Electric-powered ground transport is slowly but steadily taking over from one based on fossil fuels. Electric cars, buses, bikes, scooters, even electric skateboards are growing more common on streets around the world. The next step is electric aviation, and airplane manufacturers are eyeing this potentially very lucrative market. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Month: May 2018
Peggy and David Rockefeller’s lavish artworks and other treasures set a new world record this week at a Christie’s auction, topping $800 million as the priciest single-owner collection.
That’s about twice the previous record of $484 million from a 2009 Paris sale of designer Yves Saint Laurent’s estate.
The three-day live sale of the late couple’s belongings ended Thursday with a $115 million star lot — a Picasso painting called “Fillette a la corbeille fleurie” of a naked girl holding a basket of flowers that once belonged to the writer Gertrude Stein, estimated to be worth $100 million. The runner-up, at $84 million, was a Monet canvas with his famed water lilies, “Nimpheas en fleur,” which surpassed its $50 million estimate and set a record for his art at auction against a previous high of $81 million.
Matisse’s “Odalisque Couchee aux Magnolias,” depicting a woman in a Turkish harem, sold for $80.8 million, topping the $70 million estimate and setting a new record for a Matisse, whose highest price at auction had been $48.8 million.
Rockefeller Mania
In what one art publication dubbed “Rockefeller Mania,” Christie’s said 100 percent of the 893 Rockefeller lots offered live had sold, for a total of $828 million, as well as all of the more than 600 lots sold online for $4.6 million.
Diego Rivera’s 1931 “The Rivals” went for the highest price ever paid for a Latin American artwork on the block, $9.8 million against a pre-auction estimate of $5 million to $7 million.
On Friday, the sale wasn’t over until the online-only bids were in. Anyone with a few hundred dollars could go for a piece of the opulence that surrounded the late Rockefeller couple, by bidding on, say, cufflinks or jewelry. A 14-carat gold money clip once filled with Rockefeller cash sold for $75,000 against an estimate of $800 to $1,200.
Eclectic tastes
The total 1,564 Rockefeller lots reflected the couple’s eclectic tastes in everything from fine furniture, porcelain and ceramics to duck decoys and blue-chip art that graced their various properties and David’s bank office. Paintings filled the walls of their Maine home, their Manhattan townhouse and a country mansion in the Pocantino Hills north of the city, complete with horses and cows.
For a whiff of that life, buyers were willing to pay prices way above the pre-auction estimates.
A rare Chinese blue and white “dragon” bowl from the Maine kitchen cabinet, valued at up to $150,000, went for $2.7 million. A bronze figure of the Buddhist deity Amitayus realized $2.5 million, against a $600,000 high estimate.
A 256-piece Sevres dessert service commissioned by Napoleon Bonaparte sold for $1.8 million — more than six times its high estimate.
Six George III “Gothick” Windsor Armchairs sold for $336,500 against a top estimate of $80,000, and an English wicker picnic hamper soared to $212,500, against a high estimate of $10,000.
Proceeds go to charity
All prices include buyers’ premiums. Christie’s bolstered the auction by guaranteeing the whole Rockefeller collection, not disclosing the minimum price at which a work would have to sell or buyers’ names. Many came from abroad, drawn to the New York power name that dominated the city’s privileged, philanthropic society for a century.
Peggy died in 1996, and David in 2017, as the last surviving grandson of the oil baron John D. Rockefeller. The couple’s son, David Rockefeller Jr., said auction proceeds would go to charity.
The collection ended up, appropriately, in Rockefeller Center off Fifth Avenue where Christie’s is located. John D. Rockefeller Jr. had helped finance and build the grand complex in the 1930s.
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The latest “Star Wars” movie did not have a smooth flight to the screen, but the director and cast of “Solo” say the scramble to remake the movie ultimately paid off, with early reaction ahead of the May 25 launch largely positive.
Original directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller were fired from “Solo: A Star Wars Story” midway through production, and Walt Disney Co. asked Ron Howard to come in to oversee extensive reshoots.
The film, which tells the origin story of Han Solo, premiered in Hollywood on Thursday and drew cheers and applause throughout from the crowds in two historic theaters, the first large audiences to see the finished product.
“We went so fast to get the movie ready,” Howard said in an interview with Reuters on Friday. “I was really on pins and needles, and I was so gratified to hear laughs and hear cheers in all the places I hoped and I dreamed that they would be. It was a good night. I slept well last night.”
Alden Ehrenreich, 28, stepped into the role of cowboy smuggler Han Solo, made famous by Harrison Ford in the original “Star Wars” trilogy that began in 1977. Ehrenreich plays a younger Solo just beginning his pilot training and seeking his own spaceship when he becomes involved in a dangerous mission in the galaxy far, far away.
“Game of Thrones” star Emilia Clarke, who portrays Solo’s childhood friend Qi’ra, said the change of directors produced less drama than people may think.
“Something that on paper sounds horrific was not in reality at all for someone who was in it and experienced and was living through it,” Clarke said. “Everyone who handled it was seamless and graceful.”
Fans around the world have debated how Ehrenreich, little known beyond a well-received performance in quirky 2016 comedy “Hail, Caesar,” would handle one of cinema’s most loved characters.
Ehrenreich confirmed he had signed a contract to play Solo in three movies and said he was anxious to step into the role again in future installments.
“By the end of the movie, he’s more like the guy we know, and that’s fun,” Ehrenreich said.
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A biopic about the man who founded one of Brazil’s largest evangelical churches has sold more tickets than any other film in recent memory in the South American country. But some have accused the church of cooking the books.
The film tells the story of Bishop Edir Macedo, who founded the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in the 1970s. Macedo is a powerful and controversial figure in Brazil who owns a media empire and has been dogged by accusations of malfeasance — allegations that the film portrays as a plot by the Catholic Church and Brazilian establishment to limit his power.
A company that measures media penetration, comScore, says the film “Nada a Perder” — “Nothing to Lose” — sold more than 11.7 million tickets between its release March 29 and Thursday. That makes the film, which is being released Friday in the United States, the most attended since 2002, the first year for which comScore has Brazilian box office data. The next closest film, a 2016 movie about the life of Moses, sold more than 11.3 million tickets.
Blockbuster sales but empty seats
But the Brazilian press has accused the church of inflating sales by buying up tickets. The Folha de S.Paulo newspaper sent reporters to movie theaters during the film’s opening weekend and said the screening rooms weren’t full, despite the blockbuster ticket sales. The church denies that and, in turn, accused the Brazilian media of disseminating “fake news” to damage its reputation.
“The Universal (church) never bought tickets for the film ‘Nada a Perder,’” the church said in a statement to The Associated Press. “That said, part of the success of the film, and therein lies the hatred of some segments of the press, comes from the initiative of volunteers from Universal and other denominations and religions, who have organized so that the largest number of people possible can see the film.”
It added that other religions do exactly the same thing: recommending to their followers things they believe in.
The film, which was produced by Paris Entretenimento, is based on Macedo’s life and ends with a recorded message from the man himself. The church says it was not involved in the film’s production, though it has vigorously promoted it on its website as has Macedo’s Record TV network. Another part of Macedo’s media empire, Record Filmes, has helped to screen the film in prisons and for remote communities, including indigenous groups. A sequel is planned.
The second most-attended film since comScore started keeping track is “Os Dez Mandamentos,” which Record Filmes produced. The third film is “Tropa de Elite 2,” the sequel to a popular Brazilian film about gang violence and police corruption in Rio de Janeiro. But comScore data shows that “Nada a Perder” may not reign for long: “Avengers: Infinity War,” which opened April 26 in Brazil, has more than 10.4 million ticket sales so far.
Luis Fernando Rodrigues was among five people who saw “Nada a Perder” at a movie theater in Sao Paulo on Thursday afternoon.
“This film is part of a holy war” over the image of Macedo and his church, said the 57-year-old architect. Even the debate over how many people saw the film is part of that battle, he said.
Gesturing at the empty theater, he added: “We don’t know if it’s because of the time of day or if it’s a manipulation.”
Controversy has long surrounded Macedo, a colorful character who has won both adoration and notoriety for taking on two of Brazil’s most entrenched institutions: the Catholic church and the Globo media empire. Brazil is the world’s most populous Catholic country, but evangelicals are on the rise: They account for 1 in 5 people, up from 1 in 20 a few decades ago, and evangelical lawmakers make up a powerful voting bloc in Congress. Macedo’s Universal church has been one of the motors of the group’s growth.
Fervent followers
Macedo was raised a Catholic, but the movie shows him searching for spiritual meaning elsewhere. In the film, his family experiments with traditional healers to cure his sister’s asthma and finally joins an evangelical church. But he ends up rejecting that church as too elitist and finally founds his own.
Over the years, he and his preachers have drawn the ire of Catholics for railing against their “idolatry” of saints and calling the pope the Antichrist.
But they have also drawn fervent followers, who have turned the Universal church into a powerful player in Brazilian politics and culture. Macedo’s nephew and a bishop in the church, Marcelo Crivella, was elected mayor of Rio de Janeiro in 2016, and the Universal church says it has 9 million followers in 110 countries, 7 million of whom are in Brazil.
Macedo himself has been dogged by accusations of financial crimes and exploiting his followers. He was briefly jailed in 1990s amid accusations of extortion, tax evasion and fraud, an episode portrayed in the film as proof of the power of his message and the great lengths that the Brazilian establishment will go to silence it.
In 2011, federal prosecutors accused Macedo of false representation, larceny by fraud, money laundering and forming a criminal association. A judge rejected some of those charges, and the statute of limitations expired for others. According to the Sao Paulo Federal Justice system, the money-laundering charge is still pending.
In a statement, the church said Macedo was the victim of “judicial persecution” and that it was sure that he would be found innocent in the remaining case.
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When Facebook recently said it would allow outside reviewers inside its platform to look for signs of racial or political bias, civil liberties and human rights activists politely applauded.
For years, activists have called on tech companies to undergo assessments of how their policies affect people, both in the U.S. and globally. The companies have long rejected those audits as unnecessary.
But now Facebook is inviting outsiders in to look at allegations of racial and political bias.
“It’s better than nothing,” Rebecca MacKinnon said of the Facebook audits. She is director of Ranking Digital Rights a project that evaluates 22 tech and telecommunications firms annually in areas such as privacy, expression and governance.
“There’s increasing pressure on them to do this kind of thing,” MacKinnon added.
Facebook has faced criticism that it has allowed advertisers to use racial and ethnic profiles to target job and housing ads. American political conservatives have complained that Facebook has removed or taken down legitimate content because of its liberal bias, something the company has denied.
Both issues came under scrutiny following the 2016 U.S. election, but activists say the company’s focus on issues mainly concerning American users is overshadowing Facebook’s bigger problems with the platform abroad.
“The audits that Facebook is doing in the U.S., while welcomed, are very U.S.-centered,” said Arvind Ganesan, director of Human Rights Watch’s business and human rights division. “That’s really a response to domestic pressure.”
Call for global assessments
Critics say Facebook’s bias problems do not stop at the U.S. border. They point to the role that the platform is alleged to have played in incidents of mass violence, such as the persecution of ethnic Rohingya in Myanmar in recent years or sectarian violence in Sri Lanka.
The United Nations reported that in the case of violence in Myanmar, Facebook “substantively” contributed to the level of conflict.
Facebook’s News Feed, which highlights content of interest to a user based on the person’s friends and preferences, has also been accused of reinforcing false or inflammatory stories that go viral. That can help extreme viewpoints get in front of a mainstream audience.
Critics say the company is only starting to come to grips with the issue.
“There needs to be an honest, candid, comprehensive assessment,” said HRW’s Ganesan. “What is the panoply of Facebook’s impact?”
Transparency as industry trend
Self-assessments are nothing new for tech firms. Starting with Google in 2010, tech companies began publishing transparency reports that provide snapshots of how governments have turned to firms for user data or issued takedown notices because of copyright infringement or other reasons.
More than 60 companies regularly file transparency reports, according to Access Now, a digital rights group in New York.
Eleven companies, including Google and Facebook, undergo outside assessments every two years by the Global Network Initiative, a nongovernmental organization that looks at how companies are responding to government requests.
In its recent assessment, Ranking Digital Rights, which is a nonprofit research initiative affiliated with the nonpartisan New America Foundation think tank, gave low marks to Facebook for disclosing less information than other tech firms about how it handles data that can be used to identify, profile or track users.
Apple earned the greatest year-over-year score improvement of any company because it “strengthened its public commitment to protecting users’ privacy as a human right,” the report said.
How effective these assessments are in spurring companies to change is unclear. But company-run reports and outside audits can help find and measure problems, human rights advocates say.
“We call on Facebook to engage with stakeholders wherever it impacts human rights — the burden extends globally,” said Peter Micek with Access Now.” It doesn’t make sense from a human rights perspective to treat the U.S. exceptionally.”
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Senior officials from the United States, Canada and Mexico ended the latest round of talks on the North American Free Trade Agreement without any major breakthroughs on how to renegotiate the deal.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said Friday after a week of talks in Washington that the United States will continue to work with its partners to update the 1994 trade pact.
“The United States is ready to continue working with Mexico and Canada to achieve needed breakthroughs on these objectives,” he said.
The talks involved all three of the top officials in the NAFTA negotiations: Lighthizer, Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland and Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo.
The talks have come under increased pressure to produce a deal quickly after U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan said this week he would need to be notified of a new agreement by May 17 to give the current Congress a chance to pass it this year.
Guajardo said Friday that revising the deal will take time. “We’re not going to sacrifice the quality of an agreement because of pressure of time. We’ll keep engaged,” he said.
Freeland echoed those comments. “The negotiations will take as long as it takes to get a good deal.”
She told reporters that there was a long “to-do” list to finish a renegotiation of NAFTA, but said the talks were making progress.
U.S. President Donald Trump again heaped criticism on NAFTA during a meeting with auto executives Friday at the White House. “NAFTA has been a horrible, horrible disaster for this country. And we’ll see if we can make it reasonable,” he said.
Trump has long criticized NAFTA, blaming it for the loss of millions of manufacturing jobs that hurt the U.S. economy.
The auto industry has featured prominently in the NAFTA talks, with one of the key sticking points being a U.S. demand to increase the U.S.-made components in vehicles that receive duty-free status in NAFTA.
Trump praised Fiat Chrysler chief Sergio Marchionne on Friday for plans to move production of its popular Dodge Ram truck back to the United States from Mexico.
“Right now, he’s my favorite man in the room,” Trump said.
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So how do you ask 85-year-old Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to let you bring video cameras into a gym to record her workout?
The answer, according to the makers of the RBG documentary that’s in theaters now and bound for CNN later this year, is “very meekly.”
A trainer pushing Ginsburg on the free weights provides one of the smile-worthy moments in the documentary, which puts meat behind the cultural phenomenon created by the 2015 book Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The film’s story traces her legal work advancing rights for women leading up to her 1993 elevation to the top court, and her role as a justice since.
Mixed in is the tender love story with her husband, Martin Ginsburg, who died in 2010, and rich personal touches, including her friendship with the late Justice Antonin Scalia — bringing a liberal and conservative together in a way that seems alien to modern Washington.
Watching the Notorious RBG fame, film director Betsy West said that “we felt that many of her millennial fans didn’t know her full story.” West and co-director Julie Cohen set out to tell it.
When they first approached Ginsburg with the idea, her answer was “not yet.”
“We noticed the two words not in her email to us were ‘no’ and ‘never,’ ” Cohen said. So they got to work, and later Ginsburg cooperated with interviews.
Dean’s question
Ginsburg met her husband as an undergraduate at Cornell University. When she was admitted to Harvard Law School, a dean famously asked her and the other eight women in the class why they deserved to take a place in the class that should have gone to a man.
It was a far different time. Ginsburg attacked sexism methodically while working for the American Civil Liberties Union, using the words of the Constitution to fight gender roles that had been enshrined into law. She won five of the six cases she argued before the Supreme Court.
Filmmakers outline that effort by mining archives with tapes of her legal arguments. Research also uncovered one priceless moment in Ginsburg’s confirmation hearing to the court. As the still-novel idea of women on the court was being discussed, the camera pans to senators at the hearing where, behind them, a young legislative aide and Ginsburg’s future colleague on the court, Elena Kagan, was working.
Ginsburg provides a still-relevant model for activism, Cohen said — even if her quiet, persistent, “long game” strategy can make younger idealists impatient.
Cohen and West’s portrait is mostly loving, although Ginsburg’s unusual criticisms of Donald Trump when he was a presidential candidate were addressed. Trump’s supporters didn’t like them and many Ginsburg fans thought them ill-advised.
Perhaps unexpectedly, the film received a three-star review (out of four) from the conservative website Newsmax.
“You can completely disagree with everything Ginsburg has ever done as a lawyer and/or a judge but as a subject for a nonfiction film, she has few peers,” wrote Newsmax’s Michael Clark. “Like it or not, Ginsburg’s story is captivating and ideal fodder for a movie.”
Ginsburg in audience
The film began appearing in a limited number of theaters this month and is starting to expand its reach this weekend. The one critic Cohen and West were most interested in saw it for the first time at the Sundance Film Festival. Cohen and West sat across the aisle from Ginsburg, stealing nervous glances.
“As it went on, I think we started to relax because she was completely engrossed throughout,” Cohen said. “She laughed repeatedly, she pulled out a tissue and cried a number of times, including in an earlier scene of watching herself watching a beautiful opera duet that she loves. Wouldn’t have occurred to us as being … a strong emotional point in the movie, but that really seemed to move her.”
For the workout scene, it had been West’s job to ask if Ginsburg would allow a camera. The request was met, as was often the case, with a dramatic pause. Then came the answer: “Yes, I think that would be possible.”
“We weren’t in that room for more than a few minutes, then we knew why she’d let us film this,” West said. “She’s an elderly woman who is keeping herself in very good shape to do the job that she loves and I think she’s proud of this.”
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British Prime Minister Theresa May and U.S. President Donald Trump agreed in a phone call Friday that talks were needed to discuss how U.S sanctions on Iran would affect foreign companies operating in the country.
Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Iranian nuclear deal and revive U.S. economic sanctions has alarmed the leaders of Britain, France and Germany who remain committed to the deal and who have significant trade ties with Tehran.
“The prime minister raised the potential impact of U.S. sanctions on those firms which are currently conducting business in Iran,” her spokeswoman said. “They agreed for talks to take place between our teams.”
The spokeswoman said May had told Trump that Britain and its European partners remained “firmly committed” to ensuring the deal was upheld as the best way to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon. Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only.
The two leaders also condemned Iranian rocket attacks against Israeli forces earlier this week and strongly supported Israel’s right to defend itself.
“They agreed on the need for calm on all sides and on the importance of tackling Iran’s destabilizing activity in the region,” the spokeswoman said.
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Mexico will not be rushed into revamping the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) just to get a deal, Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo said on Friday ahead of trilateral talks with his U.S. and Canadian counterparts.
Guajardo said he would meet at 1 p.m. EDT (1700 GMT) with Canada’s Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, and that the three are closer to agreeing new rules for autos that are vital for a deal.
However, Guajardo, who is eager to reach an agreement on all the principal aspects of a modernized NAFTA before sealing a new deal, said plenty of other issues were outstanding.
“I have to make very clear [that] the quality of the agreement and the balance of the agreement has to be maintained. So we are not going to sacrifice balance and quality for time,” he told reporters on the doorsteps of Lighthizer’s office.
“We believe there is a way to solve autos. I think we are trying to make a very good effort … We are looking at the whole set of items we have to solve. So it’s not autos, it’s everything else.”
Guajardo and Freeland have been meeting Lighthizer separately since the start of the week. Friday’s trilateral meeting will be the first held this week.
Drafting new rules of origin governing what percentage of a car needs to be built in the NAFTA region to avoid tariffs has been at the center of the talks to update the 1994 deal. It forms a key plank of the Trump administration’s aim to boost jobs and investment in the United States.
Officials and industry sources say the three sides have been gradually narrowing their differences on autos.
However, several other major issues are still unresolved, including U.S. demands for a five-year sunset clause that would allow NAFTA to expire, and elimination of settlement panels for trade disputes.
U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan set a May 17 deadline to be notified of a new NAFTA to give the current Congress a chance of passing it. The United States will hold elections in November for a new Congress that will be seated early next year.
Mexico’s top trade official, however, said time was running short to meet such a deadline. Mexico will hold its presidential election on July 1.
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We’re on the move with the five most popular songs in the Billboard Hot 100 Pop Singles chart, for the week ending May 12, 2018.
This is one of those exciting weeks when we welcome a Hot Shot Debut in the Top Five.
Number 5: Post Malone & Ty Dolla $ign “Psycho”
Let’s open in fifth place, where Post Malone and Ty Dolla $ign dip a notch with “Psycho.”
Post’s “Beerbongs & Bentleys” album tops the latest Billboard 200 chart, after posting 2018’s best first-week sales. It opened with 461,000 total copies — the best showing since Taylor Swift’s “Reputation” became an instant million-seller last November.
Number 4: Bebe Rexha & Florida Georgia Line “Meant To Be”
Bebe Rexha and Florida Georgia Line weaken a slot to fourth place with “Meant To Be” — which continues to rule the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. From Nelly to the Backstreet Boys, Florida Georgia Line has ruled the charts with their pop collaborations. Tyler Hubbard and Brian Kelley are working on their fourth album, and tell People magazine that they’d love to cut some music with Migos and Cardi B.
Number 3: Ariana Grande “No Tears Left to Cry”
We mentioned we get a Hot Shot Debut this week, and it happens in third place. Everybody, welcome back Ariana Grande with “No Tears Left To Cry.”
It’s her best countdown showing since 2014, when “Bang Bang” with Jessie J and Nicki Minaj also made it to No. 3. Ariana has titled her upcoming fourth album “Sweetener,” and we should get it in July. It’s her first album since last May’s bombing following an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England. The tragedy claimed 22 lives.
Number 2: Drake “God’s Plan”
We have back-to-back Drake hits again this week, and there’s no sugar-coating this: His favorite sports team again went down in flames.
Drake is a big fan of his hometown Toronto Raptors basketball team. For the second straight year, LeBron James and his Cleveland Cavaliers swept the Raptors in the NBA playoffs. The Cavs have beaten the Raptors in 10 consecutive playoff games dating back to 2016. That’s the longest streak of its kind in league history.
We do have some good news for Drake: He’s still the champion of the Hot 100, as “Nice For What” spends a third week at No. 1.
Number 1: Drake “Nice For What”
Drake reigns atop the Billboard Hot 100 for a third week with “Nice For What.” Rihanna recently told Vogue that she and Drake were no longer friends … and he promptly unfollowed her on Instagram.
Maybe they’ll be friends again by next week. In any event, we’ll return and we hope you will, too.
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Emma and Liam are at the top of the most frequently chosen baby names in 2017.
For the fourth year in a row, Emma was the top girl’s name on the Social Security Administration’s annual list of the most popular baby names. Liam pushed last year’s champ, Noah, to second place.
The agency releases the 1,000 most popular baby names each year.
In the girls’ column, Emma was followed by Olivia, Ava, Isabella and Sophia.
For the boys, Liam and Noah were followed by William, James and Logan.
Other trends last year included a rise in the use of Melania for a girl, likely influenced by first lady Melania Trump.
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Motorists with the money can now explore off-road in luxury or just make a statement dropping the kids off at school.
Rolls-Royce unveiled its first SUV on Thursday. The Cullinan, named for the diamond in Britain’s Crown Jewels, carries a $325,000 price tag plus an estimated $5,000 gas-guzzler tax.
The Cullinan’s 6.75-liter, twin-turbo V12 engine has 563 horsepower. The SUV includes Rolls’ “magic air ride,” but drivers can press an “off-road” button to hit the trails.
Deliveries are expected to begin in 2019.
Rising sales of SUVs and pickup trucks are driving auto sales in the U.S. Autodata Corp. said in March that truck and SUV sales rose 16.3 percent, while car sales plunged 9.2 percent. Nearly two-thirds of all vehicles sold were trucks or SUVs.
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On Yaji Mountain in southern China, they are checking in the sows a thousand head per floor in high-rise “hog hotels.”
Privately owned agricultural company Guangxi Yangxiang Co Ltd is running two seven-floor sow breeding operations, and is putting up four more, including one with as many as 13 floors that will be the world’s tallest building of its kind.
Hog farms of two or three floors have been tried in Europe.
Some are still operating, others have been abandoned, but few new ones have been built in recent years, because of management difficulties and public resistance to large, intensive farms.
Now, as China pushes ahead with industrialization of the world’s largest hog herd, part of a 30-year effort to modernize its farm sector and create wealth in rural areas, companies are experimenting with high-rise housing for pigs despite the costs.
The “hotels” show how far some breeders are willing to go as China overhauls its farming model.
“There are big advantages to a high-rise building,” said Xu Jiajing, manager of Yangxiang’s mountain-top farm.
“It saves energy and resources. The land area is not that much but you can raise a lot of pigs.”
Companies like Yangxiang are pumping more money into the buildings — about 30 percent more than on single-story modern farms — even as hog prices in China hold at an eight-year low.
For some, the investments are too risky. Besides low prices that have smaller operations culling sows or rethinking expansion plans, there is worry about diseases spreading through such intensive operations.
But success for high-rise pig farms in China could have implications across densely populated, land-scarce Asia, as well as for equipment suppliers.
“We see an increasing demand for two- or three-level buildings,” said Peter van Issum, managing director of Microfan, a Dutch supplier that designed Yangxiang’s ventilation system.
Microfan also supplied a three-story breeding operation, Daedeok JongDon GGP Farm, in South Korea.
“The higher ones are still an exception, but the future might change rapidly,” van Issum said.
High-rise hogs
Yaji Mountain seems an unlikely location for a huge breeding farm. Up a narrow road, away from villages, massive concrete pig buildings overlook a valley of dense forest that Yangxiang plans to develop as a tourist attraction.
The site, however, is relatively close to Guigang, a city with a river port and waterway connections to the Pearl River Delta, one of the world’s most densely populated regions.
While Beijing is encouraging more livestock production in China’s grain basket in the northeast, many worry that farms there will struggle to get fresh pork safely to big cities thousands of miles away.
That has helped push some farm investments to southern provinces like Guangxi and Fujian, where land is hilly but much closer to many of China’s biggest cities.
Yangxiang will house 30,000 sows on its 11-hectare site by year-end, producing as many as 840,000 piglets annually. That will likely make it the biggest, most-intensive breeding farm globally. A more typical large breeding farm in northern China would have 8,000 sows on around 13 hectares.
In Fujian province, Shenzhen Jinxinnong Technology Co Ltd also plans to invest 150 million yuan ($24 million) in two five-story sow farms in Nanping. Two other companies are building high-rise hog farms in Fujian as well, according to an equipment firm involved in the projects.
Thai livestock-to-retail conglomerate CP Foods is also building four six-story pig units with local firm Zhejiang Huatong Meat Products Co in Yiwu, a Chinese city near the large populations around Shanghai.
High-tech complexity
Yangxiang spent 16,000 yuan per sow on its new farm, about 500 million yuan total, not including the cost of the pigs.
Building upward means higher costs and greater complexity, such as for piping feed into buildings, said Xue Shiwei, vice chief operations officer at Pipestone Livestock Technology Consultancy, a Chinese unit of a U.S. farm management company.
“It would save on land but increase the complexity of the structure, and costs for concrete or steel would be higher,” he said.
Health concerns also raise costs, because the risk of rampant disease — an ever-present problem in China’s livestock sector — is higher with more animals under one roof.
Even two-story farms in Europe have sparked worries that pigs will receive less care, said Irene Camerlink, an animal welfare expert at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna who has worked with Chinese farms.
Any outbreak of disease could lead to extensive culling, she said.
Farm manager Xu said Yangxiang reduces the risk of disease by managing each floor separately, with staff working on the same floor every day. New sows are introduced to a building on the top floor, and are then moved by elevator to an assigned level, where they remain.
The ventilation system is designed to prevent air from circulating between floors or to other buildings. Air enters through ground channels and passes through ventilation ducts on each level. The ducts are connected to a central exhaust on the roof, with powerful extraction fans pulling the air through filters and pushing it out of 15-meter high chimneys.
A waste treatment plant is still under construction on Yaji Mountain to handle the site’s manure. After treatment, the liquid will be sprayed on the surrounding forest, and solids sold to nearby farms as organic fertilizer.
The project’s additional equipment — much of it imported — to reduce disease, environmental impact and labor costs, significantly increased Yangxiang’s spending, the company said.
But after testing other models, Yangxiang concluded the multistory building was best. Others are less convinced.
“We need time to see if this model is do-able,” said Xue of the farm management firm, adding that he would not encourage clients to opt for “hog hotels.”
“There will be many new, competing ideas [about how to raise pigs in China],” Xue said, including high-rise farms. Eventually, “a suitable model will emerge.”
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Before taking office, President Donald Trump railed against the pharmaceutical industry and accused it of “getting away with murder.”
The populist rhetoric appears to be giving way to a more nuanced strategy focused on making the pharmaceutical market more open and competitive, with the aim of lowering costs for consumers.
It’s an approach that could avoid a direct confrontation with the powerful pharmaceutical lobby, but it could also underwhelm Americans seeking relief from escalating prescription costs.
On Friday, Trump is scheduled to give his first speech on an overarching plan to lower drug prices. Administration officials previewing the speech Thursday touted it as the most comprehensive plan to tackle prescription drug costs that any president has ever proposed, but offered few specifics.
Officials said the plan would increase competition, create incentives for drugmakers to lower initial prices and slash federal rules that make it harder for private insurers to negotiate lower prices. The result would be lower pharmacy costs for patients — a key Trump campaign promise.
The plan will not include giving the federal Medicare program power to directly negotiate prices with drugmakers, they noted. Trump campaigned on the idea, which is vigorously opposed by the pharmaceutical industry.
Public outrage over drug costs has been growing for years, because Americans are being squeezed in a number of ways: New medicines for cancer and other life-threatening diseases often launch with prices exceeding $100,000 per year. Drugs for common ailments like diabetes and asthma routinely see price hikes around 10 percent annually. Meanwhile some companies have been buying up once-cheap older drugs and hiking prices by 1,000 percent or more.
Since entering the White House, Trump has backed away from reforms directly targeting drugmakers and staffed his administration with appointees who have deep ties to the industry, including his health secretary, Alex Azar, a former top executive at Eli Lilly.
Still, administration officials ratcheted up the rhetoric ahead of Trump’s speech. Azar promised bold action. FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb — another Trump appointee with industry connections — hinted at a plan to “dismantle” the convoluted system of discounts and rebates between drugmakers and health care middlemen.
On Thursday, administration officials also vowed to address foreign governments that rely on U.S. medicines but pay drastically lower prices due to government controls. The U.S. accounts for 70 percent of the world’s brand-name drug profits, according to a White House report released earlier this year.
Here are some of the drivers of U.S. prescription drug prices, proposals for reducing the costs and what’s at stake:
Lack of regulation
Drugmakers generally can charge as much as the market will bear because the U.S. government doesn’t regulate medicine prices, unlike most other countries.
Medicare is the largest purchaser of prescription drugs in the nation, covering 60 million seniors and Americans with disabilities, but it is barred by law from directly negotiating lower prices with drugmakers. Democrats have long favored giving Medicare that power, but Republicans traditionally oppose the idea.
The powerful pharmaceutical lobby has repeatedly fended off proposals that could lower prices, such as Medicare negotiations or importing drugs from countries that regulate pricing.
With no direct government price regulation, the primary check on prices comes from buyers in bulk — such as insurance companies and pharmacy benefit managers, which handle prescription coverage for insurers, employers and other big clients.
But because there are so many players in the fragmented system, the discounts achieved in the U.S. are generally far more modest than those in other countries.
The result is that the U.S. spends more on medicines than any other nation. In 2015, the U.S. spent $1,162 per person on pharmaceuticals, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That compares with $756 for Canada and $497 for the United Kingdom, both of which have government measures to control drug prices.
Lack of transparency
The U.S. system for pricing drugs is notoriously complex, so much that the “real” price for most medicines isn’t clear. Critics contend that this lack of transparency limits competition and drives prices higher.
Pharmaceutical companies often launch their drugs with high initial prices. But they argue list prices are merely a starting point for negotiations because they give substantial rebates and discounts to pharmacy benefit managers. Those price concessions are almost never disclosed and it’s unclear what portion actually flows back to consumers.
FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb and others say the lack of transparency in the current system creates perverse incentives in which drugmakers and other health care companies benefit from rising prices — at the expense of patients.
Trump officials have suggested requiring Medicare pharmacy benefit managers to share rebate payments with patients. Another proposal would do away with rebates altogether to encourage more upfront discounts in Medicare.
But the benefit managers and insurers say that they use rebates to lower health care premiums overall and that doing away with them would drive up costs.
Patents and anti-competitive tactics
Patents last longer in the U.S. than most countries, typically giving companies a dozen years of competition-free marketing after a drug launches. Most drugmakers increase their prices annually during this monopoly period, and until recently double-digit price hikes were the norm.
Drugmakers also have developed a number of techniques to block competitors from launching lower-cost generic drugs. Companies often tweak drug formulations to extend their patents. In other cases, companies directly pay would-be competitors to stay off the market in so-called “pay-to-delay” deals.
Gottlieb has promised a crackdown on some of these techniques used to “game the system.” He’s highlighted a practice in which drugmakers use tightly controlled distribution systems to prevent rival manufacturers from purchasing their drug. This effectively blocks the development of generic versions because generic drugmakers must test their products against the original medicine before they can win FDA approval.
Public perception
A majority of Americans say bringing down prescription drug prices should be a “top priority” for Trump and Congress, according to recent polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
And experts who study drug pricing say it’s encouraging that the discussion around the issue has moved from outrage to sophisticated reforms. But some warn there is no guarantee that unraveling the current pricing-setting bureaucracy will lead to lower prices, because it all starts with drugmakers’ prices.
“Until we get closer to policy solutions that address the ability of drug manufacturers to set whatever price they want and increase prices year after year we may only be scratching the surface of this problem,” said Juliette Cubanski, a health care expert with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.
Dan Mendelson, a health care consultant, said: “If they don’t address the cost that patients see at the pharmacy counter it’s not going to be seen as responsive.”
The World Health Organization said Friday it is preparing for “the worst case scenario” for an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
WHO said Thursday that between April 4 and May 5, twenty-seven cases of fever with hemorrhagic signs, including 17 deaths, were reported in the DRC’s Bikoro district. WHO says two of the cases tested positive for the Ebola virus.
The DRC Ministry of Public Health has requested WHO’s support in coordinating the international and NGO response to the health crisis.
The full extent of the outbreak is not yet known, according to WHO, and the location presents “significant logistical challenges.” The affected area is remote with limited communication and poor transportation infrastructure.
Ebola, named for the Congolese river near where it was first identified in 1976, begins with a sudden fever, aching muscles, diarrhea and vomiting. It is a hemorrhagic fever, marked by spontaneous bleeding from internal organs and, in most cases, death. It can be transmitted by close contact with infected animals or people, usually through blood or other bodily fluids.
People can contract the virus through direct contact with victims’ bodies at funerals. Caretakers, nurses and doctors treating Ebola patients also are at high risk.
WHO says the outbreak in Bikoro is the ninth outbreak of Ebola in the DRC since it first emerged in 1976.
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Burden or business opportunity? A new U.N.-backed study of refugees from the World Bank’s International Financial Corporation argues for the latter. The IFC researchers examined one of Africa’s oldest and largest refugee camps, Kakuma in northwest Kenya. What they found is a growing consumer base they say is ripe for more private investment in sectors like mobile banking and energy. The IFC took VOA’s Daniel Schearf on a tour of the camp. He has this report.
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Advanced sensor technology can monitor a wide range of applications, from water quality to air pollution to energy use. Faith Lapidus tells us how a team of scientists at the University of Washington, with support from the National Science Foundation, is turning the sensors in smartphones into home health care tools.
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A senior United Nations official says trade protectionism, rising private and corporate debt, and shortcomings in revenue raising are growing challenges to the economic outlook for the Asia Pacific.
Shamshad Akhtar, executive secretary of the UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), noted the threats of trade wars undermining the region’s positive economic growth outlook.
The United States has pressed states, notably China, to reduce trade and current account deficits with the U.S., recently imposing tariffs on steel exports from several countries.
Akhtar said such trade protectionism represents “quite a big threat” along with nontariff barriers, which have been rising since the 2008 global financial crisis, such as cross border restrictions that further limit trade.
“If you look at the trends, there has been a post-2008 crisis, there has been an increase in nontariff barriers that face the Asia Pacific region as a whole. [The U.S. tariff increases] have been classified as a trade war eventually, if at all those [measures] are invoked there will be a counter reaction,” Akhtar said.
Trade war and growth
She said a trade war would directly impact the region’s economic growth, especially affecting small- and medium-sized enterprises in the Asia Pacific that have trading links to economies such as China, a key target of the U.S. tariffs.
“Yes, growth in itself would be impacted, and it’s happening at a time when we have just seen a recovery; both in terms of growth as well as trade,” Akhtar told VOA.
She said the trade conflicts represented a challenge to the long-standing multilateral rules set down under the World Trade Organization (WTO).
But economists with the Singapore/London based Capital Economics, say recent trade talks between the U.S. and China, and slowing global growth may have eased the threat of a trade war.
China trade surplus leveling
Capital Economics Senior China economist, Julian Evans-Pritchard, in a May commentary, said that while the trade surplus with the U.S. remains near an all-time high, there were “some signs” of it leveling off.
Evans-Pritchard said China’s export performance was also easing as global growth may have peaked.
“This will hopefully encourage [China] to adopt a pragmatic approach to trade negotiations in order to try to avoid the imposition of tariffs and an even sharper slowdown in export growth,” he said.
Outlook for 2018-2019
UNESCAP’s annual economic survey for the Asia Pacific, released this week, remained upbeat for the region’s economic growth at 5.5 percent in 2018 and 2019, with a “slight moderation” in China, offset by a recovery in India, with steady growth elsewhere in the region.
But Akhtar said there are still significant economic headwinds going forward, including infrastructure financing, estimated to be as much as $1.7 trillion.
To meet such demand, she said there is a need to reform taxation administration “in some of the Asia Pacific economies” through simplified tax regimes that could mobilize as much as $60 billion.
Mounting debt
The survey warned of “potential financial vulnerabilities” in regions of high private and corporate debt, particularly in China, South Korea, Malaysia and Thailand, in order to avoid a repeat of the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998.
“It’s very clear to me we need to tackle the issue of private and corporate debt because from our previous experiences any overexposure in terms of whether the debt is private, corporate or household can induce a huge amount of domestic financial vulnerability,” Akhtar said.
Akhtar noted progress achieved in reducing poverty from almost 44 percent in 1990 to around 12 percent in early 2010.
But poverty levels remain “relatively high” in South and Southwest Asia. The Asia Pacific region still has some “400 million people living in poverty.”
Another issue is growing income inequalities in key economies, with the most marked changes in China and Indonesia, and to a lesser extent in India and Bangladesh.
“Given that we have steep inequalities with countries, it basically means that people don’t have access to basic economic and social services,” which can also sustain poverty rates, she said.
Akhtar said in the medium term “potential economic growth” appeared on a downward trend in several countries because of aging populations and a need to boost investment in human resources, such as education.
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