Facebook CEO to Testify Before Congressional Committee

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before a congressional committee about the privacy scandal that has rocked the social media company.

The House and Energy and Commerce Committee announced Wednesday Zuckerberg will testify on April 11 about the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which obtained data on tens of millions of Facebook users that could be used to influence voters in U.S. elections. The firm was hired by U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, which paid the firm nearly $6 million.

Committee chairman Greg Walden and ranking Democrat Frank Pallone said the hearing hopes to “shed light on critical consumer data privacy issues and help all Americans better understand what happens to their personal information online.” The panel is the first of three congressional committees that have asked Zuckerberg to testify.

Zuckerberg’s upcoming testimony comes after senior Facebook officials failed to answer questions during a private meeting with congressional staffers about how the company and third-party software developers use and protect consumer data.

It remains unclear if Congress or the administration will take any action against Facebook, but the company is well-positioned to counter any efforts to regulate it.

The social media giant has a large lobbying operation to advance its interests in Washington. Documents filed with the House and Senate shows Facebook spent more than $17 million in2017, much of it on an in-house lobbying team that is comprised of former Republican and Democratic political aides. The company lobbied on a variety of issues, including potential changes to government surveillance programs and on corporate tax issues.

CDC: Drug-resistant ‘Nightmare Bacteria’ Pose Growing Threat

“Nightmare bacteria” with unusual resistance to antibiotics of last resort were found more than 200 times in the United States last year in a first-of-a-kind hunt to see how much of a threat these rare cases are becoming, health officials said Tuesday.

That’s more than they had expected to find, and the true number is probably higher because the effort involved only certain labs in each state, officials say.

The problem mostly strikes people in hospitals and nursing homes who need IVs and other tubes that can get infected. In many cases, others in close contact with these patients also harbored the superbugs even though they weren’t sick — a risk for further spread.

Some of the sick patients had traveled for surgery or other health care to another country where drug-resistant germs are more common, and the superbug infections were discovered after they returned to the U.S.

“Essentially, we found nightmare bacteria in your backyard,” said Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“These verge on untreatable infections” where the only option may be supportive care — fluids and sometimes machines to maintain life to give the patient a chance to recover, Schuchat said.

The situation was described in a CDC report.

Bugs and drugs are in a constant battle, as germs evolve to resist new and old antibiotics. About 2 million Americans get infections from antibiotic-resistant bacteria each year and 23,000 die, Schuchat said.

Concern has been growing about a rise in bacteria resistant to all or most antibiotics. Last year, public health labs around the country were asked to watch for and quickly respond to cases of advanced antibiotic resistance, especially to some last-resort antibiotics called carbapenems.

In the first nine months of the year, more than 5,770 samples were tested for these “nightmare bacteria,” as CDC calls them, and one quarter were found to have genes that make them hard to treat and easy to share their resistance tricks with other types of bacteria. Of these, 221 had unusual genes that conferred resistance. The cases were scattered throughout 27 states.

“Even in remote areas” this threat is real, because patients often transfer to and from other places for care, said Dr. Jay Butler, chief medical officer for the state of Alaska and past president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

Others in close contact with the infected patient then were tested, and 11 percent were found to be carrying the same superbugs even though they were not sick. This gives the bugs more of a chance to spread.

What to do? CDC suggests:

—Tell your doctors if you recently had health care in another country.

—Talk with them about preventing infections, taking care of chronic conditions to help avoid them, and getting vaccines to prevent them.

—Wash your hands regularly and keep cuts clean until healed.

Closure of Top Philippine Resort Island Would Shake up Business to Cut Pollution

The possible closure of a major coastal tourism magnet in the Philippines for environmental cleanup will hurt business, but for a cause that helps everyone longer term, experts say.

President Rodrigo Duterte said via the presidential website in March he would place Boracay Island under a “state of calamity.” The island may be shut down for two to 12 months, Philippine media reports say, citing other statements from Duterte and cabinet members.

The government is “addressing wastewater issues through an improved sewerage system,” the country’s environment minister Roy Cimatu said in a March 27 statement.

Boracay, a 10.3-square-kilometer feature in the central Philippines, has been compared to Bali and other Asian beach resort hot spots. Its main white sand beach runs four kilometers, paralleled by a strip of at least 100 hotels.

“The Philippines has been very aggressive in its campaign to attract tourists… and Boracay is actually the No. 1 selling point of the tourism business in the Philippines,” said Maria Ela Atienza, political science professor at University of the Philippines Diliman.

“So it will really be a big blow to the tourism industry and we don’t know what will happen to these industries depending on Boracay, if they will continue if they can return to operation,” Atienza said.

Fear of closure

Government agencies have not finalized any closure of Boracay Island but dropped enough hints to prompt flight and hotel cancellations, analysts and operators report. Domestic media say arrivals in March were normal but expected a fall for this month.

Tourists who read “negative news” about Boracay are cancelling mid-year reservations, said a manager with Boracay Pito Huts, a 10-year-old group of villas for tourist groups on the island. Villa staff people may be asked to “take a vacation” if bookings don’t pick up, she said.

“As a preparation, of course we have to tighten our belts,” said the manager, who did not want to be named. “We are in the toilet. For June bookings or June tourists it’s nothing. That’s how we got affected.”

The Boracay Foundation, a business association with an environmental focus, declined comment for this report. A Department of Tourism representative said her office could make no statements on the possible closure.

Suspension of business would hurt a network of common Filipinos who sell souvenirs, prepare meals or drive tourists around the island, Atienza added.

Boracay generated $1.076 billion in tourism receipts last year, the local provincial tourism office said, as cited by the Philippine Information Agency, an increase of about 15 percent over 2016. Tourism was 8.6 percent of the Philippine GDP in 2016.

People and waste

Boracay has an ideal capacity of about half a million tourists per year, compared to its 2017 total of 2 million, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources said in an online video. More than 300,000 tourists reached the island in January and February this year, it said.

Travelers often visit Boracay during the northern hemisphere winter to escape the cold in spots such as China, Russia and South Korea.

The island should review its “carrying capacity,” said Alicia Lustica, a coastal ecosystems cluster head with a department research Center. “We need also to assist also the volume of waste that has been generated and likewise how people are doing their activities on Boracay Island,” Lustica said in the video.

Sewage became an issue because some resorts treat their own inadequately or dump it into the sea, the domestic news website BusinessMirror.com said in January. It cites overbuilding and inadequate infrastructure as additional problems for Boracay.

The nongovernmental organization Global Coral Reef Alliance said more than 10 years ago sewage “from uncontrolled development” was hurting Boracay’s coral and fisheries.

The environment ministry also plans to do a “massive replanting” of trees on Boracay, the minister said in the March 27 statement.

Boracay renewal

A temporary closure would let Boracay clean itself up to become better for tourists, said Jonathan Ravelas, chief market strategist with Banco de Oro UniBank in Metro Manila.

“It’s going to hurt us, but I think moving forward we will probably see a lot of pent-up demand for Boracay — just like in any business a temporary renovation — and I think that’s how you should probably see what’s happening in Boracay,” he said.

Travelers would rather see a cleaner island, he added. Today Boracay-bound tourists must pay an environmental impact fee at a boat pier before stepping onto the island.

A cleaner Boracay would motivate other Philippine beach resort areas to protect their environments before they too face shutdown, Ravelas said. “You need the one example, and everybody will follow,” he said.

Duterte called Boracay a “cesspool” and ordered his government to fix problems in six months, the presidential office website says. The state of calamity, Duterte said, would let the government offer aid to people facing business losses.

Scientists Debate Return to the Moon

It’s been 45 years since men last set foot on the Moon. The year was 1972. Back then, the fastest commercially available microprocessor could handle a maximum of 16 kilobytes of memory. Today the average smartphone can crunch several millions of kilobytes. But huge leaps in computing power have not been matched by similar advances in space travel. VOA’s George Putic has more.

China Announces $50 Billion in Retaliatory Tariffs on US Goods

China announced Wednesday it plans to impose tariffs on $50 billion worth of U.S. goods in response to a similar package announced by the United States.

The Chinese measures would boost tariffs by 25 percent on 106 U.S. products, including soybeans, aircraft and cars.

China’s commerce ministry responded with its own measures less than 11 hours after the U.S. issued a proposed list of Chinese goods. The ministry said the question of when the measures will go into effect will depend on when the U.S. tariffs become active.

U.S. President Donald Trump announced his intention to impose $50 billion in increased tariffs on Chinese products last month, and on Tuesday the U.S. Trade Representative released a proposed list of 1,300 goods including aerospace, medical and information technology products.

Subject to public review

That list will be subject to a public review process scheduled to run until late May.

“The total value of imports subject to the tariff increases is commensurate with an economic analysis of the harm caused by China’s unreasonable technology policies to the U.S. economy,” the USTR said.

The United States has accused China of pressuring foreign companies to hand over technology.

China’s Vice Minister of Commerce Wang Shouwen said Wednesday that accusation is groundless, and that while China wants to resolve the trade dispute through dialogue, if the United States continues the fight then China will too.

Unlike the U.S. list, which includes many obscure industrial goods, China’s list targets cotton, frozen beef, soybeans and other agricultural products that are produced in states from Iowa to Texas that favored Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

The U.S.-China dispute has fueled concern it could stymie a global economic recovery if other countries raise their own import barriers.

The prospect of a trade war between the world’s two largest economies has also worried stock market investors.  U.S. markets were set to open lower Wednesday.

Trump, however, dismissed the notion of a U.S.-China trade war on Wednesday, tweeting that previous U.S. administrations weakened the country’s ability to defend itself on trade matters.   

“We are not in a trade war with China, that war was lost many years ago by the foolish, or incompetent, people who represented the U.S. Now we have a Trade Deficit of $500 Billion a year, with Intellectual Property Theft of another $300 Billion. We cannot let this continue!”

Despite Trump’s claims, U.S. government figures show the U.S. had a $375 billion trade deficit with China at the end of 2017.

Data Analysis Guides Mobile Clinics to Where They’re Needed Most

Health care in the United States doesn’t have to take place in a doctor’s office or clinic building. There are some 2000 mobile health clinics around the country, delivering medical, dental, pre-natal and pediatric care, preventive screenings and more. These vans go where the patients are – libraries, schools, grocery store parking lots, especially in low-income communities. As Faith Lapidus reports.

Tech CEOs Call for Gun Control Following YouTube Shooting

Several Silicon Valley leaders called for increased gun control on Tuesday afternoon after a woman at the headquarters of YouTube shot and wounded three people before taking her own life.

Tech companies have largely avoided the topic of gun control in the United States, but they have previously pushed for progressive stances on other hot-topic issues, ranging from climate change to same-sex marriage and comprehensive immigration reform. At least three major chief executives took up gun control after the shooting.

“We can’t keep being reactive to this, thinking and praying it won’t happen again at our schools, jobs, or our community spots,” tweeted Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey. “It’s beyond time to evolve our policies.”

Joining Dorsey were Uber Technologies CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and Box CEO Aaron Levie, who respectively sent tweets on Tuesday saying #EndGunViolence and #NeverAgain, two Twitter hashtags commonly used by proponents of gun control.

“On behalf of the team at @Uber, sending support to everyone @YouTube and @Google, and gratitude to the heroic first responders,” Khosrowshahi tweeted. “Another tragedy that should push us again to #EndGunViolence”

Emergency calls reporting gunfire in San Bruno, California, at the headquarters of Alphabet’s YouTube began to pour in early Tuesday afternoon, according to the city of San Bruno. Authorities have not released the identities of the suspected shooter or the victims.

The tweets on Thursday could be an indication that Silicon Valley may soon weigh in on the epidemic of mass killings by firearms in the United States.

“Incredibly sad to see the YouTube shooting today,” Levie tweeted. “Our thoughts are with our Google friends and their families. #NeverAgain”

Sundar Pichai and Susan Wojcicki, the CEOs of Google and YouTube respectively, also issued statements on Tuesday while avoiding the topic of gun control.

“There are no words to describe how horrible it was to have an active shooter @YouTube today,” Wojcicki said. “Our deepest gratitude to law enforcement & first responders for their rapid response. 

Our hearts go out to all those injured & impacted today. We will come together to heal as a family.”

Other tech leaders expressed sympathy for the employees of YouTube on social media on Tuesday without referencing gun control. Those included Apple CEO Tim Cook, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.

“From everyone at Apple, we send our sympathy and support to the team at YouTube and Google, especially the victims and their families,” Cook said in a tweet.

Coffee Conquers Conflict for Business-savvy Farmers in the Philippines

Five years ago, Filipina farmer Marivic Dubria would buy Nescafe sachets to serve visitors because she was embarrassed by the quality of the coffee she grew next to her main vegetable crops.

Life was tough for her family in Mindanao, the second largest island in the Philippines, as they struggled to earn $1,000 a year from their produce, with their coffee beans fetching only 20 cents per kilo from local traders.

But Dubria is now one of hundreds of farmers nationwide who are brewing up a storm with training from Coffee For Peace (CfP) – a social enterprise striving to boost growers’ profits, protect the environment and foster peace between communities.

Having learned how to grow, harvest and process high-quality Arabica beans at a time when global demand for coffee is soaring – it is set to hit a record high this year – Dubria exports her crop to buyers as far away as Seattle for at least $5 per kilo.

“But it’s not all about the money – it’s about taking responsibility for the environment and other communities,” Dubria told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in her home on Mount Apo while brewing a pot of thick, aromatic, treacle-like coffee.

Beyond helping coffee growers get a better deal, CfP aims to encourage dialogue between communities, with tensions ranging from colonial-era conflict between native Muslims and Christian settlers to land and resource disputes between ethnic groups.

The Philippines is battling to restore order to troubled Mindanao, where militant groups have pledged allegiance to Islamic State, and five decades of communist insurgency and separatist bombings have displaced at least 2 million people.

By bringing people together through trade, businesses with a social mission can help build peace, industry experts say.

“Social enterprise presents an emerging pathway or approach to conflict resolution,” said Angel Flores, East Asia business head at the British Council, which backs companies seeking to help people, invest in the environment and tackle social ills. “Being inclusive, participatory and prioritizing community benefit over personal agendas enhances the social fabric from a place of distrust to … confidence and mutual understanding.”

“Farmerpreneurs”

CfP was set up in 2008 on the conflict-hit southern island of Mindanao, after its founders stopped Christian and Muslim neighbors going to war over the ownership of a rice field.

The men were invited to put down their guns and talk over coffee, a tradition which quickly spread across the region.

CfP offers a three-year scheme to train farmers to produce coffee while encouraging native and settler communities and various tribes to harvest and process the beans together.

While the social enterprise buys the farmers’ beans above market value — selling them on to local coffee shops and exporting as far as Canada — communities can sell to any buyer, but are encouraged to demand higher prices.

“We don’t treat them as suppliers or just part of the chain — they are farmerpreneurs,” said CfP senior vice president Twinkle Bautista.

“The aim is to unite the settlers and indigenous people to teach each other, share techniques and tools … and harmony,” she added. “Our product is peace — coffee is just the tool.”

For Kagawad Abe and his indigenous community, setting up a processing center through CfP has brought them closer to the Christian settlers — who work with them to process their beans.

“It has also brought women together, and given them a chance to work independently … to contribute to the tribe,” he said.

About 80 percent of CfP’s coffee-growing partners are women.

“Just five or so years ago, we didn’t really know each other – but now we are talking and working together,” Abe added.

CfP says business is booming, having tripled sales to at least $46,000 last year from $15,000 in 2012 and won United Nations and regional awards for promoting peace and development.

Although social enterprises in the Philippines have more than tripled in the last decade to 165,000, many are struggling due to limited state support and a lack of funding, said the British Council and the Philippines Social Enterprise Network.

CfP’s success is likely largely due to its unusual mission, said Gerry Higgins, chief executive of Community Enterprise in Scotland (CEIS), Britain’s largest agency to support the sector.

“Coffee for Peace is unusual … there aren’t many social enterprises that recognize that if a community is resilient and sustainable, (then) fewer conflicts will emerge,” Higgins said.

Conquerors of Coffee

By walking farmers through every step of the supply chain, CfP says they no longer see the coffee industry as “a mystery.”

Once dependent on traders and big brands such as Nestle, the world’s biggest coffee maker and producer of Nescafe, farmers can now demand higher prices for better quality beans, CfP said.

Yet winning communities over remains a major challenge.

Some are proud of their traditional methods and reluctant to embrace change, while others are wary of civil society groups and used to instant cash or aid, rather than long-term support.

“We had to convince and convince our people, many times, to move from the traditional to the technical way of doing things,” said Baby Jerlina Owok, chieftain of a native tribe which has seen their coffee beans almost double in value in recent years.

Yet for women such as Owok and Dubria and their coffee cooperatives, the ambitions are much bigger than making money.

Pointing at huge swathes of coffee trees covering the hills, painting once barren land vibrant shades of green, Dubria spoke about planting more to combat deforestation and soil erosion.

Lastly, she said they need to share their prosperity.

“We need to encourage and help other communities to produce quality coffee,” she said. “We want to pull them up — to improve their standard of living — so they can experience what we have.”

Amazon Shares Finish Higher Despite Trump’s New Threat on Shipping Rates

The largest American business lobby group came to the defense of Amazon.com on Tuesday after a multi-day Twitter attack by U.S. President Donald Trump that included unsubstantiated criticism of the world’s biggest online retailer.

The value of Amazon shares held by Jeff Bezos, the online retailer’s chief executive and single largest shareholder, had taken a $10 billion hit in the week since Trump began attacking him and his company on Twitter.

Citing an unspecified report, Trump told reporters at the White House that the company was not paying the U.S. Postal Service a fair rate, and that it was costing U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars and forcing other retailers out of business, and he threatened to raise rates.

Late on Tuesday afternoon, a source familiar with proceedings at the White House said no specific actions addressing Trump’s concerns about Amazon were on the table at the White House at this time, but that could change given Trump’s dissatisfaction with the company.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobby group in the country, stepped in on Tuesday to defend Amazon, which is a member.

“It’s inappropriate for government officials to use their position to attack an American company,” Neil Bradley, chief policy officer of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement, citing the value of the free enterprise system and the rule of law. “The record is clear: deviating from those processes undermines economic growth and job creation.”

It is not the first time Trump, or another U.S. president, has been publicly critical of a company. Trump has previously criticized automakers, Carrier, which is owned by United Technologies and Boeing.

In 2015, then-President Barack Obama criticized office supply company Staples for not embracing the Affordable Care Act, drawing a quick rebuke from Republicans and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Trump has progressively escalated his criticism of Amazon and Bezos, who also privately owns The Washington Post, which has published stories that have angered the president.

Bezos, ranked by Forbes magazine as the world’s richest man with an estimated net worth of $115.6 billion, owns 78.89 million Amazon shares, worth about $110 billion at Tuesday’s market close.

Amazon shares closed up 1.5 percent at $1,392.05. The shares started the day higher but fell as low as $1,355.33 after Trump’s latest Amazon-related tweet. 

Trump has accused Amazon of not paying enough tax, taking advantage of the U.S. postal system and putting small retailers out of business, but he has offered no evidence to back up his criticisms.

“The post office is losing billions of dollars … because it delivers packages for Amazon at a very low rate,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday. “If you look at the cost that we’re subsidizing, we’re giving a subsidy to Amazon.”

Trump offered no details about the report he cited or how he might charge the company more through USPS.

Amazon also ships packages through providers such as FedEx and United Parcel Service as well as its own experimental shipping service.

Representatives of Amazon and USPS had no comment on Trump’s tweet on Tuesday and could not be immediately reached regarding his latest comments to reporters.

Developing Nations to Study Ways to Dim Sunshine, Slow Warming

Scientists in developing nations plan to step up research into dimming sunshine to curb climate change, hoping to judge whether a man-made chemical sunshade would be less risky than a harmful rise in global temperatures.

Research into “solar geo-engineering,” which would mimic big volcanic eruptions that can cool the Earth by masking the sun with a veil of ash, is now dominated by rich nations and universities such as Harvard and Oxford.

Twelve scholars, from countries including Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Ethiopia, India, Jamaica and Thailand, wrote in the journal Nature this week that the poor were most vulnerable to global warming and should be more involved.

“Developing countries must lead on solar geo-engineering research,” they wrote in a commentary.

‘Pretty crazy’

“The overall idea [of solar geo-engineering] is pretty crazy but it is gradually taking root in the world of research,” lead author Atiq Rahman, head of the Bangladesh Center for Advanced Studies, told Reuters by telephone.

The solar geo-engineering studies would be helped by a new $400,000 fund from the Open Philanthropy Project, a foundation backed by Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook, and his wife, Cari Tuna, they wrote.

The fund could help scientists in developing nations study regional impacts of solar geo-engineering such as on droughts, floods or monsoons, said Andy Parker, a co-author and project director of the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative.

Rahman said the academics were not taking sides about whether geo-engineering would work. Among proposed ideas, planes might spray clouds of reflective sulfur particles high in the Earth’s atmosphere.

“The technique is controversial, and rightly so. It is too early to know what its effects would be: it could be very helpful or very harmful,” they wrote.

Doubts expressed

A U.N. panel of climate experts, in a leaked draft of a report about global warming due for publication in October, is skeptical about solar geo-engineering, saying it may be “economically, socially and institutionally infeasible.”

Among the risks, the draft obtained by Reuters says, are that it might disrupt weather patterns, could be hard to stop once started, and might discourage countries from making a promised switch from fossil fuels to cleaner energies.

Still, Rahman said most developed nations had “abysmally failed” so far in their pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions, making radical options to limit warming more attractive.

The world is set for a warming of 3 degrees Celsius (5.7 Fahrenheit) or more above pre-industrial times, he said, far above a goal of keeping a rise in temperatures “well below” 2C (3.6F) under the 2015 Paris Agreement among almost 200 nations.

Cool Jazz: Bowhead Whales Improvise When Singing, Study Says

Some whales are taking jazz riffs to new depths.

For the first time, scientists have eavesdropped year-round on the songs of bowhead whales, the little-heard whales that r oam the Arctic under the ice. They found that bowheads — the bigger, more blubbery cousins of the better known humpbacks — are more prolific and downright jazzier than other whales. 

“Bowhead whales are the jazz singers of the Arctic. You don’t know what they’re going to do. They inject novelty,” said University of Washington oceanographer Kate Stafford.

184 bowhead songs recorded

Over three years a single underwater microphone captured 184 distinct bowhead whale songs, according to Stafford’s study in Wednesday’s Biology Letters. That’s remarkable because there are probably only a couple hundred males in an area between Greenland and Norway to make the songs, Stafford said. 

Stafford and her colleagues couldn’t track specific songs to individual whales to know for sure, but given the wide variety of songs they think each male has a different song, and that they likely change from season to season. 

In contrast nearly all humpback males sing versions of the same song every winter, Stafford said. “Humpback whales are classical music singers. They make long elaborate songs but their songs are really ordered and almost predictable.” 

Only the male sings

Until now, biologists would hear only snippets of bowhead songs in other Arctic areas. They have many recordings of humpback songs because there are more humpbacks and they travel much further south.

Scientists think only male bowheads sing and that they are singing for sex, improvising to try to attract females with the best rendition of songs. Stafford said she was reminded of Miles Davis on his “Bitches Brew” album. Though she admitted bowhead music isn’t for everyone. 

“I find the songs to be quite beautiful, but some people compare them to fingernails on a chalkboard,” Stafford said. “They’re scream-y. They’re yell-y and they’re quite funny.”

‘Huge step forward’

Bowheads — which can live to be 200 years old and are almost 60 feet long — start with very high notes, modulate their tune quite a bit and at times make two completely different sounds at the same time.

“We don’t know how they do that,” Stafford said. Humans can’t, but some birds can, she said.

Syracuse University biology professor Susan Parks, who wasn’t part of the study, praised the research as “a huge step forward” in learning about bowhead songs, showing surprising novelty and variety.

“The diversity of signal types uncovered by this study suggests that something very different is going on with bowhead whale song,” Parks wrote in an email.

‘Woo-woo-woo’

One of Stafford’s favorites makes repeated riffs of “woo-woo-woo” but with differing modulations. She’ll often just turn the songs on her cell phone and bliss out.

“These guys are great mimics. They can imitate ice,” Stafford said. “They make the nuttiest songs.”

Zuckerberg: Facebook Deleted Posts Linked to Russian ‘Troll Factory’ 

Facebook, expanding its response to people using the platform improperly, said Tuesday that it had deleted hundreds of Russian accounts and pages associated with a “troll factory” indicted by U.S. prosecutors for fake activist and political posts in the 2016 U.S. election campaign.

Facebook said many of the deleted articles and pages came from Russia-based Federal News Agency, known as FAN, and that the social media company’s security team had concluded that the agency was technologically and structurally intertwined with the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency.

Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg told Reuters in an exclusive interview that the agency “has repeatedly acted to deceive people and manipulate people around the world, and we don’t want them on Facebook anywhere.”

Massive data collection

The world’s largest social media company is under pressure to improve its handling of data after disclosing that information about 50 million Facebook users wrongly ended up in the hands of political consultancy Cambridge Analytica, which worked on then-Republican candidate Donald Trump’s campaign.

The removed accounts and pages were mainly in Russian, and many had little political import, the company said. Previously Facebook focused on taking down fake accounts and accounts spreading fake news. The new policy will include otherwise legitimate content spread by those same actors, Zuckerberg said.

“It is clear from the evidence that we’ve collected that those organizations are controlled and operated by” the Internet Research Agency, he added.

In February, the agency known as IRA was among three firms and 13 Russians indicted by U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller on charges they conspired to tamper in the presidential campaign and support Trump while disparaging Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

Russian media organization RBC last year reported that FAN and IRA once shared the same street address and had other connections. One of the people that it said made decisions at FAN was indicted by Mueller’s office, which is investigating U.S. intelligence agency conclusions that Moscow tried to undermine the democratic process. Russia denies interfering in the elections.

Ban accounts

Facebook disclosed in September that Russians used Facebook to meddle in U.S. politics, posting on the social network under false names in the months before and after the 2016 elections.

Zuckerberg said Tuesday that improved machine learning had helped find connections between the latest posts and IRA. He and Facebook security officials said the company would do the same when they find more legitimate content being pushed out by groups exposed as manipulators.

“We’re going to execute and operate under our principles,” Zuckerberg said. “We don’t allow people to have fake accounts, and if you repeatedly try to set up fake accounts to manipulate things, then our policy is to ban all of your accounts.”

Zuckerberg said that the standard is high for such retribution toward news organizations and that state-owned media by itself was fine.

The company decided to root out as much as it can of IRA, which was involved with posts including sponsoring fake pages that were pro-Trump, pro-border security and protesting police violence against minorities, among other topics.

The expanded response could provoke a backlash from Russian internet regulators.

Last October, Google followed up on reported connections between FAN and IRA by removing FAN stories from its search index. Media regulator Roskomnadzor asked Google for an explanation, saying that it needed to protect free speech.

Google then reinstated FAN, according to reports at the time. Facebook officials said its accounts and pages in question had 1 million unique followers on Facebook and 500,000 on Instagram, mainly in Russia, Ukraine, and nearby countries such as Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan.

Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook in his college dorm room in 2004, personally kept quiet about the Cambridge Analytica data leak for four days before apologizing and outlining steps that he said would help protect personal data.

The 33-year-old billionaire plans to testify before U.S. lawmakers to explain Facebook’s privacy policies, a first for him, a source said last week, although he has so far not committed to doing the same for U.K. lawmakers.

Multiple investigations

Britain’s data protection authority, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and 37 U.S. state attorneys general are investigating Facebook’s handling of personal data.

Zuckerberg initially downplayed Facebook’s ability to sway voters, saying days after the U.S. elections that it was a “pretty crazy idea” that fake news stories had an influence.

Eventually, though, Facebook’s security staff concluded that the social network was being used by spies and other government agents to covertly spread disinformation among rivals and enemies.

Critics including U.S. Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, have complained Facebook moved too slowly to investigate and counter information warfare. 

Facebook stepped up efforts to shutter fake accounts before a national election last year in France, and has said it will work with election authorities around the world to try to prevent meddling in politics.

The company, which is now one of the main ways politicians advertise to voters, plans to start a public archive showing all election-related ads, how much money was spent on each one, the number of impressions each receives and the demographics of the audience reached.

Facebook is on track to bring that data to U.S. voters before congressional elections in November, Zuckerberg said Tuesday. Facebook plans to send postcards by U.S. mail to verify the identities and location of people who want to purchase U.S. election-related advertising.

US Unveils Tariffs on $50 Billion Worth of Chinese Imports

The Trump administration on Tuesday escalated its aggressive actions on trade by proposing 25 percent tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese imports to protest Beijing’s alleged theft of American technology.

 

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative issued a list targeting 1,300 Chinese products, including industrial robots and telecommunications equipment. The suggested tariffs wouldn’t take effect right away: A public comment period will last until May 11, and a hearing on the tariffs is set for May 15. Companies and consumers will have the opportunity to lobby to have some products taken off the list or have others added.

 

The latest U.S. move risks heightening trade tensions with China, which on Monday had slapped taxes on $3 billion in U.S. products in response to earlier U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.

 

“China’s going to be compelled to lash back,” warned Philip Levy, a senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and an economic adviser to President George W. Bush.

 

Indeed, China immediately threatened to retaliate against the new U.S. tariffs, which target the high-tech industries that Beijing has been nurturing, from advanced manufacturing and aerospace to information technology and robotics.

 

Early Wednesday in Beijing, China’s Commerce Ministry said it “strongly condemns and firmly opposes” the proposed U.S. tariffs and warned of retaliatory action.

 

“We will prepare equal measures for U.S. products with the same scale” according to regulations in Chinese trade law, a ministry spokesman said in comments carried by the official Xinhua News Agency.

 

The U.S. sanctions are intended to punish China for deploying strong-arm tactics in its drive to become a global technology power. These include pressuring American companies to share technology to gain access to the Chinese market, forcing U.S. firms to license their technology in China on unfavorable terms and even hacking into U.S. companies’ computers to steal trade secrets.

 

The administration sought to draw up the list of targeted Chinese goods in a way that might limit the impact of the tariffs — a tax on imports — on American consumers while hitting Chinese imports that benefit from Beijing’s sharp-elbowed tech policies. But some critics warned that Americans will end up being hurt.

 

“If you’re hitting $50 billion in trade, you’re inevitably going to hurt somebody, and somebody is going to complain,” said Rod Hunter, a former economic official at the National Security Council and now a partner at Baker & McKenzie LLP.

 

Kathy Bostjancic of Oxford Economics predicted that the tariffs “would have just a marginal impact on the U.S. economy” — unless they spark “a tit-for-tat retaliation that results in a broad-based global trade war.”

 

Representatives of American business, which have complained for years that China has pilfered U.S. technology and discriminated against U.S. companies, were nevertheless critical of the administration’s latest action.

 

“Unilateral tariffs may do more harm than good and do little to address the problems in China’s (intellectual property) and tech transfer policies,” said John Frisbie, president of the U.S.-China Business Council.

 

Even some technology groups that are contending directly with Chinese competition expressed misgivings.

 

“The Trump administration is right to push back against China’s abuse of economic and trade policy,” said Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation think tank. But he said the proposed U.S. tariffs “would hurt companies in the U.S. by raising the prices and reducing consumption of the capital equipment they rely on to produce their goods and services.”

 

“The focus should be on things that will create the most leverage over China without raising prices and dampening investment in the kinds of machinery, equipment, and other technology that drives innovation and productivity across the economy,” Atkinson added.

 

At the same time, the United States has become increasingly frustrated with China’s aggressive efforts to overtake American technological supremacy. And many have argued that Washington needed to respond aggressively.

 

“The Chinese are bad trading partners because they steal intellectual property,” said Derek Scissors, a China specialist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.

 

In January, a federal court in Wisconsin convicted a Chinese manufacturer of wind turbines, Sinovel Wind Group, of stealing trade secrets from the American company AMSC and nearly putting it out of business.

 

And in 2014, a Pennsylvania grand jury indicted five officers in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army on charges of hacking into the computers of Westinghouse, US Steel and other major American companies to steal information that would benefit their Chinese competitors.

 

To target China, Trump dusted off a Cold War weapon for trade disputes: Section 301 of the U.S. Trade Act of 1974, which lets the president unilaterally impose tariffs. It was meant for a world in which much of global commerce wasn’t covered by trade agreements. With the arrival in 1995 of the Geneva-based World Trade Organization, Section 301 largely faded from use.

 

Dean Pinkert of the law firm Hughes Hubbard & Reed, found it reassuring that the administration didn’t completely bypass the WTO: As part of its complaint, the U.S. is bringing a WTO case against Chinese licensing policies that put U.S. companies at a disadvantage.

 

China has been urging the United States to seek a negotiated solution and warning that it would retaliate against any trade sanctions. Beijing could counterpunch by targeting American businesses that depend on the Chinese market: Aircraft manufacturer Boeing, for instance, or American soybean farmers, who send nearly 60 percent of their exports to China.

 

Rural America has been especially worried about the risk of a trade war. Farmers are especially vulnerable targets in trade spats because they rely so much on foreign sales.

 

“Beijing right now is trying to motivate US stakeholders to press the Trump Administration to enter into direct negotiations with China and reach a settlement before tariffs are imposed,” the Eurasia Group consultancy said in a research note.

 

“The next couple of weeks will be very interesting,” says Kristin Duncanson, a soybean, corn and hog farmer in Mapleton, Minnesota.

Experts: In Self-Driving Cars, Human Drivers and Standards Come Up Short

Autonomous cars should be required to meet standards on their ability to detect potential hazards, and better ways are needed to keep their human drivers ready to assume control, U.S. auto safety and technology experts said after fatal crashes involving Uber Technologies and Tesla vehicles.

Automakers and tech companies rely on human drivers to step in when necessary with self-driving technology. But in the two recent crashes, which involved vehicles using different kinds of technologies, neither of the human drivers took any action before the accidents.

Driverless cars rely on lidar, which uses laser light pulses to detect road hazards, as well as sensors such as radar and cameras. There are not, however, any standards on the systems, nor do all companies use the same combination of sensors, and some vehicles may have blind spots.

Queue the music for the human driver — music that drivers often find difficult to hear.

“Humans don’t have the ability to take over the vehicle as quickly as may be expected” in those situations, said self-driving expert and investor Evangelos Simoudis.

In the Uber crash last month, the ride-services company was testing a fully driverless system intended for commercial use when the prototype vehicle struck and killed a woman walking across an Arizona road. Video of the crash, taken from inside the vehicle, shows the driver at the wheel, seemingly looking down and not at the road. Just before the video stops, the driver looks upward toward the road and suddenly looks shocked.

In the Tesla incident last month, which involved a car that any consumer can buy, a Model X vehicle was in semi-autonomous Autopilot mode when it crashed, killing its driver. The driver had received earlier warnings to put his hands on the wheel, Tesla said.

Some semi-automated cars, like the Tesla, employ different technologies to help drivers stay in their lane or maintain a certain distance behind the vehicle in front. Those systems rely on alerts — beeping noises or a vibrating steering wheel — to get drivers’ attention.

‘Immature technology’

Duke University mechanical engineering professor Missy Cummings said the recent Uber and Tesla crashes show the “technology they are using is immature.”

Tesla says its technology is statistically proven to save lives through better driving. In a response to Reuters on Tuesday, Tesla said drivers have a “responsibility to maintain control of the car” whenever they enable Autopilot and need to be ready to respond to “audible and visual cues.”

An Uber spokesperson said, “safety is our primary concern every step of the way.”

A consumer group, Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, says a bill on self-driving cars now stalled in the U.S. Senate is an opportunity to improve safety, quite different from the bill’s original intent to quickly allow testing of self-driving cars without human controls on public roads. The group has proposed amending the bill, the AV START Act, to set standards for those vehicles — for instance, requiring a “vision test” for automated vehicles to test what their different sensors actually see.

The group believes the bill should also cover semi-automated systems like Tesla’s Autopilot — a lower level of technology than what is included in the current proposed legislation.

Other groups have also put forth proposals on self-driving cars, including requiring the vehicles and even semi-automated systems to meet performance targets, greater transparency and data from makers and operators of the vehicles, increased regulatory oversight, and better monitoring of and engagement with human drivers.

Role of drivers

Others want to focus on the human driver. In November, Consumer Reports magazine called on automakers for responsible labeling “to help consumers fully understand” their vehicles’ autonomous functions.

Jake Fisher, Consumer Reports’ head of automotive testing, said human drivers “are bad at paying attention to automation and this technology is not capable of reacting to all types of emergencies.

“It’s like being a passenger with a toddler driving the car,” he said.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is doing tests using semi-automated vehicles including models from Tesla, Volvo, Jaguar Land Rover and General Motors Co. The aim is to see how drivers use semi-autonomous technology — some watch the road with their hands above the wheel, others do not — and which warnings get their attention.

“We just don’t know enough about how drivers use any of these systems in the wild,” said MIT research scientist Bryan Reimer.

Timothy Carone, an autonomous systems expert and professor at Notre Dame University’s Mendoza College of Business, said autonomous technology’s proponents must “find the right balance so the technology is tested right, but it isn’t hampered or halted.”

“Because in the long run it will save lives,” he said.

New Gene Editing Tool May Yield Bigger Harvests

Bread and chocolate are staples of the American diet. And a scientific team in California is working hard to make sure the plants they’re made from are as robust as possible. They’re using a recently discovered bacterial gene-editing tool called CRISPR to create more pest-resistant crops.

CRISPR is a feature of the bacterial defense system. The microbes use it like a molecular pair of scissors, to precisely snip out viral infections in their DNA.

Scientists at the Innovative Genomics Institute in Berkeley, California, are using CRISPR to manipulate plant DNA. Managing director, Susan Jenkins, says the technique is so much faster and precise than other plant transformation methods, it will likely increase the speed of creating new plant varieties by years, if not decades. “What CRISPR is going to allow,” she explains, “is for us to go in and make these changes, and then within one generation of the plant actually have the trait we want.”

Rust-resistant wheat

 

While CRISPR speeds up plant breeding, Jenkins says it’s not a magic wand — changing a plant takes a lot of steps. She points to the Institute’s efforts to develop a wheat variety that resists a fungal rust that can reduce yields by nearly 50 percent.

First, scientists had to figure out just which gene was making the wheat vulnerable to fungal rust. Then they used CRISPR to remove that gene.

“So in this case, we use CRISPR to actually knock out a gene that is in the wheat,” Jenkins says. And because “snipping out” a gene does not add foreign material to a plant, last week, the USDA ruled that gene-changing methods like this do not require special regulatory approval.

 

Plant transformation expert Myeong-Je Cho says they started with a single gene-edited rust-resistant wheat cell, and grew it in the lab into wheat “clones” for further testing. After just over a year, some clones are now stalks of wheat, and Cho adds, “we have grownup plants in the greenhouse,” complete with normal stalks and robust seed heads.

While the Institute introduced no foreign genetic material into the wheat, CRISPR technology can also be used to introduce genes, even genes from other species, as is done with more traditional GMO crops. However, in standard GMO techniques, scientists use a “shotgun” approach to force new genes into a plant’s DNA in random places. Then, they choose which random change is most likely to grow healthy plants. In contrast, CRISPR is used when scientists want to add a specific gene at a specific location in the DNA. CRISPR offers that level of precision.

Protecting cacao trees

The bacterial gene known as Cas9 evolved to snip viruses out of bacterial DNA. Now Institute scientists want to use it to fight a virus that’s attacking cacao trees in West Africa.

The swollen shoot virus evolved in other plants, then, half a century ago, “jumped species” to cacao trees, which it can kill in just three years. So Jenkins says, the Institute is working to add virus resistance to cacao tree DNA, by inserting the Cas9 resistance gene. After all, she says, “If the bacteria have already evolved this to fight this viral infection, we are just going to take that mechanism and put it directly into the plant.”

 

The Institute plans to start growing cacao trees resistant to swollen shoot virus within a year. That is fast, according to Institute Science Director, Brian Staskawicz. He points out, “What this technology can do is to allow us work with the elite cultivars of a plant and basically change them for drought resistance and cold tolerance and disease resistance in a more rapid fashion than classical plant breeding.”

 

Staskawicz says that modifying cacao tree DNA is an exciting project from a technical standpoint, because cacao plants are unusually difficult to clone and genetically transform.

Public attitudes towards genetically modified crops

However, some challenges will go beyond whether the changes are technically possible. Those other challenges become evident at the Diablo Farmer’s market near Berkeley, where vendors like chocolatier Eli Curtis pride themselves on selling craft, organic foods. Curtis suspects we could increase cocoa yields by helping farmers be better stewards of wild cacao trees. He’s not sure consumers will like the idea of gene-edited chocolate, but if CRISPR leads to more pest-resistant crops, he says, “I definitely understand the value. But I also understand consumer apprehension.”

 

Nevertheless, Staskawicz says we need faster plant-breeding techniques like CRISPR because we are in a race, one we need to win, because there are currently 7.3 billion people on earth.

“By 2050 there are going to be nine billion people, and the estimates are that we actually need to increase food production by 70 percent. So we are going to need a way to actually increase the yield of these plants to feed the population of the world.”

CRISPR can help do that. He and his team hope, within a decade, CRISPR’d crops may be ingredients in many things, including bread and chocolate.

Gay Dating App Grindr to Stop Sharing HIV Status

The gay dating app Grindr will stop sharing its users’ HIV status with analytics companies.

Chief security officer Bryce Case told BuzzFeed News on Monday that the company had decided to stop the sharing of such information in order to allay people’s fears.

Analytics firms Localytics and Apptimize were paid to test and monitor how the app was being used. Grindr said the firms were under “strict contractual terms that provide for the highest level of confidentiality,” and that data that might include location or information from HIV status fields were “always transmitted securely with encryption.”

Grindr said it was important to remember that it is a public forum and that users have the option to post information about their HIV status and date when last tested. It said its users should carefully consider what information they list in their profiles.

Rare Dinosaur Prints Found on Scotland’s Isle of Skye

Dozens of rare footprints belonging to dinosaurs made some 170 million years ago have been discovered on Scotland’s Isle of Skye, offering an important insight into the Middle Jurassic era, scientists said on Tuesday.

“The more we look on the Isle of Skye, the more dinosaur footprints we find,” said Dr Steve Brusatte of the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences.

“This new site records two different types of dinosaurs — long-necked cousins of Brontosaurus and sharp-toothed cousins of T. rex — hanging around a shallow lagoon, back when Scotland was much warmer and dinosaurs were beginning their march to global dominance.”

The find is globally important as it is rare evidence of the Middle Jurassic period, from which few fossil sites have been found around the world, the university said on its website.

The footprints were difficult to study owing to tidal conditions, the impact of weathering and changes to the landscape, it added. But researchers managed to identify two trackways in addition to many isolated footprints.

They used drone photographs to make a map of the site while other images were collected using a paired set of cameras and tailored software to help model the prints.

The study, carried out by the University of Edinburgh, Staffin Museum and Chinese Academy of Sciences, was published in the Scottish Journal of Geology.

New Gene Editing Tools May Speed Creation of Bigger Harvests

Feeding the world depends on bountiful harvests, even in the face of changing pests and climate. Scientists are bringing a new tool to the effort, a bacterial gene editing system called CRISPR. The technique works like a molecular pair of scissors that targets a specific location in the DNA to introduce beneficial traits, or delete harmful ones. From Berkeley, California, Shelley Schlender reports.

Most Distant Star Ever Detected Sits Halfway Across Universe

Scientists have detected the most distant star ever viewed, a blue behemoth located more than halfway across the universe and named after the ancient Greek mythological figure Icarus.

Researchers said on Monday they used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to spot the star, which is up to a million times more luminous and about twice as hot as our sun, residing 9.3 billion lights years away from Earth. It is a type of star called a blue supergiant.

The star, located in a distant spiral galaxy, is at least 100 times further away than any other star previously observed, with the exception of things like the huge supernova explosions that mark the death of certain stars. Older galaxies have been spotted but their individual stars were indiscernible.

The scientists took advantage of a phenomenon called “gravitational lensing” to spot the star. It involves the bending of light by massive galaxy clusters in the line of sight, which magnifies more distant celestial objects. This makes dim, faraway objects that otherwise would be undetectable, like an individual star, visible.

Peering back in time

“The fraction of the universe where we can see stars is very small. But this sort of quirk of nature allows us to see much bigger volumes,” said astronomer Patrick Kelly of the University of Minnesota, lead author of the research published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

“We will now be able to study in detail what the universe was like — and specifically how stars evolved and what their natures are — almost all the way back to the earliest stages of the universe and the first generations of stars,” Kelly added.

Because its light has taken so long to reach Earth, looking at this star is like peering back in time to when the universe was less than a third of its current age. The Big Bang that gave rise to the universe occurred 13.8 billion years ago.

’15 minutes of fame’

The star spotted in this study is formally named MACS J1149+2223 Lensed Star-1, but its discoverers dubbed it Icarus, who flew so close to the sun that his wings fashioned from wax and feathers melted, sending him plunging fatally into the sea.

Kelly said he preferred the nickname Warhol, after the American artist Andy Warhol, owing to the star’s “15 minutes of fame” following its discovery.

“No one liked that, except for one other person, so it ended up Icarus,” Kelly said.

SpaceX Launches Used Supply Ship on Used Rocket for NASA

SpaceX has launched a used supply ship on a used rocket to the International Space Station.

 

The Falcon rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Monday, hoisting a Dragon capsule full of food, experiments and other station goods for NASA.

 

The Dragon and its 6,000-pound shipment should reach the space station Wednesday. The station astronauts will use a robot arm to grab it.

 

It’s the second trip to the orbiting lab for this particular Dragon, recycled following a visit two years ago. The Falcon’s first-stage booster also flew before — last summer.

 

SpaceX has combined a recycled Dragon and a recycled Falcon once before. The company aims to reduce launch costs by reusing rocket parts.

 

The space station is currently home to astronauts from the U.S., Russia and Japan.

Too Late to Plant Green Seed Among World’s Forgotten Palm Oil Farmers?

When palm oil farmer Isnin Kasno eventually retires, his three children will turn their backs on the family’s small plantation in Malaysia’s southern state of Johor.

Like many aging oil palm growers in Southeast Asia, the 58-year-old struggles to make ends meet from his 2 hectares (5 acres), and his adult children have little appetite for the physically demanding work and dwindling financial rewards.

“It makes me very sad,” said Kasno, who planted his land in 1983 after working in Singapore’s construction industry. “Soon, when I no longer have the energy to help with the harvesting, my only option will be to lease my farm.”

There are more than 2 million smallholders tending 5.6 million hectares of land in Malaysia and Indonesia – the two countries that dominate the world’s supply of the vegetable oil used widely in food, household products and biodiesel.

This army of farmers produces about 40 percent of palm oil from those two countries.

Over the last decade, growing pressure from green groups and consumers has pushed big companies that produce, trade or buy palm oil to tackle labor abuses on plantations and commit to ending deforestation that is contributing to climate change.

But smallholders like Kasno have been left behind, say industry officials.

Only 78,000 smallholders are certified by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), a body of consumer organizations, environmental groups and plantation firms that aims to make the industry greener and more ethical.

Some 35 years ago, Kasno and three workers spent 12 months clearing a plot of lush forest land near the city of Johor Bahru using chainsaws and burning.

The farmer planted oil palm on the carbon-rich peatland and then registered the land in his name for a nominal fee.

Kasno, who also does a part-time job to support his family, pays two Indonesians a monthly wage of 150 ringgit ($39) each to help harvest his plantation.

The father of three has heard of, but knows little about RSPO certification, a sustainability scheme that promotes best practice and is backed by major European buyers of palm oil.

The challenge for international companies now – faced with a scarcity of land to expand and the need to secure future supplies – is to work with small growers like Kasno, even though many farmers find it hard to follow sustainability rules.

“False Dream”

Smallholders across the region often live in poverty and have only a basic education level, industry officials said.

Averaging from 2 to 7 hectares of land each, they struggle to make large profits because they do not use the latest farming methods, cannot buy the best fertilizers and pesticides cheaply, and their yields are usually lower than the industry average.

Unlike major palm growers, independent farmers also face logistical problems getting their fresh palm fruit to mills for processing, and are inefficient because they cannot afford modern farming equipment.

During low output months when seasonal monsoon rains are at their heaviest, their income can plummet, forcing them to cut down on labor costs or spending on fertilizers. This harms harvests and quality further.

Fluctuating global palm prices also hurt farmers – many of whom cannot access credit or insurance that would help them when extreme weather damages their crops.

Growing oil palm promised big profits 25 years ago but has turned out to be a “false dream” for many smallholders, said Marianne Martinet of The Forest Trust, a non-profit that works with large plantations, consumers and smallholders.

“The common challenge now is low productivity and yields … also the financial ability to manage a business,” she added.

Smallholders outside Johor Bahru said they need lower or subsidized fertilizer prices, training in the best farming practices, more help to increase yields and financial support from governments – especially when palm oil prices drop.

The children of smallholders in Malaysia, who complain about a lack of entertainment and the difficulty of finding a partner in rural areas, often seek better-paid work in urban areas.

Halting that trend is crucial, farmers and dealers said.

“The priorities of smallholders, in most cases, (are) to put food on the table,” said Carl Bek-Nielsen, chief executive director of United Plantations, which has palm plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia.

“More resources need to be channeled to help smallholders, simply because they make up such a huge part of the (palm) cake. It’s a huge, huge task, but you have to start somewhere.”

Certification

Established back in 2004, the RSPO’s focus has been mostly on making large and medium-sized palm oil companies more sustainable, trying to achieve the maximum with limited funds.

But in 2012, it certified a first batch of smallholders, and three years later, set up a working group to look at how best to help them. In July last year, a roadmap was completed to open up the RSPO to more small growers, aimed at improving their livelihoods, sustainability and yields.

Eventually, with more funding and training, the goal is to make it easier for smallholders to get RSPO certification and access international markets. RSPO-certified palm oil is preferred by many European buyers, and is sold at a premium.

The RSPO launched a two-year pilot project late last year, partly funded by UN Environment, which will train smallholders in Sabah, Malaysia and Central Kalimantan in Indonesia.

“This is not only about economics but access to education, better healthcare,” said Julia Majail, RSPO associate director.

The RSPO project is similar to schemes backed by big palm buyers like Nestle, Unilever and Procter & Gamble (P&G), which partner with sustainability advisors like The Forest Trust, Wild Asia and Proforest.

Such schemes train pockets of smallholders to adopt modern farming techniques and ensure workplace safety, as well as to avoid planting on peatland or burning during land clearance.

Smoke from slash-and-burn agriculture is blamed for the polluting haze that brings health risks across Southeast Asia most years.

Besides helping farmers achieve RSPO certification, the hope is that other smallholders will notice the gains made by participating growers, and change their methods too.

“If we want to drive more production with the same land – improve productivity (and) minimize deforestation – the way to go about it is to work with the smallholders,” said Girish Deshpande, a global business planner at P&G.

Career Choice

But some say achieving RSPO certification is too costly and complicated for most smallholders, citing the remoteness of plantations, the number of middlemen in the supply chain and the scale of monitoring required.

“I’m now beginning to question whether certification is the route for smallholders,” said Simon Lord, chief sustainability officer at Sime Darby Plantation and former chair of the RSPO smallholders’ working group. “It’s just sheer logistics. The number of audit hours to do that just blows it out of the water, in terms of expense.”

Lord, who has more than 30 years of industry experience, said smallholders should form collectives, while government-run schemes offer them an easier “entry level” into sustainability.

The RSPO is reviewing how to simplify its certification process and standards for smallholders, said Majail, a process likely to be finalized by November.

Back in rural Johor, Malaysian navy veteran Farid Harith, 48, spotted a trend of smallholders leaving their land back in 2004, and now manages 70 plantations for owners who have moved to the cities or are too elderly to manage their crops.

“A lot of young people go to study at university and then pursue corporate careers,” said Harith, who employs some 17 Indonesian workers to help him. “It is a great loss, because I see the opportunities there are to make money in the palm plantations,” he added. “We need to change the mindset.”

($1 = 3.8620 ringgit)

Tiger Economy Roaring as Golf’s Masters Approaches

Tiger Woods is back in Green Jacket contention and from country club bars to boardrooms, the former world No. 1 is once again the tide lifting all boats in the golfing world.

Golf television ratings are trending upward, so are equipment and ball sales while Masters tickets and even tips are experiencing a “Tiger Bump” as a rejuvenated Woods returns to the U.S. Masters for the first time in three years.

Much of the buzz being generated around golf’s first major is emanating from a 42-year-old golfer who is closer to qualifying for the Seniors Tour (open to players 50 and over) than his last victory at Augusta in 2005.

But nothing gets the sporting public revved up more than a compelling comeback story and Woods is writing one for the ages.

“This is a little bit like a Lazarus resurrection here with respect to where he was,” Steve Mona, World Golf Foundation CEO, told Reuters. “Only last September he was talking about whether he would be able to come back at all. Now that he is the favorite at the Masters, it is just astonishing. He is certainly in form. I don’t think anyone would be terribly surprised if he were in the hunt.”

The greatest player of his generation, Woods dominated golf like few athletes in any sport ever have.

A prodigious talent who first appeared on television swinging a golf club at two years old, Woods grew into a champion by winning 14 majors in swashbuckling style. He became a crossover celebrity and very wealthy with career earnings totaling $1.7 billion, according to a 2017 report by Forbes.

Having climbed to such great heights, Woods’ fall from grace that started in 2009 has been all the more shocking.

A tawdry divorce, a DUI and years and years of injuries, surgeries and failed treatments sent sponsors scurrying.

The back that had caused Woods so much pain was getting no better and the golfer who had held the No. 1 world ranking for a collective 683 weeks slumped out of the top 1,000.

Even the ever-positive Woods suddenly seemed resigned to a dour fate.

Yet after undergoing spinal fusion surgery last April, the dark clouds hanging over Woods slowly began to lift.

Shaking off years of competitive rust, Woods returned with an encouraging tie for ninth at the Hero World Challenge, followed by a tie for 23rd at the Farmers Insurance Open and a missed cut at the Genesis Open.

Highest ratings

Then suddenly Woods grabbed the spotlight as only he can, announcing his return to form with three impressive results — 12th at the Honda Classic, a tie for second at the Valspar Championship and a tie for fifth at the Arnold Palmer Invitational.

Woods’ back now appears to be strong enough to carry the hopes of an entire industry that is experiencing a “Tiger Bump.”

With Woods back in contention, NBC/Golf Channel said the final rounds of both the Arnold Palmer and Valspar championships registered the highest ratings for a PGA Tour telecast, outside of the majors, since the 2015 Wyndham Championship.

The golf industry has also seen a spike. Bridgestone said that when Woods (who uses its ball) has been in the field in 2018, the average basket value with Bridgestone products increased by over 120 percent compared with the same period in 2017.

“His endorsement [that we make the best ball] is more valuable than all of the science and data that we throw out to the consumers,” Angel Ilgan, President & CEO of Bridgestone, told Reuters. “It is just ridiculous that we can show them hundreds and thousands of testings with robots and projectile guns that we’re the best ball, the most accurate ball. And the consumer doesn’t believe us until Tiger says, ‘Yeah that’s true.’

“During Tiger’s absence the entire industry, the PGA Tour, we were all kind of looking who is the next player,” he continued. “Then when Tiger came back, the entire industry is jumping on the Tiger bandwagon.”

Far-reaching effects

The trickle-down economics of Woods’ comeback are far-reaching.

During the final round of the Valspar, a bartender at a golf club raved on social media that tips were up 300 percent with Woods in contention.

“I was slammed packed with people watching Tiger play, it was insane,” said Alcaonline in a post on Reddit picked up by several news outlets. “I know it seems minimal but the economic trickle down effect this has when it comes to the golf world is hard to explain. I made at least 3X the amount of money I usually make on Sundays just because Tiger was in contention.”

With Woods at the start of a comeback but on the downslope of a turbulent but spectacular career, it is uncertain how long this Tiger bubble will last.

But with Woods’ stock soaring, everyone is buying in and Mona believes that it could be a good long-term investment.

“That [bartender] obviously takes it down to the grass-roots level and it is felt on many different levels and the most obvious ones are from TV ratings standpoint,” he said. “It’s astronomical how much they have increased and there is one common denominator and that is Tiger in contention.

“You look at attendance at those events and it is much the same story. What Tiger does is he increases interest in the game … they get interested and think maybe this is a game for me,” he added.

US Factory Activity Slows, Manufacturers Worry About Tariffs

U.S. factory activity slowed in March amid shortages of skilled workers and rising capacity constraints, but growth in the manufacturing sector remains underpinned by strong domestic and global economies.

The Institute for Supply Management (ISM) survey published Monday also showed a surge in the cost of raw materials and worries among manufacturers about the impact of steel and aluminum import tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump last month to shield domestic industries from what he has described as unfair competition from other countries.

“Demand remains robust, but the nation’s employment resources and supply chains are still struggling to keep up,” said Timothy Fiore, chair of ISM’s manufacturing business survey committee.

The ISM said its index of national factory activity slipped to a reading of 59.3 last month from 60.8 in February. A reading above 50 in the ISM index indicates growth in manufacturing, which accounts for about 12 percent of the U.S. economy.

The survey’s prices index jumped to its highest level since April 2011. There were price increases across 17 of 18 industry sectors last month. While a measure of new orders dropped, a gauge of backlog orders rose to levels last seen in May 2004.

The survey’s customers’ inventories index was at its lowest level since July 2011. A measure of factory employment dropped last month and the ISM said there were indications that labor and skill shortages were affecting production.

Seventeen industries including fabricated metal products, computer and electronic products, machinery, and chemical products reported growth last month. Apparel, leather and allied products was the only industry reporting a decrease.

Eyes on tariffs

Machinery manufacturers said the tariffs on steel and aluminum imports were “causing panic buying, driving the near-term prices higher and leading to inventory shortages for non-contract customers.”

Manufacturers of miscellaneous products reported that “new tariffs are causing concern across the supply chain. Full impact will take a few weeks to reveal itself.” Primary metal producers reported “significant price increases in the steel commodity” as a result of the tariffs.

Trump slapped 25 percent tariffs on steel imports and 10 percent for aluminum in early March. Fiore said 42 percent of survey comments in March were related to prices and tariffs.

U.S. financial markets were little moved by the data, with investors worrying about a global trade war after China increased tariffs by up to 25 percent on 128 American products in response to the duties on aluminum and steel imports.

Stocks on Wall Street were trading sharply lower and the dollar fell against a basket of currencies. U.S. government bond prices rose, with the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note falling to a near two-month low.

Still, the outlook for manufacturing remains upbeat amid dollar weakness, which is boosting the competitiveness of American-made goods on the international market.

“The near-term prospects for the manufacturing sector and the broader economy still appear brighter than they have been at any point over the past five years,” said Michael Pearce, an economist at Capital Economics in New York.

Construction spending

A separate report from the Commerce Department on Monday showed construction spending edged up 0.1 percent in February after being unchanged in January. February’s marginal increase in construction spending supports economists’ expectations for a slowdown in economic growth in the first quarter.

Gross domestic product growth estimates for the January-March quarter are mostly below a 2 percent annualized rate. The economy grew at a 2.9 percent pace in the fourth quarter.

Construction spending in February was held back by a 2.1 percent drop in outlays on public construction projects, which almost reversed January’s 2.3 percent rise.

Spending on federal government construction projects plunged 11.9 percent, the biggest decline since October 2004, after surging 13.4 percent in January.

State and local government construction outlays fell 1.0 percent after rising 1.3 percent in January. The drop in public construction spending dwarfed a 0.7 percent rise in investment in private construction projects.

“We expect only limited gains in public construction spending this year, based on the budget constraints at the state and local level,” said Gregory Daco, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics in New York.

US Stock Indexes Plunge

U.S. stocks plunged again Monday after President Donald Trump unleashed a new verbal attack on giant online retailer Amazon and China fired its shot at U.S. imports in a developing trade war.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 589 points by the close, shedding 1.9 percent. The Standard & Poor’s 500 dropped 2.3 percent while the NASDAQ fell nearly three percent at the end of trading.

Trump has strongly criticized Amazon three times in the last few days. Amazion founder Jeff Bezos also owns The Washington Post, whose revelatory stories on Trump and his administration frequently draw the president’s ire.

The U.S. leader says Amazon’s large-scale operations are detrimental to the business success of small retailers that cannot compete with its high-volume sales. Trump has also complained that the fees Amazon pays to the U.S. Postal Service to deliver merchandise the retailer sells are too low, costing the quasi-governmental agency hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, although the Postal Service says its contract with Amazon is profitable.

“Only fools, or worse, are saying that our money losing Post Office makes money with Amazon,” Trump said in his latest broadside against Amazon. “THEY LOSE A FORTUNE, and this will be changed. Also, our fully tax paying retailers are closing stores all over the country…not a level playing field!” 

Since Trump started verbally attacking Amazon, the company has lost more than $37 billion in market value.

China’s announcement that it is increasing duties on 128 categories of U.S. imports worth $3 billion in annual trade also worried investors. They fear Beijing’s response to the Trump tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese imports could spark an all-out trade war between the world’s two biggest economies.

Atsi Sheth, an analyst for Moody’s Investors Service, said, “The importance of tariff announcements by both the U.S. and China lies in what they may portend for overall bilateral trade and investment relations between the two countries.”

Late Monday, White House deputy press secretary Lindsay Walters issued a statement saying, in part, that China needs to stop “its unfair trading practices which are harming U.S. national security and distorting global markets.”