Brazilian dog plays footvolley by passing, driving ball with his snout
rio de janeiro — Rio de Janeiro’s main beaches bustle with commotion on sunny weekends. But activity ground to a near standstill on one stretch of sand. People held up their phones to record athletic feats they’d never before witnessed, or even imagined.
The game? Footvolley, a combination of soccer and beach volleyball. The athlete? A 3-year-old border collie named Floki.
Floki sparks wonder among bystanders because he hangs tough in a game that even humans struggle to get a handle on. Footvolley rules are essentially the same as beach volleyball, but with a slightly lower net and, like soccer, players are forbidden from using hands and arms. Floki springs up from the sand to drive the ball with his snout. He has become something of an internet sensation in Brazil, with hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram and TikTok.
Floki’s owner, Gustavo Rodrigues, is a footvolley coach, but swears he didn’t plan this. He had wanted an American Bully, a decidedly less sprightly breed. Floki came into Rodrigues’ life instead and quickly revealed his potential when, at just 2 months old, he started jumping after birthday balloons.
Rodrigues started Floki out on what’s called “altinha,” where a group standing in a circle juggles a soccer ball for as long as possible. In 2023, Floki made his debut in the much more complex, competitive game of footvolley — a hobby enjoyed by some Brazilian soccer stars after they retire, including World Cup winners Ronaldinho and Romario.
Footvolley players need poise, agility, coordination, timing, finesse. Covering one side of the court between just two people means quick sprints back and forth on soft sand under the baking sun. It’s no mean feat, but Floki was a natural. A star was born.
“He does things that even some professionals don’t — like positioning on the court,” said Rodrigues, 26. “Sometimes the ball goes from one side (of the court) to the other, and he doesn’t keep his back turned to it. He turns toward the ball to always hit it straight on.”
It’s clear this high-energy pup lives for this game. Even resting under the shade of the beach’s caipirinha bar, he was laser-focused on the action of the adjacent court’s match.
When playing, he barks at Rodrigues to pass him the ball and seems to at least understand the basic rules. At times, rather than passing back to Rodrigues for the third and final touch their opponents expect, he sneaks the ball over the net himself to score a point. Then he jumps into Rodrigues’ arms to celebrate.
One of the awestruck onlookers Sunday was Luiza Chioli, who had traveled to Rio from Sao Paulo. She already knew the famous Floki from TikTok, but hadn’t expected front-row seats to watch him while sipping her gin and tonic.
“Seeing social media, we had thought it was just cuts, that they used the best takes,” said Chioli, 21. “But we saw he played, performed the whole time, did really well. It’s really cool.”
As Floki’s follower count has grown, partnerships and endorsement deals have come rolling in. Rodrigues and Floki live in the inland capital Brasilia, but often travel to Rio — footvolley’s mecca — and other Brazilian states to show off his skills, do marketing appearances and create monetized social media content.
Floki’s Sunday began with almost an hour playing beside former footvolley champion Natalia Guitler, who’s been called Queen of the Beach. Between attempts to film her doing a trick pass to him, he scampered for drinks of water or to dip in the ocean. By the end, both she and Floki were scrambling for shade.
“We’re dead,” she said as she collapsed onto the sand next to a panting Floki. Someone passed her a phone to check out the best clips for her Instagram, where she has almost 3 million followers.
“Me and my bestie @dog_altinha playing footvolley,” she wrote in a later post showing their long rally, and which included her bicycle kicking the ball over the net.
After a rest and another footvolley session, Floki headed to a more remote beach to do a marketing shoot for Farm, a fashion designer that’s become the paragon of Rio’s breezy tropical style, both in Brazil and abroad.
Then Floki was on Instagram hyping a brand of dog popsicles, gnawing a banana-flavored one himself, and giving an altinha demonstration to mall shoppers. His evening stroll along Copacabana’s beachside promenade showed him straining against his leash, still evidently bursting with his boundless energy.
With their weekend marketing blitz in Rio over, Rodrigues and Floki would head back to Brasilia, where their influencer hustle takes a back seat to the hustle of playing competitive matches. They win about one in every three, Rodrigues said, and their opponents are always desperate to avoid being beaten by a dog.
“It generates talk, and people make fun,” said Rodrigues. “No one likes to lose a point to him, so people play their hearts out against us.”
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WHO flags limited mpox testing in epicenter DRC
Geneva, Switzerland — Limited capacity is keeping mpox testing coverage low in the DR Congo — the epicenter of the international emergency — the World Health Organization said Saturday in its latest situation report.
“Testing coverage in the Democratic Republic of the Congo remains low, due to limited testing capacity,” the United Nations health agency said in its update.
It said the mpox case fatality ratio in the DRC in 2024 was 0.5% among confirmed cases — or 25 deaths from 5,160 cases — and 3.3% among suspected cases, both tested and untested — or 717 deaths among 21,835 cases.
“Due to limited access to laboratory testing in remote areas, only about 40% of all suspected cases have been tested in 2024 (up from 9% in 2023), and among these, around 55% tested positive,” the WHO said.
It said the three countries reporting the most suspected cases in the year up to September 8 were the DRC, followed by Burundi (1,489 suspected cases, no deaths), and Nigeria (935 suspected cases, no deaths).
There are two clades of mpox, each with a and b subclades.
The WHO said the clades and their subclades were circulating in different geographic areas and were affecting different populations — and therefore needed “tailored and locally adapted outbreak responses.”
The WHO declared an international emergency over mpox on August 14, concerned by the surge in cases of the new Clade 1b strain in the DRC that spread to nearby countries.
In the DRC, Clade 1b has been detected chiefly in the eastern South Kivu and North Kivu provinces, with additional cases in the Kinshasa capital province.
Current sequencing capacity in the DRC “is limited, and clade distribution might be broader than what is currently known” the WHO said.
Clade 1b has also been detected in the DRC’s eastern neighbors Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda, plus Kenya. Additionally, a single case has been detected in Sweden and another in Thailand.
Looking at global vaccine availability, the WHO said more than 3.6 million doses had been pledged for the global response, including more than 620,000 doses of the MVA-BN vaccine by European countries, the United States and manufacturer Bavarian Nordic.
Meanwhile Japan has pledged 3 million doses of the LC16 vaccine.
To date, 265,000 MVA-BN doses have been delivered to Kinshasa, while 10,000 have gone to Nigeria.
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Ballerina DePrince, whose career inspired many after she was born into war, dies at 29
FORT LAUDERDALE, Florida — Ballet dancer Michaela Mabinty DePrince, who came to the United States from an orphanage in war-ravaged Sierra Leone and performed on some of the world’s biggest stages, has died, her family said in a statement. She was 29.
“Michaela touched so many lives across the world, including ours. She was an unforgettable inspiration to everyone who knew her or heard her story,” her family said in a statement posted Friday on DePrince’s social media accounts. “From her early life in war-torn Africa, to stages and screens across the world, she achieved her dreams and so much more.”
A cause of death was not provided.
DePrince was adopted by an American couple and by age 17 she had been featured in a documentary film and had performed on the TV show “Dancing with the Stars.”
After graduating from high school and the American Ballet Theatre’s Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis School, she became a principal dancer with the Dance Theatre of Harlem. She then went to the Netherlands, where she danced with the Dutch National Ballet. She later returned to the U.S. and joined the Boston Ballet in 2021.
“We’re sending our love and support to the family of Michaela Mabinty DePrince at this time of loss,” the Boston Ballet said in a statement to The Associated Press on Saturday. “We were so fortunate to know her; she was a beautiful person, a wonderful dancer, and she will be greatly missed by us all.”
In her memoir, Taking Flight: From War Orphan to Star Ballerina, she shared her journey from the orphanage to the stage. She also wrote a children’s book, Ballerina Dreams.
DePrince suffered from a skin pigmentation disorder that had her labeled “the devil’s child” at the orphanage.
“I lost both my parents, so I was there [the orphanage] for about a year, and I wasn’t treated very well because I had vitiligo,” DePrince told the AP in a 2012 interview. “We were ranked as numbers, and number 27 was the least favorite and that was my number, so I got the least amount of food, the least amount of clothes and whatnot.”
She added that she remembered seeing a photo of an American ballet dancer on a magazine page that had blown against the gate of the orphanage during Sierra Leone’s civil war.
“All I remember is she looked really, really happy,” DePrince told the AP, adding that she wished “to become this exact person.”
She said she saw hope in that photo, “and I ripped the page out and I stuck it in my underwear because I didn’t have any place to put it,” she said.
Her passion helped inspire young Black dancers to pursue their dreams, her family said.
“We will miss her and her gorgeous smile forever and we know you will, too,” their statement said.
Her sister, Mia Mabinty DePrince, recalled in the statement that they slept on a shared mat in the orphanage and used to make up their own musical theater plays and ballets.
“When we got adopted, our parents quickly poured into our dreams and arose the beautiful, gracefully strong ballerina that so many of you knew her as today. She was an inspiration,” Mia DePrince wrote. “Whether she was leaping across the stage or getting on a plane and flying to third-world countries to provide orphans and children with dance classes, she was determined to conquer all her dreams in the arts and dance.”
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Prince Harry turns 40 as the royal scamp moves to middle age
LONDON — Prince Harry was always something different.
From the moment he first appeared in public, snuggled in Princess Diana’s arms outside the London hospital where he was born in 1984, Harry was the ginger-haired scamp who stuck his tongue out at photographers. He grew to be a boisterous adolescent who was roundly criticized for wearing a Nazi uniform to a costume party, and then a young man who gave up the trappings of royal life and moved to Southern California with his American wife.
Through it all, there was a sense that Harry was rebelling against an accident of birth that made him, in the harsh calculus of the House of Windsor, just “the spare.” As the second son of the man who is now King Charles III, he was raised as a prince but wouldn’t inherit the throne unless brother William came to harm.
Now the angry young man is turning 40, the halfway point in many lives, providing a chance to either dwell on the past or look forward to what might still be achieved.
For the past four years, Harry has focused mainly on the past, making millions of dollars by airing his grievances in a wildly successful memoir and a Netflix docu-series. But he faces the likelihood that the royal aura so critical to his image may be fading, said Sally Bedell Smith, author of “Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life.”
“He is at a sort of crossroads,’’ Smith told The Associated Press. “And he appears to be struggling with how he wants to proceed.’’
How did we get here?
It wasn’t always this way.
Six years ago, Harry and his wife were among the most popular royals, a glamorous young couple who reflected the multicultural face of modern Britain and were expected to help revitalize the monarchy.
Their wedding on May 19, 2018, united a grandson of Queen Elizabeth II with the former Meghan Markle, a biracial American actress who had starred for seven years in the U.S. television drama “Suits.” George Clooney, Serena Williams and Elton John attended their wedding at Windsor Castle, after which the couple were formally known as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
But the optimism quickly faded amid allegations that Britain’s tabloid media and even members of the royal household treated Meghan unfairly because of racism.
By January 2020, the pressures of life in the gilded cage had become too much, and the couple announced they were giving up royal duties and moving to America, where they hoped to become “financially independent.” They signed lucrative deals with Netflix and Spotify as they settled into the wealthy enclave of Montecito, near Santa Barbara, California.
Since then, Harry has missed few opportunities to bare his soul, most famously in his memoir, aptly titled “Spare.”
In the ghostwritten book, Harry recounted his grief at the death of Princess Diana, a fight with Prince William and his unease with life in the royal shadow of his elder brother. From accounts of cocaine use and losing his virginity to raw family rifts, the book was rife with damning allegations about the royal family.
Among the most toxic was Harry’s description of how some family members leaked unflattering information about other royals in exchange for positive coverage of themselves. The prince singled out his father’s second wife, Queen Camilla, accusing her of feeding private conversations to the media as she sought to rehabilitate an image tarnished by her role in the breakup of Charles’ marriage to Diana.
The allegations were so venomous that there is little chance of a return to public duty, Smith said.
“He criticized the royal family in such a powerful and damaging way. You can’t un-say those things,” she said. “And you can’t unsee things like Meghan in that Netflix series doing a mock curtsey. It’s such a demeaning gesture to the queen.’’
Harry, who agreed not to use the honorific HRH, or “his royal highness,” after he stepped away from front-line royal duties, is now fifth in line to the British throne, behind his brother and William’s three children.
While he grew up in a palace and is said to be in line to inherit millions of dollars on his 40th birthday from a trust set up by his great-grandmother, applied developmental psychologist Deborah Heiser thinks that, in many ways, Harry is just like the rest of us.
Like anyone turning 40, he is likely to have learned a few lessons and has a good idea of who his real friends are, and that will help him chart the next phase of his life, said Heiser, who writes a blog called “The Right Side of 40” for Psychology Today.
“He has had a very public display of what a lot of people have gone through,” Heiser said. “I mean, most people are not princes, but … they have all kinds of issues within their families. He’s not alone. That’s why he’s so relatable.’’
Harry’s next chapter
Of course, Harry’s story isn’t just about the drama within the House of Windsor.
If he wants to write a new chapter, Harry can build on his 10 years of service in the British Army. Before retiring as a captain in 2015, the prince earned his wings as a helicopter pilot, served two tours in Afghanistan and shed the hard-partying reputation of his youth.
Harry also won accolades for establishing the Invictus Games in 2014, a Paralympic-style competition to inspire and aid in the rehabilitation of sick and wounded servicemembers and veterans.
Harry and Meghan made headlines this year with their two international trips to promote mental health and internet safety. While some in British media criticized them for accepting royal treatment in Nigeria and Colombia, the couple said they visited at the invitation of local officials.
Will Charles see the grandkids?
The prospects of reconciliation are unclear, although Harry did race home to see his father after Charles’ cancer diagnosis. And in what may be seen as a tentative olive branch, the paperback edition of “Spare” slated for October has no additions — so nothing new to stir the pot.
But plainly at this point, Harry is thinking about his family in California. He told the BBC about the importance of his two young children, Archie and Lilibet.
“Being a dad is one of life’s greatest joys and has only made me more driven and more committed to making this world a better place,” the prince said in a statement released by his spokesperson.
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Brazil’s Lula pledges to finish paving road experts say could worsen Amazon deforestation
brasilia — In a visit to see the damage caused by drought and fire in the Amazon, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva pledged to pave a road that environmentalists and some in his own government say threatens to vastly increase destruction of the world’s largest tropical forest — and contribute to climate change.
The BR-319 roadway is a mostly dirt road through the rainforest that connects the states of Amazonas and Roraima to the rest of the country. It ends in Manaus, the Amazon’s largest city with over 2 million people, and runs parallel to the Madeira River, a major tributary of the Amazon River. The Madeira is at its lowest recorded level, disrupting cargo navigation, with most of its riverbed now endless sand dunes under a sky thick with smoke.
“We are aware that, while the river was navigable and full, the highway didn’t have the importance it has now, while the Madeira River was alive. We can’t leave two capitals isolated. But we will do it with the utmost responsibility,” Lula said Tuesday during a visit to an Indigenous community in Manaquiri, in Amazonas state. He didn’t specify what steps the government would take to try to prevent deforestation from increasing after paving.
Hours later, he oversaw the signing of a contract to pave 52 kilometers (32 miles) of the road, and promised to begin work before his term ends in 2026 on the most controversial section of the road — a 400-kilometer (249-mile) stretch through old-growth forest.
A permit for the longer stretch was issued under Lula’s far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, who favored development in the Amazon and weakened environmental protections. In July, a federal court suspended the permit in a lawsuit brought by the Climate Observatory, a network of 119 environmental, civil society and academic groups.
Lula’s government had appealed the suspension, but it wasn’t until his visit on Tuesday that Lula made clear his plan to move ahead with paving. The Climate Observatory lamented the move.
“Without the forest, there is no water, it’s interconnected,” said Suely Araujo, a public policy coordinator with the group. “The paving of the middle section of BR-319, without ensuring environmental governance and the presence of the government in the region, will lead to historic deforestation, as pointed out by many specialists and by Brazil’s federal environmental agency in the licensing process.”
Lula has sought to portray himself as an environmental protector, and deforestation has slowed significantly since he took over for Bolsonaro. But he has also struck out at times against pressure from richer nations on preserving the Amazon, an invaluable resource for the planet in storing the carbon driving atmospheric warming, and did so again on Tuesday.
“The world that buys our food is demanding that we preserve the Amazon,” he said. “And why? Because they want us to take care of the air they breathe. They didn’t preserve their own lands in the last century during the Industrial Revolution.”
Brazil is enduring its worst drought ever recorded, with 59% of the country under stress — an area about half the size of the U.S. In the Amazon, rivers’ low levels have stranded hundreds of riverine communities, with shortage of potable water and food. Lula announced a wide distribution of water filters and other measures during his visit to the region.
Meanwhile, most of Brazil has been under a thick layer of smoke from wildfires in the Amazon, affecting millions of people in faraway cities such as Sao Paulo, Brasilia and Curitiba and reaching as far south as Argentina and Paraguay. At Lula’s event, Environment Minister Marina Silva blamed the extreme drought brought by climate change for the widespread fires in a rainforest usually resistant to fire, calling it “a phenomenon we don’t even know how to handle.”
Silva has been more cautious than Lula about paving the roadway. At a congressional hearing earlier, she called the Bolsonaro era’s permit a “sham” and praised the judicial ruling that suspended it.
Brazil is the world’s fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, contributing nearly 3% of global emissions, according to Climate Watch, an online platform managed by the World Resources Institute. Almost half these emissions stem from destruction of trees in the Amazon rainforest.
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Brazil officially welcomes return of sacred Indigenous cloak from Denmark
RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil formally received on Thursday the return from Denmark of an Indigenous cloak made with 4,000 red feathers of the scarlet ibis bird, a sacred mantle that was taken by Europeans during the 17th century colonial era.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva attended the ceremony outside Brazil’s National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, marking the importance that Brazil gives to the item’s repatriation.
The cloak, a feathered ceremonial cape used in religious rituals of the Tupinamba people of Bahia in northeastern Brazil, was removed during the Dutch occupation of the area.
Its first mention comes in a Danish inventory in 1689, although it is thought to have been taken from Brazil some 50 years before.
By the 21st century it was held in the ethnographic collection of Denmark’s National Museum, the Nationalmuseet. In 2000, the museum lent the cloak out for an exhibition in Sao Paulo.
A Tupinamba leader saw it there and demanded its return. Last year, after lengthy diplomatic negotiations, the Danish museum announced it would donate the cloak to Brazil’s National Museum, and it was repatriated in July.
Some 170 Tupinamba traveled from southern Bahia to Rio to celebrate its return.
“It is crucial they return what isn’t theirs and rightfully belongs to us. Our heritage strengthens our identity,” said cacique, or chief, Jamopoty Tupinamba to Agencia Brasil on Wednesday.
From the first Portuguese voyages to Brazil in the early 16th century, Indigenous cultural items were taken to Europe as evidence of the “discovery” of new territories and then entered museums or private collections.
A fresco painted in 1674 on the ceiling of the Apollo Salon at the Palace of Versailles, the king’s throne room, depicts newly found America as a woman wearing a Tupinamba cloak as if it were a headdress.
According to cultural heritage activist Gliceria Tupinamba, there are another 10 such cloaks in Europe, held in museums and libraries in Italy, France, Belgium, Switzerland and Denmark, where the National Museum still has one large and three partial ones.
“It took more than 20 years to get the cloak back. Its return is a symbol of the protection of our cultural and land rights that are under threat today in Brazil,” she said.
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Animal rights groups object to Buckingham Palace guards’ bearskin caps
london — An animal rights group trying to get real fur out of the bearskin caps worn by King’s Guards at Buckingham Palace took aim Thursday at the cost of the ceremonial garb.
The price of the caps soared 30% in a year to more than 2,000 pounds ($2,600) apiece for the hats made of black bear fur, the Ministry of Defense said in response to a freedom of information request by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
“Stop wasting taxpayer pounds on caps made from slaughtered wildlife and switch to faux fur today,” the group said in a statement.
A luxury fake fur maker has offered to supply the army with free faux bear fur for 10 years, PETA said.
Military willing to consider alternatives
The military said it was open to exploring alternatives if they pass muster in durability, water protection and appearance. But “no alternative has met all those criteria to date,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement.
The distinctive tall black hats, worn by guards in bright scarlet tunics, are seen by millions who watch the regular changing of the guard ceremony at the palace. They also appear at other royal events including the annual Trooping the Color ceremony honoring the monarch’s birthday in June.
The cost of the caps rose from 1,560 pounds ($2,035) each in 2022 to 2,040 pounds ($2,660) in 2023, the ministry said. More than 1 million pounds ($1.3 million) was spent on them in the past decade.
The price went up because of a contract change for fur that comes from bears killed in licensed hunts in Canada, the military said.
PETA, which has been pushing for more than two decades to scrap the fur hats, said each cap requires one bear pelt. The group claimed that the defense department is propping up the “cruel” Canadian bear-hunting industry.
The ministry denied that charge and said if it stopped buying the pelts, it would not reduce the numbers of bears being killed.
Petition calls for fake fur
Parliament debated the issue in July 2022 after an online petition with more than 100,000 signatures called for using fake fur in the caps.
“This hunting involves the violent killing of bears, with many bears being shot several times,” Martyn Day, then a Scottish National Party member of Parliament, said at the time. “It seems undeniable, therefore, that by continuing to purchase hats made from the fur of black bears the MOD is funding the suffering of bears in Canada by making the baiting and killing of those animals and the sale of their pelts a profitable pursuit for the hunters.”
Day said a poll at the time found 75% of the U.K. population found real bearskins were a bad use of taxpayer money and supported replacing the hats.
He noted that the late Queen Elizabeth II had ceased buying fur for her wardrobe.
Earlier this year, Queen Camilla, wife of King Charles III, pledged to buy no more fur products.
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Apple faces challenges in Chinese market against Huawei’s tri-fold phone
Taipei, Taiwan — The U.S.-China technology war is playing out in the smartphone market in China, where global rivals Apple and Huawei released new phones this week. Industry experts say Apple, which lacks home-field advantage, faces many challenges in defending its market share in the country.
The biggest highlight of the iPhone 16 is its artificial intelligence system, dubbed Apple Intelligence, while the Huawei Mate XT features innovative tri-fold screen technology. But at a starting price of RMB 19,999, about $2,810, the Mate XT will cost about three times as much as the iPhone 16.
According to data from VMall, Huawei’s official shopping site, nearly 5.74 million people in China preordered the Mate XT as of late Thursday, 5½ days after Huawei began accepting preorders.
But in a survey conducted on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo by Radio France International, half of the 9,200 respondents said they would not purchase a Mate XT because the price is prohibitive. An additional 3,500 said they are not in the market for a new phone now.
“I suggest that Huawei release some products that ordinary people can afford,” a Weibo user wrote under the name “Diamond Man Yang Dong Feng.”
The iPhone 16 is not available for preorder until Friday, but some e-commerce vendors in China have promised to deliver the new devices to consumers within half a day to two days of sale.
In the competition between Apple and Huawei, iPhone 16 has some inherent disadvantages, said Shih-Fang Chiu, a senior industry analyst at the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research.
“Apple’s strength is information security and privacy, but this is difficult to achieve in the Chinese market, where the government can control the data in China’s market to a relatively high degree. In the era of AI mobile phones, this will bring challenges to Apple’s development in the Chinese market,” Chiu said.
Apple’s AI service on its iPhone 16 will roll out at a gradual pace in different languages, first in English and other languages later this year. The Chinese version will not be available until 2025.
There are other challenges Apple faces as well, Chiu added, such as regulatory controls, consumer sentiment favoring local brands and weakening spending power amid China’s economic slowdown.
According to Counterpoint Research’s statistics, Huawei held a market share of 15% in the second quarter of 2024, surpassing Apple’s 14% market share. That compares with Apple’s 17.3% share in 2023 as reported by the industry research firm International Data Corporation China, or IDC China.
Ryan Reith, the program vice president for IDC’s Mobile Device Tracker suite, said in a written response to VOA that the iPhone 16 has not made significant hardware upgrades and that AI applications alone are not attractive because consumers have GPT and other AI solutions.
AI applications are also another hurdle. Analyst Chih-Yen Tai said iPhone 16’s AI services involve personal data collection, information application and cloud computing, which will require collaboration with Chinese service providers.
That, along with the ban on Chinese civil servants and employees at state-owned enterprises from using their iPhone at work in recent years, will affect the sales of Apple products, said Tai, the deputy director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Evaluation at Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research in Taipei.
“China’s patriotism has led to a strong number of preorders” for Huawei’s tri-fold phones, Tai said.
“The competitors in China will sell the idea [to consumers] that iPhones will soon be edged out of the premium smartphone market. So, in the next stage, the affordable iPhone versions will be the key to whether it [Apple] can return to China or its previous glorious sales era,” Tai said.
Tzu-Ang Chen, a senior consultant in the digital technology industry in Taipei, said use of Huawei’s HarmonyOS operating system surpassed that of Apple’s iOS in China in the first quarter of this year, representing China’s determination to “go its own way” and create “one world, two systems.”
“The U.S.-China technology war has extended to smartphones,” Chen said. “IPhone sales in China will get worse and worse, obviously because Huawei is doing better, and coupled with patriotism, Apple’s position in the hearts of 1.4 billion people will never return.”
He said that as China seeks to develop pro-China markets among member countries of the Belt and Road Initiative in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa, China-made mobile phones may become their first choice.
VOA’s Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
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Smithsonian honors long-running US TV show
“Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” has just been renewed for its 25th season. It is the longest-running prime-time drama on U.S. television. The show’s lead character, Captain Olivia Benson, played by Mariska Hargitay, has become such a fixture in American life she was recently honored by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. VOA’s Maxim Adams reports. Videographer: Aleksandr Bergan
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Pope wraps up Asia-Pacific tour, defies health fears along the way
Singapore — Pope Francis wrapped up an arduous 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific on Friday, defying health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore.
The 87-year-old pontiff flies home to Rome from Singapore, completing his longest trip in duration and distance since he became head of the world’s estimated 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 13 years ago.
The Argentine pope has relied on a wheelchair since 2022 because of knee pain and sciatica. He had a hernia operation in June 2023, and earlier this year he battled flu and bronchitis.
Occasionally, during his four-nation trip, the pope struggled to keep his eyes open when listening to late-night liturgical readings or to remain engaged during formal military parades.
But he was clearly energized by more freewheeling exchanges — cheerfully goading young people to shout out their agreement with his calls to help those in need.
In a lively final inter-religious meeting with young Singaporeans, the pope urged them to respect other beliefs, avoid being slaves to technology and to get out of their comfort zones.
“Don’t let your stomach get fat, but let your head get fat,” the pope said, raising a laugh from his audience.
“I say take risks, go out there,” he said. “A young person that is afraid and does not take risks is an old person.”
The historic tour, initially planned for 2020 but postponed by the COVID-19 pandemic, has included 43 hours of flight time and a distance of 32,000 kilometers.
But neither the pace — 16 speeches and up to eight hours of time difference — nor the heat, nor multiple meetings have forced any rescheduling of his international odyssey.
On a trip that took him to the outer edges of the church’s world, the pope delivered a sometimes uncomfortable message for leaders not to forget the poor and marginalized.
In Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority state, he visited the Istiqlal Mosque to deliver a joint message against conflict and climate change.
In sweltering Papua New Guinea, he donned a bird of paradise headdress in a remote, jungle village where he told inhabitants to halt violence and renounce “superstition and magic.”
Addressing political and business leaders, he insisted that the country’s vast natural resources should benefit the entire community — a demand likely to resound in a nation where many believe their riches are being stolen or squandered.
And in staunchly Roman Catholic East Timor, he addressed nearly half the population, drawing about 600,000 rapturous believers in the tropical heat to a celebration of mass on the island’s coast.
Francis addressed East Timor’s leaders, hailing a new era of “peace” since independence in 2002.
But he also called on them to do more to prevent abuse against young people, in a nod to recent Catholic Church child abuse scandals.
In the affluent city-state of Singapore, the pope called for “special attention” to be paid to protecting the dignity of migrant workers.
“These workers contribute a great deal to society and should be guaranteed a fair wage,” he said.
There are an estimated 170 million migrant workers around the world. Most live in the Americas, Europe or Central Asia.
But the Argentine pope was otherwise full of praise for the “entrepreneurial spirit” and dynamism that built a “mass of ultra-modern skyscrapers that seem to rise from the sea” in his final destination.
Sandra Ross, 55, a church administrator in Singapore, said she was still “feeling the warmth and joy” after attending mass led by the pope.
“I was deeply touched by Pope Francis’ courage and dedication to his mission, despite his health challenges. His spirit and enthusiasm are truly inspiring,” she said.
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Tech billionaire pulls off first private spacewalk high above Earth
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — A tech billionaire performed the first private spacewalk hundreds of kilometers above Earth on Thursday, a high-risk endeavor reserved for professional astronauts — until now.
Tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman teamed up with SpaceX to test the company’s brand new spacesuits on his chartered flight. The daring spacewalk also saw SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis going out once Isaacman was safely back inside.
This spacewalk was simple and quick — less than two hours — compared with the drawn-out affairs conducted by NASA. Astronauts at the International Space Station often need to move across the sprawling complex for repairs, always traveling in pairs and lugging gear. Station spacewalks can last seven to eight hours.
Isaacman emerged first from the hatch, joining a small elite group of spacewalkers who until now had included only professional astronauts from a dozen countries.
“Back at home, we all have a lot of work to do. But from here, it sure looks like a perfect world,” Isaacman said as the capsule soared above the South Pacific. Cameras on board caught his silhouette, waist high at the hatch, with the blue Earth beneath.
The commercial spacewalk was the main focus of the five-day flight financed by Isaacman and Elon Musk’s company, and the culmination of years of development geared toward settling Mars and other planets.
All four on board donned the new spacewalking suits to protect themselves from the harsh vacuum. They launched on Tuesday from Florida, rocketing farther from Earth than anyone since NASA’s moonwalkers. The orbit was reduced by half — 740 kilometers — for the spacewalk.
This first spacewalking test involved more stretching than walking. Isaacman kept a hand or foot attached to it the whole time as he flexed his arms and legs to see how the new spacesuit held up. The hatch sported a walker-like structure for extra support.
After about 15 minutes outside, Isaacman was replaced by SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis to go through the same motions. Gillis bobbed up and down in weightlessness, no higher than her knees out of the capsule, as she twisted her arms and sent reports back to Mission Control.
Each had 3.6-meter tethers but did not unfurl them or dangle at the end unlike what happens at the space station, where astronauts routinely float out at a much lower orbit.
More and more wealthy passengers are plunking down huge sums for rides aboard private rockets to experience a few minutes of weightlessness. Other have spent tens of millions to stay in space for days or even weeks. Space experts and risk analysts say it’s inevitable that some will seek the thrill of spacewalking, deemed one of the most dangerous parts of spaceflight after launch and reentry but also the most soul-stirring.
This operation was planned down to the minute with little room for error. Trying out new spacesuits from a spacecraft new to spacewalking added to the risk. So did the fact that the entire capsule was exposed to the vacuum of space.
There were a few glitches. Isaacman had to manually pull the hatch open instead of pushing a button on board. Before heading out, Gillis reported seeing bulges in the hatch seal.
Scott “Kidd” Poteet, a former Air Force Thunderbird pilot, and SpaceX engineer Anna Menon stayed strapped to their seats to monitor from inside. All four underwent intensive training before the trip.
Isaacman, 41, CEO and founder of the Shift4 credit card-processing company, has declined to disclose how much he invested in the flight. It was the first of three flights in a program he’s dubbed Polaris; this one was called Polaris Dawn. For SpaceX’s inaugural private flight in 2021, he took up contest winners and a cancer survivor.
Until Thursday, only 263 people had conducted a spacewalk, representing 12 countries. The Soviet Union’s Alexei Leonov kicked it off in 1965, followed a few months later by NASA’s Ed White.
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Botswana, US firm partner to conduct border pathogen monitoring
Gaborone, Botswana — Botswana and an American biotech firm, Ginkgo Bioworks, have partnered to conduct pathogen surveillance at the country’s entry points. Health officials say the proactive move is meant to safeguard public health as the world faces emerging disease threats.
Botswana introduced mpox screening last month for travelers at its entry points.
In a statement Wednesday, Ministry of Health spokesperson Christopher Nyanga said a pathogen-monitoring program is critical to detecting similar emerging health threats.
Dr. Mbatshi Mazwiduma, a public health expert, said the pathogen-surveillance program will complement existing strategies to prevent disease threats.
“The initiative by the Ministry of Health is a very welcome development in the sense that it is at least demonstrating that they are both embracing traditional methods of surveillance and disease detection plus at the same time, they are looking at other innovative ways of disease detection,” he said.
Through the collaboration, Boston-based Gingko Bioworks will work with the Ministry of Health to collect and monitor travelers’ samples. Nasal swabs will be used to collect the samples.
Nyanga said testing will be done on a voluntary, anonymous basis.
“Although participation in this initiative is entirely voluntary, travelers are encouraged to participate because this early detection of pathogens is meant to safeguard the health of all citizens, visitors and residents of this country,” he said. “The samples collected will be kept anonymous. The data collected from the samples will be vital in strengthening the country’s robust health system and response to public health threats and emergencies.”
But Mazwiduma said voluntary participation in the pathogen-monitoring program could hinder effective disease detection.
“Perhaps if non-invasive, non-intrusive, the technique should be compulsory because it ensures that the number of people who comply to sample acquisition is increased and, therefore, you can actually rapidly achieve suitable sample sizes for you to be able to ensure that you do not miss any patients, but also more importantly that it allows you to improve your validation of these particular technologies,” Mazwiduma said.
Botswana and Gingko Bioworks previously collaborated in a 2022 pathogen-monitoring program to detect new and emerging COVID-19 variants.
During the same year, Botswana was credited with the discovery of COVID-19 variant omicron.
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Chess academy helps children learn discipline, problem-solving skills
One Washington teacher’s attempt to help one student has turned into something much larger. VOA’s Philip Alexiou has this story of a chess academy for kids. (Camera and produced by: Philip Alexiou)
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AI not a US election gamechanger yet, officials say
Washington — When the U.S. announced the seizure of 32 internet domains tied to Russian efforts to ply American voters with disinformation ahead of November’s presidential election, prosecutors were quick to note the use of artificial intelligence, or AI.
The Russian operation, known as Doppelganger, drove internet and social media users to the fake news using a variety of methods, the charging documents said, including advertisements that were “in some cases created using artificial intelligence.”
AI tools were also used to “generate content, including images and videos, for use in negative advertisements about U.S. politicians,” the indictment added.
And Russia is far from alone in turning to AI in the hopes of swaying U.S. voters.
“The primary actors we’ve seen for election use of this are Iran and Russia, although as various private companies have noticed, China also has used artificial intelligence for spreading divisive narratives in the United States,” according to a senior intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss sensitive information.
“What we’ve seen is artificial intelligence is used by foreign actors to make their content more quickly and convincingly tailor their synthetic content in both audio and video forms,” the official added.
But other U.S. officials say the use of AI to spread misinformation and disinformation in the lead-up to the U.S. election has so far failed to live up to some of the more dire warnings about how deepfakes and other AI-generated material could shake-up the American political landscape.
“Generative AI is not going to fundamentally introduce new threats to this election cycle,” according to Cait Conley, senior adviser to the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the U.S. agency charged with overseeing election security.
“What we’re seeing is consistent with what we expected to see,” Conley told VOA.
AI “is exacerbating existing threats, in both the cyber domain and the foreign malign influence operation-disinformation campaigns,” she said. But little of what has been put out to this point has shocked officials at CISA or the myriad state and local governments who run elections across the country.
“This threat vector is not new to them,” Conley said. “And they have taken the measures to ensure they’re prepared to respond effectively.”
As an example, Conley pointed to the rash of robocalls that targeted New Hampshire citizens ahead of the state’s first in the nation primary in January, using fake audio of U.S. President Joe Biden to tell people to stay home and “save your vote.”
New Hampshire’s attorney general quickly went public, calling the robocalls an apparent attempt to suppress votes and telling voters the incident was under investigation.
This past May, prosecutors indicted a Louisiana political consultant in connection with the scheme.
More recently, the alleged use of AI prompted a celebrity endorsement in the U.S. presidential race by pop star Taylor Swift.
“Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site,” Swift wrote in an Instagram social media post late Tuesday.
“It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter,” she wrote, adding, “I will be casting my vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.”
But experts and analysts say for all the attention AI is getting, the use of such technology in attacks and other influence operations has been limited.
“There’s not a tremendous amount of it in the wild that’s particularly successful right now, at least to my knowledge,” said Katie Gray, a senior partner at In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s technology-focused, not-for-profit strategic investment firm.
“Most attackers are not using the most sophisticated methods to penetrate systems,” she said on September 4 at a cybersecurity summit in Washington.
Others suggest that at least for the moment, the fears surrounding AI have outpaced its usefulness by malicious actors.
‘We jump to the doomsday science fiction,” said Clint Watts, a former FBI special agent and counterterror consultant who heads up the Microsoft Threat Analysis Center (MTAC).
“But instead, what we’re seeing is the number one challenge to all of this right now is access, just getting to the [AI] tools and accessing them,” he said, speaking like Gray at the cybersecurity summit.
Over the past 14 months, MTAC has logged hundreds of instances of AI use by China, Russia and Iran, Watts said. And analysts found that Moscow and Tehran, in particular, have struggled to get access to a fully AI toolbox.
The Russians “need to use their own tools from the start, rather than Western tools, because they’re afraid they’ll get knocked off those systems,” Watts said.
Iran is even further behind.
“They’ve tried different tools,” Watts said. “They just can’t get access to most of them for the most part.”
U.S. adversaries also appear to be having difficulties with the underlying requirements to make AI effective.
“To do scaled AI operations is not cheap,” Watts said. “Some of the infrastructure and the resources of it [AI], the models, the data it needs to be trained [on] – very challenging at the moment.”
And Watts said until the products generated by AI get better, attempted deepfakes will likely have trouble resonating with the targeted audiences.
“Audiences have been remarkably brilliant about detecting deepfakes in crowds. The more you watch somebody, the more you realize a fake isn’t quite right,” according to Watts. “The Russian actors that we’ve seen, all of them have tried deepfakes and they’ve moved back to bread and butter, small video manipulations.”
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China takes lead in critical technology research after ‘switching places’ with US
SINGAPORE — An Australian think tank that tracks tech competitiveness says China is now the world leader in research on almost 90% of critical technologies. In a newly released report, the research group adds there is also a high risk of Beijing securing a monopoly on defense-related tech, including drones, satellites and collaborative robots — those that can work safely alongside humans.
Analysts say the huge leap forward for China is the result of heavy state investment over the past two decades. They add that despite the progress, Beijing is still dependent on other countries for key tech components and lacks self-sufficiency.
The report from the government-funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute, or ASPI, released last Thursday, says China led the way in research into 57 out of 64 advanced technologies in the five years from 2019-2023.
ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker ranks countries’ innovation capabilities based on the number of appearances in the top 10% of research papers. It focuses on crucial technologies from a range of fields including artificial intelligence, biotechnology, cyber and defense.
The report found that “China and the United States have effectively switched places as the overwhelming leader in research in just two decades.”
China led in only three of the 64 technologies between 2003 and 2007 but has shot up in the rankings, replacing the U.S., which is now a frontrunner in just seven critical technologies.
Josh Kennedy-White is a technology strategist based in Singapore. He says China’s huge leap is a “direct result of its aggressive, state-driven research and development investments over the past two decades.”
He adds that the shift toward China is “particularly stark in fields like artificial intelligence, quantum computing and advanced aircraft engines, where China has transitioned from a laggard to a leader in a relatively short period.”
ASPI also determines the risk of countries holding a monopoly on the research of critical technologies. They currently classify 24 technologies as “high risk” of being monopolized — all by Beijing.
Ten technologies are newly classified as “high risk” this year, with many of them linked to the defense industry.
“The potential monopoly risk in 24 technology areas, especially those in defense-related fields like radars and drones, is concerning in the current and future geopolitical context,” Tobias Feakin, founder of consultancy firm Protostar Strategy, told VOA.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has sought to boost his country’s advanced manufacturing capabilities with the ambitious “Made in China 2025” initiative.
The policy, launched in 2015, aims to strengthen Beijing’s self-reliance in critical sectors and make China a global tech powerhouse.
Xi, according to Feakin, views advanced technologies as “strategic priorities for China’s development, national security and global competitiveness.”
He adds that technologies are seen as a “central component of China’s long-term economic and geopolitical goals.”
Beijing’s ambitions are being closely watched in Washington, with the Biden administration working to limit China’s access to advanced technology.
Last week, the U.S. introduced new export controls on critical technology to China, including chip-making equipment and quantum computers and components.
That announcement came shortly after U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan made his first ever visit to Beijing. He met with Xi and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
Sullivan told reporters that Washington “will continue to take necessary action to prevent advanced U.S. technologies from being used to undermine national security.”
The continued efforts to curb China’s chip industry mean that Beijing must look further afield for advanced technology.
“Even though it leads in areas like artificial intelligence and 5G, China still depends on Taiwan, the U.S. and South Korea to produce high-end semiconductors”, Kennedy-White told VOA.
Describing this as China’s Achilles’ heel, Kennedy-White says the lack of self-sufficiency in the semiconductor industry could “stunt Beijing’s progress in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and military applications.”
As China continues its dominance in critical technology research, questions have been raised over exactly how the country is making these breakthroughs.
Last October, officials from the Five Eyes intelligence alliance (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States) issued a joint statement accusing China of stealing intellectual property. U.S. FBI director Christopher Wray described it as an “unprecedented threat.”
Kennedy-White, managing director of Singapore-based venture catalyst firm DivisionX Global, agrees with this assessment. He says China’s jump up the ASPI rankings is “not entirely organic.”
“There is a correlation between China’s rise in certain technologies and allegations of intellectual property theft,” he added.
ASPI also recommends ways for other countries to close the gap on China. It advises the AUKUS alliance of Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. to join forces with Japan and South Korea to try to catch up.
The report also highlights the emergence of India as a “key center” of global research innovation and excellence.
The South Asian nation now ranks in the top five countries for 45 out of the 64 technologies that are tracked by ASPI. It’s a huge gain compared with 2003-2007, when India sat in the top five for only four technologies.
Feakin says countries across the Asia-Pacific “will benefit from leveraging India’s growing technology expertise and influence.”
It will also provide a counterbalance to “overdependence on China’s technology supply chain,” he added.
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Google, Apple lose court fights against EU, owe billions in fines, taxes
LONDON — Google lost its last bid to overturn a European Union antitrust penalty, after the bloc’s top court ruled against it Tuesday in a case that came with a whopping fine and helped jumpstart an era of intensifying scrutiny for Big Tech companies.
The European Union’s top court rejected Google’s appeal against the $2.7 billion penalty from the European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s top antitrust enforcer, for violating antitrust rules with its comparison shopping service.
Also Tuesday, Apple lost its challenge against an order to repay $14.34 billion in back taxes to Ireland, after the European Court of Justice issued a separate decision siding with the commission in a case targeting unlawful state aid for global corporations.
Both companies have now exhausted their appeals in the cases that date to the previous decade. Together, the court decisions are a victory for European Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who is expected to step down next month after 10 years as the commission’s top official overseeing competition.
Experts said the rulings illustrate how watchdogs have been emboldened in the years since the cases were first opened.
One of the takeaways from the Apple decision “is the sense that, again, the EU authorities and courts are prepared to flex their [collective] muscles to bring Big Tech to heel where necessary,” Alex Haffner, a competition partner at law firm Fladgate, said by email.
The shopping fine was one of three huge antitrust penalties for Google from the commission, which punished the Silicon Valley giant in 2017 for unfairly directing visitors to its own Google Shopping service over competitors.
“We are disappointed with the decision of the Court, which relates to a very specific set of facts,” Google said in a brief statement.
The company said it made changes to comply with the commission’s decision requiring it to treat competitors equally. It started holding auctions for shopping search listings that it would bid for alongside other comparison shopping services.
“Our approach has worked successfully for more than seven years, generating billions of clicks for more than 800 comparison shopping services,” Google said.
European consumer group BEUC hailed the court’s decision, saying it shows how the bloc’s competition law “remains highly relevant” in digital markets.
“It is a good outcome for all European consumers at the end of the day,” Director General Agustín Reyna said in an interview. “It means that many smaller companies or rivals will be able to go to different comparison shopping sites. They don’t need to depend on Google to reach out to customers.”
Google is still appealing its two other EU antitrust cases: a 2018 fine of $4.55 billion involving its Android operating system and a 2019 penalty of $1.64 billion over its AdSense advertising platform.
Despite the amounts of money involved, the adverse rulings will leave a small financial dent in one of the world’s richest and most profitable companies. The combined bill of $17 billion facing Apple and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, represents 0.3% of their combined market value of $5.2 trillion.
Those three cases foreshadowed expanded efforts by regulators worldwide to crack down on the tech industry. The EU has since opened more investigations into Big Tech companies and drew up a new law to prevent them from cornering online markets, known as the Digital Markets Act.
Google is also now facing pressure over its lucrative digital advertising business from the EU and Britain, which are carrying out separate investigations, and the United States, where the Department of Justice is taking the company to federal court over its alleged dominance in ad tech.
Apple failed in its last bid to avoid repaying its Irish taxes Tuesday after the Court of Justice upheld a lower court ruling against the company, in the dispute that dates back to 2016.
The case drew outrage from Apple, with CEO Tim Cook calling it “total political crap.”
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Zimbabwe rolls out hefty fines for poor telecommunications services
Harare, Zimbabwe — Zimbabwe’s government has introduced hefty fines of up to $5,000 for poor service in the country’s telecommunications industry.
In a statement Tuesday, Zimbabwe’s ICT Minister Tatenda Mavetera said the government will levy fines of between $200 and $5,000 per infringement for telecommunications companies and internet providers who fail to give reliable service.
Willard Shoko, an independent high-speed internet consultant, said the new fines could result in a solid telecom industry that can compete in the entire southern African region.
“The motive behind that is to improve internet for the end user. But I think they should also consider improving the infrastructure sharing and also collaboration to improve internet, not only for the region but also for Zimbabwe, because this is the foundation of the digital economy,” Shoko said. “I think they should also think about how the internet can be improved and the partnership that can help improve the internet.”
Fungai Mandiveyi, media and corporate affairs executive at Econet Wireless, Zimbabwe’s biggest telecommunications company, said the new regulations will be easier to comply with than those that existed before.
“The new provisions introduce a new model of penalties, unlike the blanket penalty that existed in the previous statutory instrument,” Mandiveyi said. “The new penalties are now linked to specific quality of service breaches, that have also been clearly spelled out. There is now more clarity in what constitutes a service breach, and what penalty goes with a specific breach of the quality of service.”
However, Christopher Musodza, an independent digital policy consultant, said the pressure to maintain internet service during Zimbabwe’s frequent power outages may present challenges for telecom companies.
“For the telecoms provider, it’s going to be tough,” he said. “The economy is not performing as anyone would want. We have got issues to do with long hours of load shedding, so service providers have to power their base stations for long hours to ensure that they meet the key performance indicators. So, imagine running generators for most of the day to ensure that you avoid a fine. (I’m) not sure what will cost more; trying to keep up with these economic factors or just paying the fine.”
Zimbabweans have long complained about poor and expensive telecommunication service. Shoko said that is the reason they are welcoming the government’s decision this month to approve Starlink’s license to operate in Zimbabwe.
The U.S.-based satellite company, owned by Elon Musk, has established a presence in several other African countries, including Botswana, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, and Zambia.
“They can now easily get internet anywhere in Zimbabwe at an affordable price, thereby bridging the digital divide. That’s one major thing for the end user,” Shoko said of Starlink’s presence.
“For the local ISPs [internet service providers], there is massive opportunity that Zimbabwe can take advantage of — investment in ground infrastructure,” he added. “Currently in Africa, Nigeria has only two ground stations that are servicing the whole of Africa. If the Zimbabwe government and local ISPs can work together with Starlink to provide ground stations in Zimbabwe, this will allow local ISPs to provide internet to Starlink, and provide better latencies in the region. So this will improve Starlink internet for local Zimbabweans, as well as the region.”
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First doses of mpox vaccine from US arrive in DR Congo
KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of Congo — Authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo said that 50,000 doses of mpox vaccine from the United States arrived in the country on Tuesday, a week after the first batch arrived from the European Union.
Adults in Equateur, South Kivu and Sankuru, the three most-affected provinces, will be vaccinated first, starting on October 2, said Cris Kacita Osako, coordinator of the DRC’s Monkeypox Response Committee.
Last week, the first batch of mpox vaccines arrived in the capital, Kinshasa, the center of the outbreak. The 100,000 doses of the JYNNEOS vaccine, manufactured by the Danish company Bavarian Nordic, were donated by the EU through HERA, the bloc’s agency for health emergencies. Another 100,000 were delivered over the weekend.
The 50,000 doses from the U.S. will be of the same JYNNEOS vaccine.
The 250,000 doses are just a fraction of the 3 million doses authorities have said are needed to end the mpox outbreaks in the DRC, the epicenter of the global health emergency. EU countries pledged to donate more than 500,000 others, but the timeline for their delivery remained unclear.
Since the start of 2024, there have been 5,549 confirmed mpox cases across the continent, with 643 associated deaths, representing a sharp escalation in infections and fatalities compared with previous years. The cases in the DRC constituted 91% of the total number. Most mpox infections in the DRC and Burundi, the second-most-affected country, are in children under age 15.
Last week, the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization launched a continentwide response plan to the outbreak of mpox, three weeks after the World Health Organization declared outbreaks in 12 African countries a global emergency.
The DRC issued an emergency approval of the vaccine, which has already been used in Europe and the United States in adults. For the moment, the rollout will be reserved for adults, with priority groups being those who have been in close contact with infected people and sex workers, Africa CDC Director-General Dr. Jean Kaseya told reporters last week.
The European Medicines Agency is examining additional data to be able to administer it to children ranging in age from 12 to 17, which could happen at the end of the month, HERA Director-General Laurent Muschel said.
The next batch of mpox vaccines will come from Japan and could arrive as early as this weekend, Kacita Osako told the AP, without specifying how many doses.
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Australia plans age limit to ban children from social media
SYDNEY — Australia will ban children from using social media with a minimum age limit as high as 16, the prime minister said Tuesday, vowing to get kids off their devices and “onto the footy fields.”
Federal legislation to keep children off social media will be introduced this year, Anthony Albanese said, describing the impact of the sites on young people as a “scourge.”
The minimum age for children to log into sites such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok has not been decided but is expected to be between 14 and 16 years, Albanese said.
The prime minister said his own preference would be a block on users aged below 16.
Age verification trials are being held over the coming months, the center-left leader said, though analysts said they doubted it was technically possible to enforce an online age limit.
“I want to see kids off their devices and onto the footy fields and the swimming pools and the tennis courts,” Albanese said.
“We want them to have real experiences with real people because we know that social media is causing social harm,” he told national broadcaster ABC.
“This is a scourge. We know that there is mental health consequences for what many of the young people have had to deal with,” he said.
Australia’s conservative opposition leader Peter Dutton said he would support an age limit.
“Every day of delay leaves young kids vulnerable to the harms of social media and the time for relying on tech companies to enforce age limits,” he said.
‘Easy to circumvent’
But it is not clear that the technology exists to reliably enforce such bans, said the University of Melbourne’s associate professor in computing and information technology, Toby Murray.
“We already know that present age verification methods are unreliable, too easy to circumvent, or risk user privacy,” he said.
Analysts warned that an age limit may not in any case help troubled children.
It “threatens to create serious harm by excluding young people from meaningful, healthy participation in the digital world,” said Daniel Angus, who leads the digital media research centre at Queensland University of Technology.
“There is logic in establishing boundaries that limit young people’s access,” said Samantha Schulz, senior sociologist of education at the University of Adelaide.
“However, young people are not the problem and regulating youth misses the more urgent task of regulating irresponsible social media platforms. Social media is an unavoidable part of young people’s lives.”
The prime minister said parents expected a response to online bullying and harmful material present on social media.
“These social media companies think they’re above everyone,” he told a radio interviewer.
“Well, they have a social responsibility and at the moment, they’re not exercising it. And we’re determined to make sure that they do,” he said.
Australia has been at the forefront of global efforts to regulate social media platforms, with its online safety watchdog bumping heads notably with Elon Musk’s X over the content it carries.
your ad hereGoogle faces new antitrust trial after ruling declaring search engine a monopoly
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — One month after a judge declared Google’s search engine an illegal monopoly, the tech giant faces another antitrust lawsuit that threatens to break up the company, this time over its advertising technology.
The Justice Department, joined by a coalition of states, and Google each made opening statements Monday to a federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia, who will decide whether Google holds a monopoly over online advertising technology.
The regulators contend that Google built, acquired and maintains a monopoly over the technology that matches online publishers to advertisers. Dominance over the software on both the buy side and the sell side of the transaction enables Google to keep as much as 36 cents on the dollar when it brokers sales between publishers and advertisers, the government contends.
They allege that Google also controls the ad exchange market, which matches the buy side to the sell side.
“One monopoly is bad enough. But a trifecta of monopolies is what we have here,” Justice Department lawyer Julia Tarver Wood said during her opening statement.
Google says the government’s case is based on an internet of yesteryear, when desktop computers ruled and internet users carefully typed precise World Wide Web addresses into URL fields. Advertisers now are more likely to turn to social media companies like TikTok or streaming TV services like Peacock.
In her opening statement, Google lawyer Karen Dunn likened the government’s case to a “time capsule with a Blackberry, an iPod and a Blockbuster video card.”
Dunn said Supreme Court precedents warn judges about “the serious risk of error or unintended consequences” when dealing with rapidly emerging technology and considering whether antitrust law requires intervention. She also warned that any action taken against Google won’t benefit small businesses but will simply allow other tech behemoths like Amazon, Microsoft and TikTok to fill the void.
According to Google’s annual reports, revenue has declined in recent years for Google Networks, the division of the Mountain View, California-based tech giant that includes such services as AdSense and Google Ad Manager that are at the heart of the case, from $31.7 billion in 2021 to $31.3 billion in 2023.
The case will now be decided by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, who is best known for high-profile terrorism trials including that of Sept. 11 defendant Zacarias Moussaoui. Brinkema, though, also has experience with highly technical civil trials, working in a courthouse that sees an outsize number of patent infringement cases.
The Virginia case comes on the heels of a major defeat for Google over its search engine. A judge in the District of Columbia declared the search engine a monopoly, maintained in part by tens of billions of dollars Google pays each year to companies like Apple to lock in Google as the default search engine presented to consumers when they buy iPhones and other gadgets.
And in December, a judge declared Google’s Android app store a monopoly in a case brought by a private gaming company.
In the search engine case, the judge has not yet imposed any remedies. The government hasn’t offered its proposed sanctions, though there could be scrutiny over whether Google should be allowed to continue to make exclusivity deals that ensure its search engine is consumers’ default option.
Peter Cohan, a professor of management practice at Babson College, said the Virginia case could potentially be more harmful to Google because the obvious remedy would be requiring it to sell off parts of its ad tech business that generate billions of dollars in annual revenue.
“Divestitures are definitely a possible remedy for this second case,” Cohan said “It could be potentially more significant than initially meets the eye.”
Google is also facing intensifying pressure over its ad tech business across the Atlantic. British competition regulators last week accused the company of abusing its dominance in the country’s digital ad market and giving preference to its own services. European Union antitrust enforcers carrying out their own investigation suggested last year that breaking up the company was the only way to satisfy competition concerns about its digital ad business
In the Virginia trial, the government’s witnesses will include executives from newspaper publishers that the government contends have faced harm from Google’s practices.
“Google extracted extraordinary fees at the expense of the website publishers who make the open internet vibrant and valuable,” government lawyers wrote in court papers.
The government’s first witness was Tim Wolfe, an executive with Gannett Co., a newspaper chain that publishes USA Today as its flagship. Wolfe said Gannett feels like it has no choice but to continue to use Google’s ad tech products, even though the company keeps 20 cents on the dollar from every ad purchase, not even accounting for what it takes from the advertisers. He said Gannett simply can’t give up access to the huge stable of advertisers that Google brings to the ad exchange.
On cross-examination, Wolfe acknowledged that despite Google’s supposed monopoly, Gannett was able to work with other competitors to sell its available inventory to advertisers.
Google asserts the integration of its technology on the buy side, sell side and in the middle assures ads and web pages load quickly and enhance security.
Google says the government’s case is improperly focused on display ads and banner ads that load on web pages accessed through a desktop computer and fails to consider consumers’ migration to mobile apps and the boom in ads placed on social media sites over the last 15 years.
The government’s case “focuses on a limited type of advertising viewed on a narrow subset of websites when user attention migrated elsewhere years ago,” Google’s lawyers wrote in a pretrial filing.
The trial is expected to last several weeks.
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Morgan Wallen leads the 2024 Country Music Association award nominations
NEW YORK — He had some help: Morgan Wallen tops the 2024 Country Music Association Awards nominations with seven.
For a third year in a row, Wallen is up for both the top prize — entertainer of the year — and the male vocalist categories.
Rounding out the entertainer of the year categories are Luke Combs, Jelly Roll, Chris Stapleton and Lainey Wilson.
Post Malone’s massive radio hit, “I Had Some Help,” which features Wallen, is the main reason why the country singer leads the pack this year. It is up for single, song, musical event and music video of the year. His last nomination is a second one in the musical event category, for his collaboration with Eric Church, “Man Made a Bar.”
Single of the year is awarded to the artist, producer and mix engineers; song of the year is given to the songwriters.
Ahead of the nominations announcement, some fans speculated that Beyoncé, whose landmark country-and-then-some reclamation Cowboy Carter was released during the eligibility window, could receive a nomination at the 2024 CMAs. She did not.
Earlier this year, the album hit No. 1 on the Billboard country albums chart, making her the first Black woman to top the chart since its 1964 inception.
The album was five years in the making, a direct result of what Beyoncé has called “an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed … and it was very clear that I wasn’t,” most likely a reference to a 2016 CMAs performance that resulted in racist backlash.
The CMA Awards are nominated and voted on by members of the Country Music Association, which includes music executives, artists, publicists, songwriters and other industry professionals.
Wallen is followed by both Cody Johnson, who is also nominated in the male vocalist category for the third year in a row, and 7-time male vocalist of the year winner, Stapleton.
Stapleton and Johnson have five nominations each.
But Stapleton could take home seven trophies, should he sweep his categories.
Stapleton is both an artist and producer on “White Horse,” up for single of the year, and Higher, up for album of the year.
At the CMAs, production credits are not counted as separate nominations, although they are factored into trophy counts.
First-time nominee Post Malone and Wilson, last year’s entertainer of the year winner, are tied with four nominations. All of Malone’s nominations are for “I Had Some Help.”
Louis Bell, Charlie Handsome and Hoskins are tied with three nominations for their work as producers and co-writers on “I Had Some Help.”
Jelly Roll, Combs, Kacey Musgraves and Megan Moroney also boast three nods each. The latter three could take home four trophies: Combs is both artist and producer on Fathers & Sons, up for album of the year. The same is true for Musgraves’ album Deeper Well.
And Moroney is both artist and director of her nominated music video, “I’m Not Pretty.”
The CMA Awards will air on November 20 on ABC at 8 p.m. Eastern. It can be streamed the next day on Hulu.
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