Thirty-five European children have died from measles in the past 12 months in what the World Health Organization calls an “unacceptable” tragedy. The deaths could have been prevented by a vaccine. A measles outbreak in Minnesota sent many to the hospital. Still, some parents in developed countries continue to believe false reports that the measles vaccine causes autism. Some parents are refusing to get their children vaccinated for other diseases as well. VOA’s Carol Pearson reports.
…
Laughter can combat trauma. Spiritual cleansings could be used to fight an opioid addiction. Cactus extract may battle diabetes and obesity.
These insights are from curanderismo — traditional indigenous healing from the American Southwest and Latin America.
University of New Mexico professor Eliseo “Cheo” Torres’ has included these thoughts in a new, unique textbook connected to his internationally-known annual course on curanderismo.
“Curanderismo: The Art of Traditional Medicine Without Borders,” released last week, coincides with Torres’ annual gathering of curandero students and healers around the world at the University of New Mexico. For nearly 20 years, healers and their students have come to Albuquerque to meet and exchange ideas on traditional healing that for many years were often ignored and ridiculed.
Torres, who is also the university’s vice president for student affairs, said the popularity of the annual course and a similar online class he teaches convinced him that there needed to be a textbook on curanderismo.
“This textbook came out of the experience of this class and the ideas that have been shared through the years,” Torres said during a special morning ceremony with Aztec dancers on campus. “From healers in Mexico to those in Africa, many have long traditions of healing that are being rediscovered by a new generation.”
Curanderismo is the art of using traditional healing methods like herbs and plants to treat various ailments. Long practiced in Native American villages of Mexico and other parts of Latin America, curanderos also are found in New Mexico, south Texas, Arizona and California.
Anthropologists believe curanderismo remained popular among poor Latinos because they didn’t have access to health care. But they say the field is gaining traction among those who seek to use alternative medicine.
“I believe people are disenchanted with our health system,” Torres said. “Some people can’t afford it now, and they are looking for other ways to empower themselves to heal.”
The textbook gives a survey of medicinal plants used to help digestive systems and how healers draw in laugh therapy to cope with traumatic experiences.
Ricardo Carrillo, a licensed psychologist and a healer based in Oakland, California, said he’s seeing younger people look to curanderismo to help with challenges like addiction and physical pain.
“Yes, you have to go through detox and do all that you are supposed to do to get yourself clean,” said Carrillo, who came to the Albuquerque workshop to speak. “Curanderismo can give you the spiritual tools to keep yourself clean and look to a higher power.”
Among the ailments curanderos treat are mal de ojo, or evil eye, and susto, magical fright.
Mal de ojo is the belief that an admiring look or a stare can weaken someone, mainly a child, leading to bad luck, even death.
Susto is a folk illness linked to a frightful experience, such as an automobile accident or tripping over an unseen object. Those who believe they are inflicted with susto say only a curandero can cure them.
…
An international robotics competition in Washington was in its final day Tuesday, with teams of teenagers from more than 150 nations competing. The team getting the most attention at the FIRST Global Robotics Challenge was a squad of girls from Afghanistan who were twice rejected for U.S. visas before President Donald Trump intervened. But there are even more stories than there are teams. Here are a few:
Girl power
Sixty percent of the teams participating in the competition were founded, led or organized by women. Of the 830 teens participating, 209 were girls. And in addition to the Afghan squad, there were five other all-girl teams, from the United States, Ghana, Jordan, the Palestinian territories and the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. Vanuatu’s nickname: the “SMART Sistas.”
Samira Bader, 16, on the Jordanian team, said “it’s very difficult for us because everyone thinks” building robots is “only for boys.” She said her team wanted to prove that “girls can do it.”
The three-girl U.S. team included sisters Colleen and Katie Johnson of Everett, Washington, and Sanjna Ravichandar of Plainsboro, New Jersey.
Colleen Johnson, 16, said her team looked forward “to a day when an all-girls team is going to be no more special than an all-boys team or a co-ed team, just when that’s completely normal and accepted.”
The team competing from Brunei was also all female, though a male member previously worked on the project.
An unusual alliance
The United States and Russia were on the same side Tuesday. During the fourth round of the competition, the U.S. team was paired with teams from Russia and Sudan to work as an alliance.
The robots all the teams in the competition created were designed with the same kit of parts and did the same task: pick up and distinguish between blue and orange balls. To score points, teams deposited the blue balls, which represented water, and the orange balls, which represented contaminants, into different locations. Each three-nation alliance competed head to head in 2½-minute games.
Both U.S. and Russian teams paid their counterparts compliments after their game Tuesday. Russian team member Aleksandr Iliasov said of the U.S. team: “They cooperate well.” And U.S. team member Colleen Johnson called the Russian team’s robot “very innovative,” saying they had smartly used extra wheels and gears and zip ties to keep balls inside their robot.
Despite their good collaboration, U.S.-Russia-Sudan fell short, losing 40 to 20 to Zimbabwe, Moldova and Trinidad and Tobago.
A little help
The team from Iran got some help building their robot from American students. It turns out that the competition’s kit of robot parts, including wheels, brackets, sprockets, gears, pulleys and belts, was not approved for shipment to Iran because of sanctions involving technology exports to the country. So the competition recruited a robotics team at George C. Marshall High School in Falls Church, Virginia, to help. Iran’s team designed the robot, and about five Marshall students built it in the United States.
The team explained on its competition web page that “our friends in Washington made our ideas as a robot.”
Because of the time difference between the countries, the three-member team and its mentor were sometimes up at midnight or 3 a.m. in Iran to talk to their collaborators.
Amin Dadkhah, 15, called working with the American students “a good and exciting experience for both of us.” Kirianna Baker, one of the U.S. students who built the robot, agreed. “Having a team across the world with a fresh set of eyes is very valuable,” she said.
A robot refugee
A group of three refugees from Syria competed as Team Refugee, also known as Team Hope. All three fled Syria to Lebanon three years ago because of violence in their country.
Mohamad Nabih Alkhateeb, Amar Kabour and Mahir Alisawaui named their robot “Robogee,” a combination of the words “robot” and “refugee.”
Alkhateeb, 17, and Kabour, 16, said they wanted to be robotics engineers, and Alisawui wanted to be a computer engineer. Kabour said it’s important to the team to win, to “tell the world” refugees are “here and they can do it.”
Alkhateeb also said that living as a refugee had been difficult, but he hoped to someday return home.
“I will go back after I have finished my education so I can rebuild Syria again,” he said.
Eleven million people — half the Syrian population — have been forced from their homes by the civil war.
…
It took an intervention from U.S. President Donald Trump and other officials to allow the girls of the Afghan robotics team to receive visas after two rejections, letting them travel to the United States for a robotics competition.
One of the biggest surprises once in Washington? The tight security.
“The security that we see here is not in Herat, Afghanistan,” Kawsar Roshan, a 13-year-old member of the high-profile team, told VOA during the last day of their competition at FIRST Global Challenge, where teenagers from around the world demonstrate their skills in designing, building and programming robotic devices.
“This is a peaceful city. People are not fighting each other, and it is a friendly environment,” said Afghan player Fatima Qaderian.
Her homeland has been entangled in almost ceaseless cycles of war and violence for more than 35 years. The United Nations reported Monday that more than 1,660 civilians, many of them women and children, were killed in the war between January and June 2017.
The all-girls Afghan team made it to Washington only a day before the games were launched. Their initial visa applications had been refused by the U.S. embassy in Kabul, but they were granted entry to the country after a request by Trump, U.S. officials said.
On Tuesday, Trump’s eldest daughter and senior adviser, Ivanka Trump, paid a special visit to the team and their sponsors. She had previously tweeted that she was looking forward to welcoming them.
The annual international robotics event aims to build bridges between high school students with different backgrounds, languages, religions and customs, and to ignite in them a passion for the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Afghan team member Lida Azizi said she learned “unity and teamwork” at the robotics games.
This year’s competition was related to a practical problem that threatens more than a billion people worldwide: inadequate access to clean, drinkable water.
The task of the robots was to pick up and distinguish between blue and orange balls. To score points, teams deposit the blue balls, which represent water, and the orange balls, which represent pollutants, into different locations. The teams play in groups of three nations, with two groups competing head to head. The three-robot alliance that scores the most points in a game wins.
Some information in this report was provided by the Associated Press.
…
German automaker Daimler says it is voluntarily recalling 3 million diesel cars in Europe to improve their emissions performance.
The Stuttgart-based company, which makes Mercedes-Benz luxury cars, says it is taking the step to reassure drivers and strengthen confidence in diesel technology.
Diesels have been under a cloud since Daimler’s competitor Volkswagen admitted equipping vehicles with illegal software that meant they passed emissions tests, but then exceeded limits in everyday driving. There has been a push for diesel bans in some German cities because of concerns about levels of nitrogen oxide emitted by diesels.
The Daimler announcement comes hours after the regional government in the company’s home region of Baden-Wuerttemburg agreed to abandon proposals to restrict diesels if older diesels could be mechanically fixed to pollute less, the dpa news agency reported.
Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche said Tuesday that “the public debate about diesel engines is creating uncertainty – especially for our customers.”
The recall will cover nearly all vehicles made under the EU5 and EU6 emissions standards and start in the next few weeks. The company said it would cost 220 million euros ($254.21 million), but that customers wouldn’t pay anything.
Daimler said in May that German investigators had searched its offices in connection with investigations of Daimler employees because of suspicion of fraud and criminal advertising relating to the possible manipulation of exhaust controls in cars with diesel engines. The company has said it is cooperating with the investigation.
…
Cake and conversation, it seems, can go only so far to mend longstanding economic rifts between the United States and China.
Three months after President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, shared chocolate cake at an amiable summit in Florida, tensions between the world’s two biggest economies are flaring again.
Just as officials of the two nations prepare to meet Wednesday in Washington, the Trump administration is considering slapping tariffs on steel imports, a step that risks igniting a trade war. For the United States, it’s a perilous option to address a problem caused largely by China’s overproduction of steel.
And Trump is criticizing China again for failing to use its economic leverage to rein in its neighbor and ally, the nuclear rogue state North Korea.
Could this week’s U.S.-China Comprehensive Dialogue produce a meaningful breakthrough in economic relations?
Most China watchers are skeptical.
“I’m not looking for anything worthwhile,” says Derek Scissors, a China specialist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
For one thing, the points of difference between the two countries run deep. For another, Xi faces political pressures at home and won’t want to cause a stir in Beijing.
For all the tensions between the two nations, Trump’s words about Xi himself have remained warm. He has suggested that the personal bond he formed with Xi when the two met April 6-7 at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort can overcome fundamental differences on trade and national security. Last week, the president called his Chinese counterpart a “friend of mine,” ”a terrific guy” and “a very special person.”
At a White House event Monday, Trump suggested that the relationship is so strong that he asked during the Florida summit to start exporting U.S. beef to China and that the request was quickly granted. Trump said that the beef industry was so pleased to return to China after a 14-year ban that one executive from Nebraska “hugged me, he wanted to kiss me so badly.”
“We welcome this opportunity,” Kenny Graner, a North Dakota cattle farmer who is president of the U.S. Cattlemen’s Association, says of the China market. “They have a middle class that’s growing in income. It’s big, a lot of people.”
After the meeting, the president softened his accusations of abusive Chinese practices, dropped his threat to label China a currency manipulator and expressed optimism that China would pressure North Korea to scale back its nuclear program.
Still, the Trump-Xi relationship has yet to deliver the substantive changes that Trump the candidate had promised voters – a core piece of his mantra to put “America first.” The economic irritants are likely to vex U.S. and Chinese officials this week.
Trump had campaigned on a promise to shrink America’s trade deficits, which he blames for wiping out American factories and manufacturing jobs. The United States last year ran a trade deficit in goods with China of $347 billion, the amount by which imports exceeded exports. It’s by far the widest gap that U.S. has with any country. Trump says China unfairly subsidizes exports.
Take steel. From 2000 to 2016, China accelerated steel production, raising its share of the world market from 15 percent to nearly 50 percent. As Chinese steel poured into the market, global prices fell, hurting American steelmakers. Scissors notes that China has long promised to stop subsidizing steel and to slow production but hasn’t delivered.
The Trump administration responded by invoking a little-used weapon in American trade law that lets the president tax or restrict imports – if a U.S. Commerce Department investigation finds that they imperil national security. (The result of Commerce’s investigation of steel imports is expected soon.) The rationale was that the American military relies on steel for airplanes, ships and other equipment. Steel also goes into roads, bridges and other infrastructure.
The problem is that the United States already blocks most Chinese steel imports. So any tariffs or limits on imports would instead hurt other countries, including such staunch allies as Canada and South Korea.
Scissors says the United States could try to coordinate sanctions against China by countries that do import Chinese steel.
David Dollar, a former World Bank and U.S. Treasury official who is now at the Brookings Institution, thinks Xi isn’t likely to make a bold move to cut Chinese steelmaking capacity – or enact other economic reforms – in advance of the Chinese communist party’s National Congress this fall. At the meeting, Xi will want to further tighten his grip on the party.
What’s more, the European Union and others are likely to lash back if the U.S. imposes sanctions on foreign steel, thereby running the risk of a broader trade war.
Then there’s North Korea. As a presidential candidate, Trump attacked China for refusing to pressure Pyongyang to back off from developing nuclear weapons. After the Mar-a-Lago summit, though, Trump praised Beijing for agreeing to help deal with North Korea. As a reward, he abandoned his vow to accuse China of manipulating its currency to benefit Chinese exporters.
This month, North Korea defiantly proceeded with its first launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Trump tweeted his complaint:
“Trade between China and North Korea grew almost 40% in the first quarter. So much for China working with us – but we had to give it a try!”
Brookings’ Dollar says the administration will likely continue to be disappointed.
“China is not going to do anything dramatic” to pressure North Korea, he says. “They don’t want that regime to collapse” and thereby destabilize the Korean peninsula and likely send North Korean refugees into China.
Overall, Dollar expects more turbulence between Washington and Beijing. The Obama administration, he notes, had kept the relationship stable despite economic differences by working with China on such issues as the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal. But Trump has pulled out of the Paris deal and denounced the Iran pact.
“We’re going to see more volatility in the U.S.-China relationship than we’ve seen in years,” Dollar says.
Nepalis stand to lose millions of dollars held in high-value Indian bank notes that India banned last year and has yet to exchange, a Nepali central bank official said on Tuesday.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in November banned 500 rupee ($7.77) and 1,000 rupee bank notes as part of a drive against unaccounted wealth in India that has also hit Nepal where Indian rupees are widely used.
People holding the notes in India were given a little less than two months to exchange them at banks.
In March, officials from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) visited Nepal and promised to allow every Nepali citizen to exchange 4,500 Indian rupees ($70) worth of the old notes for new ones.
“That was only a verbal assurance but no formal decision from India has come to us,” said Chinta Mani Shivakoti, a deputy governor of the central Nepal Rastra Bank.
“Even if this amount was exchanged, individuals holding more than 4,500 Indian rupees risk losing the excess,” Shivakoti said.
Nepal depends heavily on funds from workers in India, who sent home $640 million in 2016, or about 3 percent of its gross domestic product.
The Indian central bank declined to comment. An Indian Finance Ministry spokesman also declined to comment, saying it was a central bank matter.
India fears that if it agrees to Nepal’s demand to allow Nepalis to exchange unlimited amounts, a large number of Indians may launder their ill-gotten old notes through Nepal.
Shivakoti said Nepal’s banks hold 78.5 million Indian rupees worth of the old notes, while business officials estimate that up to 10 billion in old Indian rupees ($155 million) may be held by individuals in Nepal’s informal sector.
Another NRB official, Bhisma Raj Dhungana, said the delay in resolving the issue was causing concern.
“India should have allowed the exchange facility much earlier,” Dhungana said.
Ordinary Nepalis say they have been hit badly by the delay.
“My savings are worth no more than waste papers. I can’t do anything about it,” said Saila Thakuri, who has 8,000 Indian rupees in old notes sent by his son who works in a restaurant in New Delhi.
Users of WhatsApp in China and security researchers have reported widespread service disruptions amid fears that the popular messaging service may be at least partially blocked by authorities in the world’s most populous country.
WhatsApp users in the country reported Tuesday on other social media platforms that the app was partly inaccessible unless virtual private network software was used to circumvent China’s censorship apparatus, known colloquially as The Great Firewall.
WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook and offers end-to-end encryption, has a relatively small but loyal following among Chinese users seeking a greater degree of privacy from government snooping than afforded by popular domestic app WeChat, which is ubiquitous but closely monitored and filtered.
Questions over WhatsApp’s status come at a politically fraught time in China. The government is in the midst of preparing for a sensitive party congress while Chinese censors this week revved up a sprawling effort to scrub all mention of Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died Thursday in government custody.
A report this week by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab detailed how Chinese censors were able to intercept, in real time, images commemorating Liu in private one-on-one chats on WeChat, a feat that hinted at the government’s image recognition capabilities.
It appeared that pictures were also the focus of the move to censor WhatsApp. Late Tuesday, users in China could send texts over WhatsApp without the use of VPNs, but not images.
Nadim Kobeissi, a cryptography researcher based in Paris who has been investigating the WhatsApp disruption, said he believed The Great Firewall was only blocking access to WhatsApp servers that route media between users, while leaving servers that handle text messages untouched.
Kobeissi said voice messages also appeared to be blocked. But there was no evidence to suggest that Chinese authorities were decrypting WhatsApp messages, he added.
A Chinese censorship researcher known by his pseudonym Charlie Smith said that authorities appeared to be blocking non-text WhatsApp messages wholesale precisely because they have not been able to selectively block content on the platform like they have with WeChat, which is produced by Shenzhen-based internet giant Tencent and legally bound to cooperate with Chinese security agencies.
…
“I’m addicted to cutting trees,” says Taban Ceasor.
His stained hands sift through jagged pieces of charcoal in his busy shop in South Sudan’s capital. But the 29-year-old logger says the number of trees needed to fuel his trade is falling sharply as the country’s forest cover disappears.
The world’s youngest nation is well into its fourth year of civil war. As South Sudan is ravaged by fighting and hunger, it also grapples with the devastating effects of climate change. Officials say the conflict is partly to blame.
South Sudan’s first-ever climate change conference in June highlighted a problem for much of sub-Saharan Africa: The impoverished nations face some of the world’s harshest impacts from global warming and are the least equipped to fight back.
The United States’ recent withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement hurts a huge potential source of assistance. The U.S. Embassy in South Sudan said it “does not currently support climate change efforts” in the country.
The United Nations says South Sudan is at grave risk at being left behind.
According to the Climate Change Vulnerability Index 2017 compiled by global risk consultancy Verisk Maplecroft, South Sudan is ranked among the world’s five most vulnerable countries and is experiencing some of the most acute temperature changes.
“It’s rising 2.5 times quicker” than the global average, says Jean-Luc Stalon, senior deputy country director at the U.N. Development Program.
Both U.N. and government officials call it a partially man-made crisis. While up to 95 percent of South Sudan’s population is dependent on “climate-sensitive activities for their livelihoods” such as agriculture and forestry, the civil war is worsening the problem.
The rate of deforestation in South Sudan is alarming and if it continues, in 50 to 60 years there will be nothing left, says Arshad Khan, country manager for the U.N. Environment Program. The lack of trees is directly contributing to the rise in temperatures.
Tree-cutting is especially lucrative in South Sudan because there’s no central power grid to supply electricity. A reported 11 million people use charcoal for cooking, or almost the entire population.
“This makes me more money than any other business,” says Ceasor, the Juba vendor, who says he could barely survive before turning to tree-cutting.
Thirty-five percent of the country’s land was once covered with trees, and only 11 percent is now, according to the ministry of environment and agriculture.
“Desperate people are destroying the environment,” says Lutana Musa, South Sudan’s director for climate change.
Countries across Africa are struggling to cope with a warmer world. Although the continent produces less than 4 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases, the UNDP says climate stresses and a limited capacity to adapt are increasing Africa’s vulnerability to climate change.
In South Sudan, the deforestation is compounded by an increase in illegal exports of wood and charcoal by foreign companies.
“People are taking advantage of the insecurity,” says Joseph Africano Bartel, South Sudan’s deputy environment minister. He says that due to the conflict there’s no supervision at the country’s borders, even though South Sudan has banned the export of charcoal.
South Sudan is rich in mahogany and teak, both of which are in high demand especially in Arab nations, Bartel says. He says South Sudanese tree-cutters are hired by companies primarily from Sudan, Libya and Lebanon that smuggle the coal and wood out through neighboring Uganda.
In an abandoned charcoal warehouse in Juba, 50 tons of coal sits stacked in bags. Arabic writing scribbled on the front of each sack reads: “Made in South Sudan.”
“I’ve seen bags that say ‘Destination Dubai’,” Charlie Oyul, a lead investigator with the environment ministry, told The Associated Press.
A few weeks ago, Oyul’s team impounded the warehouse and arrested the company’s owner and his assistant, who Oyul said were working for a Sudanese contractor. But Kamal Adam, a South Sudanese company official who is out on bail, says they sell charcoal only to locals.
The company is one of five illegal operations known to authorities in Juba and the surrounding area, and it’s the only one to be shut down. As much as South Sudan’s authorities try to stem the illegal exports of charcoal and wood, Oyul says he can’t keep up.
During a recent visit by The Associated Press to the impounded warehouse, roughly 10 trucks carrying piles of wood and charcoal were seen swiftly driving by.
At its climate change conference last month, South Sudan reaffirmed its commitment to the Paris climate agreement and criticized the U.S. withdrawal under President Donald Trump.
“Trump thinks climate change isn’t a reality,” says Lutana, South Sudan’s climate change director. “He should know that his pulling out won’t stop people from continuing to work on it.”
Sitting alone at his empty desk in a dimly lit, run-down office at the environment ministry, Lutana says that although South Sudan has several proposed projects to fight climate change, he doesn’t expect action any time soon as the civil war continues.
The UNEP is working with South Sudan’s government to appeal for $9 million to set up an early warning system for the weather and train government officials on climate change. But donors are showing concern because of growing insecurity, and officials say the project won’t move forward without peace.
“Because of our situation, the environment just isn’t a priority,” Lutana says.
Hyrum Johnson, mayor of the tiny city of Driggs, Idaho, expects some craziness in his one-stoplight town next month when the moon passes in front of the sun for the first total solar eclipse in the lower 48 U.S. states since 1979.
The town of 1,600 people in Teton County, just west of the jagged peaks of the Rocky Mountains Teton Range, is getting poised to receive as many as 100,000 visitors on Aug. 21 for the celestial event, said Johnson, who was both excited and worried.
Driggs is one of hundreds of towns and cities along a 70-mile arc, stretching from Oregon to South Carolina, that are in the direct path of the moon’s shadow. The full eclipse and the sun’s corona around the disk of the moon will be visible for a little more than two minutes only to those within this narrow band.
Driggs and other towns like it are scrambling to prepare for the onslaught of curious visitors.
“We expect gridlock,” Johnson, 46, said as he drove his pickup truck through town.
Tucked amid seed potato and quinoa farms, Driggs normally enjoys a more languid pace of life, with highlights including $5 lime shakes sold on balmy summer days at the corner drug store.
But with the impending eclipse, planning has kicked into high gear.
To make sure nothing more than the roads will be clogged, Johnson took shipment this month of two massive generators that can be deployed at key spots along the city’s sewage system to keep it flowing in case of a power outage.
“We are telling our residents to hunker down,” Johnson said.
And while Johnson would have preferred to have taken his family backpacking during the time of the eclipse, he’s planning to stay in town in case anything goes wrong.
‘All hands on deck’
Over on the east side of the Teton Range, authorities are preparing for the day “kind of like a fire,” said Denise Germann, a public information officer at Grand Teton National Park. Estimating crowds is nearly impossible, she said, but “it is an ‘all hands on deck’ event.”
The 480-square-mile park’s campsites are completely booked, and it expects visitors to pour in from all over, including the bigger Yellowstone National Park, just north of the path of totality. Grand Teton will waive its $30 entry fee to keep traffic from backing up.
Many of the park’s 465 summer staff will be posted at trailheads and along roads to warn visitors to brace themselves for failed cellphone service, jammed roads and scarce parking, and to urge them to carry plenty of food and water, as well as bear spray to ward off wildlife.
In nearby Moose, Huntley Dornan said the county had warned business owners like him to expect four times the usual number of customers in the days leading up to the eclipse.
“I find that hard to believe, but I’m not going to be the guy who has his head in the sand and didn’t plan for it,” said Dornan, who runs a restaurant, deli, gas station and wine shop, the last place to get supplies before entering the park from the south.
Dornan plans to park a 48-foot refrigerated trailer stocked with a couple of thousand pounds of pizza cheese, 150 pounds of ground buffalo meat, a few hundred tomatoes, and gallons of ice cream, among other provisions for the expected hordes of tourists.
On eclipse day, only people who paid as much as $100 each to attend his viewing parties will be allowed access to the narrow road on his property that offers a clear view. Security will keep others out.
About 14 miles down the highway, in Jackson, Wyoming, Bobbie Reppa expects the family business to be flush with demand. She and her husband run Macy’s Services, the only purveyor of portable toilets for miles. The 50 she normally has on hand simply aren’t enough.
“We’ll be bringing them in from as far as Ogden, Utah,” she said.
…
House Republicans on Tuesday unveiled a 10-year budget blueprint that would dramatically increase military spending while putting the GOP on record favoring Medicare cuts opposed by President Donald Trump.
The GOP plan, authored by Budget Chairman Diane Black, R-Tenn., would also pave the way for overhauling the U.S. tax code this fall, and would pair that effort with cuts to benefit programs such as food stamps. The plan also lays out a plan to balance the budget inside a decade through deep cuts to a wide swath of domestic programs — though GOP leaders have no intention of actually carrying out the cuts.
Black announced a committee vote for Wednesday, but action by the entire House could be delayed by an ongoing quarrel between the GOP’s tea party and moderate factions over spending cuts.
Medicare is the second largest mandatory program after Social Security, and the House GOP plan again proposes to turn Medicare into a voucher-like program in which future retirees would receive a fixed benefit to purchase health insurance on the open market. Republicans have proposed the idea each year since taking back the House in 2011, but they’ve never tried to implement it — and that’s not going to change now, even with a Republican as president.
The plan, in theory at least, promises to balance the budget through unprecedented and unworkable cuts across the budget. It calls for turning this year’s projected $700 billion or so deficit into a tiny $9 billion surplus by 2027. It would do so by slashing $5.4 trillion over the coming decade, including almost $500 billion from Medicare, $1.5 trillion from Medicaid and the Obama health law, along with enormous cuts to benefits such as federal employee pensions, food stamps, and tax credits for the working poor.
“The status quo is unsustainable. A mounting national debt and lackluster economic growth will limit opportunity for people all across the country,” Black said in a statement. “But we don’t have to accept this reality. We can move forward with an optimistic vision for the future and this budget is the first step in that process. This is the moment to get real results for the American people. The time for talking is over, now is the time for action.”
But in the immediate future the GOP measure is a budget buster. It would add almost $30 billion to Trump’s $668 billion request for national defense, which already exceeds an existing “cap” on spending by $54 billion. But while Trump proposed taking that $54 billion from domestic agencies and foreign aid, the GOP budget plan would restore most of the cuts, trimming non-defense agencies by just $5 billion.
All told, the GOP plan would spend about $67 billion more in the upcoming annual appropriations bills than would be allowed under harsh spending limits set by a failed 2011 budget and debt agreement and pads war accounts by $10 billion. And, like Trump’s budget, the House GOP plan assumes rosy economic projections that would erase another $1.5 trillion from the deficit over 10 years.
The measure, called a budget resolution, is nonbinding. It would allow Republicans controlling Congress to pass follow-up legislation through the Senate without the threat of a filibuster by Democrats. GOP leaders and the White House plan to use that measure to rewrite the tax code.
As proposed by House leaders, tax reform would essentially be deficit neutral, which means cuts to tax rates would be mostly “paid for” by closing various tax breaks such as the deduction for state and local taxes. However, the GOP plan would devote $300 billion claimed from economic growth to the tax reform effort.
But conservatives are insisting on adding cuts to so-called mandatory programs, which make up more than two-thirds of the federal budget and basically run on autopilot. After extended negotiations, Black would instruct 11 House panels to draw up $203 billion worth of mandatory cuts. But neither tea party lawmakers nor moderates are pleased with the idea. Conservatives want larger cuts, while moderates are blanching at voting to cut popular programs such as food stamps.
…
The Trump Administration has launched “Made In America Week” to highlight the importance of U.S. manufacturing and tout its policies to bring more such jobs back home from overseas. But as VOA White House Bureau Chief Steve Herman reports, many Trump family products are made in foreign factories, leading to criticism of the president’s trade campaign.
…
Engineers at Hyperloop recently took a significant step toward proving their new vacuum-tube-based transportation system may in fact be the future… and not just hype. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
…
Your speech may, um, help reveal if you’re uh … developing thinking problems. More pauses, filler words and other verbal changes might be an early sign of mental decline, which can lead to Alzheimer’s disease, a study suggests.
Researchers had people describe a picture they were shown in taped sessions two years apart. Those with early-stage mild cognitive impairment slid much faster on certain verbal skills than those who didn’t develop thinking problems.
“What we’ve discovered here is there are aspects of language that are affected earlier than we thought,” before or at the same time that memory problems emerge, said one study leader, Sterling Johnson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
This was the largest study ever done of speech analysis for this purpose, and if more testing confirms its value, it might offer a simple, cheap way to help screen people for very early signs of mental decline.
Don’t panic: Lots of people say “um” and have trouble quickly recalling names as they age, and that doesn’t mean trouble is on the way.
“In normal aging, it’s something that may come back to you later and it’s not going to disrupt the whole conversation,” another study leader, Kimberly Mueller, explained. “The difference here is, it is more frequent in a short period,” interferes with communication and gets worse over time.
The study was discussed Monday at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in London.
About 47 million people worldwide have dementia, and Alzheimer’s is the most common type. In the U.S., about 5.5 million people have the disease. Current drugs can’t slow or reverse it, just ease symptoms. Doctors think treatment might need to start sooner to do any good, so there’s a push to find early signs.
Mild cognitive impairment causes changes that are noticeable to the person or others, but not enough to interfere with daily life. It doesn’t mean these folks will develop Alzheimer’s, but many do — 15 to 20 percent per year.
To see if speech analysis can find early signs, researchers first did the picture-description test on 400 people without cognitive problems and saw no change over time in verbal skills. Next, they tested 264 participants in the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer’s Prevention, a long-running study of people in their 50s and 60s, most of whom have a parent with Alzheimer’s and might be at higher risk for the disease themselves. Of those, 64 already had signs of early decline or developed it over the next two years, according to other neurological tests they took.
In the second round of tests , they declined faster on content (ideas they expressed) and fluency (the flow of speech and how many pauses and filler words they used.) They used more pronouns such as “it” or “they” instead of specific names for things, spoke in shorter sentences and took longer to convey what they had to say.
“Those are all indicators of struggling with that computational load that the brain has to conduct” and supports the role of this test to detect decline, said Julie Liss, a speech expert at Arizona State University with no role in the work.
She helped lead a study in 2015 that analyzed dozens of press conferences by former President Ronald Reagan and found evidence of speech changes more than a decade before he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She also co-founded a company that analyzes speech for many neurological problems, including dementia, traumatic brain injury and Parkinson’s disease.
Researchers could not estimate the cost of testing for a single patient, but for a doctor to offer it requires only a digital tape recorder and a computer program or app to analyze results.
Alan Sweet, 72, a retired state of Wisconsin worker who lives in Madison, is taking part in the study and had the speech test earlier this month. His father had Alzheimer’s and his mother had a different type of dementia, Lewy body.
“Watching my parents decline into the awful world of dementia and being responsible for their medical care was the best and worst experience of my life,” he said. “I want to help the researchers learn, furthering medical knowledge of treatment and ultimately, cure.”
Participants don’t get individual results — it just aids science.
Another study at the conference on Monday, led by doctoral student Taylor Fields, hints that hearing loss may be another clue to possible mental decline. It involved 783 people from the same Wisconsin registry project. Those who said at the start of the study that they had been diagnosed with hearing loss were more than twice as likely to develop mild cognitive impairment over the next five years as those who did not start out with a hearing problem.
That sort of information is not strong evidence, but it fits with earlier work along those lines.
Family doctors “can do a lot to help us if they knew what to look for” to catch early signs of decline, said Maria Carrillo, the Alzheimer’s Association’s chief science officer. Hearing loss, verbal changes and other known risks such as sleep problems might warrant a referral to a neurologist for a dementia check, she said.
Listen to audio of example test.
…
Two Iranian nationals have been charged in the United States in an alleged scheme to steal and resell software to Iran, including a program to design bullets and warheads.
According to an indictment unsealed Monday, Mohammed Saeed Ajily, 35, recruited Mohammed Reza Rezakhah, 39, to break into companies’ computers to steal their software for resale to Iranian universities, the military and the government.
The two men — and a third who was arrested in 2013 and handed back to Iran in a prisoner swap last year — allegedly broke into the computers of Vermont-based Arrow Tech Associates.
The stolen software included Arrow Tech’s Projectile Rocket Ordnance Design and Analysis System (PRODAS), which is protected by U.S. controls on the export of sensitive technologies, and its distribution to Iran is banned by U.S. sanctions on the country.
According to the indictment, Rezakhah conducted the hacking and cracking operations and Ajily was in charge of marketing and selling the programs.
The two men were charged in the Rutland, Vermont, federal district court, which issued arrest warrants for the two, who are believed to be in Iran.
…
Their team shirts didn’t say “Afghanistan” and their name badges were handwritten, not typed, suggesting the last-minute nature of their entry into the United States. But the Afghan girls competing Monday in an international robotics competition in Washington were clearly excited to be representing their nation.
The team of six teenage girls was twice rejected for U.S. visas before President Donald Trump intervened at the last minute. They arrived in Washington from their hometown of Herat, Afghanistan, early Saturday, and their ball-sorting robot competed in its first round Monday morning.
“We were so interested, because we find a big chance to show the talent and ability of Afghans, show that Afghan women can make robots, too,” said Rodaba Noori, one of the team members. She acknowledged, though, that the team “hadn’t long, or enough time to get ready for competition.”
The girls’ struggle to overcome war, hardship and U.S. bureaucracy on their journey to the U.S. capital has made their team stand out among more than 150 competing in the FIRST Global Challenge, a robotics competition designed to encourage youths to pursue careers in math and science.
The U.S. won’t say why the girls were rejected for visas, citing confidentiality rules. But Afghan Ambassador Hamdullah Mohib said that based on discussions with U.S. officials, it appears the girls, who are 14 to 16 years old, were turned away due to concerns they would not return to Afghanistan.
Speaking with the assistance of a translator who summarized their remarks, 14-year-old team member Fatemah Qaderyan, said that she was “grateful” to be able to compete. Her teammate, 15-year-old Lida Azizi, said she was a little “nervous” but also excited to be playing and “proud.”
Though there was a crush of media attention, the girls looked much like other competitors, wearing jeans along with white headscarfs. Their microwave-sized robot, like that of other teams, displayed their country’s black, red and green flag.
“I’m so happy they can play,” said their mentor Alireza Mehraban, a software engineer. He added: “They are so happy to be here.”
While teams had up to four months to build their robots, the Afghan team built theirs in two weeks before it had to be shipped to reach the competition in time, Mehraban said. He said the girls had a day to test the robot in Afghanistan before it needed to be mailed.
On Monday, they were making adjustments and practicing in between rounds. When a chain seemed to come loose on a part of the robot that moves up and down, a competition judge recommended a larger part, and another team provided one.
Like others in the competition, the girls’ robot can pick up and distinguish between blue and orange balls. To score points, teams deposit the blue balls, which represent water, and the orange balls, which represent pollutants, into different locations. The teams play in alliances of three nations, with two alliances competing head to head. The three-robot alliance that scores the most points in a game wins.
Mehraban, the team’s mentor, said their robot managed to score one or two points in the first game. The team has two more games to play Monday and three games Tuesday.
…
Researchers working on a one-two punch to eliminate HIV say their first punch has landed and they can start working on the second, though plenty of work will be needed on both fronts before a cure is available.
HIV spreads just like other viruses: It takes over a cell’s DNA and uses the cell’s infrastructure to make copies of itself. Most HIV treatments work by blocking new cells from getting infected.
The cells that are actively producing HIV are constantly being killed, either by HIV or by the immune system. So once you stop new cells from getting infected, the patient can achieve a viral load close to zero.
Viral reservoir remains hidden
That’s not a total cure though, because some HIV-infected cells go into a resting state, and stop actively producing the virus. This viral reservoir remains hidden from the immune system. The problem is that if treatment stops, the latent virus will eventually reactivate and the disease will be able to spread again.
Doctors have gotten pretty good at stopping HIV from infecting new cells, but they still haven’t figured out how to eliminate these reservoirs, and so patients must take medication for their entire life.
That’s why maintaining health care access for everyone living with HIV is a major public health challenge. And even for those who can access life-long care, over time these drugs can damage the liver, kidneys, heart and brain.
‘Shock and kill’
In 2012, a University of North Carolina research group published a proof of concept for a cure called “shock and kill.” They showed that a cancer drug called Vorinostat can “shock” some infected cells into producing HIV again. That brings the virus out of hiding so it can be “killed.”
They described their work in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. “What we did in this study was to determine the optimal dosing regimen — how often the drug should be given — in order to measure consistent reactivation of HIV,” co-author Nancie Archin said to VOA.
Once reactivated, those cells should self-destruct or be killed by the immune system, just like in a typical HIV treatment. But the UNC team’s findings confirm previous evidence showing that isn’t happening.
It’s not yet clear why that is.
One theory was that Vorinostat was weakening the immune system, so that it wasn’t able to kill the infected cells. But the report ruled that out — relevant parts of the immune system, the study found, were not weakened.
Drug found to be safe
On the bright side, the research demonstrated that Vorinostat is safe to use with HIV-positive patients at doses that can effectively shock cells. The researchers have already begun trials pairing Vorinostat with drugs that might be able to kill the shocked cells. There is a high safety standard for these trials because the participants have their HIV level under control and are generally healthy.
But it’s still not clear if the shock is effective enough if all the reservoir is being activated. The researchers stress that it will likely be a long time before effective treatments are available. And because the treatment involves activating HIV, it will, at least at first, only be available to those who have their viral load under control.
Sharon Lewin, who researches HIV latency at the University of Melbourne and was not associated with this study, told VOA she wished the researchers had used more methods to measure whether the cells were being shocked. “You can measure virus inside the cell and you can measure virus that’s being released from the cell,” she said. “They measure virus just inside the cell.”
It is possible that the cell is producing HIV, but that the HIV virus isn’t leaving the cell. If so, that could explain why the cells aren’t dying.
Treatment successes are few
HIV has been eliminated in a handful of people. At least two infants who received aggressive treatment within hours of contracting HIV never developed viral reservoirs. One man in Germany has been HIV-free for several years following a pair of bone marrow transplants he received during cancer treatment. This has failed in other patients though, and bone marrow transplants are life-threatening procedures.
Lewin said other approaches to eliminating HIV, like editing a person’s genome, or aggressive early treatment, would not be as widely available as a shock and kill approach.
“Those are approaches that will be difficult to roll out to the 37 million people living with HIV,” said Lewin. “An approach that’s just tablets, and tablets that are relatively cheap, that is an approach that could be available.”
…
Foreign fishing vessels, many from China, prowl the waters off West Africa every day. They capture millions of fish — catches that used to go to local boats. The fish are then shipped to China, Europe and the United States, satisfying a global demand for seafood and fueling a multibillion-dollar industry.
The foreign vessels make life hard for West African fishermen.
Foreign trawlers from Asia and Europe have cost West Africa’s economy 300,000 jobs and $2 billion in income, according to John Hocevar, a marine biologist with Greenpeace.
However, what to do about the problem — and possible damage to regional fish populations — has eluded experts and officials.
Chinese presence
Exact numbers are difficult to come by, but experts agree no single country has a greater presence off the coast of West Africa than China.
In a 2015 report, Greenpeace estimated that, two years earlier, China had 426 distant water fishing vessels off Africa’s West Coast.
Between 2000 and 2011, 64 percent of China’s average annual catches, valued at more than $7 billion, came from that area, according to The Pew Charitable Trusts.
Fishing isn’t a big part of China’s economy, representing less than one percent of total gross domestic product. But for many in China’s coastal provinces, it’s both a livelihood and way of life, according to Haibing Ma, the China program manager for the Worldwatch Institute, a nonprofit group that researches sustainability.
Chinese fishers have traveled to Africa because their own fish stock has nearly run out. “Overfishing has destroyed the sustainability of China’s inshore fisheries,” Ma said.
Lack of oversight
Fishing practices are inherently difficult to monitor and regulate. Oceans are vast, vessels are hard to reach, and a mix of local and international laws and regulations complicates enforcement.
Domestic laws regulate waters up to 200 miles off the coast, and international laws control waters past that, according to Todd Dubois, assistant director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Office for Law Enforcement.
This complex environment has led to a variety of creative ways to maximize profits without breaking the law.
For example, legislation in Guinea-Bissau has kept large industrial fishing vessels away from its coast. So, fishing companies have deployed small boats that don’t need licenses from nearby countries such as Senegal. Those boats will fish in Guinea-Bissau and return their catches to a large “mothership,” which in turn takes its bounty back to Senegal to be traded.
In other cases, “floating factories” — large, nearby vessels used for processing and packaging catches — have enabled other boats to catch small pelagics, such as mackerels and sardines, quickly and on a massive scale for prolonged periods.
And bottom trawls, a kind of gear that contributes to overfishing, were installed on most Chinese vessels studied by Greenpeace in 2015.
Many see international fishing off Africa’s West Coast as an exploitation of local resources by foreign powers. But some of the most damaging practices occur within the law, and local African economies sometimes benefit from illegal fishing.
In Mauritania, for example, a Chinese company made a secret deal with the local government to build a fish-processing factory and bring 80 large vessels to the coast in exchange for a $100 million investment in the country.
That deal may have benefited both countries, says Andre Standing, an adviser at the Coalition for Fair Fisheries Arrangements, but it has had a profoundly negative impact on small-scale fishermen.
Responsible practices
Fishing, even when done on a massive scale, can be sustainable, provided there’s adequate planning and reporting. That means understanding the vulnerability of local fish populations and managing catches accordingly.
“Some reproduce very fast and can handle quite heavy fishing, such as tuna, and some of the small pelagics like the sardines,” Standing said, but other fish, such as sharks, develop very slowly. “We’re already seeing across Africa and across the world that industrial fishing and long line fishing in particular, they’ve decimated populations of the other types of fish.”
Standing cautions against drawing conclusions about the entire Chinese fishing industry. Individual fishing companies need to be judged on their own merits, he said. There are good Chinese companies, just as there are bad European companies.
China’s presence off Africa’s west coast shows no signs of shrinking, though. The Chinese government has enabled the industry to expand far beyond the country’s own shores. In 2013, the government gave the fishing sector about $6.5 billion in subsidies, according to a brief Standing wrote for the Africa Center for Strategic Studies.
Whether considering the actions of China, the European Union, or local African governments and businesses, the root of the problem comes from a lack of focus on long-term sustainability, according to Standing.
“In many areas, there really isn’t this careful, precautionary approach to managing fishing intensity,” he said. “A lot are being driven by short-term profit, and that’s really at the heart of the unsustainable nature of fisheries.”
Zhan Yang, Teng Xu and Ricci Shryock contributed to this report.
…
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution says humans evolved as a separate species. But modern science knows that we, together with all other creatures, have always lived in a symbiosis with a great number of microbes, dwelling inside and outside of our bodies, the so-called holobiont. VOA’s George Putic spoke with a scientist who says the fact that we evolved together calls for a revision of Darwin’s view.
…
The United States needs more foreign workers to keep some American businesses from floundering, according to a decision announced by U.S. officials Monday.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said it will make 15,000 additional H-2B visas available for companies to hire temporary, non-agricultural foreign workers before the end of the fiscal year Sept. 30.
In a written statement, DHS Secretary John Kelly called the move a “one-time increase,”
The Trump administration promotes what it calls a “Hire American” policy and the president has repeatedly called for more limited immigration. Pressed by a reporter about how the policy announcement to allow more foreign workers into the U.S. supports American jobs, a DHS spokesperson said that without those extra workers, U.S. businesses could suffer “irreparable harm.”
Exemption is not renewed
In order to hire foreign workers through the non-immigrant visa program, businesses must show there are not enough U.S. workers “able, willing, qualified, and available” for the jobs.
The H-2B program is capped at 66,000 new visas annually; of that, 33,000 is reserved for workers who are hired during the first half of the fiscal year (Oct. 1 — March 31) and the remainder are for the latter half (April 1 — Sept. 30).
Since 2015, however, some returning workers were able to participate beyond the cap, increasing the number of H-2B visas issued last year to nearly 85,000, according to State Department data.
But Congress did not renew the returnees exemption when it expired last fall, effectively curbing the number of available visas. Businesses that rely heavily on seasonal workers, like the tourism industry, said they have struggled to fill vacancies since then.
Businesses need to petition for visas
Part of budget legislation passed in May, however, gave the Department of Homeland Security — which includes U.S. CItizenship and Immigration Services — discretion to go over the 66,000 cap to compensate for the shortfall.
Businesses will be able to petition for the additional visas when the rule is published in the General Register later this week, according to senior DHS officials. Previous applicants who did not make the earlier cut-off for the fiscal year will have to reapply, the officials added, but if hired by the end of the fiscal year, they will be able to work past Sept. 30.
President Donald Trump uses the H-2B visa program to staff his Florida private club, where he has hosted visiting heads of state since his inauguration in January.
Nearly one in 10 infants worldwide, or 12.9 million, received no vaccinations in 2016, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Monday.
Those infants missed the critical first dose of the triple vaccination against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, known as the DTP3 vaccination. An additional 6.6 million infants who received the first dose didn’t receive the other two doses in the three-dose series last year.
“Since 2010, the percentage of children who received their full course of routine immunizations has stalled at 86 percent, with no significant changes in any countries or regions during the past year,” WHO said in its statement. “This falls short of the global immunization coverage target of 90 percent.”
Current levels of immunization prevent 2 million to 3 million deaths worldwide every year from diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis and measles, according to WHO, which called routine vaccinations “one of the most successful and cost-effective public health interventions” that can be carried out.
One hundred and thirty of the 194 WHO member states have achieved the 90 percent DTP3 coverage benchmark. The majority of unvaccinated infants live in countries ensnared in conflict or encumbered by high levels of poverty.
In 2016, eight nations had coverage rates below 50 percent for DTP3 shots; they were Central African Republic, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria and Ukraine.
“If we are to raise the bar on global immunization coverage, health services must reach the unreached,” said Dr. Jean-Marie Okwo-Bele, WHO Director of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals. “Every contact with the health system must be seen as an opportunity to immunize.”
Despite the stagnant overall vaccination rates, WHO reported gains in vaccination for rubella, a virus that can cause severe birth defects if contracted by pregnant women. Global coverage against that disease increased from 35 percent in 2010 to 47 percent in 2016, according to Monday’s statement. WHO called the improvement a “big step toward reducing the occurrence of … a devastating condition that results in hearing impairment, congenital heart defects and blindness.”
The fight for broader vaccination rates is not unique to developing nations or war-torn regions. Earlier this month, the French government passed a law mandating that by 2018, French parents will be required to vaccinate their children against a range of diseases, including pertussis, measles, mumps, and rubella. France already requires vaccinations against diphtheria, tetanus and poliomyelitis, with exceptions for infants with certain medical conditions.
The new law is a response to a movement against vaccinations in developed countries. In America, Britain and France, the measles vaccination rate has fallen just below the 95 percent level.
…
EU foreign ministers approved on Monday measures to allow Ukraine to export more industrial and agricultural products free of tariffs to the bloc in recognition of reforms undertaken by Kyiv and the country’s fragile economy.
By the end of September, Ukraine will be able to export greater tonnage of farm products, including grains, honey and processed tomatoes for three years.
The EU will also remove for the same period import duties on fertilizers, dyes, footwear, copper, aluminum, televisions and sound recording equipment.
The measures add to a free-trade agreement provisionally in place since January 2016 that has opened both markets for goods and services.
“It is our duty to support Ukraine and strengthen our economic and political ties, also in the face of the ongoing conflict on its soil,” said Estonia Foreign Minister Sven Mikser, whose country holds the six-month rotating presidency of the European Union.
Trade has been at the heart of a dispute between Russia and the European Union over relations with Ukraine, with Moscow and Brussels both competing to bring Kyiv closer to their side through offers of greater economic integration.
While Kyiv has moved westward, Russia has sought to destabilize Ukraine, EU governments and NATO say, by annexing Crimea and providing separatists with weapons and troops in Ukraine’s industrial east.
…
Thanks to Hollywood special effects, it’s possible to create a world of superheroes or galaxies far, far away. But that technology is also slowly making its way into the classroom and turning science education into a visual journey that can take students anywhere from inside a cell to the deepest parts of our solar system. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
…
On a sweltering summer morning in the southern Indian city of Chennai, a dozen garment workers crowd into a small courtroom for the latest hearing in a protracted battle over low wages in factories supplying global fashion brands.
The women are among tens of thousands of workers in Tamil Nadu state – the largest hub in India’s $40 billion-a-year textile and garment industry – who are seeking millions of dollars in compensation following a landmark court ruling last year that declared they had long been grossly underpaid.
The Madras High Court ordered that the garment workers should receive a pay rise of up to 30 percent – the first minimum wage hike for 12 years – and that they could claim arrears going back to 2014.
But 12 months on, many factory bosses have failed to pay up.
Squeezed into a corner at the back of the stuffy Chennai courtroom, a middle-aged woman leans against the blue walls, clutching polythene bags full of documents to prove her claim.
Normally she spends her days hunched over a sewing machine, stitching skirts, shirts and dresses destined for high streets around the world.
But for months she has been taking days off work to attend court.
“I forgo a day’s salary to come for these hearings. It may not seem like a big amount, but for us it is hard earned money,” said the 48-year-old seamstress, who did not wish to be identified fearing it would impact her case. “I am only asking for what is rightfully mine. And they won’t even tell me how they are calculating my dues.”
More than 150 claims have been filed against tailoring and export garment manufacturing units in the Chennai region alone, according to data requested by the Thomson Reuters Foundation under the Right to Information Act.
The claims, which would benefit at least 80,000 workers at factories around the port city, add up to more than 490 million Indian rupees ($7.6 million).
But workers’ unions say these claims are probably the tip of the iceberg as they only represent cases filed by government labor inspectors.
Salary cuts
Under the 2016 Madras court ruling, Tamil Nadu’s garment and textile workers should see their pay rise from a monthly average of 4,500 to 6,500 rupees – which campaigners say is comparable to wages for textile jobs in most other states.
But workers say managers have defaulted or delayed on payments since the ruling, with some even introducing pay cuts.
Despite the state’s minimum wage laws, salaries continue to be “grossly low” for thousands of workers who are still not given pay slips or are often hired only as apprentices, campaigners say.
“Instead of paying workers their correct salaries, companies are finding ways to surreptitiously squash their rights,” said Selvi Palani, a lawyer helping workers’ unions fight their cases. “There is a court order but the money is not on the table.
Workers continue to be underpaid.”
Sujata Mody of Penn Thozhilalargal Sangam, a women workers’ union, said some companies that had raised wages were now docking pay for sick days, and for factory meals and shuttle buses which were previously free, meaning many workers had seen little or no change in pay.
Some factories were also firing more expensive workers on trivial grounds, she added.
“The workers are struggling to be heard and the managements are coming up with new forms to deduct their income,” Mody said.
Repeated delays
Under the 1948 Minimum Wages Act, state governments are required to increase the basic minimum wage every five years to protect workers against exploitation, but textile manufacturers have repeatedly challenged pay rises in Tamil Nadu.
The state’s labor commissioner, Ka Balachandran, said inspectors were verifying every company’s records to check that wages were now in line with last year’s ruling.
“We are doing everything to ensure workers get fair wages, and get it quickly,” he added.
But manufacturers in Tamil Nadu say the hike is too high, putting them at a disadvantage to competitors in other states. Some say they are already paying workers more than the minimum wage.
“The new norms are not distinguishing clearly between skilled and non-skilled workers,” said S Shaktivel of the Tirupur Exporters’ Association.
He said some companies had launched an appeal against the order at the Madras High Court.
In the Chennai labor court, case numbers are called out in quick succession.
The seamstress, who is expecting arrears of up to 5,000 rupees, strains to listen over the slow whirring of the ceiling fan.
“My financial situation is not very good,” she whispers. “My husband had surgery a few months back, we have a loan to pay back and a house to run. The company owes me arrears for almost one year. I need that income desperately.”
Her case is called. The lawyer representing the company asks for more time. Another date is set, with the judge warning against further delays.
“I hope I get a good settlement,” the seamstress said as she left court. “After all these years, I would like to stop working, but that looks unlikely. At least if they paid me properly, I would feel a little better.”
…