Four more cases of Ebola have been reported in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the past two days. And the World Health Organization says officials are now concerned the virus will spread beyond the DRC. The total number of cases is now 165, with 106 deaths. But some new drugs are being deployed to fight the deadly virus. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Last-minute changes to a new North American trade deal sank U.S. hopes of making Canada and Mexico allow higher-value shipments to the countries by online retailers, such as Amazon.com, a top Mexican official said on Friday.
The revised pact was set to double the value of goods that could be imported without customs duties or taxes from the United States through shipping companies to Mexico.
But Canada’s adoption of a more restrictive threshold during its efforts last month to salvage a trilateral deal prompted Mexican negotiators to follow Canada’s lead, Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo said on Friday.
The final version of the trade agreement will insulate retailers in both countries from facing greater competition from e-commerce companies like Amazon.com Inc and eBay Inc.
“It was the solution liked much more by Mexican businesses,” Guajardo told local television.
The change was came so last-minute that it was not written into the agreement published last weekend.
The new deal, called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), was meant by U.S. President Donald Trump to create more jobs in the United States. Trump had been highly critical of the prior NAFTA agreement since before he ran for president.
U.S. negotiators originally pushed Mexico and Canada to raise import limits to the U.S. level of $800 from current thresholds of $50 and C$20, respectively.
Traditional retailers in Mexico opposed such a big hike, fearing online companies would sell cheap imports from Asia through the United States. Even so, Mexico initially agreed in August to raise the threshold on customs duties and taxes to $100 in its bilateral deal with the United States.
Guajardo said that Canada, after Mexico had finished negotiations, set its sales tax exemption at just C$40, about $30, and put a ceiling of C$150, about $117, on custom duties exemptions.
The Retail Council of Canada said the deal will protect retailers against a “massive change in the competitive landscape.”
Mexico decided to follow suit, Guajardo said, favoring local clothing, footwear and textile industries, as well as the finance ministry that collects duties and taxes.
Mexican negotiators lowered the sales tax exemption back to the $50 level, while raising the customs duties limit to $117, matching Canada, Guajardo said.
“Mexico offered a deal where it really didn’t concede anything,” said Adrian Correa, a senior lawyer at FedEx Corp.
Mike Dabbs, eBay’s government relations director for the Americas, said separate tax and custom duty thresholds could create confusion.
“That does not help the experience for small businesses and consumers,” he said.
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A new study is blaming 2017’s unusually high number of hurricanes on the Atlantic Ocean’s rising surface temperatures. The report is one of the first to suggest that human-driven global warming is actually causing more hurricanes.
The study published in last week’s journal Science also predicts that as warming increases over the next 50 to 100 years, about two more hurricanes on average will form annually than we get now. In addition, those hurricanes will be stronger and wetter.
‘The new normal’
It’s a common refrain in these days to refer to outrageous weather events as “the new normal,” but those claims have been hard to quantify. Scientists do know the Earth is getting warmer, and evidence shows humans are contributing to the problem. But scientists have warned against attributing individual weather events to changes in climate, explaining that weather and climate are two different things.
But by any standard, 2017 was a tough year for people living on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts of the United States. Hurricane Harvey turned parts of coastal Texas and the city of Houston into a watery mess. And Hurricane Maria battered Puerto Rico so badly, the island only completed its power restoration projects in August of this year.
Using a new climate model, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began studying a particular swath of warming tropical Atlantic water near the equator. Speaking to VOA, author Hiro Murakami says water was especially warm last year and their model predicted about two more major hurricanes than usual. In reality, there were two more than average.
Get used to it, Murakami says. When this area of Atlantic water gets unusually warm, as it did in 2017, the U.S. should expect at least two extra hurricanes a year, he explains, adding that as the planet warms, that area of the Atlantic should heat up more and more often.
“Last year we saw six major hurricanes,” he said. “But these six could be eight major hurricanes in the future given the same summer conditions.”
That’s bad news for people who live near the coast and for the government officials who have to prepare for the massive storms.
Tom Delworth, another NOAA researcher who contributed to the study, says the new model can predict not only what’s going to happen this season, but also “100 years in the future.” And, he says, “50 to 60 years in advance, later in this century, the most intense storms will become even more intense category 4 and 5. They will be even stronger.”
Delworth and Murakami say their model is also applicable to typhoons in the Pacific, and warming waters there should have a similar effect in regions getting battered by those late summer storms.
Future hurricanes
Both researchers pointed to the unique value of the model in being able to predict hurricanes in the next week, the next month and the next century. However, they admit that while their model can fairly accurately predict what the hurricane seasons will look like in the months and years ahead, it can’t predict specific storms.
What good is it to know that more hurricanes are coming if we don’t know exactly where and when? Delworth says it can be incredibly empowering for first responders as they prepare for any given hurricane season. “Let’s have a lot of emergency supplies on hand,” he suggested, as an example, “because we think this is going to happen.”
He also says that every year, little by little, modelers and climate scientists are getting better and better at what they do. “That’s a very optimistic thing,” Delworth said. So, even as hurricanes get stronger and more numerous, forecasters may be able to get ahead of the game, or ahead of the storm, and ultimately save lives.
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U.S. job growth slowed sharply in September likely as Hurricane Florence depressed restaurant and retail payrolls, but the unemployment rate fell to near a 49-year low of 3.7 percent, pointing to a further tightening in labor market conditions.
The Labor Department’s closely watched monthly employment report on Friday also showed a steady rise in wages, suggesting moderate inflation pressures, which could ease concerns about the economy overheating and keep the Federal Reserve on a path of gradual interest rate increases.
Nonfarm payrolls increased by 134,000 jobs last month, the fewest in a year, as the retail and leisure and hospitality sectors shed employment. Data for July and August were revised to show 87,000 more jobs added than previously reported.
The economy needs to create roughly 120,000 jobs per month to keep up with growth in the working-age population.
“The weaker gain in payrolls in September may partly reflect some hit from Hurricane Florence,” said Michael Pearce, senior U.S. economist at Capital Economics in New York. “There is little in this report to stop the Fed continuing to raise interest rates gradually.”
Economists polled by Reuters had forecast payrolls increasing by 185,000 jobs in September and the unemployment rate falling one-tenth of a percentage point to 3.8 percent.
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said on Tuesday that the economy’s outlook was “remarkably positive” and he believed it was on the cusp of a “historically rare” era of ultra-low unemployment and tame inflation.
The U.S. central bank raised rates last week for the third time this year and removed the reference in its post-meeting statement to monetary policy remaining “accommodative.”
The Labor Department said it was possible that Hurricane Florence, which lashed South and North Carolina in mid-September, could have affected employment in some industries. It said it was impossible to quantify the net effect on employment.
Payrolls are calculated from a survey of employers, which treats any worker who was not paid for any part of the pay period that includes the 12th of the month as unemployed. The average workweek was unchanged at 34.5 hours in September. The smaller survey of households from which the jobless rate is derived regards persons as employed regardless of whether they missed work during the reference week and were unpaid as result. It showed 299,000 people reported staying at home in September because of bad weather. About 1.5 million employees worked part-time because of the weather last month.
U.S. stock index futures briefly turned positive after the data before reversing course. The dollar was trading lower against a basket of currencies while U.S. Treasury yields were higher.
Diminishing slack
The drop of two-tenths of a percentage point in the unemployment rate from 3.9 percent in August pushed it to levels last seen in December 1969 and matched the Fed’s forecast of 3.7 percent by the end of this year.
Average hourly earnings increased 0.3 percent in September after a similar rise in August.
With September’s increase below the 0.5 percent gain notched during the same period last year, the annual rise in wages fell to 2.8 percent from 2.9 percent in August, which was the biggest advance in more than nine years.
Wage growth remains sufficient to keep inflation around the Fed’s 2 percent target. As more slack is squeezed out of the labor market, economists expect annual wage growth to hit 3 percent.
Last month, employment in the leisure and hospitality sector fell by 17,000 jobs, the first drop since September 2017. Retail payrolls dropped by 20,000 jobs in September. Manufacturing payrolls increased by 18,000 in September after rising by 5,000 in August.
Construction companies hired 23,000 more workers last month after increasing payrolls by 26,000 jobs in August. Professional and business services employment increased by 54,000 jobs last month and government payrolls rose 13,000.
While surveys have shown manufacturers growing more concerned about an escalating trade war between the United States and China, it does not appear to have affected hiring. In fact, the Fed’s latest survey of national business conditions reflected concerns about labor shortages that are extending into non-skilled occupations as much as about tariffs.
Washington last month slapped tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods, with Beijing retaliating with duties on $60 billion worth of U.S. products. The United States and China had already imposed tariffs on $50 billion worth of each other’s goods. The trilateral trade agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico was salvaged in an 11th-hour deal on Sunday.
Despite the Trump administration’s protectionist trade policy, the trade deficit continues to deteriorate. The trade gap increased 6.4 percent to a six-month high of $53.2 billion in August, the Commerce Department reported on Friday. The politically sensitive goods trade deficit with China surged 4.7 percent to a record high of $38.6 billion.
The Trump administration is moving ahead with plans to revise safety rules that bar fully self-driving cars from the roads without equipment such as steering wheels, pedals and mirrors, according to a document made public on Thursday.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) “intends to reconsider the necessity and appropriateness of its current safety standards” as applied to automated vehicles, the U.S. Department of Transportation said in an 80-page update of its principles dubbed “Automated Vehicles 3.0.”
The department, as reported by Reuters earlier on Thursday, disclosed that the NHTSA wants comment “on proposed changes to particular safety standards to accommodate automated vehicle technologies and the possibility of setting exceptions to certain standards that are relevant only when human drivers are present.”
U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao released the document at a department event. In the report, Chao said that self-driving cars have the potential to dramatically reduce traffic crashes and road deaths. But she added the “public has legitimate concerns about the safety, security, and privacy of automated technology.”
Automakers must currently meet nearly 75 auto safety standards, many of which were written with the assumption that a licensed driver will be in control of the vehicle.
General Motors Co in January filed a petition seeking an exemption for the current rules to use vehicles without steering wheels and other human controls as part of a ride-sharing fleet it plans to deploy in 2019.
NHTSA has not declared the GM petition complete, a step necessary before it can rule on the merits. NHTSA said it plans to propose modernizing procedures to follow when reviewing exemption petitions.
Alphabet Inc’s Waymo unit plans to launch an autonomous ride-hailing service for the general public with no human driver behind the steering wheel in Arizona later this year. But unlike GM, Waymo’s vehicles will have human controls for the time being.
In March, a self-driving Uber Technologies Inc vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian, while the backup safety driver was watching a video, police said. Uber suspended testing in the aftermath and some safety advocates said the crash showed the system was not safe enough to be tested on public roads.
NHTSA has stepped up its self-driving car focus as legislation in Congress on self-driving cars, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 2017, has stalled. It has only a slender chance of being approved in 2018, congressional aides said.
The report said “NHTSA’s current statutory authority to establish motor vehicle safety standards is sufficiently flexible to accommodate the design and performance of different” automated vehicles.
The Center for Auto Safety said NHTSA should require companies to “submit evidence” that their self-driving technology is safe “before involuntarily involving human beings in their testing.”
GM said in a statement on Thursday that “legislation is still urgently needed” to allow “the full deployment of self-driving vehicles.”
Automakers have warned it could take too long for NHTSA to rewrite the rules to allow for the widespread of adoption of self-driving cars without human controls.
The department also said it “no longer recognizes the designations of ten automated vehicle proving grounds” announced in January 2017.
The sites, including a Michigan center that U.S. President Donald Trump visited last year, were named by Congress to be eligible for $60 million in grants “to fund demonstration projects that test the feasibility and safety” of self-driving vehicles.
The Transportation Department also announced it will start studying the workforce impacts of automated vehicles with the Labor, Commerce, and the Health and Human Services departments.
The report also said the Trump administration will not support calls to end human driving. The department “embraces the freedom of the open road, which includes the freedom for Americans to drive their own vehicles.”
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People who regularly engage in light to moderate physical activity — like walking four hours a week or swimming two hours weekly — might have less severe strokes than individuals who aren’t as active, a Swedish study suggests.
Researchers examined data on 925 patients who were treated for strokes at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden, between 2014 and 2016. Overall, four in five of these patients had mild strokes.
Slightly more than half of the patients were inactive before their strokes. Compared with this inactive group, people who got at least some exercise before their strokes were twice as likely to have mild strokes, researchers reported in Neurology.
“We knew from earlier research that physical activity could reduce stroke incidence,” lead study author Malin Reinholdsson of the University of Gothenburg said by email. “However, whether or not pre-stroke physical activity could also influence stroke severity was not clear.”
Patients in the study were 73 years old on average and most of them had what’s known as an ischemic stroke, the most common kind, which occurs when a clot blocks an artery carrying blood to the brain. About 6 percent of patients had hemorrhagic strokes, a less common type that is caused by a ruptured blood vessel in the brain.
Surveyed about exercise
To assess pre-stroke activity levels, researchers surveyed participants about the duration and intensity of any exercise they got before they were hospitalized.
Researchers defined “light” activity as walking at a leisurely pace for at least four hours a week, and classified exercise as “moderate” intensity when people did things like swimming, running or walking briskly for two to three hours weekly.
Among 481 people who were inactive, 354, or 74 percent, had mild strokes.
For those who managed light physical activity, 330, or 86 percent, had mild strokes. And among the 59 participants who got moderate intensity exercise, 53, or 90 percent, had mild strokes.
Age also mattered, with higher odds of a mild stroke for younger people in the study.
The study wasn’t designed to prove whether or how the amount or intensity of exercise might influence stroke severity.
Another limitation is that researchers relied on stroke survivors to accurately recall their previous exercise habits, and memory is often compromised after a stroke.
Even so, the results add to evidence suggesting that an active lifestyle can both lower the risk of stroke and reduce the chances that a stroke will be severe, said Nicole Spartano, co-author of an accompanying editorial and a researcher at Boston University School of Medicine.
“Regular exercise helps the brain to maintain healthy arteries that have more complex networks,” Spartano said by email. “So when a blockage [stroke] happens in one area, there may be another route to provide oxygen to the affected area.”
Being physically active can also help prevent risk factors for stroke, like obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure, Spartano noted.
“This study is exciting because it suggests that you might not have to do a lot of intense exercise to see an effect,” Spartano said.
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The U.S. government warned Wednesday that a hacking group widely known as cloudhopper, which Western cybersecurity firms have linked to the Chinese government, has launched attacks on technology service providers in a campaign to steal data from their clients.
The Department of Homeland issued a technical alert for cloudhopper, which it said was engaged in cyber espionage and theft of intellectual property, after experts with two prominent U.S. cybersecurity companies warned earlier this week that Chinese hacking activity has surged amid the escalating trade war between Washington and Beijing.
Chinese authorities have repeatedly denied claims by Western cybersecurity firms that it supports hacking.
Homeland Security
Homeland Security released the information to support U.S. companies in responding to attacks by the group, which is targeting information technology, energy, health care, communications and manufacturing firms.
“These cyber threat actors are still active and we strongly encourage our partners in government and industry to work together to defend against this threat,” DHS official Christopher Krebs said in a statement.
The reported increase in Chinese hacking follows what cybersecurity firms have described as a lull in such attacks prompted by a 2015 agreement between Chinese President Xi Jinping and former U.S. President Barrack Obama to curb cyber-enabled economic theft.
“I can tell you now unfortunately the Chinese are back,” Dmitri Alperovitch, chief technology officer of U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, said Tuesday at a security conference in Washington.
“We’ve seen a huge pickup in activity over the past year and a half. Nowadays they are the most predominant threat actors we see threatening institutions all over this country and Western Europe,” he said.
Analysts with FireEye, another U.S. cybersecurity firm, said that some of the Chinese hacking groups it tracks have become more active in recent months.
Advice to US firms
Wednesday’s alert provided advice on how U.S. firms can prevent, identify and remediate attacks by cloudhopper, which is also known as Red Leaves and APT10.
The hacking group has largely targeted firms known as managed service providers, which supply telecommunications, technology and other services to business around the globe.
Managed service providers, or MSPs, are attractive targets because their networks provide routes for hackers to access sensitive systems of their many clients, said Ben Read, a senior intelligence manager with FireEye.
“We’ve seen this group route malware through an MSP network to other targets,” Read said.
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North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests have stopped, but its hacking operations to gather intelligence and raise funds for the sanction-strapped government in Pyongyang may be gathering steam.
U.S. security firm FireEye raised the alarm Wednesday over a North Korean group that it says has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars by infiltrating the computer systems of banks around the world since 2014 through highly sophisticated and destructive attacks that have spanned at least 11 countries. It says the group is still operating and poses “an active global threat.”
It is part of a wider pattern of malicious state-backed cyber activity that has led the Trump administration to identify North Korea — along with Russia, Iran and China — as one of the main online threats facing the United States. Last month, the Justice Department charged a North Korean hacker said to have conspired in devastating cyberattacks, including an $81 million heist of Bangladesh’s central bank and the WannaCry virus that crippled parts of Britain’s National Health Service.
DHS offers warning
On Tuesday, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned of the use of malware by Hidden Cobra, the U.S. government’s byword for North Korea hackers, in fraudulent ATM cash withdrawals from banks in Asia and Africa. It said that Hidden Cobra was behind the theft of tens of millions of dollars from teller machines in the past two years. In one incident this year, cash had been simultaneously withdrawn from ATMs in 23 different countries, it said.
North Korea, which prohibits access to the world wide web for virtually all of its people, has previously denied involvement in cyberattacks, and attribution for such attacks is rarely made with absolute certainty. It is typically based on technical indicators such as the Internet Protocol, or IP, addresses that identify computers and characteristics of the coding used in malware, which is the software a hacker may use to damage or disable computers.
But other cybersecurity experts tell The Associated Press that they also see continued signs that North Korea’s authoritarian government, which has a long track record of criminality to raise cash, is conducting malign activity online. That activity includes targeting of financial institutions and crypto-currency-related organizations, as well as spying on its adversaries, despite the easing of tensions between Pyongyang and Washington.
“The reality is they are starved for cash and are continuing to try and generate revenue, at least until sanctions are diminished,” said Adam Meyers, vice president of intelligence at CrowdStrike. “At the same time, they won’t abate in intelligence collection operations, as they continue to negotiate and test the international community’s resolve and test what the boundaries are.”
North Korea attacks continue
CrowdStrike says it has detected continuing North Korean cyber intrusions in the past two months, including the use of a known malware against a potentially broad set of targets in South Korea, and a new variant of malware against users of mobile devices that use a Linux-based operating system.
This activity has been taking place against the backdrop of a dramatic diplomatic shift as Kim Jong Un has opened up to the world. He has held summits with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and with President Donald Trump, who hopes to persuade Kim to relinquish the nuclear weapons that pose a potential threat to the U.S. homeland. Tensions on the divided Korean Peninsula have dropped and fears of war with the U.S. have ebbed. Trump this weekend will dispatch his top diplomat, Mike Pompeo, to Pyongyang for the fourth time this year to make progress on denuclearization.
But North Korea has yet to take concrete steps to give up its nuclear arsenal, so there’s been no let-up in sanctions that have been imposed to deprive it of fuel and revenue for its weapons programs, and to block it from bulk cash transfers and accessing to the international banking system.
FireEye says APT38, the name it gives to the hacking group dedicated to bank theft, has emerged and stepped up its operations since February 2014 as the economic vise on North Korea has tightened in response to its nuclear and missile tests. Initial operations targeted financial institutions in Southeast Asia, where North Korea had experience in money laundering, but then expanded into other regions such as Latin America and Africa, and then extended to Europe and North America.
In all, FireEye says APT38 has attempted to steal $1.1 billion, and based on the data it can confirm, has gotten away with hundreds of millions in dollars. It has used malware to insert fraudulent transactions in the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication or SWIFT system that is used to transfer money between banks. Its biggest heist to date was $81 million stolen from the central bank of Bangladesh in February 2016. The funds were wired to bank accounts established with fake identities in the Philippines. After the funds were withdrawn they were suspected to have been laundered in casinos.
Cyber attacks an alternative
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank, said in a report Wednesday that North Korea’s cyber capabilities provide an alternative means for challenging its adversaries. While Kim’s hereditary regime appears to prioritize currency generation, attacks using the SWIFT system raise concerns that North Korean hackers “may become more proficient at manipulating the data and systems that undergird the global financial system,” it says.
Sandra Joyce, FireEye’s head of global intelligence, said that while APT38 is a criminal operation, it leverages the skills and technology of a state-backed espionage campaign, allowing it to infiltrate multiple banks at once and figure how to extract funds. On average, it dwells in a bank’s computer network for 155 days to learn about its systems before it tries to steal anything. And when it finally pounces, it uses aggressive malware to wreak havoc and cover its tracks.
“We see this as a consistent effort, before, during and after any diplomatic efforts by the United States and the international community,” said Joyce, describing North Korea as being “undeterred” and urging the U.S. government to provide more specific threat information to financial institutions about APT38’s modus operandi. APT stands for Advanced Persistent Threat.
Large Chile bank hacked
The Silicon Valley-based company says it is aware of continuing, suspected APT38 operations against other banks. The most recent attack it is publicly attributing to APT38 was against of Chile’s biggest commercial banks, Banco de Chile, in May this year. The bank has said a hacking operation robbed it of $10 million.
FireEye, which is staffed with a roster of former military and law-enforcement cyberexperts, conducted malware analysis for a criminal indictment by the Justice Department last month against Park Jin Hyok, the first time a hacker said to be from North Korea has faced U.S. criminal charges. He’s accused of conspiring in a number of devastating cyberattacks: the Bangladesh heist and other attempts to steal more than $1 billion from financial institutions around the world; the 2014 breach of Sony Pictures Entertainment; and the WannaCry ransomware virus that in 2017 infected computers in 150 countries.
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Brandon Alexander would like to introduce you to Angus, the farmer of the future. He’s heavyset, weighing in at nearly 1,000 pounds, not to mention a bit slow. But he’s strong enough to hoist 800-pound pallets of maturing vegetables and can move them from place to place on his own.
Sure, Angus is a robot. But don’t hold that against him, even if he looks more like a large tanning bed than C-3PO.
To Alexander, Angus and other robots are key to a new wave of local agriculture that aims to raise lettuce, basil and other produce in metropolitan areas while conserving water and sidestepping the high costs of human labor. It’s a big challenge, and some earlier efforts have flopped. Even Google’s “moonshot” laboratory, known as X, couldn’t figure out how to make the economics work.
After raising $6 million and tinkering with autonomous robots for two years, Alexander’s startup Iron Ox says it’s ready to start delivering crops of its robotically grown vegetables to people’s salad bowls. “And they are going to be the best salads you ever tasted,” says the 33-year-old Alexander, a one-time Oklahoma farmboy turned Google engineer turned startup CEO.
Iron Ox planted its first robot farm in an 8,000-square-foot warehouse in San Carlos, California, a suburb located 25 miles south of San Francisco. Although no deals have been struck yet, Alexander says Iron Ox has been talking to San Francisco Bay area restaurants interested in buying its leafy vegetables and expects to begin selling to supermarkets next year.
The San Carlos warehouse is only a proving ground for Iron Ox’s long-term goals. It plans to set up robot farms in greenhouses that will rely mostly on natural sunlight instead of high-powered indoor lighting that sucks up expensive electricity. Initially, though, the company will sell its produce at a loss in order to remain competitive.
During the next few years, Iron Ox wants to open robot farms near metropolitan areas across the U.S. to serve up fresher produce to restaurants and supermarkets. Most of the vegetables and fruit consumed in the U.S. is grown in California, Arizona, Mexico and other nations. That means many people in U.S. cities are eating lettuce that’s nearly a week old by the time it’s delivered.
There are bigger stakes as well. The world’s population is expected to swell to 10 billion by 2050 from about 7.5 billion now, making it important to find ways to feed more people without further environmental impact, according to a report from the World Resources Institute.
Iron Ox, Alexander reasons, can be part of the solution if its system can make the leap from its small, laboratory-like setting to much larger greenhouses.
The startup relies on a hydroponic system that conserves water and automation in place of humans who seem increasingly less interested in U.S. farming jobs that pay an average of $13.32 per hour, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Nearly half of U.S. farmworkers planting and picking crops aren’t in the U.S. legally, based on a survey by the U.S. Department of Labor.
The heavy lifting on Iron Ox’s indoor farm is done by Angus, which rolls about the indoor farm on omnidirectional wheels. Its main job is to shuttle maturing produce to another, as-yet unnamed robot, which transfers plants from smaller growing pods to larger ones, using a mechanical arm whose joints are lubricated with “food-safe” grease.
It’s a tedious process to gently pick up each of the roughly 250 plants on each pallet and transfer them to their bigger pods, but the robot doesn’t seem to mind the work. Iron Ox still relies on people to clip its vegetables when they are ready for harvest, but Alexander says it is working on another robot that will eventually handle that job too.
Alexander formerly worked on robotics at Google X, but worked on drones, not indoor farms. While there, he met Jon Binney, Iron Ox’s co-founder and chief technology offer. The two men became friends and began to brainstorm about ways they might be able to use their engineering skills for the greater good.
“If we can feed people using robots, what could be more impactful than that?” Alexander says.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday strongly defended a prospective Russia-Germany natural gas pipeline as economically feasible and voiced hope that European Union nations will be able to resist U.S. pressure to thwart the project.
U.S. officials have warned that Washington could impose sanctions on the undersea Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The U.S. and some EU nations oppose it, warning it would increase Europe’s energy dependence on Russia. The U.S. is also interested in selling more of its liquefied natural gas in Europe.
Speaking Wednesday after talks with Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz in St. Petersburg, Putin noted that Bulgaria caved in to pressure and dumped the Russian South Stream pipeline.
He added that he hopes that “Europe as a whole won’t look like Bulgaria and won’t demonstrate its weakness and inability to protect its interests.”
“Russia always has been and will remain the most reliable supplier,” Putin said, adding that the Russian gas supplied via pipelines is significantly cheaper than U.S. liquefied gas. “Supplies come directly from Yamal in Siberia. There are no transit risks.”
It would be “silly and wasteful” if Europe opts for a more expensive option, hurting its consumers and its global competitiveness, Putin charged.
Ukraine, which has served as the main transit route for Russian gas supplies to Europe, has strongly opposed the Russian pipeline, fearing that it would leave its pipeline empty. The two ex-Soviet neighbors have been locked in a bitter tug-of-war after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.
Kurz spoke in support of Nord Stream 2 but also emphasized the importance to continue supplies via Ukraine.
“It’s very important that Ukraine’s interests as a key transit country be upheld,” he said.
Putin has previously pledged to consider the continuation of gas supplies via Ukraine if it settles a commercial dispute with Russia over previous gas supplies.
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Ireland’s data regulator has launched an investigation of Facebook over a recent data breach that allowed hackers access 50 million accounts which could potentially cost Facebook more than $1.6 billion in fines.
The Irish Data Protection Commission said Wednesday that it will look into whether the U.S. social media company complied with European regulations that went into effect earlier this year covering data protection.
It’s the latest headache for Facebook in Europe, where authorities are turning up the heat on dominant tech firms over data protection. Last month, European Union consumer protection chief Vera Jourova said that she was growing impatient with Facebook for being too slow in clarifying the fine print in its terms of service covering what happens to user data and warned that the company could face sanctions.
The commission said in a statement that it would examine whether Facebook put in place “appropriate technical and organizational measures to ensure the security and safeguarding of the personal data it processes.”
The commission said earlier this week the number of EU accounts potentially affected numbered less than 5 million.
Ireland, which is Facebook’s lead privacy regulator for Europe, is moving swiftly to investigate the U.S. tech company since the breach became public on Friday.
Facebook said Friday attackers gained the ability to “seize control” of user accounts by stealing digital keys the company uses to keep users logged in. They could do so by exploiting three distinct bugs in Facebook’s code.
The company said it has fixed the bugs and logged out the 50 million breached users — plus another 40 million who were vulnerable to the attack — in order to reset those digital keys. Facebook said it doesn’t know who was behind the attacks or where they’re based. Neither passwords nor credit card data was stolen. At the time, the company said it alerted the FBI and regulators in the U.S. and Europe.
Facebook on Wednesday didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
Facebook has faced a tumultuous year of security problems and privacy issues . News broke early this year that a data analytics firm once employed by the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, had improperly gained access to personal data from millions of user profiles. Then a congressional investigation found that agents from Russia and other countries have been posting fake political ads since at least 2016. In April, Zuckerberg appeared at a congressional hearing focused on Facebook’s privacy practices.
The European Union implemented stronger data and privacy rules, known as General Data Protection Regulation, in May.
The case could prove to be the first major test of GDPR. Under the new rules, companies could be hit with fines equal to 4 percent of annual global turnover for the most serious violations. In Facebook’s case, that could amount to more than $1.6 billion based on its 2017 revenues.
The new rules also require companies to disclose any breaches within 72 hours. The commission said Facebook informed it that its internal investigation is continuing and that it is taking actions to “mitigate the potential risk to users.”
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Seven-year-old Ryan drew millions of views reviewing toys on YouTube. Now, he’s become a toy himself.
Walmart is selling action figures in his likeness, putty with his face on the packaging and other toys under the Ryan’s World brand. It’s a bet that kids, who are spending more time tapping tablets, will recognize Ryan from YouTube and want the toys he’s hawking.
The new line may also help Walmart lure former Toys R Us shoppers, as many chains make a play for those customers ahead of the holiday shopping season.
The first-grader, who’s been making YouTube videos for three years, has become a major influencer in the toy industry. The clips typically show him unboxing a toy, playing with it and then waving goodbye to viewers. His most watched video, in which Ryan hunts for large plastic eggs, has more than 1.5 billion views.
Toys featured in the videos can see a spike in sales, says Jim Silver, editor of toy review site TTPM.com. “Ryan is a celebrity,” he said. “Kids watch his videos. He’s entertaining.”
So much so that toymakers have paid Ryan and his parents to feature their products. Forbes magazine estimated that the Ryan ToysReview YouTube channel brought in $11 million last year, but his parents, Shion and Loann, declined to confirm that number or give any financial details about Ryan’s deals. They also do not give their last name or say where they live for privacy and safety reasons.
Ryan’s path from reviewer to tiny toy mogul started last year when his parents signed with Pocket.watch, a two-year-old company that works with several YouTube personalities to get their names on clothing, books and other products. Ryan is the first with a product line because of his large audience, Pocket.watch says.
Last month, Walmart started selling Ryan’s World bright-colored slime for $4, 5-inch Ryan action figures for $9 and french fry-shaped squishy toys for $18. The retailer is the exclusive seller of some of the line, including T-shirts and stuffed animals.
Whether kids will want them “all comes down to the toy,” says Silver, adding that hits are made on the playground, where youngsters show off their toys and tell others about it.
What Ryan does have is a built-in audience. A video of him searching the aisles of Walmart for Ryan’s World toys has nearly 10 million views in a month, and his YouTube page has more than 16 million subscribers. Anne Marie Kehoe, who oversees Walmart’s toy department, says a couple of thousand people showed up to a recent appearance at an Arkansas store just to see a kid “jumping around and acting crazy.”
Ryan, in a phone interview, says a lot of those people wanted his picture. He then left the phone call to play.
His parents, who stayed on the line, say Ryan spends about 90 minutes a week recording YouTube videos. They say he helped with the creation of some of the toys, like when he asked for an evil twin version of himself for a figurine.
“I’m always amazed at the point of view Ryan has,” said his dad, Shion.
Chris Williams, Pocket.watch’s founder and CEO, sees Ryan as a franchise, like how “Nickelodeon looks at SpongeBob.”
But unlike a cartoon sponge, Ryan will grow up. Williams says he expects the products to evolve with Ryan’s taste. And Ryan’s parents agree, saying they’re prepared to follow his interests as he gets older, like to video games.
“We can change,” Shion said.
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Children’s and public health advocacy groups say Facebook’s kid-centric messaging app violates federal law by collecting kids’ personal information without getting verifiable consent from their parents.
The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and other groups asked the Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday to investigate Facebook’s Messenger Kids for violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA.
The complaint says the app does not meet COPPA requirements because it doesn’t try to ensure that the person who sets up the kids’ account and gives consent to have their data collected is the actual parent. In fact, the groups say, someone could set up a brand new, fictional account and immediately approve a kid’s account without proving their age or identity.
Facebook said Wednesday it hasn’t yet reviewed the complaint letter. The company has said it doesn’t show ads on Messenger Kids or collect data for marketing purposes, though it does collect some data it says is necessary to run the service.
But the advocacy groups say the privacy policy of Messenger Kids is “incomplete and vague” and allows Facebook to disclose data to third parties and other Facebook services “for broad, undefined business purposes.”
Facebook launched Messenger Kids last December on iOS and has since expanded to Android and Amazon devices and beyond the U.S. to Mexico, Canada and elsewhere. It is aimed at children under 13 who technically cannot have Facebook accounts (although plenty of them do).
Though the company says it has received a lot of input from parents and children’s development experts in creating the app, groups such as the CCFC have been trying to get Messenger Kids shut down since it launched.
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Newer birth control for men is beginning to fill the gap between the traditional condoms and sterilization.
One new technology involves inserting a hypodermic needle into the scrotum. It is said to decrease libido.
For men, contraception had remained fairly stagnant for the past century, primarily limited to condoms (85 percent effective when used correctly) and vasectomy, which is usually permanent. New methods are trying to move beyond centuries-old contraception applications, and some younger men say they are enthusiastic about the prospects.
But they want them to be safe.
“Contraceptives are necessary regardless of which partner is using them,” said Shane Sullivan, a senior at Colgate University in New York. But, “I’m adverse to solutions that may induce side effects.”
But as with contraception for women, methods free of side effects are hard to come by.
Nestorone-Testosterone is a hormonal birth control gel for men that’s been in the making for more than a decade. The gel is applied to the arms and shoulders every day and works to shut down hormones responsible for sperm production. But because it drops testosterone levels, reported side effects include a low libido or problems with ejaculation.
Meanwhile, scientists at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland have developed a daily birth control pill called DMAU. It lowers testosterone and sperm production, which decreases the likelihood of pregnancy, according to a study by the University of Washington Medical Center and at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, California.
All participants who tried DMAU noted some weight gain and a decrease of high-density lipoproteins (HDL, “good” cholesterol responsible for healthy cardiovascular functioning).
“Despite having low levels of circulating testosterone, very few subjects reported symptoms consistent with testosterone deficiency or excess,” said the study’s senior investigator, professor of medicine Stephanie Page at the University of Washington in Seattle.
“DMAU is a major step forward in the development of a once-daily ‘male pill,’” Page said. “Many men say they would prefer a daily pill as a reversible contraceptive, rather than long-acting injections or topical gels, which are also in development.”
Contraceptives such as Vasalgel block the vas deferens, or the tubes through which sperm travel, with the injection of a gel into the scrotum. The Indian developer of Vasalgel licensed it to non-profit company Parsemus Foundation in the U.S., which focuses its development on innovative but neglected pharmaceutical advances.
Vasalgel can last a few months to a few years. It has shown minimal adverse impacts and the developer calls it the “IUD for men” because it is non-hormonal.
Robert McLachlan, professor of men’s health at Monash University in Melbourne, found another injectable option for men. McLachlan designed an intramuscular shot delivered in the buttocks, increasing testosterone, which greatly reduces sperm production.
The most common side effects for the injectable hormonal contraceptive included acne, injection site pain, mood disorders, and an increased libido.
In a survey conducted with 134 young adults aged 18-27, of which 61 were male, their average likelihood of supporting male contraceptives was 8.6 on a scale from 1 to 10, (1 being the least likely and 10 being the most like to support.) Of all the respondents, 29 percent were quick to note that hormonal contraceptives for women already include the side effects that some of the newer drugs would present for men.
Brennan Sullivan, a 24-year-old research assistant from Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions (JHMI) noted the impact a male-dominated medical field has on women. He emphasized that “male contraceptives should not be seen as equivalent to female birth control,” and explained how many scientists have not considered these biological differences between men and women when developing medications.
Ahead of Food and Drug Administration approval for oral contraceptives for women in 1960, couples relied on withdrawal and condoms to prevent pregnancy. Soon, women on the early forms of the Pill began to complain of side effects that included hormone imbalance, weight gain, acne, and mood changes because of high estrogen levels. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, (CDC), nearly 30 percent of users stopped oral contraceptives, and dosage was modified to balance contraception with user tolerance.
Despite successful findings and trials, the pharmaceutical industry thinks there is a relatively small market for male contraceptives, so it may be a while before these drugs actually hit the shelves. McLachlan noted the industry was “involved in this research until about five years ago and both the big companies that were involved — one pulled out [of research] about a decade ago.”
“Seeing as they’re the same side effects as most female birth control options, it’s not too bad,” said Pavan Devraj, a sophomore at the University of Georgia.
Jameson Carter, a research assistant at the Library of Congress, also expressed support.
“I think this stuff has to start somewhere. I understand it won’t be as convenient as just using a condom, given the side effects. I’d try it.”
Some men see birth control as an opportunity to be equally accountable for contraception.
“Men should absolutely engage in the same difficult choices that women do if they choose to engage in sexual activity,” said Mishka Naiker, 22 and a recent graduate from the University of Alabama. “Women are biologically more responsible for the existence and welfare of a child, even though the creation of a fetus takes both a man and a woman. That is the only time the responsibility is honestly 50/50.”
Wazir Hossain, a 24-year-old recent graduate from the University of Georgia, agrees and says it’s great for men to “have some form of control over the outcome of a situation and hold themselves accountable.”
Computer programmer Kaden Weaver, 23, expressed concerned about potential side effects.
“I am fully supportive of male contraceptive options similar to birth control, but… I feel as though things with these side effects don’t belong in the human body. ”
That attitude is not embraced in all parts of the world. The responsibility for family planning routinely falls to women, and contraception is not accessible to an estimated 214 million women in developing countries, according to a report by the Guttmacher Institute.
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Finding the motivation to get in shape can be difficult, but a new category of smart mirrors won’t let users off the hook. Tina Trinh reports.
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China’s hopes of negotiating a free trade pact with Canada or Mexico were dealt a sharp setback by a provision deep in the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement that aims to forbid such deals with “non-market” countries, trade experts said on Tuesday.
The provision specifies that if one of the current North American Free Trade Agreement partners enters a free trade deal with a “non-market” country such as China, the others can quit in six months and form their own bilateral trade pact.
The clause, which has stirred controversy in Canada, fits in with U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to isolate China economically and prevent Chinese companies from using Canada or Mexico as a “back door” to ship products tariff-free to the United States.
The United States and China are locked in a spiraling trade war that has seen them level increasingly severe rounds of tariffs on each other’s imports.
Under the clause, the countries in the updated NAFTA, renamed the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), must notify the others three months before entering into such negotiations.
Derek Scissors, a China scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, said the provision gave the Trump administration an effective veto over any China trade deal by Canada or Mexico.
If repeated in other U.S. negotiations with the European Union and Japan, it could help isolate Beijing in the global trading system.
“For both Canada and Mexico, we have a reason to think an FTA with China is a possibility. It’s not imminent, but this is a very elegant way of dealing with that,” Scissors said.
“There’s no China deal that’s worth losing a ratified USMCA,” Scissors added.
After months of bashing its Western allies on trade, the Trump administration is now trying to recruit them to join the United States in pressuring China to shift its trade, subsidy and intellectual property practices to a more-market driven focus.
Beijing has demanded that the World Trade Organization recognize it as a “market economy” since its WTO accession agreement expired in December 2016, a move that would severely limit Western trade defenses against cheap Chinese goods.
But the United States and European Union are challenging the declaration, arguing that Chinese state subsidies fueling excess industrial capacity, the exclusion of foreign competitors and other practices are signs it is still a non-market economy.
Canadian Sovereignty Questioned
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, seeking to diversify Canada’s export base, held exploratory talks with China on trade in 2016, but a launch of formal negotiations has failed to materialize.
Tracey Ramsey, a legislator for Canada’s left-leaning New Democrats, said in the House of Commons on Tuesday that the clause was “astonishing” and a “severe restriction on Canadian independence.”
“Part of Canada’s concessions in this deal was to include language that holds Canada hostage to the Americans if we decide to trade with another country,” Ramsey said. “Why did the Liberal (Party) give the go-ahead for the U.S. to pull us into their trade wars?”
Canadian Finance Minister Bill Morneau downplayed the provision, arguing it was not significantly different from NAFTA’s clause that allows any member to leave the pact in six months’ time for any reason.
“It is largely the same. It recognizes though that the non-market economy is of significant importance as we move forward. But I don’t think it’s going to make a material difference in our activities,” Morneau told a business audience.
Mexico’s business community sided with the Trump administration in endorsing the pact.
“We are associating ourselves with countries that promote market freedom and that promote free trade in the world, free trade under equal circumstances,” said Juan Pablo Castañon, head of the Consejo Coordinador Empresarial (CCE), which represented Mexico’s private sector during the NAFTA trade talks.
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Mexico and Canada on Tuesday urged their governments to resolve a tariff dispute with the United States before signing a new trilateral trade deal that was unveiled this week.
In late May, the Trump administration announced tariffs of 25 percent on steel imports and 10 percent on aluminum imports, prompting quick retaliation from top trading partners including Canada and Mexico.
Late on Sunday, the United States and Canada reached a deal to overhaul the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), complementing an accord the Trump administration brokered with Mexico, the third member of NAFTA, in late August.
Mexican steel producers association Canacero welcomed the new trade pact, called the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), but said it viewed “with concern” the ongoing steel dispute and the “serious situation” it created for the industry.
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs would remain in place for Canada and Mexico until they “can do something different like quotas, perhaps.”
In a statement, Canacero said it supported efforts to find a solution to the impasse before the leaders of Mexico, the United States and Canada signed USMCA, which officials say could happen at a G20 summit at the end of November.
If no solution can be found, Mexico should put tariffs on U.S. steel to level the playing field, Canacero said.
Mexico has already slapped tariffs on U.S. pork, bourbon, motor boats and other products. Canada has levied tariffs on a range of U.S. imports, including steel and aluminum.
Joseph Galimberti, president of the Canadian Steel Producers Association, said he expected Canada’s government to continue to support the industry after the USMCA breakthrough.
“There is clearly an opportunity to constructively engage the United States between the achievement of a deal in principle and the ratification or signature of that deal,” he said.
Canada is the top exporter of steel and aluminum to the United States. The United Steelworkers of Canada adopted a less conciliatory tone after the new trade deal was announced, calling it a “sell-out” for Canadian workers.
Mexican officials have said they hope the steel and aluminum dispute can be resolved before USMCA is signed.
Since the tariff row broke out, Mexican steel exports to the United States had fallen 30 percent on average, Canacero said.
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A scrawny dwarf planet nicknamed “the Goblin” has been discovered well beyond Pluto.
A round frozen world just 186 miles (300 kilometers) across, the Goblin was spotted by astronomers in 2015 around Halloween, thus its spooky name. But it wasn’t publicly unveiled until Tuesday following further observations with ground telescopes.
Scott Sheppard of the Carnegie Institution for Science, one of the astronomers who made the discovery, said the Goblin is on the small end for a dwarf planet. It is officially known as 2015 TG387 by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center.
This is the third dwarf planet recently found to be orbiting on the frigid fringes of our solar system.
Goblin’s orbit is extremely elongated — so stretched out, in fact, that it takes 40,000 years for it to circle the sun.
At its most distant, the Goblin is 2,300 times farther from the sun than Earth. That’s 2,300 astronomical units, or AU. One AU is the distance from Earth to the sun, or roughly 93 million miles (150 million kilometers).
At its closest, the Goblin is 65 times farther from the sun than Earth, or 65 AU. Pluto, by comparison, is approximately 30 to 50 AU.
Sheppard, along with Northern Arizona University’s Chad Trujillo and the University of Hawaii’s David Tholen, spotted the Goblin in October 2015 when it was relatively nearby — around 80 AU.
The two other dwarf planets are Sedna, discovered in 2003, which is about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) across, and 2012 VP113, about 310 miles (500 kilometers). They were found by some of the same astronomers.
Thousands — even a million — more such objects could be way out there orbiting in the so-called Inner Oort Cloud, according to the researchers. They’re in hot pursuit of them, as well as a potentially bigger-than-Earth planet known as Planet 9, or Planet X, believed by some scientists to be orbiting at a distance of hundreds of AU.
“These objects are on elongated orbits, and we can only detect them when they are closest to the Sun. For some 99 percent of their orbits, they are too distant and thus too faint for us to observe them. We are only seeing the tip of the iceberg,” Sheppard said in an email.
Sheppard said the faraway objects are “like bread crumbs leading us to Planet X.”
“The more of them we can find, the better we can understand the outer solar system and the possible planet that we think is shaping their orbits — a discovery that would redefine our knowledge of the solar system’s evolution,” he said in a statement.
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Palu, the Indonesian city devastated by an earthquake, tsunamis and mudslides, has strived to transform itself into a major trading hub, but the city’s buildings and other infrastructure were no match for the triple whammy that has left more than 1,200 people dead.
The disasters that struck late Friday left the city’s port in ruins, its lone gantry crane atilt in the water. Its airport terminal was a sea of shattered glass and broken ceiling panels. A seven-story, 4-year-old hotel lay flat on its side. Its biggest bridge disintegrated, its picturesque yellow arches mangled in the mud.
Ringed by coconut, coffee and cocoa farms, over the past two decades Palu has acquired modern shopping malls, hotels and other amenities to suit its ambitions. Poverty has fallen from nearly a third of its 380,000 residents to under one in 10, local officials say.
A national blueprint calls for developing Palu as part of the “Sulawesi Economic Corridors” — a plan to attract investment and build up trade and commerce in a region that has remained somewhat isolated since the days of the ancient spice trade.
Given how seismically active the area is — the Palu-Koro fault runs right through the city — it’s been a race against the odds. Historical records show the area has been hit by tsunamis — triggered by powerfully destructive earthquakes — at least seven times in the past two centuries.
It’s unclear what standards were required, or enforced, in the construction of Palu’s modern buildings.
It’s an issue for all of Indonesia, an archipelago that sits square on the Pacific Ring of Fire.
Teddy Boen, an expert on earthquake-resistant engineering who has consulted with foreign governments and international organizations, has been researching the problem for a half-century.
“From 50 years ago until today, there is similar damage. Somebody is not doing their job,” he said in a phone interview. “The codes are complete. The manuals are complete. The political will is not there.”
The collapse of a mezzanine floor inside the Jakarta Stock Exchange in January that injured dozens of people underscores the extent of the problem, even in Indonesia’s capital.
After a tsunami in 2004 killed 230,000 people in Indonesia and elsewhere across Asia, it became apparent that in many communities, sturdy mosques and other strong buildings dating back to colonial times were the only structures still standing while newer structures often crumbled.
In Palu, the Arkam Babu Rahman “floating mosque” on the city’s waterfront was pushed off-kilter by Friday’s tsunamis, while its worship halls remained intact. But a bigger, 20-year-old structure topped by a heavy dome was gutted as the debris-laden water swept through.
Few of the buildings in Palu’s suburbs of Petobo, Biromaru and Bala Roa could withstand the sideways mudslide that engulfed those communities in expanses of oozing quicksand.
Indonesia’s disaster agency spokesman Sutopo Purwo Nugroho said the soil there had liquefied and that authorities believed hundreds of people may have been buried in the mud. In Bala Roa, the ground violently heaved up and then sank in places, trapping many people under their wrecked homes.
Traditional homes with thatched or tin roofs cannot withstand tsunamis or storm surges from typhoons but pose much less of a risk of severe damage even if they do collapse in an earthquake. Many homes built recently are hybrids, combining traditional styles with unreinforced masonry and tile roofs too heavy for the structures when they are shaken by quakes.
The rush to rebuild after a disaster involves cutting corners, rather than fortifying buildings to prevent future calamities.
“Now, they say, build back better, build back better, but they do the same thing again,” Boen said. “The earthquake comes, they made the same mistakes and people get killed again.”
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Takako Arai’s earliest memories are of Tsukiji, playing hide-and-seek with her brother in the concrete maze of Tokyo’s sprawling fish market. Years later, she now runs the family’s seafood stall that sells mackerel and yellowfin tuna.
Arai and hundreds of other fish traders are reluctantly packing up and preparing to leave Tsukiji this week for a gleaming new $5 billion market on reclaimed land farther from central Tokyo.
“I feel torn. I grew up here and I feel like we’re losing so much of our history by leaving this place,” said Arai, 45.
The 83-year-old market, a popular tourist attraction, is a warren of shops and warehouses where small turret trucks zip around laden with ice-filled boxes of fish. But city officials say it has become dilapidated and unsanitary.
Many fishmongers want to stay in the area where they also live. They worry about contaminated soil at the new site in Toyosu, and the difficult commute to the new market.
More than 80 percent of Tsukiji fish traders are opposed to the move, said a survey by a group fighting the relocation.
In a last-ditch bid to delay the move, 56 traders sued the city of Tokyo last month, seeking a temporary injunction. They have asked the court to rule before Tsukiji closes on Saturday.
If there are no delays, business will resume at the new Toyosu market on Oct. 11, but traders worry their customers will not follow them.
Arai, whose family have been fish traders for 95 years, said buyers have already told her the new site is inconvenient.
“They say they’re going to buy from other markets nearer to their restaurants,” she said. “What can I say? They’re business people too.”
Fewer customers will make it hard to recoup the hundreds of thousands of dollars each fish trader expects to pay for the move, including replacing freezers and refrigerators.
Some 300 fishmongers and activists voiced their anger during a protest at Tsukiji last Saturday, chanting “Toyosu No No No,” and waving banners saying “Stop the Relocation!”
Tourists visiting one of Tokyo’s most famous landmarks paused in the rain to join the chants.
“We finally made Tsukiji a famous brand and now they’re trying to destroy it,” said Kiyoshi Kimura, who owns one of Japan’s largest sushi chains, Sushi Zanmai.
His gravelly voice rising as he wept, Kimura recalled opening his first sushi restaurant in Tsukiji 17 years ago in a bid to draw tourists and revive the market. Kimura is famous for his winning bids at the market’s New Years auction, where in 2013 he paid a record $1.76 million for a bluefin tuna.
“They have no compassion. That’s it,” Kimura told Reuters. “These bureaucrats have forgotten that human beings live here. It’s all about money for them.”
Final days
The relocation plan has been delayed many times since it was conceived 17 years ago. In 2016, toxic substances were found in soil and groundwater at Toyosu, once home to a gas plant.
Tokyo spent an extra 3.8 billion yen ($33.5 million) to dig hundreds of wells to pump out groundwater.
In July, Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike declared the new site safe after experts signed off on additional cleanup measures, but some fish traders remain skeptical.
An official with the Tokyo Metropolitan Government said Tsukiji had long supported the city’s residents with its lively market, but it was important for that tradition to continue in a new location with better sanitary conditions.
The old Tsukiji site will provide temporary parking for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and eventually become a tourist center.
Tsukiji feels like a village with its own medical clinics, a bank, library and shops, but with some 40,000 workers and tourists passing through on its busiest days.
In its final days, the market is still a frenzy of activity.
Men unload, sort, pack and display thousands of cartons of white boxes filled with fresh fish and seafood trucked in from ports across Japan.
During the early morning auctions, traders use hand signals to buy and sell fish.
The day’s catch is typically carted to a hangar where traders sell their seafood to buyers strolling down the chaotic cobblestone walkways under large store signs.
Koji Amano, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, started working at Tsukiji after dropping out of high school. Now 47, he and two brothers manage a stall specializing in bluefin tuna, or “maguro,” considered the king of sushi.
As he filleted a hulk of tuna with a sword-like knife, Amano was resigned to Tsukiji’s fate.
“They’re determined to move us out,” he said. “So there’s not much we can really do to stop them.”
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A study of the African bush elephant’s vast network of deep wrinkles has found it is intricately designed to help the animals keep their cool, fight off parasites and defend against sun damage, scientists said on Tuesday.
The fine pattern of millions of channels means the elephant’s skin can retain five to 10 times more water than a flat surface, the scientists said.
The research, conducted by scientists at Switzerland’s University of Geneva and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, was published in the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday.
“Because of their huge body size, and their warm and dry habitat, African elephants can avoid over-heating only by losing calories through evaporation of the water they collect in and on their skin,” researchers wrote.
The scientists found that elephant skin channels are not just folds or wrinkles, but actual fractures in the animal’s brittle outermost layer of skin. The skin grows on a tiny lattice framework, they said, causing it to fracture under mechanical stress when the animals move.
African elephants are known to love bathing, spraying and mud-wallowing, and since they have no sweat and sebum glands to keep their skin moist and supple, the tiny crevices trap and hold on to water and mud, helping to regulate body temperature.
They also form a barrier against bugs and solar radiation.
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NASA’s Parker Solar Probe is swinging by Venus on its unprecedented journey to the sun.
Launched in August, the spacecraft gets a gravity assist Wednesday as it passes within 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) of Venus. The flyby is the first of seven that will draw Parker ever closer to the sun.
By the end of October, Parker will shatter the current record for close solar encounters, set by a NASA spacecraft in 1976 from 27 million miles (43 million kilometers) out.
Parker will get within 15 million miles (25 million kilometers) of the sun’s surface in November.
Twenty-four such orbits — dipping into the sun’s upper atmosphere, or corona — are planned over the next seven years. The gap will eventually shrink to 3.8 million miles (6 million kilometers).
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Arrayed between elegant stone buildings and run-down railway tracks in the northwest of Paris lie bustling playgrounds, plant-filled ponds and stretches of lush grass.
The Clichy-Batignolles area, a former industrial wasteland, has morphed into the French capital’s first “eco-neighborhood,” billed as a model of sustainable development for the rest of the city.
Clarisse Genton, project coordinator for the Clichy-Batignolles district, said it aims to be “environmentally responsible” — with solar panels on homes and clean geothermal energy for heating, for example.
But the eco-effort also has a social aim: to address the city’s affordable housing crisis and ensure green benefits reach the poor as well as the rich.
“We wanted to create a district that’s accessible to all and to bridge the gap between poor and rich parts of the city,” said Genton, referring to the neighboring posh district of Monceau and the poorer La Fourche.
Paris is one of more than 70 cities worldwide that have pledged to become “carbon neutral” by 2050, meaning they will produce no more climate-changing emissions than they can offset, such as by planting carbon-absorbing trees.
Each is going about achieving the goal in its own way. But because cities account for about three-quarters of carbon dioxide emissions, according to the U.N., and consume more than two-thirds of the world’s energy, whether they succeed or fail will have a huge impact on whether the world’s climate goals are met.
“Cities are where everything comes together: homes, transport, public spaces — so there’s a real role for them to help create the living places of the future,” said Eliot Whittington, director of the Prince of Wales’ Corporate Leaders Group, a coalition of businesses promoting climate action.
“We’ve got to a state of accepting a certain level of waste and energy [use], but climate change [and] heat waves affect us all and have a real toll on people’s lives,” he told Reuters.
Global warming is currently set to exceed the more ambitious limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degree Fahrenheit) called for in the 2015 Paris Agreement to curb climate change, according to a draft U.N. report due for publication in October.
Following public consultations, Paris adopted its climate action plan in March. It aims to make the city carbon-neutral and entirely powered by renewable energy by 2050.
From swimming pools heated by sewage to ensuring the city is fully “cyclable” by 2020, it includes more than 500 initiatives to reimagine Paris as a zero-carbon capital.
‘Green lung’
The Clichy-Batignolles area of 54 hectares (130 acres), once chosen as Paris’s Olympic village as part of the city’s failed 2012 bid, is built around a 10-hectare park containing a skate park, deck chairs and wooden bridges.
Martin Luther King Park acts as a “green lung” and an “island of coolness” for the neighborhood, said Genton, showing a miniature model of the district to two passersby.
“Rainwater is channeled toward wetlands rather than discharged into sewers, and household waste is collected through an underground pneumatic system — removing the need for garbage trucks,” she added.
Buildings are heated by a new geothermal plant, and about two-thirds of homes are equipped with solar panels on their roof.
But the eco-district is about more than energy efficiency and biodiversity, said Genton, adding that “we urgently need affordable homes in a city that cannot grow and where prices are skyrocketing.”
Half of the neighborhood’s newly built flats qualify as social housing and can be rented for about 300 euros a month, she said.
Local residents have so far warmed to their new neighborhood, and say they feel “more connected” to the rest of the city, she said.
But many still await the arrival of a promised metro line, which should help reduce traffic and public transport congestion in the area, Genton said.
Virgile Geraud, a retired carpenter who has lived in Clichy-Batignolles for 40 years and is considering renting one of the new homes, said that “this new park, these new buildings … it’s really nice, it’s a change of lifestyle.”
“But some people think the new buildings are too tall or too modern,” he added, pointing to a bright yellow crane looming over a half-completed building.
Denis Musanga, who two months ago moved to Clichy-Batignolles from the Paris suburb of Villiers-le-Bel, said he was “shocked by how clean it is, even at night.”
He is less convinced of the “affordable” label, however, saying that he pays 650 euros for one room in a two-bed flat — “much more than what I paid in the suburbs.”
Citizen-led
If zero-carbon initiatives are to succeed, citizens need to buy into them, according to the city of Paris’ climate plan, which received hundreds of proposals from residents to improve their city.
Fortunately, many ways of cutting emissions can also help people be more comfortable or save money, experts said.
Improving home insultation, for instance, can curb emissions, make people more comfortable and make a “significant difference” in their energy bills, Whittington said.
“Loft insulation for example is one of the easiest things to do, but what holds people back from doing it is the hassle. When do you do it? How do you clear the loft?”
European cities have come a long way in improving energy efficiency in buildings and homes, he said, but still have a “huge body of old, inefficient buildings.”
“That’s a missed opportunity to tackle energy waste and improve people’s lives,” he said.
Aiming to tackle this is France’s Passeport Efficacite Energetique (Energy Efficiency Passport) — a project led by think tanks and companies such as French utility EDF. It encourages householders to renovate their homes step by step.
Still in its pilot phase, the project involves auditing the energy efficiency of homes and storing any progress made — such as the use of more efficient lighting — with an online tool.
Musanga, whose building is not yet equipped with solar panels, said he is open to the idea but “wants proof” that going greener can save him money.
“If it helps the planet, then that’s a bonus,” he said, tying on his rollerblades before disappearing into the distance.
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With his political future at stake, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will mount a charm offensive to placate dairy farmers who say he sold them out in order to win approval of a continental trade deal.
Compounding Trudeau’s challenges in the influential province of Quebec, where many dairy farmers are based, voters there tossed out one of his allies on Monday in favor of a new center-right party that opposes immigration and supports supply management, as Canada’s dairy protection system is known.
Unhappy Quebec farmers – who are a political force – are already complaining to legislators from the ruling Liberals, and insiders concede there is no guarantee of winning them over, leaving Trudeau potentially vulnerable in a federal election set for October 2019.
The prime minister needed a win on trade after a year that has left his environmental and energy policy in tatters. That said, opposition leaders have struggled to connect with voters and their parties face their own challenges in Quebec.
Under the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), which replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Ottawa on Sunday bowed to long-standing pressure from U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration to grant more access to the highly protected dairy market.
In return, the United States dropped a threat to impose tariffs on Canadian auto exports. This would have caused major damage to the economy and disproportionately affected Ontario, Canada’s most populous province, which also tilted right in a June provincial election.
“Dairy was Trump’s personal obsession, and so there was no way we could have made a deal without some form of dairy concessions,” said one senior Liberal, who declined to be identified given the sensitivity of the situation.
The government plans to discuss a promised compensation package with dairy farmers in coming months, as well as ways the industry can be made more competitive.
“There is going to be a rough patch and our members of Parliament are already hearing it, especially those in rural areas,” said the Liberal source.
Trudeau says farmers will be fully compensated, which in the past has helped mute their protests over concessions agreed in earlier trade deals.
“We are reaching out to them, we want to work with them.
That’s going to be the message and hopefully that will be sufficient to get over this, but there’s nothing guaranteed in life,” said the Liberal.
The dairy industry is concentrated in Ontario and Quebec, which together account for 61.5 percent of the population.
Trudeau has no chance of retaining power unless the Liberals do well in both provinces.
“People feel betrayed,” said Bruno Letendre, chairman of a group representing Quebec’s dairy farmers. “They don’t want compensation. They want to produce for the Canadian market.”
Quebec’s premier-elect, Francois Legault, plans to meet with farmers on Tuesday before deciding on what options to pursue. He told reporters, “I will do everything to defend them.”
The Liberals, who now hold 40 of Quebec’s 78 seats in the federal House of Commons, privately say that to retain their parliamentary majority next year they need to win another 20 to offset expected losses elsewhere, including in British Columbia where a pipeline dispute has pitted the province against Ottawa.
Trudeau could be spared the worst in Quebec, where a prominent Conservative recently quit to form his own party, threatening to split the right-leaning vote. The leftist New Democrats, who compete directly with Trudeau’s Liberals, are losing public support.
Opinion polls taken before the trade talks ended showed the Liberals comfortably ahead of the official opposition Conservatives, who have spent the last two days accusing Trudeau of selling Canada short in the trade deal.
“The political calculus for the Liberals would be that failing on NAFTA was really not an option because that would leave them significantly vulnerable in terms of their economic track record,” said pollster Nik Nanos of Nanos Research.
“I think they decided it would probably be easier … to take their lumps with the dairy farmers than to face a broader narrative of mismanagement of the trade file and the economy among many Canadians,” he said in an interview.
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