Month: January 2018

2017 was the safest year on record for the commercial airline industry, two new reports said.

No major airline experienced a plane crash anywhere in the world, the Dutch aviation consultancy To70 reported Monday.

“2017 was much better than could reasonably [and statistically] be expected, and was again better than last year’s remarkable performance,” said To70 researcher Adrian Young.

Young said air travel is the safest way to travel, with an estimated fatal accident rate for large commercial passenger flights of 0.06 per million flights, or one fatal accident for every 16 million flights — even as global air traffic in 2017 grew by 3 percent over the previous year.

Accidents involving military planes, cargo flights and small turboprop planes were not part of the study.

A second report by the Aviation Safety Network said 10 civil passenger and cargo plane crashes killed 44 people last year.

Experts cited improved technology and safety systems aboard passenger jets, which they noted have just about eliminated midair collisions and crashes into mountains.

The network’s study also said engineers and crews were spotting more safety problems before planes take off.

President Donald Trump appeared to take credit Tuesday for 2017 being fatality-free for commercial flights:

But The Associated Press pointed out there were no new major airline safety regulations introduced by the Trump administration in 2017.

It also said the White House had dragged its feet on implementing an Obama administration proposal to ban rechargeable lithium batteries from passenger planes. Tests have shown the batteries can explode and start fires.

The president’s plan to privatize the nation’s air traffic control system has also not moved forward.

But a White House spokesman said Tuesday that the president had “raised the bar for our nation’s aviation safety and security.”

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said the last deadly passenger airline crash in the U.S. occurred in 2009, and the last fatal commuter plane crash was in Hawaii in 2013.

Airplane crash statistics were first compiled in 1946.
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Airlines recorded zero accident deaths in commercial passenger jets last year, according to a Dutch consulting firm and an aviation safety group that tracks crashes, making 2017 the safest year on record for commercial air travel.

Dutch aviation consulting firm To70 and the Aviation Safety Network both reported Monday there were no commercial passenger jet fatalities in 2017. “2017 was the safest year for aviation ever,” said Adrian Young of To70.

To70 estimated that the fatal accident rate for large commercial passenger flights is 0.06 per million flights, or one fatal accident for every 16 million flights.

The Aviation Safety Network also reported there were no commercial passenger jet deaths in 2017, but 10 fatal airliner accidents resulting in 44 fatalities onboard and 35 persons on the ground, including cargo planes and commercial passenger turbo prop aircraft.

That figure includes 12 people killed on Dec. 31 when a Nature Air Cessna 208B Grand Caravan aircraft crashed minutes after takeoff into a mountainous area off the beach town of Punta Islita, Costa Rica.

In comparison, there were 16 accidents and 303 deaths in 2016 among airliners.

The deadliest incident last year occurred in January when a Turkish cargo jet smashed into a village in Kyrgyzstan as it tried to land at a nearby airport in dense fog, killing 35 on the ground and all four onboard.

The Aviation Safety Network said 2017 was “the safest year ever, both by the number of fatal accidents as well as in terms of fatalities.”

Over the last two decades aviation deaths around the world have been steadily falling. As recently as 2005, there were 1,015 deaths aboard commercial passenger flights worldwide, the Aviation Safety Network said.

The United States last recorded a fatal airline passenger jet crash in February 2009, when Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed short of the runway in Clarence Center, New York, killing 49 onboard and one person on the ground.

In 2016, 412 people were killed in the United States in aviation accidents — nearly all in general aviation accidents and none on commercial passenger airlines.

The last fatal passenger jet airliner accident worldwide took place in November 2016 near Medellin, Colombia and the last commercial passenger aircraft crash to kill more than 100 people occurred in October 2015 in Egypt.
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Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani may have to step back from some of his core economic policies in the face of nationwide protests by tens of thousands of people frustrated by high unemployment and stagnant living standards

The protests, during which at least 10 people have been killed, are fuelled by disappointment that the lifting of sanctions on Iran in January 2016 has failed to deliver an economic boom.

Instead, the non-oil part of the economy has continued to struggle, with unemployment officially put at around 12.5 percent — in reality, much higher for Iran’s millions of young  people — and inflation running at nearly 10 percent.

“There is a crisis of expectations in Iran,” said Tame  Badawi, a research fellow at the Istanbul-based Al-Sharq Forum. “It is a deep sense of economic frustration.”

Need for more jobs

To ease that discontent, Rouhani may need to spend more government money on creating jobs, restrain inflation by supporting the rial exchange rate and do more to eradicate the widespread corruption which angers the protesters.

But all of those actions would involve policy change. Rouhani has been pursuing a conservative budget policy to bring Iran’s volatile state finances under control, part of his effort to create an attractive environment for foreign investors. Meanwhile, fighting corruption would risk a backlash from powerful interests hurt by a crackdown.

Mehrdad Emadi, an Iranian economist who is head of energy risk analysis at the Betamatrix consultancy in London, said Rouhani faced a “Herculean challenge” fighting corruption in particular. But he suggested Rouhani might have no choice 

“People are more and more desperate,” he said. “In this situation, there will be periodic outbreaks of dissent.”

Sanctions

After taking power in 2013, Rouhani quickly reversed the spendthrift fiscal and monetary policies of his predecessor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, curbing a system of cash handouts for lower- and middle-income Iranians.

Last month he proposed another conservative budget to parliament for the Iranian year starting next March 21. The $104 billion budget was up about 6 percent from the plan for the current year — a cut in real terms at current inflation rates.

Such austerity has become increasingly unpopular among the public as the economy has struggled despite the end of sanctions. Many foreign banks and companies remain reluctant to do business with Iran, partly because U.S. President Donald Trump’s hard line on Tehran has deterred trade and investment.

Emadi said a study to which he contributed found Iranians were dissatisfied with the economy for five main reasons: unemployment, weak purchasing power, corruption, a weak rial, and unequal distribution of wealth among Iran’s regions. The study showed their perceptions of the first three areas have worsened this year, he said. In some areas of southeast Iran, unemployment among young people has reached 45 percent and the job market is shrinking, he added.

The rial has sunk to 42,900 against the U.S. dollar from 36,000 a year ago. Rouhani’s administration might support the currency by spending more of Iran’s foreign reserves, but this would risk deterring foreign investment; the International Monetary Fund warned against such a policy last month.

Emadi blamed much of the economy’s poor performance on a deep-rooted structural issue: the influence of paramilitary bodies such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as well as religious institutions on business.

Those interests, which according to some estimates control over 60 percent of assets in Iran, generally do not pay taxes and stifle competition from small private companies, blocking job creation, he said.

Emadi said Rouhani’s administration was addressing this problem, pressing institutions to open their books to tax audits and demanding more transparency in the business world.

No quick fix

But Badawi predicted the government would find it hard to secure any quick improvement in the economy. While it may announce a stimulus package to create jobs, it is unlikely to backtrack on cash handouts, and problems such as diversifying the economy and repairing a debt-burdened banking system can only be solved in the long term, he said.

“My guess is that nothing significant will change. The government will try to be open with people, to propose initiatives, but there are structural problems — diversification, the banking problem and relations with the rest of world, especially Trump.”
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More than two decades after California became the first U.S. state to legalize medical marijuana use, on January first it becomes the final West Coast state to legalize pot for recreational purposes — a move approved by California voters in November 2016, in a referendum known as Prop 64.

While this is good news for cannabis enthusiasts, those with visions of unencumbered marijuana use in the California sunshine will find that reality is not quite so cut-and-dried — meaning, simple — referring to the processing of tobacco leaves.

Most importantly, while seven U.S. states and the District of Columbia have legalized recreational marijuana use, the U.S. federal government still considers it a controlled substance, classified with heroin and LSD as illegal drugs. Elsewhere, 29 states have legalized medical marijuana, and Maine and Massachusetts are set to legalize recreational pot in 2018.

Federal versus state law

Former White House spokesman Sean Spicer told reporters in February 2017 that the Department of Justice may be looking into legal marijuana use in the future.

“When you see something like the opioid addiction crisis blossoming around so many states… the last thing we should be doing is encouraging people,” Spicer said.

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, an opponent of legalized pot, said in November that he is taking a close look at federal enforcement of anti-drug laws that include marijuana. “Good people don’t smoke marijuana,” he said at a Senate hearing in 2016.

Federal and state laws come more into play in California, which has several U.S. Border Patrol checkpoints, at which federal agents, mainly searching for illegal immigrants, are also empowered to seize pot stashes and prosecute the owners.

The Associated Press quotes Ronald Vitiello, acting deputy commissioner of the federal Customs and Border Protection agency, as calling drug seizures at border checkpoints an “ancillary effect”of enforcing immigration laws.

In addition to 34 permanent checkpoints along the U.S. border with Mexico, Border Patrol operates more than 100 “tactical” stops that may appear or disappear as needed, as far as 161 kilometers inside the U.S. border.

AP reports that people found with pot at those checkpoints are typically photographed and fingerprinted, and their stashes seized. The report says those people often aren’t charged with a crime, however, because pot possession in small amounts is considered a low-priority offense.

The checkpoints are legal. Border Patrol agents say they help catch illegal immigrants who have made it past the U.S. border and might disappear into a large city; and the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that agents can question people at checkpoints even if they have no reason to believe anyone inside the car is in the country illegally.

Bureau of Cannabis Control

Meanwhile, California has created its own Bureau of Cannabis Control to regulate the growing and sale of cannabis.

Bureau spokesman Alex Traverso told the Los Angeles Times that about eight enforcement officers will be in place by January 1.

The bureau has issued fewer than 200 temporary business licenses so far, although cities such as Los Angeles and San Francisco are expected later to issue their own local licenses, which will be required to get a state permit. Only a few dozen retail outlets are expected to be up and running by January 1.

Many localities inside California have not yet approved recreational pot use — and some may choose not to do so at all. Cannabis Control did not start issuing licenses to sell recreational cannabis until mid-December, so many applications are still in the works.

San Diego, San Jose, Oakland, Berkeley and Eureka are among the towns where pot stores can open on January 1.

Still proponents of legalized pot say bringing the drug out into the open makes it possible to tax sales of cannabis — which lawmakers hope will result in $1 billion a year in new tax revenue for the state. The money will come from a 15 percent state excise tax on every cannabis purchase. Local governments can place additional taxes on top of that — or they can ban pot shops entirely, if they choose.

Daniel Yi, a spokesman for the L.A.-area dispensary Med Men, says he expects an eighth of an ounce of pot to go for about $35 when two Med Men shops begin selling to recreational users on January 2. He told Reuters news agency that three other locations will probably not begin selling to recreational users for a few more weeks.

Keeping out of trouble

Further moves to keep control on the industry include guidelines for retailers, and age and use limits for consumers.

Pot sales will be restricted to people who are age 21 or older, but anyone visiting the state who is of age may buy and consume marijuana at legal outlets. Prop 64 specifically prohibits marketing of pot products to minors.

Pot shops cannot be within 180 meters (600 feet) of a school and they must maintain 24-hour surveillance. They also cannot open before 6 a.m. and must close by 10 p.m.

California anti-smoking laws make it illegal to smoke pot in places where regular tobacco smoking is banned. Employers may still subject employees to drug tests to ensure a drug-free workplace.

Drivers are being warned not to drive after using pot. While it is harder to measure a person’s intoxication level after smoking pot than it is after alcohol consumption, Hound Labs of Oakland is developing what it says is a “marijuana breathalyzer” for cops and employers to gauge whether a person has been using while driving or on the job.

L.A. County Sheriff Jim McDonnell says he worries about people getting behind the wheel while high.

“The public’s perception is that weed is innocuous, that this is something they did 40 years ago and it is no big deal,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “Well, today’s marijuana is not yesterday’s marijuana. The active ingredient, THC, is so much higher today than back 40 years ago.”

As for food products containing THC, Californians will be able to consume them in any public place where food is normally consumed. The publishers of Mother Jones magazine say at least one of their readers wrote in to ask if there will be cannabis ice cream — and the answer, they say, is yes. Medical marijuana users have been consuming it for years. But there’s a catch: the amount of THC allowable in such items is limited to 10 milligrams per serving.

One other effect of the new pot law is that it will reduce penalties on people who have been convicted for pot crimes in the past. In addition to making pot more available, the law that legalized it, known as Prop 64, also makes pot crimes once viewed as felonies into lower-level misdemeanors. That means some people currently in California jails for selling or possessing pot could see their sentences reduced.
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China’s total domestic movie ticket sales rose 13.5 percent in 2017 to 55.9 billion yuan ($8.6 billion), a state news agency said Monday.

The top-grossing title was the mainland-made action picture “Wolf Warrior 2,” which took in 5.7 billion yuan ($875 million), the Xinhua News Agency said, citing data from the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television.

China is the second-largest global film market and is narrowing the gap with the United States, where last year’s domestic box office is estimated to have declined 2.6 percent from 2016 to $11.1 billion.

Mainland-made movies accounted for 54 percent of 2017 ticket sales, or 30.1 billion yuan ($4.6 billion), according to Xinhua.

The No. 2-grossing title was the Hollywood action movie “The Fate of the Furious,” which earned 2.7 billion yuan.
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