James Cameron turns to Earth before release of new ‘Avatar’

By MARK KENNEDY

This image released by National Geographic shows a locust from "Super/Natural,” a six-part series from National Geographic, airing on Disney+. (Jonjo Harrington/National Geographic via AP)


NEW YORK (AP) — There’s a new nature documentary series that promises to show viewers incredible animal behavior in vibrant clarity. Heard that all before? Well, this one is on steroids.

“Super/Natural,” a six-part series from National Geographic now streaming on Disney+, has tapped “Avatar” creator James Cameron as executive producer, and he’s added special effects on top of leading-edge filmmaking technology.

The effects sometimes morph the animals into something like stars in a Marvel movie, with their bellows distorting the air, lumbering attacks that cause shock waves in sand or pheromones from an insect rendered as bursting noxious clouds. Even trees light up when sugars move through their roots.

“We’re not actually falsifying or turning it into a superhero movie. We’re giving an access portal for our limited senses into a natural world that goes far, far beyond anything that we can sense directly,” Cameron told reporters recently.

The episodes are arranged by theme — eat or be eaten, the mating game and bloodlines are some of the topics — and viewers get a visual treat as cameras capture everything from fireflies in Mexico producing a synchronized light show to bottlenose dolphins teaming up with Brazilian fishermen to catch mullet.

Videographers armed with the latest science data underwent 80 animal shoots in 25 countries to create the series, using such high-tech gear as high-speed cameras and drones. Cameron listed what they tried to capture — infrasound, ultrasound, ultraviolet and infrared, among them.

“What’s our purpose in this? Not just to entertain, but absolutely to teach and to show the wonder, the majesty, the complexity, of nature,” said Cameron. “We’re going to pull out every trick we know as entertainers, as storytellers, to try to get that engagement.”

So unlike a traditional nature documentary where adding effects is a strict non-no, “Super/Natural” allows us to feel what bat sonar might look like, see what a bumblebee sees or how bears communicate with invisible clues.

“The bear can smell pheromones, but we can’t see it. It’s a visual medium; it’s not a smell medium,” he said. “It is real. It’s just that we can’t see it. So we have to use the effects to see as they see or to smell as they smell.”

The series is narrated by Benedict Cumberbatch, who is lively, sly and delicious in his descriptions. “The female of the species is into some pretty freaky stuff,” he says of vampire spiders. Of cicadas popping out after 17 years underground, he drily adds: “America’s biggest speed dating event is about to begin.”

Cameron was full of praise for Cumberbatch: “He doesn’t just narrate it; he acts it,” he said. “He gets you inside what’s happening in a way that I think is very relatable.”

Cameron, an ardent environmentalist and vegan, sees “Super/Natural” as a logical extension of his latest filmmaking, which includes the upcoming fantasy “Avatar: The Way of Water.” In both, he hopes to reawaken a sense of wonder for the natural world.

“The natural history stuff is not just a side gig to making ‘Avatar’ movies. To me, they go together perfectly as something that’s equally exciting to me,” he said. “It always awakens in me this sense of amazement at how complex nature is.”

That amazement is captured in the series with images of glow-in-the-dark flying squirrels soaring the length of a football field, burrowing owls copying the sound of a snake rattle to scare away predators and devil rays leaping 6 feet out of the ocean.

Cameron’s last documentary series on animals was “Secrets of the Whales” narrated by Sigourney Weaver. The director has fond memories from growing up in Canada of exploring the woods, trapping insects and watching birds.

“It blows your mind how amazing nature is, things that we just take for granted, and how nature has developed all these different amazing strategies for these animals and these plants over millions of years.”

He also took a gentle swipe at the attention the latest images from the James Webb Space Telescope have garnered, from Neptune’s rings to galaxy clusters.

“This is the only planet we know of for sure — evidence-based — that has life. And it’s an amazing planet,” he said. “There’s hundreds of millions of species here as opposed to Mars, where we don’t even know if there’s one species.

“I love Mars. I love exploration in space and underwater. But we have to take care of this planet. We have to understand it before we destroy it.”

___

Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

Palestinian strife highlights lost hopes of armed youths

THE STATE IS THE STATE 

NO MATTER ITS NAME

By SAM MCNEIL

Palestinian security forces clash with Palestinians following an arrest raid against local militants, in the West Bank city of Nablus Sept. 20, 2022. The rare eruption of deadly clashes this week between Palestinians and their own security forces has cast a spotlight on the growing ranks of disenfranchised, impoverished young men taking up arms. Many have spent their entire lives in a territory occupied by Israel, scarred by infighting and segmented by checkpoints. They have no hope in the long-stalemated peace process. 

(AP Photo/Nasser Nasser, File)

NABLUS, West Bank (AP) — Nablus was a battered city. Shops gaped open to the street, their windows smashed. Street signs were overturned. Ash stained the roads. Armored vehicles roamed the city center, still pockmarked and splattered with paint from a day of protests.

The destruction resembled the aftermath of firefights between Palestinian youths and the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank’s second-largest city, where posters of killed Palestinians paper the old city’s limestone walls. But this time, Israel was not involved. The violent chaos on Tuesday that left a 53-year-old man dead erupted between Palestinians and their own security forces, who coordinate with Israel in an uneasy alliance against Islamic militants.

The rare outburst, coming amid the deadliest violence in the West Bank since 2016, underscored the internal divisions tearing at Palestinian society and cast a spotlight on the growing ranks of disillusioned, impoverished young men taking up arms

Many have spent their entire lives in a territory occupied by Israel, scarred by infighting and segmented by checkpoints. They have not known a national election since 2006. They have no hope in the long-stalemated peace process. Their aging president, Mahmoud Abbas, is in his 18th year of what was supposed to be a four-year term. They see his Palestinian Authority as a vehicle for corruption and collaboration with Israel.

The clashes erupted after Palestinian forces arrested two men, including Musab Ishtayyeh, a popular local militant wanted by Israel. A 26-year-old man who lives in the area said that although the sides reached a truce, further violence was likely unless Ishtayyeh is released.

“I do not recognize the presidency of Abu Mazen,” he said, voicing a popular sentiment in the neighborhood. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared arrest.

“There is no difference between Israel and the Palestinian Authority,” he added, saying the Palestinian security forces “want to burn the resistance and kill those who fight.”

The latest violence stems from a series of deadly Palestinian attacks inside Israel last spring, which triggered a surge in nightly Israeli arrest raids across the territory. Some 90 Palestinians have been killed in the crackdown. Israel says many were militants or local youths who hurled stones and firebombs at troops, though several civilians have also died.

Experts say the escalation has deeper roots in a power struggle, as Palestinian leaders vie over the succession of the 87-year-old Abbas.

“The leadership vacuum is trickling down from the top all the way down. High-level members are trying to rally their supporters for doomsday,” said Tahani Mustafa, an analyst at the International Crisis Group. “In these sorts of contexts, radicalism really thrives.”

A lack of opportunity and political horizon has also fueled the unrest. Israel captured the West Bank in 1967, and its military occupation shows no signs of ending.

The last round of substantive peace talks broke down in 2009, and Israel has steadily consolidated its control of the territory with ever expanding construction of settlements that are now home to some 500,000 Jews. The Palestinians seek all of the West Bank, along with Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, for a future state.

Widely disenchanted with the PA, young Palestinians are flocking to an array of militant groups to get weapons. Palestinian security has struggled to assert control in flashpoint cities in the northern West Bank, like Nablus and Jenin.

The instability has consequences for Israel, which depends on cooperation with Palestinian security, and for the United States and other countries that have relied on the PA to establish order in the West Bank and serve as a partner in stalled peace negotiations.

“We need the PA to operate as a buffer between us and all the (Palestinian) organizations,” said Michael Milstein, a former head of the Palestinian department in Israeli military intelligence. “The test has only just begun.”

Palestinian security officials declined to comment on this week’s violence or the reasons for their unpopularity.

In recent months, the Israeli military has grown frustrated with what it describes as the PA’s reluctance to maintain order in flashpoint cities under its control.

“The PA has the manpower, the ammunition and the arms,” said one Israeli military official, speaking to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity in line with military guidelines. “In certain places, we feel they don’t have the will.”

The official said the army has seized 300 guns since Israel began its West Bank raids. He said the arms come mainly from small factories that make improvised pistols, or are smuggled from Jordan, Egypt or Lebanon. Some guns stolen from the military also make their way to the West Bank.

Wednesday’s truce temporarily halted the fighting, but the streets still bristled with tension and an armed group vowed to continue the battle on behalf of their arrested comrades.

“We will not abandon our brother … who is wanted by the occupation forces and is currently kidnapped,” the militant group, named the Den of Lions, wrote to the AP.

The group, based in the stone warren of the old city, is tied to Ibrahim al-Nabulsi, a prominent militant who was killed in an Israeli raid last month. His photo is on coffee stands, graffiti, posters and necklaces worn by children in Nablus. The Palestinian security services identified him as the son of one of their own colonels — a schism that illustrates how younger Palestinians, who grew up during the searing violence of the second Palestinian intifada, have lost faith in their leaders.

Many Palestinians see their security forces as protecting Israel against Palestinian protests, not Palestinians from Israeli assaults. The forces also have faced widespread criticism over brutal tactics, like last year when riots erupted over an anti-corruption activist’s death in custody.

Gangs of young Palestinian men are increasingly firing at Israeli forces during raids or shooting at soldiers manning checkpoints. The gangs operate without the backing of traditional political factions and militant groups.

Last week, two Palestinian gunmen killed an Israeli soldier at a military checkpoint in the northern West Bank before they were shot dead. One of the attackers was a Palestinian security officer.

Ghassan Khatib, a former Palestinian peace negotiator and Cabinet minister, acknowledged there is little public faith in the Palestinian leadership. He blamed a lack of hope and repeated Israeli measures that have weakened the Palestinian Authority.

“If everybody would maintain the same attitude and practices,” he warned, “we are going gradually toward the collapse of the Palestinian Authority, and chaos in Palestinian society.”

—

AP writers Tia Goldenberg and Eleanor Reich in Jerusalem contributed to this story.

Facebook violated rights of Palestinian users, report finds

By BARBARA ORTUTAY

An Israeli air strike hits a building in Gaza City, May 17, 2021. Actions by Facebook and its parent Meta during last year's Gaza war violated the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation and non-discrimination, a report commissioned by the social media company has found. (AP Photo/Hatem Moussa, File)


Actions by Facebook and its parent Meta during last year’s Gaza war violated the rights of Palestinian users to freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, political participation and non-discrimination, a report commissioned by the social media company has found.

The report Thursday from independent consulting firm Business for Social Responsibility confirmed long-standing criticisms of Meta’s policies and their uneven enforcement as it relates to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: It found the company over-enforced rules when it came to Arabic content and under-enforced content in Hebrew.

It, however, did not find intentional bias at Meta, either by the company as a whole or among individual employees. The report’s authors said they found “no evidence of racial, ethnic, nationality or religious animus in governing teams” and noted Meta has “employees representing different viewpoints, nationalities, races, ethnicities, and religions relevant to this conflict.”

Rather, it found numerous instances of unintended bias that harmed the rights of Palestinian and Arabic-speaking users.

In response, Meta said it plans to implement some of the report’s recommendations, including improving its Hebrew-language “classifiers,” which help remove violating posts automatically using artificial intelligence.

“There are no quick, overnight fixes to many of these recommendations, as BSR makes clear,” the company based in Menlo Park, California, said in a blog post Thursday. “While we have made significant changes as a result of this exercise already, this process will take time — including time to understand how some of these recommendations can best be addressed, and whether they are technically feasible.”

Meta, the report confirmed, also made serious errors in enforcement. For instance, as the Gaza war raged last May, Instagram briefly banned the hashtag #AlAqsa, a reference to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s Old City, a flash point in the conflict.

Meta, which owns Instagram, later apologized, explaining its algorithms had mistaken the third-holiest site in Islam for the militant group Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an armed offshoot of the secular Fatah party.

The report echoed issues raised in internal documents from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen last fall, showing that the company’s problems are systemic and have long been known inside Meta.

A key failing is the lack of moderators in languages other than English, including Arabic — among the most common languages on Meta’s platforms.

For users in the Gaza, Syria and other Middle East regions marred by conflict, the issues raised in the report are nothing new.

Israeli security agencies and watchdogs, for instance, have monitored Facebook and bombarded it with thousands of orders to take down Palestinian accounts and posts as they try to crack down on incitement.

“They flood our system, completely overpowering it,” Ashraf Zeitoon, Facebook’s former head of policy for the Middle East and North Africa region, who left in 2017, told The Associated Press last year. “That forces the system to make mistakes in Israel’s favor.”

Israel experienced an intense spasm of violence in May 2021 — with weeks of tensions in east Jerusalem escalating into an 11-day war with Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip. The violence spread into Israel itself, with the country experiencing the worst communal violence between Jewish and Arab citizens in years.

In an interview this week, Israel’s national police chief, Kobi Shabtai, told the Yediot Ahronot daily that he believed social media had fueled the communal fighting. He called for shutting down social media if similar violence occurs again and said he had suggested blocking social media to lower the flames last year.

“I’m talking about fully shutting down the networks, calming the situation on the ground, and when it’s calm reactivating them,” he was quoted as saying. “We’re a democratic country, but there’s a limit.”

The comments caused an uproar and the police issued a clarification saying that his proposal was only meant for extreme cases. Omer Barlev, the Cabinet minister who oversees police, also said that Shabtai has no authority to impose such a ban.

___

Associated Press reporter Josef Federman contributed from Jerusalem.

MONOPOLY CAPITALI$M

FTC says Bezos, Jassy must testify in probe of Amazon Prime

By MARCY GORDON

 Then Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos speaks at the the Amazon re:MARS convention on June 6, 2019, in Las Vegas. Federal regulators are ordering Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and CEO Andy Jassy to testify in their investigation of Amazon Prime Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2022, rejecting the company’s complaint that the executives are being unfairly harassed in the government's probe of the popular streaming and shopping service. (AP Photo/John Locher, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal regulators are ordering Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and CEO Andy Jassy to testify in the government’s investigation of Amazon Prime, rejecting the company’s complaint that the executives are being unfairly harassed in the probe of the popular streaming and shopping service.

The Federal Trade Commission issued an order late Wednesday denying Amazon’s request to cancel civil subpoenas sent in June to Bezos, the Seattle-based company’s former CEO, and Jassy. The order also sets a deadline of Jan. 20 for the completion of all testimony by Bezos, Jassy and 15 other senior executives, who also were subpoenaed.

Jassy took over the helm of the online retail and tech giant from Bezos, one of the world’s richest individuals, in July 2021. Bezos became executive chairman.

Amazon hasn’t made the case that the subpoenas “present undue burdens in terms of scope or timing,” FTC Commissioner Christine Wilson said in the order on behalf of the agency. However, the FTC did agreed to modify some provisions of the subpoenas that it acknowledged appeared too broad.

The FTC has been investigating since March 2021 the sign-up and cancellation practices of Amazon Prime, which has an estimated 200 million members around the globe.

The company said it was disappointed but not surprised that the FTC mostly ruled in favor of its own position, but it was pleased that the agency “walked backed its broadest requests” in the subpoenas.

“Amazon has cooperated with the FTC throughout the investigation and already produced tens of thousands of pages of documents,” the company said in a statement. “We are committed to engaging constructively with FTC staff, but we remain concerned that the latest requests are overly broad and needlessly burdensome, and we will explore all our options.”

In a petition to the FTC filed last month, the company objected to the subpoenas to Bezos and Jassy, saying the agency “has identified no legitimate reason for needing their testimony when it can obtain the same information, and more, from other witnesses and documents.” Amazon said the FTC was hounding Bezos, Jassy and the other executives, calling the information demanded in the subpoenas “overly broad and burdensome.”

The investigation has widened to include at least four other Amazon-owned subscription programs: Audible, Amazon Music, Kindle Unlimited and Subscribe & Save, as well as an unidentified third-party program not offered by Amazon. The regulators have asked the company to identify the number of consumers who were enrolled in the programs without giving their consent, among other customer information.

With an estimated 150 million U.S. subscribers, Amazon Prime is a key source of revenue, as well as a wealth of customer data, for the company, which runs an e-commerce empire and ventures in cloud computing, personal “smart” tech and beyond. Amazon Prime costs $139 a year. The service added a coveted feature this year by obtaining exclusive video rights to the NFL’s “Thursday Night Football.”

Last year, Amazon asked unsuccessfully that FTC Chair Lina Khan step aside from separate antitrust investigations into its business, contending that her public criticism of the company’s market power before she joined the government makes it impossible for her to be impartial. Khan was a fierce critic of tech giants Facebook (now Meta), Google and Apple, as well as Amazon. She arrived on the antitrust scene in 2017, writing an influential study titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” when she was a Yale law student.

Inflation, unrest challenge Bangladesh’s ‘miracle economy’

By JULHAS ALAM

1 of 4

Trainees work at Snowtex garment factory in Dhamrai, near Dhaka, Bangladesh, April 19, 2018. Bangladesh's economic miracle is under severe strain as fuel price hikes amplify public frustrations over rising costs for food and other necessities.

 (AP Photo/A.M. Ahad, File)


DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) — Standing in line to try to buy food, Rekha Begum is distraught. Like many others in Bangladesh, she is struggling to find affordable daily essentials like rice, lentils and onions.

“I went to two other places, but they told me they don’t have supplies. Then I came here and stood at the end of the queue,” said Begum, 60, as she waited for nearly two hours to buy what she needed from a truck selling food at subsidized prices in the capital, Dhaka.

Bangladesh’s economic miracle is under severe strain as fuel price hikes amplify public frustrations over rising costs for food and other necessities. Fierce opposition criticism and small street protests have erupted in recent weeks, adding to pressures on the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, which has sought help from the International Monetary Fund to safeguard the country’s finances.

Experts say Bangladesh’s predicament is nowhere nearly as severe as Sri Lanka’s, where months’ long unrest led its long-time president to flee the country and people are enduring outright shortages of food, fuel and medicines, spending days in queues for essentials. But it faces similar troubles: excessive spending on ambitious development projects, public anger over corruption and cronyism and a weakening trade balance.

Such trends are undermining Bangladesh’s impressive progress, fueled largely by its success as a garment manufacturing hub, toward becoming a more affluent, middle-income country.

The government raised fuel prices by more than 50% last month to counter soaring costs due to high oil prices, triggering protests over the rising cost of living. That led authorities to order the subsidized sales of rice and other staples by government-appointed dealers.

The latest phase of the program, which began Sept. 1, should help about 50 million people, said Commerce Minister Tipu Munshi.

“The government has taken a number of measures to reduce pressures on low-income earners. That is impacting the market and keeping prices of daily commodities competitive,” he said.

The policies are a stopgap for bigger global and domestic challenges.

The war in Ukraine has pushed higher prices of many commodities at a time when they already were surging as demand recovered with a waning of the coronavirus pandemic. In the meantime, countries like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Laos — among many — have seen their currencies weaken against the dollar, adding to the costs for dollar-denominated imports of oil and other goods.

To ease the strain on public finances and foreign reserves, the authorities put a moratorium on big, new projects, cut office hours to save energy and imposed limits on imports of luxury goods and non-essential items, such as sedans and SUVs.

“The Bangladesh economy is facing strong headwinds and turbulence,” said Ahmad Ahsan, an economist and director of the Dhaka-based Policy Research Institute, a thinktank. “Suddenly we are back to the era of rolling power cuts, with the taka and the forex reserves under pressure,” he said.

Millions of low-income Bangladeshis, like Begum, whose family of five can barely afford to eat fish or meat even once a month, still struggle to put food on the table.

Bangladesh has made huge strides in the past two decades in growing its economy and fighting poverty. Investments in garment manufacturing have provided jobs for tens of millions of workers, mostly women. Exports of apparel and related products account for more than 80% of its exports.

But with fuel costs so high, authorities shut diesel-run power plants that produced at least 6% of total production, cutting daily power generation by 1,500 megawatts and disrupting manufacturing.

Imports in the last fiscal year, ending in June, 2022, rose to $84 billion, while exports have fluctuated, leaving a record current account deficit of $17 billion.

More challenges are ahead.

Deadlines are fast approaching for repaying foreign loans related to at least 20 mega infrastructure projects, including the $3.6 billion River Padma bridge built by China and a nuclear power plant mostly funded by Russia. Experts say Bangladesh needs to prepare for when repayment schedules ramp up between 2024 and 2026

In July, in a move economists view as a precautionary measure, Bangladesh sought a $4.5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, becoming the third country in South Asia to recently seek its help after Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

Finance Minister A.H.M. Mustafa Kamal said that the government asked the IMF to begin formal negotiations on loans “for balance of payments and budgetary assistance.” The IMF said it was working with Bangladesh to draw up a plan.

Bangladesh’s foreign reserves have been falling, potentially undermining its ability to meet its loan obligations. By Wednesday they had dropped to $36.9 billion from $45.5 billion a year earlier, according to the central bank.

Usable foreign reserves would be about $30 billion, said Zahid Hussain, a former chief economist of the World Bank’s Dhaka office.

“I would not say this is a crisis situation. This is still enough to meet three months of imports, three and half months of imports. But it also means that … you do not have a lot of room for maneuvering on the reserve front,” he said.

Still, despite what some economists say is excessive spending on some costly projects, Bangladesh is better equipped to weather hard times than some other countries in the region.

Its farm sector — tea, rice and jute are major exports — is an effective “shock absorber,” and its economy, four to five times larger than Sri Lanka’s, is less vulnerable to outside calamities like a downturn in tourism.

The economy is forecast to grow at a 6.6% pace this fiscal year, according to the Asia Development Bank’s latest forecast, and the country’s total debt is still relatively small.

“I think in the current context, the most important difference between Sri Lanka and Bangladesh is the debt burden, particularly the external debt,” said Hussain.

Bangladesh’s external debt is under 20% of its gross domestic product, while Sri Lanka’s was around 126% in the first quarter of 2022.

“So, we have some space. I mean debt as a source of stress on the macroeconomy is not much of a much problem yet,” he said.

Waiting in a line to buy subsidized food, 48-year-old Mohammed Jamal said he was not feeling such leeway for his own family.

“It has become unbearable trying to maintain our standard of living,” Jamal said. “Prices are just out of reach for the common people,” he said. “It’s tough living this way.”

Judge tosses most charges against Kansas researcher

By MARGARET STAFFORD

 This undated file photo provided by the University of Kansas shows researcher Franklin Feng Tao. A federal judge  threw out nearly all charges against Tao, a Kansas researcher accused of illegally concealing work he was doing at a Chinese university while working at the University of Kansas, leaving only a conviction for making a false statement on a form.

 (Kelsey Kimberlin/University of Kansas via AP, File)

A federal judge on Tuesday threw out three of four convictions against a Kansas researcher accused of illegally concealing work he was doing at a Chinese university while working at the University of Kansas, leaving only a conviction for making a false statement on a form.

A jury convicted researcher Feng “Franklin” Tao in April on three counts of wire fraud and one count of false statements. He was accused of not disclosing that he was working for Fuzhou University in China while employed at the Kansas university.

However, U.S. District Judge Julie Robinson ruled that federal prosecutors did not provide sufficient evidence to support the wire fraud convictions. She upheld the making a false statement conviction and denied Tao’s request for a new trial on that count.

Tao’s attorney, Peter Zeidenberg, said in a statement that the defense team was gratified that Robinson found Tao did not intend to defraud Kansas or the federal government, and that Tao was “an outstanding researcher and award-winning professor” at Kansas.

“This will hopefully drive a final stake through the heart of these China Initiative cases, where the government has claimed that the failure to disclose a relationship to China constitutes federal grant fraud even when the researcher has completed all of the work on the grant to the government’s complete satisfaction,” Zeidenberg wrote.

The U.S. Attorney’s office in Kansas said Tuesday it would have no comment on Robinson’s ruling.

Zeidenberg said the defense team is considering its next steps related to the filing a false statement conviction, which carries a possible sentence of up to five years.

Federal prosecutors argued during the trial that Tao concealed his work in China to defraud the University of Kansas, the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. The federal agencies had awarded Tao grants for research projects at Kansas.

Defense attorneys argued that Tao was merely “moonlighting.” They said Tao completed all the research he received grants to conduct in Kansas and that his work in China wasn’t illegal because he wasn’t paid for it.

Robinson said Tao was deceptive in not disclosing his activities at Fuzhou University but there was no evidence Tao received money or property for the work, which is required for a wire fraud conviction.

“During the time period of the alleged scheme to defraud, Tao continued to rightfully receive his salary from KU for his services and continued to successfully perform the research required by DOE and NSF under their research grants,” Robinson wrote.

She said Tao did make a false statement to Kansas on a conflict of interest statement he submitted to the university in 2018.

The case against Tao was part of the U.S. Justice Department’s China Initiative, a program started in 2018 to crack down on efforts to transfer original ideas and intellectual property from U.S. universities to Chinese government institutions. The department ended the program in February amid public criticism and several failed prosecutions.

Tao did not disclose on conflict of interest forms that he was named to a Chinese talent program, the Changjiang Professorship. As part of that program he traveled to China to set up a laboratory and recruit staff for Fuzhou University, while telling Kansas officials that he was in Germany.

Zeidenberg noted during the trial that Tao listed his affiliation with both schools in some papers, suggesting he wasn’t hiding it. He also noted that the university honored Tao for his research efforts in April 2019, just months before his arrest.

Tao was born in China and moved to the U.S. in 2002. He began working in August 2014 as a tenured associate professor at the University of Kansas’ Center for Environmentally Beneficial Catalysis, which conducts research on sustainable technology to conserve natural resources and energy.

‘Knocking on famine’s door’: UN food chief wants action now


David Beasley, Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Program, speaks at the United Nations Headquarters on Thursday, Sept. 22, 2022. The U.N. food chief is warning that the world is facing "a perfect storm on top of a perfect storm" when it comes to hunger. (AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey)

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The U.N. food chief warned Thursday that the world is facing “a perfect storm on top of a perfect storm” and urged donors, particularly Gulf nations and billionaires, to give a few days of profits to tackle a crisis with the fertilizer supply right now and prevent widespread food shortages next year.

“Otherwise, there’s gonna be chaos all over the world,” World Food Program Executive Director David Beasley said in an Associated Press interview.

Beasley said that when he took the helm of WFP 5 1/2 years ago, only 80 million people around the world were headed toward starvation. “And I’m thinking, `Well, I can put the World Food Program out of business,’” he said.

But climate problems increased that number to 135 million. The COVID-19 pandemic, which began in early 2020, doubled it to 276 million people not knowing where their next meal was coming from. Finally, Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, sparking a war and a food, fertilizer and energy crisis that has pushed the number to 345 million.

“Within that are 50 million people in 45 countries knocking on famine’s door,” Beasley said. “If we don’t reach these people, you will have famine, starvation, destabilization of nations unlike anything we saw in 2007-2008 and 2011, and you will have mass migration.”

“We’ve got to respond now.”

Beasley has been meeting world leaders and speaking at events during this week’s General Assembly gathering of leaders to warn about the food crisis.

General Assembly President Csaba Korosi noted in his opening address Tuesday that “we live, it seems, in a permanent state of humanitarian emergency.” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that conflicts and humanitarian crises are spreading, and the funding gap for the U.N.’s humanitarian appeals stands at $32 billion -- “the widest gap ever.”

This year, Beasley said, the war shut down grain shipments from Ukraine — a nation that produces enough food to feed 400 million people — and sharply curtailed shipments from Russia, the world’s second-largest exporter of fertilizer and a major food producer.

Beasley said donor fatigue often undermines aid, particularly in countries in ongoing crisis like Haiti. Inflation is also a serious issue, raising prices and hitting poor people who have no coping capacity because COVID-19 “just economically devastated them.”

So mothers, he said, are forced to decide: Do they buy cooking oil and feed their children, or do they buy heating oil so they don’t freeze? Because there’s not enough money to buy both.

“It’s a perfect storm on top of a perfect storm,” Beasley said. “And with the fertilizer crisis we’re facing right now, with droughts, we’re facing a food pricing problem in 2022. This created havoc around the world.”

“If we don’t get on top of this quickly — and I don’t mean next year, I mean this year — you will have a food availability problem in 2023,” he said. “And that’s gonna be hell.”

Beasley explained that the world now produces enough food to feed the more than 7.7 billion people in the world, but 50% of that food is because farmers used fertilizer. They can’t get those high yields without it. China, the world’s top fertilizer producer, has banned its export; Russia, which is number two, is struggling to get it to world markets.

“We’ve got to get those fertilizers moving, and we’ve got to move it quickly,” he said. “Asian rice production is at a critical state right now. Seeds are in the ground.”

In Africa, 33 million small farms feed over 70% of the population, and right now “we’re several billion dollars short of what we need for fertilizers.” He said Central and South America also faced drought and India was buffeted by heat and drought. “It could go on and on,” he said.

He said the July deal to ship Ukrainian grain from three Black Sea ports is a start, but “we’ve got to get the grains moving, we’ve got to get the fertilizer out there for everybody, and we need to end the wars.”

Beasley said the United States contributed an additional $5 billion for food security, and Germany, France and the European Union are also stepping up. But he called on Gulf states to “step up more” with oil prices so high, particularly to help countries in their region like Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia.

“We’re not talking about asking for a trillion dollars here,” Beasley said. “We’re just talking about asking for a few days’ worth of your profits to stabilize the world,” he said.

The WFP chief said he also met with a group of billionaires on Wednesday night. He said he told them they had “a moral obligation” and “need to care.”

“Even if you don’t give it to me, even if you don’t give it to the World Food Program, get in the game. Get in the game of loving your neighbor and helping your neighbor,” Beasley said. “People are suffering and dying around the world. When a child dies every five seconds from hunger, shame on us.”

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Edith M. Lederer is chief U.N. correspondent for The Associated Press and has been covering international affairs for more than half a century. For more AP coverage of the U.N. General Assembly, visit https://apnews.com/hub/united-nations-general-assembly

FDA WAR ON VAPING IS DISTRACTION FROM TOXIC TOBACCO

New survey suggests little progress against U.S. teen vaping

By MIKE STOBBE and MATTHEW PERRONE

October 6, 2022

n this Jan. 31, 2020 photo a woman holds a flavored disposable vape device in New York. A government study on adolescent vaping, released on Thursday, Oct. 6, 2022, finds more than 2.5 million U.S. kids were using some form of e-cigarette in 2022, suggesting there’s been little progress in keeping vaping devices out of the hands of teenagers. 

(AP Photo/Marshall Ritzel, File)


NEW YORK (AP) — The latest government study on teen vaping suggests there’s been little progress in keeping e-cigarettes out of the hands of kids.

The data seems to show more high school students vaping, with 14% saying they had done so recently, according to survey results released Thursday. In last year’s survey, about 11% said they had vaped recently.

But experts cautioned that a change in the survey makes it difficult to compare the two: This year, a much higher percentage of participants took the survey in schools, and vaping tends to be reported more in schools than in homes.

“It continues to be difficult to assess (vaping) trends since the pandemic,” said Alyssa Harlow, a University of Southern California researcher who studies youth e-cigarette use.

Despite its persistence, vaping appears to be less popular than it was: In 2019, 28% of high schoolers said they had recently vaped.

Educators say vaping is still a big problem.

Anecdotally, the 2021-22 school year was worse than it was before the pandemic, said Mike Rinaldi, principal of Westhill High School in Stamford, Connecticut. That school year was the first when most kids returned from remote learning following COVID-19 lockdowns, noted Rinaldi, who speculated that many kids may have taken up vaping as they dealt with mental health issues or stress related to the pandemic.

Kids vaping in school bathrooms and stairwells remains “a constant battle,” said Matt Forker, principal of the nearby Stamford High School.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention researchers authored the new study, which is based on a Jan. 18 to May 31 online survey of about 28,000 U.S. middle and high school students.

The study asked about use of e-cigarettes and other vaping devices in the previous 30 days. In addition to the 14% of high school students who said they vaped recently, about 3% of middle schoolers said they had done so.

Of those who vaped, about 28% said they did it every day.

Nearly 85% of the youth who vaped used flavored products. Favored brands included Puff Bar and Vuse, followed by Hyde and Smok.

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday took action against the makers of both Puff Bar and Hyde following months of urging from congressional lawmakers and parent groups.

The agency sent a warning letter to Puff Bar manufacturer EVO Brands, stating that the company never obtained U.S. permission to sell its products and that they are being marketed illegally. Only a handful of vaping companies have received FDA clearance for their products, which must demonstrate a health benefit for adult smokers.

The agency also said it ordered Hyde manufacturer Magellan Technology to remove its products from the market, after rejecting its application for FDA authorization.

The FDA has struggled to regulate the sprawling vaping landscape, which includes both established companies and smaller startups. Regulators have been pilloried by Congress and anti-vaping advocates for missing multiple deadlines to issue decisions on millions of vaping products submitted by companies.

In the last three years, federal and state laws and regulations have raised the purchase age for tobacco and vaping products, and banned nearly all teen-preferred flavors from small, cartridge-based e-cigarettes.

Some kids also may have been scared away by a 2019 outbreak of vaping-related illnesses and deaths — most of them tied to a filler in black market vaping liquids that contained THC, the chemical that makes marijuana users feel high.

Leaders of one advocacy group said they worry the battle to diminish youth vaping is not going well.

The numbers “may not reflect the much larger reality of youth e-cigarette use that we hear about on a daily basis from parents, teachers, pediatricians, and prevention specialists who are experiencing this urgent and ongoing adolescent public-health crisis,” the group, Parents Against Vaping E-Cigarettes, said in a statement.

The FDA tried to ban the leading e-cigarette maker Juul’s products earlier this summer, citing questions about its potential health risks. But it’s been forced to put that effort on hold following a court challenge.

In this year’s survey, about one-fifth of teens who vape reported recently using Juul, though it was no longer a favorite brand. That’s a big shift from 2019, when more than half of teens reported Juul as their usual brand.

Instead, many young people have migrated to e-cigarettes delivering laboratory-made nicotine — including Puff Bar — a loophole in FDA’s oversight that Congress closed this year. Despite gaining new authority over those products, the FDA missed a mid-July deadline to issue decisions on the vast majority of those products.

___

Perrone reported from Washington, D.C.

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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.

Philadelphia apologizes for experiments on Black inmates

Edward Anthony speaks of his time at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia and the tests in which he participated while an inmate, pictured here on Oct. 24, 2007. The city of Philadelphia issued an apology Thursday, Oct. 6, 2022, for the unethical medical experiments performed on mostly Black inmates at its Holmesburg Prison from the 1950s through the 1970s. 

(Michael Bryant//The Philadelphia Inquirer via AP, File)

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The city of Philadelphia issued an apology Thursday for the unethical medical experiments performed on mostly Black inmates at its Holmesburg Prison from the 1950s through the 1970s.

The move comes after community activists and families of some of those inmates raised the need for a formal apology. It also follows a string of apologies from various U.S. cities over historically racist policies or wrongdoing in the wake of the nationwide racial reckoning after the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.

The city allowed University of Pennsylvania researcher Dr. Albert Kligman to conduct the dermatological, biochemical and pharmaceutical experiments that intentionally exposed about 300 inmates to viruses, fungus, asbestos and chemical agents including dioxin — a component of Agent Orange. The vast majority of Kligman’s experiments were performed on Black men, many of whom were awaiting trial and trying to save money for bail, and many of whom were illiterate, the city said.

Kligman, who would go on to pioneer the acne and wrinkle treatment Retin-A, died in 2010. Many of the former inmates would have lifelong scars and health issues from the experiments. A group of the inmates filed a lawsuit against the university and Kligman in 2000 that was ultimately thrown out because of a statute of limitations.

Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney said in the apology that the experiments exploited a vulnerable population and the impact of that medical racism has extended for generations.

“Without excuse, we formally and officially extend a sincere apology to those who were subjected to this inhumane and horrific abuse. We are also sorry it took far too long to hear these words,” Kenney wrote.

Last year, the University of Pennsylvania issued a formal apology and took Kligman’s name off some honorifics like an annual lecture series and professorship. The university also directed research funds to fellows focused on dermatological issues in people of color.

EXPLAINER: Fewer people cross Mediterranean; many still die

By NICOLE WINFIELD

yesterday

1 of 7

Migrants swim next to their overturned wooden boat during a rescue operation by Spanish NGO Open Arms at south of the Italian Lampedusa island at the Mediterranean sea, Aug. 11, 2022. The back-to-back shipwrecks of migrant boats off Greece that left at least 22 people dead this week has once again put the spotlight on the dangers of the Mediterranean migration route to Europe. 

(AP Photo/Francisco Seco, file)

ROME (AP) — The back-to-back shipwrecks of migrant smuggling boats off Greece has once again put the spotlight on the dangers of the Mediterranean migration route, the risks migrants and refugees are willing to take and the political infighting that has thwarted a safe European response to people fleeing war, poverty and climate change.

Here’s a look at the migration situation across the Mediterranean Sea:

WHAT HAPPENED TO TWO SMUGGLERS’ BOATS OFF GREECE?

Bodies floated amid splintered wreckage off a Greek island on Thursday as the death toll from separate sinkings of two migrant boats rose to 22, with about a dozen still missing. The vessels went down hundreds of miles apart, in one case prompting a dramatic overnight rescue effort as island residents and firefighters pulled shipwrecked migrants to safety up steep cliffs.

The Greek shipwrecks came just days after Italy commemorated the ninth anniversary of one of the deadliest Mediterranean shipwrecks in recent memory, the Oct. 3, 2013 capsizing of a migrant ship off Lampedusa, Sicily, in which 368 people died.

WHAT ARE THE TRENDS IN MEDITERRANEAN MIGRANT ARRIVALS?

So far this year, the International Organization of Migration has recorded around 109,000 “irregular” arrivals to the Mediterranean countries of Italy, Spain, Greece, Cyprus and Malta by land or sea. This has made immigration a hot political topic in those European Union nations.

U.N. refugee officials note that overall numbers of migrants seeking to come to Europe this way has decreased over the years, to an average of around 120,000 annually. They call that a relatively “manageable” number, especially compared to the 7.4 million Ukrainians who have fled their homeland this year to escape Russia’s invasion, and were welcomed by European countries.

“We’ve seen how quickly and how rapidly a response was mounted to deal with that situation in a very humane and commendable way,” said Shabia Mantoo, spokesperson for the U.N. refugee agency in Geneva. “If we can see that happen very concretely in this situation, why can’t it be applied for 120,000 people that are coming across to Europe on a yearly basis?”

Others see Europe’s harsh response to Mediterranean migrants, who often come from Africa, and its welcoming of Slavic Ukrainian migrants as racist.

HOW DANGEROUS IS THE MEDITERRANEAN?

So far this year the IOM has reported 1,522 dead or missing migrants in the Mediterranean. Overall, the IOM says 24,871 migrants have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean since 2014, with the real number believed to be even higher given the number of shipwrecks that never get reported.

“The voyage toward Italy has been confirmed to be the most dangerous,” said the ISMU foundation in Italy, which conducts research on migration trends.

The Central Mediterranean migration route that takes migrants from Libya or Tunisia north to Europe is the deadliest known migration route in the world, accounting for more than half of the reported deaths in the Mediterranean that IOM has tracked since 2014. The route has Italy as its prime destination.

WHAT ARE THE DEADLIEST KNOWN SMUGGLING SHIPWRECKS?

On April 18, 2015, the Mediterranean’s deadliest known shipwreck in living memory occurred when an overcrowded fishing boat collided 77 nautical miles off Libya with a freighter that was trying to come to its rescue. Only 28 people survived. At first it was feared the hull held the remains of 700 people. Forensic experts who set out to try to identify all the dead concluded in 2018 that there were originally 1,100 people on board.

On Oct. 3, 2013, a trawler packed with more than 500 people, many from Eritrea and Ethiopia, caught fire and capsized within sight of an uninhabited islet off Italy’s southern island of Lampedusa. Local fishermen rushed to try to help save lives. In the end, 155 survived and 368 people died.

One week later, a shipwreck occurred on Oct 11, 2013, further out at sea, 60 miles south of Lampedusa in what has become known in Italy as the “slaughter of children.” In all, more than 260 people died, among them 60 children. The Italian newsweekly L’Espresso in 2017 published the audio recordings of the migrants’ desperate calls for help and Italian and Maltese authorities seemingly delaying the rescue.

WHAT ARE OTHER MEDITERRANEAN MIGRATION ROUTES TO EUROPE?

The Western Mediterranean route is used by migrants seeking to reach Spain from Morocco or Algeria. The Eastern Mediterranean route, where the shipwrecks occurred this week off Greece, has traditionally been used by Syrian, Iraqi, Afghan and other non-African migrants who flee first to Turkey and then try to reach Greece or other European destinations.

Greece was a key transit point for hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees entering the EU in 2015-16, many fleeing wars in Iraq and Syria, though the numbers dropped sharply after the EU and Turkey reached a deal in 2016 to limit smugglers. Greece has since toughened its borders and built a steel wall along its land border with Turkey. Greece has also been accused by Turkey and some migration experts of pushing back migrants, a charge it denies.

For its part, Greece says Turkey has failed to stop smugglers active on its shoreline and has been using migrants to apply political pressure to the whole European Union.

HOW HAS MIGRATION DIVIDED THE EU’S 27 NATIONS?

Mediterranean countries have for years complained that they have been left to bear the brunt of welcoming and processing migrants, and have long demanded other European countries step up and take them in.

Poland, Hungary and other Eastern European nations refused an EU plan to share the burdens of carrying for the migrants.

Human rights groups have condemned how the EU in recent years has outsourced migrant rescues to the Libyan coast guard, which brings the migrants back to horrific camps on land where many are beaten, raped and abused.

“Over the years, the routes have changed but not the tragedies,” said the Sant’Egidio Community as it commemorated the 2013 Lampedusa anniversary this week. Working with other Christian groups, the Catholic charity has brought more than 5,000 refugees to Italy via “humanitarian corridors” and has called for more safe passages to be organized so migrants don’t have to risk dangerous Mediterranean crossings with smugglers.

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Follow all AP stories on global migration at https://apnews.com/hub/migration.

https://monoskop.org/File:Hardt_Michael_Negri_Antonio_Empire.pdf

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