Diabetics who use insulin to control their blood sugars can sometimes end up with very low readings that, if left untreated, can lead to death. While modern blood sugar monitoring systems can warn patients when their blood sugar levels are dangerously low, there is another, more “user-friendly” way to do the same thing. Shelley Schlender reports.
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A new phone app could be a “game-changer” in the fight against child marriage in Bangladesh, where more than half of all girls are married before they are 18, children’s charity Plan International said on Monday.
The impoverished South Asian nation has one of the world’s highest rates of child marriage, according to UNICEF, despite laws that ban girls under 18 and men under 21 from marrying.
The mobile app being rolled out by Plan and the Bangladesh government aims to prevent it by allowing matchmakers, priests and officers who register marriages to verify the bride and groom’s ages through a digital database.
“If we could get the people involved in the initial stages of marriage on side as well, then there would be no one to solemnize, no one to register and no one to arrange a marriage for a child,” said Soumya Guha, a director at Plan Bangladesh.
“The app could be the game-changer that we need,” he said, adding that it stopped 3,750 underage marriages during a six-month trial.
Campaigners say girls who marry young often drop out of school and face a greater risk of rape, domestic abuse and forced pregnancies, which may put their lives in danger.
The app, which has an offline text messaging version for rural areas, gives the user access to a database that stores a unique identification number linked to the three documents.
When one of the numbers is entered, it shows “proceed” if the person is of legal age and a red “warning!” if not.
All marriages in Bangladesh must be legally registered within 30 days of the ceremony, but many are not.
A hard copy of a birth certificate, school leaving document or national identity card works as age proof, but often parents who want to marry off their children often forge them.
The charity is training 100,000 officiants about the ill effects of child marriage and how to use the app, which it hopes to roll out nationally by August.
“I believe this app will help us achieve the commitment by our honorable prime minister to eliminate child marriage before 2041,” Muhammad Abdul Halim, a director general at the prime minister’s office, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
However, Supreme Court lawyer Sara Hossain said more needed to be done to educate girls about their right to consent and plug legal loopholes.
“People might just avoid the registration because it is not required for validity of marriage and there is only a minor penalty for not registering. It’s not a big thing,” Hossain told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“We would be mistaken to think that something like this will be a magic bullet solution.”
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The first vaccine campaign against cholera in Yemen has started, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday, a year and a half after an epidemic was triggered by war and a health and sanitation crisis.
There have since been more than one million suspected cases of cholera in Yemen, and 2,275 recorded deaths, the WHO says.
The disease is spread by feces in sewage contaminating water or food, and it can kill because patients quickly lose fluids through vomiting and diarrhea. Caught early it can be treated with oral rehydration salts.
The oral vaccination campaign, which began in four districts in Aden on Sunday targeting 350,000 people, coincides with the rainy season, which health workers fear could spread the disease further.
“The first four districts are being targeted… and then the campaign will move towards all the areas at risk in the country, covering at least four million people,” Lorenzo Pizzoli, WHO cholera expert, said in a tweet posted on Sunday.
Yemen’s war, a proxy conflict between Iran-aligned Houthis and the internationally recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, which is backed by a Saudi-led alliance, has killed more than 10,000 people since 2015.
It has also displaced more than 2 million and destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure, including the health system whose workers have not been paid.
Nevio Zagaria, the WHO representative in Yemen, told Reuters in April that some 1.4 million vaccine doses had been shipped via Nairobi, out of 4.4 million planned.
“The rainy season is starting, so we need to use the window of opportunity to start a vaccination campaign,” he said at the time.
In July 2017, the International Coordinating Group on Vaccine Provision – which manages a global stockpile — earmarked one million cholera vaccines for Yemen. But the WHO and local authorities together to scrap a vaccination plan on logistical and technical grounds.
Some senior Houthi health officials have been known to object to vaccinations, delaying the campaign, aid workers say.
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Air France’s share price dived Monday after its CEO quit and the French government warned that the country’s flagship carrier might collapse.
A new strike Monday over wage demands, meanwhile, prompted the cancellation of about 15 percent of Air France flights worldwide. The number of striking staffers appears to be slightly declining as the airline enters its 14th day of walkouts this year, but the labor action has already cost the company more than 300 million euros ($360 million) in a matter of weeks.
Air France’s share price plunged nearly 13 percent at the open Monday and was trading 10.9 percent lower at 7.21 euros early afternoon Paris time amid questions about its future management and direction.
The share price woes follow the resignation Friday evening of Air France-KLM CEO Jean-Marc Janaillac after workers rejected the company’s latest wage proposal.
The Air France drama is posing yet another problem for President Emmanuel Macron’s government as he marks one year in office. The airline’s labor dispute come as separate strikes over Macron’s labor reforms are hitting France’s national railways.
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire on Sunday said the government, which owns 14 percent of Air France, would not rescue the airline.
He urged striking pilots, crew and ground staff to be “responsible” and said “the survival of Air France is at stake.”
“Air France will disappear if it does not make the necessary efforts to be competitive,” he said on BFM television.
The strikes have taken a heavier toll on Air France than management and investors expected, and the company last week forecast a “notably” lower income this year compared to 2017.
Unions want a 5.1 percent pay rise this year, arguing that the company is making enough of a profit to meet their demands. They noted that their wages have been frozen since 2011 as the airline cut jobs and restructured.
The company argues that the union demands would wipe out hard-earned gains from the restructuring, which was aimed at stemming years of losses and keeping Air France afloat, as well as jeopardize efforts to win back market share from low-cost airlines and big-spending Mideast and Asian carriers.
After protracted negotiations, management last week offered a 2 percent pay rise this year and an additional 5 percent over 2019-2021.
Employees rejected that offer Friday, prompting the CEO’s decision to step down. He called the dispute a “huge waste that can only make our competitors rejoice.”
The Air France-KLM board asked Janaillac to stay on until May 15 when it will put a transitional leadership in place.
A new invention is a result of a joint effort by artists and scientists. Computerized art robots can memorize artist’s strokes and effects and reproduce them as needed. They can perform at the artist’s direction, cover large surfaces and make precision painting easier and quicker. Old masters often used their students to help paint a large canvas and ease the tediousness of repetitive strokes. As VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports, that work too can now be taken over by robots.
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Globally, more cases of cancer are reported in men than in women. A recent study in India reveals that the reverse is true there. Published in the medical journal Lancet, the study reports that Indian women not only have a higher rate of cancer, they are also afflicted by it at a younger age compared with their counterparts in developed Western countries. Ritul Joshi reports from New Delhi.
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The first railroad appeared in the United States back in 1828. Located entirely in the state of Maryland, it was only 25 kilometers long. Today, American trains look very different — modern, fast and comfortable. VOA’s Maxim Moskalkov follows the evolution of rail travel in the U.S.
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An innovative consumer awareness campaign will be launched this summer in several cities in the United States. The campaign is aimed at preventing the waste of food that costs the world billions of dollars and has severe consequences on global food security and the environment. Verónica Balderas Iglesias spoke with experts.
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Digital civil rights groups are writing to Congress next week to ask for help persuading internet giants Google and Amazon to reverse decisions they made that will make it harder for people to get around censorship controls worldwide.
At issue is the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between governments, such as Russia, Iran and China, and internet and messaging communications technology like Telegram and Signal, which are used to communicate outside of censors’ oversight.
In this case, encrypted messaging apps, such as Telegram and Signal, have been using a digital disguise known as “domain fronting.”
Disguising the final destination
As the encrypted message moves through networks, it appears to be going to an innocuous destination, such as google.com by routing through a Google server, rather than its true destination.
If a government acts against the domain google.com, it conceivably shuts down access to all services offered by the internet giant for everyone in the country.
Russia crackdown
Russia did just that in mid-April when it sought to crack down on Telegram.
But hackers can also use this disguise to mask malware, according to ZDNet.
In recent weeks, first Google and then Amazon Web Services said they would close the loopholes that allowed apps to use the disguise.
“No customer ever wants to find that someone else is masquerading as their innocent, ordinary domain,” said Amazon in a press release announcing better domain protections. Neither Google or Amazon responded for a request to comment.
Companies vote against being a disguise
Matthew Rosenfield, a co-author of the Signal protocol, said that “the idea behind domain fronting was that to block a single site, you’d have to block the rest of the internet as well. In the end, the rest of the internet didn’t like that plan.”
Amazon sent Signal an email telling it that its use of circumvention was against Amazon’s terms of service. In Middle East countries, such as Egypt, Oman and Qatar, Signal disguised itself as Souq.com, Amazon’s Arabic e-commerce platform.
Letter to Congress
The letter being sent to Congress will remind members of their stated support for encrypted communication tools and call on them to contact the technology giants to change their decision, according to sources.
Access Now, a digital-rights organization based in New York, identified about a dozen “human rights enabling technologies” that rely on domain fronting using Google.
Peter Micek, general counsel of Access Now, said in a statement that Google and Amazon have an obligation “to meet their human rights responsibilities and protect users at risk.”
“The market leaders that have the resources to fight for human rights must be just that — leaders,” he said.
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The U.S. and China ended the second day of high level talks Friday aimed at avoiding a possible trade war.
The U.S. delegation, headed by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, will brief President Donald Trump Saturday and “seek his decision on next steps,” the White House said in a statement, adding that the administration had “consensus” for “immediate attention” to change the U.S.-China trade and investment relationship.
“We will be meeting tomorrow to determine the results, but it is hard for China in that they have become very spoiled with U.S. trade wins!” Trump said in a Twitter post late Friday.
“Both sides recognize there are still big differences on some issues and that they need to continue to step up their work to make progress,” China said in a statement released by Xinhua state news agency.
An editorial Saturday by China’s ruling Communist Party newspaper, the People’s Daily, however, said that “in the face of the U.S.’s fierce offensive of protectionism, China resolutely defends its national interest,” adding that Beijing “will never trade away its core interests and rejects the U.S.’s demand for an exorbitant price.”
The announcement followed comments by Mnuchin earlier in the day that the two sides were having “very good conversations.”
Trump has threatened to levy new tariffs on $150 billion of Chinese imports while Beijing shot back with a list of $50 billion in targeted U.S. goods.
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A powerful Atlas 5 rocket was poised for liftoff early Saturday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, carrying to Mars the first robotic NASA lander designed entirely for exploring the deep interior of the red planet.
The Mars InSight probe was scheduled to blast off from the central California coast at 4:05 a.m. PDT (1105 GMT), creating a luminous predawn spectacle of the first U.S. interplanetary spacecraft to be launched over the Pacific.
The lander will be carried aloft for NASA and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) atop a two-stage, 19-story Atlas 5 rocket from the fleet of United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co.
The payload will be released about 90 minutes after launch on a 301-million-mile (484 million km) flight to Mars. It is scheduled to reach its destination in six months, landing on a broad, smooth plain close to the planet’s equator called the Elysium Planitia.
InSight’s mission
That will put InSight roughly 373 miles (600 km) from the 2012 landing site of the car-sized Mars rover Curiosity. The new 800-pound (360-kg) spacecraft marks the 21st U.S.-launched Martian exploration, dating to the Mariner fly-by missions of the 1960s. Nearly two dozen other Mars missions have been launched by other nations.
Once settled, the solar-powered InSight will spend two years, about one Martian year, plumbing the depths of the planet’s interior for clues to how Mars took form and, by extension, the origins of the Earth and other rocky planets.
Measuring marsquakes
InSight’s primary instrument is a French-built seismometer, designed to detect the slightest vibrations from “marsquakes” around the planet. The device, to be placed on the surface by the lander’s robot arm, is so sensitive it can measure a seismic wave just one-half the radius of a hydrogen atom.
Scientists expect to see a dozen to 100 marsquakes over the course of the mission, producing data to help them deduce the depth, density and composition of the planet’s core, the rocky mantle surrounding it and the outermost layer, the crust.
The Viking probes of the mid-1970s were equipped with seismometers, too, but they were bolted to the top of the landers, a design that proved largely ineffective.
Apollo missions to the moon brought seismometers to the lunar surface as well, detecting thousands of moonquakes and meteorite impacts. But InSight is expected to yield the first meaningful data on planetary seismic tremors beyond Earth.
Insight also will be fitted with a German-made drill to burrow as much as 16 feet (5 meters) underground, pulling behind it a rope-like thermal probe to measure heat flowing from inside the planet.
Meanwhile, a special transmitter on the lander will send radio signals back to Earth, tracking Mars’ subtle rotational wobble to reveal the size of the planet’s core and possibly whether it remains molten.
Hitching a ride aboard the same rocket that launches InSight will be a pair of miniature satellites called CubeSats, which will fly to Mars on their own paths behind the lander in a first deep-space test of that technology.
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Peanuts are the most common cause of fatal food-induced anaphylaxis, or severe allergic reaction. But British scientists have found a better way to monitor a significant food hazard by developing a more accurate blood test, and it’s five times cheaper than the existing one. VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports.
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Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and heavy rains can cause large amounts of rock and soil to collapse under their own weight and tumble down a slope. These landslides can crush everything in their path. Aided by sophisticated satellites, scientists are creating a comprehensive catalogue of landslide-prone areas, hoping it will help affected communities predict when and where they might happen. VOA’s George Putic has more.
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President Trump reveled in the 3.9 percent U.S. unemployment rate Friday, following the release of figures by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But some say that these numbers don’t tell the whole story. From Washington, VOA’s Jill Craig has more.
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The Trump administration has drawn a hard line in trade talks with China, demanding a $200 billion cut in the Chinese trade surplus with the United States, sharply lower tariffs and advanced technology subsidies, people familiar with the talks said Friday.
The lengthy list of demands was presented to Beijing before the start of talks Thursday and Friday between top-level Trump administration officials and their Chinese counterparts to try to avert a damaging trade war between the world’s two largest economies.
A White House statement did not mention specific demands, but said the U.S. delegation “held frank discussions with Chinese officials on rebalancing the United States-China bilateral economic relationship, improving China’s protection of intellectual property, and identifying policies that unfairly enforce technology transfers.”
The statement gave no indication that U.S. President Donald Trump would back off on his threat to impose tariffs on up to $150 billion in Chinese goods over allegations of intellectual property theft.
Trump, delegation to meet Saturday
The delegation was returning to Washington to brief Trump and “seek his decision on next steps,” the White House said, adding that the administration had “consensus” for “immediate attention” to change the U.S-China trade and investment relationship.
Trump said he would meet with the delegation Saturday.
China’s state-run Xinhua news agency described the talks as “constructive, candid and efficient” but with disagreements that remain “relatively big.”
Tariff threats have roiled stock markets in recent weeks, but the inconclusive outcome of the Beijing talks did little to stop a rally in U.S. shares prompted by jobs data that eased fears of faster Federal Reserve rate hikes. Stocks in Shanghai ended 0.5 percent lower while they fell 1.3 percent in Hong Kong.
Trump told reporters in Washington that he was determined to bring fairness to U.S.-China trade.
“We will be doing something one way or the other with respect to what’s happening in China,” Trump said. He added that he had “great respect” for China’s President Xi Jinping. “That’s why we’re being so nice, because we have a great relationship.”
Intellectual property
China during the meetings asked that the United States ease crushing sanctions on Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE Corp, people with knowledge of the matter said.
Washington’s demand for a $200 billion cut from China’s U.S. goods trade surplus doubles Trump’s previous request for a $100 billion cut. China had a record U.S. goods trade surplus of $375 billion in 2017.
Trump has also demanded “reciprocity” between U.S. and Chinese tariffs, frequently complaining about China’s 25 percent car tariff while the U.S. equivalent is 2.5 percent.
The U.S. team, led by U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, demanded that China lower tariffs to levels no higher than those imposed by the United States, two people familiar with the demands said. The delegation also asked China to halt subsidies for advanced technology linked to its “Made in China 2025,” the sources said.
At the heart of the dispute are U.S. allegations that Chinese joint venture requirements and other policies force American companies to turn over their intellectual property, costing them billions of dollars annually and giving China’s state enterprises an edge in the race to develop new industries crucial to future growth.
China denies such coercion. Its 2025 industrial plan seeks to upgrade China’s manufacturing sector to more advanced products, including information technology, semiconductors and aircraft.
“I think the U.S. is asking for the impossible. Reducing the deficit by $200 billion by 2020 is quite an unrealistic demand, but it may also be a negotiation tactic to start high first,” said Tommy Xie, economist at OCBC Bank in Singapore.
Beijing offers
China offered to increase U.S. imports and lower tariffs on some goods, including cars, according to the sources.
But Beijing asked the United States to treat Chinese investment equally under national security reviews, refrain from new restrictions on investments and halt a proposal to impose 25 percent tariffs under its “Section 301” intellectual property probe.
China also offered to reconsider anti-dumping duties on U.S. sorghum, according to a proposal it submitted.
Xinhua said there had been exchanges of opinion on intellectual property protections, expanding U.S. exports and bilateral services trade. It gave no indication of what actions might be taken but said the two sides committed to resolve their trade disputes through dialogue.
U.S. negotiators agreed to bring up the ZTE sanctions with Trump after new representations from the Chinese side, Xinhua said. ZTE was hit last month with a seven-year ban on American companies’ selling components and software to it after the U.S. Commerce Department found ZTE failed to comply with an agreement to settle breached U.S. sanctions on Iran.
“My impression was that (the talks) didn’t go well given the rhetoric,” said Kevin Lai, senior economist at Daiwa Capital markets in Hong Kong. “I think the divide is still very big.”
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A small amount of radioactive, weapons-grade plutonium about the size of a U.S. quarter is missing from an Idaho university that was using it for research, leading federal officials on Friday to propose an $8,500 fine.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Idaho State University can’t account for about a 30th of an ounce (1 gram) of the material that’s used in nuclear reactors and to make nuclear bombs.
The amount is too small to make a nuclear bomb, agency spokesman Victor Dricks said, but could be used to make a dirty bomb to spread radioactive contamination.
“The NRC has very rigorous controls for the use and storage of radioactive materials as evidenced by this enforcement action,” he said of the proposed fine for failing to keep track of the material.
Dr. Cornelis Van der Schyf, vice president for research at the university, blamed partially completed paperwork from 15 years ago as the school tried to dispose of the plutonium.
“Unfortunately, because there was a lack of sufficient historical records to demonstrate the disposal pathway employed in 2003, the source in question had to be listed as missing,” he said in a statement to The Associated Press. “The radioactive source in question poses no direct health issue or risk to public safety.”
Idaho State University has a nuclear engineering program and works with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, considered the nation’s primary nuclear research lab and located about 65 miles (105 kilometers) northwest of the school.
The plutonium was being used to develop ways to ensure nuclear waste containers weren’t leaking and to find ways to detect radioactive material being illegally brought into the U.S. following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the school said in an email to the AP.
The university, which has 30 days to dispute the proposed fine, reported the plutonium missing on Oct. 13, according to documents released by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The agency said a school employee doing a routine inventory discovered the university could only account for 13 of its 14 plutonium sources, each weighing about the same small amount.
The school searched documents and found records from 2003 and 2004 saying the material was on campus and awaiting disposal. However, there were no documents saying the plutonium had been properly disposed.
The last document mentioning the plutonium is dated Nov. 23, 2003. It said the Idaho National Laboratory didn’t want the plutonium and the school’s technical safety office had it “pending disposal of the next waste shipment.”
The school also reviewed documents on waste barrels there and others transferred off campus since 2003, and opened and examined some of them. Finally, officials searched the campus but didn’t find the plutonium.
The nuclear commission said senior university officials planned to return the school’s remaining plutonium to the Energy Department. It’s not clear if that has happened.
Energy Department officials didn’t return calls seeking comment Friday.
Dricks, the commission spokesman, said returning the plutonium was part of the school’s plan to reduce its inventory of radioactive material.
He said overall it has “a good record with the NRC.”
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The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and Peoples Bank of China (PBoC) have agreed on a currency swap worth $2.5 billion to reduce their reliance on the U.S. dollar in bilateral trade.
CBN Governor Godwin Emefiele led Nigerian officials, while the PBoC governor, Yi Gang, led the Chinese team to the signing ceremony in Beijing last week.
The agreement is aimed at providing sufficient local currency liquidity for Nigerian and Chinese industrialists and other businesses and to reduce difficulties as they search for a third currency.
The deal, purely an exchange of currencies, also will make it easier for Chinese manufacturers seeking to buy raw materials from Nigeria to obtain naira, the Nigerian currency, from Chinese banks to pay for their imports.
According to Nigerian economist Yusha’u Aminu, excluding United States in the agreement would help to lower the exchange rates between both countries.
This report originated in VOA’s Hausa service.
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The Kilauea volcano sent more lava into Hawaii communities Friday, a day after forcing more than 1,500 people to flee from their mountainside homes, and authorities detected high levels of sulfur gas that could threaten the elderly and people with breathing problems.
After a week of earthquakes and warnings, the eruption that began Thursday threw lava into the sky from a crack in a road and sent another line of molten rock snaking through a forest. On Friday, the activity continued, with reports of lava spurting from volcanic vents on two streets. Areas downhill from the vents were at risk of being covered up.
The community of Leilani Estates near the town of Pahoa on the Big Island appeared to be in the greatest danger. Authorities also ordered an evacuation of Lanipuna Gardens, a smaller, more rural subdivision directly to the east. But scientists said new vents could form, and it was impossible to know where.
Civil defense officials cautioned the public about high levels of sulfur dioxide near the volcano and urged vulnerable people to leave immediately. Exposure to the gas can cause irritation or burns, sore throats, runny noses, burning eyes and coughing.
Maija Stenback began to get nervous when she noticed cracks in the streets near her home. On Thursday, she shot video of the lava as it bubbled and splattered across a street about six blocks from her house.
“You can feel it all the way into the core of your being,” she said. “It’s just that roaring and unbelievable power of the lava bubbling up and spitting up into the air.”
Stenback, her daughter and grandchildren packed as much as they could into their car. The two kids were each allowed to select three toys to take before the family left for a friend’s home about a 30-minute drive away.
“I have lived through a lot of lava flows here, but never this close before,” Stenback said.
There were no immediate reports of injuries, but at least 100 people were staying in shelters Friday, with many more evacuees believed to be with relatives and friends.
The Hawaii governor activated the National Guard to help with evacuations and provide security to about 770 structures in Leilani Estates and 130 lots in Lanipuna Gardens left empty when residents sought shelter.
Kilauea has erupted periodically for decades, and scientists said they have no way of predicting how long the eruption will continue.
A key factor will be whether a magma reservoir at the summit starts to drain in response to the eruption, which has not happened yet, said Asta Miklius, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory.
“There is quite a bit of magma in the system. It won’t be just an hours-long eruption probably, but how long it will last will depend on whether the summit magma reservoir gets involved. And so we are watching that very, very closely,” Miklius said.
County, state and federal officials had been warning residents all week that they should be prepared to evacuate because an eruption would give little warning.
The geological survey on Thursday raised the volcano’s alert level to warning status, the highest possible, meaning a hazardous eruption was imminent, underway or expected.
Henry Calio said the first sign that something might be wrong happened when cracks emerged in the driveway of his home in Leilani Estates. His wife, Stella, then received a call from an official who told them to get out immediately.
The two feared they might lose their house.
“This is our retirement dream,” Henry Calio said.
Kilauea’s Puu Oo crater floor began to collapse Monday, triggering the earthquakes and pushing the lava into new underground chambers. The collapse caused magma to push more than 10 miles (16 kilometers) downslope toward the populated southeast coastline of the island.
The magma later crossed under Highway 130, which leads to a popular volcano access point. Civil defense authorities closed the area to visitors and ordered private tour companies to stop taking people into the region.
Over the decades, most of Kilauea’s activity has been nonexplosive, but a 1924 eruption spewed ash and 10-ton (9-metric ton) rocks into the sky and killed one person.
A 1983 eruption resulted in lava fountains soaring over 1,500 feet (457 meters) into the sky. Since then, the lava flow has buried dozens of square miles of land and destroyed many homes.
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Tesla Inc Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk acknowledged on Friday that it was “foolish” of him to snub analysts on a conference call earlier in the week, but further needled Wall Street with a series of accusatory tweets.
In a post-earnings call on Wednesday, Musk refused to answer questions from analysts on the electric vehicle maker’s capital requirements, saying “boring, bonehead questions are not cool,” before turning questions over to a little known investor who runs HyperChange, a YouTube investment channel.
The outspoken performance shocked many analysts, sparked a fall in Tesla’s share price and led some to question whether Musk’s behavior could risk the company’s ability to raise capital.
In early-morning tweets on Friday, Musk said the two analysts he cut off — RBC Capital Markets’ Joseph Spak and Bernstein’s Toni Sacconaghi — “were trying to justify their Tesla short thesis.”
‘Shorting’ means they were betting the stock would fall, but the two have ‘hold’ or ‘neutral’ ratings on the stock, according to Thomson Reuters data. “I should have answered their questions live. It was foolish of me to ignore them,” Musk tweeted.
The two analysts were not immediately available for a comment.
The spat comes at a crunch time for Tesla, when it is struggling to ramp up production of its Model 3 sedan, on which its profitability depends. It is trying to build 5,000 of the vehicles per week by the end of June and overcome manufacturing hurdles that have delayed its rollout.
Although Musk has insisted the company neither needs nor wants new funding, many believe the company will seek to raise more capital by the end of 2018.
Tesla’s stock recovered a little on Friday, up 2.4 percent at $291 in early afternoon trade. But short sellers, who shorted nearly 400,000 shares on Thursday, doubled that amount on Friday, according to financial analytics firm S3 Partners.
“Musk’s meltdown will change Tesla’s ability to raise capital when he needs it with a sector of investors,” said Eric Schiffer, chief executive of the Patriarch Organization, a Los Angeles-based private-equity firm.
“At this critical point, he needs to reinforce confidence, not raise a narrative of him as unstable and whose rational side is lost in space,” said Schiffer, who does not hold Tesla shares.
Jefferies analyst Philippe Houchois said the underlying business fundamentals were more important in any capital raise, although “management credibility” was also a factor.
“That has an impact but it’s not something that will prevent them from raising capital,” Houchois said.
Nord LB analyst Frank Schwope said that Musk’s refusal to answer questions or receive criticism was “not very clever” but added that his ability to find new money was still intact.
‘Dry’ questions
The questions Musk cut short on Wednesday related to Model 3 reservations and capital requirements.
“The ‘dry’ questions were not asked by investors, but rather by two sell-side analysts who were trying to justify their Tesla short thesis. They are actually on the opposite side of investors,” Musk tweeted on Friday.
“HyperChange represented actual investors, so I switched to them,” he wrote. On the call, he devoted 23 minutes to 25-year-old Tesla investor, Galileo Russell, who runs HyperChange TV.
At least three brokerages cut price targets on the stock following the call.
Sacconaghi, one of the rebuffed analysts, wrote: “We do worry that such theatrics will unnecessarily undermine investor confidence in Tesla’s outlook.”
Sacconaghi has a price target of $265 on Tesla’s stock and Spak lowered his target to $280 from $305 on Thursday. Tesla’s median Wall Street price target is $317.
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Google said Friday in a blog post that it would do a better job of verifying the identity of political ad buyers in the U.S. by requiring a government-issued ID and other key information.
Google will also require ad buyers to disclose who is paying for the ad. Google executive Kent Walker repeated a pledge he made in November to create a library of such ads that will be searchable by anyone. The goal is to have this ready this summer.
Google’s blog post comes short of declaring support for the Honest Ads Act, a bill that would impose disclosure requirements on online ads, similar to what’s required for television and other media. Facebook and Twitter support that bill.
Google didn’t immediately provide details on how the ID verification would work for online ad buys.
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Adults and children should consume a maximum of 10 percent of their daily calories in the form of saturated fat such as meat and butter and one percent from trans fats to reduce the risk of heart disease, the World Health Organization said Friday.
The draft recommendations, the first since 2002, are aimed at reducing non-communicable diseases, led by cardiovascular diseases, blamed for 72 percent of the 54.7 million estimated deaths worldwide every year, many before the age of 70.
“Dietary saturated fatty acids and trans-fatty acids are of particular concern because high levels of intake are correlated with increased risk of cardiovascular diseases,” Dr. Francesco Branca, Director of WHO’s Department of Nutrition for Health and Development, told reporters.
The dietary recommendations are based on scientific evidence developed in the last 15 years, he added.
The United Nations agency has invited public comments until June 1 on the recommendations, which it expects to finalize by year-end.
Saturated fat is found in foods from animal sources such as butter, cow’s milk, meat, salmon and egg yolks, and in some plant-derived products such as chocolate, cocoa butter, coconut, palm and palm kernel oils.
An active adult needs about 2,500 calories per day, Branca said.
“So we are talking about 250 calories coming from saturated fat and that is approximately a bit less than 30 grams of saturated fat,” he said.
That amount of fat could be found in 50 grams (1.76 oz) of butter, 130-150 grams of cheese with 30 percent fat, a liter of full fat milk, or 50 grams of palm oil, he said.
Trans fats
Trans fats occur naturally in meat and dairy products. But the predominant source is industrially-produced and contained in baked and fried foods such as fries and doughnuts, snacks, and partially hydrogenated cooking oils and fats often used by restaurants and street vendors.
In explicit new advice, WHO said that excessive amounts of saturated fat and trans fat should be replaced by polyunsaturated fats, such as fish, canola and olive oils.
“Reduced intake of saturated fatty acids have been associated with a significant reduction in risk of coronary heart disease when replaced with polyunsaturated fatty acids or carbohydrates from whole grains,” it said.
Total fat consumption should not exceed 30 percent of total energy intake to avoid unhealthy weight gain, it added.
The recommendations complement other WHO guidelines including limiting intake of free sugars and sodium.
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NASA’s next Mars explorer is going to have company all the way to the red planet: a couple of puny yet groundbreaking sidekicks.
Named after the characters in the 2008 animated movie, the small satellites WALL-E and EVE are hitching a ride on the Atlas V rocket set to launch early Saturday morning from California with the Mars InSight lander.
Similar in size to a briefcase or large cereal box, the satellites with pop out from the rocket’s upper stage following liftoff and hightail it to Mars, right behind InSight.
It will be the first time little cube-shaped satellites, CubeSats as they’re known, set sail for deep space. The journey will span 6 1/2 months and 300 million miles (485 million kilometers).
A brief look at the $18.5 million experiment tagging along with InSight:
Mini sats
Miniature satellites, or CubeSats, have been piggybacking on big-ticket space missions for well over a decade, providing relatively cheap and fast access to orbit for students and other out-of-the-mainstream experimenters. Until now, the hundreds of CubeSats have been confined to Earth orbit. That’s about to change with NASA’s Mars Cube One project, or MarCO.
The European Space Agency, meanwhile, has its CubeSat sights on the moon. A recent competition yielded two winning proposals: a CubeSat to explore the moon’s far side from lunar orbit, another to probe a permanently shadowed crater near the moon’s south pole, also from lunar orbit. NASA is also looking to send CubeSats to the moon, as well as an asteroid.
Movie connection
It turns out that these twin cubes are equipped with the same type of cold gas propulsion system used in fire extinguishers to spray foam. The movie WALL-E uses a fire extinguisher to propel through space. Team members couldn’t resist the connection, thus the names WALL-E and EVE for the two mini spacecraft. Engineers want to test this compact propulsion system for guiding the 30-pound (13.6-kilogram) cubes to Mars.
Getting to Mars
Once free from the rocket’s upper stage following liftoff, WALL-E and EVE will trail a few thousand miles (kilometers) behind InSight en route to Mars. The two mini spacecraft will also be a few thousand miles (kilometers) apart from one another. That’s to prevent any collisions or even close calls. While that may seem far apart, it’s actually fairly close by space standards, according to Brian Clement, an engineer on the project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
While InSight will be stopping at Mars on November 26, WALL-E and EVE will zoom past the planet from about 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) out. Don’t expect any Thunderbird pilot-theatrics as the cubes fly by, like a tilting of the solar wings in salute. “That would make a great movie, but that’s definitely not the way we’re going to do it,” Clement said.
Extra ears
Besides testing the cubes’ maneuvering system, NASA wants to see if WALL-E and EVE can transmit data to Earth from InSight during its descent to Mars. If the experiment succeeds, it should take just several minutes for flight controllers to hear from the cubes. No worries if they’re silent. NASA will rely on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter already circling the planet as the main communication link with InSight during descent and touchdown. It will take a lot longer, though, to get confirmation. The beauty of a CubeSat relay system is that it could provide descent information at planets and other cosmic stop-offs lacking established communications.
Post-Mars
Once past Mars, WALL-E and EVE will remain in an elliptical orbit around the sun, together for years to come. But they won’t work for long. Once they run out of fuel, they won’t be able to point their solar wings toward the sun for recharging.
The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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U.S. employers stepped up hiring modestly in April, and the unemployment rate fell to 3.9 percent, evidence of the economy’s resilience amid the recent stock market chaos and anxieties about a possible trade war.
Job growth amounted to a decent 164,000 last month, up from an upwardly revised 135,000 in March. The unemployment rate fell after having held at 4.1 percent for the prior six months largely because fewer people were searching for jobs.
The overall unemployment rate is now the lowest since December 2000. The rate for African-Americans — 6.6 percent — is the lowest on record since 1972.
Many employers say it’s difficult to find qualified workers. But they have yet to significantly bump up pay in most industries. Average hourly earnings rose 2.6 percent from a year ago.
WATCH: US Unemployment Rate 3.9 Percent, Lowest Since 2000
The pace of hiring has yet to be disrupted by dramatic global market swings, a recent pickup in inflation and the risk that the tariffs being pushed by President Donald Trump could provoke a trade war.
Much of the economy’s strength, for the moment, comes from the healthy job market. The increase in people earning paychecks has bolstered demand for housing, even though fewer properties are being listed for sale. Consumer confidence has improved over the past year. And more people are shopping, with retail sales having picked up in March after three monthly declines.
Workers in the private sector during the first three months of 2018 enjoyed their sharpest average income growth in 11 years, the Labor Department said last week in a separate report on compensation. That pay growth suggests that some of the momentum from the slow but steady recovery from the 2008 financial crisis is spreading to more people after it had disproportionately benefited the nation’s wealthiest areas and highest earners.
The monthly jobs reports have shown pay raises inching up. At the same time, employers have become less and less likely to shed workers. The four-week moving average for people applying for first-time unemployment benefits has reached its lowest level since 1973.
The trend reflects a decline in mass layoffs. Many companies expect the economy to keep expanding, especially after a dose of stimulus from tax cuts signed into law by Trump that have also increased the federal budget deficit.
Inflation has shown signs of accelerating slightly, eroding some of the potential wage growth. Consumer prices rose at a year-over-year pace of 2.4 percent in March, the sharpest annual increase in 12 months. The Federal Reserve has an annual inflation target of 2 percent, and investors expect the Fed to raise rates at least twice more this year, after an earlier rate hike in March, to keep inflation from climbing too far above that target.
The home market, a critical component of the U.S. economy, has been a beneficiary of the steady job growth. The National Association of Realtors said that homes sold at a solid annual pace of 5.6 million in March, even though the number of houses for sale has plunged. As a result, average home prices are rising at more than twice the pace of wages.
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Each morning, in a small Bangladeshi kitchen on the edge of the world’s largest refugee camp, a group of cooks stir rice, lentils, spices, and vitamin powder in steaming cauldrons to serve to thousands of hungry Rohingya refugees.
More than 700,000 ethnic Rohingya Muslims arrived in Bangladesh last year from neighboring Myanmar, escaping what the United Nations has called ethnic cleansing by Myanmar’s army, an allegation Myanmar denies.
Upon arrival in Bangladesh, many of the refugees were destitute, starving after fleeing army attacks on their villages.
But nearly nine months later, hunger persists for the Rohingya in Bangladesh, even though aid groups hold regular food distributions.
As a result, many families depend on the hot meals handed out at this kitchen by the Action Against Hunger aid group in the town of Ukhiya. The group also provides biscuits to children to take home after their meal to further supplement their diets.
One regular visitor to the kitchen is Abdu Sobee, who says he comes almost every day with his brother’s children.
“I need money to buy fish, vegetables, and chili to cook,” he explains, while his two nieces scoop handfuls of yellow rice into their mouths. “I don’t have this. Where will I get it? So I brought my children here because they give food for free.”
Despite the free lunches, not everyone is able to stay healthy.
In the camps, one-fifth of Rohingya children younger than 5 are malnourished, with 12 percent suffering from severe stunting as a result of their hunger, according to Action Against Hunger.
Next to the busy kitchen, the aid group operates a clinic to treat stricken children.
Currently, there are 120 children enrolled at the clinic with severe acute malnutrition, the affliction’s worst form, said Dr. Jashim Uddin Akon, who runs the Ukhiya clinic. A total of 5,000 Rohingya children are receiving treatment for severe malnutrition at 15 clinics across the camps.
During VOA’s visit, a refugee named Roshida brought her 6-month-old daughter to the doctors. The skin on the child’s arms was loose; her head lolling on a thin neck.
“She was breastfeeding for two months, and now I cannot produce enough milk, so she became malnourished,” Roshida told VOA.
A clinician measured the baby’s upper arm and determined she was a severe case. They immediately started treatment, spoon-feeding the child a high energy peanut paste mixed with water.
The baby may recover after a few weeks of this daily treatment, but the deeper problem is that Roshida herself is not fully healthy.
“I cannot produce milk because I cannot eat well,” Roshida said. “I only depend on handouts of rice. If I only eat the handouts, how will I produce milk?”
Roshida says the major issue is that she has no money to buy extra food to supplement the basic diet provided by aid groups. Her husband has a job in the refugee camp, but isn’t paid for his work. Bangladesh’s government prohibits Rohingya refugees from paid employment.
“My husband is an Islamic teacher. He’s taught for free for three months,” she said. “That’s no money.”
Recently, the World Food Program launched an initiative to close this gap. WFP’s basic food distributions include only rice, lentils and oil — hardly a balanced diet.
To fix this, WFP now gives vouchers to refugee families, which they can redeem in local markets for up to 19 different food items, including fresh vegetables, chilies, eggs, and fish, in addition to the staple rice and lentils.
Still, many refugees haven’t received the vouchers yet. With no work, another option would be to return to Myanmar, where Rohingya once had enough food. But Roshida says this is impossible.
“I’m not going back, because if we return, they will give us trouble again. We need to get our rights first. We are here in Bangladesh for justice. If we don’t get it, why will we go back?”
The past violence in Myanmar affects the nutrition of babies in another way: Mothers who suffer mental trauma from last year’s attacks struggle to properly care for their children, Akon said.
“They are not psychologically well. They have trauma. They lost their house. They lost their country. They lost their relatives,” he said. “When a mother is psychologically affected, the mothers don’t give proper caring to the babies.”
For Rohingya mothers, keeping their children well fed requires more than food handouts.
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