In Texas, rebuilding efforts in areas devastated by Hurricane Harvey’s winds and floods face higher costs and some delays because the construction industry has a critical shortage of skilled workers. VOA’s Jim Randle reports.
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With rising urban populations and ever scarcer water supplies, cities and companies are teaming up to invest billions of dollars in water management projects, a report said on Tuesday.
Around two thirds of cities from London to Los Angeles are working with the private sector to address water and climate change stresses with 80 cities seeking $9.5 billion of investment for water projects, according to a report by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a non-profit environmental research group.
Water investment opportunities are greatest in Latin America, with Quito in Ecuador seeking $800 million to manage its water supply, including building three hydropower stations and cleaning up its contaminated rivers and streams.
City in India prepares for future
The cities most concerned about their water supply lie in Asia and the Pacific, the report found, with serious risks also identified in Africa and Latin America.
The key issues for cities include declining water quality, water shortages and flooding.
The Indian city of Chennai faced extreme floods in 2015 which killed hundreds and left survivors without access to clean water, while businesses were also severely disrupted.
The city is now investing in boosting its resilience to future water crises, with water conservation education, building a storm water management system and new infrastructure.
“We are seeing critical shifts in leadership from cities and companies in response to the very real threat of flooding, for example, to local economies,” said Morgan Gillespy, head of CDP’s Water Program.
Climate change is another underlying threat to all cities with an increase in extreme weather events from droughts to floods, with cities in North America more concerned than those in Europe, the report found.
Tropical Storm Harvey, pounding the U.S. Gulf Coast, has killed at least eight people, led to mass evacuations and paralyzed Houston, the fourth most-populous U.S. city.
The storm is most likely linked to climate change, said the U.N. weather agency.
Companies are also concerned about the effects of climate change on water supplies, with $14 billion of water impacts such as loss of production reported by companies last year, the report found.
WATCH: Worrying About Water
UN predicts global water shortfall
The United Nations predicts a 40 percent shortfall in global water supply by 2030, while global demand is set to increase by 55 percent due to growing domestic use, manufacturing and electricity generation.
“From our work with cities around the world, water has consistently come up as a key resilience challenge,” said Claire Bonham-Carter, Principal and City Resilience Lead at AECOM, a global infrastructure firm and partner on the report.
“Many of them, regardless of size, from Mexico City, Mexico to Berkeley, California, are addressing both long-term water supply issues as well as chronic urban flooding.”
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Tanzania is set to launch the world’s largest drone delivery network in January, with drones parachuting blood and medicines out of the skies to save lives.
California’s Zipline will make 2,000 deliveries a day to more than 1,000 health facilities across the east African country, including blood, vaccines and malaria and AIDS drugs, following the success of a smaller project in nearby Rwanda.
“It’s the right move,” Lilian Mvule, 51, said by phone, recalling how her granddaughter died from malaria two years ago.
“She needed urgent blood transfusion from a group O, which was not available,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Malaria is a major killer in Tanzania, and children under age 5 often need blood transfusions when they develop malaria-induced anemia. If supplies are out of stock, as is often the case with rare blood types, they can die.
Tanzania is larger than Nigeria and four times the size of the United Kingdom, making it hard for the cash-strapped government to ensure all of its 5,000-plus clinics are fully stocked, particularly in remote rural areas.
The drones fly at 100 kph (62 mph), much faster than traveling by road. Small packages are dropped from the sky using a biodegradable parachute.
The government also hopes to save the lives of thousands of women who die from profuse bleeding after giving birth.
Tanzania has one of the world’s worst maternal mortality rates, with 556 deaths per 100,000 deliveries, government data show.
“It’s a problem we can help solve with on-demand drone delivery,” Zipline’s chief executive, Keller Rinaudo, said in a statement. “African nations are showing the world how it’s done.”
Companies in the United States and elsewhere are keen to use drones to cut delivery times and costs, but there are hurdles ranging from the risk of collisions with airplanes to ensuring battery safety and longevity.
The drones will cut the drug delivery bill for Tanzania’s capital, Dodoma, one of two regions where the project will first roll out, by $58,000 a year, according to Britain’s Department for International Development, one of the project’s backers.
The initiative could also ease tensions between frustrated patients and health workers.
“We always accuse nurses of stealing drugs,” said Angela Kitebi, who lives 40 kilometers east of Dodoma. “We don’t realize that the drugs are not getting here on time due to bad roads.”
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You might have gotten a taste of “augmented reality,” the blending of the virtual and physical worlds, as you chased on-screen monsters at real-world landmarks in last year’s gaming sensation, “Pokemon Go.”
Upcoming augmented reality apps will follow that same principle of superimposing virtual images over real-life settings. That could let you see how furniture will look in your real living room before you buy it, for instance.
While “Pokemon Go” didn’t require special hardware or software, more advanced AR apps will. Google and Apple are both developing technology to enable that. Google’s AR technology is already on Android phones from Lenovo and Asus. On Tuesday, Google announced plans to bring AR to even more phones, including Samsung’s popular S8 and Google’s own Pixel, though it didn’t give a timetable beyond promising an update by the end of the year.
As a result, Apple might pull ahead as it extends AR to all recent iPhones and iPads in a software update expected next month, iOS 11. Hundreds of millions of AR-ready devices will suddenly be in the hands of consumers.
But how many are ready to give AR a try?
Early applications
Of the dozen or so apps demoed recently for Android and iPhones, the ones showing the most promise are furniture apps.
From a catalog or a website, it’s hard to tell whether a sofa or a bed will actually fit in your room. Even if it fits, will it be far enough from other pieces of furniture for someone to walk through?
With AR, you can go to your living room or bedroom and add an item you’re thinking of buying. The phone maps out the dimensions of your room and scales the virtual item automatically; there’s no need to pull out a tape measure. The online furnishing store Wayfair has the WayfairView for Android phones, while Ikea is coming out with one for Apple devices. Wayfair says it’s exploring bringing the app to iPhones and iPads, too.
As for whimsical, Holo for Android lets you pose next to virtual tigers and cartoon characters. For iPhones and iPads, the Food Network will let you add frosting and sprinkles to virtual cupcakes. You can also add balloons and eyes — who does that? — and share creations on social media.
Games and education are also popular categories. On Apple devices, a companion to AMC’s “The Walking Dead” creates zombies alongside real people for you to shoot. On Android, apps being built for classrooms will let students explore the solar system, volcanoes and more.
Beyond virtual reality
Virtual reality is a technology that immerses you in a different world, rather than trying to supplement the real world with virtual images, as AR does. VR was supposed to be the next big thing, but the appeal has been limited outside of games and industrial applications. You need special headsets, which might make you dizzy if you wear one too long.
And VR isn’t very social. Put on the headset, and you shut out everyone else around you. Part of the appeal of “Pokemon Go” was the ability to run into strangers who were also playing. Augmented reality can be a shared experience, as friends look on the phone screen with you.
Being available vs. Being used
While AR shows more promise than VR, there has yet to be a “killer app” that everyone must have, the way smartphones have become essential for navigation and everyday snapshots.
Rather, people will discover AR over time, perhaps a few years. Someone renovating or moving might discover the furniture apps. New parents might discover educational apps. Those people might then go on to discover more AR apps to try out. But just hearing that AR is available might not be enough for someone to check it out.
Consider mobile payments. Most phones now have the capability, but people still tend to pull out plastic when shopping. There’s no doubt more people are using mobile payments and more retailers are accepting them, but it’s far from commonplace.
Expect augmented reality to also take time to take off.
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Forests in the northeastern United States and southern Canada could be ravaged by tree-killing beetles in coming decades as a warming climate expands the pest’s habitat, a study has found.
Over the next 60 years, southern pine beetles could infest forests in new areas of the United States and Canada, disrupting industries and ecosystems alike, it said.
Warmer winter nights allow spread
The red-brown insects, the size of a grain of rice, known to feast on pine-tree bark, has typically only thrived in the hotter climate of Central America and the southeastern United States.
But in recent years warmer than usual winter nights have allowed it to survive the cold months and spread as far north as the U.S. state of New York. The coldest winter night has warmed by 6 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit (3 to 4 degrees Celsius) over the past 50 years in various parts of the United States, the study’s authors said.
Using computer-based climate models, they predicted the beetles should gradually march north along the Atlantic coast, infesting forests including in the U.S. states of Maine and Ohio all the way to Canada’s Nova Scotia.
Pest moves fast
By 2080, the pest should proliferate to red — and jack-pine forests in a 270,000 square miles (700,000 square km) area of the United States and Canada — roughly the size of Afghanistan, the researchers wrote in Nature Climate Change.
That would not only upend ecosystems, but also disrupt several key industries “in already struggling rural areas,” said lead author Corey Lesk, a researcher at Columbia University in New York.
“Residents of these regions could see a direct hit to their pocketbooks,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Tuesday in a phone interview.
Infestations costly to timber industry
Where the southern pine beetle has struck in the past, timber industries have been hard hit.
Infestations of pine beetles have cost an estimated $100 million a year in timber losses from 1990 to 2004 in the southeastern United States, according to the U.S. Forest Service.
Thousands of adult beetles can kill a tree in two to four months as the insects carve S-shaped tunnels under the bark, depriving their host of needed nutrients.
The tourism industry would also likely suffer, said Lesk, with the potential destruction of iconic forests including the Pine Barrens of New Jersey and Long Island.
Europe faces same problem
In Europe, previous research has shown that bark beetles have similarly been chewing through pine and spruce trees in forests from the Swiss Alps to Belarus alongside temperature increases.
Land managers have found the best way to fight off bark beetles has been thinning high-density forests and cutting out infested trees, though with limited success, the researchers said.
“The key question is whether those strategies would be able to keep up with rapid advance of the pest into regions with little or no experience managing it,” Lesk said.
The U.S. space agency’s Cassini spacecraft will end its 13-year mission to Saturn in mid-September by transmitting data until the final moment before it plunges into the ringed planet’s atmosphere, officials said Tuesday.
Cassini, the first spacecraft to orbit Saturn, will make the last of 22 farewell dives between the planet’s rings and surface on Sept. 15. The spacecraft will then burn up as it heads straight into the gas giant’s crushing atmosphere.
Cassini’s final dive will end a mission that provided groundbreaking discoveries that included seasonal changes on Saturn, the moon Titan’s resemblance to a primordial Earth, and a global ocean on the moon Enceladus with ice plumes spouting from its surface.
“The mission has been insanely, wildly, beautifully successful, and it’s coming to an end in about two weeks,” Curt Niebur, Cassini program scientist, said on a telephone conference call with reporters from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
Cassini’s final photo as it heads into Saturn’s atmosphere will likely be of propellers, or gaps in the rings caused by moonlets, said project scientist Linda Spilker.
The spacecraft will provide near real-time data on the atmosphere until it loses contact with Earth at 4:54 a.m. PDT (1154 GMT) on Sept. 15, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said.
Spilker said Cassini’s latest data on the rings had shown they had a lighter mass than forecast. That suggests they are younger than expected, at about 120 million years, and thus were created after the birth of the solar system, she said.
During its final orbits between the atmosphere and the rings, Cassini also studied Saturn’s atmosphere and took measurements to determine the size of the planet’s rocky core.
Cassini has been probing Saturn, the sixth planet from the sun, and its entourage of 62 known moons since July 2004. It has provided enough data for almost 4,000 scientific papers.
Since the craft is running low on fuel, NASA is crashing it into Saturn to avoid any chance Cassini could someday collide with Titan, Enceladus or any other moon that has the potential to support indigenous microbial life.
By destroying the spacecraft, NASA will ensure that any hitchhiking Earth microbes still alive on Cassini will not contaminate the moons for future study.
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The Middle East and North Africa region loses about $21 billion each year because of an inadequate supply of water and sanitation, the World Bank said Tuesday, warning that urgent action is needed to prevent ripple effects on stability and growth.
Poor management of water resources and sanitation in the world’s most water-scarce region costs about 1 percent of its annual gross domestic product, with conflict-hit states losing as much as 2 to 4 percent each year, the bank said in a report issued at the World Water Week conference in Stockholm, Sweden.
Deaths due to unsafe water and sanitation in some parts of the region, particularly countries affected by conflict, are higher than the global average, it added.
“As the current conflict and migration crisis unfolding in the Middle East and North Africa shows, failure to address water challenges can have severe impacts on people’s well-being and political stability,” the report said.
Peril in Yemen
In Yemen, which is reeling from more than two years of conflict, water supply networks serving its largest cities are at risk of collapse due to war-inflicted damage and disrepair, and about 15 million people have been cut off from regular access to water and sanitation, the U.N. children’s agency (UNICEF) said in a separate statement Tuesday.
In Syria, where the conflict is well into its seventh year, water has frequently been used as “a weapon of war,” with pumps deliberately destroyed and water sources contaminated, and about 15 million people are in need of safe water, including an estimated 6.4 million children, UNICEF said.
Overall, 183 million people lack access to basic drinking water in countries affected by conflict, violence and instability around the world, it added.
Better management
With the urban population in the Middle East and North Africa expected to double by 2050 to nearly 400 million, a combination of policy, technology and water management tools should be used to improve the water situation, the World Bank report said.
“Water productivity — in other words, how much return you get for every drop of water used — in the Middle East in general is the lowest on average in the world,” said Anders Jägerskog, a specialist in water resources management at the World Bank and one of the report’s authors.
Middle Eastern and North African countries are using far more water than can be replenished, said the report.
To reverse the trend, technology and innovation are “essential but not enough,” Jägerskog told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Water governance — in particular, water tariffs and subsidies — must also be addressed, he said.
The region has the world’s lowest water tariffs and spends the highest proportion of GDP on public water subsidies. Such policies lead to excessive use of already scarce water supplies and are not sustainable, said Jägerskog.
Untreated wastewater
Another challenge is that more than half of the wastewater collected in the region is fed back into the environment untreated.
“Along with better water management, there is room for increasing the supply through nonconventional methods such as desalination and recycling,” Guangzhe Chen, senior director of the World Bank’s global water practice, said in a statement.
Improved water management could bring considerable financial returns, the report noted.
Governments could gain $10 billion annually by improving the storage and delivery of irrigation water to users, while increasing agricultural production by up to 8 percent, the report said.
Egypt, Syria and Iran — which have the largest proportion of irrigated land in the region — are the countries that could benefit most.
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Mexico sees a serious risk the United States will withdraw from NAFTA and is preparing a plan for that eventuality, Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo said Tuesday, calling talks to renegotiate the deal a “roller coaster.”
U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened three times in the past week to abandon the North American Free Trade Agreement, revisiting his view that the United States would probably have to start the process of exiting the accord to reach a fair deal for his country.
Trump has vowed to get a better deal for American workers, and the lively rhetoric on both sides precedes a second round of talks starting on Friday in Mexico City to renegotiate the 1994 accord binding the United States, Mexico and Canada.
“This is not going to be easy,” Guajardo said at a meeting with senators in Mexico City. “The start of the talks is like a roller coaster.”
The need for a backup plan in case Trump shreds the deal underpinning a trillion dollars in annual trade in North America has been a long-standing position of Guajardo, who travels to Washington on Tuesday with foreign minister Luis Videgaray to meet senior White House and trade officials.
“We are also analyzing a scenario with no NAFTA,” Guajardo said.
In an interview published earlier on Tuesday in Mexican business daily El Economista, Guajardo said “there is a risk, and it’s high” that the Trump administration abandons NAFTA.
Responding to Guajardo’s comments, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his government would continue to work “seriously” to improve NAFTA.
What is ‘Plan B’?
Earlier this month, Guajardo told Reuters a “Plan B” meant being prepared to replace items such as the billions of dollars in grain Mexico imports from the United States annually.
To that end, and to seek openings in more markets, Mexico is hosting trade talks with Brazil this week. Trade officials are also discussing a possible replacement for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact that Trump ditched after taking office.
Overlapping with the NAFTA talks, Mexico will participate in separate trade meetings with Australia and New Zealand in Peru, and President Enrique Pena Nieto travels to China this weekend.
Still, attempts to diversify trade will not be easy. Some 80 percent of all Mexican exports go to the United States, and economies such as Brazil and China often compete with Mexico.
Guajardo also suggested World Trade Organization tariffs that would kick in if NAFTA crumbled would be more favorable for Mexico, a view held by many Mexican experts who think trade with the United States would survive the demise of the 1994 deal.
“I don’t think it’s going to make that much of a difference in terms of the trading relationship,” said Andres Rozental, a former Mexican deputy foreign minister. “If we have to go to WTO tariffs, for us it’s fairly straightforward.”
Guajardo’s and Videgaray’s trip to Washington was announced after Trump not only threatened to pull out of the trade deal, but again said that Mexico would end up paying for the wall he wants to build between the two countries.
Mexico has refused point blank to pay for a wall. In January, after similar comments led Mexico to scrap a summit with Trump, the two sides agreed not to talk in public about it.
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Brazil will seek China’s expertise and financing to complete its third nuclear power plant when President Michel Temer makes a state visit to Beijing on Friday, Brazilian government officials said Tuesday.
The Brazilian nuclear energy company Eletronuclear will sign a cooperation agreement with China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), signaling their intent to establish a partnership to finish the Angra 3 plant, the officials said.
Construction of the 1,405-megawatt reactor on the coast south of Rio de Janeiro has dragged on for three decades and its completion is now scheduled for 2023, but Brazil does not have the estimated 16 billion reais ($5 billion) needed to finish the job.
Russia is also interested in completing Angra 3 and Eletronuclear, a subsidiary of state-run electric utility Eletrobras, has held talks with the Russian nuclear monopoly Rosatom.
The Chinese corporation is expected to have the advantage in terms of abundant financial resources.
The head of Eletronuclear, Bruno Barretto, signed an initial memorandum with CNNC on the Angra 3 completion in Beijing in December when he visited Chinese banks that are potential financiers, Eletronuclear said in a statement.
Temer’s government has announced plans to privatize Eletrobras, Latin America’s largest utility. But Eletronuclear will be split off and remain in state hands under Brazil’s Constitution, which establishes that nuclear facilities must be government controlled.
Temer said on Tuesday he expects China to be a major player in Brazil’s plans to modernize its ports, airports and other infrastructure projects that will be offered to investors in private concessions.
He also hopes China will finance energy projects.
“China could be one of the big investors in our plans for concessions,” he said in a video message released after he set off for Beijing, where he will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping ahead of the BRICS summit in Xiamen.
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School playgrounds across Syria are being transformed into vegetable gardens where children whose diets have been devastated by six years of war can learn to grow — and then eat — aubergines, lettuces, peppers, cabbages and cucumbers.
Traditional Syrian cuisine is typical of the region, and rich in vegetables. Its mainstays include hummus, minced lamb cooked with pine nuts and spices, varied salads, stews made with green beans, okra or courgettes and tomatoes, stuffed cabbage leaves and artichoke hearts.
But the six-year war has changed that for much of the population, and many now live mainly on bread or food aid.
According to U.N. figures, unemployment now stands at more than 50 percent, and nearly 70 percent of the population is living in extreme poverty, in what was once a relatively wealthy country.
“The ongoing crisis in Syria is having a devastating effect on the health and nutrition of an entire generation of children,” Adam Yao, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) acting representative in Syria, said on Tuesday, ahead of the start of the school year.
FAO is helping some 17 primary schools in both government and opposition-controlled areas to plant up to 500 meter-square fruit and vegetable plots in war-torn areas including Aleppo, Hama, Homs, Idlib and the outskirts of Damascus.
Young children are often the most vulnerable to malnutrition in a crisis, which can have serious and long-lasting effects on their growth and future development.
“Good nutrition is a child’s first defense against common diseases and important for children to be able to lead an active and healthy life,” Yao added.
The primary schools, which began planting in May, have produced 12 tons of fruit and vegetables. Another 35 schools are expected to start transforming their playgrounds soon in Aleppo and in rural areas around Damascus.
Rising prices, falling production
The price of food has risen since the start of the war — agriculture production has plummeted, and the country now relies on food imports to make up the shortfall. Transporting food around the country has also become difficult and costly.
About 13.5 million people in Syria are in need of humanitarian assistance. Of those, 7 million are unable to meet their basic food needs.
Some 5 million people receive international food aid, but not everyone in need can be reached, and the World Food Program says it has had to cut the amount of calories in its family food baskets because of funding shortages.
“The donors are generous, but we don’t know how long they can continue to be generous and rely on taxpayers’ money,” the FAO’s Yao told Reuters.
Vulnerable families are receiving help from FAO to grow food at home, so they can become less reliant on food aid.
“Food aid is very important, but … we should combine both, in a way that people grow their own food and move away from food aid gradually,” he said.
In a country where more than half the population has been forced to flee their homes, many moving several times, investing in agriculture helps people to stay put for as long as it is safe, Yao added.
“Agriculture has become a hope for [many] because they can grow their own food and survive — even in the besieged areas.”
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Brazil’s government has revised a decree that stripped protections from a reserve in the Amazon after environmental groups criticized the original order.
The new decree announced late Monday still lifts the reserve designation from a gold- and copper-rich area larger than the Netherlands in two northern Brazilian states.
But President Michel Temer’s administration clarifies that mining will not be allowed in conservation or indigenous areas within the former reserve.
The government says the new decree will allow it to crack down on the illegal mining that was taking place in the reserve, while opening up legal mining.
The Brazilian branch of the World Wide Fund for Nature said in a statement that the new decree clarifies the need for protection, but the risk of environmental damage remains.
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U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions called the opioid crisis America’s “top lethal issue” Tuesday, saying that a “comprehensive antidote” was needed to address the crisis.
Speaking from the National Alliance for Drug Endangered Children national conference in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Sessions thanked the audience for their work in making the crisis’ effects on children known.
“Our country, despite the record deaths, I don’t think has fully recognized the damage this addiction nightmare is doing to us,” he said. “And as you understand this epidemic is taking a heavy toll on the most innocent and vulnerable — our children. And yet, in the national conversation about drug abuse, these children are too often forgotten.”
Sessions said that the solution has “three-pillars” — prevention, enforcement, and treatment. Sessions added that the prevention step in particular had been discussed at a meeting with top officials, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly the day before.
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump vowed that the U.S. would “win” the battle against the heroin and opioid plague, but he stopped short of declaring a national emergency as his handpicked commission had recommended.
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In the straight-laced world of the U.S. military, the big room with glossy white paint stands out.
Beyond the desks lined with computer screens, the overhead projectors or the digital clock displaying the time in various world cities, the walls demand your attention.
They are covered from floor to ceiling with questions, equations, sketches and ideas — scribbled frantically or in moments of inspiration — all representing the best thinking of some of the U.S. military’s best analysts.
“There are precious few places in this building where you can write on a wall,” said Albert Bolden, not surprisingly given that this is, after all, part of a military base.
But according to Bolden, the director of innovation at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, that’s part of the point for the so-called Innovation Hub, or iHUB.
“People from across the agency can come into this space and figure out how to solve our problems,” he said.
‘Relevant in this digital age’
While all this may sound like a feel-good tale of military structure melding with Silicon Valley ingenuity to make life easier by using technology, it is actually about much more.
“If we don’t embrace it, our adversaries will,” said outgoing DIA Director, Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart. “The fight for remaining relevant in this digital age is what keeps me awake.”
And Stewart was clear. It is, in many ways, an arms race.
“Our adversaries have been modernizing,” he warned, speaking to a small group of reporters in August, as the agency welcomed private companies and academics to the iHub for a series of so-called Industry Days.
And it is these encounters between the DIA’s own top thinkers and some of the best outside of government that form a second, crucial component of the iHub strategy. It is a chance to see how off-the-shelf technologies might be able to help solve problems the agency’s analysts have identified.
One company making a pitch to be part of this overall effort is an Austin, Texas-based artificial intelligence start-up called SparkCognition.
SparkCognition already has attracted interest from the U.S. Air Force. And companies like Verizon and Boeing are now investing more than $30 million in the company’s neural networks, designed to mimic the functionality of a human brain in order to predict likely outcomes.
“What we’ve done is automate that research that a data scientist would do,” said SparkCognition’s Sam Septembre following a question-and-answer session at the DIA’s iHub.
Instead of taking weeks or days, however, Septembre said SparkCognition’s systems can deliver results in hours or even minutes.
“We’re not just a black box,” added the company’s director of business operations, Timothy Stefanick. “We have why the [computer] model thought that.”
SparkCognition says its platforms already have succeeded in predicting Brexit, Britain’s decision to leave the European Union. And the company says it nearly correctly predicted President Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election by looking at sales of campaign merchandise, like Trump’s “Make America Great Again” baseball caps.
“The human factor got involved and skewed it,” said Stefanick, explaining that in the run-up to the election, the company’s analysts didn’t trust the initial prediction of a Trump victory because it differed so much from the polls. He said they then decided to have the computer models take into account additional factors, causing them to predict a Trump loss.
AI for video
Another company vying for a DIA contract is Percipient.ai, which focuses on applying artificial intelligence to video.
“This is a kind of capability that helps you get into productive analytics and helps you protect forces,” said company co-founder, ret. Brig. Gen. Balan Ayyar, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer who commanded a task force in Afghanistan.
“You can check any person in any video,” he said.
Ayyar and fellow Percipient.ai co-founder Raj Shah, say their platform can save analysts considerable time, for example scouring hundreds of hours of video from the scene of a terror attack to quickly identify if any suspected terrorists were nearby.
Even mobile phones could be used to track potential adversaries, programmed to vibrate, for instance, if a person of interest turns up in a “selfie.”
“With this kind of system, the [terror] watch list could be much, much bigger,” said Shah, who previously headed up Google Maps.
Already, Ayyar and Shah say Percipient.ai’s systems can identify suspicious activity, or tradecraft, like the use of specific getaway vehicles.
Handwriting on the wall
For DIA, the early results have been promising.
“We’ve seen examples when machines are able to provide insights to the analysts that they haven’t had,” said Randy Soper, a senior DIA analyst for analytics modernization.
To speed up the process, DIA even awards seed money — up to about $250,000 — to projects that have shown the most promise.
Two have already been approved and another four projects are set to receive funding once the once the money becomes available.
More projects could soon be added to the list. DIA’s Innovation Hub is still considering the latest pitches from industry and academia, like those from SparkCognition and Percipient.ai.
The agency says that overall, the response has been “overwhelming.”
But the success in reaching out to industry and academia also has brought some changes to the program.
Last week [August 22], the DIA opened up a new Innovation Hub.
At first glance, it looks sleek and modern, a row of screens and a digital world clock etched smoothly into wood-paneled walls, while a large conference table dominates the center of the room.
To be sure, it seems like quite a departure from the old iHub, which almost had the feel of a useful but makeshift classroom.
Some things, though, have not changed. The wood-paneling only extends so far. Much of the rest of the room is covered in that white, glossy paint.
“You can still write on the walls,” said one official.
Middle-class cocaine users are turning a blind eye to the link between their drug habit and sex trafficking, slavery and murder, said the former head of UK drug strategy.
“These are middle-aged, middle-class people at dinner parties,” Tony Saggers, former head of drugs threat at the National Crime Agency, told The Times on Tuesday, in his first interview since leaving the post.
“They will find sweatshops abhorrent, slave labor a brutal, terrible thing to be happening in their neighborhood, and the news that a 16-year-old has been knifed to death in London will shock them,” he added.
Britain has one of the highest rates of cocaine use in Europe, according to the European Commission and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) with 4.2 percent of young adults having taken the drug in 2015.
Saggers said this was funding the exploitation of women in the sex industry, as well as slavery and gun violence.
“The consequences of buying cocaine are more abhorrent than most of what the people using it find abhorrent,” he said.
In Britain, there are an estimated 13,000 victims of forced labor, sexual exploitation and domestic servitude, most of them from Albania, Nigeria, Poland and Vietnam.
Saggers said there was a lack of action among employers in tackling the prevalence and acceptance of cocaine use in some industries, particularly among banks and other companies in the City of London, Britain’s financial center.
Companies should address the problem through schemes that educate their staff about the impact of cocaine abuse on their health and wider society, he added.
Tamara Barnett, projects leader at the Human Trafficking Foundation, said “we need to do all we can to emphasize the role the public can play in eradicating human trafficking.”
“Highlighting the exploitation and abuse behind certain drug production could make some people think twice before they purchase drugs, or at least twice before boasting about doing something that has for too long been seen just as a fashionable lifestyle choice,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
In 2015 a report by the National Police Chiefs’ Council found that commercial cultivation of cannabis was used to fund human trafficking.
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No ring of the doorbell, just a text. No tip for the driver? No problem in this test, where Domino’s and Ford are teaming up to see if customers will warm to the idea of pizza delivered by driverless cars.
Starting Wednesday, some pizzas in Domino’s hometown of Ann Arbor will arrive in a Ford Fusion outfitted with radars and a camera that is used for autonomous testing. A Ford engineer will be at the wheel, but the front windows have been blacked out so customers won’t interact with the driver.
Instead, people will have to come out of their homes and type a four-digit code into a keypad mounted on the car. That will open the rear window and let customers retrieve their order from a heated compartment. The compartment can carry up to four pizzas and five sides, Domino’s Pizza Inc. says.
The experiment will help Domino’s understand how customers will interact with a self-driving car, says company President Russell Weiner. Will they want the car in their driveway or by the curb? Will they understand how to use the keypad? Will they come outside if it’s raining or snowing? Will they put their pizza boxes on top of the car and threaten to mess up its expensive cameras?
“The majority of our questions are about the last 50 feet of the delivery experience,” Weiner told reporters last week.
Domino’s, which delivers 1 billion pizzas worldwide each year, needs to stay ahead of emerging trends, Weiner says. The test will last six weeks, and the companies say they’ll decide afterward what to do next. Domino’s is also testing pizza delivery with drones.
Weiner said the company has 100,000 drivers in the U.S. In a driverless world, he said, he could see those employees taking on different roles within the company.
Ford Motor Co., which wants to develop a fully driverless vehicle by 2021, said it needs to understand the kinds of things companies would use that vehicle for. The experiment is a first for Ford. But other companies have seen the potential for food deliveries. Otto, a startup backed by Uber, delivered 50,000 cans of Budweiser beer from a self-driving truck in Colorado last fall.
“We’re developing a self-driving car not just for the sake of technology,” said Sherif Marakby, Ford’s vice president of autonomous and electric vehicles. “There are so many practical things that we need to learn.”
Only one car will be deployed in Ann Arbor, and it has a special black-and-white paint job to identify it as a research vehicle.
Customers in the test area will be chosen randomly when they order a pizza, and will get a phone call to confirm they want to participate. If they agree, they’ll get a text message letting them know when the vehicle is pulling up and how to retrieve their food.
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In Cambodia, the issue of land rights is a constant source of tension. The country’s biggest dam to date is set to go online in just weeks, adding 400 megawatts of power to the country’s critically overstretched grid. But the social and environmental costs of the project are huge, especially for minority villagers facing displacement. In rural Stung Treng province, some members of an indigenous group are taking a stand. David Boyle has this report.
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It is still true that a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than attacked by a shark; but, that does not matter much to the 150 or so people who experienced what the International Shark Attack File calls “shark-human interaction in 2016. Still, some Australian eyes in the sky are helping lifeguards look out for the predators just offshore. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Japan leads the world in the number of robots per person that are used in the workplace. Instead of being wary, people apparently like them. VOA’s Deborah Block takes us to a hotel and a beer factory where droids are doing just about everything.
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Peru expects a “very ambitious” free trade deal with Australia that covers goods, services and investments to be implemented as early as next year, Peru’s deputy trade minister said on Monday.
The two countries resumed free trade talks in Australia on Monday following a first round of negotiations in July in which “a lot of progress was made,” said Deputy Trade Minister Edgar Vasquez.
“This is going to be an agreement that we should be able to implement as soon as possible, starting in 2018,” Vasquez said by telephone in Lima. “That’s what we’d like to happen and what we think is viable.”
Peru and Australia are important global producers of minerals and their bilateral trade is relatively small.
Forging a free trade deal so quickly would mark one of the first steps toward reducing trade barriers in the Pacific region after U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, which Australia and Peru had signed onto.
The remaining signatories to the TPP are in Australia this week discussing ways to salvage the deal. The 11 countries, which include Japan, Canada and Mexico, have a combined gross domestic product of $12.4 trillion.
Vasquez said the experience of negotiating the TPP had put Peru and Australia on solid footing for quickly hashing out a bilateral agreement.
“We also both have very open economies, so we’re really going to see a broad inclusion of sectors that will benefit from it – goods as well as services and investments,” Vasquez said.
Peru’s trade ministry said last month that rules of origin, migration and e-commerce were also under discussion and that Peru was eager to increase agricultural exports to Australia while spurring trade of mining and other professional services.
Australian trade officials were not immediately available for comment.
Peru’s exports to Australia amounted to $260 million last year, according to Peru’s trade ministry.
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Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto will travel to China next week to discuss trade and investment, as Mexico looks for ways to decrease its dependence on NAFTA, especially trade with neighboring United States.
He will hold a bilateral meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping and participate in a summit of the BRICS nations, a grouping that includes Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, on Sept. 4 and 5, Mexico’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
Pena Nieto’s visit comes as U.S., Mexican and Canadian negotiators meet Sept. 1 to 5 in Mexico City for a round of talks to revamp the 23-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Mexico is trying to increase trade with Latin America and Asia, and on Monday took part in the first of three days of talks in Australia aimed at reviving the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, disrupted by the withdrawal of the United States.
On Sunday, U.S. President Donald Trump renewed his threat to scrap NAFTA, which he has cast as killing jobs and exacerbating the U.S. deficit, and ripped into trading partners Canada and Mexico.
Pena Nieto is scheduled to participate in a dialogue on emerging markets and a BRICS business forum, “where over 800 business leaders are expected to discuss opportunities for investment, trade, connectivity, financial cooperation, development and the blue economy, or sustainable use of marine resources,” said the ministry.
On Sept. 6, Pena Nieto will visit the offices of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, China’s top e-commerce firm and one of Asia’s most valuable companies.
Mexico’s government is working to get Mexican products and services, especially from small- and medium-sized firms, onto Alibaba’s platform.
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By the time the rain stops, Harvey will have dumped about 1 million gallons of water for every man, woman and child in southeastern Texas — a soggy, record-breaking glimpse of the wet and wild future that global warming could bring, scientists say.
While scientists are quick to say that climate change didn’t cause Harvey and that they haven’t determined yet whether the storm was made worse by global warming, they do note that warmer air and water mean wetter and possibly more intense hurricanes in the future.
“This is the kind of thing we are going to get more of,” said Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer. “This storm should serve as warning.”
There’s a scientifically accepted method for determining if some wild weather event has the fingerprints of man-made climate change, and it involves intricate calculations. Those could take weeks or months to complete, and then even longer to pass peer review.
Storms to produce more rain
In general, though, climate scientists agree that future storms will dump much more rain than the same size storms did in the past.
That’s because warmer air holds more water. With every degree Fahrenheit, the atmosphere can hold and then dump an additional 4 percent of water (7 percent for every degree Celsius), several scientists say.
Global warming also means warmer seas, and warm water is what fuels hurricanes.
When Harvey moved toward Texas, water in the Gulf of Mexico was nearly 2 degrees (1 degree Celsius) warmer than normal, said Weather Underground meteorology director Jeff Masters. Hurricanes need at least 79 degrees F (26 C) as fuel, and water at least that warm ran more than 300 feet (100 meters) deep in the Gulf, according to University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy.
Downpours on the rise
Several studies show that the top 1 percent of the strongest downpours are already happening much more frequently. Also, calculations done Monday by MIT meteorology professor Kerry Emanuel show that the drenching received by Rockport, Texas, used to be maybe a once-in-1,800-years event for that city, but with warmer air holding more water and changes in storm steering currents since 2010, it is now a once-every-300-years event.
There’s a lot of debate among climate scientists over what role, if any, global warming may have played in causing Harvey to stall over Texas, which was a huge factor in the catastrophic flooding. If the hurricane had moved on like a normal storm, it wouldn’t have dumped as much rain in any one spot.
Harvey stalled because it is sandwiched between two high-pressure fronts that push it in opposite directions, and those fronts are stuck.
Oppenheimer and some others theorize that there’s a connection between melting sea ice in the Arctic and changes in the jet stream and the weather patterns that make these “blocking fronts” more common. Others, like Masters, contend it’s too early to say.
An off-the-chart-event
University of Washington atmospheric scientist Cliff Mass said that climate change is simply not powerful enough to create off-the-chart events like Harvey’s rainfall.
“You really can’t pin global warming on something this extreme. It has to be natural variability,” Mass said. “It may juice it up slightly but not create this phenomenal anomaly.”
“We’re breaking one record after another with this thing,” Mass said.
Closing in on rainfall record
Sometime Tuesday or early Wednesday, parts of the Houston region will have broken the nearly 40-year-old U.S. record for the heaviest rainfall from a tropical system — 48 inches, set by Tropical Storm Amelia in 1978 in Texas, several meteorologists say.
Already 15 trillion gallons of rain have fallen on a large area, and an additional 5 trillion or 6 trillion gallons are forecast by the end of Wednesday, meteorologist Ryan Maue of WeatherBell Analytics calculates. That’s enough water to fill all the NFL and Division 1 college football stadiums more than 100 times over.
The muddy floodwaters now soaking through dry wall, carpeting, mattresses and furniture in Houston will pose a massive cleanup challenge with potential public health consequences.
It’s not known yet what kinds or how much sewage, chemicals and waterborne germs are mixed in the water. For now, health officials are more concerned about drownings, carbon monoxide poisoning from generators and hygiene at shelters. In the months and years to come, their worries will turn to the effects of trauma from Hurricane Harvey on mental health.
At a shelter set up inside Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center, Dr. David Persse is building a clinic of doctors and nurses and trying to prevent the spread of viruses or having to send people to hospitals already stretched thin.
“This is rapidly evolving,” said Persse, Houston Director of Emergency Medical Services. “I always worry in these large congregations of people about viral outbreaks that cause nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. And we are just getting started.”
Medics have been at the convention center since it started taking in evacuees, along with police and other first responders. Over the last 24 hours, doctors and nurses arrived at the convention center to volunteer.
Fewer than 20 people have been hospitalized so far from the convention center.
“One of our goals is to appropriately treat people here with minor things so we don’t send everybody off to the hospital,” Persse.
Many of the around 3,000 people who fled from Harvey’s flooding waited hours in water mixed with sewage, oil and gasoline. Some weren’t able to grab their medications or medical devices. Police officers on Monday afternoon were looking for more wheelchairs.
Donors have brought diapers, baby formula and other basic necessities to the convention center. Officials are working with local pharmacies to replace lost medicines and dialysis clinics to serve patients in need of treatment. The Red Cross is arranging to bring in portable showers. A shipment of 50 wheelchairs was on the way Monday afternoon.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will begin sampling the floodwaters as soon as possible, said EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman in an email Monday. EPA teams will also be visiting water and sewage plants to offer help, she said.
EPA helped secure Superfund pollution cleanup sites last week ahead of the storm and is continuing to check with site operators.
Floodwater can be dangerous for people with open wounds, particularly if they have other health conditions. After Hurricane Katrina, five people with infected wounds died and health officials believe that exposure to brackish floodwater contributed to the deaths.
Katrina taught other lessons.
“In Katrina, a lot of people were concerned about illnesses from contact with the floodwater, but more infectious disease was associated with poor hygiene in overcrowded shelter facilities,” said Karen Levy, associate professor of environmental health at Emory University in Atlanta.
At Houston-area shelters, access to clean water or hand sanitizer and proper disposal of human waste should be stressed, she said.
Any health problems will be more dangerous for the most vulnerable — people with immune disorders, the elderly and the poor, Levy said.
Katrina left a wake of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, said Dr. Pierre Buekens, dean of Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. He said their surveys showed roughly 10 percent had PTSD, but also that people were resilient.
“I’m sure this will happen in Houston,” he said.
The most common flood-related deaths occur when people try to drive through flooded areas, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Carbon monoxide may kill more as people return to homes without electricity and hook up generators, said the CDC’s Renee Funk.
“Any sort of roof over a generator is actually a problem,” Funk said. “When people go in and out to refill the generator they can be overcome. If a structure is attached to the house, the house can fill with fumes.”
Best advice: Use a battery-operated carbon monoxide detector in the house if you’re using a generator for power, she said.
Mold is also a health hazard. The CDC recommends removing and disposing of drywall and insulation that was tainted by floodwater or sewage. Mattresses, pillows, carpeting — even stuffed toys — should be tossed out. Hard surfaces can be disinfected with a solution of one cup of bleach to five gallons of water.
“That little spot of mold can grow in the home especially in the heat of the South,” said Dr. Parham Jaberi of the Louisiana Department of Health.
If mold covers more than 100 square feet, a trained mold remover is recommended, he said.
Desperate for help and unsure whether traditional rescue efforts will come through, Harvey victims are using social media to share maps of their location and photos of themselves trapped on rooftops and inside buildings.
“Need help in NE Houston! Baby here and sick elderly!” one user posted on Twitter along with her address late Sunday.
Another woman, Alondra Molina, posted Monday on Facebook that her sister was desperate for a rescue for herself and her four children, including a 1-year-old.
“Please if someone could at least get them out of the city me and my mom will come get them,” Molina wrote on a Facebook group where dozens were pleading for help. “The roads are just all blocked and we can’t get in.”
Annette Fuller took a video when she began fearing for her life on Sunday. She was on the second floor of a neighbor’s home along with the residents of three other houses, including five children, as water rose and hit waist level on the first floor.
“We called 911 and it rang and rang and rang and rang,” Fuller said Monday after the water receded and she managed to return safely to her single-story home.
“There’s just no agency in the world that could handle Harvey,” she said. “However, none of us were warned that 911 might not work. It was very frightening.”
Fuller’s two daughters, who live in Austin and Dallas, posted her video to Facebook after their mother texted it to them, and the post went viral.
“Social media, in some ways, is more powerful than the government agencies,” Fuller said.
Nursing home rescue
A nursing home in Dickinson, a low-lying city 30 miles (48 kilometers) southeast of Houston, quickly became the face of the crisis after its owner took a photo of residents, some in wheelchairs, up to their chests in water.
The nursing home owner, Trudy Lampson, sent the photo to her daughter, whose husband posted it Sunday to Twitter, where it’s been retweeted about 4,500 times.
The photo was so dramatic that many users denounced it as fake. The nursing home residents were saved the same day.
“Thanks to all the true believers that re-tweeted and got the news organizations involved,” Lampson’s son-in-law, Timothy McIntosh, posted later in the day. “It pushed La Vita Bella to #1 on the priority list.”
McIntosh told The Associated Press on Monday that his post gained traction after a local newspaper reported it.
“We are in Tampa, Florida,” he said. “The only way we could have an impact was by trying to reach out to emergency services and trying to do social media to gain attention to the cause.”
Not only are the people who need rescuing relying on social media for help, volunteers and police departments alike are posting their phone numbers and instructions on Twitter and Facebook so people can get more immediate help.
Revolutionizing search and rescue
An unofficial battalion of volunteers called the Cajun Navy who brought small boats to Houston posted on Facebook that people who need rescuing should download the Zello cellphone app to find rescuers close to their area.
“This will connect you with officials on the ground there that can navigate help your way. PLEASE SHARE!” said the post, which has been shared more than 12,000 times since Sunday night.
Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez tweeted early Sunday that a woman was going into labor and shared the address. An hour later, he updated his followers that the woman had been taken away in an ambulance.
More than any other natural disaster, Harvey has made it clear that social media has revolutionized the search-and-rescue process, said Karen North, a professor of social media at the University of Southern California.
“And what’s really fascinating is that this is not emergency services experts creating strategic systems to rescue people,” North said. “This is evolving organically … Not only can people reach out to 911 but to friends and family elsewhere who can not only reach out to 911 but directly to rescuers in the location where the person needs help.
“It’s really just the idea of taking technology designed for one purpose and applying them to a disaster situation,” North said.
Dozens of people continued to post their pleas to be rescued through late Monday.
Fuller said if the water rises again at her home, she won’t bother calling 911 and will post directly to social media.
“If I was desperate, I’d put it in a public Facebook site and say, `Somebody please help,’ and hope that somebody was looking,”‘ she said.
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The price of a pack of cigarettes has skyrocketed in New York City, while the number of places they are available for sale is set to fall.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday signed a sweeping series of anti-smoking bills, part of a comprehensive effort to help reduce the number of smokers in the city by nearly 200,000 over the next few years.
“We are sending a loud and clear message that we will not let their greed kill any more New Yorkers without a fight,” de Blasio said at a bill-signing ceremony at a Brooklyn hospital. “These new laws will not only help reduce the number of smokers in our city, but also save lives.”
The minimum price for a pack of cigarettes will jump from $10.50 to $13, the highest base price for cigarettes in the nation, de Blasio said.
New York health officials hope that with brands forced to charge at least $13 for the cheapest pack, premium brands will also raise their prices to maintain separation from lower-tier smokes.
The planned price hike is one of seven bills aimed at pressuring the city’s 900,000 estimated smokers to quit.
Another new rule will reduce by half the number of retailers licensed to sell tobacco products. About 8,300 businesses now have a license. The numbers will be reduced through attrition, officials said.
Philadelphia and San Francisco have similar licensing restrictions.
Other laws will ban the sale of all tobacco products in pharmacies, require licensing of e-cigarette retailers, and require all residential buildings to have smoking policies that are given to all current and prospective tenants. Some residential buildings will be required to ban smoking in common areas such as hallways.
Opponents of the price increase say it may push many smokers into buying untaxed, unregulated cigarettes on the black market.
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