Introduced in Nigeria by the U.S. Peace Corps in the 1960s, baseball is slowly becoming a sport of note, thanks to the efforts of a few dedicated enthusiasts of the game. Timothy Obiezu reports from Ekiti state.
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Artificial intelligence is changing how wildlife reserves prevent poaching, with smart cameras, drones, and other technology helping rangers protect endangered species. Kate Bartlett and Zaheer Cassim report from Limpopo, South Africa. Video editor: Jason Godman.
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Drone photographers and videographers from around the world submitted more than 65,000 pieces of work in an annual online competition. VOA’s Julie Taboh highlights some of the winning entries. Editing: Adam Greenbaum
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Four temples from ancient Rome, dating back as far as the 3rd century B.C. stand smack in the middle of one of the modern city’s busiest crossroads.
But until Monday, practically the only ones getting a close-up view of the temples were the cats that prowl the so-called “Sacred Area,” on the edge of the site where Julius Caesar was assassinated.
Now, with the help of funding from Bulgari, the luxury jeweler, the group of temples can be visited by the public.
For decades, the curious had to gaze down from the bustling sidewalks rimming Largo Argentina (Argentina Square) to admire the temples below. That’s because, over the centuries, the city had been built up, layer by layer, to levels several meters above the area where Caesar masterminded his political strategies and was later fatally stabbed in 44 B.C.
Behind two of the temples is a foundation and part of a wall that archaeologists believe were part of Pompey’s Curia, a large rectangular-shaped hall that temporarily hosted the Roman Senate when Caesar was murdered.
What leads archaeologists to pinpoint the ruins as Pompey’s Curia? “We know it with certainty because latrines were found on the sides” of Pompey’s Curia, and ancient texts mentioned the latrines, said Claudio Parisi Presicce, an archaeologist and Rome’s top official for cultural heritage.
Ruins among ‘best preserved’
The temples emerged during the demolition of medieval-era buildings in the late 1920s, part of dictator Benito Mussolini’s campaign to remake the urban landscape. A tower at one edge of Largo Argentina once topped a medieval palace.
The temples are designated A, B, C and D, and are believed to have been dedicated to female deities. One of the temples, reached by an imposing staircase and featuring a circular form and with six surviving columns, is believed to have been erected in honor of Fortuna, a goddess of chance associated with fertility.
Taken together, the temples make for “one of the best-preserved remains of the Roman Republic,” Parisi Presicce said after the Mayor of Rome Roberto Gualtieri cut a ceremonial ribbon Monday afternoon. On display in a corridor near the temples is a black-and-white photograph showing Mussolini cutting the ribbon in 1929 after the excavated ruins were shown off.
Also visible are the travertine paving stones that Emperor Domitian had laid down after a fire in 80 A.D. ravaged a large swath of Rome, including the Sacred Area.
Artifacts on display
On display are some of the artifacts found during last century’s excavation. Among them is a colossal stone head of one of the deities honored in the temples, chinless and without its lower lip. Another is a stone fragment of a winged angel of victory.
Over the last decades, a cat colony flourished among the ruins. Felines lounged undisturbed, and cat lovers were allowed to feed them. On Monday, one black-and-white cat sprawled lazily on its back atop the stone stump of what was once a glorious column.
Bulgari helped pay for the construction of the walkways and nighttime illumination, a relief to tourists who step gingerly over the uneven ancient paving stones of the Roman Forum. The Sacred Area’s wooden walkways are wheelchair- and baby-stroller-friendly. For those who can’t handle the stairs down from the sidewalk, an elevator platform is available.
The attraction is open every day except for Mondays and some major holidays, with general admission tickets priced at 5 euros ($5.50).
Curiously, the square owes its name not to the South American country but to the Latin name of Strasbourg, France, which was the home seat of a 15th-century German cardinal who lived nearby and who served as master of ceremonies for pontiffs, including Alexander VI, the Borgia pope.
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A new film charts the response of the large Iranian community in Los Angeles to the brutal crackdown on anti-government protests in Iran. As Henry Ridgwell reports from Paris, Iranian communities across the world are coming together to try the help their countrymen and women back home. Camera: Vahid Karami
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A submarine on a tourism expedition to explore the wreckage of the Titanic has gone missing off the coast of southeastern Canada, according to the private company that operates the vessel.
OceanGate Expeditions said in a brief statement on Monday that it was “mobilizing all options” to rescue those on board the vessel. It was not immediately clear how many people were missing.
The U.S. Coast Guard did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Media reports said the Coast Guard has launched search-and-rescue operations.
“We are deeply thankful for the extensive assistance we have received from several government agencies and deep sea companies in our efforts to reestablish contact with the submersible,” OceanGate said in a statement.
The company is currently operating its fifth Titanic “mission” of 2023, according to its website, which was scheduled to start last week and finish on Thursday.
The expedition, which costs $250,000 per person, starts in St. John’s, Newfoundland, before heading out approximately 400 miles into the Atlantic to the wreckage site, according to OceanGate’s website.
In order to visit the wreck, passengers climb inside Titan, a five-person submersible, which takes about two hours to descend to the Titanic.
The British passenger ship famously sunk in 1912 on its maiden voyage after striking an iceberg, killing more than 1,500 people. The story has been immortalized in non-fiction and fiction books as well as the 1997 blockbuster movie “Titanic.”
June 21 marks the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere – in Seattle, Washington, the summer solstice was celebrated this past weekend with the annual Fremont Solstice Parade. Natasha Mozgovaya has more.
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The Dutch government is soon to join the United States and Japan in rolling out new semiconductor export control measures aimed at keeping sensitive technology away from China due to concern for potential misuse, the country’s economic affairs minister told reporters on a visit to Washington.
The measures are likely to further restrict sales to China by Netherlands-based ASML, maker of the world’s most advanced chip-printing machines, which last year disclosed the “unauthorized misappropriation of data” by a now former employee in China.
The United States in October 2022 announced its own export control measures affecting advanced computing integrated circuits and certain semiconductor manufacturing items.
The U.S. said the measures were aimed at items that “could provide direct contributions to advancing military decision making” such as “designing and testing weapons of mass destruction (WMD), producing semiconductors for use in advanced military systems, and developing advanced surveillance systems that can be used for military applications and human rights abuses.”
The U.S. subsequently asked allies including Japan and the Netherlands, which play key roles in the semiconductor supply chain, to introduce similar measures.
“The main concern is [the chip-making technology] will be used in military products,” Micky Adriaansens, Netherlands’ minister of economic affairs and climate, told a group of journalists on June 8 at the Dutch Embassy in Washington.
Adriaansens acknowledged that the negotiations with Washington have not been easy.
“To be honest, the conversation has been intense, and is still intense,” she said. “But we agreed already upon the main issues, with a good [mutual] understanding of what is the right thing to do.”
Adriaansens said those understandings still have to be translated into regulations but that her country understands the importance of the measures.
“We realize that we, the U.S., the Netherlands, Japan and Korea, are very strong in the semicon[ductor] value chain, supply chain, and we have a responsibility there,” the minister said, echoing a statement made by Japan’s trade minister in March.
Japan also takes steps
Tokyo announced its own measures on March 31, saying that beginning in July, Japan will restrict 23 types of semiconductor manufacturing equipment from being exported to China. “We are fulfilling our responsibility as a technological nation to contribute to international peace and stability,” Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Yasutoshi Nishimura told reporters.
At the center of the Netherlands’ semiconductor export control deliberations is ASML, a Dutch company with its headquarters in Veldhoven, about an hour and a half’s drive southeast of Amsterdam. The company was known as Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography in its early years but is now known as ASML.
Europe’s biggest high-tech firm by market capitalization, ASML is the world’s largest supplier of photolithography machines, which are used to produce computer chips.
Its flagship products are the EUV, or extreme ultraviolet, and DUV, or deep ultraviolet, lithography machines that use advanced light technology to shrink and then print tiny patterns down to the nanometer level on silicon wafers, a critical and essential component of the semiconductor manufacturing process.
Since 2019, ASML’s world-exclusive EUV machines have been on the Netherlands’ export control list, meaning they cannot be sold to China without government approval. In a statement issued in March, the company said it understood that the new export controls could be applied to its less-advanced DUV machines and other products as well.
While Taiwan is its top customer, ASML has more than 1,000 employees working in 12 office buildings in major Chinese cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. Last year, sales to China made up 14% of the company’s total net systems sales.
In its 2022 annual report, released on February 15 this year, the company disclosed that it had experienced “unauthorized misappropriation of data relating to proprietary technology by a (now) former employee in China.” The incident may have led to the violation of certain export control regulations, the report said.
The company said a comprehensive internal review has since been launched, but the nature and extent of the data that was misappropriated has not been publicly disclosed.
Report mentions possible leak
Another possible leak of the company’s proprietary information that happened in China was disclosed in the previous year’s annual report.
“Early in 2021, we became aware of reports that a company associated with XTAL, Inc., against which ASML had obtained a damage award for trade secret misappropriation in 2019 in the USA, was actively marketing products in China that could potentially infringe on ASML’s IP rights,” said the 2021 report.
The second company was identified as Beijing-based DongFang JingYuan Electron, which was established in 2014 at about the same time as XTAL and controlled by the same people.
ASML’s annual report said the company had shared its concerns with the Chinese authorities and was monitoring the situation closely.
In its case against XTAL, ASML told the court that a former Chinese employee working at an ASML subsidiary in the United States had stolen 2 million lines of source code for critical software. It said the theft was conducted on behalf of both XTAL and DongFang.
ASML’s representatives told the court that it took XTAL only two years to replicate a technology that ASML had spent $100 million and a decade developing, as first reported by Bloomberg. XTAL, which ASML’s attorneys described in court proceedings as essentially the same as DongFang JingYuan, then tried to sell the technology to South Korea-based Samsung, a longtime client of ASML.
In late March, ASML CEO Peter Wennink met with China’s newly installed minister of commerce in Beijing. China is “firmly committed to high-level openness, willing to create favorable conditions for multinationals such as ASML to do business in China,” Wang Wentao, the newly minted commerce minister, told the visiting CEO.
“We hope ASML will affirm and strengthen its confidence in trading and investing in China and make proactive contributions to Sino-Dutch collaboration in trade and economics,” Wang continued.
It isn’t clear whether the two sides discussed the intellectual property infringement issues described in ASML’s 2021 and 2022 annual reports or if they did, what remedies Beijing may have proposed.
‘Relentless pursuit’
Asked how the company plans to fend off future attempts to steal its trade secrets, a company spokesperson told VOA that ASML is committed to “relentless pursuit of individuals or entities that violate or threaten to violate our [intellectual property] in any way.”
While less well known for semiconductor manufacturing than Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. or U.S.-based Intel, ASML is often viewed as Europe’s most valuable high-tech company, likely key to the Netherlands’ winning the bid to be the seat of NATO’s newly established Innovation Fund.
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In early June, sporadic but serious service disruptions plagued Microsoft’s flagship office suite — including the Outlook email and OneDrive file-sharing apps — and cloud computing platform. A shadowy hacktivist group claimed responsibility, saying it flooded the sites with junk traffic in distributed denial-of-service attacks.
Initially reticent to name the cause, Microsoft has now disclosed that DDoS attacks by the murky upstart were indeed to blame.
But the software giant has offered few details — and did not immediately comment on how many customers were affected and whether the impact was global. A spokeswoman confirmed that the group that calls itself Anonymous Sudan was behind the attacks. It claimed responsibility on its Telegram social media channel at the time. Some security researchers believe the group to be Russian.
Microsoft’s explanation in a blog post Friday evening followed a request by The Associated Press two days earlier. Slim on details, the post said the attacks “temporarily impacted availability” of some services. It said the attackers were focused on “disruption and publicity” and likely used rented cloud infrastructure and virtual private networks to bombard Microsoft servers from so-called botnets of zombie computers around the globe.
Microsoft said there was no evidence any customer data was accessed or compromised.
While DDoS attacks are mainly a nuisance — making websites unreachable without penetrating them — security experts say they can disrupt the work of millions if they successfully interrupt the services of a software service giant like Microsoft on which so much global commerce depends.
It’s not clear if that’s what happened here.
“We really have no way to measure the impact if Microsoft doesn’t provide that info,” said Jake Williams, a prominent cybersecurity researcher and a former National Security Agency offensive hacker. Williams said he was not aware of Outlook previously being attacked at this scale.
“We know some resources were inaccessible for some, but not others. This often happens with DDoS of globally distributed systems,” Williams added. He said Microsoft’s apparent unwillingness to provide an objective measure of customer impact “probably speaks to the magnitude.”
Microsoft dubbed the attackers Storm-1359, using a designator it assigns to groups whose affiliation it has not yet established. Cybersecurity sleuthing tends to take time — and even then can be a challenge if the adversary is skilled.
Pro-Russian hacking groups including Killnet — which the cybersecurity firm Mandiant says is Kremlin-affiliated — have been bombarding government and other websites of Ukraine’s allies with DDoS attacks. In October, some U.S. airport sites were hit. Analyst Alexander Leslie of the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future said it’s unlikely Anonymous Sudan is located as it claims in Sudan, an African country. The group works closely with Killnet and other pro-Kremlin groups to spread pro-Russian propaganda and disinformation, he said.
Edward Amoroso, NYU professor and CEO of TAG Cyber, said the Microsoft incident highlights how DDoS attacks remain “a significant risk that we all just agree to avoid talking about. It’s not controversial to call this an unsolved problem.”
He said Microsoft’s difficulties fending of this particular attack suggest “a single point of failure.” The best defense against these attacks is to distribute a service massively, on a content distribution network for example.
Indeed, the techniques the attackers used are not old, said U.K. security researcher Kevin Beaumont. “One dates back to 2009,” he said.
Serious impacts from the Microsoft 365 office suite interruptions were reported on Monday June 5, peaking at 18,000 outage and problem reports on the tracker Downdetector shortly after 11 a.m. Eastern time.
On Twitter that day, Microsoft said Outlook, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business were affected.
Attacks continued through the week, with Microsoft confirming on June 9 that its Azure cloud computing platform had been affected.
On June 8, the computer security news site BleepingComputer.com reported that cloud-based OneDrive file-hosting was down globally for a time.
Microsoft said at the time that desktop OneDrive clients were not affected, BleepingComputer reported.
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The smell of pineapple bread fills the kitchen of “Vida Libre,” or “free life,” a gang rehabilitation program founded in El Salvador by American pastor Kenton Moody in 2021.
The trust that Moody puts in former gang members is not widely shared. Thousands of lives have been destroyed in this Central American country after decades of gang violence.
Over the past year, President Nayib Bukele’s security forces have cracked down harshly on gangs, arresting more than 68,000 people suspected of criminal involvement, though human rights groups say innocent people are also being detained.
Ministries like Moody’s are caught in the middle. Dozens of men who were part of evangelical rehabilitation ministries were also arrested and taken back to prison. Of the 38 members of Vida Libre, ten have been detained by the government.
Inside the Vida Libre complex, in the impoverished city of Santa Ana, Moody frequently hugs the young men under his care and assigns them chores.
On a recent day, Angel and Kevin sprinkled sugar over pastries in the bakery. Salvador replaced light bulbs in the barnyard. Moody asked that they be identified by their first names for their safety.
Andy, who crafts wooden key chains to sell, said a gang recruited him when he was 12. The 29-year-old joined Moody’s program two years ago after almost a decade in prison.
“Maybe humanity sees me as someone bad, but I hope that with my attitudes changing day by day, I can prove that I’m different,” he said.
The first of the big gangs were born far from El Salvador.
To flee the country’s civil war, half a million Salvadorans migrated to the United States in the 1980s. The majority settled in Los Angeles and there, after joining Mexican criminal groups, the Mara Salvatrucha 13 (MS-13) and Barrio 18 gangs were formed.
In the 1990s, the U.S. deported 4,000 gang members to El Salvador. The government estimates the current number of gang members is as high as 76,000.
After arriving in El Salvador, MS-13 took control of over roughly half the territory and Barrio 18 most of the rest. A few spots were considered neutral.
Many Salvadorans were forced to internalize unwritten rules, such as avoiding enemy neighborhoods, dressing according to gang standards and paying extortion demands to survive.
Last year, after a surge in gang violence, Bukele issued an emergency decree that suspended certain civil liberties, including access to a lawyer and the right to be informed of the reason for an arrest.
About 5,000 people were released after the government failed to link them to criminal groups, according to official records.
Moody founded Vida Libre after visiting a juvenile prison where gang members from a nearby community were incarcerated for burying a woman alive.
Fearing that they might return to gang life upon their release, he wondered: How can I truly help?
“A church is the basis for supporting people to get ahead,” he said.
His evangelical church, “La Puerta Abierta,” which means “open door,” is a cornerstone for social projects funded mostly by U.S. donors.
Vida Libre, one of the church’s programs, takes in minors who are nearing the end of their prison sentence. Its goal is to provide an adequate transition to society, said Allan Espinoza, who leads the project.
The stigma of prison makes it difficult for ex-convicts to resume their studies or find employment. Vida Libre offers workshops in agriculture, carpentry, automotive painting and baking.
Participants arise at 5 a.m. to attend a morning service, and they read the Bible daily. Breaking the rules leads to expulsion and rehabilitation takes time, Espinoza said. Some tell him they want to leave, but he asks them to be patient.
Others knock on his door to talk and, once in his office, they just cry.
Not all evangelical churches in El Salvador open their doors to gang members, but in most marginalized communities there are pastors willing to take the risk.
“Within the evangelical tradition, the worst sinner provides the Holy Spirit with the biggest opportunity to demonstrate the power of the Gospel and Jesus to transform people,” said Robert Brenneman, professor of criminal justice and sociology at Goshen College in Indiana.
He spent years in Central America studying gang youth who wanted a stable, nonviolent lifestyle.
Evangelical-Pentecostal congregations offer resources for transformation — and expect converts to stay away from crime, alcohol and drugs.
“These organizations address what they believe to be the root causes of gang affiliation and participation: poverty, weak schools and unemployment,” Brenneman said.
In the last two decades, three Salvadoran presidents have imposed strict measures to fight gangs. The two prior to Bukele failed in the long term.
Brenneman said, “The crisis is larger than the gangs … Salvadoran leaders have been able to scapegoat the gangs and direct attention away from the inequality that drives so much of the violence.”
While walking through an empty room behind Eben-Ezer Church in San Salvador, the Rev. Nelson Moz speaks with sadness about a man named Raúl, an ex-gang member who came under Moz’s wing in 2012.
Raúl and more than 40 men from Moz’s ministry are now back in jail.
According to the pastor, Raúl converted to Christianity in prison. The pastor placed a mattress in his office and offered temporary refuge for Raúl after his initial release. They shared lunch and long conversations there.
“That’s how I got to understand,” Moz said. “Imprisonment might be necessary to take out of circulation a person who is causing harm to society, but there’s a background to it.”
Gang members understood this. To those in need, they offered food, clothing and protection. For thousands of Salvadorans who lacked homes, the gang became their family.
The beds are still made in the empty rooms of Eben-Ezer Church.
Some new mattresses are wrapped in plastic. Before the detention of Raúl and other ex-gang members in his program, Moz was planning to expand. “True change can happen,” he said.
Moz and Moody do what they can to support families whose members have been recently imprisoned by the government. Moody builds wooden homes for single mothers and provides free school for children. Moz looks for people willing to take in orphans.
“Young people can change the course of the family, help the country’s poverty if they have education and work,” Moody said.
Rooting out gangs will take years, he thinks. The weeds have been cut, but as long as the roots remain hidden, the breeding ground — the marginalization — will also subsist.
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The PGA Tour and Saudi Arabia-backed LIV Golf have long battled in court over competing claims affecting men’s professional golf. But in a surprise move last week, the groups announced they would merge commercially. Some U.S. senators are alarmed. VOA’s Laurel Bowman reports.
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The first large-scale battery to be built at an Australian coal site has been switched on in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley, east of Melbourne.
The 150-megawatt battery is at the site of the former Hazelwood power station in the southern Australian state of Victoria. The station was built in the 1960s and closed in 2017.
The new battery was officially opened Wednesday and has the ability to power about 75,000 homes for an hour during the evening peak. The decommissioned coal plant produced 10 times more electricity, but the battery’s operators aim to increase its generating capacity over time.
The Latrobe Valley has been the center of Victoria’s coal-fired power industry for decades, but the region is changing.
The new battery will store power generated by offshore wind farms and is run by the French energy giant Engie, and its partners Eku Energy and Fluence.
Engie chief executive Rik De Buyserie told reporters it is an important part of Australia’s green energy future.
“The commissioning of this battery represents a key milestone in this journey and marks an important step in the transition of the La Trobe Valley from a thermal energy power to a clean energy power provider,” he said.
The state of Victoria aims to have at least 2.6 gigawatts of battery storage connected to the electricity grid by 2030 and 6.3 gigawatts by 2035.
Lily D’Ambrosio, Victoria’s minister for climate action, energy and resources, told reporters that the state government is committed to boosting its renewable energy sector.
“It is important that we just do not sit around waiting for old technology to disappear, close down, but we actually get in front of it and make sure that we have more than sufficient supply to meet our needs,” she said. “That is what keeps downward pressure on prices.”
Australia has legislated a target to cut carbon emissions by 43% from 2005 levels by 2030 and to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.
Electricity generation in Australia is still dominated by coal and gas but there is a distinct shift to renewable sources of power.
In April the Clean Energy Council, an industry association, said that clean energy accounted for 35.9% of Australia’s total electricity generation in 2022, up from 32.5% in 2021.
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U.S. security officials say the U.S. Energy Department and several other federal agencies have been hacked by a Russian cyber-extortion gang.
Homeland Security officials said Thursday the agencies were caught up in the hacking of MOVEit Transfer, a file-transfer program that is popular with governments and corporations.
The Energy Department said two of its entities were “compromised” in the hack.
The Russia-linked extortion group CI0p, which claimed responsibility for the hacking, said last week on the dark web site that its victims had until Wednesday to negotiate a ransom or risk having sensitive information dumped online. It added that it would delete any data stolen from governments, cities and police departments.
Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said while the intrusion was “largely an opportunistic one” that was superficial and caught quickly, her agency was “very concerned about this campaign and working on it with urgency.”
Reuters reports that the Britain’s Shell Oil Company, the University of Georgia, Johns Hopkins University and the Johns Hopkins Health System were also among those targeted in the hacking campaign. The Associated Press quoted a senior CISA official as saying U.S. military and intelligence agencies were not affected.
MOVEit said it is working with the federal agencies and its other customers to help fix their systems.
Information for this report was provided by The Associated Press and Reuters.
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Can you pay my bills?
That seems to be what Sweden is asking Beyoncé after the star came to town.
When the singer launched her global tour last month in Stockholm, tens of thousands of fans from around the world swarmed the Swedish capital. But it’s not all fun and games for the host of the kickoff of Beyoncé’s first solo tour in seven years.
A senior economist at a top Scandinavian bank says Beyoncé had something to do with Sweden’s higher-than-expected inflation rate last month.
Consumer prices rose 9.7% last month in Sweden compared with a year earlier, the country’s statistics agency, Statistics Sweden, said Wednesday. Costs for certain goods and services, including hotels, rose.
That was a drop from 10.5% in April — the first time that inflation in Sweden has fallen below 10% in more than six months — but it was still slightly higher than economists had predicted.
Michael Grahn, chief economist for Sweden at Danske Bank, thinks Beyoncé’s concert may help explain why.
“Beyonce’s start of her world tour in Sweden seems to have coloured May inflation,” he said on Twitter on Wednesday.
“How much is uncertain,” he added, but the concert “probably” contributed to 0.2 of the 0.3 percentage points that restaurant and hotel prices added to the monthly increase in inflation.
An estimated 46,000 people attended each of Beyoncé’s two Stockholm concerts. Fans from around the world took advantage of Sweden’s relatively weaker currency to buy tickets that were cheaper than in other countries, such as the United States.
“The main impact on inflation, however, came from the fact that all fans needed somewhere to stay,” Grahn told The New York Times. The popularity of the concerts meant some fans had to venture up to 40 miles [64 kilometers] away to find a room, he said.
Grahn told the Financial Times that the phenomenon was “quite astonishing.”
But he added on Twitter that he predicts the situation will return to normal in June.
“We expect this upside surprise to be reversed in June as prices on hotels and tickets reverse back to normal,” he said.
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An announcement by YouTube that it will no longer remove content containing misinformation on the U.S. 2020 presidential election has some experts divided.
In a June blog post, YouTube said it was ending its policy — enforced since December 2020 — that removed tens of thousands of videos that falsely claimed the 2020 election was impaired by “widespread fraud, errors or glitches.”
“We find that while removing this content does curb some misinformation, it could also have the unintended effect of curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm,” the post said.
The Google-owned platform says the move is to support free speech, but some experts in tech and disinformation say it could allow harmful content to again be easily shared.
“The message that YouTube is sending is that the election denial crowd is now welcome again on YouTube and can resume its campaign of undermining trust in American elections and democratic institutions,” said Paul Barrett, deputy director at New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.
But others say the policy caused “legitimate” content to be removed and that the core issue is a wider societal problem, not something confined to YouTube.
YouTube’s other election misinformation policies remain unchanged, the platform said.
These include prohibiting content aimed at misleading people about the time and place for voting and claims that could significantly discourage voting.
Google spokesperson Ivy Choi told VOA in an email that the company has “nothing to add beyond what we shared in our blog post.”
Still, some U.S. lawmakers and experts are concerned about how harmful content circulates on YouTube.
Representative Zoe Lofgren, who sat on the House January 6 committee, said the idea that election denial disinformation is “no longer harmful — including that they do not increase the risk of violence — is simply wrong.”
“The lies continue to have a dramatic impact on our democracy and on the drastic increase in threats faced by elected officials at all levels of government,” Lofgren told VOA in an emailed statement.
Lofgren, a Democrat from California, added that YouTube’s parent company Alphabet should reconsider its decision.
Justin Hendrix, founder and editor of the nonprofit website Tech Policy Press, questioned whether YouTube’s policy had even been successful.
“There is, to me, a bigger question about whether YouTube was ever really effectively removing information that promoted false claims about the 2020 election,” Hendrix told VOA. “I wonder whether this is a capitulation to the reality that the company was never able to effectively take action against false claims in the 2020 election.”
YouTube is one of the most popular social media platforms in the United States, and it has over 2 billion users around the world.
But despite the platform’s popularity, it has escaped the level of scrutiny given to Twitter and Facebook, according to Barrett. The main reason: the difficulty in analyzing videos in bulk.
YouTube is the main place people go for videos on innocuous things like how to fix your car or do your makeup, said Barrett. “But it’s also the go-to place for video for people with extreme political ideas,” he added.
Videos on YouTube amplified the false narratives that the 2020 election was rigged and that the entire American election system is corrupt, according to a 2022 report Barrett and Hendrix co-authored, A Platform ‘Weaponized’: How YouTube Spreads Harmful Content – And What Can Be Done About It.
Election misinformation was also cited by the January 6 committee as it investigated the circumstances that resulted in a mob of former President Donald Trump’s supporters storming the U.S. Capitol on the day the election results were due to be certified.
In a report on the insurrection, the committee said the platform “included efforts to boost authoritative content” and that it “labeled election fraud claims — but did so anemically.”
Some free-speech experts like Jennifer Stisa Granick, the surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, believe the policy change is good.
“There have been some legitimate discussions about voting and the legitimacy of the election that have been adversely impacted” under the former policy, Granick said.
“Election disinformation was not spread by YouTube or other online platforms, but by [Trump] himself. And the misinformation that circulates online is a drop in the bucket compared to what the [former] president of the United States says,” Granick said.
The bigger problem, she said, is that for some political candidates, “election denial is a fundamental part of their campaigns.”
People who complain that YouTube is evading its responsibility are “looking to the platform to solve a social and political problem that the United States has,” Granick said.
Roy Gutterman, director of the Tully Center for Free Speech at Syracuse University, believes any policy that openly fosters free speech is worthwhile.
“But calls to violence, which may accompany some of this discourse, would still not be protected,” Gutterman told VOA.
Barrett, however, is concerned that the reversal creates the potential for YouTube to be exploited.
The broader effect, Barrett said, “is the erosion of trust more generally” — not just in American elections.
Studies have shown that exposure to misinformation and disinformation is tied to lower trust in the media.
The YouTube policy change is hardly the main cause of that process, Barrett said, but it’s a contributing factor.
The policy change comes as several major social media companies face criticism for failing to quell election misinformation and disinformation on their platforms. The recent development with YouTube is part of a broader trend in the tech industry, according to Hendrix.
“I’m concerned that we’re seeing across the board almost a kind of throwing up the hands around some of these issues,” he said, pointing to staff layoffs, including those in trust and safety departments.
All of these factors contribute to “an erosion of even more than democracy,” Barrett said. “That’s an erosion of the social connections that hold society together.”
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Suspected state-backed Chinese hackers used a security hole in a popular email security appliance to break into the networks of hundreds of public and private sector organizations globally, nearly a third of them government agencies including foreign ministries, the U.S. cybersecurity firm Mandiant said Thursday.
“This is the broadest cyber espionage campaign known to be conducted by a China-nexus threat actor since the mass exploitation of Microsoft Exchange in early 2021,” Charles Carmakal, Mandiant’s chief technical officer, said in an emailed statement. That hack compromised tens of thousands of computers globally.
In a blog post Thursday, Google-owned Mandiant expressed “high confidence” that the group exploiting a software vulnerability in Barracuda Networks’ Email Security Gateway was engaged in “espionage activity in support of the People’s Republic of China.” It said the activity began as early as October.
The hackers sent emails containing malicious file attachments to gain access to targeted organizations’ devices and data, Mandiant said. Of those organizations, 55% were from the Americas, 22% from the Asia Pacific region and 24% from Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and they included foreign ministries in Southeast Asia and foreign trade offices and academic organizations in Taiwan and Hong Kong. the company said.
Mandiant said the majority impact in the Americas may partially reflect the geography of Barracuda’s customer base.
Barracuda announced on June 6 that some of its email security appliances had been hacked as early as October, giving the intruders a back door into compromised networks. The hack was so severe that the California company recommended fully replacing the appliances.
After discovering it in mid-May, Barracuda released containment and remediation patches, but the hacking group, which Mandiant identifies as UNC4841, altered its malware to try to maintain access, Mandiant said. The group then “countered with high-frequency operations targeting a number of victims located in at least 16 different countries.”
Blinken trip
Word of the breach comes as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken departs for China this weekend as part of the Biden administration’s push to repair deteriorating ties between Washington and Beijing.
His visit had initially been planned for early this year but was postponed indefinitely after the discovery and shootdown of what the U.S. said was a Chinese spy balloon over the United States.
Mandiant said the targeting at both the organizational and individual account levels focused on issues that are high policy priorities for China, particularly in the Asia Pacific region. It said the hackers searched for email accounts of people working for governments of political or strategic interest to China at the time they were participating in diplomatic meetings with other countries.
In an emailed statement Thursday, Barracuda said about 5% of its active Email Security Gateway appliances worldwide showed evidence of potential compromise. It said it was providing replacement appliances to affected customers at no cost.
The U.S. government has accused Beijing of being its principal cyber espionage threat, with state-backed Chinese hackers stealing data from both the private and public sector.
In terms of raw intelligence affecting the U.S., China’s largest electronic infiltrations have targeted OPM, Anthem, Equifax and Marriott.
Earlier this year, Microsoft said state-backed Chinese hackers have been targeting U.S. critical infrastructure and could be laying the technical groundwork for the potential disruption of critical communications between the U.S. and Asia during future crises.
China says the U.S. also engages in cyber espionage against it, hacking into computers of its universities and companies.
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Microsoft Founder Bill Gates was in China on Thursday for what he said were meetings with global health and development partners who have worked with his charitable foundation.
“Solving problems like climate change, health inequity and food insecurity requires innovation,” Gates tweeted. “From developing malaria drugs to investing in climate adaptation, China has a lot of experience in that. We need to unlock that kind of progress for more people around the world.”
Gates said global crises stifled progress in reducing death and poverty in children and that he will next travel to West Africa because African countries are particularly vulnerable “with high food prices, crushing debt, and increasing rates of TB and malaria.”
Reuters, citing two people familiar with the matter, said Gates would meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Gates is the latest business figure to visit China year, following Apple’s Tim Cook and Tesla’s Elon Musk.
Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters.
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Experts are raising concerns that a recent Cambodian government order allocating around $1 million to a local company for a facial recognition technology project could pave the way for the technology to be used against citizens and human rights defenders.
The order, signed by Prime Minister Hun Sen and released in March in a recent tranche of government documents, would award the funds to HSC Co. Ltd., a Cambodian company led by tycoon Sok Hong that has previously printed Cambodian passports and installed CCTV cameras in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital.
The Oct. 17 order appears to be the first direct indication of Cambodia’s interest in pursuing facial recognition, alarming experts who say such initiatives could eventually be used to target dissenters and build a stronger surveillance state similar to China’s. In recent months, the government has blocked the country’s main opposition party from participating in the July national elections, shut down independent media and jailed critics such as labor organizers and opposition politicians.
Neither the Interior Ministry nor the company would answer questions about what the project entails.
“This is national security and not everyone knows about how it works,” Khieu Sopheak, secretary of state and spokesperson for the Interior Ministry, told VOA by phone. “Even in the U.S., if you ask about the air defense system, they will tell you the same. This is the national security system, which we can’t tell everyone [about].”
The order names HSC, a company Sok Hong founded in 2007, as the funds’ recipient. HSC’s businesses span food and beverage, dredging and retail.
HSC also has close ties to the government: in addition to printing passports and providing CCTV cameras in Phnom Penh, it runs the system for national ID cards and has provided border checkpoint technology. Malaysian and Cambodian media identify Sok Hong as the son of Sok Kong, another tycoon who founded the conglomerate Sokimex Investment Group. Both father and son are oknhas or “lords,” a Cambodian honorific given to those who have donated more than $500,000 to the government.
When reached by phone, Sok Hong told VOA, “I think it shouldn’t be reported since it is related to national security.”
Cambodia’s history of repression, including monitoring dissidents in person and online, has raised suspicions that it could deploy such technology to target activists. Last year, labor leaders reported they were recorded via drones during protests.
“Authorities can use facial recognition technology to identify, track individuals and gather vast amounts of personal data without their consent, which could eventually lead to massive surveillance,” said Chak Sopheap, director of the Cambodian Center for Human Rights. “For instance, when a government uses facial recognition to monitor attendance at peaceful gatherings, these actions raise severe concerns about the safety of those citizens.”
In addition, giving control of facial recognition technology to a politically connected firm, and one that already has access to a trove of identity-related information, could centralize citizens’ data in a one-stop shop. That could make it easier to fine-tune algorithms quickly and later develop more facial recognition tools to be shared with the government in a mutually beneficial relationship, Joshua Kurlantzick, Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow for Southeast Asia, told VOA.
China — one of Cambodia’s oldest and closest allies — has pioneered collecting vast amounts of data to monitor citizens. In Xinjiang, home to about 12 million Uyghurs, Chinese authorities combine people’s biometric data and digital activities to create a detailed portrait of their lives.
In recent years, China has sought to influence Southeast Asia, “providing an explicit model for surveillance and a model for a closed and walled-garden internet,” Kurlantzick said, referring to methods of blocking or managing users’ access to certain content.
Some efforts have been formalized under the Digital Silk Road, China’s technology-focused subset of the Belt and Road initiative that provides support, infrastructure and subsidized products to recipient countries.
China’s investment in Cambodian monitoring systems dates back to the early days of the Digital Silk Road. In 2015, it installed an estimated $3 million worth of CCTV cameras in Phnom Penh and later promised more cameras to “allow a database to accumulate for the investigation of criminal cases,” according to reports at the time. There is no indication China is involved in the HSC project, however.
While dozens of countries use facial recognition technology for legitimate public safety uses, such investments must be accompanied by strict data protection laws and enforcement, said Gatra Priyandita, a cyber politics analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
Cambodia does not have comprehensive data privacy regulations. The prime minister himself has monitored Zoom calls hosted by political foes, posting on Facebook that “Hun Sen’s people are everywhere.”
Given the country’s approach to digital privacy, housing facial recognition within a government-tied conglomerate is “concerning” but not surprising, Priyandita said.
“The long-term goal of these kinds of arrangements is the reinforcement of regime security, of course, particularly the protection of Cambodia’s main political and business families,” Priyandita said.
In the immediate future, Cambodia’s capacity to carry out mass surveillance is uncertain. The National Internet Gateway — a system for routing traffic through government servers which critics compared to China’s “Great Firewall” — was delayed in early 2022. Shortly before the scheduled rollout, the government advertised more than 100 positions related to data centers and artificial intelligence, sowing doubts about the technical knowledge behind the project.
Still, the government is pushing to strengthen its digital capabilities, fast-tracking controversial laws around cybercrime and cybersecurity and pursuing a 15-year plan to develop the digital economy, including a skilled technical workforce.
Sun Narin of VOA’s Khmer Service contributed to this report.
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Chinese authorities are cracking down on political and fraud cases driven by deepfakes, created with face- and voice-changing software that tricks targets into believing they are video chatting with a loved one or another trusted person.
How good are the deepfakes? Good enough to trick an executive at a Fuzhou tech company in Fujian province who almost lost $600,000 to a person he thought was a friend claiming to need a quick cash infusion.
The entire transaction took less than 10 minutes from the first contact via the phone app WeChat to police stopping the online bank transfer when the target called the authorities after learning his real friend had never requested the loan, according to Sina Technology.
Despite the public’s outcry about such AI-driven fraud, some experts say Beijing appears more concerned about the political challenges that deepfakes may pose, as shown by newly implemented regulations on “deep synthesis” management that outlaw activities that “endanger national security and interests and damage the national image.”
The rapid development of artificial intelligence technology has propelled cutting-edge technology to mass entertainment applications in just a few years.
In a 2017 demonstration of the risks, a video created by University of Washington researchers showed then-U.S. President Barack Obama saying things he hadn’t.
Two years later, Chinese smartphone apps like Zao let users swap their faces with celebrities so they could appear as if they were in a movie. Zao was removed from app stores in 2019 and Avatarify, another popular Chinese face-swapping app, was also banned in 2021, likely for violation of privacy and portrait rights, according to Chinese media.
Pavel Goldman-Kalaydin, head of artificial intelligence and machine learning at SumSub, a Berlin-based global antifraud company, explained how easy it is with a personal computer or smartphone to make a video in which a person appears to say things he or she never would.
“To create a deepfake, a fraudster uses a real person’s document, taking a photo of it and turning it into a 3D persona,” he said. “The problem is that the technology, it is becoming more and more democratized. Many people can use it. … They can create many deepfakes, and they try to bypass these checks that we try to enforce.”
Subbarao Kambhampati, professor at the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence at Arizona State University, said in a telephone interview he was surprised by the apparent shift from voice cloning to deepfake video calling by scammers in China. He compared that to a rise in voice-cloning phone scams in the U.S.
“Audio alone, you’re more easily fooled, but audio plus video, it would be little harder to fool you. But apparently they’re able to do it,” Kambhampati said, adding that it is harder to make a video that appears trustworthy.
“Subconsciously we look at people’s faces … and realize that they’re not exactly behaving the way we normally see them behave in terms of their facial expressions.”
Experts say that AI fraud will become more sophisticated.
“We don’t expect the problem to go away. The biggest solution … is education, let people understand the days of trusting your ears and eyes are over, and you need to keep that in the back of your mind,” Kambhampati said.
The Internet Society of China issued a warning in May, calling on the public to be more vigilant as AI face-changing, voice-changing scams and slanders became common.
The Wall Street Journal reported on June 4 that local governments across China have begun to crack down on false information generated by artificial intelligence chatbots. Much of the false content designed as clickbait is similar to authentic material on topics that have already attracted public attention.
To regulate “deep synthesis” content, China’s administrative measures implemented on January 10 require service providers to “conspicuously mark” AI-generated content that “may cause public confusion or misidentification” so that users can tell authentic media content from deepfakes.
China’s practice of requiring technology platforms to “watermark” deepfake content has been widely discussed internationally.
Matt Sheehan, a fellow in the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noted that deepfake regulations place the onus on the companies that develop and operate these technologies.
“If enforced well, the regulations could make it harder for criminals to get their hands on these AI tools,” he said in an email to VOA Mandarin. “It could throw up some hurdles to this kind of fraud.”
But he also said that much depends on how Beijing implements the regulations and whether bad actors can obtain AI tools outside China.
“So, it’s not a problem with the technology,” said SumSub’s Goldman-Kalaydin. “It is always a problem with the usage of the technology. So, you can regulate the usage, but not the technology.”
James Lewis, senior vice president of the strategic technologies program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, told VOA Mandarin, “Chinese law needs to be modernized for changes in technology, and I know the Chinese are thinking about that. So, the cybercrime laws you have will probably catch things like deepfakes. What will be hard to handle is the volume and the sophistication of the new products, but I know the Chinese government is very worried about fraud and looking for ways to get control of it.”
Others suggest that in regulating AI, political stability is a bigger concern for the Chinese government.
“I think they have a stronger incentive to work on the political threats than they do for fraud,” said Bill Drexel, an associate fellow for the Technology and National Security Program at Center for a New American Security.
In May, the hashtag #AIFraudEruptingAcrossChina was trending on China’s social media platform Weibo. However, the hashtag has since been censored, according to the Wall Street Journal, suggesting authorities are discouraging discussion on AI-driven fraud.
“So even we can see from this incident, once it appeared that the Chinese public was afraid that there was too much AI-powered fraud, they censored,” Drexel told VOA Mandarin.
He continued, “The fact that official state-run media initially reported these incidents and then later discussion of it was censored just goes to show that they do ultimately care about covering themselves politically more than they care about addressing fraud.”
Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
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