As many as 3 million Malawians are expected to face food shortages this year because of drought and pests. To address the problem, Malawi and the United Nations are piloting a joint project to assess the health of crops using drones. Lameck Masina reports from Kasungu, central Malawi.
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Month: November 2018
Zimbabwe’s FM Aims to Turn Economy Around with New Budget
Zimbabwe’s finance minister has unveiled the country’s 2019 budget. Mthuli Ncube says the plan should help restore the economy of the southern African nation after years of recession.
“Madam Speaker, ma’am, in conclusion, this budget should mark a turning point towards realizing the country’s vision 2030, as austerity will lead us to prosperity,” Ncube said. “To quote the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, “We are rich not by what we possess, but by what we can do without.” I now commend the 2019 national budget to this august house. I thank you.”
Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube said the budget marked a step toward Zimbabwe attaining its vision of an “upper middle income country by 2030.”
He said Zimbabwe was working toward retiring its ever ballooning debt, which now stands at about $10 billion.
Independent economic analyst Trust Chikohora commended Ncube for removing the tax on sanitary items, removing the duty on goods used by physically disabled people, and raising the tax threshold for workers; but, he said prices can’t be stabilized until Zimbabwe stops using bond notes.
“So in spite of all the positive things he might have done, the elephant in the room, which is going to destabilize the economy, is the mismatch between the bonneted and the foreign currency, which will continue to result in increased prices,” Ncube said.
Zimbabwe has been printing bond notes for the past two years, since abandoning its dollar in 2009, after years of hyperinflation. The country has been without an official currency and relied on U.S. dollars, the British pound and South African rand to conduct transactions.
In the past three years, however, all three currencies have been hard to find, paralyzing the economy and forcing the country to rely on the bond notes that were supposed to trade at par with the U.S. dollar.
On the black market, a dollar is now worth more than three bond notes.
Before becoming finance minister in September, Ncube had indicated he would prefer dropping the notes and adopting the South African rand, but he did not mention replacing them in his presentation.
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Technology Shapes Insurance Companies’ Response to Wildfires
As wildfires raged this month in California, insurance claims experts at Travelers sat in a command center 3,000 miles (4,828 kilometers) away in Connecticut, monitoring screens showing satellite images, photos from airplane flyovers and social media posts describing what was happening on the ground.
Real-time data and technology that were unavailable to property-casualty companies even a few years ago have shaped the industry’s response to the Camp Fire, which has burned nearly 240 square miles (622 square kilometers) in northern California and the 151-square-mile (391-square-kilometer) Woolsey Fire in the Los Angeles area.
By overlaying the data on maps marking its customers’ locations, the company can quickly identify those who are likely to have been affected, said Jim Wucherpfennig, Travelers vice president of claims.
“That allows us to deploy people and resources where they are needed most,” he said.
The same data also can be used to determine risk and pricing for insurance in any given area, said Peter Kochenburger, the deputy director of the University of Connecticut’s insurance law center. Insurers, for example, can use the telemetry to identify local vegetation, wind patterns and fire history. In some cases, it can determine that the owner of one home is more likely to suffer damage than the owner of a neighboring home, he said.
“Does it seem intrusive? It can be,” he said. “They have a lot more information on all of us, on our properties than they had two, five, 10 years ago. That’s a major issue and that’s something regulators are going to have to talk about.”
During the wildfires, Travelers said the information has been used to expedite claims, even in areas that are still inaccessible to inspectors.
Workers were able to see what roads were open and map out spots in Chico and Thousand Oaks to park the RVs that serve as mobile claim centers, the company said. The tools also indicated where customers who evacuated were going to be, Wucherpfennig said.
The glassed-in Travelers National Catastrophe Center is located in Windsor, Connecticut. Modeled after military war rooms, it includes a conference table behind 19 high-definition screens, which display maps, graphs, television images and social media sites, all providing real-time data on the fires.
In some cases, even before adjusters arrive on scene, claims experts can assess damage from the fires and cut checks by using before-and-after images taken by drones, aircraft or satellites as well as videos or photos uploaded by customers from their phones. Employees have tools and smart phone apps that can convert those photos into instant measurements, to help quantify the damage.
“We’re able to virtually interact with customers much more easily than we could even in the recent past,” Wucherpfennig said. “We’re also able to monitor all forms of social media in real time. That helps us create an event footprint, which helps us understand how the event is tracking and what type of damages we’re seeing.”
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Nissan Board Fires Jailed Chairman Ghosn
Once-admired auto executive Carlos Ghosn’s fall from grace deepened Thursday when directors of Nissan Motor Co. voted unanimously to fire the recently jailed businessman from his post as board chairman.
Dismissed along with Ghosn was another director, Greg Kelly, whom the board accused of working with Ghosn to understate their incomes on formal declarations and use company assets for personal purposes.
An internal investigation presented to the board found that Kelly had “been determined to be the mastermind of this matter, together with” Ghosn, the company said in a statement. The board also said that Nissan’s longstanding partnership with the French automaker Renault “remains unchanged.”
While he has been fired as chairman, the company said, it will require a vote of shareholders to remove Ghosn from the board altogether.
The financial world was stunned on Monday when it was announced that Ghosn had been detained by Japanese authorities on suspicion of having failed to report millions of dollars in income. He could face up to 10 years in prison.
Ghosn also served as board chairman of Renault and another Japanese automaker, Mitsubishi. The news of his arrest drove down share prices in all three.
Nissan said this week that its internal probe of Ghosn and Kelly was prompted by a report from a whistleblower. It said the investigation showed Ghosn had underreported his income to the Tokyo Stock Exchange by more than $40 million over five years.
The Brazilian-born Ghosn, who is of Lebanese descent and a French citizen, was the rare foreign top executive in Japan.
Ghosn was sent to Nissan in the late 1990s by Renault SA of France, after it bought a controlling stake of Nissan. He is credited with rescuing Nissan from the brink of bankruptcy.
In 2016, Ghosn also took control of Mitsubishi, after Nissan bought a one-third stake in the company, following Mitsubishi’s mileage-cheating scandal.
Together, the three automakers comprise the biggest global car-making alliance, manufacturing one of every nine cars sold around the world. The three companies employ more than 470,000 people in nearly 200 countries.
Before Ghosn’s arrest, Satoru Takada, an analyst at TIW, a Tokyo-based research and consulting firm, said his detention would “rock the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance as he is the keystone of the alliance.”
(VOA’s Ken Bredemeier and Fern Robinson contributed to this story.)
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Balloons, Blankets at Frigid Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade
Bystanders are refusing to let cold temperatures put a damper on watching Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, breaking out the blankets and sleeping bags to watch the giant balloons go by.
Tony Stout camped out with his extended family since 2 a.m. to make sure they got a good view of his son, who would be in the parade with The Ohio State University marching band. They traveled from Columbus, Ohio, for the parade.
“Ohhh, I’m freezing and numb, but excited,” he said.
Forecasters say it could be the coldest Thanksgiving in well over a century on Thursday, with the National Weather Service projecting temperatures in the low 20s (-4 to -7 Celsius) and sustained winds of up to 20 mph (32 kph) with gusts to 30 mph (48 kph), just inside the safe zone for the balloons to fly.
City officials said the 16 giant character balloons such as SpongeBob and Charlie Brown could fly safely, although their height would be adjusted if necessary.
Diana Ross, John Legend, Martina McBride and the Muppets from “Sesame Street” are slated to perform in the frigid cold.
Thursday has the potential to be New York City’s coldest Thanksgiving since 1901, when the temperature only got as high as 26 degrees (-3.3 Celsius). The coldest on record was in 1871, when the warmest it got was 22 degrees (-5.5 Celsius).
The Macy’s parade didn’t start until 1924.
New York City has issued an extreme cold weather alert and is urging anyone going outside to wear hats, scarves, gloves and layered clothing and to keep their fingertips, earlobes, and noses covered to prevent frostbite.
Police Commissioner James O’Neill said thousands of officers will be stationed along the parade route. They include counterterrorism teams with long guns, plainclothes officers mixed in with the crowd and a new squad of K-9 teams that can sniff out explosives from a few hundred feet away.
The parade runs 46 blocks from the west side of Central Park to Macy’s flagship store in midtown Manhattan.
The parade features about 8,000 marchers, including high school bands from across the country, and two-dozen floats culminating with the arrival of Santa Claus. The performances will be shown on the NBC telecast, which starts at 9 a.m. EST.
Ross, 74, will perform a song from her new Christmas album and will be joined on her float by her some of her family members, including daughter Tracee Ellis Ross, a star of ABC’s “Black-ish,” and actor son Evan Ross.
Others in the lineup include Bad Bunny, Kane Brown and Ella Mai, Pentatonix, Rita Ora, Sugarland, Anika Noni Rose, Barenaked Ladies, Leona Lewis, Fifth Harmony’s Ally Brooke, Bazzi, Ashley Tisdale and Carly Pearce.
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Leaning Tower of Pisa Continues Long Path Towards Vertical
The Leaning Tower of Pisa isn’t leaning so much anymore.
After more than two decades of efforts to straighten it, engineers say the famed Tuscan bell tower has recovered four centimeters (1.57 inches) more and is in better structural health than predicted.
ANSA news agency quotes a consultant to the international committee monitoring the tilt, Nunziante Squeglia, as saying that while the progressive recovery of tilt is good news, the overall structural health of the tower is more important.
The 12th-century tower reopened to the public in 2001 after being closed for more than a decade to let workers reduce its slant. By using hundreds of tons of lead counterweights at the base and extracting soil from under the foundations, engineers initially shaved 17 inches off the lean.
Lebanon’s Economy Faces Stark Choice: Reform or Collapse
Lebanon is marking 75 years of independence with a military parade Thursday in Beirut, but many anxious Lebanese feel they have little to celebrate: the country’s corruption-plagued economy is dangerously close to collapse and political bickering over shares in a new Cabinet is threatening to scuttle pledges worth $11 billion by international donors.
The World Bank issued a stark warning last week, with one official saying that unless a government is formed soon to carry out badly needed reforms, “the Lebanon we know will fizzle away.”
It’s been more than six months since Lebanon held its first national elections in nine years but the prime minister-designate, Saad Hariri, still hasn’t formed a government to undertake the reforms necessary to unlock the donors’ funds.
The vote, in which the Shi’ite militant Hezbollah group and its allies made significant gains, did little to pull Lebanon out of a political impasse. Anger against politicians’ apparent indifference, worsening public services and distress over down-spiraling finances and gloomy predictions are building up.
Last Friday, heavy rains caused Beirut’s sewage system to burst, turning the city’s famous Mediterranean coastal avenue into a river of filthy, foul-smelling black water that engulfed motorists along the otherwise scenic route. On the same day, the military had closed a main artery for drills ahead of the Independence Day parade, paralyzing traffic for hours. Flights from Beirut’s international airport were missed and a woman reportedly went into labor on the road. The army later apologized.
Despite a population of over 4.5 million that is among the most educated in the region, Lebanon still has a primitive infrastructure, widespread electricity and water cuts and a longstanding waste crisis that over the past few years saw trash piling in the streets for weeks at a time.
“There is no independence [to celebrate] because corruption is eating us up,” said Mohammed al-Rayyes, a shop owner in Beirut’s Hamra district. “The coming days are going to be very difficult.”
The tiny Arab country has coped with multiple political and security crises over the past decades and also suffered from the seven-year civil war in neighboring Syria, a conflict that has occasionally spilled over the border and brought more than 1 million refugees into Lebanon, putting even more pressure on its dysfunctional infrastructure.
A soaring debt of $84 billion and unemployment believed to be around 36 percent are compounding concerns that the country will finally cave in.
“It is a shame because so much time is being wasted,” Ferid Belhaj, the World Bank’s vice president for the Middle East and North Africa, said during a meeting with a group of journalists last week.
For years, he said, Lebanese officials have been promising to work on solving the electricity crisis, which costs the country about $2 billion a year and has been the main factor in accumulating Lebanon’s debt.
Of immediate concern is the future of $11 billion in loans and grants pledged by international donors at a meeting in Paris in April, which Lebanon risks losing if no Cabinet is in place soon to unlock the funds and approve reforms that were set as conditions by the donors and which have been delayed for years. In April, Hariri pledged to reduce the budget deficit by 5 percent over the next five years.
The crisis has prompted some Lebanese to change their deposits from the local currency, which has been pegged to the U.S. dollars since 1997, to U.S. dollars for fear the Lebanese pound might collapse. Riad Salameh, the Central Bank governor, has been repeatedly reassuring the markets, saying the local currency is stable.
Mohamad Shukeir, head of the Chambers of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture, told the local MTV station that 2,200 businesses closed doors so far this year.
Aftershocks of rising tension between the United States and Iran are also felt in Beirut, with Tehran ally Hezbollah being blamed by opponents for preventing Western-backed Hariri from forming a national unity government.
Hezbollah has demanded that six Sunni lawmakers allied with the Shiite group and opposed to Hariri be included in his Cabinet — something that Hariri, the country’s top Sunni Muslim leader, categorically rejects.
Despite the dangers, political bickering is not likely to end soon and the debt is mounting.
“The level of debt that we have in Lebanon requires us to act very quickly,” said economist Kamel Wazne. “Any delay will expose us to financial collapse.”
Belhaj of the World Bank said that reforms would act as a buffer to the crisis. But in their absence, “the crisis can be very nasty.”
“If we don’t go about these reforms fast, the Lebanon that we know will fizzle away,” he said.
Diana Ross to Headline Frigid Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade
Diana Ross might be singing “Stop! In The Name of Gloves” by the time she’s done performing at New York City’s super chilly Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, which forecasters say could be the coldest ever.
John Legend, Martina McBride and the Muppets from “Sesame Street” are also slated to perform in the frigid cold. Windy conditions are also expected and officials will be monitoring wind to see if giant character balloons such as SpongeBob and Charlie Brown can fly safely.
Police say they’re ready to order the 16 helium-filled balloons to a lower altitude or removed entirely if sustained winds exceed 23 mph (37 kph) and gusts exceed 34 mph (54.7 kph). There have been mishaps and injuries in the past when gusts blew them off course.
The National Weather Service is projecting temperatures in the low 20s (-3.9 to -6.7 Celsius) and sustained winds of up to 20 mph (32.2 kph) with gusts to 30 mph (48.3 kph), just inside the safe zone for the balloons to fly.
Thursday has the potential to be New York City’s coldest Thanksgiving since 1901, when the temperature only got as high as 26 degrees (-3.33 Celsius). The coldest on record was in 1871, when the warmest it got was 22 degrees (-5.5 Celsius).
The Macy’s parade didn’t start until 1924.
New York City has issued an extreme cold weather alert and is urging anyone going outside to wear hats, scarves, gloves and layered clothing and to keep their fingertips, earlobes, and noses covered to prevent frostbite.
Police Commissioner James O’Neill said thousands of officers will be stationed along the parade route. They include counterterrorism teams with long guns, plainclothes officers mixed in with the crowd and a new squad of K-9 teams that can sniff out explosives from a few hundred feet away.
The parade runs 46 blocks from the west side of Central Park to Macy’s flagship store in midtown Manhattan.
The parade features about 8,000 marchers, including high school bands from across the country, and two-dozen floats culminating with the arrival of Santa Claus. The performances will be shown on the NBC telecast, which starts at 9 a.m. EST.
Ross, 74, will perform a song from her new Christmas album and will be joined on her float by her some of her family members, including daughter Tracee Ellis Ross, a star of ABC’s “Black-ish,” and actor son Evan Ross.
Others in the lineup include Bad Bunny, Kane Brown and Ella Mai, Pentatonix, Rita Ora, Sugarland, Anika Noni Rose, Barenaked Ladies, Leona Lewis, Fifth Harmony’s Ally Brooke, Bazzi, Ashley Tisdale and Carly Pearce.
A Holiday Miracle? Stores Try to Cut Down on Long Lines
Retailers will once again offer big deals and early hours to lure shoppers into their stores for the start of the holiday season. But they’ll also try to get shoppers out of their stores faster than ever by minimizing the thing they hate most: long lines.
Walmart, Target and other large retailers are sending workers throughout their stores to check out customers with mobile devices. And at Macy’s, shoppers can scan and pay for items on their own smartphones.
Retailers hope the changes will make in-store shopping less of a hassle. Long lines can irritate shoppers, who may leave the store empty handed and spend their money elsewhere, or go online.
“I’m all about quick and convenient,” says Carolyn Sarpy, who paid for a toy basketball hoop on a mobile device issued to a worker at a Walmart store in Houston. Sarpy says she “will turn around and walk out” of a store if she sees long lines.
Walmart says workers will stand in the busiest sections of stores, ready to swipe customer credit cards when they are ready to pay. To make them easier to find, workers wear yellow sashes that say, “Check out with me.”
The world’s largest retailer first tested the service in the spring at more than 350 stores in its lawn and garden centers. It fared well, Walmart says, and expanded the program for the holiday season.
Retailers are trying to catch up to technology giants. Apple, for example, has let those buying iPhones, laptops and other gadgets in its stores to pay on mobile devices issued to workers. And Amazon has been rolling out cashier-less convenience stores in San Francisco, Chicago and Seattle.
Barbara Kahn, a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, says shoppers know the technology is out there for faster shopping. “That makes them even more impatient,” she says.
The true test of their success will be whether retailers can handle the big crowds who are expected to turn out for Black Friday weekend. The day after Thanksgiving is expected to be the busiest shopping day this year, according to retail analytics company ShopperTrak. The Saturday after Thanksgiving also ranks in the top 10.
“The biggest pain point on Black Friday is standing in line,” says Jason Goldberg, senior vice president of commerce and content practice at consulting group SapientRazorfish.
J.C. Penney, which has been offering mobile checkout for years, says it sent an additional 6,000 mobile devices to stores this year so workers can check shoppers out quicker, like when lines get long on Black Friday. Other stores are testing it for the first time: Kohl’s says iPad-wielding workers will roam 160 of its more than 1,100 stores.
Macy’s, which announced its program in May, says customers need to use its mobile app to scan price tags and pay. After that, they have to go to a mobile checkout express line and show the app to a worker, who then removes security tags from clothing.
Target’s mobile checkout program, which is being rolled out to all its 1,800 stores, is similar to Walmart’s. Target says that at its electronics area, where there are usually two cash registers, four workers will be sent with handheld devices to help ring up customers buying TVs, video games and other devices.
“This is about servicing the guest however they want and as quickly as they want,” says John Mulligan, Target’s chief operating officer.
Solar-powered Suitcases Bring Light to Darkened Classrooms
Solar-powered suitcases are bringing light to darkened classrooms and struggling students in rural Kenya. Before solar power, the alternatives were small tin kerosene lamps that are not only expensive to fill but also have caused some health problems. VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports.
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Study Shows Chemotherapy Not Needed to Treat Many Breast Cancers
After a diagnosis of breast cancer, many women have surgery followed by chemotherapy and radiation. But a new study shows that if it’s caught early enough, women might be able to avoid the chemotherapy. VOA’s Carol Pearson has more.
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Nissan Board to Meet for Ousting Ghosn as Future of Alliance in Focus
Nissan Motor Co will hold a board meeting on Thursday to oust Chairman Carlos Ghosn after the shock arrest of its once-revered leader, starting what could be a long period of uncertainty in its 19-year alliance with Renault.
The Franco-Japanese alliance, enlarged in 2016 to include Japan’s Mitsubishi Motors, has been rattled to its core by Ghosn’s arrest in Japan on Monday, with the 64-year-old group chairman and industry star accused of financial misconduct.
Ghosn had shaped the alliance and was pushing for a deeper tie-up including potentially a full Renault-Nissan merger at the French government’s urging, despite strong reservations at the Japanese firm.
Amid growing uncertainty over the future of the alliance, finance ministers of Japan and France are due to meet in Paris on Thursday to seek ways to stabilize it.
Renault has refrained from removing Ghosn from his position, although he remains in detention along with Representative Director Greg Kelly, whom Nissan also accuses of financial misconduct.
“For me, the future of the alliance is the bigger deal,” one senior Nissan official told reporters on Wednesday, when asked about Ghosn’s arrest. “It’s obvious that in this age, we need to do things together. To part would be impossible.”
Nissan’s board meeting will be held sometime after 4:00 p.m. at its headquarters in Yokohama and the company is likely to issue a statement afterwards, the official said, requesting anonymity as the details were confidential. Renault executives are expected to join by video conference.
Nissan said on Monday an internal investigation triggered by a tip-off from an informant had revealed that Ghosn engaged in wrongdoing including personal use of company money and under-reporting of his earnings for years.
Japanese prosecutors said he and Kelly conspired to understate Ghosn’s compensation at Nissan over five years from 2010, saying it was about half the actual 10 billion yen.
Ghosn and Kelly have not commented on the accusations and Reuters has not been able to reach them.
The Asahi Shimbun said on Thursday, quoting unnamed sources, that Ghosn had given Kelly orders by email to make false statements on his remuneration. Tokyo prosecutors likely seized the related emails and may use them as evidence, the report said.
The Yomiuri, Japan’s biggest-circulation daily, cited unnamed sources as saying that Nissan’s internal investigation found that Ghosn had since 2002 instructed that about $100,000 a year be paid to his elder sister as remuneration for a non-existent “advisory role.”
Shares in Nissan were flat, in line with a broader market, ahead of the board meeting.
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Canada Unveils Investment Tax Break
Canada will allow businesses to write off additional capital investments to make them more competitive at a time when the United States is aggressively cutting taxes, Finance Minister Bill Morneau said Wednesday.
But Morneau, speaking as he unveiled a budget update that forecast a slightly smaller than predicted deficit for 2018-19, said Ottawa would not be slashing taxes to match aggressive moves by Washington.
“If we were to do that, it would add tens of billions in new debt,” he told the House of Commons.
The move could disappoint business groups that said Ottawa needed to do much more to match the U.S. cuts. Morneau acknowledged their concern and said it would be neither rational nor responsible to do nothing.
The federal government will allow businesses to immediately write off for tax purposes the full cost of machinery and equipment used in the manufacturing and processing of goods. The measure covers purchases made on or after Wednesday and expires in 2027.
The budget update projected a C$18.1 billion ($13.7 billion) deficit for 2018-19, which was smaller than a revised C$18.8 billion projection made in the February budget. The fiscal year ends on March 31.
Ottawa is also introducing an accelerated capital cost allowance for all businesses and allowing some clean energy equipment to be eligible for an immediate write-off.
The combined effect of the measures means the average overall tax rate in Canada on new business investment will fall to 13.8 percent from 17.0 percent, the lowest level in the Group of Seven large industrialized nations.
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Suicide Rate Rising Among US Workers, CDC Study Finds
Suicide rates are rising among U.S. workers, and the risk may depend partly on the types of jobs people do, government researchers suggest.
From 2000 to 2016, the U.S. suicide rate among those aged 16 to 64 rose 34 percent, from 12.9 deaths for every 100,000 people in the population to 17.3 per 100,000, according to the study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The highest suicide rate among men was for workers in construction and mining jobs, with 43.6 deaths for every 100,000 workers in 2012 and 53.2 deaths per 100,000 in 2015, the analysis found.
The highest suicide rate among women was for workers in arts, design, entertainment, sports and media, with 11.7 fatalities for every 100,000 workers in 2012 and 15.6 deaths per 100,000 in 2015.
“Since most adults spend a great deal of their time at work, the workplace is an important and underutilized venue for suicide prevention,” said study co-author Deborah Stone, a behavioral scientist at the CDC in Atlanta.
While the study wasn’t designed to prove whether or how specific types of jobs or workplace characteristics might contribute to the risk of suicide, lack of control over employment and a lack of job security can both be stressors that make suicide more likely, Stone said by email.
Many factors outside the workplace can also influence the risk of suicide, including relationship problems, substance use, physical or mental health, finances or legal problems, Stone added.
And ready access to guns and other weapons have a big impact on whether suicidal thoughts turn into actions with fatal outcomes, Stone said.
Guns may explain the higher suicide rates among men than among women, said Gary Namie, director of the Workplace Bullying Institute in Boise, Idaho.
“In America, with ready access to guns, men make the choice of death by gun, but it is the less likely choice by females,” Namie, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email. “Hence, it is possible that in moments of despair that might pass if friends or family could intervene, with a gun handy, the decision is too quickly implemented.”
Data from 17 states
To assess suicide rates by occupation, the CDC examined data collected from 17 states in 2012 and 2015; the results are not representative of the nation as a whole. The results were published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
Although arts, design, entertainment, sports and media had the highest suicide rates among women, this category saw the biggest increase in suicide rate among men during the study. For women, the biggest increase in suicide rates was in the food service industry.
One limitation of the study is that it didn’t examine suicide methods. It also excluded two groups of Americans that typically have stressors that can increase their risk of suicide: military veterans and unemployed people.
Even so, the results suggest that employers can play a role in suicide prevention by offering worksite wellness programs, encouraging use of behavioral and mental health services, and training workers in the warning signs of suicide and how to respond, Stone said.
Promoting social interaction rather than isolation in daily tasks on the job may also help with suicide prevention, along with creating a workplace culture of inclusion that does not allow for abusive conduct or bullying, Namie said.
The road to suicide begins when one employee begins a “systematic campaign of interpersonal destruction against another employee,” Namie said. “Bullying is the most preventable predictor of suicide.”
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CDC Says US Abortion Rate Fell to Decade Low in 2015
A U.S. government agency said Wednesday that abortion rates among American women of all ages fell to a decade low in 2015, which both opponents and supporters of abortion rights attributed in part to individual states’ efforts to restrict women’s access to the procedure.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that statistics for 2015, the most recent year for which data are available, showed the abortion rate was 11.8 per 1,000 women aged 15 to 44. That was down 26 percent from 2006, when the study began and the rate was 15.9 abortions per 1,000 women.
Teens aged 15 to 19 experienced a greater decrease than older women, with the rate falling 54 percent from 2006 to 2015, the CDC said.
“This decrease in abortion rate was greater than the decreases for women in any older age group,” the CDC said in a statement.
The CDC did not provide any reason for the decline, but abortion rights advocates attributed it to increased use of contraceptives as well as decreased access to abortion services in some states.
“Affordable access to the full range of contraception and family planning options is critical for people deciding if and when they’d like to become parents, develop their careers, plan for their futures and manage their health,” said Rachel Jones, a research scientist at Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research group that supports abortion rights.
Opponents of abortion rights said the decrease was primarily the result of many states’ efforts to restrict women’s access to the procedure.
“That is due, in a significant way, to pro-life legislation that seeks to provide life-affirming solutions to abortion, combined with pro-life efforts that educate Americans about the effects of abortion and the humanity of the unborn child,” Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Committee, said in an email.
Total yearly number sinks
The total number of reported abortions fell to 638,169 in 2015, from 842,855 in 2006, a 24 percent decrease. In 2015, there were 188 abortions per 1,000 live births, compared with 233 abortions per 1,000 live births in 2006, a drop of 19 percent.
In 2015, all measures reached their lowest level for the entire period of analysis from 2006 to 2015, the CDC said of the annual study, Abortion Surveillance — United States 2015.
Conservative state lawmakers are passing increasingly restrictive abortion laws in a challenge to Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 landmark decision that established that women have a constitutional right to have abortions.
The Republican-controlled Ohio House of Representatives last week approved a measure that would ban abortions at six weeks, while an Iowa law banning abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected is tied up in a court battle.
Such laws are designed to end up before the Supreme Court, which has become more conservative following President Donald Trump’s appointments of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
The CDC study also showed 91.1 percent of abortions performed in 2015 were in a woman’s first 13 weeks of pregnancy. There was also a shift toward earlier abortions, with the number performed at six weeks or less increasing 11 percent.
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German Car Bosses Reportedly Invited to White House to Discuss Tariffs
The Trump administration has invited the heads of Volkswagen, BMW and Daimler to the White House to discuss U.S. tariffs on carmakers, the Handelsblatt newspaper reported on Wednesday.
Citing industry and diplomatic sources, the paper said the meeting could possibly take place as soon as next week, depending on circumstances. Handelsblatt said it was not known whether U.S. President Donald Trump would attend the meeting.
A spokesman for Volkswagen declined to confirm or deny whether the carmaker had received an invitation. Sources close to VW said it had not received an invitation.
Daimler and BMW did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump has threatened for months to impose tariffs on all European Union-assembled vehicles, a move that could up-end the industry’s business model for selling cars in the United States.
But he has refrained from imposing car tariffs while the United States and European Union launch negotiations to cut other trade barriers.
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Radical Experimental Plane With No Moving Parts Wows Scientists
Some 115 years after the first powered flight, scientists have developed a radical new approach toward flying in the form of a small, lightweight and virtually noiseless airplane that gets airborne with no moving parts like propellers or turbine blades.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineers on Wednesday described successful flight tests at an indoor campus gymnasium of the unmanned airplane powered not by engines that burn fossils fuels but by ion wind propulsion, also called electro-aerodynamic thrust.
The aircraft, called Version 2 EAD Airframe, or V2, weighs only 5.4 pounds (2.45 kg) with a wingspan of 16-1/2 feet (5 meters).
“This is the first time that an airplane without moving parts has flown,” said MIT aerospace engineer Steven Barrett, who drew inspiration from fictional shuttlecraft from “Star Trek.”
Electrical field strength near an array of thin filaments called emitters at the front of the wing ionizes air, meaning electrons are removed and charged molecules called ions are created.
These positively charged ions are attracted to negatively charged structures on the plane called collectors. As
they move towards the collectors, the ions collide with air molecules, transferring energy to them. This creates a flow of air that gives the plane its thrust.
Only time will tell whether the test flights at the duPont Athletic Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will become historic like the 1903 test flights of the first airplane by Wilbur and Orville Wright at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. And the engineers readily acknowledge their V2 prototype is inefficient
and limited.
But it could lead to big things.
“I’m trying not to over-sell it, but there are some really exciting possibilities here,” said Barrett, who pointed to near-silent drones as a possibility within several years.
“In the long term, I’m hoping for ultra-efficient and nearly silent airplanes that have no moving control surfaces like rudders or elevators, no moving propulsion system like propellers or turbines, and no direct combustion emissions like you get with burning jet fuel,” added Barrett, who led the
research published in the journal Nature.
The researchers conducted 11 test flights in which V2 flew about 200 feet (60 meters), typically flying less than 6-1/2 feet (2 meters) off the ground.
The plane, defined as a solid-state machine because it has no moving parts, was built to be as light as possible using materials like carbon-fiber, balsa wood, a plastic called polystyrene, shrink-wrap plastic and Kevlar.
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Repatriated 6th-Century Mosaic to Help Reconstitute Apse
A rare, 1,500 year-old mosaic depicting St. Mark has joined other repatriated pieces that were looted from the ethnically split Cyprus’ breakaway north, a Cypriot Orthodox Church official said Wednesday.
Together the pieces will create a Swiss government-funded reproduction of an apse that adorned a 6th-century church in the island’s north.
The mosaics were stolen by Turkish art dealer Aydin Dikman from the Church of the Virgin of Kanakaria about four decades ago and sold abroad.
Cyprus’ Byzantine Museum Director Ioannis Eliades said the apse will go on display at the museum until it can return to the Kanakaria church.
“This is a major project that we had envisioned for many years to restore these pieces and now we have the last piece,” Eliades told The Associated Press.
“Especially such a mosaic which dates to the same period as the Ravenna mosaics is of particular importance, of great architectural value and … also has a very high religious value.”
The Kanakaria mosaics are among a few early Christian works that survived the iconoclastic period in the 8th and 9th centuries when most of such works were destroyed.
The St. Mark mosaic returned to Cyprus after Dutch investigator Arthur Brand tracked it down in Monaco and handed it over to authorities at the Cypriot Embassy in the Netherlands last week.
The Cyprus Antiquities Department said that initial information about the mosaic’s whereabouts was provided to Cypriot authorities two years ago by the Greek-American organization AHEPA.
The department said pieces of the mosaics including those of Saints Luke, Bartholomew, Matthew, James, Thaddeus, Thomas and Andrew as well as the upper part of the Virgin Mary and Christ were gradually repatriated since 1983, but more pieces are still missing.
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Trump Thanks Saudis for Tamping Down World Oil Prices
U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday thanked Saudi Arabia for tamping down world oil prices, a day after saying the U.S. would not turn its back on Riyadh despite its responsibility for killing a dissident U.S.-based Saudi journalist.
From his retreat along the Atlantic Ocean in Florida, Trump praised the Saudis, second only to the U.S. as an oil producer but the biggest global exporter, for sending enough crude to world markets to keep oil prices in check.
Before leaving Washington for the Thanksgiving holiday, Trump told reporters at the White House that U.S. national security and economic interests outweigh any human rights concerns. He said turning his back on Saudi Arabia, despite the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, “would be a terrible mistake.”
“We’re staying with Saudi Arabia,” Trump announced. He noted the kingdom’s opposition to Iran and its purchases of American military equipment that mean, according to the president, “hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of investment.”
Russia and China “are not going to get that gift,” Trump said before adding that oil prices would soar if the U.S.-Saudi relationship is broken up.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in an interview with a Kansas City radio station, defended Trump’s stance favoring Saudi Arabia, while noting that the U.S. had sanctioned 17 Saudis believed involved in the Khashoggi killing.
“We are going to make sure that America always stands for human rights,” Pompeo said.
But the top U.S. diplomat said the protection of Americans was of paramount concern to Trump.
“The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been an important national security partner to the United States, pushing back against the murderous regime in Iran that actually presents real risk to the American people, and we are determined to make sure that the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia stays strong so that we can protect America,” Pompeo said.
‘Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t’
Asked at the White House about the CIA’s reported conclusion that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman likely knew about or ordered the plot to kill Khashoggi inside Riyadh’s consulate in Istanbul, Trump replied: “Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.” Of the CIA’s finding, he declared: “They have nothing definitive.”
The president denied his decision to avoid harshly punishing the Saudis for the October 2 killing has anything to do with his personal business interests.
“I don’t make deals with Saudi Arabia. I don’t make money from Saudi Arabia,” Trump said. “Being president has cost me a fortune.”
Trump said earlier he understands that some lawmakers in Congress want to pursue sanctions against Riyadh for the killing “for political or other reasons” and said, “They are free to do so.”
“I will consider whatever ideas are presented to me, but only if they are consistent with the absolute security and safety of America,” Trump said.
But the leaders of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Republican Bob Corker and Democrat Robert Menendez, sent a letter to Trump Tuesday reminding him U.S. law requires him to examine whether the crown prince ordered Khashoggi’s death.
The Global Magnitsky Human Rights Accountability Act requires the president to determine if a foreign official is responsible for a human rights violation.
The act is named for Russian accountant Sergei Magnitsky who was apparently beaten to death in prison in 2009 after accusing Russian officials of tax fraud.
“I never thought I’d see the day a White House would moonlight as a public relations firm for the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia,” Senator Corker tweeted Tuesday. He added that Congress will consider “all the tools at our disposal” to determine the role of the crown prince in the Khashoggi killing.
Khashoggi lived in the United States, writing opinion articles for The Washington Post that were critical of the crown prince and Riyadh’s military involvement in Yemen.
His editor at the Post, Karen Attiah, described Trump’s statement as “full of lies and a blatant disregard for his own intelligence agencies. It also shows an unforgivable disregard for the lives of Saudis who dare criticize the regime. This is a new low.”
U.S Intelligence Community
.
Veterans of the U.S. Intelligence Community are also expressing their disdain with the president’s stance.
Former CIA Director John Brennan, who has repeatedly clashed with Trump, said on Twitter that Trump “excels in dishonesty” so now it is up to Congress to obtain and declassify the CIA findings on Khashoggi’s death.
“No one in Saudi Arabia — most especially the Crown Prince — should escape accountability for such a heinous act,” Brennan wrote.
Former CIA officer Ned Price wondered Tuesday “how appointed intelligence leaders could continue to serve after this betrayal is beyond me.”
A Saudi prosecutor cleared the crown prince of wrongdoing last week while calling for the death penalty for five of the 11 suspects indicted in the killing. The prosecutor said a total of 21 people have been detained.
Turkish officials concluded that Khashoggi was tortured and killed and his body dismembered. His remains have not been found.
Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Tuesday Turkey might formally seek a United Nations investigation of the killing if cooperation with Riyadh reaches an impasse.
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US: China has Failed to Alter ‘Unfair, Unreasonable’ Trade Practices
The Trump administration on Tuesday said that China has failed to alter its “unfair” practices at the heart of the U.S.-China trade conflict, adding to tensions ahead of a high-stakes meeting later this month between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The findings were issued in an update of the U.S. Trade Representative’s “Section 301” investigation into China’s intellectual property and technology transfer policies, which sparked U.S. tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese goods that later ballooned to $250 billion.
“We completed this update as part of this Administration’s strengthened monitoring and enforcement effort,” USTR Robert Lighthizer said in a statement. “This update shows that China has not fundamentally altered its unfair, unreasonable, and market-distorting practices that were the subject of the March 2018 report on our Section 301 investigation.”
In the update, USTR said it had found that China had not responded “constructively” to the initial section 301 reports and failed to take any substantive actions to address U.S. concerns. It added that China had made clear it would not change its policies in response to the initial investigation.
USTR said that China was continuing its policy and practice of conducting and supporting cyber-enabled theft of U.S. intellectual property and was continuing discriminatory technology licensing restrictions.
The update said that despite the relaxation of some foreign ownership restrictions, “the Chinese government has persisted in using foreign investment restrictions to require or pressure the transfer of technology from U.S. companies to Chinese entities.”
The report comes as the Trump administration and top Chinese officials are discussing possible ways out of their trade war and negotiating details of the Trump-Xi meeting on the sidelines of the G20 leaders summit in Buenos Aires at the end of November.
But acrimonious trade rhetoric between the governments of the world’s two largest economies has been increasing in recent days, spilling over into an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit last weekend. A top Chinese diplomat said on Tuesday that the failure of APEC officials to agree on a communique from the summit was a result of certain countries “excusing” protectionism, a veiled criticism of Washington’s tariffs.
U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said on Saturday that the United States would not back down from the trade dispute, and might even double tariffs, unless Beijing bowed to U.S. demands.
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