Gay Pride Marches in US Mark 50th Anniversary of Modern Gay Rights Movement
New York staged a huge Gay Pride march Sunday, one of several in major U.S. cities marking the 50th anniversary of the clash between police and gay patrons at the city’s Stonewall Inn bar that sparked the modern gay rights movement.The New York parade could attract three million rainbow flag-waving supporters. More than 650 contingents with 150,000 people, including community groups, corporations, politicians and celebrities, are planning to march through the city’s streets.”I believe we are going to have the greatest Pride celebration in the history of the globe,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio, a vocal defender of gay rights and a Democratic presidential candidate.In Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, the city’s first openly gay mayor, is one of seven grand marshals for its parade.The annual celebration of gay rights has its origin in the June 1969 riots sparked by repeated police raids on Stonewall Inn, a prominent gay bar in New York’s Greenwich Village. The riots proved to be a pivotal touchpoint in the LGBTQ community’s struggle for civil rights.The smaller Queer Liberation March started Sunday morning at the bar, with its organizers saying that the Pride march had become too commercialized and heavily policed.
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UN Chief Warns Paris Climate Goals Still Not Enough
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres took his global message urging immediate climate action to officials gathered in the United Arab Emirates on Sunday, where production of hydrocarbons remains a key driver of the economy.
Guterres is calling on governments to stop building new coal plants by 2020, cut greenhouse emissions by 45% over the next decade and overhauling fossil fuel-driven economies with new technologies like solar and wind. The world, he said, is facing a grave climate emergency.''It is plain to me that we have no time to lose,” Guterres said.
In remarks at a summit in Abu Dhabi, he painted a grim picture of how rapidly climate change is advancing, saying it is outpacing efforts to address it.
He lauded the Paris climate accord, but said even if its promises are fully met, the world still faces what he described as a catastrophic three-degree temperature rise by the end of the century.
Arctic permafrost is melting decades earlier than even worst-case scenarios, he said, threatening to unlock vast amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas.
Sadly, it is not yet plain to all the decision makers that run our world.''I think it is very important to have all countries committing to this cause… even more when we are talking about the country of the importance and the size – not only in terms of the economy but also the emissions – of the United States,” he said.
He spoke at the opulent Emirates Palace, where Abu Dhabi was hosting a preparatory meeting for the U.N. Climate Action Summit in September. Guterres was expected to later take a helicopter ride to view Abu Dhabi's Noor solar power plant.
When asked, U.N. representatives said the lavish Abu Dhabi summit and his planned helicopter ride would be carbon neutral, meaning their effects would be balanced by efforts like planting trees and sequestering emissions. The U.N. says carbon dioxide emissions account for around 80% of global warming.
Guterres was in Abu Dhabi fresh off meetings with The Group of 20 leaders in Osaka, Japan. There, he appealed directly to heads of state of the world's main emitters to step up their efforts. The countries of the G-20 represent 80% of world emissions of greenhouse gases, he said.
At the G-20 meeting, 19 countries expressed their commitment to the Paris agreement, with the only the United States dissenting.
In 2017, President Donald Trump pledged to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement as soon as 2020, arguing it disadvantages American workers and taxpayers. Trump has also moved steadily to dismantle Obama administration efforts to rein in coal, oil and gas emissions. His position has been that these efforts also hurt the U.S. economy.
The secretary-general's special envoy for the climate summit, Ambassador Luis Alfonso de Alba, told The Associated Press it was disappointing that the U.S. has pulled out from the accord. However, he said there are many examples of efforts at the local and state level in the United States to combat climate change.
Guterres is urging business leaders and politicians to come to the Climate Action Summit later this year with their plans ready to nearly halve greenhouse emissions by 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2050.
He suggested taxing major carbon-emitting industries and polluters, ending the subsidization of oil and gas, and halting the building of all new coal plants by next year.
We are in a battle for our lives,'' he said.But it is a battle we can win.”
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Ancient Peruvian Water-Harvesting System Could Lessen Modern Water Shortages
Sometimes, modern problems require ancient solutions.
A 1,400-year-old Peruvian water-diverting method could supply up to 40,000 Olympic-size swimming pools’ worth of water to present-day Lima each year, according to new research published in Nature Sustainability.
It’s one example of how indigenous methods could supplement existing modern infrastructure in water-scarce countries worldwide.
More than a billion people across the world face water scarcity. Artificial reservoirs store rainwater and runoff for use during drier times, but reservoirs are costly, require years to plan and can still fail to meet water needs. Just last week, the reservoirs in Chennai, India, ran nearly dry, forcing its 4 million residents to rely on government water tankers.
Animation showing monthly rainfall in the tropical Andes. Humid air transports water vapor from the Amazon and is blocked by the Andean mountain barrier, producing extreme differences between the eastern and western slopes. (B. Ochoa-Tocachi, 2019)Peru’s capital, Lima, depends on water from rivers high in the Andes. It takes only a few days for water to flow down to Lima, so when the dry season begins in the mountains, the water supply rapidly vanishes. The city suffers water deficit of 43 million cubic meters during the dry season, which it alleviates with modern infrastructure such as artificial reservoirs.
Panoramic view of the Andean highlands in the Chillon river basin where Huamantanga is located. The city of Lima would be located downstream in the horizon background. (S. Grainger, Imperial College London, 2015)Artificial reservoirs aren’t the only solution, however. Over a thousand years ago, indigenous people developed another way of dealing with water shortages. Boris Ochoa-Tocachi, a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London and lead author of the study, saw firsthand one of the last remaining pre-Inca water-harvesting systems in the small highland community of Huamantanga, Peru. Water diverted, delayed
The 1,400-year-old system is designed to increase the water supply during the dry season by diverting and delaying water as it travels down from the mountains. This nature-based “green” infrastructure consists of stone canals that guide water from its source to a network of earthen canals, ponds, springs and rocky hillsides, which encourage water to seep into the ground. It then slowly trickles downhill through the soil and resurfaces in streams near the community.
Ideally, the system should be able to increase the water’s travel time from days to months in order to provide water throughout the dry season, “but there was no evidence at all to quantify what is the water volume that they can harvest from these practices, or really if the practices were actually increasing the yields of these springs that they used during the dry season,” said Ochoa-Tocachi.
A diversion canal as part of the pre-Inca infiltration system during the wet season. Canals like this divert water during the wet season to zones of high permeability. (M. Briceño, CONDESAN, 2012)To assess the system’s capabilities, the researchers measured how much it slowed the flow of water by injecting a dye tracer high upstream and noting when it resurfaced downstream. The water started to emerge two weeks later and continued flowing for eight months — a huge improvement over the hours or days it would normally take.
“I think probably the most exciting result is that we actually confirmed that this system works,” Ochoa-Tocachi added. “It’s not only trusting that, yeah, we know that there are traditional practices, we know that indigenous knowledge is very useful. I think that we proved that it is still relevant today. It is still a tool that we can use and we can replicate to solve modern problems.” Considerable increase in supply
The researchers next considered how implementing a scaled-up version of the system could benefit Lima. Combining what they learned from the existing setup in Huamantanga with the physical characteristics of Lima’s surroundings, they estimated that the system could increase Lima’s dry-season water supply by 7.5% on average, and up to 33% at the beginning of the dry season. This amounts to nearly 100 million cubic meters of water per year — the equivalent of 40,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.
Todd Gartner, director of the World Resources Institute Natural Infrastructure for Water project, noted that this study “takes what we often just talk about — that ‘green [infrastructure] is as good as grey’ — and it puts this into practice and does a lot of evaluation and monitoring and puts real numbers behind it.”
Another benefit of the system is the cost. Ochoa-Tocachi estimated that building a series of canals similar to what exists in Huamantanga would cost 10 times less than building a reservoir of the same volume. He also noted that many highland societies elsewhere in the world have developed ways of diverting and delaying water in the past and could implement them today to supplement their more expensive modern counterparts.
“I think there is a lot of potential in revaluing these water-harvesting practices that have a very long history,” Ochoa-Tocachi said. “There are a lot of these practices that still now could be rescued and could be replicated, even though probably the actual mechanics or the actual process is different than the one that we studied. But the concept of using indigenous knowledge for solving modern engineering problems, I think that is probably very valuable today.”
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Midwifery Students Learn How to Use Cutting-Edge Technology to Bring Life into the World
Augmented technology, or AR, has been around for a few years. Just ask anyone who ever played the Pokemon Go game on a cell phone. But at a university in London, Augmented Reality is literally taking on a new life. Arash Arabasadi brings this story into the world.
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Inside the NYC Subway System’s Competitive Music World
Some might think musicians who perform in New York City subway stations just show up there to earn a little cash and entertain commuters. But that’s not the case. They have to compete to perform in the coveted spots. The city’s ‘Music Under New York’ program has been holding auditions since 1985. Nina Vishneva explores this underground music world. Anna Rice narrates.
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Scientists Teach Robots to Use Experience to Perform Better
Professors at the University of Maryland are looking to dramatically improve basic artificial intelligence as they attempt to teach robots how to think and use their past experience to perform new tasks. Nastassia Jaumen visited the University to find out more.
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Trump Administration Agrees to Delay Health Care Rule
The Trump administration has agreed to postpone implementing a rule allowing medical workers to decline performing abortions or other treatments on moral or religious grounds while the so-called “conscience” rule is challenged in a California court.
The rule was supposed to take effect on July 22 but the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and its opponents in a California lawsuit mutually agreed Friday to delay a final ruling on the matter until Nov. 22.
The agency called it the “most efficient way to adjudicate” the rule.
A federal judge in San Francisco permitted the change on Saturday.
A California lawsuit alleges that the department exceeded its authority with the rule, which President Trump announced in May.
The measure known as Protecting Statutory Conscience Rights in Health Care; Delegations of Authority would require institutions that receive money from federal programs to certify that they comply with some 25 federal laws protecting conscience and religious rights.
Most laws pertain to medical procedures such as abortion, sterilization and assisted suicide.
The department has previously said that past administrations haven’t done enough to protect such rights in the medical field.
The rule is a priority for religious conservatives, but critics fear it will become a pretext for denying medical attention to LGBT people or women seeking abortions, a legal medical procedure.
“The Trump administration is trying to systematically limit access to critical medical care for women, the LGBTQ community, and other vulnerable patients,” San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera said in a statement announcing Friday’s decision. “Hospitals are no place to put personal beliefs above patient care.”
San Francisco would have faced losing about $1 billion in federal funding for health care-related programs if the rule took effect, according to the statement from his office.
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Americans Arrive in Canada to Get Cheaper Insulin
A self-declared “caravan” of Americans bused across the Canada-U.S. border on Saturday, seeking affordable prices for insulin and raising awareness of “the insulin price crisis” in the United States. The group called Caravan to Canada started the journey from Minneapolis, Minn., on Friday and stopped at London, Ontario, on Saturday to purchase lifesaving type 1 diabetes medication at a pharmacy. About 20 people made the trip, according to Nicole Smith-Holt, a member of the group. Smith-Holt said her 26-year-old son died in June 2017 because he was forced to ration costly insulin.Caravan to Canada trekked across the border in May for the same reason, and Smith-Holt was on that trip, too. She said the previous group was smaller than this week’s group. Americans have gone to countries like Mexico and Canada for more affordable medications in the past and continue to do so, she added.’Resurgence’ in visitorsThe Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported in May that Canadian pharmacists have seen a “quiet resurgence” in Americans coming to Canada looking for cheaper pharmaceuticals. Insulin prices in the United States nearly doubled to an average annual cost of $5,705 in 2016 from $2,864 in 2012, according to a study in January. While not everyone purchased the same amount of insulin, Smith-Holt said most people were saving around $3,000 for three months’ worth of insulin, and as a whole the group was saving around $15,000 to $20,000. U.S. residents get set to depart a Canadian pharmacy after purchasing lower-cost insulin in London, Ontario, June 29, 2019.Prescriptions for insulin are not required in Canadian pharmacies Smith-Holt said, but the caravan has them so they can prove to the border patrol they are not intending to resell them when returning to the United States. T1International, a nonprofit that advocates for increased access to type 1 diabetes medication, has described the situation in U.S. as an insulin crisis. Quinn Nystrom, a leader of T1International’s Minnesota chapter, said on May via Twitter that the price of insulin in the United States per vial was $320, while in Canada the same medication under a different name was $30. “We know that many people couldn’t make this trip because they cannot afford the costs associated with traveling to another country to buy insulin there,” Elizabeth Pfiester, executive director of T1International, said in a press release. Banting HouseAn itinerary said the caravan planned to stop at the Banting House in London later in the day. The Banting House is where Canadian physician and scientist Frederick Banting, who discovered insulin, lived from 1920 to 1921, and the building is called the “birthplace of insulin,” according to the Banting House website. Smith-Holt said the group was not currently planning any future trips, but they could be organized in the near future depending on need. She hopes for long-term solutions in the United States like price caps, anti-gouging laws, patent reform and transparency from pharmaceutical companies.
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DRC Violence Threatens Lifesaving Ebola Operation
A senior World Health Organization official warns efforts to contain the spread of the deadly Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo will remain elusive unless the vicious cycle of violence in the region is broken. Latest WHO figures put the number of Ebola cases at 2284, including 1540 deaths and 637 survivors. WHO Assistant Director-General for Emergency Response Ibrahima Soce Fall says there has been good progress in scaling up operations to contain the spread of the deadly ebola virus in conflict-ridden North Kivu and Ituri provinces.Eastern DRC has been politically unstable since 1998. There are an estimated 4.5 million internally displaced people in the country. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees says new displacements are occurring mainly in the eastern provinces of Ituri and North and South Kivu. More than 100 armed groups reportedly are engaged in sporadic fighting in the region. Fall says constant and skilled negotiations with the armed groups are needed to gain access to these volatile areas.“The outbreak started there last year and spread to other areas,” Fall said. “So, it is important to break this vicious cycle to contain very quickly the situation in Mabalako and Mandima, where we have more than 55 percent of the cases coming from.” Fall says it will be exceedingly difficult to contain the virus if more money is not immediately forthcoming. He says $98 million is needed to support the government-led response to defeat ebola. To date, he says less than half that amount has been received.
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9/11 First Responder Advocate Dies at 53
A leader in the fight for health benefits for emergency personnel who responded to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the U.S. has died.Former New York City Police detective Luis Alvarez died from colorectal cancer Saturday, his family announced in a post On Facebook.The 53-year-old Alvarez appeared with American comedian and political activist Jon Stewart before a House Judiciary subcommittee on June 11 to appeal for an extension of the September 11 Victims Compensation Fund.A frail Alvarez told the panel, “This fund is not a ticket to paradise, it’s to provide our families with care.” He went on to say “You all said you would never forget. Well, I’m here to make sure that you don’t.”Alvarez was diagnosed with cancer in 2016. His illness was traced to the three months he spent searching for survivors in the toxic rubble of the World Trade Center’s twin towers that were destroyed in the terrorist attacks.He was admitted to a hospice on Long Island, New York within a few days of his testimony in Washington.Legislation to replenish the $7.3 billion compensation fund that provides health benefits to police officers, firefighters and other emergency responders passed the full committee unanimously.The federal government opened the fund in 2011 to compensate responders and their families for deaths and illnesses that were linked to exposure to toxins. Current projections indicate the fund will be depleted at the end of 2020.Other responders who spent weeks at the site have also been diagnosed with A variety of cancers and other illnesses.The World Trade Center Health Program, a separate program associated with a fund run by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said more than 12,000 related cases of cancer had also been diagnosed as of May.
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Reef ‘Grief” As Tourists Fear For Australia’s Greatest natural Treasure
Australia’s national science agency says years of concern about the health of the Great Barrier Reef have created a type of ‘grief’ among tourists. A survey of thousands of visitors to the reef has found they consider the world’s largest coral system to be less beautiful now, and worry about its decline. The study is published in the journal, Nature Climate Change. The Great Barrier Reef is nature’s gift to Australia, but it is in trouble because of climate change and pollution.“But now the largest living structure on the planet is becoming the largest dying structure. Vast amounts of coral is being killed off by rising ocean temperatures.”A new study says that media coverage of damage to the reef is causing some tourists to start mourning its loss. But researchers want to move beyond the despair and focus instead on positive changes that can help the world’s largest coral system from further decline. More than 4,500 visitors were surveyed by Australia’s main science agency and other universities in the state of Queensland.Matt Curnock is from the CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization.“One of the first questions we ask are what are the first words that come to mind when you think of the Great Barrier Reef, and some of the emotions we identified included sadness, anger, disgust and fear. And these are generally associated with grief” said Curnock.Tourism bodies are trying to dispel the view that Australia’s greatest natural treasure, is dead, or in terminal decline.Dean Miller, from Great Barrier Reef Legacy, an advocacy group, says it is very much open for business. “There is a huge misconception out there that the Great Barrier Reef is dead” said Miller. “It is absolutely not dead. You have got to look at an economic standpoint and go, okay, it is worth AUD$56bn to the economy. That is fantastic. We need to continue that attraction.”But Kelly O’Shannessy, the head of the Australian Conservation Foundation, says there needs to be an honest debate about the declining health of the reef.“It has bleached. Thirty percent of the reef corals have died after the 2016 mass bleaching and more again in 2017,” said Shannessy. “So we cannot sugar-coat these things, but we should be talking about in equal weight the solutions.”The Great Barrier Reef is about the size of Japan. It is breathtaking, and home to array of marine creatures, including 600 types of coral, 500 varieties of worms and more than 100 species of jellyfish.
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Composting Service on Wheels Appears in New York City
A group of New York bikers has set out to save the environment by starting a bike-powered composting service. They collect food waste from restaurants and households for composting, and then use that compost as fertilizer to grow vegetables. In a city with a population of 8.5 million people, this might seem like a drop in the bucket, but while the scope might be small now, the organizers have big and green plans for the project. Nina Vishneva has the story narrated by Anna Rice.
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Can a $35 Computer Reinvigorate the PC Market?
The desktop personal computer changed the world when it was introduced back in the 1970s. But lately laptops and phones have slowly eaten away at that market. But the creators of a new PC that costs less than a trip to the grocery store are hoping their little PC can change that. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Dogs Go on Vacation to Luxury Pet Resort
In the United States, dog owners often treat their pets like family. When people go on vacation, they may not take their dogs with them but want them to be well taken care of while they are gone. Doggie boarding facilities are popular alternatives where pets can stay overnight or even longer. Some pet parents even take their dog to a fancy pet resort for top notch services. VOA’s Deborah Block shows us a luxury pet resort in Virginia.
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40 Tons of Fishing Nets Retrieved in Pacific Ocean Cleanup
In a mission to clean up trash floating in the ocean, environmentalists pulled 40 tons (36 metric tons) of abandoned fishing nets this month from an area known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.Mariners on a 140-foot (43-meter) cargo sailboat outfitted with a crane voyaged from Hawaii to the heart of the Pacific Ocean, where they retrieved the haul of mostly plastic fishing nets as part of an effort to rid the waters of the nets that entangle whales, turtles and fish and damage coral reefs. Crew includes volunteersThe volunteers with the California-based nonprofit Ocean Voyages Institute fished out the derelict nets from a marine gyre location where ocean currents converge between Hawaii and California during their 25-day expedition, the group’s founder, Mary Crowley, announced Friday. The group is among a handful of nonprofits working to collect plastic trash from the open ocean, an endeavor that can be dangerous, time consuming and expensive. “Our success should herald the way for us to do larger clean ups and to inspire clean ups all throughout the Pacific Ocean and throughout the world. It’s not something that we need to wait to do,” Crowley said.Nets hold 2 tons of trashThe cargo ship returned June 18 to Honolulu, where 2 tons (1.8 metric tons) of plastic trash were separated from the haul of fishing nets and donated to local artists to transform it into artwork to educate people about ocean plastic pollution. The rest of the refuse was turned over to a zero emissions energy plant that will incinerate it and turn it into energy, she said. A year before they went to pick up the nets, the Sausalito, California-based group gave sailors going from California to Hawaii buoyant GPS trackers the size of bowling balls to attach to the nets they encountered during their voyage so they could be tracked.The group then sailed to collect the nets entangled with plastic chairs, bottles and other trash in an effort that cost $300,000. The group plans to deploy dozens more GPS trackers and next year embark on a three-month trash collection expedition, Crowley said. It is estimated that between 600,000 and 800,000 metric tons of fishing gear is abandoned or lost during storms each year in the oceans, said Nick Mallos, Director of the Trash Free Seas Program at Ocean Conservancy, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group. Others groups join the causeAnother 9 million tons (8 million metric tons) of plastic waste, including plastic bottles, bags, toys and other items, flow annually into the ocean from beaches, rivers and creeks, according to experts. The Ocean Voyages Institute is one of dozens of groups around the world trying to tackle the problem. Most focus on cleaning up beaches, ridding shores of abandoned fishing nets, traps and other gear and pushing for a reduction on single-use plastic containers. Collecting the trash already in the gyres is also the goal of The Ocean Cleanup project, which was started by Dutch innovator Boyan Slat and last year first deployed a trash collection device to corral plastic litter floating in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.The group has raised millions of dollars from donors around the world, including San Francisco billionaire Marc Benioff. The buoyant, 2,000-foot (600-meter) long boom was floating 800 miles (1,300 kilometers) from Hawaii’s coast when it broke apart under constant wind. After being repaired, it was re-deployed last week.
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Putin Says Liberalism ‘obsolete’; Elton John Disagrees
Elton John on Friday called out Russian President Vladimir Putin for saying that liberalism is “obsolete” and conflicts with the “overwhelming majority” in many countries.In a story published by the Financial Times newspaper, Putin said “the liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population.” John said in a statement released Friday that he disagrees with Putin’s “view that pursuing policies that embrace multicultural and sexual diversity are obsolete in our societies.”Putin also said Russia has “no problem with LGBT persons … let everyone be happy” in the interview.John called Putin’s words hypocritical since a Russian distributor censored LGBTQ-related scenes from “Rocketman,” the film based on John’s life and career.
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R. Kelly’s Lawyers Ask Judge to Dismiss Sex Abuse Lawsuit
R. Kelly’s lawyers want a Chicago judge to toss a 2019 lawsuit alleging the singer sexually abused a minor a little over 20 years ago.The Chicago Sun-Times reports their motion to dismiss was filed Wednesday in Cook County Circuit Court.
The lawsuit says the abuse occurred in 1998. Kelly’s attorneys say she had until 2002 to sue. But state law can extend deadlines to file in cases where the accuser becomes aware of the abuse later.
Plaintiff lawyer Jeffrey Deutschman says Kelly has a right to file the motion but that it will drag out the case.
The plaintiff is one of four accusers in a separate criminal case . The suit was filed just before Kelly was charged in February with criminal sexual abuse. He denies ever abusing anyone.
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Dominican Police Arrest ‘Mastermind’ in David Ortiz Shooting
Authorities in the Dominican Republic say they have arrested the mastermind behind the shooting of baseball great David Ortiz earlier this month in an apparent case of mistaken identity.
Police said Friday that Victor Hugo Gomez was detained in the Caribbean country. No further details were immediately released.
Authorities had said last week that they believed Gomez was living in the U.S.
He is accused of ordering the killing of his cousin, Sixto David Fernandez. Authorities say hit men confused Ortiz with Fernandez during the June 9 shooting at a bar in the capital of Santo Domingo. The two men are friends and were sharing a table.
Ortiz was flown to Boston and remains hospitalized there after doctors in the Dominican Republic removed his gallbladder and part of his intestine.
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Lowe’s Announces Charlotte, North Carolina Global Tech Hub
Lowe’s has selected Charlotte, North Carolina, to house a 2,000-employee global tech hub. The city hopes the project will cement its reputation as a home for technological talent.
Lowe’s and city officials announced Thursday the company would put $153 million toward the project, while the state’s giving a $54 million incentives grant to be paid over 12 years if Lowe’s meets job creation and investment targets.
The Charlotte Observer reports Lowe’s CEO Marvin Ellison says they selected Charlotte for its density of young tech professionals, and its location near Lowe’s headquarters in Mooresville.Lowe says it will begin hiring for about 1,600 new jobs immediately, with average annual pay at more than $115,000.Gov. Roy Cooper’s office says the 23-story tower will open in Charlotte’s South End in 2021.
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Second Florida City Pays Ransom to Hackers
A second small city in Florida has agreed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in ransom to cybercriminals who disabled its computer system. Days after ransomware crippled the city of about 12,000 residents, officials of Lake City agreed this week to meet the hackers’ ransom demand: 42 Bitcoin or about $460,000. Last week, River Bench, in Palm Beach County, paid $600,000 in Bitcoin to retrieve its data. In both cases, most of the money will be paid by insurance companies. On Thursday, Key Biscayne, a third Florida city, said it too had been targeted by a cyberattack. But city officials said it had managed to restore most of its computer systems by late Wednesday. Ransomware, a type of malicious software designed to deny access to a computer system or data until a ransom is paid, is becoming an epidemic in the public sector. The cybersecurity firm Recorded Future reported in May that 170 city, county or state government systems have been attacked since 2013.Ransomware attacks are not limited to small cities. Baltimore, a city of more than 600,000, has been fighting a cyber breach since May. The city refused to pay the $80,000 ransom that the hackers demanded. Instead, it has spent $18 million on data recovery. Similarly, the city of Atlanta spent nearly $17 million after it was targeted in March 2018. In November, the FBI indicted two Iranian men in a computer hacking and extortion scheme that targeted cities like Atlanta and Newark, N.J., in addition to the Port of San Diego, the Colorado Department of Transportation and six health care-related organizations. The estimated losses added up to more than $30 million.FILE – A screenshot shows a WannaCry ransomware demand, provided by cybersecurity firm Symantec, in Mountain View, California, May 15, 2017.WannaCry attackOne of the largest ransomware attacks was WannaCry, which encrypted hundreds of thousands of computers in more than 150 countries in a matter of hours. It was the first time that ransomware had spread across the world in what looked like a coordinated cyberattack.The British national health care system was especially hard hit by WannaCry, which caused thousands of hospitals to go offline. The attack also affected government systems, railway networks and private companies.It was eventually traced to a group of hackers working for North Korea who used stolen highly classified hacking tools developed by the U.S. National Security Agency.
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Race Walker Asks Court for Olympic Status for Women’s 50K
World champion race walker Ines Henriques is aiming for gender equality by asking the Court of Arbitration for Sport to add the women’s 50-kilometer event to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.CAS said Thursday it will hear her appeal against the International Olympic Committee and the IAAF on July 29-30.On the Olympic track and field program, the 50K walk is the only men’s medal event with no female equivalent. The IAAF has said the women’s 50K walk currently lacks the depth and quality to justify Olympic status.When Henriques won the first world championship title in 2017, only seven athletes from four countries started the race. Only four finished as Henriques set a world record of 4 hours, 5 minutes, 56 seconds. Liu Hong of China has since lowered the record below four hours, pending official ratification.The 39-year-old Portuguese walker won the 2018 European Championship title in a 19-athlete race.In an interview published on the IAAF website last year, Henriques said her dream was to compete in Tokyo with more than 30 women.”I hope that the IOC and the IAAF allow me to realize this dream,” she said last year.
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Twitter to Label Tweets by Leaders Who Break Its Rules
Twitter will begin labeling tweets by world leaders that violate its rules, but that it says still serve the “public interest,” the company announced in a blog post Thursday. The function will apply only to verified government officials and political candidates with over 100,000 followers.Twitter’s rules ban content that glorifies or encourages violence, promotes terrorism or carries out targeted harassment of other users. In the past, the company kept tweets by world leaders on the platform even when they broke the rules. The new disclaimers, Twitter said, are meant to clarify how decisions are made about keeping offending tweets online.”Our highest priority is to protect the health of the public conversation on Twitter,” the blog post says. “An important part of that is ensuring our rules and how we enforce them are easy to understand.”The decision to remove a tweet will depend on its potential to cause harm, particularly physical, its potential to provide context and unique perspectives to users, and its value in holding the official responsible.”A critical function of our service is providing a place where people can openly and publicly respond to their leaders and hold them accountable,” says the post.A task force with representatives from Twitter’s trust and safety, legal, public policy and regional teams will make decisions regarding rule-breaking tweets by world leaders.If a tweet is marked, Twitter’s algorithms and search functions won’t actively spread the content, ensuring fewer people see it. Users won’t get push notifications and won’t be able to see labeled tweets in safe search, top tweets, live events pages or the explore function.Response to Trump?Some published reports tie the new disclaimers to U.S. President Donald Trump, who has run afoul of Twitter’s rules before. He could find some of his own tweets slapped with a disclaimer. A Twitter spokesperson told Buzzfeed News that the move wasn’t aimed at any particular leader. Though meant to clarify Twitter’s decision-making process, the new policy could leave the company vulnerable to criticism from people with views that violate its rules. Some conservatives, including the president, have lambasted the platform for what they view as censorship of their speech.”They [Twitter] make it very hard for people to join me on Twitter and they make it very much harder for me to get out the message,” Trump told Fox Business on Wednesday. The disclaimers won’t be applied to any content posted to Twitter before Thursday.
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Facebook Seeks Outside Review of Decisions to Ban Certain Content
Facebook will seek nominations for a 40-person content oversight board “soon,” according to a blog post by the social media site Thursday.The review board would hear appeals to Facebook’s decisions to remove certain kinds of material from the platform and adjudicate cases independent of both Facebook management and governments, according Brent Harris, Facebook’s director of Governance and Global Affairs. In 2018, Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook should develop a “Supreme Court” for content moderation, where users could appeal decisions to a body unaffiliated with the company.FILE – Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gestures while speaking during a media event at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, California, March 7, 2013.”You can imagine some sort of structure … that is made up of independent folks who don’t work for Facebook, who ultimately make the final judgment call on what should be acceptable speech in a community that reflects the social norms and values of people all around the world,” Zuckerberg said in an interview with Vox’s Ezra Klein. “I’ve increasingly come to believe that Facebook should not make so many important decisions about free expression and safety on our own,” Zuckerberg wrote in a November post. Facebook discussed the issues with more than 2,000 people from dozens of countries.”First and foremost, people want a board that exercises independent judgment,” wrote Harris. He also said people “want a board that’s as diverse as the many people on Facebook and Instagram.” Increased scrutiny The plans to create an oversight board come as the social media entity and other tech companies receive increased scrutiny and criticism regarding content moderation and bias. Some Republican lawmakers have accused the company of bias in its content moderation systems, while others on the Democratic side have called for antitrust action against the company. In an interview with Fox Business, U.S. President Donald Trump advocated legal action against Facebook and the popular search engine, Google. “Look, we should be suing Google and Facebook and all that, which perhaps we will, OK?” Trump said.
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Video Game Helps Farmers Fight Disease
Video games aren’t just for fun — they can also be used to fight disease, new research shows.Scientists combined video games and computer models to show that the spread of a deadly pig disease can be slowed if farmers avoid risky behaviors. The authors say insights from the video games could be used to encourage people to follow rules, in the swine industry and beyond.Since its emergence 40 years ago, porcine epidemic diarrhea virus (PEDV) has swept through pig farms in Europe, Asia and North America. When PEDV erupted in the U.S. in 2013, it wiped out 7 million pigs. “A thimbleful of this virus could infect every single pig in the United States,” said Scott Merrill, a professor in the Department of Plant and Soil Science at the University of Vermont who was second author on the study.PEDV is especially harmful to young pigs.”More than 90 percent of [infected] piglets would die,” said lead author Gabriela Bucini, a postdoctoral researcher.Merrill added, “We’ve seen and had discussions where people decided that they’re not going to work in the industry anymore because of PEDV, because it was just really hard to see this many animals get sick and die.”While PEDV remains a threat to U.S. pig populations, its incidence has dropped since 2013. The researchers attributed the decline to a change in how farmers and other members of the production pipeline implemented safety protocols, such as disinfecting vehicles, clothing and footwear that could transmit infection between farms.It’s clear that those protocols play an important part in preventing the spread of swine diseases, but until now there hasn’t been a way to measure just how important.Virtual pig farmsBucini and her team used video games to tackle this problem.In one game, players assume the role of pig farmers and try to complete tasks while preventing their pigs from being infected with a contagious virus. As they complete the tasks, players are reminded of the risk of infection and are given the option to obey or ignore safety protocols like disinfecting clothing when entering and exiting buildings. Complying with safety protocols decreases the odds of infection, but uses up valuable time.The games provided insight into how people behave in the real world, which the researchers incorporated into a model of PEDV transmission to track how the disease would spread — and learn how best to contain it. One of the key variables was the number of farmers who avoided risk by following the recommended safety protocols.”We did find that by nudging or shifting the population of producers toward more risk-averse positions, the disease was more under control,” Bucini said.Images from biosecurity video games show two risk scenarios. Players were more likely to comply with biosecurity practices when risk was presented graphically, right, rather than numerically, left. (UVM Social Ecological and Simulation Lab)Even a small change could have a big effect.The model showed that nudging just 10 percent of risk-tolerant farmers away from risky behaviors decreased the number of PEDV cases by 19 percent. However, in order to substantially slow the spread of the disease, more than 40 percent of risk-tolerant farmers needed to change their ways. Steve Dritz, a swine specialist and professor in Kansas State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine who was not involved in the study, expressed hope that the model could be used to prevent the spread of future livestock disease outbreaks.”It’s a wonderful tool for when … you’re trying to figure out, ‘What are the factors that I can control to keep incursions of disease out that I’ve never seen before?'” he said.From pigs to peopleThe implications of the findings extend beyond pig farming to any situation where people need to follow rules to avoid negative consequences. Using their video games, the researchers found that changing how they presented the consequences of rule-breaking influenced the likelihood that people would follow the rules — even if the consequences themselves didn’t change.For example, conveying the risk of infection with a colorful dial rather than with percentages caused a dramatic jump in the number of game players choosing to take the time to disinfect their clothing when entering and exiting farm buildings, from 30 to 82 percent.Merrill explained the significance of this finding using a basic hygiene practice: “If you’re getting 30 percent of the people washing their hands versus 82 percent of the people washing their hands, that can be a huge difference in how quickly and how far any sort of disease spreads.”The research was published in Frontiers in Veterinary Science.
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