Russian disinformation narratives about illicit organ harvesting and biological experiments in Ukraine have no basis in fact. Russia intentionally distorts Ukrainian law intended to support vital medical procedures.
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Month: January 2025
TAIPEI, TAIWAN — As pet parents in China usher in the Year of the Snake and host Lunar New Year’s Eve dinners with their loved ones, some are also making sure that their fur babies, or “mao hai zi,” are not left out.
Over the past month, a growing number of consumers have been ordering pet-friendly versions of the traditional New Year’s Eve reunion dinner, ranging from freshly made meals to gift boxes of dried food.
A search for “dogs’ and cats’ Lunar New Year’s Eve dinner” on Douyin, the Chinese version of Tiktok and the most popular short-video app in China, lists dozens of choices.
‘Lucky’ dumplings
Some vendors even tout traditional Chinese delicacy dishes such as “Buddha jumps over the wall,” which includes seafood and meats, and “eight treasures duck rice” in addition to common ones such “lucky” dumplings and rice cake, adapted for dog palates.
The prices range from 19.9 to 168 yuan ($2.8 to $24) per set.
One vendor on Douyin, LAOTOU Pet Bakery, told VOA in a written reply Monday that it sold out of the special holiday pet meals more than a week before the Lunar New Year, which starts on Wednesday this year.
Lou Yu, vice president of Favor Pets Company in Beijing, also that the pet service firm has seen a boom year in holiday sales of pet food.
Business peaked during the Dragon Boat Festival in June, Mid-Autumn Festival in September and the Christmas holidays in December, when, respectively, rice dumplings, moon cakes and special Christmas treats were offered for pets, he said.
Booming holiday sales
“For [pets’] reunion dinner on Lunar New Year’s Eve, we’ve probably seen a 45% to 50% growth in sales this year, compared to a year ago, when sales were still tepid,” Lou told VOA by phone on Monday.
The company ran out of stock before the eight-day-long holiday began this week as a growing number of owners splurge on their pets.
Festive Fido and feline food have become an emerging and “under-supplied” niche market that is bucking the trend despite China’s economic slowdown. China’s “cat and dog parents” total more than 120 million, more than double from a decade ago, according to Lou.
Last year, there were some 9.54 million babies born in China. Pets are expected to outnumber children under 4 years of age by a ratio of 2 to 1 by 2030 — a shift that will likely create a substantial $12 billion market for pet food in China, U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs forecasted in a report late last year.
Authorities in China ended the country’s one-child policy in 2016 and started encouraging young couples to have three children in 2021 as the country’s population ages and the number of newborns declines.
Pets over kids
By contrast, many couples who find it too expensive to raise children are instead choosing pets over kids.
On Saturday, 11 dogs were treated with plates of shredded chicken and lettuce — a special Lunar New Year meal — in a Shanghai restaurant. Their owners were all female.
“He’s my soulmate! He gives me a lot of emotional support … and he’s a good friend that I’d like to be with and enjoy the New Year atmosphere together,” attendee Momo Ni told Reuters news agency, referring to her border collie, Yakult.
Daisy Xu, another 28-year-old owner, said her dog, named Niu Niu, is already a beloved member of the family.
“We will make her another dog meal. … When it comes to New Year gifts, I think my parents will probably give their granddaughter a red envelope,” Xu told Reuters. Adults traditionally give red envelopes containing money to children during the Lunar New Year.
Rich people’s world
While some Chinese social media users share postings of their pets’ special holiday treats, some users were not as enthusiastic, with several complaining that “these dogs and cats are better fed than I am.”
A Guizhou province-based Weibo user named “magnolia0526” said, “The luxurious lifestyle of cats and dogs highlights the uneven distribution of resources in human society, which is not cute at all.” The post was in response to the hashtag “sales of reunion dinner and dumplings for pets has seen a 480% growth.”
Another Shandong province-based user mocked the trend, saying “this is the world of the rich people.”
Aside from pet food, Favor Pet’s Lou said China has experienced a booming pet economy in recent years with growing business opportunities from pet grooming and sitting services, especially during holiday seasons.
He said that a growing number of job seekers have signed up for the company’s training programs as they shift career paths to find opportunities in the pet service sector.
This article originated in VOA’s Mandarin Service.
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Conservationists in Kenya are using an artificial intelligence-powered application to monitor forest degradation and launch reforestation. The data collected by the application is also used to project the amount of carbon that can be stored by a growing patch of forest. Juma Majanga reports from Nyeri, Kenya.
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Chinese researchers backed by a Hangzhou-based hedge fund recently released a new version of a large language model (LLM) called DeepSeek-R1 that rivals the capabilities of the most advanced U.S.-built products but reportedly does so with fewer computing resources and at much lower cost.
High Flyer, the hedge fund that backs DeepSeek, said that the model nearly matches the performance of LLMs built by U.S. firms like OpenAI, Google and Meta, but does so using only about 2,000 older generation computer chips manufactured by U.S.-based industry leader Nvidia while costing only about $6 million worth of computing power to train.
By comparison, Meta’s AI system, Llama, uses about 16,000 chips, and reportedly costs Meta vastly more money to train.
Open-source model
The apparent advance in Chinese AI capabilities comes after years of efforts by the U.S. government to restrict China’s access to advanced semiconductors and the equipment used to manufacture them. Over the past two years, under President Joe Biden, the U.S. put multiple export control measures in place with the specific aim of throttling China’s progress on AI development.
DeepSeek appears to have innovated its way to some of its success, developing new and more efficient algorithms that allow the chips in the system to communicate with each other more effectively, thereby improving performance.
At least some of what DeepSeek R1’s developers did to improve its performance is visible to observers outside the company, because the model is open source, meaning that the algorithms it uses to answer queries are public.
Market reaction
The news about DeepSeek’s capabilities sparked a broad sell-off of technology stocks on U.S. markets on Monday, as investors began to question whether U.S. companies’ well-publicized plans to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in AI data centers and other infrastructure would preserve their dominance in the field. When the markets closed on Monday, the tech-heavy Nasdaq index was down by 3.1%, and Nvidia’s share price had plummeted by nearly 17%.
However, not all AI experts believe the markets’ reaction to the release of DeepSeek R1 is justified, or that the claims about the model’s development should be taken at face value.
Mel Morris, CEO of U.K.-based Corpora.ai, an AI research engine, told VOA that while DeepSeek is an impressive piece of technology, he believes the market reaction has been excessive and that more information is needed to accurately judge the impact DeepSeek will have on the AI market.
“There’s always an overreaction to things, and there is today, so let’s just step back and analyze what we’re seeing here,” Morris said. “Firstly, we have no real understanding of exactly what the cost was or the time scale involved in building this product. We just don’t know. … They claim that it’s significantly cheaper and more efficient, but we have no proof of that.”
Morris said that while DeepSeek’s performance may be comparable to that of OpenAI products, “I’ve not seen anything yet that convinces me that they’ve actually cracked the quantum step in the cost of operating these sorts of models.”
Doubts about origins
Lennart Heim, a data scientist with the RAND Corporation, told VOA that while it is plain that DeepSeek R1 benefits from innovative algorithms that boost its performance, he agreed that the general public actually knows relatively little about how the underlying technology was developed.
Heim said that it is unclear whether the $6 million training cost cited by High Flyer actually covers the whole of the company’s expenditures — including personnel, training data costs and other factors — or is just an estimate of what a final training “run” would have cost in terms of raw computing power. If the latter, Heim said, the figure is comparable to the costs incurred by better U.S. models.
He also questioned the assertion that DeepSeek was developed with only 2,000 chips. In a blog post written over the weekend, he noted that the company is believed to have existing operations with tens of thousands of Nvidia chips that could have been used to do the work necessary to develop a model that is capable of running on just 2,000.
“This extensive compute access was likely crucial for developing their efficiency techniques through trial and error and for serving their models to customers,” he wrote.
He also pointed out that the company’s decision to release version R1 of its LLM last week — on the heels of the inauguration of a new U.S. president — appeared political in nature. He said that it was “clearly intended to rattle the public’s confidence in the United States’ AI leadership during a pivotal moment in U.S. policy.”
Dean W. Ball, a research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, was also cautious about declaring that DeepSeek R1 has somehow upended the AI landscape.
“I think Silicon Valley and Wall Street are overreacting to some extent,” he told VOA. “But at the end of the day, R1 means that the competition between the U.S. and China is likely to remain fierce, and that we need to take it seriously.”
Export control debate
The apparent success of DeepSeek has been used as evidence by some experts to suggest that the export controls put in place under the Biden administration may not have had the intended effects.
“At a minimum, this suggests that U.S. approaches to AI and export controls may not be as effective as proponents claim,” Paul Triolo, a partner with DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group, told VOA.
“The availability of very good but not cutting-edge GPUs — for example, that a company like DeepSeek can optimize for specific training and inference workloads — suggests that the focus of export controls on the most advanced hardware and models may be misplaced,” Triolo said. “That said, it remains unclear how DeepSeek will be able to keep pace with global leaders such as OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Mistral, Meta and others that will continue to have access to the best hardware systems.”
Other experts, however, argued that export controls have simply not been in place long enough to show results.
Sam Bresnick, a research fellow at Georgetown’s University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology told VOA that it would be “very premature” to call the measures a failure.
“The CEO of DeepSeek has gone on record saying the biggest constraint they face is access to high-level compute resources,” Bresnick said. “If [DeepSeek] had as much compute at their fingertips as Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, etc, there would be a significant boost in their performance. So … I don’t think that DeepSeek is the smoking gun that some people are claiming it is [to show that export controls] do not work.”
Bresnick noted that the toughest export controls were imposed in only 2023, meaning that their effects may just be starting to be felt. He said that the real test of their effectiveness will be whether U.S. firms are able to continue to outpace China in coming years.
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The multibillion-dollar Stargate Project announced by U.S. President Donald Trump will focus on building data centers with the goal of turning the U.S. into a computing power empire, according to experts.
Some believe the significant boost in U.S. computational capabilities will widen the gap with China in artificial intelligence.
“And this is an industrial buildout that, at least right now, China really is not in a position to do because of the [semiconductor] export controls that the United States is placing,” said Dean W. Ball, a research fellow at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. However, there are signs that China is catching up with U.S. companies in key AI metrics by relying on open-source software.
Click here for the full report in Mandarin.
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New York — Wall Street is tumbling Monday on fears the big U.S. companies that have feasted on the artificial-intelligence frenzy are under threat from a competitor in China that can do similar things for much cheaper.
The S&P 500 was down 1.9% in early trading. Big Tech stocks that have been the market’s biggest stars took the heaviest losses, with Nvidia down 11.5%, and they dragged the Nasdaq composite down 3.2%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which has less of an emphasis on tech, was holding up a bit better with a dip of 160 points, or 0.4%, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time.
The shock to financial markets came from China, where a company called DeepSeek said it had developed a large language model that can compete with U.S. giants but at a fraction of the cost. DeepSeek’s app had already hit the top of Apple’s App Store chart by early Monday morning, and analysts said such a feat would be particularly impressive given how the U.S. government has restricted Chinese access to top AI chips.
Skepticism, though, remains about how much DeepSeek’s announcement will ultimately shake the AI supply chain, from the chip makers making semiconductors to the utilities hoping to electrify vast data centers running those chips.
“It remains to be seen if DeepSeek found a way to work around these chip restrictions rules and what chips they ultimately used as there will be many skeptics around this issue given the information is coming from China,” according to Dan Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities.
DeepSeek’s disruption nevertheless rocked stock markets worldwide.
In Amsterdam, Dutch chip company ASML slid 8.9%. In Tokyo, Japan’s Softbank Group Corp. lost 8.3% and is nearly back to where it was before spurting on an announcement that it was joining a partnership trumpeted by the White House that would invest up to $500 billion in AI infrastructure.
And on Wall Street, shares of Constellation Energy sank 16.9%. The company has said it would restart the shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear power plant to supply power for Microsoft’s data centers.
All the worries sent a gauge of nervousness among investors holding U.S. stocks toward its biggest jump since August. They also sent investors toward bonds, which can be safer investments than any stock. The rush sent the yield of the 10-year Treasury down to 4.53% from 4.62% late Friday.
It’s a sharp turnaround for the AI winners, which had soared in recent years on hopes that all the investment pouring into the industry would lead to a possible remaking of the global economy.
Nvidia’s stock had soared from less than $20 to more than $140 in less than two years before Monday’s drop, for example.
Other Big Tech companies had also joined in the frenzy, and their stock prices had benefited too. It was just on Friday that Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg was saying he expects to invest up to $65 billion this year, while talking up a massive data center it would build in Manhattan.
In stock markets abroad, movements for indexes across Europe and Asia weren’t as forceful as for the big U.S. tech stocks. France’s CAC 40 fell 0.6%, and Germany’s DAX lost 0.8%.
In Asia, stocks edged 0.1% lower in Shanghai after a survey of manufacturers showed export orders in China dropping to a five-month low.
The Federal Reserve holds its latest policy meeting later this week. Traders don’t expect recent weak data to push the Fed to cut its main interest rate. They’re virtually certain the central bank will hold steady, according to data from CME Group.
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The Kansas City Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles are set to face off in the National Football League’s Super Bowl, with the Chiefs looking to become the first team to win three consecutive championships and the Eagles trying to avenge their loss from two years ago.
The Chiefs reached the Feb. 9 championship game in New Orleans with a 32-29 win on Sunday night over the Buffalo Bills.
Kansas City’s star quarterback Patrick Mahomes ran for two touchdowns and threw for another score to reach his fifth Super Bowl in six years. That included the 2023 Super Bowl in which the Chiefs defeated the Eagles 38-35.
The Eagles earned their Super Bowl spot with a resounding 55-23 win Sunday over the Washington Commanders.
Philadelphia outscored Washington 21-0 in the game’s final quarter to secure the victory.
Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts ran for three touchdowns and added another through the air, while running back Saquon Barkley added three rushing touchdowns.
Oddsmakers made Kansas City the narrow early favorite for the game.
Some information for this story was provided by The Associated Press
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NEW YORK — For author Percival Everett, libraries have long been a source of knowledge and discovery and pleasure, even of the forbidden kind.
“I remember making friends at age 13 with the librarian at the University of South Carolina, and she used to let me go through the stacks when I wasn’t supposed to,” Everett, who spent part of his childhood in Columbia, said during a telephone interview Sunday.
“One of the wonderful things about libraries is that when you’re looking for one book, it’s surrounded by other books that may not be connected to it. That’s what you get (online) with links, but (in libraries) no one’s decided what the links are.”
Everett’s latest honor comes from the country’s public libraries. On Sunday, the American Library Association announced that Everett’s “James” was this year’s winner of the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, which includes a $5,000 cash award. Kevin Fedarko’s “A Walk in the Park: The True Story of a Spectacular Misadventure in the Grand Canyon” was chosen for nonfiction.
Everett’s acclaimed reworking of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” from the perspective of Jim, Huck Finn’s enslaved companion, has already received the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize and is a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award. “James” has even topped The New York Times fiction hardcover list, a rare feat in recent years for a literary work that wasn’t a major book club pick or movie tie-in.
“Percival Everett has written a modern masterpiece, a beautiful and important work that offers a fresh perspective from the eyes of a classic character,” Allison Escoto, chair of the award’s selection committee, said in a statement. “Kevin Fedarko’s unforgettable journey through the otherworldly depths of the Grand Canyon shows us the triumphs and pitfalls of exploration and illuminates the many vital lessons we can all learn from our precious natural world.”
Fedarko is a former Time magazine correspondent whose work also has appeared in The New York Times and Esquire. A Pittsburgh native fascinated by distant places, Fedarko has a long history with libraries — Carnegie libraries. He remembers visiting two while growing up, notably one in the suburb of Oakmont near the hairdressing salon his parents ran. He would read biographies of historical figures from George Washington to Daniel Boone, and otherwise think of libraries as “important threads running through his life,” windows to a “wider world.”
Now a resident of Flagstaff, Arizona, Fedarko says that he relied in part on the library at the nearby Northern Arizona University campus for both “A Walk in the Park” and its predecessor, also about the Grand Canyon, “The Emerald Mile.”
“The library has an important and unique collection about the Grand Canyon, and it’s the backbone of the kind of history that helps form the framework of both books,” he says. “Neither of them could have been done without the library.”
Previous winners of the medals, established in 2012 with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, includes Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch,” Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad” and Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “The Bully Pulpit.”
This year’s finalists besides “James” in the fiction category were Jiaming Tang’s “Cinema Love” and Kavin Akbar’s “Martyr!”
Adam Higginbotham’s “Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space” and Emily Nussbaum’s “Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV” were the nonfiction runners-up.
All three fiction nominees were published by Penguin Random House and all three nonfiction finalists by Simon & Schuster.
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Plastic waste accounts for 10 to 12 percent of all solid waste in Kenya, according to the United Nations Environmental Program. A Kenyan tech company is using plastic waste to print 3D models that help college students with their learning while reducing damage to the environment. Mohammed Yusuf reports from Nairobi.
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New York — Critics lambasted it and audiences didn’t grade it much better. But despite the turbulence, Mel Gibson’s “Flight Risk” managed to open No. 1 at the box office with a modest $12 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.
On a quiet weekend, even for the typically frigid movie-going month of January, the top spot went to the Lionsgate thriller starring Mark Wahlberg as a pilot flying an Air Marshal (Michelle Dockery) and fugitive (Topher Grace) across Alaska. But it wasn’t a particularly triumphant result for Gibson’s directorial follow-up to 2016’s “Hacksaw Ridge.” Reviews (21% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes) and audience scores (a “C” CinemaScore) were terrible.
President Donald Trump recently named Gibson a “special ambassador” to Hollywood, along with Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone.
Going into the weekend, Hollywood’s attention was more focused on the Sundance Film Festival and on Thursday’s Oscar nominations, which were twice postponed by the wildfires in the Los Angeles region.
The weekend was also a small test as to whether the once more common Oscar “bump” that can sometimes follow nominations still exists. Most contenders have by now completed the bulk of their theatrical runs and are more likely to see an uptick on VOD or streaming.
But the weekend’s most daring gambit was A24 pushing Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” a three–and-a-half-hour epic nominated for 10 Academy Awards, into wide release. Though some executives initially greeted “The Brutalist,” which is running with an intermission, as “un-distributable,” Corbet has said, A24 acquired the film out of the Venice Film Festival and it’s managed solid business, collecting $6 million in limited release.
In wide release, it earned $2.9 million — a far from blockbuster sum but the best weekend yet for “The Brutalist.”
The audience was downright miniscule for another best-picture nominee: RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys.” Innovatively shot almost entirely in first-person POV, the Amazon MGM Studios release gathered just $340,171 in 540 locations after expanding by 300 theaters.
Coming off one of the lowest Martin Luther King Jr. weekends in years, no new releases made a major impact.
Steven Soderbergh’s “Presence,” a well-reviewed horror film shot from the perspective of a ghost inside a suburban home, debuted with $3.4 million in 1,750 locations. The film, released by Neon and acquired out of last year’s Sundance, was made for just $2 million.
The top spots otherwise went to holdovers. The Walt Disney Co.’s “Mufasa: The Lion King,” in its sixth weekend of release, scored $8.7 million to hold second place. After starting slowly, the Barry Jenkins-directed film has amassed $626.7 million globally.
“One of Them Days,” the Keke Palmer and SZA-led comedy from Sony Pictures, held well in its second weekend, dropping just 32% with $8 million in ticket sales. In recent years, few comedies have found success on the big screen, but “One of Them Days” has proven an exception.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.
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“Flight Risk,” $12 million.
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“Mufasa: The Lion King,” $8.7 million.
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“One of Them Days,” $8 million.
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“Sonic the Hedgehog 3,” $5.5 million.
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“Moana 2,” $4.3 million.
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“Presence,” $3.4 million.
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“Wolf Man,” $3.4 million.
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“A Complete Unknown,” $3.1 million.
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“Den of Thieves 2: Pantera,” $3 million.
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“The Brutalist,” $2.9 million.
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TAIPEI, TAIWAN — As the Year of the Snake approaches, a pet store in Taipei is offering adventurous customers an opportunity to enjoy the company of snakes while sipping coffee, hoping to break down some of the prejudice against the animal.
Taiwan has been plastered with images of the reptile ahead of the start of the Lunar New Year, which starts on Wednesday and whose zodiac animal this year is the snake.
The snake has a mixed reputation in traditional Taiwanese and Chinese culture as a symbol of either good or bad.
Some of Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples venerate snakes as guardian spirits, and while the island is home to species potentially deadly to humans, including vipers and cobras, deaths are rare given the wide availability of anti-venom.
Luo Chih-yu, 42, the owner of the Taipei pet shop Pythonism which opened in 2017, is offering potential snake owners the chance to interact with snakes over a cup of coffee.
“I provide a space for people to try and experience, finding out whether they like them without any prejudice,” he said.
Liu Ting-chih took his daughter to the shop, who looked curiously at the animals in their cages.
“Through this activity she can learn how to take care of small animals and cherish them,” Liu said.
Sub-tropical and mountainous Taiwan is home to some 60 native snake species.
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JAKARTA, INDONESIA — Centuries-old stone Buddha statues and precious jewelry repatriated by the Dutch government to its former colony are on display at Indonesia’s National Museum, providing a glimpse into the country’s rich heritage that the government had struggled to retrieve.
The collection is part of more than 800 artifacts that were returned under a Repatriation Agreement signed in 2022 between Indonesia and the Netherlands, said Gunawan, the museum’s head of cultural heritage. The objects are not just those looted in conflict but also those seized by scientists and missionaries or smuggled by mercenaries during the four centuries of colonial rule.
“I was so amazed that we have all of these artifacts,” said Shaloom Azura, a visitor to the museum in Jakarta. She hoped other historical objects can be repatriated too, “so we don’t have to go to the Netherlands just to see our own cultural heritage.”
The agreement to return cultural objects was inspired by the new era of global restitution and repatriation efforts.
In 2021, France said it was returning statues, royal thrones and sacred altars taken from the West African nation of Benin. Belgium returned a gold-capped tooth belonging to the slain Congolese independence hero Patrice Lumumba.
Cambodia in 2023 welcomed the return of priceless stolen artifacts that had been seized during periods of war and instability. Many of the items returned so far have come from the United States. And the Berlin museum authority said it would return hundreds of human skulls from the former German colony of East Africa.
The Dutch government announced the same year the return of the Indonesian treasures and looted artifacts from Sri Lanka.
Few objects made it back before deal was struck
The repatriation “is not something out of the blue” but followed a lengthy process, said I Gusti Agung Wesaka Puja, former Indonesian ambassador to the Netherlands who also headed the government’s team tasked to recover the objects.
He said negotiations with the Dutch government have been ongoing since Indonesia’s independence in August 1945, but it was only in July 2022 that Indonesia formally requested the return of its cultural objects with a list of specific items.
“This repatriation is important for us to reconstruct history that may be lost or obscured or manipulated,” Puja said. “And we can fill the gap of the historical vacuum that has existed so far.”
The Dutch government in 1978 returned the famous 13th-century statue of Princess Pradnya Paramita from the Javanese Singhasari Kingdom. During the same visit to Indonesia, then-Queen Juliana also returned a saddle and spear seized from Prince Diponegoro, a Javanese nobleman considered a national hero for his struggle against colonial rule in the 19th century.
The prince’s scepter was returned in 2015. In 2020, Dutch King Willem-Alexander handed over Diponegoro’s gold-plated kris dagger in his first state visit to Indonesia.
Also pending is the return of the “Java Man” — the first known example of homo erectus that was collected by Dutch paleoanthropologist Eugene Dubois in the 19th century.
“The importance of the most recent repatriation is knowledge creation, that will give society a more complete knowledge of our past history,” said Puja.
He said the recent repatriation efforts seem to also be motivated by practical considerations, such as when the Delf city administration sent back 1,500 objects in 2019. They were part of the bankrupted Nusantara Museum collection.
Focus on protection of repatriated artifacts
However, Marc Gerritsen, the Dutch ambassador to Indonesia, said the repatriation would only focus on cultural objects that are requested, rather than emptying out European museums.
“There is a huge interest from the Dutch public in Indonesian history and Indonesian culture, so we do know that if Dutch museums put these objects on display, there will be an interest,” Gerritsen said, “But again, the heart of the matter is that the colonial collections artifacts that were stolen during the colonial period are returned on the basis of this process that was established.”
He said the Netherlands, the largest investor from the European Union in Indonesia, has a unique relationship with Southeast Asia’s biggest economy.
“Of course, we have elements of which we are not proud, but we are really grateful for the fact that Indonesia is so much attached to preserving that history,” Gerritsen said.
To support its former colony in safeguarding its repatriated cultural heritage, the Dutch government has offered to assist in improving museum storage conditions and staff expertise.
Some researchers have criticized Indonesia, the world’s largest archipelago nation of 17,000 islands, for a lack of legal framework to protect its rich cultural heritage and natural conservation.
At least 11 cases of museum theft were reported between 2010 and 2020, according to a 2023 report by Rucitarahma Ristiawan, a lecturer of cultural science at Gajah Mada University, and two other researchers.
In 2023, dozens of ships dredged the bottom of the Batanghari River in Jambi province, and the crews looted archaeological objects including porcelain, coins, metal and gold artifacts, which are believed to have been sold abroad, the report said.
“I think there is a lot to be reviewed from our historical works that are still kept in other countries,” said Frengky Simanjuntak, who marveled at the Repatriation Exhibition at the National Museum, on display since October. “So it’s not just about bringing them back home, but how to protect them.”
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ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE — U.S. President Donald Trump said on Saturday he was in talks with multiple people over buying TikTok and would likely have a decision on the popular app’s future in the next 30 days.
“I have spoken to many people about TikTok and there is great interest in TikTok,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One during a flight to Florida.
Earlier in the day, Reuters reported two people with knowledge of the discussions said Trump’s administration is working on a plan to save TikTok that involves tapping software company Oracle and a group of outside investors to effectively take control of the app’s operations.
Under the deal being negotiated by the White House, TikTok’s China-based owner, ByteDance, would retain a stake in the company, but data collection and software updates would be overseen by Oracle, which already provides the foundation of TikTok’s Web infrastructure, one of the sources told Reuters.
However, in his comments to reporters on the flight, Trump said he had not spoken to Oracle’s Larry Ellison about buying the app.
Asked if he was putting together a deal with Oracle and other investors to save TikTok, Trump said: “No, not with Oracle. Numerous people are talking to me, very substantial people, about buying it and I will make that decision probably over the next 30 days. Congress has given 90 days. If we can save TikTok, I think it would be a good thing.”
The sources did say the terms of any potential deal with Oracle were fluid and likely to change. One source said the full scope of the discussions was not yet set and could include the U.S. operations as well as other regions.
National Public Radio on Saturday reported the deal talks for TikTok’s global operations, citing two people with knowledge of the negotiations. Oracle had no immediate comment.
The deal being negotiated anticipates participation from ByteDance’s current U.S. investors, according to the sources. Jeff Yass’s Susquehanna International Group, General Atlantic, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Sequoia Capital are among ByteDance’s U.S. backers.
Representatives for TikTok, ByteDance investors General Atlantic, KKR, Sequoia and Susquehanna could not immediately be reached for comment.
Others vying to acquire TikTok, including the investor group led by billionaire Frank McCourt and another involving Jimmy Donaldson, better known as the YouTube star Mr. Beast, are not part of the Oracle negotiation, one of the sources said.
Oracle responsible
Under the terms of the deal, Oracle would be responsible for addressing national security issues. TikTok initially struck a deal with Oracle in 2022 to store U.S. users’ information to alleviate Washington’s worries about Chinese government interference.
TikTok’s management would remain in place, to operate the short video app, according to one of the sources.
The app, which is used by 170 million Americans, was taken offline temporarily for users shortly before a law that said it must be sold by ByteDance on national security grounds, or be banned, took effect on Jan. 19.
Trump, after taking office a day later, signed an executive order seeking to delay by 75 days the enforcement of the law that was put in place after U.S. officials warned that under ByteDance, there was a risk of Americans’ data being misused.
Officials from Oracle and the White House held a meeting on Friday about a potential deal, and another meeting has been scheduled for next week, NPR reported.
Oracle was interested in a TikTok stake “in the tens of billions,” but the rest of the deal is in flux, the NPR report cited the source as saying.
Trump has said he “would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture” in TikTok.
NPR cited another source as saying that appeasing Congress is seen as a key hurdle by the White House.
Free speech advocates have opposed TikTok’s ban under a law passed by the U.S. Congress and signed by former President Joe Biden.
The company has said U.S. officials have misstated its ties to China, arguing its content recommendation engine and user data are stored in the United States on cloud servers operated by Oracle while content moderation decisions that affect American users are also made in the U.S.
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WASHINGTON — The CIA now believes the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic most likely originated from a laboratory, according to an assessment released Saturday that points the finger at China even while acknowledging that the spy agency has “low confidence” in its own conclusion.
The finding is not the result of any new intelligence, and the report was completed at the behest of the Biden administration and former CIA Director William Burns. It was declassified and released Saturday on the orders of President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the agency, John Ratcliffe, who was sworn in Thursday as director.
The nuanced finding suggests the agency believes the totality of evidence makes a lab origin more likely than a natural origin. But the agency’s assessment assigns a low degree of confidence to this conclusion, suggesting the evidence is deficient, inconclusive or contradictory.
Earlier reports on the origins of COVID-19 have split over whether the coronavirus emerged from a Chinese lab, potentially by mistake, or whether it arose naturally. The new assessment is not likely to settle the debate. In fact, intelligence officials say it may never be resolved, due to a lack of cooperation from Chinese authorities.
The CIA “continues to assess that both research-related and natural origin scenarios of the COVID-19 pandemic remain plausible,” the agency wrote in a statement about its new assessment.
Instead of new evidence, the conclusion was based on fresh analyses of intelligence about the spread of the virus, its scientific properties and the work and conditions of China’s virology labs.
Lawmakers have pressured America’s spy agencies for more information about the origins of the virus, which led to lockdowns, economic upheaval and millions of deaths. It’s a question with significant domestic and geopolitical implications as the world continues to grapple with the pandemic’s legacy.
Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Saturday he was “pleased the CIA concluded in the final days of the Biden administration that the lab-leak theory is the most plausible explanation,” and he commended Ratcliffe for declassifying the assessment.
“Now, the most important thing is to make China pay for unleashing a plague on the world,” Cotton said in a statement.
China’s embassy in Washington did not immediately return messages seeking comment. Chinese authorities have in the past dismissed speculation about COVID’s origins as unhelpful and motivated by politics.
While the origin of the virus remains unknown, scientists think the most likely hypothesis is that it circulated in bats, like many coronaviruses, before infecting another species, probably racoon dogs, civet cats or bamboo rats. In turn, the infection spread to humans handling or butchering those animals at a market in Wuhan, where the first human cases appeared in late November 2019.
Some official investigations, however, have raised the question of whether the virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan. Two years ago, a report by the Energy Department concluded a lab leak was the most likely origin, though that report also expressed low confidence in the finding.
The same year then-FBI Director Christopher Wray said his agency believed the virus “most likely” spread after escaping from a lab.
Ratcliffe, who served as director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term, has said he favors the lab leak scenario, too.
“The lab leak is the only theory supported by science, intelligence, and common sense,” Ratcliffe said in 2023.
The CIA said it will continue to evaluate any new information that could change its assessment.
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HARRISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA — Looking for a quick fix for their fast-growing electricity diets, tech giants are increasingly looking to strike deals with power plant owners to plug in directly, avoiding a potentially longer and more expensive process of hooking into a fraying electric grid that serves everyone else.
It’s raising questions over whether diverting power to higher-paying customers will leave enough for others and whether it’s fair to excuse big power users from paying for the grid. Federal regulators are trying to figure out what to do about it, and quickly.
Front and center is the data center that Amazon’s cloud computing subsidiary, Amazon Web Services, is building next to the Susquehanna nuclear plant in eastern Pennsylvania.
The arrangement between the plant’s owners and AWS — called a “behind the meter” connection — is the first to come before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. For now, FERC has rejected a deal that could eventually send 960 megawatts — about 40% of the plant’s capacity — to the data center. That’s enough to power more than 500,000 homes.
That leaves the deal and others that likely would follow in limbo. It’s not clear when FERC, which blocked the deal on procedural grounds, will take up the matter again or how the change in presidential administrations might affect things.
“The companies, they’re very frustrated because they have a business opportunity now that’s really big,” said Bill Green, the director of the MIT Energy Initiative. “And if they’re delayed five years in the queue, for example — I don’t know if it would be five years, but years anyway — they might completely miss the business opportunity.”
Driving demand for energy-hungry data centers
The rapid growth of cloud computing and artificial intelligence has fueled demand for data centers that need power to run servers, storage systems, networking equipment and cooling systems.
That’s spurred proposals to bring nuclear power plants out of retirement, develop small modular nuclear reactors, and build utility-scale renewable installations or new natural gas plants. In December, California-based Oklo announced an agreement to provide 12 gigawatts to data center developer Switch from small nuclear reactors powered by nuclear waste.
Federal officials say fast development of data centers is vital to the economy and national security, including to keep pace with China in the artificial intelligence race.
For AWS, the deal with Susquehanna satisfies its need for reliable power that meets its internal requirements for sources that don’t emit planet-warming greenhouse gases, such as coal, oil or gas-fueled plants.
Big Tech also wants to stand up their centers fast. But tech’s voracious appetite for energy comes at a time when the power supply is already strained by efforts to shift away from planet-warming fossil fuels.
They can build data centers in a couple years, said Aaron Tinjum of the Data Center Coalition. But in some areas, getting connected to the congested electricity grid can take four years, and sometimes much more, he said.
Plugging directly into a power plant would take years off their development timelines.
What’s in it for power providers
In theory, the AWS deal would let Susquehanna sell power for more than they get by selling into the grid. Talen Energy, Susquehanna’s majority owner, projected the deal would bring as much as $140 million in electricity sales in 2028, though it didn’t disclose exactly how much AWS will pay for the power.
The profit potential is one that other nuclear plant operators are embracing after years of financial distress and frustration with how they are paid in the broader electricity markets. Many say they’ve been forced to compete in some markets flooded with cheap natural gas and state-subsidized solar and wind energy.
Power plant owners also say the arrangement benefits the wider public, by bypassing the costly buildout of long power lines and leaving more transmission capacity on the grid for everyone else.
FERC’s big decision
A favorable ruling from FERC could open the door to many more huge data centers and other massive power users like hydrogen plants and bitcoin miners, analysts say.
FERC’s 2-1 rejection in November was procedural. Recent comments by commissioners suggest they weren’t ready to decide how to regulate such a novel matter without more study.
In the meantime, the agency is hearing arguments for and against the Susquehanna-AWS deal.
Monitoring Analytics, the market watchdog in the mid-Atlantic grid, wrote in a filing to FERC that the impact would be “extreme” if the Susquehanna-AWS model were extended to all nuclear power plants in the territory.
Energy prices would increase significantly and there’s no explanation for how rising demand for power will be met even before big power plants drop out of the supply mix, it said.
Separately, two electric utility owners — which make money in deregulated states from building out the grid and delivering power — have protested that the Susquehanna-AWS arrangement amounts to freeloading off a grid that ordinary customers pay to build and maintain. Chicago-based Exelon and Columbus, Ohio-based American Electric Power say the Susquehanna-AWS arrangement would allow AWS to avoid $140 million a year that it would otherwise owe.
Susquehanna’s owners say the data center won’t be on the grid and question why it should have to pay to maintain it. But critics contend that the power plant itself is benefiting from taxpayer subsidies and ratepayer-subsidized services — and shouldn’t be able to strike deals with private customers that could increase costs for others.
FERC’s decision will have “massive repercussions for the entire country” because it will set a precedent for how FERC and grid operators will handle the waiting avalanche of similar requests from data center companies and nuclear plants, said Jackson Morris of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Stacey Burbure, a vice president for American Electric Power, told FERC at a hearing in November that it needs to move quickly.
“The timing of this issue is before us,” she said, “and if we take our typical five years to get this perfect, it will be too late.”
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In 2016, Herschel Hepler was browsing Google Images to practice his paleography — the study of historical writing systems — when he stumbled upon an eerily familiar photo that would lead to a groundbreaking discovery.
“I recognized it immediately and said, ‘That’s a manuscript in our collection,’” Hepler, a curator at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, recalls.
The museum had recently acquired the manuscript — a rare Jewish prayer book — believing it to be part of the famous Cairo Geniza, a trove of ancient Jewish documents uncovered in a Cairo synagogue in the late 19th century.
But the black and white picture in Tablet magazine described the manuscript as a “16th to 17th century Hebrew book of Psalms, said to be from the Bamiyan area” of central Afghanistan.
Stunned by the revelation, Hepler set out to verify it. Tracking down the author of the Tablet article, British historian and archaeologist Jonathan Lee, Hepler confirmed that Lee had in fact found the book in an Afghan warlord’s possession in 1998 and photographed the cover and two inside pages.
“Without Jonathan’s documentation from his trip to Bamiyan in 1998, we would still be assuming this is probably from the Cairo Geniza,” Hepler said.
But if Hepler was surprised to learn about the book’s origin in the remote mountains of Afghanistan, Lee was equally stunned when Hepler revealed that the manuscript had been carbon-dated to at least the 9th century.
“At that point, I realized that the discovery was of major importance,” Lee said via email.
Recognizing their combined expertise — Hepler in Hebrew manuscripts and Lee in Afghan history — the duo joined forces and invited in other experts.
Their yearslong research not only established the manuscript as the oldest-known Hebrew book but also unearthed evidence that Jews had lived in Afghanistan — and along the ancient Silk Roads — for longer than historians previously believed.
But the thrill of discovery was dampened by the realization that the manuscript had probably been smuggled out of war-torn Afghanistan and bought on the antiquities market.
At the time, the museum, founded by the Green family, owners of the Hobby Lobby arts and craft company, was still reeling from its acquisition of artifacts smuggled from Iraq and Egypt.
The museum faced a significant challenge: Before it could showcase it to the world, it needed to legitimize its ownership of the manuscript. This required years of delicate negotiations with New York’s small Afghan Jewish community and an Afghan government teetering on the brink of collapse. The stakes were high, and the path to secure the manuscript’s rightful place in the museum would prove be too complex and demanding.
Lee’s discovery
Lee, who has spent the better part of the last five decades researching and writing about Afghan history and archaeology, discovered the book by chance.
In April 1998, he was guiding a Japanese TV crew in Bamiyan and was on the lookout for a Bactrian language inscription and gold coins looted from an ancient Buddhist shrine.
At the time, the Bamiyan Valley, with its famed Buddha statues still standing, was controlled by a local Shiite insurgent group, while the Taliban ruled most of the rest of the country.
The anti-Taliban group’s leader, Karim Khalili, kept a collection of antiquities, among them the cache of gold coins Lee had been looking for. Lee photographed them.
“Then, his [Khalili’s] advisers brought in a miscellaneous collection of other antiquities that included the ALQ,” Lee said, using the acronym for the “Afghan Liturgical Quire,” the Hebrew book in the Bible Museum’s collection.
A local man affiliated with the Shiite insurgent group had found the book under a collapsed roof in a cave the prior year and given it to Khalili.
Unversed in Hebrew, Khalili apparently showed the book to other foreigners visiting Bamiyan, trying to figure out what it was.
“I was told it had been found in Bamiyan, but then everything is found in Bamiyan,” Lee said.
As Lee recalls, the pocket-size book looked remarkably well-preserved for its age.
“The cover was somewhat bent, damaged and watermarked, but the folios were relatively well-preserved, and most of the texts readable,” he said.
To Lee, that suggested the manuscript was “not that old.” He left Afghanistan and for years didn’t give it much thought.
How and when the manuscript left Afghanistan remains unknown.
The 1990s were a dark period for Afghanistan’s rich cultural heritage. As armed groups fought over territory, their men — often directed by their commanders and guided by traffickers — plundered the country’s vast archaeological sites and ransacked its museums. Seventy percent of the national museum’s treasures vanished, according to one estimate, many ending up in private collections and some reputable institutions.
“There is a long history of illicit export of antiquities from the country that goes back for decades but ultimately back to colonial times,” said Cecilia Palombo, a University of Chicago professor who has researched the plunder of Afghan antiquities.
A leading researcher with extensive experience in Afghanistan said the manuscript was likely taken out of the country after the Taliban overran Bamiyan in late 1998. The researcher spoke on condition of anonymity.
Research by the Bible museum found that an unnamed Khalili deputy made multiple sales attempts in the United States and Europe between 1998 and 2001 before “apparently” offloading it to a private collector in London in fall 2001. The collector kept it for a decade or more before Hobby Lobby bought it in 2013 and donated it to the museum.
The office of Khalili, who later served as a vice president, declined a VOA interview request.
The Tablet article
Although Lee had found the book in Afghanistan, he didn’t know how significant it was. On returning to England, he showed his photographs to a Hebrew specialist, who thought it was from the 16th or 17th century.
Then, after a cache of ancient documents dubbed the “Afghan Geniza” surfaced on the international art market, Lee decided to publish his photograph, along with an article about Afghan Jewish history. Citing the book as an example of “Jewish material [turning up] occasionally” in Afghanistan, he wrote that the “whereabouts of this manuscript is now unknown.”
He would find out four years later. That’s when, “out of the blue,” Hepler contacted him via LinkedIn and told him the manuscript was not the Book of Psalms but a prayer book, comprising Sabbath prayers, poetry and a partial Haggadah, the Jewish text recited at the Passover seder.
The Green family bought the book from an Israeli antiquities dealer in 2013 during a buying spree of ancient artifacts. Some of these items were later returned after it was discovered they had been illegally taken out of Iraq and Egypt.
The Afghan Liturgical Quire came with a forged provenance of its own, tracing the manuscript to collectors in London in the 1950s, masking any ties to Afghanistan. With Lee’s documentation, the museum was able to correct its provenance.
The museum had initially thought the book was from the 9th century, but a second carbon-dating test performed in 2019 showed it dates to the 8th century, making it two centuries older than the previous oldest-known Hebrew book in the world.
The discovery electrified experts.
For Hebrew scholars, the discovery offered the earliest evidence of a bound Hebrew book.
For Afghanistan specialists, it highlighted “how significant this region was in respect of the history of the Middle East, Inner Asia and Northern India, and Afghanistan’s ancient connectivity with cultures and religious traditions,” Lee said.
Yet the realization that it had been smuggled out of Afghanistan cast a cloud over its legitimacy.
Afghan laws and the 1970 UNESCO Convention make it illegal to export cultural artifacts and heritage items without government approval.
To legitimize its custody of the manuscript, the museum adopted what it calls a “human rights-based approach” to cultural heritage.
Invoking the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the museum argued that the Afghan people and Afghan Jews living in New York have a right to access the manuscript.
“One of the things this project is focused on is on access — so, access to the Afghan Jewish community, access to the people of Afghanistan,” Hepler said.
To get the backing of both stakeholders, the museum initiated discussions with officials of the former Afghan government and members of the Jewish community in New York.
These efforts culminated in the signing of a memorandum of understanding in 2021 with the Afghan embassy in Washington before the Taliban takeover, ensuring the document would be held in custodianship.
The Afghan ambassador at the time, Roya Rahmani, did not respond to a request for an interview. Another former Afghan ambassador wrote a letter of support for the project.
Jack Abraham, head of the Afghan Jewish Federation who was born in Afghanistan, said his group offered its full support for keeping the manuscript in the United States.
“I told [Hepler], ‘What you have in your hands is our heritage. It belongs to us. It could be any of our forefathers,’” Abraham said.
But some Afghans see it as equally part of their heritage.
“This is the property of Afghanistan and must be returned to Afghanistan,” a senior former government official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Barnett Rubin, a leading Afghanistan scholar and an advisor on the ALQ project, said both communities can legitimately lay claim to the book.
“The museum wanted to have the approval of any one of the two main entities that might have a claim on it to their custody of it,” Rubin said.
With a custodianship agreement secured, the museum launched an exhibit in September, celebrating the project as an interfaith collaboration among Jews, Christians and Muslims.
A second exhibit is planned for New York starting this month.
While the Bible Museum technically owns the manuscript, Hepler said Afghanistan and the Afghan Jewish community “have a lot of agency in this custodianship.” To that end, the museum plans to provide one high-quality replica to the Jewish community and three to major cultural institutions in Afghanistan.
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OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA — From his home in northern California, Nick Russell, a former farm manager, is monitoring the Los Angeles-area fires.
He knows that about 600 kilometers south, people in Los Angeles are relying on his team’s live neighborhood-by-neighborhood updates on fire outbreaks, smoke direction, surface wind predictions and evacuation routes.
Russell is vice president of operations at Watch Duty, a free app that tracks fires and other natural disasters. It relies on a variety of data sources such as cameras and sensors throughout the state, government agencies, first responders, a core of volunteers, and its own team of reporters.
An emergency at his house, for example, would be “much different” from one at his neighbor’s house .4 kilometers away, Russell said. “That is true for communities everywhere, and that’s where technology really comes in.”
Watch Duty’s delivery of detailed localized information is one reason for its success with its 7 million users, many of whom downloaded the app in recent weeks.
It acts as a virtual emergency operations center, culling and verifying data points.
Watch Duty’s success points to the promise that technologies such as artificial intelligence and sensors will give residents and first responders the real-time information they need to survive and fight natural disasters.
Google and other firms have invested in technology to track fires. Several startup firms are also looking for ways to use AI, sensors and other technologies in natural disasters.
Utility firms work with Gridware, a company that places AI-enhanced sensors on power lines to detect a tree branch touching the line or any other vibrations that could indicate a problem.
Among Watch Duty’s technology partners is ALERTCalifornia, run by the University of San Diego, which has a network of more than 1,000 AI-enhanced cameras throughout the state looking for smoke. The cameras often detect fires before people call emergency lines, Russell said.
Together with ALERTCalifornia’s information, Russell said, “we have become the eyes and ears” of fires.
Another Watch Duty partner is N-5 Sensors, a Maryland-based firm. Its sensors, which are placed in the ground, detect smoke, heat and other signs of fire.
“They’re like a nose, if you will, so they detect smoke anomalies and different chemical patterns in the air,” Russell said.
Watch Duty is available in 22 states, mostly in the western U.S., and plans to expand to all states.
While fire has been its focus, Watch Duty also plans to track other natural disasters such as tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis, Russell said.
“Fire is not in the name,” he said. “We want to be that one-stop shop where people can go in those times of duress, to have a source that makes it clear and concise what’s happening.”
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China’s annual mass migration ahead of the Lunar New Year will peak with billions of trips anticipated during this year’s holiday, which begins Tuesday.
An estimated 9 billion trips are expected. This year’s holiday lasts from Jan. 28 through Feb. 4 and marks the arrival of the Year of the Snake. Authorities in China extended the annual break an extra day, so the public holiday will last eight days this year.
During the holiday, travel is expected to pick up domestically and internationally. The government said it expects trips by train to surpass 510 million, with 90 million more traveling by air. Inside the country, most will travel by car.
For trips overseas, travel to Southeast Asia has surged, with ticket volumes to Vietnam, Singapore and Indonesia rising by more than 50%, according to data from the World Travel and Tourism Council. Additionally, demand for travel to Hong Kong has nearly doubled, and Japan is seeing a 58% increase in airline ticket purchases.
While the Lunar New Year is known as a festive time characterized by colorful lanterns, parades and lion dances, it holds more than just cultural significance to Chinese authorities who see the period as an opportunity to boost a sluggish economy.
That is one key reason authorities increased the holiday to eight days. They also launched several efforts to help revive weak consumer spending, such as promoting winter-themed holiday destinations and ensuring affordable airfares, according to officials at a State Council press conference in Beijing.
Despite the efforts, Reuters reported businesses and consumers appear to be spending less than usual during the holiday season, citing concerns over a prolonged property slump and worries over job security.
Throughout the past year, China has implemented a series of measures aimed at addressing those concerns, including stimulus measures such as cutting interest rates, increasing pensions and widening trade-in programs for consumer goods.
One industry that appears to have gotten a boost from the festival season is cinema.
The film industry in China had struggled recently, seeing a 22.6% decrease in total box office revenue in 2024. However, according to data from Maoyan, a Chinese ticketing platform, movie tickets exceeded $55 million by Jan. 23, the fastest presales for the Lunar New Year season.
A large part of that increased demand has been from the film “Legends of the Condor Heroes,” starring Xiao Zhan, an actor and singer who is also a brand ambassador for luxury goods companies such as Gucci and Tod’s.
Shops and restaurants also hope to see an increase in spending that mirrors the film industry over the course of the holiday.
Some information in this report came from Reuters and The Associated Press.
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