The air pollution problem isn’t going away. According to the World Health Organization, nine out of 10 people worldwide breathe polluted air and approximately 7 million die as a result of exposure to it each year. One creative startup has an artistic solution to an ugly problem. VOA’s Tina Trinh reports.
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Month: July 2018
Reality TV star Kylie Jenner is on track to become the youngest self-made billionaire in the United States thanks to the booming cosmetics company she launched two years ago, Forbes magazine reported Wednesday.
Jenner, 20, half-sister of Kim, Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian, debuted Kylie Cosmetics in 2016 with $29 lip kits containing matching lipstick and lip liner, and has since sold more than $630 million worth of makeup.
Forbes valued her company at nearly $800 million, and said Jenner owns 100 percent of it.
Adding millions from TV programs, endorsements and after-tax dividends from her company, Forbes said Jenner was “conservatively” worth $900 million. Another year of growth would make her the youngest self-made billionaire ever, male or female, the magazine said.
Jenner first grabbed the spotlight as part of the Keeping Up with the Kardashians reality TV show with her mother and siblings. Forbes estimated that Kim Kardashian, who has her own cosmetics, clothing and mobile games lines, is worth $350 million.
In an interview with Forbes, Jenner credited social media for helping drive her success.
“Social media is an amazing platform,” she said. “I have such easy access to my fans and my customers.”
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Social networking platform Twitter announced Wednesday it will be removing accounts it had deemed suspicious from user’s follower counts, as part of a recent push to promote accuracy on the website. This could reduce the number of “followers” of some of the website’s most popular users, including politicians and celebrities.
The website had locked accounts of users where Twitter “detected sudden changes in account behavior,” such as sharing misleading links, being blocked by a large number of accounts that account had interacted with, or a large number of unsolicited replies to other users’ tweets, Twitter general counsel Vijaya Gadde wrote. The accounts are locked, preventing one from logging in and using the account until the account’s owner verified their use.
Wednesday’s change will remove these locked accounts from users’ follower counts, which are visible on a user’s account page and often are used as a barometer of an individual’s sway on the website, which 336 million users log into every month, according to USA Today.
Gadde wrote that while the average Twitter user will see their follower count drop only by about four, popular accounts could see a more dramatic drop in the number of their followers.
In the wake of reports that Russia had used fake accounts platform to help sow discord in the American public in the lead-up and aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey pledged in March 2018 to help clean up the website.
And on Friday, The Washington Post reported that Twitter had suspended more than a million accounts a day in recent months — upward of 70 million in the months of May and June 2018 alone.
“I wish Twitter had been more proactive sooner,” Sen. Mark Warner [D-Virginia] the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told the Post. “I’m glad that — after months of focus on this issue — Twitter appears to be cracking down on the use of bots and other fake accounts, though there is still much work to do.”
Following the Post’s report, U.S. President Donald Trump, who often was the recipient of support from Russian-linked accounts, posted this tweet:
One such Twitter account suspended in 2017, @TEN_GOP, purporting to be related to the Tennessee Republican Party, had its tweets shared on the platform by Trump White House officials such as Kellyanne Conway and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
In February 2018, special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian influence in the Trump campaign and the 2016 election, named the account in an indictment, alleging it was one of many on social media that “primarily intended to communicate derogatory information about Hillary Clinton, to denigrate other candidates such as Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and to support Bernie Sanders and then-candidate Donald Trump.”
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The first transgender woman to compete in the global Miss Universe pageant wants to make history as a role model for trans children around the globe — no matter whether she wins or not the top beauty title.
The 26-year-old Angela Ponce beat 20 other contestants in the Miss Universe Spain gala on June 29, qualifying for the global round of the pageant, which has allowed transgender participation since 2012.
The location and dates for this year’s contest have yet to be announced. But Ponce is already planning to use it as a platform to draw attention toward high rates of suicide among trans teenagers, as well as legal codes that still discriminate against them around the world.
“If my going through all this contributes to the world moving a little step forward, then that’s a personal crown that will always accompany me,” Ponce told The Associated Press at the offices of the Miss Universe franchise in central Madrid.
The Spanish capital has just wrapped up its 2018 week-long pride celebrations, whose main theme was a call for equality and greater visibility for people with non-binary gender identity. Rights campaigners marching last Saturday welcomed the World Health Organization’s recent move to take trans identities off the official list of mental health disorders, but highlighted discrimination faced by transgender people of all ages, including employment discrimination.
A study published last year by the European transgender group TGEU found that 77.5 percent of 885 transgender people over 16 years old polled in Georgia, Poland, Serbia, Spain and Sweden had considered taking their own lives and that 24.5 percent of respondents had made at least one attempt.
Ponce said she had suffered discrimination before as a model, being rejected for fashion events or shoots once designers or organizers discovered she had undergone a sex reassignment procedure.
But in those moments, she said her life motto — “To be the best is not an option, is a must” — gave her strength.
She said her experience growing up in a “loving and supporting family” but without any role models in a small town in southern Spain, near Sevilla, can be a useful story for others.
“My parents never had to go to school to demand any changes in attitudes, I did it myself,” Ponce said, highlighting how she would meet aside with every new teacher and tell them: “Whatever name appears in the roll call, you should call me Angela.”
The 1.77-meter (5 foot, 11 inch) model’s career took off after she won a provincial beauty award in 2015, reaching new heights last month with the Miss Universe pageant.
“I closed my eyes,” she said, recalling the victory. “All I wanted was to feel how they put on the crown because I was aware that it was a historical moment.”
In 2012, 23-year-old Jenna Talackova was banned from Canada’s Miss Universe pageant for not being a “naturally born” female. The organization — run at the time by now U.S. President Donald Trump — changed the regulations after she threatened legal action. Talackova made it to the shortlist in Canada, but didn’t win entry to the international contest.
Six years later, Ponce says that transphobia remains a global problem, even in Spain, a country she sees as a pioneer in the protection of LGBT rights.
After Ponce’s victory in the Spanish beauty title, she received hundreds of messages of support on social media, but also some criticism — even from some feminist, gay or transgender users who decried beauty pageants in general as objectification.
“We can’t be hypocritical,” said Ponce, rejecting the charges and describing her victories as success for all transgender people. “Beauty is used to sell everything around us, and beauty can also help us spread a message of equality.”
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The U.S. is on pace to leapfrog both Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world’s biggest oil producer.
The latest data released by the Energy Information Administration shows U.S. output growing again next year to 11.8 million barrels a day.
Linda Capuano, who heads the agency, says that would make the U.S. the world’s No. 1 producer.
The director of the International Energy Agency, a group of oil-consuming countries, made a similar prediction in February.
Russia and Saudi Arabia pumped more crude than the U.S. last year.
Production is booming in U.S. shale fields because of newer techniques such as fracking and horizontal drilling.
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Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari said on Wednesday the country will soon sign up to a $3 trillion African free trade zone.
Nigeria is one of Africa’s two largest economies, the other being South Africa. Buhari’s government had refused to join a continental free-trade zone established in March, on the grounds that it wishes to defend its own businesses and industry.
The administration later said it wanted more time to consult business leaders.
“In trying to guarantee employment, goods and services in our country, we have to be careful with agreements that will compete, maybe successfully, against our upcoming industries,” Buhari told a news conference during a visit by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.
“I am a slow reader, maybe because I was an ex-soldier. I didn’t read it fast enough before my officials saw that it was all right for signature. I kept it on my table. I will soon sign it.”
The continental free-trade zone, which encompasses 1.2 billion people, was initially joined by 44 countries in March. South Africa signed up earlier this month.
Economists point to the continent’s low level of intra-regional trade as one of the reasons for Africa’s enduring poverty and lack of a strong manufacturing base.
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Facebook will be facing its first fine in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the social media platform allowed the data mining firm to access the private information of millions of users without their consent or knowledge.
A British government investigative office, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), fined Facebook 500,000 pounds, or $663,000 – the maximum amount that can be levied for the violation of British data privacy laws. In a report, the ICO found Facebook had broken the law in failing to protect the data of the estimated 87 million users affected by the security breach.
The ICO’s investigation concluded that Facebook “contravened the law by failing to safeguard people’s information,” the report read. It also found that the company failed to be transparent about how people’s data was harvested by others on its platform.
Cambridge Analytica, a London firm that shuttered its doors in May following a report by The New York Times and The Observer chronicling its dealings, offered “tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior,” according to a March Times report.
“New technologies that use data analytics to micro-target people give campaign groups the ability to connect with individual voters,” Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham said in a statement. “But this cannot be at the expense of transparency, fairness and compliance with the law.”
The firm, which U.S. President Donald Trump employed during his successful 2016 election campaign, was heavily funded by American businessman Robert Mercer, who is also a major donor to the U.S. Republican Party. Former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon was also employed by the firm and has said he coined the company’s name.
Christopher Wylie, a whistleblower within the firm, told the Times in March that the firm aimed to create psychological profiles of American voters and use those profiles to target them via advertising.
“[Cambridge Analytica’s leaders] want to fight a culture war in America,” Wylie told the Times. “Cambridge Analytica was supposed to be the arsenal of weapons to fight that culture war.”
While this is the first financial penalty Facebook will be facing in the scandal, the fine will not make a dent in the company’s profits. The social media giant generated $11.97 billion in revenue in the first quarter, and generates the revenue needed to pay the fine about every 10 minutes.
Denham said the company will have an opportunity to respond to the fine before a final decision is made. Facebook has said it will respond to the ICO report soon.
“As we have said before, we should have done more to investigate claims about Cambridge Analytica and taken action in 2015,” said Erin Egan, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, in a statement. “We have been working closely with the Information Commissioner’s Office in their investigation of Cambridge Analytica, just as we have with authorities in the U.S. and other countries.”
The statement from the ICO also announced that the office would seek to criminally prosecute SCL Elections Ltd., Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, for failing to comply with a legal request from a U.S. professor to disclose what data the company had on him. SCL Elections also shut down in May.
“Your data is yours and you have a right to control its use,” wrote David Carroll, the professor.
The ICO said it would also be asking 11 political parties to conduct audits of their data protection processes, and compel SCL Elections to comply with Carroll’s request.
Further investigations by agencies such as the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI, and Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, are under way. In April, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared before a U.S. Senate committee to testify on the company’s actions in the scandal.
“We didn’t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake,” Zuckerberg told U.S. lawmakers in prepared remarks in April. He also said, “It was my mistake, and I’m sorry.”
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In a ceremony last week attended by heads of state from across East Africa, Djibouti inaugurated what it says will become the largest free-trade zone on the continent.
The project will take 10 years to complete and will occupy more than 48 square kilometers when finished. In the pilot phase, it will increase the size of Djibouti’s economy by 11 percent, Prime Minister Abdoulkader Kamil Mohamed told VOA’s French-to-Africa service.
But the $3.5 billion project will also add to what some experts consider to be an extreme reliance on Chinese financing and could raise the small desert nation’s debt to alarming levels.
Debt distress
Scott Morris is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and the director of the U.S. Development Policy Initiative. He co-wrote a report in March that highlights the debt implications of the Belt and Road Initiative.
Morris and his colleagues considered the debt vulnerability of 68 countries involved in the BRI, including China. They concluded that most countries have a low risk, but for eight countries, the risk is high.
Djibouti is the only high-risk African country. It stands out because its debt represents a large portion of its gross domestic product, which economists consider to be a good indicator of a country’s overall economic strength and size. By the end of 2016, Djibouti’s debt had reached more than 86 percent of its GDP, and it owed nearly all of that money to China.
Combined, these factors make Djibouti susceptible to debt distress, a condition that can hurt economic growth or even cause an economic crisis.
The new free-trade zone will add significantly to Djibouti’s Chinese debt, possibly elevating Djibouti’s risk to “an alarming state,” Morris said.
‘We are well-situated’
Djibouti is optimistic its investments will pay off.
“We don’t have natural resources, but God has placed us in a strategic zone where about 30 percent of the maritime commerce in the world passes through,” Mohamed said. “So, we are well-situated, and we plan to take advantage of this placement to have the maximum profit for our country and our people.”
Morris agrees that Djibouti’s infrastructure deals could generate significant economic activity and growth, and that helps keep the risks of debt in check.
The catch, according to Morris, is big infrastructure projects pay dividends over the long haul, but debt obligations kick in much sooner. “With deals like this continuing to stack up, it does seem to me that Djibouti is facing a real debt problem,” Morris said.
If Djibouti were to default on its loans, it might find itself handing full control of projects such as the free-trade zone or Chinese-built ports over to China. That precedent was set late last year, when Sri Lanka, burdened with $8 billion in loans to Chinese firms, transferred the Port of Hambantota to China on a 99-year lease.
If China were to take control over a Djibouti-based infrastructure project, the geopolitical implications could extend far beyond finances. But a handover wouldn’t be necessary for China to sway politics in the region and beyond.
“There’s no doubt that the Chinese government as a creditor also makes its political will known on issues that matter to it,” Morris said.
Those stipulations aren’t unique to China, Morris added, citing the United States as one example of a country that ties economics to politics. President Donald Trump’s administration, Morris said, has made clear that countries would be eligible for financial assistance depending on their votes in the United Nations.
The additional challenge with Chinese loans, according to Morris, is a lack of transparency. “It’s really hard to judge the degree to which they are extracting political concessions.”
Risks and rewards
An opaque approach to financing makes Chinese loans more risky overall, Morris said.
“There’s not a consistent reporting principle on the part of China as a creditor,” he added. And because China hasn’t agreed to be governed by globally accepted financing rules, the risk for countries that accept Chinese loans goes up.
African countries need to vet Chinese-financed projects carefully, Morris said, being sure the terms adhere to accepted financing standards. But that doesn’t mean all BRI projects should be taken off the table.
“If there is a viable infrastructure project that an entity like the China Development Bank wants to finance, and the terms look reasonable, there’s no reason not to proceed with that,” Morris said. “But one has to evaluate each project on its own merits.”
In Djibouti, the government is confident its strategy is paying off. “Chinese interests are Djiboutian interests also,” Mohamed said. “We are happy to profit from our position so we can develop our country.”
Idrissa Fall and Anasthasie Tudieshe contributed to this report.
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Actor George Clooney slammed his motorbike into an oncoming car that turned suddenly into his lane Tuesday and was thrown several meters (yards) in the air on the Italian island of Sardinia, according to video of the crash.
“He is recovering at his home and will be fine,” Clooney spokesman Stan Rosenfield told The Associated Press in an email.
Surveillance video of the crash, apparently taken by a fixed security video, was obtained late Tuesday by the newspaper Corriere della Sera. It shows a blue Mercedes veering into oncoming traffic apparently to turn into a residential compound near Olbia. The video shows what is reported as Clooney’s scooter crashing into the car while another scooter alongside him manages to veer around it.
Clooney is thrown over the front of his bike and up in the air before landing on the asphalt, where the car driver and other witnesses come to help.
The John Paul II hospital in Olbia confirmed Clooney was treated there and released after a few hours.
Local media representatives who gathered at the hospital said the Oscar-winning actor-director left in a van through a side exit.
The newspaper La Nuova Sardegna said the 57-year-old Clooney was heading to a film set when the accident happened at a curve in the road near the entrance to the Costa Corallina residential compound in the province of Olbia.
An oil stain and police paint remained on the road. Photographs taken by someone passing the scene showed the car’s front right bumper damaged and Clooney’s bike on its side.
Clooney reportedly was in Sardinia filming a television miniseries adapted from Joseph Heller’s World War II novel “Catch-22.”
He has been staying at a lush, gated rental villa in the high-end Puntaldia neighborhood on Sardinia’s northeastern coast, which overlooks the Tyrrhenian Sea. Staff at the home declined to comment.
Clooney is a frequent visitor to Italy. He has a home on Lake Como and was married in Venice in 2014 to the British human rights attorney Amal Clooney.
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Hundreds of well-wishers turned out to catch a glimpse of Prince Harry and his wife, the former actress Meghan Markle, as they made their first overseas walkabout Wednesday in Dublin.
Students and tourists flocked to the Irish capital’s Trinity College, screaming and shouting to greet the royal couple, who were on their first official trip abroad as a married couple.
Soccer was a hot topic, with England playing Croatia later Wednesday in the semi-final World Cup match. Harry asked the crowd: “Are you all cheering for England?” and chatted away with university students about soccer.
Earlier, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, as they are formally known, met with Irish President Michael D. Higgins at his official residence.
When asked by a reporter if “football was coming home” — a reference to England’s chances of winning the World Cup — Harry triggered laughter when he answered with a grin: “Most definitely.”
The royal couple also visited the headquarters of the Gaelic Athletic Association, the scene of the Bloody Sunday massacre committed by British troops against civilians in 1920.
Harry said Tuesday that he hoped to take the opportunity to reflect on the “difficult passages” in the history between Britain and Ireland.
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China expressed shock Wednesday at the Trump administration’s decision to prepare 10-percent tariffs on another $200 billion of Chinese imports covering thousands of products, the latest move in an escalating trade war between the world’s two largest economies.
China’s commerce ministry called the decision totally unacceptable and vowed to respond.
The proposed new U.S. tariffs follow the decision to impose duties in two stages on $50 billion in Chinese goods. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said the Trump administration has patiently urged China to stop its unfair practices, open its market and engage in true market competition.
“Rather than address our legitimate concerns, China has begun to retaliate against U.S. products,” Lighthizer said in a statement announcing the tariffs.”There is no justification for such action.”
The proposed tariffs come just days after the Trump administration imposed 25 percent tariffs on more than 800 Chinese products worth about $34 billion, citing what it calls China’s unfair trade practices and intellectual property theft.Beijing followed suit with an equal amount of levies on U.S. goods.
Christine McDaniel, a senior research fellow at George Mason University in Virginia, told VOA that while the Trump administration’s actions have bipartisan congressional support, its strategy to date of tariffs and investment restrictions could be costly to U.S. manufacturers and consumers.
“A tariff is a tax and in today’s global economy.American manufacturers are simply tied to suppliers from outside the U.S. for their competitiveness.So when we tax those imports, we’re taxing American manufacturers, not to mention consumers, and that heavily handicaps our own manufacturers.”
McDaniel said the longer the tariff battle goes on, the greater the impact will be felt in both economies.She added trade actions against China would be more effective if they were done in concert with America’s allies.McDaniel also expects China to eventually change its policies away from state-owned enterprises and implement more market-oriented rules and regulations, but predicts that will take time.
Despite bipartisan support, the Trump administration’s latest move drew criticism from House Speaker Paul Ryan, who is retiring at the end of his term in January. Ryan reiterated his opposition to the president’s tariffs Wednesday, saying they “are not the right way to go.” Ryan singled out China as one of a number of countries that engage in unfair trade practices, but added, “I just don’t think tariffs are the right mechanism” to resolve the problem.
The Trump administration’s decision was received with dismay by key lawmaker Senator Orrin Hatch, the chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee.Hatch said in a statement the decision “appears reckless and is not a targeted approach.”
But not all Republicans were skeptical of the president’s move. Virginia Congressman Tom Garrett said, “They will lose, because right now we are importing about $5 of Chinese goods for every $1 we send to China. If they want to play this game, the Chinese economy will be hurt more.”
Congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey had a similar prediction. “If it does (retaliate), the Chinese government will be hurt. They rely on exports to continue their prosperity. They being the government. Where will they find markets like the U.S.? They are not going to find as many in the EU or anywhere else for their products.”
A high-ranking administration official said the U.S. Trade Representative’s office will accept public comments on the plan and hold hearings in late August, before reaching a final decision.
VOA Mandarin Service congressional correspondent Yi-Hua Lee contributed to this report
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The World Meteorological Organization warns the floods, heatwaves and other extreme weather conditions gripping many parts of the world are likely to continue as a consequence of accelerating climate change.
While the world was fixated on the dramatic rescue from a cave in Thailand of 12 boys and their soccer coach, potentially deadly monsoon rains were gathering steam in the region.
The World Meteorological Organization reports extreme weather conditions have dealt a deadly blow in many places, with blistering heatwaves and disastrous precipitation forecast to continue this month.
For example, it notes the recent catastrophic flooding in Japan, the worst in decades, has claimed at least 150 lives. WMO spokeswoman, Claire Nullis, says the death toll is likely to climb. This, in what she calls one of the world’s best prepared countries when it comes to tackling disasters.
“They are supremely well prepared,” said Nullis. “And, so the magnitude of the casualties, of the destruction that we are seeing now really is an indication of just how big and how extreme this was and how heavy the rainfall was in such a short period of time.”
Other extreme weather events include drought and abnormally high temperatures in Northern Europe. The WMO expects these conditions to prevail over the coming weeks.
The WMO reports the United States has had the hottest June on record. Nullis notes the Los Angeles area in California continues to hit record high temperatures, such as 48.9 degrees Celsius in the city of Chino.
Elsewhere in the world, she says a city in the Algerian Sahara Desert has reported temperatures of 51.3 degrees Celsius.
“Climate change, as we always say, no specific event can be attributed to climate change, but what we are seeing is consistent with climate change scenarios,” said Nullis. “Extreme heat, consistent heat, persistent heat and heavy precipitation.”
WMO scientists say these extreme weather events are compatible with the general long-term trend of global warming caused by the emission of man-made greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
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The Trump administration’s 25 percent tariff on imported steel has been welcomed by U.S. producers of the material but slammed by American manufacturers that rely on a global steel supply chain to make everything from cars to razor blades. VOA’s Michael Bowman visited a can company that is being squeezed by the new tariff and has this report, which was produced by Elizabeth Cherneff.
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Samuel Umtiti’s goal in the 51st minute was all the scoring France needed to defeat Belgium and advance to the final of the 2018 World Cup in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Umtiti’s corner kick on a header capped a sterling defensive effort by the Frenchmen in St. Petersburg Stadium, highlighted by goalkeeper Hugo Loris, who made two crucial stops against the Belgians, making a diving, fingertip block of Toby Alderweireld’s shot midway through the first half, then stopping Alex Witsel’s kick late in the game to secure the victory.
The loss represents another failure for Belgium’s so-called “golden generation” of such players as captain Eden Hazard, Kevin De Bruyne and Romelu Lukaku, having failed to reach the finals of major tournament for the third time in four years
France will now await the winner of Wednesday’s semi-final match between Croatia and Britain in Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium, where Sunday’s final match will be staged. This will be France’s first World Cup final since 1998, when current coach Didier Deschamps led the team to its first and only title as team captain.
It will also give France a chance to redeem its failures in the finals of the 2006 World Cup and the 2016 European Championship on its home pitch.
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As the trade war between the world’s two largest economies nears the end of its first week, its most unsettling fact may be this: No one seems to foresee any clear path to peace.
The United States insists that China abandon the brass-knuckles tactics it’s used to try to supplant America’s technological dominance. Yet Beijing isn’t about to drop its zeal to acquire the technology it sees as crucial to its prosperity.
Having run for the White House on a vow to force China to reform its trade policies, President Donald Trump won’t likely yield to vague promises by Beijing to improve its behavior — or to pledges to buy more American soybeans or liquefied natural gas.
“It certainly feels like we’re in for a protracted fight,” said Timothy Keeler of the law firm Mayer Brown and a former chief of staff at the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. “Truthfully, I don’t know what the off-ramp is.”
The first shots sounded July 6: The United States slapped 25 percent taxes on $34 billion in Chinese imports. Most of them are industrial goods that the Trump administration says receive subsidies or other unfair support from Beijing. China quickly lashed back with tariffs on $34 billion in U.S. products.
The two countries have targeted an additional $16 billion worth of each other’s products for a second round of25 percent tariffs. On Tuesday, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative proposed 10 percent tariffs on another $200 billion in Chinese imports, ranging from fish sticks to burglar alarms.
All told, Trump has threatened eventually to slap tariffs on up to $550 billion in Chinese imports — more than China actually exported to the United States last year — if Beijing won’t relent to U.S. pressure and continues to retaliate.
At the heart of the dispute: The Trump administration’s complaints that China has used predatory practices in a relentless push to grant Chinese companies an unfair advantage in the industries of the future, including robotics, electric cars and biopharmaceuticals. These tactics include the outright theft of trade secrets, government subsidies to homegrown tech firms and demands that U.S. and other foreign companies hand over technology if they want access to China’s vast market.
Eliminating the new tariffs will prove a lot harder than it was to raise them in the first place, said Wendy Cutler, a former U.S. trade negotiator who is a vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute. “Both sides have too much at stake and don’t want to back down.”
So how does the trade war end? Analysts offer several potential scenarios:
China Blinks
The Trump administration boasts that China has more to lose in a trade war. After all, Beijing sold $524 billion worth of goods and services to the United States last year and bought far less — $188 billion. So China has far fewer goods to tax than the United States does.
And China’s benchmark stock index — the Shanghai Composite — has dropped 15 percent this year, at least partly on fears about damage from the trade conflict with Washington.
“It’s a dicey time for the Chinese economy,” said Claude Barfield, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and former consultant to the U.S. Trade Representative.
Beijing is trying to contain a run-up in corporate debt and manage a difficult transition away from fast but unsustainable export-driven growth based on exports and often-wasteful investment toward steadier growth built on consumer spending. The International Monetary Fund expects Chinese economic growth to decelerate to 6.6 percent this year from 6.9 percent in 2017.
So it’s possible that economic pressure could persuade Beijing to cave. Yet many analysts are skeptical. Eswar Prasad, an economist at Cornell University, said the economic damage from U.S. tariffs is “likely to be muted since China has enough room to forestall a growth slowdown” by increasing government spending or adopting easy-money policies that put more cash into the economy.
Mary Lovely, an economist and trade expert at Syracuse University, says it’s unclear how China could appease Trump, even if it wanted to. China has pledged in the past to police cyber-theft and end coerced technology transfers. So any negotiations, Lovely said, would raise more questions: Would the Trump administration accept another promise? How would any promise be verified? How long would it take to determine whether Beijing has actually reformed its ways?
And China’s leaders might prove reluctant to back down and risk a backlash from the public.
“They have nothing to gain internally by kowtowing to President Trump, and that’s exactly what it would be,” Lovely said.
Trump Blinks
Trump faces pressures, too. The Chinese designed their tariffs to inflict political pain in the United States. They have, for example, targeted soybeans and other farm products in a shot at Trump supporters in the American heartland. And U.S. farmers are represented by trade groups and congressional delegations who aren’t shy about attacking U.S. policies that threaten farm incomes.
But the president would also find it hard to back down. He’s already considered one possible solution only to back away from it. In May, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced after a meeting with the Chinese that the trade war was “on hold” and the tariffs suspended after Beijing agreed to reduce the U.S. trade deficit by buying more American energy and farm products.
Yet the cease-fire quickly collapsed once critics complained that the Trump administration was letting China buy its way out of the impasse.
“The president felt the sting of that and didn’t like that,” Keeler said. So the administration decided to “drive a harder bargain,” and it revived — and ramped up — its tariff threat.
A Win-Win Resolution
Taiya Smith, a former Treasury official who handled negotiations with China, says it’s possible a deal could be reached in which Beijing ends its predatory practices but can still keep itself competitive in advanced industries. The key, she says, is persuading China that its tech companies don’t need massive assistance from the state.
“Their companies are becoming very powerful,” Smith said. “They have to be willing to compete on a level playing field. They no longer need a leg up.”
But she said the U.S. would have to make concessions, too, perhaps by agreeing to let China play a bigger role in global economic policymaking.
“The Chinese have to have a political win somewhere in there, too,” Smith said. “You can’t design something where we get what we want and China gets nothing. They have their own politics.”
The War Drags On
Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing and a sharp critic of Beijing’s trade practices, wants to see the tariffs remain until either U.S. companies leave China or Beijing opens its market wider to American goods and investment.
“They should stay on for long enough that they manifest some change,” he said. “I don’t see the tariffs coming off anytime soon.”
Paul notes that China has repeatedly made empty promises to reform its practices.
“We have waste cans full of promises by the Chinese government to reform its anti-competitive practices that are completely ignored,” he said. “The tariffs are the best and only leverage that we have with China, and we would be foolish to squander them without major gains.”
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A federal court has charged a former Apple engineer with stealing trade secrets related to a self-driving car and attempting to flee to China.
Agents in San Jose, California, arrested Xiaolang Zhang on Saturday, moments before he was to board his flight.
Zhang is said to have taken paternity leave in April, traveling to China just after the birth of a child.
When he returned, he informed his supervisors he was leaving Apple to join Xiaopeng Motors, a Chinese company in Guangzhao, which also plans to build self-driving cars.
But security cameras caught Zhang allegedly entering Apple’s self-driving car lab and downloading blueprints and other information on a personal computer at the time he was supposed to be in China on paternity leave.
Neither the FBI nor Zhang’s lawyers have commented.
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The first week of June was one of Luke Combs’ biggest weeks in his still fledgling career. The 28-year-old taped an outdoor performance for the “CMT Crossroads” series with soul singer Leon Bridges, attended the CMT Awards, released a deluxe version of his debut album and sang in front of tens of thousands of fans at the CMA Fest.
And then immediately after the festival performance, he lost his voice. Put on vocal rest for 10 days, Combs had a No. 1 country album but couldn’t perform.
“It stung a little bit,” he admitted later after his voice recovered. “It made me, I guess, a bit more vulnerable than I would have liked.”
Mostly he was upset about having to reschedule shows and disappointing fans. The Asheville, North Carolina-born singer built his success on his live shows when he was performing more than 200 dates a year in 2016 in college towns all around the Southeast and adding to his fan base one show at a time.
“Imagine you’ve been working out for a year straight, as hard as you can work out and the last set, the last thing you gotta do is that last week of CMA Fest,” Combs said. “It’s like the second you’re done with it, you’re just like laid out on the floor.”
Combs has been working at a breakneck speed in the year since his debut album, “This One’s for You,” was released last year. It spawned three No. 1 country radio singles in a row, the first time that’s happened since Sam Hunt did it in 2014. The album’s deluxe version, featuring five new songs, sold better in the first week than his original debut record, meaning he’s earned himself a lot more fans in just a year. His gold-selling album is the most streamed country album of 2018 and it has spent five nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s country albums chart.
Instead of the traditional path to country stardom of writing songs for other people before launching his career as an artist, Combs released his own music and promoted himself to his millennial peers online through the now-defunct social media platform Vine.
“I think that was kind of always my goal: get people to come back and see a show twice and then see it a third time,” Combs said. “And now I’ve got people who have been to 30, 40 shows.”
Combs even found his first manager on the road when Chris Kappy saw him perform his now multiplatinum single, “Hurricane,” in a Georgia bar in 2015. Kappy, who had no previous management experience, immediately felt a kinship to Combs, as both are large men with oversized personalities and scrappy attitudes.
“We’re not the typical norm of what this industry is looking for,” Kappy said.
Kappy’s plan was to just let Combs be himself and let the natural talent win over fans. “I told Luke, ‘I just want people to fall in love with you, buddy, and to do that we have to expose you. And that’s being vulnerable, that’s being humble, that’s telling stories.'”
It helped that his first single, “Hurricane,” was a great showcase of his deep booming voice with a big hooky chorus. Already signed to a new label called River House Artists, the song was gaining ground on radio when he was added to the Columbia Nashville roster. Sony’s promotional muscle behind the song was like adding gasoline to a fire, said Kappy.
His label listened to feedback from radio programmers to give him his second radio No. 1 with “When It Rains It Pours,” a cheeky take on a breakup that turned into a lucky streak. But he went back to the well of the emotion-driven love songs with a slight R&B swagger on “One Number Away,” his third hit single. All three of his songs have also reached the Top 40 on the pop charts.
Fans connect with Combs’ unvarnished approachability and openness. The burly and bearded performer wears the same kind of shirt every time he hits the stage, a short-sleeved black sports shirt made to help fishermen deal with heat and sweat. He’s a beer-swigging, tobacco-chewing everyman who is also self-assured enough to sing about the passion of heartbreak and love.
“There’s an authenticity in just being who you are and not having an act about it or wear clothes you normally wouldn’t wear,” Combs said. “I’m just comfortable in my own skin.”
Combs is currently opening for Jason Aldean on tour and he’ll play shows in the United Kingdom and Europe this fall. But his next big play is the sophomore album, which he’s already been writing and recording. He compares the quick success he’s had with the first record to an average-looking guy who somehow landed the girlfriend that’s out of his league.
“I just try not to think about it too much,” Combs said.
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The famed Hollywood sign, worldwide symbol of Los Angeles, could be easier to reach if a proposal for a mile-long aerial tramway up the mountains gets the go-ahead.
Warner Bros. movie studio on Tuesday announced details of a proposal to build a tramway from its Burbank film lot up the steep sides of Mount Lee to the sign.
Warner Bros. said it would pay for the design, construction, operation and maintenance of the proposed Hollywood Skyway. It declined to comment on a report in the Los Angeles Times that the project would cost about $100 million.
The 44-foot-high (13.4 m) white Hollywood letters, originally created in 1923 as an advertisement for a real estate development, are a designated historical monument. But there is no easy way to get close to the sign, apart from a rugged hike from nearby Griffith Park, and tourists clog surrounding neighborhoods trying to find ways up to it.
The proposed Hollywood Skyway would take just six minutes.
Warner Bros. said in a statement that its proposal would “reduce street congestion, improve safety, and ease neighborhood frustrations,” adding that it would include an educational visitor center at the top of the skyway, and a parking and transit hub near its Burbank studio.
Warner Bros. said the project was in the early stages and that it was seeking feedback from residents, environmental groups and the Los Angeles City Council.
Councilman David Ryu, who represents the area, said the city council would discuss the project and other proposals after the summer recess.
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