According to the Water Project, more than 700 million people do not have easy access to clean, safe water. Solving the problem is the focus of an annual meeting of NGOs, charities and government leaders. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Month: August 2017
Post-Harvey Rebuilding Expected to Cost More, Take Longer Because of Labor Shortage
In Texas, rebuilding efforts in areas devastated by Hurricane Harvey’s winds and floods face higher costs and some delays because the construction industry has a critical shortage of skilled workers. VOA’s Jim Randle reports.
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Study: Cities and Companies Team Up to Tackle Urban Water Crises
With rising urban populations and ever scarcer water supplies, cities and companies are teaming up to invest billions of dollars in water management projects, a report said on Tuesday.
Around two thirds of cities from London to Los Angeles are working with the private sector to address water and climate change stresses with 80 cities seeking $9.5 billion of investment for water projects, according to a report by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a non-profit environmental research group.
Water investment opportunities are greatest in Latin America, with Quito in Ecuador seeking $800 million to manage its water supply, including building three hydropower stations and cleaning up its contaminated rivers and streams.
City in India prepares for future
The cities most concerned about their water supply lie in Asia and the Pacific, the report found, with serious risks also identified in Africa and Latin America.
The key issues for cities include declining water quality, water shortages and flooding.
The Indian city of Chennai faced extreme floods in 2015 which killed hundreds and left survivors without access to clean water, while businesses were also severely disrupted.
The city is now investing in boosting its resilience to future water crises, with water conservation education, building a storm water management system and new infrastructure.
“We are seeing critical shifts in leadership from cities and companies in response to the very real threat of flooding, for example, to local economies,” said Morgan Gillespy, head of CDP’s Water Program.
Climate change is another underlying threat to all cities with an increase in extreme weather events from droughts to floods, with cities in North America more concerned than those in Europe, the report found.
Tropical Storm Harvey, pounding the U.S. Gulf Coast, has killed at least eight people, led to mass evacuations and paralyzed Houston, the fourth most-populous U.S. city.
The storm is most likely linked to climate change, said the U.N. weather agency.
Companies are also concerned about the effects of climate change on water supplies, with $14 billion of water impacts such as loss of production reported by companies last year, the report found.
WATCH: Worrying About Water
UN predicts global water shortfall
The United Nations predicts a 40 percent shortfall in global water supply by 2030, while global demand is set to increase by 55 percent due to growing domestic use, manufacturing and electricity generation.
“From our work with cities around the world, water has consistently come up as a key resilience challenge,” said Claire Bonham-Carter, Principal and City Resilience Lead at AECOM, a global infrastructure firm and partner on the report.
“Many of them, regardless of size, from Mexico City, Mexico to Berkeley, California, are addressing both long-term water supply issues as well as chronic urban flooding.”
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World’s Biggest Drone Drug Deliveries Take Off in Tanzania
Tanzania is set to launch the world’s largest drone delivery network in January, with drones parachuting blood and medicines out of the skies to save lives.
California’s Zipline will make 2,000 deliveries a day to more than 1,000 health facilities across the east African country, including blood, vaccines and malaria and AIDS drugs, following the success of a smaller project in nearby Rwanda.
“It’s the right move,” Lilian Mvule, 51, said by phone, recalling how her granddaughter died from malaria two years ago.
“She needed urgent blood transfusion from a group O, which was not available,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Malaria is a major killer in Tanzania, and children under age 5 often need blood transfusions when they develop malaria-induced anemia. If supplies are out of stock, as is often the case with rare blood types, they can die.
Tanzania is larger than Nigeria and four times the size of the United Kingdom, making it hard for the cash-strapped government to ensure all of its 5,000-plus clinics are fully stocked, particularly in remote rural areas.
The drones fly at 100 kph (62 mph), much faster than traveling by road. Small packages are dropped from the sky using a biodegradable parachute.
The government also hopes to save the lives of thousands of women who die from profuse bleeding after giving birth.
Tanzania has one of the world’s worst maternal mortality rates, with 556 deaths per 100,000 deliveries, government data show.
“It’s a problem we can help solve with on-demand drone delivery,” Zipline’s chief executive, Keller Rinaudo, said in a statement. “African nations are showing the world how it’s done.”
Companies in the United States and elsewhere are keen to use drones to cut delivery times and costs, but there are hurdles ranging from the risk of collisions with airplanes to ensuring battery safety and longevity.
The drones will cut the drug delivery bill for Tanzania’s capital, Dodoma, one of two regions where the project will first roll out, by $58,000 a year, according to Britain’s Department for International Development, one of the project’s backers.
The initiative could also ease tensions between frustrated patients and health workers.
“We always accuse nurses of stealing drugs,” said Angela Kitebi, who lives 40 kilometers east of Dodoma. “We don’t realize that the drugs are not getting here on time due to bad roads.”
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Are Consumers Ready to Give Augmented Reality a Try?
You might have gotten a taste of “augmented reality,” the blending of the virtual and physical worlds, as you chased on-screen monsters at real-world landmarks in last year’s gaming sensation, “Pokemon Go.”
Upcoming augmented reality apps will follow that same principle of superimposing virtual images over real-life settings. That could let you see how furniture will look in your real living room before you buy it, for instance.
While “Pokemon Go” didn’t require special hardware or software, more advanced AR apps will. Google and Apple are both developing technology to enable that. Google’s AR technology is already on Android phones from Lenovo and Asus. On Tuesday, Google announced plans to bring AR to even more phones, including Samsung’s popular S8 and Google’s own Pixel, though it didn’t give a timetable beyond promising an update by the end of the year.
As a result, Apple might pull ahead as it extends AR to all recent iPhones and iPads in a software update expected next month, iOS 11. Hundreds of millions of AR-ready devices will suddenly be in the hands of consumers.
But how many are ready to give AR a try?
Early applications
Of the dozen or so apps demoed recently for Android and iPhones, the ones showing the most promise are furniture apps.
From a catalog or a website, it’s hard to tell whether a sofa or a bed will actually fit in your room. Even if it fits, will it be far enough from other pieces of furniture for someone to walk through?
With AR, you can go to your living room or bedroom and add an item you’re thinking of buying. The phone maps out the dimensions of your room and scales the virtual item automatically; there’s no need to pull out a tape measure. The online furnishing store Wayfair has the WayfairView for Android phones, while Ikea is coming out with one for Apple devices. Wayfair says it’s exploring bringing the app to iPhones and iPads, too.
As for whimsical, Holo for Android lets you pose next to virtual tigers and cartoon characters. For iPhones and iPads, the Food Network will let you add frosting and sprinkles to virtual cupcakes. You can also add balloons and eyes — who does that? — and share creations on social media.
Games and education are also popular categories. On Apple devices, a companion to AMC’s “The Walking Dead” creates zombies alongside real people for you to shoot. On Android, apps being built for classrooms will let students explore the solar system, volcanoes and more.
Beyond virtual reality
Virtual reality is a technology that immerses you in a different world, rather than trying to supplement the real world with virtual images, as AR does. VR was supposed to be the next big thing, but the appeal has been limited outside of games and industrial applications. You need special headsets, which might make you dizzy if you wear one too long.
And VR isn’t very social. Put on the headset, and you shut out everyone else around you. Part of the appeal of “Pokemon Go” was the ability to run into strangers who were also playing. Augmented reality can be a shared experience, as friends look on the phone screen with you.
Being available vs. Being used
While AR shows more promise than VR, there has yet to be a “killer app” that everyone must have, the way smartphones have become essential for navigation and everyday snapshots.
Rather, people will discover AR over time, perhaps a few years. Someone renovating or moving might discover the furniture apps. New parents might discover educational apps. Those people might then go on to discover more AR apps to try out. But just hearing that AR is available might not be enough for someone to check it out.
Consider mobile payments. Most phones now have the capability, but people still tend to pull out plastic when shopping. There’s no doubt more people are using mobile payments and more retailers are accepting them, but it’s far from commonplace.
Expect augmented reality to also take time to take off.
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Climate to Push Forest-eating Beetles to Northern US, Canada, Scientists Predict
Forests in the northeastern United States and southern Canada could be ravaged by tree-killing beetles in coming decades as a warming climate expands the pest’s habitat, a study has found.
Over the next 60 years, southern pine beetles could infest forests in new areas of the United States and Canada, disrupting industries and ecosystems alike, it said.
Warmer winter nights allow spread
The red-brown insects, the size of a grain of rice, known to feast on pine-tree bark, has typically only thrived in the hotter climate of Central America and the southeastern United States.
But in recent years warmer than usual winter nights have allowed it to survive the cold months and spread as far north as the U.S. state of New York. The coldest winter night has warmed by 6 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit (3 to 4 degrees Celsius) over the past 50 years in various parts of the United States, the study’s authors said.
Using computer-based climate models, they predicted the beetles should gradually march north along the Atlantic coast, infesting forests including in the U.S. states of Maine and Ohio all the way to Canada’s Nova Scotia.
Pest moves fast
By 2080, the pest should proliferate to red — and jack-pine forests in a 270,000 square miles (700,000 square km) area of the United States and Canada — roughly the size of Afghanistan, the researchers wrote in Nature Climate Change.
That would not only upend ecosystems, but also disrupt several key industries “in already struggling rural areas,” said lead author Corey Lesk, a researcher at Columbia University in New York.
“Residents of these regions could see a direct hit to their pocketbooks,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on Tuesday in a phone interview.
Infestations costly to timber industry
Where the southern pine beetle has struck in the past, timber industries have been hard hit.
Infestations of pine beetles have cost an estimated $100 million a year in timber losses from 1990 to 2004 in the southeastern United States, according to the U.S. Forest Service.
Thousands of adult beetles can kill a tree in two to four months as the insects carve S-shaped tunnels under the bark, depriving their host of needed nutrients.
The tourism industry would also likely suffer, said Lesk, with the potential destruction of iconic forests including the Pine Barrens of New Jersey and Long Island.
Europe faces same problem
In Europe, previous research has shown that bark beetles have similarly been chewing through pine and spruce trees in forests from the Swiss Alps to Belarus alongside temperature increases.
Land managers have found the best way to fight off bark beetles has been thinning high-density forests and cutting out infested trees, though with limited success, the researchers said.
“The key question is whether those strategies would be able to keep up with rapid advance of the pest into regions with little or no experience managing it,” Lesk said.
your ads here!US Spacecraft Readies for Fiery Plunge into Saturn After 13-year Mission
The U.S. space agency’s Cassini spacecraft will end its 13-year mission to Saturn in mid-September by transmitting data until the final moment before it plunges into the ringed planet’s atmosphere, officials said Tuesday.
Cassini, the first spacecraft to orbit Saturn, will make the last of 22 farewell dives between the planet’s rings and surface on Sept. 15. The spacecraft will then burn up as it heads straight into the gas giant’s crushing atmosphere.
Cassini’s final dive will end a mission that provided groundbreaking discoveries that included seasonal changes on Saturn, the moon Titan’s resemblance to a primordial Earth, and a global ocean on the moon Enceladus with ice plumes spouting from its surface.
“The mission has been insanely, wildly, beautifully successful, and it’s coming to an end in about two weeks,” Curt Niebur, Cassini program scientist, said on a telephone conference call with reporters from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
Cassini’s final photo as it heads into Saturn’s atmosphere will likely be of propellers, or gaps in the rings caused by moonlets, said project scientist Linda Spilker.
The spacecraft will provide near real-time data on the atmosphere until it loses contact with Earth at 4:54 a.m. PDT (1154 GMT) on Sept. 15, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said.
Spilker said Cassini’s latest data on the rings had shown they had a lighter mass than forecast. That suggests they are younger than expected, at about 120 million years, and thus were created after the birth of the solar system, she said.
During its final orbits between the atmosphere and the rings, Cassini also studied Saturn’s atmosphere and took measurements to determine the size of the planet’s rocky core.
Cassini has been probing Saturn, the sixth planet from the sun, and its entourage of 62 known moons since July 2004. It has provided enough data for almost 4,000 scientific papers.
Since the craft is running low on fuel, NASA is crashing it into Saturn to avoid any chance Cassini could someday collide with Titan, Enceladus or any other moon that has the potential to support indigenous microbial life.
By destroying the spacecraft, NASA will ensure that any hitchhiking Earth microbes still alive on Cassini will not contaminate the moons for future study.
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World Bank: Tackle Middle East Water Scarcity to Save Money, Boost Stability
The Middle East and North Africa region loses about $21 billion each year because of an inadequate supply of water and sanitation, the World Bank said Tuesday, warning that urgent action is needed to prevent ripple effects on stability and growth.
Poor management of water resources and sanitation in the world’s most water-scarce region costs about 1 percent of its annual gross domestic product, with conflict-hit states losing as much as 2 to 4 percent each year, the bank said in a report issued at the World Water Week conference in Stockholm, Sweden.
Deaths due to unsafe water and sanitation in some parts of the region, particularly countries affected by conflict, are higher than the global average, it added.
“As the current conflict and migration crisis unfolding in the Middle East and North Africa shows, failure to address water challenges can have severe impacts on people’s well-being and political stability,” the report said.
Peril in Yemen
In Yemen, which is reeling from more than two years of conflict, water supply networks serving its largest cities are at risk of collapse due to war-inflicted damage and disrepair, and about 15 million people have been cut off from regular access to water and sanitation, the U.N. children’s agency (UNICEF) said in a separate statement Tuesday.
In Syria, where the conflict is well into its seventh year, water has frequently been used as “a weapon of war,” with pumps deliberately destroyed and water sources contaminated, and about 15 million people are in need of safe water, including an estimated 6.4 million children, UNICEF said.
Overall, 183 million people lack access to basic drinking water in countries affected by conflict, violence and instability around the world, it added.
Better management
With the urban population in the Middle East and North Africa expected to double by 2050 to nearly 400 million, a combination of policy, technology and water management tools should be used to improve the water situation, the World Bank report said.
“Water productivity — in other words, how much return you get for every drop of water used — in the Middle East in general is the lowest on average in the world,” said Anders Jägerskog, a specialist in water resources management at the World Bank and one of the report’s authors.
Middle Eastern and North African countries are using far more water than can be replenished, said the report.
To reverse the trend, technology and innovation are “essential but not enough,” Jägerskog told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Water governance — in particular, water tariffs and subsidies — must also be addressed, he said.
The region has the world’s lowest water tariffs and spends the highest proportion of GDP on public water subsidies. Such policies lead to excessive use of already scarce water supplies and are not sustainable, said Jägerskog.
Untreated wastewater
Another challenge is that more than half of the wastewater collected in the region is fed back into the environment untreated.
“Along with better water management, there is room for increasing the supply through nonconventional methods such as desalination and recycling,” Guangzhe Chen, senior director of the World Bank’s global water practice, said in a statement.
Improved water management could bring considerable financial returns, the report noted.
Governments could gain $10 billion annually by improving the storage and delivery of irrigation water to users, while increasing agricultural production by up to 8 percent, the report said.
Egypt, Syria and Iran — which have the largest proportion of irrigated land in the region — are the countries that could benefit most.
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Mexico Dusts Off ‘Plan B’ as Trump Revs Up Threats to Kill NAFTA
Mexico sees a serious risk the United States will withdraw from NAFTA and is preparing a plan for that eventuality, Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo said Tuesday, calling talks to renegotiate the deal a “roller coaster.”
U.S. President Donald Trump has threatened three times in the past week to abandon the North American Free Trade Agreement, revisiting his view that the United States would probably have to start the process of exiting the accord to reach a fair deal for his country.
Trump has vowed to get a better deal for American workers, and the lively rhetoric on both sides precedes a second round of talks starting on Friday in Mexico City to renegotiate the 1994 accord binding the United States, Mexico and Canada.
“This is not going to be easy,” Guajardo said at a meeting with senators in Mexico City. “The start of the talks is like a roller coaster.”
The need for a backup plan in case Trump shreds the deal underpinning a trillion dollars in annual trade in North America has been a long-standing position of Guajardo, who travels to Washington on Tuesday with foreign minister Luis Videgaray to meet senior White House and trade officials.
“We are also analyzing a scenario with no NAFTA,” Guajardo said.
In an interview published earlier on Tuesday in Mexican business daily El Economista, Guajardo said “there is a risk, and it’s high” that the Trump administration abandons NAFTA.
Responding to Guajardo’s comments, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his government would continue to work “seriously” to improve NAFTA.
What is ‘Plan B’?
Earlier this month, Guajardo told Reuters a “Plan B” meant being prepared to replace items such as the billions of dollars in grain Mexico imports from the United States annually.
To that end, and to seek openings in more markets, Mexico is hosting trade talks with Brazil this week. Trade officials are also discussing a possible replacement for the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact that Trump ditched after taking office.
Overlapping with the NAFTA talks, Mexico will participate in separate trade meetings with Australia and New Zealand in Peru, and President Enrique Pena Nieto travels to China this weekend.
Still, attempts to diversify trade will not be easy. Some 80 percent of all Mexican exports go to the United States, and economies such as Brazil and China often compete with Mexico.
Guajardo also suggested World Trade Organization tariffs that would kick in if NAFTA crumbled would be more favorable for Mexico, a view held by many Mexican experts who think trade with the United States would survive the demise of the 1994 deal.
“I don’t think it’s going to make that much of a difference in terms of the trading relationship,” said Andres Rozental, a former Mexican deputy foreign minister. “If we have to go to WTO tariffs, for us it’s fairly straightforward.”
Guajardo’s and Videgaray’s trip to Washington was announced after Trump not only threatened to pull out of the trade deal, but again said that Mexico would end up paying for the wall he wants to build between the two countries.
Mexico has refused point blank to pay for a wall. In January, after similar comments led Mexico to scrap a summit with Trump, the two sides agreed not to talk in public about it.
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Brazil Looks to China to Finish Nuclear Power Plant
Brazil will seek China’s expertise and financing to complete its third nuclear power plant when President Michel Temer makes a state visit to Beijing on Friday, Brazilian government officials said Tuesday.
The Brazilian nuclear energy company Eletronuclear will sign a cooperation agreement with China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), signaling their intent to establish a partnership to finish the Angra 3 plant, the officials said.
Construction of the 1,405-megawatt reactor on the coast south of Rio de Janeiro has dragged on for three decades and its completion is now scheduled for 2023, but Brazil does not have the estimated 16 billion reais ($5 billion) needed to finish the job.
Russia is also interested in completing Angra 3 and Eletronuclear, a subsidiary of state-run electric utility Eletrobras, has held talks with the Russian nuclear monopoly Rosatom.
The Chinese corporation is expected to have the advantage in terms of abundant financial resources.
The head of Eletronuclear, Bruno Barretto, signed an initial memorandum with CNNC on the Angra 3 completion in Beijing in December when he visited Chinese banks that are potential financiers, Eletronuclear said in a statement.
Temer’s government has announced plans to privatize Eletrobras, Latin America’s largest utility. But Eletronuclear will be split off and remain in state hands under Brazil’s Constitution, which establishes that nuclear facilities must be government controlled.
Temer said on Tuesday he expects China to be a major player in Brazil’s plans to modernize its ports, airports and other infrastructure projects that will be offered to investors in private concessions.
He also hopes China will finance energy projects.
“China could be one of the big investors in our plans for concessions,” he said in a video message released after he set off for Beijing, where he will meet Chinese President Xi Jinping ahead of the BRICS summit in Xiamen.
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Notre-Dame’s Crumbling Gargoyles Need Help
The Archbishop of Paris is on a 100 million-euro ($120 million) fundraising drive to save the crumbling gargoyles and gothic arches of the storied Notre-Dame cathedral.
Every year, 12 million to 14 million people visit the 12th-century Parisian landmark on an island in the Seine river. Groundbreaking for the structure occurred in 1163 and construction was completed in 1345. Pollution and exposure to elements over time have resulted in losses of large chunks of stone.
“If we don’t do these restoration works, we’ll risk seeing parts of the exterior structure begin to fall. This is a very serious risk,” said Michel Picaud, president of the Friends of Notre-Dame charity set up by the archbishop.
Church officials, who have created what they are calling a “stone cemetery” from fallen masonry, say the cathedral remains safe to visit.
Entry to the cathedral is free, and the French state, which owns the building, devotes 2 million euros a year to repairs.
But that is not enough to embark on major restoration works, the last of which were carried out during the 1800s, officials at the cathedral and charity said.
Hugo’s book
Notre-Dame has long drawn tourists from around the world.
It is most famous in popular culture as the locale for 19th-century author Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame” and films of the same name, including the 1939 classic with Charles Laughton and the 1996 Disney musical animation.
The latter in particular raised the cathedral’s profile for modern-day tourists from China to the United States.
“It’s the movie for me. I just think of the Hunchback of Notre-Dame, and the book as well. After reading that book, I actually really wanted to come see it,” said U.S tourist Claire Huber as she visited the cathedral.
Church authorities hope the cathedral’s worldwide fame will attract donors, particularly from the United States.
“Gargoyles are what people want to see when they come to Paris. If there are no more gargoyles, what will they see?” Notre-Dame communications chief Andre Finot said.
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Syrian Schools Grow Edible Playgrounds to Boost Diets of Hungry Children
School playgrounds across Syria are being transformed into vegetable gardens where children whose diets have been devastated by six years of war can learn to grow — and then eat — aubergines, lettuces, peppers, cabbages and cucumbers.
Traditional Syrian cuisine is typical of the region, and rich in vegetables. Its mainstays include hummus, minced lamb cooked with pine nuts and spices, varied salads, stews made with green beans, okra or courgettes and tomatoes, stuffed cabbage leaves and artichoke hearts.
But the six-year war has changed that for much of the population, and many now live mainly on bread or food aid.
According to U.N. figures, unemployment now stands at more than 50 percent, and nearly 70 percent of the population is living in extreme poverty, in what was once a relatively wealthy country.
“The ongoing crisis in Syria is having a devastating effect on the health and nutrition of an entire generation of children,” Adam Yao, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) acting representative in Syria, said on Tuesday, ahead of the start of the school year.
FAO is helping some 17 primary schools in both government and opposition-controlled areas to plant up to 500 meter-square fruit and vegetable plots in war-torn areas including Aleppo, Hama, Homs, Idlib and the outskirts of Damascus.
Young children are often the most vulnerable to malnutrition in a crisis, which can have serious and long-lasting effects on their growth and future development.
“Good nutrition is a child’s first defense against common diseases and important for children to be able to lead an active and healthy life,” Yao added.
The primary schools, which began planting in May, have produced 12 tons of fruit and vegetables. Another 35 schools are expected to start transforming their playgrounds soon in Aleppo and in rural areas around Damascus.
Rising prices, falling production
The price of food has risen since the start of the war — agriculture production has plummeted, and the country now relies on food imports to make up the shortfall. Transporting food around the country has also become difficult and costly.
About 13.5 million people in Syria are in need of humanitarian assistance. Of those, 7 million are unable to meet their basic food needs.
Some 5 million people receive international food aid, but not everyone in need can be reached, and the World Food Program says it has had to cut the amount of calories in its family food baskets because of funding shortages.
“The donors are generous, but we don’t know how long they can continue to be generous and rely on taxpayers’ money,” the FAO’s Yao told Reuters.
Vulnerable families are receiving help from FAO to grow food at home, so they can become less reliant on food aid.
“Food aid is very important, but … we should combine both, in a way that people grow their own food and move away from food aid gradually,” he said.
In a country where more than half the population has been forced to flee their homes, many moving several times, investing in agriculture helps people to stay put for as long as it is safe, Yao added.
“Agriculture has become a hope for [many] because they can grow their own food and survive — even in the besieged areas.”
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Brazil Revises Decree Allowing Amazon Mining After Criticism
Brazil’s government has revised a decree that stripped protections from a reserve in the Amazon after environmental groups criticized the original order.
The new decree announced late Monday still lifts the reserve designation from a gold- and copper-rich area larger than the Netherlands in two northern Brazilian states.
But President Michel Temer’s administration clarifies that mining will not be allowed in conservation or indigenous areas within the former reserve.
The government says the new decree will allow it to crack down on the illegal mining that was taking place in the reserve, while opening up legal mining.
The Brazilian branch of the World Wide Fund for Nature said in a statement that the new decree clarifies the need for protection, but the risk of environmental damage remains.
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US Attorney General: Opioid Crisis Is America’s ‘Top Lethal Issue’
U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions called the opioid crisis America’s “top lethal issue” Tuesday, saying that a “comprehensive antidote” was needed to address the crisis.
Speaking from the National Alliance for Drug Endangered Children national conference in Green Bay, Wisconsin, Sessions thanked the audience for their work in making the crisis’ effects on children known.
“Our country, despite the record deaths, I don’t think has fully recognized the damage this addiction nightmare is doing to us,” he said. “And as you understand this epidemic is taking a heavy toll on the most innocent and vulnerable — our children. And yet, in the national conversation about drug abuse, these children are too often forgotten.”
Sessions said that the solution has “three-pillars” — prevention, enforcement, and treatment. Sessions added that the prevention step in particular had been discussed at a meeting with top officials, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly the day before.
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump vowed that the U.S. would “win” the battle against the heroin and opioid plague, but he stopped short of declaring a national emergency as his handpicked commission had recommended.
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Kardashian Women Give $500,000 to Help Harvey Victims
Kim Kardashian West and her famous siblings are donating $500,000 to help Harvey victims.
A spokeswoman for the reality star says she and her mother and sisters have given $250,000 to the Red Cross and $250,000 to the Salvation Army.
Kardashian West announced the donation on Twitter on Tuesday, saying, “Houston we are praying for you.” She used the hashtag #HoustonStrong.
They are among several stars who’ve said publicly they are helping hurricane victims. Kevin Hart on Monday announced a $25,000 donation to the Red Cross for storm victims and called on other celebrities to do the same.
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US Gearing Up for Digital Arms Race
In the straight-laced world of the U.S. military, the big room with glossy white paint stands out.
Beyond the desks lined with computer screens, the overhead projectors or the digital clock displaying the time in various world cities, the walls demand your attention.
They are covered from floor to ceiling with questions, equations, sketches and ideas — scribbled frantically or in moments of inspiration — all representing the best thinking of some of the U.S. military’s best analysts.
“There are precious few places in this building where you can write on a wall,” said Albert Bolden, not surprisingly given that this is, after all, part of a military base.
But according to Bolden, the director of innovation at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, that’s part of the point for the so-called Innovation Hub, or iHUB.
“People from across the agency can come into this space and figure out how to solve our problems,” he said.
‘Relevant in this digital age’
While all this may sound like a feel-good tale of military structure melding with Silicon Valley ingenuity to make life easier by using technology, it is actually about much more.
“If we don’t embrace it, our adversaries will,” said outgoing DIA Director, Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart. “The fight for remaining relevant in this digital age is what keeps me awake.”
And Stewart was clear. It is, in many ways, an arms race.
“Our adversaries have been modernizing,” he warned, speaking to a small group of reporters in August, as the agency welcomed private companies and academics to the iHub for a series of so-called Industry Days.
And it is these encounters between the DIA’s own top thinkers and some of the best outside of government that form a second, crucial component of the iHub strategy. It is a chance to see how off-the-shelf technologies might be able to help solve problems the agency’s analysts have identified.
One company making a pitch to be part of this overall effort is an Austin, Texas-based artificial intelligence start-up called SparkCognition.
SparkCognition already has attracted interest from the U.S. Air Force. And companies like Verizon and Boeing are now investing more than $30 million in the company’s neural networks, designed to mimic the functionality of a human brain in order to predict likely outcomes.
“What we’ve done is automate that research that a data scientist would do,” said SparkCognition’s Sam Septembre following a question-and-answer session at the DIA’s iHub.
Instead of taking weeks or days, however, Septembre said SparkCognition’s systems can deliver results in hours or even minutes.
“We’re not just a black box,” added the company’s director of business operations, Timothy Stefanick. “We have why the [computer] model thought that.”
SparkCognition says its platforms already have succeeded in predicting Brexit, Britain’s decision to leave the European Union. And the company says it nearly correctly predicted President Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election by looking at sales of campaign merchandise, like Trump’s “Make America Great Again” baseball caps.
“The human factor got involved and skewed it,” said Stefanick, explaining that in the run-up to the election, the company’s analysts didn’t trust the initial prediction of a Trump victory because it differed so much from the polls. He said they then decided to have the computer models take into account additional factors, causing them to predict a Trump loss.
AI for video
Another company vying for a DIA contract is Percipient.ai, which focuses on applying artificial intelligence to video.
“This is a kind of capability that helps you get into productive analytics and helps you protect forces,” said company co-founder, ret. Brig. Gen. Balan Ayyar, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer who commanded a task force in Afghanistan.
“You can check any person in any video,” he said.
Ayyar and fellow Percipient.ai co-founder Raj Shah, say their platform can save analysts considerable time, for example scouring hundreds of hours of video from the scene of a terror attack to quickly identify if any suspected terrorists were nearby.
Even mobile phones could be used to track potential adversaries, programmed to vibrate, for instance, if a person of interest turns up in a “selfie.”
“With this kind of system, the [terror] watch list could be much, much bigger,” said Shah, who previously headed up Google Maps.
Already, Ayyar and Shah say Percipient.ai’s systems can identify suspicious activity, or tradecraft, like the use of specific getaway vehicles.
Handwriting on the wall
For DIA, the early results have been promising.
“We’ve seen examples when machines are able to provide insights to the analysts that they haven’t had,” said Randy Soper, a senior DIA analyst for analytics modernization.
To speed up the process, DIA even awards seed money — up to about $250,000 — to projects that have shown the most promise.
Two have already been approved and another four projects are set to receive funding once the once the money becomes available.
More projects could soon be added to the list. DIA’s Innovation Hub is still considering the latest pitches from industry and academia, like those from SparkCognition and Percipient.ai.
The agency says that overall, the response has been “overwhelming.”
But the success in reaching out to industry and academia also has brought some changes to the program.
Last week [August 22], the DIA opened up a new Innovation Hub.
At first glance, it looks sleek and modern, a row of screens and a digital world clock etched smoothly into wood-paneled walls, while a large conference table dominates the center of the room.
To be sure, it seems like quite a departure from the old iHub, which almost had the feel of a useful but makeshift classroom.
Some things, though, have not changed. The wood-paneling only extends so far. Much of the rest of the room is covered in that white, glossy paint.
“You can still write on the walls,” said one official.
your ads here!Houston Native Beyonce Planning to Aid Those Hurt by Harvey
Beyonce says she’s working with her charity to assist those in her hometown affected by Tropical Storm Harvey.
The Houston native says in a statement to The Houston Chronicle late Monday that “my heart goes out to my hometown, Houston, and I remain in constant prayer for those affected.”
Beyonce, Kelly Rowland and the original members of Destiny’s Child who left the group, LeToya Luckett and LaTavia Roberson, formed as teenagers in Houston.
Harvey made landfall four days ago as the fiercest hurricane to hit the U.S. in 13 years.
Beyonce said she’s praying “for the rescuers who have been so brave and determined.” The singer said she is working closely with her organization BeyGOOD and her pastor to find ways to help those affected.
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Wealthy Cocaine Users Funding Slavery, Says Former UK Drug Chief
Middle-class cocaine users are turning a blind eye to the link between their drug habit and sex trafficking, slavery and murder, said the former head of UK drug strategy.
“These are middle-aged, middle-class people at dinner parties,” Tony Saggers, former head of drugs threat at the National Crime Agency, told The Times on Tuesday, in his first interview since leaving the post.
“They will find sweatshops abhorrent, slave labor a brutal, terrible thing to be happening in their neighborhood, and the news that a 16-year-old has been knifed to death in London will shock them,” he added.
Britain has one of the highest rates of cocaine use in Europe, according to the European Commission and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) with 4.2 percent of young adults having taken the drug in 2015.
Saggers said this was funding the exploitation of women in the sex industry, as well as slavery and gun violence.
“The consequences of buying cocaine are more abhorrent than most of what the people using it find abhorrent,” he said.
In Britain, there are an estimated 13,000 victims of forced labor, sexual exploitation and domestic servitude, most of them from Albania, Nigeria, Poland and Vietnam.
Saggers said there was a lack of action among employers in tackling the prevalence and acceptance of cocaine use in some industries, particularly among banks and other companies in the City of London, Britain’s financial center.
Companies should address the problem through schemes that educate their staff about the impact of cocaine abuse on their health and wider society, he added.
Tamara Barnett, projects leader at the Human Trafficking Foundation, said “we need to do all we can to emphasize the role the public can play in eradicating human trafficking.”
“Highlighting the exploitation and abuse behind certain drug production could make some people think twice before they purchase drugs, or at least twice before boasting about doing something that has for too long been seen just as a fashionable lifestyle choice,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
In 2015 a report by the National Police Chiefs’ Council found that commercial cultivation of cannabis was used to fund human trafficking.
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Venice Film Festival Offers Grit, Glamour and George Clooney
The Venice Film Festival is kicking off the fall cinema season with searing drama, serious glamour and a crop of new movies vying for attention, awards and acclaim.
Thanks to its late-summer time slot, just ahead of rivals in Telluride and Toronto, the world’s oldest cinema festival has become a key showcase for films hoping to dominate Hollywood’s awards season. In recent years, Venice has been a launch-pad for Oscar winners including “Gravity,” “Birdman,” “Spotlight” and “La La Land.”
This year’s edition opens Wednesday with Alexander Payne’s “Downsizing,” a science fiction-tinged drama starring Matt Damon as a man who hopes to minimize his problems by shrinking himself.
Other films competing for the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion, include George Clooney-directed heist movie “Suburbicon”; Guillermo del Toro’s fantastical “The Shape of Water”; Darren Aronofsky’s secrecy-shrouded thriller “Mother!”; and Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”
Here’s what to watch for at the 74th Venice Film Festival, which runs to September 9:
Glamour galore
Unspooling in one of Italy’s most ravishing cities, the festival takes style and celebrity very seriously. Among the stars who will be whisked across the Venice lagoon by boat to walk the Palazzo del Cinema red carpet are Clooney, a festival favorite who has a house on nearby Lake Como.
He’ll likely be joined by pal Damon, who stars in both “Suburbicon” and “Downsizing,” which also features Kristen Wiig. Jennifer Lawrence is expected for the much-anticipated “Mother!”, which also stars Javier Bardem. The Spanish star should also be on hand alongside Penelope Cruz for the drug-lord biopic “Loving Pablo.”
An older generation of showbiz royalty will be well represented by stars including Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Donald Sutherland and Michael Caine. Jane Fonda and Robert Redford star in the late-life romance “Our Souls at Night” and are being given lifetime-achievement awards by the festival.
Global Crises
Several films in the lineup tackle the conflicts and divisions convulsing the world.
Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s documentary “Human Flow” travels to 23 countries as it tries to put a human face on the vast migrations unfolding around the world. Paul Schrader, who wrote “Taxi Driver,” directs “First Reformed,” featuring Ethan Hawke as a minister wrestling with his faith and the specter of environmental catastrophe.
Israel’s Samuel Moaz, director of acclaimed war drama “Lebanon,” returns with “Foxtrot,” another story of conflict and loss. From China, Vivian Qu’s “Angels Wear White” centers on sexual assault in a small provincial town.
It hasn’t escaped comment that Qu is the only female director among 21 filmmakers in the festival’s main competition. Debates about diversity and inclusion in the movie business are a long way from dying down.
Thrills and chills
Once considered the preserve of B-movies, thrills have become respectable. The Venice competition brims with films that include elements of sci-fi, action and horror, including “Downsizing,” “The Shape of Water” and “Mother!”
Further jolts and shocks are promised by the Italian organized-crime series “Suburra”; S. Craig Zahler’s bloody “Brawl in Cell Block 99,” starring Vince Vaughn; and a 3-D version of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” screening alongside a 25th-anniversary documentary about the landmark video.
A changing industry
Technology and economics are transforming the film industry, and festivals like Venice are working hard to keep up.
Festival director Alberto Barbera has said he wants the lineup to provide “a perception of the future,” rather than “a snapshot of the present or a souvenir selfie of our contemporary cinema.”
One big change this year is the festival’s first virtual reality competition, featuring 22 films and installations judged by a jury led by director John Landis. Barbera said VR, until recently considered little more than “the latest technological gimmick,” looked set to “become one of the most colossal investments” for the cultural industry.
With the way films are funded, made, distributed and watched all in flux, the taste-maker role played by festivals like Venice makes them more powerful than ever.
Schrader, who has been making films since the 1970s, said advances in technology had let him make “First Reformed” twice as fast and at half the cost of a movie made just 10 or 15 years ago.
“That’s the upside of the enormous freedom we’ve been given by technology in film,” he said. “The downside is thousands of films are getting made now that no one wants to see.”
“The festivals are the new gatekeepers,” he added. “We need these festival structures to process this tsunami of product.”
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Pizza Delivery Without Drivers: Domino’s, Ford Team Up for Test
No ring of the doorbell, just a text. No tip for the driver? No problem in this test, where Domino’s and Ford are teaming up to see if customers will warm to the idea of pizza delivered by driverless cars.
Starting Wednesday, some pizzas in Domino’s hometown of Ann Arbor will arrive in a Ford Fusion outfitted with radars and a camera that is used for autonomous testing. A Ford engineer will be at the wheel, but the front windows have been blacked out so customers won’t interact with the driver.
Instead, people will have to come out of their homes and type a four-digit code into a keypad mounted on the car. That will open the rear window and let customers retrieve their order from a heated compartment. The compartment can carry up to four pizzas and five sides, Domino’s Pizza Inc. says.
The experiment will help Domino’s understand how customers will interact with a self-driving car, says company President Russell Weiner. Will they want the car in their driveway or by the curb? Will they understand how to use the keypad? Will they come outside if it’s raining or snowing? Will they put their pizza boxes on top of the car and threaten to mess up its expensive cameras?
“The majority of our questions are about the last 50 feet of the delivery experience,” Weiner told reporters last week.
Domino’s, which delivers 1 billion pizzas worldwide each year, needs to stay ahead of emerging trends, Weiner says. The test will last six weeks, and the companies say they’ll decide afterward what to do next. Domino’s is also testing pizza delivery with drones.
Weiner said the company has 100,000 drivers in the U.S. In a driverless world, he said, he could see those employees taking on different roles within the company.
Ford Motor Co., which wants to develop a fully driverless vehicle by 2021, said it needs to understand the kinds of things companies would use that vehicle for. The experiment is a first for Ford. But other companies have seen the potential for food deliveries. Otto, a startup backed by Uber, delivered 50,000 cans of Budweiser beer from a self-driving truck in Colorado last fall.
“We’re developing a self-driving car not just for the sake of technology,” said Sherif Marakby, Ford’s vice president of autonomous and electric vehicles. “There are so many practical things that we need to learn.”
Only one car will be deployed in Ann Arbor, and it has a special black-and-white paint job to identify it as a research vehicle.
Customers in the test area will be chosen randomly when they order a pizza, and will get a phone call to confirm they want to participate. If they agree, they’ll get a text message letting them know when the vehicle is pulling up and how to retrieve their food.
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Cambodian Indigenous Minorities Fighting Tide of Development
In Cambodia, the issue of land rights is a constant source of tension. The country’s biggest dam to date is set to go online in just weeks, adding 400 megawatts of power to the country’s critically overstretched grid. But the social and environmental costs of the project are huge, especially for minority villagers facing displacement. In rural Stung Treng province, some members of an indigenous group are taking a stand. David Boyle has this report.
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Lifeguard in the Sky Soon to Be Monitoring Australian Beaches
It is still true that a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than attacked by a shark; but, that does not matter much to the 150 or so people who experienced what the International Shark Attack File calls “shark-human interaction in 2016. Still, some Australian eyes in the sky are helping lifeguards look out for the predators just offshore. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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