YCLOAK

Rare Conservation Win: Mountain Gorilla Population Ticks Up

By Yscien on Thursday, November 15, 2018

There are more gorillas in the mist — a rare conservation success story, scientists say.

After facing near-extinction, mountain gorillas are slowly rebounding. On Wednesday, the Switzerland-based International Union for Conservation of Nature updated mountain gorillas’ status from “critically endangered” to “endangered,” a more promising, if still precarious, designation. There are now just over 1,000 of the animals in the wild, up from an estimated population of 680 a decade ago.

“In the context of crashing populations of wildlife around the world, this is a remarkable conservation success,” said Tara Stoinski, president and chief scientist of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund.

The Atlanta-based nonprofit is named for the primate researcher whose work helped draw international attention to mountain gorillas and whose memoir became the basis for the 1988 Sigourney Weaver film “Gorillas in the Mist.”

“This is a beacon of hope — and it’s happened in recently war-torn and still very poor countries,” said Stoinski, who is also a member of the IUCN’s primate specialist group, which recommended the status change.

Mountain gorillas live in lush and misty forests along a range of dormant volcanoes in east Africa. Their habitat falls inside national parks spanning parts of Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Fossey, who died in 1985, had projected that the primates may be extinct by 2000. Instead, their populations have been slowly increasing thanks to sustained and well-funded international conservation efforts.

“We have made progress in terms of their protection, in terms of allowing an environment where mountain gorillas can continue to thrive and grow,” said Anna Behm Masozera, director of the International Gorilla Conservation Program, based in Kigali, Rwanda. “But it’s important to note that mountain gorillas’ numbers could still slip back very quickly. We still have just two fragile and small populations,” split between two national park areas.

Several factors have enabled mountain gorillas’ modest rebound, said Masozera.

The three governments have stepped up enforcement of national park boundaries — areas where hunting, logging and paved roads are illegal.

Tourism helps too: Visitors pay up to $1,500 an hour to watch gorillas, money that helps pay for park rangers.

“Primate ecotourism, done right, can be a really significant force for funding conservation,” said Russ Mittermeier, chief conservation officer at Global Wildlife Conservation. “It gives local governments and communities a tangible economic incentive to protect these habitats and species.”

There’s also health care. Gorilla Doctors, a nongovernmental group, has trained veterinary staff in each of the countries where the mountain gorillas live.

Hunting in the national parks is illegal, but nearby residents still set traps to catch other animals, such as antelopes. Those traps can also grab gorillas’ arms and legs.

When gorillas are found struggling with snares, the vets are called in to clean wounds. Kirsten Gilardi, U.S. director for the organization, called it “extreme conservation.”

Other experts said the emergency vet interventions play a significant role in maintaining mountain gorilla populations.

“It’s a total conservation win, and there aren’t that many of them,” said Gilardi.

On Wednesday, the IUCN also announced that bans on commercial whaling in the North Pacific Ocean and elsewhere had allowed some whale populations to rebound. The fin whale’s status was updated from “endangered” to “vulnerable,” a less critical designation.
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Economy

Poll: Safety, Time Are Women’s Biggest Transportation Concerns

By Yeco on Thursday, November 15, 2018

Safety is the biggest concern for women using public and private transport in five of the world’s biggest commuter cities, according to a global poll released Thursday as improving city access for women becomes a major focus globally.

A Thomson Reuters Foundation survey of 1,000 women in London, New York, Mexico City, Tokyo and Cairo found 52 percent of respondents overall cited safety as their main worry, with women in Mexico City the most fearful about safety.

Almost three in every four women in Mexico City lacked confidence they could travel without facing sexual harassment and abuse or sexual violence, with Cairo coming a close second.

The ratio was one in four women in the other three cities.

The time it took to travel around the city — with studies showing women often take more complex routes with more stops than men because of household and child care duties — was named as the second-biggest concern, cited by 33 percent of women.

Time was the biggest worry for women in New York, with two-thirds saying it influenced their decision to take or stay in a job, while the cost of transport concerned women in London most, with nearly three in four women saying it was expensive.

The poll came as city authorities have been looking at ways to ensure women have safe, efficient transport to reach jobs, education and health care. The cities are seeking to tackle inequality and poverty and boost their economies by getting more women into the workforce.

The poll also came amid growing concern in the #MeToo climate that transport networks are magnets for sexual predators who use rush-hour crushes to hide behavior and as an excuse if caught.

“It is very rare to find a group of women in any city who don’t have concerns about safety, and it is important for planners to think about that when designing a transport system,” said Jemilah Magnusson, spokeswoman for the U.S.-based Institute for Transportation and Development Policy.

“Most transport systems focus on the solo male commuter traveling at peak hours from home and work, but women have different trip patterns. … Women must be involved in planning transit to meet their needs.”

Laws and smartphones

The survey, conducted Aug. 13-24 and supported by Uber, asked 200 women in each of five of the world’s largest commuter cities with underground train networks in different cultural regions about safety, time spent traveling and cost, among other issues.

A recent International Labor Organization study said limited access to and safety of transport were estimated to be the greatest obstacles to women’s role in the labor force in developing countries, reducing probable participation by 16.5 percent.

Transport authorities and experts said moves to improve transport for women had become a major issue in recent years because of safety concerns and congestion.

World Bank reports have stressed that improving transport can have immediate positive results on women’s lives, be it through adding safety laws, including women in planning, or offering alternative transport, such as ride-hailing apps or bikes.

The World Bank introduced gender as an issue for the first time this year at an annual conference on transforming transportation.

Magnusson said including the issue of women and transport exploded into a major issue after the 2012 fatal gang-rape of a student on a bus in Delhi shocked the world.

“This was one story that brought out lots of other horror stories from women and really galvanized people,” said Magnusson, whose group promotes environmental and livable transport.

This has led to a surge in women-only train carriages and taxi services, but just 47 percent of the women in the poll said this would improve women’s safety.

Maria Jose Bermudez, 45, a cook who commutes three hours a day using public transport in Mexico City, said more needs to be done instead to educate men about women’s rights generally.

“Women-only carriages don’t really solve the problem because the issue has to do with Mexico’s culture and how men treat women,” Bermudez told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Coping with congestion

Steve Swasey, spokesman for public transit app Moovit, said smartphones had triggered a “revolution” in mass transit with the emergence of ride-hailing apps and apps to use transport more efficiently by cutting wait times and avoiding bottlenecks.

The Inter-American Development Bank found the higher the compliance with a transport schedule or the less congested, the lower the probability that a woman will be a crime victim.

The Thomson Reuters Foundation poll found that 56 percent of women globally said ride-hailing apps had improved their ability to get around their cities. More than half of women in every city but Tokyo said these new forms of transport were helpful.

“City roads are at full capacity, and there is not one major city where congestion is not a major concern,” Swasey said. “You can’t easily or quickly put more lanes on a bridge or rails in a tunnel … but you can use data to regulate the influx of traffic and change the way people use transport.”

Magnusson said most cities were aware they should make transport more efficient and faster — but this could be a very politically unpopular move as it means cutting back on cars.

“Taking lanes from cars to make bus lanes and bike lanes, and introducing new parking and restriction schemes, can stop cars going into cities and help speed up transport,” she said.

“It is not about just one thing, but it is about creating a transport system that is fair and allows women to fully participate in society, but that in itself can be very threatening to many people.”
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Science

Frigid Planet Detected Orbiting Nearby Star

By Yscien on Thursday, November 15, 2018

A frozen and dimly lit planet, dubbed a “Super-Earth,” may be orbiting the closest single star to our solar system, astronomers said Wednesday, based on two decades of scientific observations.

The planet, estimated to be at least 3.2 times more massive than Earth, was spotted circling Barnard’s Star, a type of relatively cool and low-mass star called a red dwarf. Barnard’s Star is about 6 light-years away from our solar system, comparatively close in cosmic terms, and it’s believed that the planet obits this star every 233 days.

Planets orbiting stars beyond our solar system are called exoplanets. Nearly 4,000 have been discovered. The newly discovered one is the second closest to our solar system ever found. It is thought to be a “Super-Earth,” a category of planets more massive than Earth but smaller than the large gas planets.

“After a very careful analysis, we are 99 percent confident that the planet is there,” researcher Ignasi Ribas of the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia and the Institute of Space Sciences said in a statement. “However, we’ll continue to observe this fast-moving star to exclude possible, but improbable, natural variations of the stellar brightness which could masquerade as a planet.”

Alpha Centauri

The only closer stars than Barnard’s Star are part of the triple-star system Alpha Centauri, located a bit more than 4 light-years from our solar system.

Two years ago, astronomers announced the discovery of a roughly Earth-sized planet circling Proxima Centauri, part of the Alpha Centauri system, in an orbit that might enable liquid water to exist on its surface, raising the possibility that it could harbor alien life.

The newly detected planet orbiting Barnard’s Star may not be so hospitable, with surface temperatures of perhaps minus 274 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 170 degrees Celsius). Barnard’s Star provides the frigid planet only 2 percent of the energy that the sun provides Earth.

The researchers studied the planet by combining measurements from several high-precision instruments mounted on telescopes around the world.

The research was published in the journal Nature.
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Economy

Draft Brexit Deal Ends Britain’s Easy Access to EU Financial Markets

By Yeco on Thursday, November 15, 2018

The United Kingdom and the European Union have agreed on a deal that will give London’s vast financial center only a basic level of access to the bloc’s markets after Brexit.

The agreement will be based on the EU’s existing system of financial market access known as equivalence — a watered-down relationship that officials in Brussels have said all along is the best arrangement that Britain can expect.

The EU grants equivalence to many countries and has so far not agreed to Britain’s demands for major concessions such as offering broader access and safeguards on withdrawing access, neither of which is mentioned in the draft deal.

“It is appalling,” said Graham Bishop, a former banker and consultant who has advised EU institutions on financial services. The draft text “is particularly vague but emphasizes the EU’s ability to take decisions in its own interests. … This is code for the UK being a pure rule taker.”

Britain’s decision to leave the EU has undermined London’s position as the leading international finance hub. Britain’s financial services sector, the biggest source of its exports and tax revenue, has been struggling to find a way to preserve the existing flow of trading after it leaves the EU.

Many top bankers fear Brexit will slowly undermine London’s position. Global banks have already reorganized some operations ahead of Britain’s departure from the European Union, due on March 29.

Currently, inside the EU, banks and insurers in Britain enjoy unfettered access to customers across the bloc in all financial activities.

No commercial bank lending

Equivalence, however, covers a more limited range of business and excludes major activities such as commercial bank lending. Law firm Hogan Lovells has estimated that equivalence rules cover just a quarter of all EU cross-border financial services business.

Such an arrangement would give Britain a similar level of access to the EU as major U.S. and Japanese firms, while tying it to many EU finance rules for years to come.

Many bankers and politicians have been hoping London could secure a preferential deal giving it deep access to the bloc’s markets.

Under current equivalence rules, access is patchy and can be cut off by the EU within 30 days in some cases. Britain had called for a far longer notice period.

The draft deal is likely to persuade banks, insurers and asset managers to stick with plans to move some activities to the EU to ensure they maintain access to the bloc’s markets.

Britain is currently home to the world’s largest number of banks, and about 6 trillion euros ($6.79 trillion) or 37 percent of Europe’s financial assets are managed in the U.K. capital, almost twice the amount of its nearest rival, Paris.

London also dominates Europe’s 5.2 trillion-euro investment banking industry.

Rachel Kent, a lawyer at Hogan Lovells who has advised companies on future trading relations with the EU, said the draft deal did not rule out improved equivalence in the future.

“I don’t see that any doors have been closed,” she said. “It is probably as much as we could hope for at this stage.”
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Science

Ocean Shock: Portugal Mourns Sardines’ Escape to Cooler Waters

By Yscien on Thursday, November 15, 2018

This is part of “Ocean Shock,” a Reuters series exploring climate change’s impact on sea creatures and the people who depend on them.

A priest in a white robe swung an incense burner, leading the way for thousands of marchers as they crammed into a winding cobblestone alley decorated with candy-colored streamers in Lisbon’s ancient Alfama neighborhood.

Behind the priest, six men carried a life-sized statue of St. Anthony, Lisbon’s patron saint, born more than 800 years ago. The musky incense swirled together with the smoke from orange-hot charcoals grilling whole sardines a few streets away.

The procession moved along, leaving behind just the smell of the sardines.

In this city, June is the month to celebrate the saints. Almost every neighborhood throws a party, known as an arraial.

Some are just a scattering of makeshift tables in alleyways. Others cover several blocks and are jammed with tourists and locals alike. The saints are quickly forgotten in the din of pumping pop music, brass bands, chattering families, indiscreet lovers and flirty teens. The sardines are not. They’re the star of every party.

The fish are so popular here, fisheries managers estimate that the Portuguese collectively eat 13 sardines every second during a typical June — about 34 million fish for the month.

But as climate change warms the seas and inland estuaries, sardines are getting harder to catch. Just a week before the festival, authorities postponed sardine fishing in some ports out of a fear that the diminishing population, vulnerable to changes in the Atlantic’s water temperatures, was being overfished.

In the last few decades, the world’s oceans have undergone the most rapid warming on record. Currents have shifted. These changes are for the most part invisible. But this hidden climate change has had a disturbing impact on marine life — in effect, creating an epic underwater refugee crisis.

Effect on communities

Drawing on decades of maritime temperature readings, fisheries records and other little-used data, Reuters has undertaken an extensive exploration of the disrupted deep. A team of reporters has discovered that from the waters off the East Coast of the United States to the shores of West Africa, marine creatures are fleeing for their lives, and the communities that depend on them are facing turbulence as a result.

Here in Lisbon, the decline of the country’s most beloved fish tugs at the Portuguese soul. A nation on Europe’s western edge, Portugal has always turned toward the sea. For centuries, it has sent its people onto the sometimes treacherous oceans, from famous explorers like Ferdinand Magellan and Vasco da Gama to little-known fishermen who left weeping wives on the shore.

The St. Anthony’s festival commemorates a 13th-century priest who, church doctrine says, once drew a bay full of fish to hear his sermon. It is the capital’s biggest, most joyous celebration of the year.

At the bottom of the track where two bright yellow funicular trains begin and end an 800-foot vertiginous trip through the Bica neighborhood, a social club and a local cafe set up for the festival. Mostly locals were present, though a few German and French tourists have found their way to the party.

Four friends sat around a wobbly plastic table perched outside the G.D. Zip Zip social club. There was just enough room for others to walk past and get to the homemade grill where the sardines were being cooked. Three of the friends had sardine skeletons and heads heaped on their plates. They talked about the fish that’s as iconic in Portugal in the summer as a hamburger on the grill in America.

This year, however, because of limits on fishing, the available fish were mostly frozen.

“We listen to it all year round that maybe this year, we will not have sardines,” Helena Melo said.

Fifteen feet up the hill, Jorge Rito, who has been cooking for the club every June for five years, wiped his watering eyes with the back of his hand. He’d just gotten another order and tossed a dozen whole sardines onto the grill in neat rows.

As he flipped the silvery fish, each seven or eight inches long, a burst of smoke rose from the charcoal, and he wiped his eyes again.

“Worried? Yes, of course,” he said, removing the fish from the grill and placing them onto a platter. “It is important for our finances, our economies, for us.”

Youngest sardines vulnerable

Just as the next generation of humans may pay the highest price for climate change, the youngest generation of sardines is at risk.

Susana Garrido, a sardine researcher with the Portuguese Oceanic and Atmospheric Institute in Lisbon, said larval sardines are especially vulnerable to climate change when compared with other similar pelagic species, such as larval anchovies, which are capable of living in a wider range of temperatures.

Deep seawater upwelling dominates the waters off the western coast of the Iberian Peninsula and keeps the coastal waters cool. But small differences in temperature, especially when sardines are young, can have a significant impact on whether the fish larva dies or grows to maturity, Garrido said.

Other researchers had tested how well adult sardines survived in a variety of conditions, and there was little evidence that environmental variables such as food abundance and water temperature affected the full-grown fish, she said. So she focused on the larval stage of the species.

“We did a bunch of experiments varying salinity and all of these other variables, and they survived quite well,” she said. “It was when you change temperature that everything, yes, fell apart. So they have a very narrow range of temperatures where survival is good.”

Garrido said a recently completed stock assessment showed that the larval sardine population was extremely low.

“This is getting very serious,” she said.

The Portuguese sardine population started to fall about a decade ago, even though there were plenty of adults at the time to sustain large catches. And around the same time, southerly species, such as chub and horse mackerel, slowly moved in.

Chub mackerel, a subtropical species that was once found only in southern Portugal, is now caught all the way up the coast.

“Probably as a consequence of warming, it is now invading the main spawning area of sardines,” Garrido said.

Larger forces at work

Alexandra Silva, who works down the hall from Garrido, has been managing the Portuguese sardine stock assessment since the late 1990s — pivotal work that the organization uses to decide the size of the sardine catch.

When she started, the northern population of the species was in trouble following a period of strong upwelling that brought unusually cold water to the surface. The southern stock, however, was relatively healthy. And in the early years of the century, the species recovered.

It was not to last. These days, without large numbers of larvae growing to maturity, the population is near collapse all along the coast from Galicia in Spain to the southern end of the Portuguese coast.

All officials can do is cut down on the fishing. But larger forces, especially climate change, are now affecting the stock in ways that fisheries managers cannot control, the two said.

Regulators have tried.

Starting in 2004, they blocked fishing during the spring, when sardines spawn. And for a while, that seemed to work.

Between 2004 and 2011, the stock remained relatively healthy, with landings ranging from about 55,000 to 70,000 tons, even if the population seemed to be dipping. (From the 1930s to the 1960s, and as recently as the 1980s, fishermen landed more than 110,000 tons in a year.)

In 2009, the Portuguese proudly announced that the Marine Stewardship Council, an independent monitoring body, had designated the species healthy and sustainable. That year, Portuguese fishermen landed 64,000 tons of the fish. By 2012, however, that number had dropped to 35,000 tons, and the country lost its sustainable certification.

Since then, fisheries managers have restricted the number of days a week that fishermen can catch sardines, as well as the size of the catch. They’ve also restricted fishing to six months during a year.

Last year, the catch was limited to about 14,000 tons.

Further cuts ahead

Earlier this year, the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, a forum of scientists that advises governments about fisheries management, warned that it would take at least 15 years to restore the stock at current fishing levels.

After the report, European Union regulators permitted fishermen along the Iberian coast to continue at the current 16,100-ton level. But it also required Portugal, which gets the bulk of the quota, and Spain to submit a plan to restore the stock in October, which may well lead to further quota cuts.

Fisheries manager Jorge Abrantes handles landings for Peniche, a sleepy fishing town about 60 miles north of Lisbon. He doesn’t think the fishing industry is the culprit.

For example, Portuguese government stock assessments indicated that the sardine population had decreased by 10 percent to 25 percent in just a few months. Abrantes argued that the dip clearly wasn’t caused by fishermen pulling sardines from the sea, because no sardine nets were in the water during that period. Instead, he said, there are just not enough juvenile sardines to replenish the population.

In Peniche, fishermen Erbes Martins and Joao Dias sat among piles of nets on a bright but chilly February morning. The two 75-year-old men would have preferred to be fishing for sardines. But the fish were spawning, so they were not allowed to catch them.

Sure, there were other fish they could catch, but it wasn’t worth it, they say.

Horse mackerel, or carapau in Portuguese, one of the southerly species that now thrive all along the coast, is abundant but doesn’t sell for much at market, Dias said.

“We can’t fish for sardines in October, November, December, January, February, March — six months,” Dias said. “And carapau just doesn’t pay the bills.”

He said the restrictions on fishing sardines were keeping a new generation from going to sea, because they can’t make enough money.

“When we die,” he said, “no one is going to do the work.”

‘I would miss this’

Lisbon’s Graca neighborhood sits at the highest point in the capital, its pastel homes looking down over the city’s six other hills. For the St. Anthony festival, two stages were set up for music, along with about 20 temporary food and drink stalls.

Luis Diogo Sr., his wife, Rita, and their two children, Luis Jr. and Vera, came out to join the party. Luis Sr. looked across a picnic table at his son, who was well into his third plate of sardines.

“This is a country between Spain and the sea, so we went to the sea very soon in our history,” he said. The talk turned to the present, and the dwindling catch of the city’s favorite seafood.

Luis Jr. didn’t pay much attention to his father. He was too focused on his sardines.

“I would miss this very much,” the 17-year-old said, wiping his lips clean after polishing off the last sardine on his plate.
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Technology

FCC Launches First US High-Band 5G Spectrum Auction

By Ytech on Wednesday, November 14, 2018

The Federal Communications Commission on Wednesday launched the agency’s first high-band 5G spectrum auction as it works to clear space for next-generation faster networks.

Bidding began Wednesday on spectrum in the 28 GHz band and will be followed by bidding for spectrum in the 24 GHz band. The FCC is making 1.55 gigahertz of spectrum available and the auctions will be followed by a 2019 auction of three more millimeter-wave spectrum bands — 37 GHz, 39 GHz and 47 GHz.

“These airwaves will be critical in deploying 5G services and applications,” FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said Wednesday.

5G networks are expected to be at least 100 times faster than current 4G networks and cut latency, or delays, to less than one-thousandth of a second from one-hundredth of a second in 4G. They also will allow for innovations in a number of different fields. While millimeter-wave spectrum offers faster speeds, it cannot cover big geographic areas and will require significant new small cell infrastructure deployments.

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr said the spectrum being auctioned would allow for “faster broadband to autonomous cars, from smart [agriculture] to telehealth.”

The spectrum being auctioned over the next 15 months “is more spectrum than is currently used for terrestrial mobile broadband by all wireless service providers combined,” the FCC said.

Democratic FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said the United States was following “the lead of South Korea, the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Ireland and Australia. But we put ourselves back in the running for next-generation wireless leadership,” and she called on the FCC to clearly state the timing for future spectrum auctions.

Last month, U.S. President Donald Trump signed a presidential memorandum directing the Commerce Department to develop a long-term comprehensive national spectrum strategy to prepare for the introduction of 5G.

Trump is also creating a White House Spectrum Strategy Task Force and wants federal agencies to report on government spectrum needs and review how spectrum can be shared with private sector users.

AT&T, Verizon Communications, Sprint and T-Mobile U.S. are working to acquire spectrum and are developing and testing 5G networks. The first 5G-compatible commercial cellphones are expected to go on sale

next year.
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Technology

As Laws Fail to Slow Online Sex Trade, Experts Turn to Tech

By Ytech on Wednesday, November 14, 2018

The online sale of sex slaves is going strong despite new U.S. laws to clamp down on the crime, data analysts said Wednesday, urging a wider use of technology to fight human trafficking.

In April, the United States passed legislation aimed at making it easier to prosecute social media platforms and websites that facilitate sex trafficking, days after a crackdown on classified ad giant Backpage.com.

The law resulted in an immediate and sharp drop in sex ads online but numbers have since picked up again, data presented at the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s annual Trust Conference showed.

“The market has been destabilized and there are now new entrants that are willing to take the risk in order to make money,” Chris White, a researcher at tech giant Microsoft who gathered the data, told the event in London.

New players

Backpage.com, a massive advertising site primarily used to sell sex — which some analysts believe accounted for 80 percent of online sex trafficking in the United States — was shut down by federal authorities in April.

Days later, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), which introduced stiff prison sentences and fines for website owners and operators found guilty of contributing to sex trafficking, was passed into law.

The combined action caused the number of online sex ads to fall 80 percent to about 20,000 a day nationwide, White said.

The number of ads has since risen to about 60,000 a day, as new websites filled the gap, he said.

In October — in response to a lawsuit accusing it of not doing enough to protect users from human traffickers — social media giant Facebook said it worked internally and externally to thwart such predators.

Using technology to continuously monitor and analyze this kind of data is key to evaluating existing laws and designing new and more effective ones, White said.

“It really highlights what’s possible through policy,” added Valiant Richey, a former U.S. prosecutor who now fights human trafficking at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), echoing the calls for new methods.

Law enforcement agencies currently tackle slavery one case at a time, but the approach lacks as the crime is too widespread and authorities are short of resources, he said.

As a prosecutor in Seattle, Richey said his office would work on up to 80 cases a year, while online searches revealed more than 100 websites where sex was sold in the area, some carrying an average of 35,000 ads every month.

“We were fighting forest fire with a garden hose,” he said. “A case-based response to human trafficking will not on its own carry the day.”

At least 40 million people are victims of modern slavery worldwide — with nearly 25 million trapped in forced labor and about 15 million in forced marriages.
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Science

Experts Target Missing Link in Contraception: Men

By Yscien on Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Ask Esther Imaniragena to name her top challenge as she doles out contraceptive advice and supplies at a Rwandan health clinic and the answer comes short and fast: men.

Too many men do not share the task of family planning, said Imaniragena, one of many birth-control champions who are deploying wily tactics to encourage burden-sharing.

Be it cornering men after their wives give birth or touting a new type of “model husband” in a society that values virility, champions of birth control are trying new ways get men involved.

If they can find them, that is.

“The biggest challenge we have is males do not come,” said Imaniragena, who runs family planning at the Rwamagana Health Center in the east of the country.

Patients strolling the center’s grounds on a recent day were overwhelmingly female, babies wrapped tightly to their backs and umbrellas in hand to protect against the fierce sun.

Getting men on board has major benefits in developing nations that struggle with booming populations, a trend that puts pressure on limited resources and fuels fresh cycles of poverty, said experts, researchers and policymakers gathered at an international family planning conference this week in Rwanda.

Involving men increases contraceptive use, reducing infant and maternal mortality and the number of unwanted children. All of this frees up women for school or jobs.

Insuring universal access to family planning by 2030 is among the global targets for sustainable development that were adopted in 2015 by the United Nations.

The experts said the key to success is to inform and involve men while preserving women’s autonomy. And while some of the more creative efforts have worked, most schemes are localized and remain small-scale in the face of deep-seated resistance.

One way to find men

To target men, the Rwamagana clinic has started talking about contraception to husbands when they come to collect their wives after childbirth, Imaniragena said.

It is a start.

“We cannot say that they are involved as we wish, but this is the occasion to find them,” she told visitors at the rural outpost, which was ringed by rice paddies, banana trees and fields of maize.

The results are impressive in terms of numbers reached. Last week, 15 out of 16 couples went home with newborns as well as family planning methods, according to the clinic, which serves more than 50,000 people. Most couples opted for hormonal implants or injectable contraception.

The effort mirrored a campaign launched two years ago in Benin whose focus was cutting child and maternal deaths, said Gisele Dunia of the University Research Co., a health care company working in the west African nation. Not only did the number of couples using family planning more than double within a year, but men would influence other men to do the same, she said.

Male support ‘generally low’

As of last year, four in 10 women of reproductive age in developing regions were using modern contraceptive methods — implants, injections and contraceptive pills — with rates ranging from two in 10 in Africa to half in South America and the Caribbean, according to research by the Guttmacher-Lancet Commission, a global group of experts, published this year in The Lancet, a medical journal.

But men’s support for partners’ sexual and reproductive health and empowerment “is generally low,” the Lancet report said.

Such support dips as low as 12 percent in Lesotho and climbs as high as 77 percent in Rwanda, it said.

“Women continue to shoulder the responsibility of contraceptive use,” the Lancet report said. “Given that men are often gatekeepers for women’s access to services, involving men during pregnancy, childbirth and onward (when women want) can potentially increase gender equality and male support.”

‘Not listening’

The best way to reach men in Uganda is to empower women, said Reuben Kizito of the Zaam Community Health Development Organization, which trains women and offers small loans.

“There are so many women out there who believe that the more children you give him, the more he loves, yet they are practically destroying themselves,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “So if we are in a position to empower them economically, then they are in a position to stop that habit.”

Men take little responsibility for family planning and think that pregnancy will keep other men away from their women, he said.

“When we have more women economically empowered, then the men will listen,” Kizito said. “Now they are not listening.”

Mali runs a project that trains “model husbands” in local communities, organizers said, while programs in Togo are promoting “positive masculinity” for boys.

In the Philippines, a project called El Hombre — using men-to-men conversations — nearly doubled the rate of contraceptive usage where it was employed, said Jose Augustus Villano of the Commission on Population, a government agency.

Those rates have dropped significantly since the 2016 election of President Rodrigo Duterte, he said. Duterte’s policies and practices, including a war on drugs that has killed thousands of people, have drawn international condemnation.
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Science

Study: Neanderthals Faced Risks, But So Did Our Ancestors

By Yscien on Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Life as a Neanderthal was no picnic, but a new analysis says it was no more dangerous than what our own species faced in ancient times.

That challenges what the authors call the prevailing view of our evolutionary cousins, that they lived risky, stressful lives. Some studies have suggested they had high injury rates, which have been blamed on things like social violence, attacks by carnivores, a hunting style that required getting close to large prey, and the hazards of extensive travel in environments full of snow and ice.

While it’s true that their lives were probably riskier than those of people in today’s industrial societies, the vastly different living conditions of those two groups mean comparing them isn’t really appropriate, said Katerina Harvati of the University of Tuebingen in Germany.

A better question is whether Neanderthals faced more danger than our species did when we shared similar environments and comparable lifestyles of mobile hunter-gatherers, she and study co-authors say in a paper released Wednesday by the journal Nature.

To study that, they focused on skull injuries. They reviewed prior studies of fossils from western Eurasia that ranged from about 80,000 to 20,000 years old. In all they assessed data on 295 skull samples from 114 individual Neanderthals, and 541 skull samples from 90 individuals of our own species, Homo sapiens.

Injury rates turned out to be about the same in both species.

That questions the idea that the behavior of Neanderthals created particularly high levels of danger, Marta Mirazon Lahr of Cambridge University wrote in an accompanying commentary.

But the new study is not the final word on Neanderthal trauma, she wrote. It didn’t include injuries other than to the skull. And scientists still have plenty of work to do in seeking the likely cause of injuries and evidence of care for the injured, which could give insights into the behavior of both Neanderthals and ancient members of our species, she wrote.
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Economy

Slave-Free Jeans Get Boost from ‘Markle Sparkle’ But Can Companies Back Ethical Vows?

By Yeco on Wednesday, November 14, 2018

When Meghan Markle wore a pair of “slave-free” jeans on a royal tour of Australia last month, she sparked a sales stampede and shone a spotlight on the growing number of companies aiming to meet public demand for products untainted by modern-day slavery.

Australia-based Outland Denim employs dozens of survivors of human trafficking and modern slavery and other vulnerable women in Cambodia to make its $200 (150 pounds) jeans that are stamped as ethically sourced and produced, and environmentally friendly.

Founder James Bartle said his social enterprise — a business seeking to make profit while doing good — set out from day one in 2011 to know exactly where their materials and workforce came from — which had meant limited quantities and higher prices.

But he said today’s more educated and demanding consumers were happy to spend more on goods that were not damaging the planet or fueling slavery, and the unexpected publicity from Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, could hugely boost this trend.

He said the company was totally surprised when the duchess stepped off a plane in the rural Australian city of Dubbo wearing their jeans which all contain a written thank-you message from the seamstress on an internal pocket.

“[She] made it OK to wear an ethically-made brand to the world … we can’t put a value on that,” Bartle said at the Thomson Reuters Foundation’s annual Trust Conference on Wednesday.

“Every brand must stand for something. The public are sick and tired of marketing,” he said. “We wanted to create a sustainable model — to give genuine power to people to change their future through employment.”

Hard to prove

More companies are not only striving to clean up their supply chains but stamping their goods as slave-free.

Yet labor activists and academics say it is very difficult for any company to prove that its supply chain is entirely free of forced labor or abuses, and the public should be wary.

Dutch chocolate-maker Tony’s Chocolonely, stamps its goods with the slogan “100 percent slave-free” — despite sourcing cocoa beans from West Africa where two million children are estimated to work and reports of forced labor are rife.

The firm said it deals directly with local farming groups rather than international traders, and traces its supply chain fully, from the beans it buys to the finished product on sale.

“Unfortunately, too many companies only pay lip service in their strife to end abuses in their supply chain, instead of really making it part of their core business” said Arjen Boekhold, a “cocoa game changer” at Tony’s Chocolonely.

“Consumers will not pay extra for products which are not genuine in quality … or in efforts to end abuses or slavery,” added Boekhold, also a speaker at the London-based conference.

“People try to push us into an ethical corner … but we are the new normal,” he told a panel discussion on slave-free goods.

‘Seismic shift’ needed

About 25 million people are estimated to be trapped in forced labor, according to the United Nations, which in 2015 agreed to a global target of ending slavery in all forms by 2030.

While more companies are going public with their anti-slavery efforts, few can categorically say their products are untainted, said Andrew Crane, an academic at Bath University.

“This is very hard to prove, any such claims cannot be trusted by consumers,” the labor issues expert added. “Maybe we don’t need companies to say they are slave-free … but that they are trying to be and doing everything they can to achieve that.”

Many companies sign up to anti-slavery schemes or codes of conduct instead of directly dealing with their workers, yet such initiatives often fail to stop abuses, experts say.

A study by Sheffield University, revealed exclusively by Reuters in May, found some Indian tea plantations stamped slavery-free by groups including Fairtrade and Rainforest Alliance were abusing and underpaying workers.

“There is no doubt that low prices and cheap products are driving a race to the bottom on labor standards,” said Cindy Berman of the Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI), an alliance of trade unions, companies and charities promoting workers’ rights.

“But getting consumers to pay more for products will only scratch the surface of the problem unless it’s part of a seismic shift in the way goods and services are traded globally.”
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Economy

May’s Brexit ‘Moment of Truth’

By Yeco on Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Britain’s Theresa May scrambled Wednesday to sell to her Cabinet a draft Brexit divorce agreement British negotiators concluded after months of wrangling with their European Union counterparts.

But the 500-page draft remains a source of deep dispute within Britain’s ruling Conservative party and also in the country’s parliament, which will have the final say on whether to approve it.

As news emerged Tuesday that a text had been agreed, hardline Brexiteers lined up to attack the proposed agreement with former British foreign minister Boris Johnson, who resigned earlier this year, urging other ministers to join him in opposing the terms of the deal. Britain’s main opposition parties also announced their disapproval of the deal, which has not even been published yet.

The agreement, if approved by the Cabinet and subsequently the British parliament, would see Britain remaining in a customs union for several years with the EU after it formally exits the bloc in March, but with an unclear legal path to quitting the customs arrangement while a fuller trade deal is negotiating.

Remaining in a customs union allows Britain and the EU to avoid introducing customs checks along the border separating Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and would also allow “frictionless trade” between Britain and its erstwhile partners in the EU.

Tough sell

But critics say it would reduce Britain to the status of a “vassal state” by requiring it to accept EU rules and regulations without having any say about them. It would also block Britain from signing trade deals with other countries while a trade agreement is concluded with the EU, which itself could take three or four years or even longer. Reaching trade deals independently with non-EU countries was a key selling point of Brexit for many who voted nearly two years ago in a referendum to relinquish EU membership.

“This is just about as bad as it could possibly be,” Johnson fumed Tuesday to reporters in the corridors of the British House of Commons. Other Brexiteers joined him to denounce the proposed deal, one they are determined to sabotage and which runs, they say, contrary to the Conservative Party manifesto they fought an election on a year.

“For the first time in a thousand years this place, this parliament will not have a say over the laws which govern this country. It is quite an incredible state of affairs,” Johnson added.

“She hasn’t so much struck a deal as surrendered to Brussels… the UK will be a slave state,” said Conservative lawmaker Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Conservatives’ future at stake

The stakes couldn’t be higher for Theresa May. The draft agreement, May’s fate as Prime Minister and the longevity of the Conservative government are all hanging in the balance. The consequences of the process to get the draft agreement approved are difficult to guess and could end up sinking May, the Conservative government and even Brexit itself. “I don’t think anyone knows, to be truthful,” said Labour lawmaker Chuka Umunna.

May’s minority government relies on the votes in the House of Commons on a handful of lawmakers from a quirky Protestant-based Unionist party, which is also opposed to the draft deal.

Without the backing of the Democratic Unionist Party, and faced with an inevitable revolt by dozen of Conservative lawmakers, May will need to persuade opposition lawmakers to break with their party leaderships by arguing her deal is the best Britain can get.

Second vote?

But an increasing number of opposition lawmakers are jumping on the bandwagon of the People’s Vote movement, which is calling for a second Brexit referendum. Recent opinion polls suggest a majority of voters now, especially in traditional Labour heartlands, many of which voted in June 2016 for Brexit, now want Britain to retain EU membership, fearing the economic fallout from departure.

But even before seeking next month parliamentary backing for the draft customs union deal, May has to persuade her cabinet to back her — and that is not even a sure thing. On Tuesday — ahead of a full cabinet meeting called for Wednesday afternoon — May took a leaf out of the playbook of her Conservative predecessor Margaret Thatcher, who in 1990 called in ministers one by one to place them on the spot and demand their support. However, the tactic backfired on Thatcher and she was forced to resign.

Former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith predicts May’s days will be numbered if she fails to reverse course and decides not to pursue a cleaner break from the EU. “If the cabinet agrees it, the party certainly won’t,” he said. Conservative lawmakers who want Britain to remain in the EU are also publicly opposing the draft agreement, placing May in a tight political vice.

Leave-supporting ministers were coming under intense pressure from hardline Brexiteers in the hours leading up to the cabinet meeting to reject the deal. They pointed to a leaked EU document outlining a strategy to force Britain to accept an almost permanent alignment with its rules and regulations governing state aid, environmental protection and workers’ rights.

In a note to EU ambassadors, Sabine Weyand, a deputy EU negotiator, said the customs union will form the basis for Britain’s future trade deal with the bloc. “They must align their rules but the EU will retain all the controls. UK wants a lot more from the future relationship, so EU retains leverage,” she wrote.

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Technology

Soft Wearable Tech is Helping People Move

By Ytech on Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Robots with rigid metal frames are being used to help the paralyzed walk and have applications that could one day grant military fighters extra power on the battlefield. The problem is that they’re uncomfortable and heavy. But researchers at Harvard University are working on lighter, flexible devices that move easily and don’t weigh much. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Economy

Inside the FedEx Hub: How Packages Arrive at Your Door

By Yeco on Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Several hundred private cargo planes in the United States deliver millions of packages per year. The FedEx superhub in Memphis Tennessee works around the clock to get parcels delivered to customers and hopefully – on time. VOA’s Lesia Bakalets traveled to Memphis to learn what part of day is the busiest for the FedEx team and how quickly they can load a plane.
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Economy

Fuel Shortages the New Normal in Venezuela as Oil Industry Unravels

By Yeco on Wednesday, November 14, 2018

With chronic shortages of basic goods afflicting her native Venezuela, Veronica Perez used to drive from supermarket to supermarket in her grey Chevrolet Aveo searching for food.

But the 54-year-old engineer has abandoned the practice because of shortages of something that should be abundant in a country with the world’s largest oil reserves: gasoline.

“I only do what is absolutely necessary, nothing else,” said Perez, who lives in the industrial city of Valencia. She said she had stopped going to Venezuela’s Caribbean coast, just 20 miles (32 km) away.

Snaking, hours-long lines and gas station closures have long afflicted Venezuela’s border regions. Fuel smuggling to neighboring countries is common, the result of generous subsidies from state-run oil company PDVSA that allow Venezuelans to fill their tank 20,000 times for the price of one kilo (2.2 pounds) of cheese.

But in late October and early November, cities in the populous central region of the country like Valencia and the capital Caracas were hit by a rare wave of shortages, due to plunging crude production and a dramatic drop in refineries’ fuel output as the socialist-run economy suffers its fifth year of recession.

Venezuela produced more than 2 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude last year but by September output had fallen to just 1.4 million bpd. So far in 2018, Venezuela produced an average of 1.53 million bpd, the lowest in nearly seven decades, according to figures reported to OPEC.

Bottlenecks for transporting fuel from refineries, distribution centers and ports to gas stations have also worsened, exacerbating the shortages.

PDVSA did not respond to a request for comment. Neither did Venezuela’s oil and communications ministries.

Relatively normal supply has since been restored in Caracas and Valencia after unusually long outages but the episode has forced Venezuelans to alter their daily habits.

That could hit an economy seen shrinking by double digits in 2018. For Venezuelans coping with a lack of food and medicine, blackouts and hyperinflation, the gasoline shortages could also increase frustration with already-unpopular President Nicolas Maduro.

“My new headache is fearing I might run out of gasoline,” said Elena Bustamante, a 34-year-old English teacher in Valencia. “It has changed my life enormously.”

Production Shortfall

Venezuela’s economy has shrunk by more than half since Maduro took office in 2013. The contraction has been driven by a collapse in the price of crude and falling oil sales, which account for more than 90 percent of Venezuelan exports.

Three million Venezuelans have emigrated – or around one-tenth of the population – mostly in the past three years, according to the United Nations.

Despite a sharp drop in domestic demand due to the recession, Venezuela’s collapsing oil industry is struggling to produce enough gasoline.

Fuel demand was expected to fall to 325,000 bpd in October, half the volume of a decade ago, but PDVSA expected to be able to supply only 270,000 bpd, according to a company planning document seen by Reuters.

A gasoline price hike – promised by Maduro in August under a reform package – could further reduce demand but it has yet to take effect.

Venezuela’s declining oil production has its roots in years of underinvestment. U.S. sanctions have complicated financing.

The refining sector, designed to produce 1.3 million bpd of fuel, is severely hobbled. It is operating at just one-third of capacity, according to experts and union sources.

Its largest refinery, Amuay, is delivering just 70,000 bpd of gasoline despite having the capacity to produce 645,000 bpd of fuel, according to union leader Ivan Freites and another person close to PDVSA who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

PDVSA has tried to make up for this by boosting fuel imports, buying about half of the gasoline the country needs, according to internal company figures.

In the first eight months of 2018, Venezuela imported an average of 125,000 bpd from the United States, up 76 percent from the same period a year earlier, data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration show.

But delays in unloading fuel cargoes have contributed to shortages, since Venezuelan oil ports are more oriented toward exports than imports, according to traders, shippers, PDVSA sources and Refinitiv Eikon data.

One tanker bringing imported gasoline mixed with ethanol was contaminated with high levels of water, forcing PDVSA to withdraw the product from distribution centers, a company source said, directly contributing to the shortages in Caracas.

The incident was the result of PDVSA seeking fuel from “unreliable suppliers,” in part because the U.S. sanctions have left many companies unwilling to do business with Venezuela, said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The shortages last week prevented Andres Merida, a 29-year-old freelance publicist in Valencia, from attending client meetings.

“I had someone who used to take me from place to place but in light of the gasoline issue he would not give me a lift even when I offered to pay him,” he said. “He said he would prefer to save the gasoline and guarantee it for himself.”
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Economy

Elon Musk’s ‘Teslaquila’ Faces Clash With Mexican Tequila Industry

By Yeco on Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Tesla co-founder Elon Musk and Mexico’s tequila producers could be headed for a collision after the agave-based drink’s industry group opposed the flamboyant billionaire’s efforts to trademark an alcoholic drink dubbed “Teslaquila.”

One of the world’s richest people and chief executive of Tesla, Musk is known for ambitious and cutting-edge projects ranging from auto electrification and rocket-building to high-speed transit tunnels.

Now it seems that Musk could be setting his sights on disrupting the multibillion-dollar tequila industry.

On Oct. 12, he tweeted “Teslaquila coming soon” and an accompanying “visual approximation” of a red and white label with the Tesla logo and a caption that stated “100 percent Puro de Agave.”

Not so fast, said Mexico’s Tequila Regulatory Council (CRT).

It argued that the “name ‘Teslaquila’ evokes the word Tequila … (and) Tequila is a protected word.”

The CRT keeps tabs on producers to assure they adhere to strict denomination of origin rules, which dictate the spirit must be made in the Mexican states of Guanajuato, Jalisco, Michoacan, Nayarit or Tamaulipas, among other requirements.

According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office website, Tesla has filed an application to trademark “Teslaquila” as a “distilled agave liquor” and “distilled blue agave liquor.”

Similar applications have been filed in Mexico, the European Union and Jamaica.

“If it wants to make Teslaquila viable as a tequila it would have to associate itself with an authorized tequila producer, comply with certain standards and request authorization from Mexico’s Industrial Property Institute,” said the CRT in a statement.

“Otherwise it would be making unauthorized use of the denomination of origin for tequila,” it said, adding that the proposed name “Teslaquila” could make consumers confuse the drink with tequila.

Tesla did not respond to several requests for comment.

Other high-profile celebrities have cashed in on tequila’s new-found international appeal, as the sprit moves into the ranks of top-shelf liquors and sheds its image as a fiery booze drunk by desperadoes and frat boys.

Last year, Diageo Plc bought actor George Clooney’s high-end tequila brand Casamigos for up to $1 billion.

Other recent deals in the industry include Bacardi Ltd’s January deal to buy fine tequila maker Patron Spirits International for $5.1 billion.

After years of speculation, Mexico’s Beckmann family launched an initial public offering of Jose Cuervo in 2017, raising more than $900 million.
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Technology

Nigerian Firm Takes Blame for Routing Google Traffic Through China

By Ytech on Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Nigeria’s Main One Cable took responsibility Tuesday for a glitch that temporarily caused some Google global traffic to be misrouted through China, saying it accidentally caused the problem during a network

upgrade.

The issue surfaced Monday afternoon as internet monitoring firms ThousandEyes and BGPmon said some traffic to Alphabet’s Google had been routed through China and Russia, raising concerns that the communications had been intentionally hijacked.

Main One said in an email that it had caused a 74-minute glitch by misconfiguring a border gateway protocol filter used to route traffic across the internet. That resulted in some Google traffic being sent through Main One partner China Telecom, the West African firm said.

Google has said little about the matter. It acknowledged the problem Monday in a post on its website that said it was investigating the glitch and that it believed the problem originated outside the company. The company did not say how many users were affected or identify specific customers.

Google representatives could not be reached Tuesday to comment on Main One’s statement.

Hacking concerns

Even though Main One said it was to blame, some security experts said the incident highlighted concerns about the potential for hackers to conduct espionage or disrupt communications by exploiting known vulnerabilities in the way traffic is routed over the internet.

The U.S. China Economic and Security Review Commission, a Washington group that advises the U.S. Congress on security issues, plans to investigate the issue, said Commissioner Michael Wessel.

“We will work to gain more facts about what has happened recently and look at what legal tools or legislation or law enforcement activities can help address this problem,” Wessel said.

Glitches in border gateway protocol filters have caused multiple outages to date, including cases in which traffic from U.S. internet and financial services firms was routed through Russia, China and Belarus.

Yuval Shavitt, a network security researcher at Tel Aviv University, said it was possible that Monday’s issue was not an accident.

“You can always claim that this is some kind of configuration error,” said Shavitt, who last month co-authored a paper alleging that the Chinese government had conducted a series of internet hijacks.

Main One, which describes itself as a leading provider of telecom and network services for businesses in West Africa, said that it had investigated the matter and implemented new processes to prevent it from happening again.
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Economy

EU Court Rules Taste Cannot Be Copyrighted

By Yeco on Tuesday, November 13, 2018

The European Union’s highest court has ruled that the taste of a food cannot be protected by copyright.

The European Court of Justice said Tuesday “the taste of a food product cannot be identified with precision of objectivity,” thus making it ineligible “for copyright protection.”

Dutch cheese maker Levola had argued that a rival company copied its herbed spread called Heksenkaas or witches’ cheese. The company claimed Heksenkaas was a work protected by copyright and asked the Dutch courts to insist that the rival firm cease production and sale of its cheese.

But the judges ruled that unlike books, movies, songs and the like, the taste of food depends on personal preferences and the context in which the food is consumed, “which are subjective and variable.”

“Accordingly, the court concludes that the taste of a food product cannot be classified as a ‘work,’ and consequently is not eligible for copyright protection under the directive,” the judges said.

This is not the first time the European Court of Justice had to settle disputes about food.

In July, it ruled Nestle could not trademark the four-finger shape of its KitKat chocolate bars.
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Economy

US October Budget Deficit Jumps to $100.5 Billion

By Yeco on Tuesday, November 13, 2018

The federal government recorded a deficit of $100.5 billion in October, a big increase from a year ago that was primarily caused by quirks in the calendar.

The Treasury Department said Tuesday that the deficit shot up 59 percent from the same month a year ago. Last year’s October deficit was smaller because the government paid $48 billion in benefits in September — and that was because Oct. 1 fell on a weekend.

The government has run a deficit in every October going back to the early 1950s. The new report begins a budget year in which the federal deficit is expected to soar above $1 trillion, reflecting in part the $1.5 trillion in tax cuts Congress approved last December.

In its latest review this summer, the administration projected that the deficit would climb to $1.09 trillion this year and stay above $1 trillion for three straight years.

The only time the government has run deficits of this size was for four years from 2009 through 2012. Government revenues at the time were depressed by the worst recession since the 1930s. The U.S. boosted spending to grapple with the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis and provide benefit payments to millions of people who lost their jobs.

Less protest this time

The huge deficits during that period triggered a substantial backlash, which led to government shutdowns as conservative Republicans battled the Obama administration to try to cut government spending. This time the outcry has not been as loud.

Republican lawmakers enthusiastically supported the 10-year $1.5 trillion tax cut approved last year. Democrats charged that most of the benefits went to corporations and wealthy individuals.

While the deficits were not a major issue in most midterm races this year, President Donald Trump has said that the new budget he will present to Congress next February will require 5 percent spending cuts for domestic agencies. Larry Kudlow, head of the president’s National Economic Council, promised in a CNBC interview Tuesday that the administration would produce a “tough budget” for the new year.

The October report showed that among the biggest increases in spending from a year ago was in interest payments on the public debt, which totaled $32 billion, 30 percent more than a year ago.

Total outlays in October were $353.2 billion, up 18.3 percent from a year ago, a jump heavily influenced by the fact that Social Security and other benefits for October 2017 had been paid in September of last year.

Government revenues totaled $252.7 billion, an increase of 7.3 percent from a year ago as a strong economy and low unemployment have offset some of the losses from the tax cuts.
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Science

Former West Virginia Coal Mines Turned into Carbon-sucking Forests

By Yscien on Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Mist rises from the ripped-up and muddy earth as moist soil meets chilly morning air. This field deep within in West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest looks more like a Game of Thrones battleground than a woodlands restoration project.

This is how Chris Barton is bringing forests back to Appalachia’s old strip mines: with a bulldozer tearing up the soil with meter-long metal teeth.

“We’ve had a lot of people kind of look at us twice,” he laughed.

Barton is a forest scientist at the University of Kentucky. On these former mines, he’s found that before he can plant a forest, he has to ravage a field.

“The really interesting thing is, after we do it, there’s no question that that was the right thing to do,” he said.

More on that later. First, Barton’s work lies at a crossroads for Appalachia, and for much of the world.

Not rocket science

Coal mines have stripped away roughly 400,000 hectares of Appalachian forests.

Burning coal for energy is adding more and more planet-warming carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. As the planet heats up, experts warn that simply cutting greenhouse gas emissions won’t be enough to prevent potentially catastrophic levels of global warming. CO2 must also be removed from the atmosphere.

Currently, experimental machines that pull CO2 directly from the air are too expensive to be practical.

However, a new report from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine says effective carbon-removal technology already exists.

It’s not rocket science. It’s forests.

The report says planting trees and managing forests, along with carbon-absorbing farming and ranching practices, are among the most cost-effective strategies that are ready for large-scale use today.

Taking advantage of these natural systems could take care of more than a third of the greenhouse gas reductions needed to prevent devastating climate change, according to another recent study.

Turning red spruce loose

In Appalachia, no ecosystem is better at capturing carbon dioxide than red spruce forests.

They’re even better than hardwood forests, according to Forest Service soil scientist Stephanie Connolly.

That’s because when deciduous trees lose their leaves in the fall, “photosynthesis shuts down and the trees go dormant,” she said.

Red spruce is an evergreen. It continues to photosynthesize and pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere all winter long.

When evergreen needles do fall, they decompose more slowly than deciduous leaves, she added. And the year-round shade provided by evergreens keeps the soil cool and decomposition slow.

Plus, these forests are more than just carbon sinks. They also absorb water during heavy rains, preventing flooding; and their soils release water during droughts. They provide habitat for rare species like the Cheat Mountain salamander and the northern flying squirrel.

Appalachia has lost 90 percent of the roughly 200,000 hectares of red spruce forest that once blanketed its mountains. Barton, the Forest Service, and a host of partners are working to return red spruce habitat to a thousand-hectare tract of the Monongahela that was strip-mined in the 1980s.

Stuck

But there’s a problem with many of these lands.

After the mines closed, they were restored according to best practices of the time. The leftover rock from mining was packed down to prevent erosion and planted with shallow-rooted grass.

“That’s fine for stability,” Barton said. “But for plant life, if you went out and planted trees in these sites, they just didn’t grow. The ground was way too compacted. Water didn’t infiltrate. Roots can’t penetrate. Oxygen can’t circulate in those environments.”

Decades later, lands that had been strip-mined and reclaimed were “stuck.” Nothing but grass could grow on them.

Barton figured that ripping up the compacted soil would “unstick” them.

But it wasn’t an easy sell.

Jack Tribble was a new forest ranger at Monongahela when Barton and Green Forests Work approached him. Tribble had already tried and failed to get trees to grow on the site.

“These guys came to us and said, ‘You need to rip this,'” he said. “Of course, that doesn’t make sense at all to me.”

But he approved a 30-hectare trial plot and crossed his fingers.

“We [had] a piece of equipment the size of a dozer out there ripping the ground,” he said. “That’s just kind of a scary thing.”

That was 2011. Seven years later, he said, “these trees are just growing really, really well.”

“I get it,” he added. “I totally get it.”

Cost benefit

This kind of reforestation is not cheap. Tribble said it costs roughly $5,000 per hectare. He estimates that restoring the most critical areas will add up to about $4 million.

Partnerships with the Nature Conservancy, American Forests, the Arbor Day Foundation and many others have helped with know-how and fundraising.

Plus, he added, the effort is spending money and hiring locally.

Barton said that’s an important part of what Green Forests Work is about.

In Appalachia, where the declining coal industry is shedding jobs, he said, “the idea was to build an ecological program to restore forests, but also, at the same time, develop an economic program for Appalachia, by putting people to work.”

Restoration projects need heavy equipment operators. Locals collect seeds from native plants, and local nurseries grow the seedlings. So far, Barton says the Monongahela project has poured about $1 million into the community.

Since 2009, Green Forests Work has planted nearly 2.5 million trees on roughly 1,600 hectares of what used to be strip mines across Appalachia.

In West Virginia alone, Connolly said, restoring red spruce to its old habitat could lock up the equivalent of 56 million barrels of oil.

Not right away. It takes decades.

Nature works slowly. But it works.
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Economy

Zimbabwe’s Inflation at Highest in a Decade as Dollar Shortage Bites

By Yeco on Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Inflation in Zimbabwe soared last month to its highest level since 2008, official data showed Tuesday, after a severe dollar shortage led to a surge in prices of food, drinks and clothes.

The annual inflation rate shot up to 20.85 percent in October, statistics agency Zimstat said, from 5.39 percent in September, after the dollar shortage led to a collapse in Zimbabwe’s parallel “bond note” currency, triggering sharp price hikes in many goods and services.

That has sent a ripple of fear among citizens still traumatized by the hyperinflation era, which ended when Zimbabwe was forced to abandon its currency and adopt the U.S. dollar in 2009.

Some businesses in Zimbabwe are now demanding cash in U.S. dollars only and have raised prices by more than three times for the majority of Zimbabweans who pay for their goods using the bond note, mobile money or bank cards.

On a monthly basis, prices jumped by 16.44 percent in October from 0.92 percent in September, Zimstat said.

“This was expected after the jump in prices we saw last month but it’s more than what I had forecast,” said Tony Hawkins, a professor of business studies at the University of Zimbabwe.

“Authorities will probably say it’s a one-off spike, but how many people are going to believe that? It now makes a mockery of the official inflation forecast of 5 percent next year.”

Panic buying

Prices of basic goods like meat, cooking oil and flour rose when the value of the bond note and electronic dollars collapsed on the parallel market last month, leading to panic buying by consumers.

Zimstat stopped publishing official inflation data in September 2008 when it reached 236 million percent, but the International Monetary Fund put the figure at 500 billion percent. The statistics agency resumed running inflation figures in February 2009.

Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube said on Oct. 2 the budget deficit, which is expected to reach double digits this year, was fueling inflationary pressures and could hobble the economy.

The economic crisis is a major challenge for President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who won a disputed vote on July 30 in the first election in the southern African nation since Robert Mugabe was removed by the army a year ago after nearly four decades in power.

Teachers unions last week petitioned the government to pay them in U.S. dollars or increase their salaries, saying the cost of living had increased beyond their wages.
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Science

Juul Labs to Pull Sweet E-Cig Flavors to Curb Youth Use

By Yscien on Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Juul Labs, the U.S. market leader for electronic cigarettes, said on Tuesday it will pull popular flavors such as mango, cucumber and fruit from retail store shelves in an effort to reduce surging teenage use of its products.

The move comes as Juul and other e-cigarette makers have faced heightened scrutiny from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration amid a sharp increase by high school students in use of the devices, which look like a USB flash drive and vaporize a flavored liquid containing nicotine.

In a statement on Tuesday, Juul Chief Executive Kevin Burns said the company wants to be “the off-ramp for adult smokers to switch from cigarettes, not an on-ramp for America’s youth to initiate on nicotine.”

Juul said it will stop selling flavors except for tobacco, mint and menthol in all retail outlets, including convenience stores and vape shops, until retailers can install technology that scans buyers’ IDs to independently verify they are 21 or older.

Until then, popular fruit flavors and other sweet flavors that appeal to younger users will only be available on Juul’s website. The company said it uses an age-verification system that requires buyers to enter their social security number, address and birth date, which is verified by a third-party service.

In addition, the company said it is shutting down its social media channels on Instagram and Facebook, and working with social media companies to remove “unauthorized, youth-oriented content on their platforms” relating to Juul.

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said on Twitter that “voluntary action is no substitute for regulatory steps FDA will soon take,” but he acknowledged Juul’s actions and urged other e-cigarette makers to take steps to reduce use by minors.

‘Juul rooms’

Some of Juul’s early social media and Youtube videos included images of attractive young people using the product.

User-generated social media about Juul became popular over the last two years, with young people posting videos and photos of themselves using the product at school or with friends, often under the hashtags #doit4juul or #juullife.

“Juuling” has become synonymous with vaping in high schools across the country, where some teachers and administrators have started locking bathrooms, jokingly called “Juul rooms” by students.

The FDA in September threatened to ban Juul and four other leading e-cigarette products unless their makers took steps to prevent use by minors. The FDA gave Juul and four big tobacco companies 60 days to submit plans to curb underage use, a compliance period that has now ended.

The agency is expected to announce restrictions on flavored e-cigarette products this week that mirror those suggested by Juul and other manufacturers. A senior agency official last week said the FDA plans to only allow sales of tobacco, mint and menthol flavors in convenience stores and gas stations. Other flavors could still be sold at vape shops.

Changes by companies

Juul said that beginning in early 2017 it required models used in advertisements of its products be older than 35. Earlier this year, it began featuring only former cigarette smokers in its ads to highlight smoking cessation benefits.

Juul has grabbed significant U.S. market share over the last year, growing from 13.6 percent of the market in early 2017 to nearly 75 percent now, according to a Wells Fargo analysis of Nielsen retail data.

Marlboro maker Altria Group Inc, which sells e-cigarettes under the MarkTen brand, last month said it would stop selling its pod-based electronic cigarettes, generally smaller devices that use pre-filled nicotine liquid cartridges, in response to FDA’s concerns. The company also said it would restrict flavors for its other e-cigarette products to tobacco, menthol and mint.

James Campbell, a spokesman for the Imperial Brands Plc unit that makes blu e-cigarettes, said the company told the FDA it plans to introduce a technology early next year that would lock devices in an effort to prevent underage use. The company also said it would review its flavors and packaging to minimize youth appeal, strengthen age verification for online sales and terminate contracts with retailers found to sell to minors.

Michael Shannon, a spokesman for R.J. Reynolds Vapor, a unit of British American Tobacco, said last week the company planned to tell the FDA it would penalize retailers that sell to youth and strengthen online sales restrictions to prevent underage or large bulk purchases of its products.
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Technology

NATO Looks to Startups, Disruptive Tech to Meet Emerging Threats

By Ytech on Tuesday, November 13, 2018

NATO is developing new high-tech tools, such as the ability to 3-D-print parts for weapons and deliver them by drone, as it scrambles to retain a competitive edge over Russia, China and other would-be battlefield adversaries.

Gen. Andre Lanata, who took over as head of the NATO transformation command in September, told a conference in Berlin that his command demonstrated over 21 “disruptive” projects during military exercises in Norway this month.

He urged startups as well as traditional arms manufacturers to work with the Atlantic alliance to boost innovation, as rapid and easy access to emerging technologies was helping adversaries narrow NATO’s long-standing advantage.

Lanata’s command hosted its third “innovation challenge” in tandem with the conference this week, where 10 startups and smaller firms presented ideas for defeating swarms of drones on the ground and in the air.

Winner from Belgium

Belgian firm ALX Systems, which builds civilian surveillance drones, won this year’s challenge.

Its CEO, Geoffrey Mormal, said small companies like his often struggled with cumbersome weapons procurement processes.

“It’s a very hot topic, so perhaps it will help to enable quicker decisions,” he told Reuters.

Lanata said NATO was focused on areas such as artificial intelligence, connectivity, quantum computing, big data and hypervelocity, but also wants to learn from DHL and others how to improve the logistics of moving weapons and troops.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said increasing military spending by NATO members would help tackle some of the challenges, but efforts were also needed to reduce widespread duplication and fragmentation in the European defense sector.

Participants also met behind closed doors with chief executives from 12 of the 15 biggest arms makers in Europe.
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Economy

Wall Street Gives Up Early Gains as Energy Weighs on Stocks

By Yeco on Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Wall Street struggled for momentum Tuesday, giving up early gains as a rebound in technology stocks and renewed hope for progress in trade talks were offset by drops in Boeing and energy stocks.

Boeing Co. reported a 37 percent increase in 737 deliveries in October, but shares fell on concerns related to last month’s deadly crash of a 737 operated by Indonesia’s Lion Air. The stock finished down 2.9 percent, providing one of the bigger drags on the Dow.

Energy stocks weighed heaviest on the S&P 500, driven down after crude prices fell more than 7 percent.

Technology bounced back from recent losses; the Nasdaq finished even for the day.

U.S.-China trade tensions enjoyed a reprieve as negotiations between the world’s two largest economies appeared to be making headway.

China President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump are expected to meet at a G-20 summit in Argentina at the end of November to try to iron out trade differences that have troubled markets for much of the year.

Tariff-vulnerable industrial stocks were up slightly, led by General Electric Co. and Caterpillar Inc.

“[Trade is] still an open question. It’s still a work in progress,” said Bucky Hellwig, senior vice president at BB&T Wealth Management in Birmingham, Ala. “It will continue to dog the markets short term until it gets worked out.”

GE jumps

General Electric was up 7.6 percent as the conglomerate unveiled plans to raise $4 billion by accelerating a sale of its stake in oilfield services provider Baker Hughes.

Homebuilder Beazer Homes USA Inc. jumped 30.6 percent after its quarterly revenue topped estimates and the company announced a $50 million buyback scheme.

Home Depot Inc. posted better-than-expected same-store sales but suggested that U.S. home sales were slowing down and impending tariffs could lead to price hikes for its products. The stock finished off 0.2 percent.

Amazon.com shares closed down 0.3 percent following the online retailer’s announcement that it had selected New York City and Northern Virginia for its two new headquarters.

Shares of Tyson Foods Inc dropped 5.6 percent after the top U.S. meat processor’s sales missed Wall Street estimates because of lower demand for chicken.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.4 percent, to 25,286; the S&P 500 lost 0.2 percent, to 2,722; and the Nasdaq Composite finished even at 7,200.

Third-quarter earnings season approaches the final stretch, with 91 percent of S&P 500 companies having reported, 77.5 percent of which have beaten estimates, according to Refinitiv data.
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Technology

Facebook Unable to Identify Who Was Behind Network of Fake Accounts

By Ytech on Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Facebook said Tuesday it had been unable to determine who was behind dozens of fake accounts it took down shortly before the 2018 U.S. midterm elections.

“Combined with our takedown last Monday, in total we have removed 36 Facebook accounts, 6 Pages, and 99 Instagram accounts for coordinated inauthentic behavior,” Nathaniel Gleicher, head of cybersecurity policy, wrote on the company’s blog.

At least one of the Instagram accounts had well over a million followers, according to Facebook.

A website that said it represented the Russian state-sponsored Internet Research Agency claimed responsibility for the accounts last week, but Facebook said it did not have enough information to connect the agency that has been called a troll farm.

“As multiple independent experts have pointed out, trolls have an incentive to claim that their activities are more widespread and influential than may be the case,” Gleicher wrote.

Sample images provided by Facebook showed posts on a wide range of issues. Some advocated on behalf of social issues such as women’s rights and LGBT pride, while others appeared to be conservative users voicing support for President Donald Trump.

The viewpoints on display potentially fall in line with a Russian tactic identified in other cases of falsified accounts. A recent analysis of millions of tweets by the Atlantic Council found that Russian trolls often pose as members on either side of contentious issues in order to maximize division in the United States.
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