A new climate satellite takes off. Plus, a fresh crew arrives at the International Space Station, and NASA may want to hire you. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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Month: March 2024
Many ranchers in Panama are making the transition from breeding livestock to much smaller creatures – butterflies. Not only is it good for the planet, but for some, it’s proven to be an economic winner. Oscar Sulbaran reports in this story, narrated by Veronica Villafane.
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Although NASA has delayed the launch of a crewed mission to orbit the moon until 2025 at the earliest, four selected astronauts are training in preparation for the first such journey in more than 50 years. VOA’s Kane Farabaugh caught up with the crew of Artemis II during training and has more from San Diego.
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WASHINGTON — The Islamic holiday of Ramadan is being observed this year as the Israel-Hamas war surges in Gaza, where the United Nations is warning of a growing humanitarian crisis.
Imam Talib Shareef of Masjid Muhammad, the Nation’s Mosque, in Washington said there will be differences in how Muslims observe this year because of the conflict.
Other than organizing prayers for the community, the mosque is “more engaged in service and feeding; we actually feed at the masjid and [also at] shelters, and we also go to other faith communities,” said Shareef, who served for more than 30 years in the U.S. Air Force and helped to establish the first Islamic military chaplain in 1993.
“I do expect that … religious communities are going to be trying to come together,” he said, noting that his mosque also works with churches and gives food to others in the community.
“Obviously [the conflict] is going to be on people’s hearts, on people’s souls, it’s bothering people,” Shareef said.
Nearly 2 billion Muslims around the world will begin observing the Islamic holiday Ramadan, which is expected to begin on March 10 or 11, depending on the sighting of the moon.
During the month of Ramadan, Muslims abstain from food, drink, smoking, gossip and sexual relations from sunrise to sunset. Fasting is meant to bring Muslims closer to God and help them better empathize with those who are less fortunate.
US Muslims
In the United States, the Muslim population is about 3.45 million, which accounts for slightly more than 1% of the population, according to Pew Research.
Depending on where Muslims live in the United States, their experience can vary. In some rural areas, Muslims may not have access to a mosque or a community where they can practice their faith.
This is particularly true for immigrants who move to areas without a large Muslim population.
Jemal Yasin, who immigrated to the U.S. from Ethiopia in 2008 to do postgraduate research at the University of Vermont, described his first experience in the United States as “a little bit lonely.”
He said there was a community of Somali immigrants, though he didn’t get a chance to pray with them.
During that first year in the States, he said he had to “pray in my room by myself,” which he said was a typical experience of many Muslim immigrants.
Now, Yasin is president of the board of directors of a the First Hijrah Foundation in Washington.
The FHF started as a small organization that aimed to “promote and preserve the Islamic heritage,” and “foster the Islamic principles of brotherhood, equality, mutual assistance and teachings of peace, love and justice,” according to its website.
Initially, the organization didn’t have a building, and members of the foundation would meet at one another’s houses. It wasn’t until 2005 that their current building was officially secured, said Yasin.
“This is a center for Muslims, all Muslims. … So, when you come here, you see [people of many] backgrounds – African Americans, Ethiopians, Somalians, Arabs – they will come pray together and break fast together, so this is a place for everybody,” Yasin said.
He added that the foundation works with the community and organizes events for Muslims, before, during and after Ramadan.
When he moved to Washington later in 2008 Yasin became involved with the foundation and was able to be part of a larger Muslim community.
Ramadan observations are becoming more common in the United States, with many organizations hosting events to observe the month.
Shareef said, “We used to have more … private iftars in the past, and now they’re more open … and we are able to share more.”
After sunset, Muslims typically gather for iftar — the breaking of the fast and the most important meal of the day.
Yasin said the foundation helped organize a bazaar on Sunday to help the community prepare for Ramadan. Traditional clothing, incense and foods, such as dates, were sold.
During Ramadan, the First Hijrah Foundation will be providing free iftars for the community each night.
Ramadan this year
The ongoing Israel-Hamas war is the result of an October 7 terror attack in which Hamas crossed into Israel, killing more than 1,200 people and taking more than 240 civilians hostage. The Israeli military response has killed more than 30,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
Negotiators are pushing for a possible cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas conflict ahead of the start of Ramadan.
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LONDON — Europeans scrolling their phones and computers this week will get new choices for default browsers and search engines, where to download iPhone apps and how their personal online data is used.
They’re part of changes required under the Digital Markets Act, a set of European Union regulations that six tech companies classed as “gatekeepers” — Amazon, Apple, Google parent Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and TikTok owner ByteDance — will have to start following by midnight Wednesday.
The DMA is the latest in a series of regulations that Europe has passed as a global leader in reining in the dominance of large tech companies. Tech giants have responded by changing some of their long-held ways of doing business — such as Apple allowing people to install smartphone apps outside of its App Store.
The new rules have broad but vague goals of making digital markets “fairer” and “more contestable.” They are kicking in as efforts around the world to crack down on the tech industry are picking up pace.
Here’s a look at how the Digital Markets Act will work:
What companies have to follow the rules?
Some 22 services, from operating systems to messenger apps and social media platforms, will be in the DMA’s crosshairs.
They include Google services like Maps, YouTube, the Chrome browser and Android operating system, plus Amazon’s Marketplace and Apple’s Safari Browser and iOS.
Meta’s Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are included as well as Microsoft’s Windows and LinkedIn.
The companies face the threat of hefty fines worth up to 20% of their annual global revenue for repeated violations — which could amount to billions of dollars — or even a breakup of their businesses for “systematic infringements.”
What effect will the rules have globally?
The Digital Markets Act is a fresh milestone for the 27-nation European Union in its longstanding role as a worldwide trendsetter in clamping down on the tech industry.
The bloc has previously hit Google with whopping fines in antitrust cases, rolled out tough rules to clean up social media and is bringing in world-first artificial intelligence regulations.
Now, places like Japan, Britain, Mexico, South Korea, Australia, Brazil and India are drawing up their own versions of DMA-like rules aimed at preventing tech companies from dominating digital markets.
“We’re seeing copycats around the world already,” said Bill Echikson, senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, a Washington-based think tank. The DMA “will become the defacto standard” for digital regulation in the democratic world, he said.
Officials will be looking to Brussels for guidance, said Zach Meyers, assistant director at the Center for European Reform, a think tank in London.
“If it works, many Western countries will probably try to follow the DMA to avoid fragmentation and the risk of taking a different approach that fails,” he said.
How will downloading apps change?
In one of the biggest changes, Apple has said it will let European iPhone users download apps outside its App Store, which comes installed on its mobile devices.
The company has long resisted such a move, with a big chunk of its revenue coming from the 30% fee it charges for payments — such as for Disney+ subscriptions — made through iOS apps. Apple has warned that “sideloading” apps will come with added security risks.
Now, Apple is cutting those fees it collects from app developers in Europe that opt to stay within the company’s payment-processing system. But it’s adding a 50-euro cent fee for each iOS app installed through third-party app stores, which critics say will deter the many existing free apps — whose developers currently don’t pay any fee — from jumping ship.
“Why would they possibly opt into a world where they have to pay a 50-cent per-user fee?” said Avery Gardiner, Spotify’s global director of competition policy. “So those alternative app stores will never get traction, because they’ll be missing this huge chunk of apps that would need to be there in order for customers to find the store attractive.”
“That is utterly at odds with the very purpose of the DMA,” Gardiner added.
Brussels will be closely scrutinizing whether tech companies are complying.
EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager said this week that after 10 years on the job, “I have seen quite a number of antitrust cases and quite a lot of creativity built into how to work around the rules that we have.”
How will people get more options online?
Consumers won’t be forced into default choices for key services.
Android users can pick which search engine to use by default, while iPhone users will get to choose which browser will be their go-to. Europeans will see choice screens on their devices. Microsoft, meanwhile, will stop forcing people to use its Edge browser.
The idea is to stop people from being nudged into using Apple’s Safari browser or Google’s Search app. But smaller players still worry that they might end up worse off than before.
Users might just stick with what they recognize because they don’t know anything about the other options, said Christian Kroll, CEO of Berlin-based search engine Ecosia.
Ecosia has been pushing for Apple and Google to include more information about rival services in the choice screens.
“If people don’t know what the alternatives are, it’s rather unlikely that many of them will select an alternative,” Kroll said. “I’m a big fan of the DMA. I am not sure yet if it will have the results that we’re hoping for.”
How will internet searches change?
Some Google search results will show up differently, because the DMA bans companies from giving preference to their own services.
So, for example, searches for hotels will now display an extra “carousel” of booking sites like Expedia. Meanwhile, the Google Flights button on the search result display will be removed and the site will be listed among the blue links on search result pages.
Users also will have options to stop being profiled for targeted advertising based on their online activity.
Google users are getting the choice to stop data from being shared across the company’s services to help better target them with ads.
Meta is allowing users to separate their Facebook and Instagram accounts so their personal information can’t be combined for ad targeting.
The DMA also requires messaging systems to be able to work with each other. Meta, which owns the only two chat apps that fall under the rules, is expected to come up with a proposal on how Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp users can exchange text messages, videos and images.
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Washington — Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram were back up on Tuesday after a more than two-hour outage that was caused by a technical issue and impacted hundreds of thousands of users globally.
The disruptions started at around 10:00 a.m. ET (1500 GMT), with many users saying on rival social media platform X they had been booted out of Facebook and Instagram and were unable to log in.
“We are aware of the incident and at this time, we are not aware of any specific malicious cyber activity at this time,” a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said.
At the peak of the outage, there were more than 550,000 reports of disruptions for Facebook and about 92,000 for Instagram, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com.
“Earlier today, a technical issue caused people to have difficulty accessing some of our services. We resolved the issue … for everyone who was impacted,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X.
Meta Platforms, shares of which were down 1.2% in afternoon trading, has about 3.19 billion daily active users across its family of apps, which also include WhatsApp and Threads.
Its status dashboard had earlier showed the application programming interface for WhatsApp Business was also facing issues.
Though the outage for WhatsApp and Threads was much smaller, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from several sources including users.
Several employees of Meta said on anonymous messaging app Blind that they were unable to log in to their internal work systems, which left them wondering if they were laid off, according to posts seen by Reuters.
The outage was among the top trending topics on X, formerly Twitter, with the platform’s owner Elon Musk taking a shot at Meta with a post that said: “If you’re reading this post, it’s because our servers are working.”
X itself has faced several disruptions to its service after Musk’s $44 billion purchase of the social media platform in October 2022, with an outage in December causing issues for more than 77,000 users in countries from the U.S. to France.
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GENEVA — Former Wimbledon and French Open champion Simona Halep had her four-year doping ban cut to nine months by the top court for global sport on Tuesday, making the former world number one eligible to return to competition immediately.
Halep was initially banned for four years for two separate anti-doping rule violations. But the Lausanne-based Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) ruled that her suspension should be reduced to nine months, a period she has already served.
“The CAS Panel has unanimously determined that the four-year period of ineligibility imposed by the ITF (International Tennis Federation) Independent Tribunal is to be reduced to a period of ineligibility of nine (9) months starting on 7 October 2022, which period expired on 6 July 2023,” CAS said in a statement.
The 32-year-old Romanian was suspended in October 2022 after she tested positive for roxadustat – a banned drug that stimulates the production of red blood cells – at the U.S. Open that year.
She was also charged with another doping offense last year due to irregularities in her athlete biological passport (ABP), a method designed to monitor different blood parameters over time to reveal potential doping.
Halep had vigorously denied the charges against her.
Halep blamed contaminated supplements for her positive test at the U.S. Open and accused the International Tennis Integrity Agency (ITIA) of charging her with an ABP violation after the group of experts who assessed her profile learned her identity.
An independent tribunal accepted Halep’s argument that she had taken contaminated supplements but said the volume she ingested could not have resulted in the concentration of roxadustat found in her positive sample.
However, the CAS Panel said that while Halep should have been more careful when using the supplement, she did not bear significant fault for the violation.
Also, the ABP charge was dismissed on the basis that the sample given in late 2022 was shortly after surgery and that Halep had said she was not going to compete for the rest of that year
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A Seattle startup’s drones are helping first responders by providing them with “eyes and ears” in hazardous environments. Natasha Mozgovaya in Seattle has the story.
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The World Bank says digital entrepreneurship is paving the way for economic empowerment across Nigeria and reducing poverty through internet access. In a January report, the Bank says internet access reduced extreme poverty by 7% in the West African country. But it noted a digital gender gap where women are less likely than men to have internet access. Gibson Emeka reports from Abuja in this report narrated by Mary Alice Salinas.
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The latest innovation in artificial intelligence is photo-realistic video created from just a few words. Deana Mitchell has the story.
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LONDON — The estate of Sinead O’Connor asked Donald Trump Monday not to play her music at campaign rallies, saying the late singer considered the former president a “biblical devil.”
Trump has played O’Connor’s biggest hit, “Nothing Compares 2 U,” at events as he campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination.
In a joint statement, O’Connor’s estate and her record label, Chrysalis, demanded Trump “desist from using her music immediately.”
It said the Irish singer, who died last year aged 56, “lived by a fierce moral code defined by honesty, kindness, fairness and decency towards her fellow human beings.”
“It was with outrage therefore that we learned that Donald Trump has been using her iconic performance of Nothing Compares 2 U at his political rallies,” the statement said.
“It is no exaggeration to say that Sinead would have been disgusted, hurt and insulted to have her work misrepresented in this way by someone who she herself referred to as a ‘biblical devil.’ As the guardians of her legacy, we demand that Donald Trump and his associates desist from using her music immediately.”
Fiery and outspoken, O’Connor was a critic of the Roman Catholic Church well before
allegations of sexual abuse were widely reported, and she was open about her mental health struggles.
She was found unresponsive at her London home in July and pronounced dead at the scene. A coroner ruled that she died of natural causes.
O’Connor joins a growing list of artists who have objected to Trump using their songs, including Rihanna, Neil Young, Linkin Park, the late Tom Petty and Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler.
London — The European Union leveled its first antitrust penalty against Apple on Monday, fining the U.S. tech giant nearly $2 billion for breaking the bloc’s competition laws by unfairly favoring its own music streaming service over rivals.
Apple banned app developers from “fully informing iOS users about alternative and cheaper music subscription services outside of the app,” said the European Commission, the 27-nation bloc’s executive arm and top antitrust enforcer.
“This is illegal, and it has impacted millions of European consumers,” Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s competition commissioner, said at a news conference.
Apple behaved this way for almost a decade, which meant many users paid “significantly higher prices for music streaming subscriptions,” the commission said.
The 1.8 billion-euro fine follows a long-running investigation triggered by a complaint from Swedish streaming service Spotify five years ago.
The EU has led global efforts to crack down on Big Tech companies, including a series of multbillion-dollar fines for Google and charging Meta with distorting the online classified ad market. The commission also has opened a separate antitrust investigation into Apple’s mobile payments service.
Apple hit back at both the commission and Spotify, saying it would appeal the penalty.
“The decision was reached despite the Commission’s failure to uncover any credible evidence of consumer harm, and ignores the realities of a market that is thriving, competitive, and growing fast,” the company said in a statement.
It said Spotify stood to benefit from the decision, asserting that the Swedish streaming service that holds a 56% share of Europe’s music streaming market and doesn’t pay Apple for using its App Store met 65 times with the commission over eight years.
“Ironically, in the name of competition, today’s decision just cements the dominant position of a successful European company that is the digital music market’s runaway leader,” Apple said.
The commission’s investigation initially centered on two concerns. One was the iPhone maker’s practice of forcing app developers that are selling digital content to use its in-house payment system, which charges a 30% commission on all subscriptions.
But the EU later dropped that to focus on how Apple prevents app makers from telling their users about cheaper ways to pay for subscriptions that don’t involve going through an app.
The investigation found that Apple banned streaming services from telling users about how much subscription offers cost outside of their apps, including links in their apps to pay for alternative subscriptions or even emailing users to tell them about different pricing options.
The fine comes the same week that new EU rules are set to kick in that are aimed at preventing tech companies from dominating digital markets.
The Digital Markets Act, due to take effect Thursday, imposes a set of do’s and don’ts on “gatekeeper” companies including Apple, Meta, Google parent Alphabet, and TikTok parent ByteDance — under threat of hefty fines.
The DMA’s provisions are designed to prevent tech giants from the sort of behavior that’s at the heart of the Apple investigation. Apple has already revealed how it will comply, including allowing iPhone users in Europe to use app stores other than its own and enabling developers to offer alternative payment systems.
The commission also has opened a separate antitrust investigation into Apple’s mobile payments service, and the company has promised to open up its tap-and-go mobile payment system to rivals in order to resolve it.
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SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea’s government began steps Monday to suspend the medical licenses of thousands of striking junior doctors, days after they missed a government-set deadline to end their joint walkouts, which have severely impacted hospital operations.
Nearly 9,000 medical interns and residents have been on strike for two weeks to protest a government push to sharply increase the number of medical school admissions. Their action has led to hundreds of canceled surgeries and other treatments and threatened to burden the country’s medical service.
Monday, officials were sent to dozens of hospitals to formally confirm the absence of the striking doctors as the government began steps to suspend their licenses for at least three months, Vice Health Minister Park Min-soo told a briefing.
Park said authorities will later notify the striking doctors of their expected license suspensions and give them a chance to respond. He suggested the license suspensions would take weeks to go into effect.
“Despite repeated appeals by the government and other parts of society, the number of trainee doctors returning to work is very insignificant. Starting from today, we begin the execution of law with the on-site inspection,” Park said.
Park again repeated the government’s call for the doctors to end their walkouts.
“We again strongly urge them to return to patients by not ignoring the pains of patients hovering between life and death — and their families,” he said.
South Korea’s government earlier ordered the striking doctors to return to work by Feb. 29. South Korea’s medical law allows the government to make such back-to-work orders to doctors when it sees grave risks to public health. Anyone who refuses to follow such orders can be punished with a suspension of his or her license for up to one year, and three years in prison or a roughly $22,500 fine.
Last month, the South Korean government announced it would raise the country’s medical school enrollment cap by 2,000 starting next year, from the current 3,058.
Officials said it’s urgent to have more doctors to deal with a fast-aging population and resolve a shortage of physicians in rural areas and essential yet low-paying specialties like pediatrics and emergency departments.
Officials say South Korea’s doctor-to-population ratio is one of the lowest among developed countries.
But many doctors have opposed the plan, arguing universities can’t offer quality education to such an abrupt increase in students. They also say adding so many new doctors would also increase public medical expenses since greater competition would lead to excess treatments. They also predict newly added students would also want to work in high-paying, popular professions like plastic surgery and dermatology.
Critics say many doctors oppose the government plan simply because they worry adding more doctors would result in a lower income.
The striking junior doctors are a small fraction of the country’s 140,000 doctors. But they account for 30-40% of the total doctors at some major hospitals, where they assist senior doctors while training.
Senior doctors have staged a slew of street rallies supporting the young doctors but haven’t joined their walkouts. Police said they were investigating five ranking members of the Korea Medical Association, a body that represents South Korean doctors, for allegedly inciting and abetting the walkouts.
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March 4 is World Obesity Day. Indonesia is facing a disparity in obesity rates among adults. Almost half of the country’s women are overweight or obese, nearly double the rate of Indonesian men according to data from the country’s Ministry of Health. Dave Grunebaum looks at the issue. (Camera: Dave Grunebaum)
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Jerusalem — Israel on Sunday said it had asked lyricists to revise its proposed Eurovision Song Contest entries, potentially heading off a dispute with organizers over political content.
Authorities last week said Israel would not be able to participate in this year’s edition of the popular competition if organizers rejected the song choice, which reportedly referenced victims of Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel that triggered the ongoing war in Gaza.
Eurovision rules ban political content.
In a statement on Sunday, Israeli public broadcaster Kan said President Isaac Herzog had called for “necessary adjustments” that would ensure Israel’s inclusion in the event, which it has won four times.
This year’s competition is set to be held in Sweden in May.
The Israeli broadcaster “contacted the lyricists of the two selected songs, ‘October Rain’ which was chosen in first place, and ‘Dance Forever’ which came in second place, and asked them to readapt the texts, while preserving their artistic freedom,” the statement said.
“Among the new texts that will be proposed, Kan will choose the song that will be sent to the Eurovision supervisory committee, so that it approves Israel’s participation in the competition.”
The selected song, to be performed by 20-year-old Russian-Israeli singer Eden Golan, will be revealed on March 10, the statement said.
One line from the original lyrics of “October Rain” read: “They were all good children, every one of them.”
“There is no air left to breathe, There is no place for me,” the song ends, according to Kan, which has published the lyrics in full on its website.
Israel in 1973 became the first non-European country to enter Eurovision, and its participation and hosting of the event have regularly run into controversy.
In 2019, Icelandic band Hatari, who previously challenged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to a Nordic folk wrestling match, made pro-Palestinian statements during the vote count in Tel Aviv.
Organizers also gave US pop icon Madonna a ticking off after her dancers flouted political neutrality rules by wearing Israeli and Palestinian flags on their costumes.
This year’s competition comes against the backdrop of the war, sparked by the Hamas attack which resulted in the deaths of around 1,160 people in Israel, according to an AFP tally based on official figures.
Militants also took about 250 hostages, with 130 still held in Gaza although 31 are believed to be dead, Israeli officials said.
Israel’s military response has killed at least 30,410 people in Gaza, according to the health ministry in the Hamas-run territory.
Kan late last month said it had “no intention to replace the song,” threatening to withdraw unless the European Broadcasting Union which oversees the song contest approves its entry.
But Herzog “emphasized that it is precisely at a time when those who hate us are seeking to repress and boycott the State of Israel” that the country “must raise its voice… loud and clear in every world forum,” Sunday’s Kan statement said.
LONDON — Singer-songwriter Raye was the big winner Saturday at the BRIT Awards, the biggest night in British music, setting a new record for most prizes in one night at the annual ceremony.
Raye won six awards, including for artist of the year, album of the year for My 21st Century Blues and song of the year for Escapism.
The 26-year-old also triumphed in the genre category for R&B act and was named best new artist. Her tally of seven nods had broken the record for the most nominations by a single artist in any one year, according to the annual ceremony’s organizers, the British Phonographic Industry (BPI).
Raye, who parted ways with her record label in 2021 to work as an independent artist after she said the label had withheld her debut album, began early celebrations this week, when she was named BRITs Songwriter of the Year. She is the first woman to win the award since its launch in 2022.
“You just don’t understand what this means to me,” a tearful Raye said in her acceptance speech for album of the year, while standing next to her grandmother, whom she also thanked for “her prayers.”
“I’m so proud of this album. I’m in love with music. All I ever wanted to be was an artist and now I’m an artist with an album of the year.”
Jungle won group of the year, while rock band Bring Me the Horizon won the alternative/rock act category, beating the likes of Blur and The Rolling Stones.
Blur, who had three nominations, went home empty-handed.
Dua Lipa, who also had three nominations, won pop act.
More than half, 55%, of this year’s nominations featured women, either as a solo artist or as part of an all-woman group, the BPI said.
Artist of the year is a gender-neutral category now counting 10 nominees after organizers doubled its number following an outcry over an all-male list of contenders last year.
U.S. singer SZA won the gender-neutral international artist of the year category, which also now counts 10 nominees, beating the likes of Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus. The latter won international song of the year for her hit Flowers.
Indie rock band boygenius won international group of the year.
Ahead of the awards, Kylie Minogue was named as this year’s BRITs Global Icon, while indie rock band The Last Dinner Party were revealed as winners of the rising star award.
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VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis, who has been suffering from influenza, said he delegated the reading of a speech at a ceremony Saturday to an aide because he was unable to read it due to bronchitis.
“I have prepared a speech but as you can see, I am unable to read it because of bronchitis. I have asked Monsignor [Filippo] Ciampanelli to read it for me,” a hoarse-sounding pope said.
The speech was for the opening ceremony of the judicial year of the Vatican tribunal.
Afterward, the pope was able to meet German Chancellor Olaf Scholz during an audience at the Vatican.
Francis, 87, has had several health issues recently.
On Wednesday he made a brief trip to a Roman hospital for a checkup after he missed reading at his weekly audience, saying he had “a bit of cold.”
He canceled appointments Monday and last Saturday due to what the Vatican said was a mild flu, but he gave his regular weekly address to the crowds in St Peter’s Square on Sunday.
The pope was forced to cancel a planned trip to a COP28 climate meeting in Dubai at the start of December because of the effects of influenza and lung inflammation.
In January, he was unable to complete a speech owing to “a touch of bronchitis.” Later that month he said he was doing better despite “some aches and pains.”
As a young man in his native Argentina, Francis had part of a lung removed.
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