Month: December 2023
seattle — The U.S. government said Thursday it plans to spend more than $1 billion over the next decade to help recover depleted populations of salmon in the Pacific Northwest, and that it will help figure out how to offset the hydropower, transportation and other benefits provided by four controversial dams on the Snake River, should Congress ever agree to breach them.
President Joe Biden’s administration stopped short of calling for the removal of the dams to save the fish, but Northwest tribes and conservationists who have long sought that called the agreement a road map for dismantling them. Filed in U.S. District Court in Oregon, it pauses long-running litigation over federal operation of the dams and represents the most significant step yet toward breaching them.
“Today’s historic agreement marks a new direction for the Pacific Northwest,” senior White House adviser John Podesta said in a written statement. “Today, the Biden-Harris administration and state and tribal governments are agreeing to work together to protect salmon and other native fish, honor our obligations to tribal nations, and recognize the important services the Columbia River system provides to the economy of the Pacific Northwest.”
The Columbia River Basin, an area roughly the size of Texas, was once the world’s greatest salmon-producing river system, with at least 16 stocks of salmon and steelhead.
Today, four are extinct and seven are listed under the Endangered Species Act. Another iconic but endangered Northwest species, a population of killer whales, also depends on the salmon.
Dams blamed for decline
Dams are a main culprit behind the salmon’s decline, and federal fisheries scientists have concluded that breaching the dams in eastern Washington on the Snake River, the largest tributary of the Columbia, would be the best hope for recovering them, providing the fish with access to hundreds of miles of pristine habitat and spawning grounds in Idaho.
Conservation groups sued the federal government more than two decades ago in an effort to save the fish. They have argued that the continued operation of the dams violates the Endangered Species Act as well as treaties dating to the mid-19th century ensuring the tribes’ right to harvest fish.
Republicans in Congress who oppose the breaching of the dams released a leaked copy of the draft agreement late last month.
“I have serious concerns about what this agreement means for the future of our region,” Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican from Washington, said in an emailed statement Thursday. “It jeopardizes the energy, irrigation and navigation benefits that support our entire way of life, and it makes commitments on behalf of Congress without engaging us.”
Details of agreement
Under the agreement, the U.S. government will build enough new clean energy projects in the Pacific Northwest to replace the hydropower generated by the dams — the Ice Harbor, Little Goose, Lower Monumental and Lower Granite.
The agreement includes a compromise regarding dam operations — providing for additional water to be spilled in the spring, fall and winter to help some salmon runs such as spring and summer Chinook, while reducing the spill required in late summer, when energy demand is high and production is especially profitable. That could harm fall Chinook, said the environmental law firm Earthjustice, which is representing environmental, fishing and renewable energy groups in the litigation.
The federal Bonneville Power Administration, which operates the dams, will spend $300 million over 10 years to restore native fish and their habitats throughout the Columbia River Basin, though it said the agreement would result in rate increases of only 0.7%. Two-thirds of that money will go toward hatchery improvements and operations, and the rest will go to what the agreement refers to as the “six sovereigns” — Oregon, Washington and the four tribes involved: the Yakama Nation, the Nez Perce Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs.
Combined with other fish-restoration funding, the federal government will be spending more than $1 billion over the next decade, the White House said.
The U.S. also will conduct or pay for studies of how the transportation, irrigation and recreation provided by the dams could be replaced. The dams made the town of Lewiston, Idaho, the most inland seaport on the West Coast, and many farmers in the region rely on barges to ship their crops, though rail is also available.
The agreement “lays out a pathway to breaching,” said Shannon Wheeler, chairman of the Nez Perce Tribe. “When these things are replaced, and the Pacific Northwest is transforming into a stronger, more resilient, better place, then there’s a responsibility … to make the decisions that are necessary to make sure these treaty promises are kept.”
Utility and business groups Northwest RiverPartners, the Public Power Council and the Pacific Northwest Waterways Association have opposed the agreement.
“This settlement undermines the future of achieving clean energy goals and will raise the rates of electricity customers across the region while exacerbating the greatest threat to salmon that NOAA scientists have identified — the warming, acidifying ocean,” Northwest RiverPartners said in a news release Thursday.
There has been growing recognition that the harm some dams cause to fish outweighs their usefulness, but only a few lawmakers in the region have embraced the idea. Dams on the Elwha River in Washington state and the Klamath River along the Oregon-California border have been or are being removed.
In 2021, Republican Representative Mike Simpson of Idaho proposed removing the earthen berms on either side of the four Lower Snake River dams to let the river flow freely, and to spend $33 billion to replace the benefits of the dams.
Last year, Washington Governor Jay Inslee and Washington U.S. Senator Patty Murray, both Democrats, released a report saying carbon-free electricity produced by the dams must be replaced before they are breached. Inslee declined to endorse breaching the dams during a conference call with reporters on Thursday, but he said figuring out how to replace their benefits would enable Congress to make a better decision.
“I don’t think this agreement makes anything inevitable, but it does make it much more likely that we’ll have the information we need to make the decision,” he said.
In October, Biden directed federal agencies to use all available resources to restore abundant salmon runs in the Columbia River Basin, but that memo too stopped short of calling for the removal of the dams.
“The energy needs of the Pacific Northwest should not rest on the backs of salmon,” said Donella Miller, fisheries science manager with the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission. “What’s good for the salmon is good for the environment, and what’s good for the environment is good for the people.”
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washington — The maiden liftoff of a new American rocket called Vulcan Centaur has been delayed from December 24 to January 8, the company that developed it said Thursday.
The postponement stems from last-minute technical snags, but United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno said on X, formerly Twitter, that a recent dress rehearsal on the launch pad went well.
The rocket will carry a private lunar lander, developed by the startup Astrobotic, which could become the first such private craft to touch down on the moon and the first American robot to land on the surface since the Apollo program ended in 1972.
“This is sort of, in a way, the first giant step in the campaign for the U.S., and for all of our friends, to go back to the moon, eventually with people,” Bruno told AFP in an interview last week.
“It’s a pretty big deal to have a payload at all, let alone one that goes to the surface of the moon,” he added.
“We wanted to do something really important, and we have a lot of confidence, obviously, in the design of our rocket,” Bruno said.
Liftoff for this mission called Cert-1 will take place at the U.S. Space Force launch base at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
In dress rehearsals in recent days, some “routine” issues emerged in the ground system so a Christmas Eve flight is now out, and the new window opens January 8, Bruno wrote on X.
Besides the lunar lander, this rocket will carry the cremated remains of several people associated with the original “Star Trek” series, including creator Gene Roddenberry and cast member Nichelle Nichols, who played the character Uhura. Roddenberry’s ashes have been launched into orbit previously.
A sample of Bruno’s own DNA will also be taken into space. “Who wouldn’t want to go to space with five ‘Star Trek’ people?” he mused in the interview with AFP.
Vulcan Centaur is meant to replace ULA’s Atlas V and Delta IV rockets and is designed to carry a payload of up to 27.2 metric tons into low orbit, comparable to what the SpaceX Falcon 9 can do.
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Madrid — More than 80 Spanish media organizations are filing a $600 million lawsuit against Meta over what they say is unfair competition in a case that could be repeated across the European Union.
The lawsuit is the latest front in a battle by legacy media against the dominance of tech giants at a time when the traditional media industry is in economic decline.
Losing revenue to Silicon Valley companies means less money to invest in investigative journalism or fewer resources to fight back against disinformation.
The case is the latest example of media globally seeking compensation from internet and social media platforms for use of their content.
The Association of Media of Information (AMI), a consortium of Spanish media companies, claimed in the lawsuit that Meta allegedly violated EU data protection rules between 2018 and 2023, Reuters reported.
The newspapers argue that Meta’s “massive” and “systematic” use of its Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platform gives it an unfair advantage of designing and offering personalized advertisements, which they say constitutes unfair competition.
Irene Lanzaco, director general of AMI, told VOA it estimated the actions of Meta had cost Spanish newspapers and magazines $539.2 million in lost income between 2018 and 2023.
“This loss of income has meant it is more difficult for the media to practice journalism, to pay its journalists, to mount investigations and to hold politicians to account for corruption,” she said.
“It means that society becomes more polarized, and people become less involved with their communities if they do not know what is going on.”
Analysts say this is an “innovative” strategy by legacy media against tech giants that is more designed to engage people outside the news business.
Until now, traditional media cases against Silicon Valley centered on the theft of intellectual property from the news business, but the Spanish suit made a claim related to alleged theft of personal data.
“Previously, all the cases that legacy media has brought have been about the piracy of intellectual property — ‘We report the news, and these people are putting it on their websites without paying for it,’” Kathy Kiely, the Lee Hills chair in Free Press Studies at the Missouri School of Journalism, told VOA.
“But what this case is about is that these social media platforms have access to a lot of information about the audience to gain unfair advantage in advertising,” she said.
The lawsuit was filed with a commercial court in Madrid, reported Reuters, which saw the court papers.
Matt Pollard, a spokesman for Meta Platforms, told VOA, “We have not received the legal papers on this case, so we cannot comment. All we know about it is what we have read in the media.”
The complainants include Prisa, which publishes Spain’s left-wing daily El País; Vocento, owner of ABC, a right-wing daily; and the Barcelona-based conservative daily La Vanguardia.
They claim that Meta used personal data obtained without the express consent from clients in violation of the EU General Data Protection Regulation in force since May 2018, which demands that any website requests authorization to keep and use personal data.
“Of course in any other EU country, the same legal procedure could be initiated,” as it concerns an alleged violation of European regulations,” Nicolas González Cuellar, a lawyer representing AMI, told Reuters.
Kiely said the Spanish case may engage the broader public and policymakers, in Europe and beyond.
“[This legal case] introduces a new strategy. It is not just about the survival of the local news organization. It is about privacy,” she said. “This engages people outside the news business in a way that piracy of the intellectual property does not.”
The lawsuit is the latest attempt by media organizations who have struggled to make tech giants pay fair fees for using and sharing their content.
The legal battle comes as the Reuters Institute’s 2023 Digital News Report found that tech platforms like Meta and Google had become a “running sore” for news publishers over the past decade.
“Google and Facebook [now Meta] at their height accounted for just under half of online traffic to news sites,” the report said. “Although the so-called ‘duopoly’ remains hugely consequential, our report shows how this platform position is becoming a little less concentrated in many markets, with more providers competing.”
It added, “Digital audio and video are bringing new platforms into play, while some consumers have adopted less toxic and more private messaging networks for communications.”
Spanish media scored a victory against Alphabet’s Google News service, which the government shut down in 2014 before its reopening in 2022 under new legislation allowing media outlets to negotiate fees directly with the tech giant.
Last month, Google and the Canadian government reached an agreement in their dispute over the Online News Act, which would see Google continue to use Canadian news online in return for the company making annual payments to news companies of about $100 million.
Radio Canada and CBC News reported last month that the Canadian federal government estimated earlier this year that Google’s compensation should amount to about $172 million, while Google estimated this value at $100 million.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the agreement was “very good news.”
“After months of holding strong, of demonstrating our commitment to local journalism, to strong independent journalists getting paid for their work … Google has agreed to properly support journalists, including local journalism,” he said.
Google said it would not have a mandatory negotiation model imposed on it for talks with the media in Canada. Instead, it preferred to deal with a single media group that would represent all media, allowing the group to limit its arbitration risk.
Google had threatened to block Canadian news content on its platforms because of the legislation but did not.
In contrast, Meta ended its talks with the Canadian government last summer and stopped distributing Canadian news on Facebook and Instagram.
Last month, the Reuters Institute’s 2023 report said that 29% of Canadians used Facebook for news. Around 11% used Facebook Messenger, and 10% used Instagram for the same purpose.
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Immigrants from Belarus, Ukraine and other Eastern European countries are actively exploring the American IT startup market. One immigrant-run venture capital firm is helping them find investments. Evgeny Maslov has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. Camera: Michael Eckels.
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London/Dubai — Nearly 200 countries signed a deal Wednesday at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai to transition away from fossil fuels. Proponents say it heralds the end of the age of oil — but not all nations are satisfied with the text of the deal.
The deal calls for “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner … so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.”
It also calls for a tripling of renewable energy capacity globally by 2030, speeding up efforts to reduce coal use, and accelerating technologies such as carbon capture and storage.
Sultan al-Jaber, the COP28 president who also is head of the United Arab Emirates’ state-owned oil firm, said the deal could prevent global warming exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the target agreed to at the Paris climate summit in 2015. Scientists say that exceeding this level of warming will likely cause irreversible and increasingly catastrophic climate change.
“It is a plan that is led by the science. It is a balanced plan that tackles emissions, bridges the gap on adaptation, reimagines global finance and delivers on loss and damage,” al-Jaber said of the COP28 agreement.
He called the deal “historic” but added that its true success would be in its implementation. “We are what we do, not what we say. We must take the steps necessary to turn this agreement into tangible actions,” al-Jaber told delegates in Dubai.
Many nations, including the United States and China – the world’s two largest emitters of greenhouse gases – welcomed the agreement after two weeks of hard-fought negotiations.
“Everybody here should be pleased that in a world of Ukraine and the Middle East war and all the other challenges of a planet that is foundering, this is a moment where multilateralism has actually come together and people have taken individual interests and attempted to define the common good,” John Kerry, the U.S. climate envoy, told delegates Wednesday.
However, more than 100 countries, including many European states, had lobbied for stronger language to fully phase out fossil fuels.
They faced strong opposition from oil-producing members of the OPEC cartel, led by representatives from Saudi Arabia, who argued the world can slash emissions without shunning specific fuels.
That prompted criticism from some delegates, including small island states, that are most vulnerable to rising sea levels in a warming world.
“We have made an incremental advancement over business as usual, when what we really needed is an exponential step change in our actions and support,” said Anne Rasmussen, the chair of the Alliance of Small Island States, whose members include 39 island nations.
Many climate change campaigners said the text of the deal is too weak. “On the one hand, this is a good sign and signal that the world is finally dealing with fossil fuels after almost three decades of refusing to deal with it. But on the other hand, the new text includes cavernous loopholes that will allow for the oil and gas industry to continue,” said Jean Su of the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity.
Those loopholes include the use of so-called carbon capture technology, which removes some carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of greenhouse gases.
“That technology exists in some places, but it’s never been proven to work at the kind of scale that you would need if you were to continue burning fossil fuels,” said Ruth Townend, a research fellow with the Environment and Society Program at Chatham House, a research institution.
Scientists say we need to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 43 percent in just six years, in order to meet the target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
“The energy transition to renewables is far more feasible than trying to capture carbon from the atmosphere. We know what we need to do. And governments now need to find ways that work for them economically and politically to commit to that and deliver it. And that needs to happen very fast,” Townend told VOA.
Along with the agreement to transition away from fossil fuels, the COP28 summit secured agreement on a loss and damage fund, with close to $800 million pledged during the conference.
“The new fund helps the poorest countries of the world and the ones most vulnerable to climate change with money for the loss and damage that they are experiencing when they have a hurricane, flooding, fires or other damage to their economies,” said Professor Michael Jacobs, of the London-based ODI research group.
“Some of the richer countries have put in money for this fund. They still need to make good on this money. It’s a pledge at this point but normally pledges are realized in time. It’s something that the poorer countries have wanted for some time,” Jacobs told VOA.
COP28 also saw the first ever ‘global stocktake’ – a new process whereby countries assess their progress toward achieving the goals of the Paris Climate Change Agreement, to be conducted every five years. The conclusion from COP28 is that the world remains well off target, said Teresa Anderson, who leads climate justice research at the global non-profit, ActionAid International.
“The global stocktake report is quietly devastating in U.N. language. It says in no uncertain terms that we are not on track to save ourselves. The question is now, what do we do with that knowledge? Do we actually realize that we need to do something very different and very soon? Otherwise, we’ll be pushing the planet to the brink,” Anderson told VOA.
Dale Gavlak contributed to this report.
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Images of African senior citizens walking the runway created a buzz on social media, eventually going viral. These AI-generated pictures challenged the typical depictions of elderly Africans, showcasing them in an empowering way. Karina Choudhury has the story. Camera: Samuel Okocha.
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Detroit, Mich — Tesla is recalling more than 2 million vehicles across its model lineup to fix a defective system that’s supposed to ensure drivers are paying attention when they use Autopilot.
Documents posted Wednesday by U.S. safety regulators say the company will send out a software update to fix the problems.
The recall comes after a two-year investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration into a series of crashes that happened while the Autopilot partially automated driving system was in use. Some were deadly.
The agency says its investigation found Autopilot’s method of ensuring that drivers are paying attention can be inadequate and can lead to foreseeable misuse of the system.
The recall covers nearly all of the vehicles Tesla sold in the U.S. and includes models Y, S, 3 and X produced between Oct. 5, 2012, and Dec. 7 of this year.
The software update includes additional controls and alerts “to further encourage the driver to adhere to their continuous driving responsibility,” the documents said.
The update was to be sent to certain affected vehicles on Tuesday, with the rest getting it at a later date, the documents said.
Autopilot includes features called Autosteer and Traffic Aware Cruise Control, with Autosteer intended for use on limited access freeways when it’s not operating with a more sophisticated feature called Autosteer on City Streets.
The software update apparently will limit where Autosteer can be used.
“If the driver attempts to engage Autosteer when conditions are not met for engagement, the feature will alert the driver it is unavailable through visual and audible alerts, and Autosteer will not engage,” the recall documents said.
Depending on a Tesla’s hardware, the added controls include “increasing prominence” of visual alerts, simplifying how Autosteer is turned on and off, additional checks on whether Autosteer is being used outside of controlled access roads and when approaching traffic control devices, “and eventual suspension from Autosteer use if the driver repeatedly fails to demonstrate continuous and sustained driving responsibility,” the documents say.
Recall documents say that agency investigators met with Tesla starting in October to explain “tentative conclusions” about the fixing the monitoring system. Tesla, it said, did not agree with the agency’s analysis but agreed to the recall on Dec. 5 in an effort to resolve the investigation.
Auto safety advocates for years have been calling for stronger regulation of the driver monitoring system, which mainly detects whether a driver’s hands are on the steering wheel. They have called for cameras to make sure a driver is paying attention, which are used by many other automakers with similar systems.
Autopilot can steer, accelerate and brake automatically in its lane, but is a driver-assist system and cannot drive itself despite its name. Independent tests have found that the monitoring system is easy to fool, so much that drivers have been caught while driving drunk or even sitting in the back seat.
In its defect report filed with the safety agency, Tesla said Autopilot’s controls “may not be sufficient to prevent driver misuse.”
A message was left early Wednesday seeking further comment from the Austin, Texas, company.
Tesla says on its website that Autopilot and a more sophisticated Full Self Driving system cannot drive autonomously and are meant to help drivers who have to be ready to intervene at all times. Full Self Driving is being tested by Tesla owners on public roads.
In a statement posted Monday on X, formerly Twitter, Tesla said safety is stronger when Autopilot is engaged.
NHTSA has dispatched investigators to 35 Tesla crashes since 2016 in which the agency suspects the vehicles were running on an automated system. At least 17 people have been killed.
The investigations are part of a larger probe by the NHTSA into multiple instances of Teslas using Autopilot crashing into parked emergency vehicles that are tending to other crashes. NHTSA has become more aggressive in pursuing safety problems with Teslas in the past year, announcing multiple recalls and investigations, including a recall of Full Self Driving software.
In May, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, whose department includes NHTSA, said Tesla shouldn’t be calling the system Autopilot because it can’t drive itself.
In its statement Wednesday, NHTSA said the Tesla investigation remains open “as we monitor the efficacy of Tesla’s remedies and continue to work with the automaker to ensure the highest level of safety.”
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London — In 1979, British painter Martin Lever was only 9 years old when he moved to Hong Kong because his father was employed as a surveyor in the Hong Kong Housing Department. He tells VOA’s Cantonese service that growing up in the multicultural city gave him a very different upbringing, one he is grateful for to this day.
Lever returned to England to attend university and worked there for several years. But he returned to Hong Kong, where he pursued a career in the advertising industry. By the time he left in May 2022, he had spent a total of 36 years living in the Asian city.
Lever, who also goes by the Chinese name Li Wah, was not always an artist. He worked as a copywriter in international advertising companies in the 1990s, and later rose to the position of creative director. It was during his final years in advertising that he slowly became a full-time artist. Hong Kong has long been his muse, and his paintings of mostly urban street scenes, grassroots workers and elements of life capture Hong Kong’s characteristics in an abstract style.
Many Hong Kong people do not realize that most of their lives occur high in the sky, he said.
“They live on the 10th floor, work on the 20th floor and eat on the 30th floor,” said Lever. Hong Kong, when seen from a high altitude from the ground, is very different. Works derived from this concept have been popular, he said.
It wasn’t until more recently that he started to turn his attention to politics and the political turmoil of Hong Kong. Using his earlier perspectives, he created a series of works titled “Above the Protests,” scenes of Hong Kong’s mass demonstrations from above.
In 2021, he exhibited the work at the Affordable Art Fair in Hong Kong. Before it began, he received a notice hinting that exhibits should avoid controversy. He had no choice but to rename the work “Above the Streets,” but that experience made him start to question just how much room there was for freedom of expression as an artist in Hong Kong.
Lever said he fully supported the peaceful demonstrations of the 2014 Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. During the 2019 mass protests, while he was shocked by the violence on the streets, he believed that the root of the problem was then-Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s unwillingness to talk to the demonstrators. Lam regarded the incident as a matter of law and order.
Life in Hong Kong turned harder for him during the COVID-19 pandemic, as he was unable to visit his family in Britain. On his return to Hong Kong, he endured what he describes as a painful hotel quarantine, one of the reasons that made him decide to leave Hong Kong. After the National Security Law came into effect, his doubts about the future of Hong Kong grew stronger.
Lever said a lot of people wondered if the National Security Law was good or bad, also wondering if it was just a way to stop the violence until there could be a dialogue. But then he saw the targeting of those who had been critical of Beijing – pro-democracy media tycoon Jimmy Lai, Catholic priests – and the closing down of the Apple Daily newspaper.
“And it was, like, ‘Why are they doing this? This is so unnecessary,’’’ Lever said. “I guess that’s the game China plays. That started to impact me; it made me angry, that this should not be happening in Hong Kong.”
He said some of his Western friends who still live in Hong Kong remained neutral about law-abiding people being jailed, songs and books being banned and media outlets being shut down. They could still go through life as usual, he said.
“But having grown up in Hong Kong and having benefited from having so many freedoms and opportunities that came for me because of that, having employed so many young Chinese guys and girls over the years in advertising, and to see that they are slowly now being denied some of the freedoms that we take for granted, it makes me very sad and very angry,” he said. “Upon leaving Hong Kong, I felt I had to express this through my art.”
In his new collection “Silent Protest,” the mouths of Hong Kong people standing in front of libraries, subways, banks and courts have become closed zippers or covered by Chinese national flag face masks, a metaphor for the ubiquity of deathly silence under Hong Kong’s National Security Law.
Lever’s paintings are filled with quotes from former Chinese leader Mao Zedong. He said this is because many of Mao’s sayings are the same as what young Hong Kong residents were demanding.
“Mao said things like anyone can criticize the Communist Party; he said we work for the people; he said New China must look after her youth,” he said. “The layers of irony in putting these two things together, I felt, was very powerful.”
Like Lever, many Hong Kong residents have now moved to the U.K., part of wave of mass emigration. Though he now lives in a small town in northeastern England, he is happy that he can always see some Hong Kong people living close to him. He said they seem to be satisfied with their new lives despite the challenges of being uprooted from their home.
Lever said he hopes that his new paintings will show the changes in Hong Kong to the outside world. He adds that he is not against the Hong Kong or Chinese governments, but just stating the facts.
“I know that there is a risk that maybe if this creates enough noise, maybe I would be blackballed too, which would be heartbreaking,” he said. “But if I was to be blackballed from Hong Kong for painting some paintings, then that would kind of underline the whole point of me doing this, because that’s a tragic situation.”
Lever’s artwork will be exhibited at The Crypt Gallery in London between December 15 and 17.
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WASHINGTON — U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo vowed Monday to take the “strongest action possible” in response to a semiconductor chip-making breakthrough in China that a House Foreign Affairs Committee said “almost certainly required the use of U.S. origin technology and should be an export control violation.”
In an interview with Bloomberg News, Raimondo called Huawei Technology’s advanced processor in its Mate Pro 60 smartphone released in August “deeply concerning” and said the Commerce Department investigates such things vigorously.
The United States has banned chip sales to Huawei, which reportedly used chips from China chip giant Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp., or SMIC, in the phone that are 7 nanometers, a technology China has not been known as able to produce.
Raimondo said the U.S. was also looking into the specifics of three new artificial intelligence accelerator chips that California-based Nvidia Corp. is developing for China. “We look at every spec of every new chip, obviously, to make sure it doesn’t violate the export controls,” she said.
Nvidia came under U.S. scrutiny for designing China-specific chips that were just under new Commerce Department requirements announced in October for tighter export controls on advanced AI chips for civilian use that could have military applications.
China’s Foreign Ministry responded to Raimondo’s comments Tuesday, saying the U.S. was “undermining the rights of Chinese companies” and contradicting the principles of a market economy.
‘Almost certainly required US origin technology’
The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee in a December 7 report criticized the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security, or BIS, the regulatory body for regulating dual-use export controls.
The report said Chinese chip giant “SMIC is producing 7 nanometer chips — advanced technology for semiconductors that had been only capable of development by TSMC, Intel and Samsung.”
“Despite this breakthrough by SMIC, which almost certainly required the use of U.S. origin technology and should be an export control violation, BIS has not acted,” the 66-page report said. “We can no longer afford to avoid the truth: the unimpeded transfer of U.S. technology to China is one of the single-largest contributors to China’s emergence as one of the world’s premier scientific and technological powers.”
Excessive approvals alleged
Committee Chairman Michael McCaul said BIS had an excessive rate of approval for controlled technology transfers and lacked checks on end-use, raising serious questions about the current U.S. export control mechanism.
“U.S. export control officials should adopt a presumption that all [Chinese] entities will divert technology to military or surveillance uses,” said McCaul’s report, but “currently, the overwhelming approval rates for licenses or exceptions for dual-use technology transfers to China indicate that licensing officials at BIS are likely presuming that items will be used only for their intended purposes.”
According to BIS’s website, a key in determining whether an export license is needed from the Department of Commerce is knowing whether the item one intends to export has a specific Export Control Classification Number, or ECCN. All ECCNs are listed in the Commerce Control List, or CCL, which is divided into ten broad categories.
The committee’s report said that “in 2020, nearly 98% of CCL items export to China went without a license,” and “in 2021, BIS approved nearly 90% of applications for the export of CCL items to China.”
The report said that between 2016 and 2021, “the United States government’s two export control officers in China conducted on average only 55 end-user checks per year of the roughly 4,000 active licenses in China. Put another way, BIS likely verified less than 0.01% of all licenses, which represent less than 1% of all trade with China.”
China skilled in avoiding controls
But China is also skilled at avoiding U.S. export controls, analysts said.
William Yu, an economist at UCLA Anderson Forecast, told VOA Mandarin in a phone interview that China can get banned chips through a third country. “For example, some countries in the Middle East set up a company in that country to buy these high-level chips from the United States. From there, one is transferred back to China,” Yu said.
Thomas Duesterberg, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told VOA Mandarin in a phone interview that the Commerce Department’s BIS has a hard job.
“If you forbid technology from going to one company in China, the Chinese are experts at creating another company or just moving the company to a new address and disguising its name to try to evade the controls. China is a big country and there’s a lot of technology that is at stake here,” he said.
“It’s true on the one hand that BIS has been successful in some areas, such as advanced semiconductors in conjunction with denial of Chinese ability to buy American technology companies,” said Duesterberg. “But it’s also true as the [House Foreign Affairs Committee] report emphasizes that a lot of activities that policymakers would like to restrict is not being done.”
Insufficient resources or political will?
Despite its huge responsibility to ensure that the United States stays ahead in the escalating U.S.-China science and technology competition, the Commerce Department’s BIS is small, employing just over 300 people.
At the annual Reagan National Defense Forum on December 2, Secretary Raimondo lamented that BIS “has the same budget today as it did a decade ago” despite the increasing challenges and workload, reported Breaking Defense, a New York-based online publication on global defense and politics.
U.S. Representatives Elise Stefanik, Mike Gallagher, who is chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, and McCaul released a joint response to Raimondo’s call for additional funds for the BIS, saying resources alone would not resolve export control shortcomings.
Raimondo also warned chip companies that the U.S. would further tighten controls to prevent cutting edge AI technology from going to Beijing.
“The threat from China is large and growing,” she said in an interview to CNBC at the December 2 forum. “China wants access to our most sophisticated semiconductors, and we can’t afford to give them that access. We’re not just going to deny a single company in China, we’re going to deny the whole country access to our cutting-edge semiconductors.”
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DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES — Undeterred by wars at home, delegations from Ukraine and the Palestinian territories are active at COP28, determined to call attention not only to the environmental threats facing their homelands but also to emphasize their places in the global community.
Ukraine, attending its second COP international conference, is using its pavilion in Dubai to highlight the extensive environmental damage caused by Russia’s invasion and propose preventive measures against ecocide on a global scale.
Ruslan Strilets, Ukraine’s minister of environmental protection and natural resources, told VOA that the delegation aims not only to showcase the environmental and climate consequences of the war, but also to unite and engage the international community in achieving justice and peace.
Ukraine is committed to fighting climate change, Strilets said.
“Despite the war, Ukraine is finalizing the development of its climate architecture and consistently fulfilling its climate commitments. At COP28, we plan to gather even more partners around our country for a greener future for Ukraine and the entire world,” he said.
The Ukraine pavilion’s exposition is organized into three key blocks. One block recounts a catastrophic explosion at the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant dam in June, which flooded dozens of towns and villages and killed more than 50 people.
A second block illustrates Ukrainians’ efforts to swiftly rebuild what the war has destroyed, and the third block details the impact the war is having on the environment.
During a visit this week to the Ukrainian Pavilion, Moldova Energy Minister Victor Parlicov expressed his country’s endorsement of the COP28 Environmental Declaration and reiterated that Russia should be held responsible for the environmental harm resulting from the war.
Other visitors to the pavilion have included Slovakian President Zuzana Caputova and Keit Kasemets, first deputy minister of climate for Estonia.
In the Palestinian pavilion, Ahmed Abuthaher, director general of the West Bank-based Environment Quality Authority, told VOA his delegation is in Dubai “to tell people to look at us as humanitarians, and this conference is for human beings.”
“For climate change, we need to have easy access to the financial resources. We have water shortage and in some areas we have desertification,” he said, expressing hope for help from a Loss and Damage Fund announced on the first day of the conference.
A June 2022 report prepared by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said that 78% of piped water in Gaza is unfit for human consumption.
According to the COP28 official webpage of their pavilion, the Palestinian leadership recognizes that collective efforts across sectors are crucial to the fulfillment of the conference’s climate commitments and ensuring a sustainable and resilient future.
Abuthaher emphasized the Palestinian commitment to participating in COP28 while calling for the global community to take meaningful action to address the issues faced by the Palestinian people.
The environmental damage inflicted by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been documented in several studies, including an October 2022 report from the U.N. Environment Program finding that almost 1 million hectares (3,800 square miles) of land have experienced significant impact, with 812 specific sites facing threats.
VOA reported in January that the repercussions of the war extend as far as Indian-administered Kashmir, where ornithologists have cited its contribution to a scarcity of migratory birds.
COP28 delegate Ievgeniia Kopytsia, an associate of Oxford Net Zero at the University of Oxford in the U.K., said the war is also increasing carbon emissions that are widely blamed for rising temperatures worldwide.
“On top of the local pollution caused by the warfare,” she told VOA, a significant amount of greenhouse gas has been emitted into the atmosphere “caused by the consumption of fuel for military purposes, use of munitions, fires caused by shelling, bombing and mine-laying operations, and reconstruction of the civilian infrastructure.”
In July 2022, during a head-of-states conference in Lugano, Switzerland, the Ukrainian government unveiled the initial version of its 10-year national recovery plan, outlining proposed recovery pathways for major sectors at an estimated cost of $750 billion.
Kopytsia said participation in events such as COP28 can help turn that vision into a reality.
“Engaging with the global community in climate initiatives may foster diplomatic relations and provide opportunities for assistance in conflict resolution,” she said.
The impact of conflict on the environment must be addressed not only in Ukraine and Gaza but around the world, argued Simon Chambers, the director of ACT Alliance, a global alliance of more than 145 churches and other organizations from over 120 countries that provides humanitarian aid for poor and marginalized people.
“Climate justice is possible to be achieved, as is a just transition” to cleaner sources of energy, he said to VOA, but it will require all parts of society to come together — governments, nongovernmental organizations and businesses.
“We need to put the needs of the creation, of people and the planet ahead of profit and power,” he said. “If we all act in the face of the urgency of the climate emergency, it is possible to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement and to do so in a way that is just.”
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European Union officials worked into the late hours last week hammering out an agreement on world-leading rules meant to govern the use of artificial intelligence in the 27-nation bloc.
The Artificial Intelligence Act is the latest set of regulations designed to govern technology in Europe — that may be destined to have global impact.
Here’s a closer look at the AI rules:
What is the AI act and how does it work?
The AI Act takes a “risk-based approach” to products or services that use artificial intelligence and focuses on regulating uses of AI rather than the technology. The legislation is designed to protect democracy, the rule of law and fundamental rights like freedom of speech, while still encouraging investment and innovation.
The riskier an AI application is, the stiffer the rules. Those that pose limited risk, such as content recommendation systems or spam filters, would have to follow only light rules such as revealing that they are powered by AI.
High-risk systems, such as medical devices, face tougher requirements like using high-quality data and providing clear information to users.
Some AI uses are banned because they’re deemed to pose an unacceptable risk, like social scoring systems that govern how people behave, some types of predictive policing and emotion recognition systems in school and workplaces.
People in public can’t have their faces scanned by police using AI-powered remote “biometric identification” systems, except for serious crimes like kidnapping or terrorism.
The AI Act won’t take effect until two years after final approval from European lawmakers, expected in a rubber-stamp vote in early 2024. Violations could draw fines of up to 35 million euros ($38 million) or 7% of a company’s global revenue.
How does the AI act affect the rest of the world?
The AI Act will apply to the EU’s nearly 450 million residents, but experts say its impact could be felt far beyond because of Brussels’ leading role in drawing up rules that act as a global standard.
The EU has played the role before with previous tech directives, most notably mandating a common charging plug that forced Apple to abandon its in-house Lightning cable.
While many other countries are figuring out whether and how they can rein in AI, the EU’s comprehensive regulations are poised to serve as a blueprint.
“The AI Act is the world’s first comprehensive, horizontal and binding AI regulation that will not only be a game-changer in Europe but will likely significantly add to the global momentum to regulate AI across jurisdictions,” said Anu Bradford, a Columbia Law School professor who’s an expert on EU law and digital regulation.
“It puts the EU in a unique position to lead the way and show to the world that AI can be governed, and its development can be subjected to democratic oversight,” she said.
Even what the law doesn’t do could have global repercussions, rights groups said.
By not pursuing a full ban on live facial recognition, Brussels has “in effect greenlighted dystopian digital surveillance in the 27 EU Member States, setting a devastating precedent globally,” Amnesty International said.
The partial ban is “a hugely missed opportunity to stop and prevent colossal damage to human rights, civil space and rule of law that are already under threat through the EU.”
Amnesty also decried lawmakers’ failure to ban the export of AI technologies that can harm human rights — including for use in social scoring, something China does to reward obedience to the state through surveillance.
What are other countries doing about AI regulation?
The world’s two major AI powers, the U.S. and China, also have started the ball rolling on their own rules.
U.S. President Joe Biden signed a sweeping executive order on AI in October, which is expected to be bolstered by legislation and global agreements.
It requires leading AI developers to share safety test results and other information with the government. Agencies will create standards to ensure AI tools are safe before public release and issue guidance to label AI-generated content.
Biden’s order builds on voluntary commitments made earlier by technology companies including Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft to make sure their products are safe before they’re released.
China, meanwhile, has released ” interim measures ” for managing generative AI, which applies to text, pictures, audio, video and other content generated for people inside China.
President Xi Jinping has also proposed a Global AI Governance Initiative, calling for an open and fair environment for AI development.
How will the AI act affect ChatGPT?
The spectacular rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT showed that the technology was making dramatic advances and forced European policymakers to update their proposal.
The AI Act includes provisions for chatbots and other so-called general purpose AI systems that can do many different tasks, from composing poetry to creating video and writing computer code.
Officials took a two-tiered approach, with most general-purpose systems facing basic transparency requirements like disclosing details about their data governance and, in a nod to the EU’s environmental sustainability efforts, how much energy they used to train the models on vast troves of written works and images scraped off the internet.
They also need to comply with EU copyright law and summarize the content they used for training.
Stricter rules are in store for the most advanced AI systems with the most computing power, which pose “systemic risks” that officials want to stop spreading to services that other software developers build on top.
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Five countries in East and southern Africa are in the middle of outbreaks of the anthrax disease, with more than 1,100 suspected cases and 20 deaths this year, the World Health Organization said Monday.
A total of 1,166 suspected cases had been reported in Kenya, Malawi, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Thirty-seven cases had been confirmed by laboratory tests, according to the WHO, which also said the five countries have seasonal outbreaks every year, but Zambia was experiencing its worst since 2011 and Malawi reported its first human case this year. Uganda had reported 13 deaths.
Anthrax usually affects livestock like cattle, sheep and goats, as well as wild herbivores. Humans can be infected if they are exposed to the animals or contaminated animal products. Anthrax isn’t generally considered to be contagious between humans, although there have been rare cases of person-to-person transmission, WHO says.
Anthrax is caused by spore-forming bacteria and is sometimes associated with the weaponized version used in the 2001 attacks in the United States, when five people died and 17 others fell sick after being exposed to anthrax spores in letters sent through the mail.
Anthrax bacteria also occurs naturally in soil.
In a separate assessment of the Zambia outbreak, which was the most concerning, WHO said that 684 suspected cases had been reported in the southern African nation as of November 20, with four deaths. Human cases of anthrax had been reported in nine out of Zambia’s 10 provinces. In one instance, 26 people were suspected of contracting the disease from eating contaminated hippopotamus meat.
WHO said there was a high risk that the Zambian outbreak would spread to neighboring countries.
The outbreaks in all five countries were “likely being driven by multiple factors, including climatic shocks, food insecurity, low-risk perception and exposure to the disease through handling the meat of infected animals,” the WHO said.
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Lawmakers and parents are blaming social media platforms for contributing to mental health problems in young people. A group of U.S. states is suing the owner of Instagram and Facebook for promoting their platforms to children despite knowing some of the psychological harms and safety risks they pose. From New York, VOA’s Tina Trinh reports that a cause-and-effect relationship between social media and mental health may not be so clear.
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The U.N.’s climate body has published a draft of what is set to be its final agreement from the COP28 climate summit, which ends Tuesday.
Activists have condemned the draft as moving away from previously expected language, and not containing measures that would tackle the global warming that scientists blame for sea rise, increasing droughts and other trends that threaten hundreds of millions across the world.
Specifically, activists are upset that the draft, which was written by the COP28 presidency, run by an Emirati oil company CEO, does not call for a phasing out of all fossil fuels, something that was asked for by over 100 nations.
In referring to fossil fuels, the draft says that countries must engage in the “phasing out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption and do not address energy poverty or just transitions, as soon as possible.”
The COP28 presidency viewed the draft as a success, calling it a “huge step forward.”
“We have a text and we need to agree on the text,” COP28 President Sultan al-Jaber said. “The time for discussion is coming to an end and there’s no time for hesitation. The time to decide is now.”
Discussions are ongoing with the summit expected to end at 11 a.m. Tuesday. Fossil fuels are at the forefront of negotiations.
The presidency of the conference “recognizes that for this to be viewed as a success, we need to find some agreement on fossil fuels,” said Steven Guilbeault, Canadian environment minister and one of eight “super-negotiators.”
“I think if we can’t do that, people will see this as a failure, even though we’ve agreed on lots of other good things,” Guilbeault said.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on delegates at COP28 to go into “overdrive,” to ensure that a deal gets done before the conclusion of the event.
“We can’t keep kicking the can down the road. We are out of road – and almost out of time,” Guterres said.
Some information in this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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Prime Minister Rishi Sunak defended Britain’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic on Monday, telling an official inquiry he did not recognize testimony describing a dysfunctional government and saying his hospitality scheme was supported at the time.
The inquiry is examining Britain’s response to the pandemic which killed more than 230,000 people in the country. It has heard that the government of then-prime minister Boris Johnson was gripped by infighting and incompetence, and unable to make a decision.
Sunak was a relatively unknown politician when he was promoted to finance minister on the eve of the pandemic, appearing to be sure-footed as he set out hundreds of billions of pounds of support to keep companies and livelihoods afloat.
He has come under fire during the inquiry from other witnesses over his “Eat out to help out” subsidized meal scheme, which encouraged people to visit restaurants and pubs in August 2020.
Some scientists have questioned whether Sunak’s policy may have contributed to a wave of infections, but Sunak said scientists and other ministers did not raise any objections during meetings in the month leading up to the scheme.
He said that “Eat out to help out” took place within guidelines for the safe reopening of hospitality which had happened in July and that was why the policy went ahead.
“My primary concern was protecting millions of jobs of particularly vulnerable people who worked in this industry (hospitality),” Sunak told the inquiry.
The inquiry has also heard testimony from scientists and officials who questioned whether Sunak prioritized the economy over public health, as economic output contracted by 10% in 2020.
He told the inquiry on Monday that he wanted to say how “deeply sorry” he was to those who had lost loved ones, and that he was there in the spirit of wanting to learn how the government could do better in any future pandemic.
But he echoed Johnson in saying the fact that “debates raged” was not necessarily a bad thing.
“It’s right that there was vigorous debate because these were incredibly consequential decisions for tens of millions of people in all spheres, whether it was health, whether it’s education, whether it was economic, whether it was social, whether it was a long-term impact.
“These were incredibly big decisions, the likes of which no prime minister has taken in decades, if ever,” he said.
Sunak became prime minister in October 2022 after Johnson and his successor Liz Truss were forced out of office.
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Renowned Chinese doctor and activist Gao Yaojie who exposed the AIDS virus epidemic in rural China in the 1990s, has died at the age of 95 at her home in the United States. Gao’s outspokenness about the virus outbreak embarrassed the Chinese government and drove her to live in self-exile for over a decade in Manhattan, New York.
Gao became China’s most well-known AIDS activist after speaking out against blood-selling schemes that infected thousands with HIV. Her contributions were ultimately acknowledged to a certain extent by the Chinese government, which was forced to grapple with the AIDS crisis well into the 2000s. She moved to the U.S. in 2009, where she began holding talks and writing books about her experiences.
Renowned Chinese doctor and activist Gao Yaojie who exposed the AIDS virus epidemic in rural China in the 1990s died Sunday at the age of 95 at her home in the United States.
Gao’s outspokenness about the virus outbreak — which some gauged to have infected tens of thousands — embarrassed the Chinese government and drove her to live in self-exile for over a decade in Manhattan, New York.
Columbia University professor Andrew J. Nathan, an expert in Chinese politics who had Gao’s legal power of attorney and managed some of her affairs, confirmed her death.
Gao became China’s most well-known AIDS activist after speaking out against blood-selling schemes that infected thousands with HIV, mainly in her home province of Henan in central China. Her contributions were ultimately acknowledged to a certain extent by the Chinese government, which was forced to grapple with the AIDS crisis well into the 2000s.
Gao’s work received recognition from international organizations and officials. She moved to the U.S. in 2009, where she began holding talks and writing books about her experiences.
She told the Associated Press in a previous interview that she withstood government pressure and persisted in her work because “everyone has the responsibility to help their own people. As a doctor, that’s my job. So it’s worth it.”
She said she expected Chinese officials to “face the reality and deal with the real issues — not cover it up.”
A roving gynecologist who used to spend days on the road treating patients in remote villages, Gao met her first HIV patient in 1996 — a woman who had been infected from a transfusion during an operation. Local blood bank operators would often use dirty needles, and after extracting valuable plasma from farmers, would pool the leftover blood for future transfusions — a disastrous method almost guaranteed to spread viruses such as HIV.
At the time, Gao investigated the crisis by traveling to people’s homes. She would sometimes encounter devastating situations where parents were dying from AIDS and children were being left behind. Some estimates put the number of HIV infections from that period at tens of thousands, though no national survey was undertaken as the government was trying to conceal the crisis.
Gao delivered food, clothes and medicine to ailing villagers. She spoke out about the AIDS epidemic, capturing the attention of local media and angering local governments, which often backed the reckless blood banks. Officials repeatedly tried to prevent her from traveling abroad, where she was being celebrated for her work.
In 2001, the government refused to issue her a passport to go to the U.S. to accept an award from a United Nations group. In 2007, Henan officials kept her under house arrest for about 20 days to prevent her from traveling to Beijing to get a U.S. visa to receive another award. They were eventually overruled by the central government, which allowed her to leave China. Once in Washington, D.C., Gao thanked then-President Hu Jintao for allowing her to travel.
Gao was born on Dec. 19, 1927, in the eastern Shandong province. She grew up during a tumultuous time in China’s history, which included a Japanese invasion and a civil war that brought the Communist Party to power under Mao Zedong.
Her family moved to Henan, where she studied medicine at a local university. During the Cultural Revolution, a turbulent decade beginning in 1966, she endured beatings from Maoist “red guards” due to her family’s previous “landlord” status. She remained critical of Mao into her later years.
After news of her death circulated on Monday, Chinese social media was flooded with messages of condolences, while some criticized her move to the U.S. and her stance against the Chinese government.
“We can say Dr Gao Yaojie has dedicated everything to AIDS patients,” wrote a commenter on the social media platform Weibo, “and people with a conscience will always remember her.”
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