Engineers at Hyperloop recently took a significant step toward proving their new vacuum-tube-based transportation system may in fact be the future… and not just hype. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Month: July 2017
Your speech may, um, help reveal if you’re uh … developing thinking problems. More pauses, filler words and other verbal changes might be an early sign of mental decline, which can lead to Alzheimer’s disease, a study suggests.
Researchers had people describe a picture they were shown in taped sessions two years apart. Those with early-stage mild cognitive impairment slid much faster on certain verbal skills than those who didn’t develop thinking problems.
“What we’ve discovered here is there are aspects of language that are affected earlier than we thought,” before or at the same time that memory problems emerge, said one study leader, Sterling Johnson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
This was the largest study ever done of speech analysis for this purpose, and if more testing confirms its value, it might offer a simple, cheap way to help screen people for very early signs of mental decline.
Don’t panic: Lots of people say “um” and have trouble quickly recalling names as they age, and that doesn’t mean trouble is on the way.
“In normal aging, it’s something that may come back to you later and it’s not going to disrupt the whole conversation,” another study leader, Kimberly Mueller, explained. “The difference here is, it is more frequent in a short period,” interferes with communication and gets worse over time.
The study was discussed Monday at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in London.
About 47 million people worldwide have dementia, and Alzheimer’s is the most common type. In the U.S., about 5.5 million people have the disease. Current drugs can’t slow or reverse it, just ease symptoms. Doctors think treatment might need to start sooner to do any good, so there’s a push to find early signs.
Mild cognitive impairment causes changes that are noticeable to the person or others, but not enough to interfere with daily life. It doesn’t mean these folks will develop Alzheimer’s, but many do — 15 to 20 percent per year.
To see if speech analysis can find early signs, researchers first did the picture-description test on 400 people without cognitive problems and saw no change over time in verbal skills. Next, they tested 264 participants in the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer’s Prevention, a long-running study of people in their 50s and 60s, most of whom have a parent with Alzheimer’s and might be at higher risk for the disease themselves. Of those, 64 already had signs of early decline or developed it over the next two years, according to other neurological tests they took.
In the second round of tests , they declined faster on content (ideas they expressed) and fluency (the flow of speech and how many pauses and filler words they used.) They used more pronouns such as “it” or “they” instead of specific names for things, spoke in shorter sentences and took longer to convey what they had to say.
“Those are all indicators of struggling with that computational load that the brain has to conduct” and supports the role of this test to detect decline, said Julie Liss, a speech expert at Arizona State University with no role in the work.
She helped lead a study in 2015 that analyzed dozens of press conferences by former President Ronald Reagan and found evidence of speech changes more than a decade before he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She also co-founded a company that analyzes speech for many neurological problems, including dementia, traumatic brain injury and Parkinson’s disease.
Researchers could not estimate the cost of testing for a single patient, but for a doctor to offer it requires only a digital tape recorder and a computer program or app to analyze results.
Alan Sweet, 72, a retired state of Wisconsin worker who lives in Madison, is taking part in the study and had the speech test earlier this month. His father had Alzheimer’s and his mother had a different type of dementia, Lewy body.
“Watching my parents decline into the awful world of dementia and being responsible for their medical care was the best and worst experience of my life,” he said. “I want to help the researchers learn, furthering medical knowledge of treatment and ultimately, cure.”
Participants don’t get individual results — it just aids science.
Another study at the conference on Monday, led by doctoral student Taylor Fields, hints that hearing loss may be another clue to possible mental decline. It involved 783 people from the same Wisconsin registry project. Those who said at the start of the study that they had been diagnosed with hearing loss were more than twice as likely to develop mild cognitive impairment over the next five years as those who did not start out with a hearing problem.
That sort of information is not strong evidence, but it fits with earlier work along those lines.
Family doctors “can do a lot to help us if they knew what to look for” to catch early signs of decline, said Maria Carrillo, the Alzheimer’s Association’s chief science officer. Hearing loss, verbal changes and other known risks such as sleep problems might warrant a referral to a neurologist for a dementia check, she said.
Listen to audio of example test.
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Two Iranian nationals have been charged in the United States in an alleged scheme to steal and resell software to Iran, including a program to design bullets and warheads.
According to an indictment unsealed Monday, Mohammed Saeed Ajily, 35, recruited Mohammed Reza Rezakhah, 39, to break into companies’ computers to steal their software for resale to Iranian universities, the military and the government.
The two men — and a third who was arrested in 2013 and handed back to Iran in a prisoner swap last year — allegedly broke into the computers of Vermont-based Arrow Tech Associates.
The stolen software included Arrow Tech’s Projectile Rocket Ordnance Design and Analysis System (PRODAS), which is protected by U.S. controls on the export of sensitive technologies, and its distribution to Iran is banned by U.S. sanctions on the country.
According to the indictment, Rezakhah conducted the hacking and cracking operations and Ajily was in charge of marketing and selling the programs.
The two men were charged in the Rutland, Vermont, federal district court, which issued arrest warrants for the two, who are believed to be in Iran.
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Their team shirts didn’t say “Afghanistan” and their name badges were handwritten, not typed, suggesting the last-minute nature of their entry into the United States. But the Afghan girls competing Monday in an international robotics competition in Washington were clearly excited to be representing their nation.
The team of six teenage girls was twice rejected for U.S. visas before President Donald Trump intervened at the last minute. They arrived in Washington from their hometown of Herat, Afghanistan, early Saturday, and their ball-sorting robot competed in its first round Monday morning.
“We were so interested, because we find a big chance to show the talent and ability of Afghans, show that Afghan women can make robots, too,” said Rodaba Noori, one of the team members. She acknowledged, though, that the team “hadn’t long, or enough time to get ready for competition.”
The girls’ struggle to overcome war, hardship and U.S. bureaucracy on their journey to the U.S. capital has made their team stand out among more than 150 competing in the FIRST Global Challenge, a robotics competition designed to encourage youths to pursue careers in math and science.
The U.S. won’t say why the girls were rejected for visas, citing confidentiality rules. But Afghan Ambassador Hamdullah Mohib said that based on discussions with U.S. officials, it appears the girls, who are 14 to 16 years old, were turned away due to concerns they would not return to Afghanistan.
Speaking with the assistance of a translator who summarized their remarks, 14-year-old team member Fatemah Qaderyan, said that she was “grateful” to be able to compete. Her teammate, 15-year-old Lida Azizi, said she was a little “nervous” but also excited to be playing and “proud.”
Though there was a crush of media attention, the girls looked much like other competitors, wearing jeans along with white headscarfs. Their microwave-sized robot, like that of other teams, displayed their country’s black, red and green flag.
“I’m so happy they can play,” said their mentor Alireza Mehraban, a software engineer. He added: “They are so happy to be here.”
While teams had up to four months to build their robots, the Afghan team built theirs in two weeks before it had to be shipped to reach the competition in time, Mehraban said. He said the girls had a day to test the robot in Afghanistan before it needed to be mailed.
On Monday, they were making adjustments and practicing in between rounds. When a chain seemed to come loose on a part of the robot that moves up and down, a competition judge recommended a larger part, and another team provided one.
Like others in the competition, the girls’ robot can pick up and distinguish between blue and orange balls. To score points, teams deposit the blue balls, which represent water, and the orange balls, which represent pollutants, into different locations. The teams play in alliances of three nations, with two alliances competing head to head. The three-robot alliance that scores the most points in a game wins.
Mehraban, the team’s mentor, said their robot managed to score one or two points in the first game. The team has two more games to play Monday and three games Tuesday.
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Researchers working on a one-two punch to eliminate HIV say their first punch has landed and they can start working on the second, though plenty of work will be needed on both fronts before a cure is available.
HIV spreads just like other viruses: It takes over a cell’s DNA and uses the cell’s infrastructure to make copies of itself. Most HIV treatments work by blocking new cells from getting infected.
The cells that are actively producing HIV are constantly being killed, either by HIV or by the immune system. So once you stop new cells from getting infected, the patient can achieve a viral load close to zero.
Viral reservoir remains hidden
That’s not a total cure though, because some HIV-infected cells go into a resting state, and stop actively producing the virus. This viral reservoir remains hidden from the immune system. The problem is that if treatment stops, the latent virus will eventually reactivate and the disease will be able to spread again.
Doctors have gotten pretty good at stopping HIV from infecting new cells, but they still haven’t figured out how to eliminate these reservoirs, and so patients must take medication for their entire life.
That’s why maintaining health care access for everyone living with HIV is a major public health challenge. And even for those who can access life-long care, over time these drugs can damage the liver, kidneys, heart and brain.
‘Shock and kill’
In 2012, a University of North Carolina research group published a proof of concept for a cure called “shock and kill.” They showed that a cancer drug called Vorinostat can “shock” some infected cells into producing HIV again. That brings the virus out of hiding so it can be “killed.”
They described their work in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. “What we did in this study was to determine the optimal dosing regimen — how often the drug should be given — in order to measure consistent reactivation of HIV,” co-author Nancie Archin said to VOA.
Once reactivated, those cells should self-destruct or be killed by the immune system, just like in a typical HIV treatment. But the UNC team’s findings confirm previous evidence showing that isn’t happening.
It’s not yet clear why that is.
One theory was that Vorinostat was weakening the immune system, so that it wasn’t able to kill the infected cells. But the report ruled that out — relevant parts of the immune system, the study found, were not weakened.
Drug found to be safe
On the bright side, the research demonstrated that Vorinostat is safe to use with HIV-positive patients at doses that can effectively shock cells. The researchers have already begun trials pairing Vorinostat with drugs that might be able to kill the shocked cells. There is a high safety standard for these trials because the participants have their HIV level under control and are generally healthy.
But it’s still not clear if the shock is effective enough if all the reservoir is being activated. The researchers stress that it will likely be a long time before effective treatments are available. And because the treatment involves activating HIV, it will, at least at first, only be available to those who have their viral load under control.
Sharon Lewin, who researches HIV latency at the University of Melbourne and was not associated with this study, told VOA she wished the researchers had used more methods to measure whether the cells were being shocked. “You can measure virus inside the cell and you can measure virus that’s being released from the cell,” she said. “They measure virus just inside the cell.”
It is possible that the cell is producing HIV, but that the HIV virus isn’t leaving the cell. If so, that could explain why the cells aren’t dying.
Treatment successes are few
HIV has been eliminated in a handful of people. At least two infants who received aggressive treatment within hours of contracting HIV never developed viral reservoirs. One man in Germany has been HIV-free for several years following a pair of bone marrow transplants he received during cancer treatment. This has failed in other patients though, and bone marrow transplants are life-threatening procedures.
Lewin said other approaches to eliminating HIV, like editing a person’s genome, or aggressive early treatment, would not be as widely available as a shock and kill approach.
“Those are approaches that will be difficult to roll out to the 37 million people living with HIV,” said Lewin. “An approach that’s just tablets, and tablets that are relatively cheap, that is an approach that could be available.”
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Foreign fishing vessels, many from China, prowl the waters off West Africa every day. They capture millions of fish — catches that used to go to local boats. The fish are then shipped to China, Europe and the United States, satisfying a global demand for seafood and fueling a multibillion-dollar industry.
The foreign vessels make life hard for West African fishermen.
Foreign trawlers from Asia and Europe have cost West Africa’s economy 300,000 jobs and $2 billion in income, according to John Hocevar, a marine biologist with Greenpeace.
However, what to do about the problem — and possible damage to regional fish populations — has eluded experts and officials.
Chinese presence
Exact numbers are difficult to come by, but experts agree no single country has a greater presence off the coast of West Africa than China.
In a 2015 report, Greenpeace estimated that, two years earlier, China had 426 distant water fishing vessels off Africa’s West Coast.
Between 2000 and 2011, 64 percent of China’s average annual catches, valued at more than $7 billion, came from that area, according to The Pew Charitable Trusts.
Fishing isn’t a big part of China’s economy, representing less than one percent of total gross domestic product. But for many in China’s coastal provinces, it’s both a livelihood and way of life, according to Haibing Ma, the China program manager for the Worldwatch Institute, a nonprofit group that researches sustainability.
Chinese fishers have traveled to Africa because their own fish stock has nearly run out. “Overfishing has destroyed the sustainability of China’s inshore fisheries,” Ma said.
Lack of oversight
Fishing practices are inherently difficult to monitor and regulate. Oceans are vast, vessels are hard to reach, and a mix of local and international laws and regulations complicates enforcement.
Domestic laws regulate waters up to 200 miles off the coast, and international laws control waters past that, according to Todd Dubois, assistant director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Office for Law Enforcement.
This complex environment has led to a variety of creative ways to maximize profits without breaking the law.
For example, legislation in Guinea-Bissau has kept large industrial fishing vessels away from its coast. So, fishing companies have deployed small boats that don’t need licenses from nearby countries such as Senegal. Those boats will fish in Guinea-Bissau and return their catches to a large “mothership,” which in turn takes its bounty back to Senegal to be traded.
In other cases, “floating factories” — large, nearby vessels used for processing and packaging catches — have enabled other boats to catch small pelagics, such as mackerels and sardines, quickly and on a massive scale for prolonged periods.
And bottom trawls, a kind of gear that contributes to overfishing, were installed on most Chinese vessels studied by Greenpeace in 2015.
Many see international fishing off Africa’s West Coast as an exploitation of local resources by foreign powers. But some of the most damaging practices occur within the law, and local African economies sometimes benefit from illegal fishing.
In Mauritania, for example, a Chinese company made a secret deal with the local government to build a fish-processing factory and bring 80 large vessels to the coast in exchange for a $100 million investment in the country.
That deal may have benefited both countries, says Andre Standing, an adviser at the Coalition for Fair Fisheries Arrangements, but it has had a profoundly negative impact on small-scale fishermen.
Responsible practices
Fishing, even when done on a massive scale, can be sustainable, provided there’s adequate planning and reporting. That means understanding the vulnerability of local fish populations and managing catches accordingly.
“Some reproduce very fast and can handle quite heavy fishing, such as tuna, and some of the small pelagics like the sardines,” Standing said, but other fish, such as sharks, develop very slowly. “We’re already seeing across Africa and across the world that industrial fishing and long line fishing in particular, they’ve decimated populations of the other types of fish.”
Standing cautions against drawing conclusions about the entire Chinese fishing industry. Individual fishing companies need to be judged on their own merits, he said. There are good Chinese companies, just as there are bad European companies.
China’s presence off Africa’s west coast shows no signs of shrinking, though. The Chinese government has enabled the industry to expand far beyond the country’s own shores. In 2013, the government gave the fishing sector about $6.5 billion in subsidies, according to a brief Standing wrote for the Africa Center for Strategic Studies.
Whether considering the actions of China, the European Union, or local African governments and businesses, the root of the problem comes from a lack of focus on long-term sustainability, according to Standing.
“In many areas, there really isn’t this careful, precautionary approach to managing fishing intensity,” he said. “A lot are being driven by short-term profit, and that’s really at the heart of the unsustainable nature of fisheries.”
Zhan Yang, Teng Xu and Ricci Shryock contributed to this report.
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Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution says humans evolved as a separate species. But modern science knows that we, together with all other creatures, have always lived in a symbiosis with a great number of microbes, dwelling inside and outside of our bodies, the so-called holobiont. VOA’s George Putic spoke with a scientist who says the fact that we evolved together calls for a revision of Darwin’s view.
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The United States needs more foreign workers to keep some American businesses from floundering, according to a decision announced by U.S. officials Monday.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said it will make 15,000 additional H-2B visas available for companies to hire temporary, non-agricultural foreign workers before the end of the fiscal year Sept. 30.
In a written statement, DHS Secretary John Kelly called the move a “one-time increase,”
The Trump administration promotes what it calls a “Hire American” policy and the president has repeatedly called for more limited immigration. Pressed by a reporter about how the policy announcement to allow more foreign workers into the U.S. supports American jobs, a DHS spokesperson said that without those extra workers, U.S. businesses could suffer “irreparable harm.”
Exemption is not renewed
In order to hire foreign workers through the non-immigrant visa program, businesses must show there are not enough U.S. workers “able, willing, qualified, and available” for the jobs.
The H-2B program is capped at 66,000 new visas annually; of that, 33,000 is reserved for workers who are hired during the first half of the fiscal year (Oct. 1 — March 31) and the remainder are for the latter half (April 1 — Sept. 30).
Since 2015, however, some returning workers were able to participate beyond the cap, increasing the number of H-2B visas issued last year to nearly 85,000, according to State Department data.
But Congress did not renew the returnees exemption when it expired last fall, effectively curbing the number of available visas. Businesses that rely heavily on seasonal workers, like the tourism industry, said they have struggled to fill vacancies since then.
Businesses need to petition for visas
Part of budget legislation passed in May, however, gave the Department of Homeland Security — which includes U.S. CItizenship and Immigration Services — discretion to go over the 66,000 cap to compensate for the shortfall.
Businesses will be able to petition for the additional visas when the rule is published in the General Register later this week, according to senior DHS officials. Previous applicants who did not make the earlier cut-off for the fiscal year will have to reapply, the officials added, but if hired by the end of the fiscal year, they will be able to work past Sept. 30.
President Donald Trump uses the H-2B visa program to staff his Florida private club, where he has hosted visiting heads of state since his inauguration in January.
Nearly one in 10 infants worldwide, or 12.9 million, received no vaccinations in 2016, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Monday.
Those infants missed the critical first dose of the triple vaccination against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, known as the DTP3 vaccination. An additional 6.6 million infants who received the first dose didn’t receive the other two doses in the three-dose series last year.
“Since 2010, the percentage of children who received their full course of routine immunizations has stalled at 86 percent, with no significant changes in any countries or regions during the past year,” WHO said in its statement. “This falls short of the global immunization coverage target of 90 percent.”
Current levels of immunization prevent 2 million to 3 million deaths worldwide every year from diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis and measles, according to WHO, which called routine vaccinations “one of the most successful and cost-effective public health interventions” that can be carried out.
One hundred and thirty of the 194 WHO member states have achieved the 90 percent DTP3 coverage benchmark. The majority of unvaccinated infants live in countries ensnared in conflict or encumbered by high levels of poverty.
In 2016, eight nations had coverage rates below 50 percent for DTP3 shots; they were Central African Republic, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria and Ukraine.
“If we are to raise the bar on global immunization coverage, health services must reach the unreached,” said Dr. Jean-Marie Okwo-Bele, WHO Director of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals. “Every contact with the health system must be seen as an opportunity to immunize.”
Despite the stagnant overall vaccination rates, WHO reported gains in vaccination for rubella, a virus that can cause severe birth defects if contracted by pregnant women. Global coverage against that disease increased from 35 percent in 2010 to 47 percent in 2016, according to Monday’s statement. WHO called the improvement a “big step toward reducing the occurrence of … a devastating condition that results in hearing impairment, congenital heart defects and blindness.”
The fight for broader vaccination rates is not unique to developing nations or war-torn regions. Earlier this month, the French government passed a law mandating that by 2018, French parents will be required to vaccinate their children against a range of diseases, including pertussis, measles, mumps, and rubella. France already requires vaccinations against diphtheria, tetanus and poliomyelitis, with exceptions for infants with certain medical conditions.
The new law is a response to a movement against vaccinations in developed countries. In America, Britain and France, the measles vaccination rate has fallen just below the 95 percent level.
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EU foreign ministers approved on Monday measures to allow Ukraine to export more industrial and agricultural products free of tariffs to the bloc in recognition of reforms undertaken by Kyiv and the country’s fragile economy.
By the end of September, Ukraine will be able to export greater tonnage of farm products, including grains, honey and processed tomatoes for three years.
The EU will also remove for the same period import duties on fertilizers, dyes, footwear, copper, aluminum, televisions and sound recording equipment.
The measures add to a free-trade agreement provisionally in place since January 2016 that has opened both markets for goods and services.
“It is our duty to support Ukraine and strengthen our economic and political ties, also in the face of the ongoing conflict on its soil,” said Estonia Foreign Minister Sven Mikser, whose country holds the six-month rotating presidency of the European Union.
Trade has been at the heart of a dispute between Russia and the European Union over relations with Ukraine, with Moscow and Brussels both competing to bring Kyiv closer to their side through offers of greater economic integration.
While Kyiv has moved westward, Russia has sought to destabilize Ukraine, EU governments and NATO say, by annexing Crimea and providing separatists with weapons and troops in Ukraine’s industrial east.
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Thanks to Hollywood special effects, it’s possible to create a world of superheroes or galaxies far, far away. But that technology is also slowly making its way into the classroom and turning science education into a visual journey that can take students anywhere from inside a cell to the deepest parts of our solar system. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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On a sweltering summer morning in the southern Indian city of Chennai, a dozen garment workers crowd into a small courtroom for the latest hearing in a protracted battle over low wages in factories supplying global fashion brands.
The women are among tens of thousands of workers in Tamil Nadu state – the largest hub in India’s $40 billion-a-year textile and garment industry – who are seeking millions of dollars in compensation following a landmark court ruling last year that declared they had long been grossly underpaid.
The Madras High Court ordered that the garment workers should receive a pay rise of up to 30 percent – the first minimum wage hike for 12 years – and that they could claim arrears going back to 2014.
But 12 months on, many factory bosses have failed to pay up.
Squeezed into a corner at the back of the stuffy Chennai courtroom, a middle-aged woman leans against the blue walls, clutching polythene bags full of documents to prove her claim.
Normally she spends her days hunched over a sewing machine, stitching skirts, shirts and dresses destined for high streets around the world.
But for months she has been taking days off work to attend court.
“I forgo a day’s salary to come for these hearings. It may not seem like a big amount, but for us it is hard earned money,” said the 48-year-old seamstress, who did not wish to be identified fearing it would impact her case. “I am only asking for what is rightfully mine. And they won’t even tell me how they are calculating my dues.”
More than 150 claims have been filed against tailoring and export garment manufacturing units in the Chennai region alone, according to data requested by the Thomson Reuters Foundation under the Right to Information Act.
The claims, which would benefit at least 80,000 workers at factories around the port city, add up to more than 490 million Indian rupees ($7.6 million).
But workers’ unions say these claims are probably the tip of the iceberg as they only represent cases filed by government labor inspectors.
Salary cuts
Under the 2016 Madras court ruling, Tamil Nadu’s garment and textile workers should see their pay rise from a monthly average of 4,500 to 6,500 rupees – which campaigners say is comparable to wages for textile jobs in most other states.
But workers say managers have defaulted or delayed on payments since the ruling, with some even introducing pay cuts.
Despite the state’s minimum wage laws, salaries continue to be “grossly low” for thousands of workers who are still not given pay slips or are often hired only as apprentices, campaigners say.
“Instead of paying workers their correct salaries, companies are finding ways to surreptitiously squash their rights,” said Selvi Palani, a lawyer helping workers’ unions fight their cases. “There is a court order but the money is not on the table.
Workers continue to be underpaid.”
Sujata Mody of Penn Thozhilalargal Sangam, a women workers’ union, said some companies that had raised wages were now docking pay for sick days, and for factory meals and shuttle buses which were previously free, meaning many workers had seen little or no change in pay.
Some factories were also firing more expensive workers on trivial grounds, she added.
“The workers are struggling to be heard and the managements are coming up with new forms to deduct their income,” Mody said.
Repeated delays
Under the 1948 Minimum Wages Act, state governments are required to increase the basic minimum wage every five years to protect workers against exploitation, but textile manufacturers have repeatedly challenged pay rises in Tamil Nadu.
The state’s labor commissioner, Ka Balachandran, said inspectors were verifying every company’s records to check that wages were now in line with last year’s ruling.
“We are doing everything to ensure workers get fair wages, and get it quickly,” he added.
But manufacturers in Tamil Nadu say the hike is too high, putting them at a disadvantage to competitors in other states. Some say they are already paying workers more than the minimum wage.
“The new norms are not distinguishing clearly between skilled and non-skilled workers,” said S Shaktivel of the Tirupur Exporters’ Association.
He said some companies had launched an appeal against the order at the Madras High Court.
In the Chennai labor court, case numbers are called out in quick succession.
The seamstress, who is expecting arrears of up to 5,000 rupees, strains to listen over the slow whirring of the ceiling fan.
“My financial situation is not very good,” she whispers. “My husband had surgery a few months back, we have a loan to pay back and a house to run. The company owes me arrears for almost one year. I need that income desperately.”
Her case is called. The lawyer representing the company asks for more time. Another date is set, with the judge warning against further delays.
“I hope I get a good settlement,” the seamstress said as she left court. “After all these years, I would like to stop working, but that looks unlikely. At least if they paid me properly, I would feel a little better.”
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The roar of the engine was replaced by a furious whirring as the future of motorsports came to Brooklyn.
Formula E took over part of the waterfront neighborhood of Red Hook on Sunday, the second of two race days for the Qualcomm New York City ePrix.
The Formula One-style, open-wheel cars reach speeds of 140 mph but only about 80 decibels, compared with 130 decibels for the cars with combustion engines. Instead of screaming down the straightaways the way F1 cars do, FE cars buzz like giant, steal hummingbirds. And they run clean and green.
Sam Bird from the DS Virgin Racing team won Sunday’s 49-lap race over the narrow 1.2-mile, 10-turn track from the pole to sweep the weekend races for team owner Richard Branson, the billionaire adventurer.
The three-year-old FE series is sanctioned by the International Federation of Automobiles, the governing body for Formula One, making the New York City ePrix the first race run by a major motorsports organization in the five boroughs.
The street course was squeezed into an industrial area that has become more residential in recent years. Red Hook is known for its microbreweries, food trucks and an Ikea where New Yorkers can buy cheap furniture for their expensive apartments. With the track right next to the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal, the Statute of Liberty had a great view of the starting grid.
Twenty drivers started the race with enough battery power to make it through about 25 laps. They switch cars during the race and the key is energy conservation. Drivers are careful not to lean too hard on the accelerator and can recharge the battery when braking.
“With it being electric, there’s no delay from when you put the throttle down to when it gets to the wheels,” said Mitch Evans of New Zealand, who drives for Panasonic Jaguar Racing, a new team to the circuit this year. “The energy management in the race is quite unique.”
New York is the second-to-last of nine stops for the Formula E series. Previous race sites include Berlin, Monaco, Paris and Mexico City. In two weeks, the series finishes in Montreal. Thousands attended the races in Brooklyn, packing two metal grandstands overlooking the track on Sunday. Not bad considering Red Hook is not the easiest neighborhood to reach by mass transit and it’s no place to try to park a car.
Organizers ran shuttle buses from the Barclays Center, home of the Nets and a major subway hub, to the race site about 3 miles away. There were also ride-share stations, bicycles racks and water taxis and ferries from Manhattan.
The event drew curious locals and motorsports fans. Comedian Trevor Noah of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” was among the VIPs who got to walk the track before the race. The Hudson Horns played Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” as fans strolled across the black top as if it was a weekend street fair, minus the food carts and folding tables full of homemade wares for sale.
At the Allianz Explorer Zone, fans could check out BMW’s electric automobiles and Jaguars’ I-Pace Concept, an SUV that will be the company’s first entry into the electric market. While Formula E aspires to be highly competitive racing circuit, it is also a means by which automakers can develop electric technology and show off what it can do.
“For us, what’s really important is this represents the future,” said James Barclay, team director for Jaguar Panasonic. “The car industry is moving toward electrification. We’re going through a transition period. It’s going to take a number of years. But what is quite clear is we do need to move away from combustion cars for the future.
“It’s about learning, developing and proving actual electrical vehicle technology on the racetrack and applying that to make our road cars of the future.”
It is no coincidence the series has stopped in big cities, where urbanites see ownership of traditional fossil fuel-powered automobiles that pollute the air as nonessential.
“We go to places where cars are really a problem,” Formula E CEO Alejandro Agag said earlier this week.
Jim Overmeyer, 62, made the trip from Islip on Long Island for the New York City ePrix. He said an electric car wouldn’t work for him right now but maybe a hybrid would. He said the tight course in Brooklyn gave the ePrix a bit of a go-cart feel. And, of course, the sound takes some getting used to.
“It’s certainly a lot quieter,” he said. “It’s better than what I thought. From what I’ve seen on TV, it sounds like a bunch of squirrels being tortured or something like that.”
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A severed marine cable has left Somalia without internet for weeks, triggering losses for businesses, residents said, and adding a layer of chaos in a country where Islamist insurgents are carrying out a campaign of bombings and killings.
Abdi Anshuur, Somalia’s minister for posts and telecommunications, told state radio that internet to the Horn of Africa state went down a month ago after a ship cut an undersea cable connecting it to global data networks.
Businesses have had to close or improvise to remain open and university students told Reuters their educational courses had been disrupted.
Anshuur said the outage was costing Somalia the equivalent of about $10 million in economic output.
“The night internet went off marked the end of my daily bread,” Mohamed Nur, 22, told Reuters in the capital Mogadishu.
Nur said he now begged “tea and cigarettes from friends” after the internet cutoff also severed his monthly income of $500 that he took in from ads he developed and placed on the video website, YouTube.
Somalia’s economy is still picking up slowly after a combined force of the army and an African Union peacekeeping force helped drive the Islamist group, al Shabaab, out of Mogadishu and other strongholds.
Al Shabaab wants to topple the western backed government and rule according to its strict interpretation of Islamic sharia law.
The group remains formidable and lethal, with its campaign of frequent bombings and killings a key source of significant security risk for most businesses and regular life.
Now the internet outage potentially compounds the hardships for most firms. Most young people who say they are unable to work because of the outage spend hours idling in front of tea shops.
Mohamed Ahmed Hared, commercial manager of Somali Optical Networks(SOON), a large internet service provider in the country, told Reuters his business was losing over a million dollars a day. Hared’s clients, he said, had reported a range of crippled services including passport and e-tickets printing and money remittances.
Some students and staff at the University of Somalia in Mogadishu told Reuters their learning had been disrupted because Google, which they heavily rely on for research, was now inaccessible.
The absence of especially popular internet sites like Facebook and YouTube and Google was, however, cause for celebration for some in the conservative, Muslim nation.
“My wife used to be (on) YouTube or Facebook every minute,” Mohamud Osman, 45, said, adding the online activity would sometimes distract her from feeding her baby and that the habit had once forced him to try to get a divorce.
“Now I am happy … internet is without doubt a necessary tool of evil.”
Facebook is fighting a court order that blocks the social media giant from letting users know when law enforcement investigators ask to search their online information, particularly their political affiliations and comments.
Major technology companies and civil liberties groups have joined Facebook in the case, which resembles legal challenges throughout the country from technology companies that oppose how the government seeks access to internet data in emails or social media accounts during criminal investigations, The Washington Post reported .
Facebook is arguing in the D.C. Court of Appeals that the order violates First Amendment protections of the company and individuals.
A spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office declined to comment. Many documents have been sealed in the case and hearings have been closed to the public.
The timing of the investigation and references in court documents that have been made public suggest the search warrants relate to demonstrations during President Donald Trump’s inauguration, when more than 200 people were charged with rioting, the newspaper reported.
The search warrants at the crux of the case seek “all contents of communications, identifying information and other records” and designate three accounts for a three-month period in each request, according to a Facebook court filing.
A D.C. Superior Court judge in April denied Facebook’s request to end the gag order and directed the company to turn over the records covered by the search warrants to law enforcement. Facebook appealed and the appeals court allowed the company to share some details of the sealed case to seek legal support for its cause from other businesses and organizations. They have since filed public legal briefs supporting Facebook.
In the last six months of 2016, Facebook reported about 41,000 requests for information from the government and said it provided data in 83 percent of those cases.
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Gibraltar will not be a victim of Brexit and has had guarantees from the British government it will not do a trade deal with the European Union which doesn’t include the territory, its chief minister said on Sunday.
The future of Gibraltar, a rocky enclave on the southern tip of Spain captured by Britain in 1704, and its 30,000 inhabitants is set to be a major point of contention in Brexit negotiations. The EU annoyed Britain and Gibraltar in April by offering Spain a right of veto over the territory’s post-Brexit relationship with the bloc.
Gibraltar, which Spain wants back, voted strongly in favor of remaining in the EU at last year’s referendum but is committed to staying part of Britain.
Gibraltar’s Chief Minister Fabian Picardo told Sky News he had had “cast iron assurances” from Britain’s Brexit minister David Davis that the government would not do a trade deal with the EU if it did not include Gibraltar.
“I’m the backbone of this negotiation for Gibraltar and the backbone is made of limestone rock, it’s not going to be easy to buckle on that. We can have the War of the Summer, the War of the Autumn or the War of the Winter, if you like, on that, Gibraltar is not going to change its position,” he said.
“It’s our obligation now to energetically and enthusiastically pursue the result of the referendum and deliver a successful Brexit. We’re not going to get in the way of Brexit but we’re not going to be the victims of Brexit.”
During a state visit to Britain this week, Spain’s King Felipe said he was confident an acceptable arrangement could be worked out with Britain over the future of Gibraltar, but Prime Minister Theresa May’s spokeswoman said the topic had not come up during their bilateral meeting.
“There is not going to be any new arrangements in relation to the sovereignty of Gibraltar, that is going to remain 100 percent British,” Picardo said.
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Bilateral talks aimed at reducing the U.S. trade deficit with China have yielded some initial deals, but U.S. firms say much more needs to be done as a deadline for a 100-day action plan expires Sunday.
The negotiations, which began in April, have reopened China’s market to U.S. beef after 14 years and prompted Chinese pledges to buy U.S. liquefied natural gas. American firms have also been given access to some parts of China’s financial services sector.
More details on the 100-day plan are expected to be announced in the coming week as senior U.S. and Chinese officials gather in Washington for annual bilateral economic talks, rebranded this year as the “U.S.-China Comprehensive Economic Dialogue.”
A U.S. Commerce Department spokesman declined to discuss potential areas for new agreements since a May 11 announcement on beef, chicken, financial services and LNG.
Trade deficit grows
Earlier in April, when Chinese President Xi Jinping met U.S. President Donald Trump for the first time at his Florida resort, Xi agreed to a 100-day plan for trade talks aimed at boosting U.S. exports and trimming the U.S. trade deficit with China.
The U.S. goods trade deficit with China reached $347 billion last year. The gap in the first five months of 2017 widened about 5.3 percent from a year earlier, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.
“It is an excellent momentum builder, but much more needs to be done for U.S.-China commercial negotiations to be considered a success,” said Jacob Parker, vice president of China operations at the U.S.-China Business Council (USCBC) in Beijing.
Biggest irritants
There has been little sign of progress in soothing the biggest trade irritants, such as U.S. demands that China cut excess capacity in steel and aluminum production, lack of access for U.S. firms to China’s services market, and U.S. national security curbs on high-tech exports to China.
The Trump administration is considering broad tariffs or quotas on steel and aluminum on national security grounds, partly in response to what it views as a glut of Chinese production that is flooding international markets and driving down prices.
Deals struck
American beef is now available in Chinese shops for the first time since a 2003 U.S. case of “mad cow” disease, giving U.S. ranchers access to a rapidly growing market worth around $2.6 billion last year.
More beef deals were signed during an overseas buying mission by the Chinese last week.
“There are hopes there will be even more concrete results,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told a daily news briefing in Beijing on Friday. He did not elaborate.
Critics of the 100-day process said China had agreed to lift its ban on U.S. beef last September, with officials just needing to finalize details on quarantine requirements.
China, meanwhile, has delivered its first batch of cooked chicken to U.S. ports after years of negotiating for access to the market.
But unlike the rush by Chinese consumers for a first taste of American beef, Chinese poultry processors have not had a flurry of orders for cooked chicken.
Biotech crops, financial services
Other sectors in China under U.S. pressure to open up have moved more slowly.
Beijing had only approved two of the eight biotech crops waiting for import approval, despite gathering experts to review the crops on two occasions in a six-week period.
U.S. industry officials had signaled they were expecting more approvals. U.S. executives say the review process still lacks transparency.
Financial services is another area where little progress has been made, U.S. officials say.
USCBC’s Parker said it is unclear how long it will take for foreign credit rating agencies to be approved, or whether U.S.-owned suppliers of electronic payment services will be able to secure licenses.
The bilateral talks have also not addressed restrictions on foreign investment in life insurance and securities trading, or “the many challenges foreign companies face in China’s cybersecurity enforcement environment,” Parker said.
In an annual report released Thursday, the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai said China remained a “difficult market.”
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Forty-eight years after he landed on the moon, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin on Saturday rolled out a red carpet for the red planet at a star-studded gala at the Kennedy Space Center.
Aldrin, 87, commemorated the upcoming anniversary of the 1969 mission to the moon under a historic Saturn V rocket and raised more than $190,000 for his nonprofit space education foundation, ShareSpace Foundation. Aldrin believes people will be able to land on Mars by 2040, a goal that NASA shares. The space agency is developing the Space Launch System and the Orion spacecraft to send Americans to deep space.
Apollo astronauts Walt Cunningham, Michael Collins and Harrison “Jack” Schmitt joined Aldrin, one of 12 people to walk on the moon, at the sold-out fundraiser.
Bezos, Jemison honored
“I like to think of myself as an innovative futurist,” Aldrin told a crowd of nearly 400 people in the Apollo/Saturn V Center. “The programs we have right now are eating up every piece of the budget and it has to be reduced if we’re ever going to get anywhere.”
During the gala, the ShareSpace Foundation presented Jeff Bezos with the first Buzz Aldrin Space Innovation Award. Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com and the spaceflight company Blue Origin, is trying to bring the cost of space travel down by reusing rockets.
“We can have a trillion humans in the solar system. What’s holding us back from making that next step is that space travel is just too darned expensive,” Bezos said. “I’m taking my Amazon lottery winnings and dedicating it to (reusable rockets). I feel incredibly lucky to be able to do that.”
The foundation also honored former NASA astronaut Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman to travel in space, with the Buzz Aldrin Space Pioneering Award.
What Aldrin is talking about is “not just about the physical part of getting to Mars. It’s also about that commitment to doing something big and audacious,” Jemison told The Associated Press. “What we’re doing looking forward is making sure that we use our place at the table.”
Education foundation
Space memorabilia was auctioned at the gala, including an autographed first day insurance “cover” that fetched $42,500 and flew to the surface of the moon. Covers were set up by NASA because insurance companies were reluctant to offer life insurance to pioneers of the U.S. space program, according to the auction website. Money raised from their sale would have paid out to the astronauts’ families in the event of their deaths. The covers were issued in limited numbers and canceled on the day of launch.
The gala is the first part of a three-year campaign leading up to the 50th anniversary of the moon landing to help fund advancements that will lead to the future habitation of Mars.
ShareSpace Foundation on Saturday announced a new nonprofit, the Buzz Aldrin Space Foundation, to create an educational path to Mars. During the past year, the foundation has given 100 giant maps of Mars to schools and continues to work with children to advance education in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math, or STEAM.
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The encrypted messaging app Telegram is forming a team of moderators who are familiar with Indonesian culture and language so it can remove “terrorist-related content” faster, its co-founder said Sunday, after Indonesia limited access to the app and threatened a total ban.
Pavel Durov, who with his brother Nikolai founded the app in 2013, said in a message to his 40,000 followers on Telegram that he’d been unaware of a failure to quickly respond to an Indonesian government request to block a number of offending channels — chat groups on the app — but was now rectifying the situation.
Some addresses blocked
The Ministry of Communications and Information Technology on Friday said it was preparing for the total closure of Telegram in Indonesia, where it has several million users, if it didn’t develop procedures to block unlawful content. As a partial measure, it asked internet companies in the world’s most populous Muslim nation to block access to 11 addresses offering the web version of Telegram.
Samuel Pangerapan, the director general of informatics applications at the ministry, said the app is used to recruit Indonesians into militant groups and to spread hate and methods for carrying out attacks including bomb making.
Suspected militants arrested by Indonesian police recently have told authorities that they communicated with each other via Telegram and received orders and directions to carry out attacks through the app, including from Bahrun Naim, an Indonesian with the Islamic State group in Syria accused of orchestrating several attacks in the past 18 months.
Durov said Telegram has now blocked the channels that were reported to it by the Indonesian government.
Combatting radicalism
Indonesia’s measures against Telegram come as Southeast Asian nations are stepping up efforts to combat Islamic radicalism following the capture of the southern Philippine city of Marawi by IS-linked militants.
The free messaging service can be used as a smartphone app and on computers through a web interface or desktop messenger. Its strong encryption has contributed to its popularity with those concerned about privacy and secure communications in the digital era but also attracted militant groups and other criminal elements.
Durov said Telegram blocks thousands of IS-related channels a month and is “always open to ideas on how to get better at this.”
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Take care of your soil, and your soil will take care of you. That’s the message agriculture experts have for farmers worldwide. They say farmers can halt the degradation of their land and save money by using techniques known as conservation agriculture. But as VOA’s Steve Baragona reports, adopting those techniques takes a change of attitude.
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Sweat rolled down the faces of women dressed in super hero costumes at the recent noon SoulCycle class in San Mateo, California.
Despite the thumping beat of the music, this was no routine workout. These Silicon Valley women were cycling as a protest, part of a response to an array of claims of gender inequity brought to light in recent months.
Travis Kalanick, the former chief executive of Uber, resigned from the company he co-created after women complained about the ride-hailing firm’s culture.
More recently, two prominent male venture capitalists left their roles after women complained about sexual harassment they experienced. Justin Caldbeck of Binary Capital resigned amid a sexual harassment scandal and Dave McClure of 500 Startups also stepped down after a New York Times article earlier this month described incidents of his sexual misconduct.
The controversies threaten to cast a shadow over a unique part of the U.S. tech industry – the startup ecosystem.
“There’s no glass ceiling when you start your own business,” shouted Tim Draper, a prominent venture capitalist and organizer of the event, before the cycling began. He wore a red cape and a Spider Man shirt. “You can paint it any color you want.”
The room cheered.
The venture capital industry, which finances startups, is predominantly run by men. Some Silicon Valley women say they have faced harassment when they sought financing.
“You pitch your idea and they go, ‘Oh that’s really interesting,’ and more like they were setting up dates,” said Wendy Dent, founder and chief executive of Cinemmerse, which makes an app for smartwatches.
Dent, a former model-turned tech entrepreneur, says she faced harassment during conversations with a would-be advisor. She struggled over how to respond.
“What was I going to do, go the police and say he sent me this email?” she said.
The willingness of more women to publicly come forward, including posting their experiences on social media, is making an impact, say some industry veterans. In the case of Uber, a female engineer went online to detail her experience, which included being propositioned by someone on her team. It was the financial backers of the firm who ultimately pressed for the ousting of the CEO.
“We can use things like social media now, not just the courts, to communicate what we’re all seeing within the industry,” said Kate Mitchell, a venture capitalist.
At the SoulCycle rally, Miranda Wang, chief executive of BioCellection, said attitudes about women in the industry are slowly changing.
“What we are doing now,” she said, “is making it something people have more awareness of.”
Afghanistan’s all-girl robotics team has arrived in the U.S. for a competition after President Donald Trump personally intervened to allow them into the country.
The U.S. embassy in Kabul had denied visas for the girls earlier this month for unknown reasons.
However, VOA’s White House bureau chief, Steve Herman, reported Wednesday that Trump granted the girls what is known as a parole — reversing the earlier decision to bar them from the U.S. — that will allow them to come to Washington for 20 days.
A student team from Gambia also was granted visas last week after initially being rejected.
The president of FIRST Global, which organized the robotics competition, is former Democratic congressman and retired U.S. Navy Admiral Joe Sestak. He thanked the White House and the State Department for clearing obstacles to the Afghan and Gambian students’ travel to the United States. Teams from all 157 countries that have entered the competition now will be taking part, he added.
The three-day robotics competition begins Sunday in Washington.
FIRST Global Challenge holds the yearly contest to build up interest in science, technology, engineering and math across the world.
The group says the focus of the competition is finding solutions to problems in such fields as water, energy, medicine and food production.
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Authorities in Pakistan’s capital are investigating the water in the city’s main reservoir after tons of dead fish were found in a lake on the city’s outskirts.
Police officer Imran Haider says Saturday samples of water and dead fish from Rawal Lake have been collected and sent for forensic testing after a complaint received from the capital’s fisheries department.
According to Haider, Mohammad Sadiq Buzdar of the fisheries department said there has been an increasing number of dead fish in the lake since monsoon rains began three days earlier.
Police and the fisheries department have not yet issued any alert regarding the situation.
Rawal Dam is one of two that enable water reservoir lakes for the capital.
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Imagine being lost and unable to find the nearest bus stop.
Now imagine looking for that same bus stop as a person who is blind.
“If there are no sighted people available to guide you,” said Luiza Aguiar, executive director of Perkins Solution. “You are out of luck.”
Someone with blindness typically relies on a smartphone’s voiceover and GPS functions to help them get around, but there’s a big catch: Devices with GPS usually get people within 30 feet of their final destination.
“But that last 30 feet, when you are blind, is the last 30 feet of frustration, because you can’t get to your precise goal,” Aguiar said.
Crowdsourcing the solution
To address the problem, Perkins Solutions, a division of the Boston-based Perkins School for the Blind, has built a technological solution, the BlindWays app, which Aguiar recently showed off at the New York Times’ “Cities for Tomorrow” conference. The iPhone app is assisting the blind and visually impaired in Boston, guiding them to the nearest bus stop.
Crucial to the app’s usefulness is help from the sighted. They are invited to also download the app and become contributors, reporting landmarks near a transit stop — a fire hydrant, a bench, a tree.
The landmarks offer tactile clues for the blind user. For example, they can include specific descriptions such as “thick metal pole” or “thin square pole.”
Through the public crowdsourcing, contributors have provided these sorts of clues for 5,200 of Boston’s 7,800 bus stops.
Expanding to other cities
The app’s creators want to replicate their efforts in other cities with Los Angeles and San Francisco governments having expressed interest, Aguiar said.
The app gives back a degree of independence and autonomy to blind users.
“Not having to rely on, you know, more segregated types of transportation, that’s really what visually impaired people want,” Aguiar said.
BlindWays’ crowdsourcing model is one that Aguiar believes will be part of a larger trend in technologies that help the blind and visually impaired, especially since almost everyone has a smartphone these days.
“We’re all getting more and more used to living in a mobile world and therefore, we could contribute anywhere and anytime to help a colleague or somebody in our community,” Aguiar said. “It’s a powerful model for us, I think we’re going to see more.”
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