Hybrid cars are slowly working their way into car markets, and there are waiting lists for Elon Musk’s new all-electric Tesla Model 3. But as popular as these cars are, they have the natural limitations of their batteries. But an answer may be in sight. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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With ever-dwindling space and resources available in overburdened Rohingya refugee camps in southern Bangladesh, the government in Dhaka is boosting family planning measures and considering a voluntary sterilization plan.
The efforts include hiring more staff, distributing birth control pills and handing out condoms, a senior official told VOA.
“We have reorganized our operations in our seven camps meant for Rohingya. [Before] we had only 40 staff and now we have hired 160 others from different places to speed up our activities,” said Pintu Kanti Bhattacharjee, the head of the family planning department in Cox’s Bazar district, where the camps are located just across the border from Myanmar.
“We have distributed 3,000 strips of oral pills and 3,900 women have been given birth control injections in September and October. Only 1,000 condoms have been distributed at the same time. We are providing free of cost. At the same time, our staff is continuing family planning related counseling,” Pintu said.
Hundreds of thousands
More than 600,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar since attacks by the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army in August prompted a brutal crackdown that has revived discussions of targeted U.S. sanctions less than two years into the civilian administration of Aung San Suu Kyi.
Many arrive in camps that have existed for more than two decades, and the surge has put pressure on aid agencies to respond to the growing humanitarian crisis.
It has also strained resources within Bangladesh, one of the most densely populated countries on earth. Even though the country has welcomed refugees, it insists Myanmar take them back.
Voluntary sterilization
The growing concerns over the lack of resources have led to a proposal to introduce voluntary sterilization, which exists as an option for Bangladeshi nationals, into the camps.
The government is considering the idea, which would provide voluntary vasectomies for men and tubectomies for women, but it has not been approved yet.
It’s possible that the various family planning measures could conflict with more conservative cultural and religious beliefs among refugees. Islam does not explicitly forbid birth control but views in the camps are somewhat mixed on the idea.
Religious teacher Aminul Islam said there is nothing wrong with any method if it protects a woman’s health, but that permanent birth control procedures conflict with the faith.
But Hafez Abdul Wahab, 42, who came to Bangladesh 27 years ago and is a registered refugee in the Kutupalang camp, is not as certain.
He and his wife have 10 children and are expecting another. They are open to new options after the next birth.
“The birth control process is difficult so we prefer to go without it. But now I am thinking we will try any process after the last child is born,” he said.
Family planning sensitive topic
Family planning is also a sensitive subject for persecuted Rohingya communities. Buddhist nationalists within Myanmar advocated for a “Population Control” bill that many saw as aimed at the Muslim minority.
The bill, which was passed in 2015 but seems to have not been enforced, requires 36-month spacing between births.
The Rohingya crisis has impacted tens of thousands of children who have had to leave their homes, and some of them showed up in Bangladesh missing one or both parents.
UNICEF says there are 958 unaccompanied children in the camps, 1,968 unaccompanied minors, and 5,009 children who are separated from their parents.
Myanmar says it will take back refugees who fled to Bangladesh under a citizenship verification process, but the process has yet to resume in earnest.
De facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi made her first visit to the conflict-torn area of northern Rakhine State on Thursday in her capacity as the chairperson of the Union Enterprise for Humanitarian Assistance, Resettlement and Development in Rakhine Committee, which was set up last month in response to the crisis.
The country has faced mounting criticism from the international community and the United States, where members of Congress have proposed a new round of sanctions, many of which were lifted after Myanmar’s peaceful 2015 election that brought Aung San Suu Kyi to power after decades of military rule.
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is expected to visit Myanmar on Nov. 15.
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A Chinese official on Friday disputed President Donald Trump’s claim that the deadly opioid fentanyl flooding the U.S. is mostly produced in China.
China doesn’t deny that some fentanyl produced illicitly inside the country is contributing to the epidemic, Wei Xiaojun, deputy director-general of the Narcotics Control Bureau of the Ministry of Public Security, said at a news conference.
However, according to the intelligence the two countries have exchanged, “the evidence isn’t sufficient to say that the majority of fentanyl or other new psychoactive substances come from China,” Wei said.
Trump, Xi to talk
Trump last month said the U.S. was stepping up measures to “hold back the flood of cheap and deadly fentanyl, a synthetic opioid manufactured in China and 50 times stronger than heroin.”
He said he would mention it to Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing next week. “And he will do something about it,” Trump said.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s representative in Beijing, Lance Ho, declined to comment on Wei’s assessment.
Wei also said the Justice Department’s public announcement last month of indictments against two Chinese men accused of making tons of fentanyl and other powerful narcotics sold in the U.S. could impede efforts to bring them to justice.
“I have to admit regret regarding the U.S. move to unilaterally use the method of calling a news conference to announce the matter of these two wanted individuals who’ve fled to China,” he said.
US, China cooperation
The release of information would “impact on the ongoing joint investigation into the case,” Wei said, adding that China noted the U.S. failure to mention their successful cooperation on this and other cases.
The Justice Department said Xiaobing Yan, 40, and Jian Zhang, 38, worked separately but similarly and controlled one of the most prolific international drug-trafficking organizations. The lack of an extradition treaty significantly reduces the chances they will be returned to the U.S. for trial.
The Trump administration’s anti-drug efforts suffered another recent setback when its nominee as drug czar withdrew from consideration following reports that he played a key role in weakening the federal government’s authority to stop companies from distributing opioids.
Trump last week declared opioid abuse a national public health emergency and announced new steps to combat the crisis.
Fentanyl can be lethal even in small amounts and is often laced with other dangerous drugs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated the drug and its analogues killed more than 20,000 Americans last year, and the number is rising.
Friday’s rare news conference, held in the Ministry of Public Security’s tightly guarded compound near Tiananmen Square, appeared aimed at emphasizing China’s progress on cooperation with the U.S. on fighting opioids ahead of Trump’s visit.
China has noted Trump’s announcement of an opioid crisis and “China attaches great importance to this,” Wei said.
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In the past 25 years, the world has made remarkable progress in saving the lives of young children, according to the latest report from the United Nations.
In 1990, 35,000 children died every day; last year, 15,000 children and babies died daily, the first time that annual child deaths have fallen below the 6 million mark. But most of these deaths could have been prevented, according to a U.N. interagency group that put together this year’s report on child mortality.
Dr. Flavia Bustreo of the World Health Organization acknowledged the effort it has taken to get to this point. But while the progress is good, it is not enough, she said.
“I need to stress these deaths can be prevented. With the scientific knowledge we have, with the interventions we have, with the resources that we have available, these deaths can be prevented,” said Bustreo, WHO assistant director-general for family, women’s and children’s health.
And that is the tragedy that coincides with this achievement. The report on child and infant mortality states that every year, millions of children younger than 5 die, mostly from malaria, pneumonia and diarrhea. The last two are related to unsanitary conditions.
Malnutrition plays a part
In almost half of these cases, malnutrition weakens the immune system, leaving the child unable to fight off the disease.
Bustreo said access to clean water and exclusive breastfeeding in the first six months of life can reduce an infant’s risk of infection.
Although more children are living to their fifth birthday, Bustreo says the U.N. report shows that 46 percent of child deaths occur shortly after birth. She said the babies who die in the first months of life are born prematurely.
“They (the deaths) are caused by low birth weight. They are caused significantly by sepsis, severe infection that is acquired during the delivery, and they are also caused by asphyxia,” Bustreo said.
While in the womb, the fetus floats in amniotic fluid. This fluid is in the fetus’ mouth, ears and nose. But after birth, if a baby cannot breathe and the birth attendant, if there is one, does not know how to clear the baby’s airways, the baby will suffocate.
The report shows the largest number of newborn deaths occurred in Southern Asia (39 percent), followed by sub-Saharan Africa (38 percent). Five countries accounted for half of all newborn deaths: India, Pakistan, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia.
Children younger than 5 also are more likely to die from malaria than adults, which is one reason sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia have higher child mortality rates than other parts of the world.
Progress with vaccines
But there are bright spots in the report.
A vaccine for yellow fever spared children’s lives during an outbreak in Angola last year, and a new vaccine for malaria has proved effective for children. Tanzania has tackled air pollution, improved sanitation, and has worked to provide safe drinking water, which has also had a positive impact on child health there.
Bustreo said the concentration of child deaths are increasingly occurring in countries that are either in acute conflict or in a chronic state of strife, such as Somalia, which has the highest child death rate.
“That is important because it also links to not just the medical care, but also the social determinants of health, which, of course, include peace, stability and education, particularly girls’ education,” she said.
Bustreo explains that a girl who is educated can take better care of herself, “she does not become pregnant too early, because that is another important social phenomenon that we’re seeing that is early pregnancy associated with early and forced child marriage.”
Part of the solution lies in multisectorial planning, better training for midwives, training for nurses and vaccines.
Bustreo is dismayed that some parents in developed countries are refusing to get their children vaccinated against these diseases. Ongoing outbreaks of measles in Europe have claimed the lives of 35 children so far.
She said this trend needs to be tackled aggressively. Parents in low- and middle-income countries want to see their children immunized against measles and other disabling or life-threatening diseases.
Despite the overall gains in reducing child mortality, there’s a sense of urgency among health officials. The U.N report said if current trends continue, about 60 million children younger than 5 will die between now and 2030, and half of them will be newborns.
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Over the past 25 years, the world has made remarkable progress in saving young children’s lives. For the first time ever, child deaths have fallen below the 6 million mark globally, but most of these deaths could be prevented according to the latest report from the U.N. VOA’s Carol Pearson has more.
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The World Health Organization says that since the beginning of August there have been about 1,800 cases of plague in Madagascar with 127 resulting in death. Bubonic plague is not uncommon in the island nation, but this year the population also has been hit by plague pneumonia, which is spreading fast through the densely populated areas. Health officials say the outbreak is unusually severe and there are five more months before the end of the plague season. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke has more.
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President Donald Trump is making his mark on the US Federal Reserve, naming former investment manager and central bank governor Jerome Powell to replace Janet Yellen, whose term expires in February. If confirmed by the Senate, the next chairman of the Federal Reserve will oversee U.S. monetary policy and maintain the stability of the world’s largest economy. Mil Arcega has more from the nation’s capital.
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Venezuela on Thursday announced plans to restructure its burgeoning foreign debt, a move that may lead to a default by the cash-strapped OPEC nation whose collapsing socialist economy has left its population struggling to find food and medicine.
President Nicolas Maduro vowed to make a $1.1 billion payment on a bond maturing Thursday, but also created a commission to study “restructuring of all future payments” in order to meet the needs of citizens.
Venezuela has few avenues to do that though because of sanctions by the United States that bar American banks from participating in or even negotiating such deals.
Thus, Maduro’s most readily available recourse to ease payments is unilaterally halting them.
“I am naming a special presidential commission led by Vice President Tareck El Aissami to begin refinancing and restructuring all of Venezuela’s external debt and (begin) the fight against the financial persecution of our country,” Maduro said in a televised speech.
Billions in bonds
Venezuela and state-owned companies have $49 billion in bonds governed by New York Law and promissory notes, according to New York-based Torino Capital.
The government and state oil company PDVSA owe about $1.6 billion in debt service and delayed interest payments by the end of the year, plus another $9 billion in bond servicing in 2018.
The next hard payment deadline for PDVSA is an $81 million bond payment that was due Oct 12 but on which the company delayed payment under a 30-day grace period. Failing to pay that on time would trigger a default, investors say.
That would likely make countries less willing to do business with Venezuela, aggravating shortages of food and medicine and creating further problems for its oil industry, which is hobbled by under-investment.
Wall Street for years pumped billions of dollars into Venezuela by way of bond purchases, passing off the revolutionary rhetoric of the ruling Socialist Party as bluster that belied an iron-clad willingness to pay its debts.
Maduro surprised many by maintaining debt service after the 2014 crash in oil prices, diverting hard currency away from imports of food and medicine toward Wall Street investors.
PDVSA carried out a debt renegotiation in 2016.
But that option was taken off the table after U.S. President Donald Trump levied sanctions blocking the purchase of new debt issued by Venezuela and government-owned entities.
Investors puzzled
Investors seemed puzzled by Maduro’s statements Thursday, which neither clearly declared default nor laid out a path to easing payment burden.
“At no moment did he say they wouldn’t pay, so it’s not a default,” said Alejandro Grisanti of Caracas-based consultancy Ecoanalitica. “But in this environment, Maduro has no way to restructure or refinance as he said today.”
And the mere presence of El Aissami on the new debt commission makes it a non-starter for U.S. financial institution. He was blacklisted this year by U.S. Treasury Department on accusations he is involved in drug trafficking.
The increased pressure of the sanctions has made banks more nervous about working with PDVSA, according to financial industry sources, leading to delays in simple operations.
PDVSA struggled for days to deliver funds for a bond payment due last week amid confusion over which banks were charged with transferring the money.
Toll on Venezuelans
Critics say Maduro’s decision to put debt above imports has taken a huge toll on the population.
Child malnutrition has reached the scale of a humanitarian crisis in four Venezuelan states, according to a May 2017 report by Caritas Internationalis, a Rome-based nongovernmental organization with links to the Catholic Church. Medicine shortages have also left children dying of preventable diseases.
Officials say ideological adversaries are exaggerating problems for political effect.
But the situation is a stark contrast to the oil boom years of late socialist leader Hugo Chavez, who spent generously on social welfare programs while borrowing profusely to keep spending at full tilt.
Venezuela’s debt is the highest yielding of emerging market bonds measured by JPMorgan’s EMBI Global Diversified Index , paying investors an average of 31 percentage points more than comparable U.S. Treasury notes.
That is nearly double the spread on bonds issued by Mozambique, which is already in default, and more than six times the spread on bonds from war-torn Ukraine.
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Officials in the U.S. and Puerto Rico gave differing views Thursday on when power will be fully restored to the U.S. territory after Hurricane Maria hit as a Category 4 storm more than a month ago.
Ricardo Ramos, director of the state-owned power company, said the utility has restored 35 percent of the electrical system’s regular output and expects to reach 50 percent by mid-November and 95 percent by mid-December. But Ray Alexander, director of contingency operations at the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said the corps’ goal is to have 50 percent restored by the end of November and 75 percent by the end of January.
“We are focused on executing the mission we’ve been assigned,” Alexander said at a hearing in Washington, adding that the agency has been working with the U.S. Department of Energy to help develop a more resilient electrical grid for Puerto Rico.
Gov. Ricardo Rossello criticized the Army Corps of Engineers earlier this week for what he said was a lack of urgency in responding to Puerto Rico’s island-wide blackout.
The discrepancy came as President Donald Trump cleared the way for additional federal funding for Puerto Rico by amending a September disaster declaration to increase the share of rebuilding and recovery costs borne by the U.S. government.
Trump had already authorized the Federal Emergency Management Agency to pay 100 percent of some cleanup and emergency costs for 180 days. Washington will now pay 90 percent of the additional cost of rebuilding Puerto Rico, including repair of public infrastructure like hospitals, bridges and roads and restoration of the island’s devastated power grid.
Typically, U.S. states cover 25 percent of those costs, with federal taxpayers covering 75 percent. Puerto Rico’s finances were in shambles even before the storm made landfall in September.
A large swath of the island still has no electricity, and complaints are widespread among business owners who say losses are mounting and from parents who say their children need to start school. Nearly 20 percent of the island remains without water since Maria hit Sept. 20 with winds of up to 154 mph, killing at least 55 people. Tens of thousands have lost their jobs and some say more than 470,000 people could leave the island in upcoming years.
“If we don’t re-establish power and other basic services, the damage to our economy will be even greater,” said Puerto Rico’s public affairs secretary, Ramon Rosario. “We cannot allow that, and we have established clear goals.”
The difference in estimates came two days after the state-owned utility canceled a heavily scrutinized $300 million contract awarded to Whitefish Energy Holdings. The Montana-based company is located in the hometown of U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and had only two-full time employees before the storm hit. Crews subcontracted by Whitefish will finish their projects before Nov. 30, officials said.
Ramos continued to praise Whitefish despite local and federal audits of the contract. “They’ve performed very well,” he said.
Ramos said he is recommending that Oklahoma-based Cobra Acquisitions, which has a $200 million contract with the government, subcontract the workers Whitefish had employed if the contract allows for it. Ramos also said Cobra’s contract is “practically” the same as the one awarded to Whitefish.
He said the power company sent letters requesting help and received responses from the American Public Power Association and Edison Electric Institute. In addition, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Thursday that his state’s power authority would send 350 workers and 220 bucket trucks next week along with special equipment. It also is sending a tactical power restoration team that includes 28 engineers and 15 damage assessment experts.
The Army Corps of Engineers said it also expects about 2,100 workers to arrive by mid-November to help restore power.
Ivanka Trump, U.S. President Donald Trump’s daughter and informal adviser, told a summit in Tokyo Friday that the world must boost women and minority participation in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).
Ivanka Trump, seen as an important influence on her father, has made women’s issues one of her signature policy areas since beginning her role at the White House. Her comments came ahead of her father’s trip to Asia, his first since taking office in January, that begins in Japan on Sunday.
WATCH: Ivanka Trump on Women’s Participation in STEM Fields
“Female and minority participation in STEM fields is moving in the wrong direction,” she said at the World Assembly for Women summit. “We must create equal participation in these traditionally male-dominated sectors of our economy.”
She said her father’s tax reforms, unveiled by Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday, would benefit American families.
“We are seeking to simplify the tax code, lower rates, expand the child tax credit, eliminate the marriage penalty, and put more money back in the pockets of hard-working Americans,” she told a meeting room in a Tokyo hotel that had a number of empty seats.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said his government was aiming to mobilize women in Japan’s workforce and boost economic growth, launching policies such as improved childcare in his “Womenomics” program.
“We’ve put our full strength into creating an environment where it’s easy for women to work,” Abe said in an opening address to the conference. “I really feel that Japan has come a long way,” he said.
Japan’s gender gap remains wide despite such efforts, with little progress made since Abe vowed at the United Nations in 2013 to create “a society where women can shine.”
Japan ranked 114 out of 144 in the World Economic Forum’s 2017 Global Gender Gap report, sandwiched between Guinea and Ethiopia and down 13 places since Abe took power.
Abe appointed only two women to ministerial posts in a Cabinet reshuffle in August, down from three and five respectively in his previous two Cabinets. Only 14 percent of Japan’s lawmakers are women.
Men also dominate decision-making in business in Japan. Only 3.7 percent of Japanese-listed company executives were women at the end of July, according to the Cabinet Office, barely changed from 3.4 percent a year earlier.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s @realdonaldtrump Twitter account was deactivated by a Twitter Inc employee whose last day at the company was Thursday, and the account was down for 11 minutes before it was restored, the social media company said.
“We have learned that this was done by a Twitter customer-support employee who did this on the employee’s last day. We are conducting a full internal review,” Twitter said in a tweet.
“We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again,” the company said in an earlier tweet.
A Twitter representative declined to comment further.
The White House did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
Trump has made extensive use of messages on Twitter to attack his opponents and promote his policies both during the 2016 presidential campaign and since taking office in January.
He has 41.7 million followers on Twitter.
His first tweet after Thursday’s outage:
In a similar incident last November, Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey’s account was briefly suspended as a result of what he said was an internal mistake.
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U.S. President Donald Trump’s @realdonaldtrump Twitter account was deactivated by a Twitter Inc employee whose last day at the company was Thursday, and the account was down for 11 minutes before it was restored, the social media company said.
“We have learned that this was done by a Twitter customer-support employee who did this on the employee’s last day. We are conducting a full internal review,” Twitter said in a tweet.
“We are continuing to investigate and are taking steps to prevent this from happening again,” the company said in an earlier tweet.
A Twitter representative declined to comment further.
The White House did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
Trump has made extensive use of messages on Twitter to attack his opponents and promote his policies both during the 2016 presidential campaign and since taking office in January.
He has 41.7 million followers on Twitter.
His first tweet after Thursday’s outage:
In a similar incident last November, Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey’s account was briefly suspended as a result of what he said was an internal mistake.
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A new species of orangutan has been identified in remote Indonesian forests and immediately becomes the most endangered type of great ape in the world with just 800 individuals, scientists said on Thursday.
The Tapanuli orangutan, found only in upland forests in North Sumatra, differs from the other two species of orangutan in the shape of its skull and teeth, its genes, and in the way the males make long booming calls across the jungle, they said.
“The differences are very subtle, not easily observable to the naked eye,” Professor Michael Kruetzen of the University of Zurich, who is part of an international team, told Reuters.
“With no more than 800 individuals, this species is the most endangered great ape,” the scientists wrote. Apart from humans, great apes comprise orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees and
bonobos.
The Tapanuli orangutan had probably been isolated from other populations for 10,000-20,000 years, the researchers wrote in the journal Current Biology. The population had been known by scientists since at least 1997 but had not previously been considered a separate species.
The Tapanuli orangutan faces threats including from forest clearance to make way for mining or palm oil plantations. The region also had plans for a hydro-electric dam.
The scientists urged quick conservation measures. Otherwise, “we may see the discovery and extinction of a great ape species within our lifetime,” they wrote.
Laurel Sutherlin of Rainforest Action Network, who was not involved in the study, said the finding “must also serve as a wake up call to all of us from consumers, to global food and paper brands, to investors and local and national governments” to protect forests.
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Mexico City has updated its 911 emergency app to send earthquake alerts to residents’ smartphones following last month’s magnitude 7.1 temblor that killed 369 people, including 228 in the capital, authorities announced Thursday.
Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera said users of the free 911 CDMX app can get sound and vibration alerts for any quake strong enough to threaten damage in the city.
It was developed by the governmental center known as C5, for Command, Control Computing, Communications and Contact, and is available for both iOS and Android.
With nerves still raw from the Sept. 19 earthquake that collapsed 38 buildings in Mexico City, Mancera said there would be no demonstration of the system to avoid causing unnecessary alarm.
“We are not interested in having anyone hear it who does not know the context in which it is being presented,” the mayor said at a news conference.
More than 20 million people live in the capital and surrounding suburbs, much of which is built on a former lakebed. Its soil can amplify the effects of earthquakes that strike far away and whose shockwaves arrive in the sprawling metropolis some time later.
An even stronger earthquake Sept. 7, whose magnitude was recently adjusted upward from 8.1 to 8.2 by the U.S. Geological Survey, was centered hundreds of miles away, off the country’s southern coast, but was still felt strongly by many in Mexico City.
The capital already has a system of loudspeakers that blare alarms when a significant temblor is detected.
C5 general coordinator Idris Rodriguez Zapata urged residents to download the app. He also said they should heed quake protocols “without hesitation at the moment [the alarm] is heard through the system of speakers or on cellphones.”
Last month, Mancera said there had been reports of people setting their cellphone ringtones to the sound of the seismic alarm and urged them to remove it so as not to provoke panic.
Other 911 app functions let users view tweets about seismic activity, contact a 911 operator, or register their blood type and medical history.
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Facebook received several tongue-lashings during U.S. congressional hearings this week, but the world’s largest social network also got an assignment: Figure out how to notify tens of millions of Americans who might have been fed Russian propaganda.
U.S. lawmakers and some tech analysts are pressing the company to identify users who were served about 80,000 posts on Facebook, 120,000 on its Instagram picture-sharing app, and 3,000 ads that the company has traced to alleged Russian operatives, and to inform them.
The posts from Russia were designed to divide Americans, particularly around the 2016 U.S. elections, according to Facebook, U.S. intelligence agencies and lawmakers. The Russian government has denied it tried to meddle in the elections.
“When you discover a deceptive foreign government presentation on your platform, my presumption, from what you’ve said today — you’ll stop it and take it down,” Democratic Senator Jack Reed told Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch in the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Wednesday.
“Do you feel an obligation, in turn, to notify those people who have accessed that? And can you do that? And shouldn’t you do that?” Reed asked.
Stretch responded that he was not sure Facebook could identify the people because its estimates have relied on modeling, rather than actual counts, but he did not rule it out.
“The technical challenges associated with that undertaking are substantial,” Stretch said.
Critics of Facebook on social media and in media interviews have expressed skepticism, noting that the company closely tracks user activity such as likes and clicks for advertising purposes.
Facebook declined to comment on Thursday.
As many as 126 million people could have been served the posts on Facebook and 20 million on Instagram, according to company estimates.
Social media critics
Many of them will not believe they were manipulated unless Facebook tells them, said Tristan Harris of Time Well Spent, an organization critical of advertising-based social media.
“Facebook is a living, breathing crime scene, and they’re the only ones with access to what happened,” Harris, an ex-Google employee, said in an interview Thursday.
The 2.1 billion people with active Facebook accounts often get notifications from the service, on everything from birthdays and upcoming events to friend requests and natural disasters.
Shortly before 6 p.m. EDT on Thursday, more than 83,000 people had signed a Change.org online petition asking Facebook to tell users about the Russian posts.
Lawyers for Twitter and Alphabet’s Google also said their companies would consider notifying customers.
The intelligence committee’s vice chairman, Senator Mark Warner, drew an analogy to another industry.
“If you were in a medical facility, and you got exposed to a disease, the medical facility would have to tell the folks who were exposed,” Warner said.
IN PHOTOS: A Look at Russian Social Media Election ‘Meddling’
‘Duty to warn’
U.S. law includes a concept known as “post-sale duty to warn,” which may require notifying previous buyers if a manufacturer discovers a problem with a product.
That legal duty likely does not apply to Facebook, said Christopher Robinette, a law professor at Widener University in Pennsylvania. He said courts would likely rule that social media posts are not a product but a service, which is exempt from the duty. Courts also do not want to interfere in free speech, he said.
Robinette added, though, that he thought notifications to users would be a good idea. “This strikes me as a fairly significant problem,” he said.
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The iPhone X’s lush screen, facial-recognition skills and $1,000 price tag are breaking new ground in Apple’s marquee product line.
Now, the much-anticipated device is testing the patience of consumers and investors as demand outstrips suppliers’ capacity.
Apple said Thursday that iPhone sales rose 3 percent in the July-September quarter, a period that saw the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus come out in the final weeks. Sales could have been higher if many customers hadn’t been waiting for the iPhone X, which comes out Friday.
Apple shipped 46.7 million iPhones during the period, according to its fiscal fourth-quarter report released Thursday. That’s up from 45.5 million at the same time last year after the iPhone 7 came out, but represents a step back from the same time in 2015, when Apple shipped 48 million iPhones during the quarter.
As with recent quarters, one of the main sources of Apple’s growth is coming from its services, which are anchored by an app store that feeds the iPhone and other devices.
Revenue in that division surged 34 percent to $8.5 billion during the July-September period. All told, Apple earned $10.7 billion on revenue of $52.6 billion, compared with a $9 billion profit on revenue of $46.9 billion a year earlier.
Apple shares are up 3 percent in after-hours trading.
Nonetheless, the just-ended quarter largely became an afterthought once Apple decided to release the iPhone X six weeks after the iPhone 8.
“The Super Bowl for Apple is the iPhone X,” GBH analyst Daniel Ives said. “That is the potential game changer.”
But it also brings a potential stumbling block. While conspiracy theorists might suspect that Apple is artificially reducing supply to generate buzz, analysts say the real reason is that Apple’s suppliers so far haven’t been to manufacture the iPhone X quickly enough.
Making the iPhone X is proving to be a challenge because it boasts a color-popping OLED screen, which isn’t as readily available as standard LCD displays in other iPhone models. The new iPhone also requires more sophisticated components to power the facial-recognition technology for unlocking the device.
Even with the iPhone X’s delayed release, Apple is still struggling to catch up. Apple is now giving delivery times of five to six weeks for those ordering in advance online (limited supplies will be available in Apple stores for the formal release Friday). Most analysts are predicting Apple won’t be able to catch up with demand until early next year.
On Thursday, Apple predicted revenue for this quarter from $84 billion to $87 billion. Analysts, who have already factored in the supply challenges, expected $85.2 billion, according to FactSet.
Analysts are expecting Apple to ship 80 million iPhones during the current quarter, which includes the crucial holiday shopping season, according to FactSet. That would be slightly better than the same time last year.
Apple is counting on the iPhone X to drive even higher-than-usual sales during the first nine months of next year — a scenario that might not play out if production problems persist and impatient consumers turn instead to phones from Google or Samsung.
“What Apple needs to do is manage consumer expectations so they don’t get frustrated having to wait for so long for a new phone,” Ives said.
Analysts believe Apple can pull off the juggling act. They are expecting the company to sell 242 million iPhones in the fiscal year ending in September 2018 — the most in the product’s history. The previous record was set in 2015 when Apple shipped 231 million iPhones, thanks to larger models introduced just before the fiscal year began. By comparison, Apple shipped nearly 217 million iPhones in its just-completed fiscal 2017.
If Apple falters, investors are likely to dump its stock after driving the shares up by 45 percent so far this year on the expectation that the iPhone X will be the company’s biggest hit yet.
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Lawyers for internet giants Facebook, Google and Twitter met with three congressional committees this week to answer questions about Russian efforts to use the platforms to spread disinformation in the 2016 presidential election, and what they are doing to stop it from happening again.
Lawmakers were clear in their position that Russian use of the platforms was unacceptable, and several even called it an act of war.
“Cyber is an attack against our country. When you use cyber in an affirmative way to compromise our democratic, free election system, that’s an attack against America,” Senator Ben Cardin said Wednesday. “It’s an act of war. It is an act of war.”
That Russia attempted to interfere in the 2016 presidential election — an allegation the country adamantly denies — has been the stated position of the U.S. intelligence community since last year.
The lawyers said the exact scope of the alleged Russian operation remains unknown, though, even as they released more details about what Russian operatives were posting online.
Sean Edgett, Twitter’s acting general counsel, told lawmakers the company studied all tweets posted from Sept. 1 to Nov. 15, 2016, and found that election-related content posted by accounts linked to Russia “was comparatively small.”
Edgett described the criteria used to identify “Russian-linked account[s]” as “expansive,” including any account that was created in Russia, any account linked to a Russian email address, or any account that “frequently tweets in Russian,” among other qualifications.
Using these extremely broad qualifications, Edgett said Twitter was able to identify around 36,000 automated “bot” accounts that could be linked to Russia.
Those Russian-linked accounts, according to Edgett, represented 0.012 percent of total Twitter accounts during the time period, and the 1.4 million election-related tweets emanating from those accounts represented less than 0.74 percent of all election-related tweets.
“Those 1.4 million tweets received only one-third of a percent [0.33 percent] of impressions on election-related tweets,” Edgett told lawmakers.
An “impression” is a metric used by social media companies to note how many times a specific post is served up to a user. An “impression” does not require any additional engagement by the user and doesn’t even guarantee a user actually read the post, Edgett said.
In addition to the bot accounts, Twitter identified around 2,700 accounts linked to the Internet Research Agency (IRA), which has been described as a Russian troll farm.
“Of the roughly 131,000 tweets posted by those accounts during the relevant time period, approximately 9 percent were election-related, and many of their tweets — over 47 percent — were automated,” he said.
Edgett called the number of Russian-linked accounts “small in comparison to the total number of accounts” on Twitter and said tweets from those accounts “generated significantly fewer impressions as compared to a typical election-related tweet.”
Last week, the company said it would take the $1.9 million that Russian-backed media outlets spent on Twitter advertising since 2011, and spend it on external research into using Twitter in civic engagement, including efforts to root out malicious accounts and misinformation.
The Russian meddling campaign on Facebook was comprised of approximately $100,000 spent by “fake accounts associated with the IRA” on 3,000 ads between June 2015 and August 2017, according to Facebook lawyer Colin Stretch.
The ads, Stretch said, promoted around 120 Facebook pages set up by Russian actors and meant to focus on divisive social messages about racial issues, immigration and gun rights, among others.
In total, the Russian-linked Facebook pages produced around 80,000 pieces of content during the two-year time period. Stretch said approximately 150 million people may have been served up the IRA-created content, but it is impossible to know how many people actually saw the posts.
He said the content equaled about 0.004 percent of content of Facebook during the time and represented approximately 1 out of every 23,000 pieces of content on the platform.
“Though the volume of these posts was a tiny fraction of the overall content on Facebook, any amount is too much,” Stretch said, noting the social media company removed the accounts and pages linked to the IRA.
According to Stretch, more than half of all impressions of IRA-funded posts came after the election and 25 percent of the ads were never shown to anyone.
“For 50 percent of the ads, less than $3 was spent. For 99 percent of the ads, less than $1,000 was spent,” he said.
Facebook has turned over all the Russian ads to Congress and says its review of the activity is ongoing.
Google lawyer Richard Salgado said the company reviewed all political ads from June 2015 through last year’s election, looking for “even the loosest connection to Russia, such as a Russian IP address or billing address, or use of Russian currency.”
The company found that two accounts it believes are “associated with known or suspected government-backed entities” spent about $4,700 on ads related to the 2016 presidential election.
Salgado said the alleged Russian meddling also included use of YouTube, where the company found 18 channels with around 1,100 videos that were uploaded by individuals Google believes were associated with the Russian effort.
“These videos mostly had low view counts — just 3 percent had more than 5,000 views, and constituted only 43 hours of YouTube content,” he told lawmakers. He added that people watch “over a billion hours of YouTube content a day, and 400 hours of content are uploaded every minute.”
He called the Russian-linked videos “a relatively small amount of content,” but said “any misuse of our platforms for this purpose is a serious challenge to the integrity of our democracy.”
IN PHOTOS: A Look at Russian Social Media Election ‘Meddling’
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Google is partnering with AutoNation, the country’s largest auto dealership chain, in its push to build a self-driving car.
AutoNation said Thursday that its dealerships will provide maintenance and repairs for Waymo’s self-driving fleet of Chrysler Pacifica vehicles. The agreement will include additional models when Waymo brings them on line.
Terms of the multi-year deal were not disclosed.
Google has been partnering with a number of car-centric companies like Avis, the ridesharing company Lyft, and Fiat Chrysler.
AutoNation Inc., based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, runs about 360 dealerships in the U.S.
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The hackers who upended the U.S. presidential election had ambitions well beyond Hillary Clinton’s campaign, targeting the emails of Ukrainian officers, Russian opposition figures, U.S. defense contractors and thousands of others of interest to the Kremlin, according to a previously unpublished digital hit list obtained by The Associated Press.
The list provides the most detailed forensic evidence yet of the close alignment between the hackers and the Russian government, exposing an operation that stretched back years and tried to break into the inboxes of 4,700 Gmail users across the globe – from the pope’s representative in Kiev to the punk band Pussy Riot in Moscow.
“It’s a wish list of who you’d want to target to further Russian interests,” said Keir Giles, director of the Conflict Studies Research Center in Cambridge, England, and one of five outside experts who reviewed the AP’s findings. He said the data was “a master list of individuals whom Russia would like to spy on, embarrass, discredit or silence.”
The AP findings draw on a database of 19,000 malicious links collected by cybersecurity firm Secureworks, dozens of rogue emails, and interviews with more than 100 hacking targets.
Secureworks stumbled upon the data after a hacking group known as Fancy Bear accidentally exposed part of its phishing operation to the internet. The list revealed a direct line between the hackers and the leaks that rocked the presidential contest in its final stages, most notably the private emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
The issue of who hacked the Democrats is back in the national spotlight following the revelation Monday that a Donald Trump campaign official, George Papadopoulos, was briefed early last year that the Russians had “dirt” on Clinton, including “thousands of emails.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the notion that Russia interfered “unfounded.” But the list examined by AP provides powerful evidence that the Kremlin did just that.
“This is the Kremlin and the general staff,” said Andras Racz, a specialist in Russian security policy at Pazmany Peter Catholic University in Hungary, as he examined the data.
“I have no doubts.”
The new evidence
Secureworks’ list covers the period between March 2015 and May 2016. Most of the identified targets were in the United States, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia and Syria.
In the United States, which was Russia’s Cold War rival, Fancy Bear tried to pry open at least 573 inboxes belonging to those in the top echelons of the country’s diplomatic and security services: then-Secretary of State John Kerry, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, then-NATO Supreme Commander, U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, and one of his predecessors, U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark.
The list skewed toward workers for defense contractors such as Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin or senior intelligence figures, prominent Russia watchers and _ especially _ Democrats. More than 130 party workers, campaign staffers and supporters of the party were targeted, including Podesta and other members of Clinton’s inner circle.
The AP also found a handful of Republican targets.
Podesta, Powell, Breedlove and more than a dozen Democratic targets besides Podesta would soon find their private correspondence dumped to the web. The AP has determined that all had been targeted by Fancy Bear, most of them three to seven months before the leaks.
“They got two years of email,” Powell recently told AP. He said that while he couldn’t know for sure who was responsible, “I always suspected some Russian connection.”
In Ukraine, which is fighting a grinding war against Russia-backed separatists, Fancy Bear attempted to break into at least 545 accounts, including those of President Petro Poroshenko and his son Alexei, half a dozen current and former ministers such as Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and as many as two dozen current and former lawmakers.
The list includes Serhiy Leshchenko, an opposition parliamentarian who helped uncover the off-the-books payments allegedly made to Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort – whose indictment was unsealed Monday in Washington.
In Russia, Fancy Bear focused on government opponents and dozens of journalists. Among the targets were oil tycoon-turned-Kremlin foe Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent a decade in prison and now lives in exile, and Pussy Riot’s Maria Alekhina. Along with them were 100 more civil society figures, including anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny and his lieutenants.
“Everything on this list fits,” said Vasily Gatov, a Russian media analyst who was himself among the targets. He said Russian authorities would have been particularly interested in Navalny, one of the few opposition leaders with a national following.
Many of the targets have little in common except that they would have been crossing the Kremlin’s radar: an environmental activist in the remote Russian port city of Murmansk; a small political magazine in Armenia; the Vatican’s representative in Kiev; an adult education organization in Kazakhstan.
“It’s simply hard to see how any other country would be particularly interested in their activities,” said Michael Kofman, an expert on Russian military affairs at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington. He was also on the list.
“If you’re not Russia,” he said, “hacking these people is a colossal waste of time.”
Working 9 to 6 Moscow time
Allegations that Fancy Bear works for Russia aren’t new. But raw data has been hard to come by.
Researchers have been documenting the group’s activities for more than a decade and many have accused it of being an extension of Russia’s intelligence services. The “Fancy Bear” nickname is a none-too-subtle reference to Russia’s national symbol.
In the wake of the 2016 election, U.S. intelligence agencies publicly endorsed the consensus view, saying what American spooks had long alleged privately: Fancy Bear is a creature of the Kremlin.
But the U.S. intelligence community provided little proof, and even media-friendly cybersecurity companies typically publish only summaries of their data.
That makes the Secureworks’ database a key piece of public evidence – all the more remarkable because it’s the result of a careless mistake.
Secureworks effectively stumbled across it when a researcher began working backward from a server tied to one of Fancy Bear’s signature pieces of malicious software.
He found a hyperactive Bitly account Fancy Bear was using to sneak thousands of malicious links past Google’s spam filter. Because Fancy Bear forgot to set the account to private, Secureworks spent the next few months hovering over the group’s shoulder, quietly copying down the details of the thousands of emails it was targeting.
The AP obtained the data recently, boiling it down to 4,700 individual email addresses, and then connecting roughly half to account holders. The AP validated the list by running it against a sample of phishing emails obtained from people targeted and comparing it to similar rosters gathered independently by other cybersecurity companies, such as Tokyo-based Trend Micro and the Slovakian firm ESET.
The Secureworks data allowed reporters to determine that more than 95 percent of the malicious links were generated during Moscow office hours – between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. Monday to Friday.
The AP’s findings also track with a report that first brought Fancy Bear to the attention of American voters. In 2016, a cybersecurity company known as CrowdStrike said the Democratic National Committee had been compromised by Russian hackers, including Fancy Bear.
Secureworks’ roster shows Fancy Bear making aggressive attempts to hack into DNC technical staffers’ emails in early April 2016 – exactly when CrowdStrike says the hackers broke in.
And the raw data enabled the AP to speak directly to the people who were targeted, many of whom pointed the finger at the Kremlin.
“We have no doubts about who is behind these attacks,” said Artem Torchinskiy, a project coordinator with Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Fund who was targeted three times in 2015. “I am sure these are hackers controlled by Russian secret services.”
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Facebook, Twitter and Google executives testified in public before Senate and House investigations into Russian election interference for the first time Wednesday, amid disclosures that Russian influence on social media platforms was much wider in scope than previously understood. The lawmakers had tough questions for the Silicon Valley executives as VOA’s Katherine Gypson reports from Capitol Hill.
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A first attempt at gene therapy for a disease that leaves babies unable to move, swallow and, eventually, breathe has extended the tots’ lives, and some began to roll over, sit and stand on their own, researchers reported Wednesday.
Only 15 babies with spinal muscular atrophy received the experimental gene therapy, but researchers in Ohio credited the preliminary and promising results to replacing the infants’ defective gene early – in the first few months of life, before the neuromuscular disease destroyed too many key nerve cells.
“They all should have died by now, said Dr. Jerry Mendell of Nationwide Children’s Hospital, who led the work published by The New England Journal of Medicine. Yet, “those babies are still improving.”
Mendell cautioned that much more study is needed to prove the gene therapy works and is safe. Nor is it clear whether the replacement gene’s effects would wane over time.
Spinal muscular atrophy occurs in about 1 in 10,000 births, and those with the most severe form, called SMA Type 1, rarely reach their second birthday. They can be born looking healthy but rapidly decline. One study found just 8 percent of the most severely affected survived to age 20 months without needing permanent mechanical ventilation to breathe.
There is no cure. The first treatment wasn’t approved until last December _ a drug named Spinraza that requires spinal injections every few months.
The experimental gene therapy approach aims for a one-time fix.
What goes wrong
Spinal muscular atrophy is caused when a mutated gene can’t produce a protein crucial for survival of motor neurons, nerve cells in the spinal cord that control muscles.
Some children carry extra copies of a backup gene that produces small amounts of the vital protein, and thus have much milder forms of the disease.
Gene replacement
Scientists loaded a healthy version of the gene into a virus modified so it couldn’t cause illness. Then 15 babies got a one-time intravenous injection. The virus carried the healthy gene into motor neurons, where it got to work producing the protein those nerve cells require to live.
Three babies received a low dose of the gene therapy, as a first-step safety precaution. The remaining 12 got a high dose.
Results
All of the children are alive, Mendell said, about two years and counting after treatment. All beat the odds of needing permanent machine help to breathe by age 20 months.
But only the high-dose recipients saw better motor control, reaching some developmental milestones usually unthinkable for these patients. Eleven could sit unassisted at least briefly; nine could roll over. Eleven are speaking and able to swallow. Two were able to crawl, stand and then walk, Mendell’s team reported.
Those results are “very striking,” said Dr. Basil Darras, who directs Boston Children’s Hospital’s neuromuscular center and wasn’t involved in the new research.
While the treatment needs testing on far more babies, usually “there are no further developmental gains” after diagnosis, Darras explained. “They stagnate for a while and they go downhill very fast and die.”
The only serious side effect attributed to the gene therapy so far involved possible signs of a liver problem that eased with treatment.
Next steps
AveXis Inc., which is developing the gene therapy and helped fund Wednesday’s study, has opened a second small trial at seven hospitals.
Meanwhile, doctors are prescribing SMA patients the new medication Spinraza, which works by increasing that backup gene’s protein production and, according to a separate New England Journal study, had some benefit in about half of patients. The first year of treatment costs about $750,000, an accompanying editorial noted.
With the drug’s availability, some health groups are urging that SMA be added to the list of diseases that all newborns are screened for, so parents can seek early treatment.
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“Like a monster, it destroys everything.”
That’s how one school girl from a Pacific Island nation described a tsunami.
On Dec. 26, 2004, a magnitude-9.1 earthquake in Indonesia set off a massive tsunami which killed more than 230,000 people across four countries and cost an estimated $10 billion in damage.
Nov. 5 is World Tsunami Awareness Day and at the United Nations Wednesday, disaster risk reduction was high on the agenda.
“What I can tell you is that the tsunami wave cannot be stopped,” said Bulgaria’s U.N. Ambassador Georgi Velikov Panayotov, who with his wife was on vacation in Thailand in 2004 and survived the tsunami. “What we can do is build early warning systems and of course, educating the population about the devastating power of the tsunami wave,” he said.
On March 11, 2011, a magnitude-9 earthquake rocked northeastern Japan triggering a fierce tsunami that also damaged the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, south of Sendai.
It was the most powerful quake ever recorded in Japan, killing more than 15,000 people and causing widespread damage and destruction.
“When the big earthquake hit Japan in 2011, people thought that we were prepared for it,” said Japan’s U.N. Ambassador Koro Bessho. “We had embankments, we had drills, however, we had been counting on something the size of which that hits every 100 years and the earthquake was of the size of possibly every 500 years or thousand years,” he said.
These two events sent the countries of the region into overdrive to review and improve disaster preparedness. In 2015 the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction was born. It aims to help create a better understanding of disaster risk and enhance preparedness for an effective response.
Individual countries also assessed their preparedness and planning.
“As a consequence of the 2004 tsunami, Indonesia passed a law on disaster management,” said Willem Rampangilei, head of the Disaster Management Agency of Indonesia, which led to the creation of his agency in 2008. “Our responsibilities include mitigation and preparedness, emergency response, as well as post disaster rehabilitation and reconstruction.”
Indonesia is an archipelago made up of thousands of islands which are disaster-prone. Rampangilei noted that 150 million Indonesians live in danger of earthquakes, 60 million from floods, and four million at risk from tsunamis.
He said his government now has contingency plans for every disaster-prone city which identifies its vulnerabilities, outlines the relief response, and builds overall preparedness.
The Maldives are another Indian Ocean chain of more than one thousand small islands, of which about 188 are inhabited.
“Until the Indian Ocean tsunami … we lived in complacency,” said the Maldives U.N. Ambassador Ali Naseer Mohamed. “We all heard the word ‘tsunami’ probably in our sixth grade geography (class), but never probably paid much attention.”
Banda Aceh, Indonesia, where the quake struck, is about 700 kilometers from the Maldives.
“Three hours after the earthquake hit, the tsunami hit the Maldives and put the entire country under water for a few minutes,” Mohamed said. “About 10 percent of the islands were hit.” The death toll was comparatively low 127 fatalities. But the damage was estimated at about 60 percent of the Maldives Gross Domestic Product and the country’s mainstay its tourism industry took a nosedive.
Early warning systems
In the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami, the region put in place a Tsunami Warning System. It provides alerts through three regional watch centers in India, Indonesia and Australia, and a network of 26 national tsunami information centers.
In 2012, Banda Aceh again experienced an earthquake, but within eight minutes of it, early warnings were emitted across the region and no casualties were reported.
There are also now tsunami early warning systems in place for the Caribbean and the Northeast Atlantic, Mediterranean and connecting seas.
This week, UNESCO is helping coordinate a drill of the early warning system throughout 15 countries in the northeast Atlantic and Mediterranean. The agency hopes to evaluate local tsunami response plans, increase tsunami awareness and improve regional coordination.
Educating youth
At risk countries are also expanding their education programs, specifically targeting children from an early age so they know how to react in case of a tsunami.
Children are taught to shelter in place till the earthquake passes and then go with their classmates to higher ground away from coastal areas to avoid the walls of water the tsunami triggers.
Japan is sharing its expertise, assisting with joint evacuation drills in schools in 18 countries. It is also hosting next week a summit of high school students from 25 mainly island nations next aimed at improving their understanding on tsunami risks and on life-saving measures during such events.
Building back better
Countries which have experienced earthquakes and tsunamis have also learned that better building codes can save lives and prevent damage.
Chile, which is one of South America’s most earthquake and tsunami-prone nations, has seen the difference tougher building codes and other measures can make.
In February 2010, the country experienced an 8.8-magnitude quake and a devastating tsunami that killed some 525 people. Four years later, an 8.4-magnitude earthquake struck. Fifteen people were killed in the quake, but no one in the tsunami that followed.
“Building codes were strengthened,” said Chilean diplomat Jorge Iglesias Mori of the measures taken between 2010 and 2014. He said the country also put more resources into developing their early warning systems and expanding their disaster education programs and drills, and they joined forces with Japan, sharing knowledge and experiences.
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President Donald Trump’s commission on the opioid crisis called Wednesday for more drug courts, more training for doctors and penalties for insurers that dodge covering addiction treatment.
The panel’s final report stopped short, however, of calling for new dollars to address the worst drug crisis in U.S. history. Instead, the commission asked Congress for “sufficient funds” and suggested giving the White House drug czar’s office the ability to review federal spending on the problem.
“If we are to invest in combating this epidemic, we must invest in only those programs that achieve quantifiable goals and metrics,” the report said. The drug czar’s office “must establish a system of tracking and accountability.”
But adding a new layer of oversight was met with skepticism from addiction treatment advocates. The Office of National Drug Control Policy, known as the drug czar’s office, “is not a watchdog agency,” said Andrew Kessler, a behavioral health consultant in Washington, D.C.
Trump launched the commission seven months ago, tapping his friend and former rival New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to lead the fight. Since then, it has held five meetings and, in July, issued an interim report urging the president to elevate attention by declaring a national emergency.
Last week, Trump did so, talking in a White House speech about his brother’s alcoholism and declaring the crisis a national public health emergency.
“The president did exactly what I asked him to do,” Christie said Wednesday, addressing reports that a different type of emergency declaration, one overseen by the Federal Emergency Management Agency would have been stronger. Christie said he wanted the Department of Health and Human Services to take the lead, not FEMA.
“It’s now incumbent on Congress to step up and put money in the public health emergency fund,” Christie said. Congress hasn’t replenished the fund for years and it contains just $57,000.
More than 64,000 Americans died from drug overdoses last year, most involving a prescription painkiller or an illicit opioid like heroin.
The panel’s report contained 56 new recommendations and called for streamlining funding to states by using block grants, which would give states more flexibility.
What’s missing is more money, said Dr. Mitchell Rosenthal of Phoenix House, a nonprofit addiction treatment provider. “We need significantly more funding to the states on the front lines of this crisis, otherwise they won’t be able to implement the prevention and treatment programs that can save so many lives,” Rosenthal said.
The commission urged White House support for the Prescription Drug Monitoring Act, which would require states with federal grants to share information on narcotics users in a federal data-sharing hub.
The panel recommended training doctors who prescribe opioids and allowing more emergency responders to administer overdose reversal drugs. It called for establishing drug courts in all 93 federal judicial districts to get more treatment to drug offenders rather than send them to prison.
Alternatives to incarceration are needed, said Lindsey Vuolo of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse and author of a recent strategy guide for states.
“It’s not enough to say addiction is a disease. We have to treat it as one,” Vuolo said.
Facebook reported better-than-expected quarterly profit and revenue on Wednesday as it pushed further into video advertising, showing no sign of financial damage from the controversy over how Russia used the social network in an attempt to sway voters in the 2016 U.S. election.
The company’s shares, which hit a record earlier in the day, initially rose in after-hours trading, but later fell into negative territory. They have gained almost 60 percent this year.
Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg condemned Russia’s attempts to influence last year’s election through Facebook posts designed to sow division, and repeated his pledge to ramp up spending significantly to increase the social network’s security, something he said on Wednesday would affect profits.
“What they did is wrong, and we are not going to stand for it,” Zuckerberg said of the Russians, on a conference call with analysts.
Facebook is at the center of a political storm in the United States for the ways it handles paid political ads and allows the spread of false news stories. U.S. lawmakers have threatened tougher regulation and fired questions at Facebook General Counsel Colin Stretch in hearings this week.
Facebook, in a series of disclosures over two months, has said that people in Russia bought at least 3,000 U.S. political ads and published another 80,000 Facebook posts that were seen by as many as 126 million Americans over two years. Russia denies any meddling.
Facebook’s total advertising revenue rose 49 percent in the third quarter to $10.14 billion, about 88 percent of which came from mobile ads.
Analysts on average had expected total ad revenue of $9.71 billion, according to data and analytics firm FactSet.
Facebook in the third quarter gave advertisers for the first time the ability to run ads in standalone videos, outside the Facebook News Feed, and the company is seeing good early results, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg told analysts on a conference call.
“Video is exploding, and mobile video advertising is a big opportunity,” Sandberg said.
More than 70 percent of ad breaks up to 15 seconds long were viewed to completion, most with the sound on, she said.
The 49 percent increase in total ad sales in the latest quarter compares with a 47 percent rise in the prior quarter and a 51 percent jump in the first quarter.
Facebook has been warning for more than a year about reaching a limit in “ad load”, or the number of ads the company can feature in users’ pages before crowding their News Feed.
Advertisers seem unfazed, though, spending heavily as the social network continues to attract users.
The nearly 50 percent jump in ad revenue “is phenomenal, especially when for the past few quarters they’ve been trying to bring that expectation way, way down. Yet it keeps going up,” Tigress Financial Partners analyst Ivan Feinseth said.
Of the Russia scandal enveloping Facebook publicly, Feinseth said: “In the bigger picture, I don’t think it’s a really big factor.”
The company’s performance was strong in comparison with smaller social media firms Snap Inc and Twitter, Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter said.
“Facebook grew revenues by $3.3 billion year-over-year for the quarter. This is more than Twitter and Snapchat generate combined for the full year,” he said.
Facebook said about 2.07 billion people were using its service monthly as of Sept. 30, up 16 percent from a year earlier.
Analysts on average had expected 2.06 billion monthly active users, according to FactSet.
Net income rose to $4.71 billion, or $1.59 per share, from $2.63 billion, or 90 cents per share.
Analysts on an average were expecting the company to earn $1.28, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Total revenue increased 47.3 percent to $10.33 billion beating analysts estimate of $9.84 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
Various U.S. investigations into how Russia may have tried to sway American voters in the months before and after last year’s elections are hanging over Facebook and its competitors.
There is also proposed U.S. legislation that would extend rules governing political ads on television, radio and satellite to also cover digital advertising.
“We expect more scrutiny about Facebook’s ad system ahead,” analyst Debra Aho Williamson of research firm eMarketer said in a note. “We’re also monitoring for any signs that this investigation will have a material impact on ad revenue.”
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