Month: February 2018

Is that love in the air or french fries? White Castle, KFC and other fast-food restaurants are trying to lure sweethearts for Valentine’s Day.

It’s an attempt to capture a bit of the $3.7 billion that the National Retail Federation expects Americans to spend on a night out for the holiday. Restaurant analyst John Gordon at Pacific Management Consulting Group says it appeals to people who don’t want to splurge on a pricier restaurant. And some customers enjoy it ironically.

White Castle, which has been offering Valentine’s Day reservations for nearly 30 years, expects to surpass the 28,000 people it served last year. Diners at the chain known for its sliders get tableside service and can sip on its limited chocolate and strawberry smoothie. KFC is handing out scratch-and-sniff Valentine’s Day cards that give off a fried chicken aroma to diners who buy its $10 Chicken Share meals or a bucket full of Popcorn Nuggets.

Panera Bread wants couples to get engaged at its cafes; those who do can win food for their weddings from the soup and bread chain. And Wingstop sold out of its $25 Valentine’s Day kit, which came with a gift card and a heart-shaped box to fill with chicken wings. The company says 1,000 of the kits were gone in 72 hours.
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The U.S. on Wednesday reported its biggest increase in consumer prices in a year, pushing stocks lower in early trading.

The consumer price index, which follows the costs of household goods and services, advanced by a half percentage point in January, up from two-tenths of a point in December.

The January increase pushed the year-over-year inflation rate up by 2.1 percent. It was the same 12-month rate recorded in December, increasing fears among investors that firming inflation, along with increasing wages paid to American workers, could lead policymakers at the country’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, to boost interest rates at a faster pace.

The Labor Department said consumer prices, minus the volatile changes in food and energy costs, rose three-tenths of a percentage point in January, the largest increase since January 2017. Analysts had been expecting an increase of 0.2 percent.

Stock indexes were lower at the start of Wednesday, with the key Dow Jones industrial average falling about a third of a percentage point after a string of recent days with massive swings between losses and gains.
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Electric powered bicycles, known as “e-bikes,” are a common sight among New York’s immigrant delivery workers, who consider the bikes a necessity to make a living wage. The problem is, they’re illegal to operate in the city, creating a dilemma for these immigrants who feel they have no alternative employment options. VOA’s Ramon Taylor and Ye Yuan report.
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As a student, Leah Wangari imagined a glamorous life as a globe-trotting flight attendant, not toiling in dirt and manure.

Born and raised in Kenya’s skyscraper-filled capital, Nairobi, the 28-year-old said farming had been the last thing on her mind. The decision to drop agriculture classes haunted her later, when her efforts in agribusiness investing while running a fashion venture failed.

Clueless, she made her way to an unusual new reality TV show, the first of its kind in Africa. “Don’t Lose the Plot,” backed by the U.S. government, trains contestants from Kenya and neighboring Tanzania and gives them plots to cultivate, with a $10,000 prize for the most productive. The goal: Prove to young people that agriculture can be fun and profitable.

“Being in reality TV was like the best feeling ever, like a dream come true for me,” Wangari said. But she found it exhausting. As callouses built up on her hands, her friends made bets that she wouldn’t succeed.

“Don’t Lose the Plot” is aimed at inspiring youth in East Africa to pursue agribusiness entrepreneurship. Producers said the show wants to demystify the barriers to starting a small business and challenge the prejudices against farming-related careers, even as many youths flee rural areas for urban ones.

“What we hope to achieve … is first to show people that you can make money out of farming, to change the age profile of farmers in Africa from 60 to the youth. And the next thing we want to do is to show farmers, young farmers, that they can use their mobile and technology in order to farm and achieve their goals,” producer Patricia Gichinga said. The show also offers training via online platforms and text message.

Attracting people to agriculture is no small challenge in Africa, where a booming young population is often put off by the image of punishing work and poor, weather-beaten farmers.

“Most young Africans think of farming as back-breaking labor that pays peanuts,” former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, the committee chair for the $100,000 annual Africa Food Prize and a farmer himself, wrote in the New African magazine last year. “This view, though largely inaccurate, is to some extent understandable.”

If Africa’s youth, who make up about 65 percent of the population, don’t venture into agribusiness, “then there is little chance that agriculture will have a transformative impact on the continent’s fortunes,” Obasanjo wrote.

Most experts agree that farming growth can boost African economies by increasing trade, creating more jobs and improving food self-sufficiency on a continent with the highest occurrence of food insecurity in the world.

But much of the potential remains untapped. Africa has over 60 percent of the world’s fertile but uncultivated land while importing $35 billion to $50 billion in food per year, the Alliance for the Green Revolution in Africa says . Weak or corrupt land governance is a challenge, as well as conflict.

Yields for major crops remain low compared to other regions of the world. Change must come by empowering the smallholder farmers who produce 80 percent of the food consumed on the continent, the organization says.

Now Wangari is one of them. After placing second in “Don’t Lose the Plot,” she became a full-time mushroom farmer.

In a damp structure of mud and clay on the outskirts of Nairobi, she has harvested her first crop and is preparing for her second. She had expected to make a $2,500 profit but took in $1,000 instead after mites from a nearby chicken house invaded and lowered her yield.

“When I see young men in the village now sitting idle I feel disappointed because there is a lot of idle land and they can use it to make ends meet,” she said. “They don’t require a lot of capital but they don’t have the information.”
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Brasilia – It is one of the most expensive areas in the Brazilian capital – and one of the most sacred.

A plot in downtown Brasilia – known as Santuário dos Pajés or Shrine of the Shamans – is at the center of a conflict between indigenous people hoping to preserve their traditional way of life and developers eager to build an upmarket neighborhood.

While property is often contested in Brazil, it is usually waged over remote jungles or distant mountains – vast swaths of land that can be mined or farmed for profit.

This conflict centers on Brasilia’s urban power base. Just minutes from the National Congress, the Shrine of the Shamans – with its unpaved roads, forest and small houses – sits surrounded by lavish high rises.

Indigenous residents say they feel cornered by the encroaching developers, with multiple interests fighting over the last undeveloped plot in Brasilia, a planned city known for its futuristic buildings designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer.

“The sanctuary has been an indigenous land for more than 40 years. We have been fighting for its demarcation,” indigenous leader Márcia Guajajara told the Thomson Reuters Foundation inside the Shrine.

“When the developers arrived, we were already here. They think that money always wins,” she said.

It is one of many such conflicts in Brazil, rich in land to be exploited and low on deeds and property records.

For land demarcation is controversial in Brazil, despite safeguards in both the constitution and United Nations guidelines that are supposed to enshrine rights for indigenous people.

About a third of almost a million indigenous people live in Brazil’s cities, according to government statistics.

There are several land battles wending their way through the courts, many of them pit native people against powerful business interests.

But it is the prime downtown location that makes the fight over the Shrine stand out in the capital city, declared a World Heritage Site by the United Nations for its modernist architecture and artistic planning.

Conflicting Claims

Conflict began a decade ago when the local government claimed it owned the Brasilia plot, prompting indigenous groups to counterclaim, saying the Fulni-Ô Tapuya had lived and performed religious ceremonies there for decades.

To further complicate matters, the federal government said it took ownership of the area in 2008 and a year later sold it on to building firms to create a green and sustainable neighborhood called Noroeste (Northwest).

Since then, high-rise buildings have sprung up all around the sacred soil, making the Shrine one of the few areas in the city that is free of new buildings.

Forty-year-old Guajajara has been living in Santuário dos Pajés since 1996, after marrying shaman Santxiê Tapuya, considered the founder of the sacred land. She is one of 180 indigenous people who live in the area.

According to court documents, a receipt from 1980 shows Santxiê bought an area of about 4 hectares (9.8 acres), the size of almost six football pitches.

Indigenous locals say pressure to displace them from the area has steadily increased over the years.

One November afternoon last year, Guajajara said about 10 men – some armed – and three tractors invaded the Santuário dos Pajés area, knocking down trees in the hope of clearing the land sufficiently to pave an avenue down its middle.

Her 18-year-old son Fetxa said he tried and failed to stop them by blocking their path. “I did not get out of the front.

They pushed me forward, along with the soil, twice. I was shocked.”

According to Guajajara, she and her son – the only ones in the area when the tractors arrived – screamed they could not enter the indigenous land because it is protected by a court decision.

But the men said they had an order “to run it over.”

The local government’s development arm, Terracap, said its staff were doing some infrastructure works in the neighborhood close to the indigenous area but denied they were armed.

“We are removing garbage in various locations and they understood this as an affront,” Júlio César Reis, the head of Terracap, said by phone.

In an emailed statement, Brazil’s indigenous affairs agency, Funai, said it would not comment.

Federal prosecutors are investigating the case.

The indigenous residents were quick to fence in the area, though it is no barrier to any possible future encroachment.

How Much Land?

In 2013, a court recognized the indigenous land ownership rights over the area of about four hectares bought by Santxiê but Funai, Terracap and federal prosecutors appealed.

Terracap said it has not been proven the indigenous people lived in the sacred area before their registered their claim.

The matter was further complicated when in October 2017 federal prosecutors, who act on behalf of indigenous people in Brazil, made a request in court to allocate a further 28 hectares to  Santxiê’s family and the ethnic group Fulni-Ô Tapuya.

Federal prosecutor Felipe Fritz Braga said the sanctuary is crucial to ensure the Fulni-Ô Tapuya’s future in the area.

An anthropological report used in the suit found evidence that indigenous tribes have been living in the area since 1956, during the construction process of Brasília, he said.

Santuário dos Pajés has been targeted by almost 30 lawsuits over the last 10 years.

“This number of lawsuits reflects the complexity of the problem,” Braga said in an email to the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
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In her village of Komalia, the fog swirls so thick at 7 a.m. that Akansha Singh can see no more than 15 meters ahead. But the 20-year-old is already cycling to her workplace, nine kilometers away.

Halfway there she stops for two hours at a computer training center, where she’s learning internet skills. Then she’s off again, and by 10 a.m. reaches the small garment manufacturing plant where she stitches women’s clothing for high-end brands on state-of-the-art electric sewing machines.

Solar energy powers most of her day — the computer training center and the 25-woman garment factory run on solar mini-grid electricity — and clean power has given her personal choice as well, she said.

If the mini-grid system had not been put in place, Singh — a recent college graduate without funds to pursue training as a teacher, the only job open to women in her village — would have had no alternative but to marry, she said.

In fact, “I would already be married off,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Today, however, she earns 4,500 rupees ($70) a month working on solar-powered sewing machines. She uses part of that to pay 300 rupees ($4.70) a month for her computer education class — and is planning to start a computer training center closer to home.

Like her, most of the women at the factory earn between 2,500 and 4,500 rupees ($39- $70) a month, which has helped their families eat better, get children to school and pay for healthcare, they said.

“With a month’s earning alone we can buy new bicycles for ourselves and our school-going children,” Bandana Devi, a mother of four, told the Thomson Reuter Foundation, as she looked up from her sewing.

She bought one for her 12-year-old daughter, she said, and her 6-year-old rides pillion with her to the school, 2 km away.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced a $2.5 billion plan to electrify every Indian household by 2019 — a huge task in a country where close to 240 million people still have no access to electrical power.

Solar power — including the use of small local grids — is likely to be a big part of the push, with 60 percent of new connections expected to be to renewable power, according to a report by the International Energy Agency.

Stable Power, More Contracts

In a clearing in an acacia plantation, the more than 140 solar panels that make up the Kamlapur mini-grid are being cleaned early in the morning.

The 36-kilowatt plant, set up by the for-profit OMC Power Private Ltd.(formerly Omnigrid Micropower Company) in 2015, distributes solar energy over 2.4 kilometers of power lines to 70 households, two telecommunications towers, the clothing manufacturing unit and several other small businesses.

Solar mini-grids usually rely on one or two large users of power — often mobile phone towers — to provide a stable base revenue for the system. But as solar electricity becomes available in areas beyond the traditional grid, power-hungry small businesses are emerging that could become anchor users.

Kamlapur’s garment factory, for instance, consumes 10 kilowatts of power each day — the same as the telecom towers, said Ketan Bhatt, an OMC official in Uttar Pradesh state.

The state in 2016 became India’s first to put in place a mini-grid policy, recognizing private solar companies as legitimate players in India’s push to get power to all.

Company owners, in turn, say solar mini-grids — which can be more reliable than the unstable grid power their competitors rely on — is giving them a business advantage.

“Because the power supply is steady, we are regularly able to deliver on contract deadlines, which in turn enhances our reputation to bag more contracts,” said Mohammad Riyaz, who set up the Kamlapur garment unit in 2016.

Rohit Chandra, a co-founder of OMC, said he was seeing many solar power users moving beyond simply buying power for home lighting and appliances. Now, he said, they are harnessing solar energy for profit.

“We see barbers installing televisions and fans in their shops to attract more customers. Carpenters buy electric saws and wood polishers, fruit sellers are adding electric juicers. Health centers and dispensaries are coming up in underserved villages too,” Chandra said in a telephone interview.

“People are now continuously climbing,” he said.

Sangeeta Singh, of the Uttar Pradesh New and Renewable Energy Development Agency, said rural villagers “are willing to pay for assured, customized hours of supply, even at a higher price.”

“The myth that rural consumers will not pay for electricity is now demolished,” added Jaideep Mukherji, the CEO of Smart Power India (SPI). “Over the last two years we’ve discovered not only do rural consumers pay for the electricity, 93 percent pay on time.”

SPI is backed by the the U.S.-based Rockefeller Foundation’s $75 million Smart Power for Rural Development initiative, which aims to get power the “last mile” to users without it in India, Myanmar and sub-Saharan Africa.

SPI works with seven private mini-grid operators, including OMC, in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand — some of India’s least electrified states — to boost demand for solar mini-grid power and help develop rural economies.

The aim is both to improve life for poor people in power-hungry regions and help make sure solar mini-grid power is financially feasible for its operators, Mukherji said.

Chandra, of OMC, said that, on average, after supplying reliable power for a year, “we see around 30 micro-enterprises come up in each village.”

Though most are expansions of existing businesses, some are new ventures — such as a new water purifying plant in Kamlapur.

Sanskrit language teacher Aparna Mishra has just invested 400,000 rupees ($6,240) to set up a reverse osmosis water purifier.

Starting later this month, 100 customers — including schools, hotels and homes in the area — will begin receiving 20-liter refillable jars of water, dropped off at their doorstep, the entrepreneur said.

Mishra’s two-year target is to produce 3,000 liters of clean water a day, delivered over a 12-km radius from the 5-kilowatt plant.

“If villagers can understand the link between good health and clean drinking water from my plant, that itself is the biggest return on my investment,” the 26-year-old told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

An assessment of Smart Power India villages at the end of 2016 found that after two years of access to mini-grid power, small businesses using it had increased their monthly income by 13 percent.

A Price Too High?

While Smart Power India is reaching a growing share of communities without electricity, a 2017 study by the International Center for Research on Women found that large numbers of women and poor families still lack access to clean energy, even in areas where it is available.

For some of them, the cost of private mini-grid power is a deterrent to using it.

Riyaz’s clothing factory, for instance, pays 25 rupees (39 cents) for each kilowatt of the 10 kilowatts of power it uses each day — well above the 11 to 17 rupees that rural users of grid power pay.

“The electricity bill pinches,” the 45-year-old tailor said.

Chandra, of OMC, admitted that “on the face of it, our charges for reliable power might look high.”

But grid power users in Uttar Pradesh must pay a minimum monthly fee of 1,000 rupees, he said. With many small solar businesses — such as phone recharging — using less power, and even larger businesses often saving energy by using efficient machines, solar mini-grid power can come out cheaper, he said.
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Colombia’s President Juan Manuel Santos said on Tuesday the country needs international aid to help cope with the humanitarian crisis caused by hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans fleeing over the border to escape the economic crisis at home.

“I appreciate the offers of financial and other aid from the international community. We are fully prepared to receive them. We need them because unfortunately this problem gets worse day by day,” Santos said at an event in Bogota.

Last week, Santos tightened border controls and heightened security in frontier towns.

Colombia’s migration authority has said that the number of Venezuelans living in Colombia increased 62 percent to more than 550,000 in the second half of 2017. Colombia has estimated that it costs $5 per day to give each Venezuelan migrant food and lodging.

As the number of Venezuelans crossing the border increases, including unattended children who get free vaccinations and education, Colombia estimates it would need $30 million to build an assistance center to give the migrants a temporary place to stay before deciding their next move.

Venezuela is in the throes of a protracted, severe recession that has cast many people into abject poverty. That, combined with hyperinflation in the oil-rich country, has led to the mass exodus.

Last Thursday, Santos said he would institute stricter migration controls, temporarily suspend new daily entry cards, and deploy 3,000 new security personnel, including 2,120 more soldiers, along the 2,219 km (1,379-mile) shared frontier.

About 1.3 million Venezuelans have registered for the special migration card that allows them to cross the border by day to buy food and other products that are scarce in their own country.

While Venezuelan professionals like doctors and engineers have found work in big cities or in Colombia’s oil industry, most of the poor have settled in Colombian border towns.
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Canada and the United States exchanged barbs Tuesday over sluggish negotiations to update NAFTA, reflecting mounting tensions over trade talks that appear unlikely to conclude on schedule.

The talks have effectively stalled as Canada and Mexico seek to address wide-ranging U.S. demands for changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement. The early March deadline for wrapping up the talks has been extended to at least early April, officials said. But participants have said privately it could take months longer than that.

Steve Verheul, Canada’s chief negotiator, told an Ottawa audience that the United States aimed to weaken Canada and Mexico rather than ensure that the $1.2 trillion trilateral trade pact benefited all three members.

A few minutes earlier, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer pointedly said in Washington that talks with Mexico over NAFTA were going well. He made no mention of Canada.

U.S. President Donald Trump frequently threatens to walk away from NAFTA unless big changes are made. He blames the pact for U.S. manufacturing job losses, and his remarks about quitting have unsettled financial markets.

U.S. seen as inflexible

Verheul said the talks had achieved little progress on major issues so far and characterized U.S. negotiators as inflexible.

His comments were easily the gloomiest public remarks about the talks yet by a Canadian official.

“The U.S. approach is to focus on the U.S. perspective only, rather than a North American perspective. So they are looking to strengthen the U.S. and by doing that weaken Canada and Mexico within the North American economy,” Verheul told a conference organized by the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.

Canada has made a number of what it calls creative proposals to address the U.S. insistence that the North American content of autos be raised.

Washington also wants a clause that would allow any NAFTA member to pull out after five years.

Verheul said a U.S. demand that would slash the amount of government procurement contracts for Canadian and Mexican firms “is the worst offer ever made by the U.S. in any trade negotiation.”

Mexico has said the autos rule of origin would have to be toughened, but gave no details.

Verheul declined to directly address Lighthizer’s comment, telling reporters Canada would not walk away.

“We have no choice but to continue to … impress on the U.S. that this cannot be a winner-takes-all agreement,” he said. “It’s going to take a lot more time at the negotiating table to try to grind through these issues.”

Last week, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada “might very well be better off” not signing an updated version of the NAFTA trade pact rather than accepting a bad deal.
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Valentine’s Day is probably the most romantic holiday. In the United States, with people sending 190 million Valentine’s Day cards and spending around $100 per person on gifts. Instead of going out for a restaurant dinner for the holiday, a new idea is taking hold. These days more couples are planning to do something together. Classes like painting and cooking are a popular. Mariia Prus checked out the options for couples at one of Washington’s fanciest hotels.
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