Unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly referred to as drones, can become an important tool for farmers around the world within the next 10 years. Researchers at Texas A&M University in College Station are looking at different applications of precision farming with drone technology. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee has the details.
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Month: August 2018
If you’ve ever spent a lot of time in front of a computer, you’ve probably come away bleary eyed. That’s because you don’t blink as much when you are working on a computer, which could lead to dry eyes. With the popularity of video games and online activities, dry eye is becoming increasingly common in children and teens glued to their screens. The condition can cause permanent eye damage, but fortunately, as VOA’s Carol Pearson reports, there’s an app for that.
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Chinese state media on Thursday accused the United States of a “mobster mentality” in its move to implement additional tariffs on Chinese goods and warned that Beijing had all the necessary means to fight back.
The comments marked a ratcheting up in tensions between the world’s two largest economies over a trade dispute, which is already affecting industries including steel and autos and is causing unease about which products could be targeted next.
Beijing late on Wednesday said it would slap additional tariffs of 25 percent on $16 billion worth of U.S. imports, in retaliation against news the United States plans to begin collecting 25 percent extra in tariffs on $16 billion worth of Chinese goods beginning August 23.
“The two countries’ trade conflict, which is merely push and shove at the moment, is likely to escalate into more than just a scuffle if the U.S. administration cannot marshal its mobster mentality,” state newspaper China Daily said in an editorial.
“China continues to do its utmost to avoid a trade war, but in the face of the U.S.’s ever greater demand for protection money, China has no choice but to fight back,” it said.
So far, China has now either imposed or proposed tariffs on $110 billion of U.S. goods, representing the vast majority of its annual imports of American products. Big-ticket U.S. items that are still not on any list are crude oil and large aircraft.
“China has confidence in protecting its own interests [and] has many means,” state broadcaster CCTV said on its early-morning news show.
Another commentary, written by China Institute of International Studies research fellow Jia Xiudong and published in the overseas edition of the People’s Daily newspaper, said the United States was trying to “suppress China’s development.”
China should consider “unconventional methods” such as the stimulus plan used by Beijing during the global financial crisis if needed to sustain economic growth, the Global Times newspaper, a tabloid published by the ruling Communist Party’s People’s Daily, said in a commentary.
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Superman actress Margot Kidder’s death has been ruled a suicide, and her daughter said Wednesday that it was a relief to finally have the truth out.
Kidder, who played Lois Lane opposite Christopher Reeve’s Superman in her most famous role, was found by a friend in her Montana home on May 13.
At the time, Kidder’s manager, Camilla Fluxman Pines, said Kidder had died peacefully in her sleep.
A statement released Wednesday by Park County coroner Richard Wood said Kidder, 69, “died as a result of a self-inflicted drug and alcohol overdose” and that no further details would be released.
Maggie McGuane, Kidder’s daughter by her ex-husband Thomas McGuane, told The Associated Press in a phone interview that she knew her mother had died by suicide the moment authorities took her to Kidder’s home in Livingston, a small town near Yellowstone National Park.
“It’s a big relief that the truth is out there,” she said. “It’s important to be open and honest so there’s not a cloud of shame in dealing with this.”
Kidder’s death is one of several high-profile suicides this year that include celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain and fashion designer Kate Spade.
McGuane noted that Montana has one of the highest suicide rates in the nation and she urged people with mental illness to seek help.
“It’s a very unique sort of grief and pain,” McGuane said. “Knowing how many families in this state go through this, I wish that I could reach out to each one of them.”
Kidder struggled with mental illness much of her life, and it was made worse by a 1990 car accident that left her in debt and led to her using a wheelchair for almost two years.
4 Superman films
Kidder and Reeve starred in four Superman movies between 1978 and 1987. She also appeared in The Great Waldo Pepper with Robert Redford in 1975, Brian De Palma’s Sisters in 1973 and The Amityville Horror in 1979.
She later appeared in small films and television shows until 2017, including R.L. Stine’s the Haunting Hour. She received a Daytime Emmy Award as outstanding performer in a kids’ series in 2015 for that role.
Kidder, a native of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada, was a political activist who was arrested in 2011 in a Washington, D.C., protest over the proposed Keystone XL pipeline from Canada’s oil sands.
Her final years were troubled by conflicts with people who were down on their luck that she had taken into her home. Between August 2016 and her death in May, authorities were called to her house 40 times on reports of people trespassing, theft and other disturbances, according to police logs released to the AP under a public-records request.
The calls included responses by ambulances five times in seven months, including at the time of her death.
Joan Kesich, a longtime friend who found Kidder’s body, said Kidder was fearless and always spoke the truth, regardless of the consequences.
“In her last months, she was herself — same kind of love, same kind of energy,” Kesich said. “The challenges that she had were very public. I want what I know about her to be out there, because it was glorious. She was really a blazing energy.”
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Life has found a way to survive in some of the most extreme conditions imaginable. Now, scientists believe they might have found a new habitat for hardy microbes — inside garnets.
New research found unusual patterns of tunnels in Thai garnets with deposits of fatty acids in the burrowed pathways, indicating a microbe caused the damage.
Magnus Ivarsson, lead researcher on the study at the University of Southern Denmark, said the research started with an exchange student from Thailand who was studying the gem quality of the garnets. She discovered the tunnels that branched and changed directions, unlike previously described environmental weathering, and consulted Ivarsson.
“When I first saw these structures, these tunnels, I was sort of intrigued by the complexity of them,” Ivarsson told VOA. “I have previously studied other microbial boring in minerals and materials, but I’ve never seen anything with this complexity.”
The garnets are an unexpected habitat for microbes because of their hardness. In fact, according to Ivarsson, this is the hardest mineral yet discovered to be bored by microbes.
“Who knows what we’ll find next. Maybe a diamond bored by microbes. Who knows?” Ivarsson said.
Researchers are careful to point out that no living organisms were discovered within the gemstones.
Dawn Cardace, a researcher in the department of geosciences at the University of Rhode Island, studies how geology and biology interact. She told VOA that while this study didn’t find any DNA of the organisms, “This wasn’t troubling to me, largely because they chose to work with the sample set they have at a very close, submicroscopic scale.” She said they would have needed at least a thousand gemstones in order to collect a DNA sample.
About the research
The researchers relied on several technologies to come to their conclusions.
First, the scientists used microscopy to make 3D maps of the tunnels on the scale of microns. A human hair is about 50 microns wide, but the tunnels in the garnets were generally smaller, hence the need for high-powered microscopes.
The scientists focused on how the tunnels spread and changed directions, and when they converged at crossing points called “anastomosis.” Although environmental weathering can cause cracks and fissures in hard minerals, Ivarsson said weathering processes can’t explain the complexity of the tunnels they observed.
The second step to demonstrate that microbes most likely created the tunnels required analyzing the interior of the boreholes.
“The organic content tells us that there’s been life living in there,” said Ivarsson.
In particular, they detected lipids and fatty acids, which are organic compounds common among bacteria and fungi.
Ivarsson and his colleagues compared these biological traces to hematite and quartz grains found in the same location as the garnets, in the river sediment of the Chiang Mai stream. Neither of the comparable stones showed signs of fatty acids, indicating the biological traces were unique to the garnet tunnels.
When asked about the results, Ivarsson said, “At this point we can say at least that biology has been involved. I would suggest that it’s fungi that has been involved in this. But at the same time, I think we should be really cautious because there might be other processes [at work] that are not known today.”
More studies needed
Cardace agrees that while microbes were certainly living inside the gemstones, further research is needed to prove how the tunnels were created. She said she would like future studies to show “a set of experiments done with candidate microorganisms that could do the metabolic work” the researchers proposed in their paper.
Ivarsson and his colleagues did, however, consider why microbes like fungi might be making the garnets their home. They sampled garnets from river sediment in Thailand, as well as within granite upstream.
Ivarsson told VOA, “When we studied these garnets in the granite, we could see that there were no tunnels. But when we looked at the garnets further down the river, we could see that these tunnels structures had evolved. So, something happened along the way, along the transport in the river system.”
The researchers argue that the microbes bored into the garnets while they were in the river bed. Microbes in the sediment of the river lack access to chemical energy sources like iron, which is contained in the garnet crystals. Perhaps, researchers propose, the microorganisms created the filaments within the gemstones to access this resource.
Monetary value
Such changes to the garnets, however, decrease the value of the stones.
Shane McClure, global director of colored stones at the Gemological Institute of America, told VOA that when it comes to determining the value of garnets, “If there’s only one or two [tunnels] and they’re very small, it doesn’t affect the value at all. But if there’s a whole bunch of them and they’re very visible, well then it’s going to affect it quite a bit from a gemstone perspective.”
These gemstones might not be usable for flashy jewelry, but they do demonstrate that life finds a way in all sorts of inhospitable and unexpected locations.
As Ivarsson told VOA, “When we look for life on Mars, we need to know what to look for. And this is one type of biological signature that is definitely interesting in the search for life on Mars or any type of extreme environment.”
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New York’s city council on Wednesday dealt a blow to Uber and other car-for-hire companies, passing a bill to cap the number of vehicles they operate and impose minimum pay standards on drivers.
The city of 8.5 million is the biggest app-ride market in the United States, where public transport woes and astronomical parking costs have helped fuel years of untamed growth by the likes of Lyft, Uber and Via.
But that growth has brought New York’s iconic yellow cabs to their knees. Since December, six yellow cab drivers have committed suicide. Those deaths have been linked, at least in part, to desperation over plummeting income.
The bill stipulates a 12-month cap on all new for-hire-vehicle licenses, unless they are wheelchair accessible, as well as minimum pay requirements for app drivers — regulated by the Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC).
It makes New York the first major city in the United States to limit the number of app-based rides and to impose pay rules for drivers.
A recent TLC-commissioned study recommended a guaranteed income of $17.22 an hour for drivers — $15, plus a supplement to mitigate against rest time.
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, a progressive Democrat, vowed to sign the bill into law, proclaiming that it would “stop the influx of cars contributing to the congestion grinding our streets to a halt.”
“More than 100,000 workers and their families will see an immediate benefit from this legislation,” de Blasio said.
Around 80,000 drivers work for at least one of the big four app-based companies in New York, compared to 13,500 yellow cab drivers, according to the recent TLC-commissioned study.
The increased competition has slashed the value of yellow cab taxi licenses, from more than $1 million in 2014 to and less than $200,000 today.
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After Ireland voted to legalize abortion in May, will Argentina, another traditionally Catholic country, do the same?
The country’s senators will make the decision Wednesday, amid fiercely polarized campaigns on both sides of the hot-button issue.
The bill was passed by Congress’ lower house in June by the narrowest of margins, but it is widely expected to fall short of the votes needed to pass in the Senate — 37 of the 72 senators have made it known they will say no.
If the measure does fail, lawmakers must wait a year to resubmit the legislation.
As the lawmakers settled in for what was expected to be a marathon session that could stretch past midnight, demonstrators on both sides rallied outside Congress.
Abortion rights supporters wore green scarves while anti-abortion activists donned baby blue. A partition was set up to keep them separated.
Scores of buses have brought people into Buenos Aires from other parts of Argentina, city hall said.
Despite the negative projections and strong opposition from the highly influential Catholic Church in the homeland of Pope Francis, abortion rights proponents are not giving up hope.
“We’re doing everything so that the initiative passes. We have faith in the street movement,” leading campaigner Julia Martino told AFP.
“We believe many senators will show their support when the vote happens.”
Currently, abortion is allowed in Argentina in only three cases, similar to most of Latin America: rape, a threat to the mother’s life or if the fetus is disabled.
If passed, the bill would legalize abortion during the first 14 weeks of pregnancy and see Argentina join Uruguay and Cuba as the only countries in Latin America to fully decriminalize abortion.
It’s also legal in Mexico City. Only in the Central American trio of El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua does it remain totally banned.
With the tide seemingly flowing against legalization, abortion rights groups tried to amend the bill to reduce from 14 to 12 weeks the period in which it would be permitted, but that move failed.
What activists can count on, though, is huge support from citizens.
Question of rights
Demonstrations were held in Buenos Aires, with other rallies taking place around the world in front of Argentine diplomatic missions.
One abortion rights protester in Buenos Aires, 20-year-old Celeste Villalba, said keeping abortions illegal would not prevent them from happening.
“This debate is whether it should be legal or done in secret. It’s not about being in favor of abortion or not,” she said.
She said she feared that “social machismo and a patriarchal and retrograde Church” would block adoption of the bill in the Senate.
Various charities estimate that 500,000 illegal, secret abortions are carried out every year in Argentina, resulting in around 100 deaths.
But opponents of abortion are not lacking support and held their own demonstrations.
Priests and nuns have been joined by rabbis, imams and members of other Christian churches to oppose the bill.
One of them, Federico Berruete, a 35-year-old priest, joined anti-abortion demonstrators holding up slogans reading “Life starts at conception.”
“There is a big display of faith, a lot of people have turned out for a more humane country. Children about to be born need to be defended,” he said.
In mid-June, the lower house voted in favor by just 129 to 125 thanks in part to the nonetheless anti-abortion President Mauricio Macri’s insistence in pushing the bill through the legislature.
The conservative president released a letter Wednesday welcoming the debate and saying this is about more than legalizing abortion or not.
“As a society, it presents a peaceful scenario to promote and carry out change,” the president wrote.
Senator Norma Durango from the Justice Party said she would work “until the last minute so that this becomes law,” warning that those who vote against the bill would be “responsible for continuing deaths.”
The Catholic Church has appointed a bishop, Alberto Bochatey, to handle dialogue with Congress on the issue.
Last month, Bochatey, 62, told AFP that “you cannot make a law to justify the elimination of human life,” but said the Church was against locking up those who carried out illegal abortions.
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China and Germany defended their business ties with Iran on Wednesday in the face of President Donald Trump’s warning that any companies trading with the Islamic Republic would be barred from the United States.
The comments from Beijing and Berlin signaled growing anger from partners of the United States, which reimposed strict sanctions against Iran on Tuesday, over its threat to penalize businesses from third countries that continue to operate there.
“China has consistently opposed unilateral sanctions and long-armed jurisdiction,” the Chinese foreign ministry said.
“China’s commercial cooperation with Iran is open and transparent, reasonable, fair and lawful, not violating any United Nations Security Council resolutions,” it added in a faxed statement to Reuters.
“China’s lawful rights should be protected.”
The German government said U.S. sanctions against Iran that have an extra-territorial effect violate international law, and Germany expects Washington to consider European interests when coming up with such sanctions.
The reimposition of U.S. sanctions followed Trump’s decision earlier this year to pull out of a 2015 deal to lift the punitive measures in return for curbs on Iran’s nuclear program designed to prevent it from building an atomic bomb.
Iran’s highest authority, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said meanwhile the country had nothing to be concerned about, a report on his official website said in an apparent reference to the imposition of the U.S. sanctions
“With regard to our situation do not be worried at all. Nobody can do anything,” Khamenei said recently, the website reported. “There is no doubt about this.”
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, speaking in a meeting with North Korea’s foreign minister, said that America could not be trusted, according to the Islamic Republic News Agency.
“Today, America is identified as an unreliable and untrustworthy country in the world which does not adhere to any of its obligations,” Rouhani said.
Tuesday’s sanctions target Iran’s purchases of U.S. dollars, metals trading, coal, industrial software and the auto sector.
Trump tweeted on Tuesday: “These are the most biting sanctions ever imposed, and in November they ratchet up to yet another level. Anyone doing business with Iran will NOT be doing business with the United States.”
Europeans withdraw
European countries, hoping to persuade Tehran to continue to respect the deal, have promised to try to lessen the blow of sanctions and to urge their firms not to pull out. But that has proved difficult: European companies have quit Iran, arguing that they cannot risk their U.S. business.
Among those that have suspended plans to invest in Iran are France’s oil major Total, its big carmakers PSA and Renault, and their German rival Daimler.
Danish engineering company Haldor Topsoe, one of the world’s leading industrial catalyst producers, said on Wednesday it would cut around 200 jobs from its workforce of 2,700 due to the new U.S sanctions on Iran, which made it very hard for its customers there to finance new projects.
The chief executive of reinsurance group Munich Re said it may abandon its Iran business under pressure from the United States, but described the operation as very small.
Turkey, however, said it would continue to buy natural gas from Iran.
“Simplistic idea”
In Tehran, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was quoted by an Iranian newspaper as saying that a U.S. plan to reduce Iran’s oil exports to zero would not succeed.
U.S. officials have said in recent weeks that they aim to pressure countries to stop buying oil from Iran in a bid to force Tehran to halt its nuclear and missile programs and involvement in regional conflicts in Syria and Iraq.
“If the Americans want to keep this simplistic and impossible idea in their minds they should also know its consequences,” Zarif told the Iran newspaper. “They can’t think that Iran won’t export oil and others will export.”
Rouhani hinted last month that Iran could block the Strait of Hormuz, a major oil shipping route, if the U.S. attempted to stop the Islamic Republic’s oil exports.
Trump responded by noting that Iran could face serious consequences if it threatened the United States.
“The Americans have assembled a war room against Iran,” Zarif said. “We can’t get drawn into a confrontation with America by falling into this war room trap and playing on a battlefield.”
Iran has dismissed a last-minute offer from the Trump administration for talks, saying it could not negotiate while Washington had reneged on the 2015 deal to lift sanctions.
In a speech hours before the sanctions were due to take effect on Tuesday, Rouhani rejected negotiations as long as Washington was no longer complying with the deal.
“If you stab someone with a knife and then you say you want talks, then the first thing you have to do is remove the knife,” Rouhani said in a speech broadcast live on state television.
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Most people who use online dating websites seek partners who are out of their league, said a study Wednesday based on heterosexuals in four big US cities.
“Both men and women pursued partners about 25 percent more ‘desirable’ than themselves,” said the report in the journal Science Advances.
Hardly anyone reached out to people who ranked significantly lower than themselves.
People’s desirability was determined using a ranking algorithm based on how many messages they received from other popular users on a dating site in New York, Seattle, Boston and Chicago.
“If you are contacted by people who are themselves desirable, then you are presumably more desirable yourself,” said the study.
Using this PageRank algorithm, which is employed by web search engines, researchers could establish a person’s “league,” which they scientifically coined “hierarchies of desirability.”
For some at the pinnacle of the dating game, the flurry of messages from would-be suitors was dizzying.
“The most popular individual in our four cities, a 30-year-old woman living in New York, received 1,504 messages during the period of observation, equivalent to one message every 30 min, day and night, for the entire month,” said the study.
While researchers did not reveal the end to this lady’s love story, they did find that the majority of daters on the site tended to reach out to people who were ranked higher than themselves.
They also tended to send lengthier messages to people deemed higher on the desirability ladder.
In most cases, these long-shots fell short.
When there is a big gap in desirability between online daters, “there is a pronounced drop in the probability of reply,” said the report.
And only in Seattle were there signs that long letters were more successful than short messages at getting a potential mate to respond.
People have probably been pining for unattainable love interests since the dawn of time.
But taking a scientific look at the phenomenon gives cause for hope, according to lead author Elizabeth Bruch, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
“I think a common complaint when people use online dating websites is they feel like they never get any replies,” she said.
“This can be dispiriting. But even though the response rate is low, our analysis shows that 21 percent of people who engage in this aspirational behavior do get replies from a mate who is out of their league, so perseverance pays off.”
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The organizers of the Oscars said on Wednesday they would create a new award category for popular movies and limit the annual, televised ceremony to three hours.
In a letter to members, the board of governors of the Academy of Motion Pictures also said it would present some of the 24 Academy Awards during commercial breaks in the televised broadcast.
The changes, to take effect with the February 2019 ceremony, mark a major shake-up in the most prestigious honors in the movie industry and follow years of declining audiences for the Oscars ceremony.
The U.S. television audience for the 2018 Oscars in March was 26.5 million viewers, the smallest in the history of the 90-year-old Academy Awards.
“We have heard from many of you about improvements needed to keep the Oscars and our Academy relevant in a changing world.
The board of governors took this charge seriously,” the board said in the letter, which was made available to media.
The Oscars tends to honor art house fare for its biggest prizes rather than box office hits like the Star Wars franchise or superhero movies.
Wednesday’s letter did not give details of the new category recognizing popular film, saying those would come later.
The Oscars ceremony regularly runs close to four hours, honoring winners for achievements like sound editing and costumes along with actors, writers and director.
“We are committed to producing an entertaining show in three hours, delivering a more accessible Oscars for our viewers worldwide,” the board said.
It did not say which of the 24 awards handed out on Oscars night would be shifted to commercial breaks, but said they would be edited and aired during the broadcast.
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Tesla Inc’s board said it was evaluating taking the company private, a day after Chief Executive Elon Musk surprised shareholders with the idea of launching the biggest leveraged buyout of all time.
In a statement on Tesla’s website on Wednesday, six of Tesla’s nine directors said the board had met several times over the last week to discuss such an idea and was “taking the appropriate next steps to evaluate this.”
Musk said on Twitter on Tuesday that he was considering taking the loss-making electric car-maker private at $420 a share, which would value a deal at more than $70 billion. He said funding was “secured,” without elaborating.
Tesla said on Wednesday the discussions had addressed the issue of how to fund such a deal, but gave no details. The statement did not address how the $420-per-share price was established.
Several securities attorneys told Reuters that Musk could face investor lawsuits if it was proven he did not have secure financing at the time of his tweet.
Public companies have four days to report certain material events that shareholders should know about to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Tesla’s shares were down 2.1 percent at $371.70 on Wednesday after closing up 11 percent on Tuesday.
Some Wall Street analysts were skeptical of Musk’s ability to gather the huge financial backing to complete such a deal, given that Tesla loses money, has $10.9 billion of debt and its bonds are rated junk by credit ratings agencies.
“Who gives $30 to $50 billion to buy back the shares?” asked NordLB analyst Frank Schwope. “And if you stay as a shareholder you get less information than before and you depend more and more on Elon Musk.”
The deal would be the biggest leveraged buyout of all time, beating the $45-billion record set by Texas power utility Energy Future Holdings.
The most obvious equity partners for Musk would be a sovereign wealth fund such as Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), which sources said on Tuesday had taken a stake of just below 5 percent in Tesla, or a major technology investment fund such as SoftBank Group Corp’s Vision Fund, bankers said.
China’s Tencent Holdings Ltd, which took a 5-percent stake in Tesla last year, could also be a possible partner.
Surprise move
In a letter after his tweet on Tuesday, Musk fleshed out his idea, suggesting shareholders would get the option to sell their shares for $420 each or remain investors in a private Tesla, out of the glare of Wall Street and its need for positive quarterly results.
He said that would allow Tesla to “operate at its best, free from as much distraction and short-term thinking as possible.” Some on Wall Street shared that view.
“They’re being bombarded with questions that we don’t think are as relevant to the long-term value of the company,” said Sam Korus, an analyst for ARK Investment Management, which had 443,874 Tesla shares as of June 30. Korus said he would need more details from Musk to judge whether a buyout offer would be practical and at what price it would be attractive.
Musk has been under intense pressure this year to turn his money-losing, debt-laden company into a profitable higher-volume manufacturer, a prospect that has sent Tesla’s valuation higher than that of General Motors Co.
The company is still working its way out of what Musk called “production hell” at its home factory in Fremont, California, where a series of manufacturing challenges delayed the ramp-up of production of its new Model 3 sedan, on which the company’s profitability rests.
Going private is one way to avoid close scrutiny by the public market as Musk and the company face those challenges. Musk has feuded publicly with regulators, critics, short sellers and reporters, and some analysts suggested that less transparency would be welcomed by Musk.
The six board members who issued the statement on Wednesday included James Murdoch, chief executive of Twenty-First Century Fox Inc and Brad Buss, who was the chief financial officer of solar panel maker SolarCity until it was bought by Tesla in 2016.
Other board members mentioned in the statement included Robyn Denholm, Ira Ehrenpreis, Antonio Gracias and Linda Johnson Rice. Tesla’s other board members are Musk, his brother Kimbal Musk and venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson.
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China’s exports to the United States surged last month as its merchants rushed to fill orders ahead of a jump in U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods.
Its shipments to the United States climbed 13 percent in July from a year earlier, to $41.5 billion, after a roughly similar rise in June, customs data show.
At the same time, Beijing’s trade surplus with the United States — a frequent source of anger and threats from President Donald Trump — grew 11 percent to $28 billion.
Chinese exporters appear to be trying to ship their goods to the United States before tariffs that Trump is imposing in a fight over technology policy take full effect. The trade war between the world’s two biggest economies has forced many multinational companies to reschedule purchases and rethink where they buy materials and parts to try to dodge or blunt the effects of tit-for-tat tariffs between Washington and Beijing.
Beijing has warned that its exporters face “rising instabilities” after Washington slapped 25 percent duties on $34 billion of Chinese goods last month in response to complaints that China steals or pressures foreign companies to hand over technology. Beijing has retaliated against the U.S. tariffs with higher duties on a similar amount of American goods.
On Tuesday, the Trump administration announced that it would proceed with previously announced 25 percent tariffs on an additional $16 billion of Chinese imports starting Aug. 23. On Wednesday, China hit back by saying it would impose identical 25 percent punitive duties on $16 billion of U.S. goods, including cars, crude oil and scrap metal, also to take effect Aug. 23.
A Commerce Ministry statement labeled Trump’s decision to go ahead with the latest U.S. tariffs “very unreasonable.” Beijing’s retaliatory move was a “necessary response” to “safeguard its legitimate interests,” the ministry said on its website.
Escalating its tensions with Beijing, the Trump administration has also threatened to impose penalties on an additional $200 billion in Chinese exports to the United States. Beijing says it is ready to retaliate against $60 billion of American imports. (Beijing cannot tax an equal amount of U.S. products, because the United States exports far fewer goods to China than it imports.)
Tariffs are taxes on imports. They are meant to protect homegrown businesses and put foreign competitors at a disadvantage. But the taxes also exact a price on domestic businesses and consumers who buy imports and end up paying more for them.
In July, China’s global exports surged 12 percent, even faster than an 11 percent increase in June. At the same time, overall imports to China jumped 27 percent last month.
Exports to the rest of the world might have been boosted by a weaker Chinese currency. The yuan has declined by 8 percent this year against the dollar and by about 4 percent against a basket of global currencies. A weakening currency makes a nation’s goods more affordable for overseas buyers.
China’s trade conflict with the United States, coupled with weakening global demand, has compounded the challenges for Beijing. Economic growth has slowed since regulators tightened controls on bank lending to rein in surging debt.
The unusually strong July import figures reflected higher prices, according to Julian Evans-Pritchard of Capital Economics.
“We expect export growth to cool in the coming months, though this will primarily reflect softer global growth rather than U.S. tariffs,” Evans-Pritchard said in a report. “Import growth is likely to slow as domestic headwinds continue to weigh on economic activity.”
China’s global trade surplus narrowed by 40 percent from a year earlier to $28 billion. In the meantime, its trade gap with the 28-nation European Union contracted 8 percent to $11.2 billion.
China is running out of American goods to hit with retaliatory tariffs given the two nations’ lopsided trade balance. Last year’s imports from the United States totaled about $130 billion. That leaves only about $20 billion for penalty tariffs after increases that have already been imposed or threatened on U.S. goods are counted.
Beijing has stepped up efforts, so far without success, to recruit governments including Germany and France as allies. Those nations have criticized Trump’s tactics, but they share U.S. complaints about Chinese industrial policy and market barriers.
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An upcoming movie featuring Winnie the Pooh, a cartoon bear, is banned from release in China, as internet bloggers in the nation have taken to comparing Chinese President Xi Jinping to the iconic children’s story character.
Chinese officials, who only permit 34 foreign-made films per year to be shown in the country, did not give an explanation for denying the release of the movie Christopher Robin.
Since Xi first came to office in 2013, users of the nation’s most popular social media website, Weibo, have taken to posting memes comparing the president to the plump toy bear, memes the government has taken to censoring.
In 2015, political analysis firm Global Risk Insights deemed a meme comparing Xi and Winnie to be “China’s most censored photo of 2015.”
And in June, British comedian John Oliver was censored from Weibo after he criticized Chinese censorship on a segment of his TV show, Last Week Tonight. The segment made light of earlier censoring of Winnie the Pooh in the nation.
Winnie the Pooh was created by British author A.A. Milne in the 1920s. The bear is best known for his friendly yet naive demeanor, and his love of honey.
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After several social media outlets banned alt-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his show InfoWars earlier this week, Twitter announced it would be keeping Jones, sparking backlash from users.
“We didn’t suspend Alex Jones or Infowars yesterday. We know that’s hard for many but the reason is simple: he hasn’t violated our rules,” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey wrote. Jones, who has become notorious for hosting The Alex Jones Show on InfoWars, has more than 860,000 followers on Twitter.
On Monday, sites such as YouTube and Facebook banned Jones and his pages from their platforms, claiming that Jones’s videos violated the sites’ hate speech guidelines.
Jones has repeatedly used language incendiary towards Muslim and transgender people, and in July he appeared to threaten to shoot U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating President Trump and his White House on possible ties to Russia.
“[Mueller is] a demon I will take down, or I’ll die trying,” Jones said on a July broadcast, miming a gun-firing motion with his hands. “You’re going to get it, or I’m going to die trying, bitch.”
In the past, Jones has baselessly alleged the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School Shooting in Connecticut were hoaxes perpetrated by the U.S. government.
Several parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting are suing Jones for defamation. In a court document, the parents of one of the slain children claimed Jones broadcast his personal information on his show. At the time of its removal, Jones’s YouTube channel had more than 2.4 million subscribers, with 1.5 billion views across all of its videos.
Twitter’s hateful conduct guidelines bar “wishes for the physical harm, death, or disease of individuals or groups” as well as “behavior that incites fear about a protected group.”
“We do not tolerate behavior that harasses, intimidates, or uses fear to silence another person’s voice,” the site’s guidelines say.
While Dorsey acknowledged in a Tweet that accounts such as InfoWars can “sensationalize issues and spread unsubstantiated rumors,” he also wrote that it “serves the public conversation best” for “journalists document, validate, and refute such information directly.”
Several journalists pushed back against Dorsey’s request.
“I am not getting paid to clean up your website for you,” wrote Matt Pearce, a journalist for The Los Angeles Times, in a response to Dorsey’s Tweet.
Twitter has banned significant alt-right personalities in the past.
In 2016, alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, who has ties to white nationalist groups, was permanently banned from the site after instigating racist and sexist harassment against American actress Leslie Jones, who is black.
And in 2017, Twitter suspended the account of James Allsup, a white nationalist who spoke at the “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia earlier that year.
“We’re going to hold Jones to the same standard we hold to every account, not taking one-off actions to make us feel good in the short term,” Dorsey wrote Tuesday.
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Refugees carry few material possessions when they flee war, violence or persecution in their homelands. But they do bring talent and skill to their new countries.
At the Sandy Spring Museum in Sandy Spring, Maryland, that talent is on display in an exhibit of six refugee artists from Iraq, Ethiopia and Somalia.
Some of the displayed works depict the refugee artists’ memories of their homelands.
“My hometown is Wollo,” explained Ethiopian artist Fetun Getachew. “There is a marketplace once a week. People meet there at the markets for not only buying or selling, [but] just meet together for so many purposes.”
Iraqi artist Ahmad Alkarkhi contributed a landscape of his country. “I want to show Americans good things about my country,” he said. “This beautiful landscape, no war or different things.”
But coming to a new country inevitably changes the work. For Alkarkhi, it has added color.
“In my country, we don’t have a lot of color there, just gray and brown,” he said. “Here, I saw four seasons clear. I saw many colors. This … change[s] my art, and I need to add more colors to my painting.”
In an unincorporated community of about 6,000 people near Washington, D.C., the museum considers itself a “living history museum,” but not in the conventional sense in which museums employ re-enactors to depict history.
Rather, Sandy Spring is a place where the community can gather and “have unexpected encounters,” according to the museum website. “It means having cultural artists create experiences for the entire community to enjoy.”
Museum executive director Allison Weiss thinks this particular exhibit says a lot about the contributions of refugees.
“There’s so much talk in the news now about refugees, and how many people we should let into the country, and what are they contributing,” Weiss said. “And I think this exhibit shows that there’s individuals behind the word refugees and they have all sorts of talents that maybe we’re not hearing about from the news.”
Dancing with colors
Alkarkhi works in maintenance at an apartment complex in Riverdale, Maryland. But at night and on the weekends, he can be found in front of a canvas set up in the living room of his small apartment.
“Painting for me [is] like music. Each painting, different music. I just tell myself, ‘Let me dance with colors on the canvas,'” he said.
Alkarkhi graduated from the University of Baghdad, College of Fine Arts. He was a well-known artist in Iraq until violence forced him to flee to Syria in 2006. But war came there, too. Once again, he was uprooted, relocating three years later to Riverdale with his wife and two children.
Alkarkhi said creating art is his way to give back to America for helping him and his family build a new life in safety.
“America gives refugees a lot of things. I want to do beautiful painting, and I give it to this country and to the people to enjoy with my art,” he said.
Alkarkhi is also painting his experiences as a refugee in his new color palette, as in his piece, “Colorful Horses.”
“These horses are like refugees. Some from Europe, some from Africa, some came from [the] Middle East. And they come here, they work together, live together, do many things together,” he explained.
“Then, after like 10, 20 years, everybody say I am American. And everybody try to do something good for this country.”
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Bill Clinton is a now a million-selling novelist.
“The President is Missing,” a thriller co-written with James Patterson, has more than 1 million sales in North America alone. The book’s co-publishers, Alfred A. Knopf and Little Brown and Co., announced the sales figures Wednesday.
The novel was released June 4 and has topped best-seller lists for weeks. Reviews were mixed, but Barnes & Noble fiction buyer Sessalee Hensley said in a statement that “The President is Missing” had benefited from “very strong” word of mouth. The book’s subject has also proved timely: a potentially devastating cyberattack, which intelligence experts have called a leading concern.
Clinton, whose previous books include the memoir “My Life,” is now the rare author to have million sellers in fiction and nonfiction.
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Long before Aerosmith filled stadiums with tens of thousands of fans, the band traveled New England in a tiny van playing to smaller crowds.
That dilapidated van has been found in the woods of a small Massachusetts town.
Mike Wolfe and Frank Fritz, hosts of the History Channel show American Pickers, located the van in Chesterfield, a town of about 1,200 residents 100 miles west of Boston.
The property owner said the 1964 International Harvester Metro van was there when he bought the land from someone with a connection to Aerosmith.
Ray Tabano, a founding member of Aerosmith, confirmed it was the van the rockers used in the 1970s.
The pickers paid $25,000 for it. Wolfe says it’s “a piece of American rock and roll history.”
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A red-hot voyage to the sun is going to bring us closer to our star than ever before.
NASA’s Parker Solar Probe will get nearly seven times closer to the sun than previous spacecraft. It will hurtle through the sizzling solar atmosphere and come within nearly 4 million miles of the surface.
It’s designed to take solar punishment like never before, thanks to its revolutionary heat shield that’s capable of withstanding 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. To snuggle up to the sun, it will fly past Venus seven times over seven years.
Liftoff is set for the pre-dawn hours of Saturday.
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