Category: Silicon Valley

This time it’s for real. 

Many of Twitter’s high-profile users are losing the blue check marks that helped verify their identities and distinguish them from impostors on the Elon Musk-owned social media platform. 

After several false starts, Twitter began making good on its promise Thursday to remove the blue checks from accounts that don’t each pay a monthly fee to keep them. Twitter had about 300,000 verified users under the original blue-check system—many of them journalists, athletes and public figures. The checks began disappearing from these users’ profiles late morning Pacific time. 

High-profile users who lost their blue checks Thursday included Beyonce, Pope Francis and former President Donald Trump.

The costs of keeping the marks range from $8 a month for individual web users to a starting price of $1,000 monthly to verify an organization, plus $50 monthly for each affiliate or employee account. Twitter does not verify the individual accounts to ensure the users are who they say they are, as was the case with the previous blue check doled out during the platform’s pre-Musk administration. 

Celebrity users, from basketball star LeBron James to “Star Trek’s” William Shatner, have balked at joining — although on Thursday, James’ blue check indicated that the account paid for verification. “Seinfeld” actor Jason Alexander pledged to leave the platform if Musk took his blue check away. 

‘Anyone could be me’

“The way Twitter is going anyone could be me now. The verification system is an absolute mess,” Dionne Warwick tweeted Tuesday. She had earlier vowed not to pay for Twitter Blue, saying the monthly fee “could [and will] be going toward my extra hot lattes.” 

On Thursday, Warwick lost her blue check. 

After buying Twitter for $44 billion in October, Musk has been trying to boost the struggling platform’s revenue by pushing more people to pay for premium subscriptions. But his move also reflects his assertion that the blue verification marks have become undeserved or “corrupt” status symbols for elite personalities, news reporters and others granted verification for free by Twitter’s previous leadership. 

Twitter began tagging profiles with blue check marks about 14 years ago. One main reason for doing so was to provide an extra tool to curb misinformation coming from accounts impersonating people. Most “legacy blue checks,” including the accounts of politicians, activists and people who suddenly find themselves in the news, as well as little-known journalists at small publications around the globe, are not household names. 

One of Musk’s first product moves after taking over Twitter was to launch a service granting a blue check to anyone willing to pay $8 a month. But it was quickly inundated by impostor accounts, including those impersonating Nintendo, pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly and Musk’s businesses Tesla and SpaceX, so Twitter had to suspend the service days after its launch. 

The relaunched service costs $8 a month for web users and $11 a month for users of Twitter’s iPhone or Android apps. Subscribers are supposed to see fewer ads, be able to post longer videos and have their tweets featured more prominently. 
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SpaceX’s giant week meets a fiery end. But company officials still say the launch of Starship was a success. Plus, the European Space Agency sets sail for Jupiter’s icy moons. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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The U.S. government and state legislators are ramping up efforts to limit the use of toxic chemicals known as PFAS (pronounced pee-fas) in everyday products and to regulate levels in drinking water. But as VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias found out, scientists are going a step further by exploring ways to fully eliminate the so-called “forever chemicals.”
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SpaceX’s giant new rocket blasted off on its first test flight Thursday but exploded minutes after rising from the launch pad and crashed into the Gulf of Mexico.

Elon Musk’s company was aiming to send the nearly 400-foot (120-meter) Starship rocket on a round-the-world trip from the southern tip of Texas, near the Mexican border. It carried no people or satellites.

The plan called for the booster to peel away from the spacecraft minutes after liftoff, but that didn’t happen. The rocket began to tumble and then exploded four minutes into the flight, plummeting into the gulf. After separating, the spacecraft was supposed to continue east and attempt to circle the world, before crashing into the Pacific near Hawaii.

Throngs of spectators watched from South Padre Island, several miles away from the Boca Chica Beach launch site, which was off limits. As it lifted off, the crowd screamed: “Go, baby, go!”

The company plans to use Starship to send people and cargo to the moon and, eventually, Mars. NASA has reserved a Starship for its next moonwalking team, and rich tourists are already booking lunar flybys.

It was the second launch attempt. Monday’s try was scrapped by a frozen booster valve.

At 394 feet and nearly 17 million pounds of thrust, Starship easily surpasses NASA’s moon rockets — past, present and future. The stainless steel rocket is designed to be fully reusable with fast turnaround, dramatically lowering costs, similar to what SpaceX’s smaller Falcon rockets have done soaring from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Nothing was to be saved from the test flight.

The futuristic spacecraft flew several miles into the air during testing a few years ago, landing successfully only once. But this was to be the inaugural launch of the first-stage booster with 33 methane-fueled engines.
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NY-AALESUND, NORWAY — At the world’s northernmost year-round research station, scientists are racing to understand how the fastest-warming place on Earth is changing – and what those changes may mean for the planet’s future.

But around the tiny town of Ny-Aalesund, high above the Arctic circle on Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, scientific data is getting harder to access. And sometimes it’s vanishing before scientists can collect it.

Scientists hoping to harvest ice cores are finding glaciers inundated by water. Research sites are getting harder to reach, as earlier springtime melt leaves the ground too barren for snowmobile travel.

Researchers have been studying the polar region for decades — with Ny-Aalesund’s weather records going back more than 40 years. But their work has become vitally important as climate change ramps up. That’s because what happens in the Arctic can impact global sea levels, storms in North America and Europe, and other factors far beyond the frozen region.

While the Arctic is warming about four times faster than the rest of the world, in Svalbard temperatures are climbing even faster — up to seven times the global average.

Last summer was the hottest on record. August temperatures in Ny-Aalesund were on average 5.1C degrees, about 0.5C warmer than normal for the month.

Polar bear sightings in Kongsfjord over the past four years have been higher than ever before, as the animals are left hungrier due partly to the loss of their sea ice hunting grounds and are more often prowling nearby islands in search of food as eight watchmen take turns patrolling the perimeter of Ny-Aalesund for polar bears.

Resting harbor seals alongside nesting seabird colonies are drawing the hungry carnivores closer, said Joanna Sulich, a biologist with the Norwegian Polar Institute and Polar Bears International.

“For many researchers who are studying those birds, it’s something of concern,” Sulich said.

Within the last decade, four buildings have been damaged by thawing permafrost, and last year Kings Bay SA, the state-owned company that manages the town, had to close down a laboratory where scientists processed samples from fish snow and ice due to thaw cracking its foundation.  

Bracing against wind gusts up to 15 meters per second (34 miles per hour), a team of scientists pitched camp this month on the Holtedahlfonna icefield, a 3-hour snowmobile drive from Ny-Aalesund riven with dangerous crevasses.

The team hoped to drill 125 meters into Dovrebreen glacier, hoping to collect two ice cores for studying 300 years of climate records – part of an effort by the non-profit Ice Memory Foundation to collect and preserve ice cores from melting glaciers around the world. 

The team was shocked when the drill, at only 25 meters deep, suddenly sloshed into a massive pool of water.

“We did not expect such a huge water flux coming out from the glacier, and this is a clear sign of what is happening in this region,” said expedition leader Andrea Spolaor. “The glacier is suffering.”  

On a snowfield a kilometer south of Ny-Aalesund, the chemist Francois Burgay filled plastic test tubes with snow, looking for chemical signals from marine algae blooms which travel from the ocean to the atmosphere and are deposited with the snow.

Once these signals are identified, he hopes scientists will be able to use them to understand how Arctic waters have changed in the past, and project how they might change in the future.
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Astronomers from around the world gathered in a small town in Western Australia for one of the wonders of the universe – a total eclipse of the sun.  First landfall occurred over the northwestern tip of Australia at Exmouth, along the Ningaloo Coast before moving on to parts of East Timor and Indonesia. 

Thousands of people gathered at the remote corner of the Western Australian coast to marvel at this rare cosmic symmetry when the sun, the moon and the Earth aligned.  

The total solar eclipse was part of a hybrid eclipse, which happens only a handful of times each century.  In Western Australia, it stretched across three hours.

The most dramatic part, when the sun was completely blocked out, lasted for barely a minute.  

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization radio astronomer Vanessa Moss told VOA total solar eclipses have intrigued and scared people through the ages.

“It reminds us about our place in the solar system,” she said. “These eclipses used to be mysterious things that people could not understand.  They used to be bad omens or scary things.  But now, thanks to science, thanks to technology that has advanced we can predict them but also just, you know, appreciate more of the wonders of it as opposed to be scared about it.  It is actually just a really cool phenomenon to experience.”

For those who were there it was an experience they will likely never forget.  

The last hybrid solar eclipse was in 2013.  NASA expects the next in 2031.

Scientists used the eclipse to study the Sun’s atmosphere and learn more about distant galaxies.
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By day, Jessica Wade spends her time in a laboratory at Imperial College London surrounded by spectrometers, oscilloscopes — and men.

At night, she writes biographies on Wikipedia about women researchers like her who don’t have an online presence.

“We can’t just do the shouting about how we need more women in science. We have to do the point of honoring and celebrating the women scientists that we have,” she told AFP.

“And I think writing their stories, making sure the world recognizes what they’ve done is a really important way to do that.”

Wade, 34, has worked at Imperial’s imposing campus in west London since 2016.

As a physicist, she is involved in developing new generations of carbon-based semi-conductors to make optical and electronic devices such as televisions and solar panels more energy efficient.

She leads a team of five people in a wider team of about 15. Of them, only one other scientist is a woman.

Science “is very male dominated,” Wade said, lamenting the lack of interest in it among girls whose parents are not scientists.

“As soon as I walked into a physics department that had a majority of men and a majority of people from white privileged backgrounds, I suddenly realized that not everyone’s getting the opportunity to study physics, not everyone’s getting excited about it,” she added.

“That lack of diversity impacts the science we do, the questions we ask, the directions we go in, the way we translate our innovations into society, where those kinds of devices are actually used in the world and who they benefit.”

Visibility

Wade now seeks to “take science to more people” but came across “knowledge gaps” in the internet’s free, multilingual, collaborative encyclopedia.

“Wikipedia is an amazing platform because it’s used by everyone in society,” she said.

“It’s used by 15 billion access points a month. Parents, teachers, policymakers, journalists, scientists, Amazon, Alexa, Google Home, they all use Wikipedia when they’re looking for information.”

But there is one big problem, she added: “About 90% of Wikipedia contributors and editors are men, and about 19% of the biographies on English language Wikipedia are about women.”

Wade set out to redress the imbalance in 2018 and has since written almost 2,000 pages by herself at the rate of one a night, at home, after dinner.

“They take more than one hour each, so that’s already too many hours of my life,” she laughed.

But she is undeterred by the daunting task.

“I don’t see it stopping anytime soon,” she said.

In fact, the research itself creates more work, as she often discovers more women scientists when writing another biography.

Wades’ first Wikipedia biography entry was the American climatologist Kim Cobb.

She saw her at a conference but after looking her up on Wikipedia found there was nothing on her oceanographic research.

Acknowledgement

Wade, who is now part of a network of women editors and leads workshops on how to write for Wikipedia, says a person’s presence and their work on the internet means they are discoverable.

“Little girls who are googling something, let’s say about sea urchins, will click through and then land on a Wikipedia page about an awesome woman scientist who had contributed to that,” she said.

“If you’re trying to nominate someone for an award or to become a fellow or to invite someone to give a lecture, you always google them and if they’ve got a biography nicely summarized on somewhere like Wikipedia, it’s so much easier to write someone’s citation or reference.”

That happened for Gladys West, a 92-year-old black American mathematician, whose profile was one of Wade’s first.

Starting in 1956, when racial segregation was still imposed in the United States, she worked for 42 years on navy navigation systems. Her calculations eventually led to the development of GPS.

“I researched Gladys to write her page and there was so little about her online, she was almost 90 and no one had celebrated her,” she said.

“I put her Wikipedia page online in February 2018 and in May 2018 she was in the BBC top 100 women in the world.

“And then she was inducted to the US Air Force Hall of Fame, and she won the Royal Academy of Engineering Prince Philip medal, which had never before gone to a woman.”
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At least 67 million children partially or fully missed routine vaccines globally between 2019 and 2021 because of lockdowns and health care disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the United Nations said Wednesday.

“More than a decade of hard-earned gains in routine childhood immunization have been eroded,” read a new report from the U.N.’s children’s agency, UNICEF, adding that getting back on track “will be challenging.”

Of the 67 million children whose vaccinations were “severely disrupted,” 48 million missed routine vaccines entirely, UNICEF said, flagging concerns about potential polio and measles outbreaks.

Vaccine coverage among children declined in 112 countries and the percent of children vaccinated worldwide slipped 5 percentage points to 81%, a low not seen since 2008. Africa and South Asia were particularly hard-hit.

“Worryingly, the backsliding during the pandemic came at the end of a decade when, in broad terms, growth in childhood immunization had stagnated,” the report said.

Vaccines save 4.4 million lives each year, a number the United Nations says could jump to 5.8 million by 2030 if its ambitious targets to leave “no one behind” are met.

“Vaccines have played a really important role in allowing more children to live healthy, long lives,” Brian Keeley, the report’s editor in chief, told AFP. “Any decline at all in vaccination rates is worrying.”

Before the introduction of a vaccine in 1963, measles killed about 2.6 million people each year, mostly children. By 2021, that number had fallen to 128,000.

But between 2019 and 2021, the percentage of children vaccinated against measles fell from 86% to 81%, and the number of cases in 2022 doubled compared with 2021.

The slide in vaccination rates could be compounded by other crises, Keeley warned, from climate change to food insecurity.

“You’ve got [an] increasing number of conflicts, economic stagnation in a lot of countries, climate emergencies, and so on,” he said. “This all sort of makes it harder and harder for health systems and countries to meet vaccination needs.”

UNICEF called on governments “to double-down on their commitment to increase financing for immunization” with special attention on accelerating “catch-up” vaccination efforts for those who missed their shots.

The report also raised concerns about a drop in people’s confidence in vaccines, seen in 52 out of 55 countries surveyed.

“We cannot allow confidence in routine immunizations to become another victim of the pandemic,” Catherine Russell, UNICEF’s executive director, said in a statement. “Otherwise, the next wave of deaths could be of more children with measles, diphtheria or other preventable diseases.”

Vaccine confidence can be “volatile and time specific,” the report said, noting that “further analysis will be required to determine if the findings are indicative of a longer-term trend” beyond the pandemic.

Overall, it said that support for vaccines “remains relatively strong.”

In about half of the 55 countries surveyed, more than 80% of respondents “perceived vaccines as important for children.”

“There is reason to be somewhat hopeful that services are recovering in quite a few countries,” said Keeley, who added that preliminary vaccination data from 2022 showed encouraging signs.

But even getting numbers back up to pre-pandemic levels will take years, he said, not including reaching “the children who were missing before the pandemic.”

“And they are not an insubstantial number.”

 
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Older Americans and people with weak immune systems can get an extra COVID-19 booster dose this spring.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday signed off on a more flexible booster schedule for people who remain at the highest risk from COVID-19 — giving them the choice of a second “bivalent” Pfizer or Moderna booster, the most up-to-date formula.

“Many in the population are experiencing vaccine fatigue but there is a subset who are eager to receive additional doses,” CDC’s Dr. Sara Oliver told an agency advisory panel that expressed support for the change.

The move came a day after the Food and Drug Administration took steps to make coronavirus vaccinations simpler for everyone. From now on, anyone getting a Pfizer or Moderna dose — whether it’s a booster or their first-ever vaccination — will get an updated version rather than the outdated original shots.

Here are some things to know:

Who needs a booster?

Anyone who’s gotten their original vaccinations but hasn’t had an updated booster yet can still get one. Only 42% of Americans 65 and older — and just 20% of all adults — have gotten one of those updated boosters since September.

Who can get a second updated booster?

People 65 or older who already had one Pfizer or Moderna updated booster can roll up their sleeves again, as long as it’s been at least four months since that last shot.

The schedule is a little different for people with weak immune systems. Most can choose a second Pfizer or Moderna updated booster at least two months after their first. Under the latest FDA and CDC guidelines, they also could get additional doses if and when their physician decides they need one.

Why the extra leeway?

Older adults continue to have the highest rates of hospitalization from COVID-19, even as cases have declined. But a frail 85-year-old may want another booster right away, while a robust 65-year-old may not see the need — or might instead time another shot for peak protection ahead of a summer vacation or other special event.

CDC officials stressed there’s even more variety among immune-compromised patients, from people with only mild impairment to those trying to replenish immunity that grueling cancer treatment knocked out.

The changes put the U.S. in line with Britain and Canada, which also are offering certain vulnerable populations a spring shot. It’s a reasonable choice, Dr. Matthew Laurens, of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said before the announcement.

“We do have vaccines that are available to protect against these severe consequences, so why not use them?” he said. “They don’t do any good just sitting on a shelf.”

Will younger, healthier people get a fall dose?

Stay tuned. The FDA will hold a public meeting in June to consider if the vaccine recipe needs more adjusting to better match the latest coronavirus strains — just like it adjusts flu vaccines every year. And part of that discussion will be whether younger, healthier people also need a booster.

The updated Pfizer and Moderna shots being used now target the BA.4 and BA.5 omicron versions, which have been replaced by an ever-changing list of omicron descendants. Still, while protection against mild infections is short-lived, those updated doses continue to do a good job fighting severe disease and death even against the newest variants.

Tots are least likely to be vaccinated yet

CDC’s advisers were dismayed at how few of the youngest children are vaccinated. Just 6% of 2- to 4-year-olds have gotten their initial COVID-19 shots and 4.5% of those younger than 2. Far fewer got an updated booster.

The FDA’s new rules mean tots under 5 who’ve never been vaccinated can get the most up-to-date formula — two Moderna shots or three of the Pfizer-BioNTech version. Unvaccinated 5-year-olds can get two Moderna doses or a single Pfizer shot. And tots already fully or partially vaccinated may get a bivalent shot or two depending on their vaccination history.

What about the Novavax vaccine?

Novavax makes a more traditional type of COVID-19 vaccine, and its original formula remains available for people who don’t want the Pfizer or Moderna option. Novavax also is getting ready in case FDA urges a fall update, by manufacturing several additional formulas.
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The Supreme Court is deciding whether women will face restrictions in getting a drug used in the most common method of abortion in the United States, while a lawsuit continues.

The justices are expected to issue an order on Wednesday in a fast-moving case from Texas in which abortion opponents are seeking to roll back Food and Drug Administration approval of the drug, mifepristone.

The drug first won FDA approval in 2000, and conditions on its use have been loosened in recent years, including making it available by mail in states that allow access.

The Biden administration and New York-based Danco Laboratories, the maker of the drug, want the nation’s highest court to reject limits on mifepristone’s use imposed by lower courts, at least as long as the legal case makes it way through the courts. They say women who want the drug and providers who dispense it will face chaos if limits on the drug take effect. Depending on what the justices decide, that could include requiring women to take a higher dosage of the drug than the FDA says is necessary.

Alliance Defending Freedom, representing anti-abortion doctors and medical groups in a challenge to the drug, is defending the rulings in calling on the Supreme Court to let the restrictions take effect now.

The legal fight over abortion comes less than a year after conservative justices reversed Roe v. Wade and allowed more than a dozen states to effectively ban abortion outright.

Even as the abortion landscape changed dramatically in several states, abortion opponents set their sights on medication abortions, which make up more than half of all abortions in the United States.

The abortion opponents filed suit in November in Amarillo, Texas. The legal challenge quickly reached the Supreme Court after a federal judge issued a ruling on April 7 that would revoke FDA approval of mifepristone, one of two drugs used in medication abortions.

Less than a week later, a federal appeals court modified the ruling so that mifepristone would remain available while the case continues, but with limits. The appeals court said that the drug can’t be mailed or dispensed as a generic and that patients who seek it need to make three in-person visits with a doctor, among other things.

The generic version of mifepristone makes up two-thirds of the supply in the United States, its manufacturer, Las Vegas-based GenBioPro Inc., wrote in a court filing that underscored the perils of allowing the restrictions to be put into effect.

The court also said the drug should only be approved through seven weeks of pregnancy for now, even though the FDA since 2016 has endorsed its use through 10 weeks of pregnancy.

Complicating the situation, a federal judge in Washington has ordered the FDA to preserve access to mifepristone under the current rules in 17 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia that filed a separate lawsuit.

The Biden administration has said the rulings conflict and create an untenable situation for the FDA.

In an order issued last Friday by Justice Samuel Alito, the court put the restrictions on hold through Wednesday to give the court time to consider the emergency appeal.

If the justices aren’t inclined to block the ruling from taking effect for now, the Democratic administration and Danco have a fallback argument, asking the court to take up the challenge to mifepristone, hear arguments and decide the case by early summer.

The court only rarely takes such a step before at least one appeals court has thoroughly examined the legal issues involved.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans already has ordered an accelerated schedule for hearing the case, with arguments set for May 17.

Mifepristone has been available for use in medication abortions in the United States since the FDA granted approval in 2000. Since then, more than 5 million women have used it, along with another drug, misoprostol, to induce abortions.
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A group of American plastic surgeons has been working in  Ukraine since the beginning of Russia’s invasion, helping  wounded soldiers and civilians recover from war injuries. Omelyan Oshchudlyak has the story. Camera: Yuriy Dankevych    
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Virtual medicine, or medical extended reality, uses virtual reality headsets and imaging software to supplement conventional medical treatments. Practitioners from around the world shared best practices at a recent conference in Los Angeles. Mike O’Sullivan reports.
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Nigeria’s National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, NAFDAC, announced a provisional approval of the R21 vaccine during a media briefing on Monday.

The regulatory agency’s consent came days after Ghana approved the vaccine.

NAFDAC said the vaccine is 70 to 80 percent efficient in preventing the mosquito-borne disease and could protect millions of children.

The agency’s director general, Mojisola Adeyeye, spoke to journalists in Abuja.

“The vaccine is indicated for prevention of clinical malaria on children from five months to 36 months of age,” Adeyeye said.

NAFDAC did not say when the vaccine will be rolled out, but Adeyeye said Nigeria will conduct in-country clinical trials and pharmacovigilance study.

The WHO says some 600,000 people die of malaria every year, most of them in Africa, many of them young children.

Nigeria accounts for the highest numbers of cases and deaths from malaria globally. Health experts say the vaccine could be a game changer.

Kunle Olobayo is a lead researcher at the National Institute for Pharmaceutical Research and Development.

“A proactive, preemptive intervention will definitely be most useful especially in countries like Nigeria,” said Olobayo. “Many interventions and steps that have been taken to reduce transmission have not been very successful because of our level of development, poverty. So, it will definitely change the dynamics.

The WHO has yet to approve the vaccine. The WHO Nigeria malaria program head, Lynda Ozor, said authorities are still reviewing the vaccine’s safety and efficacy.

“The WHO is reviewing the R21 data, and it’s being supported by an independent global advisory group on immunization and malaria experts.,” said Ozor. “This group will advise the WHO on whether to recommend the R21 vaccines for use. It has to be approved by the WHO to compliment the rollout of the first vaccine.”

Last year, the WHO consented to the world’s first malaria vaccine, Mosquirix.

Olobayo said that, without donor support, African countries could struggle to acquire the vaccines.

“Vaccines in Nigeria historically tend to be dependent on donor funding,” said Olobayo. “I have a feeling there might be some substantial international funding to get these products widely used.”

Oxford University is working with the Serum Institute of India to produce up to 200 million doses of R21 every year.
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Mozambique has asked the World Health Organization to supply an additional 2 million doses of a cholera vaccine as the country struggles to control a spreading outbreak. 

The head of the Department of National Health Surveillance at the Ministry of Health, Domingos Guihole, told VOA that the government awaits the WHO’s response to the cholera vaccine request, admitting difficulties due to the high global demand for vaccines.

“At this moment in Mozambique, the cholera situation is not good,” Guihole said. “It is not good because we have 10 provinces affected by cholera. We have 53 districts in the whole country, 45 of which have active cholera disease.”

The official said the intent is to vaccinate the population in high-risk areas, such as the northern province of Nampula and Zambezia in the central part of the country.

Both provinces were hit hard by Cyclone Freddy, which tore across Mozambique twice inside two weeks last month.

All five provinces impacted by Freddy on its first and second passes have witnessed cholera outbreaks.

In addition to the risk of cholera, the government is concerned about a potential increase in cases of other waterborne diseases such as dysentery. Malaria is a concern, too; both are among the leading causes of mortality in Mozambique.

“During almost seven months from October to April 16, we have notified 27,000 cases of cholera with 124 deaths, so the situation is not good,” said Guihole. “We have to say to all Mozambicans that we must follow the recommendations from the Ministry of Health related to the hygiene of water, hygiene of food, and even the collective hygiene as well.”

In many parts of Mozambique, health workers are struggling to treat infected citizens at clinics and hospitals that were badly damaged by Cyclone Freddy.

The record-breaking storm, which lasted for several weeks, killed dozens of people in Mozambique and Malawi and destroyed many roads and bridges in addition to hospitals.
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A growing number of startups are using artificial intelligence to replicate human voices. A company is creating synthetic voices for organizations to use for advertising, marketing and training. Phil Dierking reports.
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Apple Inc. opened its first flagship store in India in a much-anticipated launch Tuesday that highlights the company’s growing aspirations to expand in the country it also hopes to turn into a potential manufacturing hub.

The company’s CEO Tim Cook posed for photos with a few of the 100 or so Apple fans who had lined up outside the sprawling 20,000-square-foot store in India’s financial capital, Mumbai, its design inspired by the iconic black-and-yellow cabs unique to the city. A second store will open Thursday in the national capital, New Delhi.

“India has such a beautiful culture and an incredible energy, and we’re excited to build on our long-standing history,” Cook said in a statement earlier.

The tech giant has been operating in India for more than 25 years, selling its products through authorized retailers and the website it launched a few years ago. But regulatory hurdles and the pandemic delayed its plans to open a flagship store.

The new stores are a clear signal of the company’s commitment to invest in India, the second-largest smartphone market in the world where iPhone sales have been ticking up steadily, said Jayanth Kolla, analyst at Convergence Catalyst, a tech consultancy. The stores show “how much India matters to the present and the future of the company,” he added.

For the Cupertino, California-based company, India’s sheer size makes the market especially encouraging.

About 600 million of India’s 1.4 billion people have smartphones, “which means the market is still under-penetrated and the growth prospect is huge,” said Neil Shah, vice president of research at technology market research firm Counterpoint Research.

Between 2020 and 2022, the Silicon Valley company has gained some ground in the smartphone market in the country, going from just about 2% to capturing 6%, according to Counterpoint data.

Still, the iPhone’s hefty price tag puts it out of reach for the majority of Indians.

Instead, iPhone sales in the country have thrived among the sliver of upper-middle-class and rich Indians with disposable incomes, a segment of buyers that Shah says is rising. According to Counterpoint data, Apple has captured 65% of the “premium” smartphone market, where prices range up from 30,000 rupees ($360).

In September, Apple announced it would start making its iPhone 14 in India. The news was hailed as a win for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, which has pushed for ramping up local manufacturing ever since he came to power in 2014.

Apple first began manufacturing from India in 2017 with its iPhone SE and has since continued to assemble a number of iPhone models from the country.

Most of Apple’s smartphones and tablets are assembled by contractors with factories in China, but the company started looking at potentially moving some production to Southeast Asia or other places after repeated shutdowns to fight COVID-19 disrupted its global flow of products.

“Big companies got a jolt, they realized they needed a backup strategy outside of China — they couldn’t risk another lockdown or any geopolitical rift affecting their business,” said Kolla.

Currently, India makes close to 13 million iPhones every year, up from less than 5 million three years ago, according to Counterpoint Research. This is about 6% of iPhones made globally — and only a small slice in comparison to China, which still produces around 90% of them.

Last week, India’s Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal said the government was in regular touch with Apple to support their business here and that the company had plans to have 25% of their global production come out of India in the next five years.

The challenge for Apple, according to Shah of Counterpoint, is that the raw materials are still coming from outside India so the tech company will need to either find a local supplier or bring their suppliers, based in countries like China, Japan and Taiwan, closer to drive up production.

Still, he’s optimistic this target could be met, especially with labor costs being lower in India and the government wooing companies with attractive subsidies to boost local manufacturing.

“For Apple, everything is about timing. They don’t enter a market with full flow until they feel confident about their prospects. They can see the opportunity here today — it’s a win-win situation,” Shah said.
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Billionaire Elon Musk said on Monday he will launch an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that he calls “TruthGPT” to challenge the offerings from Microsoft and Google.

He criticized Microsoft-backed OpenAI, the firm behind chatbot sensation ChatGPT, of “training the AI to lie” and said OpenAI has now become a “closed source,” “for-profit” organization “closely allied with Microsoft.”

He also accused Larry Page, co-founder of Google, of not taking AI safety seriously.

“I’m going to start something which I call ‘TruthGPT’, or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe,” Musk said in an interview with Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson aired on Monday.

He said TruthGPT “might be the best path to safety” that would be “unlikely to annihilate humans.”

“It’s simply starting late. But I will try to create a third option,” Musk said.

Musk, OpenAI, Microsoft and Page did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

Musk has been poaching AI researchers from Alphabet Inc’s Google to launch a startup to rival OpenAI, people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Musk last month registered a firm named X.AI Corp, incorporated in Nevada, according to a state filing. The firm listed Musk as the sole director and Jared Birchall, the managing director of Musk’s family office, as a secretary.

‘Civilizational destruction’

The move came even after Musk and a group of artificial intelligence experts and industry executives called for a six-month pause in developing systems more powerful than OpenAI’s newly launched GPT-4, citing potential risks to society.

Musk also reiterated his warnings about AI during the interview with Carlson, saying “AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production” according to the excerpts.

“It has the potential of civilizational destruction,” he said.

He said, for example, that a super intelligent AI can write incredibly well and potentially manipulate public opinions.

He tweeted over the weekend that he had met with former U.S. President Barack Obama when he was president and told him that Washington needed to “encourage AI regulation.”

Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but he stepped down from the company’s board in 2018. In 2019, he tweeted that he left OpenAI because he had to focus on Tesla and SpaceX.

He also tweeted at that time that other reasons for his departure from OpenAI were, “Tesla was competing for some of the same people as OpenAI & I didn’t agree with some of what OpenAI team wanted to do.”

Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has also become CEO of Twitter, a social media platform he bought for $44 billion last year.

In the interview with Fox News, Musk said he recently valued Twitter at “less than half” of the acquisition price.

In January, Microsoft Corp announced a further multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, intensifying competition with rival Google and fueling the race to attract AI funding in Silicon Valley.
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Kenya is using the launch of its first operational observation satellite to promote space education and science through space clubs in schools. Kenya launched an operational 3U nanosatellite April 15 aboard the SpaceX Falcon Force base in the U.S. Victoria Amunga reports from Nairobi, Kenya. Camera: Jimmy Makhulo
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