The technology sector provides many jobs for today’s innovators. But one scientist and teacher in Cameroon says there’s no reason why women should not be part of that technological growth. She’s making it her goal to prepare more young girls to enter the workforce. Arash Arabasadi reports.
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Month: September 2018
Many people enjoy playing video games but take for granted that they can hold and easily operate game controllers. Now Microsoft is making it possible for disabled gamers to join in the fun. Tina Trinh reports.
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In the era of superfoods, Maine blueberries aren’t so super.
The Maine wild blueberry industry harvests one of the most beloved fruit crops in New England, but it’s locked in a downward skid in a time when other nutrition-packed foods, from acai to quinoa, dominate the conversation about how to eat. And questions linger about when, and if, the berry will be able to make a comeback.
The little blueberries are touted by health food bloggers and natural food stores because of their hefty dose of antioxidants. They’re also deeply ingrained in the culture of New England, and they were the inspiration for “Blueberries for Sal,” a beloved 1948 children’s book.
But the industry that picks and sells them is dealing with a long-term price drop, drought, freezes, diseases and foreign competition, and farmers are looking at a second consecutive year of reduced crop size.
At Beech Hill Blueberry Farm in Rockport, this year’s harvest was off by about 50 percent, said Ian Stewart, who runs the land trust that manages the farm.
“Our year was a little underwhelming. There was a lot of drought. There was a freeze at a bad time,” Stewart said. “We’re hoping it’s a blip. We’ll see.”
North America’s wild blueberry industry exists only in Maine and Atlantic Canada, and an oversupply of berries in both places caused prices to harvesters to plummet around 2015. Recent years have brought new challenges, such as particularly bad spells of mummy berry disease, a fungal pathogen, and difficulty in opening up new markets.
The blueberries grow wild, as the name implies, in fields called “blueberry barrens” that stretch to the horizon in Maine’s rural Down East region. While the plumper cultivated blueberries harvested in states like New Jersey are planted and grown as crops, harvesters of wild blueberries tend to a naturally occurring fruit and pick it by hand and with machinery.
Woes in the industry have caused some growers to scale back operations in Maine. Harvesters collected a little less than 68 million pounds of wild blueberries in the state in 2017, which was the lowest total since 2005 and more than 33 million pounds less than 2016. Last year’s price of 26 cents per pound to farmers was also the lowest since 1985, and was more in line with the kind of prices farmers saw in the early 1970s than in the modern era.
This year’s harvest was mostly wrapped by late August, a little earlier than usual, and members of the industry said they believe it was another year of lower harvest. Exact totals aren’t available yet, but signs point to a crop that’s “similar to last year, or even smaller,” said Nancy McBrady, executive director of the Wild Blueberry Commission of Maine.
The industry has tried to focus on growing the appeal of the health aspects of wild blueberries, which are richer in antioxidants than their cultivated cousins, but it has been a slow climb, McBrady said.
“For years, the health message and the taste message of wild blueberries has been successful,” she said. “But it’s frustrating when we find ourselves in periods of oversupply and competition.”
Nearly 100 percent of the wild crop is frozen, and the berries are used in frozen and processed foods. Prices to consumers at farm stands and grocery stores have held about steady in the face of falling prices to harvesters.
The same berries are harvested in Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island, and the weakness of the Canadian dollar has also hurt the U.S. industry because Canadian berries sell for less. Some companies operate on both sides of the border, and an equal exchange rate is better for business.
Such financial stress played a role in growers harvesting 5,000 fewer acres in the U.S. last year, said David Yarborough, a horticulture professor at the University of Maine. He said he expects a similar drop this year.
Other factors, such as poor pollination last year, have also held the crop back, Yarborough said. He stopped short of describing the industry as in full-blown crisis, but he said some smaller growers are in crisis mode.
The industry at large is hoping it doesn’t suffer too many more down years, said Homer Woodward, vice president of operations for Jasper Wyman & Son, a major industry player.
“I think the state of Maine is going to pick less pounds than last year. That’s the product of economic downturn,” said Woodward said. “And mother nature was cruel to us this year.”
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Top Twitter and Facebook executives will defend their companies before U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday, with Facebook insisting it takes election interference seriously and Twitter denying its operations are influenced by politics.
But no executive from Alphabet’s Google is expected to testify, after the company declined the Senate Intelligence Committee’s request to send one of its most senior executives, frustrating lawmakers.
Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, appearing alongside Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey, will say that her company’s efforts to combat foreign influence have improved since the 2016 U.S. election, according to written testimony released Tuesday.
“The actions we’ve taken in response … show our determination to do everything we can to stop this kind of interference from happening,” Sandberg said.
The company is getting better at finding and removing “inauthentic” content and now has more than 20,000 people working on safety and security, she said.
Technology executives have repeatedly testified in Congress over the past year, on the defensive over political influence activity on their sites as well as concerns about user privacy.
The Senate Intelligence Committee has been looking into efforts to influence U.S. public opinion for more than a year, after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Kremlin-backed entities sought to boost Republican Donald Trump’s chances of winning the White House in 2016.
Moscow has denied involvement.
Google offered to send its chief legal officer, Kent Walker, to Wednesday’s hearing, but he was rejected by the committee, which said it wanted to hear from corporate decision-makers.
’Don’t understand the problem’
Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, the committee’s Republican chairman, said he expected the hearing would focus on solutions to the problem of foreign efforts to influence U.S. elections and sow political discord, with a jab at Google.
“You don’t understand the problem if you don’t see this as a large effort from whole of government and the private sector,” Burr told reporters at the Senate.
Google said Walker would be in Washington on Wednesday and be available to meet with lawmakers. On Tuesday it released written “testimony” describing the company’s efforts to combat influence operations.
Twitter’s Dorsey also will testify at a House of Representatives hearing on Wednesday that the company “does not use political ideology to make any decisions,” according to written testimony also made public Tuesday.
Dorsey will appear before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, addressing Republican concerns about how the social media platform polices content.
“From a simple business perspective and to serve the public conversation, Twitter is incentivized to keep all voices on the platform,” Dorsey said.
Conservative Republicans in Congress have criticized social media companies for what they say are politically motivated practices in removing some content, a charge the companies have repeatedly rejected.
Trump faulted Twitter on July 26, without citing any evidence, for limiting the visibility of prominent Republicans through a practice known as shadow banning.
Democratic Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island blasted Wednesday’s hearing and his Republican colleagues, calling claims of political bias baseless.
“There is no evidence that the algorithms of social networks or search results are biased against conservatives. It is a made-up narrative pushed by the conservative propaganda machine to convince voters of a conspiracy that does not exist,” Cicilline said.
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Frustrated Venezuelan drivers faced lengthy lines for gasoline in border states Tuesday as the government struggled to roll out a new payment system that President Nicolas Maduro says will reduce smuggling of heavily subsidized fuel.
Maduro says the payment system will pave the way for charging international prices for fuel, a massive increase given that gas is now almost free, as his government seeks to shore up state coffers amid a hyperinflationary economic meltdown.
Any increase would mark the first time in 20 years that the OPEC member has significantly raised domestic fuel prices, which have been a sensitive issue ever since deadly riots broke out in 1989 in response to austerity measures that included higher gasoline prices.
Fatherland Card flops
The pilot program that began Tuesday in eight states was supposed to provide service stations with wireless devices that use a state-backed identification document called the Fatherland Card to carry out fuel transactions.
“I see a lot of disorganization because they haven’t started making this work yet,” said Jose Coronel, 26, a civil servant, as he waited in line at a gas station in the border town of Ureña. “I can see that it’s difficult to control smuggling.”
At gas stations along the border with neighboring Colombia, the new machines were either not installed or not functioning properly, according to drivers filling up their tanks and two gas station attendants in two different states.
The new payment system will provide a subsidy to motorists with a Fatherland Card, directly reimbursing them for gasoline purchases, once the domestic fuel price hikes take effect.
Maduro says that will help soften the impact of a steep price increase.
Drivers on the border started lining up as early as Monday afternoon on concerns that the price hikes would be immediate or that stations would run out of fuel.
The Information Ministry did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Gas card or surveillance tool
Experts estimate Venezuela, where shortages of food and medicine have fueled hunger, disease and a mass exodus of citizens, loses at least $5 billion per year as a result of not selling gasoline at international prices.
Maduro on Monday said gasoline would rise to international price levels by October, without offering details.
The use of the Fatherland Card has drawn intense criticism from government critics, who say it is a mechanism to gather information about citizens that the ruling Socialist Party can use against adversaries by withholding basic services from them.
The government offers some benefits including subsidized food, access to scarce medicine and cash bonuses to holders of the card. Maduro says it will help combat an “economic war” led by opposition politicians with the help of Washington.
Fuel prices have stayed relatively steady for years even though inflation is projected by the IMF to reach 1,000,000 percent.
Unay Bayona, 24, an independent merchant, said he doubted prices would ever rise enough to match those in Colombia, and that residents would continue to view contraband as an option.
“Smuggling is going to continue because there is no other way to make a living,” Bayona said, at the entrance to a service station in Ureña.
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As legislators prepare to grill Silicon Valley executives over Russian hacking ahead of midterm elections, some observers say the debate over expanded government oversight is far from over.
On Tuesday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey met with legislators in Washington ahead of Wednesday morning’s hearing, where Dorsey and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg will answer questions about cybersecurity before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the committee’s ranking Democrat, told The Washington Post that the hearing aims to “to sound the alarm that what happened in 2016, as we’ve seen, was not a one-off.”
In recent weeks, Microsoft reported that it had disabled six Russian-launched websites masquerading as U.S. think tanks and Senate sites. Facebook and the security firm FireEye revealed influence campaigns, originating in Iran and Russia, that led the social network to remove 652 impostor accounts, some targeting Americans. The office of Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania said hackers tied to a “nation-state” had sent phishing emails to old campaign email accounts.
Hacking attempts
Newly reported attempts at infiltration and social media manipulation — which Moscow officially denies — point to Russia’s continued interest in meddling in U.S. politics. While observers say there is no clear evidence of Kremlin efforts to disrupt midterms, it nonetheless appears hackers outside the American political system are probing for a way in.
“What’s interesting about this is that the Russians have shown here that they are not at all partisan in this,” said David Sanger of The New York Times, who first reported on Microsoft’s account of the latest attacks, in which company officials seized website domains created by the Kremlin-linked hacker group known as Fancy Bear or APT28 — the same group that federal investigators and private cybersecurity firms blamed for the 2016 election hack.
The phony sites, designed to emulate the Hudson Institute and International Republican Institute, surreptitiously routed users to pages built by hackers to steal passwords and log-in credentials. The aim, Sanger said, is to disrupt institutions that challenge Moscow or Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“They are pursuing their own national interests, going after think tanks that have taken positions that the Russians find uncomfortable or threatening, whether it’s the use of sanctions or promotion of democracy or pursuit of kleptocrats,” Sanger told VOA.
The extent to which Microsoft coordinated with federal investigators to thwart the latest attack wasn’t clear, he said.
“I’m not sure whether they gave the government an advance heads up, but the nature of cyber now is that you hear about these [attacks from the] companies before you hear about them from government,” Sanger added.
In recent months, legislators on both sides of the aisle have expressed willingness to regulate how U.S. tech companies safeguard themselves against intrusions. But analyst Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab says the Microsoft takedown bodes well for the tech sector’s independent ability to prevent attacks.
“This is something we’ve seen over the last couple of months — tech companies have been much more forward-leaning in their attempts to prevent this kind of interference,” Nimmo told VOA.
“We had Microsoft coming out up front and saying we’ve just stopped this attack, and they actually attributed it directly to Fancy Bear, which is very striking that they’re actually confident in making that direct attribution. A couple of weeks ago, we had Facebook coming out and exposing a number of inauthentic accounts, which had some connections with the troll farm in St. Petersburg,” he added, referring to the Internet Research Agency linked to the 2016 U.S. election hack. “About a month before that, we had Twitter coming out and releasing a list of handles that it had traced back to the troll farm.”
A troll farm is a group of people who attempt to create disruption in an online community by posting comments online that are deliberately inflammatory or provocative.
US, European action
With all of the recent activity on the platform side, Nimmo said the question is “what are we going to see on the government level?”
More specifically, what can the West can do in order to pressure the Russian government — and does the West have the political will to do it? If nothing else, the latest attacks are likely to embolden U.S. and European lawmakers to pass additional sanctions.
“Although I think we need to fully understand the scope of this activity that Microsoft has reported, it clearly demonstrates that Russia is not in any way pulling back from the techniques that it used in 2016,” said Alexander Vershbow, a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, and a former NATO deputy secretary general.
“If anything, it’s broadening its target to include conservative think tanks and organizations like the Hudson Institute, and so I think you can say right now, at a minimum, it would give momentum to congressional efforts to tighten the sanctions even further,” added Vershbow, who also has been a U.S. ambassador to Russia, South Korea and NATO. “It may also strengthen the hand of administration officials as they consult with Europe in trying to push the Europeans to tighten their sanctions as well.”
Retired Marine General Jim Jones, former national security adviser during the Obama administration, said although sanctions can be effective in the short term, long-term national security depends on safeguarding the cyber infrastructure itself.
“In a not so distant future, the country that first succeeds in reaching complete cybersecurity will be able to cause even more serious disorders,” Jones told VOA. “That’s the essence of cyberwar in our century.”
For individuals targeted by foreign hackers, such as the Hudson Institute’s Russian kleptocracy expert Ben Judah, no amount of new sanctions or malware detection will be enough.
“Be careful of what you keep on your computer and on your phone,” Judah told VOA. “Have sensitive information? Use pen and paper.”
Following Wednesday morning’s Senate hearing, Twitter CEO Dorsey will appear solo before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where he’ll be asked to address allegations of political censorship.
This story originated in VOA’s Russian Service. Original reporting contributed by Natalia Antonova and Jela De Franceschi. Some information is from AP.
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Argentina will have to wait at least until the second half of September to find out whether the International Monetary Fund will agree to the early release of a credit line under a $50 billion backup financing arrangement approved earlier this year, Economy Minister Nicolas Dujovne said Tuesday.
Dujovne declined to say how much money he had requested during a meeting with IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde.
“All this requires a formal procedure so it receives an agreement at the staff level, which could be taken before the board,” Dujovne told reporters after the meeting, adding that he expects the IMF to vote on the request in the second half of the month.
Lagarde said they made progress in the meeting.
“Our discussions will now continue at a technical level and, as stated before, our common objective is to reach a rapid conclusion to present a proposal to the IMF Executive Board,” she said in a statement.
While the meeting between Dujovne and Lagarde was grabbing most of the headlines, the Argentine peso kept losing value. The U.S. dollar closed Tuesday at 39.50 pesos per unit compared to 38 the day before. The peso has devaluated around 53 percent so far this year.
Dujovne’s meeting with the IMF’s managing director followed a morning session with U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump spoke with Argentine President Mauricio Macri on Tuesday.
A statement from Trump said that “President Macri is doing an excellent job with this very difficult economic and financial situation.”
Macri on Monday announced new taxes on exports and the elimination of several ministries.
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More than a quarter of the world’s adults — 1.4 billion people — exercise too little, putting them at higher risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, dementia and cancers, according to a World Health Organization-led study.
In 2016, around one in three women and one in four men worldwide were not reaching the recommended levels of physical activity to stay healthy — at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise a week.
There has been no improvement in global levels of physical activity since 2001, according to the study, which was conducted by WHO researchers and published Tuesday in The Lancet Global Health.
The highest rates of lack of exercise in 2016 were in adults in Kuwait, American Samoa, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, where more than half of all adults were not active enough to protect their health.
By comparison, around 40 percent of adults in the United States, 36 percent in Britain and 14 percent in China did too little exercise to stay healthy.
“Unlike other major global health risks, levels of insufficient physical activity are not falling worldwide, on average, and over a quarter of all adults are not reaching the recommended levels of physical activity for good health,” said Regina Guthold of the WHO, who co-led the research.
Noncommunicable diseases
The WHO says insufficient physical activity is one of the leading risk factors for premature death worldwide. It raises the risk of noncommunicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes.
By becoming more active, it says, people can easily achieve benefits such as improve muscular and cardiorespiratory fitness, better bone health, weight control and reduced risk of hypertension, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, depression and various types of cancer.
The study found that levels of low physical activity were more than twice as great in high-income countries compared with poorer nations, and had increased by 5.0 percent in richer countries from 2001 to 2016.
In wealthier countries, the researchers said, a transition toward more sedentary jobs as well as sedentary forms of recreation and transport could explain higher levels of inactivity. In less well-off countries, people tend to be more active at work and for transport, they said.
They urged governments to take note of these changes and put in place infrastructures that promote walking and cycling for transport and active sports and recreation.
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Amazon.com is in talks with Chile to house and mine massive amounts of data generated by the country’s giant telescopes, which could prove fertile ground for the company to develop new artificial intelligence tools.
The talks, which have been little reported on so far and which were described to Reuters by Chilean officials and an astronomer, are aimed at fueling growth in Amazon.com’s cloud computing business in Latin America and boosting its data processing capabilities.
President Sebastian Pinera’s center-right government, which is seeking to wean Chile’s $325 billion economy from reliance on copper mining, announced last week it plans to pool data from all its telescopes onto a virtual observatory stored in the cloud, without giving a timeframe. The government talked of the potential for astrodata innovation, but did not give details.
The government did not comment on companies that might host astrodata in the computing cloud.
Amazon executives have been holding discussions with the Chilean government for two years about a possible data center to provide infrastructure for local firms and the government to store information on the cloud, an official at InvestChile, the government’s investment body, told Reuters.
For at least some of that time, the talks have included discussion about the possibility of Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosting astrodata, astronomer Chris Smith said, based on email exchanges he was part of between AWS and Chilean Economy Ministry officials over the last six months. Smith was at the time mission head of AURA observatory, which manages three of the U.S. federally-funded telescope projects in Chile.
Jeffrey Kratz, AWS’s General Manager for Public Sector for Latin American, Caribbean and Canada, has visited Chile for talks with Pinera. He confirmed the company’s interest in astrodata but said Amazon had no announcements to make at present.
“Chile is a very important country for AWS,” he said in an email to Reuters. “We kept being amazed about the incredible work on astronomy and the telescopes, as real proof points on innovation and technology working together.”
“The Chilean telescopes can benefit from the cloud by eliminating the heavy lifting of managing IT,” Kratz added.
AWS is a fast-growing part of Amazon’s overall business. In July it reported second-quarter sales of $6.1 billion, up by 49 percent over the same period a year ago, accounting for 12 percent of Amazon’s overall sales.
Star-gazing to shoplifting
Chile is home to 70 percent of global astronomy investment, thanks to the cloudless skies above its northern Atacama desert, the driest on Earth. Within five years, the South American country will host three of the world’s four next-generation, billion-dollar telescopes, according to Smith.
He and Economy Ministry officials leading the Chilean initiative to store astrodata in the cloud saw potential in more Earth-bound matters.
The particular tools developed for the astrodata project could be applicable for a wide variety of other uses, such as tracking potential shoplifters, fare-evaders on public transport and endangered animals, Julio Pertuze, a ministry official, told Reuters at the event announcing Chile’s aim to build a virtual observatory on the cloud.
Smith added that the same technology could also be applied to medicine and banking to spot anomalies in large datasets.
Amazon, whose founder and largest shareholder Jeff Bezos is well known for his interest in space, already provides a cloud platform for the Hubble Telescope’s data and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Australia.
As Amazon explores the potential in Chile’s astrodata, tech rival Google, owned by Alphabet, is already a member of Chile’s Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which will be fully operational in Cerro Pachon in 2022. Google also has a data center established in the country.
Justin Burr, senior PR associate for AI and Machine learning at Google, declined to comment on any Google plans around astrodata or its involvement in other telescope projects.
Separately, a Google spokeswoman said last week that the company will announce expansion plans for its Chilean data center on Sept. 12.
Giant database
Smith said that what the Chileans are calling the Astroinformatics Initiative — to harness the potential of astrodata — could enable Amazon Web Services access to the research that astronomers are doing on projects like the LSST.
“We are going to have to go through a huge database of billions of stars to find the three stars that an astronomer wants,” Smith said, adding that was not too different from searching a database of billions of people to find the right profile for a targeted advertisement.
“So a tool that might get developed in LSST or the astronomical world could be applicable for Amazon in their commercial world.”
Since speaking to Reuters, Smith has moved on from his job heading AURA to a new position at the U.S. National Science Foundation.
Amazon’s role in the astrodata project would also give it an entry into a market where it is seeking to expand. Amazon — which controls nearly one-third of the global cloud computing business, ahead of rivals Microsoft and Google — has struggled to lure public institutions in Latin America, including research facilities, to store their data online instead of on physical machines.
AWS declined to provide any information on the size of its regional business in Latin America.
Economy Minister Jose Ramon Valente said at last week’s announcement, “Chile has enormous potential in its pristine skies not only in the observation of the universe but also in the amount of data that observation generates.”
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A tiny Alaska Native village has experienced a boom in tourism in recent years as polar bears spend more time on land than on diminishing Arctic sea ice.
More than 2,000 people visited the northern Alaska village of Kaktovik on the Beaufort Sea last year to see polar bears in the wild, Alaska’s Energy Desk reported Monday.
The far north community is located on north shore of Barter Island on the Beaufort Sea coast in an area where rapid global warming has sped up the movement of sea ice, the primary habitat of polar bears. As ice has receded to deep water beyond the continental shelf, more bears are remaining on land to look for food.
The village had fewer than 50 visitors annually before 2011, said Jennifer Reed of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
“Today we’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of visitors, many from around the world, each year,” Reed said.
Polar bears have always been a common sight on sea ice near Kaktovik, but residents started noticing a change in the mid-1990s. More bears seemed to stay on land, and researchers began taking note of more female bears making dens in the snow on land instead of on the ice.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists began hearing reports of increasing numbers of polar bears in the area in the early 2000s, Reed said. As more attention was given to the plight of polar bears about a decade ago, more tourists stated heading to Kaktovik.
Bears stranded
Most tourists visit in the fall, when bears are forced toward land because sea ice is the farthest away from the shore. Some bears become stranded near Kaktovik until the sea freezes again in October or November.
The fall is also when residents of Kaktovik kill three bowhead whales. Bruce Inglangasak, an Inupiaq subsistence hunter who offers wildlife viewing tours, said residents were unsure how tourists would react to whaling.
“The community was scared about, you know, activists that were going to try to get us to shut down the whaling — subsistence whaling,” Inglangasak said. “But that’s not true.”
Inglangasak said he’s been offering polar bear tours since 2003 or 2004. Most of his clients are from China and Europe, as well as from the Lower 48 U.S. states, and arrive in Katovik on charter planes from Anchorage and Fairbanks.
Many tourists stay several days in the village, which has two small hotels, Inglangasak said.
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Seven scientists in the United States and Britain who have come up with a revolutionary gene therapy cure for a rare genetic form of childhood blindness won a 1 million euro ($1.15 million) prize Tuesday, Portugal’s Champalimaud Foundation said.
Established in 2006, the annual award for work related to vision is one of the world’s largest science prizes, more than the latest 9 million Swedish crown ($987,000) Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
“This is the first, and still only, example of successful gene therapy in humans that corrects an inherited genetic defect and is therefore a milestone in medical therapeutics,” said Alfred Sommer, Dean Emeritus of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and chairman of the award jury.
One of those honored, Michael Redmond of the National Eye Institute in Maryland, had traced the cause of the disease, Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), to a mutated gene.
Three cooperating research teams later managed to replace the gene in the eye, restoring vision to treated children and adults with one form of LCA and “enabling the entire field of gene therapy for human disease,” the foundation said.
These teams are comprised of U.S. scientists Jean Bennett and Albert Maguire; Samuel Jacobson and William Hauswirth; and Britons Robin Ali and James Bainbridge.
Their gene augmentation therapy involved the delivery of healthy genes using engineered harmless viruses, described by the foundation as “an elegant solution.”
The foundation, which focuses on neuroscience and oncology research at its Lisbon base, was set up at the bequest of Portugal’s late industrialist Antonio Champalimaud who died in 2004. The first vision prize was awarded in 2006.
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If you already subscribe to digital services like Netflix to binge on TV shows and Spotify to groove to an endless mix of music, the auto industry might have a deal for you: Subscribe to your next car as well.
Make that cars, plural. Some of these packages — which charge a monthly fee for the bundled use of a car, insurance and maintenance — let you trade in your vehicle on a regular basis, sometimes almost as readily as you can skip to a new tune on Spotify.
These still-developing car subscription programs are gaining traction among motorists who don’t want to be locked into the hassles of car ownership or even multiyear leasing commitments. All they want is a vehicle available whenever they want or need it.
“It feels like Christmas morning every time they bring me a new car,” said Steve Barnes, a video producer who subscribes to a high-end vehicle subscription program offered through Clutch Technologies, a startup operating in the Atlanta area.
Although they’re still in their infancy, car subscriptions are hooking more motorists as both long-established automakers and startups roll out plans.
How it works
Ford, a 115-year-old automaker with a network of more than 3,000 dealers, expanded into car subscriptions about 16 months ago through Canvas, a subsidiary in San Francisco.
Canvas offers a variety of used, once-leased Ford and Lincoln models as subscriptions that cost anywhere from $379 per month (for a Ford Fiesta subcompact) to $1,125 per month (for a Lincoln Navigator luxury SUV).
Those plans, however, impose driving limits of 500 miles a month. Subscribers can pay extra for higher limits — $35 per month for an additional 350 miles, for instance, or $100 per month for unlimited travel. Unused miles in any given month can be rolled over to the next one. If Canvas customers exceed the monthly mileage limits under their plan, they are charged an additional 15 cents per mile for a Ford car and slightly more for a Lincoln vehicle.
So far, Canvas has limited subscriptions to the San Francisco and Los Angeles area. In its first 16 months in California, thousands of subscribers have signed up for its subscription service while collectively driving about 8.5 million miles, according to the company.
“People are generally changing the way they are working, they are changing the way they are living and they are generally changing the way they are consuming things,” Canvas CEO Ned Ryan said. “Subscriptions are going to be a very large and growing share of how people consume automobiles.”
About a third of Canvas customers decided to subscribe to cars after moving or some other major event that left them reluctant to make a bigger commitment to leasing or owning, Ryan said. Others just like the simplicity and convenience offered by a car subscription, he said.
Temporary arrangement
Liz Dreskin of San Rafael, California, signed up for Canvas earlier this year to help her college-age kids get around at home during their summer break. Both are under the company’s 21-year-old age limit, so Dreskin got a vehicle for herself while allowing her children to drive the BMW she already owned.
After starting off with a sports utility vehicle from Canvas, she decided to pay $99 to switch to a 2015 Mustang. Although she plans to suspend her $500 monthly subscription at the end of September, she intends to start it up again when her kids return for the holidays. She’s also recommending the service to a friend whose current car is breaking down.
“I could totally see myself doing this in the future so I don’t have to deal with car insurance and car payments,” said Dreskin, 52.
Luxury automakers such as BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche and General Motors’ Cadillac brand also are offering subscription programs, but those are primarily catering to affluent drivers who want to try out a variety of expensive vehicles.
Barnes, the video producer, signed up with Clutch in 2016 for access to luxury vehicles. The divorced father will get a sports utility vehicle when he has custody of his daughters or a Tesla sports car or something else fun to drive when he’s headed out on the town with his current wife.
He pays about $1,400 per month for his Clutch subscription, substantially more than the roughly $900 per month he used to pay for a lease on a Tahoe and his insurance policy. But he says he can’t imagine ever owning or leasing a car again now that he’s driven dozens of different vehicles that he estimates would have cost him more than $1 million to own.
“I am definitely a ‘tech head’ who had always fantasized about being able to get whatever car you want,” Barnes said.
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Twitter’s CEO says the company is not biased against Republicans or Democrats and is working on ways to ensure that debate is healthier on its platform.
In prepared testimony released ahead of a House hearing Wednesday, Jack Dorsey says he wants to be clear about one thing: “Twitter does not use political ideology to make any decisions, whether related to ranking content on our service or how we enforce our rules.”
The testimony comes as some Republicans say conservatives have been censored on social media and have questioned the platform’s algorithms. Dorsey will testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday afternoon on that subject, following a morning hearing before the Senate intelligence committee on foreign interference in social media.
At the Senate hearing, Twitter and Facebook plan to tell the intelligence panel that they are aggressively working to root out foreign actors who want to influence U.S. elections. Lawmakers are especially concerned about the upcoming midterm elections after Russia used social media accounts to try to influence the 2016 election.
To address concerns about bias, Dorsey offers an explanation of how Twitter uses “behavioral signals,” such as the way accounts interact and behave on the service. Those signals can help weed out spam and abuse.
He says such behavioral analysis “does not consider in any way” political views or ideology.
Dorsey says the San Francisco-based company is also “committed to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable towards progress.”
He says the company has continued to identify accounts that may be linked to a Russian internet agency that was indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller earlier this year. The indictment detailed an elaborate plot by Russians to disrupt the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Dorsey says Twitter has so far suspended 3,843 accounts the company believes are linked to the agency, and has seen recent activity.
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s No. 2 executive, is also planning to detail efforts to take down material linked to the Russian agency, including the removal of 270 Facebook pages that targeted Russian speakers around the world. Sandberg says in prepared testimony for the Senate panel that the company’s overall understanding of the Russian activity in 2016 is still limited “because we do not have access to the information or investigative tools” that the U.S. government has.
“This is an arms race, and that means we need to be ever more vigilant,” Sandberg says.
There is expected to be an empty seat at the Senate intelligence panel’s witness table reserved for Larry Page, the CEO of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. The company declined to send Page and offered another executive instead; the committee said no.
Only Dorsey was invited to the House hearing after specific Republican concerns about bias on Twitter. President Donald Trump has charged that some Republicans have been “shadow banned” because of the ways that some search results have appeared.
The company has denied that charge, but conservatives have continued to push the issue ahead of the 2018 elections.
“Sadly, conservatives are too often finding their voices silenced,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said in a statement when the hearing was announced. “We all agree that transparency is the only way to fully restore Americans’ trust in these important public platforms.”
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Fall armyworms are on the march across Africa. Agriculture experts say the pests, the larvae of a type of moth, could cause more than $13 billion in crop losses this year. To stop them, scientists are researching pesticides, landscape management methods, and genetically modified crops. Faith Lapidus reports on an effort to find a sustainable approach that does not use pesticides.
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Science fiction has long teased consumers about a future where robots are our personal assistants. But it’s no longer science fiction. The recent spike in consumer-grade “smart speakers” that respond to users’ voice commands has been given a face — with the help of a self-navigating robot that listens to its owner’s commands. Arash Arabasadi has more.
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Asia’s growing appetite for meat and seafood over the next three decades will cause huge increases in greenhouse gas emissions and antibiotics used in foods, researchers said Tuesday.
Rising population, incomes and urbanization will drive a 78 percent increase in meat and seafood demand from 2017 to 2050, according to a report by Asia Research and Engagement Pte Ltd., a Singapore-based consultancy firm.
“We wanted to highlight that, because of the large population and how fast the population is growing, it is going to put a strain on the environment,” said co-author Serena Tan.
“By recognizing this and where it comes from, we can tackle the solutions,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
More carbon dioxide, antibiotics
With supply chains ramping up to meet demand, greenhouse gas emissions will jump from 2.9 billion tons of CO2 per year to 5.4 billion tons, the equivalent of the lifetime emissions of 95 million cars, the researchers said.
A land area the size of India will be needed for additional food production, according to the report, while water use will climb from 577 billion cubic meters per year to 1,054 billion cubic meters per year.
The use of antimicrobials, which kill or stop the growth of microorganisms, and include antibiotics, will increase 44 percent to 39,000 tons per year, said the report, which was commissioned by the Hong Kong-based ADM Capital Foundation.
Overuse and misuse of antibiotics in food is rife in Southeast Asia, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said this year, warning of serious risks for people and animals as bacterial infections become more resistant to treatment.
Income growth
Growing urban areas contribute to the rising demand for meat and seafood, because people there usually have better access to electricity and refrigeration, said David Dawe, a senior economist at the FAO in Bangkok.
“But income growth is the big driver,” he added.
Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar and Pakistan are among nations likely to contribute most to the rise in meat and seafood consumption, while countries with aging populations, like China, will likely limit growth, Tan said.
Food producers can increase efficiency by implementing rainwater harvesting, using sustainable animal feed and capturing biogas from cattle, Tan said.
Regulators, consumers and investors can also pressure restaurant chains and producers to limit the use of antibiotics in meat supplies, she added.
At meal times, consumers can also choose plant-based foods made to look like meats as an alternative, Tan said.
“You have a lot of people in Asia who don’t get that great a diet so animal-sourced food intake will increase,” said the FAO’s Dawe. “In many ways it’s a good thing for nutrition, but it does raise environmental issues.”
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Turkey saw the inflation rate rise to nearly 18 percent in August, a 15-year high fueled by a collapse in the Turkish lira, which fell more than 20 percent over the past few weeks.
The rising inflation and a falling currency are stoking fears Turkey is on the verge of financial and economic crisis.
“It’s the beginning of the slippery slope. It’s going to get worse unless there is a miraculous improvement in the exchange rate,” political analyst Atilla Yesilada of Global Source Partners said. “We’ve reached the stage where there is nothing to anchor price expectations. People simply can’t gauge what prices or wages or costs will be next month.”
“It’s a very dismal set of numbers. The likelihood is headline inflation will reach 20 percent in (the) coming months,” economist Inan Demir of Nomura Securities said. “This is clearly a set of numbers that warrant a monetary response from inflation targeting the central bank.”
The Turkish Central Bank, in a statement on its website, vowed to act, promising to use all tools at its disposal and reshape its monetary policy stance at a Sept. 13 meeting where they will discuss interest rates.
The lira recouped much of its initial heavy losses following the release of the latest inflation figures.
“This (the central bank statement) is seen as a signal for a rate hike in that meeting,” Demir said. “Even though the wording of the statement is very uncertain, the expectation of tightening are curbing lira weakness after bad inflation numbers.”
International criticism
International investors sharply criticized the central bank for failing to aggressively raise interest rates to rein in inflation and defend the currency. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s influence is widely seen as responsible for the failure of the bank to act. Erdogan has repeatedly voiced opposition to raising interest rates.
“There will be a massive sell-off to the point of panic if they don’t raise rates,” Yesilada said. “This time, they have no option, even if they meant something else (in their statement), as everyone interpreted it as rates will be hiked. But there are two questions: by how much, and will it help at all?” he added.
Investors and analyst claim the central bank needs to raise rates by at least 4 percent, while some suggest a 10 percent raise is needed to avoid further drops in the currency, which analysts warned would open the lira to further pressure.
“In such a scenario, Turkish residents would want to hold more FX (foreign exchange) rather than Turkish lira … to protect their savings. That is a big risk to the currency,” Demir said.
Already, 40 percent of individual accounts in banks are in foreign currency.
However, an aggressive increase in rates may not be enough to rein in inflation or defend the lira, analysts warned.
“The concerns are on multiple fronts,” Demir said.
“What Turkish policy needs to do is straightforward,” he added. “They need to hike rates, tighten fiscal policy (cut government spending) and ease tensions with the United States, removing the threat of further sanctions by releasing (American) pastor (Andrew) Brunson.
“There is a way out of this, but it’s not obvious that the policymakers will take that way,” Demir said.
US trade tariffs
Last month’s imposition of trade tariffs by U.S. President Donald Trump over the ongoing detention of Brunson was the trigger for the latest rout in the Turkish currency. Brunson is on trial on terrorism charges, a case dismissed by Washington as politically motivated.
Ignoring U.S. pressure, Turkey’s top appeals court judge, Rustu Cirit, on Monday supported Erdogan’s refusal to release Brunson, saying the pastor’s release is a matter only for the courts.
“To use brute force to reverse this fact, which is a basic principle of contemporary democracies and law of nations, would mean weakening human rights, rather than strengthening them,” Cirit said.
Trump is warning of further sanctions against Turkey if Brunson is not released. American regulatory authorities are considering reportedly a multibillion-dollar fine against Turkish state-controlled Halkbank for violations of Iranian sanctions.
Analysts warn the financial implications of an escalation of U.S.-Turkish tensions will continue to undermine confidence in the lira. However, Erdogan continues to take a robust stance against Washington, insisting the Turkish economy remains strong.
“The list of concerns is long, definitely, but the chief concern I have right now is the policymakers. They need to accept first that there is a significant problem that needs to be addressed,” Demir said. “But we heard this morning from finance minister (Berat) Albayrak that short-term fluctuations in inflation are normal. ”
Turkey already seems set to face a severe recession. Similar depreciations of the currency in past decades was accompanied by a double-digit contraction of the economy.
Analysts warn the stress on the economy will only grow.
“Each day, Ankara lingers or prevaricates the likelihood of a disaster event increases. Right now, the threat is very low, it’s manageable. But as winter approaches, the likelihood increases exponentially,” Yesilada said.
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The U.S. space agency NASA is offering a public challenge, with a lofty $750,000 reward, to anyone who can find ways to turn carbon dioxide into compounds that would be useful on Mars.
Calling it the “CO2 Conversion Challenge,” NASA scientists say they need help finding a way to turn a plentiful resource like carbon dioxide into a variety of useful products in order to make trips to Mars possible.
Carbon dioxide is one resource that is readily abundant within the Martian atmosphere.
Scientists say astronauts attempting space travel to Mars will not be able to bring everything they need to the red planet, so will have to figure out ways to use local resources once they get there to create what they need.
“Enabling sustained human life on another planet will require a great deal of resources and we cannot possibly bring everything we will need. We have to get creative,” said Monsi Roman, program manager of NASA’s Centennial Challenges program.
She said if scientists could learn to transform “resource like carbon dioxide into a variety of useful products, the space — and terrestrial — applications are endless.”
Carbon and oxygen are the molecular building blocks of sugars.
On Earth, plants can easily and inexpensively turn carbon dioxide and water into sugar. However, scientists say this approach would be difficult to replicate in space because of limited resources, such as energy and water.
NASA says the competition is divided into two phases. During the first phase, individuals or teams would submit a design and description of their proposal, with up to five teams winning $50,000 each. In the second phase, the finalists would build and present a demonstration of their proposals, with the winning individual or team earning $750,000.
Those who are up for the challenge need to register by Jan. 24, 2019, and then officially apply by Feb. 28, 2019.
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Yemen’s government says it is giving civil servants and pensioners pay raises, after protests against the country’s woeful economy nearly paralyzed a major port city Sunday.
Officials have not said when the raises would take effect or how much they will be.
Demonstrations against the economy in the port of Aden continued Monday. Many shops were closed, and some people burned tires in the streets.
Some of the marchers demanded to be paid in dollars, accusing senior officials of taking their salaries in the U.S.-based currency while paying the rank-and-file in the increasingly weak Yemeni rial.
The rial has lost more than half its value against the dollar since Iranian-backed Houthi rebels seized the capital of Sanaa in 2014, sending the Western-recognized government into exile in Saudi Arabia.
It has since returned to set up shop in Aden.
Airstrikes
Meanwhile, the Houthis are demanding a war crimes investigation against the Saudi-led coalition after an airstrike last month that killed 40 children.
In an appeal Monday to the International Criminal Court, the Houthis asked the court to look into its “humanitarian conscience.”
A coalition missile struck a market in a Yemeni town near the Saudi border last month, killing 51 people. Among the dead were 40 children on a school bus coming back from a summer camp outing.
The coalition called the airstrike a “mistake.” It promised to hold those behind the attack legally responsible and to compensate the victims.
But the Houithis accuse the Saudis of being both the “judge and the jury” and “making light” of the civilian deaths.
U.N. human rights officials have said they believe both sides in Yemen may be responsible for war crimes.
The Saudi-led airstrikes have compounded the misery in Yemen, which is not only one of the world’s poorest nations, but is also on the edge of famine.
The U.N. has said about 80 percent of Yemeni civilians lack enough food and medical care.
The coalition airstrikes have obliterated entire neighborhoods, including hospitals and schools.
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Developed countries are dragging their feet on meeting their pledges of billions of dollars to help developing nations tackle climate change, leaving poor nations with mounting costs from rising temperatures, rights groups said.
Rich governments have promised to mobilize $100 billion per year in climate finance by 2020 to help poorer nations make the transformation to clean energy and cope with the impact of higher temperatures.
But there is no clear pathway to reach that goal, and poor countries are struggling to cope with losses from floods and drought, campaigners said ahead of a meeting in Bangkok to produce a negotiating draft for the next United Nations climate conference.
“Rich nations are attempting to escape full accountability for their role in causing and exacerbating climate change, and their obligation to deliver climate finance,” said Lidy Nacpil of the Asian Peoples Movement on Debt and Development.
“Inadequate climate finance compromises the capacity of the developing world to survive the climate crisis,” she said.
Many of the programs developing countries have promised as part of their efforts to curb climate-related risks and turn to green energy depend on adequate international climate finance.
Negotiators are meeting in Bangkok this week to prepare for the U.N. climate conference in Poland at the end of the year, which aims to set rules for implementing the 2015 Paris climate accord on reducing greenhouse emissions.
Record heatwaves, wildfires and devastating floods across the world this summer will put pressure on almost 200 governments to reach a deal in Poland, said Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary, U.N. Climate Change.
“Every year, the impacts of climate change are getting worse. This means that the poorest and most vulnerable, who have contributed almost nothing to the problem, suffer more,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
But rich countries – including the United States – also have suffered increasingly severe climate-related losses over the last year. Whether that could drive new ambition in trying to curb climate change remains unclear, analysts say.
Espinosa said that broader funding – beyond money channeled through specific climate funds – will be needed to adequately address the needs to reduce emissions and cut risks.
“Developed nations have reiterated their commitment on climate finance. There is also a recognition – even among developing nations – that private-sector finance will play a role in these transformations,” she said on Monday.
Experts say insufficient cash and board disagreements over key decisions are hampering the flagship Green Climate Fund (GCF) that was established at U.N. climate talks in 2010 to channel a substantial portion of the $100 billion per year wealthy nations had pledged.
Of a total of more than $10 billion committed to the fund, since 2015 it has allocated about $3.5 billion for projects in 78 countries to curb heat-trapping emissions and adapt to more extreme weather and rising seas.
But there is disagreement on where the money should go.
“The big fight is that while developed nations are focused on mitigation, developing countries need help with adaptation and loss and damage from floods, storms and drought,” said Harjeet Singh of advocacy group ActionAid.
“People are losing lives; we should not be focusing on trade agreements for solar panels and wind farms,” he said.
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It’s coal people like miner Steve Knotts, 62, who make West Virginia Trump Country.
So it was no surprise that President Donald Trump picked the state to announce his plan rolling back Obama-era pollution controls on coal-fired power plants.
Trump left one thing out of his remarks, though: northern West Virginia coal country will be ground zero for increased deaths and illnesses from the rollback on regulation of harmful emission from the nation’s coal power plants.
An analysis done by his own Environmental Protection Agency concludes that the plan would lead to a greater number of people here dying prematurely, and suffering health problems that they otherwise would not have, than elsewhere in the country, when compared to health impacts of the Obama plan.
Knotts, a coal miner for 35 years, isn’t fazed when he hears that warning, a couple of days after Trump’s West Virginia rally. He says the last thing people in coal country want is the government slapping down more controls on coal — and the air here in the remote West Virginia mountains seems fine to him.
People here have had it with other people telling us what we need. We know what we need. We need a job,” Knotts said at lunch hour at a Circle K in a tiny town between two coal mines, and 9 miles down the road from a coal power plant, the Grant Town plant.
The sky around Grant Town is bright blue. The mountains are a dazzling green. Paw Paw Creek gurgles past the town.
Clean-air controls since the 1980s largely turned off the columns of black soot that used to rise from coal smokestacks. The regulations slashed the national death rates from coal-fired power plants substantially.
These days pollutants rise from smoke stacks as gases, before solidifying into fine particles — still invisible — small enough to pass through lungs and into bloodstreams.
An EPA analysis says those pollutants would increase under Trump’s plan, when compared to what would happen under the Obama plan. And that, it says, would lead to thousands more heart attacks, asthma problems and other illnesses that would not have occurred.
Nationally, the EPA says, 350 to 1,500 more people would die each year under Trump’s plan. But it’s northern two-thirds of West Virginia and the neighboring part of Pennsylvania that would be hit hardest, by far, according to Trump’s EPA.
Trump’s rollback would kill an extra 1.4 to 2.4 people a year for every 100,000 people in those hardest-hit areas, compared to under the Obama plan, according to the EPA analysis. For West Virginia’s 1.8 million people, that would be equal to at least a couple dozen additional deaths a year.
Trump’s acting EPA administrator, Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist whose grandfather worked in the coal camps of West Virginia, headed to coal states this week and last to promote Trump’s rollback. The federal government’s retreat on regulating pollution from coal power plants was “good news,” Wheeler told crowds there.
In Washington, EPA spokesman Michael Abboud said Trump’s plan still would result in “dramatic reductions” in emissions, deaths and illness compared to the status quo, instead of to the Obama plan. Obama’s Clean Power Plan targeted climate-changing carbon dioxide, but since coal is the largest source of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels, the Obama plan would have curbed other harmful emissions from the coal-fired power plants as well.
About 160 miles to the south of Grant Town, near the state capital of Charleston, shop owner Doris Keller figures that if Trump thinks something’s for the best, that’s good enough for her.
“I just know this. I like Donald Trump and I think that he’s doing the right thing,” said Keller, who turned out to support Trump Aug. 21 when he promoted his rollback proposal. She lives five miles from the 2,900-megawatt John Amos coal-fired power plant.
“I think he has the best interests of the regular common people at the forefront,” Keller says.
Trump’s Affordable Clean Energy program would dismantle President Barack Obama’s 2015 Clean Power Plan, which has been caught up in court battles without yet being implemented.
The Obama plan targeted climate-changing emissions from power plants, especially coal. It would have increased federal regulation of emissions from the nation’s electrical grid and broadly promoted natural gas, solar power and other cleaner energy.
Trump’s plan would cede much of the federal oversight of existing coal-fired power plants and drop official promotion of cleaner energy. Individual states largely would decide how much to regulate coal power plants in their borders. The plan is open for public review, ahead of any final White House decision.
“I’m getting rid of some of these ridiculous rules and regulations, which are killing our companies … and our jobs,” Trump said at the rally.
There was no mention of the “small increases” in harmful emissions that would result, compared to the Obama plan, or the health risks.
EPA charts put numbers on just how many more people would die each year because of those increased coal emissions.
Abboud and spokeswoman Ashley Bourke of the National Mining Association, which supports Trump’s proposed regulatory rollback on coal emissions, said other federal programs already regulate harmful emissions from coal power plants. Bourke also argued that the health studies the EPA used in its death projections date as far back as the 1970s, when coal plants burned dirtier.
In response, Conrad Schneider of the environmental nonprofit Clean Air Task Force said the EPA’s mortality estimates had taken into account existing regulation of plant emissions.Additionally, health studies used by the EPA looked at specific levels of exposure to pollutants and their impact on human health, so remain constant over time, said Schneider, whose group analyzes the EPA projections.
With competition from natural gas and other cleaner energy helping to kill off more than a third of coal jobs over the last decade, political leaders in coal states are in no position to be the ones charged with enforcing public-health protections on surviving coal-fired power plants, said Vivian Stockman of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition.
“Our state is beholden to coal. Our politicians are beholden to coal,” Stockman said outside Trump’s West Virginia rally, where she was protesting. “Meanwhile, our people are being poisoned.”
And when it comes to coal power plants and harm, Schneider said, “when you’re at Grant Town, you’re at Ground Zero.”
Retired coal miner Jim Haley, living 4 miles from the town’s coal-fired power plant, has trouble telling from the smokestack when the plant is even operating.
“They’ve got steam coming out of the chimneys. That’s all they have coming out of it,” Haley said.
Parked near the Grant Town post office, where another resident was rolling down the quiet main street on a tractor, James Perkins listened to word of the EPA’s health warnings. He cast a look into the rear-view mirror into the backseat of his pickup truck, at his 3-year-old grandson, sitting in the back.
“They need to make that safe,” said Perkins, a health-care worker who had opted not to follow his father into the coal mines. “People got little kids.”
The Iranian rial hit a record low against the U.S. dollar on the unofficial market Monday amid a deterioration in the economic situation and the reimposition of sanctions by the United States.
The dollar was being offered for as much as 128,000 rials, according to foreign exchange website Bonbast.com, which tracks the unofficial market.
The currency has been volatile for months because of a weak economy, financial difficulties at local banks, and heavy demand for dollars among Iranians who fear the pullout of Washington from a landmark 2015 nuclear deal and renewed U.S. sanctions could shrink Iran’s exports of oil and other goods.
A set of U.S. sanctions targeting Iran’s oil industry is due to take effect in November.
Last week, Iran’s parliament sacked the minister of economic affairs and finance, the latest in a continuing shakeup of top economic personnel. In early August, Iranian lawmakers voted out the minister of labor; in July, President Hassan Rouhani replaced the head of the central bank.
Protests linked to the tough economic situation in Iran erupted last December, spreading to more than 80 cities and towns and resulting in 25 deaths.
Sporadic protests, led by truck drivers, farmers and merchants in Tehran’s bazaar, have continued since then and have occasionally resulted in violent confrontations with security forces.
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A key opponent of high-tech, automated weapons known as “killer robots” is blaming countries like the U.S. and Russia for blocking consensus at a U.N.-backed conference, where most countries wanted to ensure that humans stay at the controls of lethal machines.
Coordinator Mary Wareham of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots spoke Monday after experts from dozens of countries agreed before dawn Saturday at the U.N. in Geneva on 10 “possible guiding principles” about such “Lethal Automated Weapons Systems.”
Point 2 said: “Human responsibility for decisions on the use of weapons systems must be retained since accountability cannot be transferred to machines.”
Wareham said such language wasn’t binding, adding that “it’s time to start laying down some rules now.”
Members of the LAWS conference will meet again in November.
When President Donald Trump pulled the plug on an upcoming trip to North Korea by his secretary of state, he pointed a finger of blame at China and the global superpower’s trade practices.
In his recent trade breakthrough with Mexico, Trump praised the country’s outgoing president for his help on border security and agriculture.
Both developments offered fresh evidence of how Trump has made trade policy the connective tissue that ties together different elements of his “America First” foreign policy and syncs up them with his political strategy for the 2020 presidential election.
Trump’s 2016 triumph was paved in part by his support among blue-collar voters in Midwestern manufacturing states that narrowly supported him over Democrat Hillary Clinton, including Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio and Pennsylvania.
His aggressive trade tactics, epitomized by tariffs and standoffs with longtime economic partners and allies, are aimed at reversing what he has long viewed as unfair trade deals while maintaining support among largely white, working-class voters who have been hurt by the loss of manufacturing jobs.
“Trump understands that economic policy is foreign policy and vice versa,” said Stephen Moore, a former Trump campaign adviser and visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation. “The most important element of foreign policy is to not just keep the world safe but to also promote America’s economic interest. That’s what Trump does — this is America First.”
It’s also good politics, in Trump’s view.
“It’s a populist position. But it’s also a popular position with a lot of Americans,” Moore said.
As he puts a high premium on trade gains, Trump is intertwining the issue with a host of top foreign policy concerns.
Trump, asked by reporters last week about North Korea living up to its commitments to denuclearize, said “part of the North Korean problem is caused by our trade disputes with China,” pointing to the U.S. trade imbalance with China.
“We have to straighten out our trade relationship because too much money is being lost by us,” Trump said. “And as you know, China is the route to North Korea.”
Trade has been a common refrain at the president’s rallies, where he has vowed to pursue “fair and reciprocal trade.”
“We don’t want stupid trade like we had for so long,” Trump said during a rally in Duluth, Minnesota, in June.
Trump’s second year as president has been marked by a number of trade disputes with traditional U.S. allies and global rivals alike, an approach cemented by his tweet that “trade wars are good.”
He imposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports in March, prompting retaliation from the European Union and other American allies. Later in the month, Trump announced tariffs on China to combat what he called the theft of U.S. technology from a wide range of goods and services.
China struck back with its own sanctions on a variety of U.S. products, including Midwest farm-produced soybeans in a way to hit hard against the president’s base of voters. The two sides have clashed during the spring and summer, raising the stakes in their trade fight.
In late July, Trump and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker reached a temporary deal at the White House to avert tariffs on automobile imports and a ramping up of their trade dispute — although the threat still remains.
After a breakthrough with Mexico, Trump’s team has been engaged in talks with Canada aimed at creating a new version of the 24-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement.
While previous administrations have often used a carrot-and-stick approach to trade as a way to forge agreements, before Trump’s arrival trade agendas had emphasized multi-lateral and bilateral deals aimed at maintaining U.S. leadership around the world, promoting American values and improving human rights.
This administration, by contrast, “is leveraging foreign policy tools to achieve its trade goals,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch.
Critics say Trump’s insistence on trade concessions could hamper his ability to move forward in other areas.
On North Korea, for example, Trump has sought to turn his meeting with Kim Jong Un into a vivid example of how his unconventional style can bring longstanding U.S. adversaries to the bargaining table.
But by raising China’s trade practices as essential to any progress to ensuring North Korea gets rid of its nuclear weapons, Trump runs the risk of getting bogged down in both areas — and having little to show for it.
Mixing foreign policy and trade policy introduces so many variables it’s “virtually impossible to close on a precise policy decision,” said Daniel Ujczo, a trade attorney with Dickinson Wright PLLC in Columbus, Ohio. “You’re constantly chasing after the next issue as opposed to having a very targeted approach to the objective.”
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