Month: April 2018

Jaw Fossil From English Beach Belongs to Monstrous Marine Reptile

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A jawbone fossil found on a rocky English beach belongs to one of the biggest marine animals on record, a type of seagoing reptile called an ichthyosaur that scientists estimated at up to 85 feet (26 meters) long – approaching the size of a blue whale.

Scientists said on Monday this ichthyosaur, which appears to be the largest marine reptile ever discovered, lived 205 million years ago at the end of the Triassic Period, dominating the oceans just as dinosaurs were becoming the undisputed masters on land. The bone, called a surangular, was part of its lower jaw.

The researchers estimated the animal’s length by comparing this surangular to the same bone in the largest ichthyosaur skeleton ever found, a species called Shonisaurus sikanniensis from British Columbia that was 69 feet (21 meters) long. The newly discovered bone was 25 percent larger.

“This bone belonged to a giant,” said University of Manchester paleontologist Dean Lomax.

“The entire carcass was probably very similar to a whale fall in which a dead whale drops to the bottom of the sea floor, where an entire ecosystem of animals feeds on the carcass for a very long time. After that, bones become separated, and we suspect that’s what happened to our isolated bone.”

Fossil collector Paul de la Salle, affiliated with the Etches Collection in Dorset, England, found the bone in 2016 at Lilstock on England’s Somerset coast along the Bristol Channel.

“The structure was in the form of growth rings, like that of a tree, and I’d seen something similar before in the jaws of late Jurassic ichthyosaurs,” he said.

Ichthyosaurs swam the world’s oceans from 250 million years ago to 90 million years ago, preying on squid and fish. The biggest were larger than other huge marine reptiles of the dinosaur age like pliosaurs and mosasaurs. Only today’s filter-feeding baleen whales are larger. The blue whale, up to about 98 feet (30 meters) long, is the biggest animal alive today and the biggest marine animal ever.

The researchers estimated the new ichthyosaur at 66 to 85 feet long (20 to 26 meters).

It appears to have belonged to an ichthyosaur group called shastasaurids. Because the remains are so incomplete, it is unclear whether it represents a new ichthyosaur genus or is a member of a previously identified genus, said paleontologist Judy Massare of the State University of New York College at Brockport.

The research was published in the journal PLOS ONE.

This story was written by Reuters.
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New Projects in Brazil’s Amazon? Not Without Congressional Approval, says Court

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Brazil’s government has been told that development projects, including hydropower dams, in protected areas can no longer go ahead without the prior approval of lawmakers.

Last week’s ruling by the supreme court followed the use by the government in recent years of the controversial “provisional measure”, a legal instrument that allowed the president to approve projects by reducing the size of protected areas.

Campaigners said the decision should ensure the country’s forests and reserves, including the Amazon rainforest, were better protected.

“This decision puts an end to a spree of provisional measures in the name of environmental de-protection,” said Mauricio Guetta, a lawyer at Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), an advocacy group.

In recent years, the government has used the measure to open up protected areas for controversial projects, including building two of Brazil’s largest hydropower dams – the Jirau and Santo Antonio – in the Amazon.

The use of the measure to shrink protected areas with immediate effect had brought “irreversible consequences, irreversible damage to the environment,” Guetta told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

The eight-judge bench ruled unanimously that using the provisional measure to reduce the size of protected areas for any reason was unconstitutional.

 

It followed a lawsuit in which the court heard the measure had been used in 2012 to allow trees in six protected areas of the Amazon to be felled to make way for five hydropower dams.

“The (provisional measure), later converted into law, reduced the level of environmental protection by deactivating due legislative process,” supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes said in a statement.

The court said the ruling would not affect the five hydropower plants in question because the provisional measure had already been enacted in law, and some are operating.

Guetta said the ruling meant any changes to protected areas must be first approved by law, and local communities should be properly consulted about projects planned on their land.

“The government has been trying to reduce by more than 1 million hectares the area under conservation in the southern part of Amazonas state. Now this initiative is officially vetoed because of the supreme court’s decision,” he said.

Environmentalists say increasing swaths of land, including the Amazon forest, are being felled for grazing and cropland, and for development projects.

Deforestation in the Amazon fell in the August 2016 to July 2017 monitoring period for the first time in three years, although the 6,624 square kilometers (2,557 square miles) cleared of forest remains well above the low recorded in 2012 and targets for slowing climate change.
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Apple: All Its Facilities Now Powered by Clean Energy

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Apple on Monday said it had achieved its goal of powering all of the company’s facilities with renewable energy, a milestone that includes all of its data centers, offices and retail stores in 43 countries.

The iPhone maker also said nine suppliers had recently committed to running their operations entirely on renewable energy sources like wind and solar, bringing to 23 the total number to make such a pledge.

Major U.S. corporations such as Apple, Wal-Mart and Alphabet have become some of the country’s biggest buyers of renewable forms of energy, driving substantial growth in the wind and solar industries.

Alphabet’s Google last year purchased enough renewable energy to cover all of its electricity consumption worldwide.

Costs for solar and wind are plunging thanks to technological advances and increased global production of panels and turbines, enabling companies seeking to green their images to buy clean power at competitive prices.

“We’re not spending any more than we would have,” Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president for environment, policy and social initiatives, said in an interview. “We’re seeing the benefits of an increasingly competitive clean energy market.”

Renewable energy projects that provide power to Apple facilities range from large wind farms in the United States to clusters of hundreds of rooftop solar systems in Japan and Singapore. The company has also urged utilities to procure renewable energy to help power Apple’s operations.

Encouraging suppliers to follow suit in embracing 100 percent renewable energy is the next step for Apple. The suppliers that pledge to use more clean energy know they will have “a leg up” against competitors for Apple’s business, Jackson said.

“We made it clear that, over time, this will become less of a wish list and more of a requirement,” she said.
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After Vegas, Jason Aldean Carries Weight of the Tragedy

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Last October, Jason Aldean was in a Las Vegas hospital visiting some of the victims injured in a mass shooting at a country music festival a week earlier.

On that Sunday afternoon, the country star turned to his longtime manager, Clarence Spalding.

 

“He looked at me and said, ‘This will be the hardest thing I ever do,'” Spalding recalled. “And it was.”

 

Aldean, the reigning Academy of Country Music’s entertainer of the year with a new album out this Friday, has built his career and reputation on his live shows that entertain tens of thousands every year. He had returned to meet face-to-face with those who had survived a terrible trauma during his performance at the festival, which had left him with lingering feelings of guilt.

 

In one room, a woman was still in a coma as he stood by her bed. Aldean recorded a message on her cell phone, promising to bring her to a show when she got better. Those moments in those hospital rooms were heavy with emotion, Spalding said.

 

“Jason would walk in and somebody who had been shot in the arm, leg, face or wherever would just start crying because it was such an emotional thing to see him,” Spalding said.

 

Aldean was onstage when the gunman started shooting with high-powered weapons at the fans from hotel room window across the street from the outdoor Route 91 Harvest Festival. That night in October, 59 people were killed and hundreds more injured in what has become the nation’s deadliest mass shooting in modern history.

 

The Macon, Georgia-born star has been singing about small-town, working class life since he started in Nashville two decades ago, and said he now feels a connection to the survivors of another recent shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida.

 

“Unless anybody has witnessed anything like that or been a part of it, it’s really hard for people to really understand where you’re coming from on that stuff,” Aldean said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “It’s like the kids from the school in Florida, that shooting. I get it, man. I understand how they are feeling.”

 

About 40 members of his band and crew, as well as his pregnant wife, Brittany, were all there at the festival. Spalding said two of their tour buses were shot, as well as their lighting board and stage. Aldean’s bass player found a bullet fragment in his bass guitar.

 

The aftermath for Aldean has been complicated. He said he felt thankful that his family, crew and friends weren’t injured, but also guilt for all the people who were there because they wanted to see him play. And then he felt anger and disbelief.

 

“You start doing that thing, like, ‘Man, did that really happen? It seems so crazy,'”‘ Aldean said. “You just sit there and relive it a thousand times a day.”

His recovery was helped by talking with his wife and his band and crew about what they experienced. And then he met those survivors.

 

“Going back to the hospital, going back to Vegas and seeing those people. Seeing some of the strength they were having. People laid up in the hospital and smiling and laughing and just being glad they were alive. That sort of stuff helped me to look at it in a different view,” Aldean said. “Those people are here and pushing on.”

 

Two months to the day after the shooting, Aldean’s son, Memphis, was born and finally Aldean found some relief from the spiraling thoughts in his head.

 

“Really to me, he just gave me something else to focus on. Something else to think about on a daily basis,” Aldean said.

And although other country musicians have spoken out about the need for gun control since the shooting, Aldean has avoided wading into the political debates about guns. “It’s a no-win situation,” Aldean said. “I think no matter what you say, whether you’re for gun control or not, I mean, you’re setting yourself up to be crucified in the public eye or in the media.”

 

However, Aldean, who is a gun owner, said there are flaws in the nation’s laws regarding gun ownership that need addressing.

 

“It’s too easy to get guns, first and foremost,” Aldean said. “When you can walk in somewhere and you can get one in 5 minutes, do a background check that takes 5 minutes, like how in-depth is that background check? Those are the issues I have. It’s not necessarily the guns themselves or that I don’t think people should have guns. I have a lot of them.”

 

But his concern is that these tragedies are just used as fodder for the political arguments that have dominated any discussion about gun control.

 

“Nobody is looking at what the actual issue is and really how to come to an agreement and make a smart decision,” Aldean said.

 

This Friday, Aldean is releasing his eighth studio album, “Rearview Town,” which he had been working on all throughout last year in between touring. It features his bluesy new single, “You Make It Easy,” which was co-written by Florida Georgia Line, as well as “Drowns the Whiskey,” a duet with Miranda Lambert. Aldean said the title track appealed to him as a metaphor for his own life.

 

“‘Rearview Town’ just kind of says you’re sort of putting some of the things that have kind of weighted you down and been on your shoulders,” Aldean said. “You’re putting that behind you and you’re moving on and looking forward to everything in store.”
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Facebook’s Zuckerberg Faces Grilling on Capitol Hill

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On the eve of an expected grilling by U.S. lawmakers, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg once again apologized for inadequately protecting the data of millions of social media platform users and highlighted steps the firm is taking to prevent a repeat.

In multiple interviews with news media outlets and in prepared remarks to be delivered on Capitol Hill, Zuckerberg on Monday acknowledged that the tools Facebook provides to promote human interconnectedness were exploited for ill or nefarious purposes.

 

“It was my mistake, and I’m sorry,” Zuckerberg said in testimony released ahead of Tuesday’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees and Wednesday’s appearance before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.

 

“I started Facebook, I run it, and I’m responsible for what happens here,” Zuckerberg added.

 

Zuckerberg was called to testify after news broke last month that personal data of millions of Facebook users had been harvested without their knowledge by Cambridge Analytica, a British voter profiling company that U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign hired to target likely supporters in 2016.

 

Prior to 2016, Facebook allowed a British researcher to create an app on Facebook on which about 200,000 users divulged personal information that was subsequently shared with Cambridge Analytica. The number of affected Facebook users multiplied exponentially because the app also collected data about friends, relatives and acquaintances of everyone who installed it.

 

Cambridge Analytica said it had data for 30 million of Facebook’s 2.2 billion users.

 

On Capitol Hill, U.S. lawmakers signaled they want action, not just contrition, from social media executives.

 

“If we don’t rein in the misuse of social media, none of us are going to have any privacy anymore,” the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee, Bill Nelson of Florida, told reporters after meeting privately with Zuckerberg Monday.

 

Meanwhile, Facebook announced it is starting to notify tens of millions of users, most of them in the United States, whose personal data may have been harvested by Cambridge Analytica.

The social media giant is also empowering all its users to shut off third-party access to their apps and is setting up cyber “firewalls” to ensure that users’ data is not unwittingly transmitted by others in their social network.

 

For years, Congress took a largely “hands-off” approach to regulating the internet. Some analysts believe that is about to change after the Facebook data breach, as well as a cascade of revelations about Russian cyber-meddling.

 

“At this point in time, it’s really up to Congress and the federal agencies to step up and take some responsibility for protecting privacy, for regulating Facebook as a commercial service which it clearly is,” Marc Rotenberg, president of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, told VOA. “We’ve gone for many years in the United States believing that self-regulation could work — that Facebook and the other tech giants could police themselves, but I think very few people still believe that.”

This story was written by Michael Bowman, Ken Bredemeier contributed.
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Pakistan Launches Countrywide Polio Eradication Drive

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Pakistan launched a nationwide polio vaccination drive this week to try to reach 38.7 million children and eradicate the paralyzing and potentially deadly virus in one of the last countries where it is endemic.

Nearly 260,000 volunteers and workers fanned out across Pakistan in an effort to vaccinate every child below the age of five in a week-long campaign, Pakistan’s national coordinator on polio, Mohammad Safdar, said.

“We’re really very close to eradicating the disease,” Safdar told Reuters, appealing to the people to cooperate with the door-to-door effort.

Pakistan is one of only three countries in the world, along with Afghanistan and Nigeria, that suffers from endemic polio, a childhood virus that can cause paralysis or death.

In 2018, Pakistan has had just one polio case, reported last month, Safdar said. The number of cases has steadily declined since 2014 when 306 were reported. Last year, there were only eight cases, he said.

Efforts to eradicate the disease have been undermined by opposition from the Taliban and other Islamist militants, who say immunization is a foreign ploy to sterilise Muslim children or a cover for Western spies.

In January, gunmen killed a mother-and-daughter vaccination team working in the southwestern province of Baluchistan, where the year’s only case so far was later reporter.

Three years earlier, 15 people were killed in a bombing by the Pakistani Taliban outside a polio vaccination center in Baluchistan.

Polio teams working on Monday were undeterred.

“Yes we feel threatened, but our work is like this,” said Bilquis Omar, who has served on a mobile vaccination team for the past six years in the southern port metropolis of Karachi.

“We are working for the children,” she said.

Aziz Memon, who heads the Rotary Club’s PolioPlus program that funds many of the immunization teams, said this year the drive was also making a renewed effort to reach migrants who come back and forth from Afghanistan.

“Mission number one is to get to zero cases and eradicate polio,” Memon said.

A country must have no cases for three consecutive years in order to be considered to have eradicated polio by the World Health Organization.

Pakistan has to contend with extra suspicion of immunization drives because of the 2011 U.S. special forces raid inside the country that killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, architect of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States in 2001.

A Pakistani doctor was accused of using a fake vaccination campaign to collect DNA samples that the CIA was believed to have been using to verify bin Laden’s identity. The doctor remains jailed in Pakistan, convicted of waging war against state.

This story was written by Reuters.
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Smartphones Could Help Measure Parkinson’s Disease Symptoms

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An experimental smartphone application could monitor changes in Parkinson’s disease symptoms throughout the day, sending data to doctors to help them treat patients, U.S. researchers say.

“Like diabetes, Parkinson’s has variability and symptom fluctuations, which can also vary the treatment. We can’t measure these fluctuations at home, and you can only do so many measurements in the clinic,” said senior study author Suchi Saria of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

The app developed by Saria and her colleagues asks patients to complete five tasks that assess speech, finger tapping, gait, balance and reaction time. From that, it generates a “mobile Parkinson’s Disease score,” which doctors can use to assess symptom severity and adjust medication, the team writes in JAMA Neurology.

Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder that affects dopamine-producing nerve cells in the brain. Symptoms include tremors, body stiffness, slow movement and difficulty walking.

“This new development is very exciting because this wasn’t feasible even a few years ago,” Saria said in a telephone interview. “Patients seem eager, willing and curious to do this with their phones.”

The researchers developed their app, HopkinsPD, for Android smartphones to assess performance on the five tasks as often as patients want to use the app. The mobile score is based on the types of assessments usually done in doctor’s offices.

To test the app and the scoring system, the researchers recruited 129 patients who completed more than 6,000 smartphone assessments. Scores ranged from 0 to 100, with higher numbers indicating more severe symptoms. Participants completed the tasks before and after their first daily dose of dopamine medication. They also completed standard assessments in the clinic.

Symptoms varied by an average of 14 points through the day, information that could help doctors understand the highs and lows for their Parkinson’s patients.

The team also found a strong correlation between the mobile app score and the in-office rating scales. On average, the mobile app score also decreased more than the official scales when dopamine medication was taken, which could highlight its sensitivity and accuracy in monitoring real-time symptoms, the authors note.

“The data from the phone aligns beautifully with what we found with classic instruments in the clinic,” Saria said. “It gives us a sense of patients’ motion and movement, like breadcrumbs along the way to understanding their symptoms.”

A limitation of the study is that only five tasks are used to measure behaviors and symptoms, the authors acknowledge.

Additional studies will evaluate whether changes in the app score represent a significant difference experienced by patients.

“We physicians may measure phenomena we think are highly relevant, but patients may disagree,” said Dr. Alberto Espay, director of the James J. and Joan A. Gardner Center for Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders at University of Cincinnati in Ohio, who wasn’t involved in the study.

“Also, it will be important to determine if the machine-learning component will require less active entry of data by patients, rendering it easier to use long-term,” Espay said in an email. “Long-term adherence will be important to ascertain if this application . . . can capture data for patients in their home settings.”

Researchers want to know whether elderly patients and those in developing countries can use similar apps, said Ye Wang of the National University of Singapore, who wasn’t involved in the current study.

“These ubiquitous technologies can and should be used to help doctors with their diagnosis,” Wang told Reuters Health by email.

“They are diagnostic aids and are not supposed to replace doctors,” he said. “But perhaps they can be part of the screening process.” 

SOURCE: JAMA Neurology

This story was written by Reuters.
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Child Advocates Ask FTC to Investigate YouTube

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The fine print of YouTube’s terms of service has a warning that goes unheeded by millions of children who visit YouTube to watch cartoons, nursery rhymes, science experiments or videos of toys being unboxed.

“If you are under 13 years of age, then please do not use the service,” the terms say. “There are lots of other great web sites for you.”

In a complaint filed Monday, child advocates and consumer groups are asking the Federal Trade Commission to investigate and impose potentially billions of dollars of penalties on Google for allegedly violating children’s online privacy and allowing ads to target them.

“Google profits handsomely from selling advertising to kid-directed programs that it packages,” said Jeff Chester, director of the Center for Digital Democracy, one of the groups that drafted the complaint. “They created a successful model monetizing kids’ data.”

Television networks also run ads during cartoons and other programs aimed at kids.

The difference? YouTube does so with a lot of data collection. Its business model relies on tracking IP addresses, search history, device identifiers, location and other personal data about its users so that it can gauge their interests and tailor advertising to them. But a 1998 federal law prohibits internet companies from knowingly collecting personal data from kids under 13 without their parents’ consent.

The coalition accuses YouTube of violating that law and deliberately profiting off luring children into what Chester calls an “ad-filled digital playground” where commercials for toys, theme parks or sneakers can surface alongside kid-oriented videos.

YouTube said in an emailed statement that it “will read the complaint thoroughly and evaluate if there are things we can do to improve. Because YouTube is not for children, we’ve invested significantly in the creation of the YouTube Kids app to offer an alternative specifically designed for children.”

That toddler-oriented YouTube Kids app, launched in 2015, offers more parental controls but is not as widely used — and features a selection of the same videos and channels that kids can also find on the regular YouTube service.

‘Day of reckoning’

Although it’s not known if the FTC will take action, the complaint comes at a time of increased public scrutiny over the tech industry’s mining of personal data and after the FTC opened an investigation last month into Facebook’s privacy practices.

For that reason, the FTC “may be more reinvigorated and ready to take these issues seriously,” said Josh Golin, director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which drafted the complaint along with the Center for Digital Democracy and a Georgetown University law clinic. Several other groups have signed on, including Common Sense Media, which runs a popular website for families, and the advocacy division of Consumer Reports.

“I think the day of reckoning has arrived,” said U.S. Sen. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who co-authored the 1998 law and says he wants the FTC to look into the YouTube complaint. “Americans want to know the answers as to whether or not the privacy of their children is being compromised in the online world.”

FTC spokeswoman Juliana Gruenwald Henderson said the agency looks forward to reviewing the letter. She said the FTC already has brought more than two dozen cases for violations of the 1998 law. It has settled child privacy cases with Yelp, mobile advertising network inMobi and electronic toy-maker VTech.

None of those services are as popular for kids as YouTube, which has toddler-themed channels with names like ChuChuTV nursery rhymes, which as of last week counted more than 16 million subscribers and 13.4 billion views. It also has many channels that cater to preteens.

Kandi Parsons, a former FTC attorney who now advises companies on child-privacy compliance, said that because YouTube is a general-audience service, it could be hard to determine if parents are curating content for their kids to watch or letting them use it on their own. Parsons said the FTC so far hasn’t gone after kid-directed channels within broader media websites, though that doesn’t mean it won’t.

Consumer advocates say Google knows what it is doing. They point to its “Google Preferred” program that allows advertisers on YouTube to pay extra to get their ads on the most popular videos. The program includes a “Parenting & Family Lineup” that has featured channels such as ChuChu TV, Fox’s BabyTV and Seven Super Girls, whose topics include “fluffy unicorn slime.”

YouTube does block children who identify themselves as under 13 from posting video, by prohibiting them from creating an account to begin with, but an account isn’t needed merely to watch.

“It’s laughable if Google execs claim that they think the parent is in charge of the online viewing behaviors of tens of millions of children,” Chester said. “Children are watching this content by themselves. Google is trying to look the other way.”

 
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Topless Protester Gets Close to Bill Cosby as Retrial Begins

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A topless protester with “Women’s Lives Matter” written on her body jumped a barricade and got within a few feet of Bill Cosby on Monday as the comedian walked into a suburban Philadelphia courthouse for the start of his sexual assault retrial.

 

The woman ran in front of Cosby toward a bank of TV cameras but was intercepted by sheriff’s deputies and led away in handcuffs. The European feminist group Femen claimed the protester as one of its own.

 

Cosby seemed startled by the commotion as a half-dozen protesters chanted at him.

 

Cosby spokesman Andrew Wyatt praised deputies for their quick action but urged court officials to increase security.

 

“It’s a different world. Things have changed,” Wyatt told The Associated Press, referring to recent mass shootings and other episodes. “You never know who’s going to want to make a name for themselves.”

 

The protester, Nicolle Rochelle, 39, of Little Falls, New Jersey, was charged with disorderly conduct, authorities said. Inna Shevchenko, a Paris-based leader of Femen, told The Associated Press that the activist was seeking to defend Cosby’s alleged victims, calling the protest “our contribution to the global revolt launched by (hash)MeToo.”

 

The disruption came ahead of opening statements, which were delayed while the judge sorted through allegations raised late Friday that a juror told a woman during jury selection that he thought Cosby was guilty. Cosby’s lawyers want the juror removed from the case.

Prosecutors have lined up a parade of accusers to make the case that the man revered as “America’s Dad” lived a double life as one of Hollywood’s biggest predators.

 

Cosby is fighting back with a new, high-profile lawyer and an aggressive strategy: attacking Andrea Constand as a greedy liar and casting the other women testifying as bandwagon accusers looking for a share of the spotlight.

“You’ve seen previews and coming attractions, but things have changed,” said professor Laurie Levenson of Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

 

Cosby’s first trial last spring ended with jurors unable to reach a unanimous verdict after five days of tense deliberations on charges that the man who made millions of viewers laugh as wise and understanding Dr. Cliff Huxtable on “The Cosby Show” drugged and molested Constand at his suburban Philadelphia home in 2004.

 

The 80-year-old comedian, who has said the sexual contact was consensual, faces three counts of aggravated indecent assault, each punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

 

His retrial is taking place in a radically changed and potentially more hostile environment. The (hash)MeToo movement caught fire four months after the first trial, raising awareness of sexual misconduct as it toppled Harvey Weinstein, Sen. Al Franken, Matt Lauer and other powerful men.

 

Nearly every potential juror questioned for the case this time knew about (hash)MeToo.

 

Kristen Houser of the National Sexual Violence Resource Center said that could help prosecutors overcome the skepticism some jurors had last time about Constand’s yearlong wait to report her allegations to the police.

 

“The (hash)MeToo movement is amplifying what experts have been saying for decades: People are ashamed, they’re confused, they can’t believe somebody they trust would hurt them, and then they worry that others won’t believe them,” Houser said.

 

After limiting the focus of the first trial, Judge Steven O’Neill has been willing to let both sides push the retrial well beyond Constand’s allegations.

 

This time, O’Neill is letting prosecutors have five additional accusers testify — including model Janice Dickinson — as they attempt to show Cosby made a habit of drugging and violating women. The judge allowed just one other accuser to take the stand last time.

 

“This one will be harder for the defense,” Levenson said. This time, Constand “is not alone, and there is strength in numbers.”

 

In another difference, the judge this time is letting Cosby’s legal team call as a witness a former co-worker of Constand’s at Temple University who said Constand spoke of setting up a “high-profile person” so she could sue and enjoy a big payday. Constand’s lawyer has said the co-worker is lying.

 

The judge also decided the jury can hear the answer to one of the biggest questions hanging over the case: How much did Cosby pay Constand to settle her lawsuit against him more than a decade ago? The two sides agreed at the first trial not to mention the lawsuit.

 

Cosby lawyer Tom Mesereau, who won an acquittal in Michael Jackson’s 2005 child molestation case, said the jury will learn “just how greedy” Constand was.

 

In a twist, the judge hinted that he might not allow jurors to hear Cosby’s lurid deposition testimony about giving Quaaludes to women before sex. He said he would rule on it during the trial. Cosby testified in 2005 and 2006 as part of Constand’s lawsuit.

 

The Associated Press does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission, which Constand and Dickinson have done.
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Rice Breeders Report ‘Eye-Popping’ Productivity Gains

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The grain that feeds half the world may have taken a big leap forward.

Scientists report the biggest improvements in rice productivity in decades.

If the results hold up in further tests, it could greatly increase harvests of a critical staple crop at a time when global population growing rapidly.

Researchers found one version of a gene that increased the number of branches in the flowering part of the plant. Each plant produced more rice as a result.

They used conventional breeding to introduce this gene version into five rice varieties. These varieties produced from 28 to 85 percent more rice than the parent strains, according to a new study in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.

That’s an “eye-popping” yield increase, said University of Arkansas rice breeder Xueyan Sha, who was not involved with this research. Normally, he added, “if we can achieve 6 percent, we can probably consider it a great achievement.”

Cautious optimism

Rice yields have not improved much since the 1960s “Green Revolution.” That’s when breeders found a gene that made plants shorter and less likely to fall over and therefore able to hold more rice grains. Farmers called the new variety “miracle rice” for its dramatic yield gains.

Experts say big increases in food production will be needed to feed the additional two billion or so people expected on the planet by 2050.

The new research was a small-scale, controlled experiment, Sha noted, and it’s not clear how the results will hold up in farmers’ fields. But he said he’s “cautiously optimistic.”

Not all rice varieties the scientists tested saw the same hefty productivity increases. That’s another reason for caution, according to rice geneticist Shannon Pinson with the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“There’s something exciting here,” she said. “I don’t think it’s as exciting as Green-Revolution caliber.”

Study authors say their new rice varieties should be available to farmers in two to four years.
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87M Facebook Users Will Find Out Whether Their Data Was Compromised

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Social media giant Facebook is starting to notify 87 million of its users whether their personal data was harvested without their knowledge by Cambridge Analytica, the Britain-based voter profiling company U.S. President Donald Trump’s campaign hired to target likely supporters in 2016.

Facebook believes most of the affected users, more than 70 million, are in the United States, but there are also more than a million each in the Philippines, Indonesia and Britain.

The company has apologized for the security breach, with Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledging the company made a “huge mistake” by not more closely monitoring use of the data and not taking a broad enough view of the company’s responsibilities.

Facebook allowed a British researcher to create an app on Facebook on which about 200,000 users divulged personal information that academic Alexsandr Kogan subsequently shared with Cambridge Analytica.  The number of affected Facebook users multiplied exponentially, however, because of the data collected from all the friends, relatives and acquaintances the 200,000 had online Facebook contact with.

Cambridge Analytica says it only had data for 30 million Facebook users.

Zuckerberg is meeting privately with lawmakers in Washington about the controversy and then testifying publicly Tuesday and Wednesday before two congressional committees.

Facebook is sending a notice to all of its 2.2 billion users with a link to see what apps they use and instructions on how they can, if they wish, shut off third-party access to their apps.

 
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Researchers Using Blue Light to Accelerate Relaxation After Intense Stress

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Spanish researchers have developed a technique to quickly remedy acute psychosocial stress, described as a short-term intense stress that occurs during social or interpersonal relationships caused by a verbal argument. The treatment involves blue, light-emitting diodes. VOA’s Mariama Diallo has more.
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Afghanistan Expands Perfume Market with Orange Blossom Scent

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Afghanistan is set to exploit its unique agricultural climate by refining and exporting another kind of flower, orange blossoms! An Afghan investor found a way to extract the citrusy, floral bouquet from the delicate flowers to create perfumes. As VOA’s Zabihullah Ghazi reports in Jalalabad, not only is the perfume diversifying the country’s agricultural output, it’s also providing employment opportunities. Shaista Sadat Lami narrates.
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Five Questions for Mark Zuckerberg as He Heads to Congress

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Congress has plenty of questions for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who will testify on Capitol Hill Tuesday and Wednesday about the company’s ongoing data-privacy scandal and how it failed to guard against other abuses of its service.

 

Facebook is struggling to cope with the worst privacy crisis in its history – allegations that a Trump-affiliated data mining firm may have used ill-gotten user data to try to influence elections. Zuckerberg and his company are in full damage-control mode, and have announced a number of piecemeal technical changes intended to address privacy issues.

 

But there’s plenty the Facebook CEO hasn’t yet explained. Here are five questions that could shed more light on Facebook’s privacy practices and the degree to which it is really sorry about playing fast and loose with user data – or just because its practices have drawn the spotlight.

 

QUESTION 1: You’ve said you should have acted years ago to protect user privacy and guard against other abuses. Was that solely a failure of your leadership, or did Facebook’s business model or other factors create an obstacle to change? How can you ensure that Facebook doesn’t make similar errors in the future?

 

CONTEXT: Zuckerberg controls 59.7 percent of the voting stock in Facebook. He is both chairman of the board and CEO. He can’t be fired, unless he fires himself. “At the end of the day, this is my responsibility,” he told reporters on a conference call last week. He also admitted to making a “huge mistake” in not taking a broad enough view of Facebook’s responsibility in the world.

 

Zuckerberg, however, has been apologizing for not doing better on privacy for 11 years . In the current crisis, neither he nor chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg have clarified exactly how Facebook developed such a huge blind spot, much less how it can prevent history from repeating itself.

 

POSSIBLE FOLLOW-UP: Does Facebook need a chief privacy officer with the authority to take action on behalf of users?

 

QUESTION 2: Who owns user data on Facebook, the company or the users? If it’s the latter, why shouldn’t Facebook allow people to opt out of being targeted by ads?

 

CONTEXT: Facebook collects data on its own (your likes, which ads you click on, etc.); keeps data you share yourself (photos, videos, messages); and correlates data from outside sources to data on its platform (email lists from marketers, and until recently, information from credit agencies).

 

Who owns what is a difficult question to answer, and Facebook clearly hasn’t been good at explaining it. While you can download everything the company knows about you, it doesn’t really allow you to take “your” data to a rival.

Sandberg told Today’s Savannah Guthrie that given Facebook’s ad-driven business model, you can’t currently avoid data mining of your public profile information. (You can opt not to see the resulting targeted ads , though.) Allowing that, Sandberg said, would effectively require Facebook to turn into a “paid product” that charges users.

POSSIBLE FOLLOW-UP: Don’t other businesses allow some users to opt out of ads? Why can’t Facebook charge users who want ad-free experiences the way Hulu and YouTube do?

QUESTION 3: Facebook has made connecting with others and sharing information dead simple. Why haven’t you put similar effort into making your privacy controls equally easy to use?

 

CONTEXT: Facebook has updated its privacy settings seven times in the last decade, each time aimed at making them simpler to use.

 

The latest update was on March 28. On April 4, the company announced new technical changes designed to close loopholes that allowed third parties overbroad access to user data.

 

Facebook makes many pieces of information your profile public by default; to lock them down, you have to change those settings yourself.

 

POSSIBLE FOLLOW-UP: Does this legacy suggest the government needs to step in with clear and universal privacy rules?

 

QUESTION 4: Did Facebook threaten legal action against the Guardian newspaper in the U.K. regarding its reporting on the Cambridge Analytica scandal?

 

CONTEXT: John Mulholland, editor of the Guardian US, tweeted in March that Facebook had threatened to sue to stop publication of its story that broke the Cambridge Analytica scandal in mid-March. Neither the Guardian nor Facebook have commented further.

 

POSSIBLE FOLLOW-UP: Do you still stand behind Facebook’s actions here?

QUESTION 5: Have you spoken with critics, including some former Facebook investors and colleagues, who argue that the company’s service has become an addictive and corrosive force in society?

 

CONTEXT: Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, said Facebook specializes in “exploiting” human psychology and may be harming our children’s brains. An early investor in Facebook, Roger McNamee compared Facebook to an addictive substance such as nicotine and alcohol.

 

Brian Acton, a co-founder of WhatsApp (acquired by Facebook in 2014), recently recommended that people should delete their Facebook accounts . Chamath Palihapitiya, an early vice president at Facebook, said Facebook’s tools are “ripping apart the social fabric.”

 

POSSIBLE FOLLOW-UP:  If not, why not?

 
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Scientists Harvest First Vegetables in Antarctic Greenhouse

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Scientists in Antarctica have harvested their first crop of vegetables grown without earth, daylight or pesticides as part of a project designed to help astronauts cultivate fresh food on other planets.

Researchers at Germany’s Neumayer Station III say they’ve picked 3.6 kilograms (8 pounds) of salad greens, 18 cucumbers and 70 radishes grown inside a high-tech greenhouse as temperatures outside dropped below -20 degrees Celsius (-4 Fahrenheit).

The German Aerospace Center DLR, which coordinates the project, said Thursday that by May scientists hope to harvest 4-5 kilograms of fruit and vegetables a week.

While NASA has successfully grown greens on the International Space Station, DLR’s Daniel Schubert says the Antarctic project aims to produce a wider range of vegetables that might one day be grown on Mars or the Moon.
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Trump Predicts Resolution of Trade Dispute with China

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U.S. President Donald Trump predicted Sunday there would be a resolution of the U.S.-China standoff on tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of goods the world’s two biggest economies are threatening to impose on each other.

The U.S. leader said, without offering any direct information, that “China will take down its Trade Barriers because it is the right thing to do.”

Trump said that “taxes will become Reciprocal & a deal will be made on Intellectual Property. Great future for both countries!”

Regardless, Trump said that he and Chinese President Xi Jinping “will always be friends, no matter what happens with our dispute on trade.”

The threats Washington and Beijing have lobbed at each other in recent days have rattled world stock markets, with wide swings of hundreds of points in stock indexes.

U.S. stocks plunged more than 2 percent Friday after Trump threatened to impose tariffs on an additional $100 billion worth of Chinese goods beyond the $50 billion worth of products he had already said would be affected.

Beijing responded in kind, saying it would impose tariffs on U.S. goods “until the end at any cost.”

Both countries have published lists of goods they intend to tax, with the U.S. hitting steel and aluminum imports from China, along with aerospace, tech and machinery goods. Other levies would target medical equipment, medicine and educational materials.

China said it would impose tariffs on more than 100 U.S. products, including soybeans, wheat, corn, beef, tobacco, vehicles, plastic products and an array of other items.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told CBS News that the threat of higher tariffs posed the risk of a trade war but that he does not expect one to materialize.

“Our expectation is that we don’t think there will be a trade war. Our objective is to continue to have discussions with China. I don’t expect there will be a trade war. It could be, but I don’t expect it at all,” he said.

Mnuchin said that Trump and Xi have a “very close relationship” and that the two countries would continue to discuss trade issues.

A key U.S. lawmaker, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, told ABC News, that U.S. businesses and consumers could inevitably be hurt if China imposes tariffs on U.S. products.

“There is no way for us to address China without absorbing some pain here,” Graham said. “To those who believe that China is cheating, what idea do you have better than Trump?”
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#MeToo Casts Long Shadow over Cosby’s Sexual Assault Retrial

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When Bill Cosby’s retrial on sexual assault charges begins on Monday, the man once known as “America’s Dad” will face the same judge and district attorney in the same Pennsylvania courtroom as he did last June when a hung jury failed to reach a verdict.

But the familiar trappings cannot disguise the reality that Cosby’s second trial on charges that he assaulted a former friend in 2004 will have significant differences from his first.

Cosby’s second trial will also play out against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement, which last autumn prompted a wave of sexual assault and misconduct accusations against dozens of powerful men in Hollywood, business and politics.

The movement has also stirred a national dialogue about the way society treats people who step forward to tell stories of sexual abuse.

More than 60 women have accused Cosby of sexual assaults dating back decades. The entertainer, now 80, has denied all of the accusations, saying any sexual encounters he may have had were consensual.

The Pennsylvania case, brought by Andrea Constand, a former administrator at Temple University, Cosby’s alma mater, is the only criminal prosecution to result from the accusations, most of which are too old to allow for charges.

At the second trial, five other Cosby accusers are expected to take the stand under oath and detail their accusations against him. Their testimony could bolster the prosecution’s argument that the celebrity best known for his role as the benign patriarch on “The Cosby Show” was a serial predator who preyed on vulnerable women.

The trial judge, Steven O’Neill, allowed prosecutors to call only one of the other accusers to the stand during the first trial. She told jurors that Cosby drugged and assaulted her in1996, in much the same manner that Constand testified Cosby did to her in 2004 at his home.

This time, prosecutors had sought to call as many as 19 other accusers, while defense attorneys objected to allowing any to appear, arguing that they would unduly prejudice the jury.

O’Neill ruled that prosecutors could call up to five women from a group of eight accusers that includes former model and television personality Janice Dickinson.

Such “prior bad act” witnesses are typically barred for fear jurors will be more likely to convict a defendant based on past behavior, rather than the specific charges before them. In rare cases, judges have permitted such testimony to show a defendant engaged in a pattern of behavior, using a particular modus operandi.

“It’s not a good day for the defense whenever a judge allows these types of witnesses to be called,” said Douglas Sughrue, a Pittsburgh-based defense lawyer. “You’re obviously now not just fighting one victim.”

Studies have shown that mock juries are far more likely to convict defendants after hearing from multiple prior accusers, particularly in sexual crime cases, according to Aviva Orenstein, a law professor at Indiana University and an expert in trial evidence.

“Even if he were able to discredit each individual woman, at a certain point, the jury is going to think, where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” she said.

The #MeToo movement has also stressed a need to be more receptive to accusers’ accounts.

“There’s no doubt the environment is more sensitive,” Sughrue said. “Your audience is maybe more sensitive to it, they’re maybe more aware of it.”

The defense case will also have some major differences, starting with the lawyers. Cosby’s new attorney is Los Angeles-based Tom Mesereau, best known for successfully defending singer Michael Jackson at his 2005 child molestation trial.

The defense has said it would seek to portray Constand as a liar motivated by a desire to get a piece of Cosby’s fortune.

That strategy got a boost this week when the judge said he would allow testimony from a woman who claims Constand mused aloud about falsely accusing a famous man to get money.

He also said  the defense could introduce evidence of Cosby’s payment to Constand to settle her civil lawsuit, a detail that has been kept from public view, including the jury from thefirst trial.

This story was written by Reuters.
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Africa Misses Out on Taiwan’s Development Aid Due to ‘One China’ Policy

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Taiwan says it regrets that the “one China” policy insisted on by Beijing prevents it from providing much needed development aid to most countries in Africa.

Taiwan was in a relatively good diplomatic position in Africa several years ago. Taiwan’s Deputy Secretary-General for International Cooperation and Development, Pai-po Lee, says this made it possible for those countries that had diplomatic relations with Taiwan to benefit from his agency’s aid projects.

“Previously, we have over nine countries with Taiwan. For instance, Senegal, the Gambia, Chad, Niger, Liberia, Central Africa — also Sao Tome Principe… Six years ago, they still have relations with Taiwan. But, then they shifted to China,” said Pai-po Lee.

Lee says Taiwan had invested a lot in the African region. But, all that is now in the past. He says Taiwan currently maintains diplomatic relations with only two countries — Burkina Faso and Swaziland.

He says Taiwan has been running productive agricultural and livestock, as well as vocational and medical programs in Swaziland since 1975.

As for Burkina Faso, he says a successful irrigation project on the Kou River, which was started in 1967, ended in 1973. That was when Burkina Faso broke off relations with Taiwan in favor of China.

But Lee tells VOA Burkina Faso restored ties with Taiwan in 1994. He suggests the lure of billions of dollars in Chinese aid was not strong enough to keep this impoverished country within Beijing’s diplomatic orbit.

“It is… coming from the Burkina Faso people. To think about the 1967 in Kou River, this 1967. They had quite a good memory of that… So, the people urged the government to restore the relations with Taiwan. So, that pressure comes from the people,” said Lee.

Since resuming development work in Burkina Faso, the Taiwanese development official says the country’s irrigation system has been expanded. He says a program is ongoing to train local nurses and medical doctors and an infant and maternal health program is having great success in reducing both maternal and infant deaths.

 

 

 
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UN, Singapore Concerned about Rising Trade Tensions

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The U.N. secretary-general and the Singaporean foreign minister voiced concerns about global trade tensions and rising protectionism during back-to-back meetings in Beijing on Sunday.

Following remarks from his Chinese counterpart, Singaporean Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan vowed to “double-down” on free trade and economic liberalization in tandem with China.

 

“This is a time in the world where the temptation to embark on unilateralism and protectionism is unfortunately rising,” Balakrishnan said.

 

In a separate meeting, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called China “absolutely crucial” in the international system.

 

“You mentioned reform and opening up — it’s so important in a moment when some others have a policy of closing up,” Guterres told Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

 

“The solutions for these problems are not to put globalization to question, but to improve globalization. Not isolation or protectionism, but more international cooperation,” Guterres said.

 

The comments came as China and the U.S. exchanged escalating tariff threats in what is already shaping up to be the biggest trade battle for more than a half century.

 

Beijing vowed Friday to “counterattack with great strength” if President Donald Trump follows through on threats to impose tariffs on an additional $100 billion in Chinese goods.

 

Trump’s announcement followed China’s decision to tax $50 billion in American products, including soybeans and small aircraft, in response to a U.S. move this week to impose tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese goods.

 

The U.S. bought more than $500 billion in goods from China last year and now is planning or considering penalties on some $150 billion of those imports. The U.S. sold about $130 billion in goods to China in 2017 and faces a potentially devastating hit to its market there if China responds in kind.

 

In the meetings, Wang attacked what he called “protectionism and unilateralism,” though he didn’t single out the U.S. by name.

 

“China will safeguard the principles of free trade and oppose protectionism,” Wang said. “We should push forward with economic globalization.”

 

Wang was welcoming both officials ahead of their planned appearances at the annual Boao Forum for Asia, a Chinese-sponsored annual gathering for political and economic elites on tropical Hainan Island.

 

Guterres will meet President Xi Jinping later Sunday and also plans to visit the China Peacekeeping Police Training Center.

 

Balakrishnan is traveling with Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on the first of a five-day visit to China.

 

 
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Women of Courage Fight Inequality, Injustice

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Outrage, compassion, a desire for justice: these are some of the motivations of 10 women honored by the U.S. State Department this year with the International Women of Courage Award. Mike O’Sullivan spoke with several recipients at a recent stop in Los Angeles.
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