Month: July 2018

US Offers German Automakers Solution to Trade Spat, Report Says

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United States Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell reportedly told German auto makers Wednesday the U.S. would back off threats of tariffs on European car imports in exchange for the European Union’s elimination of duties on U.S. cars.

The German newspaper Handelsblatt reported Grenell told BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen executives of the proposal during a meeting Wednesday at the embassy in Berlin.

Daimler and Volkswagen declined to comment and BMW was not immediately available for comment, the report said.

The reported proposal comes after the European Union warned U.S. President Donald Trump last Friday the potential indirect costs of imposing tariffs on cars could amount to $294 billion.

The EU report, submitted to the U.S. Commerce Department, maintained the tariffs would disrupt cross-border supply chains in the automotive industry. The report said the tariffs could possibly trigger higher U.S. industrial costs, raise consumer prices, hurt exports and cost jobs.  

The World Trade Organization said Wednesday trade barriers being set by world economic powers could jeopardize the global economic recovery.

“This continued escalation poses a serious threat to growth and recovery in all countries, and we are beginning to see this reflected in some forward-looking indicators,” WTO Director General Roberto Azevendo said.

Azevendo did not expound on his remarks, but the WTO’s quarter trade outlook indicator in May suggested trade growth in the second quarter would decelerate.

 
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Scientists Create Hybrids in Race to Save Rhino Subspecies

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Scientists say they’re several steps closer to perfecting a method for saving the northern white rhino from extinction. 

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, researchers said Wednesday that they had succeeded in creating embryos using frozen northern white rhino sperm and eggs from a southern white rhino.

It’s the first time such hybrid embryos have been created, and the scientists from Europe and the United States hope it will provide a pathway to saving the northern white rhino subspecies, of which only two females remain.

They plan to harvest the females’ egg cells soon and produce “pure” northern white rhinos to be borne by a southern white surrogate in three years. They’re also working on a second method that would see sperm and eggs produced from preserved cells of northern white rhinos.
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Europe Could Suffer Collateral Damage in US-China Trade War

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European businesses are unsettled as they watch the U.S. and China collide over trade. And for good reason: the nascent global trade war could represent the biggest single threat to the economic upswing that has helped the region get past its financial crisis.

In theory, some European companies could benefit, jumping into market niches if Chinese businesses are kept out of the U.S. market. But that would only be a few companies or sectors.

When your entire economy is heavily dependent on trade, an overall slowdown in global commerce caused by tit-for-tat import taxes provokes fear and undermines confidence.

And that’s just what’s happening in Europe. By one measure, business confidence has fallen in six of the past seven months in Germany, where exports are almost half of annual economic output.

“It’s worth all our efforts to defuse this conflict, so it doesn’t become a war,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Wednesday.

The U.S. is due to put tariffs on $34 billion worth of Chinese goods on Friday. The Chinese will respond with tariffs on an equivalent value of U.S. products such as soybeans, seafood and crude oil.

Amid all this, Europe has its own trade dispute with the U.S. After the U.S. put tariffs on steel and aluminum from many allies, including the European Union, the 28-country bloc responded with import taxes on some $3.25 billion of U.S. goods. The Trump administration is also studying the option of putting tariffs on cars, which would significantly escalate the confrontation.

The head of the EU’s executive, Jean-Claude Juncker, will head to Washington in late July to try to personally persuade Trump against further measures targeting Europe.

The disputes over trade threaten to spoil the good times for Europe’s economy.

Growth last year was the strongest in a decade, since before the global financial crisis. While that has eased in recent quarters, the economy is still strong enough to create jobs. The number of unemployed fell by 125,000 in May, leaving unemployment in the 19 countries that use the euro at 8.4 percent, the lowest since 2008 and down from a high of 12.1 percent in 2013.

“Trade tensions stoked by U.S. President Donald Trump are clouding the economic outlook in Europe,” wrote analysts at Berenberg bank in London. They rated the trade risk ahead of troubles from Italy’s heavy debt load or faster than expected interest rate increases from the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Many European companies would suffer because they both produce and sell goods in the U.S. and China, the world’s biggest economies.

For example, tariffs that China is expected to impose Friday on U.S.-made autos would hit German carmakers Daimler and BMW since they both make vehicles in the United States and export them to China.

Daimler has already lowered its outlook for profits, citing higher than expected costs from the new tariffs. BMW warned in a letter to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross on Friday that tariffs would make it harder for it to sell in China the vehicles it builds at its factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina, “potentially leading to a strongly reduced export volumes and negative effects on investment and employment in the United States.”

Last year, BMW exported 272,000 vehicles from the Spartanburg plant, more than half its total production. Of those, 81,000 — worth $2.37 billion — went to China. BMW says its exports reduced the U.S. trade deficit by around $1 billion.

By themselves, the tariffs that take effect Friday won’t immediately have a dramatic impact on global trade. The fear is that retaliation will spiral, hitting the total amount of global commerce.

Even if the overall effect is to harm growth, there could be benefits for some European companies and sectors. Economists Alicia Garcia Herrero and Jianwei Xu at the French bank Natixis say that European makers of cars, aircraft, chemicals, computer chips and factory machinery could in theory snare market share by substituting for Chinese or American products in the two markets. But that’s only if Europe’s own trade dispute with the U.S. does not escalate — a big if.

Europe is waiting to see whether the Trump administration will go ahead separately with tariffs on auto imports. European companies like BMW, Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen’s Porsche and Audi divisions, and Fiat Chrysler send $46.6 billion worth of vehicles every year to the U.S. Some 13.3 million people, or 6.1 percent of the employed population of the EU, work in the automotive sector, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers Association.

“Europe cannot win anything” on an overall basis “for one obvious reason: we are net exporters,” said Garcia Herrero, chief economist for Asia Pacific at Natixis and a senior fellow at European research institute Bruegel. “But we should not understate the view that some sectors could get something out of a U.S.-China trade war.”

Amid the brewing conflict, China has sought to get Europe on its side, putting on a diplomatic charm offensive during visits by Merkel and French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe. The EU and China agreed last month to deepen commercial ties and support trade rules. But the EU remains a close, longtime ally of the U.S. on a range of issues, despite the current tensions with the Trump administration.

One negative outcome for Europe, Herrero said, would be if Trump can push the Chinese into a trade agreement aimed at reducing the U.S. trade deficit. The additional U.S. goods to China could come at the expense of European competitors.

“If China concedes to the U.S. proposed agreement, the whole situation faced by the EU would be much tougher,” she and Xu wrote in a research note. “For China to massively reduce its trade surplus with the U.S., it has to in some way substitute its imports away from the EU to the U.S., which would have a significant negative impact on the EU producers.”
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Century’s Longest Total Lunar Eclipse to Grace the Sky

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Skygazers will have a celestial treat this month, when the longest total lunar eclipse of this century will grace the night sky on the evening of July 27. 

NASA says the lunar eclipse will last for 1 hour and 43 minutes with total viability in Eastern Africa and Central Asia. Residents in other parts of Africa and Asia as well those in Europe, Australia and South America will be able to see a partial lunar eclipse.

Skywatchers in North America will not be able to see the rare event and will have to wait until 2020 to experience a total lunar eclipse. 

During a lunar eclipse, the moon appears to be red because it lines up perfectly with the Earth and sun such that the Earth’s shadow totally blocks the sun’s light. The moon loses the brightness normally caused by the reflection of the sun’s light and takes on an eerie, reddish glow, giving the lunar eclipse moon the nickname of blood moon.

Scientists say the reason this lunar eclipse is especially long is because the moon is passing almost directly through the central part of Earth’s shadow. To compare, it falls just 4 minutes shy of the longest possible time a lunar eclipse could last. 

Earlier this year, a lunar eclipse occurred in January at the same time as a super moon, which takes place when a full moon is at its closet orbital point to Earth, appearing brighter and larger than usual. That event delighted moon watchers by being both a blood moon and super moon at the same time.

For those who aren’t able to see the lunar eclipse this month, July has another treat in store for skygazers.

At the end of the month, Mars makes a close approach to Earth, reaching the point in its orbit when it is closet to our planet. Mars will appear about 10 times brighter than usual, with peak brightness occurring on July 31.

Everyone in the world will have the possibility to see this celestial phenomena, providing the skies are clear.
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It Takes Chutzpah: Yiddish Version of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’

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It might seem meshuganah — crazy — to stage a beloved musical in a language that most of the audience won’t understand. But Tevye the dairyman and his family will speak Yiddish in an off-Broadway production of “Fiddler on the Roof” directed by Oscar and Tony winner Joel Grey.

 

Previews start Wednesday for the show, which will be the first-ever U.S. production of “Fiddler” in the language its characters would have spoken.

 

“I always knew what this play was about and that’s how I had the chutzpah to tackle it,” Grey said during a rehearsal at the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, which is housed at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan. “We work in English first on the scenes so that everybody understands the characters, and the third or fourth time we do it in Yiddish, and we just keep at it.”

There will be supertitles in English and Russian for theatergoers who don’t know their schmaltz from their schmutz.

 

“Fiddler on the Roof” opened on Broadway in 1964 starring Zero Mostel as Tevye and ran for eight years. It has been a favorite of schools and community theater groups ever since and has been revived on Broadway four times. Its songs including “Sunrise, Sunset” and “If I Were a Rich Man” are familiar even to people who’ve never seen the show.

 

Based on stories by Sholom Aleichem originally written in Yiddish, “Fiddler” is set in 1905 in a Jewish village in czarist Russia.

 

A Yiddish version of “Fiddler” translated by actor and writer Shraga Friedman as “Fidler afn Dakh” was performed in Israel in 1966 but was never staged in the United States until now.

 

In the Yiddish version of the show, the song “To Life!” doesn’t have to be translated from “L’Chaim!” — It’s just ‘L’Chaim!” “If I Were a Rich Man” becomes “Ven ikh bin a Rotschild,” from a story by Aleichem about a man who imagines he were as wealthy as a member of the Rothschild family.

The new production shows how decades of work to preserve Yiddish by organizations including the Folksbiene — Yiddish for World Stage — have paid off.

 

“For more than a generation we’ve had an explosion of contemporary Yiddish arts and culture by musicians, poets, theater makers, scholars and writers who have studied the language and its history and its incredible volume of modern literature and eclectic music,” said Alisa Solomon, the author of “Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof,” published in 2013.

 

Solomon said “Fiddler” is “free to just kind of be itself in a way that 50 years ago it couldn’t be in some circles because there was an absence of that vibrant Yiddish culture.”

 

Yiddish, which is based on German with elements taken from Hebrew and other languages and is written with the Hebrew alphabet, was once spoken by millions of Eastern European Jews but fell victim both to the Holocaust and the pull of assimilation. Isaac Bashevis Singer, who won a Nobel Prize for his stories written in Yiddish, famously said the language “has been dying for a thousand years, and I’m sure it will go on dying for another thousand.”

 

Immigrants to the United States built a thriving Yiddish theater scene that launched the careers of famed acting teacher Stella Adler and stars such as Edward G. Robinson. The Folksbiene was founded in 1915 and was once one of more than a dozen Yiddish theater companies on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It presents plays from the Yiddish theater canon as well as new work and adaptations of Yiddish literary works such as “Yentl,” based on Singer’s story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy.”

 

Grey’s father, Mickey Katz, was a musician and actor who performed Yiddish comedy songs, but Grey said he doesn’t speak much Yiddish himself and has been learning while rehearsing.

 

Grey watched as the actors rehearsed the tavern scene from “Fiddler” in which Tevye agrees to let the butcher Lazar Wolf marry his eldest daughter. To a non-Yiddish speaker, the most easily understood words were schnapps and vodka.

 

The 86-year-old is best known for his role as the master of ceremonies in “Cabaret,” a musical that improbably turned the rise of Hitler into popular entertainment.

 

“He brings a whole other dimension in terms of his theatrical knowledge and sense,” said Zalmen Mlotek, the Folksbiene’s artistic director. “It’s an experience.”
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‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ 50 Years Later

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It was 50 years ago the sci-fi epic “2001: A Space Odyssey” by author Arthur C. Clarke and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, opened in theaters across America to mixed reviews. The almost three-hour long film, was too cerebral and slow-moving to be appreciated by general audiences in 1968. Today, half a century later, the movie is one of the American Film Institute’s top 100 films of all time.

Film director Douglas Trumbull was a special photographic effects supervisor on the “2001” set. He describes Kubrick as a perfectionist and an innovative genius, who spent four years producing the film.

“He started out with the intention of making a more conventional movie, with dialogue and suspense and character development and drama and things that movies are normally are made out of. And during the production he began stripping away all of the conventions of normal melodrama because he was working on this 70mm giant widescreen Cinerama process and the movie progressively became more immersive. And the more immersive it became and the more experiential it became the less you had to talk about it,” says Trumbull.

To create this immersive experience Kubrick built “a centrifuge set, the big center piece of the movie” as Trumbull describes it. 

The cameras were tied on the rotating set and were filming in 360 degrees. This is how Kubrick created the illusion of the spacecraft crew walking from the floor to the ceiling. And then there was the music.

“The movie differentiates itself in many ways with using classical music rather than a score which underscores every moment and the composer will often gouge the strings at the moment you are supposed to be afraid. Kubrick did not want any of that manipulation,” says Trumbull.

The music of Johann Strauss’ Blue Danube Waltz is in step with Kubrick’s crisp, slow moving images of space: an otherworldly spectacle watched on huge Cinerama curved screens in 1968.

Many describe the effect as ‘hypnotic,’ enhancing the message of “2001:A Space Odyssey,” that humanity’s intellectual advancement was aided by alien intelligence.

Kubrick steered clear of images of stereotypical aliens. Instead, the alien presence appears suddenly, through a looming black monolith, transmitting signals that teach apelike anthropoids how to use tools for hunting and survival. Millions of years later, in Kubrick’s imagined high tech world of 2001, the aliens make contact again through the monolith.

This time, the sleek rectangle prods humans towards an exploration voyage to Jupiter.

“And they get to Jupiter and that’s where the transformation takes place.” By “transformation,” Trumbull means the evolution of Dave Bowman, the only surviving astronaut aboard Spacecraft Discovery 1, into a noncorporeal entity after he makes contact with aliens through a stargate that transcends time and space. Trumbull, takes credit for the visual effects that created the famous Stargate.

“I seemed to be able to come at it with some new solutions for Stanley that no one had thought out before and he began to trust me. So, I would go to him and say ‘I think I have the solution for the Stargate,’ for example, that was one of the high points for me on the movie. And it was this idea that you could take photography and open the camera shutter for a long period of time, several seconds, and move lights and blink them on and off in patterns and create three dimensional light streams for the star gate, which seems to me to be in perfect harmony with the idea of the Stargate which of itself was supposed to be a transition through time and space,” Trumbull says.

Other innovations followed.

“There was one artist who was in charge of painting the Earth for example, no one had any photographs of the Earth yet, because they had not added orbiting satellites yet,” says Trumbull. “And so, he worked out this technique painting with water colors on glass and then painting the clouds on glass and then going back and scratching it with a razor blade which started creating things that simulated the way clouds naturally form on the Earth. Then, I painted all the stars in the movie. All the stars are spattered white paint from my airbrush onto black shiny paper and I’ve worked out this technique of reducing the pressure of the airbrush until it started to sputter, and it would sputter stars which would become completely irregular and very natural looking, not like I painted them with a paintbrush, which would look artificial.”

Trumbull compares Kubrick’s filming of “2001” to today’s all-immersive Virtual Reality filmmaking:

“You know, the time when the ‘2001’ was made, it was in a time of Cinerama and these 70-millimeter spectacles of “Sound of Music,” “West Side Story,” and giant-screen theaters and you would go out, it was a big deal to go out to see a big-screen movie.”

Today, he says, the equivalent all immersive 360-degree filming and viewing would be virtual reality.

“A lot of people want to have their virtual reality experience, they want to go into another dimension, they want to have some experience that transcends their everyday reality. That’s what I think virtual reality promises.”

Equally significant to the film’s technology is the plot.

“The story it was trying to express was extremely cosmic and very big. Because the idea was that some super intelligent highly evolved civilization way beyond our imagination that to us would look like a god would be incomprehensible to us, like magic, was intervening in human affairs from time to time just to make sure we got through,” says Trumbull. 

A powerful sub plot was the antagonistic relationship between man and artificial intelligence. Hal, the ship’s malfunctioning central computer, and Bowman, clash over the ship’s control. 

Bowman prevails. His psychedelic-looking passage through the Stargate ends in a static hotel room the aliens have recreated from his memory in order to make contact with him in a different dimension. There, on the bed, Bowman, a very old man, is dying before he gets transformed into a transparent star child.

To celebrate the film’s 50th anniversary, artist Simon Birch recreated that hotel room at the Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. Exhibit curator Martin Collins explains the lasting power of the film.

“The movie did not seek to pose specific answers to its largest questions. What would be the fruits of space exploration, what would be the potential meaning of contact with extra-terrestrials, what would be the possible transformations that might occur to humanity as it undertakes exploration outside the planet? So, all of these larger questions are kind of implied here in this room and I think we hope that these visitors will sit back a little bit and think about why this room is here and think about this larger set of questions that Kubrick and Clark posed in “2001: (A Space Odyssey).” 

The film has been remastered in HD format and has been released in IMAX theaters to celebrate its 50th anniversary. It feels as contemporary as ever.

“I think the movie has stood all these 50 years because it’s unique, it’s spectacularly beautiful, it’s 70mm giant screen. You have to see it on a giant screen to say ‘ah, now I understand why it’s so beautiful, and why these shots last so long, because they are worth looking at. And then the story is this very cosmic evolutionary future looking. And so, when the movie is over, there is a lot to think about,” says Trumbull.
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Lakeith Stanfield: An Actor at Home in the Surreal

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The weirder it gets, the more Lakeith Stanfield looks right at home.

 

It was Stanfield, as the bodysnatched Andrew Hayworth, personifying the nightmare of Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.” In Donald Glover’s “Atlanta,” his cosmically lackadaisical pot-smoking philosopher Darius is the epitome of the show’s freewheeling surrealism. And in Boots Riley’s comic and caustic social satire “Sorry to Bother You,” Stanfield is the entry-level telemarketer Cassius (“Cash”) Green, whose swift rise introduces him to a darkly dystopian world.

 

“I do find I’m a little more comfortable than the average person in strange situations, which is probably why I’m an actor,” says Stanfield. “I’ve been in some strange situations. Like orgies. And I was in an orgy in this movie. It wasn’t strange to me at all. I had no reservations about getting naked. I was supposed to be naked in this, full frontal.”

 

He grins. “Maybe I am, I don’t know.”

 

Since his acclaimed feature-film debut in 2013’s “Short Term 12,” Stanfield, 26, has become one of the most arresting, unpredictable, and in-demand actors in Hollywood. He has played Jimmie Lee Jackson (“Selma”), Snoop Dogg (“Straight Outta Compton”‘), Miles Davis (“Miles Ahead”) and, um, Chandler, in Jay-Z’s “Friends”-style music video “Moonlight.” In even his soberer parts, Stanfield has a disarmingly laid-back, unflappable presence, like his antennae is tuned to a different frequency than everyone else.

 

Glover, the “Atlanta” creator, vividly remembers first meeting Stanfield.

 

“He barely talked to me,” Glover said in an email. “He was not concerned with getting the job at all. He was already living in a different dimension than the rest of us.”

 

“Sorry to Bother You,” which opens Friday on the heels of ecstatic reviews, Stanfield may have found the best feature-film vehicle yet for his particular dimension. The movie is a years-long passion project for Riley, the Bay-area hip-hop pioneer and activist, who along the way also spoke to Glover and Peele about the role. It’s a wild, anti-capitalist romp through workplace America, all seen through the dazed eyes of Stanfield.

“What holds the movie together — which is why I picked Lakeith — is there’s all this crazy stuff happening but you have to believe that character,” says Riley. “If it’s an actor that’s like, ‘Oh, this is how I show I’m scared. This is how I show I’m confused’ — it wouldn’t work. Lakeith doesn’t care about what his face looks like. He just gets to that emotion.”

 

In the film, Cassius is catapulted into overnight success once he begins using what an older employee played by Danny Glover terms is “your white voice.” Stanfield’s rise, though, has been predicated on remaining himself.

 

“It’s a hard thing to be yourself and be available,” Stanfield said in a recent interview in Soho. “It’s much easier to use the white voice, which I’ve also done. But at some point, I become exhausted with it and I have to say what’s on my mind and do what I feel. Part of that is the reason why people put cameras on me.”

 

Stanfield has previously channeled into music his underprivileged upbringing in the Southern California desert city of Victorville. In eachof the 2015 music videos for his hip-hop duo Moors, Stanfield (who recently apologized for a freestyle with homophobic lyrics) returns to an image of drowning on the seafloor.

 

“At the time I made those, I felt smothered by circumstances,” says Stanfield. “There was a lot of family drama at the time. I watched a family member that I love try to kill themselves by suffocation. I was writing from that place. The reason why you haven’t seen very much follow-up to that kind of material is because, luckily, I haven’t been in those kinds of situations.”

 

Drawn into acting by a high-school drama class, Stanfield came to Los Angeles at 18. He recalls spending hours staring at Echo Lake in between auditions, with nothing else to do.

 

“I was homeless. And I was hungry sometimes,” Stanfield says. “But I didn’t really view it as hard. I always kept a positive idea about it. I remember being in my car listening to Jimi Hendrix and eating McDonald’s and being like: One day, I’m going to remember this moment. And I still do.”

 

Stanfield’s breakthrough came via Destin Daniel Cretton’s college short film “Short Term 12,” which five years later became the feature about a foster care facility for at-risk teens. By then, Stanfield was in Sacramento working at a marijuana factory. His character, who gradually comes out of his shell, mirrored Stanfield’s own journey. But any reticence is now long gone.

 

“I always want to expand,” says Stanfield. “I can learn something from everyone and everything and hopefully I get to play a dog that is also a cat, that is also a man and a woman and a flower so I can just be all versions of life.”

 

“Playing a flower would be awesome,” adds Stanfield, smiling, before referencing his “Atlanta” character. “It’s a very Darius thing to say.”

 

Exactly where Darius ends and Stanfield begins can be difficult to define. A lot of Darius’ eccentric serenity comes directly from Stanfield, who improvises much of Darius’ non-sequitur musing. “In some ways, he is me,” says Stanfield.

 

“I think he’s not acting. Acting is pretending. And Keith doesn’t seem to pretend much,” explains Glover. “Darius, like Lakeith, is living in the now. I can honestly say Lakeith is the only person in the world I know who could play Darius.”

 

There’s some method to Stanfield’s madness, even if the method is the sort that worries directors. Riley discovered that himself, when he realized Stanfield didn’t know his lines as shooting approached on “Sorry to Bother You.”

 

“And he’s like: ‘I don’t usually do that until right before,’ says Riley. “His brain is still going through a process of finding the words. It might just be a millisecond more, but it’s not that polished thing. That makes the lines more real for him. That’s what all the fantastical elements and the absurdity rely on.”

 

Last summer, Stanfield had a baby with his girlfriend, actress Xosha Roquemore. He has his biggest budget film yet coming in October: “The Girl in the Spider’s Web.” In a since-deleted Instagram post, Stanfield noted of the largely Swedish cast: “I’m the only black person in this film.”

 

But having grown up gravitating toward movies that he saw himself in, Stanfield likes the idea that “Sorry to Bother You” could be “some kid’s ‘Menace to Society’ … but with less guns.”

 

“Now, black bodies can occupy space where we have these fantastical and absurd things happening, which we haven’t seen,” he says. “You can’t do that when you’re too busy trying to make yourself seem human. We can still talk about those things, but now we can also talk about these other things.”
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China Presses Europe for Anti-US Alliance on Trade

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China is putting pressure on the European Union to issue a strong joint statement against President Donald Trump’s trade policies at a summit

this month, but it’s facing resistance, European officials said.

In meetings in Brussels, Berlin and Beijing, senior Chinese officials, including Vice Premier Liu He and the Chinese government’s top diplomat, State Councillor Wang Yi, have proposed an alliance between the two economic powers and offered to open more of the Chinese market in a gesture of goodwill.

One proposal has been for China and the European Union to launch joint action against the United States at the World Trade Organization.

But the European Union, the world’s largest trading bloc, has rejected the idea of allying with Beijing against Washington, five EU officials and diplomats told Reuters, ahead of the Sino-European summit in Beijing on July 16-17.

Instead, the summit is expected to produce a modest communique that affirms the commitment of both sides to the multilateral trading system and promises to set up a working group on modernizing the WTO, EU officials said.

Liu has said privately that China is ready to set out for the first time what sectors it can open to European investment at the annual summit, expected to be attended by President Xi Jinping, China’s Premier Li Keqiang and top EU officials.

Chinese state media have promoted the message that the EU is on China’s side, officials said, putting the bloc in a delicate position. The past two summits, in 2016 and 2017, ended without a statement because of disagreements about the South China Sea and trade.

“China wants the European Union to stand with Beijing against Washington, to take sides,” said one European diplomat. “We won’t do it and we have told them that.”

China’s Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Beijing’s summit aims.

In a commentary on Wednesday, China’s official Xinhua news agency said China and Europe “should resist trade protectionism hand in hand.”

“China and European countries are natural partners,” it said. “They firmly believe that free trade is a powerful engine for global economic growth.”

China’s moment?

Despite Trump’s tariffs on European metals exports and threats to hit the EU’s automobile industry, Brussels shares Washington’s concern about China’s closed markets and what Western governments say is Beijing’s manipulation of trade to dominate global markets.

“We agree with almost all the complaints the U.S. has against China. It’s just we don’t agree with how the United States is handling it,” another diplomat said.

Still, China’s stance is striking, given Washington’s deep economic and security ties with European nations. It shows the depth of Chinese concern about a trade war with Washington, as Trump is set to impose tariffs on billions of dollars’ worth of Chinese imports on Friday.

It also underscores China’s new boldness in trying to seize leadership amid divisions between the United States and its European, Canadian and Japanese allies over issues including free trade, climate change and foreign policy.

“Trump has split the West, and China is seeking to capitalize on that. It was never comfortable with the West being one bloc,” said a European official involved in EU-China diplomacy.

“China now feels it can try to split off the European Union in so many areas — on trade, on human rights,” the official said.

Another official described the dispute between Trump and Western allies at the Group of Seven summit last month as a gift to Beijing because it showed European leaders losing a longtime ally, at least in trade policy.

European envoys say they already sensed a greater urgency from China in 2017 to find like-minded countries willing to stand up against Trump’s “America First” policies.

No ‘systemic change’

An April report by New York-based Rhodium Group, a research consultancy, showed that Chinese restrictions on foreign investment were higher in every single sector save real estate, compared with the European Union, while many of the big Chinese takeovers in the bloc would not have been possible for EU companies in China.

China has promised to open up. But EU officials expect any moves to be more symbolic than substantive.

They say China’s decision in May to lower tariffs on imported cars will make little difference because imports make up such a small part of the market.

China’s plans to move rapidly to electric vehicles mean that any new benefits it offers traditional European carmakers will be fleeting.

“Whenever the train has left the station, we are allowed to enter the platform,” a Beijing-based European executive said.

However, China’s offer at the upcoming summit to open up reflects Beijing’s concern that it is set to face tighter EU controls, and regulators are also blocking Chinese takeover attempts in the United States.

The European Union is seeking to pass legislation to allow greater scrutiny of foreign investments.

“We don’t know if this offer to open up is genuine yet,” a third EU diplomat said. “It’s unlikely to mark a systemic change.”
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AI Robot Sophia Wows at Ethiopia ICT Expo

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Sophia, one of the world’s most advanced and perhaps most famous artificial intelligence (AI) humanoid robot, was a big hit at this year’s Information & Communication Technology International Expo in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Visitors, including various dignitaries, were excited to meet the life-like AI robot as she communicated with expo guests and expressed a wide range of facial expressions. As VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports, Sophia has become an international sensation.
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Cuban Flagship Airline’s Woes Deepen After Crash

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In the busy summer travel period in Cuba, a long line of people wait for hours in the sweltering heat outside the Havana office of state-owned airline Cubana, many of them eager to visit families in the provinces.

But they are not waiting to book flights. Instead, they hope to get their money back on plane tickets or exchange them for bus tickets across the island.

Cubana, which has a virtual monopoly on domestic flights, has suspended nearly all of them due to a lack of working aircraft, plunging travel on the Caribbean’s largest island into chaos and highlighting problems at what was once a vanguard of Latin American aviation.

The flight suspensions were made a month after a Cubana flight crashed after takeoff from Havana airport in May, killing 112 people. They come at a time when Communist-run Cuba is trying to stimulate tourism, one of the few bright spots in its economy, by promoting beach resorts and colonial towns hundreds of kilometers (miles) from the capital.

“Now I will have to take a 16-hour bus ride to Guantanamo, but what other options do I have?” said kindergarten teacher Marlene Mendoza, who was bathed in sweat and got a bus ticket to eastern Cuba after queuing for more than seven hours.

Analysts say Cubana’s troubles stem largely from dual ills that afflict the whole state-run economy: the U.S. trade embargo and a problematic business model.

Cubana did not reply to requests for comment for this story.

Founded in 1929 as one of Latin America’s first airlines, Cubana was nationalized after Fidel Castro’s leftist 1959 revolution. In its heyday, it flew Cuban troops to Africa and passengers to allied socialist countries around the globe.

For decades it got around U.S. sanctions that restricted it from buying planes with a certain share of U.S. components — including European Airbus and Brazilian Embraers — by acquiring first Soviet and then Russian aircraft.

The carrier maintained a decent safety record, but its reputation for mediocre service and delays prompted many foreign tourists to use mostly land transport.

Then, over the past year, it started canceling more flights than usual, often putting passengers up in hotels for days, without commenting publicly on the disarray.

After the Boeing 737 crashed on May 18, Cubana said it had leased the plane from Mexican company Damojh due to a lack of its own aircraft. A second Damojh plane has been grounded pending a safety audit of its fleet by Mexican authorities, data from Flightradar24 shows, aggravating the shortage.

Cuban, Mexican and U.S. authorities are still investigating the crash and have not commented on possible causes. Damojh has said in a press release that is fully cooperating with those investigations into the “lamentable accident.”

Just four of Cubana’s own 16 planes are flying, according to a Reuters examination of data on Flightradar24 and Planespotters.net.

Not flying high

Over the past month, the airline announced it was axing several routes mainly used by Cubans and reducing the frequency of flights to Santiago, Holguin and Baracoa, all popular tourist destinations. In a statement, it said it was working to resolve the situation and apologized for the disruption.

Cubana also suspended all international routes except to Buenos Aires and Madrid, several staff told Reuters. The company did not comment publicly, leaving would-be travelers sharing their confusion on online forums.

“It has lost a lot of prestige. It’s already not the famous Cubana that used to fly to all parts of the world,” said one former employee, who asked to remain anonymous, who retired 6-1/2 years ago after working for Cubana for 40 years. “Anywhere else in the world, a company like Cubana would have folded.”

Cubana said in mid-June it did not have enough aircraft largely because of maintenance issues and lack of parts, which aviation experts say can cost millions of dollars.

The airline sells tickets to Cuban citizens at heavily subsidized prices. Its budget is also stretched by ferrying official delegations around sometimes at a financial loss, a former Cuban diplomat familiar with Cubana operations said.

Cash-strapped Cuba points the finger at the 56-year-old U.S. trade embargo, saying it has cost its flagship carrier millions of dollars.

The coup de grace was possibly the purchase of six AN-158 regional jets from Ukrainian manufacturer Antonov since 2013.

Cubana has said those planes have had technical problems and getting parts for the joint Russian-Ukrainian project has proven difficult since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

An Antonov representative told Reuters that Cubana had not been paying for the necessary work, but it had signed a deal in April with the airline to cooperate “to resume the use of AN-158 planes before the end of the current year.”

Typically, airlines lease planes when theirs are undergoing maintenance or there is a spike in demand, but the U.S. embargo and financial constraints likely complicate this for Cuba, said Richard Aboulafia, vice president of U.S. aviation consulting company the Teal Group.

In May, Lithuanian lessor Avion Express and Italian lessor Blue Panorama both ended their contracts with Cubana, the companies told Reuters, without explaining why. Data from Flightradar24 shows they withdrew respectively four Airbus A320s and one Boeing 737.

That is around the time when Cubana turned to the little-known Damojh, leasing the 39-year-old Boeing 737.

Damojh has faced safety concerns in other countries in the region. Guyana’s aviation authority told Reuters it had revoked Damojh’s permit to fly there last year due to issues such as overloading planes. The airline declined to comment on the matter.

The crash in May has undermined trust in Cubana.

“I like to travel by plane. It’s faster and more comfortable,” said Maylin Lopez, 48, waiting at Havana’s bus station for her 15-hour ride to eastern Cuba. “But I can’t even imagine doing that now.”
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US Allows ZTE Transactions to Maintain Networks

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The U.S. Commerce Department on Tuesday granted a temporary reprieve to ZTE that allows China’s No. 2 telecommunications equipment maker to conduct business needed to maintain existing networks and equipment in the United States as it works toward the lifting of a U.S. sales ban.

The authorization from the department’s Bureau of Industry and Services, dated July 2 and seen by Reuters, runs until August 1.

ZTE and spokespeople for the Commerce Department did not respond to requests for comment.

ZTE, which makes smartphones and networking gear, was forced to cease major operations in April after the United States slapped it with a supplier ban saying it broke an agreement to discipline executives who conspired to evade U.S. sanctions on Iran and North Korea.

The company had also agreed to pay a $1 billion penalty and put $400 million in an escrow account as part of the deal to resume business with U.S. suppliers — which provide almost a third of the components used in ZTE’s equipment.

The escrow agreement is still pending, according to a source. Until it is executed, ZTE cannot deposit the $400 million in escrow necessary to get the ban lifted.

While the denial order is still in place, the authorization grants a waiver to some companies that do business with ZTE to do so for one month, a source told Reuters.

The waivers allow for a limited type of activity but do not authorize any new business.

The uncertainty about the ban amid intensifying U.S.-China trade tensions has hammered ZTE shares, which have fallen 60 percent since trading resumed last month following a two-month hiatus, wiping out more than $11 billion of the company’s market valuation.

ZTE announced a new board last week in a radical management shakeup as part of a $1.4 billion deal with the United States.
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Actress Natalie Dormer Makes Screenwriting Debut with Thriller

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Game of Thrones actress Natalie Dormer gets in front as well as behind the camera for the thriller In Darkness, a movie she began writing nearly 10 years ago when frustrated by the lack of “three-dimensional” roles for women.

The 36-year-old, also known for television series The Tudors and The Hunger Games films, stars as blind pianist Sofia, who hears her upstairs neighbor being murdered, leading her into a dark world of war criminals.

Dormer started the script in 2009, but says things have changed on screen since then with female-lead films in movies such as Black Swan and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

“It was pre this revolution we’ve had in wanting fully fleshed out three-dimensional flawed women as our protagonists. I think we can, storytelling wise, see that wave — slower than we would have wanted, but it’s happening,” she said in an interview.

“Behind the camera is a much more pertinent question. … If it took me seven years to get my independent movie shot it’s … the female writers, directors, cinematographers who are trying to get their stuff made now that we won’t see for years.”

Women made up 18 percent of writers, directors, producers, editors and cinematographers who worked on the 250 biggest-grossing movies in the United States last year, little changed from 1998, according to the Centre for the Study of Women in Television and Film.

Dormer shares the film’s writing credits with her fiance, Anthony Byrne, who directs. Both are producers.

Asked about working behind the camera for the first time, Dormer told Reuters: “It’s just a completely different experience from being a gun for hire. I’m concerned and invested in everybody doing their job in that room, which is a completely different thing to being an actor.

“To be perfectly honest, I love the team sport element of it and I got a real kick out of it,” she added.
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Renovated Museum Opens as Part of St. Louis Arch Project

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The revitalized Gateway Arch National Park was dedicated Tuesday, the culmination of a $380 million public-private partnership that Missouri political leaders see as a template for the future of the national park system.

Several hundred people stood in steamy heat for a ceremony in the shadow of the 630-foot-tall (192-meter-tall) monument to westward expansion that sits along the Mississippi River in downtown St. Louis.

The five-year project was the first major renovation since the Arch opened in 1965. It included a $176 million remaking of the sprawling underground museum that sits beneath the Arch, a sprucing-up of the grounds around the monument, and development of a grassy park built over nearby Interstate 44 to eliminate a disconnect that made it difficult and treacherous for pedestrians to move between the area around the Arch and the rest of downtown.

About two-thirds of the funding came from private donations. St. Louis city and county voters in 2013 approved a tax increase that helped fund the project. State and federal grants paid the rest.

Both U.S. senators from Missouri said in interviews that the project was evidence of what can happen when government and the people work together.

“It means that every once in a while we can get it right, because there’s so much noise out there about how bad government is,” Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill said.

Her Republican colleague, Roy Blunt, said the Arch project sets an example that can be used in “big parks in the West and urban parks in the East.”

“I think we’ve really set a template of how we can take care of and further expand this great park system in the future,” Blunt said.

The rebuilt museum is much larger than the previous one that opened in 1976 — 46,000 square feet (4,273 square meters) of space was added. It features a curved glass entrance cut into the ground beneath the Arch. A map on the floor shows the routes followed by pioneers as they moved westward. Another part of the museum tells the history of St. Louis.

“It’s spectacular,” U.S. Representative Ann Wagner, a Republican from St. Louis County, said after a tour. “I’m blown away.”

Admission to the new museum, like the old one, is free. There is a fee for rides on a tram to the top of the Arch, which has been among the most popular attractions in St. Louis since it opened, drawing more than 130 million visitors.

More changes are in the works. A project to improve the Old Courthouse, which is part of the grounds and was the site of the first two trials in the landmark Dred Scott slavery case, is expected to be complete by 2020.
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How Much Artificial Intelligence Surveillance Is Too Much?

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When a CIA-backed venture capital fund took an interest in Rana el Kaliouby’s face-scanning technology for detecting emotions, the computer scientist and her colleagues did some soul-searching — and then turned down the money.

“We’re not interested in applications where you’re spying on people,” said el Kaliouby, the CEO and co-founder of the Boston startup Affectiva. The company has trained its artificial intelligence systems to recognize if individuals are happy or sad, tired or angry, using a photographic repository of more than 6 million faces.

Recent advances in AI-powered computer vision have accelerated the race for self-driving cars and powered the increasingly sophisticated photo-tagging features found on Facebook and Google. But as these prying AI “eyes” find new applications in store checkout lines, police body cameras and war zones, the tech companies developing them are struggling to balance business opportunities with difficult moral decisions that could turn off customers or their own workers.

El Kaliouby said it’s not hard to imagine using real-time face recognition to pick up on dishonesty — or, in the hands of an authoritarian regime, to monitor reaction to political speech in order to root out dissent. But the small firm, which spun off from a Massachusetts Institute of Technology research lab, has set limits on what it will do.

The company has shunned “any security, airport, even lie-detection stuff,” el Kaliouby said. Instead, Affectiva has partnered with automakers trying to help tired-looking drivers stay awake, and with consumer brands that want to know whether people respond to a product with joy or disgust. 

New qualms

Such queasiness reflects new qualms about the capabilities and possible abuses of all-seeing, always-watching AI camera systems — even as authorities are growing more eager to use them.

In the immediate aftermath of Thursday’s deadly shooting at a newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, police said they turned to face recognition to identify the uncooperative suspect. They did so by tapping a state database that includes mug shots of past arrestees and, more controversially, everyone who registered for a Maryland driver’s license.

Initial information given to law enforcement authorities said that police had turned to facial recognition because the suspect had damaged his fingerprints in an apparent attempt to avoid identification. That report turned out to be incorrect and police said they used facial recognition because of delays in getting fingerprint identification.

In June, Orlando International Airport announced plans to require face-identification scans of passengers on all arriving and departing international flights by the end of this year. Several other U.S. airports have already been using such scans for some departing international flights.

Chinese firms and municipalities are already using intelligent cameras to shame jaywalkers in real time and to surveil ethnic minorities, subjecting some to detention and political indoctrination. Closer to home, the overhead cameras and sensors in Amazon’s new cashier-less store in Seattle aim to make shoplifting obsolete by tracking every item shoppers pick up and put back down.

Concerns over the technology can shake even the largest tech firms. Google, for instance, recently said it will exit a defense contract after employees protested the military application of the company’s AI technology. The work involved computer analysis of drone video footage from Iraq and other conflict zones.

Google guidelines

Similar concerns about government contracts have stirred up internal discord at Amazon and Microsoft. Google has since published AI guidelines emphasizing uses that are “socially beneficial” and that avoid “unfair bias.”

Amazon, however, has so far deflected growing pressure from employees and privacy advocates to halt Rekognition, a powerful face-recognition tool it sells to police departments and other government agencies. 

Saying no to some work, of course, usually means someone else will do it. The drone-footage project involving Google, dubbed Project Maven, aimed to speed the job of looking for “patterns of life, things that are suspicious, indications of potential attacks,” said Robert Work, a former top Pentagon official who launched the project in 2017.

While it hurts to lose Google because they are “very, very good at it,” Work said, other companies will continue those efforts.

Commercial and government interest in computer vision has exploded since breakthroughs earlier in this decade using a brain-like “neural network” to recognize objects in images. Training computers to identify cats in YouTube videos was an early challenge in 2012. Now, Google has a smartphone app that can tell you which breed.

A major research meeting — the annual Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, held in Salt Lake City in June — has transformed from a sleepy academic gathering of “nerdy people” to a gold rush business expo attracting big companies and government agencies, said Michael Brown, a computer scientist at Toronto’s York University and a conference organizer.

Brown said researchers have been offered high-paying jobs on the spot. But few of the thousands of technical papers submitted to the meeting address broader public concerns about privacy, bias or other ethical dilemmas. “We’re probably not having as much discussion as we should,” he said.

Not for police, government

Startups are forging their own paths. Brian Brackeen, the CEO of Miami-based facial recognition software company Kairos, has set a blanket policy against selling the technology to law enforcement or for government surveillance, arguing in a recent essay that it “opens the door for gross misconduct by the morally corrupt.”

Boston-based startup Neurala, by contrast, is building software for Motorola that will help police-worn body cameras find a person in a crowd based on what they’re wearing and what they look like. CEO Max Versace said that “AI is a mirror of the society,” so the company chooses only principled partners.

“We are not part of that totalitarian, Orwellian scheme,” he said.
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‘Ant-Man’ Sequel Brings Female Characters to Forefront

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The “Ant-Man” sequel may be about tiny superheroes, but the film is making a big statement about female empowerment by featuring Evangeline Lilly’s The Wasp not only in the title, but giving her a larger stake in Marvel’s sprawling movie franchise.

“Ant-Man and The Wasp,” the 20th film in the Marvel cinematic universe that includes “Black Panther,” “Iron Man” and  “Avengers: Infinity War,” is the first one in the series to include a female character in a title role. The prominence of The Wasp, a character who has major roles in the “Ant-Man” and “Avengers” comic books, comes after years of fan anticipation for a female Marvel superhero to get her own film. Scarlett Johansson has expressed her desire to see her character, Black Widow, get a standalone film, but Marvel Studios has kept her primarily in its marquee “Avengers” films.

“You know, I’ve asked myself the same question: Are we making a mountain out of a molehill?” Lilly said during a recent interview when asked about being featured in a Marvel film’s title. She said after considering it more closely, ‘“No, actually, this is kind of a big deal, and this is about time.’”

The film is the sequel to 2015’s “Ant-Man,” which introduced Paul Rudd as a thief enlisted by Michael Douglas’ Hank Pym to become a do-gooder. The original earned more than $180 million in North America and $500 million at the global box office. The sequel is the third Marvel Films release this year, but it largely steers clear of the developments in the blockbuster “Avengers: Infinity War.”

The Wasp was a comic book favorite of director Peyton Reed, who teased her appearance in future Marvel films with a cameo of her supersuit at the end of “Ant-Man.”

He said it was important that The Wasp be a fully-formed hero and not bound by stereotypes.

“I worked really closely with Evangeline, and we talked about, ‘Now we’re going to have a chance to make a fully formed hero, and we want her to be as dimensional as possible. And we don’t want her to be a hero who is always glammed up with hair and makeup. We wanted her to be a little sweaty. And we want her, like, when that helmet comes off, her hair is in a ponytail, because that’s the practical thing you would do,’” Reed said.

Lilly’s role isn’t the only prominent female character in the film. Hannah John-Kamen plays Ghost, a villain bent on sowing discord among powerful institutions, in a role that was initially written for a man.

“It’s amazing, as a female, to play such a strong character  … so that people can look up to that and see that, ‘Yeah, this is a progression,’” said John-Kamen, who is in her biggest role yet after starring in the Canadian sci-fi series “Killjoys” and having small roles in “Ready Player One” and “Tomb Raider.”

“There is so much more going on in this film that represents female energy, that represents female stories, that represents female struggle and that represents female power,” Lilly said. “In this film, I’m very proud to say I recognize authentic female power in that it’s powerful to be vulnerable, it’s powerful to be elegant, it’s powerful to be graceful and nurturing and kind and forgiving and compassionate and generous … things that tend to be typically categorized as weaknesses.”

Marvel’s first film based solely on a female superhero will be the 1990s’ set “Captain Marvel,” which stars Brie Larson in the title role and is slated for release next year.

“Ant-Man and The Wasp” is the first Marvel film to be released after April’s “Infinity War,” which upended the franchise and set up a fourth “Avengers” film that will be released next summer.

The “Ant-Man and The Wasp” cast are keeping any secrets about that film closely guarded. During a recent interview, Rudd started to answer a question about his character’s role going forward in Marvels films. “A funny story, because, you know, in ‘Avengers 4,’” he said, before pretending to be hit in the neck with a dart and falling out of his chair.

Douglas said before his first Comic-Con panel about the original “Ant-Man,” he underwent secrecy tests — and thought he might have to give blood — to prove that he could keep from spoiling that film’s secrets. While he thought it was a bit much at the time, Douglas said he’s grown to appreciate what Marvel Films has done and the care they take to avoid spoilers for fans.

“Marvel has done this amazing job of creating buzz just for people not knowing what exactly is going to happen,” Douglas said.

“We do not want to spoil things for people. There are people out there hired to try and find things out,” Rudd said. “It’s an amazing, intense thing to be a part of.”

 

 
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India Demands Facebook Curb Spread of False Information on WhatsApp

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India has asked Facebook to prevent the spread of false texts on its WhatsApp messaging application, saying the content has sparked a series of lynchings and mob beatings across the country.

False messages about child abductors spread over WhatsApp have reportedly led to at least 31 deaths in 10 different states over the past year, including a deadly mob lynching Sunday of five men in the western state of Maharashtra.

In a strongly worded statement Tuesday, India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology said the service “cannot evade accountability and responsibility” when messaging platforms are used to spread misinformation.

“The government has also conveyed in no uncertain terms that Whatsapp must take immediate action to end this menace and ensure that their platform is not used for such mala fide activities,” the ministry added.

Facebook and WhatsApp did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but WhatsApp previously told the Reuters news agency it is educating users to identify fake news and is considering changes to the messaging service.

The ministry said law enforcement authorities are working to apprehend those responsible for the killings.

WhatsApp has more than 200 million users in India, the messaging site’s largest market in the world.
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Measles Spreads in Brazil After Cases Come From Venezuela

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A measles outbreak is growing in Brazil after cases were imported from neighboring Venezuela where health services have collapsed.

More than 460 cases of the disease have been confirmed in two Brazilian border states, the Health Ministry said Monday. There are also concerns that the outbreak has reached an isolated tribe that lives in the Amazon that has little resistance to such diseases.

The cases in Brazil come after the World Health Organization declared the Americas measles-free in 2016. But outbreaks can still occur even after a country is declared free because cases can be imported. That’s just what has happened in Brazil, where the disease slipped across the border with people fleeing economic and political collapse in neighboring Venezuela.

Measles spreads through the air and is highly contagious. While there is no specific treatment for the disease, the vaccine is very effective. Symptoms of measles include fever, runny nose, cough, sore throat and a rash that spreads over the body.

Last year, measles started spreading in Venezuela, where there have been more than 2,000 cases.

Oil-rich Venezuela was once wealthy, and the health system there was a model for the region. But mismanagement and a fall in oil prices have led to widespread shortages of everything from food to medicine. Doctors have fled and health services have collapsed.

Hardships in general in Venezuela have sent more than 1 million people fleeing to neighboring countries, sometimes bringing disease with them.

To combat the outbreak, authorities in Brazil are offering measles vaccinations to foreigners registering with the federal police and are also increasing efforts to ensure Brazilians are vaccinated. Brazilians should be vaccinated against measles as a matter of routine, but authorities have recently held special campaigns in Roraima and Amazonas to vaccinate those who slipped through the system.

Beyond the usual concerns of containing the extremely contagious disease, Survival International said an outbreak could devastate the isolated Yanomami tribe, which lives on both sides of the Brazil-Venezuela border, deep in the Amazon. So far, 23 Yanomami with measles symptoms have sought medical treatment in Brazil, the indigenous rights organization said, and one of those cases has been confirmed. Many more could be sick in Venezuela, where Survival International said it is harder to get information.

 
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Britain Trials Virtual Reality Time Travel to Combat Dementia

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About 100 dementia sufferers in Britain will take part in government-backed trials using virtual reality to help recall lost memories, the firm behind the technology said on Tuesday.

Virtual reality (VR) headsets allow people with dementia to watch films that take them to popular seaside resorts, a 1940s candy store or a 1950s street party, to recall thoughts and emotions and help them re-engage with relatives and caregivers.

“If people remember more of their past, remember more of themselves, it just helps with overall mental wellbeing,” Arfa Rehman, co-founder of Virtue, which created the software, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) is testing the new form of reminiscence therapy – where films are played on a smartphone in an inexpensive virtual reality headset – in several hospitals and care homes across the country, she said.

Dementia is caused when the brain is damaged by strokes or diseases such as Alzheimer’s. People with dementia can suffer from memory loss and difficulties with thinking, problem-solving or language.

There are 850,000 people with dementia in Britain, with that number estimated to rise to 1 million by 2025, according to the Alzehimer’s Society, a charity.

Researchers have found that reminiscence therapy improves cognitive functions and reduces depressive symptoms in people with dementia and that it is more effective with those in care homes than those living independently.

Looking at, listening to and discussing objects, images and music from the past triggers memories, which participants enjoy.

“Several of us working on the project had a very positive experience with family and friends using VR,” said the NHS’s Michael Hurt, a dementia expert, who will be helping to implement the pilot in Walsall, a town in central England.

“All of the pilot areas are very keen to see if this software improves wellbeing, mood and sleep and if it reduces anxiety and agitation, as well as the potential to reduce some of the pain experienced in dementia.”

Trials over the next six months aim to find out the potential benefits of more regular use of the technology, said Rehman of Virtue, a social impact-focused business, which has won numerous awards since it was set up last year.

Britain is seen as a global leader in the innovative social enterprise sector, with about 70,000 ethical businesses employing nearly 1 million people, according to Social Enterprise UK, which represents the growing sector.

“We’ve seen our app have amazing impact so far,” Rehman said in emailed comments on Tuesday. “We hope that this collaboration encourages other organizations to embrace immersive technology.”

Marston Court, in the university city of Oxford, is typical of most British care homes in that 70 percent of residents have dementia or severe memory problems, for which there is no cure.

“This is absolutely brilliant,” said Terry Carter, 91, who has lived for two years at Marston Court, where residents have been watching dozens of short films for several months.

Diane Davidson, the home’s care leader, said the immersive experience of using virtual reality goggles has been positive for dementia sufferers because it cuts out distractions.

“A lot of people with dementia can’t focus on things like watching TV or reading a book for a long time. With this, because it’s right there in front of their eyes, it clicks them into the moment,” she said.

“When you’ve got the goggles on, you are in your own little world.”

 
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Trump Moves to Block China Mobile’s US Entry on National Security Grounds

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The U.S. government moved on Monday to block China Mobile Ltd. from offering services to the U.S. telecommunications market, recommending its application be rejected because the government-owned firm posed national security risks.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) should deny China Mobile’s 2011 application to offer telecommunication services between the United States and other countries, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) said in a statement posted on its website.

“After significant engagement with China Mobile, concerns about increased risks to U.S. law enforcement and national security interests were unable to be resolved,” said the statement, which quoted David Redl, assistant secretary for communications and information at the U.S. Department of Commerce, which NTIA is part of.

China Mobile, the world’s largest telecom carrier with 899 million subscribers, did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.

Its shares fell 2.6 percent at start of trading on Tuesday to their lowest in more than four years.

The Trump administration’s move on China Mobile comes amid growing trade frictions between Washington and Beijing. The United States is set to impose tariffs on $34 billion worth of goods from China on July 6, which Beijing is expected to respond to with tariffs of its own.

And ZTE Corp., China’s No. 2 telecommunications equipment maker, was forced to cease major operations in April after the U.S. slapped it with a supplier ban saying it broke an agreement to discipline executives who conspired to evade U.S. sanctions on Iran and North Korea. ZTE is in the process of getting the ban lifted and announced a new board last week.

China Mobile Communications Corp., a state-owned firm, owned almost 73 percent of China Mobile, according to Thomson Reuters data as of December.

In its recommendation, the NTIA said that its assessment rested “in large part on China’s record of intelligence activities and economic espionage targeting the US, along with China Mobile’s size and technical and financial resources.”

It said the company was “subject to exploitation, influence and control by the Chinese government” and that its application posed “substantial and unacceptable national security and law enforcement risks in the current national security environment.”

U.S. senators and spy chiefs warned in February that China was trying, via means such as telecommunications firms, to gain access to sensitive U.S. technologies and intellectual properties.
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With Refrigerated ATMs, Camel Milk Business Thrives in Kenya

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Halima Sheikh Ali is the proud owner of one of the few ATMs in Wajir town in northeast Kenya. But rather than doling out shilling notes, it dispenses something tastier: a fresh pint of camel milk.

“For 100 Kenyan shillings ($1), you get one liter of the freshest milk in Wajir County,” she says, opening a vending machine advertising “fresh, hygienic and affordable camel milk” in order to check the liquid’s temperature.

One of the world’s biggest camel producers, East Africa also produces much of the world’s camel milk, almost all of it consumed domestically.

In the northeast Kenyan county of Wajir, demand is booming among local people, who say it is healthier and more nutritious than cow’s milk.

“Camel milk is everything,” said Noor Abdullahi, a project officer for U.S.-based aid agency Mercy Corps. “It is good for diabetes, blood pressure and indigestion.”

But temperatures averaging 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in the dry season, combined with the risk of dirty collection containers, mean the liquid can go sour in a matter of hours, he added, making it much harder to sell.

To remedy this, an initiative is equipping about 50 women in Hadado, a village 80km from Wajir, with refrigerators to cool the milk that remote camel herders send them via tuk-tuk taxi, plus a van to transport it daily to Wajir.

There a dozen women milk traders, including Sheikh Ali, sell it through four ATM-like vending machines, after receiving training on business skills such as accounting.

“The (milk) supply and demand are there. We just have to make it easier for the milk to get from one point to another,” said Abdullahi.

The project, which is part of the Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters (BRACED) program, is funded by the U.K. Department for International Development (DFID) and led by Mercy Corps.

Fresh and Lucrative

Asha Abdi, a milk trader in Hadado who operates one of the refrigerators with 11 other women, said she used to have to boil camel’s milk — using costly and smoky firewood — to prevent it turning sour.

“I spent 100 shillings ($1) a day on firewood, and the milk would often go bad by the time it got to Wajir as the (public) transport took over three hours,” she said.

Now Abdi and the other women in her group send about 500 liters of fresh milk to Wajir every day — a trip that takes just over an hour by van. They then reinvest the profits in other ventures.

“With the milk money I bought 20 goats,” said Abdi as she rearranged bags of sugar in her crowded kiosk. “But my dream would be to export the camel milk to the United States,” she added. “I hear it’s like gold over there.”

Drought-safe Investment

Amid hundreds of camels roaming stretches of orange dirt outside of Hadado, Gedi Mohammed sits under the shade of a small acacia tree.

“The (tuk-tuk) drivers should be here soon to buy my camel milk,” he said, sipping the precious liquid from a large wooden bowl.

In Kenya’s largely pastoralist Wajir County, prolonged drought is pushing growing numbers of the region’s nomadic herders to see camels — and their milk — as a drought-safe investment.

Mohammed, who used to own over 100 cows, said he exchanged them a decade ago for camels, “which drink a lot of water but can then survive eight days without another drop, when a cow will die after two days.”

But even camels suffer when the weather is really dry, he added.

“Drought is bad for business because with less food and water the camels produce less milk,” he said, impatiently waving at a teenage boy to fetch a straying camel.

“Business would be better if I had a vehicle to transport the milk to buyers myself,” said Mohammed, who said he has to travel ever-longer distances to find pastures for his animals. “Right now I rely on the (tuk-tuk) drivers to find me, and you never know how long they will be.”

Technical Issues

Back in Wajir, Sheikh Ali said her group’s cooled milk ATM allows her to save about 5,000 shillings ($50) per month, as she no longer has to buy firewood to boil milk and can sell the fresh liquid at a higher price.

But although the vending machines are proving popular, they also have been plagued by technical issues, said Amina Abikar, who also works for Mercy Corps in Wajir.

“Sometimes the machines break down, or indicate that there is no milk left when there are still 100 liters” inside, she explained.

“So we have to wait for the machine supplier’s technician to travel all the way from Nairobi. It would be better to train someone locally,” she said.

Also slowing down business growth is the high rate of illiteracy among women involved in the project, Abikar said.

Sheikh Ali, who cannot read or write, relies on her son to operate the machine and check its various indicators.

“I would love to do it myself but I don’t know my ABCs,” she said, adding that she still feels “proud that I am one of the only fresh milk traders in Wajir.”
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