Month: May 2024

Annual rich list says Paul McCartney is Britain’s 1st billionaire musician

LONDON — Paul McCartney is a billionaire Beatle.

According to figures released Friday, the former member of the Fab Four is the first British musician to be worth 1 billion pounds ($1.27 billion).

The annual Sunday Times Rich List calculated that the wealth of the 81-year-old musician and his wife, Nancy Shevell, had grown by 50 million pounds since last year thanks to McCartney’s 2023 Got Back tour, the rising value of his back catalogue and Beyonce’s cover of the Beatles’ “Blackbird” on her “Cowboy Carter” album.

A “final” Beatles song, “Now and Then,” was also released in November and topped music charts in the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries. Surviving Beatles McCartney and Ringo Starr completed a demo track recorded in 1977 by the late John Lennon, adding in a guitar recording by George Harrison, who died in 2001.

The newspaper estimated 50 million pounds of the couple’s wealth is due to Shevell, daughter of the late U.S. trucking tycoon Mike Shevell.

McCartney ranked 165th overall on the newspaper’s respected and widely perused list of the U.K.’s 350 richest people. The top spot went to Gopi Hinduja and his family, who own the banking, media and entertainment conglomerate Hinduja Group and are worth an estimated 37 billion pounds ($47 billion).

Other entertainment figures on the list include “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling, whose fortune is estimated at 945 million pounds ($1.2 billion), and singer Elton John, estimated to be worth 470 million pounds ($597 million).

King Charles III ranked 258th with an estimated wealth of 610 million pounds ($775 million). The king’s fortune includes the large inherited private estates of Sandringham in England and Balmoral in Scotland. The total does not include items held in trust by the monarch for the nation, such as the Crown Jewels.

Australian researchers say enzyme could help lower lower CO2

SYDNEY — Australian scientists say they have discovered how an enzyme “hidden in nature’s blueprint” could help develop climate-resilient crops able to remove more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. 

An Australian study, by researchers from Australian National University and the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, focuses on a type of bacteria researchers call “tiny carbon superheroes.” 

Cyanobacteria, a type of algae-like bacteria also called blue-green algae, are found in fresh and coastal waters, as well as oceans.  They are commonly known for their toxic blooms in lakes and rivers.  

Through the process of photosynthesis, Australian scientists say, they capture about 12% of the world’s carbon dioxide each year. 

Their study says a carbon dioxide-concentrating mechanism in cyanobacteria lets them turn atmospheric carbon dioxide into sugars for cells to eat more quickly than most standard plants and crops.

Until now, the Australian team was unaware how critical an enzyme in cyanobacteria, called carboxysomal carbonic anhydrase, was to the process. The study says the mystery of how the enzyme maximizes the cyanobacteria’s ability to extract atmospheric carbon dioxide has been solved.

Ben Long, a senior lecturer in molecular plant biology at Australia’s University of Newcastle and is the study’s lead author.

He told VOA that the aim is to engineer crops that can absorb more greenhouse gases.   

“We are actually interested in utilizing this CO2-concentrating mechanism from cyanobacteria, which we know is a remarkably efficiently system for capturing CO2 and we want to engineer that into plant cells to make plant cells able to capture CO2 far more effectively and efficiently,” Long said.

The research says that engineered plants that are more efficient at capturing carbon dioxide could increase crop yield, making global food systems that are more resilient to climate change. 

Long says the findings should be part of international efforts to reduce greenhouse gases.  

“Every technology has to be brought to bear to try to reduce CO2 emissions and reduce CO2 in the atmosphere and I think to date we have not really focused much on those potential biological applications to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Long said.

The study has been published in the journal Science Advances.

Scholar called ‘Putin’s brain’ attacked on Chinese internet

Washington — Aleksander Dugin, a Russian nationalist ideologue and strong supporter of President Vladimir Putin, has been bombarded with attacks on Chinese social media, where netizens criticized and mocked his Russian expansionist views that had once included the dismembering of China.

Two years after Putin launched an invasion of Ukraine, pro-Russia sentiment has been prevalent on Chinese internet.

But the backlash against Dugin has revealed a less mentioned side of what has so far appeared to be a cozy alliance between Beijing and Moscow — hostility between Chinese nationalists and their Russian counterparts, the result of centuries of territorial disputes and political confrontations that Beijing has been reticent about displaying publicly in recent decades.

On May 6, Dugin opened an account on two of the most popular Chinese social media apps Weibo, China’s X, formerly known as Twitter, and Bilibili, a YouTube-like video site.

In the first video posted on both Weibo and Bilibili, Dugin greeted the Chinese audience and praised Beijing’s economic and political achievements in recent decades.

In the same video, he also criticized an article published in April in The Economist by Feng Yujun, director of Russian and Central Asian studies at Fudan University in Shanghai. Feng said in the article that Russia will inevitably lose the Ukraine war.

Dugin countered that Feng and some Chinese people underestimated Russia’s “tenacity and perseverance.”

The video was quickly condemned by Chinese citizens, who posted comments such as “Russia must lose,” which received thousands of likes.

“This is an extremist who is extremely unfriendly to China and has made plans to dismember China,” another message posted by a Weibo user named “Zhixingbenyiti” said.

Dugin, 62, was born in Moscow. In the 1980s, he became an anti-communist dissident.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he began to promote Russian expansionism. He believes that Moscow’s territorial expansion in Eurasia will allow it to counter Western forces led by the United States.

In his 1997 book, Foundations of Geopolitics, Dugin wrote that dismembering China was a necessary step for Russia to become strong. People within Putin’s inner circle have reportedly shown interest in Dugin’s writing, which gave rise to his nickname “Putin’s brain.”

However, Dugin’s attitude toward China has changed significantly in recent years. In 2018, he visited China for the first time. In a speech at Fudan University, he praised China’s economy, culture and leadership in the fight against colonialism.

He also changed his previous support for containing China and said in a speech that China and Russia could work together to “form a very important and non-negligible containment/pull effect” on Western powers.

Dugin is now a senior fellow at Fudan University’s China Institute and one of the columnists for China’s nationalist news organization, Guancha.

Before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Dugin said in a column that the alliance between China and Russia would “mean the irreversible end of Western hegemony.”

Philipp Ivanov, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute, told VOA that “Dugin is an opportunist. As the Ukraine war dramatically accelerated the alignment between China and Russia, his position started to change, resulting in his current attempt to engage with China’s intellectual and broader community.”

Ivanov also thinks Dugin’s influence on the Kremlin has been exaggerated.

Since joining Chinese social media, Dugin has gained more than 100,000 followers on Weibo and 25,000 followers on BiliBili. He has published fewer than five posts on Weibo, but nearly every one of them has more than 1,000 comments, most of which criticized him.

Under a post in which Dugin supported Putin on his fifth presidential term, people responded with comments such as “Russia is about to lose the war” and “The gates of hell are waiting for you.”

Wang Xiaodong, China’s most influential nationalist scholar, shared a Weibo post he made two years ago criticizing Dugin and Chinese pro-Russian groups.

“Introducing Dugin’s ideas is not because I worry that the Kremlin will implement his ideas; He has the intention but not the strength! I just want to tell the Chinese people how some Russians, including elites in the powerful departments, view China. Do we Chinese need to risk our lives for them?” the post read.

Ivanov was not surprised by the attacks on Dugin on the Chinese internet.

“While Chinese netizens may support Putin’s anti-Western/anti-US agenda, they are skeptical or outright negative about Russia’s assault on an independent country’s sovereignty and Russian expansionism, nationalism and chauvinism (which Dugin represents),” he told VOA in an email.

He said the history of China-Russia relations is predominantly about confrontation, competition and mistrust.

Among the attacks on Dugin, many netizens also brought up former Chinese territories that Russia occupied in the past 200 years.

“For the sake of ever-lasting friendship between China and Russia, please return Sakhalin and Vladivostok,” one Weibo comment posted by “lovejxcecil” read.

Although China has not been involved in the war, the Russia-Ukraine war has been a hot topic on the Chinese internet.

According to Eric Liu, a former Weibo censor, Dugin’s joining the platform undoubtedly brought more traffic to Weibo. However, it also means that Weibo needs to invest more resources in censorship to prevent him from making remarks that Beijing considers sensitive.

“He is a foreigner. He has no idea about China’s ‘political correctness’ or where the boundaries are,” Liu said. “This risk will have to be taken care of by Weibo, which brought him in.”

On Thursday, Dugin posted on Weibo that China and Russia could achieve “anything” together. His comment section has been turned off. 

US arrests American and Ukrainian in North Korea-linked IT infiltration scheme

WASHINGTON — U.S. prosecutors on Thursday announced the arrests of an American woman and a Ukrainian man they say helped North Korea-linked IT workers posing as Americans to obtain remote-work jobs at hundreds of U.S. companies.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said the elaborate scheme, aimed at generating revenue for North Korea in contravention of international sanctions, involved the infiltration of more than 300 U.S. firms, including Fortune 500 companies and banks, and the theft of the identities of more than 60 Americans.

A DoJ statement said the overseas IT workers also attempted to gain employment and access to information at two U.S. government agencies, although these efforts were “generally unsuccessful.”

An earlier State Department statement said the scheme had generated at least $6.8 million for North Korea. It said the North Koreans involved were linked to North Korea’s Munitions Industry Department, which oversees development of the country’s ballistic missiles, weapons production, and research and development programs.

An indictment filed in federal court in Washington last week and unsealed on Thursday said charges had been filed against Christina Marie Chapman, 49, of Litchfield Park, Arizona; Ukrainian Oleksandr Didenko, 27, of Kyiv; and three other foreign nationals.

A Justice Department statement said Chapman was arrested on Wednesday, while Didenko was arrested on May 7 by Polish authorities at the request of the United States, which is seeking his extradition.

The State Department announced a reward of up to $5 million for information related to Chapman’s alleged co-conspirators, who used the aliases Jiho Han, Haoran Xu and Chunji Jin, and another unindicted individual using the aliases Zhonghua and Venechor S.

Court records did not list lawyers for those arrested and it was not immediately clear whether they had legal representation.

The head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, Nicole Argentieri, said the alleged crimes “benefited the North Korean government, giving it a revenue stream and, in some instances, proprietary information stolen by the co-conspirators.”

The charges “should be a wakeup call for American companies and government agencies that employ remote IT workers,” she said in the statement.

It said the scheme “defrauded U.S. companies across myriad industries, including multiple well-known Fortune 500 companies, U.S. banks, and other financial service providers.”

The DoJ said Didenko was accused of creating fake accounts at U.S. IT job search platforms, selling them to overseas IT workers, some of whom he believed were North Korean. It said overseas IT workers using Didenko’s services were also working with Chapman.

Didenko’s online domain, upworksell.com, was seized Thursday by the Justice Department, the statement said.

The DOJ statement said the FBI executed search warrants for U.S.-based “laptop farms” – residences that hosted multiple laptops for overseas IT workers.

It said that through these farms, including one Chapman hosted from her home, U.S.-based facilitators logged onto U.S. company computer networks and allowed the overseas IT workers to remotely access the laptops, using U.S. IP addresses to make it appear they were in the United States.

The statement said search warrants for four U.S. residences associated with laptop farms controlled by Didenko were issued in the Southern District of California, the Eastern District of Tennessee, and Eastern District of Virginia, and executed between May 8 and May 10.

North Korea is under U.N. sanctions aimed at cutting funding for its missile and nuclear weapons programs and experts say it has sought to generate income illicitly, including through IT workers.

Confidential research by a now-disbanded U.N. sanctions monitoring panel seen by Reuters on Tuesday showed they had been investigating 97 suspected North Korean cyberattacks on cryptocurrency companies between 2017 and 2024, valued at some $3.6 billion.

The U.N. sanctions monitors were disbanded at the end of April after Russia vetoed renewal of their mandate.

A research report from a Washington think tank in April said North Korean animators may have helped create popular television cartoons for big Western firms despite international sanctions. 

Webb telescope uncovers merger of two massive black holes from early universe

CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA — The Webb Space Telescope has discovered the earliest known merger of black holes.

These two gigantic black holes and their galaxies consolidated just 740 million years after the universe-forming Big Bang. It’s the most distant detection ever made of merging black holes, scientists reported Thursday.

One black hole is 50 million times more massive than our sun. The other is thought to be similar in size, but is buried in dense gas, which makes it harder to measure.

Until now, astronomers weren’t sure how supermassive black holes got so big.

The latest findings, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, suggest mergers are how black holes can grow so rapidly — “even at cosmic dawn,” said lead author Hannah Ubler of the University of Cambridge.

“Massive black holes have been shaping the evolution of galaxies from the very beginning,” Ubler said in a statement.

Launched in 2021 as the eventual successor to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, Webb is the biggest and most powerful observatory ever sent into space. A joint U.S.-European project, the infrared observatory surveys the universe from a location 1.6 million kilometers from Earth.

TSMC says no damage to its Arizona facilities after incident

TAIPAI, TAIWAN — Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC said Thursday there was no damage to its facilities after an incident at its Arizona factory construction site where

a waste disposal truck driver was transported to a hospital.

Firefighters responded to a reported explosion Wednesday afternoon at the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company plant in Phoenix, the Arizona Republic reported, citing the local fire department.

TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker whose clients include Apple and Nvidia, said in a statement none of its employees or onsite construction workers had reported any related injuries.

“This is an active investigation with no additional details that can be shared at this time,” it added.

TSMC’s Taipei-listed shares pared earlier gains after the news and were last up around 0.8% on Thursday morning. TSMC last month agreed to expand its planned investment by $25 billion to $65 billion and to add a third Arizona plant by 2030.

The company will produce the world’s most advanced 2 nanometer technology at its second Arizona facility expected to begin production in 2028.

Fewer US overdose deaths reported last year, but experts still cautious

NEW YORK — The number of fatal overdoses in the U.S. fell last year, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data posted Wednesday.

Agency officials noted that the data is provisional and could change after more analysis, and that they still expect a drop when the final counts are in. It would be only the second annual decline since the current national drug death epidemic began more than three decades ago.

Experts reacted cautiously. One described the decline as relatively small and said it should be thought of as part of a leveling off rather than a decrease. Another noted that the last time a decline occurred — in 2018 — drug deaths shot up in the years that followed.

“Any decline is encouraging,” said Brandon Marshall, a Brown University researcher who studies overdose trends. “But I think it’s certainly premature to celebrate or to draw any large-scale conclusions about where we may be headed long term with this crisis.”

It’s also too soon to know what spurred the decline, Marshall and other experts said. Explanations could include shifts in the drug supply, expansion of overdose prevention and addiction treatment, and the grim possibility that the epidemic has killed so many that now there are basically fewer people to kill.

CDC Chief Medical Officer Dr. Debra Houry called the dip “heartening news” and praised efforts to reduce the tally, but she noted that “there are still families and friends losing their loved ones to drug overdoses at staggering numbers.”

About 107,500 people died of overdoses in the U.S. last year, including American citizens and noncitizens who were in the country at the time they died, the CDC estimated. That’s down 3% from 2022, when there were an estimated 111,000 such deaths, the agency said.

The drug overdose epidemic, which has killed more than 1 million people since 1999, has had many ripple effects. For example, a study published last week in JAMA Psychiatry estimated that more than 321,000 U.S. children lost a parent to a fatal drug overdose from 2011 to 2021.

“These children need support” and are at a higher risk of mental health and drug use disorders themselves, said Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which helped lead the study. “It’s not just a loss of a person. It’s also the implications that loss has for the family left behind.”

Prescription painkillers once drove the nation’s overdose epidemic, but they were supplanted years ago by heroin and more recently by illegal fentanyl. The dangerously powerful opioid was developed to treat intense pain from ailments such as cancer but has increasingly been mixed with other drugs in the illicit drug supply.

For years, fentanyl was frequently injected, but increasingly it’s being smoked or mixed into counterfeit pills.

A study published last week found that law enforcement seizures of pills containing fentanyl are rising dramatically, jumping from 44 million in 2022 to more than 115 million last year.

It’s possible that the seizures indicate that the overall supply of fentanyl-laced pills is growing fast, not necessarily that police are whittling down the illicit drug supply, said one of the paper’s authors, Dr. Daniel Ciccarone of the University of California, San Francisco.

He noted that the decline in overdoses was not uniform. All but two of the states in the eastern half of the U.S. saw declines, but most Western states saw increases. Alaska, Washington and Oregon each saw 27% increases.

The reason? Many Eastern states have been dealing with fentanyl for about a decade, while it’s reached Western states more recently, Ciccarone said.

Nevertheless, some researchers say there are reasons to be optimistic. It’s possible that smoking fentanyl is not as lethal as injecting it, but scientists are still exploring that question.

Meanwhile, more money is becoming available to treat addiction and prevent overdoses, through government funding and legal settlements with drugmakers, wholesalers and pharmacies, Ciccarone noted.

“My hope is 2023 is the beginning of a turning point,” he said. 

Miniature poodle Sage fetches top prize at Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show 

NEW YORK — A sprightly miniature poodle named Sage was crowned “Best in Show” on Tuesday at the 148th annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, winning the grand prize in the most prestigious competition among pure-bred canines in the United States.

Sage, the finalist representing 21 breeds classified as non-sporting dogs, triumphed over more than 2,500 top-ranked dogs competing in the two-day contest, held at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in the Queens borough of New York City.

Sage, a 4-year-old black-colored female groomed in the fine, fluffy topiary style traditional for poodles, competed head to head against the winners in six other groups — terriers, hounds, herding dogs, working dogs, sporting dogs and toy dogs.

She was the first female to win the top prize at Westminster since 2020, according to commentators on the Fox Sports channel, which broadcast the event live.

And she became the fourth miniature poodle to claim the top prize in the 148-year history of the contest, with the trophy previously going to her breed in 1943, 1959 and 2002, according to kennel club records.

The larger “standard” poodle breed has been declared Best in Show five times, most recently in 2020, and the smaller “toy” poodle breed has won twice.

The poodle originated as a hunting dog in Germany and is now recognized as the national dog of France.

Sage’s handler, Kaz Hosaka, cried tears of joy and carried his prized poodle in his arms around floor of the auditorium to cheers of the crowd as he celebrated what he said was his 45th year participating at the Westminster dog show and the last of his career.

The Westminster dog show bills itself as the second-oldest U.S. sporting event, behind only the Kentucky Derby thoroughbred horse race. This year’s competition drew a field of contenders representing 200 breeds from all 50 U.S. states and 12 other countries.

Mercedes, a female 4-year-old German shepherd, was named runner-up for the overall contest, after first winning the top prize in the herding dog group.

Along with Sage and Mercedes, the two other finalists chosen on Monday were Comet the Shih Tzu, representing the toy group, and Louis, the Afghan hound leading the hound group.

Rounding out the finalists were three group winners chosen on Tuesday – Micah the black cocker spaniel, representing sporting dogs; Monty, the giant schnauzer, leading the working dogs; and Frankie, a colored bull terrier from the terrier group.

New Zealand researchers say artificial intelligence could enhance surgery

SYDNEY — Researchers in New Zealand say that artificial intelligence, or AI, can help solve problems for patients and doctors.  

A new study from the University of Auckland says that an emerging area is the use of AI during operations using so-called “computer vision.”

The study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, says that artificial intelligence has the potential to identify abnormalities during operations and to unburden overloaded hospitals by enhancing the monitoring of patients to help them recover after surgery at home.

The New Zealand research details how AI “tools are rapidly maturing for medical applications.”  It asserts that “medicine is entering an exciting phase of digital innovation.”

The New Zealand team is investigating computer vision, which describes a machine’s understanding of videos and images. 

 

Dr. Chris Varghese, a doctoral researcher in the Department of Surgery at the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences at the University of Auckland, led the AI research team.

He told VOA the technology has great potential.

“The use of AI in surgery is a really emerging field. We are seeing a lot of exciting research looking at what we call computer vision, where AI is trying to learn what surgeons see, what the surgical instruments look like, what the different organs look like, and the potential there is to identify abnormal anatomy or what the safest approach to an operation might be using virtual reality and augmented reality to plan ahead of surgeries, which could be really useful in cutting out cancers and things like that.”

Varghese said doctors in New Zealand are already using AI to help sort through patient backlogs.

 

“We are using automated algorithms to triage really long waiting lists,” he said. “So, getting people prioritized and into clinics ahead of time, based on need, so the right patients are seen at the right time.”

The researchers said there are limitations to the use of artificial intelligence because of concerns about data privacy and ethics.

The report concludes that “numerous apprehensions remain with regard to the integration of AI into surgical practice, with many clinicians perceiving limited scope in a field dominated by experiential” technology.

The study also says that “autonomous robotic surgeons…. is the most distant of the realizable goals of surgical AI systems.”

Alice Munro, Canadian Nobel Prize-winning author, dies at 92

ottawa — Nobel Prize-winning Canadian writer Alice Munro, whose exquisitely crafted tales of the loves, ambitions and travails of small-town women in her native land made her a globally acclaimed master of the short story, has died at the age of 92, her publisher said on Tuesday. 

Munro died at her home in Port Hope, Ontario, said Kristin Cochrane, chief executive officer of McClelland & Stewart.  

“Alice’s writing inspired countless writers … and her work leaves an indelible mark on our literary landscape,” she said in a statement. 

The Globe and Mail newspaper, citing family members, said Munro had died on Monday after suffering from dementia for at least a decade. 

Munro published more than a dozen collections of short stories and was honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. 

Her stories explored sex, yearning, discontent, aging, moral conflict and other themes in rural settings with which she was intimately familiar, the villages and farms in the Canadian province of Ontario. She was adept at fully developing complex characters within the limited pages of a short story. 

“Alice Munro was a Canadian literary icon. For six decades, her short stories captivated hearts around Canada and the world,” Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge said on the X social media network. 

Munro, who wrote about ordinary people with clarity and realism, was often likened to Anton Chekhov, the 19th century Russian known for his brilliant short stories, a comparison the Swedish Academy cited in honoring her with the Nobel Prize. 

Calling her a “master of the contemporary short story,” the Academy also said: “Her texts often feature depictions of everyday but decisive events, epiphanies of a kind, that illuminate the surrounding story and let existential questions appear in a flash of lightning.” 

In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation after winning the Nobel, Munro said, “I think my stories have gotten around quite remarkably for short stories, and I would really hope that this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something that you played around with until you’d got a novel written.” 

Munro’s works included “Dance of the Happy Shades” (1968), “Lives of Girls and Women” (1971), “Who Do You Think You Are?” (1978), “The Moons of Jupiter” (1982), “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage” (2001), “Runaway” (2004), “The View from Castle Rock” (2006), “Too Much Happiness” (2009) and “Dear Life” (2012). 

The characters in her stories were often girls and women who lead seemingly unexceptional lives but struggle with tribulations ranging from sexual abuse and stifling marriages to repressed love and the ravages of aging. 

“Last month I reread all of Alice Munro’s books. I felt the need to be close to her. Every time I read her is a new experience. Every time changes me. She will live forever,” Canadian author Heather O’Neill said in a post on X. 

Munro’s story of a woman who starts losing her memory and agrees to enter a nursing home titled “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” from “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” was adapted into the Oscar-nominated 2006 film “Away From Her,” directed by fellow Canadian Sarah Polley. 

‘Shame’ a driving force of characters 

Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, writing in The Guardian after Munro won the Nobel, summarized her work by saying: “Shame and embarrassment are driving forces for Munro’s characters, just as perfectionism in the writing has been a driving force for her: getting it down, getting it right, but also the impossibility of that. Munro chronicles failure much more often than she chronicles success, because the task of the writer has failure built in.” 

American novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote in 2005, “Reading Munro puts me in that state of quiet reflection in which I think about my own life: about the decisions I’ve made, the things I’ve done and haven’t done, the kind of person I am, the prospect of death.” 

The short story, a style more popular in the 19th and early 20th century, has long taken a back seat to the novel in popular tastes and in attracting awards. But Munro was able to infuse her short stories with a richness of plot and depth of detail usually more characteristic of full-length novels. 

“For years and years, I thought that stories were just practice, ’til I got time to write a novel. Then I found that they were all I could do and so I faced that. I suppose that my trying to get so much into stories has been a compensation,” Munro told the New Yorker magazine in 2012. 

Second Canadian to win Nobel

Munro was the second Canadian-born writer to win the Nobel literature prize but the first with a distinctly Canadian identity. Saul Bellow, who won in 1976, was born in Quebec but raised in the U.S. city of Chicago, Illinois, and was widely seen as an American writer. 

Munro also won the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 and the Giller Prize — Canada’s most high-profile literary award — twice. 

Alice Laidlaw was born to a hard-pressed family of farmers on July 10, 1931, in Wingham, a small town in the region of southwestern Ontario that serves as the setting for many of her stories, and started writing in her teens. 

She married James Munro in 1951 and moved to Victoria, British Columbia, where the two ran a bookstore. They had four daughters, one died just hours old, before divorcing in 1972. Afterward, Munro moved back to Ontario. Her second husband, geographer Gerald Fremlin, died in April 2013. 

Iranian director Rasoulof urges film world to support colleagues

cannes, france — Film director Mohammad Rasoulof, who has secretly fled Iran for an undisclosed location in Europe, urged the world film community on Tuesday to provide “strong support” to his colleagues.

Rasoulof, who was sentenced to jail on national security charges, and whose latest movie will compete at this month’s Cannes film festival, said he fears for the “safety and well-being” of fellow filmmakers still in Iran.

“The global film community must provide strong support to the makers of these films,” Rasoulof said in a statement to Agence France-Presse.

Rasoulof announced on Monday he had escaped clandestinely from Iran, just days after it emerged that he had been sentenced to eight years in prison for “collusion against national security.”

Rasoulof had been under pressure from Iranian authorities to withdraw his latest film, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” from Cannes, where it will compete for the prestigious event’s top prize, the Palme d’Or.

Cannes director Thierry Fremaux said the festival was working with the French Foreign Ministry in the hope of ensuring that Rasoulof, 51, can attend his premiere next week.

Rasoulof’s statement said he did not yet know if he could attend the premiere.

“I arrived in Europe a few days ago after a long and complicated journey,” said Rasoulof, who won the Berlin International Film Festival’s Golden Bear in 2020 for “There Is No Evil.”

He said his latest movie set out to portray a version of Iran “that is far from the narrative dominated by censorship in the Islamic Republic and is closer to reality.”

After he and his filmmaking colleagues came under pressure from the authorities, Rasoulof learned that his “unfair” eight-year sentence would be enforced imminently, and he felt he had no choice but to flee.

“I had to choose between prison and leaving Iran,” he wrote. “With a heavy heart, I chose exile.”

While some colleagues involved in the film were also able to leave the country, others remain there.

“My thoughts go to every single one of them, and I fear for their safety and well-being,” he said.

Biden sharply hikes US tariffs on billions in Chinese chips, cars

WASHINGTON — U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday unveiled a bundle of steep tariff increases on an array of Chinese imports including electric vehicles, computer chips and medical products, risking an election-year standoff with Beijing in a bid to woo voters who give his economic policies low marks.

Biden will keep tariffs put in place by his Republican predecessor Donald Trump while ratcheting up others, including a quadrupling of EV duties to over 100%, the White House said in a statement. It cited “unacceptable risks” to U.S. economic security posed by what it considers unfair Chinese practices that are flooding global markets with cheap goods.

The new measures impact $18 billion in Chinese imported goods including steel and aluminum, semiconductors, batteries, critical minerals, solar cells and cranes, the White House said. The announcement confirmed earlier Reuters reporting.

The United States imported $427 billion in goods from China in 2023 and exported $148 billion to the world’s No. 2 economy, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, a trade gap that has persisted for decades and become an ever more sensitive subject in Washington.

“China’s using the same playbook it has before to power its own growth at the expense of others by continuing to invest, despite excess Chinese capacity and flooding global markets with exports that are underpriced due to unfair practices,” White House National Economic Adviser Lael Brainard told reporters on a conference call.

U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said the revised tariffs were justified because China was continuing to steal U.S. intellectual property and in some cases had become “more aggressive” in cyber intrusions targeting American technology.

She said prior “Section 301” tariffs had minimal impact on U.S. economy-wide prices and employment, but had been effective in reducing U.S. imports of Chinese goods, while increasing imports from other countries.

But Tai recommended tariff exclusions for dozens of industrial machinery import categories from China, including 19 for solar product manufacturing equipment.

Even as Biden’s steps fell in line with Trump’s premise that tougher trade measures are warranted, the Democrat took aim at his opponent in November’s election.

The White House said Trump’s 2020 trade deal with China did not increase American exports or boost American manufacturing jobs, and it said the 10% across-the-board tariffs on goods from all points of origin that Trump has proposed would frustrate U.S. allies and raise prices. Trump has floated tariffs of 60% or higher on all Chinese goods.

Administration officials said their measures are “carefully targeted,” combined with domestic investment, plotted with close allies and unlikely to worsen a bout of inflation that has already angered U.S. voters and imperiled Biden’s re-election bid. They also downplayed the risk of retaliation from Beijing.

Biden has struggled to convince voters of the efficacy of his economic policies despite a backdrop of low unemployment and above-trend economic growth. A Reuters/Ipsos poll last month showed Trump had a 7 percentage-point edge over Biden on the economy.

Analysts have warned that a trade tiff could raise costs for EVs overall, hurting Biden’s climate goals and his aim to create manufacturing jobs.

Biden has said he wants to win this era of competition with China but not to launch a trade war that could hurt the mutually dependent economies. He has worked in recent months to ease tensions in one-on-one talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Both 2024 U.S. presidential candidates have sharply departed from the free-trade consensus that once reigned in Washington, a period capped by China’s joining the World Trade Organization in 2001.

China has said the tariffs are counterproductive and risk inflaming tensions. Trump’s broader imposition of tariffs during his 2017-2021 presidency kicked off a tariff war with China.

As part of the long-awaited tariff update, Biden will increase tariffs this year under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 from 25% to 100% on EVs, bringing total duties to 102.5%, from 7.5% to 25% on lithium-ion EV batteries and other battery parts and from 25% to 50% on photovoltaic cells used to make solar panels. “Certain” critical minerals will have their tariffs raised from nothing to 25%.

The tariffs on ship-to-shore cranes will rise to 25% from zero, those on syringes and needles will rise to 50% from nothing now and some personal protective equipment (PPE) used in medical facilities will rise to 25% from as little as 0% now. Shortages in PPE made largely in China hampered the United States’ COVID-19 response.

More tariffs will follow in 2025 and 2026 on semiconductors, whose tariff rate will double to 50%, as well as lithium-ion batteries that are not used in elective vehicles, graphite and permanent magnets as well as rubber medical and surgical gloves.

A step Biden previously announced to raise tariffs on some steel and aluminum products will take effect this year, the White House said.  

A number of lawmakers have called for massive hikes on Chinese vehicle tariffs. There are relatively few Chinese-made light-duty vehicles being imported now. Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sherrod Brown wants the Biden administration to ban Chinese EVs outright, over concerns they pose risks to Americans’ personal data.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who warned China in April that its excess production of EVs and solar products was unacceptable, said that such concerns were widely shared by U.S. allies and the actions were “motivated not by anti-China policy but by a desire to prevent damaging economic dislocation from unfair economic practices.” 

Dazzling auroras fade from skies as sunspot turns away

Washington — The spectacular auroras that danced across the sky in many parts of the world over the weekend are fading, scientists said Monday, as the massive sunspot that caused them turns its ferocious gaze away from Earth.

Since Friday, the most powerful solar storm to strike our planet in more than two decades has lit up night skies with dazzling auroras in the United States, Tasmania, the Bahamas and other places far from the extreme latitudes where they are normally seen.

But Eric Lagadec, an astrophysicist at France’s Observatoire de la Cote d’Azur, told AFP that the “most spectacular” period of this rare event has come to an end.

The first of several coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — expulsions of plasma and magnetic fields from the Sun — came just after 1600 GMT Friday, according to the US-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The event was later upgraded to an “extreme” geomagnetic storm — the first since the “Halloween Storms” of October 2003 that caused blackouts in Sweden and damaged power infrastructure in South Africa.

Excitement over the phenomenon — and otherworldly photos of pink, green and purple night skies — broke out across the world, from Austria to Australia’s island state of Tasmania.

The storm had been forecast to intensify again until 0600 GMT Monday, the NOAA said, adding that auroras could be viewable as far south as New York.

But thousands of people who came out on Sunday night in the hope of seeing the aurora borealis over the Joshua Tree National Park in California instead saw the Milky Way. AFP pictures showed stars shining clearly in the night sky.

Lagadec said that while there were further solar outbursts on Sunday, it is unlikely that more auroras will be visible to the naked eye in lower latitudes such as in France.

“Only the most experienced photographers will be able to capture them” in such areas, said Lagadec, who was moved by witnessing an aurora during the event’s peak on Friday night.

The solar storm emanated from a massive sunspot cluster that is 17 times wider than our planet.

The storm has not ended, and auroras are expected to continue in the far northern or southern regions where they are normally visible.

But “the source of the storm is a sunspot that is now on the edge of the Sun, (so) we do not expect the next coronal mass ejections to head in Earth’s direction,” Lagadec said.

Scientists had already warned that the intensity of anything seen on Sunday night would unlikely reach the level of Friday’s show.

“This is likely the last of the Earth-directed CMEs from this particular monster sunspot,” Mathew Owens, a professor of space physics at the UK’s University of Reading, told AFP.

When charged particles from solar winds are captured by Earth’s magnetic field, they accelerate towards the planet’s magnetic poles, which is why auroras are normally seen there.

But during periods of heightened solar activity, the effects extend farther toward the equator.

Unlike during 2003’s solar storms, no major disruptions to power or communications networks appear to have been reported this time around.

Elon Musk’s satellite internet operator Starlink said on X that its thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit had “weathered the geomagnetic storm and remain healthy”.

Unlike solar flares, which travel at the speed of light and reach Earth in around eight minutes, CMEs travel at a more sedate pace, with officials putting the current average at 800 kilometers (500 miles) per second.

People with eclipse glasses can still look for the sunspot cluster during the day.

Fluctuating magnetic fields associated with geomagnetic storms induce currents in long wires, including power lines, which can lead to blackouts. Long pipelines can also become electrified.

Spacecraft are at risk from high doses of radiation, although the atmosphere prevents this from reaching Earth.

NASA can ask astronauts on the International Space Station to move to better-shielded places within the outpost.

Even pigeons and other species that have internal biological compasses can be affected.