An estimated 47 million people around the world have dementia, a decline in memory or other thinking skills severe enough to interfere with daily life. The most common form of the condition is Alzheimer’s disease. Now, research shows the way you speak may indicate whether you are at risk of developing dementia. A new study says pauses and filler words may be a sign of early mild cognitive impairment, and that could help doctors diagnose Alzheimer’s much quicker. VOA’s Deborah Block reports. …
AIDS Burdens Zimbabwe’s Elderly With Orphans, Illness
Jabulani Zilawe lost all 11 of his children to AIDS. Now he is the only one left to care for their orphans. “This has become my life — with my grandchildren. All their parents died. AIDS killed them. I had 11 children, six of them were girls who had moved to South Africa to seek better life, but they all came back dead — one after the other,” Zilawe told the Thompson Reuters Foundation as he surveyed his small grandchildren scrambling around him. Zilawe lives in a dilapidated homestead outside Norton, a town 40 kilometers from Harare, the Zimbabwean capital. His bedroom is a thatched mud hut that sits near 12 mounds marking the remains of his wife and children. “My sons, who became illegal gold miners, also suffered from AIDS before they died. You can see the graves here; the additional one belongs to my wife, who also died some two years ago, leaving me to look after our orphaned grandchildren,” said Zilawe, 76. Nearby, some of his grandchildren wrestled over a pot of leftover porridge. None is in school; instead, like their grandfather, each child passes the day at the homestead, idling and seeking a spot to bask in the sunshine. Some of the little ones fall ill — regularly, said Zilawe, who didn’t know whether any carried the virus that had killed their parents. “I don’t know anything about my grandchildren’s HIV status; maybe they have the disease or maybe not,” he said. Ailing caregivers His life …
More Cyber Attacks, More Job Security for Hackers
The surge in far-flung and destructive cyber attacks is not good for national security, but for an increasing number of hackers and researchers, it is great for job security. The new reality is on display in Las Vegas this week at the annual Black Hat and Def Con security conferences, which now have a booming side business in recruiting. “Hosting big parties has enabled us to meet more talent in the community, helping fill key positions and also retain great people,” said Jen Ellis, a vice president with cybersecurity firm Rapid7 Inc., which filled the hip Hakkasan nightclub Wednesday at one of the week’s most popular parties. More tech, more jobs Twenty or even 10 years ago, career options for technology tinkerers were mostly limited to security firms, handfuls of jobs inside mainstream companies, and in government agencies. But as tech has taken over the world, the opportunities in the security field have exploded. Whole industries that used to have little to do with technology now need protection, including automobiles, medical devices and the ever-expanding Internet of Things, from thermostats and fish tanks to home security devices. More insurance companies now cover breaches, with premiums reduced for strong security practices. And lawyers are making sure that cloud providers are held responsible if a customer’s data is stolen from them and otherwise pushing to hold tech companies liable for problems, meaning they need security experts too. 1.8 million skilled workers needed The nonprofit Center for Cyber Safety and Education last month …
New Surgical Glue Inspired by Slug Slime
Scientists have developed an experimental surgical glue inspired by the mucus secreted by slugs that could offer an alternative to sutures and staples for closing wounds. While some medical glues already exist, they often adhere weakly, are not particularly flexible and frequently cannot be used in very wet conditions. To get around those problems, a group of scientists from Harvard and other research centers decided to learn from slugs, which — as well as making slime to glide on — can produce extremely adhesive mucus as a defense mechanism. The slugs’ trick is to generate a substance that not only forms strong bonds on wet surfaces but also has a matrix that dissipates energy at the point of adhesion, making it highly flexible. Strong, nontoxic The man-made version of this tough adhesive is based on the same principles and in a series of experiments reported in the journal Science on Thursday it was shown to adhere strongly to pig skin, cartilage, tissue and organs. It also proved nontoxic to human cells. In one test, the new glue was used to close a wound in a blood-covered pig’s heart and successfully maintained a leak-free seal after the heart was inflated and deflated tens of thousands of times. In another case it was applied to a laceration in a rat’s liver and performed just as well as a hemostat, a surgical tool often used in operations to control bleeding. “There are a variety of potential uses and in some settings this could …
Warming to Worsen Dead Zones, Algae Blooms Choking US Waterways
Projected increases in rain from global warming could further choke U.S. waterways with fertilizer runoff that trigger dead zones and massive algae blooms, a new study said. If greenhouse gas emissions keep rising, more and heavier rain will increase nitrogen flowing into lakes, rivers and bays by about 19 percent by the end of the century, according to a study in Thursday’s journal Science. While that may not sound like much, many coastal areas are already heavily loaded with nitrogen. Researchers calculated that an extra 860,000 tons of nitrogen yearly will wash into American waterways by century’s end. The nutrients create low-oxygen dead zones and harmful blooms of algae in the Gulf of Mexico, Great Lakes, Pacific Northwest and Atlantic coast. “Many of these coastal areas are already suffering year-in, year-out from these dead zones and algal blooms,” said one of the researchers, Anna Michalak, an ecologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University. “And climate change will make it all worse.” When waterways are overloaded with nutrients, algae growth can run amok, creating dead zones. Algae can also choke waterways with “green mats of goop on top of the water” that are giant floating blooms, Michalak said. The blooms often have toxins that can pollute drinking water. In 2014, a bloom on Lake Erie fouled tap water for half a million people in Toledo, Ohio, for more than two days. The study, which is based on computer simulations, found the …
Lawmakers: Ross Defers to Trump on US Steel Tariff Timing
U.S. lawmakers said on Thursday that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told them he will defer to President Donald Trump on the timing of a decision on new steel import curbs, likely meaning further delays and deliberations on the issue. Members of the House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee attending a briefing with Ross said he did not specify a timetable for releasing a long-awaited report that will lay out options for shielding the steel industry from imports on national security grounds. Ross had originally hoped to release the steel “Section 232” report at the end of June but the timing has slipped amid disagreements among White House aides over the merits of restricting imports that could hurt steel consuming industries. A House Democratic aide who attended the briefing said Ross repeated President Donald Trump’s comments in a Wall Street Journal interview this week that the decision on potential steel tariffs would take more time and could come after congressional debates on health care, tax reform and infrastructure spending. “I can only follow my leader,” the aide said Ross told the briefing. The Commerce secretary also told lawmakers the issue had a lot of complexities and that he was considering the interests of both steel makers and steel users and concerned about potential trade retaliation against U.S. agricultural products. The lawmakers said Ross told them he was taking a similar approach to a parallel national security probe into aluminum imports. “I think it’s a good sign that they’re actually slowing …
US Republicans Kill Border Tax, Focus on Corporate Rate Cuts
A proposed border tax in the House of Representatives was killed on Thursday, bringing relief to retailers and other large importers whose profits faced threats and removing a hurdle that had kept negotiations on the long-promised Republican overhaul of the U.S. tax code from advancing. The border adjustment tax was part of a broad reform of the tax code being pushed by House Republican leaders. It was meant to discourage companies from manufacturing products overseas and then importing them into the United States for sale instead of producing goods in the U.S. The tax would have generated roughly $1 trillion in revenue, allowing tax-code writers to slash the corporate tax rate without increasing the nation’s deficit. Removing the controversial provision could make it easier to pass tax legislation, but likely narrows the scope of what could become law. It suggests Republicans are more likely to implement simple rate cuts and not accomplish sweeping tax reform on the scale of the last major overhaul in 1986, such as moving to a territorial tax system, in which companies would pay tax only on profits earned in the United States. Without a new source of revenue, it will make it more difficult for Republicans to make tax code changes permanent and deficit-neutral. The Republicans are looking to use rules that would require passage of a tax bill only with a simple majority – meaning they would not need any Democratic votes. Those rules restrict creating long-term deficits, so if the bill is not …
‘Terrible Crimes’ Made Putin World’s Richest Person, Financier Testifies
Financier Bill Browder testified Thursday before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee that Russian President Vladimir Putin was the “richest man in the world,” a result of “terrible crimes” Putin’s government committed without the threat of retribution. “I believe he is worth $200 billion,” Browder said, testifying in the Senate panel’s probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. “The purpose of the Putin regime has been to commit terrible crimes in order to get that money, and he doesn’t want to lose that money by having it frozen. So he is personally at risk of the Magnitsky Act.” Browder said that to protect the vast amounts of money, some of which he said was in American banks, Putin launched a campaign to repeal the Magnitsky Act, a U.S. law that imposed sanctions on Russian officials whom the U.S. held responsible for the 2009 death of Russian lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Russian jail after being retained by Browder to investigate corruption. Browder is the CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, an investment firm that was once the largest portfolio investor in Russia. Fraud, money-laundering case Browder testified that Kremlin-linked Natalia Veselnitskaya was the “family lawyer” for the Russian family that owns Prevezon Holdings Ltd., the target of a $230 million fraud and money-laundering case that Magnitsky had exposed. Veselnitskaya once represented a military unit run by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB), the country’s primary intelligence agency. She also met last June with Donald Trump …
World’s Richest Person? Not Bill Gates, But Jeff Bezos
The founder and CEO of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos, has overtaken Bill Gates of Microsoft and is now the world’s richest man, based on Thursday’s stock prices for the corporations that make up the bulk of their wealth. Forbes magazine, which tracks the world’s biggest personal fortunes, said Bezos’ net worth is now a bit over $90.5 billion, ahead of Gates, whose wealth was measured at just over $90 billion. Bezos, who is 53 years old, owns around 17 percent of Amazon.com Inc. The world’s largest online retailer, founded in 1994, has been expanding and growing into a diversified technology firm active in cloud computing, online video, computing hardware and artificial intelligence. The company also announced this year that it will acquire U.S. grocer Whole Foods, which could help expand Amazon’s online food-shopping services. Bezos became the first multi-billionaire to surpass Gates in seven years, in monetary terms. Gates, who is 61, has been No. 1 for 18 of the past 22 years; he has stepped down from his former Microsoft chairmanship and now devotes more time to the charities that have received over $30 billion from him in recent years. Amazon.com founder Bezos is only the sixth person to hold the “world’s richest” title in the 30 years that Forbes has been tracking personal fortunes. In addition to his huge holdings of Amazon.com stock, Bezos also personally owns The Washington Post corporation news and founded the space technology company Blue Origin. …
Scientists in US Successfully Edit Human Embryo’s Genes
Scientists at the Oregon Health and Science University say they have successfully edited genes of human embryos in the first such attempt in the United States. Previously, similar experiments have been reported only by scientists in China. Engineering human genes in the embryo stage opens up the possibility of correcting their defective parts that cause inherited diseases. The new trait is passed on to subsequent generations. But the practice is controversial, since many fear it could be used for unethical purposes such as creating “designer babies” with specific enhanced abilities or traits. Oregon scientists led by Kazakhstan-born Shoukhrat Mitalipov successfully repeated the experiment on scores of embryos created with sperm donated for scientific purposes by men with inherited disease mutations. The editing was done very close to the moment of fertilization of the egg in order to make sure the changes would be repeated in all subsequent cells of the embryo. Scientists have been experimenting with gene editing for a long time, but the availability of the technique called CRISPR rapidly advanced the precision, flexibility and efficiency of cutting and replacing parts of the molecule chains that comprise genes. Citing ethical concerns, the U.S. Congress made it illegal to turn genetically-edited embryos into babies. Many other countries do not have such regulations. …
МАУ позивається проти Міністерства інфраструктури, аеропорту «Львів» і Ryanair
Компанія «Міжнародні авіалінії України» подала два позови: перший спрямований до Міністерства інфраструктури та компанії Ryanair, другий — до Міжнародного аеропорту «Львів» та Ryanair, заявив на прес-конференції у Києві адвокат МАУ Олег Бондар. Президент МАУ Юрій Мірошников у свою чергу зазначив, що компанія вітає можливі позитивні наслідки від приходу компанії Ryanair на авіаринок, але вступають проти створення ефективних умов діяльності лише для однієї авіакомпанії. «Насправді в діях МАУ немає нічого того, що могло би призвести до зупинення польотів Ryanair в Україну на умовах, які будуть доступні не лише для Ryanair, а й для всіх інших авіакомпаній. Так, ми вважаємо, що наші інтереси під загрозою, і під загрозою – не внаслідок фактора початку польотів компанії Ryanair, а внаслідок того, яким чином та на яких умовах це робиться», – сказав він. Міністр інфраструктури України Володимир Омелян заявив 26 липня, що приватна компанія «Міжнародні авіалінії України» (МАУ) позивається до очолюваного ним міністерства через імовірний прихід на ринок авіаперевезень лоукост-компанії Ryanair. За його даними, компанія МАУ вимагає скасувати контракт Ryanair з аеропортом Львова та заборонити міністерству інфраструктури надавати сприяння Ryanair в Україні. 10 липня компанія Ryanair заявила, що скасовує планований прихід до України через недотримання раніше досягнутої угоди з Міністерством інфраструктури України і посадовцями аеропорту «Бориспіль». Перед цим гендиректор аеропорту «Бориспіль» Павло Рябікін заявив, що аеропортові не вигідний контракт із Ryanair у тому вигляді, як його домагалася компанія. За його словами, виконання певних вимог могло б призвести аеропорт до збитків у два мільярди гривень щороку. Міністр інфраструктури Володимир Омелян вважає, що за позицією керівника аеропорту «Бориспіль» стоїть компанія «Міжнародні авіалінії України». …
WHO: Hepatitis B, C Could Be Eliminated by 2030
On the eve of World Hepatitis Day, the World Health Organization is calling for stepped up action to eliminate Hepatitis B and C by 2030. It says the goal can be reached by scaling up diagnosis, treatment and prevention of the diseases, which can cause death from cirrhosis and liver cancer. WHO reports viral Hepatitis B and C affected 325 million people and caused 1.34 million deaths in 2015, and is calling for the elimination of the public health threat by reducing new infections by 90 percent and death by 65 percent by 2030. Officials say it can be done if countries show the political will and invest in available tools to rid the world of the ailment. They say the epidemic of Hepatitis B, which mainly affects the African and Western Pacific regions, can be prevented by vaccinating infants against the disease. In regard to Hepatitis C, the director of the WHO Department of HIV Global Hepatitis Program, Gottfried Hirnschall, says there has been a sea change in the treatment of this disease. He tells VOA until four years ago no good treatment existed for Hepatitis C, which kills nearly 400,000 people annually. “Then we saw the revolution. New drugs came on the market that are really fantastic drugs,” Hirnschall noted. “They have very limited side effects. You only have to take them for three months and 95 percent of people are cured. And, even those who are not cured in the first round, we now have even alternatives that …
After Drought, California Looks to Replenish Aquifers
At the Terranova Ranch near Fresno, California, general manager Don Cameron examines grapes in a vineyard that workers flooded last spring. Winter rains had ended a severe drought and he was engaged in “groundwater recharge,” returning unused water from the North Fork of the Kings River to an underground aquifer, the source of irrigation for this region. Some were skeptical because he was flooding a working vineyard and not a special basin designed for the purpose. “We’ve been through a five-year drought,” Cameron explained. “Our groundwater has been depleted during that period, and long term, we want to rebuild what we’ve lost.” Recharging groundwater on fields that are in production was a test, and the vines were closely monitored. They held up well to the thousands of cubic meters of water that flooded the fields and percolated down to nature’s underground storage system. A research team led by hydrologist Helen Dahlke at the University of California, Davis, wants to test this concept throughout the Central Valley. California produce The 50,000-square-kilometer swath of California farmland produces one-quarter of the food for Americans, and 40 percent of their fruits, nuts and vegetables. The Terranova Farm grows 25 crops, from tomatoes to onions, and Cameron wants to see how other crops respond to the winter flooding. He is expanding the farm’s recharge project with help from a $5 million grant from the California state government, and envisions recharge efforts at farms around the state. Aquifers are like a banking system, says Graham Fogg, …
US Weekly Requests for Jobless Aid Up 10K, to 244,000
More Americans applied for jobless aid last week, though the number of people seeking benefits remains near historic lows pointing to a healthy job market. THE NUMBERS: Weekly unemployment applications rose by 10,000 to 244,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. It was the largest weekly increase since late May. The less volatile four-week average was unchanged at 244,000. The number of people collecting unemployment benefits has fallen 8.3 percent over the past 12 months to 2 million. THE TAKEAWAY: The job market appears solid as the U.S. enters its ninth year of recovery from the Great Recession. Employers are holding onto workers with the expectation that business will continue to improve. Jobless claims – a close indication of layoffs – have come in below 300,000 for 125 weeks in a row. That’s the longest such stretch since 1970, when the U.S. population was much smaller. KEY DRIVERS: After a weak start this year, the economy is expected to grow at roughly 2 percent. That would be roughly in line with annual gains during the recovery. Consistent hiring has helped sustain the gradual recovery, although the expansion is starting to show its age as the pace of job gains has slowed this year. The unemployment rate has fallen to a healthy 4.4 percent. The Labor Department’s report for June showed that U.S. employers added a robust 222,000 jobs, the most in four months and a reassuring sign that businesses may be confident enough to keep hiring despite a …
China to Speed Up Bullet Trains in September
China plans to raise the speed of its bullet trains back up to 350 kph (217 mph), state media reported on Thursday, six years after a deadly high-speed rail crash prompted authorities to slow trains across the country. Trains on China’s high-speed rail network are designed to travel up to 350 kph, but Beijing ordered speeds to be cut to between 250-300 kph in 2011 after over 30 people were killed in a train crash in eastern Zhejiang province. The Beijing News said the government planned to implement the increased speeds between Beijing and Shanghai in September, which would cut travel time to 4.5 hours from up to 6 hours currently. China’s newest “Fuxing” bullet trains, which were unveiled in June and are capable of top speeds of 400 kph, will be used for that journey, it said. China is home to the world’s longest high-speed rail network which competes heavily with domestic airlines. Of China’s 31 provinces and regions, 29 are served by high-speed rail with only the regions of Tibet and Ningxia in the northwest yet to be connected. …
Samsung Poised to Unseat Intel as King of Microchips
Intel’s more than two decade-long reign as the king of the silicon-based semiconductor is poised to end Thursday when South Korea’s Samsung Electronics elbows the U.S. manufacturer aside to become the leading maker of computer chips. Samsung reported record-high quarterly profit and sales Thursday. Analysts say it likely nudged aside Intel in the April-June quarter as the leading maker of semiconductors, the computer chips that are as much a staple of the 21st century wired world as crude oil was for the 20th century. Samsung said its semiconductor business recorded 8 trillion ($7.2 billion) in operating income on revenue of 17.6 trillion won ($15.8 billion) during the April-June period. Intel, which reports its quarterly earnings later Thursday, is expected to report $14.4 billion in quarterly revenue. On an annual basis, Samsung’s semiconductor division is widely expected to overtake Intel’s sales this year, analysts at brokerages and market research firms say. Mobile devices and data are the keys to understanding Samsung’s ascent as the new industry leader, even as its de facto chief is jailed, battling corruption charges, and it recovers from a fiasco over Galaxy Note 7 smartphones that had to be axed last year because they were prone to catch fire. Manufacturers are packing more and more memory storage capacity into ever smaller mobile gadgets, as increased use of mobile applications, connected devices and cloud computing services drive up demand and consequently prices for memory chips, an area dominated by Samsung. Just as Saudi Arabia dominates in oil output, …
Amazon Reaches for Millions in Southeast Asia’s Cyberspace
Amazon is introducing express delivery to Singapore in its first direct effort to tap into surging online shopping in fast-growing Southeast Asia. The American e-commerce company announced Thursday it will begin operating a distribution facility bigger than a football field in the wealthy island nation. It promises to deliver tens of thousands of types of items within two hours for free, if customers spend at least 40 Singapore dollars ($29.52). That’s a step up from past international shipping options offered by Amazon, where items sometimes took weeks to arrive. Amazon is late to capitalize on the region’s rising middle class. The biggest local competitor is Lazada, which is backed by Chinese giant Alibaba and launched in the region in 2012. It operates in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam and Singapore. Henry Low, the Asia Pacific director of Amazon Prime Now, said the company is keen to expand elsewhere in Southeast Asia, a market of more than 600 million people. “I’m super excited about future possibilities,” Low said. The number of internet users in Southeast Asia is expected to rise from 260 million now to 480 million by 2020, according to research by Google and state-owned investor Temasek Holdings. It forecasts that the value of e-commerce in the region will soar to 88 billion by 2025 from 5.5 billion in 2015. “The offline-to-online shift will continue and we strongly believe in the great success of e-commerce [with] the rising middle class in many Southeast …
Monitoring Air Pollution Worldwide
Every second, millions of tons of various gases rise from the surface of the earth into the atmosphere. Many of them are man-made and harmful, contributing massively to pollution and consequently to global warming. The European Space Agency, ESA, is slowly building a network of satellites that will help scientists create a real-time global map of the health of our planet. VOA’s George Putic reports. …
Fed Holds Key Rate Steady, Will Reduce Holdings ‘Relatively Soon’
Leaders of the U.S. central bank said Wednesday that they were holding their benchmark lending rate at a low level — in a range between 1 and 1.25 percent — for the time being. Federal Reserve officials said in a report issued after their two-day policy meeting that the world’s largest economy was growing at a “moderate” pace and the job market was improving, but that inflation remained a bit low. The chief economist of Stifel Fixed Income, Lindsey Piegza, said the Fed appeared eager to raise interest rates back to a more “normal” level and might well approve an increase at its next meeting in September. Sara Johnson of IHS Markit said the next rate hike likely would be in December. Fed officials cut short-term interest rates to nearly zero during the 2007-09 financial crisis to boost investment and growth. They said the recovering economy no longer needed so much help, so they have been gradually raising interest rates and are expected to boost them further in the future. In a VOA interview, Piegza said keeping rates too low for too long might prompt investors to seek better returns by putting money into excessively risky areas. During the recession, the Fed also tried to boost growth by cutting long-term interest rates, with a complex program that involved purchasing huge amounts of securities. Fed officials said they would keep these assets for the time being but indicated they would begin selling them off “relatively soon.” Fed officials have …
From Humble Start, NASA Engineer Uplifts Herself and Others
When astronaut John Glenn became the first man to set foot on the moon 48 years ago this month, the scene transfixed a small girl in Costa Rica watching on a neighbor’s TV. “I was 7 years old when I saw the Apollo landing. … I told Mami, ‘I want to reach the moon,’ ” Sandra Cauffman recalled. Since seeing that 1969 event, Cauffman has watched rockets roar into space carrying the Mars-orbiting MAVEN satellite and other exploratory equipment she has worked on while leading or supporting teams as a NASA engineer. “I marvel at my own journey, and how I came to help probe the mysteries of outer space,” Cauffman said in a 2014 TED Talk. Cauffman, deputy director of NASA’s Earth Science division, is believed to be among a handful of Hispanic women leaders at the space agency she joined as a contractor in 1988. While she’s proud to have worked on the Hubble space telescope and other high-profile projects, she’s also committed to another mission: encouraging young people – especially girls – to pursue careers in science and technology. “What I have been trying to do for a long time now is to plant those seeds in those little girls that just because you’re a girl doesn’t mean that you cannot be a scientist or an engineer,” she told VOA in an interview earlier this month at NASA headquarters. “And just because your parents didn’t go to school doesn’t mean you cannot go to school.” WATCH: Sandra …
Lift Debt Limit Before Recess, Mnuchin Urges Congress
U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Wednesday urged federal lawmakers to raise the federal debt limit before they leave Washington for their August recess to avoid increased interest costs to taxpayers and market uncertainty about a potential default. Mnuchin told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee that maintaining U.S. creditworthiness was of “utmost importance” and that the United States must pay its bills on time. “As I’ve suggested in the past, based upon our best estimate at the time, we do have funding through September, but I have urged Congress to take this up before they leave for the recess,” Mnuchin said. …
White House: Foxconn to Bring 3,000 Manufacturing Jobs to Wisconsin
Foxconn, a Taiwanese electronics manufacturer and major supplier to Apple Inc., has announced plans to build a $10 billion plant in the U.S. state of Wisconsin, to make LCD display screens. The company, formally known as Hon Hai Precision Industry and which supplies Apple with screens for the iPhone, made the announcement Wednesday as company executives paid a visit to U.S. President Donald Trump in the White House. Trump said at the meeting that the Foxconn commitment was a result of his election win. And, in fact, just two days after Trump was inaugurated, Foxconn Chief Executive Terry Gou told reporters his company plans to invest $7 billion in a U.S. factory to make computer displays. “If I didn’t get elected, he definitely would not be spending $10 billion,” Trump said on Wednesday. “We are going to have some very, very magnificent decades.” In addition to Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who said the project will be the largest economic development project in Wisconsin history, were at the White House event. Foxconn has pledged to invest $10 billion over the next four years to build a factory that will create a projected 3,000 jobs with a potential to add 10,000 more, the company said in a statement. But Foxconn made a similar pledge for a factory in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 2013, promising it would invest $30 million and hire 500 workers for a plant to be built there. The deal was widely praised by state …
Peer Educators in Cameroon Promote HIV Testing for Mothers, Babies
As the world’s AIDS experts meet at a conference this week in Paris, health workers in Cameroon still struggle to identify and treat HIV-positive mothers and babies. Myriam Anang lost her husband and three-month-old baby two years ago to HIV. Now, Anang works as a peer educator in a government-initiated program to help others become better informed. She was among the speakers in northern Cameroon at a gathering addressing AIDS and HIV. Anang said that when she tries to persuade sick villagers to go with their babies for HIV screening, they argue that they are not ill, but bewitched by their relatives. She said she knows three men who died of HIV, yet their wives have refused to take their babies to the hospital, claiming the families are suffering from a spell. Anang did not have prenatal care. She delivered her baby at a traditional birth attendant’s home. It was only afterward, when she became sick, that she went to a hospital and found out she had HIV. In 2016, the government found that seven out of 10 women in the northern part of the country were not visiting hospitals when they were pregnant. About a third of those who did go to a hospital never returned for postnatal visits, even if they had tested positive for HIV. The job of the peer educators is to identify pregnant women in their villages and encourage them to get medical care, even reminding them of their hospital appointments. The government says that …
EU Warns US It May Counter New Sanctions on Russia
The European Union warned on Wednesday that it was ready to act within days to counter proposed new U.S. sanctions on Russia, saying they would harm the bloc’s energy security. Sanctions legislation overwhelmingly approved by the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday has angered EU officials: they see it as breaking transatlantic unity in the West’s response to Moscow’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and its support for separatists in eastern Ukraine. Brussels also fears the new sanctions will harm European firms with connections to Russia, and oil and gas projects on which the EU is dependent. “The U.S. bill could have unintended unilateral effects that impact the EU’s energy security interests,” EU chief executive Jean-Claude Juncker said in a statement issued after a meeting at which European commissioners were united in their views, according to a senior EU official. “If our concerns are not taken into account sufficiently, we stand ready to act appropriately within a matter of days. ‘America First’ cannot mean that Europe’s interests come last,” he said, mentioning President Donald Trump’s guiding slogan. A EU document prepared for the commissioners, seen by Reuters, laid out the EU’s plans to seek “demonstrable reassurances” that the White House would not use the bill to target EU interests. The bloc, it says, will also prepare to use an EU regulation allowing it to defend companies against the application of extraterritorial measures by the United States. If diplomacy fails, Brussels plans to file a complaint at the World …