Wi-Fi is very simply a way to send information via short-range radio. That can be a problem, though, when a lot of people are using the same open network at the same time. But a relatively new technology using light bulbs could help relieve that overwhelmed Wi-Fi network. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Hackers released documents and files Friday that cybersecurity experts said indicated the U.S. National Security Agency had accessed the SWIFT interbank messaging system, allowing it to monitor money flows among some Middle Eastern and Latin American banks.
The release included computer code that could be adapted by criminals to break into SWIFT servers and monitor messaging activity, said Shane Shook, a cyber security consultant who has helped banks investigate breaches of their SWIFT systems.
The documents and files were released by a group calling themselves The Shadow Brokers. Some of the records bear NSA seals, but Reuters could not confirm their authenticity.
The NSA could not immediately be reached for comment.
Holes in Windows
Also published were many programs for attacking various versions of the Windows operating system, at least some of which still work, researchers said.
In a statement to Reuters, Microsoft, maker of Windows, said it had not been warned by any part of the U.S. government that such files existed or had been stolen.
“Other than reporters, no individual or organization has contacted us in relation to the materials released by Shadow Brokers,” the company said.
The absence of warning is significant because the NSA knew for months about the Shadow Brokers breach, officials previously told Reuters. Under a White House process established by former President Barack Obama’s staff, companies were usually warned about dangerous flaws.
Bangladesh heist
Shook said criminal hackers could use the information released Friday to hack into banks and steal money in operations mimicking a heist last year of $81 million from the Bangladesh central bank.
“The release of these capabilities could enable fraud like we saw at Bangladesh Bank,” Shook said.
The SWIFT messaging system is used by banks to transfer trillions of dollars each day. Belgium-based SWIFT downplayed the risk of attacks employing the code released by hackers Friday.
SWIFT said it regularly releases security updates and instructs client banks on how to handle known threats.
“We mandate that all customers apply the security updates within specified times,” SWIFT said in a statement.
SWIFT said it had no evidence that the main SWIFT network had ever been accessed without authorization.
It was possible that the local messaging systems of some SWIFT client banks had been breached, SWIFT said in a statement, which did not specifically mention the NSA.
When cyberthieves robbed the Bangladesh Bank last year, they compromised that bank’s local SWIFT network to order money transfers from its account at the New York Federal Reserve.
NSA and SWIFT
The documents released by the Shadow Brokers on Friday indicate that the NSA may have accessed the SWIFT network through service bureaus. SWIFT service bureaus are companies that provide an access point to the SWIFT system for the network’s smaller clients and may send or receive messages regarding money transfers on their behalf.
“If you hack the service bureau, it means that you also have access to all of their clients, all of the banks,” said Matt Suiche, founder of the United Arab Emirates-based cybersecurity firm Comae Technologies, who has studied the Shadow Broker releases and believes the group has access to NSA files.
The documents posted by the Shadow Brokers include Excel files listing computers on a service bureau network, user names, passwords and other data, Suiche said.
“That’s information you can only get if you compromise the system,” he said.
Cris Thomas, a prominent security researcher with the cybersecurity firm Tenable, said the documents and files released by the Shadow Brokers show “the NSA has been able to compromise SWIFT banking systems, presumably as a way to monitor, if not disrupt, financial transactions to terrorists groups.”
Thwarting terrorists
Since the early 1990s, interrupting the flow of money from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere to al-Qaida, the Taliban, and other militant Islamic groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other countries has been a major objective of U.S. and allied intelligence agencies.
Mustafa Al-Bassam, a computer science researcher at University College London, said on Twitter that the Shadow Brokers documents show that the “NSA hacked a bunch of banks, oil and investment companies in Palestine, UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Yemen, more.”
He added that NSA “completely hacked” EastNets, one of two SWIFT service bureaus named in the documents that were released by the Shadow Brokers.
Reuters could not independently confirm that EastNets had been hacked. And EastNets, based in Dubai, denied it had been hacked in a statement, calling the assertion “totally false and unfounded.”
EastNets ran a “complete check of its servers and found no hacker compromise or any vulnerabilities,” according to a statement from EastNets’ chief executive and founder, Hazem Mulhim.
Snowden documents
In 2013, documents released by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden said the NSA had been able to monitor SWIFT messages.
The agency monitored the system to spot payments intended to finance crimes, according to the documents released by Snowden.
Reuters could not confirm whether the documents released Friday by the Shadow Brokers, if authentic, were related to NSA monitoring of SWIFT transfers since 2013.
Some of the documents released by the Shadow Brokers were dated 2013, but others were not dated. The documents released by the hackers did not clearly indicate whether the NSA had actually used all the techniques cited for monitoring SWIFT messages.
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Apple is joining the fiercely competitive race to design self-driving cars, raising the possibility that a company that has already re-shaped culture with its iPhone may try to transform transportation, too.
Ending years of speculation, Apple’s late entry into a crowded field was made official Friday with the disclosure that the California Department of Motor Vehicles had awarded a permit for the company to start testing its self-driving car technology on public roads in the state.
The permit covers three vehicles — all 2015 Lexus RX 450h hybrid SUVs — and six individual drivers. California law requires people to be in a self-driving car who can take control if something goes wrong.
Apple Goes Mobile … In a New Way
Apple confirmed its arrival in the self-driving car market, but wouldn’t discuss its intentions. Its interest in autonomous vehicle technology, however, has long been clear .
The Cupertino, California, company pointed to a statement that it issued in December. “Apple is investing heavily in machine learning and autonomous systems,” the company said then. “There are many potential applications for these technologies, including the future of transportation.”
Apple released that statement after Steve Kenner, a former Ford Motor executive who is now Apple’s director of product integrity, notified federal regulators of the company’s interest in self-driving cars in a letter.
Like others, Apple believes self-driving cars could ease congestion and save millions of people who die annually in traffic accidents often caused by drunk or distracted motorists.
Self-driving cars could also be a lucrative new market. And Apple has been searching for its next act for a while, one that will take it beyond its mainstay phones, tablets and personal computers.
A Next Big Thing
Although iPhone’s ongoing popularity has helped Apple remain the world’s most valuable company, the company hasn’t had a breakthrough product since the 2010 debut of the iPad, currently in the throes of a three-year sales slump. The dry spell has raised doubts as to whether Apple lost some of its trend-setting magic with the death of co-founder Steve Jobs in 2011.
Apple will be vying against 29 other companies that already have California permits to test self-driving cars. The list includes major automakers, including Ford, General Motors, BMW, Volkswagen and Tesla, as well as one of its biggest rivals in technology, Google, whose testing of self-driving cars has been spun off into an affiliate called Waymo.
Since Google began its work on self-driving vehicles eight years ago, Waymo’s fleet of self-driving cars has logged more than 2 million miles on the road.
That means Apple has a long way to catch up in self-driving technology. But it has often been a follower in markets that it eventually revolutionized. It wasn’t the first to introduce a digital music player, smartphone, or tablet before its iPod, iPhone and iPad came out.
Deep Pockets
With $246 billion in cash, Apple also could easily afford to buy technology that accelerates its development of self-driving cars. There has been recurring speculation that Apple might eventually acquire Tesla, which has a market value of about $50 billion. Neither Apple nor Tesla has given any inkling that they’re interested in joining forces, though.
Speculation about Apple’s interest in expanding into automobiles began swirling in 2015 amid media reports that the company had begun secretly working on building its own electric car under the name project “Titan.” Apple never confirmed the existence of Titan, which is now believed to be dead.
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The so-called “Mother of All Bombs,” may be the biggest conventional weapon in the U.S. arsenal, but it’s not the biggest non-nuclear bomb in the world.
That title goes to Russia’s “Father of All Bombs,” which is reportedly four times heavier than the 10,300-kilogram Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB), the official name of the U.S. GBU-43/B.
FOAB is also quite a different kind of bomb. While the MOAB is conventional, the FOAB is thermobaric, meaning it uses oxygen in the atmosphere to increase the damaging effects.
According to Business Insider, the FOAB explodes in midair with a “fuel-air mixture” that, according to the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, creates an intense “pressure wave” as well as a vacuum that “ruptures the lungs.”
Even if the fuel does not ignite, it’s highly toxic and likely deadly to anyone coming into contact with it, the DIA wrote.
The blast radius of the FOAB is around 300 meters, with an explosion equivalent to 44 tons of TNT, Reuters reported.
On Thursday, the U.S. military used its MOAB for the first time on the battlefield, dropping it on tunnels in Afghanistan that were reportedly used by Islamic State terrorists.
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Three university engineering graduates in Uganda are taking on one of the leading killers of young children in Africa – pneumonia. They say the prototype of their invention, a “smart jacket” they have named Mama’s Hope, can diagnose the illness faster and more accurately than the current medical protocol.
Four-month-old Nakato Christine writhes on a hospital bed, breathing fast. On the other end of the bed is her twin sister, in the same condition.
Nakato coughs as Senior Nurse Kyebatala Loy adjusts the nasal gastric tube.
“They have been put on oxygen because they have difficulty in breathing and the feeding is also difficult because of their fast breathing,” Kyebatala said.
Since January, 352 babies have been admitted with pneumonia to pediatric ward 16 at Mulago National Referral Hospital in Kampala.
Pneumonia is the leading infectious cause of death for children under five years of age in Africa and south Asia, according to the World Health Organization. In 2015, pneumonia killed nearly a million children worldwide.
A key problem is the challenge involved in diagnosing the disease. The sooner the sick children start receiving antibiotics, the better their chance of survival. But health workers armed with stethoscopes and thermometers can miss the infection in its early stage. Dr. Flavia Mpanga of the U.N. Children’s Fund in Kampala says other methods, like the respiratory timer, can lead to misdiagnosis.
“If you see the respiratory timer, it’s got a ticking mechanism that confuses the community health workers. When they are taking the breathe rates, they confuse the ticking sound of the respiratory timer with the breathe rates and every child is almost diagnosed with pneumonia,” said Dr. Mpanga.
She says over-diagnosis means some children are taking antibiotics they don’t need, which is also a public health problem.
A trio of recent university engineering graduates in Uganda think they have an answer. They have been working with the Mulago School of Public Health to test a prototype of their invention, the smart jacket, called Mama’s Hope.
Two of the inventors, 26-year-old Beseufekad Shifferaw and 25-year-old Brian Turyabagye, gave VOA a demonstration.
“Ahh so…[zipper sound]… the jacket…is placed on the child…first, this goes around the child and then the falcon fastening is placed, and then the flaps are placed…[fade out]”
“This jacket will simply measure the vital signs of pneumonia. That is the breathing rate, the state of the lungs and the temperature,” said Turyabagye. “Now those signs are transmitted to our unit here, through which a health worker can read off the readings, which include cough, chest pains, nausea or difficulty in breathing. With those additional signs and symptoms, they are coupled with the result that has been measured by the jacket and it gives a more accurate diagnosis result.”
For now, it is just a prototype. But the inventors say their tests have shown that the smart jacket can diagnose pneumonia three times faster than traditional exams.
UNICEF has put the team in touch with its office in Copenhagen in charge of innovations to help them advance in the pre-trial stage. Dr. Mpanga sees potential.
“My only hope is that this jacket can reach a commercial value and be regulatory-body approved so that it can help the whole world,” said Dr. Mpanga.
Dr. Mpanga says taking the guess work out of pneumonia diagnosis could save countless lives in the developing world.
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Along northeastern Cape Cod off the coast of Massachusetts, April doesn’t usually equate with sunshine and sandcastles. The month is mostly a time of waiting for the fog and chill to lift off the Atlantic Ocean and the tourists to arrive.
But this year is a problem for seasonal businesses, whose model is built around five-to-six-month, low-skilled jobs in areas like hospitality. Few Americans are willing to fill them and now, thousands of foreign seasonal workers may not be allowed into the U.S. to take them.
Changes to the U.S. temporary work visa program, called H2B, are keeping out the workers that businesses count on.
For affected businesses, the financial loss could be plenty.
“It could be 20 percent,” said Allen Sylvester, president of American Tent & Table, Inc., a family-owned tent rental and party accessory business in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Sylvester, who has been with the company since 1996, says it earns roughly 85 to 90 percent of its profits in five months — the region’s outdoor wedding season. Fully staffed, the company employs seven to eight Americans and 13 H2B visa workers.
Normally it’s the former group Sylvester has a hard time hiring. But last September, Congress failed to renew a provision that effectively quadrupled the number of H2B visas available in 2016 by not counting returnees against the annual cap. This year, instead of potentially 264,000 visas, there are 66,000 — half allocated in the spring, the other half in the fall.
Businesses in colder areas like Cape Cod, which typically have later start dates, find themselves at a loss. By the time many could complete their visa applications, the cap had been reached.
“Instead of bringing 3,000 workers here, we right now are bringing 300 workers,” said Jane Nichols Bishop, president of Peak Season Workforce, a family-owned business that helps local companies secure annual H2B visas.
Bishop, who calls herself “Mama Visa,” says the 90-day application process that businesses must follow to gain seasonal employment is stringent, including evidence of advertising to recruit American workers.
Of the 171 applications she personally filed for clients, Bishop says 24 made their way through the Department of Homeland Security before all the visas were gone.
Why not hire more Americans?
At 3.4 percent, the February unemployment rate in Massachusetts is lower than the current national average, 4.5 percent, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But as Falmouth, Massachusetts, resident Paul Skudder said, the numbers don’t paint the whole picture on Cape Cod, a community with a growing number of retirees and decreasing number of youth.
“There is a limited number of job opportunities on the Cape for college-educated professional or near professional people, which overall leads to a little bit of an exodus of bright, educated young people,” Skudder said.
Eligible job seekers who are willing to accept low-skilled employment, generally need a permanent source of income. And students can offer just three months of labor during their summer breaks, not five or six.
The well-being of the younger population is also a factor. In 2015, Cape Cod suffered the highest per capita death rate by opioid overdose in Massachusetts and remains one of the most affected areas in the country.
“A lot of the kids I used to know have now passed away,” said Prince Wright, who attended high school in Falmouth. “That’s the big problem right now … most of our locals are not coming in no more. Either they’re locked up or they moved away because of the changes on the Cape.”
More effort needed?
But along Main Street in the Cape’s largest town, not all are convinced that businesses are trying their best to hire local.
“It’s good for the [foreigners] that are coming over here on work visas, but it also takes away from the people that are living on the streets that can work,” said Mary Richard. “I just think it’s hard on the people here too.”
Politicians are divided on the H2B visa program, seeing it as either economically exploitative or a job-killer for Americans.
Republicans, who control both chambers of Congress, send mixed messages. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the country’s top law enforcement official, has called the H2B program “detrimental to wages and job opportunities of American workers.” But Donald Trump, before he was president, employed H2B workers during peak resort season at his Florida golf club, Mar-a-Lago.
H2B-reliant businesses worry that the visa is unfairly lumped into Trump’s hard-line stance on immigration. And in Bishop’s mind, some legislators simply don’t understand seasonal economies.
“When people come to Cape Cod and the islands, they come to see and visit us. It’s full employment, we are busy, there’s traffic, so they don’t even realize there is a labor shortage,” Bishop said. “But when you come here in January, you may be the only car on the road for quite a while.”
Hiring strategy
Jim Underdah, general manager at the Coonamessett Inn, considers himself one of the lucky few to secure his share of foreign seasonal workers from Jamaica. Still, a backlog in the system has delayed their arrival and forced him to repurpose the limited workforce he retains year-round.
In anticipation of this, Underdah says many businesses like his choose to employ workers full-time even during the offseason, when he doesn’t need them.
“I have people in the kitchen that we work 40 hours for the winter, so they’re not going to leave me,” Underdah said. “They’re gonna say, ‘Hey, they’re treating us good.’ They’re going to be here this spring. They’re going to get me through till hopefully the workers get in.”
Paul Dean, who runs a seafood retail and catering business, was not as lucky. Lacking the workforce he needs to keep his multiple operations running, he says he may be forced to close one of his locations a couple days a week.
Like Sylvester, Dean predicts this would amount to a loss of 20 percent of annual income.
“That means I’m buying 20 percent less product from local vendors,” Dean said. “We’re obviously collecting 20 percent less in meals tax toward the state. We’re not paying payroll taxes … there’s a huge trickle-down effect.”
Dean and Sylvester are crossing their fingers for a last-ditch effort by lawmakers to reinstate an H2B returning worker exemption before April 28, as part of its fiscal year 2017 federal spending bill. But in case that doesn’t happen, Sylvester offers last-resort advice for summer tourists.
“If you’re going to stay over, bring your sheets and some towels,” he joked, “because there’s going to be no one to clean your room.”
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Shaking, slowness of movement and difficulty talking, those are the most obvious symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. The progressive neurological disorder affects the way the brain connects with muscles. It has no cure, and the treatments address only the symptoms. April is Parkinson’s Awareness Month. Faiza Elmasry has more. VOA’s Faith Lapidus narrates.
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CIA Director Mike Pompeo defended the need for secrecy in United States government agencies tasked with keeping the country safe. In a public discussion Thursday, he warned against celebrating individuals who steal U.S. classified documents and make them public, like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. Pompeo said Americans should realize these “whistleblowers” act in their own interest and sometimes in the interest of a hostile country. Zlatica Hoke reports.
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As humans struggle to control the greenhouse gases that are warming the planet, scientists are searching for natural ways to remove them from the atmosphere. One group of researchers is drilling deep into a mountain range in Oman, looking for answers to how nature turns carbon dioxide gas into rock. VOA’s Steve Baragona has more.
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An emergency-room doctor in the U.S. Midwest has been arrested and charged with performing female genital mutilation on girls between the ages of 6 and 8, in the first criminal case brought under a 1996 law that outlawed the practice.
Jumana Nagarwala, a 44-year-old doctor at a hospital in Detroit, Michigan, is accused of performing genital mutilation on young girls as far back as 2005, according to a criminal complaint released Thursday. The U.S. Department of Justice said she “performed horrifying acts of brutality on the most vulnerable victims.”
Nagarwala had an initial court appearance before a U.S. magistrate Thursday in Detroit and was ordered detained until Monday, pending a further hearing on the felony charges she is facing, which specifically involve two 7-year-old girls she operated on in February.
Senior officials called the charges “disturbing” and “deplorable,” and said U.S. law-enforcement agencies “are committed to doing whatever is necessary to bring an end to this barbaric practice, and to ensure no additional children fall victim to this procedure.”
Physician denies charges
A preliminary criminal complaint released by the U.S. Department of Justice said Nagarwala told federal agents she knew that performing female genital mutilation is a crime in the United States and denied that she conducted the procedure on anyone.
Nagarwala, who received her medical degree from Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, has been licensed as a physician in Michigan since 2001; state records show no formal complaints or disciplinary action against her. Her lawyer, Shannon Smith, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the case.
If convicted, Nagarwala faces a fine and up to five years in prison for performing female genital mutilation, also known as FGM. She would be the first person prosecuted under the 1996 law prohibiting FGM.
In the most recent case outlined in the complaint, the FBI, using court-ordered telephone records and video surveillance, tracked two Minnesota mothers and their 7-year-old daughters as they visited Nagarwala at a medical office near Detroit, and where the physician allegedly performed FGM procedures on the girls two months ago.
Examination confirms FGM
One of the children told an investigator this week that they were in Michigan to see a doctor because “our tummies hurt,” and were examined by Nagarwala. The doctor reportedly told the girl she was going to perform a procedure to “get the germs out” of her body.
Doctors who examined the girls this week confirmed that their genital areas were “abnormal” and bore signs of mutilation.
The girls were interviewed by an FBI child forensic expert and identified Nagarwala as the doctor who operated on them. The parents of one of the victims later admitted to the FBI that they had taken their daughter to Nagarwala for a “cleansing” of extra skin.
The hospital that employed Nagarwala apparently was not involved in the case, and the physician was not listed as having any links to the office in Livonia, outside Detroit, where she examined the girls.
Agents of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, who worked together on the case, said they have identified multiple other incidents where young girls have been victims of FGM allegedly performed by Nagarwala between 2005 and 2007, according to the criminal complaint.
“Female genital mutilation constitutes a particularly brutal form of violence against women and girls,” acting U.S. Attorney Daniel Lemisch of the Eastern District of Michigan said in a statement. “The practice has no place in modern society and those who perform FGM on minors will be held accountable under federal law.”
Female genital mutilation, sometimes called female circumcision, is the ritual removal of some or all of the external female genitalia. The practice is found in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and last year UNICEF estimated that 200 million women alive today in 30 countries — 27 African nations, Indonesia, Iraqi Kurdistan and Yemen — have undergone the procedure.
Many U.S. women at risk
Although it is illegal, female genital mutilation is practiced in some African diaspora communities in the United States. According to a 2012 study by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, more than 500,000 women and girls were at risk of female genital mutilation or its consequences in the United States, more than three times higher than an earlier estimate based on 1990 census data. The study said the increase was due to rapid growth in the number of immigrants from countries where the procedure is commonly practiced.
In 2012, Congress passed a law making it illegal to transport a girl outside the United States for the purpose of performing FGM.
The practice is rooted in attempts to control women’s sexuality and ideas about purity, modesty and beauty that persist in some communities. It is usually initiated and carried out by women, some of whom see it as an honorable practice, or who fear that failing to have their daughters and granddaughters cut will expose the girls to social exclusion.
There are no known health benefits from female circumcision, but a wide range of complications can result: recurrent infections, difficulty urinating and passing menstrual flow, chronic pain, the development of cysts, an inability to get pregnant, complications during childbirth and even fatal bleeding.
A survivor’s story
“When we think of female genital mutilation, we usually think of African cultures and non-Christian religions,” said Renee Bergstrom, an American survivor of genital cutting. “However, my FGM took place in white Midwest America.”
Bergstrom and other women discussed the issue in a video produced by the U.S. State Department and posted online last month.
Until Nagarwala’s arrest, the most high-profile case related to FGM in the United States was that of a father in the state of Georgia. Khalid Adem, an Ethiopian citizen, was deported last month after serving 10 years in prison for using scissors to cut the genitals of his 2-year-old daughter. He was charged with aggravated battery and cruelty to children, not under terms of the federal FGM law invoked in Nagarwala’s case.
VOA’s Victoria Macchi contributed to this story.
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People living in arid, drought-ridden areas may soon be able to get water straight from a source that’s all around them — the air, American researchers said Thursday.
Scientists have developed a box that can convert low-humidity air into water, producing several liters every 12 hours, they wrote in the journal Science.
“It takes water from the air and it captures it,” said Evelyn Wang, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and co-author of the paper.
The technology could be “really great for remote areas where there’s really limited infrastructure,” she said.
The system, which is currently in the prototype phase, uses a material that resembles powdery sand to trap air in its tiny pores. When heated by the sun or another source, water molecules in the trapped air are released and condensed — essentially “pulling” the water out of the air, the scientists said.
A recent test on a roof at MIT confirmed that the system can produce about a glass of water every hour in 20 to 30 percent humidity.
Companies like Water-Gen and EcoloBlue already produce atmospheric water-generation units that create water from air.
What is special about this new prototype, though, is that it can cultivate water in low-humidity environments using no energy, Wang said.
“It doesn’t have to be this complicated system that requires some kind refrigeration cycle,” she said in an interview with Reuters.
An estimated one-third of the world’s population lives in areas with low relative humidity, the scientists said. Areas going through droughts often experience dry air, but Wang said the new product could help them still get access to water.
“Now we can get to regions that really are pretty dry, arid regions,” she said. “We can provide them with a device, and they can use it pretty simply.”
The technology opens the door for what co-author Omar Yaghi called “personalized water.”
Yaghi, a chemistry professor at University of California, Berkeley, envisions a future where the water is produced off-grid for individual homes and possibly farms using the device.
“This application extends beyond drinking water and household purposes, off grid,” he said. “It opens the way for use of [the technology] to water large regions as in agriculture.”
In the next few years, Wang said, the developers hope to find a way to reproduce the devices on a large scale and eventually create a formal product. The resulting device, she believes, will be relatively affordable and accessible.
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At first glance, U.S. President Donald Trump and Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen may have little in common.
Yellen is an academic economist and veteran of Democratic administrations who is committed to an open global economy, while Trump is a real estate mogul with an electoral base suspicious of the economic order Yellen helped to create.
Yet the two may have interests in common now that Trump is president and both want to get as many Americans working as possible.
Since her appointment as Fed chair in February 2014, Yellen has kept interest rates low and she currently pledges to raise them only slowly even though unemployment, at 4.5 percent, is at its lowest in nearly 10 years.
Meanwhile, Trump’s election campaign promises to cut taxes, spend money on infrastructure and deregulate banking, have helped propel a surge in the U.S. Conference Board’s consumer confidence index to its highest level since the internet stocks crash 16 years ago.
Former Fed staff and colleagues who know Yellen said Trump’s surprising remarks this week in a Wall Street Journal interview, in which he did not rule out Yellen’s reappointment to a new four-year term next year, are not as outlandish as they may appear now that the president has a vested interest in keeping markets and the economy on an even keel.
And the same staff and colleagues say Yellen may well accept reappointment, despite Trump’s criticism of her during last year’s election campaign.
Many in Trump’s Republican party have called for tighter monetary policy and a less activist Fed, but “the president would not really find that useful,” said former Fed vice chair Donald Kohn.
If Trump fills three existing Federal Reserve board vacancies with people Yellen thinks she could work with, “it would be really difficult to turn down” a reappointment when her term as chair expires in February 2018.
“If she continues to do well, he’d be nuts to ditch her for an unknown quantity,” said University of California, Berkeley, economics professor Andrew Rose, a long-time colleague and co-author with Yellen of an oft-cited study of labor markets.
Yellen took over from Ben Bernanke as Fed chair in February 2014 with the U.S. economic recovery from the 2008 financial crisis still on shaky ground, and she has made no secret she puts a priority on growth in jobs and wages and a broad recovery in U.S. household wealth.
In a slow return to more normal monetary policy, Yellen has stopped the purchase of additional financial securities by the Fed and in December 2015 began raising short term interest rates for the first time in 10 years.
So far those policy shifts have been engineered with little apparent impact on job growth, and so mesh with Trump’s core election campaign promises to restore employment and earnings.
The slow rise in interest rates in the past year has also happened while U.S. stock prices have risen to record highs, though Trump has claimed the credit for himself.
Precedent for Fed Chair to Stay On
There is precedent for Trump to stick with a former president’s Fed chair appointment. Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, the three previous Fed chairs, served at least two four-year terms and were nominated by both Democratic and Republican presidents.
However it may be a more difficult step for Trump.
During last year’s election campaign, Trump accused Yellen of accepting orders from then President Obama to keep interest rates low for political reasons, and he said he would replace her as Fed chair because she is not a Republican party member.
In a particularly biting moment last year, in a campaign video advertisement, he labeled her as among the “global special interests” who had ruined life for middle America.
The Fed on Thursday said it had no response to Trump’s comments published on Wednesday on Yellen and or on whether Yellen would consider a second term.
Much Could Still Go Wrong
Some of Trump’s advisers and some Republican lawmakers want a more conservative Fed in which the chair has less power and would see a Yellen reappointment as yet another step away from his promise to “drain the swamp” of the Washington establishment.
There are also three current vacancies on the Fed’s seven member Board of Governors, and unorthodox new members could make it difficult for Yellen to manage policy or accept another four-year term.
But if the choice is her consensus style or someone unproven in their ability to manage public and market expectations, “he’d be wise to reappoint her,” said Joseph Gagnon, a former Fed staffer and Berkeley colleague of Yellen’s currently at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
“I don’t see what is in his interests to appoint someone who is going to jack up interest rates.”
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A fossil found by an elk hunter in Montana nearly seven years ago has led to the discovery of a new species of prehistoric sea creature that lived about 70 million years ago in the inland sea that flowed east of the Rocky Mountains.
The new species of elasmosaur is detailed in an article published Thursday in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Most elasmosaurs, a type of marine reptile, had necks that could stretch 18 feet, but the fossil discovered in the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge is distinct for its much shorter neck — about 7{ feet.
“This group is famous for having ridiculously long necks, I mean necks that have as many as 76 vertebrae,” said Patrick Druckenmiller, co-author of the article and a paleontologist with the University of Alaska Museum of the North. “What absolutely shocked us when we dug it out — it only had somewhere around 40 vertebrae.”
The smaller sea creature lived around the same time and in the same area as the larger ones, which is evidence contradicting the belief that elasmosaurs did not evolve over millions of years to have longer necks, co-author Danielle Serratos said.
Elasmosaurs were carnivorous creatures with small heads and paddle-like limbs that could grow as long as 30 feet. Their fossils have been discovered across the world, and the one discovered in northeastern Montana was well-preserved and nearly complete.
Hunter David Bradt came across the exposed fossil encased in rock while he was hunting for elk in the wildlife refuge in November 2010, Druckenmiller said. He recognized it as a fossil, took photographs and alerted a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employee.
The refuge along the Missouri River is popular with hunters for its big game and remote setting.
“This is a vast, remote and rugged place that has changed very little since Lewis and Clark passed through these lands more than 200 years ago,” refuge manager Paul Santavy said.
Bradt, who lives in Florence, Montana, did not immediately return a call for comment.
It took three days to excavate the fossil, but much longer to clean and study it before the determination could be made that it was a new species, Druckenmiller said.
He and Serratos submitted their findings to the journal last year.
Druckenmiller said the inland sea that stretched the width of Montana to Minnesota and from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico was teeming with marine reptiles, but relatively few of their fossils have been excavated.
“It’s a total bias — just more people out there are interested in land-living dinosaurs than marine reptiles,” he said. “There would be a lot more known if more people were studying them.”
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk says the company plans to unveil an electric semi-truck in September.
Musk tweeted the announcement Thursday. He offered no other details about the semi, such as whether it will be equipped with Tesla’s partially self-driving Autopilot mode.
Musk also said the company plans to unveil a pickup truck in 18 to 24 months.
Tesla currently sells two electric vehicles, the Model S sedan and Model X SUV. Its lower-cost Model 3 electric car is due out by the end of this year.
But Musk revealed last summer that the Palo Alto, California-based company is working on several more vehicles, including the semi and a minibus.
Tesla shares rose nearly 3 percent in late trading Thursday in response to Musk’s tweet.
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Microsoft Corp said on Thursday it had received at least a thousand surveillance requests from the U.S. government that sought user content for foreign intelligence purposes during the first half of 2016.
The amount, shared in Microsoft’s biannual transparency report, was more than double what the company said it received under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) during the preceding six-month interval, and was the highest the company has listed since 2011, when it began tracking such government surveillance orders.
The scope of spying authority granted to U.S. intelligence agencies under FISA has come under renewed scrutiny in recent weeks, sparked in part by evolving, unsubstantiated assertions from President Donald Trump and other Republicans that the Obama White House improperly spied on Trump and his associates.
Microsoft said it received between 1,000 and 1,499 FISA orders for user content between January and June of 2016, compared to between 0 and 499 during both January-June 2015 as well as the second half of 2015.
The number of user accounts impacted by FISA orders fell during the same period, however, from between 17,500 and 17,999 to between 12,000 and 12,499, according to the report.
The U.S. government only allows companies to report the volume of FISA requests in wide bands rather than specific numbers.
FISA orders, which are approved by judges who sit on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, are tightly guarded national security secrets. Even the existence of a specific FISA order is rarely disclosed publicly.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that the FBI obtained a FISA order to monitor the communications of former Trump advisor Carter Page as part of an investigation into possible links between Russia and Trump’s presidential campaign.
Parts of FISA will expire at the end of the year, unless U.S. lawmakers vote to reauthorize it. Privacy advocates in Congress have been working to attach new transparency and oversight reforms to any FISA legislation, and to limit government searches of American data that is incidentally collected during foreign surveillance operations.
Microsoft also for the first time published a national security letter, a type of warrantless surveillance order used by the FBI.
Other technology companies, including Twitter Inc and Yahoo Inc, have also disclosed national security letters in recent months under a transparency measure of the USA Freedom Act that was enacted into law by the U.S. Congress in 2015.
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The world’s most experienced spacewoman says she’s thrilled to get an extra three months off the planet.
The commander of the International Space Station, Peggy Whitson, told the Associated Press on Thursday that five months into her mission, she’s still not bored. She misses cooking, though, and a diverse menu. Plus, she’s afraid there isn’t much chocolate left to celebrate Easter this Sunday.
Earlier this month, NASA announced Whitson will stay up until September, stretching her mission to nearly 10 months. NASA is taking advantage of an empty seat in a Russian Soyuz capsule for her return.
The 57-year-old Whitson — the oldest woman to fly in space — is on the verge of setting a U.S. record for most accumulated time in space. This is her third space station stint.
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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government introduced legislation Thursday to let adults possess 30 grams of marijuana in public – a measure that would make Canada the largest developed country to end a nationwide prohibition on recreational marijuana.
Trudeau has long promised to legalize recreational pot use and sales. U.S voters in California, Massachusetts, Maine and Nevada voted last year to approve the use of recreational marijuana, joining Colorado, Washington, Oregon and Alaska.
The South American nation of Uruguay is the only nation to legalize recreational pot.
The proposed law allows four plants to be grown at home. Those under 18 found with small amounts of marijuana would not face criminal charges.
Officials said Canadians should be able to smoke marijuana legally by July 1, 2018. The federal government set the age at 18, but is allowing each of Canada’s provinces to determine if it should be higher. The provinces will also decide how the drug will be distributed and sold. The law also defines the amount of THC in a driver’s blood, as detected by a roadside saliva test, that would be illegal. Marijuana taxes will be announced at a later date.
The Canadian government closely followed the advice of a marijuana task force headed by former Liberal Health Minister Anne McLellan. That panel’s report noted public health experts tend to favor a minimum age of 21 as the brain continues to develop to about 25, but said setting the minimum age too high would preserve the illicit market.
Canadian youth have higher rates of cannabis use than their peers worldwide.
“If your objective is to protect public health and safety and keep cannabis out of the hands of minors, and stop the flow of profits to organized crime, then the law as it stands today has been an abject failure,” Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale told a news conference. “Police forces spend between $2 billion and $3 billion every year trying to deal with cannabis, and yet Canadian teenagers are among the heaviest users in the western world … We simply have to do better.”
Goodale said they’ve been close touch with the U.S. government on the proposed law and noted exporting and importing marijuana will continue to be illegal.
“The regime we are setting up in Canada will protect our kids better and stop the flow of illegal dollars to organized crime. Our system will actually be the better one,” Goodale said
Former Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair, who is the parliamentary secretary to the justice minister, said officials learned from the experiences from other jurisdictions like Colorado and Washington state.
While the government moves to legalize marijuana, retail outlets selling pot for recreational use have already been set up. Trudeau has emphasized current laws should be respected. Police in Toronto, Vancouver and other cities raided stores earlier last month and made arrests.
The news that Canada was soon going to announce the law was noticed online last month by Snoop Dogg , who tweeted “Oh Canada!” Canadian folk singer Pat Robitaille released a “Weed song” to coincide with the government’s announcement.
The number of newly diagnosed childhood cancer cases worldwide rose by 13 percent during the past two decades, according to an agency of the World Health Organization.
In a study published in the journal The Lancet Oncology, researchers with the International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France, reported the incidence of childhood cancer was 140 per million per year from 2001-2010 among children up to age 14.
The incidence was 124 per million cancers annually throughout the 1980’s, according to data from a previous IARC study.
Eva Steliarova-Foucher works in the cancer surveillance section of the IARC, which is part of the WHO.
She said cancers that strike adults, notably cancers of the breast, colon and prostate, are often caused by genetic mutations that accumulate over time.
In children, she said, the disease is likely due to a genetic predisposition, adding that children tend to get different cancers than adults.
“The first most common cancer in children is leukemia, and this was seen in all the regions. And then it is followed by cancers of the central nervous system in mostly high-income countries, and it was lymphoma in the other world, in low-income countries.”
The data were collected from 153 cancer registries in 62 countries, departments and territories covering about 10 percent of the world’s children.
The best records of childhood cancers were from Western countries, including the United States, which kept records on almost 100 percent of sick children. Five percent or less of the data came from Africa and Asia, according to the report. In those low resource settings, Steliarova-Foucher says many cancers may go undiagnosed because of a lack of awareness and the unavailability of diagnostic equipment.
But she stresses that collection of data is important because, “You need to know how many cases there will be in the next years so that you have enough amenities to take care of these children. You need to know how much their treatment will cost also. So, these data provide the first indicator of the burden (of cancer) in this population.”
For the first time, the IARC report also gathered cancer data on adolescents, between the ages of 15 and 19. The incidence there was 185 cancers in one million teens each year, with lymphoma and melanoma at the top of the list.
By knowing the incidence of childhood cancer, Steliarova-Foucher says researchers can begin to identify some of the factors that may contribute to childhood cancer, including environmental pollutants and infections, which might be avoided.
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Restaurant inspectors found 13 violations at Mar-a-Lago, the exclusive Florida resort owned by President Donald Trump, the Miami Herald reported.
Undercooled meat, potentially dangerous raw fish and two broken coolers were among the problems found at the private club that charges $200,000 in initiation fees and has become known as the Southern White House, the newspaper reported late Wednesday.
Neither Mar-a-Lago nor the Florida Department of Business and Professional Regulation, which last inspected the club on Jan. 26, immediately responded to Reuters requests for comment Thursday.
Trump bought Mar-a-Lago in 1985. This weekend, he is to make his seventh trip to the Palm Beach property as the 45th president of the United States.
Violations found just days before the state visit of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe included failure to use proper parasite destruction on fish intended to be served raw or undercooked, the Herald reported, quoting the inspection report.
Inspectors ordered that the fish be cooked immediately or tossed out.
Inside the broken coolers, inspectors found raw meats meant to be stored at 41 degrees that were potentially dangerously warm, including ham at 57 degrees, raw beef at 50 degrees, duck at 50 degrees and chicken at 49 degrees, the newspaper said.
Other violations included sinks with water too cold to sanitize hands and rusty shelves inside walk-in coolers.
Three were “high priority” violations, meaning they could allow for illness-causing bacteria in meals served in the dining room, the newspaper said.
Mar-a-Lago was issued a citation for the broken coolers, which the club was ordered to empty and repair.
It was not the first time a Trump eatery has gotten negative publicity since his November 2016 election. The restaurant in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York City was reviewed by Vanity Fair in December 2016 under the headline “Trump Grill Could Be the Worst Restaurant in America.”
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Facebook said on Thursday it is taking action against tens of thousands of fake accounts in France as the social network giant seeks to demonstrate it is doing more to halt the spread of spam as well as fake news, hoaxes and misinformation.
The Silicon Valley-based company is under intense pressure as governments across Europe threaten new laws unless Facebook moves quickly to remove extremist propaganda or other content illegal under existing regulation
Social media sites including Twitter, Google’s YouTube and Facebook also are under scrutiny for their potential to be used to manipulate voters in national elections set to take place in France and Germany in coming months.
In a blog post, Facebook said it was taking action against 30,000 fake accounts in France, deleting them in some, but not all, cases. It said its priority was to remove fake accounts with high volumes of posting activity and the biggest audiences.
“We’ve made improvements to recognize these inauthentic accounts more easily by identifying patterns of activity — without assessing the content itself,” Shabnam Shaik, a Facebook security team manager, wrote in an official blog post.
For example, the company said it is using automated detection to identify repeated posting of the same content or an increase in messages sent by such profiles.
Also on Thursday, Facebook took out full-page ads in Germany’s best-selling newspapers to educate readers on how to spot fake news.
In April, the German cabinet approved proposed new laws to force social networks to play a greater role in combating online hate speech or face fines of up to 50 million euros ($53 million).
These actions by Facebook follow moves the company has taken in recent months to make it easier for users to report potential fraud amid criticism of the social network’s role in the spread of hoaxes and fake news during the U.S. presidential elections.
It has also begun working with outside fact-checking organizations to flag stories with disputed content, and removed financial incentives that help spammers to cash in by generating advertising revenue from clicks on false news stories.
With economic growth rates close to 7 percent, Laos is a star in South East Asia, buoyed by investment and business ties with China, the country’s largest investor.
In a new assessment the Lao government and Asian Development Bank predict the country’s good economic fortunes will continue.
The ADB said national output (GDP) should reach 6.9 percent in 2017, and 7 percent in 2018, despite fiscal constraints and weaker global demand for minerals in recent years.
Rattanatay Luanglathbandith, Vientiane-based ADB public management specialist, said, “The key driver of Laos’ economic growth is mainly the resources sector, hydropower and mining, namely copper, silver and gold.”
Laos’ ambition as the “battery of South East Asia” has seen development of hydro-power dams with 10 now operating. Three more proposed for the Mekong River are moving forward despite criticism from conservationists because of their environmental impact, especially on fish stocks.
Meanwhile, the Tourism Development Department says tourism contributed $724 million to the national budget in 2016. Visitor arrivals stood at 4.23 million, down from 4.68 million a year earlier, but Laos is spending $61 million to expand Wattay International airport.
Service sector growing
Rattanatay said the tourism industry is a key to absorbing rising numbers entering the workforce.
“The expansion of the services’ sector is happening right now. [It will] start to absorb labor into the total labor employed, but it happens slowly in the hotel, restaurant and retail trade and then some service provider in the IT sector,” Ratanatay told VOA.
China is Laos’ largest investor with more than $6.7 billion in 760 projects, according to a report by the Xinhua news agency. Behind China, the other key trade and investment partners are Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia.
Martin Stuart-Fox, emeritus professor of history at the University of Queensland, says Laos must manage the interests of China and Vietnam.
“The problem for Laos is balancing the Chinese money against the Vietnamese, the traditional Vietnamese influence, particularly the Vietnamese influence through the military. And there’s the Chinese money coming in and the special economic zones – some are a complete set up run by a single Chinese company [for] casinos, money laundering, and prostitution and gambling,” Stuart-Fox told VOA.
China is also contributing 70 percent of the total cost of the $5.8 billion China-Lao railway. The 410-kilometer segment is part of China’s Kunming-Singapore rail link. Chairman of the Lao National Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Oudeth Saouvannavong, told Lao media the rail link is seen as “crucial in boosting development, generating jobs and income for local people”.
Growth impacting society
But economists say rapid growth has led to fiscal and budgetary issues, as well as social considerations. In 2017 budget expenditures are forecast at $3.92 billion against revenues of $2.89 billion, a deficit of $1.07 billion.
Buavanh Vilavong, a Lao scholar at the Australian National University, said the Lao economy suffers from chronic fiscal deficits due to a narrow revenue base and “macro-economic mismanagement”. He said the government is taking steps at reform with improved economic governance and “fiscal consolidation.”
ADB’s Rattanatay says for the long term, “The government has to create a favorable business environment to encourage the development of small and medium enterprises in order to diversify the economy from the resources sector to more labor intensive manufacturing and service sector.”
The Asian Development Bank says the 23 percent of Laos’ seven million population living in poverty needs to be addressed.
Holly High, a senior research fellow from Sydney University’s department of anthropology, says promising prosperity is a cornerstone of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party platform.
“So if they are generating a lot of economic growth that is certainly a step towards delivering on their promises, but it’s not going to be adequate if this isn’t delivered in a way that’s perceived to be equitable,” High told VOA.
Analysts say Laos faces high rates of corruption. The Berlin-based Transparency International in 2016 ranked Laos at 123 of 176 nations on its corruption perception index. Stuart-Fox says corruption and the black economy, that disregards government rules, remains a major issue.
“It’s massively corrupt. Absolutely massively corrupt. If you are the top of the party you get a lot of money, and there’s a lot of Chinese money coming in, of course, and there are top people in the politburo who are extremely wealthy,” said Stuart-Fox.
High says with the backdrop of growth, there is also a need for “more venues for political dissent” for public debate on social and economic issues.
“Even when there’s good news, about say economic growth or poverty declining, people are still suspicious because there’s not a lot of trust in the political sphere in Laos,” she said.
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Sleep deprivation has been linked to weakened immune systems and could cost the U.S. economy hundreds of billions, so it is no wonder many Americans are looking to apps to help them sleep.
A new analysis of the 35 popular apps available to download has led researchers to say the apps need improvement.
There are hundreds of sleep apps available for Android devices or iPhones, most use soothing sounds to help people fall asleep. But researchers say less than half of the apps they looked at offered any “general information about sleep” or explain the hazards of not getting enough sleep.
“We were surprised that some of the apps didn’t say anything about the recommended amount of sleep someone should get on a regular basis,” said University of Illinois kinesiology and community health professor Diana Grigsby-Toussaint, who led the new analysis with colleagues at the New York University School of Medicine . “And there weren’t a lot of apps that had any information about the benefits of sleep.”
They also looked at whether the apps “include reminder messages to help users meet their sleep goals,” where they linked to social media so that the user could get positive reinforcement from friends, and did they provide information about what habits enhanced or interfered with sleep.
Most importantly, did the apps help the users sleep?
“From a population health perspective, I really see this as how do we use these apps in terms of educating people about the importance of sleep,” she said. “And how do you then use the apps as a tool to help people to get to that point where they do engage in healthy sleeping habits?”
According to the researchers, many of the apps were well designed, but “just four of the 35 apps described the health risks associated with not getting enough sleep, like high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity and depression.”
Just four provided information about habits that can cause sleep problems such as drinking alcohol or caffeine before bedtime. Only six had “sleep reminders,” and only one “included rewards or praise for success in reaching one’s goals.”
The analysis was published in the journal Preventive Medicine Reports.
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Austin Russell, now 22, was barely old enough to drive when he set out to create a safer navigation system for robot-controlled cars. His ambitions are about to be tested.
Five years ago, Russell co-founded Luminar Technologies, a Silicon Valley startup trying to steer the rapidly expanding self-driving car industry in a new direction. Luminar kept its work closely guarded until Thursday, when the startup revealed the first details about a product Russell is touting as a far more powerful form of “lidar,” a key sensing technology used in autonomous vehicles designed by Google, Uber and major automakers.
Lidar systems work by bouncing lasers off nearby objects and measuring the reflections to build up a detailed 3-D picture of the surrounding environment. The technology is similar to radar, which uses radio waves instead of lasers.
Russell says Luminar’s version, consisting of its own patented hardware and software, will provide 50 times more resolution and 10 times the range of current lidar systems. Those improvements, he said, will enable self-driving cars to be sold on the mass market more quickly.
Thiel backbone
During an interview in an empty warehouse on a San Francisco pier where Luminar has been testing its lidar, Russell wasn’t shy about making big claims for its technology. “When you see your vehicle is powered by Luminar, you will know you will be safer,” he said. “We need to get to the point where humans don’t have to constantly baby-sit and take control” of autonomous cars.
If Luminar’s lidar lives up to its promise, some of the world’s biggest technology and auto companies may have been upstaged by a precocious entrepreneur who says he memorized all the periodic table of the elements when he was 2 years old. By the time he turned 11, Russell says he was tinkering with supercomputers.
Like another technology prodigy — Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg — Russell won the early support of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who became a billionaire after investing $500,000 in Facebook during the company’s infancy.
One of Luminar’s early investors is a venture capital firm backed by Thiel and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Russell also dropped out of Stanford University after just three months when he won a Thiel fellowship, which pays students $100,000 to work on promising ideas instead of pursuing a degree.
Cost or safety?
Also like Zuckerberg, Russell is CEO of his company. Most of Luminar’s roughly 150 employees are older than him, including his former mentor in photonics, 45-year-old Jason Eichenholz, now the company’s chief technology officer. Russell’s father, a former commercial real estate specialist, is the company’s chief financial officer.
Now Russell will have to prove he has indeed invented something revolutionary.
While lidar is a key component in self-driving clears, some believe Luminar may be working on the wrong problem. The big issue for lidar systems these days is cost, not safety, said Alex Lidow, CEO of Efficient Power Conversion, which supplies chips for lidar. The systems currently cost thousands of dollars apiece.
“You don’t need the resolution that would allow a car to stop before a bug hits its windshield,” Lidow said. “The question comes down to, what is the exact right amount of information for the car to make exactly the right decision all the time?”
Luminar plans to being manufacturing 10,000 lidar units at a 50,000-square-foot plant in Orlando, Florida, this year. Russell won’t disclose what they’ll cost. About 100 of the lidar systems will be tested by four makers of autonomous cars that Luminar isn’t identifying. The partners include technology companies and automakers, Russell said.
The lidar landscape
Luminar will be competing against other lidar suppliers such as Velodyne and Quanergy Systems, which have each raised $150 million so far. Velodyne’s backers include Ford Motor, which invested $75 million last summer .
By comparison, Luminar has raised $36 million, some of which has been used to set up its headquarters on a former Silicon Valley ranch that used to be home for a collection of vintage military tanks.
Waymo, a company spun off from Google’s early work on self-driving cars, also looms as an imposing competitor. It hopes to sell its technology, which includes a lidar system, to automakers.
One sign of lidar’s importance: Waymo has accused Uber of stealing its technology in a high-profile legal battle. Uber has denied the allegations , contending it is designing its own superior lidar system.
Waymo’s lidar has a solid track record so far. Its self-driving cars have logged more than 2 million miles in autonomous mode on city streets without being involved in a major traffic accident. Most of the roughly three dozen accidents that Google had reported through last year were fender benders.
Russell isn’t impressed. “It’s very easy to build an autonomous vehicle that is safe 99 percent of the time,” he said. “It’s that other 1 percent that’s the tricky part.”
South Korea is expecting tough trade talks ahead with the United States after President Donald Trump strongly criticized the free trade agreement between the two countries for dramatically increasing the U.S. trade deficit.
A report by the United States Trade Representative (USTR) laid out key trade objectives for the Trump administration that include “breaking down unfair trade barriers” and ensuring American businesses have a “fair opportunity to compete.” And it specifically points to South Korea, along with China and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), as egregious examples of unbalanced and unfair trade.
The South Korea/U.S. free trade agreement (KORUS FTA) was the largest trade deal implemented during the administration of former President Barack Obama. Since it took effect in 2012, the U.S. trade deficit with South Korea has more than doubled. U.S. exports to South Korea fell by $1.2 billion, while U.S. imports from South Korea grew by more than $13 billion. “Needless to say,” the report notes, “this is not the outcome the American people expected from that agreement.”
”Those are harsh words and that is the economic and political reality that we have to deal with,” said Jeffrey Jones, an international trade attorney with the law firm Kim & Chang at a recent Korea International Trade Association forum.
Deficit vs. investment
Business leaders and some former trade officials in Seoul have voiced concern that the Trump administration is being overly critical of the KORUS FTA by putting too much emphasis on the trade deficit that is just one aspect of a complex and evolving economic relationship.
For example, Korean investment in the United States, from companies like Samsung and Hyundai, have created more than 45,000 American jobs. “Direct investments Korean companies have made in the United States since KORUS have exceeded trade deficits with Korea,” James Kim, chairman of both GM Korea and the American Chamber of Commerce, said in a recent Korea Times interview.
However Kim also said South Korea could do more to lower non-tariff related trade barriers in the auto industry, that account for 80 percent of the U.S. trade deficit, by relaxing environmental and inspection regulations.
There is also an argument to be made that the KORUS FTA helped prevent the trade deficit from getting worse, said Jones, who is also a former chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce in Korea. All foreign imports into South Korea have been in decline in recent years. U.S. imports dropped only by 2.8 percent, while Japanese imports are down 15 percent, Australian imports are down by 20 percent, and imports from the EU are down almost 10 percent.
And Jones notes that last year’s $23 billion South Korea trade deficit with the United States is small in comparison with the U.S. trade deficit with Japan that is five times higher and with China that is 10 times as large.
Broader alliance
While American business leaders in Seoul say it is important to understand the complex reasons for the current U.S. trade deficit with South Korea, former trade officials say it is also important to recognize how it took years of tough negotiations and compromises to reach such a comprehensive free trade deal.
Kim Jong-hoon, the former director of the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, who was a key trade negotiator during the KORUS talks, said his country made major concessions.
“Everybody knows that Korea’s tariff was much higher than those of the U.S. So when we talk about reduction, then Korea had a deeper cut, deeper, deeper cut than the U.S. did,” said Kim.
Wendy Cutler, the former USTR chief KORUS negotiator, who is now vice president of the Asia Society Policy Institute, said the trade agreement also provided a framework to resolve disputes that were undermining trust and cooperation in other areas of the U.S./South Korea alliance.
“In our bilateral relationship it was often the economic issues that were really the source of tension. And so once we were able to conclude KORUS, we found that our overall alliance became stronger,” said Cutler.
Business leaders with the American Chamber of Commerce in Korea recommend that the South Korean government agree to cooperate with the Trump administration to improve the FTA, which is now five years old and in need of upgrading.
Youmi Kim contributed to this report
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