Just days after the announcement that the 4,400 year old tomb of a high-ranking priestess had been found in Egypt, comes word of an even older discovery in the country, from about 100 million years ago. Faith Lapidus tells us about the new species of dinosaur found in the western Egyptian desert.
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Month: February 2018
Casino Mogul Wynn Resigns After Sexual Misconduct Allegations
Billionaire casino mogul Steve Wynn has resigned as head of Wynn Resorts, less than two weeks after the Wall Street Journal published a report about decades of allegations of sexual misconduct.
The Journal article detailed several incidents in which Wynn allegedly pressured staff to perform sex acts. The allegations include those from a manicurist who claims she was forced to have sex with Wynn in 2005, shortly after he opened his flagship Wynn Las Vegas. The paper said she was later paid a $7.5 million settlement.
Wynn has denied the accusations, including again in a statement issued Tuesday announcing he was stepping down.
“In the last couple of weeks, I have found myself the focus of an avalanche of negative publicity. As I have reflected upon the environment this has created — one in which a rush to judgment takes precedence over everything else, including the facts — I have reached the conclusion I cannot continue to be effective in my current roles,” he said.
Wynn is a towering figure in the gambling world who helped revitalize Las Vegas with resorts such as The Bellagio, The Mirage and Treasure Island.
In addition to being a business mogul, Wynn also served as the finance chairman of the Republican National Committee before resigning from that post last month, and has been a large contributor to the Republican Party.
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‘Star Wars’ Films on Way from TV’s ‘Game of Thrones’ Creators
Disney on Tuesday announced it was expanding its “Star Wars” universe, hiring the creators behind HBO’s massive TV hit “Game of Thrones” to write a new series of films set in the galaxy far, far away.
The Walt Disney Co. said in a statement that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss would write and produce the new series, which will be separate from both the episodic Skywalker saga and the recently announced trilogy being developed by director Rian Johnson.
No release dates or plot details were given.
Shares in Disney, which also reported a quarterly profit that topped forecasts on Tuesday, rose nearly 3 percent in after hours trading.
Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilm, said in a statement that Benioff and Weiss’s “command of complex characters, depth of story and richness of mythology will break new ground and boldly push ‘Star Wars’ in ways I find incredibly exciting.”
Disney is also developing “a few” “Star Wars” television series for an upcoming streaming service from the company, Chief Executive Bob Iger said on a conference call.
In November, Disney had announced that Johnson, director of “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” would write and direct the first of a new trilogy of films in the sci-fi franchise that would bring new characters and worlds not yet explored on screen.
“The Last Jedi,” released in December 2017, has earned more than $1.3 billion at the global box office.
Disney had previously committed to making three standalone “Star Wars” films outside of the Skywalker saga. They include 2016’s “Rogue One,” and May 2018 release “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” which follows the origins of the roguish smuggler Han Solo, made famous by Harrison Ford in the original 1977 movie.
Fantasy “Game of Thrones”, based on novels by author George R.R. Martin, is a huge hit internationally for HBO and has won multiple awards. The seventh season last year was watched by some 30 million viewers in the United States alone.
The final season is due to be broadcast in 2019, bringing to a close the saga of the warring families in the fictional Seven Kingdoms of Westeros and their multi-generational struggle for control of the Iron Throne.
Benioff and Weiss said on Tuesday they had long been “Star Wars” fans.
“In the summer of 1977 we traveled to a galaxy far, far away, and we’ve been dreaming of it ever since,” they said in a statement. “We are honored by the opportunity, a little terrified by the responsibility, and so excited to get started as soon as the final season of Game of Thrones is complete.”
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Soaring Agave Prices Give Mexican Tequila Makers a Headache
In the heartland of the tequila industry, in Mexico’s western state of Jalisco, a worsening shortage of agave caused by mounting demand for the liquor from New York to Tokyo has many producers worried.
The price of Agave tequilana, the blue-tinged, spiky-leaved succulent used to make the alcoholic drink, has risen six-fold in the past two years, squeezing smaller distillers’ margins and leading to concerns that shortages could hit even the larger players.
In front of a huge metal oven that cooks agave for tequila, one farmer near the town of Amatitan said he had been forced to use young plants to compensate for the shortage of fully grown agave, which take seven to eight years to reach maturity.
He asked not to be identified because he did not want his clients to know he was using immature plants.
The younger plants produce less tequila, meaning more plants have to be pulled up early from a limited supply – creating a downward spiral.
“They are using four-year-old plants because there aren’t any others. I can guarantee it because I have sold them,” said Marco Polo Magdaleno, a worried grower in Guanajuato, one of the states allowed to produce tequila according to strict denomination of origin rules.
More than a dozen tequila industry experts interviewed by Reuters said that the early harvesting will mean the shortage is even worse in 2018.
Already, the 17.7 million blue agaves planted in 2011 in Mexico for use this year fall far short of the 42 million the industry needs to supply 140 registered companies, according to figures from the Tequila Regulatory Council (CRT) and the National Tequila Industry Chamber (CNIT).
The shortages are likely to continue until 2021, as improved planting strategies take years to bear fruit, according to producers.
The result is agave prices at 22 pesos ($1.18) per kilo – up from 3.85 pesos in 2016.
Those higher prices mean that low-cost tequila producers, which make a cheaper, less pure drink that once dominated the market, find it harder to compete with premium players.
“It doesn’t make sense for tequila to be a cheap drink because agave requires a big investment,” said Luis Velasco, CNIT’s president.
Small-scale distillers of quality tequilas are also feeling the pinch and some warn that drinkers are seeking alternative tipples.
“At more than 20 pesos per kilo, it’s impossible to compete with other spirits like vodka and whisky,” said Salvador Rosales, manager of smaller producer Tequila Cascahuin, in El Arenal, a rural town in Jalisco.
“If we continue like this a lot of companies will disappear,” he said.
Exports to the United States of pure tequila jumped by 198 percent over the past decade, while cheaper blended tequila exports rose by just 11 percent, CNIT data shows.
Over the same time, Mexican production declined 4 percent, with blended tequila leading the fall.
Global Demand
As it sheds its image as a fiery booze drunk by desperados and fratboys, while moving into the ranks of top-shelf liquors, the tequila industry has seen a flurry of deals in recent years.
In January, Bacardi Ltd. said it would buy fine tequila maker Patron Spirits International for $5.1 billion.
In 2017, after years of speculation, Mexico’s Beckmann family launched an initial public offering of Jose Cuervo, raising more than $900 million.
And Britain’s Diageo Plc swapped its Bushmills Irish whiskey label for full ownership of the high-end Don Julio tequila in 2014.
The question posed by many distillers is how to keep pace with tequila’s success.
“The growth has overtaken us. It’s a crisis of success of the industry,” said Francisco Soltero, director of strategic planning at Patron, which buys agave under various contracts.
“We thought that we were going to grow a certain amount, and we’re growing double,” he said.
Large sellers such as Patron and Tequila Sauza say they have not experienced problems paying for agave, and forecast that their inventories will keep growing.
“If you sell value, the costs don’t worry you,” Soltero said.
Tequila Sauza, which mostly grows its own agave, does not foresee supply problems, chief executive Servando Calderon said.
But some think it is simply a matter of time before the higher production costs and scarcity pressures bigger players.
“We are sure this will have a strong impact on the big firms such as Cuervo or Sauza,” said Raul Garcia, President of the National Committee for Agave Production in Tequila, a group that includes most agave producers in the country.
“We don’t see that the problem will be resolved soon, and that’s what worries us.”
Demand is also being driven by other, fashionable agave-derived products, including agave syrup and health supplement inulin, which use the equivalent of 20 percent of the plants needed in 2018, the CRT said.
And rising prices are leading to growing theft, driving out smaller producers, said Jose de Jesus, a producer of blue agave in Tepatitlan. Criminals come to the area with large trucks in the middle of the night to steal agave, he said.
According to the CRT last year 15,000 plants were reported stolen, more than triple the number in 2016.
($1 = 18.7096 Mexican pesos)
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Peru Defends China as Good Trade Partner After US Warnings
Peru’s trade minister defended China as a good trade partner on Tuesday, after U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned Latin American countries against excessive reliance on economic ties with the Asian powerhouse.
Eduardo Ferreyros said Peru’s 2010 trade liberalization deal with China had allowed the Andean nation of about 30 million people to post a $2.74 billion trade surplus with Beijing last year.
“China is a good trade partner,” Ferreyros told foreign media, as Tillerson met with President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski in Lima, a stop on Tillerson’s five-nation Latin American tour.
“We’re happy with the results of the trade agreement.”
The remarks were the Peruvian government’s first signal since Tillerson’s warning that it does not share Washington’s concerns about growing Chinese influence in the region.
Before kicking off his trip to Latin America on Friday, Tillerson suggested that China could become a new imperial power in the region, and accused it of deploying unfair trade practices.
“I appreciate advice, no matter where it comes from. But we’re careful with all of our trade relations,” Ferreyros said, when asked about Tillerson’s remarks.
Ferreyros also praised Peru’s trade relationship with Washington, despite a trade deficit with the United States. “I’m not afraid of trade deficits,” Ferreyros said.
Since China first overtook the United States as Peru’s biggest trade partner in 2011, thanks mostly to its appetite for Peru’s metals exports, bilateral trade has surged and diplomatic ties have tightened.
Kuczynski, a former Wall Street banker, made a point of visiting China before any other nation on his first official trip abroad as president in 2016.
Under former president Barack Obama, the United States had hoped to counter China’s rise in the fast-growing Asia-Pacific region, which includes large parts of Latin America, with the sweeping Trans-Pacific trade deal known as the TPP.
While President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the TPP upon taking office, the 11 remaining signatories, including Peru and Japan, have struck a similar deal that they plan to sign without the United States in March.
Tillerson, who left Peru for Colombia on Tuesday, said on Monday that Trump was open to evaluating the benefits of the United States joining the so-called TPP-11 pact in the future, which Ferreyros called “a good sign.”
All countries in the Asia-Pacific region, including China, were welcome to join TPP-11, Ferreyros said. “But the deal has closed and countries that want to join obviously can’t renegotiate the whole agreement,” he added.
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Second Man Undergoes Gene Editing; Therapy Has No Safety Flags So Far
A second patient has been treated in a historic gene editing study in California, and no major side effects or safety issues have emerged from the first man’s treatment nearly three months ago, doctors said Tuesday.
Gene editing is a more precise way to do gene therapy, and it aims to permanently change someone’s DNA to try to cure a disease.
In November, Brian Madeux, 44, became the first person to have gene editing inside the body for a metabolic disease called Hunter syndrome that’s caused by a bad gene. Through an IV, he received many copies of a corrective gene and a genetic tool to put it in a precise spot in his DNA.
“He’s doing well and we were approved to go ahead with the second patient, who also is doing well,” said Dr. Paul Harmatz of UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland, who treated both men for the same disease.
At a medical conference in San Diego, Harmatz reported safety results for the first six weeks after Madeux’s treatment. Sangamo Therapeutics, the company that makes the gene editing tool called zinc finger nucleases, said more safety information and initial results on effectiveness should come by midyear.
Problems faded
Madeux had dizziness, cold sweats and weakness four days after the treatment but they went away on their own in a day, Harmatz said. Madeux also had a severe cough and a partially collapsed lung, but these were deemed unrelated to the gene therapy because he had had similar problems previously.
It was important that there were no signs of harm to his liver.
“That’s the big worry,” because changes in the liver might mean the immune system was fighting the treatment and possibly undermining its effectiveness, Harmatz said.
The liver results were welcome news after some other recent reports caused alarm. A prominent gene therapy scientist, Dr. James Wilson of the University of Pennsylvania, published two studies reporting liver and other serious problems in monkeys and piglets that were given experimental gene therapies. Several had to be euthanized.
The animal studies tested very high intravenous doses of a therapy that used a certain virus to carry the gene into cells. Relatives of this virus are widely used in human gene therapies, but Wilson said he did not believe that the results in animals had any bearing on use of lower doses, different types of the virus, or therapies given in different ways such as a shot.
Neuromuscular disorders
The results might mean it will be harder to develop gene therapies for some neuromuscular disorders — higher doses in the animal studies were thought necessary to get the therapy into the brain and throughout muscles.
The Sangamo study that Madeux is in used much lower doses of a different type of the virus.
Wilson said it was important to the field that any safety concerns be published quickly. He helped lead a very early gene therapy experiment that killed a teen in 1999, putting some other studies on hold for years.
An editorial in the journal HumanGeneTherapy, which published one of Wilson’s animal studies, said gene therapy experiments should not stop, because that might deprive patients of potentially lifesaving treatments.
In the last year, the first gene therapies were approved in the United States to treat cancer and an inherited form of blindness.
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‘Black Panther’ Gets Superhero Reception From Critics
Black Panther, the first black standalone Marvel superhero movie, won rave reviews Tuesday, with critics praising both its sense of adventure and its portrayal of a majestic Africa.
Directed by Ryan Coogler and featuring a predominantly black cast including Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong’o and Angela Bassett, Black Panther was hailed by The Daily Beast as “a love letter to every black person” and “a correction for years of diversity neglect” by Rolling Stone.
The Disney movie, opening worldwide next week, tells the story of T’Challa, the newly crowned king of the fictional, technologically advanced African nation Wakanda, who is challenged from factions within his own country.
The movie arrives after years of criticism about the under representation of actors and filmmakers of color in Hollywood, including the #OscarsSoWhite campaign that prompted the Academy of Motion Pictures to increase diversity in its predominantly while, male membership.
It got a rare 100 percent rating from review aggregator RottenTomatoes.com and analysts expect it to bring in $150 million at the North American box office on its opening weekend.
The New York Times said the film “creates wonder with great flair and feeling” while having a story that “has far more going for it than branding.”
Best Marvel, ‘by far’
Entertainment Weekly said the movie’s “nuanced celebration of pride and identity and personal responsibility” was the movie’s “own true superpower.”
IndieWire called it “the best Marvel movie so far, by far.”
USA Today said that along with the fantastical elements of the film and its James Bond-style spycraft, Black Panther was extremely grounded in “dealing with the consequences of age-old colonialism and exploring isolation at a time when actual countries are building borders rather than breaking them down.”
Business Insider said that Black Panther arrived at a perfect time. “Like Wonder Woman last year, Black Panther is a project that fans have been waiting decades to see. And just like Wonder Woman, it was worth the wait.”
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Skiing’s Origins Being Preserved in Remote Western China
On the western edge of China, Sulita straps on his skis and heads out into a winter morning. The temperature is -30 degrees Celsius (-22 Fahrenheit).
For much of the year, skiing is the only way to get around Khom, a village of wooden cabins heated by earthen stoves, five hours’ drive from the nearest major town in the northern Altay region of Xinjiang.
The design of skis such as the ones used by Sulita, who like many people in this region uses just one name, has barely changed for centuries. The bottoms of the skis are covered with horsehide, and shoes are tied on with leather rope.
The direction of the horse hair allows the skis to slide forward, while preventing them from slipping backward when traveling uphill.
“I’ve been up the highest mountains with these,” Sulita said. “When I was young, we used the horsehide skis a lot, for hunting or if we lost a cow or sheep.”
Xinjiang is a volatile region where hundreds of people have been killed in recent years in violence between Uighurs, a mostly Muslim people, and ethnic majority Han Chinese. Most of the violence, which Beijing blames on Islamist militants, has been in the far south of the region, rather than its far north.
Cave paintings discovered in Altay — today home to a mixture of ethnic Tuvans and Kazakhs — show rows of figures standing on what look like skis, with herds of animals running below them.
Archaeologists have dated the paintings as 10,000 to 30,000 years old, according to Chinese ski historian Shan Zhaojian.
That would date them as much older than archaeological findings of skiing in Russia, cited by the International Ski Federation, the sport’s governing body, as coming from 6,300 to 5,000 BC.
“It’s the earliest in the world, that’s for sure,” said Shan. “I’ve got a total of 10 pieces of evidence that can prove this.”
China is keen to cash in on this historical connection.
The country is set to host the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing and wants 300 million Chinese involved in winter sports before then.
With Shan’s help, the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region government has organized races using traditional skis and recognizes skiing as a cultural heritage.
Still, the practice is slowly dying out.
Forty minutes outside Altay city, the regional capital, Slanbek, still makes skis, but today they are just for show.
“You can’t hunt anymore, you can’t cut down trees, so there’s not much use for them,” he said, referring to official bans on both practices.
Instead, much of Altay has embraced modern skiing. At the General’s Mountain resort, Mongolian folk-metal and Adele blast out over loudspeakers as children as young as 5 zip down the slopes.
Its abundant snow and mountains make this region one of the best places for skiing in the country, and instructors hope some of the children training here might become Olympians.
Whether the use of horsehide skis survives will depend on the younger generation in the remote villages around Khom.
As the sun peeks over the mountains into valleys around Khom, Namujel, 13, races on his horsehide skis against his neighbor and friend Mieergenku, 12, who is using modern skis.
There’s no competition, Mieergenku zooms past, the clear winner.
But for Namujel it doesn’t matter.
“We can’t just give up on the horsehair skis. We have to pass them on to the next generation,” he said.
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In Puerto Rico, Housing Crisis US Storm Aid Won’t Solve
Among the countless Puerto Rico neighborhoods battered by Hurricane Maria is one named after another storm: Villa Hugo. The illegal shantytown emerged on a public wetland after 1989’s Hurricane Hugo left thousands homeless.
About 6,000 squatters landed here, near the El Yunque National Forest, and built makeshift homes on 40 acres that span a low-lying valley and its adjacent mountainside. Wood and concrete dwellings, their facades scrawled with invented addresses, sit on cinder blocks. After Maria, many are missing roofs; some have collapsed altogether.
Amid the rubble, 59-year-old Joe Quirindongo sat in the sun one recent day on a wooden platform — the only remaining piece of his home. Soft-spoken with weathered skin and a buzzcut, Quirindongo pondered his limited options.
“I know this isn’t a good place for a house,” said Quirindongo, who survives on U.S. government assistance. “Sometimes I would like to go to another place, but I can’t afford anything.”
Villa Hugo reflects a much larger crisis in this impoverished U.S. territory, where so-called “informal” homes are estimated to house about half the population of 3.4 million.
Some residents built on land they never owned. Others illegally subdivided properties, often so family members could build on their lots.
Most have no title to their homes, which are constructed without permits and usually not up to building codes. The houses range in quality and size, from one-room shacks to sizable family homes. Many have plumbing and power, though not always through official means.
The concentration of illegal housing presents a vexing dilemma for local and federal authorities already overwhelmed by the task of rebuilding an economically depressed island after its worst natural disaster in nine decades.
Puerto Rico Governor Ricardo Rosselló has stressed the need to “build back better,” a sentiment echoed by U.S. disaster relief and housing officials. But rebuilding to modern standards or relocating squatters to new homes would take an investment far beyond reimbursing residents for lost property value.
It’s an outlay Puerto Rico’s government says it can’t afford, and which U.S. officials say is beyond the scope of their funding and mission. Yet the alternative — as Villa Hugo shows — is to encourage rebuilding of the kind of substandard housing that made the island so vulnerable to Maria in the first place.
“It’s definitely a housing crisis,” said Fernando Gil, Puerto Rico’s housing secretary. “It was already out there before, and the hurricane exacerbates it.”
In Puerto Rico, housing is by far the largest category of storm destruction, estimated by the island government at about $37 billion, with only a small portion covered by insurance.
That’s more than twice the government’s estimate for catastrophic electric grid damage, which was made far worse by the shoddy state of utility infrastructure before the storm.
Puerto Rico officials did not respond to questions about how the territory estimated the damage to illegally built homes.
Maria destroyed or significantly damaged more than a third of about 1.2 million occupied homes on the island, the government estimates. Most of those victims had no hazard insurance — which is only required for mortgage-holders in Puerto Rico — and no flood insurance. Just 344,000 homes on the island have mortgages, according U.S. Census Bureau data.
Officials at the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Small Business Administration (SBA) acknowledged the unique challenges of delivering critical housing aid to Puerto Rico. Among them: calculating the damage to illegal, often substandard homes; persuading storm victims to follow through on application processes that have frustrated many into giving up; and allocating billions in disaster aid that still won’t be nearly enough solve the island’s housing crisis.
By far the most money for Puerto Rico housing aid is expected to come from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
HUD spokeswoman Caitlin Thompson declined to comment on how the agency would spend billions of dollars in disaster relief funds to rebuild housing, or how it planned to help owners of informally built homes. Two HUD officials overseeing the agency’s Puerto Rico relief efforts, Todd Richardson and Stan Gimont, also declined to comment.
But the disaster aid package currently under consideration by the U.S. Congress would provide far less housing aid than Puerto Rico officials say they need. Governor Rosselló is seeking $46 billion in aid from HUD, an amount that dwarfs previous allocations for even the most destructive U.S. storms.
That’s nearly half the island’s total relief request of $94 billion.
The U.S. House of Representatives instead passed a package of $81 billion, with $26 billion for HUD, that still needs Senate and White House approval. The money would be divided between regions struck by several 2017 hurricanes — including Maria, Harvey in Texas and Irma in Florida — as well as the recent California wildfires. Congress could also decide to approve additional aid later.
‘My mother is scared’
A generation ago, Maria Vega Lastra, now 61, was among the estimated 28,000 people displaced by Hurricane Hugo. Neighbors helped her build a new home in what would become Villa Hugo, in the town of Canóvanas.
Her daughter, 34-year-old Amadaliz Diaz, still recalls her older brother grinning as he sawed wood for the frame of their self-built, one-floor house, with a porch and three bedrooms.
Now, Vega Lastra’s roof has holes in it, and her waterlogged wooden floorboards buckle with each step.
Vega Lastra has been staying with her daughter, who lives in Tampa, as the family waits on applications for FEMA aid. The agency initially denied her application in December, saying it could not contact her by phone, Diaz said.
Vega Lastra is returning to her home this week, uncertain if its condition has gotten worse. Her daughter bought her an air mattress to take with her.
“My mother is scared,” Diaz said. “I hope the government helps her. I work, but I have three kids to take care of.” The island’s housing crisis long predated the storm.
According to Federal Housing Finance Agency data, Puerto Rico’s index of new home prices fell 25 percent over the last decade, amid a severe recession that culminated last May in the largest government bankruptcy filing in U.S. history.
Legal home construction, meanwhile, plummeted from nearly 16,000 new units in 2004 to less than 2,500 last year, according to consultancy Estudios Tecnicos, an economic data firm.
A 2007 study by environmental consultant Interviron Services Inc., commissioned by the Puerto Rico Builders Association, found that 55 percent of residential and commercial construction was informal. That would work out to nearly 700,000 homes.
That figure might be high, said David Carrasquillo, president of the Puerto Rico Planning Society, a trade group representing community planners. But even a “every conservative” estimate would yield at least 260,000 illegally built houses, he said.
Generations of Puerto Rican governments never made serious efforts to enforce building codes to stop new illegal housing, current and former island officials said in interviews. Past administrations had little political or economic incentive to force people out of neighborhoods like Villa Hugo.
Former Governor Rafael Hernandez Colon, in office during Hurricane Hugo, said he tried to help informal homeowners without policing them.
“Our policy was not to relocate, but rather improve those places,” Hernandez Colon said in an interview.
Subsequent administrations advocated similar policies; none made meaningful headway, partly because of Puerto Rico’s constant political turnover.
Today, informal communities provide a stark contrast to San Juan’s glittering resorts and bustling business districts. San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulin Cruz pointed to poor barrios like those near the city’s Martín Peña Channel, hidden behind the skyscrapers of the financial hub known as the Golden Mile.
“It’s not something I’m proud of, but we hide our poverty here,” Cruz said in an interview.
Recovery dilemma
The task of rebuilding Puerto Rico’s housing stock ultimately falls to the territory government, which has no ability to pay for it after racking up $120 billion in bond and pension debt in the years before the storm.
That leaves the island dependent on U.S. relief from FEMA, the SBA and HUD.
The SBA offers low-interest home repair loans of up to $200,000. FEMA provides homeowners with emergency grants, relocation assistance and other help. HUD is focused on long-term rebuilding efforts, working directly with local agencies to subsidize reconstruction through grants.
FEMA’s cap for disaster aid to individuals is $33,300, and actual awards are often much lower. Normally, FEMA eligibility for housing aid requires proving property ownership, but the agency says it will help owners of informal homes if they can prove residency.
How exactly to help gets complicated. For example, someone who builds their own home with no permits on land they own is more likely to be treated as a homeowner, said Justo Hernandez, FEMA’s deputy federal coordinating officer. Squatters who built on land they didn’t own, however, would likely only be given money to cover lost items and relocate to a rental, he said.
Several Villa Hugo residents said they received money from FEMA, but many didn’t know what it was for and complained it wasn’t enough.
Lourdes Rios Romero, 59, plans to appeal the $6,000 grant she got for repairs to her flooded home, citing a much higher contractor’s quote. Neighbor Miguel Rosario Lopez, a 62-year-old retiree, showed a statement from FEMA saying he was eligible for $916.22, “to perform essential repairs that will allow you to live in your home.”
Without money for major changes, most homeowners said they planned to combine the aid they might get from FEMA with what little money they could raise to rebuild in the same spot.
FEMA does not police illegal building. Code enforcement is left to the same local authorities who have allowed illegal construction to persist for years.
Quirindongo is planning to buy materials to rebuild his Villa Hugo home himself with about $4,000 from FEMA. It will be the third time he has done so, having lost one home to a 2011 flood, another to a fire.
“I just want to have something that I can say, ‘This is mine,’” Quirindongo said.
Giving up
Many others appear to have given up on FEMA aid because the agency’s application process is entangled with a separate process for awarding SBA loans to rebuild homes.
FEMA is legally bound to assess whether applicants might qualify for SBA loans before awarding them FEMA grants. If an applicant passes FEMA’s cursory eligibility assessment, they are automatically referred to SBA for a more thorough screening.
Applicants are not required to follow through on the SBA process — but they cannot qualify for FEMA aid unless they do.
FEMA only provides a grant when the SBA denies the applicant a loan.
FEMA said it has referred about 520,000 people out of 1.1 million total applicants so far to the SBA. But as of Monday, only 59,000 followed through with SBA applications. Of those, some 12,000 later withdrew, SBA data shows.
“As soon as people see SBA they say, ‘I give up, I don’t want a loan — I can’t afford a loan,’” FEMA’s Hernandez said.
SBA spokeswoman Carol Chastang said the agency is working with FEMA to educate flood victims on available benefits and the application process, including sending staffers to applicants’ homes.
330,000 vacant homes
Before the storm hit, Puerto Rico already had about 330,000 vacant homes, according to Census Bureau 2016 estimates, resulting from years of population decline as citizens migrated to the mainland United States and elsewhere. Puerto Ricans are American citizens and can move to the mainland at will.
Puerto Rico and federal officials have considered rehabilitating the vacant housing for short- and long-term use, along with building new homes and buying out homeowners in illegally built neighborhoods, according to Gil and federal officials.
Rosselló, the Puerto Rican governor, has said the rebuilding plan must include a fleet of properly built new homes. Gil, the housing secretary, said the administration would like to build as many as 70,000 properties.
HUD officials declined to comment on whether the agency would finance new housing. Its Community Development Block Grant program allows for local governments to design their own solutions and seek HUD approval for funding.
The cost of constructing enough new, code-compliant properties to house people displaced by Maria could far exceed the available federal aid. Making them affordable also presents a problem.
Puerto Rico’s subsidized “social interest housing,” geared toward low-income buyers, typically provides units that sell in the mid-$100,000 range, with prices capped by the government.
That’s beyond the means of many displaced storm victims.
Gil offered little detail on a solution beyond saying it will include a mix of new development, buyout programs for owners of illegally built homes and other options.
The answer will come down to how much Washington is willing to pay, he said. He invoked the island’s territorial status and colonial history as a root cause of its poor infrastructure and housing stock before the storm.
“It is precisely because we have been neglected by the federal government that the island’s infrastructure is so weak,” he said.
Many Puerto Rico officials continue to advocate for bringing relief and legitimacy to squatter communities like Villa Hugo, rather than trying to relocate their residents.
Canóvanas Mayor Lornna Soto has been negotiating with island officials to provide property titles to Villa Hugo’s population.
The vast majority still don’t have them.
“It’s long overdue to recognize that they are not going anywhere and their communities need to be rebuilt with proper services,” Soto said.
Diaz said she supports her mother’s decision to return to Villa Hugo, regardless of what aid the government ultimately provides.
“I grew up there,” Diaz said. “Everyone knows us there.”
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Wall Street Roars Back, Traders Eye Volatility Ahead
Shaken out of many months of calm, Wall Street braced for a higher level of volatility in the days ahead, after a roughly 2 percent rebound in U.S. stocks on Tuesday followed the biggest one-day selloff in more than six years.
The question that vexed traders: were the wild swings of the past two days the start of a deeper move down or just clearing the way to the resumption of the aging bull market, which would turn nine on March 9.
“Today’s market action is a classic of a market that has searched for a bottom,” said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at First Standard Financial In New York, who predicted a rebound back to record levels.
Bulls argue that strong U.S. corporate earnings, including a boost from the Trump administration’s tax cuts, will ultimately support market valuations. Bears, including short sellers that bet on the market decline, say that the market is over-stretched in the context of rising bond yields as central banks withdraw their easy money policies of recent years.
“The markets went into being religiously over-bought to deeply over-sold in a matter of four trading days,” said Adam Sarhan, chief executive of 50 Park Investments, an investment advisory service. “New buyers are showing up, who were waiting for the prices to go down.”
Tuesday’s wild trading session saw the Dow swing more than 1,100 points from its low to its high and ended with the benchmark S&P 500 tallying its best day since just before President Donald Trump’s November 2016 election.
“I don’t think the volatility is over,” said JJ Kinahan, chief market strategist at TD Ameritrade in Chicago. “These types of moves tend to take about three weeks to get through the system … and volatility just doesn’t suddenly settle down.”
Investors were eyeing the recent steep slide as an opportunity, an extreme example of the “buying the dip” that has symbolized the market’s steady climb to record highs.
“We’ve been looking at this as an opportunity to incrementally add a little bit of risk – not get over our skis, but a little bit,” said Erin Browne, head of asset allocation at UBS Asset Management in New York.
During the trading day, stocks swung from negative to positive after indexes started the session 2 percent lower. The S&P 500 ended 6.2 percent below its Jan. 26 peak.
The sharp declines in recent days marked a pullback that had been long awaited by investors after the market minted record high after record high in a relatively calm ascent.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 567.02 points, or 2.33 percent, to 24,912.77, the S&P 500 gained 46.2 points, or 1.74 percent, to 2,695.14 and the Nasdaq Composite added 148.36 points, or 2.13 percent, to 7,115.88.
After the end of regular trading on Tuesday, S&P 500 e-mini futures were down 0.4 percent.
Technology, materials and consumer discretionary were the top-performing sectors on Tuesday. Defensive sectors utilities and real estate were the only major S&P groups to end negative.
Apple climbed 4.2 percent, while Microsoft and Amazon gained 3.8 percent each.
The U.S. stock market has climbed to record peaks since Trump’s election on the prospect of tax cuts and corporate deregulation as well as optimism over corporate earnings.
The S&P 500 remains up 26 percent since his election, and on Tuesday clawed back into positive territory for 2018, up 0.8 percent.
“We had gone very far, very fast,” Matthew Cheslock, a trader at Virtu Financial, said from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. “But I don’t think anyone expected the velocity or the ferocity that we saw on the downside.”
The market’s pullback came amid concerns about rising bond yields and higher inflation. These were reinforced by Friday’s January U.S. jobs report that prompted worries the Federal Reserve will raise benchmark interest rates at a faster pace than expected this year.
Traders had speculated that Monday’s selling was spurred by automated programs, and had called Monday’s session busy but orderly.
Market experts also attributed the selloff, including the overnight slide in S&P 500 futures, to the violent unwind of a trade betting on volatility in U.S. stocks staying low as the CBOE Volatility index, known as the VIX, notched its biggest one-day jump on Monday in over two years.
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton said he “can’t really say” what caused the dramatic drop in stock prices during recent trading sessions, but that all signs indicate financial markets are functioning normally.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said recent volatility was not enough to rock market fundamentals.
Tuesday’s rebound came a day after a steep selloff that brought the biggest percentage daily declines for the S&P 500 and the Dow since August 2011 and a near 1,600 point intraday loss for the Dow.
Trading volume of more than 12.3 billion shares marked the busiest trading day since just after the November 2016 election, and topped Monday’s volume of 11.7 billion.
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Will Disney’s Streaming Service Roar — Or Squeak?
Will Disney’s upcoming streaming services be the mouse that roared … or squeaked?
Disney already owns enviable entertainment properties including Pixar, Marvel and Star Wars. Now, it’s looking to add Fox’s TV and movie studios as it prepares to launch two streaming services, one for sports and another focused on entertainment.
In announcing first-quarter earnings Tuesday, CEO Bob Iger said he was “excited about what lies ahead” including the sports streaming service and the pending deal for Fox. Adjusted income of $1.89 per share beat analyst expectations, as did revenue of $15.35 billion, a 4 percent increase.
But the same financial report hints at trouble with the lucrative ESPN cable channel. Revenue in the cable networks business fell 1 percent to $4.5 billion, hurt by an ESPN revenue decline. The ESPN decline resulted from lower ad revenue, though that was partly offset by growth in fees from cable distributors and lower programming costs.
Disney announced a $5-a-month price for the ESPN Plus streaming service, which is coming this spring.
The services represent Disney’s big bet on what the next generation of entertainment will look like: more streaming and more choices. A streaming business is critical for Disney because the ESPN channel has been losing subscribers as more people ditch cable and satellite TV services and stream video on Netflix, Amazon and Hulu instead.
While Disney is trying to brace for the future with the streaming services, questions remain about whether they will offer enough to take on well-established services such as Netflix.
Rich Greenfield of BTIG Research said the ESPN streaming service seems more like a niche offering because it won’t have any content from the ESPN channel.
Stuck in the past?
And while the Disney-branded entertainment service could be a hit, with classic and upcoming movies from the studio, shows from Disney Channel, and the Star Wars, Marvel and Pixar movies, that service isn’t launching until late 2019.
“Our fear is that they’re just not all in on streaming,” Greenfield said. “If they want to be successful, they have to bring all their content to streaming.”
Instead, he said, Disney is dipping its toes in streaming while trying to preserve its traditional business models.
To boost revenue from theatrical screenings, studios such as Disney typically wait months to sell or rent movies on DVDs and a year to make them available through subscription services such as HBO. But such a timeline is quickly becoming a relic of the past. People now expect things immediately, like being able to watch a Disney movie on an Xbox right after it is released in the theater.
“That’s very hard to balance and be successful,” Greenfield said.
The Fox factor
The Fox content could help give viewers more reason to subscribe to yet another streaming service. Disney has offered $52.4 billion to buy the bulk of 21st Century Fox in a deal expected to close in the next 12 to 18 months. When that happens, Disney will own the Fox movie and television studios, cable TV networks such as FX and National Geographic, and 22 regional sports networks.
But many of the movies and shows from those businesses are already licensed out in the short term; for example, HBO gets Fox movies until 2022.
RBC Capital Markets analyst Steven Cahall is more positive about the prospects. Notably, Disney gets Fox’s share in Hulu, giving it a controlling stake. Cahall said the Fox video will help both Hulu and the upcoming Disney-branded streaming service.
“Disney is likely to be a global player in streaming in the coming years given the breadth and depth of its content,” he said.
In a call with investors, CEO Iger offered some details on what Disney’s streaming service might look like once it launches in late 2019.
He said Disney will “have an opportunity to spend more” on original programs for the service, but won’t have to be as aggressive as Netflix because Disney already has popular brands like Marvel and Pixar. He said the company is developing original shows around Star Wars, High School Musical and Pixar’s Monsters Inc.
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Drake Makes Surprise Visit to Miami School, Shoots Video
Drake had no trouble drawing crowds as he visited Miami to shoot a music video.
Images shared by fans on social media show Miami Senior High students singing along as Drake performs “God’s Plan” from a crane above the school’s baseball field. A drone captured Monday’s surprise concert by the rap superstar.
The Miami Herald reports that before he left, Drake gave the school a $25,000 check and said he would help design new school uniforms. School alum Edgar Grant Santiago rushed over when a friend told him of the visit, and said “that was truly God’s plan to bless the school.”
Drake also gave an impromptu concert at the University of Miami, where he awarded a $50,000 scholarship to a lucky student.
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Robots Replacing Workers Is Nothing New
From mowing the grass and cleaning windows to making deliveries at hotels and hospitals, even child and elder care, robots of all shapes and sizes are doing things humans have been doing for years.
These types of machines can also do things humans cannot.
“It can work all day, 24 hours a day, and it doesn’t get emotional. It’s always welcoming with a smile,” said Simon Wang of the Beijing Canny Unisboro Technology Co. Ltd.
He said the machines’ ability to work around the clock makes them cheaper than hiring a human employee.
“It will be the cheapest member of your team for sure,” said Steve Cousins of Savioke, a company that makes hotel and hospital delivery robots for rent around the world.
A Chinese-made, Mandarin-speaking robot named UU is already working in the service industry. He dances, tells jokes and provides information.
“For example, it can be a shopping center, hotel, restaurant, some convention centers, galleries as a guide…,” Wang said, adding the UU robot is already working in China “in a hospital setting, in a clinic, to diagnose problems and to answer some medical questions.”
Adapting technology
Adapting technology to perform humans’ work is nothing new.
“Go back to ploughs or go back to tractors, those are the beginning of adding technology to work to make workers more productive. A spreadsheet is not smarter than you, but it is faster at calculations. It’s just different, and so when you put a spreadsheet in an accountant’s hands, you make that accountant much, much more productive. The same thing with robots,” Cousins said.
Robots are getting smarter. A demonstration at the Consumer Electronics Show last month showed a robot playing the English word game Scrabble against a human opponent, and winning.
“Its (the robot’s) main point is not to replace people’s jobs. It is to help people do really complicated work,” said Hu Ji Ping of the Industrial Technology Research Institute.
In addition to doing complicated work, robots are also doing dull, dirty and dangerous work.
A robot called RoboMantis can do unsavory work, so a person does not have to be in those situations.
“Confined spaces, refinery tank cleaning, things like that where you can really take advantage of a robot that can go in and work for hours on end without endangering a human in those situations,” said Chris Thayer of California-based Motiv Robotics that makes the RoboMantis.
Robots can also do work that is so repetitive, such as in agriculture, that no one wants to do it, Thayer said.
“…picking, maintenance, a lot of things of that kind, caring for the plants themselves in a certain very specific way that needs to be done, and they aren’t getting those workers in regardless of seasonal, not seasonal, whatever it may be. It’s just a labor shortage,” Thayer said.
“I guess there are people who do just put a plug in a hole one after the other, all day long. Those people have already been replaced by robots, and those were pretty horrible jobs anyway,” said Cousins.
Wang said bosses love robots, but they are not a threat to people, yet.
“Robots will free people up to do more specialized work that can only be learned by a human’s intellect,” Wang said. “I don’t think a robot will completely replace a human’s mind currently or in the next 10 years, I haven’t found this kind of danger.”
The consensus among technologists: Robots are here to assist and not to replace. However, humans may have to continue to learn more specialized skills to stay ahead of what a robot can do.
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Indian Fake Doctor Infects 21 With HIV With Tainted Syringes
A fake doctor treating poor villagers in northern India for colds, coughs and diarrhea has infected at least 21 of them with HIV by using contaminated syringes and needles, a health official said Tuesday.
Sushil Choudhury, the official, said police were looking for Rajendra Yadav, who fled Bangarmau, a small town in Uttar Pradesh state, after the HIV infections were detected in December last year.
The villagers said they rarely saw Yadav changing the needles. Choudhury said that probably led to the spread of HIV.
With India’s health care system facing a massive shortage of doctors and hospitals, millions of poor people seek fake doctors for cheap treatment.
India had 2.1 million people living with HIV at the end of 2016, according to a UNAIDS report. Of those, 9,100 were children under age 15. India has registered a 20 percent annual decline in new infections over the past few years, according to the report.
Yadav would visit villages on his bicycle and treat patients outdoors. Villagers complained that he would give injections for almost all ailments for meager payments, Choudhury said.
A sudden spurt in HIV cases in and around Bangarmau detected in December last year alerted state authorities. “An investigation showed that almost all of them had taken injections from one person,” Choudhury said. “This was an important lead. We set up special medical camps in villages in the area and checked 566 people, and 21 were found to be HIV positive.”
Mehtab Alam, a project manager for Raza Hussain Memorial Charitable Trust, said that fake doctors do not use disposable syringes, instead using glass syringes and one needle to inject hundreds of patients. The group works with HIV and AIDS patients in the region.
“Villagers are ignorant about hygiene,” he said.
HIV — or the human immunodeficiency virus — is transmitted through blood transfusion, use of infected needles and syringes, unprotected sex, or from mother to child. It weakens the body’s immune system, making it susceptible to various infections. Over time, an HIV infection can develop into AIDS, a progressive failure of the immune system that leaves the body open to life-threatening infections and cancers.
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Misery on US Stock Market Spreads to Asia Tuesday
Asia’s benchmark stock indexes collapsed Tuesday, as Monday’s massive selloffs on Wall Street rolled across the globe.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 index lost as much seven percent of its value at one point during the trading session, before closing at 21,610 points, a loss of nearly five percent. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index followed suit, dropping just over five percent in its worst trading day since August 2015.
The benchmark indexes Australia and South Korea also suffered serious losses.
In early Europe trading London’s FTSE 100 was down 3.5 percent at 7,081 points.
Asian markets were caught in the ripple effect of Monday’s 1,175-point loss on the Dow Jones Industrial Average, marking the biggest point decline in history. The S&P (Standard and Poor’s) 500 also had a bad day, losing just over four percent to finish at 2,648 points.
The stock market has now lost about a trillion dollars in value since Friday, when the Dow lost 666 points. That drop followed a solid jobs report that showed the U.S. economy adding 200 thousand jobs and wages rising at the fastest pace in a decade. The tighter labor market and rising wages prompted investor fears of higher inflation and the possibility that the U.S. Federal Reserve would raise interest rates faster and higher than they have in recent years.
Analysts who spoke with VOA had been expecting a stock market “correction” (a decline of about 10% from recent highs) as a result of the record run up in stock prices this year.
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Pacemaker in the Brain May Slow Alzheimer’s Symptoms
There are nearly 44 million people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. But a highly experimental new treatment may slow the advance of the disease. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Malawi Farmers Fight Armyworms with Home-Made Repellents
Malawi farmers are under attack by armyworms, and government-provided pesticides are not effective. So farmers are fighting back with home-made concoctions. Faith Lapidus reports.
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SpaceX Bucks Launch Tradition in First Flight of New Rocket
SpaceX is bucking decades of launch tradition for the first test flight of its new megarocket.
The Falcon Heavy is set to become the world’s most powerful rocket in use Tuesday when it blasts off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. None of the usual, no-big-deal-if-it’s-destroyed launch ballast — like steel or concrete slabs, or mundane experiments — for this curtain raiser.
Instead, the rocket will be hauling a red sports convertible with a space-suited dummy at the wheel and David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” on the soundtrack. It’s the inspiration of Elon Musk, the high-tech, science fiction-loving maverick who heads SpaceX and electric carmaker Tesla.
On the eve of the launch, Musk said he’s at peace with whatever happens, be it a successful test flight or an explosive failure.
“It’s guaranteed to be exciting, one way or another,” Musk said Monday in a phone conference with reporters.
Musk said he normally feels “super stressed out” the day before a launch. “This time I don’t, so that may be a bad sign.”
The hope is that any failure comes far enough into the flight “so we at least learn as much as possible along the way.”
More about Tuesday afternoon’s planned launch:
Rocket Stats:
The Falcon Heavy has three first-stage boosters, strapped together with 27 engines in all. Stretching 40 feet (12 meters) at the base and standing 230 feet (70 meters) tall, the Heavy is a triple dose of the Falcon 9, the company’s frequent flyer with just a single booster. At liftoff, the Heavy packs about 5 million pounds of thrust. That’s more liftoff punch than any other rocket currently operating in the world — by a factor of two — but less than NASA’s old space shuttles and Saturn V moon rockets. Two of the Heavy’s boosters are recycled; they have flown on previous Falcon 9 launches. Once spent, they will aim for side-by-side vertical touchdowns at Cape Canaveral. The brand new, center core will attempt to land on an ocean barge.
Car Stats:
SpaceX’s Elon Musk also runs the electric carmaker Tesla. So in a bit of cross-marketing, he’s put his own cherry-red Tesla Roadster on the Heavy’s inaugural flight. It is one of the car company’s original Roadsters.
No car has ever rocketed into space before, if you don’t count NASA’s Apollo-era moon buggies, still parked on the lunar surface. The Federal Aviation Administration had to sign off on the Heavy-Tesla combo. It’s at the top of the rocket, enclosed for liftoff. The protective cover will drop away, allowing the car to travel on its way. Three cameras are mounted on the Roadster that should provide “some epic views if they work and everything goes well,” Musk said.
Destination:
SpaceX is targeting a long, oval orbit around the sun for the Roadster that will take the car as far out as Mars, and have it making laps for a billion years. If the convertible makes it into space in one piece, it still must endure several hours of deep-space coasting through the high-energy Van Allen radiation belts encircling Earth. Musk said Monday that the car could come fairly close to Mars and that there’s an “extremely tiny” chance it could crash into the planet. But he quickly added, “I wouldn’t hold your breath.” Musk’ intent on establishing a city on the red planet, with hordes of Earthlings and building materials flying there on a super-extra-mega SpaceX rocket that is still in development.
Historic Departure Point:
The Falcon Heavy is flying from the same launch pad used by NASA to send men to the moon. SpaceX leases Launch Complex 39A from NASA. Not only did LC-39A, as it’s known, serve as the departure point for all the Apollo moonshots from 1968 to 1972, it was the scene for most of the space shuttle liftoffs. It’s location at Kennedy Space Center keeps people at least three miles away, a distance determined by NASA in the 1960s to be safe just in case the Saturn V exploded on the pad.
Competition:
Blue Origin, an aerospace company run by another billionaire, is developing a large orbital-class rocket that promises to give Heavy an out-of-this-world run for its money. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the force behind Blue Origin, offered Musk “best of luck” Monday. “Hoping for a beautiful, nominal flight!” Bezos wrote via Twitter. In the language of rocket scientists, “nominal” means the rocket behaves and the cargo reaches its target. NASA, meanwhile, is sinking billions of dollars into a massive new rocket called the Space Launch System, or SLS, that’s meant to return astronauts to the moon and also get them one day to Mars.
Future Flights:
SpaceX already has customers lined up for the Falcon Heavy. The rocket is designed to hoist supersize satellites as well as equipment to the moon, Mars or other far-flung points. The private company’s online flight manifest shows the U.S. Air Force as already signed up. SpaceX has changed its mind about carrying people on the Heavy, Musk said, preferring to use the super-duper rocket under development.
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Oscars Chief: Hollywood Abuses Being ‘Jack-hammered Into Oblivion’
The president of the group that hands out the annual Oscars declared on Monday that some of the worst abuses in the movie industry were finally being “jack-hammered into oblivion.”
John Bailey, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, told more than 200 Oscar nominees that the Academy was working hard toward a greater diversity.
The Oscars, the highest honors in the movie business, have been criticized in recent years for excluding people of color from nominations. In response to the #OscarsSoWhite social media campaign, it has broadened its white, old and male-dominated membership to invite more women and people of color into its 8,000-strong ranks.
Addressing the class of 2018 nominees at an annual luncheon, Bailey said the 90-year-old Academy was reinventing itself with programs committed to inclusion and diversity “in today’s era of a greater awareness and responsibility in balancing gender, race, ethnicity and religion.’
As a 75-year old white man, Bailey said he was gratified that “the fossilized bedrock of many of Hollywood’s worst abuses are being jack-hammered into oblivion.”
Nominees for this year’s Oscars, to be handed out in March, include female director Greta Gerwig and African-American director Jordan Peele, Rachel Morrison as the first Oscar-nominated female cinematographer, four black actors, and movies that range from female-driven stories to romantic fantasy, war films and contemporary reflections on race.
Bailey did not directly refer to the sexual misconduct scandal that has jolted Hollywood and led to dozens of actors, directors, producers and agents being fired, forced to step down or dropped from creative projects.
The Hollywood awards season has consequently been dominated by passionate speeches about female empowerment, calls for equal pay and better opportunities for women in front of and behind the camera, and solidarity with victims of sexual harassment.
The Oscar winners are voted on by the 8,000 members of the Academy of Motion Pictures and will be handed out at a ceremony in Hollywood on March 4.
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Arachnophobes Take Heed: Ancient Spider Had Whip-like Tail
If you are not a fan of spiders, you may not like the creepy little arachnid scientists found entombed in chunks of amber from northern Myanmar. Unlike its spider cousins alive today, this guy had a tail.
Scientists on Monday described four specimens of the arachnid, called Chimerarachne yingi, that inhabited a Cretaceous Period tropical forest about 100 million years ago during the dinosaur age. Alongside modern spider traits such as a silk-producing structure called a spinneret, it possessed a remarkably primitive feature: a whip-like tail covered in short hairs that it may have used for sensing predators and prey.
“It is a key fossil for understanding spider origins,” said paleontologist Bo Wang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “Our new fossil most likely represents the earliest branch of spiders, and implies that there was a lineage of tailed spiders that presumably originated in the Paleozoic (the geological era that ended 251 million years ago) and survived at least into the Cretaceous of Southeast Asia.”
Despite its fearsome appearance, the fanged Chimerarachne was only about three-tenths of an inch (7.5 mm) long, more than half of which was its tail.
University of Kansas paleontologist Paul Selden said Chimerarachne represents “a kind of missing link” between true spiders and earlier spider forerunners that had tails but lacked spinnerets.
“Chimerarachne could be considered as a spider. It all depends on where we decide to draw the line,” Selden said. “I am sure arachnophobes would not like this animal, except that it is only a few millimeters long, so it would be living almost unseen by them.”
The earliest arachnids, a group including spiders, scorpions, mites, ticks and others, dates to about 420 million years ago. The oldest-known true spiders lived about 315 millions year ago.
Numerous animals and plants have been found beautifully preserved inside amber, which is fossilized tree resin. Many important amber finds have been made in Myanmar. Chimerarachne may have lived under bark or in the moss at the foot of a tree.
“All four specimens are adult males, which would have been roving around looking for females at this point in their lives,” Selden said.
“Chimerarachne most likely wove a sheet web, and possibly a burrow lined with silk. Spiders use silk for a great many purposes, of which prey-capture webs is just one. Egg-wrapping is a vital function for spider silk, as well as laying a trail to find its way back home.”
The research was published in the journal “Nature Ecology & Evolution.”
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As US Stocks Plummet, Trump Goes Silent on Role in Markets
As U.S. stocks plunged on Monday, President Donald Trump was speaking at an event in Ohio but noticeably not taking credit for the market despite doing so repeatedly when stocks were rising.
The stark contrast was a sign that Trump may be absorbing a tough message, underscored by former White House advisers, that American presidents traditionally have avoided commenting directly on Wall Street’s fickle trends.
Gene Sperling, a top economic adviser to Democratic former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, said Trump erred in recent months by focusing so heavily on the stock market.
“Even though the stock market tripled under Bill Clinton, his view was that you should always focus your policies and your public messages on bread-and-butter kitchen table issues … and that focusing on the stock market would take your eye off the real economy,” Sperling said.
White House spokesman Raj Shah, in an adjustment to the administration’s message on stocks, told reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Trump’s speaking event in Ohio, “Look, markets do fluctuate in the short term. We all know that … But the fundamentals of this economy are very strong and they’re headed in the right direction.”
Throughout a speech at a factory in Blue Ash, Ohio, Trump made no mention of stock markets. That departed sharply from past practice.
In his State of the Union address last week, Trump said, “The stock market has smashed one record after another, gaining $8 trillion and more in value in just this short period of time.”
‘Tremendous Benefits’
On Jan. 7, he wrote on Twitter, “The Stock Market has been creating tremendous benefits for our country in the form of not only Record Setting Stock Prices, but present and future Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. Seven TRILLION dollars of value created since our big election win!”
Three days before that, he tweeted, “Dow just crashes through 25,000. Congrats! Big cuts in unnecessary regulations continuing.” He had sent similar tweets for months.
The Republican president told Reuters in a Jan. 17 interview he has been getting kudos from people grateful for increased 401(k) retirement plan values and he believed the rise would not have happened if his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 presidential election.
“If the Democrats won the election, the stock market would have gone down 50 percent from where it was, and now look at the percentage increase. It’s a record increase,” Trump said.
Once the markets closed, the White House issued a statement saying Trump’s focus is “on our long-term economic fundamentals, which remain exceptionally strong, with strengthening U.S. economic growth, historically low unemployment, and increasing wages for American workers.”
“The president’s tax cuts and regulatory reforms will further enhance the U.S. economy and continue to increase prosperity for the American people,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said.
The benchmark Dow Jones industrial average soared 42 percent between Election Day 2016, when Trump won the presidency, and its historic peak a week ago above 26,400.
On Monday, the Dow fell to below 24,000 but regained some of its midday losses to close at 24,345. In the past five trading days, the index has erased all its gains since late November.
The benchmark S&P 500 has pulled back more than 6 percent from a Jan. 26 record high.
The “Trump rally,” as some traders have dubbed it, has coincided with a sweeping tax code overhaul approved in December, which slashed corporate taxes, and a deregulation push.
The S&P 500 rose 34 percent from Trump’s election to its recent high.
But stocks have been climbing since March 2009, when Obama inherited a serious financial crisis and the worst economic recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. At that time, the Dow was trading at around 6,500.
Trump has also criticized his predecessor Obama’s effect on markets. In November 2012, Trump tweeted, “The stock market and U.S. dollar are both plunging today. Welcome to @BarackObama’s second term.”
The S&P 500 rose 126 percent from Obama’s 2008 election to his final day in office in 2017.
Former Obama press secretary Jay Carney on Monday tweeted, “Good time to recall that in the previous administration, we NEVER boasted about the stock market — even though the Dow more than doubled on Obama’s watch — because we knew two things: 1) the stock market is not the economy; and 2) if you claim the rise, you own the fall.”
Doug Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum and a former economic adviser to 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain, said, “The president shouldn’t comment about the stock market. Indeed if anyone is going to make major pronouncements about economic data, it should be the Treasury secretary or the agency releasing the data, so if they get it wrong you can get rid of them. You don’t want the president owning those things.”
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Nome, Alaska, Gets Fresh Review as Possible US Arctic Port
Federal officials will take another look at the historic Alaska community of Nome as a possible port serving ships heading for the Arctic.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced it has signed an agreement with the city of Nome to examine whether benefits justify costs of navigation improvements, said Bruce Sexauer, chief of civil works for the Corps’ Alaska District.
“The study will look at economic and social reasons to see if expanding the port is in the federal interest,” he said.
The study process generally takes three years and could culminate in a Corps’ recommendation to Congress to authorize port improvements, Sexauer said.
Alaska lacks deep-water ports along most of its west and northwest coast. The nearest permanent U.S. Coast Guard station is Kodiak more than 800 miles (1,287 kilometers) away.
Arctic marine traffic continues to grow and Nome, though south of the Arctic Circle, is well situated south of the Pacific chokepoint to the Arctic, the Bering Strait, Sexauer said.
A joint federal-state study started in 2008 looked at alternatives for Arctic ports in the Bering and Chukchi seas. Nome became the top choice because of infrastructure already in place, including an airport that handles jets, a hospital and fuel supply facilities.
“It just needed to be bigger and deeper,” Sexauer said
However, economic justification for the port diminished in late 2015 when Royal Dutch Shell PLC drilled a dry hole in the Chukchi Sea and suspended its U.S. Arctic offshore drilling program.
“The benefits for a project at Nome went away, at least the oil and gas benefits,” Sexauer said. The Corps paused its study with the state and officially terminated it last month, Sexauer said.
The study with the city will again look at how a Nome port would aid marine traffic for petroleum development, mining and regional delivery of fuel and other products.
Federal law changed in 2016 to allow the Corps to also consider social benefits, such as support of search and rescue operations, national security and aid to communities to help them be sustainable.
The Port of Nome remains too shallow to handle large ships. Fuel tankers stay anchored in deep water and fuel is lightered to Nome.
Nome’s inner harbor in 2014 was just 10 feet (3 meters) deep and its outer harbor was less than 23 feet (7 meters) deep. The Corps that year looked at constructing docks up to 1,000 feet (305 meters) long and dredging to 35 feet (10.7 meters).
The Corps in late April has scheduled a planning meeting in Nome to detail the scope of the new study.
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