Another solid month for the U.S. economy as American companies added 200,000 new workers to their payrolls last month. The unemployment rate remained unchanged at 4.1 percent, but wages are rising. Although the number of unemployed Americans continues to fall, recruiting agencies say they’ve never been busier. Mil Arcega explains.
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Month: February 2018
The Federal Reserve announced Friday that it was imposing more penalties on Wells Fargo, freezing the bank’s growth until it can prove it has improved its internal controls. In addition, bank agreed to replace four board members.
It’s the latest blow against the San Francisco bank that has had its reputation tarnished by revelations it opened phony customer accounts and sold auto insurance to customers who did not need it.
The new penalties were announced on Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s last day at the central bank.
“We cannot tolerate pervasive and persistent misconduct at any bank,” Yellen said in a statement. “The enforcement action we are taking today will ensure that Wells Fargo will not expand until it is able to do so safely and with the protections needed to manage all of its risks and protect its customers.”
The Fed said it was restricting the bank’s assets to the level where they stood at the end of last year until it can demonstrate that it has improved its internal controls.
Stock price drops
The announcement came after the close of trading on Wall Street. The bank’s stock fell more than 6 percent in after-hours trading.
Wells Fargo has 16 members on its board of directors. It agreed to replace three directors by April and another one by year’s end. The letter did not say whether particular board members were being singled out. Fed officials referred questions about who will be replaced to the bank.
In a statement, Wells Fargo said it was “confident” it would satisfy the Fed’s requirements.
“We take this order seriously and are focused on addressing all of the Federal Reserve’s concerns,” the bank’s CEO, Timothy Sloan, said. “It is important to note that the consent order is not related to any new matters, but to prior issues where we have already made significant progress.”
Sloan said that “while there is still more work to do, we have made significant improvements over the past year to our governance and risk management that address concerns highlighted in this consent order.”
The Fed’s new order marked the latest chapter in a series of scandals that have rocked the bank in recent years.
Fake accounts
Wells Fargo has admitted that employees opened more than 3 million fake accounts in order to meet sales quotas. It ended up paying $185 million to regulators and settled a class-action suit for $142 million.
It also has admitted it signed up hundreds of thousands of auto loan customers for auto insurance they did not need. Some of those customers had their cars repossessed because they could not afford both the auto loan and insurance payments.
And Wells Fargo also offered refunds to customers last year after acknowledging that its mortgage bankers unfairly charged them fees to lock in interest rates on mortgages.
The Fed’s action came on a 3-0 vote. Randal Quarles, who is the Fed’s vice chairman for supervision, has recused himself from participating in matters involving Wells Fargo.
With Yellen’s departure, Fed officials said that the central bank would still be able to deal with Wells Fargo issues with the two remaining board members — Jerome Powell, who has been a member of the Fed’s board since 2012 and is taking over for Yellen as chairman on Monday, and Lael Brainard.
Marvin Goodfriend, an economics professor from Carnegie Mellon University, has been nominated by President Donald Trump for one of the vacancies on the seven-member board, but the Senate has not yet acted on the nomination. Trump has not yet nominated people to fill the other vacancies.
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Spain has extradited to the United States a Russian citizen who is suspected of being one of the world’s most notorious spammers.
Pyotr Levashov, a 37-year-old from St. Petersburg, was arrested in April while vacationing with his family in Barcelona.
U.S. authorities had asked for him to be detained on charges of fraud and unauthorized interception of electronic communications. He was scheduled to be arraigned late Friday in a federal courthouse in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where a grand jury indicted him last year.
A statement from Spain’s National Police said officers handed Levashov over to U.S. marshals Friday. The extradition was approved in October by Spain’s National Court, which rejected a counter-extradition request from Russia.
The Russian Embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Army of botnets
Authorities in the U.S. say they have linked Levashov to a series of powerful botnets, or networks of hijacked computers, that were capable of pumping out billions of spam emails. An indictment unsealed last year said he commanded the sprawling Kelihos botnet, which at times allegedly involved more than 100,000 compromised computers that sent phony emails advertising counterfeit drugs, harvested users’ logins and installed malware that intercepted bank account passwords.
On a typical day, the network would generate and distribute more than 2,500 spam emails, according to the indictment.
Levashov’s lawyers have alleged the case is politically motivated and that the U.S. wants him for reasons beyond his alleged cybercrimes. They had argued that he should be tried in Spain instead, and pointed to evidence showing that he gained access to Russian state secrets while studying in St. Petersburg.
Levashov’s U.S.-based lawyer, Igor Litvak, didn’t return emails or calls seeking comment Friday.
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Male rats exposed to very high levels of the kind of radiation emitted by cellphones developed tumors in the tissues around their hearts, according to a draft report by U.S. government researchers on the potential health risks of the devices.
Female rats and mice exposed in the same way did not develop tumors, according to the preliminary report from the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP), a part of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
The findings add to years of research meant to help settle the debate over whether cellphone radiation is harmful.
However, NTP scientists and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were quick to say the findings could not be extrapolated to humans and that current safety limits on cellphone radiation are protective.
The 10-year, $25 million studies — the most comprehensive assessments of health effects and exposure to radiofrequency radiation in rats and mice to date — do raise new questions about exposure to the ubiquitous devices.
John Bucher, a senior scientist with NTP, said the tumors seen in the studies are “similar to tumors previously reported in some studies of frequent cellphone users.”
Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, noted that the studies were negative for common tumors.
“These draft reports are bound to create a lot of concern, but in fact they won’t change what I tell people: The evidence for an association between cellphones and cancer is weak, and so far, we have not seen a higher cancer risk in people,” he said in a statement on Twitter.
Brawley said if cellphone users are concerned about this data in animals, they should wear an earpiece.
Different kind of radiation
Unlike ionizing radiation such as that from gamma rays, radon and X-rays, which can break chemical bonds in the body and are known to cause cancer, radiofrequency devices such as cellphones and microwaves emit radiofrequency energy, a form of non-ionizing radiation.
The concern with this type of radiation is that it produces energy in the form of heat, and frequent exposure against the skin could alter brain cell activity, as some studies have suggested.
In the NTP study, rats and mice were exposed to higher levels of radiation for longer periods of time than what people experience with even the highest level of cellphone use, and their entire bodies were exposed all at once, according to the draft report.
Cellphones typically emit lower levels of radiation than maximum levels allowed, the draft report said.
NTP, a part of the National Institutes of Health, will hold an external expert review of its complete findings from these rodent studies on March 26-28.
Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, head of the FDA’s radiological health division, said there is not enough evidence to say cellphone use poses health risks to people.
“Even with frequent daily use by the vast majority of adults, we have not seen an increase in events like brain tumors,” he said in a statement. “We believe the current safety limits for cellphones are acceptable for protecting the public
health.”
Nevertheless, the findings are potentially a concern for device makers, especially the world’s three biggest smartphone sellers, Apple Inc., Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and China’s Huawei Technologies.
The CTIA, the trade association representing AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc., Apple Inc., Sprint Corp., DISH Network Corp. and others, said on Friday that previous studies have shown cellphone RF energy emissions have no known heath risks.
“We understand that the NTP draft reports for its mice and rat studies will be put out for comment and peer review so that their significance can be assessed,” the group said.
Samsung and Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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U.S. stocks slumped Friday, pulling down the Dow Jones industrial average by more than 650 points and handing the market its worst week in two years.
Technology, banks and energy stocks accounted for much of the broad slide. Several major companies, including Exxon Mobil and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, sank after reporting weak earnings.
Fears of rising inflation sent bond yields higher and contributed to the stock market swoon after the government reported that wages grew last month at the fastest pace in eight years.
The sharp drop follows a long period of unprecedented calm in the market. Stocks haven’t had a pullback of 10 percent or more in two years, and hit their latest record highs just one week ago.
“We’ve enjoyed low interest rates for so long, we’re having to deal with a little bit higher rates now, so the market is trying to figure out what that could mean for inflation,” said Darrell Cronk, head of the Wells Fargo Investment Institute.
The increase in bond yields hurts stocks in two ways: it makes it more expensive for companies to borrow money, and it also makes bonds more appealing to investors than riskier assets such as stocks.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 59.85 points, or 2.1 percent, to 2,762.13. That’s the biggest loss for the benchmark index since September 2016. The S&P 500 has lost 3.9 percent since hitting a record high a week ago.
The Dow Jones industrial average lost 665.75 points, or 2.4 percent, to 25,520.96. The Nasdaq slid 144.92 points, or 2 percent, to 7,240.95. The Russell 2000 index of smaller-company stocks gave up 32.59 points, or 2.1 percent, to 1,547.27.
Rise in interest rates
While interest rates are still low by historical standards, meaning borrowing is still relatively cheap for businesses and people, they’ve been rising more swiftly, and that’s what has markets on edge.
“The pace of rate increases is more important than the level,” said Nate Thooft, senior portfolio manager at Manulife Asset Management.
The increase in rates has been driven by the prospect of stronger economic growth, and higher inflation, in the U.S. and abroad.
Bond prices declined again Friday, pushing yields higher. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note, a benchmark for interest rates on many kinds of loans, including mortgages, climbed to 2.83 percent, the highest level in roughly four years. The rate was at 2.41 percent four weeks ago and 2.66 percent on Monday.
“Once we started going north of 2.5 percent, and you put that together with an overbought market, it had the ingredients of a sell-off, especially since January was so strong,” said Jeff Zipper, regional investment strategist at U.S. Bank Private Wealth Management.
The S&P 500, which many index funds track, soared 5.6 percent in January, its biggest monthly gain since March 2016.
The expectation among investors has long been for a gradual rise in interest rates, as the Federal Reserve slowly pulls back from the stimulus that it implemented for the economy amid the Great Recession. But if rates rise more quickly than expected, it could upset markets.
The key concern is that the Fed will respond to higher inflation by raising its key interest rate more quickly than expected. The government’s latest job and wage data stoked those concerns Friday.
U.S. jobs
U.S. employers added a robust 200,000 jobs in January, slightly above market expectations for an 185,000 increase. Meanwhile wages rose sharply, suggesting employers are competing more fiercely for workers. The figures point to an economy on strong footing even in its ninth year of expansion, fueled by global economic growth and healthy consumer spending at home.
That’s good news for Main Street USA, but not for Wall Street. Investors fear the pickup in hourly wages, along with a recent uptick in inflation, may make it more likely that the Fed will raise short-term interest rates more quickly in the coming months. Some economists were predicting Friday that the central bank will raise its benchmark rate four times this year, rather than the three times most previously expected.
“With financial conditions continuing to ease and core price inflation also starting to pick up, we expect this will persuade the Fed to hike rates four times this year,” Andrew Hunter, an economist with Capital Economics, wrote in a published note Friday.
The market slide may have been overdue, particularly after the strong start for stocks this year where the S&P 500 had its best January in two decades.
The global economy is still strong, corporate profits and sales have been better than expected this reporting season and buyers for stocks still remain, all reasons to be optimistic about stocks, said Nate Thooft, senior portfolio manager at Manulife Asset Management.
“It’s appealing, these 2 to 3 percent pullbacks,” said Thooft, who had been trimming some of his stock holdings after the market’s big January gains. “We look at this and say, ‘Maybe it’s your first day to buy a little bit.'”
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Stocks closed sharply lower in New York on Friday, extending a weeklong slide, as the Dow Jones industrial average plunged more than 600 points.
The drop capped stocks’ worst week in two years. The Dow’s drop was its biggest in percentage terms since June 2016.
Several giant U.S. companies’ shares dropped after reporting weak earnings, including Exxon Mobil and Alphabet. Apple and Chevron also fell.
Bond yields rose sharply after the government reported the fastest wage growth in eight years, stoking fears of inflation.
The Dow fell 665 points, or 2.5 percent, to 25,520.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 index dropped 59 points, or 2.1 percent, to 2,762. The S&P is down almost 4 percent since hitting a record high a week ago.
The Nasdaq was off 144 points, or 2 percent, to 7,240.
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James Ivory didn’t see “Call Me By Your Name” with an audience until the week before he was nominated for its screenplay. He caught it at a New York theater with a good audience, he says, that applauded at the end. It was his first tangible taste of the adulation for the film he wrote, about first love in Northern Italy, since it began its celebrated run at last year’s Sundance Film Festival.
“I’ve just been thinking: What is it about the film that people respond to so much?” Ivory says in a recent phone interview from his upstate New York home in Claverack. “And I think it’s a story about a happy love in a beautiful place. I think that just appeals to people. It ought to.”
The pure and glittering romance of “Call Me By Your Name” has taken on an almost escapist quality in an awards season consumed with sexual harassment revelations throughout Hollywood. But if “Call Me by Your Name,” about the sun-dappled relationship between 17-year-old Elio (Timothee Chalamet) and a visiting grad student (Armie Hammer), radiates with the tumultuous emotions of youth, it’s also composed with the insight of age.
Expected to win
Ivory is 89, and should he win the Oscar for adapting Andre Aciman’s 2007 novel — as Ivory is widely expected to — he’ll become the oldest Oscar winner ever. (That is, unless the 89-year-old French filmmaker Agnes Varda, born a week before Ivory, also wins at the March 4 ceremony. Her “Faces Places” is up for best documentary.)
But regardless of the outcome, “Call Me By Your Name” has proven an unlikely yet altogether fitting encore for a master filmmaker whose films have already pocketed 31 Oscar nominations and six wins. For some 50 years, Ivory was half of perhaps the most long-running and illustrious independent filmmaking duo in film history. With Ismail Merchant, his partner and producer, they made up Merchant Ivory Productions, a name virtually synonymous with literate, refined period dramas.
Together, with their regular screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, they more or less wrote the book on literary adaptations with films such as “Remains of the Day,” “Howard’s End,” “Maurice,” “A Room With a View” and “The Golden Bowl.” Though sometimes superficially seen as stuffy portraits of upper-class life, the recent and ongoing 4K restorations of their work by Cohen Media Group has only enhanced the films’ intimacy of character and pristine economy of storytelling.
“A lot of directors don’t bother to go back and look at their films, but I do,” says Ivory. “If I hear that a film of mine is going to be shown on a big screen somewhere and I haven’t seen it in a while, I make a point to get to see it. I just want to see it up on the big screen. My feelings don’t usually change much about it. I happen to like all our movies.”
‘Three-headed monster’
For filmmakers known for tales about British aristocracy, they were an unusual trio: Ivory, the Oregon son of a sawmill owner; Merchant, the son of a Bombay textile dealer whose family protested the 1947 partitioning of India; and Jhabvala, a German Jew who fled Britain during World War II. Merchant called them “a three-headed monster.”
Merchant died in 2015, Jhabvala in 2013 and Ivory’s last film was 2009’s “The City of Your Final Destination,” which he prepped with Merchant and which Jhabvala wrote from Peter Cameron’s novel. The losses were profound, but Ivory never wanted to retire.
“No! I still don’t,” Ivory says. “In fact, I’m working on a new screenplay. Maybe it’s absurd to imagine that I would actually get to direct it at my age. But I don’t know why. I’m much healthier than other people who are doing movies. And I’m in great shape. It’s always a matter of convincing the insurance people. They seem to think that after a certain age, you’re just going to fall over or something.”
For the past several years, Ivory has been trying to mount a “Richard II” film, with a script penned by Chris Terrio (“Argo,” “Justice League”) and potentially Tom Hiddleston and Damian Lewis starring. “A Shakespeare film does not grab the hearts of financiers, I can tell you,” he says.
Concerns over Ivory’s age also fed into his experience on “Call Me By Your Name.” The rights to Aciman’s novel were acquired by Ivory’s neighbors, Peter Spears and Howard Rosenman. They asked Ivory to be an executive producer, and Ivory accepted.
Script takes a year
After some difficulty finding a director or financing, the producers met with Luca Guadagnino, who suggested he co-direct with Ivory. Ivory again accepted but he wanted to write the screenplay. Ivory spent a year on the script but the co-directing framework was less appealing to investors.
“We wanted to make it with him as the director, but we were disappointed by the market,” says Guadagnino. “When we realized that could have been made was a teenie, teenie tiny movie in a very small amount of time, and that there was some interest in me doing it, we said, ‘OK.’ He was very generous. He said, ‘I bless this project if you do it.’”
“James is at the peak of his career,” added Guadagnino. “I can’t explain how full of life is James. It’s extraordinary. His wonderment and love of discovery. I am 46 and he’s almost 90, and the energy in his body is really more than mine.”
Ivory’s script, which he typed on a typewriter, begins with a description of the villa owned by Ellio’s family and an atmosphere “of upper-middle class comfort but nothing princely, or run-down aristocratic.” As is commonplace, there were changes along the way. To save money, the film was uprooted from Sicily and re-set around Guadagnino’s town of Crema. The film’s beloved final close-up — which even Aciman has praised as superior to his ending — was originally located not by a fire but while Elio was hanging a candle on a Christmas tree.
A few issues to be settled
The collaboration wasn’t without issues. Ivory went to arbitration with the Writers Guild over whether Guadagnino deserved a co-writer credit. The WGA ruled he didn’t. Ivory has also previously suggested disappointment that the film didn’t feature more of the nudity in the script. (Both Chalamet and Hammer had contract clauses against frontal nudity.) But Ivory has walked back those comments.
“I think it has to do with nationalities,” he says. “In ‘A Room With a View,’ you have three young Englishmen running around naked and laughing and whooping and jumping in the water. It’s something the English don’t apparently find troublesome. They like that. But you would never get three American actors to do that. It’s just not in our nature, somehow, to expose ourselves like that. It’s a cultural thing.”
“Call Me By Your Name” is a kind of bookend to Ivory’s 1987 film “Maurice,” a restoration of which was released last summer. Now regarded as a landmark in gay cinema, Ivory’s adaptation of E.M. Forster’s posthumously published novel is about two Cambridge students (James Wilby, Hugh Grant) who fall in love in Edwardian England. Released at the height of the AIDS epidemic, it dared something groundbreaking: a happy ending.
In “Maurice,” their love is tortured and strained by the times. But in “Call Me By Your Name,” any hurdles to romance are entirely interior. It’s about, Ivory says, “young love that doesn’t know how to trust itself.” Having both films in theaters a few months apart, Ivory grants, has been gratifying.
“It’s been a really interesting year, I have to say.”
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All five former members of the Spice Girls have met up amid rumors of a plan to reunite the girl-power group.
Photos posted by several group members on social media showed Victoria “Posh Spice” Beckham, Melanie “Sporty Spice” Chisholm, Emma “Baby Spice” Bunton, Melanie “Scary Spice” Brown and Geri “Ginger Spice” Horner.
They had been seen earlier Friday arriving at Horner’s home north of London, along with former manager Simon Fuller.
The Sun newspaper reported the quintet is considering several projects, including a TV talent show, though not a live tour.
The Spice Girls were a 1990s phenomenon, with hits including “Wannabe.” They split in 2000 and last reunited at the 2012 London Olympics.
Now the group’s highest-profile member is Beckham, a fashion designer married to former soccer star David Beckham.
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Britain’s Prince Andrew says an Oct. 12 wedding date has been set for his daughter, Princess Eugenie.
Andrew, the third child of Queen Elizabeth II, announced the date Friday on his official Twitter account.
Eugenie, the 27-year-old daughter of Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, will marry Jack Brooksbank at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor.
Eugenie’s cousin Prince Harry and his American fiancée, Meghan Markle, will marry at the same chapel on May 19.
Eugenie, one of the queen’s granddaughters, is eighth in line to the British throne.
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Britain has made clear its desire to be part of China’s so-called “One Belt One Road” initiative — a cornerstone of President Xi Jinping’s vision to boost Chinese investment and influence across Asia, Europe and Africa. But there are concerns about the financial and humanitarian costs of the vast infrastructure projects being undertaken.
British Prime Minister Theresa May recently visited Beijing, leading a delegation of ministers and business leaders in an effort to boost trade after Britain’s European Union exit. The two countries signed deals worth $12.7 billion, and May hailed a “golden era” of Sino-British relations.
Her ambassador to Beijing, Barbara Woodward, earlier outlined Britain’s hopes of cooperating in China’s “One Belt One Road” initiative.
“The first is, we’d like to collaborate on practical projects,” she said. “The second area where we’d like to collaborate with China is bringing some of our city of London financing experience. Because these projects are big projects, particularly infrastructure, they require complex funding mechanisms.”
Too complex, according to some.
Approximately 9,500 kilometers away in Uganda, one of China’s latest “One Belt One Road” projects is nearly complete. Soaring above the muddy swamp between the capital, Kampala, and its airport, the new 51-kilometer (31-mile) four-lane expressway was built by the China Communications Construction Company. Its $580 million cost was met with a loan from Beijing.
Kampala’s mayor, Erias Lukwago, says the price is too high.
“Even these Chinese who are coming here from — even these commercial banks we are borrowing from, Exim Banks and what not, the burden will finally come on our shoulders as Ugandans, our children and grandchildren will have to shoulder this burden which is very, very unfortunate,” Lukwago said.
Through the “One Belt” initiative, China has invested across Africa, Asia and the Middle East, and even into eastern Europe.
However, Britain’s decision to get involved should not be taken lightly, warns Barnaby Willitts-King of the Overseas Development Institute.
“Particularly in fragile parts of the world where China’s Belt and Road initiative is going to be running through, there are a lot of potential risks around humanitarian concerns, environmental concerns, that I think focusing on just on a trade deal might overlook,” Willitts-King said. “But it’s also got an advantage. The U.K. has worked and invested in a lot of these countries over the years. And it could actually provide some very practical advice to China.”
Washington has gone further in its criticism of China’s trade and foreign policy.
“China, as it does in emerging markets throughout the world, offers the appearance of an attractive path to development. But in reality, this often involves trading short-term gains for long-term dependency,” U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Thursday, ahead of his trip to Latin America.
Many emerging economies welcome China’s investments, and the involvement of countries such as Britain. However, there are concerns that mounting debts will cause big problems further down the road.
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A rare glimpse inside the everyday lives of polar bears may give scientists clues about their decline.
With bear-cams and activity trackers around the necks of nine polar bears, researchers monitored more than a week of their daily activity during peak hunting season in the Beaufort Sea above Alaska.
Five of the nine bears lost weight over that time, burning far more calories during their hunt than they were catching.
The study, published in the journal Science, raises questions about the top predators’ future. As climate change melts their prime hunting grounds, scientists expect polar bears will have a harder time finding prey.
Seal, a meal
The bears spend much of their time on sea ice, where it’s easiest to catch their favorite meals: fatty, energy-rich seals.
But sea ice is shrinking by 14 percent per decade as the planet warms. In addition, the ice is breaking up earlier in the spring and freezing later in the fall.
Polar bear numbers are declining. They are not endangered, but they are vulnerable, as defined by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. That means their population is expected to drop by 30 percent or more within three polar bear generations.
But it’s not clear if that’s because the bears are not catching enough seals, or if they are having to work harder and travel farther to find them.
Biologist Anthony Pagano with the U.S. Geological Survey and colleagues went out on the ice-covered Beaufort Sea and captured nine polar bears with tranquilizer darts.
They weighed the bears and took blood samples to measure their metabolism. And they fitted each bear with a collar equipped with a camera, GPS and motion tracker.
They recaptured each bear about 10 days later, took measurements and retrieved the cameras.
Watching the video “was really quite fascinating,” Pagano said. Polar bears spend most of their lives in very remote areas, so researchers don’t often get a chance to see their daily lives.
Pagano’s team did. They watched bears hunt. They watched them court and mate.
But mostly, they watched them sit.
“These bears are active about 35 percent of the time. Which means they’re resting about 65 percent of the time,” Pagano said. “Which means if you’re watching video of bears and trying to document their behaviors, you’re spending a good portion of your time watching them rest.”
Crash diet
One of the most surprising findings was how much the bears’ weight changed in the short time scientists watched them.
Five of the bears didn’t catch anything while they were monitored. Four lost about 10 percent of their body weight.
For a 180-kilogram bear, Pagano said, “you’re talking about 18 to 20 kilograms that they’re losing over the course of 10 days. Which is a pretty remarkable amount of mass to lose over such a short amount of time.”
They studied the bears in March and April, before the sea ice began to break up. “This is really the beginning of the time when they’re supposed to be putting on a lot of body mass to sustain them for most of the rest of the year,” he added.
The scientists also found that the bears’ metabolism was more than one-and-a-half times as high as previous estimates.
“Polar bears need to be catching a lot of seals,” Pagano explained. As sea ice continues to decline and break up earlier, he added, it’s likely going to get harder for them.
Pagano noted that polar bears in other parts of the Arctic spend more time on land than do the bears he studied on the Beaufort Sea. If the sea ice melts completely in the summer, as it is expected to, many of them will likely move onto land.
But how well the land can sustain them is “a big unknown,” Pagano added.
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February in Minneapolis, Minnesota, is cold — the kind of cold that stings your face and burns your lungs as soon as you walk outside. Today’s temperature is minus 10 degrees Celsius, and local business owner Brad Rohles is getting ready for work.
Boots? Check.
Heavy jacket? Check.
Gloves? Check.
Bomber hat? Check.
“We are in Minnesota,” Rohles said, “so when it’s really cold outside sometimes, it can hit minus 20 degrees. And for a lot of people, that’s a little too cold to be walking around in the elements.”
WATCH: World’s Longest Skyway Gives Minneapolis Residents a Break From Harsh Winter
Built for winter
Luckily for locals, Minneapolis is a city built to handle the worst that winter dishes out.
Snow plows patrol roads and highways while smaller Bobcat bulldozers remove slushy buildup as fast as it hits the ground. The city can easily get more than 130 centimeters of snow a year, and it is quickly removed from local roads with an almost ruthless efficiency. That only leaves the temperatures and wind chill to deal with.
“Bright, sunny days in the winter are always the worst,” Rohles said. “They are always the coldest.”
The Skyway
While minus 10 degrees Celsius is about average for this time of year in Minneapolis, the city has its way of handling that: the Skyway. Here, the majority of downtown buildings are connected by elevated and enclosed pedestrian footbridges — the longest continuous system of skywalks in the world. The Skyway allows residents to walk in climate-controlled comfort for more than 18 kilometers across 80 full city blocks.
“All in all, I think I step outside for about 30 seconds in any given day, if I have to,” Rohles said.
The Minneapolis Skyway is more than just a way for residents to get to work; it’s a city within a city and, importantly, it allows locals to deal with the weather in their own way. It has shops and bars, restaurants and hotels. It connects business and sports arenas, stores and apartment buildings. There are a thousand different things you can do within the Skyway without actually having to step foot outside.
Sharri Murphy is another Minneapolis resident who is downtown volunteering for this week’s Super Bowl festivities.
“It makes it convenient for everybody to get to places,” Murphy explained. “I used the light rail to get downtown today, and then to the Skyway, so I’ve only been outside for about a block and a half. It’s an easy way to do it, to enjoy the city, and get to everything.”
Fittest American city
But Rohles is quick to add that just because he has the luxury of remaining indoors almost all day long, that doesn’t mean he does.
“We are one of the most active places in the country, and it doesn’t matter what the weather is,” he said. “It could be minus 20 degrees outside and you’re driving down the road, and you’re going to see more bicycles than cars on the street. People are running and training for marathons in the middle of January.”
This is key to understanding the mindset of Minneapolis. The city was named the fittest in America by the American College of Sports Medicine in 2017, a remarkable achievement considering the weather residents have to deal with. Minnesota is known as “the land of 10,000 lakes,” which means locals have an abundance of possible outdoor activities regardless of the season; swimming in the summer becomes ice fishing in the winter.
But for now, Rohles is happy to make the famous Minneapolis Skyway his second home.
VOA’s Arash Arabasadi contributed to this report.
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Minneapolis is known for being cold — extremely cold. But when the temperatures drop and the wind chill bites, how do local residents cope and still carry on with their day-to-day lives? VOA’s Brian Allen will take you up into the sky, or more specifically, up into the Skyway to find out.
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As virtual reality becomes more popular, different types of 360-degree cameras are popping up for consumers. One that stands out from the crowd for its unique look and design are eye glasses with built-in cameras. Elizabeth Lee has the details.
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Just like every other health technology, prosthetics are now able to do things that were unimaginable a few years ago. The advances are happening with the help of machine learning, but also through human ingenuity. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Investigators in the unsolved 1981 drowning death of actress Natalie Wood have named her husband, actor Robert Wagner, as a “person of interest” in a case that stunned the nation.
Wood’s body was found floating off Santa Catalina Island the morning after she disappeared from a yachting party with Wagner, actor Christopher Walken and the boat’s captain. All had been drinking heavily.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Lieutenant John Corina tells CBS-TV’s 48 Hours, to be broadcast Saturday, “We know now that he [Wagner] was the last person to be with Natalie before she disappeared.”
Corina also said Wagner’s story of what happened that night has shifted over the years and “his version of events just don’t add up.”
The capitan told investigators he heard Wood and Wagner arguing that night. Wagner had written that it was he and Walken who argued and that he did not notice his wife was missing until he saw a small boat hooked onto the yacht was also gone.
Investigators originally ruled Wood’s death an accident, but reopened the case in 2011. The coroner has since amended Wood’s death certificate to read the cause of death as “drowning and other undetermined factors.”
Investigators say the 87-year-old Wagner is not a suspect, but just a person of interest, meaning he may have more information that he has yet to disclose. He has always denied responsibility for his wife’s death.
Wood, 43 when she died, started her career as a child actress and became a Hollywood icon, starring in such classics as Rebel Without a Cause, West Side Story, The Great Race, and Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.
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Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently declared that artificial intelligence fueled by powerful computers was more important to humanity than fire or electricity. And yet the search giant increasingly faces a variety of messy people problems as well.
The company has vowed to employ thousands of human checkers just to catch rogue YouTube posters, Russian bots and other purveyors of unsavory content. It’s also on a buying spree to find office space for its burgeoning workforce in pricey Silicon Valley.
For a company that built its success on using faceless algorithms to automate many human tasks, this focus on people presents something of a conundrum. Yet it’s also a necessary one as lawmakers ramp up the pressure on Google to deter foreign powers from abusing its platforms and its YouTube unit draws fire for offensive videos , particularly ones aimed at younger audiences.
In the latest quarter alone, Google parent Alphabet Inc. added 2,009 workers, for a total of 80,110. Over the last three years, it hired a net 2,245 people per quarter on average. That’s nearly 173 per week, or 25 people per day.
Some of the extra workers this year will come from its vow to have 10,000 workers across Google snooping out content policy violations that computers can’t catch on their own, representing “significant growth” in personnel.
Alphabet on Thursday reported a fourth-quarter loss of $3.02 billion, after reporting a profit in the same period a year earlier.
The Mountain View, California-based company said it had a loss of $4.35 per share, caused by provisions for U.S. tax changes enacted last year. Earnings, adjusted for pretax expenses, came to $9.70 per share.
The results missed Wall Street expectations. The average estimate of 14 analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research was for earnings of $10.12 per share.
The internet search leader posted revenue of $32.32 billion in the period. After subtracting Alphabet’s advertising commissions, revenue was $25.87 billion, exceeding Street forecasts. Twelve analysts surveyed by Zacks expected $25.65 billion.
Alphabet shares were down 4 percent at $1,119.22 in after-hours trading.
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Haiti’s teen women’s soccer team made history this week when it qualified for the country’s first FIFA Women’s Under-20 World Cup berth.
Star midfielder Sherly Jeudy scored the winning goal to lead the team to a 1-0 victory over Canada in the third-place game Sunday at the CONCACAF Women’s Under-20 Championship, held in Couva, Trinidad and Tobago.
“I’m very happy I was able to score the goal, but I’m even happier for Haiti as a country,” Jeudy said in a postgame interview. “I was just so very happy because we were able to qualify.”
Haiti has not qualified for the World Cup since 1973, which led to the men’s national team’s only appearance in the FIFA championship series, in 1974. The team was eliminated in the first round.
Both inside Haiti and in the diaspora, Haitians reacted happily to the news on social media, posting photos and videos of the team on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook with congratulatory messages.
“Bravo, ladies, we respect the sacrifices you made [to win] because soccer in Haiti is not easy,” Ansitho Pierre Louis posted in Creole on the Haitian Soccer Federation’s Facebook page. “I congratulate you, hang in there, keep working so we can shine at the World Cup. Much respect.”
VOA Creole reporter Pierre Nazon Beauliere caught up with the players during a stop in Miami before they returned to Haiti. Goalie Kerby Theus discussed their strategy heading into the match against Canada.
“We were very motivated and focused [going into the game],” Theus told VOA. “We weren’t worried about the loss to the United States [in the semifinals] . … We set qualifying for World Cup as our goal. We never entertained the thought of losing. It was important to us to achieve this goal for Haiti.”
Team physical therapist Aldride Joseph talked about the significance of the win for Haitians.
“The win means so many things to us, not just socially but also politically,” she told VOA. “Despite our country’s problems, you can see everyone is sending the girls congratulatory messages and expressing their joy — that means so much to us — and we’re going to keep working for the win [at the World Cup competition].”
Joseph said it was more than luck that helped Haiti clinch the berth. “We worked hard for this,” she said, adding that the women train twice a day to perfect their game.
Haitian Football Federation (FHF) President Dr. Yves Jean Bart said he was extremely proud of the athletes’ performances.
Jean Bart launched Haiti’s women’s soccer effort before the devastating Janurary 2010 earthquake that left hundreds of thousands dead. He said after the disaster that many countries stepped forward to help the federation get back on its feet.
He said the FHF’s goal now is to train the girls just like the boys and to also provide academic support in addition to the rigorous athletic training.
“We’re not going to France just to look around — we are aiming to win,” Jean Bart told VOA Creole. France will host the 2018 event. “I hope we will get to a point where we can face any team from any nation.”
The U-20 team’s return to Haiti was full of pomp and circumstance. Haitian President Jovenel Moise and Prime Minister Jacques Guy Lafontant met the team at the airport in Port-au-Prince with flowers, handshakes and praise for a job well done.
With an eye toward France in August, goalie Kerby Theus had this message for the fans: “Keep encouraging us, keep rooting for us and you’ll see — we’ll do even greater things in the future.”
Pierre Nazon Beauliere contributed to this report.
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