Month: November 2018

National Board of Review Names ‘Green Book’ Year’s Best Film

The feel-good road-trip drama Green Book was named the best film of the year, and its star, Viggo Mortensen, best actor, by the National Board of Review in one of the first in a parade of awards season honors.

The NBR awards, announced Tuesday, gave the Oscar hopes of Universal’s Green Book a jolt. The film, directed by Peter Farrelly (who typically makes broader comedies like There’s Something About Mary with his brother, Bobby) was declared an Oscar favorite after taking the audience award at the Toronto International Film Festival.

But in two weeks of release, it has struggled to latch on at the box office, and some critics have called its portrayal of race relations old-fashioned and criticized it for relying on “white savior” tropes. It stars Mahershala Ali as classical pianist Don Shirley, who tours the Deep South in 1962 with a racist Italian-American driver played by Mortensen.

Bradley Cooper’s lauded remake A Star Is Born also took several top awards, including best director for Cooper, best actress for Lady Gaga and best supporting actor for Sam Elliott.

Barry Jenkins’ James Baldwin adaptation If Beale Street Could Talk took prizes for Jenkins’ screenplay and for Regina King’s supporting performance. 

Though sometimes called an Oscar harbinger, the National Board of Review, a 109-year-old organization of film enthusiasts, academics and professionals, has typically deviated from eventual best picture winners. It last year chose Steven Spielberg’s The Post. Before that, its top winners were Manchester By the Sea, Mad Max: Fury Road and A Most Violent Year.

On Monday night, the Gotham Awards, which honor independent film, selected Chloe Zhao’s The Rider as its best feature film of the year. Critics groups will soon start weighing in with their picks, starting with the New York Film Critics Circle on Thursday.

Other prizes from the National Board of Review included best ensemble for the cast of the romantic-comedy hit Crazy Rich Asians; best documentary to the popular Ruth Bader Ginsberg chronicle RBG; best screenplay to Paul Schrader’s First Reformed; best animated feature to Incredibles 2; best foreign language film to Cold War.

The awards will be handed out in on January 8 in New York at a gala hosted by Willie Geist.

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UNICEF: Millions of Poor City Children Worse Off Than Rural Peers

Millions of poor urban children are more likely to die before their fifth birthday than those living in rural areas, according to a U.N. study released Tuesday that challenges popular assumptions behind the global urbanization trend.

The UNICEF research found not all children in cities benefited from the so-called urban advantage — the idea that higher incomes, better infrastructure and proximity to services make for better lives.

“For rural parents, at face-value, the reasons to migrate to cities seem obvious: better access to jobs, health care and education opportunities for their children,” said Laurence Chandy, UNICEF director of data, research and policy.

“But not all urban children are benefiting equally; we find evidence of millions of children in urban areas who fare worse than their rural peers.”

Although most urban children benefit from living in cities, the study identified 4.3 million globally who were more likely to die before age five than their rural counterparts, and said 13.4 million were less likely to complete primary school.

“Children should be a focus of urban planning, yet in many cities they are forgotten, with millions of children cut off from social services in urban slums and informal settlements,” said Chandy in a statement.

About 1 billion people are estimated to live in slums globally, hundreds of millions of them children, according to the U.N. children’s agency.

A decade ago, the world officially became majority urban, and two-thirds of the global population is expected to live in urban areas by 2050, according to the United Nations.

“We applaud UNICEF for putting numbers around a problem that will only get more serious as more and more families move to cities,” said Patrin Watanatada of the Bernard van Leer Foundation, which works to promote early childhood development. “Cities can be wonderful places to grow up, rich with opportunities — but they can also pose serious challenges for a child’s healthy development.”

Poor transport links, limited access to health clinics and parks, as well as growing air pollution and stressed caregivers can exacerbate city living for children, said Watanatada.

Improved walking and cycling infrastructure, affordable housing and transportation, and polices targeted at supporting children and those who care for them could help ease life for urban families.

ICLEI, a global network of more than 1,500 cities, towns and regions, said disasters were more likely to impact the most vulnerable in cities, including children.

“Children are disproportionately affected by gaps in urban services, especially when it comes to water, sanitation, air quality, and food security,” said Yunus Arikan, head of global policy and advocacy at ICLEI.

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Trump Threatens to Cut GM Subsidies in Retaliation for US Job Cuts

U.S. President Donald Trump threatened on Tuesday to cut subsidies for General Motors after the largest U.S. automaker said it would halt production at five plants in North America and cut nearly 15,000 jobs.

“The U.S. saved General Motors, and this is the THANKS we get! We are now looking at cutting all @GM subsidies, including … for electric cars,” Trump said on Twitter.

Trump has made boosting auto jobs a key priority during his almost two years in office and has often attacked automakers on Twitter for not doing enough to boost U.S. employment.

GM electric vehicles are eligible for a $7,500 tax credit under federal law, but it is not clear how the administration could restrict those credits or if Trump had other subsidies in mind. GM shares extended earlier declines and were down 3.6 percent after Trump’s tweets.

GM declined to immediately comment.

GM Chief Executive Mary Barra spoke to Trump over the weekend to discuss the cuts and was at the White House on Monday to meet with economic adviser Larry Kudlow.

Trump also criticized GM for not closing facilities in Mexico or China.

“General Motors made a big China bet years ago when they built plants there (and in Mexico) – don’t think that bet is going to pay off. I am here to protect America’s Workers!” Trump wrote on Twitter.

GM currently builds just one vehicle in China that it exports to the United States — the Buick Envision — and has sold about 22,000 through September. GM sold nearly 2.7 million vehicles in China through September, nearly all of them built in China for the market.

White House spokesman Sarah Sanders told reporters Tuesday that the president is looking at options.

“The president wants to see American companies build cars here in America, not build them overseas and he is hopeful that GM will continue to do that here,” she said.

GM has been lobbying Congress, along with Tesla, to lift the current cap on electric vehicles eligible for tax credits, but any action by Congress before 2019 is a long-shot, congressional aides said.

Under current law, once a manufacturer sells 200,000 electric vehicles, the tax credit phases out over time starting in the following quarter. GM has said it expects to hit the 200,000-vehicle threshold by the end of the year.

GM announced Monday it will halt production at one Canadian plant and four U.S. factories, including the Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly plant that builds the plug-in hybrid electric Chevrolet Volt. GM is ending production of six vehicles, including the Volt, as it cuts more than 6,500 factory jobs.

GM will continue to build the electric Chevrolet Bolt in Michigan.

Trump told GM on Monday it “better” find a new product for Lordstown Assembly plant in Ohio that will halt production in March. GM has said sagging demand for small cars largely prompted the cuts, but also cited factors including higher costs from U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum.

GM said it also plans to close two unnamed plants outside North America by the end of 2019.

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White House Adviser: US, China Could Reach New Trade Deal

U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping could reach a new trade deal between the world’s two largest economies when they meet in Argentina this weekend, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said Tuesday.

“The president said there is a good possibility that we can make a deal and he is open to it,” he said of Trump. But he cautioned that obstacles remain.

Kudlow said the two leaders must resolve the issues of “fairness and reciprocity” at the center of the dispute.

“China should change its practices and come into the community of responsible trading nations,” he said. “Their responses have disappointed because … we can’t find much change in their approach.”

The U.S. and China over several months have imposed tit-for-tat tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of imports arriving from each other’s shores.

On Monday, Trump voiced doubts that a deal would be reached when he meets with Xi Saturday night in Buenos Aires on the sidelines of the G-20 summit of the world’s largest economies.

Trump has threatened to impose more tariffs on Chinese exports if the two sides cannot reach what he considers fairer trading between the two countries.

Kudlow said “certain conditions have to be met. … Intellectual property theft must be solved. Forced technology transfers must be solved.”

He said Trump is “not going away” if no deal is reached.

“I hope they understand that,” he added.

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Scientists: Mild El Nino Event Likely by Next February

There is a 75 to 80 percent probability of an El Nino weather phenomenon developing within the next three months, the World Meteorological Organization reports.

Global seasonal climate data show precipitation patterns predicted for December to February resemble those normally associated with El Nino, WMO said, adding that it is not expected to be as powerful as the deadly event in 2015 and 2016, which caused droughts, flooding and coral bleaching around the world.

While a weaker El Nino is expected to emerge, WMO scientists warn it still can have a significant impact on rainfall and temperature patterns. They say it could adversely affect agriculture and food security, the management of water resources, and public health.

WMO spokeswoman Claire Nullis tells VOA neutral weather conditions have prevailed for the past few months, with neither El Nino nor its opposite La Nina present. While they are associated with extreme weather events, she says they are not the only factors.

“And we need to bear in mind, we have got climate change,” she said. “So, every El Nino, every La Nina, which takes place now is taking place against a background of the fact that we are living in a dramatically altered climate compared to even 50 years ago. So, the impacts, for instance, on heat waves are likely to be more pronounced than they were several decades ago.”

El Nino and La Nina are phases of what is known as the El Nino-Southern Oscillation cycle, or ENSO. This phenomenon involves fluctuations in temperatures between the ocean and atmosphere in the equatorial Pacific. 

El Nino is sometimes referred to as the warm phase of ENSO, with La Nina acting as its cold opposite. WMO says both events have a major influence on weather and climate patterns over many parts of the world.

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‘SpongeBob’ Creator Stephen Hillenburg Dies at 57

Stephen Hillenburg, who created SpongeBob SquarePants and the absurd undersea world he inhabited, has died at age 57, Nickelodeon announced Tuesday.

Hillenburg died Monday of Lou Gehrig’s disease, also known as ALS, the cable network said in a statement. He was 57.

Hillenburg had announced he had the disease in March 2017. His death comes just weeks after the passing of another cartoon hero in Marvel creator Stan Lee.

An Oklahoma native with a love of both drawing and marine biology, Hillenburg conceived, wrote, produced and directed the animated series that began in 1999 and went on to spawn hundreds of episodes, movies and a Broadway show.

“He was a beloved friend and long-time creative partner to everyone at Nickelodeon, and our hearts go out to his entire family,” Nickelodeon’s statement said. “Steve imbued ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ with a unique sense of humor and innocence that has brought joy to generations of kids and families everywhere. His utterly original characters and the world of Bikini Bottom will long stand as a reminder of the value of optimism, friendship and the limitless power of imagination.”

The absurdly jolly SpongeBob, his starfish sidekick Patrick, and a vast cast of oceanic creatures quickly appealed to college kids and parents as much as it did kids.

“The fact that it’s undersea and isolated from our world helps the characters maintain their own culture,” Hillenburg told The Associated Press in 2001. “The essence of the show is that SpongeBob is an innocent in a world of jaded characters. The rest is absurd packaging.”

Born at his father’s army post in Lawton, Oklahoma, Hillenburg graduated from Humboldt State University in California in 1984 with a degree in natural resource planning with an emphasis on marine resources, and went on to teach marine biology at the Orange County Marine Institute.

He shifted to drawing and earned a master of fine arts degree in animation from the California Institute of the Arts in 1992.

That same year he created an animated short called “Wormholes” that won festival plaudits and helped land him a job on the Nickelodeon show “Rocko’s Modern Life,” where he worked from 1993 to 1996 before he began to build SpongeBob’s undersea world of Bikini Bottom, which showed off his knowledge of marine life and willingness to throw all the details out the window.

“We know that fish don’t walk,” he told the AP, “and that there is no organized community with roads, where cars are really boats. And if you know much about sponges, you know that living sponges aren’t square.”

The show was an immediate hit that has lost no momentum in the nearly 20 years since its creation. Its nearly 250 episodes have won four Emmys and 15 Kids Choice Awards, and led to an endless line of merchandise to rival any other pop cultural phenomenon of the 2000s.

In 2004, the show shifted to the big screen with “The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie” and a 2015 sequel, “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water.”

A musical stage adaptation bowed on Broadway in 2017, with music from such stars as Steven Tyler, Sara Bareilles and John Legend. It earned 12 Tony Award nominations, including one for best performance by a leading actor for Ethan Slater.

“I am heartbroken to hear of the passing of Stephen Hillenburg,” Slater said in an email Tuesday. “Through working on ‘SpongeBob,’ I got to know him not only as a creative genius, but as a truly generous and kind person. He warmly embraced us on Broadway as the newest members of his wonderful ‘SpongeBob’ family, and made it so clear from the get-go why he is so beloved: genuine kindness.”

Hillenburg is survived by his wife of 20 years Karen Hillenburg, son Clay, mother Nancy Hillenburg, and a brother, Brian Kelly Hillenburg.

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China Launches Probe Into ‘First’ Gene-Edited Babies

A Chinese researcher’s surprise claim that he is the first person in the world to successfully edit the genes of a pair of recently born twin girls, making them resistant to HIV, the AIDS virus, has been met with criticism, scorn and denial in China.

 

Provincial health authorities in the southern province of Guangdong released a statement Tuesday announcing that an investigation into the experiment, which involved seven couples and one successful pregnancy, already is under way and being given utmost attention.

 

“Results of the investigation will be promptly released to the public,” the statement said.

 

Continuous denials

 

China’s Ministry of Health said it was placing a high priority on the case and that it ordered the probe. Meanwhile, those who supposedly were involved in approving an ethical review of the experiment that He Jiankui said he conducted are distancing themselves.

 

He is an associate professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology, but his employer has said that the researcher has been on leave without pay since February and that the school was not aware of the experiment.

 

The Shenzhen Health and Family Planning Commission said it had not received an ethical assessment application for the study.

 

According to a form posted online, the city’s science and innovation committee was listed as backing the experiment, something the panel denies.

 

The Shenzhen Harmonicare Hospital was listed as having given ethical approval for He’s experiment, although the hospital is denying this.

 

According to Reuters, Hong Kong-listed Harmonicare Medical Holdings has issued a statement saying the signatures on the form posted online are suspected of having been forged and that “no relevant meeting of the Medical Ethics Committee of the hospital, in fact, took place.”

 

In its exclusive report on the experiment released Monday, the Associated Press noted that He Jiankui gave official notice of his trial to authorities on November 8, long after his research had begun and during the same month that the two baby girls — Lulu and Nana — were born.

 

It was clear from He’s interview with AP, that He knew what he was getting himself into. He told AP he was aware of the possible ramifications for future research.

 

“I feel a strong responsibility that it’s not just to make a first, but also make it an example,” He said.

 

He currently is in Hong Kong and is expected to deliver a speech at the University of Hong Kong on Wednesday at a summit on human genome editing.

Heated debate

 

Revelations of the experiment were quickly met with criticism, both and home and abroad, although in China, the pushback was particularly sharp.

 

Shortly after news broke on Monday, 122 scientists issued an open letter warning that the gene editing tool used in the experiment, the CRISPR-Cas 9 technology, was risky. The scientists also voiced concern the experiment could harm the reputation and development of China’s biomedical community.

 

The Chinese news website the Paper posted a copy of the statement online in which the scientists said, “Pandora’s box has been opened. We still might have a glimmer of hope to close it before it’s too late.”

 

They also said the biomedical ethics review for the so-called research existed only in name.

 

“Conducting direct human experiments can only be described as crazy,” they said.

 

On social media in China, however, some were optimistic and exuberant about the prospects the claimed breakthrough could bring to fighting disease.

 

“What is wrong with replacing old humanity with a new humanity? Who doesn’t want to be smarter, live longer, be stronger and healthier?” one post said. “I never expected to see something like Marvel comics in real life…a rebel eccentric scientist as the protagonist who wants to save all human beings.”

 

Others were worried about the bigger ramifications.

 

“In the future, humans will create humans and the fatality rate will largely decrease; meanwhile there will be less resources and more competition. We cannot go against natural law,” argued one posting. Another quipped: “For the first time I wish it was an academic fraud.”

 

Genetic Frankenstein

 

Liu Wei, a Chinese scientist, said that right now there still are too many uncertainties, adding that the technology has the capability of becoming a genetic version of Frankenstein.

 

“People are not quite clear about the long-term function of every gene yet. Based on the knowledge we have now, modifying the gene could avoid one disease but may bring about other problems,” Liu noted.

He added that since the technology is cutting-edge there is a big risk those involved in the review process lack the understanding needed, which could lead to negligence.

 

“If the technology is mature enough, there will definitely be a huge demand in the market to modify the genes of babies, which could lead to black market exchanges and many other challenges,” he said. “We may need more measures to deal with it and simply advocating ethics will not solve the problem.”

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Google Blocks Gender-Based Pronouns From New AI Tool

Alphabet Inc’s Google in May introduced a slick feature for Gmail that automatically completes sentences for users as they type. Tap out “I love” and Gmail might propose “you” or “it.” But users are out of luck if the object of their affection is “him” or “her.”

Google’s technology will not suggest gender-based pronouns because the risk is too high that its “Smart Compose” technology might predict someone’s sex or gender identity incorrectly and offend users, product leaders revealed to Reuters in interviews.

Gmail product manager Paul Lambert said a company research scientist discovered the problem in January when he typed “I am meeting an investor next week,” and Smart Compose suggested a possible follow-up question: “Do you want to meet him?” instead of “her.”

Consumers have become accustomed to embarrassing gaffes from autocorrect on smartphones. But Google refused to take chances at a time when gender issues are reshaping politics and society, and critics are scrutinizing potential biases in artificial intelligence like never before.

“Not all ‘screw ups’ are equal,” Lambert said. Gender is a “a big, big thing” to get wrong.

Getting Smart Compose right could be good for business. Demonstrating that Google understands the nuances of AI better than competitors is part of the company’s strategy to build affinity for its brand and attract customers to its AI-powered cloud computing tools, advertising services and hardware.

Gmail has 1.5 billion users, and Lambert said Smart Compose assists on 11 percent of messages worldwide sent from Gmail.com, where the feature first launched.

Smart Compose is an example of what AI developers call natural language generation (NLG), in which computers learn to write sentences by studying patterns and relationships between words in literature, emails and web pages.

A system shown billions of human sentences becomes adept at completing common phrases but is limited by generalities. Men have long dominated fields such as finance and science, for example, so the technology would conclude from the data that an investor or engineer is “he” or “him.” The issue trips up nearly every major tech company.

Lambert said the Smart Compose team of about 15 engineers and designers tried several workarounds, but none proved bias-free or worthwhile. They decided the best solution was the strictest one: Limit coverage. The gendered pronoun ban affects fewer than 1 percent of cases where Smart Compose would propose something, Lambert said.

“The only reliable technique we have is to be conservative,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, who oversaw engineering of Gmail and other services until a recent promotion.

New policy

Google’s decision to play it safe on gender follows some high-profile embarrassments for the company’s predictive technologies.

The company apologized in 2015 when the image recognition feature of its photo service labeled a black couple as gorillas. In 2016, Google altered its search engine’s autocomplete function after it suggested the anti-Semitic query “are jews evil” when users sought information about Jews.

Google has banned expletives and racial slurs from its predictive technologies, as well as mentions of its business rivals or tragic events.

The company’s new policy banning gendered pronouns also affected the list of possible responses in Google’s Smart Reply. That service allow users to respond instantly to text messages and emails with short phrases such as “sounds good.”

Google uses tests developed by its AI ethics team to uncover new biases. A spam and abuse team pokes at systems, trying to find “juicy” gaffes by thinking as hackers or journalists might, Lambert said.

Workers outside the United States look for local cultural issues. Smart Compose will soon work in four other languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and French.

“You need a lot of human oversight,” said engineering leader Raghavan, because “in each language, the net of inappropriateness has to cover something different.”

Wispread challenge

Google is not the only tech company wrestling with the gender-based pronoun problem. Agolo, a New York startup that has received investment from Thomson Reuters, uses AI to summarize business documents.

Its technology cannot reliably determine in some documents which pronoun goes with which name. So the summary pulls several sentences to give users more context, said Mohamed AlTantawy, Agolo’s chief technology officer.

He said longer copy is better than missing details. “The smallest mistakes will make people lose confidence,” AlTantawy said. “People want 100 percent correct.”

Yet, imperfections remain. Predictive keyboard tools developed by Google and Apple Inc propose the gendered “policeman” to complete “police” and “salesman” for “sales.”

Type the neutral Turkish phrase “one is a soldier” into Google Translate and it spits out “he’s a soldier” in English. So do translation tools from Alibaba and Microsoft Corp. Amazon.com Inc opts for “she” for the same phrase on its translation service for cloud computing customers.

AI experts have called on the companies to display a disclaimer and multiple possible translations.

Microsoft’s LinkedIn said it avoids gendered pronouns in its year-old predictive messaging tool, Smart Replies, to ward off potential blunders.

Alibaba and Amazon did not respond to requests to comment. Warnings and limitations like those in Smart Compose remain the most-used countermeasures in complex systems, said John Hegele, integration engineer at Durham, North Carolina-based Automated Insights Inc, which generates news articles from statistics.

“The end goal is a fully machine-generated system where it magically knows what to write,” Hegele said. “There’s been a ton of advances made but we’re not there yet.”

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UN: Climate Change Outpacing Efforts to Slow It

The United Nations says all countries must triple efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions to limit an average global temperature increase to two degrees Celsius by 2030.

The ninth annual U.N. Environmental Program Emissions Gap report released Tuesday says emissions in 2030 could be up to 15 billion tons higher than needed to prevent a more than two degree hike.

The report said emissions in 2030 would need to be 55 percent lower than they were in 2017 to limit the average increase to a safer 1.5 degrees.

The 2015 Paris Agreement calls for limiting a temperature rise to between 1.5 and two degrees.

The report said emissions reached a record high of 53.5 tons in 2017 after three years of decreases.

The report also said the world’s 20 largest economies, the Group of Twenty, are not on track to meet their goals in 2030.

The analysis follows a special report last month by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  It concluded that two degrees of warming, once believed to be a safe threshold, would trigger more deadly extreme weather events.  The report said limiting the Earth’s temperature rise to 1.5 degrees would require countries to make rapid and unprecedented changes.

“If the IPCC report represented a global fire alarm, this report is the arson investigation,” said UNEP deputy executive director Joyce Msuya.  “The science is clear; for all the ambitious climate action we have seen, government’s need to move faster and with greater urgency. We are feeding this fire while the means to extinguish it are within reach.”

Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration issued The National Climate Assessment, which predicts climate change could cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars annually through the end of the century.

Trump, who has vowed to pull the U.S. out of the Paris agreement, has dismissed that prediction, telling a reporter Friday, “I don’t believe it.  No, no, I don’t believe it.”

A U.N. climate conference will be held in Poland December 2-14, when officials will produce a “rule book” on how to implement the Paris agreement.

 

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Uber Fined $1.2 Million For 2016 Data Breach

British and Dutch regulators have fined ride-hailing company Uber $1.2 million for what it said were inadequate security measures that left personal data at risk for a cyber attack.

The fines are linked to a 2016 hack of Uber data that allowed attackers to download information about 32 million users, including 2.7 million accounts in Britain.

The files included full names, mobile phone numbers, email addresses and some user passwords. Information about 3.7 million drivers, 82,000 of them in Britain, was also downloaded.

Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office said the hack was the result of “a series of avoidable data security flaws.”

“This was not only a serious failure of data security on Uber’s part, but a complete disregard for the customers and drivers whose personal information was stolen,” ICO Director of Investigations Steve Eckersley said. “At the time, no steps were taken to inform anyone affected by the breach, or to offer help and support. That left them vulnerable.”

Uber said in a statement it is “pleased to close this chapter on the data incident from 2016.”

“As we shared with European authorities during their investigations, we’ve made a number of technical improvements to the security of our systems both in the immediate wake of the incident as well as in the years since,” the company said.

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Lawmakers Criticize Facebook’s Zuckerberg for UK Parliament No-Show

Facebook came under fire on Tuesday from lawmakers from several countries who accused the firm of undermining democratic institutions and lambasted chief executive Mark Zuckerberg for not answering questions on the matter.

Facebook is being investigated by lawmakers in Britain after consultancy Cambridge Analytica, which worked on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, obtained the personal data of 87 million Facebook users from a researcher, drawing attention to the use of data analytics in politics.

Concerns over the social media giant’s practices, the role of political adverts and possible interference in the 2016 Brexit vote and U.S. elections are among the topics being investigated by British and European regulators.

While Facebook says it complies with EU data protection laws, a special hearing of lawmakers from several countries around the world in London criticized Zuckerberg for declining to appear himself to answer questions on the topic.

“We’ve never seen anything quite like Facebook, where, while we were playing on our phones and apps, our democratic institutions… seem to have been upended by frat-boy billionaires from California,” Canadian lawmaker Charlie Angus said.

“So Mr Zuckerberg’s decision not to appear here at Westminster [Britain’s parliament] to me speaks volumes.”

Richard Allan, the vice president of policy solutions at Facebook who appeared in Zuckerberg’s stead, admitted Facebook had made mistakes but said it had accepted the need to comply with data rules.

“I’m not going to disagree with you that we’ve damaged public trust through some of the actions we’ve taken,” Allan told the hearing.

Facebook has faced a barrage of criticism from users and lawmakers after it said last year that Russian agents used its platform to spread disinformation before and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, an accusation Moscow denies.

Allan repeatedly declined to give an example of a person or app banned from Facebook for misuse of data, aside from the GSR app which gathered data in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Legal documents reviewed by Reuters show how the investigation by British lawmakers has led them to seize documents relating to Facebook from app developer Six4Three, which is in a legal dispute with Facebook.

Damian Collins, chair of the culture committee which convened the hearing, said he would not release those documents on Tuesday as he was not in a position to do so, although he has said previously the committee has the legal power to.

 

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Momoa and Heard Take to Seas in Superhero Film ‘Aquaman’

“Game of Thrones” actor Jason Momoa brings the latest superhero spin-off to the big screen, this time “Aquaman,” to tell the story of the DC Comics half-human, half-Atlantean character.

The 39-year-old first made an appearance in the role in 2016’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” but now has his own movie exploring the superhero’s origins.

Momoa portrays the character, known as Arthur Curry, as he embarks on a journey of self-discovery, and with plenty of action and special effects, viewers are taken to the underwater world of the seven seas.

Walking a blue carpet – in line with the film’s aquatic theme – at the film’s world premiere in London on Monday, Momoa said the role was the toughest he had undertaken so far.

“Physically it’s just really challenging and demanding to do the stunts and then stay in shape,” the actor told Reuters, adding he identified with the character for various reasons including “being an outcast.”

“I had two stunt doubles. I’ve never had stunt doubles really ever…This had so many stunts.”

The film also stars “The Rum Diary” and “Magic Mike XXL” actress Amber Heard as warrior Mera. Dressed in a floor-length green dress with matching head cap, Heard said she was not keen at first on doing a superhero film.

“I was pretty allergic to the idea…In my very limited experience with that world, I didn’t see intuitively what that would have to appeal to me,” she said. “I’m interested in complex nuanced roles that depict women in more accurate and more organic ways. And then the creators called me (saying) she’s a warrior queen.I was like.. ‘OK, I’m interested.'”

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App Shows US, Canadian Commuters the Cleanest, Greenest Route Home

A mobile application launched in dozens of U.S. and Canadian cities on Monday measures the planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions of inner-city travel, its creators said, letting concerned commuters map their so-called carbon footprints.

Mapping app Cowlines can suggest the most efficient route as well which uses the least fuel, combining modes of transport such as bicycling and walking, within cities, its Vancouver, Canada-based creators said.

Some two-thirds of the world’s population is expected to settle in urban areas by 2050, according to the United Nations.

The trend presents an environmental challenge, given that the world’s cities account for the bulk of greenhouse gas emissions.

Not only will the app measure a trip’s emissions and suggest alternatives, it will provide the data to cities and urban planners working on systems from subway lines to bike-sharing programs, said Jonathan Whitworth, chief strategy officer at Greenlines Technology, which created the app.

“As you would imagine here in Canada, especially Western Canada, most people are driven by the environmental side of it,” Whitworth told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The app aims to encourage users in 62 U.S. and Canadian cities to use cleaner modes of transportation, from mass transit to walking or biking, he said.

In the United States, mass transit accounts for less than 2 percent of passenger miles traveled, according to Daniel Sperling, founding director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis.

“People are starved for good information and data for good travel choices,” said Sperling.

The app’s suggested route is a cowline – city planner parlance for the fastest route, said Whitworth. In pastoral settings, a cowline is the most direct path cattle use to reach grazing grounds.

The app shows users after a trip how many kilograms of carbon-dioxide equivalent emissions they are responsible for, Whitworth said.

While other apps such as Changers CO2 Fit track users’ carbon footprints, Cowlines claims its methodology, certified by the International Organization for Standardization, is most accurate, he said.

Whitworth said the company also plans to sell the data it collects.

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Experts: African Fishing Communities Face ‘Extinction’ as Blue Economy Grows

Fishing communities along Africa’s coastline are at a greater risk of extinction as countries eye oceans for tourism, industrial fishing and exploration revenue to jumpstart their “blue economies,” U.N. experts and activists said on Monday.

The continent’s 38 coastal and island states have in recent years moved to tap ocean resources through commercial fishing, marine tourism and sea-bed mining, according to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA).

“There is a great risk and a great danger that those communities will be marginalized,” said Joseph Zelasney, a fishery officer at U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

“The resources that they depend on will be decimated,” he added at a side event at the Blue Economy Conference organized by Kenya, Canada and Japan in Nairobi.

The world’s poorest continent hosts a blue economy estimated at $1 trillion but loses $42 billion a year to illegal fishing and logging of mangroves along the coast, according to UNECA estimates.

Seismic waves generated by prospectors to search for minerals, oil and gases along the ocean floor have scared away fish stocks, said Dawda Saine of the Confederation of African Artisanal Fishing in Gambia.

“Noise and vibration drives fishes away, which means they (fishermen) have to go further to fish,” Saine said.

Pollution from a vibrant tourism sector and foreign trawlers have reduced stocks along the Indian Ocean, Salim Mohamed, a fisherman from Malindi in Kenya, said.

“We suffer as artisanal fishers but all local regulation just look at us as the polluter and doesn’t go beyond that,” he said.

The continent’s fish stocks are also being depleted by industrial trawlers which comb the oceans to feed European and Asian markets, experts say, posing a threat to livelihoods and food security for communities living along the coast.

Growth of blue economies in Africa could also take away common rights to land and water along the coastline and transfer them to corporations and a few individuals, said Andre Standing, advisor with the Coalition for Fair Fisheries Arrangements.

Most of the land and beaches along Africa’s thousands of miles of coastline is untitled, making it a good target for illegal acquisition, activists said.

“There is a great worry that we could see privatization of areas that were previously open to these communities,” Standing told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “We need to have a radical vision that values communities and livelihoods or they will become extinct.”

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175 People Dead of Cholera in Northern Nigeria, Up to 10,000 Cases Recorded

A humanitarian group working in northern Nigeria says it has recorded 10,000 cases of cholera there and that at least 175 people have died from the disease since the start of November. The Norwegian Refugee Council says most of the cases were found in camps for displaced people in Borno state, where thousands seek refuge from Boko Haram attacks. Timothy Obiezu reports from Maiduguri.

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Insight Lander Touches Down on Mars

NASA scientists were ecstatic Monday when they received word from 54 million kilometers away that their newest mission to Mars had arrived safely. The probe is called InSight and true to its name. Officials say it’s going to give scientists new insight into what’s inside the Red Planet. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.

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Apple to Tutor Women in Tech in Bid to Diversify Industry

Apple is launching a new program designed to address the technology industry’s scarcity of women in executive and computer programming jobs.

 

Under the initiative announced Monday, female entrepreneurs and programmers will attend two-week tutorial sessions at the company’s Cupertino, California, headquarters.

 

The camps will be held every three months beginning in January. For each round, Apple will accept up to 20 app makers founded or led by a woman. The app maker must have at least one female programmer in its ranks to qualify. Apple will cover travel expenses for up to three workers from each accepted company.

Like other major tech companies, Apple has been trying to lessen its dependence on men in high-paying programming jobs. Women filled just 23 percent of Apple’s technology jobs in 2017, according to the company’s latest breakdown. That’s only a slight improvement from 20 percent in 2014, despite the company’s pledge to diversify its workforce.

 

The idea behind the new camp is to keep women interested and immersed in the field, said Esther Hare, Apple’s senior director of world developer marketing.

 

It’s not clear how much of a dent Apple’s new program will have. Google also offers training for girls and women pursuing careers in technology, but its program hasn’t done much to diversify the workforce so far. Women were hired for nearly 25 percent of Google’s technology jobs in 2017, up from nearly 21 percent in 2014, according to the company.

Apple and other technology companies maintain that one of the main reasons so many men are on their payrolls is because women traditionally haven’t specialized in the mathematical and science curriculum needed to program.

 

But industry critics have accused the technology companies of discriminating again women through a male-dominated hierarchy that has ruled the industry for decades.

 

Apple isn’t saying how much it is spending on the initiative, though beyond travel expenses, the company will be relying on its current employees to lead the sessions.

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Mick Jagger on New Stones Tour, Aretha, Acting and Grammys

Mick Jagger likes a buzz. A natural buzz.

 

The Rolling Stones frontman, who will tour America next spring with his iconic band, says live shows give him a rush that can’t be matched and is the reason that at 75, he still loves touring.

 

“When you go out in front of all those people you get an enormous rush of chemicals in your body — your own chemicals, not chemicals you’ve put in,” he said laughing.

 

“Let’s face it, it is a huge buzz. Must be like playing football or something,” he said.

 

Jagger should feel like a football player — since he’ll be playing the same stadiums as NFL stars when the Stones’ No Filter tour launches in Miami on April 20, 2019.

 

Tickets go on sale Friday and the 13 shows will hit Florida, Texas, Arizona, California, Washington, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Illinois and Washington, D.C.

 

“Basically your life’s attuned to doing those few hours onstage and everything else is a build up to that. Of course, you get to enjoy yourself at other times, but really you’re thinking about the next show or the show you’re doing that night,” said Jagger, who will be joined onstage with Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and Charlie Watts. “A lot of prep time goes into that — keeping yourself (together) so you can get through the whole thing without screwing up physically and mentally and keeping yourself really sharp. But I really enjoy it.”

 

In an interview Monday with The Associated Press, Jagger talked about the tour, only having three Grammys and appearing in the new-but-old Aretha Franklin concert documentary, “Amazing Grace,” filmed at a Los Angeles church in 1972.

 

AP: What can fans expect from the U.S. shows?

 

Jagger: A good night out! A good night out for all. We did a kind of similar tour in Europe this summer, so it’s got a lot of fun. …It’s pretty high energy and it’s a good a show, I think. I’m into it.

 

AP: Is it different performing in the U.S. compared to other territories?

 

Jagger: Well, I don’t have to speak foreign languages normally, so that’s a big difference. When you tour Europe it’s a lot of languages, so I try to do them all and that takes up some time, so (in the U.S.) I can concentrate on some other things. There’s lots of regional differences, say between Houston and New York, so you’ve got to tune yourself to that a little bit. It’s slightly about adjusting your set and attitude. Its different. It’s nice that it’s different, you don’t want it to be completely homogenous. But it’s great to be going around so many different areas, different states and so on.

 

AP: How’s the new music you’re writing coming along?

 

Jagger: It’s going good. I’ve got lots of stuff. I’m doing some more writing this week. And I’m always, like, messing around. I enjoy the writing process a lot. I mean, you always think the last thing you wrote is really wonderful and sometimes they’re really not (laughs). But it’s really fun doing it and it’s really enjoyable doing new things.

 

AP: You don’t even need to release music because of the band’s catalog…

 

Jagger: Yeah, and we haven’t released that much and I think it’s a shame we haven’t released more new music. So, I would hope we’re going to release some music. We do have a huge catalog. The thing about the catalog is when we come up to doing a tour like this, I try and go back and find some stuff that we haven’t done ever or we haven’t done very much and try to mix it in, so it isn’t always the same show. But when you’re playing a really big show, there’s a certain amount of songs people want to hear — you don’t have to play them — but there’s a certain percentage of the songs that people will want to hear and if you don’t do them, they’ll go, “Wish he’d done that one.”

 

AP: Were you happy with the success of the band’s blues album, which won a Grammy this year?

 

Jagger: That was good. We weren’t really setting out to do that. It just happened. It was a fun thing to do. It was … stuff we’d known for years since we were kids and played in like clubs and we knew it all pretty well. I really thought it was great and the response was really surprising, and I thought that was really wonderful. And I just hope we’re going to come up with some new stuff as well.

 

AP: I’m surprised the Stones only have three Grammys, when other acts have 10 or 20. Does that bother you?

 

Jagger: No, I don’t really care about Grammys very much. I’m not saying it’s not not nice to have, it’s lovely to have. But it’s not going to break my heart if I don’t get Grammys and if my Grammys count is not as big as other peoples. But it’s very nice to get a Grammy. I appreciate it.

 

AP: I saw you in the new Aretha documentary…

 

Jagger: I didn’t even see it yet! …It was like an amazing event. It was so delayed and long and I don’t think Aretha wanted it to come out for whatever reasons and there were so many technical problems with the sound, but I’m glad it’s out and I can’t wait to see it. …It was quite a lot of preaching. Did they leave the preaching in?

 

AP: They did.

 

Jagger: I remember that very well.

 

AP: What else do you remember about that day?

 

Jagger: I remember it really well. It was just a wonderful event. It was quite mesmerizing from start to finish really. I think I went with Charlie (Watts) and I think Billy Preston quite possibly, but I don’t know if you see him there. It was really an amazing, really fantastic day in church really, which I haven’t had for a while.

 

AP: What do you remember about working with filmmaker Nicolas Roeg, who died a couple days ago and directed you in 1970’s “Performance”?

 

Jagger: He was a wonderful filmmaker and I only worked with him that one time, and he was co-directing. And he’s a wonderful cinematographer and did some great movies, and he was very quirky and all his films were very different, one to the other. He did some great work and he had a long life and I’m sad he passed away, but I always remember working with him; a wonderful guy to work with.

 

AP: I know you’ve produced a lot lately, from TV shows to documentaries, but do you want to do more acting?

 

Jagger: I just actually finished doing a cameo part in a movie which is kind of a twisted thriller, which is called “The Burnt Orange Heresy.” I just finished doing that in Italy. I did a couple weeks on that, so it’ll be out next year. It was only a small part, but fun to do.

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United Technologies Breaking Into 3 Independent Companies

United Technologies is breaking itself into three independent companies now that it has sealed its $23 billion acquisition of aviation electronics maker Rockwell Collins.

The company’s announcement Monday was the latest by a sprawling industrial conglomerate deciding it will be more efficient and focused as smaller, separate entities.

“Our decision to separate United Technologies is a pivotal moment in our history and will best position each independent company to drive sustained growth, lead its industry in innovation and customer focus, and maximize value creation,” said United Technologies CEO Gregory Hayes.

The three companies will be United Technologies, which will house its aerospace and defense industry supplier businesses; Otis, the maker of elevators, escalators and moving walkways; and the Carrier air conditioning and building systems business.

The separation is expected to be completed in 2020, United Technologies said.

On Friday, United Technologies said it received final regulatory approval for its deal for Rockwell Collins, a Cedar Rapids, Iowa-based maker of flight deck avionics, cabin electronics and cabin interiors. The newly minted combined aerospace business would have had sales of about $39 billion last year, United Technologies said.

Hayes will stay on as CEO of the aerospace business. The company did not name leaders for the separated Otis and Carrier businesses.

Founded in 1934, United Technologies is based in Farmington, Connecticut, and currently employs about 205,000 people. It did not say if any jobs would be lost in the breakup.

The company got embroiled in politics in 2016 when then-presidential candidate Donald Trump criticized plans to close a Carrier plant in Indianapolis and shift production to Mexico. Weeks after Trump won the election, Carrier announced an agreement brokered by the president-elect to spare about 800 jobs in Indianapolis, where the company has pledged to keep nearly 1,100 jobs. That’s down from the approximately 1,600 factory, office and engineering jobs at the facility.

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Argentina Says It is Close to Inking a Beef Deal with US

Argentina is on the verge of signing a deal with the United States that would allow two-way trade of fresh beef for the first time in nearly two decades, the South American country’s international trade secretary, Marisa Bircher, said.

The agreement, expected to be signed within days, would simultaneously open beef imports to both countries, Bircher told Reuters in an interview.

“We are negotiating the reopening to happen over the days ahead,” she said. “All the technical and administrative questions have been settled.”

At a time when the South American nation is seeking to boost beef sales abroad, the agreement would allow Argentina to show other prospective buyers that its meat is healthy enough to enter a country with some of the world’s toughest sanitary protocols.

The deal would also open a new market for the U.S. cattle sector, although demand for U.S. beef is low in Argentina. The country is famous for its quality steaks, some tender enough to be cut with a spoon, as demonstrated with a flourish by waiters in the iconic steak houses of Buenos Aires.

Argentina will have a 20,000-ton limit on its exports to the United States, Bircher said, while there will be no limit on U.S. beef going to Argentina.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Trade Representative’s Office in Washington declined to comment. The U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires did not respond to a request for comment.

U.S. beef passed a bureaucratic hurdle needed to access Argentina last week, according to a notice posted on Wednesday on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service website.

But before any U.S. beef can be exported to Argentina, meat companies need to register their products, processing plants and labels with Argentina’s National Service for Agrifood Health and Quality, said Joe Schuele, spokesman for the U.S. Meat Export Federation, a trade group.

The USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service formally approved imports of fresh beef from northern Argentina in 2015, according to a document posted in the U.S. Federal Register.

​The USDA still needs to certify Argentine processing plants that would ship meat to the United States to make sure they meet safety standards, said Bill Bullard, chief executive of U.S. cattle producers’ group R-CALF USA.

“Opening the border to raw beef from Argentina is certain to put downward pressure on U.S. cattle prices, and meat packers will be able to use this cheaper, undifferentiated beef as a direct substitute for beef produced by U.S. cattle producers,” he said.

Cattle disease

Bircher said Argentina stopped exporting beef to the United States about 17 years ago due to U.S. concerns about contamination of Argentine cattle by foot-and-mouth disease. “We have eliminated that through a vaccine program in our livestock sector,” she said.

Another senior Argentine official, speaking on background, confirmed that Argentina and the United States were “close” to striking a deal. The last time the United States sent fresh beef to Argentina was in 1999, according to Argentina’s official statistics agency.

Once one of the world’s top five beef suppliers, Argentina was hobbled under the anti-farm policies of the country’s previous president, Cristina Fernandez. The country fell off the top 10 list of beef exporters during her eight-year presidency.

It is back in the top 10, according to USDA data and could get into the top five next year thanks to the free-market policies of President Mauricio Macri and a sharp weakening of the local peso currency this year.

The United States produced 11.9 million tons of beef last year and exported 1.3 million tons, according to USDA data. Argentina produced 2.8 million tons of beef and veal in 2017, exceeding its domestic consumption by 293,000 tons in 2017.

It is a delicate time for the world food system. Traditional trade routes of grains and oil seeds have been interrupted by a trade war between Washington and Beijing, and the world’s two biggest economies are now looking for new commercial partnerships to strengthen their positions.

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Scientists Warn New Brazil President May Smother Rainforest

Scientists warn that Brazil’s president-elect could push the Amazon rainforest past its tipping point — with severe consequences for global climate and rainfall.

 

Jair Bolsonaro, who takes office Jan. 1, claims a mandate to convert land for cattle pastures and soybean farms, calling Brazil’s rainforest protections an economic obstacle.

 

Brazilians on Oct. 28 elected Bolsonaro, a far-right candidate who channeled outrage at the corruption scandals of the former government and support from agribusiness groups.

 

Next week global leaders will meet in Poland for an international climate conference to discuss how to curb climate change, and questions about Brazil’s role in shaping the future of the Amazon rainforest after Bolsonaro’s election loom large. New Brazilian government data show the rate of deforestation — a major factor in global warming — has already increased over the past year.

 

Brazil contains about 60 percent of the Amazon rainforest, and scientists are worried.

 

It’s nearly impossible to overstate the importance of the Amazon rainforest to the planet’s living systems, said Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist at the University of Sao Paulo.

 

Each tree stores carbon absorbed from the atmosphere. The Amazon takes in as much as 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year and releases 20 percent of the planet’s oxygen, earning it the nickname “the lungs of the planet.”

 

It’s also a global weather-maker.

 

Stretching 10 times the size of Texas, the Amazon is the world’s largest rainforest. Billions of trees suck up water through deep roots and bring it up to their leaves, which release water vapor that forms a thick mist over the rainforest canopy.

 

This mist ascends into clouds and eventually becomes rainfall — a cycle that shapes seasons in South America and far beyond.

 

By one estimate, the Amazon creates 30 to 50 percent of its own rainfall.

 

Now the integrity of all of three functions — as a carbon sink, the Earth’s lungs, and a rainmaker — hangs in the balance.

On the campaign trail, Bolsonaro promised to loosen protections for areas of the Brazilian Amazon designated as indigenous lands and nature reserves, calling them impediments to economic growth. “All these reserves cause problems to development,” he told supporters.

 

He has also repeatedly talked about gutting the power of the environmental ministry to enforce existing green laws.

 

“If Bolsonaro keeps his campaign promises, deforestation of the Amazon will probably increase quickly — and the effects will be felt everywhere on the planet,” said Paulo Artaxo, a professor of environmental physics at the University of Sao Paulo.

 

Bolsonaro’s transition team did not respond to an interview request from the Associated Press.

 

Brazil was once seen as a global environmental success story. Between 2004 and 2014, stricter enforcement of laws to safeguard the rainforest — aided by regular satellite monitoring and protections for lands designated reserves for indigenous peoples — sharply curbed the rate of deforestation, which peaked in the early 2000s at about 9,650 square miles a year (25,000 square kilometers).

 

After a political crisis engulfed Brazil, leading to the 2016 impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff, enforcement faltered. Ranchers and farmers began to convert more rainforest to pastureland and cropland. Between 2014 and 2017, annual deforestation doubled to about 3,090 square miles (8,000 square kilometers). Most often, the trees and underbrush cut down are simply burned, directly releasing carbon dioxide, said Artaxo.

 

“In the Brazilian Amazon, far and away the largest source of deforestation is industrial agriculture and cattle ranching,” said Emilio Bruna, an ecologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Now observers are parsing Bolsonaro’s campaign statements and positions as a congressman to anticipate what’s next for the Amazon.

 

Bolsonaro — who some call “tropical Trump” because of some similarities to U.S. President Donald Trump — is a former army captain with a knack for channeling outrage and generating headlines. As a federal congressman for 27 years, he led legislative campaigns to unravel land protections for indigenous people and to promote agribusiness. He also made derogatory comments about minorities, women, and LGBT people.

 

Much of his support comes from business and farming interests.

 

“These farmers are not invaders, they are producers,” said congressman and senator-elect Luiz Carlos Heinze, a farmer and close ally of Bolsonaro. He blamed past “leftist administrations” for promoting indigenous rights at the expense of farmers and ranchers.

 

“Brazil will be the biggest farming nation on Earth during Bolsonaro’s years,” said Heinze.

 

Indigenous-rights advocates are worried about the new direction signaled. “Bolsonaro has repeatedly said that indigenous territories in the Amazon should be opened up for mining and agribusiness, which goes completely in the opposite direction of our Constitution,” said Adriana Ramos, public policy coordinator at Social Environmental Institute in Brasilia, a non-governmental group.

 

In a Nov. 1 postelection interview with Catholic TV, Bolsonaro said, “We intend to protect the environment, but without creating difficulties for our progress.”

 

Bolsonaro has repeatedly said that Brazil should withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, a treaty his predecessor signed in 2016 committing to reduce carbon emissions 37 percent over 2005 levels by 2030. After the election, he has publicly wavered.

 

Meanwhile he has named a climate-change denier, Ernesto Araujo, to become the next foreign minister.

 

Nelson Ananias Filho, sustainability coordinator at Brazil’s National Agriculture and Cattle Raising Confederation, which backed Bolsonaro’s campaign, said, “Brazil’s agribusiness will adapt to whatever circumstances come.”

 

Whether or not Brazil formally remains in the Paris Climate Accord, the only way for the country to make its emission targets is to completely stop deforestation by 2030 and to reduce agricultural emissions, said Nobre, the climate scientist. “If Bolsonaro keeps moving in the current direction, that’s basically impossible.”

 

There’s another danger lurking in deforestation.

 

Aside from the oceans, tropical forests are the most important regions on the planet for putting water vapor in the air, which eventually becomes rainfall. “It’s why we have rain in the American Midwest and other inland areas — it’s not just the Amazon, but it’s the largest tropical rainforest,” said Bill Laurance, a tropical ecologist at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia.

 

Carlos Nobre and Thomas Lovejoy, an environmental scientist at George Mason University, have estimated that the “tipping point for the Amazon system” is 20 to 25 percent deforestation.

 

Without enough trees to sustain the rainfall, the longer and more pronounced dry season could turn more than half the rainforest into a tropical savannah, they wrote in February in the journal Science Advances.

 

If the rainfall cycle collapses, winter droughts in parts of Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Argentina could devastate agriculture, they wrote. The impacts may even be felt as far away as the American Midwest, said Laurance.

 

Bolsonaro’s rhetoric about potentially dismantling the environmental ministry and rolling back indigenous rights worries Nobre who says, “I am a scientist, but I am also a Brazilian citizen, and a citizen of the planet.”

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Prosecutor: Peru Nearing Plea Deal with Odebrecht on Corruption Probe

Brazilian construction company Odebrecht is close to reaching a final settlement with Peruvian prosecutors over their investigation into bribes paid by Odebrecht for public works contracts in Peru, a prosecutor said on Monday.

Odebrecht has admitted to paying about $30 million in bribes to win contracts in the South American country and has agreed to provide prosecutors with details on the payments, culminating in a formal plea deal intended to reduce its exposure to legal risks.

“It is true we are near to closing everything,” Rafael Vela, one of the prosecutors investigating Odebrecht, told Reuters. He declined to offer details on what the agreement would include.

Brazilian newspaper Valor reported late Sunday that Odebrecht would sign a definitive agreement this week with Peruvian authorities investigating the company.

Representatives of the Peruvian attorney’s office could not immediately be reached for comment.

The Odebrecht office in Lima told Reuters that the company was in full talks to reach an agreement, but declined to provide further details.

“Odebrecht Peru maintains its commitment to collaborate with the justice administration and to the confidentiality of the case, so it is unable to make any comment on the matter,” it said to Reuters in an email.

Odebrecht has been at the center of a massive graft scandal that has rippled across Latin America. In 2016, it acknowledged in a leniency deal that it had bribed officials in a dozen countries to secure public works contracts, dating back over a decade. It agreed to pay a record $3.5 billion in settlements in the United States, Brazil and Switzerland.

After Brazil, Peru is the country where the Odebrecht scandal has been most disruptive. Peru’s four most recent presidents are under investigation in connection with alleged bribes paid by Odebrecht.

The investigation hit a snag in July, when the Brazilian builder raised complaints about the probe in Peru to authorities in Brazil. Sources at the time said it wanted legal protections because it felt it was being treated as a suspect and not a willing informant.

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