Only about 1 in 5 politicians in the US is female, even though women make up just over half of the US population. With many saying 2018 could be “The Year of the Woman” in American politics, new tools have become available for women running for office. VOA’s Carolyn Presutti shows us some high-tech and social media sites geared toward female candidates.
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The United States is suffering through an unprecedented, deadly wave of opioid and prescription drug overdoses. The drug crisis comes nearly 50 years after the government declared a “War on Drugs.” VOA’s Chris Simkins looks back at the War on Drugs and how experts say mistakes of the past cannot be repeated in this new battle against opioid drug abuse.
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Doctors in the U.S. are increasingly employing a new approach when treating tumors, thanks to the new technology of genomic sequencing. It allows them to look at each patient and his or her cancer as an individual, and develop a customized therapy. The new approach is showing some promising results. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Twitter Inc said on Tuesday it would add labels to election-related advertisements and say who is behind each of them, after a threat of regulation from the United States over the lack of disclosure for political spending on social media.
Twitter said in a blog post the company would launch a website so that people could see the identities of the buyers, targeting demographics and total ad spending by election advertisers, as well as information about all ads currently running on Twitter, election-related or otherwise.
Silicon Valley social media firms and the political ads that run on their websites have generally been free of the disclaimers and other regulatory demands that U.S. authorities impose on television, radio and satellite services.
Calls for that to change have grown, however, after Twitter, Facebook Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google said in recent weeks that Russian operatives used fake names on their platforms to spread divisive messages in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Russia has denied interfering in the election.
Twitter plans to make changes first in the United States and then roll them out globally.
Changes would appear within Twitter feeds, where election ads would have a label like “promoted by political account,” the company said.
“To make it clear when you are seeing or engaging with an electioneering ad, we will now require that electioneering advertisers identify their campaigns as such,” Bruce Falck, Twitter’s general manager of revenue product, said in the blog post.
Twitter also said it would limit the targeting options for election ads, although it did not say how, and introduce stronger penalties for election advertisers who violate policies.
Democratic U.S. Senator Mark Warner said from his Twitter account that the moves by the company were a “good first step” but he added that Congress should make the disclosures mandatory by approving legislation he is co-sponsoring.
Policing difficult
Separately, Twitter has long been criticized by users and lawmakers as lax in policing fake or abusive accounts. Unlike Facebook, Twitter allows anonymous accounts and automated accounts, or bots, making the service more difficult to police.
Twitter said last month it had suspended about 200 Russia-linked accounts as it investigated online efforts to influence last year’s U.S. election.
The general counsels for Facebook, Google and Twitter are scheduled to testify next week before public hearings of the Senate and House intelligence committees.
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Human-caused space pollution can range from a hammer that floats away from a space station, to a nuclear weapons test in the atmosphere, and could damage nearby spacecraft. But one unexpected source of “pollution” helps many satellites. The special pollution protects spacecraft from “killer electrons,” in a region above the earth called the Van Allen belts. Reporting from Boulder, Colorado, Shelley Schlender reports.
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Arctic sea ice may be thinning faster than predicted because salty snow on the surface of the ice skews the accuracy of satellite measurements, a new
study from the University of Calgary said on Tuesday.
The report from the Canadian university’s Cryosphere Climate Research Group published in the academic journal Geophysical Research Letters found satellite estimates for the thickness of seasonal sea ice have been overestimated by up to 25 percent.
That means the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free much sooner than some scientific predictions, which forecast sea ice will first disappear completely during summer months between 2040 and 2050, according to lead author Vishnu Nandan.
Ice-free summers in the Arctic Ocean would impact global weather patterns by increasing the magnitude and frequency of major storms, and alter the Arctic marine ecosystem, making it harder for animals like polar bears to hunt.
There are a wide range of projections as to when Arctic sea ice will start disappearing in summertime as a result of warming global temperatures, and the University of Calgary study calls into question satellite measurements provided so far.
“The problem is, microwave measurements from satellites don’t penetrate the salty snow very well, so the satellite is not measuring the proper sea ice freeboard and the satellite readings overestimate the thickness of the ice,” Nandan said.
The sea ice freeboard refers to ice that can be seen above sea level and co-researcher John Yackel said, “Our results suggest that snow salinity should be considered in all future estimates on the Arctic seasonal ice freeboard made from satellites.”
Reporting by Nia Williams; editing by Diane Craft.
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An unprecedented Chinese financial and construction effort is rapidly developing Pakistan’s strategically located Arabian Sea port of Gwadar into one of the world’s largest transit and transshipment cargo facilities.
The deep water port lies at the convergence of three of the most commercially important regions of the world, the oil-rich Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia.
Beijing is developing Gwadar as part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, known as CPEC. The two countries launched the 15-year joint mega project in 2015 when President Xi Jinping visited Islamabad.
Under the cooperation deal construction or improvement of highways, railways, pipelines, power plants, communications and industrial zones is underway in Pakistan with an initially estimated Chinese investment of $46 billion.
The aim is to link Gwadar to landlocked western China, including its Muslim-majority Xinjiang region, giving it access to a shorter and secure route through Pakistan to global trade. The port will also provide the shortest route to landlocked Central Asian countries, including Afghanistan, through transit trade and offering transshipment facilities.
Chinese fuel imports and trading cargo will be loaded on trucks and ferried to and from Xinjiang through the Karakoram Highway, snaking past snow-caped peaks in northern Pakistan.
‘Qualitative change’
Gwadar will be able to handle about one million tons of cargo annually by the end of the year. Officials anticipate that with expansion plans under way, the port will become South Asia’s biggest shipping center within five years, with a yearly capacity of handling 13-million tons of cargo. And by 2030, they say, it will be capable of handling up to 400-million tons of cargo annually.
China has in recent months begun calling CPEC the flagship project of its global Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI. The “qualitative change” from an experimental project to flagship project underscores the importance Beijing attaches to CPEC, said Zhao Lijian, the deputy chief of mission at the Chinese embassy in Islamabad.
Out of 39 “early harvest” projects under CPEC, 19 have since been completed or are under construction with a Chinese investment of about $18.5 billion, Lijian told VOA. The progress makes it the fastest developing of all of at least six BRI’s corridors China plans to establish, added the Chinese diplomat.
Gwadar is a “symbol of regional peace and prosperity” because it will connect countries around Pakistan to serve their trading interests, said port Chairman Dostain Khan Jamaldini.
Jamaldini dismissed as “not true” concerns that skilled Chinese laborers, engineers and businesses will flood Pakistan, hurting domestic industries. About 65 percent of the labor force on construction and other projects at Gwadar is Pakistani, and the number of Chinese is currently just over 300, he added.
Security concerns and India’s claims over some of the territory crossed by the massive project remain key challenges for Gwadar and CPEC in general. Pakistani and Chinese officials dismiss reported assertions that Beijing is expanding its presence at Gwadar to be able to handle naval ships and military transport planes.
The collaboration has “no strategic or political” aims against a third country, insisted Lijian. He went on to assert that the purpose of CPEC” is to help our iron brother Pakistan” to improve its economy and to strengthen the bilateral relationship.
Pakistani officials have trained and deployed about 15,000 troops and paramilitary forces to guard CPEC-related projects and the Chinese working on them. Islamabad alleges that the Indian intelligence agency has been tasked to plot subversive acts to derail CPEC.
Sleepy fishing town
Gwadar, with a population of around 100,000, mostly fishermen and boat makers, is often referred to as a sleepy fishing town.
The costal city’s poverty-stricken residents are hoping new employment opportunities will be created for them in the wake of the massive development underway in Gwadar.
But their immediate challenges are shortages of clean drinking water and hours long daily power blackouts.
“We are happy Chinese are building port, hospitals, schools and roads but right now we out of power during most of the day and limited water availability,” said fisherman Khalil Ahmed.
The family, like other fishermen in Gwadar, has been plying unspoiled crystal blue waters of the Arabian Sea for decades with age-old fishing techniques and barely surviving on limited income because financial resources do not allow them to buy modern fishing tools.
However, ongoing massive economic activity will “qualitatively” change the lives of its poverty-stricken residents for the better, says Mushahid Hussain, who chairs a parliamentary committee on CPEC.
He says a fisheries processing plant is being installed at the port and arrangements are being planned to train and equip fishermen to improve and export local fish to other parts of Pakistan and China.
Senator Hussain believes economic projects under construction in Gwadar will help its people and address long-running grievances of the province of Baluchistan, where the port is situated.
The poverty-stricken largest Pakistani province has long been in the grip of a low-level Baluchistan separatist insurgency, which mainly stems from demands from the federal government for local control over Baluchistan’s vast natural resources.
Gwadar’s existing 50-bed government hospital is being extended to 300 beds, a technical and vocational institute is being constructed, a 300-megawatts coal-based power plant and a desalination plant are being installed, a new international airport and a six-lane international standard expressway are being built to connect Gwadar port with the rest of Pakistan and neighboring countries, including Iran and Afghanistan.
Local officials say most of the projects, including the new airport, are being built with Chinese financial grants. The rest of the projects in Gwadar and elsewhere in Pakistan under CPEC are being built with “interest-free” and “soft-loans” from China.
The U.S. economy is expected add another 11.5 million jobs by 2026, as an aging population and longer life spans raise the need for health care providers. The total U.S. workforce is expected to grow to 167.6 million people.
Tuesday’s projections come from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which says job growth will accelerate slightly from its current pace, but it will not return to the brisk gains seen the over previous decades. The BLS updates its job outlook every two years as new information becomes available.
The percentage of the workforce over age 55 will rise to nearly one-quarter in 2026, a sharp increase from the less than 17 percent back in 2006. People in their 50s and 60s may retire, which is one reason experts expect workforce participation rates (the percentage of working age people who have jobs or are seeking work) to decline.
Over the decade, nine out of 10 new jobs will be in the services sector, particularly health care. Employment by companies that produce goods is expected to grow at a meager one-tenth of one percent a year, with a gain of just 219,000 jobs by 2026.
The workforce is expected to become more diverse as Asian and Hispanic parts of the U.S. population grow more quickly than average. Whoever is in the workforce will find additional education important, as two out of three jobs in the fastest-growing areas require at least some post-secondary education and training.
And the whole economy is predicted to expand at a two percent annual rate. That is faster than the current growth rate, but below the gains seen in previous decades.
Hope is the thing with feathers, poet Emily Dickinson wrote. For Richard Thorns, the feathers are pink.
Thorns’ hope? To prove that a colorful duck is not extinct. This week, he launches a seventh expedition into the inaccessible wilds of Myanmar to search for the pink-headed duck that hasn’t been seen alive since 1949, and that was in India. No one has seen the bird alive in Myanmar in more than a century.
Thorns, a British writer who quit his shop clerk job 20 years ago after reading about the pink-headed duck in the book “Vanishing Birds,” has spent $20,000 of his own money on previous fruitless trips. His birder brother called him mad.
“I could have had a lot of nice things,” the 53-year-old said. “I don’t want nice things. I want to see a pink-headed duck.”
This time, he is backed by the Global Wildlife Conservation group, which launched a hunt for “lost species” — 25 quirky and elusive plants and animals beginning with the duck. A sports optic company and cheesemaking company are also helping pay.
Thorns and three others plan to head to the wetlands north of the vast Indawgyi Lake during the rainy season where they believe they have a better chance of spotting the duck. And Thorn thinks he has a secret weapon: elephants.
He used canoes in the past and thinks he probably spooked the shy birds. Now he plans to bring elephants stomping through the wetlands.
“Clearly a bird isn’t going to hunker down if there are 2-ton elephants,” said Thorn.
As crazy as it may seem, Thorns may be onto something, said ornithologist Kevin McGowan at Cornell University who isn’t part of the expedition.
“Fairly regularly birds get rediscovered,” says McGowan, who has gone on unsuccessful expeditions for the ivory-billed woodpecker. “We don’t see all the world that is in front of our eyes.”
A Cornell student found Bermuda petrels, rare seabirds thought to be extinct for 300 years. Other rediscovered animals include a crow species in Asia and a nocturnal parrot in Australia. These birds survive by not being noticed “so what’s your certainty that it’s gone?” said McGowan.
One thing that keeps Thorns going is the thought that someone else might find the pink-headed duck first.
Every time he goes out, the bird “breaks my heart,” he said. “Sometimes I wish I hadn’t seen that picture.”
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Nearly 30 years ago, 1,000 children a day were paralyzed by the polio virus. So far this year, 11 children have been diagnosed with polio, thanks to a global effort to wipe out the polio virus. The effort has produced amazing results, but as VOA’s Carol Pearson reports, those behind it say it’s not time yet to celebrate.
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After a deadly earthquake in 1985, authorities in Mexico City decided they must start constructing houses that can withstand strong shakes. Government buildings, hospitals and schools are now built according to stricter rules, while architects are pushing for their application to other structures too, especially high rise apartment buildings. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Facebook Inc said on Monday it was testing the idea of dividing its News F eed in two, separating commercial posts from personal news in a move that could lead some businesses to increase advertising.
The Facebook News Feed, the centerpiece of the world’s largest social network service, is a streaming series of posts such as photos from friends, updates from family members, advertisements and material from celebrities or other pages that a user has liked.
The test, which is occurring in six smaller countries, now offers two user feeds, according to a statement from the company: one feed focused on friends and family and a second dedicated to the pages that the customer has liked.
The change could force those who run pages, everyone from news outlets to musicians to sports teams, to pay to run advertisements if they want to be seen in the feed that is for friends and family.
The test is taking place in Bolivia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Serbia, Slovakia and Sri Lanka, and it will likely go on for months, Adam Mosseri, the Facebook executive in charge of the News Feed, said in a blog post.
Mosseri said the company has no plans for a global test of the two separate feeds for its 2 billion users.
Facebook also does not currently plan to force commercial pages “to pay for all their distribution,” he said.
Facebook, based in Menlo Park, California, frequently tests changes big and small as it tries to maximize the time people spend scrolling and browsing the network. Sometimes it makes changes permanent, and other times not.
Depending on how people respond, two news feeds could mean that they see fewer links to news stories. News has proved to be a tricky area for Facebook, as hoaxes and false news stories have sometimes spread easily on the network.
The test has already affected website traffic for smaller media outlets in recent days, Slovakian journalist Filip Struharik wrote over the weekend in a post on Medium.
Publishers might need to buy more Facebook ads to be seen, he wrote: “If you want your Facebook page posts to be seen in old newsfeed, you have to pay.”
When Britain’s Cambridge University put physicist Stephen Hawking’s 1966 thesis on line for the first time Monday, the university’s website collapsed.
Professor Hawking’s “Properties of Expanding Universes” has been the most requested item in the university’s library.
To meet the demand, and with Hawking’s encouragement, Cambridge made it available on line.
About 60,000 people sought to access it, causing the system to periodically shut down throughout the day Monday.
Hawking is the world’s best-known physicist and expert on the cosmos.
His landmark 1988 work “A Brief History of Time” has sold more than 10 million copies.
With his thesis now available for anyone to read, Hawking said he hopes to “inspire people around the world to look up at the stars and not down at their feet, to wonder about our place in the universe and to try and make sense of the cosmos.”
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A chocolate bar may make you feel better when you’re down, but a cup of yogurt or a handful of cashews might be a better choice.
“I think about our body in some ways like a car engine,” says therapist Leslie Korn. “We need to give it the right fuel. And each of us have a need for a particular combination of proteins, and carbohydrates and fats.”
Korn has been treating people for trauma and depression for more than 40 years. She noticed that when her patients changed their diet and began eating foods like dark chocolate, sweet potatoes, eggs and cherries, they had much more success in lifting their depression and decreasing their pain.
She turned her observations into a book: The Good Mood Kitchen. It contains recipes and nutrition tips that can help put you in a good mood.
Fat for the brain
Fats, she explains, are not the nemesis many diets have made them out to be. We need fats in our diet because our brain is made up of fat. “It’s made up of chemicals that talk to each other and that are lubricated by the fat in order to communicate across the synapses, and contribute to our ability to focus, to apply attention and to lift our mood. Indeed, there is some very good research going on in the military looking at the role of Omega 3 fatty acids for not only treatment of depression and anxiety, but also for suicide prevention.”
Taking care of the digestive system, which breaks down the fat, is essential for the brain to benefit, and Korn has a suggestion for that, too.
“For example, if your liver and if your gallbladder is not working, you can’t break down fats that are absorbed into the blood stream and then support brain function. What we know is that the greens, in particular bitter greens, help us digest fats and send those fats to the brain where we need it.”
The Brainbow diet
Those greens are part of what Korn calls the “Brainbow” diet. She says the colors in the food represent different nutrients. “Your orange, and kind of yellow foods provide lots of vitamin A, lots of vital nutrients. The variety of greens are very good for our digestion. Your purple food and your red food are very anti-inflammatory. These are beets and our eggplants and our berries.”
The “Brainbow” Food list also includes:
Red foods: red cabbage, radishes, watermelons
Orange foods: carrots, sweet potatoes, oranges, pumpkins
Yellow foods: lemons, bananas
Green foods: kale
White foods: garlic, onion, nuts
Foods for every symptom
Therapist Korn says probiotics are important in treating depression and lifting our mood. She calls them “psychobiotics.” Those can be found in yogurt and fermented food.
For people who suffer from PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder), she recommends foods rich in Omega 3 fatty oils like salmon, flaxseed oil and nuts.
Cocoa and chocolate are known to be good for improving the brain’s cognitive function.
Caffeine helps the brain focus. It stimulates the brain to release dopamine, a chemical messenger that helps in the transmission of signals in the brain and other vital areas.
Cherries and chamomile help the brain release melatonin and anti-anxiety chemicals for a good night’s sleep.
Around the world with good mood food
Every country, Korn says, has certain foods that enhance mental well-being. In her book, she offers recipes for them — fresh raw sauerkraut from Eastern Europe, kimchi from Korea and miso soup from Japan. Plantain is a popular food in India, Mexico and countries in Africa and the Caribbean. The Good Mood Kitchen includes a recipe for Plantain Soup.
“Plantains are large bananas, very starchy and a little bit sweet. And I add some lemon, and butter and chopped onion, and garlic. And you make it with either a vegetable broth or a chicken broth. Then you add coconut milk, and blend. And then I top it with cilantro, Chinese parsley and garlic, grated orange peel and lime juice.”
Sweet potatoes are familiar to people around the world. In her book, Korn offers a simple recipe for preparing them. “Add butter, sea salt and bake. This is good for stress.”
Relax and savor
Korn says because mood follows food, we have to improve our digestion in order to improve our mental health. And since stress and hyperactivity slow down the enzymes our body releases to digest food, once you have prepared a dish designed to improve your emotional balance, it’s important to slow down, take some deep breaths, relax and enjoy eating the meal.
Good Mood Recipes
Baked Wild Salmon
Sprinkle sea salt and a little olive oil on the salmon and place it on a cookie sheet.
Bake for 10 minutes at 350 degrees, then place it under the broiler for at least 5 minutes.
Keep an eye on the salmon. It should be pink on the inside.
Garlic Yogurt Salad Dressing
½ -3/4 cup plain cow or goat milk yogurt
1 small garlic clove (minced)
¼ tsp. dried basil
½ tbsp. apple cider vinegar
1/16 tsp. stevia powder
1 tsp. chopped fresh parsley
4 tbsp. organic mayonnaise
Whisk all ingredients together in a bowl and serve.
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Amazon said Monday that it received 238 proposals from cities and regions in the United States, Canada and Mexico hoping to be the home of the company’s second headquarters.
The online retailer kicked off its hunt for a second home base in September, promising to bring 50,000 new jobs and spend more than $5 billion on construction. Proposals were due last week, and Amazon made clear that tax breaks and grants would be a big deciding factor on where it chooses to land.
Amazon.com Inc. said the proposals came from 43 U.S. states as well as Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, three Mexican states and six Canadian provinces. In a tweet, the company said it was “excited to review each of them.”
Besides looking for financial incentives, Amazon had stipulated that it was seeking to be near a metropolitan area with more than a million people; be able to attract top technical talent; be within 45 minutes of an international airport; have direct access to mass transit; and be able to expand that headquarters to as much as 8 million square feet in the next decade.
Generous tax breaks and other incentives can erode a city’s tax base. For the winner, it could be worth it, since an Amazon headquarters could draw other tech businesses and their well-educated, highly paid employees.
The seven U.S. states that Amazon said did not apply were: Arkansas, Hawaii, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming.
Ahead of the deadline, some cities turned to stunts to try and stand out: Representatives from Tucson, Arizona, sent a 21-foot tall cactus to Amazon’s Seattle headquarters; New York lit the Empire State Building orange to match Amazon’s smile logo.
The company plans to remain in its sprawling Seattle headquarters, and the second one will be “a full equal” to it, founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said in September. Amazon has said that it will announce a decision sometime next year.
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It was a source of national pride — technology and discipline besting a crippling lack of water.
But four years of drought have overtaxed Israel’s unmatched array of desalination and wastewater treatment plants, choking its most fertile regions and catching the government off-guard.
“No one imagined we would face a sequence of arid years like this, because it never happened before,” said Uri Schor, spokesman for Israel’s Water Authority.
The Sea of Galilee, technically a lake near the border with Syria, is forecast to hit its lowest level ever before winter rains come, despite the fact that pumping there was massively reduced. Underground aquifers, the other main freshwater source, are nearing levels that will turn them salty.
How to cope with the crisis is becoming an increasingly touchy subject in Israel. Proposed cuts to water use for the coming year, more than 50 percent in some areas, prompted vehement opposition from farmers, who already face tough restrictions and would have been the hardest hit. The government quickly backtracked.
In the Middle East, one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change, water is also the subject of wider tensions.
Intense pressure on already scarce water resources could lead to an increase in migration and the risk of conflict, the World Bank has warned.
Syria and Jordan depend on some of the same water sources as Israel, which as added to tensions in the past. Palestinians have long complained of inadequate access to water, which is mostly under Israeli control in the occupied West Bank. Israel has said it has supplied more water than required under interim peace deals.
Under discussion for a possible long-term solution to Israel’s water problem is the construction of an additional desalination plant, an industry official said. A similar facility in Israel has cost more $400 million.
Several new reservoirs to catch rain and flood waters could also relieve some pressure as a quick, $60 million fix, the official said, asking to remain anonymous due to the political sensitivity of the subject.
Just a few years ago Israel, a country two-thirds arid, declared an end to the water shortages that hounded it for decades. A longstanding nationwide awareness campaign ceased and Israelis could take long showers and water their gardens.
There was even talk of exporting surplus water to its neighbors. This came as a result of a massive investment drive which saw Israel put 15 billion shekels ($4.3 billion) in its national water grid and sewage treatment centers. The commercial sector invested another 7 billion shekels into the construction of five desalination plants.
Supply issues are being hardest felt among farmers in the northern tip of Israel, the region where Dubi Amitay, a fourth-generation farmer and president of the Israel Farmers Federation, lives.
Amitay said the shortage had made him decide to dry out 3,700 acres of land, which will take a toll on future harvests.
His home region of eastern Galilee, a lush swath of land between the coast and the Golan Heights, could lose up to 500 million shekels this season, he said.
The lack of reliable waters supply leaves farmers with deep uncertainty.
“Will we have water or not?,” he said.
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A collection of radio telescopes that spans thousands of miles and is remotely operated from central New Mexico has measured a span of 66,000 light-years (one light-year is equal to 6 trillion miles) from Earth across the Milky Way’s center to a star-forming area near the edge of the other side of the galaxy.
Astronomers say they hope to measure additional points around the galaxy to produce a map – the first of its kind – over the next decade.
Alberto Sanna of Germany’s Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy said in a news release that using the Very Long Baseline Array, which is remotely operated near Socorro, allows astronomers to “accurately map the whole extent of our galaxy,” the Albuquerque Journal reported.
Mark Reid, a senior radio astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who worked on the project, said they hope to create the map by measuring additional points around the galaxy. So far, they have measured around 200.
Reid said 100 or so observations must be done from the Earth’s southern hemisphere, so he will be traveling to Australia in the future to use telescopes there.
Although the data for the 66,000 light-year measurement was collected in 2014 and 2015, the team has spent the time since then analyzing it, Reid said. “It’s not like you get a Hubble (Space Telescope) space image,” he said.
While there are artistic renderings of what the Milky Way probably looks like, this effort will yield a highly accurate image, Reid said.
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Sierra Leone hopes to raise millions of dollars for development projects by auctioning a huge uncut diamond, believed to be one of the world’s largest, in New York in December.
It will be the government’s second attempt to sell the 709-carat gem, known as the “Peace Diamond”, after it rejected the highest bid of $7.8 million at an initial auction in New York in May.
Over half of the proceeds from the sale will be used to fund clean water, electricity, education and health projects in Sierra Leone, and particularly in the village of Koryardu, in the Kono region in eastern Sierra Leone, where the diamond was discovered.
“There’s a reason God gave these diamonds to the poorest people in the world and made the richest people want them. This is Tikun Olam [Hebrew for correcting the world], this is making the world a better place,” Martin Rapaport, chairman of Rapaport Group, a network of diamond companies which will manage the auction, told Reuters.
The diamond, which the auctioneers described as the 14th largest in the world, was unearthed in Koryardu in March by a Christian pastor who gave it to the government.
Diamonds fuelled a decade-long civil war in Sierra Leone, ending in 2002, in which rebels forced civilians to mine the stones and bought weapons with the proceeds, leading to the term “blood diamonds.”
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The U.S. Federal Reserve will raise interest rates in December and twice next year, according to a Reuters poll of economists, who now worry that the central bank will slow its tightening because of expectations that inflation will remain low.
Most respondents expected the nation’s economy to determine future rate hikes, but a change in regime at the Fed could also affect monetary policy.
U.S. President Donald Trump could decide this week whether to reappoint Fed Chair Janet Yellen, whose term ends in February, since he has concluded interviews with five candidates for that post.
“There is a greater-than-usual degree of uncertainty around monetary policy next year, with the Fed’s leadership up in the air,” wrote RBC economist Josh Nye.
A Reuters poll of economists published last week showed Fed Board Governor Jerome Powell getting the top job, although most said reappointing Yellen would be the best option.
Still, a vast majority of the more than 100 economists in the latest poll expect rate hikes to depend largely on how the U.S. economy performs.
“Despite intense speculation about the next Fed chair, the path of policy rates is still likely to be driven primarily by the data, regardless of who is nominated,” said Christian Keller, head of economics research at Barclays.
Forty of the 50 economists who answered an extra question also said the U.S. economy, which is on a steady growth path, did not need a big fiscal stimulus in the form of sweeping tax cuts.
The dollar rose on Friday after the Senate approved a budget proposal for the 2018 fiscal year that cleared a critical hurdle for a tax-cut package.
But the need for such a large stimulus to boost the U.S. economy at this late stage of its cycle, when the jobless rate is at more than a 16-year low, remains questionable.
“The U.S. needs to return to a sustainable fiscal path, and I have little faith that sweeping tax cuts will generate enough growth to put us on that path,” said Bank of the West economist Scott Anderson.
While recent U.S. economic data has improved, the closely watched core PCE inflation measure has been below its medium-term target of 2 percent for more than five years, despite strong employment growth.
The latest poll, taken Oct. 16-23, showed scant expectations of economic growth lifting off from its current trend or of inflation reaching the Fed’s target before 2019.
That has divided Fed policymakers and raised doubts about the pace of further rate hikes, according to minutes from the Sept. 19-20 meeting.
Still, economists predicted the Fed would raise rates 25 basis points to 1.25-1.50 percent in December. All 100 economists polled expect it to keep policy on hold at its next meeting.
The central bank is projecting three more rate increases in 2018, while economists expect only two next year, which would take the fed funds rate to 1.75-2.00 percent.
But about two-thirds of 52 economists who answered an extra question said risks to those forecasts were skewed more toward a slower pace of rate hikes. Fifteen of those respondents suspected there could be fewer than two increases next year.
The remaining 17 economists said there was a greater chance of faster rate hikes.
Economic growth probably took a hit from the devastation caused by Hurricanes Harvey and Irma.
The consensus in the latest Reuters poll was for an annualized expansion of 2.4 percent in the third quarter, down from 2.6 percent in last month’s survey. Growth expectations for this quarter remained at 2.5 percent.
The median full-year forecast was 2.2 percent for 2017 and 2.3 percent for next year.
Predictions for core PCE inflation have not changed much from last month, with the consensus now in a 1.4-1.9 percent range through the end of next year even though the jobless rate has fallen well below 5 percent.
Taiwan is offering visa waivers and setting up overseas investment offices across a swathe of countries to its south, the latest moves to deepen a rebalancing of economic relations away from political foe China.
Officials in Taipei hope to foster more tourism, trade and higher education links with 18 countries covering most of South and Southeast Asia plus Australia and New Zealand. Stronger ties in theory would reduce the role of China, which is Taiwan’s top trading partner now, as the two sides struggle over political differences.
In the latest phase of Taiwan’s effort, called the New Southbound Policy, Philippine citizens may visit Taiwan visa-free for 14 days during a trial period that starts next month and ends in July. Taiwan offered waivers to citizens of Brunei and Thailand in August 2016. Those efforts complement new investment offices, growth in the number of university students in Taiwan and more Taiwanese development aid.
“The purpose of the New Southbound Policy is for us to hold a more advantageous position in international society,” Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen said in a National Day speech earlier this month. “I also want to use this opportunity to tell our friends from around the world that faced with a rapidly changing Asia-Pacific region. Taiwan is ready to play a more important role in shaping regional prosperity and stability.”
Shaky relations with China
Tsai announced the New Southbound Policy after taking office in May 2016 to rebalance relations for Taiwan’s $529 billion economy.
Taiwanese business people traditionally choose China for investment because of its relatively low costs, skilled workforce and cultural links. More than 93,000 Taiwanese businesses invested in China between 1988 and 2016, according to the American think tank Council on Foreign Relations.
But China claims sovereignty over Taiwan despite the island’s democratic self-rule, causing enough friction to stop dialogue under Tsai’s presidency.
How the New Southbound Policy works
Taiwan’s economic affairs ministry has established investment offices in Indonesia, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines to help investors find projects in those countries based on local needs.
The Taiwan government is offering as well credit guarantees for smaller businesses headed to Southeast Asia, where aid from Taipei will help pay for infrastructure and other major projects in those countries. The visa waivers facilitate travel to Taiwan, another boon to the economy.
Taiwan’s trade with the 18 countries covered by the policy had risen 20 percent this year compared to last, Tsai said in her speech without giving an exact time frame.
Tourist arrivals from New Southbound countries are rising as the headcount from China decreases, official data show. The number of postsecondary students in Taiwan from New Southbound Policy countries went up 10 percent over the six months to March from a year earlier, while the number of non-degree university students from China has eased since mid-2016.
Taiwan’s Investment Commission last year approved 252 applications for projects intended for China last year, down 21.5 percent from 2015.
But China remains Taiwan’s top trading partner thanks to a thriving consumer market and the maturity of its supply chain for the likes of tech and machinery. Imports and exports totaled $117.9 billion in 2016.
Feedback from South and Southeast Asia
Indonesia has been a bright spot for finding new investment projects, especially in agriculture, an economic affairs official in Taipei said earlier in the year. Thailand had already approved 274 Taiwanese investment applications, worth $1.39 billion, from 2010 to 2015.
About 3,500 Taiwanese investors had invested in Vietnam as early as 2011 because costs were rising in China while Vietnam was offering incentives to lure foreign capital.
The restart in May of Taiwanese-owned Formosa Plastics Group’s Vietnam steel plant could draw a “cluster” of related Taiwanese firms, said Liang Kuo-yuan, president of Taipei-based think tank Polaris Research Institute in Taipei. Factory work had stopped over a suspected toxic leak that killed fish.
The Philippines, an investment-thirsty Southeast Asian archipelago, is actively looking for Taiwanese companies, said Jonathan Ravelas, chief market strategist with Banco de Oro UniBank in Metro Manila. Taiwanese electronics firms consider the country an export manufacturing base, he said, while healthcare firms may find partners such as hospitals. The growing consumer base lures others.
“We’re seeing entrepreneurs from Taiwan looking into the Philippines, given that it’s a very big retail market,” Ravelas said.
But one Southeast Asian country, Cambodia, may fear angering China by veering too close to Taiwan. Beijing forbids its allies from establishing formal ties with Taipei. In February Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen declared a ban on raising the Taiwan flag. Two years earlier the government forbid Taiwan from establishing an informal trade office.
Still early days
Similar go-south policies fell flat under former Taiwan president Lee Teng-hui in 1993 and his successor, Chen Shui-bian, after 2000. China in those years was cheaper, with less competition from local companies, in turn drawing Taiwanese investors.
Today’s policy will struggle as Taiwan faces competition in the 18 target counties from other foreign investment sources, Liang said. Competitors include China, India, Japan and South Korea. China and India were less competitive before 2000. Taiwan lacks a material advantage, he said.
“The biggest problem is that Southeast Asia is not a blue ocean market,” Liang said. “There are too many competitors, so Taiwan can’t just use its point of view to go compete in that market. Taiwan after all has what strength?”
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The United States is in the middle of an unprecedented opioid overdose epidemic. The abuse of prescription opioids along with the illicit use of heroin killed nearly 60-thousand people last year. Every day 91 Americans die from prescription opioid related overdoses. VOA’s Chris Simkins has more on the story.
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Electric cars are steadily gaining ground in the global auto market, but it’s a slow process. Along with their high price, one of the main reasons for the consumers’ reluctance is the scarcity of infrastructure needed for charging the cars’ batteries. VOA’s George Putic looks at efforts to remove one of the obstacles on the road towards the electric future.
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The bumper sticker on the back of Scott Wilson’s car reads, “This is what the end of gasoline looks like.”
And what does that car look like? A sleek, sci-fi experimental vehicle? A $100,000 Tesla luxury car?
Nope. It’s just a Kia Soul EV, the battery-powered version of the Korean automaker’s boxy hatchback.
Once the domain of concept cars and hobbyists, electric vehicles are no longer so exotic. And sales are picking up. A record 150,000 of them sold last year in the United States.
“It used to be I knew everyone I saw that was driving an electric car,” said Wilson, the vice president of the Electric Vehicle Association of Greater Washington, D.C. “Now, I don’t.”
There are about to be a lot more strangers in EVs on the roads, many experts say.
Big carmakers, big plans
Volvo says every car it makes in 2019 and beyond will have an electric motor. General Motors says the company “believes in an all-electric future.” Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) predicts that in just over two decades, EVs will make up more than half of all vehicles sold.
Other analysts have more modest expectations. But even Exxon Mobil sees EVs topping 10 percent of the market by 2040.
Automakers hit a significant milestone in the past year. In December, General Motors launched the Chevrolet Bolt EV, the first car with a price tag under $40,000 and a range of more than 320 kilometers.
Automakers hit a significant milestone in the past year. In December, General Motors launched the Chevrolet Bolt EV, the first car with a price tag under $40,000 and a range of more than 320 kilometers.
That range is “basically double anything else that’s available at a comparable price,” said Chevrolet spokesman Fred Ligouri. Those figures “do wonders for getting beyond” what’s known as range anxiety, potential buyers’ fear of draining the battery before reaching their destination.
One-third of buyers have never owned an electric vehicle before.
“They went from (an) internal combustion engine vehicle right into pure electric,” an encouraging sign, Ligouri said.
The Bolt’s performance has impressed critics as well. Motor Trend magazine named the Bolt the 2017 Car of the Year.
The Bolt beat industry upstart Tesla to the mid-priced market. A modest 15,000 or so have been sold so far. But nearly a half-million people have ordered the Tesla Model 3, the company’s entrant into the mass market, despite long waits and slow production.
“Those are signals that there’s unmet demand for some of these new technologies,” said the World Resources Institute’s Eliot Metzger.
Electrification is cheaper than ever as the price of lithium ion batteries plummets faster than analysts expected. As costs come down, experts are moving up the date when electric vehicles can compete with internal combustion engines on price. BNEF puts that date in the second half of the next decade.
“We’re much further along than most researchers (and) industry insiders would have projected just two or three years ago,” said Nic Lutsey at the International Council on Clean Transportation.
China syndrome
Another reason the industry is moving fast: China.
Officials in the world’s biggest auto market will require carmakers to meet an electric vehicle quota starting in 2019.
Beijing aims to increase EVs’ share of the market from 1 to 2 percent today to around 4 percent in 2020.
“That’s a very large scale up within just several years,” Lutsey noted, but automakers say they can do it.
The push for electric vehicles is part of the government’s plan to clean up the toxic air in China’s major cities. Chinese officials are considering a ban on gas- and diesel-powered cars.
But it’s not just China. Pollution concerns in France, the United Kingdom, and India have officials there considering bans, too.
In the United States, the Trump administration aims to relax vehicle emissions standards, though state policies will likely complicate those efforts.
Without a push from government, experts say electric vehicles will have a hard time making major gains as long as gas prices are relatively low.
But as electric vehicle driver Wilson points out, that can change at any time.
“After the next crisis, when gas is $5 a gallon, then there will be waiting lists for cars like this,” he said.
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The sloping vineyards of New York’s Finger Lakes region known for producing golden-hued rieslings and chardonnays also are offering a splash of orange wine.
The color comes not from citrus fruit, but by fermenting white wine grapes with their skins on before pressing – a practice that mirrors the way red wines are made. Lighter than reds and earthier than whites, orange wines have created a buzz in trendier quarters. And winemakers reviving the ancient practice like how the “skin-fermented” wines introduce more complex flavors to the bottle.
“Pretty outgoing characteristics. Very spicy, peppery. A lot of tea flavors, too, come through,” winemaker Vinny Aliperti said, taking a break from harvest duties at Atwater Estate Vineyards on Seneca Lake. “They’re more thoughtful wines. They’re more meditative.”
Atwater is among a few wineries encircling these glacier-carved lakes that have added orange to their mix of whites and reds. The practice dates back thousands of years, when winemakers in the Caucasus, a region located at the border of Europe and Asia, would ferment wine in buried clay jars. It has been revitalized in recent decades by vintners in Italy, California and elsewhere looking to connect wine to its roots or to conjure new tastes from the grapes. Or both. Clay jars are optional.
Aliperti has been experimenting with skin fermenting for years, first by blending a bit into traditional chardonnays to change up the flavor and more recently with full-on orange wines. This fall, he fermented Vignoles grapes with their skins in a stainless steel vat for a couple of weeks before pressing and then aging them in oak barrels.
Orange wines account for “far less than 1 percent” of what is handled by Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, the nation’s largest distributor with about a quarter of the market, according to Eric Hemer, senior vice president and corporate director of wine education.
Hemer expects orange wines to remain a niche variety due to small-scale production, higher retail prices _ up to $200 for a premium bottle – and the nature of the wine.
“It’s not a wine that’s going to appeal to the novice consumer or the mainstream wine drinker,” Hemer said. “It really takes a little bit more of, I think, a sophisticated palate.”
The wines have caught on in recent years among connoisseurs who like the depth of flavors, sommeliers who can regale customers with tales of ancient techniques and drinkers looking for something different. Christopher Nicolson, managing winemaker at Red Hook Winery in Brooklyn, said the wines hit their “crest of hipness” a couple of years ago, though they remain popular.
“I think they’re viewed by these younger drinkers as, ‘Oh, this is something new and fresh. And they’re breaking the rules of these Van Dyke-wearing, monocled … fusty old wine appreciators,’” Nicolson said.
It’s not for everyone. The rich flavors can come at the expense of the light, fruity feel that some white wine drinkers crave. And first-time drinkers can be thrown by seeing an orange chardonnay in their glasses.
“Actually I wasn’t sure because of the color, but it has a really nice flavor,” said Debbie Morris, of Chandler, Arizona, who tried a sip recently at Atwater’s tasting room. “I’m not a chardonnay person normally, but I would drink this.”
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