Fighting hunger around the globe is uniquely challenging. It’s not just getting the food to those who need it. It includes growing, or in the case of protein, raising the food that will feed the hungry. But a group of California researchers may have an answer to the protein problem. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Canada’s defense minister repeated a threat Wednesday to cancel the purchase of 18 fighter jets from Boeing Co. because of the company’s trade complaint against Canadian plane maker Bombardier.
Harjit Sajjan said Boeing’s action against Bombardier is “unfounded” and not the behavior of a “trusted partner.” He said buying the Super Hornet fighter jets “requires a trusted industry partner.”
Sajjan urged Boeing to withdraw the complaint. Canada’s foreign minister has also threatened to block the order.
“Our government — and I stress this — our government is disappointed in the action of one of our leading industry partners,” he said.
Complaint could mean duties
Chicago-based Boeing’s trade complaint prompted a U.S. Commerce Department anti-dumping investigation that could result in duties being imposed on Bombardier’s new larger C Series passenger aircraft. Boeing insists the plane receives Canadian government subsidies that give it an advantage internationally.
Canada’s threat is coming amid increasing trade disputes with the U.S.
Scott Day, a spokesman for Boeing, noted that Sajjan also recognized Boeing as a strong partner in the past and for the future. Day defended the company’s trade action.
“This is a commercial matter that Boeing is seeking to address through the normal course for resolving such issues,” Day said in an email.
Boeing petitioned the U.S. Commerce Department and the U.S. International Trade Commission to investigate subsidies of Montreal-based Bombardier’s C Series aircraft. Boeing says Bombardier has received more than US $3 billion in government subsidies that let it engage in “predatory pricing.”
Brazil has also launched a formal complaint to the World Trade Organization over Canadian subsidies to Bombardier. Sao Paolo-based Embraer is a fierce rival of Bombardier.
Government investment
The Quebec government invested US $1 billion in exchange for a 49.5 percent stake in the C Series last year. Canada’s federal government also recently provided a US $275 million loan to Bombardier, which struggled to win orders for its new medium-size plane. But Bombardier won a 75-plane order for the C Series from U.S.-based Delta Air Lines in 2016. Bombardier said its planes never competed with Boeing in the sale to Delta.
The Canadian government said late last year it would enter into discussions on buying 18 Super Hornet jet fighters from Boeing on an interim basis and hold an open competition to buy more planes over the next five years. Canada remains part of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program.
Major investors put U.S. industry on notice Wednesday that climate change matters, even as reports emerged that President Donald Trump plans to withdraw the United States from an international pact to fight global warming.
A number of large institutional fund firms including BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, supported a shareholder resolution calling on ExxonMobil to share more information about how new technologies and climate change regulations could impact the business of the world’s largest publicly traded oil company. The proposal won the support of 62.3 percent of votes cast.
The victory, on such a wide margin, was hailed by climate activists as a turning point in their decades-long campaign to get oil and gas companies to communicate how they would adapt to a low-carbon economy.
Major investors see major risk
With major investors now seeing climate change as a major risk, activists said U.S. corporations will have to be more transparent about the impact of a warming planet even if the United States withdraws from the 2015 Paris climate accord, as Trump promised during his presidential campaign.
“Economic forces are outrunning any other considerations,” said Anne Simpson, investment director for sustainability at the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, one of the sponsors of the resolution.
She credited big investors in Exxon for the change, since at least some of them switched their votes after last year when a similar measure won just 38 percent support.
“We have seen a sea change in their viewpoint,” she said.
Many top investors now consider their votes on shareholder proposals “on merit, rather than considering it a test of loyalty to management,” she said.
Among Exxon’s top investors, Vanguard Group and BlackRock opposed last year’s call for climate change reporting. A spokeswoman for Vanguard, which has about 7 percent of Exxon’s shares, declined to comment on its voting this year.
A person familiar with the matter said funds run by BlackRock, which holds about 6 percent of Exxon shares, voted in favor of the climate resolution.
Filings showing their exact votes are not due for months.
But both fund firms and others have taken steps since last year to make it easier to support climate resolutions.
Doug Holt, a spokesman for Exxon’s ninth-largest investor Northern Trust Corp, said it voted in favor of the proposal, citing its own guidelines updated in 2016.
Vote from the street
The investment firms’ approach reflects a new interest in climate matters among their own investors, who have stuffed money into so-called green mutual funds and other vehicles that use environmental factors in their stock picking.
Wall Street’s priorities have shifted the terms of debate at a number of other energy and utility companies. A majority of shareholders voting at Occidental Petroleum Corp and PPL Corp called for similar reports on the risks of climate change. Votes on two more of the measures are scheduled for June 7 at Devon Energy and at Hess.
Michael Crosby, involved in corporate outreach for the Midwest Capuchin Franciscans, a religious order, said Wednesday’s vote was a rejection of Exxon’s arguments it already provides enough detail on its outlook.
“The Street is saying, you have to give better evidence,” Crosby said.
Exxon and the Paris deal
After the measure passed, Exxon Chief Executive Officer Darren Woods said its board would reconsider its climate communications.
The activists now face the task of maintaining alliances with leaders like Woods who opposed their resolutions but who in some cases support the 195-nation Paris agreement. Exxon said in a March 22 letter to the White House that the Paris deal is “an effective framework for addressing the risks of climate change.”
Trump had at least one ally at Exxon’s meeting in Dallas, Steven Milloy of Potomac, Maryland, who urged other investors to support his resolution that would make it harder to file proposals like the one on climate change.
Milloy said management should show less concern for climate issues, which he called misplaced, and cited Trump as a model.
“For the first time we have a president who actively opposes climate hysteria,” Milloy said.
According to Exxon, Milloy’s proposal received support from 1.6 percent of votes cast.
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An Indian charity is using big data to pinpoint human trafficking hot spots in a bid to prevent vulnerable women and girls vanishing from high-risk villages into the sex trade.
My Choices Foundation uses specially designed technology to identify those villages that are most at risk of modern slavery, then launches local campaigns to sound the alarm.
“The general Indian public is still largely unaware that trafficking exists, and most parents have no idea that their children are actually being sold into slavery,” said Elca Grobler, the founder of My Choices Foundation.
“That’s why grass-roots awareness and education at the village level is so important to ending the human traffic trade,” Grobler said in a statement released late Tuesday.
The analytics tool — developed by Australian firm Quantium — uses a range of factors to identify the most dangerous villages.
It draws on India’s census, education and health data and factors such as drought risk, poverty levels, education and job opportunities to identify vulnerable areas.
Red alert
There are an estimated 46 million people enslaved worldwide, with more than 18 million living in India, according to the 2016 Global Slavery Index. The Index was compiled by the Walk Free Foundation, a global organization seeking to end modern slavery.
Many are villagers lured by traffickers with the promise of a good job and an advance payment, only to find themselves or their children forced to work in fields or brick kilns, enslaved in brothels and sold into sexual slavery.
Almost 20,000 women and children were victims of human trafficking in India in 2016, a rise of nearly 25 percent from the previous year, according to government data.
While India has strengthened its anti-trafficking policy in recent years, activists say a lack of public awareness remains one of the biggest impediments.
In 2014, My Choices Foundation launched “Operation Red Alert,” offering educational programs to inform parents, teachers, village leaders and children about traffickers.
But with more than 600,000 villages across India and limited resources, the charity teamed up with Quantium to build the new data tool and use methods old and new to fight the criminals.
“We are helping to banish human trafficking, one village at a time, through a combination of highly sophisticated technology and grass-roots … education,” said Grobler.
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The head of a New York-based advocacy group has called on President Donald Trump and his older daughter to help secure the release of three men who reported labor violations at a Chinese company that makes shoes bearing the Ivanka Trump brand.
“We appeal to President Trump, Ivanka Trump herself, and to her related brand company to advocate and press for the release of our activists,” Li Qiang, executive director of China Labor Watch, the men’s employer, said Wednesday.
The Ivanka Trump brand has declined to comment. The White House and Ivanka Trump’s lawyer did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Calls to provincial police in China were not answered. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said she was unaware of the situation and declined to make further comments.
Hua Haifeng and two other labor activists, Li Zhao and Su Heng, had been covertly investigating labor conditions at two Chinese factories that make shoes for Trump and other brands, in the cities of Ganzhou and Dongguan. They disclosed preliminary findings to China Labor Watch, indicating workers at the factories had been subject to extremely long hours.
Hua was arrested in Jiangxi province on suspicion of illegally using eavesdropping equipment; he and the other two men disappeared Saturday and were last seen in Ganzhou, in southern Jiangxi province, China Labor Watch reported Tuesday.
The arrest and disappearances came amid Chinese President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on the country’s advocacy groups and civil society. In the past year, dozens of human rights activists have been detained in China.
The global human rights group Amnesty International called for the release of the three men if they are being held only for investigating possible labor abuses at the factories, which are owned by Huajian International.
“Activists exposing potential human rights abuses deserve protection, not persecution,” said Amnesty International spokesman William Nee. “The trio appear to be the latest to fall foul of the Chinese authorities’ aggressive campaign against human rights activists who have any ties to overseas organizations, using the pretense of ‘national security.’ ”
The relationship between the Trump family and China has received widespread attention since last year’s presidential campaign. While Trump has accused China of taking coveted manufacturing jobs from the U.S., the Trump family has sought to benefit financially from the Chinese market.
Trump recently obtained more than 75 trademarks in China. The family of Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband, is attempting to raise money from Chinese investors for a real estate venture.
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Nest Labs is adding Google’s facial recognition technology to a high-resolution home-security camera, offering a glimpse of a future in which increasingly intelligent, internet-connected computers can see and understand what’s going on in people’s homes.
The Nest Cam IQ, unveiled Wednesday, will be Nest’s first device to draw upon the same human-like skills that Google has been programming into its computers — for instance, to identify people in images via its widely used photo app. Facebook deploys similar technology to automatically recognize and recommend tags of people in photos posted on its social network.
Nest can tap into Google’s expertise in artificial intelligence because both companies are owned by the same parent company, Alphabet Inc.
With the new feature, you could program the camera to recognize a child, friend or neighbor, after which it will send you notifications about that person being in the home.
Nest isn’t saying much about other potential uses down the road, though one can imagine the camera recognizing when grandparents are visiting and notifying Nest’s internet-connected thermostat to adjust the temperature to what they prefer. Or it might be trained to keep a close eye on the kids when they are home after school to monitor their activities and send alerts when they’re doing something besides a list of approved activities.
The cost of facial recognition
The new camera will begin shipping in late June for almost $300. You’ll also have to pay $10 a month for a plan that includes facial recognition technology. The same plan will also include other features, such as alerts generated by particular sounds — barking dogs, say — that occur out of the camera’s visual range.
The camera will only identify people you select through Nest’s app for iPhones and Android devices. It won’t try to recognize anyone that an owner hasn’t tagged. Even if a Nest Cam IQ video spies a burglar in a home, law enforcement officials will have to identify the suspect through their own investigation and analysis, according to Nest.
Privacy concerns
Facial recognition is becoming more common on home-security cameras. Netatmo, for instance, introduced a security camera touting a similar facial recognition system in 2015. That camera sells for about $200, or $100 less than the Nest Cam IQ.
The way that the Nest and Netatmo cameras are being used doesn’t raise serious privacy concerns because they are only verifying familiar faces, not those of complete strangers, said Jennifer Lynch, who specializes in biometrics as a senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital advocacy group.
But Lynch believes privacy issues are bound to crop up as the resolution and zoom capabilities of home security cameras improve, and as engineers develop more sophisticated ways of identifying people even when an image is moving or only a part of a face is visible. Storing home-security videos in remote data centers also raises security concerns about the imagery being stolen by computer hackers. “It definitely could become a slippery slope,” Lynch said.
The privacy issues already are thorny enough that Nest decided against offering the facial recognition technology in Illinois, where state law forbids the collection and retention of an individual’s biometric information without prior notification and written permission.
Further details
Nest’s $10-a-month subscription includes video storage for 10 days. Video can be stored up to 30 days with an upgrade to a subscription plan costing $30 per month.
The high-end camera supplements lower-resolution indoor and outdoor cameras that Nest will continue to sell for almost $200. Neither of the lower-end cameras is equipped for facial recognition.
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When Rajnish Dhall’s driver wanted to borrow money to buy a home, Dhall suggested he go to a bank. But without proof of income or tax returns to show his credentials, the driver said no bank would lend to him.
It was the start of a whole new business for Dhall, a former banker whose firm aims to help the hundreds of millions of informal workers who make up the bulk of India’s labor force.
They are the newly emerging home-owning class.
“My driver was earning a steady income and could have paid back the loan easily, yet none of the banks would lend to him because he didn’t have the necessary paperwork,” Dhall told Reuters. “The housing problem is very real and visible, especially in a city like Mumbai. There is certainly aspiration to own a home, but without finance, there is no way to realize the aspiration.”
Dhall lent his driver the money, then looked more closely at home loans for a host of other workers in the informal sector.
Of India’s 470 million-strong workforce, about 90 percent is in the informal sector. They include domestic help, street vendors, daily wage earners and small business operators, who may have no collateral and whose incomes are irregular.
They have few options besides borrowing from money lenders and employers, Dhall found. So he set up Micro Housing Finance Corp. to give home loans to low-income and informal workers.
Housing for all
More homes are desperately needed.
Already, one in three Indians live in cities, many in crowded slums and other informal settlements. Every year, tens of thousands of villagers migrate to cities in search of jobs, and the pace of urbanization is set to rise.
India has a shortage of about 20 million urban homes; the shortfall disproportionately affects families earning less than 16,000 rupees ($248) a month, according to consultancy KPMG.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made affordable housing a priority, offering incentives such as subsidized loans to meet a 2022 target of “Housing for All,” even as critics say the plan bypasses the homeless.
The government plan aims to create 20 million new urban homes and 30 million rural homes.
An affordable home is typically about 250 square feet (23 square meters) in size, and can cost up to 1.2 million rupees ($18,600). It is aimed at families earning 8,000-25,000 rupees a month, and is usually located in the outskirts of the city where land is cheaper.
In recent years, developers including the Tata group, Mahindra and TVS group have entered the affordable housing market, enticed by government incentives and future potential.
These big firms have enhanced the quality and reputation of affordable homes, which were once described as “vertical slums.”
About 15 micro home finance companies have also launched, with reputable builders and more ready finance combining for better results for low-income earners.
Increasingly, it is a choice between “owning a good-quality, formal home in the periphery of the city over a badly made or informal home in the city,” said Vikram Jain, director of social consultancy FSG, which has studied the segment.
“With more developers and better access to finance, they are well designed, quality constructions that residents take pride in owning,” he told Reuters.
From chalk to pigeons
India’s micro housing finance companies have a loan portfolio of more than $160 million, with near-zero defaults, Jain estimates.
But micro home loans of up to 1 million rupees for low-income clients only account for a quarter of home loans.
Micro home finance companies lend up to 90 percent of the value of the property, at slightly higher interest rates of about 13 percent, on average. The repayment term can be up to 25 years.
Since its founding, MHFC has dispensed about 14,000 home loans, Dhall said.
Its customers represent 600 diverse professions — from a man selling grains to feed pigeons, to one making marking chalk for tailors, and a grass seller for people with cows at home.
At Aadhar Housing Finance — owned in part by the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation — more than three-quarters of customers did not have a credit history when they asked for a loan, said Chief Executive Deo Shankar Tripathi.
Aadhar has given more than 50,000 home loans, mostly in India’s poorest states where customers typically buy a plot of land and build a modest home, Tripathi said.
The high cost of land needed to build homes can be a challenge to affordable housing. Rising construction costs and limited financing for developers are other constraints.
But Tripathi said nobody should be deterred.
“Owning a home is a dream for everyone. For the low-income segment, a home means security, empowerment and greater inclusion in society,” Tripathi said.
“We cannot give them a big bungalow like Mukesh Ambani’s [India’s wealthiest man], but we can make a decent home within the reach of everyone,” he said.
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The United States space agency NASA says it will launch a mission next year to send a spacecraft directly into the sun’s atmosphere.
NASA announced the plan at the University of Chicago Wednesday during a ceremony to honor astrophysicist Eugene Parker, whom the Parker Solar Probe is named after.
The probe will gather data on solar activity and give us a better idea of how space-weather events can impact life of Earth.
It will orbit within four million miles of the sun’s surface, about eight times closer to the sun than any spacecraft has ever flown. It will need to withstand heat and radiation no human could endure.
“Parker Solar Probe is going to answer questions about solar physics that we’ve puzzled over for more than six decades,” said mission scientist Nicola Fox.
“It’s a spacecraft loaded with technological breakthroughs that will solve many of the largest mysteries about our star, including finding out why the sun’s corona is so much hotter than its surface.”
Parker was the first scientist to study the phenomenon now known as solar wind and his research changed the way scientists understand the way stars interact with the worlds that orbit them.
WATCH: Parker on solar probe
Solar winds are made of charged gases emanating from the sun. Those winds eventually flow past the Earth at around 1.6 million kilometers per hour and scientists believe they have the capability to cause serious damage to the planet.
At its closest point to the sun, the spacecraft’s 12-centimeter-thick solar shields will need to withstand temperatures of 1300 degrees Celsius.
The probe is on track to launch in August 2018 and is scheduled to last until June 2025.
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The Czech Republic on Wednesday enforced a smoking ban in bars, restaurants and cafes, putting to an end to the country’s status as one of the last havens for tobacco smokers in Europe.
The ban, which applies to inside areas of bars and restaurants as well as public places like cinemas, theaters and sports venues, was approved by Parliament following years of heated debate and signed by President Milos Zeman, a chain smoker.
Unlike most of Europe, Czechs had remained tolerant of smoking up until now — and it was up to restaurant owners to decide whether to allow it in their establishments.
According to data from the European Union, 17 member states have comprehensive smoke-free laws in place. But some, including Austria, Portugal, Romania and Serbia, only have partial bans on indoor smoking in restaurants and bars.
Others, like Greece, have official bans but the rules are flouted — even by government ministers.
After the Czech ban, Slovakia appeared to be the only EU country left with no official ban in place inside bars.
The Czech Health Ministry said it estimated 18,000 Czechs die of smoking every year and another two thousand non-smokers die due to exposure to second-hand smoke.
From Wednesday, which is World No Tobacco Day, violating the ban would incur a fine of up to 5,000 koruna ($190).
Most Czechs approve the ban, but a group of lawmakers have challenged it at the Constitutional Court.
Jakub Storek, owner of the Cafe Liberal in Prague — a popular hangout among local smokers — said he opposed the ban.
“It’s hard to predict the impact at the moment,” he said. “But I guess it would be different clients coming here in the future.”
Stepan Ourecky said he would still come, but may have a smoke outside the cafe.
“Or perhaps, I will smoke less,” the 18-year-old student said.
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Most smokers in China, the world’s largest tobacco consumer, have no intention of kicking the habit and remain unaware of some of its most damaging health effects, Chinese health officials and outside researchers said Wednesday.
An estimated 316 million people smoke in China, almost a quarter of the population, and concerns are growing about the long-term effects on public health and the economy.
The vast majority of smokers are men, of whom 59 percent told surveyors that they have no plans to quit, according to a decade-long study by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and Canadian researchers with the International Tobacco Control project.
Such numbers have prompted efforts to restrict the formerly ubiquitous practice. Major cities including Beijing and Shanghai having recently moved to ban public smoking, with Shanghai’s prohibition going into effect in March. In 2015, the central government approved a modest nationwide cigarette tax increase.
But Chinese and international health officials argue that more is needed, including a nationwide public smoking ban, higher cigarette taxes and more aggressive health warnings. Such actions are “critically important,” Yuan Jiang, director of tobacco control for the Chinese Center for Disease Control, said in a statement released with Wednesday’s study.
A public smoking ban appeared imminent last year. The government health ministry said in December that it would happen by the end of 2016, but that has yet to materialize.
“They have to figure out what’s important as a health policy,” said Geoffrey Fong of Canada’s University of Waterloo, one of the authors of Wednesday’s study. “Every third man that you pass on the street in China will die of cigarettes. …When you have cheap cigarettes, people will smoke them.”
In line with global trends, smoking rates among Chinese have fallen slowly over the past 25 years, by about 1 percent annually among men and 2.6 percent among women, according to a separate study published in April in the medical journal The Lancet.
Yet because of China’s population growth — 1.37 billion people at last count — the actual number of smokers has continued to increase. Rising prosperity means cigarettes have become more affordable, while low taxes keep the cost of some brands at less than $1 a pack.
Sixty percent of Chinese smokers were unaware that cigarettes can lead to strokes and almost 40 percent weren’t aware that smoking causes heart disease, according to the study, which was released on World No Tobacco Day, when the World Health Organization and others highlight health risks associated with tobacco use.
Judith Mackay, an anti-tobacco advocate based in Hong Kong, said China has made strides with the public smoking bans in some cities and a similar ban covering schools and universities, but that’s not enough.
“This is the first time there has been a report looking at the overall picture of where China stands,” said Mackay, senior adviser at Vital Strategies, a global health organization. “The reality is, it’s falling behind.”
Mackay blamed behind the scenes lobbying by China’s state-owned tobacco monopoly for impeding efforts to toughen tobacco policies. The State Tobacco Monopoly Administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Government agencies and research institutes in China, Canada and the United States funded the study.
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What is Climate Change? This video explains the basic concept of this hot political topic.
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A group of Senate Democrats has sent a letter to U.S. President Donald Trump requesting information about a raft of trademark approvals from China this year that they say may violate the U.S. Constitution’s ban on gifts from foreign governments.
“China’s rapid approvals after years of court battles have raised questions as to whether the trademarks will prevent you from standing up to China on behalf of American workers and their businesses,” the eight senators, led by Michigan Democrat Debbie Stabenow and Connecticut Democrat Richard Blumenthal, wrote in the letter Tuesday.
China’s most recent nod for a Trump trademark, covering clothing, came on May 6, bringing to 40 the number of marks China has granted or provisionally granted to the president and a related company, DTTM Operations LLC, since his inauguration. If there are no objections, provisional approvals are formally registered after 90 days. China has also rejected or partially rejected nine Trump trademarks since the inauguration.
Trademarks give the holder monopoly rights to a brand in a given market. In many jurisdictions, like China, they can also be filed defensively, to prevent squatters from using a name. Because trademarks are granted at the discretion of foreign governments and can be enormously valuable, they can be problematic for U.S. officials, who are barred by the emoluments clause of the constitution from accepting anything of value from foreign states without congressional approval.
In their letter, the senators were particularly interested in any special efforts Trump, his Chinese lawyers, or the U.S. Embassy in China, which sometimes advocates for U.S. firms, may have made to secure approval for the president’s trademarks. They cited an Associated Press report quoting one of Trump’s lawyers in China, Spring Chang, who said that “government relations are an important part of trademark strategy in China.”
Concern about favoritism is particularly sharp in China, where the courts and bureaucracy are designed to reflect the will of the ruling Communist Party. China has defended its handling of Trump’s intellectual property interests, saying it followed the law in processing his applications, though some trademark lawyers viewed the pace as unusually quick and well-coordinated. In addition, China approved one trademark for Trump-branded construction services after a 10-year legal battle that turned in his favor only after he declared his candidacy.
Alan Garten, chief legal officer of The Trump Organization, did not respond immediately to a request for comment. He has previously said that Trump’s trademark activity in China predates his election and noted that Trump has stepped away from managing his company. However, the president retains an ownership stake in his global branding and real estate empire.
In April, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group, added “gratuitous Chinese trademarks” to its lawsuit against the president for alleged emoluments violations. Trump has dismissed the suit as without merit.
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Inside the sprawling Acer stall at Computex Taipei, Asia’s largest tech show, staff displayed a laptop computer that’s ready for virtual reality play yet thinner than most PCs for gaming. At the same exhibition, the Taiwanese tech hardware maker showed how its internet cloud uses artificial intelligence to predict what customers will do when shopping and allow the shop to make decisions accordingly.
VR and AI usher in a new world of technology
Acer was riding two major new themes at the annual show: virtual reality, often abbreviated to VR, and artificial intelligence, or AI.
Demand from gamers, a lucrative market of people willing to pay more than $10,000 for a personal computer (PC), is driving the VR side, compelling Acer and its peers to install new lines of processors that support immersive, 3D play with headgear and hand controls.
“You can see that the company is moving into more gaming centric, VR, new experience innovation,” said Vincent Lin, senior director of Acer’s global product marketing. “Not all gaming notebooks or not all notebooks are VR ready. There are certain requirements needed to be VR ready. VR, certainly it’s a growth area. It’s supposed to like grow five times or something over next 3 years.”
Revenue is forecast to rise quickly
Silicon Valley investment advisory firm Digi-Capital forecasts a surge in global revenue from $20 billion this year to $108 billion in 2021 in virtual reality technology and a similar technology known as augmented reality.
The anticipation of growth inspired 60 Computex exhibitors to show games, gear or PCs that support virtual reality. The technology that first popped into public view in the 1980s is normally aimed now at computer gamers, though scientific researchers have used VR as well as the related augmented reality to model processes they can’t duplicate in real life.
Near Acer’s stall, Computex visitors donned thick, black head-mounted goggles to race cars or fire at things, yelling in excitement through the dimly lit booths as they tested new products.
PCs will be thinner, quieter and quicker to support VR
Developers were excited about Nvidia’s newly announced graphics processors that are designed to make PCs thinner and quieter. They also noticed the seventh update of Intel’s Core i5 processor, which stands to make PCs faster.
At one stall, Hong Kong developer Zotac showed off backpacks that can hold a gamer’s VR hardware system to prevent any tripping over wires – which might happen to someone immersed in a 3D scenario and unable to see the real floor.
“Right now the way the virtual reality equipment is made, you’re tethered to a system. That means you have to worry about tripping over cables, wrapping them around yourself as well,” Zotac product marketer Buu Ly said. “With our VR backpack, that removes those barriers so you are more free to experience VR the way it was supposed to be experienced.”
AI attracting much interest this year
Artificial intelligence also made its way into the show, where about 1,600 exhibitors occupied 5,010 booths, this year as companies test a relatively new technology that teaches computers to make decisions based on patterns they detect through analysis of user commands.
Voice-activated assistants on mobile phones use artificial intelligence by searching the phone for requested information, even sending commands across apps to get answers.
Computex organizers have not tallied the number of exhibitors showing AI technology, but analysts in Taipei say a number are pursuing servers that can speed up development of AI functions allowed by the likes of Nvidia’s Jetson TX computer processing module.
With a compound annual growth rate of 63 percent from 2016 to 2022, the artificial intelligence market should be worth $16.06 billion by 2022, according to forecasts by the research firm Markets and Markets.
“AI has caught much of the spotlight in various exhibitions around the world and has become one of major deployment highlights for many companies in recent years,” said Ray Han, industry analyst with the Marketing Intelligence & Consulting Institute in Taipei. “The next battlefield will lie on platforms or chips.”
Internet of things
One contender is Socionext, a Japanese developer that has developed a processor partly for AI and the Internet of things, or IoT, which means using phones or PCs to control other electronic objects. Five customers are evaluating whether to install the chip, said Fumitaka Shiraishi, a Socionext business project management group member.
“Our chip is a processor chip, so not too specific for AI but also suitable for AI because of the low power,” Shiraishi said.
Artificial intelligence can help the Internet of things by picking the most relevant points from vast fields of data collected.
“In the future five years, I think IoT devices also need to judge some information — not just sensing,” Shiraishi said.
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The United Nations predicts that by 2025 nearly two billion people will be living in places where there’s not enough water to go around. And since on average water makes up about 60% of the human body, not having it has a host of devastating effects that go way beyond just being thirsty. That’s why some new technology to turn saltwater into drinkable water holds so much promise, VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Solar power is lighting up the night sky in Jordan and making life easier for the 20,000 Syrian refugees at a camp that once had no reliable source of electricity. Faith Lapidus reports.
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Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc said Tuesday that he would sign deals for U.S. goods and services worth $15 billion to $17 billion during his visit to Washington, mainly for high-technology products and for services.
“Vietnam will increase the import of high technologies and services from the United States, and on the occasion of this visit, many important deals will be made,” Phuc told a U.S. Chamber of Commerce dinner.
Phuc, who is due to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday at the end of a three-day visit to the United States, did not provide further details of the transactions.
GE Power Chief Executive Officer Steve Bolze told the dinner that General Electric Co. would sign deals worth about $6 billion with Vietnam, but also offered no details.
Phuc’s comments came after U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer expressed concern about the rapid growth of the U.S. trade deficit with Vietnam, saying this was a new challenge for the two countries and that he was looking to Phuc to help address it.
“Over the last decade, our bilateral trade deficit has risen from about $7 billion to nearly $32 billion,” Lighthizer said. “This concerning growth in our trade deficit presents new challenges and shows us that there is considerable potential to improve further our important trade relationship.”
Reducing deficits
Lighthizer and other Trump administration trade officials have pledged to work to reduce U.S. bilateral deficits with major trading partners. The $32 billion deficit with Vietnam last year — the sixth-largest U.S. trade deficit — reflects growing imports of Vietnamese semiconductors and other electronics products in addition to more traditional sectors such as footwear, apparel and furniture.
The trade issue has become a potential irritant in a relationship where Washington and Hanoi have stepped up security cooperation in recent years, given shared concerns about China’s increasingly assertive behavior in East Asia.
Phuc’s meeting with Trump makes him the first Southeast Asian leader to visit the White House under the new administration.
It reflected calls, letters, diplomatic contacts and lower-level visits that started long before Trump took office in Washington, where Vietnam retains a lobbyist at $30,000 a month.
Vietnam was disappointed when Trump ditched the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade pact, in which Hanoi was expected to be one of the main beneficiaries, and focused U.S. trade policy on reducing deficits.
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Mexico’s foreign minister says the country is “inevitably” set to review rules of origin when renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement, giving a boost to President Donald Trump’s manufacturing push.
Foreign Relations Secretary Luis Videgaray said Tuesday at an event in Miami that NAFTA has allowed Mexican industry to enter the U.S. market with lax rules of origin. The rules dictate how much U.S. content a product assembled in Mexico must have in order to escape tariffs when being imported into the United States. Currently set at 62.5 percent for the auto industry, that number could increase.
“One part that must inevitably be reviewed is the chapter on rules of origin,” Videgaray said at the University of Miami. “Over time, the free trade agreement has sometimes been used — not always, of course, but sometimes — as a way to access the U.S. market perhaps with laxity in some ways of rules of origin.”
The Trump administration told Congress this month there would be 90 days of consultations on the renegotiation of the 23-year-old pact before beginning talks with Canada and Mexico. Annual trade of goods between Mexico and the U.S. was worth $525 billion in 2016, with the U.S. running a trade deficit of more than $63 billion.
The foreign minister said Mexico won’t entertain any talks on building a wall along the border. Videgaray maintained it is seen as an unfriendly sign and questioned its efficiency. Trump’s budget seeks $2.6 billion for border security technology, including money to design and build a wall along the southern border. Trump repeatedly promised voters during the campaign that Mexico would pay for a wall.
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A man investigating working conditions at a Chinese company that produces Ivanka Trump-brand shoes has been arrested and two others are missing, the arrested man’s wife and an advocacy group said Tuesday.
Hua Haifeng was accused of illegal surveillance, according to his wife, Deng Guilian, who said the police called her Tuesday afternoon. Deng said the caller told her she didn’t need to know the details, only that she would not be able to see, speak with or receive money from her husband, the family’s breadwinner.
China Labor Watch Executive Director Li Qiang said he lost contact with Hua Haifeng and the other two men, Li Zhao and Su Heng, over the weekend. By Tuesday, after dozens of unanswered calls, he had concluded: “They must be held either by the factory or the police to be unreachable.”
China Labor Watch, a New York-based nonprofit, was planning to publish a report next month alleging low pay, excessive overtime and the possible misuse of student interns. It is unclear whether the undercover investigative methods used by the advocacy group are legal in China.
For 17 years, China Labor Watch has investigated working conditions at suppliers to some of the world’s best-known companies, but Li said his work has never before attracted this level of scrutiny from China’s state security apparatus.
“Our plan was to investigate the factory to improve the labor situation,” Li said. “But now it has become more political.”
Disney decision
Walt Disney Co. stopped working with a toy maker in Shenzhen last year after the group exposed labor violations. China Labor Watch has also published reports on child labor at Samsung suppliers and spent years investigating Apple Inc.’s China factories. In the past, the worst thing Li feared was having investigators kicked out of a factory or face a short police detention.
That has changed.
The arrest and disappearances came amid a crackdown on perceived threats to the stability of China’s ruling Communist Party, particularly from sources with foreign ties such as China Labor Watch. Faced with rising labor unrest and a slowing economy, Beijing has also taken a stern approach to activism in southern China’s manufacturing belt and to human rights advocates generally, sparking a wave of critical reports about disappearances, public confessions, forced repatriation and torture in custody.
Another difference is the target of China Labor Watch’s investigation: a brand owned by the daughter of the president of the United States.
White House spokeswoman Hope Hicks referred questions to Ivanka Trump’s brand. The Ivanka Trump brand declined to comment for this story.
Abigail Klem, who took over day-to-day management when the first daughter took on a White House role as presidential adviser, has said that the brand requires licensees and their manufacturers to “comply with all applicable laws and to maintain acceptable working conditions.”
No reply from police
Li said China Labor Watch asked police about the three missing investigators on Monday but received no reply. Li added that a friend had tried to file a missing-person report on Li Zhao in Jiangxi, where the factory is located, but was told he had to do so in the man’s hometown.
AP was unable to reach the other investigators’ families. China’s Ministry of Public Security and police in Ganzhou city and Jiangxi province could not be reached for comment Tuesday, which was a national holiday in China.
All three men were investigating Ganzhou Huajian International Shoe City Co.’s factory in Jiangxi province, just north of Guangdong province. Su Heng had been working undercover at the factory since April, Li said. The parent company is known as Huajian Group.
In January, Liu Shiyuan, then spokesman for the Huajian Group, told AP the company makes 10,000 to 20,000 pairs of shoes a year for Ivanka Trump’s brand — a small fraction of the 20 million pairs the company produces a year. A current spokeswoman for the company, Long Shan, did not reply to questions Tuesday. “I told you I could not check until tomorrow,” she said. “If your official letter contains a stamp and signature, we can confirm whether the media is real or not.”
Li said investigators had seen Ivanka Trump-brand shoes in the factory, as well as production orders for Ivanka Trump, Marc Fisher, Nine West and Easy Spirit merchandise.
“We were unaware of the allegations and will look into them immediately,” a spokeswoman for Marc Fisher, which manufactures Ivanka Trump, Easy Spirit and its own branded shoes, said in an email. Nine West did not respond to requests for comment.
Li Zhao and Hua Haifeng were blocked from leaving mainland China for Hong Kong in April and May — something that had never happened to his colleagues before, Li said. Hua Haifeng was stopped at the border Thursday and later questioned by police, Li said. During their final phone conversation on Saturday, Hua told Li that police had asked him to stop investigating the Huajian factory — another turn of events that Li said was unprecedented.
Excessive overtime, low wages
Li said the men had documented excessive overtime, with working days sometimes stretching longer than 18 hours, and a base salary below minimum wage. They were working to confirm evidence suggesting that student interns, some of whom allegedly quit in protest, were putting in excessive hours on work unrelated to their field of study, in violation of Chinese law, Li said.
The use of student workers in China is legal, but meant to be strictly regulated. Rights groups and journalists have documented widespread abuse of the system over the years.
“It is the role of the police to prevent that kind of independent investigation,” said Nicholas Bequelin, East Asia director for Amnesty International. “The threshold is much lower today than it was one year ago, two years ago, and if this is something that has a foreign diplomacy dimension, that would make national security personnel even more willing to stop it.”
Hua’s wife, Deng, meanwhile, has yet to tell the couple’s children, ages 3 and 7, about their father’s plight. But they seem to know anyway, she said.
“My son suddenly burst into tears. He said he missed Papa,” Deng said by phone from her home in central China’s Hubei province. “I said Papa would come home soon and buy you toys.”
She said the child looked at her and answered: “Papa was taken away by a monster.”
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Lowering expectations, Iowa’s two Republican senators say the long-promised repeal of “Obamacare” is unlikely, and any final agreement with the Republican-controlled House is uncertain.
The comments Tuesday by Sens. Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst come as the Republican-controlled Senate moves forward on its work to dismantle the 2010 health care bill while facing conflicting demands within their own party and lockstep Democratic opposition. Both senators are active players in the health care debate.
“You can’t repeal it in its entirety,” Ernst told reporters after a joint appearance with Grassley in suburban Des Moines.
Frank admission
It was a frank admission from loyal conservatives representing a state Republican Donald Trump carried in November.
The Senate’s filibuster rule means that Republicans — who control the Senate with 52 seats — can’t repeal the entire law.
“You’ve got to have 60 votes and we don’t have 60 votes at this point,” Grassley said.
Grassley, in his seventh term, is a senior member of the Finance Committee, which oversees the law’s tax and Medicaid provisions. Ernst, elected in 2014, says has been part of an informal GOP health care working group’s discussions.
“As much as I’d love to go back and scrap the whole darn thing, we’re simply unable to do that,” Ernst said.
Other Senate rules permit the GOP majority to repeal portions of Obamacare without Democratic support but render other parts of the law off limits.
“That just allows us to tinker around the edges,” Ernst earlier told Eric Borseth, an Altoona, Iowa, businessman who implored her to “get rid of that monstrosity.”
What Grassley and Ernst did not mention are divisions within the Republican caucus in the Senate. Getting every Republican on board is proving arduous.
House measure
House Republicans passed a measure May 4 axing major parts of the 2010 law, including hundreds of billions in extra Medicaid money that 31 states now receive for expanding to cover more lower-income Americans under the federal insurance program.
Such provisions, as well as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office’s estimate that 23 million Americans would lose health insurance, make the House bill a non-starter with several Republican senators.
Erasing Obama’s health care law was a top promise of Donald Trump during his presidential campaign, and by congressional GOP candidates since its 2010 enactment.
But writing legislation that can pass with only Republican votes has proven agonizing.
House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin canceled a March vote after opposition from party conservatives and moderates would have sealed its defeat, and the two wings of the GOP spent weeks blaming each other for the bill’s demise.
Ernst says the Senate will be able to make individual changes to Obama’s law where only a simple majority vote is required.
For instance, she mentioned changing mandatory health care benefits required by insurers as ripe for Senate action.
Ernst stopped short of saying whether any legislation passed in the Senate would be accepted by the House.
“We will be working with the House,” she said.
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Fuel shortages have paralyzed the small central African nation of Burundi, threatening further damage to an economy already moribund after years of political violence and raising questions about the role of the country’s only oil importer.
The problem has damaged two big foreign investors, Kenya’s KenolKobil and South Africa’s Engen, a subsidiary of Malaysian parastatal Petronas.
The shortages, which forced the government to introduce rationing on May 16, have paralyzed commerce and caused food prices to jump by around a third, raising the prospect of a wave of economic migration. More than 400,000 people have already fled Burundi into the volatile central African region.
Anti-corruption campaigners said the fuel shortages became severe after Burundian company Interpetrol Trading Ltd. received the lions’ share of dollars that are allocated by the central bank to import fuel.
“The oil sector is undermined by favoritism and lack of transparency, because the rare hard currency available in the central bank reserves is given to one oil importer,” said Gabriel Rufyiri, head of anti-graft organization OLUCOME.
The central bank declined to answer Reuters’ questions.
Interpetrol’s lawyer, Sylvestre Banzubaze, said: “I am not associated with the day-to-day operations and only intervene on legal questions. You should address your questions directly to Interpetrol sources.”
He did not respond when asked for further contacts, and the company does not have a website.
Rufyiri said that government sources told him that the bulk of dollars for fuel purchasing had been allocated to Interpetrol since March this year.
Reuters confirmed with two other sources that Interpetrol received the bulk of dollar allocations. Other companies only received a small fraction of the dollars they needed, the sources said, severely damaging their businesses.
Earlier this month, South African petrol company Engen confirmed it had sold its assets in Burundi to Interpetrol.
Engen declined to comment further. KenolKobil also declined to comment, but Burundian citizens say most of their petrol stations have been closed for three months.
Sole importer
Interpetrol is now the sole oil importer and runs all the fuel storage tanks in the country, said an industry source.
Banzubaze said there was “no link” between Interpetrol’s shareholders and any member of the government.
But a 2011 U.S. State Department report described attempts by senior government officials to pressure judges into dropping a corruption case against the company, owned by brothers Munir and Tariq Bashir. Neither the government nor Interpetrol’s lawyer responded when asked about the status of the case.
Government officials blame dollar shortages on aid cuts that donors imposed after President Pierre Nkurunziza ran for a third term in 2015, triggering a wave of political violence.
“These days, fuel importers don’t get enough dollars to bring petroleum products,” said Daniel Mpitabakana, the government’s director of fuel management.
Burundi’s economy shrank by 0.5 percent last year, and the International Monetary Fund expects no growth at all this year and 0.1 percent next year.
Black market prices for fuel range between 5,000 to 6,000 Burundi francs per liter, vendors said, double the official price of 2,200 francs.
The street exchange rate is 2,600 francs to the dollar, although it is just over 1,700 to the dollar at the central bank. Only the central bank can receive dollar deposits and allocate dollars to businesses.
In the capital, queues at empty petrol stations snaked around the block. One civil servant said he had taken the last three days off work to search for gas.
“I have no fuel for days and I don’t know if by chance will get it today,” he said, asking not to be named.
Burundi has also been battered by drought and almost two years of political instability. Hundreds of people were killed and hundreds of thousands were forced to flee abroad during the political violence, which still sometimes erupts in low-level clashes.
Almost 3 million of Burundi’s 11 million citizens are dependent on food aid, the U.N. says.
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DNA from mummies found at a site once known for its cult to the Egyptian god of the afterlife is unwrapping intriguing insight into the people of ancient Egypt, including a surprise discovery that they had scant genetic ties to sub-Saharan Africa.
Scientists on Tuesday said they examined genome data from 90 mummies from the Abusir el-Malek archaeological site, located about 70 miles (115 km) south of Cairo, in the most sophisticated genetic study of ancient Egyptians ever conducted.
The DNA was extracted from the teeth and bones of mummies from a vast burial ground associated with the green-skinned god Osiris. The oldest were from about 1388 BC during the New Kingdom, a high point in ancient Egyptian influence and culture.
Genomes provide a surprise
The most recent were from about 426 AD, centuries after Egypt had become a Roman Empire province.
“There has been much discussion about the genetic ancestry of ancient Egyptians,” said archeogeneticist Johannes Krause of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, who led the study published in the journal Nature Communications.
“Are modern Egyptians direct descendants of ancient Egyptians? Was there genetic continuity in Egypt through time? Did foreign invaders change the genetic makeup: for example, did Egyptians become more ‘European’ after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt?” Krause added. “Ancient DNA can address those questions.”
The genomes showed that, unlike modern Egyptians, ancient Egyptians had little to no genetic kinship with sub-Saharan populations, some of which like ancient Ethiopia were known to have had significant interactions with Egypt.
The closest genetic ties were to the peoples of the ancient Near East, spanning parts of Iraq and Turkey as well as Israel, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.
Middle-class mummies
Egypt, located in North Africa at a crossroads of continents in the ancient Mediterranean world, for millennia boasted one of the most advanced civilizations in antiquity, known for military might, wondrous architecture including massive pyramids and imposing temples, art, hieroglyphs and a pantheon of deities.
Mummification was used to preserve the bodies of the dead for the afterlife. The mummies in the study were of middle-class people, not royalty.
The researchers found genetic continuity spanning the New Kingdom and Roman times, with the amount of sub-Saharan ancestry increasing substantially about 700 years ago, for unclear reasons.
“There was no detectable change for those 1,800 years of Egyptian history,” Krause said. “The big change happened between then and now.”
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U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Tuesday urged the Trump administration not to leave the Paris Climate Agreement, saying the deal would have long-term benefits for the U.S. economy and even its security.
Speaking to an audience of students, civil society and business leaders at New York University, Guterres delivered his subtle pitch to the U.S. administration, which has said a decision about whether to stay in the 2015 agreement will come soon.
“If one country decides not to be present — I’m talking about countries with an important global reach, like it is the case with United States or China — if one country decides to leave a void, I can guarantee someone else will occupy it,” Guterres said in response to a student’s question about dealing with the Trump administration’s skepticism about climate change.
Guterres said he was engaging with the administration and Congress to try to convince them that it is in the United States’ interest to stay in the deal, which seeks to keep the global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius.
“There are many good arguments that in my opinion should lead an administration that has a concern to put its own interests first, and the interests of its people and its country first, to invest in what is necessary to preserve the global reach of its economy and to preserve the security of its citizens,” Guterres said, alluding to Trump’s “America First” policy.
“And so my argument today is that it is absolutely essential that the world implements the Paris Agreement, and that we fulfill that duty with increased ambition,” Guterres said during his prepared address.
He said the science was “beyond doubt” and that the effects of global warming already were being felt around the world.
Nearly every country has signed on to the Paris Agreement, and a majority have ratified it. The accord entered into force last November. In addition to lowering greenhouse gas emissions, it seeks to mitigate the effects already felt by global warming.
“The sustainability train has left the station,” Guterres said. “Get on board or get left behind. Those who fail to bet on the green economy will be living in a grey future.”
He praised China for its “massive shift to other forms of energy,” saying the country had made a “very strong bet recently in greening its economy.”
Renewable energy
The U.N. chief noted that renewable forms of energy were growing in use and decreasing in cost.
“Last year, solar power grew 50 percent, with China and the United States in the lead,” he said. “Around the world, over half of the new power generation capacity now comes from renewables. In Europe, the figure is more than 90 percent.”
He said 80 percent of the world’s energy still comes from fossil fuels — oil, gas and coal — and that would not change overnight. But it is important, he said, to engage the energy industry and governments to use those energy sources as moderately as possible while making the transition to renewable, clean ones.
“I think they are working towards having an answer for that, and so we’ll wait and see what that answer is,” Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., told reporters earlier Tuesday when asked about the administration’s plans.
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The World Health Organization warns that more than 7 million people die prematurely every year from tobacco-related causes, and it’s a costly drain on national economies.
In advance of World No Tobacco day, to be observed Wednesday, the global health agency urged governments to implement strong tobacco control measures for the health of their people and their economies.
WHO calls tobacco a threat to development. Besides the heavy toll in lives lost, global estimates show that “tobacco costs the global economy $1.4 trillion a year,” or 1.8 percent of global gross domestic product. The WHO notes this estimate takes into consideration “only medical expenses and lost productive capacities.”
Despite effective tobacco control measures, WHO reports the number of people dying from smoking is increasing because those dying today have mostly been long-term smokers and it takes time for tobacco control policies to make an impact.
Vinayak Prasad, program manager of the WHO’s Tobacco Free Initiative, told VOA, “What we are seeing is that if the policies were not in place, the number of 7.2 million would have been higher. We are seeing a reduction of tobacco use prevalence in most countries. The only regions now which are seeing higher growth are the African continent and Middle Eastern region. The rest of the world is seeing a decline.”
Diseases, disabilities
Besides leading to premature death, the WHO has found, countless millions of people who smoke suffer from a wide variety of tobacco-related diseases and resultant serious disabilities, including blindness, amputation, impotence and poor oral health.
Andrew Black of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control Secretariat noted that smoking is an addiction largely taken up in childhood and adolescence, “so it is crucial to reduce the number of young people taking up smoking in the first place. We must stop the tobacco industry’s powerful advertising and promotion, which can all too often be oriented toward young people.”
Black said tobacco widens social inequalities and is a driver of poverty around the world.
“We know that those living on lower incomes in virtually all countries are likely to smoke, and therefore more likely to suffer the consequences of tobacco use,” he said.
Black said that by 2030, about 80 percent of the world’s tobacco-related mortality will be in low- and middle-income countries.
“High rates of tobacco use being promoted by aggressive strategies from the tobacco industry are projected to lead to a doubling of the number of tobacco-related deaths in low- and middle-income countries between 2010 and 2030,” he said.
Study issued
To mark World No-Tobacco Day, the U.N. Development Program and the Secretariat of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control issued a study that focuses on the harmful effects of tobacco on both health and on efforts aimed at achieving the U.N.’s sustainable development goals (SDGs).
Dudley Tarlton, UNDP program specialist on health and development, told VOA that tobacco undermines the SDGs because “household consumption on tobacco displaces consumption on other goods and services that might lead to a better end.
“So, it affects poverty. It affects hunger. Education is affected. Children get ear infections because they are exposed to household smoke in the home,” he said.
For the first time, the WHO and UNDP released a joint report showing the bad impact tobacco has on the environment.
Prasad acknowledged that the data received from the tobacco industry and from governments were relatively weak. Nevertheless, he said, “the evidence is really astounding as to how tobacco is extremely dangerous and harming the environment.”
He said using land to grow tobacco “can lead to severe damage because of the widespread use of agrochemicals.”
Use of trees
Prasad noted that more than 11 million metric tons of wood was required to cure and dry tobacco, “which essentially means deforestation is already happening.”
The report found that tobacco waste contains over 7,000 toxic chemicals that poison the environment, including human carcinogens, and that tobacco smoke contributes “thousands of tons of human carcinogens, toxicants and greenhouse gases to the environment.”
Prasad said that cigarettes are bad news for tree lovers because “for every 300 cigarettes, we need to cut a tree. … Even conservatively, if we are looking at 6 trillion cigarettes, we are looking at almost 15 to 20 billion trees to cut.
“We have 6 trillion trees in the world, so we are almost looking at a big cut, which is going to happen, if we do not hold this,” he said.
And regarding the sullying of the world’s environment, he noted that cigarette butts “account for 30 to 40 percent of all items collected in coastal and urban cleanups.”
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In a roadside cafe in Kenya’s majestic highlands, Elly Sigilai cradled a steaming mug of tea and recalled how 17 relatives died after British colonialists ousted them in 1934 to plant tea on their family land.
The 79-year-old is one of hundreds of elderly Kenyans seeking to sue the British government for alleged displacement and torture by its colonial predecessor, in a case that could encourage other former colonies to press similar claims.
“Those on this list died from malaria and sleeping sickness,” said Sigilai, a neatly folded piece of paper in his hand naming the dead in his family, including two brothers and a sister. “They were sent to a valley infested by tsetse flies to die.”
Survivors and their descendants hope to win “significant” compensation from Britain’s High Court and the return of swaths of land, largely owned by international tea companies, said George Tarus, a legal adviser to the government of Nandi County in Kenya’s North Rift region, which is financing the case.
“We became beggars in our own land,” Sigilai said, removing a faded baseball cap and putting it on the table by his tea.
“We love it,” he said of the commodity which is grown in and around Kericho, 260 kms (162 miles) northwest of Kenya’s capital. “But it has brought a lot of misery to my community.”
Around 200 people have already come forward with evidence to support the case, Tarus said.
“All land within Nandi belongs to the county and we want it all to be given back to us,” he said.
Kenya’s 47 counties manage leaseholds on their land.
A British foreign office spokeswoman declined to comment on the legal proceedings.
The case could be politically important for millions of voters ahead of Kenya’s elections in August, with some politicians already starting to stoke tensions over land.
More than 1,200 Kenyans were killed following a disputed 2007 poll, largely in the Rift Valley where resentment over the loss of land during the colonial era still festers.
Much of the land vacated when the British left Kenya in 1963 after 43 years was sold to the political elite who could afford to buy it, rather than returned to its original owners.
Atrocities
Kenya was one of Britain’s most important colonies with hundreds of settlers moving into the best agricultural land to grow tea, coffee and tobacco, forcing Africans into reserves and employing them as cooks, guards and gardeners.
The British displaced hundreds of Nandi and Kipsigis families — sub-tribes of Kenya’s third-largest ethnic group, the Kalenjin — from the Rift Valley highlands for tea plantations.
“They have to pay for what they did to us,” said Moses Mosonet, 83, a Nandi, his eyes coated with a milky veneer.
“They can take their tea and leave us with our land,” he said, seated outside his home, which overlooks lush, hilly tea estates in Nandi, some 70 km north of Kericho, not far from the African reserve where his parents were taken eight decades ago.
Kenya is the world’s largest exporter of black tea, an industry which employs more than 3.5 million Kenyans, directly and indirectly, the national trade union says.
London-based Finlays, one of the tea companies whose land is being targeted, declined to comment.
Dozens of villages were decimated, the potential plaintiffs say, and those who opposed the displacement tortured and exiled.
“Serious atrocities were committed,” said Philemon Koech of Lilan and Koech Associates, which won a tender from Nandi County government in March to pursue a civil case for reparations. “If such things like the torture of the people and their subsequent displacement were to happen in present day, we would be dealing with the International Criminal Court [ICC].”
More than 5,200 other elderly Kenyans won almost 14 million pounds ($18 million) in compensation from Britain in a 2013 out-of-court settlement for abuse by colonial forces during the 1950s Mau Mau insurgency.
Evidence
Gathering evidence will not be easy, particularly as the annexation of African land was legal under British colonial law, said Gitobu Imanyara, a Kenyan human rights lawyer.
“There can hardly be anyone alive to corroborate some of the claims,” he said.
Once the evidence is collected, British lawyer Karim Khan, who specializes in international criminal law and international human rights law, has agreed to assess its worth.
“I will advise on the merits or otherwise of a case under English law,” he told Reuters by phone. “I can’t possibly say that there will definitely be a case in the High Court until I have advised on the evidence.”
Khan is well-known in Kenya for successfully defending deputy president William Ruto against charges of crimes against humanity in the ICC from 2013 to 2016.
While the undulating manicured tea bushes, extending as far as the eye can see, evoke painful memories for the elderly, the younger generation are more skeptical about the case.
“If they tell the multinationals to leave who will employ us?” asked Justus Ngetich, 30, a taxi driver in Bomet, some 70 km south of Kericho. “It is all about power and politics, not about the well-being of the people. We shall just sit here and watch the tea estates change hands from the whites to blacks.”
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