This time of the year, Hollywood rolls out its big-budget films. Monsters and superheroes are framed by spectacular special effects on IMAX screens, and the industry’s big stars flex their muscles, figuratively and literally. This summer, some of the industry’s monster flicks look promising. VOA’s Penelope Poulou reports.
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Month: May 2017
About three million American university graduates will enter the job market this year. And with unemployment currently at a 10-year low, it’s a good time to be graduating, says Nicole Smith, chief economist at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW).
“We are at one of the lowest unemployment rates we’ve had since May of 2007, so what that means for the graduating class of 2017 is that the likelihood of getting a job is really, really good,” she said.
The U.S. Labor Department says unemployment for those with a four-year bachelor’s degree or higher is 2.5 percent, compared to the overall jobless rate of 4.5 percent. For those with a high school diploma or less, the average unemployment rate is 6.8 percent.
Watch: Job Prospects for 2017 College Grads, Best in More Than a Decade
Demand for graduates with associate, bachelor’s and master’s degrees is particularly strong in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, according to the latest survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers.
However, Smith says, a four-year degree is not necessary to compete in today’s economy.
“There are about 28 million jobs or so in the U.S. economy that are good-paying jobs; that are high-skilled jobs for people without a B.A,” she said.
While higher learning can give new workers the upper hand, Smith says almost a third of students with bachelor’s degrees are under-unemployed.
“So we have to do this cakewalk, this tightrope walk, to understand exactly what the market demands,” she said.
Options without college degree
A survey of the hottest employment sectors in 2017 shows some of the fastest-growing fields don’t require a four-year degree, according to Bankrate.com senior analyst Mark Hamrick.
“You don’t have to have a college degree for some of those technical jobs, where, let’s say, a kind of therapy might be involved — physical or occupational therapy,” he said.
Health care and service-oriented jobs aimed at the needs of a graying population are bound to remain strong as baby boomers — those born between 1946 to 1964 — continue to retire. But, Hamrick says, some skills are harder to learn in school.
“One of the skills which has been in strong demand really involves people skills — closing the deal, sales … business strategy; charting the course for a viable enterprise, that’s something that’s needed,” he said.
What is clear is that jobs that fueled the economy three or four decades ago are not the same jobs driving the economy today. In the 1970s, manufacturing accounted for nearly two of every five jobs; today, those manufacturing jobs account for fewer than one in 10.
“The types of manufacturing jobs that remain are jobs that are really high-skill, high-tech, high-demand manufacturing jobs. So those jobs require a lot more skills than their predecessors did,” Smith said.
Life-long learning key
Today’s job market also differs from the past because rapid technological and societal change demands a commitment to life-long learning, which means that getting a degree is just the beginning, according to Smith.
“Each year, there’s a new … version of technology that we must use,” she said. “So what the students need to be aware of is that they will need to come back to re-up their certification, to re-up their skills.”
Participating in today’s economy also means older and newer workers must be willing to move where the jobs are. Demand for workers is greatest where local economies are dynamic and where populations are growing, says Bankrate.com’s Hamrick. That means the exodus toward bigger cities on the East and West coasts will continue.
“That’s a process that’s accelerating,” Hamrick said. “It’s not slowing down, and so having the right skills, going where the jobs are located — those are the keys to obtaining and maintaining employment.”
The most recent jobs report shows the U.S. economy added 211,000 jobs in April, and unemployment fell to 4.4 percent. That’s a sharp contrast to the dark days that followed the 2008 financial crisis, when the U.S. economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month and unemployment peaked at 10 percent.
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The family of Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell is disputing “inferences that Chris knowingly and intentionally” killed himself.
The family said in a statement that without toxicology tests completed, they can’t be sure what led to his death, or if any substances were involved.
According to lawyer Kirk Pasich, Cornell had a prescription for the anti-anxiety drug Ativan, which he said has various side effects.
The musician was found dead in his Detroit hotel room Wednesday after performing at a concert.
Cornell’s wife, Vicky Cornell, said in the statement that when she spoke to her husband after the Detroit show, he told her he may have taken “an extra Ativan or two” and was slurring his words.
The medical examiner in Detroit said Cornell hanged himself. Police told two Detroit newspapers the singer was found with a band around his neck.
We’re liberating the five most popular songs in the Billboard Hot 100 Pop Singles chart, for the week ending May 20, 2017.
This week’s lineup is a real thriller, but you’ll have to wait until the end for the payoff.
Number 5: Ed Sheeran Shape of You
Ed Sheeran slides three slots to fifth place with his former 12-week champ “Shape Of You.” Last year, Ed took a lengthy hiatus from the spotlight. He quit social media and traveled the globe, seeking balance in his life.
Ed says six years in the public eye had left him overweight and dependent on alcohol…he was so stressed that he was losing clumps of hair. Ed says the time off did him a world of good.
Number 4: Kendrick Lamar “Humble”
Another former champ falls in the rankings as Kendrick Lamar’s “Humble” slips to fourth place.
The BET Award nominations emerged this week, and Kendrick competes in two categories: Best Male Hip-Hop Artist and Best Collaboration for his track “Freedom” with Beyonce. The 2017 BET Awards ceremony takes place on June 25 in Los Angeles.
Number 3: Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee & Justin Bieber “Despacito”
Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee and Justin Bieber gain a notch in third place with “Despacito,” and Justin’s catching heat over lip synching accusations.
On May 10, Justin gave his first Indian concert in Mumbai, and some fans claimed he mimed his vocals. Actor Rohit Roy says he and his daughter saw Justin chewing gum and drinking water during songs…but also says most of Justin’s young fans didn’t seem to mind.
Number 2: Bruno Mars “That’s What I Like”
Bruno Mars loses the singles crown this week, as “That’s What I Like” slips a slot to number two.
Bruno just earned five BET Award nominations, trailing only Beyonce, who has seven. He competes for Album Of The Year; Video Of The Year; Best Male R & B/Pop Artist; Viewer’s Choice; and Video Director Of The Year. June 25 is the big night in Los Angeles.
Number 1: DJ Khaled Featuring Justin Bieber, Quavo, Chance The Rapper & Lil Wayne ” I’m The One”
We promised you a big payoff at the end and now it’s time to deliver: DJ Khaled bags his first Hot 100 championship, as “I’m The One” debuts at the top. It’s only the 28th song to open at number one in the 57-year history of the Hot 100. Along for the ride are Justin Bieber, Quavo from Migos, Lil Wayne and Chance The Rapper…who also earns his first Hot 100 win.
What does next week hold? Join us in seven days.
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A sizable majority of rural Americans backed Donald Trump’s presidential bid, drawn to his calls to slash environmental rules, strengthen law enforcement and replace the federal health care law.
But last month, many of them struck a sour note after White House aides signaled that Trump would deliver on another signature vow by edging toward abandoning the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Farm Country suddenly went on red alert.
Trump’s message that NAFTA was a job-killing disaster had never resonated much in rural America. NAFTA had widened access to Mexican and Canadian markets, boosting U.S. farm exports and benefiting many farmers.
“Mr. President, America’s corn farmers helped elect you,” Wesley Spurlock of the National Corn Growers Association warned in a statement. “Withdrawing from NAFTA would be disastrous for American agriculture.”
Within hours, Trump softened his stance. He wouldn’t actually dump NAFTA, he said. He’d first try to forge a more advantageous deal with Mexico and Canada – a move that formally began Thursday when his top trade negotiator, Robert Lighthizer, announced the administration’s intent to renegotiate NAFTA.
Farmers have been relieved that NAFTA has survived so far. Yet many remain nervous about where Trump’s trade policy will lead.
As a candidate, Trump defined his “America First” stance as a means to fight unfair foreign competition. He blamed unjust deals for swelling U.S. trade gaps and stealing factory jobs.
But NAFTA and other deals have been good for American farmers, who stand to lose if Trump ditches the pact or ignites a trade war. The United States has enjoyed a trade surplus in farm products since at least 1967, government data show. Last year, farm exports exceeded imports by $20.5 billion.
“You don’t start off trade negotiations … by picking fights with your trade partners that are completely unnecessary,” says Aaron Lehman, a fifth-generation Iowa farmer who produces corn, soybeans, oats and hay.
Many farmers worry that Trump’s policies will jeopardize their exports just as they face weaker crop and livestock prices.
“It comes up pretty quickly in conversation,” says Blake Hurst, a corn and soybean farmer in northwestern Missouri’s Atchison County.
That county’s voters backed Trump more than 3-to-1 in the election but now feel “it would be better if the rhetoric (on trade) was a little less strident,” says Hurst, president of the Missouri Farm Bureau.
Trump’s main argument against NAFTA and other pacts was that they exposed American workers to unequal competition with low-wage workers in countries like Mexico and China.
NAFTA did lead some American manufacturers to move factories and jobs to Mexico. But since it took effect in 1994 and eased tariffs, annual farm exports to Mexico have jumped nearly five-fold to about $18 billion. Mexico is the No. 3 market for U.S. agriculture, notably corn, soybeans and pork.
“The trade agreements that we’ve had have been very beneficial,” says Stephen Censky, CEO of the American Soybean Association. “We need to take care not to blow the significant gains that agriculture has won.”
The U.S. has run a surplus in farm trade with Mexico for 20 of the 23 years since NAFTA took effect. Still, the surpluses with Mexico became deficits in 2015 and 2016 as global livestock and grain prices plummeted and shrank the value of American exports, notes Joseph Glauber of the International Food Policy Research Institute.
Mexico has begun to seek alternatives to U.S. food because, as its agriculture secretary, Jose Calzada Rovirosa, said in March, Trump’s remarks on trade “have injected uncertainty” into the agriculture business.
Once word had surfaced that Trump was considering pulling out of NAFTA, Sonny Perdue, two days into his job as the president’s agriculture secretary, hastened to the White House with a map showing areas that would be hurt most by a pullout, overlapped with many that voted for Trump.
“I tried to demonstrate to him that in the agricultural market, sometimes words like ‘withdraw’ or ‘terminate’ can have a major impact on markets,” Perdue said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I think the president made a very wise decision for the benefit of many agricultural producers across the country” by choosing to remain in NAFTA.
Trump delivered another disappointment for U.S. farm groups in January by fulfilling a pledge to abandon the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the Obama administration negotiated with 11 Asia-Pacific countries. Trump argued that the pact would cost Americans jobs by pitting them against low-wage Asian labor.
But the deal would have given U.S. farmers broader access to Japan’s notoriously impregnable market and easier entry into fast-growing Vietnam. Philip Seng of the U.S. Meat Export Federation notes that the U.S. withdrawal from TPP left Australia with a competitive advantage because it had already negotiated lower tariffs in Japan.
Trump has also threatened to impose tariffs on Chinese and Mexican imports, thereby raising fears that those trading partners would retaliate with their own sanctions.
Farmers know they’re frequently the first casualties of trade wars. Many recall a 2009 trade rift in which China responded to U.S. tire tariffs by imposing tariffs on U.S. chicken parts. And Mexico slapped tariffs on U.S. goods ranging from ham to onions to Christmas trees in 2009 to protest a ban on Mexican trucks crossing the border.
The White House declined to comment on farmers’ fears that Trump’s trade policy stands to hurt them. But officials say they’ve sought to ease concerns, by, for example, having Agriculture Secretary Perdue announce a new undersecretary to oversee trade and foreign agricultural affairs.
Many farmers are still hopeful about the Trump administration. Some, for example, applaud his plans to slash environmental rules that they say inflate the cost of running a farm. Some also hold out hope that the author of “The Art of the Deal” will negotiate ways to improve NAFTA.
One such way might involve Canada. NAFTA let Canada shield its dairy farmers from foreign competition behind tariffs and regulations but left at least one exception – an American ultra-filtered milk used in cheese. When Canadian farmers complained about the cheaper imports, Canada changed its policy and effectively priced ultra-filtered American milk out of the market.
“Canada has made business for our dairy farmers in Wisconsin and other border states very difficult,” Trump tweeted last month. “We will not stand for this. Watch!”
Some U.S. cattle producers would also like a renegotiated NAFTA to give them something the current version doesn’t: The right to label their product “Made in America.” In 2015, the World Trade Organization struck down the United States’ country-of-origin labeling rules as unfair to Mexico and Canada.
Many still worry that Trump’s planned overhaul of American trade policy is built to revive manufacturing and that farming remains an afterthought.
“So much of the conversation in the campaign had been in Detroit or in Indiana” and focused on manufacturing jobs,” said Kathy Baylis, an economist at the University of Illinois. The importance of American farm exports “never made it into the rhetoric.”
The World Health Organization has delivered dramatic news about the causes of death for young people the world over. Governments and health agencies have made great strides in reducing deaths of young children through immunization and programs that address maternal and infant care. But adolescents have somehow fallen through the cracks.
Dr. Anthony Costello, director of WHO’s Department of Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health told VOA, “We’re finding 1.2 million (adolescents) die each year. That’s 3,000 deaths a day. That’s 10 jumbo jets.” What’s more, Costello says these deaths are largely preventable.
The study shows traffic injuries are the top cause of death among adolescents, those between 10 and 19. In most cases, the adolescent is struck by a car while walking or riding a bicycle.
Other leading causes of death include lower respiratory infections and suicide, the report found. The causes differ by gender, age and region. Boys between 15 and 19 years old are more likely to die from traffic injuries than girls or than younger boys. In sub-Saharan Africa, children are more likely to contract HIV.
Girls between 10 and 14 are at risk for getting respiratory infections from indoor air pollution and from breathing in fumes from cooking fuels. Older girls, between 15 and 19, had a greater risk of death from pregnancy complications, childbirth or unsafe abortions. Teenage girls generally have small pelvises which lead to difficult labor.
Costello said pregnant adolescent girls are also “more likely to get high blood pressure; they may be more vulnerable to bleeding, they may be more anemic. They may be in situations more vulnerable to malaria, to HIV.”
The point of the study that was conducted by the WHO and partners at other U.N. agencies and the World Bank.
Looking forward
While the study focuses on the causes of death, Costello said the point was to help develop a framework and a plan to improve the health of adolescents. If adolescents had access to good health services, education and social support, fewer young people would die. In the case of traffic related deaths, he said better traffic laws, speed limits, the use of seatbelts could save lives in countries that don’t have strict driving safety laws. Costello pointed out that “In India, for example, there are 90,000 deaths on the road each year; many of those are adolescents and children.”
Dr. Flatvia Bistro, the assistant director-general at WHO, said, “Adolescents have been entirely absent from national health plans for decades.” The report proposes changing these plans and trying to help adolescents develop healthy lifestyle habits.
Costello said, “The roots of diabetes, of heart attacks, of strokes, of lung cancer, the root of that lies in the adolescent years, how the adolescents approach nutrition, and diet and exercise, whether they start to smoke or not, or abuse other substances.
Concept shift
Costello said countries need to create more adolescent friendly cities so adolescents have places to play, gather together safely and avoid gang violence.
“Governments have got to invest in young people,” Costello said, because “they’re the future. We mustn’t be afraid to involve children in designing their own environments, in coming up with creative ideas, in working with peer groups, and investing in things that will give them an exciting life without exposing them to long term risks that could be avoidable.”
A study published in The Lancet in April shows that improving the physical, mental and sexual health of adolescents could result in significant economic returns. The study contends that an investment of about $4.60 per person per year would yield more than 10 times as much in benefits to society. This study was conducted by researchers from Victoria University and the University of Melbourne along with the United Nations Populations Fund.
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An OPEC panel reviewing scenarios for next week’s policy-setting meeting is looking at the option of deepening and extending an OPEC-led deal to reduce oil output, OPEC sources said Friday.
OPEC’s national representatives — officials representing the 13 member countries, plus officials from OPEC’s Vienna secretariat — met Wednesday and Thursday to discuss the market.
The two-day meeting, called the Economic Commission Board, was scheduled to finish Thursday but will conclude later Friday, two OPEC sources said.
“We have not agreed on final scenarios,” said one of the sources.
A second source said a deeper supply cut was an option depending on estimated growth in supply from non-OPEC and U.S. shale oil.
The meeting precedes a policy-setting gathering of OPEC and non-OPEC oil ministers May 25 to decide whether to extend their deal to reduce output beyond June 30.
The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, Russia and other producers originally agreed to cut production by 1.8 million barrels per day (bpd) for six months from Jan. 1 to support the market.
Oil prices, trading around $53 a barrel, have gained support from reduced output, but high inventories and rising supply from producers outside the deal have limited the rally, pressing the case for extending the deal.
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A couple of things about the WannaCry cyberattack are certain. It was the biggest in history and it’s a scary preview of things to come. But one thing is a lot less clear: whether North Korea had anything to do with it.
Despite bits and pieces of evidence that suggest a possible North Korea link, experts warn there is nothing conclusive yet, and a lot of reasons to be dubious.
Within days of the attack, respected cybersecurity firms Symantec and Kaspersky Labs hinted at a North Korea link. Google researcher Neel Mehta identified coding similarities between WannaCry and malware from 2015 that was tied to the North. And the media have since spun out stories on Pyongyang’s league of hackers, its past involvement in cyberattacks and its perennial search for new revenue streams, legal or shady.
Meet Lazarus
But identifying hackers behind sophisticated attacks is a notoriously difficult task. Proving they are acting under the explicit orders of a nation state is even trickier.
When experts say North Korea is behind an attack, what they often mean is that Pyongyang is suspected of working with or through a group known as Lazarus. The exact nature of Lazarus is cloudy, but it is thought by some to be a mixture of North Korean hackers operating in cahoots with Chinese “cyber-mercenaries” willing to at times do Pyongyang’s bidding.
Lazarus is a serious player in the cybercrime world.
It is referred to as an “advanced persistent threat” and has been fingered in some very sophisticated operations, including an attempt to breach the security of dozens of banks this year, an attack on the Bangladesh central bank that netted $81 million last year, the 2014 Sony wiper hack and DarkSeoul, which targeted the South Korean government and businesses.
“The Lazarus Group’s activity spans multiple years, going back as far as 2009,” Kaspersky Labs said in a report last year. “Their focus, victimology, and guerrilla-style tactics indicate a dynamic, agile and highly malicious entity, open to data destruction in addition to conventional cyberespionage operations.”
WannaCry doesn’t fit
But some experts see the latest attack as an anomaly.
WannaCry infected more than 200,000 systems in more than 150 countries with demands for payments of $300 in Bitcoin per victim in exchange for the decryption of the files it had taken hostage. Victims received warnings on their computer screens that if they did not pay the ransom within three days, the demand would double. If no ransom was paid, the victim’s data would be deleted.
As ransomware attacks go, that’s a pretty typical setup.
But that’s not — or at least hasn’t been — the way North Korean hackers are believed to work.
“This is not part of the previously observed behavior of DPRK cyberwar units and hacking groups,” Michael Madden, a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and founder of North Korea Leadership Watch, said in an email to The Associated Press. “It would represent an entirely new type of cyberattack by the DPRK.”
Madden said the North, officially known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, if it had a role at all, could have instead been involved by giving or providing parts of the packet used in the attack to another state-sponsored hacking group with whom it is in contact.
“This type of ransomware/jailbreak attack is not at all part of the M.O. of the DPRK’s cyberwar units,” he said. “It requires a certain level of social interaction and file storage, outside of those with other hacking groups, that DPRK hackers and cyberwar units would not engage. Basically they’d have to wait on Bitcoin transactions, store the hacked files and maintain contact with the targets of the attack.”
Attack not strategic
Other cybersecurity experts question the Pyongyang angle on different grounds.
James Scott, a senior fellow at the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology, a cybersecurity think tank, argues that the evidence remains “circumstantial at best,” and believes WannaCry spread because of luck and negligence, not sophistication.
“While it is possible that the Lazarus group is behind the WannaCry malware, the likelihood of that attribution proving correct is dubious,” he wrote in a recent blog post laying out his case. “It remains more probable that the authors of WannaCry borrowed code from Lazarus or a similar source.”
Scott said he believes North Korea would likely have attacked more strategic targets — two of the hardest-hit countries, China and Russia, are the North’s closest strategic allies — or tried to capture more significant profits.
Very few victims of the WannaCry attack appear to have paid up. As of Friday, only $91,000 had been deposited in the three Bitcoin accounts associated with the ransom demands, according to London-based Elliptic Enterprises, which tracks illicit Bitcoin activity.
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Commercial development of the globe’s huge reserves of a frozen fossil fuel known as “combustible ice” has moved closer to reality after Japan and China successfully extracted the material from the seafloor off their coastlines.
But experts said Friday that large-scale production remains many years away, and if not done properly could flood the atmosphere with climate-changing greenhouse gases.
Frozen mix of water, gas
Combustible ice is a frozen mixture of water and concentrated natural gas. Technically known as methane hydrate, it can be lit on fire in its frozen state and is believed to comprise one of the world’s most abundant fossil fuels.
The official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported that the fuel was successfully mined from beneath the South China Sea on Thursday. Chinese Minister of Land and Resources Jiang Daming declared the event a breakthrough moment heralding a potential “global energy revolution.”
A drilling crew in Japan reported a similar successful operation two weeks earlier, on May 4 along the Shima Peninsula.
For Japan, methane hydrate offers the chance to reduce its heavy reliance on imported fuels. In China, it could serve as a cleaner substitute for coal-burning power plants and steel factories that have polluted much of the country with lung-damaging smog.
Estimated reserves are large
Methane hydrate has been found beneath seafloors and buried inside Arctic permafrost and beneath Antarctic ice.
Estimates of worldwide reserves range from 280 trillion cubic meters (10,000 trillion cubic feet) up to 2,800 trillion cubic meters (100,000 trillion cubic feet), according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. By comparison, total worldwide production of natural gas was 3.5 billion cubic meters (124 billion cubic feet) in 2015, the most recent year available.
That means methane hydrate reserves could meet global gas demands for 80 to 800 years at current consumption rates.
Yet efforts to successfully extract the fuel at a profit have eluded private and state-owned energy companies for decades. That’s in part because of the cost of extraction techniques, which involve large amounts of water and power to flood methane hydrate reserves so the fuel can be released and brought to the surface.
There are also environmental concerns, said David Sandalow, a former senior official with the U.S. State Department now at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.
If methane hydrate leaks during the extraction process, it can increase greenhouse gas emissions. If it can be used without leaking, it has the potential to replace dirtier coal in the power sector.
“The climate implications of producing natural gas hydrates are complicated.There are potential benefits, but substantial risks,” Sandalow said.
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Robots can see well enough to drive a car. Computers can hear our voices and respond to commands. VOA’s Arturo Martinez and Steve Baragona report that engineers are breaking through the next sensation frontier for robots: touch. Steve Baragona narrates.
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In New York, where buildings outnumber green spaces, some people have small gardens to grow some of their own food. Now, another garden is growing in New York in a very unusual location. On a barge, floating on a river, a variety of crops are being nurtured. VOA’s Deborah Block tells us more about this unique, self-sustaining garden project.
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Virgin Galactic’s Beth Moses, who received the Adler Planetarium’s “Women in Space Science Award” this year, views the opportunity for widely available space flight as a unifying endeavor for humanity. As Kane Farabaugh reports from Chicago, Moses is telling students about space flight as a way to motivate them to pursue careers like hers.
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Nearly 30 years after his death, the work of American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat is breaking records.
Basquiat’s “Untitled” canvas was sold Thursday at Sotheby’s for $110.5 million. The auction house said the price tag was a record for the artist and also set a record price for an American artist at auction.
Japanese billionaire Yosaku Maezawa, who bought the artwork in a 10-minute bidding war, said he plans to loan the Basquiat to museums and exhibitions before it is housed in a museum in Maezawa’s hometown of Chiba, Japan.
“I hope it brings as much joy to others as it does to me, and that this masterpiece by the 21-year-old Basquiat inspires our future generations,” Maezawa said.
The “Untitled” multimillion-dollar masterpiece depicts a skulllike head and was created with oil-stick, acrylic and spray paint on a giant canvas.
It had been part of a private collection since 1984 when it was sold for just $19,000.
“I’ve never seen so much emotions in such a painting,” said Gregorie Billault, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art. “He’s bringing something never seen before.”
Another Basquiat work, also labeled “Untitled,” sold last year of $57.3 million. Maezawa also purchased that piece.
Basquiat, who was black, was born in Brooklyn to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother.
He died in 1988 from a drug overdose at the age of 27.
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Two-thirds of those caught up in the past week’s global ransomware attack were running Microsoft’s Windows 7 operating system without the latest security updates, a survey for Reuters by security ratings firm BitSight found.
Researchers are struggling to try to find early traces of WannaCry, which remains an active threat in hardest-hit China and Russia, believing that identifying “patient zero” could help catch its criminal authors.
They are having more luck dissecting flaws that limited its spread.
Security experts warn that while computers at more than 300,000 internet addresses were hit by the ransomware strain, further attacks that fix weaknesses in WannaCry will follow that hit larger numbers of users, with more devastating consequences.
“Some organizations just aren’t aware of the risks; some don’t want to risk interrupting important business processes; sometimes they are short-staffed,” said Ziv Mador, vice president of security research at Israel’s SpiderLabs Trustwave.
“There are plenty of reasons people wait to patch and none of them are good,” said Mador, a former long-time security researcher for Microsoft.
WannaCry’s worm-like capacity to infect other computers on the same network with no human intervention appear tailored to Windows 7, said Paul Pratley, head of investigations & incident response at UK consulting firm MWR InfoSecurity.
Data from BitSight covering 160,000 internet-connected computers hit by WannaCry, shows that Windows 7 accounts for 67 percent of infections, although it represents less than half of the global distribution of Windows PC users.
Computers running older versions, such as Windows XP used in Britain’s NHS health system, while individually vulnerable to attack, appear incapable of spreading infections and played a far smaller role in the global attack than initially reported.
In laboratory testing, researchers at MWR and Kyptos say they have found Windows XP crashes before the virus can spread.
Windows 10, the latest version of Microsoft’s flagship operating system franchise, accounts for another 15 percent, while older versions of Windows including 8.1, 8, XP and Vista, account for the remainder, BitSight estimated.
Computer basics
Any organization which heeded strongly worded warnings from Microsoft to urgently install a security patch it labeled “critical” when it was released on March 14 on all computers on their networks are immune, experts agree.
Those hit by WannaCry also failed to heed warnings last year from Microsoft to disable a file sharing feature in Windows known as SMB, which a covert hacker group calling itself Shadow Brokers had claimed was used by NSA intelligence operatives to sneak into Windows PCs.
“Clearly people who run supported versions of Windows and patched quickly were not affected”, Trustwave’s Mador said.
Microsoft has faced criticism since 2014 for withdrawing support for older versions of Windows software such as 16-year-old Windows XP and requiring users to pay hefty annual fees instead. The British government canceled a nationwide NHS support contract with Microsoft after a year, leaving upgrades to local trusts.
Seeking to head off further criticism in the wake of the WannaCry outbreak, the U.S. software giant last weekend released a free patch for Windows XP and other older Windows versions that it previously only offered to paying customers.
Microsoft declined to comment for this story.
On Sunday, the U.S. software giant called on intelligence services to strike a better balance between their desire to keep software flaws secret – in order to conduct espionage and cyber warfare – and sharing those flaws with technology companies to better secure the internet.
Half of all internet addresses corrupted globally by WannaCry are located in China and Russia, with 30 and 20 percent respectively. Infection levels spiked again in both countries this week and remained high through Thursday, according to data supplied to Reuters by threat intelligence firm Kryptos Logic.
By contrast, the United States accounts for 7 percent of WannaCry infections while Britain, France and Germany each represent just 2 percent of worldwide attacks, Kryptos said.
Dumb and sophisticated
The ransomware mixes copycat software loaded with amateur coding mistakes and recently leaked spy tools widely believed to have been stolen from the U.S. National Security Agency, creating a vastly potent class of crimeware.
“What really makes the magnitude of this attack so much greater than any other is that the intent has changed from information stealing to business disruption”, said Samil Neino, 32, chief executive of Los Angeles-based Kryptos Logic.
Last Friday, the company’s British-based 22-year-old data breach research chief, Marcus Hutchins, created a “kill-switch”, which security experts have widely hailed as the decisive step in halting the ransomware’s rapid spread around the globe.
WannaCry appears to target mainly enterprises rather than consumers: Once it infects one machine, it silently proliferates across internal networks which can connect hundreds or thousands of machines in large firms, unlike individual consumers at home.
An unknown number of computers sit behind the 300,000 infected internet connections identified by Kryptos.
Because of the way WannaCry spreads sneakily inside organization networks, a far larger total of ransomed computers sitting behind company firewalls may be hit, possibly numbering upward of a million machines. The company is crunching data to arrive at a firmer estimate it aims to release later Thursday.
Liran Eshel, chief executive of cloud storage provider CTERA Networks, said: “The attack shows how sophisticated ransomware has become, forcing even unaffected organizations to rethink strategies.”
Security Experts Find Clues to Ransomware Worm’s Lingering Risks
Researchers from a variety of security firms say they have so far failed to find a way to decrypt files locked up by WannaCry and say chances are low anyone will succeed.
However, a bug in WannaCry code means the attackers cannot use unique bitcoin addresses to track payments, security researchers at Symantec found this week. The result: “Users unlikely to get files restored”, the company’s Security Response team tweeted.
The rapid recovery by many organizations with unpatched computers caught out by the attack may largely be attributed to back-up and retrieval procedures they had in place, enabling technicians to re-image infected machines, experts said.
While encrypting individual computers it infects, WannaCry code does not attack network data-backup systems, as more sophisticated ransomware packages typically do, security experts who have studied WannaCry code agree.
These factors help explain the mystery of why such a tiny number of victims appear to have paid ransoms into the three bitcoin accounts to which WannaCry directs victims.
Less than 300 payments worth around $83,000 had been paid into WannaCry blackmail accounts by Thursday (1800 GMT), six days after the attack began and one day before the ransomware threatens to start locking up victim computers forever.
The Verizon 2017 Data Breach Investigations Report, the most comprehensive annual survey of security breakdowns, found that it takes three months before at least half of organizations install major new software security patches.
WannaCry landed nine weeks after Microsoft’s patch arrived.
“The same things are causing the same problems. That’s what the data shows,” MWR research head Pratley said.
“We haven’t seen many organizations fall over and that’s because they did some of the security basics,” he said.
Scientists have discovered a possible cure for all five known Ebola viruses, one of which ravaged West Africa in recent years.
The so-called broadly neutralizing antibodies were discovered in the blood of a survivor of the West African epidemic, which ran from late 2013 to mid-2016. The deadly virus killed more than 11,000 people of the nearly 29,000 who became infected in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.
Ebola got its name from the first documented outbreak, which occurred along the Ebola River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire, in 1976. Since then, there have been two dozen outbreaks of Ebola in Africa, including a current one that has infected nine people in the DRC. Three people have died.
Kartik Chandran, a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, New York, helped identify the antibodies, which were described online in the journal Cell. He is optimistic that the antibodies can be used as a single therapy to treat all Ebola viruses.
“Based on the nonhuman primate studies that are ongoing, and given the fact that they are pretty predictive, I would be optimistic that they could be used to protect people and reverse disease,” Chandran said.
350 antibodies isolated
Researchers isolated about 350 antibodies from the human blood sample, two of which showed promise in neutralizing three viruses in tissue culture. The antibodies work by interfering with a process that the pathogen uses to infect and multiply inside cells.
The drug company Mapp Pharmaceutical Inc. is now testing the antibodies in monkeys to make sure they are safe and effective.
A forerunner of the experimental drug, called Zmapp, was in the experimental stages when it was pressed into service during the last epidemic. Zmapp is a combination of cloned antibodies discovered in mice that enlist the body’s natural immune system to fight infection. If given up to five days after symptoms appear, it can cure the disease.
The problem, Chandran said, is Zmapp is not terribly specific and works to neutralize only Ebola Zaire, one of the five known viruses. He said the broadly neutralizing human antibodies attack and destroy all of the viruses.
It took scientists just six months to discover the antibodies, according to Chandran, “so this is really incredibly fast and incredibly gratifying. And we are hoping that things will continue at this pace and that in very short order we will be in a position to be able to test these things in people.”
While the broadly neutralizing antibodies are being developed as a treatment, Chandran envisions using them in a vaccine that can be given ahead of an Ebola outbreak to guard against infection.
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Heavy rain shaped the Martian landscape billions of years ago, according to a new study.
According to researchers at the Smithsonian Institution and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, rain on Mars once carved river beds and created valleys much like rain on Earth has, and does. It no longer rains on the Red Planet, and the water that remains is mostly in the form of ice.
The rain appears to have slowly changed over time, researchers said, noting that changes in the Martian atmosphere influenced how heavy the rain was, particularly the size of the raindrops.
When Mars formed 4.5 billion years ago, it had a much thicker atmosphere and higher atmospheric pressure. Pressure, researchers say, influences the size of raindrops.
They say that early in the planet’s history, the rain would have actually been more like fog, so it would unlikely have made much of an impact on the terrain. But as the atmosphere thinned over time, larger raindrops could form and were heavy enough to “cut into the soil” changing the shape of craters and leading to running water that could have carved valleys.
Specifically, researcher say the atmospheric pressure on the Red Planet was about four bars, compared to one bar on Earth today. This means the raindrops could not have been bigger than three millimeters across. Over time the pressure dropped to 1.5 bars allowing for larger drops measuring about 7.3 millimeters across.
“By using basic physical principles to understand the relationship between the atmosphere, raindrop size and rainfall intensity, we have shown that Mars would have seen some pretty big raindrops that would have been able to make more drastic changes to the surface than the earlier fog-like droplets,” said Ralph Lorenz of John Hopkins APL.
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Colon cancer patients who adopt a healthy lifestyle after treatment could potentially reduce their risk of death from a recurrence by more than 40 percent, according to new research.
The findings were released ahead of a conference of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the world’s largest organization of clinical cancer professionals.
Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco analyzed data gathered in a prospective study of 1,000 advanced, stage III colon cancer patients from across the United States who were enrolled from 1999-2001. The volunteers, from 13 institutions, were evaluated over a period of seven years.
At two points during the trial, participants filled out a questionnaire asking whether their lifestyle following treatment matched prevention guidelines recommended by the American Cancer Society.
Body weight
The guidelines include maintaining a healthy body weight, eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, limiting consumption of red and processed meats, and engaging in regular physical activity.
Nine percent of patients in the study adhered to the guidelines. Of those, there was a reduction in death by 42 percent and a 31 percent lower risk of cancer recurrence compared to patients who did not follow the guidelines. In the study, colon cancer returned in 355 patients, 256 of whom died.
The federally-funded study was the first to look at colon cancer survivorship. Other studies have focused on cancer prevention through adoption of a healthy lifestyle.
There are a reported one million colon cancer survivors in the United States; the disease is the second-leading cause of cancer death.
UCSF lead author Erin Van Blarigan said treated colon cancer patients are living longer than ever before, but there needs to be more emphasis on survivorship care. She called for an increase in resources to help more people adopt a healthy lifestyle in the aftermath of a diagnosis and treatment.
“There is a pressing need for improved survivorship care and resources to help people adopt and maintain a healthy lifestyle after cancer diagnosis,” Blarigan said.
Harvard University in Massachusetts administered the lifestyle questionnaire. The results were analyzed by researchers at the University of California.
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U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration says it has notified Congress it intends to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico.
In a letter sent Thursday to congressional leaders, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said the administration plans 90 days of consultations with lawmakers over how to rewrite the agreement followed by negotiations with Canada and Mexico that could begin after August 16.
Renegotiation of NAFTA was a key promise of Trump’s during his presidential campaign, when he frequently called the treaty a “disaster.”
Lighthizer told reporters NAFTA has helped strengthen the U.S. agriculture, investment services and energy sectors, but it has hurt U.S. factories and resulted in well-paying manufacturing jobs being sent to Mexico.
Lighthizer said in the letter that NAFTA needs to be updated to more effectively address matters involving digital trade, intellectual property rights and labor and environmental standards.
At a news conference Thursday at the State Department with Mexican officials and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and other U.S. officials, Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray said Mexico “welcomes” the renegotiation of NAFTA.
“We understand that this is a 25-year-old agreement when it was negotiated,” Videgaray said. “The world has changed. We’ve learned a lot and we can make it better.”
Commerce Department Secretary Wilbur Ross said in a statement, “Since the signing of NAFTA, we have seen our manufacturing industry decimated, factories shuttered, and countless workers left jobless. President Trump is going to change that.”
VOA State Department correspondent Nike Ching contributed to this report
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