Would you buy a car that sprayed soothing aromas when you are stuck in rush-hour traffic? Or how about a robot that has the scent of a real person? Scientists say that new technology means we will soon be using devices like these in our everyday lives. Henry Ridgwell visited this month’s British Science Festival in Brighton, England, to find out more.
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Month: September 2017
Can children who have never been to school teach themselves basic reading, writing and math skills using only a tablet computer? Elon Musk and the XPrize Foundation are betting $15 million on the idea that they can. VOA’s Tina Trinh has more.
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In the Australian bushland, citizen scientists are helping conservation officials track invasive, and endangered species. Using a special app, nature lovers can mark the vulnerable or even invasive wildlife as they wander the countryside. VOA’s Kevin Enochs.
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It is estimated that nearly 40 million people in the U.S. alone suffer from chronic sleep deprivation. But a new study, perhaps the first of its kind, is shedding light on how and why humans sleep, or don’t sleep. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Equifax Inc promised to make it easier for consumers to control access to their credit records in the wake of the company’s massive breach after the top U.S. consumer financial watchdog called on the industry to introduce such a system.
Equifax’s interim chief executive officer, Paulino do Rego Barros Jr., vowed to introduce a free service by Jan. 31 that will let consumers control access to their own credit records.
Barros, who was named interim CEO on Tuesday as Richard Smith stepped down from the post amid mounting criticism over the handling of the cyber attack, also apologized for providing inadequate support to consumers seeking information after the breach was disclosed on Sept. 7. He promised to add call-center representatives and bolster a breach-response website.
“I have heard the frustration and fear. I know we have to do a better job of helping you,” Barros said in a statement published in The Wall Street Journal.
Equifax announced the free credit freeze service after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) director, Richard Cordray, told CNBC earlier in the day that the agency would beef up oversight of Equifax and its rivals.
“The old days of just doing what they want and being subject to lawsuits now and then are over,” Cordray said.
He also called for implementing a scheme of preventive credit monitoring.
“They are going to have to accept that. They are going to have to welcome it. They are going to have to be very forthcoming,” Cordray said.
The Equifax hack compromised sensitive data of up to 143 million Americans and prompted investigations by lawmakers and regulators, including the New York Department of Financial Services (DFS), which issued a subpoena to Equifax demanding more information about the breach.
Federal laws give the CFPB the power to supervise and examine large credit-reporting firms to ensure the quality of information they provide. In January, the CFPB fined TransUnion and Equifax $5.5 million in total for deceiving customers about the usefulness and cost of their credit scores.
Cordray called for expanded powers to cover data security to prevent breaches and suggested placing monitors inside credit reporting firms, borrowing a tactic from the regulatory regime for banks.
The CFPB is working with the Federal Trade Commission and New York’s DFS on a new regulatory framework, Cordray said. He also called for Congress to tighten oversight of the industry.
TransUnion said in a statement that it had “long been subject to regulatory oversight from state and federal regulators including the CFPB.”
Experian did not respond to requests for comment.
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Rocky outcrops in eastern Canada contain what may be some of the oldest evidence of life on Earth, dating back about 3.95 billion years.
Scientists said on Wednesday they found indirect evidence of life in the form of bits of graphite contained in sedimentary rocks from northern Labrador that they believe are remnants of primordial marine microorganisms.
The researchers carried out a geological analysis of the Labrador rocks and measured concentrations and isotope compositions of the graphite, and concluded that it was produced by a living organism.
They did not find fossils of the microorganisms that may have left behind the graphite, a form of carbon, but said they may have been bacteria.
“The organisms inhabited an open ocean,” said University of Tokyo geologist Tsuyoshi Komiya, who led the study published in the journal Science.
Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago and the oceans appeared roughly 4.4 billion years ago. The new study and some other recent research indicate that microbial life emerged earlier than previously known and relatively soon after the Earth’s formation.
Canada has produced some of the most ancient signs of life.
Another team of scientists in March reported that microfossils between 3.77 billion and 4.28 billion years old found in northern Quebec, relatively close to the Labrador site, are similar to the bacteria that thrive today around sea floor hydrothermal vents.
Other scientists last year described 3.7 billion-year-old fossilized microbial mats, called stromatolites, from Greenland.
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Saudi Arabia’s decision to lift its ban on women driving cars may help to restore sales growth in an auto market dented by the economic fallout from weak oil prices, handing an opportunity to importers of luxury cars and sport utility vehicles.
Carmakers joined governments in welcoming the order by Saudi Arabia’s King Salman that new rules allowing women to drive be drawn up within 30 days and implemented by June 2018, removing a stain on the country’s international image.
“Congratulations to all Saudi women who will now be able to drive,” Nissan said in a Twitter post depicting a license plate bearing the registration “2018 GRL.” BMW, whose X5 SUV is the group’s Middle East top-seller, also saluted the move.
WATCH: Activists: Driving Augurs Further Expansion of Saudi Women’s Rights
Midrange brands dominate the Saudi market, with Toyota, Hyundai-Kia and Nissan together commanding a 71 percent share of sales.
Market had shrunk
That market has shrunk by about a quarter from a peak of 858,000 light vehicles in 2015 to an expected 644,000 this year, reflecting the broader economic slowdown. But the rule change adds almost 9 million potential drivers, including 2.7 million resident non-Saudi women, Merrill Lynch has calculated.
“We expect demand to rise again on news that women will be allowed to drive,” said a senior executive at Jeddah-based auto distributor Naghi Motors, whose brand portfolio includes BMW, Mini, Hyundai, Rolls Royce and Jaguar Land Rover models.
The arrival of women drivers could lift Saudi car sales by 15-20 percent annually, leading forecaster LMC Automotive predicts, as the kingdom’s “car density” of 220 vehicles per 1,000 adults rises to about 300 in 2025, closing the gap with the neighboring United Arab Emirates.
A middle- to upper-class Saudi family typically has two vehicles, one driven by the man of the house and a second car in which a full-time chauffeur transports his wife and children.
The rule change could spell bad news for some of the 1.3 million men employed as chauffeurs in the kingdom, including a large share of its migrant workforce, while boosting upscale car sales as households upgrade for their new drivers.
Entire market likely to benefit
“The move to allow women to drive is set to benefit the entire market,” LMC analyst David Oakley said. “But we might expect to see a disproportionately positive impact on super-premium brands.”
Luxury brands including Lamborghini and Bentley are about to launch SUVs, a vehicle category that has proved popular among women and accounts for more than 1 in 5 cars sold in Saudi Arabia.
Welcoming the announcement, British-based Aston Martin said it was well timed for the arrival of the James Bond-associated sports car maker’s DBX model, due in 2019.
“The SUV crossover boom across all segments has been powered by women,” spokesman Simon Sproule said.
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President Donald Trump said on Wednesday a foreign leader told him at the United Nations last week that the country would soon announce plans to build or expand five automobile industry factories in the United States.
“I just left the United Nations last week and I was told by one of the most powerful leaders of the world that they are going to be announcing in the not too distant future five major factories in the United States, between increasing and new, five,” Trump said in a speech on tax reform in Indianapolis.
He added the factories were in the automotive industry.
He did not name the country. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Automakers in Japan and Germany have both announced investments in the United States this year, with companies coming under pressure from Trump’s bid to curb imports and hire more workers to build cars and trucks in the country.
Investments to expand U.S. vehicle production capacity also reflect intensified competition for market share in the world’s most profitable vehicle market. In August, Toyota Motor Corp said it would build a $1.6 billion U.S. assembly plant with Mazda Motor Corp.
Toyota also said this week it was investing nearly $375 million in five U.S. manufacturing plants to support U.S. production of hybrid powertrains.
Last week, German automaker Daimler AG said it would spend $1 billion to expand its Mercedes Benz operations near Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to produce batteries and electric sport utility vehicles and create more than 600 jobs.
Rival German luxury automaker BMW AG said in June it would expand its U.S. factory in South Carolina, adding 1,000 jobs. And last month, Volkswagen AG’s brand president Herbert Diess said the company expected to bring electric SUV production to the United States and could add production at its Tennessee plant.
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The South American trade bloc Mercosur could seek trade deals with Canada, Australia and New Zealand this year, an Argentine official said Wednesday, as largest members Brazil and Argentina seek to open their economies.
Mercosur, which also includes Uruguay and Paraguay, is working with the European Union to finalize the political framework for a trade deal this year, at a time when the United States under President Donald Trump has been shying away from trade.
“There is a possibility that Mercosur starts negotiations with Canada, Australia and New Zealand this year,” Argentine Commerce Secretary Miguel Braun said at the Thomson Reuters Economic and Business forum in Buenos Aires.
“Integrating ourselves with these countries takes us in the direction we want to go,” he said, pointing to developed economies with high salaries. Argentina alone is seeking a trade agreement with Mexico, and Braun said it was also working on a trade agreement with Chile that would “deepen what we already have.”
Chilean President Michelle Bachelet said in New York last week that Santiago was finishing a trade liberalization agreement with Buenos Aires to boost trade and open opportunities for investors.
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Weather extremes and air pollution from burning fossil fuels cost the United States $240 billion a year in the past decade, according to a report Wednesday that urged President Donald Trump to do more to combat climate change.
This year is likely to be the most expensive on record, with an estimated $300 billion in losses from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria and a spate of wildfires in Western states in the past two months, it said.
“The evidence is undeniable: The more fossil fuels we burn, the faster the climate continues to change,” leading scientists wrote in the study published by the nonprofit Universal Ecological Fund.
Costs to human health from air pollution caused by fossil fuels averaged $188 billion a year over the past decade, it estimated, while losses from weather extremes such as droughts, heat waves and floods averaged $52 billion.
Trump could curb the $240 billion cost, equivalent to 1.2 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, by revising his plans to promote the U.S. coal industry and to pull out of the 195-nation Paris climate agreement, it said.
“We are not saying that all [weather extremes] are due to human activity, but these are the sorts of events that seem to be increasing in intensity,” co-author Robert Watson, a former head of the U.N. panel of climate scientists, told Reuters.
Higher ocean temperatures, for instance, mean more moisture in the air that can fuel hurricanes.
Events on the rise
And, in a sign of increasing risks, there were 92 extreme weather events that caused damage exceeding $1 billion in the United States in the decade ending in 2016, compared with 38 in the 1990s and 21 in the 1980s.
The combined cost of extreme weather and pollution from fossil fuels would climb to $360 billion a year in the next decade, the study said. Trump’s pro-coal policies could mean more air pollution, reversing recent improvements in air quality.
Last month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency accused scientists who linked record extreme rainfall from Tropical Storm Harvey to man-made climate change as trying to “politicize an ongoing tragedy.”
Wednesday’s study has been in the works for months, said co-author James McCarthy, professor of oceanography at Harvard University. He said there was widening evidence that a shift from fossil fuels made economic sense.
“Why is Iowa, why is Oklahoma, why is Kansas, why is Texas investing in wind energy? Not because they are interested in sea level rise or ocean temperatures but because it’s economically sensible,” he told Reuters.
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Researchers say the likelihood of scorching summer temperatures in southern Europe is increasing because of man-made climate change.
Hotter-than-usual temperatures in the Mediterranean region – including an August heatwave in Italy and the Balkans dubbed ‘Lucifer’ – resulted in higher hospital admissions, numerous forest fires and widespread economic losses this summer.
The World Weather Attribution team says it combined temperature measurements and computer simulations, concluding that greenhouse gas emissions linked to human activity have increased the chances of such heatwaves four-to-tenfold.
They warned Wednesday that summers like this one could become the norm in the Euro-Mediterranean region by 2050 if emissions continue to rise.
The team’s techniques are widely accepted among scientists as a means of determining whether climate change plays a role in extreme events.
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Can children who have never been to school teach themselves basic reading, writing and math skills using only a tablet computer?
The World Bank and XPrize are betting $15 million on the idea.
“It’s a little bit out there, it’s a little bit of a crazy idea,” said Matt Keller, senior director of the Global Learning XPrize, a competition funded by the XPrize Foundation, a non-profit that spurs inventors to tackle global problems such as climate change and universal healthcare.
The inaugural Global Learning XPrize competition awards $10 million dollars to the team or company that develops the best educational app for children who have never set foot in a classroom. According to UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics, approximately 263 million children around the world are not in school.
“Can you develop something that’s so intuitive, so inferential, so dynamic that you give it to a child who is illiterate in a very remote part of the world — she picks it up, she touches it and she begins to learn how to read? That’s the challenge we put out to the world,” said Keller.
The finalists
At least 198 teams were up to the challenge. From that pool, five finalists were recently selected and awarded $1 million dollars each.
The finalists will begin testing their educational apps this November. Nearly 4,000 children from 150 villages in the Tanga region of Tanzania will use tablets donated by Google to access the apps and teach themselves.
A subset of students initially will be tested on literacy and numeracy comprehension using the early grade reading assessment (EGRA) and early grade math assessment (EGMA) models. After 15 months, the same students will be re-tested. The grand prize of $10 million will be awarded to the developer team with the highest proficiency gains among students.
XPrize is working with UNESCO, the World Food Program, and the government of Tanzania to distribute and maintain the tablets.
“Most development organizations and most aid agencies and most governments are focused on building new schools and training new teachers,” Keller told VOA News, “What we’re saying is there are a lot of kids out there who don’t access school and there are a lot of kids out there who access really bad schools. So, can you give technology to a child that’s so good that it doesn’t supplant, but supplements a learning process that she may or may not have?”
Goals for the future
By 2030, the world will need to recruit 68.8 million teachers in order to meet the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goal of universal primary and secondary education, according to a 2016 report by UNESCO’s Institute for Statistics.
“That’s simply not possible,” said Jamie Stuart, co-founder of educational non-profit Onebillion, which is one of the five Global Learning XPrize finalists. “So we have to look for radical alternatives in terms of children’s learning,” said Stuart.
Developers at Onebillion already have field-tested their app, Onecourse, for the past 10 years in Malawi. The app is designed so that children can use it with little or no adult assistance, and teaches children reading and numeracy using a teacher character that speaks their language.
Testing brings many challenges, the least of which involves working with populations that often never have interacted with a tablet before.
“Keeping it simple, keeping it focused on the individual needs of the child, and adapting to how they learn are the key ingredients,” said Stuart.
The other finalists are Curriculum Concepts International (CCI), a lesson-based app that incorporates games, videos and books, Chimple, which focuses on play and discovery-based learning, Kitkit School , which originally was designed for special needs children, and RoboTutor, which was developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, incorporates artificial intelligence and machine learning.
“If we can prove that a child needs no instruction other than what’s on that device, then we begin a series of events that will lead inexorably to a device that is designed for that child, in that part of the world, with a teacher on it,” said Keller.
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According to U.S. government statistics, nearly 40 percent of all pregnancies around the world are unwanted or unplanned. And yet the means to prevent every unwanted pregnancy in the world exists, and has existed for more than 50 years. VOA’s Kevin Enochs looks at the history of birth control on World Contraception day.
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Switzerland is the world’s most competitive economy for a ninth straight year, the Geneva-based World Economic Forum said on Wednesday.
Since suffering a rare blip in 2008, when it was nudged into second place by the United States, the Swiss economy has maintained an efficient but unshakeable grip on the top spot in the WEF annual ranking.
WEF economist Thierry Geiger said Switzerland had a virtuous circle of infrastructure, institutions and education, but at the heart of its success was the way it created and used talent.
“That is really the secret of Switzerland, this ability to innovate, supported by a whole range of enabling factors,” he said.
However, after almost a decade at the top, Switzerland is at risk from complacency and populism. The ageing population could undermine the innovation miracle by shutting the door to foreign talent in one of the referendums that make Swiss law, he said.
“We see a proliferation of such referendums on everything, some of them are kind of dangerous, they could really endanger and jeopardize Switzerland’s prosperity,” Geiger said.
The World Economic Forum, the same organization that runs the Davos meeting of global powerbrokers each January, bases its rankings on a dozen drivers of competitiveness and a survey of business leaders.
“Global competitiveness will be more and more defined by the innovative capacity of a country,” Klaus Schwab, WEF founder and executive chairman, said in a statement.
Besides Switzerland, the top 10 remained the same as a year ago, although there was some shuffling of the order. The United States climbed over Singapore into second place, and Hong Kong jumped three places to sixth, leapfrogging Japan in ninth spot Britain slipped one place to eighth.
Britain has not yet dropped in the rankings because of its Brexit negotiations with the European Union but it is expected to do so, the WEF said.
China inched up one place to 27th, well ahead of 38th-ranked Russia and India, which was in 40th position.
The wooden spoon went to Yemen, a poor country further devastated by civil war, economic collapse, cholera and near-famine conditions, which was in 137th place.
Full List of Top 30 countries:
1. Switzerland
2. United States
3. Singapore
4. Netherlands
5. Germany
6. Hong Kong
7. Sweden
8. United Kingdom
9. Japan
10. Finland
11. Norway
12. Denmark
13. New Zealand
14. Canada
15. Taiwan
16. Israel
17. United Arab Emirates
18. Austria
19. Luxembourg
20. Belgium
21. Australia
22. France
23. Malaysia
24. Ireland
25. Qatar
26. South Korea
27. China
28. Iceland
29. Estonia
30. Saudi Arabia
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The United States and Mexico have agreed to renew and expand a far-reaching conservation agreement that governs how they manage the overused Colorado River, which supplies water to millions of people and farms in both nations.
The agreement to be signed Wednesday calls for the U.S. to invest $31.5 million in conservation improvements in Mexico’s water infrastructure to reduce losses to leaks and other problems, according to officials of U.S. water districts who have seen summaries of the agreement.
The water that the improvements save would be shared by users in both nations and by environmental restoration projects
The deal also calls on Mexico to develop specific plans for reducing consumption if the river runs too low to supply everyone’s needs, said Bill Hasencamp of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which supplies water to about 19 million people in and around Los Angeles.
Major river consumers in the U.S. would be required to agree on their own shortage plan before Mexico produces one, he said.
The deal will extend a previous agreement that both countries would share the burden of water supply cutbacks if the river runs low, Hasencamp said.
The International Boundary and Water Commission, which has members from both countries and oversees U.S.-Mexico treaties on borders and rivers, declined to release a copy of the agreement before Wednesday’s signing ceremony in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Officials with the Mexican foreign ministry said in an email Tuesday they had no immediate comment, but U.S. officials who have been briefed on the details said the deal will help both sides.
“It’s good news for both nations, for water users in the U.S. and Mexico,” said Chuck Collum of the Central Arizona Project, another Colorado River user that will help fund the infrastructure improvements in Mexico.
The agreement provides more certainty in how the two countries will deal with the risk of a shortage and recognizes the danger the river faces, he said.
“It’s an acknowledgement that the U.S. and Mexico both share risk due to a hotter and drier future,” Collum said.
The Colorado River is in the midst of a prolonged regional drought, and some climate scientists have said global warming is already reducing the amount of water it carries.
A study published in February by researchers from the University of Arizona and Colorado State University said climate change could cut the river’s flow by one-third by the end of the century.
The river begins in the mountains of Colorado and winds 1,400 miles (2,250 kilometers) to Mexico, although heavy use means it usually dries up before it reaches its delta on the Gulf of California where Mexico’s Sonora and Baja California states meet.
Along the way, it supplies water to about 40 million people and 6,300 square miles (16,300 square kilometers) of farmland in the United States alone. Equivalent figures for Mexico weren’t immediately available.
The deal being signed Wednesday, known as Minute 323, is an amendment to a 1944 U.S.-Mexico treaty that lays out how the two nations share the river. The treaty promises Mexico 1.5 million acre-feet (1.9 billion cubic meters) of water annually.
The U.S. uses the rest. The average annual flow in the river is about 16.4 million acre-feet (20 billion cubic meters), according the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which manages the river in the United States.
One acre-foot (1,200 cubic meters) is enough to supply a typical U.S. family for a year.
The new agreement, which will be in force for nine years, does not include a repeat of the historic 2014 “pulse” that sent about 105,000 acre-feet (130 million cubic meters) of water surging into river’s delta in Mexico, the U.S. water officials said.
That was an environmental experiment that brought water and life to the dried-out delta for the first time in years.
But the agreement does include up to 210,000 acre-feet (260 million cubic meters) for environmental restoration projects, according to a briefing from Southern California’s Imperial Irrigation District, one of the funders of the Mexican infrastructure projects.
Details of those projects were not immediately available.
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Miami is a city that lives on air conditioning. When it fails, people can die.
After Hurricane Irma knocked down power lines and disconnected the cooling system at a nursing home north of Miami this month, 11 residents perished when temperatures inside soared.
Florida Governor Rick Scott blamed management at the facility for allowing patients to endure sweltering conditions as the heat index — a measure of combined heat and humidity — passed 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
But public outrage has also targeted the local utility company for not restoring electricity fast enough, and the city for not ordering and assisting with an evacuation.
In this often sweltering southern city, widespread use of air conditioning makes it easy to overlook the growing risks of extreme heat. But the risks are there — and they can be just one power failure away.
Around the world, a surge in extreme weather events, including storms, floods and droughts, has focused attention on the risks associated with global warming.
But one of the biggest threats — and a particularly serious one for already hot countries and cities — is worsening heat waves, which remain an under-estimated risk, experts say.
In the United States, Florida is predicted to experience the greatest increase in the deadly combination of heat and humidity over the next decades.
The number of extreme heat days, when the heat index is above 105 degrees Fahrenheit (40.6 degrees Celsius), is expected to jump to 126 a year by 2030 and 151 by 2050 in Miami, according to a study by Climate Central, a U.S. nonprofit science and media organization.
In 2000, Miami saw 24 such extreme heat days, the study noted.
Miami’s sweating residents — particularly those who spend a lot of time outside — say they’re noticing the difference already.
“I’ve been here all my life and working in construction, and I can tell you: It’s getting hotter every year,” said Rai Finalet, as he moved barriers along Little Havana’s Flagler Street, which is being repaved.
On a summer day in early September, there was not even a hint of fall in the air. Instead it was 93 degrees, with a heat index of 107 degrees.
Finalet’s long-sleeve shirt, which he needed to protect his skin from the scorching sun, had been soaked since he started his shift at 8 a.m., he said.
Taking frequent breaks and drinking “gallons” of water is his secret to surviving an outdoor job, even as most Miami residents try to avoid stepping out of air-conditioned spaces.
Tourists wilt
With only a thin canopy of trees and a location far from Miami’s breezy shores, densely populated Little Havana often registers the city’s hottest temperatures.
In the summer, which effectively lasts from April through October, the average temperature is often above 86 degrees and very few locals venture out on the streets around midday.
But Nolvia Hernandez, parasol in hand, had rushed out to pick up her son from school.
“I avoid going out during the hottest times of the day, and when I do, I take my umbrella,” she said. Asked why she was wearing a long-sleeve shirt, she said the air conditioning is kept very cold at her workplace.
Tourists regularly brave the heat to experience iconic Little Havana, where hundreds of thousands of Cuban immigrants settled over the decades, opening quaint cigar shops, lively restaurants and salsa clubs.
At the Ball and Chain, a traditional bar with a live salsa band playing most days and evenings, a powerful misting system along the facade offers visitors an inviting respite from the heat.
Next door, the Azucar ice cream shop, with its powerful air conditioning, is another spot where tourists can take a break from suffocating temperatures outside.
Veronica Agudo, Lucia Beth Marcoleta and Tatiana Harder walk in and breathe a big sigh of relief as the cold air sweeps over them. The friends from Chile sit on a bench and slouch against the wall, sweat trickling down their faces.
“This humidity is killing us,” said Marcoleta. “We want to walk around and see all the sights, but it’s just so hot.” “It’s better to stay on Miami Beach, in the water, for our entire vacation,” Agudo joked.
One outdoors spot in the heart of Little Havana where temperatures are cooler is Maximo Gomez park, also known as Domino Park. It’s a small green oasis with lush trees where residents play dominoes and chess on tables under gazebos fitted with ceiling fans.
Leo Diaz, one of the players, lives in a building with a new central air system, but prefers to spend time outdoors. He worries about Miami’s future as climate change boosts temperatures.
“This city is building more, paving more areas, and we can all feel that the climate is changing. Soon we won’t even be able to stand being here. I hope I don’t see that in my lifetime,” said the former radio announcer who arrived in Miami from Cuba almost 30 years ago.
‘Immune’ to heat
Already heat is the top weather-related killer in the United States — but it is a silent one, with heat-linked illnesses often diagnosed as other disorders, said Laurence Kalkstein, a climatology professor at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine.
In places like Florida, there is low awareness of heat risks because people expect days to be hot, and the state is relatively well-equipped to deal with high temperatures, he said.
“Heat-related mortality isn’t very common here, so most people believe they are immune to it,” he noted. “But we have a growing vulnerable population — of aging people who don’t sweat as efficiently, and others like the homeless, obese people, or those on certain medications.”
In steamy Florida, high humidity makes it harder for sweat to evaporate, preventing the body from cooling off. That’s what can cause heat exhaustion and potentially deadly heat stroke — and what may have contributed to the deaths at the nursing home.
Climate change has already given Florida a lot to worry about, with many officials so far more focused on dealing with rising sea level and worsening flooding than heat threats.
But cities in Florida also have created “resilience” offices to try to adapt to and plan for coming changes, including worsening monster storms — and rising heat.
“Heat is an issue for low-income communities and more vulnerable individuals, [such as] the elderly population,” Jane Gilbert, the chief resilience officer for the city of Miami, said in an interview before Hurricane Irma.
“We want to understand better if there are places where people can’t afford to have air conditioning, and to have an efficient plan for the more vulnerable groups to evacuate to shelters in case of power outages,” she said.
Miami is also working to increase the number of trees in neighborhoods such as Little Havana, and to guarantee that key facilities, such as hospitals, gas stations and supermarkets, have alternative power sources when electricity fails, she said.
After Irma, more than 12 million people lost power. Many had already evacuated to other areas, fearing the aftermath of being stuck at home for days without air conditioning or working refrigerators.
Air conditioning boom
The invention of air conditioning has in many ways made modern Florida possible, fueling a population boom after World War II, according to a history book by the University of South Florida.
The state’s famed tourism industry, its top revenue generator, for instance, only took off after most hotels invested hefty sums in efficient cooling systems by the 1960s.
Now nearly everyone relies on air conditioning — and plenty of it.
Silvana Giuffrida, an architect in Miami, has three units in her townhouse-style condo in the luxury Brickell neighborhood, one on each floor.
She keeps her home’s remote-controlled shades down as much as possible to reduce the heat that floods into her sun-bathed home facing spectacular Biscayne Bay.
“I try to keep the temperature around 78 degrees, which is also the best level for energy efficiency,” she said.
Drinking a lot of water, wearing light-colored clothes and avoiding going outside in peak temperature hours are also part of her routine to beat the heat, she said.
For the most vulnerable, however, state authorities have decided to step up protections after the nursing home tragedy exposed the dangers of extreme heat.
Governor Scott issued an emergency order requiring nursing homes to have generators that can keep air conditioners running for up to four days.
Kalkstein, of the University of Miami, said the deaths highlight the risk that heat poses for Miami — and for many more cities.
“What we all need to realize is that these excessive heat events will happen more and more often, all over the world, and we all need to be more aware of the potential health impacts,” he said.
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The Commerce Department slapped duties of nearly 220 percent on Canada’s Bombardier C Series aircraft Tuesday in a victory for Boeing that is likely to raise tensions between the United States and its allies Canada and Britain.
Commerce ruled that Montreal-based Bombardier used unfair government subsidies to sell jets at artificially low prices in the U.S.
“The U.S. values its relationships with Canada, but even our closest allies must play by the rules,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said.
Canada ‘strongly disagrees’
Canada responded by saying it “strongly disagrees” with the U.S. move.
“This is clearly aimed at eliminating Bombardier’s C Series aircraft from the U.S. market,” said Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s minister of foreign affairs.
Bombardier, meanwhile, called the decision “absurd … U.S. trade laws were never intended to be used in this manner, and Boeing is seeking to use a skewed process to stifle competition.”
In April, Boeing charged that Bombardier had received at least $3 billion in subsidies from the governments of Britain, Canada and the province of Quebec. The Chicago-based aircraft manufacturer asked the Commerce Department and the U.S. International Trade Commission to investigate the alleged “predatory pricing.”
Specifically, Boeing said that Bombardier last year sold Delta Air Lines 75 CS100 aircraft for less than it cost to build them.
“Subsidies enabled Bombardier to dump its product into the U.S. market, harming aerospace workers in the United States and throughout Boeing’s global supply chain,” Boeing said Tuesday.
Boeing upset with Delta deal
But Delta has said Boeing didn’t even make the 100-seat jets it needed.
“Boeing has no American-made product to offer because it canceled production of its only aircraft in this size range — the 717 — more than 10 years ago,” Delta said in a statement Tuesday.
President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to get tough on trade. He has repeatedly criticized Canada, saying it unfairly blocks U.S. dairy products and subsidizes its softwood lumber industry. Trump also has threatened to pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement if he can’t negotiate a better version with Canada and Mexico.
Boeing’s complaint against Bombardier drew a backlash even before Tuesday’s decision. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau threatened this month to stop doing business with Boeing, which is in talks to sell Canada 18 Super Hornet jet fighters. British Prime Minister Theresa May has discussed the case with Trump. Her concern: Bombardier employs more than 4,000 workers in Northern Ireland.
Connecticut lawmakers concerned
Connecticut Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Christopher Murphy last week wrote a letter urging U.S. government officials to “refrain from taking action that will endanger the many jobs in Connecticut that depend upon Bombardier.” Engines for the C Series aircraft are made by Pratt & Whitney, based in East Hartford, Connecticut.
Commerce’s findings Tuesday aren’t the end of the matter. The department is expected to announce its findings in another case against Bombardier early next month. Then the International Trade Commission — an independent federal agency that rules on trade cases — will decide early next year whether to uphold Commerce’s duties.
Bombardier could appeal any sanctions to a U.S. court or to a dispute-resolution panel created under NAFTA. The Canadian government could also take the case to the World Trade Organization in Geneva.
It is not quite going back to the horse, even if the bicycle was the first contraption to replace beasts as a means of personal transport.
This is a new two-wheeled animal, though, that millions of consumers in Beijing, Taipei, Singapore and cities across Asia are renting via phone apps to cover the last mile of journeys, leaving cars and motorcycles at home, and forgoing taxis.
The two-year bike-share boom has put over 16 million bikes in China alone, according to its Ministry of Transport, with more than 100 million riders registered, eating into car use and gasoline demand growth already expected to stagnate by 2025.
“I often use bike-sharing services because it’s very convenient. I can find it anywhere and will not worry about losing the bike,” said life-long Beijing native Wei Zhang, 36, who uses a shared bike several times a week on her commute, riding 5 km or more.
Analysts can’t keep up with bike numbers, let alone estimate how much gasoline consumption growth has dropped off due to the rapid rise in bike-sharing. But it is clear from industry estimates, government reports and a Reuters survey that bike services are resulting in fewer trips by motor vehicles.
“Bike-sharing has been crazy since late last year. … The general belief is that [it] boosts the utilization of public transport as shared bikes help to complete the journey,” said Harry Liu, downstream consultant with IHS Markit.
Even before the number of bike-share units began growing by multiples, analysts had already been saying greater fuel efficiency in autos and the rising use of electric cars meant gasoline’s big growth story was over.
China’s gasoline demand growth is expected to slow to nearly 4 percent this year, compared with 6.5 percent growth last year, said Sri Paravaikkarasu, head of East of Suez oil at FGE.
And Chinese demand for gasoline is expected to peak as early as 2025, according to state-owned China National Petroleum Corp.
“There used to be long queues of taxis waiting for customers outside train stations, but I don’t see them anymore,” said a Beijing analyst, who took part in a Reuters survey of bike-share users and wanted to be known only by her surname Wang.
Just in the past month, Chinese bike-sharing startup Mobike introduced its services in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Bangkok, Thailand, as well as in U.S. capital Washington, D.C. Mobike, which launched in April 2016, and China-owned rival Ofo have attracted combined funding of more than $2 billion from venture capital and private equity firms that include Temasek Holdings, Tencent Holdings, DST Global and Ant Financial.
Ofo — which has more than 10 million bikes globally to Mobike’s 7 million — says it is on track to increase its global bike units to 20 million over the next three months.
The investments “demonstrate investors’ confidence in the global bike-sharing industry,” said Lawrence Cao, head of Asia Pacific business for Ofo.
Consultancy Roland Berger said the “unforeseeable” amounts of venture capital put into bike schemes made it almost impossible to estimate the growth potential of bike operators, particularly in China, over the last two years.
Taiwan, where the government backs a bike-sharing scheme, is aiming to have bikes account for a 12 percent share in trips to work by 2020, up from about 5 percent now.
The Taipei city government is expanding bike-sharing program Youbike — which uses docking stations — to have a bike station within a 10-minute walk of every citizen by 2018.
Singapore-owned Obike and U.S.-based VBikes — both free-range systems — are also operating in Taiwan.
Four wheels bad
A survey done by Mobike of 100,000 customers across 36 cities in China found that car trips among the respondents had more than halved since its service was introduced.
A report from the Transport Commission of Shenzhen, one of China’s richest cities, said more than 500,000 bike-share units there had replaced nearly 10 percent of travel by private car or 13 percent of gasoline consumption.
Bike-sharing could pose a risk to gasoline consumption “if a stronger state push to reduce carbon intensity and improve air quality translates to more drivers replacing shorter-distance driving with bike rides,” said Peter Lee, an oil and gas analyst at BMI research.
Chinese growth of passenger car sales, which grew an average annual rate of 10.1 percent over 2011 to 2016, is expected to slow to 2.5 percent over the next five years, said BMI’s Lee.
Still, mismanagement of bike numbers and misuse of some bicycles may attract legislation that could curb their use. New shared bikes were recently banned in some areas in the Chinese cities of Wuhan, Shanghai and Guangzhou, because of bicycles being discarded in public spaces.
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Despite concerns about low inflation in the United States, the head of the U.S. central bank says raising interest rates gradually would be the most appropriate policy stance for the Federal Reserve.
“It would be imprudent to keep monetary policy on hold until inflation is back to two percent,” Fed Chair Janet Yellen said Tuesday, while speaking to the National Association for Business Economists (NABE) in Cleveland, Ohio.
Inflation, a sustained increase in the price of goods and services, has remained consistently below the Fed’s target rate of 2 percent. But even with uncertainty about the possible reasons for the low rate of inflation — from misjudging the strength of the labor market to the impact of foreign competition on the global supply chain — Yellen said the Fed “should be wary of moving too gradually.”
The Federal Reserve has kept its benchmark lending rate near record lows since the 2008 financial crisis to stimulate the U.S. economy. It has raised its interest rate three times since last December. The federal funds rate, the interest rate the central bank charges banks on overnight loans, currently sits in a range between one and one-and-one-quarter percent.
Ellen Zentner, chief economist at Morgan Stanley, says her biggest takeaway from the Cleveland speech was Yellen’s confidence that “a strong U.S. labor market would ultimately drive inflation closer to the Fed’s two percent goal over the next few years.”
Equity markets, which have benefited from low borrowing costs, anticipate a fourth rate hike in December, and possibly three more next year. Starting next month, the Fed says it will begin the process of “unwinding,” or selling off, the massive holdings of bonds and securities it has acquired since 2008.
But Yellen’s longer-term goals may be subject to change. Her four-year term as the nation’s top banker ends in February. President Donald Trump has not said whether he plans to re-appoint Yellen or overhaul the central bank’s seven-member board of governors.
Zentner believes there is a 60 percent chance Yellen will be named to serve a second term. “The longer the president waits, the greater the probability that Yellen will be re-appointed,” the bank economist said.
Yellen spoke in Cleveland as the Conference Board released a survey that showed consumer confidence declined in September. The global business research group reported consumers’ views about the strength of the U.S. labor market have weakened and home sales have dropped to an eight-month low due to Hurricanes Harvey and Irma in the states of Texas and Florida.
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Digital devices designed to monitor the wearer’s health in much greater detail than current models will need regulatory approval, and Apple, Fitbit and seven other companies will take part in a program to speed the approval process, the U.S. health regulator said Tuesday.
The firms will take part in a program that could make it faster for digital health devices to come to market by requiring less information to be sent to regulators ahead of time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said.
Current devices, like the Apple Watch or Fitbit Blaze, measure things like motion and heart rate. But to take further measurements like blood oxygen or glucose, future devices might full under regulatory review. That review can take months or years, which is far slower than the pace of software updates from most technology firms.
Because of the potential for lengthy reviews, consumer technology companies have been reluctant to wade directly into territory regulated by the FDA. Apple, for example, has tended to partner with existing health researchers and companies such as DexCom Inc, a conventional medical device firm, for uses of their products that involve regulatory oversight.
But under President Donald Trump, the FDA has been moving to relax some of its requirements. The FDA in July created a pilot program that would pre-certify certain companies so that they have to submit less information before marketing a product.
The initial participants in the pilot program also included Samsung Electronics, Alphabet’s Verily biotech unit, Johnson & Johnson and Swiss biotech firm Roche AG, among others. The FDA said in a statement it was also considering whether companies in the pilot program “may not have to submit a product for premarket review in some cases.”
“Our method for regulating digital health products must recognize the unique and iterative characteristics of these products,” FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in the statement.
One major difference in the pilot program from existing regulations is that it will evaluate companies based on how well their software-design systems work, rather than looking at each product and its accompanying software individually.
“We are hopeful this will allow us to accelerate FDA regulated features and software development, bringing new capabilities that could positively impact health outcomes to market more quickly,” Fitbit CEO James Park said in a statement.
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Mexican officials are tallying up the economic losses of the magnitude 7.1 earthquake that caused widespread damage in the capital, as the number of buildings that may need to be pulled down or need major repairs rose to 500.
The death toll in the quake rose to 333, with 194 of those deaths in Mexico City. Authorities pledged a return to normality, but many streets in the capital were still blocked by construction equipment and recovery teams looking to extract the last remaining bodies from the rubble. Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera said 40 to 50 people are still considered missing.
The city government announced a plan of reconstruction loans and aid for apartment dwellers who lost their homes or who may lose them as teetering buildings are pulled down.
But for city businesses like the downtown restaurant Guapa Papa, the result is already all too clear.
Sitting in the entrance of his restaurant Monday, surrounded by caution tape, Antonio Luna said: “This is a bust. It’s already closed due to structural damage to the building.”
He had to let go the three dozen employees at the 1950s-themed restaurant and is just trying to salvage whatever furniture and equipment wasn’t damaged.
“In the end the company let everyone go because it couldn’t continue having expenses,” Luna said.
Mancera said that the city, in alliance with private developers, would handle repairs on buildings that needed touch-ups or minor structural work to be habitable. He offered low-interest loans to apartment owners whose buildings would have to be demolished and rebuilt.
However, it is unclear to what extent the city can force owners to demolish buildings. Some that were damaged in the 1985 are still standing, in part because court challenges can stretch on for years.
Moody’s Investors Service said in a report Monday that the Sept. 19 earthquake that caused damage and deaths in the capital and nearby states “has the potential to be one of Mexico’s costliest natural catastrophes.”
Alfredo Coutino, Latin America director for Moody’s Analytics, said they were still collecting data on losses, but a preliminary estimate was that the earthquake could knock 0.1 to 0.3 percentage point off growth in Mexico’s gross domestic product in the third and fourth quarters.
For the full year, the impact on gross domestic product should be about 0.1 percentage point. “The impact on the year’s growth will be small, particularly considering that the reconstruction work will compensate for some of the total loss in activity during the fourth quarter,” Coutino said.
Money is expected to pour into the economy as Mexico City and the federal government tap their disaster funds. As of June, the city’s disaster fund stood at 9.4 billion pesos (more than $500 million), making it slightly larger than the national fund, according to a Moody’s Investors Services report.
Of course, the national fund also has to deal with recovery from the even stronger Sept. 7 quake that has been blamed for nearly 100 deaths, mostly in the southern states of Oaxaca and Chiapas.
There will be months of work ahead from demolition to repairs and reconstruction.
Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera said that 500 “red level” buildings would either have to be demolished or receive major structural reinforcement. An additional 1,300 are reparable, and about 10,000 buildings inspected so far were found to be habitable.
At least 38 buildings, including apartments and office buildings, collapsed during the earthquake.
Mexico’s education ministry also has 1.8 million pesos (about $100,000) to spend on school repairs. In Mexico City alone, only 676 of the city’s 9,000 schools had been inspected and cleared to resume classes, Education Secretary Aurelio Nuno said Monday.
AIR Worldwide, a Boston-based catastrophe modeling consultant, provided a wide range for industry-insured losses, but noted they would be only a small part of the total economic losses. It put the insured losses at between 13 billion pesos ($725 million) and 36.7 billion pesos ($2 billion).
A graceful traffic roundabout encircled by restaurants, cafes and shops is now a sprawling expanse of medical tents, piles of food and other relief supplies, and stacks of building materials. While relief work went on outside Monday, men were busily wrapping furniture in foam and plastic inside the Antiguo Arte Europeo store.
Stone panels on the building’s facade appeared cracked or were altogether missing. Saleswoman Luisa Zuniga said the owners were waiting for civil defense inspectors to certify there was no structural damage to the building before reopening to the public.
Meanwhile, they were moving furniture that could still be sold to their other branches.
“Then we’ll see how long it takes to fix everything,” she said. “It is important to get back to work.”
Edgar Novoa, a fitness trainer, went back to his job Monday after working as a volunteer following the earthquake. Around midday, he stopped his bicycle at a cleared foundation where a building of several stories had stood near his home.
He knelt and prayed while others left flowers and candles at the site.
The government has said that nine foreigners, including five from Taiwan, died in the quake. One of the buildings that collapsed in the quake housed a business listed as Asia Jenny Importaciones, SA de CV. A South Korean man was also confirmed dead.
A Panamanian woman died, as did one man from Spain and one from Argentina.
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The days of Twitter limiting messages to 140 characters, a signature of the social network since its launch in 2006, may be numbered.
Twitter said on Tuesday that it would begin a test with a random sample of users allowing them to send tweets that are as long as 280 characters, double the existing cap, in most languages around the world.
The San Francisco-based company has stood by its short messages as a defining characteristic – like chirps from a bird, which is the company logo – even as users found ways around the limit, such as posting photos of text.
In a blog post on Tuesday, Twitter said its emphasis on brevity would never change but that it had been wondering whether people could express themselves easily enough, hurting the service’s popularity.
“Trying to cram your thoughts into a Tweet – we’ve all been there, and it’s a pain,” Twitter project manager Aliza Rosen and senior software engineer Ikuhiro Ihara said in the post.
The employees acknowledged some users may have an “emotional attachment” to the current limit.
News reports in January 2016 said that Twitter was running internal tests for longer tweets and considering a limit as high as 10,000 characters.
Though Twitter is ubiquitous in media because of frequent use by U.S. President Donald Trump and many celebrities, the company has struggled financially. For the second quarter, it reported a loss of $116 million and zero growth in the number of users, at 328 million people. Facebook Inc has 2 billion users.
A higher character limit was inspired by how people use Twitter when writing in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, the company said.
Characters in those languages can often express more than Roman characters can, meaning those users already, in effect, have a higher limit. They also use Twitter more often.
“In all markets, when people don’t have to cram their thoughts into 140 characters and actually have some to spare, we see more people Tweeting,” the two employees wrote.
The test of 280 characters will run for an unspecified number of weeks in all languages except Chinese, Japanese and Korean, Twitter said. The company declined to say how many people would be included in the test.
The 140-character limit originated from the use of SMS text messages. Twitter’s founders, including Chief Executive Jack Dorsey, wanted a limit just below the SMS cap of 160 characters.
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A coalition of businesses including Amazon, Google and General Motors has agreed to give $300 million to boost K-12 computer science programs across the U.S.
Internet Association CEO Michael Beckerman announced Tuesday that the private-sector contribution will come in over the next five years. Beckerman led a panel discussion at a downtown Detroit high-rise that featured President Donald Trump’s daughter and adviser Ivanka Trump.
Her visit to Detroit came a day after the president announced a plan to spend at least $200 million annually on competitive grants so schools can broaden access to computer science education.
“Knowing how to code is really foundational toward success in any industry, not just tech narrowly defined,” Ivanka Trump said.
Just before Ivanka Trump arrived on stage, Beckerman announced the private-sector contribution.
Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.org are giving $50 million apiece; Lockheed Martin is promising $25 million; Accenture is committing more than $10 million; and General Motors and Pluralsight have pledged $10 million toward the effort. Additionally, Detroit-based Quicken Loans announced that it will work to make sure that 15,000 Detroit Public Schools students receive computer science training.
Ivanka Trump said it is crucial that young people, especially girls and racial minorities, learn how to write computer code and study computer science.
“We have to do better. We are going to do better, and this is a giant leap forward in that direction,” she said during the panel discussion, which also included Dan Gilbert, chairman of Quicken Loans; Hadi Partovi, CEO of Code.org; Rob Acker, CEO of Salesforce.org; and Marillyn Hewson, CEO of Lockheed Martin.
Gilbert said teaching schoolchildren computer science “isn’t one of these things where maybe this will work.
“This is the answer. This is flat-out the answer,” said Gilbert, who also owns the Cleveland Cavaliers of the NBA.
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The United States has imposed sanctions on eight North Korean banks and 26 bank executives amid escalating tensions with Pyongyang over its nuclear program.
“This further advances our strategy to fully isolate North Korea in order to achieve our broader objectives of a peaceful and denuclearized Korean Peninsula,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Tuesday in a statement.
Last week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for new economic sanctions against individuals and businesses that finance trade with Pyongyang’s reclusive communist regime and fund its weapons development.
U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis emphasized Tuesday that the U.S. sought a peaceful resolution to escalating tensions with North Korea, despite the regime’s claim that a tweet Monday by Trump was tantamount to a declaration of war.
In New Delhi for talks with Indian officials about strengthening U.S.-India ties, Mattis said that while the U.S. military presence on the Korean Peninsula was necessary to deter North Korea’s threats, it also supported diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict peacefully.
“And that is our goal, to solve this diplomatically, and I believe President Trump has been pretty clear on this issue,” Mattis said, following a meeting with India’s defense minister.
Hope for diplomacy
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Tuesday also stressed that the U.S. would “continue to pursue our diplomatic efforts and hope that’s the way we’ll solve this”
On Monday, Trump commented on Twitter that if North Korea carried out its threats, Kim Jong Un’s regime “won’t be around much longer.”
Speaking to reporters near U.N. headquarters in New York, North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho said, “Given the fact that this comes from someone who is currently holding the seat of the United States presidency, this is clearly a declaration of war.”
The world should clearly remember, he added, that “it was the U.S. who first declared war on our country.”
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called Ri’s characterization of the tweet “absurd.”
“We’ve not declared war on North Korea,” she said.
Although North Korea has declared “war” many times in the past, now “we’ve entered a bona fide crisis,” Van Jackson, senior lecturer in international relations at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, told VOA.
“Even if we’re not in a war right now, we seem to be doing everything in our power to make one happen by actions and statements that make deterrence more likely to fail,” said Jackson, a former director for Korea policy and a defense strategy adviser at the U.S. Defense Department.
Threat to bombers
Ri warned that his country might shoot down U.S. strategic bombers, even if they were not in North Korean airspace. According to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency Tuesday, Lee Cheol-woo, the chief of the National Assembly’s intelligence committee, said Pyongyang was spotted readjusting the position of its warplanes and boosting its defensive capabilities along its east coast.
A fighter jet from North Korea in 1969 shot down an unarmed U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane, outside North Korean territorial airspace in the Sea of Japan, killing 30 sailors and one marine on board.
Speaking at a security conference on Monday, Trump’s national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, said the United States hoped to avoid war with North Korea, “but what we can’t do is discount that possibility.”
The Army lieutenant general added that the U.S. had thought through several different ways the problem with North Korea could be resolved, and “some are uglier than others.”
However, McMaster, told the conference, hosted by the Institute for the Study of War, that “there’s not a precision strike that solves the problem.”
One peaceful solution, according to McMaster, would be for Pyongyang to give access to inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. But any diplomatic negotiations, McMaster said, would “have to happen under conditions that are different from previous talks.” He said, however, he was not going to come up with a list of preconditions.
Beijing’s role
Some analysts see the path to talks still running through Beijing, which recently moved to cut banking ties between China and North Korea, shut off the supply of liquefied natural gas to the North Koreans and stop imports of their textiles.
“I think that the Chinese are sending a signal to the North that they are skating on thin ice,” said T.J. Pempel, a political science professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
The North Korean foreign minister threatened on Saturday that his country could conduct an atmospheric hydrogen bomb test over the Pacific Ocean.
Mattis responded Monday that if North Korea carried out its threat, “this would be a shocking display of irresponsibility toward global health, toward stability, toward nonproliferation.”
U.S. Air Force B-1B Lancer bombers from Guam escorted by F-16 fighter jets from a U.S. base in Japan on Saturday flew in international airspace over waters east of North Korea.
The Pentagon said the show of force, meant to display some of the military options available to Trump, was “the farthest north of the demilitarized zone any U.S. fighter or bomber aircraft have flown off North Korea’s coast in the 21st century.”
VOA’s William Gallo contributed to this report from New Delhi.
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