British inventor Nik Spencer believes household garbage is a valuable and underrated resource. That’s because trash happens to be the perfect fuel for his latest invention: the Home Energy Resources Unit, or HERU. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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Month: July 2018
US Formally Lifts Ban on China’s ZTE
The United States has formally lifted a crippling ban on exports to the Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE.
The Commerce Department said Friday that it had removed the ban after ZTE deposited $400 million in a U.S. bank escrow account as part of a settlement reached last month.
ZTE has already paid a $1 billion fine that is also part of its settlement with the U.S. government.
“While we lifted the ban on ZTE, the department will remain vigilant as we closely monitor ZTE’s actions to ensure compliance with all U.S. laws and regulations,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement. He described the terms of the deal as the strictest ever imposed in such a case.
The Chinese company is accused of selling sensitive technologies to Iran and North Korea, despite a U.S. trade embargo.
In April, the Commerce Department barred ZTE from importing American components for its telecommunications products for the next seven years, practically putting the company out of business. However, Trump later announced a deal with ZTE in which the Chinese company would pay a $1 billion fine for its trade violations, as well as replace its entire management and board by the middle of July.
Lawmakers from both parties have criticized Trump’s efforts and have taken steps to block the White House’s efforts to revive ZTE. The Senate passed legislation last month included in a military spending bill that would block ZTE from buying component parts from the United States. That legislation now moves to a joint committee of House and Senate members who will decide the fate of the ZTE measure in a compromise defense bill.
Most of the world first heard of the dispute over ZTE in May after one of Trump’s tweets. “President Xi of China and I are working together to give massive Chinese phone company, ZTE, a way to get back into business, fast. Too many jobs in China lost. Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!” Trump said.
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White House Declares War on Poverty ‘Largely Over’
The White House released a report Thursday contending that the United States’ war on poverty — a drive that started over 50 years ago to improve the social safety net for the poorest citizens of the world’s largest economy — is “largely over and a success,” contrasting with other reports on the nation’s poor.
The report, authored by President Donald Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, called for federal aid recipients to be pushed toward work requirements.
The report says poverty, when measured by consumption, has fallen by 90 percent since 1961. It also says that only 3 percent of Americans currently live under the poverty line.
“The timing is ideal for expanding work requirements among non-disabled working-age adults in social welfare programs,” according to the report. “Ultimately, expanded work requirements can improve the lives of current welfare recipients and at the same time respect the importance and dignity of work.”
U.N. report
The council’s report contrasts with a U.N. report on poverty in the U.S. that was released last month. That report said about 12 percent of the U.S. population lives in poverty, and that the U.S. “leads the developed world in income and wealth inequality.”
Phillip Alston, a U.N. adviser on extreme poverty and the author of the report, wrote in December 2017 that he believed Trump and his administration, along with U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, “will essentially shred crucial dimensions of a safety net that is already full of holes.”
In April, Trump signed an executive order outlining work mandates for low-income citizens on federal aid programs. These programs included Medicaid, which provides federal health insurance for low-income individuals, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides these low-income individuals with assistance in food purchasing.
Both programs were among those introduced in the 1960s, during the administration of then-President Lyndon Johnson, a Democrat who coined the term “war on poverty” during his first State of the Union address.
Four state mandates
The Trump administration has already permitted four states — Kentucky, Indiana, Arkansas, and New Hampshire — to implement work requirement programs for Medicaid recipients, the first such restrictions enforced on the program. In June, however, a federal judge struck down Kentucky’s mandate, writing that the administration’s waiver “never adequately considered whether [the program] would in fact help the state furnish medical assistance to its citizens, a central objective of Medicaid.”
Anne Marie Regan, a senior staff attorney for the Kentucky Equal Justice Center, one of the organizations that successfully challenged the Kentucky waiver, told VOA that while she didn’t know the specifics of other states’ Medicare waivers, she thought similar challenges could be successful because of the administration’s insistence on work requirements.
Regan said her state’s proposal would have removed 95,000 people from health care coverage.
“The war on poverty is certainly not over,” Regan said. “There’s certainly still a great need for a safety net.”
In June, the U.S. House of Representatives narrowly passed a farm bill that includes work requirements for some adults who receive food assistance benefits. Every Democrat, along with 20 Republicans, voted against the bill, which is not expected to pass the Senate.
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Report: Failure to Educate Girls Could Cost World $30 Trillion
Failing to let girls finish their education could cost the world as much as $30 trillion in lost earnings and productivity, yet more than 130 million girls are out of school globally, the World Bank said Wednesday.
Women who have completed secondary education are more likely to work and earn on average nearly twice as much as those with no schooling, according to a report by the World Bank.
About 132 million girls worldwide aged 6 to 17 do not attend school, while fewer than two-thirds of those in low-income nations finish primary school, and only a third finish lower secondary school, the World Bank said.
If every girl in the world finished 12 years of quality education, lifetime earnings for women could increase by $15 trillion to $30 trillion, according to the report.
“Overall, the message is clear: Educating girls is not only the right thing to do,” the World Bank said in the report, “it also makes economic and strategic sense for countries to fulfill their development potential.”
Other positive impacts of completing secondary school education for girls include a reduction in child marriage, lower fertility rates in countries with high population growth, and reduced child mortality and malnutrition, the World Bank said.
“We cannot keep letting gender inequality get in the way of global progress,” Kristalina Georgieva, World Bank chief executive, said in a statement.
The benefits of educating girls are considerably higher at secondary school level in comparison to primary education, said Quentin Wodon, World Bank lead economist and main report author.
“While we do need to ensure that, of course, all girls complete primary school, that is not enough,” Wodon told Reuters.
Women who have completed secondary education are at lesser risk of suffering violence at the hands of their partners, and have children who are less likely to be malnourished and themselves are more likely to go to school, the report said.
“When 130 million girls are unable to become engineers or journalists or CEOs because education is out of their reach, our world misses out on trillions of dollars,” Malala Yousafzai, 2014 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said in a statement.
“This report is more proof that we cannot afford to delay investing in girls,” said Yousafzai, an education activist who was shot in the head at the age of 15 by a Taliban gunman in 2012.
The report was published ahead of U.N. Malala Day on Thursday, which marks the birthday of the Pakistani activist.
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Kenya Uber to Keep Fares Unchanged for Now, Following Drivers’ Strike
Uber’s business in Kenya said on Friday it will keep its fares unchanged for now, after associations representing taxi drivers in the country signed a deal giving guidelines for better fares and working conditions.
“As of today, we will not be adjusting our fares as we are busy completing a deeper study of driver economics in light of the concerns and feedback that we have received from drivers to ensure that fares are correctly priced,” a spokesperson for Uber Technologies said in an email to Reuters.
The Digital Taxi Association of Kenya, representing more than 2,000 ride-hailing taxi drivers, signed a deal on Wednesday meant to give drivers higher pay and better conditions.
The drivers told Reuters they thought the deal would cushion them in the event of falling fares arising from discounts companies offers to passengers. They had staged a nine-day strike seeking higher fares and better working conditions.
As in other markets, these ride-hailing services in Kenya initially faced opposition and sometimes hostility from other taxi drivers.
Kenya is Uber’s second-largest market in sub-Saharan Africa, after South Africa. It competes mostly against its local rival Taxify, which has gained popularity in Nairobi in the past year and a half, but does not disclose numbers of active riders and users.
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8 Endangered Black Rhinos Die in Kenya After Relocation
Eight critically endangered black rhinos are dead in Kenya following an attempt to move them from the capital to a national park hundreds of kilometers away, the government said Friday, calling the toll “unprecedented” in more than a decade of such transfers.
Preliminary investigations point to salt poisoning as the rhinos tried to adapt to saltier water in their new home, the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife said in a statement. It suspended the ongoing move of other rhinos and said the surviving ones were being closely monitored.
Losing the rhinos is “a complete disaster,” said prominent Kenyan conservationist Paula Kahumbu of WildlifeDirect.
Conservationists in Africa have been working hard to protect the black rhino sub-species from poachers targeting them for their horns to supply an illegal Asian market.
In moving a group of 11 rhinos to the newly created Tsavo East National Park from Nairobi last month, the Kenya Wildlife Service said it hoped to boost the population there. The government agency has not said how the rhinos died. Fourteen of the animals were to be moved in all.
“Disciplinary action will definitely be taken” if an investigation into the deaths indicates negligence by agency staff, the wildlife ministry said.
“Moving rhinos is complicated, akin to moving gold bullion, it requires extremely careful planning and security due to the value of these rare animals,” Kahumbu said in a statement. “Rhino translocations also have major welfare considerations and I dread to think of the suffering that these poor animals endured before they died.”
Transporting wildlife is a strategy used by conservationists to help build up, or even bring back, animal populations. In May, six black rhinos were moved from South Africa to Chad, restoring the species to the country in north-central Africa nearly half a century after it was wiped out there.
Kenya transported 149 rhinos between 2005 and 2017 with eight deaths, the wildlife ministry said.
According to WWF, black rhino populations declined dramatically in the 20th century, mostly at the hands of European hunters and settlers. Between 1960 and 1995, numbers dropped by 98 percent, to fewer than 2,500.
Since then the species has rebounded, although it remains extremely threatened. In addition to poaching, the animals also face habitat loss.
African Parks, a Johannesburg-based conservation group, said earlier this year that there are fewer than 25,000 rhinos in the African wild, of which about 20 percent are black rhinos and the rest white rhinos.
In another major setback for conservation, the last remaining male northern white rhino on the planet died in March in Kenya, leaving conservationists struggling to save that sub-species using in vitro fertilization.
Eight Rhinos Found Dead After Move to New Kenyan Sanctuary
The Kenyan Wildlife Service (KWS) has halted the relocation of black rhinos to a new sanctuary after eight of the animals died soon after arriving at the site. Investigators are trying to determine what went wrong at the sanctuary, located in Kenya’s Tsavo East National Park.
According to the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife, a preliminary investigation attributes the deaths to salt poisoning. They say the rhinos apparently drank water of high salinity in the new environment.
KWS had recently transferred the rhinos from two other national parks, in an effort to create a safe breeding ground for the country’s blackrhinopopulation.
KWS spokesman Paul Gathitu told VOA earlier this week that all measures were in place to ensure the rhinos were comfortable in the new habitat.
“There has to be sufficient food, it has to be correct in terms of weather, in terms of water that is available, so all those factors had to be put in place including even the issue of security of the rhinos themselves. All that put together, we felt that the conditions were about right,” said Gathitu.
The eight dead rhinos were among 11 that had been moved to the new sanctuary.
Paula Kahumbu, the CEO of Wildlife Direct, said the deaths equal one percent of Kenya’s black rhino population.
“It is an unprecedented disaster,” said Kahumbu. “We have never seen anything like it before and so we are very anxious and very worried and many citizens and concerned persons in this country has been calling for an investigation.”
Kenyans on social media expressed outrage and suspicion at the deaths. One Twitter user wrote, “Can photos of the dead rhinos be shared to ascertain the horns are intact?”
Poachers have killed hundreds of the animals in recent years to satisfy black market demand for rhino horn.
KWS has moved rhinos from one park to another in the past without incident, and successfully immobilized many rhinos for medical treatment.
Tourism and wildlife officials are waiting for a full postmortem report on the deceased rhinos.
In the meantime, the Ministry of Tourism and Wildlife says the remaining rhinos are being closely monitored by veterinary and park management teams and are being provided with fresh water in temporary pans.
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Jailed Ukrainian Filmmaker’s Mother Asks Putin to Pardon Him
The mother of a jailed Ukrainian filmmaker who has been refusing food for nearly two months asked Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday to pardon him.
Oleg Sentsov, a vocal opponent of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, was sentenced in 2015 to 20 years for conspiracy to commit terror acts. He denies the charges and has been on a hunger strike since mid-May.
In a letter written on Sentsov’s 42nd birthday, Lyudmila Sentsova pleaded with Putin to show mercy and pardon her son. The letter was published by the liberal Ekho Moskvy radio station Friday.
“I will not trying to convince you of Oleg’s innocence, although I myself believe it. I will simply say that he didn’t kill anyone,” Sentsova wrote. “He has already spent four years in jail. His children are waiting for him.”
She exhorted Putin “not to ruin his life and the life of his loved ones.”
Sentsov has lost about 20 kilograms (44 pounds) and is very frail, according to his lawyer. He is receiving vitamins and other nutrients through an intravenous line.
Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Putin would consider the request. But Peskov added that he wasn’t sure whether pardoning Sentsov was even legally possible since under Russian law, the president can only pardon a convict if he or she personally asks. Sentsov has refused to do that.
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Technology Enhances Soccer Watching Experience
Football fans are watching the World Cup on multiple screens in bars, on their phones while they should be working, on TVs at home with their friends. One day, they could be following the action in 3D. Researchers at the University of Washington are developing a way to watch soccer games and other sporting matches as if you were in the stadium, by using augmented reality devices. Faiza Elmasry takes a look at the new technology in this report, narrated by Faith Lapidus.
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Rising Greenhouse Gases Making Food Less Nutritious
Temperatures around the world are rising as humans burn coal, oil and other fossil fuels for energy. Burning those fuels releases heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But it does more than that. CO2 is vital for plant growth. While having more of it sounds like a good thing, scientists are finding it is not always that simple. VOA’s Steve Baragona has more.
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US Lawmakers Blast Trump on Tariffs
U.S. senators Thursday continued a bipartisan rebuke of President Donald Trump’s punitive trade strategy, one day after an overwhelming vote asserting a congressional role in the imposition of tariffs for national security reasons. VOA’s Michael Bowman reports from Capitol Hill, where anti-tariff sentiment is strong but not universal.
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Jeff Bezos to Charge At Least $200,000 for Space Rides, Sources Say
Jeff Bezos’ rocket company plans to charge passengers about $200,000 to $300,000 for its first trips into space next year, two people familiar with its plans told Reuters.
Potential customers and the aerospace industry have been eager to learn the cost of a ticket on Blue Origin’s New Shepard space vehicle, to find out if it is affordable and whether the company can generate enough demand to make a profit on space tourism.
Executives at the company, started by Amazon.com Inc founder Bezos in 2000, told a business conference last month they planned test flights with passengers on the New Shepard soon, and to start selling tickets next year.
The company, based about 20 miles (32 km) south of Seattle, has made public the general design of the vehicle — comprising a launch rocket and detachable passenger capsule — but has been tight-lipped on production status and ticket prices.
Blue Origin representatives did not respond to requests for comment on its programs and pricing strategy. Bezos said in May ticket prices had not yet been decided.
One Blue Origin employee with first-hand knowledge of the pricing plan said the company will start selling tickets in the range of about $200,000 to $300,000. A second employee said tickets would cost a minimum of $200,000. They both spoke on condition of anonymity as the pricing strategy is confidential.
The New Shepard is designed to autonomously fly six passengers more than 62 miles (100 km) above Earth into suborbital space, high enough to experience a few minutes of weightlessness and see the curvature of the planet before the pressurized capsule returns to Earth under parachutes.
The capsule features six observation windows Blue Origin says are nearly three times as tall as those on a Boeing Co 747 jetliner.
Blue Origin has completed eight test flights of the vertical takeoff and landing of New Shepard from its launch pad in Texas, but none with passengers aboard. Two flights have included a test dummy the company calls “Mannequin Skywalker.”
The company will do the first test in space of its capsule escape system, which propels the crew to safety should the booster explode, “within weeks,” one of the employees said.
Small step for a man
Blue Origin, whose Latin motto means “step by step, ferociously,” is working toward making civilian space flight an important niche in the global space economy, alongside satellite services and government exploration projects, already worth over $300 billion a year.
Bezos, the world’s richest person with a fortune of about $112 billion, has competition from fellow billionaires Richard Branson and Elon Musk, Tesla Inc’s chief executive.
Branson’s Virgin Galactic says it has sold about 650 tickets aboard its own planned space voyages, but has not set out a date for flights to start. The company is charging $250,000 per ticket, in line with Blue Origin’s proposed pricing.
SpaceX, founded by Musk in 2002, says its ultimate goal is to enable people to live on other planets.
All three are looking to slash the cost of spaceflight by developing reusable spacecraft, meaning prices for passengers and payloads should drop as launch frequency increases.
While Blue Origin has not disclosed its per-flight operating costs, Teal Group aerospace analyst Marco Caceres estimated each flight could cost the firm about $10 million. With six passengers per trip, that would mean losing millions of dollars per launch, at least initially.
Three sources said Blue’s first passengers are likely to include its own employees, though the company has not selected them yet.
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A Look at Euro-Russian Energy Deal Opposed by Trump
President Donald Trump’s criticism of Germany’s involvement in a natural gas pipeline deal with Russia launched a tense two days of NATO meetings in Brussels — but it also may have set the tone for the U.S. leader’s highly anticipated summit with his Russian counterpart Monday in Helsinki.
In a taut exchange with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on Wednesday, Trump said Nord Stream 2 — an offshore pipeline that would deliver gas to Germany directly from Russia via the Baltic Sea — leaves the Western military alliance’s largest and wealthiest European member “totally controlled” by and “captive to” Russia.
“We’re supposed to protect you against Russia but [Germany is] paying billions of dollars to Russia, and I think that’s very inappropriate,” Trump told Stoltenberg.
According to the U.S. leader, Germany “got rid of their coal plants, got rid of their nuclear, they’re getting so much of the oil and gas from Russia. I think it’s something NATO has to look at.”
As Europe’s biggest natural gas consumer, Germany relies on Russia for roughly half of its gas imports, which account for 20 percent of its current energy mix, according to London-based Marex Spectron group. The International Energy Association projects German natural gas demand to increase by 1 percent in the next five years, as Berlin continues phasing out its nuclear power plants by 2022.
Expanding upon the existing Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which has been transporting gas from Russia to Germany along the same Baltic Sea route since 2011, Nord Stream 2, currently slated for completion by 2019, would roughly double Russia’s export volume.
Trump says the $11 billion, 800-mile pipeline expansion linking Russia and Germany would give Moscow greater geopolitical leverage over Europe at a time of heightened international tensions, an opinion in keeping with that of his his immediate predecessor, former President Barack Obama, and former President George W. Bush, who opposed Nord Stream 1.
The administrations have long pushed for Germany, Europe’s largest energy consumer, to buy American liquefied natural gas (LNG) in an attempt to overtake a sector of the market long dominated by Russian distribution routes that run through Ukraine.
Poland and Lithuania, who are among Nord Stream 2’s most vociferous European critics, have built LNG terminals that would stand to profit from an American takeover of the market. But other former Soviet satellite nations — such as Ukraine, Latvia and Estonia — have long warned that a growing reliance on Russian energy not only compromises European security, but rewards Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and other campaigns to destabilize the European Union.
There have been numerous price disputes between Moscow and Kyiv over natural gas deliveries to Ukraine, whose pipelines serve other European nations. In 2009, a disagreement between the two nations cut natural gas supplies to Western Europe in the middle of winter, leaving many without heat.
Nord Stream 2, they argue, will not only deprive land-transit countries such as Poland and Ukraine of billions in annual transit fees, it will also give Russia a way to penalize Eastern European foes without sacrificing lucrative deals further to the west.
According to Atlantic Council energy expert Agnia Grigas, Nord Stream 2 contradicts the EU’s official energy security strategy, which calls on EU nations to diversify energy sources, distributors and routes.
“If Nord Stream 2 is built, Germany would be the EU country most exposed to dubious Russian influence,” Grigas recently reported. “Moscow already has a track record of relying on German businesses and lawmakers to advance its own strategic goals. For instance, following Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, large German companies with considerable business ties with Russia were among the harshest critics of Western sanctions against Moscow.”
As a private project backed by energy giants such as Shell — a British-Dutch multinational — Germany’s Wintershall and Uniper, along with Russia’s state-owned Gazprom, Nord Stream 2 is also being financed by private firms from Austria, France and Britain, but not by German tax funds.
In responding to Trump’s Wednesday tirade against Berlin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she knew all too well from her childhood in the East what it is like to live under Soviet control. But she said energy deals with Russia do not make 21st-century Berlin beholden to Moscow.
“I am very happy that today we are united in freedom as the Federal Republic of Germany. Because of that, we can say that we can make our independent policies and make independent decisions,” she said.
Merkel’s predecessor, Gerhard Schroeder, a longtime friend of Putin, has championed the Nord Stream enterprise since just before being voted out of office in 2005. He soon went on to lead the shareholder committee of Nord Stream AG, a consortium for construction and operation of the submarine pipeline, eventually going on to become chairman of the Kremlin-controlled Rosneft, Russia’s largest oil company.
In March, European politicians increased calls for sanctions against the ex-chancellor for representing Russian interests, though his name has yet to appear on any lists of individuals targeted for sanctions.
Despite repeated U.S. warnings that companies involved in the deal also risk being slapped with sanctions, Nord Stream 2 is scheduled for completion next year.
This story originated in VOA’s Russian service.
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Scientists Track ‘Ghost Particle’ to Source for First Time
Scientists have announced a new finding about the source of a high-energy neutrino, a subatomic particle detected at an observatory at the Earth’s South Pole.
The study, published Thursday in the journal Science, details the work of more than 1,000 scientists who pooled their research on the tiny particles, which are able to pass through matter in a straight line — like a ghost.
The neutrino’s ability to travel without deviation from its course means its source can be accurately tracked, unlike other types of subatomic particles that can be dragged off course by a magnetic field like the Earth’s.
“[Neutrinos are] very clean, they have simple interactions, and that means every single neutrino interaction tells you something,” said Heidi Schellman, a particle physicist at Oregon State University.
The scientists used a large observatory known as IceCube, in use since 2010, to hunt for neutrinos and try to track the source. A group of neutrinos coming from the same location over the past couple of years was determined to have emanated from a blazar, or black hole that aims a jet of radiation at Earth. The black hole is estimated to have been in a distant galaxy that destructed four billion years ago.
The blazar that is considered the source of the neutrino was named TXS 0506+056 and is believed to be the first known source of a high-energy neutrino.
The discovery could be a breakthrough for multimessenger astronomy, where scientists look at the entire electromagnetic spectrum and pool their findings, using known relationships between types of electromagnetic particles to put together a larger picture.
“It is an entirely new means for us to learn about the cosmos,” Roopesh Ojha of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center told The Washington Post.
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US to Appeal Approval of AT&T Acquisition of Time Warner
The U.S. Justice Department said Thursday that it would appeal a federal judge’s approval of AT&T Inc.’s $85.4 billion acquisition of Time Warner.
The Justice Department opted in June not to seek an immediate stay of the court’s approval of the merger, allowing the merger to close on June 14. The department still had 60 days to appeal the decision.
The government’s court filing did not disclose on what ground it intended to challenge the approval.
AT&T and the Justice Department did not immediately comment.
AT&T shares fell 1 percent after the bell.
The merger, announced in October 2016, was opposed by President Donald Trump. AT&T was sued by the Justice Department but won approval from a judge to move forward with the deal in June following a six-week trial.
Judge Richard Leon of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the tie-up between AT&T’s wireless and satellite businesses and Time Warner’s movies and television shows was legal under antitrust law.
The Justice Department had argued the deal would harm consumers.
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Lost Luggage Finds New Homes — At Bargain Prices
Suspiciously cheap diamonds, jeans for a dollar and a pair of skis for next to nothing are all bargains that can be found at a store in a small Alabama town that sells are the contents of lost airline baggage. Every year airline companies lose about 20 million suitcases, and while most of them do find their way back to their owners, thousands of bags are never picked up. As Daria Dieguts found out, some of these lost items end up at the lost baggage store in Alabama.
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From Mutton Soup to Pelmeni Dumplings: Football Fans Experience Russian Gastronomy
From mutton soup to caviar to veal tongue, Russian gastronomy is now being enjoyed by football fans from around the world who are in Russia for the World Cup. We get more from VOA’s Mariama Diallo.
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Fingerprinting Technology Could Save Endangered Pangolins
Pangolins are the world’s most illegally trafficked animal. Eight species of the elusive mammals are found in Africa and Southeast Asia, but as many as 300 are poached every day, destined for markets in Vietnam and China, where their meat is considered a delicacy and their scales believed to have medicinal properties. Researchers in the UK are hoping to deter pangolin poaching with fingerprint technology that’s designed to identify poachers and bring them to justice. VOA’s Julie Taboh explains.
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First Test-Tube Baby Born 40 Years Ago This Month
Forty years ago this month, the first test-tube baby was born in what is now called in vitro fertilization. British baby Louise Brown was born July 25, 1978. She’s married now with two children who were born naturally. A new exhibition at the Science Museum in London is showcasing the anniversary and the technological advances achieved through in vitro fertilization. VOA’s Deborah Block has more.
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India Tops List of Most Dangerous Country for Women in Reuters Survey
India has emerged as the most dangerous country in the world for women, according to a survey by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The survey is a repeat of one conducted by the foundation in 2011, which rated India as the fourth most dangerous country for women, after Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Pakistan. The survey is not well received by the Indian government or field experts who have raised questions about the survey’s methodology. Ritul Joshi has more from New Delhi.
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