Khalid Al-Khateb was born in Libya in the 1990s without the use of his legs. Despite wars and economic collapse in his country, the greatest challenge he has faced is trying to function in a world where disabilities are mostly ignored. From Tripoli, Libya, Malik Ghariani has this animated story.
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Category: Silicon Valley
Silicon valley news. Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley
DALLAS, TEXAS — The number of people with measles in Texas increased to 146 in an outbreak that led this week to the death of an unvaccinated school-aged child, health officials said Friday.
The number of cases — Texas’ largest in nearly 30 years — increased by 22 since Tuesday. The Texas Department of State Health Services said cases span over nine counties in Texas and 20 patients have been hospitalized.
The child who died Tuesday night in the outbreak is the first U.S. death from the highly contagious but preventable respiratory disease since 2015, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s top health official and a vaccine critic, said Wednesday that the U.S. Department of the Health and Human Services was watching cases but dismissed the outbreak as “not unusual.”
But on Friday afternoon, Kennedy said in a post on X that his heart went out to families impacted by the outbreak, and he recognized “the serious impact of this outbreak on families, children, and healthcare workers.”
Kennedy also said his agency will continue to fund Texas’ immunization program and that ending the outbreak is a “top priority” for him and his team.
The virus has largely spread through rural, oil rig-dotted West Texas, with cases concentrated in a “close-knit, undervaccinated” Mennonite community, state health department spokesperson Lara Anton has said.
Gaines County has a strong homeschooling and private school community. It is also home to one of the highest rates of school-aged children in Texas who have opted out of at least one required vaccine, with nearly 14% skipping a required dose last school year.
Texas law allows children to get an exemption from school vaccines for reasons of conscience, including religious beliefs. Anton has said the number of unvaccinated kids in Gaines County is likely significantly higher because homeschooled children’s data would not be reported.
The measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine is safe and highly effective at preventing infection and severe cases. The first shot is recommended for children ages 12 to 15 months, and the second for ages 4 to 6 years. Most kids will recover from measles, but infection can lead to dangerous complications such as pneumonia, blindness, brain swelling and death.
Vaccination rates have declined nationwide since the COVID-19 pandemic, and most states are below the 95% vaccination threshold for kindergartners — the level needed to protect communities against measles outbreaks.
The U.S. had considered measles eliminated in 2000, which meant there had been a halt in continuous spread of the disease for at least a year. Measles cases rose in 2024, including a Chicago outbreak that sickened more than 60.
Eastern New Mexico has nine cases of measles, but the state health department said there is no connection to the outbreak in West Texas.
At a news conference Friday in Austin, officials urged people to get vaccinated if they are not already.
“We’re here to say quite simply: Measles can kill, ignorance can kill and vaccine denial definitely kills,” said U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat.
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GABORONE, BOTSWANA — Southern Africa energy experts and political leaders pledged to improve access to energy at a summit in Botswana this week. The commitments come as most countries in the region still rely on coal, a major contributor to global warming.
More than 500 participants from 16 Southern African Development Community, or SADC, member states, as well as other African countries, participated in the energy gathering.
Moses Ntlamelle, a senior SADC programs officer, said pursuing a more inclusive transition to cleaner energy was one of the resolutions that regional representatives adopted at the summit.
“The region is recommended to expedite just energy transition and explore the development of a regional renewable energy market,” he said. “This is to ensure that nobody is left behind. … Inasmuch as we are going for cleaner energy, we must ensure that this energy transition is just to everybody.”
Botswanan President Duma Boko spoke about the need to end energy poverty.
“Countries across the SADC region face challenges related to energy poverty,” Boko said. “This constrains our economies, leaving millions of people, especially in rural areas, without access to critical services like health, education, communication, among others. A clarion call for an energy-secure region is, therefore, urgent in order to drive industrialization and integration of our economies.”
Most Southern Africa countries rely on coal for energy. Boko called on the region to cut its dependence on fossil fuels and speed up the transition to green energy.
“We should incentivize renewable energy and energy-efficiency projects and initiatives, enforce environmental protections and establish clear roadmaps for a just and equitable energy transition, which is relevant to the realities of our countries and region,” he said. “As a region, let us set tangible targets not only to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels but also to increase the use of renewables.”
Yunus Alokore, a technical expert at the intergovernmental organization East Africa Center for Renewable Energy and Efficiency, told VOA that if Africa wants to accelerate its transition to sustainable energy, several key elements are needed.
“There has to be policies in place and regulatory framework,” Alokore said. “What this does is that it creates transparent, long-term, consistent target, which is something that investors and development partners need.”
Alokore said access to finance is also key.
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Apple announced this week it would spend $500 billion in the U.S. over the next four years and create 20,000 jobs, signaling its pro-U.S. jobs and investment policy. U.S. President Donald Trump also announced he would double tariffs on China, where most Apple products are made. Michelle Quinn reports.
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WASHINGTON — This year’s harsh flu season — the most intense in 15 years — has federal health officials trying to understand if it sparked an increase in a rare but life-threatening brain complication in children.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates 19,000 people have died from the flu so far this winter, including 86 children. On Thursday, the CDC reported at least nine of those children experienced brain complications, and it has asked state health departments to help investigate if there are more such cases.
There is some good news: The CDC also reported that this year’s flu shots do a pretty good job preventing hospitalization from the flu — among the 45% of Americans who got vaccinated. But it comes a day after the Trump administration canceled a meeting of experts who are supposed to help choose the recipe for next winter’s flu vaccine.
Still, it’s not too late to get vaccinated this year: “If you haven’t gotten your flu shot yet, get it because we’re still seeing high flu circulation in most of the country,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Flu shot effectiveness varies from year to year. While not great at blocking infections, the vaccine’s main role “is to keep you out of the hospital and to keep you alive,” said Vanderbilt University vaccine expert Dr. William Schaffner.
Preliminary CDC data released Thursday found that children who got this year’s vaccine were between 64% and 78% less likely to be hospitalized than their unvaccinated counterparts, and adults were 41% to 55% less likely to be hospitalized.
Earlier this month, state health departments and hospitals warned doctors to watch for child flu patients with seizures, hallucinations or other signs of “influenza-associated encephalopathy or encephalitis” — and a more severe subtype called “acute necrotizing encephalopathy.” Encephalitis is brain inflammation.
On Thursday, the CDC released an analysis of 1,840 child flu deaths since 2010, finding 166 with those neurologic complications. Most were unvaccinated children. But the agency concluded it’s unclear if this year’s nine deaths with those complications — four of whom had the worse subtype — mark an uptick.
There’s no regular tracking of those neurologic complications, making it hard to find the answers. In California, Dr. Keith Van Haren of Stanford Medicine Children’s Health said earlier this month that he’d learned of about 15 flu-related cases of that severe subtype from doctors around the country and “we are aware of more cases that may also meet the criteria.” He did not say how many died.
O’Leary, with the pediatricians’ academy, said parents should remember this complication is rare — the advice remains to seek medical advice anytime a child with flu has unusual or concerning symptoms, such as labored breathing.
Doctors see more neurologic complications during severe flu seasons — they may be linked to particular influenza strains — and survivors can have ongoing seizures or other lingering problems, he said.
Meanwhile, vaccine makers are gearing up for the monthslong process of brewing next winter’s flu shots. A Food and Drug Administration advisory committee was supposed to meet on March 13 to help choose which flu strains to include but with that meeting’s cancellation, it’s unclear if the government will decide on its own.
“The FDA will make public its recommendations to manufacturers in time for updated vaccines to be available for the 2025-2026 influenza season,” Andrew Nixon, communications director for the Department of Health and Human Services, said in an email.
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A public-private partnership aims for a dark landing on the moon. Plus, a look at why Mars is red, and a phenomenon known as a planetary parade. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA — Katy Perry and Gayle King are headed to space with Jeff Bezos’ fiancee, Lauren Sanchez, and three other women.
Bezos’ rocket company, Blue Origin, announced the all-female celebrity crew on Thursday. Sanchez, a helicopter pilot and former TV journalist, picked the crew who will join her on a 10-minute spaceflight from west Texas, the company said.
They will blast off sometime this spring aboard a New Shepard rocket. No launch date was given.
Blue Origin has flown tourists on short hops to space since 2021. Some passengers have gotten free rides, while others have paid a hefty sum to experience weightlessness.
It was not immediately known who’s footing the bill for this upcoming flight.
Sanchez invited singer Perry and TV journalist King, as well as former NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, research scientist Amanda Nguyen and movie producer Kerianne Flynn.
This will be Blue Origin’s 11th human spaceflight. Bezos climbed aboard with his brother for the inaugural flight.
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TOKYO — The number of babies born in Japan fell to a record low of 720,988 in 2024 for a ninth consecutive year of decline, the health ministry said on Thursday, underscoring the rapid aging and dwindling of the population.
Births were down 5% on the year, despite measures in 2023 by former Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s government to boost child-bearing, while a record number of 1.62 million deaths meant that more than two people died for every new baby born.
Although the fertility rate in neighboring South Korea rose in 2024 for the first time in nine years, thanks to measures to spur young people to marry and have children, the trend in Japan has yet to show an upturn.
Behind Japan’s childbirth decline are fewer marriages in recent years, stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, said Takumi Fujinami, an economist at the Japan Research Institute.
Although the number of marriages edged up 2.2% to 499,999 in 2024, that came only after steep declines, such as a plunge of 12.7% in 2020.
“The impact could linger on in 2025 as well,” Fujinami said.
Unlike some Western countries, only a few of every 100 babies in Japan are born out of wedlock, suggesting a stronger correlation between marriages and births.
News this week that South Korea’s fertility rate rose to 0.75 in 2024 from 0.72 in 2023 suggested the neighboring nation’s demographic crisis might have turned a corner.
In Japan, the most recent data shows the corresponding figure for the average number of babies a woman is expected to have during her reproductive life came in at 1.20 in 2023.
While it was too early for any meaningful comparison between the figures in the two countries, Fujinami warned, it was important for both to improve job opportunities and close the gender gap to encourage young people to marry and have children.
Experts believe South Korea’s positive turn resulted from government support in the three areas of work-family balance, childcare and housing, as well as a campaign for businesses to nudge employees towards parenthood.
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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — A private company launched another lunar lander Wednesday, aiming to get closer to the moon’s south pole this time with a drone that will hop into a black crater where the sun never shines.
Intuitive Machines’ lander, named Athena, caught a lift with SpaceX from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. It’s taking a fast track to the moon, with a landing on March 6. The company hopes to avoid the fate of Athena’s predecessor, which tipped over at touchdown.
Never before have so many spacecraft angled for the moon’s surface all at once. Last month, U.S. and Japanese companies shared a rocket and separately launched landers toward the moon. The lander from the U.S. company, Firefly Aerospace of Texas, should get there first this weekend.
The two U.S. landers are carrying tens of millions of dollars’ worth of experiments for NASA as it prepares to return astronauts to the moon.
“It’s an amazing time. There’s so much energy,” NASA science mission chief Nicky Fox told The Associated Press a few hours ahead of the launch.
Last year, Texas-based Intuitive Machines made the first U.S. touchdown on the moon in more than 50 years. But an instrument that gauges distance did not work, and the lander came down too hard and broke a leg, tipping onto its side.
Intuitive Machines said it has fixed that issue and dozens of others. A sideways landing like last time would prevent a drone and a pair of rovers from moving out. A NASA drill that’s aboard also needs an upright landing to be able to pierce the lunar surface and gather soil samples for analysis.
“Certainly, we will be better this time than we were last time. But you never know what could happen,” said Trent Martin, senior vice president of space systems.
It’s an extraordinarily elite club. Only five countries have pulled off a lunar landing over the decades: Russia, the U.S., China, India and Japan. The moon is littered with wreckage from many past failures.
The 4.7-meter (15-foot) Athena will target a landing 160 kilometers (100 miles) from the lunar south pole. Just 400 meters (a quarter mile) away is a permanently shadowed crater — the ultimate destination for the drone named Grace.
Named after the late computer programming pioneer Grace Hopper, the 1-meter (3-foot) drone will make three increasingly higher and longer test hops across the lunar surface using hydrazine-fueled thrusters for flight and cameras and lasers for navigation.
If those excursions go well, it will hop into the nearby pitch-black crater, an estimated 20 meters (65 feet) deep. Science instruments from Hungary and Germany will take measurements at the bottom while hunting for frozen water.
It will be the first up-close peek inside one of the many shadowed craters dotting both the north and south poles. Scientists suspect these craters are packed with tons of ice. If so, this ice could be transformed by future explorers into water to drink, air to breathe and even rocket fuel.
NASA is paying $62 million to Intuitive Machines to get its drill and other experiments to the moon. The company, in turn, sold space on the lander to others. It also opened up the Falcon rocket to ride-sharing.
Tagalongs included NASA’s Lunar Trailblazer satellite, which will fly separately to the moon over the next several months before entering lunar orbit to map the distribution of water below. Also catching a ride was a private spacecraft that will chase after an asteroid for a flyby, a precursor to asteroid mining.
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KINSHASA, CONGO — Unidentified illnesses in northwestern Congo have killed more than 50 people over the past five weeks, nearly half of them within hours after they felt sick.
The outbreaks in two distant villages in Congo’s Equateur province began on Jan. 21 and include 419 cases and 53 deaths. Health officials still do not know the cause, or whether the cases in the two villages, which are separated by more than 190 kilometers (118 miles), are related. It’s also unclear how the diseases are spreading, including whether they are spreading between people.
The first victims in one of the villages were children who ate a bat and died within 48 hours, the Africa office of the World Health Organization said this week. More infections were found in the other village, where at least some of the patients have malaria.
Outbreaks in two remote villages
Illnesses have been clustered in two remote villages in different health zones of Equateur province, which is 640 kilometers (398 miles) from Kinshasa.
The first outbreak began in the village of Boloko after three children ate a bat and died within 48 hours. More than two weeks later a second and larger outbreak was recorded in the village of Bomate, where more than 400 people have been sickened. According to WHO’s Africa office, no links have been established between the cases in the two villages.
Dr. Serge Ngalebato, medical director of Bikoro Hospital, a regional monitoring center, and one of the government experts deployed to respond to the outbreak, says the situations in the two villages are somewhat different.
“The first one with a lot of deaths, that we continue to investigate because it’s an unusual situation, (and) in the second episode that we’re dealing with, we see a lot of the cases of malaria,” said Ngalebato.
The WHO Africa office said the quick progression from sickness to death in Boloko is a key concern, along with the high number of deaths in Bomate.
What are the symptoms?
Congo’s Ministry of Health said about 80% of the patients share similar symptoms including fever, chills, body aches and diarrhea.
While these symptoms can be caused by many common infections, health officials initially feared the symptoms and the quick deaths of some of the victims could also be a sign of a hemorrhagic fever such as Ebola, which was also linked to an infected animal.
However, Ebola and similar diseases including Marburg have been ruled out after more than a dozen samples were collected and tested in the capital of Kinshasa.
The WHO said it is investigating a number of possible causes, including malaria, viral hemorrhagic fever, food or water poisoning, typhoid fever and meningitis.
What is being done in response?
Congo’s government says experts have been sent to the villages since Feb. 14, mainly to help investigate the cases and slow the spread.
Ngalebato said patients have been responding to treatments that target the different symptoms.
The remote location of the villages has hindered access to patients while the weak health care infrastructure has made it difficult to carry out surveillance and manage patients. Such challenges are common in disease outbreaks in Congo. In December, an unknown illness killed dozens.
In the latest outbreaks, several victims died before experts could even reach them, Ngalebato said.
There needs to be urgent action “to accelerate laboratory investigations, improve case management and isolation capacities, and strengthen surveillance and risk communication,” the WHO Africa office has said.
The United States has been the largest bilateral donor to Congo’s health sector and supported the training of hundreds of field epidemiologists to help detect and control diseases across the vast country. The outbreaks were detected as the Trump administration put a freeze on foreign aid during a 90-day review.
Is there a link to Congo’s forests?
There have long been concerns about diseases jumping from animals to humans in places where people regularly eat wild animals. The number of such outbreaks in Africa has surged by more than 60% in the last decade, the WHO said in 2022.
Experts say this might be what is happening in Congo, which is home to about 60% of the forests in the Congo Basin, home to the largest expanse of tropical forest on Earth.
“All these viruses are viruses that have reservoirs in the forest. And so, as long as we have these forests, we will always have a few epidemics with viruses which will mutate,” said Gabriel Nsakala, a professor of public health at Congo’s National Pedagogical University, who previously worked at the Congolese health ministry on Ebola and coronavirus response programs.
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LUBBOCK, TEXAS — A person who was hospitalized with measles has died from measles in West Texas, the first death in an outbreak that began late last month.
Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center spokesperson Melissa Whitfield confirmed the death Wednesday.
It wasn’t clear the age of the patient, who died overnight. Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The measles outbreak in rural West Texas has grown to 124 cases across nine counties, the state health department said Tuesday.
There are also nine cases in eastern New Mexico. Measles is a respiratory virus that can survive in the air for up to two hours.
Up to 9 out of 10 people who are susceptible will get the virus if exposed, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most kids will recover from the measles if they get it, but infection can lead to dangerous complications like pneumonia, blindness, brain swelling and death.
The outbreak is largely spreading in the Mennonite community in an area where small towns are separated by vast stretches of oil rig-dotted open land but connected due to people traveling between towns for work, church, grocery shopping and other day-to-day errands.
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WASHINGTON — The U.S. will invest up to $1 billion to combat the spread of bird flu, including increasing imports of eggs, agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins said on Wednesday.
A three-year bird flu outbreak in U.S. poultry has killed 166 million chickens since 2022, according to USDA data.
The virus has also infected nearly 1,000 dairy herds and almost 70 people, including one death, since early 2024.
The USDA will spend up to $500 million to provide free biosecurity audits to farms and $400 million to increase payment rates to farmers who need to kill their chickens due to bird flu, Rollins said at a conference of state agriculture officials.
Some of the money will come from cuts to USDA spending by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, Rollins said in a Wednesday Wall Street Journal op-ed.
The USDA is exploring vaccines for chickens but is not yet authorizing their use, Rollins said. The poultry industry is divided on whether to vaccinate chickens because of potential trade implications.
The administration plans to increase imports and decrease exports of eggs to boost domestic supply and combat record high egg prices, Rollins said. Turkey has said it will export 15,000 tons of eggs to the U.S. through July.
In May, the administration of former president Joe Biden allocated more than $800 million to combat bird flu in livestock. About $450 million of that money is still available, a USDA official said on Tuesday at the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture conference.
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Earth is not in danger of being hit by an asteroid in the near future, NASA and the European Space Agency said Tuesday.
The proclamations from the two agencies came after an asteroid dubbed 2024 YR4, discovered in December, had scientists speculating that it could strike Earth in December 2032.
Scientists now project the asteroid will simply fly past our planet. That’s a good thing, because an asteroid that big, measuring 40 to 90 meters across, could cause a lot of damage.
After two months of observation, scientists have significantly reduced the odds of the asteroid hitting Earth. At one point the likelihood of a strike was as high as 3%. ESA has reduced the odds to 0.001%, while NASA has reduced its odds to 0.0027%.
“That’s the outcome we expected all along, although we couldn’t be 100% sure that it would happen,” said Paul Chodas, who heads up NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies.
The odds changed because the world’s telescopes were able to track the asteroid, narrowing where a strike could occur and increasingly ruling out the odds of a direct hit. The asteroid is moving away from Earth and is expected to disappear from view in one or two months.
“While this asteroid no longer poses a significant impact hazard to Earth, 2024 YR4 provided an invaluable opportunity” for study, NASA said in a statement.
NASA cautioned, however, that there is a small chance the asteroid could hit the moon in 2032. The probability, according to NASA, of that happening currently stands at 1.7%. NASA’s Chodas thinks those odds will likely dwindle, too.
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KINSHASA, DR Congo — An unknown illness has killed over 50 people in northwestern Congo, according to doctors on the ground and the World Health Organization on Monday.
The interval between the onset of symptoms and death has been 48 hours in the majority of cases, and “that’s what’s really worrying,” Serge Ngalebato, medical director of Bikoro Hospital, a regional monitoring center, told The Associated Press.
The latest disease outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo began on Jan. 21, and 419 cases have been recorded including 53 deaths.
According to the WHO’s Africa office, the first outbreak in the town of Boloko began after three children ate a bat and died within 48 hours following hemorrhagic fever symptoms.
There have long been concerns about diseases jumping from animals to humans in places where wild animals are popularly eaten. The number of such outbreaks in Africa has surged by more than 60% in the last decade, the WHO said in 2022.
After the second outbreak of the current mystery disease began in the town of Bomate on Feb. 9, samples from 13 cases have been sent to the National Institute for Biomedical Research in Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, for testing, the WHO said.
All samples have been negative for Ebola or other common hemorrhagic fever diseases like Marburg. Some tested positive for malaria.
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BOGOTA, Colombia — An annual United Nations conference on biodiversity that ran out of time last year will resume its work Tuesday in Rome with money at the top of the agenda.
That is, how to spend what’s been pledged so far — and how to raise a lot more to help preserve plant and animal life on Earth.
The talks in Colombia, known as COP16, yielded some significant outcomes before they broke up in November, including an agreement that requires companies that benefit from genetic resources in nature — say, by developing medicines from rainforest plants — to share the benefits. And steps were taken to give Indigenous peoples and local communities a stronger voice in conservation matters.
But two weeks turned out to be not enough time to get everything done.
The Cali talks followed the historic 2022 COP15 accord in Montreal, which included 23 measures aimed at protecting biodiversity. Those included putting 30% of the planet and 30% of degraded ecosystems under protection by 2030, known as the Global Biodiversity Framework.
“Montreal was about the ‘what’ — what are we all working towards together?” said Georgina Chandler, head of policy and campaigns for the Zoological Society London. “Cali was supposed to focus on the ‘how’ — putting the plans and the financing in place to ensure we can actually implement this framework.”
“They eventually lost a quorum because people simply went home,” said Linda Krueger of The Nature Conservancy, who is in Rome for the two days of talks “And so now we’re having to finish these last critical decisions, which are some of the nitty gritty decisions on financing, on resource mobilization and on the planning and monitoring and reporting requirements under the Global Biodiversity Framework.”
The overall financial aim was to achieve $20 billion a year in the fund by 2025, and then $30 billion by 2030. So far, only $383 million had been pledged as of November, from 12 nations or sub-nations: Austria, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Norway, Province of Québec, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
Participants will discuss establishing a “global financing instrument for biodiversity” intended to effectively distribute the money raised. And a big part of the talks will be about raising more money.
‘Completely off track’ on larger financial goal
Chandler and Kruger both said the finance points at Colombia’s talks were particularly contentious.
“It’s really about how do we collect the money and how do we get it distributed fairly. Get it to the ground where it’s needed most, so that that’s really the core issue,” said Kruger.
Oscar Soria, chief executive of The Common Initiative, a think tank specializing in global economic and environmental policy, was pessimistic about raising a great deal more money.
“We are completely off track in terms of achieving that money,” Soria said. Key sources of biodiversity finance are shrinking or disappearing, he said.
“What was supposed to be a good Colombian telenovela in which people will actually bring the right resources, and the happy ending of bringing their money, could actually end up being a tragic Italian opera, where no one actually agrees to anything and everyone loses,” Soria said.
Susana Muhamad, Colombia’s former environment minister and the COP16 president, said she’s hopeful of “a good message from Rome.”
“That message is that still, even with a very fragmented geopolitical landscape, with a world increasingly in conflict, we can still get an agreement on some fundamental issues,” Muhamad said in a statement. “And one of the most important is the need to protect life in this crisis of climate change and biodiversity.”
Global wildlife populations have plunged on average by 73% in 50 years, according to an October report from the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London.
“Biodiversity is basically essential to our livelihoods and well-being,” Chandler said. “It’s essential to the the air we breathe, the water we drink, rainfall that food systems rely on, protecting us from increasing temperatures and increasing storm occurrences as well.”
Chandler said deforestation in the Amazon has far-reaching impacts across South America, just as it does in the Congo Basin and other major biodiverse regions worldwide.
“We know that has an impact on rainfall, on food systems, on soil integrity in other countries. So it’s not just something that’s kind of small and isolated. It’s a widespread problem,” she said.
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LONDON — More than 1,000 musicians including Kate Bush and Cat Stevens on Tuesday released a silent album to protest proposed changes to Britain’s copyright laws which could allow tech firms to train artificial intelligence models using their work.
Creative industries globally are grappling with the legal and ethical implications of AI models that can produce their own output after being trained on popular works without necessarily paying the creators of the original content.
Britain, which Prime Minister Keir Starmer wants to become an AI superpower, has proposed relaxing laws that currently give creators of literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works the right to control the ways their material may be used.
The proposed changes would allow AI developers to train their models on any material to which they have lawful access, and would require creators to proactively opt out to stop their work being used.
The changes have been heavily criticized by many artists, who say it would reverse the principle of copyright law, which grants exclusive control to creators for their work.
“In the music of the future, will our voices go unheard?” said Bush, whose 1985 hit “Running Up That Hill” enjoyed a resurgence in 2022 thanks to Netflix show “Stranger Things.”
The co-written album titled “Is This What We Want?” features recordings of empty studios and performance spaces to represent what organizers say is the potential impact on artists’ livelihoods should the changes go ahead.
A public consultation on the legal changes closes later on Tuesday.
Responding to the album, a government spokesperson said the current copyright and AI regime was holding back the creative industries, media and AI sector from “realizing their full potential.”
“We have engaged extensively with these sectors throughout and will continue to do so. No decisions have been taken,” the spokesperson said, adding that the government’s proposals will be set out in due course.
Annie Lennox, Billy Ocean, Hans Zimmer, Tori Amos and The Clash are among the musicians urging the government to review its plans.
“The government’s proposal would hand the life’s work of the country’s musicians to AI companies, for free, letting those companies exploit musicians’ work to outcompete them,” said organizer Ed Newton-Rex, the founder of Fairly Trained, a non-profit that certifies generative AI companies for fairer training data practices.
“The UK can be leaders in AI without throwing our world-leading creative industries under the bus.”
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U.S. tech giant Apple has announced plans to create some 20,000 jobs and invest $500 billion over the next four years in the United States.
Apple says it will expand teams and facilities in nine states across the country and that it aims to open a 23,200-square-meter server manufacturing facility in Texas in 2026.
The announcement comes just days after Apple CEO Tim Cook met with U.S. President Donald Trump.
“We are bullish on the future of American innovation, and we’re proud to build on our long-standing U.S. investments with this $500 billion commitment to our country’s future,” Cook said on the investment.
“From doubling our Advanced Manufacturing Fund, to building advanced technology in Texas, we’re thrilled to expand our support for American manufacturing. And we’ll keep working with people and companies across this country to help write an extraordinary new chapter in the history of American innovation,” he added in a company statement.
Trump thanked Cook and Apple for the investment on Monday morning on the social media platform Truth Social.
“Apple has just announced a record $500 billion investment in the United States of America. The reason, faith in what we are doing, without which, they wouldn’t be investing 10 cents,” Trump said.
Most of Apple’s consumer goods are currently assembled and produced overseas. Many of them, assembled in China, are liable to 10% tariffs imposed by Trump earlier in February.
To reduce its reliance on international supply chains, Apple announced in January that it had begun mass producing its own chips at an Arizona factory owned by TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
The TSMC Arizona factory, along with legislation aimed at increasing U.S. semiconductor production, were two of Trump’s largest industrial policy moves during his first term.
In a release on its website, Apple said the $500 billion commitment includes the company’s work with thousands of suppliers across all 50 states, direct employment, Apple Intelligence infrastructure and data centers, corporate facilities, and Apple TV+ production in 20 states.
Apple said it is also set to open a manufacturing academy in Michigan, offering training led by engineers and local university staff to support mid-sized manufacturing firms in areas like project management and manufacturing processes.
Sydney — Australia’s online safety regulator fined messaging platform Telegram about $640,000 on Monday for its delay in answering questions about measures the app took to prevent the spread of child abuse and violent extremist material.
The eSafety Commission in March 2024 sought responses from social media platforms YouTube, X and Facebook to Telegram and Reddit, and blamed them for not doing enough to stop extremists from using live-streaming features, algorithms and recommendation systems to recruit users.
Telegram and Reddit were asked about the steps they were taking to combat child sexual abuse material on their services. They had to respond by May, but Telegram submitted its response in October.
“Timely transparency is not a voluntary requirement in Australia and this action reinforces the importance of all companies complying with Australian law,” eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said in a statement.
Telegram’s delay in providing information obstructed eSafety from implementing its online safety measures, Grant said.
Telegram said it had fully responded to all eSafety’s questions last year, with no outstanding issues.
“The unfair and disproportionate penalty concerns only the response time frame, and we intend to appeal,” the company said in an email.
Australia’s spy agency in December said one in five priority counterterrorism cases investigated involved youths.
The messaging platform has been under growing scrutiny around the world since its founder Pavel Durov was placed under formal investigation in France in August in connection with alleged use of the app for illegal activities.
Durov, who is out on bail, has denied the allegations.
Grant said Big Tech must be transparent and put in place measures to prevent their services from being misused as the threat posed by online extremist materials poses a growing risk.
“If we want accountability from the tech industry we need much greater transparency. These powers give us a look under the hood at just how these platforms are dealing, or not dealing, with a range of serious and egregious online harms which affect Australians,” Grant said.
If Telegram chooses to ignore the penalty notice, eSafety would seek a civil penalty in court, Grant said.
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