Mammography has been a standard screening device for breast cancer since the mid-1970s. And the practice is crediting with a 30 percent decline in death due to early detection and treatment. Now, many doctors are urging women to get a 3-D mammogram, which produces a more detailed view of the breast. But there has not been a large-scale study to determine if the technology actually provides a better outcome… until now. Faith Lapidus reports.
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Month: December 2017
Net neutrality is a simple concept but a dense and often technical issue that has been argued over for years in tech and telecom circles. Now everyday folks are talking about it.
That’s because the Federal Communications Commission has scheduled a vote next week to gut Obama-era rules meant to stop broadband companies such as Comcast, AT&T and Verizon from exercising more control over what people watch and see on the internet. The protests aren’t likely to stop the agency’s vote on Thursday, but activists hope the outcry will push Congress to intervene and will show support for stricter regulation down the road.
Net neutrality has been a hot button before, thanks to assists from Silicon Valley and TV host John Oliver speaking out about what they see as threats to the internet. More Hollywood celebrities have been joining the cry against the agency’s direction.
“Long live cute dog videos on YouTube! #RIPinternet. Share what you loved about The Internet,” actor Mark Ruffalo tweeted as he urged people to push Congress to intervene. Big-time Hollywood producer Shonda Rhimes tweeted a link to a story about saving net-neutrality on her lifestyle website.
Net-neutrality rules bar cable and phone companies from favoring certain websites and apps — such as their own services — and give the FCC more oversight over privacy and the activities of telecom companies. Supporters worry that repealing them would hurt startups and other companies that couldn’t afford to pay a broadband company for faster access to customers.
Critics of the rules say that they hurt investment in internet infrastructure and represent too much government involvement in business. Phone and cable companies say the rules aren’t necessary because they already support an open internet.
While libertarian and conservative think tanks and telecom trade groups have spoken up against net neutrality, everyday people have been vocal in protesting the rules’ repeal.
Since the FCC announced just before Thanksgiving that it was planning to gut the rules, there have been about 750,000 calls to Congress made through Battle for the Net, a website run by groups that advocate for net neutrality. By contrast, there were fewer than 30,000 calls in the first two weeks of November. While Congress doesn’t need to approve FCC decisions, it can overrule the agency by passing a law.
Net neutrality also has triggered discussions all over social media, even in groups that typically do not discuss tech policy. In one Facebook group about leggings seller LuLaRoe, one woman’s lament about the repeal triggered more than 270 responses. They included questions about what net neutrality was, links to explanations and statements of support. The discussion sprawled into the next day.
Meanwhile, net-neutrality supporters protested outside 700 Verizon stores Thursday, said Tim Karr, senior director of strategy for Free Press, an advocacy group involved in Battle for the Net. In midtown Manhattan, some 350 people came to chant slogans and wave signs.
“Access to a free and fair internet is necessary for a functioning democracy,” said Lauren Gruber, a writer for a branding agency who joined the New York protest. If the net-neutrality rules are repealed, she said, “it’s just another showcase of oligarchy upon America.”
Most people don’t follow what federal agencies like the FCC are doing, even though decisions can have a lot of impact on people’s lives, said Beth Leech, political science professor at Rutgers University. Having celebrities speak out can help spark people’s interest, she said.
“Protests that draw average people out into the streets across the country are relatively rare,” she said. “It’s the rarity that gives them some of their power.”
The liberal organization MoveOn is urging Americans to speak up for net neutrality. Democratic senators have called for a delay in next Thursday’s vote, while Democratic FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel urged backers to “make a ruckus.” Some Democrats are hoping that the gutting of Obama-era net neutrality rules will become a campaign rallying cry in 2018 and beyond.
“Net neutrality has the potential to motivate young and progressive voters to turn out,” said Tyler Law, spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which tries to get Democrats elected to the House.
“There will be a political price to pay for those who are on the wrong side of this issue, because net neutrality’s time as a campaign issue has arrived,” Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., a longtime net neutrality supporter, said on a call with reporters Wednesday.
Republican campaign officials didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
The FCC’s commenting system has logged 23 million comments, compared with roughly 4 million for the last blockbuster issue — when the agency approved the net-neutrality rules in 2015. An August study by a data firm backed by the telecom industry found that 60 percent of the comments made this year supported keeping the 2015 rules.
But the commenting system has been messy. The FCC says millions of comments used temporary email accounts from fakemailgenerator.com, hundreds of thousands of comments came from one address in Russia and many comments were duplicates.
Some net-neutrality supporters have become intensely personal in their advocacy. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and his staff have called out ugly and racist tweets and death threats. Pai also said activists came to his home to post signs that referenced his children. One man was charged in November with threatening to kill U.S. Rep. John Katko and his family if the New York Republican didn’t support net neutrality.
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Rising seas driven by climate change are threatening coastal cities around the world. The Southern U.S. city of Miami is already feeling the effects. Every autumn, when tides are at their highest, residents contend with flooded streets. Now, scientists are turning citizens into scientists to help them understand the impacts. VOA’s Steve Baragona spent time with volunteers splashing in puddles for science.
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Bangladesh’s central bank has asked the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to join a lawsuit it plans to file against a Philippines bank for its role in one of the world’s biggest cyber-heists, several sources said.
The Fed has yet to respond formally, but there is no indication it would join the suit.
Unidentified hackers stole $81 million from Bangladesh Bank’s account at the New York Fed in February last year, using fraudulent orders on the SWIFT payments system. The money was sent to accounts at Manila-based Rizal Commercial Banking Corp and then disappeared into the casino industry in the Philippines.
Nearly two years later, there is no word on who was responsible, and Bangladesh Bank has been able to retrieve only about $15 million, mostly from a Manila junket operator.
Legal action discussed
Officials from Bangladesh Bank and the New York Fed spoke about legal action against RCBC in a conference call last month that was also attended by two representatives from SWIFT, according to three sources in Dhaka who had direct knowledge of the conversations.
It was agreed that Bangladesh Bank would send a proposal on the suit to the New York Fed, they said.
“The aim is to file a case by March-April in New York,” said one of the sources. “Work is on. Bangladesh Bank is likely to send something to the Fed soon.”
The source said the idea was it would be a civil suit to recover the money, and that Bangladesh hoped the Fed and SWIFT would be joint petitioners.
Subhankar Saha, a spokesman for Bangladesh Bank, said he had no knowledge of any plans to sue RCBC but that “efforts are on to recover the entire stolen money.”
The New York Fed and SWIFT declined comment.
A source familiar with the New York Fed’s thinking confirmed that Bangladesh Bank’s external counsel raised the idea of filing a suit against RCBC in the call.
The New York Fed officials agreed to review any proposal Bangladesh Bank wrote up, but they did not formally agree to a joint effort, and have not since worked on it nor heard from Bangladesh Bank, the source said.
Rogue employees
RCBC has blamed rogue employees, and Philippine prosecutors have filed money-laundering charges against a former RCBC bank manager and four people who owned the bank accounts where the funds were sent, but are not identifiable because the accounts were in fake names. They are the only people to be formally cited in association with the crime.
Bangladeshi officials have cited internal RCBC documents, also seen by Reuters, to assert that the Filipino bank ignored suspicions raised by some RCBC officials when the money was first remitted to the accounts on Feb. 5, 2016, and then delayed acting on requests from RCBC’s head office to freeze the funds on Feb. 9.
RCBC did not respond to requests for comment. But it has said in the past that it would not pay any compensation and that Bangladesh Bank bore responsibility for the theft since it was negligent.
RCBC was fined a record 1 billion Philippine pesos ($20 million) by the country’s central bank last year for its failure to prevent the movement of the stolen money through it.
Separately, a Bangladesh court has sent letters rogatory to the United States seeking the findings of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) into the case, said the main police investigator in Dhaka. Letters rogatory are documents used to obtain judicial assistance from foreign courts.
“We have questions for the Federal Reserve Bank, we want to collect the FBI report, what their findings are,” Molla Nazrul Islam, a special superintendent of police in Bangladesh, told Reuters this week.
An FBI spokeswoman said the agency could not comment on ongoing cases.
A hacking group called Lazarus that is believed to have connections to North Korea has been linked to the Bangladesh cyberheist, and some U.S. officials said earlier this year that prosecutors were building a case against Pyongyang. But no case has yet been filed.
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Mammography has been a standard screening device for breast cancer since the mid-1970s. And the practice is credited with a 30 percent decline in death, thanks to early detection and treatment.
Now, many doctors are urging women to get a 3-D mammogram, which produces a more detailed view of the breast. But there has not been a large-scale study to determine if the technology actually provides a better outcome — until now.
Women older than 50 are advised to get a mammogram every year or two to screen for breast cancer, the second leading cause of cancer deaths among women.
Comparing mammograms
A new study funded by the National Cancer Institute will compare traditional mammograms with the 3-D version to determine if the newer, often pricier choice really improves early detection of tumors.
“It’s a new technology that has been FDA approved,” said Dr. Tova Koenigsberg of Montefiore Health Systems in New York. “But we don’t actually have studies that know whether in a large population 3-D actually helps.”
Koenigsberg heads the project at Montefiore Einstein Center for Cancer Care, one of about 100 clinics participating in the five-year study. The clinics, spread across the United States, and a few in Canada, will soon enroll healthy women ages 45 to 74 who are planning to get a routine mammogram, including Sabitri Jaipersaud.
After a doctor found what turned out to be a benign abnormality in her breast, she became diligent about annual mammograms and felt joining the study was important.
“It immediately piqued my interest because I feel that all, all of us can benefit from this and for the future,” Jaipersaud said.
The women in the study will be randomly assigned to get either the regular mammogram or the 3-D version for five years. Most will be screened annually but post-menopausal women who don’t have certain cancer risk factors will be screened every other year.
A traditional mammogram takes an X-ray of the breast from top to bottom and side-to-side.
“In a 3-D mammogram,” Koenigsberg said, “the camera actually sweeps at an angle and allows us to see the breast at different angles and projections.”
Known pros, cons
Doctors know that there are pros and cons to 3-D mammography, said Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society.
“It might find disease that we need to find that two-dimensional does not,” Brawley said. “There’re potential cons in that it has a higher cost, higher amount of radiation, given every dose, every time a person has a test, as well as it may find a higher number of false positives.”
As for what type to choose, some insurers, including Medicare, cover the 3-D version, and a small number of states mandate coverage. Other insurers may require women to pay $50 to $100 more out of pocket.
After collecting the result of every scan, biopsy and cancer at the end of the study, researchers hope to provide certainty about how often women should get mammograms, and which women would benefit most from which type.
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Detecting cancer early can make all the difference in beating the disease. That is why a new test created by Polish doctors could be so important to women suffering from ovarian cancer. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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A Congolese fashion designer is promoting safe sex with a collection of clothes made of condoms that she hopes will help combat HIV/AIDS in the central African country.
Felicite Luwungu started making her condom line, which includes strapless evening gowns and tops, after the HIV/AIDS epidemic hit close to home.
“I have lost loved ones to HIV – that’s what inspired me to do this,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from the capital, Kinshasa. “The message that I hope people will apply is to be prudent.”
The number of people living with HIV/AIDS and dying from related infections in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been falling for more than a decade, according to the United Nations.
The prevalence rate of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is about 0.7 percent, among the lowest in southern and central Africa, UNAIDS data shows.
Luwungu, 40, displays her work in runway shows and exhibitions. When she finishes the condom collection, she plans to present it at a large fashion show next year.
The designs have shocked audiences but responses have been mostly positive, Luwungu said.
“People make jokes but it doesn’t discourage me,” she said. “That only pushes me to do this more.”
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Ford Motor Co will begin testing its latest self-driving vehicle technology next year in at least one city but has not changed its plan to begin commercial production until 2021, the company said.
The automaker said on Thursday that it would test self-driving prototypes in various pilot programs with partners such as Lyft, the ride services company in which rival General Motors owns a minority stake, and Domino’s Pizza. However, Ford has still not decided whether to operate its own on-demand transportation service.
New business models
In a blog post, Jim Farley, president of global markets, said Ford also would test new business models that involve its self-driving vehicles, including the movement of people and goods.
GM unveiled plans last week to introduce its own on-demand ride-sharing service in several U.S. cities in 2019, using self-driving versions of the battery-powered Chevrolet Bolt.
Ford is shifting production of a future battery electric vehicle to Mexico to free up capacity at its Flat Rock, Michigan, plant to build the self-driving vehicles in 2021, according to spokesman Alan Hall.
The electric vehicle, whose more-advanced battery system will enable a driving range of more than 300 miles, will go into production in 2020 at Ford’s Cuatitlan plant, which suppliers say will also build a new hybrid crossover vehicle around the same time.
Adding 850 jobs
At the Flat Rock plant, Ford is boosting investment to $900 million from $700 million and adding 850 jobs.
Both the 2020 electric and the 2021 self-driving vehicles will draw on the next-generation Ford Focus for some of their underbody structure and components while using different propulsion systems.
Unlike the full electric vehicle from Cuatitlan, the self-driving vehicle from Flat Rock will use a hybrid system with a gasoline engine and an electric motor, Hall said.
Since 2016, the Ethiopian government has targeted dissidents and journalists in nearly two dozen countries with spyware provided by an Israeli software company, according to a new report from Citizen Lab, a research and development group at the University of Toronto.
Once their computers are infected, victims of the attack can be monitored covertly whenever they browse the web, the report says.
Based on an in-depth analysis of the methods used to trick victims into installing the software, Citizen Lab concluded that “agencies of the Ethiopian government” deployed the spyware to target individuals critical of their policies.
More than 40 devices in 20 countries were infected, according to Citizen Lab’s research. It’s unknown how many individuals might have been targeted.
Full access
Citizen Lab’s report found that attackers used email to target dissidents, outspoken critics and perceived enemies by impersonating legitimate websites and software companies. In some cases, they sent messages about events related to Ethiopian politics, with links purporting to show related videos.
Those links led to web pages that prompted victims to update their Flash Players or download “Adobe PdfWriter,” fictitious software that, in fact, led to CutePDF Writer, a tool to create PDF files.
The attackers embedded the spyware in bona fide programs by exploiting security vulnerabilities, creating the impression that recipients were installing legitimate software and coaxing them to provide the administrator-level permissions needed to activate the surveillance. Once installed, the spyware spread to additional files tied to web browsers, making the software difficult to remove and nearly always active.
Any activity on an infected computer can be monitored, and information from web searches, emails and Skype contact lists can be extracted. A remote operator can take screenshots and record audio and video from a connected webcam.
Based on information provided by WiFi networks, attackers can also track the physical location of the infected device.
“Once the government has that information, they can do things like hijacking your email account,” said Bill Marczak, a senior research fellow at Citizen Lab and lead author of the new report.
“So, they’ll sign into your email account and then use your account to target your friends and basically expand the number of targets they have,” Marczak told VOA.
Eritrean, Ethiopian dissidents among those targeted
In October 2016, the Ethiopian government declared a nearly year-long state of emergency following months of protests that spread across the country.
Those protests — and a subsequent government crackdown that resulted in more than 800 deaths, according to a 2016 report by Amnesty International — were monitored by diaspora media groups, including the Oromia Media Network.
OMN’s executive director, Jawar Mohammed, was a confirmed target of the recently uncovered spyware attack.
“The pattern seems to be that they were very interested in what these Oromo activists and journalists were saying, how they were working, and perhaps even whom they were talking to back in Ethiopia,” Marczak said.
The Citizen Lab report also found seven infections in Ethiopia’s neighbor and longtime rival, Eritrea, most of whom were targets with ties to Eritrean government agencies and businesses.
According to Human Rights Watch, this is at least the third spyware vendor since 2013 that Ethiopia has used to target dissidents, journalists and activists.
Ethiopia previously used Remote Control System spyware from HackingTeam, an Italian company, to target journalists based in the United States, Citizen Lab said. It said Ethiopia also targeted dissidents using FinSpy spyware by FinFisher, a company based in Munich, Germany.
Citizen Lab’s analysis produced an unusual level of detail about the program due to the discovery of a publicly available log file with in-depth data about both the attackers and targets. After analyzing that file, Citizen Lab concluded “that the spyware’s operators are inside Ethiopia, and that victims also include various Eritrean companies and government agencies.”
Since the Israel-based spyware manufacturer was only authorized to sell their software to intelligence and law enforcement agencies, Citizen Lab concluded that the Ethiopian government was behind the attacks.
Israeli security firm
The group behind the spyware, Cyberbit, is a subsidiary of Elbit Systems, a $3 billion company that trades on the NASDAQ. Cyberbit describes itself as “a team of cybersecurity experts, who know firsthand what it means to protect high-risk organizations and manage complex incidents.”
The spyware used in the attacks uncovered by Citizen Lab is called PC Surveillance System (PSS). Cyberbit no longer lists PSS on its website, but marketing materials from 2015 describe the software as “a comprehensive solution for monitoring and extracting information from remote PCs.”
Key features touted by Cyberbit include covert operation, the ability to bypass encryption and the ability to target devices anywhere in the world. Cyberbit marketed the product to intelligence organizations and law enforcement agencies.
Citizen Lab also determined that Cyberbit representatives contacted Zambia’s Financial Intelligence Center and potential clients in Rwanda and Nigeria.
Spying with impunity
Citizen Lab and Human Rights Watch both have raised concerns about the ease with which governments can acquire sophisticated surveillance tools to target dissidents with impunity.
According to Marczak, it’s legal to produce and sell spyware to governments and law enforcement organizations, but Cyberbit would have required approval from the Israeli government to export the software to Ethiopia.
Missing in the process, Marczak said, is careful consideration of the impact on human rights.
In their report, researchers with Citizen Lab concluded that, “The fact that PSS wound up in the hands of Ethiopian government agencies, which for many years have demonstrably misused spyware to target civil society, raises urgent questions around Cyberbit’s corporate social responsibility and due diligence efforts, and the effectiveness of Israel’s export controls in preventing human rights abuses.”
The use of spyware by governments to monitor people around the world also occupies a murky legal space.
In 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia dismissed a lawsuit filed by an American citizen born in Ethiopia. The plaintiff claimed the Ethiopian government used spyware to monitor his activities for months, but the court dismissed the case because the law allegedly broken did not apply to foreign states.
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Before it became the worst day of her life, Allison Norland spread a blanket on the grass outside her father-in–law’s house so her infant daughter could crawl on the soft ground. New to motherhood, her first child was a surprise. “I found out when I was six and a half months pregnant, which was unbelievable for me,” she said. “Then I went to the hospital, found out I was in labor, obviously still using.”
The daughter of an alcoholic, Allison says she has a highly addictive personality. Her drug use started with marijuana when she was 18. “I would start kind of hanging out with my sister and the older crowd and drink, and then the coke [cocaine] started. I was actually dating a man at the time who was selling weed and cocaine. So, easy access I guess,” she told us.
At 19, she met the man she would eventually marry. He introduced her to Oxycodone, a commonly prescribed, but highly addictive, semi-synthetic opioid.
“We started using when we would go out of town to visit his friends and then it kind of proceeded to [finding] some people down where we live who were selling [Oxycodone] and it kind of became more common place,” she said.
After two back-to-back car accidents while driving high, she was sent to a pain doctor for her injuries. “It was straight to 30 milligrams of Oxycodone. I was getting 90 pills a month. That doctor shut down and I went to another doctor and proceeded to 150 pills a month,” she said. “I was using every day.”
Pain medication
She says the doctors never asked her if she had a history of illegal drug use or had ever abused opioids. Estimates are six out of 10 heroin users on the street started out with pain medication prescribed by a doctor. As the opioid crisis has exploded across the country, the medical community has come under scrutiny for the way they treat pain, and addiction specialists often point a finger directly at the conduct of the medical community.
Allison developed what she described as an intense addiction. The birth of her daughter was her wake-up call. Her obvious drug use was called to the attention of child protective services in Miami-Dade County where she lived. She says they almost took her newborn from her.
“I was so guilty and so ashamed that I had let that go on as long as I did. But I had her, she was healthy, no withdrawal symptoms, no anything,” she said.
She stayed clean for seven months. Then tragedy struck. As Allison watched her daughter play on the blanket that day in the back yard, her father-in-law accidentally drove his car off the driveway, striking and killing the little girl.
After seeing her daughter in the hospital for the last time, Allison drove straight to where she knew she could get pills. She says she used every day for the next year.
“Every day I pushed the limit further and further because I didn’t know how to be anymore, and what to be anymore. To go from being a mom and loving this thing so much, so much more than I love myself, to having her gone and this absence in my heart, it was really hard,” she said.
The incident left Allison with Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, and depression. The years passed in a fog. After an arrest, and time at another rehabilitation facility, Allison was ordered by the court to go to The Village, in Miami Florida, one of several residential and outpatient rehab centers run by Westcare, a non-profit healthcare corporation that specializes in addiction services.
Treating addiction
At first, she was hostile toward being at The Village, a renovated old Florida motel-style complex a few blocks from Biscayne Bay in the Edgewater neighborhood north of downtown Miami. Now 28, Allison sat with us in the room she shares with two other women, the walls lined with metal bunk beds and cabinets decorated with family pictures.
“I snuck in phones [which are forbidden]. I would get caught smoking on the facility, but then again I fought a lot. I fought in here, I fought out there. I just fought. I was so angry and broken down that I couldn’t be that person anymore,” she said.
Allison was initially ordered to stay at the facility for 90 days. She has chosen to stay longer. Now in her fourth month, she has slowly begun to unravel the threads of her addiction. The problems were not socio-economic. “I didn’t grow up on the streets,” she told us. “My family was upper middle-class.”
For decades, opioid abuse predominantly affected people of color in poverty-wracked inner cities. Today’s crisis has moved into the white middle-class suburbs and spread to small towns across the country.
When we asked her what an addict loses, she said “everything.” At the core of her loss were the morals and values she grew up with.
“To learn to look people in the eye and tell the truth because that is a big part of addiction – lying. I have to learn how to look people in the eye. I have to learn how to stand up straight. I have to learn how to love myself. That is what I lost most of all,” she said.
The Village uses a combination of medication, and individual and group therapy to treat its clients.
Patients are given Suboxone, a synthetic opioid strip that dissolves under the tongue. There has been some controversy with treating opioid addiction with opioids, but The Village says it has used Suboxone with great success. Delivered in small doses, the strips can eliminate withdrawal symptoms in 15 minutes. Suboxone also eliminates the cravings for opioids with limited side effects. Clients continue on the drug for months.
“With medication, we can begin to have an effect on your cravings for drugs and keep you engaged in your recovery,” says Frank Rabbito, senior vice president for Westcare, which runs The Village. “Medication keeps you away from illegal drugs and gives you an opportunity to engage in your recovery, be monitored by us for a period of time, and move toward a greater independent lifestyle.”
Therapy sessions
Allison credits the relationship and trust she has built with her therapist for her turnaround. Like many substance abusers, she has a history of physical, mental and sexual abuse going back to her childhood.
“I would say 80 percent of substance users have trauma in their past,” said Alexandra Kirkland, a therapist who works with patients at The Village. “And it causes them to have depressive symptoms. So when they flash back and think about the trauma, it breaks into their daily functioning, and many times they use substances as an escape to deal with the trauma.”
“My therapist has been incredible and has helped me through things I have done in the dark that I never thought would come to light,” Allison told us. “There are things that happened to me that I never wanted to talk about I have talked about with her. And it is because I know she can understand.”
The sessions have helped her confront some painful realities, such as using drugs while pregnant.
“I put my daughter in harm’s way for a pill. I put my life in danger for a pill. I was risking everything for this drug. And that is it – chasing a high that was never going to be enough, “she said.
It’s hard to reconcile the darkness she describes with the person in front of us; she now carries herself with an air of happiness and confidence, and can flash a smile that lights up the room. Allison wants to stay even longer at the The Village and further her recovery.
The odds are against her. Researchers estimate a mere three percent of addicts stay clean for life. Allison is not deterred. She now wants to become an addiction specialist.
“That is my goal,” she says, brimming with energy. “It is exciting to work toward something. That is a huge thing. I want to help people. People like me.”
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A bitcoin mining company in Slovenia has been hacked for the possible theft of tens of millions of dollars, just days before the virtual currency, which hit a record above $15,000 on Thursday, is due to start trading on major U.S. exchanges.
NiceHash, a company that mines bitcoins on behalf of customers, said it is investigating a security breach and will stop operating for 24 hours while it verifies how many bitcoins were taken.
Research company Coindesk said that a wallet address referred to by NiceHash users indicates that about 4,700 bitcoins had been stolen. At Thursday’s record price of about $15,000, that puts the value at over $70 million.
There was no immediate response from NiceHash to an emailed request for more details.
“The incident has been reported to the relevant authorities and law enforcement and we are cooperating with them as a matter of urgency,” it said. The statement urged users to change their online passwords.
Slovenian police are investigating the case together with authorities in other states, spokesman Bostjan Lindav said, without providing details.
The hack will put a spotlight on the security of bitcoin just as the trading community prepares for the currency to start trading on two established U.S. exchanges. Futures for bitcoin will start trading on the Chicago Board Options Exchange on Sunday evening and on crosstown rival CME Group’s platforms later in the month.
That has increased the sense among some investors that bitcoin is gaining in mainstream legitimacy after several countries, like China, tried to stifle the virtual currency.
As a result, the price of bitcoin has jumped in the past year, particularly so in recent weeks. On Thursday it surged to over $15,000, up $1,300 in less than a day, according to Coindesk. At the start of the year, one bitcoin was worth less than $1,000.
Bitcoin is the world’s most popular virtual currency. Such currencies are not tied to a bank or government and allow users to spend money anonymously. They are basically lines of computer code that are digitally signed each time they are traded.
A debate is raging on the merits of such currencies. Some say they serve merely to facilitate money laundering and illicit, anonymous payments. Others say they can be helpful methods of payment, such as in crisis situations where national currencies have collapsed.
Miners of bitcoins and other virtual currencies help keep the systems honest by having their computers keep a global running tally of transactions. That prevents cheaters from spending the same digital coin twice.
Online security is a vital concern for such dealings.
In Japan, following the failure of a bitcoin exchange called Mt. Gox, new laws were enacted to regulate bitcoin and other virtual currencies. Mt. Gox shut down in February 2014, saying it lost about 850,000 bitcoins, possibly to hackers.
Ali Zerdin in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and Carlo Piovano in London contributed to this story.
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At the summit of one of Iceland’s most dangerous volcanoes, a 72-foot (22-meter) depression in the snow is the only visible sign of an alarming development.
The Oraefajokull volcano, dormant since its last eruption in 1727-1728, has seen a recent increase in seismic activity and geothermal water leakage that has worried scientists. With the snow hole on Iceland’s highest peak deepening 18 inches (45 centimeters) each day, authorities have raised the volcano’s alert safety code to yellow.
Experts at Iceland’s Meteorological Office have detected 160 earthquakes in the region in the past week alone as they step up their monitoring of the volcano. The earthquakes are mostly small but their sheer number is exceptionally high.
“Oraefajokull is one of the most dangerous volcanos in Iceland. It’s a volcano for which we need to be very careful,” said Sara Barsotti, Coordinator for Volcanic Hazards at the Icelandic Meteorological Office.
What worries scientists the most is the devastating potential impact of an eruption at Oraefajokull.
Located in southeast Iceland about 320 kilometers (200 miles) from the capital, Reykjavik, the volcano lies under the Vatnajokull glacier, the largest glacier in Europe. Its 1362 eruption was the most explosive since the island was populated, even more explosive that the eruption of Italy’s Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. that destroyed the city of Pompei.
Adding to the danger is the lack of historical data that could help scientists predict the volcano’s behavior.
“It’s not one of the best-known volcanos,” Barsotti said. “One of the most dangerous things is to have volcanos for which we know that there is potential for big eruptions but with not that much historical data.”
Iceland is home to 32 active volcanic sites, and its history is punctuated with eruptions, some of them catastrophic. The 1783 eruption of Laki spewed a toxic cloud over Europe, killing tens of thousands of people and sparking famine when crops failed. Some historians cite it as a contributing factor to the French Revolution.
The Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupted in April 2010, prompting aviation authorities to close much of Europe’s airspace for five days out of fear that its volcanic ash could damage jet engines. Millions of travelers were stranded by the move.
To remedy the lack of data for Oraefajokull, scientists are rushing to install new equipment on and around the volcano. Those include ultra-sensitive GPS sensors that can detect even the slightest tremors, webcams for real-time imagery of the volcano and sensors in the rivers that drain the volcano’s glaciers to measure the chemical composition of the water.
Associated Press journalists last week visited scientists working near the mouth of the Kvia River, where the stench of sulfur was strong and the water was murky, clear signs that geothermal water was draining from the caldera.
“The most plausible explanation is that new magma is on the move deep below the surface,” said Magnus Gudmundsson, professor of geophysics at the Institute of Earth Sciences in Reykjavik.
But what happens next is anyone’s guess. In the most benign scenario, the phenomenon could simply cease. More concerning would be the development of a subglacial lake that could lead to massive flooding. At the far end of the spectrum of consequences would be a full eruption.
With such high-risk developments at stake, authorities are taking precautions. Police inspector Adolf Arnason now is patrolling the road around the volcano, which will be used for any evacuation, and residents have received evacuation briefings.
“Some farmers have only 20 minutes (to leave),” he said, pulling up to a small farm on the flank of the mountain.
If an evacuation is ordered, everyone in the area will receive a text message and the radio will broadcast updates. Police are confident that Oraefi’s 200 residents will know how to react, but their biggest concern is contacting tourists.
Iceland has seen a huge boom in tourism since the 2010 eruption — a record 2.4 million people are expected to visit this year and about 2,000 tourists travel through Oraefi every day. While some stay in hotels that could alert their guests, others spend the night in camper vans spread across the remote area.
“The locals know what to do. They know every plan and how to react. But the tourists, they don’t,” said Police Chief superintendent Sveinn Runarsson. “That’s our worst nightmare.”
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Within seconds of pulling out of the station parking lot, Major Mike Will gets his first call to respond to a crisis. Wills switches on his lights and siren and picks up the pace.
A thirty-year veteran of the Louisville’s emergency medical services, he has witnessed the explosion in opioid overdoses that have ravaged the city over the past two-years.
“The information we have right now is a 52-year old adult male who is unconscious, CPR in progress. And it look like an overdose,” he tells us.
The epidemic is taking a toll on Louisville’s first responders who field an average of over 20 overdose calls a day.
“When I first started, we could anticipate making narcotic or opioid overdose calls maybe five times a year,” he says. “And in the past year or two we have several of our crews that are making five in a 12 or 16 hour shift.”
As overdoses have steadily risen in cities and small towns across the country, officials have been searching for answers. Louisville reached a crisis point last August, with 151 overdoses over a span of four days.
Doctor on the front lines
Dr. Robert Couch, an emergency room physician and medical director at Louisville’s Norton Audubon Hospital, was on call at that time. He saw nine overdoses in five hours.
“We have been seeing heroin overdoses for a long time. But what was unusual about this overdose experience was it was taking larger and larger doses of the antidote Naloxone to reverse the effects of it,” he says. “So we knew that it wasn’t just heroin.”
Couch had learned of a similar spike in overdose cases in Ohio and West Virginia several weeks earlier. According to toxicology reports, those cases were caused by heroin mixed with Carfentanil, an opioid derivative often known as “the elephant tranquilizer,” that is 5,000 times more powerful than heroin.
“It is toxic in microgram quantities,” says Couch. “And so I suspected what other communities had seen was moving into Louisville at that time.”
According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Fentanyl and Carfentanil are synthetic opioids predominantly manufactured in underground laboratories in China. Often sold as research chemicals, they can be bought on the dark web.
Cheaper to produce than heroin, they are often delivered to the U.S. through the mail. Dealers then mix the synthetics with their heroin to boost profits. The results are often deadly.
“Unfortunately, users don’t know what they are getting,” says Couch. “Heroin is toxic enough as it is. These other derivatives can cause death almost immediately through respiratory depression.”
Fentanyl and its derivatives have forced emergency rooms across the country to change their protocols for overdose patients.
“A couple of years ago we would start with a very small dose, say 0.4 milligrams of Naloxone and that would be effective,” Couch tells us. “That dose has increased to about 2 milligrams and now we are using 4 milligrams of Naloxone just to restore breathing initially.”
Naloxone can suppress opioids in the body for about 30 minutes, which is long enough to treat a typical heroin overdose. The Fentanyl derivatives are so potent emergency rooms are having to re-dose patients as the Naloxone wears off.
“People can re-sedate and be right back in the throes of their overdose even though they have been administered the reversal agent,” Couch says.
Fear on the streets
As overdoses have risen, so has fear on the street among drug users.
“To find a bag of heroin is pretty rare – that is just heroin,” says Mathew LaRocco, who runs the Louisville Metro Needle Exchange out of the first floor of a city government building. The exchange provides clean needles and other supplies to 400 drug users a week.
Studies have shown that drug users who frequent needle exchanges are 5 times more likely to seek treatment and less likely to contract HIV, hepatitis, and other health problems associated with intravenous drug use.
LaRocco works closely with the drug-using community in metro Louisville and says people are legitimately scared.
“There is a lot more respect for the product that is on the street,” he says. “People are realizing just how dangerous this is.”
LaRocco says several years ago when Fentanyl first came on the scene there was a small subset of users – usually young male users – who had the attitude that it would never happen to them.
“You don’t see that anymore,” he says. “You are seeing a volatility to the drug where people who used to inject five times a day are now injecting 15 times a day. They are still using the same amount of drug throughout the day, they are just breaking it up into smaller doses because they don’t want to die.”
He says Fentanyl and its derivatives are also showing up in other street drugs like methamphetamine.
“I have a client that only shoots methamphetamine,” says LaRocco. “He doesn’t shoot anything else. He was drug-screened and there was Fentanyl in his screen.”
LaRocco says even with the fear on the streets it is still difficult for an addict to overcome their irrational cravings.
“That still doesn’t change the fact that when someone overdoses on a bag of dope, everybody want to figure out where they got that bag of dope from. Because they know it is going to get them high,” he told us.
Lucky man
Major Mike Will arrives on the scene and pulls up behind a fire truck parked in a middle-class, suburban neighborhood lined with sidewalks. Two police officers are standing in the yard of a modest house with a brick front porch. Inside, paramedics are administering Naloxone, the opioid antidote, and the patient begins to regain consciousness.
“The transport unit was right on top of the run,” says Will. “So that gives this individual a much better chance because the first responders were so close. Apparently we had a two minute response time.”
A few minutes later, a white man with graying hair walks out under his own power and lays on a gurney waiting for him in the front yard – cheating certain death. Major Wills says he’s one of the lucky ones.
“You know these people we are bringing back with Naloxone, it’s giving them a second chance,” he says. “And it is frustrating to see these folks doing it over and over again. But I mean, you know, addiction is a sickness. And these people are addicted.”
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The World Health Organization warns the number of people living with dementia globally will triple from 50 million to 152 million by 2050. WHO is launching a global monitoring system on dementia, which will track progress and identify areas of concern.
The WHO reports dementia exacts a huge social and economic burden, one that will grow as people age and succumb to this mental illness.
The agency estimates five percent of the world’s older population suffers from dementia and is in need of care. Belying common belief, WHO says this is not mainly a problem of rich countries as dementia also affects people living in poorer countries.
The health agency says the cost of caring for dementia patients today is $818 billion or one percent of the world’s Gross Domestic Product. Tarun Dua is a medical officer in WHO’s Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse. She says this economic cost will be more than $2 trillion by 2030.
“Moreover, there is stigma, human rights violations associated with people with dementia and their caregivers,” said Dua. “And, therefore, it is imperative that we have a public health response. An important step that has been taken by all member States has been endorsing an action plan on dementia this year.”
She says the plan focuses on caring for people who have dementia, on preventing and on finding a cure for this illness. She says raising awareness of this problem is essential.
“Many people consider that dementia is a normal part of ageing, which is not true,” said Dua. “We need to think about risking, preventing dementia because the risk factors for dementia are the same for communicable diseases. So, good exercise, good diet, no tobacco, decreasing alcohol, all of this can decrease the risk of dementia.”
Along with this, she says elderly people who suffer from depression should receive treatment for this malady. She says social inclusion and cognitive exercise are other strategies that should be employed to reduce the risk of dementia.
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A group of 2017 Nobel Laureates have addressed the lack of female representation in sciences ahead of the prize-awarding ceremony in Stockholm.
The seven winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, Chemistry and Economic Sciences – all white men – said change is happening.
Jacques Dubochet, who won the chemistry prize, told reporters: “Science has been made by males, for males. It is changing, it takes time, but you will see it, they (women in science) are coming.”
Physicist Kip Thorne pointed to the increase in the number of women entering undergraduate programs in sciences today compared to when he was a student.
He said Thursday: “Change is coming, but there is a long delay between entering freshman and the Nobel prize.”
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Vulnerable communities uprooted by climate change are being left out of a voluntary pact to deal with migration, campaigners said, after the United States pulled out of the global deal.
Although people within low-lying states are being forced to relocate because of worsening storms and rising seas, they will not be recognized in U.N. migration pact talks next year, putting lives at risk, campaigners said.
“Many of the situations we find ourselves in, here in the Pacific, are not caused by us. We continue to ask, ‘Where is the justice?’ Those of us who are least responsible, continue to bear the brunt,” said Emele Duituturaga, head of the Pacific Islands Association of Non-Governmental Organizations (PIANGO).
Hoping for acceptance
“We hope that there will be an openness and an acceptance that climate-induced migration is one that the world community has to be responsible for,” she said on the sidelines of a conference co-hosted by PIANGO in Fiji’s capital, Suva.
With a record 21.3 million refugees globally, the 193-member U.N. General Assembly adopted a political declaration in September 2016 in which it also agreed to spend two years negotiating a pact on safe, orderly and regular migration.
U.S. President Donald Trump this week withdrew from negotiations because the global approach to the issue was “simply not compatible with U.S. sovereignty.”
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres regretted the U.S. decision, his spokesman said, but expressed hope the United States might re-engage in the talks ahead of the start of formal negotiations in February.
Unique heritage
Climate displacement is already a reality for Telstar Jimmy, a student from the Bank Islands in northern Vanuatu.
Her family has relocated several times because of worsening cyclones and flooding, as rising seas slowly wash away ancestral homelands and burial sites.
“The foundations of our unique heritage were taken,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“Relocation just meant safety and continuing to exist. But now the question is: Safe and existing for how much longer?”
Worldwide, sea levels have risen 26 centimeters (10 inches) since the late 19th century, driven up by melting ice and a natural expansion of water in the oceans as they warm, U.N. data show. Seas could rise by up to a meter by 2100.
‘It’s only going to get worse’
“With climate-induced displacement, we know that there are already people, communities and countries at risk,” said Danny Sriskandarajah, head of the rights group CIVICUS, co-hosting the Fiji conference. “It’s only going to get worse [and] we need to come up with ways to manage those flows.”
PIANGO and CIVICUS are among campaign groups drafting a declaration that calls on the United Nations to recognize climate change as a key driver of migration.
The 1951 Refugee Convention recognizes that people fleeing persecution, war and conflict have the right to protection, but not those forced out by climate change.
Trump also plans to pull out of the 2015 Paris climate accord, which seeks to end the fossil fuel era this century with a radical shift to cleaner energies to curb heat waves, downpours, floods and rising sea levels.
The deal aims to hold the global temperature rise to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and try to limit the rise even further, to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The U.S. is the only country that is not part of the climate pact after Syria and Nicaragua joined this year.
“I’m a bit nervous because other countries may also pull out with the U.S., and that’s going to be a bigger issue for us, especially at a time when we’re trying to battle climate change,” said Vanuatu local Jimmy. “Whatever each country does will impact the lives of other people around the whole globe.”
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Those apps on your phone are expected to earn their developers about $77 billion this year. Some entrepreneurs who are looking to grab a bit of that market were showing off their products in Germany this week. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Sinopec USA, a subsidiary of the Chinese oil and gas conglomerate, has sued Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA in a U.S. court, claiming it never received full payment for an order of steel rebar.
The lawsuit asks for $23.7 million for breach of contract and conspiracy to defraud. The legal action signals a split with another of Venezuela’s biggest backers as the cash-strapped country seeks to restructure some $60 billion in debt in a landscape of low oil prices and production.
The complaint suggests “patience is getting really thin at this point,” said Mark Weidemaier, law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an expert on international debt disputes. “This is a further sign of frostiness in the Chinese-Venezuelan relations.”
PDVSA declined to comment.
China, which has loaned Venezuela more than $50 billion over the past decade, recently has been reluctant to involve itself more deeply in the South American country’s debt crisis. It has curtailed its credit to Venezuela in the last 22 months because of chronic payment delays, troubles with joint venture projects, and crime faced by Chinese firms operating in the country.
In its lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Houston on Nov. 27, Sinopec said PDVSA paid half of a 2012 purchase order for 45,000 tons of steel rebar, which is used in oil rigs, by its fully owned subsidiary Bariven.
It accused the Venezuelan oil company of using Bariven “as a sham to perpetrate fraud against Sinopec,” and called the PDVSA subsidiary an “undercapitalized shell with the sole purpose of preventing Sinopec from having a remedy.”
Any solution to Venezuela’s financial crisis will need the involvement of the Chinese and Russian governments, which are owed a substantial amount from the country. A Russian state-owned shipping company, Sovcomflot, also brought suit last year against PDVSA over $30 million in unpaid shipping fees.
PDVSA is in talks with a handful of European companies to obtain credit for oil and gas projects in a bid to reverse a slump in output to an almost 30-year low, and has been seeking financing from China and Russia.
But kidnappings and thefts in Caracas have prompted some Chinese executives working in the country to move to Colombia to escape the problems, sources have said. Chinese-run infrastructure projects also have faced delays.
Carmakers and small grocery stores that flourished under late president Hugo Chavez due to preferential currency exchange terms have either closed or downsized. Current president Nicolas Maduro no longer offers the same preferential terms for Chinese businesses to have access to cheap imports.
“The Chinese don’t have a whole lot to show for their loans,” a Western diplomat in Caracas said.
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If you buy a “Swiss-made” watch thinking it’s almost entirely produced in Switzerland, you might be mistaken.
The manufacture of components including dials, sapphire glass and cases is flourishing in China, Thailand and Mauritius and many of these end up in watches designated as “Swiss-made.”
Stricter rules came into force this year for watches bearing the coveted label on their dial and for which consumers are prepared to pay a premium.
The key requirement is that 60 percent of the manufacturing costs occur in Switzerland, up from a previous 50 percent threshold that applied only to the movement – the core mechanism.
The new rules were meant to make the label more credible in the eyes of consumers and to shield the industry from Asian competition.
But the change has made it difficult for the makers of cheaper Swiss watches to cut costs and weather a harsh industry downturn. And at the same time it has left the makers of more expensive brands enough leeway to shift a chunk of component supplies to Asia to protect their profit margins.
“Since the Swiss-made rules were tightened, we have fewer orders, not more,” said Alain Marietta of dialmaker Metalem, based in Swiss watchmaking hub Le Locle. “Some customers ask us to produce half of the components in China so we can be cheaper.”
He said he was concerned about losing customers but had stuck to his principles. “We want to offer a real Swiss made in Switzerland, otherwise for the people working in the watch industry here, it’ll mean slow death.”
Cost pressures
Affordable brands struggle to make money in Switzerland, where labor costs are high, margins are low and intense foreign competition, including from smartwatches, means they can’t raise prices.
Citychamp’s Rotary brand, which had used the label for decades, offers no “Swiss-made” pieces in its latest collections, saying the new rules made it hard to deliver value and quality.
Swatch Group, whose watches span all price points and which has extensive production facilities in Switzerland, said it was benefiting from the new rules it advocated. Chief Executive Nick Hayek said in a recent newspaper interview the group might soon be without competition in affordable “Swiss-made” watches.
Mondaine Group’s Ronnie Bernheim said the group’s brands, which include popular Swiss railways watch Mondaine, had also abandoned some models that would not have met the new criteria.
National Watch Federation (FH) statistics show the value of exported watches with a retail price of up to 600 Swiss francs ($610), fell by more than 11 percent in the first 10 months of 2017, versus an overall rise of 2.4 percent for all price tags.
Watches account for roughly 10 percent of overall Swiss exports and almost 57,000 people work in the industry.
Specialist companies have sprung up that offer brands the optimum product mix that will qualify for the “Swiss-made” tag.
EOS Watch Development, for example, promises on its website to deliver “Swiss-made” products that will help customers save money by combining Swiss and Far East suppliers.
Tough at the top
At the top end of the market where timepieces sell for thousands of francs, a severe downturn in demand translated into sharply lower profits in recent years.
Profitability at luxury group Richemont and more diversified Swatch Group is recovering now, helped by improving sales, but a tight focus on costs remains vital.
“Some brands in the high end would up to now never have considered buying components abroad for ethical reasons, but also because their excessive retail prices and resulting margin levels allowed it,” said a Swiss dialmaker who asked to remain anonymous.
“The slowing demand forced almost all brands to reposition their products and they benefit from the new law, which is very explicit, to improve their margins by partly sourcing abroad.”
He said his own dial company was mainly producing in Mauritius, where salaries are much lower, but a technical bureau performing some operations in Switzerland meant the dials qualified as “Swiss-made.”
Several sources said almost all watch case makers now imported sapphire glass from Asia. Luxury watchmakers generally keep their suppliers secret, but recently there have been some initiatives denouncing this lack of transparency.
Francois Aubry, a supplier turned watchmaker, recently launched a timepiece with “99.99 percent Swiss production,” publishing the list of all its suppliers, while the Swiss CODE41 watch project raised 543,000 francs on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter with a concept of total transparency on the mostly
Chinese origin of its components.
Industry body FH said it was its task to intervene if “Swiss-made” rules were not respected. It has decided to set up a task force to make sure everybody plays by the new rules, especially once a transition period expires at the end of 2018.
However, some watchmakers have already lost patience with the system.
High-end brand H.Moser & Cie this year dumped the “Swiss-made” label while declaring its own watches over 95 percent Swiss. It denounced the official rules as “too lenient, providing no guarantee, creating confusion and encouraging abuses.”
Chinese exports to Cuba have plunged this year in the latest sign of a worsening in the Communist-run island’s financial situation, which began in 2015 with the economic crisis in its top trading partner Venezuela.
Chinese exports to Cuba slumped 29.8 percent to $1 billion from January through October compared with the same period last year, according to Chinese customs.
Chinese exports peaked at a record $1.9 billion in 2015, nearly 60 percent above the annual average of the previous decade. They slipped slightly last year to $1.8 billion.
China sends a broad array of supplies to Cuba, from machinery and transportation equipment to raw materials, chemicals and food.
The Chinese commercial office in Havana said the decline was due to Cuba’s payment problems. China ranked as Cuba’s first trading partner in terms of goods in 2016, followed by Venezuela.
The economic crisis in Venezuela, lower revenue from commodity and related exports, the devastation wrought by Hurricane Irma and the Trump administration’s tightening of business and travel restrictions have left Cuba without cash to pay some suppliers and investment partners.
Western diplomats and businessmen estimate Cuban state-run banks, which must pay suppliers, have fallen behind by anywhere from $800 million to well over a billion dollars since 2015.
“China’s exports to Cuba are experiencing difficult times and the pressure continues for many businessmen due to the economic difficulties this Caribbean nation is going through,” Hong Xiao, economic and commercial counselor at the Chinese embassy, told Chinese business representatives attending a Havana trade fair last month, according to news agency Xinhua.
Cuba’s trade in goods last year was $12.6 billion, compared with $15 billion in 2015, more than 80 percent imports.
The cash crunch and lower oil supplies from Venezuela have forced the government to slash imports and reduce the use of fuel and electricity, helping tip its economy into recession in 2016 for the first time in nearly a quarter century.
The island’s economy relies on imports to fuel economic activity, so a drop in Chinese exports does not bode well.
“The fall in imports from China is a pattern more or less across the board and in part reflects the government’s efforts to balance revenues and pay debt,” said former Cuban central bank economist Pavel Vidal, now a professor at Universidad Javeriana Cali in Colombia.
“That means less consumer goods and supplies for the productive sector, which effects growth,” said Vidal, who expects little if any growth this year despite increased government spending and foreign investment.
The government had hoped for a 2 percent increase in the gross domestic product after last year’s contraction of 0.9 percent.
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Luxury goods companies may ban sales of their products on online platforms like Amazon to preserve their aura of exclusivity, the European Union’s top court said Wednesday.
The European Court of Justice ruled in favor of the German branch of luxury cosmetics group Coty, whose brands include Calvin Klein and Marc Jacobs, which sought to keep its products from selling on non-authorized digital sale platforms.
The court said Coty’s effort to limit distributors “is appropriate to preserve the luxury image of those goods,” adding that it “does not appear to go beyond what is necessary.” Coty wanted to ban an authorized distributor from selling its products on Amazon.de in a case pending at a Frankfurt court, which requested a ruling from EU judges.
The Computer and Communications Industry Association said the ruling was “bad news for consumers who will face fewer choices and also less competition when they want to shop online.”
Germany’s antitrust agency said it was examining the EU court ruling, but expected it to have only a limited effect on its own decisions.
The court in Luxembourg “apparently made a great effort to limit its statements to the realm of real prestige products, where the luxurious aura is a significant part of the product itself,” said Andreas Mundt, the head of the Federal Cartel Office.
Manufacturers of goods that aren’t luxury brands “still have no carte blanche to sweepingly limit their distributors’ use of sales platforms, according to our assessment,” Mundt added.
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Imagine the day you board a bus and it starts moving. It obeys all traffic signs and stops at signal lights. All without a driver. That’s the future, happening right now at a business park in Northern California. VOA’s Carolyn Presutti takes us on what’s probably your first ride on a driverless shuttle bus.
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Apple’s chief executive said Wednesday he’s optimistic some apps that fell afoul of China’s tight internet laws will eventually be restored after being removed earlier this year.
Speaking at a business forum in southern China, CEO Tim Cook also dismissed criticism of his appearance days earlier at an internet conference promoting Beijing’s vison of a censored internet.
Cook’s high-profile appearance Sunday at the government-organized World Internet Conference drew comments from activists and U.S. politicians who say Apple should do more to push back against Chinese internet restrictions.
He said he believed strongly in freedoms but also thought that foreign companies need to play by local rules where they operate.
When asked about Chinese government policies requiring removal of apps, including ones from operators of virtual private networks that can get around the country’s internet filters, he said, “My hope over time is that some of these things, the couple things that have been pulled, come back.”
“I have great hope on that and great optimism,” he added.
Cook said he didn’t care about being criticized for working with China, because he believes change is more likely when companies participate rather than opting to “stand on the sideline and yell at how things should be.”
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About 17 million babies worldwide live in areas where outdoor air pollution is six times the recommended limit, and their brain development is at risk, the U.N. children’s agency (UNICEF) said on Wednesday.
The majority of these babies — more than 12 million — are in South Asia, it said, in a study of children under one-year-old, using satellite imagery to identify worst-affected regions.
“Not only do pollutants harm babies’ developing lungs — they can permanently damage their developing brains — and, thus, their futures,” said UNICEF executive director Anthony Lake.
Any air pollution above the World Health Organization’s recommended limit is potentially harmful for children, and risks grow as pollution worsens, UNICEF said.
Air pollution is closely associated with asthma, pneumonia, bronchitis and other respiratory infections, it said.
Scientific findings about the links with brain development are not yet conclusive, but rapidly growing evidence is “definitely reason for concern”, UNICEF’s Nicholas Rees, the report’s author, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Brain development in the first 1,000 days of a child’s life is critical for their learning, growth and for them “being able to do everything that they want and aspire to in life,” he said.
“A lot of focus goes on making sure children have good quality education, but also important is the development of the brain itself,” he added.
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