Photo Courtesy: Kohenoor News. Caption: Marvia Malik, Pakistan’s first transgender news anchor
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Month: March 2018
Thousands Mourn Creator of Venezuelan Youth Orchestras
Thousands of Venezuelans have paid homage to Jose Antonio Abreu, parading past the coffin of the economist turned visionary musical educator who created a network of youth orchestras that has been replicated around the world.
His coffin was delivered with military honors Sunday morning to the headquarters of the program, where the concert hall was converted into a chapel. Students of varying ages took turns playing pieces by Bach, Beethoven and other composers.
The death of the 78-year-old Abreu was announced Saturday by his family. No cause was given, but he had been known to be battling several illnesses since he retired a few years ago from running the musical education program known as El Sistema.
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China Warns Trade War Will Set off a ‘Greater Conflict’
A senior Chinese official is warning that a trade war would hurt all sides and set off a “greater conflict.”
“A trade war serves the interests of none. It will only lead to serious consequences and negative impact,” Vice Premier Han Zheng said at a development forum in Beijing Sunday. “We believe trade protectionism, against the trend, will lead to nowhere.”
Han did not mention the United States or President Donald Trump by name, whose announcement of stiff tariffs on imported Chinese steel and aluminum was answered with tariffs and duties on a list of U.S. imports.
Han appealed to all global trading partners to “cooperate with each other like passengers in the same boat … make economic globalization more open, inclusive, balanced and beneficial for all.”
Fears of a trade war between the world’s two largest economies have sent world markets tumbling.
The United States has accused China of unfair trade practices, including intellectual property theft and dumping Chinese goods on the global marketplace to make U.S. goods appear more expensive.
China has denied the U.S. charges, and Vice Premier Liu He told U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in a telephone call Saturday that China is ready to defend its interests.
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Facebook’s Zuckerberg Apologizes for ‘Breach of Trust’ in Disclosure of Users’ Data
Facebook co-founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg apologized Sunday in full-page ads in nine major British and U.S. newspapers for the massive “breach of trust” at the social media giant that revealed personal information of millions of Facebook users.
Zuckerberg did not mention the British firm accused of using the data, the voter profiling company Cambridge Analytica that obtained the cache of information from British researcher Alexsandr Kogan, who had been authorized by Facebook to collect the data as part of an academic study.
Cambridge Analytica was paid $6 million by President Donald Trump’s successful 2016 presidential campaign for the White House to develop voter profiles.
Zuckerberg said in the ads, “This was a breach of trust, and I’m sorry we didn’t do more at the time” when Kogan developed an app on which 270,000 Facebook users supplied information about themselves. “We’re now taking steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again.”
In all, because of extensive links of friends and associates to the 270,000 Facebook users, 50 million Facebook users may have had their personal data compromised.
“We have a responsibility to protect your information,” Zuckerberg said. “If we can’t, we don’t deserve it.”
The ads ran in six British national newspapers, including the best-selling Mail, The Sunday Times and The Observer, along with The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal in the U.S.
Zuckerberg said Facebook, with 2.2 billion users worldwide, is also investigating “every single app that had access to large amounts of data before we fixed this. We expect there are others. And when we find them, we will ban them and tell everyone affected.”
A new Reuters-Ipsos poll in the U.S. released Sunday showed that 41 percent of Americans trust Facebook to obey laws that protect their personal information, compared to 66 percent of trust in Amazon; 62 percent in Google; 60 percent in Microsoft and 47 percent in Yahoo.
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Scientists Track Chinese Space Station as It Falls to Earth
Scientists are monitoring a defunct Chinese space station that is expected to fall to Earth around the end of the month, the largest manmade object to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere in a decade.
The head of the European Space Agency’s debris office, Holger Krag, says China’s Tiangong-1 space station will likely fall to Earth between March 30 and April 3.
Krag said it still not yet known where the space station will hit Earth, but said it would be extremely unlikely for anyone to be injured when it does.
Injury unlikely
“Our experience is that for such large objects typically between 20 and 40 percent of the original mass, of 8.5 tons, will survive re-entry and then could be found on the ground, theoretically,” he said.
“However, to be injured by one of these fragments is extremely unlikely. My estimate is that the probability to be injured by one of these fragments is similar to the probability of being hit by lightning twice in the same year,” Krag added.
He said the space station is expected to fall between the areas of 43 degrees south and 43 degrees north, and everything outside that zone is considered safe.
“Northern Europe including France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland are definitely on the safe side. Southern Europe, the southern part of North America, South Asia, Africa, Australia and also South America are still within the zone today,” he said.
Where will it hit?
Scientists say it is hard to predict where Tiangong-1 will hit Earth in part because of its low orbit and high velocity. They say the space station is traveling 17,400 mph and orbits Earth about every 90 minutes.
Tiangong-1 was launched into orbit in 2011 as China’s first space lab. It carried out orbit experiments in preparation for China’s plan to put a permanent space station into orbit by 2023.
your ads here!New Dating App Matches Users Based on Their DNA
Love from a cheek swab? That’s what founders of a new dating app are promising.
There always seems to be another dating app popping up with promises of helping find romance — just answer this, just swipe that — but one new online dating service is incorporating genetics into the mix and promising something other apps cannot: compatibility through genetics.
The app is called Pheramor, a cross between pheromone, the small molecules that are emitted from the body and are smelled by the people around us,and amour, the French word for love.
The Houston-based company competed in a recent Bay Area pitch competition, where they stood out with a charismatic presentation that included references to their own failed attempts at online dating.
“Who here is single as hell and tired of swiping on Tinder?” asked Brittany Barreto, chief scientific officer and co-founder of Pheramor.
“I am,” replied data scientist Asma Mirza, the company’s CEO and co-founder. Audience members also chimed in.
“What if I told you that with this genetic cheek swab, I could tell you who you’d be attracted to, and who is going to be attracted to you based on your cheek cells?” Mirza said.
The company claims their app is based on 40 years of research showing that there are 11 genetic markers proven by scientists to be “responsible for attraction.”
“Pheramor looks at genetics-based human attraction and social media metadata to help people increase their efficiency of dating,” said Mirza.
Rasmus Nielsen, professor of computational biology and human genetics at UC-Berkeley, said “the 11 genetic markers, or MHC type, that they are referencing are the same that have to do with protection against viruses and pathogens.”
Nielsen said research has shown that mice can recognize DNA that’s similar to their parents’ and avoid mating with their siblings.
“We’ve been looking into whether something like that is going on in humans. And there is some idea that maybe when we mate, we avoid individuals with the same MHC type. And that’s what they are basing it on. But the science is sketchy. It’s still very, very, very,very controversial as to whether humans can even do this. And there’s really very little science into whether it would help us predict mates,” Nielsen added.
On their website, Pheramor states, “We are constantly smelling each other’s pheromone profiles and deciding subconsciously how attractive that individual is to us.”
Pheramor cites a study done in the 1990s called “The Sweaty T-shirt Experiment.” In the study, women rated T-shirts worn consecutively for three days by specific men. The scientists found that women were more attracted to the scent of a man whose genetics were more diverse than their own.
But Nielsen argues the study has never really been replicated successfully.
“Our ability to predict anything from genetic data is relatively poor, and something like mate choice — who you are attracted to — you really cannot predict that at all. It’s to a certain degree like selling snake oil, because you can’t really do it. The genetics is not worked out well enough yet,” he said.
The founders say critics are focusing too much on the pheromones. They point out that the app doesn’t just look at genetics, it pairs the genetic information with your social media activity to get a fuller picture of your personality and interests.
Users are able to connect all of their social media activity to the app, which Pheramor uses with its proprietary algorithm to help match mates. And to discourage endless swiping, each match shows up as a blurred photo, placing the emphasis on the compatibility score, not physical appearance.
“So, you download the app, you purchase a kit, you instantly start to match with local singles based on the metadata from social media,” Barreto said. “When you swab your cheek, you send it back to us — it takes about two weeks for you — the genetic information will just enhance the compatibility scores.”
In addition to finding romance, the company said Pheramor is also helping save lives.
The same 11 genetic markers they are looking at are the same used to fight blood cancers. Pheramor has partnered with a national cancer registry called Gift of Life in which customers have the option of being added to the registry to potentially be a match for someone fighting leukemia, lymphoma or other blood disorders
For young, would-be lovers who want to throw their hats in the ring, the DNA test costs $19.99, with a $10-a-month service fee. It’s available oniOS and Android. Perhaps a small price to pay if their science has even the smallest possibility of leading to love?
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Pride, Loneliness in the Deep North: Russians Who Refuse to Abandon Arctic City
In Russia’s far north, the city of Vorkuta is slowly being reclaimed by the Arctic tundra. Its population has plummeted as the local coal mines have closed, and the very future of the city is in doubt. As Henry Ridgwell reports for VOA, Vorkuta’s fate reflects a wider population crisis across Russia’s far north as old Soviet industries have crumbled.
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A New Dating Service Uses Your DNA to Find Love
There always seems to be another dating app popping up with promises of helping find romance — just answer this, just swipe that — but one new online dating service is incorporating genetics into the mix and promising something other apps cannot: compatibility through genetics.
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Swelling Tourism Numbers Come at a Cost in Indonesia
Tourist numbers in Indonesia swelled last year on the back of overseas advertising and infrastructure development. President Joko Widodo has said he wants to “create 10 tourist destinations like the island of Bali.” But the pleasing economic numbers also come with a social and environmental cost as rampant development threatens ecosystems and traditional livelihoods. Jack Hewson has this report.
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Young Syrian Refugee Invents Life-Saving Life-Jacket
Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention. Even more so, when the invention is something a loved one needs. That was the case for a young Syrian woman who invented a GPS-equipped life vest. VOA’s Faith Lapidus reports.
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What Do Palm Trees and Wind Turbines Have in Common?
Increasingly popular wind turbines are getting bigger and making more power, but there is a limit to their size. At some point they become too big, too difficult to transport and install, and strong winds can bend them out of shape. But researchers led by scientists from the University of Virginia say there’s a way around it. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Some Fear Steel Tariff Could Hurt Auto Industry in the South
German business leaders are expressing concerns that President Donald Trump’s 25 percent tariff on imported steel could affect the auto industry in the South.
WABE Radio reports Mercedes-Benz USA this month opened its new North American headquarters in Sandy Springs, Georgia, for 1,000 employees.
The luxury car manufacturer is owned by Germany-based Daimler, but Mercedes-Benz USA CEO Dietmar Exler used the grand opening to remind the crowd of the brand’s U.S. presence.
German automakers in US
That includes operations in South Carolina and in Alabama.
“We are now in the midst of construction of our own factory here, which will open doors in the fall in Charleston, South Carolina, and we’ll make all of the Sprinter vans for North America right here,” Exler said at the grand opening of its headquarters in Sandy Springs, Georgia, just north of Atlanta.
“Right next to me you have a member of the most successful SUV family, a GLE Coupe,” Exler said. “As you know, the GLE and the GLS are produced in Alabama. Last year, 280,000 cars were produced here not just for the U.S. market, but for markets all over the world.”
German car factories in the U.S. made more than 800,000 vehicles last year, and about half were sold overseas, according to the German Association of the Automotive Industry.
This month, Volkswagen of America Inc. announced plans to build a new five-passenger SUV at its factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where it manufactures other vehicles. Volkswagen AG is based in Wolfsburg, Germany.
“During my time as governor, I’ve watched Volkswagen Chattanooga flourish from a single vehicle producer, starting with the Passat, into what it is today — a thriving U.S. manufacturing operation that can produce three models, and counting,” said Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam said in a statement Monday, when plans were announced.
“We value Volkswagen as a committed partner, whose investments in the state have not only created new jobs, but have helped us build a skilled Tennessee workforce,” Haslam said.
Volkswagen Chattanooga also manufactures the Passat and the Atlas.
Trump proclamation, industry concern
Trump signed a proclamation last week to impose a 25 percent tariff on steel from every country except Canada and Mexico. The hope is to boost steel manufacturing in the U.S.
The concern among some industry experts is that tariffs on steel could hurt companies like Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen and Porsche, all of which have significant operations in the South, said Stefan Mair of the Federation of German Industries in Berlin.
“Do you see the cars outside? There’s a lot of steel in there,” Mair said at the grand opening of the Georgia headquarters complex. “We think there will be some additional percentage points on the prices of cars.”
That price increase could be enough to stop people from buying new cars, said Lisa Cook, who teaches economics and international relations at Michigan State University.
“If consumers are price sensitive, and they are for many types of cars, this could cause people to postpone their decision to purchase a car,” Cook said.
US steel in cars
A little more than a quarter of all U.S. steel is used to make cars in this country, according to the German American Chamber of Commerce for the southern U.S.
“Approximately 25 percent of all steel is used in automotive manufacturing and 10 percent in machinery and equipment; both industries that German companies have heavily invested in the U.S. over the years,” said Stefanie Ziska, president of GACC South.
Making cars more expensive to build and export could hurt U.S. jobs, said Jeffrey Rosensweig, who teaches international business at Georgia’s Emory University.
“That would not only cost us jobs, it would hurt the U.S. and could potentially harm the U.S. trade balance,” Rosensweig said. “Just the opposite of what President Trump thinks he’s trying to achieve.”
He said the steel tariffs could trigger a trade war that would go beyond the auto industry.
“These foreign nations that we’re going to put these import taxes on, these tariffs, are not stupid,” Rosensweig said. “They’re going to retaliate against our exports, and they’re going to hit us where it hurts, which is often our farm exports.”
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Indian Agency Denies Reported Security Lapse in ID Card Project
The semi-government agency behind India’s national identity card project on Saturday denied a report by news website ZDNet that the program has been hit by another security lapse that allows access to private information.
ZDNet reported that a data leak on a system run by a state-owned utility company, which it did not name, could allow access to private information of holders of the biometric “Aadhaar” ID cards, exposing their names, their unique 12-digit identity numbers and their bank details.
But the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which runs the Aadhaar program, said “there is no truth in this story” and that it was “contemplating legal action against ZDNet.”
ZDNet could not immediately be contacted for comment on the UIDAI’s response.
“There has been absolutely no breach of UIDAI’s Aadhaar database. Aadhaar remains safe and secure,” the agency said in a statement late Saturday.
Even if the claim purported in the story were taken as true, it would raise security concerns about the database of the utility company and would have “nothing to do with the security of UIDAI’s Aadhaar database,” it said.
More than 1 billion users
ZDNet had reported that even though the security lapse was flagged to some government agencies over a period of time, it had yet to be fixed. It said it was withholding the name of the utility and other details.
Karan Saini, a New Delhi security researcher, said that anyone with an Aadhaar number was affected.
“This is a security lapse. You don’t have to be a consumer to access these details. You just need the Uniform Resource Locator where the Application Programming Interface is located. These can be found in less than 20 minutes,” Saini told Reuters.
In recent months, researchers and journalists who have identified loopholes in the identity project have said they were slapped with criminal cases or harassed by government agencies because of their work.
Aadhaar, a biometric identification card with over 1.1 billion users, is the world’s biggest database. But it has been facing increased scrutiny over privacy concerns following several instances of breaches and misuse.
Last Thursday, the CEO of UIDAI said the biometric data attached to each Aadhaar was safe from hacking because the storage facility was not connected to the internet.
“Each Aadhaar biometric is encrypted by a 2,048-key combination and to decode it, the best and fastest computer of our era will take the age of the universe just to hack into one card’s biometric details,” Ajay Bhushan Pandey said.
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UK Watchdog Evaluates Evidence From Cambridge Analytica
Britain’s information regulator said Saturday that it was assessing evidence gathered from a raid on the office of data mining firm Cambridge Analytica, part of an investigation into alleged misuse of personal information by political campaigns and social media companies like Facebook.
More than a dozen investigators from the Information Commissioner’s Office entered the company’s central London office late Friday, shortly after a High Court judge granted a warrant. The investigators were seen leaving the premises early Saturday after spending about seven hours searching the office.
The regulator said it would “consider the evidence before deciding the next steps and coming to any conclusions.”
“This is one part of a larger investigation by the ICO into the use of personal data and analytics by political campaigns, parties, social media companies and other commercial actors,” it said.
Authorities in Britain as well as the U.S. are investigating Cambridge Analytica over allegations the firm improperly obtained data from 50 million Facebook users and used it to manipulate elections, including the 2016 White House race and the 2016 Brexit vote in Britain.
Both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook deny wrongdoing.
Chief executive suspended
The data firm suspended its CEO, Alexander Nix, this week after Britain’s Channel 4 News broadcast footage that appeared to show Nix suggesting tactics like entrapment or bribery that his company could use to discredit politicians. The footage also showed Nix saying Cambridge Analytica played a major role in securing Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Cambridge Analytica’s acting chief executive, Alexander Tayler, said Friday that he was sorry that SCL Elections, an affiliate of his company, “licensed Facebook data and derivatives from a research company [Global Science Research] that had not received consent from most respondents” in 2014.
“The company believed that the data had been obtained in line with Facebook’s terms of service and data protection laws,” Tayler said.
His statement said the data were deleted in 2015 at Facebook’s request, and he denied that any of the Facebook data that Cambridge Analytica obtained were used in the work it did on the 2016 U.S. election.
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China Warns US It Will Defend Own Trade Interests
The United States has flouted trade rules with an inquiry into intellectual property and China will defend its interests, Vice Premier Liu He told U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in a telephone call on Saturday, Chinese state media reported.
The call between Mnuchin and Liu, a confidante of President Xi Jinping, was the highest-level contact between the two governments since U.S. President Donald Trump announced plans for tariffs on up to $60 billion of Chinese goods on Thursday.
The deepening rift has sent a chill through financial markets and the corporate world as investors predicted dire consequences for the global economy should trade barriers start going up.
Several U.S. chief executives attending a high-profile forum in Beijing on Saturday, including BlackRock Inc’s Larry Fink and Apple Inc’s Tim Cook, urged restraint.
In his call with Mnuchin, Liu, a Harvard-trained economist, said China still hoped both sides would remain “rational” and work together to keep trade relations stable, the official Xinhua news agency reported.
U.S. officials say an eight-month probe under the 1974 U.S. Trade Act has found that China engages in unfair trade practices by forcing American investors to turn over key technologies to Chinese firms.
However, Liu said the investigation report “violates international trade rules and is beneficial to neither Chinese interests, U.S. interests nor global interests”, Xinhua cited him as saying.
In a statement on its website, the office of the U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said it had filed a request – at the direction of Trump – for consultations with China at the World Trade Organization to address “discriminatory technology licensing agreements.”
China’s commerce ministry expressed regret at the filing on Saturday, and said China had taken strong measures to protect the legal rights and interests of both domestic and foreign owners of intellectual property.
Counter moves
During a visit to Washington in early March, Liu had requested Washington set up a new economic dialogue mechanism, identify a point person on China issues, and deliver a list of demands.
The Trump administration responded by telling China to immediately shave $100 billion off its record $375 billion trade surplus with the United States. Beijing told Washington that U.S. export restrictions on some high-tech products are to blame.
“China has already prepared, and has the strength, to defend its national interests,” Liu said on Saturday.
According to an editorial by China’s state-run Global Times, it was Mnuchin who called Liu.
Firing off a warning shot, China on Friday declared plans to levy additional duties on up to $3 billion of U.S. imports in response to U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminium, imposed after a separate U.S. probe.
Zhang Zhaoxiang, senior vice president of China Minmetals Corp, said that while the state-owned mining group’s steel exports to the U.S. are tiny, the impact could come indirectly.
“China’s direct exports to the U.S. are not big. But there will be some impact due to our exports via the United States or indirect exports,” Zhang told reporters on the sidelines of the China Development Forum in Beijing on Saturday.
Global Times said Beijing was only just beginning to look at means to retaliate.
“We believe it is only part of China’s countermeasures, and soybeans and other U.S. farm products will be targeted,” the widely-read tabloid said in a Saturday editorial.
Wei Jianguo, vice chairman of Beijing-based think tank China Centre for International Economic Exchanges, told China Daily that Beijing could impose tariffs on more U.S. products, and is considering a second and even third list of targets.
Possible items include aircraft and chips, Wei, a former vice commerce minister, told the newspaper, adding that tourism could be a possible target.
Soybeans, autos, planes
The commerce ministry’s response had so far been “relatively weak,” respected former Chinese finance minister Lou Jiwei said at the forum.
“If I were in the government, I would probably hit soybeans first, then hit autos and airplanes,” said Lou, currently chairman of the National Council for Social Security Fund.
U.S. farm groups have long feared that China, which imports more than third of all U.S. soybeans, could slow purchases of agricultural products, heaping more pain on the struggling U.S. farm sector.
U.S. agricultural exports to China stood at $19.6 billion last year, with soybean shipments accounting for $12.4 billion.
Chinese penalties on U.S. soybeans will especially hurt Iowa, a state that backed Trump in the 2016 presidential elections.
Boeing jets have also been often cited as a potential target by China.
China and the U.S. had benefitted by globalization, Blackrock’s Larry Fink said at the forum.
“I believe that a dialogue and maybe some adjustments in trade and trade policy can be in order. It does not need to be done publicly; it can be done privately,” he said.
Apple’s Tim Cook called for “calm heads” amid the dispute.
The sparring has cast a spotlight on hardware makers such as Apple, which assemble the majority of their products in China for export to other countries.
Electrical goods and tech are the largest U.S. import item from China.
Some economists say higher U.S. tariffs will lead to higher costs and ultimately hurt U.S. consumers, while restrictions on Chinese investments could take away jobs in America.
“I don’t think local governments in the United States and President Trump hope to see U.S. workers losing their jobs,” Sun Yongcai, general manager at Chinese railway firm CRRS Corp, which has two U.S. production plants, said at the forum.
your ads here!Cate Blanchett Slams Aung San Suu Kyi Over Rohingya Crisis
Australian actress Cate Blanchett says she is bewildered by Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s silence over the atrocities being committed against Rohingya Muslims.
More than 670,000 Rohingya refugees from Myanmar have sought safety across the border in Bangladesh since August 2017, after a military campaign against the minority group that a U.N. official has previously called genocide.
Oscar-winning actress Blanchett visited some of the displaced Muslims from Myanmar last week in her capacity as a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador. The Australian star warns that thousands of refugees are at risk of disease and starvation as the monsoon season approaches. The Rohingya are not recognized as citizens by Myanmar and have lived under a segregated ethnic system in the country’s western Rakhine state for decades.
Blanchett, who is also goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), is criticizing Myanmar State Counselor Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s de facto leader, for not speaking out over the crisis.
“It is bewildering, is it not, that someone who has been such a fighter for even a fragile democracy, someone who upholds human rights, does not seem to be speaking out more clearly about the atrocities that are so very clearly happening under her watch. The most pressing thing for me is the need to support the refugees in the very immediate present as the monsoon comes. Obviously, political solutions are absolutely vital,” Blanchett said.
Aung San Suu Kyi was in Australia earlier this month for the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit, where she was also criticized by the Malaysian Prime Minister. In unusually stern language, Najib Razak said Myanmar’s treatment of Rohingya Muslims put them at risk of radicalization by extremists because they have no hope for the future.
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said Aung San Suu Kyi had addressed the controversy during private talks with other South-East Asian leaders in Sydney.
Aung San Suu Kyi was kept under house arrest for many years by Myanmar’s military dictators before the country embraced democracy. The author and winner of a Nobel Peace Prize was widely thought to be the champion of human rights and tolerance in Myanmar, although her reputation has clearly been dented by the Rohingya crisis.
your ads here!Australia Developing Lasers to Track, Destroy Space Junk
Australian scientists say a powerful ground-based laser targeting space junk will be ready for use next year. They say there are hundreds of thousands of pieces of debris circling the Earth that have the potential to damage or destroy satellites.
Reducing the amount of space junk in orbit has been the focus of a meeting of scientists this week in Canberra organized by Australia’s Space Environment Research Center.
The meeting has heard that a laser using energy from light radiation to move discarded objects in space could be ready for use within a year. Researchers in Australia believe the technology would be able to change the path of orbital junk to prevent collisions with satellites. The aim is to eventually build more powerful laser beams that could push debris into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it would burn up.
Professor Craig Smith, head of EOS Space Systems, the Australian company that is developing the junk-busting devices, explained how it would work.
“We track objects and predict collisions to high accuracy and if we think a space debris object is going to have a collision with another space debris object then we can use our laser to change its orbits rather than crashing into a satellite or another space debris object causing more space debris. Again as we ramp up the power to bigger and bigger lasers then, yes, you can actually start moving it enough to what we call de-orbit the satellite by reducing its velocity enough that it starts to change orbit height and eventually hits the atmosphere and the atmosphere takes over and drags it,” Smith said.
The system, which would operate through a telescope near the Australian capital, Canberra, is expected to be finished early next year. It is estimated there are 7,500 tons of trash in space. This includes an estimated half-a-million marble-sized pieces of junk, while other items, such as discarded rockets and disused parts of space crafts, are much larger.
In 2012, the eight-ton Envisat Earth Observation satellite unexpectedly shut-down in orbit, where it remains. The size of a school bus, the satellite is one of the largest pieces of ‘junk’ in orbit and could become a catastrophic hazard if struck by other space debris and broken into fragments.
But space debris does not have to be big to cause damage. A floating fleck of paint is thought to have cracked a window on the International Space Station.
In Europe, large nets and harpoons are being developed to catch debris encircling our planet.
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Wayne Huizenga, Who Built Fortune in Trash, Dies at 80
H. Wayne Huizenga, a college dropout who built a business empire that included Blockbuster Entertainment, AutoNation and three professional sports franchises, has died. He was 80.
Huizenga died Thursday night at his home, said Valerie Hinkell, a longtime assistant. The cause was cancer, said Bob Henninger, executive vice president of Huizenga Holdings.
Starting with a single garbage truck in 1968, Huizenga built Waste Management Inc. into a Fortune 500 company. He purchased independent sanitation engineering companies, and by the time he took the company public in 1972, he had completed the acquisition of 133 small-time haulers. By 1983, Waste Management was the largest waste disposal company in the United States.
The business model worked again with Blockbuster Video, which he started in 1985 and built into the leading movie rental chain nine years later. In 1996, he formed AutoNation and built it into a Fortune 500 company.
Sports team owner
Huizenga was founding owner of baseball’s Florida Marlins and the NHL’s Florida Panthers — expansion teams that played their first games in 1993. He bought the NFL’s Miami Dolphins and their stadium for $168 million in 1994 from the children of founder Joe Robbie but had sold all three teams by 2009.
“Wayne Huizenga was a seminal figure in the cultural history of South Florida,” current Dolphins owner Stephen Ross said in a statement. “He completely changed the landscape of the region’s sports scene. … Sports fans throughout the region owe him a debt of thanks.”
The Marlins won the 1997 World Series, and the Panthers reached the Stanley Cup Finals in 1996, but Huizenga’s beloved Dolphins never reached a Super Bowl while he owned the team.
“If I have one disappointment, the disappointment would be that we did not bring a championship home,” Huizenga said shortly after he sold the Dolphins to Ross. “It’s something we failed to do.”
Fan favorite — for a time
Huizenga earned an almost cultlike following among business investors who watched him build Blockbuster Entertainment into the leading video rental chain by snapping up competitors. He cracked Forbes’ list of the 100 richest Americans, becoming chairman of Republic Services, one of the nation’s top waste management companies, and AutoNation, the nation’s largest automotive retailer. In 2013, Forbes estimated his wealth at $2.5 billion.
For a time, Huizenga was also a favorite with South Florida sports fans, drawing cheers and autograph seekers in public. The crowd roared when he danced the hokey pokey on the field during an early Marlins game. He went on a spending spree to build a veteran team that won the World Series in the franchise’s fifth year.
But his popularity plummeted when he ordered the roster dismantled after that season. He was frustrated by poor attendance and his failure to swing a deal for a new ballpark built with taxpayer money.
Many South Florida fans never forgave him for breaking up the championship team. Huizenga drew boos when introduced at Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino’s retirement celebration in 2000 and kept a lower public profile after that.
In 2009, Huizenga said he regretted ordering the Marlins’ payroll purge.
“We lost $34 million the year we won the World Series, and I just said, ‘You know what, I’m not going to do that,’” Huizenga said. “If I had it to do over again, I’d say, ‘OK, we’ll go one more year.’”
He sold the Marlins in 1999 to John Henry, and sold the Panthers in 2001, unhappy with rising NHL player salaries and the stock price for the team’s public company.
Dolphins man
Huizenga’s first sports love was the Dolphins; he had been a season-ticket holder since their first season in 1966. But he fared better in the NFL as a businessman than as a sports fan.
He turned a nifty profit by selling the Dolphins and their stadium for $1.1 billion, nearly seven times what he paid to become sole owner. But he knew the bottom line in the NFL is championships, and his Dolphins perennially came up short.
Huizenga earned a reputation as a hands-off owner and won raves from many loyal employees, even though he made six coaching changes. He eased Pro Football Hall of Famer Don Shula into retirement in early 1996, and Jimmy Johnson, Dave Wannstedt, interim coach Jim Bates, Nick Saban, Cam Cameron and Tony Sparano followed as coach.
Johnson tweeted: “A great man, one of the nicest individuals I have ever known, Wayne Huizenga passed away. RIP.”
Garbage business
Harry Wayne Huizenga was born in the Chicago suburbs on Dec. 29, 1937, to a family of garbage haulers. He began his business career in Pompano Beach in 1962, driving a garbage truck from 2 a.m. to noon each day for $500 a month.
Huizenga was a five-time recipient of Financial World magazine’s “CEO of the Year” award, and was the Ernst & Young “2005 World Entrepreneur of the Year.”
Regarding his business acumen, Huizenga said: “You just have to be in the right place at the right time. It can only happen in America.”
In 1960, he married Joyce VanderWagon. Together they had two children, Wayne Jr. and Scott. They divorced in 1966. Wayne married his second wife, Marti Goldsby, in 1972. She died in 2017.
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Why is Austin an Attractive Hub for Many Tech Companies?
Austin, Texas, is not California’s Silicon Valley technology corridor. But companies from Silicon Valley and other major U.S. hubs are taking notice of Austin’s growing tech scene. Austin’s lower cost of living and doing business, combined with its smaller size, are just a few reasons that people are attracted to the area. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee explains other reasons that tech companies are opening up shop there.
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Chinese of the Mississippi Delta – An Audiovisual Journey
Two Asian-American photographers from New York traveled to the deep south — The Mississippi Delta — to explore the roots of a seldom-mentioned, but long-established Chinese community. Their images explore the diverse contributions and experiences of both native-born and immigrant residents. But the young photographers’ journey is also a story of self-identity in an environment far from home.
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Colon Cancer Can Be Prevented and Treated
Although cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, colorectal cancer is one of the cancers that we can actually prevent, the World Health Organization says.
The colon is a long, muscular tube that’s also known as the large intestine. It is part of the digestive system. Colon cancer is linked to diet, genetic predisposition and age. In the U.S., 1 in 23 people will be told they have colon cancer.
WATCH: Colon Cancer Can be Prevented and Treated
Michele Alexander got her diagnosis at age 53.
“How much longer do I have? My daughter’s 24. You know, she’s still got a lot of life left. How much longer will I be with her? Those kind of thoughts go through your head,” Alexander said.
Largely preventable
Dr. Zihao Wu at the University of Missouri Health Care says this type of cancer is largely preventable.
“The majority of colon cancer develops from a benign polyp, and that takes about 10 to 15 years,” he said. “And if you find a polyp and remove it, you won’t have colon cancer, so it’s very important to have a screening to prevent cancer.”
As scary as her diagnosis was, Alexander’s passion for auto racing helped her get through her ordeal. Her favorite driver is Carl Edwards, and she had tickets to a race in which he was competing. When someone shared her story with him, he called her.
“I said, ‘I know there’s an auction where I can bid to ride in the truck with you for driver intros, and it is my goal to win that auction,’” she said. … He said, ‘Don’t bid. You get here, you’re riding with me.’”
Six weeks after surgery to remove the cancer in her colon, Alexander got her ride.
“Oh, it was just joy. In a race for my life, and I crossed the finish line a winner,” she said.
Healthy lifestyle helps
Wu said Alexander’s attitude helped.
“She wanted to get better. She had a strong will to get better, and I think that’s very important,” he said.
Doctors say you can help prevent colon cancer if you eat plenty of greens, whole grains and vegetables and legumes, which are high in fiber. Regular exercise also helps, and if you smoke, stop.
Most importantly, get a regular screening starting at age 50 or sooner if you have a family history.
If colon cancer is diagnosed at an early stage, the World Health Organization says 90 percent of patients survive at least five years, compared with no more than percent of those diagnosed at an advanced stage.
Two years after her surgery, Alexander is still cancer free and still a racecar enthusiast.
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Top 5 Songs for Week Ending March 24
We’re on the move with the five most popular songs in the Billboard Hot 100 Pop Singles chart, for the week ending March 24, 2018.
It’s always a good week when we welcome a new song, and this one is already setting records.
Number 5: Bebe Rexha & Florida Georgia Line “Meant To Be”
Bebe Rexha and Florida Georgia Line are your Top Five newcomers this week, as “Meant To Be” rises two slots to fifth place.
This song comes with a pedigree: It’s now in its 16th week atop the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. That’s the longest reign in that chart’s history for a song with a lead female vocal. Ironically, it was originally released on the contemporary hit radio format … not country.
Number 4: Post Malone Featuring Ty Dolla $ign “Psycho”
Post Malone and Ty Dolla $ign back off two slots to fourth place with “Psycho.”
Post’s next album “Beerbongs & Bentleys” has been a long time coming …and we still don’t have a release date. However, he’s now offering two different beer bongs on his merchandise page for $20 apiece … so that new album can’t be too far off, can it?
Number 3: Bruno Mars & Cardi B “Finesse”
Bruno Mars and Cardi B take over third place with “Finesse,” and Cardi just gave us her unfiltered opinion of the #MeToo movement.
Speaking with Cosmopolitan magazine, Cardi said she doesn’t feel the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements will have much effect on the hip hop scene. She says sexual favors were expected back when she was trying to break into videos, and if women spoke up they were belittled. Cardi also doesn’t feel that male producers and directors have learned much from anti-harassment initiatives … they’re just scared.
Number 2: Ed Sheeran “Perfect”
Ed Sheeran recovers a slot to second place with “Perfect.” Ed’s plans to build a chapel on his English estate may be foiled by newts. Ed submitted an application to the Suffolk Coastal District Council, but neighbors worry about the planned structure’s impact on the crested newt population. The little amphibians are a protected species.
Number 1: Drake “God’s Plan”
Drake heads the hit list for a seventh week with “God’s Plan.” Last year, author Margaret Atwood suggested that Drake should appear in the TV adaptation of her novel The Handmaid’s Tale. On March 18, cast members made their own appeals for Drake to take a cameo role in the dystopian show. Season 2 releases on April 25 on Hulu … without Drake, as far as we know.
We’ll be back next week with a new lineup!
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