World Menstrual Health Day on May 28 is being observed in Cameroon with NGOs and girls asking the government to either subsidize sanitary pads or provide them for free, as they already do with condoms. At least 300 school children are gathered at the government school in the southwestern town of Buea on the occasion of this year’s World Menstrual Health Day. Fifteen-year-old Carine Ndzelen tells them in Lamnso, a language spoken in Cameroon, that young girls and women continue to suffer from stigma during their menstrual periods, and it’s considered taboo to even discuss it.She says it is unethical for students and teachers to mock girls who are seen with drops of blood on their skirts. She says menstruation is a normal vaginal bleeding that occurs as part of a woman’s monthly cycle indicating that her growth is normal. She says people should comfort and assist girls who menstruate by donating sanitary kits or clean pieces of cloth that can be used to absorb menstrual discharge.Ndzelen said the education of many young girls is undermined by limited access to hygienic menstrual products and poor sanitation infrastructure.Ernestine Oben is founder and coordinator of the NGO Able Women Cameroon that works for the emancipation of women and girls. She says the NGOs invited Ndzelen because of the ordeal she endured while experiencing her first menses in the countryside. “She didn’t even notice that her period had started until blood stains were dripping on her legs, and her mother had to start tearing her dress that she was putting on,” said Oben. “Every now and then she would tear off a piece and give her to use until they got here. Her first experience was in the bush, and her mother had to sacrifice the dress that she was wearing.”Cameroon’s ministry of social affairs reports that many girls do not understand what is happening when they start menstruating. They either go into hiding or start using traditional concoctions proposed by their peers to stop the flow. Mothers often do not discuss menstruation with their daughters.The absence of adequate sanitation facilities in schools and public spaces makes it very difficult for women and girls to manage their periods. Feka Parchibel is coordinator of the NGO Hope for the Vulnerables and Orphans. She says the government should assist young girls with menstrual kits every month. Her NGO distributed menstrual pads to poor children at school.”There are many more women and girls who need sanitary kits than the quantity we actually brought, and it is frustrating,” said Parchibel. “You see women who use rags, papers, who use just anything unhealthy to stop that blood flow at that particular moment. It has made women and girls lose their dignity. Our wish is for the government to subsidize the cost of these sanitary pads, why not make them free. If they [government] can give condoms for free why can’t they give sanitary pads, too, for free at least to young girls.”The government did not say if it will provide the kits free. But Stela Dopgima of Cameroon’s Youth and Family Empowerment Center says there is ongoing education against taboos. She says communities should stop thinking that menstruation is an impurity or a disease. She says communities should stop subjecting women and girls to religious, domestic or sexual prohibitions, which often lead to further isolation or stigmatization.
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Month: May 2021
The state-backed Russian cyber spies behind the SolarWinds hacking campaign launched a targeted spear-phishing assault on U.S. and foreign government agencies and think tanks this week using an email marketing account of the U.S. Agency for International Development, Microsoft said.
The effort targeted about 3,000 email accounts at more than 150 different organizations, at least a quarter of them involved in international development, humanitarian and human rights work, Microsoft Vice President Tom Burt said in a blog post late Thursday.
It did not say what portion of the attempts may have led to successful intrusions.
The cybersecurity firm Volexity, which also tracked the campaign but has less visibility into email systems than Microsoft , said in a post that relatively low detection rates of the phishing emails suggest the attacker was “likely having some success in breaching targets.”
Burt said the campaign appeared to be a continuation of multiple efforts by the Russian hackers to “target government agencies involved in foreign policy as part of intelligence gathering efforts.” He said the targets spanned at least 24 countries.
The hackers gained access to USAID’s account at Constant Contact, an email marketing service, Microsoft said. The authentic-looking phishing emails dated May 25 purport to contain new information on 2020 election fraud claims and include a link to malware that allows the hackers to “achieve persistent access to compromised machines.”
Microsoft said in a separate blog post that the campaign is ongoing and evolved out of several waves of spear-phishing campaigns it first detected in January that escalated to the mass-mailings of this week.
While the SolarWinds campaign, which infiltrated dozens of private sector companies and think tanks as well as at least nine U.S. government agencies, was supremely stealthy and went on for most of 2020 before being detected in December by the cybersecurity firm FireEye, this campaign is what cybersecurity researchers call noisy. Easy to detect.
Microsoft noted the two mass distribution methods used: the SolarWinds hack exploited the supply chain of a trusted technology provider’s software updates; this campaign piggybacked on a mass email provider.
With both methods, the company said, the hackers undermine trust in the technology ecosystem.
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Some veteran Hollywood actors say a law intended to help gig economy workers has the unintended consequence of threatening nonprofit theaters. Mike O’Sullivan has the story from Los Angeles.
Camera: Roy Kim, Rodmy Dorcil and Arturo Martinez
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Saudi Arabia is requiring all pilgrims for the scaled-back, annual Hajj in July to be vaccinated against COVID-19. In Tanzania, where vaccinations have not yet begun, Muslims hoping to go to Mecca are urging authorities to start jabbing.Omar Aboubakar, like many other Muslims in Tanzania, wants to make the pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. It’s an integral part of the Muslim faith, but for now only those immunized against COVID-19 can take part in this year’s Hajj.Aboubakar is worried because vaccinations in Tanzania have yet to be approved.“The time remaining is limited but still, we haven’t given up,” he said. “We expect our top leaders to check on the issue of vaccination carefully so we can accomplish this holy worship. We failed to go last year because of COVID-19, and if it continues till next year it means our worship has ended. This is the main pillar of our religion.”Until earlier this year, Tanzanian authorities had rejected COVID-19 vaccines. Then-President John Magufuli instead promoted false remedies for the disease.Soon after Magufuli’s death in March, his successor, Samia Hassan, formed a COVID-19 task force to advise her government on handling the infections.In its report two weeks ago, the committee declared the vaccines to be effective and recommended that travelers going abroad be among those to get their shots first.”The committee advises the government using its institutions and continues to move to allow free vaccines, using vaccine brands listed by the World Health Organization, because the shots are effective and safe since they are scientifically proved,” said Said Aboud, the committee chairperson.Last week, President Hassan said the government was checking to see if COVID-19 vaccines that are available in other countries can be ordered for Tanzanians.But with no vaccination campaign in sight, Muslim leaders see the chances of Tanzanians attending this year’s pilgrimage to be low at best.”I cannot say that we can’t accomplish Hajj worship, but the percentages seem to be very low to accomplish the worship this year,” Haidari Kambwili, the Hajj travelers coordinator with the National Muslim Council of Tanzania, said. “The remaining percentages only Allah will decide, because even if we get vaccinated as our leaders are struggling to accomplish — still, time is a challenge.”Meanwhile, COVID-19 has not stopped Tanzanians like Aboubakar from continuing to worship in mosques. But for now, his plan to join his fellow Muslims in Mecca for Hajj prayers remains up in the air.
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Facebook says it will no longer remove claims that COVID-19 is human-made or manufactured “in light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts.”There is rising pressure worldwide to investigate the origins of the pandemic, including the possibility that it came from a lab. Since the pandemic began, Facebook has been changing what it allows on the topic and what it bans. In February, it announced a host of new claims it would be prohibiting — including that COVID-19 was created in a Chinese lab. Other claims it added at the time included the false notion that vaccines are not effective or that they are toxic.Lisa Fazio, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, said the reversal shows the difficulty of fact-checking in general, particularly with something unprecedented like the coronavirus, when experts can disagree and change their minds with new evidence.“It’s one reason that content moderation shouldn’t be static, scientific consensus changes over time,” Fazio said. “It’s also a reminder to be humble and that for some questions the best current answer is “we don’t know yet” or “it’s possible, but experts think it’s unlikely.”Facebook’s reversal comes as President Joe Biden ordered U.S. intelligence officials to “redouble” their efforts to investigate the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, including any possibility the trail might lead to a Chinese laboratory. After months of minimizing these claims as a fringe theory, the Biden administration is joining worldwide pressure for China to be more open about the outbreak. It aims to head off GOP complaints that Biden has not been tough enough and to use the opportunity to press China on alleged obstruction.“We’re continuing to work with health experts to keep pace with the evolving nature of the pandemic and regularly update our policies as new facts and trends emerge,” said Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of integrity, in a statement Wednesday.Facebook does not usually ban misinformation outright on its platform, instead adding fact-checks by outside parties, which includes The Associated Press, to debunked claims. The two exceptions have been around elections and COVID-19.
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At night, the floors of sheds vanish beneath carpets of scampering mice. Ceilings come alive with the sounds of scratching. One family blamed mice chewing electrical wires for their house burning down.Vast tracts of land in Australia’s New South Wales state are being threatened by a mouse plague that the state government describes as “absolutely unprecedented.” Just how many millions of rodents have infested the agricultural plains across the state is guesswork.”We’re at a critical point now where if we don’t significantly reduce the number of mice that are in plague proportions by spring, we are facing an absolute economic and social crisis in rural and regional New South Wales,” Agriculture Minister Adam Marshall said this month.Bruce Barnes said he is taking a gamble by planting crops on his family farm near the central New South Wales town of Bogan Gate.”We just sow and hope,” he said.The risk is that the mice will maintain their numbers through the Southern Hemisphere winter and devour the wheat, barley and canola before it can be harvested.NSW Farmers, the state’s top agricultural association, predicts the plague will wipe more than 1 billion Australian dollars ($775 million) from the value of the winter crop.The state government has ordered 5,000 liters of the banned poison Bromadiolone from India. The federal government regulator has yet to approve emergency applications to use the poison on the perimeters of crops. Critics fear the poison will kill not only mice but also animals that feed on them, including wedge-tail eagles and family pets.”We’re having to go down this path because we need something that is super strength, the equivalent of napalm to just blast these mice into oblivion,” Marshall said.The plague is a cruel blow to farmers in Australia’s most populous state who have been battered by fires, floods and pandemic disruptions in recent years, only to face the new scourge of the introduced house mouse, or Mus musculus.Hank, a working dog turned mouser, chases a mouse on a farm near Tottenham, Australia, on May 19, 2021.The same government-commissioned advisers who have helped farmers cope with the drought, fire and floods are returning to help people deal with the stresses of mice.The worst comes after dark, when millions of mice that had been hiding and dormant during the day become active.By day, the crisis is less apparent. Patches of road are dotted with squashed mice from the previous night, but birds soon take the carcasses away. Haystacks are disintegrating due to ravenous rodents that have burrowed deep inside. Upending a sheet of scrap metal lying in a paddock will send a dozen mice scurrying. The sidewalks are strewn with dead mice that have eaten poisonous bait.But a constant, both day and night, is the stench of mice urine and decaying flesh. The smell is people’s greatest gripe.”You deal with it all day. You’re out baiting, trying your best to manage the situation, then come home and just the stench of dead mice,” said Jason Conn, a fifth-generation farmer near Wellington in central New South Wales.”They’re in the roof cavity of your house. If your house is not well sealed, they’re in bed with you. People are getting bitten in bed,” Conn said. “It doesn’t relent, that’s for sure.”Colin Tink estimated he drowned 7,500 mice in a single night last week in a trap he set with a cattle feeding bowl full of water at his farm outside Dubbo.”I thought I might get a couple of hundred. I didn’t think I’d get 7,500,” Tink said.Barnes said mouse carcasses and excrement in roofs were polluting farmers’ water tanks.Mice scurry around stored grain on a farm near Tottenham, Australia, on May 19, 2021.”People are getting sick from the water,” he said.The mice are already in Barnes’ hay bales. He’s battling them with zinc phosphide baits, the only legal chemical control for mice used in broad-scale agriculture in Australia. He’s hoping that winter frosts will help contain the numbers.Farmers like Barnes endured four lean years of drought before 2020 brought a good season as well as the worst flooding that some parts of New South Wales have seen in at least 50 years. But the pandemic brought a labor drought. Fruit was left to rot on trees because foreign backpackers who provide the seasonal workforce were absent.Plagues seemingly appear from nowhere and often vanish just as fast.Disease and a shortage of food are thought to trigger a dramatic population crash as mice feed on themselves, devouring the sick, weak and their own offspring.Government researcher Steve Henry, whose agency is developing strategies to reduce the impact of mice on agriculture, said it is too early to predict what damage will occur by spring.He travels across the state holding community meetings, sometimes twice a day, to discuss the mice problem.”People are fatigued from dealing with the mice,” Henry said.
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After so many years — and episode re-watches — could there BE anything left to learn about “Friends”?As the highly-anticipated, almost two-hour reunion special for HBO Max shows (and with apologies to Matthew Perry for continuing to borrow his lines), “Yes, yes, a thousand times, yes.”One thing that we didn’t need to learn (because we already knew it) was just how truly there these six characters were for the audience.In the 1990s and early-aughts, the cast of “Friends” provided hours of joy — first just on Thursday nights when new episodes aired, but soon enough five nights a week in syndication. Within the past decade, diehard and casual fans alike could spend any time of any day with Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Perry and David Schwimmer, as the show became available on streaming services. This sextet has helped their audience get through so much, now including the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only did “Friends” see a spike in viewership in the earliest lockdown days according to Nielsen, but also, just before the world fully reopens, they gathered together to shoot “Friends: The Reunion.””It was life-changing, not only for us but for whoever watched it, and that’s just such a great feeling,” Cox said of her experience on “Friends.”Within the special, they reminisced over their time working together while walking around recreated versions of Joey and Chandler’s apartment, Monica and Rachel’s (turned Monica and Chandler’s) apartment and the Central Perk coffeehouse, as well as while sitting down on the ironic orange couch for an outdoors interview with “The Late Late Show’s” James Corden.They performed scene readings from “The One Where Ross Finds Out,” “The One Where Everybody Finds Out” and the Season 4 premiere, “The One With The Jellyfish.” They also took part in a trivia game, designed and shot identically to the one in “The One With The Embryos.”In doing all of these things, they revealed behind-the-scenes tidbits and showed off special relationship dynamics that expanded even the biggest fan’s knowledge of their favorite show. The one thing they did NOT do was dance in a fountain.Here are 18 things learned from “Friends: The Reunion.”The one where Ross and Rachel were on a break!
Corden asked the six stars to reveal whose side of that infamous argument they fell on, and they all agreed that Ross and Rachel were on a break when he slept with Chloe (Angela Featherstone). Admittedly, they all had different levels of enthusiasm about that belief, but the authorities have spoken, so debate no more!The one with the crush
Borrowing a question that Janice (Maggie Wheeler) once posed to the six characters, Corden asked the six actors who became romantically involved with each other while filming. “The first season I had a major crush on Jen,” Schwimmer admitted. “It was reciprocal,” she shared. But, he went on, “It was like two ships passing because one of us was always in a relationship and we never crossed that boundary. We respected that.” LeBlanc piped up with a fake cough and a “Bullshit,” which sent the audience into wild applause. But he was joking, and Aniston clarified that she once told Schwimmer, “It’s going to be such a bummer if the first time you and I kiss is on national television.” But, “sure enough, the first time we kissed was in that coffee shop. So we just channeled all of our adoration and love for each other into Ross and Rachel.”The one where Ross and Rachel almost didn’t end up together
“Friends” co-creator David Crane, who was sitting in the COVID-safe audience during Corden’s interview and gave in an off-site interview for the special, shared that in working on the final season, the writers’ room did consider more ambivalent endings about the status of Ross and Rachel. But ultimately love won out definitively because, “People have been waiting 10 years to see this couple get together, we’ve got to give them what they want, we just have to find a way to do it so the journey is unexpected.”The one without a movie
For anyone holding out hope that the experience these actors had coming together for only the second time since “Friends” wrapped in 2004 would spark interest in more, we’re sorry to burst your bubble, but that is not going to happen. “That’s all up to Marta and David,” Kudrow said. “I once heard them say, and I completely agree, that they ended the show very nicely, everyone’s lives are very nice, and they would have to unravel all of those good things in order for there to be stories. And I don’t want anyone’s lives to be unraveled.” Kudrow also added, “At my age, saying like, ‘Floopy’ — stop. You have to grow up.” Aniston took things farther and said they probably wouldn’t even do another reunion like this.The one with where they are now
Kudrow may have crushed many people’s dreams about actually seeing where the characters would be at this place in time, but she said she imagines Phoebe is still married to Mike (Paul Rudd), with kids, living in Connecticut. “I think she was probably the advocate for her kids…and all of the other kids who were a little different, creating the arts program,” she said. Aniston said Ross and Rachel got married and had some kids, and Ross still “played with bones.” Cox said she believed that because Monica is so competitive, she would still be “in charge of the bake sale in elementary school,” even though her and Chandler’s kids would be out of school by now. “She’s just got to keep things going, PTA. And you are still making me laugh every day,” she said to Perry. “Just wanted to make sure I factored in somewhere,” he replied. And Joey? “I think he probably opened a sandwich shop on Venice Beach,” LeBlanc said.The one where the audience inspired Monica and Chandler’s relationship
The audience reaction was so loud — and long — at the reveal that Chandler and Monica slept together in “The One With Ross’ Wedding Part 2,” it made the writers re-think plans for that storyline. Originally, Crane said, it was going to be a “brief thing where we had fun with it afterward, ‘What did we do?'” Since that episode was the fourth season finale, the writers and producers had time to reflect on the reaction, and ultimately expanded it from being “just one night in London,” as Crane said it was originally meant to be. This opened up a wealth of stories, from dating in secret, to having multiple characters find out about the relationship at different times, to eventually getting engaged, married and adopting twins.The one with the grudge against MarcelWhen asked what part of the show the cast members did not enjoy, poor Marcel came to mind immediately. Cox clarified that this was because “the monkey scared me,” but Schwimmer had some serious complaints. “The monkey didn’t do its job right,” he said. Marcel (real name: Katie) was a trained working capuchin, of course, but Schwimmer noted there would be choreographed bits the human actors worked out that didn’t perfectly align with the monkey’s own timing to hit his mark, “so we’d have to reset, we’d have to go again, because the monkey didn’t get it right. This kept happening over and over.” But he didn’t stop there: Schwimmer also remembered how Marcel would be fed live grubs while sitting on his shoulder. “I’d have monkey grubby hands all over. It was just time for Marcel to [expletive] off.” (The irony is that the producers shared a story about how Schwimmer had such a bad time doing a previous TV show he had quit this side of the biz to only focus on theater and in order to get him to agree to do “Friends,” they had to swear up and down it would be different. And it was different, but not always better for him, judging by his still-palpable anger about the monkey all these decades later.)The one with missing set pieces
As detail-oriented as the production design team and art department were in rebuilding the sets for this special reunion, they could not replace every item exactly. Cox pointed out that the cookie jar in Monica’s kitchen was different because the “original cookie jar is at Lisa Kudrow’s house.” Additionally, Aniston shared she took a mug from the original set and LeBlanc took the foosball from that iconic table. While those items are small enough that the casual viewer would never know, “Friends” fans have been re-watching the old episodes for years in anticipation of a reunion like this and certainly would have freeze-framed moments in the kitchen to call out that cookie jar, if nothing else, had Cox not said something.The one with the beam
The beam should have been the seventh billed in the “Friends” reunion, as almost every cast member called it out when stepping onto the set of Monica’s apartment. In early episodes (and others that James Burrows directed), there was a wooden archway that separated the kitchen and living room sets on that part of the soundstage. It provided a convenient piece of story in Season 3’s “The One with the Giant Poking Device” when Monica banged her nephew’s head into it, but it limited camera angles and interfered with lighting, so it was usually absent, wreaking havoc with continuity and raising questions about just how much work a renter could do on a New York City apartment. It was restored in all of its nostalgic glory for the reunion special, truly bringing the experience full-circle.The one with Courteney Cox’s cheat sheets
As LeBlanc walked through Monica’s meticulously-recreated kitchen during the special, he paused at the table and pondered aloud whether Cox’s line would still be written on it. Although he sounded like he was kidding at first, he revealed to Aniston, Kudrow and Schwimmer that he caught her doing it once and asked her what it was. “Mind your business,” he recalls her telling him. While he didn’t name what episode this happened during, it would not be a surprise if she did it often. The writers used to rework jokes during the live tapings so much that the show became notorious for its tapings running extremely late. Their bar for quality was so high, they would finesse as much as they could based on the live audience’s reaction on Stage 24 on the Warner Bros. lot, which required the cast members to be quick on their feet to absorb the new material immediately. Cox ended up joining the group as they were reminiscing over her keeping scripts in the sink and she added, “I had so much of my dialog within these apples,” while messing with the bowl on the table.The one where they gambled on Jennifer Aniston
Don’t let Rachel herself know, but Crane referred to the character as “incredibly selfish, self-involved, spoiled.” He noted that, “In the wrong hands, you don’t like Rachel.” This is partially why she was the last character cast. When they found Aniston, they felt she was perfect but she was already committed to a show called “Muddling Through.” They hired her anyway and shot the pilot, as well as a few subsequent episodes, figuring they’d see what show won later. “If CBS would have picked [‘Muddling Through’] up,” Crane recalled, “we would have had to reshoot the first three episodes of ‘Friends.'” Aniston added that she loved “Friends” so much she actually went to her other producers and asked to be released from it. The response? “That show’s not going to make you a star,” she remembered being told.The one with Janice’s laugh
Maggie Wheeler, who played Chandler’s on-again-off-again girlfriend Janice, shared that she created Janice’s iconic laugh (second only to her delivery of, “Oh my god”) because she was acting opposite Perry, who was so funny she knew she would end up laughing in the scene and potentially ruining the take. So she worked a unique laugh into the scene as Janice’s response to Chandler, and the rest is history.The one with Matthew Perry’s confession
Perry revealed to his former cast mates that he often “felt like I was going to die if [the audience] didn’t laugh” at his jokes on tape night. “It’s not healthy, for sure, but I would sometimes say a line and they wouldn’t laugh and I would sweat and just go into convulsions. … I would freak out.” It was something he kept to himself while working on the show, but he said he felt like that “every single night.”The one with technology
Schwimmer, who directed 10 episodes of “Friends” (and two of its spinoff “Joey!”) marveled at the sitcom cameras on the stage today, compared to what they used on “Friends.” These, he noted, could be operated by one person, but back then, each one required three. “It was a huge crew,” he said. ” four cameras, the choreography was incredible.”The one with memory lapses
Much fun was to be had with the fading memories of cast members — but to be fair, they don’t binge their own show. In fact, a few of whom shared they never watch the show at all. “There are seasons I’ve never seen,” said Kudrow, which Perry seconded. Schwimmer said he only recently looked back at some episodes because his daughter has started watching the show. LeBlanc seemed to have the most details teed up and ready to be talked about (somehow he magically even correctly identified Joey’s hand twin just by looking at hands), but even he didn’t remember that the length of Rachel’s letter to Ross was 18 pages… front and back. Perry didn’t remember that by the end of the series, the foosball table had been destroyed; Aniston still thought Chandler’s job was a transponster; Schwimmer didn’t remember the titular plot in “The One With The Ball” (Season 5) even though his character started the challenge of not dropping the ball in the story. Nobody remembered Mr. Heckles’ name — though Kudrow knew the actor who played him was Larry Hankin (who made a surprise guest appearance, in costume) and no one could finish the lyrics to the barbershop quartet’s message from Ross in the third season episode, “The One With All The Jealousy.” Behind-the-scenes details fared better, though: Aniston even remembered what some of her fellow actors were wearing during the first table read.The one with real-life friends as character inspirations
Co-creators Marta Kauffman and Crane have always talked about being inspired by their own lives in New York City in their 20s when creating the show, but here Kauffman revealed that the character of Chandler was even named after one of her friends. (We hope he didn’t take offense when, in the fourth season, Joey listed multiple reasons Chandler is a terrible name when he was trying to get Phoebe to name one of the triplets Joey instead of Chandler.) In this same interview package, Crane shared the one-line pitch for the show as being “about that time in your life when your friends are your family,” which seems both like a perfectly universal show any network would want and also way too broad to be sold on that alone today.The one with the rough audition
The night before LeBlanc was set to audition for “Friends,” he told Corden, he was running lines with a friend who said that because the show was about a group of friends hanging out, they should go out drinking. They did, and LeBlanc crashed at his place after, where, after he “got up [to go to the bathroom] too fast, I kind of blacked out, as you do, and fell face-first into the toilet,” he said. “A huge chunk of meat came off my nose.” When he went in the next day, Kauffman asked what happened. “I told the truth and got the job,” he said. What made this story even more special was that executive producer Kevin Bright revealed in an interview package that the role of Joey, in the end, came down to LeBlanc and Louis Mandylor — who went on to play Carl, the guy Joey hired to pretend to be his twin brother to get into a medical science study in the sixth season.The one with an on set injury
Not to make this all about LeBlanc, but the reunion special also revealed how he dislocated his shoulder during the third season of “Friends,” which resulted in him wearing a sling for a few episodes. In “The One Where No One’s Ready,” he had to dive for the chair after Chandler came back into Monica’s apartment fully dressed and vying for the vacated seat. During one take, which the cast watched raw footage of together, LeBlanc landed wrong on his left arm, resulting in production being paused so he could go to the hospital. Although they wrote the sling into a few episodes so everybody could go back to work, they didn’t finish filming this particular episode until LeBlanc’s arm was healed. “What started out the simplest ‘Friends’ episode,” Bright said, “ended up taking the longest amount of time to shoot.” If you’re superstitious, you might say the reason this episode went so wrong was because the cast didn’t do their usual pre-show huddle that night. “It was sort of early on, but then after that we’d say, ‘Do we need to do the huddle?’ And he’d say, ‘Yeah,'” Kudrow said of LeBlanc.
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Uganda is seeing a sharp increase in COVID-19 cases, forcing its health officials to take stern emergency measures. From 200 cases per day in April, the East African country is now recording over 1,000 cases per day amid a looming vaccine shortage.At the Ministry of Health, hundreds of people line up standing, others sitting, as the line snakes its way to the vaccination tent. Uganda’s COVID-19 cases stand at 44,594, with 361 deaths. Dr. Yonas Tegegn Woldemariam, the country’s representative at the World Health Organization, spells out the rate at which the coronavirus is spreading in Uganda. “On the week starting from 25 April, Uganda reported 256 cases. The week starting 2nd May, that number went up to 411. The week of the 9th of May, the number went to 475. And the week of the 16 May, the number has already reached 1,060,” he said. Kampala is among 10 districts that have recorded a high number of cases. Odoi Paul, 39, is among the many who thronged to the Ministry of Health on Thursday to get their first jab. “To make sure that I’m free from COVID-19. Like in India, people are dying, in USA. Like, that is why I say, let me also go and save my life before such a thing happens in our country,” said Paul. Dr. Henry Mwebesa, the director of health services, notes that it has taken the country less than 10 days to get to a full-blown pandemic. The most affected group is people between the ages of 20 and 39, and the number of severely and critically ill COVID-19 patients is higher than it was in the first wave. Dr. Mwebesa says officials are making tough decisions to ensure that people in densely populated areas such as Kampala get the vaccine. “To also note with concern that some districts, especially in the Eastern and Northern regions, have not performed as well. So, the strategic committee meeting of the Ministry of Health resolved that vaccines be withdrawn from the poorly performing districts, and that the exercise should commence 27th May, which is today,” he said. In March, Uganda received 964,000 doses of COVID-19 vaccine from the COVAX facility, with 100,000 doses coming from India. Since March 10, about 550,000 people have been vaccinated with the AstraZeneca vaccine. A second batch of vaccines was expected starting this month. But Dr. Woldemariam says that is not guaranteed. “The supply we were expecting in May hasn’t come, and it’s unlikely to come in June. So, we are working towards seeing where we can get an alternative supplier other than India. Globally, now there is a big effort for big countries which have excess to vaccines to donate, so, we are looking into whether we will benefit from that,” he said. To show the full extent of the second wave, tonight the three major local television stations in Uganda will anchor a joint news bulletin under the theme, Act or Perish.
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Authorities in Cameroon are clearing the streets in the capital, Yaounde, of more than 300 psychiatric patients whom officials say have been abandoned by family members. The central African state says stress from Boko Haram terrorism, a separatist crisis in its English-speaking western regions and the increase in consumption of hard drugs are responsible for growing numbers of such patients.Laure Mengueme is the director of mental health at Cameroon’s Ministry of Health. She speaks to a group of about 70 people at the central market in Yaounde on why psychiatric patients should not be left on the streets.Mengueme says she is making it clear that mentally ill patients should not be removed from the streets as refuse. She says local councils in Cameroon have social affairs services that will assist in the treatment of all abandoned mental health patients in the company of family members.Among those listening to Mengueme is 49-year-old secondary school teacher Theresia Mbiteh. Mbiteh says her 19-year-old son became violent in the English-speaking northwestern town of Bamenda in 2017. She says his son began taking illegal drugs when separatist fighters prohibited children from going to school.”I have done a lot, many people can testify. He escaped from here (Cameroon} and trekked to Nigeria,” said Mbiteh. “A person picked (found) him in Nigeria, called me one day after six weeks of his stay there and then told me. I had to borrow money to go collect him from Nigeria. When I brought him back here I thought things were going to be better, but nothing changed.”Mbiteh said she travelled from Bamenda to Yaounde when Cameroon state radio reported that the government was helping families take their loved ones off the streets.The health ministry reported that the number of abandoned psychiatric patients increased from 50 to more than 300 in Yaounde within two years. At least 2,700 patients are on the streets all over Cameroon with more than 400 in the commercial capital city Douala. Cameroon counted 1,300 such patients in its territory in 2019.Frankline Ngwen is supervisor of the mental health department of the Cameroon Baptist Convention Health Services. He says abuse and trauma from the various crises Cameroon faces has led to an increase in the number of psychiatric patients.”There are several reasons why people who are developing mental illnesses are increasing,” said Ngwen. “Some of them are very eminent including the sociopolitical crisis in the northwest region, the southwest region and the Boko Haram crisis in the north. This has given an opportunity for a lot of abuses, violence and trauma and these traumas can result to the development of mental illnesses. We also have schools where teenagers are using a lot of drugs and all these drugs are contributing to the development of mental illnesses.”Traditionally, many Cameroonians believe that mental health crises are divine punishment for wrongdoing. Some say witchcraft or spiritual possession are responsible for mental illness.Fonbe Hedwick runs Living Vine Mental Health Center in the English-speaking northwestern town of Bamenda. He is part of the campaign to remove mental patients from the streets. Fonbe says some patients are escaping from the homes of African traditional healers and Pentecostal pastors who abuse them, claiming that they are chasing evil spirits.”They should not be beaten. Patients with psychiatric conditions should not be tied up. Some kind of brutal force should not be meted on them,” said Fonbe. “We encourage families to avoid taking them to places where they think that they {pastors} will just pray for these patients and they get miracle healing or to traditional healers who will think that they will do some concoctions and these patients will get well. This is our message to all the families and all the communities.”Fonbe said with the arrival of the coronavirus in Cameroon in March 2020, many families have lacked the resources to care for psychiatric patients at home, putting them on the streets.The health ministry is asking family members to take relatives with mental health problems to hospitals for treatment.
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Videos of Navy pilots pursuing flying objects with amazing capabilities have struck a nerve in Washington. Matt Dibble looks into the latest UFO mystery.
Producer: Matt Dibble
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Actor and professional wrestler John Cena has apologized to fans in China after he called Taiwan a country in a promotional interview for his upcoming film and became the latest celebrity to face the fury of Chinese nationalists.
In a short video posted Tuesday on Chinese social media site Weibo, Cena did not refer to Taiwan or go into much detail about the incident, which occurred earlier this month when he was doing a promotion for “Fast & Furious 9” with Taiwanese media.
“In one interview, I made a mistake,” he said in heavily accented Mandarin Chinese. “I need to say now that this is very, very, very, very, very important. I love and respect China and the Chinese people. I’m very, very sorry. As for my mistake, I really apologize for it.”FILE – Actor John Cena attends the Road to “Fast & Furious 9” Concert at Maurice A. Ferre Park in Miami Beach, Fla.In his interview with TVBS, a Taiwanese cable channel, Cena was also speaking in Mandarin when he said Taiwan would be the first “country” to be able to see the film. That led to an uproar in China, which considers the self-governing democracy its own territory to be taken back by force if necessary.
It was unclear if Cena’s apology worked, as many comments on Chinese social media in response to his video were negative. Likewise, Cena was also facing scorn back in the United States, where Sen. Tom Cotton called the apology “pathetic” and others lashed out at him on social media as a “coward.”
Global companies and celebrities seeking to maintain access to the lucrative Chinese market have to tread a fine line on many issues as online nationalistic outrage can spark boycotts.
China has increasingly pressured foreign firms over their statements on Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, the South China Sea and other issues Beijing considers sensitive.
Airlines and other multinational companies have been pushed to refer to Taiwan as a part of China on their websites or risk damage to their business in China.
Chinese state broadcaster CCTV cut ties with the NBA for a year in response to a tweet by Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey backing pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, even though the post was quickly deleted.
News about Chloe Zhao, a Chinese director, winning an Oscar was censored in April after old interviews surfaced where she said that she grew up in a place where there were “lies” everywhere.
Brands including Swedish retailer H&M, Adidas and Nike have been targeted for consumer boycotts after state media criticized them for expressing concern about reports of forced labor in China’s western region of Xinjiang.
Meanwhile, “Fast & Furious 9” — the latest in the Hollywood franchise — appeared to be doing well in China despite the uproar. The film has taken in $155 million at the box office in China since it opened on May 21, according to local media reports.
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While studying at Howard University, young Chadwick Boseman helped lead a student protest against plans to merge his beloved College of Fine Arts into the College of Arts and Sciences.
He failed in that goal, but 20 years later, the acclaimed actor is being posthumously honored as the namesake of Howard’s newly re-established Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts.
Boseman, who graduated in 2000 with a bachelor’s degree in directing, died in August at 43 of colon cancer. He rose to prominence playing a succession of Black icons in biographical films: Jackie Robinson, singer James Brown and Thurgood Marshall.
The South Carolina native’s portrayal of African superhero Black Panther spawned a thousand memes and its cultural impact launched him to broader stardom. At the time of his death, Boseman’s character was poised to become an anchor of the Marvel Comics movie machine, with multiple sequels planned.
Howard University President Wayne Frederick said he and Boseman discussed ways of reviving the College of Fine Arts multiple times.
“It was always important to him,” Frederick told The Associated Press. “His commitment was very strong.”
The announcement comes a few weeks after fellow Howard alum Phylicia Rashad was announced as the fine arts college’s new dean. Boseman and Rashad met during his undergrad years, and Boseman publicly cited her as a mentor.
Boseman declared his love for the school in a 2018 commencement speech, praising, “the magic of this place. Almost anything can happen here.”
Boseman’s family said his student protest proved his passion for his alma mater.
“Chad fought to preserve the College of Fine Arts during his matriculation at Howard and remained dedicated to the fight throughout his career, and he would be overjoyed by this development,” the Boseman family said in a statement.
Boseman’s widow, Simone Ledward-Boseman, called him “a very proud Bison” and said the naming of the school “brings this part of his story full-circle and ensures that his legacy will continue to inspire young storytellers for years to come.”
Howard Fine Arts alumni include actors Taraji P. Henson, Oscar-nominated cinematographer Bradford Young, and singers Roberta Flack and Jessye Norman, as well as Rashad and her sister, Kennedy Center Honors recipient Debbie Allen.
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Some of the world’s biggest oil companies are under pressure to take more action to address climate change.ExxonMobil shareholders Wednesday elected at least two members proposed by hedge fund Engine No. 1 to serve on the company’s 12-member board of directors.The fund said in a statement earlier this week that the board needed “directors with experience in successful and profitable energy industry transformations who can help turn aspirations of addressing the risks of climate change into a long-term business plan, not talking points.”ExxonMobil shareholders also voted in favor of a proposal requiring the company to report on its climate change lobbying activities.”We’ve heard from shareholders about their desire to catalyze further progress at ExxonMobil and we are well prepared to deliver,” chief executive Darren Woods said Wednesday.Also Wednesday, Chevron shareholders approved a proposal to cut Scope 3 emissions, which are those generated by the use of a company’s products.The proposal did not set specific targets for how much to cut emissions or any deadline.Wednesday also brought a ruling from a Dutch court ordering Royal Dutch Shell to cut its carbon emissions by a net 45% by 2030 compared to 2019 levels.Seven environmental groups filed the lawsuit against Royal Dutch Shell arguing the company was in breach of its obligation to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.In her decision, Hague District Court Judge Larissa Alwin ruled that since Royal Dutch Shell currently has a plan to reduce emissions and was still developing it, it is not currently in breach of its obligation, as the groups argued.But the judge said a violation of that obligation is imminent, as the company’s policy “is not concrete, has many caveats and is based on monitoring social developments rather than the company’s own responsibility for achieving a carbon dioxide reduction.”
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Videos of Navy pilots pursuing flying objects with amazing capabilities have struck a nerve in Washington. Matt Dibble looks into the latest UFO mystery.
Producer: Matt Dibble
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Kenya’s Department of Gender says reported cases of gender-based violence have nearly quintupled during the COVID-19 pandemic. But campaigners note that stigma and fear of reporting abuse means the number of cases that go unreported is many times higher. Victoria Amunga reports from Nairobi.
Camera: Robert Lutta
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Russia and Iran are leading the way when it comes to pushing bad information on one of the world’s most popular social media platforms, and new analysis finds they are getting savvier at evading detection. Facebook issued a report Wednesday looking at so-called coordinated inauthentic behavior over the past four years, warning that despite ongoing efforts to identify and remove disinformation networks, there is no let-up in attempts to exploit or weaponize conflict and crisis. “Threat actors have adapted their behavior and sought cover in the gray spaces between authentic and inauthentic engagement and political activity,” according to the Facebook report, which looked at the more than 150 networks from more than 50 countries that its security teams took down from 2017 to 2020. “We know they will continue to look for new ways to circumvent our defenses,” the report added, noting disinformation efforts were evenly split between foreign and domestic efforts. “Domestic IO also continues to push the boundaries of acceptable online behavior worldwide” per @Facebook “About half of the influence operations we’ve removed since 2017–including in #Moldova, #Honduras, #Romania, #UK, US, #Brazil & #India–were conducted by locals…” pic.twitter.com/e2pLpgLNaJ— Jeff Seldin (@jseldin) May 26, 2021 Russia, Iran influence efforts Overall, Russia was the biggest purveyor of disinformation, according to the analysis, with 27 identified influence operations during the four-year timeframe. Of those, 15 were connected to the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) or other entities linked to Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin. US Hits Back at Russian Election Disinformation Ring New sanctions target the ‘inner circle’ of Ukrainian politician Andrii Derkach, previously outed by U.S. officials as a long-time Russian agent Another four Russian networks were traced to the Kremlin’s intelligence services and two more originated with Russian media sites. Iran was second on the list, with 23 inauthentic networks, nine of which were connected to the government or Iranian state broadcasters. Myanmar ranked third, with nine disinformation networks, followed by the United States and Ukraine. NEW: #Russia, #Iran#Myanmar top @Facebook’s list of sources for influence ops/ Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior in new report covering 2017-2020US is 4th, #Ukraine is 5th pic.twitter.com/X2Z45AqUO2— Jeff Seldin (@jseldin) May 26, 2021Facebook said the culprits in the United States and Ukraine included public relations firms, fringe political actors, and in the case of Ukraine, two political parties. China’s ‘strategic communication’ China, accused by U.S. intelligence officials for running multiple, intensive influence operations, did not make Facebook’s list of illicit disinformation networks, but not because Beijing was not active. Outgoing US Intel Chief Warns China Seeking Global Domination Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe has repeatedly sounded alarms about Beijing’s efforts, but now says China is prepared for an ‘open-ended period of confrontation’ with US “The China-origin activity on our platform manifested very differently than IO [influence operations] from other foreign actors, and the vast majority of it did not constitute CIB [Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior],” the Facebook report said. “Much of it was strategic communication using overt state-affiliated channels [e.g. state-controlled media, official diplomatic accounts] or large-scale spam activity that included primarily lifestyle or celebrity clickbait and also some news and political content.” #Election2020: “In the year leading up to the US 2020 election, we exposed over a dozen CIB operations targeting US audiences, including an equal number of networks originating from #Russia, #Iran, & the #UnitedStates itself” per @Facebookpic.twitter.com/MISQHnJigc— Jeff Seldin (@jseldin) May 26, 2021The Facebook report warned, however, that catching sophisticated disinformation actors like China and Russia is getting more difficult. “They are showing more discipline to avoid careless mistakes,” the report said. “Some are also getting better at avoiding language discrepancies.” Amplifying, outsourcing disinformation Facebook further warned that countries like Russia and China “are getting better at blurring the lines between foreign and domestic activity by co-opting unwitting [but sympathetic] domestic groups to amplify their narratives.” Another concerning trend identified in the Facebook report: outsourcing. “Over the past four years, we have investigated and removed influence operations conducted by commercial actors—media, marketing and public relations companies, including in Myanmar, the U.S., the Philippines, Ukraine, the UAE [United Arab Emirates] & Egypt,” according to the report. The report said despite a growing number of influence operations and their growing sophistication, many of them are being identified and taken down more quickly than in the past. But Nathaniel Gleicher, the head of Facebook security policy, said the social media platform can only do so much by itself. “Countering IO is a whole-of-society challenge. Defenders are most effective when gov’ts, industry, and civil society work together,” Gleicher wrote on Twitter. “We know threat actors are continuing to innovate, so we can’t take our foot off the gas now,” he added. “We have to keep pressing to stay ahead of adversarial innovation in 2021 and beyond.”
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In a landmark case brought by seven environmental groups, a Dutch court Wednesday ordered energy company Royal Dutch Shell (RDS) to cut its carbon emissions by net 45% from 2019 levels by 2030.The ruling could set a precedent for similar cases against polluting multinationals, particularly petroleum companies, around the world.The environmental groups, which included the Dutch chapter of Greenpeace, filed the suit in 2019 on behalf of 17,000 Dutch citizens. The groups had argued RDS was in breach of its obligation to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.In her decision, Hague District Court Judge Larissa Alwin ruled that since the Anglo-Dutch energy giant currently has a plan to reduce emissions and was still developing it, it is not currently in breach of its obligation, as the groups argued.But the judge said a violation of that obligation is imminent, as the company’s policy “is not concrete, has many caveats and is based on monitoring social developments rather than the company’s own responsibility for achieving a CO2 reduction.She ordered the company to make the 45% cuts by 2030, which would be in line with the 2016 Paris Agreement on climate change.The case in the Netherlands is the latest in a string of legal challenges filed around the world by climate activists seeking action to rein in emissions, but it is believed to be the first targeting a multinational company.In statement ahead of the ruling, RDS has said litigation will do little to accelerate the world’s transition away from fossil fuels.
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A former chief aide to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told a parliamentary committee Wednesday the government failed the British people in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a statement Johnson rejects.
Dominic Cummings, who left the government in December, explained to a select committee investigating the government’s pandemic response how Johnson failed to take the pandemic seriously early on, dismissing it as a “scare story.” He said ministers and officials literally went on vacation in February of 2020.
Cummings said, “When the public needed us most the government failed. And I’d like to say to all the families of those who have died unnecessarily how sorry I am for the mistakes that were made and my own mistakes of that.”
The former aide said Johnson had been told Britain needed to be locked down on March 14, 2020, but there was no plan to do so. He said the prime minister had been advised the peak of the pandemic would be in June, when, in fact, the National Health Service was already in danger of being overwhelmed.
Cummings had been a chief strategist behind the 2016 Brexit campaign and Johnson’s landslide election win in 2019. Since leaving Johnson’s team late last year, Cummings has become one of his former boss’s most vocal critics over how the prime minister led his team in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, describing it as “disastrous.”
Johnson responded to his former aide’s testimony from the floor of the lower house of parliament Wednesday, saying he takes full responsibility for the government’s response to the pandemic. He rejected Cummings claim the government had been complacent in its response to the pandemic at any point.
He said, “I maintain my point that the government acted throughout with the intention to save life and protect the NHS [National Health Service] and in accordance with the best scientific advice. That’s exactly what we did.”
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WhatsApp has filed a lawsuit challenging the Indian government’s new rules that require the Facebook-owned messaging platform to make people’s messages traceable, a move it says would undermine the privacy of users.The lawsuit was filed as India brought sweeping new regulations into force on Wednesday to make social media and technology companies, that have tens of millions of users in the country, more accountable for content on their platform.One of the new rules would require messaging platforms to identify the “first originator of information” when authorities demand it. WhatsApp wants that regulation blocked saying that it undermines citizens’ fundamental right to privacy.In a statement issued after the lawsuit was filed, the government said it respects the right to privacy as a fundamental right but “no Fundamental Right, including the Right to Privacy, is absolute and it is subject to reasonable restrictions.”The statement by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology said the requirement to disclose the origin of a particular message will only arise in the case of “prevention, investigation or punishment” of very serious offences.With over 40 million users, India is one of the biggest markets for the messaging platform. It has said that it is committed to protecting the privacy of people’s personal messages.“Technology and privacy experts have determined that traceability breaks end-to-end encryption and would severely undermine the privacy of billions of people who communicate digitally,” WhatsApp says in a blog post on its website. It said that a government “that chooses to mandate traceability is effectively mandating a new form of mass surveillance.”Technology experts in New Delhi called the lawsuit by WhatsApp significant.“This is one of the most significant lawsuits for privacy and it has implications not just for Indian users but globally. What will be debated in court is — can privacy of all users be compromised because there might be a legitimate demand from law enforcement agencies for information on one user or one message,” said Nikhil Pahwa, a digital rights activist and founder of technology publication Medianama. “Basically many governments around the world don’t want these kind of encrypted platforms because these platforms are blind to them and do not allow mass surveillance.”FILE – Rohitash Repswal, a digital marketer, shows a software tool that appears to automate the process of sending messages to WhatsApp users, on a screen inside his office in New Delhi, India, May 8, 2019.The sweeping new rules that were announced in February give the government more power to order social media companies, digital media and streaming platforms to remove content that it considers unlawful and require them to help with police investigations in identifying people who post “misinformation.” The employees of the companies in India can be held criminally liable for failing to comply with the government’s requests.Social media companies in India have been facing a tougher environment as the government seeks to regulate content posted online, which has become one of the most important spaces to express dissenting views.A spokesman for the opposition Congress Party, Abhishek Manu Singhvi, said the new rules were “extremely dangerous” for free speech and creativity, “unless extreme restraint is exercised” in implementing them.Critics accuse the government of trying to stifle online criticism and point to its requests to Twitter last month to remove several tweets including some that were critical of the government’s handling of the pandemic ravaging India. The government had said the messages could incite panic and were misinformation.Police also turned up at the local offices of Twitter in New Delhi on Monday to serve notice to the company concerning an investigation into the tagging of some government official’s tweets as “manipulated media.”
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Amazon is going Hollywood.
The online shopping giant is buying MGM, the movie and TV studio behind James Bond, “Legally Blonde” and “Shark Tank,” with the hopes of filling its video streaming service with more stuff to watch.
Amazon is paying $8.45 billion for MGM, making it the company’s second-largest acquisition after it bought grocer Whole Foods for nearly $14 billion in 2017.
The deal is the latest in the media industry that’s aimed at boosting streaming services to compete against Netflix and Disney+. AT&T and Discovery announced on May 17 that they would combine media companies, creating a powerhouse that includes HGTV, CNN, Food Network and HBO.
Amazon doesn’t say how many people watch its Prime Video service. But more than 200 million have access to it because they’re signed up for its Prime membership, which gives them faster shipping and other perks. Besides Prime Video, Amazon also has a free streaming service called IMDb TV, where Amazon makes money by playing ads during movies and shows.
Buying MGM would give Amazon access to more films, shows and famous characters, including Rocky, RoboCop and Pink Panther. Amazon will also get a cable channel: Epix, which MGM owns.
Known for its roaring lion logo, MGM is one of the oldest Hollywood studios, founded in 1924 when films were silent. It has a long list of classics in its library, including “Singin’ in the Rain.”
More recent productions include reality TV staples “Shark Tank” and “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” as well as the upcoming James Bond movie “No Time to Die” and an Aretha Franklin biopic called “Respect.”
Amazon already has its own studio but has had mixed results. Two of its shows, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and “Fleabag,” won best comedy series Emmys. But many of its films have failed to click with audiences at the box office. Recently, Amazon has been spending on sports and splashy shows. It will stream “Thursday Night Football” next year and is producing a “Lord of the Rings” show, which reportedly cost $450 million for its first season alone.
The deal, which is subject to customary approvals, will make Amazon, already one of the most powerful and valuable companies in the world, even bigger. Regulators around the world are scrutinizing Amazon’s business practices, specifically the way it looks at information from businesses that sell goods on its site and uses it to create its own Amazon-branded products.
A report by the House Judiciary Committee in October called for a possible breakup of Amazon and others, making it harder for them to buy other businesses and imposing new rules to safeguard competition.
Amazon, founded in 1995 as an online bookstore, has become a $1.6 trillion behemoth that does a little bit of everything. It has a delivery business network that gets orders to people in two days or sooner; sells inhalers and insulin; has a cloud-computing business that powers the apps of Netflix and McDonald’s; and has plans to send more than 3,200 satellites into space to beam internet service to Earth.
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The first total lunar eclipse in more than two years coincides with a “supermoon” Wednesday, putting on a cosmic show for at least half the world.A total lunar eclipse occurs when the moon passes completely through the Earth’s dark shadow, or umbra. During this type of eclipse, the moon will gradually get darker, taking on a rusty or blood-red color. The color is so striking, lunar eclipses are sometimes called blood moons.This lunar eclipse coincides with the moon’s nearest approach to Earth, making it appear as the closet and largest full moon of the year. This is what is commonly referred to as a supermoon.The super “blood” moon will be visible Wednesday across the Pacific — offering the best viewing — as well as the western half of North America, bottom of South America and eastern Asia. Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, including Hawaii, will also see the eclipse in its entirety.The total eclipse will last about 15 minutes as Earth passes directly between the moon and the sun. But the entire show will last five hours, as Earth’s shadow gradually covers the moon, then starts to ebb. The reddish-orange color is the result of all the sunrises and sunsets in Earth’s atmosphere projected onto the surface of the eclipsed moon.May’s full moon was known by early Native American tribes as the flower moon because this was the time of year when spring flowers appeared in abundance.
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The situation in pandemic-ravaged South Asia is “unlike anything our region has seen before,” the regional director of UNICEF said Tuesday.”The sheer scale and speed of this new surge of COVID-19 is outstripping countries’ abilities to provide life-saving treatment,” George Laryea-Adjei told reporters Monday in Geneva.Laryea-Adjei said that while India recorded the highest-ever single-day death toll from COVID-19 – 4,529 deaths in one day last week – an estimated 228,000 children and 11,000 mothers across the region died due to disruptions in essential health care services.“With a surge that is four times the size of the first, we are facing a real possibility of a sever spike in child and maternal deaths in South Asia,” he said.India has recorded nearly 27 million cases of COVID-19 since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Many believe the number is much higher because of a lack of testing.Olympic warningWith less than two months remaining before the opening ceremony, the Tokyo Olympics received another jolt Monday when the U.S. government issued a warning for its citizens not to travel to Japan due to rising rates of new COVID-19 cases.The State Department issued its highest travel advisory warning, Level 4, citing Japan’s slow vaccination rate and the country’s own restrictions on travelers from the United States.People wearing masks to help protect against the spread of the coronavirus walk in front of a screen showing the news on U.S. warning against visits to Japan, May 25, 2021, in Tokyo.A separate warning issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said “even fully vaccinated travelers may be at risk for getting and spreading COVID-19 variants and should avoid all travel to Japan.”The Tokyo Olympics are scheduled to take place from July 23 to August 8 after a one-year postponement as the novel coronavirus pandemic began spreading across the globe. But the Japanese capital and other parts of Japan are under a state of emergency to quell a surge of new infections that has overwhelmed hospitals across the country, prompting growing public sentiment against staging the event.The opposition was boosted by an open letter earlier this month from the Tokyo Medical Practitioners Association, which represents about 6,000 primary care doctors and hospitals, urging Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga to convince the International Olympic Committee to cancel the games.Senior citizens wait to receive a COVID-19 vaccine at a large-scale vaccination center in Osaka, western Japan, May 24, 2021, in this photo distributed by Kyodo.The current outbreak has already prompted Japanese authorities to ban foreign audiences from attending the Olympics. But Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato told reporters Tuesday the warning does not prohibit essential travel to Japan, and that authorities there do not detect any change in Washington’s support for Japan to go through with staging the Olympics.Japan has recorded just 722,668 total COVID-19 infections and 12,351 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, but has only inoculated just under five percent of its population.Expiring vaccinesIn Hong Kong, a high-ranking official is warning that the city may soon have to discard millions of COVID-19 vaccine doses because not enough people are getting inoculated before the doses expire.Thomas Tsang, a former controller of Hong Kong’s Centre for Health Protection and a member of the government’s vaccine task force, told public broadcaster RTHK Tuesday there is only a “three-month window” to use the first batch of the two-dose Pfizer vaccine, a situation complicated by current plans to close the community vaccination centers after September.Migrant workers queue up for Covid-19 testing in the Central district of Hong Kong, May 1, 2021.Hong Kong bought rough doses of Pfizer and China’s Sinovac vaccine to cover its entire 7.5 million citizens, but only 2.1 million have taken the shots since the city’s vaccination program began in late February.Tsang said it was “just not right” that Hong Kong was sitting on an unused pile of doses while the rest of the world “is scrambling for vaccines” and warned that the city would not be buying anymore doses.Observers have blamed the situation on a number of factors, including vaccine hesitancy, online disinformation, a lack of urgency in a city that has largely avoided a major outbreak of the virus, and rising distrust of authorities in Hong Kong and China.
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A few hours after the latest cease-fire took effect in the Gaza Strip, a number of Palestinian journalists in the coastal enclave found they were blocked from accessing WhatsApp messenger — a crucial tool used to communicate with sources, editors and the world beyond the blockaded strip. The Associated Press reached out to 17 journalists in Gaza who confirmed their Whatsapp accounts had been blocked since Friday. By midday Monday, only four journalists — working for Al Jazeera — confirmed their accounts had been restored.The incident marks the latest puzzling move concerning WhatsApp’s owner Facebook Inc. that’s left Palestinian users or their allies bewildered as to why they’ve been targeted by the company, or if indeed they’d been singled out for censorship at all.Twelve of the 17 journalists contacted by the AP said they had been part of a WhatsApp group that disseminates information related to Hamas military operations. Hamas, which rules over the Gaza Strip, is viewed as a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States, where WhatsApp owner Facebook is headquartered.It’s unclear if the journalists were targeted because they’d been following that group’s announcements on WhatsApp. Hamas runs Gaza’s Health Ministry, which has a WhatsApp group followed by more than 80 people, many of them journalists. That group, for example, has not been blocked. Hassan Slaieh, a freelance journalist in Gaza whose WhatsApp account is blocked, said he thinks his account might have been targeted because he was on a group called Hamas Media.”This has affected my work and my income because I lost conversations with sources and people,” Slaieh said. Al Jazeera’s chief correspondent in Gaza, Wael al-Dahdouh, said his access to WhatsApp was blocked around dawn on Friday before it was reinstated Monday. He said journalists subscribe to Hamas groups only to get information needed to do journalistic work.A WhatsApp spokesperson said the company bans accounts to comply with its policies “to prevent harm as well as applicable law.” The company said it has been in touch with media outlets over the last week about its practices. “We will reinstate journalists if any were impacted,” the company said. Israeli Missiles Destroy Gaza Building Housing Foreign Media OutletsAssociated Press says the ‘world will know less about’ escalating violence in Gaza because of attack on buildingAl Jazeera said that when it sought information regarding its four journalists in Gaza impacted by the blockage, they were told by Facebook that the company had blocked the numbers of groups based out of Gaza and consequently the cell phone numbers of Al Jazeera journalists were part of the groups they had blocked.Among those affected by the WhatsApp blockage are two Agence France-Presse journalists. The Paris-based international news service told the AP it is working with WhatsApp to understand what the problem is and to restore their accounts.The 11-day war caused widespread destruction across Gaza with 248 Palestinians, including 66 children and 39 women, killed in the fighting. Israel says 12 people in Israel, including two children, also died.It’s not the first time journalists have been suddenly barred from WhatsApp. In 2019, a number of journalists in Gaza had their accounts blocked without explanation. The accounts of those working with international media organizations were restored after contacting the company. Facebook and its photo and video-sharing platform Instagram were criticized this month for removing posts and deleting accounts by users posting about protests against efforts to evict Palestinians from their homes in east Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. It prompted an open letter signed by 30 organizations demanding to know why the posts had been removed.Gaza Diary: Shouts, a Hurried Evacuation, and Then the Bombs Came AP journalist details the destruction of the building housing his officesThe New York Times also reported that some 100 WhatsApp groups were used by Jewish extremists in Israel for the purpose of committing violence against Palestinian citizens of Israel. WhatsApp said it does not have access to the contents of people’s personal chats, but that they ban accounts when information is reported they believe indicates a user may be involved in causing imminent harm. The company said it also responds to “valid legal requests from law enforcement for the limited information available to us.”The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, or 7amleh, said in a report published this month that Facebook accepted 81% of requests made by Israel’s Cyber Unit to remove Palestinian content last year. It found that in 2020, Twitter suspended dozens of accounts of Palestinian users based on information from the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs.Al-Dahdouh, the Al Jazeera correspondent, said although his account was restored, his past history of chats and messages was erased. “The groups and conversations were back, but content is erased, as if you are joining a new group or starting a new conversation,” he said. “I have lost information, images, numbers, messages and communications.”Al Jazeera said its journalists in Gaza had their WhatsApp accounts blocked by the host without prior notification.”Al Jazeera would like to strongly emphasize that its journalists will continue to use their WhatsApp accounts and other applications for newsgathering purposes and personal communication,” the news network told the AP. “At no time, have Al Jazeera journalists used their accounts for any means other than for personal or professional use.”The Qatar-based news network’s office in Gaza was destroyed during the war by Israeli airstrikes that took down the high-rise residential and office tower, which also housed The Associated Press offices. Press freedom groups accused the military, which claimed the building housed Hamas military intelligence, of trying to censor coverage of Israel’s offensive. The Israeli military telephoned a warning, giving occupants of the building one hour to evacuate. Sada Social, a West Bank-based center tracking alleged violations against Palestinian content on social media, said it was collecting information on the number of Gaza-based journalists impacted by the latest WhatsApp decision.
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U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra on Tuesday called on the World Health Organization (WHO) to conduct a second, more fully transparent investigation into the origins of the coronavirus that causes COVID-19.The WHO issued a joint statement with Chinese scientists in March after the agency led a four-week mission to the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the first cases of the coronavirus emerged in December 2019. But the U.S. and other nations raised concerns about the way the mission was carried out and the lack of cooperation from China. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus also agreed that further studies were needed into the virus’ origins.In a video message at the annual ministerial meeting of the WHO’s World Health Assembly, Becerra called for a second phase of the investigation to be launched “with terms of reference that are transparent, science-based and give international experts the independence to fully assess the source of the virus and the early days of the outbreak.”Becerra did not mention China directly, but his remarks follow a Wall Street Journal report from Sunday in which U.S. officials are quoted saying three Chinese researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology sought hospital care in November 2019, a month before the first confirmed coronavirus case in China.Dr. Anthony Fauci, senior White House health adviser and director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, said in a recent interview he was also not convinced about the natural origins of the coronavirus and called for further investigations.
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