Virtual reality allows the user to enter a different world through sight and sound. Now, researchers are adding a sense of touch to the experience, making the virtual world seem even more real. The ability to feel an object in the virtual world has quite a few real-world applications. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee spoke to one French company about its device.
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The United States Food and Drug Administration will be talking about alternatives to cigarette smoking as it deliberates whether to approve a new product offered by tobacco companies that delivers nicotine to the user without burning tobacco. The American Lung Association reports that cigarette smoking rates in the U.S. are at historically low levels. A little over 15 percent of Americans smoke.
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The American Lung Association says fewer Americans smoke cigarettes now than before tobacco control policies were put in place.
In its annual report, the ALA says smoking rates among adults and teens are at historic lows. On average, just over 15.5 percent of American adults and eight percent of high school students smoke cigarettes.
The association gets its data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which show the smoking rate declined from 20.9 percent in 2005 to 15.5 percent in 2016. Still, CDC data shows that nearly 38 million American adults continue to smoke.
“The good news is that these data are consistent with the declines in adult cigarette smoking that we’ve seen for several decades. These findings also show that more people are quitting, and those who continue to smoke are smoking less,” according to Corinne Graffunder, director of the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health quoted in a news release from the CDC.
Yet, the American Lung Association finds that certain groups and regions in the United States are disproportionately impacted by tobacco use and exposure to second-hand smoke. Thomas Carr, the ALA’s Director of National Policy who wrote the 2018 report “The State of Tobacco Control,” said poorer Americans, those who are less educated, Native Americans and some ethnic groups have smoking rates that are close to 30 percent or higher.
“The tobacco industry advertises more to some of these groups and more heavily than others, and you will find in low-income areas, there are sometimes a bigger concentration of tobacco stores and that kind of thing.”
There’s also peer pressure, and when friends or parents smoke, teens tend to take up the habit. Studies show that most people who smoke start before they are 18. Some start as young as age 11 according to The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. Carr calls it a pediatric disease. “It starts in your teens and then once you’re hooked, you can’t get off of it.”
The lung association is pushing states to raise the age where young people can legally purchase cigarettes to 21, the minimum age in the United States for purchasing alcohol. The thought is that if middle and high school students can’t get cigarettes, they are less likely to start smoking. “It cuts off access to people 15 to 17 years old. A lot of times they’ll go to their friends who are 18 (and still) in high school, but they’re not as likely to hang around with people who are 19 or 20 or 21.” So far five states — California, Oregon, Maine, Hawaii and New Jersey have raised the age to 21.
The lung association issues an annual report to help promote state and federal regulations to make it easier for people who smoke to quit and to help those who don’t smoke not to start.
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The Trump administration is set to announce a raft of trade decisions over the next months, ranging from curbs on foreign imports of steel and aluminum to steps to clamp down on China’s alleged theft of intellectual property.
U.S. President Donald Trump has stressed his “America First” agenda in his first year in office and called for fairer, more reciprocal trade. He has blamed globalization for ravaging American manufacturing jobs as companies sought to reduce labor costs by relocating to Mexico and elsewhere.
Imported washing machines, solar panels
In its first major trade decision of the year, the administration slapped steep tariffs on imported washing machines and solar panels, boosting Whirlpool Corp. and dealing a setback to the renewable energy industry.
Monday’s decision imposed a 20 percent tariff on the first 1.2 million imported large residential washers in the first year, and a 50 percent tariff on machines above that number. The tariff declines to 16 percent and 40 percent respectively in the third year.
The move punishes Samsung Electronics, which recently began washer production in South Carolina, and LG Electronics, which is building a plant in Tennessee.
The U.S. Solar Energy Industries Association on Tuesday warned that Trump’s move to slap 30 percent tariffs on imported panels would kill tens of thousands of jobs, raise the cost of going solar and quash billions of dollars of investment.
South Korea could push back by launching a complaint through the Geneva-based World Trade Organization, but that is likely to take years. Seoul could also raise it during current negotiations with the United States on modifying the U.S.-South Korea free-trade agreement, known as KORUS.
Steel
The U.S. Commerce Department sent its recommendations on ways to curb foreign steel imports to the White House on January 11. The report followed Trump’s decision, made several months after he took office, to open a Section 232 investigation (from Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962) into whether steel imports threaten U.S. national security.
Trump has 90 days to decide on any potential action. He has promised that any actions will protect steelworkers from imports. Curbing excess steel production in China, which now supplies half of the world’s steel, would be a key goal of any action. Broad tariffs could, however, also affect steelmakers in Europe, Japan, South Korea and Turkey.
It is unclear when the decision on steel imports will be announced.
Aluminum
The Commerce Department has sent Trump the results of its national security investigation into aluminum imports. That Section 232 probe could see broad import restrictions imposed on lightweight metal. The White House has been debating whether to order broad tariffs or quotas on steel and aluminum, pitting administration officials who favor aggressive restrictions against those who favor a more cautious approach to avoid a run-up in prices.
It is unclear when Trump will make his decision.
Intellectual property
Trump and his trade advisers are currently considering penalizing China under Section 301 of the 1974 trade law for its alleged theft of American intellectual property.
The 301 investigation would allow Trump to impose retaliatory tariffs on Chinese goods or other trade sanctions until China changes its policies.
Trump told Reuters in an interview on January 17 that he was considering imposing a big “fine” against China, but he did not elaborate on his answer.
U.S. businesses say they lose hundreds of billions of dollars in technology and millions of jobs to Chinese firms that have stolen ideas and software or forced them to turn over intellectual property as part of doing business in China.
A White House official told Reuters January 19 that Trump was particularly focused on the 301 investigation because it was “systemic” and covered a large swath of American businesses.
China could retaliate by weighing whether the actions are in line with WTO rules while ratcheting up pressure on U.S. businesses — for example, by buying from a European company such as Airbus instead of Boeing.
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Seven years ago, a computer beat two human quizmasters on a Jeopardy challenge. Ever since, the tech industry has been training its machines even harder to make them better at amassing knowledge and answering questions.
And it’s worked, at least up to a point. Just don’t expect artificial intelligence to spit out a literary analysis of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace any time soon.
Research teams at Microsoft and Chinese tech company Alibaba reached what they described as a milestone earlier this month when their AI systems outperformed the estimated human score on a reading comprehension test. It was the latest demonstration of rapid advances that have improved search engines and voice assistants and that are finding broader applications in health care and other fields.
The answers they got wrong — and the test itself — also highlight the limitations of computer intelligence and the difficulty of comparing it directly to human intelligence.
Error! Error!
“We are still a long way from computers being able to read and comprehend general text in the same way that humans can,” said Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, in a LinkedIn post that also commended the achievement by the company’s Beijing-based researchers.
The test developed at Stanford University demonstrated that, in at least some circumstances, computers can beat humans at quickly “reading” hundreds of Wikipedia entries and coming up with accurate answers to questions about Genghis Khan’s reign or the Apollo space program.
The computers, however, also made mistakes that many people wouldn’t have.
Microsoft, for instance, fumbled an easy football question about which member of the NFL’s Carolina Panthers got the most interceptions in the 2015 season (the correct answer was Kurt Coleman, not Josh Norman). A person’s careful reading of the Wikipedia passage would have discovered the right answer, but the computer tripped up on the word “most” and didn’t understand that seven is bigger than four.
“You need some very simple reasoning here, but the machine cannot get it,” said Jianfeng Gao, of Microsoft’s AI research division.
Human vs. machine
It’s not uncommon for machine-learning competitions to pit the cognitive abilities of computers against humans. Machines first bested people in an image-recognition competition in 2015 and a speech recognition competition last year, although they’re still easily tricked. Computers have also vanquished humans at chess, Pac-Man and the strategy game Go.
And since IBM’s Jeopardy victory in 2011, the tech industry has shifted its efforts to data-intensive methods that seek to not just find factoids, but better comprehend the meaning of multi-sentence passages.
Like the other tests, the Stanford Question Answering Dataset, nicknamed Squad, attracted a rivalry among research institutions and tech firms — with Google, Facebook, Tencent, Samsung and Salesforce also giving it a try.
“Academics love competitions,” said Pranav Rajpurkar, the Stanford doctoral student who helped develop the test. “All these companies and institutions are trying to establish themselves as the leader in AI.”
Limits of understanding
The tech industry’s collection and digitization of huge troves of data, combined with new sets of algorithms and more powerful computing, has helped inject new energy into a machine-learning field that’s been around for more than half a century. But computers are still “far off” from truly understanding what they’re reading, said Michael Littman, a Brown University computer science professor who has tasked computers to solve crossword puzzles.
Computers are getting better at the statistical intuition that allows them to scan text and find what seems relevant, but they still struggle with the logical reasoning that comes naturally to people. (And they are often hopeless when it comes to deciphering the subtle wink-and-nod trickery of a clever puzzle.) Many of the common ways of measuring artificial intelligence are in some ways teaching to the test, Littman said.
“It strikes me for the kind of problem that they’re solving that it’s not possible to do better than people, because people are defining what’s correct,” Littman said of the Stanford benchmark. “The impressive thing here is they met human performance, not that they’ve exceeded it.”
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Europe’s economy is on a roll — raising the question of exactly when the European Central Bank will end its extraordinary stimulus efforts. Bank President Mario Draghi will be at pains this week to leave that point open.
No changes in stimulus settings or interest rates are expected at Thursday’s meeting of the bank’s 25-member governing council, which sets monetary policy for the 19 countries that use the euro.
Draghi’s post-meeting news conference, however, will be closely scrutinized for any hints of a change in the timetable for withdrawing a key stimulus component — a massive bond-buying program — later this year.
Here is a fast guide.
Where’s inflation?
Stubbornly low inflation is why Draghi and his ECB colleagues want to keep the stimulus program running.
The bank’s mission is to keep inflation consistently close to but below 2 percent. Usually that means fighting inflation, but in the case of this economic recovery, prices have been unusually slow to respond to a pickup in demand for goods. Annual inflation was just 1.4 percent in December. Excluding oil and food, it was even lower, at 0.9 percent. Meanwhile, the economy is expected to have grown 2.4 percent in 2017; unemployment has fallen from over 12 percent to 8.7 percent.
ECB officials say that eventually growth will lead to higher wages as unemployment falls and labor becomes scarcer. But inflation has taken its time to show up.
Stimulus settings
So Draghi has been urging patience. The bank lowered its bond purchases to 30 billion euros ($37 billion) a month at the start of the year, from 60 billion euros, and has said they will run at least through September — and longer if necessary. The purchases, started in March 2015, pump newly printed money into the economy, which should raise inflation and make credit easier to get.
Much of the speculation in markets has centered on whether the purchases will stop in September, or be continued, perhaps at a lower level. Draghi and the governing council majority have so far resisted stimulus skeptics on the board, such as Germany’s Jens Weidmann, who say it’s time to head for the exit from stimulus.
Promises, promises
A key point to watch is the wording the bank uses to manage expectations of its future actions. Right now, the bank has included wording in its policy statement that it could increase the bond purchases if necessary. Dropping that phrase would be a first step to prepare markets for an end to the stimulus. This week’s meeting might be too early for that tweak, but the wording is being watched in the markets.
The bank has also promised it won’t raise interest rates — its benchmark rate is currently zero — until well after the end of the bond purchases. That puts a first rate increase well into 2019.
Why you should care
The withdrawal of the stimulus by the ECB and other central banks such as the U.S. Federal Reserve will have wide-ranging effects on the finances of ordinary people.
Higher interest rates will mean more return on savings accounts and an easier time funding private and public pension plans. They could also mean trouble for “zombie companies” that might not have any profits if they had to pay higher rates to borrow. Such bankruptcies would be painful in the short term, but would free investment for more profitable uses.
More interest earnings on conservative holdings such as bonds and time deposits would make riskier assets — like stocks — relatively less attractive, and ease the pressure on investors and savers to rummage for returns in riskier holdings.
Down, euro, down
Market reaction is a key concern for Draghi, particularly when it comes to the euro’s exchange rate. The euro has risen in the past several weeks, to around $1.22, in part because markets are anticipating an end to the stimulus. Monetary stimulus can weaken a currency, so investors are bidding the euro up on speculation that the stimulus might come to an earlier end due to the strong economy.
A stronger euro, however, can hurt Europe’s many exporters and further weaken inflation.
Here’s the take from analyst Florian Hense at Berenberg Bank: “The ECB should and will likely stop asset purchases after September: Recent hawkish comments, including the minutes of the last meeting, point in that direction.
“However, in order to not trigger a further appreciation of the euro, the ECB will likely change its communication only cautiously and gradually — and not in January already.”
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President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed into law a steep tariff on imported solar panels, a move billed as a way to protect American jobs but which the solar industry said would lead to tens of thousands of layoffs.
The following are some questions and answers about the decision:
What impact will the decision have on the solar industry?
Trump has said the tariff will lead to more U.S. manufacturing jobs, by preventing foreign goods that are cheap and often subsidized from undercutting domestic products. He also expects foreign solar panel producers to start manufacturing in the United States.
“You’re going to have people getting jobs again and we’re going to make our own product again. It’s been a long time,” Trump said as he signed the order.
The main solar industry trade group, the Solar Energy Industries Association, has a different view: It predicts the tariff will put 23,000 people out of work in the panel installation business this year by raising product costs and thus reducing demand.
Research firm Wood Mackenzie estimated that over the next five years the tariffs would reduce U.S. solar installation growth by 10 to 15 percent. The United States is the world’s fourth-largest solar market after China, Japan and Germany.
Research firm CFRA analyst Angelo Zino said he expected any added manufacturing jobs would be “minimal” given the 18 months to two years it takes to build and ramp up a new production facility and the industry’s shift toward automation.
Who wanted the tariff?
The main beneficiaries of the tariff include U.S.-based solar manufacturers Suniva and SolarWorld.
Suniva filed for bankruptcy in April, days before it filed the petition for trade relief. The Georgia-based company argued it could not compete with the cheap imports that have caused panel prices to fall more than 30 percent since 2016. It was later joined in the petition by SolarWorld. They asked the Trump administration for the equivalent of a 50 percent tariff.
Suniva is majority-owned by Hong Kong-based Shunfeng International Clean Energy, and SolarWorld is the U.S. arm of Germany’s SolarWorld AG.
Suniva called the tariffs “necessary,” while SolarWorld said it was “hopeful they will be enough.”
Most other U.S. solar companies, including SunPower, which manufactures panels in Asia, and residential installer SunRun Inc. were opposed to the trade barrier — as were offshore manufacturers such as China’s JinkoSolar, which will be among the biggest losers.
Solar manufacturer and developer First Solar supported the tariffs, and is likely to be among the biggest beneficiaries. First Solar makes panels using cadmium telluride that are excluded from the trade case. The company has seen an increase in demand for its unique technology.
Will the tariff lead to a trade war?
China branded the move an “overreaction” that would harm the global trade environment.
“The U.S.’s decision … is an abuse of trade remedy measures, and China expresses strong dissatisfaction regarding this,” said Wang Hejun, the head of the commerce ministry’s Trade Remedy and Investigation Bureau. “China will work with other WTO [World Trade Organization] members to resolutely defend its legitimate interests in response to the erroneous U.S. decision.”
Trump dismissed worries of trade retaliation.
“There won’t be a trade war. It’ll only be stock increases for companies that are in our country,” he said.
How does the tariff fit into Trump’s energy policy?
If the tariff cools growth in the U.S. solar industry, it could help Trump’s effort to support the coal industry — which competes with renewable energy technologies for a share of the nation’s power generation market.
Trump campaigned on a promise to revive the ailing coal mining sector and boost U.S. production of other fossil fuels as a way to create jobs and bolster American influence overseas.
He has also downplayed the threat from global warming — an issue that led past administrations to throw their support behind emissions-free solar and wind energy development — rolling back climate change regulations and pulling the United States from a global pact to combat it.
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Sao Paulo closed its zoo and botanical gardens Tuesday as a yellow fever outbreak that has led to 70 deaths is picking up steam.
The big Inhotim art park, which attracts visitors from all over the world, also announced that all visitors would have to show proof of vaccination to be allowed in. The park said the measure was preventative and no case of yellow fever had been found there.
Cases of yellow fever have been rising in Brazil during the southern hemisphere summer rainy season, and health officials are planning to vaccinate millions of people in the coming weeks in the hopes of containing the outbreak.
Authorities did not say when the Sao Paulo zoo or nearby botanical gardens would reopen. The zoo said in a statement that a wild monkey was found dead last week in the park that contains the zoo and tests Monday confirmed it was positive for yellow fever.
According to figures put out by each state, 148 cases have been confirmed in the southeastern states of Minas Gerais, Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Of those, 69 people have died. A week ago, the Health Ministry had confirmed 34 cases and 19 deaths in those states; it also confirmed one case in the capital district that ended in death.
Sao Paulo has registered the most cases, with 81, and the World Health Organization recommended last week that foreigners planning to travel anywhere in the state be vaccinated for the mosquito-borne disease. Brazil’s own recommendations include only parts of the state.
Much of Brazil is considered at risk for the yellow fever, but last year it saw its largest outbreak of the disease in decades, including in areas not previously thought to be at risk. More than 770 people were infected, and more than 250 died. Minas Gerais was at the epicenter of that outbreak, and it declared a state of emergency last week.
Yellow fever typically causes fever, muscle pain and nausea; some patients also experience the jaundice from which the disease gets its name.
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Lebanon must cut Iran-backed Hezbollah from the financial sector, a U.S. official on combating illicit finance said Tuesday, two weeks after Washington began a new push to disrupt the militant group’s global financing routes.
On a two-day visit to Lebanon, the U.S. Treasury’s Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing Marshall Billingslea “urged Lebanon to take every possible measure to ensure [Hezbollah] is not part of the financial sector.”
Billingslea also “stressed the importance of countering Iranian malign activity in Lebanon,” a statement from the United States embassy in Lebanon said.
The Iran-backed, Shiite Hezbollah is classified as a terrorist group by Washington, but sits in Lebanon’s delicate national unity government.
U.S. officials say Hezbollah is funded not just by Iran but by global networks of people, businesses and money laundering operations.
The U.S. Hezbollah International Financing Prevention Acts of 2015 and 2017 aimed to sever the group’s funding routes and a number of people linked to Hezbollah are on sanctions lists.
The United States has had to balance its targeting of Hezbollah funding routes with the need to maintain Lebanon’s stability. Lebanese banking and political authorities have lobbied Washington to make sure its anti-Hezbollah measures do not destroy the banking system underpinning the economy.
In his meetings with President Michel Aoun, Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri and other banking and political figures, Billingslea said the U.S. government was committed to work with Lebanon to protect its financial system and support a “strong, stable and prosperous Lebanon.”
Billingslea also said Washington would help Lebanon protect its financial system from Islamic State and other militants.
Two weeks ago, the Trump administration set up a team to reinvigorate U.S. investigations into Hezbollah-linked drug trafficking.
Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah last week denied any involvement in drug trafficking and said Hezbollah had a very clear religious and moral stance which forbids drugs and drug trading.
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U.S., Canadian and Mexican officials opened a key round of negotiations to modernize NAFTA on Tuesday as President Donald Trump, who has regularly threatened to quit the trade pact, said the talks were going “pretty well.”
Trump, vowing to undo what he portrays as disastrous trade deals, has in recent days expressed different views of the North American Free Trade Agreement, stoking investor worries that one of the world’s largest trading blocs may be disrupted.
With time running out to address U.S. demands for major changes to the 1994 deal, officials met in a Montreal hotel for the sixth and penultimate round of talks, which are to conclude by the end of March to avoid a clash with Mexico’s elections.
“We have come to Montreal with a lot of new ideas, a lot of creative strategies to try to bridge some of the gaps in the negotiations,” Canadian chief negotiator Steve Verheul told reporters, adding that he had “high hopes” of progress.
Trump offers positive comment
Insiders say the Canadian and Mexican governments are prepared to be flexible on a U.S. demand that the amount of North American content in autos be boosted to qualify for duty-free status in NAFTA.
But Ottawa and Mexico City strongly oppose the proposal that autos produced on the continent should have 50 percent U.S. content. Differences also remain over how to address the U.S. push for changes to various dispute resolution mechanisms.
Trump, who has blamed NAFTA for the loss of U.S. jobs, told White House reporters on Tuesday the talks were going “pretty well.”
The Mexican peso immediately pared losses on his comments.
Mexico’s chief negotiator Ken Smith said he hoped progress could be made on less contentious areas such as telecommunications, anti-corruption and sanitary and phytosanitary measures.
Canada unsure about US
Many Canadian officials, however, are downbeat about the talks amid uncertainty over whether Washington really wants to negotiate.
“If you’re unsure where the other side wants to go it is really difficult to know what would please them unless you capitulate, and that’s not going to happen,” one person briefed on Ottawa’s negotiating stance said on condition of anonymity.
With NAFTA’s future up in the air, Canada is taking steps to diversify its trade. Canada currently sends 75 percent of its goods exports to the United States.
Canada joins TPP
Earlier on Tuesday, Canada and 10 other nations agreed to sign a reworked Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact. The United States pulled out of an earlier version of that deal.
Paul Ashworth, chief North America economist at Canada Economics, said the TPP deal might give Canada “a slightly stronger hand to play in the current NAFTA negotiations.”
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is currently attending the World Economic Forum meeting in Switzerland to drum up investment. Next month he will spend five days in India, which Canada sees as potentially a bigger trading partner.
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President Donald Trump’s move Tuesday to tax imported solar cells and washing machines is meant to make good on his vow to reverse decades of U.S. support for free trade and to protect American jobs from foreign competition.
But the tariffs — already denounced by China, Germany and Mexico — are likely to heighten tensions between the United States and its trade partners, slow the U.S. solar-installation business and raise prices for American consumers. And even touchier trade cases lie ahead, involving China’s overproduction of steel and aluminum and its theft of trade secrets, with consequences for American industry and workers.
“My administration is committed to defending American companies, and they’ve been very badly hurt from harmful import surges that threaten the livelihood of their workers,” Trump said as he signed the tariffs. “The United States will not be taken advantage of anymore.”
Trump had campaigned on the argument that foreign nations had long outmaneuvered the United States at the negotiating table and had unfairly subsidized their own industries at the expense of American jobs. He pledged to return manufacturing jobs to America by killing or renegotiating trade deals and cracking down on such countries as China and Mexico that sell more to the United States than they buy from it.
Almost as soon as he took office, Trump abandoned an Asia-Pacific trade pact negotiated by the Obama administration. And Trump’s trade team is engaged in a contentious effort to rewrite the 24-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico.
Immediate tariffs
But until Tuesday, the administration had not imposed major tariffs on imported goods. It is now slapping an immediate tariff of 30 percent on most imported solar modules; the rate will gradually phase out in four years. For large residential washing machines, tariffs will start at up to 50 percent and phase out after three years.
The White House is dusting off a trade weapon not used since President George W. Bush imposed tariffs on imported steel in 2002. The Trade Act of 1974 allows a president to temporarily impose tariffs or other trade barriers on imports that are deemed to damage U.S. industries.
The solar case emerged from a complaint by two U.S.-based companies that manufactured solar cells, the building blocks of solar panels: Suniva Inc., the Georgia-based subsidiary of a Chinese firm, which declared bankruptcy in April; and SolarWorld Americas, the U.S. subsidiary of a German company.
Hurt by imported solar cells, modules
The two companies argued that they had been crushed by an influx of cheap imported solar cells and modules, mostly produced by Chinese companies. China’s share of global solar-cell production shot up from 7 percent in 2005 to nearly 70 percent last year. As prices plunged, nearly 30 U.S. plants closed over the past five years.
In 2012, the Commerce Department imposed duties on Chinese solar-cell imports after ruling that Beijing had unfairly subsidized its producers. Chinese companies avoided the duties, the United States says, by moving production to Taiwan and eventually to Malaysia, Singapore, Germany and South Korea.
Though U.S. solar-cell manufacturers have suffered from cheaper imports, U.S. companies that install solar panels have been booming, thanks to the tumbling prices. Installations have jumped tenfold since 2010. In 2016, solar became the top source of new U.S. electricity-generating capacity. But solar installation companies may now have to eliminate jobs.
Abigail Ross Hopper, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, predicts that the tariffs will wipe out 23,000 jobs and mean that 1.2 million homes won’t be outfitted with solar power.
“They’re significant numbers if you think about employment, and they’re certainly significant numbers if you think about investment,” she says.
Joseph Osha, an energy analyst with JMP Securities, says he doubts the new tariffs will raise solar prices enough to revive U.S. manufacturing. And he thinks China may not bother to retaliate with trade sanctions of their own.
“This is not enough to allow any manufacturing to take root in the U.S.,” Osha says. “So I think (the Chinese) looked at it and said, ‘Whatever.’’’
Whirlpool complaint
The washing-machine case dates back to a 2011 complaint by Whirlpool, which charged that South Korean competitors LG and Samsung were dumping low-priced machines in the U.S. market. To avoid duties imposed by the Commerce Department, the companies shifted production, first to China and then to Thailand and Vietnam.
Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, hailed the new tariffs.
“This is welcome news for the thousands of Whirlpool workers in Clyde, Ohio, whose jobs have been threatened by a surge of cheap washers,” he said. “These tariffs will help level the playing field, and show anyone who tries to cheat our trade laws that they won’t get away with it.”
But critics warned that the tariffs will drive up washing-machine prices.
“Tariffs are taxes on families,” said U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Nebraska. “Moms and dads shopping on a budget for a new washing machine will pay for this — not big companies.”
Tired of the wrangling, the South Korean companies announced plans last year to build plants in the United States — Samsung in Newberry, South Carolina, and LG is Clarksville, Tennessee.
Dan Ikenson, director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Trade Policy, says the solar and washing-machine tariffs by themselves are unlikely to ignite a broader trade war because similar cases have been handled through the World Trade Organization, which rules on trade disputes.
Aluminium, steel next?
Ikenson is more worried about several other trade cases the Trump administration is pursuing. The Trump administration is expected to announce results in coming weeks of its investigation into whether Beijing improperly pressures foreign companies to hand over their technology. Beijing has warned that it will “resolutely safeguard” its interests if Washington acts.
The U.S. also is weighing whether to slap tariffs on aluminium and steel imports by arguing that they pose a threat to national security. If the United States taxes imports on national security grounds, other countries could do the same, Ikenson says. The WTO wouldn’t intervene, he says, because it tends to let countries determine their own national security interests.
Protectionism is already rising around the world, notes Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “The fact that Trump offers an open door for any industry that wants protection from imports fuels this process … What we can expect is not exactly a trade war, but lots of trade skirmishes.”
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The Senate on Tuesday approved President Donald Trump’s selection of Jerome Powell to be the next chairman of the Federal Reserve beginning next month.
Senators voted 84-13 to confirm Powell to lead the nation’s central bank, a post that is considered the most powerful economic position in government.
Powell will succeed Janet Yellen, the first woman to lead the Fed, when her term ends Feb. 3. Trump decided against offering Yellen a second four-year term as chair despite widespread praise for her performance since succeeding Ben Bernanke.
Powell, 64, has served for five-and-a-half years on the Fed’s board. A lawyer and investment manager by training, he will be the first Fed leader in 40 years without an advanced degree in economics. Many expect him to follow Yellen’s cautious approach to interest rates.
Powell, viewed as a centrist, enjoyed support from Republicans and Democrats.
The 13 senators who voted against Powell’s nomination included four Republicans, eight Democrats and Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who votes with the Democrats. The vote total was initially announced as 85-12. But Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, received permission to change her vote to no after the initial count had been announced.
One of the dissenters, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said she was concerned that Powell “will roll back critical rules that help guard against another financial crisis.”
But Sen. Sherrod Brown, the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, praised Powell’s tenure on the Fed board.
“His track record over the past six years shows he is a thoughtful policymaker,” Brown said.
During the presidential race, Trump was critical of the role the Fed played in implementing the Dodd-Frank Act, the 2010 law that tightened banking regulations after the 2008 financial crisis. Trump and many Republicans in Congress contended that the stricter regulations were too burdensome for financial institutions and were a key reason why economic growth since the Great Recession ended in 2009 had been lackluster.
Powell has signaled that he favors ways to make bank regulations less onerous, especially for smaller community banks.
Trump will be able to essentially remake the Fed’s board during his first two years in office. He has already filled the key post of vice chairman for regulation with Randal Quarles. The president has also nominated Marvin Goodfriend, a conservative economist, for another vacancy on the board.
In addition, he can fill three more vacancies on the seven-member board, including the key spot of Fed vice chairman, which has been vacant since Stanley Fischer left in October.
All told, the vacancies will have given Trump the ability to fill six of the seven board positions with his own choices. Lael Brainard will remain the lone board member not to have been chosen by Trump.
Powell, known as a collegial consensus-builder, could help serve as a steadying force for the U.S. economy as well as a unifying figure among the central bank’s policymakers. As a Fed governor, Powell has never dissented from a central bank decision.
Educated at Princeton University with a law degree from Georgetown, Powell, known as Jay, spent many years in investment management — at Dillon Read and then at the Carlyle Group. His work there made him one of the wealthiest figures to serve on the Fed board: His most recent financial disclosure form places his wealth at between $19.7 million and $55 million. And based on how government disclosures are drafted, his wealth may actually be closer to $100 million.
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U.S. mayors increasingly view climate change as a pressing urban issue, so much so that many advocate policies that could inconvenience residents or even hurt their cities financially.
The annual survey of big-city executives, released Tuesday by the Boston University Initiative on Cities, also reflected the nation’s sharp political divide. Ninety-five percent of Democratic mayors who responded believed climate change was caused by human activities, a view shared by only half of Republican mayors.
A clear majority of mayors were prepared to confront President Donald Trump’s administration over climate change and felt their cities could be influential in counteracting the policies of the Republican president, who at times has called global warming a hoax and last year withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate accord.
“A striking 68 percent of mayors agree that cities should play a strong role in reducing the effects of climate change, even if it means sacrificing revenues or increasing expenditures,” a report accompanying the survey stated.
Boston mayor started survey
In all, 115 mayors of cities with at least 75,000 residents answered the fourth annual survey named for Thomas Menino, a longtime Democratic mayor of Boston who founded the university program before his death in 2014. The survey was sponsored in part by The Rockefeller Foundation and Citigroup.
Organizers of the survey declined to release a list of the 115 mayors who responded, citing confidentially agreements. According to the report, nearly two-thirds of the mayors were Democrats and the cities had an average population of 233,000.
The survey cited the availability and affordability of housing as the single most pressing concern of mayors, followed closely by climate change and municipal budget pressures caused in part by federal and state cuts.
A foreword to the report, signed by Democratic Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and Betsy Price, the Republican mayor of Fort Worth, Texas, argued that cities can exert formidable influence over U.S. and global policies.
“At a time when the national conversation is divisive, cities offer a sense of hope and shared identity,” the mayors said.
Democrats support changes
Sixty-eight percent of mayors said they would be willing to expend additional resources or sacrifice revenue to combat climate change.
Democrats were more than twice as likely as Republicans to promote environmental policies that might inconvenience motorists in their cities, and almost three times as likely to support entering into regional climate pacts or networks. Yet only 26 percent of Democrats and 5 percent of Republican mayors were eager to slap any costly new regulations on the private sector.
The survey found that attitudes about climate change differed geographically as well as politically. For example, 90 percent of all Eastern mayors and 97 percent from the Midwest blamed human activities for climate change, compared to 70 percent from Southern cities.
Drugmakers’ response to the threat posed by “superbugs” remains patchy even after years of warnings, according to the first analysis of individual companies’ efforts to tackle the antibiotic resistance crisis.
The rise of drug-resistant bacteria is a growing threat to modern medicine with the emergence of infections resistant to even last-resort antibiotics — a situation made worse in recent years by overuse of antibiotics and cutbacks in drug research.
New analysis by the nonprofit Access to Medicine Foundation (AMF), published Tuesday, found that GlaxoSmithKline and Johnson & Johnson were doing more than most among large research-based pharmaceutical companies to tackle the problem, while Mylan led the way among generic drugmakers and Entasis was top among biotechs.
Overall, GSK led the field with 55 antimicrobial pipeline projects, including 13 vaccines.
But action taken by such companies is only the start of what could be done to address the problem, which former Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O’Neill in 2014 estimated could cause 10 million deaths a year worldwide by 2050.
“The whole of modern medicine depends on being able to control and treat infections,” said Jeremy Farrar, director of the Wellcome Trust charity. “Perhaps the most exciting area of medicine at the moment, immunotherapies for cancer, is impossible unless you can control infection.”
‘Definitely more’ should be done
While more experimental antibiotics are now moving through development than a few years ago, the number is still down from what it was during the 1980s and 1990s. And a lot more work needs to be done to ensure appropriate use of medicines — both new ones and the thousands of metric tons of older pills churned out each year by generic companies.
“There’s definitely more that all companies can do,” said Jayasree Iyer, executive director of AMF, which published the analysis at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. “We need to strengthen the research and development pipeline, and when new products reach the market, we need to ensure that they are used in a conservative way so that misuse and overuse is limited.”
There are now 28 experimental antibiotics in late-stage development against critical pathogens, but only two of these are supported by plans to ensure they can be both made accessible and used wisely if they reach the market.
The AMF said four companies — GSK, Shionogi, Pfizer and Novartis — had taken steps to separate sales representatives’ bonuses from the volume of antibiotics sold, but that much more needed to be done across the industry to counter overuse.
Another under-recognized problem is the pollution caused by mass production of antibiotics, due to lax oversight of wastewater runoff.
In India’s Hyderabad region, for example, the presence of hundreds of drug factories and inadequate water treatment has left lakes and rivers laced with antibiotics, making the area a giant petri dish for anti-microbial resistance.
The AMF urged multinational drugmakers to do more to ensure that their suppliers of bulk antibiotic ingredients were complying with rigorous wastewater standards.
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Eleven countries aiming to forge an Asia-Pacific trade pact after the United States pulled out of an earlier version will sign an agreement in Chile in March, Japan’s economy minister said on Tuesday, in a big win for Tokyo.
Trade officials had been meeting in Tokyo to resolve rifts including Canada’s insistence on protections for its cultural industries such as movies, TV and music.
An agreement is a win for Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government, which has been lobbying hard to save the pact, originally called the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
In one of his first acts as U.S. president in January 2017, Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the original 12-nation treaty.
Abe has painted the deal as a spur to growth and reform in Japan and a symbol of commitment to free and multilateral trade at a time when Trump stresses “America First” policies.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the agreement the “right deal.”
Canada’s trade minister said in a statement it included an improved arrangement on autos with Japan and the suspension of intellectual property provisions that had been a concern.
The timing of the deal is significant for Canada, which is trying to diversify its exports. U.S., Canadian and Mexican negotiators opened a key week-long round of talks to modernize NAFTA on Tuesday.
Japanese Economy Minister Toshimitsu Motegi said the new Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), or TPP-11, would be an “engine to overcome protectionism” emerging in parts of the world.
He added Japan would explain the importance of the deal to Washington in hopes of persuading it to join.
Ministers from the 11 countries, including Japan, Australia and Canada, agreed in November on core elements to move ahead without the United States, but demands by countries including Canada for measures to ensure the deal protects jobs blocked a final agreement.
“This outcome reaffirms the CPTPP countries’ collective commitment towards greater trade liberalization and regional integration,” Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Industry said in a statement.
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said last week the new agreement would leave a door open for eventual U.S. participation.
Canada, which wanted protection of its cultural industries, and Vietnam, which has worried about labor protection rules, will exchange separate side letters with other members on those topics at the time of the signing, Motegi said.
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It seems like a game everyone wins: Some of China’s biggest tech companies, looking to hook in new consumers, are using cash prizes to draw millions of contenders to mobile-based online quiz shows.
Up to 6 million people at a time log into the free, live games on their smartphones to answer a series of rapid-fire questions in an elimination battle, with those remaining sharing the prize money.
Over the weekend, search engine giant Baidu and video game maker NetEase launched their own online shows, joining news feed platform Toutiao, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd-owned UCWeb and Wang Sicong, the scion of Chinese billionaire Wang Jianlin.
But how they will cash in on the games and stay on the right side of government censors might prove to be a tricky question.
The trivia games have drawn some controversy, heightened by a broader crackdown on online content during the last year under President Xi Jinping, from livestreams and blogs to a campaign against internet addiction.
This month, one quiz show, “Millions Winner,” backed by internet security company Qihoo 360, apologized after it was chastised by a regulator for listing Taiwan and Hong Kong, over which China claims sovereignty, as independent countries in a question.
How firms will monetize the craze is also not yet clear, though some companies, such as online retailer JD.com, have already jumped on the trend, sponsoring shows to help raise their profiles. Many of the games show ads to players during the shows.
“If you ask me why I do this, to be honest, I don’t really know if I can make money,” Zhou Hongyi, chairman of Qihoo, said at an event where he presented a contestant with a 1 million yuan ($156,115.84) prize check two weeks ago. “But from a user’s perspective, I think this is really fun.”
The quiz mania underlines the fierce appetite of China’s consumers for internet entertainment, a trend helping drive billions of dollars of investment into digital news portals, online gaming, internet advertising and television content.
“I heard about this game from a friend who won 1,700 yuan in one day. I immediately decided to join up myself,” Wang Ting, a 26-year-old graduate student in Qingdao, told Reuters. She now spends three hours each day on her phone playing the games.
Uncertain future
Questions, read by a live host, might include: “From which country were pineapples imported to China in the 16th century?” “In which dynasty was the lamb hot pot invented?” or “How many fingers does Mickey Mouse have?”
Contestants get 10 seconds — a time frame designed cut out cheating — to select the correct answer from a choice of three.
Winnings can be up to 3 million yuan per game, but are often split between many winners.
Toutiao parent Bytedance said that “millions of our users” had taken part in its live quiz “Million Dollar Hero” since the show launched at the start of January. It also has a tougher “Hero Game” with harder questions and bigger prizes.
“We’ve been running for just two weeks, so it’s still in the very early stages, but it’s encouraging to see how the game has taken off across the country, and with all age groups,” the company said in a statement to Reuters.
Toutiao, a highly popular news feed app, was valued at around $20 billion in a fundraising last year, sources close to the company told Reuters.
Raymond Wang, managing partner at Beijing law firm Anli Partners, said the shows were a “relatively low-cost way to get to users,” but cautioned there were political and technical risks.
Wang Ran, a prominent investor and head of Beijing-based private investment bank CEC Capital Group, posed a question on his WeChat account about the future of the online quiz show trend.
“A) Growing numbers will jump into the market. B) Someone will win 10 million yuan in one go. C) Authorities will strictly crack down on it. 10 seconds. Go!”
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Of the 30 U.S. children who have died from the flu this season, some 85 percent likely will not have been vaccinated, said Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald, who urged Americans to get flu shots amid one of the most severe flu seasons in years.
“My message is, if you haven’t gotten a vaccine, please get a vaccine. Also, please get your children vaccinated,” said Fitzgerald, who is urging citizens “to take every advantage that you can to protect yourself.”
The dominant strain during this flu season is an especially nasty type called influenza A (H3N2) that in seasons past has been linked with severe disease and death, especially in the elderly and young. This year’s seasonal flu epidemic is especially severe.
In past flu seasons, between 80 and 85 percent of children who have died from the flu had not gotten a flu vaccine that season, the agency said in an email.
In its latest report, the CDC said the virus is present in every state, with 32 states reporting severe flu activity.
Although the vaccine is only estimated to be about 30 percent effective against the H3N2 strain, it has been shown in studies to reduce severity and duration if people do become infected, said Dr. Dan Jernigan, director of the influenza division at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Fitzgerald conceded in a telephone interview that reports that the flu vaccine in Australia was only 10 percent effective may have caused people to think the vaccine would not be worth the trouble.
Fitzgerald said the agency’s flu division has been on the job during the three-day federal government shutdown. Senators on Monday reached a deal to keep the government funded through Feb. 8.
Studies have shown that even a vaccine that has lower overall effectiveness can decrease the number of days spent in hospital, duration of the flu and the degree of symptoms.
“That helps support the point of getting a vaccine,” Jernigan said.
Fitzgerald said the flu vaccine and antiviral drugs used to fight the flu are widely available across the country, noting that people can go to the CDC website and enter their zip code to find the nearest flu clinics with vaccines.
Fitzgerald also recommended that people frequently wash their hands or use hand sanitizer, avoid those who are sick or coughing, and carry disinfectant wipes.
The CDC does not have numbers for adult deaths from the flu because adult flu is not a reportable disease in all U.S. states. But she said North Carolina, which collects such data, has reported 42 adult flu deaths this season.
Official estimates from the CDC are expected at the end of the current season, based on a calculation from hospitals and states reporting data to the agency.
In the 2014/2015 flu season, in which the H3N2 strain was also the leading strain, there were an estimated 35.6 million cases, 710,000 hospitalizations and 56,000 deaths. At this point, it is not clear whether the current flu season will surpass those estimates, Jernigan said.
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China and South Korea are protesting U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to impose steep tariffs on washing machines and solar panels, a move that is fueling concerns in Asia that more U.S. protectionist measures are forthcoming.
Trump said Tuesday that the U.S. was also considering raising tariffs on steel and aluminum.
“We’re looking at it; we’re looking at a lot of things,” he told reporters.
South Korean Trade Minister Kim Hyun-chong called the tariffs “excessive” and said they violate World Trade Organization rules. Kim said South Korea planned to file a petition against the U.S. at the WTO.
The tariffs significantly impact South Korea’s Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics, which have captured about one quarter of the U.S. washing machine market that is dominated by American companies Whirlpool and General Electric.
Samsung said the tariffs are “a tax on every consumer who wants to buy a washing machine.”
China, the U.S.’ largest trade partner and the world’s biggest solar panel manufacturer, said the tariffs are an “overreaction” that would hurt the global trade environment.
Beijing’s Commerce Ministry said it would collaborate with other WTO members to “resolutely defend its legitimate interests,” without offering specifics.
Trump has frequently criticized China for engaging in what he believes are unfair trade practices that have led to the elimination of U.S. jobs.
“After a year’s preparation, Trump is ready to take action to address the huge trade deficit with China and get even,” said Zhang Yi, chief economist with the Beijing-based Capital Securities.
Washington will impose tariffs of up to 50 percent on large washing machines over a three-year period and up to 30 percent on solar panels over four years.
They were imposed after the U.S. International Trade Commission found that the imported products were “a substantial cause of serious injury to domestic manufacturers.”
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Spacewalking astronauts gave a hand to the International Space Station’s big robot arm Tuesday.
As the federal government geared back up 250 miles below, NASA astronauts Mark Vande Hei and Scott Tingle successfully installed the new mechanical gripper.
Because of the lingering effects of the government shutdown, the spacewalk got started in the morning without coverage on NASA TV. An on-air message simply stated: “We regret the inconvenience.” Nearly an hour into the spacewalk, however, NASA TV came alive and began broadcasting the event with typical blow-by-blow commentary.
Space station operations were largely unaffected by the three-day shutdown. Considered essential personnel, Mission Control kept watch as usual at Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Vande Hei performed a similar spacewalk last October, when he replaced the first of two original hands on the Canadian-built arm. This second new hand will go on the opposite end of the 58-foot arm, able to move like an inchworm by grabbing hold of special fixtures.
The bulky bundle of latches — more than 3 feet, or a meter, long and weighing more than 440 pounds, or 200 kilograms — needed to be replaced because of wear and tear. It’s been in orbit, grabbing cargo capsules and performing other chores, since 2001.
Tingle had to use extra muscle to release a stubborn bolt securing the spare mechanical arm.
“Nice work,” Vande Hei said. “And the crowd goes wild,” chimed in Mission Control.
Next, the spacewalkers wrested the old, degraded hand from the robot arm. Once the new hand was in place, a software issue cropped up briefly. Six hours into the spacewalk, NASA declared victory. The spacewalk lasted 7 1/2 hours.
It was the first spacewalk for Tingle, who arrived last month, and the third for Vande Hei.
“Make us proud out there,” astronaut Joe Acaba told the spacewalkers from inside. “We’ll have hot chow for you when you get back.”
Vande Hei will go back out Monday with another astronaut to finish the job. Then the two Russians on board will conduct a spacewalk Feb. 2 to install a new antenna on their country’s side of the outpost.
The space station is home to three Americans, two Russians and one Japanese.
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Uganda’s cancer patients can finally breathe a sigh of relief after the country got a new cobalt-60 radiation treatment machine. But, health officials say this may not be enough because of an ever increasing number of cancer cases in the country. Halima Athumani reports for VOA from Kampala.
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There’s little doubt that virtual reality is likely to be the future of video gaming. Now, a Russian company in Moscow is pushing the limits of the technology with a game changing VR experience. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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A trade group representing U.S. auto parts makers on Monday urged the Trump administration to adopt NAFTA automotive rules that cover research, engineering, design and software development work as part of North American regional value content goals.
The proposal from the Motor and Equipment Manufacturers Association (MEMA) was sent to U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer as a sixth round of negotiations to revise the North American Free Trade Agreement began in Montreal.
U.S. demands for sweeping changes to automotive content rules are among the most contentious issues in the NAFTA talks, including a requirement that half the value of all North American vehicles come from the United States and a far higher content requirement of 85 percent from North America.
Canada and Mexico have said the U.S. targets are unworkable, but have not responded with counter-proposals.
They are expected to do so at the Montreal talks ending Jan 29. Lack of progress in bridging the gap on autos could jeopardize the negotiations and increase the chances that President Donald Trump follows through on his threat to seek a U.S. withdrawal from NAFTA.
The U.S. auto industry, including MEMA and trade groups representing Detroit and foreign-brand automakers, have largely sided with Canada and Mexico in arguing that the U.S. proposals would hurt the industry’s competitiveness.
The MEMA letter to Lighthizer makes no mention of the proposed U.S. and regional content targets, and focuses instead on recommendations that its members believe will help retain and grow automotive jobs in the United States.
“We think it lines up very well with the president’s initiatives and his stated goals for NAFTA and other free trade agreements,” Ann Wilson, MEMA’s senior vice president of government affairs, told Reuters. “What we have been trying to do is find other ways of getting to the president’s objectives without getting to a 50 percent domestic requirement.”
Counting the well-paid engineering, design, research and software development as part of a vehicle’s value content would provide an incentive for companies to retain jobs doing this work now largely done in the United States.
The proposal also urges the Trump administration to preserve “tariff-shifting” for automotive parts as a means to retain the higher value-added work being done on sophisticated automotive electronics and other systems.
Currently, companies that import components and materials into North America and convert them into automotive parts can “shift,” or apply, NAFTA tariff-free benefits to such inputs.
For example, off-the-shelf electronics parts from Asia such as lidar and radar units, cameras, sensors and circuit boards currently gain this benefit as they are assembled into vehicle crash avoidance systems. Steel tubing converted to fuel injectors also can gain such benefits.
But the current USTR autos proposal would require that virtually all components be subject to a “tracing list” to verify their North American origin so they can count toward regional value targets.
The tracing list would be expanded to steel, glass, plastic resins and other materials, under the proposal.
Industry executives have argued that these requirements are likely to push auto and parts companies to source more products outside the region and simply pay the low 2.5 percent U.S. tariffs on many parts.
MEMA also urged Lighthizer to negotiate an agreement that provides incentives to U.S. companies to train and expand the U.S. workforce, as parts companies struggle to fill open positions amid rising retirements. The group also urged that aftermarket parts be subject to the same NAFTA rules as original equipment parts.
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China invited Latin American and Caribbean countries to join its “One Belt, One Road” initiative on Monday, as part of an agreement to deepen economic and political cooperation in a region where U.S. influence is historically strong.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said the region was a natural fit for the initiative, which China has leveraged to deepen economic and financial cooperation with developing nations.
“China will always stay committed to the path of peaceful development and the win-win strategy of opening up and stands ready to share development dividends with all countries,” Wang said at a meeting between China and 33 members of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).
Representatives from China and CELAC signed a broad agreement to expand ties in the second time China has met with CELAC – a bloc formed in Venezuela in 2011 that does not include the United States or Canada.
Though it had few specific details, the agreement is part of an evolving and more aggressive Chinese foreign policy in Latin America as the United States, under President Donald Trump, has taken a more protectionist stance.
The “One Belt, One Road” initiative, proposed in 2013 by Chinese President Xi Jinping, promotes expanding links between Asia, Africa and Europe, with billions of dollars in infrastructure investment.
Wang emphasized projects to improve connectivity between land and sea, and cited the need to jointly build “logistic, electricity and information pathways.”
The so-called Santiago declaration, signed by China and CELAC delegates, also calls for bolstering trade and taking action on climate change.
Chile Foreign Minister Heraldo Munoz, who has criticized Trump in the past, said the agreement marked an “historic” new era of dialogue between the region and China.
“China said something that is very important, that it wants to be our must trustworthy partner in Latin America and the Caribbean and we greatly value that,” said Munoz. “This meeting represents a categoric repudiation of protectionism and unilateralism.”
China has sought a bigger role overseas since Trump was elected, presenting its Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership trade agreement as an alternative to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the United States has abandoned.
The country is already testing U.S. dominance in Latin America, offering the region $250 billion in investment over the next decade. It is the top trading partner of many countries in the region, including Brazil, Chile and Argentina.
Still, Wang played down the idea of a race for influence.
“It has nothing to do with geopolitical competition. It follows the principle of achieving shared growth through discussion and collaboration,” Wang said in his remarks. “It is nothing like a zero sum game.”
In recent years, Chinese companies have moved away from merely buying Latin American raw materials and are diversifying into sectors such as auto manufacturing, e-commerce and even
technology businesses such as car-hailing services.
“Our relations with China are very broad, this (CELAC) is one more pathway for Brazil to work with China. Together we identified more areas of cooperation,” said Brazil’s Vice Foreign Minister Marcos Galvao.
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Facebook took a hard look in the mirror with a post Monday questioning the impact of social media on democracies worldwide and saying it has a “moral duty” to understand how it is being used.
Over the past 18 months, the company has faced growing criticism for its limited understanding of how misinformation campaigns and governments are using its service to suppress democracy and make people afraid to speak out.
“I wish I could guarantee that the positives are destined to outweigh the negatives, but I can’t,” wrote Samidh Chakrabarti, Facebook’s product manager of civic engagement.
Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Facebook has been looking more critically at how it is being used. Some of what it found raises questions about company’s long-standing position that social media is a force for good in people’s lives.
In December, in a post titled “Is Spending Time on Social Media Bad for Us?” the company wrote about its potential negative effects on people.
The self-criticism campaign extended to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal goals. Each year he publicly resolves to reach one personal goal, which in the past included learning Mandarin, reading more books and running a mile every day.
This year, Zuckerberg said his goal is to fix some of the tough issues facing Facebook, including “defending against interference by nation states.”
Foreign Interference
During the 2016 U.S. election, Russian-based organizations were able to reach 126 million people in the U.S. with 80,000 posts, essentially using social media as “an information weapon,” wrote Chakrabarti. The company made a series of changes to make politics on its site more transparent, he wrote.
False News
Facebook is trying to combat misinformation campaigns by making it easier to report fake news and to provide more context to the news sources people see on Facebook.
“Even with these countermeasures, the battle will never end,” Chakrabarti wrote.
One of the harder problems to tackle, he said, are so-called “filter bubbles,” people only seeing news and opinion pieces from one point of view. Critics say some social media sites show people only stories they are likely to agree with, which polarizes public opinion.
One obvious solution – showing people the opposite point of view – doesn’t necessarily work, he wrote. Seeing contrarian articles makes people dig in even more to their point of view and create more polarizations, according to many social scientists, Chakrabarti said.
A different approach is showing people additional articles related to the one they are reading.
Reaction to Facebook’s introspection was mixed with some praising the company for looking at its blind spots. But not everyone applauded.
“Facebook is seriously asking this question years too late,” tweeted Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
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