Month: May 2018

US Drug Supply Firm Execs: They Didn’t Cause Opioid Crisis

By Uponsci | | No Comments | Science

Top executives of the nation’s leading wholesale drug distributors told Congress under oath Tuesday that their companies didn’t help cause the nation’s deadly opioid epidemic, drawing bipartisan wrath that included one lawmaker suggesting prison terms for some company officials.

 

The confrontation came at a House subcommittee hearing at which legislators asked why huge numbers of potentially addictive prescription opioid pills had been shipped to West Virginia, among the states hardest hit by the drug crisis. Lawmakers are making an election-year push for legislation aimed at curbing a growing epidemic that saw nearly 64,000 people die last year from drug overdoses, two-thirds from opioids.

 

Company officials’ responses ranged from apologies to explanations to finger-pointing at doctors who prescribe the drugs, pharmacies that fill prescriptions and the federal Drug Enforcement Administration for not doing enough as overseer of sales of legally controlled substances.

In a scene that recalled Congress’ 1994 grilling of tobacco industry officials, House Energy and Commerce investigations subcommittee Chairman Gregg Harper, R-Miss., administered oaths to the heads of five pharmaceutical distributors and asked each if “the actions you or your company took contributed to the opioid epidemic.”

 

Answering no were the leaders of the nation’s three biggest distribution firms: McKesson Corp., Cardinal Health Inc. and AmerisourceBergen Corp., which dominate the U.S. market. The only yes came from Joseph Mastandrea, chief of the smaller Miami-Luken Inc., while the former chief of H.D. Smith Wholesale Drug Company also said no.

 

The denials drew an angry response from GOP Rep. David McKinley of West Virginia, where federal figures show 884 people died from drug overdoses in 2016. That gives the state the nation’s highest overdose death rate — 52 out of 100,000 people. Other states with high death rates included Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, plus Washington, D.C.

 

“The fury inside me right now is bubbling over,” said McKinley. He said he found the denial of responsibility “particularly offensive” and he wondered aloud about the proper punishment.

 

“Just a slap on the wrist, some financial penalty?” he asked. “Or should there be time spent for participation in this? I just want you to feel shame.”

 

Members of both parties accused company officials of missing signs of suspicious activity. The government requires distributors of controlled substances to report suspicious drug orders to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and to deny questionable transactions.

 

The committee’s investigation has found that distributors sent more than 780 million pills of hydrocodone and oxycodone — prescription pain-killers that have caused many deaths — to West Virginia from 2007 to 2012. Around 1.8 million people live in the state.

 

Investigators said 20.8 million opioid pills were shipped from 2006 to 2016 to Williamson, population 2,900. One pharmacy in Kermit, with around 400 residents, ranked 22nd in the U.S. in the number of hydrocodone pills it received in 2006, according to the investigation.

“Was it the profit motive” that prompted them to continue making dubious sales, asked Rep. Cathy Kastor, D-Fla.

 

The corporate executives said they’ve improved their detection systems — a promise lawmakers said they’d heard before. The officials also acknowledged responsibility for fixing the problem but said that was divided with others, too. Nearly 12 million people misused opioids in 2016, according to federal figures.

 

“It’s a shared responsibility among many different players: physicians, pharmacists, state medical boards, state pharmacy boards, DEA” for solving the problem, said Mastandrea.

 

In some cases, they apologized.

 

“To the people of West Virginia, I want to express my personal regrets for judgments that we’d make differently today,” said George Barrett, executive board chairman of Cardinal Health.

The Trump administration and lawmakers of both parties have been drawing attention to opioids, a range of pain-killing drugs that can be addictive when misused. They include prescription drugs like hydrocodone, oxycodone and codeine, synthetic opioids like fentanyl that can be made illegally, and illegal drugs like heroin.

 

House and Senate committees have been working on dozens of bills that include encouraging doctors to use non-addictive pain killers, spurring research on such products, broadening access to treatment and giving financial incentives for drug treatment specialists to work in underserved areas.

 

In 1994, tobacco company executives testified before the Energy and Commerce panel, then controlled by Democrats. The officials said they didn’t believe cigarettes were addictive, despite evidence to the contrary.

 

Within four years, the industry reached a settlement to pay states more than $200 billion over 25 years for tobacco-related health care costs.
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US Lawmakers’ Help Sought on Use of Encrypting Apps

By Uponsil | | No Comments | Silicon Valley

A digital rights organization has asked congressional leaders for help in persuading Google and Amazon to support a technology that people in authoritarian countries use to get around censorship controls worldwide.

In a letter sent this week, Access Now, which is based in New York, sought to put pressure on Google and Amazon, which decided recently to close a loophole that allowed some encrypted-communication apps to assume a disguise as messages moved through the internet.

Access Now asked for help from leaders of the House and Senate foreign affairs committees, the House and Senate commerce committees and the Congressional Executive Committee on China.

At issue is the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between governments, such as Russia, Iran and China, and those who use internet and messaging technologies, like Telegram and Signal, to communicate outside censors’ oversight.

In this case, encrypted-messaging apps have been using a digital disguise known as “domain fronting.” Some of these technologies have received financial support from the Open Technology Fund, a U.S. government program funded by Radio Free Asia and the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the agency that oversees Voice of America.

Disguising final destination

As an encrypted message moves through networks, it appears to be going to an innocuous destination, such as google.com, by routing through a Google server, rather than its true destination.

If a government acts against the domain google.com, it conceivably shuts down access to all services offered by the internet giant for everyone in the country. The gamble is that governments wouldn’t want to cut off residents’ access to large swaths of the internet just to block a specific communication.

Russia did just that in mid-April when it sought to crack down on Telegram.

But it’s not just dissidents and religious or human rights activists who are using these apps. Hackers can also use this disguise to mask malware, according to ZDNet.

In recent weeks, first Google and then Amazon Web Services said they would close the loopholes that allowed apps to use the disguise.

“No customer ever wants to find that someone else is masquerading as their innocent, ordinary domain,” said Amazon in a news release announcing better domain protections.

“Domain fronting has never been a supported feature at Google,” a Google representative said. “But until recently it worked because of a quirk of our software stack. We’re constantly evolving our network, and as part of a planned software update, domain fronting no longer works. We don’t have any plans to offer it as a feature.”

Matthew Rosenfield, who helped develop the Signal technology, said that “the idea behind domain fronting was that to block a single site, you’d have to block the rest of the internet as well. In the end, the rest of the internet didn’t like that plan.”

Amazon sent Signal an email telling it that its use of circumvention was against Amazon’s terms of service. In Middle East countries, such as Egypt, Oman and Qatar, Signal disguised itself as Souq.com, Amazon’s Arabic e-commerce platform.

Letter to Congress

In its letter to Congress, Access Now wrote that “until this change by Amazon and Google, domain fronting was the most effective and most widely used method of enabling free speech, free association and freedom online in countries that aggressively filter and monitor internet access.”

“The end of domain fronting will not permanently impede progress toward our shared goal of global internet freedom, but it will set it back, and the adverse effects will be felt most direly by those already experiencing repressive censorship and surveillance,” the letter said.
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Major Review Backs Cervical Cancer Shots, Especially for Teens

By Uponsci | | No Comments | Science

Vaccines designed to prevent infection with human papillomavirus (HPV) are effective in protecting against pre-cancerous cervical lesions in women, particularly in those vaccinated between age 15 and 26, according to a large international evidence review.

The research by scientists at the scientific network the Cochrane Review also found no increase in the risk of serious side effects, with rates of around 7 percent reported by both HPV-vaccinated and control groups.

“This review should reassure people that HPV vaccination is effective,” Jo Morrison, a consultant in gynecological oncology at Britain’s Musgrove Park Hospital, told reporters at a briefing about the review’s findings.

She noted that some campaign groups have expressed concern about HPV vaccines, but said this review had found no evidence to support claims of increased risk of harm.

HPV is one of the common sexually transmitted diseases. Most infections do not cause symptoms and go away on their own, but when the immune system does not clear the virus, persistent HPV infection can cause abnormal cervical cells.

These pre-cancerous lesions can progress to cervical cancer if left untreated. HPV is a leading cause of cancer deaths among women worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.

Drugmakers GlaxoSmithKline and Merck make vaccines that protect against HPV.

The Cochrane research pooled data and results from 26 studies involving more than 73,000 women across all continents over the last eight years.

The researchers found that in young women who tested negative for HPV, vaccination reduced the risk of developing precancer. About 164 out of every 10,000 women who got placebo developed cervical pre-cancerous lesions, compared with two out of every 10,000 who were vaccinated.

Looking more broadly across all women in the studies, regardless of whether they had previously had HPV or not, the vaccines were found to be slightly less effective, but still reduced the risk of cervical precancer from 559 per 10,000 to 391 per 10,000.

Experts not directly involved in the review said its findings were robust and important.

“This intensive and rigorous Cochrane analysis … provides reassuring and solid evidence of the safety of these vaccines in young women,” said Margaret Stanley, a specialist in the pathology department at Cambridge University. “It reinforces the evidence that preventing infection by vaccination in young women … reduces cervical precancers dramatically.”
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Can Shutting Down Online Hate Sites Curb Violence?

By Uponsil | | No Comments | Silicon Valley

GoDaddy has pulled the plug on another online peddler of violence.

The popular internet registration service last week shut down altright.com, a website created by white nationalist leader Richard Spencer and popular with many in the so-called alt-right movement.

The takedown is the latest example of how companies like GoDaddy are increasingly responding to growing public pressure to clamp down on violent sites in the wake of the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last summer.

GoDaddy, which registers domains for more than 75 million websites around the world, said it generally does not delist sites that promote hate, racism and bigotry on the ground that such content is protected as free speech.

But it said altright.com had “crossed the line and encouraged and promoted violence in a direct and threatening manner.”

“In instances where a site goes beyond the mere exercise of these freedoms, however, and crosses over to promoting, encouraging or otherwise engaging in specific acts of violence against any person, we will take action,” GoDaddy said in a statement emailed to VOA.

The company would not say whether it canceled altright.com’s domain registration in response to pressure but it stressed that “we take all complaints about content on websites very seriously, and have a team dedicated to investigate each complaint.”

The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a Washington-based civil rights organization, said it filed such a complaint with GoDaddy last month, citing several instances in which altright.com carried content that advocated violence.

In one example, a January 26, 2018, article encouraged “use of live ammunition at the border, in order to create a substantial chance that they [immigrants crossing the border] lose their life in the process,” according to the organization’s complaint.

Kristen Clarke, the group’s president and executive director, said the shutdown of altright.com was part of her organization’s campaign to combat a recent “hate crime crisis” in the United States.

“We know that so much hate that we see today originates online,” Clarke said. “It originates in dangerous platforms and online hubs that provide a space to people to essentially coordinate violence and incite people to violence.”

There is no tally of sites that promote violence on the internet. But Clarke said there are “too many” and that her organization is in talks with domain and web hosting companies to shut down close to a dozen of them. She declined to name the websites.

“We’re focused on some of the biggest platforms and places where we’re seeing some of the most dangerous and violent activity,” she said. “We’ll see if those efforts bear fruit.”

Spencer denounced the closure of his website.

“The Left will not stop their censorship crusade with the Alt-Right,” Spencer tweeted on Thursday. “They’re going to come for every right-wing website. Free speech will cease to exist if the GOP fails to enact legislation.”

Altright.com’s takedown comes as public scrutiny of hate sites has grown and internet intermediaries have started to strictly enforce their terms of service and acceptable use policies in the wake of the Charlottesville rally.

Prior to the rally, tech companies had largely left it to users to police online content. But after the march, social media and payment processing companies took steps to close the accounts of several white nationalist leaders, and hosting companies shut down websites associated with the movement such as The Daily Stormer and Stormfront.

“They did know that they had very hateful groups using their services but there didn’t seem to be either political or public pressure to get rid of them,” said Natasha Tusikov, a criminology professor at York University in Toronto.

After Charlottesville, “we saw a number of them suddenly become more pressured publicly and politically.”

Amid growing public pressure, she said, “I think we’re going to see more of these cases.”

But shuttering entire websites is not likely to eliminate violence-mongering online. For one, there is no dearth of small services that would host sites banished by others. Indeed, while The Daily Stormer and Stormfront were forced by their closure to hop from host to host for several months, they eventually found a home. Altright.com is likely to similarly resurface.

The crackdown can also push some websites underground into the dark web — content on networks that use the internet but require specific authorization to access — making it difficult to track them and find out “who their members are and what they’re doing,” Tusikov said. 

Tusikov said that what she finds even more problematic is the way in which these sites are shut down. Internet intermediaries such as GoDaddy give themselves “considerable” latitude to close websites for any number of reasons. 

“A lot of us would agree that any kind of hateful violent speech should be removed,” she said. “The question is in murkier areas, when it gets to other types of perhaps controversial speech but lawful speech.”

In the U.S. and other countries with a strong free-speech tradition, governments have largely shied away from regulating online content, leaving it to internet intermediaries to assume the role. But Tusikov said internet intermediaries are ill-equipped to distinguish between legal and illegal content. 

Instead, she said, policymakers should institute regulations such as the Manila Principles, a set of standards adopted by civil society groups and digital rights advocates in 2015. Among other things, the Manila Principles require that content restriction policies must “follow due process” and “comply with the tests of necessity and proportionality.” 

“So if you have one problem with one element of copyright infringement, you shouldn’t take the entire site down,” Tusikov said. “You should deal with that one problem.” 
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Uber, US Army To Test Quiet Aircraft Technology

By Uponsil | | No Comments | Silicon Valley

Uber Technologies said Tuesday that it would work with the U.S. Army to advance research on a novel, quiet aircraft rotor technology that could be used in future flying cars, or military aircraft.

The alliance highlights stepped-up efforts by Uber and other companies to transform flying cars from a science fiction concept to real hardware for residents of mega-cities where driving is a time-consuming bore.

Uber and the Army’s Research, Development and Engineering command said in a statement that they expected to spend $1 million to develop and test prototypes for a rotor system that would be used on a vertical takeoff and landing vehicle.

The system would have two rotors, one stacked atop the other, moving in the same direction under the command of sophisticated software. This approach, which Uber and the Army said had not been deployed in a production aircraft, could lead to quieter operation than conventional stacked rotor systems.

“Achieving ultra-low noise is one of the critical obstacles” to deploying aerial taxis in urban areas, Rob McDonald, head of vehicle engineering for Uber Elevate, the company’s flying car operation, said in an interview.

The Army wants to develop a new generation of unmanned drones that do not need runways and are quieter than current drones, said Dr. Jaret Riddick, director of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory’s Vehicle Technology Directorate.

The Army is increasingly turning to partnerships with private companies to research advanced technology, Riddick said in an interview.

Uber is planning more alliances with government agencies as it aims to launch prototype airborne taxis by 2020, Mark Moore, Uber’s director of engineering and aircraft systems and a former NASA researcher, said in an interview.

Uber already has a partnership with NASA, the U.S. government space agency, to develop software for managing large numbers of aircraft over cities, Moore said.

Uber is one of several companies, including aircraft makers Boeing and Airbus SE and a venture backed by Alphabet co-founder Larry Page, that are investing in the concept of small, automated and electrified aircraft that could be used to ferry passengers or cargo across congested cities.

Uber said it would develop its low-noise rotor system in collaboration with Launchpoint Technologies Inc., a Goleta, California, engineering company focused on electric and hybrid aircraft technologies.

Uber will hold a conference on flying vehicles this week in Los Angeles.
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‘Museum of Broken Relationships’ Comes to Kosovo

By Uponent | | No Comments | Entertainment

Dolls, a memory jar, a magnifying glass, a used condom — each is a memento of heartbreak contributed by an anonymous contributor to the Museum of Broken Relationships, an eccentric display in Kosovo.

The traveling exhibition — tied to a permanent tourist attraction in the Croatian capital, Zagreb, dedicated to treasuring and sharing heartbreak stories and symbolic possessions — opened a monthlong stint in Kosovo last week as part of Europe Week. 

“Its mission is to connect people in public spaces through the stories of love and loss,” a statement from the EU office in Kosovo said.

Curator Kushtrim Fetahu said organizers launched an open call for stories on Facebook and Instagram, and managed to collect 30 objects for the Kosovo exhibition.

They all aim at “storytelling, story sharing, to explain all the relationships, what happened not only between lovers but also between friends and families,” he said.

One contributor from the western Kosovo city of Prizren writes of a memory jar: “This jar holds the beautiful days and nights of our relationship and that doesn’t deserve to be thrown away and not to be remembered.”

The collection in Pristina includes items from the museum’s permanent collection in Zagreb, such as a positive pregnancy test from Leipzig, Germany, as well as the wedding dress of a Turkish woman who lost her husband-to-be the day they would have gotten married — in June 28, 2016, when a terrorist attack killed him at the Istanbul airport.

The museum won the EMYA Kenneth Hudson Award in 2010 for the most innovative and daring museum project in Europe.

The EU statement said that the Museum “encourages discussion and reflection not only on the fragility of human relationships but also on the social, cultural and political circumstances surrounding the stories being told.”

When the project wraps up in Kosovo, some of the stories will be sent to the permanent museum in Zagreb.

“In this way, stories from Kosovo will be a permanent part of an international museum,” the EU statement said.
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Disney Seeks New Frontiers as More People Watch Video Online

By Uponent | | No Comments | Entertainment

Disney is seeking new frontiers.

The media company launched its $5-a-month sports streaming service, ESPN Plus, last month, and it signed a deal with Twitter this month to create Marvel, ABC and ESPN content on that service. Meanwhile, Disney is trying to buy much of 21st Century Fox, including the Fox television network and the X-Men movie franchise.

The moves come as Disney seeks ways to extend beyond the traditional cable-bundle format as more people watch TV online. Sports network ESPN was once a jewel in Disney’s crown but subscriptions have been falling as people drop cable services.

But the company has found strength elsewhere, notably its movie studio and theme parks.

Disney’s franchises such as Marvel’s Avengers and Star Wars have been raking in money. Avengers: Infinity War has grossed over $1 billion since it opened April 27.

In a statement, CEO Bob Iger said Disney was “very well-positioned for future growth” because of its ability to take advantage of such franchises across all businesses and “the unique value proposition” it’s creating with direct-to-consumer streaming services.

In Disney’s fiscal second quarter, net income rose 23 percent to $2.94 billion, or $1.95 per share, from $2.39 billion, or $1.50 per share a year ago. Excluding one-time items such as a benefit from the U.S. tax overhaul, net income totaled $1.84 per share.

The results surpassed Wall Street expectations. The average estimate of six analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research was for earnings of $1.68 per share.

Revenue rose 9 percent to $14.5 billion, from $13.3 billion a year ago. Four analysts surveyed by Zacks expected $14.2 billion.

Sports streaming

To prepare for the future, Disney launched a sports streaming service with video not available on the regular ESPN channels. This includes additional baseball and soccer games, and the entire 30 for 30 documentary series on demand.

The Walt Disney Co. is also working on an entertainment streaming service with classic and upcoming movies from the Disney studio, shows from Disney Channel, and the Star Wars, Marvel and Pixar movies. That service will launch in late 2019 and will include movies leaving Netflix, once its deal with Disney expires.

If the $52.4 billion Fox deal goes through, Disney could supplement the entertainment service with Fox properties — such as X-Men movies and National Geographic programming. Disney is still awaiting regulatory approval, and published reports say Comcast is mulling a counterbid.

J.P. Morgan analyst Alexia Quadrani expects the service to break even by 2021 with about 13 million subscribers. Until then, Quadrani said, Disney might lose some licensing fees and see spending increase to acquire content.

Morgan Stanley analyst Benjamin Swinburne said in a client note that the direct-to-consumer businesses like its streaming services could add $6.5 billion to revenue by 2020.
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US to Reveal Winners of Drone Program That Attracted Top Firms

By Uponsil | | No Comments | Silicon Valley

Major technology and aerospace companies including Amazon.com, Apple, Intel, Qualcomm and Airbus SE are vying to take part in a new slate of drone tests the United States is set to announce on Wednesday, people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The wide interest in the U.S. initiative, launched by President Donald Trump last year, underscores the desire of a broad range of companies to have a say in how the fledgling industry is regulated and ultimately win authority to operate drones for everything from package delivery to crop inspection.

The pilot program will allow a much larger range of tests than are generally permitted by federal aviation regulators, including flying drones at night, over people and beyond an operator’s line of sight.

The U.S. Transportation Department said it will announce 10 winning state, local or tribal governments to host the experiments on Wednesday. The governments in turn have partnered with companies who will play a role in the tests.

Senator Dean Heller of Nevada, who is up for re-election in November, said in a press release the city of Reno was named one of the winners. The city is partnered with Nevada-based Flirtey, a company that has worked on delivering defibrillators by drone, as well as pizza for Domino’s.

At least 200 companies spanning 149 applications are vying to be part of the program, a U.S. official said. Many major U.S. companies are part of the winning submissions.

Winners include projects focused on package delivery, environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, pipeline oversight and integrating drones near airports, the U.S. official said.

Companies such as Boeing and Ford have also expressed interest in the program, sources said, though it was unclear whether they had joined applications and what they would be testing.

Amazon declined to comment.

Airbus, Intel and Qualcomm confirmed they on one or more applications, with Airbus noting it is interested in topics like risk analysis for airspace management. Qualcomm hopes to test network connectivity along with partners Verizon Communications and AT&T.

Raytheon Co said it had not applied but was in talks with partners who have. Other companies did not immediately answer requests for comment.

Changes to U.S. policy that result from the tests are not expected for some time. Package delivery, which can be particularly complex, might not take place until later on during the program.

Earl Lawrence, who directs the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s unmanned aircraft systems integration office, told a Senate panel on Tuesday that many of the other projects “could go forward under the FAA’s existing rules, including with waivers where appropriate.”

He said after “the 10 selections for the pilot program are announced, the FAA will be reaching out to other applicants, as well as interested state and local authorities, to provide additional information on how to operationalize their proposed projects.”

The FAA is also working on proposed regulations to ensure the safety of drones and their integration into U.S. airspace.

The initiative is significant for the United States, which has lagged other countries in drone operations for fear of air crashes. That had pushed companies like Amazon to experiment overseas.

In the United Kingdom, the world’s largest online retailer already sends some packages by drone. It completed its first such mission in late 2016, taking 13 minutes from click to delivery.
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Canada: NAFTA Talks ‘Constructive,’ Auto Rules Center Stage

By Uponbiz | | No Comments | Business

Canadian and U.S. negotiators held “constructive” talks to revamp the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on Tuesday as efforts focused on agreeing to new rules for the auto sector, Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland said.

Freeland, U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Robert Lighthizer and Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo are meeting in Washington this week in search of a breakthrough in the grinding talks to renegotiate NAFTA that began last August.

Hopes for a deal hinge substantially on the three countries’ ability to update rules for the automotive sector, the central plank of the Trump administration’s push to make changes to NAFTA that bring more jobs and investment to the United States.

After a brief meeting with Lighthizer, Freeland told reporters she had held “good, constructive” talks with the U.S. team and that discussions focused on auto rules of origin.

“We are definitely making progress. I am not going to predict the day, hour and minute that we will be finished. We are certainly very, very hard at work, negotiators from all three sides,” she said.

The meetings would continue, the minister added. She, Guajardo and Lighthizer would be in touch by phone “and we’ll get together today again as needed,” Freeland said.

Guajardo and Mexican Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray later entered the USTR offices to meet Lighthizer and other U.S. officials without taking questions from reporters.

U.S. President Donald Trump initiated the talks to retool the 1990s-era trade agreement, threatening to dump NAFTA if it cannot be changed to his satisfaction.

Trump blames NAFTA for causing U.S. manufacturing jobs to be moved to Mexico. The pact’s supporters say the integration of North America has helped U.S. industry be more competitive.

Earlier Tuesday, Freeland said that Canada was looking for a “good deal, not just any deal,” on NAFTA and that her government would take the time required to reach that objective.

To do so, the three sides must narrow their differences on U.S. demands to overhaul rules for the auto sector.

Auto tussle

Mexico’s automotive industry has described the latest U.S. plan, which includes raising North American auto content to 75 percent from the current 62.5 percent over a period of four years for light vehicles, as “not acceptable.”

The U.S. proposal would also require that 40 percent of the value of light passenger vehicles and 45 percent for pickup trucks be built in areas with wages of $16 per hour or higher, which would create problems for lower-cost Mexico.

Mexico’s government has said it would put forward its own plan for the industry this week, and Jerry Dias, president of Canadian private sector union Unifor, told reporters he believed the discussions on the Mexican proposals had already begun.

High-level discussions over NAFTA have intensified since Lighthizer in early March floated the idea of agreeing to a deal in principle in a matter of weeks. But there has been no clear sign of a conclusive breakthrough on the most contentious issues.

With a presidential election less than two months away in Mexico, time is running out to strike a quick deal.

Major differences remain between the three on several U.S. demands, including autos, the future of the pact’s dispute-resolution mechanisms, and a U.S. proposal for a sunset clause that could automatically kill the deal after five years.
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Yankees and Red Sox to Play in London in 2019

By Uponent | | No Comments | Entertainment

The New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox will face each other in two regular-season games at the Olympic Stadium in London next year.

“We are bringing you one of the best rivalries in baseball,” MLS Commissioner Rob Manfred said Tuesday.

Boston will be the home team for both of MLB’s first games in Europe on June 29 and 30, 2019. The stadium will have a capacity of 55,000 in a baseball configuration.

MLB said it also “committed to playing in London in 2020 and our intention is to establish a long-term footprint in the city” as American sports further embrace British fans.

The NFL has played regular-season games in London since 2007, holding 18 games at Wembley and three at Twickenham. Three more NFL games are scheduled for this year, including one at Tottenham’s new stadium.

The NBA and NHL have also held regular-season games in London.

“The stadium infrastructure in this city gives Major League Baseball every opportunity to put on a first-class event,” Manfred said. “We hope this series will be the beginning of a relationship with London that persists and a continuation of increasing exposure for Major League Baseball in Europe.”

MLB has put renewed emphasis on international games since Manfred became commissioner in 2015.

Cleveland and Minnesota played a two-game series last month in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego just completed a  three-game weekend series in Monterrey, Mexico. MLB announced Tuesday that Oakland and Seattle will open next season at the Tokyo Dome on March 20-21.

 
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White House, Industry Leaders to Meet on Artificial Intelligence

By Uponsil | | No Comments | Silicon Valley

The White House plans to convene a meeting on Thursday on the future of artificial intelligence in U.S. industry with major companies including Facebook, Amazon.com, Google parent Alphabet and Oracle as well as senior government officials.

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich and the chief technical officers of Ford and Boeing are also due to take part in the event, along with executives from Mastercard, Microsoft and Accenture, administration and industry officials said.

The Pentagon and the U.S. departments of agriculture, commerce, energy, health, labor and transportation are due to take part in the daylong meeting that will look at artificial intelligence (AI) innovation and research and development and removing barriers to its application.

“AI is quickly transforming every segment of American industry – from applications in precision agriculture and medical diagnostics to advanced manufacturing and autonomous transportation,” the White House said.

Other companies taking part include IBM, Bank of America, General Electric, Johnson & Johnson, JPMorgan Chase & Co, Monsanto, Pfizer, Walmart, Whirlpool, CVS Health and United Airlines.

Facebook Vice President of AI Jerome Pesenti, Google senior research scientist Greg Corrado and the presidents of California Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University also are set to participate.

Dean Garfield, president and chief executive of the Information Technology Industry Council, called the event “an important step to building collaboration between government and industry.”

“The tech sector is committed to ensuring that all Americans reap the benefits of this transformative technology, which has the potential to save lives, improve how we harvest food, transform education and more,” Garfield said.

Britain last month announced a 1 billion pound ($1.4 billion) joint investment in the AI industry, while the European Union announced it would boost AI investment by about 70 percent to 1.5 billion euros ($1.8 billion) by 2020.

Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of the Consumer Technology Association, said in a Fox News opinion piece published on Tuesday that as AI accomplishes more complex tasks “it will transform economies, industries and our everyday lives. It will also raise questions about its impact on our economy and jobs.”

Professional services firm PwC forecast last year that aggregate worldwide gross domestic product will be 14 percent higher in 2030 as a result of AI and will impact retail, financial services and healthcare.
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Pop Singers Compete for Top Prize at CMT Music Awards

By Uponent | | No Comments | Entertainment

Carrie Underwood, Florida Georgia Line and Jason Aldean are the leading nominees for the CMT Music Awards with four each, but it’s the pop artists who might steal the big prize at this year’s awards show.

CMT announced Tuesday that for the first time, pop artists who have collaborated with country artists are nominated for video of the year. Justin Timberlake’s “Say Something” featuring Chris Stapleton and the country chart-topping song “Meant To Be,” by Bebe Rexha featuring Florida Georgia Line are both nominated in the category, alongside artists like Blake Shelton, Kelsea Ballerini, Brothers Osborne and Thomas Rhett.

Although non-country acts have often been nominated in other categories, such as collaborative video or CMT performance of the year, the top award has been reserved for country artists.

A dozen songs are nominated for the video of the year, which include Underwood’s duet with rapper Ludacris, “The Champion,” Aldean’s chart-topper “You Make It Easy,” and Kane Brown and Lauren Alaina’s duet “What Ifs.”

Grammy-winning group Little Big Town are taking over the helm as hosts for the first time when the show premieres on June 6 at 8 p.m. Eastern/Pacific on CMT.

“The CMT Awards is such a special night and always has the most insane collaborations and performances,” the band said in a statement. “We look forward to it all year long. We are excited and honored not just to be nominees, but to also host the show and keep the party going.”

Underwood is the record holder for most CMT Music Awards with 17 and is also nominated in female video, collaborative video and CMT performance of the year. Florida Georgia Line are also nominated for duo video of the year, collaborative video and CMT performance of the year. Aldean is nominated for male video of the year and has two nominations in the CMT performance of the year category.

Fan voting starts Tuesday at CMT.com. The final five nominees in the video of the year category will be announced on the morning of the show.

 
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104-Year-old Australian Promotes Right to Assisted Suicide

By Uponsci | | No Comments | Science

A 104-year-old British-born Australian scientist who is planning to kill himself on Thursday says he doesn’t think the drugs used for assisted suicide should be available to just anyone, but that doctors should be able to prescribe them.

In an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press just two days before he plans to take advantage of Switzerland’s assisted-suicide laws, David Goodall spoke of his determination to end his life. He also talked about his disbelief in the afterlife, his childhood after being born the year World War I began and his family, who lives across three continents.

Goodall, described by the right-to-die group Exit International as its first member, said he’s been contemplating the idea of suicide for about 20 years, but only started thinking about if for himself after his quality of life deteriorated over the last year. He cited a lack of mobility, doctor’s restrictions and an Australian law prohibiting him from taking his own life among his complaints, but he is not ill.

Goodall, a botanist, said he tried clumsily to take his life himself at least three times — and then finally decided to get professional help. He has been looking to draw attention to his desire to end his life in hopes that countries like Australia change their laws to be more accepting of assisted suicide.

Hundreds of people — some far more frail than Goodall, who uses a wheelchair — travel to Switzerland every year to take their lives. The best-known group to help foreigners end their days in the Alpine country is Dignitas, but others include Life Circle in Basel — Goodall’s choice.

Goodall has a libertarian bent but he knows that some religious people — which he is not — might take exception to not letting nature take its course.

“If people for religious purposes interfere with the free will of other people, I think that’s most regrettable. By all means, let them follow their own choice in respect to the end of life, but don’t impose it on other people,” he said from his hotel room near Basel’s Spalentor tower gate.

Doctors say Goodall plans to take his life with an injection of the barbiturate pentobarbitol, a chemical often used as an anesthetic but which is lethal at excessive doses. Those who take their lives through assisted suicide in Switzerland often get injections 15 times greater than that of typical medical doses for anesthesia, said Dr. Christian Weber, a Swiss anesthesiologist who will help set up Goodall for his suicide on Thursday.

Goodall said after reaching middle age, people should be allowed to decide themselves whether to use medicine to take their own lives.

“I wouldn’t suggest that it’s available to everyone, and just going and buying it off the shelf,” he said. “I think there are plenty of people who might misuse that. But I would accept that it should be done by doctors’ prescription — but they should be free to prescribe.”

 
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17 Deaths Reported in Congo as Ebola Outbreak Confirmed

By Uponsci | | No Comments | Science

At least 17 people have died in an area of northwestern Democratic Republic of Congo where health officials have now confirmed an outbreak of Ebola, the health ministry said on Tuesday.

It is the ninth time Ebola has been recorded in the central African nation, whose eastern Ebola river gave the deadly virus its name when it was discovered there in the 1970s, and comes less than a year after its last outbreak which killed eight people.

“Our country is facing another epidemic of the Ebola virus, which constitutes an international public health emergency,” the ministry said in a statement.

“We still dispose of the well trained human resources that were able to rapidly control previous epidemics,” it said.

Ebola is believed to be spread over long distances by bats, which can host the virus without dying, as it infects other animals it shares trees with such as monkeys. It often spreads to humans via infected bushmeat.

Before the outbreak was confirmed, local health officials reported 21 patients showing signs of hemorrhagic fever around the village of Ikoko Impenge, near the town of Bikoro. Seventeen of those later died.

Medical teams supported by the World Health Organization and medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres were dispatched to the zone on Saturday and took five samples from suspected active cases.

Two of those samples tested positive for the Zaire strain of the Ebola virus, the ministry said.

“Since notification of the cases on May 3, no deaths have been reported either among the hospitalized cases or the healthcare personnel,” the statement said.

After Congo’s last Ebola flare-up, authorities there approved the use of a new experimental vaccine but in the end did not deploy it owing to logistical challenges and the relatively minor nature of the outbreak.

The worst Ebola epidemic in history ended in West Africa just two years ago after killing more than 11,300 people and infected some 28,600 as it rolled through Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Despite regular outbreaks every few years, death tolls in Congo have been significantly lower.

“Our top priority is to get to Bikoro to work alongside the Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and partners to reduce the loss of life and suffering related to this new Ebola virus disease outbreak,” said Dr. Peter Salama, WHO Deputy Director-General, Emergency Preparedness and Response.

“Working with partners and responding early and in a coordinated way will be vital to containing this deadly disease.”

Health experts credit an awareness of the disease among the population and local medical staff’s experience treating for past successes containing its spread.

Congo’s vast, remote geography also gives it an advantage, as outbreaks are often localized and relatively easy to isolate.

Ikoko Impenge and Bikoro, however, lie not far from the banks of the Congo River, an essential waterway for transport and commerce.

Further downstream the river flows past Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital Kinshasa and Brazzaville, capital of neighboring Congo Republic – two cities with a combined population of over 12 million people.
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Walmart’s Grocery Delivery Partnerships With Uber, Lyft Falter

By Uponbiz | | No Comments | Business

Walmart’s online grocery delivery partnerships with ride-hailing services Uber and Lyft have ended, according to two sources, a potential setback for the retailer’s ambitions to challenge Amazon.com head-on with speedy delivery of groceries to people’s homes.

The end of the Walmart partnerships, which has not been previously reported and was confirmed by Walmart and Uber, undercuts a vision the ride-hailing companies laid out: a service that can efficiently deliver anything on-demand,

including people and cargo, at the touch of a smartphone app.

“It is incredibly hard to deliver people and packages together,” said a source with a delivery company that works with Walmart and has direct knowledge of the matter. “They are two completely different business models.”

The decision marks an abrupt end to a business relationship that Walmart and Uber announced with much fanfare less than two years ago. At Walmart’s shareholders meeting in June 2016, CEO Doug McMillon touted the company’s investments in technology and spoke about the partnerships in front of a cheering crowd of 14,000 employees.

Soon after, Uber’s grocery delivery service was launched and expanded to four markets. As recently as March, just before Uber ended the arrangement, Walmart said Uber would be a partner in its plans to deliver groceries to more than 40 percent of the country.

“There was clearly some lack of communication there,” said one of the sources with knowledge of the partnerships ending.

Walmart spokeswoman Molly Blakeman confirmed the end of the tie-ups when asked by Reuters, but did not detail the reasons behind the decision. She said Walmart will use other delivery service providers in the four markets where it had previously used Uber.

“Customers shouldn’t notice any difference as the transition takes place,” said Blakeman, who added that the partnership with Lyft never expanded beyond the initial test market of Denver.

Blakeman said the end of the partnerships will not impact Walmart’s plans to scale grocery delivery as they are not tied to any single provider.

Uber put a stop to the grocery partnership when it informed Walmart in March that it would cease delivery operations on June 30, Uber spokeswoman Ellen Cohn told Reuters. The retailer was Uber’s largest partner for its ‘Rush’ service, which delivered groceries as well as clothes, flowers and other goods.

Uber will shutter the entire Rush program at the end of next month. “We are coordinating with Walmart to make this change as seamless as possible,” Cohn said.

Lyft declined comment and deferred to Walmart on the issue.

For Walmart, which is the country’s largest grocer and gets 56 percent revenue from groceries, the partnerships offered a fast solution to expand its online grocery offerings and improve overall revenue from internet shoppers.

For example, Walmart delivers groceries in China through a partnership with ecommerce company JD.com Inc, and in Japan through an alliance with Rakuten.

But the retailer was recently punished for its fourth-quarter online sales performance, which investors say is key to the company’s future.

Last-mile competition

Last-mile delivery of packages is an intensely competitive business, with companies ranging from Amazon to United Parcel Services Inc, FedEx Corp and the U.S. Postal service, as well as startups like Instacart and Deliv, vying for a share.

Since the dot-com boom, companies have tried to crack the business model for online grocery delivery. The rush to solve the technological and logistical challenges has gotten even more frenzied since Amazon acquired high-end grocery chain Whole Foods Market Inc for $13.7 billion last year, a deal that has intensified competition in the sector.

Former Uber Chief Executive Travis Kalanick touted the idea of carrying a person in the backseat and a bag of groceries in the trunk as the ultimate cash-generating transportation service in a smart-phone era.

The delivery service marked the first time Uber publicly committed to a business outside of ride-hailing that was supposed to be meaningful to its bottom line and support its stratospheric valuation, although the private company never offered exact dollar projections.

But startup investors and experts in on-demand delivery say there is a much different set of logistical and economic challenges for moving around cargo than people, requiring a single company to be proficient in two distinct business models.

Uber’s Cohn said Rush was “an experiment” and the company has turned its focus and resources to UberEats, a restaurant delivery service that in the fourth quarter last year generated $1.1 billion, or about 10 percent of Uber’s overall revenue.

New partners

Walmart has added startups Deliv, Postmates and DoorDash to its list of delivery partners. These companies have the singular business of delivering goods, not people, and drivers have more experience safely transporting perishables.

It remains unclear if these startups will step in and replace Uber in the various markets they served.

A particular challenge for companies such as Postmates, however, will be offering rush delivery in suburban and rural areas, where most Walmart stores are located. Such startups have been most successful in urban centers, where there is a high density of customers and couriers can use bicycles or walk to deliver multiple packages in one trip.

“Density has been a challenge historically for all types of delivery companies, all the way back to the Pony Express,” said Ben Narasin, a partner at venture capitalist firm NEA who has been critical of the on-demand delivery business model. “The reality is that the far-away drives will likely be subsidized.”
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Historic Drought Takes Toll on South Africa’s Vineyards

By Uponbiz | | No Comments | Business

The worst drought in living memory has hit vineyards in South Africa’s Western Cape hard, reducing grape harvests and adding to pressure on the region’s centuries-old wine industry, officials said on Tuesday.

In its latest wine harvest report, industry body Vinpro said South Africa’s wine-grape production was down 15 percent from last year, and would lead to a production shortfall of 170 million liters of wine and prices rising as much as 11 percent.

South Africa’s wine sector, which dates back to the arrival of the first European settlers in the 1650s, employs 300,000 people directly and indirectly and contributed about $3 billion to the economy in 2015, according to an industry study.

The government has declared the drought a disaster in the Western Cape, the country’s main wine-producing region around the tourist city of Cape Town. Besides vineyards, it has decimated wheat crops and cut apple, grape and pear exports, most of which go to Europe.

Vinpro managing director Rico Basson said more than a third of vineyards were operating at a loss and overall numbers were shrinking as farmers uprooted vines to make way for more profitable fruit crops or simply failed to replace old vines.

Over the last decade, the amount of land used for growing grapes had shrunk by 9 percent, he said.

The problems in South Africa mirror those in other wine-growing countries and are likely to fuel concerns about changes in weather patterns as a result of global warming.

Globally, wine output fell to its lowest in 60 years last year due to unfavorable weather, especially in Europe, according to the international wine organization OIV.

In April, the OIV said South Africa, the world’s eighth largest producer, had produced 1.1 billion liters of wine in 2017, a 3 percent increase on the previous year.

The Western Cape’s historic vineyards, nestled in mountains to the east of Cape Town, are a major draw for tourists, with tens of thousands of overseas visitors enjoying tours and tastings every year.
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Zimbabwe Parliament Delays Mugabe’s Questioning on Diamond Revenue

By Uponbiz | | No Comments | Business

Former President Robert Mugabe will not appear before Zimbabwe’s parliament as scheduled on Wednesday to answer questions on diamond mining operations, a legislator said.

Temba Mliswa, who leads the parliamentary committee on mines, said the clerk of parliament hadn’t written to Mugabe to invite him to appear.

“It has been delayed but that resolution still stands,” Mliswa said. “He will have to appear before the committee whether he likes it or not.”

The committee had ordered the 94-year-old Mugabe to face legislators over his previous pronouncements that the state had been deprived of at least $15 billion in diamond revenue by mining companies.

Mugabe said in March 2016 the country was robbed of the revenue by diamond companies, including joint ventures between Chinese companies and the army, police and intelligence services, whose operations were shielded from public scrutiny.

Specifically, he said Zimbabwe lost $15 billion from the Marange gem fields, more than 400 kilometers (250 miles) east of the capital. He later expelled the companies and replaced them with a state-owned diamond company.

Mliswa said a new date for Mugabe to testify would be set.

The questioning on Wednesday would have been Mugabe’s first public appearance since the army deposed him last November in a de facto coup.
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US, China to Meet for Round 2 of Trade Talks, But Big Differences Remain

By Uponbiz | | No Comments | Business

Trade negotiations between China and the United States continue early next week in Washington D.C., but analysts say after the first round, the differences between the two sides are huge. Some believe the differences are so fundamental and big that an escalation of tariffs is unavoidable.

According to a widely circulated copy of Washington’s demands, President Donald Trump’s delegation not only asked Beijing to cut its trade deficit with the United States by $200 billion by 2020, but to also sharply lower tariffs and government subsidies of advanced technologies.

Beijing wants the United States to no longer oppose granting China market economy status at the World Trade Organization, amend an export ban against Chinese tech company ZTE Corp and open American government procurement to Chinese technology and services among other demands.

View to escalation

 

Scott Kennedy, a China scholar at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the first round made it clear just how far apart the U.S. and China are in their views of what’s fair, what they want and expect the other side to do.

 

“I think we’re still headed toward escalation with both sides adopting tariffs in the next few weeks, but at least now we know what the fight is about,” Kennedy said. “It’s about whether or not China should be a market economy, or what you know whether it should be able to maintain its state capitalist system without any constraints.”

 

China joined the WTO in December of 2001 as a non-market economy and after 15 years it was expected the granting of the status as a market economy would naturally follow — along with its opening up.

 

But that is not what has happened, and the United States and European Union have refused to grant China market economy status.

Beijing insists it should be regarded as a market economy regardless of whether other countries believe it fits the definition. Under Xi Jinping, the Communist Party has moved to assert greater control over business and the economy.

Competition vs. compensation

 

It has also become increasingly clear that China’s definition of reform and that of the West are strikingly different.

 

In an interview with VOA earlier this year, William Zarit, chairman of the American Chamber of Commerce, said that while many used to assume China would continue to carry out Western style economic reforms initiated in the early 2000s, that is no longer the case.

 

“In the last four or five years, we’ve seen that reform has taken a different direction, that the Chinese economy is on a different trajectory and that is more support for state-owned enterprises,” Zarit said. “And when I hear reforms now, it is more about making state-owned enterprises more efficient and not necessarily competitive in a fully market-based economy.”

But Song Hong, an economist with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, argues that China has fulfilled its WTO obligations and it is the United States and European Union that have broken their promises to grant the country market economy status.

He said Washington’s demands to slash the trade deficit by $100 billion a year does not make economic sense. He also said the demand for China to lower tariffs and put the two countries on equal footing is impossible.

 

“The market in China is of course not as open as the U.S. market because China remains a developing country, which is no match to the U.S.,” Song Hong said. “The per capita income level in China around $10,000 vs. the U.S.’s some $50,000. How can both countries be equal?”

Talks as clock ticks

 

Some Chinese state media reports have tried to sound upbeat about the meetings focusing on the two sides agreed to keep talking, despite their differences.

On Monday, the White House announced a Chinese delegation led by Liu He, China’s vice premier and a top aide to Chinese leader Xi Jinping, will visit the United States early next week.

 

At the same time, however, the clock is ticking on U.S. threats to implement up to $150 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods. A day after Liu arrives in Washington, there will be a public hearing to discuss tariffs and the Trump administration’s investigation into China’s trade policies and practices.

If no agreement is reached by May 23, Washington would be well within its right to go ahead with the tariffs, analysts note. To which, China has promised to promptly reply.

 

Kennedy said that while the United States has used unilateral penalties in the past, this time around the chances of escalation are a lot higher.

 

“Not only are the disagreements deeply fundamental, China is much more powerful and ambitious than it used to be. And so it’s not likely to cave easily,” he said.

Brian Kopczynski contributed to this report.
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