President Trump’s decision to delay a new program for immigrant entrepreneurs to come to the U.S. has drawn criticism from the technology industry. VOA’s Arturo Martínez reports from Silicon Valley, California.
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Month: July 2017
Syrian Artist Depicts Life in Raqqa Under Islamic State
Images of life under Islamic State rule are rare because taking photos, drawing or painting was discouraged or even banned. An artist who escaped from Raqqa, an Islamic State stronghold in Syria which is now under siege, depicts scenes from the occupied city in a temporary shelter where he now lives. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports Faisal’s drawings and paintings are rare historic documents as well works of art.
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Native American Healing Class Sparks Unique Health Textbook
Laughter can combat trauma. Spiritual cleansings could be used to fight an opioid addiction. Cactus extract may battle diabetes and obesity.
These insights are from curanderismo — traditional indigenous healing from the American Southwest and Latin America.
University of New Mexico professor Eliseo “Cheo” Torres’ has included these thoughts in a new, unique textbook connected to his internationally-known annual course on curanderismo.
“Curanderismo: The Art of Traditional Medicine Without Borders,” released last week, coincides with Torres’ annual gathering of curandero students and healers around the world at the University of New Mexico. For nearly 20 years, healers and their students have come to Albuquerque to meet and exchange ideas on traditional healing that for many years were often ignored and ridiculed.
Torres, who is also the university’s vice president for student affairs, said the popularity of the annual course and a similar online class he teaches convinced him that there needed to be a textbook on curanderismo.
“This textbook came out of the experience of this class and the ideas that have been shared through the years,” Torres said during a special morning ceremony with Aztec dancers on campus. “From healers in Mexico to those in Africa, many have long traditions of healing that are being rediscovered by a new generation.”
Curanderismo is the art of using traditional healing methods like herbs and plants to treat various ailments. Long practiced in Native American villages of Mexico and other parts of Latin America, curanderos also are found in New Mexico, south Texas, Arizona and California.
Anthropologists believe curanderismo remained popular among poor Latinos because they didn’t have access to health care. But they say the field is gaining traction among those who seek to use alternative medicine.
“I believe people are disenchanted with our health system,” Torres said. “Some people can’t afford it now, and they are looking for other ways to empower themselves to heal.”
The textbook gives a survey of medicinal plants used to help digestive systems and how healers draw in laugh therapy to cope with traumatic experiences.
Ricardo Carrillo, a licensed psychologist and a healer based in Oakland, California, said he’s seeing younger people look to curanderismo to help with challenges like addiction and physical pain.
“Yes, you have to go through detox and do all that you are supposed to do to get yourself clean,” said Carrillo, who came to the Albuquerque workshop to speak. “Curanderismo can give you the spiritual tools to keep yourself clean and look to a higher power.”
Among the ailments curanderos treat are mal de ojo, or evil eye, and susto, magical fright.
Mal de ojo is the belief that an admiring look or a stare can weaken someone, mainly a child, leading to bad luck, even death.
Susto is a folk illness linked to a frightful experience, such as an automobile accident or tripping over an unseen object. Those who believe they are inflicted with susto say only a curandero can cure them.
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Ready-to-cook Meals from Amazon in Bid to Expand Groceries
Amazon has begun selling ready-to-cook meal packages for busy households in a bid to expand its groceries business.
Amazon-branded meal kits come with raw ingredients needed to prepare such meals as chicken tikka masala and falafel patties. They can help households save time; a kit for salmon with soba noodles can be prepared in just a half-hour, for instance. But at $16 to $20 for two servings, they can be more expensive than buying ingredients separately in larger quantities.
The development comes as Amazon is also buying the organic grocer Whole Foods for $13.7 billion, a deal that would give the company a foothold in both groceries and brick-and-mortar retailing. Amazon could ultimately use Whole Foods’ more than 400 locations as distribution centers for all food services, including meal kits.
For now, Amazon’s meal kits are sold only in selected markets. The Associated Press was able to place an order in Seattle, Amazon’s headquarters. A similar search for meal kits in New York generated items only from third-party vendors such as Martha & Marley Spoon and Tyson Tastemakers.
Amazon didn’t respond to requests for additional information.
Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, said meal kits fall between regular groceries and deliveries of fully cooked meals and represent Amazon’s bid to expand its food business.
“I’m not sure any of this will work, but that’s where they are headed,” Pachter said in an email.
The food industry consulting firm Pentallect says meal kits represent a “rounding error” of $2.2 billion in a $1.5 trillion U.S. food industry, but the firm forecasts growth of 25 percent to 30 percent a year over the next five years. Pentallect says that because relatively few households have yet to try meal kits, there’s a lot of room for growth.
Amazon meal kits are available only through the AmazonFresh grocery-delivery program, which costs $15 a month and requires a separate $99-a-year Prime membership. Delivery costs an additional $10 on orders of $40 or less, though free pickup options are available in Seattle.
Sales appeared to have begun in late June, based on customer reviews.
Earlier this month, Amazon.com applied for U.S. trademark protection for the phrase “We do the prep. You be the chef.” for packaged food kits “ready for cooking and assembly as a meal.” Amazon listed a range of food types, including meat, seafood, salads and soups.
Shares of a leading competitor, Blue Apron, fell nearly 14 percent to $6.36 this week as reports of Amazon’s plans emerged at GeekWire and other news sites. That includes a 3.5 percent drop on Tuesday. Amazon’s stock increased $14.41, or 1.4 percent, to close Tuesday at $1024.45.
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House Budget Blueprint Key to Success of Trump Tax Agenda
Despite opposition from Republican moderates and conservatives, House leaders are pressing ahead with a budget plan whose success is critical to the party’s hopes to deliver on one of President Donald Trump’s top priorities — a GOP-only effort to overhaul the tax code.
The importance of the measure has been magnified by the cratering in the Senate of the Trump-backed effort to overhaul President Barack Obama’s health care law, leaving a rewrite of the tax code as the best chance for Trump to score a major legislative win this year. The measure would require about $200 billion worth of cuts to benefit programs and other so-called mandatory spending coupled with the tax plan.
The budget plan unveiled Tuesday is crucial because its passage would pave the way to pass a tax overhaul this fall without the fear of a filibuster by Senate Democrats.
But it also proposes trillions of dollars in cuts to the social safety net and other domestic programs and puts congressional Republicans at odds with Trump over cutting Medicare. It also would sharply boost military spending.
“In past years, the budget has only been a vision. But now, with the Republican Congress and a Republican White House, this budget is a plan for action,” said Budget Committee Chair Diane Black, a Republican from Tennessee. “Now is our moment to achieve real results.”
Unclear, however, is whether GOP leaders can get the budget measure through the House. Conservatives want a larger package of spending cuts to accompany this fall’s tax overhaul bill, while moderates are concerned cuts to programs such as food stamps could go too far.
“I just think that if you’re dealing with too many mandatory cuts while you’re dealing with tax reform you make tax reform that much harder to enact,” said Representative Charlie Dent, a Republican from Pennsylvania.
Black announced a committee vote for Wednesday, but was less confident of a vote by the entire House next week; a delay seems likely because of the ongoing quarrel between the GOP’s factions.
The House GOP plan proposes to turn Medicare into a voucher-like program in which future retirees would receive a fixed benefit to purchase health insurance on the open market. Republicans have proposed the idea each year since taking back the House in 2011, but they’ve never tried to implement it — and that’s not going to change now, even with a Republican as president.
“Republicans would destroy the Medicare guarantee for our seniors and inflict bone-deep cuts to Medicaid that would devastate veterans, seniors with long-term care needs, and rural communities,” said Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California.
The plan promises to balance the budget through unprecedented cuts across the budget. It calls for turning this year’s projected $700 billion-or-so deficit into a $9 billion surplus by 2027. It would do so by cutting $5.4 trillion over the coming decade, including almost $500 billion from Medicare and $1.5 trillion from Medicaid and the Obama health law, along with sweeping cuts to benefits such as federal employee pensions, food stamps and tax credits for the working poor.
But in the immediate future, the GOP measure is a budget buster. It would add almost $30 billion to Trump’s $668 billion request for national defense. The GOP budget plan would cut non-defense agencies by $5 billion. And of the more than $4 trillion in promised saving from mandatory programs like Medicare and Medicaid, the plan assumes just $203 billion would actually pass this year.
Democrats focused their fire on the plan’s sweeping promises to cut from almost every corner of the budget other than Social Security, defense and veterans programs.
Top Budget Committee Democrat John Yarmuth of Kentucky told reporters the GOP “utilizes a lot of gimmicks and vagueness to reach some semblance of theoretical balance and also hides a lot of the draconian cuts would be inflicted on the American people.”
All told, the GOP plan would spend about $67 billion more in the upcoming annual appropriations bills than would be allowed under spending limits set by a 2011 budget and debt agreement. It pads war accounts by $10 billion. And, like Trump’s budget, the House GOP plan assumes rosy economic projections that would erase another $1.5 trillion from the deficit over 10 years.
The budget resolution is nonbinding. It would allow Republicans controlling Congress to pass follow-up legislation through the Senate without the threat of a filibuster by Democrats. GOP leaders and the White House plan to use that measure to rewrite the tax code.
As proposed by House leaders, tax reform would essentially be deficit-neutral, which means cuts to tax rates would be mostly “paid for” by closing various tax breaks such as the deduction for state and local taxes. However, the GOP plan would devote $300 billion claimed from economic growth to the tax reform effort.
But conservatives are insisting on adding cuts to so-called mandatory programs, which make up more than two-thirds of the federal budget and basically run on autopilot.
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Story of Afghan Girls’ Team Just One of Many at Robotics Event
An international robotics competition in Washington was in its final day Tuesday, with teams of teenagers from more than 150 nations competing. The team getting the most attention at the FIRST Global Robotics Challenge was a squad of girls from Afghanistan who were twice rejected for U.S. visas before President Donald Trump intervened. But there are even more stories than there are teams. Here are a few:
Girl power
Sixty percent of the teams participating in the competition were founded, led or organized by women. Of the 830 teens participating, 209 were girls. And in addition to the Afghan squad, there were five other all-girl teams, from the United States, Ghana, Jordan, the Palestinian territories and the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. Vanuatu’s nickname: the “SMART Sistas.”
Samira Bader, 16, on the Jordanian team, said “it’s very difficult for us because everyone thinks” building robots is “only for boys.” She said her team wanted to prove that “girls can do it.”
The three-girl U.S. team included sisters Colleen and Katie Johnson of Everett, Washington, and Sanjna Ravichandar of Plainsboro, New Jersey.
Colleen Johnson, 16, said her team looked forward “to a day when an all-girls team is going to be no more special than an all-boys team or a co-ed team, just when that’s completely normal and accepted.”
The team competing from Brunei was also all female, though a male member previously worked on the project.
An unusual alliance
The United States and Russia were on the same side Tuesday. During the fourth round of the competition, the U.S. team was paired with teams from Russia and Sudan to work as an alliance.
The robots all the teams in the competition created were designed with the same kit of parts and did the same task: pick up and distinguish between blue and orange balls. To score points, teams deposited the blue balls, which represented water, and the orange balls, which represented contaminants, into different locations. Each three-nation alliance competed head to head in 2½-minute games.
Both U.S. and Russian teams paid their counterparts compliments after their game Tuesday. Russian team member Aleksandr Iliasov said of the U.S. team: “They cooperate well.” And U.S. team member Colleen Johnson called the Russian team’s robot “very innovative,” saying they had smartly used extra wheels and gears and zip ties to keep balls inside their robot.
Despite their good collaboration, U.S.-Russia-Sudan fell short, losing 40 to 20 to Zimbabwe, Moldova and Trinidad and Tobago.
A little help
The team from Iran got some help building their robot from American students. It turns out that the competition’s kit of robot parts, including wheels, brackets, sprockets, gears, pulleys and belts, was not approved for shipment to Iran because of sanctions involving technology exports to the country. So the competition recruited a robotics team at George C. Marshall High School in Falls Church, Virginia, to help. Iran’s team designed the robot, and about five Marshall students built it in the United States.
The team explained on its competition web page that “our friends in Washington made our ideas as a robot.”
Because of the time difference between the countries, the three-member team and its mentor were sometimes up at midnight or 3 a.m. in Iran to talk to their collaborators.
Amin Dadkhah, 15, called working with the American students “a good and exciting experience for both of us.” Kirianna Baker, one of the U.S. students who built the robot, agreed. “Having a team across the world with a fresh set of eyes is very valuable,” she said.
A robot refugee
A group of three refugees from Syria competed as Team Refugee, also known as Team Hope. All three fled Syria to Lebanon three years ago because of violence in their country.
Mohamad Nabih Alkhateeb, Amar Kabour and Mahir Alisawaui named their robot “Robogee,” a combination of the words “robot” and “refugee.”
Alkhateeb, 17, and Kabour, 16, said they wanted to be robotics engineers, and Alisawui wanted to be a computer engineer. Kabour said it’s important to the team to win, to “tell the world” refugees are “here and they can do it.”
Alkhateeb also said that living as a refugee had been difficult, but he hoped to someday return home.
“I will go back after I have finished my education so I can rebuild Syria again,” he said.
Eleven million people — half the Syrian population — have been forced from their homes by the civil war.
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Mexico Economy Minister Queries US Talk on Cutting NAFTA Trade Deficits
Mexico’s economy minister on Tuesday expressed concern that the United States was insisting on reducing trade deficits in objectives it set out for the renegotiation of the NAFTA trade deal, a document he nevertheless said contained “no surprises.”
Speaking on Mexican television, Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo also raised questions about U.S. hopes to scrap the North American Free Trade Agreement’s Chapter 19 dispute settlement mechanism that hinders the United States in pursuing anti-dumping and anti-subsidy cases against Mexico and Canada.
Talking by telephone from Japan, Guajardo likened the U.S. desire to cut trade deficits with its NAFTA partners Mexico and Canada to a “mercantilist” vision of international trade.
“What I have said insistently in my conversations with my colleagues is that we’re delighted to review trade balances provided that we focus on how to improve them by expanding commerce, not by reducing it,” he said.
U.S. President Donald Trump has pushed for a renegotiation of NAFTA, threatening to dump it if he cannot rework the accord to the benefit of the United States. He argues it has fueled a trade deficit with Mexico and cost thousands of U.S. jobs.
Guajardo said the document sent by U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to lawmakers on Monday contained “no surprises,” and he explicitly welcomed parts of it, including plans to enshrine anti-corruption provisions in NAFTA.
“What is positive is that [the United States] themselves paraphrased that they won’t reintroduce quotas or tariffs during this process [of renegotiation],” he added.
Aside from his concern over Chapter 19, Guajardo also expressed doubts about the United States’ intention to get rid of NAFTA’s so-called “global safeguard exclusion” that curbs Washington’s ability to impose measures on others.
“This will all have to be subject to the three sides being in agreement in the process,” he said.
One Mexican official told Reuters on Monday he expected the Canadian government to fight to the “death” on Chapter 19, suggesting it could become a major bone of contention in negotiations due to begin next month.
Both Mexico and the United States face important elections in 2018 which could complicate the NAFTA revamp, and Guajardo has said it would be in the interests of both nations to wrap up the three-way talks by the end of this year.
However, there was no guarantee the process would be finished as quickly as they would like, Guajardo said.
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Afghan All-girls Robotics Team Impressed by ‘Friendly’ US
It took an intervention from U.S. President Donald Trump and other officials to allow the girls of the Afghan robotics team to receive visas after two rejections, letting them travel to the United States for a robotics competition.
One of the biggest surprises once in Washington? The tight security.
“The security that we see here is not in Herat, Afghanistan,” Kawsar Roshan, a 13-year-old member of the high-profile team, told VOA during the last day of their competition at FIRST Global Challenge, where teenagers from around the world demonstrate their skills in designing, building and programming robotic devices.
“This is a peaceful city. People are not fighting each other, and it is a friendly environment,” said Afghan player Fatima Qaderian.
Her homeland has been entangled in almost ceaseless cycles of war and violence for more than 35 years. The United Nations reported Monday that more than 1,660 civilians, many of them women and children, were killed in the war between January and June 2017.
The all-girls Afghan team made it to Washington only a day before the games were launched. Their initial visa applications had been refused by the U.S. embassy in Kabul, but they were granted entry to the country after a request by Trump, U.S. officials said.
On Tuesday, Trump’s eldest daughter and senior adviser, Ivanka Trump, paid a special visit to the team and their sponsors. She had previously tweeted that she was looking forward to welcoming them.
The annual international robotics event aims to build bridges between high school students with different backgrounds, languages, religions and customs, and to ignite in them a passion for the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Afghan team member Lida Azizi said she learned “unity and teamwork” at the robotics games.
This year’s competition was related to a practical problem that threatens more than a billion people worldwide: inadequate access to clean, drinkable water.
The task of the robots was to pick up and distinguish between blue and orange balls. To score points, teams deposit the blue balls, which represent water, and the orange balls, which represent pollutants, into different locations. The teams play in groups of three nations, with two groups competing head to head. The three-robot alliance that scores the most points in a game wins.
Some information in this report was provided by the Associated Press.
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Silicon Valley Mostly Quiet in Internet Surveillance Debate in Congress
Facebook, Alphabet’s Google, Apple and other major technology firms are largely absent from a debate over the renewal of a broad U.S. internet surveillance law, weakening prospects for privacy reforms that would further protect customer data, according to sources familiar with the matter.
While tech companies often lobby Washington on privacy issues, the major firms have been hesitant to enter a fray over a controversial portion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), industry lobbyists, congressional aides and civil liberties advocates said.
Among their concerns is that doing so could jeopardize a trans-Atlantic data transfer pact underpinning billions of dollars in trade in digital services, the sources said.
Technology companies and privacy groups have for years complained about the part of FISA known as Section 702 that allows the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) to collect and analyze emails and other digital communications of foreigners living overseas. Though targeted at foreigners, the surveillance also collects data on an unknown number of Americans — some privacy advocates have suggested it could be millions — without a search warrant.
Section 702 expires at end of year
Section 702 will expire at the end of the year unless the Republican-controlled Congress votes to reauthorize it. The White House, U.S. intelligence agencies and many Republican senators want to renew the law, which they consider vital to national security, without changes and make it permanent.
A coalition of Democrats and libertarian-leaning conservatives prefer, however, to amend the law with more privacy safeguards.
Reform Government Surveillance, a coalition of tech firms established after the 2013 leaks by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, said reforming the law remains a priority. A spokeswoman declined to comment further but referred to two letters sent earlier this year by technology companies urging Congress to consider changes to the law.
Snowden exposed the spy agency’s program that collected U.S. phone call metadata in bulk and also the extent of spying under Section 702, embarrassing some U.S. technology firms.
Bulk collection curtailed
The companies, working with privacy rights activists, successfully lobbied Congress two years ago to pass legislation that curtailed the NSA’s bulk collection of call records. For example, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page that he had personally called then-President Barack Obama to express “frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future.”
Now, however, Silicon Valley’s reduced involvement frustrates civil liberties groups because of a widely held view that Section 702 poses a far greater threat to privacy than the telephone program, which did not harvest actual content.
Facebook declined comment. Google and Apple did not respond to requests for comment.
Privacy shield agreement
The companies’ relative inactivity is explained by several legal challenges in Europe to an agreement between the United States and the European Union, known as the Privacy Shield, the sources said. The litigation hinges on whether U.S. surveillance practices afford enough privacy safeguards. A coalition of human rights organizations has urged Europe to suspend Privacy Shield unless Section 702 is substantially reformed.
U.S. technology companies have privately bristled at those efforts, three industry lobbyists, in part because expectations that 702 reforms will pass Congress are low.
“If you link them and you lose one, you lose both,” said one of the lobbyists, who like the others requested anonymity to discuss private conversations with technology companies.
The lobbyist added that several major firms were more interested in making deals with the Trump administration that could affect their bottom lines, such as tax repatriation, than getting caught in politically charged fights over government surveillance.
Another industry lobbyist said Section 702 surveillance is “not a C-suite issue” that concerns chief executives in Silicon Valley like other issues, including encryption.
Lobbying is limited
Companies have also been limited in how they can lobby for changes to the law because no comprehensive reform bill has been introduced yet in Congress, said Alex Abdo, a privacy advocate and staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
A bipartisan group of lawmakers in the House Judiciary Committee is not expected to introduce such legislation until after Congress returns from its August recess.
The schism between tech companies and privacy groups was on display earlier this year in litigation in Ireland — Facebook argued customer data was sufficiently protected from U.S. spying programs, while an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union testified that more protections were needed.
‘Backdoor search loophole’
Snowden’s leaks showed that Section 702 collects content of digital communications directly from the internet backbone and through a program formerly code named Prism where the NSA gathered data directly from several companies, including Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft.
The statute also allows the FBI and others to query pools of data collection for U.S. information in what critics have derided as a “backdoor search loophole” that evades traditional warrant requirements.
The tech industry may become more engaged once the public debate becomes clearer, Abdo said. He added that a stronger position “would be enormously helpful to those that want to impose meaningful constraint on NSA surveillance.”
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Kenny, Dolly Announce Final Performance Together
Two of country music’s biggest stars, Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton, whose onstage chemistry spawned hit duets like “Islands in the Stream” and “Real Love,” will be making their final performance together this year.
Rogers, who is retiring from touring, says his final performance with Parton will be part of an all-star farewell show to be held at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena on October 25. The two have been performing together for more than 30 years since “Islands in the Stream,” written by the Bee Gees, became a pop crossover platinum hit in 1983.
Other performers for the farewell show are Little Big Town, Flaming Lips, Idina Menzel, Elle King, Jamey Johnson and Alison Krauss, with more names to be announced. Rogers made the announcement Tuesday at a press conference in Nashville. Tickets for the show will go on sale July 21.
Rogers, 78, said it’s been more than a decade since he performed with Parton for a CMT special.
“I think we owe it to her to let her go on with her career, but we owe it to me to do it one more time, and we’re going to do that,” Rogers said after the press conference.
In his 60-year career, Rogers has had several successful duet partners, including Dottie West, Kim Carnes, Sheena Easton and Linda Davis, but Parton’s star power made their collaborations a tour de force.
“We can go three years without talking to each other and when we get together, it’s like we were together yesterday,” Rogers said. “We both feel that comfort.”
“Performing with Kenny for the last time ever on October 25th is going to be emotional for both of us, but it’s also going to be very special,” Parton said in a statement. “Even though Kenny may be retiring, as he fades from the stage, our love for each other will never fade away.”
The actor, singer and photographer with hits like “The Gambler,” “Lady” and “Lucille,” announced in 2015 he would do a final farewell tour before retiring to spend more time with his family.
Rogers said he and Parton would definitely sing “Islands in the Stream,” but beyond that, he wasn’t sure yet.
“Whether we do something else, I don’t know,” Rogers said. “That would require a rehearsal and I don’t know that Dolly or I, either one, are up for that.”
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Boston Launches Poster Campaign to Combat Islamophobia
Boston has launched a new public service campaign to fight Islamophobia by offering the public ways to address aggression toward others because of their appearance or beliefs.
The campaign launched Monday involves 50 posters that provide a step-by-step guide to handling when someone is being harassed. They will be posted on bus stop benches and other public places around the city.
Titled “What to do if you are witnessing Islamophobic harassment,” the posters encourage people to engage with the person who is being targeted and to draw attention away from the harasser. The technique is called “non-complementary behavior,” and is intended to disempower an aggressive person by countering their expectations.
“These posters are one tool we have to send the message that all are welcome in Boston,” Mayor Marty Walsh said. “Education is key to fighting intolerance, and these posters share a simple strategy for engaging with those around you.”
The city’s Islamic community lauded the campaign.
“We encourage all of our fellow Bostonians to apply the approach in these posters to anyone targeted — whether Muslim, Latino or otherwise,” said Suzan El-Rayess, civic engagement director at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center.
San Francisco has a similar campaign. Thea Colman, whose sister had worked with San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit to have posters installed throughout that system, approached Walsh’s office.
The posters, designed by French artist Maeril, will stay up for six months.
Spanish Soccer Executive, Son Arrested in Corruption Probe
The executive who oversaw Spain’s rise to dominate world soccer in recent years was arrested Tuesday in an anti-corruption investigation, dealing yet another blow to the sport’s already-tarnished image.
Angel Maria Villar, his son, Gorka Villar, and two other soccer officials were detained while raids were conducted at the federation headquarters and other properties, the state prosecutor and Spanish police said.
The elder Villar, who has led the Spanish Football Federation for three decades and is the senior vice president of FIFA and a vice president for the European football organization, is suspected of having arranged matches for Spain that led to business deals benefiting his son, said the office of the state prosecutor in charge of anti-corruption.
Angel Maria Villar is a longtime power broker in football both inside and beyond Spain’s borders, and he was singled out for questionable conduct in the 2014 FIFA report on the World Cup bidding process that rocked the sport.
A 2015 U.S. investigation into corruption in world soccer led to the eventual resignation of longtime president Sepp Blatter and other top officials.
Several hours after Tuesday’s arrests, police escorted Villar into the federation offices in Las Rozas, on the outskirts of Madrid. He emerged from a Guardia Civil vehicle flanked by two uniformed agents. Two policemen guarded the entrance to the federation offices near the training grounds for Spain’s national teams.
Also arrested were Juan Padron, the federation’s vice president of economic affairs who is also president of the regional federation for Tenerife, and Ramon Hernandez, the secretary of that regional federation.
The four were arrested on charges of improper management, misappropriation of funds, corruption and falsifying documents as part of an inquiry into the finances of the federations.
“We have taken note of the media reports concerning the situation of Mr. Villar Llona,” FIFA said in a statement. “As the matter seems to be linked to internal affairs of the Spanish Football Association, for the time being we kindly refer you to them for further details.”
As part of an operation called “Soule,” the Guardia Civil said it raided the national federation’s headquarters, the offices of the regional soccer federation on the island of Tenerife and “headquarters of businesses and several private homes linked to the arrested individuals.”
Police began the investigation in early 2016 after a complaint from Spain’s Higher Council of Sport, the government’s sports authority.
The probe led the state prosecutor’s office to suspect that Angel Maria Villar “could have arranged matches of the Spanish national team with other national teams, thereby gaining in return contracts for services and other business ventures in benefit of his son.”
Unregulated by FIFA, friendly matches between national teams can be more easily corrupted. Scandals in recent years involving FIFA were tied to the siphoning of cash from deals struck for friendly matches, often held in North and South America.
Gorka Villar, a lawyer, worked in recent years for the South American body CONMEBOL as legal director and then as the CEO-like director general for three presidents who were implicated in the U.S. investigation. Gorka Villar left CONMEBOL in July 2016.
The prosecutor’s office said it also suspects that Padron and the Tenerife secretary “favored the contracting of business” for their personal benefit.
Inigo Mendez de Vigo, minister of education, culture and sport, told national television after the raids that “in Spain the laws are enforced, the laws are the same for all, and nobody, nobody is above the law.”
Calls by The Associated Press to the Spanish and Tenerife federations went unanswered.
UEFA said in a statement it was aware of the reports regarding Villar, but “we have no comment to make at this time.” The Higher Council of Sport said it will “use everything in its means to ensure that competitions are not affected” by the arrests.
In the wake of the arrests, the Royal Spanish Federation of Football postponed meetings to draw the Spanish football league schedule.
A former professional player, the 67-year-old Villar has been the head of Spain’s soccer federation since 1988, overseeing the national team’s victories in the 2010 World Cup and the 2008 and 2012 European Championships.
Villar won an eighth term as president in May, running unopposed after another candidate, Jorge Perez, withdrew to protest what he called irregularities in the election of the federation’s general assembly.
He has been at the heart of FIFA and UEFA politics since the 1990s, and has worked closely with several international soccer leaders who have since been indicted by the U.S. Justice Department.
Villar was a tough midfielder for Athletic Bilbao and Spain before retiring to work as a lawyer and soccer administrator. He was elected to the UEFA executive committee 25 years ago, and to FIFA’s ruling committee 19 years ago. He has also been an influential figure in the legal and referees committees of both organizations.
He led the Spain-Portugal bids for the 2018 and 2022 World Cup competitions. In 2010, FIFA’s ethics committee investigated an alleged voting pact involving South American countries. Russia won the bid for 2018 and Qatar won for 2022.
His conduct in a wider 2014 probe of the bids was singled out in a 2014 report by then-FIFA ethics prosecutor Michael Garcia.
“He [Villar] was not willing to discuss the facts and circumstances of the case,” Garcia wrote in the report, published last month. “Moreover, his tone and manner were deeply disturbing, as the audio recording of the interview … makes evident.”
Increasingly seen as a polarizing figure, Villar decided against trying to succeed Michel Platini as UEFA president last year.
Before joining CONMEBOL, Gorka Villar was a prominent sports lawyer in Madrid. He helped represent cyclist Alberto Contador in a failed appeal at the Court of Arbitration for Sport of a positive doping test that cost him the 2010 Tour de France title.
The arrests are the latest step by Spain to crack down on financial wrongdoing in soccer. Last year, Barcelona forward Lionel Messi and his father were found guilty of tax fraud. In recent weeks, prosecutors have opened tax fraud investigations into several others, including Real Madrid forward Cristiano Ronaldo and former Madrid coach Jose Mourinho. Both Ronaldo and Mourinho deny cheating on their taxes.
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War-torn South Sudan at Grave Risk on Climate Change
“I’m addicted to cutting trees,” says Taban Ceasor.
His stained hands sift through jagged pieces of charcoal in his busy shop in South Sudan’s capital. But the 29-year-old logger says the number of trees needed to fuel his trade is falling sharply as the country’s forest cover disappears.
The world’s youngest nation is well into its fourth year of civil war. As South Sudan is ravaged by fighting and hunger, it also grapples with the devastating effects of climate change. Officials say the conflict is partly to blame.
South Sudan’s first-ever climate change conference in June highlighted a problem for much of sub-Saharan Africa: The impoverished nations face some of the world’s harshest impacts from global warming and are the least equipped to fight back.
The United States’ recent withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement hurts a huge potential source of assistance. The U.S. Embassy in South Sudan said it “does not currently support climate change efforts” in the country.
The United Nations says South Sudan is at grave risk at being left behind.
According to the Climate Change Vulnerability Index 2017 compiled by global risk consultancy Verisk Maplecroft, South Sudan is ranked among the world’s five most vulnerable countries and is experiencing some of the most acute temperature changes.
“It’s rising 2.5 times quicker” than the global average, says Jean-Luc Stalon, senior deputy country director at the U.N. Development Program.
Both U.N. and government officials call it a partially man-made crisis. While up to 95 percent of South Sudan’s population is dependent on “climate-sensitive activities for their livelihoods” such as agriculture and forestry, the civil war is worsening the problem.
The rate of deforestation in South Sudan is alarming and if it continues, in 50 to 60 years there will be nothing left, says Arshad Khan, country manager for the U.N. Environment Program. The lack of trees is directly contributing to the rise in temperatures.
Tree-cutting is especially lucrative in South Sudan because there’s no central power grid to supply electricity. A reported 11 million people use charcoal for cooking, or almost the entire population.
“This makes me more money than any other business,” says Ceasor, the Juba vendor, who says he could barely survive before turning to tree-cutting.
Thirty-five percent of the country’s land was once covered with trees, and only 11 percent is now, according to the ministry of environment and agriculture.
“Desperate people are destroying the environment,” says Lutana Musa, South Sudan’s director for climate change.
Countries across Africa are struggling to cope with a warmer world. Although the continent produces less than 4 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases, the UNDP says climate stresses and a limited capacity to adapt are increasing Africa’s vulnerability to climate change.
In South Sudan, the deforestation is compounded by an increase in illegal exports of wood and charcoal by foreign companies.
“People are taking advantage of the insecurity,” says Joseph Africano Bartel, South Sudan’s deputy environment minister. He says that due to the conflict there’s no supervision at the country’s borders, even though South Sudan has banned the export of charcoal.
South Sudan is rich in mahogany and teak, both of which are in high demand especially in Arab nations, Bartel says. He says South Sudanese tree-cutters are hired by companies primarily from Sudan, Libya and Lebanon that smuggle the coal and wood out through neighboring Uganda.
In an abandoned charcoal warehouse in Juba, 50 tons of coal sits stacked in bags. Arabic writing scribbled on the front of each sack reads: “Made in South Sudan.”
“I’ve seen bags that say ‘Destination Dubai’,” Charlie Oyul, a lead investigator with the environment ministry, told The Associated Press.
A few weeks ago, Oyul’s team impounded the warehouse and arrested the company’s owner and his assistant, who Oyul said were working for a Sudanese contractor. But Kamal Adam, a South Sudanese company official who is out on bail, says they sell charcoal only to locals.
The company is one of five illegal operations known to authorities in Juba and the surrounding area, and it’s the only one to be shut down. As much as South Sudan’s authorities try to stem the illegal exports of charcoal and wood, Oyul says he can’t keep up.
During a recent visit by The Associated Press to the impounded warehouse, roughly 10 trucks carrying piles of wood and charcoal were seen swiftly driving by.
At its climate change conference last month, South Sudan reaffirmed its commitment to the Paris climate agreement and criticized the U.S. withdrawal under President Donald Trump.
“Trump thinks climate change isn’t a reality,” says Lutana, South Sudan’s climate change director. “He should know that his pulling out won’t stop people from continuing to work on it.”
Sitting alone at his empty desk in a dimly lit, run-down office at the environment ministry, Lutana says that although South Sudan has several proposed projects to fight climate change, he doesn’t expect action any time soon as the civil war continues.
The UNEP is working with South Sudan’s government to appeal for $9 million to set up an early warning system for the weather and train government officials on climate change. But donors are showing concern because of growing insecurity, and officials say the project won’t move forward without peace.
“Because of our situation, the environment just isn’t a priority,” Lutana says.
Small US Towns Brace for Rare Solar Eclipse, and Crowds
Hyrum Johnson, mayor of the tiny city of Driggs, Idaho, expects some craziness in his one-stoplight town next month when the moon passes in front of the sun for the first total solar eclipse in the lower 48 U.S. states since 1979.
The town of 1,600 people in Teton County, just west of the jagged peaks of the Rocky Mountains Teton Range, is getting poised to receive as many as 100,000 visitors on Aug. 21 for the celestial event, said Johnson, who was both excited and worried.
Driggs is one of hundreds of towns and cities along a 70-mile arc, stretching from Oregon to South Carolina, that are in the direct path of the moon’s shadow. The full eclipse and the sun’s corona around the disk of the moon will be visible for a little more than two minutes only to those within this narrow band.
Driggs and other towns like it are scrambling to prepare for the onslaught of curious visitors.
“We expect gridlock,” Johnson, 46, said as he drove his pickup truck through town.
Tucked amid seed potato and quinoa farms, Driggs normally enjoys a more languid pace of life, with highlights including $5 lime shakes sold on balmy summer days at the corner drug store.
But with the impending eclipse, planning has kicked into high gear.
To make sure nothing more than the roads will be clogged, Johnson took shipment this month of two massive generators that can be deployed at key spots along the city’s sewage system to keep it flowing in case of a power outage.
“We are telling our residents to hunker down,” Johnson said.
And while Johnson would have preferred to have taken his family backpacking during the time of the eclipse, he’s planning to stay in town in case anything goes wrong.
‘All hands on deck’
Over on the east side of the Teton Range, authorities are preparing for the day “kind of like a fire,” said Denise Germann, a public information officer at Grand Teton National Park. Estimating crowds is nearly impossible, she said, but “it is an ‘all hands on deck’ event.”
The 480-square-mile park’s campsites are completely booked, and it expects visitors to pour in from all over, including the bigger Yellowstone National Park, just north of the path of totality. Grand Teton will waive its $30 entry fee to keep traffic from backing up.
Many of the park’s 465 summer staff will be posted at trailheads and along roads to warn visitors to brace themselves for failed cellphone service, jammed roads and scarce parking, and to urge them to carry plenty of food and water, as well as bear spray to ward off wildlife.
In nearby Moose, Huntley Dornan said the county had warned business owners like him to expect four times the usual number of customers in the days leading up to the eclipse.
“I find that hard to believe, but I’m not going to be the guy who has his head in the sand and didn’t plan for it,” said Dornan, who runs a restaurant, deli, gas station and wine shop, the last place to get supplies before entering the park from the south.
Dornan plans to park a 48-foot refrigerated trailer stocked with a couple of thousand pounds of pizza cheese, 150 pounds of ground buffalo meat, a few hundred tomatoes, and gallons of ice cream, among other provisions for the expected hordes of tourists.
On eclipse day, only people who paid as much as $100 each to attend his viewing parties will be allowed access to the narrow road on his property that offers a clear view. Security will keep others out.
About 14 miles down the highway, in Jackson, Wyoming, Bobbie Reppa expects the family business to be flush with demand. She and her husband run Macy’s Services, the only purveyor of portable toilets for miles. The 50 she normally has on hand simply aren’t enough.
“We’ll be bringing them in from as far as Ogden, Utah,” she said.
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Trump Touts ‘Made in America Week’
The Trump Administration has launched “Made In America Week” to highlight the importance of U.S. manufacturing and tout its policies to bring more such jobs back home from overseas. But as VOA White House Bureau Chief Steve Herman reports, many Trump family products are made in foreign factories, leading to criticism of the president’s trade campaign.
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Hyperloop Technology Takes One Small Step Forward
Engineers at Hyperloop recently took a significant step toward proving their new vacuum-tube-based transportation system may in fact be the future… and not just hype. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Trump Declares ‘Hard Part Now is Done’ to Bring Jobs Back to America
President Donald Trump inspected products brought to the White House on Monday from all 50 U.S. states to launch his “Made In America Week.”
On display from the easternmost state of Maine was a yacht. From the distant shores of Hawaii, more than 7,500 kilometers from the nation’s capital, there was a bottle of rum.
Even Marine One, the presidential helicopter, was turned into an expensive prop to tout Connecticut manufacturing.
The president hopped into a Wisconsin firetruck.
“Where’s the fire? I’ll put it out,” he asked as Vice President Mike Pence looked on and press secretary Sean Spicer snapped photos.
Highlighting US manufacturing prowess
Minutes later, Trump signed a proclamation declaring July 17 as Made in America Day, saying the “hard part now is done,” because his administration has removed regulatory barriers.
“For decades Washington has allowed other nations to wipe out millions of American jobs through unfair trade practices,” said the president to representatives of the featured businesses from 50 states. “Wait ‘till you see what is up for you. You are going to be so happy.”
The latest weekly-themed campaign of the six-month-old Trump administration (and there are more to come in the next few weeks) is meant to highlight the importance of U.S. manufacturing and tout its policies to bring more such jobs back from overseas.
Amid the continuing pursuit of health care legislation and the growing investigations into links between the Trump campaign and Russia, another themed week should have come as a welcome and positive distraction.
Monday’s launch, however, was somewhat overshadowed by the fact that many, if not most, of the Trump family business products are made in foreign factories.
Steel and aluminum to build some of the most recent Trump hotels in the U.S. came from China. Much of the merchandise sold in those hotels, as well as the president’s private golf courses, are of foreign origin.
What about Trump products?
The Democratic National Committee calls the domestic promotion campaign “the epitome of hypocrisy,” saying the president, instead of lecturing, should try setting an example.
“If you’re going to preach something, start at home, start at home,” said Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Party’s leader in the Senate. “Trump shirts and ties: where are they made? China. Trump furniture: where is it made? Turkey.”
The clothing line carrying daughter Ivanka Trump’s name is also made overseas. That point was repeatedly raised by reporters at Monday’s off-camera White House press briefing.
“Some products may not have the scalability or the demand here in this country,” acknowledged Spicer. “But like so many other things, if that demand – if there is enough of demand then hopefully somebody builds a factory and does it.”
Globalization makes ‘Made in…’ obsolete
Trade analysts say it is not that simple, because we are now in an interconnected global economy.
“The factory floor has broken through its walls and now spans borders and oceans,” said Daniel Ikenson, who directs trade policy studies at a libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute. “So things, a final good on an American retail store shelf, tends to have components, value-added, in five, six, 10 countries.”
While internationalists acknowledge there is a problem with Americans displaced from their jobs by technological changes or trade treaties, “The way to address that is not to compel people to buy American. The way to address that is to get rid of the frictions in the labor market that will make it easier for people to adjust to the new conditions,” Ikenson told VOA.
White House policymakers are undeterred by such arguments, pursuing their protectionist agenda. It seeks to reverse decades of work by administrations of both parties – supported by major U.S. business groups — to promote international commerce and trade agreements.
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Netflix Still Piling Up Viewers — and Big Programming Bills
Netflix is pulling in new viewers and award nominations in droves, but the online video service still faces a long-term problem: Its acclaimed programming line-up is costing far more money than what subscribers pay for it.
That hasn’t been a big issue so far, thanks to investors’ willingness to accept scant profits in exchange for robust subscriber growth.
Netflix delivered on that front again Monday, announcing that it added 5.2 million subscribers in the second quarter covering April to June. That’s the largest increase ever during the period, which has always been the company’s slowest time of year.
Wall Street rewarded Netflix by driving up its stock by more than 10 percent to $178.30 in extended trading, putting the shares on track to hit a new high in Tuesday’s regular trading.
International Costs
The Los Gatos, California, company now has 104 million subscribers worldwide. For the first time in its history, most of those subscribers (slightly more than 52 million) are outside the U.S.
That milestone could further complicate Netflix’s cost issues, since the company will need to keep creating more shows that appeal to the unique interests of viewers in countries such as Japan, India and Indonesia.
“It is going to be imperative for them to have more locally produced content,” says CFRA Research analyst Tuna Amobi. “They can’t afford to pursue a ‘one-size-fits-all’ strategy.”
As part of its efforts to boost its profits, Netflix is becoming more aggressive about dumping shows that aren’t drawing enough viewers to justify their costs. In the second quarter, Netflix jettisoned both the high-concept science fiction show “Sense 8” and the musical drama “The Get Down.”
In a Monday letter to shareholders, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings made it clear that the company plans to exert more discipline in the future. “They are becoming more like any other Hollywood studio and paying more attention to the economics of their shows,” Amobi said.
Programming Coups
The subscriber growth further validates Netflix’s decision to expand into original programming five years ago. Two of its longest running shows — “House of Cards” and “Orange Is The New Black” — recently launched their latest seasons.
Those two series, along with new hits like “Master of None” and “13 Reasons Why,” helped Netflix easily surpass the average 1.8 million subscribers it has added in the second quarter over the past five years.
This fall, new seasons of two other hits, “Stranger Things” and “The Crown,” are due. Those two series accounted for about a third of the 91 Emmy nominations that 27 different Netflix programs received last week — more than any other TV network except its role model, HBO, which landed 111 nominations.
Cash Burn
But the success hasn’t come cheaply.
Netflix is locked into contracts requiring it to pay more than $13 billion for programming during the next three years, a burden that has forced the company to borrow to pay its bills.
After burning through $1.7 billion in cash last year, Netflix expects that figure to rise to as much as $2.5 billion this year. It’s continuing to invest in more original programming amid increasing competition from the likes of Amazon, Hulu and YouTube.
Netflix expects to be spending more money than it brings in for several more years. It posted a more detailed explanation about its negative cash flow to give investors a better grasp of its programming expenses.
The company is still profitable under corporate accounting rules, although its earnings remain puny by Wall Street standards. It earned $66 million on revenue of $2.8 billion in revenue during its latest quarter.
Funding international operations remains Netflix’s biggest financial drag, although the overseas losses are narrowing. The company now expects its international operation to produce a small operating profit for the full year.
Netflix also could make more money by raising its prices closer to the $15 per month that HBO charges for its streaming service, but the company has said no increases are planned in the near future. Netflix’s U.S. rates currently range from $8 to $12 per month.
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Hearing is Believing: Speech May be a Clue to Mental Decline
Your speech may, um, help reveal if you’re uh … developing thinking problems. More pauses, filler words and other verbal changes might be an early sign of mental decline, which can lead to Alzheimer’s disease, a study suggests.
Researchers had people describe a picture they were shown in taped sessions two years apart. Those with early-stage mild cognitive impairment slid much faster on certain verbal skills than those who didn’t develop thinking problems.
“What we’ve discovered here is there are aspects of language that are affected earlier than we thought,” before or at the same time that memory problems emerge, said one study leader, Sterling Johnson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
This was the largest study ever done of speech analysis for this purpose, and if more testing confirms its value, it might offer a simple, cheap way to help screen people for very early signs of mental decline.
Don’t panic: Lots of people say “um” and have trouble quickly recalling names as they age, and that doesn’t mean trouble is on the way.
“In normal aging, it’s something that may come back to you later and it’s not going to disrupt the whole conversation,” another study leader, Kimberly Mueller, explained. “The difference here is, it is more frequent in a short period,” interferes with communication and gets worse over time.
The study was discussed Monday at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in London.
About 47 million people worldwide have dementia, and Alzheimer’s is the most common type. In the U.S., about 5.5 million people have the disease. Current drugs can’t slow or reverse it, just ease symptoms. Doctors think treatment might need to start sooner to do any good, so there’s a push to find early signs.
Mild cognitive impairment causes changes that are noticeable to the person or others, but not enough to interfere with daily life. It doesn’t mean these folks will develop Alzheimer’s, but many do — 15 to 20 percent per year.
To see if speech analysis can find early signs, researchers first did the picture-description test on 400 people without cognitive problems and saw no change over time in verbal skills. Next, they tested 264 participants in the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer’s Prevention, a long-running study of people in their 50s and 60s, most of whom have a parent with Alzheimer’s and might be at higher risk for the disease themselves. Of those, 64 already had signs of early decline or developed it over the next two years, according to other neurological tests they took.
In the second round of tests , they declined faster on content (ideas they expressed) and fluency (the flow of speech and how many pauses and filler words they used.) They used more pronouns such as “it” or “they” instead of specific names for things, spoke in shorter sentences and took longer to convey what they had to say.
“Those are all indicators of struggling with that computational load that the brain has to conduct” and supports the role of this test to detect decline, said Julie Liss, a speech expert at Arizona State University with no role in the work.
She helped lead a study in 2015 that analyzed dozens of press conferences by former President Ronald Reagan and found evidence of speech changes more than a decade before he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She also co-founded a company that analyzes speech for many neurological problems, including dementia, traumatic brain injury and Parkinson’s disease.
Researchers could not estimate the cost of testing for a single patient, but for a doctor to offer it requires only a digital tape recorder and a computer program or app to analyze results.
Alan Sweet, 72, a retired state of Wisconsin worker who lives in Madison, is taking part in the study and had the speech test earlier this month. His father had Alzheimer’s and his mother had a different type of dementia, Lewy body.
“Watching my parents decline into the awful world of dementia and being responsible for their medical care was the best and worst experience of my life,” he said. “I want to help the researchers learn, furthering medical knowledge of treatment and ultimately, cure.”
Participants don’t get individual results — it just aids science.
Another study at the conference on Monday, led by doctoral student Taylor Fields, hints that hearing loss may be another clue to possible mental decline. It involved 783 people from the same Wisconsin registry project. Those who said at the start of the study that they had been diagnosed with hearing loss were more than twice as likely to develop mild cognitive impairment over the next five years as those who did not start out with a hearing problem.
That sort of information is not strong evidence, but it fits with earlier work along those lines.
Family doctors “can do a lot to help us if they knew what to look for” to catch early signs of decline, said Maria Carrillo, the Alzheimer’s Association’s chief science officer. Hearing loss, verbal changes and other known risks such as sleep problems might warrant a referral to a neurologist for a dementia check, she said.
Listen to audio of example test.
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Two Iranians Charged in US for Hacking, Selling Weapons Software
Two Iranian nationals have been charged in the United States in an alleged scheme to steal and resell software to Iran, including a program to design bullets and warheads.
According to an indictment unsealed Monday, Mohammed Saeed Ajily, 35, recruited Mohammed Reza Rezakhah, 39, to break into companies’ computers to steal their software for resale to Iranian universities, the military and the government.
The two men — and a third who was arrested in 2013 and handed back to Iran in a prisoner swap last year — allegedly broke into the computers of Vermont-based Arrow Tech Associates.
The stolen software included Arrow Tech’s Projectile Rocket Ordnance Design and Analysis System (PRODAS), which is protected by U.S. controls on the export of sensitive technologies, and its distribution to Iran is banned by U.S. sanctions on the country.
According to the indictment, Rezakhah conducted the hacking and cracking operations and Ajily was in charge of marketing and selling the programs.
The two men were charged in the Rutland, Vermont, federal district court, which issued arrest warrants for the two, who are believed to be in Iran.
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