Forty-eight years ago this month (July), U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the moon. That image transfixed a little Costa Rican girl as she watched on a neighbor’s TV. VOA Vero Balderas explains how that moon walk launched Sandra Cauffman’s journey to a leadership role at the U.S. space agency.
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Month: July 2017
Amazon has some job openings. Lots of them.
The company said Wednesday that it’s looking to fill more than 50,000 positions across the U.S.
It’s planning to make thousands of offers on the spot on Aug. 2, when it opens the doors to potential hires at 10 Amazon.com Inc. shipping sites.
There will be more than 10,000 part-time jobs available at sorting centers, and some supporting and managerial positions.
The labor market is growing tight with back-to-school and holiday shopping around the corner. Others will be competing for those same hires.
The unemployment rate is 4.4 percent, near a 16-year low, yet the average hourly pay rose just 2.5 percent in the past year. The last time unemployment was this low, wages were rising at roughly a 4 percent rate.
A decade-long battle by luxury brands to defend their image neared an end on Wednesday when an adviser to Europe’s top court said Coty can block a German retailer from selling its beauty products via online marketplaces.
“A supplier of luxury goods may prohibit its authorized retailers from selling its products on third-party platforms such as Amazon or eBay,” Advocate General Nils Wahl at the European Union’s Court of Justice said in a non-binding opinion.
Wahl’s view relates to a dispute between the German business of Coty, whose brands include Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein and Chloe, and German retailer Parfumerie Akzente, which sells Coty’s goods on sites including Amazon against its wishes.
Luxury brands say they should have the right to choose who sells their products to protect their image and exclusivity.
Judges at Europe’s highest court, who follow their advisers’ opinions in four out of five cases, will rule on the case “Coty Germany GmbH v Parfumerie Akzente GmbH” in the coming months.
Coty did not respond to a request for comment.
Denis Waelbroeck, a lawyer at Ashurst, said there is a rationale to the luxury brands’ arguments against so-called free riders, companies who may benefit from others’ marketing efforts without paying the costs.
“I don’t think free riding deserves a particular reward. Competition rules do not allow free riding on heavy investments made by luxury goods companies,” he said.
EU antitrust regulators crafted rules in 2010 which allow brand owners with less than a 30 percent market share to block online retailers without a bricks-and-mortar shop from distributing their products.
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Twitter Inc heads toward its quarterly earnings report on Thursday with a stock that has risen more than 40 percent since April when much of Wall Street was ready to write off the tech company.
The company’s share price popped after its most recent earnings report in April, when Twitter disclosed better-than-expected user growth.
The number of people on Twitter will be in sharp focus on Thursday, when investors and analysts will see if it has kept up the 6 percent year-over-year growth in monthly active users it reported in April. Twitter said then that it had 328 million users.
“For a company that people thought six months ago was knocking on death’s door and going the way of Myspace and AOL, the double-digit rebound and the continued acceleration in users has really surprised investors,” BTIG Research analyst Richard Greenfield said.
Twitter shares closed on Tuesday at $19.97, nearly flat on the day but up 41.4 percent since its stock hit an intraday low of $14.12 on April 17.
The S&P 500 information technology index is up 10.6 percent since its April 17 closing price.
The surge of interest is a morale boost for Twitter, which has limped through past earnings announcements, struggled to keep a stable management and suffered unfavorable comparisons to its bigger and more profitable competitor Facebook Inc.
This month, Twitter had a streak of 12 days when its shares closed up.
The business is expected to report quarterly revenue of $536.6 million, according to a Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S forecast average. That would be a drop of 10.9 percent from $602 million a year earlier.
What has investors upbeat, though, is the number of people on the service, which public figures including U.S. President Donald Trump use to blast out 140-character messages.
“People are willing to give them the benefit of the doubt if they start to grow again,” Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said.
Other positive signs cited by analysts include co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey purchasing additional shares and co-founder Biz Stone announcing in May his return to Twitter. Ex-banker Ned Segal starts next month as Twitter’s next chief financial officer.
Meanwhile, advertisers and investors have gotten used to Twitter existing as a niche platform, Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser said. “There’s nothing wrong with that,” he said.
Tests on deceased former professional American football players showed nearly all of them had a chronic traumatic brain disease, according to scientific research published Tuesday in the JAMA medical journal.
The disease, called chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), is believed to be caused by repeated head trauma and has been known to cause memory loss, disorientation, depression and impaired judgement, among other symptoms.
Of the 202 total deceased former players studied for the report, which included high school, college and professional players, 177 were diagnosed with CTE. National Football League players seemed particularly prone to CTE, with 110 of the 111 former NFL players examined in the study being diagnosed with the disease.
“There’s no question that there’s a problem in football. That people who play football are at risk for this disease,” study author and director of Boston University’s CTE Center Dr. Ann McKee said. “And we urgently need to find answers for not just football players, but veterans and other individuals exposed to head trauma.”
The study marks the most recent research published linking head trauma sustained while playing football to chronic brain injuries, though it is by no means conclusive.
As pointed out in the study, the brains examined for the research were donated by family members of football players who may have exhibited symptoms of chronic brain injury prior to death. This creates a selective sample that may not be representative of all football players.
The NFL released a statement praising the study for its role in advancing the science related to chronic head injuries and said it is working with “a wide range of experts to improve the health of current and former NFL athletes.”
“There are still many unanswered questions relating to the cause, incidence and prevalence of long-term effects of head trauma such as CTE,” the statement read.
Last year, the NFL acknowledged for the first time publicly a link between head blows sustained on the football field and brain disease and agreed to a $1 billion settlement to compensate former players who suffer from head trauma-related injuries.
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German automaker Daimler’s profits barely rose and were short of market expectations as its Mercedes-Benz luxury car division boomed while earnings lagged at its truck, van and bus businesses.
The second-quarter results were overshadowed by the growing controversy over diesel technology hanging over the automaker — and the auto industry in general — ahead of a meeting in Germany of carmakers and government officials next week.
The Stuttgart-based company reported Wednesday that net profit was up a scant 2 percent compared with a year ago, to 2.51 billion euros ($2.9 billion). Revenue increased 7 percent to 41.16 billion euros ($48 billion).
The profit was short of analyst estimates for 2.61 billion as compiled by financial information provider FactSet. On the bright side, the Mercedes division had its best quarter for unit sales ever and 2.4 billion euros ($2.8 billion) in operating profit. Mercedes division profits were boosted by strong sales of the E-Class sedan, which is equipped with extensive driver assistance technology, and of the company’s SUVs, which bring high profits per vehicle.
But operating earnings fell 13 percent in its truck business, and also lagged at the van and bus divisions.
The company reiterated that profits would “increase significantly” once again in 2017. Daimler shares traded 0.1 percent higher at 61.06 euros in Frankfurt.
The earnings announcement takes place amid extensive public discussion of the future of diesel and what to do about excessive pollution emissions. The government has summoned carmakers to a diesel summit on Aug. 2 to try to lower pollution levels and ensure the technology has a future. There have been calls for diesel bans in several German cities.
CEO Dieter Zetsche said during a conference call with journalists that the company’s new generation of diesel engines offered lower emissions and that diesel can make an important contribution to reducing emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas blamed for global warming.
He said he saw “no reason to forego the advantages” of diesel in reaching goals for lowering carbon dioxide emissions. Automakers must meet new, tighter carbon dioxide emissions limits imposed by the European Union by 2021.
Daimler has said it will update engine software on 3 million diesel cars to improve their emissions performance and reduce customer uncertainty about the technology. Zetsche said customers were responding positively to the service action.
Diesel vehicles need pollution controls to limit emissions of nitrogen oxide, a pollutant that harms people’s health, but they emit less carbon dioxide than do gasoline motors.
Der Spiegel reported Friday that German automakers including Daimler had colluded for years on diesel technology and other issues and had agreed to limit the size of the tanks for the urea solution used to reduce emissions of nitrogen oxides. The European Commission, the EU’s executive body, is assessing the matter. The company has said it cannot comment on “speculation.” An antitrust ruling that the companies illegally restrained competition could lead to heavy fines.
German prosecutors have searched Daimler offices as part of a probe into possible emissions manipulation, and U.S. authorities have asked Daimler to conduct an internal investigation into its emissions certification procedures. The company said Wednesday it could not answer questions about either investigation.
Diesel was subjected to new scrutiny after Volkswagen was discovered in September 2015 to have equipped 11 million cars with illegal software that cheated on U.S. emissions tests by turning emissions controls on during lab examinations and off during every day driving to improve performance.
The company has pleaded guilty to criminal charges in the U.S. and agreed to more than $20 billion in civil and criminal settlements and penalties.
The Trump administration’s refusal to publicly accuse Russia and others in a wave of politically motivated hacking attacks is creating a policy vacuum that security experts fear will encourage more cyber warfare.
In the past three months, hackers broke into official websites in Qatar, helping to create a regional crisis; suspected North Korean-backed hackers closed down British hospitals with ransomware; and a cyber attack that researchers attribute to Russia deleted data on thousands of computers in the Ukraine.
Yet neither the United States nor the 29-member NATO military alliance have publicly blamed national governments for those attacks. President Donald Trump has also refused to accept conclusions of U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. elections using cyber warfare methods to help the New York businessman win.
“The White House is currently embroiled in a cyber crisis of existential proportion, and for the moment probably just wants ‘cyber’ to go away, at least as it relates to politics,” said Kenneth Geers, a security researcher who until recently lived in Ukraine and works at NATO’s think tank on cyber defense. “This will have unfortunate side effects for international cyber security.”
Without calling out known perpetrators, more hacking attacks are inevitable, former officials said.
“I see no dynamics of deterrence,” said ex-White House cyber security officer Jason Healey, now at Columbia University.
The government retreat is underscored by the departure at the end of July of Chris Painter, the official responsible for coordinating U.S. diplomacy on cyber security. No replacement has been named and the future of the position in the State Department is in flux.
Some of Trump’s cyber officials have publicly highlighted a strategy to focus less on building global norms and more on bilateral agreements. Trump and the Kremlin have said Russia and the United States are in discussions on creating a cyber security group.
But at the big Black Hat and Def Con security conferences this week in Las Vegas the U.S. government will have an unusually light footprint. Past government speakers have included a head of the National Security Agency and senior Homeland Security officials.
A session featuring U.S. law enforcement officials discussing the purported theft by Russia of hundreds of millions of Yahoo account credentials was pulled at the last minute. A spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation said the presentation was canceled because the Yahoo expert slated to talk, Deputy Assistant Director Eric Sporre, had been reassigned to run the Tampa FBI office.
The policy vacuum left by the United States is also affecting private security firms, which say they have grown more cautious in publicly attributing cyber attacks to nation-states lest they draw fire from the Trump administration.
Trump suggested in an April interview that the security firm CrowdStrike, which worked on investigating the election hack of the Democratic National Committee, might not be trustworthy because he was told it was controlled by a Ukrainian. It is not.
Cyber policy veterans are particularly alarmed about the lack of U.S. and NATO response to the destructive attack, dubbed NotPetya, in June that struck computers worldwide but was especially harmful for Ukraine, which is in armed conflict with Russia in the east of the country.
Cyber security experts, such as Jim Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a government veteran who advised former President Barack Obama, believe Russia carried out the attack. The Russian defense ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Lewis and others predicted that Trump will not publicly accuse Russia, and NATO has only said it appears to be the work of a government agency somewhere.
“If you are not ringing alarm bells in an eloquent way, then I think you’re dropping the ball,” said retired CIA officer Daniel Hoffman, who worked on Russian issues. “When we fail to do enough, that just emboldens them.”
“It was the fair and right thing to do,” former President George H. W. Bush said in an interview in 1999 when asked why he supported the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA), which he signed into law on July 26, 1990.
“I think there are a lot of people who, if given access to the workplace, for example, can achieve things,” Bush continued. “But if they are denied that, they won’t have a shot at the American dream.”
In his remarks at the signing ceremony, Bush noted that there were 43 million Americans living with disabilities.
The ADA bars discrimination against Americans with disabilities in jobs, schools, transportation, and all public and privately-owned places that are open to the general public.
The signing of the legislation marked a rare moment of bipartisanship in Washington politics.
Even the most hardened politicians, such as Lee Atwater, a senior Bush adviser who was considered a key architect of the “negative campaign” concept, supported the measure.
A priest with no arms attended the signing ceremony, using his feet to hand the president a pen to sign the bill.
Before becoming law, the ADA faced some resistance, mostly by small business owners concerned about the cost of outfitting workspaces with the proper facilities to accommodate disabled workers.
Since 1990, the ADA has been retooled, by former Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, as medical treatment for some chronic conditions like muscular sclerosis have dramatically improved.
In the digital era, the challenges for disabled employees have shifted from building ramps for those in wheelchairs and making other office accommodations to unmet technical needs for others who cannot use computers without assistance.
Origami – the ancient Japanese art of paper folding – can create cranes whose wings flap and frogs that jump. Engineers are taking the same idea and apply it to robotics. VOA’s Deborah Block reports.
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In 2016, an Iraqi-American artist sat down with Bahjat Abdulwahed — the so-called “Walter Cronkite of Baghdad” — with the idea of launching a radio project that would be part documentary, part radio play and part variety show.
Abdulwahed was the voice of Iraqi radio from the late 1950s to the early 1990s, but came to Philadelphia as a refugee in 2009 after receiving death threats from insurgents.
“He represented authority and respectability in relationship to the news through many different political changes,” said Elizabeth Thomas, curator of “Radio Silence,” a public art piece that resulted from the meeting with Abdulwahed.
Thomas had invited artist Michael Rakowitz to Philadelphia to create a project for Mural Arts Philadelphia, which has been expanding its public art reach from murals into new and innovative spaces.
After nearly five years of research, Rakowitz distilled his project into a radio broadcast that would involve putting the vivacious and caramel-voiced Abdulwahed back on the air, and using Philadelphia-area Iraqi refugees and local Iraq war veterans as his field reporters. It would feature Iraqi music, remembrances of the country and vintage weather reports from a happier time in Iraq.
“One of the many initial titles was “Desert Home Companion,” Rakowitz said, riffing on “A Prairie Home Companion,” the radio variety show created by Garrison Keillor.
Rakowitz recorded an initial and very informal session with Abdulwahed in his living room in January 2016. Two weeks later, Abdulwahed collapsed. He had to have an emergency tracheostomy and was on life support until he died seven months later.
At Abdulwahed’s funeral, his friends urged Rakowitz to continue with the project, to show how much of the country they left behind was slipping away and to help fight cultural amnesia.
Rakowitz recalibrated the project, which became “Radio Silence,” a 10-part radio broadcast with each episode focusing on a synonym of silence, in homage to Abdulwahed.
“The voice of Baghdad had lost his voice,” Rakowitz said, calling him a “narrator of Iraq’s history.”
It will be hosted by Rakowitz and features fragments of that first recording session with Abdulwahed, as well as interviews with his wife and other Iraqi refugees living in Philadelphia.
Rakowitz and Thomas also worked with Warrior Writers, a nonprofit based in Philadelphia that helps war veterans work through their experiences using writing and art.
The first episode, on speechlessness, will launch Aug. 6. It will be broadcast on community radio stations across the country through Prometheus Radio Project.
One participant is Jawad Al Amiri, an Iraqi refugee who came to the United States in the 1980s. He said silence in Iraq has been a way of life for many decades.
“Silence is a way of survival. Silence is a decree by the Baath regime, not to tell what you see in front of your eyes. Silence is synonymous with fear. If you tell, you will be put through agony,” he said at a preview Tuesday of the live broadcast. He said he saw his own sister poisoned and die and wasn’t allowed to speak of it.
When he came to the U.S. in 1981, his father told him: “We send you here for education and to speak for the millions of Iraqis in the land where freedom of speech is practiced.”
Lawrence Davidson is an Army veteran who served during the Iraq War and works with Warrior Writers also contributed to the project. He said the project is a place to exchange ideas and honestly share feelings with refugees and other veterans.
The project kicks off on July 29 with a live broadcast performance on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall — what Rakowitz calls the symbolic home of American democracy. It will feature storytelling, food from refugees and discussions from the veterans with Warrior Writers.
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Stories of survival in turbulent times, including David Gordon Green’s world premiere of Stronger about a victim of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, are among the highlights in store at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.
Angelina Jolie’s First They Killed My Father, set in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge reign, and horror mystery Mother! by Darren Aronofsky, starring Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem, were also among the films announced Tuesday in the first look at the festival’s lineup for 2017.
Audiences can also catch social satire Downsizing, directed by Alexander Payne and starring Matt Damon, and George Clooney-directed crime-comedy Suburbicon. Guillermo del Toro’s fantastical The Shape of Water will also screen.
The Toronto event, which kicks off September 7, has become one of the world’s largest film festivals, known for debuting critically acclaimed films that have later won Academy Awards for best picture.
Stronger stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Jeff Bauman, who lost both his legs during the Boston Marathon, and Tatiana Maslany as his girlfriend.
“It’s a moment of incredible transformation, disruption, change, challenge, so I think you’ll see that reflected in the films we’re showing,” said Piers Handling, chief executive and director of the film festival, now in its 42nd year.
“One of the ideas that struck me is the whole notion of survival,” he said about the films announced so far. “It seems to be a topic that a lot of people are thinking about.”
Hany Abu-Assad’s The Mountain Between Us, starring Idris Elba and Kate Winslet, is about two strangers stranded on a mountain after surviving a plane crash.
Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier’s Long Time Running is a documentary about the 2016 tour of The Tragically Hip, a Canadian rock band, as frontman Gord Downie battles terminal brain cancer.
Organizers did not announce which film would kick off the 10-day festival, but said the world premiere of C’est La Vie! by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano, the duo behind The Intouchables, would close.
Women will also grab the festival spotlight, with Haifaa Al Mansour’s Mary Shelley and Angela Robinson’s Professor Marston & the Wonder Women having their world premieres in Toronto.
“We don’t program for themes, but as you begin to step back … and you look at the films that you’ve chosen, some things begin to emerge,” Cameron Bailey, the festival’s artistic director, said in an interview.
The festival will run until September 17.
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Colombian officials received $27 million in bribes from Brazilian engineering firm Odebrecht, more than double previously thought, as the company sought to win a road-building contract, Colombia’s attorney general said on Tuesday.
As fallout from a massive corruption scandal continues to bite Odebrecht, Attorney General Nestor Humberto Martinez said bribes paid for the contract to build a 528-km (328-mile) highway were much more than the $11 million originally estimated.
Martinez said criminal charges for money laundering would be filed against two Brazilian citizens, one Portuguese and three Colombians. He will also ask the Supreme Court of Justice to investigate five congressional lawmakers.
Seven people, including a former senator and an ex-vice minister of transport, have been jailed for involvement in the corruption scandal.
Odebrecht’s bribes in Colombia spilled over into the election campaigns of President Juan Manuel Santos, who in March acknowledged that his 2010 election campaign received illegal payments. He said he had no knowledge at the time of the payments.
Odebrecht allegedly paid hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes in association with infrastructure projects in 12 countries, including Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela, between 2002 and 2016.
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Dozens of teen pregnancy prevention programs deemed ineffective by President Donald Trump’s administration will lose more than $200 million in funding following a surprise decision to end five-year grants after only three years.
The administration’s assessment is in sharp contrast with that of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, which credited the program with contributing to an all-time low rate of teen pregnancies.
Rachel Fey of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy said Tuesday that grantees under the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program were given no explanation when notified this month their awards will end next June. The program, begun under President Barack Obama’s administration, receives about $100 million a year.
“We know so little about the rationale behind cutting short these grants,” said Fey, who said the teen birth rate has fallen by about 40 percent nationally since the program went into effect in 2010. The focus of the program is on evidence-based interventions aimed at preventing teen pregnancy. It does not pay for or provide contraceptives.
Competing outcomes
A Health and Human Services spokesman said late Tuesday that an evaluation of the first round of grants released last fall found only four of 37 programs studied showed lasting positive impacts. Most of the other programs had no effect or were harmful, the department said, including three that it said increased the likelihood that teens would have unprotected sex and become pregnant.
“Given the very weak evidence of positive impact of these programs, the Trump administration, in its … 2018 budget proposal, did not recommend continued funding for the TPP program,” the department statement said.
The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists urged the administration “not to turn back the clock” on progress.
“It’s as though the evidence and the facts don’t matter,” ACOG President Dr. Haywood Brown said.
The North Texas Alliance to Reduce Unintended Pregnancy in Teens, one of more than 80 current grantees around the country, will lose just under $1 million a year, about three-quarters of its budget, Executive Director Terry Goltz Greenberg said. The program worked with more than 1,700 kids last year in high-poverty neighborhoods where the teen birth rates are three to five times the national average, she said.
“Most of the evidence-based programs are not just talking about contraception but are putting it in the context of bigger goals in life, such as, `Where do you want to be in three years?’ `How does a kid fit into that,”‘ she said.
Elizabeth Gomez, 44, said the Texas program’s after-school classes taught her how to discuss difficult topics with her three daughters in a respectful way that made them listen and respond.
“For Hispanics, it’s difficult, because it’s a taboo to talk about sex,” she said.
A letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price signed by 37 Democratic senators called the decision short-sighted. Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program grantees served a half-million youths from 2010 to 2014 and were on their way to serve an additional 1.2 million through 2019 when the grant was scheduled to end, the senators said. Their letter asked Price for an explanation and questioned the timing of the notifications in advance of congressional action on fiscal year 2018 appropriations.
‘Line of communication’
Two of Shawanda Brown-Cannon’s children take classes once a week through a southwest Georgia program called Quest for Change which, according to its director, will lose about 87 percent of its total budget.
The classes prompted both her 17-year-old daughter, Amaya, and her 13-year-old son, Chandler, to talk with their mother about what they’ve learned, for instance a Valentine’s Day class on how to show love without sexual activity.
“It opens up a line of communication,” Brown-Cannon said.
Angelina Jackson, a 17-year-old high school senior, is a member of Quest for Change. She helps run classroom lessons and organize events as a member of the youth leadership council focused on her school.
“Some people are not able to talk to their parents at home about the stuff that Quest does,” Jackson said. “They provided a comfortable environment where people could ask questions or talk about their concerns.”
Vermont-based Youth Catalytics was informed July 5 that its five-year, $2.8 million federal grant had been cut off June 30, the end of the first year. The grant provided about half of the organization’s annual budget. As recently as July 3, people from the organization had been working with HHS officials about the details of the program, said Meagan Downey, the group’s director of special projects. The grant covered about half of her salary.
Downey said her organization was one of five grant recipients nationwide that lost their funding immediately. Others were given until July 1, 2018, to prepare for the loss of the funds.
Leaders of the HOPE Buffalo program always had an eye toward establishing partnerships with city and community leaders that would enable its work to continue beyond the five-year lifespan of the grant, which provided $2 million a year, Project Director Stan Martin said. With less time and less funding, he said, “our efforts were just accelerated.”
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Kathryn Bigelow hasn’t forgotten the out-of-body experience she felt when she won the best director Academy Award for her 2009 The Hurt Locker. At that moment, she became the first woman to win the award. None have been nominated since.
“The gender inequity that exists in the industry, I thought it would maybe be the beginning of that inequity not being quite so pronounced,” said Bigelow in a recent interview. “Sadly, that doesn’t seem to be the case. And I don’t know why that is. I just don’t know. But I sort of feel like on behalf of all the women who might yearn to tell challenging, relevant, topical, entertaining stories, that I was standing there for them. And that emboldened me.”
Boldness is not a fleeting quality for Bigelow. Since The Hurt Locker, she has, with the reporter-turned-screenwriter Mark Boal, continued to craft an ambitious, intrepid kind of cinema that marries visceral big-screen immersion with deeply researched journalism. Their previous collaboration, the Osama bin Laden-hunt thriller Zero Dark Thirty, proved an unparalleled flashpoint in both Hollywood and Washington, prompting debates over its representation of the role torture played in the manhunt.
“I’m the messenger. I didn’t invent the message,” she said. “I’m just compelled to make these challenging pieces. And I’m compelled by stories that are informational, that tell you what you didn’t know going in — that I didn’t know going in.”
Incident amid 1967 riots
Her latest film, Detroit, is a no less challenging dive into the violent soul of America, but this time, she’s on the home front. The film, also from a script from Boal, is about the Algiers Motel incident, a relatively little-remembered event that took place amid the 1967 Detroit riots — an uprising sparked by a police raid of an after-hours club — and a reaction to a long history of oppression of the city’s African-Americans. The riots, among the largest in U.S. history, left 43 dead and led to the deployment of thousands of national guardsmen to a Detroit that raged in fire and fury.
Detroit seeks to show the historical context and individual reality of the riots, which many say should be called a “rebellion.” Within the chaos was the particularly heinous act at the Algiers Motel. Three unarmed black males were killed in an encounter with police, and nine others (seven of them black) were beaten and terrorized. Three officers were charged with murder, as well as other crimes, but found not guilty.
Boal approached Bigelow about making a film about the incident shortly after a St. Louis County grand jury decided not to indict Officer Darren Wilson, whose fatal shooting of Michael Brown in August 2014 prompted the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. The relevance of the Detroit tale, Bigelow said, fueled her motivation for making it.
“There was something sadly, tragically contemporaneous about this story,” Bigelow said. ” ‘How can this conversation happen in a meaningful way?’ is what I walk away asking. I’m just telling this story in as authentic and truthful and honest a way as we could, given the information that is out there.”
Swept into a nightmare
The story for Boal began with Cleveland Larry Reed. During the riots, Reed (played by Algee Smith in the film) was an 18-year-old singer in the Dramatics, an up-and-coming Motown group whose concert was canceled that night. He and another bandmate hunkered down at the Algiers, only to find themselves swept into a nightmare. Reed, who met with Boal and later with Smith, never recovered from the ordeal; he gave up professional music, singing instead in church choirs.
“In the summer of 2014, I was drawn to this story after meeting Larry Reed and hearing him recount what had happened to him 50 years ago, and then, later on, hearing from other survivors of the Algiers,” Boal wrote in an email. “My idea for the movie was driven from the start by real people, being moved by the fine-grained particulars of what they went through.”
Smith, a 22-year-old actor from Saginaw, Michigan, described the set as a profoundly emotional one where the cast merely needed to “log on to our social medias for inspiration.”
“We were shooting a movie about history but it felt like today,” he said.
He and other actors playing the terrorized victims weren’t given scripts for much of the production so that their reactions of shock and horror were more genuine.
“She wanted us to have a tomorrow’s-not-promised type of mindset,” Smith said. “We just got there and then the first day it was just total chaos. It was: ‘Put your hands on the wall.’ Screaming. I’m getting lightheaded because I’m breathing so hard in between takes. It was emotionally and physically draining every day for those first two weeks. Will Poulter (who plays the ringleader officer) broke down on set. In the middle of a scene, he just started crying. The whole set just stopped. Everyone stopped. Will went outside and I put my arm around him, but I just started crying, too.”
Not the perfect storyteller
Some may say Detroit is a story that ought to have been told by black filmmakers. Bigelow, who has spent her career either ignoring or exploding gender stereotypes, understands such criticism.
“Am I the perfect person to tell that story? Absolutely not,” Bigelow said. “But I felt honored to tell this story. It’s a story that’s been out of circulation for 50 years. And if it can encourage a conversation about race in this country, I would find that extremely encouraging and important.”
Her films, she said, are about creating empathy and, she hopes, dialogue. Earlier this year, she co-directed an eight-minute virtual reality film about park rangers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, The Protectors: Walk in the Rangers’ Shoes.
“Institutionalized racism is at the heart of the piece,” Bigelow said of Detroit. “I think the purpose of art is to agitate for change. But you can’t change anything unless you’re aware of it.”
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Peruvian authorities have launched a major crackdown on modern slavery after a warehouse fire in Lima last month killed four workers, including two who were trapped inside a padlocked container on the roof.
Officials said they had shut down six furniture factories in the capital on Monday in an operation to root out forced labor and exploitation, following raids by prosecutors, police and labor inspectors.
Last month’s toxic blaze which tore through several warehouses in the city center highlighted labor exploitation in the capital and prompted calls for better protection of workers’ rights and more labor inspections.
President visits site of blaze
Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski said the victims were “practically slave workers” when he visited the site following the June 22 blaze.
Peru’s attorney general said on Monday there would be more raids on factories and warehouses to prevent further “tragic accidents.”
Another eight operations are planned this year in the wider Lima region and the north of the country where forced labor has been linked to the fishing industry.
Prosecutors said the furniture factories targeted in Monday’s raids were operating without a licence, health and safety was “inadequate” and fire exits had been blocked, putting workers at risk.
Over 200,000 trapped in slavery
An estimated 200,500 people are trapped in modern day slavery in Peru, according to rights group The Walk Free Foundation, the third highest number in Latin America after Mexico and Colombia.
The International Labor Organization (ILO), which estimates there are 21 million people in forced labour worldwide, welcomed the new labor inspections in Peru.
“The tragic fire was shocking. People were outraged,” said Teresa Torres, coordinator of ILO’s program against forced labor in Peru.
“Having this kind of task force carrying out inspections is progress and an important response from the government,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Need for ‘justice’
Public prosecutors have launched an investigation into possible human trafficking following the fire.
“What’s important in this case is that there’s justice, and as such those people responsible are punished,” Torres said, adding those found guilty could face up to 25 years in prison.
Across Peru, forced labor is more commonly linked to the illegal logging industry and illegal gold mines in the Amazon jungle. Girls are also trafficked to these areas for sex work.
Forced labor widespread
Torres said the warehouse blaze showed forced labor is more widespread than many Peruvians believe.
“This is more evidence to show that forced labour doesn’t just happen in … remote areas of the Amazon, but it could be happening right in the center of the capital too,” Torres said.
“We have information that forced labor is also happening in the north of Peru, in other sectors such as the shrimp fishing industry.”
She said victims of forced labor were often hidden from view, working on fishing vessels, in small clandestine workshops, commercial agriculture or private homes.
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A pesticide banned by international treaty in 2011 could be responsible for the deaths of young children in South Asia, according to new findings.
In June 2012, 14 children were brought to the Dinajpur Medical College Hospital in northern Bangladesh with acute encephalitis, a dangerous swelling of the brain. Most were unconscious within three hours, and all but one died after about 20 hours.
Scientists from the International Center for Diarrheal Disease Research, a major research institution in Bangladesh, investigated what caused the outbreak. The medical team noticed that almost all the children lived next to a lychee orchard, many lived with someone who worked in the industry, and most had visited the fruit orchards shortly before becoming ill, lead author Mohammed Islam told VOA.
A report published earlier this year in The Lancet reviewed a 2014 outbreak that killed 122 children in India’s Muzaffarpur region, the country’s largest lychee-producing region and an area where there are annual outbreaks of illness resembling acute encephalitis. That report blamed the outbreak on naturally occurring toxins in lychees that can lead to dangerously low blood-sugar levels in malnourished children.
But a new report this week by Islam and his team, who analyzed the 2012 outbreak and subsequent incidents, noted that affected areas more often are places where lychees are produced, rather than consumed. And outbreaks typically ended when monsoon rains began, washing away pesticide residues from the fruit trees.
The researchers interviewed lychee orchard workers, their families and neighbors, as well as the families of children who had not fallen ill. They learned that children frequently ate unwashed fruit that fell to the ground, and peeled away the lychees’ rough-textured red skin with their teeth.
Workers in the orchards said children were sometimes recruited to help with the harvest, since they could easily climb the small lychee trees. The workers were not always able to report what pesticides were used, since the labels had been removed before pesticide containers reached the fields. However, the researchers were able to collect empty containers for testing.
The new report by Islam and his team, published in The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, found that a number of pesticides — including endosulfan — were being used. Endosulfan was added to the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants in 2011, which should have ended its use in most of the world. However, slow implementation, numerous exceptions and weak enforcement led to continued use.
Endosulfan is permitted for use on some crops in Bangladesh, but not on lychees, Islam told VOA.
Overall, though, “There is very poor monitoring of the use of pesticides,” he said.
The study was not able to definitively show that each case was caused by pesticides, or identify which pesticides were responsible for the young victims’ brain inflammation. If researchers can respond rapidly to the next outbreak and collect blood samples within hours, Islam said, scientists should be able to determine which pesticides are present.
Islam said he wants to coordinate with other scientists and conduct further studies across Bangladesh and in India, Vietnam and Thailand, where similar outbreaks have been reported and endosulfan may still be used on crops.
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Continuing its focus on curbing government regulations, a Republican-led House is seeking to overturn a rule that would let consumers band together to sue their banks or credit card companies rather than use an arbitrator to resolve a dispute.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized the rule just two weeks ago. It bans most types of mandatory arbitration clauses, which are often found in the fine print of contracts governing the terms of millions of credit card and checking accounts.
Republican lawmakers, cheered on by the banking sector and other leading business trade groups, have wasted no time seeking to undo the rule before it goes into effect next year. They’ll succeed if they can get a simple majority of both chambers of Congress to approve the legislation and President Donald Trump to sign it. The numbers are likely on their side, just as they were earlier this year when Republicans led efforts to upend 14 Obama-era rules.
GOP lawmakers described the rule as a bad deal for consumers but a big win for trial lawyers. They said the average payout in a class-action lawsuit was just $32 while the payout for the attorney in the case was nearly $1 million.
“Arbitration is an alternative to the judicial system and it offers results and a better outcome for consumers,” said Representative Ken Buck, a Republican from Colorado. “Arbitration allows parties to use an independent mediator instead of hiring expensive lawyers to settle a dispute.”
Support for the rule
Democratic lawmakers are fighting to keep the rule. They said the point of participating in a class-action lawsuit is generally to pursue relief from small financial injuries — the kind that would not be worth the time and expense for someone to pursue on their own through the legal system. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said that when a whole lot of people get hurt in the same way, they should have a chance to join together to pursue redress.
“If you’re going to cheat people, there’s going to be some accountability,” Warren said. “That’s what this provision is all about.”
Democratic lawmakers framed the debate as Republicans sticking up for powerful financial companies at the expense of consumers who often are outgunned and outmanned in their disputes with banks and other creditors.
“It sadly reflects a Republican Party that works relentlessly to empower Wall Street and to rig the system against consumers,” Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said of the repeal effort.
Republicans portrayed arbitration as a superior option for consumers and said that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s action could force banks to hold greater reserves to prepare for future litigation. The money could instead be used to lend out to small businesses and families.
The consumer protection agency estimated that the cost of complying with the new rule would be less than $500 million annually for banks. The agency also said that banks generated more than $171 billion in profits in 2016.
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Al Gore admits he was frustrated upon hearing the news last month that President Donald Trump was pulling out of the Paris climate accord, but since then he’s become more optimistic.
Gore worried that a U.S. withdrawal from the treaty would compel other nations to opt out of the historic pact for adopting clean energy solutions. But that’s not what happened.
“The whole rest of the world has redoubled their commitment. And in this country, the governors and the mayors and the business leaders have all said, ‘We’re still in the agreement, and we’re going to fill the gap. We’re going to meet the U.S. commitment, regardless of what Donald Trump does,’ ” Gore told The Associated Press last week at a special screening for An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.
It follows the 2006 Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth and continues the conversation of finding solutions for the effects of climate change, including an emphasis on renewable energy. Much like the first film, Gore is front and center in leading the discussion.
It’s been a remarkable second act for Gore since winning the popular vote, but losing the Electoral College in the 2000 presidential election. There’s no question that Gore was devastated by the loss, but his stature as an important voice for environmental issues has proven equally successful, as he amassed a Nobel Prize, Academy Award, an Emmy and a Grammy for his relentless dedication to climate change activism.
Grateful for the chance
“I’m under no illusion that there’s any position with as much chance to do good as president of the United States, but I’m very grateful to have found another way to serve the public interests. I’m devoting my life to this and hoping to make a big difference,” Gore said.
CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, who also attended the premiere, agrees that Gore has done “pretty well for himself” since the disputed 2000 presidential election.
“Al Gore could have done many things after he was not inaugurated in 2001, but what he did was become the leading global spokesman for perhaps the most important scientific and environmental cause of our lifetime, and he won a Nobel Prize in the bargain. So I don’t think anyone could quarrel with how Al Gore has decided to live his life,” he said.
A big part of Gore’s mission depends on convincing people that climate change is not a hoax. Instead, it’s based on science that shows the global mean surface temperature continues to rise, due in part to an increase in greenhouse gases. So while global warming is immune to politics, the topic remains a partisan issue in the United States. That’s something the former vice president blames on corporate funding for political campaigns.
“The truth about the climate crisis is still inconvenient for the big carbon polluters, and the politicians that they support with their big campaign contributions and lobbying activities are scared to cross them. That’s the main reason. They’ve spent a lot of money trying to put out false information about it,” Gore said.
Still, he remains confident that the problem can be fixed.
“People are seeing through this now. Two-thirds of the American people want to solve this, big time. We are going to solve it. We just need to move faster on it,” Gore said.
Gore feels that change will come from the “grass roots up.” That’s why he spends a great deal of time training climate activists around the globe.
“We need to get more people involved. That’s one of the real purposes of this movie — to tell people what they need to know, to show them that there is hope and there are solutions now, and inspire them to get involved,” he said.
Davis Guggenheim directed the first film to box office and Oscar glory, bringing climate change into the mainstream. The sequel, directed by Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, picks up the conversation with more of a battle cry for saving the planet.
Knowing he was stepping into big shoes for this film, Shenk noted the importance of his predecessor’s film.
“An Inconvenient Truth was one of the most successful documentaries in history. Not only did it do fabulously well at the box office, but by almost any measure it put the words ‘global warming’ and ‘climate crisis’ on the map for the entire world,” Shenk said.
Ending updated
In order to keep the information timely, producers changed the ending from what audiences saw at the Sundance Film Festival to reflect Trump’s announcement about withdrawing the United States from the global climate agreement in time for the film’s limited release on July 28 and its wide release on August 4.
Gore also said he’d recently spoken to Hillary Clinton, and that’s “she’s going to be fine.”
Clinton won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College to Trump, just as Gore lost to George W. Bush in 2000.
As for Trump’s continued attacks on the news media, Gore feels disheartened by them.
“Well, I think that’s really unfortunate. We need someone who will unite us and not divide us. The press obviously plays an absolutely crucial role in making our democracy work. If the press isn’t free to get out there and tell people what’s going on, then we can’t make the changes we need to know about and then change,” Gore said.
Part of the news coverage called into question involves the constant flurry of revelations in the investigation of the Trump team’s possible collusion with the Russian government during the 2016 presidential campaign.
“Every day there seems like there’s something different, and they’re not getting anything good done. That’s a problem,” Gore said.
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