In the Baltic country of Lithuania, there’s growing debate over a Russian-owned taxi ride-sharing service that Lithuanian government officials warn could be spying on users through their smartphones. So, could an ‘app’ be the latest tool in Kremlin hybrid tactics, or has fear of all things Russian gone too far? From Vilnius, Charles Maynes reports.
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Month: November 2018
The United States and China offered competing views to regional leaders at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meetings in Papua New Guinea, trading sharp words over trade, investment, and regional security. Washington said it can provide a better option for regional allies under is “Free and Open Indo-Pacific” strategy. as VOA’s State Department correspondent Nike Ching reports, the APEC gathering ended without a formal leaders’ statement.
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Humans have been genetically modifying foods for centuries. Wild tomatoes or carrots for instance don’t look much like the mass produced foods we eat today. But in these days of genetic modification, consumers have tended to keep so called “Frankenfoods” at arms length. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports a new generation of precision editing techniques may change that.
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British-based startup ARC unveiled its first motorcycle model in Milan this week, one being described as fast, advanced and expensive. The so-called Vector costs more than $100,000, but ARC says it’s for good reason. VOA Correspondent Mariama Diallo reports.
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Hundreds of protesters have turned out in central London and blocked off the capital’s main bridges to demand the government take climate change seriously.
A group called “Extinction Rebellion” encouraged sit-ins on the bridges Saturday as part of a coordinated week of action across the country.
Metropolitan Police said emergency vehicles were hampered from getting across London because of the “blockade” of five bridges. The force said it had asked all protesters to congregate at Westminster Bridge where officers can facilitate lawful protest.
About two dozen people were arrested on Monday after protesters blocked traffic and glued themselves to gates outside the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
A load of space station supplies rocketed into orbit from Virginia on Saturday, the second shipment in two days.
And another commercial delivery should be on its way in a couple weeks.
“What an outstanding launch,” said NASA’s deputy space station program manager, Joel Montalbano.
Northrop Grumman launched its Antares rocket from Wallops Island before dawn, delighting chilly early-bird observers along the Atlantic coast. The Russian Space Agency launched its own supplies to the International Space Station on Friday, just 15 hours earlier.
The U.S. delivery will arrive at the orbiting lab Monday, a day after the Russian shipment. Among the 7,400 pounds (3,350 kilograms) of goods inside the Cygnus capsule: ice cream and fresh fruit for the three space station residents, and a 3D printer that recycles old plastic into new parts.
Thanksgiving turkey dinners — rehydratable, of course — are already aboard the 250-mile-high outpost. The space station is currently home to an American, a German and a Russian.
There’s another big event coming up, up there: The space station marks its 20th year in orbit on Tuesday. The first section launched on Nov. 20, 1998, from Kazakhstan.
“As we celebrate 20 years of the International Space Station,” Montalbano noted, “one of the coolest things is the cooperation we have across the globe.” Then there’s the U.S. commercial effort to keep the space station stocked and, beginning next year, to resume crew launches from Cape Canaveral. “To me, it’s been a huge success,” he said.
This Cygnus, or Swan, is named the S.S. John Young to honor the legendary astronaut who walked on the moon and commanded the first space shuttle flight. He died in January.
It is the first commercial cargo ship to bear Northrop Grumman’s name. Northrop Grumman acquired Orbital ATK in June. SpaceX is NASA’s other commercial shipper for the space station; its Dragon capsule is set to lift off in early December.
Experiments arriving via the Cygnus will observe how cement solidifies in weightlessness, among other things. There’s also medical, spacesuit and other equipment to replace items that never made it to orbit last month because of a Russian rocket failure; the two men who were riding the rocket survived their emergency landing. Three other astronauts are set to launch from Kazakhstan on Dec. 3.
Federal Reserve policymakers on Friday signaled further interest rate increases ahead, but raised relatively muted concerns over a potential global slowdown that has markets betting heavily that the Fed’s rate hike cycle will soon peter out.
The widening chasm between market expectations and the rate path the Fed laid out just two months ago underscores the biggest question in front of U.S. central bankers: How much weight to give a growing number of potential red flags, even as U.S. economic growth continues to push down unemployment and create new jobs?
“We are at a point now where we really need to be especially data dependent,” Richard Clarida, the newly appointed vice chair of the Federal Reserve, said in a CNBC interview. “I think certainly where the economy is today, and the Fed’s projection of where it’s going, that being at neutral would make sense,” he added, defining “neutral” as interest rates somewhere between 2.5 percent and 3.5 percent.
But that range that implies anywhere from two more to six more rate hikes, and Clarida declined to say how many more increases he would prefer.
He did say he is optimistic that U.S. productivity is rising, a view that suggests he would not see faster economic or wage growth as necessarily feeding into higher inflation or, necessarily, requiring higher interest rates. But he also
sounded a mild warning.
“There is some evidence of global slowing,” Clarida said. “That’s something that is going to be relevant as I think about the outlook for the U.S. economy, because it impacts big parts of the economy through trade and through capital markets and the like.”
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Robert Kaplan, in a separate interview with Fox Business, also said he is seeing a growth slowdown in Europe and China.
“It’s my own judgment that global growth is going to be a little bit of a headwind, and it may spill over to the United States,” Kaplan said. .
The Fed raised interest rates three times this year and is expected to raise its target again next month, to a range of 2.25 percent to 2.5 percent. As of September, Fed policymakers expected to need to increase rates three more times next year, a view they will update next month.
Over the last week, betting in contracts tied to the Fed’s policy suggests that even two rate hikes might be a stretch. The yield on fed fund futures maturing in January 2020, seen by some as an end-point for the Fed’s current rate-hike cycle, dropped sharply to just 2.76 percent over six trading days.
At the same time, long-term inflation expectations have been dropping quickly as well. The so-called breakeven inflation rate on Treasury Inflation Protected Securities, or TIPS, has fallen sharply in the last month. The breakeven rate on five-year TIPS hit the lowest since late 2017 earlier this week.
Those market moves together suggest traders are taking the prospect of a slowdown seriously, limiting how far the Fed will end up raising rates.
But not all policymakers seemed that worried. Sitting with his back to a map of the world in a ballroom in Chicago’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel, Chicago Federal Reserve Bank President Charles Evans downplayed risks to his outlook, noting that the leveraged loans that some of his colleagues have raised concerns about are being taken out by “big boys and girls” who
understand the risks.
He told reporters he still believes rates should rise to about 3.25 percent so as to mildly restrain growth and bring unemployment, now at 3.7 percent, back up to a more sustainable level.
Asked about risks from the global slowdown, he said he hears more talk about it but that it is not really in the numbers yet.
But the next six months, he said, bear close watching.
“There’s not a great headline” about risks to the economy right now, Evans told reporters. “International is a little slower; Brexit — nobody’s asked me about that, thank you; [the slowing] housing market: I think all of those are in the mix for uncertainties that everybody’s facing,” he said.
“But at the moment, it’s not enough to upset or adjust the trajectory that I have in mind.”
Still, Evans added, the risks should not be counted out: “They could take on more life more easily because they are sort of more top of mind, if not in the forecast.”
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Investigative group Bellingcat and Russian website The Insider are suggesting that Russian intelligence has infiltrated the computer infrastructure of a company that processes British visa applications.
The investigation, published Friday, aims to show how two suspected Russian military intelligence agents, who have been charged with poisoning a former Russian spy in the English city of Salisbury, may have obtained British visas.
The Insider and Bellingcat said they interviewed the former chief technical officer of a company that processes visa applications for several consulates in Moscow, including that of Britain.
The man, who fled Russia last year and applied for asylum in the United States, said he had been coerced to work with agents of the main Russian intelligence agency FSB, who revealed to him that they had access to the British visa center’s CCTV cameras and had a diagram of the center’s computer network. The two outlets say they have obtained the man’s deposition to the U.S. authorities but have decided against publishing the man’s name, for his own safety.
The Insider and Bellingcat, however, did not demonstrate a clear link between the alleged efforts of Russian intelligence to penetrate the visa processing system and Alexander Mishkin and Anatoly Chepiga, who have been charged with poisoning Sergei Skripal in Salisbury in March this year.
The man also said that FSB officers told him in spring 2016 that they were going to send two people to Britain and asked for his assistance with the visa applications. The timing points to the first reported trip to Britain of the two men, who traveled under the names of Alexander Petrov and Anatoly Boshirov. The man, however, said he told the FSB that there was no way he could influence the decision-making on visa applications.
The man said he was coerced to sign an agreement to collaborate with the FSB after one of its officers threatened to jail his mother, and was asked to create a “backdoor” to the computer network. He said he sabotaged those efforts before he fled Russia in early 2017.
In September, British intelligence released surveillance images of the agents of Russian military intelligence GRU accused of the March nerve agent attack on double agent Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury. Bellingcat and The Insider quickly exposed the agents’ real names and the media, including The Associated Press, were able to corroborate their real identities.
The visa application processing company, TLSContact, and the British Home Office were not immediately available for comment.
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In a historic vote, nations on Friday unanimously approved a groundbreaking overhaul to the international system of measurements that underpins global trade and other vital human endeavors, uniting behind new scientific definitions for the kilogram and other units in a way that they have failed to do on so many other issues.
Scientists, for whom the update represents decades of work, clapped, cheered and even wept as the 50-plus nations gathered in Versailles, west of Paris, and one by one said “yes” or “oui” to the change, hailed as a revolution for how humanity measures and quantifies its world.
The redefinition of the kilogram, the globally approved unit of mass, was the mostly hotly anticipated change. For more than a century, the kilogram has been defined as the mass of a cylinder of platinum-iridium alloy kept in a high-security vault in France. That artefact, nicknamed “Le Grand K,” has been the world’s sole true kilogram since 1889.
But now, with the vote, the kilogram and all of the other main measurement units will be defined using numerical values that fit handily onto a wallet card. Those numbers were read to the national delegates before they voted.
Scientists at the meeting were giddy with excitement: Some even sported tattoos on their forearms that celebrated the science.
Nobel prize winner William Phillips called the update “the greatest revolution in measurement since the French revolution,” which ushered in the metric system of meters and kilograms.
Jon Pratt of the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology said the vote left him “a basket case” and “extremely emotional.”
“Those units, those constants chosen now, include everything we know, everything we have always known and provide that springboard for us to go pursue those things that we don’t know,” he said. “That was just leaving me in a puddle of tears.”
The Grand K and its six official copies, kept together in the same safe on the edge of Paris and collectively known as the “heir and the spares,” will be retired but not forgotten. Scientists want to keep studying them to see whether their masses decay over time.
Benefits of the change
The change will have no discernable impact for most people. Bathroom scales won’t suddenly get kinder and kilos and grams won’t change in supermarkets.
But the new formula-based definition of the kilogram will have multiple advantages over the precision-crafted metal lump that set the standard from the 19th century to the 21st, through periods of stunning human achievement and stunning follies, including two world wars.
Unlike a physical object, the new formula for the kilo, now also known as “the electric kilo,” cannot pick up particles of dust, decay with time, or be dropped and damaged.
It is expected to be more accurate when measuring very, very small or very, very large masses and help usher in new innovations in science, industry, climate study and other fields.
With time, as the science behind the new definition becomes more accessible and affordable, it should also mean that countries won’t have to send their own kilograms back to France to be checked occasionally against Le Grand K, as they have done until now, to see whether their mass was still accurate.
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Now that South Africa’s highest court has relaxed the nation’s laws on marijuana, local entrepreneurs are trying to cash in on the popular herb. Among the latest entries to the market: several highly popular cannabis-laced alcohol products, which deliver the unique taste, though without the signature high. Marijuana activists say this could just be the beginning and that the famous plant could do much more for the national economy. VOA’s Anita Powell reports from Johannesburg.
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Place names in Arlington County have never been a simple matter. A major fight broke out when National Airport was named for Ronald Reagan in 1998. A fight continues over whether to name a park next to the airport for Nancy Reagan. And in the 1920s, the Postal Service refused to establish a post office in Arlington because the street names were so confusing and haphazard.
So it is fitting that as Arlington officials celebrated Amazon’s decision to locate a new headquarters in the area, there was a bit of confusion over the place name.
Amazon announced Tuesday that it was coming to National Landing, a place people had not heard of because it doesn’t exist. Economic development officials who were wooing the online retailing giant came up with the name as a way to describe the multiple neighborhoods that were being offered as a site.
Those neighborhoods — Crystal City and Pentagon City in Arlington County, and Potomac Yard in the city of Alexandria — span multiple jurisdictions, so the name allowed Alexandria and Arlington to work cooperatively without marketing one locality over another.
Unfortunately, because the yearlong process of wooing Amazon had been so secretive, the moniker that had become so commonplace in the economic-development discussions had zero recognition among the general public. So Amazon’s use of the name in its big announcement left people scratching their heads.
Some people confused it with National Harbor, a new development in Maryland that has attracted one of the biggest casinos on the East Coast. Comedian Remy Munasifi, who made his name poking fun at Arlington in a YouTube rap that has been viewed more than 2 million times, suggested that Arlington National Cemetery would soon be renamed “Kindle Shores.”
Rep. Don Beyer, whose congressional district encompasses the neighborhoods, got in on the act when he suggested that the location of a new $1 billion graduate campus be dubbed “Hokie Landing.” The campus was a key incentive offered to Amazon by Virginia, which promised to double the number of students who graduate each year with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science and related fields.
No official steps were ever taken to rename the region, and local officials have made clear they have no intention of trying to rename Crystal City or any other neighborhood.
In a tweet posted by Arlington Economic Development on Thursday, Arlington County Manager Mark Schwartz explained that National Landing was simply “a way to avoid saying, ‘Parts of Arlington, parts of Alexandria.’ ”
Christina Winn, director of business investment for Arlington Economic Development, said officials never imagined “there would be so much conversation” about the concept. Winn said there’s no intention to supplant or override the name of Crystal City, which draws its name from a big chandelier in one of the first apartment buildings to go up in the area in the 1960s.
Still, she said, if Arlington and Alexandria team up on another economic-development pitch in the future, she said that the moniker might be revived.
“It worked once,” she said.
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Somalia’s 30 years of chronic conflict have left an estimated 1 in 3 people affected by mental health issues, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, there are only three licensed psychiatrists in the entire country. Mohamed Sheikh Nor reports from Mogadishu on Somalia’s huge mental health challenges.
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The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has already killed hundreds of people, could continue for several months. That’s the latest warning from a senior World Health Organization official. VOA Correspondent Mariama Diallo reports.
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Land laws mean nothing unless communities can prove their ownership, researchers said Thursday, calling for better tools to map the land and stave off conflict over property.
From South Africa to the Amazon rainforest, battles over land and who owns it are unleashing unprecedented conflict and labyrinthine legal cases as governments and companies seek to exploit ever more of the world’s natural resources, from trees to minerals to rubber.
With an estimated 70 percent of the world unmapped, more than 5 billion people lack proof of ownership, according to the Lima-based Institute for Liberty and Democracy.
Laws no safeguard
Speaking at the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s annual two-day Trust Conference, which focuses on a host of human rights issues, experts said the existence of laws in itself was no safeguard against abuse.
South Africa enshrines security of tenure in its constitution but the government rides roughshod over locals by promoting controversial mining deals, said Aninka Claassens, director of the University of Cape Town’s Land and Accountability Research Center.
More than two decades after the end of apartheid, whites still own most of the land in resource-rich South Africa and ownership remains a highly emotive subject ahead of next year’s national election.
“Our constitution means nothing unless people affected can prove their land rights, that’s why recorded rights are so important,” she said. “Mining is destroying livelihoods and land.”
Who owns what, where
Mapping property rights is crucial to understand “who owns what, where and how,” said Anne Girardin, land surveyor at the Cadasta Foundation, which develops digital tools to document and analyze land and resource rights information.
“That allows you to monitor changes in land resources, but also to better protect them,” she added.
More than 200 activists protecting their land and environment were killed in 2017, according to a survey of 22 countries by Global Witness, marking the deadliest year since the human rights group began collecting data.
Better and more coordinated information is needed to ward off more deadly conflicts, the experts said, citing satellite images and smartphones as tools that could document land.
Technology is plentiful but resources are scattered, Girardin said.
“It would take all the land surveyors we have 200-300 years to map the world’s undocumented land, so we need to be more pragmatic and work together,” she said.
Communities document land
Rampant deforestation means communities should rush to document their own land rather than wait for governments to act, said Nonette Royo, executive director of the International Land and Forest Tenure Facility, which helps indigenous people.
“In the world, forest area the size of Belgium disappears every year,” she said.
For Claassens, land rights should be mapped and recorded in accordance with who uses land as well as who actually owns it.
“Who uses the land? Most often, it’s women,” she said, adding that women were often excluded from property records.
Women are key in the fight for land rights from Brazil to Cambodia, often deployed at the frontline to ward off development and protect family plots, fields and villages.
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Ethically driven businesses are becoming increasingly popular and profitable but they can face threats for shaking up the existing order, entrepreneurs said on Social Enterprise Day.
When Meghan Markle wore a pair of “slave-free” jeans on a royal tour of Australia last month, she sparked a sales stampede and shone a spotlight on the growing number of companies aiming to meet public demand for ethical products.
“Right now is the perfect time to have this kind of business,” said James Bartle, founder of Australia-based Outland Denim, which made the $200 (150 pound) jeans. “There is awareness and people are prepared to spend on these kinds of products.”
Social Enterprise Day
Social Enterprise Day, which celebrates firms seeking to make profit while doing good, is being marked in 23 countries, including Australia, Nigeria, Romania and the Philippines, led by Social Enterprise UK (SEUK), which represents the sector.
Outland Denim is one such company, employing dozens of survivors of human trafficking and other vulnerable women in Cambodia to make its jeans, which all contain a written thank-you message from the seamstress on an internal pocket.
Bartle said he wanted to create a sustainable model that gives people power to change their future through employment.
More companies are striving to clean up their supply chains and stamp their goods as environmentally friendly and ethical, with women and millennials, people born between 1982 and 2000, driving the shift to products that seek to improve the world.
“For-profits create the mess, and then the not-for-profits clean it up,” said Andrew O’Brien, director of external affairs at SEUK, which estimates that 2 million British workers are employed by a social enterprise. “We are an existential threat to that system, by coming through the middle and forcing businesses to change the way they do business.”
Risky business
Britain has the world’s largest social enterprise sector, according to the U.K. government. About 100,000 firms contribute 60 billion pounds ($76 billion) to the world’s fifth largest economy, SEUK says.
Elsewhere in the world, it can be a risky business.
“I get threats,” said Farhad Wajdi who runs Ebtakar Inspiring Entrepreneurs of Afghanistan, which helps women enter the workforce by training and providing seed money for them to operate food carts in the war-torn country. “I can’t go to the provinces.”
His work has met resistance in parts of Afghanistan, a conservative society where women rarely work outside the home.
“A social enterprise can lead to sustainable change in those communities,” Wajdi said on the sidelines of the Trust Conference in London. “It can propagate gender equality and create friction for social change at a grassroots level.”
Niche? Window dressing?
There is, however, a danger that social enterprise will remain a niche form of business or become window-dressing for firms that just want to improve their public image.
“I don’t want social enterprise to become the next (corporate social responsibility), another (public relations) move,” said Melissa Kim, the founder of Costa Rican-based Uplift Worldwide, which supports social enterprises.
“To me this is just good business, and good sustainable business is not just about the environment and human rights … if you care about your relationships internally and externally you will stay in business.”
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As world leaders land in Papua New Guinea for a Pacific Rim summit, the welcome mat is especially big for China’s president.
A huge sign in the capital, Port Moresby, welcomes Xi Jinping, picturing him gazing beneficently at Papua New Guinea’s leader, and his hotel is decked out with red Chinese lanterns. China’s footprint is everywhere, from a showpiece boulevard and international convention center built with Chinese help to bus stop shelters that announce their origins with “China Aid” plaques.
On the eve of Xi’s arrival for a state visit and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting, newspapers in the country ran a full-page statement from the Chinese leader. It exhorted Pacific island nations to “set sail on a new voyage” of relations with China, which in the space of a generation has transformed from the world’s most populous backwater into a major economic power.
With both actions and words, Xi has a compelling message for the South Pacific’s fragile island states, long both propped up and pushed around by U.S. ally Australia: they now have a choice of benefactors. With the exception of Papua New Guinea, those island nations are not part of APEC, but the leaders of many of them have traveled to Port Moresby and will meet with Xi.
The APEC meeting, meanwhile, is Xi’s to dominate. Headline-hogging leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump are not attending. Trump’s stand-in, Vice President Mike Pence, is staying in Cairns in Australia’s north and flying into Papua New Guinea each day. Australia’s new prime minister, Scott Morrison, the country’s fifth leader in five years, is barely known abroad.
“President Xi Jinping is a good friend of Papua New Guinea,” its prime minister, Peter O’Neill, told reporters. “He has had a lot of engagement with Papua New Guinea and I’ve visited China 12 times in the last seven years.”
Pacific island nations, mostly tiny, remote and poor, rarely figure prominently on the world stage but have for several years been diligently courted by Beijing as part of its global effort to finance infrastructure that advances its economic and diplomatic interests. Papua New Guinea with about 8 million people is by far the most populous, and with its extensive tropical forests and oil and gas reserves is an obvious target for economic exploitation.
Six of the 16 Pacific island states still have diplomatic relations with Taiwan, a sizeable bloc within the rapidly dwindling number of nations that recognize the island regarded as a renegade province by Beijing. Chinese aid and loans could flip those six into its camp. A military foothold in the region would be an important geostrategic boost for China, though its purported desire for a base has so far been thwarted.
Beijing’s assistance comes without the oversight and conditions that Western nations and organizations such as the World Bank or International Monetary Fund impose. It is promising $4 billion of finance to build the first national road network in Papua New Guinea, which could be transformative for the mountainous nation. But experts warn there could also be big costs later on: unsustainable debt, white elephant showpieces and social tensions from a growing Chinese diaspora.
“China’s engagement in infrastructure in PNG shouldn’t be discounted. It should be encouraged but it needs to be closely monitored by the PNG government to make sure it’s effective over the long term,” said Jonathan Pryke, a Papua New Guinea expert at the Lowy Institute, a think tank in Sydney.
“The benefits of these projects, because a lot of them are financed by loans, only come from enhanced economic output over a long time to be able to justify paying back these loans,” he said.
“The history of infrastructure investment in PNG shows that too often there is not enough maintenance going on,” Pryke said. “There’s a build, neglect, rebuild paradigm in PNG as opposed to build and maintain which is far more efficient.”
Some high-profile Chinese projects in Papua New Guinea have already run into problems. A promised fish cannery hasn’t materialized after several years and expansion of a port in Lae, the major commercial center, was botched and required significant rectification work. Two of the Chinese state companies working in the country, including the company responsible for the port expansion, were until recently blacklisted from World Bank-financed projects because of fraud or corruption.
Xi’s newspaper column asserted China is the biggest foreign investor in Papua New Guinea, a statement more aspirational than actual. Its involvement is currently dwarfed by the investment of a single company—ExxonMobil’s $19 billion natural gas extraction and processing facility.
Australia, the former colonial power in Papua New Guinea, remains its largest donor of conventional foreign aid. Its assistance, spread across the country and aimed at improving bare bones public services and the capacity of government, is less visible.
But its approach is shifting in response to China’s moves.
In September, the Australian government announced it would pay for what is typically a commercial venture — a high-speed undersea cable linking Australia, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands that promises to make the internet and telecommunications in the two island countries faster, more reliable and less expensive.
Earlier this month, Australia announced more than $2 billion of funding for infrastructure and trade finance aimed at Pacific island nations and also agreed to joint development of a naval base in Papua New Guinea, heading off feared Chinese involvement. It is also boosting its diplomatic presence, opening more embassies to be represented in every Pacific island state.
“The APEC meeting is shaping up to be a faceoff between China and Australia for influence in the Pacific,” said Elaine Pearson, the Australia director of Human Rights Watch.
That might seem a positive development for the region, but Pearson cautioned that competition for Papua New Guinea’s vast natural resources has in the past had little positive impact on the lives of its people.
“Sadly exploitation of resources in PNG has fueled violent conflict, abuse and environmental devastation,” she said.
This is part of “Ocean Shock,” a Reuters series exploring climate change’s impact on sea creatures and the people who depend on them.
PURU NI TIMBUL, MALAYSIA — Swinging his machete with an economy of movement that only the jungle can teach, Matakin Bondien lopped a stray branch from the path of his boat. He hopped barefoot from the prow, climbed a muddy slope and stared once more at what he’d lost.
Not long ago, the clearing had been home to mangroves, saltwater-loving trees that anchor a web of life stretching from fish larvae hatching in the cradle of their underwater roots to the hornbills squawking at their crown. Now the trees’ benevolent presence was gone, in their place a swath of stripped soil littered with felled trunks as gray as fossils.
“Do you think we can find any food in this place now?” asked Bondien, a village leader of the Tombonuo people. “The company thinks it can do anything it wants — that we don’t count.”
The company is Sunlight Inno Seafood. Owned by Cedric Wong King Ti, a Malaysian businessman known as “King Wong,” it has bulldozed swaths of mangroves in the Tombonuo’s homeland in northern Borneo to make space for plastic-lined ponds filled with millions of king prawns. The shrimp are destined to be fattened for three months, scooped up in nets, quick-frozen, packed into 40-foot refrigerated containers and loaded onto cargo ships bound for distant ports.
Gargantuan as it may seem to Bondien and his relatives, the project represents only a speck in the global aquaculture industry, one of the world’s fastest-growing sources of protein.
Unfolding across Asia and around the world, this revolution in farming could help mitigate the impacts of climate change — or make them even worse.
As the buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases causes the world’s oceans to warm, ecosystems that formed hundreds of thousands of years ago are being upended in less than a human lifespan. Across the planet, fish and other marine creatures are being forced into a desperate search for cooler waters. Even coral is on the move: Some Japanese reefs are expanding northward at up to nearly nine miles per year, researchers have found.
Tropical seas may be the hardest hit. Species in the once-stable conditions near the equator could find it much harder to tolerate even mild temperature increases than hardier cousins at higher latitudes, which are used to coping with the contrast between summer and winter.
“If you ask me what is the No. 1 concern that I have on climate change effects on fisheries, it is on these tropical, developing countries,” said William Cheung, director of science at the Nippon Foundation-University of British Columbia Nereus Program. “The sheer speed of the change will make it that much harder for marine life to adapt.”
Coral reefs, as vital to tropical fish as trees are to birds, are becoming more vulnerable to a process called bleaching, which occurs when a spike in water temperatures causes coral to expel the algae that provide their kaleidoscopic colors, leaving them prone to starvation or disease. Today, swaths of the once-psychedelic Great Barrier Reef in Australia have turned boneyard white and largely devoid of life.
Scientists fear a similar fate could await the Coral Triangle, a huge underwater wonderland east of Borneo endowed with a trove of biodiversity comparable to the rainforests of the Amazon Basin. Millions of people depend on its bounty to survive, a large share of them Malaysians, who eat an average of 125 pounds of fish each a year — more than double the world average.
With climate change bearing down on the tropics, the search is on for a more sustainable way of getting food from the sea, one that doesn’t take more than nature can give.
Farther to the north on Borneo, an island divided among Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei, villagers are raising sea cucumbers: curious-looking creatures resembling giant slugs that are typically braised and served with oysters, mushrooms and spring onions, or — if you’re in Japan — thinly sliced, flavored with wasabi and eaten raw.
These echinoderms, close relatives of sea urchins and starfish, may not appeal to every palate. But farming them has one of the lightest footprints of any form of food production, a reminder of the vast untapped global potential for harvesting oysters, mussels, clams and many other types of filter-feeders.
A couple of hours’ drive from the Sunlight Seafood shrimp farm, inhabitants of the stilted village of Mapan Mapan have created a maze of sunken enclosures fenced with a barnacle-covered mesh.
Immersed waist-deep in one of these briny paddocks, sea-cucumber farmer Astinah Binti Jamari plucked one of the sandpaper-skinned creatures from the seabed. It responded by squirting her with a jet of saltwater — a defense normally used to scare away crabs.
A revolution in fish
Forty years ago, only 5 percent of the world’s fish production was farmed. After decades of rapid growth, aquaculture reached a tipping point in 2013, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, when the amount the industry raised in cages, tanks and ponds outweighed the tonnage of freely swimming fish hauled from lakes, rivers and seas for people’s plates.
In many respects, the industry has a good-news story to tell. Farmed salmon, for example, can convert feed into edible protein far more efficiently than cows or pigs, while producing fewer greenhouse gases. Now, almost all the salmon sold in restaurants and supermarkets is raised in captivity, with Norway, Chile and Scotland the biggest producers.
But this phenomenal expansion has come at a cost. The appetite for farmed species is so voracious, almost 20 percent of the annual catch from the world’s seas is ground into fishmeal, a nutrient-rich powder that forms the basis of the feeds used from salmon cages in Scottish lochs to shrimp ponds on Borneo. Vast amounts of fish have been taken from poorer countries to feed species destined for the plates of wealthier consumers. In addition, shrimp farms, in particular, have made coastal communities in the tropics even more vulnerable by cutting down mangroves, their first line of defense against extreme weather and rising sea levels.
Since the mid-1970s, the aquaculture industry has led to the destruction of more than 1.3 million acres of mangroves spread across Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Bangladesh, China, Brazil and Ecuador, according to a 2013 paper in the Bulletin of Marine Science. Untreated waste and epidemics of shrimp-killing diseases mean the gains can be short-lived: A study published this year identified more than half a million acres of abandoned shrimp ponds in Indonesia alone.
Nevertheless, some governments in Southeast Asia and Latin America have concluded that it’s worth sacrificing more mangroves in return for the export earnings and employment the projects can generate. Among them is the Malaysian state of Sabah, which is a partner in King Wong’s shrimp farm.
Hope of a better life
In 2013, representatives of Sunlight Seafood offered leaders of the Tombonuo and other indigenous communities a deal. In return for some of the land flanking the tidal creeks where their mangroves stood, locals recalled, the company would provide running water, electricity and much-needed employment for youths in the surrounding area, known as Pitas.
Five years since the bulldozers went to work, Tombonuo community leaders say they’ve lost more than 2,000 acres of mangroves and that the jobs and infrastructure they were promised haven’t materialized.
“I have no words. It’s like we’ve lost our whole world,” said Samad Samayong, a Tombonuo elder, surveying a sacred outcrop consecrated by his ancestors that is now encircled by shrimp ponds. “We only realized what was happening when it was too late.”
On the other side of a fence, a lone worker trudged past carrying a large bag of Royal Dragon brand shrimp feed on his shoulder. He didn’t seem to notice Samayong and other Tombonuo watching from the trees.
Sunlight Seafood didn’t respond to Reuters’ requests for comment made by telephone, email and a letter hand-delivered to its office in Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah. Reuters also contacted a law firm in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, that had acted for the company in the past but received no reply.
Sunlight Seafood has issued statements to Borneo media saying the project was built on land long earmarked for aquaculture by government officials, and that it is boosting the economy in Pitas, one of the poorest districts in Sabah.
The sheer scale of the farm is only fully apparent from up close. In July, a Reuters reporter and photographer accompanied Samayong, Bondien and others on a three-boat party to various points where water from the ponds gushed from pipes, leaving foamy trails of scum in the creeks.
It took hours to trace even a portion of the fence enclosing the site. The barrier’s stark edges cut a jarring contrast to the tangle of mangrove roots straddling saltwater and land, their branches home to proboscis monkeys, pig-tailed macaques, blue-eared kingfishers and storks.
The Sabah Environmental Protection Association, a nongovernmental organization, says Sunlight Seafood has already cut down 2,300 acres of mangroves, citing satellite imagery.
“They cleared the mangroves with no proper consultation with the community,” said the group’s president, Lanash Thanda. “They have to redress the wrong they have done.”
Apart from losing more trees, Samayong and Bondien fear diggers will further encroach on their ancestral shrines, such as an eerie riverbank guarded by a spirit husband and wife.
Visiting on his boat, Bondien dedicated a cigarette he had rolled from mangrove bark to the couple, placing it on an altar made of branches.
“It’s not only the forest that’s being destroyed,” said Mastupang Somoi, another member of the Tombonuo. “It’s our identity.”
Trees provide buffer
With evidence mounting that mangroves represent an effective buffer against climate impacts, some tropical countries are starting to question the gusto with which they once felled the trees, which can take 15 years to mature.
Were it not for the way mangroves served as shields, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami could have taken many more than 220,000 lives. The trees can also help mitigate the impact of rising sea levels: Their multi-tiered root systems trap sediment to raise the land around them relative to the encroaching waves.
Equally ingeniously, mangroves sequester more greenhouse gases than almost any other type of forest, as well as serving as natural larders of fish, birds, fruit and the kind of snails you can eat raw by snapping their conical shells and sucking out the innards.
“If you catch a fish in the open sea or off a coral reef, it may well have spent part of its life in the mangroves,” said Dan Friess, an associate professor of geography at the National University of Singapore.
Sabah’s government says it is committed to striking a balance between economic development and preserving Borneo’s extraordinary natural heritage, including by designating extensive areas of forest as nature reserves for threatened orangutans and creating Malaysia’s largest marine protected area.
Earlier this month, Junz Wong, Sabah’s agriculture minister, toured the Sunlight Seafood farm and said the company had operated “quite professionally” and created nearly 400 jobs. On his Facebook page, Wong said he had rejected a company request to cut down an additional 1,000 acres of mangroves. “I told them NO,” he wrote. “No more destroying of mangroves.”
In July, a Reuters reporter visited Sunlight Seafood’s offices in a suburb of Kota Kinabalu and hand-delivered a letter summarizing the Tombonuo community’s grievances and requesting an interview with owner Wong or another company representative.
While the reporter was explaining the purpose of the letter to a worker who had been sent to meet him at the door, a security guard cut their conversation short and escorted the reporter off the premises. The guard then closed the gate to the driveway. It bore a large sign in red letters warning that trespassers would be prosecuted.
Food without a face
Nestled in sea-cucumber farmer Jamari’s palm, the specimen she had fished from the seabed convulsed with a slow-motion shudder. Jamari, once a struggling single parent, says the creatures came to her rescue, earning her enough money to put her five children through school and build a new house.
“The sea cucumbers are my treasure chest,” she said. “I can’t even imagine what life would be like without them.”
Mapan Mapan has earned so much money from its sunken farms that it has declared an annual sea cucumber “birthday” festival, at which villagers give thanks by stewing a share of their harvest in a communal meal.
Chinese traders have been importing sea cucumbers for more than a thousand years. Served at royal banquets, they were considered both a status symbol and an aphrodisiac. A Ming Dynasty book published in 1602 called “Miscellanies of Five Items” lists them as “sea ginseng.”
This mystique drives much of the appetite today. In the decade that ended in 2016, global production of sea cucumbers more than doubled to nearly 275,000 tons, according to the FAO.
At top Chinese restaurants, the echinoderms are used to make one of the world’s most expensive soups, a broth called Buddha Jumps Over the Wall that can sell for $400 and needs to be ordered five days in advance.
Irwin Wong is a manager at Oceandrive, a Malaysian seafood company that buys the sea cucumbers for export. He served as an adviser when Mapan Mapan started cultivating the creatures eight years ago in a 20-farmer pilot project backed by the local government. He says the scheme is harvesting wild sea cucumbers at a sustainable rate, but that even better management could help Borneo produce many more.
“Perhaps this is the lowest impact of all aquaculture activities,” Wong said, standing on a platform overlooking a planned new phase, to be built with barnacle-proof mesh and more durable epoxy-coated stakes. “It can seriously go very big.”
Researchers believe there is enormous potential to scale up global production of plankton-eaters such as scallops, clams, oysters, cockles and other bivalves — and, of course, sea cucumbers.
“The current way of feeding ourselves is simply not sustainable,” said Sebastian Ferse, an ecologist at the Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Research in Bremen, Germany. “I think on a global level we have to start thinking about the lower levels of the marine food chain, such as bivalves, when it comes to supplying our proteins.”
Scientific advisers to the European Union agree. They concluded last year that it should be possible to harvest a combined 165 million tons annually of bivalves and seaweed — almost double the world’s annual landings of wild-caught fish.
The beauty of these creatures is that, unlike farmed fish or prawns, they don’t require any feed apart from the nutrients they absorb from the sea. No mangroves have to be felled to culture them. Neither do they spew tons of fish waste or chemical pollutants. In fact, bivalves actually remove toxins from the water; a single oyster filters 50 gallons of seawater a day.
Yet even as the risks posed by climate change bring the potential of shellfish, seaweed and sea cucumbers into sharper focus, it is also putting them in danger. As oceans absorb carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels, seawater is rapidly becoming more acidic. There is already evidence that acidification can make mussels’ shells more brittle, or weaken their grip on rocks, leaving them at greater risk of being swept away by advancing waves.
‘Preserve every species’
Life has been kind to the prize specimens at the Borneo Marine Research Institute: mammoth tropical fish known as giant grouper, which can weigh as much as a person, and in some cases have been swimming in spirals in silo-like tanks for almost 20 years. The only drama happens at feeding time. When fresh sardines hit the surface, the fish dart through the water with torpedo force.
Their wild relatives will have to work a lot harder to survive. In experiments to simulate the effects of more acidic waters, the institute has found that grouper — a staple in the Coral Triangle — find it harder to reproduce, and their young don’t develop properly. The findings have sharpened concerns about what climate change will mean for the region’s marine life, already struggling with plastic pollution, runoff from oil palm plantations, damage to reefs by dynamite fishing and the loss of mangroves.
Shek Qin, a research assistant, visits the busy fish-landing quay at Kota Kinabalu two nights a week to monitor catches of sharks and rays. In the early hours of a July morning, she picked up a newly landed shark by its tail, plonked it onto the dock and cheerfully inserted her forefinger into its mouth, peering inside to inspect the teeth — a trick for classifying a specimen more accurately, especially if fishermen have lopped off the fins.
“It’s a whole food web: If one species is declining, others will get affected, too,” Qin said, cradling a recently deceased hammerhead. “That’s why we need to preserve every species of fish.”
Near the fence surrounding the Sunlight Seafood shrimp farm, villagers Bondien and Samayong moored their flotilla under some mangrove trees and cast lead-weighted hooks. Samayong’s daughter Ida remembered her grandfather regaling her with tales of the monster fish of his youth — notably, a ray he once caught that was bigger than his boat. But that day, nothing came to nibble.
“You used to be able to catch a fish here in 10 minutes,” said Bondien, his line slack in the water. “Now, even if you have good bait, you can wait an hour and get only one — maybe nothing.”
Around a bend in the river, an empty bag of Royal Dragon feed had become snagged in some mangrove branches. It was emblazoned with an image of a shrimp.
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Companies could help refugees rebuild their lives by paying them to boost artificial intelligence (AI) using their phones and giving them digital skills, a tech nonprofit said Thursday.
REFUNITE has developed an app, LevelApp, which is being piloted in Uganda to allow people who have been uprooted by conflict to earn instant money by “training” algorithms for AI.
Wars, persecution and other violence have uprooted a record 68.5 million people, according to the U.N. refugee agency.
People forced to flee their homes lose their livelihoods and struggle to create a source of income, REFUNITE co-chief executive Chris Mikkelsen told the Trust Conference in London.
“This provides refugees with a foothold in the global gig economy,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s two-day event, which focuses on a host of human rights issues.
$20 a day for AI work
A refugee in Uganda currently earning $1.25 a day doing basic tasks or menial jobs could make up to $20 a day doing simple AI labeling work on their phones, Mikkelsen said.
REFUNITE says the app could be particularly beneficial for women as the work can be done from the home and is more lucrative than traditional sources of income such as crafts.
The cash could enable refugees to buy livestock, educate children and access health care, leaving them less dependant on aid and helping them recover faster, according to Mikkelsen.
The work would also allow them to build digital skills they could take with them when they returned home, REFUNITE says.
“This would give them the ability to rebuild a life … and the dignity of no longer having to rely solely on charity,” Mikkelsen told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Teaching the machines
AI is the development of computer systems that can perform tasks that normally require human intelligence.
It is being used in a vast array of products from driverless cars to agricultural robots that can identify and eradicate weeds and computers able to identify cancers.
In order to “teach” machines to mimic human intelligence, people must repeatedly label images and other data until the algorithm can detect patterns without human intervention.
REFUNITE, based in California, is testing the app in Uganda where it has launched a pilot project involving 5,000 refugees, mainly form South Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo. It hopes to scale up to 25,000 refugees within two years.
Mikkelsen said the initiative was a win-win as it would also benefit companies by slashing costs.
Another tech company, DeepBrain Chain, has committed to paying 200 refugees for a test period of six months, he said.
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Facebook says it is getting better at proactively removing hate speech and changing the incentives that result in the most sensational and provocative content becoming the most popular on the site.
The company has done so, it says, by ramping up its operations so that computers can review and make quick decisions on large amounts of content with thousands of reviewers making more nuanced decisions.
In the future, if a person disagrees with Facebook’s decision, he or she will be able to appeal to an independent review board.
Facebook “shouldn’t be making so many important decisions about free expression and safety on our own,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a call with reporters Thursday.
But as Zuckerberg detailed what the company has accomplished in recent months to crack down on spam, hate speech and violent content, he also acknowledged that Facebook has far to go.
“There are issues you never fix,” he said. “There’s going to be ongoing content issues.”
Company’s actions
In the call, Zuckerberg addressed a recent story in The New York Times that detailed how the company fought back during some of its biggest controversies over the past two years, such as the revelation of how the network was used by Russian operatives in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The Times story suggested that company executives first dismissed early concerns about foreign operatives, then tried to deflect public attention away from Facebook once the news came out.
Zuckerberg said the firm made mistakes and was slow to understand the enormity of the issues it faced. “But to suggest that we didn’t want to know is simply untrue,” he said.
Zuckerberg also said he didn’t know the firm had hired Definers Public Affairs, a Washington, D.C., consulting firm that spread negative information about Facebook competitors as the social networking firm was in the midst of one scandal after another. Facebook severed its relationship with the firm.
“It may be normal in Washington, but it’s not the kind of thing I want Facebook associated with, which is why we won’t be doing it,” Zuckerberg said.
The firm posted a rebuttal to the Times story.
Content removed
Facebook said it is getting better at proactively finding and removing content such as spam, violent posts and hate speech. The company said it removed or took other action on 15.4 million pieces of violent content between June and September of this year, about double what it removed in the prior three months.
But Zuckerberg and other executives said Facebook still has more work to do in places such as Myanmar. In the third quarter, the firm said it proactively identified 63 percent of the hate speech it removed, up from 13 percent in the last quarter of 2017. At least 100 Burmese language experts are reviewing content, the firm said.
One issue that continues to dog Facebook is that some of the most popular content is also the most sensational and provocative. Facebook said it now penalizes what it calls “borderline content” so it gets less distribution and engagement.
“By fixing this incentive problem in our services, we believe it’ll create a virtuous cycle: by reducing sensationalism of all forms, we’ll create a healthier, less-polarized discourse where more people feel safe participating,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post.
Critics of the company, however, said Zuckerberg hasn’t gone far enough to address the inherent problems of Facebook, which has 2 billion users.
“We have a man-made, for-profit, simultaneous communication space, marketplace and battle space and that it is, as a result, designed not to reward veracity or morality but virality,” said Peter W. Singer, strategist and senior fellow at New America, a nonpartisan think tank, at an event Thursday in Washington, D.C.
VOA national security correspondent Jeff Seldin contributed to this report.
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Climate change, steel and migration have emerged as sticking points in the final communique that world leaders will issue at the end of the Group of 20 summit in Argentina later this month, an Argentine government official said on Thursday.
Those issues were the “most complicated” areas of discussion, said Argentina’s Pedro Villagra Delgado, the lead organizer, or “sherpa,” for the summit of leaders from key industrialized and developing economies.
But he told a press briefing he was optimistic these issues would be resolved in time.
The G20 communique is a non-binding agreement on key international policy issues and will be presented at the conclusion of the two-day summit, which begins on Nov. 30.
Climate goals concern United States
Villagra Delgado said the United States was resistant to including language that outlined guidelines for climate goals in the document.
After withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement last year, the United States broke with other G20 member countries who have pledged to end coal usage and take steps to reach the goals outlined in the accord.
Villagra Delgado also said China disagreed with the rest of the G20 countries on steel, but did not provide further details over the specifics of their disagreement.
The United States has skirmished with a number of its trading partners — including China — over steel, imposing a 25 percent duty on imports of steel and a tariff of 10 percent on aluminum.
Other countries objected to including language about immigration in the communique, Villagra Delgado said, but would not elaborate on which countries expressed concern.
WTO reform may be on table
Reform of the World Trade Organization (WTO) may also be a topic of discussion at this month’s meeting, Villagra Delgado said, but added that specific issues to be discussed in the G20 sessions were still being worked out.
U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened to pull out of the WTO, while China has claimed the 20-year-old organization’s dispute resolution mechanisms are outdated in the current global economy.
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Super-realistic face masks made by a tiny company in rural Japan are in demand from the domestic tech and entertainment industries and from countries as far away as Saudi Arabia.
The 300,000-yen ($2,650) masks, made of resin and plastic by five employees at REAL-f Co., attempt to accurately duplicate an individual’s face down to fine wrinkles and skin texture.
Company founder Osamu Kitagawa came up with the idea while working at a printing machine manufacturer.
But it took him two years of experimentation before he found a way to use three-dimensional facial data from high-quality photographs to make the masks, and started selling them in 2011.
The company, based in the western prefecture of Shiga, receives about 100 orders every year from entertainment, automobile, technology and security companies, mainly in Japan.
For example, a Japanese car company ordered a mask of a sleeping face to improve its facial recognition technology to detect if a driver had dozed off, Kitagawa said.
“I am proud that my product is helping further development of facial recognition technology,” he added. “I hope that the developers would enhance face identification accuracy using these realistic masks.”
Kitagawa, 60, said he had also received orders from organizations linked to the Saudi government to create masks for the king and princes.
“I was told the masks were for portraits to be displayed in public areas,” he said.
Kitagawa said he works with clients carefully to ensure his products will not be used for illicit purposes and cause security risks, but added he could not rule out such threats.
He said his goal was to create 100 percent realistic masks, and he hoped to use softer materials, such as silicon, in the future.
“I would like these masks to be used for medical purposes, which is possible once they can be made using soft materials,” he said. “And as humanoid robots are being developed, I hope this will help developers to create [more realistic robots] at a low cost.”
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Millions of Brazilians may be left without access to doctors due to the end of a program that brought Cuban physicians to rural and dangerous areas in Brazil, the former health minister who helped create the initiative said Thursday.
The Cuban government on Wednesday said it would end the program after Brazilian President-elect Jair Bolsonaro said it could only continue if several conditions were met.
Bolsonaro, a former army captain, campaigned in part on promises to take a hard line against left-leaning governments. As a congressman, the far-right leader often complained about the Cuban doctors’ program and tried to end it.
In a phone interview, former Health Minister Alexandre Padilha said the decision to pull out would leave millions of Brazilians without access to doctors.
Padilha said Cuban doctors were in 2,800 cities and towns — and they were the only doctors in 1,700 of those towns. Padilha said the initiative was launched in 2013 because local doctors could not be found for many positions.
“This will have an immediate and terrible impact on the health care system,” said Padilha. “Cuban doctors are in the most vulnerable areas. They are in the Amazon, rural towns and in slums.”
Brazil, which includes the largest portion of the Amazon basin, is a vast country, a little bit larger than the continental United States. Many areas, particularly in the Amazon and historically poor Northeast region, are sparsely populated and lacking basic infrastructure.
After Cuba’s announcement Wednesday, Bolsonaro made a blistering critique of the program. Frequently referring to the Cuban government as a “dictatorship,” he said the program was “slave work” because the Cuban government keeps 70 percent of doctors’ salaries. He also said Brazil had no way to verify if the doctors were truly qualified.
Neither Bolsonaro nor the Cuban government has said when the estimated 8,500 Cuban doctors currently in Brazil would be leaving. Bolsonaro said Cuban doctors who asked for asylum would get it, though he stopped short of saying Brazil would provide that to any Cuban who asked.
Bolsonaro, who takes office Jan. 1, said he had signaled the program could only continue if doctors directly received their salaries from Brazil, were able to bring their families during their assignments and had their credentials verified.
“We have no proof that they are really doctors and able to take on these functions,” Bolsonaro said.
Padilha said the program, passed by Congress, already includes an evaluation of the doctors’ credentials and language training; Brazil’s national language is Portuguese and Cuba’s is Spanish.
The former health minister said the doctors were not only highly qualified, but specialists in rural medicine, something that Brazil’s health system badly lacks. He said the salary structure was something the Cuban government had worked out with more than 60 countries that participate in the program, and not something specific to Brazil.
“Bolsonaro doesn’t understand that a doctor doesn’t just practice medicine for money,” said Padilha. “Doctors who work in the poorest areas are not just thinking about money.”
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Smoke masks. Eye drops. No outdoor exercise. This is how Californians are trying to cope with wildfires choking the state, but experts say an increase in serious health problems may be almost inevitable for vulnerable residents as the disasters become more commonplace.
Research suggests children, the elderly and those with existing health problems are most at risk.
Short-term exposure to wildfire smoke can worsen existing asthma and lung disease, leading to emergency room treatment or hospitalization, studies have shown.
Increases in doctor visits or hospital treatment for respiratory infections, bronchitis and pneumonia in otherwise healthy people also have been found during and after wildfires.
Some studies also have found increases in ER visits for heart attacks and strokes in people with existing heart disease on heavy smoke days during previous California wildfires, echoing research on potential risks from urban air pollution.
For most healthy people, exposure to wildfire smoke is just an annoyance, causing burning eyes, scratchy throats or chest discomfort that all disappear when the smoke clears.
But doctors, scientists and public health officials are concerned that the changing face of wildfires will pose a much broader health hazard,
“Wildfire season used to be June to late September. Now it seems to be happening all year round. We need to be adapting to that,” Dr. Wayne Cascio, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency cardiologist, said this week.
In an overview published earlier this year, Cascio wrote that the increasing frequency of large wildland fires, urban expansion into wooded areas and an aging population are all increasing the number of people at risk for health problems from fires.
Wood smoke contains some of the same toxic chemicals as urban air pollution, along with tiny particles of vapor and soot 30 times thinner than a human hair. These can infiltrate the bloodstream, potentially causing inflammation and blood vessel damage even in healthy people, research on urban air pollution has shown. Studies have linked heart attacks and cancer with long-term exposure to air pollution.
Whether exposure to wildfire smoke carries the same risks is uncertain, and determining harm from smog versus wildfire smoke can be tricky, especially with wind-swept California wildfires spreading thick smoke hundreds of miles away into smoggy big cities.
“That is the big question,” said Dr. John Balmes, a University of California, San Francisco, professor of medicine who studies air pollution.
“Very little is known about the long-term effects of wildfire smoke because it’s hard to study populations years after a wildfire,” Balmes said.
Decreased lung function has been found in healthy firefighters during fire season. They tend to recover but federal legislation signed this year will establish a U.S. registry tracking firefighters and potential risks for various cancers, including lung cancer. Some previous studies suggested a risk.
Balmes noted that increased lung cancer rates have been found in women in developing countries who spend every day cooking over wood fires.
That kind of extreme exposure doesn’t typically happen with wildfires, but experts worry about the kinds of health damage that may emerge for firefighters and residents with these blazes occurring so often.
Whether that includes more cancer is unknown. “We’re concerned about that,” Balmes said.
Regular folks breathing in all that smoke worry about the risks too.
Smoke from the fire that decimated the Northern California city of Paradise darkened skies this week in San Francisco, nearly 200 miles southwest, and the air smelled “like you were camping,” said Michael Northover, a contractor.
He and his 14-year-old son have first-time sinus infections that Northover blames on the smoke.
“We’re all kind of feeling it,” Northover said.
Classes were canceled Thursday in at least six universities in Northern California as smoke from the fire continued to blanket all nine counties of the Bay Area. Some were closing all buildings but others, including Cal State East Bay said libraries, health centers and dining halls would stay open.
At Chico State University, 11 miles from Paradise, ash was falling this week and classes were canceled until after Thanksgiving.
“It’s kind of freaky to see your whole town wearing air masks and trying to get out of smoke,” said freshman Mason West, 18. “You can see the particles. Obviously it’s probably not good to be breathing that stuff in.”
West returned home this week to Santa Rosa, hard hit by last year’s wine country fire, only to find it shrouded in smoke from the Paradise fire 100 miles away. West’s family had to evacuate last year for a week but their home was spared.
“It’s as bad here as it was in Chico,” West said. “It almost feels like you just can’t get away from it.”
Smoke has been so thick in Santa Rosa that researchers postponed a door-to-door survey there for a study of health effects of last year’s fire.
“We didn’t feel we could justify our volunteer interns going knocking on doors when all the air quality alerts were saying stay indoors,” said Irva Hertz-Picciotto, a public health researcher at the University of California, Davis. The study includes an online survey of households affected by last year’s fire, with responses from about 6,000 people so far.
Preliminary data show widespread respiratory problems, eye irritations, anxiety, depression and sleep problems around the time of the fire and months later.
“Conventional thinking is that these effects related to fires are transient. It’s not entirely clear that’s the case,” Hertz-Picciotto said.
Researchers also will be analyzing cord blood and placentas collected from a few dozen women who were pregnant during the fire, seeking evidence of stress markers or exposure to smoke chemicals.
They hope to continue the study for years, seeking evidence of long-term physical and emotional harms to fire evacuees and their children.
Other studies have linked emotional stress in pregnant women to developmental problems in their children and “this was quite a stress,” Hertz-Picciotto said.
It’s a kind of stress that many people need to prepare for as the climate warms and wildfires proliferate, she said.
“Any of us could wake up tomorrow and lose everything we own,” she said. “It’s pretty scary.”
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A U.S. astronaut said on Thursday she had full confidence in the safety of the Russian-made Soyuz rocket that will blast a three-person crew into space next month in the first such launch since a rocket failure.
Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko and U.S. and Canadian astronauts Anne McClain and David Saint-Jacques are due to embark for the International Space Station on Dec. 3 after a similar launch on Oct. 11 ended in an emergency landing.
Two minutes into that launch, a rocket failure forced Russian cosmonaut Alexei Ovchinin and U.S. astronaut Nick Hague to abort their mission and hurtle back to Earth in a capsule that landed in the Kazakh steppe. The two were unharmed.
Speaking at a news conference in Star City near Moscow, McClain said that occasional failures were inevitable, but that the mishap with the Soyuz-FG in October had demonstrated the reliability of its emergency safety mechanisms.
“We trust our rocket. We’re ready to fly,” she said at the conference also attended by her colleagues Kononenko and Saint-Jacques.
“A lot of people called it an accident, or an incident, or maybe want to use it as an example of it not being safe, but for us it’s exactly the opposite because our friends came home,” McClain told reporters.
Russian investigators said the rocket failure was caused by a sensor that was damaged during assembly at the Soviet era-cosmodrome at Baikonur from where McClain, Saint Jacques and Kononenko are due to launch.
Ahead of their mission, an unmanned rocket carrying cargo is due to launch on Nov 16. in what will be the first Soyuz-FG take-off from Baikonur since the mishap.
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