The World Bank says digital entrepreneurship is paving the way for economic empowerment across Nigeria and reducing poverty through internet access. In a January report, the Bank says internet access reduced extreme poverty by 7% in the West African country. But it noted a digital gender gap where women are less likely than men to have internet access. Gibson Emeka reports from Abuja in this report narrated by Mary Alice Salinas.
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Day: March 4, 2024
The latest innovation in artificial intelligence is photo-realistic video created from just a few words. Deana Mitchell has the story.
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LONDON — The estate of Sinead O’Connor asked Donald Trump Monday not to play her music at campaign rallies, saying the late singer considered the former president a “biblical devil.”
Trump has played O’Connor’s biggest hit, “Nothing Compares 2 U,” at events as he campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination.
In a joint statement, O’Connor’s estate and her record label, Chrysalis, demanded Trump “desist from using her music immediately.”
It said the Irish singer, who died last year aged 56, “lived by a fierce moral code defined by honesty, kindness, fairness and decency towards her fellow human beings.”
“It was with outrage therefore that we learned that Donald Trump has been using her iconic performance of Nothing Compares 2 U at his political rallies,” the statement said.
“It is no exaggeration to say that Sinead would have been disgusted, hurt and insulted to have her work misrepresented in this way by someone who she herself referred to as a ‘biblical devil.’ As the guardians of her legacy, we demand that Donald Trump and his associates desist from using her music immediately.”
Fiery and outspoken, O’Connor was a critic of the Roman Catholic Church well before
allegations of sexual abuse were widely reported, and she was open about her mental health struggles.
She was found unresponsive at her London home in July and pronounced dead at the scene. A coroner ruled that she died of natural causes.
O’Connor joins a growing list of artists who have objected to Trump using their songs, including Rihanna, Neil Young, Linkin Park, the late Tom Petty and Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler.
London — The European Union leveled its first antitrust penalty against Apple on Monday, fining the U.S. tech giant nearly $2 billion for breaking the bloc’s competition laws by unfairly favoring its own music streaming service over rivals.
Apple banned app developers from “fully informing iOS users about alternative and cheaper music subscription services outside of the app,” said the European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s executive arm and top antitrust enforcer.
“This is illegal, and it has impacted millions of European consumers,” Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition commissioner, said at a news conference.
Apple behaved this way for almost a decade, which meant many users paid “significantly higher prices for music streaming subscriptions,” the commission said.
The 1.8 billion-euro fine follows a long-running investigation triggered by a complaint from Swedish streaming service Spotify five years ago.
The EU has led global efforts to crack down on Big Tech companies, including a series of multbillion-dollar fines for Google and charging Meta with distorting the online classified ad market. The commission also has opened a separate antitrust investigation into Apple’s mobile payments service.
Apple hit back at both the commission and Spotify, saying it would appeal the penalty.
“The decision was reached despite the Commission’s failure to uncover any credible evidence of consumer harm, and ignores the realities of a market that is thriving, competitive, and growing fast,” the company said in a statement.
It said Spotify stood to benefit from the decision, asserting that the Swedish streaming service that holds a 56% share of Europe’s music streaming market and doesn’t pay Apple for using its App Store met 65 times with the commission over eight years.
“Ironically, in the name of competition, today’s decision just cements the dominant position of a successful European company that is the digital music market’s runaway leader,” Apple said.
The commission’s investigation initially centered on two concerns. One was the iPhone maker’s practice of forcing app developers that are selling digital content to use its in-house payment system, which charges a 30% commission on all subscriptions.
But the EU later dropped that to focus on how Apple prevents app makers from telling their users about cheaper ways to pay for subscriptions that don’t involve going through an app.
The investigation found that Apple banned streaming services from telling users about how much subscription offers cost outside of their apps, including links in their apps to pay for alternative subscriptions or even emailing users to tell them about different pricing options.
The fine comes the same week that new EU rules are set to kick in that are aimed at preventing tech companies from dominating digital markets.
The Digital Markets Act, due to take effect Thursday, imposes a set of do’s and don’ts on “gatekeeper” companies including Apple, Meta, Google parent Alphabet, and TikTok parent ByteDance — under threat of hefty fines.
The DMA’s provisions are designed to prevent tech giants from the sort of behavior that’s at the heart of the Apple investigation. Apple has already revealed how it will comply, including allowing iPhone users in Europe to use app stores other than its own and enabling developers to offer alternative payment systems.
The commission also has opened a separate antitrust investigation into Apple’s mobile payments service, and the company has promised to open up its tap-and-go mobile payment system to rivals in order to resolve it.
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SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s government began steps Monday to suspend the medical licenses of thousands of striking junior doctors, days after they missed a government-set deadline to end their joint walkouts, which have severely impacted hospital operations.
Nearly 9,000 medical interns and residents have been on strike for two weeks to protest a government push to sharply increase the number of medical school admissions. Their action has led to hundreds of canceled surgeries and other treatments and threatened to burden the country’s medical service.
Monday, officials were sent to dozens of hospitals to formally confirm the absence of the striking doctors as the government began steps to suspend their licenses for at least three months, Vice Health Minister Park Min-soo told a briefing.
Park said authorities will later notify the striking doctors of their expected license suspensions and give them a chance to respond. He suggested the license suspensions would take weeks to go into effect.
“Despite repeated appeals by the government and other parts of society, the number of trainee doctors returning to work is very insignificant. Starting from today, we begin the execution of law with the on-site inspection,” Park said.
Park again repeated the government’s call for the doctors to end their walkouts.
“We again strongly urge them to return to patients by not ignoring the pains of patients hovering between life and death — and their families,” he said.
South Korea’s government earlier ordered the striking doctors to return to work by Feb. 29. South Korea’s medical law allows the government to make such back-to-work orders to doctors when it sees grave risks to public health. Anyone who refuses to follow such orders can be punished with a suspension of his or her license for up to one year, and three years in prison or a roughly $22,500 fine.
Last month, the South Korean government announced it would raise the country’s medical school enrollment cap by 2,000 starting next year, from the current 3,058.
Officials said it’s urgent to have more doctors to deal with a fast-aging population and resolve a shortage of physicians in rural areas and essential yet low-paying specialties like pediatrics and emergency departments.
Officials say South Korea’s doctor-to-population ratio is one of the lowest among developed countries.
But many doctors have opposed the plan, arguing universities can’t offer quality education to such an abrupt increase in students. They also say adding so many new doctors would also increase public medical expenses since greater competition would lead to excess treatments. They also predict newly added students would also want to work in high-paying, popular professions like plastic surgery and dermatology.
Critics say many doctors oppose the government plan simply because they worry adding more doctors would result in a lower income.
The striking junior doctors are a small fraction of the country’s 140,000 doctors. But they account for 30-40% of the total doctors at some major hospitals, where they assist senior doctors while training.
Senior doctors have staged a slew of street rallies supporting the young doctors but haven’t joined their walkouts. Police said they were investigating five ranking members of the Korea Medical Association, a body that represents South Korean doctors, for allegedly inciting and abetting the walkouts.
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