To judge by their popularity in online videos, cats rule the pet kingdom. In fact, there are more pet cats in the United States than dogs, in part because most cat households are home to multiple cats. Some new DNA evidence suggests that long before they began showing up on our daily Facebook feed, cats were part of our lives. VOA’s Kevin Enochs explains.
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The Red Cross launched a smartphone app Tuesday to help refugees and migrants arriving in Italy access information and services, including medical, psychological and legal support.
The digital platform called “Virtual Volunteer” was unveiled on World Refugee Day as new data showed the number of refugees globally reached a record 22.5 million in 2016.
“People moving are often caught in a fog of poor information,” said Jagan Chapagain, head of programs and operations at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). “They don’t always know what services are available to them.
“This is a tool that will help give them a clearer view so that they can make informed decisions,” he said in a statement.
Italy is on the front line in the European migrant crisis, which has seen hundreds of thousands of people arrive in the continent by land and sea after fleeing wars and poverty in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.
Nearly 70,000 have arrived in Italy so far this year, mostly migrants from West Africa and Bangladesh, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Goods, services, tips
Virtual Volunteer uses geolocation to show users on a map where to access shelters, food banks, canteens, showers, clothes distribution points, maternal health centers, free legal assistance, dentists and language schools.
Refugees and migrants can also find advice on how to protect themselves from traffickers and can access information to help them locate family members if they have become separated.
The app — developed by the IFRC and tech giant IBM — has already been rolled out in Greece and Sweden, where it has been used by 30,000 people. “Information saves lives. Ensuring that people can access unbiased, factual information has a big impact,” Italian Red Cross President Francesco Rocca said in a statement.
Virtual Volunteer, also accessible as a website, offers information in multiple languages depending on what is most needed in each country. Languages in Italy include French, Arabic and Tigrinya, reflecting the high number of Eritrean arrivals, while those in Greece include Arabic, Farsi and Dari.
The IFRC plans to roll out the service in other countries affected by migration, including the Philippines and countries in West Africa.
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The Red Cross launched a smartphone app Tuesday to help refugees and migrants arriving in Italy access information and services, including medical, psychological and legal support.
The digital platform called “Virtual Volunteer” was unveiled on World Refugee Day as new data showed the number of refugees globally reached a record 22.5 million in 2016.
“People moving are often caught in a fog of poor information,” said Jagan Chapagain, head of programs and operations at the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). “They don’t always know what services are available to them.
“This is a tool that will help give them a clearer view so that they can make informed decisions,” he said in a statement.
Italy is on the front line in the European migrant crisis, which has seen hundreds of thousands of people arrive in the continent by land and sea after fleeing wars and poverty in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.
Nearly 70,000 have arrived in Italy so far this year, mostly migrants from West Africa and Bangladesh, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Goods, services, tips
Virtual Volunteer uses geolocation to show users on a map where to access shelters, food banks, canteens, showers, clothes distribution points, maternal health centers, free legal assistance, dentists and language schools.
Refugees and migrants can also find advice on how to protect themselves from traffickers and can access information to help them locate family members if they have become separated.
The app — developed by the IFRC and tech giant IBM — has already been rolled out in Greece and Sweden, where it has been used by 30,000 people. “Information saves lives. Ensuring that people can access unbiased, factual information has a big impact,” Italian Red Cross President Francesco Rocca said in a statement.
Virtual Volunteer, also accessible as a website, offers information in multiple languages depending on what is most needed in each country. Languages in Italy include French, Arabic and Tigrinya, reflecting the high number of Eritrean arrivals, while those in Greece include Arabic, Farsi and Dari.
The IFRC plans to roll out the service in other countries affected by migration, including the Philippines and countries in West Africa.
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The United States Treasury Department announced additional sanctions Tuesday against Russia, pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, and individuals and companies associated with them.
The move comes on the heels of a White House meeting Tuesday between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.
The increased sanctions is in response to continued Russian support for pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine. Prior to his meeting with Trump, Poroshenko stressed the importance of taking such action before the U.S. president’s meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
The sanctions will target 38 individuals and business entities linked to the continuing conflict in eastern Ukraine. The penalties will remain in place until Russia meets the terms of 2014 and 2015 peace accords reached in Minsk, Belarus.
“These designations will maintain pressure on Russia to work toward a diplomatic process that guarantees Ukrainian sovereignty,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said in a statement. “There should be no sanctions relief until Russia meets its obligations under the Minsk agreement.”
Among those sanctioned are two high-level Russian officials, Deputy Economy Minister Sergey Nazarov and Russian MP Alexander Babakov.
Nazarov, who oversees Russia’s humanitarian aid programs in separatist-controlled areas of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions, has been designated for materially assisting and sponsoring the separatist campaigns and advocating international investment in Crimea.
Babakov, Putin’s special liaison for expatriates, voted in favor of annexing Crimea in 2014 on the grounds that Moscow is obligated to represent ethnic Russians living abroad.
Russia’s largest arms producer, Kalashnikov Concern, has been designated along with a number of small Russian-owned banks for operating in Crimea, along with Oboronlogistyka, a Russian Defense Ministry subsidiary in charge of procurement and provisioning for the annexed Black Sea peninsula.
KPSK, one of Russia’s top corporate property underwriters, has been designated for insuring the Kerch Bridge project, which, if completed, would link Crimea and mainland Russia.
The action follows moves by lawmakers last week to pass a bill to limit the White House’s authority to lift sanctions against Russia without congressional approval. The bill passed with 98 votes in the Senate and now moves on to the House of Representatives.
The Trump administration had pushed back against the Senate bill.
“I would urge Congress to ensure any legislation allows the president to have the flexibility to adjust sanctions,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told lawmakers last week.
Ukrainian President Poroshenko said he received strong assurances of U.S. support for his country from Trump during Tuesday’s meeting.
Trump is expected to meet with Putin at the upcoming Group of 20 (G-20) summit slated for July 7-8 in Hamburg, Germany, under the theme “Shaping an Interconnected World.”
Oksana Bedratenko and Oleksiy Kuzmenko of VOA’s Ukrainian Service contributed to this article.
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Chinese stocks will be included for the first time in a leading U.S. index of emerging market shares.
The New York-based index giant MSCI said Tuesday that it would add 222 Chinese A shares beginning next year.
“International investors have embraced the positive changes in the accessibility of the China A shares market over the last few years, and now all conditions are set for MSCI to proceed with the first step of the inclusion,” Remy Briand, MSCI managing director and chairman of the MSCI Index Policy Committee, said in a release.
MSCI’s decision to give the Chinese shares the green light represents a victory for the Chinese government, which has long sought MSCI inclusion because it could help establish Shanghai and Shenzhen as global financial centers.
MSCI has in the past cited obstacles such as China’s restrictions on market access and on moving capital in and out of the country. Prior to Tuesday’s decision, it had excluded Chinese shares for three years in a row.
“Inclusion in the MSCI index family is a strong signal of greater market openness, and it will undoubtedly help the A share market to attract broader attention and participation of international investors,” said Yannan Chenye, head of China equities research and portfolio manager at Harvest Global investments in Hong Kong.
While China celebrated, Argentinian investors reeled as the index compiler defied predictions that the country would be upgraded to emerging-market status, keeping it in its frontier group for at least another year.
MSCI also said it would consult on adding Saudi Arabia to the benchmark, and that Nigeria would remain a frontier market, awaiting further review on a possible downgrade to “standalone” status.
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Countries that make up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations will be a wellspring of opportunity for the United States because of growth in the region’s digital economy and its young population, researchers say.
Those combined forces will “create a much more dynamic [economy] … over the coming decades,” said Satu Limaye, head of the Washington office of the East-West Center, which has conducted research on major trends in Southeast Asia. “You have a young population, very adept at technology, adaptive to innovation, so … they are going to be moving up the supply chain in terms of their comfort with technology-based innovation.”
ASEAN is the world’s fastest-growing internet market, with nearly 4 million Southeast Asians coming online every month, according to data from ASEAN Matters for America/America Matters for ASEAN, which was released in May.
The report projected that by 2020, up to 480 million Southeast Asians would be online, compared with 260 million in 2016, driven largely by the adoption of smartphones. This young and tech-savvy population, with a growing middle-class base, is projected to help the digital economy grow by 500 percent to around $200 billion by 2025.
The report marking ASEAN’s 50th anniversary was published in collaboration with the U.S.-ASEAN Business Council (USABC) and the Singapore-based ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, formerly known as the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
Global players
Alexander Feldman, chairman and chief executive of USABC, said ASEAN’s digital dynamism means Southeast Asia-based companies will become global players, and the United States should play a key role in ensuring that this digital growth will help narrow economic inequality.
“Technology is a great leveler and it is something that ASEAN has been focusing on,” Feldman told VOA Khmer. “How do we ensure the prosperity is shared throughout the economy and that you have equal growth in ASEAN? I think the digital economy is a key, and American companies are the key to the digital economy.”
Feldman, who attended the World Economic Forum on ASEAN, a three-day event in Phnom Penh that focused on youth and digital technology, said the host country, Cambodia, sees big potential in its nascent technology sector in addition to its traditional agriculture sector, where growth appears more promising because of technology.
In both sectors, Feldman sees room for U.S. companies working in logistics, a key component of e-commerce, which is just getting started in Cambodia and its neighbors.
ASEAN ambassadors who attended the launch of the report in Washington in May agreed that the digital economy presents new opportunities for boosting their economies, while strengthening their relationships with the U.S. They agreed that U.S. digital engagement in helping less-developed ASEAN countries like Cambodia will help kick-start their digital economies.
Accent on technology
Chum Bunrong, Cambodia’s ambassador to the U.S., said his government has now made technology a priority for development. He said the U.S. has been particularly helpful in investment and tech-related education through exchange programs.
Singapore’s ambassador to the U.S., Ashok Kumar Mirpuri, said many young Southeast Asians look to the U.S. as they hope to launch their startups in California’s Silicon Valley. Singapore is home to the regional offices of Facebook and Google and has taken advantage of the U.S. tech sector. For example, two years ago, Singapore expanded its famed “Block71” tech ecosystem to Silicon Valley.
Increased connectivity among ASEAN economies and emerging country-based technologies like fintech (financial technology) will only increase the region’s two-way digital trade with the U.S., according to Mirpuri.
The biggest challenges ASEAN nations now face are protecting data and digital transactions to increase consumer confidence in cybersecurity, said Feldman, who is working with U.S. companies to help build a common data security framework for ASEAN’s diverse economies.
“We hope that there will be harmonization of regulations, especially around data in the ASEAN Economic Community,” he said, “and we hope that that harmonization will allow for free flow of data.”
U.S. exit from pact
Feldman added that the recent withdrawal of the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) would affect “digital trade” with ASEAN.
“We fully understand that in America, some will benefit more than others and some that will not benefit at all” from the TPP, he said. “I think it’s silly for America to solely focus on industries of the past. We definitely need to focus on the industries we are strong on currently and in the future. And technology and the digital economy are certainly areas where America is strong.”
This report originated on VOA Khmer.
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The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reports the planet Earth is experiencing another exceptionally warm year with record-breaking temperatures occurring in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and the United States.
At least 60 people have been killed in the devastating forest fires in central Portugal. The World Meteorological Organization says one of the factors contributing to these run-away wildfires are very high temperatures that have exceeded 40 degrees Celsius.
Extremely high temperatures also have been recorded in Spain and in France, which issued an Amber alert, the second highest alert level on Tuesday. WMO reports near record heat is also being reported in California and in the Nevada deserts.
Meteorologists report North Africa and the Middle East are experiencing extremely hot weather with temperatures topping 50 degrees Celsius. But WMO spokeswoman Claire Nullis says the hottest place on Earth appears to be the town of Turbat in southwestern Pakistan, which reported a temperature of 54 degrees Celsius in May.
“It seems like this is a new temperature record for Asia. If it is verified, it will equal a record … which was set in Kuwait last July. So, we will now set up an investigation committee to see if that indeed is a new temperature record for the region,” Nullis said.
WMO Senior Scientist Omar Baddour says the world heat record of 56 degrees Celsius was recorded in Death Valley in the United States in 1913.
“It is very difficult to break a world record because it is not easy to have all the conditions in terms of pressure, invasion of air together at one place. So, the concern now is we are close to cross that record. We are now 54. We are not that far.”
The WMO says it expects global heat waves will likely trigger more deadly wildfires. If necessary precautions are not taken, it warns many people will die from the heat, as happened in 2003, when heat waves across Europe killed 70,000 people.
Scientists predict climate change will cause heat waves to become more intense, more frequent and longer.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) reports the cholera outbreak in Yemen has spread to practically every part of the war-torn country. Suspected cases of cholera and acute watery diarrhea now top 170,000, with 1,170 deaths.
WHO reports cholera has spread to 20 of Yemen’s 22 governorates in just two months. Spokesman Tarik Jasarevic says aid agencies are scaling up their operation and refining their response.
He says it is not possible to cover the country at all times, so WHO and the United Nations Childrens Fund (UNICEF) workers are going to so-called hotspots – the most affected areas – to treat cholera victims who are most at risk.
He calls the situation a very challenging one.
“If you look at the numbers, we are talking close to 2,000 suspected cases a day. Cholera is endemic in Yemen. It is currently the largest cholera outbreak that we have in the world,” Jasarevic said.
Cholera can be easily treated by replacing lost fluids right away. But patients can die within hours if the disease is left untreated. Jasarevic says cholera is being transmitted through contaminated water so it is critical to provide people with a clean water supply.
“It is difficult in a situation where a country has a health system that is collapsing. There is simply no money in the budget and health facilities are not having money to run their daily operations. There is also the issue of waste collection that obviously affects the quality of water and access to clean water,” he said.
Jasarevic says the WHO and UNICEF are providing water purification tablets and are chlorinating water in an effort to keep contaminated water sources at a minimum. He says both agencies also are providing money to health workers as an incentive to have them treat cholera patients. He notes health workers have not received a salary in six months.
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A man who died last year when his semi-autonomous Tesla Model S collided with a truck kept his hands off the steering wheel and apparently did not respond to automated warnings from the car to take the wheel, according to over 500 documents released by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Monday.
The report found that over the “vast majority” of the 37-minute trip Joshua Brown, a former Navy SEAL, was not holding the steering wheel. He only did so for 25 seconds, the NTSB said. The report found that Brown also appeared to ignore numerous warnings to take hold of the wheel prior to the May 2016 crash near Williston, Fla.
The findings appear to take the blame away from Tesla, which has yet to comment on the NTSB report. The company did say last year that autopilot mode “does not allow the driver to abdicate responsibility.”
The report is also good news for the nascent driverless car industry, which hopes to show that computers can drive safely for extended periods of time with limited human intervention.
The NTSB findings echo a report on the incident released last month by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. At that time, Tesla founder Elon Musk called the report “very positive.”
According to the Reuters news agency, Brown family attorney Jack Landskroner said the NTSB documents disprove prior media reports that Brown was watching a movie when the crash occurred. He also said the family has yet to take legal action against Tesla, but would continue to review the NTSB documents.
In the wake of the incident, Tesla upgraded its autopilot mode making it harder to operate in hands-off position. The upgrade also prevents drivers from using autopilot mode if they fail to respond to computerized prompts from the system.
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Australia says it will move classified government information from a private data center in Sydney after a Chinese consortium bought a major stake in the company. The move comes despite assurances from the company, Global Switch, that its files are secure.
Global Switch owns two secure data facilities in downtown Sydney, and stores classified Australian government defense and intelligence files.
Its ownership changed in December when its UK-based parent company accepted a $3 billion bid from Chinese investors for a 49 percent stake in the Sydney-based firm. Among the investors was an entrepreneur who owns part of China’s leading data enterprise, the Daily Tech.
In response, Australian officials said they would move classified files from the private storage facility to a state-run data unit when its current contract expires in 2020, despite a promise from Global Switch that its services are secure.
Peter Jennings, the executive director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a respected think tank, says the government in Canberra is right to be wary of China’s cyber capabilities.
“China is certainly up there with Russia and Iran and North Korea as being amongst the most active cyber espionage entities. It is looking to steal information,” he said. “Increasingly I think China is building a capability to actually go in and do damage to critical infrastructure through cyber means as well.”
The government says Australia is increasingly a target for cybercrime and espionage, and has warned that cyberspace was “under persistent threat.”
Earlier this year, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said cyber security was “the new frontier of warfare” and announced new measures to protect Australian democracy from foreign interference.
Last October, Canberra revealed a foreign power had managed to install malicious software on the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s computer system to steal sensitive documents and compromise other government networks. Officials did not identify the country suspected of the breach, but security analysts pointed the finger at China.
Scientists said on Monday they had pinpointed a particular type of immune system cell that could predict more precisely if cancer patients are likely to respond to modern immunotherapy medicines.
The discovery, reported in the journal Nature Immunology, suggests doctors and drug developers will need to get smarter in zeroing in on those people who stand to benefit from the expensive new drugs, which are revolutionizing cancer care.
Drugs such as Merck’s Keytruda, Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Opdivo, Roche’s Tecentriq and AstraZeneca’s Imfinzi can boost the immune system’s ability to fight tumors, but they only work for some patients.
The current widely used benchmark when giving cancer immunotherapy is a protein called PDL-1. However, many experts view PDL-1 as a “blunt instrument”, since it does not match precisely to drug response, leading to the consideration of other measures, such as the level of mutation in tumors.
The latest research adds a further twist by highlighting therole of so-called tissue-resident memory T-cells.
Researchers from the University of Southampton and La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology found that lung cancer patients with lots of this cell type in their tumors were 34 percent less likely to die than others.
“Having made the first baby steps with PDL-1 testing, we need to be smarter by using new tests,” said Christian Ottensmeier, a Cancer Research UK scientist who worked on the study.
“PDL-1 testing is a little bit like saying ‘you’ve got a Ferrari because it is red.’ Many Ferraris are red and many tumors that are PDL-1 positive will respond to immunotherapy, but on its own that is not sufficient.”
Ottensmeier and colleagues now plan further clinical trials to see how well their biological predictor can pick out patients who will benefit from taking Opdivo.
Industry analysts expect the new generation of cancer immunotherapy drugs to generate tens of billions of dollars in annual sales by early next decade, with lung cancer the biggest single market.
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Artificial intelligence is turning out to be a useful tool for doctors who are increasingly using complex algorithms to help them diagnose disease, and even create new drugs. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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A mass bleaching of coral reefs worldwide is finally easing after three years, U.S. scientists announced Monday.
About three-quarters of the world’s delicate coral reefs were damaged or killed by hot water in what scientists say was the largest coral catastrophe.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced a global bleaching event in May 2014. It was worse than previous global bleaching events in 1998 and 2010.
The forecast damage doesn’t look widespread in the Indian Ocean, so the event loses its global scope. Bleaching will still be bad in the Caribbean and Pacific, but it’ll be less severe than recent years, said NOAA coral reef watch coordinator C. Mark Eakin.
Places like Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, northwest Hawaii, Guam and parts of the Caribbean have been hit with back-to-back-to-back destruction, Eakin said.
University of Victoria, British Columbia, coral reef scientist Julia Baum plans to travel to Christmas Island in the Pacific where the coral reefs have looked like ghost towns in recent years.
“This is really good news,” Baum said. “We’ve been totally focused on coming out of the carnage of the 2015-2016 El Nino.”
While conditions are improving, it’s too early to celebrate, said Eakin, adding that the world may be at a new normal where reefs are barely able to survive during good conditions.
Eakin said coral have difficulty surviving water already getting warmer by man-made climate change. Extra heating of the water from a natural El Nino nudges coral conditions over the edge.
About one billion people use coral reefs for fisheries or tourism. Scientists have said that coral reefs are one of the first and most prominent indicators of global warming.
“I don’t see how they can take one more hit at this point,” Baum said. “They need a reprieve.”
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Long before cats became the darlings of Facebook and YouTube, they spread through the ancient human world.
A DNA study reached back thousands of years to track that conquest and found evidence of two major dispersals from the Middle East, in which people evidently took cats with them. Genetic signatures the felines had on those journeys are still seen in most modern-day breeds.
Researchers analyzed DNA from 209 ancient cats as old as 9,000 years from Europe, Africa and Asia, including some ancient Egyptian cat mummies.
“They are direct witnesses of the situation in the past,” said Eva-Maria Geigl of the Jacques Monod Institute in Paris. She and colleagues also looked at 28 modern feral cats from Bulgaria and east Africa.
It’s the latest glimpse into the complicated story of domesticated cats. They are descendants of wild ancestors that learned to live with people and became relatively tame – though some cat owners would say that nowadays, they don’t always seem enthusiastic about our company.
The domestication process may have begun around 10,000 years ago when people settled in the Fertile Crescent, the arch-shaped region that includes the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea and land around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They stored grain, which drew rodents, which in turn attracted wild cats. Animal remains in trash heaps might have attracted them too. Over time, these wild felines adapted to this man-made environment and got used to hanging around people.
Previous study had found a cat buried alongside a human some 9,500 years ago in Cyprus, an island without any native population of felines. That indicates the cat was brought by boat and it had some special relationship to that person, researchers say.
Cats were clearly tame by about 3,500 years ago in Egypt, where paintings often placed them beneath chairs. That shows by that time, “the cat makes its way to the household,” said Geigl.
But the overall domestication process has been hard for scientists to track, in part because fossils skeletons don’t reveal whether a cat was wild or domesticated.
It’s easier to distinguish dogs, our first domesticated animal, from their wolf ancestors. Dogs evolved from wolves that had begun to associate with people even before farming began, perhaps drawn by the food the humans left behind.
The new study tracked the spread of specific cat DNA markers over long distances through time, a sign that people had taken cats with them. Results were released Monday by the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
The study “strengthens and refines previous work,” said Carlos Driscoll of the Wildlife Institute of India. The extensive sampling of cat DNA going back so far in time is unprecedented, he said.
Researchers also looked for a genetic variant that produces the blotchy coat pattern typical of modern-day domestic cats, rather than the tiger-like stripes seen in their wild cousins. It showed up more often in samples from after the year 1300 than earlier ones, which fits with other evidence that the tabby cat markings became common by the 1700s and that people started breeding cats for their appearance in the 1800s.
That’s late in the domestication of cats, in contrast to horses, which were bred for their appearance early on, Geigl said.
Most of the study focused on the ancient dispersals of cats. In the DNA samples analyzed, one genetic signature found first in the Asian portion of Turkey – and perhaps once carried by some Fertile Crescent cats – showed up more than 6,000 years ago in Bulgaria.
That indicates cats had been taken there by boat with the first farmers colonizing Europe, Geigl said. It also appeared more than 5,000 years ago in Romania, as well as around 3,000 years ago in Greece.
A second genetic signature, first seen in Egypt, had reached Europe between the first and fifth centuries, as shown by a sample from Bulgaria. It was found in a seventh-century sample from a Viking trading port in northern Europe, and an eighth-century sample from Iran.
The dispersal of the cats across the Mediterranean was probably encouraged by their usefulness in controlling rodents and other pests on ships, the researchers said.
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Killer heat is getting worse, a new study shows.
Deadly heat waves like the one now broiling the American West are bigger killers than previously thought and they are going to grow more frequent, according to a new comprehensive study of fatal heat conditions. Still, those stretches may be less lethal in the future, as people become accustomed to them.
A team of researchers examined 1,949 deadly heat waves from around the world since 1980 to look for trends, define when heat is so severe it kills and forecast the future. They found that nearly one in three people now experience 20 days a year when the heat reaches deadly levels. But the study predicts that up to three in four people worldwide will endure that kind of heat by the end of the century, if global warming continues unabated.
“The United States is going to be an oven,” said Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii, lead author of a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The study comes as much of the U.S. swelters through extended triple-digit heat. Temperatures hit records of 106, 105 and 103 in Santa Rosa, Livermore and San Jose, California on Sunday, as a heat wave was forecast to continue through midweek. In late May, temperatures in Turbat, Pakistan, climbed to about 128 degrees (53.5 degrees Celsius); if confirmed, that could be among the five hottest temperatures reliably measured on Earth, said Jeff Masters, meteorology director of Weather Underground.
Last year 22 countries or territories set or tied records for their hottest temperatures on record, said Masters, who wasn’t part of the study. So far this year, seven have done so.
“This is already bad. We already know it,” Mora said. “The empirical data suggest it’s getting much worse.”
Mora and colleagues created an interactive global map with past heat waves and computer simulations to determine how much more frequent they will become under different carbon dioxide pollution scenarios. The map shows that under the current pollution projections, the entire eastern United States will have a significant number of killer heat days. Even higher numbers are predicted for the Southeast U.S., much of Central and South America, central Africa, India, Pakistan, much of Asia and Australia.
Mora and outside climate scientists said the study and map underestimate past heat waves in many poorer hot areas where record-keeping is weak. It’s more accurate when it comes to richer areas like the United States and Europe.
If pollution continues as it has, Mora said, by the end of the century the southern United States will have entire summers of what he called lethal heat conditions.
A hotter world doesn’t necessarily mean more deaths in all locales, Mora said. That’s because he found over time the same blistering conditions _ heat and humidity _ killed fewer people than in the past, mostly because of air conditioning and governments doing a better job keeping people from dying in the heat. So while heat kills and temperatures are rising, people are adapting, though mostly in countries that can afford it. And those that can’t afford it are likely to get worse heat in the future.
“This work confirms the alarming projections of increasing hot days over coming decades – hot enough to threaten lives on a very large scale,” said Dr. Howard Frumkin, a University of Washington environmental health professor who wasn’t part of the study.
Mora documented more than 100,000 deaths since 1980, but said there are likely far more because of areas that didn’t have good data. Not all of them were caused by man-made climate change.
Just one heat wave – in Europe in 2003 – killed more than 70,000 people.
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As South Korea’s new leadership works toward easing long strained inter-Korean relations, U.S. experts are eyeing the country’s conciliatory overtures to the Kim Jong Un regime, worried that a possible resumption of the Kaesong Industrial Complex could provoke discord with the Trump administration.
Shortly after South Korean President Moon Jae-in named Cho Myoung-gyun to be his North Korea point man on June 13, Cho, who played a key role in launching the now-stalled economic cooperation project, told reporters, “Operations at the Kaesong Industrial Complex should be restored. I will speak after thoroughly looking into the details.”
That statement caused a flurry of criticism in Washington, with many analysts saying reviving activities at the complex possibly could hurt Washington-Seoul relations and diminish their alliance coordination. Seoul closed the complex in February 2016 as punishment for the regime’s nuclear test and long-range rocket launch.
“Reopening the Kaesong Industrial Complex is very problematic from Washington’s perspective,” Sue Mi Terry, a former CIA analyst who specializes in North Korea, told VOA’s Korean Service.
Launched in 2004 to enhance cooperation between the two Koreas, the jointly run industrial complex in Kaesong, just north of the border, has reportedly provided $100 million a year in wages to 54,000 North Korean workers and contributed almost $2 billion in trade for Pyongyang.
Terry said any conciliatory action that translates into significant financial benefits for Pyongyang contradicts Washington’s North Korea policy, which is focused on thwarting the Kim regime’s nuclear weapons program by severing all possible revenue streams that fund it.
“We don’t know where the money is going,” Terry said. “It could be contributing to North Korea’s WMD (weapons of mass destruction) missile program. There is no evidence that it’s not.”
Thomas Countryman, who served in the Obama administration as assistant secretary of state for international security and nonproliferation, said restarting Kaesong’s activities would not only reward Kim for the continued provocations, but also throw cold water on international efforts.
“It would be inconsistent with the [U.N. Security Council] resolutions if not in the letter, then in the spirit,” Countryman said. “There is simply no way that [South Korea] could convince China to have a strict enforcement of the U.N. resolutions, if South Korea is reopening a complex that provides tens of millions of dollars of hard currency every year to the North Korean regime.”
Formerly the Obama White House coordinator for arms control and WMD, Gary Samore of the Belfer Center at Harvard University said Seoul should be more strategic and use Kaesong as a bargaining chip in response to or as part of a deal with Pyongyang to take steps toward limiting and eventually eliminating its nuclear activities.
“It would be a big mistake to resume the Kaesong Industrial Park without getting something in return,” Samore said. “So if Kim Jong Un agrees to some limits on nuclear and missile activity — for example, a freeze on testing — then I think one response that [South Korea] could make would be to resume the Kaesong Industrial Park, with the understanding that the facility would be suspended if Kim Jong Un resumed nuclear and missile testing.”
Negotiations on Pyongyang’s nuclear program have been in limbo for almost a decade, with Washington and Seoul ratcheting up economic pressure and a stubborn Pyongyang persisting with weapons development. But since Moon took office last month, he appears to be easing conditions for talks with the North.
“I make it clear that we will open dialogue without a precondition” should North Korea stop launching missiles and testing nuclear devices, Moon said Thursday at an event marking the 2000 inter-Korean summit.
But when President Donald Trump’s top diplomat Rex Tillerson led a U.N. Security Council special meeting in April, he rejected negotiations with Kim, saying North Korea “must take concrete steps to reduce the threat that its illegal weapons programs pose to the U.S. and our allies before we can even consider talks.” Those steps would be dismantling its nuclear and missile programs.
Moon Chung-in, South Korea’s special presidential advisor for foreign and security affairs, commented at an event in Washington Friday that his president proposed “scaling down” the Washington-Seoul joint military drills if North Korea “suspends its nuclear and missile activities.”
The State Department downplayed the significance of the comments.
“We understand these views are the personal views of Mr. Moon and may not reflect official ROK govern policy,” said Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs spokesperson Alicia Edwards in an email to VOA.
A senior official at the South Korean presidential office said the advisor did not coordinate with the president’s office on the proposal.
This report originated on VOA Korean.
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U.S. President Donald Trump on Monday announced he wants to see up to $1 trillion of tax savings over the next decade by a “sweeping transformation of the federal government’s technology.”
Trump told the American Technology Advisory Council in the White House State Dining Room that “we’re embracing big change, bold thinking and outsider perspectives to transform government and make it the way it should be and at far less cost.”
A slew of high-tech heavyweights, some of whom have criticized President Donald Trump’s policies, huddled at the White House on Monday as the administration kicked off its “technology week.”
The chief executive officers of 18 companies held meetings with White House and other Trump administration officials to generate ideas to attempt to transform and modernize government services.
“In addition to the trillion in cost we can take out, probably we can add another two trillion [dollars] on the numerator in terms of digital business by getting the public and the private sector in full cooperation under your administration,” Bill McDermott, the CEO of enterprise software company SAP, told Trump.
Also speaking to the group, one of the world’s most successful venture capitalists, John Doerr, contended that there is also a “trillion dollars of value locked up in government databases. The Kleiner Perkins chairman told the president that “if you set the data free the entrepreneurs are going to do the rest.”
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, the world’s largest online shopping retailer, recommended government, for its transformation, “use commercial technologies whenever possible” to save taxpayers’ money. He also said it was impossible to overstate that investment is needed in machine learning and artificial intelligence.
The CEO of cloud computing company VMware, Pat Gelsinger, echoed that, saying “we deeply believe that we need to be planting those seed corns for our children and grandchildren.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also agreed, saying increasing competitiveness could be achieved through government spending in research. And the native of India told the president the United States should maintain an “enlightened immigration policy,” noting he was the beneficiary of such a policy.
The corporate leaders at the table with the president on Monday cumulatively represented more than $3.5 trillion in market value, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters.
“Today we’ve assembled a very impressive group of leaders from the private sector and are putting them to work here today to work on some of the country’s biggest challenges that will make a very meaningful difference to a lot of its citizens,” White House senior advisor Jared Kushner said as the White House kicked off the day of meetings.
Kushner, who is President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, says the goal is to “work to modernize the government’s technology infrastructure.”
There is outside skepticism about whether the president’s goal – at least in monetary terms – can be achieved.
“I do not understand how or where that trillion-dollar number comes from,” veteran Silicon Valley engineer Leslie Miley told VOA. “There is no basis for that claim so, as an engineer, I would not believe it until I saw a breakdown.”
The sprawling federal government maintains more than 6,000 data centers, some of the systems stretching back more than a half century.
The Department of Defense is still using floppy disks in some of its computer systems, Kushner noted.
Apple CEO Tim Cook told Trump that computer coding should be a required subject in every public school and that “the U.S. should have the most modern government in the world, and today it doesn’t.”
“Tim Cook is right, we should,” Miley, who has worked at Apple, Google, Slack and Twitter, told VOA. “However, with key leadership positions in the government unfilled, it’s going to be difficult getting a strategy in place and executed.”
Monday’s White House event included working sessions over four hours focused on citizen services, cloud computing, analytics, cybersecurity, big data, purchasing and contract reform, talent recruitment and retraining, government and private sector partnerships, H1-B Visas and future trends, according to a White House official.
Other prominent administration participants included Vice President Mike Pence, National Security Advisor Gen. H.R. McMaster, Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert, Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney and three cabinet secretaries: Steven Mnuchin of Treasury, John Kelly of Homeland Security and Wilbur Ross of Commerce.
Other participating Silicon Valley chief executives included Eric Schmidt of Alphabet (parent company of Google), Brian Krzanich of Intel, Steven Mollenkopf of Qualcomm, Shantanu Narayen of Adobe and Ginni Rometty of IBM.
Several of those attending on Monday also were at a similar meeting Trump convened last December before his presidential inauguration.
Notably absent from this second meeting was Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, who recently quit as an outside economic advisor to the president in protest of Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change.
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The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday handed a victory to Chevron Corp. by preventing Ecuadorean villagers and their American lawyer from trying to collect on an $8.65 billion pollution judgment issued against the oil company by a court in Ecuador.
The justices turned away an appeal by New York-based lawyer Steven Donziger, who has spent more than to two decades trying to hold Chevron responsible for pollution in the Ecuadorean rain forest, of lower court rulings blocking enforcement in the United States of the 2011 judgment.
While not disputing that pollution occurred, San Ramon, California-based Chevron has said it is not liable and that Donziger and his associates orchestrated the writing of a key environmental report and bribed the presiding judge in Ecuador.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan barred enforcement of the judgment in 2014, citing the corruption used to obtain it. The New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year upheld Kaplan’s decision, citing “a parade of corrupt actions” by Donziger and his associates, including coercion and fraud, culminating in the bribe offer.
The 2nd Circuit found that Chevron’s $8.646 billion judgment debt was “clearly traceable” to corrupt conduct by the legal team representing the villagers from the area affected by the pollution.
The lengthy legal battle with Chevron has been waged in several countries and was documented in “Crude,” a 2009 documentary film. The plaintiffs have said they plan to continue efforts to enforce the judgment in other countries, regardless of the outcome in the United States.
The saga was drawn extensive media attention over the years, with a succession of reporters given tours by both sides of the affected sites on the edge of the Amazonian jungle near the town of Lago Agrio. The plaintiffs also touted the backing of several celebrities including actors Mia Farrow and Danny Glover.
Donziger and representatives of residents of the Lago Agrio region have sought to force Chevron to pay for water and soil contamination caused from 1964 to 1992 by Texaco, which Chevron acquired in 2001. Chevron has said a 1998 agreement between Texaco and Ecuador absolved it of further liability.
Donziger’s crusade began to unravel when Chevron noticed a deleted scene in the “Crude” documentary, released in 2009, showing Donziger working with supposedly neutral experts in preparing a report for the Ecuadorean court.
Chevron was then able to get access to out-takes and other material related to the documentary via court order. Chevron cited this evidence when it filed its lawsuit in 2011 seeking to block enforcement of the judgment, saying Donziger’s actions violated U.S. anti-racketeering law.
Donziger has also tried to enforce the judgment in Canada, Brazil and other countries where Chevron operates.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday tightened rules on where injury lawsuits may be filed, handing a victory to corporations by undercutting the ability of plaintiffs to bring claims in friendly courts in a case involving litigation over the Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. blood-thinning medication Plavix.
The justices, in an 8-1 ruling, threw out a lower court decision allowing hundreds of out-of-state patients who took Plavix to sue the company in California. State courts cannot hear claims against companies that are not based in the state when the alleged injuries did not occur there, the justices ruled.
The court last month reached a similar conclusion in a separate case involving out-of-state injury claims against Texas-based BNSF Railway Co.
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Google says it is stepping up its efforts to identify and remove videos related to terrorism and violent extremist content, particularly on its YouTube platform.
“While we and others have worked for years to identify and remove content that violates our policies,” Google said, “the uncomfortable truth is that we, as an industry, must acknowledge that more needs to be done. Now.”
First, the company says it’s increasing its use of technology to identify videos that contain extremist messages. It added that it has used “video analysis models” to find and assess more than 50 percent of the terrorism-related content that has been removed in the past six months.
“We will now devote more engineering resources to apply our most advanced machine learning research to train new ‘content classifiers’ to help us more quickly identify and remove extremist and terrorism-related content,” the company said.
The company acknowledges that technology can’t fully solve the problem, so it is also adding 50 expert NGO’s to its YouTube Trusted Flagger program. Flaggers, the company said, can better identify the difference between violent propaganda and news and that they are more than 90 percent accurate. Google says it already works with 63 organizations as part of the program.
Google said it will also be taking a “tougher stance on videos that do not clearly violate our policies.” It said videos that “contain inflammatory religious or supremacists content” will appear with a warning. People will not be able to make money off them, or to comment on or endorse them.
“That means these videos will have less engagement and be harder to find,” Google wrote. “We think this strikes the right balance between free expression and access to information without promoting extremely offensive viewpoints.”
In a fourth step, Google said it will “expand its role in counter-radicalization efforts” through what it calls the “Redirect Method.”
“This promising approach harnesses the power of targeted online advertising to reach potential Isis recruits and redirects them towards anti-terrorist videos that can change their minds about joining,” Google wrote, in reference to Islamic State. “In previous deployments of this system, potential recruits have clicked through on the ads at an unusually high rate, and watched over half a million minutes of video content that debunks terrorist recruiting messages.”
The steps were first published in an opinion piece Sunday on the Financial Times website and can now be found on a Google blog.
Google’s steps follow a recent Facebook announcement that the social media giant is using artificial intelligence to combat terrorist content.
Earlier this year, the non-profit Southern Poverty Law Center issued a report critical of organizations like Google and Facebook. The anti-hate group said the companies “have done little to counter the use of their platforms to spread hateful, false “information,” from conspiracy theories accusing various minority groups of plotting against America to websites promoting Holocaust denial and false “facts” about Islam, LGBT people, women, Mexicans and others.”
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Climate change, trade and terrorism were highlighted Monday at a Beijing meeting of foreign affairs officials from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, known collectively as the BRICS nations.
The five nations are seeking to further align their views on key issues at a time when President Donald Trump is withdrawing the U.S. from multilateral arrangements such as the Paris climate accords and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said China in the coming year would look to “expand with more broad and wide-ranging cooperation in areas such as trade and commerce and investment.”
Together the BRICS countries account for roughly 40 percent of the world population and 20 percent of the global economy. All five countries are members of the G20, although their economic prospects have declined somewhat amid crises in Brazil and South Africa and the effect of sanctions lodged against Russia by the West.
South African Foreign Minister Maite Nkoana-Mashabane pointed to climate change as a major concern.
“There is one climate and for future generations we must employ every effort at our disposal to reverse the effects of climate change,” she said.
Nkoana-Mashabane also pointed to the need to form joint efforts to fight terrorism, sentiments reflected by Vijay Kumar Singh, an Indian External Affairs official.
“It is important to enhance BRICS security in counterterrorism matters,” Singh said.
Leaders of the five nations are due to meet for a summit in the southeastern Chinese city of Xiamen in September.
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When Wal-Mart Stores Inc. bought online retailer Jet.com for $3 billion last year, it marked a crucial moment — the world’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer, after years of ceding e-commerce leadership to arch rival Amazon, intended to compete.
On Friday, Amazon.com Inc. countered. With its $14 billion purchase of grocery chain Whole Foods Market Inc., the largest e-commerce company announced its intention to take on Wal-Mart in the brick-and-mortar world.
The two deals make it clear that the lines that divided traditional retail from e-commerce are disappearing and sector dominance will no longer be bound by e-commerce or brick-and-mortar, but by who is better at both.
Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods also brings disruption to the $700 billion U.S. grocery sector, a traditional area of retailing that stands on the precipice of a ferocious price war.
German discounters Aldi and Lidl are battling Wal-Mart, which controls 22 percent of the U.S. grocery market, with each vowing to undercut whatever price the others offer.
The stakes are highest for Wal-Mart. Amazon’s move aims at the heart of the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retail giant’s business — groceries, which account for 56 percent of Wal-Mart’s $486 billion in revenue for the year ending Jan. 31. With the deal, Whole Foods’ more than 460 stores become a test bed with which Amazon can learn how to compete with Wal-Mart’s 4,700 stores with a large grocery offering that are also within 10 miles (16 km) of 90 percent of the U.S. population.
Amazon is expected to lower Whole Foods’ notoriously high prices, enabling it to pursue Wal-Mart’s customers. The push comes as Wal-Mart is headed in the opposite direction — going
after Amazon’s higher-income shoppers with a recent string of acquisitions of online brands such as Moosejaw and Modcloth and on Friday, menswear e-tailer Bonobos.
Wal-Mart may be ready. In preparation for the grocery price war, Wal-Mart in recent months has cut grocery prices, improved fresh food and meat offerings, modernized shelving and lighting
in its grocery aisles, and expanded its online grocery pickup service.
Marc Lore, the Jet.com founder who now runs Wal-Mart’s e-commerce business after selling a startup to Amazon, told Reuters in an interview that Amazon’s move does not change Wal-Mart’s game plan. “We’re playing offense,” he said.
Wal-Mart is offering curbside pickup of online grocery purchases at 700 locations, with 300 more planned by year end.
It also is testing same-day fresh and frozen home delivery from 10 of its stores. “We see an opportunity to do a lot more of that,” Lore said.
Roger Davidson, who oversaw Wal-Mart’s global food procurement and now is president of Oakton Advisory Group, said the deal will reduce Wal-Mart’s brick-and-mortar advantage.
“I think this acquisition is a concern,” he said.
Some industry observers say Amazon will find it difficult to use Whole Foods to pull away Wal-Mart shoppers because the two stores appeal to different customers. But Michelle Grant, head of retailing at market research firm Euromonitor, said Amazon could use an obscure part of the Whole Foods portfolio — Whole Foods 365 — to lure Wal-Mart shoppers.
Whole Foods 365 offers private-label goods and lower prices than typical Whole Foods stores, and is targeted at younger, value-conscious shoppers. Amazon could provide the financial
capital and tactical ability to build that into something big.
“That [Whole Foods 365] may become a big problem for Wal-Mart,” Grant said.
Amazon, which reported $12.5 billion in cash and equivalents and a free cash flow of $10.2 billion in the year ended March 31, has plenty to spend. Wal-Mart reported $6.9 billion in cash
and equivalents and $20.9 billion in free cash flow at its year ended Jan. 31.
Brittain Ladd, a former senior manager at Amazon who worked on its brick-and-mortar strategy, said Amazon will use Whole Foods to test concepts for the grocery store of the future.
Ladd, who left Amazon in March, said Amazon will seek to eliminate checkout lines by using technology that automatically scans goods as customers add them to their shopping carts. It
will select merchandise based on Amazon’s vaunted customer data, and potentially expects the use of technology to change prices during the course of a day.
Amazon declined comment on competition with Walmart but spokesman Drew Herdener said in a statement the company has no plans to cut jobs or use technology in development at its
Seattle Amazon Go store to automate jobs of cashiers.
Ladd, who helped with AmazonFresh’s global expansion and now is a supply chain consultant, said an Amazon-owned Whole Foods also likely will offer in-car pickup of online purchases, and
home delivery from Whole Foods stores, add pharmacies and showcase Amazon devices inside the stores.
“Amazon will reduce prices and change the assortment of products carried in Whole Foods stores to attract a larger customer base,” said Ladd. “Kroger and Wal-Mart will be impacted as their customers will defect to Amazon.”
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The soaring cathedrals of Europe seem to defy gravity. But 3-D architects are taking a page from the ancient masters to form their new creations. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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The soaring cathedrals of Europe seem to defy gravity. But 3D architects are taking a page from the ancient masters to form their new creations. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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