Electric cars have been a futuristic promise for decades. And electric vehicles finally appear poised to enter the mainstream. Major carmakers, from Volvo to General Motors, are proclaiming the future is electric. VOA’s Steve Baragona has a look at how soon that future may arrive.
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The FBI hasn’t been able to retrieve data from more than half of the mobile devices it tried to access in less than a year, FBI Director Christopher Wray said Sunday, turning up the heat on a debate between technology companies and law enforcement officials trying to recover encrypted communications.
In the first 11 months of the fiscal year, federal agents were unable to access the content of more than 6,900 mobile devices, Wray said in a speech at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Philadelphia.
“To put it mildly, this is a huge, huge problem,” Wray said. “It impacts investigations across the board – narcotics, human trafficking, counterterrorism, counterintelligence, gangs, organized crime, child exploitation.”
The FBI and other law enforcement officials have long complained about being unable to unlock and recover evidence from cellphones and other devices seized from suspects even if they have a warrant, while technology companies have insisted they must protect customers’ digital privacy.
The long-simmering debate was on display in 2016, when the Justice Department tried to force Apple to unlock an encrypted cellphone used by a gunman in a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California. The department eventually relented after the FBI said it paid an unidentified vendor who provided a tool to unlock the phone and no longer needed Apple’s assistance, avoiding a court showdown.
The Justice Department under President Donald Trump has suggested it will be aggressive in seeking access to encrypted information from technology companies. But in a recent speech, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein stopped short of saying exactly what action it might take.
“I get it, there’s a balance that needs to be struck between encryption and the importance of giving us the tools we need to keep the public safe,” Wray said.
In a wide-ranging speech to hundreds of police leaders from across the globe, Wray also touted the FBI’s partnerships with local and federal law enforcement agencies to combat terrorism and violent crime.
“The threats that we face keep accumulating, they are complex, they are varied,” Wray said, describing threats from foreign terror organizations and homegrown extremists.
Wray also decried a potential “blind spot” for intelligence gathering if Congress doesn’t reauthorize an intelligence surveillance law set to expire at the end of the year. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act allows the government to collect information about militants, people suspected of cyber crimes or proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and other foreign targets outside the United States. Intelligence and law enforcement officials say the act is vital to national security.
A section of the act permits the government, under the oversight of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, to target non-Americans outside the United States.
“If it doesn’t get renewed or reauthorized, essentially in the form that it already is, we’re about to get another blind spot,” Wray said.
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A bakery in a low-income area of Johannesburg slashed prices of its popular bread, with unexpected results. What started as a way to help feed the community became a recipe for success as the bakery has a lot more business than ever. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi reports.
((NARRATOR))
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The World Health Organization rescinded Sunday its appointment of Zimbabwe’s longtime President Robert Mugabe as a goodwill ambassador.
“I have listened carefully to all who have expressed their concerns, and heard the different issues that they have raised. I have also consulted with the Government of Zimbabwe and we have concluded that this decision is in the best interests of the World Health Organization,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement.
Tedros, who became head of the WHO in July, had announced his appointment of Mugabe two days earlier during a conference in Uruguay, saying that Zimbabwe could “influence his peers in his region” and praising the country’s commitment to providing health care for all.
But over two dozen organizations quickly released a statement slamming the decision, saying health officials were “shocked and deeply concerned” — citing Mugabe’s record of human rights abuses and claiming that the country’s healthcare system has collapsed under his nearly 30-year rule.
The United States called the appointment of Mugabe by WHO’s first African leader “disappointing.”
The United States has maintained sanctions on Zimbabwe since 2003, citing the leader’s use use of millions of dollars to travel abroad, human rights abuses, and accusations of electoral fraud.
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Despite laws banning child marriage, rights groups in Pakistan say the problem continues, partly because of a desire to follow tradition, and partly because of poverty. No matter the reason, development experts say early marriage hurts the education and health prospects for girls. Sahar Majid brings us this report by Saman Khan from VOA’s Urdu service in Lahore.
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Autistic children often have social difficulties. They tend to linger on the edges of social groups at school and have fewer friendships than those without the condition. But that can change, if their classmates understand them and give them a chance. As Faiza Elmasry tells us, an Australian mother wrote and illustrated a children’s book to help kids do that. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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President Donald Trump is considering nominating Federal Reserve Governor Jerome Powell and Stanford University economist John Taylor for the central bank’s top two jobs, in an apparent bid to reassure markets and appease conservatives hungry for change.
Under that scenario, either Powell or Taylor would take the reins from Fed Chair Janet Yellen when her term expires in early February, and the other would fill the vice chair position left vacant when Stanley Fischer retired this month.
“That is something that is under consideration, but he hasn’t ruled out a number of options. He’ll have an announcement on that soon, in the coming days,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told reporters Friday.
Powell a centrist
Making Powell, a soft-spoken centrist who has supported Yellen’s gradual approach to raising interest rates, the next Fed chief would provide the continuity in monetary policy that investors crave.
The addition of Taylor, who has backed an overhaul of the Fed and embraced a more rigid rule-oriented monetary policy, would be a feather in the cap of conservative Republicans who feel that monetary policy has been too loose under Yellen, who was named as Fed chair by Democratic President Barack Obama and has led the central bank since February 2014.
“I think Powell might be the safer pick insofar as we know what we’re getting,” said Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist at J.P. Morgan Chase. “He’s a guy who obviously knows the Fed culture, how the (policy-setting) committee operates, so for some of those soft skills we know he would be effective.”
Powell has embraced the Yellen Fed’s monetary policy, keeping the faith that a tighter job market will eventually push wages higher and end a lengthy period of worryingly low inflation.
Taylor has spent the last two decades refining and advocating wider use of a rule that lays out where interest rates ought to be, given certain conditions of inflation and the broader economy. His rule implies that rates should be higher than they are now.
Yellen’s defense
Yellen, speaking at an economic conference in Washington Friday evening, mounted a strong defense of the tools the Fed has used to fight the sharp economic downturn triggered by the financial crisis and said there was a risk of another crisis in which those “unconventional policies” may be needed again.
Yellen, who Trump has indicated could still be named to another term as Fed chair, was not asked about the Fed job and did not offer any comment on the selection process.
Taylor inflexible?
Although Taylor is highly regarded within the Fed, his rule-based rate-setting position has spurred criticism that he would handcuff U.S. monetary policy.
Taylor pushed back at a meeting at the Boston Fed on Saturday, saying he favored a flexible implementation of policy rules and did not want to tie the Fed’s hands or suggest that he was motivated by a distrust of policymakers.
“I think that’s completely incorrect,” he said. “I trust policymakers; (rules) are an effort to make policy better.”
Some analysts suggest that fears that Taylor would bring an inflexible monetary policy with him to the Fed, as some Republicans in Congress hope, are likely exaggerated.
“There is some scope for disappointment if people think putting Taylor in will just lead to mechanical-based policy,” Feroli said.
Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester, speaking with reporters Friday, seemed to agree.
“Even if you pick a rule, the rule itself would need to be modified given the structure of the economy,” she said. “But I do think being systematic, looking at the kinds of information we look at systematically over time, articulating our strategy for policy and being less discretionary is a good idea.”
Confusing signal
At the same time, there are concerns that the combination of Powell and Taylor atop the world’s most powerful central bank could send a confusing signal to markets.
It is unclear whether Trump, who has criticized Yellen’s stewardship but also said on several occasions that he preferred rates to stay low, wants to dramatically alter the Fed’s direction.
Although he appears to be tilting to Powell and Taylor, in addition to Yellen the Republican president has interviewed his top economic adviser Gary Cohn and former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh for the Fed chief position.
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The Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation warned in a report distributed by email late on Friday that the nuclear, energy, aviation, water and critical manufacturing industries have been targeted along with government entities in attacks dating back to at least May.
The agencies warned that hackers had succeeded in compromising some targeted networks, but did not identify specific victims or describe any cases of sabotage.
The objective of the attackers is to compromise organizational networks with malicious emails and tainted websites to obtain credentials for accessing computer networks of their targets, the report said.
U.S. authorities have been monitoring the activity for months, which they initially detailed in a confidential June report first reported by Reuters. That document, which was privately distributed to firms at risk of attacks, described a narrower set of activity focusing on the nuclear, energy and critical manufacturing sectors.
Department of Homeland Security spokesman Scott McConnell declined to elaborate on the information in the report or say what prompted the government to go public with the information at this time.
“The technical alert provides recommendations to prevent and mitigate malicious cyber activity targeting multiple sectors and reiterated our commitment to remain vigilant for new threats,” he said.
The FBI declined to comment on the report, which security researchers said described an escalation in targeting of infrastructure in Europe and the United States that had been described in recent reports from private firms, including Symantec Corp.
“This is very aggressive activity,” said Robert Lee, an expert in securing industrial networks.
Lee, chief executive of cyber-security firm Dragos, said the report appears to describe hackers working in the interests of the Russian government, though he declined to elaborate. Dragos is also monitoring other groups targeting infrastructure that appear to be aligned with China, Iran, North Korea, he said.
The hacking described in the government report is unlikely to result in dramatic attacks in the near term, Lee said, but he added that it is still troubling: “We don’t want our adversaries learning enough to be able to do things that are disruptive later.”
The report said that hackers have succeeded in infiltrating some targets, including at least one energy generator, and conducting reconnaissance on their networks. It was accompanied by six technical documents describing malware used in the attacks.
Homeland Security “has confidence that this campaign is still ongoing and threat actors are actively pursuing their objectives over a long-term campaign,” the report said.
The report said the attacker was the same as one described by Symantec in a September report that warned advanced hackers had penetrated the systems controlling operations of some U.S.
and European energy companies.
Symantec researcher Vikram Thakur said in an email that much of the contents of Friday’s report were previously known within the security community.
Cyber-security firm CrowdStrike said the technical indicators described in the report suggested the attacks were the work of a hacking group it calls Berserk Bear, which is affiliated with the Russian Federation and has targeted the energy, financial and transportation industries.
“We have not observed any destructive action by this actor,” CrowdStrike Vice President Adam Meyers said in an email.
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Turkey’s banking regulator urged the public on Saturday to ignore rumors about financial institutions, in an apparent dismissal of a report that some Turkish banks face billions of dollars of U.S. fines over alleged violations of Iran sanctions.
“It has been brought to the public’s attention that stories, that are rumors in nature, about our banks are not based on documents or facts, and should not be heeded,” the BDDK banking regulator said in a statement, adding that Turkey’s banks were functioning well.
The Haberturk newspaper on Saturday reported that six banks potentially face substantial fines, citing senior banking sources. It did not name the banks. One bank faces a penalty in excess of $5 billion, while the rest of the fines will be lower, it said.
Asked to comment, a spokesman for the U.S. Treasury, which is responsible for U.S. sanctions regimes, said only: “Treasury doesn’t telegraph intentions or prospective actions.”
Two senior Turkish economy officials told Reuters Turkey has not received any notice from Washington about such penalties, adding that U.S. regulators would normally inform the finance ministry’s financial crimes investigation board.
U.S. authorities have hit global banks with billions of dollars in fines over violations of sanctions with Iran and other countries in recent years.
The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump last week adopted a harsh new approach to Iran by refusing to certify its compliance with a nuclear deal struck with the United States and five other powers including Britain, France and Germany under his predecessor Barack Obama.
Trump argues the deal was too lenient and has effectively left its fate up to the U.S. Congress, which might try to modify it or bring back U.S. sanctions previously imposed on Iran.
Last week, the U.S. Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Sigal Mandelker said Trump’s strategy involved placing additional sanctions on Tehran and that Washington had been “engaging our allies and partners” with the aim of denying funds to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The Haberturk report comes as relations between Washington and Ankara, which are NATO allies, have been strained by a series of diplomatic rows, prompting both countries to cut back issuing visas to each other’s citizens.
U.S. prosecutors last month charged a former Turkish economy minister and the ex-head of a state-owned bank with conspiring to violate Iran sanctions by illegally moving hundreds of millions of dollars through the U.S. financial system on Tehran’s behalf.
President Erdogan has dismissed the charges as politically motivated, and tantamount to an attack on the Turkish Republic.
The charges stem from the case against Reza Zarrab, a wealthy Turkish-Iranian gold trader who was arrested in the United States over sanctions evasion last year. Erdogan has said U.S. authorities had “ulterior motives” in charging Zarrab, who has pleaded not guilty.
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Georgia Rep. Betty Price says her comments on people with HIV that ignited a national firestorm were “taken completely out of context.”
Price, the wife of former U.S. Health Secretary Tom Price, was in a legislative committee meeting Tuesday when she asked a state health official whether people with HIV could legally be quarantined.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports Price said Saturday that she was just being “provocative.”
She said a health official had presented that Georgia is second only to Louisiana in the rate of new infections. Part of the reason is that more than a third of Georgians with HIV are not receiving care for it. She said that’s what sparked her “rhetorical” comments.
“I do not support a quarantine in this public health challenge and dilemma of undertreated HIV patients,” Price said in a statement. “I do, however, wish to light a fire under all of us with responsibility in the public health arena _ a fire that will result in resolve and commitment to ensure that all of our fellow citizens with HIV will receive, and adhere to, a treatment regimen that will enhance their quality of life and protect the health of the public. I look forward to continuing to work with all to accomplish this goal.”
Price, a Republican whose district includes parts of Atlanta’s northern suburbs, asked the head of the Georgia Department of Public Health’s HIV Epidemiology Section about stopping the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
“What are we legally able to do? I don’t want to say the quarantine word, but I guess I just said it,” Price can be seen asking the official, Dr. Pascale Wortley, in a video of the study committee meeting on barriers to adequate health care.
“Is there an ability, since I would guess that public dollars are expended heavily in prophylaxis and treatment of this condition, so we have a public interest in curtailing the spread,” she continued. “Are there any methods, legally, that we could do that would curtail the spread?”
Like her husband, who resigned last month as Health and Human Services secretary after an outcry over his use of costly private planes for official travel, Betty Price is a doctor. Her legislative biography says she worked as an anesthesiologist for more than two decades, served on the boards of the Medical Association of Atlanta and the Medical Association of Georgia and is a past president of the American Medical Women’s Association in Atlanta.
In 2015, Georgia ranked fifth highest in the country for the number of adults and adolescents living with HIV, according to a fact sheet on the state’s Department of Public Health website. The total number of people living with HIV infection in Georgia on Dec. 31 of that year was 54,574 and nearly two-thirds of them lived in the Atlanta metro area.
Project Q Atlanta, a website serving the city’s gay community, was the first to report Price’s comments.
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Hong Kong’s last remaining stock market floor traders are taking their final orders as the exchange prepares to shut its trading hall.
The bourse’s operator, Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing, says it will close the trading hall by the end of the month and turn the space into a showcase for the city’s financial markets.
Yip Wing-keung, a trading manager at brokerage Christfund Securities, donned his red trading jacket for the last time Friday, his final day on the floor. He and the other few floor traders left have been moving out ahead of the closure.
Computerized trading
The shutdown marks the end of an era for the stock market, which symbolized the city’s ascent as an Asian finance hub. Activity on the floor, one of a few such venues left worldwide, dwindled as stock dealing became fully computerized.
“I feel sadness and regret,” said Yip, who has been a floor trader since the hall was opened in 1986 after four previous exchanges were merged. “Hong Kong is one of the world’s financial centers, but if we don’t have the stock market trading hall, it will be a little sorrowful. This is my own individual reflection.”
Yip said the floor traders resisted the closure. They sent a protest letter to the government but it was in vain.
“We wrote it but were overruled,” he said. “We can’t stop the times from changing.”
Peers disappearing, too
Hong Kong’s stock exchange, Asia’s third biggest by volume, follows other global peers like Tokyo, Singapore and London that have eliminated their trading floors.
In the U.S., floor traders at the New York Stock Exchange still provide the backdrop for financial TV news reports and bell-ringing ceremonies. But Chicago and New York commodity futures trading pits, where traders used old-fashioned “open outcry” techniques, have shut in recent years as volume fell to 1 percent of the total.
Hong Kong Exchanges stopped updating stats for floor trading in 2014, when it accounted for less than 1 percent of monthly turnover.
From 900 desks to 62
In the 1980s and 1990s the hall housed more than 900 trading desks. The exchange’s most recent count showed only 62 dealing desks were leased, with about 30 traders showing up on an average day. On a visit to the hall this week, only about seven traders could be seen.
Back in its heyday, floor trading was computer-assisted but dealers still needed to talk to each other to complete transactions, either by phone or in person, depending on how far away they sat from each other, Yip said.
“If they were too far you had to use the internal phone line, but if you couldn’t get through, you had to run over to them,” he said. “So you saw lots of people running back and forth.”
These days, Yip just punches orders into his computer.
“Now it’s more comfortable” but relationships with other traders are not as good as they used to be, Yip said.
He doesn’t look forward to returning to his head office.
“It won’t be so free,” he said.
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Parents of small children have long been hearing about the perils of “screen time.” And with more screens, and new technologies such as Amazon’s Echo speaker, the message is getting louder.
And while plenty of parents are feeling guilty about it, some experts say it might be time to relax a little.
Go ahead and hand your kid a gadget now and then to cook dinner or get some work done. Not all kids can entertain themselves quietly, especially when they are young. Try that, and see how long it takes your toddler to start fishing a banana peel out of the overflowing trash can.
“I know I should limit my kid’s screen time a lot, but there is reality,” said Dorothy Jean Chang, who works for a tech company in New York and has a 2-year-old son. When she needs to work or finds her son awake too early, “it’s the best, easiest way to keep him occupied and quiet.”
Screen time, she says, “definitely happens more often than I like to admit.”
She’s not alone. Common Sense Media, a nonprofit group focused on kids’ use of media and technology, said in a report Thursday that kids ages 8 and younger average about 2 hours and 19 minutes with screens every day at home. That’s about the same as in 2011, though it’s up from an hour and a half in 2013, the last time the survey was conducted, when smartphones were not yet ubiquitous but TV watching was on the decline.
While the overall numbers have held steady in recent years, kids are shifting to mobile devices and other new technologies, just as their parents are. The survey found that kids spend an average of 48 minutes a day on mobile devices, up from 15 minutes in 2013. Kids are also getting exposed to voice-activated assistants, virtual reality and internet-connected toys, for which few guidelines exist because they are so new.
Mixed message
Some parents and experts worry that screens are taking time away from exercise and learning. But studies are inconclusive.
The economist Emily Oster said studies have found that kids who watch a lot of TV tend to be poorer, belong to minority groups and have parents with less education, all factors that contribute to higher levels of obesity and lower test scores. For that reason, it’s “difficult to draw strong conclusions about the effects of television from this research,” Oster wrote in 2015.
In fact, the Common Sense survey found that kids whose parents have higher incomes and education spend “substantially less time” with screens than other children. The gap was larger in 2017 than in previous years.
Rules relaxed
For more than a quarter century, the American Academy of Pediatrics held that kids under 2 should not be exposed to screens at all, and older kids should have strict limits. The rules have relaxed, such that video calls with grandma are OK, though “entertainment” television still isn’t. Even so, guidelines still feel out of touch for many parents who use screens of various sizes to preserve their sanity and get things done.
Jen Bjorem, a pediatric speech pathologist in Leawood, Kansas, said that while it’s “quite unrealistic” for many families to totally do away with screen time, balance is key.
“Screen time can be a relief for many parents during times of high stress or just needing a break,” she said.
Moderation
Bjorem recommends using “visual schedules” that toddlers can understand to set limits. Instead of words, these schedules have images — dinner, bed time, reading or TV time, for example.
Another idea for toddlers? “Sensory bins,” or plastic tubs filled with beads, dry pasta and other stuff kids can play around with and, ideally, be just as absorbed as in mobile app or an episode of “Elmo.”
Of course, some kids will play with these carefully crafted, Pinterest-worthy bins for only a few minutes. Then they might start throwing beans and pasta all over your living room. So you clean up, put away the bins and turn on the TV.
In an interview, Oster said that while screen time “is probably not as good for your kid as high-quality engagement” with parents, such engagement is probably not something we can give our kids all the time anyway.
“Sometimes you just need them to watch a little bit of TV because you have to do something, or you need (it) to be a better parent,” Oster said.
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A California judge on Friday threw out a $417 million verdict against Johnson & Johnson in a lawsuit by a woman who claimed she developed ovarian cancer after using its talc-based products like Johnson’s Baby Powder for feminine hygiene.
The ruling by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Maren Nelson marked the latest setback facing women and family members who accuse J&J of not adequately warning consumers about the cancer risks of its talc-based products.
The decision followed a jury’s decision in August to hit J&J with the largest verdict to date in the litigation, awarding California resident Eva Echeverria $70 million in compensatory damages and $347 million in punitive damages.
New trial
Nelson on Friday reversed the jury verdict and granted J&J’s request for a new trial. Nelson said the August trial was underpinned by errors and insufficient evidence on both sides, culminating in excessive damages.
Mark Robinson, who represented the woman in her lawsuit, in a statement said he would file an appeal immediately.
“We will continue to fight on behalf of all women who have been impacted by this dangerous product,” he said.
J&J in a statement said it was pleased with the verdict, adding that it will continue to defend itself in additional trials.
The judge added that there also had been misconduct of the jury during the trial.
J&J said declarations by two jurors after the trial showed that three members of the 12-person jury who voted against finding the company liable were improperly excluded from determining damages.
Nearly 5,000 plaintiffs
J&J says it faces lawsuits by 4,800 plaintiffs nationally asserting talc-related claims. Many of those cases are in California, where Echeverria’s case was the first to go to trial, and in Missouri, where J&J has faced five trials.
The Missouri litigation led to four verdicts against J&J in which juries issued verdicts totaling $307 million. The company has won one trial.
But the Missouri cases, which have largely been brought by out-of-state plaintiffs, have faced jurisdictional questions after the Supreme Court issued a ruling in June that limited where personal injury lawsuits could be filed.
On Tuesday, a Missouri appellate court threw out a $72 million verdict by a jury in February 2016 to the family of a deceased Alabama woman after ruling the case should not have been tried in St. Louis.
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Running 1,300 kilometers over the world’s highest mountain pass, the “Friendship,” or Karakoram, Highway is evidence of China’s willingness to spend big as a contributor to global development.
Costing tens of billions of dollars, the road links western China with Pakistan, part of Beijing’s “One Belt One Road” Initiative, which seeks to rekindle ancient Silk Road trade routes linking China with Europe and Africa and is a central tenet of President Xi Jinping’s leadership, said professor Steve Tsang of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.
“The government is committed to do whatever it can to make sure that it is successful,” Tsang said. “So a lot more money and resources will be put into it to support that.”
But figures show that since the Karakoram Highway was built, Pakistani exports to China have fallen while imports have increased, raising concern China’s new Silk Road could become a one-way street.
WATCH: China to Spend Billions More on ‘One Belt’ Initiative, but Campaigners Want Focus on Poverty
Address poverty
Stephen Gelb of the Overseas Development Institute says Beijing should focus its investments on global development goals.
“At the moment there’s a lot of focus on infrastructure and particularly transport, pipelines, that sort of thing, which don’t directly address poverty,” Gelb said. “And in fact there’s been in some cases some controversy about the social and environmental impacts. But I think the focus should be to address development, including poverty and related issues.”
Gliding above the choking traffic of the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, the Chinese-funded tramway system opened last year at a cost of half a billion dollars. Beijing says investments like this will boost African economies, thereby alleviating poverty.
Gelb says it is also part of China’s plan to become a dominant force on the global stage.
“It was affirmed in Xi Jinping’s speech (this week to China’s Communist Party Congress),” he said, “China’s very much about these days rules-based global governance, multilateralism, globalization.”
Visiting India this week, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson accused China of not always playing by those rules.
“China, while rising alongside India, has done so less responsibly, at times undermining the international, rules-based order,” Tillerson said.
Paying the piper
Recipient countries have welcomed Chinese investment, which sometimes comes with fewer conditions than Western aid, such as demands for democratic reform. But Tsang warns there could be a sting in the tail.
“The real issue will come when some of those countries, particularly in central Asia, have to pay back some of the loans that were acquired in the Belt and Road Initiative,” Tsang said. “And most of those countries will have problems paying back those loans.”
For now, Chinese investment continues to expand. Development campaigners say Beijing’s focus should be not only on ports and pipelines but on tackling poverty.
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Environmental pollution, from filthy air to contaminated water, kills at least 9 million people a year, according to a new study published by the medical journal The Lancet. Two entrepreneurs from Georgia have invented a wearable filter they say can produce clean, fresh air. Faith Lapidus reports.
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The Group of Seven industrialized nations threw their support behind a new technology industry alliance aimed at detecting and blunting online propaganda, saying Friday it had a “major role” to play in combating extremism on the internet.
G-7 interior ministers meeting in Italy invited representatives from Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter to a session Friday dedicated to the fight against terrorism. In a final communique, the ministers pressed the industry as a whole to do more.
“Internet companies will continue to take a proactive role and ensure decisive action in making their platforms more hostile to terrorism, and will support actions aimed at empowering civil society partners in the development of alternative narratives online,” the statement said.
Social media companies have long seen themselves as neutral platforms for other people to share information, and have traditionally been cautious about taking down objectionable material. But as social media platforms have increasingly been used to recruit jihadis, radicalize young people, share fake news and incite extremism, they have come under pressure from governments to take action.
Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube in June created the Global Internet Forum to Combat Terrorism, which got an early boost when British Prime Minister Theresa May used a speech to the U.N. General Assembly to applaud the initiative and demand internet companies develop technology to more quickly identify and remove terrorist content.
The alliance says it is committed to developing new content detection technology, to helping smaller companies combat extremism and to promoting “counter-speech,” content meant to blunt the impact of extremist material.
The G-7 endorsed the aims and pledged to work collaboratively across the industry to counter the “misuse of technology” by terrorist organizations.
Italian Interior Minister Marco Minniti said “a great alliance” had been formed between world governments and major internet providers. While stressing the internet has been an important tool for promoting freedom, “at the same time we all together have agreed that al-Qaida and Islamic State are enemies of our freedoms.”
Several ministers said that while the industry had made progress to quickly remove extremist content, more needed to be done, and faster.
“Our enemies are moving at the speed of a tweet, so we have to counter them just as quickly,” said acting U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke.
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President Salva Kiir opened South Sudan’s first-ever kidney hospital Thursday in Juba, calling it a breakthrough for the country’s medical care.
The facility — a welcome positive sign in conflict-torn South Sudan — is to provide free services to all kidney patients in the country, including foreigners who have been residing there for at least six months.
However, the government has not explained how it will pay for the services. Oil production is the country’s main revenue-producer, and output remains far below normal as the country endures its fourth year of a civil war.
The Al Cardinal group of companies, headed by investor Asraf Seed Ahmed, built the hospital, which boasts 10 dialysis machines and the capacity to treat at least 50 patients a day, although no transplants will be performed for the time being.
As Asraf turned over management of the hospital to the government Thursday, he called on Kiir to ensure that the hospital remains well-staffed and continues to provide free care to all patients.
“Mr. President, I want this center to be taken care of. If this center is managed well, it means citizens will get good services. I call upon all the organizations and foreign embassies here to work and provide for the other needs of South Sudanese citizens,” Asraf said.
At a ribbon-cutting ceremony, guests clapped and women ululated as Kiir said citizens can now receive “first-class treatment right here at home.”
“They will no longer have to travel abroad for diagnosis and long-term care,” he said.
Dr. Maker Isaac, director of Juba Teaching Hospital, said the new facility will receive 20 patients each month, but the overwhelming majority of kidney patients will be referred to other countries for treatment.
Isaac said a large number of South Sudanese patients suffered from suspected kidney diseases, many of whom died because there were no facilities available to treat or diagnose the disease.
“People die in front of us and we believe this death can be prevented simply by cleaning the blood of the patient, but we were unable to do anything. We just watch them die,” he told VOA’s South Sudan in Focus.
“Now, kidney patients can receive treatment, free of charge. This will make a very huge impact in the care of the patients in South Sudan,” Isaac said.
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A mass transit strike in the Philippines this week risks more disruptive collective action unless drivers and the government settle differences over costly upgrades to an aging yet iconic vehicle fleet, analysts say.
Thousands of drivers and operators of “jeepneys” went on strike Monday and Tuesday. The government called for two days off work and school to minimize disruption for commuters. Jeepneys are distinctly Philippine vehicles that are about the size of small buses and provide most urban mass transit.
President Rodrigo Duterte wants the aging fleet replaced by January 1 to combat air pollution. But operators may lack the money for vehicle replacements. Experts say a new strike could erupt without compromise by officials, disrupting already difficult commutes in major cities such as the capital, Manila.
“They have to meet in the middle,” said Jonathan Ravelas, chief market strategist with Banco de Oro UniBank in Metro Manila. “So, it’s more of a communication problem to probably try to address both areas, making government aware of certain things. They just have to do a compromise somewhere.”
Costly demand
The drivers went on strike to draw attention to the role of their smoke-belching but colorfully decorated vehicles. Some people carried flags and placards; a few blocked roads. Smaller strikes were held last month and in February for the same cause.
The Philippine government last year approved a modernization program to replace jeepneys older than 15 years with low-polluting vehicles, such as solar-powered ones.
It has neither offered financing to the operators nor addressed a likely increase in passenger fares on newer jeepneys, said Maria Ela Atienza, political science professor at the University of the Philippines Diliman.
“It seems like the government is already set to implement the phase-out of the jeepneys by January of next year,” Atienza said. “So it appears to disregard the livelihood of a mass of jeepney drivers who will lose their jobs. They won’t [have] money to pay for the new units, so many of them will be jobless.”
A political camp called Piston Partylist is speaking out for drivers’ interests in the legislature, adding a political element to the dispute. Experts expect more strikes over the next two months unless drivers reach a deal with the government.
Cultural icon
Jeepneys emerged after U.S. colonization of the Philippines ended in 1946. In much of the country, passengers can hail them from any roadside. They pay according to distance traveled, sometimes as little as 14 cents (seven pesos). Passengers normally sit on two long benches facing each other in a pickup truck-style bed covered with a roof. Passengers help one another pass fares up to the driver and pass back any change.
Operators often paint the vehicles in their own style and name them after women or religious figures, making the vehicles a hallmark of Philippine culture.
In Philippine cities, jeepneys provide most of the local mass transit because of the lack of bus systems or wide-reaching commuter rail networks.
Reaching a compromise on vehicle replacement could be tough in today’s political climate, said Christian de Guzman, vice president and senior credit officer with Moody’s in Singapore. He cites a “heightened level of noise” and “confrontational politics” since Duterte took office in June last year.
“If you go to social media, there’s certainly a great degree of polarization that has happened over a fairly short amount of time,” de Guzman said. “Since Duterte has come in, there’s this ‘with-us-or-against-us’ type of mentality.”
Threat of more strikes
The strike earlier this week “barely affected the riding public,” the presidential office said on its website.
But repeated transit strikes or a prolonged one would eat away at commerce if people face trouble getting to work, analysts say. Low-paid commuters would also need to pay more for taxis or ride-sharing apps.
Participants in major events such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations leadership summit scheduled for Nov. 10 to 14 in Manila use private cars, leading to little disruption. If the summit coincides with a strike, delegates will find relatively little traffic in the typically gridlocked city.
“It’s sad to say, but if you ask me, traffic was tolerable,” Ravelas said, recounting the strike this week. “It just highlights the main problem, which is too many vehicles.”
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A malaria outbreak has killed at least four people at a refugee camp in northwestern Kenya, according to local residents and health officials.
Hundreds of people have come down with the infectious disease at the Kalobeyei refugee complex in Kenya’s Turkana County.
“Already four to six people have died due to malaria,” Galama Guyo, a health care professional at Kalobeyei, told VOA’s Horn of Africa service. “Weekly, we report more than 200 malaria cases, especially people with low body resistance [immunity].”
Health care providers do not have enough drugs to treat patients, and there is no major hospital in the area, so some patients have to travel to up to 30 kilometers for treatment, he said.
The type of malaria hitting the camps is plasmodium falciparum, one of four types common in the Horn of Africa, said Guyo.
The U.N. refugee agency is tracking the situation at Kalobeyei and the nearby town of Kakuma, says the agency’s communication director in Nairobi, Yvonne Ndege.
“Our health partners have mobilized some resources to ensure they procure enough drugs and diagnostic kits to treat the increased cases of malaria that we have seen in Kakuma and Kalobeyei,” she said. “UNHCR is also planning to provide additional drugs to help address the situation.”
Located in a very arid region, Kalobeyei hosts thousands of African immigrants, mostly from Ethiopia, Somalia and South Sudan.
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Kenya’s economy is expected to grow next year by 5 percent, down from a projected 6 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund. The slowdown is largely blamed on the political uncertainties related to the re-run presidential election scheduled for October 26. Mohammed Yusuf reports from Kisumu, an opposition stronghold in western Kenya.
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The World Health Organization reports pneumonic plague is continuing to spread at an alarming rate in urban areas of Madagascar and greater effort is needed to bring this deadly disease under control. Latest figures put the number of suspected cases at 1,153, including 94 deaths.
Health agencies are worried at how quickly this disease is spreading so early in Madagascar’s plague season, which runs from September to April. The disease usually infects some 400 people a year. But this year, with six more months to go, the number of suspected cases is nearly three times higher than normal. WHO Regional Emergency Director for Africa, Ibrahima Soce Fall, says the spread of the disease is faster because pneumonic plague, which is transmitted from person to person, has moved from the remote rural areas to congested urban areas. It is mainly found in the capital Antananarivo and the port city of Toamasina.
Nevertheless, Fall tells VOA he is confident WHO in coordination with the Ministry of Health and other agencies will be able to contain the disease in short order. He says WHO has provided enough antibiotics to treat 5,000 patients and to protect up to 100,000 people who may have been in contact with an infected person.
“This can be controlled relatively quickly if we manage to improve the contact tracing as we are doing right now,” said Fall. “So, with the teams who are already used to contact tracing and putting all contacts under antibiotic prophylaxis, we can prevent the disease. I am confident that with the strong team we have on the ground, in common with some partners coming and more health workers, we will be able to revert very quickly the trend.”
Fall cautions, though, it will be important to remain vigilant after transmission is over. He notes stopping the transmission of the plague does not mean the risk is gone. He says the virus is still in the country, and while people continue living in poor, unsanitary conditions, the disease is likely to recur.
Astronauts went spacewalking Friday to provide some necessary focus to the International Space Station’s robot arm.
The main job for commander Randy Bresnik and teacher-turned-astronaut Joe Acaba was to replace a blurry camera on the new robotic hand that was installed during a spacewalk two weeks ago. The two men were supposed to go spacewalking earlier this week, but NASA needed extra time to rustle up the repair plan.
Sharp focus is essential in order for the space station’s robot hand to capture an arriving supply ship. The next delivery is a few weeks away, prompting the quick camera swap-out.
Orbital ATK, one of NASA’s commercial shippers, plans to launch a cargo ship from Virginia on November 11.
Acaba was barely outside an hour when he had to replace one of his safety tethers, which keep him secured to the orbiting outpost and prevent him from floating away.
Mission Control noticed his red tether seemed frayed and worn and ordered Acaba to “remain put” with his good waist tether locked to the structure as Bresnik went to get him a spare.
Spacewalking astronauts always have more than one of these crucial lifelines in case one breaks. They also wear a jetpack in case all tethers fail and they need to fly back to the space station.
This was the third spacewalk in two weeks for the space station’s U.S. residents. Bresnik performed the first two with Mark Vande Hei.
As they ventured out, Bresnik noted they were flying over Puerto Rico.
“Get out of here,” replied Acaba, the first astronaut of Puerto Rican heritage.
Acaba’s parents were born there, and he still has family on the hurricane-ravaged island.
“There’s a whole line of people looking up and smiling today as you get ready to head out the door,” Bresnik said.
Friday’s spacewalk should be the last one for the year. Early next year, astronauts will replace the hand on the opposite side of the 58-foot robot arm, Canada’s main contribution to the space station. The original latching mechanisms are showing wear and tear since the arm’s launch in 2001.
The 250-mile-high complex is currently home to three Americans, two Russians and one Italian.
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When the new school year started in September, 16-year-old Aelina Pogosian couldn’t wait to tell her friends about the most interesting part of her summer vacation: her RISE internship, working three weeks in the biology lab at Montgomery College.
“A lot of the materials and machinery we used is not given at most high schools, which is really important for me to learn how to use these things,” she said. “And I got to learn a lot at the same time I was able to have a lot of fun. And I met some new people.”
Among those new people was Jennifer Sengbusch, instructional lab coordinator, who worked closely with Aelina.
“At first, working in the lab I had to go over safety rules with her to avoid any injury to herself,” Sengbusch said. “We also went through working with chemicals, making solutions, doing calculations. Then we progressed into doing more complicated things as measuring protein concentrations and doing DNA tests.”
And the internship wasn’t all inside a lab, it also included some animal husbandry experience with the lab’s snakes and tortoises.
Real interesting experiences
Aelina is one of more than 400 students from all of Montgomery County’s 25 high schools who took part in the RISE program in its first year. RISE stands for Real Interesting Summer Experience, and those experiences were offered at construction companies, police stations, marketing firms, fire stations and more. More than 140 businesses, government agencies and nonprofits offered to host the students for the paid internships.
Local activist Will Jawando founded the program and says it has two main goals.
“The first goal is to expose our students to career opportunities early on so they can inform their education or training after high school,” he said.
The second is boosting the local economy.
“We said there are 30,000 middle-skill-level jobs here in Montgomery County that are not filled,” Jawando said. “So how do we also expose them to that there are jobs here in the county that they could be doing in a year or two that pay well and are on career track? So it was also an economic development tool. So it not only benefits the students, but hopefully it benefits the county and the region, if they stay here, they become productive citizens and as taxpayers.”
Local government support
The program received partial funding from the Montgomery County Council. Councilman Craig Rice helped secure the money.
“All the time in government, there are always so many needs and so many things that are important, whether it’s our roads or our infrastructure, all the different types of programs that we provide as government, but it is really important to make sure that we’re providing for our future generation,” Rice said.
He stressed that providing high school students with real life career opportunities was a priority.
“It’s really something that if we’re going to be serious about being globally competitive, we’re going to be serious about providing a number of different options for our children, we’ve got to make sure that we put our money where our mouth is,” Rice added.
Active, curious and dedicated
Jennifer Sengbusch says RISE gave her a chance to work with high school students who may soon be applying to attend Montgomery College. She found them curious and eager to learn.
“I think high school students are more inquisitive” than college students, she observed, “the high school students really ask a lot of great questions.”
She was also pleased to find Aelina, engaged and prompt.
“I didn’t realize that she was arriving an hour early just so she would be on time, that she would be sitting on the end of the hallway and I glanced over and said, ‘What are you doing here?’ She said ‘I just didn’t want to be late.’”
After a successful start this summer, RISE participants and organizers hope the program will expand next year and inspire surrounding counties to offer similar Real Interesting Summer Experiences.
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The parliament of Australia’s second largest state passed legislation Friday to allow terminally ill patients to seek medical help to end their lives, a bill that is expected to act as a catalyst for the rest of the country to adopt similar laws.
Any resident of Victoria state older than 18, with a terminal illness and with less than 12 months to live can request a lethal dose of medication, the bill permits. Anyone that is too ill to administer the dosage can ask for a doctor to help.
Many countries have legalized euthanasia or physician-assisted deaths, including Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and some states in the United States.
Federal government opposed
But Australia’s federal government has opposed legalizing euthanasia even though the remote Northern Territory became the first jurisdiction in the world to do so in 1995.
The federal government enacted its own legislation to override the Northern Territory law in 1997 under rules allowed by the constitution. State law cannot be overridden.
The passage of the bill in Victoria is expected to herald assisted death legislation in other Australian states.
“It is a landmark moment. Other states are likely to follow. We have seen this in other jurisdictions and I expect once politicians see how the system works, they will adopt similar models,” said Ben White, director of the Australian Centre for Health Law Research at Queensland University of Technology.
Divisive issue
The issue has divided lawmakers and medicinal professionals.
Victorian premier Daniel Andrews introduced the bill after his father’s death from cancer in 2016.
An opponent of the legalization, Michael Gannon, president of the Australian Medical Association, which represents medical practitioners, said state law should not change because of the death of Andrews’ father. He later apologized for the comment.
Members of the state assembly debated the bill through the night in a 26-hour session that ended with approval by 47 votes to 37.
The legislation needs the approval of Victoria’s senate, though analysts expect it to pass into law.
The legislation will not come into effect for 18 months to allow time to properly implement the assisted dying process.
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