The United Kingdom is now banning the manufacturing of tiny plastic microbeads used in products such as cosmetics, toothpaste and shower gels because they could hurt marine animals. The move comes as some other countries have banned microbeads, including the United States. It is estimated that more than 8 million tons of plastic is dumped into our oceans every year. VOA’s Deborah Block has more.
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Month: January 2018
The newest Olympic sport should prove to be a crowd pleaser straight away.
Big air snowboarding makes its Olympic debut in Pyeongchang, bringing tricks, thrills and danger to the slopes.
Big air has been an FIS Snowboarding World Championship event since 2003 and has been at the X Games for far long, yet 2018 will marks its entry onto the Olympic stage.
The event is the extreme version of slopestyle, an Olympic discipline that itself only debuted in 2014.
Athletes send themselves down one huge ramp and look to perform the highest-scoring individual trick possible.
Pyeongchang will have the world’s biggest big air ramp standing at 49 meters with a maximum slope angle of 40 degrees, giving athletes more time in the air to show off their latest tricks.
Many of the snowboarders who compete in the slopestyle will also try their hand at the big air event, giving them two chances at clinching an Olympic medal.
Canadian pair Mark McMorris and Max Parrot are widely touted as the favorites in the men’s competition. They were first and second in last year’s FIS Big Air rankings and have 11 X Games gold medals between them.
Both athletes are known for bringing out a new trick in major competitions and so snowboarding fans should be expecting something special on the huge ramp in Pyeongchang.
However, such daredevil stunts come with major risks. McMorris himself has suffered two major injuries in recent years; a broken femur in 2016 and then several severe injuries including a collapsed lung in a March 2017 incident.
Although McMorris has made a full recovery to compete in Pyeongchang, if he is to show any sign of nerves on the ramp there will be a host of other top snowboarders looking to take the inaugural big air gold.
Norwegians Staale Sandbech and Marcus Kleveland clinched podium spots at last year’s World Championships while 18-year-old Chris Corning is the hottest young prospect coming out of Team USA.
In the women’s competition, another American teenager Hailey Langland will look to add an Olympics gold to her X Games Big air gold.
The 17-year-old will have to hold off competition from compatriots Julia Marino and 2014 slopestyle Olympic champion Jamie Anderson as well as surprise British candidate Katie Ormerod, who will be looking to clinch her country’s second ever Olympic medal on the snow.
However, the favorite looks to be Austrian Anna Gasser. Gasser qualified in first place for the slopestyle final in Sochi only to fall during both runs and finish in tenth place.
The 26-year-old has rebounded from this disappointment to win big air gold at the 2017 World Championships and won the 2017 World Cup.
Whoever emerges victorious with a place on the podium in Pyeongchang, the fans are guaranteed to be winners of the event as the big air looks to shine on Olympics debut.
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Human antibodies made in genetically engineered cows have proved safe in an early stage clinical trial, U.S. scientists said on Wednesday, and could be developed into a treatment for the fatal viral disease, MERS.
MERS, or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, is a SARS-like viral infection first identified in Saudi Arabia in 2012 that has caused deadly outbreaks in the Middle East as well as sporadic cases around the world.
Despite more than five years of waves of infection, no effective treatment or vaccine has been developed against MERS, which has a 35 percent case fatality rate and has so far killed at least 740 people worldwide.
More than 80 percent of MERS cases have been reported in Saudi Arabia, according to the World Health Organization.
In research published in the Lancet Infectious Diseases journal on Wednesday, scientists found that human antibodies called SAB-301 generated in so-called transchromosomic cattle — animals with human DNA incorporated into their genome — were safe in healthy volunteers.
The antibodies also persisted for more time than the MERS virus typically remains in the body, the study found, with antibodies still detected in bloodstream after 90 days.
This points a way ahead for the antibodies — which offer immunity against an invading infection — to be tested in further trials in people infected with MERS, the researchers said.
“This is the first study to show the safety and immune effects of a potential treatment for MERS,” said John Beigel at Leidos Biomedical Research, who co-led the U.S. government-funded study. “The data from our study suggest that SAB-301 is safe, and further research into the treatment is warranted.”
The idea of using human antibodies has developed in recent years in a variety of severe and emerging diseases, including flu, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), MERS and Ebola.
Blood plasma harvested from people whose immune systems have successfully fought the disease contains the right antibodies and can be given to other patients to help their immune systems fight the virus.
But harvesting human plasma is not always easy or swift when a new disease emerges, so scientists turned to the idea of transchromosomic cattle as a way of manufacturing specific antibodies in larger amounts.
Transchromosomic cattle have human DNA that codes for human antibodies incorporated into their genome. To make SAB-301, they were injected with a part of the MERS virus, stimulating their immune systems to produce antibodies against it. The antibodies were then extracted from the cattle’s blood and purified.
“The process of creating antibody treatments by harvesting antibodies from human donors is slow and often small-scale,” said Beigel. “However, the cattle-produced antibodies could be created as soon as three months.”
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Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has caved in to pressure from the governor and is banning oil and gas drilling off the Florida coast.
“I support the governor’s position that Florida is unique and its coasts are heavily reliant on tourism as an economic driver,” Zinke said in a statement late Tuesday.
He outright admitted that Florida’s Republican Governor Rick Scott pressured him to put the state’s waters off limits.
Last week, the Trump administration proposed opening nearly all U.S. offshore waters to oil and gas drilling, reversing former Obama administration policies.
The White House has said it wants to make the U.S. more energy independent.
But environmental groups and Republican and Democratic governors from coastal states loudly object. They say oil and gas drilling puts marine life, beaches, and lucrative tourism at risk.
The Pentagon has also expressed misgivings about drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico, where naval exercises are held.
The 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf was the largest such disaster in U.S. history, causing billions of dollars in damage to the Gulf Coast, from Louisiana to Florida, killing more than 100,000 different marine mammals, birds, and reptiles.
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President Donald Trump on Tuesday ordered the secretaries of Defense, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs to come up with a plan to improve mental health care for U.S. veterans.
“They get out of the military and they had nobody to talk to, nobody to speak to. And it’s been a very sad situation,” Trump said moments before signing his executive order.
Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shuklin said 20 U.S. veterans a day commit suicide.
Under the president’s order, the three departments will come up with a plan to provide U.S. servicemen and women with 12 months of mental health benefits after they leave active duty.
This includes suicide prevention services and a 24-hour veterans’ hotline.
“We will not rest until all of America’s great veterans receive the care they’ve earned through their incredible service and sacrifice to our country,” Trump said.
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Nearly seven years into Syria’s civil war, Syrian refugees in neighboring Lebanon are becoming poorer, leaving children at risk of child labor and early marriage, aid organizations said on Tuesday.
A recent survey by the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF, U.N.’s World Food Program, and refugee agency, UNHCR showed that Syrian refugees in Lebanon are more vulnerable now than they have been since the beginning of the crisis.
Struggling to survive, more than three quarters of the refugees in Lebanon now live on less than $4 per day, according to the survey which was based on data collected last year.
“The situation for Syrian refugees in Lebanon is actually getting worse – they are getting poorer. They are barely staying afloat,” Scott Craig, UNHCR spokesman in Lebanon, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Around 1.5 million refugees who fled Syria’s violence account for a quarter of Lebanon’s population.
The Lebanese government has long avoided setting up official refugee camps. So, many Syrians live in tented settlements, languishing in poverty and facing restrictions on legal residence or work.
“Child labor and early marriage are direct consequences of poverty,” Tanya Chapuisat, UNICEF spokeswoman in Lebanon said in a statement to the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“We fear this (poverty) will lead to more children being married away or becoming breadwinners instead of attending school,” she said.
According to UNICEF, 5 percent of Syrian refugee children between 5-17 are working, and one in five Syrian girls and women aged between 15 and 25 is married.
Mike Bruce, a spokesman for the Norwegian Refugee Council, said without sufficient humanitarian aid and proper work Syrian families would increasingly fall into debt and more could turn to “negative coping mechanisms” like child labor and marriage.
Cold winter temperatures in Lebanon would also hurt refugees, he said.
“Refugees are less and less able to deal with each shock that they face and severe weather could be one of those shocks,” said Bruce.
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A handful of Indian cities are gearing up to launch bike-sharing systems to ease traffic congestion and deadly air pollution, as urban populations surge and vehicles clog the streets.
Bike-sharing systems in the southern city of Mysuru and the central city of Bhopal, both launched last June, have met with a tremendous response, officials say.
About half a dozen more cities, including Bengaluru, Pune and Bhubaneswar, are now drawing up similar plans, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI), a Washington D.C.-based research organization.
“Bike sharing is a viable option for Indian cities — we just need good-quality bikes, dedicated lanes and a system that is efficient,” said Chandramauli Shukla, chief executive of Bhopal Smart City Corporation.
The corporation implements the federally-funded Smart Cities program to improve services like internet connectivity and public transport in 100 cities across India.
With rising incomes and a large young population, passenger vehicle ownership in India has nearly tripled in the last decade, government data shows. Gridlock has become common and transit systems struggle to keep pace.
Vehicle emissions account for almost a third of air pollution in India, which has nearly half the world’s 20 most polluted cities, according to the World Health Organization.
Some 2.5 million people in the country die every year due to pollution.
Mysuru, close to the technology hub of Bengaluru, was the first to introduce a bike-sharing program, with the state’s chief minister riding a yellow Trin Trin bike at the launch.
Registered users can borrow any of 450 bikes from 48 docking stations for a nominal fee.
In Bhopal, users can register on their smartphones and unlock one of 500 bikes from 60 docking stations.
The city now has 11 kilometers (6.8 miles) of dedicated bike lanes, according to WRI, which provided technical expertise to the Bhopal Municipal Corporation on the bike-sharing system.
More than 25,000 people registered in the first few months, half of them women, said Amit Bhatt, director of transport at WRI India.
“In India, people look down on those who bike. So we had to show this is cool, with good-quality bikes and a mobile app to register and unlock bikes,” he said.
“But the main priority is safety, with dedicated bike lanes. That has encouraged people to give it a go,” he told Reuters.
Officials must be careful not to repeat the mistakes of China, where unchecked growth of bike-sharing firms led to piles of discarded bikes clogging sidewalks, Bhatt added.
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Sudan’s pound currency weakened to 30.5 pounds to the U.S. dollar on Tuesday from about 29.5 pounds a day earlier, traders said, continuing its fall amid protests over bread prices and an acute shortage of hard currency.
Street protests broke out across the northeastern African country after bread prices doubled in recent days, following a government announcement late last month that it was eliminating subsidies in its 2018 budget as part of austerity measures.
This month Sudan devalued its pound currency to 18 per U.S. dollar from 6.7 pounds to the dollar previously. Hard currency remains scarce in the formal banking system however, forcing importers to resort to an increasingly expensive black market.
“The dollar is rising on a daily basis and there is a strong appetite to buy at any price given its scarcity on the market,” one black market trader told Reuters.
The government has ruled out a market-determined exchange rate and the black market rate for pounds has been steadily weakening against the dollar since late last month, when the devaluation was announced.
“I expect the dollar price to continue to increase in the coming days because companies and importers are buying dollars in large quantities since the beginning of the year because the banks are not meeting their hard currency needs,” another black market trader said.
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Twenty-First Century Fox’s Fox Sports is partnering with Twitter to stream a live show and Snap Inc’s Snapchat to showcase stories with match-day highlights on the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament to be hosted in Russia later this year.
Fox Sports would produce the show, which will be streamed from Moscow’s Red Square on each match day and provide previews, recaps and near real-time video highlights for each game, the company said.
Fox said the coverage of the tournament, taking place from June 14 to July 15, will be available in the United States and can be seen using the @FOXSports and @FOXSoccer Twitter handles.
Fox Sports will also produce magazine-like editions of content for Snapchat’s mobile-first audience, called Publisher Stories.
The Publisher Stories on Snapchat will record the day-by-day highlights of the monthlong tournament through recaps, previews and features produced specifically for Snap.
Snapchat will also produce FIFA World Cup “Our Stories,” featuring video highlights of goals and other key moments provided by Fox Sports.
Livestreaming has been one of Twitter’s biggest focus areas since last year as it seeks to attract new users.
The company had previously signed a multi-year deal with the U.S. National Football League to livestream pre-game coverage as well as a 30-minute show.
Snapchat has also done something similar by previously partnering with Discovery Communications Inc’s Eurosport for a European, multi-language deal that will see Winter Olympics content held this year as part of Snapchat’s “stories” feature.
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When urban designer Trupti Vaitla asked residents of a Mumbai slum what new features they’d like to see in their dilapidated public space, she was surprised by one popular answer: a patch of grass.
The Lotus Garden is the only open area for about 200,000 people who live in cramped and squalid tenements abutting the city’s biggest landfill. The municipal corporation had done little for its upkeep and it was littered with trash.
Three years ago, Vaitla and her team were tasked with transforming it into a space that people would actually use.
They expected residents to suggest elements like lighting, elaborate landscaping and a gym.
The team didn’t expect such enthusiasm for a simple lawn.
“But they were excited to be involved, and for them, a patch of green was really important – a small oasis in their otherwise drab and congested world,” said Vaitla, chief executive of Mumbai Environmental Social Network (MESN).
Vaitla’s team, backed by funding from United Nations Habitat, which promotes sustainable urban development, spent months cleaning up Lotus Garden. They installed lights and water, planted shrubs and grass, and built an open-air gym.
From the very first day, residents including women and children who had earlier avoided the space, swarmed in, Vaitla said.
The appetite for areas like the Lotus Garden is not surprising. In Mumbai, with its population of 18 million and counting, soaring real estate prices and relentless construction, public spaces are shrinking.
“In a crowded slum, these spaces are particularly relevant, as people have nowhere else to go,” said Pontus Westerberg, digital projects officer at UN Habitat. “These spaces also impact on their health, sanitation, safety, access to emergency services.”
Digital Lego
Encouraged by their success with Lotus Garden, MESN and UN-Habitat collaborated on another space in the nearby Gautam Nagar neighborhood. This time, they decided to use technology to encourage even more community involvement.
The team settled on Minecraft, a video game that allows players to build their own worlds using virtual Lego-like pieces.
For the past five years, UN Habitat has used Minecraft in its Block by Block programme, which aims to encourage some of the poorest communities in the developing world to participate in upgrading their common spaces.
The program is a partnership between UN Habitat, Mojang, the creator of Minecraft, and Microsoft, which owns Mojang.
“It can be a challenge to mobilize people in slums – especially the youth – who are resigned to their environment and don’t feel a sense of ownership,” said Westerberg by telephone from Kenya’s capital, Nairobi.
The traditional approach, using maps and drawings, often draws little interest from residents, he said.
“But with an interactive design tool like this – I call it digital Lego – they are so engaged, and that makes the process more democratic,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The Block by Block program was launched in Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum. It has since been used in about 50 locations in more than 20 countries including Indonesia, Nigeria and Mexico.
Once UN-Habitat selects a site, a Minecraft model of the site is built using photographs, videos, maps and Google Street View, if it is available. UN-Habitat then holds a workshop.
Residents are put into groups of mixed ages and genders, and given a laptop with the Minecraft model. They learn the game in a matter of minutes or hours, Westerberg said, and everyone pitches in on the redesign.
The designs are then discussed with local officials, one design is chosen, and the project is handed over to a local architect to execute.
No Swimming Pool
When Vaitla brought Minecraft to a workshop in Gautam Nagar, participants used it to create plans including better lighting, seating, trees and play areas for children.
The slum’s 6,000 residents live in close quarters, among open drains and common spaces strewn with garbage. They were looking for realistic solutions to improve their lives.
“The designs they came up with were all sensible,” Vaitla recalled. “No one said, ‘We want a swimming pool.'”
Other organizations are also putting digital tools like Google Earth and smartphones to work for disadvantaged residents of India’s urban areas.
Shelter Associates, a charity that focuses on slum upgrades, is working with residents to create maps of slums that need amenities like sewage lines, or are at risk of eviction because they are on disputed land.
This is particularly relevant as the government’s Smart Cities plan risks hastening slum evictions.
In the western state of Maharashtra, where Mumbai is located, Shelter Associates has mapped about 500 settlements of more than 200,000 homes, said Executive Director Pratima Joshi.
“There are so many low-cost technologies that are easy to use, and we train slum residents to use them as a first step towards mobilizing the communities,” she said.
As for Lotus Garden, residents continue to take pride in the space they redesigned, said Vaitla.
“The lawn is a bit scraggly, but still being maintained, as are other amenities,” she said. “If you involve the community, they will participate, and they will take better care of these spaces.”
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Venezuela’s opposition-run parliament on Tuesday outlawed a “petro” cryptocurrency promoted by socialist President Nicolas Maduro, calling it an effort to illegally mortgage the cash-strapped country’s oil reserves.
Maduro on Friday said his government would issue nearly $6 billion of petros as a way to raise hard currency and to evade financial sanctions imposed by Washington.
Cryptocurrency experts say Venezuela’s mismanagement of its own economy, combined with the ruling Socialist Party’s historic lack of respect for private property rights, will likely leave investors uninterested in acquiring petros.
“This is not a cryptocurrency, this is a forward sale of Venezuelan oil,” said legislator Jorge Millan. “It is tailor-made for corruption.”
Legislators warned investors that the petro would be seen as null and void once Maduro, who is up for re-election this year, is no longer in office. They added that the petro issue violates constitutional requirements that the legislature approve borrowing.
The Information Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Maduro has routinely ignored the legislature since his party lost control of it in 2016, and the pro-government Supreme Court has shot down nearly every measure passed since then.
In July, the country elected an all-powerful legislative body called the Constituent Assembly, a vote that was boycotted by the opposition.
The government of U.S. President Donald Trump described the new Constituent Assembly as the consolidation of a dictatorship, and issued sanctions barring U.S. financial institutions from acquiring any debt issued by Venezuela after mid-2017.
That has effectively blocked Maduro’s government from refinancing its hefty debt burden, and would likely add to investor concern about the petro, although it was not specifically mentioned in the sanctions measure.
Maduro hopes it will serve as a payment mechanism for foreign suppliers and avoid the payments delays that have grown more acute since the sanctions went into place.
The government plans in the coming weeks to issue 100 million petros, backed by 100 million barrels of oil reserves.
The petro’s price is initially to be pegged to the value of Venezuela’s basket of oil and fuel exports, which last week closed at $59.07.
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Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos is now the richest person of all time, with a fortune of $105.1 billion, according to financial news outlet Bloomberg.
With the stock market soaring to new heights in the first few days of 2018, Bezos’ fortune rocketed upward, growing $6.1 billion in just five trading days.
That happened because most of Bezos’ wealth is contained in shares of Amazon.com, the online retail giant. Shares of Amazon rose 56 percent in 2017 and more than 6 percent since the start of this year.
Financial news trackers differ on whether Bezos is the richest man in history, or if his nearest rival, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, holds that record.
Bezos surpassed Gates briefly last year before taking the lead for good in October and crossing the $100-billion mark by November, buoyed by the holiday shopping season.
Gates is worth more than $90 billion, but financial experts say he would be worth far more if he had not given away so much in cash and shares of Microsoft to charity. Bloomberg reports that if Gates had not given away some $36 billion of stock to charity, his fortune would be worth more than $150 billion.
In addition to Amazon, Bezos’ holdings include The Washington Post and the space exploration company, Blue Origin.
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They’re the friendly face of North Korea, and it looks like they’re coming south to the Olympics.
With sparkling costumes and winning smiles, figure skaters Ryom Tae Ok and Kim Ju Sik could lead the North Korean team in Pyeongchang, South Korea, next month after their government said Tuesday it would send athletes to the Winter Games.
Ryom and Kim are the only North Korean athletes who have qualified for the Feb. 9-25 Olympics in Pyeongchang so far. However, the International Olympic Committee could potentially hold extra invitational spots open to symbolize togetherness between the two Koreas.
Ryom and Kim almost certainly won’t win a medal in the fiercely competitive world of pairs skating, but they’ve already won friends against a backdrop of political tension.
On their world championship debut last year in Finland, Ryom and Kim put in two spirited skates to enthusiastic applause from the crowd as they finished 15th, above one of the two U.S. pairs and a string of more experienced European competitors.
They weren’t afraid to show their feelings, either. The 18-year-old Ryom punched the air with joy on finishing the short program to a Jeff Beck cover of The Beatles classic A Day in the Life.
Ryom and her partner, Kim, embraced in their matching silver-and-black costumes before soaking up the crowd’s cheers and skating off to celebrate with their coaches.
Rarely seen abroad, they have given little away about their lives, other than that they train in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. At the world championships, Kim said he was keen to take part in “a big competition” when asked about the Olympics through a translator from his team. They wouldn’t talk about visiting South Korea and walked away when asked about their choice of music.
Previous boycott
North Korea was far from certain to compete in Pyeongchang. It boycotted the only other Olympics hosted in South Korea, the Seoul Games of 1988, and often has skipped the Winter Olympics entirely.
It hasn’t won a winter medal since 1992 and its last team, in 2010, consisted of just one figure skater and one speed skater, neither of whom came close to the podium.
By contrast, North Korea punches above its weight in the Summer Olympics. It won seven medals across weightlifting, gymnastics, shooting and table tennis in 2016.
Even with a deal for North Korea to compete in Pyeongchang, the two Koreas and the IOC face some thorny issues of protocol.
Flags, anthems and the opening ceremony all will require delicate negotiation.
At the games themselves, any slip-up could spark a diplomatic incident. The North Korean women’s soccer team walked off the field at the 2012 Olympics when the South Korean flag was mistakenly shown in a pre-game video package.
North and South Korean athletes have marched together at some previous Olympics during periods of warmer relations between the two governments, and South Korea has suggested a repeat in Pyeongchang. If they march separately, the South Korean team would massively outnumber the North Koreans.
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Oil prices surged to a three-year high Tuesday on rising expectations that OPEC member countries will comply with oil production cuts to the end of 2018.
Brent Crude prices are headed toward $70 a barrel, West Texas Crude settled at $62.96 bbl, the highest since December 2014. But other factors could derail OPEC member agreement on production quotas, including continued expansion of U.S. shale production and the likelihood of stronger global demand.
Analysts say rapid changes in supply and demand could trigger an early exit or prompt member countries to cheat on production quotas, especially when prices start to rise.
Meanwhile, the United States is increasingly less dependent on foreign oil, thanks in part to the shale boom and the influx of cheap natural gas. U.S. Energy Information Administration forecasts U.S. crude oil production will climb to more than 10 million barrels per day by the first quarter of 2018, exceeding 11 million bpd in 2019.
The American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. trade group that represents the oil and natural gas industry, boasted Tuesday about helping to create “U.S. energy abundance” but said the industry was focused on minimizing the harmful effects of greenhouse gases associated with fossil fuels.
In his 2018 State of American Energy address, API president and CEO Jack Girard said it was time to move beyond the debate over climate change.
“I think we’re at the point where we need to get over the conversation of who believes and who doesn’t, and move to a conversation about solutions,” he said.
The U.S. is now the world’s biggest natural gas producer. Despite a 30 percent increase in domestic natural gas production since 2008, Girard says CO2 emissions in the U.S. are near 25-year lows, and key air pollutants have declined 73 percent since 1970.
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Failure to rein in global temperature rises could cause the marine food web to collapse, devastating the livelihoods of tens of millions of people who rely on fisheries for food and income, scientists have warned.
Warming oceans restrict vital energy flows between different species in the marine ecosystem, reducing the amount of food available for bigger animals — mostly fish — at the top of the marine food web, according to a study in the journal PLOS Biology published Tuesday.
This could have “serious implications” for fish stocks, said Ivan Nagelkerken, a professor of marine ecology at Australia’s University of Adelaide and one of the study’s authors.
Globally, about 56.5 million people were engaged in fisheries and aquaculture in 2015, according to the latest data from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
In addition, almost a fifth of animal protein consumed by 3.2 billion people in 2015 comes from fish, FAO said.
The Adelaide scientists set up 12 large tanks, each holding 1,800 liters of water, in a temperature-controlled room to replicate complex marine food webs, and test the effects of ocean acidification and warming over six months.
Plant productivity increased under warmer temperatures but this was mainly due to an expansion of bacteria which fish do not eat, Nagelkerken said in a phone interview.
The findings show that the 2015 Paris agreement on curbing global warming must be met “to safeguard our oceans from collapse, loss of biodiversity and less fishery productivity.”
Under the landmark agreement, world leaders agreed to limit the rise in average global temperatures to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times.
The United Nations, however, has warned the world is heading toward a 3-degree increase by 2100.
Recent studies have sounded alarm bells for oceans and its inhabitants as the Earth continues to experience record-breaking heat.
A Jan. 4 paper published in the journal Science said “dead zones” — where oxygen is too low to support most marine life — more than quadrupled in the past 50 years due to human activities.
Another said high ocean temperatures are harming tropical corals, which are nurseries for fish, almost five times more often than in the 1980s.
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Honeybees are attracted to a fungicide used in agriculture with “unsettling implications” for global food production, a scientist said Tuesday.
Tests carried out by a team from the University of Illinois showed bees preferred to collect sugar syrup laced with the fungicide chlorothalonil over sugar syrup alone.
The finding follows other studies linking fungicides to a worldwide plunge in honeybee and wild bee populations that are crucial for pollinating crops.
“Bees are kind of like humans in that they sometimes like things that aren’t necessarily good for them,” said University of Illinois entomology professor May Berenbaum, who led the research.
She said fungicides were bad news for bees because they could exacerbate the toxicity of pesticides and kill off beneficial fungi in hives.
Her team set up two feeding stations in an enclosure allowing the bees to choose sugar syrup laced with a test chemical or without. The chemicals included three fungicides and two herbicides at various concentrations.
The researchers were taken aback to find the bees choosing one of the fungicides.
Expanation for contamination
“It was a surprise when they actually liked them,” Berenbaum told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone, adding that it could explain why fungicide contamination in hives was so common.
“This is not anything that anyone had even thought about before, so we need to readjust our focus because there certainly could be implications for agriculture,” she said.
However, she said the bees actively avoided a second tested fungicide and were neutral about a third.
The scientists said the findings were “worrisome” in light of research showing fungicides interfere with honeybees’ ability to metabolize pesticides used by beekeepers to kill parasitic mites that infest their hives.
The scientists were also surprised to find the bees showed a taste for the widely used herbicide glyphosate.
A study by the Center for Biological Diversity last year said hundreds of native bee species in North America and Hawaii were sliding toward extinction.
It said bees provided more than $3 billion in fruit-pollination services each year in the United States.
Experts have blamed habitat loss, heavy pesticide use, climate change and increasing urbanization for declining numbers.
The United Nations recently announced an annual World Bee Day on May 20 to raise awareness of their importance and declining numbers.
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The inability of law enforcement authorities to access data from electronic devices due to powerful encryption is an “urgent public safety issue,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said on Tuesday as he sought to renew a contentious debate over privacy and security.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation was unable to access data from nearly 7,800 devices in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 with technical tools despite possessing proper legal authority to pry them open, a growing figure that impacts every area of the agency’s work, Wray said during a speech at a cyber security conference in New York.
The FBI has been unable to access data in more than half of the devices that it tried to unlock due to encryption, Wray added.
“This is an urgent public safety issue,” Wray added, while saying that a solution is “not so clear cut.”
Technology companies and many digital security experts have said that the FBI’s attempts to require that devices allow investigators a way to access a criminal suspect’s cellphone would harm internet security and empower malicious hackers.
U.S. lawmakers, meanwhile, have expressed little interest in pursuing legislation to require companies to create products whose contents are accessible to authorities who obtain a warrant.
Wray’s comments at the International Conference on Cyber Security were his most extensive yet as FBI director about the so-called Going Dark problem, which his agency and local law enforcement authorities for years have said bedevils countless investigations. Wray took over as FBI chief in August.
The FBI supports strong encryption and information security broadly, Wray said, but described the current status quo as untenable.
“We face an enormous and increasing number of cases that rely heavily, if not exclusively, on electronic evidence,” Wray told an audience of FBI agents, international law enforcement representatives and private sector cyber professionals.
A solution requires “significant innovation,” Wray said, “but I just do not buy the claim that it is impossible.”
Wray’s remarks echoed those of his predecessor, James Comey, who before being fired by President Donald Trump in May frequently spoke about the dangers of unbreakable encryption.
Tech companies and many cyber security experts have said that any measure ensuring that law enforcement authorities are able to access data from encrypted products would weaken cyber security for everyone.
U.S. officials have said that default encryption settings on cellphones and other devices hinder their ability to collect evidence needed to pursue criminals.
The matter came to a head in 2016 when the Justice Department tried unsuccessfully to force Apple to break into an iPhone used by a gunman during a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.
The Trump administration at times has taken a tougher stance on the issue than former President Barack Obama’s administration.
U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in October chastised technology companies for building strongly encrypted products, suggesting Silicon Valley is more willing to comply with foreign government demands for data than those made by their home country.
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U.S. Senate Democrats said on Tuesday they will force a vote later this year on the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s reversal of landmark Obama administration net neutrality rules and will try to make it a key issue in the 2018 congressional elections.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said the issue will be a major motivating factor for young voters the party is courting.
“We’re going to let everyone know where we stand and they stand,” Schumer said at a Capitol Hill news conference in Washington.
The FCC voted in December along party lines to reverse rules introduced in 2015 that barred internet service providers from blocking or throttling traffic, or offering paid fast lanes. A group of state attorneys general immediately vowed to sue.
A trade group representing major tech companies including Facebook, Alphabet and Amazon.com said last week it will back legal challenges to the reversal.
The vote in December marked a victory for AT&T, Comcast and Verizon Communications and hands them power over what content consumers can access over the internet. It marked the biggest win for FCC Chairman Ajit Pai in his sweeping effort to undo many telecommunications regulations.
Senate Democrats on Tuesday called the FCC decision “un-American” and an “all-out assault on consumers.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, backs the FCC repeal. A reversal of the FCC vote would need the approval of the Senate, U.S. House and President Donald Trump.
Trump also backed the FCC action, the White House said last month.
The FCC order grants internet providers sweeping new powers to block, throttle or discriminate among internet content, but requires public disclosure of those practices. Internet providers have vowed not to change how consumers get online content.
Democrats say net neutrality is essential to protect consumers, while Republicans say the rules hindered investment by providers and were not needed.
Democratic Senator Ed Markey said on Tuesday he had 39 co-sponsors to force a vote, but it is not clear when the vote will occur since the new rules will not take effect for at least another three months. “There will be a political price to pay for those who are on the wrong side of history,” Markey said.
Republicans control the Senate with 51 votes out of the 100-member body.
Senator Brian Schatz, a Hawaii Democrat, said the issue was resonating with teenagers and college students.
“People are mobilizing across the country to save the free and open internet,” Schatz said.
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