An estimated 5 million people around the world are bitten by venomous snakes each year, and more than 100,000 victims die. In many cases the key to survival is anti-venom, but getting the right treatment can depend on knowing what kind of snake did the biting. Some new medical tech developed in Denmark is taking the guesswork out of the snake bite business. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Month: January 2018
US Safety Board to Probe Tesla Autopilot Crash
The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board has opened an investigation in an accident involving a Tesla car that may have been operating under its semi-autonomous Autopilot system.
The board sent two investigators to Culver City, California, to learn whether the Autopilot was on and if so, how the car’s sensors failed to detect a firetruck stopped on a highway near Los Angeles on Monday.
This is the second time the safety agency will look in to a crash involving Tesla’s Autopilot feature.
In September, the NTSB determined that while the technology played a major role in the May 2016 fatal crash in Florida, the blame fell on driver errors, including overreliance on technology by an inattentive Tesla driver.
The California driver said the Autopilot mode was engaged when the car struck the firetruck while traveling 104 kilometers per hour (65 mph). “Amazingly there were no injuries! Please stay alert while driving!,” the Culver City firefighters union said in a tweet.
Tesla wouldn’t say if Autopilot was working at the time of the Culver City crash, but said in a statement Monday that drivers must stay attentive when it’s in use. The company would not comment on the investigation.
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In Davos, Gulf Arabs Slam an Absent Iran
Gulf Arab officials used the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday to slam Iran for what they said was its destabilizing behavior in the region,
taking advantage of Tehran’s conspicuous absence at the annual event.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif had been a regular presence at the annual forum that brings together top politicians, CEOs and bankers, and he often clashed with his Gulf Arab counterparts at competing sessions. But this year, he did not show.
As a result, the platform was wide open for Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to criticize Iran.
Iran, the leading Shiite Muslim power, and Sunni Muslim Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. ally, are rivals for influence in the Middle East, where they support opposing sides in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.
“In the Middle East, we have two competing visions … and the vision of darkness is sectarianism. It’s trying to restore an empire that was destroyed thousands of years ago. It’s using sectarianism and terrorism in order to interfere in the affairs of other countries,” Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir told a panel at the forum. “History has shown that light always prevails over darkness.”
Iran denies interference in Arab countries’ affairs. Last year at Davos, Zarif said Iran and Saudi Arabia should be able to work together to help end conflicts in Syria and Yemen.
Yemeni conflict
Saudi-led forces, which back the Yemeni government, have fought the Iran-allied Houthis in Yemen’s civil war. Saudi Arabia’s crown prince has described Iran’s supply of rockets to the Houthis as “direct military aggression” that could be an act of war.
Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri gave a more measured critique. With his coalition government, which includes the Iran-backed Hezbollah group, he has had to tread carefully. His Saudi allies accuse Hezbollah of waging war
across the Middle East as agents of Iran.
“Iran is a country that we need to deal with. … As prime minister, I would like to have the best relationship with Iran, but I would like it state to state,” Hariri said at a separate panel.
“Iran represents a challenge in the region, maybe, but dialogue also is a part of resolving these issues,” Hariri said.
German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen, while acknowledging that Berlin had issues with Iran, used the moment to defend the 2015 Iran nuclear deal sealed with world powers, which U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened to abandon.
“We have many worries about Iran, without any question, and we see a lot of problems with Iran, without any question. But we think that the Iran [nuclear] deal encapsulates the core problem, and therefore we think we should stick to the deal as long as Iran sticks to the deal, too,” she said.
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Former Pharma Exec Confirmed as New US Health Chief
The Senate has confirmed a former pharmaceutical industry executive as head of the U.S. Health and Human Services Department.
Alex Azar, former president of the U.S. division of Eli Lilly & Co., was confirmed by a 55-43 vote on Wednesday.
Azar, 50, will replace Tom Price, who resigned in September amid questions over his use of private jets for official travel.
Azar says he has four main priorities for the Health and Human Services Department: help curb the cost of prescription drugs; make health insurance more affordable and available; continue bipartisan efforts to focus Medicare payments on quality; and confront the opioid addiction epidemic.
Azar had served in senior health jobs under President George W. Bush and had the support of much of the health care industry.
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Elton John Retiring, Says Upcoming Tour Will Be His Last
Elton John is retiring from the road after his upcoming three-year global tour, capping nearly 50 years on stages around the world. He calls it a “way to go out with a bang.”
“I’ve had a good run, I think you’d admit that,” John said Wednesday, adding that he wanted to “leave people thinking, `I saw the last tour and it was fantastic.”‘
The 70-year-old singer, pianist and composer said he wanted to spend time with his family. His children will be 10 and 8 when he stops in 2021, and John said he hoped he might be able to take them to soccer practice. “My priorities now are my children and my husband and my family,” he said. “This is the end.”
John made the announcement at an event in New York in which he sat at a piano and performed “Tiny Dancer” and “I’m Still Standing.” He wore his signature glasses and a colorful suit jacket that read “Gucci Loves Elton.”
His final tour — dubbed “Farewell Yellow Brick Road” — starts in September. It will consist of 300 shows in North America, Europe, Asia, South America and Asia. Tickets go on sale beginning Febraury 2.
John said he decided on his retirement plans in 2015 in France. “I can’t physically do the traveling and I don’t want to,” he said. He also ruled out a residency but vowed: “I will be creative up until the day I die.”
At the Grammy Awards, to be presented in New York on Sunday, John is to perform alongside Miley Cyrus and will collect the President’s Merit Award. His Vegas residency ends in May after six years.
His hits include “Your Song” and “Candle in the Wind.” He has won five Grammys, an Oscar, a Golden Globe for “The Lion King” and a Tony Award for “Aida” He is the recipient of a Kennedy Center Honor.
John, who has sold 300 million records, launched his first tour in 1970 and boasts having performed over 4,000 times in more than 80 countries. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.
He has suffered several medical setbacks of late, including a bacterial infection last year that he contracted during a South American tour and an E. coli bacterial infection in 2009. He’s also suffered an appendicitis and has been fitted with a pacemaker.
From 1970-76, John released 10 original studio albums and seven consecutive chart toppers. He remained a hit maker over the following four decades, from “The Lion King” soundtrack song “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” to a revision of his Marilyn Monroe ode “Candle in the Wind,” released in 1997 after the death of John’s friend Princess Diana and one of the best-selling singles of all time.
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Toys R Us, Citing Holiday ‘Missteps,’ Will Close up to 182 Stores
Toys R Us, a nostalgic favorite even as many shoppers moved to Amazon and huge chains like Walmart, plans to close up to 182 stores, or about 20 percent of its U.S. locations.
The company that once dominated toy sales in the U.S. has been operating under bankruptcy protection since last fall, when it filed for Chapter 11 under the weight of $5 billion in debt. Toys R Us operates about 900 stores in the U.S., including Babies R Us stores.
Loyal fans lamented the closing of their hometown stores. Many said they liked to shop at Toys R Us because of the atmosphere and the variety of toys they found.
“It’s an experience,” said Bryan Likins of Indianapolis, who takes his 4-year-old daughter to Toys R Us. “She likes to walk through the store and point to different toys she liked.”
Likins said he remembered playing with the video games and trying out bikes with his brothers at Toys R Us, and he liked continuing that with his child. He said he shopped on Amazon only for specific items that he wasn’t sure other toy sellers carried.
The store closings will begin in February and the majority of locations identified for closure, which include Babies R Us stores, will go dark by mid-April. At some other locations, Toys R Us and Babies R Us stores will be combined. The bankruptcy court still must sign off on the closings.
Toys R Us wouldn’t say how many jobs were to be cut. It said some employees would be moved to other stores and those who could not be moved would severance pay.
Ease of shopping
Chairman and CEO Dave Brandon said Wednesday that tough decisions were required to save Toys R Us. He acknowledged “operational missteps” during the critical holiday shopping season, when shopping at its stores and online wasn’t as easy as it should have been.
“The actions we are taking are necessary to give us the best chance to emerge from our bankruptcy proceedings as a more viable and competitive company that will provide the level of service and experience you should expect,” he said in a letter to customers.
Gerrick Johnson, an analyst at BMO Capital Markets, had estimated that holiday sales at the company’s North America stores were down more than 10 percent. He attributed much of the decline to people’s confusion around the bankruptcy filing and a fear of buying gifts at Toys R Us because they thought they wouldn’t be able to return them if necessary. Johnson also blamed a weak marketing campaign and email promotions that didn’t create a sense of urgency.
Toys R Us, based in Wayne, New Jersey, has struggled with debt since private-equity firms Bain Capital, KKR & Co. and Vornado Realty Trust took it private in a $6.6 billion leveraged buyout in 2005. The plan had been to take the company public again, but weak sales have prevented that from happening. With such debt levels, Toys R Us has not had the financial flexibility to invest in its business.
Meanwhile, other stores like Target have been increasing their assortment of toys.
Toys R Us closed its flagship store in Manhattan’s Times Square, a huge tourist destination, about two years ago.
While its sales numbers have been shrinking, Toys R Us still sells about 20 percent of the toys bought in the U.S., according to Stephanie Wissink, an analyst at Jefferies LLC.
Competitive pressures will force the company to examine all its stores, and more will likely be shuttered over the next year or two, Wissink said. Moody’s lead retail analyst Charlie O’Shea said the closings would let Toys R Us “focus all of its operating efforts on only its best locations.”
Ryan McLaine, mother of a 4-year-old boy, is disappointed that her favorite Toys R Us store in Exton, Pennsylvania, was on the list of closures.
“We would always like to reward him. It was always fun to take him to the big store to see what he would like,” she said. “Now, we have to figure out what to do next.”
She said the next closest Toys R Us location is in King of Prussia, and it’s not well-maintained. And she doesn’t like to shop for toys on Amazon.com because she likes to get a reaction from her son before she buys.
A ‘category killer’
Toys R Us reigned supreme in the 1980s and early 1990s, when it was one of the first of the “category killers” — a store totally devoted to one thing: toys. Its scale gave it leverage with toy sellers and it disrupted general merchandise stores and mom-and-pop shops. Children sang along with commercials featuring the mascot, Geoffrey the giraffe.
Now Toys R Us and other category killers like the now-defunct Sports Authority, Borders and Circuit City are being upended by Amazon and online shopping. More than three dozen retailers sought bankruptcy protection last year, due in large part to radical shifts in where people shop, and what they buy.
GlobalData Retail estimates that nearly 14 percent of toy sales were made online in 2016, more than double the level five years ago.
Jonathan Cordell, the father of an 8-month-old boy, said he does a lot of price comparisons online, jumping back and forth between Babies R Us and Amazon. But he likes to buy baby clothes at Babies R Us in Queens’ College Point section, which is on the list of stores to be closed.
“I usually take advantage of the price matching. I could find clothing at 50 percent off. You can’t find that on Amazon,” he said.
Toys R Us has been hurt by the shift to mobile devices taking up more play time. Some toy makers have struggled as well, with talk last year about the possibility of a merger between Mattel and Hasbro, the nation’s largest toy makers.
Wissink estimates that Toys R Us accounts for about 11 percent of Mattel’s annual sales and about 9 percent of Hasbro’s annual volume. Shares of Mattel Inc. fell while Hasbro Inc.’s stock was up in afternoon trading.
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Move Over, Dolly: Monkeys Cloned; A Step Closer to People?
For the first time, researchers have used the cloning method that produced Dolly the sheep to create two healthy monkeys, bringing science an important step closer to being able to do the same with humans.
Since Dolly’s birth in 1996, scientists have cloned nearly two dozen kinds of mammals, including dogs, cats, pigs, cows and polo ponies, and have also created human embryos with this method. But until now, they have been unable to make babies this way in primates, the category that includes monkeys, apes and people.
“The barrier of cloning primate species is now overcome,” declared Muming Poo of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai.
He and colleagues announced their success with macaques in a paper released Wednesday by the journal Cell. The female baby monkeys, about 7 and 8 weeks old, are named Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua.
“It’s been a long road,” said one scientist who tried and failed to make monkeys and was not involved in the new research, Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health & Science University. “Finally, they did it.”
In principle, Poo said, the feat means humans can be cloned. But he said his team has no intention of doing that. Mainstream scientists generally oppose making human babies by cloning, and Poo said society would ban it for ethical reasons.
Instead, he said, the goal is to create lots of genetically identical monkeys for use in medical research, where they would be particularly valuable because they are more like humans than other lab animals such as mice or rats.
Inefficient and challenging
The process is still very inefficient — it took 127 eggs to get the two babies — and so far it has succeeded only by starting with a monkey fetus. The scientists failed to produce healthy babies from an adult monkey, though they are still trying. Dolly caused a sensation because she was the first mammal cloned from an adult.
The procedure was technically challenging. Essentially, the Chinese scientists removed the DNA-containing nucleus from monkey eggs and replaced it with DNA from the monkey fetus. These reconstituted eggs grew and divided, finally becoming an early embryo, which was then placed into female monkeys to grow to birth.
The scientists implanted 79 embryos to produce the two babies. Still, the approach succeeded where others had failed. Poo said that was because of improvements in lab techniques and because researchers added two substances that helped reprogram the DNA from the fetus. That let the DNA abandon its job in the fetus, which involves things like helping to make collagen, and take on the new task of creating an entire monkey.
The Chinese researchers said cloning of fetal cells could be combined with gene editing techniques to produce large numbers of monkeys with certain genetic defects that cause disease in people. The animals could then be used to study such diseases and test treatments. The researchers said their initial targets will be Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
‘Big ethical dilemma’
Mitalipov, noting the Chinese failed to produce healthy babies from adult cells, said he suspects attempts to clone babies from a human adult would also fail. “I don’t think it would be advisable to anyone to even think about it,” he said.
Jose Cibelli, a scientist at Michigan State University, said it might be technically possible someday, but “criminal” to try now because of the suffering caused by the many lost pregnancies the process entails.
If the procedure became efficient enough in monkeys, he said, society could face “a big ethical dilemma” over whether to adapt it for humans. The key step of transferring DNA might be combined with gene editing to correct genetic disorders in embryos, allowing healthy babies to be born, he said.
Of course, the familiar image of human cloning involves making a copy of someone already born. That might be possible someday, but “I don’t think it should be pursued,” said researcher Dieter Egli of Columbia University. “I can’t think of a strong benefit.”
Henry Greely, a Stanford University law professor who specializes in the implications of biomedical technologies, said the strongest argument he can think of would be the desire of grieving parents to produce a genetic duplicate of a dead child. But he doubts that’s a compelling enough reason to undertake the extensive and costly effort needed to get such a procedure approved, at least for “decades and decades.”
Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society in Berkeley, California, called it unethical to subject that new child to “the psychological and emotional risks of living under the shadow of its genetic predecessor.” Human cloning could also require many women to donate eggs and to serve as surrogates, she said.
At the moment, because of safety concerns, federal regulators in the U.S. would not allow making a human baby by cloning, and international scientific groups also oppose it, said biomedical ethics expert Insoo Hyun of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
‘Misery and death’
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals condemned the monkey-cloning experiments.
“Cloning is a horror show: a waste of lives, time and money — and the suffering that such experiments cause is unimaginable,” PETA Senior Vice President Kathy Guillermo said in a statement. “Because cloning has a failure rate of at least 90 percent, these two monkeys represent misery and death on an enormous scale.”
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Apple Will Give Users Control Over Slowdown of Older iPhones
Apple’s next major update of its mobile software will include an option that will enable owners of older iPhones to turn off a feature that slows the device to prevent aging batteries from shutting down.
The free upgrade announced Wednesday will be released this spring.
The additional controls are meant to appease iPhone owners outraged since Apple acknowledged last month that its recent software updates had been secretly slowing down older iPhones when their batteries weakened.
Many people believed Apple was purposefully undermining the performance of older iPhones to drive sales of its newer and more expensive devices. Apple insisted it was simply trying to extend the lives of older iPhones, but issued an apology last month and promised to replace batteries in affected devices at a discounted price of $50.
Despite Apple’s contrition, the company is still facing an investigation by French authorities, a series of questions from U.S. Senate and a spate of consumer lawsuits alleging misconduct.
Besides giving people more control over the operation of older iPhones, the upcoming update dubbed iOS 11.3 will also show how well the device’s battery is holding up. Apple had promised to add a battery gauge when it apologized to consumers last month.
Other features coming in the next update will include the ability to look at personal medical histories in Apple’s health app, more tricks in its augmented reality toolkit and more animated emojis that work with the facial recognition technology in the iPhone X.
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Protests Roil Swiss Cities Ahead of Trump’s Davos Visit
Protesters have been pouring into the streets in several Swiss cities to express opposition to U.S. President Donald Trump’s attendance at this week’s World Economic Forum in Davos.
Trump arrives Thursday in the Swiss ski resort and is slated to present his “America First” message in a speech Friday to global business and political leaders.
On the eve of his arrival, members of Trump’s economic team previewed the strategy for increasing U.S. global competitiveness.
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, one of 10 Cabinet secretaries attending the gathering, endorsed a lower dollar, pushing the greenback to its lowest level in three years, according to the Bloomberg Dollar Index.
“Obviously, a weaker dollar is good for us as it relates to trade and opportunities,” Mnuchin told reporters at Davos.
A day after Trump imposed tariffs on imported solar-energy components and large washing machines, Mnuchin said he was not worried about what many see as a clash between Trump’s protectionist policies and the concept of globalism.
“This is about an ‘America First’ agenda, but ‘America First’ does mean working with the rest of the world” on free trade issues, Mnuchin said.
But many observers and analysts see an irreconcilable conflict of economic philosophies.
Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at Washington’s Peterson Institute for International Economics, expressed amusement at the prospect of the populist Trump speaking at a forum that has become a symbol of the growing consensus around an increasingly globalized world.
“It’s hard to square ‘America First’ with the Davos ethos of globalism, but Trump might put it this way: Every other country pursues its own interests first and foremost, while America makes concession after concession and carries burden after burden,” Hufbauer said in a written answer to a VOA request. “The time has come for America to act just like all the other countries represented in Davos.”
Presidential scholar Joshua Sandman of the University of New Haven likens Trump’s visit to the biblical story of Daniel in the Lion’s Den.
“Even though the Davos people are antithetical to his populist message, he wants to confront them and to establish the legitimacy of the American approach as he articulates it, which is to confront globalism and put American interests first,” Sandman said in a phone interview.
Briefing White House reporters this week, Trump’s chief economic adviser Gary Cohn said the president would use his speech at Davos to tell the world America is open for business. “We want the world to invest in America and create jobs for hardworking Americans,” he said.
“He’s going to talk to world leaders about making sure we all respect each other, we all abide by the laws, we all have free, fair, open, and reciprocal trade,” Cohn explained. “And if we live in a world where there are not artificial barriers, we will all grow and we will all help each other grow. And the president truly believes that.”
Political scientist Thomas Whalen of Boston University says Trump is unlikely to win many converts among the globalist crowd at Davos.
“Trump at Davos would be greeted about the same way an appearance by [disgraced Hollywood producer] Harvey Weinstein would go off at the Oscars,” Whalen said. “His approach to world affairs is anathema to those world leaders. We live in a 21st century interconnected globalized economy, and his idea of erecting trade barriers is going to unspool the entire system if left unchecked.”
Sideline meetings
The president ‘s schedule includes sideline meetings with several other world leaders, including British Prime Minister Theresa May. The president earlier canceled a planned trip to Britain for the opening of the new U.S. embassy in London, where he would be likely to face fierce protests. But National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster said Trump is prioritizing the meeting with May.
“We do have a special relationship,” McMaster said, adding that the meeting would touch on critical global issues, such as “the conflict in Syria, Iran’s destabilizing behavior, ways to address shortcomings in that Iran nuclear deal, and our shared goal of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula.”
Trump also will meet the incoming African Union chairman, Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame, to “reaffirm the U.S.-Africa relationship and discuss shared priorities, including trade and security,” McMaster said.
The meeting comes weeks after Trump was reported to have used a vulgar slur to describe African countries during a conversation about immigration.
Trump will be the first U.S. president to attend the Davos forum since Bill Clinton in 2000. Other world leaders in attendance for the first time include Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Emmanuel Macron.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel also will be there, but her advisers say she will not meet with Trump.
Economic adviser Cohn has attended several Davos meetings in his previous role as president of the Wall Street banking firm Goldman Sachs. Asked what Trump might find on his first trip to the Swiss resort that he would not expect, Cohn replied, “A lot of snow. Fourteen feet [4.25 meters] of snow.”
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Film About Kenya Terror Attack Up for an Oscar
A movie produced by a German film student about the 2015 Mandera bus attack in Kenya has just been nominated for an Oscar. The short film, Watu Wote, or Swahili for “All of Us,” tells the story of how average Kenyans resisted Al Shabab. The film premiered in Nairobi Tuesday night and is based on the real-life events of December 21, 2015.
On that day, Al-Shabab militants attacked a bus headed from Nairobi to Mandera, a town at Kenya’s border with Somalia. The terrorists tried to coerce the Muslim passengers to identify the Christians. The passengers refused.
The film depicts the harrowing encounter.
German film student Katja Benrath directed the short film as her graduation project at the Hamburg Media School.
“We felt very good being nominated because this is a huge achievement being nominated, for us, for Gernany and for Kenya,” said Benrath. “It’s just great.”
Kenya, in particular the country’s border region, has been struck repeatedly by Al Shabab attacks in recent years. Watu Wote explores the tensions that have arisen in Kenya over that violence.
The film’s fictional protagonist is a woman named Jua. She is taking the bus to visit her sick mother. We see Jua get angry at a Muslim boy selling water. A Muslim passenger named Salah Farah later asks her why and Jua says her husband and child had been murdered by terrorists.
Later, during the attack, Salah defends the non-Muslim passengers. He challenges the terrorists on the virtues of what true Islam is all about. Finally they shoot him.
The real-life Salah Farah died from his injuries less than a month after the attack.
In the film, we see Jua sitting in the row behind Salah, her hand placed reassuringly on the injured man’s shoulder as the bus escapes.
Actress Adelyne Wairimu played the role of Jua.
“I started seeing life in a different way because it’s not every day you are attacked by terrorists and people have the courage to stand in and tell them you are not going to do this and that. It’s unbelievable,” said Wairium.
28-year-old Abdulahi Ahmed played the role of the Al-Shabab second in command.
“It was hard acting as a terrorist, but the thing is I really wanted to spread the message that Muslims are not allowed to kill Christians and our religion doesn’t teach us to kill Christians,” said Ahmed. “In our Koran, we are told that our religion does not allow us to kill even an innocent ant without a reason.”
The short film has already swept up awards at film festivals in the United States and is now up for a prestigious Oscar award in the “Live Action Short Film” category.
The director, Katja Benrath hopes the message of the film will spread.
“I think prejudices are not the right way to live, so I think maybe this movie could help to start again, to look at the next person as a human being and not as a religion you don’t like or a culture you don’t like,” said Benrath. “I think this movie could really open up minds.”
The 90th Oscar awards ceremony will take place in Los Angeles on March 4.
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Internet Access Booming in Least Developed Countries
The International Telecommunication Union reports hundreds of millions of people in the world’s poorest countries now have access to the Internet and mobile devices.
It is increasingly difficult to function in this modern digital world without access to the Internet, a smart phone or other digital device. A new report by the International Telecommunication Union finds e-banking, e-commerce and other actions in cyberspace are no longer just the purview of the rich world.
It says all 47 of the world’s Least Developed Countries are making huge strides in increasing their Internet access. The ITU says more than 60 percent of LDC populations are covered by a 3G network, referring to a third generation or advanced wireless mobile telecommunication technology.
It notes by the end of last year, about 700 million people in LDCs had subscriptions to mobile phones, with 80 percent of their populations living within range of a mobile cellular network. Given this progress, the ITU reports LDCs are on track toward achieving the U.N. Sustainable Development Goal on universal and affordable Internet access by 2020.
ITU spokeswoman Jennifer Ferguson-Mitchell tells VOA having access to the Internet and mobile phones has a positive impact on peoples’ lives. She says digital connectivity can provide valuable knowledge and information to populations around the world.
“It gives farmers access to information on crops, when to plant their crops, weather patterns that are happening. It provides access to online education to communities,” she said. “It can make micro and small and medium sized enterprises be able to compete with larger businesses.”
The lTU says universal and affordable Internet access can help LDCs leap-frog in areas such as education, health, government services, trade and can trigger new business opportunities. While this is positive, the report identifies lack of digital skills as a key barrier to Information Communication Technology and Internet use in LDCs.
The report calls on policy makers, industry leaders, and educators to work together to increase digital skills across the Least Developed Countries.
Legendary Jazz Musician, Political Activist Hugh Masekela dies at 78
South African jazz trumpeter and anti-apartheid activist Hugh Masekela dies at the age of 78. Among his greatest hits were the anthem “Bring Him Back Home,” demanding Nelson Mandela’s freedom from jail. But he recorded countless other solos and worked with other big names, including Senegalese and American superstars Youssou N’Dour and Paul Simon. VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports on the outpouring of tributes to his long career in music and political activism.
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New Nicotine Delivery System Part of FDA’s Anti-Smoking Campaign
The United States Food and Drug Administration will be talking about alternatives to cigarette smoking as it deliberates whether to approve a new product offered by tobacco companies that delivers nicotine to the user without burning tobacco. The American Lung Association reports that cigarette smoking rates in the U.S. are at historically low levels. A little over 15 percent of Americans smoke.
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Cigarette Smoking Rates in US Reach Historic Lows
The American Lung Association says fewer Americans smoke cigarettes now than before tobacco control policies were put in place.
In its annual report, the ALA says smoking rates among adults and teens are at historic lows. On average, just over 15.5 percent of American adults and eight percent of high school students smoke cigarettes.
The association gets its data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which show the smoking rate declined from 20.9 percent in 2005 to 15.5 percent in 2016. Still, CDC data shows that nearly 38 million American adults continue to smoke.
“The good news is that these data are consistent with the declines in adult cigarette smoking that we’ve seen for several decades. These findings also show that more people are quitting, and those who continue to smoke are smoking less,” according to Corinne Graffunder, director of the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health quoted in a news release from the CDC.
Yet, the American Lung Association finds that certain groups and regions in the United States are disproportionately impacted by tobacco use and exposure to second-hand smoke. Thomas Carr, the ALA’s Director of National Policy who wrote the 2018 report “The State of Tobacco Control,” said poorer Americans, those who are less educated, Native Americans and some ethnic groups have smoking rates that are close to 30 percent or higher.
“The tobacco industry advertises more to some of these groups and more heavily than others, and you will find in low-income areas, there are sometimes a bigger concentration of tobacco stores and that kind of thing.”
There’s also peer pressure, and when friends or parents smoke, teens tend to take up the habit. Studies show that most people who smoke start before they are 18. Some start as young as age 11 according to The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. Carr calls it a pediatric disease. “It starts in your teens and then once you’re hooked, you can’t get off of it.”
The lung association is pushing states to raise the age where young people can legally purchase cigarettes to 21, the minimum age in the United States for purchasing alcohol. The thought is that if middle and high school students can’t get cigarettes, they are less likely to start smoking. “It cuts off access to people 15 to 17 years old. A lot of times they’ll go to their friends who are 18 (and still) in high school, but they’re not as likely to hang around with people who are 19 or 20 or 21.” So far five states — California, Oregon, Maine, Hawaii and New Jersey have raised the age to 21.
The lung association issues an annual report to help promote state and federal regulations to make it easier for people who smoke to quit and to help those who don’t smoke not to start.
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Ursula K. Le Guin, Best-selling Science Fiction Author, Dies
Ursula K. Le Guin, the award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer who explored feminist themes and was best known for her Earthsea books, has died at 88.
Le Guin died suddenly and peacefully Monday at her home in Portland, Oregon, after several weeks of health concerns, her son, Theo Downes-Le Guin said Tuesday.
“She left an extraordinary legacy as an artist and as an advocate of peace and critical thinking and fairness, and she was a great mother and wife as well,” he said.
“Godspeed into the galaxy,” Stephen King tweeted, saying Le Guin was a literary icon, not just a science fiction writer.
Le Guin won an honorary National Book Award in 2014 and warned in her acceptance speech against letting profit define what is considered good literature.
Despite being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1997 — a rare achievement for a science fiction-fantasy writer — she often criticized the “commercial machinery of bestsellerdom and prizedom.”
“I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river,” Le Guin said in the speech. “We who live by writing and publishing want — and should demand — our fair share of the proceeds. But the name of our beautiful reward is not profit. Its name is freedom.”
Le Guin’s first novel was “Roncannon’s World” in 1966 but she gained fame three years later with “The Left Hand of Darkness,” which won the Hugo and Nebula awards — top science fiction prizes — and conjures a radical change in gender roles well before the rise of the transgender community.
The book imagines a future society in which people are equally male and female and also dramatizes the perils of tyranny, violence and conformity.
Her best-known works, the Earthsea books, have sold in the millions worldwide and have been translated into 16 languages. She also produced volumes of short stories, poetry, essays and literature for young adults.
Le Guin’s work also won the Newbery Medal, the top honor for American children’s literature. Last year, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
“I know that I am always called ‘the sci-fi writer.’ Everybody wants to stick me into that one box, while I really live in several boxes,” she told reviewer Mark Wilson of Scifi.com.
Neil Gaiman, a fellow Newbery, Hugo and Nebula recipient, mourned her death on Twitter and called Le Guin “the deepest and smartest of the writers.”
“Her words are always with us. Some of them are written on my soul,” he wrote.
A longtime feminist, Le Guin earned degrees from Radcliffe and Columbia. Her 1983 “Left-Handed Commencement Address” at Mills College was ranked one of the top 100 speeches of the 20th century in a 1999 survey by researchers at the University of Wisconsin and Texas A&M University.
“Why should a free woman with a college education either fight Machoman or serve him?” she told the graduates. “Why should she live her life on his terms? … I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated.”
Born in Berkeley, California, on Oct. 21, 1929, Le Guin described a well-off childhood even during the Depression, with summers in the countryside. Her success followed an early setback: At age 11, she had her first offering rejected by Amazing Stories, the pioneering science fiction magazine.
“During the Second World War, my brothers all went into service and the summers in the Valley became lonely ones, just me and my parents in the old house,” she told sfsite.com, another science fiction website.
“There was no TV then; we turned on the radio once a day to get the war news. Those summers of solitude and silence, a teenager wandering the hills on my own, no company, ‘nothing to do,’ were very important to me. I think I started making my soul then,” she said.
She married Charles Le Guin in Paris in 1953. They moved to Portland and had three children.
Her themes ranged from children’s literature to explorations of Taoism, feminism, anarchy, psychology and sociology to tales of a society where reading and writing are punishable by death and of a scientist who battles aliens to save the world.
Critic Harold Bloom placed her in the pantheon of fantasy writers along with JRR Tolkien.
“Sometimes I think I am just trying to superstitiously avert evil by talking about it,” she told sfsite.com. “Throughout my whole adult life, I have watched us blighting our world irrevocably … ignoring every warning and neglecting every benevolent alternative in pursuit of `growth.'”
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Hollywood’s Oldest Working Actress, Connie Sawyer, Dies at 105
You may not know her name, but you know her face.
Connie Sawyer, known in Hollywood as the oldest working actress in show business, has finally ended her career.
Sawyer died late Monday at her home in Los Angeles at 105.
She began her career as a singer and comedienne on radio, in nightclubs, and vaudeville in the early 1930s.
When Sawyer became too old to be called a “girl singer,” she began acting in character parts on Broadway and on hundreds of television comedy shows and films, playing little old ladies in such hits as When Harry Met Sally, Dumb and Dumber, and Pineapple Express.
Sawyer never retired and said she never wanted to be a star — just a working actress who could always get a paycheck.
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Trump Administration Prepares Flurry of Trade Moves
The Trump administration is set to announce a raft of trade decisions over the next months, ranging from curbs on foreign imports of steel and aluminum to steps to clamp down on China’s alleged theft of intellectual property.
U.S. President Donald Trump has stressed his “America First” agenda in his first year in office and called for fairer, more reciprocal trade. He has blamed globalization for ravaging American manufacturing jobs as companies sought to reduce labor costs by relocating to Mexico and elsewhere.
Imported washing machines, solar panels
In its first major trade decision of the year, the administration slapped steep tariffs on imported washing machines and solar panels, boosting Whirlpool Corp. and dealing a setback to the renewable energy industry.
Monday’s decision imposed a 20 percent tariff on the first 1.2 million imported large residential washers in the first year, and a 50 percent tariff on machines above that number. The tariff declines to 16 percent and 40 percent respectively in the third year.
The move punishes Samsung Electronics, which recently began washer production in South Carolina, and LG Electronics, which is building a plant in Tennessee.
The U.S. Solar Energy Industries Association on Tuesday warned that Trump’s move to slap 30 percent tariffs on imported panels would kill tens of thousands of jobs, raise the cost of going solar and quash billions of dollars of investment.
South Korea could push back by launching a complaint through the Geneva-based World Trade Organization, but that is likely to take years. Seoul could also raise it during current negotiations with the United States on modifying the U.S.-South Korea free-trade agreement, known as KORUS.
Steel
The U.S. Commerce Department sent its recommendations on ways to curb foreign steel imports to the White House on January 11. The report followed Trump’s decision, made several months after he took office, to open a Section 232 investigation (from Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962) into whether steel imports threaten U.S. national security.
Trump has 90 days to decide on any potential action. He has promised that any actions will protect steelworkers from imports. Curbing excess steel production in China, which now supplies half of the world’s steel, would be a key goal of any action. Broad tariffs could, however, also affect steelmakers in Europe, Japan, South Korea and Turkey.
It is unclear when the decision on steel imports will be announced.
Aluminum
The Commerce Department has sent Trump the results of its national security investigation into aluminum imports. That Section 232 probe could see broad import restrictions imposed on lightweight metal. The White House has been debating whether to order broad tariffs or quotas on steel and aluminum, pitting administration officials who favor aggressive restrictions against those who favor a more cautious approach to avoid a run-up in prices.
It is unclear when Trump will make his decision.
Intellectual property
Trump and his trade advisers are currently considering penalizing China under Section 301 of the 1974 trade law for its alleged theft of American intellectual property.
The 301 investigation would allow Trump to impose retaliatory tariffs on Chinese goods or other trade sanctions until China changes its policies.
Trump told Reuters in an interview on January 17 that he was considering imposing a big “fine” against China, but he did not elaborate on his answer.
U.S. businesses say they lose hundreds of billions of dollars in technology and millions of jobs to Chinese firms that have stolen ideas and software or forced them to turn over intellectual property as part of doing business in China.
A White House official told Reuters January 19 that Trump was particularly focused on the 301 investigation because it was “systemic” and covered a large swath of American businesses.
China could retaliate by weighing whether the actions are in line with WTO rules while ratcheting up pressure on U.S. businesses — for example, by buying from a European company such as Airbus instead of Boeing.
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AI Can Read! Tech Firms Race to Smarten Up Thinking Machines
Seven years ago, a computer beat two human quizmasters on a Jeopardy challenge. Ever since, the tech industry has been training its machines even harder to make them better at amassing knowledge and answering questions.
And it’s worked, at least up to a point. Just don’t expect artificial intelligence to spit out a literary analysis of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace any time soon.
Research teams at Microsoft and Chinese tech company Alibaba reached what they described as a milestone earlier this month when their AI systems outperformed the estimated human score on a reading comprehension test. It was the latest demonstration of rapid advances that have improved search engines and voice assistants and that are finding broader applications in health care and other fields.
The answers they got wrong — and the test itself — also highlight the limitations of computer intelligence and the difficulty of comparing it directly to human intelligence.
Error! Error!
“We are still a long way from computers being able to read and comprehend general text in the same way that humans can,” said Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, in a LinkedIn post that also commended the achievement by the company’s Beijing-based researchers.
The test developed at Stanford University demonstrated that, in at least some circumstances, computers can beat humans at quickly “reading” hundreds of Wikipedia entries and coming up with accurate answers to questions about Genghis Khan’s reign or the Apollo space program.
The computers, however, also made mistakes that many people wouldn’t have.
Microsoft, for instance, fumbled an easy football question about which member of the NFL’s Carolina Panthers got the most interceptions in the 2015 season (the correct answer was Kurt Coleman, not Josh Norman). A person’s careful reading of the Wikipedia passage would have discovered the right answer, but the computer tripped up on the word “most” and didn’t understand that seven is bigger than four.
“You need some very simple reasoning here, but the machine cannot get it,” said Jianfeng Gao, of Microsoft’s AI research division.
Human vs. machine
It’s not uncommon for machine-learning competitions to pit the cognitive abilities of computers against humans. Machines first bested people in an image-recognition competition in 2015 and a speech recognition competition last year, although they’re still easily tricked. Computers have also vanquished humans at chess, Pac-Man and the strategy game Go.
And since IBM’s Jeopardy victory in 2011, the tech industry has shifted its efforts to data-intensive methods that seek to not just find factoids, but better comprehend the meaning of multi-sentence passages.
Like the other tests, the Stanford Question Answering Dataset, nicknamed Squad, attracted a rivalry among research institutions and tech firms — with Google, Facebook, Tencent, Samsung and Salesforce also giving it a try.
“Academics love competitions,” said Pranav Rajpurkar, the Stanford doctoral student who helped develop the test. “All these companies and institutions are trying to establish themselves as the leader in AI.”
Limits of understanding
The tech industry’s collection and digitization of huge troves of data, combined with new sets of algorithms and more powerful computing, has helped inject new energy into a machine-learning field that’s been around for more than half a century. But computers are still “far off” from truly understanding what they’re reading, said Michael Littman, a Brown University computer science professor who has tasked computers to solve crossword puzzles.
Computers are getting better at the statistical intuition that allows them to scan text and find what seems relevant, but they still struggle with the logical reasoning that comes naturally to people. (And they are often hopeless when it comes to deciphering the subtle wink-and-nod trickery of a clever puzzle.) Many of the common ways of measuring artificial intelligence are in some ways teaching to the test, Littman said.
“It strikes me for the kind of problem that they’re solving that it’s not possible to do better than people, because people are defining what’s correct,” Littman said of the Stanford benchmark. “The impressive thing here is they met human performance, not that they’ve exceeded it.”
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Europe’s Recovery Rolls On — And So Does European Central Bank Stimulus
Europe’s economy is on a roll — raising the question of exactly when the European Central Bank will end its extraordinary stimulus efforts. Bank President Mario Draghi will be at pains this week to leave that point open.
No changes in stimulus settings or interest rates are expected at Thursday’s meeting of the bank’s 25-member governing council, which sets monetary policy for the 19 countries that use the euro.
Draghi’s post-meeting news conference, however, will be closely scrutinized for any hints of a change in the timetable for withdrawing a key stimulus component — a massive bond-buying program — later this year.
Here is a fast guide.
Where’s inflation?
Stubbornly low inflation is why Draghi and his ECB colleagues want to keep the stimulus program running.
The bank’s mission is to keep inflation consistently close to but below 2 percent. Usually that means fighting inflation, but in the case of this economic recovery, prices have been unusually slow to respond to a pickup in demand for goods. Annual inflation was just 1.4 percent in December. Excluding oil and food, it was even lower, at 0.9 percent. Meanwhile, the economy is expected to have grown 2.4 percent in 2017; unemployment has fallen from over 12 percent to 8.7 percent.
ECB officials say that eventually growth will lead to higher wages as unemployment falls and labor becomes scarcer. But inflation has taken its time to show up.
Stimulus settings
So Draghi has been urging patience. The bank lowered its bond purchases to 30 billion euros ($37 billion) a month at the start of the year, from 60 billion euros, and has said they will run at least through September — and longer if necessary. The purchases, started in March 2015, pump newly printed money into the economy, which should raise inflation and make credit easier to get.
Much of the speculation in markets has centered on whether the purchases will stop in September, or be continued, perhaps at a lower level. Draghi and the governing council majority have so far resisted stimulus skeptics on the board, such as Germany’s Jens Weidmann, who say it’s time to head for the exit from stimulus.
Promises, promises
A key point to watch is the wording the bank uses to manage expectations of its future actions. Right now, the bank has included wording in its policy statement that it could increase the bond purchases if necessary. Dropping that phrase would be a first step to prepare markets for an end to the stimulus. This week’s meeting might be too early for that tweak, but the wording is being watched in the markets.
The bank has also promised it won’t raise interest rates — its benchmark rate is currently zero — until well after the end of the bond purchases. That puts a first rate increase well into 2019.
Why you should care
The withdrawal of the stimulus by the ECB and other central banks such as the U.S. Federal Reserve will have wide-ranging effects on the finances of ordinary people.
Higher interest rates will mean more return on savings accounts and an easier time funding private and public pension plans. They could also mean trouble for “zombie companies” that might not have any profits if they had to pay higher rates to borrow. Such bankruptcies would be painful in the short term, but would free investment for more profitable uses.
More interest earnings on conservative holdings such as bonds and time deposits would make riskier assets — like stocks — relatively less attractive, and ease the pressure on investors and savers to rummage for returns in riskier holdings.
Down, euro, down
Market reaction is a key concern for Draghi, particularly when it comes to the euro’s exchange rate. The euro has risen in the past several weeks, to around $1.22, in part because markets are anticipating an end to the stimulus. Monetary stimulus can weaken a currency, so investors are bidding the euro up on speculation that the stimulus might come to an earlier end due to the strong economy.
A stronger euro, however, can hurt Europe’s many exporters and further weaken inflation.
Here’s the take from analyst Florian Hense at Berenberg Bank: “The ECB should and will likely stop asset purchases after September: Recent hawkish comments, including the minutes of the last meeting, point in that direction.
“However, in order to not trigger a further appreciation of the euro, the ECB will likely change its communication only cautiously and gradually — and not in January already.”
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Music Firms Sue to Keep Hit Songs Off Fitness Streaming App
Some of the nation’s largest recording studios have joined forces in an effort to stop a music streaming service aimed at fitness enthusiasts from using songs by Beyonce, Justin Bieber, Green Day and other stars.
In a federal lawsuit filed in Atlanta, Sony Music Entertainment and more than a dozen other record companies say Fit Radio illegally infringes on their copyrighted recordings “on a massive scale.”
The Atlanta-based streaming business is hurting artists who rely on music royalties, the music companies states in the suit filed recently in U.S. District Court in Atlanta. The lawsuit mentioned several major artists, including Beyonce, Jason Derulo, Green Day and others.
“Rampant copyright infringement of sound recordings over the internet and through mobile applications, including the infringement engaged in and enabled by entities such as Fit Radio, has resulted in significant harm to the music industry, including to artists who rely on royalties from recorded music for their livelihood,” the complaint states.
A representative of the Atlanta firm said in a statement Tuesday that it looks forward to “being vindicated by the court system.”
“We will continue providing exceptional services to our customers,” it said.
Fit Radio is available through its website, fitradio.com, and through an application or app on mobile devices such as cellphones. Fit Radio recruits disc jockeys who copy and upload popular songs to attract users, the lawsuit says.
The streaming service entices the DJs to upload recordings to Fit Radio as a way for the DJs to “promote your personal brand,” the lawsuit states. The company also supports the DJs with marketing efforts through Facebook and email campaigns, according to the lawsuit.
The recording companies say their music is legally streamed via services such as Apple Music and Spotify through business agreements with them. But Fit Radio is different because it has no such agreements to stream the copyrighted music, they say.
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