American tech companies have long looked to China as a key partner to help build and sell cutting-edge devices and services. But tensions are rising between Washington and Beijing, and Silicon Valley may be caught in the middle. Michelle Quinn reports.
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China hopes Britain’s exit from the European Union can happen in an orderly way and that the bloc will reduce hurdles to Chinese investment and keep its markets open, China’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday.
China, the world’s second-largest economy, has watched Brexit nervously, worried not only about potential market turmoil from a disorderly departure but about losing Britain’s supportive voice for free trade within the EU.
“China hopes to see Brexit proceed in an orderly fashion and stands ready to advance China-EU and China-UK relations in parallel,” the ministry said in a lengthy policy document on EU ties.
The EU and China are often at loggerheads over trade and other issues, with the EU sharing many of the same concerns as the United States about market access, trade imbalances and intellectual property rights protection.
The bloc is China’s largest trading partner while China is its biggest trading partner after the United States.
The EU has been pressing for better access to the Chinese market for its companies, while China has complained about what it sees as unfair restrictions on Chinese investments in the EU.
Despite events such as Brexit, China said the EU has remained committed to integration, pressed on with reforms and played a major role in regional and international affairs.
Beijing has promised to look at the possibility of reaching a “top notch” free trade deal with Britain post-Brexit.
The Brexit process is currently deadlocked with just over 100 days until Britain is due to leave the EU.
On trade, China’s white paper said the EU should ease high-tech export controls on China and facilitate mutual investment.
The government will significantly ease market access and endeavor to foster a “stable, fair, transparent, law-based and predictable business environment that protects the legitimate rights and interests of foreign investment and treats Chinese and foreign firms registered in China as equals,” it said.
“China hopes that the EU will keep its investment market open, reduce and eliminate investment hurdles and discriminatory barriers, and provide Chinese companies investing in Europe a fair, transparent and predictable policy environment and protect their legitimate rights and interests.”
The EU last month provisionally agreed on rules for a far-reaching system to coordinate scrutiny of foreign investments into Europe, notably from China in the wake of a surge in Chinese investments, to end what a negotiator called “European naivety.”
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A microscopic examination of fossils from China has revealed that the fur-like body covering of pterosaurs, the remarkable flying reptiles that lived alongside dinosaurs, was actually made up of rudimentary feathers.
The surprising discovery described by scientists on Monday means that dinosaurs and their bird descendants were not the only creatures to boast feathers and that feathers likely appeared much longer ago than previously known. Pterosaurs were only distantly related to dinosaurs and birds.
Birds need feathers to fly. That was not the case with pterosaurs. Short, hair-like feathers covered their bodies and wings but lacked the strong central shaft of avian flight feathers, the researchers said. They may have provided insulation and other benefits, as hair does for mammals.
“They were not flight feathers,” said paleontologist Baoyu Jiang of Nanjing University, who led the research published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. “They looked fuzzy, and they didn’t have complicated feathers.”
The researchers examined beautifully preserved Jurassic Period fossils roughly 160 to 165 million years old of two small pterosaurs called anurognathids from northeastern China.
Apparently forest dwellers and insect eaters, they possessed 18-inch (45 cm) wingspans, short tails and superficially frog-like faces.
Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to master flight, followed much later by birds and bats. Scientists have known since the 19th century that pterosaurs had a fur-like body covering and there has been a long-running scientific debate about how to classify it.
Many of the filaments, under the microscope, showed branching like in feathers but not hair.
University of Bristol paleontologist and study co-author Mike Benton said four types of pterosaur feathers were observed: downy feathers; single filaments; bundles of filaments; and filaments with tufts at the end. Tiny pigment-related structures indicated these feathers were ginger-brown in color.
Birds, many meat-eating dinosaurs and some plant-eating dinosaurs are known to have had feathers, though these looked different from those seen on the pterosaurs.
“We feel the simplest thing for the present is to call them all feathers because they show branching, the fundamental distinguishing character of a feather,” Benton said.
Pterosaurs and dinosaurs both appeared roughly 230 million years ago during the Triassic Period. The researchers said the appearance of feathers in both groups suggests feathers first evolved perhaps 250 million years ago in a common ancestor of pterosaurs and dinosaurs.
Pterosaurs, the biggest of which had 35-foot (10.7-meter)wingspans, went extinct along with the dinosaurs after an asteroid impact 66 million years ago.
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Mexico’s wage commission said on Monday it planned to hike the country’s minimum wage by 16 percent to around $5 per day and leftist President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador pledged further increases to keep salaries apace with inflation.
The salary commission, made up of government, business and labor representatives, said the daily minimum wage would rise to 102.68 pesos from 88.36 pesos on Jan. 1, the biggest such hike since 1996.
“During many years the minimum wage has lost its purchasing power. Some say it has lost 70 percent of its purchasing power over the last 30 years,” said Lopez Obrador.
“We’re never going to have wage (increases) below inflation,” said Lopez Obrador, who took office on Dec. 1.
Low wages have helped to attract foreign companies to Mexico and create jobs, but also encourage migration to the United States. U.S. President Donald Trump argues that low wages south of the border kill U.S. jobs.
Lopez Obrador has called for doubling the minimum wage in northern states that border the United States in a bid to reduce inequality with neighboring U.S. areas.
In the area within 25 kilometers (16 miles) from the U.S. border, the minimum wage will be increased to 176.72 pesos per day, Mexican employers’ confederation Coparmex said in a statement.
Lopez Obrador’s maiden budget, delivered on Saturday, was welcomed by markets for pledging to stick to fiscal discipline, but the wage policy raised concerns that it could hit inflation and spark higher interest rates.
Benito Berber, chief economist for Latin America at Natixis, said Lopez Obrador’s new take on wages, including the commitment to keep pace with inflation, could push Mexico’s central bank to raise interest rates on Thursday.
“It seems the government is willing to accept higher inflation and perhaps stickier inflation,” Berber said. “Banxico has been clear that wage increases above productivity would entail tight monetary policy.”
($1 = 20.1160 Mexican pesos)
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Astronomers have spotted the farthest known object in our solar system — and they’ve nicknamed the pink cosmic body “Farout.”
The International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center announced the discovery Monday.
“Farout” is about 120 astronomical units away — that’s 120 times the distance between Earth and the sun, or 11 billion miles. The previous record-holder was the dwarf planet Eris at 96 astronomical units. Pluto, by comparison, is 34 astronomical units away.
The Carnegie Institution’s Scott Sheppard said the object is so far away and moving so slowly it will take a few years to determine its orbit. At that distance, it could take more than 1,000 years to orbit the sun.
Sheppard and his team spied the dwarf planet in November using a telescope in Hawaii. Their finding was confirmed by a telescope in Chile.
“I actually uttered “farout” when I first found this object, because I immediately noticed from its slow movement that it must be far out there,” Sheppard wrote in an email. “It is the slowest moving object I have ever seen and is really out there.”
It is an estimated 310 miles (500 kilometers) across and believed to be round. Its pink shade indicates an ice-rich object. Little else is known.
The discovery came about as the astronomers were searching for the hypothetical Planet X, a massive planet believed by some to be orbiting the sun from vast distances, well beyond Pluto.
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Women must wait 202 years before they can earn the same as men and have equal job opportunities, according to a global report released Tuesday, which said the rise in robots and the lack of child care were keeping many women out of work.
Women earn about half as much as men, said the World Economic Forum (WEF), reporting a gender pay gap of 51 percent in 2018.
“It’s still a long way from parity, and it’s still a long way from reaching a point where women and men are being paid the same for the same job,” said report co-author Saadia Zahidi, head of WEF’s Center for the New Economy and Society.
There were fewer women working this year than men, mostly due to the lack of child care which kept women from jobs or from progressing to senior roles, according to the annual index ranking 149 countries on their progress to close the gender gap.
“Most economies still have not made much progress in providing better infrastructure for child care,” said Zahidi in a phone interview.
“This continues to be a major source of why women don’t enter the labor market at all or aren’t able to progress as much as they should given the talent that they have,” she added.
Women were missing at the top, the report found, with only a third of all managerial roles taken by women.
There were also just 17 female heads of state this year, with women occupying 18 percent of ministerial positions and 24 percent of parliamentary roles globally, it added.
Robot takeover
Zahidi warned that emerging technology like robots and artificial intelligence (AI) were also taking jobs traditionally occupied by women, including administration, customer service and telemarketing.
“While a lot of the narrative in the past tended to focus on men in blue collar work in factories, there are a lot of women in blue collar or service work that are also being displaced — and that trend is starting to become more marked,” she said.
The WEF report found that only 22 percent of people working in AI worldwide were female.
According to a 2017 study by the Brookings Institution, a U.S. think tank, the use of digital tools has increased in 517 of 545 occupations since 2002 in the United States alone, with a striking uptick in many lower-skilled occupations.
As technology advances, experts say women and girls with poor digital skills will be the hardest hit and will struggle to find jobs.
Although the number of women in science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) has increased in recent years, they still only account for about 30 percent of the world’s researchers, the U.N. cultural agency UNESCO says.
“More than ever, societies cannot afford to lose out on the skills, ideas and perspectives of half of humanity,” said Klaus Schwab, executive chairman of the WEF.
No country has closed the pay gap yet, WEF said, using data from institutions such as the International Labour Organization, United Nations Development Programme and World Health Organization.
Top spots
Iceland, for the tenth year in a row, held the top spot across all indicators that measured gender equality including social, economic and health, according to the WEF report.
Nordic countries Norway, Sweden and Finland were among the top scoring countries, followed by Nicaragua, which ranked fifth.
Meanwhile Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq and Syria were the worst performing countries.
Last year, WEF said women would achieve economic equality in 217 years, the widest gap in almost a decade.
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The European Union agreed Monday to a goal of cutting carbon emissions from cars by 37.5 percent in a decade, finally settling differences between vehicle-producing countries and environmentally-conscious lawmakers.
The 28-nation bloc has been divided for months over how strict to be on CO2 emissions from vehicles as part of its push to reduce greenhouse gases overall by 40 percent by 2030.
Germany, with the EU’s biggest auto sector worth some 423 billion euros ($480 billion) in 2017, had warned tough targets and the drive toward more electric cars could harm its industry and cost jobs.
Representatives of the European Parliament and the EU countries finally struck a compromise Monday, after nine hours of talks, to cut emissions from cars by 37.5 percent and vans by 31 percent by 2030 compared with 2021.
There was also agreement on an interim target of a 15 percent cut for both cars and vans by 2025.
“This is an important signal in our fight against climate change,” said current EU president Austria’s Sustainability Minister Elisabeth Koestinger.
But Brussels-based green lobbying group Transport & Environment expressed disappointment the deal was not even more ambitious.
“Europe is shifting up a gear in the race to produce zero-emission cars. The new law means by 2030 around a third of new cars will be electric or hydrogen-powered,” said its clean vehicles director, Greg Archer. “That’s progress, but it’s not fast enough to hit our climate goals.”
The compromise was tougher than the original EU executive proposal of an emissions decline of 30 percent compared to 2021.
Germany had endorsed that, but a push by several EU countries, including the Netherlands and France, raised the target for EU countries to 35 percent. The EU Parliament had wanted 40 percent, so in the end, they split the difference.
The German automobile association (VDA) said the new legislation would set high demands while doing little to promote or provide incentives for switching to electric vehicles.
EU countries were among nearly 200 that agreed Saturday to rules for implementing the 2015 Paris climate accord at a U.N. conference in Poland.
“Today’s successful outcome is even more important in view of this weekend’s conclusions … in Katowice. It clearly shows, once again, our unwavering commitment to the Paris Agreement,” EU Climate Commissioner Arias Canete said.
EU countries are separately considering the extent to which truck emissions should be cut, with a debate due Thursday.
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President Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order before the end of the year creating a U.S. Space Command as a major military command.
Vice President Mike Pence will make the announcement Tuesday at the Kennedy Space Center, in Cape Canaveral, Florida, two U.S. officials said, and Trump could sign the order as soon as Tuesday.
The move is separate from Trump’s goal of creating a “Space Force” as an independent armed service branch, but could be a step in that direction.
The U.S. Air Force’s existing Space Command would be a key component of the new joint entity, raising space to the same status as U.S. Cyber Command.
Pence to meet with Joint Chiefs
According to U.S. officials, Pence will be at the Pentagon on Tuesday and will meet with the Joint Chiefs. Space Command is expected to be among the issues discussed. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.
The move would actually recreate a U.S. Space Command, which existed from 1985 to 2002. It was disbanded in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks so that U.S. Northern Command could be established, focusing on defense of the homeland.
Although Space Command went away, its functions did not. They were absorbed by U.S. Strategic Command, and the Air Force retained its lead role in space through Air Force Space Command.
Alphabet’s Google is investing more than $1 billion on a new campus in New York, becoming the second major technology company after Amazon to pick America’s financial capital to expand and create thousands of jobs.
The 1.7 million-square-foot campus, called Google Hudson Square, will include leased properties at Hudson Street and Washington Street, the company said in a blog post Monday. The new campus will be the main location for Google’s advertising sales division, the Global Business Organization.
Google hopes to start moving into two Hudson Street buildings by 2020, followed by a Washington Street in 2022 and will have the capacity to more than double its New York headcount, currently more than 7,000, in the next 10 years.
The company’s plans to invest outside its home base mirror those of other U.S. tech giants such as Apple Inc, which said last week it would spend $1 billion to build a new 133-acre campus in Austin, Texas.
Last month, Amazon.com Inc said it would open offices in New York and the Washington, D.C. area, creating more than 25,000 jobs.
Mountain View, California-based Google’s move to invest in prime real estate on the lower west side of Manhattan also underscores the growing importance of New York as a hub for innovation and an incubator for technology companies.
With a plethora of white-collar workers and good infrastructure, the city provides a better option to other places that would require more investment.
“We’re growing faster outside the Bay Area than within it,” said Ruth Porat, chief financial officer of Alphabet and Google.
It is a “fairly sensible” move for Google given the amount of available talent pool, Atlantic Equities analyst James Cordwell said.
It also makes sense for Google as New York has been the center for their core advertising business, Cordwell added.
U.S. corporations are also under pressure from the Trump administration to create more jobs domestically. Companies that have moved jobs overseas or closed factories have drawn sharp rebukes from President Donald Trump.
The Wall Street Journal reported last month that Google was nearing a deal to buy or lease an office building in New York City that could add space for more than 12,000 new workers.
Google’s first New York office at 111 Eighth Avenue is one of the city’s largest buildings that it bought in 2010 for $1.77 billion.
Earlier this year, the company announced a $2.4 billion purchase of the Manhattan Chelsea Market. It also has leased space on Pier 57 jutting into the Hudson, which will create a four-block campus.
Google shares were down 1.7 percent at $1,032.84 amid a broader market sell-off.
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Boeing is buying a majority stake in Embraer’s commercial aircraft and services operations for $4.2 billion.
The joint venture, announced Monday, gives Boeing 80 percent ownership of those operations, with Embraer owning the remaining stake.
Boeing will have operational and management control of the company. Embraer will keep consent rights for some decisions, such as the transfer of operations from Brazil.
The deal still needs approval from the Brazilian government, as well as shareholders and regulators.
The companies also agreed to another joint venture to promote and develop new markets for the multi-mission medium airlift KC-390. Embraer will own a 51 percent stake in the joint venture, with Boeing owning the remaining 49 percent. The transaction is targeted to close by the end of next year.
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Israeli scientists making final preparations to launch the country’s first spacecraft to the moon added a special passenger on Monday that will accompany the journey.
A time capsule of three digital discs containing thousands of files was ceremoniously placed within the space pod by organizers wearing white dust coats at the plant where it is being constructed and tested.
They included drawings by children, pictures of Israeli symbols like the flag, Israeli songs and a booklet written by a Jewish man of his personal account of the Holocaust.
One of the founders of the nonprofit organization behind the launch, SpaceIL, compared the time capsule to prayers written on bits of paper that worshippers stuff into Jerusalem’s Western Wall, one of Judaism’s holiest sites.
“Today we are putting all those dreams on the spaceship like you would take a note and put it in the Kotel, wishing for a bright future,” said Yonatan Winetraub, using the Hebrew word for the Western Wall.
The spacecraft weighing some 585 kilograms (1,300 pounds) is expected to be launched in the coming months, though a precise date has not been set. Organizers are hoping for February.
It will be sent via a Falcon 9 rocket from American entrepreneur Elon Musk’s SpaceX firm and will take around a month and a half to arrive.
The launch will be from Cape Canaveral in the United States.
The cost of the project is some $95 million (84 million euros), with private philanthropists providing funding. SpaceIL has also partnered with state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries, among the country’s largest defense firms.
‘Budget of almost $10 million’
Organizers say if successful it will not only be Israel’s first spacecraft to land on the moon, but also the first private one. Israel would be the fourth country to land on the moon.
It is called Beresheet, or Genesis in Hebrew, a name chosen by the public, and resembles a tall, oddly shaped table with round fuel tanks under the top.
It will measure the magnetic field as part of efforts to investigate how the moon was formed. The data will be shared with US space agency NASA.
“I’ve seen hundreds of kids look at the spacecraft and you see in their eyes that they say, ‘Wow, if a small country can do this maybe little old me can do almost anything’,” said Opher Doron, general manager of IAI’s space division.
The project began as part of the Google Lunar XPrize, which in 2010 offered $30 million in awards to encourage scientists and entrepreneurs to come up with relatively low-cost moon missions.
Although the Google prize expired in March without a winner having reached the moon, Israel’s team pledged to push forward.
Asked whether the project had so far gone as planned, SpaceIL co-founder Yariv Bash said “hell no.
“Back when we got started, we thought it was going to be a two-year project, the budget would be less than $10 million, and the spacecraft will weigh less than five kilograms,” he said.
“And here we are eight years later with a project with a budget of almost $100 million.”
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U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday implored the country’s independent central bank to not raise interest rates again when its policy makers meet this week.
In a Twitter message, Trump said, “It is incredible that with a very strong dollar and virtually no inflation, the outside world blowing up around us, Paris is burning and China way down, the Fed is even considering yet another interest rate hike. Take the Victory!”
Central bank policy makers, who operate independently of White House oversight, are meeting Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington and have hinted they could again boost the key rate by another quarter percentage point, with even higher rates a possibility but not a certainty in 2019.
Trump has basked in a robust U.S. economy, the world’s biggest, even as numerous investigations engulf him and his 2016 presidential campaign and key advisers have quit his administration or been forced out.
U.S. trade disputes are ongoing with China and world stock market volatility has cut investor gains in recent weeks. But the 3.7 percent jobless rate is the lowest in the United States in 49 years, worker wages are increasing and consumers, the backbone of the U.S. economy, are spending.
But Jerome Powell, the Fed board member Trump named a year ago as chairman, has drawn the president’s ire by overseeing three interest rate hikes this year, pushing the country’s key lending rate to a range of 2 to 2.25 percent, a benchmark that helps determine other lending rates on loans for U.S. businesses and consumers and often serves as a guidepost for central banks around the world.
Trump last month said he is “not even a little bit happy” with his appointment of Powell.
Trump has said he thinks the Fed is “way off base” by raising rates, but has been powerless to stop it from boosting them. Central bank policy makers have raised interest rates to keep the inflation rate in check and keep the economy from expanding too rapidly.
“I’m doing deals and I’m not being accommodated by the Fed,” Trump told The Washington Post last month. “They’re making a mistake because I have a gut and my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.”
Some economists are predicting, however, that the decade-long improving U.S. economy could stall in the next year or so and perhaps even fall into a recession, which, if it occurs, would in most circumstances call for cutting interest rates to boost economic activity.
Nissan’s board met Monday but failed to pick a new chairman to replace Carlos Ghosn, who was arrested last month on charges of violating financial regulations, saying more discussion was needed.
Nissan Motor Co. Chief Executive Hiroto Saikawa told reporters that the board approved a special committee of outsiders to strengthen governance at the company. A date for the selection of a chairman was not decided.
“We plan to be cautious in this process, and I do not plan to rush this,” Saikawa said.
The recommendations for beefing up governance are due in March, and Saikawa said he was willing to wait until then to choose a chairman.
The board meeting came amid an unfolding scandal that threatens the Japanese automaker’s two-decade alliance with Renault SA of France and its global brand, and highlights shoddy governance at the manufacturer of the Leaf electric car.
Ghosn and another board member Greg Kelly were formally charged last week with falsifying financial reports in underreporting Ghosn’s income by about 5 billion yen ($44 million) from 2011 to 2015. They were arrested Nov. 19 by Tokyo prosecutors and remain in detention.
A source close to Ghosn’s family says Ghosn is innocent, as the alleged income was never decided upon or paid. Aubrey Harwell, the U.S. lawyer for Kelly, an American, says he is innocent, and that Nissan insiders and outside experts had advised him that the financial reporting was proper.
The chairman must be selected from among the board members. Three outside board members — race-car driver Keiko Ihara, Masakazu Toyoda, an academic, and Jean-Baptiste Duzan, formerly of Renault — are making that decision.
The special committee for governance includes the three outside board members and four other outsiders, including former judge Seiichiro Nishioka.
One candidate for chairman is Saikawa, who was hand-picked by Ghosn to succeed him as chief executive. He has denounced Ghosn and Kelly as the “masterminds” in a scheme to falsify income reports and abuse company money and assets.
Renault has kept Ghosn as chief executive and chairman, saying its investigation has not found wrongdoing in the awarding of Ghosn’s compensation.
Nissan Motor Co.’s allegations also include million-dollar homes in several nations, including France, Japan, Brazil, Lebanon and the Netherlands, purchased by Nissan or a subsidiary and used by Ghosn.
Wrangling over a home in Rio de Janeiro has developed into a court battle in Brazil, with Nissan seeking to block Ghosn’s family from retrieving items.
Ghosn was born in Brazil of Lebanese ancestry and holds French citizenship. He was sent in by Renault in 1999 to turn around Nissan from the brink of bankruptcy.
It’s unclear when Ghosn and Kelly may be released, with Tokyo prosecutors saying they are a flight risk.
The United States said on Monday that China’s “unfair competitive practices” were harming foreign companies and workers in a way that violates World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, but vowed to lead reform efforts.
U.S. trade ambassador Dennis Shea drew fire from Chinese envoy Zhang Xiangchen who said the Trump administration’s tariffs on steel and aluminum products allowed protectionism under the guise of dubious national security concerns.
The heated words, in texts seen by Reuters, were exchanged at the start of a closed-door review of U.S. trade policies, held every two years at the WTO, which continues on Wednesday.
Shea expressed concern about the WTO dispute settlement system having “strayed far from the system agreed to by members” and said that the Appellate Body had overreached in some legal interpretations.
Zhang countered that by blocking the selection of judges, Washington was putting the system into paralysis.
To force reform at the WTO, Trump’s team has refused to allow new appointments to the Appellate Body, the world’s top trade court, a process which requires consensus among member states. As a result, the court is running out of judges, and will be unable to issue binding rulings in disputes.
Shea described the U.S. economy as “one of the most open and competitive economies in the world,” with among the lowest tariffs globally, rejecting criticism by some of the U.S. approach as “unilateralist and protectionist.”
China has pursued “non-market industrial policies and other unfair competitive practices” aimed at supporting its domestic industries while restricting or discriminating against foreign companies and their goods and services, he said.
“The WTO is not well equipped to handle the fundamental challenge posed by China, which continues to embrace a state-led, mercantilist approach to the economy and trade,” Shea said.
He did not refer to the dispute on steel or automobiles which brought the two powers to the brink of a major trade war but defended the U.S. “Section 301” investigation that found in March that Chinese practices related to technology transfer, intellectual property and innovation were discriminatory.
On Section 301, Zhang said the U.S. measures vastly increased tariffs, “bringing back to life the ghost of unilateralism that has been dormant for decades.”
Shea said the United States was committed to working with like-minded members to address concerns on the functioning of the WTO. “Reforms are necessary for the continued viability of the institution,” he said.
Zhang echoed his call, but said: “If the roof of this building is leaking, we should work together to fix it, rather than dismantling it and exposing all of us to rains and storms.”
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As many families prepare to holiday abroad during the festive season,
British charities on Monday warned that girls taken overseas could be at risk of female genital mutilation.
Known as FGM, female genital mutilation is a ritual that usually involves the partial or total removal of the external genitalia, including the clitoris. Some girls bleed to death or die from infections.
Cutting affects an estimated 200 million girls worldwide and is a rite of passage in many societies, often with the aim of promoting chastity, with the highest prevalence in Africa and parts of the Middle East.
An estimated 137,000 women and girls in England and Wales have undergone FGM. Many cases go unnoticed because they had happened at a young age and abroad, campaigners say. Campaigners say teachers should look out for warning signs, such as when a child is taken abroad for a long time to a country where there is a high prevalence of FGM.
“The best way of preventing the practice is by working with girls and their families … and training professionals like teachers and social workers to spot girls at risk of FGM,” said Leethen Bartholomew, head of Britain’s National FGM Center.
Some warning signs that a girl might have been cut include difficulty walking or sitting down, spending a long time in the toilet or becoming withdrawn, said the Center, run by children’s charity Barnardo’s and the Local Government Association.
FGM has been a criminal offense in Britain since 1985. Legislation in 2003 made it illegal for British citizens to carry out or procure FGM abroad, even in countries where it is legal.
In 2015, it became mandatory for health professionals, social workers and teachers in Britain to report known cases of FGM to police.
The practice mostly affects immigrant communities from various countries including Somalia, Sierra Leone, Eritrea, Sudan, Nigeria and Egypt.
British-based charity Forward, which supports FGM survivors from African communities, said though teachers have a crucial role to play, they should not stigmatize certain communities.
“While teachers need to be alert at all times about safeguarding children in their care, we also need to ensure that some communities are not unduly targeted and stigmatized,” said Naana Otoo-Oyortey, executive director of FORWARD.
“Ending FGM requires multiple entry points (and) enabling families and communities to be proactive in ending the practice of FGM is ultimately the most effective channel,” she said in emailed comments to the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Britain in November pledged $63 million to combat female genital mutilation in Africa.
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With the impact of climate change an increasingly pressing global issue, a new generation of start-ups in Kenya is developing new technologies to combat global warming. As Rael Ombuor reports from Nairobi, the technologies offer both environmental and financial sustainability.
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Colin Kroll, a tech executive who was a co-founder of the popular apps HQ Trivia and Vine, was found dead Sunday in New York.
Police said officers found the 34-year-old unresponsive in his apartment after receiving a call asking them to go check on him.
Medical examiners are working to determine his cause of death.
HQ Trivia launched in 2017 and became wildly popular, bringing users together for a nightly live game show that awarded cash prizes to winners.
The show’s host, Scott Rogowsky announced the company decided to cancel Sunday’s game out of respect for Kroll. He said because Kroll loved animals, the $25,000 that was due to be awarded would instead be donated to the Humane Society.
Rogowsky called Kroll a “visionary who changed the app game twice” by helping to launch both HQ Trivia and Vine, the service that allowed people to post six-second videos and was acquired by Twitter in 2012 before being shut down.
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Scientists exploring what may trigger a complex disorder known as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) have found clues in the way some people’s immune systems respond more actively to a health attack.
A severe illness characterized by long-term physical and mental fatigue, CFS is thought to affect up to 17 million people worldwide and around 250,000 people in Britain.
Sufferers are often bed-bound and unable to carry out basic daily activities like washing and feeding themselves.
The researchers used a drug known as interferon alpha to create a model of the syndrome and found that patients whose immune response to treatment was hyperactive or exaggerated were more likely to then develop severe fatigue.
“For the first time, we have shown that people who are prone to develop a CFS-like illness have an overactive immune system, both before and during a challenge to the immune system,” said Alice Russell of King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), who led the work.
The condition, as well as research into it, is highly contentious, in part because its possible causes and range of debilitating symptoms are poorly understood.
Interferon alpha is used as a treatment for hepatitis C infection, and activates the immune system in the same way as a powerful infection. Many patients who receive interferon alpha experience extreme fatigue during treatment, and some continue to feel chronic fatigue for many months after the drug course is completed.
Russell’s team used this knowledge and measured fatigue and immune system markers in 55 patients before, during and after treatment with interferon alpha.
They found that the 18 of those 55 who went on to develop a CFS-like illness had a hyperactive immune system before treatment, and an highly overactive response during treatment. “(This suggests) people who have an exaggerated immune response to a trigger may be more at risk of developing CFS,” Russell told reporters at a briefing about the findings.
IoPPN professor Carmine Pariante stressed that while the study’s main finding is a useful addition to scant scientific knowledge about CFS – also known as myalgic encephalopathy (ME) – it offers few clues on how to treat, cure or prevent it.
“It’s a light in the fog,” he told reporters. “But a better understanding of the biology underlying the development of CFS is needed to help patients.”
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A group of young female business owners in Guinea Bissau have banded together to learn more about the business world and increase sales. A year later, their efforts appear to be paying off. Ricci Shryock reports from the west African nation.
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Homeowners appear to have learned the lesson of the Great Recession about not taking on too much debt. There is some concern that Corporate America didn’t get the message.
For much of the past decade, companies have borrowed at super-low interest rates and used the money to buy back stock, acquire other businesses and refinance old debt. The vast majority of companies are paying their bills on time, thanks in large part to profits that have surged since the economy emerged from the Great Recession nine and a half years ago.
But with interest rates rising and U.S. economic growth expected to slow next year, worries are building from Washington to Wall Street that corporate debt is approaching potentially dangerous levels. U.S. corporate debt has grown by nearly two-thirds since 2008 to more than $9 trillion and, along with government debt, has ballooned much faster than other parts of the bond market. Investors are most concerned about companies at the weaker end of the financial-strength scale _ those considered most likely to default or to get downgraded to “junk” status should a recession hit.
“I’ve been more worried about the bond market than the equity market,” said Kirk Hartman, global chief investment officer at Wells Fargo Asset Management. “I think at some point, all the leverage in the system is going to rear its ugly head.”
Consider General Electric, which said in early October it would record a big charge related to its struggling power unit, one that ended up totaling $22 billion. Both Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s subsequently downgraded GE’s credit rating to three notches above “speculative” grade, which indicates a higher risk of default.
GE, with about $115 billion in total borrowings, is part of a growing group of companies concentrated at the lower end of investment-grade. Other high-profile names in this area within a few notches of junk grade include General Motors and Verizon Communications. They make up nearly 45 percent of the Bloomberg Barclays Credit index, more than quadruple their proportion during the early 1970s.
Credit-rating agencies say downgrades for GE, GM or Verizon aren’t imminent. But the concern for them, and broadly for this swelling group of businesses, is if profits start falling or the economy hits a recession.
If those companies do drop below investment grade, they’d be what investors call “fallen angels,” and they can trigger waves of selling. Many mutual funds and other investors are required to own only high-quality, investment-grade bonds — so they would have to sell any bonds that get cut to junk.
The forced selling would lead to a drop in bond prices, which could result in higher borrowing costs for companies, which hurts their ability to repay their debts, which could lead to even more selling.
Even the chairman of the Federal Reserve has taken notice of the rise in corporate debt. Jerome Powell said in a recent speech that business borrowing usually rises when the economy is growing. But he said it’s concerning that, over the last year, the companies increasing their borrowing the most are those already with high debt and interest burdens.
To be sure, many bond fund managers say companies were smart to borrow hefty sums at low rates. And at the moment, there are no outward signs of danger. The default rate for junk-rated corporate bonds was 2.6 percent last month, which is lower than the historical average, and S&P Global Fixed Income Research expects it to fall in upcoming months.
Even if the economy does fall into a recession, fund managers say losses won’t be to the same scale as 2008 when the financial crisis sent the S&P 500 to a drop of nearly 37 percent and the most popular category of bond funds to an average loss of 4.7 percent.
In his speech, Powell said he doesn’t see the weaker parts of the corporate debt market undermining the financial system in the event of an economic downturn, at least “for now.”
Other investors see the market’s growing worries as premature. Companies are still making record profits, which allow them to repay their debts, and consumer confidence is still high.
“There is a story out there that there’s a recession coming very soon, and you had better head for the hills,” said Warren Pierson, deputy chief investment officer at Baird Advisors. “We think that’s a pretty early call. We don’t see recession on the horizon.”
That’s why he and Mary Ellen Stanek, who run bond mutual funds at Baird, haven’t given up on corporate bonds, even if they’ve moderated how much they own.
But critics see some echoes of the financial crisis in today’s loosening lending standards. Consider leveraged loans, a section of the market that makes loans to companies with lots of debt or relatively weak finances. These loans have been popular with investors in recent years because they often have what are called floating rates, so they pay more in interest when rates are rising.
Paul Massaro, portfolio manager for floating-rate strategies at T. Rowe Price, says he’s still positive about this market in general. But his team of analysts has been finding more warning flags in offerings, where the terms of the deal may be overly friendly to borrowers and allow them to amass more debt than they should.
It’s gotten to the point where Massaro is participating in about 15 percent of all offerings today, down from 30 percent a few years ago.
Investors have largely been willing to stomach higher risk because they’ve been starved for income following years of very low interest rates.
As a result, some bonds that by many accounts look like risky junk bonds are trading at prices and yields that should be reserved for higher-quality bonds, say Tom McCauley and Yoav Sharon, who run the $976.3 million Driehaus Active Income fund. To take advantage, they’re increasingly “shorting” corporate bonds, which are trades that pay off if the bonds’ prices fall.
They recently began shorting bonds of a packaged goods company with a “BBB” rating that borrowed to help pay for a large acquisition, for example. A “BBB” rating is at the lower end of investment grade, and a drop to “BB” would send it into junk status.
With so much debt, McCauley and Sharon believe that it’s at risk of getting downgraded to junk and is not paying enough in yield to compensate for its risk.
“As we get into the later stages of the cycle, the sins of the early stages of the cycle tend to start showing up,” said Sharon. “We think that’s where we are today.”
Fertilizer is made of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus. Chemical fertilizers require huge amounts of energy to produce. But there are other, natural and more readily available sources.
The University of Michigan, with support from the National Science Foundation, is working at making our water cleaner, and our agriculture more sustainable, by capturing one of those sources, rather than flushing it down the toilet.
On a hot summer afternoon near Brattleboro, Vermont, farmer Dean Hamilton has fired up his tractor and is fertilizing his hay field — with human urine.
It takes a bit of time to get used to, says environmental engineer Nancy Love.
“I’ve been surprised at how many people actually get beyond the giggle factor pretty quickly,” she said, “and are willing to listen.”
Fine-tuning the recycling
Rich Earth Institute, a nonprofit, is working with Love and her team. Abraham Noe-Hays says they are fine-tuning new methods to recycle urine into fertilizer.
“There’s a great quote by Buckminster Fuller about how pollution is nothing but the resources that we’re not harvesting, and that we allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value,” he said.
Harvesting the resource of urine — which is, after all, full of the same nutrients as chemical fertilizer — will fix two problems at once: eliminate waste and create a natural fertilizer.
The Rich Earth Institute has been using urine as fertilizer since 2012. Kim Nace says they collect about 26,000 liters a year, thanks to a loyal group of dedicated donors.
“We now have people who have some source-separating toilets in their homes. We also have people who have 55 gallon (200-liter) barrels where they collect and then we transport to our farms, and we’ve also got a large urine depot,” Nace said.
They pasteurize the urine to kill any microbes, and then it is applied directly onto hay fields like Hamilton’s.
Next level of project
Now that they’ve partnered with the University of Michigan, Love says they’re looking to take their project to the next level.
“There are three things we really are trying to do with the urine in this kind of next phase. We’re trying to concentrate it. We’re trying to apply technologies to reduce odor, and we’re trying to deal with trace contaminants like the pharmaceuticals,” she said.
Dealing with pharmaceuticals is an important issue. Heat urine kills germs but has no effect on chemicals like drugs that pass through our bodies.
“We know pharmaceuticals are a problem for aquatic organisms and water systems,” Love said. “It’s debatable about the impact on human health at very, very low levels. Independent of that, I think most people would prefer that they not be in their food.”
21st century infrastructure
For Love, this is all about redesigning our wastewater infrastructure for the 21st century. Too many nutrients in the water leads to poor water quality by causing hazardous algal blooms.
“Our water emissions are going into very sensitive water bodies that are vulnerable to these nutrient loads,” she said. “We need to change that dynamic. And if we can capture them and put them to a beneficial use, that’s what we’re trying to do.”
Their efforts could make agriculture greener and our waterways cleaner.
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Sand dunes in the state of Michigan are a scenic attraction for many American and foreign tourists. These sand dunes expand and move. Over time, they swallow cottages and the vegetation around them, as VOA’s Emre Elci reports.
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Fertilizer is made of nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus. Chemical fertilizers require huge amounts of energy to produce. But there are other, natural and more readily available sources. A project at the University of Michigan is aimed at making our water cleaner and our agriculture more sustainable by capturing one of those sources … rather than flushing it down the toilet. Faith Lapidus explains.
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After two weeks of bruising negotiations, officials from almost 200 countries agreed Saturday on universal, transparent rules that will govern efforts to cut emissions and curb global warming. Fierce disagreements on two other climate issues were kicked down the road for a year to help bridge a chasm of opinions on the best solutions.
The deal agreed upon at U.N. climate talks in Poland enables countries to put into action the principles in the 2015 Paris climate accord.
“Through this package, you have made a thousand little steps forward together,” said Michal Kurtyka, a senior Polish official chairing the talks.
He said while each individual country would likely find some parts of the agreement it didn’t like, efforts had been made to balance the interests of all parties.
“We will all have to give in order to gain,” he said. “We will all have to be courageous to look into the future and make yet another step for the sake of humanity.”
The talks in Poland took place against a backdrop of growing concern among scientists that global warming on Earth is proceeding faster than governments are responding to it. Last month, a study found that global warming will worsen disasters such as the deadly California wildfires and the powerful hurricanes that have hit the United States this year.
Overhaul of global economy
And a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, concluded that while it’s possible to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century compared with pre-industrial times, this would require a dramatic overhaul of the global economy, including a shift away from fossil fuels.
Alarmed by efforts to include this in the final text of the meeting, oil-exporting nations the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait blocked an endorsement of the IPCC report midway through this month’s talks in Katowice. That prompted an uproar from vulnerable countries like small island nations and environmental groups.
The final text at the U.N. talks omits a previous reference to specific reductions in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and merely welcomes the “timely completion” of the IPCC report, not its conclusions.
Last-minute snags forced negotiators in Katowice to go into extra time, after Friday’s scheduled end of the conference had passed without a deal.
One major sticking point was how to create a functioning market in carbon credits. Economists believe that an international trading system could be an effective way to drive down greenhouse gas emissions and raise large amounts of money for measures to curb global warming.
But Brazil wanted to keep the piles of carbon credits it had amassed under an old system that developed countries say wasn’t credible or transparent.
Push from U.S.
Among those that pushed back hardest was the United States, despite President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord and promote the use of coal.
“Overall, the U.S. role here has been somewhat schizophrenic — pushing coal and dissing science on the one hand, but also working hard in the room for strong transparency rules,” said Elliot Diringer of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a Washington think tank.
When it came to closing potential loopholes that could allow countries to dodge their commitments to cut emissions, “the U.S. pushed harder than nearly anyone else for transparency rules that put all countries under the same system, and it’s largely succeeded.”
“Transparency is vital to U.S. interests,” added Nathaniel Keohane, a climate policy expert at the Environmental Defense Fund. He noted that the breakthrough in the 2015 Paris talks happened only after the U.S. and China agreed on a common framework for transparency.
“In Katowice, the U.S. negotiators have played a central role in the talks, helping to broker an outcome that is true to the Paris vision of a common transparency framework for all countries that also provides flexibility for those that need it,” said Keohane, calling the agreement “a vital step forward in realizing the promise of the Paris accord.”
Among the key achievements in Katowice was an agreement on how countries should report their greenhouses gas emissions and the efforts they’re taking to reduce them. Poor countries also secured assurances on getting financial support to help them cut emissions, adapt to inevitable changes such as sea level rises and pay for damages that have already happened.
Some not hearing alarms
“The majority of the rulebook for the Paris Agreement has been created, which is something to be thankful for,” said Mohamed Adow, a climate policy expert at Christian Aid. “But the fact countries had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the finish line shows that some nations have not woken up to the urgent call of the IPCC report” on the dire consequences of global warming.
But a central feature of the Paris Agreement — the idea that countries will ratchet up their efforts to fight global warming over time — still needs to be proved effective, he said.
“To bend the emissions curve, we now need all countries to deliver these revised plans at the special U.N. secretary-general summit in 2019. It’s vital that they do so,” Adow said.
In the end, a decision on the mechanics of an emissions trading system was postponed to next year’s meeting. Countries also agreed to consider the issue of raising ambitions at a U.N. summit in New York next September.
Speaking hours before the final gavel, Canada’s Environment Minister Catherine McKenna suggested there was no alternative to such meetings if countries want to tackle global problems, especially at a time when multilateral diplomacy is under pressure from nationalism.
“The world has changed, the political landscape has changed,” she told The Associated Press. “Still, you’re seeing here that we’re able to make progress, we’re able to discuss the issues, we’re able to come to solutions.”
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