According to the most recent Environmental Protection Agency data, about 262 million tons of municipal solid waste were generated in the U.S. in 2015. But while trash proliferation remains a global problem, there is a growing trend to help combat it. Repair Cafés are cropping up around the world, building community while teaching people how to fix their broken items instead of tossing them out. VOA’s Jill Craig recently visited the Twins ACE hardware store in Fairfax, Virginia.
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Tornadoes, hurricanes, fires and earthquakes are not a rare occurrence in California. Julia Vassey introduces us to people who are trying to be prepared to not only survive these cataclysms themselves, but help others do so as well. Anna Rice narrates her report.
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Chinese President Xi Jinping said Monday that China would take steps to widen access to its markets as he opened a huge trade fair amid criticism from other countries about China’s economic and business practices.
Xi said China would lower tariffs, take more action to punish violations of intellectual property rights, and work to boost domestic consumption of imported goods.
Speaking at the trade expo in Shanghai, Xi pledged to “embrace the world” as China promotes the growing consumer market in the world’s second-largest economy.
He did not mention U.S. President Donald Trump by name, but alluded to Trump’s “America first” economic policies by criticizing isolationism and citing a need to defend multilateral trade.
The United States and China are locked in a battle over trade, with Trump complaining about the trade gap between the two countries and accusing China of stealing intellectual property and imposing policies that make it more difficult for U.S. companies to access the Chinese market.
Trump has announced boosted tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese goods, while China has countered with $110 billion in tariffs on U.S. products. Xi and Trump are expected to meet later this month.
The European Union has also complained about China’s trade policies, including criticizing Xi for not following through on earlier reform pledges. The EU called last week for Xi to present concrete steps to opening its market.
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When employees enter Saba — an Israeli restaurant started by award-winning chef Alon Shaya — they pass by the company’s mission statement, which emphasizes the importance of a safe and comfortable working environment. Only at the end does it really get around to food with the words: “Then, we will cook and serve and be happy.”
“The team is number one and that is who we are as a company,” said Shaya, explaining the genesis of his and his wife’s new venture, Pomegranate Hospitality , which includes restaurants in New Orleans and Denver, and the environment he hopes to create for the company’s nearly 150 employees.
Discussions about new restaurants generally revolve around the food. And at Saba the piping hot pita bread or the blue crab hummus is discussion-worthy. But long before the first plate of shakshouka was served, Shaya and his team focused on how to create an inclusive work environment different than the toxic restaurant workplaces exposed by the #MeToo movement.
Just over a year ago, Shaya was part owner and executive chef of three restaurants in the Besh Restaurant Group, headed by New Orleans chef John Besh, including his James Beard-awarding winning namesake Israeli restaurant.
Then a story in NOLA.com/The Times-Picayune detailed allegations of sexual misconduct in Besh’s company, causing Besh to step down. Shaya wasn’t personally accused of misconduct but the story detailed allegations of harassment at two of his restaurants. Shaya was quoted in the story about concerns he had over BRG’s then-lack of a human resources department. Shaya has said that’s what led to his firing — something Besh’s company disputed. A messy legal battle ensued during which Shaya lost all rights to his namesake restaurant.
Fast forward to current day: Shaya sits at Saba discussing the policies and procedures Pomegranate has put in place to ensure a safe working environment.
The interview process includes questions way beyond whether a person has waited tables before (‘What was the last gift you bought for somebody?’). Management holds 30- and 90-day chats with new employees and then every six months. The restaurants are closed Monday and Tuesday so everyone has a guaranteed two days in a row off.
Women populate high-profile roles including executive chef in New Orleans. About 60 percent of each restaurant’s staff is women. They’ve adopted ideas from other restaurants including a system used by Erin Wade at the Oakland, California-based Homeroom to deal with sexual harassment and a code of conduct for guest chefs used by Raleigh, N.C.-based restaurateur Ashley Christiansen.
Service is limited during 2:30 to 4 p.m. so the staff can sit together for a meal, often accompanied by staff presentations to their co-workers. Some topics are work-related. But employees are also encouraged to share what interests them. During a recent session, cook Timmy Harris talked to the waiters, managers, and cooks about existentialism, Southern literature and author Walker Percy.
“It kind of drives home the point that this is a place for people to develop themselves. It’s not just a restaurant. We’re not just slinging pita,” Harris said after.
Shaya said he can’t talk much about what happened while working at BRG for legal reasons but says now that he and his wife own their company they’re able to create the structure they want.
“Even in our restaurants someone will be inappropriate at some point,” Shaya said. “And I know that when that happens people are going to jump on it because people have really bought into the values.”
Experts say many issues have contributed to sexual misconduct in the restaurant industry, including a tipping structure that can inhibit servers — often women — from complaining about out-of-line customers, little training for managers and high turnover. Restaurants’ small size — often family-owned or single units — has historically meant they don’t have strong HR policies, said Juan Madera, an associate professor at the Conrad N. Hilton College of Hotel and Restaurant Management.
Allegations of sexual misconduct at restaurants and the wider #MeToo discussion have been a “wakeup call for restaurants,” Madera said. He’s hearing from restaurant associations and others who want to figure out how to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace.
Raleigh, N.C.-based chef and restaurateur Ashley Christiansen, who talked with Shaya about his new venture, says a restaurant’s HR presence is as important as the food or the linen service. She says it’s difficult to measure how much progress has been made across the industry since the growth of the #MeToo movement, but she sees cause for optimism.
“I feel like it’s the thing I talk about more than food now, and I think that’s a positive thing,” she said.
Shaya says his new venture hasn’t been without problems. He’s fired one person who was cursing at another employee. But he’s also been inspired by staff members calling out someone who makes an off-color joke or not tolerating negativity.
“We’ve taken it down to the very basics of kindness, and we stick to it and I feel that we’ve attracted a lot of people who believe in that,” he said.
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The UN Migration Agency has begun providing life-saving health care to two Somali towns previously inaccessible because of war and conflict.
Tens of thousands of people in the towns of Gobweyn and Bulla Gaduud have been deprived of life-saving health care for nearly three decades. These areas have been too dangerous for aid workers to reach because of the never-ending cycles of war and conflict in the area.
In recent months, International Organization for Migration spokesman, Joel Millman says government forces have succeeded in subduing the armed groups that have made life a misery for local inhabitants. This, he says has opened up these areas to outside help.
“For the past 27 years, war and conflict have made healthcare access difficult or impossible in many parts of the country. Now these communities have access to vaccinations, malaria treatment, antenatal care for pregnant mothers, malnutrition screenings and referrals, among other essential services,” Millman said.
Millman says aid agencies who finally were able to reach these towns were dismayed by the prevailing conditions. He says they found high levels of malnutrition and extremely poor immunization coverage.
Because the towns had no humanitarian services, he says many people had abandoned their villages. He says they were living in overcrowded settlements in far-away urban centers where medical care was available.
He says it is likely many of these displaced people will decide to return to their communities now that the life-saving aid they need can be had closer to home.
A prosthetic center in Iraq’s holy city of Karbala is introducing highly advanced robotic limbs, offering amputees a new beginning by enabling them to regain mobility and independence. VOA’s Correspondent Mariama Diallo reports.
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Aquaculture is the world’s fastest growing food industry and now accounts for more than 50 percent of the total global seafood supply, according to the World Economic Forum. But farming fish requires food for those fish, and currently, it relies on a lot of ingredients that could be feeding people, including soybean, corn, rice and wheat. Faith Lapidus reports on some new sustainable ideas about feeding farmed fish, from Norway.
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At first, it may seem that the small cold city of Barrow, Alaska, 515 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle, is in the heart of endless empty tundra. But, as Natasha Mozgovaya discovered on a visit to the northern-most city in the U.S., now known as Utqiagvik, that’s not the case. Anna Rice narrates her story.
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Facing a blizzard of trade complaints, China is throwing an “open for business” import fair hosted by President Xi Jinping to rebrand itself as a welcoming market and positive global force.
More than 3,000 companies from 130 countries selling everything from Egyptian dates to factory machinery are attending the China International Import Expo, opening Monday in the commercial hub of Shanghai. Its VIP guest list includes prime ministers and other leaders from Russia, Pakistan and Vietnam.
The United States, fighting a tariff war with Beijing, has no plans to send a high-level envoy.
Xi’s government is emphasizing the promise of China’s growing consumer market to help defuse complaints Beijing abuses the global trading system by reneging on promises to open its industries.
“This says, look, we’re not a global parasite that is creating massive deficits, we are buying goods,” said Kerry Brown, a Chinese politics specialist at King’s College London.
The event also is part of efforts to develop a trading network centered on China and increase its influence in a Western-dominated global system.
President Donald Trump and his “America First” trade policies that threaten to raise import barriers to the world’s biggest consumer market loom in the background.
Exporters, especially developing countries, want closer relations with China to help “insulate themselves from what is happening with Trump and the U.S.,” said Gareth Leather of Capital Economics.
China has cut tariffs and announced other measures this year to boost imports, which rose 15.9 percent in 2017 to $1.8 trillion. But none addresses the U.S. complaints about its technology policy that prompted Trump to impose penalty tariffs of up to 25 percent on $250 billion worth of Chinese imports. Beijing has responded with tariff hikes on $110 billion worth of American imports.
Chinese ambitions
Chinese leaders have rejected pressure to roll back plans such as “Made in China 2025,” which calls for state-led creation of global champions in robotics and other fields, ambitions that some American officials worry will undermine U.S. industrial leadership.
To keep the economy growing, China needs to nurture its consumer market, and that requires more imports.
But foreign companies say regulators are still trying to squeeze them out of promising industries and that they face pressure to hand over technology.
The Shanghai expo “will be of little consequence to U.S. and other companies unless its pageantry is matched by meaningful and measurable changes in China trade practices,” Kenneth Jarrett, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, said in an email.
Some companies might get a brief sales boost, “but its long-run impact will be defined by China’s willingness to end many of its unfair trade practices,” said Jarrett.
Europe, Japan and other trading partners have been leery of Trump’s tactics but echo U.S. complaints.
They say Beijing improperly hampers access to finance, logistics and other service industries. European leaders are frustrated that Beijing bars foreign acquisitions of most assets while its own companies are on a global buying spree.
Writing in a Chinese business magazine, the French and German ambassadors to Beijing appealed for changes including an end to requirements that foreign companies operate in joint ventures with state-owned partners. They called for an overhaul of rules they say hinder companies from profiting from and protecting their technology.
“We encourage China to address these issues through concrete and systematic measures that go beyond tariff adjustments,” Ambassadors Jean-Maurice Ripert of France and Clemens von Goetze of Germany wrote in the magazine Caixin.
China already is the No. 1 trading partner for all its Asian neighbors, though a big share of the iron ore, industrial components and other goods it buys are turned into smartphones, TV sets and other goods for export.
Better access to some goods
Tariff cuts announced over the past year were aimed at giving Chinese consumers better access to foreign goods. Chinese leaders emphasize those include anti-cancer drugs and other medical products. But many are specialty goods such as high-end baby strollers, avocados and mineral water that don’t compete with Chinese suppliers.
The Shanghai expo also gives Beijing a chance to repair its image following complaints about its “Belt and Road Initiative” to expand trade by building ports, railways and other infrastructure across a vast arc of 65 countries from the South Pacific through Asia to Africa and Europe.
Governments including Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand have scrapped or scaled back projects because of high costs or complaints that too little work goes to local companies. Sri Lanka, Kenya and other nations have run into trouble repaying Chinese loans.
“It’s become too associated with debt and China getting what it wants,” said Brown. “They are trying to get out this more positive message that China is open for business.”
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Four U.N. specialized agencies warn that many parts of Asia and the Pacific suffer from alarmingly high levels of malnutrition and hunger. This is the first time the Food and Agriculture Organization, the U.N. Children’s Fund, the World Food Program and the World Health Organization have issued a joint report, which calls for urgent action to reverse the situation.
The report finds efforts to reduce malnutrition and hunger have come to a virtual standstill in Asia and the Pacific. Unless greater effort is made to tackle this situation, it warns prospects for economic and social development in the region will be at serious risk.
As of now, the U.N. agencies say many parts of Asia and the Pacific will not reach the U.N. sustainable goal of ending all forms of malnutrition and achieving zero hunger by 2030.
The United Nations reports 821 million people globally suffer from hunger. World Food Program spokesman Herve Verhoosel said 62 percent of that number, or 509 million people, are in the Asia-Pacific region, with children, in particular, bearing the biggest burden.
Verhoosel said 79 million children, or one in every four under age five, suffer from stunting, and 34 million children are wasting. He says 12 million children suffer from severe acute malnutrition, which increases their risk of death.
The report notes climate-related disasters are rising in the region, having a detrimental impact on agriculture. Loss of crops, it says, results in more hunger, more loss of nutrition and loss of livelihood.
According to the report, climate-related losses in Asia between 2005 and 2015 amounted to a staggering $48 billion. Authors of the report say countries in the region must adapt agriculture so it’s more resilient to extreme climate events, and to mitigate the damage from climate change.
For the first time an underwater robot is to be used to plant baby coral to parts of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef damaged by mass bleaching, as scientists plan to collect hundreds of millions of coral spawn off the Queensland city of Cairns in the coming weeks.
Most coral reproduce through spawning, where eggs and sperm are pushed into the water at the same time. In northern Australia, researchers are preparing to harvest this mass release of coral spawn on the Great Barrier Reef. They will be reared into baby corals in floating enclosures. Then they will be delivered as so-called ‘larval clouds’ to Vlasoff Reef about an hour’s sailing from Cairns by a semi-autonomous robot.
Professor Peter Harrison, the director of the Marine Ecology Research Center at Southern Cross University, said science is giving a nature a helping hand.
“What we are trying to do now is compensate for the loss of corals that would normally provide enough larvae for the system to naturally heal,” Harrison said.
Large areas of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have been damaged by severe bleaching – or loss of the algae that gives coral its color. The bleaching is caused by rising water temperatures and made worse by climate change.
The experiment on Vlasoff reef, which was badly affected by the mass bleaching, will be coordinated by divers, who will guide the spawn-spreading robot, known as the LarvalBot.
Professor Matthew Dunbabin from the Queensland University of Technology says time is of essence.
“In future projects we are hoping that we can start to do that more autonomously, but this is very new and we are up against the clock in terms of trying to get this in the field as quick as possible to make sure that we can have a reef to preserve,” Dunbabin said.
A coral reef is made up of millions of tiny animals called coral polyps. The reefs are critical ecosystems, and provide a home for at least a quarter of all marine species.
The Great Barrier Reef is about the same size as Italy or Japan. Thirty species of whales, dolphins, and porpoises have been recorded along the reef.
It faces a range of threats, from climate change and overfishing, to the run-off of pollution from farms, to coral-eating crown of thorns starfish.
Many people know that a woman’s health, including her diet and exercise habits, can impact the health of her baby even before she gets pregnant. But, until recently, little was known about a father’s diet and exercise choices.
Matthew Hurt is teaching his young sons how to hit a baseball. He wants them to enjoy sports and exercising.
“I want it to be just natural for them. I don’t want it to be a chore. I want them to just want to go outside, want to be active and enjoy life to its fullest.”
Impact of exercise
A study at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center looked at the impact of fathers’ exercise habits on their offspring.
Kristin Stanford is a member of Ohio State’s Diabetes and Metabolism Research Center. She co-led the study. The results showed that even moderate exercise before a baby was conceived “resulted in an improved metabolic health in their adult offspring. Essentially, it improved their glucose metabolism, decreased body weight and increased their insulin sensitivity.”
The World Health Organization says 1 in 4 adults worldwide are dangerously inactive. That increases the risk of obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes.
Inactivity also has social and economic consequences.
The research at Ohio State was done in mice. More work needs to be done to see if it applies to people as well.
“The idea would be that if you have a dad who wants to have a child, if they would exercise maybe just a month prior to conception, that would have a really dramatic effect on their child’s life.”
Poor diet? Just exercise
The researchers also found that exercise helped even with a poor diet. Sedentary mice fed a high fat diet passed along negative health issues like obesity and insulin resistance, but those effects were completely reversed by exercise.
“A high-fat diet, even mild high-fat diet, in this case it was only three weeks, changes the profile, but exercise kind of restored it back to normal.”
More work needs to be done to see if the same applies to humans. But in the animal studies, exercise for the male mouse was key to the health of his offspring.
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As U.S. voters prepare to head to the polls Tuesday, the election will also be a referendum on Facebook.
In recent months, the social networking giant has beefed up scrutiny of what is posted on its site, looking for fake accounts, misinformation and hate speech, while encouraging people to go on Facebook to express their views.
“A lot of the work of content moderation for us begins with our company mission, which is to build community and bring the world closer together,” Peter Stern, who works on product policy stakeholder engagement at Facebook, said at a recent event at St. John’s University in New York City.
Facebook wants people to feel safe when they visit the site, Stern said. To that end, it is on track to hire 20,000 people to tackle safety and security on the platform.
As part of its stepped-up effort, Facebook works with third-party fact-checkers and takes down misinformation that contributes to violence, according to a blog post by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO.
But most popular content, often dubbed “viral,” is frequently the most extreme. Facebook devalues posts it deems are incorrect, reducing their viralness, or future views, by 80 percent, Zuckerberg said.
Disinformation campaigns
Recently Facebook removed accounts followed by more than 1 million people that it said were linked to Iran but pretended to look like they were created by people in the U.S. Some were about the upcoming midterm elections.
The firm also removed hundreds of American accounts that it said were spamming political misinformation.
Still, Facebook is criticized for what at times appears to be flaws in its processes.
Vice News recently posed as all 100 U.S. senators and bought fake political ads on the site. After approving them all, Facebook said it made a mistake.
Politicians in Britain and Canada have asked Zuckerberg to testify on Facebook’s role on spreading disinformation.
“I think they are really struggling and that’s not surprising, because it’s a very hard problem,” said Daphne Keller, who used to be on Google’s legal team and is now with Stanford University.
“If you think about it, they get millions, billions of new posts a day, most of them some factual claim or sentiment that nobody has ever posted before, so to go through these and figure out which are misinformation, which are false, which are intending to affect an electoral outcome, that is a huge challenge,” Keller said. “There isn’t a human team that can do that in the world, there isn’t a machine that can do that in the world.”
Transparency
While it has been purging its site of accounts that violate its policies, the company has also revealed more about how decisions are made in removing posts. In a 27-page document, Facebook described in detail what content it removes and why, and updated its appeals process.
Stern, of Facebook, supports the company’s efforts at transparency.
“Having a system that people view as legitimate and basically fair even when they don’t agree with any individual decision that we’ve made is extremely important,” he said.
The stepped-up efforts to give users more clarity about the rules and the steps to challenge decisions are signs Facebook is moving in the right direction, Stanford’s Keller said.
“We need to understand that it is built into the system that there will be a fair amount of failure and there needs to be appeals process and transparency to address that,” she said.
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Many people know that a woman’s health, including her diet and exercise habits, can impact the health of her baby even before she gets pregnant. Many women try to shed excess weight and check with their doctors to optimize their health. But, until recently, little was known about the role a father’s diet and exercise choices might play. VOA’s Carol Pearson reports on a study that shows, just like for women, there is a link between the father’s health and that of his unborn children.
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As U.S. voters prepare to head to the polls Nov. 6, all eyes are on how Facebook is grappling with giving people a platform to speak but also keeping misinformation in check. Michelle Quinn reports from San Francisco.
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Scientists across the world have set an ambitious goal for themselves: to sequence the genome of every known life form on Earth within the next decade.
The Earth BioGenome Project, launched this week in London, is attempting to map the entire DNA of every known animal, plant, fungus and protozoan on the planet, roughly 1.5 million species.
Scientists say the project rivals in importance the Human Genome Project, which took 13 years to map the human genetic code. That project was completed in 2003.
Contributions from around world
The new project will rely on scientists contributing data from around the world, with the largest pledge so far coming from Britain’s Wellcome Sanger Institute, which says it will map 66,000 species. The institute was also a large contributor to the Human Genome Project.
The cost of the massive project is estimated to be $4.7 billion, which will come from charities and governments around the world.
Scientists say the result of the grand-scale project would be a huge resource for researchers that could offer insights into a range of topics, including a better understanding of evolution, the development of diseases, and insight into the aging process.
Researchers also hope the information could help in efforts to conserve threatened species by better understanding how life forms can adapt to changes.
Why not sequence everything?
Project member and evolutionary geneticist Jenny Graves of La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia told Nature, “Variation is the fount of all genetic knowledge.”
“The more variation you have the better — so why not sequence everything?” she said.
Supporters of the project say the initiative will help to coordinate the efforts of researchers from around the world and will ensure that all life forms are sequenced and not just those that have previously drawn interest.
They say the project will also set standards for the collection of samples, the sequencing of data and for sharing information. Proponents say such standards are essential for making sure the final data is useful to scientists everywhere.
Scientists say part of the appeal of the project is that they don’t fully know what the results will lead to.
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We’ve all heard about how surveillance robots can scope out an area before police or rescue personnel head into a potentially dangerous situation. But some K-9 officers in the U.S. states of Oregon and Wisconsin are getting great help from camera equipped dogs. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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A hungry American economy powered by a strong U.S. dollar saw record imports in September, driving the U.S. trade deficit to its highest level in seven months, the government reported Friday.
And amid President Donald Trump’s trade war with Beijing, the U.S. trade deficit with China swelled again, as crucial soybean exports — a sore spot for Republicans in next week’s midterm elections — continued to suffer.
With rising wages and low unemployment, Americans purchased more foreign-made telecommunications equipment, computers, mobile phones, aircraft engines, clothing and toys, the Commerce Department said.
The U.S. trade deficit posted its fourth straight monthly increase, rising 1.3 percent to a seasonally adjusted $54 billion, significantly overshooting analyst forecasts, as imports hit $266.6 billion, the highest level ever recorded. Exports also rose to $212.6 billion.
The U.S. trade gap has increased a steep 10.1 percent so far this year.
The expanding trade gap should weigh on GDP calculations in the third quarter, although many estimates may already have factored in the trade drag.
Record imports from China
Trade with China, a central target of Trump’s aggressive economic agenda, was a clear culprit, as the deficit in goods with the world’s second-largest economy jumped $3 billion to $37.4 billion, seasonally adjusted.
Goods imports from China hit a record of $47.7 billion, seasonally adjusted, an increase of $3.5 billion from August.
The trade report showed American producers sold more gold, petroleum products and civilian aircraft, but exports of soybeans fell $700 billion from August, also largely the result of the trade spat with China.
U.S. imports rose faster than exports on robust spending by companies and consumers — driving the U.S. goods deficit to its highest level ever recorded at $76.3 billion.
U.S. goods imports also were the highest ever, at $217.6 billion.
Analysts say recent tax cuts and fiscal stimulus should support demand that outstrips domestic production, keeping imports high and allowing the trade gap to widen further.
Excluding oil and aircraft, U.S. exports fell at an annual rate of 8.6 percent, something Ian Shepherdson of Pantheon Macroeconomics called “grim.”
Trump said Thursday that he had spoken to Chinese President Xi Jinping about trade confrontation, and the leaders are expected to meet late this month at the Group of 20 summit in Argentina.
That will be a chance for the two to work toward ending a deadlock, which has imposed steep tariffs on hundreds of millions of dollars in two-way trade.
No high hopes
However, senior White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow poured cold water on expectations for a breakthrough.
“Look, there’s no massive movement to deal with trade,” Kudlow told CNBC on Friday.
Markets, manufacturers and importers are bracing for a stiff increase in U.S. duties on Chinese goods, which are due to rise to 25 percent on January 1.
Trump has slapped tariffs on more than $250 billion in imports from China, alleging massive state intervention and technological theft, and has sought leverage in talks by threatening to put duties on all Chinese imports.
Wall Street interrupted this week’s rally, closing down sharply on fears the U.S.-China trade war could worsen.
“The risks from a trade war remain our biggest concern in light of recent events,” Oxford Economics said in a research note.
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Twitter Inc. deleted more than 10,000 automated accounts posting messages that discouraged people from voting in Tuesday’s U.S. election and wrongly appeared to be from Democrats, after the party flagged the misleading tweets to the social media company.
“We took action on relevant accounts and activity on Twitter,” a Twitter spokesman said in an email. The removals took place in late September and early October.
Twitter removed more than 10,000 accounts, according to three sources familiar with the Democrats’ effort. The number is modest, considering that Twitter has previously deleted millions of accounts it determined were responsible for spreading misinformation in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Yet the removals represent an early win for a fledgling effort by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, or DCCC, a party group that supports Democrats running for the U.S. House of Representatives.
2016 experience
The DCCC launched the effort this year in response to the party’s inability to respond to millions of accounts on Twitter and other social media platforms that spread negative and false information about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and other party candidates in 2016, three people familiar with the operation told Reuters.
While the prevalence of misinformation campaigns has so far been modest in the run-up to the congressional elections on Nov. 6, Democrats are hoping the flagging operation will help them react quickly if there is a flurry of such messages in the coming days.
The tweets included ones that discouraged Democratic men from voting, saying that would drown out the voice of women, according to two of the sources familiar with the flagging operation.
The DCCC developed its own system for identifying and reporting malicious automated accounts on social media, according to the three party sources.
The system was built in part from publicly available tools known as “Hoaxley” and “Botometer” developed by University of Indiana computer researchers. They allow a user to identify automated accounts, also known as bots, and analyze how they spread information on specific topics.
Free tools
“We made Hoaxley and Botometer free for anyone to use because people deserve to know what’s a bot and what’s not,” said Filippo Menczer, professor of informatics and computer science at the University of Indiana.
The Democratic National Committee works with a group of contractors and partners to rapidly identify misinformation campaigns.
They include RoBhat Labs, a firm whose website says it has developed technology capable of detecting bots and identifying political bias in messages.
The collaboration with RoBhat has already led to the discovery of malicious accounts and posts, which were referred to social media companies and other campaign officials, DNC Chief Technology Officer Raffi Krikorian said in email.
Krikorian did not say whether the flagged posts were ultimately removed by Twitter.
“We provide the DNC with reports about what we’re seeing in terms of bot activity and where it’s being amplified,” said Ash Bhat, co-founder of RoBhat Labs.
“We can’t tell you who’s behind these different operations — Twitter hides that from us — but with the technology you know when and how it’s happening,” Bhat said.
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U.S. regulators have approved a powerful new opioid tablet to be used in hospitals over objections from critics who fear the pill will be abused.
The new drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Friday is five to 10 times more potent than pharmaceutical fentanyl and will be used as an alternative to intravenous (IV) painkillers in medical settings.
Approval for the drug, which will be manufactured by a California company called AcelRx and marketed under the name Dsuvia, was supported by the Department of Defense. The Pentagon wants to have a pill that it can give soldiers on the battlefield to relieve pain when using an IV is not possible.
Critics say the pill could be diverted to illicit use and could worsen the country’s opioid crisis.
One of the pill’s critics is the head of an FDA committee tasked with advising regulators about whether drugs should be approved. This month, in a rare dissent with his committee, Raeford Brown urged the FDA to reject the drug and predicted the medicine would be abused inside and outside medical settings.
FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said in a statement Friday that there would be “very tight restrictions” placed on the drug’s distribution and that the medicine was intended only for supervised settings like hospitals. The drug will not be available in retail pharmacies.
Gottlieb also said he would seek more authority for the FDA to consider whether there are too many similar drugs on the market, a move that could limit the number of new opioid drugs approved by the agency in the future.
“We won’t sidestep what I believe is the real underlying source of discontent among the critics of this approval — the question of whether or not America needs another powerful opioid while in the throes of a massive crisis of addiction,” Gottlieb wrote.
Preliminary figures from a report by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration released Friday showed more than 49,000 opioid-related deaths in 2017. That was a rise from the reported 42,249 opioid overdose deaths in 2016.
The DEA’s National Drug Threat Assessment report shows that heroin, fentanyl and other opioids continue to pose the highest drug threat in the nation.
Developers of the new opioid pill say the tablet is placed under the tongue and starts reducing pain in 15 to 30 minutes. It contains sufentanil, a chemical cousin of the fentanyl, which is commonly used after surgery and in emergency rooms. Each pill will come in a plastic applicator that looks like a syringe and will sell for $50 to $60.
The FDA says that because of the controls on drugs in medical facilities, medicines rarely get into the hands of general public through hospitals. However, the agency acknowledges that the greatest risk of misuse of such drugs is among medical personnel themselves.
Sidney Wolfe, founder of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, said in a statement: “It is certain that Dsuvia will worsen the opioid epidemic and kill people needlessly. It will be taken by medical personnel and others for whom it has not been prescribed. And many of those will overdose and die.”
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Participants at the first ever WHO Global Conference on Air Pollution have adopted a plan for reducing air pollution, which every year prematurely kills an estimated seven million people.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has called the conference a resounding success, noting 900 people attended, twice as many as expected. Furthermore, it says more than 70-member states, non-governmental organizations, and other participants have made voluntary commitments to take action to reduce air pollution.
Director of the WHO’s Department of Public Health and Environment Maria Neira said the WHO is taking a leading role in setting forth action to tackle air pollution for a cleaner, healthier world.
“WHO, as the global health agency, made, as well, very strong commitments, starting by proposing an aspiration target of reducing by two-thirds the mortality caused by air pollution by the year 2030. And, this is really a big challenge that we will mobilize and, we will call for everyone to contribute to that,” she said.
Neira said prompt action is needed to reach that goal. For example, she says people need to stop burning solid waste and agricultural waste. She said they have to move away from fossil fuels. She said people in Africa and other areas with populations in great need must be helped to meet the goal.
“We need to liberate those three billion people that today, they are still relying on fossil fuels at the household level to cook or heat or light their house. We need to make sure that they will have access to clean sources of energy,” said Neira.
The WHO plans to put in place a tracking system to monitor commitments made by the participants. The system is intended to gauge the progress being made toward achieving better health for all by freeing the world of air pollution.
Uganda will begin administering the experimental Ebola vaccine to approximately 2,000 health care and front-line workers along its border with the Democratic Republic of Congo on Monday, the Ministry of Health said.
Uganda has no confirmed cases of Ebola, but as the threat worsens in the DRC, the preventive measure is seen as necessary because of heavy border traffic. More than 20,000 people cross from the DRC into Uganda and back every week, the ministry says.
“The public high risk of cross-border transmission of Ebola to Uganda was assessed to be very high at national level,” said Jane Ruth Aceng, Uganda’s minister for health. “Hence, the need to protect our health workers with this vaccine. Currently in Uganda, we have 2,100 doses of the vaccine available at the National Medical Stores and preparations are in high gear, including training of the health workers that are to be targeted.”
Many of those crossing the border are from the DRC’s North Kivu province, about 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the Ugandan border, where armed conflict has made fighting the Ebola outbreak a challenge.
The vaccine, known as rVSV, has been used during recent outbreaks in Congo, Guinea and Sierra Leone, and is currently being dispensed in North Kivu.
Uganda’s Health Ministry says the Ebola vaccine will be given with the consent of Uganda’s health workers, since it is being used outside of clinical trials.
Despite being experimental, the vaccine is absolutely safe, Aceng says.
“The vaccine is a recombinant vaccine genetically developed by getting a particle of the Ebola gene, replacing a particle of the gene with another virus called the vesicular stomatitis virus. The vaccine therefore is a genetically modified organism, that is able to replicate and cause antibody production against the Ebola virus but not cause Ebola virus disease,” she explained.
The Ebola virus causes a severe and often fatal hemorrhagic fever.
The Democratic Republic of Congo has confirmed 250 cases of Ebola — causing 180 deaths — and another 41 suspected cases.
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U.S. employers added a stellar 250,000 jobs last month and boosted average pay by the most in nearly a decade in an effort to attract and keep workers.
The Labor Department’s monthly jobs report, the last major economic data before the Nov. 6 election, also shows the unemployment rate remained at a five-decade low of 3.7 percent.
The influx of new job-seekers lifted the proportion of Americans with jobs to the highest level since January 2009.
Consumers are the most confident they have been in 18 years and are spending freely and propelling brisk economic growth. The U.S. economy is in its 10th year of expansion, the second-longest such period on record, and October marks the 100th straight month of hiring, a record streak.
A paralyzed man you’re about to meet didn’t have much hope that one day he’d be able to walk again. But thanks to a new medical device, things are looking up for him. VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports.
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