Google 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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Apple embraces AI craze with newly unleashed iPhone 16 lineup
CUPERTINO, California — Apple on Monday charged into the artificial intelligence craze with a new iPhone lineup that marks the company’s latest attempt to latch onto a technology trend and transform it into a cultural phenomenon.
The four different iPhone 16 models will all come equipped with special chips needed to power a suite of AI tools that Apple hopes will make its marquee product even more indispensable and reverse a recent sales slump.
Apple’s AI features are designed to turn its often-blundering virtual assistant Siri into a smarter and more versatile sidekick, automate a wide range of tedious tasks, and pull off other crowd-pleasing tricks such as creating customized emojis within seconds.
After receiving a standing ovation for Monday’s event, Apple CEO Tim Cook promised the AI package would unleash “innovations that will make a true difference in people’s lives.”
But the breakthroughs won’t begin as soon as the new iPhones — ranging in price from $800 to $1,200 — hit the stores on September 20.
Most of Apple’s AI functions will roll out as part of a free software update to iOS 18, the operating system that will power the iPhone 16 rolling out from October through December. U.S. English will be the featured language at launch, but an update enabling other languages will come out next year, according to Apple.
It’s all part of a new approach that Apple previewed at a developers conference three months ago to create more anticipation for a next generation of iPhones amid a rare sales slump for the well-known devices.
Since Apple’s June conference, competitors such as Samsung and Google have made greater strides in AI — a technology widely expected to trigger the most dramatic changes in computing since the first iPhone came out 17 years ago.
Just as Apple elevated fledgling smartphones into a must-have technology in 21st-century society, the Cupertino, California, company is betting it can do something similar with its tardy arrival to artificial intelligence.
‘Apple Intelligence’
To set itself apart from the early leaders in AI, the technology being baked into the iPhone 16 is being promoted as “Apple Intelligence.” Despite the unique branding, Apple’s new approach mimics many of the features already available in the Samsung Galaxy S24 released in January and the Google Pixel 9 that came out last month.
“Apple could have waited another year for further development, but initial take up of AI- powered devices from the likes of Samsung has been encouraging, and Apple is keen to capitalize on this market,” said PP Foresight analyst Paolo Pescatore.
As it treads into new territory, Apple is trying to preserve its longtime commitment to privacy by tailoring its AI so that most of its technological tricks can be processed on the device itself instead of relying on giant banks of computers located in remote data centers. When a task needs to connect to a data center, Apple promises it will be done in a tightly controlled way that ensures that no personal data is stored remotely.
While corralling the personal information shared through Apple’s AI tools inherently reduces the chances that the data will be exploited or misused against a user’s wishes, it doesn’t guarantee iron-clad security. A device could still be stolen, for instance, or hacked through digital chicanery.
For users seeking to access even more AI tools than being offered by the iPhone, Apple is teaming up with OpenAI to give users the option of farming out more complicated tasks to the popular ChatGPT chatbot.
Although Apple is releasing a free version of its operating system to propel its on-device AI features, the chip needed to run the technology is only available on the iPhone 16 lineup and the high-end iPhone 15 models that came out a year ago.
That means most consumers who are interested in taking advantage of Apple’s approach to AI will have to buy one of the iPhone 16 models – a twist that investors are counting on will fuel a surge in demand heading into the holiday season.
The anticipated sales boom is the main reason Apple’s stock price has climbed by more than 10%, including a slight uptick Monday after the shares initially slipped following the showcase for the latest iPhones.
Besides its latest iPhones, Apple also introduced a new version of its smartwatch that will include a feature to help detect sleep apnea as well the next generation of its wireless headphones, the AirPods Pro, that will be able to function as a hearing aid with an upcoming software update.
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James Earl Jones, actor, voice of Darth Vader, dies at 93
NEW YORK — James Earl Jones, who overcame racial prejudice and a severe stutter to become a celebrated icon of stage and screen — eventually lending his deep, commanding voice to CNN, The Lion King and Darth Vader — has died. He was 93.
His agent, Barry McPherson, confirmed Jones died Monday morning at home in New York’s Hudson Valley region. The cause was not immediately clear.
The pioneering Jones, who was one of the first African American actors in a continuing role on a daytime drama and worked deep into his 80s, won two Emmys, a Golden Globe, two Tony Awards, a Grammy, the National Medal of Arts, the Kennedy Center Honors and was given an honorary Oscar and a special Tony for lifetime achievement. In 2022, a Broadway theater was renamed in his honor.
He cut an elegant figure late in life, with a wry sense of humor and a ferocious work habit. In 2015, he arrived at rehearsals for a Broadway run of The Gin Game having already memorized the play and with notebooks filled with comments from the creative team. He said he was always in service of the work.
“The need to storytell has always been with us,” he told The Associated Press then. “I think it first happened around campfires when the man came home and told his family he got the bear, the bear didn’t get him.”
Jones created such memorable film roles as the reclusive writer coaxed back into the spotlight in Field of Dreams, the boxer Jack Johnson in the stage and screen hit The Great White Hope, the writer Alex Haley in Roots: The Next Generation and a South African minister in Cry, the Beloved Country.
He was also a sought-after voice actor, expressing the villainy of Darth Vader (“No, I am your father,” commonly misremembered as “Luke, I am your father”), as well as the benign dignity of King Mufasa in Disney’s animated The Lion King and announcing “This is CNN” during station breaks. He won a 1977 Grammy for his performance on the Great American Documents audiobook.
“If you were an actor or aspired to be an actor, if you pounded the payment in these streets … one of the standards we always had was to be a James Earl Jones,” Samuel L. Jackson once said.
Some of his other films include Dr. Strangelove, The Greatest (with Muhammad Ali), Conan the Barbarian, Three Fugitives and playing an admiral in three Tom Clancy blockbuster adaptations — The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger. In a rare romantic comedy, Claudine, Jones had an onscreen love affair with Diahann Carroll.
Jones made his Broadway debut in 1958’s Sunrise At Campobello and would win his two Tony Awards for The Great White Hope (1969) and Fences (1987). He also was nominated for On Golden Pond (2005) and Gore Vidal’s The Best Man (2012). He was celebrated for his command of Shakespeare and Athol Fugard alike. More recent Broadway appearances include Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Driving Miss Daisy, The Iceman Cometh, and You Can’t Take It With You.
As a rising stage and television actor, he appeared in As the World Turns in 1965, one of the first Black actors to have such a role on daytime TV. He performed with the New York Shakespeare Festival Theater in Othello, Macbeth and King Lear and in off-Broadway plays.
Early years
Jones was born by the light of an oil lamp in a shack in Arkabutla, Mississippi, on Jan. 17, 1931. His father, Robert Earl Jones, had deserted his wife before the baby’s arrival to pursue life as a boxer and, later, an actor.
When Jones was 6, his mother took him to her parents’ farm near Manistee, Michigan. His grandparents adopted the boy and raised him.
“A world ended for me, the safe world of childhood,” Jones wrote in his autobiography, Voices and Silences. “The move from Mississippi to Michigan was supposed to be a glorious event. For me it was a heartbreak, and not long after, I began to stutter.”
Too embarrassed to speak, he remained virtually mute for years, communicating with teachers and fellow students with handwritten notes. A sympathetic high school teacher, Donald Crouch, learned that the boy wrote poetry, and demanded that Jones read one of his poems aloud in class. He did so faultlessly.
Teacher and student worked together to restore the boy’s normal speech. “I could not get enough of speaking, debating, orating — acting,” he recalled in his book.
At the University of Michigan, he failed a pre-med exam and switched to drama, also playing four seasons of basketball. He served in the Army from 1953 to 1955.
In New York, he moved in with his father and enrolled with the American Theater Wing program for young actors. Father and son waxed floors to support themselves while looking for acting jobs.
True stardom came suddenly in 1970 with The Great White Hope. Howard Sackler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play depicted the struggles of Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight boxing champion, amid the racism of early 20th-century America. In 1972, Jones repeated his role in the movie version and was nominated for an Academy Award as best actor.
Jones’ two wives were also actors. He married Julienne Marie Hendricks in 1967. After their divorce, he married Cecilia Hart, best known for her role as Stacey Erickson in the CBS police drama Paris, in 1982. She died in 2016. They had a son, Flynn Earl, born in 1983.
No artist ‘has served America more’
In 2022, the Cort Theater on Broadway was renamed after Jones, with a ceremony that included Norm Lewis singing “Go the Distance,” Brian Stokes Mitchell singing “Make Them Hear You” and words from Mayor Eric Adams, Samuel L. Jackson and LaTanya Richardson Jackson.
“You can’t think of an artist that has served America more,” director Kenny Leon told the AP. “It’s like it seems like a small act, but it’s a huge action. It’s something we can look up and see that’s tangible.”
Citing his stutter as one of the reasons he wasn’t a political activist, Jones nonetheless hoped his art could change minds.
“I realized early on, from people like Athol Fugard, that you cannot change anybody’s mind, no matter what you do,” he told the AP. “As a preacher, as a scholar, you cannot change their mind. But you can change the way they feel.”
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Bomb blast hits Pakistan polio team amid national immunization drive
Islamabad — Authorities in northwestern Pakistan said Monday that a roadside bomb explosion injured at least 10 people, including anti-polio vaccinators and police personnel escorting them.
The bombing in the South Waziristan district near the border with Afghanistan targeted a convoy carrying polio workers and their guards on the opening day of a nationwide immunization campaign.
Area security and hospital officials reported that three health workers and six security personnel were among the victims. No group immediately claimed responsibility for the violence in a region where security forces are fighting militants linked to the outlawed Pakistani Taliban.
Last week, Pakistan reported its 17th wild poliovirus case of the year from Islamabad, saying it paralyzed a child and marked the first infection in 16 years in the national capital.
Pakistani health officials said in the lead-up to Monday’s polio campaign that it is designed to vaccinate more than 33 million children under five in 115 districts nationwide.
Muhammad Anwarul Haq, coordinator of the National Emergency Operations Center for Polio Eradication, stated that the immunization drive would primarily focus on districts where “the virus has been detected and the risk of continued transmission and spread is really high.”
Haq encouraged all parents and caregivers to ensure their children get vaccinated, lamenting that “parents have not always welcomed and opened their doors to the vaccinators when they visit their homes.”
Pakistan and Afghanistan, which reported nine paralytic polio cases so far in 2024, are the only two remaining polio-endemic countries globally. Polio immunization campaigns have long faced multiple challenges in both countries, such as security and vaccine boycotts, dealing setbacks to the goal of eradicating the virus from the world.
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K-pop takes socialist Cuba by storm
Havana, Cuba — Socialist Cuba, the birthplace of salsa and other rhythms that have conquered the world, is now surrendering to the invasion of South Korean pop music.
Thirteen thousand kilometers of distance separate the Asian nation and the communist-run island, as well as a different language and cultural traditions. However, all of these barriers would seem to vanish in a split second thanks to K-pop’s infectious beat and elaborate choreography.
Korean popular music, or K-pop, has spread far and wide from its Asian roots as boy bands like BTS and NCT and their female counterpart Blackpink rival Taylor Swift for downloads and album sales globally.
But it was slow to catch on in Cuba, where salsa is king and internet speeds were glacial until recently.
On Saturday, far from Seoul, dozens of teenagers clad in plaid, prep school skirts, baggy bomber pants and heavy black eyeliner busted their best moves as images of the genre’s idols were projected on a large screen of a Havana dance club.
“K-pop has opened a new world to me,” said 24-year-old Fransico Piedra, who when not working with his father as a blacksmith dreams up meticulous dance steps. Known by his artistic name Ken he one day aspires to be a professional K-pop choreographer. “It’s a place where I can be myself, and share with friends the joy of laughter, song and dance.”
Many of the teenagers hope to follow in the footsteps of two Cuban groups — Limitless and LTX — that before the pandemic traveled to South Korea to partake in the K-POP World Festival, an annual talent competition.
K-pop — a catch all for musical styles ranging from R&B to rock — first penetrated the island when Cubans fell in love with South Korean soap operas about a decade ago. As internet speeds improved, and government controls eased, more young Cubans got online and started streaming videos like teenagers everywhere.
While Cuban kids may be mesmerized by K-pop, an older generation of leaders have had frostier ties to South Korea. The two countries only restored diplomatic relations that were severed following the 1959 Cuban revolution this year and have yet to exchange ambassadors.
Meanwhile, Cuba remains a staunch ally of North Korea, which views K-pop as a dangerous form of propaganda from a capitalist enemy with whom is has been locked in a military standoff since the 1950s.
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India isolates ‘suspected mpox case’
New Delhi — India reported Sunday that it had put a “suspected mpox case” into isolation, assuring that the world’s most populous nation had “robust measures” in place, the health ministry said in a statement.
There have been no confirmed cases of mpox in India, a country of 1.4 billion people.
“A young male patient, who recently traveled from a country currently experiencing mpox transmission, has been identified as a suspect case of mpox,” the health ministry said in a statement.
“The patient has been isolated in a designated hospital and is currently stable,” it said, adding the samples “are being tested to confirm the presence of mpox.”
It gave no further details of where he may have contracted the disease.
“There is no cause of any undue concern,” the statement added.
“The country is fully prepared to deal with such (an) isolated travel related case and has robust measures in place to manage and mitigate any potential risk.”
Mpox’s resurgence and the detection in the Democratic Republic of Congo of a new strain, dubbed Clade 1b, prompted the World Health Organization to declare its highest international alert level on August 14.
Mpox has also been detected in Asia and Europe.
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China plans to allow wholly foreign-owned hospitals in some areas
Beijing — China said Sunday it would allow the establishment of wholly foreign-owned hospitals in nine areas of the country including the capital, as Beijing tries to attract more foreign investment to boost its flagging economy.
In a document on the official website of China’s commerce ministry, it said the new policy was a pilot project designed to implement a pledge the ruling Communist Party’s Central Committee led by President Xi Jinping made at its July plenum meeting held roughly every five years.
“In order to … introduce foreign investment to promote the high-quality development of China’s medical-related fields, and better meet the medical and health needs of the people, it is planned to carry out pilot work of expanding opening-up in the medical field,” according to the document.
The project will allow the establishment of such hospitals in Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Nanjing, Suzhou, Fuzhou, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hainan — all relatively wealthy cities or provinces in eastern or southern China.
The new policy excludes hospitals practicing traditional Chinese medicine and “mergers and acquisitions of public hospitals,” the document read, adding that the specific conditions, requirements and procedures for setting up such foreign-owned hospitals would be detailed soon.
The policy also allows companies with foreign investors to engage in the development and application of gene and human stem cell technologies for treatment and diagnosis in the pilot free-trade zones of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, and Hainan.
This includes registration, marketing and production of products that can be bought nationwide, according to the document.
The removal of restrictions on foreign investment in these fields comes as the world’s second-largest economy faces growing headwinds with flagging foreign business sentiment, one of the issues threatening growth.
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African film, TV event draws big names, big dreams, big business
MIP Africa — an event that matches African film and TV creatives to the people and countries that produce their work, wrapped up last week [Sept. 4] with several signed deals. Industry members and legislators from film meccas worldwide attended the event, part of the larger Fame Week Africa conference for creative professionals. Reporter Vicky Stark has the story from Cape Town, South Africa.
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Family keeps up Beirut dessert tradition
Beirut — At a shop nestled in a busy, crowded Beirut district, Hasan El-Makary is weighing out containers of warm, fragrant mufataka, a traditional sweet in the Lebanese capital that is rarely found in stores.
“I’ve been in this shop for 50 years, but we started specializing in mufataka 30 years ago,” Makary said from the humble shop with its aging decor and low ceiling.
A kind of rice pudding made with turmeric, tahini sesame paste, sugar and pine nuts, mufataka is traditional in Beirut but less known even outside the city.
Makary, 73, said he used to sell other sweets but as demand grew for mufataka, he abandoned the rest and now he and his cousin – who is also his business partner – just make the yellow pudding.
“At the beginning you add turmeric, that’s the main thing, then tahini, sugar and rice … we cook it slowly on fire,” he said.
The rice must be soaked overnight, and Makary said he comes to the shop at 5:00 a.m. to make the dish, which takes around four hours and requires regular stirring.
He said his father started making mufataka despite initially believing people would not pay money for a dish that is normally prepared at home.
Plastic containers of the pudding, which is eaten with a spoon, dotted trays and tables across the shop, waiting for customers who peered through a window to place their order from the busy street outside.
Customer Iman Chehab, 55, was picking up mufataka for her mother, who used to make it herself.
“She is elderly now and she can’t stir … it takes a lot of work,” said Chehab, who works in human resources management.
The dish is “something traditional for us who are from Beirut,” she told AFP.
Places like Makary’s shop “are the old face of Beirut that we love and always want to remember,” she added.
‘Heritage’
A few bustling neighborhoods away, Samir Makari, 35, is carrying on the family tradition.
At a gleaming shop also selling Arabic sweets like baklava, Makari attends to a huge copper pot of mufataka behind the counter, stirring it with a long, wooden-handled implement.
He weighs out and mixes the sugar, tahini paste and pine nuts in a second pot, later combining it all.
Mufataka used to be made just once a year on the last Wednesday in April, with families gathering by the sea at Beirut’s public beach, father and son said.
The occasion was “Job’s Wednesday,” a reference to the biblical figure also mentioned in the Koran and who is renowned for his patience, the younger Makari said, noting the virtue is also required for making mufataka.
On the wall of his shop, which he runs with his brother, were photos of his father and his grandfather at work.
He said he sometimes makes mufataka twice a day depending on demand, with some customers taking it outside Beirut to introduce it to those who do not know the dish.
At the original store, the elder Makary said he was happy his children had kept up the tradition.
Mufataka is part of “my heritage,” he said, and the family has “taken it from generation to generation.”
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Drought forces Kenya’s Maasai, other cattle herders to consider fish, camels
KAJIADO, Kenya — The blood, milk and meat of cattle have long been staple foods for Maasai pastoralists in Kenya, perhaps the country’s most recognizable community. But climate change is forcing the Maasai to contemplate a very different dish: fish.
A recent yearslong drought in Kenya killed millions of livestock. While Maasai elders hope the troubles are temporary and they will be able to resume traditional lives as herders, some are adjusting to a kind of food they had never learned to enjoy.
Fish were long viewed as part of the snake family due to their shape, and thus inedible. Their smell had been unpleasant and odd to the Maasai, who call semi-arid areas home.
“We never used to live near lakes and oceans, so fish was very foreign for us,” said Maasai Council of Elders chair Kelena ole Nchoi. “We grew up seeing our elders eat cows and goats.”
Among the Maasai and other pastoralists in Kenya and wider East Africa — like the Samburu, Somali and Borana — cattle are also a status symbol, a source of wealth and part of key cultural events like marriages as part of dowries.
But the prolonged drought in much of East Africa left carcasses of emaciated cattle strewn across vast dry lands. In early 2023, the Kenya National Drought Management Authority said 2.6 million livestock had died, with an estimated value of 226 billion Kenya shillings ($1.75 billion).
Meanwhile, increasing urbanization and a growing population have reduced available grazing land, forcing pastoralists to adopt new ways to survive.
In Kajiado county near Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, the local government is supporting fish farming projects for pastoralists — and encouraging them to eat fish, too.
Like many other Maasai women, Charity Oltinki previously engaged in beadwork, and her husband was in charge of the family’s herd. But the drought killed almost 100 of their cows, and only 50 sheep of their 300-strong flock survived.
“The lands were left bare, with nothing for the cows to graze on,” Oltinki said. “So, I decided to set aside a piece of land to rear fish and monitor how they would perform.”
The county government supplied her with pond liners, tilapia fish fingerlings and some feed. Using her savings from membership in a cooperative society, Oltinki secured a loan and had a well dug to ease the challenge of water scarcity.
After six months, the first batch of hundreds of fish was harvested, with the largest selling for up to 300 Kenyan shillings each ($2.30).
Another member of the Maasai community in Kajiado, Philipa Leiyan, started farming fish in addition to keeping livestock.
“When the county government introduced us to this fish farming project, we gladly received it because we considered it as an alternative source of livelihood,” Leiyan said.
The Kajiado government’s initiative started in 2014 and currently works with 600 pastoralists to help diversify their incomes and provide a buffer against the effects of climate change. There was initial reluctance, but the number of participants has grown from about 250 before the drought began in 2022.
“The program has seen some importance,” said Benson Siangot, director of fisheries in Kajiado county, adding that it also addresses issues of food insecurity and malnutrition.
The Maasai share their love for cattle with the Samburu, an ethnic group that lives in arid and semi-arid areas of northern Kenya and speaks a dialect of the Maa language that the Maasai speak.
The recent drought has forced the Samburu to look beyond cattle, too — to camels.
In Lekiji village, Abdulahi Mohamud now looks after 20 camels. The 65-year-old father of 15 lost his 30 cattle during the drought and decided to try an animal more suited to long dry spells.
“Camels are easier to rear as they primarily feed on shrubs and can survive in harsher conditions,” he said. “When the pasture dries out, all the cattle die.”
According to Mohamud, a small camel can be bought for 80,000 to 100,000 Kenyan shillings ($600 to $770) while the price of a cow ranges from 20,000 to 40,000 ($154 to $300).
He saw the camel’s resilience as worth the investment.
In a vast grazing area near Mohamud, 26-year-old Musalia Piti looked after his father’s 60 camels. The family lost 50 cattle during the drought and decided to invest in camels that they can sell whenever they need cattle for traditional ceremonies. Cows among the Samburu are used for dowries.
“You have to do whatever it takes to find cattle for wedding ceremonies, even though our herds may be smaller nowadays,” said Lesian Ole Sempere, a 59-year-old Samburu elder. Offering a cow as a gift to a prospective bride’s parents encourages them to declare their daughter as “your official wife,” he said.
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Pakistan hasn’t learned lessons from 2022 deadly floods, experts say
ISLAMABAD — Millions of people in Pakistan continue to live along the path of floodwaters, showing neither people nor the government have learned lessons from the 2022 devastating floods that killed 1,737 people, experts said Thursday, as an aid group said half of the 300 victims killed by rains since July are children.
Heavy rainfall is drenching those areas that were badly hit by the deluges two years ago.
The charity Save the Children said in a statement that floods and heavy rains have killed more than 150 children in Pakistan since the start of the monsoon season, making up more than half of all deaths in rain-affected areas.
The group said that 200 children have also been injured in Pakistan because of rains, which have also displaced thousands of people. Save the Children also said that people affected by floods were living in a relief camp in Sanghar, a district in the southern Sindh province, which was massively hit by floods two years ago.
“The rains and floods have destroyed 80% of cotton crops in Sanghar, the primary source of income for farmers, and killed hundreds of livestock,” the charity said, and added that it’s supporting the affected people with help from a local partner.
Khuram Gondal, the country director for Save the Children in Pakistan, said that children were always the most affected in a disaster.
“We need to ensure that the immediate impacts of the floods and heavy rains do not become long-term problems. In Sindh province alone, more than 72,000 children have seen their education disrupted,” he said.
Another charity, U.K.-based Islamic Relief, also said weeks of torrential rains in Pakistan have again triggered displacement and suffering among communities that were already devastated by the 2022 floods and are still in the process of rebuilding their lives and livelihoods.
Asif Sherazi, the group’s country director, said his organization is reaching out to flood-affected people.
There was no immediate response from the country’s ministry of climate change and national disaster management authority.
Pakistan has yet to undertake major reconstruction work because the government didn’t receive most of the funds out of the $9 billion that were pledged by the international community at last year’s donors’ conference in Geneva.
“We learned no lessons from that 2022 floods. Millions of people have built mud-brick homes on the paths of rivers, which usually remain dry,” said Mohsin Leghari, who served as irrigation minister years ago.
Leghari said that less rain is predicted for Pakistan for monsoon season compared with 2022, when climate-induced floods caused $30 billion in damage to the country’s economy.
“But the floodwater has inundated several villages in my own Dera Ghazi Khan district in the Punjab province,” Leghari said. “Floods have affected farmers, and my own land has once again come under the floodwater.”
Wasim Ehsan, an architect, said Pakistan was still not prepared to handle any 2022-like situation mainly because people ignore construction laws while building homes and even hotels in urban and rural areas.
He said the floods in 2022 caused damage in the northwest because people had built homes and hotels after slightly diverting a river. “This is reason that a hotel was destroyed by the Swat River in 2022,” he said.
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Belarusian Sabalenka defeats America’s Pegula to win US Open women’s title
NEW YORK — Belarusian Aryna Sabalenka beat American sixth seed Jessica Pegula 7-5, 7-5 in the U.S. Open women’s final on Saturday.
Sabalenka blocked out the wild cheers of the home crowd in Arthur Ashe Stadium to break Pegula in the final game and win her first title at Flushing Meadows.
A year after coming up short in the final, the second seed fought back from a break down in both sets to claim victory and fell to the court in her moment of triumph.
The 30-year-old Pegula had waited a long time to reach her first major final but could not match her opponent’s raw power despite the noisy backing of the New York crowd.
The roof on Arthur Ashe Stadium was closed because of heavy rain, and the players traded breaks twice as they settled into the stormy affair in front of a celebrity-packed house.
Sabalenka held her serve through a four-deuce 11th game and fought through a spine-tingling 12th, mixing precision at the net with her usual power from the baseline before breaking her opponent on the fifth set point.
Pegula struggled with her rackets throughout the match, complaining to her coaches as she seemed unable to find the right tension on her strings, and it looked as though she would not put up a fight in the second set when Sabalenka went 3-0 up.
But the American found another level and brought the fans to their feet when she won the next five games in a furious fight back.
Sabalenka leveled when she sent over a forehand winner that just kissed the line on break point in the 10th game and sought to bring a swift end to the contest, holding serve and then applying pressure from the baseline in the final game.
The tears flowed immediately for Sabalenka as she claimed her third Grand Slam title after winning the Australian Open twice, and she high-fived fans as she ran up the stands to share a joyful celebration with her team.
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Almodovar’s ‘The Room Next Door’ triumphs at Venice Festival
VENICE, ITALY — Spanish director Pedro Almodovar’s first English-language movie “The Room Next Door,” which tackles the hefty themes of euthanasia and climate change, won the prestigious Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday.
Starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, the film received an 18-minute standing ovation when it premiered at Venice earlier in the week — one of the longest in recent memory.
Almodovar is a darling of the festival circuit and was awarded a lifetime achievement award at Venice in 2019 for his bold, irreverent and often funny Spanish-language features.
He also won an Oscar in the best foreign language category for his 1999 film “All About My Mother.”
Now aged 74, he has decided to try his hand at English, focusing his lens on questions of life, death and friendship. Speaking after collecting his prize, he said euthanasia should not be blocked by politics or religion.
“I believe that saying goodbye to this world cleanly and with dignity is a fundamental right of every human being,” he said, speaking in Spanish.
He also thanked his two female stars for their performances.
“This award really belongs to them, it’s a film about two women and the two women are Julianne and Tilda,” he said.
While “The Room Next Door” had been widely tipped to win, the runner-up Silver Lion award was a surprise, going to Italian director Maura Delpero for her slow-paced drama set in the Italian Alps during World War Two — “Vermiglio.”
Australia’s Nicole Kidman won the best actress award for her risqué role in the erotic “Babygirl,” where she plays a hard-nosed CEO, who jeopardizes both her career and her family by having a toxic affair with a young, manipulative intern.
Kidman was in Venice on Saturday, but did not attend the awards ceremony after learning that her mother had died unexpectedly.
France’s Vincent Lindon was named best actor for “The Quiet Son,” a topical, French-language drama about a family torn apart by extreme-right radicalism.
Road to Oscars
The best director award went to American Brady Corbet for his 3-1/2 hour-long movie “The Brutalist,” which was shot on 70mm celluloid and recounts the epic tale of a Hungarian Holocaust survivor played by Adrien Brody, who seeks to rebuild his life in the United States.
“We have the power to support each other and tell the Goliath corporations that try and push us around: ‘No, it’s three-and-a-half hours long and it’s on 70mm,” he told the auditorium Saturday.
The festival marks the start of the awards season and regularly throws up big favorites for the Oscars, with eight of the past 12 best director awards at the Oscars going to films that debuted at Venice.
The prize for best screenplay went to Murilo Hauser and Heitor Lorega for “I’m Still Here,” a film about Brazil’s military dictatorship, while the special jury award went to the abortion drama “April,” by Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili.
Among the movies that left Venice’s Lido island empty-handed were Todd Phillips’s “Joker: Folie à Deux,” starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, the sequel to his original “The Joker” which claimed the top prize here in 2019.
Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer,” with Daniel Craig playing a gay drug addict, and Pablo Larrain’s Maria Callas biopic “Maria,” starring Angelina Jolie as the celebrated Greek soprano, also won plaudits from the critics but did not get any awards.
The Venice jury this year was headed by French actress Isabelle Huppert.
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Back in business: Bookstore forced to close in China reopens in Washington
Six years after Jifeng Bookstore was forced to close its doors in Shanghai, the shop has reopened in Washington to bring debate and literature to a new audience. Liam Scott has the story for VOA News. Videographer: Yi Ruokun
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New polio strain threatens setback to eradication in Nigeria
ABUJA, NIGERIA — Nigeria’s difficult victory over polio faces a challenge as the poliovirus type 2 variant reemerges and the nation considers new measures to tackle the outbreak.
Nigeria eradicated wild polio in 2020, but more than 50 cases of the poliovirus type 2 variant were reported between January and May. Authorities and global partners met Wednesday in Abuja with northern traditional leaders to strengthen efforts against the disease, particularly in under-immunized areas.
Bill Gates, a key global funder of Nigeria’s polio fight, said eradicating this strain is a top priority for the Gates Foundation.
“We do have this circulating variant, poliovirus type 2. The acronym is cVDPV2. … Unfortunately, it’s equally bad as the wild poliovirus,” Gates said. “It can paralyze or even kill children, and we still have work to do to get rid of this.”
Efforts focus on improving surveillance and expanding vaccination coverage. The World Health Organization noted setbacks earlier this year, stressing the need for continuing vigilance.
“We are facing the challenge of interrupting transmission of significant variant poliovirus type 2,” said Walter Kazadi Mulombo, WHO country representative to Nigeria. “We nearly got there several months ago but then we experienced some setbacks.”
Reluctance to take the vaccine, driven by religious and traditional beliefs, has hampered polio eradication efforts in Nigeria. However, northern traditional leaders have played a pivotal role in community outreach and health campaigns.
Muyi Aina, executive director of the Nigerian Primary Healthcare Development Agency, said traditional leaders have helped close the immunization gap in remote areas.
“The results we’re getting are due largely to the commitment received from our revered traditional leaders,” Aina said. “For example, we had a 57% reduction in pending noncompliance from the April campaign, and we were able to vaccinate an additional 117,000 zero-plus children [newborns and older] across 14 states with the help of the traditional leaders.”
Nigeria’s routine vaccination efforts, including recent campaigns to immunize against the human papilloma virus have been lauded. However, the resurgence of poliovirus type 2 highlights the need for sustained immunization, especially in vulnerable regions.
Cristian Munduate, the UNICEF country representative, called for more collaboration.
“We need to accelerate with polio, but we also need to accelerate in line with all these effects to link more routine immunization to reach those children,” Munduate said. “To work and strengthen primary health care, we are very committed to at least having one primary health care [worker] fully equipped per ward.”
Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar, the sultan of Sokoto, representing northern traditional rulers, reaffirmed their commitment to supporting vaccination efforts while thanking stakeholders.
“We are more concerned in the welfare of our people, so whoever is going to help us to help our people is part and parcel of us and is always welcomed,” Abubakar said.
Despite progress, the resurgence of poliovirus type 2 remains a serious threat. The Abuja meeting concluded with calls for stronger efforts, better surveillance, and continued collaboration between traditional leaders and health officials to ensure eradication.
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Boeing’s beleaguered Starliner returns home without astronauts
WASHINGTON — Boeing’s beleaguered Starliner made its long-awaited return to Earth on Saturday without the astronauts who rode it up to the International Space Station, after NASA ruled the trip back too risky.
After years of delays, Starliner launched in June for what was meant to be a roughly weeklong test mission — a final shakedown before it could be certified to rotate crew to and from the orbital laboratory.
But unexpected thruster malfunctions and helium leaks en route to the ISS derailed those plans, and NASA ultimately decided it was safer to bring crewmates Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams back on a rival SpaceX Crew Dragon — though they’ll have to wait until February 2025.
The gumdrop-shaped Boeing capsule touched down softly at the White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico, its descent slowed by parachutes and cushioned by airbags, having departed the ISS around six hours earlier.
As it streaked red-hot across the night sky, ground teams reported hearing sonic booms. The spacecraft endured temperatures of 1,650 degrees Celsius during atmospheric reentry.
NASA lavished praise on Boeing during a post-flight press conference where representatives from the company were conspicuously absent.
“It was a bullseye landing,” said Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s commercial crew program. “The entry in particular has been darn near flawless.”
Still, he acknowledged that certain new issues had come to light, including the failure of a new thruster and the temporary loss of the guidance system.
He added it was too early to talk about whether Starliner’s next flight, scheduled for August next year, would be crewed, instead stressing NASA needed time to analyze the data they had gathered and assess what changes were required to both the design of the ship and the way it is flown.
Ahead of the return leg, Boeing carried out extensive ground testing to address the technical hitches encountered during Starliner’s ascent, then promised — both publicly and behind closed doors — that it could safely bring the astronauts home. In the end, NASA disagreed.
Asked whether he stood by that decision, NASA’s Stich said: “It’s always hard to have that retrospective look. We made the decision to have an uncrewed flight based on what we knew at the time and based on our knowledge of the thrusters and based on the modeling that we had.”
History of setbacks
Even without crew aboard, the stakes were high for Boeing, a century-old aerospace giant.
With its reputation already battered by safety concerns surrounding its commercial jets, its long-term prospects for crewed space missions hung in the balance.
Shortly after undocking, Starliner executed a powerful “breakout burn” to swiftly clear it from the station and prevent any risk of collision — a maneuver that would have been unnecessary if crew were aboard to take manual control if needed.
Mission teams then conducted thorough checks of the thrusters required for the critical “deorbit burn” that guided the capsule onto its reentry path around 40 minutes before touchdown.
Though it was widely expected that Starliner would stick the landing, as it had on two previous uncrewed tests, Boeing’s program continues to languish behind schedule.
In 2014, NASA awarded both Boeing and SpaceX multibillion-dollar contracts to develop spacecraft to taxi astronauts to and from the ISS, after the end of the Space Shuttle program left the US space agency reliant on Russian rockets.
Although initially considered the underdog, Elon Musk’s SpaceX surged ahead of Boeing, and has successfully flown dozens of astronauts since 2020.
The Starliner program, meanwhile, has faced numerous setbacks — from a software glitch that prevented the capsule from rendezvousing with the ISS during its first uncrewed test flight in 2019, to the discovery of flammable tape in the cabin after its second test in 2022, to the current troubles.
With the ISS scheduled to be decommissioned in 2030, the longer Starliner takes to become fully operational, the less time it will have to prove its worth.
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Sergio Mendes, Grammy-winning Brazilian music legend, dies at 83
RIO DE JANEIRO — Sergio Mendes, the celebrated Brazilian musician whose 1966 hit “Mas Que Nada” made him a global superstar and helped launch a long, Grammy-winning career, has died after months battling the effects of long COVID. He was 83.
The death Thursday of the Brazilian pianist, songwriter and arranger was confirmed in a statement by his family.
“His wife and musical partner for the past 54 years, Gracinha Leporace Mendes, was by his side, as were his loving children,” the statement said Friday. “Mendes last performed in November 2023 to sold out and wildly enthusiastic houses in Paris, London and Barcelona.”
Mendes was born in Niteroi, Rio de Janeiro’s sister city, and studied classical music at a conservatory before joining jazz groups. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began playing Bossa Nova as the genre was heating up in Rio’s nightclub scene with Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joao Gilberto and others.
In 1962, they traveled to New York for a Bossa Nova festival at Carnegie Hall. During the trip, Cannonball Adderley invited Mendes to collaborate on the album “Cannonball Adderley and The Bossa Rio Sextet,” leading to his first American record, “The Swinger from Rio,” after signing with Atlantic Records.
Two years later, Mendes moved to California and formed Brazil ’64, which evolved into Brazil ’66 after he added two female vocalists. The group’s debut album, produced by Herb Alpert, featured “Mas Que Nada.” Sung entirely in Portuguese, “Mas Que Nada” was a mid-tempo Samba number originally released in 1963 by composer Jorge Ben Sor and updated three years later by Mendes, who had been playing the song in clubs and gave it a jazzier, more hard-hitting feel.
“I put a band together called Brasil ’66,” he told The Guardian in 2019. “I’d always had instrumental groups, but when I added the two female singers — Lani Hall and Bibi Vogel — it made a different kind of sound. We recorded the song in Los Angeles, with me, the drums, bass and guitar all performing live.”
Mendes’ version was a worldwide hit that helped perpetuate the Brazilian music boom of the 1960s. In 2006, a modern version of the song topped U.S. charts, as performed by the Black Eyed Peas. It was included in his album “Timeless,” produced by will.i.am and also featuring Stevie Wonder, Justin Timberlake and John Legend, among others.
“Sergio Mendes was my brother from another country,” trumpet player Alpert wrote on Facebook, along with a photo from decades ago, sitting next to Mendes at the piano. “He was a true friend and extremely gifted musician who brought Brazilian music in all its iterations to the entire world with elegance.”
Mendes’ other hits were an eclectic blend ranging from covers of the Beatles’ “The Fool on the Hill” and “With a Little Help from My Friends,” to his own Brazilian chant, “Magalenha.” Mendes also composed the soundtrack for the film “Pele,” featuring saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, and even produced an album recorded by the great Brazilian soccer player.
Mendes won the 1992 Grammy Award for Best World Music Album for “Brasileiro” and two Latin Grammy Awards. He also received an Oscar nomination in 2012 for Best Original Song for “Real in Rio,” from the animated film “Rio.”
“Brazilian soul was there,” pianist, singer, and songwriter Marcos Valle told GloboNews about Mendes’ music. Valle also noted that it was Mendes who helped open doors for other Brazilian artists of his generation, including himself, to reach foreign audiences.
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Some Zimbabweans worry about nation’s continued reliance on coal
Zimbabwe’s heavy reliance on coal-based energy is hurting the health of people in mining regions who continue to be exposed to dirty air from coal burning. Columbus Mavhunga visited the Hwange thermal power station — about 700 kilometers from Harare — and the surrounding area, where residents have complained about the air pollution.
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In the US, music cassette tapes are making a comeback
Music cassette tapes are making a comeback in the U.S, with more than 430,000 sold in 2023 – about five times the number sold just a decade ago. Cassette tapes are especially popular with younger generations who grew up with digital music. Karina Bafradzhian has the story. Videographer: Sergii Dogotar
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Tribes celebrate removal of dam, revival of community along Klamath River
For more than a century, dams have blocked fish migration on California’s second-largest river. VOA’s Matt Dibble takes us to the removal of the last of four dams, a victory for Native Americans who depend on the river.
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