More and more Americans are interested in consuming healthy food and products. Retailers are feeding this growing demand by offering new products or introducing old ones in brand new ways. Coconut is currently one of the hottest trends in the U.S. food market. VOA’s Faiza Elmasry has more. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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Month: April 2017
Most people have likely heard about the dangers of microplastics, the particles less than 5 millimeters in size that deteriorate from larger plastic pieces that have entered the oceans. Scientists are beginning to realize the effect this plastic is having on all kinds of sea life, from the smallest to the largest, and even those that live in the deepest darkest parts of the Mariana Trench. VOA’s Kevin Enochs has details.
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A relatively large asteroid will cross Earth’s orbit around the sun this month. Astrophysicists and astronomers say there is no chance of a collision, but it will be the closest flyby of an asteroid that large for at least another 10 years.
Asteroid 2014 JO25, discovered three years ago, is about 650 meters (2,100 feet) in diameter, 60 times as large as the small asteroid that plunged into our atmosphere as a meteor and exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013. That blast was felt thousands of kilometers away and caused havoc on the ground, damaging more than 7,000 homes and offices and injuring 1,500 people.
Asteroid 2014 JO25’s pass by Earth on April 19 will be a near miss, cosmically speaking. The U.S. space agency NASA said no one should worry: “There is no possibility for the asteroid to collide with our planet, [but] this will be a very close approach for an asteroid of this size.”
The Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union classifies 2014 JO25 as a “potentially hazardous asteroid.” (Astronomers classify asteroids as “minor planets”; when they pass close to Earth they are termed “near Earth objects.”)
WATCH: NASA Animation: Asteroid 2014 JO25’s Orbit
An animation of the intersection of Earth’s orbit and that of 2014 JO25, prepared by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a unit of the California Institute of Technology, makes it look like an awfully close call, but the hard facts are more reassuring: At its closest point, the asteroid will be about five times as far from Earth as the moon is, more than 1.75 million kilometers away (1,087,400 miles).
Although the asteroid is expected to be twice as reflective as our moon, it will be difficult to spot in a night sky filled with stars, and certainly not without help. Scientists say the sort of telescope amateur astronomers use should be adequate to pick out the space rock as it whizzes across the sky at 120,000 kilometers per hour (74,500 mph).
EarthSky.org, a website that follows developments in the cosmos and throughout nature in general, has posted an article with detailed information to help sky-watchers find the asteroid on April 19, and for a day or two afterward.
Professional astronomers also will be tracking 2014 JO25 closely. Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory, an extremely powerful radio telescope center, will study the asteroid for five days.
After all, it’s not often that something as big as this comes along, even a couple of million kilometers from home. NASA says 2014 JO25 hasn’t been this close to Earth in the past 400 years, and it will be at least 500 years before it comes back for a repeat close encounter with our planet.
Asteroids actually pass close to Earth fairly often, but it’s their size that matters. Asteroid 2017 GM made one of the closest passes by Earth ever seen — 16,000 kilometers (9,900 miles) above sea level — less than a week ago, on April 4. Little notice was taken, however, because that chunk of space rock was about the size of a small car.
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India and Bangladesh signed a slew of agreements on Saturday, including a $4.5 billion concessionary line of credit from India for development projects in Bangladesh, as the South Asian neighbors try to deepen their ties.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bangladeshi counterpart, Sheikh Hasina, held wide-ranging talks in New Delhi, exchanging views on defense, regional security and cooperation in combating international terrorism.
Officials from the two sides signed 22 agreements, including a framework deal for defense cooperation over the next five years and an additional $500 million for Bangladesh to buy military equipment from India.
The two sides also signed an agreement on civil nuclear cooperation under which India will help Bangladesh develop its civilian nuclear program.
Modi said Hasina’s visit marked the “golden era” of India-Bangladesh relations and described India as “a long-standing and trusted development partner of Bangladesh.”
India and Bangladesh share a nearly 4,100-kilometer (2,545-mile) border. The two countries have had a close relationship since 1971, when Bangladesh, aided by India, gained independence from Pakistan following a bloody nine-month war.
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India and Bangladesh signaled deepening ties Saturday as New Delhi committed a $4.5 billion line of credit to Dhaka for development projects, and the two countries signed their first-ever pact on defense cooperation.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced an additional $500 million in credit for Bangladesh to buy military equipment from India during the visit to New Delhi by Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.
Calling India a “long standing and trusted development partner,” Modi said that the new credit lines “bring our resources allocation to Bangladesh to more than $8 billion over the past six years.”
Both leaders reaffirmed their close ties during the Bangladeshi prime minister’s first visit to India in seven years, with Modi speaking of a “golden era” in their friendship and Hasina saying their friendly ties would benefit South Asia.
The two countries signed 22 agreements, including one on civil nuclear cooperation that aims to help Bangladesh develop its civilian nuclear program.
Many in New Delhi see the deal for defense cooperation over the next five years as the key breakthrough that will help reduce Bangladesh’s reliance on China for its military needs.
Worried by the growing Chinese influence in its neighborhood, New Delhi has made a concerted push in recent years to grow strategic ties with neighboring countries. Bangladesh’s purchase of two submarines from China last year deepened those concerns in India.
Calling the defense pact a feather in India’s cap, Sukh Deo Muni, a South Asia expert at New Delhi’s Institute of Defense Studies and Analyses, said,“India does not want China to consolidate defense ties just next to its belly, that is true.”
Although the political opposition in Bangladesh has denounced the pact, independent analysts in Dhaka was optimistic that it will help achieve balance.
“Approximately 80 percent dependency at this moment you see on China, so it should be brought down. That actually reduces our vulnerability,” said Abdur Rashid, Executive Director of the Institute of Conflict, Law and Development Studies in Dhaka. “If one is interrupted we can depend on the other.”
A new rail link between the Indian city of Kolkata and Khulna in Bangladesh, and a bus link between Kolkata and Dhaka also were inaugurated, while another old rail link was restored to coincide with Hasina’s visit. The Bangladeshi leader said the greater connectivity is vital for the region’s development.
A key water-sharing agreement that Dhaka has long pushed for, however, eluded Hasina.
Although New Delhi favors such an arrangement, opposition from West Bengal state in India, through which the Teesta River flows into Bangladesh, has prevented the two countries from clinching a deal.
As Modi assured her of his commitment to conclude a deal, the Bangladeshi leader sounded a note of optimism. “I believe we shall be able to get India’s support in resolving these issues expeditiously,” said Hasina.
The two countries have had a close relationship since 1971, when India helped Bangladesh gain independence from Pakistan following a bloody nine-month war.
March was a disappointing month for job seekers, with the U.S. Labor Department reporting that the private sector added only 98,000 jobs last month. But one industry is looking beyond the job numbers and toward distant shores as President Donald Trump meets for the first time with Chinese President Xi Jinping to talk about trade. Mil Arcega reports.
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When Arnaud Laillou, a nutrition specialist with UNICEF, led a salt iodization study in 2014, he wanted to be sure that salt producers were not adding too much iodine.
Just four years earlier, UNICEF had stopped providing iodine to salt producers at the end of a decade-long, largely successful government-run iodization program.
Laillou was stunned to find that 90 percent of coarse salt and 40-50 percent of fine salt was now not iodized. And all of it was labeled as iodized.
“It was a real shock for us,” says Laillou of the findings of the paper that was published last year in the online journal Nutrients.
Serious public health problem
That paper said iodine deficiency in Cambodia had become “a serious public health problem” just years after the issue had largely been dealt with, and warned that poorer families and rural families were worst affected.
That was at odds with a study carried out three years earlier that showed salt producers were adding iodine, and that authorities were enforcing a 2003 subdecree that mandated iodization.
Iodine is essential to brain development and hormonal functions. If a pregnant woman is iodine-deficient, for example, her baby’s brain will not develop properly. The mineral is vital for brain development in children, too, and for proper hormone functioning in all ages. Iodine is so important that the World Health Organization has described iodine-deficiency as “the [world’s] single greatest preventable cause of mental retardation.”
Iodizing salt is widely regarded as one of the cheapest and most effective public health measures: it costs 2 cents per kilogram of salt.
Children hurt most
Iodine-deficiency, Laillou said, is particularly damaging for children.
“For example, Cambodia is investing a lot of money at the level of the Ministry of Education to improve the education of their children,” he said. “But having a lack of iodine in the brain, it decreases [their] IQ by 13 points.”
That, he points out, compares with the loss of three IQ points for a child who is not breastfed for the first six months of life.
Wholesale failure
In theory, adding iodine to Cambodia’s annual output of 80-100,000 tons of salt should be simple: close to 100 percent is produced by the SPCKK cooperative in the southern province of Kampot. SPCKK produces coarse salt, which it sells in bulk to middlemen who operate boilers that refine that into fine salt.
By law, SPCKK must iodize all of its salt output. But over the years several of the iodizing machines it was given have broken down, and SPCKK has not sourced spare parts. Now it has four working machines and that’s not enough.
And so, as SPCKK’s technical chief, Bun Narin told VOA, its workers often spray iodine by hand, a method that is at best imprecise.
“Large companies [outside Cambodia] use machines to monitor, whereas we are still using labor and so it’s not always accurate,” he said.
That is putting it mildly, given that Laillou’s research found 90 percent of the country’s coarse salt lacks any iodine. Despite that, SPCKK’s output is labeled as containing the mandated amount of iodine.
If boilers don’t test for the concentration of iodine in the coarse salt that they buy, and if, further along the production line, salt repackagers, like 57-year-old Koy Rithiya, don’t test for the concentration in the fine salt that they buy from the boilers and then add iodine where needed, the result is noniodized salt.
Which is exactly what has happened.
Routine testing
When Rithiya set up his business in Phnom Penh 15 years ago, he didn’t know he needed to add iodine; he started doing that a decade ago after being advised by UNICEF.
These days he uses an electronic monitor to test the concentration of iodine in the 500 kilograms of fine salt that he repackages each day, and adds iodine where needed to meet the mandated standard of 30-60 parts per million.
He doesn’t yet use the monitor to test his daily output of 400 kilograms of coarse salt; instead he relies on a test that merely shows whether iodine is present or not. That test, however, does not measure the concentration.
Rithiya reckons the problem of iodine-deficiency has emerged in part because some producers use expired iodine, “but also because some producers combine salt with iodine without correctly balancing it.”
“And some don’t bother to use it correctly,” he said.
A lack of enforcement
The report makes clear where the problem lies: on the production side is SPCKK, as well as some boilers and salt repackagers; on the enforcement side are the authorities for failing to ensure that producers follow the law.
The irony is that by 2010, the government’s program meant the health problems associated with iodine deficiency in Cambodia were largely a thing of the past. A decade earlier, nearly 1 in 5 primary school children had goiters, a condition where the thyroid in the neck swells up. Many adults did, too. By 2010, that was no longer the case.
But when iodine prices tripled after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, many salt producers in Cambodia stopped buying the additive, and the authorities failed to make sure they were iodizing. The result: a re-emergent public health issue that has, to date, remained largely invisible.
The situation, though bad, should start to improve. UNICEF is working with a government subcommittee to devise a certification standard for all producers, although that could take two years to implement.
Ven Keahak, who heads the subcommittee on salt iodization, says the new licensing system will mean producers “have to have a machine, iodine powder [in stock], a brand name, and salt with proper quality in order to get a license.”
“It’s a legal enforcement that the ministry has to conduct,” he said.
A lack of enforcement has been part of the problem, but Keahak would not comment on the failure of government agencies to apply the current law. He did confirm that no one has been prosecuted for failing to add iodine or for failing to monitor the system.
The difficulty for concerned Cambodians is that every bag of salt carries the logo stating that it is iodized. To deal with that, the Ministry of Planning will now test all salt brands and will place advertisements in newspapers to tell people which brands they can trust.
Until then, the failure to police the country’s salt output will keep damaging lives in what experts say was an entirely avoidable public health issue.
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With the right attachment, a smartphone can be used as a diagnostic tool for infectious diseases like tuberculosis. Faith Lapidus reports.
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Despite ethical and safety concerns, researchers are getting closer to building life from scratch. In fact, scientists are hoping to synthesize a human genome in the next 10 years. Investors are putting huge amounts of money into research that may deliver novel drugs, materials and chemicals. Some of the projects were highlighted at a synthetic biology conference in London April 4-6. VOA’s Deborah Block has a report.
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Kostas Argyros’s unpaid electricity bills are piling up, among a mountain of debt owed to Greece’s biggest power utility.
His family owe 850 euros to the Public Power Corporation (PPC), a tiny fraction of the state-controlled firm’s 2.6 billion euros ($2.8 billion) in unpaid bills.
Argyros picks up only occasional work as an odd-job man.
“When you only work once a week, what will you pay first?” said the 35-year-old, who lives in a tiny apartment in an Athens suburb with his unemployed wife and four small children.
The Argyros family are emblematic of deepening poverty in Greece following seven years of austerity demanded by the country’s international creditors. They burn wood to heat their home in winter, food is cooked on a small gas stove, and hot water is scarce.
The only evening light is the blue glare of a TV screen, for fear of racking up more debt.
Five-watt lightbulbs provide a dim glow and Argyros worries about the effect on their eyesight. More than 40 percent of Greeks are behind on their utility bills, higher than anywhere else in Europe.
People in poor neighborhoods are also increasingly turning to energy fraud, meaning that the problem for PPC is much higher than the mountain of unpaid bills suggests.
Power theft is costing PPC around 500-600 million euros a year in lost income, an industry official said, requesting anonymity because he was not authorised to divulge the numbers.
PPC declined to comment on the figure. Public disclosures by the Hellenic Electricity Distribution Network Operator HEDNO, which checks meters, show that verified cases of theft climbed to 10,600 last year, up from 8,880 in 2013 and 4,470 in 2012.
Authorities believe theft is far higher than the cases verified by HEDNO, another official said, declining to be named.
Households in the country are equipped with analog meters, which are easy to hack. One of the most common tricks is using magnets, which slow down the rotating coils to show less consumption than the real amount, a HEDNO official said.
Some websites even offer consumers tips and tricks on power fraud.
Burden of Arrears
For households who have had their electricity cut off, a group of activists calling themselves the “I Won’t Pay” movement have taken it upon themselves to reconnect the supply. The group says it has done hundreds this year.
PPC, which has a 90 percent share of the retail market and 60 percent of the wholesale market, is supposed to reduce this dominance to less than 50 percent by 2020 under Greece’s third, 86 billion euro bailout deal.
The lenders also want PPC to sell some of its assets, but the company is toiling under the debt of unpaid bills, a problem opposition lawmakers say will force a fire-sale.
In little over a year from June 2015, overdue bills to the 51-percent state-owned firm grew by nearly a billion euros to 2.6 billion, Chief Executive Manolis Panagiotakis told lawmakers in March.
Analysts estimate PPC’s cash reserves have shrunk to about 00 million euros, forcing it to secure a 200 million euro bank loan to repay a bond due in May.
The tangle has left it with little leeway for new investments or to fund a switch to cleaner forms of energy from coal to improve environmental standards.
“It is often said that PPC is undergoing the most critical phase of its history,” Panagiotakis told lawmakers. “I will not argue with that.” He declined a Reuters request for an interview.
The burden of arrears for PPC is now “so big that some worry it will not be able to lift it for much longer”, said energy expert Constantinos Filis.
The apartment building where the Argyros family live is a testament to that. Many tenants struggle even to pay the 25 euro annual fee to light communal areas such as staircases.
Ground Zero
PPC has tried to recoup unpaid bills with phased repayment plan. A total of 625,000 customers owing a total of 1.3 billion euros had signed up to the plan by January.
The Argyros family have also entered the plan with the help of Theofilos, a local charity, which also contributes towards their monthly bills.
Meanwhile, PPC’s provisions for bad debt remain high. The plans drove the figure down to 453 million euros in the nine months to September last year from 690 million a year earlier.
Analysts expect PPC to swing back to a profit of between 63-109 million euros in 2016, with provisions of below 600 million euros.
Filis, the energy expert, said the more things stayed the same, the closer PPC was to “ground zero” and he drew comparisons with the Greek state’s brushes with near bankruptcy during the debt crisis.
“It’s reasonable to say that PPC is too big to allow it to collapse, particularly regarding energy security,” he said. “On the other hand, a few years ago some argued that no country could fail either.”
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A torrid summer and devastating fires across central Chile’s wine belt have forced an earlier harvest this year, but there are no signs that volume or flavor will be affected, local industry experts said on Thursday.
High temperatures can lead to excessive sugar and alcohol in the grapes and the harvest needed to take place as soon as the right level was reached, they said.
Climate change is contributing to record droughts, heat and wildfires in Chile, the world’s No. 4 exporter of wine by volume and the biggest among New World producers, threatening crops and spurring growers to move south to cooler climes.
In December, temperatures in central Chile hit their highest level in a century. The hot, dry conditions sparked the biggest wildfires in the country’s modern history, burning homes and forests and blanketing the entire region in thick smoke.
Most vines had escaped the flames and the bigger worry was the effect of the smoke on the flavor of the grapes, said Angelica Valenzuela, commercial director of industry body Wines of Chile.
“The number of vines burnt was low. But there could be an effect from the smoke which we will see when the harvest is done,” she said in an interview at the Undurraga vineyard near Talagante, 22 miles (35 kilometers) southwest of the capital of Santiago. “For now, the first results are not showing signs of any problems.”
Close to where some of the worst fires raged, Undurraga produces around 2 million cases a year, some 70 percent of which is exported.
The hot conditions in the southern hemisphere summer had forced growers like Undurraga to bring forward the harvest by about a month, with the first varieties picked as early as January, company spokesman Fernando Anania said.
That earlier-than-usual harvest was a challenge to Chile’s winegrowers in logistics terms, but should not have a major effect on volumes or taste, said Anania in an interview.
Exports of Chilean wine grew 0.9 percent in 2016 by volume and 3.5 percent by value, according to Wines of Chile. Last year, for the first time, China overtook the United States to become the industry’s top export destination.
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Serbian President-elect Aleksandar Vucic likes to use the past to explain the future.
In 1947, as Josip Broz Tito was consolidating Yugoslavia, he built a railway through Bosnia that linked Serbs, Croats and Muslim Bosniaks, friend and foe after World War II.
“Tito wasn’t stupid,” Vucic told Reuters. “People had to work together, build together, then travel together, live together. That’s what we need — connecting.”
Together again
Yugoslavia broke up in war 26 years ago, spawning seven states. Now, the European Union has taken up a project put forward by Vucic that would see five of them — plus Albania — joined once more, this time in a common market.
It would abolish all remaining tariff barriers, lift obstacles to the free movement of people, commodities and services and introduce standard regulations across the region.
The EU wants an outline agreed to in July, seizing on the idea as a way to re-engage with Balkan states unnerved by the bloc’s evaporating enthusiasm for further enlargement and exposed to the growing influence of Russia.
But it has received a mixed reception.
Some apprehensions
Kosovo, for one, fears being roped back into a Serbian-dominated union of the kind it fought to leave; others worry it will only slow their accession to the EU, or worse still replace it.
The EU has delegated development of the plan to the Regional Cooperation Council. Its head, Goran Svilanovic, told Reuters Balkan leaders were “increasingly realistic” about the reduced appetite in Brussels for EU enlargement.
“They see what’s up in the EU,” he said.
But they will work together on the Balkan market plan and with the EU “when it comes to something they see is … bringing change to their daily lives.”
Market of 20 million
For years, the prospect of EU accession has stabilized relations and driven reform in a turbulent and impoverished region. But since Croatia followed ex-Yugoslav Slovenia in joining in 2013, the EU has been beset by problems of migration, Brexit and right-wing populism.
A year later, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker ruled out any further expansion until at least 2020.
Stability and democracy in the Balkans have suffered.
Juncker was stating a fact, a senior EU official told Reuters, but in hindsight he had made “a huge mistake.”
“A lot of things that were in progress just stopped,” the official said. Another EU diplomat said Brussels had “dropped the ball” and was trying to re-engage.
Start with market, trade
One of the results is the Western Balkans Common Market, which would build on the Central European Free Trade Area, CEFTA. All six countries are members of CEFTA, but the pact has struggled to stimulate trade within the region and some barriers remain.
Backers of the plan say a single economic space with a market of 20 million people would be more attractive to investors than six small states each with their own red tape.
“Investors would be banging down our doors,” said Vucic, Serbia’s prime minister who was elected president Sunday.
The EU says it would mark a step toward membership, not an alternative.
But it did not go unnoticed that enlargement had no place in a March document by Juncker that set out the options for the EU after Britain leaves in 2019.
“Create your own common market [because you are not joining ours],” was the headline of an opinion piece last month by Kosovo analyst Besa Shahini on the Pristina Insight website.
Kosovo threw off Belgrade’s repressive rule in a 1998-99 war, and is wary of Serbia as the biggest country in the region and a friend of Russia.
“We don’t want to see a Serbia that behaves in the style of Russia, trying to politically dominate the region,” Kosovo Foreign Minister Enver Hoxhaj said of the initiative Tuesday.
Prime Minister Isa Mustafa took to Facebook: “We share different experiences of the past,” he wrote. “We do not want that past to return, repackaged.”
Sokol Havolli, an adviser to Mustafa, told Reuters the project risked slowing the region’s EU integration.
Alternative narratives
Asked if a common market may become a substitute for EU enlargement, Vucic said that “should not and must not” happen but said he had heard, unofficially, of such fears in Montenegro.
The office of Montenegrin Prime Minister Dusko Markovic told Reuters Podgorica had yet to receive a detailed proposal, but that it supported greater regional cooperation.
An Albanian official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Tirana was “skeptical.”
Kristof Bender, deputy chairman of the European Stability Initiative, a Brussels-based research group, said he would be surprised if creating a club of poor economies would do much to address the region’s woes.
Nor could it be a “credible alternative” to the narrative of prosperity and stability inside the EU.
“If this narrative evaporates, Balkan politicians will need to look for other narratives,” Bender told Reuters. “Given recent history, this is dangerous.”
Railroad holds lessons
Today, the railway Tito built speaks less of the future than the folly of the past: as trains cross between Bosnia’s two ethnically-based regions, different crews take over, reflecting how power was divided up in order to end the 1992-95 war. Part of the line is no longer used.
Vucic said critics of his idea argued they simply wanted to leave the Balkans behind and join the EU.
So does Serbia, he said. “But does that mean we should lose the next three, four, five years when we know we’re not going to become a member?”
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The U.S. government on Friday dropped its effort to force Twitter to identify users behind an account critical of President Donald Trump, the social media company said.
In response, Twitter said it was dropping a federal lawsuit against the U.S. government that challenged the request to unmask the users.
Twitter had sued just a day earlier, claiming the government overstepped its authority in issuing a summons to reveal the account owners.
The lawsuit said that the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection had sought the identity of the users of Twitter handle @ALT-USCIS.
‘Alternative’ handles
The account describes itself as “immigration resistance.” Its creators told media outlets the account is run by current and former employees of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which is overseen by the Department of Homeland Security.
It is one of several “alternative” handles purportedly created by current federal employees unhappy with the Trump administration.
It was not immediately clear why the government withdrew its effort to identify the Twitter users. It was also not immediately known whether the government had closed an investigation it said it was conducting into the Twitter account.
The American Civil Liberties Union praised the government’s decision to withdraw its request, saying in a tweet, “Big victory for free speech and the right to dissent.”
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The World Health Organization Friday marked World Health Day with the warning that depression is the most common cause of ill health, affecting some 300 million people worldwide. The U.N. agency is urging people to seek treatment for depression, which can lead to disability and even death.
WHO says conflict, wars and natural disasters are major risk factors for depression.
WHO estimates one in five people affected by these events suffers from depression or anxiety. Given the magnitude of the problem, it says mental health and psychosocial assistance should be a part of all humanitarian assistance.
Apart from these situations, WHO reports depression is the leading cause of disability. The director of WHO’s department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Shekhar Saxena, says depression is behind a global epidemic of death by suicide.
“All over the world, 800,000 people die because of suicide every year and this converts into a death every 40 seconds,” said Saxena. “So, while we are dealing with the number of deaths, which are of course very unfortunate in conflicts and wars, we also need to remember that there are silent epidemics going on in the world, which are also killing a very large number of people without obvious headlines and banners.”
Saxena tells VOA there is no significant difference in the prevalence of depression between developed and developing countries. He notes the majority of people with depression lives in low- and middle-income countries.
“Depression is more common amongst the women – 5.1 percent versus 3.6 percent amongst men,” said Saxena. “Other risk factors include poverty, discrimination, and all adverse life situations – either chronic or acute, especially amongst young people.”
Saxena says treatment usually involves psychotherapy, antidepressant medication or a combination of both. He says it is not necessary to have a specialist treat depression. He says the so-called talking cure administered by general doctors, nurses, or health care workers can be just as effective.
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The U.S. economy had a net gain of 98,000 jobs in March, which is much weaker job growth than most economists expected.
Payroll growth was slowed by stormy weather in March after unusually good weather helped growth in January and February, according to economist Jed Kolko, of the job web site “Indeed.”
Friday’s report from the Labor Department also said the unemployment rate fell two-tenths of a percent, to 4.5 percent. Government data show that is the lowest level since April, 2007. The unemployment rate has been five percent or lower for well over a year.
The slight decline in the jobless rate is due to 145,000 people entering the workforce and nearly half a million Americans finding jobs, according to S&P Global Rating’s economist Beth Ann Bovino. She says this is the latest in a series of mostly positive reports on the job market.
PNC Bank economist Gus Faucher says the job market “is getting tighter and business are finding it more difficult to hire.” That may force employers to raise wages to attract and keep workers.
Job gains were found in professional and business services and mining, while retail continued to lose positions. Faucher also said problems in retail may reflect a shift from traditional stores to on-line commerce. That shift is evident in the announcement that several major retail chains are closing a large number of stories, according to economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
While the report shows that the total number of unemployed Americans fell by over 300,000, there are still 7.2 million people out of work across the country.
We have radars to track flying objects, but a tiny fly may be even better at tracking and grabbing fast moving prey. Scientists at the University of Cambridge learned that not only the number of lenses in the fly’s eye, but also their variety, help it focus on fast moving objects. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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The U.S. Air Force is open to buying rides on previously flown SpaceX rockets to put military satellites into orbit, a move expected to cut launch costs for the Pentagon, the head of the Air Force Space Command said on Thursday.
The idea of flying on recycled rockets became a reality a week ago when privately owned Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, launched a communications satellite on a Falcon 9 booster that previously put a cargo ship into orbit for NASA.
That Falcon main stage had been recovered from a successful return landing on an ocean platform shortly after its maiden flight last April, then was relaunched and salvaged again last Thursday, marking a spaceflight first.
“I would be comfortable if we were to fly on a reused booster,” General John “Jay” Raymond told reporters at the U.S. Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. “They’ve proven they can do it. … It’s going to get us to lower cost.”
SpaceX has so far won three launch contracts to fly military and national security satellites – business previously awarded exclusively to United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
All those flights will take place on new Falcon 9 rockets.
SpaceX, owned and operated by technology entrepreneur Elon Musk, has a backlog of more than 70 missions worth more than $10 billion.
After last week’s landmark launch, Musk said the company planned to fly about 20 more rockets this year, including the debut blastoff of its new heavy-lift vehicle. Up to six of those missions, including the Falcon Heavy, will use previously flown boosters, he said.
Speaking at the symposium on Wednesday, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said the cost of refurbishing and reflying the Falcon 9 first stage was “substantially less than half” the cost of manufacturing a new booster – the most expensive part of the rocket. SpaceX’s website lists the cost of a basic Falcon 9 launch at $62 million.
SpaceX expects to reduce costs even further.
The company’s next goal is to launch and return a rocket and relaunch it within 24 hours. “That’s when we’ll really feel like we’ve got reusability right,” Shotwell said.
Raymond said the Air Force would need to certify that a used booster could safely deliver its satellites into orbit.
“I’m pretty comfortable we’ll get comfortable with doing it,” Raymond said. “This is just beginning.”
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Twitter on Thursday sued to block an order by the U.S. government demanding that it reveal who is behind an account opposed to President Donald Trump’s tough immigration policies.
Twitter cited freedom of speech as a basis for not turning over records about the account, @ALT_uscis. The account is claimed to be the work of at least one federal immigration employee, according to the lawsuit filed in San Francisco federal court.
The acronym USCIS refers to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and the account describes itself as “immigration resistance.” Trump has vowed to build a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico and has promised to deport millions of illegal immigrants.
Following Trump’s inauguration in January, anonymous Twitter feeds that borrowed the names and logos of more than a dozen U.S. government agencies appeared to challenge the president’s views on climate change and other issues. They called themselves “alt” accounts.
Twitter spokesman Nick Pacilio declined to comment on whether the government had demanded information about other accounts critical of Trump.
User privacy advocate
Twitter, which counts Trump among its active users, has a record of litigating in favor of user privacy.
“The rights of free speech afforded Twitter’s users and Twitter itself under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution include a right to disseminate such anonymous or pseudonymous political speech,” Twitter said in the lawsuit.
The Department of Homeland Security, which is a defendant in the lawsuit, declined to comment on pending litigation. The Justice Department, which typically represents federal agencies in court, and the White House had no immediate comment.
Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, said in a statement that it was a waste of resources to try to uncover an anonymous critic, and he called on the Homeland Security inspector general to investigate who directed the “witch hunt.”
Esha Bhandari, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the Twitter user, said the government’s request was highly unusual. Requests for social media account information from the U.S. government typically involve national security or criminal charges, she said.
“We have seen no reason the government has given for seeking to unmask this speaker’s identity,” Bhandari said, adding that the right to anonymous speech against the government is “a bedrock American value” strongly protected under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Tweeter’s response
Shortly after the lawsuit became public, @ALT_uscis tweeted a copy of the First Amendment and a picture of part of the lawsuit. The account’s followers nearly tripled to 89,000 in the hours after the news broke.
For weeks the account has posted criticism of the administration. It tweeted a parody of the game bingo for “right-wing idiots,” said that some anti-immigration advocates must have been dropped on their heads at birth, and mocked Trump for not giving more of his wealth to charities.
Twitter said it received an administrative summons last month demanding that it provide records related to the account.
A copy of the summons filed with the lawsuit says the records are needed for an investigation to ensure compliance with duties, taxes and fines, and other customs and immigration matters.
It was not immediately clear how the anonymous account fit into those laws and regulations, and Twitter said the summons was an abuse of a law meant to be used to investigate imported merchandise.
Twitter might have a strong case that the summons was improper, said Paul Alan Levy, staff attorney at Public Citizen Litigation Group, who specializes in online privacy and free speech issues.
“I don’t think there is any way for the government to come out of this looking good,” Levy said.
There is no indication that the White House was aware of the summons, which was signed by a Florida-based supervisor who works in an office that investigates employee corruption, misconduct and mismanagement. The supervisor could not be reached for comment.
The summons requested, but apparently did not order, that Twitter keep the document private.
Past battles
The social media company has a history of challenging government demands for information on its users, including a 2012 demand from New York prosecutors about an Occupy Wall Street protester. In that case, Twitter was forced to hand over tweets from the protester to a judge who threatened the company with sanctions, and the protester pleaded guilty of disorderly conduct.
Twitter sued the U.S. Department of Justice in 2014, seeking permission to publicly disclose more information about requests it gets from U.S. authorities for information about its users.
The lawsuit was partly dismissed last year.
Among the lawyers representing Twitter in the latest case is Seth Waxman, a former high-ranking Justice Department official under President Bill Clinton.
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Don’t look to the Kentucky Coal Museum to bring coal back.
The museum is installing solar panels on its roof, part of a project aimed at lowering the energy costs of one of the city’s largest electric customers. It’s also a symbol of the state’s efforts to move away from coal as its primary energy source as more coal-fired power plants are replaced by natural gas. The state legislature recently lifted its decades-old ban on nuclear power.
“It’s a little ironic or coincidental that you are putting solar green energy on a coal museum,” said Roger Noe, a former state representative who sponsored the legislation that created the coal museum. “Coal comes from nature, the sunrays come from nature, so it all works out to be a positive thing.”
The museum is in Benham, once a coal camp town whose population peaked at about 3,000, according to Mayor Wanda Humphrey, 85. Today, it has about 500 people.
The town’s second building was a company commissary known as the “big store,” where Humphrey would visit every day after school to order an RC Cola and a bag of peanuts, charged to her father’s account. Today, that building houses the Kentucky Coal Museum, which opened in 1994 with the help of some state funding. The museum houses relics from the state’s coal mining past, including some items from the personal collection of “Coal Miner’s Daughter” country singer Loretta Lynn.
It’s also the best place in town to get the most direct sunlight, which made it an ideal location for solar panels.
“The people here are sort of in awe of this solar thing,” Humphrey said.
The Southeast Community and Technical College, which owns the museum, expects the solar panels to save between $8,000 and $10,000 a year on energy costs, according to spokesman Brandon Robinson.
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Jupiter is extra close and extra bright this week, and that means some amazing, new close-ups.
The Hubble Space Telescope zoomed in on the solar system giant Monday, and NASA released the pictures Thursday. Jupiter was a relatively close 415 million miles (668 million kilometers) away.
The planet’s Great Red Spot is especially vivid. It’s a storm big enough to swallow Earth, but is mysteriously shrinking. Hubble’s ongoing observations may help explain why. Also visible in the photos is Red Spot Jr.
On Friday, Jupiter will be in opposition. That’s when Jupiter, Earth and the sun all line up, with Earth in the middle. Jupiter will appear brighter than usual — the brightest all year. Stargazers won’t want to miss it.
Look for one of the brightest objects in the night sky, visible from sundown to sunrise near the moon.
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Pirooz Parvarandeh, a longtime Silicon Valley executive, saw a problem.
Although he has lived in the United States for more than 40 years, he knew little about the contributions and accomplishments of Iranian Americans like himself. That lack of knowledge is widespread, he feared, and in his view makes Iranians in America more subject to stereotypes, discrimination and attacks.
“What image comes up with ‘Iranian’? A terrorist? A hostage-taker? Or a contributing member of society?” he asked at a talk this week at the University of California, Berkeley. “If we don’t know the contributions of Iranian Americans, how can we expect the American public to know? If the public is not with us, why would policymakers want to stick up for us?”
Last year, Parvarandeh met with other Iranian Americans to come up with the Iranian Americans’ Contribution Project, a nonprofit that uses technology to gather and analyze data about Iranian Americans. Their efforts picked up steam after Iran was listed among countries included in the Trump administration’s travel ban.
“We want to build a shield,” Parvarandeh said. “We want to build a protective mechanism to say, ‘Here is what we’ve done.'”
Counting contributions
Parvarandeh’s quest is one that many immigrant groups have considered as they try to both assimilate in the U.S. and stand proud of their cultural identity. For Iranian Americans, the issue has been especially complicated by long-standing tensions between the U.S. and Iran. An estimated one million Iranians live in the U.S., mainly in California.
The project aims to stay out of the political fray and has no religious affiliation. It approaches the question of Iranian Americans’ contributions in a systematic way, something Parvarandeh considers “pioneering” among all of the U.S. diaspora groups.
Working with software engineers, the project has come up with an algorithm that captures 200,000 unique Iranian last names and 70,000 unique first names. By applying that algorithm to public databases the organization buys or finds of professional organizations, scholarly articles and licensing bodies, the project creates a snapshot of Iranian Americans in a variety of professions.
So far, the project has found 490 Iranian American chiropractors, more than 9,000 physicians, more than 3,000 dentists and about 1,000 pharmacists. Iranians have been awarded at least 40,000 patents and they make up more than 2.5 percent of lawyers admitted to the State Bar of California. On its website, the project shows where Iranians in a variety of professions are on a U.S. map, sometimes county by county. It also offers a breakdown of professions of people found through LinkedIn.
Since some Iranian names can be found in other countries, the algorithm also calculates the probability that a person is Iranian.
Building a brand
The approach has its limits. The second generation of Iranian Americans and people marrying non-Iranian Americans may begin to take more American-sounding names. But Parvarandeh says he is hoping that Iranian Americans will participate in the project and help make it more accurate. At the moment, the data is anonymized, meaning that it doesn’t list the names of people it captures. But the project combines the data with interviews with Iranian Americans about their life stories and accomplishments.
“There are many arrows being shot in our direction,” he said. “There’s anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. and Europe. What we’re trying to do is build a reputation, build a brand.”
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U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross held out hope Thursday that the Trump administration will revive the U.S. Export-Import bank’s full lending powers, saying the institution is part of its “trade toolbox” to boost exports.
The U.S. government trade lender has been hobbled for the better part of two years by conservative Republicans in Congress who tried to shut it down in 2015 by revoking its charter, and then limited its lending powers last year by blocking nominations to its board of directors.
Big loans impossible
With only two active members on its five-seat board, the bank cannot make or guarantee loans of more than $10 million, preventing it from financing large exports such as U.S.-built commercial aircraft, nuclear reactors or petrochemical plants.
Thus far, Trump administration officials have not said publicly whether they support reviving EXIM’s full lending powers, but some members of Congress say that Trump has told them privately that he supports the institution.
“The bank is part of a domestically focused trade toolbox that this administration will continue to focus on in the coming months,” Ross said in brief video remarks to EXIM’s annual conference in Washington. “We will use that toolbox to rebalance our trade policy in order to put American workers first.”
Ross did not provide details of how EXIM will be used in his trade strategy or whether the administration has specific plans to nominate new board members.
Trump appears to be an ally
He urged hundreds of U.S. manufacturers, lenders and foreign government and company officials attending the meeting to work toward increasing U.S. exports to create jobs.
U.S. Representative Chris Collins of New York, a Republican Trump ally who headed a small manufacturer that used EXIM working capital loan guarantees in the past, told the conference that Trump told him February 16 at a White House meeting that he was “all in” on supporting EXIM.
“We asked him very directly about the five board seats,” Collins said. “The president looked to his right and to his left and said ‘Can you get me some names? I’m all in.’ There was no hesitation whatsoever.”
Reviving EXIM, however, would anger conservative groups backed by the Koch brothers, the influential billionaire Republican donors. The groups have waged a campaign that has painted EXIM as unnecessary corporate welfare even though it is self-funding through the interest and fees it charges borrowers.
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Conservative activist groups that generally support Republicans but oppose a pro-export, anti-import Republican tax proposal released a study on Thursday estimating its impact on individual U.S. states, underscoring the party’s division over taxes.
The two activist groups, backed by billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch, reported that seven states won by President Donald Trump in November’s election would be among the 10 hardest hit by the proposal.
Freedom Partners and Americans for Prosperity, both based in the Washington area, said the “border adjustment tax,” or BAT, would harm all 50 states, but that those heavily dependent on imports could suffer most.
The report predicted economic harm to Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas — all states Trump won in the 2016 presidential election. The list of hard-hit states also includes California, New Jersey and Illinois, which Democrat Hillary Clinton carried.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady, a Texas Republican who intends to include the BAT in tax reform legislation this spring, sharply criticized the study.
‘Fantasy figures’
“That so-called study will be easily discredited and probably fits the definition of fake news,” Brady told reporters. “It takes one provision, pretends the economy freezes … applies it in our current tax code and comes up with fantasy figures.”
BAT, billed as a way to boost U.S. manufacturing, would exempt export revenues from federal tax, while ending the deductibility of import costs by corporations, making imports for production or resale costlier.
The plan is part of a tax reform blueprint supported by House Speaker Paul Ryan. Trump is also working on a tax plan.
The proposal is also opposed by a number of Senate Republicans who could prevent its passage, should the House approve a tax reform bill that contains it.
Koch organizations, including the brothers’ privately held conglomerate, Koch Industries, have warned that BAT could devastate the U.S. economy by raising prices on consumer goods, including gasoline. Refineries owned by Koch Industries rely on oil imports from Canada.
The Koch groups say they support tax reform but oppose BAT.
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White House economic adviser Gary Cohn said he backed bringing back the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law that would revamp Wall Street banks by splitting their consumer-lending businesses from their investment arms.
The National Economic Council director, also a former Goldman Sachs president, expressed support to lawmakers for a banking system where firms would focus primarily on trading and underwriting securities or issuing loans.
Big banks have strongly opposed such a move that would fundamentally overhaul their business. Reinstating the law, which was repealed in 1999, has not attracted significant attention in Congress, but advocates in the White House and both parties now argue it would provide critical safeguards to prevent another financial crisis.
Critics of that approach say it lacks nuance and would not have prevented the last financial meltdown.
The fact Cohn, widely viewed as one of Wall Street’s own, was willing to push that position spooked big banks’ representatives in Washington.
The White House confirmed Cohn’s remarks in a private meeting with lawmakers on Wednesday. A spokesperson said he was “simply discussing the President’s previously stated position” in favor of a “21st century Glass-Steagall.”
Cohn’s remarks were first reported by Bloomberg.
The Trump administration has indicated support for a return to Glass-Steagall. The White House has stuck by the idea since it was included in the Republican Party platform during the presidential campaign, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin expressed interest in a modernized version of the law.
When asked on Thursday when large financial institutions should begin to worry about Glass-Steagall becoming a reality, one industry representative said, “Right now.”
However, any legislation establishing such a firewall faces long odds in the current Congress. The heads of the House and Senate banking committees have indicated support for alternative approaches, and efforts to move Glass-Steagall legislation in prior years have garnered little support.
“A new Glass-Steagall would require legislation, and it simply isn’t a priority issue in Congress,” wrote Ian Katz, a financial policy analyst for the research firm Capital Alpha Partners, in a note to clients.
In the meeting which was arranged by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Mike Crapo, Cohn was asked by Senator Elizabeth Warren about Glass-Steagall. Cohn responded favorably, noting that the Republican Party platform supports the idea, according to sources familiar with the meeting. The meeting included lawmakers from both parties and their staff.
Bringing back Glass Steagall would likely have a significant impact on banks like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup that have large highly intertwined commercial lending and investment banking operations, say analysts.
It would impact Goldman Sachs Group and Morgan Stanley to a lesser degree although, they would likely have to revert to being standalone investment banks and shed their deposit funding.
Here are some details about the law, called the Glass-Steagall Act:
What is Glass-Steagall: Originally passed as part of the U.S. Banking Act of 1933, Glass-Steagall established a firewall between commercial and investment banking activity. The law was whittled away over time as banks gained permission to engage in more trading activity, and was repealed altogether in 1999 with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.
Who supports it?: Since the 2008 financial crisis, Glass-Steagall has become a calling card for politicians eager to crack down on Wall Street. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren frequently invokes it, and Senator Bernie Sanders made it a major part of his presidential campaign. President Donald
Trump also seized on the policy during his campaign.
What does the White House say?: The Trump administration has not backed away from his campaign stance, but there are questions about how aggressively the president will push for a new law. The issue only tends to come up when officials are asked about it. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he supported a modern version of Glass-Steagall in response to a
question during his confirmation hearing. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said the White House supports the proposal when asked by reporters. Cohn responded favorably when asked by Warren at a private meeting with senators.
What would a new Glass-Steagall look like?: There are number
of ideas to create what some refer to as a “21st Century Glass-Steagall.” Warren has proposed splitting commercial and investment banking, and also barring depository institutions from using modern financial instruments like derivatives. Thomas Hoenig, the vice chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance
Corporation, has proposed a similar split, and would subject banks to a higher, 10 percent capital requirement. Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, would force big banks to take on so much capital they would prefer to split into smaller institutions.
Could it happen?: Although many Wall Street critics have seized on Glass-Steagall, efforts to change the law have garnered very little support. Warren’s proposal received just a handful of legislative co-sponsors. And because Congress and the White House are still consumed with complex fights over health care and tax reform, there seems to be little appetite for a
broad, controversial overhaul of the financial system.
Are there risks for banks?: Big U.S. lenders including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup would be most impacted, because their commercial lending and investment banking operations are closely
intertwined, say analysts. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley might be less impacted, although they would likely have to revert to being standalone investment banks and shed their deposit funding. But even if Glass-Steagall does not become law, the industry may have to spend money, time and
energy lobbying against the idea, when they would rather focus on rolling back existing rules.
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