Kenya’s economy is expected to grow next year by 5 percent, down from a projected 6 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund. The slowdown is largely blamed on the political uncertainties related to the re-run presidential election scheduled for October 26. Mohammed Yusuf reports from Kisumu, an opposition stronghold in western Kenya.
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Month: October 2017
The World Health Organization reports pneumonic plague is continuing to spread at an alarming rate in urban areas of Madagascar and greater effort is needed to bring this deadly disease under control. Latest figures put the number of suspected cases at 1,153, including 94 deaths.
Health agencies are worried at how quickly this disease is spreading so early in Madagascar’s plague season, which runs from September to April. The disease usually infects some 400 people a year. But this year, with six more months to go, the number of suspected cases is nearly three times higher than normal. WHO Regional Emergency Director for Africa, Ibrahima Soce Fall, says the spread of the disease is faster because pneumonic plague, which is transmitted from person to person, has moved from the remote rural areas to congested urban areas. It is mainly found in the capital Antananarivo and the port city of Toamasina.
Nevertheless, Fall tells VOA he is confident WHO in coordination with the Ministry of Health and other agencies will be able to contain the disease in short order. He says WHO has provided enough antibiotics to treat 5,000 patients and to protect up to 100,000 people who may have been in contact with an infected person.
“This can be controlled relatively quickly if we manage to improve the contact tracing as we are doing right now,” said Fall. “So, with the teams who are already used to contact tracing and putting all contacts under antibiotic prophylaxis, we can prevent the disease. I am confident that with the strong team we have on the ground, in common with some partners coming and more health workers, we will be able to revert very quickly the trend.”
Fall cautions, though, it will be important to remain vigilant after transmission is over. He notes stopping the transmission of the plague does not mean the risk is gone. He says the virus is still in the country, and while people continue living in poor, unsanitary conditions, the disease is likely to recur.
Astronauts went spacewalking Friday to provide some necessary focus to the International Space Station’s robot arm.
The main job for commander Randy Bresnik and teacher-turned-astronaut Joe Acaba was to replace a blurry camera on the new robotic hand that was installed during a spacewalk two weeks ago. The two men were supposed to go spacewalking earlier this week, but NASA needed extra time to rustle up the repair plan.
Sharp focus is essential in order for the space station’s robot hand to capture an arriving supply ship. The next delivery is a few weeks away, prompting the quick camera swap-out.
Orbital ATK, one of NASA’s commercial shippers, plans to launch a cargo ship from Virginia on November 11.
Acaba was barely outside an hour when he had to replace one of his safety tethers, which keep him secured to the orbiting outpost and prevent him from floating away.
Mission Control noticed his red tether seemed frayed and worn and ordered Acaba to “remain put” with his good waist tether locked to the structure as Bresnik went to get him a spare.
Spacewalking astronauts always have more than one of these crucial lifelines in case one breaks. They also wear a jetpack in case all tethers fail and they need to fly back to the space station.
This was the third spacewalk in two weeks for the space station’s U.S. residents. Bresnik performed the first two with Mark Vande Hei.
As they ventured out, Bresnik noted they were flying over Puerto Rico.
“Get out of here,” replied Acaba, the first astronaut of Puerto Rican heritage.
Acaba’s parents were born there, and he still has family on the hurricane-ravaged island.
“There’s a whole line of people looking up and smiling today as you get ready to head out the door,” Bresnik said.
Friday’s spacewalk should be the last one for the year. Early next year, astronauts will replace the hand on the opposite side of the 58-foot robot arm, Canada’s main contribution to the space station. The original latching mechanisms are showing wear and tear since the arm’s launch in 2001.
The 250-mile-high complex is currently home to three Americans, two Russians and one Italian.
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When the new school year started in September, 16-year-old Aelina Pogosian couldn’t wait to tell her friends about the most interesting part of her summer vacation: her RISE internship, working three weeks in the biology lab at Montgomery College.
“A lot of the materials and machinery we used is not given at most high schools, which is really important for me to learn how to use these things,” she said. “And I got to learn a lot at the same time I was able to have a lot of fun. And I met some new people.”
Among those new people was Jennifer Sengbusch, instructional lab coordinator, who worked closely with Aelina.
“At first, working in the lab I had to go over safety rules with her to avoid any injury to herself,” Sengbusch said. “We also went through working with chemicals, making solutions, doing calculations. Then we progressed into doing more complicated things as measuring protein concentrations and doing DNA tests.”
And the internship wasn’t all inside a lab, it also included some animal husbandry experience with the lab’s snakes and tortoises.
Real interesting experiences
Aelina is one of more than 400 students from all of Montgomery County’s 25 high schools who took part in the RISE program in its first year. RISE stands for Real Interesting Summer Experience, and those experiences were offered at construction companies, police stations, marketing firms, fire stations and more. More than 140 businesses, government agencies and nonprofits offered to host the students for the paid internships.
Local activist Will Jawando founded the program and says it has two main goals.
“The first goal is to expose our students to career opportunities early on so they can inform their education or training after high school,” he said.
The second is boosting the local economy.
“We said there are 30,000 middle-skill-level jobs here in Montgomery County that are not filled,” Jawando said. “So how do we also expose them to that there are jobs here in the county that they could be doing in a year or two that pay well and are on career track? So it was also an economic development tool. So it not only benefits the students, but hopefully it benefits the county and the region, if they stay here, they become productive citizens and as taxpayers.”
Local government support
The program received partial funding from the Montgomery County Council. Councilman Craig Rice helped secure the money.
“All the time in government, there are always so many needs and so many things that are important, whether it’s our roads or our infrastructure, all the different types of programs that we provide as government, but it is really important to make sure that we’re providing for our future generation,” Rice said.
He stressed that providing high school students with real life career opportunities was a priority.
“It’s really something that if we’re going to be serious about being globally competitive, we’re going to be serious about providing a number of different options for our children, we’ve got to make sure that we put our money where our mouth is,” Rice added.
Active, curious and dedicated
Jennifer Sengbusch says RISE gave her a chance to work with high school students who may soon be applying to attend Montgomery College. She found them curious and eager to learn.
“I think high school students are more inquisitive” than college students, she observed, “the high school students really ask a lot of great questions.”
She was also pleased to find Aelina, engaged and prompt.
“I didn’t realize that she was arriving an hour early just so she would be on time, that she would be sitting on the end of the hallway and I glanced over and said, ‘What are you doing here?’ She said ‘I just didn’t want to be late.’”
After a successful start this summer, RISE participants and organizers hope the program will expand next year and inspire surrounding counties to offer similar Real Interesting Summer Experiences.
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The parliament of Australia’s second largest state passed legislation Friday to allow terminally ill patients to seek medical help to end their lives, a bill that is expected to act as a catalyst for the rest of the country to adopt similar laws.
Any resident of Victoria state older than 18, with a terminal illness and with less than 12 months to live can request a lethal dose of medication, the bill permits. Anyone that is too ill to administer the dosage can ask for a doctor to help.
Many countries have legalized euthanasia or physician-assisted deaths, including Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and some states in the United States.
Federal government opposed
But Australia’s federal government has opposed legalizing euthanasia even though the remote Northern Territory became the first jurisdiction in the world to do so in 1995.
The federal government enacted its own legislation to override the Northern Territory law in 1997 under rules allowed by the constitution. State law cannot be overridden.
The passage of the bill in Victoria is expected to herald assisted death legislation in other Australian states.
“It is a landmark moment. Other states are likely to follow. We have seen this in other jurisdictions and I expect once politicians see how the system works, they will adopt similar models,” said Ben White, director of the Australian Centre for Health Law Research at Queensland University of Technology.
Divisive issue
The issue has divided lawmakers and medicinal professionals.
Victorian premier Daniel Andrews introduced the bill after his father’s death from cancer in 2016.
An opponent of the legalization, Michael Gannon, president of the Australian Medical Association, which represents medical practitioners, said state law should not change because of the death of Andrews’ father. He later apologized for the comment.
Members of the state assembly debated the bill through the night in a 26-hour session that ended with approval by 47 votes to 37.
The legislation needs the approval of Victoria’s senate, though analysts expect it to pass into law.
The legislation will not come into effect for 18 months to allow time to properly implement the assisted dying process.
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The last mass-produced car designed and built in Australia rolled off General Motors Co.’s production line in the industrial city of Adelaide on Friday as the nation reluctantly bid farewell to its auto manufacturing industry.
GM Holden Ltd., an Australian subsidiary of the U.S. automotive giant, built its last car almost 70 years after it created Australia’s first, the FX Holden, in 1948.
Since then, an array of carmakers including Ford, Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Chrysler and Leyland have built and closed manufacturing plants in Australia.
Clocking out for last time
After the last gleaming red Holden VF Commodore, a six-cylinder rear-wheel drive sedan, left the plant in the Adelaide suburb of Elizabeth that had grown over decades to provide its workforce, 955 factory workers will clock off the last time
“It’s pretty tragic really that we’ve let go probably one of the best cars around the world,” an auto painter who identified himself as Kane told reporters.
The 36-year-old was worked at Holden for 17 years and starts a new job with an air conditioner manufacturer Monday. But he knows many other former Holden employees won’t find jobs so quickly.
Dozens of Holden enthusiasts gathered outside the factory, bringing with them generations of Holdens dating back to favored FJ models that were built between 1953 and 1956.
South Australia state Premier Jay Weatherill said car manufacturing was seminal to the state’s industrial know-how.
“It has provided the backbone for our manufacturing capability in this state,” Weatherill told reporters. “It’s given us … the capacity to imagine ourselves as an advanced manufacturing state.”
Iconic Australian brand
Holden is an iconic Australian brand and has been a source of national pride for generations.
The V8 Holden Commodore has sold in the United States since 2013 as the Chevrolet SS.
The brand will survive although Holdens will all now be imported from GM plants around the globe.
Holden retains design and engineering teams, a global design studio, a local testing ground, 1,000 employees and a 200-strong national dealer network.
The brand that became known as “Australia’s own car,” accounted for more than half the new cars registered in Australia by 1958.
The reasons behind the demise of Australian auto manufacturing are numerous.
The first Holden cars were built in an era of high Australian tariffs and preferential trade with former colonial master Britain, which encouraged global carmakers to set up local factories to increase market share.
Australian import tariffs have since tumbled through bilateral free trade deals with car manufacturing countries like the United States, Japan, China, South Korea, Thailand and Malaysia.
The Holden workers’ union blames a lack of government support through subsidies for GM’s decision to end manufacturing.
There had been debate about whether the 7 billion Australian dollars ($5.5 billion) that the government spent on the car industry in subsidies since 2001 was worth the jobs that it created.
“We’re not just losing a car, we’re not just losing an industrial capability. We’re losing an icon and that is a tragedy,” Labor lawmaker Nick Champion, who represents the Holden factory region, told reporters Thursday.
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An aquatic robot, small and nimble enough to fit inside the smallest of openings, is being tested in Japan ahead of being deployed into the damaged core of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Faith Lapidus reports.
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American teens have crowned a new king of social media. According to a recent poll, Snapchat is the most popular app for teens, toppling even Facebook for their neck-bending attention. Arash Arabasadi reports from Washington.
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Technology firms have improved cooperation with the authorities in tackling online militant material but must act quicker to remove propaganda fueling a rise in homegrown extremism, acting U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke said Wednesday.
The United States and Britain will push social media firms at a meeting of G7 interior ministers this week to do more on the issue, Duke told reporters in London where she had been meeting British Home Secretary Amber Rudd.
Duke said there has been a change in the attitude of tech companies since a rally organized by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August turned deadly when a counter-protester was killed by a car driven into a crowd.
“There has been a shift and for us somewhat with the Charlottesville incident,” she said. “There are a lot of social pressures and they want do business so they really have to balance between keeping their user agreements and giving law enforcement what they need.
“The fact they are meeting with us at G7 is a positive sign. I think they’re seeing the evidence of it being real and not just hyperbole.”
Series of attacks
After a series of Islamist militant attacks this year, British Prime Minister Theresa May and her ministers such as Rudd have been demanding action from tech leaders such as Facebook, Google and Twitter to do more about extremist material on their sites.
British politicians have also called for access to encrypted messaging services like Facebook’s WhatsApp, a campaign that U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein gave his backing to after meeting Rudd and the head of the UK domestic spy agency MI5 last week.
Internet companies say they want to help governments remove extremist or criminal material but say they have to balance the demands of state security with civil liberties.
“We would like to have the ability to get encrypted data with the right legal processes,” Duke said.
Propaganda’s role
Asked what action governments might take if social media firms failed to act to improve their removal of extremist material, she said: “We will continue to push as far as we can go. I think that we have the cooperation of those companies and we just need to work on that.”
Authorities say propaganda from Islamic State has played a major part in radicalizing people in the West but despite its defeat in its capital Raqqa in Syria, Duke said the group’s online presence was likely to increase.
“I would surmise being able to put terrorist propaganda on the internet might become more imperative,” said Duke, who described the terrorist threat to the United States as being as high as it had been since pre-9/11.
She also warned that those who turned to violence by being radicalized by such material posed a bigger problem than the comparatively small number of fighters who had joined the militant group returning to United States.
“The number of foreign fighters we have returning is declining,” she said. “The number of home-grown violent extremists, most of them inspired by terrorist organizations, is increasing.”
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With U.S. midterm elections barely a year away, lawmakers on Thursday unveiled a bipartisan proposal to regulate online political advertising in the United States, an effort prompted by revelations that Russian elements spent large sums on internet ads targeting Americans ahead of the 2016 U.S. election.
“Our entire democracy was founded on the simple idea that the people in our country should be self-governing,” said Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the ranking Democrat on the Rules Committee, which has jurisdiction over federal elections, at a news conference.
“Our democracy is at risk,” Klobuchar added. “We recently learned that $100,000 was spent in [Russian] rubles on Facebook political ads during the 2016 election. We know that [Russian-funded] ads were purchased in other venues, as well.”
To prevent a repeat, Klobuchar, along with Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, unveiled the Honest Ads Act, which would require Facebook, Twitter, Google and other technology giants to post information about the source of political ads, just as U.S. television and radio broadcasters are required to do.
The bill has the backing of Republican John McCain of Arizona, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
“Unfortunately, U.S. laws regulating transparency in political campaigns have not kept pace with rapid advances in technology, allowing our adversaries to take advantage of these loopholes to influence millions of American voters with impunity,” McCain said in a statement.
The bill also would require tech companies to make “reasonable efforts” to ensure that foreign entities are not using social media platforms for political purposes. Earlier this year, Facebook shut down a multitude of suspicious accounts that targeted elections in France.
Since its creation, the internet has been more free-wheeling and less regulated than other media forms, a feature that technology firms and others have argued is critical to its success.
Warner, a former cellphone executive, insisted he has no desire to alter cyberspace’s fundamental nature.
“We don’t want to slow down innovation in the internet,” the Virginia senator said. “But I think Americans deserve to know if the ads they are seeing are generated by Americans or generated by foreign interests.”
Executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter will have a chance to weigh in on the legislation when they testify in an open hearing the Senate Intelligence Committee has scheduled for next month.
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Two weeks ago Carla Rountree of Washington, D.C., was enjoying an autumn afternoon with friends at the Maryland Renaissance Festival, gaily dressed in a tutu with a goofy unicorn horn tied to her head. While ordering a drink at a beverage stall, a man standing next to her said, “You know, I could grab that horn like you’re an ice cream cone, flip you over, and just lick you.”
She retorted, “I don’t think you’d like the results of that.” He smirked and replied, “YOU might.”
“No one within earshot, including the female bartender, said anything about it,” Rountree says. “It was just accepted, which infuriated me just as much as the god-awful comment.”
That incident occurred as women all over the United States are tweeting and posting #MeToo, sharing their experiences with sexual harassment.
The movement followed the fall from grace of movie producer Harvey Weinstein, the latest rich, famous and powerful man to be brought down by a series of allegations of sexual harassment dating as far back as 30 years and involving more than 20 women. Weinstein’s attorneys say he did not participate in any nonconsensual sex.
If the number of women harassed by Weinstein looks dramatic, the number who have spoken up via #MeToo to reveal their own sexual harassment experiences is more startling.
On Oct. 15, actress Alyssa Milano called for sexual harassment victims to post or tweet the two-word phrase. By the next day, Time magazine reported, more than 27,000 people had responded. By mid-week, women from around the globe were tweeting their stories.
By the numbers
Meanwhile, a poll released Tuesday by ABC/The Washington Post, indicated 54 percent of female respondents said they have been the victim of sexual assault.
A third of female respondents said they have experienced sexual advances from a male coworker or a man who had influence over their career. Fifty-eight percent of the women who said they had been harassed on the job said they didn’t report it. And 94 percent of women who were harassed at work believe men usually don’t face consequences for those actions.
An all-too-common thread among #MeToo stories: When the behavior was reported, no one did anything.
Kellie Dickson Johnson of Chattanooga, Tennessee, says she was frustrated by just such an experience while working at a restaurant. A patron pursued her relentlessly with flowers, poems and invitations to go out. She began to dread going to work.
“When I finally told the managers, their response was that it was ‘cute’ and ‘sweet.’ They absolutely did not see the problem. The next week, they were down one employee.” In other words, she quit.
In The Washington Post poll, 64 percent of women who had been harassed said they felt intimidated, 52 percent said they felt humiliated, 31 percent said they felt ashamed.
Many of the stories happened when the victims were children.
Deirdre Launt says she was 14 and working at a hometown grocery store in Portage, Michigan, when it happened to her.
“It was my first job,” she says in an email. “There were two guys a bit older than me who worked there, too … They used to poke me really hard, all over, and laugh and be like, ‘What are you gonna do, go tell?”‘
When she reported the incident, Launt says, “I got something like a ‘boys will be boys’ brush off and nothing was done. They didn’t see the guy’s behavior as a problem, they saw me as a problem.” Launt quit the job and 29 years later, she rarely enters the store.
Many women have wondered if their experience counts as sexual harassment if it wasn’t considered too bad, if they didn’t feel psychological damage, or if they were drinking or dressed provocatively when it happened.
Biggest question
But the biggest question is this: What do we do about it?
Cheryl Colbert of Arlington, Virginia, recalls an incident in the early 1990s when a man accosted her in the courtyard of her apartment building. She is now raising a teenage son and daughter, and says she feels guilty the rules she sets for her daughter are different than those she sets for her son, such as coming straight home after a practice at school so she won’t be walking alone at night.
Colbert says she takes heart that men and women are responding to #MeToo with support.
“While my story isn’t public, those that need to know are aware. But speaking up wasn’t easy so please listen, acknowledge & accept.,” actor Alex Winter tweeted this week.
The hashtag #HowIWillChange has also cropped up, posted by men who detail what they will do differently in future to help protect women. Some of the methods mentioned are teaching children respect, proactively learning about women’s issues, and calling out predatory behavior.
“Men, keep in mind women don’t owe us their stories for us to become advocates for them in public/private spaces,” Phillip Lewis wrote.
Other men and women are tweeting #WithYou.
“I’m raising my son to treat all women with respect and compassion. I am speaking out against misogyny. I am listening,” U.S. military veteran Dave Harrell said.
Colbert has a pretty straightforward plan, which she describes in an email. “The only thing I feel we can do is each one do the right thing. And say something when it happens. SAY SOMETHING WHEN IT HAPPENS.”
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Iridium Communications says its next two launches of new-generation satellites will use refurbished SpaceX Falcon 9 first-stage boosters that have flown previously.
The announcement Thursday is another step in SpaceX’s effort to reduce launch costs.
The company has launched a few used boosters and is trying to expand acceptance of reusability across the industry.
Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX has had successful landings of Falcon 9 first stages after launches from both coasts.
Iridium is in the midst of seven launches to replace its satellite fleet that provides global mobile voice and data communications.
The McLean, Virginia, company says insurers confirmed there is no increase in premiums for “flight-proven” rocket use.
Thirty new satellites are in orbit and the fourth launch is scheduled for Dec. 22 at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.
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Hundreds of workers streamed through dark streets, blocking an entrance to an Apple iPhone supplier’s factory in eastern China to protest unpaid bonuses and factory reassignments, two witnesses and China Labor Watch, a New York based non-profit group, said Thursday.
The protest Wednesday night at Jabil Inc.’s Green Point factory in Wuxi city prompted Apple to launch an investigation and vow to redress the payment discrepancies. “We are requiring Jabil to send a comprehensive employee survey to ascertain where gaps exist in payment and they must create an action plan that ensures all employees are paid for the promised bonus immediately,” Apple said Thursday in an email to China Labor Watch.
The incident highlights the complexity of overseeing global supply chains that can involve hundreds of manufacturers and subcontractors, as well as third-party labor brokers — and their subcontractors — that are tasked with recruiting workers for those factories. Companies differ in the amount of responsibility they are willing to take on. Apple stepped up oversight and disclosure following a spate of negative reports about worker suicides and injuries at suppliers.
After Tim Cook took over as chief executive, in 2011, Apple began publicly identifying top suppliers. It also publishes annual audits detailing labor and human rights performance throughout its global web of suppliers. Apple said it did comprehensive audits of 705 sites last year and documented significant improvements in compliance with its supplier code of conduct.
“About 600 workers went protesting for failing to get their bonus,” a worker who asked that only his family name, Zhang, be published for fear of retribution, said Thursday. He said that like many of his colleagues, he was promised a bonus of up to 7,000 yuan ($1,056) if he stayed for 45 days when he signed up for the job through a labor broker. “It has already been over three months but I still haven’t got the money,” he said.
Tu Changli, a security guard at Jabil’s Green Point factory, said a labor broker promised him 2,000 yuan ($302) if he stayed for two months. “I didn’t get it at all,” he said. He also said he saw hundreds of workers protesting. The company he said he works for, Wu Tai Security Co., declined comment.
A spokeswoman for U.S.-based Jabil, Lydia Huang, disputed those accounts, saying only 20 to 40 employees were actually protesting and the rest were night-shift workers trying to enter the factory. “As long as they can present evidence of promises by brokers we will help them to get paid,” she said.
Jabil, in a statement late Thursday, said it was “committed to ensuring every employee is paid fairly and on time.”
Tensions had been running high at Jabil’s Green Point factory. Tu, the security guard, said he saw a worker talked down from the edge of a rooftop in late September. And Zhang said that on Sept. 30, he saw a security guard hit a worker with a wooden stick so hard the stick broke.
Apple in its email to China Labor Watch said both incidents had to do with disputes with security guards, not underpayment, and added that it was working with Jabil “to make sure their security guards are properly trained to avoid and de-escalate situations.”
The current iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 plus had a 2 percent share of the iOS device market nearly a month after their launch, significantly lagging the 5 percent share grabbed by the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 plus at a similar point last year, according to Localytics, a mobile engagement platform that analyzes iPhone adoption rates. Analysts attribute iPhone 8 sluggishness to the pending release of the iPhone X.
Missouri officials were submitting a bid Thursday for Amazon’s second headquarters that would involve an innovation corridor between Kansas City and St. Louis rather than a single location in one of the state’s major metropolitan areas.
That’s proposal is in addition to individual applications submitted by Kansas City and St. Louis, two of a number of North American metropolitan areas vying to become the company’s second home. Amazon in September opened the search for a second headquarters and promised to spend more than $5 billion on the site. The Seattle-based company says it would bring up to 50,000 jobs.
Missouri Chief Operating Officer Drew Erdmann said the state’s bid could be aided if it succeeds in landing a high-speed Hyperloop track connecting the cities.
The number of Americans collecting unemployment benefits fell last week to the lowest level since Richard Nixon was president.
THE NUMBERS: The Labor Department said Thursday that claims for jobless aid dropped by 22,000 to 222,000, fewest since March 1973. The less volatile four-week average slid by 9,500 to 248,250, lowest since late August.
The overall number of Americans collecting unemployment checks dropped to 1.89 million, lowest since December 1973 and down nearly 9 percent from a year ago.
THE TAKEAWAY: Unemployment claims are a proxy for layoffs. The low level suggests that employers are confident enough in the economy to hold onto workers.
The unemployment rate last month hit a 16-year low 4.2 percent. Employers cut 33,000 jobs in September — the first monthly drop in nearly seven years — but only because Hurricanes Harvey and Irma rattled the economies of Texas and Florida; hiring is expected to bounce back.
KEY DRIVERS: The economic impact of Harvey and Irma is fading; claims dropped in Texas and Florida as more people returned to work. But the Labor Department said that Hurricanes Irma and Maria have disrupted the ability of people to file claims in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.
The idea of gravitational waves has been around for over 100 years since Albert Einstein posited their existence. But in 2016 scientists proved they were out there using giant L-shaped detectors called gravitational wave observatories. But this week more news was made when scientists were able to watch the creation of gravitational waves. VOA’s Kevin Enochs report
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In Iraq, young entrepreneurs cash-in on a food trend popularized in the West. Trucks serving American-style fast food serve meals on-the-go and opportunities for those hungry for work. Arash Arabasadi reports.
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The U.S. Military is looking at technologies such as wearable sensors, virtual and augmented reality to enhance the training of its recruits. At a recent meeting of military personnel and academics at the University of Southern California’s Global Body Computing Conference, commanding officers talked about why there is a need for ever more modern technology. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee reports from Los Angeles on some of the emerging technologies that can help the military.
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Back in the old days, movies were edited by simply cutting out a piece of film you didn’t want and replacing it with a new shot. That’s almost exactly how the CRISPR gene editing technology works, but on a cellular level. Researchers now say they are close to being able to use this technology to fix some genetic diseases. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Divers are removing hundreds of old tires, plastic jugs and other junk that was dumped off the Southern California coast nearly 30 years ago by a man who thought he was helping the ocean environment.
The cleanup began last week off of Newport Beach, the California Coastal Commission announced Wednesday.
“It’s about time this was cleaned up. Dumping plastic and other trash into our oceans is not the way to restore the marine ecosystem,” commission Chair Dayna Bochco said in a statement. “There is an estimated 18 billion pounds of plastic that enters the world’s oceans every year and we must do what we can to clean this up.”
In 1988, Rodolphe Streichenberger created what he described as an experimental, artificial reef.
The reef covered several acres of ocean floor and consisted of 1,500 used automobile tires, 2,000 one-gallon plastic jugs covered with plastic mesh, 100 sections of PVC pipe and other items, including fishing net, Styrofoam and iron roads, the commission said.
Streichenberger believed the reef would spur the growth of kelp forests, provide a place to grow mussels for commercial harvest and rebuild ocean habitat damaged by pollution and development.
The materials are “absolutely harmless,” Streichenberger told the Los Angeles Times in 1996. “You have seen no impact. Only fish. It’s very good for the fish.”
But his research was “deeply flawed,” according to the Coastal Commission.
“State scientists said the tires contained harmful toxins, the material was not dense enough to anchor to the ocean floor and warned the discarded netting and ropes could trap fish and marine mammals,” the commission said in its statement.
“It’s hard to believe there was a time when someone thought this was a good idea,” commission Executive Director Jack Ainsworth said. “We now know that plastic is poison in the ocean, polluting every level of the food chain.”
Streichenberger also had failed to obtain permission from the commission for the project. He was refused a retroactive permit in 1997 and the commission eventually issued a cease-and-desist order.
Streichenberger and his now-defunct Marine Forests Society sued, challenging the commission’s authority. In 2005, the California Supreme Court reversed a lower court ruling and sided with the commission.
Streichenberger died the next year at 77.
Over the years, the Coastal Commission and the state Department of Fish and Wildlife kept tabs on the reef.
Instead of a thriving and diverse ecosystem, divers found that the junk had been spread around the sea floor by currents and held only “the type of marine life commonly found on pier pilings and boat bottoms,” the commission statement said.
“There’s no native kelp, just a few fish swimming around,” said Kirsten Gilardi, assistant director at the Wildlife Health Center School at the University of California, Davis, which is involved in the cleanup. “It’s nothing like the diversity and density you’d see on a natural rocky reef off the Southern California coast.”
Earlier this year, the Coastal Commission finally found a way to fund a cleanup through permit fees for a different underwater project at Hermosa Beach.
Since then, divers have been pulling tires from the water at the rate of about 100 a day, according to the commission.
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The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 23,000 for the first time on Wednesday, driven by a jump in IBM after it hinted at a return to revenue growth.
The Dow hit 22,000 on Aug. 2, only 54 trading days earlier and roughly half the time it took the index to move from 21,000 to 22,000. This marks the fourth time this year the Dow has reached a 1,000-point milestone.
“Retail investors continue to pour into the marketplace, and with each headline about a new record, and especially round numbers like that, people tend to feel like they’re missing out and you kind of suck more people into the market,” said Ian Winer, head of equities at Wedbush Securities in Los Angeles.
“Ultimately, the only way you’re going to top is by getting everybody all in. And we’re getting close.”
Investors globally pulled $33.7 billion from U.S. equity funds during the third quarter, according to Thomson Reuters’ Lipper research unit. The funds are on course to post net outflows for the full year.
Shares of IBM, which beat expectations on revenue, jumped 8.9 percent and accounted for about 90 points of the day’s 160 point-gain in the blue-chip index.
Solid earnings, stronger economic growth and hopes that President Donald Trump may be able to make progress on tax cuts have helped the market rally this year.
The S&P 500 and Nasdaq also hit record closing highs.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 160.16 points, or 0.7 percent, to end at 23,157.6, the S&P 500 gained 1.9 points, or 0.07 percent, to 2,561.26 and the Nasdaq Composite added 0.56 point, or 0.01 percent, to 6,624.22.
“Today the catalyst is clearly IBM … which appears to have turned the corner. It gave the Dow the boost to stay over 23,000,” said Quincy Krosby, chief market strategist at Prudential Financial in Newark, New Jersey.
The Dow had briefly surpassed the all-time peak on Tuesday but closed just shy of it.
The financial index jumped 0.6 percent, led by bank stocks recovering from recent post-earnings losses. Bullish calls by brokerages helped to support the bank shares.
Bank shares had run up ahead of recent results, which resulted in some selling following the news, Krosby said.
Investors await news on Trump’s decision on the Federal Reserve chair position. The White House said Wednesday Trump will announce his decision in the “coming days.”
Abbott rose 1.3 percent after the company’s profit beat estimates on strong sales in its medical devices business.
After the bell, shares of eBay fell 4 percent following its results.
Advancing issues outnumbered declining ones on the NYSE by a 1.09-to-1 ratio; on Nasdaq, a 1.32-to-1 ratio favored advancers. About 5.6 billion shares changed hands on U.S. exchanges, below the 5.9 billion daily average for the past 20 trading days, according to Thomson Reuters data.
Some flowers have found a nifty way to get the blues.
They create a blue halo, apparently to attract the bees they need for pollination, scientists reported Wednesday. Bees are drawn to the color blue, but it’s hard for flowers to make that color in their petals.
Instead, some flowers use a trick of physics. They produce a blue halo when sunlight strikes a series of tiny ridges in their thin waxy surfaces. The ridges alter how the light bounces back, which affects the color that one sees.
The halos appear over pigmented areas of a flower, and people can see them over darkly colored areas if they look from certain angles.
The halo trick is uncommon among flowers. But many tulip species, along with some kinds of daisy and peony, are among those that can do it, said Edwige Moyroud of Cambridge University in England.
In a study published Wednesday by the journal Nature, Moyroud and others analyze the flower surfaces and used artificial flowers to show that bumblebees can see the halos.
An accompanying commentary said the paper shows how flowers that aren’t blue can still use that color to attract bees. Further work should see whether the halo also attracts other insects, wrote Dimitri Deheyn of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.
Every month, Fatma Ahmed sends $200 of the earnings she makes in London to her family in Somalia.
“It’s for daily life. For rent, for buying grocery things, to live over there. Because actually in Somalia, that much we do not have,” she said.
Remittances from overseas diaspora constitute a vital part of the economy of many developing nations, none more so than Somalia, where the inflows add up to more than foreign aid and investment combined. However, analysts warn that the industry is poorly understood by regulators and banks, putting the welfare of millions of people at risk.
The two million Somalis living overseas send an estimated $1.3 billion back home every year. With no formal banking system in Somalia, most of the diaspora use remittance services.
Technology makes that possible, says Abdirashid Duale, CEO of Dahabshiil, one of Africa’s biggest remittance services.
“Now, it is so instant, where we have the latest technology, with the internet, secure channels that we can use to send money back home,” Duale said. “Or we use mobiles … smartphones, technology where it will help us to deliver money quickly, but less costly. Technology is supporting us also with the compliance issue.”
Remittance companies rely on global banks to route the money, and those banks must comply with regulations on money laundering and the financing of crime and terrorism.
Citing those concerns, many banks have chosen to withdraw from the market. Such a move is unnecessary, says remittance industry expert Laura Hammond of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
“Very often, it is not based on any kind of empirical evidence that shows that money is going into the wrong hands,” Hammond said. “The fear is just there is a conflict in Somalia, there’s the al-Shabab movement. And so there is a problem in a sense, a real precarious nature of the Somali remittance industry.”
The industry received a high-profile boost last month as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donated $1 million using the remittance firm Dahabshiil, along with mobile phone companies Somtel and eDahab, with the money transferred “live” to 1,000 families suffering the drought in Somalia.
The technology is moving fast. However, the cooperation of the global banking system remains key, and the remittance industry wants regulators to do more to support this lifeline.
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Remittances from overseas diaspora constitute a vital part of the economy of many developing nations, none more so than Somalia, where the inflows add up to more than foreign aid and investment combined. But analysts warn the industry is poorly understood by regulators and banks — and its precarious nature puts the welfare of millions of people at risk. Henry Ridgwell reports.
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