It’s one of the biggest challenges of the 21st century: how to feed a growing population without ruining the environment. Farmers may get some help from artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things. As VOA’s Steve Baragona reports, falling costs and advancing technology may put precision agriculture in reach for more farmers worldwide.
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Doctors encourage their patients to eat a healthful diet, and often give them tips on how to do that. But a pediatrician in Spotsylvania, Virginia, is doing even more. Dr. Nimali Fernando is showing her young patients and their parents how to eat healthy by offering them a variety of cooking classes, from baby food for parents to cooking with preschoolers and older kids. Faiza Elmasry has the story. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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EU antitrust regulators fined Google $2.7 billion Tuesday for unfairly boosting search results for its online shopping service.
The European Union said Google began efforts in 2008 to boost the service now known as Google Shopping by making its results show up higher in search results, while demoting the search results of rival companies.
The result, according to regulators, was the most highly ranked rival services appeared on average on the fourth page of the results, an area few consumers ever reach.
EU Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said Google has created many innovative products, but in this case abused its market dominance in internet searches.
Google said it will review the EU decision as it considers an appeal to the decision.
“When you shop online, you want to find the products you are looking for quickly and easily. And advertisers want to promote those same products. That is why Google shows shopping ads, connecting our users with thousands of advertisers, large and small, in ways that are useful for both,” Kent Walker, a Google senior vice president, said in a statement.
Vestager said Google denied other companies the chance to compete on the merits and to innovate, and denied European consumers a genuine choice of service.
In addition to the fine, Google is required to give rival comparison shopping services equal treatment, and the company must explain how it will accomplish that.
When we’re buying groceries by weight, being a few grams off may not be a big deal. But we do expect the store scales to be calibrated to show the exact measure. The situation becomes more complicated when we want to know the exact measure of something weighing a hundred tons or more. VOA’s George Putic visited a lab that calibrates large-force instruments.
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Jury selection began Monday in the trial of a Chinese billionaire accused of bribing United Nations diplomats to gain their approval of a U.N. conference center he wanted to build.
Ng Lap Seng has pleaded not guilty. He has posted $50 million bail, but is restricted to a luxury New York City apartment that he owns, where he is under guard around the clock. He is allowed to leave his apartment only to visit his doctors or his lawyers.
Ng, who is 69, is accused of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes for the center he planned to build in Macau.
Prosecutors say some of the money reached former General Assembly president John Ashe and a former diplomat from the Dominican Republic, Francis Lorenzo.
Ashe died last year in a freak accident while lifting weights at his home.
Lorenzo pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate with U.S. prosecutors in the case against Ng.
Ng’s lawyers contend the charges are politically motivated, aimed at trying to curb China’s influence over developing countries that might have used the Macau conference center.
If prosecutors and defense lawyers can agree on selection of a jury without delay, the judge in the case estimated the trial would last a month or perhaps longer.
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Thirteen EU nations voiced support on Monday for a proposal to empower the bloc’s executive to negotiate with Russia over objections to a new Russian gas pipeline to Germany, despite opposition from Berlin.
At an informal debate among EU energy ministers, Germany’s partners in the 28-nation bloc spoke out against Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline plan to pump more gas directly from Russia’s Baltic coast to Germany.
EU nations are expected to vote in the autumn on the European Commission’s request for a mandate to negotiate with Russia on behalf of the bloc as a whole.
Germany, the main beneficiary of the pipeline, sees it as a purely commercial project, with Chancellor Angela Merkel last week saying she saw no role for the Commission.
The plan taps into divisions among the bloc over doing business with Russia, which covers a third of the EU’s gas needs, despite sanctions against Moscow over its military intervention in Ukraine.
In private, EU officials say they hope direct talks with Russia would delay the project past 2019, depriving Russian state gas exporter Gazprom of leverage in talks over transit fees for Ukraine, the current route for most gas supplies to Europe.
Germany, Austria and France – which have firms partnering with Gazprom on the project – declined to take the floor on Monday, EU diplomats said.
“We had 13 delegations intervening, with all of them being supportive of the Commission’s approach,” Commission Vice President Maros Sefcovic told Reuters by telephone after presenting the EU executive’s case to member states. “I am definitely optimistic about getting the mandate, but I know this is just the beginning of the debate.”
The Commission found support from Italy as well as Nordic, Eastern European and Baltic states, EU sources told Reuters.
“Germany has commercial interests, but it needs to explain itself,” one senior EU official said.
With the pipeline expected to reroute Russian gas supplies around Ukraine to the north, Italy voiced concerns it would increase gas prices for customers further down the line.
Eastern European and Baltic states fear it will increase their dependence on Gazprom and undercut Ukraine.
Nordic nations, meanwhile, have security concerns over the pipeline being laid near their shores under the Baltic Sea, where Russia has bolstered its military presence.
However, many EU nations have yet to take a stand.
“It is quite toxic. Many member states are quite wary of advertising their position,” one diplomat told Reuters.
There are also differences among EU member states over what aims to pursue in potential talks with Russia.
Speaking in Paris on Monday, Ukraine’s foreign minister said the draft EU proposal did not go far enough to secure guarantees from Russia, warning Nord Stream 2 would have “dangerous consequences” for the bloc.
Adding to tensions is the threat of new U.S. sanctions on Russia that would penalize Western firms involved in Nord Stream 2: Uniper, Wintershall, Shell, OMV and Engie.
Several EU diplomats said the measures proposed by the U.S. Senate have already backfired against their stated aim of bolstering European energy security.
“It’s a divisive measure,” one senior official said. “It’s easy for the U.S. to go after Russian gas of course, they don’t use it. … We are trying to make the best of a bad thing by balancing the interest of different member states.”
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The latest farm tools on the job in Pakistan are cell phones and satellites. A new program is using satellite data to estimate how much water a field needs, and then texting this information to farmers.
The hope is to prevent overwatering. A 2013 report from the Asian Development Bank called Pakistan “one of the most water-stressed countries in the world,” with a 30-day storage capacity, well below the recommended capacity of 1,000 days. The per capita water resources are on par with those of Syria, where drought has helped to fuel a civil war.
The water crisis is being driven by several factors: climate change, an expanding population, local mismanagement and a greater demand on farmers. It threatens to destabilize relations between Pakistan and India, who share the Indus River.
Turning off the spigot
Overwatering is costly for farmers trying to make ends meet. While Pakistan continues to suffer from chronic fuel shortages, farmers must use diesel motors to pump groundwater onto their fields. The lower the water table, the more fuel it takes to pump it to the surface.
And overwatering also reduces crop yields. But many older farmers learned their trade at a time when the water ran freely, and the risks of under-watering are so great that farmers still err on the side of too much irrigation. The Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR) found that rice farmers were using more than three times as much water as they needed to.
The PCRWR reached out to the Sustainability, Satellites, Water, and Environment research group (SASWE) at the University of Washington, hoping to use science to inform irrigation choices.
Pakistan’s program started last spring with a 700-farmer pilot. As of January, 10,000 farmers were receiving messages like this one: “Dear farmer friend, we would like to inform you that the irrigation need for your banana crop was 2 inches during the past week.”
The messages come from a fully-automated system that does everything from downloading publicly available satellite data and distributing the text messages to using models to compute how much each farmer needs to irrigate.
A nationwide effort
PCRWR plans to scale up the program for use across the nation, and expects millions of farmers to participate. But first they are reviewing the system. They want to know how easy it is for farmers to use, and how many actually follow the irrigation advisories. And they want to know how accurate it is and how effective it is at saving farmers money.
They are collecting feedback from farmers over the phone.
“I haven’t seen any report yet,” Faisal Hossain of SASWE told VOA, but “we got a story last month from one of the farmers who was telling us how he was able to get, I think, for every acre 700 kilograms more of wheat than his neighbor.” The farmer credited the irrigation advisories.
There are challenges to expansion. They may need to do more work to persuade farmers to trust the technology. As more farmers use it on smaller farms in areas with more varied terrain, the satellite data resolution may not be precise enough for accurate measurements. And small farmers may not be comfortable relying on cell phone technology.
But for the most part, cell phones already are fairly ubiquitous in Pakistan. Last year, the Punjab government reported that it would be giving out 5 million smartphones to farmers.
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More than half of Cuba’s arable land remains fallow nearly a decade after a government pledge to cultivate it, and food production is sluggish, according to a government report.
Cuba has yet to publish an overall figure for last year’s agricultural output. But the report released over the weekend by the National Statistics Office indicated only minor improvement in 2016 over the previous year.
The state owns 80 percent of the land and leases most of that to farmers and cooperatives. The remainder is owned by private family farmers and their cooperatives.
Despite the leasing of small parcels of land to some 200,000 would-be-farmers over the last decade, the report said just 2.7 million hectares (6.7 million acres) out of the 6.2 million hectares (15.3 million acres) of arable land available were under cultivation.
The Cuban government often blames bad weather, a lack of labor and capital for poor land use and production, while critics charge it is due to a lack of private property and foreign investment, rickety infrastructure and the Soviet-style bureaucracy.
President Raul Castro made increased food production and reducing the Communist-run Caribbean island’s dependence on imports his top priority after taking office in 2008 from his then ailing and now deceased brother, Fidel.
Castro began leasing land, decentralizing decision-making and introducing market mechanisms into the sector. But most of the effort has faltered and the state has backtracked on market reforms, once more assigning resources, setting prices and controlling most distribution.
Cash-strapped Cuba imports more than 60 percent of the food it consumes at a cost of around $2 billion annually, mainly for bulk cereals and grains such as rice, corn, soy and beans, as well as other items such as powdered milk and chicken.
Last year, $232 million of the imports came from the United States under an exception to the trade embargo that allows agricultural sales for cash.
The country does not produce wheat or soybeans, though experiments are underway to produce the latter. Over the last decade the government has poured millions of dollars into corn, rice, beans, meat and milk production in hopes of reducing imports, but with little success.
Unprocessed rice production was 514,000 tons in 2016, up more than 20 percent from the previous year. But that figure, representing just a third of national consumption, barely surpassed the 436,000 tons reported in 2008 and was less than the 642,000 produced five years ago.
Beans weighed in at 137,000 tons, up more than 15 percent from the previous year and compared with 117,000 in 2012, but little changed from the 2008 figure of 127,000 tons.
Corn, at 404,000 tons last year, was up some 10 percent over 2015 and the 360,000 output of 5 and 10 years ago, but again just a third of national consumption.
Pork and beef production have increased, while milk, chicken and egg production have stagnated.
Export crops, from coffee and citrus to tobacco and sugar cane, have not increased significantly, and in some cases declined.
Tonnage for root and garden vegetables has improved some 15 percent over the decade and reached 5.3 million tons last year, an increase of 200,000 tons. Bananas and plantains increased some 15 percent to a million tons in 2016 compared with an average of around 850,000 tons over the decade.
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Social media giants Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft say they are forming a working group to remove terrorist content from their platforms.
The global technology companies announced Monday they are creating the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism which will help them share technical solutions to remove terrorist and extremist postings.
The companies are facing growing pressure from governments around the world to quickly remove hateful content. They have previously begun working together to create fingerprints for videos or pictures with extremist information that can be shared across social media platforms.
The tech firms say the new forum will also help them to commission research to fight terrorist speech as well as to work with counter-terrorism experts.
The forum will “formalize and structure existing and future areas of collaboration between our companies and foster cooperation with smaller tech companies, civil society groups and academics, governments and supra-national bodies such as the EU and the U.N.,” the companies said in a statement. “The scope of our work will evolve over time as we will need to be responsive to the ever-evolving terrorist and extremist tactics.”
Last week, European heads of state called on tech companies to develop new technology to automatically detect and remove extremist content. Germany has proposed a new law that would fine social media firms up to $56 million if they do not quickly remove extremist postings.
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The American company which made cladding used London’s Grenfell Tower, where 79 people died after the building caught fire, has said it will stop global sales of the product.
U.S.-based Arconic cited “inconsistencies in building codes around the world” for stopping the sales. The company’s shares fell over 11 percent after it was linked to the blaze in London.
Hours after the announcement from Arconic, the Department for Communities and Local Government said that samples from 75 high-rises in England had failed fire safety tests.
The tests were initiated following the Grenfell Tower fire. Grenfell’s exterior insulation is thought to have been responsible for the rapid acceleration of the blaze, resulting in the deaths of at least 79 people, fire officials said.
Grenfell Tower and many of the buildings tested are all part of government-run, low-cost, public housing developments.
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The promotion of Saudi Arabia’s top economic reformer to crown prince has cheered business leaders who believe it will open up new opportunities. But they worry about officials’ ability to implement reforms and about geopolitical tensions in the region.
The Saudi stock market jumped 7 percent in the two days after Mohammed bin Salman, previously deputy crown prince, was appointed last week to be first in line for the throne.
Part of the market’s rise was due to a decision by index compiler MSCI to consider upgrading Riyadh to emerging market status. But much of the euphoria was political; shares in companies closely linked to Prince Mohammed’s reforms were the top performers.
National Commercial Bank, the biggest lender, which is expected to play a big role handling financial transactions related to the reforms, surged 15 percent.
Miner Ma’aden soared 20 percent; Prince Mohammed has labelled mining a key sector in his drive to cut Saudi Arabia’s reliance on oil exports. Emaar the Economic City, builder of an industrial zone which the prince hopes
to develop as an export industry base, gained 16 percent.
Solid political move
Business leaders said the promotion of Prince Mohammed, 31, removed political uncertainty by confirming a smooth shift of power from an older generation of Saudi leaders to a young generation represented by the prince.
“The political transition was very smooth — we expect the reforms to continue,” Muhammad Alagil, chairman of Jarir Marketing, a top retailing chain, told Reuters.
He said Jarir, which has 47 stores, some 39 of which are in Saudi, would open at least six this year and a similar number next year, mostly inside Saudi Arabia.
Fresh opportunity
To some in business, Prince Mohammed represents fresh opportunity in the form of a $200 billion privatization program and state investment to help kick start new industries such as shipbuilding, auto parts making and tourism.
Some executives predicted the progress of these plans, which are still largely on the drawing board a year after Prince Mohammed announced them, would accelerate after his promotion.
“I didn’t see a risk of the reforms stalling or being reversed before, given the political backing behind them. But now the reforms can go ahead with more strength,” said Hesham Abo Jamee, chief executive at Alistithmar Capital.
He added that social initiatives in the reforms would help the economy by stimulating consumer spending.
For example, developing an entertainment sector, in a conservative society which has so far shunned many forms of public entertainment, would create jobs. The government plans an entertainment zone south of Riyadh with sports, cultural and recreational facilities.
Increasing the role of women in the workforce would boost family incomes and could accelerate creation of small businesses such as restaurants, Abo Jamee said.
Repatriation
Prince Mohammed is also architect of a tough austerity policy, including spending cuts and tax rises, that aims to abolish by 2020 a budget gap which totaled $79 billion in 2016.
The austerity has slowed private sector growth almost to zero.
But many in business see austerity as inevitable in an era of low oil prices and are pleased by the prince’s willingness to moderate it to avoid a worse slowdown. To mark his promotion, Riyadh retroactively restored civil servants’ allowances at a cost it estimated at around $1.5 billion.
Privately, many executives expect Prince Mohammed to persuade or pressure wealthy Saudis to repatriate some of the billions of dollars which they are believed to have transferred overseas for safe-keeping.
Other issues
It is not clear what tools he would use — moral suasion, legal action or financial incentives — but his promotion may have given him the political capital for such a sensitive step. Businesses remain worried by two other issues, however.
One is the competence of the bureaucracy to carry out the complex reforms. The government talks of partnerships between the public and private sectors to finance projects, for example, but has not released legal frameworks for such deals.
“Many of the reforms are in name only — nothing has happened. They’re struggling with the details,” said a foreign economist who advises the Saudi government.
Military intervention
The other big worry is rising tensions around Saudi Arabia — tensions in which Prince Mohammed has been closely involved in his role as defense minister for two years.
In addition to its military intervention in Yemen, Saudi Arabia is locked in a diplomatic confrontation with Iran, its allies are struggling in Syria’s civil war, and early this month it cut diplomatic and transport ties with Qatar.
For some in business, these tensions are at best a distraction for the government at a time when it needs to focus on the economy, and at worst risk a more serious regional crisis that could deter foreign investment and endanger the reforms.
Ethiopia’s highlands traditionally have a built-in protection for the people who live there. The elevation and the cool temperatures have meant that malaria, the deadly mosquito-borne illness, cannot be transmitted.
But climate change may be putting an end to that safeguard. A new study led by a researcher at the University of Maine found that since 1981, the elevation needed to protect people from malaria has risen by 100 meters.
For the first time, people living in Ethiopia’s highlands could be vulnerable to the disease.
“What’s happening is the conditions, at least in terms of temperature, that are suitable for malaria are slowly creeping up at higher elevations,” said Bradfield Lyon at Maine’s Climate Change Institute and School of Earth and Climate Sciences. “The same thing would be true in other highland locations throughout the tropics.”
“It’s sort of eroding this natural buffer,” he said.
The two most common types of parasites that cause malaria in the region require consistent temperatures above 18 degrees Celsius and 15 degrees Celsius respectively.
Lyon’s study found that temperatures in the Horn of Africa are rising by an average of 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade due to climate change. He said this may not sound like a major change, but that over the course of the years studied (1981 to 2014), more than 6 million people who once lived areas protected from malaria may have lost that protection.
Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa, at 2,300 meters above sea level, still sits well above the threshold for malaria. Lyon said the communities potentially at risk are at elevations between 1,200 and 1,700 meters.
Still, he emphasized that this is simply a meteorological study. He has not seen evidence that people in the described areas actually contracted malaria. But the research is pointing out that it is possible.
“It does not mean that these people, therefore, are going to get malaria. It just says that it is slowly enhancing the risk if we leave all other factors alone,” Lyon said. “I mean the hope is through interventions and so forth that we can, in fact, eradicate malaria in this and other regions of the tropics.”
In 2015, about 212 million people worldwide fell ill with malaria and about 429,000 died, according to the World Health Organization. About nine-tenths of the cases and deaths occurred in sub-Saharan Africa.
Worldwide, about 214 million people fall ill with malaria each year and 438,000 people die as a result, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The most vulnerable are children living in sub-Saharan Africa.
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More than 75 people, mostly young children, have gotten measles in the U.S. state of Minnesota. Nearly all were unvaccinated.
Measles is one of the most highly contagious diseases that exists. All it takes is a sneeze or a cough to spread the virus in tiny droplets through the air.
One person can infect up to 18 others. Each one of those people infects another dozen or so people, and it spreads from there.
Ninety percent of those exposed will get the virus, unless they have been vaccinated or have already had measles.
The measles virus can linger on doorknobs, tables, any surface for up to two hours. Touch it and you’re exposed.
‘Not a trivial disease’
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, says, “Measles is not a trivial disease. If you have a measles outbreak, a proportion of people are going to have serious complications.”
The complications can be as serious as permanent brain damage. It can leave a child blind or deaf. Measles also kills.
Dr. Peter Hotez is a professor at Baylor College of Medicine. He’s also the director of Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development.
Hotez told VOA, “In the pre-vaccine era, we had about 500 kids die of measles every year in the U.S. and 50,000 hospitalizations.”
And that’s not all. Dr. Flavia Bustreo at the World Health Organization says measles can have lingering consequences.
“Measles can lead to pneumonia, and a reduction in immune function for some time after the infection, so the child becomes weaker and more susceptible to other infections,” Bustreo said.
The U.S. was declared measles free in 2000. Last year the World Health Organization declared the Americas measles free. This came after a 22-year campaign to eradicate this disease in both North and South America. The achievement was considered a historic milestone.
International hub
So, why, you could ask, have more than 75 people, mostly children, gotten measles in the Midwestern state of Minnesota?
All cases of measles in the Americas are imported. In Minnesota, the outbreak started among the Somali-American community and spread because this group had low vaccination rates for measles.
Minneapolis is an international hub where people arrive from countries around the world. As of now, no one knows the identity of the first patient with measles, whether it was someone visiting from abroad or if an unvaccinated American brought the disease home after traveling overseas.
Like most pediatricians in the U.S., Dr. Hope Scott counts herself lucky to have never seen a case of measles. “The kids who get measles are really, really sick. It’s a pretty big deal to get measles,” she says.
The first signs of measles are a runny nose, cough and a fever followed by a blotchy rash that starts on the face and then spreads all over the body. Once the rash appears, the fever spikes.
An infected person can spread the virus to others about four days before the rash appears and for about four more days afterward.
Hospitalizations
About a third of the children who have acquired measles in Minnesota have been hospitalized. There is no treatment that can get rid of a measles infection, but doctors can treat the symptoms.
Patsy Stinchfield, a nurse practitioner who’s overseeing care at Children’s Minnesota, where these children have been treated, says they are exhausted and dehydrated when they arrive. But, she told VOA, that so far none of the children has suffered any complications.
The American Academy of Pediatrics has asked doctors to work with parents who are reluctant to get their children vaccinated.
Reston Town Center Pediatrics in Virginia allows parents to set up a delayed vaccine schedule for their children, to a point.
Scott says the practice will work with the parents until the child is about 2 years old. Then, if the child is not vaccinated and the parents don’t have a plan to do so, Scott said the office sends them a letter saying their children can no longer be treated at the practice.
Measles is not just a childhood disease. Adults can get it, too, and adults are also at risk for complications.
The best protection is to get two doses of the measles vaccine. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends children get the first dose after their first birthday and the second when they are 4 to 6 years old. The two doses together provide 97 percent protection against measles.
Stinchfield said Children’s Minnesota has a walk-in clinic for measles vaccinations. She said before the outbreak, about 500 children would get vaccinated against the virus in a week. Since the outbreak, 3,000 people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds get vaccinated each week.
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More than 75 people, mostly young children, have gotten measles in the U.S. state of Minnesota. Nearly all were unvaccinated. The same is true in every other country worldwide. That’s why pediatricians and public health doctors want every child to get vaccinated against this virus. VOA’s Carol Pearson takes a look at measles to find out why.
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We know that forests are carbon sinks. That means they absorb a lot of planet-warming carbon dioxide. But researchers are trying to find out just how good they are at storing carbon, and if there is a limit to how much they can absorb. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Embattled Japanese auto parts manufacturer Takata said Monday it has filed for bankruptcy protection.
Takata also announced that rival Key Safety Systems is purchasing Takata for $1.5 billion.
Takata has been overwhelmed with the costs of lawsuits and recalls related to defective airbags linked to the deaths of 16 people and scores of injuries worldwide.
The defective airbags led to a global recall of tens of millions of automobiles. The chemicals that power the airbags were found to deteriorate spontaneously with prolonged exposure to high humidity, causing the airbags to deploy far more forcefully than normal and sending metal and plastic shrapnel into drivers and passengers.
Takata has already agreed to pay a billion-dollar fine to settle with U.S. safety regulators. Former U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx has said that Takata engaged in a pattern of “delay, misdirection and refusal to acknowledge the truth.”
Jason Luo, president and CEO of Key Safety Systems, said, “Although Takata has been impacted by the global airbag recall, the underlying strength of its skilled employee base, geographic reach, and exceptional steering wheels, seat belts and other safety products have not diminished.”
The Tokyo Stock Exchange suspended trading of Takata shares Monday and said it would delist Takata stock Tuesday.
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A SpaceX rocket carried 10 communications satellites into orbit from California on Sunday, two days after the company successfully launched a satellite from Florida.
The Falcon 9 rocket blasted off through low-lying fog at 1:25 p.m. PDT from Vandenberg Air Force Base northwest of Los Angeles. It carried a second batch of new satellites for Iridium Communications, which is replacing its orbiting fleet with a next-generation constellation of satellites.
About 7 minutes after liftoff, the rocket’s first-stage booster returned to earth and landed on a floating platform on a ship in the Pacific Ocean, while the rocket’s second stage continued to carry the satellites toward orbit.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 on Friday launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida and boosted a communications satellite for Bulgaria into orbit. Its first stage was recovered after landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
Billionaire Elon Musk, who founded Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX, believes reusing rocket components will bring down the cost of space launches.
Iridium plans to put in place 75 new satellites for its mobile voice and data communications system by mid-2018, requiring six more launches, all by SpaceX.
The $3 billion effort by the McLean, Virginia, company involves complex procedures to replace 66 operational satellites in use for many years. Some of the new satellites will be so-called on-orbit spares, or older satellites that remain in orbit on standby for use if the newer ones malfunction.
Swapping out and deorbiting some old satellites has already begun, Iridium CEO Matt Desch said in a pre-launch call with reporters.
Several old satellites have been moved into lower orbits to use up their remaining fuel and configure the solar panels for maximum drag so they will re-enter the atmosphere and burn up.
The first re-entry was believed to have occurred on June 11, Desch said.
“It’s hard to celebrate something like that, but these satellites have put in almost 20 years of service, and making sure we’ve cleaned up after ourselves as we deploy our new constellation is a priority,” he said.
The new satellites also carry payloads for joint-venture Aerion’s space-based, real-time tracking and surveillance of aircraft around the globe, which has implications for efficiency, economy and safety — especially in remote airspace over the oceans.
“This will truly be a revolutionary aspect of air-traffic control,” said Aireon CEO Don Thomas.
The technology, which requires aircraft to be equipped with certain equipment, is undergoing testing involving eight of the initial batch of Iridium NEXT satellites.
The Iridium NEXT program also will bring an end to so-called “Iridium flares,” which space enthusiasts have observed for years. The new satellites will not create visible flashes of reflected sunlight as they passed overhead.
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The global economy has picked up and prospects for the next few months are the best in a long time.
But the recovery is maturing and faces risks from populist rejection of free trade and from high debt that could burden consumers and companies as interest rates rise.
Those were key takeaways from a review of the global economy released Sunday by the Bank for International Settlements, an international organization for central banks based in Basel, Switzerland.
The report said that “the global economy’s performance has improved considerably and that its near-term prospects appear the best in a long time.” Global growth should reach 3.5 percent this year, according to a summary of forecasts, not quite what it was before the Great Recession but in line with long-term averages. Meanwhile, financial markets for stocks and bonds have been unusually buoyant and steady.
On top of that, forecasts by governments and international organizations as well as by private analysts point to “further gradual improvement” in coming months.
Key risks include a possible weakening of consumer spending across different economies. So far, the recovery has been largely fueled by people being willing and able to spend more. But that trend could fall victim to higher levels of debt as interest rates rise in some countries and as the amount people need to spend to service their debts takes a bigger chunk of income.
Countries that were slammed by collapsing real estate markets during the Great Recession seem less vulnerable now, such as the United States, the U.K., and Spain. But debt burdens are more worrisome in a range of other countries mentioned in the report, including China, Australia and Norway.
Another risk comes from weak business investment, typically the second stage of recovery after consumers start spending more; yet that kind of spending has lagged its pre-recession levels for reasons that aren’t always clear to economists.
The BIS urged governments around the world to take advantage of the economic recovery as an opportunity to make growth more resistant to trouble by implementing pro-business and pro-growth measures.
In particular, the report warned against a backlash against globalization, saying that trade and interconnected financial markets had led to higher standards of living and lifted large parts of the world’s population out of poverty. It called for domestic policies to address inequality and lost jobs, saying that changing technology was often to blame, not free trade. “Attempts to roll back globalization would be the wrong response to these challenges,” it said.
Governments around the world are using surveillance software that taps into individual smartphones, taking screenshots, reading email and tracking users’ movements, according to security experts and civil liberties groups.
The rise of so-called spyware comes as electronic communications have become more encrypted, frustrating law enforcement and governments’ surveillance efforts.
Over the past several years, private companies have begun selling advanced software that first appears as a text message with a link. When a person clicks on the link, the phone becomes infected. A third party can then read emails, take data and listen to audio, as well as track users’ movements.
The companies that sell this spyware exclusively to government agencies insist that the software must be used only in a legal manner, to fight crime and terrorism. However, security researchers and civil liberties groups contend that some governments use the programs to track human rights activists, journalists and others.
A recent story in The New York Times focused on activists and journalists in Mexico who have received text messages and emails with links that, if clicked on, would infect their devices with spyware. In some cases, the messages appeared to come from legitimate sources, such as the U.S. Embassy.
The Mexican government says it does not target activists, journalists and others with spyware unless it has “prior judicial authorization.”
‘Lawful intercept’
In recent years, there’s been a rise in software sales in what is known as the “lawful intercept” market, said Mike Murray, vice president of security intelligence at Lookout, a mobile security company based in San Francisco, California.
Countries that can’t make their own surveillance software can now buy sophisticated surveillance tools, Murray said.
“What’s new is the enthusiasm [from] nation-states. … It’s a capability they always wished they had. Now they have it,” he added.
Lookout, which makes security software and services, receives monthly information from more than 100 million phones in 150 countries. It has seen spyware “in every kind of contentious place around the world,” Murray said.
Nation-state use
The use of nation-state spyware used to be limited to a handful of governments, said Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group. But now that the price of the spyware has come down, countries can spend a few hundred thousand dollars to get the same capability.
Galperin spent three weeks in Mexico last year training activists. One tip she gives: Users who are not certain that a link in email or a text message is safe should forward it to a separate account, such as Google’s Gmail or Google Docs, to prevent infection.
“We should be very concerned,” Galperin said. “Surveillance malware is incredibly powerful. You have full control of the machine. You can see everything the user can see, and do everything the user can do.”
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Chief lieutenants in the Koch brothers’ political network lashed out at the Senate Republican health care bill on Saturday, becoming a powerful outside critic as GOP leaders try to rally support for their plan among rank-and-file Republicans.
“This Senate bill needs to get better,” said Tim Phillips, who leads Americans for Prosperity, the Koch network’s political arm. “It has to get better.”
Phillips called the Senate’s plans for Medicaid “a slight nip and tuck” over President Barack Obama’s health care law, a modest change he described as “immoral.”
The comments came on the first day of a three-day private donor retreat at a luxury resort in the Rocky Mountains. Invitations were extended only to donors who promise to give at least $100,000 each year to the various groups backed by the Koch brothers’ Freedom Partners — a network of education, policy and political entities that aim to promote small government.
No outside group has been move aggressive over the yearslong push to repeal Obama’s health care law than that of the Kochs, who vowed on Saturday to spend another 10 years fighting to change the health care system if necessary. The Koch network has often displayed a willingness to take on Republicans — including President Donald Trump — when their policies aren’t deemed conservative enough.
Big-budget push
Network spokesman James Davis said the organization would continue to push for changes to the Senate health care bill over the coming week.
“At the end of the day, this bill is not going to fix health care,” Davis declared.
The network’s wishes are backed by a massive political budget that will be used to take on Republican lawmakers, if necessary, Phillips said.
He described the organization’s budget for policy and politics heading into the 2018 midterm elections as between $300 million and $400 million. “We believe we’re headed to the high end of that range,” he said.
On Friday, Nevada Republican Dean Heller became the fifth GOP senator to declare his opposition to the Senate health care proposal. Echoing the other four, Heller said he opposed the measure “in this form” but did not rule out backing a version that was changed to his liking.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, has said he’s willing to alter the measure to attract support, and promised plenty of backroom bargaining as he tries pushing a final package through his chamber next week.
Republican leaders have scant margin for error. Facing unanimous Democratic opposition, McConnell can afford to lose just two of the 52 GOP senators and still prevail.
At least two of the current opponents, Utah Senator Mike Lee and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, were among 18 elected officials scheduled to attend the Koch donor conference.
The Senate measure resembles legislation the House approved last month that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said would mean 23 million additional uninsured people within a decade and that recent polling shows is viewed favorably by only around 1 in 4 Americans.
Meeting with Pence
Billionaire industrialist Charles Koch and his chief lieutenants met privately with Vice President Mike Pence for nearly an hour Friday. Pence, a longtime Koch ally, was in Colorado Springs to address a gathering of religious conservatives.
Phillips said it was “a cordial discussion” about policy.
Also Saturday, retired football star Deion Sanders announced plans to partner with the Kochs to help fight poverty in Dallas.
The unlikely partnership aims to raise $21 million over the next three years to fund anti-poverty programs in the city where Sanders once played football. The outspoken athlete also defended Koch, who is often demonized by Democrats, as someone simply “trying to make the world a better place.”
“I’m happy where I am and who I’m with because we share a lot of the same values and goals,” Sanders said when asked if he’d be willing to partner with organizations on the left.
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A cholera outbreak in war-ravaged Yemen could infect more than 300,000 people by the end of August, up from nearly 180,000 cases today, the United Nations said Friday. VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports on the dire situation resulting from the 27-month-long conflict, which pits Houthi rebels against government forces backed by a Saudi-led coalition.
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A deadly heat wave that has claimed at least six lives in parts of the American Southwest continues.
While temperatures cooled off Friday in Los Angeles, residents are bracing for a long, hot summer.
Planes were grounded for a time in Phoenix earlier this week, as temperatures in parts of the U.S. Southwest soared to 45 degrees Celsius and higher, from Tucson, Arizona, to Palm Springs, California.
Cooling stations, community centers
People have tried their best to stay cool, using community cooling stations in parks and community centers throughout the region.
An air-conditioned senior center in the Los Angeles suburb of Canoga Park offered companionship and relief from the heat.
Four women relaxed over a game of dominoes, while in another part of the center, a dozen women kept active in a tap-dancing class.
They are fine indoors, center director Karin Haseltine said, but she warned too much activity outside on hot days could be hazardous for both seniors and young children.
Haseltine said many seniors also worry about the cost of air-conditioning.
“They can’t turn it on because the bill is so expensive,” she said.
Inside the center, where it is cool, seniors were staying active, taking tap dancing classes and doing yoga.
Deaths blamed on heat
Scattered fires have burned throughout the West, and several deaths in Nevada, Arizona and California have been blamed on intense heat.
Animals are in danger, too.
Zoo workers have been hosing down the elephants at the Phoenix Zoo. Authorities also warn parents and pet owners not to leave animals or children in cars, where temperatures can quickly soar to deadly levels.
At an air-conditioned center in Los Angeles, senior volunteer Rosalie said people are making the best of being indoors.
“The don’t have to worry about being uncomfortable, getting ill,” she said, and can have lunch and activities with friends.
Others are doing what they can to stay cool outdoors, from lounging in the shade to splashing in public fountains.
Makeshift hydration stations are offering bottled water. Near-record-high temperatures are expected through early next week, and people say they are prepared for more heat this summer.
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A deadly heat wave continues in parts of the American Southwest. In Los Angeles, temperatures cooled off Friday, but residents are bracing for a long, hot summer.VOA’s Mike O’Sullivan reports.
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The Zika virus made headlines last year because it caused microcephaly in many babies whose mothers were pregnant while they had the virus. Microcephaly keeps the brain from developing normally in children but is relatively harmless to adults. That got cancer researchers thinking about the possibility the virus could be used to attack cancer cells in the brain. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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