Robots Created to Help Elderly in Hospitals Pass Patient Testing Phase

A collection of eight robots designed by PAL Robotics and trialed by researchers collaborating across multiple universities in Europe and the Middle East have successfully passed the testing phase with patients. The robots, referred to as SPRING (Socially Assistive Robots in Gerontological Healthcare), are designed to provide comfort to elderly patients and alleviate their anxiety, while reducing the burden placed on nursing staff in busy environments. 

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“We believe that the SPRING project marks a significant milestone in the development of interactive robotics, and we are proud of its achievements, while recognising the exciting challenges that lie ahead,” Oliver Lemon, a professor of AI and academic co-lead at the National Robotarium stated in a press release.

The results of the tests showed that robots were able to perform routine tasks like greeting patients, provide directions, and answer questions during the initial trials in Assistance Publique Hopitaux de Paris in France. They were also able to understand group conversations and facilitate assistance based on what patients asked of them. These advances were made possible by the progress seen in large language models in recent years, the type of artificial intelligence technology that powers ChatGPT. 

The use of robots also reduced the amount of physical contact healthcare workers had with patients, which could help reduce the spread of infections in hospital settings. 

The SPRING project began nearly four and half years ago and is funded by Horizon 2020, a research and innovation initiative by the European Union. 

“The prospect of robots seamlessly collaborating with hospital staff to enhance the patient experience is now closer to reality” said Lemon.

source https://time.com/6590440/robots-hospital-patient-testing-phase-ai-assistance/

Justice Department Investigating Cori Bush for Alleged Misuse of Campaign Funds

The Department of Justice has launched an investigation into Democratic Rep. Cori Bush for allegedly misusing campaign money to spend on private security, the Missouri congresswoman confirmed in a statement Tuesday.

Although the scope of the allegations were not immediately known, a congressional ethics inquiry had previously raised questions about her alleged use of campaign funds to hire her husband, Cortney Merritts, as her security. Federal law bars lawmakers from paying family members to work in their official offices, unless they are providing “bona fide” services to the campaign. The Office of Congressional Ethics dismissed a complaint filed against Bush last fall after concluding that her husband had performed bona fide security work and was not overpaid.

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According to Federal Election Commission filings, Bush paid Merritts $60,000 in 2022 and $42,500 in 2023. The couple got married in Feb. 2023.

“As a rank-and-file member of Congress I am not entitled to personal protection by the House, and instead have used campaign funds as permissible to retain security services,” Bush said in a statement. “I have not used any federal tax dollars for personal security services.” She said she is “fully cooperating” with the investigation.

The Justice Department declined to comment.

Under federal election law, House members may use campaign funds to pay for private security for protection when not at the Capitol only if the money is used for “bona fide” security services.

Bush, a former Black Lives Matter organizer whose district includes St. Louis, has played a key role in the progressive wing of the House Democratic caucus since her election in 2020, becoming a member of the group of Democratic lawmakers known as “the Squad.” Bush is currently running for re-election.

source https://time.com/6590139/cori-bush-justice-department-investigation-security-spending/

Your Brain Doesn’t Want You to Exercise

If the benefits of physical activity were distilled into a pill, everyone would be on it. Studies show that moving improves nearly every aspect of health: boosting sleep, strength, and mental well-being while slashing the risk of chronic conditions and premature death. What’s more, studies show that exercise has a positive impact even when done in very short chunks and with no equipment or fancy gym membership required.

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Still, most people don’t exercise nearly enough. According to data published in 2023, less than a third of U.S. adults get the government-recommended amount of physical activity in their free time: at least 20 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic movement (think brisk walking) per day, plus a couple muscle-strengthening sessions (such as resistance training) each week.

Why is it so tough to get people to do something so good for and accessible to them? Physical limitations and health problems are certainly a factor for many people, since more than half of U.S. adults have some kind of chronic condition. Modern life deserves much of the blame, too, with long, sedentary work days and infrastructure that often makes it easier to hop in the car than walk or bike somewhere. And studies have long shown that people who don’t make much money are less likely to exercise than wealthier people, in part because they may live in areas with relatively few spaces where it’s safe and pleasant to be active.

But research suggests there’s another obstacle that affects all of us: our brains don’t want us to exercise.

Wired to be sedentary

For most of human existence, people had to be physically active to carry out the basic functions of life, such as finding or growing food. Humans evolved to tolerate a high level of activity—but also to gravitate toward rest when possible, to conserve energy for when movement was either necessary or pleasurable, explains Daniel Lieberman, a human evolutionary biologist and author of Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do is Healthy and Rewarding.

In other words, hunter gatherers weren’t out jogging to burn extra calories. From an evolutionary perspective, “that would be a stupid thing to do,” Lieberman says. “You’re wasting energy on something that’s not going to give you any benefit whatsoever.”

As a society, we no longer move much in the course of daily life, but the evolutionary instinct to conserve energy remains, Lieberman says. “That disinclination, that reluctance, that voice that says, ‘I don’t want to [exercise],’ is completely normal and natural,” he says.

Physical-activity researcher Matthieu Boisgontier, an associate professor at the University of Ottawa, demonstrated that phenomenon in a 2018 study. While hooked up to brain-activity monitors, people were given control of a digital avatar. They were told to move the avatar away from images of sedentary behavior that popped up on their computer screens and toward images of physical activity. Boisgontier and his colleagues found that avoiding sedentary behavior took more brain power, which suggests “we have an automatic tendency” to choose relaxing over moving, he says.

That conclusion shows up repeatedly in research. Studies show, for example, that people consistently choose to take an escalator instead of the stairs. That natural instinct isn’t inherently bad—it’s just that modern life gives us so many chances to give in to our preference for rest that “we have reached an extreme that is no longer beneficial to our health,” Boisgontier says.

Many people also subconsciously harbor negative feelings toward exercise that go back to childhood, says Jackie Hargreaves, a senior lecturer on sport and exercise psychology at the U.K.’s Leeds Beckett University. A gym-class embarrassment or unpleasant experience with a youth sports team can make a person avoid working out well into adulthood, Hargreaves says.

Sometimes it’s also a confidence issue. Research suggests people who view themselves as competent exercisers are more likely to stick to a regular routine, while people who think the opposite may struggle to find consistent motivation, says Stefanie Williams, a behavioral scientist who works with a U.K. organization that translates health research into practice.

How to trick your brain into exercising

Feeling good about your ability is crucial to finding the motivation to exercise, says Sam Zizzi, an exercise psychologist at West Virginia University. He recommends starting small—perhaps walking just a few minutes per day at first—and building on that progress over time. Observing a peer doing what you’d like to do, particularly if they share your age, gender, or health status, can also help you realize you can accomplish it, too, Williams says.

A counterintuitive way to build confidence, Lieberman adds, is to simply recognize the ways your brain sets you up to fail. “When people struggle to exercise, they’re told they’re lazy or there’s something wrong with them,” when in reality, people who exercise purely for fitness are the ones working against their natural instincts, Lieberman says. Replacing guilt and shame with self compassion—and an understanding of how the human brain works—can go a long way.

So can reframing what counts as exercise. You don’t need to spend an hour lifting weights at the gym; even taking a few minutes per day to dance in your kitchen or weed the garden is great for your mind and body, numerous studies show. “It’s not about going out and doing vigorous, competitive sport,” Hargreaves says. “It’s about moving,” and finding ways to move that are actually enjoyable.

Finally, Zizzi recommends making exercise “serve a double purpose”—perhaps by planning a bike ride with friends so your workout doubles as a social outing, or making an existing work meeting a walk-and-talk. Intertwining exercise with something you already want or need to do, Zizzi says, can make it easier to ignore the part of your brain that’s telling you it’s better to park yourself on the couch.

source https://time.com/6590020/why-its-so-hard-to-motivate-yourself-to-exercise/

China Evergrande, World’s Most-Indebted Property Developer, Ordered to Liquidate

China Evergrande Group was ordered to be liquidated by a Hong Kong court, a stunning legal coda for the world’s most-indebted property developer.

A wind-up could end up in management being replaced and addressing some issues, Judge Linda Chan said in the city’s High Court on Monday morning.

The ruling on Monday cements the homebuilder, carrying 2.39 trillion yuan ($333 billion) of liabilities, as the most prominent symbol so far of China’s real estate crisis, which has crimped economic growth and hurt consumer confidence. The order is also likely to send ripples through China’s financial system at a time when policymakers are trying to stem a stock market rout.

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Read More: How China’s Government Keeps Inadvertently Hurting Its Own Economy

Evergrande, which first defaulted on a dollar bond in December 2021, was for a time in the last decade the country’s largest builder by sales. The petition for liquidation was filed in June 2022 by Top Shine Global Limited of Intershore Consult (Samoa) Ltd., which was a strategic investor in the homebuilder’s online sales platform.

Trading in Evergrande shares was suspended on Monday morning after the stock tumbled 21%, giving it a market value of just HK$2.15 billion ($275 million).

Judge Chan, who has presided over a string of developer hearings and ordered the liquidation of one last year, will conduct the hearing on a potential regulating order at 2:30pm Monday, according to information on the city’s judiciary website. Such orders mean that the court would regulate the winding-up process, potentially including appointing a liquidator.

Read More: China’s Real Estate Crisis Has No Easy Fix—Just Ask Chinese Soccer Fans

But the liquidator is likely to face a daunting process in dealing with Chinese developers. Most Evergrande projects are operated by local units, which could be hard for the offshore liquidator to seize. And construction work, housing delivery and other activities in mainland China likely will continue while the process unfolds.

The property market has continued to sag even as China introduced a slew of new measures to stem sinking prices and sluggish demand.

Evergrande’s winding-up petition case number is HCCW 220/2022.

source https://time.com/6589524/china-evergrande-group-ordered-liquidate-developer-debt-hong-kong-court/

Taylor Swift Searches Blocked by X Amid Circulation of Deepfakes

Social media platform X, formerly Twitter, has blocked searches of Taylor Swift’s name to crack down on the proliferation of sexually explicit deepfakes of the pop star, revealing the challenges of tackling such content. 

“This is a temporary action and done with an abundance of caution as we prioritize safety on this issue,” Joe Benarroch, head of business operations at X, tells TIME in an email Sunday. At the time of publication, searches of Taylor Swift’s name on X were still inaccessible.

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On Friday, X’s Safety account on the platform posted that non-consensual nudity is strictly prohibited and the company has a “zero-tolerance policy towards such content.” Teams were “actively removing all identified images and taking appropriate actions against the accounts responsible for posting them,” the statement read. “We’re committed to maintaining a safe and respectful environment for all users.”

TIME has reached out to Swift’s publicist for comment. 

The Swift deepfakes have spotlighted the issue of AI-generated pornography, where the face of an individual is superimposed onto an explicit picture or video without their consent, and the need for more legal protections as regulation struggles to keep pace with technology. As X acknowledged, banning searches is a stopgap measure. Although it has been used to effect in this particular case, it’s not a long-term fix for the wide-reaching problem.

Ninety-six percent of all deepfakes online in 2019 were nonconsensual pornography, almost all of women, media analyst Sensity found, and the FBI warned last year that this content can be used for sextortion and criminal financial gain.

“It is alarming,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Friday when asked about the Swift deepfakes. “While social media companies make their own independent decisions about content management, we believe they have an important role to play in enforcing their own rules to prevent the spread of misinformation and non-consensual intimate imagery of real people.”

While 10 states criminalize deepfakes, federal law does not, and legislators in Congress are stepping up to try to outlaw the content. 

Rep. Joe Morelle, a Democrat from New York, introduced the Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act last year, but the bill has not moved forward yet. Another New York Democrat, Rep. Yvette Clarke, introduced the DEEPFAKES Accountability Act last year to protect against national security threats and provide legal recourse to victims.

In January, legislators introduced the No Artificial Intelligence Fake Replicas And Unauthorized Duplications (No AI Fraud) Act to protect Americans from AI-manipulations of their voice and images.

In response to a reporter’s question about proposed law, Jean-Pierre said “there should be legislation, obviously, to deal with this issue,” but pointed out that President Joe Biden already took action by authoring an executive order on how his administration would govern generative AI and creating a task force to tackle online harassment.

source https://time.com/6589487/taylor-swift-searches-blocked-x-twitter-deepfakes-response/

Three American Troops Killed In Drone Attack by Iran-Backed Militia in Jordan, Says Biden

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Three American troops were killed and “many” were wounded Sunday in a drone strike in northeast Jordan near the Syrian border, President Joe Biden said. He blamed Iran-backed militias for the first U.S. fatalities after months of strikes by the groups against American forces across the Middle East amid the Israel-Hamas war.

With an increasing the risk of military escalation in the region, U.S. officials were working to conclusively identify the precise group responsible for the attack, but they have assessed that one of several Iranian-backed groups was behind it.

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Biden said the United States “will hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner (of) our choosing.”

According to a U.S. official, at least 25 U.S. service members were wounded, but that number may grow. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details not made public, said a large drone struck the base, which is in Jordan, right on the Syrian border. It is used largely by troops involved in the advise-and-assist mission for Jordanian forces. The small installation includes U.S. engineering, aviation, logistics and security troops.

Jordanian state television quoted Muhannad Mubaidin, a government spokesman, as insisting the attack happened outside of the kingdom across the border in Syria. U.S. officials insisted that the attack took place in Jordan.

U.S. troops long have used Jordan, a kingdom bordering Iraq, Israel, the Palestinian territory of the West Bank, Saudi Arabia and Syria, as a basing point. U.S. Central Command said 25 service members were injured the attack in addition to the three killed.

Some 3,000 American troops typically are stationed in Jordan.

Two U.S. officials said the attack occurred at the base in northeastern Jordan known as Tower 22. Previously released U.S. military photos in 2018 identify troops working at the base as supporting special operation forces in the area, likely across the border into Syria. The U.S. military base at al-Tanf in Syria is just some 20 kilometers (12 miles) north of Tower 22. The installation provide a critical logistical hub for U.S. forces in Syria, including those at al-Tanf, which is near the intersection of the Iraq, Syria and Jordan borders.

Since Israel’s war on Hamas in the Gaza Strip began, U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria have faced drone and missile attacks on their bases. The attack on Jordan marks the first targeting American troops in Jordan during the war and the first to result in the loss of American lives. Other attacks have left troops seriously injured, including with traumatic brain injuries.

The U.S. in recent months has struck targets in Iraq, Syria and Yemen to respond to attacks on American forces in the region and to deter Iranian-backed Houthi rebels from continuing to threaten commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

Biden, who was in Columbia, South Carolina, on Sunday, was briefed by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, national security adviser Jake Sullivan, and principal deputy national security adviser Jon Finer, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said. He was expected to meet again with his national security team later Sunday.

The president called it a “despicable and wholly unjust attack” and said the service members were “risking their own safety for the safety of their fellow Americans, and our allies and partners with whom we stand in the fight against terrorism. It is a fight we will not cease.”

Syria is still in the midst of a civil war and long has been a launch pad for Iranian-backed forces there, including the Lebanese militia Hezbollah. Iraq has multiple Iranian-backed Shiite militias operating there as well.

Jordan, a staunch Western ally and a crucial power in Jerusalem for its oversight of holy sites there, is suspected of launching airstrikes in Syria to disrupt drug smugglers, including one that killed nine people earlier this month.

An umbrella group for Iran-backed factions known as the Islamic Resistance in Iraq earlier claimed launching explosive drone attacks targeting three areas in Syria, as well as one inside of “occupied Palestine.” The group has claimed responsibility for dozens of attacks against bases housing U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria since the Israel-Hamas war began.

source https://time.com/6589475/biden-americans-killed-iran-backed-militia-drone-attack/

Biden Aide Urges Beijing to Press Iran Over Attacks by Yemen’s Houthi Rebels

U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan pressed Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi during talks in Thailand to use China’s influence with Iran to ease tensions in the Middle East. The officials also agreed to work toward arranging a call between President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

The meetings Friday and Saturday in Bangkok, which followed up on the presidents’ discussions in November in California, took place after a ruling-party candidate opposed by Beijing won Taiwan’s recent presidential election and U.S. and Chinese military officials resumed a once-frozen dialogue. They played out as attacks by Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen continue to threaten global shipping in the Red Sea.

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A senior U.S. official said Sullivan cited China’s extensive economic leverage over Iran and emphasized that the destabilizing effect of the Houthi attacks on international commerce. The official noted that China has publicly called for lower tensions, but said it was too soon to tell whether Beijing was using its diplomatic muscle to press Tehran on the matter. The official was not authorized to publicly discuss the private conversations between Sullivan and Wang and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry said Wang said Washington should stand by a commitment not to support independence for Taiwan. Wang said Taiwan’s election, won by Lai Ching-te, the current vice president, did not alter the Chinese position that the island is part of China and that the biggest challenge in U.S.-China relations is the issue of “Taiwan independence,” according to a statement from the ministry.

Biden has said he does not support independence, but U.S. law requires a credible defense for Taiwan and for the U.S. to treat all threats to the island as matters of “grave concern.”

The U.S. official said it was not clear when the next Biden-Xi conversation would happen, but that the officials hoped it would take place in the coming months.

Wang and Sullivan previously met on the Mediterranean island nation of Malta and in Vienna last year before the Biden-Xi meeting in California.

In November, both sides showcased modest agreements to combat illegal fentanyl and reestablish military communications, keeping the relationship from growing any worse. The U.S.-China Counternarcotics Working Group is set to hold its first meeting on Tuesday. American officials say fentanyl and its precursors are largely manufactured in China.

China claims self-ruled Taiwan as its own territory and in recent years has shown its displeasure at political activities in Taiwan by sending military planes and ships. Earlier Saturday, Taiwan’s defense ministry said China had sent more than 30 warplanes and a group of navy ships toward the island during a 24-hour period, including 13 warplanes that crossed the midline of the Taiwan Strait — an unofficial boundary that’s considered a buffer between its territory and the mainland.

Wang also said China and the U.S. should use the 45th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries this year as an opportunity to reflect on past experiences and treat each other as equals, rather than adopting a condescending attitude.

The countries should “be committed to mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation, building a correct way for China and the U.S. to interact,” the statement quoted Wang as saying.

Taiwan has said six Chinese balloons either flew over the island or through airspace just north of it, days after the self-governing island held its election. Lai’s Democratic Progressive Party largely campaigned on self-determination, social justice and a rejection of China’s threats.

Apart from cross-strait issues, Sullivan and Wang also discussed Russia’s war against Ukraine, the Middle East, North Korea, the South China Sea, and Myanmar, the White House said. Sullivan and Wang talked about progress toward holding a dialog this spring between U.S. and Chinese officials on artificial intelligence.

Sullivan highlighted that although Washington and Beijing are in competition, both sides have to “prevent it from veering into conflict or confrontation,” according to a White House summary of the meeting.

source https://time.com/6589389/biden-aide-beijing-iran-relations-yemen-houthis-attacks/

U.S. Suspends Funding to U.N. Agency Amid Claims Its Staff Were Involved in Hamas Attack

The United Nations fired several staffers at its Palestinian refugee agency over Israeli allegations that they took part in the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, news that prompted the U.S., the U.K. and other countries to suspend funding.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres “is horrified by the news” that workers with the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, may have been involved in the attack by Hamas militants on southern Israel, and urged the agency’s chief to refer the accused for potential prosecution, his office said in a statement Friday. According to the statement, there will be an “urgent and comprehensive independent review” of the agency.

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The claims come as a black eye for UNRWA, which provides humanitarian assistance and protection to Palestinian refugees in the Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank. It has long been regarded with suspicion by Israel and Republicans in the U.S., who argue that it only fuels the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and money going to food, education and health care frees up Hamas to fund hostilities against Israel.

“These shocking allegations come as more than 2 million people in Gaza depend on lifesaving assistance that the agency has been providing since the war began,” UNRWA Director-General Philippe Lazzarini said in a statement Friday. “Anyone who betrays the fundamental values of the United Nations also betrays those whom we serve in Gaza, across the region and elsewhere around the world.”

Israel said it will seek U.S. and European Union support to halt UNRWA operations in Gaza. Foreign Minister Israel Katz wrote in a post on X that his ministry wants to ensure the agency “will not be part of the day after.”

He urged the U.N. to take “immediate personal actions” against the UNRWA leadership.

While criticism over UNRWA’s role in the Israel-Palestinian conflict became even more charged after Hamas launched its surprise attack on Israel, the group has also paid a heavy price in Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, with more than 150 of its staff killed in the violence. 

A vast majority of UNRWA’s 30,000 staff is Palestinian, with 13,000 of those in Gaza. The U.S. State Department said in a statement Friday that 12 UNRWA staff had been accused of links to the attacks.

The U.S. — UNRWA’s main donor — also announced Friday it was suspending additional funding for the organization in the wake of the allegations. “There must be complete accountability for anyone who participated in the heinous attacks of Oct. 7,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said in the statement. The US contributed more than $296 million to the group in 2023.

The U.K., Australia, Canada, Italy and Finland also said they are pausing additional funding to UNRWA.

Senator James Risch, an Idaho Republican who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he had warned the Biden administration for years about funding the agency, which he said “has a history of employing people connected to terrorist movements like Hamas.”

Despite the recent allegations, the U.S. signaled it continues to support the agency. UNRWA plays “a critical role in providing lifesaving assistance to Palestinians, including essential food, medicine, shelter, and other vital humanitarian support,” Miller said in the statement.

The EU also expressed concern over the allegations, and said it expects UNRWA “to provide full transparency on the allegations and to take immediate measures against staff involved.”

source https://time.com/6589373/us-suspends-funding-unrwa-hamas-staff-involvement-claims/

American Museum of Natural History Closes Certain Displays Amid New Federal Regulations

The American Museum of Natural History in New York City is the latest institution across the country to close access to Native American exhibits as authorities return or seek permission from tribes to display artifacts in accordance with a new Biden Administration rule.

The museum’s president Sean Decatur informed staff in a letter Friday of the closure of two of its halls filled with Native American objects, as well as the covering of cases in or just outside three other halls, starting Saturday. The museum will also suspend school field trips to one hall, but said it remains committed to supporting education about Indigenous peoples. Another exhibit developed with Indigenous communities remains open.

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“While the actions we are taking this week may seem sudden, they reflect a growing urgency among all museums to change their relationships to, and representation of, Indigenous cultures,” Decatur wrote. “The Halls we are closing are vestiges of an era when museums such as ours did not respect the values, perspectives, and indeed shared humanity of Indigenous peoples. Actions that may feel sudden to some may seem long overdue to others.” 

The Administration’s new rule, an update to the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act that regulates the return of Native American human remains and sacred, cultural or funeral objects to descendants of those communities, came into effect on Jan. 12. The Natural History Museum already pulled all human remains, many of Native American or Black enslaved people, from display in October.

Other museums across the country, including Chicago’s Field Museum, Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the Cleveland Museum of Art have covered exhibits, or are working on the repatriation of remains, to comply with the updated law.

The changes follow a reckoning in recent years over the history of publicly displayed items, as Native Americans sought justice and respect for the remains of their ancestors and artifacts obtained without consent. Universities across the U.S. have also come under scrutiny. Last year, University of California, Berkeley disclosed that it possessed thousands of Native American remains, some dug up from local graves, and began the process of identifying and returning them to tribes.

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the first Native American to oversee the agency implementing the new rule, said in a statement in December that the updated law was “an essential tool for the safe return of sacred objects to the communities from which they were stolen.”

“Among the updates we are implementing are critical steps to strengthen the authority and role of Indigenous communities in the repatriation process,” she said. “Finalizing these changes is an important part of laying the groundwork for the healing of our people.”  

The debate extends beyond the U.S., as museums in former colonial power Britain previously repatriated Native American remains to an Oregon tribe and this week agreed to return looted gold and silver items to Ghana on a long-term loan agreement, one among a number of contested items subject to requests for return from other governments.

source https://time.com/6589334/natural-history-museum-native-american-displays-federal-regulations/

Who Needs Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2024?

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Recently, my mother, who escaped Hungary as a young teen in 1943 as the Nazis were closing in, called me from her home in Jerusalem. She was quite agitated, asking why even Israel’s loyal friends seem to be promoting compromise on issues fundamental to its security. She begged me to speak to anyone and everyone I know, from community leaders to elected officials.

As the world marks Saturday, January 27, as the annual International Holocaust Remembrance Day, it is clear that my mother needs no such day. The question the Jewish people must be asking is who will benefit from a day in January, 2024, designated to remember the Holocaust?

The Holocaust deniers, including President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority, many Western nations’ preferred steward of Gaza for the day after the war, and Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose country funds Hamas and the other armed groups attacking Israel and its allies on multiple fronts, will not benefit from it. They cannot commemorate something they claim never occurred.

The United Nations, which at the initiative of its Israeli delegation designated the day back in 2005 to build Holocaust awareness and prevent further acts of genocide, now deploys the lessons of the Holocaust against the Jewish people. The U.N. has yet to condemn the explicitly and admittedly genocidal acts of Hamas against Israel on October 7 while its International Court of Justice is trying Israel for genocide in Gaza. If this is the result of remembering the Holocaust, we Jews would prefer they forgot about it.

Jews surely don’t need this day. Many of us have been remembering the Holocaust every day since that dark day in October. The Holocaust is why we do not use the word “unprecedented” to describe the monstrous and unspeakable acts of cruelty committed in Be’eri and Kfar Aza, the blind hatred that drives others to destroy us even if it destroys them, and the apathy of the nations of the world who – with the notable exception of the United States and a few others – are either supporting evil or standing silently by.

For my mother, for me, and for many Jews, the Holocaust is the precedent, the comparable, the question that, since the Hamas massacres, bewildered and frightened Jews have been asking themselves and anyone who will listen. The Holocaust is why we have no naivete about the tunnel builders, hang gliders, and missile launchers who, in their unflagging genocidal pursuit of the Jews, continue to dream, plan, rearm, and reorganize. It is why we in the U.S. are so frightened by the violent tone of the ubiquitous pro-Palestinian protests and by the intimidation of Jews on campuses. We have seen this all before and shame on us if we allow ourselves to forget and fall prey once again to the empty promises of those masquerading as peacemakers and to the assumption that in the Western civilized world of course Jews will be safe.

Everyday since Oct. 7, my mother is reminded of and haunted by the delusions of her grandparents and more than a dozen uncles and aunts who naively chose not to join her parents’ escape to Palestine as the Nazi menace spread, only to be turned to ashes in Auschwitz. She often muses aloud about how my father, of blessed memory, a Holocaust survivor, would process October 7th in Israel, October 8th in Harvard, and October 9th in the UN.

But let us not cancel Holocaust Remembrance Day. Let us mark it with those who have traditionally been our friends and supporters in government and the arena of public opinion, those people we have brought year after year to Yad Vashem and other Holocaust memorials, who have wished only good for the Jewish people but who see our situation from the outside. 

Although they have done much good for us, and still do mean well, it has now become obvious that they cannot possibly see the current realities as we do. These friends are now wavering, running out of patience, understandably shaken by the devastating images from Gaza and by their desperate desire to bring the hostages home, hoping against hope—as do all good people—for the imminent arrival of the blessings of peace. It is for these reasons they are urging Israel to stop the war short of achieving its critical goal of decisively destroying Hamas and its terror infrastructure.

There is a classic Jewish teaching that warns us against judging others until we stand in their place. Things look different from the sidelines than they do from the battlefield. Holocaust Remembrance Day is an opportunity for American and allied leaders and citizens to stand in our place and see Hamas, the United Nations, the ICJ, certain protestors and university leaders, and a long list of others through the eyes of Jews, the survivors of the Nazis and the Jew-haters of each and every generation, experiencing once again an all-too-familiar existential threat. To see them through the eyes of my mother.

It is also an opportunity for these allies and friends to stand in the places of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and President Franklin D. Roosevelt and of the leaders and press of the free world who failed miserably in the 1930’s and 40’s. It is the current generation’s opportunity, to do it right, to act decisively against evil by living up to the commitment made by Churchill on February 9, 1941: “Give us your faith and your blessing, and, under Providence, all will be well. We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.”

That would make Holocaust Remembrance Day 2024 meaningful for everyone, even my mother. Maybe she would finally feel like people are listening, learning from the history she lived, and will take the right actions now.

source https://time.com/6589026/holocaust-remembrance-day-2024/

The True Story Behind Apple TV+’s World War II Drama Masters of the Air

Masters of the Air, a new World War II drama about bomber pilots, comes to Apple TV+ on Jan. 26. The limited series is produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg—the duo behind some of the most popular World War II TV and film productions, including Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers—and is based on the story of the real-life American Eighth Air Force, a unit of American bomber pilots who served during the war, primarily from 1942-1945. Masters of Air is inspired by a book of the same name, Masters of the Air: America’s Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany by biographer Don Miller.

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Over nine episodes, which will air weekly after the first two premiere on Friday, the series focuses on a few of the men in that unit, in particular, Maj. Buck Cleven (Austin Butler) and Maj. John Egan (Callum Turner) as they bond over navigating harrowing flying conditions and end up becoming friends for life.

Here, Miller, who spoke to several of the surviving men to write his book, breaks down everything to know about the American Eighth Air Force and the challenges they faced that form the drama of Masters of the Air.

The American Eighth Air Force was created just after the Pearl Harbor attack

According to Miller, the idea behind the group, established in 1942, was to create the first American long range bombing force in the hopes of quickening victory. “Its purpose was to obliterate the German economy and you could take out gigantic German industries accurately without killing a lot of civilians and win the war far more quickly than you could on the ground,” he says.

The bombers flew in planes that were unheated, according to Miller, making frostbite “as big an enemy as the Germans.” 

“There were no medics on the plane. Oxygen masks froze. Guys carried morphine, but did not use it very well,” he says. “All you could do is put a wounded comrade on the freezing floor of the plane and hope you got back.” 

The Eighth Air Force accounted for roughly half of all U.S. Army Air Force casualties, and its 26,000 fatality count trumps the total number of Marine fatalities (24,511).

How Masters of the Air portrays the bomber pilots

As the series and Miller’s work shows, the bomber pilots make for a “pretty jittery, nervous group of guys,” men who are tasked with not only a major responsibility but also taking care of a plane and each other. For example, Robert Rosenthal, played by Nate Mann in the Apple TV+ series, hummed classical music to keep his fellow servicemen calm.

The two main characters in the show are John Egan and Buck Cleven, who are worshiped by their fellow crew members for their flying skills. They get shot down within a month of each other, and survive.

Egan may be a ladies man on the ground, but in the air, he was known for being steady and reliable. Egan and Cleven become lifelong friends. Egan attends Cleven’s wedding, and the bride is even wearing a dress made out of a parachute as an homage to their service.

How the American Eighth Air Force helped to end World War II

The American Eighth Air Force had three major accomplishments, according to Miller. First, they knocked out the German U-boat fleets in the Central Atlantic, menacing Wolf Packs that threatened to sever the economic lifeline by which cargo ships from the US carried food and war munitions to resource starved and heavily bombed Great Britain.

Then, they destroyed the German Air Force in brutal sky battles in the three month run-up to D-Day in early 1944. “There could not have been a D-Day landing had the German Luftwaffe controlled the skies over the invasion beaches,” Miller says. “We lost over 18,000 airmen in these tremendous sky fights.”

The third accomplishment occurred after D-Day when Allied air power destroyed great parts of the German war economy, including its oil refineries, canals, and railroads. Attacks on the enemy railroad network, by which coal was transported, also created a coal famine that brought Germany close to economic collapse and helped the Anglo-American ground forces take the war directly onto German soil. By this time, the Allied air forces, led by the 8th Air Force, had become “masters of the air” over all of Europe.

“That’s something that a lot of people don’t realize—the role that the air force played in helping to shorten the war,” Miller says. 

source https://time.com/6588976/masters-of-the-air-true-story/

Alabama Executes a Man With Nitrogen Gas, the First Time the Controversial Method Has Been Used

ATMORE, Ala. — Alabama executed a convicted murderer with nitrogen gas Thursday, putting him to death with a first-of-its-kind method that once again placed the U.S. at the forefront of the debate over capital punishment. The state said the method would be humane, but critics called it cruel and experimental.

Officials said Kenneth Eugene Smith, 58, was pronounced dead at 8:25 p.m. at an Alabama prison after breathing pure nitrogen gas through a face mask to cause oxygen deprivation. It marked the first time that a new execution method has been used in the United States since lethal injection, now the most commonly used method, was introduced in 1982.

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The execution took about 22 minutes from the time between the opening and closing of the curtains to the viewing room. Smith appeared to remain conscious for several minutes. For at least two minutes, he appeared to shake and writhe on the gurney, sometimes pulling against the restraints. That was followed by several minutes of heavy breathing, until breathing was no longer perceptible.

In a final statement, Smith said, “Tonight Alabama causes humanity to take a step backwards. … I’m leaving with love, peace and light.”

He made the “I love you sign” with his hands toward family members who were witnesses. “Thank you for supporting me. Love, love all of you,” Smith said.

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey said the execution was justice for the murder-for-hire killing of 45-year-old Elizabeth Sennett in 1988.

“After more than 30 years and attempt after attempt to game the system, Mr. Smith has answered for his horrendous crimes,” Ivey said in a statement. “I pray that Elizabeth Sennett’s family can receive closure after all these years dealing with that great loss.”

Mike Sennett, the victim’s son, said Thursday night that Smith “had been incarcerated almost twice as long as I knew my mom.”

“Nothing happened here today is going to bring Mom back. It’s kind of a bittersweet day. We are not going to be jumping around, whooping and holler, hooray and all that,” he said. “I’ll end by saying Elizabeth Dorlene Sennett got her justice tonight.”

The state had previously attempted to execute Smith in 2022, but the lethal injection was called off at the last minute because authorities couldn’t connect an IV line.

The execution came after a last-minute legal battle in which his attorneys contended the state was making him the test subject for an experimental execution method that could violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Federal courts rejected Smith’s bid to block it, with the latest ruling coming Thursday night from the U.S. Supreme Court.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who along with two other liberal justices dissented, wrote, “Having failed to kill Smith on its first attempt, Alabama has selected him as its ‘guinea pig’ to test a method of execution never attempted before. The world is watching.”

The majority justices did not issue any statements.

The state had predicted the nitrogen gas would cause unconsciousness within seconds and death within minutes. State Attorney General Steve Marshall said late Thursday that nitrogen gas “was intended to be — and has now proved to be — an effective and humane method of execution.”

Asked about Smith’s shaking and convulsing on the gurney, Alabama corrections Commissioner John Q. Hamm said they appeared to be involuntary movements.

“That was all expected and was in the side effects that we’ve seen or researched on nitrogen hypoxia,” Hamm said. “Nothing was out of the ordinary from what we were expecting.”

Smith’s spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeff Hood, said the execution did not match the state attorney general’s prediction in court filings that Smith would lose consciousness in seconds followed by death within minutes.

“We didn’t see somebody go unconscious in 30 seconds. What we saw was minutes of someone struggling for their life,” said Hood, who attended the execution.

Some doctors and organizations had expressed alarm about the method, and Smith’s attorneys asked the Supreme Court to halt the execution to review claims that it violates the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment and deserved more legal scrutiny before it was used on a person.

“There is little research regarding death by nitrogen hypoxia. When the State is considering using a novel form of execution that has never been attempted anywhere, the public has an interest in ensuring the State has researched the method adequately and established procedures to minimize the pain and suffering of the condemned person,” Smith’s attorneys wrote.

In her dissent, Sotomayor said Alabama has shrouded its execution protocol in secrecy, releasing only a heavily redacted version. She added that Smith should have been allowed to obtain evidence about the protocol and to proceed with his legal challenge.

“That information is important not only to Smith, who has an extra reason to fear the gurney, but to anyone the State seeks to execute after him using this novel method,” Sotomayor wrote.

“Twice now this Court has ignored Smith’s warning that Alabama will subject him to an unconstitutional risk of pain,” Sotomayor wrote. “I sincerely hope that he is not proven correct a second time.”

Justice Elena Kagan wrote a separate dissent and was joined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

In his final hours, Smith met with family members and his spiritual adviser, according to a prison spokesperson.

Smith ate a last meal of T-bone steak, hash browns, toast and eggs slathered in A1 steak sauce, Hood said by telephone before the execution was carried out.

“He’s terrified at the torture that could come. But he’s also at peace. One of the things he told me is he is finally getting out,” Hood said.

The execution protocol called for Smith to be strapped to a gurney in the execution chamber — the same one where he was strapped down for several hours during the lethal injection attempt — and a “full facepiece supplied air respirator” to be placed over his face. After he had a chance to make a final statement, the warden, from another room, was to activate the nitrogen gas. It would be administered through the mask for at least 15 minutes or “five minutes following a flatline indication on the EKG, whichever is longer,” according to the state protocol.

Hamm, the corrections commissioner, confirmed afterward that the gas was flowing for about 15 minutes.

Sant’Egidio Community, a Vatican-affiliated Catholic charity based in Rome, had urged Alabama not to go through with the execution, saying the method is “barbarous” and “uncivilized” and would bring “indelible shame” to the state. And experts appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council cautioned they believe the execution method could violate the prohibition on torture.

Some states are looking for new ways to execute people because the drugs used in lethal injections have become difficult to find. Three states — Alabama, Mississippi and Oklahoma — have authorized nitrogen hypoxia as an execution method, but no state had attempted to use the untested method until now.

Smith’s attorneys had raised concerns that he could choke to death on his own vomit as the nitrogen gas flows. The state made a last-minute procedural change so he would not be allowed food in the eight hours beforehand.

Sennett was found dead in her home March 18, 1988, with eight stab wounds in the chest and one on each side of her neck. Smith was one of two men convicted in the killing. The other, John Forrest Parker, was executed in 2010.

Prosecutors said they were each paid $1,000 to kill Sennett on behalf of her pastor husband, who was deeply in debt and wanted to collect on insurance. The husband, Charles Sennett Sr., killed himself when the investigation focused on him as a suspect, according to court documents.

Smith’s 1989 conviction was overturned, but he was convicted again in 1996. The jury recommended a life sentence by 11-1, but a judge overrode that and sentenced him to death. Alabama no longer allows a judge to override a jury’s death penalty decision.

source https://time.com/6589042/alabama-nitrogen-gas-execution-2/

The World War II Stories Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg Should Tackle After Masters of the Air, According to a Historian

The eagerly awaited miniseries Masters of the Air, debuting on Apple TV+ on Jan. 26, caps off a long-term collaboration between Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg to dramatize real-life World War II history for American audiences. The multi-part drama focuses on the extraordinary missions the U.S. Army Air Forces’ “Bloody Hundredth” Bomb Group flew over Nazi Germany and serves as a companion piece for two other Hanks-Spielberg productions: Band of Brothers (2001), which follows the incredible journey of the 101st Airborne’s “Easy Company” paratroopers, from their D-Day drop zones to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest retreat, and The Pacific (2010), which traces the 1st Marine Division’s island-hopping slog through the sands and swamps of the South Pacific.

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These shows present visceral portraits of actual soldiers who endured some of the fiercest fighting and highest casualty rates encountered by U.S. troops during the war. Through the same kind of immersive combat realism shown in the opening sequences of Saving Private Ryan, they remind viewers of the horrors fascism can wreak upon the world and leave them in awe that any of these servicemen made it through their ordeals alive.

This trilogy also represents the culmination of a distinctive era of myth and memory making about the “Good War” fought by the “Greatest Generation,” which began in earnest in the 1980s and 1990s when Americans flocked to nationalistic celebrations of U.S. combat troops’ role in the Allied victory—both to honor an aging population of veterans and to find a war to be proud of in the wake of Vietnam.

Read More: The 31 Most Anticipated TV Shows of 2024

But it’s worth reflecting on the historical perspective that is lost when such remembrance focuses exclusively on frontline troops. It took so much more than U.S. battlefield heroism to win this war. Indeed, only an estimated 16% of the U.S. Army ever saw ground combat. Those GIs were the tip of the spear and mobilized only in the final chapters of a sprawling and complex global crisis. Their efforts were deeply intertwined with, and dependent upon, the work and resources of others around the globe.

Long before GIs began storming beaches, U.S. service personnel fanned out across the continents, fortifying defense outposts, forging transportation routes, and collaborating with allies. More than 120,000 U.S. servicemen were posted to wartime China (none of them in combat units), and another 200,000 served in India. At its peak, 111,000 soldiers, along with military advisers, engineers, and others, staffed the so-called Caribbean Sea Frontier, a major thoroughfare for troop and cargo transports. Thousands more manned an air ferry route that stretched from Brazil to West Africa, Sudan, and Egypt.

Who ended up where was far from simply a matter of grit and bravery—as illustrated by the experiences of Black Americans, who were over-represented in racially segregated manual labor battalions and routinely passed over for combat roles. President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that Black soldiers should serve in all theaters, but as soon as recruiting began, demands poured in from those seeking to keep Black soldiers out of their jurisdictions, including overseas allies.

Prime Minister John Curtin, citing his country’s White Australia policy, only begrudgingly allowed Black troops to serve in remote areas of the Northern Territory and Queensland—and those deployed were discouraged from traveling to Sydney, even while on leave. British officials made similar demands that as few Black troops as possible be sent to the United Kingdom and its Caribbean colonies. When they arrived nonetheless, the U.S. military’s Jim Crow policies followed, squandering precious time, talent, and resources. Chiang Kai-shek proved most successful at keeping Black GIs out of his territory. By the spring of 1945, less than a dozen of them—truck drivers—were allowed into China, and still with orders not to venture east of Kunming.

Read More: 5 Black World War II Heroes to Know

Black troops were sent instead, disproportionately, to some of the most dangerous hardship postings the U.S. military had: to garrison the malaria-ridden Roberts Field airport in Liberia; to build the Ledo Road, India’s overland lifeline to China across steep, unsurveyed terrain; and to work the supply line connecting the Soviet Union and Iran in heat that reached 140 degrees.

So far the Hanks-Spielberg productions have avoided the entire topic of American race relations. (The Pacific, although based on the memoirs of E. B. Sledge and Robert Leckie which both documented the incident, does not, for example, let viewers know that the first thing victorious Marines raised on Okinawa was a Confederate flag). Masters of the Air, in welcome contrast, includes a subplot about the Tuskegee Airmen, the U.S. military’s first Black pilots. But it’s important to remember the odds working against such service.

American war stories are also often misleading about the contributions and sacrifices non-Americans made during the conflict—both Allied armed forces and civilians, many of whom were colonial subjects of Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the United States. Civilians in fact furnished the vast majority of the 60 million or more people who died during World War II.

Yet Band of Brothers’ Normandy scenes never reveal that Americans were a minority among the multinational forces that landed—or that Soviet troops’ brutal faceoff with the Wehrmacht bought them the time they needed to get there. Likewise they give little hint of the toll the war took on the province’s French inhabitants, some 20,000 of whom lost their lives during that campaign alone. Houses and villages are for the most part pictured abandoned. Blink and you will miss the seconds-long shot of a small family hiding, unharmed, in a shed.

Read More: The Forgotten Story of One of the First U.S. Soldiers Killed Overseas After Pearl Harbor

The Pacific similarly zeroes in so tightly on U.S. Marines that it discounts the diverse coalitions and cooperation it took to wage that offensive drive toward Tokyo. It makes no mention of the New Guinea campaign, in which American, Australian, Dutch, and Indigenous people together repelled a Japanese incursion that threatened mainland Australia. It characterizes Guam, Wake, and the Philippines as far away, unknown lands, not the formal U.S. territories that they were, where more than 16 million Asian and Pacific Islanders had been living under U.S. colonial and Commonwealth rule for roughly half a century, and where as many as a million U.S. nationals would lose their lives.

How Hollywood portrays World War II matters, because the conflict continues to hold such a special place in the stories Americans tell themselves about who they are and who they want to be.  It continues to shape public assumptions about how wars work—or ought to work.

Given the challenges of the 21st century—resurgent racism, globe-wide threats to democracy, and environmental perils that will require collective solutions—we need talented filmmakers like Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg to pivot to a new era of World War II storytelling more attuned to the war’s vast landscapes, the complex political dimensions of Americans’ involvement, and the critical part international cooperation and sacrifice played in the Allied victory.

Brooke L. Blower is Associate Professor of History at Boston University. Her most recent book is Americans in a World at War: Intimate Histories from the Crash of Pan Am’s Yankee Clipper (2023).

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

source https://time.com/6588475/masters-of-the-air-world-war-ii-history/

An Inside Look at the Embryo Transplant That May Help Save the Northern White Rhino

The two loneliest rhinos in the world are the female known as Najin and her daughter, known as Fatu. They live in the Ol Pejeta conservancy, a 360 sq km (140 sq mi.) sanctuary in central Kenya. A lot of different animals representing a lot of different species call Ol Pejeta home, but Najin and Fatu are special: they are the world’s last remaining northern white rhinos, a species that once numbered 25,000 and ranged across what is now South Sudan, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic. The near-death of the species is mostly due to poaching—with humans hunting down the rhinos in order to remove and sell their horns.

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But Najin and Fatu may soon have company—if not in Ol Pejeta then in the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin, Germany. As the institute just announced, a group of researchers led by BioRescue, an international consortium of scientists and conservationists, has, for the first time, succeeded in transplanting a rhinoceros embryo fertilized in the lab into the womb of an adult female. This breakthrough implantation, say the researchers, will not be the last; if the methods they used to achieve the reproductive feat bear themselves out, the northern white rhino, now barely clinging to existence, could rebound across sanctuaries and perhaps even parts of the wild.

“The embryo transfer technique is well established for humans and domesticated animals such as horses and cows,” said Thomas Hildebrandt, head of both BioRescue and the department of reproductive management at the Leibniz Institute, in a statement. “But for rhinos it has been completely uncharted territory. It took many years to get it right and we are overwhelmed that this technique works perfectly.”

The in vitro northern white rhino fertilization in fact did not involve a northern white rhino at all. Since 2019, BioRescue has produced 29 northern white rhino embryos, made of Fatu’s harvested eggs and the preserved sperm of four deceased males. The embryos are cryopreserved at -196°C (-314°F) in labs in Berlin and Cremona, Italy. Such a small store of embryos is a precious genetic treasure, and the BioRerscue team dared not risk squandering even one on an experiment that might not succeed. Instead, they worked with three southern white rhinos—close cousins to the northern species.

Read more: The Endangered Species Act Has Been a Success for 50 Years. Its Work Is Just Beginning

First, the researchers harvested eggs from Elinore, a female southern white rhino living at the Pairi Daiza Zoo in Belgium. They then collected sperm from a male known as Athos, at the Salzburg Zoo in Hellbrunn, Austria. Next, the eggs were fertilized using a technique known as intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI), which, as the name suggests, involves injecting the sperm into the egg using a microscopic needle. Finally, they transferred two of the embryos into a surrogate mother—a southern white female named Curra, living at Ol Pejeta.

But that step wasn’t so easy. Before Curra could be implanted with the embryo, a so-called teaser bull—a male southern white rhino named Ouwan, always at the ready to breed—had to be introduced to her enclosure to detect if she was in heat. Scientists can’t determine if a female rhino’s system is primed for mating, but males, sensitive to reproductive pheromones, can. Ouwan had to be prepped for this job through a sterilization procedure in which his epididymis, or sperm-carrying tubules, were sealed by microwave ablation. Had Ouwan been left fertile it would have been impossible to know if he was responsible for any embryo in the surrogate’s womb or if the implantation was.

The next step was to perform that implantation—a procedure that also presented challenges. “The cervix of the female rhino is convoluted and impossible to pass,” says Hildebrandt. “If you try to pass it you will produce a lot of the [hormone-like lipid] prostaglandin, leading to a contraction of the uterus.” That, in turn, would cause the female to expel the embryo. Instead, researchers had to enter the female through the rectum and use a needle to penetrate the wall to the womb.

Read more: Biodiversity Is Nearing an ‘Extinction Crisis,’ Animal Researchers Say

On Sept. 24, 2023, they successfully executed the implantation on an anesthetized Curra. The next step was—or ought to have been—waiting the 16-month gestation period before Curra would give birth. But that was not to be. On Nov. 22, 2023, Ouwan died, and on Nov. 25 Curra followed. Both were claimed by sudden rainfall and flooding, which unearthed preserved Clostridia bacteria spores, infecting and killing the animals. The rhinos, tragically, were lost, but the experiment wasn’t. An autopsy of Curra found that she had been carrying a viable 70-day old, 6.4 cm (2.5 in) male embryo in her womb.

“It’s a miracle, this little baby,” says Hildebrandt. “Unfortunately humans were responsible for losing it, because climate change produced so much rain that we had mudslides; those released the 100-year-old bacteria.”

Human depredations and the loss of the embryo notwithstanding, Hildebrandt and the rest of the BioRescue team are looking forward to other miracles. Before the end of the year, they plan to implant northern white rhino embryos into two southern white rhino surrogates named Armited and Daly. If viable babies are produced, more such implantations will be conducted—likely not restoring the northern white rhino species to full, wild viability, but at least giving it a toehold on survival.

“Advanced science,” says Hildebrandt, “can help create a population that can be introduced and start reproducing itself. It’s a blueprint for restoring ecosystems.”

source https://time.com/6588316/breakthrough-white-rhino-embryo-implantation-photos/

Meta Tightens Teen Message Settings as Safety Debate Persists

Meta Platforms Inc. is tightening default direct message settings for teens on Instagram and Facebook, building on efforts to enhance safety as lawmakers and parents concerned about harmful content continue to pressure social media platforms.

The ability for teens to get direct messages from anyone they don’t follow or aren’t connected to will be turned off on Instagram, including other teens, according to a blog post. Users under age 16 in the US, or under 18 in the UK and Europe, will only be able to receive messages or be added to group chats by people they’re already connected to, Meta told Bloomberg via email. Teens in supervised accounts will need parental approval to change the setting, which also applies to Messenger.

Supervision tools were first launched on Instagram in March 2022, after a whistleblower leaked internal documents suggesting Facebook knowingly prioritized profit over well-being and safety. The controversy led to a congressional testimony and spurred debate about what could be done to protect minors online. In October 2023, more than 30 US states filed a lawsuit against Meta alleging harmful youth marketing.

Meta also plans to launch a feature to help protect teens from seeing unwanted and potentially inappropriate images in their messages from those they’re already connected to. More information is expected on this later this year.

source https://time.com/6588482/meta-teen-message-settings-safety/

Why Evangelicals Went All In on Trump, Again

Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign may have ended on Sunday, January 21st, but whatever competition Trump may have faced for the hearts of white evangelical voters ended months ago. Perhaps “competition” is being too generous. In poll after poll, Trump maintained double-digit leads over his rivals among white evangelicals. Yet there were flickers of hope that Trump’s evangelical support was vulnerable, particularly among the most devout.

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But they were only flickers.

In March 2023, psychologist Joshua Grubbs and I asked a national sample of Americans who they planned on voting for in the next Presidential election. Among white evangelical voters who identified as Republican, 53% said they would vote for Trump while 31% favored DeSantis. Less than 1% said they would vote for Joe Biden. In other words, over a year before Republicans would need to decide their presidential candidate, Trump already enjoyed majority support among white evangelicals.

Yet when we split the sample by church attendance, we found only 48% of white evangelical Republicans who attend at least monthly planned on voting for Trump, compared to 61% of those who attend less than once a month. DeSantis’s support stayed at around 31% either way (the gains were mostly for Mike Pence who dropped out in October), but Trump enjoyed less dominance among the most devout. Other polls around this time also suggested evangelical support for Trump could be wavering. Flickers of hope for would-be rivals.

But by late Fall of 2023, white evangelicals were once again unifying around Trump. When Pew Research Center asked white evangelical Republican voters about their primary preferences, 55% said they would vote for Trump. And importantly, this percentage was identical among those who attend church at least monthly and the less frequent attendees. DeSantis did enjoy greater support among the monthly churchgoers (21% compared to 13%), but the 17% lead Trump enjoyed among the more devout in Spring 2023 had doubled to 34% 9 months later.

Read More: The Surprising Voters Driving Trump to Victory

What changed? Did Trump start courting white evangelicals again like in 2016? Not really. In fact, Trump hasn’t made many public appearances at all compared to other GOP primary candidates, and very few on the Christian right circuit. Did white evangelical thought leaders start campaigning for Trump in earnest over the past year? Again, not really. Some fringe far-right pastors never left him. But a number of prominent evangelical leaders, authors, and pastors, some of whom previously endorsed Trump, publicly endorsed DeSantis.

Rather than focusing on anything Trump or evangelical leaders have done to solidify Trump’s evangelical support, there are two more likely explanations.

The first is that white evangelicals, and especially the most devout ones, are ride-or-die partisans. The more often white evangelical voters attend church, the more likely they are to identify as Republican. For example, when I analyze data from Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel Survey, Wave 114, I find that less than 48% of white evangelical voters who “Never” attend church are Republicans, while nearly 73% of those who attend more than once a week identify that way.

Trump is the Republican party now. And thus, while a minority of devout white evangelicals may have entertained other political options a year before the primary would be decided, as Trump’s victory became more inevitable, any reluctant supporters among the most committed fell into line. Even when evangelical theologian Wayne Grudem called for Trump to drop out of the race, he wasn’t standing against Trump (whom he praised). Rather, he merely thought Trump would lose against Biden. The issue was party victory, not principle.

The second reason evangelicals have rallied to Trump again is because they are not only partisans but culture warriors who still feel under attack. And despite DeSantis’s best efforts to sell himself as an anti-woke, no apologies, warrior for religious conservatives, the majority of evangelicals either never bought it or simply had more confidence in Trump as their warrior king. As journalist Tim Alberta has described the white evangelical mindset, “The barbarians are at the gates, and we need a barbarian to keep them at bay.” Trump is nothing if not a convincing barbarian.

We shouldn’t oversell the rivalry that wasn’t. Trump was always the evangelical favorite even among the most devout. He has been the favorite among white evangelicals, regardless of their church attendance, since well before the primaries were decided in January 2016. Even then, Pew data showed white evangelicals across the board were more enthusiastic about his potential as a President.

Trump has white evangelicals in his pocket. Whatever cognitive dissonance some devout Christians may feel for supporting a twice-impeached serial philandering liar who tried to stage a coup and threatens violence against political opponents is easily dismissed with the conviction that no Republican nominee, no matter how problematic, could be worse than losing to a Democrat.

Understand the American religion of fanatical partisanship and culture-warring and you understand why white evangelicals will always fall in line. As Nikki Haley is learning all over again.

source https://time.com/6588138/evangelicals-support-donald-trump-2024/

Greta Gerwig, Bradley Cooper, and the Strange Curse of Ambition

Even in an age when you can shoot a movie on an iPhone, you need the heart of a lion to make a film and get it out there. To make all the necessary decisions, to get the gears going for every day of pre-production, shooting, and post-production, to answer each of the million and one questions that come up on a film set, you need higher-than-normal confidence levels, and any self-doubts you have had better be worked out in private. This is as true in 2024 as it was in 1924, 1954, 1974, or any year in between. And it’s as true for a veteran director (like Martin Scorsese) as it is for a younger, less-well-known French filmmaker who got her start in documentaries (like Anatomy of a Fall director Justine Triet).

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And still, in the world of filmmaking—as elsewhere—ambition is a dirty word, especially if you’re a woman. When the Oscar nominations were announced on Jan. 23, it wasn’t particularly surprising that both Barbie and Maestro received Best Picture nods. But the people most clearly responsible for bringing those pictures to the screen, Greta Gerwig and Bradley Cooper, were absent from the Best Director category. Barbie and Maestro are two wildly different pictures, and there are night-and-day distinctions between the sensibilities of the directors who made them: Gerwig is sunshine; Cooper is moonlight. The Academy is, of course, a voting body and not a sentient individual. But this group—even after it became more diversified in the wake of the Oscars So White movement—still has its blind spots, especially when it comes to women and people of color. So it’s normal to wonder if there isn’t some collective disapproval shining through the scrim of these omissions. Are both Gerwig and Cooper guilty of wanting too much too soon?

Read more: The Internet Has a Surprising Theory About Greta Gerwig’s Barbie Oscars Snub

One of the problems, of the Academy’s own making, is that there are 10 Best Picture slots and only 5 for Best Director. (The change was made in 2009 to widen the playing field and to provide more chances for films in less frequently recognized genres, like animation and comedy, to win.) So in any year, it’s likely there will be four or five movies that seemingly directed themselves; singling those filmmakers out as being snubbed doesn’t take much imagination. But for whatever reason, the other non-nominated directors whose films made the Best Picture cut this year (Celine Song for Past Lives, Alexander Payne for The Holdovers, and Cord Jefferson for American Fiction) don’t have the same hot-button quality that Gerwig and Cooper have. Though they’ve of course done interviews, they haven’t been as widely exposed—or perhaps overexposed—as Gerwig and Cooper have. These two face another liability: both are actors as well as directors, which means the public automatically has a deeper relationship with them—and actor-directors always have to work harder to prove their worth as filmmakers, too. Unwittingly, Gerwig and Cooper may have ended up like the kids in class who sit up front and beg, “Pick me, pick me!” The teacher, almost reflexively, looks right past them. Maybe you would, too.

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But for better or worse, Cooper and Gerwig are in a class by themselves this year. Gerwig defied expectations by making what was seen by many as a smart, feminist movie about a semi-controversial toy; she also delivered a huge box-office hit, and the fact that a woman could actually do so hit Hollywood like a lightning bolt. (My onetime mother-in-law, a New Englander by marriage, used to have an expression that summed up this type of duh! moment: “The light dawns on Marblehead.”) And although the idea for Maestro didn’t originate with Cooper, he jumped into the project with Leonard Bernstein-like gusto; he studied conducting for six years in preparation. He took a chance by wearing a prosthetic nose for his role, which incited controversy early on—and however you ended up feeling about that nose, once you saw it in that first released image, you couldn’t unsee it. As their films rolled out, the one thing Gerwig and Cooper had in common was that you couldn’t ignore them.

Maybe that turned out to be a liability. The Barbenheimer phenomenon turned Barbie into a force of nature; it was great for the industry, but somewhat exhausting in the runup. By the time Barbie was released, I’d become worn down by all the interviews given by Gerwig and her star (and one of the movie’s producers) Margot Robbie, as well as other members of the cast. And that’s not to mention the Mattel overlords who’d funded the film, and who professed they were at first shocked by Gerwig’s intentions for the movie, only to end up touting how evolved they were in letting her have her way after all. Before Barbie had even opened, I’d grown weary of hearing how smart this movie about a doll was going to be. (I’ve been pro-Barbie all my life, so I didn’t need convincing there.) Then I saw it, and my suspicions were confirmed: though I loved Robbie’s performance, and Ryan Gosling’s Ken, as well as the production and costume design, Barbie’s relentless “This movie is feminist! Really!” sloganeering wore me down.

But even if Gerwig’s vision didn’t resonate with me, I would concede in a heartbeat that she had used her intelligence and instincts to reach for something seemingly impossible. She took a big swing with Barbie, and whether you like the film or not, you can see her fingerprints all over it. The Academy did grant the film eight nominations in total, not exactly shabby for big commercial blockbuster. And Gerwig and her co-writer and husband, Noah Baumbach, did receive a nomination for Adapted Screenplay—but that makes the Director omission even more glaring. As a filmmaker and a presence, Gerwig has big Theater Kid energy. And because she’s already made several acclaimed movies, she can’t be anyone’s discovery. But it still seems strange that the Academy had the chance to recognize a woman director who’s made a much-loved movie that has also broken box-office records, and failed to do so. (In addition to being the highest-grossing movie of 2023, Barbie is the highest-grossing film ever made by a woman.) Critics, moviegoers, and the Academy often want to celebrate different things for different reasons. We often wrongly laud the Academy as being a group of people with good taste, when really it’s a body designed to make Hollywood feel good about itself. In that context, its failure to recognize Gerwig is even weirder.

And what about Cooper, who, like Gerwig, has been working in the industry for years, and who also has a number of Oscar nominations (as actor, producer, and director) to his credit? Maestro has been recognized in seven categories, including Best Picture. Cooper is a producer of the film; he has also been nominated for his performance and for the movie’s screenplay, which he co-wrote with Josh Singer. Although Maestro premiered during the SAG strike, Cooper quickly made up for lost time in promoting the film. He has been forthright and earnest about his approach to bringing the story of Bernstein—and, more specifically, his marriage to the Chilean-Costa Rican actor Felicia Montealegre, played by Carey Mulligan—to the screen. I happen to love Maestro. While others shrink from its bravado, I adore the way Cooper fills the screen with big-feeling vibrations. Even so, he’s sensitive to the unorthodox nuances of this relationship: here’s a story about two vibrant individuals who, in the 1950s, were working their way through complex expectations of what a marriage should and could be—as well as making a distinction between spiritual loyalty and sexual fidelity. That seems pretty progressive to me—the opposite of awards bait, actually—and you’d think it would be a plus for all those people who complain about what they see as tired biopic clichés.

Even so, in the past few months, I’ve encountered roughly equal numbers of people who love Maestro and people who despise it, with almost nothing in between—and those who hate it are particularly noisy online. I’ve heard people mock Mulligan-as-Felicia’s slow-death-from-cancer scenes. (“Just die, already!”) Some of these takes are gently mischievous, some are just plain bad, and some come from cloudy notions of what we expect—or want—a biopic to be. Because I’m unshakable in my love for Maestro, I find it fascinating to hear why others hate it, and at this point I’ve heard everything: It’s too gay. It’s too straight. It’s too much about the marriage—who cares?—and not enough about Bernstein’s career. It doesn’t respect Bernstein enough. It lets Bernstein get away with too much. There aren’t enough scenes of actual conducting. Cooper, in his prosthetic nose, is too cartoony, too overbearing, just bad. Mulligan’s Felicia steals the show from him.

But no one has accused Maestro of being too small, and if you think its grandness is a flaw, there’s only Cooper to blame. I think Cooper is a big part of why some moviegoers and critics—and, at least to a degree, the Academy—dislike Maestro. A colleague of mine put it this way: The Academy should have just given him something for A Star Is Born to get him out of the way for a while. Now, it’s almost as if they want to curb his impulses, to show him that he’s not as big a deal as he thinks he is. It’s possible they’ve been influenced by the online Maestro haters, who seem to think Cooper is way too thirsty for an Oscar. The campaigning season is a horror show for lots of reasons, not least because people who just really want to make movies are thrust into the position of promoting them—and may even end up overpromoting them. That can naturally affect how we feel—or the Academy feels—about a movie.

Then again, if you don’t speak up for a movie you’ve poured years of your life into, who will? The line between being overambitious and just getting the word out is easily blurred. We’d also be justified in asking, “Who cares about an ambitious white guy?” And it’s true: in a field, like most fields, where white men have had more than their share of opportunity, we need more ambitious filmmakers of all kinds. The movie world has a long history of actor-directors—Orson Welles, Clint Eastwood, Warren Beatty, George Clooney, the list goes on—who have strived to have it all. We need smart, driven people, and they can’t all just be white men. Just ask Ava DuVernay, Gina Prince-Bythewood, and Dee Rees—filmmakers who have made terrific, underrecognized pictures in the past dozen years—what it takes to send a movie out into the world.

But deciding who should be praised for ambition and who should be punished only leads to a restrictive way of looking at art. We can sneer at the idea of a director’s vision, especially if it’s a director we don’t particularly like. But when a movie finally sees the light of day, it’s the director who’s holding the bag; its merits or failures fall on his or her head. We should want filmmakers to think big, even if that means they have further to fall. Because when they hit it right, the rewards are great for us too.

source https://time.com/6566922/greta-gerwig-bradley-cooper-oscar-director-snub/