Construction is one of the fields that has long been dominated by men. Though women have increasingly come to the field, working as electricians, carpenters and plumbers, they’re still underrepresented. Faiza Elmasry tells us about a training program established by Supporting and Linking Tradeswomen, SALT, an Australian non-profit that works hard to change that. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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Many Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh facing diminished income are supplementing their needs with work in the camps. Steve Sandford talks to a few young and old entrepreneurs who have set up new businesses in the refugee zones.
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Israel’s markets regulator said on Monday he will propose regulation to ban companies based on bitcoin and other digital currencies from trading on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE).
Shmuel Hauser, the chairman of the Israel Securities Authority (ISA), told the Calcalist business conference he will bring the proposal to the ISA board next week. If approved, it would be subject to a public hearing and then the TASE bylaws would need to be amended.
“If we have a company that their main business is digital currencies we would not allow it. If already listed, its trading will be suspended,” Hauser said, adding the ISA must find the appropriate regulation for such companies.
Bitcoin plunged by 30 percent to below $12,000 on Friday as investors dumped the cryptocurrency after its sharp rise to nearly $20,000. It recouped some losses to trade above $14,000 on the Bitstamp platform, down 9 percent on the day.
“We feel that the prices of bitcoin behave like bubbles and we don’t want investors to be subject to that volatility and uncertainty,” Hauser said. “There is an importance to signal to the market where things are… Investors should know where we stand.”
Earlier this month, Hauser had said bitcoin-based companies would not be included in TASE indexes and that there was a need for a suitable regulatory framework for such instruments given that the global market value of all digital currencies grew in 2017 to $300 billion from $18 billion.
The proposal will likely be the last for Hauser, who will step down next month after 6-1/2 years as ISA chief.
“But once it’s on its way it will continue to be pursued,” said Hauser, who will be replaced by Anat Guetta.
He said he hopes she will promote easing capital gains taxes and focus on regulatory enforcement.
The year 2017 saw amazing advances in some areas of medicine and avoidable setbacks in others. VOA’s Carol Pearson has the highs and the lows in this report.
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Saving digital files in commercial memory banks called cloud storage is a cheap and convenient way for long-term storage of documents, photos, music and video. Private users as well as businesses can access them from anywhere and share them with whomever they give the password to. Providers, such as Dropbox, Google Drive or Amazon S3, claim almost absolute security. But computer scientists say the protection should be in the users’ hands. VOA’s George Putic has more.
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Management experts are always coming up with innovative ideas to improve the work environment, inspire employees and raise productivity. Big companies in Germany, like Lufthansa, Siemens, Daimler, BMW and Volkswagen’s Audi, are bringing harmony to the workplace by having symphony orchestras and encouraging employees to play music together. Faiza Elmasry has the story. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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Amazon’s diligent, computerized know-it-all is the latest technology to enlist in NORAD Tracks Santa, the military-run program that fields phone calls and emails from children around the world eager to ask when Santa will arrive.
Now entering its 62nd year, NORAD Tracks Santa will go live Sunday, with about 1,500 volunteers answering calls and emails at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Updates will be posted on social media and at www.noradsanta.org.
And if you have Amazon’s voice-activated Echo device, you can ask Alexa once you enable the function.
Technology has always been at the heart of NORAD Tracks Santa, which got its start in 1955 with an old-school glitch.
An advertisement in a Colorado Springs newspaper that year invited kids to call Santa, but it mistakenly listed the number for the hotline at the U.S. Continental Air Defense Command. CONAD, as it was called, had the job of monitoring a vast radar network from a combat operations center in Colorado Springs, searching the skies for any hint of a nuclear attack by the onetime Soviet Union.
Col. Harry Shoup, who was in charge of the operations center, took the first child’s call. Once he figured out what was happening, he played along, he said in a 1999 interview with The Associated Press.
“Here I am saying, ‘Ho, ho, ho, I am Santa,'” said Shoup, who died in 2009. “The crew was looking at me like I had lost it.”
He told his staff what was happening and told them to play along, too.
It’s not clear what day the first call came in, but by Friday, Dec. 23 of that first year, the AP reported that CONAD was tracking Santa.
“Note to the kiddies,” the story began, under a Colorado Springs dateline. “Santa Claus Friday was assured safe passage into the United States by the Continental Air Defense Command combat operations center here which began plotting his journey from the North Pole early this morning.”
Maybe hoping to soothe a jittery nation, the story added: ”CONAD, Army, Navy and Marine Air Forces will continue to track and guard Santa and his sleigh on his trip to and from the U.S. against possible attack from those who do not believe in Christmas.” That was likely a reference to the officially atheist Soviet Union.
The history of the program over the next few years isn’t well documented, said Preston Schlachter, a spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command or NORAD, a U.S.-Canadian command that eventually succeeded CONAD.
But TV and radio stations began broadcasting Christmas Eve bulletins from CONAD and NORAD. And by the 1980s, NORAD was soliciting phone calls from children. (The number is now 877-Hi NORAD or 877-446-6723.)
NORAD added its Santa-tracking website in 1997. It went on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in 2008. Mobile apps came in 2011, Instagram in 2016.
Last year, NORAD Tracks Santa got nearly 154,200 phone calls and drew 10.7 million unique visitors to its website. It snared 1.8 million Facebook followers, 382,000 YouTube views and 177,000 Twitter followers.
And this year, Alexa joins the party.
Technology and the Santa Claus story have a long but uneasy history together, said Gerry Bowler, a Canadian historian whose books include ”Santa Claus: A Biography” and ”Christmas in the Crosshairs: Two Thousand Years of Denouncing and Defending the World’s Most Celebrated Holiday.”
“Every new technology gets tried on Santa,” Bowler said. In the late 1800s, for example, he was depicted chatting with children on the telephone, then a new and wondrous invention.
But NORAD’s Santa tracker is one of the only technological upgrades the public has welcomed into the Santa story, Bowler said.
“I think that it will be ultimately incompatible with most technology,” Bowler said. “I’m sure of it, because he represents something timeless, and we don’t want him to become dated.
“We don’t want him using a fax machine or carrying around one of those 5-pound cellphones,” he said.
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In 2017, China’s Xi Jinping rose to become the country’s most powerful leader in decades. And as he shoulders more responsibility, analysts say the government in Beijing is likely to take more risks in 2018 at home and overseas, even as it deals with economic challenges at home, a nuclear North Korea and the looming threat of trade tensions with the United States. VOA’s Bill Ide has this report.
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For those interested in experiencing life on the Red Planet, the time has come. There are four operating stations in the world where the environment on Mars is replicated: in the U.S., Australia, Iceland and the Arctic. VOA’s Alex Yanevskyy was given exclusive access to the research station in the Utah dessert. Here’s his report.
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Silicon Valley has long inspired Chinese business and tech ventures. But now that a Chinese dockless bike share company has landed in the Valley, is the tide turning? VOA’s Calla Yu has more.
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There is an entire industry of add-ons that are designed to keep your cellphone screen from cracking. And yet broken screens are the main reason cellphones fail. But one Japanese researcher may have solved the problem. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Americans are traveling in record numbers this season, according to the American Automobile Association’s (AAA) annual estimate, which forecasts more than 107 million will travel by road, rail or air between now and the start of 2018.
Despite higher gas prices, travel volume is expected to be 3.1 percent higher than last year’s holiday season, the association said.
AAA said this season marks the ninth consecutive year of rising year-end holiday travel in the United States. Since 2005, it said, holiday travel has grown by 21.6 million, an increase of 25 percent.
The majority of travelers, 97.4 million, will make their way to their destinations by road, while 6.4 million people are expected to fly to see family and friends or to take holiday vacations. Only 3.6 million are expected to take to trains, buses or cruise ships for the holiday.
Apparently, not all holiday travelers are making family visits.
AAA said, for the second year in a row, the top destinations for holiday travel are Orlando, Florida, and Anaheim, California – the homes of theme parks Walt Disney World and Disneyland.
Sunny destinations also make up the next seven entries on the top 10 destinations: Cancun, Mexico; Hawaii, Jamaica, Dominican Republic and several locations in Florida. The only non-beach destination on the list? No. 10, New York City.
What’s a bitcoin worth? Lately nobody knows for sure, but after a wild ride Friday, it’s worth a good deal less than it was Thursday.
After losses over the last few days, the digital currency fell as much as 30 percent overnight in Asia, and the action became so frenzied that the website Coinbase suspended trading. It later made up much of that ground, and slumped 9.5 percent to $14,042 Friday, according to the tracking site CoinDesk.
Experts are warning that bitcoin is a bubble about to burst, but things might get crazier before it does: A lot of people have heard of bitcoin by now, but very few people own it.
“Bubbles burst when the last buyers are in,” said Brett Ewing, chief market strategist for First Franklin. “Who are the last buyers? The general public, unfortunately.”
1,000 people own 40 percent
Ewing said 40 percent of bitcoin belongs to just 1,000 people, and hedge funds and other major investors are going to start buying it soon. But those funds may buy bitcoin and also protect themselves by placing bets that it will fall. Retail investors may just buy it only to see it fall.
“I think investors should approach it with caution and I think many people will dive into it not understanding what it is,” he said.
As bitcoin skyrocketed this month, the volume of trading was unprecedented as investors hoping to catch a ride up piled in. Prices have risen so fast, the fall on Friday returned the price of bitcoin only to where it was trading two weeks ago.
From tea to blockchain overnight
The volatility has created a circuslike atmosphere. Some companies that have added the word “bitcoin” or related terms to their names to get in on the action. The craziest thing is, it’s worked.
Long Island Iced Tea Corp. until this week had been known for its peach-, raspberry-, guava-, lemon- and mango-flavored drinks. Then, on Thursday, the company announced a radical rebranding. It’s changing its name to Long Blockchain Corp., shifting its primary focus from iced tea to “the exploration of and investment in opportunities that leverage the benefits of blockchain technology.”
Blockchain is a ledger where transactions of digital currencies, like bitcoin, are recorded.
Shares in Long Island Iced Tea soared 200 percent in one day.
The Hicksville, New York, company did what investors are doing, hitching a ride on a currency that raced from less than $10,000 at the end of November to almost $20,000 on Sunday. And it cost less than $1,000 at the beginning of the year.
Crash every three months
The rise of price of bitcoin, which is still difficult to use if you actually want to buy something, has led to heated speculation about when the bubble might burst.
The currency has been, if nothing else, highly elastic, bouncing back every time it crashes, which occurs about once every quarter.
It fell 11.5 percent over two days in early December and 21.5 percent over five days in November.
Curiosity has now driven bitcoin to the futures market, where investors bet on which direction it will go.
Bitcoin futures started trading on two major exchanges, the Cboe and CME, this month. Those futures fell about 8 percent Friday.
Investor beware
If people get burned, it won’t be because they were not warned.
The Securities and Exchange Commission put out a statement last week warning investors to be careful with bitcoin and other digital currencies. The Commodities Futures Trading Commission has proposed regulating bitcoin like a commodity, similar to gold or oil.
Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a financial watchdog, issued a similar warning recently.
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A reused SpaceX rocket carried 10 satellites into orbit from California on Friday, leaving behind a trail of mystery and wonder as it soared into space.
The Falcon 9 booster lifted off from coastal Vandenberg Air Force Base, carrying the latest batch of satellites for Iridium Communications.
The launch in the setting sun created a shining, billowing streak that was widely seen throughout Southern California and as far away as Phoenix.
Calls came in to TV stations as far afield as San Diego, more than 200 miles south of the launch site.
Cars stopped on freeways in Los Angeles so drivers and passengers could take pictures and video.
The Los Angeles Fire Department issued an advisory that the “mysterious light in the sky” was from the rocket launch.
Jimmy Golen, a sports writer for The Associated Press in Boston who was in Southern California for the holidays, said he and other tourists saw the long, glowing contrail while touring Warner Bros. studio in the Los Angeles suburb of Burbank.
“People were wondering if it had something to do with movies, or TV or a UFO,” he said. “It was very cool.”
The same rocket carried Iridium satellites into orbit in June. That time, the first stage landed on a floating platform in the Pacific Ocean. This time, the rocket was allowed to plunge into the sea.
It was the 18th and final launch of 2017 for SpaceX, which has contracted to replace Iridium’s system with 75 updated satellites. SpaceX has made four launches and expects to make several more to complete the job by mid-2018.
The satellites also carry payloads for global real-time aircraft tracking and a ship-tracking service.
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Louisiana officials have chosen a sugar cane farm as the next home for residents of a tiny, shrinking island, a move funded with a 2016 federal grant awarded to help relocate communities fleeing the effects of climate change.
Dozens of Isle de Jean Charles residents are to be relocated about 40 miles (64 kilometers) to the northwest, in Terrebonne Parish, Nola.com|The Times-Picayune and The New Orleans Advocate report.
The state is negotiating to purchase the 515-acre (208-hectare) tract, which is closer to stores, schools and health care — and which is less flood-prone than the island, which has been battered by hurricanes and tropical storms.
Louisiana’s Office of Community Development expects to finalize the purchase in the coming weeks.
“Everybody seems to think it’ll be a pretty quick property negotiation,” said Mathew Sanders, the community development office’s resilience program manager.
Construction on the new settlement could begin in late 2018 or early 2019, meaning island residents most likely will have to endure at least one more hurricane season before moving.
Last year, Isle de Jean Charles became the first community in the U.S. to receive federal assistance for a large-scale retreat from the effects of climate change. About $48 million was allotted to purchase land, build homes and move the island’s approximately 80 full-time residents.
Tribe’s area mostly gone
Isle de Jean Charles is home to members of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe. It has lost 98 percent of its area since 1955. Causes include erosion, sinking of coastal land, and Mississippi River levees that block replenishing river sediment.
Climate change-triggered sea-level rise is expected eventually to drown the island.
Owned by Acadia Agricultural Holdings, the sugar farm is valued at $19.1 million, but the actual purchase price may be about half that, Sanders said.
Albert Naquin, the tribe’s chief, said he looked at the site two years ago and it was immediately his favorite.
“It’s in the best part of the parish; it’s the highest area,” he said. “I pushed for that one.”
A master plan for the new development being created by the consulting firm CSRS will include not just houses but also community spaces and maybe even features such as crawfish ponds.
“We want to move the people on the island in such a way that the community can sustain itself,” Sanders said. To that end, officials may try to attract some businesses, including retail.
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In the face of a diphtheria outbreak in parts of Indonesia, authorities have embarked on an immunization drive to slow the advance of the dangerous respiratory disease. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless, the first person to fly freely and untethered in space, has died. He was 80.
He was famously photographed in 1984 flying with a hefty spacewalker’s jetpack, alone in the cosmic blackness above a blue Earth. He traveled more than 300 feet away from the space shuttle Challenger during the spacewalk.
“The iconic photo of Bruce soaring effortlessly in space has inspired generations of Americans to believe that there is no limit to the human potential,” Sen. John McCain said in a statement. The Arizona Republican and McCandless were classmates at the U.S. Naval Academy.
NASA’s Johnson Space Center said Friday that McCandless died Thursday in California. No cause of death was given.
McCandless said he wasn’t nervous about the historic spacewalk.
“I was grossly over-trained. I was just anxious to get out there and fly. I felt very comfortable … It got so cold my teeth were chattering and I was shivering, but that was a very minor thing,” he told the Daily Camera in Boulder, Colorado, in 2006.
During that flight, McCandless and fellow astronaut Robert L. Stewart pioneered the use of NASA’s backpack device that allowed astronauts walking in space to propel themselves from the shuttle. Stewart became the second person to fly untethered two hours after McCandless.
“I’d been told of the quiet vacuum you experience in space, but with three radio links saying, ‘How’s your oxygen holding out?’ ‘Stay away from the engines!’ ‘When’s my turn?’ it wasn’t that peaceful,” McCandless wrote in the Guardian in 2015.
But he also wrote: ”It was a wonderful feeling, a mix of personal elation and professional pride: it had taken many years to get to that point.”
McCandless was later part of the 1990 shuttle crew that delivered the Hubble Space Telescope to orbit. He also served as the Mission Control capsule communicator in Houston as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon in 1969.
During his spacewalk, “My wife was at mission control, and there was quite a bit of apprehension,” McCandless wrote. “I wanted to say something similar to Neil when he landed on the moon, so I said, ‘It may have been a small step for Neil, but it’s a heck of a big leap for me.’ That loosened the tension a bit.”
Born in Boston, McCandless graduated from Woodrow Wilson Senior High School in Long Beach, California. He graduated from the Naval Academy and earned master’s degrees in electrical engineering and business administration.
He was a naval aviator who participated in the Cuban blockade in the 1962 missile crisis. McCandless was selected for astronaut training during the Gemini program, and he was a backup pilot for the first manned Skylab mission in 1973. After leaving NASA, McCandless worked for Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Colorado.
“Bruce served his country with humility and dignity, and encouraged all of us to reach new heights,” McCain said.
Survivors include his wife, Ellen Shields McCandless of Conifer, Colorado, two children and two grandchildren.
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Over the next month, Christians of all kinds will celebrate the birth of Jesus. The world has been wondering about the reality of his existence, his life, death, and the question of his divinity for thousands of years. But the place considered to be his tomb has been dated to the time he is believed to have walked the earth. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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One big problem confronts Africa as it tries to predict how its weather patterns will shift in the face of climate change: Almost all the climate models for the continent were created in the United States or Europe.
Now South African climate researcher Francois Engelbrecht has changed that by developing a climate model for Africa, in Africa.
The model aims to “generate reliable projections of future climate change over Africa,” said Engelbrecht, the chief researcher for climate studies, modeling and environmental health at South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.
Those projections include figuring out which areas will get more or less rainfall — “a key to adapting agriculture successfully” — or looking at where African grasslands might give way to thickets as more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere drives the growth of trees.
“We know that climate is changing, risks are changing, including changes in the risk of heat waves, flooding, drought, tropical cyclones, changes in growing seasons [and] rising temperatures,” said Rachel James, a visiting climate researcher at the University of Cape Town.
“People everywhere will need to adapt to these changing conditions in the years and decades to come,” she told Reuters.
“The problem is that we don’t know exactly what will happen in any one location. It’s challenging to predict which areas might get more rainfall and which might get less.”
More detail
The new African-built climate model aims to generate much more detailed and place-specific projections, to give decision makers the information they need to prepare for coming changes.
It responds, in part, to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noting in 2014 that Africa was the only region of the world in which climate forecasts had not improved in recent years.
Developed in collaboration with Australia, the model will look at things such as how El Nino patterns are likely to affect Africa in the future and how African monsoons may shift, Engelbrecht said.
Africa has a lot of expertise on its ecosystems, regional oceans, and climate, but this knowledge has not been built into models up to now, he said.
Models developed by northern hemisphere countries have tended to focus more on areas of northern interest, such as the Arctic, where sea ice is fast disappearing, he said.
And global models that include Africa generally are not specific enough to be helpful on the ground in a particular country or region, said Neville Sweijd, head of the South Africa-based Alliance for Collaboration on Climate and Earth Systems Science.
“All models are not complete representations of reality and have to be tested for sensitivity to various features and phenomena,” he said, including the direction of winds.
James noted that “climates in Africa are particularly challenging to model” because of the influence of local events such as key thunderstorms, “which occur on finer scales than the models can resolve,” she said.
A ‘game changer’
Jean-Pierre Roux, who manages the Future Climate for Africa project, an effort, backed by UK aid, to improve climate information and resilience on the continent, said he worries that weak climate information and weather information services that do not meet the needs of vulnerable communities could hurt millions in Africa.
Having African scientists involved in climate information efforts is important as African researchers naturally have more expertise on local and regional weather and climate in many cases, he said.
Also, “it gives a better chance for African priorities to shape the research agenda and leaves behind a legacy in terms of improved African capacity to conduct research,” he said.
African climate scientists say they are also worried that the continent does not yet have enough climate scientists to collaborate with other experts globally on models and other work.
“A lot of model application work is being done in Africa, but not by Africans or at African institutions. That disempowers African intellectual development in this field,” Sweijd told Reuters.
Engelbrecht sees the development of his model as a chance to build skills in everything from climate science to high-performance computing.
“It is a game changer in enhancing our human capacity in the climate and earth sciences,” he said.
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IPhone owners from several states sued Apple Inc. for not disclosing sooner that it issued software updates deliberately slowing older-model phones so aging batteries lasted longer, saying Apple’s silence led them to wrongly conclude that their only option was to buy newer, pricier iPhones.
The allegations were in a lawsuit filed Thursday in Chicago federal court on behalf of five iPhone owners from Illinois, Ohio, Indiana and North Carolina, all of whom say they never would have bought new iPhones had Apple told them that simply replacing the batteries would have sped up their old ones. The suit alleges Apple violated consumer fraud laws.
A similar lawsuit was filed Thursday in Los Angeles. Both suits came a day after Apple confirmed what high-tech sleuths outside the company already observed: The company had deployed software to slow some phones. Apple said it was intended as a fix to deal with degraded lithium-ion batteries that could otherwise suddenly die.
“Our goal is to deliver the best experience for customers, which includes overall performance and prolonging the life of their devices,” an Apple statement said. It said it released the fix for iPhone 6, iPhone 6s and iPhone SE and later extended it to iPhone 7. Apple didn’t respond to a message Friday seeking comment.
The Chicago lawsuit suggests Apple’s motive may have been sinister, though it offers no evidence in the filing.
“Apple’s decision to purposefully … throttle down these devices,” it says, “was undertaken to fraudulently induce consumers to purchase the latest” iPhone.
Plaintiff Kirk Pedelty, of North Carolina, contacted Apple as his frustration grew. However, the lawsuit says: “Nobody from Apple customer support suggested that he replace his battery to improve the performance of his iPhone. … Frustrated by slowdowns and intermittent shutdowns of his iPhone 7, Pedelty purchased an iPhone 8.”
The lawsuit seeks class-action status to represent thousands of iPhone owners nationwide.
Creative Strategies analyst Carolina Milanesi said she believes the tech giant was seeking to help consumers extend the lives of the older phones — though it would have been better to disclose what it was doing and why right away.
“Even if you are trying to do something good for your customers, it is going to be perceived as you are sneaking around behind their backs if you don’t tell them about it first,” she said.
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Indonesia’s foremost hard-line Islamist group, the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), has announced a Christmas Day boycott of Facebook and the Whatsapp instant messaging service, as well as a live protest at Facebook’s Indonesia office in the near future.
They say Facebook — like other major social media outlets such as Twitter and Instagram — has blocked several FPI accounts, and that Facebook allows pro-LGBT and anti-Sharia pages to stay on its site. The group also plans to protest at Indonesia’s Ministry of Communications and Information in the new year.
While the boycott is unlikely to make a major impact on Facebook, it underscores that FPI’s official accounts are blocked on many major platforms, leading some to speculate the move was at the national government’s request.
That’s unlikely, said Ross Tapsell, who researches media in Southeast Asia at Australian National University.
“There is a misperception, both within FPI and outside of it, that the Indonesian government calls up social media companies like Facebook and Twitter and asks for certain pages to be taken down and these companies simply comply,” he said. “That isn’t how this works. Social media companies have their own codes of conduct and it is through fairly extensive and rigorous internal debates that these decisions are ultimately made.”
He suggested that Facebook likely shut down FPI’s pages, which have in the past engaged in hate speech and advocated for violence, for violating its terms and policies.
This is an ambiguous moment for the FPI, which has risen rapidly from a fringe group, founded in 1999 after the fall of Suharto, to a mainstream organization that swayed the Jakarta gubernatorial election.
In late 2016, the FPI organized mass protests in Jakarta against its Chinese Christian governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, for allegedly insulting the Quran. The eventually triumphant candidate, Governor Anies Baswedan, openly allied with the FPI during his campaign.
Crackdown on Islamist groups
“On the issue of internal regulation, Twitter and Facebook have involved many social organizations from Indonesia to become their trusted flaggers [of problematic content], not only the government,” said Damar Juniarto, a coordinator of the Southeast Asia Freedom of Expression Network. He suggested the decision to block FPI happened after numerous complaints from different sources.
“Various FPI members have posted videos of violence, bullying and harassing people who criticized them or their leader in 2017, and these videos would have been given as evidence for the need to ban them on Facebook,” Tapsell said.
In June, a Chinese-Indian teenager in Jakarta was physically abused by FPI members for posting memes about its leader.
Facebook and Twitter could not be immediately reached for comment.
Beyond social media, other Indonesian hard-liners have been the target of crackdowns this year. In July, the government banned the international Islamist organization Hizbut Tahrir because it threatened the nation’s pluralist state ideology, known as Pancasila. Hizbut Tahrir advocates for a global Islamic caliphate.
Vague leadership
Today, FPI’s leader, Habib Rizieq Shihab, is a fugitive in Saudi Arabia; he was charged shortly after the Jakarta election under the nation’s pornography law for allegedly texting explicit photos with a woman who is not his wife. It is a far cry from late 2016, when he enthralled hundreds of thousands of Muslims who brought Jakarta to a grinding halt to attend the “peaceful actions” that Rizieq and FPI organized against the governor.
FPI also has had trouble expanding its brand beyond Java, like in West Kalimantan province in Borneo, where the group failed to hold a similar rally last summer.
Support for FPI increased from 15.6 percent to 23.6 percent between June 2016 and August 2017, according to a recent report from researchers Marcus Mietzner, Burhanuddin Muhtadi and Rizka Halida.
As the year draws to a close, FPI’s agenda is once more trained on local and domestic actions, where it started as Indonesia’s unofficial moral police. For instance, it has promised to raid establishments that make their staff wear Christmas hats. It remains to be seen whether FPI will return to influence the national political discourse in the new year, or whether the group’s stature has peaked.
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Toshiba Corp.’s energy systems unit on Friday unveiled a long telescopic pipe carrying a pan-tilt camera designed to gather crucial information about the situation inside the reactor chambers at Japan’s tsunami-wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant.
The device is 13 meters (43 feet) long and designed to give officials a deeper view into the nuclear plant’s Unit 2 primary containment vessel, where details on melted fuel damage remain largely unknown.
The Fukushima plant had triple meltdowns following the 2011 quake and tsunami. Finding details about the fuel debris is crucial to determining the right method and technology for its removal at each reactor, the most challenging process during the plant’s decades-long decommissioning.
Toshiba officials said the new device will be sent inside the pedestal, a structure directly below the core, to investigate the area and hopefully to find melted debris. The mission could come as soon as late January.
The device looks like a giant fishing rod about 12 centimeters (4.7 inches) in diameter, from which a unit housing the camera, a dosimeter and thermometer slowly slides down. The probe, attached by a cable on the back, can descend all the way to the bottom of the reactor vessel if it can avoid obstacles, officials said.
Two teams of several engineers will be tasked with the mission, which they will remotely operate from a radiation-free command center at the plant.
A simpler predecessor to the pipe unveiled Friday had captured a limited view of the vessel during a preparatory investigation in February. A crawling robot sent in later in February struggled with debris on the ground and stalled in the end due to higher-than-expected radiation, its intended mission incomplete.
The upgraded probe has been co-developed by Toshiba ESS and International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning, a government-funded unit of construction and nuclear technology companies over the past nine months.
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A nutritional survey of Rohingya refugee children at a camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, found high rates of malnutrition and other debilitating, life-threatening health problems.
UNICEF spokesman Christophe Boulierac calls the survey findings alarming, saying they indicate thousands of Rohingya refugee children are facing a public health crisis.
“Up to 25 percent of children under the age of five are suffering from acute malnutrition,” Boulierac said. “This is much more than the WHO emergency threshold of 15 percent. … Half of the children, nearly half of them, have anemia. Up to 40 percent of them have diarrhea and up to 60 percent of them have acute respiratory infections.”
UNICEF conducted three surveys between October 22 and November 27 of more than 1,700 newly arrived refugee children from Myanmar in refugee camps and makeshift settlements in Cox’s Bazar.
Fewer than 16 percent of children in the camps are eating a diet considered barely acceptable and sufficient for their growth and development, Boulierac says.
UNICEF has set up 22 outpatient treatment centers where refugee children can receive special nutritional food and clean water.
An estimated 645,000 Rohingya have fled persecution and violence in Myanmar since the end of August. More than half are children.
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Bitcoin plunged by a quarter to below $12,000 on Friday as investors dumped the cryptocurrency in manic trading after its blistering ascent to a peak close to $20,000 prompted warnings by experts of a bubble.
It capped a brutal week that had been touted as a new era of mainstream trading for the volatile digital currency when bitcoin futures debuted on CME Group Inc, the world’s largest derivatives market on Sunday.
Friday’s steep fall bled into the U.S. stock market, where shares of companies that have recently lashed their fortunes to bitcoin or blockchain — its underlying technology — took a hard knock in early trading.
The biggest and best-known cryptocurrency had seen a staggering twentyfold increase since the start of the year, climbing from less than $1,000 to as high as $19,666 on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange on Sunday and to over $20,000 on other exchanges.
Bitcoin has fallen each day since, with losses accelerating on Friday.
In the futures market, bitcoin one-month futures on Cboe Global Markets were halted due to the steep price drop, while those trading on the CME hit the limit down threshold.
In the spot market, bitcoin fell to as low as $11,159, down more than 25 percent on the Luxembourg-based Bitstamp exchange, its largest one-day drop in nearly three years. For the week, it was down around a third — its worst performance since April 2013.
“After its parabolic-like rally, a crash was imminent and so it has proved,” said Fawad Razaqzada, market analyst at Forex.com in London. “Investors may have also been put off buying bitcoin at those elevated levels amid repeated warnings from experts about the way it had climbed near $20,000.”
“A manic upward swing led by the herd will be followed by a downturn as the emotional sentiment changes,” said Charles Hayter, founder and chief executive of industry website Cryptocompare in London. “A lot of traders have been waiting for this large correction.”
“With the end of the year in sight a lot of investors will be taking profits and saying thank you very much and closing their books for the holiday period,” he added.
Warnings about the risks of investing in the unregulated market have increased — Denmark’s central bank governor called it a “deadly” gamble — and there have been worries about the security of exchanges on which cryptocurrencies are bought and sold.
South Korean cryptocurrency exchange Youbit said on Tuesday it is shutting down and is filing for bankruptcy after it was hacked for the second time this year.
Coinbase, a U.S. company that runs one of the biggest exchanges and provides digital “wallets” for storing bitcoins, said on Wednesday it would investigate accusations of insider trading, following a sharp increase in the price of a bitcoin spin-off hours before it announced support for it.
Crypto-rivals
As rival cryptocurrencies slid along with bitcoin, the total estimated value of the crypto market fell to as low as $440 billion, according to industry website Coinmarketcap, having neared $650 billion just a day earlier.
But other cryptocurrencies surged this week, with investors moving into cheaper digital coins, rather than cashing out of the sector.
Ethereum, the second-biggest cryptocurrency by market size, soared to almost $900 earlier in the week, from around $500 a week earlier. Ripple, the third-biggest, has more than quadrupled in price since Monday.
Stephen Innes, head of trading in Asia-Pacific for retail FX broker Oanda in Singapore, said that there have also been moves out of bitcoin into Bitcoin Cash, a clone of the original cryptocurrency. Oanda does not handle trading in bitcoin.
“Most of it is unsophisticated retail traders getting burned badly,” Innes said on bitcoin’s recent retreat.
While some say the launch by CME and its rival Cboe Global Markets of bitcoin futures over the last two weeks has given the digital currency some perceived legitimacy, many policymakers remain skeptical.
Bitcoin is known to go through wild swings. In November, it tumbled almost 30 percent in four days from $7,888 to $5,555. In September, it fell 40 percent from $4,979 to $2,972.
Reporting by Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss in New York and Jemima Kelly in London; Additional reporting by Shinichi Saoshiro in Tokyo; Editing by Keith Weir and Susan Thomas.
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