The U.S. economy ended 2017 by adding 148,000 new jobs in December. Despite the modest gain, hiring was strong enough to suggest the economic momentum will continue. But while the national unemployment rate remained unchanged at a 17-year low of 4.1 percent, analysts say the pace of job growth may be slowing down. Mil Arcega has more.
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Social media giant Twitter has reiterated its stance that accounts belonging to world leaders have special status, pushing back against calls from some users for the company to ban U.S. President Donald Trump.
In a blog post Friday, Twitter said it would not block the accounts of world leaders even if their statements were “controversial” because of a need to promote discussions about public policy.
“Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate,” Twitter said.
It said such a move would also not silence a world leader, but it “would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.”
“Twitter is here to serve and help advance the global, public conversation. Elected world leaders play a critical role in that conversation because of their outsized impact on our society,” the post said.
The company has previously said that it considers whether a post is newsworthy and of public interest before deciding whether to remove it.
Twitter did not specifically mention Trump in its statement. The debate over Trump’s tweets grew on Wednesday, when he tweeted that he had a “much bigger” nuclear button than North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
Critics said the tweet violated Twitter’s ban against threats of violence.
Last month, Twitter began enforcing new rules to remove “hateful” content on the network, including posts that promote violence.
The company said Friday that it reviews all tweets, including those of world leaders. “We review tweets by leaders within the political context that defines them, and enforce our rules accordingly,” the statement said.
A White House spokeswoman said she did not expect there to be any White House comment on the Twitter statement.
Pete Heinlein at the White House contributed to this report.
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Chances that a fix to a major microchip security flaw may slow down or crash some computer systems are leading some businesses to hold off installing software patches, fearing the cure may be worse than the original problem.
Researchers this week revealed security problems with chips from Intel Corp and many of its rivals, sending businesses, governments and consumers scrambling to understand the extent of the threat and the cost of fixes.
Rather than rushing to put on patches, a costly and time-intensive endeavor for major systems, some businesses are testing the fix, leaving their machines vulnerable.
“If you start applying patches across your whole fleet without doing proper testing, you could cause systems to crash, essentially putting all of your employees out of work,” said Ben Johnson, co-founder of cyber-security startup Obsidian.
Flaws not ‘critical’
Banks and other financial institutions spent much of the week studying the vulnerabilities, said Greg Temm, chief information risk officer with the Financial Services Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, an industry group that shares data on emerging cyber threats.
The flaws affect virtually all computers and mobile devices, but are not considered “critical” because there is no evidence that hackers have figured out how to exploit them, said Temm, whose group works with many of the world’s largest banks.
“It’s like getting a diagnosis of high blood pressure, but not having a cardiac arrest,” Temm said. “We’re taking it seriously, but it’s not something that is killing us.”
Testing the patches
Banks are testing the patches to see if they slow operations and, if so, what changes need to be made, Temm said. For instance, computers could be added to networks to make up for the lack of processor speed in individual machines, he added.
Some popular antivirus software programs are incompatible with the software updates, causing desktop and laptop computers to freeze up and show a “blue screen of death,” researcher Johnson said.
Antivirus software makers responded by rolling out fixes to make their products compatible with the updated operating systems, he said. In a blog posting Friday, Microsoft Corp said it would only offer security patches to Windows customers whose antivirus software suppliers had confirmed with Microsoft that the patch would not crash the customer’s machine.
“If you have not been offered the security update, you may be running incompatible antivirus software, and you should consult the software vendor,” Microsoft advised in the blog post.
Government agencies also are watching. The Ohio Attorney General’s office is monitoring the situation, a spokesman said by email.
“Intel continues to believe that the performance impact of these updates is highly workload-dependent and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time,” the world’s No. 1 chipmaker said on Thursday in a release.
No significant patch impact
It cited Amazon.com Inc, Apple Inc, Alphabet Inc’s and Microsoft as saying that most users had seen no significant impact on performance after installing the patches.
The cloud vendors are among a group of firms that quickly patched their technology to mitigate against the threat from one of those vulnerabilities, dubbed Meltdown, which only affects machines running Intel chips.
Major software makers have not issued patches to protect against the second vulnerability, dubbed Spectre, which affects nearly all computer chips made in the last decade, including those from Intel, Advanced Micro Devices Inc, and ARM-architecture manufacturers, including Qualcomm Inc.
However, Google, Firefox and Microsoft have implemented measures in most web browsers to stop hackers from launching remote attacks using Spectre.
Governments and security experts say they have seen no cyber attacks seeking to exploit either vulnerability, though they expect attempts by hackers as they digest technical data about the security flaws.
One key risk is that hackers will develop code that can infect the personal computers of people visiting malicious websites, said Chris Wysopal, chief technology officer of cyber security firm Veracode.
He advised PC owners to install the patches to protect against such potential attacks. Computer servers at large enterprises are less at risk, he said, because those systems are not used to surf the web and can only be infected in a Meltdown attack if a hacker has breached that network.
Operating system protection
Microsoft has issued a patch for its Windows operating system, and Apple desktop users with the most recent operating system are protected. Google has said most of its Chromebook laptops are already protected and that the rest would be soon.
Apple said it planned to release a patch to its Safari web browser within coming days to protect Mac and iOS users from Spectre.
While third-party browsers from Google and others can protect Mac users from Spectre, all major web browsers for Apple’s iOS devices depend on receiving a patch from Apple.
Until then, hundreds of millions of iPhone and iPad users will be exposed to potential Spectre attacks while browsing the web.
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An 892-pound (405-kilogram) bluefin tuna has sold for 36.5 million yen ($320,000) in what may really be Tsukiji market’s last New Year auction at its current site in downtown Tokyo, local media reports said Friday.
The winning bid for the prized but threatened species at the predawn auction was well below the record 155.4 million yen bid at 2013’s annual New Year auction. It amounted to about 90,000 yen ($798) per kilogram and was paid by a local wholesaler, the reports said.
This year’s top per kilogram price, for a smaller tuna, was $1,419, compared with about $7,930 per kilogram for the 2013 record-setting auction price, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun and other local media reported. That price was paid by Kiyomura Corp., whose owner, Kiyoshi Kimura, runs the Sushi Zanmai chain, the reports said. Kimura has often won the annual auction in the past.
The reports said the top-priced tuna was one of the biggest ever sold at the auction.
Last year’s New Year auction was supposed to be the last at Tsukiji’s current location, as was the New Year auction the year before. The market’s shift to a new facility on a former gas plant site on Tokyo Bay has been repeatedly delayed because of concerns over soil contamination.
Japanese are the biggest consumers of the torpedo-shaped bluefin tuna, and surging consumption here and overseas has led to overfishing of the species. Experts warn it faces possible extinction, with stocks of Pacific bluefin depleted by more than 97 percent from their pre-industrial levels.
There are signs of progress toward protecting the bluefin, though. Japan has begun enforcing laws banning catches that exceed quotas, with violators subject to fines or possible jail time.
Japan and other governments recently agreed on a plan to rebuild Pacific bluefin stocks, with a target of 20 percent of historic levels by 2034.
Tsukiji is one of Tokyo’s most popular tourist destinations as well as the world’s biggest fish market. It was due to move to the new site, at Toyosu, in 2016. Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike postponed the relocation, but after months of political haggling and uncertainty she announced the move would go ahead.
The new market is due to open October 11, 2018.
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The Internet Association, a trade group representing companies such as Google parent Alphabet Inc and Facebook Inc, said on Friday it intends to join an expected lawsuit against a decision to roll back net neutrality rules.
Several states including New York, and public interest advocacy groups have said they intend to sue to stop the mid-December ruling by the Federal Communications Commission.
The approval of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s proposal in a 3-2 vote marked a victory for internet service providers such as AT&T Inc, Comcast Corp and Verizon Communications Inc, handing them power over what content consumers can access.
Democrats, Hollywood and companies such as Google parent Alphabet and Facebook had urged Pai, a Republican appointed by U.S. President Donald Trump, to keep the Obama-era rules barring service providers from blocking, slowing access to or charging more for certain content.
“The final version of Chairman Pai’s rule, as expected, dismantles popular net neutrality protections for consumers. This rule defies the will of a bipartisan majority of Americans and fails to preserve a free and open internet,” the Internet Association said in a statement.
The new rules give internet service providers sweeping powers to change how consumers access the internet but must have new transparency requirements that will require them to disclose any changes to consumers.
Internet Association members also include Airbnb, Etsy Inc, Amazon.com and several dozen online and social media companies.
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The World Health Organization warns that children in Yemen are dying as diphtheria, a preventable disease, spreads rapidly throughout the country.
Forty-six of the more than 470 people with clinically diagnosed diphtheria in Yemen — or nearly 10 percent — have died in less than four months, according to WHO.
“Diphtheria is a highly infectious but vaccine-preventable disease,” WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic said. “It can be treated with antitoxins and antibiotics, both of which are in short supply in Yemen. The diphtheria vaccine is normally administered as a part of routine immunization programs for children around the world.
“The rapid spread of diphtheria in Yemen highlights major gaps in routine vaccination and also means the health system is under severe strain.”
Sixty-eight percent of suspected diphtheria cases are children under 15 years old, Jasarevic said.
WHO has deployed Rapid Response Teams throughout affected parts of the country to ensure proper case detection, contact tracing and follow up, as well as health education.
WHO has delivered $200,000 worth of antibiotics and 1,000 vials of diphtheria antitoxins, Jasarevic said. The medication can help stop the spread of the bacterium to vital organs in patients already infected with diphtheria.
However, prevention remains the best way to contain the spread of the disease. In preparation for a nationwide immunization campaign, the U.N. children’s fund imported 5.5 million doses of anti-diphtheria vaccines into the country December 20.
The final decision on when the campaign will kick off rests with Yemeni health authorities, who have not yet given the go-ahead.
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People walking outdoors with masks are an increasingly common sight in the capital of India, where the toxic air, which ranks among the world’s dirtiest, has rung alarm bells. Now a team of innovators from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, is offering another solution: a tiny respiratory filter that can be stuck in the nose to restrict particulate matter from entering the body without hampering breathing.
The project involved creating a thin, flexible membrane which blocks out most dust and air pollutants, including concentrations of the deadly PM 2.5, the tiny particulate matter which doctors say causes maximum damage to lungs.
The innovation, called Nasofilters, won the Indian president’s “National Startups Award” last May and was featured in South Korea’s 2017 list of “Top 50 technical startups in the world.”
The idea of nasal filters is not new, and some are available in Western countries to help reduce exposure to allergens such as pollen. One study conducted in 2016 on a product made in Denmark found it reduced symptoms of allergies and was comfortable to use.
The Indian device, however, focuses on the country’s pressing problem of air pollutants. Working out of one room on the sprawling IIT campus, which has been the home of several innovations, the young team is optimistic it will find acceptance in a city where the toxic cocktail of vehicle fumes, construction dust and burning waste spikes to as much as 30 times the safe limit in winter.
Shaped roughly like a fingernail, the dark brown membrane is made by assembling millions of small-sized pores and resembles a fine, porous cloth.
The costs have been held down to ensure the filter is within the reach of most people: It is priced at approximately 16 cents. Effective for around eight hours, the innovators claim it can filter out 95 percent of the pollutants.
Origins of the invention
Prateek Sharma started working on the idea along with some faculty members and others when he enrolled at IIT for engineering studies. The inspiration: His mother suffered from asthma.
“The initiation of this story was about a decade back. I always noticed my mother is wearing some kind of cloth on her face. That has always annoyed me,” said Sharma, the 25-year-old who now heads the startup which produces the filters, Nanoclean Global Private Ltd.
Noticing she refused to wear a mask when she went outside, he set out to search for another solution.
“The problem is mega, the product is nano,” said Sharma, pointing to the filters. “It’s comfortable to wear, it is aesthetically not bothering them like a face mask which covers half of your face. There is a problem — I can’t even eat, can’t even talk to you while putting on a face mask.”
Growing curiosity
Reports of the product in Indian media have piqued curiosity in the city.
Ashok Joshi, a retired senior army officer who lives in Delhi, made the trip to IIT with his wife to find out more about the filters and pick them up after reading reports about it in newspapers.
“We are outdoor people by and large, being in the army, mostly I am outdoors,” he said. “If something is there, which does not look very ugly and you can wear it comfortably, excellent idea. Why not?”
On days when air pollution is categorized as severe, doctors advise people, especially children and the elderly, against outdoor activities. On New Year’s Day, New Delhi’s air pollution levels bordered on severe.
The nose filter’s real test lies in winning acceptance from people like Joshi as they try it out in the weeks and months ahead.
While the invention, if it proves acceptable to consumers, may help people protect themselves from the dirty air, environmental activists stress that the pressing need is to address the causes of the air pollution: the city’s huge vehicle fleet and smoke from fires.
India’s air pollution crisis is not restricted to New Delhi — nine other Indian cities figure among the WHO’s list of the world’s 20 most polluted cities.
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U.S. employers added 148,000 jobs in December, a modest gain but still enough to suggest that the economy entered the new year with solid momentum.
The unemployment rate remained 4.1 percent for a third straight month, the lowest level since 2000, the Labor Department said Friday.
For all of 2017, employers added nearly 2.1 million jobs, enough to lower the unemployment rate from 4.7 percent a year ago. Still, average job gains have slowed to 171,000 this year from a peak of 250,000 in 2014. That typically happens when the unemployment falls to ultra-low levels and fewer people are available to be hired.
While modest, the job gains underscore the economy’s continued health in its ninth year of recovery. The unemployment rate for African-Americans dropped to a record low of 6.8 percent.
Solid economic growth in both the United States and major countries overseas is supporting more hiring. Factory managers received the most new orders in December than in any month since 2004. Retailers have reported strong holiday sales. Builders are ramping up home construction to meet growing demand.
Sales of existing homes reached their fastest pace in nearly 11 years in November. Consumer confidence is at nearly a 17-year high. And the Dow Jones industrial average reached 25,000 for the first time on Thursday.
Most economists expect the Trump administration’s tax cuts to help speed the economy’s already decent pace of growth. Some envision the unemployment rate dropping as low as 3.5 percent by the end of 2018. A rate that low would mark the lowest such level in nearly a half-century, and it would likely force businesses to accelerate pay raises to attract and retain employees. Pay raises have remained puzzlingly sluggish for many U.S. workers despite the robust job market.
Some businesses, though, are already howling that they can’t find enough qualified people. There are roughly 6 million available jobs, near a record high, according to government data. Should unemployment fall to 3.5 percent, those complaints will intensify.
For at least two years, economists have been expecting the falling unemployment rate to boost wages. Though average hourly pay growth has picked up a bit, it remains about 1 percentage point below the 3.5 percent annual gain that typically occurs in a healthy economy.
Economists point to several trends that may be keeping a lid on wage gains.
As the vast baby boom generation ages — 10,000 of them are turning 65 every day — they are retiring and are being replaced by younger workers, who typically earn far less money. That is likely suppressing overall wage growth, economists say.
Worker pay also depends on productivity, or how efficient employees are. And productivity has been weak for roughly a decade.
In 2000, the last time the unemployment rate fell this low, wages were growing at a 4 percent annual pace. But productivity, which measures workers’ output per hour, was much higher then. A falling unemployment rate can force up pay, but rising productivity has a much greater effect.
Many businesses, meanwhile, feel they have limited ability to pass on higher wages to consumers in the form of higher prices. Online shopping and cheaper imported goods make it easier for consumers to find bargains. That leaves retailers and other firms reluctant to raise pay.
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America’s space agency wants you to head for the mountains with a smartphone and a measuring stick.
NASA’s earth science arm is funding research that recruits citizen scientists on skis, snowshoes and snowmobiles to measure the depth of snow in backcountry locations in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.
Their measurements will be incorporated into computer models that calculate how much water will end up in the region’s rivers and reservoirs.
Early results promising
“Our initial model runs show that citizen science measurements are doing an amazing job of improving our simulations,” said David Hill, an Oregon State University professor of civil engineering, who is collaborating with Alaska and University of Washington researchers. They received one of 16 NASA citizen science grants for the project.
The snowpack measurements are incorporated into computer models estimating “snow-water equivalent,” the amount of liquid water contained in snow cover, of a watershed.
In Western states, according to NASA, nearly three-fourths of annual stream flow that provides drinking water comes from spring and summer melt.
NASA in February began a multiyear research project to improve the accuracy of its snow measurements with partners in Europe and Canada, trying to solve challenges such as detecting snow through trees.
Several projects
The grant awarded to Hill, Anthony Arendt of the University of Washington and Gabriel Wolken, a research geologist with the Alaska Division of Geological & Geophysical Surveys, is not directly connected to that project but has a mutual interest, said Kevin Murphy, a program executive for science data systems at NASA headquarters.
“We decided about two years ago to start this program, which really looks at how can we harness the creativity and the capabilities of citizens to augment a lot of our satellite or aircraft measurements,” Murphy said.
Cheap, plentiful volunteers
Snow telemetry stations maintained by the U.S. Agriculture Department are another important tool for measuring snow in high-elevation and other hard-to-access places, Hill said. The unmanned stations collect data using a system of automated sensors.
But too few of them exist, Hill said. “They’re expensive to install, they’re expensive to maintain, so there just aren’t that many.”
The citizen snow-measuring program, Community Snow Observations, aims to supplement that with people.
“We want to turn the public into these mobile snow telemetry stations,” he said. “You just need a probe to do it.”
The measuring device can be as rudimentary as a yardstick, Hill said, but most people venturing into mountains already carry an avalanche probe, a 5- to 6-meter stick that folds down like a tent pole. After an avalanche, the probes are used to feel for people buried in the snow. Probes typically carry measurement markings.
“You want to know when you actually find that person how deep they are,” Hill said. “They’re really just a big, long ruler.”
First volunteers in Alaska
For the citizen science program, an online tutorial tells participants to find undisturbed snow, push the probe firmly to the ground, read the depth in centimeters and enter the data onto a smartphone app. Participants are asked to repeat that several times and average the measurements.
The app records the location and time of the measurement and uploads the information. The program accounts for measurements in continental climate locations with light, dry snow or the wet, dense snow of maritime climates.
Initial measurements were made last winter in Alaska’s Thompson Pass north of Valdez, where other snow research was being conducted.
“I recruited some of the folks from Valdez Avalanche Center. They brought friends along,” said Wolken, the Alaska research geologist. “That was our first go at getting sort of a grassroots, citizen science team.”
The hundreds of measurements collected far outpaced what the scientists could gather themselves. When NASA announced grants for citizen scientist projects, the researchers jumped to apply, Wolken said.
Modeling errors plunge
Preliminary calculations have been “striking,” Hill said, and the subject of a paper written by a doctoral student.
“He has results that basically show that the errors in our modeled snow-water equivalent are cut by about 90 percent with this input from public,” Hill said. “We’re thrilled about that.”
Other NASA grants in the program will use citizen scientists to collect data on mosquito populations and their breeding environments around the world, water depths in lakes in North Carolina and elsewhere, moisture in soil at various locations, changes in giant kelp across the globe, and images of clouds from the ground in Colorado.
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Britain should charge a 25-pence ($0.34) levy on disposable coffee cups to cut down waste and use the money to improve recycling facilities, a committee of lawmakers said Friday.
Chains Pret A Manger, Costa Coffee, Caffe Nero and Greggs alongside U.S. firm Starbucks are among the biggest coffee-sellers in Britain, rapidly expanding in the last 10 years to meet increasing demand.
Although some outlets give a discount to customers using their own cup, only 1-2 percent of buyers take up the offer, according to parliament’s environmental audit committee, which said a “latte levy” was needed instead.
2.5 billion cups a year
“The UK throws away 2.5 billion disposable coffee cups every year; enough to circle the planet 5½ times,” said chair of the committee, Mary Creagh.
“We’re calling for action to reduce the number of single-use cups, promote reusable cups over disposable cups and to recycle all coffee cups by 2023,” she said.
The committee said that if the recycling target is not met then disposable coffee cups should be banned.
Bag levy success
In October 2015, Britain introduced a charge of 5-pence on all single-use plastic bags provided by large shops, which led to an 83 percent reduction in UK plastic bags used in the first year.
On Friday the environment ministry said the government was working closely with the sector and had made progress in increasing recycling rates.
“We are encouraged by industry action to increase the recycling of paper cups with some major retail chains now offering discounts to customers with reusable cups,” said a spokeswoman.
“We will carefully consider the committee’s recommendations and respond shortly,” she said.
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The Consumer Electronics show opens this weekend in Las Vegas, Nevada. There are a host of new tech startups descending on the city, hoping to become the next big thing. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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A life threatening cold front swept across North America, bringing piles of snow and icy conditions. The National Weather Service issued wind chill advisories and freeze warnings covering a vast area from South Texas to Canada and from Montana through New England. VOA’s Carol Pearson reports doctors are issuing warnings about injuries from frostbite and ice.
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Apple Inc. will release a patch for the Safari web browser on its iPhones, iPads and Macs within days, it said Thursday, after major chipmakers disclosed flaws that leave nearly every modern computing device vulnerable to hackers.
On Wednesday, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and other security researchers disclosed two major chip flaws, one called Meltdown affecting only Intel Corp. chips and one called Spectre affecting nearly all computer chips made in the last decade. The news sparked a sell-off in Intel’s stock as investors tried to gauge the costs to the chipmaker.
In a statement on its website, Apple said all Mac and iOS devices were affected by both Meltdown and Spectre. But the most recent operating system updates for Mac computers, Apple TVs, iPhones and iPads protect users against the Meltdown attack and do not slow down the devices, it added. Meltdown does not affect the Apple Watch.
Macs and iOS devices are vulnerable to Spectre attacks through code that can run in web browsers. Apple said it would issue a patch to its Safari web browser for those devices “in the coming days.”
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A major outbreak of coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish has been found munching Australia’s world heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef, scientists said Friday, prompting the government to begin culling the spiky marine animals.
The predator starfish feeds on corals by spreading its stomach over them and using digestive enzymes to liquefy tissue, and the outbreak hits as the reef is still reeling from two consecutive years of major coral bleaching.
“Each starfish eats about its body diameter a night, and so over time that mounts up very significantly,” Hugh Sweatman, a senior research scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, told Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) radio.
“A lot of coral will be lost,” he said.
That would be a blow for both the ecosystem and the lucrative tourism industry which it supports.
The crown-of-thorns starfish were found in plague proportions last month in the Swains Reefs, at the southern edge of the Great Barrier Reef, by researchers from the reef’s Marine Park Authority, a spokeswoman for the authority told Reuters by phone.
The remote reefs, about 200 km (120 miles) offshore from Yeppoon, a holiday and fishing town some 500 km north of Queensland state capital, Brisbane, are well south of the most-visited sections of the Great Barrier Reef, where most culling efforts are focused.
But the government’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority already killed some starfish at Swains Reefs in December and will mount another mission this month, a director at the authority, Fred Nucifora, told the ABC.
“The complexity with the Swains Reef location is … they are logistically difficult to access and it is actually quite a hostile environment to work in,” Nucifora said.
Previous outbreaks
There have been four major crown-of-thorns outbreaks since the 1960s in the Great Barrier Reef, but it recovered each time because there were always healthy populations of herbivorous fish. The outbreaks are usually triggered by extra nutrients in the water but the reason for the current outbreak was unclear, Sweatman said.
The reef is still recovering from damage wrought by the worst-ever coral bleaching on record, which in 2016 killed two-thirds of a 700 km stretch of reef.
On Friday, a report published in the journal Science found that high ocean temperatures are harming tropical corals much more often than a generation ago, putting reefs under pressure.
The Great Barrier Reef, covering 348,000 square kilometers, was World Heritage listed in 1981 as the most extensive and spectacular coral reef ecosystem on the planet, according to the UNESCO website.
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Marijuana-related stocks plummeted, cannabis boosters worried about the industry’s future and defiant growers and sellers vowed to keep operating after U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions signaled a tougher approach Thursday to federal pot enforcement.
The plunging stock prices reversed a weekslong rally driven by optimism for legal recreational sales that started Monday in California. Several marijuana stocks saw double-digit losses in the hours after Sessions’ announcement, including the largest pot-producing company that is publicly traded.
Canopy Growth, a Canada-based company with the ticker symbol WEED, lost $3.58 a share, or 10 percent, to close at $32.32 on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
Shares of garden-supply company Scotts Miracle-Gro also skidded Thursday, following a steady rise last year after it added fertilizer, lights and other products to serve marijuana growers. The company’s share price fell by as much as 7 percent before closing down 2.3 percent, or $2.49, to $106.17 on the New York Stock Exchange.
Investors spooked
“Jeff Sessions’ decision to rescind the Cole memoranda puts the marijuana industry and marijuana legalization efforts in a precarious position,” said Aaron Herzberg, a California lawyer and founder of the cannabis investment company CalCann Holding, referring to an Obama-era memo that limited U.S. crackdowns on pot in states where it’s legal.
Brent Kenyon, a consultant who helps advise and establish recreational marijuana businesses in Oregon, said his phone had been ringing all Thursday with calls from worried clients. Investors, including some who are involved in his businesses, are spooked, he said.
“I’m just telling people to hold off. We need more information, we need to see what the president is going to say about this,” he said by phone from a cannabis conference in Hawaii.
Andy Williams, CEO of the Medicine Man Denver dispensary, is taking a wait-and-see approach to the new policy but pointed out the economic impact of legal pot.
“This industry around the United States has attracted a lot of investment. Billions of dollars in investment,” he said. “Just talking about what Sessions wants to do today has dropped the market.”
’Business as usual’
Steve DeAngelo, owner of California’s largest marijuana retailer, said it will be “business as usual” at his Harborside dispensary in Oakland.
“I think the main impact of this is really going to be on investors, more than anything else,” he said. “Some investors might get a bit nervous about putting more money into the cannabis industry until the situation resolves itself.”
Another of California’s largest marijuana operators said it also plans no changes in response to Sessions’ announcement.
“For this industry and for this community, we are really based on resilience, going against the tide. This is no different,” said Michael Steinmetz, CEO of Flow Kana, which distributes cannabis products from small, outdoor farmers. “From my perspective, things don’t change.”
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Intel Corp shares fell nearly 2 percent Thursday as investors worried about the potential financial liability and reputational hit from recently disclosed security flaws in its widely used microprocessors.
The largest chipmaker had confirmed Wednesday that flaws reported by researchers could allow hackers to steal sensitive information from computers, phones and other devices. Apple Inc, Microsoft Corp and other software makers have issued patches to protect against the vulnerabilities.
Intel may be on the hook for costs stemming from lawsuits claiming that the patches would slow computers and effectively force consumers to buy new hardware, and big customers will likely seek compensation from Intel for any software or hardware fixes they make, security experts said.
“The potential liability is big for Intel,” said Eric Johnson, dean of Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management. “Everybody will be scrambling over the next few days to figure out just how big it is.”
Intel has said that the patches for the bugs would slow its chips down somewhat but that most users will not notice.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), the largest seller of cloud computing services, said in a statement it does not “expect meaningful performance impact for most customer workloads.”
Microsoft and Alphabet Inc’s Google both said in statements on their websites that they expect few performance problems for most of their cloud computing customers.
Financial repercussions
But the incident is likely to spur cloud companies to press Intel for lower prices on chips in future talks, said Kim Forrest, senior equity research analyst at Fort Pitt Capital Group in Pittsburgh, which owns shares in Intel.
“What [Intel’s cloud customers] are going to say is, ‘You wronged us, we hate you, but if we can get a discount, we’ll still buy from you,'” Forrest said.
Forrest also expects Intel will have to increase its chip development spending to focus on security.
Government agencies and security experts said they knew of no cyberattacks that had exploited the vulnerabilities.
Financial services firms were studying information on the vulnerabilities to determine how to best respond, said the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, a global industry group known as FS-ISAC that shares data on cyberthreats.
Banks and other firms are trying to understand what it will cost to respond to the issue, FS-ISAC said in an emailed statement.
“In addition to the security considerations raised by this design flaw, performance degradation is expected, which could require more processing power for affected systems to compensate and maintain current baseline performance,” FS-ISAC said. “There will need to be consideration and balance between fixing the potential security threat vs. the performance and other possible impact to systems.”
Lawsuit filed
Lawyers filed a lawsuit in San Jose, California, federal court on Wednesday that sought class-action status and compensation for people who had bought vulnerable Intel chips or computers that came with them already installed.
Intel did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday about the lawsuit.
While more lawsuits are expected, Intel’s biggest customers are likely to quietly seek compensation for any harm caused by the vulnerabilities, including costs to patch machines or replace microprocessors, Johnson said.
Legal experts said that consumers would have to prove concrete damages and harm to proceed with claims.
Intel shares fell 1.8 percent, following a 3.4 percent decline Wednesday.
Shares in rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc climbed 4.9 percent as investors speculated the No. 2 maker of microprocessors would woo customers away from Intel.
Still, researchers had said some of AMD’s chips had one of the two vulnerabilities disclosed on Wednesday, as do processors from ARM Holdings.
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A new study has found that anti-tuberculosis drugs killed more bacteria in laboratory mice given a vitamin C supplement than those given drugs alone.
If the findings hold up in human studies, the authors say, the result could be that there’s a cheap, safe way to reduce the months-long treatment time for one of the world’s leading killers. Also, the vitamin supplement could offer a way to cut down on the development of drug-resistant TB, a serious health threat.
Tuberculosis is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, 1.7 million people died of the disease last year. Of more than 10 million new infections, about 600,000 were resistant to the leading drug.
Front-line drugs attack TB cells as they multiply, but a small proportion of the bacteria survive by going dormant. If therapy stops too soon, these “persisters” start multiplying and the patient relapses, often with strains that are resistant to the drugs.
Current TB treatment takes six months, largely to outlast the persisters. But it’s hard for patients to stay on treatment for so long.
Accidental discovery
Albert Einstein College of Medicine microbiologist William Jacobs and colleagues previously discovered by accident that antioxidants like vitamin C stopped TB bacteria in a test tube from becoming persisters.
“When we first discovered it, it was like, ‘Wow! There’s just so much we don’t know yet. And wouldn’t that be really cool if it really works,’ ” Jacobs said.
The study in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy said Jacobs and colleagues found that TB-infected mice treated with two standard drugs plus a high dose of vitamin C had roughly tenfold fewer bacteria in their lungs after several weeks than mice treated with drugs alone.
“It’s not sterilization yet,” he added, “but it’s heading in that direction.”
But will it work in people?
“The bottom line is that we don’t know the answer,” Jacobs acknowledged. “But I think what this study suggests is we should really go and [find out].”
Other experts not connected to the study agreed.
Even though there has been very little research on vitamin C and tuberculosis, the nutrient is “a safe compound, it’s widely available, it’s inexpensive,” noted David Alland, associate dean of clinical research at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. “I think that when we have those kinds of options to look at, we should look at them without having to spend decades trying to figure out exactly how they work.”
And if it does work, he added, “you’d get a big bang for your buck.”
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Wall Street sure loves the tax bill, even if polls show most Americans don’t.
The Dow Jones industrial average surged past 25,000 Thursday, a strong signal of investor enthusiasm for President Donald Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cut. The milestone comes less than a year after the Dow topped 20,000.
“We broke a very, very big barrier,” Trump said Thursday at the White House. “Every time you see that number go up on Wall Street it means jobs, it means success, it means 401(k)s that are flourishing.”
It’s easy to see why investors like the tax overhaul: Businesses will benefit from a steep cut in the corporate tax rate. They’ll also be able to fully deduct the cost of major purchases from their taxable income, reducing the amount they owe. And companies with large stockpiles of cash overseas can bring the money back to the United States at new, lower rates.
All told, Wall Street analysts estimate the tax package should boost earnings for companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index by roughly 8 percent this year. That’s much more generous than the average tax cut of 1.6 percent that middle-class families will receive, according to the Tax Policy Center.
“All else being equal, this should go straight to the bottom line,” said David Joy, chief market strategist for Ameriprise Financial, a financial services company based in Minneapolis. Improved corporate profits contributed to the market’s gains last year.
The public has been less enthusiastic about the tax law. A Monmouth University poll last month found that nearly half of Americans disapproved of it, with only 26 percent in support.
Where profits will go
Still, some workers have seen a benefit: So far, nearly 20 large companies have announced bonuses and higher minimum wages as a result of the tax cut. AT&T, Comcast, Bank of America, and American Airlines have all pledged to pay $1,000 bonuses to their employees.
Investors also appear less concerned than many politicians about how the additional profits will be used. The Trump administration says it expects companies will plow much of the extra profit back into their businesses, purchasing more software, machinery, and other equipment. Those investments will make workers more productive and provide a key boost to the economy’s long-run growth. They should also boost wages and salaries for employees.
Opponents of the tax law respond that companies are more likely to pass the windfall on to shareholders in the form of higher dividend payments and share buybacks, which raise the price of those shares still in investors’ hands. Previous cuts in corporate tax rates, in the U.S. and overseas, haven’t always led to higher wages.
For Wall Street, it’s all good, at least in the short run. Most analysts take the view that either way, companies and the economy will benefit. Whether businesses pass most of the extra money to workers or to shareholders, consumer spending should increase and lift economic growth.
Trump has repeatedly made highly optimistic claims about the impact of his tax cuts and other policies on the economy, speculating that they would lead to annual growth of 4 percent or higher.
Expectations
Last month, the Treasury Department estimated that the economy will expand at a 2.9 percent annual rate for the next decade.
Private economists, as well as the Federal Reserve, forecast a more modest impact. Most expect growth will be closer to 2.5 percent in 2018 and slower than that in subsequent years.
Some companies and sectors will likely benefit more than others, particularly if they derive most of their income from the United States. Analysts at Goldman Sachs estimate that large banks will see their earnings rise by 13 percent as a result of the corporate rate cut. Wells Fargo will likely see the biggest gain, at 18 percent.
Analysts at Stifel, an investment bank, project that some restaurant chains could see earnings boosts of 20 percent or more, including Chipotle, Wingstop and Domino’s Pizza.
Barclays, another bank, says that technology and pharmaceutical firms, which are already paying lower taxes because they have lots of cash overseas, will see much smaller increases of less than 4 percent.
The legislation’s corporate tax cut is not necessarily as dramatic as it seems, because most corporations don’t end up paying the full 35 percent rate. Barclays estimates that the “effective” tax rate — what companies actually pay — will drop from 26 percent to 20.1 percent.
Shareholders vs. investment
Joy and other analysts think that most of the money brought back from other countries will go to shareholders, rather than investment. That’s what happened in 2004, when companies were given a one-time low rate on repatriated cash as an inducement.
Opinions differ, however, when it comes to the additional profits that result from the tax cut. Many economists expect that most of those dollars will also be passed on to shareholders.
Glenn Hubbard, an economist at Columbia Business School and former top economist for President George W. Bush, says the corporate tax cut will eventually benefit workers through higher pay. That will also boost the economy and most businesses by lifting spending.
“Any way you slice it, it’s good for companies,” Hubbard said.
For much of last year, the stock market’s gains were helped by a synchronized global recovery, with economies from Europe to Asia to Latin America expanding simultaneously for the first time in a decade.
Since November, investors’ anticipation of a tax cut has pushed markets higher, said Keith Parker, an analyst at UBS.
Still, the market’s outsize return only benefits a narrow slice of the population. According to research by Edward Wolff, an economist at New York University, just 10 percent of the population owns 84 percent of the stock market’s value.
“That benefit won’t accrue to everybody, certainly,” Joy said.
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The U.S. Department of the Interior has announced plans to open up 90 percent of America’s coastal waters to oil drilling, including off California and Florida, two areas where activists have worked for years to protect marine ecosystems from oil spills.
The proposed five-year plan released Thursday is much more expansive than one issued by President Donald Trump in April last year. The Interior Department is proposing 47 possible auctions of drilling rights in nearly all parts of the U.S. continental shelf.
It is a major increase from the 11 lease sales during the Obama administration.
The draft plan would allow the sale of drilling leases in 25 of the nation’s 26 offshore planning areas, including 19 areas in the waters around Alaska, seven in the Pacific Ocean, and nine in the Atlantic Ocean.
One area considered off-limits is the waters near Alaska’s far-western Aleutian Islands, which were protected by former President George W. Bush.
“We are going to become the strongest energy superpower this world has ever known,” Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke told reporters Thursday in a conference call. “We want to grow our nation’s offshore energy industry, instead of slowly surrendering it to foreign shores. We will produce enough energy to meet our needs at home, and we will export enough energy to lead the world.”
Zinke also said in a news release Thursday that “responsibly developing our energy resources” is important to the U.S. economy and will help fund coastline conservation. He said the broad proposal is meant to kick off a “lengthy and robust” public comment period.
“Not all areas are appropriate for offshore drilling, and we will take that into consideration in the coming weeks,” he said.
The Department of the Interior is in charge of setting the start date of the 60-day public comment period.
Some critics of the proposal have already let their feelings be known.
Florida Governor Rick Scott, an ally of Trump, has already vowed to fight attempts to drill in Florida. In a statement Thursday, Scott said, “I have already asked to immediately meet with Secretary Zinke to discuss the concerns I have with this plan and the crucial need to remove Florida from consideration.”
Another Trump ally in Florida, Representative Matt Gaetz, has also said he is opposed to drilling off the Florida coast.
The administration is currently operating under the five-year plan set by the Obama administration, which covers 2017-2022. Initially, President Barack Obama had proposed drilling off the Atlantic Coast and off Alaska’s Arctic shore, but both proposals were dropped in the final plan.
Last year, Zinke took a number of steps to make it easier to lease and explore for onshore and offshore oil, including removing some safety regulations put into place after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Eleven people died in the initial explosion on the Deepwater Horizon in 2010, and the resulting oil spill — an estimated total of 4.9 billion barrels over five months — is considered the largest industrial spill in the history of the petroleum industry.
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YouTube star Logan Paul has stepped away from posting videos following an outcry when he uploaded images of what appeared to be the body of someone who killed themselves in a Japanese forest.
Paul took to Twitter on Wednesday to say he was suspending his video blog “for now” and “taking time to reflect.”
A petition on Change.org that demands his YouTube channel be deleted had been signed by more than 125,000 people by Thursday morning.
Paul created a furor when he posted a video of him in a forest near Mount Fuji showing what seemed to be a body hanging from a tree.
The video was viewed some 6 million times before being removed from Paul’s YouTube channel, a verified account with more than 15 million subscribers.
A storm of criticism followed despite two apologies, with commenters saying Paul seemed disrespectful and that his initial apology was inadequate.
In Paul’s initial apology, he said he had wanted to raise awareness about suicide and possibly save lives, and he denied his goal was to drive clicks to his social media content.
“I thought I could make a positive ripple on the internet, not cause a monsoon of negativity,” he said in his Twitter post.
“I don’t expect to be forgiven. I’m simply here to apologize,” he said on the more somber video apology uploaded on YouTube and Twitter late Tuesday. “None of us knew how to react or how to feel.”
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Patients in African hospitals are twice as likely to die after surgery than the global average, according to a new study.
Although African patients were younger and at lower risk than average, 1 percent died of complications after elective surgery, compared to a 0.5 percent death rate worldwide.
“It’s really concerning when you see how high the mortality is, considering that the patients are generally fit and they’re having a lot more minor surgeries,” lead author Bruce Biccard of the University of Cape Town said.
Workforce and resource shortages across the continent are likely a major factor, the authors of the study write in the journal The Lancet.
The group of more than 30 African researchers took a one-week snapshot of surgeries at 247 hospitals in 25 African countries, from Algeria to Madagascar.
The study found a severe shortage of African surgeons, obstetricians and anesthesiologists. Previous research has found that fewer patients die after surgery when there are 20 to 40 specialists per 100,000 population. Across the continent, this study found an average of less than one per 100,000.
In addition to the high death rate, “the most alarming finding was how few people actually received surgery,” noted a commentary accompanying the study. An expert panel has estimated that 5 percent of the population needs surgery in a year. African hospitals on average performed less than one-twentieth of that figure.
It noted that patients were receiving surgery later in the course of their diseases. Nearly 60 percent of the operations were urgent or emergency procedures, compared with about a quarter in high-income countries.
Most of the patients who died did not do so on the operating table, but in the days following surgery.
“We’re actually failing to recognize patients who are having complications in the post-op period,” study author Biccard said. “So a minor complication becomes a major complication.”
That offers an opportunity for improvement, Biccard noted. Since increasing the number of doctors is unlikely in the short term, his group is working on a method “that will tell us before surgery which patients we think are going to get into trouble.”
His group is planning a study in 2019 to see if they can reduce patient deaths by focusing limited resources on patients at the highest risk.
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The Dow Jones Industrial Average broke through the 25,000-threshold for the first time Thursday, and notched another 1,000-point milestone. The index of blue-chip stocks is studded with industrial heavyweights such as Boeing and Caterpillar.
Among the biggest gainers were technology companies and banks. Wells Fargo jumped 1.9 percent and Microsoft rose 0.7 percent.
U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted Thursday morning, “Dow just crashes through 25,000. Congrats! Big cuts in unnecessary regulations continuing.”
The Dow increased 118 points, or 0.5 percent, to 25,037. The Nasdaq edged up 16 points to 7,081.
This latest record came in early trading Thursday — only five weeks after closing above 24,000 points for the first time.
Other major indexes also rose to new levels, driven by a strong report on private jobs.
The recent rally has been spurred by faster economic gains around the world, along with a more optimistic outlook from businesses and consumers.
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Coal-fired power plants release greenhouse gases into the air, causing pollution and contributing to climate change. But as much as 10 percent of the coal used in power stations could be replaced … by chicken waste. VOA’s Deborah Block has a report.
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The recreational use of marijuana is now legal in California. But only a few cities in the U.S. state are ready to start selling pot, which was officially legalized on Jan. 1. The logistics of creating new business models is complicated, but it’s clear the demand is high. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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