It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Wednesday, November 03, 2021
Brandon Lee's sister says actors need gun safety training
Issued on: 02/11/2021 -
Shannon Lee said gun safety training could be a matter of life or death for those working in the film industry Robyn Beck AFP
Los Angeles (AFP)
Actors who use firearms on Hollywood sets should have to be trained in safety protocols, Shannon Lee, whose brother, Brandon Lee, was killed in an accidental shooting on a movie set, said Monday.
Lee, the daughter of martial arts legend Bruce Lee, said such training could be a matter of life or death for those working in the film industry.
"I think that mandatory gun safety training (should be required) for the actor so that they can check the guns themselves and know how to use them appropriately," Lee told AFP during the Asian World Film Festival in Los Angeles.
"And so that they can keep others safe," she added.
Lee said she finds the current gun safety situation "frustrating," referencing the tragic accident last month when Alec Baldwin fatally shot cinematographer Halyna Hutchins.
Hutchins was killed during the filming of "Rust" when Baldwin fired a gun he had been told by the film's assistant director was "cold" -- meaning it did not have a live round in the chamber.
The assistant director, Dave Halls, has since told detectives that he did not fully check the gun before declaring it safe.
"It shouldn't happen again," said Lee, whose brother Brandon was killed at age 28 while filming "The Crow" in 1993.
Lee said she never spoke with Michael Massee, who fired the gun that killed her brother and who died of cancer in 2016.
"I felt sorry for Michael Massee, I felt really sorry because it is a horrible thing to cause someone else to die. And I also feel sorry for Alec Baldwin," she said.
She advised Baldwin to look after himself after such a traumatic incident, and to not feel pressured to talk to the press.
"It's really tough what he's going through, he has to take care of himself," she said.
The 63-year-old actor broke his silence about the incident on Saturday, telling reporters he had been advised by police not to talk about the ongoing investigation.
Top Indian brands baulk after threats by Hindu hardliners Top Indian brands baulk after threats by Hindu hardlinersClothing brand Manyavar had to roll back its campaign after one of its ads featuring Bollywood A-lister Alia Bhatt appeared to question a traditional wedding ritual
(AFP/Money SHARMA)
Abhaya SRIVASTAVA Tue, November 2, 2021,
India's biggest festive season is in full swing but top brands are under pressure from right-wing hardliners accusing them of hurting Hindu sentiments.
Critics say an atmosphere of growing religious intolerance and fear since Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014 is behind the rise in social media vitriol and physical attacks on minority groups.
Clothes and furniture retailer FabIndia and wellness firm Dabur had to pull adverts in the busy shopping period ahead of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights later this week.
Household name FabIndia triggered a storm of abuse online for using an Urdu term, "Jash-e-Rivaaz" ("celebration of tradition"), to describe its latest festive collection.
Urdu is one of India's 22 official languages but uses a Persian-Arabic script and is considered a "Muslim language". While Urdu originated in India, which is home to nearly 200 million Muslims, it is also the national language of bitter rival Pakistan.
Many devout Hindus believe it should not be used for their rituals and festivals.
Others were outraged that women featured in the advert were not wearing a bindi, a decorative design with religious significance often adorned by Hindu women on their foreheads. Soon, the hashtag #NoBindiNoBusiness began to trend on Twitter.
Tejasvi Surya, a parliamentarian from Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), tweeted that FabIndia "must face economic costs for such deliberate misadventures".
FabIndia insisted the collection was not for Diwali and said it has "always stood for the celebration of India with its myriad traditions in all hues."
Dabur's advert courted controversy by showing two women in a same-sex partnership celebrating "Karwa Chauth" -- a festival in which married Hindu women pray and fast for the longevity of their husbands.
After Dabur pulled the ad following intense pressure online, Twitter user Milind Risbud, whose bio calls for the global supremacy of Hinduism, wrote: "That's the power of United Hindus! Well done Hindus!"
- 'Obscene and objectionable' -
Designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee, whose creations are popular with top Indian celebrities such as Priyanka Chopra Jonas, was next.
Mukherjee's promotional campaign featured seductive close-up images of women -- and men -- wearing a traditional mangalsutra necklace usually reserved for married women.
Narottam Mishra, the home minister in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, called it "objectionable and obscene" and threatened to have Mukherjee arrested.
His Sabyasachi label pulled the ad late Sunday, saying it was "deeply saddened that it has instead offended a section of our society."
But it added: "In the context of making heritage and culture a dynamic conversation, the Mangalsutra campaign aimed to talk about inclusivity and empowerment."
Clothing brand Manyavar too had to roll back its campaign after one of its ads featuring Bollywood A-lister Alia Bhatt appeared to question a traditional wedding ritual.
The latest incidents come after jewellery brand Tanishq, owned by the Tata conglomerate, was last year forced to withdraw an advert showing an interfaith couple at a baby shower organised for the Hindu bride by her Muslim in-laws.
The brand was accused of glorifying "love jihad" -- a term coined by nationalist extremists to accuse Muslim men of seducing Hindu women and forcing them to convert -- a flashpoint issue in the officially secular country.
The brand faced a backlash on social media and a store manager in Modi's home state of Gujarat was forced to write an apology note by men who stormed into his shop.
- 50 threats a day -
Activists say since Modi took power, minority groups have become increasingly marginalized, something the government denies.
A spate of incidents have been taken place in the real world and not just on social media, including attacks on Muslims and lower-caste Hindus for cow slaughter, or vandalism of churches.
Even entertainers have felt the heat with three shows in Mumbai featuring comedian Munawar Faruqui cancelled last week after Hindu right-wing outfit Bajrang Dal threatened to burn down the venues.
Faruqui, who was arrested in January in a case accusing him of insulting Hindu gods and goddesses, told NDTV in an interview Monday that he gets "50 threat calls daily".
Last month, Bajrang Dal members ransacked the set of web-series "Ashram" in Madhya Pradesh and threw ink on producer-director Prakash Jha, accusing him of showing Hindus in a wrong light.
"Because of the silence at the top both in the government and the party, people at the lower end, the rank and file, feel they can flex their muscles and indulge in such ruffian behaviour," political analyst Parsa Venkateshwar Rao told AFP.
"The pendulum is swinging towards right-wing attitudes which has become sort of legitimate because of the right-wing government."
Jen Oneal has stepped down from her role as co-leader of Blizzard, leaving Mike Ybarra as the head of the studio known for making Overwatch, World of Warcraft and Diablo. Oneal will temporarily transition to a new position, but will leave Activision Blizzard (fine, and King) at the end of the year.
Activision Blizzard is facing a handful of lawsuits and investigations into reports of sexual harassment, gropings, and systemic gender discrimination at the studio, stemming from the leadership down. Oneal and Ybarra took over as co-leaders of Blizzard in August after president J. Allen Brack was named in the original California lawsuit, leading to his dismissal. Oneal was the first woman in a president role since Activision's founding in 1979.
Oneal published an open letter to the Blizzard community, reading in part as follows:
I have made the decision to step away from co-leading Blizzard Entertainment and will transition to a new position before departing ABK at the end of the year. Effective immediately, Mike Ybarra will lead Blizzard. I am doing this not because I am without hope for Blizzard, quite the opposite — I’m inspired by the passion of everyone here, working towards meaningful, lasting change with their whole hearts. This energy has inspired me to step out and explore how I can do more to have games and diversity intersect, and hopefully make a broader industry impact that will benefit Blizzard (and other studios) as well. While I am not totally sure what form that will take, I am excited to embark on a new journey to find out.
After months of pressure from employees, shareholders and government agencies, Activision Blizzard ended its policy of forced arbitration in cases of sexual harassment and discrimination, and implemented a zero-tolerance approach to harassment at the studio. The original California lawsuit is ongoing.
Blizzard announced two big delays alongside news of Oneal's departure: Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV, neither of which was given a release window
Activision loses Blizzard
co-leader, delays launch of 'Overwatch', 'Diablo'
·
(Reuters) - Activision Blizzard Inc co-leader Jen Oneal on Tuesday decided to step down from her role, giving full control to Mike Ybarra and the videogame publisher put off the launch of two much-awaited titles, sending its shares down 10%.
Ybarra said the delay in the rollout of "Overwatch 2" and "Diablo IV" was due to the leadership change, but did not give a new timeline for their launch, while the company forecast an underwhelming adjusted sales in the holiday quarter.
Oneal and Ybarra took the helm three months ago after Allen Brack stepped down as president, a week after the company was sued for workplace harassment and pay discrimination.
Following this, the company last month fired more than 20 employees, with 20 more facing other forms of disciplinary action.
The owner of "Call of Duty" and "Candy Crush" franchises also created an $18 million fund to compensate and make amends to eligible claimants, while Chief Executive Bobby Kotick said he would take a large paycut.
In a letter to the company's gaming community, Oneal said she will leave at the end of the year to focus more on diversity in the gaming industry, which will "hopefully make a broader industry impact that will benefit Blizzard" and other studios.
With her exit, the company now has three female executives in the 13-member leadership team.
Meanwhile, as pandemic-related curbs eased, Activision's total monthly active users in the third quarter remained unchanged at 390 million from a year earlier, indicating signs of slowing demand for games.
The company, which faces competition from rivals Electronic Arts Inc and Take-Two, said in-game net bookings were same as the third quarter of 2020.
Its adjusted sales for the third quarter was $1.88 billion, in line with Wall Street expectations.
The company said it expects fourth-quarter adjusted sales to be $2.78 billion. Analysts were expecting it to be $2.93 billion, according to Refinitiv data.
(Reporting by Tiyashi Datta and Nivedita Balu in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur)
‘Ordinary people suffer most’: China farms face climate woes
By CHRISTINA LARSON and EMILY WANG FUJIYAMA 1 of 24
A farmer talks about the impact of recent floods as she grabs the stubs of corn plants that were washed away in Huangtugang village in central China's Henan province on Saturday, Oct. 23, 2021. The flooding disaster in July is the worst that older farmers can remember in 40 years – but it is also a preview of the kind of extreme conditions the country is likely to face as the planet warms up, and weather patterns farmers depend upon are increasingly destabilized. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan)
JIAOZUO, China (AP) — Wang Yuetang’s sneakers sink into the mud of what was once his thriving corn and peanut farm as he surveys the damage done by an unstable climate.
Three months after torrential rains flooded much of central China’s Henan province, stretches of the country’s flat agricultural heartland are still submerged in several inches of water. It’s one of the many calamities around the world that are giving urgency to the U.N. climate summit underway in Glasgow, Scotland.
”There is nothing this year. It’s all gone,” Wang said. “Farmers on the lowland basically have no harvest, nothing.” He lost his summer crop to floods, and in late October the ground was still too wet to plant the next season’s crop, winter wheat.
On other nearby farms, shriveled beanstalks and rotted cabbage heads bob in the dank water, buzzing with flies. Some of the corn ears can be salvaged, but because the husks are moldy, they can be sold only as animal feed, bringing lower prices.
The flooding disaster is the worst that farmers in Henan like Wang can remember in 40 years — but it is also a preview of the kind of extreme conditions the country is likely to face as the planet warms and the weather patterns growers depend upon are increasingly destabilized.
“As the atmosphere warms up, air can hold more moisture, so when storms occur, they can rain out more extreme precipitation,” said Richard Seager, a climate scientist at Columbia University. “Chances are extremely likely that human-induced climate change caused the extreme flooding you saw this summer in places like China and Europe.”
China, the most populous country in the world, with 1.4 billion people, is now the planet’s largest contributor to climate change, responsible for around 28% of carbon dioxide emissions that warm the Earth, though the United States is the biggest polluter historically.
As world leaders take part this week in the climate summit, China is being criticized for not setting a more ambitious timeline for phasing out fossil fuels.
President Xi Jinping, who has not left China since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and will not be attending the summit but sent a veteran negotiator, has said the country’s carbon emissions will level off before 2030. Critics say that’s not soon enough.
Chinese government projections paint a worrying vision of the future: rising sea levels threatening major coastal cities, including Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hong Kong, and melting glaciers and permafrost imperiling western China’s water supply and grand infrastructure projects such as the railroads across the Tibetan plateau.
Top government scientists also predict an increase in droughts, heat waves and extreme rainfall across China that could threaten harvests and endanger reservoirs and dams, including Three Gorges Dam.
Meanwhile, China’s people are already suffering the brunt of climate change. And in a common pattern around the world, those who have contributed least to the warming and have the fewest resources to adapt often feel the pain most acutely.
In late July, Chinese news broadcasts carried startling footage of torrential rains swamping Henan’s provincial capital, Zhengzhou — at one point, 8 inches (20 centimeters) fell in a single hour — with cars swept away, subways flooded and people struggling through waist-deep water. More than 300 people died as the megacity turned into an accidental Venice, its highways transformed into muddy canals.
Even after the most dramatic storms ceased, the water continued to pool in much of the surrounding countryside, a flat and fertile region.
Here the economy depends on corn, wheat and vegetables, and other regions of China depend on Henan for food. The local government reported that nearly 3 million acres (1.2 million hectares) of farmland were flooded — an area about the size of Connecticut — with damage totaling $18 billion.
“All I could do at the time was to watch the heavens cry, cry and cry every day,” said Wang, the peanut farmer.
A limited number of rudimentary pumps were shared among farmers in Henan. Soft plastic tubes were stretched across fields to drain water, but they periodically burst, sending farmers running to patch holes.
A 58-year-old farmer who gave only her last name, Song, said everything she owned was submerged by the floods — her home, furniture, fields, farming equipment.
“Nothing was harvested. This year, the common people have been suffering all year long,” she said. “Ordinary people suffer most.”
“We have been working so hard, breaking our backs … without even a penny back, my heart aches,” said Hou Beibei, a farmer whose simple vegetable greenhouses — plastic tarps covering plots of eggplant, garlic and celery — remain flooded, her hard work washed away.
She is worried about her two young children. “The tuition fees of the children and the living expenses of the whole family rely on this land,” she said.
The summer also saw another climate-linked natural disaster in China. In July, the hottest month on Earth in 142 years of record-keeping, according to U.S. weather experts, a vast and toxic blue-green algae bloom spanning 675 square miles (1,748 square kilometers) engulfed coastal waters off the prosperous city of Qingdao, threatening navigation, fishing and tourism. State broadcasts carried footage of people using dump trucks to remove the mounds of algae.
Another threat to China’s coastal provinces is sea level rise. Government records show that coastal water levels have already risen around 4.8 inches (122 millimeters) between 1980 and 2017 and project that within the next 30 years, waters could rise an additional 2.8 to 6.3 inches (70 to 160 millimeters).
Because China’s coastal areas are largely flat, “a slight rise in the sea level will aggravate the flooding of a large area of land,” erasing expensive waterfront properties and critical habitats, a government report projects.
“I think these impacts are triggering a national awakening. I think people are increasingly asking, ‘Why have extreme weather events like this happened? What are the root causes?’” said Li Shuo, a climate policy expert at Greenpeace East Asia in Beijing.
“I think this is bringing the Chinese policymakers and the general public to a realization that we are indeed in a climate emergency.”
___
AP researcher Chen Si contributed research from Shanghai.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Starkly different portrayals of Rittenhouse in Kenosha trial
KENOSHA, Wis. (AP) — Jurors heard starkly different portrayals of Kyle Rittenhouse — instigator or victim — in opening statements at his trial Tuesday on charges of shooting three people on the streets of Kenosha during a turbulent protest against racial injustice.
A prosecutor said Rittenhouse set the bloodshed in motion when he triggered a confrontation with a man that night and then killed him with a bullet to the back.
But Rittenhouse’s attorney told the jury that his client acted in self-defense after the man tried to grab Rittenhouse’s gun and others kicked the teen in the face and clubbed him in the head with a skateboard.
“You as jurors will end up looking at it from the standpoint of a 17-year-old under the circumstances as they existed,” defense attorney Mark Richards said.
Rittenhouse, now 18, is charged with killing two men and wounding a third during the summer of 2020 with an assault-style rifle. The one-time aspiring police officer could get life in prison if convicted.
The teenager traveled to Kenosha from his home in Illinois, just across the Wisconsin state line, after protests broke out over the shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake, by a white Kenosha police officer. Rittenhouse said he went there to protect property after two nights in which rioters set fires and ransacked businesses.
The first witness was Dominick Black, who was dating Rittenhouse’s sister at the time. Black faces charges he bought the rifle for Rittenhouse months before the shootings because the teen was not old enough to own one at the time.
Black testified that he and Rittenhouse went to downtown Kenosha to help protect a car dealership after vehicles were burned the night before. Black said he thought nobody would start trouble if they saw him with his assault-style rifle. He also said Rittenhouse helped give medical aid and put out fires.
Black said he was on the roof as protesters hurled gasoline bombs and rocks at the business. He said he heard gunshots but didn’t know Rittenhouse was involved until the teenager called and said, “I shot somebody, I shot somebody.”
Afterward, Black said, Rittenhouse was “freaking out. He was really scared. He was pale, shaking a lot.” Black said Rittenhouse told him that he acted in self-defense because “people were trying to hurt him.”
In his opening statement, prosecutor Thomas Binger described the unrest in Kenosha as “two of the roughest nights that our community has ever seen” and said outsiders were drawn to the city “like moths to a flame.”
Yet Binger repeatedly stressed that amid the hundreds of people in Kenosha and the anger and chaos in the streets, “the only person who killed anyone is the defendant, Kyle Rittenhouse.”
“When we consider the reasonableness of the defendant’s actions, I ask you to keep this in mind,” Binger said, after explaining to the jury that a claim of self-defense can be valid only if Rittenhouse reasonably believed he was using deadly force to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm.
The prosecutor said that it is not known exactly what words were said, but it is clear that Rittenhouse started a confrontation that led Joseph Rosenbaum to begin chasing Rittenhouse across a parking lot.
Binger emphasized that Rosenbaum, 36, was killed by a shot to the back after he threw a plastic bag. The first two bullets hit Rosenbaum in the lower extremities, causing him to fall forward, the prosecutor noted.
Richards, the defense attorney, argued that it was Rosenbaum who “lit the fuse that night.” Rosenbaum yelled an expletive at Rittenhouse and lunged for his gun before Rittenhouse fired at him, according to the defense.
Rittenhouse fired four shots in less than a second because Rosenbaum was “trying to take Kyle’s weapon from him to use against him,” Richards said.
Binger, the prosecutor, said that after shooting Rosenbaum, Rittenhouse fled the scene instead of rendering aid, despite portraying himself as a medic earlier in the night. But Richards said Rittenhouse didn’t stop to help because the crowd wanted to “kill him,” and instead ran toward police.
The crowd at that point clearly believed Rittenhouse was an active shooter, according to the prosecutor.
Moments after shooting Rosenbaum, Rittenhouse shot and killed Anthony Huber, 26, a protester from Silver Lake, Wisconsin, who was seen on bystander video hitting Rittenhouse with a skateboard. The defense attorney portrayed Rittenhouse as the victim, saying Huber was “trying to separate the head from the body” with the skateboard.
Rittenhouse then wounded Gaige Grosskreutz, 27, a protester from West Allis, Wisconsin, who had a gun in his hand as he stepped toward Rittenhouse.
Prosecutors called FBI agent Brandon Cramin to testify about infrared surveillance video of the protest on the night of the shooting. Prosecutors have said previously that the video would show that it was Rittenhouse following or chasing Rosenbaum at one point. They played a grainy video from 8,500 feet in which figures on the ground weren’t immediately identifiable. After a dispute between the two sides over whether additional surveillance videos exist that the defense hadn’t seen, Cramin, who testified off-camera by the court’s order, was asked by the judge if he could return and testify another day.
The defense pushed back against the notion that Rittenhouse was an outsider drawn to Kenosha by a call to arms on right-wing social media. Richards said Rittenhouse had strong ties to Kenosha -- his father lived there and Rittenhouse worked in Kenosha County as a lifeguard -- and had seen livestreams of what was happening.
As his attorney displayed photos and video clips from the night of the shootings, Rittenhouse, wearing a dark pinstriped suit and tie, leaned on his elbows to view the images on a desktop monitor. He sat ramrod straight as audio of gunfire was played, and occasionally turned toward jurors, seeming to scrutinize their reactions.
His mother, Wendy Rittenhouse, sat behind him.
The most serious count against Rittenhouse, first-degree intentional homicide, is Wisconsin’s top murder charge.
Rittenhouse has been painted by supporters on the right — including foes of the Black Lives Matter movement — as a patriot who took a stand against lawlessness by demonstrators and exercised his Second Amendment gun rights. Others see him as a vigilante and police wannabe.
He is white, as were those he shot, but many activists see race as an underlying issue in the case, in part because the protesters were on the streets to decry police violence against Black people.
___ Bauer reported from Madison, Wisconsin, Forliti from Minneapolis. Associated Press writer Tammy Webber contributed from Fenton, Michigan.
Facebook to shut down face-recognition system, delete data
By MATT O'BRIEN and BARBARA ORTUTAY
PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Facebook said it will shut down its face-recognition system and delete the faceprints of more than 1 billion people amid growing concerns about the technology and its misuse by governments, police and others.
“This change will represent one of the largest shifts in facial recognition usage in the technology’s history,” Jerome Pesenti, vice president of artificial intelligence for Facebook’s new parent company, Meta, wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.
He said the company was trying to weigh the positive use cases for the technology “against growing societal concerns, especially as regulators have yet to provide clear rules.” The company in the coming weeks will delete “more than a billion people’s individual facial recognition templates,” he said.
Facebook’s about-face follows a busy few weeks. On Thursday it announced its new name Meta for Facebook the company, but not the social network. The change, it said, will help it focus on building technology for what it envisions as the next iteration of the internet -- the “metaverse.”
The company is also facing perhaps its biggest public relations crisis to date after leaked documents from whistleblower Frances Haugen showed that it has known about the harms its products cause and often did little or nothing to mitigate them.
More than a third of Facebook’s daily active users have opted in to have their faces recognized by the social network’s system. That’s about 640 million people. Facebook introduced facial recognition more than a decade ago but gradually made it easier to opt out of the feature as it faced scrutiny from courts and regulators.
Facebook in 2019 stopped automatically recognizing people in photos and suggesting people “tag” them, and instead of making that the default, asked users to choose if they wanted to use its facial recognition feature.
Facebook’s decision to shut down its system “is a good example of trying to make product decisions that are good for the user and the company,” said Kristen Martin, a professor of technology ethics at the University of Notre Dame. She added that the move also demonstrates the power of public and regulatory pressure, since the face recognition system has been the subject of harsh criticism for over a decade.
Meta Platforms Inc., Facebook’s parent company, appears to be looking at new forms of identifying people. Pesenti said Tuesday’s announcement involves a “company-wide move away from this kind of broad identification, and toward narrower forms of personal authentication.”
“Facial recognition can be particularly valuable when the technology operates privately on a person’s own devices,” he wrote. “This method of on-device facial recognition, requiring no communication of face data with an external server, is most commonly deployed today in the systems used to unlock smartphones.”
Apple uses this kind of technology to power its Face ID system for unlocking iPhones.
Researchers and privacy activists have spent years raising questions about the tech industry’s use of face-scanning software, citing studies that found it worked unevenly across boundaries of race, gender or age. One concern has been that the technology can incorrectly identify people with darker skin.
Another problem with face recognition is that in order to use it, companies have had to create unique faceprints of huge numbers of people – often without their consent and in ways that can be used to fuel systems that track people, said Nathan Wessler of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has fought Facebook and other companies over their use of the technology.
“This is a tremendously significant recognition that this technology is inherently dangerous,” he said.
Facebook found itself on the other end of the debate last year when it demanded that facial recognition startup ClearviewAI, which works with police, stop harvesting Facebook and Instagram user images to identify the people in them.
Concerns also have grown because of increasing awareness of the Chinese government’s extensive video surveillance system, especially as it’s been employed in a region home to one of China’s largely Muslim ethnic minority populations.
Facebook’s huge repository of images shared by users helped make it a powerhouse for improvements in computer vision, a branch of artificial intelligence. Now many of those research teams have been refocused on Meta’s ambitions for augmented reality technology, in which the company envisions future users strapping on goggles to experience a blend of virtual and physical worlds. Those technologies, in turn, could pose new concerns about how people’s biometric data is collected and tracked.
Facebook didn’t provide clear answers when asked how people could verify that their image data was deleted and what the company would be doing with its underlying face-recognition technology.
On the first point, company spokesperson Jason Grosse said in email only that user templates will be “marked for deletion” if their face-recognition settings are on, and that the deletion process should be completed and verified in “coming weeks.” On the second, point, Grosse said that Facebook will be “turning off” components of the system associated with the face-recognition settings.
Meta’s newly wary approach to facial recognition follows decisions by other U.S. tech giants such as Amazon, Microsoft and IBM last year to end or pause their sales of facial recognition software to police, citing concerns about false identifications and amid a broader U.S. reckoning over policing and racial injustice.
At least seven U.S. states and nearly two dozen cities have limited government use of the technology amid fears over civil rights violations, racial bias and invasion of privacy.
President Joe Biden’s science and technology office in October launched a fact-finding mission to look at facial recognition and other biometric tools used to identify people or assess their emotional or mental states and character. European regulators and lawmakers have also taken steps toward blocking law enforcement from scanning facial features in public spaces.
Facebook’s face-scanning practices also contributed to the $5 billion fine and privacy restrictions the Federal Trade Commission imposed on the company in 2019. Facebook’s settlement with the FTC included a promise to require “clear and conspicuous” notice before people’s photos and videos were subjected to facial recognition technology.
And the company earlier this year agreed to pay $650 million to settle a 2015 lawsuit alleging it violated an Illinois privacy law when it used photo-tagging without users’ permission.
“It is a big deal, it’s a big shift but it’s also far, far too late,” said John Davisson, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. EPIC filed its first complaint with the FTC against Facebook’s facial recognition service in 2011, the year after it was rolled out.
___
Ortutay reported from Oakland, Calif.
Wu, Pureval mayoral wins mark milestone for Asian Americans
Boston Mayor-elect Michelle Wu addresses supporters at her election night party, Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2021, in Boston. Wu defeated fellow city councilor Annissa Essaibi George to become the first woman of color elected as mayor of Boston. (AP Photo/Josh Reynolds)
Asian Americans will serve as mayor in Boston and Cincinnati for the first time in both cities’ histories, signaling political progress for a population that has struggled for almost two years with a rise in anti-Asian hate.
Boston voters tapped City Councilor Michelle Wu, 36, on Tuesday to serve in the city’s top political office. In Cincinnati, Aftab Pureval, 39, easily defeated former Democratic Congressman David Mann. “Tonight, we made history in Cincinnati,” Pureval told a large gathering of supporters. “Cincinnati is a place where no matter what you look like, where you’re from, or how much money you have, if you come here and work hard you can achieve your dreams.”
When Pureval decided to leave his attorney job in 2015 to run for county clerk, it was some fellow Democrats who warned him against the idea. They felt he didn’t have a “good ballot name” that would appeal to the predominantly white votership in Hamilton County, Ohio.
“When you see A-f-t-a-b on a yard sign, it doesn’t occur to people that’s a candidate not an insurance company,” Pureval told The Associated Press earlier in the day. “When you’re Asian, when you have an ethnic name, it’s just harder. You’ve got to be creative, you’ve got to work harder, you’ve got to knock on more doors.”
Pureval, the son of a Tibetan mother and Indian father, must have knocked on enough doors. He went on to score a major upset, becoming the first Democrat in over 100 years to be elected clerk.
Meanwhile, in Seattle, Bruce Harrell, who is second-generation Japanese American and Black, was ahead of current City Council President M. Lorena González. But, it could be days before there’s a clear winner.
What’s extraordinary is how spread out the three cities are. High-profile mayors who are Asian American and Pacific Islander, also known as AAPI, have typically been elected in places with historically large Asian populations like California and Hawaii. These candidacies signal just how large the AAPI electorate has multiplied with more feeling empowered to be a voice in the political fray.
The wider implications of his mayoral victory in a city with a small AAPI community mean a great deal to Pureval, who says his election “will show not just that AAPIs can run and win on the coasts or where there’s large Asian populations, but that AAPIs can run and win anywhere.”
Wu, 36, Boston’s first Asian American city councilor, beat fellow city councilor Annissa Essaibi George, 47, an Arab Polish American. Wu, who is Taiwanese American, was the favorite especially after getting a coveted endorsement from acting mayor Kim Janey, who was elevated to the post when the former mayor resigned. Janey was the city’s first Black and first female mayor.
Harrell, 63, became Seattle’s first Asian American mayor by appointment in 2017 after Mayor Ed Murray resigned over child sex abuse allegations. Less than a week in, Harrell decided to continue serving on the City Council instead.
In another notable win Tuesday, Dearborn, Michigan, elected state lawmaker Abdullah Hammoud as the city’s first Arab American mayor. A final unofficial vote count showed him in an insurmountable lead ahead of Gary Woronchak, a former state representative. Dearborn, a city of over 100,000, has one of the largest Arab American populations in the nation.
The AAPI Victory Fund, a Super PAC that mobilizes eligible Asian American and Pacific Islander voters and candidates, endorsed Pureval and Wu (They never heard back from Harrell’s campaign about a meeting). Varun Nikore, AAPI Victory Fund president, called Wu’s and Pureval’s wins “a new day in America at the local level.”
“This is now a newfound path for AAPIs to engage in public service,” Nikore said. “I think it’s going to be a beacon for those who wanna run for local office.”
As mayor, they each can lay a foundation for greater representation with who they select for their staff or as key decisionmakers.
“If your community is well represented, then you create a legitimate pipeline pathway for public service whether it be political office, whether it be appointed office, whether it be just appointing more AAPIs on boards and commissions,” Nikore said. “By being proactive at those levels, it really is this ripple effect that lasts — in some cases — decades.”
James Lai, an ethnic studies professor at Santa Clara University whose specialties include Asian American and urban politics, said these mayoral races are a “beautiful” microcosm of how Asian Americans are a growing political force. Since the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 became law, Asian American communities have continued to emerge in regions like the Midwest and the Northeast.
“In fact, in the last 30 years, the fastest growing region for Asian Americans, according to the last three censuses, is the South region,” Lai said.
The Reflective Democracy Campaign, which looks at diversity in political leadership, recently released a study that found Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders make up over 6% of the U.S. population but less than 1% of elected offices.
The presence of Asian American leaders in small and medium size suburbs, however, is another story, one worth paying attention to. Lai, also author of “Asian American Political Action: Suburban Transformations,” points out that more Asian Americans are getting appointed as mayors or taking the majority of city council seats.
Nikore, of the AAPI Victory Fund, believes the pandemic-sparked racism that pushed American and Pacific Islander voter turnout in the 2020 election will continue. Candidate wins will also dispel stereotypes that Asians don’t “belong,” he added.
Pureval confronts the foreigner stereotypes head-on, often introducing himself as “a brown dude with a funny name.” Perceived political liabilities like ethnicity can be strengths too, he added.
“I’m hopeful one day when we elect more and more AAPIs to office, future AAPI candidates won’t have to think through that.”
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Associated Press writers Gene Johnson in Seattle, Steve LeBlanc in Boston and Corey Williams in Detroit contributed to this report.
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Terry Tang is a member of The Associated Press’ Race and Ethnicity team. Follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ttangAP
Bangladesh’s villages bear the brutal cost of climate change
A man rides a boat in Bonnotola in Satkhira, Bangladesh on Oct. 5, 2021. The effects of global warming, particularly increased cyclones, coastal and tidal flooding that bring saltwater further inland, are devastating Bangladesh and destroying the livelihoods of millions, said Mohammad Shamsuddoha, chief executive of the Center for Participatory Research Development, a non-profit. Bonnotola village once had 2,200 adult residents, as per voting records. But breaches in the embankments and intruding salt water have rendered many homeless. Now, the village is home to just 480 people, said 58-year-old Abdus Satter, a fisherman. (AP Photo/Mahmud Hossain Opu)
SHYAMNAGAR, Bangladesh (AP) — With each tide, Abdus Satter watches the sea erode a little more of his life.
His village of Bonnotola in southwestern Bangladesh, with its muddy roads and tin-roofed houses, was once home to over 2,000 people. Most were farmers like the 58-year-old Satter. Then the rising seas poisoned the soil with salt water. Two cyclones in the last two years destroyed the mud embankments that shielded the village from tidal waves.
Now, only 480 people remain, with the rest rendered homeless by the sea.
The effects of global warming — particularly increased cyclones, and coastal and tidal flooding that bring salt water further inland — are devastating Bangladesh and destroying the livelihoods of millions, said Mohammad Shamsuddoha, chief executive of the nonprofit Center for Participatory Research Development.
“It’s a grave concern for a country like Bangladesh,” he said, adding that projections show some 30 million people may be displaced from the country’s coastal regions.
With world leaders gathered in Glasgow, Scotland, for a U.N. climate conference this week, countries like Bangladesh are pressing for more financial support to cope with global warming.
A decade-old deal for rich countries to give poor nations $100 billion each year to switch to clean energy and adapt to climate change has not been fulfilled. Even the money that is being provided — about $80 billion in 2019 — is spread too thin to make much of a difference on the ground.
In Gabura, another village in the Bengal River delta, Nazma Khatun, 43, has been struggling to feed her two daughters. Half of her meager daily income — less than $3 from sewing and selling cloth — goes toward medicine for skin diseases she says everyone in the village suffers from due to rising sea levels, which have contaminated land and water.
“We have water everywhere, but we don’t have a drop any more to drink from ponds or wells,” she said.
This land was once fertile. Khatun said mango and jackfruit used to flourish, and everyone grew vegetables in their backyard, relying on ponds, rivers and wells for drinking water.
“Now it’s impossible. See the pond here, fresh water is gone,” she said.
In 1973, 833,000 hectares (3,216 square miles) of land was affected by the encroaching sea water, accelerated by more frequent cyclones and higher tides that have contaminated water supplies. That’s bigger than the U.S. state of Delaware.
This grew to 1.02 million hectares (3,938 square miles) in 2000, and 1.056 million hectares (4,077 square miles) in 2009, according to Bangladesh’s Soil Resources Development Institute. Salinity in soil has increased by 26% over the past 35 years.
At Bonbibi Tola village, women gather daily at a hand-pump well to collect water for cooking and drinking. The women walk up to 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) hauling water daily.
But this won’t last long. Wells in the region only have fresh water in the months after monsoon rains. In the summer — when the flow from Himalayan rivers decreases —- fresh water becomes scarce, said one of the women, Maheswari Halder.
“This is the fate we all surrender to,” she said.
Villagers collect bricks from their house that was destroyed by natural disasters at Pratap Nagar in Satkhira, Bangladesh on Oct. 5, 2021. The effects of global warming, particularly increased cyclones, coastal and tidal flooding that bring saltwater further inland, are devastating Bangladesh and destroying the livelihoods of millions, said Mohammad Shamsuddoha, chief executive of the Center for Participatory Research Development, a non-profit. He said that projections show that around 30 million people may be displaced from the country’s coastal regions. "It’s a grave concern for a country like Bangladesh," he said. (AP Photo/Mahmud Hossain Opu)
The three villages lie in Bangladesh’s southwestern Shyamnagar region, home to 400,000 people. Officials say the government lacks funding for additional desalination plants to convert salt water into fresh water.
“The area needs maybe 500 desalination plants. But we’ve only 50 or so,” said Alamgir Kabir, director of a local NGO, the Nawabenki Ganomukhi Foundation.
Despite seeing its gross domestic product rise from $6.2 billion in 1972 to $305 billion in 2019, Bangladesh can’t pay the cost of global warming on its own. There are only six countries in the world more impacted by climate change from 2000 to 2019, according to the 2021 Climate Change Performance Index by nonprofit Germanwatch. In those years, Bangladesh lost 0.41% of its gross domestic product due to climate change, and a single cyclone in 2019 caused losses of $8.1 billion,
Nor should it, says Abul Kalam Azad, the country’s special envoy to the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a group of nations most at risk from the impacts predicted of a hotter future. Bangladesh, a country of about 160 million, has historically contributed a fraction of the world’s emissions, and yet the country is being devastated by climate change, he said.
Azad says aid in the form of high-cost loans would be of no use, but low-cost loans combined with grants would help.
Environmental campaigners say a sea change is needed in the international debate on climate aid to ensure a steady increase in funding to poor, vulnerable nations from a variety of public and private sources.
“You also need to make sure that at least 50% of the funds go into adaptation (to climate change) because people are on the front line,” said Jennifer Morgan, the head of Greenpeace International.
Speaking before fellow leaders Monday, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh raised the thorny issue of major polluters paying compensation for the destruction caused by global warming.
“The issue of loss and damage must be addressed, including global sharing of responsibility for climate migrants and those displaced by sea-level rise, salinity increase, river erosion, floods, droughts,” she said.
The 2015 Paris accord already contains a provision for this. Article 8 states that parties to the pact, “recognize the importance of averting, minimizing and addressing loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change, including extreme weather events and slow onset events, and the role of sustainable development in reducing the risk of loss and damage.”
“Unfortunately, there hasn’t been a single penny paid for loss and damage,” Saleemul Huq, director of the Bangladesh-based International Centre for Climate Change and Development, said in a recent documentary.
Huq argues that a compensation fund for oil spills offers a template for how big polluters, particularly fossil fuel companies, could provide funding to nations whose islands have been washed away or farms turned to desert as a result of global warming.
Rich countries such as the United States are wary of any suggestion that they might be legally liable for their decades-long greenhouse gas emissions still lingering in the atmosphere.
But addressing such issues in Glasgow will be critical, said Huq. “Otherwise, the developing countries, particularly the most vulnerable countries, will deem the (conference) a failure.”
For Satter, it may already be too late.
Every morning, waves gush into his home and soon he, his wife and two sons will have to flee. The sea has snatched away their future and their past, he said, pointing to a muddy trench that was once a courtyard where his parents’ graves lay.
“It’s just a matter of time,” he said.
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Ghosal reported from New Delhi. Frank Jordans in Berlin contributed to this report.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
ETHIOPIA'S WAR OF AGRESSION
UN report says Ethiopia’s war marked by ‘extreme brutality’ By JAMEY KEATEN and CARA ANN
FILE - Ethnic Tigrayan survivor Abrahaley Minasbo, 22, from Mai-Kadra, Ethiopia, shows wounds from machetes he says were inflicted by a pro-government militia on Nov. 9, inside a shelter in Hamdeyat Transition Center near the Sudan-Ethiopia border, in eastern Sudan on Dec. 15, 2020. A year after war began there, the findings of the only human rights investigation allowed in Ethiopia's blockaded Tigray region will be released Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2021. (AP Photo/Nariman El-Mofty, File)
GENEVA (AP) — The U.N. human rights chief said Wednesday that Ethiopia’s yearlong war has been marked by “extreme brutality” as a joint investigation into alleged atrocities faulted all sides for committing abuses, but avoided saying who was the most to blame.
The investigation was hampered by authorities’ intimidation and restrictions and didn’t visit some of the war’s worst-affected locations.
The report, a rare collaboration by the U.N. human rights office with the government-created Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, was released a day before the war’s one-year mark and as Africa’s second most populous country enters a new state of emergency with rival Tigray forces threatening the capital.
The U.N. told The Associated Press that the collaboration was necessary for its team to gain access to a troubled region that Ethiopian authorities have largely prevented journalists, rights groups and other outside observers from entering.
The conflict that erupted in Ethiopia’s Tigray region has killed thousands of people since the government of Nobel Peace Prize-winning Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed allowed soldiers from neighboring Eritrea to invade Tigray and join Ethiopian forces in fighting the Tigray forces who long dominated the national government before Abiy took office. Ethnic Tigrayans across the country have since reported being targeted with arbitrary detentions, while civilians in Tigray have described gang rapes, famine and mass expulsions.
“In western Tigray, it was apparent that the Tigrayans had left most of the areas, as it was difficult to find Tigrayans to interview,” the new report says.
The joint investigation covers events until late June when the Tigray forces regained much of their region, but it failed to visit some of the deadliest sites of the war, including the city of Axum, because of security and other obstacles. Notably, the report says, those obstacles included the Ethiopian government’s failure to release satellite phones procured for the investigation.
The investigation says all sides, including forces from the neighboring Amhara region that have claimed western Tigray, have committed abuses, which may amount to crimes against humanity and war crimes. It breaks little new ground and confirms in general the abuses described by witnesses throughout the war. But it gives little sense of scale, saying only that the more than 1,300 rapes reported to authorities are likely far fewer than the real number.
Despite the report’s shortcomings, the prime minister’s office said in a statement that it “clearly established the claim of genocide as false and utterly lacking of any factual basis.” The statement noted “serious reservations” about the report but claimed it laid “sinister allegations to rest.” And it acknowledged the need to “redouble our efforts” to hold perpetrators accountable. A high-level task force will be formed, it said.
Among the investigation’s findings: Several Ethiopian military camps were used to torture captured Tigray forces or civilians suspected of supporting them. Others were detained in “secret locations” and military camps across the country, with arbitrary detentions in many cases. Tigray forces detained some ethnic Amhara civilians in western Tigray in the early days of the war on suspicion of supporting the military, and in some cases tortured them.
“The Tigray conflict has been marked by extreme brutality. The gravity and seriousness of the violations and abuses we have documented underscore the need to hold perpetrators accountable on all sides,” said Michelle Bachelet, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights.
And yet the report gives little sign that Eritrean soldiers were responsible for many of the atrocities, as witnesses have alleged from the earliest days of the war. Until March, Ethiopia’s prime minister denied they were even in the country.
“Some of the absolutely worst violations were committed by the Eritrean defense forces,” U.S. Horn of Africa Envoy Jeffrey Feltman said Tuesday.
Ethiopia’s government imposed a blockade on Tigray since the Tigray forces regained control in June, cutting off almost all access for commercial goods and humanitarian aid. That followed large-scale looting and destruction of food and crops across the region that “has had a severe socioeconomic impact on the civilian population,” the report says. In addition, some camps for displaced people who fled the war didn’t receive food rations for months.
And yet the joint investigation “could not confirm deliberate or willful denial of humanitarian assistance to the civilian population in Tigray or the use of starvation as a weapon of war.” It did call for further investigation.
The new report, based on more than 260 interviews with victims and witnesses, said it had received no response from Eritrea’s government or from Amhara regional officials, and the Tigray forces expressed its opposition to the involvement of the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission. The report acknowledged that the presence of EHRC staffers at times inhibited interviews.
The investigation says the Ethiopian government should “consider” setting up a court to ensure accountability and the international community should “support” the government in restoring stability.
Ethiopia’s government has said it would pursue accountability for perpetrators, but the new report expresses concern that “investigations conducted by Ethiopian national institutions do not match the scope and breadth of the violations it has identified.”
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Cara Anna reported from Nairobi, Kenya.
Ethiopia tried to limit rare UN report on Tigray war abuses
FILE - Haftom Gebretsadik, a 17-year-old from Freweini, Ethiopia, near Hawzen, who had his right hand amputated and lost fingers on his left after an artillery round struck his home in March, sits on his bed at the Ayder Referral Hospital in Mekele, in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, on May 6, 2021. A year after war began there, the findings of the only human rights investigation allowed in Ethiopia's blockaded Tigray region will be released Wednesday, Nov. 3, 2021. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis, File)
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — The findings of the only human rights investigation allowed in Ethiopia’s blockaded Tigray region will be released Wednesday, a year after war began there. But people with knowledge of the probe say it has been limited by authorities who recently expelled a U.N. staffer helping to lead it.
And yet, with groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International barred from Tigray, along with foreign media, the report may be the world’s only official source of information on atrocities in the war, which began in November 2020 after a political falling-out between the Tigray forces that long dominated the national government and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed’s current government. The conflict has been marked by gang rapes, mass expulsions, deliberate starvation and thousands of deaths.
The joint investigation by the U.N. human rights office and the government-created Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, or EHRC, is a rare collaboration that immediately raised concerns among ethnic Tigrayans, human rights groups and other observers about impartiality and government influence.
In response to questions from The Associated Press, the U.N. human rights office in Geneva said it wouldn’t have been able to enter Tigray without the partnership with the rights commission. Although past joint investigations occurred in Afghanistan and Uganda, the U.N. said, “the current one is unique in terms of magnitude and context.”
But Ethiopia’s government has given no basis for expelling U.N. human rights officer Sonny Onyegbula last month, the U.N. added, and without an explanation “we cannot accept the allegation that our staff member ... was ‘meddling in the internal affairs’ of Ethiopia.”
Because of those circumstances, and the fact that the U.N. left the investigation to its less experienced regional office in Ethiopia, the new report is “automatically suspect,” said David Crane, founder of the Global Accountability Network and founding chief prosecutor for the Special Court for Sierra Leone, an international tribunal.
“What you need when you go into an atrocity zone is a clean slate so outside investigators can look into it neutrally, dispassionately,” Crane said. “You want to do these things where you don’t build doubt, distrust from the beginning,” including among people interviewed.
The investigation might be the international community’s only chance to collect facts on the ground, he said, but because of its setup, it may disappear “in the sands of time.”
People close to the investigation, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, asserted that the head of the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, Daniel Bekele, underplayed some allegations that fighters from the country’s Amhara region were responsible for abuses in Tigray and pressed instead to highlight abuses by Tigray forces.
That’s even though witnesses have said the perpetrators of most abuses were soldiers from neighboring Eritrea, Ethiopian forces and Amhara regional forces.
In response to AP’s questions, Bekele asserted his commission’s independence, saying it is “primarily accountable to the people it is created to serve.” Attempts to influence the investigation, he added, can come from ”many directions” in such a polarized environment.
Bekele said he and the commission have consistently cited “serious indications that all parties involved in the conflict have committed atrocities.”
Observers say a major shortcoming of the investigation is its failure to visit the scene of many alleged massacres in Tigray, including the deadliest known one in the city of Axum, where witnesses told the AP that several hundred people were killed.
Bekele said the investigation lacked the support of the Tigray authorities now administering the region after Tigray forces retook much of the area in June, about midway through the joint team’s work.
The U.N. human rights office, however, said the government’s subsequent severing of flights and communications from Tigray during the planned investigation period made it difficult to access key locations, both “logistically and from a security point of view.”
Even the interim Tigray authorities hand-picked by Ethiopia’s government to run the region earlier in the war rejected the joint investigation, its former chief of staff, Gebremeskel Kassa, told the AP.
“We informed the international community we wanted an investigation into human rights but not with the EHRC because we believe this is a tool of the government,” he said.
The U.N. has said Ethiopia’s government had no say in the report’s publication, though it was given the chance to read the report in advance and to point out “anything it believes to be incorrect.”
Late last week, Ethiopia’s government and a diaspora group released the results of their own investigations focusing on alleged abuses by Tigray forces after they entered the neighboring regions of Amhara and Afar four months ago in what they called an effort to pressure the government to end its blockade on Tigray.
The ministry of justice said it found 483 non-combatants were killed and 109 raped in parts of Amhara and Afar that were recaptured by federal forces in recent weeks. It also found “widespread and systematic looting” of schools, clinics, churches, mosques and aid groups’ offices.
A separate report by the Amhara Association of America said it found that 112 people were raped in several districts covered by the ministry’s findings. The diaspora group drew on data from offices of women’s and children’s affairs as well as interviews with witnesses, doctors and officials.
The diaspora group asserted that the Tigray forces “committed the rapes as revenge against ethnic Amharas, whom they blame as responsible for abuses in their home region.”
The spokesman for the Tigray forces, Getachew Reda, said the allegations aren’t worth “the paper they’re written on.” Accusations of rapes and killings by Tigray forces are “absolutely untrue, at least on a level these organizations are alleging,” he said.
Robots hit the streets as demand for food delivery grows
A food delivery robot crosses a street in Ann Arbor, Mich. on Thursday, Oct. 7, 2021. Robot food delivery is no longer the stuff of science fiction. Hundreds of little robots __ knee-high and able to hold around four large pizzas __ are now navigating college campuses and even some city sidewalks in the U.S., the U.K. and elsewhere. While robots were being tested in limited numbers before the coronavirus hit, the companies building them say pandemic-related labor shortages and a growing preference for contactless delivery have accelerated their deployment. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)
ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) — Robot food delivery is no longer the stuff of science fiction. But you may not see it in your neighborhood anytime soon.
Hundreds of little robots __ knee-high and able to hold around four large pizzas __ are now navigating college campuses and even some city sidewalks in the U.S., the U.K. and elsewhere. While robots were being tested in limited numbers before the coronavirus hit, the companies building them say pandemic-related labor shortages and a growing preference for contactless delivery have accelerated their deployment.
“We saw demand for robot usage just go through the ceiling,” said Alastair Westgarth, the CEO of Starship Technologies, which recently completed its 2 millionth delivery. “I think demand was always there, but it was brought forward by the pandemic effect.”
Starship has more than 1,000 robots in its fleet, up from just 250 in 2019. Hundreds more will be deployed soon. They’re delivering food on 20 U.S. campuses; 25 more will be added soon. They’re also operating on sidewalks in Milton Keynes, England; Modesto, California; and the company’s hometown of Tallin, Estonia.
Robot designs vary; some have four wheels and some have six, for example. But generally, they use cameras, sensors, GPS and sometimes laser scanners to navigate sidewalks and even cross streets autonomously. They move around 5 mph.
Remote operators keep tabs on multiple robots at a time but they say they rarely need to hit the brakes or steer around an obstacle. When a robot arrives at its destination, customers type a code into their phones to open the lid and retrieve their food.
The robots have drawbacks that limit their usefulness for now. They’re electric, so they must recharge regularly. They’re slow, and they generally stay within a small, pre-mapped radius.
They’re also inflexible. A customer can’t tell a robot to leave the food outside the door, for example. And some big cities with crowded sidewalks, like New York, Beijing and San Francisco, aren’t welcoming them.
A food delivery robot stops outside a building in Ann Arbor, Mich. on Thursday, Oct. 7, 2021. Robot food delivery is no longer the stuff of science fiction. Hundreds of little robots __ knee-high and able to hold around four large pizzas __ are now navigating college campuses and even some city sidewalks in the U.S., the U.K. and elsewhere. While robots were being tested in limited numbers before the coronavirus hit, the companies building them say pandemic-related labor shortages and a growing preference for contactless delivery have accelerated their deployment. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)
But Bill Ray, an analyst with the consulting firm Gartner, says the robots make a lot of sense on corporate or college campuses, or in newer communities with wide sidewalks.
“In the places where you can deploy it, robot delivery will grow very quickly,” Ray said.
Ray said there have been few reports of problems with the robots, other than an occasional gaggle of kids who surround one and try to confuse it. Starship briefly halted service at the University of Pittsburgh in 2019 after a wheelchair user said a robot blocked her access to a ramp. But the university said deliveries resumed once Starship addressed the issue.
Patrick Sheck, a junior at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, gets deliveries from a Starship robot three or four times a week as he’s leaving class.
“The robot pulls up just in time for me to get some lunch,” Sheck said. Bowling Green and Starship charge $1.99 plus a service fee for each robot delivery.
Rival Kiwibot, with headquarters in Los Angeles and Medellin, Columbia, says it now has 400 robots making deliveries on college campuses and in downtown Miami.
Delivery companies are also jumping into the market. Grubhub recently partnered with Russian robot maker Yandex to deploy 50 robots on the campus of Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. Grubhub plans to add more campuses soon, although the company stresses that the service won’t go beyond colleges for now.
U.S. delivery orders jumped 66% in the year ending in June, according to NPD, a data and consulting firm. And delivery demand could remain elevated even after the pandemic eases because customers have gotten used to the convenience.
Ji Hye Kim, chef and managing partner of the Ann Arbor, Michigan, restaurant Miss Kim, relied heavily on robot delivery when her dining room was closed last year. Kim had partnered with a local robot company, Refraction AI, shortly before the pandemic began.
Kim prefers robots to third-party delivery companies like DoorDash, which charge significantly more and sometimes cancel orders if they didn’t have enough drivers. Delivery companies also bundle multiple orders per trip, she said, so food sometimes arrives cold. Robots take just one order at a time.
Kim said the robots also excite customers, who often post videos of their interactions.
“It’s very cute and novel, and it didn’t have to come face to face with people. It was a comfort,” Kim said. Delivery demand has dropped off since her dining room reopened, but robots still deliver around 10 orders per day.
While Kim managed to hang on to her staff throughout the pandemic, other restaurants are struggling to find workers. In a recent survey, 75% of U.S. restaurant owners told the National Restaurant Association that recruiting and retaining employees is their biggest challenge.
That has many restaurants looking to fill the void with robot delivery.
“There is no store in the country right now with enough delivery drivers,” said Dennis Maloney, senior vice president and chief digital officer at Domino’s Pizza.
Domino’s is partnering with Nuro, a California startup whose 6-foot-tall self-driving pods go at a maximum speed of 25 mph on streets, not sidewalks. Nuro is testing grocery and food delivery in Houston, Phoenix and Mountain View, California.
Maloney said it’s not a question of if, but of when, robots will start doing more deliveries. He thinks companies like Domino’s will eventually use a mix of robots and drivers depending on location. Sidewalk robots could work on a military base, for example, while Nuro is ideal for suburbs. Highway driving would be left to human workers.
Maloney said Nuro delivery is more expensive than using human drivers for now, but as the technology scales up and gets more refined, the costs will go down.
For cheaper sidewalk robots __ which cost an estimated $5,000 or less __ it’s even easier to undercut human delivery costs. The average Grubhub driver in Ohio makes $47,650 per year, according to the job site Indeed.com.
But robots don’t always cost delivery jobs. In some cases, they help create them. Before Starship’s robots arrived, Bowling Green didn’t offer delivery from campus dining spots. Since then, it has hired more than 30 people to serve as runners between kitchens and robots, Bowling Green dining spokesman Jon Zachrich said.
Brendan Witcher, a technology analyst with the consulting firm Forrester, says it’s easy to get excited about the Jetsons-like possibility of robot delivery. But ultimately, robots will have to prove they create an advantage in some way.
“It’s possible that we see this emerge into something else,” he said. “But it’s the right time and place for companies considering robots to test them and learn from them and do their own evaluation.”
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AP Video Journalist Mike Householder contributed from Bowling Green, Ohio.
