It’s been only 10 years since Apple’s late co-founder Steve Jobs presented the first iPhone. Since then, the competition with other companies has evolved into a giant battle of smartphones, each trying to outsmart and outperform the others. Samsung and LG already released their new phones for this year, so expectations for the iPhone 8 are high. VOA’s George Putic looks at what features the new version may bring.
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Mexican director Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, a dark fairy tale in which a mute cleaning lady falls in love with an aquatic creature, won the Golden Lion award for best film at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday.
The film beat contenders including George Clooney’s Suburbicon and Alexander Payne’s Downsizing at the end of a 10-day, high-quality and star-studded movie marathon that critics said showed Venice was now on an equal footing with the widely revered Cannes film festival.
“As a Mexican, I want to say this is a first for a Mexican storyteller, so I want to dedicate and give the prize to every young Mexican filmmaker or Latin American filmmaker that is dreaming to do something in the fantastic genre, as a fairy tale, as a parable, and is faced with a lot of people saying it can’t be done. It can,” del Toro said.
The runner-up Grand Jury prize went to family tragedy Foxtrot by Israel’s Samuel Maoz, while France’s Xavier Legrand was picked as best director for his divorce drama Jusqu’a la Garde (Custody).
Charlotte Rampling received the best actress award for her performance in Italian film Hannah, while Palestinian Kamel El Basha took the best actor prize for his role in The Insult.
The award ceremony brought down the curtain on the Venice festival, the world’s oldest, which is seen as a launching pad for the industry’s awards season.
Moviemakers will be hoping for a replay of the success of films such as musical La La Land, clergy sex-abuse drama Spotlight, space movie Gravity and backstage comedy Birdman, which all won Academy Awards after premiering in Venice.
‘Incredible day’
“This is an incredible day for Mexican film, for Mexican storytellers. The three amigos have now conquered the Lido, with Alfonso Cuaron (Gravity) and Alejandro Inarritu (Birdman) both going on to Oscar gold after dominating Venice,” said Ariston Anderson, a film critic at Hollywood Reporter.
“While there’s no sure bet at this stage, there couldn’t be a better start for del Toro’s road to Oscar gold. And it will be very interesting to see what happens in March at the Academy Awards if he can continue the trend of Venice picking Oscar winners,” she said.
The big disappointment of the night was Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, starring Frances McDormand, which won only the award for best screenplay. The film, a portrayal of vengeance in small-town America, was acclaimed by critics in Venice as a prime Oscar contender.
For all the quality of the Venice film fest, this year in its 74th edition, critics said there was no clear outstanding movie.
“My thoughts after having viewed the lineup are the same — a lot of strong Oscar contenders but no clear-cut winner, unfortunately, as we had in previous years at the festival,” Anderson said.
Still, she said Venice — which not too long ago was seen as being doomed in the face of strong competition from Cannes and Toronto — had once again shown its appeal.
“Because of recent successes, we’re seeing more big studio films shift over to Venice for their international launches, so it will be interesting to see if this trend will continue over the next few years.”
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We know that fingerprints can be lifted off various surfaces. But now technology is available to steal fingerprints from a digital photograph. VOA’s Deborah Block explains how.
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The U.S. credit monitoring company Equifax is facing a storm of criticism, lawsuits and investigations after a data breach that may have compromised personal data for about 143 million Americans.
New York state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced Friday that his office would formally investigate the data breach, saying that more than 8 million New Yorkers had been affected by the hack.
“The Equifax breach has potentially exposed sensitive personal information of nearly everyone with a credit report, and my office intends to get to the bottom of how and why this massive hack occurred,” Schneiderman said in a statement.
Illinois’ attorney general also opened an investigation into the data breach, and more states are likely to follow suit.
Also Friday, U.S. Representative Jeb Hensarling, a Texas Republican who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said he would call for congressional hearings on the Equifax breach.
Two proposed class-action lawsuits, one filed in Portland, Oregon, and another in Atlanta, Georgia, alleged that Equifax had been negligent in protecting consumer data.
Stock price slides
Investors were also showing their displeasure about the hack by dropping their stock in the company. Equifax’s share price fell more than 13 percent in trading Friday, to $123.32. The decline equates to more than $2 billion in lost market value.
The Atlanta company said Thursday that the hackers had obtained names, Social Security numbers, birth dates and addresses of more than 40 percent of the U.S. population.
“Based on the company’s investigation, the unauthorized access occurred from mid-May through July 2017,” the company said in a statement.
The company said credit card numbers were also compromised for 209,000 U.S. consumers, as were credit dispute accounts for 182,000 people.
Equifax discovered the hack July 29 but waited until Thursday to warn consumers.
Although other cyberattacks have been bigger than this one, such as a data breach at Yahoo last year that affected more than 500 million accounts, this one could be the most damaging because of the type of data collected.
Equifax is one the largest credit-reporting companies in the United States.
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Country music singer Don Williams, one of the biggest stars of the 1970s and 1980s, died on Friday at the age of 78, his publicist said.
Williams, known as “the Gentle Giant” because of his 6-foot, 1-inch frame, mellow voice and low-key profile, had hits with Tulsa Time, I Believe in You and It Must Be Love over the course of a 50-year career.
He died on the same day as Troy Gentry, one half of the country music duo Montgomery Gentry, who was killed in a helicopter crash in New Jersey.
“2 legends lost at once. Troy Gentry and Don Williams will be missed so much. Praying for their families and may they rest in peace,” country-pop band Big & Rich wrote on Twitter.
The statement announcing his passing said Williams died of an undisclosed illness but gave no further details.
Williams was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2010 and released his last studio album, “Reflections,” in 2014.
Two years later, he announced his retirement from touring, saying it was “time to hang up my hat and enjoy some quiet time at home.”
Williams was a big influence on other musicians, spanning country to rock. Eric Clapton and Pete Townshend were among those who have recorded his music.
In 2016, a tribute album, “Gentle Giants: The Songs of Don Williams,” was released featuring performances by Alison Krauss, Trisha Yearwood, Garth Brooks and many others.
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Troy Gentry, one half of the award-winning country music duo Montgomery Gentry, died Friday in a helicopter crash just hours before a concert, according to a statement from the band’s website. He was 50.
The Federal Aviation Administration said the helicopter crashed into a wooded area near the Flying W Airport in Medford hours before Montgomery Gentry was due to perform at a resort that is also housed at the airport.
The band’s website called Gentry’s death “tragic” and said details of the crash are unknown.
“Troy Gentry’s family wishes to acknowledge all of the kind thoughts and prayers, and asks for privacy at this time,” the website said.
Medford Township Police Chief Richard Meder told NJ.com that police got a call at around 1 p.m. about a helicopter that was “distressed.”
He said crews were able to remove the passenger from the wreckage, but he died on the way to a hospital. The pilot died at the scene and crews were working to remove his body, Meder said.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether Gentry was the pilot or the passenger.
Gentry was born on April 5, 1967, in Lexington, Kentucky, where he met bandmate Eddie Montgomery and formed a group based off their last names.
Montgomery Gentry had success on the country charts and country radio in the 2000s, scoring No. 1 hits with Roll With Me, Back When I Knew It All, Lucky Man, Something to Be Proud Of and If You Ever Stop Loving Me. Some of the songs even cracked the Top 40 on the pop charts.
The band mixed country music with Southern rock. It was inducted into the Grand Ole Opry in 2009. The group released their debut album, “Tattoos & Scars,” in 1999.
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Hugh Jackman, Lupita Nyong’o, Aaron Paul and Demi Lovato will co-host this year’s Global Citizen Festival, an annual free event held in New York’s Central Park.
Performers at the Sept. 23 event include Stevie Wonder, Green Day, The Killers, The Lumineers, The Chainsmokers, Pharrell Williams, Big Sean, Andra Day and Alessia Cara.
The organization announced Friday that Frieda Pinto, Connie Britton, Deborra-lee Furness, Joan Smalls, Kal Penn, Malin Akerman, Mark Cuban and others will also co-host the multi-hour event. It will air live on MSNBC and Comcast NBCUniversal.
Fans can earn their free tickets for admission by joining the movement at globalcitizenfestival.com.
Last year, Jackman co-hosted the event with Neil Patrick Harris, Chelsea Handler and others. Performers at the 2016 concert included Rihanna, Eddie Vedder, Kendrick Lamar and Metallica.
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Television is one of the few screens that has Apple hasn’t conquered, but that may soon change. The world’s richest company appears ready to aim for its own Emmy-worthy programming along the lines of HBO’s Game of Thrones and Netflix’s Stranger Things.
Apple lured longtime TV executives Jaime Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg away from Sony Corp. in June and has given them $1 billion to spend on original shows during the next year, according to a Wall Street Journal report quoting unnamed people.
The programming would be available only on a subscription channel, most likely bundled with the company’s existing Apple Music streaming service. Apple declined to comment.
While $1 billion is a lot of money, it’s a drop in the bucket for Apple and its $262 billion cash hoard. But it’s still enough to vault Apple into the top tier of tech-industry outsiders producing their own slates of television shows.
iTunes came first
Hollywood has long shuddered at the thought of Apple training its sights on TV the way it once did on the music business.
Almost 15 years ago, Apple’s then-CEO Steve Jobs convinced record labels to let the company sell digital music on its iTunes store for 99 cents a single, a deal the music industry was happy to take in the face of growing music piracy enabled by Napster. Over time, though, Apple’s dominance in digital music chafed music executives, who saw the company siphoning off a chunk of their profits.
Movies and television have proven much harder for Apple to crack. The company’s interest in transforming television has been an open secret for years, but Hollywood has so far spurned Apple’s efforts to make itself an indispensable digital middleman for video.
In a way, Netflix beat Apple to the punch with its groundbreaking video streaming service. Launched in 2007, that service pioneered “binge watching” of entire TV seasons on any device with an internet connection. That gave new life to existing shows such as Breaking Bad, whose creator credits Netflix with its survival , and spawned the creation of other series tailor-made for bingeing.
Netflix also helped unleash a crescendo of creativity in Hollywood. Follow-on rivals Amazon and Hulu also boast popular video streaming services, and mainstream broadcasters such as CBS and Walt Disney Co. — the owner of ABC and ESPN, among other networks — are also jumping in.
Pressure to act
All of that has increased the pressure on Apple to step up its game in TV — not least because the increasing popularity of streaming is hurting its business of renting and selling video from iTunes.
Apple “doesn’t want to be left behind,” said Debby Ruth, senior vice president of consumer research firm Magid. “This is a way for them to put a stake in the ground.”
This year, the company released its first two original series, Planet of the Apps and Carpool Karaoke, on its Apple Music service, which has 27 million subscribers. But neither show has generated much buzz or critical acclaim.
The recent hiring of Erlicht and Van Amburg signaled Apple’s intent to make bigger splash. The executives have helped orchestrate several TV hits, including AMC’s Breaking Bad, and more recently branched out into video streaming with The Crown, which landed on Netflix last year and is up for 13 Emmy nominations in this Sunday’s ceremony.
Apple also has a not-so-secret weapon: hundreds of millions of iPhones and iPads already in the hands of faithful fans. It could easily transform those into a marketing platform to lure users to its TV service.
But the company has a steep hill to climb.
Bigger players
Netflix has more than 100 million worldwide subscribers and a video library that will add 1,000 hours of original programming this year alone. And HBO has become the Emmys’ pacesetter since branching into original programming 20 years ago.
Both companies vastly outspend Apple’s reported $1 billion production budget. HBO spends about $2 billion annually on its programming, which garnered 111 nominations in this year’s Emmy Awards, more than any other network. Netflix, which boasts the second most Emmy nominations with 91, expects to spend $6 billion on programming this year.
Apple is still experimenting in TV, said Gene Munster, a longtime Apple watcher and managing partner with the research and venture capital firm Loup Ventures.
“In five years, I bet Apple will either be investing $10 billion a year in content or zero,” said Munster. “It’s going to be one or the other.”
Jobs’ legacy
Jobs discussed his ambitions to shake up TV with his biographer, Walter Issacson, shortly before his death in 2011.
“He very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players and phones: Make them simple and elegant,” Isaacson wrote.
But no Apple television ever materialized. Instead, Apple has periodically upgraded its Apple TV, which isn’t a television, just a video streaming player that connects to TVs. That device has been losing market share to other streaming players made by Roku, Amazon and Google, according to the research firm Park Associates.
Building a successful programming lineup could give Apple more leverage to license shows from other Hollywood production houses. It might even embolden the company to finally release its own streaming TV set.
Apple will presumably also want to emulate Netflix’s ability to exploit usage data to determine what it thinks audiences want to watch. Netflix’s data analysis has helped it attract 25.5 million more subscribers in the U.S. alone since the February 2013 debut of its first original series, House of Cards.
But if Apple decides it needs a little more help in video streaming, Munster thinks there’s in 1-in-3 chance that it will buy Netflix to instantly gain the cachet and expertise in TV programming that it craves.
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This is the Top Five Countdown! We’re taking aim at the five most popular songs in the Billboard Hot 100 Pop Singles chart for the week ending September 9, 2017.
You’ll be glad you joined us this week because countdown history is made – this is one for the record books.
Number 5: Charlie Puth “Attention”
Charlie Puth rebounds a slot to fifth place with “Attention,” which tops this week’s Billboard Pop Songs chart.
How did Charlie know this song was a hit? His artist & repertoire partner Mike Beard tells Billboard that they usually have other people critique their songs…but this time they didn’t need to. They knew “Attention” was a winner.
Number 4: Imagine Dragons “Believer”
Also on the upswing is Imagine Dragons in fourth place with “Believer.”
Lead singer Dan Reynolds says therapy has made him a better person. Dan says he went through a crisis of faith, which has now led him to fight on behalf of others. Last month, Imagine Dragons headlined their own festival, LoveLoud, which works to benefit LGBTQ youths…particularly within the Mormon community.
Number 3: Cardi B “Bodak Yellow (Money Moves)”
Holding in third place is Cardi B with “Bodak Yellow (Money Moves).”
Earlier this year the New York rapper signed with the Atlantic label, and now says her debut album will drop in October. She broke the news to her fans last weekend at the Made In America festival in Philadelphia.
Number 2: DJ Khaled Featuring Rihanna & Bryson Tiller ” Wild Thoughts”
DJ Khaled, Rihanna, and Bryson Tiller occupy the runner-up slot for another week with “Wild Thoughts.”
DJ Khaled tells E! News that he used to fear flying so much that he hadn’t stepped on a plane in 10 years. He says taking his infant son Asahd on tour has helped him overcome that fear. Khaled couldn’t bear to be apart from him, so he’s back in the air and feeling fine.
Number 1: Luis Fonsi & Daddy Yankee Featuring Justin Bieber “Despacito”
“Despacito” remains airborne for an incredible 16th week at number one, and yes…that ties the all-time Hot 100 record, set in late 1995 and early 1996 by Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men. The name of their song? “One Sweet Day.”
Next week looms large: what will happen on the Hot 100? We’ll be here to tell you so don’t miss a moment!
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In Rwanda, less than 15 percent of the population has access to electricity. In rural areas, it can be as low as one percent.
In order to increase Rwanda’s energy capacity, a 17-hectare solar field with 28,000 panels was constructed in six months in 2014 by private power companies.
It is East Africa’s first large-scale commercial solar field, bringing in 8.5 megawatts of power at its peak — four percent of the country’s total power capacity. The project has brought power to more than 15,000 homes.
“We are living in the world and we have to contribute or to eradicate or eliminate polluting the atmosphere,” said Twaha Twagirimana, plant supervisor for Scatec Solar, which operates the project. “We need energy, and we need clean energy.”
Twagirimana said this investment in solar power is a step toward reducing global warming. Rwanda’s power grid relies heavily on diesel fuel, which is expensive and bad for the environment.
According to Scatec Solar, the solar field reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 8,000 tons per year.
Orphanage land
Private homes aren’t the only ones to benefit from the project. The solar panels are on land owned by the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village.
The choice of the site, about 60 kilometers from the capital, Kigali, was no accident. The rent paid for the land helps vulnerable children and young adults who were orphaned during or after Rwanda’s 1994 genocide.
About 500 young Rwandans live, study and play on the 144-acre residential community.
Mediatilice Kaytitesi, the community’s art center and theater coordinator, says she uses art to help youth cope with their losses.
“It’s something that can help open the mind of the kids,” she said. “Some draw tears, which means they have the tears in their hearts, their wounds. You can see their expressions.”
Pascal Atismani Claudien lost his father in 2006 and his mother in 2010. He said he doesn’t exactly know why they died — just that they were sick.
“When I have a problem, I take a paper and a pencil and draw and that problem goes away. When I have stress, I draw or paint,” said Claudien, who is starting his final year of high school at the village. “And when I am painting or drawing, I feel very happy.”
The Agahozo Shalom Youth Village was modeled after similar ones built for orphans in Israel after the Holocaust. In the Rwandan language of Kinyarwanda, Agahozo means “tears are dried.” In Hebrew, Shalom means peace.
“The mission was really to help bring back all the children who have lost parents and siblings and everything in their lives, to try to recreate the next best family that these children should have had, had their parents been alive,” explained Jean-Claude Nkulikiyimfura, the youth village’s executive director.
Claudien said he considers it more of a family than a school. “That’s why we call each other brothers and sisters,” he said.
Learning engineering
During his time at the school, Claudien visited the nearby solar panels and learned from the staff about how Rwanda’s largest solar field is positively impacting the country. He, himself, is from a small village with limited access to electricity.
About 50 students also received technical training at the solar field on engineering and solar technology to encourage them to work in green jobs in the future.
The construction of the nearly $24 million solar field employed more than 350 Rwandan workers.
Gigawatt Global developed the project with early-stage funding from the U.S. government’s Power Africa initiative.
“Rwanda had the right leadership and the right conditions to be really the test case and the positive fruits of concept for the entire sub-Saharan Africa for commercial scale solar,” said Yosef Abramowitz, the CEO and founder of Gigawatt Global.
About 600 million Africans don’t have access to electricity, according to the International Energy Agency.
Rwanda’s government aspires to nearly triple its power capacity by the end of 2018, through renewable power sources like methane, hydro, mini-hydro, peat, thermal and more solar fields.
In 2016, Rwanda partnered with developer Ignite Power to provide rooftop solar to 250,000 houses by the end of next year. Users will pay about $5 per month for the solar power system in a rent-to-own model.
Efforts like this will go toward the Rwandan government’s goal of bringing power to 70 percent of households.
Abramowitz said he’s convinced “solar is the future of Africa.” His firm wants to replicate this model throughout sub-Saharan Africa, increasing energy capacity while also benefiting the social good.
“There’s every reason in the world — economic, social and political — that solar should be the main generation source of energy on the continent,” he said.
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There are smart cars, hybrid cars, electric cars, and now a biodegradable car. A group of technology students has built the first car with a biocomposite structure. VOA’s Deborah Block tells us more about it.
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Germany’s BMW is gearing up to mass produce electric cars by 2020 and will to have 12 different models by 2025, it said on Thursday, as traditional manufacturers race to catch up with U.S. electric car pioneer Tesla.
Car buyers shunned electric vehicles because of their high cost and limited operating range until Tesla unveiled the Model S in 2012, a car that cracked the 200 mile (322 km) range barrier on a single charge.
Since then, big advances in battery technology and a global crackdown on pollution in the wake of Volkswagen’s diesel scandal have raised pressure on carmakers to speed up development of zero-emission alternatives.
BMW, which launched the i3 electric car in 2013, said it was now readying its factories to mass produce electric cars by 2020 if demand for battery driven vehicles takes off.
“By 2025, we will offer 25 electrified vehicles — 12 will be fully-electric,” Chief Executive Harald Krueger told journalists in Munich, adding the electric cars would have a range of up to 700 km (435 miles).
It marks a significant foray by a major manufacturer into electrification. BMW, which includes the Mini and Rolls-Royce brands and sold 2.34 million cars last year, announced the move on the day smaller rival Jaguar said it would offer electric or hybrid variants of all its models by 2020.
On Wednesday, Nissan unveiled a new version of its Leaf electric vehicle in its latest move to take on Tesla, the U.S. firm co-founded by Elon Musk that sold 83,922 vehicles last year.
Rolls-Royce
Traditional carmakers have been slow to embrace the electric vehicle market because it remains unprofitable, largely due to the cost of batteries which make up between 30 percent and 50 percent of the cost of an electric vehicle.
A battery pack with 60 kWh capacity and 500 km range costs around $14,000 today, compared with a gasoline engine that costs around $5,000. Add to that the $2,000 for the electric motor and the inverter, and the gap is even wider.
But capacity investments into the battery sector may bring down costs of electric vehicles to a “tipping point” when they reach parity with combustion-engine equivalents some time between 2020 and 2030, according to analysts at Barclays.
With cities threatening to ban combustion-engine vehicles or to tax diesel cars more heavily, the total cost of ownership of electric cars could drop below their combustion-engine equivalents, and Europe could become a 100 percent pure battery electric vehicle market by 2035, according to analysts at ING.
The Frankfurt motor show, starting next week, will be used by BMW to unveil a new four-door electric car positioned between the i3 city car and the i8 hybrid sportscar, Krueger said.
“We will be increasing the share of electrified models across all brands and model series. And, yes, that also includes the Rolls-Royce brand and BMW M vehicles,” he said.
German rivals will also be showing electric cars, with Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz brand unveiling the EQA, a concept mass market electric car, Volkswagen taking the wraps off the ID Crozz.
Aside from vehicle cost, a key obstacle to making electric cars popular is the amount of time it takes to recharge, and a lack of charging stations.
London needs to spend 10 billion euros ($12 billion) to get charging infrastructure to a level where retail buyers can practically own an electric car, consultancy AlixPartners has said. Almost none of that spending has been earmarked so far.
($1 = 0.8331 euros)
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Graydon Carter, the longtime editor of Conde Nast’s culture magazine “Vanity Fair,” will be stepping down in December after 25 years at the helm, the publication said on Thursday.
Carter, 68, who has steered Vanity Fair through the shifting journalism landscape and expanded it onto a successful digital platform as well as print edition, will oversee the magazine’s 2018 Hollywood issue, the publication said.
“I’ve loved every moment of my time here and I’ve pretty much accomplished everything I’ve ever wanted to do,” Carter said in a statement, adding that he was “now eager to try out this ‘third act’ thing.”
Carter said in an interview with The New York Times published on Thursday that he wanted to “leave while the magazine is on top.”
“I want to leave while it’s in vibrant shape, both in the digital realm and the print realm. And I wanted to have a third act – and I thought, time is precious,” he told the Times.
The Times said no replacement has been named yet for Carter, who earns a “seven-figure salary” at the magazine, but suggested that New York magazine’s editor-in-chief, Adam Moss, and Janice Min, former editor of The Hollywood Reporter, are potential candidates.
Carter, appointed editor of Vanity Fair in 1992, and turned the magazine’s focus to crime, culture and celebrities. He nurtured revered writers such as Christopher Hitchens and Dominick Dunne, humorists Fran Lebowitz and James Wolcott, and photography great Annie Leibovitz.
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A full 67 percent of Americans now report receiving at least a portion of their news from social media, according to a new poll released Thursday.
The Pew Research poll showed a small increase since early 2016, when 62 percent of people said they relied on social media for some of their news. The overall change isn’t particularly substantial, but among some demographics, social media use increased significantly.
Among non-white U.S. adults, 74 percent now say they get news from social media, marking a 10-percent increase over last year when 64 percent said they did. Similarly, among those aged 50 or older, the percentage who said they receive news from social media rose by 10 percent from 2016 to 55 percent.
While Facebook still dwarfs other social media sites in terms of news dissemination, Twitter, Snapchat and YouTube made strong gains in the number of people using the sites for news over the course of the last year.
“Looking at the population as a whole, Facebook by far still leads every other social media site as a source of news. This is largely due to Facebook’s large user base, compared with other platforms, and the fact that most of its users get news on the site,” the report reads.
Twitter showed a 15-percent increase in the number of users who said that’s where they get their news, from 59 percent in 2016 to 74 percent in 2017. The number of YouTube users who get news from the site rose from 21 percent in 2016 to 32 percent in 2017. Snapchat showed a 12-percent gain, from 17 percent in 2016 to 29 percent in 2017.
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Movie fans attending a special screening of the movie It in Bangor, Maine, got a bonus: Author and local resident Stephen King joined them.
King’s radio station, WKIT-FM, sponsored the special showing Wednesday night, and King received a standing ovation. He told the moviegoers: “You’re going to be scared out of your seats anyway, so you might as well sit down.”
It is based on King’s book about a sewer-dwelling, homicidal clown in Derry, Maine. King has said the fictionalized town is based on Bangor.
The new adaptation of King’s novel will be previewed in many select theaters Thursday before it opens nationwide Friday.
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As new smartphones hit the market month in month out, one Slovak technology buff is offering visitors to his vintage cellphone museum a trip down memory lane – to when cellphones weighed more than today’s computers and most people couldn’t afford them.
Twenty-six year-old online marketing specialist Stefan Polgari from Slovakia began his collection more than two years ago when he bought a stock of old cellphones online. Today, his collection boasts some 1,500 models, or 3,500 pieces when counting duplicates.
The museum, which takes up two rooms in his house in the small eastern town of Dobsina, opened last year and is accessible by appointment.
The collection includes the Nokia 3310, which recently got a facelift and re-release, as well as a fully functional, 20-year old, brick-like Siemens S4 model, which cost a whopping 23,000 Slovak koruna – more than twice the average monthly wage in Slovakia when it came out.
“These are design and technology masterpieces that did not steal your time. There are no phones younger than the first touchscreen models, definitely no smartphones,” said Mr Polgari.
“It’s hard to say which phone is most valuable to me, perhaps the Nokia 350i Star Wars edition,” said Mr Polgari – who uses an iPhone in his daily life.
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Water-poor Jordan on Thursday launched a project using seawater to produce crops with clean energy.
Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Crown Prince Haakon of Norway, which contributed most of the $3.7 million cost, inaugurated the facility in the kingdom’s Red Sea port city of Aqaba.
Haakon told reporters he was “impressed by the way innovative ideas have been translated into a plant the size of four football fields.”
The facility, part of the Sahara Forest Project (SFP), produces “energy, freshwater and food and all this in an arid desert,” he said.
The facility, surrounded by rocky desert, uses seawater to cool greenhouses. A solar-powered plant then desalinates the water for irrigation.
Inside the greenhouses, pesticide-free cucumbers flourish.
The project is set to produce 130 tons of vegetables a year and 10,000 liters of freshwater a day.
“This is just the start,” said Joakim Hauge, head of SFP. He said the organization selected Jordan because it has the required abundance of sunlight and seawater.
Last month, a report by Stanford University suggested that Jordan, one of the world’s driest countries, could face more severe droughts unless new technologies are applied in farming and other sectors.
“Future adaptation to extreme droughts in Jordan will be an immense challenge,” said the report by the university’s School of Earth Science. “The projected negative impacts of more severe droughts of greater duration calls for essential alternatives.”
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Although 75 percent of our planet is covered with water, many countries around the world suffer from a low supply of fresh water. There is plenty of water in the ocean, but removing the salt is very expensive, and only coastal nations with an ample supply of power, such as the Arab Gulf States, can afford to rely on desalination. Now, as sources of fresh water dwindle, emerging new technologies could make the technology much more cost effective. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Some energy, like solar and wind, is renewable. Other sources of power are recyclable. Faith Lapidus tells us how old tires and congealed fat are generating interest and energy.
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