Category: Silicon Valley

Nearly two thirds of the sharks and rays that live among the world’s corals are threatened with extinction, according to new research published Tuesday, with a warning this could further imperil precious reefs.

Coral reefs, which harbor at least a quarter of all marine animals and plants, are gravely menaced by an array of human threats, including overfishing, pollution and climate change.

Shark and ray species — from apex predators to filter feeders — play an important role in these delicate ecosystems that “cannot be filled by other species”, said Samantha Sherman, of Simon Fraser University in Canada and the wildlife group TRAFFIC International.

But they are under grave threat globally, according to the study in the journal Nature Communications, which assessed extinction vulnerability data from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to look at 134 species of sharks and rays linked to reefs.

The authors found 59 percent of coral reef shark and ray species are threatened with extinction, an extinction risk almost double that of sharks and rays in general.

Among these, five shark species are listed as critically endangered, as well as nine ray species, all so-called “rhino rays” that look more like sharks than stingrays.

Keeping reefs healthier

“It was a bit surprising just how high the threat level is for these species,” Sherman told AFP. 

“Many species that we thought of as common are declining at alarming rates and becoming more difficult to find in some places.”

Sherman said the biggest threat to these species by far is overfishing.

Sharks are under most threat in the Western Atlantic and parts of the Indian Ocean, whereas the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia are the highest risks for rays.

These regions are heavily fished and do not currently have management in place to reduce the impact on these species, said Sherman.

Coral reef fisheries directly support the livelihoods and food security of over half a billion people, but this crucial ecosystem is facing an existential threat.

Human-driven climate change has spurred mass coral bleaching as the world’s oceans get warmer.

Modelling research has shown that even if the Paris climate goal of holding global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is reached, 99 percent of the world’s coral reefs will not be able to recover.

At two degrees of warming, the number rose to 100 percent.

“We know coral reef health is declining, largely due to climate change, however, coral reef sharks and rays can help keep reefs healthier for longer,” said Sherman. 

The study was carried out by an international team of experts from universities, government and regional oceanic and fishery organizations as well as non-governmental organizations across the world.
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Jill Biden’ s advocacy for curing cancer didn’t start with her son’s death in 2015 from brain cancer. It began decades earlier, long before she came into the national spotlight, and could now be further energized by her own brush with a common form of skin cancer.

The first lady often says the worst three words anyone will ever hear are, “You have cancer.” She heard a version of that phrase for herself this past week.

A lesion that doctors had found above her right eye during a routine screening late last year was removed on Wednesday and confirmed to be basal cell carcinoma — a highly treatable form of skin cancer. While Biden was being prepped to remove the lesion, doctors found and removed another one from the left side of her chest, also confirmed to be basal cell carcinoma. A third lesion from her left eyelid was being examined.

While it’s too early to know when and how Biden might address her situation publicly, her experience could inject new purpose into what has become part of her life’s work highlighting research into curing cancer and urging people to get regular screenings.

Personal experiences can add potency to a public figure’s advocacy.

“Nothing like ‘I’ve been there, done that’ and being personally involved,” said Myra Gutin, a first lady scholar at Rider University.

Biden’s spokesperson, Vanessa Valdivia, said “the first lady’s fight against cancer has always been personal. She knows that cancer touches us all.”

Biden’s advocacy dates to 1993, when four girlfriends were diagnosed with breast cancer, including her pal Winnie, who succumbed to the disease. She said last year in a speech that “Winnie inspired me to take up the cause of prevention and education.”

That experience led her to create the Biden Breast Health Initiative, one of the first breast health programs in the United States, to teach 16-to 18-year-old girls about caring for their breasts. Biden was among staffers who went into Delaware’s high schools to conduct lectures and demonstrations.

Her mother, Bonny Jean Jacobs, and father, Donald Jacobs, died of cancer, in 2008 and 1999, respectively. A few years ago, one of her four sisters needed an auto-stem cell transplant to treat her cancer.

In May 2015, Beau Biden, President Joe Biden’s son with his late first wife, died of a rare and aggressive brain cancer, leaving behind a wife and two young kids. Joe Biden was vice president at the time and the blow from Beau’s loss led him to decide against running for president in 2016. Jill Biden, who had helped raise Beau from a young age after she married his dad, was convinced he would survive the disease and later described feeling “blinded by the darkness” when he died.

After their son’s death, the Bidens helped push for a national commitment to “end cancer as we know it.” Then-President Barack Obama — Biden’s boss — put the vice president in charge of what the White House named the Cancer Moonshot.

The Bidens resurrected the initiative after Joe Biden became president and added a new goal of cutting cancer death rates by at least 50% over the next 25 years, and improving the experience of living with and surviving cancer for patients and their families.

“We’re ensuring that all of our government is ready to get to work,” Jill Biden said at the relaunch announcement at the White House last February. “We’re going to break down the walls that hold research back. We’re going to bring the best of our nation together — patients, survivors, caregivers, researchers, doctors, and advocates — all of you — so that we can get this done.”

In the years between Biden serving as vice president and running for president, the Bidens headed up the Biden Cancer Initiative, a charity.

Jill Biden, 71, has been using her first lady platform to highlight research into a cancer cure, along with other issues she has long championed, including education and military families.

Her first trip outside of Washington after the January 2021 inauguration was to Virginia Commonwealth University’s Massey Cancer Center in Richmond to call for an end to disparities in health care that she said have hurt communities of color.

She has toured cancer centers, including those for children, in New York City, South Carolina, Tennessee, Costa Rica, San Francisco and Florida, among others. She joined the Philadelphia Eagles and Phillies — two of her favorite professional sports teams — for events, including during the World Series, to highlight efforts to fight cancer through early detection and to honor patients.

For Breast Cancer Awareness Month last October, Jill Biden hosted a White House event with the American Cancer Society and singer Mary J. Blige, who became an advocate for cancer screening after losing aunts and other relatives to various forms of cancer.

The first lady also partnered with the Lifetime cable channel to encourage women to get mammograms. A Democrat, she gave an interview last year to Newsmax, the conservative cable news channel, to discuss the federal investment in accelerating the cancer fight.

She regularly encourages audiences to schedule cancer screening appointments they skipped during the pandemic out of fear of visiting doctor’s offices.

Asked on Friday how the first lady was doing, the president flashed a thumbs-up to reporters.

Basal cell carcinoma, for which the first lady was treated with the procedure known as Mohs surgery, is the most common type of skin cancer, but also the most curable form. It’s considered highly treatable, especially when caught early. It is a slow-growing cancer that doesn’t usually spread and seldom causes serious complications or becomes life-threatening.

The Skin Cancer Foundation says the delicate skin around the eyes is especially vulnerable to damage from the sun’s ultraviolet rays, which makes basal cell carcinoma on and around the eyelids particularly common.
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When Benjamin Franklin fashioned the first lightning rod in the 1750s following his famous experiment flying a kite with a key attached during a thunderstorm, the American inventor had no way of knowing this would remain the state of the art for centuries.

Scientists now are moving to improve on that 18th-century innovation with 21st-century technology — a system employing a high-powered laser that may revolutionize lightning protection. Researchers said on Monday they succeeded in using a laser aimed at the sky from atop Mount Santis in northeastern Switzerland to divert lightning strikes.

With further development, this Laser Lightning Rod could safeguard critical infrastructure including power stations, airports, wind farms and launchpads. Lightning inflicts billions of dollars in damage on buildings, communication systems, power lines and electrical equipment annually while also killing thousands of people.

The equipment was hauled to the mountaintop at an altitude of about 8,200 feet (2,500 meters), some parts using a gondola and others by helicopter, and was focused on the sky above a 400-foot-tall (124-meter-tall) transmission tower belonging to telecommunications provider Swisscom SCMN.S, one of Europe’s structures most affected by lightning.

In experiments during two months in 2021, intense laser pulses — 1,000 times per second — were emitted to redirect lightning strikes. All four strikes while the system was active were successfully intercepted. In the first instance, the researchers used two high-speed cameras to record the redirection of the lightning’s path by more than 160 feet (50 meters). Three others were documented with different data.

“We demonstrate for the first time that a laser can be used to guide natural lightning,” said physicist Aurelien Houard of Ecole Polytechnique’s Laboratory of Applied Optics in France, coordinator of the Laser Lightning Rod project and lead author of the research published in the journal Nature Photonics.

Lightning is a high-voltage electrical discharge between a cloud and the ground, within a cloud or between clouds.

“An intense laser can generate on its path long columns of plasmas in the atmosphere with electrons, ions and hot air molecules,” Houard said, referring to positively charged particles called ions and negatively charged particles called electrons.

“We have shown here that these plasma columns can act as a guide for lightning,” Houard added. “It is important because it is the first step toward a laser-based lightning protection that could virtually reach a height of hundreds of meters [yards] or a kilometer [0.6 mile] with sufficient laser energy.”

The laser device is the size of a large car and weighs more than 3 tons. It uses lasers from German industrial machine manufacturing company Trumpf Group. With University of Geneva scientists also playing a key role, the experiments were conducted in collaboration with aerospace company ArianeGroup, a European joint venture between Airbus SE AIR.PA and Safran SA SAF.PA.

This concept, first proposed in the 1970s, has worked in laboratory conditions, but until now not in the field.

Lightning rods, dating back to Franklin’s time, are metal rods atop buildings, connected to the ground with a wire, that conduct electric charges lightning strikes harmlessly into the ground. Their limitations include protecting only a small area.

Houard anticipated that 10 to 15 years more work would be needed before the Laser Lightning Rod can enter common use. One concern is avoiding interference with airplanes in flight. In fact, air traffic in the area was halted when the researchers used the laser.

“Indeed, there is a potential issue using the system with air traffic in the area because the laser could harm the eyes of the pilot if he crosses the laser beam and looks down,” Houard said. 
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Pakistan Monday launched its first nationwide anti-polio campaign of the year to immunize children under the age of five against the crippling disease. The move follows a surge in new infections in 2022.

While no new case has been reported in Pakistan so far this year, the highly infectious wild poliovirus paralyzed 20 children last year. That compares to just one infection reported in 2021.

National eradication program officials said that more than 360,000 health workers would deliver polio drops to at least 44.2 million children across 156 districts during the five-day campaign. They noted that children would also be administered an additional vitamin A supplement to boost their immunity against infectious diseases.

The 20 polio cases in Pakistan in 2022 were reported in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, mostly in its violence-hit North Waziristan district on the Afghan border.

An official statement quoted Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif as saying on Sunday the resurgence of cases has raised concerns among Pakistan’s global partners, including the World Health Organization and other stakeholders.

The previous nationwide polio campaign in Pakistan was organized last August but was disrupted by catastrophic floods triggered by erratic summer monsoon rains. Authorities later carried out special polio drives in flood-affected districts and vaccinated children against the virus there.

Pakistan has repeatedly come close to eradicating polio but long-running propaganda in conservative rural areas that the vaccines cause sterility in children, coupled with deadly militant attacks on vaccinators, have set back the mission.

The latest militant attack on a polio team took place earlier this month in Dera Ismail Khan district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, wounding four policemen escorting health workers.

Officials also blame the 2011 killing of al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden by the United States military in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad for dealing a serious blow to national polio eradication efforts.

A Pakistani doctor organized a fake vaccination campaign to help the U.S. troops locate the hideout of the fugitive terror leader and kill him. Pakistani authorities later arrested the doctor and a court subsequently sentenced him to 23 years in prison.

Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only countries where polio continues to cripple children. Afghan officials detected two cases in 2022 and have reported no new ones this year.

The global polio eradication program has identified Pakistan, Afghanistan, parts of Somalia and Yemen as areas where outbreaks are very difficult to control, according to Hamid Jafari, the director of polio eradication for WHO’s eastern Mediterranean region.

“These are countries, and in fact some national areas, that are prone to be affected by repeated polio outbreaks., and these are usually complex countries, countries that have fragile health systems, conflicts, other complex challenges,” Jafari explained in a video statement tweeted Monday.

“Moreover, these countries export polio virus. So, when there is an outbreak in these countries, the neighboring countries are affected because of international spread but also distant international spread,” he added.
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Pakistan launched its first anti-polio campaign of the year Sunday, targeting 44.2 million children under the age of five.

Pakistan and Afghanistan are the only two countries in the world where polio continues to threaten the health and well-being of children. Polio affects the nervous system of children and ultimately leads to paralysis.

Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif kicked off the nationwide drive by administering polio drops to children in the capital, Islamabad, saying Pakistan was unfortunately among the few countries that still suffered from the disease.

Twenty cases were reported in the tribal North Waziristan area last year, though the disease was contained among other children through immunization, Sharif said.

Around 44 million children in 156 districts will be immunized.

This includes 22.54 million children in Punjab, 10.1 million in Sindh and 7.4 million in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces.

Sharif said his government along with other stakeholders, including U.S. billionaire Bill Gates and the World Health Organization, were effectively contributing to polio eradication in Pakistan.

He gave out appreciation certificates at the launch to front-line polio workers and praised their “invaluable sacrifices.”

Pakistan has witnessed frequent attacks on polio teams and police officers deployed to protect them. Militants falsely claim that vaccination campaigns are a Western conspiracy to sterilize children. 
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The U.S. has now collected 510 reports of unidentified flying objects, many of which are flying in sensitive military airspace. While there’s no evidence of extraterrestrials, they still pose a threat, the government said in a declassified report summary released Thursday.

Last year the Pentagon opened an office, the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, solely focused on receiving and analyzing all of those reports of unidentified phenomena, many of which have been reported by military pilots. It works with the intelligence agencies to further assess those incidents.

The events “continue to occur in restricted or sensitive airspace, highlighting possible concerns for safety of flight or adversary collection activity,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in its 2022 report.

The classified version of the report addresses how many of those objects were found near locations where nuclear power plants operate or nuclear weapons are stored.

The 510 objects include 144 objects previously reported and 366 new reports. In both the old and new cases, after analysis, the majority have been determined to exhibit “unremarkable characteristics,” and could be characterized as unmanned aircraft systems, or balloon-like objects, the report said.

But the office is also tasked with reporting any movements or reports of objects that may indicate that a potential adversary has a new technology or capability.

The Pentagon’s anomaly office is also to include any unidentified objects moving underwater, in the air, or in space, or something that moves between those domains, which could pose a new threat.

ODNI said in its report that efforts to destigmatize reporting and emphasize that the objects may pose a threat likely contributed to the additional reports.
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Astronomers have detected in the stellar halo that represents the Milky Way’s outer limits a group of stars more distant from Earth than any known within our own galaxy – almost halfway to a neighboring galaxy.

The researchers said these 208 stars inhabit the most remote reaches of the Milky Way’s halo, a spherical stellar cloud dominated by the mysterious invisible substance called dark matter that makes itself known only through its gravitational influence. The furthest of them is 1.08 million light years from Earth. A light year is the distance light travels in a year, 9.5 trillion km (5.9 trillion miles).

These stars, spotted using the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea mountain, are part of a category of stars called RR Lyrae that are relatively low mass and typically have low abundances of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. The most distant one appears to have a mass about 70% that of our sun. No other Milky Way stars have been confidently measured farther away than these.

The stars that populate the outskirts of the galactic halo can be viewed as stellar orphans, probably originating in smaller galaxies that later collided with the larger Milky Way.

“Our interpretation about the origin of these distant stars is that they are most likely born in the halos of dwarf galaxies and star clusters which were later merged – or more straightforwardly, cannibalized – by the Milky Way,” said Yuting Feng, an astronomy doctoral student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led the study, presented this week at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.

“Their host galaxies have been gravitationally shredded and digested, but these stars are left at that large distance as debris of the merger event,” Feng added.

The Milky Way has grown over time through such calamities.

“The larger galaxy grows by eating smaller galaxies – by eating its own kind,” said study co-author Raja GuhaThakurta, UC Santa Cruz’s chair of astronomy and astrophysics.

Containing an inner and outer layer, the Milky Way’s halo is vastly larger than the galaxy’s main disk and central bulge that are teeming with stars. The galaxy, with a supermassive black hole at its center about 26,000 light years from Earth, contains perhaps 100 billion–400 billion stars including our sun, which resides in one of the four primary spiral arms that make up the Milky Way’s disk. The halo contains about 5% of the galaxy’s stars.

Dark matter, which dominates the halo, makes up most of the universe’s mass and is thought to be responsible for its basic structure, with its gravity influencing visible matter to come together and form stars and galaxies.

The halo’s remote outer edge is a poorly understood region of the galaxy. These newly identified stars are almost half the distance to the Milky Way’s neighboring Andromeda galaxy.

“We can see that the suburbs of the Andromeda halo and the Milky Way halo are really extended – and are almost ‘back-to-back,'” Feng said.

The search for life beyond the Earth focuses on rocky planets akin to Earth orbiting in what is called the “habitable zone” around stars. More than 5,000 planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets, already have been discovered.

“We don’t know for sure, but each of these outer halo stars should be about as likely to have planets orbiting them as the sun and other sun-like stars in the Milky Way,” GuhaThakurta said.
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Israel’s Cognyte Software Ltd won a tender to sell intercept spyware to a Myanmar state-backed telecommunications firm a month before the Asian nation’s February 2021 military coup, according to documents reviewed by Reuters.

The deal was made even though Israel has claimed it stopped defense technology transfers to Myanmar following a 2017 ruling by Israel’s Supreme Court, according to a legal complaint recently filed with Israel’s attorney general and disclosed Sunday.

While the ruling was subjected to a rare gag order at the request of the state and media cannot cite the verdict, Israel’s government has publicly stated on numerous occasions that defense exports to Myanmar are banned.

The complaint, led by high-profile Israeli human rights lawyer Eitay Mack who spearheaded the campaign for the Supreme Court ruling, calls for a criminal investigation into the deal.

It accuses Cognyte and unnamed defense and foreign ministry officials who supervise such deals of “aiding and abetting crimes against humanity in Myanmar.”

The complaint was filed on behalf of more than 60 Israelis, including a former speaker of the house as well as prominent activists, academics and writers.

The documents about the deal, provided to Reuters and Mack by activist group Justice for Myanmar, are a January 2021 letter with attachments from Myanmar Posts and Telecommunications (MPT) to local regulators that list Cognyte as the winning vendor for intercept technology and note the purchase order was issued “by 30th Dec 2020.”

Intercept spyware can give authorities the power to listen in on calls, view text messages and web traffic including emails, and track the locations of users without the assistance of telecom and internet firms.

Representatives for Cognyte, Myanmar’s military government and MPT did not respond to multiple Reuters requests for comment. Japan’s KDDI Corp and Sumitomo Corp, which have stakes in MPT, declined to comment, saying they were not privy to details on communication interception.

Israel’s attorney general did not respond to requests for comment about the complaint. The foreign affairs ministry did not respond to requests for comment about the deal, while the defense ministry declined to comment.

Two people with knowledge of Myanmar’s intercept plans separately told Reuters the Cognyte system was tested by MPT.

They declined to be identified for fear of retribution by Myanmar’s junta.

MPT uses intercept spyware, a source with direct knowledge of the matter and three people briefed on the issue told Reuters although they did not identify the vendor. Reuters was unable to determine whether the sale of Cognyte intercept technology to MPT was finalized.

Even before the coup, public concern had mounted in Israel about the country’s defense exports to Myanmar after a brutal 2017 crackdown by the military on the country’s Rohingya population while Aung San Suu Kyi’s government was in power. The crackdown prompted the petition led by Mack that asked the Supreme Court to ban arms exports to Myanmar.

Since the coup, the junta has killed thousands of people including many political opponents, according to the United Nations.

Cognyte under fire

Many governments around the world allow for what are commonly called “lawful intercepts” to be used by law enforcement agencies to catch criminals but the technology is not ordinarily employed without any kind of legal process, cybersecurity experts have said.

According to industry executives and activists previously interviewed by Reuters, Myanmar’s junta is using invasive telecoms spyware without legal safeguards to protect human rights.

Mack said Cognyte’s participation in the tender contradicts statements made by Israeli officials after the Supreme court ruling that no security exports had been made to Myanmar.

While intercept spyware is typically described as “dual-use” technology for civilian and defense purposes, Israeli law states that “dual-use” technology is classified as defense equipment.

Israeli law also requires companies exporting defense-related products to seek licenses for export and marketing when doing deals. The legal complaint said any officials who granted Cognyte licenses for Myanmar deals should be investigated. Reuters was unable to determine whether Cognyte obtained such licenses.

Around the time of the 2020 deal, the political situation in Myanmar was tense with the military disputing the results of an election won by Suu Kyi.

Norway’s Telenor, previously one of the biggest telecoms firms in Myanmar before withdrawing from the country last year, also said in a Dec. 3, 2020 briefing and statement that it was concerned about Myanmar authorities’ plans for a lawful intercept due to insufficient legal safeguards.

Nasdaq-listed Cognyte was spun off in February 2021 from Verint Systems Inc, a pioneering giant in Israel’s cybersecurity industry.

Cognyte, which had $474 million in annual revenue for its last financial year, was also banned from Facebook in 2021.

Facebook owner Meta Platforms Inc said in a report Cognyte “enables managing fake accounts across social media platforms.”

Meta said its investigation identified Cognyte customers in a range of countries such as Kenya, Mexico and Indonesia and their targets included journalists and politicians. It did not identify the customers or the targets.

Meta did not respond to a request for further comment.

Norway’s sovereign wealth fund last month dropped Cognyte from its portfolio, saying states said to be customers of its surveillance products and services “have been accused of extremely serious human rights violations.” The fund did not name any states.

Cognyte has not responded publicly to the claims made by Meta or Norway’s sovereign wealth fund.
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A new report finds nearly a billion people in the world’s poorer countries are treated for often life-threatening conditions in health care facilities that lack a reliable electricity supply.  A joint report by the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and the International Renewable Energy Agency, “Energizing Health: Accelerating Electricity Access in Health-Care Facilities,” has just been issued. 

Health officials say electricity access in health care facilities can make the difference between life and death.  

Heather Adair-Rohani is Acting Unit Head, Air Quality, Energy and Health at the World Health Organization.  She says it is critical that health care facilities have a reliable, always functioning electricity supply available.

“Imagine going to a health care facility with no lights, with no opportunity to have a baby warmer functioning,” said Adair-Rohani. “To have medical devices functioning and powered all the time. It’s absolutely fundamental that we have this electricity. This is an often-overlooked infrastructure aspect of health care facilities that are desperately needed to continue to provide care to those most vulnerable populations in low- and middle-income countries.”

The report finds more than one in 10 health facilities in South Asia and sub-Saharan African countries lack any electricity access.  It adds power is unreliable for half of all facilities in sub-Saharan Africa.  

It notes electricity is needed to power the most basic devices such as lights and refrigeration as well as devices that measure vital signs like heartbeat and blood pressure. It says increasing the electrification of health-care facilities is essential to save lives. 

Adair-Rohani adds it is important to maintain these systems once they are installed to ensure their reliability and functionality.

“Reliable decentralized renewable electricity in health care facilities can really ensure the resilience of climate change for health care facilities so that they can provide care in the most dire circumstances and provides emergency preparedness so that yes, indeed, when there is a hurricane or floods or what have you, they still are able to have some form of power to provide emergency care as needed,” said Adair-Rohani.

Authors of the report say healthcare systems and facilities increasingly are affected by the accelerating impacts of climate change.  They say decentralized sustainable renewable energy solutions are available.  For example, they note solar photovoltaic systems are cost-effective and clean and can be rapidly deployed on site.

The authors say building climate-resilient health care systems can meet the challenges of a changing climate while ensuring the delivery of quality health care services.  

 
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An upcoming U.S. Supreme Court case that asks whether tech firms can be held liable for damages related to algorithmically generated content recommendations has the ability to “upend the internet,” according to a brief filed by Google this week.

The case, Gonzalez v. Google LLC, is a long-awaited opportunity for the high court to weigh in on interpretations of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. A provision of federal law that has come under fire from across the political spectrum, Section 230 shields technology firms from liability for content published by third parties on their platforms, but also allows those same firms to curate or bar certain content.

The case arises from a complaint by Reynaldo Gonzalez, whose daughter was killed in an attack by members of the terror group ISIS in Paris in 2015. Gonzales argues that Google helped ISIS recruit members because YouTube, the online video hosting service owned by Google, used a video recommendation algorithm that suggested videos published by ISIS to individuals who displayed interest in the group.

Gonzalez’s complaint argues that by recommending content, YouTube went beyond simply providing a platform for ISIS videos, and should therefore be held accountable for their effects.

Dystopia warning

The case has garnered the attention of a multitude of interested parties, including free speech advocates who want tech firms’ liability shield left largely intact. Others argue that because tech firms take affirmative steps to keep certain content off their platforms, their claims to be simple conduits of information ring hollow, and that they should therefore be liable for the material they publish.

In its brief, Google painted a dire picture of what might happen if the latter interpretation were to prevail, arguing that it “would turn the internet into a dystopia where providers would face legal pressure to censor any objectionable content. Some might comply; others might seek to evade liability by shutting their eyes and leaving up everything, no matter how objectionable.”

Not everyone shares Google’s concern.

“Actually all it would do is make it so that Google and other tech companies have to follow the law just like everybody else,” Megan Iorio, senior counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told VOA.

“Things are not so great on the internet for certain groups of people right now because of Section 230,” said Iorio, whose organization filed a friend of the court brief in the case. “Section 230 makes it so that tech companies don’t have to respond when somebody tells them that non-consensual pornography has been posted on their site and keeps on proliferating. They don’t have to take down other things that a court has found violate the person’s privacy rights. So you know, to [say] that returning Section 230 to its original understanding is going to create a hellscape is hyperbolic.”

Unpredictable effects

Experts said the Supreme Court might try to chart a narrow course that leaves some protections intact for tech firms, but allows liability for recommendations. However, because of the prevalence of algorithmic recommendations on the internet, the only available method to organize the dizzying array of content available online, any ruling that affects them could have a significant impact.

“It has pretty profound implications, because with tech regulation and tech law, things can have unintended consequences,” John Villasenor, a professor of engineering and law and director of the UCLA Institute for Technology, Law and Policy, told VOA.

“The challenge is that even a narrow ruling, for example, holding that targeted recommendations are not protected, would have all sorts of very complicated downstream consequences,” Villasenor said. “If it’s the case that targeted recommendations aren’t protected under the liability shield, then is it also true that search results that are in some sense customized to a particular user are also unprotected?”

26 words

The key language in Section 230 has been called, “the 26 words that created the internet.” That section reads as follows:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher of or speaker of information provided by another information content provider.”

At the time the law was drafted in the 1990s, people around the world were flocking to an internet that was still in its infancy. It was an open question whether an internet platform that gave individual third parties the ability to post content on them, such as a bulletin board service, was legally liable for that content.

Recognizing that a patchwork of state-level libel and defamation laws could leave developing internet companies exposed to crippling lawsuits, Congress drafted language meant to shield them. That protection is credited by many for the fact that U.S. tech firms, particularly in Silicon Valley, rose to dominance on the internet in the 21st century.

Because of the global reach of U.S. technology firms, the ruling in Gonzalez v. Google LLC is likely to echo far beyond the United States when it is handed down.

Legal groundwork

The groundwork for the Supreme Court’s decision to take the case was laid in 2020, when Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in response to an appeal that, “in an appropriate case, we should consider whether the text of this increasingly important statute aligns with the current state of immunity enjoyed by internet platforms.”

That statement by Thomas, arguably the court’s most conservative member, heartened many on the right who are concerned that “Big Tech” firms enjoy too much cultural power in the U.S., including the ability to deny a platform to individuals with whose views they disagree.

Gonzalez v. Google LLC is remarkable in that many cases that make it to the Supreme Court do so in part because lower courts have issued conflicting decisions, requiring an authoritative ruling from the high court to provide legal clarity.

Gonzalez’s case, however, has been dismissed by two lower courts, both of which held that Section 230 rendered Google immune from the suit.

Conservative concerns

Politicians have been calling for reform of Section 230 for years, with both Republicans and Democrats joining the chorus, though frequently for different reasons.

Former President Donald Trump regularly railed against large technology firms, threatening to use the federal government to rein them in, especially when he believed that they were preventing him or his supporters from getting their messages out to the public.

His concern became particularly intense during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, when technology firms began working to limit the spread of social media accounts that featured misinformation about the virus and the safety of vaccinations.

Trump was eventually kicked off Twitter and Facebook after using those platforms to spread false claims about the 2020 presidential election, which he lost, and to help organize a rally that preceded the assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Major figures in the Republican Party are active in the Gonzalez case. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and Texas Senator Ted Cruz have both submitted briefs in the case urging the court to crack down on Google and large tech firms in general.

“Confident in their ability to dodge liability, platforms have not been shy about restricting access and removing content based on the politics of the speaker, an issue that has persistently arisen as Big Tech companies censor and remove content espousing conservative political views,” Cruz writes.

Biden calls for reform

Section 230 criticism has come from both sides of the aisle. On Wednesday, President Joe Biden published an essay in The Wall Street Journal urging “Democrats and Republicans to come together to pass strong bipartisan legislation to hold Big Tech accountable.”

Biden argues for a number of reforms, including improved privacy protections for individuals, especially children, and more robust competition, but he leaves little doubt about what he sees as a need for Section 230 reform.

“[W]e need Big Tech companies to take responsibility for the content they spread and the algorithms they use,” he writes. “That’s why I’ve long said we must fundamentally reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects tech companies from legal responsibility for content posted on their sites.”
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The U.S. Department of the Interior will reform its regulations for the development of wind energy facilities on the country’s outer continental shelf to help meet crucial climate goals, it said in a statement on Thursday.

The proposed rule changes would save developers a projected $1 billion over a 20-year period by streamlining burdensome processes, clarifying ambiguous provisions, and lowering compliance costs, , the statement said.

“Updating these regulations will facilitate the safe and efficient development of offshore wind energy resources, provide certainty to developers and help ensure a fair return to the U.S. taxpayers,” U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in the release.

The reforms come days after the department named Elizabeth Klein, a lawyer who worked in the Obama and Clinton administrations, to head its Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), overseeing offshore oil, gas and wind development.

As part of its offshore clean energy program, the BOEM has over the past two years approved the first two commercial scale offshore wind projects in the United States, held three lease auctions including the first-ever sale off the coast of California, and explored extending offshore wind to other areas like the Gulf of Mexico.

The department expects to hold as many as four more auctions and review at least 16 new commercial facilities by 2025, adding more than 22 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy.

In September last year, President Joe Biden’s administration set a goal of having 15 GW of floating offshore wind capacity by 2035 to accelerate development of next-generation floating wind farms in line with its target of permitting 30 GW of offshore wind by 2030.
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England will ban a range of single-use plastic items such as cutlery, plates and bowls starting in October to limit soaring plastic pollution, Britain’s environment department said Saturday. 

The decision follows a public consultation by the government in which 95% of respondents were in favor of the bans, the department said in a statement. 

“We all know the absolutely devastating impacts that plastic can have on our environment and wildlife,” Environment Secretary Therese Coffey said. “These new single-use plastics bans will continue our vital work to protect the environment.” 

Most plastics can remain intact for centuries and damage oceans, rivers and land where millions of tons end up as waste each year. The United Nations says decades of overuse of single-use plastics has caused a “global environmental catastrophe.” 

The government said it is estimated England uses 2.7 billion items of single-use cutlery, most of which are plastic, a year as well as 721 million such plates, but only 10% end up being recycled. 

England’s ban will also include single-use plastic trays, balloon sticks and some types of polystyrene cups and food containers. 

A ban on supplying plastic straws and stirrers and plastic-stemmed cotton buds came into force in England in 2020. 

Anti-plastic campaign group A Plastic Planet welcomed the latest bans but called for further limitations, especially on sachets. 

“The plastic sachet, the ultimate symbol of our grab and go, convenience-addicted lifestyle, should be the next target … 855 billion sachets are used annually, never to be recycled,” Sian Sutherland, the group’s co-founder, said. 

The British government said it was also considering limiting the use of other commonly littered and “problematic” plastic items, including wet wipes, tobacco filters and sachets. 

Governments worldwide are clamping down on the use of single-use plastic to varying degrees, and a global survey last year found three in four people want single-use plastics to be banned as soon as possible. 
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A Swiss company says it has certifiably extracted CO2 from the air and permanently stored it in the ground — for the first time on behalf of paying customers, including Microsoft.

Climeworks, a startup created in 2009 by two Swiss engineers, said its facility in Iceland had successfully removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and injected it into the ground, where it would very gradually be transformed into rock.

The potential for scaling up remains to be proved.

In its announcement on Thursday, Climeworks said its process had been certified in September by DNV, a Norwegian independent auditor, marking the first time carbon had been permanently captured on behalf of paying corporate clients.

Climeworks counts companies including Microsoft, Stripe and Shopify among the clients who have bought into its future carbon removal services, to compensate for their greenhouse gas emissions.

The startup said it hoped “to lead as an example for peers, customers and policy makers alike that are committed to climate action.”

The Paris Agreement, adopted by nearly all the world’s nations in 2015, called for the rise in the Earth’s average temperature to be limited at 1.5 degrees Celsius, which scientists say would keep the impact of climate change at manageable levels.

Many businesses, including fossil fuel companies, rely heavily on carbon offset schemes based on afforestation to compensate for continuing carbon emissions.

But there has been growing interest in the newest carbon dioxide removal method, of which Climeworks is the industry leader: a chemical process known as direct air carbon capture and storage.

In its report last year, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that regardless of how quickly the world slashes greenhouse gas emissions, it will still need to suck CO2 from the atmosphere to avoid climate catastrophe.

But it remains to be seen whether this can be done at scale.

So far, Climeworks’ direct air capture facility in Iceland, the largest in the world, removes in a year what humanity emits in 3 to 4 seconds.

The company has not divulged how much its clients are paying for the service, and how much CO2 each client wants extracted.
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It was an anomaly detected in the storm of a nuclear reactor so puzzling that physicists hoped it would shine a light on dark matter, one of the universe’s greatest mysteries. 

However, new research has definitively ruled out that this strange measurement signaled the existence of a “sterile neutrino,” a hypothetical particle that has long eluded scientists.  

Neutrinos are sometimes called “ghost particles” because they barely interact with other matter — around 100 trillion are estimated to pass through our bodies every second. 

Since neutrinos were first theorized in 1930, scientists have been trying to nail down the properties of these shapeshifters, which are one of the most common particles in the universe. 

They appear “when the nature of the nucleus of an atom has been changed,” physicist David Lhuillier of France’s Atomic Energy Commission told AFP. 

That could happen when they come together in the furious fusion in the heart of stars like our sun, or are broken apart in nuclear reactors, he said. 

There are three confirmed flavors of neutrinos: electron, muon and tau. 

However, physicists suspect there could be a fourth neutrino, dubbed “sterile” because it does not interact with ordinary matter at all. 

In theory, it would answer only to gravity and not the fundamental force of weak interactions, which still hold sway over the other neutrinos. 

The sterile neutrino has a place ready for it in theoretical physics, “but there has not yet been a clear demonstration that it exists,” he added. 

Dark matter candidate  

So Lhuillier and the rest of the STEREO collaboration, which brings together French and German scientists, set out to find it. 

Previous nuclear reactor measurements had found fewer neutrinos than the amount expected by theoretical models, a phenomenon dubbed the “reactor antineutrino anomaly.” 

It was suggested that the missing neutrinos had changed into the sterile kind, offering a rare chance to prove their existence. 

To find out, the STEREO collaboration installed a dedicated detector a few meters away from a nuclear reactor used for research at the Laue–Langevin institute in Grenoble, France. 

After four years of observing more than 100,000 neutrinos and two years analyzing the data, the verdict was published in the journal Nature on Wednesday. 

The anomaly “cannot be explained by sterile neutrinos,” Lhuillier said.  

But that “does not mean there are none in the universe,” he added. 

The experiment found that previous predictions about the amount of neutrinos being produced were incorrect. 

But it was not a total loss, because it offered a much clearer picture of neutrinos emitted by nuclear reactors. This could help not just with future research, but also for monitoring nuclear reactors. 

Meanwhile, the search for the sterile neutrino continues. Particle accelerators, which smash atoms, could offer up new leads. 

Despite the setback, interest could remain high because sterile neutrinos have been considered a suspect for dark matter, which makes up more than a quarter of the universe but remains shrouded in mystery.  

Like dark matter, the sterile neutrino does not interact with ordinary matter, making it incredibly difficult to observe. 

“It would be a candidate which would explain why we see the effects of dark matter — and why we cannot see dark matter,” Lhuillier said.
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The effects of the war in Ukraine are extending beyond Moscow and Kyiv, and may be impacting not only people but also wildlife. VOA’s Bilal Hussain reports from Srinagar, in Indian-administered Kashmir. VOA Mandarin Service contributed to this report.
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The World Health Organization has issued an alert warning against the use of two Indian cough syrups blamed for the deaths of at least 20 children in Uzbekistan.

WHO said the products, manufactured by India’s Marion Biotech, were “substandard” and that the firm had failed to provide guarantees about their “safety and quality.”

The alert, issued Wednesday, comes after Uzbekistan authorities said last month at least 20 children died after consuming a syrup made by the company under the brand name Doc-1 Max.

India’s health ministry subsequently suspended production at the company and Uzbekistan banned the import and sale of Doc-1 Max.

The WHO alert said an analysis of the syrup samples by the quality control laboratories of Uzbekistan found “unacceptable amounts of diethylene glycol and /or ethylene glycol as contaminants.”

Diethylene glycol and ethylene are toxic to humans when consumed and can prove fatal.

“Both of these products may have marketing authorizations in other countries in the region. They may also have been distributed, through informal markets, to other countries or regions,” WHO said.

The products were “unsafe and their use, especially in children, may result in serious injury or death,” it said.

Marion Biotech officials could not be reached immediately for comment.

It is the second Indian drugmaker to face a probe by regulators since October, when the WHO linked another firm’s medicines to a spate of child deaths in Gambia.

Maiden Pharmaceuticals was accused of manufacturing several toxic cough and cold remedies that led to the deaths of at least 66 children in the African country.

The victims, mostly between 5 months and 4 years old, died of acute renal failure.

India launched a probe into Maiden Pharmaceuticals but later said the investigation had found the suspect drugs were of “standard quality.”
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A recently published report in a U.S.-based magazine says Iran is likely using facial recognition technology to monitor women’s compliance with the country’s hijab law.

While there are other ways people can be identified, Wired magazine says Iran’s apparent use of facial recognition technology against women is “perhaps the first known instance of a government using face recognition to impose dress law on women based on religious belief.”

Iran announced late last year that it would begin to use recognition technology to monitor its women.

Wired said that since the protests that have erupted across Iran following the death of a young women who was arrested for wearing her headscarf improperly, Iranian women are reporting that they are being arrested for hijab infractions a day or two after attending protests, even though they had no interaction with police during the protests.

Tiandy, a Chinese company blacklisted by the U.S., is a likely provider of facial recognition technology to Iran, although neither it nor Iranian officials responded to a request for comment from Wired.

The company has in the past listed the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corp and other Iranian police and government agencies as customers. Tiandy also boasted on its website that its technology has helped China identify the country’s ethnic minorities, including Uyghurs.
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Guan Yao, who lives in California, never thought that on his last video chat with his grandmother in Beijing he would watch her die.

He had installed a tiny robot camera in his grandmother’s home some time ago so they could be in constant contact after he moved to the U.S. in 2016. She took to the device, holding it almost as if it provided the comfort of his touch.

Guan was video chatting with her throughout the last four hours of her life on December 22.

The 85-year-old had tested positive for COVID-19 and had had a fever for days. Two days before dying, she finally got a bed in a hospital.

Guan watched her blood oxygen saturation level suddenly turn from a low of 70 to a question mark. The doctor announced her death after an electrocardiogram.

“Her final death certificate said kidney failure because she had kidney disease before,” Guan told VOA Mandarin from his home in the Los Angeles area. “Not COVID.”

On the same day, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention issued an epidemic report stating that “there were no new deaths of COVID.”

Before his grandmother died, Guan, 39, an IT professional, had already lost four relatives in his extended family since December 14: his father-in-law, his father, an uncle and another elderly female relative. Among them, only Guan’s grandmother and uncle had tested positive for COVID-19. The others died before getting tested.

His father-in-law died of asthma. His father had heart disease and died in his sleep. His uncle’s medical images showed the white lungs associated with COVID-19 when he was sent to the hospital, but his death certificate states Parkinson’s disease as the cause.

China’s “zero-COVID” policy reversed almost overnight after three years on December 7, when the government issued the “New Ten Measures” for epidemic prevention that announced the relaxation of coronavirus-containment controls.

A tsunami-like COVID outbreak followed, its magnitude suggested by countless tragedies reported every day on social media despite China’s relentless internet censorship.

“The last day of 2022 ended with a funeral, and 2023 started with another funeral. In just half a month, the old people around here have been infected and died one after another. The sadness is lasting a bit too long,” wrote a poster from Jiangsu province.

“I work in a hospital, and I see people die every day. The crematorium works 24 hours every day, but people still have to wait in line,” wrote a poster from Guangdong.

Guan said, “The reopening was too sudden, prompting such a large-scale outbreak, and the medical system was completely unprepared for a large number of infection cases.”

Until January 7, the official death toll from COVID-19 remained at 30.

“The statistics are definitely underreported by a lot,” said Guan, a political activist who is a board member of Dialogue China, a nongovernmental think tank established by Tiananmen student leader Wang Dan. “My aunt said that she was in the emergency room and saw four or five people die and be carried away in such a short period of time.”

Tan Hua, who is in Shanghai and is infected with COVID-19, told VOA Mandarin that “we don’t have access to the official data now, and we don’t pay attention to the data on severe disease and death, because it’s completely inconsistent with how we feel around us.”

When Guan’s father died, the family found a one-stop service from the funeral home and spent about 30,000 yuan or roughly $4,400 to cremate him — twice the usual price. Without paying extra, they had to wait in a long queue.

When Guan’s grandmother died, the hospital said the government had a collective arrangement and that all the bodies would be stored in the funeral home, waiting for collective cremation.

An official notice informed the family that the morgues in hospitals and funeral homes were full and that local warehouses had been turned into temporary morgues until the collective cremation scheduled for January 19.

For unknown reasons, Guan said his grandmother’s body was not sent to the temporary morgue and was cremated on December 31.

Three years ago, when the pandemic broke out in Wuhan, Guan bought masks for his family in Beijing and told them not to believe the government. He thought they were spreading lies to cover up the pandemic. He never imagined that after three years of lockdown, China would witness death on such a scale.

“The three years [of lockdown] were meaningless,” Guan said. “It’s really unacceptable that so many loved ones have passed away. Whenever I think about it, I get really, really angry and sometimes I bang on the table at breakfast.”

When other overseas Chinese media approached Guan, hoping to interview him about the deaths in his family, he declined.

“I worried that they [the government] were going to do something under the rug,” he said. “My grandmother was such an important relative, and if she couldn’t be cremated because of my [media] appearance, my family would hate me for the rest of my life.”

Now that all five of his relatives have been cremated, Guan said that he doesn’t mind telling his story.

“Five relatives left in eight days. It’s too unusual. Someone has to tell the story,” he said.

The Lunar New Year arrives on January 22 this year. Guan’s father always spent New Year’s Eve with his mother, Guan’s grandmother. Being so far away across the Pacific Ocean, Guan would make video calls to his grandmother on the holiday, sharing New Year’s blessings, chatting about family affairs and making jokes.

This year, he keeps thinking of his grandmother who died not knowing that her only son had died three days before her.

“There is no one left home,” Guan said. “To be honest, there is nothing to celebrate this year.”

Hai Bao and Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
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