The Trump Administration has launched “Made In America Week” to highlight the importance of U.S. manufacturing and tout its policies to bring more such jobs back home from overseas. But as VOA White House Bureau Chief Steve Herman reports, many Trump family products are made in foreign factories, leading to criticism of the president’s trade campaign.
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Month: July 2017
Hyperloop Technology Takes One Small Step Forward
Engineers at Hyperloop recently took a significant step toward proving their new vacuum-tube-based transportation system may in fact be the future… and not just hype. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Netflix Still Piling Up Viewers — and Big Programming Bills
Netflix is pulling in new viewers and award nominations in droves, but the online video service still faces a long-term problem: Its acclaimed programming line-up is costing far more money than what subscribers pay for it.
That hasn’t been a big issue so far, thanks to investors’ willingness to accept scant profits in exchange for robust subscriber growth.
Netflix delivered on that front again Monday, announcing that it added 5.2 million subscribers in the second quarter covering April to June. That’s the largest increase ever during the period, which has always been the company’s slowest time of year.
Wall Street rewarded Netflix by driving up its stock by more than 10 percent to $178.30 in extended trading, putting the shares on track to hit a new high in Tuesday’s regular trading.
International Costs
The Los Gatos, California, company now has 104 million subscribers worldwide. For the first time in its history, most of those subscribers (slightly more than 52 million) are outside the U.S.
That milestone could further complicate Netflix’s cost issues, since the company will need to keep creating more shows that appeal to the unique interests of viewers in countries such as Japan, India and Indonesia.
“It is going to be imperative for them to have more locally produced content,” says CFRA Research analyst Tuna Amobi. “They can’t afford to pursue a ‘one-size-fits-all’ strategy.”
As part of its efforts to boost its profits, Netflix is becoming more aggressive about dumping shows that aren’t drawing enough viewers to justify their costs. In the second quarter, Netflix jettisoned both the high-concept science fiction show “Sense 8” and the musical drama “The Get Down.”
In a Monday letter to shareholders, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings made it clear that the company plans to exert more discipline in the future. “They are becoming more like any other Hollywood studio and paying more attention to the economics of their shows,” Amobi said.
Programming Coups
The subscriber growth further validates Netflix’s decision to expand into original programming five years ago. Two of its longest running shows — “House of Cards” and “Orange Is The New Black” — recently launched their latest seasons.
Those two series, along with new hits like “Master of None” and “13 Reasons Why,” helped Netflix easily surpass the average 1.8 million subscribers it has added in the second quarter over the past five years.
This fall, new seasons of two other hits, “Stranger Things” and “The Crown,” are due. Those two series accounted for about a third of the 91 Emmy nominations that 27 different Netflix programs received last week — more than any other TV network except its role model, HBO, which landed 111 nominations.
Cash Burn
But the success hasn’t come cheaply.
Netflix is locked into contracts requiring it to pay more than $13 billion for programming during the next three years, a burden that has forced the company to borrow to pay its bills.
After burning through $1.7 billion in cash last year, Netflix expects that figure to rise to as much as $2.5 billion this year. It’s continuing to invest in more original programming amid increasing competition from the likes of Amazon, Hulu and YouTube.
Netflix expects to be spending more money than it brings in for several more years. It posted a more detailed explanation about its negative cash flow to give investors a better grasp of its programming expenses.
The company is still profitable under corporate accounting rules, although its earnings remain puny by Wall Street standards. It earned $66 million on revenue of $2.8 billion in revenue during its latest quarter.
Funding international operations remains Netflix’s biggest financial drag, although the overseas losses are narrowing. The company now expects its international operation to produce a small operating profit for the full year.
Netflix also could make more money by raising its prices closer to the $15 per month that HBO charges for its streaming service, but the company has said no increases are planned in the near future. Netflix’s U.S. rates currently range from $8 to $12 per month.
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US Makes Lower Trade Deficit Top Priority in NAFTA Talks
The United States on Monday launched the first salvo in the renegotiation of the 23-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), saying its top priority for the talks was shrinking the U.S. trade deficit with Canada and Mexico.
In a much-anticipated document sent to lawmakers, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said he would seek to reduce the trade imbalance by improving access for U.S. goods exported to Canada and Mexico under the three-nation pact.
For the first time in a U.S. trade deal, the administration also said it wants an “appropriate” provision to deter currency manipulation by trading partners. The move appeared aimed at future trade deals rather than specifically at Canada and Mexico, which are not considered currency manipulators.
The 17-page document asserted that no country should manipulate its currency exchange rate to gain an unfair competitive advantage, an often-cited complaint about China in past years.
Shortly before the release of the document, President Donald Trump lashed out against trade deals and unfair trade practices, saying he would take more legal and regulatory steps during the next six months to protect American manufacturers.
‘Not earth shattering’
Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland said the U.S. list was “part of its internal process” although a source familiar with Canadian government thinking said the document was “not earth shattering.”
Trade experts have argued that shrinking the yawning U.S. trade deficit will not be achieved by revising trade deals but rather by boosting U.S. savings.
“The first bullet point shows their preoccupation with bilateral trade deficits, and that’s unfortunate,” said Chad Brown, a senior fellow and trade expert at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “There’s not much that trade policy and trade agreements can do to change those. That’s more of a macroeconomic issue.”
No mention of lumber or dairy products
Among the priorities, Lighthizer said the administration would seek to eliminate a trade dispute mechanism that has largely prohibited the United States from pursuing anti-dumping and anti-subsidy cases against Canadian and Mexican firms.
There was no mention of active disputes between the United States and Canada over softwood lumber and dairy products, but the document targeted a range of agricultural non-tariff barriers, including subsidies and unfair pricing structures, that are currently at the heart of those standoffs.
USTR said it would seek to strengthen NAFTA’s rules of origin to ensure that the pact’s benefits do not go to outside countries and to “incentivize” the sourcing of U.S. goods. It offered no details on such incentives and did not specify how much of a product’s components must originate from NAFTA countries.
No date has been announced for the NAFTA talks, but they are expected in mid-August.
Automaker support stance
Matt Blunt, president of the American Automotive Policy Council, a group representing U.S. automakers, welcomed the decision to include in the list of objectives the removal of regulatory barriers and the provision on currency manipulation.
A spokesman for Ford Motor Co said: “Foreign currency manipulation is the 21st century trade barrier, and we strongly support the inclusion of this top-tier issue in the U.S. negotiating objectives for NAFTA. We look forward to working with the administration to achieve this objective by including strong and enforceable currency prohibitions as part of NAFTA.”
The document also outlined plans to upgrade standards for labor and the environment and govern digital trade. Canada and Mexico have already agreed to upgrade these areas as part of the defunct Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.
No reaction from Mexico
Representative Sander Levin, a Democrat from Michigan, said there was nothing in the document that would change the way Mexico treated its workers.
“Mexico has used their workers having no rights and suppressing labor costs as a key part of their industrial policy,” he said, “There is nothing in the summary that assures in these vital aspects that a new NAFTA will be different than the old.”
There was no formal reaction to the letter from Mexican government.
NAFTA called a ‘failure’
Earlier on Monday, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said NAFTA had been an “unequivocal failure” and should be completely renegotiated.
“We will do everything we can to make this a good agreement and to hold the president at his word and make sure we get a renegotiation,” the head of the 12.5-million-strong union umbrella group told a conference call with reporters.
“If it comes out that it is not a good deal, no deal is better than a bad deal,” Trumka said.
NAFTA has quadrupled trade among the three countries, surpassing $1 trillion in 2015, but the U.S. trade deficit with Mexico exceeded $63 billion last year.
your ads here!Hearing is Believing: Speech May be a Clue to Mental Decline
Your speech may, um, help reveal if you’re uh … developing thinking problems. More pauses, filler words and other verbal changes might be an early sign of mental decline, which can lead to Alzheimer’s disease, a study suggests.
Researchers had people describe a picture they were shown in taped sessions two years apart. Those with early-stage mild cognitive impairment slid much faster on certain verbal skills than those who didn’t develop thinking problems.
“What we’ve discovered here is there are aspects of language that are affected earlier than we thought,” before or at the same time that memory problems emerge, said one study leader, Sterling Johnson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
This was the largest study ever done of speech analysis for this purpose, and if more testing confirms its value, it might offer a simple, cheap way to help screen people for very early signs of mental decline.
Don’t panic: Lots of people say “um” and have trouble quickly recalling names as they age, and that doesn’t mean trouble is on the way.
“In normal aging, it’s something that may come back to you later and it’s not going to disrupt the whole conversation,” another study leader, Kimberly Mueller, explained. “The difference here is, it is more frequent in a short period,” interferes with communication and gets worse over time.
The study was discussed Monday at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in London.
About 47 million people worldwide have dementia, and Alzheimer’s is the most common type. In the U.S., about 5.5 million people have the disease. Current drugs can’t slow or reverse it, just ease symptoms. Doctors think treatment might need to start sooner to do any good, so there’s a push to find early signs.
Mild cognitive impairment causes changes that are noticeable to the person or others, but not enough to interfere with daily life. It doesn’t mean these folks will develop Alzheimer’s, but many do — 15 to 20 percent per year.
To see if speech analysis can find early signs, researchers first did the picture-description test on 400 people without cognitive problems and saw no change over time in verbal skills. Next, they tested 264 participants in the Wisconsin Registry for Alzheimer’s Prevention, a long-running study of people in their 50s and 60s, most of whom have a parent with Alzheimer’s and might be at higher risk for the disease themselves. Of those, 64 already had signs of early decline or developed it over the next two years, according to other neurological tests they took.
In the second round of tests , they declined faster on content (ideas they expressed) and fluency (the flow of speech and how many pauses and filler words they used.) They used more pronouns such as “it” or “they” instead of specific names for things, spoke in shorter sentences and took longer to convey what they had to say.
“Those are all indicators of struggling with that computational load that the brain has to conduct” and supports the role of this test to detect decline, said Julie Liss, a speech expert at Arizona State University with no role in the work.
She helped lead a study in 2015 that analyzed dozens of press conferences by former President Ronald Reagan and found evidence of speech changes more than a decade before he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She also co-founded a company that analyzes speech for many neurological problems, including dementia, traumatic brain injury and Parkinson’s disease.
Researchers could not estimate the cost of testing for a single patient, but for a doctor to offer it requires only a digital tape recorder and a computer program or app to analyze results.
Alan Sweet, 72, a retired state of Wisconsin worker who lives in Madison, is taking part in the study and had the speech test earlier this month. His father had Alzheimer’s and his mother had a different type of dementia, Lewy body.
“Watching my parents decline into the awful world of dementia and being responsible for their medical care was the best and worst experience of my life,” he said. “I want to help the researchers learn, furthering medical knowledge of treatment and ultimately, cure.”
Participants don’t get individual results — it just aids science.
Another study at the conference on Monday, led by doctoral student Taylor Fields, hints that hearing loss may be another clue to possible mental decline. It involved 783 people from the same Wisconsin registry project. Those who said at the start of the study that they had been diagnosed with hearing loss were more than twice as likely to develop mild cognitive impairment over the next five years as those who did not start out with a hearing problem.
That sort of information is not strong evidence, but it fits with earlier work along those lines.
Family doctors “can do a lot to help us if they knew what to look for” to catch early signs of decline, said Maria Carrillo, the Alzheimer’s Association’s chief science officer. Hearing loss, verbal changes and other known risks such as sleep problems might warrant a referral to a neurologist for a dementia check, she said.
Listen to audio of example test.
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Two Iranians Charged in US for Hacking, Selling Weapons Software
Two Iranian nationals have been charged in the United States in an alleged scheme to steal and resell software to Iran, including a program to design bullets and warheads.
According to an indictment unsealed Monday, Mohammed Saeed Ajily, 35, recruited Mohammed Reza Rezakhah, 39, to break into companies’ computers to steal their software for resale to Iranian universities, the military and the government.
The two men — and a third who was arrested in 2013 and handed back to Iran in a prisoner swap last year — allegedly broke into the computers of Vermont-based Arrow Tech Associates.
The stolen software included Arrow Tech’s Projectile Rocket Ordnance Design and Analysis System (PRODAS), which is protected by U.S. controls on the export of sensitive technologies, and its distribution to Iran is banned by U.S. sanctions on the country.
According to the indictment, Rezakhah conducted the hacking and cracking operations and Ajily was in charge of marketing and selling the programs.
The two men were charged in the Rutland, Vermont, federal district court, which issued arrest warrants for the two, who are believed to be in Iran.
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Afghan Girls Robotics Team Competes after Visa Obstacles
Their team shirts didn’t say “Afghanistan” and their name badges were handwritten, not typed, suggesting the last-minute nature of their entry into the United States. But the Afghan girls competing Monday in an international robotics competition in Washington were clearly excited to be representing their nation.
The team of six teenage girls was twice rejected for U.S. visas before President Donald Trump intervened at the last minute. They arrived in Washington from their hometown of Herat, Afghanistan, early Saturday, and their ball-sorting robot competed in its first round Monday morning.
“We were so interested, because we find a big chance to show the talent and ability of Afghans, show that Afghan women can make robots, too,” said Rodaba Noori, one of the team members. She acknowledged, though, that the team “hadn’t long, or enough time to get ready for competition.”
The girls’ struggle to overcome war, hardship and U.S. bureaucracy on their journey to the U.S. capital has made their team stand out among more than 150 competing in the FIRST Global Challenge, a robotics competition designed to encourage youths to pursue careers in math and science.
The U.S. won’t say why the girls were rejected for visas, citing confidentiality rules. But Afghan Ambassador Hamdullah Mohib said that based on discussions with U.S. officials, it appears the girls, who are 14 to 16 years old, were turned away due to concerns they would not return to Afghanistan.
Speaking with the assistance of a translator who summarized their remarks, 14-year-old team member Fatemah Qaderyan, said that she was “grateful” to be able to compete. Her teammate, 15-year-old Lida Azizi, said she was a little “nervous” but also excited to be playing and “proud.”
Though there was a crush of media attention, the girls looked much like other competitors, wearing jeans along with white headscarfs. Their microwave-sized robot, like that of other teams, displayed their country’s black, red and green flag.
“I’m so happy they can play,” said their mentor Alireza Mehraban, a software engineer. He added: “They are so happy to be here.”
While teams had up to four months to build their robots, the Afghan team built theirs in two weeks before it had to be shipped to reach the competition in time, Mehraban said. He said the girls had a day to test the robot in Afghanistan before it needed to be mailed.
On Monday, they were making adjustments and practicing in between rounds. When a chain seemed to come loose on a part of the robot that moves up and down, a competition judge recommended a larger part, and another team provided one.
Like others in the competition, the girls’ robot can pick up and distinguish between blue and orange balls. To score points, teams deposit the blue balls, which represent water, and the orange balls, which represent pollutants, into different locations. The teams play in alliances of three nations, with two alliances competing head to head. The three-robot alliance that scores the most points in a game wins.
Mehraban, the team’s mentor, said their robot managed to score one or two points in the first game. The team has two more games to play Monday and three games Tuesday.
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Research Tries ‘Shock and Kill’ to Eliminate HIV
Researchers working on a one-two punch to eliminate HIV say their first punch has landed and they can start working on the second, though plenty of work will be needed on both fronts before a cure is available.
HIV spreads just like other viruses: It takes over a cell’s DNA and uses the cell’s infrastructure to make copies of itself. Most HIV treatments work by blocking new cells from getting infected.
The cells that are actively producing HIV are constantly being killed, either by HIV or by the immune system. So once you stop new cells from getting infected, the patient can achieve a viral load close to zero.
Viral reservoir remains hidden
That’s not a total cure though, because some HIV-infected cells go into a resting state, and stop actively producing the virus. This viral reservoir remains hidden from the immune system. The problem is that if treatment stops, the latent virus will eventually reactivate and the disease will be able to spread again.
Doctors have gotten pretty good at stopping HIV from infecting new cells, but they still haven’t figured out how to eliminate these reservoirs, and so patients must take medication for their entire life.
That’s why maintaining health care access for everyone living with HIV is a major public health challenge. And even for those who can access life-long care, over time these drugs can damage the liver, kidneys, heart and brain.
‘Shock and kill’
In 2012, a University of North Carolina research group published a proof of concept for a cure called “shock and kill.” They showed that a cancer drug called Vorinostat can “shock” some infected cells into producing HIV again. That brings the virus out of hiding so it can be “killed.”
They described their work in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. “What we did in this study was to determine the optimal dosing regimen — how often the drug should be given — in order to measure consistent reactivation of HIV,” co-author Nancie Archin said to VOA.
Once reactivated, those cells should self-destruct or be killed by the immune system, just like in a typical HIV treatment. But the UNC team’s findings confirm previous evidence showing that isn’t happening.
It’s not yet clear why that is.
One theory was that Vorinostat was weakening the immune system, so that it wasn’t able to kill the infected cells. But the report ruled that out — relevant parts of the immune system, the study found, were not weakened.
Drug found to be safe
On the bright side, the research demonstrated that Vorinostat is safe to use with HIV-positive patients at doses that can effectively shock cells. The researchers have already begun trials pairing Vorinostat with drugs that might be able to kill the shocked cells. There is a high safety standard for these trials because the participants have their HIV level under control and are generally healthy.
But it’s still not clear if the shock is effective enough if all the reservoir is being activated. The researchers stress that it will likely be a long time before effective treatments are available. And because the treatment involves activating HIV, it will, at least at first, only be available to those who have their viral load under control.
Sharon Lewin, who researches HIV latency at the University of Melbourne and was not associated with this study, told VOA she wished the researchers had used more methods to measure whether the cells were being shocked. “You can measure virus inside the cell and you can measure virus that’s being released from the cell,” she said. “They measure virus just inside the cell.”
It is possible that the cell is producing HIV, but that the HIV virus isn’t leaving the cell. If so, that could explain why the cells aren’t dying.
Treatment successes are few
HIV has been eliminated in a handful of people. At least two infants who received aggressive treatment within hours of contracting HIV never developed viral reservoirs. One man in Germany has been HIV-free for several years following a pair of bone marrow transplants he received during cancer treatment. This has failed in other patients though, and bone marrow transplants are life-threatening procedures.
Lewin said other approaches to eliminating HIV, like editing a person’s genome, or aggressive early treatment, would not be as widely available as a shock and kill approach.
“Those are approaches that will be difficult to roll out to the 37 million people living with HIV,” said Lewin. “An approach that’s just tablets, and tablets that are relatively cheap, that is an approach that could be available.”
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Chinese Overfishing Threatens West African Economies
Foreign fishing vessels, many from China, prowl the waters off West Africa every day. They capture millions of fish — catches that used to go to local boats. The fish are then shipped to China, Europe and the United States, satisfying a global demand for seafood and fueling a multibillion-dollar industry.
The foreign vessels make life hard for West African fishermen.
Foreign trawlers from Asia and Europe have cost West Africa’s economy 300,000 jobs and $2 billion in income, according to John Hocevar, a marine biologist with Greenpeace.
However, what to do about the problem — and possible damage to regional fish populations — has eluded experts and officials.
Chinese presence
Exact numbers are difficult to come by, but experts agree no single country has a greater presence off the coast of West Africa than China.
In a 2015 report, Greenpeace estimated that, two years earlier, China had 426 distant water fishing vessels off Africa’s West Coast.
Between 2000 and 2011, 64 percent of China’s average annual catches, valued at more than $7 billion, came from that area, according to The Pew Charitable Trusts.
Fishing isn’t a big part of China’s economy, representing less than one percent of total gross domestic product. But for many in China’s coastal provinces, it’s both a livelihood and way of life, according to Haibing Ma, the China program manager for the Worldwatch Institute, a nonprofit group that researches sustainability.
Chinese fishers have traveled to Africa because their own fish stock has nearly run out. “Overfishing has destroyed the sustainability of China’s inshore fisheries,” Ma said.
Lack of oversight
Fishing practices are inherently difficult to monitor and regulate. Oceans are vast, vessels are hard to reach, and a mix of local and international laws and regulations complicates enforcement.
Domestic laws regulate waters up to 200 miles off the coast, and international laws control waters past that, according to Todd Dubois, assistant director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Office for Law Enforcement.
This complex environment has led to a variety of creative ways to maximize profits without breaking the law.
For example, legislation in Guinea-Bissau has kept large industrial fishing vessels away from its coast. So, fishing companies have deployed small boats that don’t need licenses from nearby countries such as Senegal. Those boats will fish in Guinea-Bissau and return their catches to a large “mothership,” which in turn takes its bounty back to Senegal to be traded.
In other cases, “floating factories” — large, nearby vessels used for processing and packaging catches — have enabled other boats to catch small pelagics, such as mackerels and sardines, quickly and on a massive scale for prolonged periods.
And bottom trawls, a kind of gear that contributes to overfishing, were installed on most Chinese vessels studied by Greenpeace in 2015.
Many see international fishing off Africa’s West Coast as an exploitation of local resources by foreign powers. But some of the most damaging practices occur within the law, and local African economies sometimes benefit from illegal fishing.
In Mauritania, for example, a Chinese company made a secret deal with the local government to build a fish-processing factory and bring 80 large vessels to the coast in exchange for a $100 million investment in the country.
That deal may have benefited both countries, says Andre Standing, an adviser at the Coalition for Fair Fisheries Arrangements, but it has had a profoundly negative impact on small-scale fishermen.
Responsible practices
Fishing, even when done on a massive scale, can be sustainable, provided there’s adequate planning and reporting. That means understanding the vulnerability of local fish populations and managing catches accordingly.
“Some reproduce very fast and can handle quite heavy fishing, such as tuna, and some of the small pelagics like the sardines,” Standing said, but other fish, such as sharks, develop very slowly. “We’re already seeing across Africa and across the world that industrial fishing and long line fishing in particular, they’ve decimated populations of the other types of fish.”
Standing cautions against drawing conclusions about the entire Chinese fishing industry. Individual fishing companies need to be judged on their own merits, he said. There are good Chinese companies, just as there are bad European companies.
China’s presence off Africa’s west coast shows no signs of shrinking, though. The Chinese government has enabled the industry to expand far beyond the country’s own shores. In 2013, the government gave the fishing sector about $6.5 billion in subsidies, according to a brief Standing wrote for the Africa Center for Strategic Studies.
Whether considering the actions of China, the European Union, or local African governments and businesses, the root of the problem comes from a lack of focus on long-term sustainability, according to Standing.
“In many areas, there really isn’t this careful, precautionary approach to managing fishing intensity,” he said. “A lot are being driven by short-term profit, and that’s really at the heart of the unsustainable nature of fisheries.”
Zhan Yang, Teng Xu and Ricci Shryock contributed to this report.
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Walt Disney Opens Iconic American Amusement Park on This Day in 1955
Walt Disney was already a well-known creative genius — the creator of Mickey Mouse and the 1938 feature-length cartoon Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs — when he had an idea to create Disneyland, his famed Anaheim, California, amusement park.
“All my life I heard him talk about doing this park, from the time I was five,” daughter Diane Disney Miller said in a documentary about Disneyland.
“The dream just grew,” she says in the film, adding that by the time she turned 21, her father had finally done it, at a cost of $17 million.
On opening day, July 17, 1955, everything that could go wrong did, according to those who helped build the amusement park.
That day — it became known as “Black Sunday” — more people showed up than the park could accommodate and mountains of trash stood uncollected. That same day there was a strike by plumbers in Anaheim, so organizers were forced to choose between working bathrooms or working water fountains. Rivers in the park that had been filled the night before, ran dry.
Disney was deeply disappointed, but he and his team kept improving the park, adding new rides and characters, and a giant monorail system in 1959.
Expanding on his dream, work began on an even bigger amusement park in Orlando, Florida, in 1965.
Walt Disney died in 1966. Walt Disney World was opened in his honor on Oct. 1, 1971.
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Communicating With Our Microbes
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution says humans evolved as a separate species. But modern science knows that we, together with all other creatures, have always lived in a symbiosis with a great number of microbes, dwelling inside and outside of our bodies, the so-called holobiont. VOA’s George Putic spoke with a scientist who says the fact that we evolved together calls for a revision of Darwin’s view.
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US to Add 15K Temporary Worker Visas
The United States needs more foreign workers to keep some American businesses from floundering, according to a decision announced by U.S. officials Monday.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said it will make 15,000 additional H-2B visas available for companies to hire temporary, non-agricultural foreign workers before the end of the fiscal year Sept. 30.
In a written statement, DHS Secretary John Kelly called the move a “one-time increase,”
The Trump administration promotes what it calls a “Hire American” policy and the president has repeatedly called for more limited immigration. Pressed by a reporter about how the policy announcement to allow more foreign workers into the U.S. supports American jobs, a DHS spokesperson said that without those extra workers, U.S. businesses could suffer “irreparable harm.”
Exemption is not renewed
In order to hire foreign workers through the non-immigrant visa program, businesses must show there are not enough U.S. workers “able, willing, qualified, and available” for the jobs.
The H-2B program is capped at 66,000 new visas annually; of that, 33,000 is reserved for workers who are hired during the first half of the fiscal year (Oct. 1 — March 31) and the remainder are for the latter half (April 1 — Sept. 30).
Since 2015, however, some returning workers were able to participate beyond the cap, increasing the number of H-2B visas issued last year to nearly 85,000, according to State Department data.
But Congress did not renew the returnees exemption when it expired last fall, effectively curbing the number of available visas. Businesses that rely heavily on seasonal workers, like the tourism industry, said they have struggled to fill vacancies since then.
Businesses need to petition for visas
Part of budget legislation passed in May, however, gave the Department of Homeland Security — which includes U.S. CItizenship and Immigration Services — discretion to go over the 66,000 cap to compensate for the shortfall.
Businesses will be able to petition for the additional visas when the rule is published in the General Register later this week, according to senior DHS officials. Previous applicants who did not make the earlier cut-off for the fiscal year will have to reapply, the officials added, but if hired by the end of the fiscal year, they will be able to work past Sept. 30.
President Donald Trump uses the H-2B visa program to staff his Florida private club, where he has hosted visiting heads of state since his inauguration in January.
your ads here!1 in 10 Babies Received No Vaccinations in 2016
Nearly one in 10 infants worldwide, or 12.9 million, received no vaccinations in 2016, the World Health Organization (WHO) said Monday.
Those infants missed the critical first dose of the triple vaccination against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, known as the DTP3 vaccination. An additional 6.6 million infants who received the first dose didn’t receive the other two doses in the three-dose series last year.
“Since 2010, the percentage of children who received their full course of routine immunizations has stalled at 86 percent, with no significant changes in any countries or regions during the past year,” WHO said in its statement. “This falls short of the global immunization coverage target of 90 percent.”
Current levels of immunization prevent 2 million to 3 million deaths worldwide every year from diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis and measles, according to WHO, which called routine vaccinations “one of the most successful and cost-effective public health interventions” that can be carried out.
One hundred and thirty of the 194 WHO member states have achieved the 90 percent DTP3 coverage benchmark. The majority of unvaccinated infants live in countries ensnared in conflict or encumbered by high levels of poverty.
In 2016, eight nations had coverage rates below 50 percent for DTP3 shots; they were Central African Republic, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria and Ukraine.
“If we are to raise the bar on global immunization coverage, health services must reach the unreached,” said Dr. Jean-Marie Okwo-Bele, WHO Director of Immunization, Vaccines and Biologicals. “Every contact with the health system must be seen as an opportunity to immunize.”
Despite the stagnant overall vaccination rates, WHO reported gains in vaccination for rubella, a virus that can cause severe birth defects if contracted by pregnant women. Global coverage against that disease increased from 35 percent in 2010 to 47 percent in 2016, according to Monday’s statement. WHO called the improvement a “big step toward reducing the occurrence of … a devastating condition that results in hearing impairment, congenital heart defects and blindness.”
The fight for broader vaccination rates is not unique to developing nations or war-torn regions. Earlier this month, the French government passed a law mandating that by 2018, French parents will be required to vaccinate their children against a range of diseases, including pertussis, measles, mumps, and rubella. France already requires vaccinations against diphtheria, tetanus and poliomyelitis, with exceptions for infants with certain medical conditions.
The new law is a response to a movement against vaccinations in developed countries. In America, Britain and France, the measles vaccination rate has fallen just below the 95 percent level.
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Disneyland in photos:
Walt Disney pursues dream of Disneyland despite investor doubts and a chaotic opening day in 1955
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EU Agrees to Allow in More Ukraine Exports for 3 Years
EU foreign ministers approved on Monday measures to allow Ukraine to export more industrial and agricultural products free of tariffs to the bloc in recognition of reforms undertaken by Kyiv and the country’s fragile economy.
By the end of September, Ukraine will be able to export greater tonnage of farm products, including grains, honey and processed tomatoes for three years.
The EU will also remove for the same period import duties on fertilizers, dyes, footwear, copper, aluminum, televisions and sound recording equipment.
The measures add to a free-trade agreement provisionally in place since January 2016 that has opened both markets for goods and services.
“It is our duty to support Ukraine and strengthen our economic and political ties, also in the face of the ongoing conflict on its soil,” said Estonia Foreign Minister Sven Mikser, whose country holds the six-month rotating presidency of the European Union.
Trade has been at the heart of a dispute between Russia and the European Union over relations with Ukraine, with Moscow and Brussels both competing to bring Kyiv closer to their side through offers of greater economic integration.
While Kyiv has moved westward, Russia has sought to destabilize Ukraine, EU governments and NATO say, by annexing Crimea and providing separatists with weapons and troops in Ukraine’s industrial east.
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VR Learning the Wave of the Future
Thanks to Hollywood special effects, it’s possible to create a world of superheroes or galaxies far, far away. But that technology is also slowly making its way into the classroom and turning science education into a visual journey that can take students anywhere from inside a cell to the deepest parts of our solar system. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Famed Director Heads Effort to Preserve African Cinema
American filmmaker Martin Scorsese is backing an international effort to preserve African movies, hoping to protect the work of some of Africa’s most influential directors. Arzouma Kompaore reports.
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Park Wins US Women’s Open
After weeks of uncertainty, the U.S. Women’s Open stopped being about President Donald Trump, his course and his views toward women and it turned out to be what the USGA wanted: a good tournament on a good course.
Not surprisingly, the best player this week won, making up for a bad weekend in this event a year ago.
Sung Hyun Park shot her second straight 5-under 67 on Sunday and won a final-round battle with front-running Shanshan Feng and teenage amateur sensation Hye-Jin Choi at Trump National Golf Club for her first LPGA Tour victory.
The 23-year-old Park birdied the 15th to move into a tie for the lead and the 17th to open a two-shot edge after Choi made a double bogey to squander her chance of becoming the second amateur to win the event.
Park finished with an 11-under total of 277, two shots better than Choi, who shot a final-round 71.
It was a far cry from a year ago when Park hit into the water on the 18th hole at CordeValle in California and missed a playoff with eventual winner Britanny Lang and Anna Nordqvist by two shots.
“The experience was definitely worth it, because based on that good experience that I had last year, I think I was able to garner the championship this year,” Park said through an interpreter.
The USGA was criticized for not moving the event from Trump National after comments made by the president about women came to light during the election campaign. There were threats of protests, especially after Trump decided to attend the tournament after his trip to Paris on Thursday and Friday.
Trump arrived Friday and became the first sitting president to attend a Women’s Open, seeing parts of the final three rounds. There was a small protest after he arrived at his box near the 15th green shortly after 3 p.m., but it was peaceful.
It ended up being a quiet week of politics at the course. The golf was excellent.
Park needed a fine chip from over the green on the par-5 18th hole to save par and win the $900,000 top prize from the $5 million event.
Walking to the scoring tent to sign her card, she got a thumps-up from Trump from his box.
“Well, to be honest with you, I still cannot believe that it is actually happening,” said Park, who is the leading rookie on the LPGA Tour. “It’s almost feel like I’m floating on a cloud in the sky. Of course, I did have many winnings in other tournaments, but winning here at U.S. Open means so much more.
Choi was the low amateur for the second straight year. She was 38th in 2016. The only drawback was she could not pocket the $540,000 second-place prize.
“I mean it will be nice if I could get the money but I think my primary goal was to come here and compete so, to me, getting this second place in runner-up actually means more to me,” the 17-year-old said.
Top-ranked So Yeon Ryu (70) and fellow South Korean Mi Jung Hur (68) tied for third at 7 under. Feng, from China, had a 75 to drop into a tie for fifth at 6 under with Spain’s Carlota Ciganda (70) and South Korea’s Jeongeun6 Lee (71).
South Koreans Sei Young Kim (69), Mirim Lee (72) and Amy Yang (75) tied for eighth at 5 under. Marina Alex of nearby Wayne, New Jersey, was the best of the American at 4 under after a 70. It was the worst finish in the Open for the top American since Paula Creamer was seventh in 2012.
Choi was the story for most of the final round. She had a two-shot lead with nine holes to play and needed a 5-foot birdie at 15 to regain a piece with Park, who had made a 20-footer in the group in front of her.
The 139-yard, par-3 16th over water ended Choi’s hopes. Her 7-iron landed in the water to the right of the hole. She ended with a double bogey and basically lost her chance of winning.
“At the time I felt that all this work, hard work I put together was going to disappear so I was bit disappointed but I had to refocus,” said Choi, who birdied the final hole.
Choi’s 279 was the best by an amateur in the Open, four shots better than the old mark by Grace Park in 1999. Catherine Lacoste remains the only amateur to win the Open, doing it in 1967.
Feng, who was the leader after the first three rounds and carried a one-shot edge into the final 18 holes, triple bogeyed the final hole.
“I think overall, before the last hole I did pretty well,” said Feng, who had only two birdies in the last two rounds. “I mean I did a good job hanging in right there because my putting was not really that great.”
It was not her first professional win for Park, who won seven times on the KLPGA Tour in 2016 and three times the year before.
“She’s young and long so she hits the ball very long and very straight, very accurate and has very good short game, also,” Feng said about Park. “I don’t see any weak part in her game.”
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India’s Low-paid Garment Workers Seek $7.6M Compensation
On a sweltering summer morning in the southern Indian city of Chennai, a dozen garment workers crowd into a small courtroom for the latest hearing in a protracted battle over low wages in factories supplying global fashion brands.
The women are among tens of thousands of workers in Tamil Nadu state – the largest hub in India’s $40 billion-a-year textile and garment industry – who are seeking millions of dollars in compensation following a landmark court ruling last year that declared they had long been grossly underpaid.
The Madras High Court ordered that the garment workers should receive a pay rise of up to 30 percent – the first minimum wage hike for 12 years – and that they could claim arrears going back to 2014.
But 12 months on, many factory bosses have failed to pay up.
Squeezed into a corner at the back of the stuffy Chennai courtroom, a middle-aged woman leans against the blue walls, clutching polythene bags full of documents to prove her claim.
Normally she spends her days hunched over a sewing machine, stitching skirts, shirts and dresses destined for high streets around the world.
But for months she has been taking days off work to attend court.
“I forgo a day’s salary to come for these hearings. It may not seem like a big amount, but for us it is hard earned money,” said the 48-year-old seamstress, who did not wish to be identified fearing it would impact her case. “I am only asking for what is rightfully mine. And they won’t even tell me how they are calculating my dues.”
More than 150 claims have been filed against tailoring and export garment manufacturing units in the Chennai region alone, according to data requested by the Thomson Reuters Foundation under the Right to Information Act.
The claims, which would benefit at least 80,000 workers at factories around the port city, add up to more than 490 million Indian rupees ($7.6 million).
But workers’ unions say these claims are probably the tip of the iceberg as they only represent cases filed by government labor inspectors.
Salary cuts
Under the 2016 Madras court ruling, Tamil Nadu’s garment and textile workers should see their pay rise from a monthly average of 4,500 to 6,500 rupees – which campaigners say is comparable to wages for textile jobs in most other states.
But workers say managers have defaulted or delayed on payments since the ruling, with some even introducing pay cuts.
Despite the state’s minimum wage laws, salaries continue to be “grossly low” for thousands of workers who are still not given pay slips or are often hired only as apprentices, campaigners say.
“Instead of paying workers their correct salaries, companies are finding ways to surreptitiously squash their rights,” said Selvi Palani, a lawyer helping workers’ unions fight their cases. “There is a court order but the money is not on the table.
Workers continue to be underpaid.”
Sujata Mody of Penn Thozhilalargal Sangam, a women workers’ union, said some companies that had raised wages were now docking pay for sick days, and for factory meals and shuttle buses which were previously free, meaning many workers had seen little or no change in pay.
Some factories were also firing more expensive workers on trivial grounds, she added.
“The workers are struggling to be heard and the managements are coming up with new forms to deduct their income,” Mody said.
Repeated delays
Under the 1948 Minimum Wages Act, state governments are required to increase the basic minimum wage every five years to protect workers against exploitation, but textile manufacturers have repeatedly challenged pay rises in Tamil Nadu.
The state’s labor commissioner, Ka Balachandran, said inspectors were verifying every company’s records to check that wages were now in line with last year’s ruling.
“We are doing everything to ensure workers get fair wages, and get it quickly,” he added.
But manufacturers in Tamil Nadu say the hike is too high, putting them at a disadvantage to competitors in other states. Some say they are already paying workers more than the minimum wage.
“The new norms are not distinguishing clearly between skilled and non-skilled workers,” said S Shaktivel of the Tirupur Exporters’ Association.
He said some companies had launched an appeal against the order at the Madras High Court.
In the Chennai labor court, case numbers are called out in quick succession.
The seamstress, who is expecting arrears of up to 5,000 rupees, strains to listen over the slow whirring of the ceiling fan.
“My financial situation is not very good,” she whispers. “My husband had surgery a few months back, we have a loan to pay back and a house to run. The company owes me arrears for almost one year. I need that income desperately.”
Her case is called. The lawyer representing the company asks for more time. Another date is set, with the judge warning against further delays.
“I hope I get a good settlement,” the seamstress said as she left court. “After all these years, I would like to stop working, but that looks unlikely. At least if they paid me properly, I would feel a little better.”
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Oscar-winning Actor Martin Landau Dead at 89
Martin Landau, the chameleon-like actor who gained fame as the crafty master of disguise in the 1960s TV show “Mission: Impossible,” then capped a long and versatile career with an Oscar for his poignant portrayal of aging horror movie star Bela Lugosi in 1994’s “Ed Wood,” has died. He was 89.
Landau died Saturday of unexpected complications during a short stay at UCLA Medical Center, his publicist Dick Guttman said.
“Mission: Impossible,” which also starred Landau’s wife, Barbara Bain, became an immediate hit upon its debut in 1966. It remained on the air until 1973, but Landau and Bain left at the end of the show’s third season amid a financial dispute with the producers. They starred in the British-made sci-fi series “Space: 1999” from 1975 to 1977.
Landau might have been a superstar but for a role he didn’t play — the pointy-eared starship Enterprise science officer, Mr. Spock. “Star Trek” creator Gene Rodenberry had offered him the half-Vulcan, half-human who attempts to rid his life of all emotion. Landau turned it down.
“A character without emotions would have driven me crazy; I would have had to be lobotomized,” he explained in 2001. Instead, he chose “Mission: Impossible,” and Leonard Nimoy went on to everlasting fame as Spock.
Ironically, Nimoy replaced Landau on “Mission: Impossible.”
After a brief but impressive Broadway career, Landau had made an auspicious film debut in the late 1950s, playing a soldier in “Pork Chop Hill” and a villain in the Alfred Hitchcock classic “North By Northwest.”
He enjoyed far less success after “Mission: Impossible,” however, finding he had been typecast as Rollin Hand, the top-secret mission team’s disguise wizard. His film career languished for more than a decade, reaching its nadir with his appearance in the 1981 TV movie “The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island.”
He began to find redemption with a sympathetic role in “Tucker: The Man and his Dream,” the 1988 Francis Ford Coppola film that garnered Landau his first Oscar nomination.
He was nominated again the next year for his turn as the adulterous husband in Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
His third nomination was for “Ed Wood,” director Tim Burton’s affectionate tribute to a man widely viewed as the worst Hollywood filmmaker of all time.
“There was a 10-year period when everything I did was bad. I’d like to go back and turn all those films into guitar picks,” Landau said after accepting his Oscar.
In “Ed Wood,” he portrayed Lugosi during his final years, when the Hungarian-born actor who had become famous as Count Dracula was ill, addicted to drugs and forced to make films with Ed Wood just to pay his bills. A gifted mimic trained in method acting, Landau had thoroughly researched the role.
“I watched about 35 Lugosi movies, including ones that were worse than anything Ed Wood ever made,” he recalled in 2001. “Despite the trash, he had a certain dignity about him, whatever the role.”
So did the New York-born Landau, who had studied drawing at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and worked for a time as a New York Daily News cartoonist before switching careers at age 22.
He had dabbled in acting before the switch, making his stage debut in 1951 at a Maine summer theater in “Detective Story” and off-Broadway in “First Love.”
In 1955, he was among hundreds who applied to study at the prestigious Actors Studio and one of only two selected. The other was Steve McQueen.
On Broadway, Landau won praise for his work in “Middle of the Night,” which starred Edward G. Robinson. He toured with the play until it reached Los Angeles, where he began his film career.
Landau and Bain had two daughters, Susan and Juliet. They divorced in 1993.
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Burns Sees Vietnam War as Virus, Documentary as Vaccination
Filmmaker Ken Burns views the Vietnam War as a virus that infected Americans with an array of chronic illnesses — alienation, a lack of civil discourse, mistrust of government and each other. And he hopes his new documentary can be part of a cure.
“What if the film was just an attempt at some sort of vaccination, a little bit more of the disease to get you immune to the disunion that it has sponsored?” Burns said in a recent interview. “It’s important for us to begin to have creative but courageous conversations about what took place.”
Burns and co-director Lynn Novick had just finished work on their World War II documentary a decade ago when he turned to her and said, “We have to do Vietnam.” The result is their 10-part, 18-hour series that will air beginning Sept. 17 on PBS.
“For me, it was the sense that Vietnam was the most important event for Americans in the second half of the 20th century, yet we had done almost everything we could in the intervening years to avoid understanding it,” Burns said. “As horrible as they are, wars are incredibly valuable moments to study, and I thought what Vietnam lacked was a willingness to engage in that.”
The film brings together the latest scholarly research on the war and features nearly 80 interviews, including Americans who fought in the war and those who opposed it, Vietnamese civilians and soldiers from both sides. Burns and Novick have been showing excerpts of the film around the country in recent months, most recently at Dartmouth College on Thursday night.
“I think this will be for a general American audience a kind of revelation, a cascade of new facts and new figures, and I don’t mean numeral figures, but biographical figures that will stagger their view of what was, and hopefully get everybody, regardless of political perspective to let go of the baggage of the superficial and the conventional,” Burns said.
Having been blamed for the war itself, many Vietnam War soldiers were understandably reluctant to share their stories, the co-directors said. But compared to his earlier series on World War II and the Civil War, Burns said there was one challenge he didn’t face.
“One of the great tasks for us as filmmakers — amateur historians if you will — was how to cut through all the nostalgia and sentimentality that had attached itself to the Civil War and World War II,” he said. “There’s no such problem with Vietnam.”
After watching the hour-long preview, U.S. Army veteran David Hagerman, of Lyme Center, said he can’t wait to watch the entire series.
“It was powerful,” said Hagerman, who spent his nine months in Vietnam running a treatment center for soldiers addicted to heroin. While strangers now approach him and thank him for his service, he said coming home in 1972 was traumatic.
“I walked into the Seattle airport, and I was in my Army outfit,” he said. “The reception I received was so negative and so powerful that I walked into the nearest men’s room, took my uniform off, threw it in the trash, and put on a T-shirt and a pair of pants.”
Burns said while he doesn’t buy into the notion that history repeats itself, it’s clear that human nature doesn’t change. And he acknowledges that many of the themes his series explores are uncannily relevant to the present.
“If I backed up this conversation and said, ‘OK, I’ve spent the last year working a film about a White House in disarray obsessed with leaks, about a huge document drops into the public of classified information … about a deeply polarized country, about a political campaign accused of reaching out to a foreign power during an election, about mass demonstrations across the country,’ you’d say, ‘Gee, Ken, you stopped doing history, you’re doing the present moment,’” he said.
At Dartmouth, Novick and Burns were joined by U.S. Army veteran Mike Heaney, of Hartland, Vermont, who is shown in the film describing losing fellow platoon members in a 1966 ambush and spending the night paranoid that a dead Viet Cong soldier lying next to him was just faking it and would rise up to kill him.
After the screening, he told the audience about returning to Vietnam in 2008, where he compared war wounds with former enemies turned fellow “grandpas.” He said he’s been able to cope thanks to the support of his family, as well as both Americans and the Vietnamese people.
“I don’t expect to ever get closure on this kind of experience that I had,” he said. “And that’s OK.”
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George A. Romero, Father of the Zombie Film, Dead at 77
George Romero, whose classic “Night of the Living Dead” and other horror films turned zombie movies into social commentaries and who saw his flesh-devouring undead spawn countless imitators, remakes and homages, has died. He was 77.
Romero died Sunday following a battle with lung cancer, said his family in a statement provided by his manager Chris Roe. Romero’s family said he died while listening to the score of “The Quiet Man,” one of his favorite films, with his wife, Suzanne Desrocher, and daughter, Tina Romero, by this side.
Romero is credited with reinventing the movie zombie with his directorial debut, the 1968 cult classic, “Night of the Living Dead.” The movie set the rules imitators lived by: Zombies move slowly, lust for human flesh and can only be killed when shot in the head. If a zombie bites a human, the person dies and returns as a zombie.
Romero’s zombies, however, were always more than mere cannibals; they were metaphors for conformity, racism, mall culture, militarism, class differences and other social ills.
“The zombies, they could be anything,” Romero told The Associated Press in 2008. “They could be an avalanche, they could be a hurricane. It’s a disaster out there. The stories are about how people fail to respond in the proper way. They fail to address it. They keep trying to stick where they are, instead of recognizing maybe this is too big for us to try to maintain. That’s the part of it that I’ve always enjoyed.”
“Night of the Living Dead,” made for about $100,000, featured flesh-hungry ghouls trying to feast on humans holed up in a Pennsylvania house. In 1999, the Library of Congress inducted the black-and-white masterpiece into the National Registry of Films.
Romero’s death was immediately felt across a wide spectrum of horror fans and filmmakers. Stephen King called him his favorite collaborator and said, “There will never be another like you.” Guillermo del Toro said, “The loss is so enormous.”
“(‘Night of the Living Dead’) was so incredibly DIY I realized movies were not something that belonged solely to the elites with multiple millions of dollars but could also be created by US, the people who simply loved them, who lived in Missouri, as I did,” wrote James Gunn, the “Guardians of the Galaxy” director, who penned the 2004 remake of “Dawn of the Dead.”
Romero’s influence could be seen across decades of American movies, from John Carpenter to Jordan Peele, the “Get Out” filmmaker. Many considered “Night of the Living Dead” to be a critique on racism in America. The sole black character survives the zombies, but he is fatally shot by rescuers. When Edgar Wright made 2004’s “Shaun of the Dead,” he acknowledged, “What we now think of as zombies are Romero zombies.”
Ten years after “Night of the Living Dead,” Romero made “Dawn of the Dead,” where human survivors take refuge from the undead in a mall and then turn on each other as the zombies stumble around the shopping complex.
Film critic Roger Ebert called it “one of the best horror films ever made — and, as an inescapable result, one of the most horrifying. It is gruesome, sickening, disgusting, violent, brutal and appalling. It is also … brilliantly crafted, funny, droll, and savagely merciless in its satiric view of the American consumer society.”
Romero had a sometimes combative relationship with the genre he helped create. He called “The Walking Dead” a “soap opera” and said big-budget films like “World War Z” made modest zombie films impossible. Romero maintained that he wouldn’t make horror films he couldn’t fill them with political statements.
“People say, ‘You’re trapped in this genre. You’re a horror guy.’ I say, ‘Wait a minute, I’m able to say exactly what I think,” Romero told the AP. “I’m able to talk about, comment about, take snapshots of what’s going on at the time. I don’t feel trapped. I feel this is my way of being able to express myself.”
The third in the Romero’s zombie series, 1985’s “Day of the Dead,” was a critical and commercial failure. There wouldn’t be another “Dead” film for two decades.
“Land of the Dead” in 2005 was the most star-packed of the bunch — the cast included Dennis Hooper, John Leguizamo, Asia Argento and Simon Baker. Two years later came “Diary of the Dead,” another box-office failure.
There were other movies interspersed with the “Dead” films, including “The Crazies” (1973), “Martin” (1977), “Creepshow” (1982), “Monkey Shines” (1988) and “The Dark Half” (1993). There also was 1981’s “Knightriders,” Romero’s take on the Arthurian legend featuring motorcycling jousters. Some were moderately successful, others box-office flops.
George Andrew Romero was born on Feb. 4, 1940, in New York City. He grew up in the Bronx, and he was a fan of horror comics and movies in the pre-VCR era.
“I grew up at the Loews American in the Bronx,” he wrote in an issue of the British Film Institute’s Sight and Sound magazine in 2002.
His favorite film was Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s “The Tales of Hoffman,” based on Jacques Offenbach’s opera. It was, he once wrote, “the one movie that made me want to make movies.”
He spoke fondly of traveling to Manhattan to rent a 16mm version of the film from a distribution house. When the film was unavailable, Romero said, it was because another “kid” had rented it — Martin Scorsese.
Romero graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 1960. He learned the movie business working on the sets of movies and “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” which was shot in Pittsburgh.
The city became Romero’s home and many of his films were set in western Pennsylvania. “Dawn of the Dead” was filmed in suburban Monroeville Mall, which has since become a popular destination for his fans.
Romero struggled to get films made late in life. The last film he directed was 2009’s “Survival of the Dead,” though other filmmakers continued the series with several sequels, including the recently shot “Day of the Dead.”
But Romero held strong to his principles. A movie with zombies just running amok, with no social consciousness, held no appeal, he often said.
“That’s not what I’m about.”
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