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| ===== Roses are red, violets are blue, 940 million flowers are traveling (through Miami) to you ===== | ===== International Women's Day protests demand equal rights and an end to discrimination, sexual violence ===== |
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| By DAVID FISCHER Associated Press | By MEHMET GUZEL and ANDREW WILKS Associated Press |
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| MIAMI (AP) — If any husbands or boyfriends mess up Valentine's Day this week, it's not because of a shortage of flowers. | ISTANBUL (AP) — Women took to the streets of cities across Europe, Africa, South America and elsewhere to mark International Women's Day with demands for ending inequality and gender-based violence. |
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| In the run up to Feb. 14, agricultural specialists at Miami International Airport have processed about 940 million stems of cut flowers, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Around 90% of the fresh cut flowers being sold for Valentine's Day in the United States come through Miami, while the other 10% pass through Los Angeles. | On the Asian side of Istanbul, Turkey's biggest city, a rally in Kadikoy saw members of dozens of women's groups listen to speeches, dance and sing in the spring sunshine. The colorful protest was overseen by a large police presence, including officers in riot gear and a water cannon truck. |
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| Roses, carnations, pompons, hydrangeas, chrysanthemums and gypsophila arrive on hundreds of flights, mostly from Colombia and Ecuador, to Miami on their journey to florists and supermarkets across the U.S. and Canada. | The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared 2025 the Year of the Family. Protesters pushed back against the idea of women's role being confined to marriage and motherhood, carrying banners reading "Family will not bind us to life" and "We will not be sacrificed to the family." |
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| Miami's largest flower importer is Avianca Cargo, based in Medellín, Colombia. In the past three weeks, the company has transported about 18,000 tons of flowers on 300 full cargo flights, senior vice president Diogo Elias said during a news conference last week in Miami. | Critics have accused the government of overseeing restrictions on women's rights and not doing enough to tackle violence against women. |
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| "We transport flowers all year round, but specifically during the Valentine's season, we more than double our capacity because there's more than double the demand," Elias said. | Erdogan in 2021 withdrew Turkey from a European treaty, dubbed the Istanbul Convention, that protects women from domestic violence. Turkish rights group We Will Stop Femicides Platform says that 394 women were killed by men in 2024. |
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| Flowers continue to make up one of the airport's largest imports, Miami-Dade chief operation officer Jimmy Morales said. The airport received more than 3 million tons of cargo last year, with flowers accounting for nearly 400,000 tons, worth more than $1.6 billion. | "There is bullying at work, pressure from husbands and fathers at home and pressure from patriarchal society. We demand that this pressure be reduced even further," Yaz Gulgun, 52, said. |
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| "With 1,500 tons of flowers arriving daily, that equals 90,000 tons of flower imports worth $450 million just in January and February," Morales said. | **Women across Europe and Africa march against discrimination** |
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| It's a big job for CBP agriculture specialists, who check the bundles of flowers for potentially harmful plant, pest and foreign animal diseases from entering the country, MIA port director Daniel Alonso said. | In many other European countries, women also protested against violence, for better access to gender-specific health care, equal pay and other issues in which they don't get the same treatment as men. |
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| "Invasive species have caused $120 billion in annual economic and environmental losses to the United States, including the yield and quality losses for the American agriculture industry," Alonso said. | In Poland, activists opened a center across from the parliament building in Warsaw where women can go to have abortions with pills, either alone or with other women. |
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| Colombia's flower industry was recently looking at a possible 25% tariff, as President Donald Trump quarreled with the South American country's leadership over accepting flights carrying deported immigrants. But the trade dispute came to a halt in late January, after Colombia agreed to allow the flights to land. | Opening the center on International Women's Day across from the legislature was a symbolic challenge to authorities in the traditionally Roman Catholic nation, which has one of Europe's most restrictive abortion laws. |
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| Colombian President Gustavo Petro had previously rejected two Colombia-bound U.S. military aircrafts carrying migrants. Petro accused Trump of not treating immigrants with dignity during deportation and threatened to retaliate against the U.S. by slapping a 25% increase in Colombian tariffs on U.S. goods. | From Athens to Madrid, Paris, Munich, Zurich and Belgrade and in many more cities across the continent, women marched to demand an end to treatment as second-class citizens in society, politics, family and at work. |
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| Officials at Friday's news conference declined to answer any questions about politics or tariffs. | In Madrid, protesters held up big hand-drawn pictures depicting Gisele Pélicot, the woman who was drugged by her now ex-husband in France over the course of a decade so that she could be raped by dozens of men while unconscious. Pélicot has become a symbol for women all over Europe in the fight against sexual violence. |
| ===== Trump's AI ambition and China's DeepSeek overshadow an AI summit in Paris ===== | |
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| ---- | Thousands of women marched in the capital Skopje and several other cities in North Macedonia to raise their voices for economic, political and social equality for women. |
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| {{:en:ecrit:ap25040553551642.jpg?300 |}} | Organizers said only about 28% of women in the country own property and in rural areas only 5%, mostly widows, have property in their name. Only 18 out of 100 women surveyed in rural areas responded that their parents divided family property equally between the brother and sister. "The rest were gender discriminated against within their family," they said. |
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| By SYLVIE CORBET and KELVIN CHAN Associated Press | In Nigeria's capital, Lagos, thousands of women gathered at the Mobolaji Johnson Stadium, dancing and signing and celebrating their womanhood. Many were dressed in purple — the traditional color of the women's liberation movement. |
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| | In Russia, the women's day celebrations had a more official tone, with honor guard soldiers presenting yellow tulips to girls and women during a celebration in St. Petersburg. |
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| | **German president warns of backlash against progress already made** |
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| | In Berlin, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier called for stronger efforts to achieve equality and warned against tendencies to roll back progress already made. |
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| | "Globally, we are seeing populist parties trying to create the impression that equality is something like a fixed idea of progressive forces," he said. He gave an example of " large tech companies that have long prided themselves on their modernity and are now, at the behest of a new American administration, setting up diversity programs and raving about a new 'masculine energy' in companies and society." |
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| | **Marchers in South America denounce femicides** |
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| | In South America, some of the marches were organized by groups protesting the killings of women known as femicides. |
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| | Hundreds of women in Ecuador marched through the streets of Quito to steady drumbeats and held signs that opposed violence and the "patriarchal system." |
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| | "Justice for our daughters!" some demonstrators yelled in support of women slain in recent years. |
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| | In Bolivia, thousands of women began marching late Friday, with some scrawling graffiti on the walls of courthouses demanding that their rights be respected and denouncing impunity in femicides, with less than half of those cases reaching a sentencing. |
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| | Kirsten Grieshaber contributed to this report from Berlin. |
| | ===== How a canoe helped turn Hawaiian culture into a source of pride and even influenced Hollywood ===== |
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| PARIS (AP) — The geopolitics of artificial intelligence will be in focus at a major summit in France where world leaders, executives and experts will hammer out pledges on guiding the development of the rapidly advancing technology. | {{:en:ecrit:ap25068028178507.jpg?300 |}} |
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| It's the latest in a series of global dialogues around AI governance, but one that comes at a fresh inflection point as China's buzzy and budget-friendly DeepSeek chatbot shakes up the industry. | By AUDREY McAVOY Associated Press |
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| U.S. Vice President JD Vance — making his first trip abroad since taking office — will attend the Paris AI Action Summit starting Feb. 10, while China's President Xi Jinping will be sending his special envoy, signaling high stakes for the meeting. | KANEOHE, Hawaii (AP) — Hawaii's American colonizers once banned the Hawaiian language in schools. Some Native Hawaiians tried to lighten their skin with lye. Many people believed Polynesian voyagers had simply lucked into finding the islands by drifting on logs. |
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| Here's a breakdown: | But a canoe launched half a century ago helped turn Hawaiian culture from a source of shame to one of pride, reviving the skill of traveling the seas by decoding the stars, waves and weather. That vessel — a double-hulled sailing canoe called the Hokulea, after the Hawaiian name for the star Arcturus — would even influence the Disney blockbuster "Moana" decades later. |
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| **Summit basics** | To mark the anniversary, the Hokulea's early crew members gathered Saturday for ceremonial hula and kava drinking at the Oahu beach where the canoe launched on March 8, 1975, and where they began their first training sails. |
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| Heads of state and top government officials, tech bosses and researchers are gathering in Paris for the two-day summit hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The event aims to address how to harness artificial intelligence's potential so that it benefits everyone, while containing the technology's myriad risks. | "It's a vehicle of exploration. It's a vehicle of discovery," Nainoa Thompson, the CEO of the Polynesian Voyaging Society, said in an interview. "It's also been our vehicle for justice as Native Hawaiians, as Pacific Islanders, as a very unique, special culture of the Earth." |
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| European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is attending, along with company officials from 80 countries, including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Microsoft President Brad Smith and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. | In 1980, Thompson became the first Hawaiian in six centuries to navigate to Tahiti without a compass or other modern instruments — a span of about 2,700 miles (4,300 kilometers). |
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| Tesla chief Elon Musk, who attended the inaugural 2023 summit at former codebreaking base Bletchley Park in England, and DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng have been invited, but it's unclear if either will attend. | **Hawaiian culture had long been repressed** |
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| Panel talks and workshops at the Grand Palais venue on Monday will be followed by a dinner at the Elysee presidential palace for world leaders and CEOs. Leaders and company bosses are expected to give speeches at Tuesday's closing session. | Thompson, 71, remembers stories from his grandmother, born less than a decade after the U.S.-backed overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893. Teachers beat her for speaking Hawaiian, and her uncle tried to wash the brown off his skin with lye. |
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| **What's at stake?** | When she had children, she didn't teach them Hawaiian. |
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| More than two years after ChatGPT 's debut, generative AI continues to make astounding advances at breakneck speed. The technology that powers all-purpose chatbots is transforming many aspects of life with its ability to spit out high-quality text, images or video, or carry out complex tasks. | "If her children tried to be Hawaiian, they would get hurt in the new society," Thompson said. "And so you have to become something else." |
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| The 2023 summit in the U.K. resulted in a non-binding pledge by 28 nations to tackle AI risks. A follow-up meeting hosted by South Korea last year secured another pledge to set up a network of public AI safety institutes to advance research and testing. | A resurgence of Hawaiian pride and identity starting in the late 1960s and 1970s set off a cultural renaissance. Artist Herb Kane began painting ancient canoes based on drawings from European explorers and got the idea to build a double-hulled canoe with tall, triangular sails similar to those his ancestors had used hundreds of years earlier. |
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| AI safety is still on the agenda in Paris, with an expert group reporting back on general purpose AI's possible extreme dangers. | **Debunking the drifting log theory** |
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| But this time organizers are expanding the discussion to more countries, and widening the debate to a range of other AI-related topics. Like previous editions, this summit won't produce any binding regulation. | At the time, many people accepted the notion that Polynesians settled islands by accident. |
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| "The summit comes at a time when many are trying to position themselves in the international competition," Macron told reporters, according to La Provence newspaper. "It's about establishing the rules of the game. AI cannot be the Wild West." | Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl had theorized that Polynesians arrived from South America, pushed west by the prevailing winds and currents. In 1947, he set out to prove it by floating from Peru on a log raft. He landed in the Tuamotu Islands north of Tahiti and wrote a best-seller. |
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| **The deliverables** | Heyerdahl's theory took hold even though Hawaiians for generations had passed down stories of people who traveled from the distant lands -- including Kahiki, possibly what is today known as Tahiti — by canoe, bringing with them edible plants such as ulu, or breadfruit. |
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| Organizers are working on getting countries to sign a joint political declaration gathering commitments for more ethical, democratic and environmentally sustainable AI, according to Macron's office. But it's unclear whether the U.S. would agree to such a measure. | Kane, University of Hawaii archaeologist Ben Finney and Honolulu surfer Tommy Holmes wanted to challenge the drifting log concept. They started the Polynesian Voyaging Society, intent on sailing a canoe to Tahiti without modern instruments. |
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| A public-interest partnership named "Current AI" is to be launched with an initial $400 million investment. The initiative aims at raising $2.5 billion over the next five years for the public-private partnership involving governments, businesses and philanthropic groups that will provide open-source access to databases, software and other tools for "trusted" AI actors, according to Macron's office. | They needed a navigator. Traditional long-distance voyaging skills had all but disappeared, but a Peace Corps volunteer on the isolated atoll of Satawal in Micronesia told them about Pius "Mau" Piailug, who had been taught navigation from childhood. Over about a month in 1976, Piailug guided the Hokulea from Hawaii to Tahiti — about the same distance from Hawaii to California. |
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| Macron's team wants to shift the focus away from the race to develop better-than-human artificial intelligence through sheer computing power and, instead, open up access to data that can help AI solve problems like cancer or long COVID. | Some 17,000 people thronged the Tahitian shore to greet them and witness what one crew member called "the spaceship of our ancestors." |
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| "We now have this incredible opportunity to figure out not only how we should mitigate the potential harms from artificial intelligence, but also how we can ensure that it's used to improve people's lives," said Martin Tisné, the summit's envoy for public interest AI. | Former Hawaii Gov. John Waihe'e was in his 20s then, and a delegate to the 1978 state Constitutional Convention. The Hokulea's success spurred delegates to make Hawaiian an official state language even though few residents still spoke it, he said. They also created the Office of Hawaiian Affairs to improve the well-being of Native Hawaiians. |
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| **Trump's team** | "It helped us believe in everything that we were doing," Waihe'e said. |
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| U.S. President Donald Trump has spoken of his desire to make the U.S. the "world capital of artificial intelligence" by tapping its oil and gas reserves to feed the energy-hungry technology. Meanwhile, he has moved to withdraw the U.S. — again — from the Paris climate agreement and revoked former President Joe Biden's executive order for AI guardrails. | Today, two dozen schools have Hawaiian language immersion programs, and Census data show more than 27,000 people in Hawaii, and 34,000 in the U.S., speak Hawaiian at home. |
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| Trump is replacing it with his own AI policy designed to maintain America's global leadership by reducing regulatory barriers and building AI systems free of "ideological bias." | **Bringing dignity to the elders** |
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| The U.S. position might undermine any joint communique, said Nick Reiners, senior geotechnology analyst at the Eurasia Group. | In 1978, an ill-prepared crew set out for Tahiti in poor weather, and the Hokulea capsized just hours after leaving port. Crew member Eddie Aikau paddled his surfboard to get help. The Coast Guard rescued the canoe, but Aikau was never found. |
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| "Trump is against the very idea of global governance," Reiners said. "It's one thing to get countries to agree that AI should have guardrails and that AI safety is something worth caring about. But they've widened the scope to talk about the future of work and the environment and inclusivity and so on — a whole range of concepts. So it's hard to imagine getting a widespread agreement on such a broad range of subjects." | The voyaging society overhauled itself in response, setting clear goals and training requirements. Thompson studied at a Honolulu planetarium and spent over a year under the tutelage of Piailug. In 1980, he navigated to Tahiti. |
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| **China's role** | Thompson said he felt a deep obligation to fulfill Aikau's wish to follow the path of his ancestors and "pull Tahiti out of the sea." But he didn't celebrate when the Hokulea got there. |
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| Chinese leader Xi is sending Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing, who's been elevated to the role of Xi's special representative. | "I just went into a quiet, dark place and just told Eddie we pulled it out of the sea," Thompson said. "There's no high fives. It's too profound." |
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| It's a big step up from the 2023 Bletchley meeting, when the Chinese government sent the vice minister of science and technology. It signifies that Xi wants China to play a bigger role in global AI governance as Trump pulls back, Reiners said. | In decades since, the society has sailed the canoe around the Pacific and world, including New Zealand, Japan, South Africa and New York. |
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| DeepSeek 's release last month stunned the world because of its ability to rival Western players like ChatGPT. It also escalated the wider geopolitical showdown between Beijing and Washington over tech supremacy. | It inspired other Pacific Island communities to revive or newly appreciate their own wayfinding traditions. |
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| Trump said DeepSeek was a " wake-up call " for the U.S. tech industry and his AI advisor David Sacks accused DeepSeek of training its model on stolen OpenAI data. The DeepSeek chatbot app now faces investigations, and in some cases, bans in the U.S. and a number of other countries over privacy and security concerns. | In Rapa Nui, Chile — also known as Easter Island — islanders have embarked on long-distance canoe voyages. The University of Guam has a navigation program. Similar trends have surfaced in the Cook Islands, French Polynesia, Samoa and Tonga, said Mary Therese Perez Hattori, the director of the Pacific Islands Development Program at the East-West Center. |
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| Yet the rise of DeepSeek, which built its open source AI model at a fraction of the cost and with fewer chips, also puts China's interests in line with France's. | "We come from very, very ancient societies," said Hattori, who is Chamorro, the Indigenous people of the Mariana Islands. "Hokulea sort of helped us remind the world of this." |
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| French organizers said "the summit aims at promoting an ambitious French and European AI strategy" as advances in the sector have been led by the U.S. and China. Macron hopes to make room for others, including French startup Mistral, which also uses an open source AI model. | **Hollywood makes a blockbuster** |
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| "DeepSeek is being seen as a kind of vindication of this idea that you don't have to necessarily invest hundreds of billions of dollars in in chips and data centers," Reiners said. | Hokulea's influence spread in 2016 when Disney released "Moana," an animated film about a 16-year-old girl who learns wayfinding about 3,000 years ago. |
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| **Transatlantic tensions** | Thompson spoke to hundreds on the movie's creative team about wayfinding and the importance of canoes to Pacific culture, said Aaron Kandell, a Hawaii-born writer who worked on the movie. |
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| Another showdown could involve Brussels, which has long been a thorn in the side of U.S.-based Big Tech companies, cracking down with antitrust penalties against the likes of Google, Apple and Meta. Trump lashed out at last month's World Economic Forum with "very big complaints" about the EU's multibillion-dollar fines, calling them a tax on American companies. | Kandell, who is not Native Hawaiian, spent a year studying navigation with the Polynesian Voyaging Society during his 20s and incorporated that into the script, including where Moana learns to use her outstretched hand to track the stars and runs her hand in the ocean to feel the currents. |
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| More recently, the European Union's artificial intelligence regulation has met resistance from the companies. The EU recently unveiled a non-binding "code of practice" for its AI Act but Meta's top lobbyist said the company, which owns Facebook and Instagram, won't sign up. | Crew members taught animators about coconut fiber ropes so they would look right when Moana pulls on them, Kandell said. |
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| The EU guidelines, intended to standardize how the AI Act's regulations are applied across the 27-nation bloc, are "unworkable" and the continent's regulatory environment is "pushing Europe to the sidelines," Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan told a Brussels event. | The Polynesian Voyaging Society's initial plan was to sail to Tahiti once, supporting a documentary, book and research papers. Thompson remembers pushing Hokulea's hull into the water with the crew back in 1975. |
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| Chan reported from London. AP writer John Leicester in Paris contributed to this report. | "It was really a moment — I didn't recognize it — but this was going to change everything," he said. |
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