An international energy watchdog warns that the decline in global investment in the oil sector could lead to energy shortages when prices start to rebound. The International Energy Agency says energy investments have declined 20 percent in the past three years as oil profits fell. One analyst tells VOA that is a short-term recipe for long-term problems. Mil Arcega reports.
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In some parts of the world, the race is on to find the next generation of clean fuel. In the Netherlands, a group of students called Team Fast has developed a unique secret catalyst that can produce hydrogen fuel that is cheaper and cleaner than gasoline. VOA’s Kevin Enochs.
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The government of Peru’s President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski said on Thursday that it was firing its special counsel in a corruption probe of Brazilian builder Odebrecht, sparking accusations of interference.
Justice Minister Marisol Perez said she dismissed special attorney Katherine Ampuero for blocking Odebrecht’s sale of its irrigation company Olmos. Perez said the decision put thousands of jobs at risk and deprived the state of revenues it would have seized as payment for reparations under a new anti-graft law.
Ampuero argued that Odebrecht would have used the sale of Olmos to pay its creditors abroad instead of Peru, which the company denied.
“Trust in Ampuero was lost because she did not apply the law, and by not applying the law she created economic loss for the state,” Perez told reporters on Thursday.
The announcement put the Odebrecht graft probe in Peru under increased scrutiny and renewed tensions between Kuczynski’s year-old government and the opposition-controlled Congress, which has already pressured three of Kuczynski’s ministers to step down.
“The president should ask Perez to resign immediately,” Popular Force lawmaker Hector Becerril said in broadcast comments on local broadcaster RPP. “This is a government of lobbyists.”
Odebrecht has been offloading its assets as it faces at least $2.6 billion in fines and graft probes in several countries where it has admitted bribing officials. In Peru, the company has been negotiating a plea deal with the attorney general’s office in which Ampuero had taken part as the state’s representative.
Anti-corruption state attorney Julia Principe said she was fired for refusing to dismiss Ampuero and noted that Ampuero had asked the attorney general’s office in March to look into any links that Kuczynski might have had with Odebrecht.
“This situation is a clear interference by the executive branch,” Principe said in a news conference flanked by Ampuero.
Kuczynski’s office did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Kuczynski has denied knowing about or being involved in the $29 million in bribes that Odebrecht has said it paid to officials in Peru over a decade.
Last year Odebrecht said it agreed to sell Olmos to Brookfield Infrastructure Partners LP and Suez SA for an undisclosed sum.
The sale will remain blocked pending an appeals court’s decision on whether to allow it.
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They dove in, splashed around and blissfully floated in the murky river water.
Intrepid swimmers got a once-a-year chance to beat the summer heat with a dip in the once-notorious dirty water of Boston’s Charles River on Tuesday.
The annual “City Splash” is one of the few days a year the state permits public swimming on the city’s stretch of the 80-mile river, which gained notoriety in the Standells’ 1960s hit “Dirty Water.”
The event, now in its fifth year, spotlights the nonprofit Charles River Conservancy’s efforts to build a “swim park” — floating docks where swimmers can safely jump into the river without touching the hazardous bottom and where water quality would be regularly tested.
Nearly 300 people signed up to take the plunge.
“It felt refreshing and wonderful,” said Ira Hart, a Newton, Massachusetts, resident as he hopped out of the river, goggles in hand. “They used to talk about how it was toxic sludge and you’d glow if you came out of the Charles. Well I’m not glowing, at least not yet.”
Boston is among the cities hoping to follow the model of Copenhagen, Denmark, which opened the first of its floating harbor baths in the early 2000s. Paris opened public swimming areas in a once-polluted canal this week, and similar efforts are in the planning stages in New York, London, Berlin, Melbourne and elsewhere.
In Boston, the Charles River Conservancy still needs to raise several million dollars and garner approvals from state, federal and city agencies.
But S.J. Port, the group’s spokeswoman, said the biggest hurdle already has been overcome: The Charles is now among the cleanest urban rivers in the country.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced this month the river earned a “B” grade for water quality last year, meaning it met the standards for boating 86 percent of the time and 55 percent of the time for swimming. That’s a marked improvement from the “D” the Charles was given in 1995, when cleanup started in earnest, but down from 2015’s “B+” grade.
Here’s a sampling of where other efforts to reclaim urban rivers for swimming stand:
Portland, Oregon
The city partnered with a local civic group to entice residents to take a dip in the Willamette River this summer.
They opened the first official public beach with lifeguards on the river earlier this month. They’ve also launched a public awareness campaign and scheduled a range of water-centered events.
Among them was last weekend’s Big Float inner tube river parade that drew about 2,500 revelers.
London
A group of architects, designers and engineers have proposed a series of pools in the middle of the iconic River Thames, where river water would be constantly filtered.
Chris Romer-Lee, a lead organizer of the Thames Baths project, said the group aims to submit plans to local authorities by early 2018.
The group launched an online crowd-funding campaign last year that raised about $182,000 to refine their design but are working to secure almost $19.6 million in outside investment for the project itself.
New York
Four local artists and architects launched the idea for +Pool , a floating, filtered pool in the shape of a plus sign in 2010.
Since then, they’ve successfully tested a filtration system that removes bacteria without using chemicals, said Kara Meyer, deputy director for the nonprofit effort.
She said organizers also have raised nearly $2 million to continue developing the project, are exploring potential sites on the East and Hudson rivers and are preparing to seek necessary city approvals.
Melbourne, Australia
The nonprofit Yarra Swim Co. unveiled its concept for a floating pool on the city’s Yarra River at Australia’s Venice Biennale Exhibition last year.
Michael O’Neill, the effort’s co-founder, said the company will be reaching out to community groups and government agencies starting next month to get their feedback on what the Yarra Pools project should offer and to promote its broader vision for use of the river.
Berlin
The long-gestating Flussbad project calls for cleaning up a canal off the German capital’s Spree River for public bathing.
Barbara Schindler, a spokeswoman for the effort, said the idea has been around since the 1990s, but has reached notable milestones in recent years.
She said the organization completed a water quality study in 2015 and has received $4.6 million in government funding to hopefully turn the concept into reality.
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Sears will begin selling its appliances on Amazon.com, including smart appliances that can be synced with Amazon’s voice assistant, Alexa.
The announcement Thursday sent shares of Sears soaring almost 11 percent. The tie-up with the internet behemoth could give shares of the storied retailer one of its biggest one-day percentage gains ever.
Sears, which also owns Kmart, said that its Kenmore Smart appliances will be fully integrated with Amazon’s Alexa, allowing users to control things like air conditioners through voice commands.
“The launch of Kenmore products on Amazon.com will significantly expand the distribution and availability of the Kenmore brand in the U.S.,” Sears Chairman and CEO Edward Lampert said in a company release.
Sears bleeding money?
Sears has struggled with weak sales for years, and announced more store closings earlier this month, partly due to the emergence of Amazon.com and other internet operators. It said in March that there was “substantial doubt” it could continue as a business after years of bleeding money.
Neil Saunders, managing director of research firm GlobalData Retail, said it’s a win for Sears, putting its products where customers are shopping.
Sales at existing Sears stores, a key measure of a retailer’s health, have been in rapid retreat for years.
“Other channels and routes to market are needed,” Saunders said.
Lifeline for Sears
Many saw the agreement with Amazon.com as a lifeline for Sears, with the volume of trading company shares enormous on Thursday.
And the law of action-reaction is almost always visible when Amazon.com is in the mix.
Shares of other major retailers that sell appliances, Best Buy, Home Depot and Lowe’s, fell between 4 percent and 6 percent.
Sears will handle after-sale services
The agreement with Seattle-based Amazon goes beyond the point of sale for Sears. Also part of the deal is delivery, installation and the service work that comes with product warranties, which will be provided by Sears Home Services.
While Saunders doesn’t think the deal represents a big shift for the retail sector, he said that it does illustrate how retailers must adapt and offer goods through multiple channels if they want to thrive. He believes others are already scrambling to do so.
Shares of Sears Holdings Corp., based in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, just outside of Chicago, jumped 92 cents to close at $9.60.
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A pilot program that paid landowners in Uganda to not cut down trees was successful, according to researchers looking for ways to try to reduce carbon emissions.
The researchers used interviews, periodic inspections and satellite images to monitor forests around 121 villages over two years. In 60 villages, they offered landowners $28 every year for each hectare of forest they preserved.
Deforestation is responsible for about one-tenth of global carbon emissions, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, and leaving trees in place is one of the most cost-efficient options for capturing carbon. But it is hard to show it is effective.
“If you put up solar panels, you can say, ‘Ha! I put in those solar panels. Please give me my credits towards my target.’ If you slow deforestation … it’s harder to really know what impact you had,” co-author Seema Jayachandran, an economist at Northwestern University, told VOA.
Uganda deforestation
The study was conducted by researchers at Northwestern and a Dutch organization named Porticus. Uganda was an ideal location to attempt the program because between 2005-2010, the country had one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world, with a 2.7 percent loss each year.
Researchers wanted to address concerns that payments wouldn’t actually reduce deforestation, either because participants in the program wouldn’t have harvested trees anyway, they would just harvest more from other unprotected forest or they would quickly harvest immediately after the end of the program.
The study, published in the journal Science, found that there was less than half as much deforestation around villages in the program than around the control villages. Researchers found that villages in the payment program had preserved 5.5 more hectares of forestland than other villages.
And after the program ended, there was not a rush to cut down trees, so the benefits of the program lasted.
However, because the study was small, relative to the size of the national timber and charcoal markets, researchers were not able to see its effect on those markets. Without that information, they were not able to demonstrate that reduced deforestation in the study region didn’t lead to increased deforestation elsewhere.
Reasons for deforestation
Jayachandran said a program like this would do best if it was paired with efforts to address the reasons for deforestation. These could be helping people in cities get stoves, so they aren’t cooking with charcoal, or teaching farmers how to grow more food in less space, so they don’t need to clear as much forest for crop land.
The researchers hope that governments trying to meet their carbon emission targets under the 2015 Paris Agreement will consider paying poorer countries to reduce deforestation. The Paris accord on climate change aims to keep average world temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times.
Program was popular
Jayachandran told VOA that humanity can’t afford to ignore any opportunity to reduce carbon emissions.
The program was administered by the Chimpanzee Sanctuary and Wildlife Conservation Trust. The Chimpanzee trust talked to participants about other ways to make a livelihood from the forest such as bee keeping or growing mushrooms, and about the benefits of preserving forest land.
Lilly Ajarova, executive director of the trust, said the program was very popular with participants.
“The challenge we have at this point is that there has been no continuity,” Ajarova said. The program will need to be more long term in order for it to have “real economic benefits, not just for the people involved but for the whole nation.”
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Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk on Thursday said he had received “verbal” approval to start building a high-speed underground transport system linking New York and Washington that could cut travel time between the cities to about half an hour.
Musk, the chief executive of electric car maker Tesla Inc. and rocket company SpaceX, is seeking to revolutionize transportation by sending passengers and cargo packed into pods through an intercity system of giant vacuum tubes known as the “hyperloop.”
He recently started a project, the Boring Company, to build transport tunnels for the system, which he says would be far faster than current high-speed trains and use electromagnetic propulsion.
In tweets on Thursday, Musk said he had “Just received verbal govt approval for The Boring Company to build an underground NY-Phil-Balt-DC Hyperloop. NY-DC in 29 mins.”
Amtrak’s high-speed Acela train currently takes nearly three hours to cover the distance between the two cities, assuming no delays.
Without clarifying, Musk also tweeted that a first set of tunnels would be to “alleviate greater LA [Los Angeles] urban congestion,” adding that the company would “probably” do a loop from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and another in Texas.
“City center to city center in each case, with up to a dozen or more entry/exit elevators in each city,” he wrote.
Musk acknowledged there was still a “lot of work” to do before formal approval was granted, but said he was optimistic.
Signaling that Musk’s tweets may be premature, the press secretary for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted a reply: “This is news to City Hall.”
Last month, Musk tweeted that he had “promising conversations” about a tunnel network with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.
By traveling in vacuum tubes on magnetic cushions, hyperloop trains would avoid being slowed down by air pressure or the friction of wheels on rails, making them faster and cheaper to operate, supporters say. A number of startups have begun to develop the technology, despite concerns about the cost and practicality.
On its website, the Boring Company says its goal is to lower costs by a factor of 10 or more. Some tunneling projects today cost as much as $1 billion per mile, the company said.
In 2013, Musk said a hyperloop between Los Angeles and San Francisco would cost less than $6 billion and take seven to 10 years for completion.
Major infrastructure projects typically require complex approval from various levels of government and likely would cost billions of dollars.
President Donald Trump in March met with Musk, who raised the Boring Company idea then, White House officials said. Musk also talked about his plans to launch a mission to Mars.
White House National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn in April praised the idea of Musk using tunnels to speed rail transit on the densely populated East Coast of the United States and also to cut traffic congestion in Los Angeles.
In a statement, the White House said it had had “promising conversations to date” with Musk and was committed to “transformative infrastructure projects.”
The Boring Company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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European explorers had long speculated about the existence of an Arctic route that connected the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and would avoid the long journey around South America’s Cape Horn.
For centuries, able seafarers failed to find the Northwest Passage, among them John Cabot, Henry Hudson, Francis Drake and James Cook.
Harsh weather, thick ice and treacherous shallows forced many expeditions to turn back. Those that didn’t ended in disaster, such as the expedition led by British naval officer John Franklin in 1845.
Franklin’s men perished from scurvy, starvation and apparent lead poisoning from food tins, with some resorting to cannibalism toward the end. The wrecks of their formidable ships, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, were found in 2014 and 2016.
Rescue parties sent to find Franklin’s expedition made key discoveries about the passage’s maritime geography, eventually paving the way for the first successful transit.
In 1903, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and six other men set out in a tiny ship, the Gjoa. Sailing from east to west, they drew on the expertise of indigenous Inuit people to brave the dangerous conditions and reached Alaska in 1906.
The next recorded transit of the Northwest Passage, this time from west to east, was completed by the Canadian RCMP vessel St. Roch in 1942.
Over the years, there have been 410 recorded transits, mostly by Canadian icebreakers and small adventure yachts. The first cargo ship to achieve a transit was the SS Manhattan, a reinforced tanker accompanied by several icebreakers in 1969.
In 1984, the Lindblad Explorer became the first cruise ship to complete the passage, carrying 104 passengers on a trip from New York to the Japanese port of Yokohama. Thirty-two years later, the Crystal Serenity set a new record, carrying 1,100 cruise passengers through the passage at once.
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Ancient civilizations plowed themselves into oblivion, and modern agriculture risks doing it again, geologist David Montgomery says.
In his new book, Montgomery says a growing number of farmers are using techniques that can save their farms from slow death by erosion.
In Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life, Montgomery meets farmers who are building healthy soil and buffering themselves against climate change — and saving money while doing it — by practicing what is called conservation agriculture.
Experts worldwide are working to persuade farmers to reject thousands of years of agricultural tradition in order to save their soil.
Erosion of civilizations
Montgomery told VOA, while finishing his previous book, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, “It was very difficult to write the final chapter and not have it sound really depressing.”
Dirt describes how tillage, one of the oldest practices in agriculture, degraded farms and civilizations from Mesopotamia to 1930’s Dust Bowl America.
Farmers till the soil to control weeds and make planting easier, but exposed soil washes away in the rain and blows away in the wind, carrying with it the nutrients plants need to thrive.
And yet, most farmers worldwide still plow their soil and leave it bare in the off-season. Many plant the same crops over and over again. All three practices wear out the soil.
Growing a Revolution picks up where Dirt ends, with the promise of a relatively new kind of farming.
“Conservation agriculture flip[s] all three of those ideas on their head,” he said. “It’s a completely different philosophy to not till, to always have the ground covered with either a commercial crop or a cover crop, and to grow a much more diverse rotation.”
Trouble in tidy fields
Trey Hill of Maryland has not tilled his soybean field in years. The young crop peeks out from below waist-high brown stalks of what remains of last year’s cover crop, a mix of grains, legumes, radishes and more.
“If you don’t like your fields to look like a mess,” Hill said with a laugh, “it has to kind of grow on you. Yet, I have a lot of other owners and peers that are, like, ‘Wow, what you’re doing is really exciting.'”
A short drive away, in a neighbor’s conventionally tilled field, soybeans grow in neat and tidy lines on a clean slate of bare earth.
University of Maryland soil scientist Ray Weil sees signs of trouble. The lower leaves of the soybean plants are splashed with mud from a rainstorm two nights earlier.
“When it rained, that soil went flying,” Weil said. “When the soil goes flying, it goes running down the slope. That’s the first step in soil erosion.”
Just a few millimeters below the surface, he finds soybean roots growing sideways, unable to penetrate a layer of hard earth packed down by the effects of tillage. If it turns dry later in the summer, he said, “they’re going to be crying uncle for water.”
‘Farming ugly’
“When no-till started, they called it ‘farming ugly,'” Weil said.
Hill’s “ugly” field is pretty on the inside. The roots of the cover crop he planted last year held onto the soil and its precious nutrients through the winter. Legumes added nitrogen, a key fertilizer. Earthworms feasting on the decomposing plants dig tunnels in the earth. Those pores soak up rainfall like a sponge, and they provide paths for the roots of Hill’s soybeans to grow through.
Cushioning against droughts and downpours, these soils help Hill through the weather extremes that are becoming more frequent with climate change.
And Hill is saving money. Less tilling means paying for less tractor fuel. He buys less fertilizer because his cover crops feed the soil.
“It all means more income to the farmer,” Hill said.
Profits for big and small farms
Conservation agriculture is also working on small farms in the developing world.
“What surprised me was how profitable these techniques can be in both settings,” Montgomery said.
Montgomery visited Ghana, where traditional slash-and-burn farming is degrading the soil, but conservation agriculture is turning fields into food forests. Farmers raised multiple crops on the same field, keeping the ground covered year ’round.
“You would have, say, an overstory of plantains and an understory of peppers and cassava,” he said. “If I’d squinted and didn’t know better, I might have sworn I was in a jungle, but everything around me was food.”
The spread of conservation agriculture has been slow. The transition can take several years. Weeds can cut yields in that time. Equipment designed to work on bare earth may not operate on cover-cropped fields.
Developing world farmers, in particular, often remove the residues of one crop before planting the next, to feed livestock, thatch roofs, or use as cooking fuel.
“There’s lots of uses,” Weil said. “But the residues need to be left in the field, at least most of them, to feed the soil.”
“Lots of barriers to giving it a try,” he added. “But once you get going, it’s cheaper.”
Cheaper, soil-saving and climate-friendly, experts worldwide are helping farmers switch to conservation agriculture and consign the plow to the history books.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) reports a survey of 11 countries finds evidence that HIV drug resistance is growing, posing a potential threat to the prevention and treatment of AIDS.
According to the WHO, 36.7 million people are living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. More than half that number are on life-saving antiretroviral therapy.
In what it calls a wake-up call, the WHO says more than 10 percent of people starting antiretroviral therapy in six of the 11 countries surveyed in Africa, Asia and Latin America were resistant to the drugs. It warns this potentially could undermine progress in controlling and reducing the spread of this disease.
Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest number of HIV cases and accounts for nearly two-thirds of the global total of new HIV infections; but, the WHO coordinator for HIV treatment and care, Meg Doherty, told VOA other parts of the world, especially eastern Europe and central Asia, have some of the highest incidences of drug resistance.
She added some of the higher incidences are in places with the lowest amount of antiretroviral coverage.
“So, we know in most of Africa, in sub-Saharan Africa, that there is very good and the highest coverage of treatment. So, it is a good news story. But, once we have more people on therapy and more people who are potentially taking drugs that could alter the virus, the risk of this resistance can go up,” Doherty said.
The World Health Organization is issuing new guidelines to help countries address HIV drug resistance. It recommends countries monitor the quality of their treatment programs and as soon as resistance is detected, people should be switched to a different drug treatment regimen.
The U.N. agency warns increasing HIV drug resistance could lead to an additional 135,000 deaths and 105,000 new infections in the next five years if no action is taken. It projects the cost of HIV treatment could increase by $650 million during this time.
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A Chinese telecoms carrier said it had begun closing virtual private networks (VPNs) and other tools that can bypass the so-called Great Firewall, which state
authorities use to filter and block traffic between Chinese and overseas servers.
A spokesman for Guangzhou Huoyun Information Technology Ltd, which operates in around 20 cities across China, told Reuters the company received a directive from authorities to start blocking services from midday on Tuesday.
Enlisting telecom firms will extend China’s control of its cyberspace – which it believes should mimic real-world border controls and be subject to the same laws as sovereign states.
While the Great Firewall blocks access to overseas sites, much like a border control, the telecoms firms can filter and censor online access at a more granular level, in the home and on smartphones.
“The telcos have methods at their disposal that the Great Firewall may not,” said Philip Molter, Chief Technology Officer at Golden Frog, which operates VyprVPN, a popular VPN in China.
“Because these routers deal with far less traffic, they can block more aggressively using more resource intensive methods.”
The telecoms firms have taken up their new filtering roles under a law introduced in January, and set to come into full effect next March. Experts say this could lead to increasingly targeted attacks on VPNs, one of the few tools Chinese can use to access overseas internet services.
A member of China-based anti-censorship site GreatFire.org, who goes by the pseudonym of Charlie Smith, said the authorities were shifting the responsibility to the telecoms firms.
“This is a major step towards closing whatever windows are still left open,” he said.
New attacks
The latest moves come after dozens of popular China-based VPNs have been shut down in recent weeks, and there have been rolling attacks on overseas VPNs.
This week, users also reported partial blocks and delays in the encrypted messaging app WhatsApp, the latest western social media tool to be hit. And researchers found that messages related to Liu Xiaobo, a dissident and Nobel laureate who died
from cancer in custody last week, disappeared from local messaging apps.
VPN services say they are bracing for further blocks in the run-up to this autumn’s Communist Party Congress.
President Xi Jinping, who has overseen a marked sharpening of China’s cyberspace controls, including tough new data surveillance and censorship rules, is expected to consolidate his hold on power at the Congress, which takes place every five years.
The January regulations make telecoms providers and other internet service providers (ISPs) liable for filtering and blocking unlawful network tools, according to the Ministry of Information Industry and Technology (MIIT).
Beyond VPNs, experts say the telecoms firms could potentially bar a range of services, and even prevent mobile apps from being installed.
“Much of the usage we see from China is via mobile devices, so limitations on this kind of functionality would hit a large number of Chinese,” said Golden Frog’s Molter.
Yet, despite the ambitious plans, the authorities will likely struggle to put up the blanket safeguards necessary to cripple foreign VPNs by March, experts say.
“There’s been an ongoing game of cat-and-mouse with China and VPNs … we’re optimistic that VPNs will continue to be accessible from China for the foreseeable future,” said a spokesman for ExpressVPN, noting its user numbers continue to grow in China.
Small businesses
While VPNs with foreign servers, including VyprVPN and ExpressVPN, play cat-and-mouse with regulators, quickly patching blocks and developing workarounds, small business owners say they have been hard hit by the rapid loss of local VPNs.
“Our small logistics business has just imploded”, said one business owner on the Weibo microblogging site, adding she could no longer access foreign sites despite trying several new VPNs.
Large numbers of free or low-cost VPN services flourished in Chinese app stores in the 18 months or so prior to the recent blocks.
“The ministry says we must apply for a license … and we have to buy Chinese services,” one person operating a small online media site told Reuters, asking not to be named. “If the website touches on social and political news, we have to hand over the platform account passwords. Of course, if we still had a VPN this wouldn’t be the case.”
The MIIT did not respond to a request for comment. It said last week that the new measures were not intended to harm business interests, and has previously said it would allow businesses to operate VPNs licensed by the government.
“These newest measures are one more hurdle for Chinese users to jump, in what is turning out to be an extremely long steeplechase,” said GreatFire.org’s Smith.
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China unveiled a national artificial intelligence (AI) development plan on Thursday, laying out its ambitions to build world-leading technology amid heightened international friction over applications of AI in military technology.
The value of the country’s core AI industries will exceed 150 billion yuan ($22.15 billion) by 2020 and 400 billion yuan ($59.07 billion) by 2025, the State Council said in a notice on Thursday.
“The situation with China on national security and international competition is complex… we must take initiative to firmly grasp this new stage of development for artificial intelligence and create a new competitive edge,” it said.
The plan comes as the United States is poised to bolster its scrutiny of investments, including artificial intelligence, over fears that countries including China could access technology of strategic military importance.
It follows a similar national AI development plan released by the U.S. in October last year.
The report says China aims to catch up to global leaders by rectifying existing issues including a lack of high-end computer chips and equipment, software and trained personnel.
It outlines strategic plans to strengthen links between private firms, research bodies and military bodies to promote mutual development in AI.
It also says it will increase the role of government in guiding development of AI with policy support and market regulation as well as developing AI safety assessments and control capabilities.
China has already begun investing heavily in artificial intelligence technology, including a mix of private and state-backed initiatives.
Several top Chinese firms have established research bases in the U.S., including Baidu Inc. and Tencent Holdings Ltd.
This year AI was named as a strategic technology by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in an annual report that lays out the most important leadership priorities.
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Many people enjoy a cup of coffee, especially in the morning. Turns out, that is giving them a good start – not just to their day – but to their lives. A new study indicates that people who drink at least three cups of coffee each day appear to live longer than those who don’t. In the largest study on coffee drinking so far, scientists examined data from 500,000 healthy people over the age of 35 in 10 European countries. VOA’s Deborah Block has more.
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The achievement gap is defined as the persistently low scores disadvantaged children get on tests when compared to their middle and upper class peers. It has economic and racial components, and educators have been battling to solve the problem for decades. Some research done with low-income kids in India is providing some clues that may help close the gap. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Australia is contributing funds to help Sri Lanka combat its worst outbreak of dengue fever, which has claimed 250 lives and infected nearly 100,000 people so far this year in the Indian Ocean island nation.
Visiting Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said Wednesday night that Australia is giving $475,000 Australian (US $377,000) to the World Health Organization to implement immediate dengue prevention, management and eradication programs in Sri Lanka.
Sri Lanka’s hospitals are overcrowded with patients, and the government has deployed soldiers, police and health officials to inspect houses and clear rotting garbage, stagnant water pools and other potential mosquito-breeding grounds across the country. Health officials blamed the public for their failure to clear puddles and piles of trash after last month’s heavy monsoon rains.
The number of infections nationwide is 38 percent higher than last year, when 55,150 people were diagnosed with dengue and 97 died, according to the Health Ministry. Cases were concentrated around the main city of Colombo, though they were occurring across the tropical island nation.
Bishop is on a two-day visit and will meet Thursday with government leaders.
She said Australia is offering an additional $1 million (US $795,000) for a research partnership between Australia’s Monash University and Sri Lanka’s Health Ministry to test the introduction of naturally occurring Wolbachia bacteria to eradicate dengue fever from Sri Lanka.
She said the bacteria “prevent transmission of dengue virus between humans’’ and that it has shown success during the last six years in countries such as Brazil, Columbia, Australia, India, Vietnam and Indonesia where it was piloted.
The bacteria have the ability to block other mosquito-borne diseases such as Zika and Chikungunya, the Australian embassy said in a statement.
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India’s top builders have pledged to make at least a fifth of their new housing developments sustainable by 2022, as the country looks to tap sectors other than renewable energy to meet its ambitious climate goals.
The campaign is led by the Sustainable Housing Leadership Consortium (SHLC) comprising builders Godrej Properties, Mahindra Lifespaces, Shapoorji Pallonji, Tata Housing and VBHC Value Homes. It is backed by the Ministry of Housing.
Builders will use mainly local and recycled material, and design homes that conserve water and electricity and make best use of natural light and wind patterns, while also pursuing more energy-efficient methods of construction.
“The construction industry has one of the biggest carbon footprints, so it’s really important for us to take action to minimize the impact,” said Jainin Desai, head of design and sustainability at developer Mahindra Lifespaces.
“This initiative pushes us to incorporate sustainability right from the selection of the site to the design, the use of materials and in increasing awareness in the industry, as well as among our clients,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
India is the world’s third-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
As a signatory to the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, India is committed to reducing its carbon emissions by a third by 2030.
It is doing so with tougher emission norms, more electric vehicles and giant solar power plants to replace energy generated by coal.
The real-estate sector is responsible for nearly a quarter of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions. Those emissions come mainly from energy-intensive processes in making construction materials such as steel, cement and bricks.
As India’s economy grows at a fast clip, demand for homes, offices, roads, airports and factories is also rising. The demand for homes is particularly acute: in urban areas alone, there is a shortage of about 20 million homes.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made affordable housing a priority, with incentives such as subsidized loans to meet a 2022 target of “Housing for All.” This has led to a boom in construction across the country.
The effort by SHLC – an initiative of the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation under the eco-cities program of the European Union – will add 110 million sq ft of green housing by 2020.
Green homes the norm?
While “green” homes were built at a premium earlier and therefore had a niche appeal, newer technologies and greater demand have narrowed the cost differential between them and traditional housing to “almost nothing” now, Desai said.
Developers and buyers are also able to tap financing more easily for sustainable projects, as banks and investors look beyond renewable energy. The SHLC campaign is backed by HDFC Bank and PNB Housing Finance.
“India has huge funding requirements in … sustainable housing, metro rail networks, urban waste management and infrastructure development, that can be met through green financing options,” said Sanjeev Jha, India head of Global Capital Markets at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
India, a relatively new player to green financing, has issued nearly $4.5 billion worth of green bonds so far, he said.
For homeowners, green homes will create savings of 198 million kWh per year in electricity consumption, and 108 billion liters in water savings, according to SHLC.
This will reduce India’s carbon footprint by approximately 0.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, it estimates.
“Our long-term goal is to make green homes 100 percent of the industry portfolio,” Desai said. “We see green homes becoming the default choice.”
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While Western drivers like the “new car smell” of a vehicle fresh off the production line, Chinese would rather their cars didn’t smell of anything — a cultural divide that’s testing carmakers seeking an edge to revive sales in the world’s biggest auto market.
At Ford Motor Co., for example, 18 smell assessors, dubbed “golden noses,” at its research plant outside the eastern city of Nanjing test the smell of each material that goes inside a Ford car to be sold in China and around Asia.
The China smell test isn’t unique, but illustrates the lengths automakers go to to attract buyers in markets where consumer attitudes vary widely.
Smell matters
“In North America, people want a new car smell and will even buy a ‘new car’ spray to make older cars feel new and fresh. In China it’s the opposite,” says Andy Pan, supervisor for material engineering at the Ford facility, which employs around 2,300 people.
The smell of a new car in China can have an outsized effect.
A J.D. Power report last year showed that unpleasant car smells were the top concern for Chinese drivers, ahead of engine issues, road noise or fuel consumption.
The smell assessors at Ford, whose China sales are down 7 percent this year, carry out 300 tests a year, a third more than their counterparts in Europe. They rate the odor of all materials used in a car from “not perceptible” to “extremely disturbing.”
Pungent materials, from carpets to seat covers and steering wheels, are noted as smelling of anything from “burnt tire” and “bad meat” to “moth balls” or “dirty socks”. Some are sent back to the supplier.
Seats for Ford cars in China are stored in perforated cloth bags to keep them ventilated before being installed, as opposed to plastic wrapping in the U.S. market where consumers are less concerned about chemical smells.
“The smell inside the car can often be pretty pungent,” said Tom Lin, a 24-year-old high-school teacher in Zhejiang province, who bought a local Roewe brand car last October. He said there was still a bit of an odor six months later.
“With the next car I buy, I’m going to take more care to check out any odd smells,” he said.
Looking for an edge
To be sure, smell is just one factor for automakers to get right in China, where picky buyers are always looking for fresh car models and Beijing is making a big drive toward new energy vehicles.
In a slower market — consultancy IHS forecasts vehicle sales will slip slightly this year — firms are looking for an extra edge to appeal to consumers, beyond price discounts, says IHS analyst James Chao.
Local rivals Geely Automobile and BYD Co. Ltd. tout their in-car air filters to protect drivers from China’s harmful air pollution, and BMW says it is adding larger touch screens and tweaking colors to appeal to Chinese buyers.
Concern about chemicals, pollution
Smell is key though, reflecting a wider concern in China about chemicals and pollution.
“When I lived in the United States I might look at the suspension or the engine,” said Don Yu, China general manager at CGT, which makes materials to cover car seats and dashboards for General Motors, Volkswagen and Ford.
“In China, though, people open the car and sit inside, if the smell isn’t good enough they think it will jeopardize their health.”
For Ford’s “golden noses” that means a strict routine.
Testers undergo a tough selection process, proving themselves on blind smell tests before being chosen.
“We have to have very healthy habits; we can’t smoke, we can’t drink,” says one of the team, 33-year-old Amy Han, adding she avoids spicy food and doesn’t wear nail polish, strong perfume or even a leather jacket to keep her smell sense sharp.
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Venezuela’s severe economic crisis will worsen if President Nicolas Maduro presses ahead with a controversial new congress that would further undermine investor confidence in the OPEC nation, the head of the country’s biggest business guild said.
Despite months of protests by the majority-backed opposition and widespread international condemnation, the ruling Socialist Party is holding a vote on July 30 to set up a legislative superbody known as a Constituent Assembly.
The assembly would have powers to rewrite the constitution and abolish the existing opposition-controlled legislature in what foes fear would enshrine a leftist dictatorship.
“What country in the world has a successful socialist model? None!” Carlos Larrazabal, 60, president of Fedecamaras told Reuters on Tuesday during its annual meeting in the sweltering western city of Maracaibo.
“In a constituent process, with the characteristics that are being proposed, there is no legal certainty and that does not attract investment but rather scares it away,” added the U.S-educated economist.
Fedecamaras has long been at odds with the government after
a former head briefly became interim president in a 2002 coup against late socialist leader Hugo Chavez.
Though officials have given few details on what the Constituent Assembly – which the opposition is boycotting – might do, investors fear its legal and economic ramifications.
Comments by a Socialist Party candidate that the assembly could rewrite parts of the constitution that allow joint ventures with foreign companies have spooked some in the country’s oil sector – though state energy company PDVSA later reassured partners that would not happen.
The political showdown comes amid a brutal economic crisis: inflation is in triple digits, the currency has fallen 99 percent against the dollar since Maduro was elected in 2013, and millions are struggling with food shortages.
A Reuters poll of economists on Wednesday forecast Venezuela would shrink 6 percent this year and another 3.0 percent in 2018.
“The forecasts are catastrophic. We have no positive expectations,” Maria Uzcategui, president of retailers’ guild Consecomercio, told Reuters at the Maracaibo conference.
‘Real Solutions’
Consecomercio estimates almost a million jobs in the private sector were lost in the last 18 months, and 1,150 businesses looted amid this year’s violent anti-Maduro protests.
Venezuela’s private sector wants to see an end to currency controls, enacted by Chavez in 2003 to curb capital flight, and price controls, which crimp production.
“Those would be the real solutions,” said Uzcategui.
Some 100 people have died in nearly four months of anti-Maduro unrest. On Sunday, Venezuela’s opposition capitalized on anger and held an unofficial vote in which they said 7.5 million participated and 98 percent rejected the Constituent Assembly.
The campaign is due to escalate on Thursday with a national strike, recalling events prior to a short-lived coup against former leader Chavez in 2002.
Fedecamaras’ line on the strike is that each employer and employee must decide for themselves whether to follow the opposition call for a 24-hour shutdown.
Maduro says the July 30 vote is necessary to achieve peace in the volatile South American nation, and also defeat an “economic war” being waged against his government by the opposition and Washington.
“Here, there is no economic war… They’ve expropriated more than 1,500 businesses, taken more than 5.2 million hectares… The economic war is in fact against all these companies that were private that now don’t produce!” said Larrazabal.
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An underwater robot entered a badly damaged reactor at Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant Wednesday, capturing images of the impact of its meltdown, including key structures that were torn and knocked out of place.
Plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. said the robot, nicknamed “the Little Sunfish,” successfully completed the day’s work inside the primary containment vessel of the Unit 3 reactor at Fukushima, which was destroyed by a massive March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
TEPCO spokesman Takahiro Kimoto praised the work, saying the robot captured views of the underwater damage that had not been previously seen. However, the images contained no obvious sign of the melted nuclear fuel that researchers hope to locate, he said.
The robot was left inside the reactor near a structure called the pedestal, and is expected to go deeper inside for a fuller investigation Friday in hopes of finding the melted fuel.
“The damage to the structures was caused by the melted fuel or its heat,” Kimoto told a late-night news conference held nine hours after the probe ended its exploration earlier in the day.
‘The Little Sunfish’
The robot, about the size of a loaf of bread, is equipped with lights, maneuvers with five propellers and collects data with two cameras and a dosimeter. It is controlled remotely by a group of four operators.
The robot was co-developed by Toshiba Corp., the electronics and energy company charged with helping clean up the plant, and the International Research Institute for Nuclear Decommissioning, a government-funded consortium.
It was on a mission to study the damage and find the fuel that experts say has melted, breached the core and mostly fallen to the bottom of the primary containment chamber, where it has been submerged by highly radioactive water as deep as 6 meters (20 feet).
The robot discovered that a grate platform that is supposed to be below the reactor core was missing and apparently was knocked down by melted fuel and other materials that fell from above, and that parts of a safety system called a control rod drive were also missing.
Robots key to mothballing plant
Remote-controlled robots are key to the decadeslong decommissioning of the damaged plant, but super-high levels of radiation and structural damage have hampered earlier probes at two other reactors at the plant.
Japanese officials say they want to determine preliminary methods for removing the melted nuclear fuel this summer and start work in 2021.
Scientists need to know the fuel’s exact location and understand the structural damage in each of the three wrecked reactors to work out the safest and most efficient ways to remove the fuel.
Two earlier robots failed
Robots tested earlier became stuck inside the two other reactors. A scorpion-shaped robot’s crawling function failed and it was left inside the plant’s Unit 2 containment vessel. A snake-shaped robot designed to clear debris for the scorpion probe was removed after two hours when its cameras failed because of radiation levels five times higher than anticipated.
The robot used Wednesday was designed to tolerate radiation of up to 200 sieverts, a level that can kill humans instantly.
Kimoto said the robot showed that the Unit 3 reactor chamber was “clearly more severely damaged” than Unit 2, which was explored by the scorpion probe.
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More than nine billion tons of plastic has been produced since 1950 with most of it discarded in landfills or the environment, hurting ecosystems and human health, according to the first major global analysis of mass-produced plastics.
Nearly 80 percent of this plastic ended up in landfills or the environment and production in increasing quickly, researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, said in the study published on Wednesday.
Less than 10 percent was recycled and about 12 percent was incinerated.
“If you spread all of this plastic equally, ankle-deep, it would cover an area the size of Argentina,” Roland Geyer, a professor of industrial ecology and the study’s lead author, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “It is an enormous amount of material that does not biodegrade … I am very worried.”
Burning plastics contributes to climate change and adversely impacts human health, while build-ups of the material can hurt the broader environment, Geyer said.
Packaging is the largest market for plastic and the petroleum-based product accelerated a global shift from reusable to single-use containers, researchers said.
As a result, the share of plastics in city dumps in high and middle income countries rose to more than 10 percent by 2005 from less than 1 percent in 1960.
Unlike other materials, plastic can stay in the environment for thousands of years, Geyer said.
There are more than 5 trillion pieces of plastic floating in the world’s oceans, according to a 2014 study published in a Public Library of Science journal.
This build-up harms marine life and ecosystems on sea and land, Geyer said.
If current trends continue more than 13 billion tons of plastic waste will end up in the environment or landfills by 2050, researchers said.
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Argentina said Wednesday that it has sent the regional bloc Mercosur its ratification of the group’s 2010 trade agreement with Egypt, and the pact will go into force within a month.
The trade deal, which covers food, cars, auto parts and industrial supplies, was signed by Egypt and Mercosur members Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay in 2010, but it did not go into effect because Argentina’s Congress had not approved it.
Argentina’s Congress signed off on the deal in May, and Argentina has sent Mercosur its formal ratification, the last step needed for implementation, Argentina’s production ministry said.
“In 30 days the agreement will be in full force,” the ministry said in a statement Wednesday.
The deal will eliminate tariffs on 60 percent of Argentina’s exports immediately and phase in reduced tariffs for other products over 10 years, the ministry said.
Tariffs in Argentina on imports of beef, pears, apples and cars and auto parts from Egypt will also be lifted, it added.
The announcement comes as Mercosur has been seeking to finalize trade deals with other blocs and countries, including the European Union, Canada and South Korea, after pro-business governments took office in Argentina and Brazil.
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SpaceX’s chief said Wednesday that the first launch of its big new rocket is risky and stands “a real good chance” of failure.
Founder Elon Musk told a space station research conference Wednesday that he wants to set realistic expectations for the flight later this year from Cape Canaveral. The Falcon Heavy will have three boosters instead of one, and 27 engines instead of nine, all of which must ignite simultaneously. No one will be aboard the initial flights. When it comes time to add people, Musk said, “no question, whoever’s on the first flight, brave.”
SpaceX plans to fly two paying customers to the moon late next year, using a Falcon Heavy.
While the moon may not be in Musk’s personal travel plans, he said in response to a question that he’d like to ride one of his smaller Falcon rockets to the International Space Station in maybe three or four years. SpaceX plans to start ferrying NASA astronauts to the orbiting outpost, using Falcon 9 rockets and enhanced Dragon capsules, by the middle of next year. SpaceX now uses the Dragon capsule to deliver supplies to the space station.
“All right, we’ll put you on the manifest,” said NASA’s space station program manager Kirk Shireman.
’Major pucker factor’
Speaking for over an hour at the Washington conference, Musk encouraged people to go to Cape Canaveral for the Falcon Heavy launch. “It’s guaranteed to be exciting,” he promised, getting a big laugh.
“There’s a lot of risk associated with Falcon Heavy, real good chance that that vehicle does not make it to orbit,” he said. “Major pucker factor, really, is like the only way to describe it.”
Building the Falcon Heavy has proven harder than SpaceX envisioned, according to Musk. But it will be capable of lifting more than double the amount of payload into orbit than the current Falcon 9, and also hoisting a SpaceX Dragon capsule into a loop around the moon.
As for Mars, Musk said he favored friendly competition for getting astronauts to the red planet. NASA for years has supported an international effort. Musk said it would be better to have at least two or three-country coalitions striving to get there first and making the most progress.
Praise for NASA
He praised the model used by NASA in the commercial crew program, in which both SpaceX and Boeing are developing capsules for flying space station astronauts. Americans have not launched from home soil since the last shuttle flight in 2011, instead forced to use Russian rockets. The crew Dragons will parachute into the ocean just like the cargo Dragons; land landings were scrapped because of the work needed to make everything safe.
Musk said he’s updated his long-term plan for colonizing Mars to make it more economically feasible. The vehicles will be smaller, although still big. He promised to share his evolving ideas at a September conference in Australia.
“Going to Mars is not for the faint of heart,” Musk stressed. “It’s risky, dangerous, uncomfortable and you might die. Now do you want to go? For a lot of people, the answer is going to be hell no, and for some, it’s going to be hell yes.”
Amazon.com has launched a social feature called Spark that allows members to showcase and purchase products on its platforms, the retail giant’s first clear move into the world of social media.
Spark, which is currently only available for Amazon’s premium paying Prime members, encourages users to share photos and videos, just like popular social media platforms Instagram and Pinterest. The new feature publicly launched on Tuesday for use on mobile devices that use Apple’s iOS operating system.
Spark users can tag products on their posts that are available on Amazon and anyone browsing the feeds can instantly find and purchase them on the platform. Users can also respond to posts with “smiles,” equivalent to Facebook’s “likes.”
“We created Spark to allow customers to discover – and shop – stories and ideas from a community that likes what they like,” said an Amazon spokeswoman.
“When customers first visit Spark, they select at least five interests they’d like to follow and we’ll create a feed of relevant content contributed by others. Customers shop their feed by tapping on product links or photos with the shopping bag icon.”
Amazon has also invited publishers including paid influencers and bloggers to post on Spark. Their posts are identified with a sponsored hashtag.
Many Amazon users on social media called the service a cross between Instagram and Pinterest with a touch of e-commerce.
Brand strategist Jill Richardson (@jillfran8) said: “Been messing with #AmazonSpark all morning and I am LIVING. It’s like Pinterest, Instagram, and my credit card had a baby and it’s beautiful.”
Community manager Lucas Miller (@lucasmiller3) also tweeted: “So #amazonspark is going to be a dangerous pastime.
The app is already too easy to shop…” Amazon shares closed up 0.2 percent at $1,026.87 on Wednesday.
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U.N. human rights experts called on the government of Mexico on Wednesday to “cease the surveillance immediately” of activists and journalists and to conduct a fully impartial investigation into the illegal spying.
In the latest case, an international probe into the 2014 disappearance of 43 students in Mexico was targeted with spying software sold to governments to fight criminals and terrorists, according to a report published last week.
Civilians in Mexico have been targeted by the software known as Pegasus, which Israeli company NSO Group only sells to governments, according to the report by Citizen Lab, a group of researchers based at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.
“We urge the Government to commit to cease the surveillance immediately,” the independent U.N. experts said in a joint statement demanding effective controls over the security and intelligence services.
“The allegations of surveillance, which represent a serious violation of the rights to privacy, freedom of opinion and expression, and freedom of association, are highly concerning and are evidence of the hostile and threatening environment that human rights defenders, social activists and journalists face in Mexico today,” they said.
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto has asked the attorney general’s office to investigate previous charges that the government spied on private citizens, saying he wanted to get to the bottom of the accusations that he called “false.”
“We are concerned about the alleged implication in the purchase and use of Pegasus of the same authorities that are now in charge of conducting the investigations”, the U.N. experts said. “In that sense, we call on the Government to take all the necessary steps to ensure the impartiality of the investigating organ.”
Citizen Lab said it had found a trace of the Pegasus software in a phone belonging to a group of experts backed by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights who investigated the 2014 disappearance of the students that marked one of Mexico’s worst atrocities.
The U.N. experts include those on human rights defenders, enforced disappearances, freedom of opinion, and the right to privacy.
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