Finding a cure for Alzheimer’s is an extremely complex task. Scientists still do not know what causes the disease. Once the symptoms appear, the gradual memory loss is inevitable and available drugs can only slow down the process. Researchers, however, believe the disease develops slowly, over years, so detecting it before the symptoms appear may give the patients a better chance of a longer life. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Month: February 2018
Fixing Pollution by Fixing Your Gas Guzzler
Statistics from the Environmental Protection Agency show automobiles are responsible for at least 50 percent of emissions of harmful and planet-warming gases. But because cars are not going away, one enterprising British company is working to fix the problem where it starts. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Historic Candy Store Has Sweets That Trace Back Centuries
For a lot of people, there’s nothing better than a piece of candy. Sweets go back to the ancient Egyptians, who ate honey with sesame seeds. In the United States, candy has a fascinating history that can be traced back centuries at the True Treats Historic Candy store in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. The shop sells an abundance of sweets that were popular during different time periods. VOA’s Deborah Block shows us the unusual assortment, ranging from classic chocolate kisses to edible bugs.
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Guest Workers Leave Behind Big Houses, Ghost Neighborhoods
Over the last decades, growing economic hardships forced people in cities and villages around the world to leave their hometowns to find work in other countries. Dreaming of returning one day and enjoying a better life where they grew up, many invested most of their savings buying houses back home. But often, these houses remain empty, making many communities look like ghost towns. Faiza Elmasry has the story. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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Tillerson Visits Argentina to Talk Conservation, Economics
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s Latin American tour took him Saturday to Argentina, where he talked with officials about conservation and diplomacy.
Traveling from Mexico City after meeting with the Mexican president and other senior officials on Friday, Tillerson arrived in Bariloche, a lakeside resort town in Argentina’s Nahuel Huapi National Park.
Local news reports said Tillerson met with park rangers to discuss progress made in joint U.S.-Argentine projects on science and conservation issues. He also met with a student selected for the U.S. Fulbright scholarship program.
Tillerson was scheduled to visit the Argentine capital, Buenos Aires, to meet with his counterpart, Jorge Faurie.
On Monday, Tillerson is set to meet with Argentina President Mauricio Macri to discuss regional issues, including upcoming elections and the political crisis in Venezuela.
Before his visit, Tillerson told reporters that he hoped other countries would follow Argentina’s lead on making economic reforms and generating growth.
On Friday in Mexico, Tillerson said that immigrants bring “enormous value” to the U.S., but added the U.S. government lacked “good discipline” in regulating who enters the country to live.
‘Out of normal order’
After meeting in Mexico City with Mexican Foreign Secretary Luis Videgaray and Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, Tillerson told reporters the U.S. had put “many mechanisms in place” over the years to control immigration, but had “never gone back to clean this up.”
“Let’s make sure we have systems in place where we understand who’s coming into the country,” Tillerson said. He said immigration in the U.S. had “gotten out of normal order,” which is why President Donald Trump is pushing Congress to “fix these defects that have risen over the years.”
The Mexican government has repeatedly expressed opposition to Trump’s proposals to curb illegal immigration and have Mexico pay for a reinforced border wall.
Differences over the issue did not preclude Videgaray from praising the U.S. He said the Mexican government’s relationship with the Trump administration was “closer” than it was under former President Barack Obama’s administration. Videgaray acknowledged the two countries “do have some differences” but said “we are working closely and we are about results.”
Tillerson later held a closed-door meeting with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto during a time when relations have also been strained by U.S. threats to pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
NAFTA, which Trump alleges costs American jobs, was discussed at the trilateral meeting, along with energy development and drug interdiction.
Tillerson’s travels through Latin America will also take him to Peru and Colombia, with a final stop in Jamaica on February 7.
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Luxe Event Aims to Change Haiti’s Image Through Fashion
Dozens of designers from Haiti and around the world showcased their spring-summer collections against a lush tropical background during the recent Haiti Fashion Week.
The January 28-31 event in Petionville focused on the theme “Innovation” and “haute couture” this year. Event founder Maguy Durce said her main goal was to show Haiti in a positive light, as opposed to negative images usually portrayed by the international media.
“Haiti Fashion Week is a cultural event. But we want to use it to respond to President [Donald] Trump — to his negative comments [about Haiti] — because we think if he saw what was happening this week at El Rancho [hotel], he would say, ‘Hey, I lied,’ or, ‘Hey, I was wrong,’ or, ‘I was misinformed,’ ” Durce said.
Trump’s reported use of a vulgar term to describe Haiti and African nations angered the Haitian-American community and sparked rallies in Port-au-Prince, New York, Palm Beach and Boston to denounce racism. Haiti’s ambassador to the United States said the comments about Haiti “hurt the country.”
The fifth edition of Haiti Fashion Week had been scheduled for November 2017, but was rescheduled after some of the designers said their collections would not be ready in time.
Young fashion designer Maille Timothee, whose fashion line is called MAE, presented her designs for the first time this year. She won applause for her colorful dresses made with unconventional textiles.
“I wanted to do something unconventional. Something unexpected. So I mixed different fabrics that people would not expect, and even what I’m wearing is an example of that,” she explained.
Timothee is the daughter of seasoned Haitian designer Immacula Pericles, who runs a highly acclaimed fashion school called Academie Verona. She also participated in Haiti Fashion Week, showcasing a collection of dresses made in the colors of the national flag and representing the natural beauty of the Caribbean country. Her collection wowed the audience.
“Well, I’ve been doing these designs for a long time now, so it’s new to some people, but we’ve been around a while,” Pericles noted. “The theme of our fashion school is Haiti will survive – so my goal is first to incorporate sustainable materials and second to make the clothing using the same international standards the big fashion houses use so that we can sell our line anywhere in the world.”
Pericles said Haiti has huge potential to excel in the fashion world.
French designer Marie-Caroline Behue flew from Paris to Port-au-Prince and went straight to work on her collection. A first-time participant in the event, she admitted to being awed by the quality and intricacy of the designs.
“I knew nothing about Haiti Fashion Week and I was amazed by the level of detail in the designs,” she admitted. “I’ve worked in the French haute couture design houses and I can tell you the designs I saw here meet the bar – and to be honest, what really piqued my interest was the men’s haute couture, because when one thinks of haute couture, they naturally think of women’s fashion, but here in Haiti, I was like, ‘Wow! They’re got couture men’s clothing.’”
Haitian-American designer Marcia Roseme, whose collection features bright colored separates matched with muted tones, traveled from New York to show her first collection at Haiti Fashion Week.
“It was a great event; there were a lot of different styles that represented many markets. There was a lot of innovation, a lot of creativity and unique styles – I really like that,” she told VOA.
Organizer Durce, who put in many long hours to pull off a culturally rich and diverse showcase of Haitian and international artistry, was pleased with the turnout and the positive reviews from the national and international press.
“Africa Fashion TV has been here all four days, broadcasting our fashion shows live, so what we’re doing here in Haiti is being seen in 29 African countries and all over the world. Each time a person tweets or posts something about Fashion Week to Facebook, it raises Haiti’s image to a higher level.”
Durce said she’s looking forward to the sixth edition of Haiti Fashion Week – to be held in 2019.
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New Movie Highlights Racism, Tension in Inter-War Australia
A provocative film that chronicles racism and brutality in the 1920s has been released in Australia. Set in the red dust of the outback, “Sweet Country” is the story of an Aboriginal herder who goes on the run after killing a white landowner in self-defense.
The film is a historical, Western-style epic that has at its heart racist aggression between white colonialists and Australia’s indigenous population they displaced. The movie is directed by celebrated Aboriginal filmmaker Warwick Thornton, whose first film was the highly acclaimed feature “Samson and Delilah,” which was released in 2009.
Thornton says “Sweet Country” shows the brutality of Australia in the 1920s.
“It is a bit of history you will not find in your everyday high school curriculum, even though it is all based on true stories. It is important for us as a country to learn more about our history so we can make better choices about our future, I guess. You know, it has got a lot of connotations today. Racism is still around today. It is just that people are not allowed to openly say what they feel, but they are still racist,” Thornton said.
The cast includes veteran Australian actor Bryan Brown, who came to prominence in “Gorillas in the Mist” and “Cocktail,” alongside U.S. actor Tom Cruise.
“Sweet Country” also features the New Zealand actor Sam Neill, who starred in “The Piano” and “Jurassic Park.”
Hamilton Morris plays the character of Sam Kelly, the indigenous farm worker who goes on the run with his wife after killing a white landowner. Morris had no film experience before landing the role as Kelly, although he did have a role in an Australian TV series about a remote radio station. There was also a large cast of Aboriginal extras.
Many of the reviews of “Sweet Country” have been positive with the newspaper The Australian saying it was “Australian filmmaking at its best.”
Indigenous Australians make up about 3 percent of the population and are, by far, the most disadvantaged group in the country, suffering high rates of poverty, ill health and imprisonment.
Warwick’s “Sweet Country” already was awarded a Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival last September at an early screening.
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Hidden Mayan Civilization Revealed in Guatemala Jungle
Researchers using a high-tech aerial mapping scanner have discovered the ruins of tens of thousands of ancient Mayan structures that have been hidden and preserved for centuries under northern Guatemala’s thick jungle.
The 60,000 newly discovered structures include raised highways, urban centers with sidewalks, homes, terraces, industrial-sized agricultural fields, irrigation canals, ceremonial centers, a 30-meter high pyramid, fortresses and moats.
Stephen Houston, professor of archaeology and anthropology at Brown University, told the BBC that the revelation of the sprawling Central American civilization was “breathtaking.” He said, “I know it sounds hyperbolic, but . . . it did bring tears to my eyes.”
An alliance of U.S., European and Guatemalan archaeologists worked with Guatemala’s Mayan Heritage and Nature Foundation on the project over the past two years.
The Mayan culture was at its peak about 1,500 years ago in what is present day southern Mexico, Guatemala and parts of Belize, El Salvador and Honduras.
Marcello Canuto, a Tulane University archaeologist and one of the project’s top investigators, said the discoveries are a “revolution in Maya archeology.”
The new information suggests that millions more people lived in what is now Guatemala’s Petan region than previously thought.
Researchers say they now believe that instead of five million that as many as 10 to 15 million people lived in the region.
The researchers used a remote sensing method known as LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) to discover the hidden treasures of a civilization that National Geographic now compares to ancient Greece or China.
LiDAR bounced pulsed laser light off the ground, revealing contours hidden by dense foliage in the 2,100-square-kilometer mapped area.
“Now it is no longer necessary to cut through the jungle to see what’s under it,” said Canuto.
“We’ve had this western conceit that complex civilizations can’t flourish in the tropics, that the tropics are where civilizations go to die,” Canuto told National Geographic. “But,with the new LiDAR-based evidence from Central America and [Cambodia’s] Angkor Wat, we now have to consider that complex societies may have formed in the tropics and made their way outward from there.”
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Americans Gear Up for Football’s ‘Super Bowl’
Super Bowl LII is almost here. In the week leading up to the biggest sporting event in the United States, the National Football League kicked-off the Super Bowl Experience at the Minnesota Convention Center.
It’s a family-friendly, interactive theme park where fans of all ages can run some of the same football drills as the pros. They kick, pass, catch and run … albeit badly when compared to the players who buckle their chinstraps and put the NFL’s multibillion-dollar-a-year product on the field every week of the season.
This year’s Super Bowl host city is Minneapolis, Minnesota. Its home team – the Vikings – came within one win of playing in the big game.
That’s still a fresh wound for Vikings fans like Drake Jackson.
“My heart aches a little bit once I see Patriots and Eagles (instead of Patriots and Vikings), but you know, it is what it is … maybe next season.”
Thirty-two teams started the season in September, but now only the Philadelphia Eagles and New England Patriots remain. The teams take the field at U.S. Bank Stadium to decide the winner of this year’s Vince Lombardi Trophy; the iconic prize awarded to the winner of the NFL’s championship game.
Kickoff is scheduled for 2330 UTC Sunday
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Former Utah Monument Lands Open to Claims, but No Land Rush in Sight
The window opened Friday for oil, gas, uranium and coal companies to make requests or stake claims to lands that were cut from two sprawling Utah national monuments by President Trump in December, but there doesn’t appear to be a rush to seize the opportunities.
For anyone interested in the uranium on the lands stripped from the Bears Ears National Monument, all they need to do is stake a few corner posts in the ground, pay a $212 initial fee and send paperwork to the federal government under a law first created in 1872 that harkens back to the days of the Wild West.
They can then keep rights to the hard minerals, including gold and silver, as long as they pay an annual fee of $155.
It was unclear if anyone was doing that Friday.
Inquiries, but no claims yet
The Bureau of Land Management declined repeated requests for information about how they’re handling the lands and how many requests and claims came in.
The agency says it must comply with a complex web of other laws and management plans.
Steve Bloch, legal director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, said he was told by the BLM Friday afternoon that inquiries were made but no claims sent in.
He said other conservation groups that have sued to block the downsized monument boundaries are watching closely to ensure no lands are disturbed in the short-term, hoping a judge will side with them and return the monuments to the original boundaries.
Two of the largest uranium companies in the U.S., Ur-Energy Inc. and Energy Fuels Resources Inc., said they have no plans to mine there. The price of uranium, which has fallen to about $22 per pound, down from more than $100 in the mid-2000s, would “discourage any investment in new claims,” said Luke Popovich, a spokesman for the National Mining Association.
Colorado-based Energy Fuels asked for a reduction of Bears Ears last year in a public comment, but spokesman Curtis Moore said in a statement that the company has higher priorities elsewhere. He noted the lands were open to claims for 150 years before President Barack Obama creating the national monument in 2016.
“There probably isn’t any land available for staking that would be of much interest to anyone,” Moore said.
Coal in Grand Staircase-Escalante
In Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, part of a major coal reserve that a company was preparing to mine before President Bill Clinton protected the lands in 1996, has been made available again but it appears unlikely any company will immediately jump at the chance this time.
Out-of-state demand for Utah’s coal had led to a drop in coal production to about 14 million tons in 2017, down from about 27 million tons in the mid-2000s, said Michael Vanden Berg, energy and mineral program manager at the Utah Geological Survey.
“If a new mine were to open, it would be competing with existing mines in Utah for limited demand,” Vanden Berg said.
Popovich called it “doubtful given market conditions and other factors” that companies interested in coal would put in a lease request.
Vanden Berg noted that a potential coal port in Oakland, California, could open up an Asian market and that technology could be developed to change market forces.
Oil and gas potential
There’s some potential for oil and gas at Grand Staircase, Vanden Berg said. But Kathleen Sgamma, president of an oil and gas industry group called Western Energy Alliance, said heavy oil shale in the area would require an intensive mining operation that doesn’t make sense in today’s market.
“There’s no fracking trucks at the border waiting to rush in,” Sgamma said.
President Trump downsized the Bears Ears National Monument by about 85 percent and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by nearly half. It earned him cheers from Republican leaders in Utah who lobbied him to undo protections by Democratic presidents that they considered overly broad.
Bears Ears, created nearly a year ago, will be reduced to 315 square miles (815.85 square kilometers). Grand Staircase-Escalante will be reduced from nearly 3,000 square miles (7,770 square kilometers) to 1,569 square miles (4,063.71 square kilometers).
Conservation groups called it the largest elimination of protected land in American history.
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Scientists Develop Blood Test to Detect Eight Types of Cancer
Feb. 4 is World Cancer Day, an annual opportunity to raise awareness of cancer and encourage its prevention, detection and treatment. In the area of detection, Faith Lapidus reports that researchers at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center in Baltimore, Maryland, are developing a blood test that screens for eight different types of cancer.
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Driverless Bus Gets a Tryout in Sweden
Getting onto a bus with a driver may be a thing of the past someday. Already, a technology company in Sweden is trying out a driverless minibus in Stockholm. VOA’s Deborah Block tells us about it.
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Britain Buys Into China’s ‘One Belt’ Initiative, but Washington Offers Warning
Britain has made clear its desire to be part of China’s so-called ‘One Belt One Road Initiative’ — a cornerstone of President Xi Jinping’s vision to boost Chinese investment and influence across Asia, Europe and Africa. There are, however, concerns over the financial and humanitarian costs of the vast infrastructure projects being undertaken. As Henry Ridgwell reports, the United States has issued a blunt warning over what it sees as the dangers of being tied to China’s huge investment projects.
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Workers Benefiting from Tight Labor Market
Another solid month for the U.S. economy as American companies added 200,000 new workers to their payrolls last month. The unemployment rate remained unchanged at 4.1 percent, but wages are rising. Although the number of unemployed Americans continues to fall, recruiting agencies say they’ve never been busier. Mil Arcega explains.
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Suspected Spam King Extradited to US
Spain has extradited to the United States a Russian citizen who is suspected of being one of the world’s most notorious spammers.
Pyotr Levashov, a 37-year-old from St. Petersburg, was arrested in April while vacationing with his family in Barcelona.
U.S. authorities had asked for him to be detained on charges of fraud and unauthorized interception of electronic communications. He was scheduled to be arraigned late Friday in a federal courthouse in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where a grand jury indicted him last year.
A statement from Spain’s National Police said officers handed Levashov over to U.S. marshals Friday. The extradition was approved in October by Spain’s National Court, which rejected a counter-extradition request from Russia.
The Russian Embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Army of botnets
Authorities in the U.S. say they have linked Levashov to a series of powerful botnets, or networks of hijacked computers, that were capable of pumping out billions of spam emails. An indictment unsealed last year said he commanded the sprawling Kelihos botnet, which at times allegedly involved more than 100,000 compromised computers that sent phony emails advertising counterfeit drugs, harvested users’ logins and installed malware that intercepted bank account passwords.
On a typical day, the network would generate and distribute more than 2,500 spam emails, according to the indictment.
Levashov’s lawyers have alleged the case is politically motivated and that the U.S. wants him for reasons beyond his alleged cybercrimes. They had argued that he should be tried in Spain instead, and pointed to evidence showing that he gained access to Russian state secrets while studying in St. Petersburg.
Levashov’s U.S.-based lawyer, Igor Litvak, didn’t return emails or calls seeking comment Friday.
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High Levels of Cellphone Radiation Linked to Tumors in Rats, Study Says
Male rats exposed to very high levels of the kind of radiation emitted by cellphones developed tumors in the tissues around their hearts, according to a draft report by U.S. government researchers on the potential health risks of the devices.
Female rats and mice exposed in the same way did not develop tumors, according to the preliminary report from the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP), a part of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
The findings add to years of research meant to help settle the debate over whether cellphone radiation is harmful.
However, NTP scientists and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were quick to say the findings could not be extrapolated to humans and that current safety limits on cellphone radiation are protective.
The 10-year, $25 million studies — the most comprehensive assessments of health effects and exposure to radiofrequency radiation in rats and mice to date — do raise new questions about exposure to the ubiquitous devices.
John Bucher, a senior scientist with NTP, said the tumors seen in the studies are “similar to tumors previously reported in some studies of frequent cellphone users.”
Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, noted that the studies were negative for common tumors.
“These draft reports are bound to create a lot of concern, but in fact they won’t change what I tell people: The evidence for an association between cellphones and cancer is weak, and so far, we have not seen a higher cancer risk in people,” he said in a statement on Twitter.
Brawley said if cellphone users are concerned about this data in animals, they should wear an earpiece.
Different kind of radiation
Unlike ionizing radiation such as that from gamma rays, radon and X-rays, which can break chemical bonds in the body and are known to cause cancer, radiofrequency devices such as cellphones and microwaves emit radiofrequency energy, a form of non-ionizing radiation.
The concern with this type of radiation is that it produces energy in the form of heat, and frequent exposure against the skin could alter brain cell activity, as some studies have suggested.
In the NTP study, rats and mice were exposed to higher levels of radiation for longer periods of time than what people experience with even the highest level of cellphone use, and their entire bodies were exposed all at once, according to the draft report.
Cellphones typically emit lower levels of radiation than maximum levels allowed, the draft report said.
NTP, a part of the National Institutes of Health, will hold an external expert review of its complete findings from these rodent studies on March 26-28.
Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, head of the FDA’s radiological health division, said there is not enough evidence to say cellphone use poses health risks to people.
“Even with frequent daily use by the vast majority of adults, we have not seen an increase in events like brain tumors,” he said in a statement. “We believe the current safety limits for cellphones are acceptable for protecting the public
health.”
Nevertheless, the findings are potentially a concern for device makers, especially the world’s three biggest smartphone sellers, Apple Inc., Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and China’s Huawei Technologies.
The CTIA, the trade association representing AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc., Apple Inc., Sprint Corp., DISH Network Corp. and others, said on Friday that previous studies have shown cellphone RF energy emissions have no known heath risks.
“We understand that the NTP draft reports for its mice and rat studies will be put out for comment and peer review so that their significance can be assessed,” the group said.
Samsung and Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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US Stocks Swoon, Sending Dow Down More Than 650 Points
U.S. stocks slumped Friday, pulling down the Dow Jones industrial average by more than 650 points and handing the market its worst week in two years.
Technology, banks and energy stocks accounted for much of the broad slide. Several major companies, including Exxon Mobil and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, sank after reporting weak earnings.
Fears of rising inflation sent bond yields higher and contributed to the stock market swoon after the government reported that wages grew last month at the fastest pace in eight years.
The sharp drop follows a long period of unprecedented calm in the market. Stocks haven’t had a pullback of 10 percent or more in two years, and hit their latest record highs just one week ago.
“We’ve enjoyed low interest rates for so long, we’re having to deal with a little bit higher rates now, so the market is trying to figure out what that could mean for inflation,” said Darrell Cronk, head of the Wells Fargo Investment Institute.
The increase in bond yields hurts stocks in two ways: it makes it more expensive for companies to borrow money, and it also makes bonds more appealing to investors than riskier assets such as stocks.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 59.85 points, or 2.1 percent, to 2,762.13. That’s the biggest loss for the benchmark index since September 2016. The S&P 500 has lost 3.9 percent since hitting a record high a week ago.
The Dow Jones industrial average lost 665.75 points, or 2.4 percent, to 25,520.96. The Nasdaq slid 144.92 points, or 2 percent, to 7,240.95. The Russell 2000 index of smaller-company stocks gave up 32.59 points, or 2.1 percent, to 1,547.27.
Rise in interest rates
While interest rates are still low by historical standards, meaning borrowing is still relatively cheap for businesses and people, they’ve been rising more swiftly, and that’s what has markets on edge.
“The pace of rate increases is more important than the level,” said Nate Thooft, senior portfolio manager at Manulife Asset Management.
The increase in rates has been driven by the prospect of stronger economic growth, and higher inflation, in the U.S. and abroad.
Bond prices declined again Friday, pushing yields higher. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note, a benchmark for interest rates on many kinds of loans, including mortgages, climbed to 2.83 percent, the highest level in roughly four years. The rate was at 2.41 percent four weeks ago and 2.66 percent on Monday.
“Once we started going north of 2.5 percent, and you put that together with an overbought market, it had the ingredients of a sell-off, especially since January was so strong,” said Jeff Zipper, regional investment strategist at U.S. Bank Private Wealth Management.
The S&P 500, which many index funds track, soared 5.6 percent in January, its biggest monthly gain since March 2016.
The expectation among investors has long been for a gradual rise in interest rates, as the Federal Reserve slowly pulls back from the stimulus that it implemented for the economy amid the Great Recession. But if rates rise more quickly than expected, it could upset markets.
The key concern is that the Fed will respond to higher inflation by raising its key interest rate more quickly than expected. The government’s latest job and wage data stoked those concerns Friday.
U.S. jobs
U.S. employers added a robust 200,000 jobs in January, slightly above market expectations for an 185,000 increase. Meanwhile wages rose sharply, suggesting employers are competing more fiercely for workers. The figures point to an economy on strong footing even in its ninth year of expansion, fueled by global economic growth and healthy consumer spending at home.
That’s good news for Main Street USA, but not for Wall Street. Investors fear the pickup in hourly wages, along with a recent uptick in inflation, may make it more likely that the Fed will raise short-term interest rates more quickly in the coming months. Some economists were predicting Friday that the central bank will raise its benchmark rate four times this year, rather than the three times most previously expected.
“With financial conditions continuing to ease and core price inflation also starting to pick up, we expect this will persuade the Fed to hike rates four times this year,” Andrew Hunter, an economist with Capital Economics, wrote in a published note Friday.
The market slide may have been overdue, particularly after the strong start for stocks this year where the S&P 500 had its best January in two decades.
The global economy is still strong, corporate profits and sales have been better than expected this reporting season and buyers for stocks still remain, all reasons to be optimistic about stocks, said Nate Thooft, senior portfolio manager at Manulife Asset Management.
“It’s appealing, these 2 to 3 percent pullbacks,” said Thooft, who had been trimming some of his stock holdings after the market’s big January gains. “We look at this and say, ‘Maybe it’s your first day to buy a little bit.'”
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Dow Falls More Than 600 Points as Stocks’ Slide Continues
Stocks closed sharply lower in New York on Friday, extending a weeklong slide, as the Dow Jones industrial average plunged more than 600 points.
The drop capped stocks’ worst week in two years. The Dow’s drop was its biggest in percentage terms since June 2016.
Several giant U.S. companies’ shares dropped after reporting weak earnings, including Exxon Mobil and Alphabet. Apple and Chevron also fell.
Bond yields rose sharply after the government reported the fastest wage growth in eight years, stoking fears of inflation.
The Dow fell 665 points, or 2.5 percent, to 25,520.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 index dropped 59 points, or 2.1 percent, to 2,762. The S&P is down almost 4 percent since hitting a record high a week ago.
The Nasdaq was off 144 points, or 2 percent, to 7,240.
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James Ivory, 89, May Set an Oscar Record, But He’d Rather Work
James Ivory didn’t see “Call Me By Your Name” with an audience until the week before he was nominated for its screenplay. He caught it at a New York theater with a good audience, he says, that applauded at the end. It was his first tangible taste of the adulation for the film he wrote, about first love in Northern Italy, since it began its celebrated run at last year’s Sundance Film Festival.
“I’ve just been thinking: What is it about the film that people respond to so much?” Ivory says in a recent phone interview from his upstate New York home in Claverack. “And I think it’s a story about a happy love in a beautiful place. I think that just appeals to people. It ought to.”
The pure and glittering romance of “Call Me By Your Name” has taken on an almost escapist quality in an awards season consumed with sexual harassment revelations throughout Hollywood. But if “Call Me by Your Name,” about the sun-dappled relationship between 17-year-old Elio (Timothee Chalamet) and a visiting grad student (Armie Hammer), radiates with the tumultuous emotions of youth, it’s also composed with the insight of age.
Expected to win
Ivory is 89, and should he win the Oscar for adapting Andre Aciman’s 2007 novel — as Ivory is widely expected to — he’ll become the oldest Oscar winner ever. (That is, unless the 89-year-old French filmmaker Agnes Varda, born a week before Ivory, also wins at the March 4 ceremony. Her “Faces Places” is up for best documentary.)
But regardless of the outcome, “Call Me By Your Name” has proven an unlikely yet altogether fitting encore for a master filmmaker whose films have already pocketed 31 Oscar nominations and six wins. For some 50 years, Ivory was half of perhaps the most long-running and illustrious independent filmmaking duo in film history. With Ismail Merchant, his partner and producer, they made up Merchant Ivory Productions, a name virtually synonymous with literate, refined period dramas.
Together, with their regular screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, they more or less wrote the book on literary adaptations with films such as “Remains of the Day,” “Howard’s End,” “Maurice,” “A Room With a View” and “The Golden Bowl.” Though sometimes superficially seen as stuffy portraits of upper-class life, the recent and ongoing 4K restorations of their work by Cohen Media Group has only enhanced the films’ intimacy of character and pristine economy of storytelling.
“A lot of directors don’t bother to go back and look at their films, but I do,” says Ivory. “If I hear that a film of mine is going to be shown on a big screen somewhere and I haven’t seen it in a while, I make a point to get to see it. I just want to see it up on the big screen. My feelings don’t usually change much about it. I happen to like all our movies.”
‘Three-headed monster’
For filmmakers known for tales about British aristocracy, they were an unusual trio: Ivory, the Oregon son of a sawmill owner; Merchant, the son of a Bombay textile dealer whose family protested the 1947 partitioning of India; and Jhabvala, a German Jew who fled Britain during World War II. Merchant called them “a three-headed monster.”
Merchant died in 2015, Jhabvala in 2013 and Ivory’s last film was 2009’s “The City of Your Final Destination,” which he prepped with Merchant and which Jhabvala wrote from Peter Cameron’s novel. The losses were profound, but Ivory never wanted to retire.
“No! I still don’t,” Ivory says. “In fact, I’m working on a new screenplay. Maybe it’s absurd to imagine that I would actually get to direct it at my age. But I don’t know why. I’m much healthier than other people who are doing movies. And I’m in great shape. It’s always a matter of convincing the insurance people. They seem to think that after a certain age, you’re just going to fall over or something.”
For the past several years, Ivory has been trying to mount a “Richard II” film, with a script penned by Chris Terrio (“Argo,” “Justice League”) and potentially Tom Hiddleston and Damian Lewis starring. “A Shakespeare film does not grab the hearts of financiers, I can tell you,” he says.
Concerns over Ivory’s age also fed into his experience on “Call Me By Your Name.” The rights to Aciman’s novel were acquired by Ivory’s neighbors, Peter Spears and Howard Rosenman. They asked Ivory to be an executive producer, and Ivory accepted.
Script takes a year
After some difficulty finding a director or financing, the producers met with Luca Guadagnino, who suggested he co-direct with Ivory. Ivory again accepted but he wanted to write the screenplay. Ivory spent a year on the script but the co-directing framework was less appealing to investors.
“We wanted to make it with him as the director, but we were disappointed by the market,” says Guadagnino. “When we realized that could have been made was a teenie, teenie tiny movie in a very small amount of time, and that there was some interest in me doing it, we said, ‘OK.’ He was very generous. He said, ‘I bless this project if you do it.’”
“James is at the peak of his career,” added Guadagnino. “I can’t explain how full of life is James. It’s extraordinary. His wonderment and love of discovery. I am 46 and he’s almost 90, and the energy in his body is really more than mine.”
Ivory’s script, which he typed on a typewriter, begins with a description of the villa owned by Ellio’s family and an atmosphere “of upper-middle class comfort but nothing princely, or run-down aristocratic.” As is commonplace, there were changes along the way. To save money, the film was uprooted from Sicily and re-set around Guadagnino’s town of Crema. The film’s beloved final close-up — which even Aciman has praised as superior to his ending — was originally located not by a fire but while Elio was hanging a candle on a Christmas tree.
A few issues to be settled
The collaboration wasn’t without issues. Ivory went to arbitration with the Writers Guild over whether Guadagnino deserved a co-writer credit. The WGA ruled he didn’t. Ivory has also previously suggested disappointment that the film didn’t feature more of the nudity in the script. (Both Chalamet and Hammer had contract clauses against frontal nudity.) But Ivory has walked back those comments.
“I think it has to do with nationalities,” he says. “In ‘A Room With a View,’ you have three young Englishmen running around naked and laughing and whooping and jumping in the water. It’s something the English don’t apparently find troublesome. They like that. But you would never get three American actors to do that. It’s just not in our nature, somehow, to expose ourselves like that. It’s a cultural thing.”
“Call Me By Your Name” is a kind of bookend to Ivory’s 1987 film “Maurice,” a restoration of which was released last summer. Now regarded as a landmark in gay cinema, Ivory’s adaptation of E.M. Forster’s posthumously published novel is about two Cambridge students (James Wilby, Hugh Grant) who fall in love in Edwardian England. Released at the height of the AIDS epidemic, it dared something groundbreaking: a happy ending.
In “Maurice,” their love is tortured and strained by the times. But in “Call Me By Your Name,” any hurdles to romance are entirely interior. It’s about, Ivory says, “young love that doesn’t know how to trust itself.” Having both films in theaters a few months apart, Ivory grants, has been gratifying.
“It’s been a really interesting year, I have to say.”
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Viva Forever? Ex-Spice Girls Meet Up Amid Reunion Rumors
All five former members of the Spice Girls have met up amid rumors of a plan to reunite the girl-power group.
Photos posted by several group members on social media showed Victoria “Posh Spice” Beckham, Melanie “Sporty Spice” Chisholm, Emma “Baby Spice” Bunton, Melanie “Scary Spice” Brown and Geri “Ginger Spice” Horner.
They had been seen earlier Friday arriving at Horner’s home north of London, along with former manager Simon Fuller.
The Sun newspaper reported the quintet is considering several projects, including a TV talent show, though not a live tour.
The Spice Girls were a 1990s phenomenon, with hits including “Wannabe.” They split in 2000 and last reunited at the 2012 London Olympics.
Now the group’s highest-profile member is Beckham, a fashion designer married to former soccer star David Beckham.
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