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Lifting boxes by hand, day after day, in places like warehouses can cause muscle strain and other injuries. But now a new exoskeleton — a rigid external body frame that assists with limb movement can help prevent problems associated with repetitive tasks like handling boxes or materials at construction sites. VOA’s Deborah Block tells us more about it.
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In the U.S. and Africa, communities of African descendants are experiencing a high rate of diet related disorders like diabetes and heart disease. A Nigerian American in Washington wants to change that. Nutritionist Tambra Raye Stevenson is on a mission to inspire young girls and women in the diaspora and in Africa to embrace their heritage from farm to fork and become leaders in nutrition. VOA’s June Soh caught up with Stevenson at a recent event to promote her initiative.
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Broadband access in the United States is not universal, with a longtime digital divide beween urban and rural areas.
But in one small town just four hours from Washington, D.C., there’s no internet service at all.
The town of Green Bank, West Virginia, is the site of the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world, so internet connections and anything else that can create electromagnetic waves, such as microwave ovens, are banned.
It becomes apparent in Green Bank that visitors have to navigate the old-fashioned way: by reading road signs. That’s because GPS comes to a screeching halt as you approach this West Virginia town, which has two churches, an elementary school, a library and the world’s largest radio telescope.
Sherry, who manages the largest store in Green Bank, was born here so the lack of internet access is normal for her.
“Yes, we are different. Many would say that we live the old-fashioned way, in the past. But for us, it’s just the way of life that we have always lived,” Sherry said.
On her store wall, an artifact from the past … a phone attached to a wall jack … the only way to call someone in Green Bank.
No modern wireless conveniences, such as smartphones, are usable here.
Green Bank is frozen in time, somewhere in the 1950s, because there’s a 33,000-square-kilometer zone of silence due to the telescope. Cellphone towers are forbidden.
But that’s OK for residents because there are several payphones.
The closer you get to the telescope, the greater the restrictions. There’s a 16-kilometer radius around the observatory where radio-controlled items, even toys, cannot be used. Compliance with these conditions is strictly enforced.
Jonah Bauserman acts as a “technical” policeman. If he suspects there’s an unauthorized signal, he drives to the house and inspects it for prohibited devices.
“This equipment allows me to catch even the weakest signals that could affect the telescope,” Bauserman said.
Telescope employees even work in a special room — much like a sarcophagus — that blocks electromagnetic waves from leaving the interior.
“Here imagine a submarine, water cannot get inside, and so this room is an electric submarine. No electromagnetic waves can get into this room, just as you can’t go beyond it,” Michael Holstein, an observatory officer, said.
The job of these scientists is to minimize the impact of outside interference on the radio telescope.
Only once a week, when there’s regularly scheduled maintenance, some prohibited devices are allowed near the telescope, Holstein said.
The size of a football field, the telescope is so sensitive it could pick up signals sent from an alien world. And scientists can’t wait for that to happen.
“All the signals that we now receive with the help of telescopes are signals that come from cosmic objects — stars, galaxies. We have not yet received anything from intelligent civilizations,” scientist Richard Lynch said.
Local people respect the work of the scientists. And they are more than happy to live life Wi-Fi free.
“When we want to meet friends, we just call each other on a wire phone. //// And instead of sitting in front of your screen, we talk, we go fishing, to the mountains,” resident Sherry said.
For the latest news, residents read the weekly local newspaper. When she’s looking for a phone number, Sherry reaches for the phone book.
And instead of Facebook, Sherry enjoys daily conversations with her customers. In this town, everyone knows each other and communication is face to face.
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Broadband access in the United States is not universal, with a longtime digital divide between urban and rural areas. But in one small town just four hours from Washington, D.C., there’s no internet service at all, because Green Bank, W.Va., is the site of the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world, so internet connections and anything else that can create electromagnetic waves are banned. VOA’s Lesya Bakalets traveled to Green Bank as we see in this report narrated by Joy Wagner.
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Turkish and Gulf airlines are touting free WiFi and better in-flight connectivity for smartphones as they scramble to mitigate the impact of a ban on laptops in plane cabins bound for the United States.
The restrictions could deal a blow to fast-growing Gulf airlines, which depend on business-class flyers stopping over in Dubai or Doha for far-flung destinations, and to Turkish Airlines with its high volume of transit passengers.
A Turkish Airlines official said it was working on rolling out a system to allow passengers to use 3G data roaming on mobile phones to connect to the internet in-flight, and planned to make WiFi freely available on some aircraft from next month.
“We’ve sped up infrastructure work after the latest developments. … If the work is complete, we’re planning on switching to free WiFi services in our Boeing 777 and Airbus 330 aircraft in April,” the official told Reuters.
Emirates said Thursday it was introducing a “laptop and tablet handling service” for U.S.-bound flights which would allow passengers to use their devices until just before they board. The devices would be “carefully packed into boxes” and returned on arrival in the United States, it said.
Emirates passengers can access limited free WiFi or pay $1 for 500 MB.
Fellow Gulf carrier Etihad encouraged passengers to pack their electronics in check-in luggage but said it would also allow devices to be handed over at boarding, a spokesman said. Turkish said it had introduced a similar measure.
Qatar Airways did not respond to questions on how it planned to mitigate the impact of the new security measures, but in a Facebook posting this week it said its in-flight entertainment was “the only entertainment you’ll need on board.”
Royal Jordanian also took a tongue-in-cheek approach, listing on Twitter “12 things to do on a 12-hour flight with no laptop or tablet,” including reading, meditating, saying hello to your neighbor, or “reclaiming territory on your armrest.”
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In New York, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell for the eight consecutive day on Monday. Investors may have been discouraged by the failure of U.S. President Donald Trump to pass big changes to the health care insurance system that he promised during the campaign.
U.S. stock indexes were down sharply in morning trading, but by Monday’s close, the S&P 500 was off just one-tenth of a percent, with the Dow down two-tenths. The NASDAQ posted a slight gain.
U.S. and other stocks had been mostly rising since the November election on business hopes that promised cuts in taxes and regulation and a boost in spending on public works would stimulate the economy and boost profits.
Now investors are worried that the inability of the Republican president to get support from his Republican-controlled Congress means he will struggle to deliver promised changes on other complex and controversial efforts.
Later this week, government officials will report new data on growth of the U.S. economy and the health of the job market.
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Transnational crime, or crimes committed across international borders, is growing at a faster pace than many realize, partly because the international community is not paying a lot of attention to it. That’s the conclusion from Global Financial Integrity or GFI, a non-profit Washington think tank that tracks illicit financial flows across borders.
The group’s latest findings estimate that transnational crime is worth between $1.6 to $2.2 trillion per year. GFI says the lion’s share of illicitly generated funds around the globe comes from counterfeiting, worth between $923 billion to $1.13 trillion per year, followed by drug trafficking which generates between $426 to $652 billion in illegal funds annually.
“Transnational crime is a business, and business is very good,” said Channing May, author of GFI’s “Transnational Crime and the Developing World.” Less understood, said May, are the lasting and negative consequences for governments and the economies of developing countries.
“Very rarely do the revenues from transnational crime have any long-term benefit to citizens, communities or economies of developing countries. Instead, the crimes undermine local and national economies, destroy the environment and jeopardize the health and well-being of the public,” said May.
Rounding out the top 10
Of the top 10 illegal revenue generators around the globe, human trafficking is ranked in fourth place, generating roughly $150 billion per year, followed by illegal mining, worth upwards of $48 billion. In eighth place, crude oil theft is valued between $5 to $12 billion, and in 10th place, the trafficking of human organs may be worth as much as $1.7 billion per year.
The report says shutting down the global shadow financial system that facilitates the movement and transfer of illicitly generated funds is technically not a difficult undertaking, but rather a matter of political will.
Complete report due March 29
GFI program manager Christine Clough said recommendations include greater financial transparency and regulations requiring all corporations to declare the nature and the ultimate beneficiaries of doing business within countries.
“Networks involved in these illicit markets are akin to major global corporations: they need access to finance and banking to be profitable to continue operating,” said Clough.
The complete GFI report will be released March 29 in Washington and is based on a compilation of statistics from various government and non-governmental bodies and law enforcement sources.
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Facebook Inc will add a feature to its Messenger app Monday to allow users to share their locations, the company said, ramping up competition with tools offered by Apple Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google Maps.
The company has found that one of the most used phrases on Messenger as people talk to friends and family is “How far away are you?” or some variation, Stan Chudnovsky, head of product for Messenger, said in an interview.
“It happens to be what people are saying, what they’re interested in the most,” he said.
Sharing location information will be optional, he said, but it will also be live, so that once a user shares the information with a friend, the friend will be able to watch the user’s movement for up to 60 minutes.
Messenger was once part of the core Facebook smartphone app, but the company broke it out as a separate app in 2014 and has since invested in frequent changes to build a service distinct from the massive social network.
Google Maps said last week that it was adding a similar feature, an attempt to boost engagement on a product of increasing strategic importance to that company.
The close proximity of the announcements tells Facebook “that we’re working on the right things,” Chudnovsky said.
The Messages app on Apple’s iPhone has such a feature, too.
Facebook has been testing its change in Mexico, he said. It was ready as long ago as October, he added, but the company worked on it for five more months to minimize the impact on the battery life of phones.
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Driverless vehicles operated by Uber Technologies Inc. were back on the road in San Francisco on Monday after one of its self-driving cars crashed in Arizona, the ride-hailing company said.
Uber’s autonomous vehicles in Arizona and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, remained grounded but were expected to be operating again soon, according to a spokeswoman for the company, who refused to be identified.
“We are resuming our development operations in San Francisco this morning,” she said in an email.
Uber’s San Francisco program is currently in development mode. It has two cars registered with the California Department of Motor Vehicles, but is not transporting passengers.
The spokeswoman said because of this, the company felt confident in putting the cars back on the road while it investigates the collision in Arizona.
On Friday, Uber suspended its pilot program in the three states. A human-driven vehicle “failed to yield” to an Uber vehicle while making a turn in Tempe, Arizona, said Josie Montenegro, a spokeswoman for the city’s police department.
“The vehicles collided, causing the autonomous vehicle to roll onto its side,” Montenegro said in an email. “There were no serious injuries.”
Two “safety” drivers were in the front seats of the Uber car, which was in self-driving mode at the time of the crash, Uber said on Friday, a standard requirement for its self-driving vehicles. The back seat was unoccupied.
Photos and a video posted on Twitter by Fresco News showed a Volvo SUV flipped on its side after an apparent collision involving two other, slightly damaged cars. Uber said the images appeared to be from the Tempe crash scene.
President Donald Trump says that empowering and promoting women in business are priorities in his administration.
In a round-table discussion, the president is telling a group of female business owners that his team will work on barriers women face. He says the administration is also trying to make childcare more affordable and accessible.
WATCH: Trump’s comments during roundtable discussion
The gathering comes on the first work day since the Republican-led plan to repeal and replace the nation’s health care law was pulled before a House vote, a major setback for the Trump administration.
The White House is trying to focus this week on another campaign priority: creating jobs and economic issues.
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Islamic State propagandists are seeking to capitalize on last week’s terror attack in London, which left five people dead and 40 injured, by flooding YouTube with hundreds of violent recruitment videos.
The online propaganda offensive comes as Britain demands social media companies scrub their sites of jihadist postings.
Amber Rudd, the country’s interior minister, has vowed to “call time” on internet firms allowing terrorists “a place to hide” and has summoned some of the leading social media companies, including Facebook and Twitter, for what is being dubbed by British officials as “showdown talks” later this week.
Rudd says she is determined to stop extremists “using social media as their platform” for recruitment and for operational needs.
Britain’s security services are in a standoff with WhatsApp, which has refused to allow them access to the encrypted message the London attacker sent three minutes before he used an SUV to mow down pedestrians on Westminster Bridge and stabbed to death a policeman outside the House of Commons.
British security services are powerless to read that final message, which might cast light on whether the attack was a “lone wolf” or one aided and directed by others. Police investigators believe the terrorist acted alone and have seen no evidence that he was associated with IS or al-Qaida.
WhatsApp, which has a billion users worldwide, employs “end to end encryption” for messages, which the company says prevents even its own technicians from reading people’s messages.
Officials want voluntary action
Rudd and other government ministers have launched a media onslaught, saying they are considering legislation to require online companies to take down extremist material. They argue this wouldn’t be necessary if the companies recognized their community responsibilities.
Rudd told the BBC that Facebook, Google and other companies should understand they are not just technology businesses, but also publishing platforms. “We have to have a situation where we can have our security services get into the terrorists’ communications,” she argued. “There should be no place for terrorists to hide.”
British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson joined in the condemnation of social media and online companies. “I think it’s disgusting,” he told The Sunday Times. “They need to stop just making money out of prurient violent material.”
At a security conference last week in the United States, Johnson called for action.
“We are going to have to engage not just militarily, but also to stop the stuff on the internet that is corrupting and polluting so many people,” he said. “This is something that the internet companies and social media companies need to think about. They need to do more to take that stuff off their media — the incitements, the information about how to become a terrorist, the radicalizing sermons and messages. That needs to come down.”
Recruiting criminals
The furor over extremist use of the internet was fueled Monday by front-page articles in the Times and Daily Mail newspapers highlighting the IS propaganda videos posted on YouTube since last Wednesday’s slaughter in the British capital. The high-definition videos, some of which contained references to the London attack, include gory scenes of beheadings and “caliphate violence” carried out by child adherents of the terror group.
U.S. and European officials have long complained online companies are, in effect, aiding and abetting terrorism. A year ago in January, much of the U.S. national security leadership of the Obama administration sat down with Silicon Valley chiefs to discuss jihadist use of the internet to recruit and radicalize people and plot attacks.
Also last year, British spy chief, Robert Hannigan, singled out messaging apps as especially worrisome for the security services, saying they had become “the command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals — precisely because they are highly encrypted.”
Some cooperation
After initial resistance to complaints from Western governments, Facebook, Google and Twitter have in recent months been more cooperative with authorities and have removed large amounts of extremist material. Twitter said in the second half of 2016 it suspended 376,890 accounts for violations related to promotion of terrorism.
But some services have resisted providing governments with encryption keys, or so-called back doors.
Apple has developed encryption keys that message users can use that are not possessed by the company. Apple’s chief executive, Timothy Cook, argued last year, “If you put a key under the mat for the cops, a burglar can find it, too.”
Silicon Valley chiefs say they fear violations of privacy and their priority is their customers, not national security, an argument that has resonated since former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed the extent of electronic surveillance by U.S. intelligence agencies.
Last year, WhatsApp was blocked several times in Brazil for failing to hand over information relating to criminal investigations.
Messages sent on a rival service by Telegram are also encrypted, but after bad publicity and immense pressure from Western governments, the company does provide a backdoor for security and law-enforcement agencies.
Not that access to encrypted communications always helps.
Sunday, it emerged that German police knew the Christmas market attacker in Berlin who drove a truck into a crowd of shoppers was planning a suicide attack. Police had intercepted his Telegram messages nine months before the attack.
A police recommendation that he be deported was declined by state government prosecutors because they feared the courts would reject the request.
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Spinach is known as a super food for its nutritional value, but a new experiment reveals another power of the green leaf.
Researchers say they’ve grown beating human heart cells on spinach leaves, using the vascular network of the plant to transport fluids. The finding could eventually lead to being able to grow working human cardiac tissue that could one day be used to replace heart cells damaged by heart attacks.
“Plants and animals exploit fundamentally different approaches to transporting fluids, chemicals, and macromolecules, yet there are surprising similarities in their vascular network structures,” said researchers from Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Arkansas State University-Jonesboro. “The development of decellularized plants for scaffolding opens up the potential for a new branch of science that investigates the mimicry between plant and animal.”
The breakthrough is important because so far, bioengineering such as 3-D printing, can’t replicate the complex system of blood vessels in the human body that deliver the oxygen, nutrients, and essential molecules required for proper tissue growth.
For the experiment, researchers first stripped plant cells from spinach leaves and passed beads the size of human blood cells through the leftover vascular system and seeded the spinach veins with human cells that line our blood vessels.
“We have a lot more work to do, but so far this is very promising,” said Glenn Gaudette, PhD, professor of biomedical engineering at WPI and corresponding author of the paper. “Adapting abundant plants that farmers have been cultivating for thousands of years for use in tissue engineering could solve a host of problems limiting the field.”
Researchers added that other plants have been shown to offer the same kind of promise, including parsley, Artemesia annua (sweet wormwood), and peanut hairy roots.
“The spinach leaf might be better suited for a highly vascularized tissue, like cardiac tissue, whereas the cylindrical hollow structure of the stem of Impatiens capensis (jewelweed) might better suit an arterial graft. Conversely, the vascular columns of wood might be useful in bone engineering due to their relative strength and geometries,” the authors wrote.
Using plants could also be economical.
“By exploiting the benign chemistry of plant tissue scaffolds,” researchers wrote, “we could address the many limitations and high costs of synthetic, complex composite materials. Plants can be easily grown using good agricultural practices and under controlled environments. By combining environmentally-friendly plant tissue with perfusion-based decellularization, we have shown that there can be a sustainable solution for pre-vascularized tissue engineering scaffolds.”
The paper, “Crossing kingdoms: Using decelluralized plants as perfusable tissue engineering scaffolds” is published online in advance of the May 2017 issue of the journal Biomaterials.
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White House officials say President Donald Trump will sign executive orders Tuesday that would effectively dismantle Obama era environmental regulations, rekindling the highly-charged partisan debate about how human activity affects the earth’s climate, and deepening concern decades of work on global climate treaties may be unraveling.
“Many agree that would be disastrous,” Dutch Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen told VOA in a telephone interview. “Whatever has been achieved could be destroyed, so I don’t think many scientists would be pleased with this,” said Crutzen, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize for work explaining the depletion of the earth’s ozone layer.
Trump has repeatedly signaled disdain for his predecessor’s climate policy. On the campaign trail he called President Obama’s Clean Power Plan “stupid”, largely because it puts in place what he calls “job killing” regulations. The executive orders he is set to sign Tuesday directs the Environmental Protection agency to thoroughly revise regulations outlined in the Clean Power Plan.
Trump’s 2018 budget proposal slashes EPA funding by 31 percent, including an almost total cut of climate research funds. Trump’s Budget Director Mick Mulvaney told a White House briefing, “We’re not spending money on that any more.”
International effect
Less clear is the president’s commitment to international agreements such as the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, signed by Obama. Trump has an aversion to treaties that cede U.S. authority to global bodies, and EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, speaking Sunday on ABC’s This Week, called the Paris treaty a “bad deal.”
Early drafts of the executive orders were said to have included language critical of the Paris deal. News reports, however, say two of his closest confidants, daughter Ivanka and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, a former chief of the global energy giant ExxonMobil, intervened to have references to the Paris Accord dropped from the final draft.
The EPA’s Pruitt said Sunday that revising the Clean Power Plan is aimed at unshackling American industry. “This is about making sure we have a pro-growth and pro-environment approach to how we do regulation in this country,” he said.
A hot issue
Leaked details of the executive orders have ignited a firestorm among climate scientists.
Tim Barnett, emeritus research geophysicist at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California says even he, a Trump supporter, would find it “unconscionable” to roll back regulations contained in the Clean Power Plan. “Global warming is not a Democratic issue or a Republican issue,” he said. “If you look at what’s going on the Arctic, the Antarctic, by continuing to put carbon dioxide in the atmosphere we’re making the oceans more acidic. It is thought that by 2040 half the planktonic creatures will be under stress.”
In Washington views on climate change generally split along party lines. With Republicans controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress, the views of climate skeptics, largely marginalized during the Obama years, are finding fresh voice.
EPA chief Pruitt was known for numerous legal challenges to EPA regulations when he was attorney general of Oklahoma. His official biography describes him as “a leading advocate against the EPA’s activist agenda.”
On Capitol Hill, the House Science Committee has scheduled hearings this week to look into the methods of climate scientists, as Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) pushes forward a bill to require the EPA to make public the data it uses to justify environmental regulations. The hearing will feature three prominent academics who question the scientific consensus, alongside Michael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University and author of the “hockey stick” graph that suggests a steep rise in the earth’s temperature since fossil fuels came into wide use.
Speaking to VOA, Mann said the rising profile of climate change doubters in Washington is part of a well-funded campaign by big energy industry interests, mainly Charles and David Koch, who are major contributors to conservative political and policy groups.
“Trump’s administration has been filled with individuals who have close ties to polluting interests, ExxonMobil obviously, but the Koch brothers, the largest privately owned fossil fuel interests in the country,” Mann said. “… and their agenda has long been to gut all government regulations so they can increase their own profits from the sale of fossil fuels.”
Climate skeptics agree money has corrupted the scientific debate, but they differ on its effect. The dissenters argue that fierce competition for the billions of dollars in government research grants has forced academics to exaggerate the danger of climate chance.
Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, represents the small minority of scientists who find fault with the overwhelming consensus on climate change. He argues universities have given in to the temptation to exaggerate climate change as they have become increasingly dependent on billions of dollars in government research funding, effectively making bureaucrats the real judges of science.
“We went way backward in studying climate and replaced it with this single variable, (CO2) and increased funding by 1500% and created a whole new community that had never studied climate but was willing to attribute everything to it,” he said.
Lindzen supports Trump’s initiative to limit funding for climate change research. “Then only people interested in the physics of climate change would remain,” he said.
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The global trend in counterfeiting and piracy is forecast to increase during the decade with China at the heart of production of fake goods from clothes to electronics, and risky fake medicines and cosmetics.
But governments and businesses are looking to challenge the commercial threats posed by counterfeiting with steps to detect fake goods and protect brands and jobs.
A report commissioned by the International Trademark Association (INTA) and the International Chamber of Commerce, said the global economic value of counterfeiting and piracy could reach $2.3 trillion by 2022. The global value of the counterfeit market in 2015 stood at $1.7 trillion.
The February 2017 report, by research firm Frontier Economics, said the wider social, investment and criminal enforcement costs could take the total to $4.2 trillion, leaving at risk about 5.4 million “legitimate jobs”.
Analysts say while counterfeiting and fraud have been a part of commercial life, the quickening pace of fake products has come with the globalization of business.
Plague on world economy
A recent report by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime says “counterfeit goods and fraudulent medicines pose a serious risk to public health and safety”.
The goods range from automotive supplies, to chemicals and pesticides, consumer electronics, electrical components, food, drink and agricultural products.
While deaths and sickness have been reported from key foods such as baby milk powder in Asia, the full human toll as a result of fake mechanical, food and medicines is unclear.
China said to be at center
The UNODC and the World Customs Organization estimate 75 percent of counterfeit products seized worldwide in 2010 were manufactured in East Asia, mostly in China.
Australia-based product security firm, YPB Group executive chairman, John Houston, says the “problem [of counterfeiting] essentially is in China”.
“The Chinese counterfeiter can now copy the best packaging, they actually put holograms on things that the original brand owner doesn’t have a hologram on, to create the aura of authenticity,” Houston said.
“So what you need is a traceable, identifiable, authenticable technology in products and you would be absolutely amazed how little there is in the world,” he said.
The UNODC says India and China are the largest sources of fraudulent medicines, with China the lead “departure point” of nearly 60 percent of counterfeit medical products seized globally.
But even as China takes steps to crack down on counterfeit medicines, “key aspects of production” are likely to move elsewhere, including to North Korea, Myanmar and Vietnam.
Major problem
The major driver of the sales of counterfeit goods has come through e-commerce and major online distribution channels. In December the United States placed China’s Alibaba Group on a ‘counterfeit goods watch list’.
Since then Alibaba, the $270 billion e-commerce powerhouse, led by chief executive Jack Ma, said it was taking steps to crackdown on counterfeit sellers on its network, including a digital ledger system designed to track genuine food products through a supply chain.
Alibaba also called on China’s authorities to introduce tougher laws, stricter enforcement and stiffer penalties to crackdown on producers of counterfeit goods in China. The company blamed China’s “ambiguous counterfeiting laws” that hampered authorities’ ability to build legal cases against counterfeiters.
Steps by Alibaba, included the taking down of 380 million product listings and the shutdown of 180,000 Taobao stores, and 675 operators as a result of anti-counterfeiting measures.
Countries fighting back
Governments are also taking action against elements in the counterfeiting trade. Thailand regularly carries out high profile raids on counterfeit goods’ suppliers and well publicized destruction of the goods.
In Cambodia, where the key health challenge is counterfeit medicines, the Interior Ministry recently said it had closed down over 60 illegal pharmacies, as well measures to curb production of fake currencies, notably U.S. dollars.
In Vietnam, faced with a “tidal wave” of counterfeit cosmetics flooding the market, the Health Department of Medicine Management suspended the distribution of more than 30 beauty products.
Businesses in Vietnam have also complained that fake products from China were costing the firms “hundreds of thousands of dollars each year in lost revenue”.
Anti-counterfeiting measures
YPB’s Houston said there is increasing demand for technologies to thwart counterfeiting or forgery, especially with issues of cross border migration and terrorism in many parts of the world.
A report by MarketsandMarkets.com said the value of anti-counterfeiting packaging is set to reach $153.95 billion by 2020, from $82.05 billion in 2015.
Houston said Asian governments were looking to anti-counterfeiting technology realizing “the burden and loss of revenue that counterfeit and the black economy place on developing economies.”
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Elissa Montanti can rattle off the stories without hesitation of the hundreds of wounded children who have come through the doors of her small New York charity to get medical help.
Marci, a five-year-old from Afghanistan, was shot in the face in a Taliban ambush. She lost her eye, and her father died trying to shield her.
Hamandani, nine, was hanging from a tree, trying not to be swept away in Indonesia’s 2004 tsunami when he fell and crushed his arm.
And Sarki stumbled into a wood stove as a toddler living high in the Himalayas, a six-hour trek from the nearest passable road. Her burned arm healed into a frozen position, with a web-like hand.
They are among the more than 200 children injured in disaster or conflict and brought to the United States for surgery, prosthetics and other medical treatment, courtesy of Montanti’s Global Medical Relief Fund (GMRF).
Almost all come more than once, especially when growing children need larger prosthetics, bringing the number of follow-up visits to about a thousand.
“All the kids are in my head and in my heart,” said Montanti, who founded GMRF 20 years ago. “I love all of them.
“People say, ‘Do you have kids?’ and I say, ‘Yeah, 200,'” she said with a laugh. “I look good for 200 kids.”
Actually, those 200-plus children take a toll on Montanti, who puts them up in a four-bedroom house down the street from her own in the New York City borough of Staten Island.
“It’s not 9 to 5,” she told Reuters in a recent interview. “I’m up the street at 12, 1, 2 in the morning seeing who has a fever, who’s got a cold.”
And she gets some criticism.
“People say why don’t you help kids here,” she said. “These kids have no resources. Why shouldn’t we help them? They don’t have half of what we have.”
GMRF has hosted children from the United States as well as 40 other countries, their lives shredded by war or calamity.
Some are missing limbs, and others are severely burned or disfigured. Some must be carried off airplanes when they arrive, she said.
Staying in New York City with Montanti, they are treated at no cost by the Shriners Hospital in Philadelphia. Some also have been treated by New York’s Northwell Health hospital.
‘Healing and love’
The first to be helped by Montanti was a boy who lost both arms and a leg stepping on a landmine in Bosnia. Word spread, especially among U.S. soldiers who befriended young war victims and sought her help for them.
That brought her children like Ahmed, who lost his vision and an arm in an explosion in Iraq as he walked home from school at age seven.
This week, Montanti has four children with albinism from Tanzania who lost limbs in brutal attacks and need prosthetics.
Albinos in Tanzania are targeted for body parts, which are highly valued in witchcraft and can fetch a high price.
The four children are on a return visit, having first come to the United States and Montanti two years ago for care.
At the same time, she has three amputee children from Nicaragua — two teenage boys who lost limbs in car accidents and the mischievous seven-year-old Alexis Pineda who was born missing one arm below the elbow.
Alexis likes to show off that he is adept at tying his shoes without his prosthetic but with it, he can grab things and use scissors, his mother said through an interpreter.
“”There are a lot of bullies. In Nicaragua, they look at him. It’s hard,” said his mother, Cristian Marcela Pineda, who accompanied him to New York from Managua. “Now they can look at him but at least he has another hand.”
Daniel Solis, 14, who lost his leg in a hit-and-run accident in his Nicaraguan hometown of Masaya, grabbed Montanti in a hug as he practiced walking on his prosthetic.
“We are best friends,” he said in Spanish.
As the children grow up and move on, they stay in touch, often on Facebook, where Montanti said she recently got birthday greetings from children she helped from Bosnia in 1998.
“In this little house with four bedrooms, there’s a lot of healing and love that goes on under the roof,” she said.
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Snap Inc., owner of messaging app Snapchat, received top ratings from a number of its IPO underwriters on Monday, sending its shares up more than 3 percent in premarket trading.
Snap had a red-hot debut on March 1 in what was the largest listing by a technology firm in three years. However, many investors have been critical of the company’s lack of profitability and decelerating user growth.
At least six brokerages, including Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, rated the stock “buy” or higher, citing the company’s long-term growth in a highly competitive market.
As of Friday’s close, the stock had risen nearly 34 percent from its $17 initial public offering price. The stock was trading at $23.52 before the bell on Monday.
The Los Angeles-based company’s app, which allows users to share short-lived messages and pictures, is popular with young people but faces intense competition from larger rivals such as Facebook Inc.’s Instagram. Snap has warned it may never become profitable.
“SNAP’s engaged/hard-to-reach millennial users and unique video offerings should attract significant ad dollars,” said Morgan Stanley analysts, who started the stock with an “overweight” rating.
The analysts also said that Snap’s ad monetization was still in its infancy.
Among other underwriters, Jefferies, RBC, Cowen & Co and Credit Suisse rated the stock a “buy.” RBC was the most bullish with a $31 price target.
“The big question is whether SNAP’s user base can ‘age up,'” analysts at Cowen & Co. said in a note.
However, JP Morgan, also an underwriter, started with a “neutral” rating.
“[The] neutral rating is driven by an increasingly competitive social media landscape which includes Facebook and others implementing successful Snap features across a broader user base, potentially weighing on user growth, and lack of profit until 2019E,” JP Morgan analysts said.
Including the latest actions, Snap now has eight “buy” or higher ratings, six “sell” and seven “neutral” ratings, according to Thomson Reuters data.
The Associated Press used dozens of interviews and multiple public records requests to determine that North Carolina’s “bathroom bill” will cost the state more than $3.76 billion in lost business over a dozen years.
This is how the largest elements were compiled and used:
PAYPAL
A state Commerce Department analysis shows officials expected a planned Charlotte PayPal operations center to contribute more than $200 million annually to the state’s gross domestic product — an overall measure of the economy. By the end of 2028, the state expected PayPal to have added more than $2.66 billion overall to the state economy, according to the March 2, 2016, analysis.
But shortly after House Bill 2 was enacted, PayPal CEO Dan Schulman announced the company was backing out of the 400-job plan because of the law.
The fiscal cost-benefit analysis model has been used for more than a decade when the state offers major discretionary tax breaks to attract jobs. The Job Development Investment Grant program can provide incentives for up to 12 years under state law — so the analyses are often done for that length of time. A recent annual report on the incentive program shows it’s not uncommon for the state to estimate that a company could add billions to the economy over the grant’s life.
DEUTSCHE BANK
Using the same model, the Commerce Department estimated that a Deutsche Bank project in Cary would pump about $47 million annually into the economy once fully staffed at 250 jobs in 2017. The September 2015 analysis predicted a total impact of about $543 million by the end of 2027. But the company announced it was halting plans because of the law.
COSTAR
The AP used figures from North Carolina and Virginia to conclude that CoStar’s decision not to put its facility in Charlotte will cost North Carolina at least $250 million.
When CoStar announced in October 2016 that it had picked Virginia for a research center employing 732 people, that state said the project’s economic impact would be $250 million based on payroll, capital investments and other factors. That number is consistent with planning documents from North Carolina that projected the company to bring the same number of jobs _ average salary, around $57,000. State economic planners expected a capital investment of $24 million, so its impact would’ve exceeded $250 million in the first half-dozen years.
Officials said they didn’t run the wider-ranging 12-year analysis that was used for Deutsche Bank and Paypal.
CoStar’s CEO had recommended Charlotte to his board and was preparing for final negotiations for a site there when the board backed out because of negative publicity over the law, according to a September 2016 email exchange between Charlotte Chamber of Commerce and city officials.
VOXPRO
The AP analysis valued Voxpro’s decision not to come to the state at about $52 million based on figures from North Carolina and an interview with the CEO.
The company was in negotiations to bring hundreds of call-center jobs to the Raleigh area, but chose not to because of the law, founder and CEO Dan Kiely said in an interview. The company chose Athens, Georgia; Kiely said the company will employ 500 there.
North Carolina’s Commerce Department projected annual wages around $29,000 for 2016-20. The project was expected to create 230 jobs in the last quarter of 2016, according to state documents. The AP used 230 jobs over three months for its 2016 calculations, and the same headcount for 2017.
Kiely said the company would have ramped up hiring in 2017 to bring 500 jobs to the North Carolina site. The AP used the 500-job figure for the years 2018, 2019 and 2020; that’s consistent with the company’s expectation for staffing to reach 500 workers at the Georgia site before 2020.
North Carolina officials said they didn’t run the wider-ranging, 12-year analysis that was used for Deutsche Bank and Paypal.
ADIDAS
The AP used figures from North Carolina and Georgia to compute a value of about $67 million for the decision by Adidas not to choose North Carolina for a factory.
The shoe and apparel company was considering a High Point site and visited about a week before the law passed, according to state economic development emails. They show that soon after the law passed, a top Adidas executive sought a meeting with Commerce Secretary John Skvarla to discuss the law’s implications. By late June, North Carolina Economic Development Partnership recruiter Evan Stone bemoaned that the company’s “site location decision is imminent, and High Point was the preferred site but is being rejected solely on the basis of recent legislation.”
The AP calculation started with North Carolina officials’ estimate that Adidas would’ve made a capital investment of $35 million, according to emails. To estimate yearly payroll, the AP used the 160 jobs it’s bringing to Georgia with an average salary of about $40,000. That payroll number was multiplied by five years _ a time period commonly used for projections during early rounds of negotiations with state officials.
North Carolina officials said they didn’t run the wider-ranging 12-year analysis that was used for Deutsche Bank and PayPal.
SPORTS, CONVENTIONS, CONCERTS
The AP conducted more than a dozen interviews and email exchanges with tourism officials and planners to determine the state lost more than $196 million from sporting events, conventions, concerts and other events. Cities researched include: Asheville, Charlotte, Greensboro, Raleigh, Manteo, Wilmington, Durham and Fayetteville.
The Qatar Investment Authority, the Gulf Arab state’s acquisitive sovereign wealth fund, is setting up an office in San Francisco to manage its growing portfolio in the United States, the CEO of QIA said in London on Monday.
“Soon we will be opening an office in the Silicon Valley in San Francisco,” Sheikh Abdullah Bin Mohammed al-Thani told reporters at an investment conference.
The fund is one of the most active sovereign investors in the world, snapping up stakes in everything from real estate to luxury goods.
Much of its activity has traditionally been in Europe but the fund has said it is looking to diversify into Asia and the United States, announcing last year a plan to spend $20 billion in Asian investments over the next five years.
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President Donald Trump’s aides opened the door to working with moderate Democrats on health care and other issues while Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer quickly offered to find common ground with Trump for repairing former President Barack Obama’s health care law.
Schumer said Sunday that Trump must be willing to drop attempts to repeal his predecessor’s signature achievement, warning that Trump was destined to “lose again” on other parts of his agenda if he remained beholden to conservative Republicans.
Trump initially focused the blame for the failure on Democrats and predicted a dire future for the current law. But on Sunday he turned his criticism toward conservative lawmakers for the failure of the Republican bill, complaining on Twitter: “Democrats are smiling in D.C. that the Freedom Caucus, with the help of Club For Growth and Heritage, have saved Planned Parenthood & Ocare!”
The Freedom Caucus is a hard-right group of more than 30 GOP House members who were largely responsible for blocking the bill to undo the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare.”
The bill was pulled from the House floor Friday in a humiliating political defeat for the president, having lacked support from conservative Republicans, some moderate Republicans and Democrats.
In additional fallout from the jarring setback, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, said he was leaving the caucus. Poe tweeted Friday that some lawmakers “would’ve voted against the 10 Commandments.”
“We must come together to find solutions to move this country forward,” Poe said Sunday in a written statement. “Saying `no’ is easy, leading is hard but that is what we were elected to do.”
On Sunday, Trump aides made clear that the president could seek support from moderate Democrats on upcoming legislative battles ranging from the budget and tax cuts to health care, leaving open the possibility he could revisit health care legislation. Whether he would work to repair Obama’s law was a big question.
White House chief of staff Reince Priebus scolded conservative Republicans, explaining that Trump had felt “disappointed” with a “number of people he thought were loyal to him that weren’t.”
“It’s time for the party to start governing,” Priebus said. “I think it’s time for our folks to come together, and I also think it’s time to potentially get a few moderate Democrats on board as well.”
As he ponders his next steps, Trump faces decisions on whether to back administrative changes to fix Obama’s health care law or undermine it as prices for insurance plans rise in many markets. Over the weekend, the president tweeted a promise of achieving a “great healthcare plan” because Obamacare will “explode.”
Priebus did not answer directly regarding Trump’s choice, saying that fixes to the health law will have to come legislatively and he wants to ensure “people don’t get left behind.”
“I don’t think the president is closing the door on anything,” he said.
Schumer, a New York Democrat, suggested that “if he changes, he could have a different presidency.”
“But he’s going to have to tell the Freedom Caucus and the hard-right special wealthy interests who are dominating his presidency … he can’t work with them, and we’ll certainly look at his proposals,” Schumer said.
Their comments came after another day of finger-pointing among Republicans, both subtle and otherwise. On Saturday, Trump urged Americans in a tweet to watch Judge Jeanine Pirro’s program on Fox News that night. She led her show by calling for House Speaker Paul Ryan to resign, blaming him for the defeat of the bill in the Republican-controlled chamber.
Priebus described the two events as “coincidental,” insisting that Trump was helping out a friend by plugging her show and no “preplanning” occurred.
“He doesn’t blame Paul Ryan,” Priebus said. “In fact, he thought Paul Ryan worked really hard. He enjoys his relationship with Paul Ryan, thinks that Paul Ryan is a great speaker of the House.”
Priebus said Trump was looking ahead for now at debate over the budget and a tax plan, which he said would include a border adjustment tax and middle-class tax cuts.
“It’s more or less a warning shot that we are willing to talk to anyone. We always have been,” he said. “I think more so now than ever, it’s time for both parties to come together and get to real reforms in this country.”
Congressman Mark Meadows, R-N.C., chairman of the Freedom Caucus, acknowledged he was doing a lot of “self-critiquing” after the health care defeat. He insisted the GOP overhaul effort was not over and that he regretted not spending more time with moderate Republicans and Democrats “to find some consensus.”
Priebus spoke on Fox News Sunday, and Schumer and Meadows appeared on ABC’s This Week.
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U.S. economic growth is expected to accelerate this year and next, yet remain modest, even if President Trump’s promised tax cuts and infrastructure spending are implemented, a survey found.
The economy will grow a solid 2.3 percent this year and 2.5 percent in 2018, according to 50 economists surveyed by the National Association for Business Economics. Those rates would be up from 2016’s anemic pace of 1.6 percent.
Still, those rates are below the 3 percent to 4 percent growth that Trump has promised to bring about through steep corporate and individual tax cuts and more spending on roads, airports and tunnels.
Most of the economists surveyed assume that a tax reform package will be approved by Congress this year. About two-fifths expect an infrastructure spending proposal to pass this year, while rest forecast it will happen in 2018 or beyond.
The survey also found that 70 percent of economists think financial markets are too optimistic about the impact of Trump’s proposals, should they be enacted.
The S&P 500 stock index has risen about 6.5 percent since the presidential election on anticipation of faster growth stemming from Trump’s policies. Shares slipped last week as Congress and the Trump administration failed to agree on a health care proposal to replace the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act.
The economists surveyed work for companies, trade associations and in academia. The results were compiled by Timothy Gill, an economist at the American Iron and Steel Institute; Steve Cochrane, an economist at Moody’s Analytics; and David Teolis at General Motors, among others.
The survey found economists more optimistic about hiring than they were in a previous survey, conducted in December. They now forecast employers will add an average of 183,000 jobs a month this year, up from their earlier forecast of 168,000. The new figure is roughly in line with last year’s average of 187,000.
Most of the economists assume that Trump’s tax proposals will pass in the second half of this year, though about one-fifth expect that it will take until next year.
Most do not expect an infrastructure package, even if it passes this year, to boost the economy until 2018, the survey found.
Trump’s tax proposals will face many challenges before they become law. Most economists surveyed by NABE do not expect they will include a proposal from House Republicans to tax imports and exempt exports. That proposal is forecast to raise $1 trillion in revenue over a decade. Without it, the tax plan will need to raise other revenue or will make the government’s budget deficit larger.
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As East Africa struggles through a drought, scientists say climate change may be making the situation worse as a warming planet may be altering the weather patterns that bring rain to the region.
In Somalia, the rains failed late last year. And the rains before that were meager. Livestock have died. Crops have failed.
Famine threatens Somalia for the second time this decade.
While drought is not uncommon in this dry region, it has gotten worse, Chris Funk, a climate scientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, said.
“What we’ve seen over, say, the last 35 years is that the rainfall during what’s called the long rains in East Africa has declined substantially,” Funk said.
He added the explanation may lie in an atmospheric cycle that links East Africa and the Pacific Ocean.
WATCH: Experts: Climate change may be making drought worse
Warm, wet air rises over the western Pacific, causing rain over Southeast Asia.
On the other side of the cycle, dry air descends over East Africa. That is why not much rain falls here even in normal years.
But when the western Pacific is warmer, it pushes the whole system harder: more rain over Southeast Asia, and more dry air descending on East Africa.
More dry air means more drought.
And Funk said the ocean is getting warmer.
“The warming over the western Pacific appears to be pretty much directly related to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” he said.
Research shows that in the past, a warmer ocean meant a drier East Africa. But Funk says it is not entirely clear whether the current drying trend will continue.
“One of the things making it hard to look into the future is the fact that the story told by the global climate models, the climate change models, is pretty much the exact opposite of what we’re seeing in East Africa,” Funk said.
The models predict it should be getting wetter. But experts increasingly think the models may be flawed in this area.
Funk and others are working on it.
The short term is more clear. The western Pacific is still warmer than average. Which means the forecast is for a third season of disappointing rains.
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President Donald Trump is set to announce a new White House office run by his son-in-law that will seek to overhaul government functions using ideas from the business sector.
A senior administration official said Trump on Monday will announce the White House Office of American Innovation. The official sought anonymity to discuss the office in advance of the formal rollout.
The plans for the office were first reported by The Washington Post.
The innovation office will be led by Jared Kushner, a senior adviser to Trump, and will report directly to the president.
Among those working on the effort are National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, senior counselor to the president for economic initiatives and deputy national security adviser, Chris Liddell, assistant to the president for strategic initiatives and Reed Cordish, assistant to the president for intragovernmental and technology initiatives. All have extensive business experience.
Trump is readying to announce the new office at a low point in his young administration, days after the Republican bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare.” imploded in the House of Representatives, revealing deep divides within GOP and fraying tensions at the White House.
This effort has been developing since shortly after the inauguration, the official said. The group has been meeting since then and started talking to CEOs from various sectors about ways to make changes to federal programs. Areas they hope to tackle include overhauling Veterans’ Affairs, improving workforce development and targeting opioid addiction.
Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who is married to Kushner and has a West Wing office but no official job, will get involved on issues she is focused on, such as workforce development.
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A joint committee of ministers from OPEC and non-OPEC oil producers has agreed to review whether a global pact to limit supplies should be extended by six months, it said in a statement on Sunday.
An earlier draft of the statement said the committee “reports high level of conformity and recommends six-month extension.”
But the final statement said only that the committee had requested a technical group and the OPEC Secretariat “review the oil market conditions and revert … in April, 2017 regarding the extension of the voluntary production adjustments.”
It was not immediately clear why the wording had been changed, although a senior industry source said the committee lacked the legal mandate to recommend an extension.
OPEC and rival oil-producing countries were meeting in Kuwait to review progress with their global pact to cut supplies.
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and 11 other leading oil producers including Russia agreed in December to cut their combined output by almost 1.8 million barrels per day (bpd) in the first half of the year.
“Any country has the freedom to say whether they do or they don’t support [an extension]. Unless we have conformity with everybody, we cannot go ahead with the extension of the deal,” Kuwaiti Oil Minister Essam al-Marzouq said, adding that he hoped a decision would come by the end of April.
The oil ministerial committee “expressed its satisfaction with the progress made towards full conformity with the voluntary production adjustments and encouraged all participating countries to press on towards 100 percent conformity,” the statement said.
The December accord, aimed at supporting the oil market, has lifted crude to more than $50 a barrel. But the price gain has encouraged U.S. shale oil producers, which are not part of the pact, to boost output.
The committee said it took note that certain factors, such as low seasonal demand, refinery maintenance and rising non-OPEC supply had led to an increase in crude oil stocks. It also observed the liquidation of positions by financial players.
“However, the end of the refinery maintenance season and noticeable slowdown in U.S. stock build as well as the reduction in floating storage will support the positive efforts undertaken to achieve stability in the market,” it said.
It asked the OPEC Secretariat to review oil market conditions and come back with recommendations in April regarding an extension of the agreement.
“This reaffirms the commitment of OPEC and participating non-OPEC countries to continue to cooperate,” the statement said.
Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said it was too early to say whether there would be an extension, although the agreement was working well and all countries were committed to 100 percent compliance.
‘Encouraging elements’
Before the meeting, Iraqi Oil Minister Jabar Ali al-Luaibi told reporters there were some encouraging elements that suggested the oil market was improving, and that if all OPEC members agreed measures to help price stability, Iraq would support such steps.
“Any decisions taken unanimously by members of OPEC … Iraq will be part of the decision and will not be deviating from this,” Luaibi said.
Iraq’s oil production is running at 4.312 million bpd this month, Luaibi said, adding that his country had cut its oil exports by 187,000 bpd so far and would reach 210,000 bpd in a few days.
Compliance with the supply-cut deal was 94 percent in February among OPEC and non-OPEC oil producers combined, Russia’s Novak said.
Russia is committed to cuts of 300,000 bpd by the end of April, Novak said.
Novak said he expects global oil stockpiles to decrease in the second quarter of this year.
“The dynamics are positive here, I believe,” Novak said, adding that inventories in the United States and other industrialized countries had risen by less than in the past.
Kuwait’s oil minister said the market may return to balance by the third quarter of this year if producers comply fully with their production targets.
“More has to be done. We need to see conformity across the board. We assured ourselves and the world that we would reach our adjustment to 100 percent conformity,” Marzouq said.
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There are an estimated 1.1 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon, 500,000 of them are children. For many of them, getting enough food and water are their biggest challenges. Children who are hearing impaired face even bigger obstacles. But some of them are getting help, thanks to a U.S. based charity called Deaf Planet Soul. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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