The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is exploring ways artificial intelligence can help detect fentanyl and prevent it from entering the country. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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Day: May 23, 2023
A growing number of health emergencies around the world, from COVID-19 to cholera, have left the World Health Organization’s response “overstretched,” a senior advisor said on Tuesday.
Speaking at the U.N. agency’s annual meeting, Professor Walid Ammar, chairman of a committee reviewing the WHO’s emergency response, said funding and staffing gaps were widening in the face of ever-increasing demands.
“[The] program is overstretched as demands have only grown with the multiplicity and complexity of emergencies,” he said.
As of March, the WHO was responding to 53 high-level emergencies, a report by the committee said. These included diseases like COVID-19, cholera and a Marburg outbreak in Equatorial Guinea and Tanzania, as well as humanitarian emergencies like the earthquake in Turkey and Syria and floods in Pakistan.
The report also noted that climate change was increasing the frequency of events like floods and cyclones, all of which have health consequences.
However, the emergency program’s core budget for 2022-2023 is only about 53% funded, the report found, calling for more stable financing.
The WHO and member states are trying to reform how the agency — and countries — respond to health emergencies, as well as shoring up the WHO’s funding. On Monday, member states approved a new budget including a 20% hike in their mandatory fees.
The report also called on the WHO to look for more efficiencies: for example, in Malawi, four different emergency teams were responding to cholera, COVID-19, polio, and flooding, in ways that may have overlapped, it said.
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Brazil declared a state of animal health emergency for 180 days in response to the country’s first detection of the highly pathogenic avian influenza virus in wild birds, in a document signed Monday by Agriculture Minister Carlos Favaro.
Infection by the H5N1 subtype of avian flu in wild birds does not trigger trade bans, based on guidelines of the World Organization for Animal Health. However, a case of bird flu on a farm usually results in the entire flock being killed and can trigger trade restrictions from importing countries.
Brazil, the world’s biggest chicken meat exporter with $9.7 billion in sales last year, has so far confirmed eight cases of the H5N1 in wild birds, including seven in Espirito Santo state and one in Rio de Janeiro state.
The country’s agriculture ministry said later Monday it has created an emergency operations center to coordinate, plan and evaluate “national actions related to avian influenza.”
Though Brazil’s main meat producing states are in the south, the government is on alert after the confirmed cases, as avian flu in wild birds has been followed by transmission to commercial flocks in some countries.
Over the weekend, the Health Ministry said samples of 33 suspected cases of avian influenza in humans in Espirito Santo, where Brazil confirmed the first cases in wild birds last week, came back negative for the H5N1 subtype.
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TikTok on Monday filed suit in U.S. federal court to stop the northern state of Montana from implementing an overall ban on the video-sharing app.
The unprecedented ban, set to start in 2024, violates the constitutionally protected right to free speech, TikTok argued in the suit.
“We believe our legal challenge will prevail based on an exceedingly strong set of precedents and facts,” a TikTok spokesperson told AFP.
Montana Governor Greg Gianforte signed the prohibition into law on May 17.
Gianforte said on Twitter that he endorsed the ban in order to “protect Montanans’ personal and private data from the Chinese Communist Party.”
“The state has enacted these extraordinary and unprecedented measures based on nothing more than unfounded speculation,” TikTok contended in its lawsuit.
Five TikTok users last week filed a suit of their own, calling on a federal court to overturn Montana’s ban on the app, arguing that it violates their free speech rights.
Both suits filed against Montana argue the state is trying to exercise national security power that only the federal government can wield and is violating free speech rights in the process.
TikTok called on the federal court to declare the Montana ban on its app unconstitutional and block the state from ever putting it into effect.
“Montana can no more ban its residents from viewing or posting to TikTok than it could ban the Wall Street Journal because of who owns it or the ideas it publishes,” the lawsuit filed by TikTok users contends.
The app is owned by Chinese firm ByteDance and is accused by a wide swath of U.S. politicians of being under the tutelage of the Chinese government and a tool of espionage by Beijing, something the company furiously denies.
Montana became the first U.S. state to ban TikTok, with the law set to take effect next year as debate escalates over the impact and security of the popular video app.
A matter of law
The prohibition will serve as a legal test for a national ban of the platform, something that lawmakers in Washington are increasingly calling for.
The Montana ban makes it a violation each time “a user accesses TikTok, is offered the ability to access TikTok, or is offered the ability to download TikTok.”
Each violation is punishable by a $10,000 fine every day it takes place.
Under the law, Apple and Google will have to remove TikTok from their app stores and companies will face possible daily fines.
The prohibition will take effect in 2024 but would be voided if TikTok is acquired by a company incorporated in a country not designated by the United States as a foreign adversary, the law reads.
The cases should move quickly in court, since they center on points of law that don’t require lots of evidence to be gathered, according to University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias.
“There are very compelling constitutional arguments that favor the plaintiffs,” Tobias said.
“First is free speech, and second is if the ban is justified by national security, that is a matter for the federal government not any individual state.”
The law is the latest skirmish in duels between TikTok and many western governments, with the app already banned on government devices in the United States, Canada and several countries in Europe.
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“The war never ends. Tomorrow it will start again,” remarks a character in “Goodbye Julia,” the first Sudanese film ever selected for Cannes.
It explores the racism fueling decades of conflict in the country, and director Mohamed Kordofani admitted to “contradictory feelings” about walking the glitzy red carpet of the Cannes Film Festival while his fellow Sudanese are cowering from bombs.
The irony is not lost on Kordofani, who did not expect his debut feature to coincide with the breakout of a new conflict in Sudan.
“Right now, I am stranded in Cannes,” he joked in an interview with AFP on a seaside terrace overlooking a flotilla of yachts, before adding on a serious note that he was “heartbroken” by the conflict and the fact he could not go home.
“The bombing needs to stop,” said the former aircraft engineer, who packed in his career to start a film production company.
“Goodbye Julia” is playing in the Un Certain Regard category in Cannes, a segment focusing on young, innovative talent.
The film starts in 2005 after the end of an earlier bout of fighting, between Khartoum and the separatist south, and ends as South Sudan gains independence in 2011.
It tells the story of how a covered-up murder brings a southern Sudanese woman, Julia, into contact with a northern Sudanese woman, Mona, and her overbearing conservative husband.
‘My own transformation’
The two women’s friendship is complex, and the racist undercurrent between Arabs and black Africans that stalks the Middle East and North Africa is on stark display.
Mona’s husband refers to the southerners as “slaves” and “savages,” and she is forced to confront her own ingrained racism, while gender roles are also explored.
Kordofani said he was inspired by how his own views had changed over the past decade.
“I started to review how I was behaving in my previous relationships. I reviewed my own racism.”
He said discrimination was so deeply ingrained in Sudan that “to this day, I don’t know if I’m completely not racist.”
While racism is not at the heart of Sudan’s current conflict, Kordifani said the film’s message was still relevant, as the country lurches from one broken cease-fire to the next, and residents hunker down with barely any food or supplies.
“I don’t think the war will end unless we change. We the people, not the government. We need to be equal, and we need to be inclusive, and we need to learn to coexist.”
Critics have warmly received “Goodbye Julia,” with Screen calling it “a gut-wrenching and emotionally rewarding tale.”
The Hollywood Reporter said it had “shades of a thriller” and praised Kordofani’s “fine direction.”
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Ray Stevenson, who played the villainous British governor in “RRR,” an Asgardian warrior in the “Thor” films, and a member of the 13th Legion in HBO’s “Rome,” has died. He was 58.
Representatives for Stevenson told The Associated Press that he died Sunday but had no other details to share Monday.
Stevenson was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, in 1964. After attending the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and years of working in British television, he made his film debut in Paul Greengrass’s 1998 film “The Theory of Flight.” In 2004, he appeared in Antoine Fuqua’s “King Arthur” as a knight of the round table and several years later played the lead in the pre-Disney Marvel adaptation “Punisher: War Zone.”
Though “Punisher” was not the best-reviewed film, he’d get another taste of Marvel in the first three “Thor” films, in which he played Volstagg. Other prominent film roles included the “Divergent” trilogy, “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” and “The Transporter: Refueled.”
A looming presence at 6-foot-4, Stevenson, who played his share of soldiers past and present, once said in an interview, “I guess I’m an old warrior at heart.”
On the small screen, he was the roguish Titus Pullo in “Rome,” a role that really got his career going in the United States and got him a SAG card, at the age of 44. The popular series ran from 2005 to 2007.
“That was one of the major years of my life,” Stevenson said in an interview. “It made me sit down in my own skin and say, just do the job. The job’s enough.”
In the Variety review of “Rome,” Brian Lowery wrote that “the imposing Stevenson certainly stands out as a brawling, whoring and none-too-bright warrior — a force of nature who, despite his excesses, somehow keeps landing on his feet.”
He was Blackbeard in the Starz series “Black Sails,” Commander Jack Swinburne in the German television series “Das Boot,” and Othere in “Vikings.”
Stevenson also did voice work in “Star Wars Rebels” and “The Clone Wars,” as Gar Saxon, and has a role in the upcoming Star Wars live-action series “Ahsoka,” in which he plays a bad guy, Baylan Skoll. The eight-episode season is expected on Disney+ in August.
In an interview with Backstage in 2020, Stevenson said his acting idols were, “The likes of Lee Marvin (and) Gene Hackman.”
“Never a bad performance, and brave and fearless within that caliber,” Stevenson said. “It was never the young, hot leading man; it was men who I could identify with.”
Stevenson has three sons with Italian anthropologist Elisabetta Caraccia, who he met while working on “Rome.”
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