‘Food Fraud’ costs the food and beverage industry an estimated $30 billion every year. Food fraud is the deliberate substitution or misrepresentation of food products for economic gain. It can be as harmless as selling watered down olive oil, or as dangerous as substituting starch or plastic for rice. But a new laser test developed in Italy can spot the fakes with incredible accuracy. VOAs’ Kevin Enochs reports.
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Month: December 2017
Every year hundreds of the most famous names in high tech gather on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or M.I.T, for the EmTech Conference, an opportunity to discover future trends in technology that will drive the new global economy. This report by VOA Russsian Service reporter Evgeny Maslov is narrated by Bob Leverone.
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The United States, European Union and Japan vowed Tuesday to work together to fight market-distorting trade practices and policies that have fueled excess production capacity, naming several key features of China’s economic system.
In a joint statement that did not single out China or any other country, the three economic powers said they would work within the World Trade Organization and other multilateral groups to eliminate unfair competitive conditions caused by subsidies, state-owned enterprises, “forced” technology transfer and local content requirements.
The move was a rare show of solidarity with the United States at a World Trade Organization meeting dominated by differences over U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America First” trade agenda and U.S. efforts to stall the appointment of WTO judges.
It reflected growing frustration among industrial countries over China’s trade practices, along with concerns that other developing countries will follow Beijing’s lead.
The statement said protectionist practices “are serious concerns for the proper functioning of international trade, the creation of innovative technologies and the sustainable growth of the global economy.”
EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom said China’s industry subsidies, including for aluminum and steel, were flooding global markets and hurting European workers in a “very, very dramatic” way.
“There’s no secret that we think that China is a big sinner here, but there are other countries that are as well,” Malmstrom told reporters on the sidelines of a business forum.
In the opening session of the WTO ministerial conference in Buenos Aires on Monday, the United States and Japan criticized a lack of transparency in some WTO members’ trade practices, a thinly veiled swipe at Beijing.
China, meanwhile, appealed for members to “join hands” and uphold WTO rules to protect globalization in the face of rising protectionism.
The joint statement came after Japan approached the European Union and the United States about overcapacity, according to an EU source, with both Tokyo and Brussels concerned about the possibility the Trump administration could act unilaterally.
“There is a thought that if we bring them into the fold, and can work jointly with them, then it reduces the risk of them going alone,” the source said.
’Playing by the rules’
Washington, Brussels and Tokyo have previously raised complaints about China’s excess production capacity in a number of industrial sectors that has pushed down world prices and caused layoffs elsewhere.
The United States recently sided with the EU in arguing that such distortions mean the WTO should not grant China market economy status, a move that would severely weaken their trade defenses.
“We have been … reaching out to China to tell them they really must start playing by the rules,” Malmstrom told reporters.
The EU’s and Japan’s willingness to cooperate with the Trump administration comes despite disagreements over the role of the WTO and the future of multilateral trade deals.
Trump has expressed his preference for bilateral negotiations, and his trade rhetoric has cast a cloud over the WTO meeting.
Efforts on Tuesday to make progress on a ministerial statement from all 164 WTO members were unsuccessful, since one country could not agree on the language, WTO spokesman Keith Rockwell told reporters, declining to name that country.
U.S. officials last month blocked WTO efforts to draft a statement of unity over the “centrality” of the global trading system and the need to aid development.
A spokeswoman for the office of the U.S. trade representative could not be immediately reached for comment.
The Trump administration is considering several unilateral tariff actions on steel, aluminum and China’s intellectual property practices that are likely to draw disputes from WTO members.
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The African Export and Import Bank has pledged up to $1.5 billion in new loans and financial guarantees to Zimbabwe in a major boost for new President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government, the bank’s president and chairman said Tuesday.
Mnangagwa, who took over last month after veteran autocrat Robert Mugabe quit following a de facto military coup, has vowed to focus on reviving the struggling economy and provide jobs in a nation with an unemployment rate exceeding 80 percent.
Afreximbank was the only international lender that stood by Zimbabwe throughout Mugabe’s repressive 37-year rule, but its quick announcement of a fresh package of loans and guarantees appeared to be a vote of confidence in the new government.
Cairo-based Afreximbank was a major funder of Zimbabwe while the country was cut off from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank for having defaulted on its debt in 1999.
Bank president and chairman Okey Oramah told reporters after a meeting with Mnangagwa and senior government officials that Afreximbank would provide $150 million to local banks to help them pay for outstanding critical imports.
“We also discussed a number of other areas that involve additional investment from us for something that will be in the order of $1 billion to $1.5 billion that will include certain kinds of guarantees to encourage investors to come to Zimbabwe.
“We … want to make sure that we support the stabilization of the economy, that means providing liquidity to make sure that the situation where people are rushing every time to look for cash is dealt with,” Oramah said.
In August, before Mugabe’s ouster, Afreximbank provided $600 million to help Zimbabwe pay for imports and $300 million to allow it to print more “bond notes,” a quasi-currency that officially trades on par with the U.S. dollar.
Zimbabwe has a foreign debt of more than $7 billion and in September said it would not be able to pay $1.8 billion in arrears to the World Bank and African Development Bank until economic fundamentals improved.
The southern African nation, which dumped its hyperinflation-hit currency in 2009, is struggling with a severe dollar crunch that has seen banks fail to avail cash to customers while importers struggle to pay for imports.
Finance Minister Patrick Chinamasa promised in a budget speech last week to re-engage with international lenders, curb spending and attract investors to revive the economy.
On Tuesday, Chinamasa described Afreximbank as a “pillar of strength” and said the economy was “in for some very good times.”
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When U.S.-based scientist Christopher Cantrell heard President Donald Trump pull the United States out of the Paris climate accord, he did not imagine that six months later he would be shaking the French leader’s hand and starting anew in France.
Hours after Trump’s announcement in June, President Emmanuel Macron made a dramatic TV announcement in English, responding that he would not give up the fight against climate change and adding in a dig: “Make our planet great again.”
That later became the name of a research grant program sponsored by the French presidency to attract U.S.-based scientists — like Cantrell, 62, an expert in atmospheric chemistry at the University of Colorado Boulder.
“It was all over the news in the United States and on social media,” he told Reuters on the sidelines of a summit in Paris marking the Paris accord’s two year anniversary.
“I found out about a week ago that I was successful. This is going to be fun,” he said.
Moving for the funding
For Cantrell, the decision to move to France is not a political one, but a response to a gradual decline in public funds in his field, which he did not expect to get better under Trump.
“I’ve been disappointed with this whole administration, as to how they … view the world of science and policy-making,” Cantrell said.
“I wouldn’t say I’m coming to France to get away from the Trump administration, but it was an opportunity that wasn’t available in the United States,” he added.
Macron, who repeatedly tried to persuade the U.S. leader to reverse his decision, also sees an opportunity to raise the profile of French research institutes and attract top talent.
‘World-class’
Some 1,822 researchers applied for the program, the French presidency said, with almost two thirds of them coming from the United States.
Thirteen of the initial 18 grants awarded on Monday were given to U.S.-based scientists, including some from prominent Ivy League universities such as Princeton, Stanford and Harvard.
A second batch of grants will be awarded early next year.
Cantrell, who works on air quality and what happens to pollution when the atmosphere tries to process it, will be based at the University of Paris-Est in the suburb of Creteil. He will study the Paris plume — the cloud of pollution that regularly shrouds the French capital.
“This laboratory that I’m going to be associated with has world-class expertise, state-of-the-art computer models to simulate the atmosphere, so this place I’m going to is actually perfect for the kind of work I’m interested in,” he said.
Salary covered for five years
The 1.5-million-euro ($1.76-million) French grant means the constant hunt for funds to finance his research that was part of his daily life in the U.S. was now less of a concern.
“It’s been tough. Now I’ll be able to not have to worry about that part of it. My salary is covered for five years, I can focus on science,” he said.
He and his wife are now busy brushing up on their French.
“I came for a week to visit the lab, see the kind of things they did, I got to meet the staff, English works fine for all the people that work there,” he said.
A project in the Philippines that used debris to rebuild typhoon-ravaged houses and Californian homes providing year-round housing for migrant workers won one of the world’s most prestigious housing awards on Tuesday.
The development charity CARE used innovative techniques, such as teaching building skills to residents and using wreckage from destroyed homes, to rehouse more than 15,000 Filipino families devastated in 2013 by Typhoon Haiyan.
“This is the first time self-recovery has been used on such a large scale,” said David Ireland, director of British charity World Habitat, which co-hosts the World Habitat Awards together with the United Nations (U.N.) settlement program, UN-Habitat.
“It has helped more people, more quickly, than traditional disaster recovery programs. The potential of this approach to be used elsewhere is absolutely huge.”
The winners of the competition, which was established in 1985, received 10,000 pounds and opportunities to share their ideas around the world.
The second winner was Mutual Housing, a not-for-profit affordable housing developer in Yolo County in northern California, which built the first permanent year-round homes for seasonal fruit and vegetable pickers.
Tens of thousands of workers are brought in from Central America at harvest time to do low-wage jobs, often living in sub-standard houses in government-funded migrant centers.
“It has been a complete 180 degree turn since we’ve been living here,” said Saul Menses, who moved into one of Mutual Housing’s 62 apartments and houses in Spring Lake, some 60 miles (97 km) northeast of San Francisco, in 2015.
“For five years, we lived in an apartment there that was very cold and in poor condition. My wife had to board the windows up with tape and unclog the sink daily.”
The Spring Lake houses are the United States’ first certified zero-energy rental homes, meaning they consume less energy than they produce, using solar power, efficient lights and drought-resistant landscaping.
Seasonal work also disrupts family life for the estimated 6,000 migrants who come to Yolo County for the harvest, making it difficult for children to stay in one school. The new houses are less than 1 km from a secondary school and other services.
“Seasonal agricultural laborers are one of the most marginalized groups in the USA,” said World Habitat’s Ireland. “Mutual Housing California have managed to help a group not normally reached and proven that you don’t have to be a homeowner or on a high income to embrace green lifestyles.”
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President Donald Trump signed into law on Tuesday legislation that bans the use of Kaspersky Lab within the U.S. government, capping a months-long effort to purge the Moscow-based antivirus firm from federal agencies amid concerns it was vulnerable to Kremlin influence.
The ban, included as part of broader defense policy spending legislation that Trump signed, reinforces a directive issued by the Trump administration in September that civilian agencies remove Kaspersky Lab software within 90 days. The law applies to both civilian and military networks.
“The case against Kaspersky is well-documented and deeply concerning. This law is long overdue,” said Democratic Senator Jeanne Shaheen, who led calls in Congress to scrub the software from government computers. She added that the company’s software represented a “grave risk” to U.S. national security.
Kaspersky Lab has repeatedly denied that it has ties to any government and said it would not help a government with cyber espionage. In an attempt to address suspicions, the company said in October it would submit the source code of its software and future updates for inspection by independent parties.
U.S. officials have said that step, while welcomed, would not be sufficient.
In a statement on Tuesday, Kaspersky Lab said it continued to have “serious concerns” about the law “due to its geographic-specific approach to cybersecurity.”
It added that the company was assessing its options and would continue to “protect its customers from cyber threats (while) collaborating globally with the IT security community to fight cybercrime.”
On Tuesday, Christopher Krebs, a senior cyber security official at the Department of Homeland Security, told reporters that nearly all government agencies had fully removed Kaspersky products from their networks in compliance with the September order.
Kaspersky’ official response to the ban did not appear to contain any information that would change the administration’s assessment of Kaspersky Lab, Krebs said.
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India’s small farmers are better equipped than large landowners to deal with climate change, but need more support to find innovative ways to minimize the impacts of higher temperatures, uneven rainfall, floods and droughts, analysts said.
About 60 percent of India’s population of 1.3 billion depends on agriculture for a living. More than three quarters of farmers cultivate than 2 hectares (5 acres) of land each.
While the small size of the land holding is often seen as a challenge to raising incomes, it is an advantage when it comes to tackling extreme weather and rising temperatures, said Arindom Datta, Asia head of sustainability banking at Rabobank.
Mono cropping
“Large farmers tend to do mono cropping, which is far more vulnerable to climate change, and more difficult to change and adapt as the situation demands. Plus they need more water, another resource under threat from warmer weather,” he said.
“Small farmers are far more versatile; they usually plant multiple varieties of crops, so they are more flexible and better able to adjust and adapt,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised to double farmers’ incomes over the next five years, with reforms including better irrigation, crop insurance and higher prices for crops.
Size of land holdings drop
Poor prices for grains and cereal have led to mounting piles of debt for Indian farmers, triggering thousands of suicides every year. More than two-thirds of farmers who committed suicide were small and marginal farmers, data show.
The average size of land holdings in rural India has halved over the past two decades as land is passed down from father to son, and as more land is surrendered for development projects.
While a law caps the amount of land that can be owned by individual farmers, several states have introduced leasing laws to enable farmers to increase the land under cultivation.
Training for women farmers
But smaller land holdings are better suited if the government invests in training — particularly for women — on topics such as traditional grains such as millets, said Ishira Mehta, founder of CropConnect Enterprises, which links farmers to markets.
“With rising temperatures, we may not be able to grow basmati rice or wheat 20 years from now; we need to revive traditional grains that are more climate resilient,” she said.
“Women farmers in particular are more adaptable, more willing to learn about new harvest and marketing methods. But they cannot tackle the problem on their own.”
Farmers in the southern state of Tamil Nadu are already returning to indigenous varieties of rice and traditional seeds as the region suffers more frequent droughts.
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A major U.S. electronic retailer says it wants to help immigrant and underprivileged teens gain the technology skills they’ll need for the job market.
Best Buy, in partnership with a local nongovernmental organization known as the Brian Coyle Center, has opened a tech center in Minneapolis’ Cedar-Riverside area. The center provides after-school computer classes for teens in the area, many of whom come from East African immigrant families.
The company plans to open 60 such centers nationwide by 2020. Trish Walker, the president of service for Best Buy, said the aim is to train a million teens each year to help them be prepared for tech-related jobs.
“Here, teens can learn so many skills, from coding to web programming, music production, 3-D design, editing, fashion design, getting leadership skills, entrepreneurship, mentoring from others,” Walker said at the opening ceremony for the center. “Great stuff to be able to prepare the teens for workforce for the future. Eighty percent of the future [jobs] are tech-related.”
Hamza Nur is a Somali youth who spent four years learning at the first Minneapolis-area Best Buy tech center, where he learned how to digitally edit and draw.
“I learned so much, and am grateful,” Nur said at the ceremony. “I think this is a great idea that we can all learn from. I think the idea of tech center is pretty great one, because it lets all the youth of Cedar have a great experience with technology.”
Abdirahman Mukhtar, the youth program director at the Brian Coyle Center, says the center gives young people a positive outlet through which to channel their energy, and it helps to keep them away from drugs and gangs, which have been recurring problems in the area.
“The time of the program is after-school time, and it’s [then] that a youth has free time and can commit negative habits,” he told VOA’s Somali service.
Minneapolis is home to the United States’ largest communities of Somali and East African immigrants, most of whom came to the U.S. because of armed conflicts in their home countries.
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A new report finds permafrost in the Arctic is thawing faster than ever before.
The annual report card released Tuesday also finds water is warming and sea ice is melting at the fastest pace in 1,500 years at the top of the world.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says Earth’s northern region has entered a “new normal” for levels of warming.
And while Arctic temperatures this year weren’t record-breaking hot, scientists are still concerned.
Jeremy Mathis, head of NOAA’s Arctic research program, says the region is a different place than just a decade ago. He says a warming Arctic can cause problems like extreme weather that affects the rest of the world.
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Social media giant Facebook said on Tuesday it would start booking advertising revenue locally instead of re-routing it via its international headquarters in Dublin although the move is unlikely to result in it paying much more tax.
Corporate taxation has become a hot-button topic in the wake of revelations of tax avoidance schemes by multinationals which have led to calls for companies to pay more tax while Europe has begun exploring options for taxing digital giants.
Facebook Chief Financial Officer Dave Wehner said the company had decided to move to a local selling structure in countries where it has an office to support sales to local advertisers.
“In simple terms, this means that advertising revenue supported by our local teams will no longer be recorded by our international headquarters in Dublin, but will instead be recorded by our local company in that country,” Wehner said in a blog post.
Tuesday’s announcement follows Facebook’s April 2016 shift to recording revenues from its large U.K. sales customers in Britain which resulted in an increase in the tax it paid.
“We believe that moving to a local selling structure will provide more transparency to governments and policy makers around the world who have called for greater visibility over the revenue associated with locally-supported sales in their countries,” Wehner said.
The European Commission is working on legislative proposals, expected in March, to increase taxes on multinational digital companies, who are accused of paying too little in the EU by booking profits in low-tax countries where they have their EU headquarters, like Ireland and Luxembourg.
Among the options the EU executive is considering to raise taxes quickly on tech giants is a levy on revenues from advertising, according to an EU document published in September.
Other short-term options are a tax on turnovers of digital firms and a withholding tax on electronic transactions. Wehner said Facebook would implement the change throughout 2018 and aim to complete it by the first half of 2019.
Facebook’s recent experience in Britain suggests that the move will not lead to the company paying significantly more in tax.
Facebook reported a dramatic rise in revenues and profits reported in the UK for 2016 and had a 2.5 million pound ($3.34 million) tax bill against racking up tax credits in previous years.
However, while the change did lead to an increase in the tax it paid, Facebook still enjoyed a low effective tax rate.
That’s because, even with this measure, Facebook declares relatively little profit in Britain. It reported a profit margin of under 7 percent for 2016 in Britain, compared to a group wide margin of around 45 percent for the year.
Much of the profit linked to U.K. sales is reported elsewhere are a result of inter-group transactions worth hundreds of millions of pounds.
($1 = 0.7491 pounds)
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Digital currency exchange operators Coinbase and Bitfinex reported problems with service through their websites on Tuesday, frustrating traders seeking to cash in on the latest surge in the value of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
Wallet-provider Coinbase’s website showed “service unavailable” early on Tuesday U.S. time, flashing a message that said it was down for maintenance. Its exchange gdax.com was still quoting prices, although it also said it was experiencing a “minor service outage.”
Bitfinex, another cryptocurrency exchange, tweeted it was under heavy distributed denial of service (DDoS) and its application programming interface was down.
DDoS attacks have been common on the internet, using hijacked and virus-infected computers to target websites until they can no longer cope with the scale of data requested. It was not immediately clear if the two incidents were related to any cyberattacks.
Bitfinex last Thursday tweeted that it had been under significant denial of service attack for several days, and that the attack had recently worsened.
Bitcoin exchanges and wallets have a history of being hacked, and security experts say they become more vulnerable to cyber-crime as valuations rise.
There have been at least three dozen heists on exchanges that buy and sell digital currencies since 2011, including one that led to the 2014 collapse of Mt. Gox, once the world’s largest bitcoin market.
The latest attack came last Thursday, when a Slovenian cryptocurrency mining marketplace, NiceHash, said it lost about $64 million worth of bitcoin in a hack of its payment system.
Bitfinex did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reuters was unable to contact Coinbase since the website was down.
Reporting By Aparajita Saxena in Bengaluru; Editing by Martina. D’Couto and Patrick Graham.
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SpaceX has delayed its latest grocery run for the International Space Station for at least a day.
The company now aims to launch its first recycled rocket for NASA on Wednesday.
The unmanned Falcon originally flew in June. The Dragon capsule, meanwhile, made a space station shipment in 2015.
This will be the first launch in more than a year from this Florida pad, the scene of a rocket explosion in 2016. SpaceX says it needs more time for checks. Liftoff time is 11:24 a.m.
As before, SpaceX will attempt to land the first-stage booster back at Cape Canaveral. SpaceX chief Elon Musk is pushing to lower launch costs by reusing the most expensive rocket parts.
The Dragon holds nearly 5,000 pounds of supplies, including a barley experiment for Budweiser.
French President Emmanuel Macron has told more than 200 global investors and 50 world leaders in Paris the global community “is losing the battle” against climate change.
“It’s time to act and move faster and win this battle,” Macron said Tuesday at a summit to secure more funding to fight climate change.
Macron’s office announced a dozen initiatives designed to inject hundreds of millions of dollars in efforts to stem global warming, including the World Bank’s decision to stop financing oil and gas exploration and extraction after 2019.
Bid to cut emissions
A coalition of 237 companies, including banking giant HSBC and French insurer AXA, announced a five-year initiative called “Climate Action 100+” that aims to pressure 100 of the largest greenhouse gas producers to cut emissions.
An estimated 20 companies joined a global alliance of 26 nations that have committed to phase out coal. The plan by the “Powering Past Coal Alliance” calls for traditional coal power to be phased out by 2030 in wealthy countries and by 2050 in other parts of the world.
The summit comes two years after nearly 200 nations agreed to the Paris climate accord, which calls for nations to limit greenhouse gas emissions and for rich nations to help developing countries deal with the impacts of climate change.
U.S. President Donald Trump was not among those invited to take part in the conference. Last year, Trump announced he was pulling out of the accord, saying it “disadvantages the United States to the exclusive benefit of other countries.” The U.S. is now the only country in the world to have rejected the global climate agreement.
Kerry attends summit
While the U.S. federal government stepped back from the global effort, many of the country’s states and some cities have pledged to move forward with steps consistent with the agreement.
“We have 38 states that have renewable portfolio standard laws,” said former Secretary of State John Kerry, who is attending the summit. “We have 90 cities, the major cities in America, their mayors all committed to meeting Paris. So 80 percent of the population of America is in those 38 states that are committed, and we are going to stay on track.”
Scientists offered French grants
The European Union announced a new investment plan aimed at supporting renewable energy production, climate-friendly transportation, sustainable water and sanitation systems, as well as growth in sustainable agriculture.
The EU commissioner for climate action and energy, Miguel Arias Canete, also urged contributors to fulfill their commitments to provide $100 billion a year by 2020 to developing nations to help them utilize renewable energy sources instead of fossil fuels that boost carbon levels in the atmosphere.
Ahead of Tuesday’s summit, Macron awarded 18 scientists, including 13 from the United States, grants to relocate to France and carry out climate change research. He announced the initiative after Trump said the United States was withdrawing from the global accord, and the French leader played on Trump’s campaign slogan by naming his own program “Make Our Planet Great Again.”
“I refuse this double fatality, the one that says that there is this global warming that we can do nothing against and the one that says that this world is forced onto us and we cannot make profound changes,” Macron said. “But what you are showing here tonight, through your commitment, these projects that have been selected through your commitment on a daily basis is the exact opposite. We don’t want climate change and we want to produce and create jobs and do things differently if we decide so. There is no fatality.”
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China made an impressive display of its clout in the digital economy during a three-day internet conference in Beijing last week by pulling together the participation of U.N. agencies, the World Telecom Union and CEOs of major US based IT companies like Google, Apple and Cisco System.
The conference started with a message from Chinese president Xi Jinping who said, “China would never close its doors. They will only be open wider and wider going forward.”
But at the same time, Xi and Wang Huning, one of the ruling Communist Party’s seven most powerful men, emphasized the need for “cyber sovereignty,” which allows individual countries to establish cyber boundaries to protect their respective sovereign interests.
Xi said that besides benefits, “the internet has also brought many new challenges to the sovereignty, security and development interests of nations across the world.”
The Cyber Administration of China, which organized the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen city, was trying to obtain public confirmation about its Internet policies. This was also the first time the annual conference, which started in 2014, had attracted a high-profile attendance from heads of major international companies and agencies.
Analysts are skeptical the conference helped to boost China’s quest to influence rulemaking in the digital world. Many have noted that none of the foreign speakers specifically referred to Internet controls in China, which include bans on U.S. based services like Google, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
“I certainly don’t see (this) as China’s role as a rule setting has expanded. The regulatory bodies and standards actually usually doesn’t apply to China,” Jacob Cooke, CEO of consulting firm, Web Presence in China told VOA. “There is actually a noticeable lack of Chinese presence… And, likewise here there is no international presence in terms of regulatory body or rules and regulations.”
Apple’s challenge
Apple recently removed hundreds of apps from its app store in China to adhere to the Chinese great firewall of censorship. Apple CEO Tim Cook did not mention that at the conference but said Apple shared the same vision with China on open Internet.
“The theme of this conference—developing a digital economy for openness and shared benefits—is a vision we at Apple share,” Cook said adding, “We are proud to have worked alongside many of our partners in China to help build a community that will join a common future in cyberspace.”
But in the wake of Apple’s decisions to remove APPS and similar moves, questions have surfaced about whether American CEOs are indirectly endorsing China’s censorship methods in their eagerness to obtain a larger slice of the country’s lucrative market.
Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy specifically targeted the Apple chief for failing to promote freedom of expression. “Apple is clearly a force for good in China, but I also believe it and other tech companies must continue to push back on Chinese suppression of free expression,” Leahy said.
Cook responded with a statement saying, “Each country in the world decides their laws and their regulations, and so your choice is do you participate or stand on the sideline and yell at how things should be…. And my own view, very strongly, is that you show up and you participate, you go in the arena. Because nothing changes from sideline.”
Cooke of Web Presence in China agrees, adding that such questions are not Apple’s responsibility.
“If you want do to business in a country you got to obey rules and laws of that country. That’s with any business. I mean it is not up to you to criticize or change the laws that serve the politicians,” Cooke said.
Robert Elliot Kahn, regarded by many as father of the Internet for co-inventing Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP) views the controversy over China’s internet restrictions in a somewhat different light.
“Governments are going to impose their own rules and regulations; that’s the way the world works,” he told VOA on the sidelines of the conference. “But if we can make it easier for people to build better products and services, to get more services to the public and is supported by people and governments around the world, I think that’s progress for humanity.”
Seeking business
It was apparent from the meeting that western businessmen, including Cook and Google CEO Sudar Pichai, were doing what they can to expand in the Chinese market. Although Google’s browser and Gmail is banned in China and the company left China more than seven years ago, Bloomberg recently reported that the company was making a comeback investing artificial intelligence.
“A lot of work Google does is to help Chinese companies. Many small and medium-sized businesses in China take advantage of Google to get their products to many other countries outside of China,” Pichai said.
Cook pointed out that Apple’s app store has helped give China’s 1.8 million developers total earnings worth $16.9 billion, which is the highest earned by developers in any country.
In a quote widely used in state media Cook said, “many people see China as a big market, but for us the main attraction is the quality of the people.”
But in the end, analysts note that China’s influence remains limited to the extent of the market it can offer to foreign companies and this is limited by the fact that several giant Chinese companies are jostling to fill every inch of the space.
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Medical marijuana has been used to treat epilepsy in patients for years, and this month, U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said it should be studied and treated like other pain relief drugs. A growing body of scientific evidence is leading the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to do that. Meanwhile, researchers at Colorado State University are examining the benefits of cannabidiol, a non-psychoactive byproduct of marijuana, for treating dogs with epilepsy and arthritis. Faith Lapidus reports.
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Scientists have for the first time fixed a protein defect that causes Huntington’s disease by injecting a drug from Ionis Pharmaceuticals into the spine, offering new hope for patients with the devastating genetic disease.
The success in the early-stage clinical trial has prompted Roche to exercise its option to license the product, called IONIS-HTT(Rx), at a cost of $45 million.
Lead researcher Sarah Tabrizi, professor of clinical neurology at University College London, said the ability of the drug to tackle the underlying cause of Huntington’s by lowering levels of a toxic protein was “groundbreaking.”
“The key now is to move quickly to a larger trial to test whether IONIS-HTT(Rx) slows disease progression,” she said in a statement Monday.
Ionis senior vice president of research Frank Bennett said the protein reductions observed in the study “substantially exceeded our expectations” and that the drug was also well tolerated.
However, experts cautioned that the results were still early and the ability of the new medicine to improve clinical outcomes for patients had yet to be demonstrated.
“The question is whether this is enough to make a difference to patients and their clinical course, and for that we will have to wait for bigger trials,” said Roger Barker of the University of Cambridge, who was also involved in the research.
Huntington’s is a progressive neurodegenerative disease affecting mental abilities and physical control that normally hits sufferers between the ages of 30 and 50 years before continually worsening over a 10- to 25-year period.
There is currently no effective disease-modifying treatment for the condition, with existing medicines focused only on managing disease symptoms.
Ionis said Roche would now be responsible for all IONIS-HTT(Rx) development, regulatory and commercialization activities and costs.
The drug uses an approach called antisense to stop a gene producing a particular protein. The technique has already led to a drug for spinal muscular atrophy that was approved last year.
Shares in Ionis rose around 2 percent in early Nasdaq trade as did those in Wave Life Sciences, which is also working on antisense medicine.
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Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Monday he is making a second emergency move to keep the government from going above the debt limit while awaiting congressional action to raise the threshold.
In a letter to congressional leaders, Mnuchin said he will not be able to fully invest in a large civil service retirement and disability fund. Skipped investments will be restored once the debt limit has been raised, he said.
In September, Congress agreed to suspend the debt limit, allowing the government to borrow as much as it needed. But that suspension ended Friday.
The government said the debt subject to limit stood at $20.46 trillion on Friday. Mnuchin has said he will employ various “extraordinary measures” to buy time until Congress raises the limit.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated in a recent report that Mnuchin has enough maneuvering room to stay under the limit until late March or early April.
If Congress has not acted before Mnuchin has exhausted his bookkeeping maneuvers, the government would be unable to borrow the money it needs to meet its day-to-day obligations, including sending out Social Security and other benefit checks and making interest payments on the national debt.
In August 2011, a standoff between Congress and the Obama administration over raising the borrowing limit came down to the wire and prompted the Standard & Poor’s credit rating agency to impose the first-ever downgrade of the government’s credit rating.
Raising the debt limit is a separate issue from the need for Congress to pass a spending bill to cover government operations. A failure to pass a spending bill triggers a partial government shutdown but does not carry the potential catastrophic market disruptions that a failure to raise the debt limit poses.
In his new letter, Mnuchin said, “I respectfully urge Congress to protect the full faith and credit of the United States by acting to increase the statutory debt limit as soon as possible.”
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear an appeal by a Georgia security guard who said she was harassed and forced from her job because she is a lesbian, avoiding an opportunity to decide whether a federal law that bans gender-based bias also outlaws discrimination based on sexual orientation.
The justices left in place a lower court ruling against Jameka Evans, who had argued that workplace sexual orientation discrimination violates Title VII of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Workplace protections are a major source of concern for advocates of rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.
Gregory Nevins, an attorney at Lambda Legal, an LGBT legal advocacy group representing Evans, said it was unfortunate the court turned away the case. Lambda Legal had cited language in the Supreme Court’s landmark 2015 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide to support their argument.
“The vast majority of Americans believe that LGBT people should be treated equally in the workplace,” Nevins said.
The case hinged on an argument currently being litigated in different parts of the United States: whether Title VII, which bans employment discrimination based on sex, also outlaws bias based on sexual orientation. Title VII also bars employment discrimination based on race, color, religion and national origin.
Lower courts are divided over the issue, making it likely the Supreme Court eventually will hear a similar case. In April, a Chicago-based federal appeals court found that Title VII does forbid job discrimination based on sexual orientation.
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an independent federal agency that enforces Title VII, had argued since 2012, during Democratic former President Barack Obama’s administration, that bias against gay workers violates that law.
In July, Republican President Donald Trump’s administration argued the opposite in a separate case before a New York federal appeals court.
Evans in 2015 sued Georgia Regional Hospital at Savannah, a psychiatric facility, and several of its officials.
She alleged that while she worked there from 2012 to 2013, her supervisor tried to force her to quit because she wore a male uniform and did not conform to female gender stereotypes.
She said the supervisor asked questions about her relationships, promoted a junior employee above her, and slammed a door into her body.
In March, the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the hospital, saying only the Supreme Court can declare that Title VII’s protections cover gay workers.
On Monday, a spokeswoman for Georgia’s attorney general, whose office represented the defendants, had no immediate comment.
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Free-trade talks between the European Union and South American trade bloc Mercosur still face hurdles over beef and ethanol, and an expected deal announcement this week might not happen, officials involved in negotiations said on Monday.
Mercosur diplomats involved in the talks on the sidelines of the World Trade Organization minister’s meeting in Buenos Aires said EU officials had not presented improved offers on EU tariff-free imports of South American beef and ethanol as promised.
“Basically, they want us to show our cards before they show theirs,” a senior diplomat from a Mercosur country told Reuters, asking not to be named due to the sensitive stage of the negotiations.
Resistance by some EU member states to agricultural imports, such as Ireland and France, has delayed negotiation of the free trade agreement with Mercosur that seeks to liberalize trade and investment, services and access to public procurement.
Brazilian President Michel Temer, speaking to reporters after attending the opening of the WTO meeting on Sunday, said an announcement of the framework political agreement for the
EU-Mercosur deal might have to wait until Dec. 21, when the bloc’s presidents meet in Brasilia.
A spokeswoman for the Argentine Foreign Ministry said agreement on the conclusion of the negotiations that have gone on for almost two decades could still be reached by Wednesday in Buenos Aires or, if not, next week in Brazil.
Besides disagreement over the tonnage of beef that EU countries would allow in each year free of tariffs, EU diplomats have said rules of origin still have to be included in the provisional political accord.
Brazil has said that can be worked out in the coming months before a final agreement is signed sometime in mid-2018. Brazil’s foreign ministry played down the hurdles to a deal.
“There is very little left to negotiate and they are not fundamental issues,” said an official, who requested anonymity. “There will be a deal and it will be announced when it is struck, here or in Brasilia.”
Mercosur members Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay are pushing for an improvement on the EU offer of tariff-free imports for 70,000 tons a year of beef and 600,000 tons of ethanol a year.
They complain that it is lower than the 100,000-tons beef offer the EU made in 2004, though EU negotiators say Europeans eat less meat today.
The Irish Farmers Association has called the deal “toxic” and opposes any increase.
The European Union’s top five economies are warning the United States that its massive tax overhaul could violate some of its international obligations and risks having “a major distortive impact” on trade.
In a letter to U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin, the finance ministers of Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Spain wrote they had “significant concerns” about three tax initiatives in particular.
In the letter, seen by The Associated Press, the five wrote that “it is important that the U.S. government’s rights over domestic tax policy be exercised in a way that adheres with international obligations to which it has signed-up.”
EU nations have been warily eyeing President Donald Trump’s domestic tax proposals as they made their way through Congress and have long expressed fears they might hurt world trade and EU companies in particular.
“The inclusion of certain less conventional international tax provisions could contravene the U.S.’s double taxation treaties and may risk having a major distortive impact on international trade,” the five wrote.
They specifically targeted the so-called Base Erosion and Anti-abuse Tax (or BEAT) Senate bill. This measure aims to combat what is called base erosion and profit shifting, the practice by some multinationals to avoid tax by exploiting mismatches in countries’ tax rules to artificially report their profits in countries with low or no taxes.
The finance ministers lauded the measure’s aim to ensure companies pay their fair share in taxes to the U.S. But they said that under the current plans, the measures would also hurt genuine commercial deals. In the financial sector in particular, “the provision appears to have the potential of being extremely harmful for international banking and insurance business.”
They said it “may lead to significant tax charges and may harmfully distort international financial markets.”
The EU’s 28 finance ministers had already expressed concern about the U.S. plans during a meeting last week, but now its five biggest economies have gone ahead with their own warning.
In Washington, Republicans are upbeat about finalizing the tax bill from the House and Senate versions for Trump’s first major legislative accomplishment in nearly 11 months in office.
Trump has set a Christmas deadline for signing the bill into law, giving lawmakers named to a special conference committee two weeks to iron out major differences in the House and Senate versions of the legislation. The conference committee has scheduled its first formal meeting for Wednesday.
Both measures would cut taxes by about $1.5 trillion over the next decade while adding billions to the $20 trillion deficit, combining steep tax cuts for corporations with more modest reductions for most individuals. Together, the changes would amount to the biggest overhaul of the U.S. tax system in 30 years, touching every corner of society.
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Emmanuel Macron plans to award multi-year grants for several U.S.-based scientists to relocate to France, his office said on Monday on the eve of a climate summit hosted by the president to raise finances to counter global warming.
Macron unveiled the “Make our Planet Great Again” grants after President Donald Trump in June said he was pulling the United States out of an international accord to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that was brokered in Paris in 2015.
Macron repeatedly tried to persuade the U.S. leader to reverse his decision. In a statement, the Elysee Palace said 13 of the initial 18 grants would be awarded to scientists based in the United States. Macron will make a detailed announcement later on Monday evening.
At Tuesday’s summit, Macron will urge wealthy nations to increase climate financing and urge investors to turn their backs on polluters in a bid to accelerate efforts to combat global warming.
French state-controlled utility EDF on Monday said it would invest 25 billion euros to develop 30 gigawatt of solar capacity in France between 2020 an 2035. Daily Newspaper Les Echos quoted the chief executive of Engie, Isabelle Kocher, as saying her company would invest one billion euros to improve the energy efficiency of buildings.
Separately, nine European energy companies including EDF, Italy’s Enel, Spain’s Iberdrola and Britain’s SSE said they would include green bonds in their financing policies.
Developing nations say that the rich are not on track with a broader commitment in the Paris accord for wealthy economies to provide $100 billion a year by 2020 – from public and private sources alike — to help developing countries switch from fossil fuels to greener energy sources and adapt to the effects of climate change.
Oxfam estimated that there was only between $4-$8 billion available for adaptation and that recent estimates showed the cost of helping emerging nations deal with rising sea levels, droughts, flooding and other effects of global warming could add up to $140 to 300 billion per year by 2030.
“Right now, the world’s poorest people are getting only a tiny fraction of the help they desperately need to survive,” Oxfam said in a statement.
“This year’s barrage of climate disasters showed that poor communities are often completely unprepared to deal with extreme weather.”
($1 = 0.8487 euros)
Reporting by Jean-Baptiste Vey; writing by Richard Lough; editing by John Irish and William Maclean
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Celebrity chef Mario Batali said on Monday that he has stepped away from his restaurant company and ABC said it asked him to step aside as co-host of a daytime food and talk show after he was accused of sexual harassment in a report by an online food trade publication.
Eater New York reported that four women, who were not identified, accused Batali of touching them inappropriately in a pattern of behavior that spanned at least two decades. Three worked for the chef during their careers, according to Eater New York.
Batali said in a statement emailed by his representative Risa Heller, “I apologize to the people I have mistreated and hurt. Although the identities of most of the individuals mentioned in these stories have not been revealed to me, much of the behavior described does, in fact, match up with ways I have acted.”
“That behavior was wrong and there are no excuses,” he said.
“I take full responsibility and am deeply sorry for any pain, humiliation or discomfort I have caused.”
Reuters could not independently confirm the accusations.
Batali said in the statement that he was stepping away from day-to-day operations of his businesses as he works to regain people’s trust and respect.
Batali’s reputation as a master of seasonal Italian food turned him into a restaurant executive, television star, cookbook author and one of the world’s most recognizable chefs.
He premiered on Food Network in 1997 on the show “Molto Mario” and in 2011 helped launch “The Chew” on ABC.
B&B Hospitality Group, which services about 24 restaurants owned by Batali and other chefs, said in an emailed statement that it takes such accusations seriously.
“We have had systematic policies and training about sexual harassment for over 10 years, including a detailed procedure for employees to report complaints to senior management,” B&B Hospitality Group said. “All members of management have participated in these trainings, including Mr. Batali.”
“Mr. Batali and we have agreed that he will step away from the company’s operations, including the restaurants, and he has already done so,” the company said in the statement.
The ABC Television Network, a unit of Walt Disney, said in a statement, “We have asked Mario Batali to step away from The Chew while we review the allegations that have just recently come to our attention.”
“ABC takes matters like this very seriously as we are committed to a safe work environment. While we are unaware of any type of inappropriate behavior involving him and anyone affiliated with the show, we will swiftly address any alleged violations of our standards of conduct.”
Food Network said in an emailed statement that it was suspending plans to relaunch “Molto Mario” in light of the accusations.
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Space Age hand-me-downs are soaring to a whole new level.
On Tuesday, SpaceX plans to launch its first rocket for NASA. The unmanned Falcon 9 — last used in June — will carry up a Dragon capsule that’s also flown on a previous space station supply run.
NASA’s International Space Station manager, Kirk Shireman, says the risk of launching a recycled rocket is about the same as for a brand new one. He says he’ll be just as anxious as he always is at every launch.
As before, the first-stage booster will attempt to land back at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
This will be the first launch in more than a year from Launch Complex 40. The pad was ruined when a SpaceX rocket exploded during testing in September 2016.
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