Month: October 2017

Migrants Stranded on Greek Isles Facing Mental Health Crisis

More than 10,000 mainly Syrian refugees who escaped fighting in their country are living on five Greek islands. About 2,500 of them are crowded into camps on the island of Samos, even though there is only room for about 800. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports aid groups say there is a growing mental health crisis among those refugees.

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Houston-Bound World Series Lifts Spirits, If Momentarily

As the best-of-seven 2017 World Series shifts from Los Angeles to Houston at one game apiece, diehard fans of the hurricane-devastated city can sense a first-ever baseball championship within their grasp. Houstonians admit that a series victory — if only a momentary distraction — would lift the city’s spirits. Ramon Taylor reports from Minute Maid Park, home of the Astros.

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New Styles, Smarter Machines and Next-Generation Safety Highlight Tokyo Motor Show

Automakers from around the world take the stage this weekend at the 45th annual Tokyo Motor Show. Designers will showcase electronic cars with advanced artificial intelligence and at least one concept car with safety features for the world around it. Arash Arabasadi reports.

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Tech Companies Get Ready to Face Congress Over Foreign Interference in U.S. Election

Facebook, Google and Twitter are heading to Washington to answer questions about how their services were used by Russia-based operatives to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In Silicon Valley, there’s concern that the scrutiny may bring new regulations, as VOA’s Michelle Quinn reports.

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Who Will Be the Next Fed Chief?

President Trump says he is “very close” to picking a person for the most important economic post in the country: the head of the US Federal Reserve. Current Chair Janet Yellen, whose term expires early next year, is one of at least five candidates under consideration. Regardless of the president’s choice, most analysts who spoke with VOA don’t expect big changes in US monetary policy. But as Mil Arcega reports, others say, sooner or later the next Fed Chief could face a slowing economy.

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MSNBC Takes Halperin Off Air After Harassment Claims

MSNBC said Thursday that journalist Mark Halperin had been suspended from his role as network contributor following charges from five women that he sexually harassed them while he was an ABC News executive.

The network said it found Halperin’s conduct as described in a CNN story “very troubling” and that the veteran political reporter would be off the air until questions about his past were fully understood.

Later Thursday, Penguin Press canceled a planned book by Halperin and John Heilemann about the 2016 election, and HBO called off a miniseries that would have been based on the book. Halperin and Heilemann had collaborated on two previous books, including Game Change, a best-seller about the 2008 race that almost single-handedly revived the campaign book genre and was the basis for an award-winning HBO adaptation.

“HBO has no tolerance for sexual harassment within the company or its productions,” the company said in an emailed statement.

The planned book had no title or official publication date, but had been expected to be released in early 2018.

Halperin has apologized for what he termed inappropriate behavior, and ABC said Thursday that no complaints were filed against him during his tenure, which ended more than a decade ago.

The women, who asked to remain anonymous, said they didn’t report Halperin’s conduct because they feared retribution or were embarrassed.

But Emily Miller, a former ABC employee who is now a reporter at One America News Network, retweeted the Halperin story on Thursday with the hashtag “#MeToo.”

She gave no details of her alleged incident, but tweeted that she did not report Halperin to ABC “because I thought I was the only one, and I blamed myself, and I was embarrassed and I was scared of him.”

CNN international correspondent Clarissa Ward, who also used to work at ABC, tweeted that Halperin’s behavior was “an open secret” at the network. She saluted the women who came forward in the CNN story.

“Let’s be very clear — the one responsible for any sexual misconduct that may have taken place is the man who instigated it,” Ward tweeted, “NOT the women who were victims of it, nor their friends and colleagues who tried to support them through it.”

Halperin told CNN Wednesday night that he was “deeply sorry” and was taking a “step back” from day-to-day work to deal with the situation.

His statement came after CNN reported allegations that Halperin had propositioned, fondled and pushed himself against five women in the early 2000s while he was ABC News’ political director.

Halperin said he pursued relationships, sometimes with junior co-workers, but CNN said he denied the groping allegations.

Showtime, where Halperin has co-hosted the political series The Circus, said Thursday that it had not heard of any allegations of untoward behavior. “We are aware of these reports and will continue to evaluate all options should we decide to move forward with another season of The Circus,” the network said.

On MSNBC’s Morning Joe Thursday, co-host Mika Brzezinski informed viewers about Halperin. He has been a frequent panelist on the show.

“We’re going to be following this story as it develops,” she said. “I’m sure we’ll be talking about it again when we know more about it.”

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Experts Say Measles Victims Dropped Below 100,000 in 2016

The World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say the rate of deaths from measles has dropped 84 percent since the beginning of a global vaccination campaign in 2000.

Experts say the number of people who died from measles in 2016 was about 90,000, compared to more than 550,000 deaths in 2000. This marks the first time that worldwide measles deaths have fallen to less than 100,000 per year.

Robert Linkins, of the Measles and Rubella Initiative at the CDC, said in a statement that “saving an average of 1.3 million lives per year through measles vaccine is an incredible achievement and makes a world free of measles seem possible, even probable, in our lifetime.”

Since 2000, some 5.5 billion doses of measles vaccine have been administered to children through routing immunization services and mass vaccination campaigns. The disease is contagious through air particles and can spread quickly. Measles kills more people every year than any other vaccine-preventable disease.

But the WHO says the world is still far from reaching regional measles elimination goals. Since 2009, officials have managed to deliver a first dose of the vaccine to 85 percent of the babies who need it, but there has been no improvement in that rate in eight years. And only 64 percent of the affected population has gotten the second dose, which comes when a child is four or five years old.

The WHO says “far too many children” — about 20.8 million — have not had their first measles vaccine dose. Most of those children live in Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The disease puts children at risk of developing complications such as pneumonia, diarrhea, encephalitis and blindness.

Measles vaccine is administered along with vaccines for mumps and rubella, in a shot known widely as MMR.

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Hawaii: No Screen Time While Crossing a Street

Police in Hawaii will ticket people who get caught looking at digital devices while crossing a street in the state capital, Honolulu.

The law, passed in July, came into effect this week, making Honolulu the first major city in the U.S. to pass such a law.

The only exemption to the Distracted Walking Law is to use a device to call 911 to report an emergency.

The fines for the offenses will range from $15 to up to $99 for repeat offenders.

Pedestrians are still allowed to talk on their phones while crossing the streets, as long as they look at their surroundings.

The National Safety Council added “distracted walking” to its annual list of injury risks in 2015.

According to a study in the Journal of Safety Studies in 2015, some 400 pedestrians distracted by a phone were injured in the United States each year between the years 2000 and 2007. But after the introduction of the smartphone, the numbers have risen. The study found an estimated 1,300 pedestrians were injured in 2012.

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Greater Scrutiny Set for Nonimmigrant Work Visa Renewals

The United States has announced changes to its nonimmigrant work visa policies that are expected to make renewals more difficult.

In the past, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services would generally approve the renewals unless the visa holder had committed a crime. Now, renewals will face the same scrutiny as the original applications.

“USCIS officers are at the front lines of the administration’s efforts to enhance the integrity of the immigration system,” USCIS Director L. Francis Cissna said, according to the announcement posted on USCIS’ website this week. “This updated guidance provides clear direction to help advance policies that protect the interests of U.S. workers.”

The new regulations could affect more than 100,000 people holding at least eight different types of work visas who fill out the I-129 form for renewals.

Sam Adair, a partner at the Graham Adair business immigration law firm in California and Texas, said that for the most part, he expected visa holders would most likely face lengthier adjudication periods in their renewal processes, as opposed to increased numbers of denials.

“I don’t think it’s going to be a big shift for us,” Adair told VOA. “But I think what we’ll see is just an increase in the number of requests for evidence, an increase in the delays on the adjudication of these petitions, and really it’s going to just result in more costs for the employers who are filing these petitions.”

‘High-skilled’ workers

Of all visa holders affected by this policy, those in the United States on an H-1B, a visa for “high-skilled” workers, are the biggest group. Of 109,537 people who had to submit I-129 forms in fiscal 2017, 95,485 were H-1B holders, according to data sent to VOA by USCIS.

H-1B visas have been threatened in the past, most recently by a bill proposed this year that would have raised the minimum salary requirement for workers brought in on the visa. While advocates of the program argued that it would keep workers from being exploited, many H-1B holders feared that businesses would be less willing to hire them or keep them on board.

But some Americans support the new regulations, saying that nonimmigrant work visas hurt American workers.

“It’s prudent to make sure that the people that receive those visas are in complete compliance with all of the requirements,” Joe Guzzardi, national media director of Californians for Population Stabilization, told VOA.

“It just isn’t possible to think that there aren’t American workers that couldn’t fill these jobs,” he said, noting that while the regulations might hurt businesses, they would help Americans looking for work.

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Trump Ponders New Head for Federal Reserve

President Donald Trump says he is “very close” to picking a person for the most important economic post in the United States, the head of the Federal Reserve. Current Chair Janet Yellen’s term expires early next year and she is one of at least five candidates for the job.

Besides Yellen, the candidates include Fed board member Jerome Powell, former Fed governor Kevin Warsh, Stanford University economist John Taylor and Trump economic adviser Gary Cohn.

Moody’s Analytics economist Ryan Sweet says a new Fed chief is likely to continue current policy at least for a while because “rocking the boat” could rattle financial markets.

The Fed’s job is to manage the world’s largest economy in ways that maximize employment and maintain stable prices. During recessions, the bank cuts interest rates in a bid to boost economic growth and create more jobs.To cope with the most recent recession, the U.S. central bank slashed interest rates nearly to zero.

The jobless rate fell from 10 percent to the current 4.2 percent, and the economy stopped shrinking and began growing slowly.

Critics of the record-low interest rates said keeping rates too low for too long could spark strong inflation and damage the economy. However, the inflation rate has been below the two percent level that many experts say is best for the economy.

As a member of the Fed’s board and later as Chair, Yellen supported low interest rates and a slow, cautious return to “normal” rates. Experts also say she improved communication between the Fed and financial markets, which reduced uncertainty and reassured investors.

Trump criticized Yellen during the campaign, but then as president, praised her work. Analysts Tom Buerkle of “Reuters Breaking Views” gives the Fed credit for taking effective action during a crisis when Congress was reluctant to act.

Another candidate is former investment banker Gary Cohn, who now heads the National Economic Council at the White House. He has reportedly been working on efforts to reform taxes and boost spending on U.S. infrastructure.

Fed Board member Jerome Powell is also a candidate. He is a Republican with a background in private equity who served in a top Treasury Department post. Powell supported Yellen’s approach of slashing interest rates during the crisis, and returning them to historic levels as the economy recovers.

When rates were cut to nearly zero, Fed officials took the further step of buying huge quantities of bonds in an effort to push down long-term interest rates to give additional economic stimulus. The complex procedure is called “quantitative easing.”

“Ryan Sweet of Moody’s Analytics says when the next recession appears, Powell will be more willing to use tools like quantitative easing than more conservative candidates like Kevin Warsh and John Taylor.

Warsh is a former member of the Fed’s board, a lawyer, and a former executive of a major financial firm with experience at the president’s National Economic Council.

John Taylor of Stanford University and the Hoover Institution is an eminent economist who has served on advisory councils for presidents and congress and written books on economic topics. Taylor came up with an equation, called the “Taylor Rule,” that considers inflation as well as slack in the economy as a way to set interest rates. Some conservatives say the Taylor Rule would improve policymaking.

Critics say the economy is too complex to be managed by a computer, and the Taylor Rule would make the Fed less independent and effective.

Tara Sinclair of Indeed.com says independence is a “key part” of having an effective monetary policy. She says the interest rate-setting process and other decisions need to be separate from Congress and the administration so interest rates and other policies are based on long-run economic needs.

The president is expected to announce his choice in early November.

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N. Korean Debt to Sweden Remains Unpaid After Four Decades

More than four decades after selling 1,000 Volvos to North Korea, Sweden is still trying to get paid for the cars.

The vehicles were part of a $131 million trade package delivered to North Korea in 1974, during a period of openness. But Pyongyang never paid anything on the deal, leaving a debt that has now accumulated with interest to $328 million, according to the Swedish Foreign Ministry.

North Korea owes millions elsewhere in Europe from purchases made during the early 1970s, when Pyongyang was expanding economic relations with the West.

“Volvo Car Corporation sold approximately 1,000 of our 144 sedan(s) to North Korea in 1974,” said Per-Åke Fröberg of Volvo Heritage in the company’s press office in Sweden, who added that he did not know what else was included in the deal. The Swedish government was also unable to say what else was included.

Fröberg said the sale of the Volvos was insured through the Swedish Export Credit Agency, or EKN. “When North Korea failed to pay for the cars, EKN stepped in, meaning that Volvo Cars did not suffer financially,” he said. “The deal was closed from our point of view.”

But not for EKN, which twice a year reminds North Korea of its outstanding balance.

“For the most part, we get no response,” Carina Kemp, the EKN press manager, told VOA’s Korean service. However, “EKN’s position is that claims will be recovered.”

Many of the Volvos remain in service, as shown by an October 2016 tweet from the Swedish Embassy in Pyongyang describing “one of the Volvo’s from yr 1974 still unpaid for by DPRK.”

Sweden and North Korea have a long-standing relationship. It was the first Western European nation to establish diplomatic relations with Pyongyang; two years later, in 1975, it was the first to set up an embassy in Pyongyang.

Expanding relations

At the time, North Korea was expanding economic relations with the West. “In 1972-1973, before the global oil crisis, the prices of gold, silver, lead, zinc and other export items of North Korea were rising and Pyongyang must have been confident of its payment capabilities,” said Yang Moon-soo, professor of North Korean economy at the University of North Korea Studies, in the March 2012 issue of the KDI Review of the North Korea Economy, which is published by the Korea Development Institute, a think tank run by the South Korean government.

North Korea, after noting South Korea’s economic development through introduction of Western technologies, decided “to spur development with large-scale buildup of manufacturing plants with Western equipment and financing,” he said.

Of the 16 countries that owe a total of $729 billion to Sweden, North Korea’s share accounts for 45 percent, according to the EKN Annual Report 2016. Cuba, which is the next largest debtor, owes $225 billion as of December 2016 and began making payments that year, the EKN report shows.

Experts on sovereign debt told VOA there aren’t many ways for nations to recover what they are owed by cash-strapped North Korea.

“No payment has been made since 1989,” Katarina Byrenius Roslund, deputy director of the Swedish Foreign Ministry’s press office, told VOA in an email.

“This is the largest claim that Sweden has on a single country,” Roslund wrote. “Responsibility for the claim now lies with the Swedish Export Credits Guarantee Board, which sends a reminder to North Korea every six months.”

Roslund said the Volvos “are no longer a common sight on Pyongyang’s streets, but the odd Volvo 144 is still rolling down the country roads, often as a taxi.”

Paths to spare parts

Volvo’s Fröberg said he did not know whether the original deal included spare parts for the cars. But because the model purchased in bulk by North Korea, the 144, “was sold all over the world, they might have had their ways to get hold of parts through various channels.”

North Korea owes money elsewhere in Europe. The Swiss government reports it has claims for $241 million as of December 2016. North Korea owes Finland and private Finnish businesses more than $35 million, according to a YLE Uutiset report. Pyongyang “ordered paper machines and other assorted equipment” in the 1970s, according to YLE.

Isabel Herkommer, media spokeswoman at Switzerland’s State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (SECO), told VOA via email that “Swiss Export Risk Insurance (SERV) has an agreement with North Korea, which exempts the country from payment at the moment.”

According to the SERV Annual Report 2016, the agency signed a new restructuring agreement with North Korea in October 2011. Herkommer wrote that “there has not been a debt settlement with North Korea,” and when asked whether the Swiss government considered waiving all or part of the debt owed by North Korea as Russia recently did, she said, “No, this has not been considered.”

Outi Homanen of Finnvera, Finland’s export credit agency, said “that although the debts were not paid [on] original due dates, there are no defaulted receivables at the moment.”

However, experts on sovereign debt and the international monetary system say that there aren’t many ways for countries to recover their claims from North Korea. In 2014, Russia forgave 90 percent of the nearly $11 billion in debt that it and the Soviet Union before it was owed by North Korea.

“International debt is typically thought of as having two enforcing mechanisms. The first is that if a country wants to be able to borrow more, it has to be repaying or have repaid its previous debts,” said Dane Rowlands, a professor of international affairs at Carleton University’s Norman Paterson School of International Affairs in Ottawa, Ontario. “Since North Korea seems happy not to engage officially with the international community and capital market, cutting them off is not a useful enforcement tool.”

Asset seizure

He added that seizing exposed assets is another option for lenders but one that would not be effective against North Korea.

Hamid Zangeneh is an economics professor at Widener University in Chester, Pennsylvania. An expert in the debt of economically developing nations, he said that in North Korea’s case, “it really doesn’t matter because it is not part of the international monetary system.”

Rowlands speculated that Switzerland and North Korea might have made a deal when they signed the debt restructuring agreement in 2011.

“Given the relatively few channels of international finances that North Korea has access to, I could see them doing a deal with Switzerland saying we [North Korea] will pay back a portion of the debt. … What that would end up doing is Switzerland forgives the rest of the debt and they don’t have claim on seizing North Korean deposits for example,” he said.

According to the SERV 2016 report, the Swiss agency had claims of 179.1 million Swiss Francs ($210 million) with North Korea as of the end of 2016. However, the report says the claims have been reduced to 17.9 million Swiss Francs ($21 million), or about 10 percent of the original claim.

SECO’s Herkommer said, “There has not been any debt cancellation. We cannot make any further comment.”

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US House of Representatives Approves a $4T Fiscal 2018 Bill

The U.S. House of Representatives Thursday approved a $4 trillion fiscal 2018 budget blueprint, a major step forward toward the introduction of a Republican tax cut bill.

The measure narrowly passed (216-212) despite last-minute resistance from the ranks of Republicans.

House passage makes enactment of an eventual tax bill more likely in the Senate, although decisions on numerous thorny issues lie ahead.

Approval of the budget resolution was a victory for President Donald Trump and Republican congressional leaders, who have vowed to rewrite the tax code, a feat that has not been accomplished in more than four decades.

“President Trump has always made cutting taxes for hard-working American families, creating more jobs for American workers, and simplifying the rigged and burdensome tax code a priority, and he looks forward to further cooperation with Congress to advance the Administration’s pro-growth and pro-jobs agenda,” the White House said in a statement.

Democrats oppose plan

The Republican plan is opposed by Democrats, who contend it would benefit primarily the wealthy and corporations.

“The struggle Republicans had in passing the budget shows how uncomfortable many of them are with eliminating the state and local deduction. In the weeks ahead, Democrats will do everything we can to preserve it and work to defeat any tax proposal that favors the wealthy few over the middle class many,” Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement.

 

 

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Ashley Judd Says A ‘Deal’ Helped Her Flee from Weinstein

Actress Ashley Judd says she escaped Harvey Weinstein’s sexual advances by making a deal.

She says she told him, yes, she would submit to him only after winning an Oscar in one of his movies.

 

Then she says she fled from his hotel room where, two decades ago, she had arrived as a young actress for what she thought would be a business meeting.

 

Appearing on Thursday’s “Good Morning America,” Judd says she remains of two minds about how she handled the confrontation. She says she feels ashamed. She also credits her snap decision as brilliant.

 

Judd was among the first of what has become dozens of women alleging sexual harassment or assault by Weinstein, who is now under criminal investigation for rape in London, New York and Los Angeles.

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AP Source: Drake Did Not Submit Latest Album to Grammys

Drake’s “More Life” album won’t earn him more Grammy Awards: The rapper didn’t submit the album for consideration at the 2018 Grammys.

 

A person close to the nomination process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person was not allowed to publicly talk about the topic, said the multi-platinum rapper did not submit “More Life” for album of the year or best rap album. The person also says Drake did not submit any of the songs from the album.

 

Drake has described “More Life” as a mixtape and playlist. Despite that, the album has sold more 2 million units and includes the Top 10 hits “Fake Love,” “Passionfruit” and “Portland.”

 

Representatives for Drake and the Grammys did not respond to emails seeking comment.

 

 

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Twitter Surprises With Third Quarter Earnings

Twitter is reporting a loss of $21.1 million in its third quarter, but turned in a better-than-expected profit when one-time charges and benefits are removed.

 

Shares of Twitter Inc. soared almost 9 percent before the opening bell Thursday.

 

The San Francisco company had a loss of 3 cents, but a gain of 10 cents if those non-re-occurring events are removed.  That’s 2 cents better than industry analysts had predicted, according to a survey by Zacks Investment Research.

 

Revenue was $589.6 million in the period, in line with expectations.

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Twitter Toughens Abuse Rules – and now has to Enforce Them

Twitter is enacting new policies around hate, abuse and ads, but creating new rules is only half the battle – the easy half.

The bigger problem is enforcement, and there the company has had some high-profile bungles recently. That includes its much-criticized suspension of actress Rose McGowan while she was speaking out against Harvey Weinstein, and the company’s ban, later reversed, of a controversial ad by a Republican Senate candidate.

 

The twists and turns suggest that Twitter doesn’t always communicate the intent of its rules to the people enforcing them. The company says it will be clearer about these policies and decisions in the future.

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Jessica Alba Reveals She’s Expecting Her First Baby Boy

Jessica Alba and husband Cash Warren are expecting their first baby boy.

 

The actress and Honest Company founder announced her pregnancy on Instagram in July and revealed on the platform Wednesday that the baby is a boy.

She chatted about her pregnancy later with Jimmy Fallon on “The Tonight Show.” Alba told Fallon she’s been trying to resist cravings for ice cream.

 

Alba and Warren have two daughters, Honor and Haven.

 

Alba most recently appeared as a judge alongside fellow actress-turned-entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow on the Apple Music summer series “Planet of the Apps.”

 

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Young Scientist Invents Device that Detects Lead in Water

What looks like clean drinking water can contain harmful chemicals, like lead, and there is no easy, reliable way to detect it. So, a young scientist invented one, in the process, winning the 2017 Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge. Faith Lapidus reports.

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Lung Transplant Recipient Singing Again

The extent to which organ transplants can allow recipients to not only survive but thrive was on display this week at a medical conference in the U.S. A former opera singer who received a double lung transplant five years ago returned to the stage, to sing with her donor’s daughter. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.

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Ancient Origami Art Becomes Engineers’ Dream in Space

Robert Salazar has been playing with origami, the Japanese art of paper folding, since he was 8 years old. When he sees a sheet of paper, his imagination takes over and intricate animals take shape.

“Seeing the single uncut sheet, it has everything you need to create all of the origami that have ever been folded. It is all in the single sheet so there is endless potential,” Salazar said.

The endless potential of origami, folding a single sheet of paper into an intricate sculpture, reaches all the way to space.

Salazar’s 17-year experience with origami is appreciated at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As a contractor and intern, Salazar is helping create objects that may one day be used in space exploration.

“Origami offers the potential to take a very large structure, even a vast structure, and you can get it to fit within the rocket, go up, then deploy back out again. So it greatly magnifies what we are capable of building in space,” Salazar said.

Folding a large object into a relatively small space is not a simple task.

“A big challenge in origami design in general is that because all of these folds share a single resource, which is a single sheet … everything is highly interdependent, so if you change just one feature it has an impact on everything else,” Salazar said.

“One of our guide stars really is keep it as simple as can be,” said Manan Arya, a technologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Don’t add unnecessary complexity because every piece of complexity, every piece of hardware you add, that ends up being another potential point of failure.”

Starshade

Folding an object the size of a baseball diamond so that it could fit into a rocket is the goal of a NASA project called Starshade.

Once it opens in space, Starshade would allow a space telescope to better see the planets around bright stars.

“Seeing an exoplanet next to its parent star is like trying to image a firefly next to a search light, the searchlight being the star,” said Arya, who is  working on the Starshade project. “Starshade seeks to block out that starlight so you can image a really faint exoplanet right next to it.”

Origami robot

Origami is also used in designing a robot called the Pop-Up Flat Folding Explorer Robot, or PUFFER. It has a body that can fold itself flat and roll under small spaces. PUFFER has been tested on desert terrains and snowy slopes. It may one day end up on a mission to another planet.

 

“It [PUFFER] is to explore environments otherwise inaccessible to a robot that could not fold itself to fit inside these cracks, [to] explore cave systems, could be other planets, even on our own,” Salazar said.

Origami antenna

Another application for space origami design is to pack an antenna into satellites the size of a briefcase, called CubeSats.

“The bigger the antenna you have, the more gain your antenna has, so it is useful to have a big antenna that gets packaged into this tiny space that unfolds out to be a large antenna. The biggest CubeSat antennas right now are about half a meter,” Arya said.

Unexplored territory

There are also largely unexplored surfaces that can utilize origami concepts in designing new technologies.

“So often, origami design has been tailored toward materials that are already lying flat,” Salazar said. “But there is actually a vastly, a much larger field of application for which the surfaces are not flat, so they could be parabolic. They could be spherical. They could be many combinations of doubly curved surfaces coming together. All of these things can also be folded.”

In the current origami-inspired technologies being developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, there is a graceful beauty to the folding and unfolding of designs such as the Starshade, which unfurls into what looks like a sunflower. In origami, Salazar said, art, science and engineering are only superficially different.

“Really, when it comes down to it, you’re looking at the world,” he said. “You’re making observations. You’re finding patterns in these observations. [You’re] developing an understanding of what you see, then using that understanding to create. And when you’re creating, [it] can either be creating with the intention of solving a physical problem or it could be nonphysical. It could be aesthetic. You’re trying to find a particular impact on people when they see your work. So really, the practice is the same.”

In origami, Salazar said art, science and engineering are quite similar. They draw on making observations and creating something that produces an impact.

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Ancient Art of Paper Folding Becomes Engineers’ Dream in Space

Paper folding known as origami is widely considered a Japanese art form. From a single piece of paper, an animal, a flower or even a boat can take shape. Besides the fun and artistic side of origami, the art of paper folding also has applications that can take it to outer space. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee has the details from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

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Photography Exhibit Highlights Human Trafficking

“Sorry, I’ll try not to cry,” said Janine Tkach as she gazes at one of about two dozen photographic images displayed in Washington’s busy Dupont Circle.

The pictures depict men, women and children who were victims of trafficking, either as sexual or labor slaves. Along with quotes from each of the subjects, the pictures challenge passers-by like Tkach to imagine the daily horrors and desperation of the victims.

“I was aware of the problem before, but it kind of hits home when you see it so visually like this exhibition,” said David, a tourist from London who did not give his last name. “Obviously some of these traffic victims are exploited to make products cheap.”

​The Bought and Sold exhibit is part of ArtWorks for Freedom, a grassroots effort to raise awareness of a problem that seems unreal in the 21st century. The U.S. Department of State estimates between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year. Millions more are enslaved within national borders.

Award-winning photographer Kay Chernush created the collage from her photos of trafficked persons.

“I was first introduced to the issue of human trafficking through an assignment I had for the State Department. This was back in 2005,” Chernush said. “I was sent to Hong Kong, Macau, Thailand, India and Italy to photograph all different kinds of human trafficking at that time.”

 

WATCH: Photography Exhibit Highlights Human Trafficking

Gripped by the human rights violations she saw, Chernush continued to work in different countries partnering with anti-trafficking NGOs. The first of her Bought and Sold exhibits was held in The Hague in 2009, before moving on to other cities in the Netherlands. That was the beginning of ArtWorks for Freedom. Since then, the exhibit has been shown in major cities in many parts of the world.

“If photography could be that powerful and not only in moving audience perceptions but also empowering survivors, why not bring in other arts besides photography?” asked Chernush.

Other artists join

Other artists joined the anti-trafficking campaign in their own mediums. Dance depicts the journey of trafficking victims from trauma to healing and recovery. 

“I think it makes a bigger impact through empathy. That’s what I’m trying to do with my dance piece,” said Erica Rebollar, director of Rebollar Dance. “It is to create an empathetic environment of the individual stories, and I think through that … that’s going to touch people even more than just reading dry facts.”

Rebollar choreographed part of a dance piece called “Strong in the Broken Places,” which was performed at the Dance Place in Washington D.C. as part of the campaign.

The Washington exhibit also presents art from migrant workers’ children and quilts made by trafficking survivors. Twelve golden doors transformed from battered wooden doors are a metaphor for reclaiming the victims’ lives.

“This is something that we can eradicate in our lifetimes, and everybody has a role to play,” Chernush said. “Everyone can do something.”

That message is not lost on Tkach, whose eyes well up as she studies the photographs in spite of her assurance she wouldn’t cry.

“I’m definitely glad I stopped,” she said. “And I hope that I’ll take more of this with me so that I can make a difference even if it’s just by abstaining from a practice or a clothing line or something that might actually hurt someone else.”

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