Month: December 2018

WHO: DRC Ebola Progress Will Be Lost if Violence Persists

Progress in fighting Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Ebola outbreak, the second worst ever, will be reversed if fighting continues around the disease hot spots of Beni and Butembo, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said Friday.

“We have reached a critical point in the Ebola response,” WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement. “After an intensification of field activities, we were seeing hopeful signs in many areas, including a recent decrease in cases in Beni. 

 

“These gains could be lost if we suffer a period of prolonged insecurity, resulting in increased transmission. That would be a tragedy for the local population, who have already suffered too much.” 

 

The disease has killed 356 of the 585 people infected during the almost six-month outbreak, and one-fifth of the cases have occurred within the past three weeks, according to a weekly update from WHO. 

 

The epidemic in a volatile part of DRC is now surpassed only by the 2013-16 outbreak in West Africa, where more than 28,000 cases were confirmed. 

 

Congo has suffered 10 Ebola outbreaks since the virus was discovered there in 1976. It spreads through contact with bodily fluids and causes hemorrhagic fever with severe vomiting, diarrhea and bleeding. 

 

On Thursday, Congo’s Health Ministry said 24 patients fled an Ebola treatment center in Beni when it came under attack by people protesting the cancellation of voting in the eastern city in Sunday’s presidential election. 

 

“Protests at government buildings in Beni spilled over to an Ebola transit center, frightening people waiting for Ebola test results and the staff who were caring for them. Staff at the center temporarily withdrew and most suspected cases were transferred to a nearby treatment center,” Tedros said. 

 

Health teams in Beni were prevented from carrying out critical field work, including vaccinations, tracing of potential Ebola carriers, and following up on alerts of potential new cases. 

 

In Butembo, health workers were unable to give vaccinations or trace people who may have come into contact with the disease — a critical part of preventing its spread. 

 

In other areas, the fight against Ebola has continued, and local communities have been generally supportive of the health teams, Tedros said.

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UK Honors Cave Rescue Divers, Twiggy, Monty Python’s Palin

British divers who rescued young soccer players trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand are among those being recognized in Britain’s New Year’s Honors List, along with 1960s model Twiggy and Monty Python star Michael Palin.

Twiggy, a model who shot to stardom during the Beatles era, will become a Dame — the female equivalent of a knight — while Palin, whose second career has seen him become an acclaimed travel documentary maker, receives a knighthood.

Jim Carter, who played the acerbic Mr. Carson in “Downton Abbey,” was also recognized, as was filmmaker Christopher Nolan, director of “Inception” and “Dunkirk,” and best-selling author Philip Pullman, creator of the Dark Materials trilogy.

The list released Friday also named 43 people who responded quickly to the extremist attacks in Manchester and London in 2017.

The honors process starts with nominations from the public, which are winnowed down by committees and sent to the prime minister before the various honors are bestowed by Queen Elizabeth II or senior royals next year.

The 92-year-old monarch has increasingly called on her children and grandchildren to hand out the coveted awards.

Divers

Divers Joshua Bratchley, Lance Corporal Connor Roe and Vernon Unsworth will be made Members of the Order of the British Empire for their roles in the risky Thai cave rescue last summer.

Four other British cave divers will receive civilian gallantry awards for their roles in the thrilling rescue of 12 boys and their coach, who were trapped in the cave for more than two weeks.

Richard Stanton and John Volanthen, the first to reach the stranded children and their coach, have been awarded the George Medal, while Christopher Jewell and Jason Mallinson received the Queen’s Gallantry Medal.

Twiggy​

Twiggy, whose modeling career lasted for decades, burst on the London Mod scene as one of the original “It” girls. She earned worldwide fame by 17 and went on to a career in theater and films.

“It’s wonderful, but it makes me giggle,” said Twiggy, 69, whose real name is Lesley Lawson. “The hardest thing has been keeping it a secret.”

Michael Palin

Palin’s knighthood recognizes his contribution to travel, culture and geography. He said the news had not sunk in yet but noted “I have been a knight before, in Python films. I have been several knights, including Sir Galahad.”

“I don’t think it will (sink in) until I see the envelopes addressing me as Sir Michael Palin,” said the 75-year-old. 

 

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Study: Migrants to Affluent Nations May Be Healthier Than Natives

International migrants who relocate to high-income countries to work, study or join family members are less likely to die prematurely than people born in their new homelands, a research review suggests. 

For the analysis, researchers examined data from 96 studies with mortality estimates for more than 15.2 million international migrants in 92 countries. 

Overall, migrants were about 30 percent less likely to experience premature death from all causes than other people in the general populations of the countries where they moved, the analysis found. 

“Migrants to rich countries have lower rates of death due to most major disease areas compared to the general population,” said lead study author Robert Aldridge of University College London in the U.K. 

“We know from U.N. data that the majority of migrants to these rich countries tend to be moving for work or study,” Aldridge said by email. 

About 258 million people worldwide reside outside their countries of birth, accounting for more than 3 percent of the world’s population, researchers note in The Lancet. 

In many high-income nations, public perception that migrants place an undue burden on society in general and on health resources in particular has led to restrictions on migrants’ access to care, the authors write. 

But the current analysis suggests that, if anything, migrants may use fewer health resources than native-born residents, Aldridge said by email. 

Diseases, external causes

The only causes of death that were more common among migrants were infectious disease and external causes like homicide, the analysis found. 

Immigrants were 28 percent more likely to die of external causes and more than twice as likely to die of infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, hepatitis and HIV than people who were born in their adopted homelands. 

However, immigrants were less likely to die from a variety of other causes including heart disease, digestive disorders, endocrine or circulatory problems, mental health disorders, cancers or diseases of the respiratory or nervous systems. 

Both men and women appeared to have a longevity advantage after migration. Male immigrants were 28 percent less likely to die prematurely from all causes than native-born men, while female immigrants were 25 percent less likely to die prematurely. 

The vast majority of the studies in the analysis focused on migration to high-income countries, not on refugees or asylum seekers. Researchers also excluded studies from their analysis that focused just on migrants with serious or chronic health problems or just on maternal and infant health outcomes. 

It may be, however, that migrants in the study were healthier than people in their native countries who didn’t migrate, said Anjali Borhade, director of the Disha Foundation in Gurugram, India, and co-author of an editorial accompanying the study. 

“Educated migrants have better sources of income and being healthy doesn’t affect their choice to migrate,” Borhade said by email. “Also, educated migrants have better living or working conditions and their health status is similar to the host populations, both for risks as well as outcomes.” 

Infectious disease and homicide deaths may be higher among migrants than other people in the general population because of unfavorable conditions immigrants face at work and in their new communities, Borhade added. That’s because many young, relatively healthy migrants may take low-paying and dangerous jobs and only be able to afford housing in subpar conditions. 

“Hazardous jobs and low living conditions increase their risk of dying due to external causes and infectious diseases,” Borhade said. “However, since migrants are healthier to begin with, their mortality due to other causes might be lower.” 

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Strong Week, Yet Horrible Month for Wall Street

Wall Street capped a week of volatile trading Friday with an uneven finish and the market’s first weekly gain since November. 

 

Losses in technology, energy and industrial stocks outweighed gains in retailers and other consumer-focused companies. Stocks spent much of the day wavering between small gains and losses, ultimately unable to maintain the momentum from a two-day winning streak. 

 

Even so, the major stock indexes closed with their first weekly gain in what’s been an otherwise painful last month of the year. The Dow Jones industrial average and S&P 500 rose more than 2 percent for the week, while the Nasdaq added nearly 4 percent. The indexes are still all down around 10 percent for the month and on track for their worst December since 1931. 

 

“It seems like convulsions in either direction have been the real norm for much of December and that’s certainly been the case this week,” said Eric Wiegand, senior portfolio manager for Private Wealth Management at U.S. Bank. “The initial push higher and then seeing it subside a little bit is perhaps getting back to a little bit more of a normal environment, reflecting the reality that we have still a number of issues overhanging the market.” 

 

The market’s sharp downturn since October has intensified this month, erasing all its 2018 gains and nudging the S&P 500 closer to its worst year since 2008. 

 

Investors have grown worried that the testy U.S.-China trade dispute and higher interest rates would slow the economy, hurting corporate profits. This week, with trading volumes lower than usual because of the Christmas holiday, served up some pronounced swings in the market. 

 

A steep sell-off during the shortened trading session on Christmas Eve left the major indexes down more than 2 percent. On Wednesday, stocks mounted a stunning rebound, posting the market’s best day in 10 years as the Dow shot up more than 1,000 points for its biggest single-day point gain ever. 

Late reversal

 

The market appeared ready to give much of those gains back on Thursday, before a late-afternoon reversal that erased a 600-point drop in the Dow left the market with a two-day winning streak. 

 

“The market was so oversold and then Wednesday and Thursday were key reversal days, but also stronger closes than opens,” said Janet Johnston, portfolio manager at TrimTabs Asset Management. 

 

“The market was starting to price in the worst-case scenario: a recession,” Johnston said 

 

Still, the market’s downturn has left stocks substantially less expensive than they were heading into the fourth quarter, Johnston noted. 

 

“And that sets up a good buying opportunity,” she said. 

 

On Friday, the S&P 500 index fell 3.09 points, or 0.1 percent, to 2,485.74. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 76.42 points, or 0.3 percent, to 23,062.40. The average had briefly climbed to 243 points. 

 

The Nasdaq added 5.03 points, or 0.1 percent, to 6,584.52. The Russell 2000 index of smaller-company stocks climbed 6.11 points, or 0.5 percent, to  1,337.92. 

 

Technology companies, a big driver of the market’s gains before things deteriorated in October, were among the big decliners. Alliance Data Systems dropped 1.4 percent to $149.82. 

 

Oil prices recovered after wavering in midmorning trading. Benchmark U.S. crude rose 1.6 percent to settle at $45.33 a barrel in New York. Brent crude, used to price international oils, inched up 0.1 percent to close at $52.20 a barrel in London. 

 

Despite the rise in oil prices, energy sector stocks declined. Cabot Oil & Gas slid 3.5 percent to $22.95, while Hess lost 2.8 percent to $40.38. 

 

Retailers and other consumer-focused companies fared better. Amazon rose 1.1 percent to $1,478.02. 

 

Wells Fargo settlement

Wells Fargo rose 0.5 percent to $45.78 on news that the lender has agreed to pay $575 million in a national settlement with state attorneys general over its fake bank accounts scandal. The San Francisco-based bank has acknowledged that its employees opened millions of unauthorized bank accounts for customers in order to meet unrealistic sales goals. 

 

Tesla climbed 5.6 percent to $333.87 after naming two independent directors to its board under an agreement with federal regulators. 

 

Homebuilders fell broadly in the morning after the National Association of Realtors said its pending home sales index fell last month as fewer Americans signed contracts to buy homes. Higher mortgage rates and prices are squeezing would-be buyers out of the market, especially in the West. The stocks mostly recovered by midafternoon. William Lyon Homes gained 3.4 percent to $10.81. 

 

Bond prices recovered after a midday dip, sending the yield on the 10-year Treasury down to 2.72 percent from 2.74 percent late Thursday. 

 

The dollar declined to 110.41 yen from Thursday’s 110.74 yen. The euro weakened to $1.1442 from $1.1449. 

 

Gold edged up 0.1 percent to $1,283 an ounce and silver gained 0.8 percent to $15.44 an ounce. Copper rose 0.5 percent to $2.68 a pound. 

 

Overseas, major indexes in Europe closed higher while markets in Asia mostly rose. London’s FTSE 100 gained 2.3 percent, while the Nikkei 225 index fell 0.3 percent.  

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Revered Israeli Writer Amos Oz Dies at 79

Renowned Israeli writer Amos Oz, a passionate peace advocate whose stirring memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness became a worldwide bestseller, died Friday at age 79, his daughter said.

Fania Oz-Salzberger said on Twitter that her father had died and offered thanks to “those who loved him.”

“My beloved father, Amos Oz, a wonderful family man, an author, a man of peace and moderation, died today peacefully after a short battle with cancer,” she wrote.

Tributes poured in for Oz, including from Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon, who called his death “a loss for us all and for the world.”

While Oz’s writing is widely acclaimed, he is perhaps equally known as one of the earliest and most forceful critics of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands captured in the Six-Day War of 1967.

In recent years, Oz spoke out against the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, shunning official Israeli functions abroad in protest at what he called the “growing extremism” of his country’s government.

Netanyahu on Friday celebrated Oz as “among the greatest writers from the state of Israel.”

“Despite our diverging views on numerous issues, I have deeply appreciated his contribution to the Hebrew language and the revival of Hebrew literature,” the premier said in a statement released by his office.

Oz was described as a “literary great” by Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin.

“A tale of love and light and henceforth, great darkness,” he wrote on Twitter.

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Wells Fargo Agrees to $575 Million US Settlement on Consumer Ills

Wells Fargo agreed to a $575 million nationwide settlement over its opening of millions of unauthorized customer accounts and other alleged predatory practices, the bank and U.S. authorities announced Friday.

The agreement between the bank and attorneys general from the 50 states plus the District of Columbia covers a series of scandals that have dogged the big U.S. bank since 2016, when it was fined $185 million by U.S. regulators over its so-called fake accounts scandal.

Wells Fargo, which replaced its chief executive and overhauled its system for compensating staff in the wake of the debacle, said the deal “underscores our serious commitment to making things right in regard to past issues as we work to build a better bank.”

In addition to the payments, the San Francisco-based bank agreed to maintain a dedicated team and website to help consumers work through the problem and to periodically report to the states on the status of remediation efforts.

The agreement will help address conduct that was “unlawful and disgraceful,” said California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, whose state will receive $148.7 million, by the far the largest settlement.

“Instead of safeguarding its customers, Wells Fargo exploited them, signing them up for products — from bank accounts to insurance — that they never wanted,” Becerra said.

“This is an incredible breach of trust that threatens not only the customers who depended on Wells Fargo, but confidence in our banking system.”

Wells Fargo has identified some 3.5 million accounts and 528,000 online bill-pay enrollments that may have not been authorized by customers, according to allegations listed in the settlement.

Other alleged violations short-changed consumers on auto insurance, mortgage rates and collateral protection insurance.

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Zuckerberg Sees ‘Progress’ for Facebook After Tumultuous Year 

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg said Friday that the world’s biggest social network has “fundamentally” changed to focus on securing its systems against manipulation and misinformation. 

 

Capping a tumultuous year marked by data protection scandals and government probes, Zuckerberg said he was “proud of the progress we’ve made” in addressing Facebook’s problems. 

 

“For 2018, my personal challenge has been to focus on addressing some of the most important issues facing our community — whether that’s preventing election interference, stopping the spread of hate speech and misinformation, making sure people have control of their information, and ensuring our services improve people’s well-being,” he wrote on his Facebook page. 

 

“We’re a very different company today than we were in 2016, or even a year ago. We’ve fundamentally altered our DNA to focus more on preventing harm in all our services, and we’ve systematically shifted a large portion of our company to work on preventing harm.” 

 

He said Facebook now has more than 30,000 people “working on safety” and invests billions of dollars in security. 

Misuse of data

 

Zuckerberg’s comments come at the close of a year when Facebook was roiled by revelations about the misuse of personal data by the political consultancy Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 U.S. election and on data sharing with business partners.  

But he said the questions around Facebook are “more than a one-year challenge” and that the California giant was in the process of “multiyear plans to overhaul our systems.” 

 

“In the past we didn’t focus as much on these issues as we needed to, but we’re now much more proactive,” he said. 

 

The comments follow a message from Zuckerberg in January, before many of Facebook’s troubles emerged, when he outlined his goals of stemming abuse and hate and foreign interference, among other things, on the network used by more than 2 billion people. 

 

“My personal challenge for 2018 is to focus on fixing these important issues,” Zuckerberg said in January. 

Artificial intelligence

 

In Friday’s message, Zuckerberg enumerated a series of steps taken over the past year, including fact-checking partnerships, advertising transparency and artificial intelligence to remove harmful content. 

 

He added that Facebook’s systems were also being retooled with the aim of helping “improve people’s well-being,” based on research it conducted. 

 

The research, he said, “found that when people use the internet to interact with others, that’s associated with all the positive aspects of well-being. … But when you just use the internet to consume content passively, that’s not associated with those same positive effects.” 

 

One of the changes aims to reduce “viral videos” that are shared across the Facebook platform. 

 

“These changes intentionally reduced engagement and revenue in the near term, although we believe they’ll help us build a stronger community and business over the long term,” Zuckerberg said.

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The Year in Science: 2018

Chemical attacks, cloning and giant black holes. The year in science was an odd and diverse series of headlines. VOA’s Kevin Enochs takes a look at some of the big stories of the year.

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50th-Anniversary Woodstock Event Set for 2019

Fifty years after the Woodstock music festival became one of the watersheds of hippie counterculture, an anniversary event will take place in August 2019 on the same field north of New York City.

The Bethel Woods Center for the Arts announced a three-day festival of “music, culture and community” that will celebrate “the golden anniversary at the historic site of the 1969 Woodstock festival.”

The Bethel Woods Center, a nonprofit that now owns the 37-acre (15-hectare) field that was the site of the 1969 Woodstock festival, said in a Facebook posting Thursday that the Aug. 16-18 festival will be a “pan-generational event.”

It will feature live performances from prominent and emerging artists across multiple genres and decades, as well as talks from leading futurists and tech experts. The festival is a joint venture with concert promoters Live Nation.

Details of performers, tickets and other participants will be announced at a later date, the Bethel Woods Center said.

The August 1969 Woodstock festival, billed as “three days of peace and music,” is regarded as one of the pivotal moments in music history and 1960s counterculture.

Over three sometimes-rainy days, more than 30 acts — including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, The Band, and the Grateful Dead — performed around the clock to a 400,000-strong audience, most of whom watched for free and camped onsite in the mud. The festival was documented in the 1970 film Woodstock, which won an Oscar.

Although it was known as Woodstock, the festival actually took place in Bethel, some 70 miles (110 km) south of the village of Woodstock in upstate New York. Bethel is 90 miles (144 km) north of New York City.

“Fifty years ago, people gathered peacefully on our site inspired to change the world through music,” Darlene Fedun, chief executive of the Bethel Woods Center, said in a statement announcing the 50th-anniversary event.

“We remain committed to preserving this rich history and spirit, and to educating and inspiring new generations to contribute positively to the world through music, culture, and community,” Fedun added.

The Bethel Woods festival is not affiliated with Michael Lang, a promoter of the 1969 festival, who has also spoken of plans to organize a 50th-anniversary event but has yet to make any announcement. Woodstock anniversary festivals were also held in 1994, 1998 and 1999.

Many of the 1969 Woodstock artists are now dead. Surviving musicians who are still performing into their 70s include Joan Baez, Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend of The Who, and David Crosby, Neil Young, Graham Nash and Stephen Stills of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.

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Trump EPA Says Limits on Mercury Emissions from Coal Plants Not Necessary

The Trump administration on Friday said limits on mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants were no longer necessary as their costs outweighed the benefits, a move environmentalists said was favorable for the coal industry and could increase health hazards.

Under the Mercury and Air Toxic Standards, or MATS, enacted under former President Barack Obama, coal plants have been forced to install expensive equipment to cut output of mercury, which can harm pregnant women and put infants and children at risk of developmental problems.

Since August, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been reconsidering the justification for the rule.

Electric utilities have pushed back on the potential loosening of requirements, saying they have already invested in technology to cut emissions of the dangerous pollutant.

In a statement issued Friday during a partial government shutdown, the EPA said the emission standards of the MATS rule would remain in place. But it proposed to withdraw the justification for the requirements.

“EPA is proposing that it is not ‘appropriate and necessary’ to regulate HAP emissions from coal- and oil-fired power plants … because the costs of such regulation grossly outweigh the quantified HAP benefits,” it said.

The industry had challenged a 2016 conclusion by Obama’s EPA that the rule was justified because savings to U.S. consumers on health care costs would exceed compliance costs. The calculations accounted for how pollution-control equipment would reduce emissions of other harmful substances in addition to mercury.

Since taking office in January 2017, Trump has targeted rolling back Obama-era environmental and climate protections to maximize production of domestic fossil fuels, including crude oil. U.S. oil production is the highest in the world, above Saudi Arabia and Russia, after a boom that was triggered more than a decade ago by improved drilling technology.

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US Army Looks for a Few Good Robots, Sparks Industry Battle

The U.S. Army is looking for a few good robots. Not to fight — not yet, at least — but to help the men and women who do.

These robots aren’t taking up arms, but the companies making them have waged a different kind of battle. At stake is a contract worth almost half a billion dollars for 3,000 backpack-sized robots that can defuse bombs and scout enemy positions. Competition for the work has spilled over into Congress and federal court.

The project and others like it could someday help troops “look around the corner, over the next hillside and let the robot be in harm’s way and let the robot get shot,” said Paul Scharre, a military technology expert at the Center for a New American Security.

 

WATCH: US Army Looks for a Few Good Robots, Sparks Industry Battle

The big fight over small robots opens a window into the intersection of technology and national defense and shows how fear that China could surpass the U.S. drives even small tech startups to play geopolitics to outmaneuver rivals. It also raises questions about whether defense technology should be sourced solely to American companies to avoid the risk of tampering by foreign adversaries.

Regardless of which companies prevail, the competition foreshadows a future in which robots, which are already familiar military tools, become even more common. The Army’s immediate plans alone envision a new fleet of 5,000 ground robots of varying sizes and levels of autonomy. The Marines, Navy and Air Force are making similar investments.

“My personal estimate is that robots will play a significant role in combat inside of a decade or a decade and a half,” the chief of the Army, Gen. Mark Milley, said in May at a Senate hearing where he appealed for more money to modernize the force.

Milley warned that adversaries like China and Russia “are investing heavily and very quickly” in the use of aerial, sea and ground robots. And now, he added, “we are doing the same.”

Such a shift will be a “huge game-changer for combat,” said Scharre, who credits Milley’s leadership for the push.

The promise of such big Pentagon investments in robotics has been a boon for U.S. defense contractors and technology startups. But the situation is murkier for firms with foreign ties.

Concerns that popular commercial drones made by Chinese company DJI could be vulnerable to spying led the Army to ban their use by soldiers in 2017. And in August, the Pentagon published a report that said China is conducting espionage to acquire foreign military technologies — sometimes by using students or researchers as “procurement agents and intermediaries.” At a December defense expo in Egypt, some U.S. firms spotted what they viewed as Chinese knock-offs of their robots.

The China fears came to a head in a bitter competition between Israeli firm Roboteam and Massachusetts-based Endeavor Robotics over a series of major contracts to build the Army’s next generation of ground robots. Those machines will be designed to be smarter and easier to deploy than the remote-controlled rovers that have helped troops disable bombs for more than 15 years.

The biggest contract — worth $429 million — calls for mass producing 25-pound robots that are light, easily maneuverable and can be “carried by infantry for long distances without taxing the soldier,” said Bryan McVeigh, project manager for force projection at the Army’s research and contracting center in Warren, Michigan.

Other bulkier prototypes are tank-sized unmanned supply vehicles that have been tested in recent weeks in the rough and wintry terrain outside Fort Drum, New York.

A third $100 million contract — won by Endeavor in late 2017 — is for a midsized reconnaissance and bomb-disabling robot nicknamed the Centaur.

The competition escalated into a legal fight when Roboteam accused Endeavor, a spinoff of iRobot, which makes Roomba vacuum cleaners, of dooming its prospects for those contracts by hiring a lobbying firm that spread false information to politicians about the Israeli firm’s Chinese investors.

A federal judge dismissed Roboteam’s lawsuit in April.

“They alleged that we had somehow defamed them,” said Endeavor CEO Sean Bielat, a former Marine who twice ran for Congress as a Republican. “What we had done was taken publicly available documents and presented them to members of Congress because we think there’s a reason to be concerned about Chinese influence on defense technologies.”

The lobbying firm, Boston-based Sachem Strategies, circulated a memo to members of the House Armed Services Committee. Taking up Endeavor’s cause was Rep. Seth Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat — and, like Bielat, a Marine veteran — who wrote a letter to a top military official in December 2016 urging the Army to “examine the evidence of Chinese influence” before awarding the robot contracts.

Six other lawmakers later raised similar concerns.

Roboteam CEO Elad Levy declined to comment on the dispute but said the firm is still “working very closely with U.S. forces,” including the Air Force, and other countries. But it’s no longer in the running for the lucrative Army opportunities.

Endeavor is. Looking something like a miniature forklift on tank treads, its prototype called the Scorpion has been zipping around a test track behind an office park in a Boston suburb.

The only other finalist is just 20 miles away at the former Massachusetts headquarters of Foster-Miller, now a part of British defense contractor Qinetiq. The company did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The contract is expected to be awarded in early 2019.

Both Endeavor and Qinetiq have strong track records with the U.S. military, having supplied it with its earlier generation of ground robots such as Endeavor’s Packbot and Qinetiq’s Talon and Dragon Runner.

After hiding the Scorpion behind a shroud at a recent Army conference, Bielat and engineers at Endeavor showed it for the first time publicly to The Associated Press in November. Using a touchscreen controller that taps into the machine’s multiple cameras, an engineer navigated it through tunnels, over a playground-like structure and through an icy pool of water, and used its grabber to pick up objects.

It’s a smaller version of its predecessor, the Packbot, which was first used by U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2002 and later became one of soldiers’ essential tools for safely disabling improvised explosives in Iraq. Bielat said the newer Scorpion and Centaur robots are designed to be easier for the average soldier to use quickly without advanced technical training.

“Their primary job is to be a rifle squad member,” Bielat said. “They don’t have time to mess with the robot. They’re going to demand greater levels of autonomy.”

It will be a while, however, before any of these robots become fully autonomous. The Defense Department is cautious about developing battlefield machines that make their own decisions. That sets the U.S. apart from efforts by China and Russia to design artificially intelligent warfighting arsenals.

A November report from the Congressional Research Service said that despite the Pentagon’s “insistence” that a human must always be in the loop, the military could soon feel compelled to develop fully autonomous systems if rivals do the same. Or, as with drones, humans will still pull the trigger, but a far-away robot will lob the bombs.

Said P.W. Singer, a strategist for the New America Foundation think tank: “China has showed off armed ones. Russia has showed them off. It’s coming.”

 

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Cybersecurity Law: Vietnam Will Censor Internet, Not Close Websites

Expect to get caught if you post anti-government material on the internet in Vietnam or take a phishing trip. From 2019 authorities can build evidence against you from material provided by email services and social media networks including Facebook. Yet the country, mindful of its role in the emerging digital economy, won’t close down websites the way China does.

Vietnam has long walked a thin line between a free internet as part of its economic growth and resistance against what market research firm IDC’s country manager Lam Nguyen calls “digital disasters.” The country is getting testier toward online dissent at the same time.

A draft Cybersecurity Law decree to take effect Jan. 1 after 18 months in the making will help the communist government reach these goals by ordering service providers to do some of its surveillance work.

Despite objections from Google and Facebook, global social media as well as email and e-commerce providers may be asked to store data in Vietnam, according to the Cybersecurity Law. Alternately, they can self-censor, turn over customer profiles and delete certain content, Nguyen said.

“It’s like saying OK, as an online service provider with Vietnam users, you do collect data about such users and their online activities, but you are letting users use your platform or services for unlawful activities, so please come to the front of the line (so) that we can keep an eye out for you,” said Yee Chung Seck, partner with the Baker McKenzie law firm in Ho Chi Minh City.

Catching up in cybersecurity

According to a United Nations index, Vietnam ranked 101 out of 165 countries in exposure to cyberattacks. 

“Vietnam has been historically weak when in it comes to cybersecurity,” cyber intelligence analyst Emilio Iasiello wrote in a commentary for the Cyber Research Databank.

Domestic websites were hit by more than 6,500 malware or phishing attacks in the first eight months of 2018, Viet Nam News reports.

Vietnam does not block the websites of foreign internet services that could spread objectionable content. Vietnam, like much of Asia, is trying to develop a digital economy, but unlike China it lacks easy-to-control homegrown alternates to the major Silicon Valley internet firms.

“Obviously, the business and user communities are more likely hoping to avoid censorship of the internet outright, due to the growing digital commerce economy and also wanting a platform where freedom of expressions and opinions are allowed,” Nguyen said.

A digital economy gives Vietnam an opportunity to resolve “big issues in its economic development,” the deputy minister of industry and trade was quoted saying in June. The manufacturing-reliant economy has grown 6 to 7 percent per year since 2012.

About 70 percent of Vietnam’s 92 million people use the internet, with 53 million on social media sites.

Protest from multinational internet content providers

After Vietnam’s National Assembly approved the Cybersecurity Law in June, 17 U.S. congressional representatives sent a letter to Google and Facebook. They urged both to avoid storing data in Vietnam, to establish “transparent guidelines” on content removal and to publish the number of requests for removal.

Facebook, Google and other foreign internet companies said earlier this month via a lobbying group that requirements to localize data would hobble investment and economic growth in Vietnam. The law also requires firms with more than 10,000 local users to set up local representative offices.

Facebook said for this report it “remains committed to its community in Vietnam and in helping Vietnamese businesses grow at home and abroad.”

Internet providers also worry the cybersecurity law gives “too much power” to Vietnam’s police ministry and lacks “due process,” Nguyen said. Authorities, they fear, could “seize customer data” and expose a provider’s users, partners or employees to arrest, which goes against privacy protection policies, he said.

​Fear among online activists

Vietnam is looking to the cybersecurity law as well to control public criticism of government activity, activist bloggers believe. A string of Vietnamese bloggers was arrested in 2016 and 2017.

Authorities will be able to collect user names, profiles and data on their friends, media reports and analysts say.

“This law threatens and further curbs freedom to information, infringes (on) personal privacy, and will be certainly used as a tool to give more power to police force, which violates rights, even on behalf of the court on judging on the use of internet,” Hanoi-based internet blogger and human rights activist Nguyen Lan Thang said.

Vietnamese activists leaned heavily on internet media to spread information about what they considered slow government reaction to a mass fish die-off in 2016. They use it now to decry corruption.

“The Cybersecurity Law will have a huge impact on Vietnam’s dissidents and online activists. It will be a tool to silence dissidents, social commentators, and activists in general,” said Vu Quoc Ngu, a writer in Hanoi and director of the non-profit Defend the Defender.

Vu Pham, Michelle Quinn of VOA contributed to this report.

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US Fossil Fuel Exports Spur Growth, Climate Worries

In South Korea’s largest shipyard, thousands of workers in yellow hard hats move ceaselessly between towering cranes lifting hulks of steel. They look like a hive of bees scurrying over a massive circuit board as they weld together the latest additions to the rapidly growing fleet of tankers carrying super-chilled liquefied natural gas across the world’s oceans. 

 

The boom in fossil-fuel production in the United States has been matched by a rush on the other side of the Pacific to build the infrastructure needed to respond to the seemingly unquenchable thirst for energy among Asia’s top economies. When Congress lifted restrictions on shipping crude oil overseas in 2015, soon after the Obama administration opened the doors for international sales of natural gas, even the most boosterish of Texas oil men wouldn’t have predicted the U.S. could become one of the world’s biggest fossil-fuel exporters so quickly.  

  

Climate experts say there is little doubt increased American production and exports are contributing to the recent rise in planet-warming carbon emissions by helping keep crude prices low, increasing consumption in developing economies.  

Better than dirtier fuel, some say

  

Backers of U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, argue that the boom will produce environmental benefits because it will help China and other industrial nations wean themselves from coal and other dirtier fossil fuels. 

 

Environmentalists counter that the massive new supplies unleashed by American advances in extracting natural gas from shale doesn’t just make coal-fired power plants less competitive. LNG also competes with such zero-carbon sources of electricity as nuclear, solar and wind — potentially delaying the full adoption of greener sources. That’s time climate scientists and researchers say the world doesn’t have if humans hope to mitigate the worst-case consequences of our carbon emissions, including catastrophic sea-level rise, stronger storms and more wildfires.  

  

“Typically, infrastructure has multi-decadal lifespans,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. “So, if we build a natural-gas plant today, that will impact carbon emissions over decades to come. So those are the critical and crucial decisions that are being made today. Do we increase access to and use of fossil fuels, or do we make decisions that limit and eventually reduce access to fossil fuels?”  

Boon to shipyards

While it is difficult to estimate how much America’s rise as major exporter of fossil fuels is contributing to a hotter climate, some of the economic benefits are plain to see in South Korea’s shipyards. 

 

At the sprawling Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering facility on the island of Geoje, more than half of the 35 vessels scheduled for delivery in 2018 were LNG carriers. A similar number of vessels are lined up for completion next year. 

 

It’s the same story at the two other major Korean yards. The construction of the big gas tankers has been credited with lifting the nation’s shipbuilding sector out of the doldrums from a decade ago, when the Great Recession caused a downturn in transoceanic trade.  

South Korea’s big three shipbuilders — Daewoo, Hyundai Heavy Industries and Samsung Heavy Industries — won orders for 53 new LNG carriers in 2018 at about $200 million each, soaking up the lion’s share of the 62 vessels ordered globally, according to numbers compiled by the London-based shipping group Clarkson Research. South Korea is expected to finish 2018 at the top spot in overall orders for new commercial ships, surpassing China for the first time in seven years. 

 

“We are getting out of a long tunnel,” Song Ha-dong, a senior Daewoo executive, said as he surveyed the company’s 1,200-acre yard from above the British Contributor, a gargantuan LNG carrier with a freshly painted deck covered in a maze of pipes. “The U.S.-led shale gas boom is getting fully under way, and China, Japan and South Korea are increasing their consumption of natural gas.”  

During a recent visit by The Associated Press, three of the LNG carriers were being assembled inside a massive dry dock. Another 13, including the British Contributor, had been floated out to nearby berths where workers were putting on finishing touches.  

  

The Korean shipyards have developed a niche in building ships with the complex systems needed to transport natural gas. The gas is compressed and liquefied for storage by keeping it really cold, about -260 Fahrenheit. In this liquid state, natural gas is about 600 times smaller than at room temperature. 

Top three importers

 

The British Contributor is as long as three football fields and can carry enough liquefied gas to fill about 70 Olympic-sized swimming pools — nearly two days’ national supply for South Korea. The country used about 1.9 trillion cubic feet of LNG in 2017, finishing third behind China and Japan as the world’s biggest importers, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. 

 

With no domestic oil and gas resources and an unfriendly neighbor blocking overland shipments from the north, South Korea relies exclusively on oceangoing tankers. Nearly half of South Korea’s gas imports come from Qatar and Australia, but the share shipped from the U.S. is growing fast as additional export terminals along the Gulf coast are coming online to handle the glut of gas unleashed by hydraulic fracturing in the Permian Basin of West Texas and southeastern New Mexico. 

 

U.S. LNG exports quadrupled in 2017, with this year on track to see similarly exponential growth. Nearly a fifth of all that gas goes to South Korea.  

The British Contributor is the third of six LNG carriers being built by Daewoo for British energy giant BP, which will mainly use them to transport U.S. gas to Asia under a 20-year contract with the Freeport LNG facility south of Houston. Daewoo delivered four similar ships this year to the government-owned Korea Gas Corporation, which has a 20-year deal to buy gas exported from Cheniere Energy’s Sabine Pass LNG terminal in Louisiana. 

 

South Korea has been vying with Mexico for the title of the largest importer of U.S. LNG, and its reliance on gas could further increase under the government of President Moon Jae-in, who has pledged to transition his country away from nuclear power following the Fukushima meltdown in Japan.  

  

Park Moo-hyun, a senior analyst at Hana Financial Investment, predicts shipping companies will need to place orders for around 480 new LNG carriers over the next decade to match the U.S.-driven increase in global LNG trade — roughly doubling the current worldwide fleet. 

 

“The impact brought by the emergence of shale is not just about an increase in U.S. energy exports — there has been tremendous growth in the production of energy sources that hadn’t been used much, such as LNG,” Park said. “Once the groundwork is established for the stable use of these new energy sources, industries are pushed to adapt.” 

 

Natural gas has the added appeal of producing about half the carbon dioxide of coal when it’s burned. Its increased adoption for generating electricity has been pitched by the U.S. and others as a way for nations to make progress toward meeting their emissions reductions goals under the 2015 Paris climate accord. Burning gas also creates less particulate pollution. 

 

In China, the Communist government has declared a “Blue Sky Defense War” to reduce the choking smog in Beijing and two dozen surrounding cities with a program to convert hundreds of thousands of homes and industrial facilities from burning coal to gas.  In February, Texas-based Cheniere signed a 25-year deal with the state-controlled China National Petroleum Corporation to export LNG from its export terminal in Corpus Christi. 

Carbon emissions increase

 

But the increased gas exports from the U.S. and other sources hasn’t really put much of dent in Chinese coal consumption, which has remained largely flat in 2018. Overall carbon emissions for China, the globe’s biggest emitter, increased nearly 5 percent in 2018.  

Daniel Raimi, a researcher at the Washington-based think tank Resources for the Future, said determining whether U.S. gas exports are a net good or bad for the climate is difficult. When considering China, researchers can’t just look at whether coal use or carbon emissions are falling. They must also try to calculate how much more coal would have been burned had ample supplies of gas not been available. 

 

Another challenge is that the primary component of natural gas is methane, a potent greenhouse gas that traps far more heat in the atmosphere than a comparable amount of carbon dioxide. Studies have shown that a significant amount of natural gas leaks into the air at almost every stage of its production and transport — from wells to pipelines, processing facilities to ships. Raimi said the impact of all that leaking methane on the climate is roughly 84 times more powerful than the same amount of carbon dioxide over a 20-year time frame. 

 

As part of its broad rollback of environmental rules, the Trump administration moved in September to weaken Obama-era regulations designed to prevent methane from escaping into the atmosphere during oil and gas operations. The regulatory rollbacks are part of President Donald Trump’s pro-industry “Energy Dominance” strategy to ramp up U.S. fossil fuel production without concern for the corresponding increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Trump has falsely claimed climate change is a “hoax,” and he moved in 2017 to pull the United States out of the 2015 Paris accord. 

 

“With or without increased U.S. oil and gas exports, ambitious policy measures are the essential ingredient to achieving long-term climate goals such as those laid out in the 2015 Paris Agreement,” Raimi said. “For U.S. LNG exports to reduce global emissions, they must primarily displace coal, and methane emissions must be limited both domestically and abroad.” 

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Dow Finishes Up 1.1 Percent as US Stocks Rebound

Wall Street stocks finished solidly higher Thursday following a late-afternoon surge as worries over slowing economic growth gave way to bargain-hunting.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished at 23,138.82, an increase of 1.1 percent and up some 870 points from the low point of the session.

The broad-based S&P 500 climbed 0.9 percent to 2,488.83, while the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index advanced 0.4 percent to 6,579.49.

The push into positive territory came in the final 30 minutes of the session. While trading is usually light during Christmas week, data has suggested volumes more in line with non-holiday sessions.

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Instagram ‘Back to Normal’ After Bug Triggers Temporary Change to Feed

Facebook Inc’s photo-sharing social network Instagram said on Thursday it has fixed a bug that led to a temporary change in the appearance of its feed for a large number of users.

The bug led to a small test being distributed widely, the company said. As part of the test, some users had to tap and swipe their feed horizontally to view new posts, similar to its Stories feature.

The momentary change sparked a widespread outrage among users on Twitter, with several comparing it to Snapchat’s unpopular redesign.

“The Instagram update is so trash it’s worse than the Snapchat update,” @samfloresxo tweeted.

The redesigned Snapchat app has struggled to attract more users since its roll-out last year and newer versions have been criticized for being too confusing.

In response to a tweet, Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri apologized for the confusion and said, “that was supposed to be a very small test that went broad by accident.”

“We quickly fixed the issue and feed is back to normal,” Instagram said in an emailed statement.

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Pluto Explorer Ushering in New Year at More Distant World

The spacecraft team that brought us close-ups of Pluto will ring in the new year by exploring an even more distant and mysterious world.

 

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will zip past the scrawny, icy object nicknamed Ultima Thule soon after the stroke of midnight.

 

One billion miles beyond Pluto and an astounding 4 billion miles from Earth (1.6 billion kilometers and 6.4 billion kilometers), Ultima Thule will be the farthest world ever explored by humankind. That’s what makes this deep-freeze target so enticing; it’s a preserved relic dating all the way back to our solar system’s origin 4.5 billion years ago. No spacecraft has visited anything so primitive.

 

“What could be more exciting than that?” said project scientist Hal Weaver of Johns Hopkins University, part of the New Horizons team.

 

Lead scientist Alan Stern of Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, expects the New Year’s encounter to be riskier and more difficult than the rendezvous with Pluto: The spacecraft is older, the target is smaller, the flyby is closer and the distance from us is greater.

 

New horizons 

NASA launched the spacecraft in 2006; it’s about the size of a baby grand piano. It flew past Pluto in 2015, providing the first close-up views of the dwarf planet. With the wildly successful flyby behind them, mission planners won an extension from NASA and set their sights on a destination deep inside the Kuiper Belt. As distant as it is, Pluto is barely in the Kuiper Belt, the so-called Twilight Zone stretching beyond Neptune. Ultima Thule is in the Twilight Zone’s heart.

 

Ultima Thule

 

This Kuiper Belt object was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014. Officially known as 2014 MU69, it got the nickname Ultima Thule in an online vote. In classic and medieval literature, Thule was the most distant, northernmost place beyond the known world. When New Horizons first glimpsed the rocky iceball in August it was just a dot. Good close-up pictures should be available the day after the flyby.

Are we there yet ?

 

New Horizons will make its closest approach in the wee hours of Jan. 1 — 12:33 a.m. EST. The spacecraft will zoom within 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) of Ultima Thule, its seven science instruments going full blast. The coast should be clear: Scientists have yet to find any rings or moons around it that could batter the spacecraft. New Horizons hurtles through space at 31,500 mph (50,700 kph), and even something as minuscule as a grain of rice could demolish it. “There’s some danger and some suspense,” Stern said at a fall meeting of astronomers. It will take about 10 hours to get confirmation that the spacecraft completed — and survived — the encounter.

 

Possibly twins

 

Scientists speculate Ultima Thule could be two objects closely orbiting one another. If a solo act, it’s likely 20 miles (32 kilometers) long at most. Envision a baked potato. “Cucumber, whatever. Pick your favorite vegetable,” said astronomer Carey Lisse of Johns Hopkins. It could even be two bodies connected by a neck. If twins, each could be 9 miles to 12 miles (15 kilometers to 20 kilometers) in diameter.

 

Mapping mission

 

Scientists will map Ultima Thule every possible way. They anticipate impact craters, possibly also pits and sinkholes, but its surface also could prove to be smooth. As for color, Ultima Thule should be darker than coal, burned by eons of cosmic rays, with a reddish hue. Nothing is certain, though, including its orbit, so big that it takes almost 300 of our Earth years to circle the sun. Scientists say they know just enough about the orbit to intercept it.

 

Comparing flybys

 

New Horizons will get considerably closer to Ultima Thule than it did to Pluto: 2,220 miles versus 7,770 miles (3,500 kilometers vs. 12,500 kilometers). At the same time, Ultima Thule is 100 times smaller than Pluto and therefore harder to track, making everything more challenging. It took 4 { hours, each way, for flight controllers at Johns Hopkins’ Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Maryland, to get a message to or from New Horizons at Pluto. Compare that with more than six hours at Ultima Thule.

 

What’s next 

It will take almost two years for New Horizons to beam back all its data on Ultima Thule. A flyby of an even more distant world could be in the offing in the 2020s, if NASA approves another mission extension and the spacecraft remains healthy. At the very least, the nuclear-powered New Horizons will continue to observe objects from afar, as it pushes deeper into the Kuiper Belt. There are countless objects out there, waiting to be explored.

 

 

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Tourism Group Gives Funds to Reopen Liberty Bell for 3 Days

Tourists in Philadelphia for the holidays will be able to see the Liberty Bell this weekend despite a partial federal government shutdown that closed many national parks throughout the country.

Most of the buildings in the Independence National Historic Park including Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell Center have been shuttered since Saturday morning because of the partial shutdown.

That was bad news for tourists and the city of Philadelphia, which sees the second highest attendance at the Liberty Bell during the weekend before New Year’s Day annually.

Officials at VISIT PHILADELPHIA, a tourism and marketing group, say they’re giving the park $32,000 to open Friday, Saturday and Sunday to let in the estimated 25,000 people who had planned to see the Liberty Bell this weekend.

 

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Race Plays Huge Role in Cleft Lip/Palate Deformities

A cleft lip or cleft palate is one of the most common birth defects worldwide. Before birth, babies can have a split, or cleft, in their lip and the roof of the mouth. This split normally closes between the 6th to 11th week of pregnancy. If this doesn’t happen, and the baby is born with this split, doctors can usually fix it. But if the cleft isn’t fixed, the baby can have serious health problems and a shortened life.

In the U.S. and other developed countries, corrective surgery is done when a baby is between three months and 18 months old.  Surgical intervention is less common in less developed nations.

Dr. Albert Oh, a pediatric plastic surgeon, said he performs one or two corrective surgeries a week at Children’s National hospital in Washington.

“We’re one of the busiest centers in the United States, and so my partner and I, we average over a hundred primary cases per year.”

About one out of every 1,500 babies in the U.S. is born with a cleft palate. One out of every 900 babies is born with cleft lip. Babies of African descent have lower odds — one out of every 1,200 births.

Dr. Yang Chai at the University of Southern California said Asians are most at risk.

“If you look at a patient population worldwide, if you are Asian, the prevalence is about 1 out of 700.”

These children are often stigmatized because of the way they look. But complications from a cleft lip and cleft palate go beyond the cosmetic. They impact speech and cause dental problems. A baby with a cleft palate cannot suck and is at risk of being malnourished. Malnutrition, in turn, causes stunted growth.

Dr. Ben Gitterman, a pediatrician who has worked as a volunteer in low-income countries to help these children, said the experience was life-changing.

“Seeing these kids and thinking, ‘What a cute little 3 or 4 year old,’ and finding that 3 or 4 year old was 7, 8 or 9.  And because of the fact that they couldn’t process food, they couldn’t eat well. They had been so stunted … by malnutrition. Not malnutrition from the lack of food in the community, but because they couldn’t feed properly because of the cleft lip and palate situation. These were tiny little kids, and I was in shock.”

Gitterman has volunteered numerous times with Operation Smile, one of the charities that organizes surgical missions to help these children.  In a Skype interview with Dr. Bill Magee, Operation Smile’s founder, Magee said his organization’s mission has expanded in the more than 35 years of its existence.

“Up until about 1999, all of our volunteers pretty much came out of the United States. Today, 70 to 80 percent of our missions are done by local people in their countries that we have trained.”

Charitable organizations perform more than 80 percent of cleft lip and cleft palate surgeries in Vietnam, according to a 2016 study issued by Dr. William Magee III and his colleagues at the University of Southern California. Magee III is the son of the founder of Operation Smile.

The report showed how difficult it is for parents to get the surgery their children need in low and middle income countries. It’s common in these countries for medical care to be paid in advance, which many families cannot afford.  

Operation Smile is working to change that.

“It’s given us this incredible opportunity to understand how the infrastructure of surgery is so important … and how to advance that infrastructure in countries all over the world,” Magee said.

As for what causes this condition, genetic factors account for about 30 percent of cleft conditions. The mother’s health is a contributing factor, but scientists are still searching for other causes with the hope of one day being able to prevent children from being born with cleft lips or palates.

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RUSADA’s Chief Appeals to Putin Over Doping Data

The head of the Russian Anti-Doping Agency has asked for President Vladimir Putin’s help in getting Russian officials to hand over key doping data to World Anti-Doping Agency inspectors.

WADA reinstated the suspended RUSADA in September on the condition Russian authorities hand over lab data, which could help confirm a number of violations uncovered during an investigation that revealed a state-sponsored doping program designed to win medals at the 2014 Olympics and other major events.

WADA officials said earlier this month they were leaving Moscow empty-handed after Russian authorities prevented them from accessing data.

In a letter released Thursday, RUSADA chief Yuri Ganus appealed to Putin to reverse the decision and allow the data to be given to WADA inspectors. Ganus warned that refusal to do so would hurt Russia’s efforts to clean up its sports from doping.

WADA has previously said that Russia unexpectedly demanded its equipment be “certified under Russian law.” The deadline to turn over the data is Dec. 31.

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Times Square New Year’s Eve Ball Gets Some New Sparkle

Preparations for New Year’s Eve in Times Square are taking shape, and some of those shapes are 192 new crystal triangles on the famous ball.

The new Waterford crystal triangles will join about 2,500 others Thursday on the big, sparkling sphere. Some new crystals are swapped in every year.

This year’s additions feature rosette cuts designed to make them appear to flow harmoniously into each other. That’s in keeping with this year’s “gift of harmony” theme.

The ball measures 3.5 meters (12 feet) in diameter and weighs almost 5,450 kg (nearly 12,000 pounds). It’s positioned atop One Times Square.

 

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Source: Foxconn to Begin Assembling Top-End Apple iPhones in India in 2019

Apple Inc will begin assembling its top-end iPhones in India through the local unit of Foxconn as early as 2019, the first time the Taiwanese contract manufacturer will have made the product in the country, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Importantly, Foxconn will be assembling the most expensive models, such as devices in the flagship iPhone X family, the source said, potentially taking Apple’s business in India to a new level.

The work will take place at Foxconn’s plant in Sriperumbudur town in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, said the source, who is not authorized to speak to the media and so declined to be named.

Foxconn, which already makes phones for Xiaomi Corp in India, will invest 25 billion Indian rupees ($356 million) to expand the plant, including investment in iPhone production, Tamil Nadu’s Industries Minister M C Sampath told Reuters.

The investment may create as many as 25,000 jobs, he added. Another source also said Foxconn planned to assemble iPhones in India, in a move that could help both it and Apple to limit the impact of a trade war between the United States and China.

The Hindu newspaper first reported on Dec. 24 that the Foxconn plant would begin manufacturing various models of the iPhone. Reuters is first to report the size of the investment and the kind of phones to be assembled.

Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller declined to comment. Foxconn said it did not comment on matters related to current or potential customers, or any of their products.

Lower-end phones

Until now, Cupertino, California-based Apple has only assembled the lower-cost SE and 6S models in India through Wistron Corp’s local unit in the Bengaluru technology hub.

Its sales in India have also been focused on lower-end phones – more than half of its sales volume is driven by models older than the iPhone 8, launched last year, according to technology research firm Counterpoint.

Apple launched the pricey iPhone X last year but has cut production of that phone, according to industry analysts, since it began selling the newer versions, iPhone XS and XR, globally this year.

Still, it could potentially get Foxconn to make the older iPhone X version in India where it sells cheaper models in a bid to get a bigger share of the world’s fastest growing major mobile phone market.

Full details of Apple’s deal with Foxconn are not yet clear and could change.

It is not known if any of the iPhone assembly is being moved from existing Foxconn factories in China and elsewhere. It is also unclear whether the production will be confined to assembly or include any component production in India.

Looking beyond China

For Apple, widening assembly beyond China is critical to mitigate the risks of the Sino-U.S. trade war.

Foxconn, the world’s biggest electronics contract manufacturer, is considering setting up a factory in Vietnam, Vietnamese state media reported this month. If that goes ahead, it will be one of the biggest recent steps by a major company to secure an additional production base outside of China.

Foxconn has previously admitted the China-U.S. trade spat was its biggest challenge and that its senior executives were making plans to counter the impact.

“Widening iPhone manufacturing in India through Foxconn will allow Apple to hedge the risk of any new U.S. trade policies,” said Navkendar Singh, an associate research director at International Data Corporation.

Indian taxes on import of devices and components have also heightened Apple’s headache in a market where it has only a 1 percent share by smartphone shipments.

Making more phones locally will help Apple save costly duties and boost Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flagship drive to make India a manufacturing hub, Singh said.

Apple shocked investors last month with a lower-than-expected sales forecast for the Christmas quarter that jolted parts suppliers across the world.

Foxconn has previously expressed concern over demand for Apple’s flagship devices.

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Tesla Sets up Shanghai Financial Leasing Unit as China Plans Accelerate

Tesla Inc has registered a financial leasing company in China, a local business registration filing shows, in the latest sign the U.S. electric car maker is attempting to speed up its push into China.

The California-based carmaker, led by billionaire Chief Executive Elon Musk, has opened a wholly-owned financial leasing unit in Shanghai’s free trade zone with registered capital of $30 million, according to China’s National Enterprise Information Publicity System.

Its scope includes leasing and consultancy, the document said, which listed the firm’s legal representative as Zhu Xiaotong, Tesla’s boss in China.

Tesla declined to comment.

The company has opened a tender process to build its Shanghai Gigafactory and at least one contractor has started buying materials, Reuters reported earlier this month.

The $2 billion factory, Tesla’s first in China, marks a major bet by the U.S. electric vehicle (EV) maker as it looks to bolster its presence in the world’s biggest auto market where it faces rising competition from a swathe of domestic EV makers and its earnings have been hit by increased tariffs on U.S. imports.

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