The exotic Tasmanian tiger once roamed Australia and New Guinea. It looked like a cross between a tiger and a dog, and is believed to have become extinct in the wild in the 20th century. The last one died in a zoo in the 1930’s. Using preserved Tasmanian tigers, Australian scientists did 3D scans of the animal, which they hope will explain why it evolved to look so much like a canine. VOA’s Deborah Block has more.
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On the same day Facebook bought ads in U.S. and British newspapers to apologize for the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the social media site faced new questions about collecting phone numbers and text messages from Android devices.
The website Ars Technica reported that users who checked data gathered by Facebook on them found that it had years of contact names, telephone numbers, call lengths and text messages.
Facebook said Sunday the information is uploaded to secure servers and comes only from Android users who opt-in to allow it. Spokeswomen say the data is not sold or shared with users’ friends or outside apps. They say the data is used “to improve people’s experience across Facebook” by helping to connect with others.
The company also says in a website posting that it does not collect the content of text messages or calls. A spokeswoman told the Associated Press that Facebook uses the information to rank contacts in Messenger so they are easier to find, and to suggest people to call.
Users get the option to allow data collection when they sign up for Messenger or Facebook Lite, the Facebook posting said. “If you chose to turn this feature on, we will begin to continuously log this information,” the posting said.
The data collection can be turned off in a user’s settings, and all previously collected call and text history shared on the app will be deleted, Facebook said.
The feature was first introduced on Facebook Messenger in 2015 and added later on Facebook Lite.
Messages were left Sunday seeking comment about security from Google officials, who make the Android operating system.
Reports of the data collection came as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took out ads in multiple U.S. and British Sunday newspapers to apologize for the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The ads say the social media platform doesn’t deserve to hold personal information if it can’t protect it.
According to the ads, a quiz app built by a Cambridge University researcher leaked Facebook data of millions of people four years ago. Zuckerberg said this was a “breach of trust” and that Facebook is taking steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Facebook’s privacy practices have come under fire after Cambridge Analytica, a Trump-affiliated political consulting firm, got data inappropriately. The social media platform’s stock value has dropped over $70 billion since the revelations were first published.
Among the newspapers with the ads were The New York Times and The Washington Post in the U.S., and The Sunday Times and The Sunday Telegraph in the United Kingdom.
The ads said Facebook is limiting the data apps received when users sign in. It’s also investigating every app that had access to large amounts of data. “We expect there are others. And when we find them, we will ban them and tell everyone affected,” the ads stated.
Cambridge Analytica got the data from a researcher who paid 270,000 Facebook users to complete a psychological profile quiz back in 2014. But the quiz gathered information on their friends as well, bringing the total number of people affected to about 50 million.
The Trump campaign paid the firm $6 million during the 2016 election, although it has since distanced itself from Cambridge.
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A senior Chinese official is warning that a trade war would hurt all sides and set off a “greater conflict.”
“A trade war serves the interests of none. It will only lead to serious consequences and negative impact,” Vice Premier Han Zheng said at a development forum in Beijing Sunday. “We believe trade protectionism, against the trend, will lead to nowhere.”
Han did not mention the United States or President Donald Trump by name, whose announcement of stiff tariffs on imported Chinese steel and aluminum was answered with tariffs and duties on a list of U.S. imports.
Han appealed to all global trading partners to “cooperate with each other like passengers in the same boat … make economic globalization more open, inclusive, balanced and beneficial for all.”
Fears of a trade war between the world’s two largest economies have sent world markets tumbling.
The United States has accused China of unfair trade practices, including intellectual property theft and dumping Chinese goods on the global marketplace to make U.S. goods appear more expensive.
China has denied the U.S. charges, and Vice Premier Liu He told U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in a telephone call Saturday that China is ready to defend its interests.
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Facebook co-founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg apologized Sunday in full-page ads in nine major British and U.S. newspapers for the massive “breach of trust” at the social media giant that revealed personal information of millions of Facebook users.
Zuckerberg did not mention the British firm accused of using the data, the voter profiling company Cambridge Analytica that obtained the cache of information from British researcher Alexsandr Kogan, who had been authorized by Facebook to collect the data as part of an academic study.
Cambridge Analytica was paid $6 million by President Donald Trump’s successful 2016 presidential campaign for the White House to develop voter profiles.
Zuckerberg said in the ads, “This was a breach of trust, and I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time” when Kogan developed an app on which 270,000 Facebook users supplied information about themselves. “We’re now taking steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
In all, because of extensive links of friends and associates to the 270,000 Facebook users, 50 million Facebook users may have had their personal data compromised.
“We have a responsibility to protect your information,” Zuckerberg said. “If we can’t, we don’t deserve it.”
The ads ran in six British national newspapers, including the best-selling Mail, The Sunday Times and The Observer, along with The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal in the U.S.
Zuckerberg said Facebook, with 2.2 billion users worldwide, is also investigating “every single app that had access to large amounts of data before we fixed this. We expect there are others. And when we find them, we will ban them and tell everyone affected.”
A new Reuters-Ipsos poll in the U.S. released Sunday showed that 41 percent of Americans trust Facebook to obey laws that protect their personal information, compared to 66 percent of trust in Amazon; 62 percent in Google; 60 percent in Microsoft and 47 percent in Yahoo.
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Scientists are monitoring a defunct Chinese space station that is expected to fall to Earth around the end of the month, the largest manmade object to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere in a decade.
The head of the European Space Agency’s debris office, Holger Krag, says China’s Tiangong-1 space station will likely fall to Earth between March 30 and April 3.
Krag said it still not yet known where the space station will hit Earth, but said it would be extremely unlikely for anyone to be injured when it does.
Injury unlikely
“Our experience is that for such large objects typically between 20 and 40 percent of the original mass, of 8.5 tons, will survive re-entry and then could be found on the ground, theoretically,” he said.
“However, to be injured by one of these fragments is extremely unlikely. My estimate is that the probability to be injured by one of these fragments is similar to the probability of being hit by lightning twice in the same year,” Krag added.
He said the space station is expected to fall between the areas of 43 degrees south and 43 degrees north, and everything outside that zone is considered safe.
“Northern Europe including France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland are definitely on the safe side. Southern Europe, the southern part of North America, South Asia, Africa, Australia and also South America are still within the zone today,” he said.
Where will it hit?
Scientists say it is hard to predict where Tiangong-1 will hit Earth in part because of its low orbit and high velocity. They say the space station is traveling 17,400 mph and orbits Earth about every 90 minutes.
Tiangong-1 was launched into orbit in 2011 as China’s first space lab. It carried out orbit experiments in preparation for China’s plan to put a permanent space station into orbit by 2023.
In Russia’s far north, the city of Vorkuta is slowly being reclaimed by the Arctic tundra. Its population has plummeted as the local coal mines have closed, and the very future of the city is in doubt. As Henry Ridgwell reports for VOA, Vorkuta’s fate reflects a wider population crisis across Russia’s far north as old Soviet industries have crumbled.
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There always seems to be another dating app popping up with promises of helping find romance — just answer this, just swipe that — but one new online dating service is incorporating genetics into the mix and promising something other apps cannot: compatibility through genetics.
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Tourist numbers in Indonesia swelled last year on the back of overseas advertising and infrastructure development. President Joko Widodo has said he wants to “create 10 tourist destinations like the island of Bali.” But the pleasing economic numbers also come with a social and environmental cost as rampant development threatens ecosystems and traditional livelihoods. Jack Hewson has this report.
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Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention. Even more so, when the invention is something a loved one needs. That was the case for a young Syrian woman who invented a GPS-equipped life vest. VOA’s Faith Lapidus reports.
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Increasingly popular wind turbines are getting bigger and making more power, but there is a limit to their size. At some point they become too big, too difficult to transport and install, and strong winds can bend them out of shape. But researchers led by scientists from the University of Virginia say there’s a way around it. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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What does it take to build a thriving technology company – and an environment in which black techies, their financial backers and their markets can flourish?
That question underpins the new VOA documentary “Beyond the Unicorn.” Subtitled “Africans Making IT in Silicon Valley,” it explores how some Africans and African-Americans are finding their way in the tech sector’s global capital in California.
The 26-minute documentary profiles several entrepreneurs and venture capitalists and how they overcome hurdles. Its screening Wednesday evening, at a VOA event at the San Francisco campus of the French university INSEEC U., served as a springboard for a panel discussion spanning market potential, funding gaps and hiring disparities.
First, a definition for the uninitiated. A unicorn is a private startup technology firm valued at $1 billion or more. Once rare, such companies have proliferated in the last few years, with almost 200 globally as of last May, according to Forbes.
Silicon Valley has spawned herds of unicorns, such as Uber and Airbnb.
Africa hasn’t. With less readily available investment funding, “a unicorn might be quite unrealistic for an entrepreneur in Africa to build very quickly,” said venture capitalist Mbwana Alliy, who appears in the documentary. He suggested its counterpart might be a “zebracorn.”
“Does that mean it’s a $100 million startup? Maybe that’s more achievable for an entrepreneur,” said Alliy, founder of the Africa-focused Savannah Fund. “And it’s still a major outcome.”
Panelist Stephen Ozoigbo proposed another term: gazelle, “something real and indigenous.”
“If it’s a gazelle, then you’re sure it would outrun, it would outhustle” the competition, said Ozoigbo, CEO of the African Technology Foundation.
Market potential
The continent has some fast-growing economies – think Ethiopia and Nigeria – and the world’s fastest-growing population. More than half of its countries are expected to double their head counts by 2050, the United Nations reports.
No wonder investment in African tech ventures is surging.
Figures vary: The Disrupt Africa news portal says African tech startups raised more than $195 million last year, up from almost $130 million in 2016.
Partech Ventures reports even stronger growth. The global venture capital firm, which has offices in San Francisco and Dakar, Senegal, reports that 124 tech startups drew $560 million in equity in 2017, up from almost $367 million for 74 startups the previous year.
Still, Africa gets only a very tiny share of global private equity capital, said Andile Ngcaba, a panelist and founder of the African tech investment management fund Convergence Partners.
That’s just one of the challenges for Africans and African-Americans in tech.
Lack of diversity
Blacks account for just 3 percent of the workforce among Silicon Valley’s top 75 tech companies, an underrepresentation so striking that it has drawn public condemnation and scrutiny by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in a 2016 report.
The male-dominated tech sector can be even less welcoming to black females.
“Being an African woman in Silicon Valley … has been very difficult. I actually had an easier time in Nigeria,” said Bukola Akinfaderin, a senior developer – and the only black female mobile engineer – for the genealogy website Ancestry.com. She said her homeland’s tech sector has less of a gender imbalance.
Akinfaderin, featured in the documentary, finds support in groups such as dev/color, a nonprofit for black software engineers.
She gets encouragement to revive Jandus Radio, her app enabling the African diaspora to hear live radio from the continent. It had as many as 500,000 users by 2016, when the hosting company’s server malfunctioned and deleted the app’s database. She plans to reboot the app as KinFolk.
Akinfaderin touts the value of being an African woman engineer working in Silicon Valley. “When you’re building a product – especially if it’s a consumer-facing product, one that’s international – you are going to need perspective from everyone.”
Need for helping hands
Mentoring and networking can make all the difference in finding opportunities, said Nate Yohannes, a Microsoft business development director for artificial intelligence – and the evening’s keynote speaker.
“Coming to the United States as a child of [Eritrean] refugees,” he said, he couldn’t always rely on his parents’ guidance because of their unfamiliarity with the new setting. So, he sought out mentors, who helped shape his trajectory from law school to a Wall Street job to the U.S. Small Business Association to Microsoft.
“It’s on us” to help each other and connect the continents, Yohannes told the scores of people, including other Africans, in the screening room.
Other concerns
Africa’s rapid population growth heightens the need to educate African youths so they can compete for work globally, said Convergence Partners’ Ngcaba. He added that those aspiring to the tech sector will need training in, say, data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence.
“That’s the only way we can position ourselves in the global landscape,” Ngcaba said.
Skills, opportunity and capital are vital for entrepreneurs, agreed Yonas Beshawred, founder and CEO of StackShare, an online marketplace for comparing engineering tools and software.
But, he added, “I think the most important thing is that you have something that you’re passionate about and you start working on it … instead of just talking.”
A VOA showcase
The “Unicorn” screening event also served as a showcase for VOA’s commitment to “telling America’s story” along with providing accurate news and information to countries without independent media, VOA director Amanda Bennett said.
“And what is more American than the American diaspora, the people who come here from places around the world looking for something and looking to give something, looking to be someone? And what is more American than technology?” she asked rhetorically in her introductory remarks, pointing out that VOA opened a Silicon Valley office last spring.
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German business leaders are expressing concerns that President Donald Trump’s 25 percent tariff on imported steel could affect the auto industry in the South.
WABE Radio reports Mercedes-Benz USA this month opened its new North American headquarters in Sandy Springs, Georgia, for 1,000 employees.
The luxury car manufacturer is owned by Germany-based Daimler, but Mercedes-Benz USA CEO Dietmar Exler used the grand opening to remind the crowd of the brand’s U.S. presence.
German automakers in US
That includes operations in South Carolina and in Alabama.
“We are now in the midst of construction of our own factory here, which will open doors in the fall in Charleston, South Carolina, and we’ll make all of the Sprinter vans for North America right here,” Exler said at the grand opening of its headquarters in Sandy Springs, Georgia, just north of Atlanta.
“Right next to me you have a member of the most successful SUV family, a GLE Coupe,” Exler said. “As you know, the GLE and the GLS are produced in Alabama. Last year, 280,000 cars were produced here not just for the U.S. market, but for markets all over the world.”
German car factories in the U.S. made more than 800,000 vehicles last year, and about half were sold overseas, according to the German Association of the Automotive Industry.
This month, Volkswagen of America Inc. announced plans to build a new five-passenger SUV at its factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where it manufactures other vehicles. Volkswagen AG is based in Wolfsburg, Germany.
“During my time as governor, I’ve watched Volkswagen Chattanooga flourish from a single vehicle producer, starting with the Passat, into what it is today — a thriving U.S. manufacturing operation that can produce three models, and counting,” said Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam said in a statement Monday, when plans were announced.
“We value Volkswagen as a committed partner, whose investments in the state have not only created new jobs, but have helped us build a skilled Tennessee workforce,” Haslam said.
Volkswagen Chattanooga also manufactures the Passat and the Atlas.
Trump proclamation, industry concern
Trump signed a proclamation last week to impose a 25 percent tariff on steel from every country except Canada and Mexico. The hope is to boost steel manufacturing in the U.S.
The concern among some industry experts is that tariffs on steel could hurt companies like Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen and Porsche, all of which have significant operations in the South, said Stefan Mair of the Federation of German Industries in Berlin.
“Do you see the cars outside? There’s a lot of steel in there,” Mair said at the grand opening of the Georgia headquarters complex. “We think there will be some additional percentage points on the prices of cars.”
That price increase could be enough to stop people from buying new cars, said Lisa Cook, who teaches economics and international relations at Michigan State University.
“If consumers are price sensitive, and they are for many types of cars, this could cause people to postpone their decision to purchase a car,” Cook said.
US steel in cars
A little more than a quarter of all U.S. steel is used to make cars in this country, according to the German American Chamber of Commerce for the southern U.S.
“Approximately 25 percent of all steel is used in automotive manufacturing and 10 percent in machinery and equipment; both industries that German companies have heavily invested in the U.S. over the years,” said Stefanie Ziska, president of GACC South.
Making cars more expensive to build and export could hurt U.S. jobs, said Jeffrey Rosensweig, who teaches international business at Georgia’s Emory University.
“That would not only cost us jobs, it would hurt the U.S. and could potentially harm the U.S. trade balance,” Rosensweig said. “Just the opposite of what President Trump thinks he’s trying to achieve.”
He said the steel tariffs could trigger a trade war that would go beyond the auto industry.
“These foreign nations that we’re going to put these import taxes on, these tariffs, are not stupid,” Rosensweig said. “They’re going to retaliate against our exports, and they’re going to hit us where it hurts, which is often our farm exports.”
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The semi-government agency behind India’s national identity card project on Saturday denied a report by news website ZDNet that the program has been hit by another security lapse that allows access to private information.
ZDNet reported that a data leak on a system run by a state-owned utility company, which it did not name, could allow access to private information of holders of the biometric “Aadhaar” ID cards, exposing their names, their unique 12-digit identity numbers and their bank details.
But the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which runs the Aadhaar program, said “there is no truth in this story” and that it was “contemplating legal action against ZDNet.”
ZDNet could not immediately be contacted for comment on the UIDAI’s response.
“There has been absolutely no breach of UIDAI’s Aadhaar database. Aadhaar remains safe and secure,” the agency said in a statement late Saturday.
Even if the claim purported in the story were taken as true, it would raise security concerns about the database of the utility company and would have “nothing to do with the security of UIDAI’s Aadhaar database,” it said.
More than 1 billion users
ZDNet had reported that even though the security lapse was flagged to some government agencies over a period of time, it had yet to be fixed. It said it was withholding the name of the utility and other details.
Karan Saini, a New Delhi security researcher, said that anyone with an Aadhaar number was affected.
“This is a security lapse. You don’t have to be a consumer to access these details. You just need the Uniform Resource Locator where the Application Programming Interface is located. These can be found in less than 20 minutes,” Saini told Reuters.
In recent months, researchers and journalists who have identified loopholes in the identity project have said they were slapped with criminal cases or harassed by government agencies because of their work.
Aadhaar, a biometric identification card with over 1.1 billion users, is the world’s biggest database. But it has been facing increased scrutiny over privacy concerns following several instances of breaches and misuse.
Last Thursday, the CEO of UIDAI said the biometric data attached to each Aadhaar was safe from hacking because the storage facility was not connected to the internet.
“Each Aadhaar biometric is encrypted by a 2,048-key combination and to decode it, the best and fastest computer of our era will take the age of the universe just to hack into one card’s biometric details,” Ajay Bhushan Pandey said.
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Britain’s information regulator said Saturday that it was assessing evidence gathered from a raid on the office of data mining firm Cambridge Analytica, part of an investigation into alleged misuse of personal information by political campaigns and social media companies like Facebook.
More than a dozen investigators from the Information Commissioner’s Office entered the company’s central London office late Friday, shortly after a High Court judge granted a warrant. The investigators were seen leaving the premises early Saturday after spending about seven hours searching the office.
The regulator said it would “consider the evidence before deciding the next steps and coming to any conclusions.”
“This is one part of a larger investigation by the ICO into the use of personal data and analytics by political campaigns, parties, social media companies and other commercial actors,” it said.
Authorities in Britain as well as the U.S. are investigating Cambridge Analytica over allegations the firm improperly obtained data from 50 million Facebook users and used it to manipulate elections, including the 2016 White House race and the 2016 Brexit vote in Britain.
Both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook deny wrongdoing.
Chief executive suspended
The data firm suspended its CEO, Alexander Nix, this week after Britain’s Channel 4 News broadcast footage that appeared to show Nix suggesting tactics like entrapment or bribery that his company could use to discredit politicians. The footage also showed Nix saying Cambridge Analytica played a major role in securing Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Cambridge Analytica’s acting chief executive, Alexander Tayler, said Friday that he was sorry that SCL Elections, an affiliate of his company, “licensed Facebook data and derivatives from a research company [Global Science Research] that had not received consent from most respondents” in 2014.
“The company believed that the data had been obtained in line with Facebook’s terms of service and data protection laws,” Tayler said.
His statement said the data were deleted in 2015 at Facebook’s request, and he denied that any of the Facebook data that Cambridge Analytica obtained were used in the work it did on the 2016 U.S. election.
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The United States has flouted trade rules with an inquiry into intellectual property and China will defend its interests, Vice Premier Liu He told U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in a telephone call on Saturday, Chinese state media reported.
The call between Mnuchin and Liu, a confidante of President Xi Jinping, was the highest-level contact between the two governments since U.S. President Donald Trump announced plans for tariffs on up to $60 billion of Chinese goods on Thursday.
The deepening rift has sent a chill through financial markets and the corporate world as investors predicted dire consequences for the global economy should trade barriers start going up.
Several U.S. chief executives attending a high-profile forum in Beijing on Saturday, including BlackRock Inc’s Larry Fink and Apple Inc’s Tim Cook, urged restraint.
In his call with Mnuchin, Liu, a Harvard-trained economist, said China still hoped both sides would remain “rational” and work together to keep trade relations stable, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
U.S. officials say an eight-month probe under the 1974 U.S. Trade Act has found that China engages in unfair trade practices by forcing American investors to turn over key technologies to Chinese firms.
However, Liu said the investigation report “violates international trade rules and is beneficial to neither Chinese interests, U.S. interests nor global interests”, Xinhua cited him as saying.
In a statement on its website, the office of the U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said it had filed a request – at the direction of Trump – for consultations with China at the World Trade Organization to address “discriminatory technology licensing agreements.”
China’s commerce ministry expressed regret at the filing on Saturday, and said China had taken strong measures to protect the legal rights and interests of both domestic and foreign owners of intellectual property.
Counter moves
During a visit to Washington in early March, Liu had requested Washington set up a new economic dialogue mechanism, identify a point person on China issues, and deliver a list of demands.
The Trump administration responded by telling China to immediately shave $100 billion off its record $375 billion trade surplus with the United States. Beijing told Washington that U.S. export restrictions on some high-tech products are to blame.
“China has already prepared, and has the strength, to defend its national interests,” Liu said on Saturday.
According to an editorial by China’s state-run Global Times, it was Mnuchin who called Liu.
Firing off a warning shot, China on Friday declared plans to levy additional duties on up to $3 billion of U.S. imports in response to U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminium, imposed after a separate U.S. probe.
Zhang Zhaoxiang, senior vice president of China Minmetals Corp, said that while the state-owned mining group’s steel exports to the U.S. are tiny, the impact could come indirectly.
“China’s direct exports to the U.S. are not big. But there will be some impact due to our exports via the United States or indirect exports,” Zhang told reporters on the sidelines of the China Development Forum in Beijing on Saturday.
Global Times said Beijing was only just beginning to look at means to retaliate.
“We believe it is only part of China’s countermeasures, and soybeans and other U.S. farm products will be targeted,” the widely-read tabloid said in a Saturday editorial.
Wei Jianguo, vice chairman of Beijing-based think tank China Centre for International Economic Exchanges, told China Daily that Beijing could impose tariffs on more U.S. products, and is considering a second and even third list of targets.
Possible items include aircraft and chips, Wei, a former vice commerce minister, told the newspaper, adding that tourism could be a possible target.
Soybeans, autos, planes
The commerce ministry’s response had so far been “relatively weak,” respected former Chinese finance minister Lou Jiwei said at the forum.
“If I were in the government, I would probably hit soybeans first, then hit autos and airplanes,” said Lou, currently chairman of the National Council for Social Security Fund.
U.S. farm groups have long feared that China, which imports more than third of all U.S. soybeans, could slow purchases of agricultural products, heaping more pain on the struggling U.S. farm sector.
U.S. agricultural exports to China stood at $19.6 billion last year, with soybean shipments accounting for $12.4 billion.
Chinese penalties on U.S. soybeans will especially hurt Iowa, a state that backed Trump in the 2016 presidential elections.
Boeing jets have also been often cited as a potential target by China.
China and the U.S. had benefitted by globalization, Blackrock’s Larry Fink said at the forum.
“I believe that a dialogue and maybe some adjustments in trade and trade policy can be in order. It does not need to be done publicly; it can be done privately,” he said.
Apple’s Tim Cook called for “calm heads” amid the dispute.
The sparring has cast a spotlight on hardware makers such as Apple, which assemble the majority of their products in China for export to other countries.
Electrical goods and tech are the largest U.S. import item from China.
Some economists say higher U.S. tariffs will lead to higher costs and ultimately hurt U.S. consumers, while restrictions on Chinese investments could take away jobs in America.
“I don’t think local governments in the United States and President Trump hope to see U.S. workers losing their jobs,” Sun Yongcai, general manager at Chinese railway firm CRRS Corp, which has two U.S. production plants, said at the forum.
Australian scientists say a powerful ground-based laser targeting space junk will be ready for use next year. They say there are hundreds of thousands of pieces of debris circling the Earth that have the potential to damage or destroy satellites.
Reducing the amount of space junk in orbit has been the focus of a meeting of scientists this week in Canberra organized by Australia’s Space Environment Research Center.
The meeting has heard that a laser using energy from light radiation to move discarded objects in space could be ready for use within a year. Researchers in Australia believe the technology would be able to change the path of orbital junk to prevent collisions with satellites. The aim is to eventually build more powerful laser beams that could push debris into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it would burn up.
Professor Craig Smith, head of EOS Space Systems, the Australian company that is developing the junk-busting devices, explained how it would work.
“We track objects and predict collisions to high accuracy and if we think a space debris object is going to have a collision with another space debris object then we can use our laser to change its orbits rather than crashing into a satellite or another space debris object causing more space debris. Again as we ramp up the power to bigger and bigger lasers then, yes, you can actually start moving it enough to what we call de-orbit the satellite by reducing its velocity enough that it starts to change orbit height and eventually hits the atmosphere and the atmosphere takes over and drags it,” Smith said.
The system, which would operate through a telescope near the Australian capital, Canberra, is expected to be finished early next year. It is estimated there are 7,500 tons of trash in space. This includes an estimated half-a-million marble-sized pieces of junk, while other items, such as discarded rockets and disused parts of space crafts, are much larger.
In 2012, the eight-ton Envisat Earth Observation satellite unexpectedly shut-down in orbit, where it remains. The size of a school bus, the satellite is one of the largest pieces of ‘junk’ in orbit and could become a catastrophic hazard if struck by other space debris and broken into fragments.
But space debris does not have to be big to cause damage. A floating fleck of paint is thought to have cracked a window on the International Space Station.
In Europe, large nets and harpoons are being developed to catch debris encircling our planet.
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H. Wayne Huizenga, a college dropout who built a business empire that included Blockbuster Entertainment, AutoNation and three professional sports franchises, has died. He was 80.
Huizenga died Thursday night at his home, said Valerie Hinkell, a longtime assistant. The cause was cancer, said Bob Henninger, executive vice president of Huizenga Holdings.
Starting with a single garbage truck in 1968, Huizenga built Waste Management Inc. into a Fortune 500 company. He purchased independent sanitation engineering companies, and by the time he took the company public in 1972, he had completed the acquisition of 133 small-time haulers. By 1983, Waste Management was the largest waste disposal company in the United States.
The business model worked again with Blockbuster Video, which he started in 1985 and built into the leading movie rental chain nine years later. In 1996, he formed AutoNation and built it into a Fortune 500 company.
Sports team owner
Huizenga was founding owner of baseball’s Florida Marlins and the NHL’s Florida Panthers — expansion teams that played their first games in 1993. He bought the NFL’s Miami Dolphins and their stadium for $168 million in 1994 from the children of founder Joe Robbie but had sold all three teams by 2009.
“Wayne Huizenga was a seminal figure in the cultural history of South Florida,” current Dolphins owner Stephen Ross said in a statement. “He completely changed the landscape of the region’s sports scene. … Sports fans throughout the region owe him a debt of thanks.”
The Marlins won the 1997 World Series, and the Panthers reached the Stanley Cup Finals in 1996, but Huizenga’s beloved Dolphins never reached a Super Bowl while he owned the team.
“If I have one disappointment, the disappointment would be that we did not bring a championship home,” Huizenga said shortly after he sold the Dolphins to Ross. “It’s something we failed to do.”
Fan favorite — for a time
Huizenga earned an almost cultlike following among business investors who watched him build Blockbuster Entertainment into the leading video rental chain by snapping up competitors. He cracked Forbes’ list of the 100 richest Americans, becoming chairman of Republic Services, one of the nation’s top waste management companies, and AutoNation, the nation’s largest automotive retailer. In 2013, Forbes estimated his wealth at $2.5 billion.
For a time, Huizenga was also a favorite with South Florida sports fans, drawing cheers and autograph seekers in public. The crowd roared when he danced the hokey pokey on the field during an early Marlins game. He went on a spending spree to build a veteran team that won the World Series in the franchise’s fifth year.
But his popularity plummeted when he ordered the roster dismantled after that season. He was frustrated by poor attendance and his failure to swing a deal for a new ballpark built with taxpayer money.
Many South Florida fans never forgave him for breaking up the championship team. Huizenga drew boos when introduced at Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino’s retirement celebration in 2000 and kept a lower public profile after that.
In 2009, Huizenga said he regretted ordering the Marlins’ payroll purge.
“We lost $34 million the year we won the World Series, and I just said, ‘You know what, I’m not going to do that,’” Huizenga said. “If I had it to do over again, I’d say, ‘OK, we’ll go one more year.’”
He sold the Marlins in 1999 to John Henry, and sold the Panthers in 2001, unhappy with rising NHL player salaries and the stock price for the team’s public company.
Dolphins man
Huizenga’s first sports love was the Dolphins; he had been a season-ticket holder since their first season in 1966. But he fared better in the NFL as a businessman than as a sports fan.
He turned a nifty profit by selling the Dolphins and their stadium for $1.1 billion, nearly seven times what he paid to become sole owner. But he knew the bottom line in the NFL is championships, and his Dolphins perennially came up short.
Huizenga earned a reputation as a hands-off owner and won raves from many loyal employees, even though he made six coaching changes. He eased Pro Football Hall of Famer Don Shula into retirement in early 1996, and Jimmy Johnson, Dave Wannstedt, interim coach Jim Bates, Nick Saban, Cam Cameron and Tony Sparano followed as coach.
Johnson tweeted: “A great man, one of the nicest individuals I have ever known, Wayne Huizenga passed away. RIP.”
Garbage business
Harry Wayne Huizenga was born in the Chicago suburbs on Dec. 29, 1937, to a family of garbage haulers. He began his business career in Pompano Beach in 1962, driving a garbage truck from 2 a.m. to noon each day for $500 a month.
Huizenga was a five-time recipient of Financial World magazine’s “CEO of the Year” award, and was the Ernst & Young “2005 World Entrepreneur of the Year.”
Regarding his business acumen, Huizenga said: “You just have to be in the right place at the right time. It can only happen in America.”
In 1960, he married Joyce VanderWagon. Together they had two children, Wayne Jr. and Scott. They divorced in 1966. Wayne married his second wife, Marti Goldsby, in 1972. She died in 2017.
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Austin, Texas, is not California’s Silicon Valley technology corridor. But companies from Silicon Valley and other major U.S. hubs are taking notice of Austin’s growing tech scene. Austin’s lower cost of living and doing business, combined with its smaller size, are just a few reasons that people are attracted to the area. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee explains other reasons that tech companies are opening up shop there.
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Although cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, colorectal cancer is one of the cancers that we can actually prevent, the World Health Organization says.
The colon is a long, muscular tube that’s also known as the large intestine. It is part of the digestive system. Colon cancer is linked to diet, genetic predisposition and age. In the U.S., 1 in 23 people will be told they have colon cancer.
WATCH: Colon Cancer Can be Prevented and Treated
Michele Alexander got her diagnosis at age 53.
“How much longer do I have? My daughter’s 24. You know, she’s still got a lot of life left. How much longer will I be with her? Those kind of thoughts go through your head,” Alexander said.
Largely preventable
Dr. Zihao Wu at the University of Missouri Health Care says this type of cancer is largely preventable.
“The majority of colon cancer develops from a benign polyp, and that takes about 10 to 15 years,” he said. “And if you find a polyp and remove it, you won’t have colon cancer, so it’s very important to have a screening to prevent cancer.”
As scary as her diagnosis was, Alexander’s passion for auto racing helped her get through her ordeal. Her favorite driver is Carl Edwards, and she had tickets to a race in which he was competing. When someone shared her story with him, he called her.
“I said, ‘I know there’s an auction where I can bid to ride in the truck with you for driver intros, and it is my goal to win that auction,’” she said. … He said, ‘Don’t bid. You get here, you’re riding with me.’”
Six weeks after surgery to remove the cancer in her colon, Alexander got her ride.
“Oh, it was just joy. In a race for my life, and I crossed the finish line a winner,” she said.
Healthy lifestyle helps
Wu said Alexander’s attitude helped.
“She wanted to get better. She had a strong will to get better, and I think that’s very important,” he said.
Doctors say you can help prevent colon cancer if you eat plenty of greens, whole grains and vegetables and legumes, which are high in fiber. Regular exercise also helps, and if you smoke, stop.
Most importantly, get a regular screening starting at age 50 or sooner if you have a family history.
If colon cancer is diagnosed at an early stage, the World Health Organization says 90 percent of patients survive at least five years, compared with no more than percent of those diagnosed at an advanced stage.
Two years after her surgery, Alexander is still cancer free and still a racecar enthusiast.
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Earth is losing plants, animals and clean water at a dramatic rate, according to four new U.N. scientific reports that provide the most comprehensive and localized look at the state of biodiversity.
Scientists meeting in Colombia issued four regional reports Friday on how well animals and plants are doing in the Americas; Europe and Central Asia; Africa; and the Asia-Pacific area.
Their conclusion after three years of study : Nowhere is doing well.
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem was about more than just critters, said study team chairman Robert Watson. It is about keeping Earth livable for humans, because we rely on biodiversity for food, clean water and public health, the prominent British and U.S. scientist said.
“This is undermining well-being across the planet, threatening us long term on food and water,” Watson said in an interview.
Scientists pointed to this week’s death of the last male northern white rhino in Africa and severe declines in the numbers of elephants, tigers and pangolins, but said those are only the most visible and charismatic of species that are in trouble.
What’s happening is a side effect of the world getting wealthier and more crowded with people, Watson said. Humans need more food, more clean water, more energy and more land. And the way society has tried to achieve that has cut down on biodiversity, he said.
Crucial habitat has been cut apart; alien species have invaded places; chemicals have hurt plants and animals; wetlands and mangroves that clean up pollution are disappearing; and the world’s waters are overfished, he said.
Man-made climate change is getting worse, and global warming will soon hurt biodiversity as much as all the other problems combined, Watson said.
“We keep making choices to borrow from the future to live well today,” said Jake Rice, Canada’s chief government scientist for fisheries and oceans, who co-chaired the Americas report.
Duke University conservationist Stuart Pimm, who wasn’t part of the study team, said the reports make sense and are based on well-established scientific data: “Are things pretty dire? Yes.”
Among the regional findings:
The Americas
If current trends continue, by the year 2050 the Americas will have 15 percent fewer plants and animals than now. That means there will be 40 percent fewer plants and animals in the Americas than in the early 1700s.
Nearly a quarter of the species that were fully measured are now threatened, Rice said.
And when all of “nature’s contributions” are taken into account, nearly two-thirds are declining and more than one-fifth are “decreasing strongly,” Rice said.
Asia-Pacific
If trends continue, there will be no “exploitable fish stocks” for commercial fishing by 2048. Around that same, the region will lose 45 percent of its biodiversity and about 90 percent of its crucial corals, if nothing changes, said Asia co-chair Sonali Seneratna Sellamuttu, a senior researcher at the International Water Management Institute.
“All major ecosystems are threatened in the region,” she said.
Europe and Central Asia
Even though it is the region that Watson said may be doing the best, 28 percent of the species that live only in Europe are now threatened. In the last decade, 42 percent of the land plant and animal species have declined, said Europe co-chair Mark Rounsevell of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany.
Wetlands have been cut in half since 1970.
Africa
Africa could lose half of some bird and mammal species by 2100. And more than 60 percent of the continent’s people depend on natural resources for their livelihoods, said report co-chair Luthando Dziba of South African National Parks.
Already more than 20 percent of Africa’s species are threatened, endangered or extinct.
While scientists said government and society needs to change its ways, individuals can use less energy, less water and eat less red meat, Watson said.
“A balanced diet can really help,” he said. There are “lots of individual things you can do.”
The outlook is bleak if society doesn’t change, but it still can, Watson said.
“Some species are threatened with extinctions. Others, just pure numbers will go down,” Watson said. “It will be a lonelier place relative to our natural world. It’s a moral issue. Do we humans have right to make them go extinct?”
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Being black and working in the tech industry can be an isolating experience. But at the Afrotectopia festival in New York, it’s what everyone has in common. Tina Trinh meets with the creative people exploring the intersection of race and technology.
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Now that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has spoken publicly about the firm’s data controversy, the chief question remains whether the changes he outlined will be enough to restore the public’s trust in the social media giant.
In a series of media interviews this week, Zuckerberg went into full damage control mode about how the company handled user data when it discovered in 2015 that 50 million users’ data had been shared with Cambridge Analytica, a consultancy that advises political campaigns, thus breaking the company’s rules.
He apologized. He called the recent controversy “a major breach of trust.”
What now?
Congressional leaders have already called on Zuckerberg to testify in Congress — something that Zuckerberg appeared willing to do, according to the interviews, if he was “the right person.”
Some Facebook critics argue the firm, which relies on advertising revenue, isn’t able or willing to curtail practices that may improve users’ privacy but potentially hurt its bottom line. The company needs some sort of regulatory oversight, they say, or new laws about users’ personal data.
But for now, Zuckerberg outlined a series of measures that would limit the amount of data collected on users, something that many privacy advocates have argued for. The firm’s revenue model, he said, is here to stay.
“I don’t think the ad model is going to go away because I think fundamentally, it’s important to have a service like this that everyone in the world can use, and the only way to do that is to have it be very cheap or free,” Zuckerberg told the New York Times.
Going back to 2014
Facebook plans to turn the clock back to 2014, before it changed its rules stopping a developers’ ability to tap into users’ friends’ data.
With the help of forensic auditors, the company plans to investigate all “large apps” — “thousands,” by Zuckerberg’s estimate, that scooped up data then.
This includes users whose data was gathered by a researcher and given to Cambridge Analytica. Facebook plans to inform affected users. Cambridge Analytica has denied that it improperly used user data.
If a developer doesn’t want to comply with Facebook’s audit, Facebook will ban it from the social network, Zuckerberg said.
“Even if you solve the problem going forward, there’s still this issue of: Are there other Cambridge Analyticas out there,” Zuckerberg told the Times. “We also need to make sure we get that under control.”
Remove access to data
In addition, the company plans to remove a developer’s access to a person’s data if someone hasn’t used the developer’s app in three months. And the company plans to reduce the amount of information collected when users sign in.
Finally, the company says it plans to make it easier to see who has access to their data and to revoke permissions. The moves are intended to curtail what critics have long complained about Facebook’s role in enabling the ongoing collection of more data on users than is needed.
Feeling ‘uncomfortable’
Zuckerberg told Recode that Facebook, with more than two billion users, has become so big and important in the lives of many around the world that he doesn’t always feel comfortable making blanket decisions.
“I feel fundamentally uncomfortable sitting here in California at an office, making content policy decisions for people around the world,” he said. “Things like where is the line on hate speech?”
He has to make the decisions he said, because he runs Facebook.
“But I’d rather not.”
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Being black and working in the tech industry can be an isolating experience.
New York nonprofit Ascend Leadership analyzed the hiring data of hundreds of San Francisco Bay-area tech companies from 2007 and 2015 and issued a report last year, detailing the lack of diversity in tech.
Based on data from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Ascend found that the black tech professional workforce declined from 2.5 percent in 2007 to 1.9 percent in 2015. The outlook was even bleaker at the top. Despite 43 percent growth in the number of black executives from 2007 to 2015, blacks accounted for 1.1 percent of the total number of tech executives in 2015.
“You’re one in a sea full of people that just don’t look like you,” said Ari Melenciano, a graduate student in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University. Melenciano decided to do something about it and created Afrotectopia.
Recently held at NYU, the inaugural 2-day festival brought together black technologists, designers and artists to discuss their work and the challenges of navigating the mostly white world of technology and new media.
“It’s really important for us to be able to see ourselves and build this community of people that actually look like us and are doing amazing things,” Melenciano said.
Glenn Cantave, founder and CEO of performance art coalition Movers and Shakers NYC, was on hand to demonstrate the group’s use of augmented reality and virtual reality, with apps that address racism and discrimination.
“My parents told me from a very young age that ‘You will not be treated like your white friends. There are certain privileges that you do not have,'” said Cantave. “It’s affected my conduct, it affects how I navigate spaces. I stay hyper-aware of my surroundings at all times, in terms of safety.”
Cantave and his team are working on an augmented reality book for children entitled, White Supremacy 101: Columbus the Hero? The book will contain various images that become animated when viewed with an augmented reality app. Each excerpt is intended to be a counterpoint to traditional history lessons which tell American history from a white perspective.
“If these false narratives are perpetuated for generations in the future, you’re going to have a collective consciousness that doesn’t see black people as human beings,” Cantave said. “You see it with mass incarceration, you see it with police brutality, you see it with unsympathetic immigration policy.”
But technology offers an opportunity to change that, according to Idris Brewster, creator of the app and CTO of Movers and Shakers NYC.
“Augmented reality and virtual reality … really provides us with a unique opportunity to use very immersive technology and tell a story in a very different and engaging way,” Brewster said.
Public response has been positive. “It’s blown the kids’ minds just to see animations. A lot of kids will be like, ‘Wow, this is like Harry Potter,'” he said.
Brewster also works as a computer science instructor at Google, where in 2016, blacks made up 1 percent of the company’s U.S. tech workers. He wants to see more minorities become tech creators, not just end users.
“There’s algorithms being created in our world right now that are detrimental to people of color because they’re not made for people of color,” Brewster said. “We need to start being able to figure out how we can get our minds and our perspectives in those conversations, creating those algorithms.”
Virtual reality filmmaker Jazzy Harvey attended Afrotectopia to present her virtual-reality film, Built Not Bought, which profiles the custom-car enthusiasts of south central Los Angeles.
Harvey said she felt greater creative freedom working with the new medium. “There’s no rules, and the fact that I have no rules and no restrictions … I get to choose which story is worth telling,” Harvey said.
Afrotectopia panelists and attendees tackled a variety of topics including digital activism, entrepreneurship and education, but ultimately, it was about getting everyone in the same room together.
“To come into a space where you don’t have to assimilate culturally, you can just be yourself and talk the way that you actually talk and really have people that can connect with you culturally is so important,” Melenciano said. “Especially when you’re talking about things that you’re passionate about like tech, it’s a space where we’re so often dismissed from.”
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Australian rescuers were racing against time to save 15 short-finned pilot whales Friday after more than 150 of the migrating mammals beached on the country’s west coast.
Most of the whales had died, said Jeremy Chick, incident controller at Western Australia’s conservation department, after becoming stranded on dry land overnight.
Authorities and trained volunteers were trying to save 15 in shallow waters.
The whales beached at Hamelin Bay, 315 km (198 miles) south of the state’s capital, Perth.
While whales regularly get stranded on the coastal strip migrating between Antarctic feeding grounds in the south and warmer northern waters where they raise their young, the large number this time is unusual.
Melissa Lay, manager at the Hamelin Bay Holiday Park, told Reuters by phone that it was the second mass stranding she had witnessed during her 15 years in the area.
“There are some that are still alive but barely,” Lay said. “The last time it happened, none survived.”
Locals and tourists were being warned to stay out of the water because of a likely increase in sharks attracted by the dead whales.
People there for the peak salmon fishing season were also advised to stay out of the shallows.
“It is possible the dead and dying animals will act as an attractant, which could lead to sharks coming close into shore along this stretch of coast,” the Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development said in a statement.
The largest mass stranding of whales in the state occurred in 1996 when 320 long-finned pilot whales stranded themselves just north of Hamelin Bay.
Short-finned pilot whales are dark-colored with pinkish-grey undersides, travel in large numbers and often get stranded en masse, the department said.
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