A few dozen colorfully painted pianos have appeared on New York City streets as part of a charity project called “Sing for Hope,” that is not just a musical event but an art show too. From New York, Mikhail Gutkin has the story.
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Month: June 2018
We were warned.
On June 23, 1988, a sultry day in Washington, James Hansen told Congress and the world that global warming wasn’t approaching — it had already arrived. The testimony of the top NASA scientist, said Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley, was “the opening salvo of the age of climate change.”
Thirty years later, it’s clear that Hansen and other doomsayers were right. But the change has been so sweeping that it is easy to lose sight of effects large and small — some obvious, others less conspicuous.
Earth is noticeably hotter, the weather stormier and more extreme. Polar regions have lost billions of tons of ice; sea levels have been raised by trillions of gallons of water. Far more wildfires rage.
Over 30 years — the time period climate scientists often use in their studies in order to minimize natural weather variations — the world’s annual temperature has warmed nearly 1 degree (0.54 degrees Celsius), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And the temperature in the United States has gone up even more — nearly 1.6 degrees.
“The biggest change over the last 30 years, which is most of my life, is that we’re no longer thinking just about the future,” said Kathie Dello, a climate scientist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. “Climate change is here, it’s now and it’s hitting us hard from all sides.”
Warming hasn’t been just global, it’s been all too local. According to an Associated Press statistical analysis of 30 years of weather, ice, fire, ocean, biological and other data, every single one of the 344 climate divisions in the Lower 48 states — NOAA groupings of counties with similar weather — has warmed significantly, as has each of 188 cities examined.
The effects have been felt in cities from Atlantic City, New Jersey, where the yearly average temperature rose 2.9 degrees in the past 30 years, to Yakima, Washington, where the thermometer jumped a tad more. In the middle, Des Moines, Iowa, warmed by 3.3 degrees since 1988.
South central Colorado, the climate division just outside Salida, has warmed 2.3 degrees on average since 1988, among the warmest divisions in the contiguous United States.
When she was a little girl 30 years ago, winery marketing chief Jessica Shook used to cross country ski from her Salida doorstep in winter. It was that cold and there was that much snow. Now, she has to drive about 50 miles for snow that’s not on mountain tops, she said.
“T-shirt weather in January, that never used to happen when I was a child,” Shook said. When Buel Mattix bought his heating and cooling system company 15 years ago in Salida, he had maybe four air conditioning jobs a year. Now he’s got a waiting list of 10 to 15 air conditioning jobs long and may not get to all of them.
Wildfires
And then there’s the effect on wildfires. Veteran Salida firefighter Mike Sugaski used to think a fire of 10,000 acres was big. Now he fights fires 10 times as large.
“You kind of keep saying ‘How can they get much worse?’ But they do,” said Sugaski, who was riding his mountain bike on what usually are ski trails in January this year.
In fact, wildfires in the United States now consume more than twice the acreage they did 30 years ago.
The statistics tracking climate change since 1988 are almost numbing. North America and Europe have warmed 1.89 degrees — more than any other continent. The Northern Hemisphere has warmed more than the Southern, the land faster than the ocean. Across the United States, temperature increases were most evident at night and in summer and fall. Heat rose at a higher rate in the North than the South.
Heat records
Since 1988, daily heat records have been broken more than 2.3 million times at weather stations across the nation, half a million times more than cold records were broken.
Doreen Pollack fled Chicago cold for Phoenix more than two decades ago, but in the past 30 years nighttime summer heat has increased almost 3.3 degrees there. She said when the power goes out, it gets unbearable, adding: “Be careful what you ask for.”
The AP interviewed more than 50 scientists who confirmed the depth and spread of warming.
Clara Deser, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said that when dealing with 30-year time periods in smaller regions than continents or the globe as a whole, it would be unwise to say all the warming is man-made. Her studies show that in some places in North America — though not most — natural weather variability could account for as much as half of local warming.
But when you look at the globe as a whole, especially since 1970, nearly all the warming is man-made, said Zeke Hausfather of the independent science group Berkeley Earth. Without extra carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, he said, the Earth would be slightly cooling from a weakening sun. Numerous scientific studies and government reports calculate that greenhouse gases in the big picture account for more than 90 percent of post-industrial Earth’s warming.
“It would take centuries to a millennium to accomplish that kind of change with natural causes. This, in that context, is a dizzying pace,” said Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.
Since the 1800s, scientists have demonstrated that certain gases in Earth’s atmosphere trap heat from the sun like a blanket. Human activities such as burning of coal, oil and gasoline are releasing more of those gases into the atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide. U.S. and international science reports say that more than 90 percent of the warming that has happened since 1950 is man-made.
Extremes
Others cautioned that what might seem to be small increases in temperature should not be taken lightly.
“One or two degrees may not sound like much, but raising your thermostat by just that amount will make a noticeable effect on your comfort,” said Deke Arndt, NOAA’s climate monitoring chief in Asheville, North Carolina, which has warmed nearly 1.8 degrees in 30 years.
Arndt said average temperatures don’t tell the entire story: “It’s the extremes that these changes bring.”
The nation’s extreme weather — flood-inducing downpours, extended droughts, heat waves and bitter cold and snow — has doubled in 30 years, according to a federal index.
The Northeast’s extreme rainfall has more than doubled. Brockton, Massachusetts, had only one day with at least four inches of rain from 1957 to 1988, but a dozen of them in the 30 years since, according to NOAA records. Ellicott City, Maryland, just had its second thousand-year flood in little less than two years.
And the summer’s named Atlantic storms? On average, the first one now forms nearly a month earlier than it did in 1988, according to University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy.
The 14 costliest hurricanes in American history, adjusted for inflation, have hit since 1988, reflecting both growing coastal development and a span that included the most intense Atlantic storms on record.
“The collective damage done by Atlantic hurricanes in 2017 was well more than half of the entire budget of our Department of Defense,” said MIT’s Kerry Emanuel.
Arctic ice
Climate scientists point to the Arctic as the place where climate change is most noticeable with dramatic sea ice loss, a melting Greenland ice sheet, receding glaciers and thawing permafrost. The Arctic has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the world.
Alaska’s annual average temperature has warmed 2.4 degrees since 1988 and 5.4 degrees in the winter. Since 1988, Utqiagvik, Alaska, formerly known as Barrow, has warmed more than 6 degrees yearly and more than 9 degrees in winter.
“The temperature change is noticeable. Our ground is thawing,” said Mike Aamodt, 73, the city’s former acting mayor. He had to move his own cabins at least four times because of coastal erosion and thawing ground due to global warming. “We live the climate change.”
The amount of Arctic sea ice in September, when it shrinks the most, fell by nearly one third since 1988. It is disappearing 50 years faster than scientists predicted, said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University.
“There is a new Arctic now because the Arctic ocean is now navigable” at times in the summer, said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
The vast majority of glaciers around the world have shrunk. A NASA satellite that measures shifts in gravity calculated that Earth’s glaciers lost 279 billion tons of ice — nearly 67 trillion gallons of water — from 2002 to 2017. In 1986, the Begich Boggs visitor center at Alaska’s Chugach National Forest opened to highlight the Portage glacier. But the glacier keeps shrinking.
“You absolutely cannot see it from the visitor center and you haven’t in the last 15 or so years,” said climatologist Brian Brettschneider of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica have also shriveled, melting about 455 billion tons of ice into water, according to the NASA satellite. That’s enough to cover the state of Georgia in water nearly 9 feet deep.
Sea level
And it is enough — coupled with all the other melting ice — to raise the level of the seas. Overall, NASA satellites have shown three inches of sea level rise (75 millimeters) in just the past 25 years.
With more than 70 percent of the Earth covered by oceans, a 3-inch increase means about 6,500 cubic miles (27,150 cubic km) of extra water. That’s enough to cover the entire United States with water about 9 feet deep.
It’s a fitting metaphor for climate change, say scientists: We’re in deep, and getting deeper.
“Thirty years ago, we may have seen this coming as a train in the distance,” NOAA’s Arndt said. “The train is in our living room now.”
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Norway tested a two-seater electric plane on Monday and predicted a start to passenger flights by 2025 if new aviation technologies match a green shift that has made Norwegians the world’s top buyers of electric cars.
Transport Minister Ketil Solvik-Olsen and Dag Falk-Petersen, head of state-run Avinor which runs most of Norway’s airports, took a few minutes’ flight around Oslo airport in an Alpha Electro G2 plane, built by Pipistrel in Slovenia.
“This is … a first example that we are moving fast forward” towards greener aviation, Solvik-Olsen told Reuters. “We do have to make sure it is safe – people won’t fly if they don’t trust it.”
He said plane makers such as Boeing and Airbus were developing electric aircraft and that battery prices were tumbling, making it feasible to reach a government goal of making all domestic flights in Norway electric by 2040.
Asked when passenger flights in electric planes could start, Falk-Petersen, the pilot, said: “My best guess is before 2025 … It should all be electrified by 2040.”
The two said the plane, with a takeoff weight of 570 kg (1255 lb), was cramped and buffeted by winds but far quieter than a conventional plane run on fossil fuels.
Norway tops the world league for per capita sales of electric cars such as Teslas, Nissan Leafs or Volkswagen Golfs, backed by incentives such as big tax breaks, free parking and exemptions from road tolls.
In May 2018, 56 percent of all cars sold in Norway were either pure electric or hybrids against 46 percent in the same month of 2017, according to official statistics.
Norway, a mountainous country of five million people where fjords and remote islands mean many short-hop routes of less than 200 kms, would be ideal for electric planes, Solvik-Olsen said. Also, 98 percent of electricity in Norway is generated from clean hydro power.
Some opposition politicians said the government needed to do far more to meet green commitments in the 200-nation Paris climate agreement.
“This is a start … but we have to make jet fuel a lot more expensive,” said Arild Hermstad, a leader of the Green Party.
The first electric planes flew across the English Channel in July 2015, including an Airbus E-Fan. French aviator Louis Bleriot who was first to fly across the Channel, in 1909, in a fossil-fuel powered plane.
Electric planes so far have big problems of weight, with bulky batteries and limited ranges. Both Falk-Petersen and Solvik-Olsen said they had been on strict diets before the flight.
“My wife is happy about it,” Solvik-Olsen said.
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Exhausted but relieved, Yariani Flores lay next to her healthy newborn son, along with four other Venezuelan women who just gave birth in a hospital in Colombia’s border city of Cucuta.
Thousands of Venezuelan women have done the same over the past few years, as the health system in their home country has crumbled. They crossed the border, driven by fear that they or their babies could die.
Early in her pregnancy, Flores sought a pre-natal checkup at a municipal hospital in Venezuela’s frontier state of Tachira only to be told that there was little point.
“The doctor said, ‘Don’t bother coming here, I can’t do much for you,'” said Flores, lying in the 12-bed maternity ward at Cucuta’s Erasmo Meoz University Hospital. “She recommended I come to Cucuta and have the birth here.”
Venezuela’s economic crisis has laid waste to its health system. The numbers of babies and women dying during or after childbirth have soared, while medicines and supplies have become increasingly scarce.
“You have to bring everything to the hospital in Venezuela,” said Flores, a 33-year-old mother of five. “There aren’t even any surgical gloves.”
A March survey of 137 hospitals, led by the opposition-dominated Congress, showed that they often lack basic equipment like catheters, as well as incubators and x-ray units.
Venezuelan hospitals are also plagued by water and electricity outages, and only 7 percent of emergency services are fully operative, the survey found.
Infant mortality in the oil-rich nation rose 30 percent last year, according to latest government data. Maternal mortality – dying during pregnancy or within 42 days of giving birth – shot up by 65 percent.
Healthcare Overwhelmed
Venezuela’s economic meltdown, including hyperinflation, is now putting a financial strain on the health system in Cucuta and other Colombian cities.
Nearly 820,000 Venezuelans have left their homeland to live in Colombia during the last 15 months, with arrivals expected to continue, according to Colombian authorities.
Cucuta, the largest city along the porous frontier and separated by a bridge that connects with Venezuela, has borne the brunt of the influx.
At the main hospital alone, Erasmo Meoz, about 14,000 Venezuelan patients have been treated in the past three years, most with no health insurance, said Juan Agustin Ramirez, director of the 500-bed facility.
The hospital has debts of about $6 million accumulated to care for Venezuelans, which the Colombian government has yet to reimburse as it promised last year, Ramirez said.
“This has created a financial crisis … and there comes a time when we collapse,” he said.
Until recently, the hospital treated only a few Venezuelans, mostly for road injuries, Ramirez said.
But now, on any given day, up to one in five patients at the hospital is Venezuelan, and its crowded emergency ward is overwhelmed.
Many are children suffering skin diseases, diarrhea and respiratory problems. Others are women who have high risk pregnancies and arrive malnourished, having had few or no pre-natal checkups.
“It’s a sign that something serious is happening with public health in Venezuela,” Ramirez told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Brother Nation
Ramirez said Colombia has a duty to help Venezuelans.
Colombians often refer to Venezuelans as their “brothers,” as they share close cultural and family ties.
In past decades, it was Venezuela that opened its doors to millions of Colombians fleeing civil war. Many found jobs and cutting-edge medical care in the once prosperous nation, Ramirez said.
“We can’t forget that during all these years of violence in Colombia, four to five million Colombians went to Venezuela where they were given services for free,” Ramirez said. “We have an immense debt with Venezuela.”
In the past year, about 54,500 Venezuelan migrants have received emergency care in public hospitals across Colombia, according to authorities, while nearly 200,000 have been vaccinated, many at border crossings.
But only patients needing emergency care, including pregnant women, get free treatment.
Those with chronic illnesses, like cancer, kidney failure, and HIV/AIDS are turned away because of a lack of resources.
“For those poor people, the situation is catastrophic,” Ramirez said.
Earlier this month, the Organization of American States reiterated its call on Venezuela to allow international aid into the country, to ease what it has described a “humanitarian crisis.”
Many expect the migration to continue following the re-election of Venezuela’s socialist President Nicolas Maduro last month, which the United States called “a sham” and many countries refused to recognize.
“We are not prepared, nor are we going to be prepared, if there’s a bigger exodus of citizens from Venezuela as conditions deteriorate even more,” Ramirez said.
Malnutrition
Another casualty of Venezuela’s crisis was laid bare at the hospital’s children’s ward.
A severely underweight four-month-old baby from Venezuela’s Yukpa tribe slept, hooked up to an intravenous tube to help him recover from malnutrition.
About 200 Yukpas have fled hunger in their ancestral lands.
They now live in ragged, makeshift tents just inside Colombia, near the border crossing.
Across town at a shelter run by the Scalabrini International Migration Network, a Catholic organization for migrant aid, pregnant women are given priority while other Venezuelans sleep on cardboard outside, waiting for a bed and a hot meal.
Keila Diaz, 23, who is heavily pregnant with her second child, came to the shelter with her husband in May. When the contractions start, she said, she will head to the hospital.
“I’m afraid to have my baby in Venezuela. Babies die, mothers die giving birth over there,” said Diaz, gently rubbing her bulging belly. “I have a better chance here.”
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When Jamil Bey wanted to move back to the Pittsburgh neighborhood where he had grown up, he found the perfect house to buy. There was just one problem — a fall in property values on that street had left the owners trapped in negative equity.
Unable to agree on a price that would allow the sellers to pay off their mortgage, Bey realized he would not be able to buy a house in his old neighborhood — and that the owners would be stuck with a property they did not want.
Across the United States, former manufacturing centers like Pittsburgh have experienced overwhelming population declines in recent decades, pushing down property prices and leaving homes empty and neglected.
“For folks who have a connection to those neighborhoods because they grew up there, there’s not a whole lot of quality properties to chose from,” Bey told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “Even if you’re looking for property to invest in, you can’t fund new construction because the property values in those neighborhoods are too low.”
It took a trip to New York state for Bey to find a potential solution to the problem blighting his city — land banks, which have the power to search out vacant properties and work to return them to the market.
“I was in Syracuse and realizing that the vacant lots looked well taken care of — planted, with cut grass and nicely maintained,” he said. “And I was told, ‘We have a land bank’.”
Many former industrial cities, particularly in the northeastern United States, have lost a quarter of their population or more since the 1950s, according to census data.
Pittsburgh, once one of the largest and most prosperous cities in the country, has been among the hardest hit.
Some neighborhoods there have suffered population declines of 80 percent and more, said Bey, setting up a cycle of decline that has blighted entire communities.
Recycling Land
Bey is now vice chairman of the Pittsburgh Land Bank, which is set to start operating this summer, aiming to take on the growing numbers of abandoned properties in the city.
He describes its remit as “recycling land” — working through entanglements of ownership, addressing tax issues and fixing up or tearing down structures with a view to getting vacant property back on the market or giving it over as a public space.
Houses that have sat for long enough to become blighted are often saddled with significant tax arrears, reducing their appeal to investors.
Many land banks are able to short-circuit this process, clearing arrears before addressing regulatory violations to make the property appealing to new buyers.
Land banks have existed in the United States since the 1980s, but interest has spiked since the economic downturn of 2008-09, according to law professor Frank S. Alexander.
That created a wave of foreclosures in which “abandonment was occurring, particularly at the low end of the property spectrum,” said Alexander, a leading authority on land banking who said the sector had seen “tremendous growth” as a result.
Around 170 land banks were operating across the country as of January, according to the Center for Community Progress, which Alexander co-founded.
Land banking initially concentrated on post-industrial inner cities, but since the recession demand has expanded to other areas, said Alexander.
“I don’t go in and evangelize, but rather work with state and local officials on why vacant and abandoned properties are killing their neighborhoods and cities,” he said. And the first thing they need to do is acknowledge the cost of doing nothing.”
‘Missing Tooth’
In some places, authorities at the highest levels have taken this lesson to heart.
In 2013, New York’s attorney general announced the creation of a seed fund for land banks across the state, drawing on legal settlements from big financial institutions involved in the housing crisis that preceded the recession.
Today, there are 25 land banks operating across the state, which turned around more than $28 million worth of property through 2016 according to a report last year from the Center for Community Progress.
Jocelyn Gordon oversees a land bank in Buffalo, a city in western New York that has some of the oldest housing stock in the country but has lost half of its population.
The city has seen over 6,000 demolitions in the past decade and has thousands of vacant lots. Many of the houses that remain are enormous and so energy-inefficient that residents’ fuel bills can exceed their rents, Gordon said.
The situation, she says, is “desperate … it’s a huge problem.”
Her Buffalo Erie Niagara Land Improvement Corporation (BENLIC) is taking over vacant parcels of land and building or retrofitting to make smaller and more energy-efficient homes.
BENLIC takes on about 70 properties annually, a figure it hopes to increase to 120. It aims to take on the parcels of land it feels will have the biggest impact in a neighbourhood — what Gordon calls filling in a block’s “missing tooth.”
“If there’s a demolition on a lot in a marketable neighborhood, and we can strengthen that block,” she said, “that’s the most fulfilling part.”
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Intel topped a list issued on Monday ranking how well technology companies combat the risk of forced labor in their supply chains, overtaking HP and Apple.
Most of the top 40 global technology companies assessed in the study by KnowTheChain, an online resource for business, had made progress since the last report was published in 2016. But the study found there was still room for improvement.
“The sector needs to advance their efforts further down the supply chain in order to truly protect vulnerable workers,” said Kilian Moote, project director of KnowTheChain, in a statement.
Intel, HP and Apple scored the highest on the list, which looked at factors including purchasing practices, monitoring and auditing processes. China-based BOE Technology Group and Taiwan’s Largan Precision came bottom.
Workers who make the components used by technology companies are often migrants vulnerable to exploitative working conditions, the report said.
About 25 million people globally were estimated to be trapped in forced labor in 2016, according to the International Labor Organization and rights group Walk Free Foundation.
Laborers in technology companies’ supply chains are sometimes charged high recruitment fees to get jobs, trapped in debt servitude, or deprived of their passports or other documents, the report said.
It highlighted a failure to give workers a voice through grievance mechanisms and tackle exploitative recruiting practices as the main areas of concern across the sector.
In recent years modern slavery has increasingly come under the global spotlight, putting ever greater regulatory and consumer pressure on firms to ensure their supply chains are free of forced labor, child labor and other forms of slavery.
From cosmetics and clothes to shrimp and smartphones, supply chains are often complex with multiple layers across various countries — whether in sourcing the raw materials or creating the final product — making it hard to identify exploitation.
Overall, large technology companies fared better than smaller ones, suggesting a strong link between size and capacity to take action, the report said. Amazon, which ranked 20th, was a notable exception, it said.
“Top-ranking brands … are listening to workers in their supply chains and weeding out unscrupulous recruitment processes,” Phil Bloomer, head of the Business & Human Rights Resource Center, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
A spokesman for Amazon said the report drew from old and incomplete information and failed to take into account recently launched anti-slavery commitments and initiatives.
HP said it regularly assessed its supply chain to identify and address any concerns and risks of exploitation.
“We strive to ensure that workers in our supply chain have fair treatment, safe working conditions, and freely chosen employment,” said Annukka Dickens, HP’s director for human rights and supply chain responsibility.
Intel, Apple, BOE Technology and Largan Precision did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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Women must be at the heart of climate action if the world is to limit the deadly impact of disasters such as floods, former Irish president and U.N. rights commissioner Mary Robinson said on Monday.
Robinson, also a former U.N. climate envoy, said women were most adversely affected by disasters and yet are rarely “put front and center” of efforts to protect the most vulnerable.
“Climate change is a man-made problem and must have a feminist solution,” she said at a meeting of climate experts at London’s Marshall Institute for Philanthropy and Entrepreneurship.
“Feminism doesn’t mean excluding men, it’s about being more inclusive of women and – in this case – acknowledging the role they can play in tackling climate change.”
Research has shown that women’s vulnerabilities are exposed during the chaos of cyclones, earthquakes and floods, according to the British think-tank Overseas Development Institute.
In many developing countries, for example, women are involved in food production, but are not allowed to manage the cash earned by selling their crops, said Robinson.
The lack of access to financial resources can hamper their ability to cope with extreme weather, she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on the sidelines of the event.
“Women all over the world are … on the front lines of the fall-out from climate change and therefore on the forefront of climate action,” said Natalie Samarasinghe, executive director of Britain’s United Nations Association.
“What we — the international community — need to do is talk to them, learn from them and support them in scaling up what they know works best in their communities,” she said at the meeting.
Robinson served as Irish president from 1990-1997 before taking over as the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, and now leads a foundation devoted to climate justice.
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Every workday, about 7,400 trucks mostly loaded with automotive parts rumble across the Ambassador Bridge connecting Detroit and Canada, at times snarling traffic along the busy corridor.
But if President Donald Trump delivers on threats to slap 25 percent tariffs on imported vehicles and components, there will be far fewer big rigs heading to factories that are now humming close to capacity on both sides of the border.
The tariff threat could be a negotiating ploy to restart stalled talks on the North American Free Trade Agreement. But it also could be real, since the administration already has imposed duties on $50 billion worth of Chinese imports, as well as steel and aluminum from China, the European Union, Canada and Mexico.
Tariffs against China include some autos and parts but if those spread to Canada and Mexico, the impact will be far larger because auto manufacturing has been integrated between the three countries for nearly a quarter century.
The Commerce Department said in a statement last week that it “has just launched its investigation into whether imports of auto and auto parts threaten to impair the national security. That investigation, which has only just begun, will inform recommendations to the president for action or inaction.”
If the wider auto tariffs are imposed, industry experts say they will disrupt a decades-old symbiotic parts supply chain, raise vehicle prices, cut new-vehicle sales, cost jobs in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, and even slow related sectors of the economy.
“It seems like it is going to be so devastating that I can’t imagine that they’re actually going to do it,” said Kristen Dziczek, vice president of labor and economics at the Center for Automotive Research, an industry think tank.
Trump, who was sniping on Twitter at Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau after a contentious economic summit of the Group of Seven earlier this month, told the Commerce Department to look at national security reasons to justify tariffs with hopes of bringing factory jobs to the U.S.
He tweeted that the administration would “look at tariffs on automobiles flooding the U.S. Market!”
But experts predict the tariffs likely would do the opposite, slowing the economy as other countries retaliate. Here’s what they say is likely to happen:
Auto prices rise, sales fall
The tariffs would be charged on parts and assembled autos. Canada, Mexico and others would likely retaliate with duties, and automakers won’t be able to absorb all of the increases. So, they will have to raise prices. Imported parts, which all cars and trucks have, will cost more, further raising costs.
“We’re all going to pay a lot more for vehicles,” said Tim Galbraith, sales manager of Cavalier tool and manufacturing in Windsor, Ontario, near Detroit, maker of steel molds used to produce plastic auto parts.
About 44 percent of the 17.2 million new vehicles sold last year in the U.S. were imported from other countries, and half of those came from Canada and Mexico. All have parts from outside the U.S., sometimes as much as 40 percent.
Based on the 24-year-old NAFTA, automakers and suppliers constantly ship fully assembled vehicles as well as engines, transmissions and thousands of small widgets across both U.S. borders. Parts also come from China and other countries.
It’s difficult to determine how large any price increases would be. But some back-of-the-envelope calculations show that a Chevrolet Equinox small SUV made in Canada would cost about $5,250 more in the U.S. if General Motors doesn’t eat part of it. That’s based on an average price of $30,000 in the U.S. for the hot-selling Equinox, made primarily in Ingersoll, Ontario. Tariffs are charged on the manufacturing cost, which is about 70 percent of the sales price.
Toyota’s RAV4, a main Equinox competitor and the top-selling vehicle in the U.S. that’s not a pickup truck, also is made in Canada and would face the same duties. “An import tariff would hurt consumers the most since it would increase the costs of vehicles and parts,” Toyota said in a statement.
Honda’s CR-V, another small SUV, is made in Ohio and would be exempt from the tariff on assembled vehicles, so it would have a price advantage. But about one-quarter of its parts come from other countries. That would force Honda to raise its price too, said Dziczek.
With higher prices, many people will either keep current vehicles or buy used ones.
Jeff Schuster, senior vice president LMC Automotive, expects U.S. new-vehicle sales would fall 1 million to 2 million per year if tariffs are imposed.
Since U.S. auto factories making popular models are running near capacity, automakers couldn’t do much in the short run to build more vehicles in the U.S. and avoid the tariff, Schuster said.
Jobs lost
As sales fall, auto and parts makers would need to cut costs by laying off workers. Mexico and Canada would be hit first, but since they import parts from the U.S., component makers domestically also would have to cut.
For instance, the RAV4’s engines are made in Alabama and transmissions in West Virginia. If sales drop, those factories wouldn’t need as many workers.
On the assembly line at the Ontario Equinox factory, the 2,400 workers are worried about the escalating dispute, said Joe Graves, the union president.
“I don’t really see how one individual can change everything that was put in place over decades,” Graves said of Trump. “It does cause a lot of uncertainty and instability with our members.”
As sales slump, dealers who sell imported cars would lay off workers, too.
The pro-free trade Peterson Institute predicted that if other countries impose tariffs, U.S. auto production would fall 4 percent, costing 624,000 U.S. jobs in about one-to-three years.
Other sectors of the economy would also be hit because autos touch nearly all manufacturing, said Dan Ujczo, a trade lawyer in Columbus, Ohio. Tariffs would “be a shock wave through the economy. And that will be a red line for Congress to step in and do something,” he predicted.
Retaliatory tariffs from other countries would likely hit U.S. agriculture and other businesses, curtailing exports and also costing jobs, Dziczek said.
Companies with price advantages due to the tariffs may increase U.S. production, and that could bring more jobs. But Schuster and others expect they would raise production with the existing workforce.
Although Trump would like to see auto and parts production relocated to the U.S., experts say such moves are not likely.
It would take several years and billions of dollars to plan and build new plants, which companies would be reluctant to do without knowing the tariffs are permanent. It’s possible the next president could undo the tariffs, and the industry likely would wait for that, Dziczek said.
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France’s finance minister promised to cut red tape on companies, open up more financing for them and create incentives for employee profit-sharing under a new bill presented on Monday.
The proposed law is part of President Emmanuel Macron’s pro-business reform drive that has already eased labour laws and cut companies’ and entrepreneurs’ taxes.
“The law’s ultimate objective is more growth and the creation of a new French economic growth model,” Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire told reporters.
Le Maire said that by 2025 the overhaul of French corporate law was expected to boost overall gross domestic product by one percent over the long term.
The new law aims to address one long-standing complaint from business owners about a complex system that imposes new charges in multiple stages as companies increase their workforce.
The bill would simplify the system, Le Maire said, by halving the number of those stages to three — bringing in new charges and obligations when a company has 11, 50 and then 250 employees.
It would also make it easier, cheaper and faster to register a company, giving entrepreneurs a single online platform to replace the current round of seven administrative bodies.
Liquidation of insolvent companies will be sped up so business owners can move on and bankruptcy law will give more power to creditors who have a stake in seeing the firm survive, the minister added.
The government aims to boost the more than 220 billion euros French people currently hold in long-term retirement savings, which it hopes will make more funds available to be invested in companies’ capital.
To do that, employees’ voluntary contributions will largely be made tax-deductible for all types of savings products and they will be able to transfer savings from one money manager to another at no cost, potentially boosting competition, according to a statement on the bill.
The government aims to make profit-sharing much more common in small companies by scrapping charges employers currently have to make on payouts to employees.
Largely because of that measure, the new law is expected to cost the government 1.2 billion euros annually, which Le Maire said would be paid for by planned cuts in subsidies to companies.
The law also sets the stage for several large privatizations with the proceeds already earmarked for a new 10 billion euro innovation fund.
It will in particular lift legal restraints on selling down stakes in airport operator ADP and energy group Engie while allowing the national lottery FDA to be privatized.
While some left-wing and far-right politicians have said the sales amounted to selling the family jewels, Macron’s party has a sufficiently large parliamentary majority to pass the bill with little trouble early next year.
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Vowing to reclaim U.S. leadership in space, President Donald Trump announced Monday he is directing the Pentagon to create a new “Space Force” as an independent service branch aimed at ensuring American supremacy in space.
Trump envisioned a bright future for the U.S. space program, pledging to revive the country’s flagging efforts, return to the moon and eventually send a manned mission that would reach Mars. The president framed space as a national security issue, saying he does not want “China and Russia and other countries leading us.”
“My administration is reclaiming America’s heritage as the world’s greatest spacefaring nation,” Trump said in the East Room, joined by members of his space council. “The essence of the American character is to explore new horizons and to tame new frontiers.”
Trump had previously suggested the possibility of creating a space unit that would include portions equivalent to parts of the Air Force, Army and Navy. But his directive will task the Defense Department to begin the process of establishing the ‘Space Force’ as the sixth branch of the U.S. armed forces. He said the new branch’s creation will be overseen by Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“When it comes to defending America, it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space,” Trump said. He added: “We are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space Force, separate but equal.”
The president also used the White House event to establish a new policy for reducing satellite clutter in space. The policy calls for providing a safe and secure environment up in orbit, as satellite traffic increases. It also sets up new guidelines for satellite design and operation, to avoid collisions and spacecraft breakups.
Trump was joined by Vice President Mike Pence, who leads the recently revived space council, and several Cabinet members, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, retired astronauts and scientists.
The council’s executive secretary, Scott Pace, told reporters before the meeting that space is becoming increasingly congested and current guidelines are inadequate to address the challenge.
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Apple is trying to drag the U.S.’s antiquated system for handling 911 calls into the 21st century.
If it lives up to Apple’s promise, the next iPhone operating system coming out in September will automatically deliver quicker and more reliable information pinpointing the location of 911 calls to about 6,300 emergency response centers in the U.S.
Apple is trying to solve a problem caused by the technological mismatch between a system built for landlines 50 years ago and today’s increasingly sophisticated smartphones that make most emergency calls in the U.S.
The analog system often struggles to decipher the precise location of calls coming from digital devices, resulting in emergency responders sometimes being sent a mile or more from people pleading for help.
Many Muslims around the world are not happy with Hollywood’s stereotypes of Muslims and Islam. But instead of protesting, nonprofit group Muslim Public Affairs Council created a Hollywood bureau to engage with filmmakers. It also honors those making a difference with the so-called “Muslim Oscars.” VOA’s Vina Mubtadi reports from Los Angeles.
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For the first time, the World Health Organization is adding Gaming disorder to the section on Mental and Addictive Disorders in its new International Classification of Diseases. The ICD provides data on the causes of thousands of diseases, injuries and deaths across the globe and information on prevention and treatment.
The International Classification of Diseases was last revised 28 years ago.
Changes, which have occurred since then are reflected in this edition. Gaming disorder has been added to the section on mental and addictive disorders because demand for services to tackle this condition has been growing.
Gaming disorders usually are linked to a system of rewards or incentives, such as accumulating points in competition with others or winning money. These games are commonly played on electronic and video devices.
WHO officials say statistics, mainly from East and South Asian countries, show only a very small two to three percent of people are addicted to Gaming.
Director of WHO’s Department for Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Shekhar Saxena, describes some of the warning signs of addictive Gaming behavior.
“Be careful if the person you are with, a child or another person is using Gaming in an excessive manner… If it is consuming too much time and if it is interfering with the expected functions of the person, whether it is studies, whether it is socialization, whether it is work, then you need to be cautious and perhaps seek help,” said Saxena.
In the previous WHO classification, gender identity disorders, such as transsexualism were listed under mental and behavioral conditions. Saxena says this now has been moved to the chapter on disorders of sexual behavior along with some other conditions.
“The people with gender identity disorder should be not categorized as a mental disorder because in many cases, in many countries it can be stigmatizing, and it can actually decrease their chances of seeking help because of legal provisions in many countries,” said Saxena.
A new chapter also has been added on traditional medicine. Although traditional medicine is used by millions of people worldwide, it never before has been classified by WHO in this system.
Discarded life jackets on a beach in Greece inspired artwork by a teenager who wanted to learn more about the refugee crisis.
Achilleas Souras, the 17-year-old creator of the artwork, titled SOS: Save Our Souls, hopes his project prompts others to learn as well.
Souras was 15 and living in Barcelona when the flood of refugees from places that include the Middle East and Africa landed on the beaches of Lesbos, Greece, and created a humanitarian crisis.
The idea for the project came to him after he learned about the crisis in school.
Souras reached out to the mayor of Lesbos, the first stop for thousands of seaborne migrants who undertook their desperate voyage in the Aegean Sea. The island’s beaches were littered with debris from their journeys.
“It culminated in me reaching out to get actual life jackets,” Souras recalled. The mayor of Lesbos responded.
Souras said the vests still had the smell of the sea. “When I touched them, I realized that every one of these life jackets represented a human life.”
Searching for a theme, Souras, who is of Greek-British heritage, was inspired by what the migrants were seeking – shelter. He used the vests — to build igloo-shaped enclosures modeled on the temporary homes indigenous peoples build of snow and ice in the far north.
The installation struck a chord, and Souras has been invited by museums, design fairs and refugee organizations to show his work around the world. Different versions of the project have been displayed in Spain, Italy, South Africa, Brazil, Thailand and Canada. There is now an installation in Byblos, Lebanon.
Souras brought a small version of the installation to Los Angeles for the four-day LA Design Festival that ended June 10. The exhibit consisted of miniature life jackets made with fabric from the real ones.
He said the point of the exhibit is not political, and “isn’t really meant to influence somebody’s point of view. “It’s really just meant to make somebody feel more inspired to explore more about the crisis like I did,” he said.
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than 65 million people worldwide have been displaced from their homes, and more than 22 million are refugees – people forced to flee because of conflict or persecution.
Souras said that is something he wants those who see his art to think about.
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Astronomers and stargazers will get a chance to get up close and personal with Mars over the next six weeks, as the Earth passes between the Red Planet and the sun.
Mars will make its closest swing toward Earth, bringing it closer and appearing brighter, than it has in the past 15 years.
In 2003, Mars came within 56.1 million kilometers of Earth, the closest it had come in 60,000 years, according to the Weather Channel.
This year the two planets won’t get quite as cozy. The Weather Channel said Mars will appear the brightest to Earth stargazers on July 31, when the two planets are just 57.6 million kilometers apart.
How large Mars appears in the sky to people on Earth depends on where the two neighboring planets are in their elliptical journey. While it takes Earth 365 days to orbit the sun, it takes Mars almost twice as long, or 687 days.
In 2016, the planets were at the opposite ends of their orbits, with 75.6 million kilometers between them, making Mars appear very small.
The next time Mars comes this close to Earth will be in March 2035.
In Myanmar, the most popular sport is football. But baseball, which is American’s national pastime, has carved a small niche for itself thanks to a man from Japan. Dave Grunebaum has the story.
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For 25 years, Patrick Matondo has earned a living buying and selling monkeys, bats and other animals popularly known as bush meat along the Congo River. Standing on the riverbank in Mbandaka, a city affected by the deadly new outbreak of the Ebola virus, the father of five said that for the first time he’s worried he won’t be able to support his family.
“Since Ebola was declared, business has decreased by almost half. It’s really, really bad,” the 47-year-old said, hanging his head.
Congo’s latest Ebola outbreak declared in May has 38 confirmed cases, including 14 deaths. The discovery of a handful of Ebola cases among Mbandaka’s more than 1 million residents also has hurt the economy, especially among traders of meat from wild animals.
The virus, which spreads through bodily fluids of those infected, has been known to jump from animals such as monkeys and bats to humans. In the West Africa outbreak four years ago that killed more than 11,000 people, it was widely suspected that the epidemic began when a 2-year-old boy in Guinea was infected by a bat.
Usually the wild animals are highly sought-after as popular sources of protein along with beef and pork, and cargo ships carrying the smoked meat arrive daily in the city, the trade hub for Congo’s northwestern Equateur province. Meanwhile, bush meat markets still see locals bartering for the animals, both dead and alive. Prospective buyers pause at tables piled with monkey meat, picking up blackened chunks one by one for a closer look.
“Meat is very important for people here. It’s one of the biggest industries in Mbandaka,” said Matondo, a leader in the city’s bush meat association.
Dr. Pierre Rollin, an Ebola expert with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said if the meat is cooked, smoked or dried it kills the virus. The people at greatest risk are hunters and butchers who process the meat, he said.
The World Health Organization has advised against trade and travel restrictions because of the current outbreak, which is mostly in remote areas.
Boats with bush meat continue to depart for the capital, Kinshasa, 600 kilometers (323 miles) downstream and for villages tucked deep in the rainforest up and down the river. Disease experts warned, however, that precautions are still necessary as monkeys and bats are sold live throughout the region.
Traders said demand has dwindled because of Ebola, with sales for many dropping from about 100 animals a day to about 20.
“Kinshasa and Brazzaville told us to stop sending monkeys and bats,” said another trader in Mbandaka, Willy Taban, who said his business has been cut in half in recent weeks. He was referring to buyers in the capital of the nearby Republic of Congo, which is across the river from Kinshasa.
Congo’s health minister, Dr. Oly Ilunga Kalenga, said there are no plans to ban sales of bush meat in the province since bush meat is not the primary way the Ebola virus spreads. Instead, the government is focusing on good hygiene practices such as hand-washing, he said.
Health officials are also tracking down anyone who had close contact with anyone infected by the virus, offering an experimental vaccine and promoting safe burials and other practices. Such health efforts can be challenging in communities where many people consider Ebola to be witchcraft. Others are skeptical that the disease exists, even though this is the Central African country’s ninth outbreak.
One Mbandaka trader, Gamo Louambo, said he’s still shipping 100 wild animals to Kinshasa daily and said he won’t stop eating them as they’re his main source of food. “I don’t see Ebola. It isn’t here,” he said.
In West Africa, where there had never been an outbreak before 2014, getting people to accept that Ebola was a real disease was key, said WHO’s Jonathan Polonsky.
For those in Kinshasa, “Ebola is very far away,” said Defede Mbale, immigration chief at the capital’s port of Maluku.
Pointing to a poster of safe Ebola practices on his desk, he said the government has provided extra resources to patrol the river and take people’s temperatures as they arrive by boats, checking for fevers.
He doesn’t doubt the deadly virus exists, but Mbale said there’s only so much that he’s willing to change.
“We have our customs and they won’t change because of Ebola,” he said. “We’ll eat all foods.”
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A Puerto Rican from the Bronx, Orlando Pagan fell in love with Ukrainian folklore when he was a teenager. He used to dance in the Syzokryli Ukrainian Dance Ensemble, and now he leads it. Pagan believes Ukrainian dances are truly special and hopes to make them as popular as the Argentine tango or the Austrian waltz. Carolyn Presutti narrates this report by Tatiana Vorozhko.
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