UN calls on Taliban to release women's rights activists

The U.N. human rights chief on Friday called on Afghanistan's Taliban government to release five people the U.N. says were detained during a news conference organised by a women's civil society organisation. Rights groups say women's freedoms in Afghanistan have been undermined since the Taliban seized power in August 2021 as international forces backing a pro-Western government pulled out.

Reuters | Geneva | Updated: 04-11-2022

The U.N. human rights chief on Friday called on Afghanistan's Taliban government to release five people the U.N. says were detained during a news conference organised by a women's civil society organisation. Police disrupted a news conference in Kabul on Thursday intended to launch a new women's movement called 'Afghan Women’s Movement for Equality', the U.N rights office said.

A female activist, Zarifa Yaqobi, and four male colleagues were arrested. The other female participants in the room were also temporarily detained and subject to phone and body searches, before being released, it added. "We are concerned about the welfare of these five individuals and have sought information from the de facto authorities regarding their detention," said U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk via a spokesperson at a Geneva news briefing.

A Taliban spokesperson did not immediately provide a comment and said he would look into the matter. Rights groups say women's freedoms in Afghanistan have been undermined since the Taliban seized power in August 2021 as international forces backing a pro-Western government pulled out. They point to new curbs on their clothes, movement and education despite earlier Taliban vows to the contrary.

Facebook threatens to remove all news content if bill forcing payments to local media outlets passes


Robert Channick, Chicago Tribune
Tue, December 6, 2022 

Meta/Facebook is threatening to remove all local news from its platform following reports that proposed legislation to force Big Tech to pay publishers for news content is being added to a defense bill in a bid to win approval during the lame-duck Congress session.

The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act made it through the Senate Judiciary Committee in September, but is running out of time to pass before the end of the year, when the House will flip to Republican control. Including it in the National Defense Authorization Act, an annual “must-pass” bill, is seen as a strategy for getting it done before the new Congress convenes in January.

The legislative maneuver generated criticism Monday from Meta/Facebook, which issued a statement in opposition to the journalism act and its potential pairing with the defense act. The text of the defense bill had not been released as of Tuesday afternoon, but a source familiar with the matter told the Tribune that lawmakers are considering adding the journalism measure to the legislation.

“If Congress passes an ill-considered journalism bill as part of national security legislation, we will be forced to consider removing news from our platform altogether rather than submit to government-mandated negotiations that unfairly disregard any value we provide to news outlets through increased traffic and subscriptions,” Meta/Facebook said in its statement, which was posted on Twitter.

A Meta/Facebook spokesperson Tuesday declined to explain the mechanism for eliminating local news content, which proliferates in posts across the social media platform.

A Google spokesperson declined to comment.

The News Media Alliance, a Washington, D.C.-based newspaper trade organization that has lobbied in favor of the legislation, criticized Facebook’s statement but declined to comment on any efforts to include the measure in the defense bill.

“Facebook’s threat to take down news is undemocratic and unbecoming,” the News Media Alliance said in a statement Monday. “As the tech platforms compensate news publishers around the world, it demonstrates there is a demand and economic value for news.”

The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act would temporarily exempt newspapers, broadcasters and other publishers from antitrust laws to collectively negotiate an annual fee from Google and Meta/Facebook, which dominate the nearly $250 billion U.S. digital advertising market. Backers say it will boost struggling news organizations and level the playing field with Big Tech, while critics question whether local journalism or large media companies will be the true beneficiaries of the bill.

Introduced in the House and the Senate last year, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., is the lead co-sponsor of the bill, which covers thousands of local and regional newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and other Tribune Publishing newspapers. The proposed legislation excludes large national publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal.

Local TV and radio broadcasters — including network owned and operated stations — that publish original digital news content and meet other eligibility requirements would also be covered by the bill.

A Klobuchar spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

Opposition to the bill has been mounting over everything from the temporary antitrust exemption to undermining fair use on the internet. A coalition of 27 groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, Common Cause, Public Knowledge and United Church of Christ Ministry, sent a letter to Congressional leaders Monday opposing the act and its possible inclusion in the defense legislation.

“This bill, despite months of advocacy and multiple revisions, contains far too many contradictions, complexities, and problems to be included in any omnibus or must-pass legislation,” the coalition said in the letter.

News publishers have struggled during the new millennium. Newspaper ad revenue, which peaked at $49.4 billion in 2005, fell by more than 80% to $9.6 billion in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. More than a fourth of the nation’s newspapers have folded since 2005, according to a study by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

In August, Gannett, the nation’s largest newspaper chain, laid off 400 employees, or about 3% of its U.S. workforce. Last week, Gannett began another round of layoffs, cutting its news division staff of 3,440 by 6%, or about 200 positions.

McLean, Virginia-based Gannett publishes USA Today and more than 230 other newspapers.

Big Tech is eating up most of the digital advertising pie. Google is projected to generate nearly $70.1 billion and Meta/Facebook $55.5 billion, or more than 50% of the total U.S. digital ad spend this year, according to Insider Intelligence.

Under the bill, the annual fee paid by Big Tech would be distributed to all local publishers that participate in the collective negotiations, with 65% of the allocation based on how much they spend on journalists as a proportion of their overall budget.

As legislators weigh forcing social media giants to pay for aggregating local news content, Facebook, which changed its name to Meta in October to reflect ambitions to expand its social media platform into the virtual reality metaverse, is moving in the opposite direction.

In 2019 Facebook agreed to pay licensing fees to The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post and Chicago Tribune, among others, to run their content. But with revenues declining, the company announced in July it would no longer pay news publishers to aggregate curated stories.

On Monday, Meta/Facebook distanced itself even further from its former initiative to support local journalism.

“No company should be forced to pay for content users don’t want to see and that’s not a meaningful source of revenue,” the social media giant said in its statement.

rchannick@chicagotribune.com

S.Africa’s Ramaphosa future fragile despite party backing


ByAFP
Published December 6, 2022

Ramaphosa is not charged yet over the scandal - Copyright AFP Marco Longari
Susan NJANJI

The threat of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa’s immediate exit from office over a cash-in-sofas scandal has temporarily faded after his party vowed to rally around him at next week’s impeachment vote, but his woes are far from over.

The next days are critical for the head of state who has been championed as a graft-busting saviour after the corruption-drenched tenure of predecessor Jacob Zuma.

Ruling African National Congress (ANC) party lawmakers vowed to close ranks around him at an impeachment vote in parliament next week, but Ramaphosa remains embroiled in the worst scandal of his career that could yet bring him down.

After a tumultuous week following a report by a parliament-sanctioned independent panel which found that he “may have committed” serious violations and misconduct, Ramaphosa appeared to have earned a respite.

The parliament sitting to vote on whether he should face impeachment, initially slated for Tuesday, was at the 11th hour pushed back by a week, prolonging the uncertainty around Ramaphosa’s future.

That vote will come just three days before the ANC meets for its five-yearly conference to elect a new president. Ramaphosa is the leading candidate of the two nominees named so far for the party leadership.

But that is no guarantee he will be re-elected, or serve out his full state presidential term which should run until April 2024.

ANC members facing criminal allegations or charges are expected to step aside.

Ramaphosa is not charged yet over the scandal dubbed “Phala Phala farm-gate”, after the name of the estate in northeastern South Africa.

That gives him room to still try his luck and contest the ANC leadership — a ticket to the national presidency.

“The step-aside rule doesn’t apply here, Cyril Ramaphosa is not charged with anything,” lawyer and ANC veteran Mathews Phosa told eNCA news at the weekend.

But scandals do not necessarily decide the fate of an ANC president and the party throughout its nearly three decades in power has exhibited a tendency to protect its own people.

“In the ANC you could be charged for rape and still become president, you could be charged for an international arms deal and still be a president,” said political analyst Sandile Swana.

– Undignified exit? –

Formerly a wealthy businessman, the president may follow the footsteps of two of his predecessors, Zuma and Thabo Mbeki, who did not complete their tenures and were forced out by the ANC.

“The presidency of Ramaphosa is going to be short,” said Swana, but “his chances of leaving in a dignified manner are minimal”.

The 70-year-old president found himself in hot water in June when South Africa’s former spy boss filed a complaint to the police alleging Ramaphosa had concealed a huge cash theft from his game and rare cattle farm in 2020.

He accused the president of having organised for the burglars to be kidnapped and bribed into silence.

Ramaphosa has denied any wrongdoing, saying the cash — more than half a million dollars, stashed beneath sofa cushions — was payment for buffaloes bought by a Sudanese businessman.

But his explanations did not convince the special panel, which raised questions about the source of the cash.

On Monday Ramaphosa rushed to the country’s top court asking it to annul the panel’s report, but it is uncertain if his request will be granted.

The Constitutional Court case, which may take days or weeks to be concluded, “does not in itself stop the parliamentary (impeachment) proceedings from continuing”, said public law professor at the University of Cape Town Cathy Powell.

If the impeachment process is greenlighted it will take months of investigations and hearings before the final vote.

“The problem with this one is that it doesn’t seem to be completely frivolous,” the question whether it is serious enough to be fired for, said Powell.

When lawmakers meet next week a simple majority in the National Assembly, where the ANC has 230 out of 400 seats, will be required to initiate the impeachment process.

The impeachment vote itself would need a two-thirds majority to succeed.

If the impeachment proceedings go ahead, Ramaphosa risks being the first South African leader to be formally removed from office by parliament, said Swana.

The scandal has preoccupied South Africans who are already battling economic hardships, the inadequate provision of basic services such as electricity and a dizzying rate of unemployment.

Pandemic stress physically aged teens’ brains, a new study finds

The brains of adolescents who were assessed after the pandemic shutdowns ended appeared several years older than those of teens who were assessed before the pandemic. Until now, such accelerated changes in “brain age” have only been seen in children experiencing chronic adversity, such as neglect and family dysfunction.

A new study from Stanford University suggests that pandemic-related stressors have physically altered adolescents’ brains, making their brain structures appear several years older than the brains of comparable peers before the pandemic. The study was published on Dec. 1, 2022, in Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science.

The brains of adolescents who were assessed after the pandemic shutdowns ended appeared several years older than those of teens who were assessed before the pandemic. (Image credit: Getty Images)

In 2020 alone, reports of anxiety and depression in adults rose by more than 25 percent compared to previous years. The new findings indicate that the neurological and mental health effects of the pandemic on adolescents may have been even worse.

“We already know from global research that the pandemic has adversely affected mental health in youth, but we didn’t know what, if anything, it was doing physically to their brains,” said Ian Gotlib, the Marjorie Mhoon Fair Professor of Psychology in the School of Humanities & Sciences, who is the first author on the paper.

Changes in brain structure occur naturally as we age, Gotlib notes. During puberty and early teenage years, kids’ bodies experience increased growth in both the hippocampus and the amygdala, areas of the brain that respectively control access to certain memories and help to modulate emotions. At the same time, tissues in the cortex, an area involved in executive functioning, become thinner.

By comparing MRI scans from a cohort of 163 children taken before and during the pandemic, Gotlib’s study showed that this developmental process sped up in adolescents as they experienced the COVID-19 lockdowns. Until now, he says, these sorts of accelerated changes in “brain age” have appeared only in children who have experienced chronic adversity, whether from violence, neglect, family dysfunction, or a combination of multiple factors.

Although those experiences are linked to poor mental health outcomes later in life, it’s unclear whether the changes in brain structure that the Stanford team observed are linked to changes in mental health, Gotlib noted.

“It’s also not clear if the changes are permanent,” said Gotlib, who is also the director of the Stanford Neurodevelopment, Affect, and Psychopathology (SNAP) Laboratory at Stanford University. “Will their chronological age eventually catch up to their ‘brain age’? If their brain remains permanently older than their chronological age, it’s unclear what the outcomes will be in the future. For a 70- or 80-year-old, you’d expect some cognitive and memory problems based on changes in the brain, but what does it mean for a 16-year-old if their brains are aging prematurely?”

Originally, Gotlib explained, his study was not designed to look at the impact of COVID-19 on brain structure. Before the pandemic, his lab had recruited a cohort of children and adolescents from around the San Francisco Bay Area to participate in a long-term study on depression during puberty – but when the pandemic hit, he could not conduct regularly-scheduled MRI scans on those youth.

“Then, nine months later, we had a hard restart,” Gotlib said.

Once Gotlib could continue brain scans from his cohort, the study was a year behind schedule. Under normal circumstances, it would be possible to statistically correct for the delay while analyzing the study’s data – but the pandemic was far from a normal event. “That technique only works if you assume the brains of 16-year-olds today are the same as the brains of 16-year-olds before the pandemic with respect to cortical thickness and hippocampal and amygdala volume,” Gotlib said. “After looking at our data, we realized that they’re not. Compared to adolescents assessed before the pandemic, adolescents assessed after the pandemic shutdowns not only had more severe internalizing mental health problems, but also had reduced cortical thickness, larger hippocampal and amygdala volume, and more advanced brain age.”

These findings could have major implications for other longitudinal studies that have spanned the pandemic. If kids who experienced the pandemic show accelerated development in their brains, scientists will have to account for that abnormal rate of growth in any future research involving this generation.

“The pandemic is a global phenomenon – there’s no one who hasn’t experienced it,” said Gotlib. “There’s no real control group.”

These findings might also have serious consequences for an entire generation of adolescents later in life, added co-author Jonas Miller, who was a postdoctoral fellow in Gotlib’s lab during the study and is now an assistant professor of psychological sciences at the University of Connecticut.

“Adolescence is already a period of rapid reorganization in the brain, and it’s already linked to increased rates of mental health problems, depression, and risk-taking behavior,” Miller said. “Now you have this global event that’s happening, where everyone is experiencing some kind of adversity in the form of disruption to their daily routines – so it might be the case that the brains of kids who are 16 or 17 today are not comparable to those of their counterparts just a few years ago.”

In the future, Gotlib plans to continue following the same cohort of kids through later adolescence and young adulthood, tracking whether the COVID pandemic has changed the trajectory of their brain development over the long term. He also plans to track the mental health of these teens and will compare the brain structure of those who were infected with the virus with those who weren’t, with the goal of identifying any subtle differences that may have occurred.


The study was supported by funding from the National Institutes of Health (R37MH101495 to Ian Gotlib).

Gotlib is also a member of Bio-X, the Maternal & Child Health Research Institute, the Precision Health and Integrated Diagnostics Center, and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute. He is also a faculty affiliate of the Stanford Center on Longevity.

Ancient Turkey-Dinosaur Found in Museum after Gathering Dust for 90 Years

BY JESS THOMSON 

Update 11/08/2022

A fossil that was discovered in 1933 has finally been identified as a new species.

The fossil had sat unidentified in a museum for 89 years before it was officially confirmed to be a new species of turkey-like dinosaur named Centuriavis lioae, according to a paper published in the Journal of Paleontology.

Daniel Ksepka, curator of the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, and Kate Dzikiewicz, curatorial associate, led a study of the fossil, in which they used CT scans to reconstruct the shape of the brain and analyzed skeletal features to place the fossil in the evolutionary tree of birds.

The species was named in honor of Suzanne Lio, the managing director and chief operating officer at the Bruce Museum.

"I'm so thankful to have even been considered for this honor," Lio said in a statement. "I'm truly blessed to work for the Bruce Museum where I'm surrounded by such an incredible, dedicated team of employees. This is really a celebration for all of us at the Bruce."

Centuriavis lioae is thought to have lived around 11 million years ago, and is a distant relative of modern day turkeys and grouse. The fossil was first discovered in 1933 in Nebraska, but hadn't been examined until now. Having lived long after the Cretaceous extinction event caused by an asteroid impact around 66 million years ago, this species only has some of the characteristics of a traditional dinosaur.

A file photo of a turkey (left) and a raptor dinosaur with feathers (right). A turkey-like dinosaur fossil was identified as a new species after laying in museum archives for nearly 100 years.

"I love that it's being called a dinosaur by everyone. That is 100% accurate, but it's also a bird, related to today's grouse and turkeys. The specimen is beautifully preserved and shows that Centuriavis was about the size of a sage grouse, which is about half the size of a big farm chicken. If it was like its relatives, it was probably a social and beautiful member of the developing grasslands of North America," Ashley Poust, a paleontology researcher at San Diego Natural History Museum, told Newsweek.

This surprisingly long period of time between discovery and identification is not uncommon in the field.

"Museums often contain hundreds of thousands or millions of specimens, and these have been collected over the last 100 years or more. Often paleontologists or biologists come back from an expedition into new territory with huge collections of specimens, and can take literally years or decades to sort out, clean up, identify and catalog everything," Mike Benton, a professor of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Bristol, told Newsweek.

"With fossils, the specimens may be enclosed in the rock, and it can sometimes take an expert fossil preparator (a technician) many weeks or months to do the painstaking work to remove rock attached to a delicate skeleton before it is ready for study or exhibit."

Additionally, newer technologies like DNA sequencing may result in the identification of newer species long after their arrival at a museum.

"Museum collections contain millions of specimens of fossil and living organisms but there are not enough scientists to study every single one; they are like an immense library where many of the books have not been fully read. So scrutiny of museum collections can yield fantastic new discoveries.

"One important new development is DNA technology—all major museums hold collections of DNA as well as physical specimens. Often, analysis of this DNA reveals what we formerly thought were a single species is actually a complex of several 'cryptic species' which are very similar, but reproductively isolated and genetically distinct," Michael Lee, a professor of evolutionary biology at Flinders University, told Newsweek.

This may mean that specimens buried in museum archives across the globe could eventually find themselves identified as new species with the advance of technology.


"It makes me excited to think about all of the studies that will happen in the future, when new technologies that we can scarcely imagine today are brought to bear on fossils and other objects that museums have been patiently securing for decades," Steve Brusatte, a vertebrate paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh, told Newsweek.

Prehistoric 50-Foot Whale Discovered in Deep Jungle Valley by Accident

BY JESS THOMSON 

ON 12/6/22 

Research Team Uncovers 50-Foot Whale Skeleton Fossil

A nearly complete ancient whale skeleton measuring 50 feet long has been discovered in Taiwan, the most complete whale specimen ever found on the island.

In May, Zhou Wenbo, one of the members of the whale fossil excavation team from the National Cheng Kung University's Archaeological Institute, was searching for fossils with local fossil collector Zhang Yumu when they found four of the whale's ribs sticking out of the ground deep in a jungle valley. After some initial excavation, they contacted Yang Zirui at the university.

The fossil, which turned out to be nearly 70 percent complete, is estimated to be that of a blue whale or "big fin whale" that lived around 85,000 years ago. The whale's shoulder blades, jawbone, back side of the skull and tail vertebrae are all well preserved, a National Cheng Kung University release said.

Pictured are students and researchers from Taiwan's National Cheng Kung University and the National Science and Technology Museum, who unearthed the most complete whale fossil found in the nation's history, at 50 feet long.

NATIONAL CHENG KUNG UNIVERSITY/NATIONAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY MUSEUM/YANG ZIRUI

Whales evolved from land animals, splitting off from hippos, their common ancestor, about 50 million years ago. Blue whales, the largest creature to ever exist, can grow up to 98 feet, with fin whales close behind at a record 85 feet long. The earliest specimen of modern blue whales ever found was identified from a skull fossil in Southern Italy, and these creatures were thought to have lived 1.5 million to 1.25 million years ago. Blue and fin whales are considered related evolutionarily as humans are to gorillas, having evolved into separate species from their common ancestor about 3.5 million years ago.

The Tougou area in Hengchun is a fossil hotspot, and many fossils from shells, sharks, crabs and whalebone have been found there, Zhou said.

1 of 4

A student lies next to the 7-foot jawbone

.NATIONAL CHENG KUNG UNIVERSITY/NATIONAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY MUSEUM/YANG ZIRUI

The 50-foot specimen was excavated in Hengchun by Yang, an assistant professor at the Department of Earth Sciences at National Cheng Kung University, as well as other researchers from there and the National Museum of Natural Science and several students from the Chengdu University of Technology.

The Taiwan fossil was excavated over 90 days and carried on foot back to the university, where it was stored at the National Museum of Natural Science. According to the release, the heaviest whale jawbone "weighed 334 kilograms [736 pounds] and was 223 centimeters [7.3 feet] long."

Zhuang Jingren, a rescue volunteer, said in the release that he had never seen jawbones longer than 3.2 feet. Eight people carried the bones on wooden stretchers over rugged terrain and through dense vegetation.

The university said the skeleton represented the second-largest mammal fossil found in Taiwan after some rhino fossils were discovered in 1971. The hayasaka rhino skeletons were found in Tainan's Zuojhen District and are specimens of a rhino species believed to have lived only in Taiwan in the Pleistocene Epoch, between 2.5 million and 11,700 years ago. A near-complete skeleton of Nesorhinus hayasakai is on display in Tainan City Zuojhen Fossil Park.

The geology team at the science museum will continue to clean the whalebone specimens. The scientists hope that further research into the fossils will "help to understand how whales adapt to environmental changes from the ice age to the present."

The excavation team carefully removed water and dirt from a mandible fossil before plastering it.

Whale scapula fossils are cast in plaster.

Pictured are the whale vertebral fossils.

NATIONAL CHENG KUNG UNIVERSITY/NATIONAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY MUSEUM/YANG ZIRUI

READ MORE

Ancient turkey-dinosaur found in museum after gathering dust for 90 years

Ancient New York ocean discovery could hold secret of hydrogen storage

Another T. Rex Is Being Auctioned, Horrifying Scientists Again

Group spotted taking 23-million-year-old whale fossil in New Zealand

Lost Medieval Graveyard With Over 1,300 Bodies Reveals Mutation Mystery

Story by Robyn White • 

An ancient graveyard holding over 1,300 medieval bodies has revealed a bone mutation mystery.


In this combination image, a stock image of a cemetery and bone found by Queens University Belfast© Getty/ queens university belast

Scientists from Queen's University Belfast and Trinity College Dublin discovered that two men, hidden within the graveyard at Ballyhanna, suffered from a condition called multiple osteochondromas, which causes benign bone tumors.

The long lost Gaelic medieval graveyard was unearthed during the construction of a large bypass in County Donegal, northwestern Ireland. It dates back more than 1,000 years.

The condition the two men suffered from stemmed from a genetic mutation within their EXT1 gene.

It was initially assumed that the men would have been related, and lived during the same time. But it turns out that the two men weren't related at all, and lived hundreds of years apart, findings published in the European Journal of Human Genetics reported.

While the condition affected the same gene, the two men had completely different mutations.

Multiple osteochondromas is incredibly rare and only occurs in 1 in 50,000 people. One of the men suffered from a mutation that has been recorded in patients today, the study found. But the other has never been seen in sequencing data before. It's also the first time a new disease mutation has been found in ancient genomic data.

Iseult Jackson, from Trinity's School of Genetics and Microbiology and first author of the study, said in a press release: "It was really surprising that these individuals had completely different mutations causing their condition, especially because it's so rare."

Those buried there would have been farmers, labourers, merchants, artisans, clergy and the very poor, Queens University said in a press release.

Others among the 1,300 buried at the lost graveyard also had skeletal indicators of stress and ill health. Some were found to have suffered from tuberculosis.

These two men likely suffered from the rare condition, as while the tumors are benign, they can cause limb deformity and extreme pain. The condition can also cause nerve compression, and in a small amount of cases, malignancy.

Professor Dan Bradley, from Trinity's School of Genetics and Microbiology, said in a statement: "Discovery of the mutations that cause serious diseases through application of whole genome sequencing has been a key medical breakthrough in recent years, but this is the first time this has been applied to ancient individuals.

The study demonstrates the important contribution that ancient DNA analysis on people from the past can make to understanding conditions that still affect people today."

The findings will allow scientists to build on osteoarchaeological research, the study said.

Do you have a tip on a science story that Newsweek should be covering? Do you have a question about genes? Let us know via science@newsweek.com.

References

Iseult Jackson et al, Genetic causes of bone tumors discovered in 1,000-year-old Irish skeletons, European Journal of Human Genetics, published November 28, doi 10.1038/s41431-022-01219-2

Elizabeth Taylor's First Authorized Biography: 'She Said Her Entire Life Was a Fight'

Story by Brenton Blanchet • 4h ago

The first time author Kate Andersen Brower encountered Elizabeth Taylor, it wasn't in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or Cleopatra. It was in the supermarket.


HarperCollins Publishing© Provided by People

The New York Times bestselling author remembers going to the store with her mother growing up in the '80s, and seeing Taylor's face on tabloids — with ex-husband Larry Fortensky, with Michael Jackson, and often critiqued for her weight. That's how Brower was introduced to the Academy Award winner. And as she reveals in the authorized biography Elizabeth Taylor: The Grit & Glamour of an Icon (out Dec. 6 via HarperCollins), she was much more than just those fragments of her life. She was human.

"I had this kind of image of her — the punchline, someone who was out of control," Brower tells PEOPLE of her childhood memories of Taylor, who died in March 2011 at the age of 79.

"Getting to go through her life, to see her inner thoughts and how she was working through things psychologically all the time. And also how empathetic she was to other people, how she struggled being a working mother of four kids, struggled to find true love… I just think there was so much more to her than we could see."

RELATED: Elizabeth Taylor's 1961 Oscars Dress Discovered in Suitcase Decades After Event



Jim Smeal/Ron Galella Collection via Getty© Provided by People

For the biography, which is three years in the making and marks the first-ever authorized story of the icon's life, Brower dives into the "more."

With the go-ahead to explore the family and estate's archives (including 7,358 letters and personal notes) and interviews with 250 of Taylor's closest loved ones and other acquaintances, the author took on the "tremendous responsibility" to document Taylor's life, in her own words, and in the words of those who knew her best.

Brower spoke to notable names like Demi Moore, Carol Burnett, and Colin Farrell for the book, the actress' four children, and even some of Liz's former loves — including George Hamilton, Robert Wagner, and her last surviving husband Senator John Warner, who initially gave Bower the green light to write the book before he died in 2021.

With their help, and the help of Taylor's archives, she was able to tell the story of not just a woman who was an iconic actress, who was struggling with addiction, who was a victim of abuse, or who was a champion for those with AIDS in the '80s — but as someone who considered herself a "full-fledged human being, as she liked to say."

"She said her entire life was a fight," Brower shares. "The resilience is the refusing to be a victim. Her father did beat her up. And he beat her because he felt intimidated that his 12-year-old was making more money [as a child star] than he was. And they had a reconciliation when she was in her 20s. But I mean, the fact that she wouldn't let herself be victimized even though she was on paper, a victim. I think that's terrible that he did that. But she got up again, like she almost died in her 20s when she had pneumonia, and she kept going and going. It was the never giving up."

Related video: Dame Elizabeth Taylor's diamond ring belonged to a Nazi's ex-wife  Duration 1:09  View on Watch

RELATED: Elizabeth Taylor's Grandson Quinn Tivey Carries on Her AIDS Activism: 'Grandma Stood Up'

NY Daily News Archive/Getty© Provided by People

Addiction is a heavy topic in The Grit & Glamour of an Icon, as Taylor opened up in personal letters about the struggles she faced being addicted to drugs.

At one point, her son Chris told Brower about a specific incident that took place in the '70s, which prompted him to move away. Chris, in the book, recalled how his mother asked him to give her an injection of Demerol in her knee sometime when she put her skirt around her hips and handed him a needle to do it himself.

He couldn't bring himself to do it, Brower says.

"And he walked out of the room and left Washington, DC because she was just so unhappy there," she says. "He said she had this dead behind-the-eyes look on her face handing him the syringe. It's just like 'God, you think she has everything.' But really, there was always a void as she was trying to fill."

In the book, the author makes note of instances of abuse that Taylor suffered at the hands of her loved ones. The actress was married eight times to seven husbands throughout her life, and Brower writes of one moment where Eddie Fisher, Taylor's fourth husband, held a gun to her head in 60s and said "Don't worry, you're too beautiful to kill."

"She said being married to him was a slow suicide," Brower explains. "So she needed to leave. So she got out of these situations that she was in that were abusive. But I think that the thing about her too, is that she always thought that she was her best when she was married. But if you just look at it, the period of time when she was the most impactful and was when she was single."

Some of the letters Taylor wrote were never even sent, including ones she penned to Richard Burton and close friend Michael Jackson after they died.

As for those who knew Taylor well and are still remembering her legacy today, Brower says the family was happy with the book, after finally being "ready" to tell Taylor's story for the first time.

"I got a call from her son, Chris, who had read it and said that it was hard for him to read sometimes, but that it brought back all of these memories about his mom," she says.

"But that there were things that he learned in reading it because her life was so big, no one person was there for all of it. She was always surrounded by an entourage of people. But in the long run, the family is happy with it, because they were ready."

Arizona Is Getting a Big, New Chip Fab. Biden and Apple CEO Are Psyched

Story by Stephen Shankland • CNET

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. will announce on Tuesday that it's building a second new factory in Phoenix to create cutting-edge processors.

TSMC is building a fab in Phoenix, one of a pair the Taiwanese semiconductor giant has committed to operating in the United States. TSMC

That's big news for companies like Apple, AMD and Nvidia, whose chief executives will join President Joe Biden to laud the development.

TSMC is already building a chip fabrication plant, or fab, in the Arizona city -- a $12 billion investment to make processors with the newer 5-nanometer manufacturing process it uses to make iPhone processors and other chips today. At a ceremony to mark the arrival of the first chipmaking equipment at the fab, it'll announce it'll also make improved 4nm chips there and build a second fab to make significantly more advanced 3nm chips. The total investment: $40 billion.

Customers of TSMC currently rely on fabs in Taiwan, but modern fabs in the US could help ensure a US supply of processors too. More US chip manufacturing also can encourage a broader manufacturing ecosystem, including some business partners that supply chipmakers with equipment and materials and others that test, package, assemble chips after they're made.

It's unlikely the US will match the breadth of Asia's electronics manufacturing anytime soon, but if politicians and businesses get their way, the semiconductor industry might avoid the fate of industries like steelmaking and textiles that largely vanished from the US.

Processors are critical to just about every modern product and industry, not just phones and laptops. They are used to control cars, refrigerators, military hardware, toys and power plants. A global chip shortage triggered by the COVID pandemic kept products like Ford F-150 pickups and Sony PlayStations out of customers' and revealed just how vulnerable global supply chains are.

The TSMC expansion comes weeks after of Micron's $20 billion "megafab" investment in New York announced in October, which ultimately could reach $100 billion, and Intel's announcement of $20 billion in two new fabs outside Columbus, Ohio, which also could reach $100 billion investment this decade.

More disruptions are possible. Russia's invasion of Ukraine showed that political borders aren't necessarily fixed. That has particular importance to Taiwan, the island nation that China claims as its own and that's home to most of TSMC's manufacturing.

Related video: 'A really significant milestone': Biden to visit Arizona chip maker facility

Duration 3:52

View on Watch

All these forces combined to nudge Congress into passing the CHIPS and Science Act. It promises nearly $53 billion in subsidies for fabs, research into the semiconductor technology that underpins processors and spending to train future workers. And it's a much more assertive industrial policy than the US had in the past, when most chipmaking moved overseas to its current stronghold in Asia.

"We saw during the pandemic that something that we took for granted, global supply chains, were actually a key vulnerability for economic and our national security," Ronnie Chatterji, acting deputy director for industrial policy at the White House's National Economic Council, said in a press briefing.

Biden lobbied for the CHIPS funding and has touted it often as a success in rebuilding US manufacturing abilities. The idea is to try to encourage private companies to make their own investments knowing they'll find an economically favorable climate.

"This is a marked departure from the economic philosophy that has governed for much of the last 40 years in this country," said Brian Deese, director of the National Economic Council. With the old strategy, "you said that government should get out of the way, cut taxes for large companies, cut regulations, and assume that the American economy American families would benefit."

The new policy can mean a subsidy of about $3 billion to boost fab construction that otherwise costs about $10 billion. That makes the US more competitive with Asian countries like Taiwan, South Korea and China, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has said. Intel has a major presence in Chandler, immediately next to Phoenix, and is building $20 billion in new fabs there.

Building fabs takes a long time. TSMC broke ground on its 5nm fab in April 2021, and it won't start producing chips until 2024. The newly announced 3nm fab won't make chips until 2026.

TSMC's Arizona fabs will employ about 10,000 people overall, 4,500 of them working directly for TSMC. In addition, building the fabs employs more than 10,000 construction workers, the company said.

In addition to the over 10,000 construction workers who helped with construction of the site, TSMC Arizona's two fabs are expected to create an additional 10,000 high-paying high-tech jobs, including 4,500 direct TSMC jobs. When complete, TSMC Arizona's two fabs will manufacture over 600,000 wafers per year, with estimated end-product value of more than $40 billion.

One big fan of TSMC's expansion is Nvidia, which relies on TSMC to manufacture its graphics chips and AI accelerators. "Bringing TSMC's investment to the United States is a masterstroke and a game-changing development for the industry," CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement.

Deese and Chatterjee stopped short of promising that the new investments would benefit from the CHIPS funding. Details of how to apply won't even arrive until the first quarter of 2023. But they pointed to comments from chip manufacturing executives who touted the legislation as a reason for their US investments.

"The passage of the CHIPS and Science Act was absolutely critical in providing the long-term certainty for companies like TSMC to expand their footprint and really expand their investment commitment to the United State," Deese said.

FOR-PROFIT MEDICINE U$A

Hospital shutdown spurs questions about private equity in health care

Story by Jon LaPook • 

After a car accident last month, Latifa Dixon, a mother of two, arrived at the emergency room at Delaware County Memorial Hospital in suburban Philadelphia only to learn the ER had just shut down. Twenty-eight-year-old Cecilia Vizuete, who was having trouble feeding her one-year-old daughter because of a breast infection, said she was told by a security guard to search Google Maps for another hospital. Shirley Posey arrived there suffering from shortness of breath and tightness in her chest.

"This was the closest hospital to me and I needed help," Posey said when CBS News met her outside Delaware County Memorial. Posey later recovered, but not until she raced to an urgent care, collapsed, and was transported by ambulance to another hospital.

For nearly a century, Delaware County Memorial delivered babies, treated trauma and tended to the critically ill. That all changed earlier this year, when its current owners, a Los Angeles-based for-profit company called Prospect Medical Holdings, began cutting services at the 168-bed hospital in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. First the maternity ward went, then the operating rooms and the I.C.U., and then, last month, the emergency department closed its doors to the community's nearly 85,000 residents.




The shutdown has raised questions about the role of private equity as it piles into the health care space, snapping up everything from local doctors' practices to specialty clinics, even hospices. According to the consultancy Bain & Company, private equity firms posted a record year for deal volume in health care in 2021, with the total value of those deals topping $150 billion.

Backed by private equity investment, Prospect Medical Holdings rapidly grew to own 20 hospitals in six states by 2018. In 2016, it bought Crozer Health, a nonprofit Pennsylvania health system that was in danger of failing.

A CBS News investigation found that of those 20 hospitals owned by Prospect Medical, five have closed. In addition to Delaware County Memorial, Prospect Medical has suspended all services at Springfield, another acute care hospital in the same Pennsylvania health system. It also closed three hospitals in a San Antonio health system it purchased in 2012.

In court proceedings, Prospect Medical argues it is not seeking to close Delaware County Memorial for good. In a statement to CBS News, the company said it is working to transition the hospital to a "100 patient facility for those in need of behavioral health and other services." As part of the plan, the hospital will lose inpatient "acute care services," which includes the lone emergency room in the community of Upper Darby.

"There aren't resources nearby and so we find that people wait longer to go to the hospital," county official Monica Taylor told CBS News chief medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook, adding that closing what's considered a safety-net hospital will hit the area's low-income population hardest.

"We wouldn't see a hospital closing down if this were a more affluent area," said Taylor. "It leaves a gaping hole in this community that is going to be very hard and very difficult to fill."

"What they cared about was making money"

In a presentation provided to Delaware County officials, Prospect Medical cited struggles with high labor costs, record inflation for supplies and pharmaceuticals, and the strain of the COVID-19 pandemic for its decision. Taylor said she believes the company has not been upfront, and has been reluctant to share its financials with the county.

"I had the sense they were not giving us all the information," Taylor said.

Prospect Medical has faced scrutiny before. In 2019, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha's office investigated a proposed company transaction. Prospect Medical owns two hospitals in the state, that Neronha said were "in real danger of closing" because of the debt Prospect Medical had taken on.

"This had nothing to do with the pandemic," Neronha told CBS News. "Hospitals all over the country were facing the pandemic … but the problems here were exacerbated, frankly, by greed."


A van from the county medical examiner's office waits at the entrance of Delaware County Memorial Hospital in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, on Jan. 4, 2021. The hospital is now closed. 

Pete Bannan/ MediaNews Group//Daily Times 

Neronha invoked state law to force Prospect Medical to turn over its finances. A ruling by the Attorney's General's office found the company put "every hospital in its system…at risk of reduction of services, sale or closure."

Related video: Hospital closure leaves patients scrambling, owners collect millions

Duration 8:17

View on Watch

"They didn't care about health care," Neronha said. "What they cared about was making money for their investors."

Neronha hired two different outside experts to follow the money and discovered one reason why Prospect Medical was experiencing financial strain. In 2018, company owners took out a $1.12 billion loan, using proceeds to pay themselves and their private equity shareholders a $457 million dividend, according to the company's financial statements, obtained by Neronha's office in the course of the investigation.

"It'd be like a homeowner going to a bank, taking out a $100,000 loan, and instead of using it to invest in their property or pay for their kids to go to college, what they did was they just basically stuck it in their pockets as cash," Neronha told CBS News.

The company's financial statements revealed that to pay back that $1.12 billion loan, Prospect Medical sold the land and the buildings from hospitals they owned in California, Connecticut and Pennsylvania to a real estate investment trust for $1.386 billion. The documents show Prospect Medical then leased those hospitals back from the real estate investment trust.

"So now you're even in a worse position because you have no equity any longer," Neronha said. "You don't own anything that you can then go to the bank and use as collateral to raise more money when you need it."

In Delaware County, that lease-back arrangement instead meant the health system was saddled with $35 million a year in rent.

CBS News submitted detailed questions to Prospect Medical about these financial decisions, including about the $457 million dividend and the lease-back arrangement. The company, through a spokesman, declined to answer those questions.

"They are drawing the value out of these hospitals as they would money from a piggy bank," said Eileen O'Grady, campaign director with the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a nonprofit organization that has raised concerns about Prospect Medical to attorneys general in the six states where the company owned hospitals. "Meanwhile, the company's owners have made out like bandits."

Neronha's office confirmed to CBS News that the Prospect Medical CEO's personal share of the $457 million dividend was about $90 million.

"What they've done is extremely evil"

One of the early investors in Prospect Medical's 2016 purchase of the Pennsylvania health system told CBS News that the company entered into the arrangement as the only bidder and "last hope for these failing hospitals." When the purchase was announced, local officials said it came with a promise: to invest $200 million to "dramatically increase…service to the community."

"They tried to tell us that they were going to run us the same way," said emergency nurse Angela Neopolitano, who worked at Delaware County Memorial for 41 years. Instead Neopolitano, who was president of the local nurses' union, says Prospect Medical dismantled the hospital piece by piece, leading to longer waits in the emergency room and forcing staff to transfer more patients to other hospitals.

"They kept on cutting services," Neopolitano said. "Things wouldn't get fixed. Our elevator in the back of the emergency room had been broken for over a year. When they closed the I.C.U., that was the knife in my heart."

Neopolitano said at one point, the credit cards used by paramedics within the health system to fill their ambulances with fuel were disabled because Prospect Medical "didn't pay their bill."

The company did not respond to questions about its specific investments at Delaware County Memorial, but in an annual report said it had lived up to its commitment to invest $200 million in Crozer Health.

The company did not respond to a question about whether it neglected to pay fuel bills for ambulances, which was first reported in an investigation of the company by ProPublica. The company told ProPublica a company credit card was rejected because it had a charge limit as a security measure, and it increased the limit when it was brought to their attention to ensure there was not a disruption of services.

Now, the company has pivoted to a plan to convert Delaware County Memorial into a behavioral health facility. An executive with the hospital told the Philadelphia Inquirer last week that the new incarnation would not be "a moneymaker… but we go from losing $18 million a year to making $3 million and providing needed services to the community."

The shut down of Delaware County Memorial in September has sparked a legal battle which has drawn in Pennsylvania's attorney general and governor-elect Josh Shapiro.

In October, a judge granted an emergency injunction to keep the hospital open. Yet weeks later, the state's health department shut it down anyway, after Prospect Medical notified the department of staffing issues.

In a statement to CBS News, Prospect Medical said the ongoing litigation limits what it can say, but that the company is communicating with state health officials about its "multiple efforts to address those staffing issues." The company has pledged to save the facility by turning it into a "desperately needed 100-patient facility for those in need of behavioral health and other services."

Next week, a judge will hear arguments over whether to require Prospect Medical to find a way to re-open the hospital's doors. Shapiro's office has asked the judge to hold Prospect Medical in contempt and to fine it $100,000 for every day it does not resolve the staffing issues.

Neopolitano told CBS News she thinks that the $457 million dividend Prospect Medical's owners and private equity investors paid themselves should have gone back into the hospitals and into the community.

"What they've done is extremely evil, in my words," said Neopolitano of Prospect Medical. "To gain a dollar, you maybe destroyed lives, maybe even ended lives, because they can't get the help they need."