Washington, D.C., is not a fashion town. Residents are known for dressing conservatively, if not for wearing clothes that are downright stodgy. But a computer engineer-turned fashion designer believes the nation’s capital is one of the best locations for fashion. VOA’s June Soh met DC Fashion Week founder Ean Williams to learn what the event is all about. Her report is narrated by Faith Lapidus.
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Month: September 2018
Brad Smith on Microsoft’s $40M AI for Humanitarian Action Program
VOA contributor Greta Van Susteren talks with Brad Smith, Microsoft’s President and Chief Legal Officer about the tech giant’s new Artificial Intelligence program.
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Italian Stocks Fall on Populist Government’s Spending Plans
Italy’s stock market fell sharply Friday after the new populist, euroskeptic government announced a sharp public spending increase that will push the budget deficit to 2.4 percent of gross domestic product next year, risking a collision with the European Union.
The benchmark FTSE MIB dropped 2.2 percent early Friday, hours after the government announced its first financial targets since taking office three months ago.
Italy’s government partners, the 5-Star movement and the League, pressed for money to fulfill campaign pledges, namely a basic citizen’s income for job seekers and a flat tax. Finance Minister Giovanni Tria, who is politically unaligned, had wanted to keep the budget deficit capped at no more than 2 percent.
The leader of the 5-Star Movement, Luigi Di Maio, called the document approved early Friday by the Cabinet “a maneuver of the people.”
“The historic measures are a victory,” Di Maio said. “It is not the government that wins, but citizens. It is a maneuver that allows us to relaunch investments and growth.”
The 2019 deficit target is a significant jump from the 2018 target of 1.6 percent, set by the former center-left government, but still remains within the 3-percent ceiling set by the EU. The European Union has been pressing Italy to address its deficit in a bid to reduce the country’s debt, the second largest in the EU after Greece.
The spending targets contained in the document calls for spending of 27 billion euros, including blocking an increase in value-added tax, launching the 5-Star Movement’s basic income scheme, undoing pension reforms and introducing a flat tax.
To pay for the new spending, the government has pledged a tax amnesty, a spending review and possible changes to tax breaks.
The government must submit a draft budget to the EU by Oct. 15.
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In One Virginia City, Beer is the Answer
An Bui and his siblings emigrated to the United States from Vietnam in the late 1980s. Several years later, his parents followed them to Richmond, Virginia. VOA’s Hung Lai visited the family’s restaurant, which helped make their adopted city one of the nation’s ultimate destinations for beer lovers.
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Puerto Rico Struggling, Still Open for Tourists, Governor Says
Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello flew to New York this week on a mission: convince potential tourists that the hurricane-ravaged island was ready for their return.
But Puerto Rico’s recovery from last year’s Hurricane Maria has been a “mixed bag,” Rossello told Reuters on Thursday, acknowledging that the bankrupt U.S. territory, while improving, was far from out of the woods.
Puerto Rico has received only a small fraction of the federal funding it needs to get back on its feet, Rossello said in a 75-minute interview, and getting access to the rest could take more than a decade.
$4 billion or less
His administration estimates that fixing Puerto Rico fully will require $139 billion, but the federal government has earmarked only about $60 billion to $65 billion for the recovery, he said. Of that, only about $3 billion to $4 billion has actually flowed into the island’s coffers.
Obtaining the remainder could take 10 to 11 years, he said, adding that his team was lobbying Congress for more money.
Compounding the problem is Puerto Rico’s bankruptcy in U.S. federal court, where it is trying to restructure $120 billion of debt and pension obligations. There are also ongoing spending disputes between the government and a federally appointed fiscal oversight board.
In the year since Hurricane Maria, Rossello has at times been diplomatic regarding the federal government’s response, while at other times — especially lately — he’s been more critical. He has also been criticized for sticking with an estimated death toll of 64 early on, when strong evidence suggested it could be higher. A government-commissioned study by researchers at George Washington University eventually pegged the toll at around 3,000.
When asked whether his administration’s messaging strategies have been tied to an effort to maintain good relations with President Donald Trump, Rossello said a “critical part” of the island’s recovery “is making sure the federal government responds to our petitions.”
“So ,yes, I have opted for a path that involves dialog, that involves collaboration,” Rossello said, adding that he has not been afraid to be critical.
If Trump does not sign the island’s request to extend the federal government’s 100 percent coverage of repair costs, “I’ll be the first one to fight it,” Rossello said, “and I’ll be the first to point out that action, or lack of action, is one of the main obstacles to our recovery.”
Rossello said Puerto Rico still has as many as 60,000 homes with temporary tarp roofs. It also has hundreds of thousands of informally constructed homes with many owners lacking title to their property.
Rebuilding will require that the current ranks of about 45,000 construction workers to grow to 130,000, according to Rossello, who recently signed an executive order increasing the minimum hourly construction wage to $15 despite opposition from the oversight board and the private sector.
Power shift
The island’s government is still considering initiatives that could make the its troubled electricity grid more resilient, Rossello said. Ultimately, the island hopes to generate 40 percent of its electricity from renewables and steer away from fossil fuels. The shift would require a new regulatory policy, approval by the bondholders, and, potentially, investment from outside companies or organizations.
“We have received 10 to 12 unsolicited proposals for generation,” he said, while acknowledging the government has yet to find a private operator for the power utility’s transmission and distribution operations.
But changes at the electric agency known as PREPA, which Rossello called one of the most troubled organizations in modern history, will be gradual. The governor said he was working with a search firm to identify outside board members for the utility, after nearly the entire board quit in an uproar over appointment of a new chief executive.
Limited electricity was a major problem for the island’s small-business sector, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of New York report on Thursday. A survey of more than 400 businesses with fewer than 500 employees found 77 percent suffered losses as a result of Hurricanes Irma and Maria.
Broader effort
Meanwhile, Rossello is trying not only to restore tourism, but to expand it in such a way that it incorporates hundreds of square miles of seaside and mountain communities that are largely unvisited. Puerto Rico’s tourism is small compared with that of other Caribbean locales and tends to be centered in San Juan.
The island’s visitor lodgings hit a 2017 high of 204,025 in July, but fell to just under 30,000 in October following the hurricanes, according to Puerto Rico Tourism Company data.
Persuading tourists to leave the capital, though, will require easier travel. “Puerto Rico should be a multiport destination,” he said, discussing plans to beef up airport capacity in the south and west of the island.
He emphasized the possibility of capitalizing on Puerto Rico’s near-constant spate of community festivals. “We have flower festivals, orange festivals, plantain festivals, coffee festivals, music festivals,” he said.
Rossello pointed to so-called chinchorreos as a possible draw, events in which Puerto Rican foodies move from one inexpensive eatery to the next.
“A bar crawl for food — that’s the best way to put it,” the governor said, “and the island is small, so you start in one place and you’re on a beachfront, and 15 minutes later you’re in the mountains.”
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New Orleans Publicly Unveiling Slave Market Tour App
The city of New Orleans has unveiled a smartphone app tour of sites involved in the slave trade during the 18th and 19th centuries, including the pre-Civil War years during which the city was the nation’s largest slave market.
The project, officially launched on Thursday, is affiliated with New Orleans’ tricentennial celebrations. It comes as cities around the country are shining an unblinking light on slavery and racial violence through such projects as a slavery museum outside New Orleans, an Alabama memorial to victims of lynchings, and the preservation of slave cemeteries.
In announcing the app at a news conference, African-American Mayor LaToya Cantrell said the New Orleans Slave Trade Marker and App Project “will let us honor the lives and dignity of those ancestors who were undoubtedly bought and sold here.”
The city’s Tricentennial Commission reached out to Erin Greenwald, then curator at the Historic New Orleans Commission, and historian Joshua Rothman of the University of Alabama, after they wrote an opinion piece in 2016 “calling out New Orleans for being behind other southern cities” in recognizing “difficult history,” Greenwald said.
The piece noted that Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama; Charleston, South Carolina; and Memphis, Tennessee, all had historical markers noting slavery, Reconstruction or Civil Rights troubles, but New Orleans had nothing to indicate that 135,000 people of color had been sold there as slaves.
The app has been available for about two months. It includes more than two hours of recorded segments including historical descriptions and readings from interviews with and writings by former slaves.
It opens by naming 11 children — Bill, Isaac, John, Monroe, Lewis, Washington, Robert, Phyllis, Elizabeth, Mary and Lovie — sent from Norfolk, Virginia, to the New Orleans slave market on the ship Ajax in September 1835.
“Ripped from their families, their communities and their homes, they were among more than 1 million enslaved people forcibly relocated” from Maryland, Virginia, Washington and North Carolina to lower Southern states between 1808, when the United States banned the international slave trade, and the end of the Civil War, a narrator states.
In a later segment, an actor reads from a Federal Writers Project interview in 1937 with Virginia Bell, who was born enslaved near Opelousas.
“My mother’s name was Della. That was all, just Della,” she begins. She tells about her father, “sold away” from a wife and five children in Virginia. “I don’t know what became of his family back in Virginia, because when we was freed, he stayed with us,” she said.
The stops include five with markers created for this project — a sixth is underway — and two with markers created by another group. Unlike state historic markers, those made for the project are mounted directly on buildings and topped with the project’s logo: a black man, woman and child around an auction block behind which a white man has raised a gavel.
If all the stops are taken in their listed order, the tour covers nearly 4 miles (6.4 kilometers), including more than a mile of backtracking. A map navigation button can be used to find nearby sites, with pop-up boxes to show each site’s name. That in turn will show an image, a list of audio tracks for the site, and directions to the next.
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US Regulators Sue Tesla’s Musk for Fraud, Seek to Bar Him as Officer
U.S. securities regulators on Thursday accused Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk of fraud and sought to ban him as an officer of a public company, saying he made a series of “false and misleading” tweets about potentially taking the electric car company private last month.
Musk, 47, is one of the highest-profile tech executives to be accused of fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Losing its public face and guiding force would be a big blow for money-losing Tesla, which has a market value of more than $50 billion, chiefly because of investors’ belief in Musk’s leadership.
Tesla shares tumbled 12 percent in after-hours trading. Company officials were not immediately available for comment.
The SEC’s lawsuit, filed in Manhattan federal court, came less than two months after Musk told his more than 22 million Twitter followers on Aug. 7 that he might take Tesla private at $420 per share, and that there was “funding secured.”
“Neither celebrity status nor reputation as a technological innovator provides an exemption from federal securities laws,” Stephanie Avakian, co-director of enforcement at the SEC, told a news conference announcing its charges against Musk.
Musk has long used Twitter to criticize short-sellers betting against his company, and already faced several investor lawsuits over the Aug. 7 tweets, which caused Tesla’s share price to gyrate.
According to the SEC, Musk “knew or was reckless in not knowing” that his tweets about taking Tesla private at $420 a share were false and misleading, given that he had never discussed such a transaction with any funding source.
The SEC said he also knew he had not satisfied other contingencies when he declared unequivocally that only a shareholder vote would be needed.
Thursday’s complaint also seeks to impose a civil fine and other remedies. The SEC does not have criminal enforcement power.
On Aug. 24, after news of the SEC probe had become known, Musk blogged that Tesla would remain public, citing investor resistance.
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Deputy UN Chief: Fight Against TB Drastically Underfunded
Tuberculosis is a vicious epidemic that is drastically underfunded. That was the takeaway message from the first high-level meeting focused on the infectious disease at the U.N. General Assembly in New York.
Amina Mohammad, U.N. deputy secretary-general, said the disease is fueled by poverty, inequality, migration and conflict, and that an additional $13 billion per year is needed to get the disease under control.
Last year, tuberculosis killed more people than any other communicable disease — more than 1.3 million men, women and children.
The World Health Organization estimates that the 10 million people who become newly infected each year live mostly in poor countries with limited access to health care.
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the WHO, told the assembly that partnership is vital to end the disease. He said the WHO is committed to working with every country, partner and community to get the job done.
The WHO plans to lead U.N. efforts to support governments and other partners in order to drive a faster response to TB.
Most people can be cured with a six-month treatment program. But as world leaders told the assembly, medication is expensive, and the stigma associated with TB interferes with getting people screened and treated.
Nandita Venkatesan, a young woman from India, told the assembly about the toll the disease has taken on her life. She got TB more than once, including a drug-resistant variety. She said it robbed her of eight years of her life while she was being treated. One of the medications she took to help cure TB robbed her of her hearing.
Venkatesan said getting cured involved hospital stays, six surgeries and negative reactions to at least one drug used to cure her.
Just days before the high-level meeting, the WHO released its annual TB report. It found cases in all countries and among all age groups. It also found that two-thirds of the cases were in eight countries — India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Africa and Nigeria.
The meeting ended with the adoption of a declaration intended to strengthen action and investments for ending TB and saving millions of lives.
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Art for Everyone
Earlier this year, two artists in Leesburg, Virginia, founded an art space where they could work and teach other art lovers as well. Part retail business, part studio, Clay and Metal Loft helps aspiring local artists gain the skills and confidence needed to start their own business. But, as Faiza Elmasry tells us, the founders have a bigger dream, they want their space to energize the community. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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Report: Disappearing Wetlands Put Planet Life at Risk
A new report warns that wetlands are disappearing three times faster than the world’s forests, with serious consequences for all life on earth.
The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands is a global treaty ratified in 1971 by 170 countries to protect wetlands, which are ecosystems inundated by water, such as swamps, bogs and floodplains.
Unfortunately, the goal of this treaty is under threat. Ramsar Convention officials report about 35 percent of the world’s wetlands have been lost between 1970 and 2015.
State of crisis
Unless this situation is urgently reversed, Ramsar Convention Secretary-General Martha Roja Urrego warns the world will be in a state of crisis because wetlands are critical for all aspects of life.
“All the water that we use for consumption, irrigation and for hydro-electricity comes directly or indirectly from wetlands,” Urrego said. “Secondly, wetlands also have a main function in filtering waste and pollutants, so they act as the kidneys of the world. They filter the waste.”
Urrego says wetlands also are essential in regulating the global climate as peatlands store twice as much carbon as the world’s forests.
Several factors
The report finds wetland loss is driven mainly by such factors as climate change, population increase, changing consumption patterns and urbanization, particularly in coastal zones and river deltas.
Authors of the report say biodiversity also is in a state of crisis. They say more than 25 percent of all wetlands plants and animals are at risk of extinction.
Scientists say without biodiversity, there is no future for humanity, because the air people breathe, the water they drink and the food they eat ultimately rely on biodiversity in its many forms.
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Indonesia’s National Gallery Hosts Art of Refugees, Highlighting Migrant Plight
The National Gallery of Indonesia is usually associated with such artists as Raden Saleh, Affandi and other icons of the nation’s artistic history. This month it plays host to the works of asylum seekers and refugees in an exhibition entitled Berdiam/Bertandang, which means Stay/Visit.
With about 13,800 people identified as “persons of concern” by the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR) residing in Indonesia, the exhibit aims to raise awareness of their plight while they wait in an uncertain and increasingly prolonged “transit.”
The exhibition is partly the culmination of a program called Art for Refuge, established by 16-year-old Indonesian high school student Katrina Wardhana, to teach art to children and young people at the Jakarta-based Roshan Learning Center for refugees.
“I felt art was like a really powerful tool where refugees in Indonesia can share their stories,” she told VOA.
Many from Afghanistan
About half of the refugees in Indonesia are from Afghanistan. Mumtaz Khan Chopan, a professional artist who arrived in Indonesia in 2013 and whose paintings were part of Berdiam/Bertandang, said being an artist in Afghanistan holds extreme risks. There are few art institutions, he said, restricting opportunities to “go and practice and talk to likeminded people, artists.”
“Most of the people in Afghanistan believe that art is not a valuable thing,” he added. “Not only valuable, it’s not even allowed … but this does not mean that Afghanistan doesn’t have art.”
Binam, a 17-year-old from Afghanistan whose name has been changed to protect his identity, came to Indonesia three years ago as an unaccompanied minor and lives in a shelter provided by the UNHCR. He learned photography as part of Art for Refuge and his work appeared in Berdiam/Bertandang.
“It’s my first work, exhibition and it’s a big exhibition,” he said. “I feel proud.”
Stuck in Indonesia
Indonesia has historically been a transit country for refugees seeking asylum in third countries, particularly Australia. While Indonesia is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, it also does not deport asylum seekers and refugees back to potential danger. Jakarta’s historical approach to refugees has been described by anthropologist Antje Missbach as a form of “benign neglect.”
President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo in January 2017 signed a presidential decree that for the first time acknowledged the presence of a refugee community in Indonesia as distinct from “illegal immigrants” and gave directives to various government institutions regarding their respective responsibilities in managing humanitarian aid. They continue to be denied the right to work, however, and opportunities for formal education are limited.
Moreover, resettlement in third countries such as Australia, the United States and Canada are increasingly unavailable to refugees residing in Indonesia. As of late 2017, the UNHCR reportedly began telling the refugee community there that resettlement elsewhere was highly unlikely for at least 10 to 15 years, if ever.
“We have to live in shelter[s] because in here we can’t work,” Binam said. “And now there is no resettlement for the refugee from other countries.”
According to UNHCR data, 269 out of almost 4,000 refugee children in Indonesia are enrolled in accredited national schools. The work of the Roshan Learning Center and other community-led education initiatives are therefore vital. Mitra Salima Suryono, a spokesperson for UNHCR Jakarta, told VOA that “by doing such activities, it’s good because it keeps their hopes alive. What’s more important is that friendship between Indonesians and the refugees are getting tighter with initiatives like this.”
Building relationships
The main goal of Art for Refuge is boosting understanding about refugees in the broader community, said Wardhana, its founder.
“Having just found out about refugees only quite recently after my involvement at Roshan, I realized how unaware and un-talked-about the issue is here in Indonesia,” she said.
Chris Bunjuman, a photographer who taught teenagers through the program, encouraged his students to attend a public festival in Jakarta and take photos of 40 people with mustaches as an assignment.
“Most of the time they always stay in the same community … they don’t really interact with people around them because of the language barrier,” he said. “Those assignments really pushed them, with their thinking … eventually they got out of their comfort zone.”
Alia Swastika, the curator of Berdiam/Bertandang, said that “the problem in Indonesia is that when we discuss about refugees they always think, ‘Oh, we have many other different problems that need to be solved and these are more related to Indonesian people themselves.’”
“People in Indonesia they are educated, of course they are very nice, but there is one thing they don’t know much about refugee[s] … what they are doing here,” said Chopan, the Afghan artist, who says he has found empowerment through the creative scene in Indonesia. “If I introduce myself to a person that I am a refugee, I get different reaction to if I say I am an artist.”
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Ban on Kenyan Lesbian Film Lifted for One Week
After a months-long ban because of its lesbian love theme, the Kenyan film “Rafiki,” which means “friend” in Swahili, premiered for the first time in Nairobi following a Kenyan high court decision to allow the screening of the controversial film. VOA correspondent Mariama Diallo reports.
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Blind Kurdish Musician Experiences Life in US Through His Music
The late reggae legend Bob Marley once sang: “One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain.” For a young Kurdish immigrant living in San Diego, Marley’s observation rings true. Blind since birth, the young musician says music washes away his pain. VOA’s Lukman Ahmad visited the talented musician in San Diego, California, and filed this report, narrated by Bezhan Hamdard.
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US, Japan Working Toward Free-trade Agreement
The United States and Japan have agreed to begin negotiations on a bilateral free-trade agreement, reducing the prospect that Washington might impose tariffs against another trading partner.
“We’ve agreed today to start trade negotiations between the United States and Japan,” U.S. President Donald Trump said at a summit with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in New York on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly.
“This was something that for various reasons over the years Japan was unwilling to do and now they are willing to do. So we’re very happy about that, and I’m sure that we will come to a satisfactory conclusion, and if we don’t, ohhhhhh,” Trump added.
Fast-track authority
The White House released a statement after the meeting, stating the two countries would enter into talks after completing necessary domestic procedures for a bilateral trade agreement on goods and other key areas, including services.
U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer called it a “very important step” in expanding U.S.-Japan relations. He told reporters that the U.S. and Japan were aiming to approve a full free-trade agreement soon. Lighthizer said he would talk to Congress on Thursday about seeking authority for the president to negotiate the agreement, under the “fast track” trade authority law.
Lighthizer said he expected the negotiations to include the goal of reaching an “early harvest” on reducing tariffs and other trade barriers.
Tokyo’s reticence
Tokyo had been reluctant to commit to a bilateral free-trade pact and had hoped that Washington would consider returning to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a broader regional trade agreement championed by the Obama administration that Trump pulled out of in January 2017.
Trump has complained about Japan’s $69 billion trade surplus with the U.S. and has been pressuring Abe to agree to a two-way agreement to address it, including during Abe’s visit to Trump’s Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, in April.
Japanese officials have expressed concern Trump might pressure Tokyo to open up its politically sensitive farm market. They also are wary Trump might demand a reduction in Japanese auto imports or impose high tariffs on autos and auto parts, which would be detrimental to Japan’s export-reliant economy.
Trump is expressing confidence the two sides will reach an agreement.
“We’re going to have a really great relationship, better than ever before on trade,” he said. “It can only be better for the United States because it couldn’t get any worse because of what’s happened over the years.”
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Uber to Pay $148M for Hiding Data Breach
The ride-hailing service Uber has agreed to pay $148 million to settle claims that it concealed a massive data breach that exposed personal information of drivers and customers.
In November 2016, Uber learned that hackers had accessed personal data of about 600,000 Uber drivers, including their driver’s license numbers. Hackers also had stolen email addresses and cellphone numbers of 57 million riders worldwide.
The claims, filed in every U.S. state and the District of Columbia, said rather than inform the drivers involved, Uber hid the breach for more than a year and paid ransom to ensure the data wouldn’t be misused.
“This is one of the most egregious cases we’ve ever seen in terms of notification; a yearlong delay is just inexcusable,” Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan told The Associated Press.
Uber’s chief legal officer, Tony West, said the decision to come clean about the hack was made after major management changes at the company.
“It embodies the principles by which we are running our business today: transparency, integrity and accountability,” West said.
Each state will receive a part of the settlement based on how many drivers they have. Most states estimate each affected Uber driver will receive about $100.
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CDC Official: 80,000 Died of Flu Last Winter in US
An estimated 80,000 Americans died of flu and its complications last winter, the disease’s highest death toll in at least four decades.
The director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, revealed the total in an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press.
Flu experts knew it was a very bad season, but at least one found the size of the estimate surprising.
“That’s huge,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a Vanderbilt University vaccine expert. The tally was nearly twice the figure previously seen by health officials as representing a bad year, he said.
In recent years, flu-related deaths have ranged from about 12,000 to 56,000, according to the CDC.
Last fall and winter, the U.S. went through one of the most severe flu seasons in recent memory. It was driven by a kind of flu that tends to put more people in the hospital and cause more deaths, particularly among young children and the elderly.
The season peaked in early February and it was mostly over by the end of March.
Making a bad year worse, the flu vaccine didn’t work very well. Experts nevertheless say vaccination is still worth it because it makes illnesses less severe and saves lives.
CDC officials do not have exact counts of how many people die from flu each year. Flu is so common that not all flu cases are reported, and flu is not always listed on death certificates. So the CDC uses statistical models, which are periodically revised, to make estimates.
Fatal complications from the flu can include pneumonia, stroke and heart attack.
CDC officials called the 80,000 figure preliminary, and it may be revised. But they said it was not expected to go down.
The 80,000 figure eclipsed estimates for every flu season going back to the winter of 1976-77. Estimates for many earlier seasons were not readily available.
Last winter was not the worst flu season on record, however. The 1918 flu pandemic, which lasted nearly two years, killed more than 500,000 Americans, historians estimate.
It’s not easy to compare flu seasons through history, partly because the nation’s population is changing. There are more Americans — and more elderly Americans — today than in decades past, noted Dr. Daniel Jernigan, a CDC flu expert.
How bad will the coming flu season be? So far, the flu that’s been detected is a milder strain, and early signs are that the vaccine is shaping up to be a good match, Jernigan said.
The makeup of the vaccine has been changed this year to try to better protect against expected strains.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen, but we’re seeing more encouraging signs than we were early last year,” Jernigan said.
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Experimental Malaria Vaccines Target Liver Cells
After decades of disappointment in efforts to develop a malaria vaccine, researchers are starting to see promise in a new approach.
While most vaccines trigger the body’s defenses to produce antibodies against a disease-causing germ, the new approach recruits an entirely different branch of the immune system.
If it works, it could open up a new route to attack other diseases, including hepatitis and possibly HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
Nearly 450,000 people die of malaria each year, according to the World Health Organization. The parasites that cause the disease are increasingly becoming drug-resistant.
One successful vaccine has been developed so far, but it prevented only about a third of cases in a clinical study.
Experts have decided that’s better than nothing. The vaccine is being piloted in Ghana, Kenya and Malawi.
New angle
Other scientists are trying a different angle of attack.
There are basically two ways to prevent germs from causing infections. “You either prevent them from getting into cells with antibodies, or you kill them inside the cells with T-cells,” said Stephen Hoffman, chief executive officer of Sanaria, a company working on one vaccine.
Most vaccines target the infection by building up antibodies. “If you need to kill them inside the cells with T-cells, we haven’t been overwhelmingly successful,” Hoffman said.
But Sanaria is one group seeing success by targeting malaria parasites inside infected liver cells, the first stop in the complex life cycle of the disease.
One key difference is how the vaccine is delivered. Hoffman’s group tried a typical route: injecting radiation-weakened parasites into patients’ skin or muscle. That didn’t work.
But it did work when injected directly into veins.
The weakened parasites traveled to the liver, where they set off an immune reaction. Defensive cells killed liver cells that were infected with malaria parasites.
And the liver’s defenses were ready when faced with the real thing months later.
Most of that early work has been done in mice and macaques. When Hoffman and colleagues did something similar with a handful of human patients, most were protected against infection.
No waiting
Recruiting immune cells in the liver is especially effective because “we don’t need to wait until the immune system figures out that the parasite is in the liver and starts mounting an immune response, which can take days and sometimes weeks,” said Adrian Hill, director of the Jenner Institute at Oxford University.
“By then, the malaria’s gone. It only spends a week in the liver, and then it’s out in your blood causing disease.”
Hill’s group just published a study in the journal Science Translational Medicine in which immune cells in the liver were triggered by using a protein from the parasite, rather than the entire organism.
Scientists hope to get a better grasp on the system these vaccines employ, known as cellular immunity. Harnessing this system could help tackle hepatitis and HIV infection.
Drugs can control HIV infection but can’t eliminate it from the body.
“If somebody could get cellular immunity to work really well for vaccination, that would be transformative for a whole range of diseases,” Hill said. “Not just for infectious diseases that we want to prevent, but ones that we want to treat and we can’t treat today.”
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US Lawmakers Urged to Enact Personal Data Protections, But With Care
U.S. communications and social media titans are urging lawmakers to craft strong, uniform protections for Americans’ personal data without squashing innovation.
The Senate Commerce Committee heard testimony Wednesday from Apple, Amazon.com, Google, Twitter, and AT&T executives at a time when data breaches are commonplace, many Americans are mystified or unaware of how their personal data may be used or shared, and jurisdictions from the European Union to the state of California have taken action to safeguard consumers.
“Privacy means much more than having the right to not share your personal information. Privacy is about putting the user in control when it comes to that information. We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right, which should be supported by both social norms and the law,” said Apple’s vice president for software technology, Bud Tribble.
“In today’s data-driven world, it is more important than ever to maintain consumers’ trust and give them control over their personal information,” said AT&T’s senior vice president for global public policy, Leonard Cali.
The executives urged lawmakers to implement national standards that would preempt individual states from taking action on their own, as California has done.
“California is a single state, and if other states follow suit, we’ll be facing a patchwork of rules and fragmentation that will be just unworkable for consumers, as well as mobile companies and internet companies,” Cali said.
At the same time, senators were urged to craft legislation with care. Several witnesses described the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, implemented earlier this year, as overly burdensome.
“Meeting its [the GDPR’s] specific requirements for the handling, retention, and deletion of personal data required us to divert significant resources to administrative tasks and away from invention on behalf of customers,” Amazon.com Vice President Andrew DeVore said.
DeVore added, “We encourage Congress to ensure that additional overhead and administrative demands any legislation might require, actually produce commensurate consumer privacy benefits.”
Current proposal
Congress already has legislation to consider. Earlier this year, Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar and Louisiana Republican John Kennedy introduced a bill that would require companies to write terms of service agreements in plain language and allow consumers to review data collected about them and find out if and how it has been shared. Other proposals are likely to be forthcoming.
“The question is no longer whether we need a federal law to protect consumers’ privacy,” said the committee’s chairman, Republican Senator John Thune of South Dakota. “The question is what shape that law should take.”
Privacy questions
Several senators readily acknowledged that they did not grow up in the digital age.
“This thing sometimes mystifies me,” Montana Democrat Jon Tester said, holding up his smartphone. Tester added that he was perplexed to see that, after searching for new tires for his truck, online advertisements for tires appeared on Web pages he subsequently visited.
“How the hell did they get that information?” he asked.
Google Chief Privacy Officer Keith Enright responded the search engine allows Web pages to earn revenue “by placing advertisements that may be targeted to a user’s interests.” But, he stressed, “No personal information is passing from Google to that third party — we neither sell it nor share it.”
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Report: Ford CEO Warns Tariffs Cut $1 Billion in Profit
Ford chief Jim Hackett on Wednesday ramped up his warnings about the tariffs imposed by President Donald Trump, saying his company was seeing profits slashed by $1 billion.
Hackett said the global automaker could face more damage if the trade confrontations were not resolved quickly.
“The metals tariffs took about $1 billion in profit from us,” Hackett said in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “If it goes on longer, there will be more damage.”
Trump in June imposed steep tariffs on steel and aluminum and has hit $250 billion in Chinese products with tariffs, prompting retaliation from US trading partners and raising costs for many industries.
The company earlier this year estimated materials costs would be $1.5 billion over 2017, which had already seen a jump.
And in the July earnings report Ford said it lost $500 million in China in the latest quarter due in part to the tariffs.
General Motors likewise warned the current trade wars should cost it $1 billion this year, mainly due to rising input costs.
Ford recently announced it was scrapping plans to import the compact Focus model from Chinese plants into the US market due to the tariffs.
Joseph Hinrichs, Ford’s executive vice president for global operations, said this week the company was speeding up plans to build some models in China since it was becoming less attractive to export amid the trade tensions.
He also said he did not see any easy resolution to the trade dispute between the United States and China.
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Somalia to Get First Direct World Bank Grants in Decades
Somalia’s finance minister says World Bank grants to the government are a sign the country has “trustable leadership” again after decades of chaos and corruption.
The World Bank said Tuesday it will provide $80 million in grants to Somalia’s federal government, the bank’s first direct grants to a Somali central authority in 27 years.
In an interview with VOA’s Somali service, Finance Minister Abdirahman Duale Beileh said the grants are “proof of Somalia’s merit.”
Beileh said $60 million will be used to increase the capacity of Somalia’s financial institutions, and $20 million will go toward education and energy projects to build the country’s resilience.
He said the grants show that international financial agencies have faith the government is capable of fighting against corruption.
“The work we have done and the trustworthiness we have earned brought us here,” he said.
The World Bank cut ties with Somalia in 1991, following the collapse of the Mohamed Siad Barre government and the start of a long civil war.
Beileh said that in recent years, Somalia’s government has made tangible improvement in management of the economy and its institutions.
However, the latest global index of Transparency International put Somalia as the world’s most corrupt country.
Somali President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohammed, also known as Farmajo, took power last year in an election by parliament that observers said was characterized by bribes and vote-buying.
Beileh acknowledged the government’s fight against corruption is “far from over.”
“There is a perception that Somalia cannot be trusted because of its corruption history. Most of that is not perception,” he said.
He added: “We are proud that we made progress to at least a transparent level that both the World Bank and the IMF can notice.”
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Fed Lifts Rates for Third Time in ’18; One More Expected
The Federal Reserve on Wednesday raised a key interest rate for the third time this year in response to a strong U.S. economy and signaled that it expected to maintain a pace of gradual rate hikes.
The Fed lifted its short-term rate — a benchmark for many consumer and business loans — by a quarter-point to a range of 2 percent to 2.25 percent. It was the eighth hike since late 2015.
The central bank stuck with its previous forecast for a fourth rate increase before year’s end and for three more hikes in 2019.
The Fed dropped phrasing it had used for years that characterized its rate policy as “accommodative” by favoring low rates. In dropping that language, the central bank may be signaling its resolve to keep raising rates.
Many analysts think the economy could weaken next year, in part from the effects of the trade conflicts President Donald Trump has pursued with China, Canada, Europe and other trading partners. The tariffs and countertariffs that have been imposed on imports and exports are having the effect of raising prices for some goods and supplies and potentially slowing growth.
Compounding the effects of the tariffs, other factors could slow growth next year. The benefits of tax cuts that took effect this year, along with increased government spending, for example, are widely expected to fade.
Still, some analysts hold to a more optimistic scenario. They think momentum already built up from the government’s economic stimulus will keep strengthening the job market and lowering unemployment — at 3.9 percent, already near a 50-year low. A tight employment market, in this scenario, will accelerate wages and inflation and prod the Fed to keep tightening credit to ensure that the economy doesn’t overheat.
Full-year growth
The U.S. economy, as measured by the gross domestic product, is expected to grow 3 percent for 2018 as a whole. That would mark the strongest full-year gain in 13 years. For the first nine years of the economic expansion, annual GDP growth averaged only around 2.2 percent.
The robust job market has helped make consumers, the main drivers of growth, more confident than they’ve been in nearly 18 years. Business investment is up. Americans are spending freely on cars, clothes and restaurant meals.
All the good news has helped fuel a stock market rally. Household wealth is up, too. It reached a record in the April-June quarter, although the gain is concentrated largely among the most affluent.
Many economists worry, though, that Trump’s combative trade policies could slow the economy. Trump insists that the tariffs he is imposing on Chinese imports, for which Beijing has retaliated, are needed to force China to halt unfair trading practices. But concern is growing that China won’t change its practices, the higher tariffs on U.S. and Chinese goods will become permanent, and both economies — the world’s two largest — will suffer.
Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has so far been circumspect in reflecting on Trump’s trade war. Powell has suggested that while higher tariffs are generally harmful, they could serve a healthy purpose if they eventually force Beijing to liberalize its trade practices.
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Stealth Drug Targets Superbug Through Trojan Horse
The Trojan Horse allowed the ancient Greek army to enter the city of Troy and defeat it. A similar strategy could help doctors destroy superbugs that are resistant to current antibiotics.
The decreasing effectiveness of antibiotics is among the most critical challenges facing medicine today, as drug-resistant bacteria resist almost every therapy thrown at them. But researchers at the University of Washington School of Medicine wondered if superbugs could be tricked into taking in a molecule that looks like food but wreaks havoc once inside.
Microbiology professor Pradeep Singh said they focused on iron, which is a critical nutrient for bacteria to multiply and spread. He told VOA that natural binders in the body take up iron, which is also important for our health, and try to keep it from bacteria. But the invaders have mechanisms to get to the bound iron.
“So, we were thinking about an alternative way that didn’t involve iron binding,” he explained. “How could we exploit the really high requirement for iron for infecting bacteria? And that’s how we came up with the idea of using a chemical mimic to exploit the bacteria’s own uptake system to get an antimicrobial drug inside.”
An iron Trojan Horse
The mimic they chose was gallium, a metal similar to iron. And like many successful antibiotics, Singh notes that gallium targets a number of vital functions in the bacteria.
“We know that one of the things it does is it inhibits an enzyme that is involved in producing copies of bacterial cell DNA — that’s really important for making daughter cells. If you can’t replicate your DNA, you can’t multiply. We’ve also shown that gallium can inhibit an enzyme that protects (bacteria) from oxidative stress like hydrogen peroxide. It probably does a bunch of other things, too, so it kind of just causes this kind of haywire in the cell for a bunch of those biological functions of iron.”
In lab studies, bacteria developed resistance to gallium at low rates, and its potency was increased when it was administered with some existing antibiotics. These factors led Singh and his colleague Chris Goss, a professor of medicine and pediatrics, to do preliminary tests of gallium in mice and humans, with exciting results detailed in the current issue of Science Translational Medicine.
A promising strategy against bad bacteria
In mice, they found that a single dose of gallum cured lethal lung infections.
The human trial — involving 20 patients with the lung disease cystic fibrosis — provided some tantalizing findings. Goss told VOA the gallium was given by infusion over five days. And while it rapidly cleared from the blood, it moved to the lungs, positively impacting patients’ breathing for up to a month.
“The key measure in cystic fibrosis and many lung diseases is forced expiratory volume, which is, you blow in a tube, and we see how much you can blow. And what we found is actually (forced expiratory volume) increased significantly from baseline in the realm of what we would normally see in an antibiotic-treated population. So, a similar effect as giving inhaled antibiotics or some oral antibiotics. And that was what I think made this an unusual finding, that the proof seemed to be there that you can give this drug intravenously, and it would actually impact lung function.”
More research is needed to confirm gallium’s safety and effectiveness as a treatment, but preliminary results suggest that the strategy that ended the Trojan War might be a winning approach to today’s battle against superbugs.
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