Gun violence interrupts a peaceful gathering and scores of people die once again. This time it was in Las Vegas, where a gunman fired upon thousands of people attending a music festival Sunday night. At least 59 people died. More than 500 were wounded. VOA’s Carol Pearson looks at why people commit these atrocities.
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Month: October 2017
With more and more consumers shopping online, do brick-and-mortar stores stand a chance?
At least for one pop-up shop in New York City, the future of retail is about embracing digital trends rather than resisting them.
Mastercard and Marie Claire magazine have teamed up to create “The Next Big Thing” concept shop, a pop-up store in SoHo that brings the convenience of online shopping to a physical storefront.
Industry insiders aren’t discounting physical stores just yet.
“I’m a big believer in the physical store and I think when you look at just pure volume of sales, you still see a majority of that happening in a physical environment,” said Stephane Wyper, senior vice president of Internet of Things partnerships and commercialization at Mastercard.
For its part, Mastercard is taking cues from the online world and making transacting as seamless as possible.
“We look at solving for one very key point of friction, which is how do I reduce the amount of time that somebody has to wait and actually go through the checkout process,” Wyper said.
Window-shopping is interpreted literally here, with a touchscreen display built into the store window which lets users get their retail therapy fix any time of day. Passersby can browse, select and pay for clothes without stepping foot inside. Payment is made via an accompanying store app that’s powered by Mastercard.
Inside, fitting rooms also allow for cashless check out and payment via touchscreen mirrors created by Oak Labs.
Technology is allowing brick-and-mortar stores to respond swiftly to ever-changing consumer tastes.
“In the online world where you can track page views, click-throughs, we can track impressions, discoveries, dwell time, and provide that real-time data analytics,” said Phillip Raub, co-founder of b8ta. The retail tech startup was part of the concept shop and had several consumer electronics on display.
Tech startup b8ta uses cameras to measure foot traffic and time spent looking at products. Tabletop tablets display product information and marketing that vendors can change on the fly.
“Physical retail is probably the #1 biggest area of opportunity for brand product and awareness . . . the future really is looking at how do you start monetizing the space and the services that you provide, in addition to the fact that you can purchase products,” said Raub.
Not to be left out is the social experience of shopping.
“This is a playground for women,” said Nancy Berger, publisher of Marie Claire, “It really brings together, in a social way, interesting women so that they can experience this all together. And I think that sense of community is really going to be an important part of this experience.”
The pop-up store runs until Oct. 12 and has hosted several events such as makeovers, food samplings and talks on health and wellness.
By bringing digital convenience and know-how into a physical store, organizers are showcasing a 2.0 version of brick-and-mortar retail.
“It’s really an opportunity, when you look at the Internet of Things and these connected devices, to really leverage those, to really redefine what the physical store could be,” Wyper said.
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In Zimbabwe, researchers say they are breeding maize that is drought and heat resistant as part of efforts to fight hunger across Africa, where maize is a staple food.
In Hezekaya Village in Gokwe, about 200 kilometers west of Harare, cotton is what most people plant because it can grow in hot, dry weather. But that is slowly changing, thanks to a program of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, funded by USAID and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The head of the center’s southern Africa program, Cosmos Magorogosho, says the vitamin-A fortified, drought-resistant maize varieties being developed will ensure food security across Africa if they are widely adopted.
“Since its inception, this program has been able to produce more than 50,000 tons of maize seed, not just for Zimbabwe, but for Southern Africa, Eastern Africa and West Africa,” Magorogosho said. “And these seeds are certified. They have been produced by seed companies and have been marketed in communities, and communities are benefiting from increased yields.”
According to Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Agriculture, this year the country harvested about 2.8 million tons of maize — well above the minimum requirement of 1.8 million tons.
One of the farmers who planted the new seeds is Tariro Mudazvose in Gokwe.
“We managed to have a good harvest in relation to the farming seeds that were distributed to us,” Mudazvose said. “There is much difference with other existing maize seeds because this maize seed reduces hunger and is drought resistant. It produces high yields, and creates food security in our households. We eat sadza three times a day as a result of this seed.”
Eating sadza, a thick corn porridge, three times a day is a luxury for most people in Zimbabwe because of the chronically poor economy and erratic rainfall.
Across much of sub-Saharan Africa, maize production is almost completely dependent on rain, making farmers highly vulnerable to drought.
Magorogosho hopes the new seeds will make farmers more resilient and productive, and put more sadza on tables across Zimbabwe.
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Google is ending a decade-old policy that required publishers to provide some free stories to Google users — though it’s not clear how many readers will even notice, at least for the moment.
Publishers had been required to provide at least three free stories a day under the search engine’s previous policy, called “first click free.” Now they have the power to choose how many free articles they want to offer readers via Google before charging a fee, Richard Gingras, vice president of news at Google Inc., wrote Monday in a company blog post.
The goal is to help publishers build up digital subscriptions, an imperative for many media outlets that pay large sums for news production but are starved for advertising revenue.
Google’s previous approach had let readers skirt paywall policies by typing a headline into Google and getting access to a story without having it count against a monthly free article limit, said Kinsey Wilson, an adviser to New York Times Co. CEO Mark Thompson.
Impact on readers
Many online readers may not notice a change overnight unless they visit a particular site several times a month without subscribing. And not every publication blocks users from reading stories with a paywall. Newer digital-only outfits tend not to.
Newspaper companies that do cut off readers tend to do so after a certain monthly allotment of free stories. The Times offers 10 free articles, for example; the Boston Globe, two.
Newspaper companies are trying to cope with steep declines in print-ad revenues as advertising has moved online. Google and social media companies like Facebook and Twitter are powerful drivers of traffic for publishers. But mandated freebie articles can complicate publishers’ attempts to bolster their paid-subscriber base.
News Corp.’s Wall Street Journal had turned off “first click free” for its four main sections in January. It then lost half its Google traffic to articles, said spokesman Steve Severinghaus. Google would demote a publisher’s content if they didn’t use first click free, but now says that won’t happen anymore.
Jason Kint, the head of the Digital Content Next media trade group, said he expects Google’s change will lead to news sites enabling more subscription models, making it harder down the road for web users to gorge themselves on stories from a particular outlet without paying for it.
Turning to subscriptions
Subscription revenue is increasingly important for newspaper publishers. Print-ad revenue continues to shrink, and Facebook and Google are gobbling up most digital ad revenue. Research firm eMarketer says the two companies will take in 63 percent of U.S. digital ad dollars this year.
Facebook, too, is working on a way for news articles to charge readers for articles they share and read on the social network.
News outlets have become more aggressive at challenging the Silicon Valley giants. In July, news outlets sought permission from Congress for the right to negotiate jointly with Google and Facebook, given the duo’s dominance in online advertising and online news traffic.
In a statement Monday, News Corp. CEO Robert Thomson said Google’s change would be good for journalism if “properly introduced.”
In months of testing with Google, reducing those free clicks from three to zero “generally improved” subscription rates, the New York Times’ Wilson said. But he added the Times continues to assess whether to actually reduce the number of free clicks now that it can. He said it was “not simply a mechanical decision” because the Times’ mission was in part to make sure its news was available to a wide audience and to set the news agenda.
Google says it made the changes after feedback from and experiments with publishers. The company also says it wants to make subscribing to publications a more streamlined process and says it is working on ways to use its artificial intelligence capabilities to help publishers find new subscribers.
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Even though gasoline-powered SUVs are what people are buying now, General Motors is betting that electric vehicles will be all the rage in the not-to-distant future.
The Detroit automaker is promising two new EVs on Chevrolet Bolt underpinnings in the next 1 ½ years and more than 20 electric or hydrogen fuel cell vehicles by 2023. The company sees its entire model lineup running on electricity in the future, whether the source is a big battery or a tank full of hydrogen.
“We are far along in our plan to lead the way into that future world,” product development chief Mark Reuss said Monday at a news conference at the GM technical center north of Detroit.
The event was billed as a “sneak peak” into GM’s electric future. The company also pledged to start producing hydrogen fuel cell vehicles for commercial or military use in 2020. And it promised an increase in the number of electric fast-charging stations in the U.S., which now total 1,100 from companies and governments, taking a shot at electric competitor Tesla Inc. by saying the system would not be “walled off” from electric vehicles made by other manufacturers.
Tesla has 951 fast-charging stations globally that can only be used by Tesla owners.
The hastily called event was short on specifics, and it came just a day before the CEO of Ford Motor Co., GM’s prime competitor, was to announce its business plan that likely will include electric and autonomous vehicles as priorities.
The two new GM electrics in the immediate future likely will be SUVs or a sportier car designed to compete with Tesla’s upcoming Model 3 sedan, Reuss said. The Model 3, which is now in the early stages of production, will go hood-to-hood with the Bolt, starting around $35,000 (excluding a $7,500 federal tax credit) with a range of over 200 miles. The Bolt starts at $37,495 excluding the credit.
Behind Reuss and other executives were nine vehicles covered with tarps that the company said were among the 20 to be unveiled by 2023. GM pulled away the tarps on three of them, clay models of low-slung Buick and Cadillac SUVs and a futuristic version of the Bolt that looked like half of an airport control tower glued to the top of a car body. The rest remained covered.
The company wouldn’t allow photographs of the vehicles, and it wouldn’t say if any of the vehicles it showed were the ones coming in the next 18 months.
Reuss said the new vehicles that aren’t built on the Bolt platform will have GM’s next-generation electric architecture, which he said will be more efficient with longer range than the Bolt’s 238 miles. Through August, GM has sold 11,670 Bolts, which is less than 1 percent of GM’s total U.S. sales so far this year.
Reuss promised that the new vehicles will be profitable as people become more accustomed to the advancing technology. “We can’t just flip a switch and make the world go all-electric,” he said.
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Facebook Inc plans to hire 1,000 more people to review ads and ensure they meet its terms, as part of an effort to deter Russia and other countries from using the social media network to interfere in others’ elections, it said on Monday.
Facebook said last month that it believed people in Russia bought about 3,000 politically divisive ads on its network in the United States in the months before and after the November U.S. presidential election.
Since its disclosure, Facebook has faced questions and calls for increased U.S. regulation from U.S. authorities. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has outlined steps that the company plans to take to deter governments from abusing the social media network, the world’s largest.
In a statement on Monday, Facebook said it would add more than 1,000 people over the next year and invest more in software to flag and take down ads automatically.
“Reviewing ads means assessing not just the content of an ad, but the context in which it was bought and the intended audience – so we’re changing our ads review system to pay more attention to these signals,” the company said.
Facebook said it had 17,048 employees at the end of 2016, excluding contractors. In May, it said it would hire 3,000 more people over the following year to speed up the removal of videos showing murder, suicide and other violent acts that shocked users.
Like other companies that sell advertising space, Facebook publishes policies for what it allows, prohibiting ads that are violent, discriminate based on race or promote the sale of illegal drugs.
With more than 5 million paying advertisers, however, Facebook has difficulty enforcing all of its policies.
The company said on Monday that it would adjust its policies further “to prevent ads that use even more subtle expressions of violence.” It did not elaborate on what kind of material that would cover.
Facebook also said it would begin to require more thorough documentation from people who want to run ads about U.S. federal elections, demanding that they confirm their businesses or organizations.
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U.S. factory activity surged to a more than 13-year high in September amid strong gains in new orders and raw material prices, pointing to underlying strength in the economy even as Hurricanes Harvey and Irma are expected to dent growth in the third quarter.
The economic outlook was also bolstered by other data on Monday showing a rebound in construction spending in August. The acceleration in manufacturing activity and the accompanying increase in prices could harden expectations that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates in December.
The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) said its index of national factory activity surged to a reading of 60.8 last month, the highest reading since May 2004, from 58.8 in August.
A reading above 50 in the ISM index indicates an expansion in manufacturing, which accounts for about 12 percent of the U.S. economy. The ISM said Harvey and Irma had caused supply chain and pricing issues in the chemical products sector. There were also concerns about the disruptive impact of the storms in the food, beverage and tobacco products industries.
The hurricanes are expected to chop off as much as six-tenths of a percentage point from gross domestic product growth in the third quarter. Harvey, which pummeled Texas at the end of August, has undercut consumer spending and weighed on industrial production, homebuilding and home sales.
Further weakness is likely after Irma struck Florida in early September, causing widespread power cuts. Manufacturing outside the areas affected by the hurricanes remained strong in September. The ISM survey’s production sub-index rose 1.2 points to a reading of 62.2 in September.
A gauge of new orders jumped to 64.6 in September from 60.3 in August. Factories reported paying more for raw materials, with the survey’s prices paid index surging 9.5 point to 71.5, the highest reading since May 2011.
The dollar rose against the euro after the data. Prices for U.S. Treasuries were trading higher as were stocks on Wall Street.
Construction spending rises
In separate report Monday, the Commerce Department said construction spending rose 0.5 percent to $1.21 trillion. July’s construction outlays were revised sharply down to show a 1.2 percent plunge instead of the previously reported 0.6 percent drop. Construction spending increased 2.5 percent on a year-on-year basis.
The government said Harvey and Irma did not appear to have impacted the construction spending data as the responses from the Texas and Florida areas affected by the storms were “not significantly lower than normal.”
In August, spending on private residential projects increased 0.4 percent, rising for a fourth straight month.
Spending on nonresidential structures increased 0.5 percent, snapping two straight monthly declines.
In the wake of Harvey and Irma, nonresidential construction spending could fall in September. According to the Commerce Department, Texas and Florida accounted for 22 percent of U.S. private nonresidential construction spending in 2016.
Investment in nonresidential structures such as oil and gas wells has been slowing as the boost from recovering oil prices fizzles. Private construction projects spending increased 0.4 percent in August.
Outlays on public construction projects rebounded 0.7 percent in August after slumping 3.3 percent in July. Spending on state and local government construction projects increased 1.1 percent in August. Gains in September are likely to be curbed by the hurricanes.
Texas and Florida accounted for 15 percent of U.S. state-and-locally owned construction spending in 2016, according to the Commerce Department.
Federal government construction spending tumbled 4.7 percent to its lowest level since April 2007.
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In most of the world, more men are connected to the internet than women. But in Africa, this gender gap has been widening, according to ITU, the U.N. agency tracking the ICT sector. Nanjira Sambuli, who works with the World Wide Web Foundation in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, sat down with VOA’s Jill Craig in Nairobi to explain how offline inequalities are being replicated online.
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to consider a bid by Samsung Electronics Co Ltd. to force customers who have filed proposed class-action lawsuits against the company to arbitrate their claims instead of bringing them to court.
The justices left intact a lower court’s ruling that purchasers of certain Galaxy smartphones made by the South Korean electronics company were not bound by a warranty provision that compelled arbitration of customer complaints.
Warranties with arbitration clauses have become common in consumer electronics and other industries. Courts and regulatory agencies increasingly are scrutinizing arbitration agreements that seek to limit options for resolution of future disputes.
The Samsung case involves two smartphone buyers from California who separately filed proposed class-action lawsuits in 2014 over concerns about the products’ performance and resale value.
Neither Daniel Norcia, who owned an Galaxy S4 device, nor Hoai Dang, who owned an SIII, saw the arbitration provisions when they bought the phone because the language was placed deep inside the warranty booklet and not mentioned on the box, according to their legal papers.
The agreement states that all disputes must be resolved through arbitration, and specifically rules out class actions.
Samsung tried to force the customers to arbitrate their claims, but a unanimous three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco denied the request in January. The court said Samsung did not provide proper notice of the arbitration provision and neither customer had expressly consented to be bound by it.
Appealing to the Supreme Court, Samsung noted that the 9th Circuit decided that the warranty was valid except for the arbitration provision. Samsung argued that the 9th Circuit ruling violated a U.S. law called the Federal Arbitration Act that requires arbitration agreements to be treated equally with other contracts.
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Social media giant Facebook is expected to provide Congress on Monday with more than 3,000 ads that ran around the time of the 2016 presidential election and are linked to a Russian ad agency.
Company officials will meet with the House and Senate intelligence committees and the Senate Judiciary Committee to hand over the ads, a Facebook official said. The official requested anonymity because the meetings are private.
Facebook said last month that it had found thousands of ads linked to Facebook accounts that likely operated out of Russia and pushed divisive social and political issues during the U.S. presidential election. The company said it found 450 accounts and about $100,000 was spent on the ads.
Twitter has said it found postings linked to those same accounts, and the House and Senate intelligence panels have asked both companies, along with Google, to testify publicly in the coming weeks.
None of the companies have said whether they will accept the invitations.
The three committees are investigating Russian meddling in the election and whether there are any links to President Donald Trump’s campaign. They have recently focused on the spread of false news stories and propaganda on social media, putting pressure on the companies to turn over more information and release any Russia-linked ads.
It is unclear whether the ads will eventually be released publicly. Several lawmakers — including Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence panel — have said they believe the American public should see them.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced September 21 that the company would provide the ads to Congress and also make changes to ensure the political ads on its platform are more transparent. The company is also working with special counsel Bob Mueller’s investigation into the Russian meddling.
“As a general rule, we are limited in what we can discuss publicly about law enforcement investigations, so we may not always be able to share our findings publicly,” Zuckerberg said. “But we support Congress in deciding how to best use this information to inform the public, and we expect the government to publish its findings when their investigation is complete.”
Facebook said the ads addressed social and political issues and ran in the United States between 2015 and 2017. The company said the ads appear to have come from accounts associated with a Russian entity called the Internet Research Agency.
Twitter said last week that it had suspended 22 accounts corresponding to the 450 Facebook accounts that were likely operated out of Russia.
Warner criticized Twitter for not sharing more information with Congress, saying the company’s findings were merely “derivative” of Facebook’s work. The company’s presentations to staff last week “showed an enormous lack of understanding from the Twitter team of how serious this issue is, the threat it poses to democratic institutions,” he said.
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The 2017 Nobel Prize for Medicine has been awarded to three American scientists.
Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young were awarded for their discoveries of the molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm.
“Using fruit flies as a model organism, this year’s Nobel laureates isolated a gene that controls the normal daily biological rhythm,” the award committee said. “They showed that this gene encodes a protein that accumulates in the cell during the night, and is then degraded during the day.”
Circadian rhythms adapt one’s physiology to different phases of the day, influencing sleep, behavior, hormone levels, body temperature and metabolism.
The prize for physiology or medicine is first Nobel Prize awarded each year.
The prizes for physics, chemistry, literature and peace will also be announced from Tuesday to Friday respectively; and the prize for economics on Monday, October 9.
The prize comes with $1.1 million.
Who are they?
Jeffrey C. Hall was born 1945 in New York, USA. He received his doctoral degree in 1971 at the University of Washington in Seattle and was a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena from 1971 to 1973. He joined the faculty at Brandeis University in Waltham in 1974. In 2002, he became associated with University of Maine.
Michael Rosbash was born in 1944 in Kansas City, USA. He received his doctoral degree in 1970 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. During the following three years, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Since 1974, he has been on faculty at Brandeis University in Waltham, USA.
Michael W. Young was born in 1949 in Miami, USA. He received his doctoral degree at the University of Texas in Austin in 1975. Between 1975 and 1977, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University in Palo Alto. From 1978, he has been on faculty at the Rockefeller University in New York.
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Scrolling through dating websites a year ago, Indonesian app developer Lindu Pranayama realized there were a lot of married men looking for another wife – but few online services to meet their needs.
“When they go to regular dating sites, they don’t see options for polygamy. They don’t see options for finding second, third or fourth wives,” he said.
Enter “AyoPoligami” – a new smartphone app developed by Pranayama, which aims to “bring together male users with women who are willing to make ‘big families’.”
Loosely translated as “Let’s do polygamy”, the Tinder-style dating app has already stirred up controversy since its April launch in Indonesia, where over 80 percent of the 250 million population are Muslim and polygamy is legal.
Muslim men can take up to four wives in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, if permission is granted by a court and the first wife gives her consent.
Court officials could not provide figures of how many people in Indonesia are polygamous, but activists say cases of men giving false information to gain permission and manipulation of women are common.
The app has been downloaded over 10,000 times before it stopped registering new members following concerns of fake accounts were being set up, and men using the site without the knowledge of their first wives.
A new version is set to be launched on Oct. 5, and will impose stricter rules on users including requiring them to provide an identification card, marital status and a letter of permission from their first wives.
‘This is what God planned for me’
Iyus Yusuf Fasyiya, an Indonesian factory worker who has two wives, said he used the app to share tips with other users on how to maintain a polygamous marriage.
“Many members are looking for wives – they ask about how to start, how to maintain polygamous marriages, and also government regulations,” he said from his home village in Bogor, about 90-minute drive from the capital Jakarta.
The 37-year-old dodged questions about whether he was using the app to look for another wife but said he continues to learn about polygamy, after he took on his second wife six years following his first marriage in 2000.
“It just happened, this is what God planned for me,” said Fasyiya, who takes turns to see his two wives and five children who live in nearby villages.
The majority of the app users were men, but there were also about 4,000 women who have registered, the app developer said.
Lawyer Rachmat Dwi Putranto, who deals with marriage matters, said polygamy is “not that easily achieved” as Indonesian courts will only give permission if the first wife is disabled, ill or cannot bear children.
Violence against women
But Indriyati Suparno, a commissioner from the government-backed National Commission on Violence Against Women, said the app was trying to “normalize polygamy”.
“The reality is women tend to be the victims of domestic violence in a polygamous marriage – polygamy is a form of violence against women,” she said.
Indonesia’s Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection Ministry said it was up to individuals if they wanted to use the app because polygamy is legal as long as it can be done in a fair manner.
“For us what is important is whether the women and children are protected in polygamous marriages,” the ministry’s spokesman Hasan, who uses one name, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
User Fasyiya said he will continue to refer to the app to learn how to juggle his two families.
“Me and my wives, we’re committed to showing people that polygamy isn’t as scary as they think,” he said.
“We’re trying to make it work.”
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Social media giant Facebook is expected to provide Congress on Monday with more than 3,000 ads that ran around the time of the 2016 presidential election and are linked to a Russian ad agency.
Company officials will meet with the House and Senate intelligence committees and the Senate Judiciary Committee to hand over the ads, a Facebook official said. The official requested anonymity because the meetings are private.
Facebook said last month that it had found thousands of ads linked to Facebook accounts that likely operated out of Russia and pushed divisive social and political issues during the U.S. presidential election. The company said it found 450 accounts and about $100,000 was spent on the ads.
Twitter has said it found postings linked to those same accounts, and the House and Senate intelligence panels have asked both companies, along with Google, to testify publicly in the coming weeks.
None of the companies have said whether they will accept the invitations.
The three committees are investigating Russian meddling in the election and whether there are any links to President Donald Trump’s campaign. They have recently focused on the spread of false news stories and propaganda on social media, putting pressure on the companies to turn over more information and release any Russia-linked ads.
It is unclear whether the ads will eventually be released publicly. Several lawmakers – including Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence panel – have said they believe the American public should see them.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Sept. 21 that the company would provide the ads to Congress and also make changes to ensure the political ads on its platform are more transparent. The company is also working with Special Counsel Bob Mueller’s investigation into the Russian meddling at the Justice Department.
“As a general rule, we are limited in what we can discuss publicly about law enforcement investigations, so we may not always be able to share our findings publicly,” Zuckerberg said. “But we support Congress in deciding how to best use this information to inform the public, and we expect the government to publish its findings when their investigation is complete.”
Facebook said the ads addressed social and political issues and ran in the United States between 2015 and 2017. The company said the ads appear to have come from accounts associated with a Russian entity called the Internet Research Agency.
Twitter said last week that it had suspended 22 accounts corresponding to the 450 Facebook accounts that were likely operated out of Russia.
Warner criticized Twitter for not sharing more information with Congress, saying the company’s findings were merely “derivative” of Facebook’s work. The company’s presentations to staff last week “showed an enormous lack of understanding from the Twitter team of how serious this issue is, the threat it poses to democratic institutions.”
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Animals that make the water their home are uniquely sensitive to changes in their liquid world. Oysters are very good at filtering dirty water, and crayfish are very sensitive to changes in water quality. Now scientists in the Czech Republic are using these sensitive bottom dwellers to monitor water quality in a business where clean water matters. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Facebook Inc founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg asked for forgiveness for ways his work was used to divide people in a Facebook posting marking the end of Yom Kippur, the Jewish holiday of atonement on Saturday.
“For the ways my work was used to divide people rather than bring us together, I ask forgiveness and I will work to do better,” Zuckerberg said in the post.
He did not refer to specific issues in the message, which comes as Facebook and other technology companies are under increased scrutiny amid a U.S. investigation into potential Russian involvement in the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign.
Facebook said on September 6 it had found that an operation, likely based in Russia, spent $100,000 on thousands of U.S. ads promoting divisive social and political messages in a two-year-period through May.
Facebook, the dominant social media network, said 3,000 ads and 470 “inauthentic” accounts and pages spread polarizing views on topics including immigration, race and gay rights.
Facebook has launched an overhaul of how it handles paid political advertisements, after U.S. lawmakers threatened to regulate the world’s largest social network over secretive ads that run during election campaigns.
Probes being conducted by several congressional committees along with the Department of Justice, have clouded U.S. President Donald Trump’s tenure since he took office in January and have threatened his agenda, which has yet to secure a major legislative victory.
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What makes autistic children different and how can their parents make the best choices to integrate them into daily life, especially with an overwhelming amount of clinical research to consider? In the United States, where an estimated one in 68 children suffer from the condition, thousands of parents are faced with these questions. VOA’s Anush Avetisyan introduces us to a mother who has first-hand experience.
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To mark the International Day of the Older Person, the World Health Organization is calling for a new, integrated approach to meet the health needs of an aging population.
By mid-century, the World Health Organization reports one in five people in the world will be aged 60 or older. As people age, it says they are likely to be afflicted with numerous health problems.
WHO Department of Aging and Life Course Director, John Beard, says older people probably will have more than one chronic disease at the same time. He says knowing how to treat these complex conditions is challenging.
“It has been demonstrated that integrated care that is already into a holistic system of the individual provides much better outcomes than just health services, which respond independently to a specific condition every time somebody presents with them. And, so one of the things we are trying to emphasize is the need to develop these systems of integrated care and chronic care,” he said.
Ed Kelley is Director of the Department of Service Delivery and Safety at WHO. He personally identifies with a health system that does not comprehensively assess the problems of older persons.
“If you take my own father, I have these parents we are dealing with — he is 90 years old, he takes 13 medications, he has got five doctors. None of them talk to each other. And, he is relatively healthy. That is a very typical situation for your average elderly person around the world,” he said.
The World Health Organization says the health of older people would improve if all ailments were taken into consideration when an individual seeks relief for one specific illness or disease. For example, chronic pain might be linked to an individual’s difficulties with hearing, seeing, walking or performing other activities.
Casinos in the world’s biggest casino hub of Macau extended a 14-month winning streak in September with revenue up 16.1 percent, priming for a bumper national holiday week, which is expected to see strong visitor traffic in the southern Chinese territory.
Macau, a former Portuguese colony and now special administrative region, is the only place in the country where casino gambling is legal.
Government data Sunday showed monthly gambling revenue was 21.4 billion patacas ($2.66 billion) in September, within analyst expectations of growth between 11-17 percent.
Two typhoons
September saw the tail end impact from two typhoons in August, which caused massive destruction and unprecedented flooding.
Many casinos shut down for several days and had problems accessing fresh water and power, but big resorts on Macau’s Las Vegas style Cotai strip were left relatively unscathed.
Macau’s government this week will release a 15-year plan to boost tourism with key objectives including rebranding Macau into a multiday destination and managing local tourism capacity.
Typically during national holidays, Macau’s tiny peninsula and adjoining islands are inundated with swarms of visitors putting pressure on creaking infrastructure and transport.
Casino executives have said that hotels are fully booked for the official holiday period, Oct. 1-8.
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A rescued green sea turtle named Picasso was released back into the Gulf of Mexico on Saturday, carrying the ashes of a self-taught Texas oceanographer who founded the rehabilitation center that helped nurse it back to health.
Hundreds of well-wishers pressed forward to get better views during a sunset ceremony that effectively allowed Tony Amos, who devoted his life to helping the endangered reptiles, to do so once more in death. On a stretch of beach named in his honor, Amos’ wife, Lynn; his son, Michael; and other relatives sprinkled ashes on the turtle’s back, then watched it slowly flap and craw its way into the waves.
“Come on little turtle, off you go. The sun’s about to set,” called Lynn Amos, when the creature stopped and briefly raised its head, almost as if to acknowledge the onlookers.
Many in attendance were barefoot. Some choked back tears. When the turtle finally disappeared into the shimmering surf, a few cried, “Bye Tony!”
Weathering the hurricane
Amos, 80, died of complications from prostate cancer on Sept. 4, days after Harvey roared ashore as a fearsome Category 4 hurricane. It damaged the Animal Rehabilitation Keep for ailing sea turtles and aquatic birds that Amos opened nearly four decades ago.
But the turtles there weathered the storm well, as their counterparts in the wild also appear to have done, advocates say.
Turtle, bird center battered
At Amos’ turtle and aquatic bird center in the Harvey-ravaged beach town of Port Aransas, the hurricane smashed roof tiles and solar panels and collapsed parts of buildings. Partially submerged concrete tanks housing around 60 rescue turtles were also damaged, but the animals weren’t harmed. Even Barnacle Bill, a 200-plus pound loggerhead who first came to the center in 1997, was fine despite the storm mangling the cover of his pool.
Sea turtles generally are good at avoiding hurricanes except for eggs that can be flooded or babies who are displaced from floating mats of seaweed where they feed, said Jeff George, executive director of Sea Turtle, Inc., a rescue and rehabilitation center on South Padre Island near the Texas-Mexico border. As Harvey approached Texas, George and volunteers scoured the beach and collected about 280 eggs that waited out the storm indoors, inside insolated containers. All but a few hatched and were released about a week later.
In Port Aransas, a few turtles were discovered amid Harvey’s wreckage, but most marine experts say it could have been worse.
Oil spill’s impact
Amos was born in London and went to Bermuda at 17, trying unsuccessfully to engineer a color, flat-screen television. Having never graduated from college, he moved to Port Aransas in 1976 and became an oceanographer for the University of Texas Marine Science Institute.
Three years later, the Ixtoc I exploratory well exploded in the Gulf about 50 miles from Mexico’s coast, and Amos saw the devastating effects of the resulting oil spill on sea life. He later founded the Animal Rehabilitation Keep, which still helps hundreds of turtles and birds annually _ tackling everything from pelicans that swallow plastic to turtles stricken with a tumor-causing virus.
Known for a long, white beard that helped him play Santa Claus at Christmas, Amos collected and analyzed debris on Texas beaches and painstakingly entered findings in databases. He also sailed on marine voyages throughout the world.
At the conclusion of Saturday’s ceremony, some attendees tossed flowers into the surf behind the turtle, but then went to retrieve them, wary that Amos would have objected to littering in the Gulf.
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