penalty of up to 10% of their global revenue for any violations. The EU is proposing a similar penalty.
The U.K. committee will be hoping to hear more from Haugen about the data that tech companies have gathered. Collins said the internal files that Haugen has turned over to U.S. authorities are important because it shows the kind of information that Facebook holds — and what regulators should be asking when they investigate these companies.
The committee has already heard from another Facebook whistleblower, Sophie Zhang, who raised the alarm after finding evidence of online political manipulation in countries such as Honduras and Azerbaijan before she was fired.
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In a decision with potential ramifications across European museums, France is displaying 26 looted colonial-era artifacts for one last time before returning them home to Benin.
The wooden anthropomorphic statues, royal thrones and sacred altars were pilfered by the French army in the 19th century from Western Africa.
President Emmanuel Macron suggested that France now needed to right the wrongs of the past, making a landmark speech in 2017 in which he said he can no longer accept “that a large part of many African countries’ cultural heritage lies in France.” It laid down a roadmap for the controversial return of the royal treasures taken during the era of empire and colony. The French will have a final glimpse of the objects in the Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac from 26-31 October.
French Culture Minister Roselyne Bachelot tried to assuage jitters among European museums, emphasizing that this initiative “will not create a legal precedent.”
A French law was passed last year to allow the restitution of the statues to the Republic of Benin, as well as a storied sword to the Army Museum in Senegal.
But she said that the French government’s law was intentionally specific in applying solely to the 27 artifacts. “[It] does not establish any general right to restitution” and “in no way calls into question” the right of French museums to hold on to their heritage.
Yet critics of such moves — including London’s British Museum that is in a decades-long tug-of-war with the Greek government over a restitution of the Elgin Marbles — argue that it will open the floodgates to emptying Western museums of their collections. Many are made up of objects acquired, or stolen, during colonial times. French museums alone hold at least 90,000 artifacts from sub-Saharan Africa.
The story of the “Abomey Treasures” is as dramatic as their sculpted forms. In November 1892, Colonel Alfred Dodds led a pilfering French expeditionary force into the Kingdom of Danhomè located in the south of present-day Benin. The colonizing troops broke into the Abomey Palace, home of King Behanzin, seizing as they did many royal objects including the 26 artifacts that Dodds donated to the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris in the 1890s. Since 2003, the objects have been housed at the Musée du quai Branly–Jacques Chirac.
One hundred and twenty-nine years later, their far-flung journey abroad will finally end.
Benin’s Culture Minister Jean-Michel Abimbola called the return of the works, a “historic milestone,” and the beginning of further cooperation between the two countries, during a news conference last week. The country is founding a museum in Abomey to house the treasures that will be partly funded by the French government. The French Development Agency will give some 35 million euros toward the “Museum of the Saga of the Amazonians and the Danhome Kings” under a pledge signed this year.
The official transfer of the 26 pieces is expected to be signed in Paris on Nov. 9 in the presence of Macron and the art is expected to be in Benin a few days later, Abimbola said.
While locals say the decision is overdue, what’s important is that the art will be returned.
“It was a vacuum created among Benin’s historical treasures, which is gradually being reconstituted,” said Fortune Sossa, President of the African Cultural Journalists Network.
The director-general of the World Health Organization said Sunday that unless countries use existing tools in the fight against the pandemic effectively, there will be no end in sight. “The pandemic will end when the world chooses to end it,” Tedros said addressing World Health Summit, a global forum held in Germany.
“We have all the tools we need — effective public health tools and effective medical tools. But the world has not used those tools well,” Tedros said, addressing participants drawn from 100 countries online.
The barriers to fulfilling WHO’s goal of vaccinating 40% of every country’s population against the coronavirus are “politics and profit,” the WHO chief said, “not production.”
“The countries that have already reached the 40% target, including all G-20 countries, must give their place in the vaccine delivery queue to COVAX and the African Vaccines Acquisition Trust,” Tedros said. COVAX is the international collaboration established for the equitable distribution of the COVID vaccine.
The WHO official also urged vaccine producers to “prioritize and fulfil their contracts with COVAX and AVAT [the African Vaccine Acquisition Trust]” and become “far more transparent about what is going where.” AVAT is an African Union initiative focusing on providing access to COVID-19 vaccines across Africa.
He urged vaccine manufacturers to “share know-how, technology and licenses, and waive intellectual property rights.”
“We’re not asking for charity,” Tedros said,” we’re calling for a common-sense investment in the global recovery.”
A report in The Washington Post says Americans living abroad are struggling to receive COVID vaccines, while many of their U.S. counterparts are starting to receive booster shots after receiving their first two vaccine doses.
Marylouise Serrato, executive director of American Citizens Abroad, told the Post, “You have Americans who are filing and paying taxes, and a promise by the administration that all Americans will get vaccinated, and yet that whole community has been left out of the equation.”
The White House “has insisted that it has no special responsibility to vaccinate Americans abroad,” the Post reported. At least 9 million Americans are living overseas, the report added.
A surge of British COVID cases has Dr. Edward Morris, the president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, concerned the National Health Service may not be able to provide “the care it needs to” for women giving birth, according to a report in The Guardian.
Morris also said the COVID surge has also resulted in the creation of an enormous backlog of cases of women who have had to postpone gynecological treatments.
The Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center reported early Monday that it has recorded 243.7 million global COVID infections and nearly 5 million global deaths. Almost 7 billion vaccines have been administered, according to the university’s data.
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