Researchers at Israel’s Tel Aviv University who are monitoring the effects of plastics on animals have found an ocean dwelling helper. They’re using a tiny nuisance of a creature called the sea squirt. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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A Japanese spacecraft touched down on a distant asteroid Friday on a mission to collect material that could provide clues to the origin of the solar system and life on Earth.
Workers at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency control center applauded Friday as a signal sent from space indicated the Hayabusa2 spacecraft had touched down.
During the touchdown, Hayabusa2 is programmed to extend a pipe and shoot a pinball-like object into the asteroid to blow up material from beneath the surface. If that succeeds, the craft would then collect samples to eventually be sent back to Earth. Three such touchdowns are planned.
Japanese Education Minister Masahiko Shibayama said the space agency had concluded from its data after the first touchdown that the steps to collect samples were performed successfully.
JAXA, as the Japanese space agency is known, has likened the touchdown attempts to trying to land on a baseball mound from the spacecraft’s operating location of 20 kilometers (12 miles) above the asteroid.
The asteroid, named Ryugu after an undersea palace in a Japanese folktale, is about 900 meters (3,000 feet) in diameter and 280 million kilometers (170 million miles) from Earth.
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From homeowners facing higher flood insurance premiums to investors putting money into coal-fired power plants, financial risks related to climate change are growing, analysts say.
But working out how a switch to lower-carbon train travel could affect an airline or what an insurance firm should do to weather more flood claims is neither clear nor simple, they say.
Help may be at hand, however, from guides published Friday to assess financial risks from the physical threats of climate change, as well as the risks and opportunities of a global transition away from fossil fuels.
“What is the exposure financial institutions have to natural catastrophes? I don’t think that question traditionally has been asked,” said Greg Lowe, global head of resilience and sustainability for Aon, a London-based insurance and risk firm.
Traditional ideas may fall short
For disasters, “there’s always been an assumption we have insurance for that,” said Lowe, whose firm contributed to the reports by ClimateWise, an initiative of the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership that aims to better disclose and respond to climate-related insurance risks.
With those risks growing — particularly as heat-trapping emissions continue to rise — traditional methods of dealing with them may not be enough as the world tracks toward 2 degrees Celsius or more of global warming, the twin reports warn.
“If indeed people think we’re headed on that path [past 2 C], it’s going to be a hugely difficult task for the financial system to manage,” Lowe predicted.
Over the next 30 years, the risks from heat waves, storm surges and floods will increase substantially because of warming already underway, the physical threats report noted.
In Britain, that could lead to higher flood insurance premiums and people more often made homeless by floods, as well as greater investment by cities and towns in flood defenses.
That homeowners understand changing flood risks and will respond adequately to them “is probably a generous assumption,” Lowe said.
But even for those who do grasp the shift, simply boosting insurance coverage is unlikely to be an answer, he said.
“I don’t think buying more insurance is a politically or financially sustainable thing to do,” he said. “Even with insurance, this is still a tremendous hardship on people if they are out of their homes.”
Who foots the bill?
Rather, there should be honest discussions about who foots the bill for the growing risk and damage, he said.
“Someone is going to pay for this. How that gets distributed through the financial system is the question,” he added.
The new reports aim to demonstrate that it is possible to start taking a more precise look at the risks and their financial impacts, and to give experts tools to do that, said Bronwyn Claire, senior program manager for ClimateWise.
For instance, they could explore how changes in transport demand between trains and planes, or a carbon tax that is influencing fuel prices, might affect an airport in Germany.
The guides could also help investors spot opportunities, she added.
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As China and the United States resume high-level talks in Washington Thursday, there are signs that the two may be closing in on a deal.
Reuters news agency is reporting that top trade officials from both sides are trying to hammer out the details of six broad agreements aimed at resolving the most difficult issues from forced technology transfers, to state subsidies and cyber theft.
Earlier this week, President Donald Trump said there is no “magical date” for reaching a trade deal, a comment some felt suggests that the March 1 deadline, which could trigger a steep hike in tariffs from both countries, could be postponed if progress is being made.
Meanwhile, a senior Communist party adviser, speaking at a forum organized by the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, predicted Washington and Beijing would reach a trade deal in early March . He also said that Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Chinese tech giant Huawei, is likely to be released by April or May.
Speaking on the sidelines of a conference hosted by the newspaper, Xie Maosong, an adjunct professor at the Central Party School, said he was confident that is what would happen because of what he called the countermeasures China had taken.
Those “countermeasures” include Bejing’s detention and charging of two Canadian citizens — Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor — for endangering state security.
Meng is currently on bail in Canada awaiting possible extradition to the United States.
According to a Reuters report on Thursday, U.S. and Chinese negotiators are working on six broader agreements as well as a 10-item list of shorter-term measures.
Analysts tell VOA, that while it appears a more comprehensive deal is coming together, the details of any agreement will be key in determining whether it is a success or just an opportunity to kick long-standing issues down the road.
Christopher Balding, an economist and associate professor at Fulbright University Vietnam, said deals like the one China and the United States are working on take time.
There will be a lot of paperwork and time spent making sure individual agreements for industries are worked out, he said.
“The other issue that is going to be the real hang up, and this is going to be the real hang up for Beijing, is that there is some type of verification mechanism,” Balding said. “It’s not just the agreement, but what comes after the agreement.”
William Choong, a senior fellow with the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore, said while they are two entirely different issues, the way President Trump is handling China is similar to how he is working with North Korea.
Choong said much like the meeting between Kim Jong Un and Trump in Singapore led to a North Korea deal 1.0, next week we’re going to get a 2.0 deal with North Korea in Vietnam.
The trade deal that is coming up is similar, he said.
“It will not be the all and end all. We are going to see more iterations along the road,” Choong said. “Whatever agreement they settle on, that the Americans and Chinese agree on, will be enough to let go of some of the steam, some of the pressure that has built up.”
That will give Trump a chance to kick the March 1 deadline further down the road, he added.
Chinese state media reports on Thursday were upbeat about the meetings.
An editorial in the China Daily, entitled “Decisive Talks Must be Forward Thinking,” said, “both sides should cherish the narrowing of their differences that has been achieved, as it has involved more than just picking off low-hanging fruit.”
Calling President Trump’s suggestion that the deadline could be delayed a “conciliatory signal,” the paper also added that it would be “naïve to think that such a Gordian knot of differing goals and ambitions will be simple to unravel, especially as the discussions are now about the most divisive and touch-a-nerve issues.”
It also said Washington needs to be realistic about what China can and cannot do. What that actually entails will only be clearer when the complete agreement is released.
“China more than anything wants this to go away because it is hindering a lot of their confidence building measures and investment decisions, that’s what they are really hoping to get out of it [a deal],” Balding said.
Choong agrees, noting that what Beijing wants is to get Trump off its back. But, he added, how China could change course enough on issues such as forced technology transfers is unclear.
“I do not know how the Chinese are going to put something that is significant enough in the agreement to actually placate the Americans,” Choong said. The Chinese, he said, are looking for a way to play Trump, much like North Korea has done.
“If Trump gets enough on paper that looks satisfactory, he can go away to the Twitter-verse and say look I’ve got this big deal with the Chinese.”
British Airways and Air New Zealand have joined a wave of major U.S. airlines planning to introduce extra gender options for LGBT+ passengers who don’t identify as either male or female.
LGBT+ groups have welcomed the change, saying it would smooth the way for many trans, intersex and non-binary passengers — or those who simply don’t look typically male or female — who have long faced discrimination when flying.
“It’s a big move”, Julia Ehrt, of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA), told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“Persons presenting as gender non-conforming or trans persons who might not have been able to change their name or gender markers in passports regularly have serious challenges in traveling.
“That can range from being challenged about your gender marker or first name upon check-in or at security, through to outright denial of being able to board a plane.”
Global aviation body the International Air Transport Association (IATA) recently released new guidance for airlines who want to offer non-binary gender options for passengers.
Typical examples of non-binary markers could include a X or ‘undisclosed’ instead of male or female, and the gender-neutral title Mx instead of Mr or Mrs.
Several major U.S. airlines including United, American Airlines and Delta have confirmed they are preparing to bring in more gender options in the wake of the new guidelines.
Now British Airways and Air New Zealand say they are planning to follow suit.
“We know how important it is for all of our customers to feel comfortable and welcome no matter how they self-identify,” a spokesman for British Airways said on Wednesday.
“We are working to change our booking platform to reflect this.”
Air New Zealand said it was “exploring how we can introduce non-binary gender options across our various digital environments.”
The Lufthansa Group, which owns Lufthansa, SWISS and Austrian Airlines, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation it was “taking the implementation of additional gender options into consideration.”
Up to 1.7 percent of people are intersex meaning they are born with sex characteristics that are neither definitively male or female – according to the United Nations.
In addition, studies suggest that a growing number of people identify as trans or non-binary.
More than 10 percent of U.S. adults identify as LGBT+, rising to 20 percent among younger millennial, found a 2016 study by LGBT+ group GLAAD which argued that youth increasingly reject binary identities such as male or female.
Experts said airlines would be looking to adapt to changing demographics and social norms.
“The world itself is evolving… it’s in airlines’ interests to show they are friendly to all types of people,” said British aviation expert John Strickland.
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Google has a new cloud computing boss and big ambitions to someday produce more revenue from that business than from advertising. Now comes the hard part: winning over big-spending customers.
Alphabet Inc’s cloud computing division remains a distant third behind Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft Corp in terms of global revenue, according to analysts’ estimates. A few major companies manage their data on Google’s servers. But Google has nowhere near the vast customer base of Amazon, according to a new Reuters analysis of company regulatory filings.
Businesses generally are not required to disclose their cloud vendors. Reuters found 311 out of about 5,000 worldwide that did so in 2018. While not comprehensive, the data provide a window into Google’s challenge.
Thirty five of those companies named Google as a cloud provider. The largest by market capitalization were oil major Total SA and bank HSBC Holdings Plc.
Amazon Web Services led with 227 clients, including travel company Expedia Group Inc and industrials giant Siemens AG. Microsoft’s Azure cloud had 69 firms, among them weapons maker Axon Enterprise Inc and business data firm Dun & Bradstreet Co. Thirty four of the companies cited multiple clouds.
The previously untracked data show the work ahead for Thomas Kurian, who is weeks on the job as chief executive of Google Cloud. Kurian has vowed to double down where Google has seen promising results. Specifically, he plans to target governments and top companies in retail, manufacturing, healthcare, media and finance.
“A lot of our focus as we go forward is making sure that our sales organization has the background and the ability to sell to large, more traditional companies,” Kurian said at a Goldman Sachs investor conference last week. “There’s enormous appetite in those companies to consider Google.”
Google declined to comment or make Kurian available for an interview.
People familiar with his plans said he is looking to reshape his division’s culture. A key part is developing or acquiring easy-to-use, industry-specific corporate applications, an area that Amazon and Microsoft do not dominate.
“It’s about the on-ramp onto their cloud,” said Daniel Ives, a New York-based financial analyst following the cloud industry for Wedbush Securities. “The main way to get that is through applications.”
A 22-year veteran of Oracle Corp, Kurian gave the database company fresh life as the product leader behind its move to selling cloud services. His hire is already making potential customers reconsider Google, said Ray Wang, founder of Constellation Research, a Monta Vista, Calif.-based firm that helps businesses negotiate cloud deals.
“They’ve worked with him,” Wang said. “There’s a trust factor that wasn’t there before.”
Kurian also must reassure some investors bewildered by Google’s cloud ambitions: Diversifying revenue beyond advertising is a plus, but it is not coming cheap.
Google, Microsoft and Amazon combined spent nearly $53 billion on capital expenses last year, driven by data center projects to house their clouds.
With gross margins of 20 percent or less, selling cloud storage or tools for which customers need specialized staff is less lucrative for a small vendor, industry experts said. But margins on the type of software Kurian likely wants to offer can top even the 60 percent of Google’s ad business.
“The next wave of growth is going to have to come from the heavy hitting applications,” said Kerry Liu, chief executive at Rubikloud, which helps retailers with cloud projects.
‘Geeky, Techy platform’
Google got serious about the cloud around 2016, five years after Amazon Web Services had become a multibillion-dollar behemoth. But Google’s reputation for limited customer support has attracted mostly newer businesses or those with significant tech know-how.
Mike Fisher, Etsy Inc’s chief technology officer, said Google’s superior AI tools helped win over the New York-based crafts marketplace. Fisher expects data-crunching algorithms to account for 25 percent of its server use this year, up from 10 percent last year.
“We’ve been more pleasantly surprised than we thought,” Fisher said of the cloud’s benefits.
Advertising software company OpenX recently agreed to spend at least $110 million on Google Cloud over five years. The Pasadena, Calif. firm bet its clients would benefit from transacting on the same infrastructure as Google’s ads system. “It’s a bit more of a geeky, techy platform, but we’re that kind of company,” said Chief Technology Officer Paul Ryan.
Kurian’s plan
To attract more traditional corporate clients, Google Cloud will need to do some handholding, executives at its partners and rivals said.
Kurian is well-suited to the role. Two of his former colleagues said his follow-up and candid disclosures about product limitations helped seal deals at Oracle. An early riser, Kurian impressed staff with his meticulous preparation for morning meetings as well as his recall of the tiniest details of clients’ systems from years before.
Kurian also managed billions of dollars in acquisitions at Oracle, including the purchases of software firms BEA Systems and Taleo.
Applications could come through similar deals and internally: Google is testing product recommendation software for shopping apps, a person familiar with the project said, to add to its small set of specialized tools.
Kurian told the investor conference that “you will see us continue to expand our footprint there.”
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Ten years after launching its Galaxy line of smartphones, Samsung Electronics unveiled a new form of the ubiquitous device — a phone that seamlessly turns into a tablet — to create some new excitement in the sluggish global smartphone market.
At an event in San Francisco on Wednesday, Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Fold, its long-awaited foldable smartphone. Only FlexPai, by Royale, a U.S.-based Chinese company, has anything like it on the market, but the FlexPai has garnered mixed reviews.
Samsung ignored the FlexPai’s existence and unveiled the Galaxy Fold as if it were the first of its kind.
“The size of our screens is still fundamentally limited by the size of our devices until now,” said Justin Denison, Samsung senior vice president of product marketing. “With the Galaxy Fold, we are creating a new dimension for your phone and your life. We are giving you a device that doesn’t just define category, it defies category.”
WATCH: Samsung Rolls Out New Smartphones
Three apps at once for multitasking
When closed, the Galaxy Fold is a smartphone. When opened, the Fold turns into an expansive tablet.
The device is for the impatient multitaskers because users can run three apps at the same time and continuously use the apps while moving from phone to tablet.
The Galaxy Fold is slated to go on sale in late April. It will cost nearly $2,000. That price tag caused sticker shock at the event, eliciting gasps and some grumbling among the audience.
But it appears the Galaxy Fold is in keeping with Samsung’s aim to generate buzz for the smartphone market, while also aiming for the market’s high end, where Apple and its iPhone dominate.
Slumping smartphone sales
The challenge smartphone makers have faced in recent years is that consumers hold on to the devices for longer and longer, seeing few reasons to upgrade.
The leader in worldwide smartphone sales, the South Korean electronics firm is hoping to give consumers a few reasons to trade in their older ones, and generate buzz about what smartphones can be in the future.
Samsung’s new line of Galaxy smartphone, the S10, comes in three models, S10e, S10 and the S10+. The S10 models have bigger screens, more battery life and more cameras packed in each device than earlier Galaxy lines.
Ultrasound fingerprint scanner
The S10 has the world’s first “ultrasonic fingerprint scanner,” which uses sound waves that bounce from a user’s fingertip to unlock a device. It’s unclear if the fingerprint scanner will work through screen savers. And the S10 can act as a charger for other devices such as watches.
The S10 line, with a price starting at $749, will start shipping March 8.
Samsung executives say that with the firm’s foldable phone and new S10 line, it is ushering in the mobile era for the next decade.
“For those who say everything possible has already been done,” said DJ Koh, president and CEO of Samsung’s IT and mobile communications division. “I say open your mind and get ready for the dawn of a new mobile era.”
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Samsung has unveiled its newest line of smartphones. The top-selling smartphone maker hopes to inject excitement into a sluggish global smartphone market. Michelle Quinn attended the event in San Francisco on Wednesday and gives us a look.
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The Trump administration is set Thursday to resume high-level talks with Chinese officials, aiming to ease a trade standoff that’s unnerved global investors and clouded the outlook for the world economy.
A Chinese delegation led by Vice Premier Liu He will meet in Washington with a U.S. team led by Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross as well as Larry Kudlow, a key White House economic adviser, and Peter Navarro, a trade adviser. The talks are expected to end Friday.
The world’s two biggest economies are locked in a trade war that President Donald Trump started over his allegations that China deploys predatory tactics to try to overtake U.S. technological dominance. Beijing’s unfair tactics, trade analysts agree, include pressuring American companies to hand over trade secrets and in some cases stealing them outright.
To try to force China to change its ways, Trump has imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions in Chinese goods. Beijing has retaliated with tariffs of its own. China rejects the allegations and complains that Washington’s goal is simply to cripple a rising economic competitor.
On March 2, the Trump administration has warned, it will escalate its import taxes on $200 billion in Chinese goods from 10 percent to 25 percent if the two sides haven’t reached a resolution by then. But in recent days, Trump has signaled that he may be willing to extend the deadline if negotiators are making progress.
The conflict has rattled markets. It’s also fanned uncertainty among businesses that must decide where to invest and whether Trump’s tariffs – which raise the cost of the affected imports – will be in effect long enough to justify replacing Chinese suppliers with those from countries not subject to the tariffs.
The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have all downgraded their forecasts for the global economy, citing the heightened trade tensions.
After meetings last week in Beijing, Lighthizer said the two countries had “made headway.”
And citing upbeat comments from the two countries, Xingdong Chen, chief China economist at BNP Paribas, said the negotiators are “likely to make progress, convincing Trump it is worth extending the tariff truce if necessary.”
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A security bug is allowing users to bypass new privacy controls introduced by Facebook-owned messaging service WhatsApp on iPhones this month, the service said Wednesday after users posted about the problem on social
media.
The disclosure came as messaging and other applications race to improve security and privacy and as Facebook Inc. is addressing criticism for not safeguarding privacy.
WhatsApp’s new privacy feature allows iPhone users to require Touch ID or Face ID — fingerprint or facial recognition — to open the app, but users were able to bypass those log-in methods by using the iPhone’s “share” function to send files over WhatsApp.
Users can set verification to be required immediately upon log-in, meaning they would need to supply Touch ID or Face ID each time they open WhatsApp, or at intervals of up to an hour, allowing them to toggle between apps on the iPhone for that time period.
The security system fails when users select any interval option other than “immediately.”
A user named “u/de_X_ter” wrote a Reddit post detailing the problem Tuesday. Reuters verified the bug.
“We are aware of the issue and a fix will be available shortly. In the meantime, we recommend that people set the screen lock option to ‘immediately,’ ” a WhatsApp spokesperson said by email.
Last month, a user discovered a privacy flaw with Apple’s FaceTime group video chat software, which allowed iPhone users to see and hear others before they accept a video call. Apple rolled out an iOS update to fix the issue.
Apple did not immediately respond to questions on whether a similar fix would be required for the WhatsApp glitch.
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Samsung Electronics Co Ltd on Wednesday said it will release a folding smartphone in April that works with the next-generation 5G networks and will cost almost $2,000, a move to entice consumers to upgrade their phones.
The Galaxy Fold will go on sale on April 26, Samsung officials said at an event in San Francisco. The device will have a 4.6-inch (11.7 cm) display while folded and a 7.3-inch (18.5 cm) display when unfolded.
The device “breaks new ground because it answers skeptics who said that everything that could be done has been done,” DJ Koh, chief executive of Samsung Electronics, said at the event. “We are here to prove them wrong.”
The device could help Samsung, the world’s largest mobile phone maker, compete against rivals such as Apple Inc and China’s Huawei Technologies Co Ltd. While Huawei gained market share last year, the entire industry saw overall unit sales fall as the Chinese economy struggled toward the end of the year.
Samsung also introduced several accessories to compete against Apple, including a pair of wireless headphones called Galaxy Buds. The headphones include wireless charging, a feature that Apple has promised to put into is competing AirPods but has not yet released.
Samsung also said that its new Galaxy phones will be able to wirelessly charge its headphones and new smartwatches by setting the accessories on the back of the phone.
Samsung said it worked with Facebook Inc, Alphabet Inc’s Google and Microsoft Corp to create special versions of their popular apps to fit the new display. For example, the Galaxy folding phone has a feature to let users dive into a Facebook post by unfolding the phone.
Samsung said it had developed new manufacturing processes for the phone’s hinge and flexible display to tolerate opening and closing hundreds of thousands of times. 10 times faster
Along with the folding phone, Samsung also added new cameras and a 5G version to its Galaxy series of phones. Verizon Communications Inc will be the first carrier to offer service for Samsung’s 5G phones. The networks are expected to be 10 times faster than current ones, improving viewing of live news and sports events.
The 5G smartphones, both folding and rigid, aim to beat major rivals Apple and Xiaomi Corp to market with a next-generation device as Samsung defends a narrowing lead in global handset shipments.
With the 5G versions of its flagships, the Korean electronics maker looks to have beaten Chinese rivals in the 5G race, although the device will operate only on the small number of networks launching later this year. Apple is not expected to release a 5G smartphone until late 2020.
Rival smartphone makers are expected to announce 5G models at next week’s Mobile World Congress, the industry’s top annual event, in Spain. Samsung said its 5G handset would be available in the early summer.
The Galaxy 10 series needs to appeal to consumers who are reluctant to upgrade for only incremental technological improvements in performance. Such reluctance led to the worst-ever year for smartphone sales in 2018.
All of the Galaxy series of rigid phones except the 5G will be available from March 8, with the S10+ priced from $1,000, the S10 priced from $900 and the smaller S10e from $750.
The mainline S10 compares with $999 for Apple’s iPhone XS and $858 for Huawei’s premium Mate 20 Pro.
Samsung is still the global smartphone market leader with about 19 percent share but it underperformed the market, which was itself down.
Huawei and Apple are vying for second place with about 13 and 12 percent respectively.
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U.N. and international health agencies say Venezuela’s health care crisis is causing a rise in infectious diseases and the re-emergence of illnesses such as malaria and tuberculosis, once considered vanquished.
The World Health Organization (WHO) blames Venezuela’s complex political and socio-economic situation for the virtual collapse of the country’s health care system. It says the system is under stress because of a shortage of doctors and nurses who have left the country, as well as a lack of medical supplies and other factors.
WHO spokesman Tarek Jasarevic says this is having an adverse impact on many essential programs, including those related to disease prevention and control. He told VOA immunizing children against killer diseases has been a major casualty of the deteriorating health services in the country.
He said the first recent case of measles in the country was reported in July 2017. Since then, he said, there have been nearly 6,400 confirmed cases, including 76 deaths. Jasarevic said a similar situation has arisen with diphtheria, and that an outbreak of the disease in July 2016 lasted until January of this year, causing more than 2,500 cases and 270 deaths.
“That is why there was a push for vaccination, and as a result of a concerted effort to halt the measles outbreak between April and December 2018, more than 8 million children between the ages of six months and 15 years were vaccinated against measles, and 4.8 million children between the ages of seven and 15 years were vaccinated against diphtheria,” Jasarevic said.
WHO reports malaria cases in Venezuela have increased significantly over the past three years, nearly tripling from over 136,000 in 2015 to more than 400,000 cases in 2017. It attributes this rise to the migration of people infected in the mining areas of Bolivar state into other areas of the country, as well as a shortage of antimalarial drugs.
Jasarevic said the WHO is supporting 23 hospitals, training health personnel and preventing infectious diseases. He said about 50 tons of supplies and medicines have been distributed across all hospitals.
More than 3 million Venezuelans have fled to Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Brazil to escape what is considered the worst humanitarian crisis in the Western Hemisphere.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer will testify next week at a U.S. House of Representatives hearing on U.S.-China trade issues, a spokesman for the House Ways and Means Committee said on Wednesday.
Lighthizer has been the lead negotiator in ongoing trade negotiations with Beijing as the world’s two largest economies seek to find agreement amid a bitter dispute that has seen both sides impose tariffs on imports.
In a statement, the committee said the hearing was scheduled for Feb. 27, just days ahead of President Donald Trump’s March 1 deadline that the Republican U.S. leader has said could slide.
China and the United States began their latest round of talks this week.
The Year of the Pig is getting off to a rough start in China as the world’s largest consumer of pork and home to half the world’s pigs struggles to contain the spread of the African swine fever (ASF) virus.
Recent incidents, where traces of the virus were found in samples of frozen pork dumplings, suggest the outbreak is more widespread than has been reported, analysts said.
They add that the disease could have devastating socioeconomic consequences for both Chinese consumers and the global pig industry.
Latest outbreaks
Over the weekend, food safety regulators in southern Hunan and northwest Gansu provinces identified traces of the virus in pork products, including frozen dumplings.
The first outbreaks of African swine flu showed up in the northeastern province of Liaoning in August of last year.
Since then, China has reported more than 100 outbreaks from 25 of the country’s 34 provincial-level administrative units, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization under the United Nations.
Of China’s population of 430 million pigs, nearly one million have been culled because there’s not yet a vaccine to prevent and halt the spread of the virus.
The losses have added pressure to local pig farmers, who are already be set with rising feed costs brought on by U.S.-China trade frictions.
Food scare
Chinese authorities have worked with food manufacturers to address the latest outbreaks, but it remains unclear if all contaminated frozen pork products have been located and destroyed.
Although the virus poses no risk to human health, people are likely to be one of the carriers of the disease and can spread the virus through contaminated water or waste food.
The disease is highly contagious among domestic and wild pigs and the virus is very difficult to eradicate. It can survive for an hour at boiling temperatures, days in the environment, weeks in meat or even months in frozen meat products.
It has taken some European countries more than a decade to eradicate the virus after it was first introduced to Georgia in 2007.
Under control?
Prior to recent outbreaks, Chinese authorities claimed the country’s infection had been brought under control an assertion analysts find unlikely.
“This is not impossible, but unlikely given the enormously high density of domestic pigs in China over a geographical space larger than France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands combined,” Dirk Pfeiffer, the chair professor of One Health from the City University of Hong Kong’s college of veterinary medicine and life sciences, said in an email to VOA.
Another challenge is China’s “high proportion of small to medium size pig farms with low biosecurity which don’t have the financial means to invest into better facilities,” he added.
The professor expressed concern over the possibility of under-reporting by Chinese farmers as they may not be provided an adequate level of compensation when pigs are culled.
China offers $179 (1,200 yuan) for each culled pig.
The dilemma lies in the balance, he said. If the compensation is too low, farmers are less likely to report. But too high, some may be incentivized to introduce the disease themselves and collect the fee.
Chinese officials have called on all stakeholders in the industry to cooperate with its efforts in stopping the virus’ spread.
Although few of its neighbors, such as Hong Kong, Macau and Mongolia, import pork from China, the epidemic still puts many other Asian countries at high risk. Vietnam, in particular, is one of the 10 largest pork producers in the world and shares a border with China.
Cross-border transmission
On Tuesday,the Animal Health Department of Vietnam, confirmed the country’s first outbreaks of the infection on three farms located in Hung Yen and Thai Binh provinces, southeast of the capital, Hanoi, claiming that all pigs had been culled.
Analysts said the epidemic will change the landscape of pig industries in China and globally.
“There will be a shift towards larger farms which can afford better facilities and that also means they are able to implement better biosecurity,” professor Pfeiffer said.
The feeding of waste food to pigs will decline because the practice is a common mechanism for spreading this virus, he added.
Deng Jinping, an animal science professor at South China Agricultural University, said he’s confident China has taken all necessary steps, including a ban on kitchen waste to pigs.
Enforcement, however, is always key for a sprawling country like China.
But the crisis, he added, will present opportunities for the country’s massive pork industry to foster a better future.
“The butchery industry may be forced to seek a better development. Many would hope that the [long distance] transport of live pigs will be replaced by the use of refrigerated transportation. That will better manage risks for the third parties or across different regions. So, big changes to the industry can be expected,” Deng said.
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The Year of the Pig is getting off to a rough start in China as the world’s largest consumer of pork and home to half the world’s pigs struggles to contain the spread of the African swine fever (ASF) virus.
Recent incidents, where traces of the virus were found in samples of frozen pork dumplings, suggest the outbreak is more widespread than has been reported, analysts said.
They add that the disease could have devastating socioeconomic consequences for both Chinese consumers and the global pig industry.
Latest outbreaks
Over the weekend, food safety regulators in southern Hunan and northwest Gansu provinces identified traces of the virus in pork products, including frozen dumplings.
The first outbreaks of African swine fever showed up in the northeastern province of Liaoning in August of last year.
Since then, China has reported more than 100 outbreaks from 25 of the country’s 34 provincial-level administrative units, according to the Food and Agricultural Organization under the United Nations.
Of China’s population of 430 million pigs, nearly one million have been culled because there’s not yet a vaccine to prevent and halt the spread of the virus.
The losses have added pressure to local pig farmers, who are already be set with rising feed costs brought on by U.S.-China trade frictions.
Food scare
Chinese authorities have worked with food manufacturers to address the latest outbreaks, but it remains unclear if all contaminated frozen pork products have been located and destroyed.
Although the virus poses no risk to human health, people are likely to be one of the carriers of the disease and can spread the virus through contaminated water or waste food.
The disease is highly contagious among domestic and wild pigs and the virus is very difficult to eradicate. It can survive for an hour at boiling temperatures, days in the environment, weeks in meat or even months in frozen meat products.
It has taken some European countries more than a decade to eradicate the virus after it was first introduced to Georgia in 2007.
Under control?
Prior to recent outbreaks, Chinese authorities claimed the country’s infection had been brought under control an assertion analysts find unlikely.
“This is not impossible, but unlikely given the enormously high density of domestic pigs in China over a geographical space larger than France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands combined,” Dirk Pfeiffer, the chair professor of One Health from the City University of Hong Kong’s college of veterinary medicine and life sciences, said in an email to VOA.
Another challenge is China’s “high proportion of small to medium size pig farms with low biosecurity which don’t have the financial means to invest into better facilities,” he added.
The professor expressed concern over the possibility of under-reporting by Chinese farmers as they may not be provided an adequate level of compensation when pigs are culled.
China offers $179 (1,200 yuan) for each culled pig.
The dilemma lies in the balance, he said. If the compensation is too low, farmers are less likely to report. But too high, some may be incentivized to introduce the disease themselves and collect the fee.
Chinese officials have called on all stakeholders in the industry to cooperate with its efforts in stopping the virus’ spread.
Although few of its neighbors, such as Hong Kong, Macau and Mongolia, import pork from China, the epidemic still puts many other Asian countries at high risk. Vietnam, in particular, is one of the 10 largest pork producers in the world and shares a border with China.
Cross-border transmission
On Tuesday,the Animal Health Department of Vietnam, confirmed the country’s first outbreaks of the infection on three farms located in Hung Yen and Thai Binh provinces, southeast of the capital, Hanoi, claiming that all pigs had been culled.
Analysts said the epidemic will change the landscape of pig industries in China and globally.
“There will be a shift towards larger farms which can afford better facilities and that also means they are able to implement better biosecurity,” professor Pfeiffer said.
The feeding of waste food to pigs will decline because the practice is a common mechanism for spreading this virus, he added.
Deng Jinping, an animal science professor at South China Agricultural University, said he’s confident China has taken all necessary steps, including a ban on kitchen waste to pigs.
Enforcement, however, is always key for a sprawling country like China.
But the crisis, he added, will present opportunities for the country’s massive pork industry to foster a better future.
“The butchery industry may be forced to seek a better development. Many would hope that the [long distance] transport of live pigs will be replaced by the use of refrigerated transportation. That will better manage risks for the third parties or across different regions. So, big changes to the industry can be expected,” Deng said.
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A year ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin sailed to victory in what challengers dubbed a “filthy election.” Facing weak candidates — some likely encouraged to run by a Kremlin eager to give the poll a veneer of greater competitiveness — Putin basked in his re-election, promising a flag-waving rally of loyalists off Moscow’s Red Square that “success awaits us.”
But with less than a month to go before marking the anniversary of his re-election, Putin faces rising public frustration with his rule and unprecedented dips in his approval ratings. In a recent opinion poll, nearly half of those surveyed said the country is heading in the wrong direction.
Putin, who has held power since succeeding Boris Yeltsin in 1999, had always been guaranteed victory in an election timed to coincide with the fourth anniversary of the Russian annexation of Crimea. Many pro-Putin voters interviewed by VOA last year said they were backing him because he had restored Russian strength and transformed the country from a regional power to a global player.
The domestic political landscape has changed since then, and the spell of Russian foreign adventurism doesn’t have the pull it once had, say analysts. The 66-year-old Russian leader appeared to acknowledge that Wednesday in his first address to parliament since his re-election.
Shift in focus
He went much more lightly on foreign and military issues in contrast to his last annual address in which he saber-rattled and unveiled a raft of new missiles, bragging about their stealth and speed. This time, he focused more on domestic challenges.
In response to rising public anger at the country’s economic malaise, Putin pledged to increase spending on development and social benefits, announcing a jump in child benefits along with tax breaks for families. He also pledged to almost double disability support payments. Putin boasted that for the first time, the country’s currency reserves cover external debt obligations and said economic growth should exceed 3 percent by 2021.
“Thanks to many years of common work and the results achieved, we can now direct and concentrate enormous financial resources on our development goals for our country,” Putin said.
“Nobody gave these funds to us; we did not borrow them. These funds were earned by millions of our citizens, the whole country,” he added.
“In the near future, this year, people should feel real changes for the better,” Putin pledged.
A tough sell
Whether Putin can deliver and reverse his growing unpopularity waits to be seen.
Analysts say Russians are unlikely to be satisfied with just words when it comes to quality of life issues, including the delivery of public services, municipal amenities or, more often than not, their absence, and on health and safety issues. It is the everyday “parochial” issues that worry them, including the potentially deadly consequences of shoddy and unsafe municipal housing and the reckless discarding of trash as Russia runs out of landfill sites.
Last year, thousands protested when dozens of children, in the town of Volokolamsk near Moscow, were hospitalized with suspected poisoning, the result of noxious gases emanating from an overfull local landfill.
In the past, when his political star has waned, Putin has turned to adventurism abroad to shore up support, offering foreign policy triumphs to whip up his domestic standing. That is unlikely to work moving forward, say analysts such as Mikhail Dmitriev.
Urban-rural divide
Dmitriev says polling data suggest the Kremlin is heading for a rocky few months with signs that dissent is likely to mount, and not just among the usual middle-class Putin skeptics and critics in the Russian capital and St. Petersburg, but in non-metropolitan Russia, in the smaller towns and villages, which traditionally have been the backbone of his support.
Raising the retirement age last year triggered the slide in Putin’s popularity. Cuts to salaries and sluggish economic growth added to the drag on his approval ratings, pollsters say. Real incomes have fallen by more than 10 percent since 2014, and nearly 40 percent of Russians say their material well-being has worsened just in the last 12 months.
Alexander Baunov of the Carnegie Moscow Center, a research institution, noted in a commentary earlier this month that ordinary workers are becoming more vexed with the Kremlin’s failure to deliver higher standards of living, as Putin promised he would do during the election campaign.
“Increasingly he is getting into fights with real Russians who want to complain about government policies. Last September, when he visited the Zvezda shipyard in the Russian Far East, the president got into an argument with the workers there about their salaries. (The transcript of their conversation in which Putin massively overestimated what they were paid was subsequently removed from the Kremlin website),” according to Baunov.
Baunov says the Putin system is increasingly being found wanting and the Russian president will not be able to deliver on the growing demand for economic redistribution “at the expense of the country’s rich capitalists,” in effect the friends of Putin and businessmen close to the Kremlin.
A hacking group has targeted European democratic institutions including think tanks and non-profit groups ahead of highly anticipated EU parliamentary elections in May, Microsoft said.
The company said Tuesday that a group called Strontium targeted email accounts for more than 100 people in six European countries working for the German Council on Foreign Relations, the Aspen Institutes in Europe and the German Marshall Fund.
Microsoft said in a blog post that it is continuing to investigate but is confident many of the attacks originated from Strontium, a group that others call Fancy Bear or APT28. U.S. authorities have tied the group to Russia’s main intelligence agency, known as the GRU.
Microsoft said the attacks occurred from September to December, and that it notified the organizations after discovering they were targeted.
Tech companies have been accused of not doing enough to prevent hacking attacks and the spread of fake news, which some say influenced major elections like the U.S. presidential vote and the Brexit referendum.
Hundreds of millions of people are set to vote for more than 700 European Union parliamentary lawmakers in May, and the recent rise of populist parties has raised the prospect of euroskeptic politicians gaining more seats and potentially undermining the bloc.
The German Marshall Fund has done extensive work researching and documenting Russian attempts at interfering in elections as part of its broader efforts on democracy-building and trans-Atlantic cooperation.
In a statement, the German Marshall Fund president, Karen Donfried, said the attacks were unsurprising for an organization “dedicated to advancing and promoting democratic values.”
The organization said its systems did not appear to be compromised.
The German Council on Foreign Relations declined to offer details, citing the ongoing investigation. But a council spokeswoman, Eva-Maria McCormack, called for “strong political and public attention” to the issue of cyberattacks.
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The U.S. decision last week to permit Vietnam to fly its commercial aircraft directly to American airports is seen as a continuation of improving relations and follows other signs of international recognition for Hanoi.
Observers say the breakthrough shows that major countries including the United States take Vietnam ever more seriously after more than three decades of brisk economic development and foreign policy that includes balancing relations with its communist neighbor China without worrying the West.
“It’s been a slow and progressive bringing back [of] Vietnam into the international community,” said Adam McCarty, chief economist with Mekong Economics in Hanoi. “It’s been this continual process from the Vietnamese side of being caught, as they have been historically for hundreds of years, between larger powers.”
The Federal Aviation Administration’s award of a “category 1” rating for Vietnam means the country meets international safety standards. Vietnamese airlines can get permits now from the administration to open flights to the United States and carry the codes of U.S. carriers, the FAA said in a statement February 14.
US officials see change
Vietnamese officials knew the significance of the U.S. market in 2012, when they started working toward the FAA category 1 rating, Communist Party news website Nhan Dah reported Monday. They set out to solve 49 safety problems that the FAA found a year later, the website added.
The FAA inspected Vietnam’s civil aviation schemes again last year and gave high marks in most areas. It found just 14 “individual and not systematic problems,” the report says.
Clinching category 1 status from the world’s largest economy follows other signs of growing recognition.
The U.S. ran a $29.3 billion trade deficit with Vietnam in the first nine months of last year, but Washington did not make it a big issue. China and the United States, however, have been locked in disputes for about the past year partly because of China’s trade surplus with the United States.
U.S. President Donald Trump, who praised Vietnam’s economic momentum in 2017, is scheduled to visit Hanoi next week for his second summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. Both sides picked Vietnam as host because it’s seen as geopolitically neutral.
Trump and his “hawkish colleagues” will see Vietnam as distinct from China in terms of trade, McCarty said.
“The degree of economic and trade closeness between Vietnam and the United States is always increasing,” said Tai Wan-ping, Vietnam-specialized international business professor at Cheng Shiu University in Taiwan. “Apart from Vietnam having trade deals, in substance the degree of progress is extremely high.”
Bigger economy, more fliers
Foreign investment in Vietnamese manufacturing is fueling economic growth of 6 to 7 percent since 2012. That trend is growing the middle class to about one-third of the 93 million population by next year, the Boston Consulting Group estimates.
Citizens are spending some of their new wealth on airfares.
The country saw 94 million passengers in 2017, including 13 million foreign nationals, up 16 percent over 2016. The domestic civil aviation industry has grown 17.4 percent over the past decade and the International Air Transport Association projects Vietnam will become the world’s fifth fastest growing aviation market by 2035.
Foreign investors are expected to keep flying in, too. In January Vietnam formally joined the 11-country Comprehensive and Progressive Trans Pacific Partnership, a free-trade deal encompassing about 13.5 percent of the world economy. The European Union expects to ratify its own trade pact with Vietnam.
As part of a 10-member bloc of Southeast Asian countries, Vietnam trades freely with China. But political scientists say Vietnam avoids favoritism toward China, despite its having a similar political system and its significance as a source of raw materials. Vietnam has vied with China over territory for centuries and prefers a multi-country foreign policy today.
Loads of returnees, fewer tourists
Vietnamese in the United States are likely to pack the eventual direct flights as relatively few American tourists visit Vietnam, compared to other sources, McCarty said. Some Vietnamese-Americans go back to visit; others to invest.
The Migration Policy Institute estimates there are about 1.3 million people of Vietnamese heritage live in the United States today, many relocated after the U.S.-backed former South Vietnam lost to the Communist north in the 1970s. Foreign tourism to Vietnam surged to 14.1 million in the first 11 months of last year, led by citizens from China and South Korea.
“There are residents in the U.S. itself, so that alone would be good enough for airline connections if they see fit to,” said Song Seng Wun, regional economist in the private banking unit of CIMB in Singapore, “Every country on the planet has representation in the U.S. population in one way or another. Obviously therefore it makes economic sense, commercial sense to have connectivity.”
Passengers on the eventual direct flights would avoid today’s stopovers in places such as Hong Kong and Taipei, Tai said.
Hundreds of orange robots zoom and whiz back and forth like miniature bumper cars — but instead of colliding, they’re following a carefully plotted path to transport thousands of items ordered from online giant Amazon.
A young woman fitted out in a red safety vest, with pouches full of sensors and radio transmitters on her belt and a tablet in hand, moves through their complicated choreography.
This robot ballet takes place at the new Amazon order fulfillment center that opened on Staten Island in New York in September.
In an 80,000-square-meter (855,000-square-foot) space filled with the whirring sounds of machinery, the Seattle-based e-commerce titan has deployed some of the most advanced instruments in the rapidly growing field of robots capable of collaborating with humans.
The high-tech vest, worn at Amazon warehouses since last year, is key to the whole operation — it allows 21-year-old Deasahni Bernard to safely enter the robot area, to pick up an object that has fallen off its automated host, for example, or check if a battery needs replacing.
Bernard only has to press a button and the robots stop or slow or readjust their dance to accommodate her.
Human-robot ‘symphony’
Amazon now counts more than 25 robotic centers, which chief technologist for Amazon Robotics Tye Brady says have changed the way the company operates.
“What used to take more than a day now takes less than an hour,” he said, explaining they are able to fit about 40 percent more goods inside the same footprint.
For some, these fulfillment centers, which have helped cement Amazon’s dominant position in global online sales, are a perfect illustration of the looming risk of humans being pushed out of certain business equations in favor of artificial intelligence.
But Brady argues that robot-human collaboration at the Staten Island facility, which employs more than 2,000 people, has given them a “beautiful edge” over the competition.
Bernard, who was a supermarket cashier before starting at Amazon, agrees.
“I like this a lot better than my previous jobs,” she told AFP, as Brady looked on approvingly.
What role do Amazon employees play in what Brady calls the human-robot “symphony?”
In Staten Island, on top of tech-vest wearers like Bernard, there are “stowers,” “pickers” and “packers” who respectively load up products, match up products meant for the same customers and build shipping boxes — all with the help of screens and scanners.
At every stage, the goal is to “extend people’s capabilities” so the humans can focus on problem-solving and intervene if necessary, according to Brady.
At the age of 51, he has worked with robotics for 33 years, previously as a spacecraft engineer for MIT and on lunar landing systems of the Draper Laboratory in Massachusetts.
He is convinced the use of “collaborative robots” is the key to future human productivity — and job growth.
Since Amazon went all-in on robotics with the 2012 acquisition of logistics robot-maker Kiva, gains have been indisputable, Brady says.
They’ve created 300,000 new jobs, bringing the total number of worldwide Amazon employees up to 645,000, not counting seasonal jobs.
“It’s a myth that robotics and automation kills jobs, it’s just a myth,” according to Brady.
“The data really can’t be denied on this: the more robots we add to our fulfillment centers, the more jobs we are creating,” he said, without mentioning the potential for lost jobs at traditional stores.
The ‘R2D2’ model
For Brady, the ideal example of human-robot collaboration is the relationship between “R2D2” and Luke Skywalker from “Star Wars.”
Their partnership, in which “R2D2” is always ready to use his computing powers to pull people out of desperate situations “is a great example of how humans and robots can work together,” he said.
But despite Brady’s enthusiasm for a robotic future, many are suspicious of the trend — a wariness that extends to the corporate giant, which this month scrapped high-profile plans for a new New York headquarters in the face of local protests.
Attempts by Amazon employees to unionize, at Staten Island and other sites, have so far been successfully fought back by the company, further fuelling criticism.
At a press briefing held last month as part of the unionization push, one employee of the facility, Rashad Long, spoke out about what he said were unsustainable work conditions.
“We are not robots, we are human beings,” Long said.
Sharing the benefits
Many suspect Amazon’s investment in robotics centers aims to eventually automate positions currently held by humans.
For Kevin Lynch, an expert in robotics from Northwestern University near Chicago, the development of collaborative robots is “inevitable” and will indeed eventually eliminate certain jobs, such as the final stage of packing at Amazon for instance.
“I also think other jobs will be created,” he said. “But it’s easier to predict the jobs that will be lost than the jobs that will be created.”
“Robotics and artificial intelligence bring clear benefits to humanity, in terms of our health, welfare, happiness, and quality of life,” said Lynch, who believes public policy has a key role to play in ensuring those benefits are shared, and that robotics and AI do not sharpen economic inequality.
“The growth of robotics and AI is inevitable,” he said. “The real question is, ‘how do we prepare for our future with robots?”
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Suraj Nachre works long hours and regularly misses meals but he treasures his job as a driver for a food delivery startup — working in a booming industry that highlights India’s expanding apps-based gig-economy.
The 26-year-old is one of hundreds of thousands of young Indians who, armed with their smartphones and motorcycles, courier dinners to offices and homes ordered at the swipe of a finger.
A surge in the popularity of food-ordering apps like Uber Eats and Swiggy provides a welcome source of income for many as India’s unemployment rate sits at a reported 45-year high.
But they also shine a spotlight on the prevalence of short-term contracts in the economy, raising questions about workers’ rights and conditions and the long-term viability of the jobs.
“(These delivery workers) are treated as independent contractors so labor laws governing employees are not applicable and they lack job security,” Gautam Ghosh, a human resources consultant, told AFP.
“While jobs created by food delivery apps are crucial, they may not exist in 10 years so for the majority of youngsters they are a stopgap arrangement,” he added.
India’s army of food delivery drivers, mostly men but some women too, became a talking point on social media late last year when a rider for the Zomato platform was filmed sampling a customer’s order.
The video, apparently shot on a mobile phone, showed the man taking bites from several food parcels before wrapping them again. It sparked anger online and he was promptly sacked.
Rushing around
Many internet users rallied to his defense, however. They insisted that the two-minute clip showed he was hungry and desperate, and said Zomato had acted harshly in dismissing him.
“It is a challenging job,” said Nachre, expressing sympathy for the unnamed delivery man who was working in the southern city of Madurai before being fired.
“We work 12 hours straight in soaring heat and heavy rains. Sometimes I don’t even have time to eat,” he added.
Nachre drives for the Scootsy platform. He leaves home at 9:00 am and does not return until after 1:00 am. Navigating Mumbai’s abysmal traffic makes work stressful, he says.
“We’re always in a rush to deliver and customers keep calling us. We know we have to be on our toes all the time or customers might complain and we may lose our jobs,” Nachre told AFP.
India’s food delivery apps, backed by major international investment, are offering new avenues of employment for Indian youngsters who lack higher education but possess a driving license.
Their importance to the likes of Nachre was highlighted recently when a leaked government report said India’s unemployment rate was 6.1 percent in 2017-18, the highest since the 1970s.
“This job is lucrative,” said Nachre, who has no post-school qualifications and earns a minimum of 18,000 rupees ($253) a month.
In his previous job running errands at an office he made only 8,000 rupees.
The app-based food delivery industry is worth an estimated $7 billion to Asia’s third-largest economy, according to market research firm Statista, and is expanding rapidly.
Swiggy announced at the end of last year that it had received $1 billion in funding from foreign backers including South Africa’s Naspers and China’s Tencent.
Foreign investment
That put the valuation of the five-year-old company, headquartered in Bangalore, at more than $3 billion.
Zomato, Swiggy’s nearest challenger for market dominance, is being aggressively backed by Alibaba’s Ant Financial. The Chinese giant recently pumped in $210 million, valuing the Delhi-based startup at $2 billion.
The food delivery platforms are soaring as India’s growing middle classes take advantage of better smartphone connectivity and cheap data plans that are fueling a gig economy centered on technology.
Informal, casual labor has long been the bedrock of India’s economy but now Indians can access a host of services on their phones from hiring a rickshaw to booking a plumber or yoga teacher.
FlexingIt, a global consulting agency, estimates the country’s gig economy has the potential to grow up to $30 billion by 2025.
Analysts say it is time the government started to regulate the sector.
“There is no regulator overlooking this sector. Working conditions definitely need to get better for these workers,” Anurag Mahur, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers told AFP.
Thirty-year-old Tushar Khandagale, who delivers for Zomato, is the sole breadwinner in his family.
With millions of youngsters entering India’s workforce every year and looking for a job, Khandagale would relish a long-term contract that offered him some security.
“I hope to stay in this job. It pays well and my family depend on me,” he said.
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At home in the United States, Kerrie Springer takes pride in being environmentally conscious. So when she booked a week’s getaway at the Bucuti and Tara Beach Resort in Aruba, she choose the “green stay” option, agreeing to reuse her sheets and towels rather than have them changed each day.
“You don’t do that at home, so why do it at a resort?” asked Springer, who visited the resort with her husband. “Water in the Caribbean is precious, so why use it if you do not have to?”
Environmentally friendly tourism options — available at a growing string of hotels across the Caribbean — are proving popular with tourists, helping curb climate change and waste, industry groups say.
The Bucuti and Tara resort last August was certified as 100 percent carbon neutral by Natural Capital Partners, an international organization that works to promote low-carbon sustainable development.
The resort, established by Austrian Ewald Biemans in 1987, after he moved to Aruba in the 1960s, is known for its use of renewable energy, smaller portions at meal time to reduce food waste, and reuseable containers for everything from ketchup to shampoo.
Those kinds of changes are catching on around the Caribbean, with a range of hotels and resorts eliminating single-use plastics such as straws, water bottles and shampoo containers.
Others are switching to more efficient air conditioners and refrigerators and installing LED lights, officials say.
The push is part of an ongoing effort to make tourism in the region greener, said Amanda Charles, a sustainable tourism development specialist at the Caribbean Tourism Organization (CTO).
Less Energy, Lower Bills
Loreto Duffy-Mayers, who works with Charles on hotel energy audits, said efforts to improve energy efficiency, for instance, have helped many hotels cut their energy bills 30 to 50 percent.
The Paradise Island Beach Club in the Bahamas was able to slash its energy costs, saving about a quarter million dollars a year, through measures such as installing air conditioners that turn off when a room is cool enough and unplugging unused refrigerators, she said.
The CTO’s members are 24 countries throughout the English, French and Dutch Caribbean whose economies are heavily dependent on tourism.
Charles said the group encourages members to focus on providing three kinds of benefits in their countries: environmental, social and economic.
In Aruba, for instance, tourism provides over 90 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product – and, by extension, most of its employment and tax revenue, said Frank Comito, director general of the Caribbean Hotel and Tourism Association (CHTA).
That revenue in turn funds schools, healthcare and other public services, he said.
Because the country’s sea, sun and natural beauty is the primary driver for tourism, places like Aruba also have enacted policies to conserve water and electricity and protect the environment, he said.
Comito said the hotel and tourism association offers regular webinars on sustainability issues, including waste management, sustainable design, and climate change, and guides members through environmental certification programs.
It also holds disaster risk preparedness workshops for its members – from the U.S. Virgin Islands to Jamaica – to help them prepare for worsening climate-related risks.
Charles acknowledges, however, that raising environmental awareness in the tourism sector remains a work in progress.
“Most of the CTO’s member countries have a higher budget for marketing than one for sustainable tourism initiatives,” she admitted.
High turnover among hotel staff – particularly housekeepers – can also make it difficult to ensure that green changes brought in continue to be fully implemented, she said.
But changes slowly are taking root. Biemans, of the Bucuti and Tara, said water at his resort is recycled and solar panels provide 20 percent of the facility’s electricity needs.
The resort also buys another 22 percent of its energy from a wind farm operated by the Aruban government, he said.
“We reuse every drop of water. Our meal portions are about 30 percent less and people are actually pleased with it. We do not have a single complaint. And our food waste is reused by pig farms on the island,” Biemans said. “It is good for business, the staff and customers. It saves the environment as much as it saves money. The customer has to pay less for the room, we have to pay less for energy — and in the end everybody benefits.”
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Striking a pose in the mirror, Swedish model and stylist Lisa Anckarman shows off a new jacket with a difference on Instagram – though it fits her perfectly in the photo, it’s a virtual design that does not exist in real life.
She is among a number of trendsetters embracing cutting-edge technology that offers the opportunity to sate appetites for fast fashion while dramatically slashing the emissions, pollution and labor abuses linked to the garment industry.
“I really liked the idea and the aspect that it’s good for the environment,” Anckarman told the Thomson Reuters Foundation as she discussed her virtual styling. Actually I think it maybe looked too good because people didn’t really get that it was digital.”
“People were asking me ‘Where did you buy this?’ and I was saying, ‘It’s digital’, and they were like, ‘No, at what shop did you buy it?'”
Fashion is one of the world’s most damaging industries – it is responsible for about 10 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, sucks up scarce water and creates vast amounts of pollution and waste.
But the desire for the latest look is only increasing. Global fashion sales grew by about 4.5 percent to $1.7 trillion in 2018, found analysts at McKinsey and Company, who said social media is bringing trends to consumers at an ever swifter pace.
Some businesses are now looking to meet the demand for new styles through digital designs, with Scandinavian fashion firm Carlings convincing its customers to pay real cash for virtual clothes that are digitally “fitted” onto users’ photographs.
“It was kind of scary (launching it) but the response was so overwhelming that we were convinced we were on to something,” said Ronny Mikalsen, the firm’s brand director.
The first Carlings designs, costing between 10 euros ($11) and 30 euros, sold out and a second digital collection is due to be released in spring 2019.
High fashion, low emissions
Digital clothes create far lower emissions than physical clothes as they cut out the long, labor-intensive process of sourcing materials, producing fabrics, making garments and shipping them worldwide.
While virtual styles may still be niche, experts say they are set to grow as technology seeps into more aspects of human lives.
Younger generations in particular are keen to curate their online personas as much as their real-life image, said Matthew Drinkwater, the head of the Fashion Innovation Agency based at the London College of Fashion.
On Instagram you have to ask “how much of that is a real person and how much is an enhanced version or a way they wish to portray themselves?” he said.
The increasing use of filters on social media that can add cute dog ears or a flower crown on top of a photo or edit video in real time to make people vomit rainbows shows how people are already using digital effects to play with their image, he said.
“In a very simple sense people are beginning to enhance or alter the way that they look,” he said. “You can begin to see a drift towards this merging of physical and digital.”
Shopping habits are already changing to meet the demands of online images: nearly one in 10 people have bought clothes to wear once, with the aim of sharing their outfit on social media, according to a survey of 2,000 Britons by finance firm Barclaycard last summer.
“If you get caught wearing the same clothes too many times it’s seen as a bad thing,” said Morten Grubak from the Virtue creative agency, who came up with the Carlings campaign.
“One of the worst things you can write under images is ‘Not again’, making the hint they have posted that outfit before.”
‘Physics-defying’ outfits
Some involved in virtual fashion said they had set out to offer a new solution to the industry’s climate damage and waste rather than trying to persuade consumers to buy less.
“Right now (environmental campaigns) are always about, like, how much water did we save producing these jeans and people don’t care about that,” said Grubak.
“Instead of getting angry with people doing fashion on Instagram, how can we innovatively solve that problem by adding a new platform?”
Other companies said they had taken a deliberate decision to avoid the traditional fashion market entirely.
“We’ve made a very clear point of never wanting to be a physical fashion brand,” said Kerry Murphy of Dutch digital fashion house The Fabricant, which creates only virtual designs.
“We believe the world does not need more clothing. It’s an incredibly wasteful and polluting industry. That’s why we very consciously said we want to re-imagine fashion.”
Digital design also opens up new possibilities to play with fashion, from using fabrics like rubber which would be relatively uncomfortable in real life through to dabbling in exotic skins or even physics-defying fantasies.
“Clothing will definitely have a different meaning because it does not have the same functionality as physical clothing,” Murphy said.
“People can wear fire or they wear rain or they can be a dinosaur, so the possibilities are limitless.”
Those involved in the digital design industry said it will not offer a complete solution to fashion’s emissions and waste problems, but it can help by encouraging people to update their existing wardrobes with virtual flourishes.
And as technology advances, virtual fashion could sashay into the mainstream, said Drinkwater.
Within a decade, people could regularly wear high-tech glasses that can apply digital effects over what the wearer sees in real life, he predicted, meaning virtual clothes will no longer be restricted to a computer or phone screen.
“Could you imagine a point where your existing clothes could be constantly updated through digital design? Could we be downloading content that could portray ourselves differently? Would that stop us from simply buying more product?” he asked. “That potential is really quite exciting.”
($1 = 0.8834 euros)
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And now for the weather on Mars: NASA’s newest lander is offering daily reports on the red planet’s frigid winter.
Starting Tuesday, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is posting the highs and lows online, along with wind speed and atmospheric pressure from the InSight lander.
On Sunday, InSight recorded a high of 2 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 17 Celsius) and a low of minus 138 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 95 Celsius). Compare that with Sunday’s coldest U.S. temperature: minus 27 degrees (minus 3 Celsius) in Taylor Park, Colorado.
Scientists need to know the local Mars weather to determine if InSight’s seismometer is registering real marsquakes or simply wind or pressure changes.
InSight landed near the Mars equator in November. NASA’s Curiosity rover is also providing weather updates, while roaming around Mars.
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A rubbery sea creature with an irritating habit of clinging to ships and invading beaches could help measure plastic pollution as it can filter tiny particles from the ocean and store them in its soft tissue.
Israeli researchers have found that ascidians – round, palm-sized animals also known as sea squirts can thrive in dirty industrial areas and pristine waters alike, allowing them to detect and analyze waste and its impact in various regions.
A staggering amount of plastic flows into the ocean each year. The United Nations says it is as if a garbage truck full of plastic was dumped into the water every minute, a rate some estimates show could lead to oceans carrying more plastic than fish in 30 years.
But the long-term impact of the waste, particularly tiny pieces called microplastic, is still not fully understood.
“[Sea squirts] just sit in one place all their life and filter the water, like a pump,” said Gal Vered of Tel Aviv University, and who co-published the researchers’ findings in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin.
“They can really give us a picture of what the whole reef, the whole ecosystem felt during its life.”
As a bonus, sea squirts are related in evolutionary terms to human beings. So studying them and the plastic inside them could be more insightful than looking at creatures like fish or clams.
“Although we don’t look alike at all, we have similar systems,” said Noa Shenkar, of Tel Aviv University’s zoology department and museum of natural history.
Durable and dangerous
Plastic never disappears. Over time it breaks down into microplastics, ranging from the size of a grain of rice on down. They mix with tiny plastic beads found in products like cosmetics and cleaners that were flushed away.
These are eaten by wildlife, filling their bellies, exposing them to chemical additives and, potentially, entering the food chain, said Vered.
Vered searched piers and rocks in the Red Sea resort of Eilat, eventually finding a cluster of sea squirts on a brick.
Back in her lab, a gentle push on one squirt’s belly saw the creature let loose the eponymous squirt of water. Invisible to the naked eye are the microplastics, perhaps once part of a bag or bottle, and that were found at all the sites they tested along Israel’s coasts.
“We as humans invented a material that can last for hundreds, thousands of years, and then we use it as a single-use product. It’s quite a paradox,” she said.