Month: September 2018

Facebook, Twitter Executives Testify on Capitol Hill; Google Absent

By Uponsil | | No Comments | Silicon Valley

Facebook and Twitter executives insisted at a Senate hearing Wednesday that they were aggressively trying to identify foreign actors who wanted to inflict damage on the U.S. before the November midterm elections.

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg told the Senate Intelligence Committee her company was “now blocking millions of attempts to register false accounts each and every day” and was “making progress on fake news.”

She said the company’s recent efforts were “starting to pay off” but added, “We cannot stop interference by ourselves.”

Sandberg said Facebook was “working with outside experts, industry partners and governments, including law enforcement, to share information about threats and prevent abuse” to avert further interference in American elections.

Social media companies are under pressure over foreign meddling in U.S. elections, the spread of disinformation, privacy and censorship. Congress has criticized social media companies during the past year as it became clear they were on the front lines during Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections and beyond.

Special counsel Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russians earlier this year on charges stemming from plans to disrupt the 2016 election by creating bogus accounts that circulated divisive issues on social media. The indicted Russians are members of the GRU, a Russian Federation intelligence agency.

Twitter Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey said that his company was “unprepared and ill-equipped” for the foreign influence campaigns but that it had intensified its efforts to eliminate phony accounts to prevent “hostile foreign influence.”

“We’re identifying and challenging 8 million to 10 million suspicious accounts every week, and we’re thwarting over a half-million accounts from logging into Twitter every single day,” he said.

Dorsey also said Twitter was continuing to find accounts that might be linked to the Russians, noting that 3,843 accounts had been suspended and that the company had seen recent activity.

Google’s parent, Alphabet Inc., refused to send its top executive to Wednesday’s hearing, prompting sharp words from some senators for Alphabet CEO Larry Page. Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, suggested the company might have bailed because it was “arrogant,” while Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, expressed outrage about the absence.

Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner said at the hearing that social media giants “were caught flat-footed by the brazen attacks on our election” and expressed doubt that the companies were adequately confronting the problem.

“I’m skeptical that, ultimately, you’ll be able to truly address this challenge on your own,” Warner said. “Congress is going to have to take action here.”

Despite such skepticism from lawmakers, a key U.S. military official said Wednesday that he was encouraged by the actions companies like Facebook and Twitter had taken in advance of the midterm elections.

“This is where social media companies can impose a cost against our adversaries,” U.S. Cyber Command’s General Paul Nakasone told a security conference in Washington. “This is an ability that I think, uniquely, they are stepping up to.”

Nakasone, who also heads the National Security Agency, also said he was not prepared to give up on companies that have been hesitant to take action, calling continued engagement critical.

“We can’t run from it. We can’t hide from it,” he said, warning that adversaries like Russia and even nonstate actors “continue to have an ability to up their game.”

While Congress has forced social media companies during the past year to focus more on the Russian interference issue, it took several months last year for Facebook and Twitter to acknowledge they had been manipulated.

Many social media companies have made policy changes that caught and banned numerous malicious accounts during the past year. But free services that find out as much about users as possible remain unchanged, prompting critics to say social media companies will continue to contend with bad actors manipulating their systems unless they change.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged in a Washington Post opinion piece on Tuesday that his company found out too late in 2016 there were “foreign actors running coordinated campaigns to interfere with America’s democratic process.”

He said the company had since made improvements, such as “finding and removing fake accounts” and misinformation.

But Zuckerberg warned that Facebook and other social media companies faced “sophisticated, well-funded adversaries who are getting smarter over time, too. It’s an arms race, and it will take the combined forces of the U.S. private and public sectors to protect America’s democracy from outside interference.”

Over the past year, three-fourths of all Facebook users have adjusted their privacy settings, taken weeks-long breaks from the platform or deleted Facebook apps from their cellphones, according to a Pew Research Center survey.

The survey was conducted May 19-June 11, after revelations that the former consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had gathered data on tens of millions of Facebook users without their knowledge.

House hearing

Later Wednesday, Twitter’s Dorsey was headed to a House committee hearing focused on Republican complaints that social media companies have shown evidence of bias against conservatives. In testimony released before that hearing, Dorsey denied that Twitter uses political ideology to make decisions.

Some Republicans have contended that Twitter is “shadow banning” some in their party because of the ways search results have appeared. Twitter has rejected the assertions.

Dorsey was the lone invitee to the House hearing. While all three tech companies have been accused of being biased against conservatives, the more public-facing nature of Twitter has made it an easier  target.

VOA National Security Correspondent Jeff Seldin contributed to this report. Some information for this report came from The Associated Press.
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Collapsing Emerging-Market Currencies Spark Concerns

By Uponbiz | | No Comments | Business

First it was Argentina, quickly followed by Turkey. Now anxious investors and policy-makers are watching with alarm the plummeting currencies of several emerging-market economies, most of which have borrowed heavily in dollars.

The nosediving currencies are prompting fears of a repeat of the 1997 Asian financial crash or the “Tequila Effect” of Mexico’s 1994 financial crisis. Or is something even worse coming — a financial contagion to compare with 2008?

Argentina’s peso dropped 29 percent against the U.S. dollar in August, the worst performer among major emerging-market currencies. Turkey’s currency followed closely, with a 25 percent slide.South Africa’s rand saw an almost 10 percent drop. The Indonesian rupiah fell to its weakest level since the 1997 Asian financial crisis, while India’s currency slid into unprecedented territory against the dollar.

September has seen no major uplift in those currencies. The Turkish lira is down 40 percent to the U.S. dollar this year, sparking mounting alarm over the sustainability of the country’s sizable dollar-denominated debts held primarily by its banks and businesses rather than the government.

The foreign exchange markets are jittery with traders watching to see if more countries start joining the troubled list, which would indicate contagion is underway. African countries like Angola, Ghana, Ethiopia, and Mozambique could be vulnerable. And in a worst-case scenario even more developed economies like Chile, Poland and Hungary, which are also shouldering large foreign-currency debts above 50 percent of their GDPs, could be impacted, say some financial analysts.

Corporate debt in emerging and developing economies is significantly larger than it was before the 2008 global financial crisis.The bigger the debt, the harder the fall.

“The risk is increasing in those countries,” Bertrand Delgado, director of global markets for Societe Generale in New York, has warned.

There is general consensus why emerging markets are in turmoil. Three main developments are blamed:

1 – The impact on market sentiment from U.S. President Donald Trump’s tit-for-tat trade war with China and others

2 – Rising U.S. interest rate that has prompted global investors to exit emerging markets to chase yield in dollar investments

3 – The winding down of post-2008 quantitative easing by the U.S. Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, which has reduced liquidity and the availability of cheap money for governments and businesses in emerging markets to borrow.

A global financial crash?

Marcus Ashworth of Bloomberg cautioned last week the emerging-markets sell-off looks contagious.

“The difficulties for emerging markets have entered a new phase.What were once clearly country-specific crises, well contained within their borders, are bleeding across the world,” he warned.

Ashworth, a columnist and a veteran of the banking industry, most recently as chief markets strategist at Haitong Securities in London, added, “One emerging country’s problems have become other emerging countries’ problems, and it’s hard to see how to break the cycle.”

Other analysts dispute that contagion is underway, saying each of the troubled states have their own idiosyncratic problems and country-specific challenges, although they acknowledge the turmoil could mount with the U.S. Federal Reserve expected to raise interest rates several times this year.

In a note to investors, DBS, a Singapore-based international financial services group, warned the currencies of Argentina and Turkey “have been struggling with rising U.S. rates since the start of the year, due to deficits in their fiscal and current account balances.

“Heightened trade tensions threatening to erupt into a full-blown trade war could prompt, DBS said, disorderly capital outflows leading to “financial instability, especially in countries that have high external debt levels.”

Britain’s The Economist magazine argues the weakness in emerging-market currencies “is not fundamentally contagious” and the fallout can be contained.Western lenders including banks will be impacted, it said, as emerging-market borrowers struggle to repay dollar and other foreign-currency debts now worth more in terms of their own currencies. “But it would not threaten their [Western lenders’] solvency,” it said.

Optimists say for all the wider currency woes and the economic weakness of Argentina and Turkey, many major emerging-market countries are doing well.

India’s GDP was growing at an 8 percent rate ending June. Mexico’s peso is steady and it appears to have concluded trade negotiations with the Trump White House, which markets are viewing favorably.

The optimists say the global scare is being fanned by screaming, doom-laden headlines, pointing out that in 2013, when the U.S. Federal Reserve started to cease Quantitative Easing, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Turkey and South Africa all suffered from currency depreciation, but they soon regained their footing.

The biggest emerging-market risk, though, is that rattled global investors could be so alarmed by currency turmoils that they ignore economic fundamentals and stampede away from emerging-market countries, compounding currency falls, triggering indirect contagion, and adding to debt burdens.
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Art Collection Depicts Africa as a Woman Being Lured by China

By Uponent | | No Comments | Entertainment

Kenyan artist Michael Soi is criticizing China’s relationship with Africa through his collection of paintings at Nairobi’s Circle Art Gallery that depict the interest that China is showing in Africa. The 74-piece collection underscores China’s heavy involvement in the continent by depicting Africa as a woman being lured by China.
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Transcript: Target in Latest Hack says Journalist, Researcher Attacks ‘More Widespread than People Realize’

By Uponsil | | No Comments | Silicon Valley

Ben Judah is the author of This Is London and Fragile Empire, a contributing writer at Politico, and an expert at the Hudson Institute. His think tank project on modern-day kleptocracy was recently targeted in a cyberattack that Microsoft has linked to the Fancy Bear (ATP28) hacking unit associated with Russian military intelligence.

Judah spoke the Voice of America about the attack on the various right-leaning think tanks, Senate groups, and the current similarities between Moscow and Washington’s political climates.

Question: What happened at the Hudson Institute? Why was your research targeted?

Ben Judah: There is a lot I can’t discuss due to security procedures in place. But what happened is that Microsoft revealed that a series of think tanks and conservative organizations had been targeted by Russian hackers, including, specifically, the program that I had been working on.

Prior to that my own computer had been attacked from a Russian-speaking country. I actually think this is more widespread than people realize. The computers with journalists and think-tankers, dealing not just with Russia, but with Iran, or Turkey, or China, are being targeted far more frequently than talked about.

Q: Should there be more awareness of this problem? Should news organizations, and journalists themselves, be establishing better security protocols?

BJ: When the Russian hackers targeted the think tank project, they created a clone website, so that people would sign up for it and give their details. People trying to read or engage with the work would have their information compromised in this manner. We didn’t know it was happening, so it wasn’t an issue of our security procedures.

And there was no way to find out, apart from frantically Googling yourself all of the time and name-searching yourself in different corners of the internet.

Q: What were the goals of the attack on the Hudson Institute?

BJ: I can’t be entirely sure, but I would assume that they wanted to know the identities of people interested in the work that the think tank was doing on anti-kleptocracy. They wanted to know who was subscribing to it, who was checking it, and who was collaborating with the project. And what the project has been doing is pushing reform on the U.S. legal and financial system—because it argues that the corruption cases that are linked to the administration of President Donald Trump and to Russia are rather a systemic problem in the U.S.

Q: Could intimidation be another factor? Particularly intimidation of researchers or journalists who rely on trips to Russia for their work? Visa issues, for example, can routinely come up for people like that.

BJ: What I’m doing at the moment doesn’t really involve travel to Russia. It’s more to do with the U.S. legal and financial systems, and how shell companies, for example, allow foreign kleptocrats, not only Russian kleptocrats, to abuse the U.S. system. But I also think that intimidation could be a part of the rationale here.

Q: You recently wrote a piece for The Atlantic talking about the similarities between the political climate in Moscow and in Washington. What has changed in D.C. to make such a comparison possible?

BJ: Since the election of Trump, a lot of things [in Washington] have started to remind me of how power behaves in Moscow: endless discussions of the Trump family, the blurring of business interests and executive power, the intensity of the propaganda, politics revolving around one man, increased paranoia amongst journalists and policy operatives—not groundless paranoia, I would say, about being potentially targeted or hacked—the hysteria about foreign influence and foreign interference in politics… All of that reminds of the atmosphere in Moscow.

Another aspect of this is that while working as a journalist in Moscow, I had to face the fact that even if I got an interview with lowly ministers or chairmen of committees or Federation Council senators, I wasn’t talking to people with power vested in their hands. Because it was far more a world of oligarchs and TV propaganda all linked to the Russian president, and there is something of that I’ve noticed developing in Washington.

Previously influential people, people linked into policymaking systems, just don’t have the influence [in Washington] right now, and people who are influencing the president are his family and his top propagandists, as well as other oligarchs.

Q: What is your advice for people in Washington who are dealing with this climate, a climate most Americans simply aren’t used to?

BJ: Be careful of what you keep on your computer and your phone. Have sensitive information? Use pen and paper.

This report was produced in collaboration with VOA’s Russian Service.
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Scientist Trains Cameroon’s Future Innovators with Focus on Girls

By Uponsci | | No Comments | Science

The technology sector provides many jobs for today’s innovators. But one scientist and teacher in Cameroon says there’s no reason why women should not be part of that technological growth. She’s making it her goal to prepare more young girls to enter the workforce. Arash Arabasadi reports.
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Level Up: With Xbox Adaptive Controller, Anyone Can Play

By Uponsil | | No Comments | Silicon Valley

Many people enjoy playing video games but take for granted that they can hold and easily operate game controllers. Now Microsoft is making it possible for disabled gamers to join in the fun. Tina Trinh reports.
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Wild Blueberries Sing the Blues, With Industry in Decline

By Uponbiz | | No Comments | Business

In the era of superfoods, Maine blueberries aren’t so super.

 

The Maine wild blueberry industry harvests one of the most beloved fruit crops in New England, but it’s locked in a downward skid in a time when other nutrition-packed foods, from acai to quinoa, dominate the conversation about how to eat. And questions linger about when, and if, the berry will be able to make a comeback.

 

The little blueberries are touted by health food bloggers and natural food stores because of their hefty dose of antioxidants. They’re also deeply ingrained in the culture of New England, and they were the inspiration for “Blueberries for Sal,” a beloved 1948 children’s book.​

But the industry that picks and sells them is dealing with a long-term price drop, drought, freezes, diseases and foreign competition, and farmers are looking at a second consecutive year of reduced crop size.

At Beech Hill Blueberry Farm in Rockport, this year’s harvest was off by about 50 percent, said Ian Stewart, who runs the land trust that manages the farm.

 

“Our year was a little underwhelming. There was a lot of drought. There was a freeze at a bad time,” Stewart said. “We’re hoping it’s a blip. We’ll see.”

North America’s wild blueberry industry exists only in Maine and Atlantic Canada, and an oversupply of berries in both places caused prices to harvesters to plummet around 2015. Recent years have brought new challenges, such as particularly bad spells of mummy berry disease, a fungal pathogen, and difficulty in opening up new markets.

 

The blueberries grow wild, as the name implies, in fields called “blueberry barrens” that stretch to the horizon in Maine’s rural Down East region. While the plumper cultivated blueberries harvested in states like New Jersey are planted and grown as crops, harvesters of wild blueberries tend to a naturally occurring fruit and pick it by hand and with machinery.

 

Woes in the industry have caused some growers to scale back operations in Maine. Harvesters collected a little less than 68 million pounds of wild blueberries in the state in 2017, which was the lowest total since 2005 and more than 33 million pounds less than 2016. Last year’s price of 26 cents per pound to farmers was also the lowest since 1985, and was more in line with the kind of prices farmers saw in the early 1970s than in the modern era.

This year’s harvest was mostly wrapped by late August, a little earlier than usual, and members of the industry said they believe it was another year of lower harvest. Exact totals aren’t available yet, but signs point to a crop that’s “similar to last year, or even smaller,” said Nancy McBrady, executive director of the Wild Blueberry Commission of Maine.

The industry has tried to focus on growing the appeal of the health aspects of wild blueberries, which are richer in antioxidants than their cultivated cousins, but it has been a slow climb, McBrady said.

 

“For years, the health message and the taste message of wild blueberries has been successful,” she said. “But it’s frustrating when we find ourselves in periods of oversupply and competition.”

 

Nearly 100 percent of the wild crop is frozen, and the berries are used in frozen and processed foods. Prices to consumers at farm stands and grocery stores have held about steady in the face of falling prices to harvesters.

 

The same berries are harvested in Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island, and the weakness of the Canadian dollar has also hurt the U.S. industry because Canadian berries sell for less. Some companies operate on both sides of the border, and an equal exchange rate is better for business.

 

Such financial stress played a role in growers harvesting 5,000 fewer acres in the U.S. last year, said David Yarborough, a horticulture professor at the University of Maine. He said he expects a similar drop this year.

 

Other factors, such as poor pollination last year, have also held the crop back, Yarborough said. He stopped short of describing the industry as in full-blown crisis, but he said some smaller growers are in crisis mode.

The industry at large is hoping it doesn’t suffer too many more down years, said Homer Woodward, vice president of operations for Jasper Wyman & Son, a major industry player.

 

“I think the state of Maine is going to pick less pounds than last year. That’s the product of economic downturn,” said Woodward said. “And mother nature was cruel to us this year.”
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Facebook, Twitter to Face US Lawmakers Over Politics, Internet 

By Uponsil | | No Comments | Silicon Valley

Top Twitter and Facebook executives will defend their companies before U.S. lawmakers on Wednesday, with Facebook insisting it takes election interference seriously and Twitter denying its operations are influenced by politics.

But no executive from Alphabet’s Google is expected to testify, after the company declined the Senate Intelligence Committee’s request to send one of its most senior executives, frustrating lawmakers.

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, appearing alongside Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey, will say that her company’s efforts to combat foreign influence have improved since the 2016 U.S. election, according to written testimony released Tuesday.

“The actions we’ve taken in response … show our determination to do everything we can to stop this kind of interference from happening,” Sandberg said.

The company is getting better at finding and removing “inauthentic” content and now has more than 20,000 people working on safety and security, she said.

Technology executives have repeatedly testified in Congress over the past year, on the defensive over political influence activity on their sites as well as concerns about user privacy.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has been looking into efforts to influence U.S. public opinion for more than a year, after U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that Kremlin-backed entities sought to boost Republican Donald Trump’s chances of winning the White House in 2016.

Moscow has denied involvement.

Google offered to send its chief legal officer, Kent Walker, to Wednesday’s hearing, but he was rejected by the committee, which said it wanted to hear from corporate decision-makers.

​’Don’t understand the problem’

Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, the committee’s Republican chairman, said he expected the hearing would focus on solutions to the problem of foreign efforts to influence U.S. elections and sow political discord, with a jab at Google.

“You don’t understand the problem if you don’t see this as a large effort from whole of government and the private sector,” Burr told reporters at the Senate.

Google said Walker would be in Washington on Wednesday and be available to meet with lawmakers. On Tuesday it released written “testimony” describing the company’s efforts to combat influence operations.

Twitter’s Dorsey also will testify at a House of Representatives hearing on Wednesday that the company “does not use political ideology to make any decisions,” according to written testimony also made public Tuesday.

Dorsey will appear before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, addressing Republican concerns about how the social media platform polices content.

“From a simple business perspective and to serve the public conversation, Twitter is incentivized to keep all voices on the platform,” Dorsey said.

Conservative Republicans in Congress have criticized social media companies for what they say are politically motivated practices in removing some content, a charge the companies have repeatedly rejected.

Trump faulted Twitter on July 26, without citing any evidence, for limiting the visibility of prominent Republicans through a practice known as shadow banning.

Democratic Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island blasted Wednesday’s hearing and his Republican colleagues, calling claims of political bias baseless.

“There is no evidence that the algorithms of social networks or search results are biased against conservatives. It is a made-up narrative pushed by the conservative propaganda machine to convince voters of a conspiracy that does not exist,” Cicilline said.
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Fragments Found in Brazil Museum Fire Provide Some Hope

By Uponent | | No Comments | Entertainment

Firefighters found bone fragments from a collection in the still-smoldering National Museum, an official said Tuesday, raising hopes that a famed skull might somehow have survived a massive blaze that turned historic and scientific artifacts to ashes.

Flames tore through the museum Sunday night, and officials have said much of Latin America’s largest collection of treasures might be lost. Aerial photos of the main building showed only heaps of rubble and ashes in the parts of the building where the roof collapsed.

The firefighters “found fragments of bones in a room where the museum kept many items, including skulls,” said Cristiana Serejo, the museum’s vice director. “We still have to collect them and take them to the lab to know exactly what they are.” 

In its collection of about 20 million items, one of the most prized possessions is a skull called Luzia, which is among the oldest fossils ever found in the Americas. 

Museum spokesman Marcio Martins noted that the collection contains hundreds of skulls, and all material would first need to be examined by the Federal Police, who are investigating the still-unknown cause of the fire. Experts will then examine them to determine their identity.

Some objects were rescued from the flames on Sunday night by a professor who rushed into the blaze. Paulo Buckup, a professor of zoology at the museum, recounted Tuesday how he and a few other people pulled out mollusks and marine specimens, going into and out of the building several times until it became too dangerous. He said the group tried to identify in the dark the most irreplaceable objects, but said they only saved a “minuscule portion of the heritage that was lost.” 

Many have already said that regardless of what is salvaged, the loss will be immeasurable. Marina Silva, a candidate for president in upcoming elections, called it a “lobotomy of Brazilian history.” 

The Globo newspaper wrote in an editorial published Tuesday: “The size of the catastrophe is vast: It struck the national memory, through the loss of the important historical collection; it affected the sciences, interrupting research; and it represents a cultural loss impossible to quantify. We only know that it is enormous.”

The disaster has led to a series of recriminations about who was to blamed, and it has raised concerns that other institutions might be at risk. The national development bank announced Tuesday that it would make $6 million available for museums looking to upgrade their security or fire-prevention plans. 

Investigators were first allowed to enter the main building Monday, but it is still off-limits to researchers. Instead, some scientists were focusing attention on an annex on the site, where vertebrate specimens were housed. The fire didn’t reach the area, but it caused the electricity to fail, threatening some artifacts, said Marcelo Wexler, a researcher in the vertebrate department.

“We have animals that need to be frozen, and they were rotting without electricity,” Wexler said.

In a sign of the enormity of the task ahead, a man created a stir when he arrived on the scene carrying a document he said belonged to the institution that he had found across the street. A group of journalists crowded in to see the piece of paper, which was burned at the edges and contained printed text and was in a clear plastic folder. It was not clear what it was or if it was authentic.

“I came here to give it back. I am sure there is much more that flew around,” said Felipe Silva, who said he was a guard at the museum. 

Even as efforts turned to searching the rubble, firefighters were still occasionally directing water at the building, where some embers were still burning. Eduardo Rosse, a fire official, said that was normal for a blaze of this size.

Luiz Fernando Dias Duarte, a museum official, said Monday that anything held in the main building was probably destroyed, and Serejo told the G1 news portal that 90 percent of the collection may have been destroyed.

But on Tuesday, she held out some hope, telling journalists that staff members were “reasonably optimistic about finding some more items inside.”

She added that UNESCO, the U.N.’s cultural agency, had offered financial and technical assistance. French and Egyptian officials also have offered help. The museum was home to Egyptian artifacts, and Egypt’s ministries of foreign affairs and antiquities have expressed concern over the fate of those objects.

With the cause still under investigation, many already have begun to fix blame, saying years of government neglect left the museum underfunded and unsafe. 

Roberto Leher, rector of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, to which the museum was linked, said it was well known that the building was vulnerable to fire and in need of extensive repair. In fact, two years ago, federal prosecutors in Rio de Janeiro began investigating safety conditions in the building. 

The institution had recently secured approval for nearly $5 million for a planned renovation, including an upgrade of the fire-prevention system, but the money had not yet been disbursed.

On Monday, government officials promised $2.4 million to shore up the building and promised to rebuild the museum.
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Venezuelan Gas Lines Stretch as New Payment System Flops

By Uponbiz | | No Comments | Business

Frustrated Venezuelan drivers faced lengthy lines for gasoline in border states Tuesday as the government struggled to roll out a new payment system that President Nicolas Maduro says will reduce smuggling of heavily subsidized fuel.

Maduro says the payment system will pave the way for charging international prices for fuel, a massive increase given that gas is now almost free, as his government seeks to shore up state coffers amid a hyperinflationary economic meltdown.

Any increase would mark the first time in 20 years that the OPEC member has significantly raised domestic fuel prices, which have been a sensitive issue ever since deadly riots broke out in 1989 in response to austerity measures that included higher gasoline prices.

​Fatherland Card flops

The pilot program that began Tuesday in eight states was supposed to provide service stations with wireless devices that use a state-backed identification document called the Fatherland Card to carry out fuel transactions.

“I see a lot of disorganization because they haven’t started making this work yet,” said Jose Coronel, 26, a civil servant, as he waited in line at a gas station in the border town of Ureña. “I can see that it’s difficult to control smuggling.”

At gas stations along the border with neighboring Colombia, the new machines were either not installed or not functioning properly, according to drivers filling up their tanks and two gas station attendants in two different states.

The new payment system will provide a subsidy to motorists with a Fatherland Card, directly reimbursing them for gasoline purchases, once the domestic fuel price hikes take effect.

Maduro says that will help soften the impact of a steep price increase.

Drivers on the border started lining up as early as Monday afternoon on concerns that the price hikes would be immediate or that stations would run out of fuel.

The Information Ministry did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

​Gas card or surveillance tool

Experts estimate Venezuela, where shortages of food and medicine have fueled hunger, disease and a mass exodus of citizens, loses at least $5 billion per year as a result of not selling gasoline at international prices.

Maduro on Monday said gasoline would rise to international price levels by October, without offering details.

The use of the Fatherland Card has drawn intense criticism from government critics, who say it is a mechanism to gather information about citizens that the ruling Socialist Party can use against adversaries by withholding basic services from them.

The government offers some benefits including subsidized food, access to scarce medicine and cash bonuses to holders of the card. Maduro says it will help combat an “economic war” led by opposition politicians with the help of Washington.

Fuel prices have stayed relatively steady for years even though inflation is projected by the IMF to reach 1,000,000 percent.

Unay Bayona, 24, an independent merchant, said he doubted prices would ever rise enough to match those in Colombia, and that residents would continue to view contraband as an option.

“Smuggling is going to continue because there is no other way to make a living,” Bayona said, at the entrance to a service station in Ureña.
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After Fresh Cyberattacks, Experts Say Silicon Valley Showing Improved Response

By Uponsil | | No Comments | Silicon Valley

As legislators prepare to grill Silicon Valley executives over Russian hacking ahead of midterm elections, some observers say the debate over expanded government oversight is far from over.

On Tuesday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey met with legislators in Washington ahead of Wednesday morning’s hearing, where Dorsey and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg will answer questions about cybersecurity before the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the committee’s ranking Democrat, told The Washington Post that the hearing aims to “to sound the alarm that what happened in 2016, as we’ve seen, was not a one-off.”

In recent weeks, Microsoft reported that it had disabled six Russian-launched websites masquerading as U.S. think tanks and Senate sites. Facebook and the security firm FireEye revealed influence campaigns, originating in Iran and Russia, that led the social network to remove 652 impostor accounts, some targeting Americans. The office of Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania said hackers tied to a “nation-state” had sent phishing emails to old campaign email accounts.

Hacking attempts

Newly reported attempts at infiltration and social media manipulation — which Moscow officially denies — point to Russia’s continued interest in meddling in U.S. politics. While observers say there is no clear evidence of Kremlin efforts to disrupt midterms, it nonetheless appears hackers outside the American political system are probing for a way in.

“What’s interesting about this is that the Russians have shown here that they are not at all partisan in this,” said David Sanger of The New York Times, who first reported on Microsoft’s account of the latest attacks, in which company officials seized website domains created by the Kremlin-linked hacker group known as Fancy Bear or APT28 — the same group that federal investigators and private cybersecurity firms blamed for the 2016 election hack.

The phony sites, designed to emulate the Hudson Institute and International Republican Institute, surreptitiously routed users to pages built by hackers to steal passwords and log-in credentials. The aim, Sanger said, is to disrupt institutions that challenge Moscow or Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“They are pursuing their own national interests, going after think tanks that have taken positions that the Russians find uncomfortable or threatening, whether it’s the use of sanctions or promotion of democracy or pursuit of kleptocrats,” Sanger told VOA.

The extent to which Microsoft coordinated with federal investigators to thwart the latest attack wasn’t clear, he said.

“I’m not sure whether they gave the government an advance heads up, but the nature of cyber now is that you hear about these [attacks from the] companies before you hear about them from government,” Sanger added.

In recent months, legislators on both sides of the aisle have expressed willingness to regulate how U.S. tech companies safeguard themselves against intrusions. But analyst Ben Nimmo of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab says the Microsoft takedown bodes well for the tech sector’s independent ability to prevent attacks.

“This is something we’ve seen over the last couple of months — tech companies have been much more forward-leaning in their attempts to prevent this kind of interference,” Nimmo told VOA.

“We had Microsoft coming out up front and saying we’ve just stopped this attack, and they actually attributed it directly to Fancy Bear, which is very striking that they’re actually confident in making that direct attribution. A couple of weeks ago, we had Facebook coming out and exposing a number of inauthentic accounts, which had some connections with the troll farm in St. Petersburg,” he added, referring to the Internet Research Agency linked to the 2016 U.S. election hack. “About a month before that, we had Twitter coming out and releasing a list of handles that it had traced back to the troll farm.”

A troll farm is a group of people who attempt to create disruption in an online community by posting comments online that are deliberately inflammatory or provocative.

US, European action

With all of the recent activity on the platform side, Nimmo said the question is “what are we going to see on the government level?”

More specifically, what can the West can do in order to pressure the Russian government — and does the West have the political will to do it? If nothing else, the latest attacks are likely to embolden U.S. and European lawmakers to pass additional sanctions.

“Although I think we need to fully understand the scope of this activity that Microsoft has reported, it clearly demonstrates that Russia is not in any way pulling back from the techniques that it used in 2016,” said Alexander Vershbow, a distinguished fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, and a former NATO deputy secretary general.

“If anything, it’s broadening its target to include conservative think tanks and organizations like the Hudson Institute, and so I think you can say right now, at a minimum, it would give momentum to congressional efforts to tighten the sanctions even further,” added Vershbow, who also has been a U.S. ambassador to Russia, South Korea and NATO. “It may also strengthen the hand of administration officials as they consult with Europe in trying to push the Europeans to tighten their sanctions as well.”

Retired Marine General Jim Jones, former national security adviser during the Obama administration, said although sanctions can be effective in the short term, long-term national security depends on safeguarding the cyber infrastructure itself.

“In a not so distant future, the country that first succeeds in reaching complete cybersecurity will be able to cause even more serious disorders,” Jones told VOA. “That’s the essence of cyberwar in our century.”

For individuals targeted by foreign hackers, such as the Hudson Institute’s Russian kleptocracy expert Ben Judah, no amount of new sanctions or malware detection will be enough.

“Be careful of what you keep on your computer and on your phone,” Judah told VOA. “Have sensitive information? Use pen and paper.”

Following Wednesday morning’s Senate hearing, Twitter CEO Dorsey will appear solo before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where he’ll be asked to address allegations of political censorship.

This story originated in VOA’s Russian Service. Original reporting contributed by Natalia Antonova and Jela De Franceschi. Some information is from AP.
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New Mormon Narrative History Book Includes Polygamous Roots

By Uponent | | No Comments | Entertainment

Mormon church founder Joseph Smith insisted on introducing polygamy in the early 1800s despite knowing the societal risks and getting pushback from other leaders and his first wife, recounts a new church history book unveiled Tuesday.

A nearly 600-page book that covers early church history from 1815-1846 doesn’t dwell on polygamy, but doesn’t skip over it either. That’s noteworthy and marks The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ latest attempt to be more transparent about sensitive issues of its past. 

Quentin L. Cook and Dale Renlund, high-ranking leaders with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said the parts about plural marriage provide the full story within the context of what was happening at that time in history.   

“There is discussion of how it began, how it was viewed by the individuals and its part of the history of the restored gospel,” said Renlund, a member of a top governing panel called the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. “It’s taken in that context without shying away from it. So, a person can get a clear view of what was going on and when and why.”

The book recounts founder Joseph Smith’s introduction of plural marriage after he received what he believed was a revelation from the Lord. The book details how his wife, Emma Smith, and many leaders recoiled and questioned the direction.

At one point, the faith’s polygamous practices led an excommunicated Mormon to publish an expose about the religion and give lectures titled, “The secret wife system at Nauvoo,” the new book says. Some Mormon leaders denied the allegation because polygamy was being practiced secretly and they were unaware.

Previous acknowledgments

The book’s recognition of polygamy — which the faith banned in 1890 and prohibits today — is the most recent example of the Utah-based faith acknowledging polygamous roots.

The faith published an online essay in 2014 that provided a detailed account of polygamous practices during the 1830s and 1840s in Kirtland, Ohio, and Nauvoo, Illinois. That essay acknowledged that while most of Smith’s wives were between 20 and 40 years old, he had one who was 14 years old.  

That young bride isn’t mentioned in the new book, but it does tell the story of his marriages to a pair of sisters who were older teens.

In 2015, the church included a small display about plural marriages when it opened its renovated history museum.

The book is a robust and honest version of early church history and while it doesn’t dwell on polygamy, it’s notable that it provides the history of plural marriages in a straightforward way, said Patrick Mason, a professor of religion at Claremont Graduate University in California who is the chair of Mormon Studies at the college.

Steven E. Snow, executive director of the church history department, said the book provides the whole story behind a difficult time and one that is not well understood.

“If people read this, they’ll understand we’ve been pretty forthright in our telling of the story,” Snow said.

Future books

The book is the first of four planned volumes that will retell the story of the faith. The first volume covers Joseph Smith’s “first vision” in which he said he received a visit from God and Jesus in 1820 in the woods of upstate New York that led to the foundation of the religion. It also tells the story of when Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were fatally shot by a mob in 1844.

The last multi-volume history of the faith was published in 1930 — when church membership was less than 1 million with most members in the American West. Today, the faith counts 16 million members with more than half outside the U.S. The book is available in 14 languages.

Snow said the book “draws on the power of narrative, but is not fiction,” with every scene and dialogue backed by historical research. 
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Actor Spacey Won’t Face Sex Charge in Los Angeles

By Uponent | | No Comments | Entertainment

Prosecutors in Los Angeles said Tuesday that they would not pursue a sexual assault charge against actor Kevin Spacey because the statute of limitations has run out.

Spacey has been accused of assaulting a male colleague in 1992.

The Los Angeles district attorney’s office said it was also declining to charge another actor, Steven Seagal, on allegations of assaulting a teenage girl in 1993 for the same reason. Seagal denies the charge.

Spacey is facing other sexual assault charges, and also is under investigation for alleged misconduct in London.

The Oscar-winning star of such films as American Beauty was fired from the television series House of Cards earlier this year, and his appearance in the film All the Money in the World was edited out.

Spacey apologized last year for trying to seduce a teenage actor in 1986, and his spokesman said Spacey was seeking treatment. 
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Trauma, Pop Music Fame Collide in Portman’s ‘Vox Lux’

By Uponent | | No Comments | Entertainment

In 2010, Natalie Portman opened the Venice Film Festival as a tormented ballerina in “Black Swan,” a role that earned her an Oscar. She was back Tuesday with “Vox Lux,” as a brattish pop star with a troubled past.

That past plays out in the film’s early scenes, where Portman’s character, Celeste, played as a 14-year-old girl by Raffey Cassidy, has her life transformed by a school shooting that leaves her wounded and psychologically scarred.

A song Celeste plays at a televised memorial for the dead propels her to fame, condemning the sweet young girl to grow up into an infantilized pop princess, managed by Jude Law who veers between nurturing and sleazy.

Speaking ahead of its world premiere, Portman said “Vox Lux” was “a portrait and a reflection of our society and this sort of intersection of pop culture and violence and the spectacle that we equate between the two.”

Calling the regularity of school shootings in the United States “a sort of civil war,” she added: “The psychological impact of what that means for every kid going to school every day, every parent dropping their kids off every day … small acts of violence can create widespread psychological torment.”

Writer-director Brady Corbet, who won prizes in Venice in 2015 for his debut “The Childhood of a Leader,” said Portman’s character was “really not designed to be a monster at all.”

“She’s as much a victim of the era as she is a leader of the era … the film is very much about the fact that the 20th century was marked by the term ‘the banality of evil’ and the 21st century, I think, will be defined by the ‘pageantry of evil.’”

With songs composed by Australian singer-songwriter Sia, “Vox Lux” is one of 21 films vying for the Golden Lion, which will be awarded in Venice on Sept 8.
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Inactivity Puts Quarter of Adults’ Health at Risk, WHO Says

By Uponsci | | No Comments | Science

More than a quarter of the world’s adults — 1.4 billion people — exercise too little, putting them at higher risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, dementia and cancers, according to a World Health Organization-led study.

In 2016, around one in three women and one in four men worldwide were not reaching the recommended levels of physical activity to stay healthy — at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise a week.

There has been no improvement in global levels of physical activity since 2001, according to the study, which was conducted by WHO researchers and published Tuesday in The Lancet Global Health.

The highest rates of lack of exercise in 2016 were in adults in Kuwait, American Samoa, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, where more than half of all adults were not active enough to protect their health.

By comparison, around 40 percent of adults in the United States, 36 percent in Britain and 14 percent in China did too little exercise to stay healthy.

“Unlike other major global health risks, levels of insufficient physical activity are not falling worldwide, on average, and over a quarter of all adults are not reaching the recommended levels of physical activity for good health,” said Regina Guthold of the WHO, who co-led the research.

Noncommunicable diseases

The WHO says insufficient physical activity is one of the leading risk factors for premature death worldwide. It raises the risk of noncommunicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes.

By becoming more active, it says, people can easily achieve benefits such as improve muscular and cardiorespiratory fitness, better bone health, weight control and reduced risk of hypertension, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, depression and various types of cancer.

The study found that levels of low physical activity were more than twice as great in high-income countries compared with poorer nations, and had increased by 5.0 percent in richer countries from 2001 to 2016.

In wealthier countries, the researchers said, a transition toward more sedentary jobs as well as sedentary forms of recreation and transport could explain higher levels of inactivity. In less well-off countries, people tend to be more active at work and for transport, they said.

They urged governments to take note of these changes and put in place infrastructures that promote walking and cycling for transport and active sports and recreation.
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Amazon Eyes Chilean Skies as It Seeks to Datamine Stars

By Uponsil | | No Comments | Silicon Valley

Amazon.com is in talks with Chile to house and mine massive amounts of data generated by the country’s giant telescopes, which could prove fertile ground for the company to develop new artificial intelligence tools.

The talks, which have been little reported on so far and which were described to Reuters by Chilean officials and an astronomer, are aimed at fueling growth in Amazon.com’s cloud computing business in Latin America and boosting its data processing capabilities.

President Sebastian Pinera’s center-right government, which is seeking to wean Chile’s $325 billion economy from reliance on copper mining, announced last week it plans to pool data from all its telescopes onto a virtual observatory stored in the cloud, without giving a timeframe. The government talked of the potential for astrodata innovation, but did not give details.

The government did not comment on companies that might host astrodata in the computing cloud.

Amazon executives have been holding discussions with the Chilean government for two years about a possible data center to provide infrastructure for local firms and the government to store information on the cloud, an official at InvestChile, the government’s investment body, told Reuters.

For at least some of that time, the talks have included discussion about the possibility of Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosting astrodata, astronomer Chris Smith said, based on email exchanges he was part of between AWS and Chilean Economy Ministry officials over the last six months. Smith was at the time mission head of AURA observatory, which manages three of the U.S. federally-funded telescope projects in Chile.

Jeffrey Kratz, AWS’s General Manager for Public Sector for Latin American, Caribbean and Canada, has visited Chile for talks with Pinera. He confirmed the company’s interest in astrodata but said Amazon had no announcements to make at present.

“Chile is a very important country for AWS,” he said in an email to Reuters. “We kept being amazed about the incredible work on astronomy and the telescopes, as real proof points on innovation and technology working together.”

“The Chilean telescopes can benefit from the cloud by eliminating the heavy lifting of managing IT,” Kratz added.

AWS is a fast-growing part of Amazon’s overall business. In July it reported second-quarter sales of $6.1 billion, up by 49 percent over the same period a year ago, accounting for 12 percent of Amazon’s overall sales.

Star-gazing to shoplifting

Chile is home to 70 percent of global astronomy investment, thanks to the cloudless skies above its northern Atacama desert, the driest on Earth. Within five years, the South American country will host three of the world’s four next-generation, billion-dollar telescopes, according to Smith.

He and Economy Ministry officials leading the Chilean initiative to store astrodata in the cloud saw potential in more Earth-bound matters.

The particular tools developed for the astrodata project could be applicable for a wide variety of other uses, such as tracking potential shoplifters, fare-evaders on public transport and endangered animals, Julio Pertuze, a ministry official, told Reuters at the event announcing Chile’s aim to build a virtual observatory on the cloud.

Smith added that the same technology could also be applied to medicine and banking to spot anomalies in large datasets.

Amazon, whose founder and largest shareholder Jeff Bezos is well known for his interest in space, already provides a cloud platform for the Hubble Telescope’s data and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research in Australia.

As Amazon explores the potential in Chile’s astrodata, tech rival Google, owned by Alphabet, is already a member of Chile’s Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, which will be fully operational in Cerro Pachon in 2022. Google also has a data center established in the country.

Justin Burr, senior PR associate for AI and Machine learning at Google, declined to comment on any Google plans around astrodata or its involvement in other telescope projects.

Separately, a Google spokeswoman said last week that the company will announce expansion plans for its Chilean data center on Sept. 12.

Giant database

Smith said that what the Chileans are calling the Astroinformatics Initiative — to harness the potential of astrodata — could enable Amazon Web Services access to the research that astronomers are doing on projects like the LSST.

“We are going to have to go through a huge database of billions of stars to find the three stars that an astronomer wants,” Smith said, adding that was not too different from searching a database of billions of people to find the right profile for a targeted advertisement.

“So a tool that might get developed in LSST or the astronomical world could be applicable for Amazon in their commercial world.”

Since speaking to Reuters, Smith has moved on from his job heading AURA to a new position at the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Amazon’s role in the astrodata project would also give it an entry into a market where it is seeking to expand. Amazon — which controls nearly one-third of the global cloud computing business, ahead of rivals Microsoft and Google — has struggled to lure public institutions in Latin America, including research facilities, to store their data online instead of on physical machines.

AWS declined to provide any information on the size of its regional business in Latin America.

Economy Minister Jose Ramon Valente said at last week’s announcement, “Chile has enormous potential in its pristine skies not only in the observation of the universe but also in the amount of data that observation generates.”
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Alaska Village Experiences Boom in Polar Bear Tourism 

By Uponbiz | | No Comments | Business

A tiny Alaska Native village has experienced a boom in tourism in recent years as polar bears spend more time on land than on diminishing Arctic sea ice.

More than 2,000 people visited the northern Alaska village of Kaktovik on the Beaufort Sea last year to see polar bears in the wild, Alaska’s Energy Desk reported Monday. 

The far north community is located on north shore of Barter Island on the Beaufort Sea coast in an area where rapid global warming has sped up the movement of sea ice, the primary habitat of polar bears. As ice has receded to deep water beyond the continental shelf, more bears are remaining on land to look for food. 

The village had fewer than 50 visitors annually before 2011, said Jennifer Reed of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

“Today we’re talking about hundreds and hundreds of visitors, many from around the world, each year,” Reed said. 

Polar bears have always been a common sight on sea ice near Kaktovik, but residents started noticing a change in the mid-1990s. More bears seemed to stay on land, and researchers began taking note of more female bears making dens in the snow on land instead of on the ice.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists began hearing reports of increasing numbers of polar bears in the area in the early 2000s, Reed said. As more attention was given to the plight of polar bears about a decade ago, more tourists stated heading to Kaktovik.

Bears stranded

Most tourists visit in the fall, when bears are forced toward land because sea ice is the farthest away from the shore. Some bears become stranded near Kaktovik until the sea freezes again in October or November.

The fall is also when residents of Kaktovik kill three bowhead whales. Bruce Inglangasak, an Inupiaq subsistence hunter who offers wildlife viewing tours, said residents were unsure how tourists would react to whaling. 

“The community was scared about, you know, activists that were going to try to get us to shut down the whaling — subsistence whaling,” Inglangasak said. “But that’s not true.”

Inglangasak said he’s been offering polar bear tours since 2003 or 2004. Most of his clients are from China and Europe, as well as from the Lower 48 U.S. states, and arrive in Katovik on charter planes from Anchorage and Fairbanks. 

Many tourists stay several days in the village, which has two small hotels, Inglangasak said.
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Gene Therapy Breakthrough Wins World’s Largest Vision Award

By Uponsci | | No Comments | Science

Seven scientists in the United States and Britain who have come up with a revolutionary gene therapy cure for a rare genetic form of childhood blindness won a 1 million euro ($1.15 million) prize Tuesday, Portugal’s Champalimaud Foundation said.

Established in 2006, the annual award for work related to vision is one of the world’s largest science prizes, more than the latest 9 million Swedish crown ($987,000) Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

“This is the first, and still only, example of successful gene therapy in humans that corrects an inherited genetic defect and is therefore a milestone in medical therapeutics,” said Alfred Sommer, Dean Emeritus of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and chairman of the award jury.

One of those honored, Michael Redmond of the National Eye Institute in Maryland, had traced the cause of the disease, Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA), to a mutated gene.

Three cooperating research teams later managed to replace the gene in the eye, restoring vision to treated children and adults with one form of LCA and “enabling the entire field of gene therapy for human disease,” the foundation said.

These teams are comprised of U.S. scientists Jean Bennett and Albert Maguire; Samuel Jacobson and William Hauswirth; and Britons Robin Ali and James Bainbridge.

Their gene augmentation therapy involved the delivery of healthy genes using engineered harmless viruses, described by the foundation as “an elegant solution.”

The foundation, which focuses on neuroscience and oncology research at its Lisbon base, was set up at the bequest of Portugal’s late industrialist Antonio Champalimaud who died in 2004. The first vision prize was awarded in 2006.
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