Health experts are dispatching an experimental vaccine in areas of The Democratic Republic of the Congo that are considered ground zero in the fight against Ebola. Their hope is to try to combat the outbreak from the onset. The crucial test is providing hope, in times of uncertainty. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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Month: June 2018
Judging by the size of the crowd and the number of exhibitors at the fourth annual Consumer Electronics Show Asia, which opened Wednesday in Shanghai, China is well on its way toward catching up with the United States in consumer technology. A mirror image of the older and bigger sister show in Las Vegas, CES Asia 2018 presents the latest hardware and software for everyone. VOA’s George Putic has more.
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The head of UNAIDS says testing for the HIV virus is critical in reaching the goal of eliminating the virus by 2030. But the U.N. official tells VOA the effort is hampered in many countries by social taboos and stigma attached to AIDS and other HIV-related diseases. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke has more.
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Up to a million football fans from around the world are expected to travel to Russia over the coming weeks for the World Cup, which kicks off Thursday. They include hundreds of thousands of supporters from South America and Africa, who are famous for bringing their passion and partying to the tournament. But as Henry Ridgwell reports, there are concerns that stem from a record of racism and violence in Russian football.
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Two promising new ways to prevent cholera are on the horizon. One is an entirely new kind of vaccine. The other is as simple as a cup of yogurt.
Both may offer fast, cheap protection from explosive outbreaks of a disease that claims tens of thousands of lives each year.
The research has so far only been done in animals. Human studies are yet to come.
Cholera declawed
Cholera causes such serious diarrhea that it can kill within hours. Current vaccines take at least 10 days to work, don’t provide complete protection and don’t work well for young children.
One group of scientists working to create a better vaccine engineered cholera bacteria that are missing the genes that make the microbe toxic.
The researchers fed the modified bacteria to rabbits. The microbes colonized the animals’ guts but did not make them sick.
When the scientists then fed rabbits normal, disease-causing cholera 24 hours later, most of the animals survived.
Those that did get sick took longer to do so than rabbits given unmodified bacteria, or modified bacteria that had been killed. Those animals died within hours.
The engineered cholera bacteria provided protection much faster than a conventional vaccine. They acted as a probiotic: colonized the animals’ intestines in less than a day and prevented the disease-causing microbes from getting a foothold.
The researchers expect that the modified bacteria will also act like a typical vaccine, stimulating the body’s immune system to fight a future cholera infection.
“This is a new type of therapy,” Harvard University Medical School microbiologist Matthew Waldor said. “It’s both a probiotic and a vaccine. We don’t know the right name for it yet.”
The research is published in the Science Translational Medicine journal.
Yogurt solution
In another study in the same journal, a group of researchers discovered that a microbe commonly found in yogurt, cheese and other fermented dairy products can prevent cholera infection.
Bioengineer Jim Collins at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and colleagues had been working on genetically modifying the bacteria, known as Lactococcus lactis, to treat cholera.
It hadn’t been working.
But they accidentally discovered that unmodified L. lactis keeps cholera germs in check by producing acid that the disease-causing microbes can’t tolerate.
Feeding mice doses of L. lactis bacteria every 10 hours nearly doubled their survival rate from cholera infection.
“It was remarkably surprising and satisfying,” Colllins said. “We were really getting frustrated.”
They also designed a strain of L. lactis that turns a cholera-infected mouse’s stool red. It could be a useful diagnostic, for example, to identify those carrying the bacteria but not showing symptoms.
Collins said pills of L. lactis bacteria — or simply ample supplies of fermented milk products — could be “a very inexpensive, safe and easy-to-administer way to keep some of these outbreaks in check.”
Waldor said his group’s modified-cholera vaccine also could be grown and packaged in pills quickly and easily in case of an outbreak.
Both caution that these animal studies are a long way from new treatments for human patients. They need to be proven in clinical trials.
Beyond cholera
The two studies could not only have an impact on cholera, but could also influence how doctors treat other intestinal diseases and manage gut health, according to Robert Hall, who oversees research funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
While fermented foods promising better health are widely available, “the studies with probiotics in the field have really seldom shown great effectiveness when they’re done scientifically,” Hall said.
The work Collins’s group did not only shows effectiveness, but explains how it works: by “making the intestine inhospitable” to cholera, he added.
Hall wrote a commentary accompanying the two studies.
Other gut diseases work the same way as cholera, he noted, so it’s possible that other microbes could be developed that block harmful germs from gaining a foothold while acting as vaccines at the same time.
“It’s a very exciting principle,” Hall said.
An Indian chess champion announced she will not be participating in a tournament in Iran, as the country’s law requiring women to wear headscarves is a violation of her human rights, she said.
Soumya Swaminathan, a 29-year-old grandmaster, wrote on Facebook, “It seems that under the present circumstances, the only way for me to protect my rights is not to go to Iran.”
Swaminathan was scheduled to be part of the Indian team in the Asian Team Chess Competition, taking place in Hamadan, Iran, from July 26 to Aug. 4.
Iran and Saudi Arabia are two countries that by law require women to wear headscarves in public, although the practice is common in fellow Muslim-majority nations.
In February, Iranian police arrested 29 people following a series of protests in which women removed their headscarves in public.
Swaminathan is not the only female grandmaster to find herself in opposition to Iran’s laws. In October, Iranian national Dorsa Derakhshani was barred from playing in the country, or for the national team, after she played in a tournament in Gibraltar earlier that year without donning the headscarf.
Derakhshani later moved to the United States and joined the U.S. national team.
“It feels good and … peaceful to play for a federation where I am welcomed and supported,” Derakhshani said.
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Caterers in Washington tweeted a photo of maroon sashimi appetizers served to 700 guests attending the governor’s inaugural ball last year. They were told the tuna was from Montauk.
But it was an illusion. It was the dead of winter and no yellowfin had been landed in the New York town.
An Associated Press investigation traced the supply chain of national distributor Sea To Table to other parts of the world, where fishermen described working under slave-like conditions with little regard for marine life.
In a global seafood industry plagued by deceit, conscientious consumers will pay top dollar for what they believe is local, sustainably caught seafood. But even in this fast-growing niche market, companies can hide behind murky dealings, making it difficult to know the story behind any given fish.
Sea To Table said by working directly with 60 docks along U.S. coasts it could guarantee the fish was wild, domestic and traceable — sometimes to the fisherman.
The New York-based company quickly rose in the sustainable seafood movement. While it told investors it had $13 million in sales last year, it expected growth to $70 million by 2020. The distributor earned endorsement from the Monterey Bay Aquarium and garnered media attention from Bon Appetit, Forbes and many more. Its clientele included celebrity chef Rick Bayless, Roy’s seafood restaurants, universities and home delivery meal kits such as HelloFresh.
As part of their investigation, reporters staked out America’s largest fish market, followed trucks and interviewed fishermen who worked on three continents. During a bone-chilling week, they set up a time-lapse camera at Montauk harbor that showed no tuna boats docking. The AP also had a chef order $500 worth of fish sent “directly from the landing dock to your kitchen,” but the boat listed on the receipt hadn’t been there in at least two years.
Preliminary DNA tests suggested the fish likely came from the Indian Ocean or the Western Central Pacific. There are limitations with the data because using genetic markers to determine the origins of species is still an emerging science, but experts say the promising new research will eventually be used to help fight illegal activity in the industry.
Some of Sea To Table’s partner docks on both coasts, it turned out, were not docks at all. They were wholesalers or markets, flooded with imports.
The distributor also offered species that were farmed, out of season or illegal to catch.
“It’s sad to me that this is what’s going on,” said chef Bayless, who hosts a PBS cooking series. He had worked with Sea To Table because he liked being tied directly to fishermen — and the “wonderful stories” about their catch. “This throws quite a wrench in all of that.”
Other customers who responded to AP said they were frustrated and confused.
Sea To Table response
Sea To Table owner Sean Dimin stressed that his suppliers are prohibited from sending imports to customers and added violators would be terminated.
“We take this extremely seriously,” he said.
Dimin also said he communicated clearly with chefs that some fish labeled as freshly landed at one port were actually caught and trucked in from other states. But customers denied this, and federal officials described it as mislabeling.
The AP focused on tuna because the distributor’s supplier in Montauk, the Bob Gosman Co., was offering chefs yellowfin tuna all year round, even when federal officials said there were no landings in the entire state.
Almost nightly, Gosman’s trucks drove three hours to reach the New Fulton Fish Market, where they picked up boxes of fish bearing shipping labels from all over the world.
Owner Bryan Gosman said some of the tuna that went to Sea To Table was caught off North Carolina and then driven 700 miles to Montauk. That practice ended in March, he said, because it wasn’t profitable. While 70 percent of his yellowfin tuna is imported, he said that fish is sold to local restaurants and sushi bars and kept separate from Sea To Table’s products.
“Can things get mixed up? It could get mixed up,” he said. “Is it an intentional thing? No, not at all.”
Some of Gosman’s foreign supply came from Land, Ice and Fish, in Trinidad and Tobago.
Indonesian fishermen
The AP interviewed and reviewed complaints from more than a dozen Indonesian fishermen who said they earned $1.50 a day, working 22 hours at a time, on boats that brought yellowfin to Land, Ice and Fish’s compound. They described finning sharks and occasionally cutting off whale and dolphin heads, extracting their teeth as good luck charms.
“We were treated like slaves,” said Sulistyo, an Indonesian who worked on one of those boats and gave only one name, fearing retaliation. “They treat us like robots without any conscience.”
Though it’s nearly impossible to tell where a specific fish ends up, or what percentage of a company’s seafood is fraudulent, even one bad piece taints the entire supply chain.
Dimin said the labor and environmental abuses are “abhorrent and everything we stand against.”
For caterers serving at the ball for Washington Governor Jay Inslee, who successfully pushed through a law to combat seafood mislabeling, knowing where his fish came from was crucial.
The Montauk tuna came with a Sea To Table leaflet describing the romantic, seaside town and the quality of the fish. A salesperson did send them an email saying the fish was caught off North Carolina. But the boxes came from New York and there was no indication it had landed in another state and was trucked to Montauk. A week later, the caterer ordered Montauk tuna again. This time the invoice listed a boat whose owner later told AP he didn’t catch anything for Sea To Table at that time.
“I’m kind of in shock right now,” said Brandon LaVielle of Lavish Roots Catering. “We felt like we were supporting smaller fishing villages.”
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The head of UNAIDS says the global community is at a “defining moment” in the effort to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic by 2030.
“This midpoint is important for us to reflect on what was not working,” Michel Sidibe told VOA, noting this year marks the halfway point to agreed global targets. “It’s about how to deal with vulnerable communities, fragile society.”
According to 2016 data, 36.7 million people globally are living with HIV. There were nearly 2 million new infections and 1 million AIDS-related deaths.
WATCH: UNAIDS Chief: Testing is Critical in Combating HIV/AIDS
But the good news is there has been success in expanding access to critical anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs), which reached nearly 21 million people in 2016, leading to a reduction by one-third in global AIDS-related deaths.
Eliminating mother-to-child HIV transmission through childbirth and breast-feeding also has become a real possibility by 2030. This was considered a dream just a few years ago, Sidibe said.
“Today, we are seeing after six years that we reduced by almost 61 percent the infection among children — the transmission from mother to child,” Sidibe said. “But we still have 39 percent of babies born with HIV. We want to stop that and we are working very closely with countries who are lagging behind to make sure we have a catch-up plan.”
Know your HIV status
The UNAIDS executive director says one of the most critical factors in ending the epidemic is making sure people are tested and know their HIV status. This requires lifting taboos and making testing more widely available.
“We need to reduce the price of self-testing; we need to go to community levels, family levels, to reach people where they are,” he said. “The family-centered approach and also community-based approach will become central to what we will do in the future, if we want to reach those millions of people who don’t know their status.”
A recent United Nations report on the AIDS response found that at the end of 2016, some 70 percent of people living with HIV knew their status, and 77 percent of them were accessing ARV therapy. Once on those treatments, 82 percent had suppressed the virus to undetectable levels in their systems. That is not a cure. HIV still remains in their body, but it greatly reduces the likelihood of transmission to a partner.
Uneven progress
While there have been significant successes, progress is uneven, especially for women and adolescent girls. This is the case in sub-Saharan Africa, where females aged 15-24 accounted for 23 percent of new infections in 2016, compared to 11 percent for their male counterparts.
Sidibe says women and young girls face unique challenges, including cultural norms, child marriage and early pregnancies.
“It’s something which we need to address at not just a peripheral level, we need to deal with poverty, to deal with violence against women, to change the laws, to make sure we give them services,” he said.
In order to stop new HIV infections, other vulnerable populations also need a scaled-up response, including intravenous drug users, sex workers and men who have sex with men.
Working with at-risk groups and spreading awareness of the importance of condoms and single-needle use for drug addicts are all crucial to the fight against HIV.
Next month, thousands of experts, activists and people living with HIV/AIDS will meet in Amsterdam for the International AIDS conference. Special attention will be focused on the need to reach key populations, including in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, North Africa and the Middle East, where epidemics have grown.
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Apple Inc said Wednesday it will change its iPhone settings to undercut the most popular means for law enforcement to break into the devices.
The company told Reuters it was aiming to protect customers in countries where police seize phones at will and all users from the risk that the attack technique will leak to spies and criminals.
The privacy standard-bearer of the tech industry said it will change the default settings in the iPhone operating system to cut off communication through the USB port when the phone has not been unlocked in the past hour. That port is how machines made by forensic companies GrayShift, Cellebrite and others connect and get around the security provisions that limit how many password guesses can be made before the device freezes them out or erases data.
These companies have marketed their machines to law enforcement in multiple countries this year, offering the machines themselves for thousands of dollars but also per-phone pricing as low as $50.
Apple representatives said the change in settings will protect customers in countries where law enforcement seizes and tries to crack phones with fewer legal restrictions than under U.S. law. They also noted that criminals, spies and unscrupulous people often can use the same techniques to extract sensitive information from a phone. Some of the methods most prized by intelligence agencies have been leaked on the internet.
“We’re constantly strengthening the security protections in every Apple product to help customers defend against hackers, identity thieves and intrusions into their personal data,” Apple said in a prepared statement. “We have the greatest respect for law enforcement, and we don’t design our security improvements to frustrate their efforts to do their jobs.”
The switch had been documented in beta versions of iOS 11.4.1 and iOS12, and Apple told Reuters it will be made permanent in a forthcoming general release.
Apple said that after it learned of techniques being used against iPhones, it reviewed the operating system code and made a number of improvements to the security. It also decided to simply alter the setting, a cruder way of preventing most of the potential access by unfriendly parties.
Time limit
With the new settings, police or hackers will typically have an hour or less to get a phone to a cracking machine. In practical terms, that could cut access by as much as 90 percent, security researchers estimate.
In theory, the change could also spur sales of cracking devices, as law enforcement looks to get more forensic machines closer to where seizures occur.
Either way, researchers and police vendors will find new ways to break into phones, and Apple will then look to patch those vulnerabilities.
The latest step could draw criticism from American police departments, the FBI, and perhaps the U.S. Justice Department, where officials have recently renewed an on-again, off-again campaign for legislation or other extraordinary means of forcing technology companies to maintain access to their users’ communications.
Apple has been the most prominent opponent of those demands.
In 2016, it went to court to fight an order that it break into an iPhone 5c used by a terrorist killer in San Bernardino.
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Comcast made a $65 billion bid Wednesday for Fox’s entertainment businesses, setting up a battle with Disney to become the next mega-media company.
The bid comes just a day after a federal judge cleared AT&T’s takeover of Time Warner and rejected the government’s argument that it would hurt competition in cable and satellite TV and jack up costs to consumers for streaming TV and movies. The ruling signaled that Comcast could win regulatory approval, too; its bid for Fox shares many similarities with the AT&T-Time Warner deal.
Comcast says its cash bid is 19 percent higher than the value of Disney’s offer as of Wednesday. The Wall Street Journal and others reported earlier that Comcast had lined up $60 billion in cash to challenge Disney for media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s company. Disney’s offer was for $52.5 billion when it was made in December, though the final value will depend on the stock price at the closing.
The battle for Twenty-First Century Fox comes as traditional entertainment companies try to amass more content to compete better with technology companies such as Amazon and Netflix for viewers’ attention — and dollars.
If the Comcast bid succeeds, a major cable distributor would control even more channels on its lineup and those of its rivals. That could lead to higher cable bills or make it more difficult for online alternatives to emerge, though there is not yet evidence of either happening following other mergers. For Disney, a successful Comcast bid could make Disney’s planned streaming service less attractive, without the Fox video.
Content is becoming more important as ways to deliver content proliferate. Cable companies like Comcast are no longer competing only with satellite alternatives such as DirecTV, but also stand-alone services such as Netflix and cable-like online bundles through Sony, AT&T and others.
Disney already started its own sports streaming service and plans an entertainment-focused one late next year featuring movies and shows from its own studios, which include Marvel, Pixar and Star Wars creator Lucasfilm.
With the Fox deal, Disney would get more content for those services — through the studios behind the Avatar movies, The Simpsons and Modern Family, along with National Geographic. Marvel would get back the characters previously licensed to Fox, reuniting X-Men with the Avengers.
Comcast, meanwhile, has been leading the way in marrying pipes with the entertainment that flows through them. It bought NBCUniversal’s cable channels and movie studio in 2013 and added Dreamworks Animation in 2016.
The Philadelphia company has been tinkering with the traditional cable bundle, offering stand-alone subscriptions for some types of video along with smaller bundles of cable channels delivered over the internet. Comcast has said it will add Netflix to some cable bundles.
With Fox, Comcast would expand a portfolio that already includes U.S. television rights to the Olympics and comedy offerings such as Saturday Night Live.
Whichever company prevails would also control Fox’s cable and international TV businesses. That’s key for Comcast, which currently doesn’t have an international presence. The Fox television network and some cable channels including Fox News and Fox Business Network would stay with Murdoch’s family under either deal, as with the newspaper and book businesses under a separate company, News Corp.
Fox shareholders are set to vote on the Disney bid on July 10. Despite Comcast’s higher offer, it’s not immediately clear whether Fox’s board would entertain it. According to regulatory filings, an unnamed company, widely thought to be Comcast, previously made an offer for Fox. But Fox went with Disney because of concerns it would face more regulatory scrutiny with the other company.
That was before U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ruled in AT&T’s favor and rejected the government’s argument that its takeover of Time Warner would hurt competition in pay TV and cost consumers hundreds of millions of dollars more to stream TV and movies. The government worried that AT&T, as DirecTV’s owner, could charge Comcast and other rival distributors higher prices for Time Warner channels like CNN or HBO. In turn, that could drive up what consumers pay. AT&T and Time Warner argue they’re simply trying to stay afloat in the new streaming environment.
Disney wouldn’t face the same issues because it isn’t a television distributor as the way Comcast and AT&T are. But if Disney gets Fox, the combined movie studios would account for 45 percent of worldwide box office revenue, according to BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield. That could raise regulatory objections. A larger studio could use its power to keep its movies in more theaters longer, dampening competition from rival studios.
Disney and Comcast had already been at battle in the U.K. over Sky TV. Fox has a 39 percent stake in that company and has been trying to buy outright, with the intention of selling the full company to Disney as part of that deal. U.K. regulators have given the OK to that offer if Fox sells Sky News. Regulators there also have cleared Comcast’s $30.7 billion offer for the 61 percent of Sky that Murdoch doesn’t own.
In addition to the $35-per-share cash offer, Comcast agreed to pay a $2.5 billion termination fee if the deal doesn’t pass regulatory muster. It also agreed to reimburse Fox for the $1.5 billion-plus break-up fee it agreed to pay to Disney if their deal doesn’t go through.
Disney and Fox did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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Leaders of the U.S. central bank raised interest rates slightly Wednesday and signaled that rates are likely to go higher as the economy continues to strengthen.
At the end of two days of deliberation in Washington, the Federal Reserve set the key interest rate a quarter of a percent higher, at a range between 1.75 and 2 percent. They say the labor market continues to improve, spending is rising, and inflation is rising closer to the modest 2 percent annual rate that experts say helps the economy grow predictably.
Fed officials work to maximize employment while maintaining stable prices. With that in mind, they slashed interest rates to nearly zero during the recession in 2008 to boost economic activity. Now, they judge that it is time to continue raising rates because holding rates too low for too long could spark inflation, and such rapidly rising prices could harm the economy.
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Twitter announced Wednesday it would be updating its services to make it easier for users to find content about major events such as natural disasters and the FIFA World Cup that begins on Thursday.
“We’re keeping you informed about what matters by showing the tweets, conversations and perspectives around topics you care about,” Keith Coleman, product vice president, said in a blog post. “Our goal is to make following what’s happening as easy as following an account.”
Users will receive notifications about breaking news stories based on their personal interests — the accounts they follow or what they tweet about, Coleman explained. These notifications will become available in the coming weeks to users in the United States. When clicked, users will be taken to a specialized timeline about the topic.
“If someone uses Twitter all the time, they’ll have a perfectly curated timeline,” Twitter spokesperson Liz Kelley told VOA. “But if you don’t have those things in place, there’s maybe a better way for us to present that.”
The app will also link to related topics at the top of its search results. Another update includes a change in the format of the “Moments” tab, which will now be accessed by scrolling vertically rather than horizontally. The tab, which hosts collections of tweets about major events, is curated by a global team, Kelley said, and is available in five languages across 16 different countries.
Coleman also announced a dedicated page for the World Cup, which will be available in 10 languages and have individualized timelines for each game of the 32-team tournament. Kelley told VOA that users should be able to see every goal of the tournament through the app.
“Our long-term strategy is making it easier for people to see what’s happening on Twitter,” Kelley said. “Really, we’re organizing and presenting content in a way that’s easier to discover and consume.”
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German authorities fined Volkswagen nearly $1.2 billion Wednesday for its role in a diesel emissions scandal that first surfaced in the United States in 2015.
Prosecutors found the German automaker failed to properly monitor its engine development department. The lack of oversight resulted in global sales of nearly 11 million diesel vehicles with illegal emissions-controlling software.
U.S. authorities previously imposed billions of dollars in penalties on the automaker, which said Wednesday it would accept the fine announced by prosecutors in the city of Braunschweig.
Volkswagen said paying the latest fine would hopefully have “positive effects on other official proceedings being conducted in Europe” against the company and its subsidiaries.
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U.S. President Donald Trump says oil prices are too high and blames the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.
The 14 oil-producing nations in OPEC — Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Venezuela among them — produce about 40 percent of the world’s oil, but about 60 percent of the oil traded on international markets. OPEC’s actions, whether to cut or increase production, often heavily influence the price of oil, and by extension the prices consumers and businesses pay for fuel.
OPEC’s oil chiefs struck a deal in 2016 to cut production by 1.8 million barrels a day to reduce the global glut of oil and shore up prices. Since then, oil prices have risen from below $30 a barrel to more than $70.
But that rollback in production is set to expire at the end of the year. OPEC has yet to set new production levels beyond that, but the cartel’s oil ministers are meeting again next week in Vienna.
Saudi Energy Minister Khaled al-Faleh said in April that the global market can absorb higher oil prices, a remark that drew a swift rebuke from Trump.
“With record amounts of oil all over the place, including the fully loaded ships at sea, Oil prices are artificially Very High! No good and will not be accepted!” the U.S. leader tweeted on April 20, although he has no control over what OPEC decides to do.
Early in the year, with gas prices at service stations still relatively low, Trump suggested raising the country’s gasoline tax that customers pay at service stations by 25 cents a gallon to fund road and highway repairs.
But the president has not mentioned the tax increase idea in months as gas prices have steadily risen because of higher oil prices on the world market, eating into higher take-home pay that millions of American workers gained when Congress late last year passed tax-cut legislation supported by Trump.
The average gallon of gas in the United States now costs $2.92, far more than in such oil-producing countries as Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Iran, and far less than in other countries around the world, including Europe.
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For many years, Ivory Coast has been the world’s largest producer of cocoa. Most of it leaves the country in bulk and ends up in Europe, where it gets turned into fine and expensive chocolate, fetching up to 50 times the price of the raw cocoa.
Chocolate is the world’s favorite comfort food. Two-thirds of all that sweet stuff comes out of factories in the United States and Western Europe. It is where most people consume it, too. Almost completely left out of this feast for the palate are the countries that produce the raw material for chocolate: cocoa.
A few years ago, a Dutch-Ivorian television crew went to one of Ivory Coast’s many cocoa farms and recorded the surprise on the planters’ faces when tasting chocolate for the first time: so THIS is what they do with our cocoa beans?
Very little chocolate is consumed in Africa, but this Ivorian entrepreneur is planning to change that.
Axel Emmanuel Gbaou says he worked at a commercial bank until 2010 before he decided to go into the business of making chocolate. The taste for the sweet bars came from his mother, who had been living among Swiss missionaries, great chocolate lovers. His conviction came from doing some basic arithmetic.
Eighty percent of next year’s cocoa beans, he explains, have already been bought up by the big multinational companies that transport them raw to the chocolate factories in other parts of the world. One kilo of chocolate fetches up to 50 times more than one kilo of unprocessed cocoa beans. Axel wants some of that money to stay in Ivory Coast.
In this nondescript building close to the market in Abidjan’s Cocody district, you will find the production unit, the packaging center and sales office. Axel’s company sells its products to an ever expanding circle of customers, including the global airline Air France.
Back in the cocoa producing fields, the situation is dire. World market prices have been falling for two years. In response, the government of Ivory Coast has lowered the standard price per kilo.
Agronomist N’dourou M’beo is quality control manager at Axel’s company. He says current cocoa prices stand at around $1.40 per kilo. That is the raw harvest that gets shipped out of the country. But after some basic treatment — roasting and winnowing — those beans fetch three times as much and they can be stored for months. This is one model the company has adopted. As a result, more work and money stay on the farm and the company has a reliable supply of quality beans.
The world is the market, but Axel’s biggest challenge lies right here in Africa.
In the next two years, he says he wants to sell 100 million bars of chocolate on the African continent.
That sounds like a lot, but in fact with well more than one billion inhabitants and a fast growing middle class that can afford buying a few bars at $3 each, he thinks it is perfectly doable.
As the trade dispute escalates between the United States and its global trading partners, American bourbon whiskey is among the U.S. exports in the crosshairs. It will soon be subject to a 25 percent tariff imposed by a growing number of countries as a retaliatory measure for U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum. As VOA’s Kane Farabaugh reports, the retaliation is a blow to smaller craft distilleries in the U.S. trying to expand overseas.
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Football’s governing body has awarded the 2026 World Cup to a joint hosting bid by Canada, Mexico and the United States.
FIFA member countries voted 134-65 in favor of the three-nation group over runner-up Morocco.
President Donald Trump praised the selection for the 2026 World Cup.
The 2018 World Cup begins Thursday with host Russia playing Saudi Arabia.
The 2022 tournament will take place in Qatar.
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Belgium is celebrating the 60th birthday of the Smurfs by giving fans the chance to experience living in their village and take a virtual reality ride through mystical forests and caves.
Cartoonist Pierre Culliford, who wrote under the pseudonym Peyo, struck gold with the incidental creation of the Smurfs in 1958, as he initially had only invented them as supporting characters in his comic of medieval heroes Johan And Peewit.
After a great public response and demand for more Smurf adventures, the Belgian put the blue-skinned creatures center stage with their own comic book the following year.
That set off a global conquest of the family of Smurf characters as they fight off sorcerer Gargamel, who wants to turn them into gold – culminating in a Hollywood hit grossing half a billion dollars in box office takings in 2011.
In the Smurf Experience at Brussels Expo, which will run until late January 2019, visitors are taken through the Smurf village, with human sized mushroom shaped homes, and the virtual reality ride, while fighting Gargamel.
In a linguistically divided country, the Smurfs have become a unifying symbol in Belgium alongside chocolate, waffles, beer and the national soccer team.
“They (Smurfs) are a symbol of Belgian culture and of Belgian heritage,” said Chloé Beaufays, the spokeswoman of the exhibition.
Organizers hope to take the exhibition to other European countries as well as the United States and Asia over next five years.
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