The singer had been in critical condition recently after being hospitalized due to a fall at his Guadalajara ranch in August, and being diagnosed with Guillain–Barré syndrome afterwards.
(Image credit: Kevin Winter/Getty Images for LARAS)
Social media has become “one of the main sources of threat to today’s democracy,” Turkish President Erdogan has declared, adding the platforms make it difficult to “protect” the “vulnerable” without imposing undue censorship.
While social media networks were initially marketed as “a symbol of freedom,” they have become a menace to democratic society, Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared in a video message to a communications conference on Saturday, according to the Associated Press.
“We try to protect our people, especially the vulnerable sections of our society, against lies and disinformation without violating our citizens’ right to receive accurate and impartial information,” Erdogan continued. Since last year, social media companies that have over 1 million users are required to store data and maintain a legal representative in Turkey. The order convinced Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to set up satellite offices there.
Turkey is considering a law that would outlaw spreading “false information” online, a notoriously difficult-to-define term for both social media platforms and their billions of users. All three of the major platforms have tightened the reins of censorship significantly since the beginning of the Covid-19 epidemic only to further declare ideas off-limits in the run-up to the US 2020 presidential election.
If that law passes, it would create a social media regulator position capable of officially deeming posts misinformation on behalf of the government. Those posting the newly-offensive content could face up to five years in prison.
Turkey’s media climate has been criticized for the heavy-handed role played by the government, and the self-appointed guardians of press freedom, such as Freedom House, have criticized Erdogan’s government for removing content critical of the government and “prosecuting” people who post “undesirable” commentary on social media. For example, the infamously-biased ‘free encyclopedia’ Wikipedia was blocked in Turkey for three years, supposedly due to the English version’s claim (in an article on “state-sponsored terrorism”) that Turkey was such a state sponsor. The ban was repealed last year after the Constitutional Court of Turkey found it violated human rights.
The COVID-19 pandemic is likely to halt two decades of global progress towards Universal Health Coverage, according to reports released on Sunday from the World Health Organization (WHO) and World Bank, which reveal more than half a billion people are being pushed into extreme poverty because they have to pay for health services out of their own pockets.
In 1962, thousands of Indians of Chinese descent were sent to prison camps during a brief war with Beijing. Recent clashes on the India-China border have revived Chinese Indians’ fears of persecution.
The head and co-founder of a company that produces one of the most widely used Covid jabs, Ugur Sahin, has commented on an interview in which he revealed that he and his family had not been vaccinated.
A video of Sahin, the German immunology and oncology professor who helped develop the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, telling a reporter he was not immunized against the coronavirus recently went viral on social media. In an interview with the German DW TV channel, conducted in English, the reporter queries whether the CEO will “allow personal questions,” before asking, “I have heard that you yourself have not taken the vaccine yet. Why not?” Sahin responds that he is “legally not allowed to take the vaccine at the moment,” due to there being a priority list. “It is more important for us that our co-workers and partners get vaccinated,” he says, adding, “What is also important, we were even not allowed to participate in clinical trials.”
In an apparent response to the video, Sahin posted a rebuttal on the professional networking site LinkedIn this week. His friends had been urging him to share a photograph of himself being inoculated against the deadly virus, he wrote, but he had thus far “refused to do so,” explaining that he had been of the view that his communications should not be about himself, but “should contribute to scientific transparency and provide data, facts, and insights.”
However, he said, since the aforementioned interview, he and his wife had each received two doses and a boosterof the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The LinkedIn post was accompanied by a photo of Sahin being jabbed against Covid-19 “in early 2021,” he said, to address the “false rumors” circulating on social media that he had refused to be vaccinated.
Urging others to follow suit,and citing the experience of a friend “fighting for his life” against severe Covid, Sahin added that his company was currently developing another vaccine “to address the Omicron variant, irrespective of whether it will be needed or not.”
The video of the interview, which is still doing the rounds on Twitter, has garnered so much attention that the BioNTech press office has also been obliged to comment on it. The statements its then-unvaccinated CEO made in it were accurate at the time, it said, but were now “completely outdated,” a spokesperson told Reuters. The interview was recorded a year ago, when only older people and those in high-risk groups in Germany were legally eligible to receive a Covid-19 shot.
