Researchers and doctors are using incredibly tiny particles — fluorescent nanoparticles — in a quest for new ways to fight cancer. Some nanoparticles, just billionths of a meter across, are engineered to carry special dye that glows when it hits cancer cells. Oregon State University scientists say this makes it easier for surgeons to find and remove tumors. Iryna Matviichuk visited Portland and learned the new procedure is closer to testing in human patients. Anna Rice narrates her report.
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Month: February 2019
Egypt Unveils Ancient Burial Site, Home to 50 Mummies
Egyptian archaeologists uncovered a tomb containing 50 mummies dating to the Ptolemaic era, in Minya, south of Cairo, the Ministry of Antiquities said Saturday.
The mummies, 12 of which were of children, were discovered inside four, 9-meter-deep burial chambers in the Tuna el-Gebel archaeological site.
The identities of the mummies aren’t known, said Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.
“We have not found names written in hieroglyphics,” he said, adding it was obvious from the mummification method that the individuals whose remains were found had to some extent held important or prestigious positions.
Visitors, including ambassadors from several countries, gathered at the discovery site, where 40 of the mummies were exhibited during the announcement ceremony.
Some of the mummies were found wrapped in linen while others had been placed in stone coffins or wooden sarcophagi.
The archaeological finding was the first of 2019 and was unearthed through a joint mission with the Research Center for Archaeological Studies of Minya University.
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Gates Hopes to Enlighten Americans About Reconstruction
Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. can trace the roots of his upcoming PBS documentary about the Reconstruction to his days in school, when he’d hear about the end of slavery during the Civil War, then virtually nothing about race relations until the civil rights movement in the middle of the 20th century.
“It led me to think: If Lincoln freed the slaves, why did we need a civil rights movement?” the Harvard University historian said at a news conference Saturday.
The answer arrives April 9 with the Gates-produced, four-hour Reconstruction: America After the Civil War, which he hopes enlightens people about what he believes is one of the least understood periods of the nation’s history.
Freeing blacks in the South had a brief and dramatic impact on society. Within two years, about 80 percent of freed blacks in the former Confederacy were registered to vote — a greater participation level by percentage than blacks have today, Gates said.
That scared whites in the South, and in the North, too, and led to a rollback in rights that lasted longer than the initial freedoms, he said. In 1898, more than 100,000 blacks voted in Louisiana. But because the state then restricted voting rights, 1,342 blacks voted six years later.
Control of the message
Racist depictions of blacks took hold in the public imagination in large part because whites controlled the messaging, he said. The 1915 film Birth of a Nation, which glorified slavery and demonized freed blacks, has been seen by 240 million people, Gates said.
A fellow historian, Kimberle Crenshaw of the University of California-Los Angeles and Columbia University, said the U.S. Supreme Court was restrictive as well, changing the image of anti-discrimination laws into measures that gave blacks special treatment.
“The North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war,” Gates said, “and what we are trying to do is change that narrative.”
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Millions of Cancer Patients Suffer Needlessly From Pain
In advance of World Cancer Day (February 4), the World Health Organization is issuing new cancer pain control guidelines aimed at ending the needless suffering experienced by millions of people afflicted with this illness.
Cancer is a leading cause of death globally. The World Health Organization reports there are more than 18 million new cases every year and 9.6 million deaths, most in low-or middle-income countries.
Great advances have been made in the treatment of cancer, but measures to relieve the horrific pain experienced by patients lag woefully behind. WHO hopes to remedy this with its new guidance on pain management.
Director of WHO’s Department for the Management of Noncommunicable Diseases, Etienne Krug, says controlling pain should be an essential part of cancer treatment. Yet, he says pain is very often neglected as part of that treatment, a situation he considers unacceptable.
“Nobody, cancer patients or not cancer patients should live or die in pain in the 21st century. We have the knowledge of how to treat pain,” said Krug. “We have the medicines of how to address it. It is a question of making sure everybody has that knowledge and everybody has access to the necessary treatment.”
Krug says the situation is most acute in the poorer countries because pain management systems tend not to be in place. But he notes even in the rich countries people are still living and dying in pain.
WHO says opioid painkillers like oral morphine are an essential treatment for moderate to severe cancer pain. But WHO Noncommunicable Coordinator, Cheriana Varghese says some governments have enacted regulatory and legal barriers against their use in reaction to the global scare of opioid and morphine addiction.
“When a government of a country wants to introduce opioids, there is always this looming danger that this is going to get out of hand,” Varghese said. “And, so the governments are more conservative because of this.”
Varghese says there are sufficient safeguards against the abuse of opioids and morphine. He says these painkillers should be given only by trained health care providers, doctors and nurses. He adds oral preparation should be given whenever possible to prevent addiction.
Business Space for Women Fosters Creativity, Cooperation
Finding a comfortable working environment can sometimes be difficult, especially for women working in male-dominated fields like science and technology. But some new startups are all about creating spaces that cater to and are dominated by women. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Optimism, But No Concrete Progress at US-China Trade Talks
The most recent round of trade talks between the United States and China concluded in Washington this week with no firm deal other than a commitment to keep talking. Nike Ching reports on the status of the talks between the world’s leading economies, as they try to find common ground before more America tariffs come online in early March.
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End of an Era: China-Silicon Valley Relationship Chills
The trade dispute between the U.S. and China is disrupting Silicon Valley.
What had been a steady flow of Chinese money into tech firms appears to be slowing. Investors are concerned about the “headline risk” of doing business with Chinese investors.
And in some cases, U.S. startups are shunning Chinese investment.
These changes come after years of investment and collaboration between China and Silicon Valley. But the trade dispute, coupled with U.S. policymakers’ concerns about Chinese investments in sensitive technologies, such as artificial intelligence, have increased scrutiny of cross border deals on all sides.
A drop in investment
In 2018, Chinese firms invested more than $2 billion in U.S. technology firms, but that was a drop of nearly 80 percent from the year before, according to a Forbes report citing S&P Global Market Intelligence.
While Chinese investors took stakes in roughly the same number of U.S. tech deals — 80 compared to 89 in 2017 — that was off from the peak in 2016 when Chinese investors were part of 107 deals. Among the biggest recipients of Chinese investment in 2018 were Farasis Energy, a battery maker, and Epic Games, a gaming company, according to the Rhodium Group.
While deals continue to come together in 2019, the recent indictment of a Huawei executive has added to a new chill between the two regions, according to observers in Silicon Valley.
A technology war
In China, the battle is seen as less about Huawei and its alleged wrongdoing and more as a proxy for a “technology war” between countries over technological supremacy.
“The Huawei incident seems like an action against an individual corporation, but it is actually bigger than this,” said Hu Xingdou, a Beijing-based scholar. “This is about one state’s technology war against another state, about which one will occupy the technology high ground in the future.”
One recent change in the U.S. has been the expansion of a government program that reviews foreign investment in areas deemed sensitive.
Despite the expanded U.S. regulatory reviews, Chinese investments in U.S. tech firms are mostly getting through, said Chuck Comey, a partner at Morrison Foerster, a law firm.
As for Chinese companies buying or merging with U.S. tech ones?
“It ain’t happening,” he said.
Saying ‘no’ to Chinese investment
The increased tensions have given investors — and even some potential recipients of investment — some pause. One U.S. company, which had accepted Chinese investment in the past, told Reuters that it declined investment from Chinese investors in its most recent round.
“We decided for optical reasons it just wouldn’t make sense to expose ourselves further to investors coming from a country where there is now so much by way of trade tensions and IP tensions,” said Carson Kahn, CEO of Volley, an artificial intelligence training firm.
At a recent event in Silicon Valley about China and U.S. investments, speakers on a panel discussed how the geopolitical tensions affected their business. While several predicted that in the long run, the current friction between the two countries will have a minimal effect on cross-border business between China and Silicon Valley, there was a sense that an era has ended.
“We’ve kind of taken for granted,” said Kyle Lui, a partner at DCM, a global venture capital firm, “that the prior decade plus there’s been lots of strong collaboration between the U.S. and China.”
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Unpublished Salinger Work to Be Released
One of the book world’s greatest mysteries is finally ending: J.D. Salinger’s son says previously unpublished work by his late father will be coming out.
In comments that appeared Friday in The Guardian, Matt Salinger confirmed long-standing reports that the author of The Catcher in the Rye continued to write decades after he stopped publishing books. He said that he and Salinger’s widow, Colleen, were “going as fast as we freaking can” to prepare the material for release.
“He wanted me to pull it together, and because of the scope of the job, he knew it would take a long time,” Salinger said of his father, who died in 2010 and had not published work since the mid-1960s.
“This was somebody who was writing for 50 years without publishing, so that’s a lot of material. So there’s not a reluctance or a protectiveness — when it’s ready, we’re going to share it,” he said.
Might take years
Salinger, who helps oversee his father’s literary estate, says any new work might be years away and did not cite any specific titles or plots. He did indicate that the Glass family made famous in such fiction as Franny and Zooey would be seen again.
“I feel the pressure to get this done, more than he did,” he said, adding that the unseen work “will definitely disappoint people that he wouldn’t care about, but for real readers, I think it will be tremendously well-received by those people and they will be affected in the way every reader hopes to be affected when they open a book. Not changed, necessarily, but something rubs off that can lead to change.”
Longtime Salinger publisher Little, Brown and Co. had no comment Friday.
J.D. Salinger published just four books in his lifetime: Nine Stories, The Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey and a volume with the two novellas Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. The last work to come out in his lifetime was the story Hapworth 16, 1924, which appeared in The New Yorker in 1965.
Salinger rarely spoke to the media and not only stopped releasing new work but rejected any reissues or e-book editions of his published material. This year marks the centennial of his birth and signs of a new openness emerged in 2018 when his estate permitted new covers and a boxed edition of his old fiction to come out for the 100th anniversary. A Salinger exhibit is planned later this year at the New York Public Library, and other promotional events are in the works.
Over the past half-century, rumors and speculation intensified about whether any new books existed and whether they were of publishable quality. A former lover, Joyce Maynard, and Salinger’s daughter, Margaret, have both contended that the author continued to write books, allegedly stored in a vault in the author’s home in Cornish, N.H.
5 works predicted
A 2013 documentary and book by Shane Salerno and David Shields cited two “independent and separate sources” in predicting five new works. One of the Salinger books would center on Catcher protagonist Holden Caulfield and his family. Others would draw on Salinger’s World War II years and his immersion in Eastern religion.
Matt Salinger has dismissed the contents of the Salerno-Shields project, but never definitively said that no new work would appear.
Salerno wrote in an email Friday to The Associated Press that “it was always his [J.D. Salinger’s] intention — and specific direction — to have his work published after his death.”
“I’m thrilled that Salinger fans around the world will finally get to see this important work from one of America’s finest writers,” Salerno added. “As the stories roll out over the years, I think you will find that all of our reporting was correct.”
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Tech Firms, States Spar With US Government Over Net Neutrality
Tech companies and nearly two dozen U.S. states clashed with the government in federal court Friday over the repeal of net neutrality, a set of Obama-era rules aimed at preventing big internet providers from discriminating against certain technology and services.
Judges challenged arguments made by both sides in the face-off in an appeals court in Washington.
Lawyers for the states and the companies tried to persuade the three-judge panel to restore the net neutrality regime, set in 2015 but repealed in December 2017 at the direction of a regulator appointed by President Donald Trump. The companies challenging the FCC action include Mozilla, developer of the Firefox web browser, and Vimeo, a video-sharing site.
The net neutrality rules had banned cable, wireless and other broadband providers from blocking or slowing down websites and apps of their choosing, or charging Netflix and other video services extra to reach viewers faster.
The practice of slowing down transmission is known as “throttling.”
The action by the Federal Communications Commission rolling back the neutrality rules “is a stab in the heart of the Communications Act,” said attorney Pantelis Michalopoulos, referring to the Depression-era law that established the FCC.
Information vs. telecom service
The FCC wrongly classified the internet as an information service rather than a telecom service, using that as a rationale for not cracking down on misconduct by big internet providers, Michalopoulos said, who represents Mozilla and the other companies in the case.
Government lawyers, as well as big internet providers such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast, argued to keep net neutrality repealed.
Thomas Johnson, the FCC’s general counsel, said the agency’s “light-touch” regulatory scheme, requiring the internet providers to disclose their practices and operations, provides adequate safeguards. The internet — used more extensively to transmit information — is different both in nature and function from phone service, Johnson maintained. It therefore should be regulated as an information service and not subject to the utility-style oversight of phone companies, he said.
The politically charged issue has emerged from its origins as an engineering challenge to become an anti-monopoly rallying point and even a focus for “resistance” to the Trump administration.
Once Trump took office, net neutrality became one of his first targets as part of broader government deregulation. The FCC chairman he appointed, Ajit Pai, made rolling back net neutrality a top priority.
On the other side, support for net neutrality comes from many of the same people who also are critical of the data-vacuuming tech giants that benefit from it. Politicians have glommed on to the cause to appear consumer-friendly.
The Democratic takeover of the House in November’s midterm elections could revive efforts to enshrine net neutrality in federal law, though Trump likely would veto any such attempts.
At the hearing in the U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia, Judge Stephen Williams questioned Michalopoulos’s assertions that the FCC had wrongly classified the internet as an information service. Telephone services, too, offer an array of customer products, he said. On the question of broadband providers charging premiums for faster service, Williams said a large majority of consumers prefer cheaper, lower-speed options, citing polls.
Judges’ views
The judges are weighing whether the FCC had the authority to nix the 2015 rules and get out of the business of enforcing net neutrality. It appeared that Williams was sympathetic to the FCC’s arguments, while Judge Patricia Millett raised possible legal avenues for the companies and states suing the agency, and Judge Robert Wilkins was the swing vote, said Doug Brake, director of broadband and spectrum policy for the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington think tank.
The judges could decide to can the repeal or send it back to the FCC for a redo if they have specific objections.
“Today we fought for an open and free internet that puts consumers first,” Mozilla Chief Operating Officer Denelle Dixon said after the hearing. “We believe the FCC needs to follow the rules like everyone else.”
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Trump Health Chief Asks Congress to Pass Drug Discount Plan
The Trump administration’s top health official asked Congress on Friday to pass its new prescription drug discount plan and provide it to all patients, not just those covered by government programs like Medicare.
The plan would take now-hidden rebates among industry players like drug companies and insurers and channel them directly to consumers when they go to pay for their medications.
Patients with high drug copays stand to benefit from the proposal, while people who take no prescription drugs, or who rely on generics mainly, would probably pay somewhat more, since premiums are expected to rise.
A day after unveiling the plan as a proposed regulation, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar raised the stakes by calling on Congress to make it law and broaden it to include people covered by employer health insurance, not just Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries.
“Congress has an opportunity to follow through on their calls for transparency … by passing our proposal into law immediately and extending it into the commercial drug market,” Azar said in a speech at the Bipartisan Policy Center think tank.
Trump under pressure
Ahead of next week’s State of the Union speech, President Donald Trump is under political pressure to show results for his promise to slash prescription drug costs. Data show that prices for brand-name drugs have continued to rise, though at a somewhat slower pace. Polls show consumers across the political spectrum want government action.
Democrats say the administration’s plan doesn’t go far enough because it still leaves drug companies free to set high list prices. They say drug pricing is like a black box, and it’s impossible to tell if prices reflect actual costs or if companies are charging what they think the market will bear.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., says she’s also worried that the plan would raise premiums. HHS acknowledges Medicare prescription premiums would go up $3 to $5 a month.
Proposal draws interest
Nonetheless, the administration’s proposal appears to be in the mix as Congress gears up to craft legislation addressing prescription drug costs. Friday evening, the Republican chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, expressed his support. Rebates “ought to lower costs to patients, and this is a good first step towards that goal,” Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said in a statement.
The complex plan would work by doing away with an exemption from federal anti-kickback rules that currently allows drugmakers, insurers and middlemen called pharmacy benefit managers to negotiate rebates among themselves.
Drug companies pay rebates to make sure their medications are covered by insurance plans that are the intermediaries between them and patients. HHS says hidden rebates can amount to up to 30 percent of a drug’s list price. Insurers say they use the money from rebates to hold down premiums for all consumers.
Under the plan, the current anti-kickback exemption for industry rebates would be replaced with a new one for discounts offered directly to consumers.
Azar said the idea would reshape the drug pricing system, shifting it away from hidden rebates to upfront discounts, creating pressure on drugmakers to keep prices down. The proposal was co-authored with the HHS inspector general’s office.
Potential consequences
Experts say it will take time to sort out all the potential consequences.
Peter Bach, director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, said the current system of rebates harms patients who take costly drugs with high copays.
Think people with cancer, patients with intractable illnesses such as multiple sclerosis or rheumatoid arthritis, and those who take brand-name medicines with no generic competition. Patients’ cost sharing is often based on list prices, not the cost of the drug after rebates.
“Simply put, those on no medications at all will just see their premiums go up and see no savings because they don’t take any medicine,” said Bach. “Those on generics only may be essentially in this category (as well).
“But those on expensive medications … they will see savings in total,” he added. More than half a million people filled at least $50,000 in prescriptions in 2014, according to an Express Scripts report.
Insurers and pharmacy benefit managers like Express Scripts and CVS oppose the administration plan, saying it will undercut their ability to bargain with drugmakers for lower prices.
Companies please with plan
Drugmakers have applauded the administration’s action.
Consumers are worried about prices for brand-name drugs, particularly new medications that promise breakthrough results. Generics account for nearly 90 percent of prescriptions filled, but brand-name drugs account for more than 70 percent of the spending.
Azar contends that under the current system everybody but the patient benefits from high prices. A high list price makes room for bigger negotiated rebates for insurers and middlemen. And drugmakers then merely build that expectation into their prices.
Before joining the Trump administration, Azar was a top executive for drugmaker Eli Lilly. That led to criticism that he would be an industry pawn. But the drugmakers vehemently disagree with some of his other ideas, including an experiment using lower international drug prices to cut some Medicare costs.
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Why Wealthy Americans Are Renting Instead of Buying
Although they can afford to purchase a home, more well-to-do Americans are choosing to rent instead.
The number of U.S. households earning at least $150,000 annually that chose to rent rather than buy skyrocketed 175 percent between 2007 and 2017, according to an analysis by apartment search website RentCafe, which used data from the Census Bureau to reach its conclusions.
This new breed of renters challenges long-held assumptions that Americans rent a place to live primarily because they can’t afford to buy a home.
“Lifestyle plays an important part in their decision to rent,” study author Alexandra Ciuntu told VOA via email. “Renting in multiple cities at once has its perks, and so does changing one trendy location after another.”
Business and technology hubs like San Francisco and Seattle have the highest numbers of wealthy renters.
“Given the escalating house prices, it seems like a verifiable better decision to go with renting for longer,” Ciuntu said. “Given that in San Francisco, for example, $200,000 buys you just 260 square feet, it’s understandable why top-earners give renting a serious try before deciding whether to invest in a property or not.”
In fact, in both San Francisco and New York, wealthy renters outnumber well-to-do buyers. There are more high-earning renters — 250,000 — in New York City that anywhere else in the country.
“Ten years ago we would have associated real estate equity with life stability, whereas the two are not necessarily interrelated nowadays,” Ciuntu said. “Renting proves to be a more flexible option for those enjoying a dynamic and rich lifestyle. From a more millennial standpoint, this is no longer a brief solution before settling down, but rather an attractive world of possibilities.”
However, this rental enthusiasm doesn’t mean folks in the wealthiest brackets are rejecting homeownership, according to Ciuntu. Between 2007 and 2017, Chicago added 9,800 more wealthy owners than high-income renters, Seattle gained 13,400, and Denver added almost 18,000 more well-to do earners than wealthy renters.
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WHO Reports Progress in Controlling Ebola in Congo
Six months after the outbreak of Ebola was declared in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s North Kivu province, the World Health Organization is expressing cautious optimism that it is making headway in controlling the spread of the deadly virus.
Latest figures reported by the WHO show 752 cases of Ebola, including 465 deaths.
WHO Regional Director for Africa, Matshidiso Moeti, says progress in containing the spread of the virus is due to a number of public health measures, including the training of health workers on infection prevention and control, closer engagement with communities, case investigation and contact tracing.
She says the use of a vaccine and promising new drugs have been a boon to these efforts.
“I feel optimistic,” Moeti said. “I am very clear that we need to continue this work. We need to make sure that in the places where we have made progress, we build on this progress and we do not go back. And, we are being very, very conscious of the fact that we need to invest to improve the preparedness both in the DRC areas that are highest at risk and, most importantly, in the surrounding countries that are at risk.”
The risk of the virus spreading to countries like Uganda, Rwanda and South Sudan is very high because of the heavy cross-border traffic among the countries, Moeti said. However, she added, surveillance and preparedness activities have been enhanced on both sides of the border.
She says there is extensive monitoring at border crossings and improvements have been made in screening people for the virus. In addition, 2,600 health care workers in Uganda have been vaccinated. Moeti said a similar vaccination campaign began two days ago in South Sudan.
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US Researchers Look for Long-Lasting Ebola Vaccine
South Sudan is vaccinating health workers against Ebola in case the virus crosses the border from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ebola has stricken more than 700 people in the DRC and killed more than 400. The World Health Organization said the death rate is 59 percent.
Half a world away in Ohio, U.S. researchers are racing to develop a new, long-lasting vaccine against Ebola. At Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Dr. Paul Spearman is leading a clinical trial that tests two experimental Ebola vaccines.
“Researchers are looking for new ways to stop these outbreaks and to treat people who become infected and develop Ebola virus disease. The development of preventive vaccines for Ebola is a top global public health priority,” said Spearman, director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Cincinnati Children’s and the lead investigator in the trial.
Volunteers first receive one of the vaccines. A week later, they get the other one. Spearman said this one-two shot is promising and could provide rapid protection against Ebola.
These are weakened live-vector vaccines that cannot grow in human cells, but they produce strong immune responses to Ebola virus proteins.
Karnail Singh, Ph.D., also at Cincinnati Children’s, heads the program that tests volunteers’ blood samples. The researchers test the samples collected before the volunteers are injected with the experimental vaccines and again afterward.
Singh said that way, researchers can compare the samples and see if the vaccines provide immunity. The researchers also plan to take blood samples six months after the first two injections. If the vaccine is still effective, they hope to repeat the process six months later. These intensive lab studies and the rapid prime-boost schedule have not been done before in developing a vaccine against Ebola.
In Congo, health workers are using a vaccine developed during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa that raged from 2013 until 2016. It protects the Zaire strain of Ebola circulating in Congo. But there are two other deadly strains of Ebola. Health officials want vaccines that protect against all of them.
The vaccine being tested at Cincinnati Children’s has not yet been compared to the one being used in Congo, but it may protect against at least one other strain of Ebola. The goal is to produce a vaccine that is safe, effective and long-lasting.
The researchers in Cincinnati hope their work will improve the understanding of how to build immunity to other viruses or bacteria that can cause disease.
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Robust Job Gain in January Shows US Economy’s Durability
U.S. employers shrugged off last month’s partial shutdown of the government and engaged in a burst of hiring in January, adding 304,000 jobs, the most in nearly a year.
The healthy gain the government reported Friday illustrated the job market’s resilience nearly a decade into the economic expansion. The U.S. has now added jobs for 100 straight months, the longest such period on record.
The unemployment rate did rise in January to 4 percent from 3.9 percent, the Labor Department said, but mostly for a technical reason: The number of people counted as temporarily unemployed jumped 175,000, with most of that increase consisting of federal workers and contractors affected by the shutdown.
The government on Friday also sharply revised down its estimates of job growth in November and December. Still, hiring has accelerated since last summer, a development that has surprised economists because hiring typically slows when unemployment is so low.
“The overwhelming conclusion from today’s numbers is that the U.S. labor market remained incredibly strong at the start of 2019,” said Leslie Preston, senior economist at TD Economics.
Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton, said that many federal workers and contractors likely went out and found part-time work during the 35-day shutdown. The ability of many of them to do so is itself a sign of the job market’s strength, Swonk said.
Last month’s healthy job gain will assuage some concerns that had arisen about the U.S. economy. Global growth is weakening, the Trump administration is engaged in a trade war with China and higher mortgage rates have slowed home sales. Those factors have led many economists to forecast slower growth this year compared with 2018.
Yet strong hiring should boost household incomes, fueling more consumer spending, which would help drive economic growth.
Most sectors of the economy reported solid hiring gains in January. Education and health care added 55,000 jobs, retailers nearly 21,000 and professional and business services, which includes such higher-paying positions as engineers and architects, 30,000.
Rising pay
The ongoing demand for workers is leading some businesses to offer higher pay to attract and keep staff. Average hourly wages rose 3.2 percent in January from a year earlier. That’s just below the annual gain of 3.3 percent in December, which matched October and November for the fastest increase since April 2009.
Teresa Carroll, an executive at the staffing firm Kelly Services, said her company has explained to many clients that they have to pay more to find the workers they need. Some employers are still reluctant to offer higher pay, which has made it harder for them to find and keep workers, she said.
“They’ve enjoyed two decades of minimal pay growth in general,” she said. “It’s our job to educate our clients about the labor market.”
On a monthly basis, from December to January, wages barely rose, though. That’s likely to keep the Federal Reserve unlikely to raise interest rates in the coming months, economists said. Chairman Jerome Powell said earlier this week that the case for raising the Fed’s benchmark rate had weakened. Many economists and investors took that as a sign that a rate increase is unlikely any time in the coming months.
Swonk cautioned that some quirks likely inflated last month’s job gain. For example, some of the furloughed federal workers and contractors who took part-time jobs during the 35-day government shutdown might have been counted as having two jobs during January. Now that the shutdown has ended, these people will go back to being counted as having just one job beginning in February.
And for most of January, the weather was relatively warm in much of the United States, which likely boosted construction employment. Builders added 52,000 jobs, the most in nearly a year.
The strong job market, though, is encouraging more people who weren’t working to begin looking. The proportion of Americans who either have a job or are seeking one — which had been unusually low since the recession ended a decade ago — reached 63.2 percent in January, the highest level in more than five years.
Jessica Jacumin began a permanent job a month ago as a cook at an assisted living facility in Augusta, Georgia, after working there as a paid intern. Before that, she had been out of work and mostly not looking while she spent 18 months studying culinary arts at Helms College, a career school sponsored by Goodwill Industries.
Though Jacumin, 42, and her husband both have Navy pensions, her new job has provided much-needed income and health insurance. That, in turn, has allowed their family to spend a bit more freely.
“I am right now planning our first family vacation in three years,” she said.
Jacumin, her husband and three children will head to Hilton Head in South Carolina in July.
Impact of shutdown
The partial government shutdown caused 800,000 workers to miss two paychecks. But because these workers will eventually receive back pay, they were counted as employed in the survey of businesses that produces the monthly job gain.
But in a separate survey of households that is used to calculate the unemployment rate, some of these people were counted as temporarily jobless. That’s a key reason why the unemployment rate rose despite the healthy job gain.
Most economists have forecast that the shutdown will likely slow economic growth for the first three months of this year. But some say that even businesses that lost income from the shutdown likely held onto their staffs, knowing that the shutdown would only be temporary.
The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that the shutdown slowed annual growth for the January-March quarter by about 0.4 percentage point, to a rate of 2.1 percent, though that loss should lead to a bounce-back later this year.
The partial government shutdown has delayed the release of a range of government data about the economy, including statistics on housing, factory orders, and fourth-quarter growth.
The reports that have been released have been mixed. The Federal Reserve’s industrial production report showed that manufacturing output rose in December by the most in nearly a year, boosted by auto production. But consumer confidence fell in January for a third straight month.
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Expedition Will Gauge Health of Seychelles Reef Systems
One of the important aspects of gauging the damage being done to the world’s ecosystems by climate change is knowing the current status of those systems. So a Britain-based charity is about to embark on a seven-week expedition to gauge the health of one of the world’s few remaining pristine reefs. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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EPA Taps Climate Skeptic for Science Advisory Panel
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency added eight members on Thursday to its scientific advisory board tasked with providing independent input for agency policy, a list that includes at least one vocal climate-change doubter.
The EPA said John Christy, an atmospheric science professor at the University of Alabama, was among the new appointees to the advisory body, which now numbers 45 people and includes several appointees from past administrations.
Christy has downplayed the threat of climate change in congressional hearings and media appearances, arguing that scientific models overestimate warming, and that major steps to cut greenhouse gas emissions are not warranted.
Those views place him outside the mainstream scientific consensus, including from U.S. federal agencies, that global warming will have devastating consequences if not urgently addressed. But they dovetail with President Donald Trump’s policy of rolling back Obama-era climate-change regulations to free up more drilling and mining.
Christy did not immediately return a call seeking comment.
New appointees
Other new appointees include Hugh Barton, a toxicology and risk assessment consultant who formerly worked for pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc, and Richard Williams, an economics and benefit-cost analysis consultant who previously worked for the Food and Drug Administration.
“In a fair, open, and transparent fashion, EPA reviewed hundreds of qualified applicants nominated for this committee,” acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a statement. They “include experts from a wide variety of scientific disciplines who reflect the geographic diversity needed to represent all 10 EPA regions.”
Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, has said he believes climate change is occurring, but told senators at his confirmation hearing earlier this month that he did not see it as an urgent problem.
Trump downplays climate change
Trump has also repeatedly downplayed the threat of climate change, and announced his intention shortly after taking office in January 2017 to pull the United States from a global accord to fight it.
The science advisory board was created by Congress to serve as a check on EPA policies and research.
The EPA in 2017 barred scientists who have won agency-awarded grants from serving on the panel, a move the administration said was aimed at reducing conflicts of interest, but which environmental groups said would keep qualified scientists out of contention.
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Snowboarder Revives Goal of Representing Uganda at Olympics
It’s always in the back of Brolin Mawejje’s mind, whether he’s soaring over the snow or fine-tuning his rail technique: What more can he do to become an Olympic contender in snowboarding?
The 26-year-old hopes to enter the record books as the first African competing in his sport at the highest echelon – on behalf of his native Uganda. He was close to qualifying for the 2018 Winter Games in South Korea when a medical condition threw him off course.
“It’s a life circumstance,” he said matter of factly.
The setback arose last February at the Winter University Games in Kazakhstan, where he fell ill during practice. Medical tests revealed arrhythmia, an irregular heartbeat that can be fatal.
Mawejje packed up his gear and headed back to Utah. After consulting with his coaches and doctors, Mawejje shifted his focus to the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing.
“My goal has not changed or wavered. My goal is to still represent my home nation of Uganda at the world games,” the young man said during an interview last year at Westminster College here (Utah).
WATCH: Brolin Mawejje Talks About Snowboarding
Snowboarding video courtesy of Brolin Mawejje’s Instagram account.
Mountains provide a spectacular backdrop for the liberal arts college, where Mawejje is completing a master’s degree in public health, emphasizing epidemiology.
Mawejje has been back on the slopes since shortly after his diagnosis; the Mayo Clinic lists regular exercise among protective factors for his condition. He trains in Park City, Utah, and Jackson, Wyo., near the home of the American family that took him in. He also runs, lifts weights and bounces on a trampoline to improve his balance for the jumps, flips and twists of freestyle snowboarding.
“I have not won any major trophies this year,” Mawejje acknowledged in an email. But he’ll have a home advantage for his next competition: The FIS World Championships open this weekend in Park City. Athletes earn points at events sanctioned by the FIS, short for International Ski Federation, which countries consider when they pick athletes to represent them at the Olympics.
Unusual path
Mawejje took an unlikely trail to snowboarding. He never saw snow until he was 12, when he moved from his family home outside Uganda’s capital, Kampala, to a suburb of Boston, Mass. His mother had relocated there when he was a toddler.
“I came to the U.S. for more opportunities and better education,” he said.
At 14, an after-school program introduced him to skiing and snowboarding. “I wanted to have friends, so I joined in,” Mawejje said.
Through close pal Philip Hessler, he got a second family, moving with them to Jackson Hole, Wyo., in 2009. Both boys later enrolled at Westminster.
Hessler traced Mawejje’s development as a snowboarder and young man growing up in a foreign land in the 2014 documentary Far From Home, shot while both were students. Hessler went on to co-found the video production agency WZRD Media and works as a filmmaker.
Hessler regards Mawejje “as my brother and one of my best friends,” he told VOA, lauding Mawejje’s perseverance and ability “to thrive in new circumstances. … He is able to straddle being a part of many worlds.”
That includes Uganda. Mawejje says his mother gave him the opportunity and “understanding that I need to go back home and give back to my people and to my community.” He’s concentrating now on the Olympics, but aims to later attend medical school to become a doctor.
“To have a career that impacts a lot of people … is greater than sports,” he said.
Kaye Stackpole, a Westminster official who’s among Mawejje’s mentors, expands on his point.
“He has personally experienced great medical care and average-to-low medical care,” she said. “He wants to elevate education and medical care, especially in his country of Uganda. … I think that every step he takes is toward his goal of helping others.”
Charity work
Meanwhile, Mawejje works with charities such as the Kampala-based advocacy group Joy for Children on “initiatives that empower the youth and future of Uganda,” he said.
The athlete travels to Uganda and to snowboarding events around the world as a goodwill ambassador for Visa financial services. On Instagram, he tags that company and other corporate sponsors. He also has worked since he was in high school, as a lab analyst at Massachusetts General Hospital and as an instructor at snowboarding camps, among other jobs.
While in Kampala recently, Mawejje participated in a charity event and met with Uganda’s Olympic Committee president to “discuss the path to the Olympics with their support,” he said.
The committee has provided verbal encouragement but, to date, no “tangible support,” Mawejje said. Economic growth slowed in the East African country in the last few years, the World Bank has reported, noting that roughly a fifth of its 40 million residents live in poverty.
Mawejje hopes to get support from Uganda, the African continent and the diaspora. He says his Olympic quest is not just for himself.
“I am just the face going through the journey. … A lot of people in Africa go, ‘Why help him?’ … You are not helping me, you are helping the idea of all of us. It’s really the Olympic goal.”
He cites the three Nigerian women who last February made up the first African bobsled team at the Olympics. Though they placed last, “I am proud just to hear of the ladies of Nigeria,” Mawejje said. “And I just want East Africa to have the same representation.”
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UAE Senior Diplomat Denies Hacking Americans
A United Arab Emirates senior diplomat denied Thursday the country had targeted “friendly countries” or American citizens in a cyberspying program that a Reuters report said involved a hacking team of U.S. mercenaries.
The Reuters investigation published Wednesday found that the UAE used a group of American intelligence contractors to help hack rival governments, dissidents and human rights activists. The contractors, former U.S. intelligence operatives, formed a core part of UAE’s cyber hacking program called Project Raven.
Project Raven also targeted Americans, and the Apple Inc iPhones of embassy staff for France, Australia and the United Kingdom, according to former operatives and program documents reviewed by Reuters.
Apple has declined to comment and did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
When asked about Project Raven by reporters at a briefing in New York, UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash acknowledged the country has a “cyber capability,” but denied targeting U.S. citizens or countries with which it has good relations.
“We live in a very difficult part of the world. We have to protect ourselves,” Gargash said. “We don’t target friendly countries and we don’t target American citizens.”
The French and U.K. embassies in Washington have declined to comment. A spokeswoman for the Australian ministry of foreign affairs has declined to comment. The U.S. State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Doga — Yoga with Your Dog
The pet parents do yoga poses, like downward-facing dog, as their pups walk around the room and socialize, sniffing each other and the people on their yoga mats. This is doga, a fun, relaxing way to connect with your pet while getting some exercise.
At EMMAvet in Alexandria, Va., owner and veterinarian Veronica Jarvinin decided to begin doga classes a few months ago. She does a bending pose as she pets Emma, her beloved dog whose name is on the sign at the emergency pet care practice.
“Everybody giggles the whole time, and dogs roam from person to person,” she said. “I think it just brings everybody a lot of joy.”
Doga was started by an American fitness coach more than 15 years ago. Some of the poses the dogs do naturally take time for the humans to learn.
“You can do puppy pose where your hips stay up and everything else kind of stays the same,” instructor Ashley Stewart told the group. She is a yoga teacher and dog lover who decided to give teaching doga a try.
“It’s definitely less focused on the human yoga practitioner and more focused on the human and the dog connecting,” she explained. The dogs start to emulate what the humans are doing,” she said, as a black Labrador rested next to its owner who was doing a yoga pose flat on the floor. But the class also expects unusual distractions, Stewart said with a laugh. “We often have accidents that we are cleaning up or dogs that are barking.”
Doga helps create a stronger bond between the pet parent and pup.
Wendy Kuo, a veterinarian in Maryland, brought her two dogs to her first doga class. “Dogs have so much love to give, and I felt that when I was practicing with them,” she said.
Stewart cuddled a cute little gray poodle that licked her face as she asked the group members to lean over to their ankles.
Mike Salinas, who has been taking yoga for some time, said the best part of doga is snuggling with the dogs. “All dogs want our affection and attention,” he said. “It’s relaxing. Doga also provides a good workout.”
Stewart pushes the class members to reach up high with their right arms. “We’re just going to hold here for a second,” she said.
Doga newbie Celina Williams found the poses challenging, since she had not taken a yoga class before. She signed up for the class because her dog could come with her, which she thought was great.
College student Beth Barrett arrived without a dog since she can’t fit one in her life right now. “I love dogs and I love yoga,” she said, “so it’s a perfect combination of both.”
As the class ended with the resting pose, both the people and dogs were ready to relax, including Marieka Johnson and her best friend, a sweet terrier mix named Chewy.
“Maybe doga is a little crazy,” she said, “but it brings more of the peace aspect of yoga to you and the animal, and also helps with the bond you create.”
Stewart thanked the class for coming. “The dog lover in me, honors the dog lover in you. Good job, dogs,” she said enthusiastically.
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