Month: September 2017

The U.S. Justice Department has announced it is putting nearly $59 million toward fighting the epidemic of opioid drug addiction. In a news release Friday, the department cited preliminary figures from the National Center for Health Statistics showing that drug overdose deaths in the United States rose 21 percent from 2015 to 2016. In 2016, a record high of around 65,000 people died from drug overdoses, driven by the opioid crisis. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the new figures Thursday, blaming opioid painkiller addiction for the rise. The 2016 estimate “would be the highest drug death toll and the fastest increase in that death toll in American history,” Sessions said. “And every day this crisis continues to grow, as more than 5,000 Americans abuse painkillers for the first time [daily].” Opioids such as heroin and the synthetic drug fentanyl were responsible for most of the fatal overdoses, killing more than 33,000 Americans — quadruple the number from 20 years ago. The Justice Department said about $24 million in federal grants would be awarded to 50 cities, counties and public health departments for creation of “comprehensive diversion and alternatives to incarceration programs” for people impacted by the epidemic. An additional $3.1 million will be awarded by the National Institute of Justice for research and evaluation on drugs and crime, prioritizing heroin and other opioids and synthetic drugs. Also, $22 million is being awarded to 53 jurisdictions to support implementation of adult drug courts and veterans’ services. And $9.5 million is …

Study Finds Damaging Stereotypes About Boys, Girls Begin Early In Life

Early in life, children get the message that boys are strong and capable and that girls are vulnerable and limited in what they can do. That’s the result of a new study, the first ever, that looks at adolescents and the messages they get from society and their parents. VOA’s Carol Pearson has more. …

Solar Boom or Bust? Companies Seek Tariffs on Solar Imports

Cheap solar panels imported from China and other countries have led to a boom in the U.S. solar industry, where rooftop and other installations have surged 10-fold since 2011. But two U.S. solar manufacturers say the flood of imports has led one to bankruptcy and forced the other to lay off three-quarters of its workforce. The International Trade Commission is set to decide Friday whether the imports, primarily from Asia, are causing “serious injury” to the companies. If so, the commission will recommend this fall whether the Trump administration should impose tariffs that could double the price of solar panels from abroad. President Donald Trump has not cozied up to the solar industry, as he has for coal and other fossil fuels, but he is considered sympathetic to imposing tariffs on solar imports as part of his “America first” philosophy. A White House spokeswoman declined to comment Thursday. Both sides of the dispute were making their case ahead of Friday’s meeting. “Simply put, the U.S. industry cannot survive under current market conditions,” a lawyer for Georgia-based Suniva Inc. wrote in a petition filed with the commission. Suniva brought the case with Oregon-based SolarWorld Americas. Opposition to tariffs Governors of four solar-friendly states — Nevada, Colorado, Massachusetts and North Carolina — oppose the tariff, warning it could jeopardize the industry. They cited a study showing that a global tariff could cause solar installations to drop by more than 50 percent in two years, a crushing blow as states push for renewable …

NASA’s Asteroid Chaser Swings by Earth on Way to Space Rock

NASA’s asteroid-chasing spacecraft is swinging by Earth on its way to a space rock. Launched a year ago, Osiris-Rex will pass within about 11,000 miles (17,700 kilometers) of the home planet Friday afternoon. It will use Earth’s gravity as a slingshot to put it on a path toward the asteroid Bennu. If all goes well, Osiris-Rex should reach the small, roundish asteroid next year and, in 2020, collect some of its gravel for return to Earth. Friday’s close approach will occur over Antarctica. It will be a quick hello: The spacecraft will speed by at about 19,000 mph (31,000 kph). NASA has taken precautions to ensure Osiris-Rex does not slam into any satellites. Ground telescopes, meanwhile, have been trying to observe the spacecraft while it’s in the neighborhood. …

У Раді представили проект держбюджету на 2018 рік

09/22/2017 sellbiz

У Верховній Раді представили проект закону про Державний бюджет України на 2018 рік. У засіданні взяли участь члени Кабміну на чолі з прем’єр-міністром Володимиром Гройсманом. «Цього року ми зробили ще один важливий крок на шляху до прозорого, передбачуваного та ефективного бюджетного процесу. Вперше за всю історію бюджетування ми розпочали реальне запровадження середньострокового бюджетного планування», – сказав міністр фінансів Олександр Данилюк. Міністр заявив, що «цей бюджет є реалістичним, збалансованим, прозорим, розрахованим на перспективу і таким, який містить чіткі пріоритети та дозволяє ефективно використовувати бюджетні кошти». Кабінет міністрів вніс до парламенту проект закону про держбюджет 15 вересня, в останній день, коли згідно з Бюджетним кодексом, мав це зробити. Документ, зокрема, передбачає доходи бюджету на наступний рік у сумі понад 877 мільярдів гривень, видатки – більш ніж 948 мільярдів гривень. Показник дефіциту закладений у межах 77,9 мільярда гривень, а річне зростання реального ВВП очікується на рівні 3%. Крім того, відповідно до проекту держбюджету, з 1 січня 2018 року планується збільшення мінімальної заробітної плати в Україні на 523 гривень – до 3 723 гривень. Курс гривні на кінець наступного року уряд прогнозує на рівні 30,1 гривні за долар США. Минулого року держбюджет-2017 депутати ухвалили вночі 21 грудня 2016 року. …

California Condor, a Rare Environmental Success Story

At their low point in the late 1980s, there were 22 California condors left in the world. But in 1992, after dedicated efforts to save them, the condors began rebounding. Today, these magnificent raptors are coming back. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports. …

For Africa’s Poorest, Cutting-edge HIV Drugs for $75 a Year

In a landmark deal, HIV patients in Africa will now have access to the latest drugs for $75 a year. The arrangement is a major victory for the poorest nations fighting AIDS, a health epidemic with unrestrained global reach. …

Mercedes-Benz to Invest $1 Billion in US Electric Car Plant

German carmaker Mercedes-Benz has announced plans to invest $1 billion to start making electric vehicles at its manufacturing plant in the southern U.S. state of Alabama. The luxury automaker said it will manufacture electric SUVs under Mercedes’ EQ subbrand at the plant in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in just more than three years. The expansion is expected to create 600 jobs. Daimler-Benz, which has more than 30 plants worldwide, said the Tuscaloosa plant will become the first in the U.S. to produce electric vehicles, and only the sixth in the world to do so. Construction is to begin next year on the 92,900-square-meter facility. Daimler also said it will build a new global logistics center and aftersales North American hub in Bibb County, Alabama, about 8 kilometers from the Tuscaloosa plant. …

As Africa Warms, Mosquito Carrying Zika, Dengue More Likely to Thrive

From deadly droughts and destroyed crops to shrinking water sources, communities across sub-Saharan Africa are struggling to withstand the onslaught of global record-breaking temperatures. But the dangers do not end there. Rising heat poses another threat, one that is far less known and studied but could spark disease epidemics across the continent, scientists say. Mosquitoes are the menace, and the risk goes beyond malaria. The Aedes aegypti mosquito, which spreads debilitating and potentially deadly viruses, from Zika and dengue to chikungunya, thrives in warmer climates than its malaria-carrying cousin, known as Anopheles, say researchers at Stanford University. In sub-Saharan Africa, this means malaria rates could rise in cooler areas as they heat up, but fall in hotter places that now battle the disease. In those areas, malaria, one of the continent’s biggest killers, may be rivaled by other vector-borne diseases as major health crises. “As temperatures go past 25 degrees Celsius (77 degrees Fahrenheit), you move away from the peak transmission window for malaria, and towards that of diseases such as dengue,” said Erin Mordecai, an assistant professor at Stanford. “We have this intriguing prospect of the threat of malaria declining in Africa, while Zika, dengue and chikungunya become more of a danger,” she said. Besides a warming planet, scientists fear growing urbanization across Africa could also fuel the transmission of diseases carried by the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which flourishes in cities and slums, the opposite of the country-loving Anopheles. Half of Africans are expected to live in cities by …

Deep Sleep: Even Jellyfish Need Their Slumber

Even a jellyfish — one of Earth’s first and most ancient animals — needs its sleep. Scientists said on Thursday they have demonstrated that a primitive type of jellyfish called Cassiopea goes to sleep nightly. While sleep has been confirmed in other invertebrates such as worms and fruit flies, the jellyfish is the most evolutionarily ancient animal that has been shown to slumber. “These results suggest that even those animals that lack a centralized nervous system require sleep, which means that sleep is one of the most ancient behavioral states, deeply rooted within the animal lineage,” California Institute of Technology biologist Ravi Nath said. Jellyfish have thrived in the seas for at least 600 million years, longer than nearly any other animal. By comparison, dinosaurs appeared roughly 230 million years ago and humans appeared roughly 300,000 years ago. The findings involving such a primordial creature raise fresh questions about sleep’s origin and purpose. “We do not know if sleep is limited to just animals,” said Nath, who helped lead the study published in the journal Current Biology. “Sleep is a genetically encoded behavioral state. Genes and neural circuits interact to generate the sleep state,” Nath added. “I think it would be hard to demonstrate a sleep state in an organism that is not an animal, but I think the sleep state that we know may have been co-opted from periods of quiescence in organisms as diverse as plants, bacteria and fungi.” Jellyfish are among the first animals to have developed …

Human Frontiers: How Much Heat Can the Body and Mind Take?

What Christian Clot remembers most vividly from his days in Iran’s boiling Dasht-e Lut desert was having to stay completely still for 12 hours a day — or die. “It was so hot I had to lie down behind some rocks between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. Staying in a tent was too dangerous as it would have instantly overheated,” he recalled. Clot, a French-Swiss explorer, is testing the limits of human endurance, including to worsening temperature extremes. In the Iranian desert and on three other 30-day expeditions alone in the world’s harshest climates, he has explored what impacts extreme weather might have on people, both physically and mentally. “Most studies on the human body have been done in labs rather than in real settings,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “I wanted to experience what you can’t find in scientific journals.” If planet-warming emissions continue to rise at their current pace, three in four people in the world will face deadly heat by the turn of the century, according to a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change in June. Emily Y.Y. Chan, a professor of public health at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, expects heatwaves to become not just more frequent but also longer by the end of the century. That could lead to a range of worsening health problems — including some unexpected ones, such as more malnutrition. Ability to keep cool For his experiment with heat, Clot chose Iran’s Dasht-e Lut desert, where the …

Next Round of NAFTA Talks Take on Thornier Issues

The United States will present new proposals and begin to weigh into thornier issues of the North American Free Trade Agreement in the third round of negotiations starting in Ottawa Saturday, U.S. chief negotiator John Melle said Thursday. The stepped-up negotiations come with four more rounds of talks left after Ottawa and a self-imposed year-end deadline to finish the talks before Mexico launches campaigning for its July presidential election. “With progress made in several issue areas in the first two NAFTA negotiation rounds, USTR (United States Trade Representative) looks to move forward with additional new text proposals in round three of the negotiations,” Melle said in comments emailed to Reuters. “At this point in the negotiations, more challenging issues will start taking center stage,” he added, without elaborating. Third round The first two rounds of talks between the United States, Canada and Mexico focused on consolidating language on chapters covering small- and medium-sized enterprises, competitiveness, digital trade, services and the environment. Now, negotiators will begin to weigh into more contentious issues such as rules of origin — how much of a product’s components must originate from within North America — labor standards aimed at increasing Mexican wages and mechanisms for resolving trade and investment disputes. In its negotiating strategy for revising NAFTA ahead of the start of the talks in July, the United States said it would emphasize reducing the U.S. trade deficit as a priority. It also said it wanted to eliminate an arbitration system for resolving trade disputes, …

Rohingya Crisis Dents Myanmar Hopes of Western Investment Boom

When officials from Myanmar’s commercial capital Yangon toured six European countries in June, they were hoping to drum up investment in transport, energy and education. Instead, they were bombarded with questions about the country’s treatment of the Rohingya Muslim minority, who have long complained of persecution by the Buddhist majority in the oil-rich, ethnically divided, western state of Rakhine. “In each of every country, that issue was always brought up,” Hlaing Maw Oo, secretary of Yangon City Development Committee, told Reuters after the 16-day trip. The situation in Rakhine has worsened dramatically since then, with more than 400,000 Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh to escape a military counterinsurgency offensive the United Nations has described as “ethnic cleansing.” Western trade and investment in Myanmar is small, but there were hopes that a series of reforms this year would pry open an economy stunted by international sanctions and decades of mismanagement under military rule. With most sanctions now lifted, an expected flood of Western money was seen as a key dividend from the transition to civilian rule under Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. Regional diplomats saw it balancing China’s growing influence over its neighbor. But Aung San Suu Kyi has been beset by international criticism for saying little about human rights abuses against the Rohingya, and lawyers, consultants and lobbyists say the European and U.S. companies that had been circling are now wary of the reputational risks of investing in the country. Louis Yeung, managing principal of Yangon-based investment firm Faircap Partners, …

China’s Small Factories Fear ‘Rail Armageddon’ with Orders to Ditch Trucks

Thousands of small factories in China, making everything from steel to chemicals, are scrambling for access to the country’s clogged rail network as Beijing curbs the use of diesel trucks in an effort to tackle air pollution. The Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) last month gave tens of thousands of companies in 28 cities until Nov. 1 to halve their use of diesel trucks over the winter months, when pollution is at its worst. The ministry, in a policy document, also set more stringent, permanent targets for more than 20 power and steel companies, including Zhengzhou Xinli Power, Xingtai Iron & Steel and Hebei Risun Coke, directing them to send at least half their shipments by rail. Trucking is a cheaper and preferred mode of transport for heavy industry in China, especially for inland companies moving goods over relatively short distances and those far from railways. Some provinces have taken even tougher stances on trucks. In Hebei and central Henan, some steel producers must deliver as much as 90 percent of their products via rail on a permanent basis, up from around 50 to 60 percent currently. The moves are the latest in Beijing’s years-long battle to tackle the pollution that blankets the north as houses turn up the heat between November and March, drawing on the nation’s power plants, which are mainly fueled with coal. China is also forcing steel mills and other factories to shut up to 50 percent of capacity across the north to try and prevent …

Trafficking, Debt Bondage Rampant in Thai Fishing Industry, Study Finds

More than a third of migrant fishermen in Thailand clearly were victims of trafficking over the past five years, and even more workers in the industry were possibly trafficked as well, according to a report published Thursday. Routinely underpaid and physically abused, three-quarters of migrants working on Thai fishing vessels have been in debt bondage, working to pay off an obligation, said the study by the anti-trafficking group International Justice Mission (IJM). Thailand’s multibillion-dollar seafood sector came under fire in recent years after investigations showed widespread slavery, trafficking and violence on fishing boats and in onshore food-processing factories. The politically unstable country, which is under military rule, has vowed to crack down on trafficking and recently introduced reforms to its fisheries law. The IJM study of 260 fishermen from Myanmar and Cambodia found 38 percent were clearly trafficked and another 49 percent possibly trafficked. Only 13 percent reported fair labor conditions at sea and no exploitative recruitment, it said. Three-quarters reported working at least 16 hours a day, and only 11 percent said they were paid more than 9,000 Baht ($272 U.S.) per month, the legal monthly minimum wage in Thailand. One fisherman was quoted in the report as saying he was held in debt bondage, owing 20,000 Baht ($604) to his brother, who worked as a supervisor overseeing fishermen. In debt to brother “I fear for my life as he has killed in front of me before,” he was quoted as saying. “I don’t dare to run. He would …

У ФДМ розраховують на приватизацію «Одеського припортового» у 2018-му

09/21/2017 sellbiz

У Фонді державного майна розраховують провести приватизацію Одеського припортового заводу навесні 2018 року. Про це заявив виконувач обов’язків голови ФДМ Віталій Трубаров. «Ми провели конкурс з відбору оцінювачів, і вони вже працюють, щоб у встановлені терміни закінчити оцінку ОПЗ. Зважаючи на те, наскільки важливим є підприємство для регіону та країни, Фонд не може дозволити собі зволікати з проведенням його прозорої та ефективної приватизації, завдяки якій були б вирішені всі проблемні питання його роботи і він вийшов на нормальну ефективну діяльність», – зазначив Трубанов, якого цитує прес-служба ФДМ. Публічне акціонерне товариство «Одеський припортовий завод» – це гігантський український виробничий комплекс, що працює з 1978 року. Він розташований за 30 кілометрів від Одеси і займає площу 250 гектарів. Основна продукція – карбамід та аміак – мінеральні добрива, які використовують аграрії. Понад 20 років держава намагається його продати, проте приватизація щоразу зривається. …

Standard & Poor’s Cuts China Credit Rating, Citing Debt

The Standard & Poor’s rating agency cut China’s credit rating Thursday due to its rising debts, highlighting challenges faced by Communist leaders as they cope with slowing economic growth. The downgrade added to mounting warnings about the dangers of increasing Chinese debt, which has fueled fears of a banking crisis or a drag on economic growth. Moody’s Investors Service cut its own rating for China in May. S&P lowered its rating on China’s sovereign debt by one notch from AA- to A+, still among its highest ratings. The agency had given a warning sign of a possible downgrade in March 2016 when it changed China’s outlook to negative. “A prolonged period of strong credit growth has increased China’s economic and financial risks,” S&P said in a statement. “Although this credit growth had contributed to strong real GDP growth and higher asset prices, we believe it has also diminished financial stability to some extent.” The ratings cut, announced after Chinese financial markets closed for the day, could raise Beijing’s borrowing costs slightly, but the more significant impact is on investor sentiment. Phone calls to the Chinese Finance Ministry were not answered. After the Moody’s downgrade in May, the ministry said the agency had used improper methods and misunderstood China’s economic difficulties and financial strength. Communist leaders have cited reducing financial risk as a priority this year. They have launched initiatives to reduce debts owed by state companies, including by allowing banks to accept stock as repayment …

Центробанк Росії розпочав санацію 12-го за обсягом активів банку країни

09/21/2017 sellbiz

Центральний банк Росії 21 вересня оголосив про санацію «Бінбанку», 12-ї за обсягом активів фінансової установи країни. У прес-релізі йдеться, що банк продовжить працювати в звичайному режимі. Раніше цього тижня в Банку Росії заявили, що «Бінбанк» отримає кошти, «необхідні для підтримки ліквідності». Суму в керівництві регулятора не назвали, але уточнили, що про виділення цих коштів попросив сам банк. «Бінбанк» входить в число 30 найбільших банків Росії, обіймаючи сьоме місце за розмірами вкладів фізичних осіб. Повідомлення про його фінансові проблеми почастішали в останні тижні. …

Global Leaders See Globalization as Challenged, Not Failing

On the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Wednesday, business and political leaders around the world met to urge cooperation on such issues as trade, investment and international technology to help boost globalization. Without integration between nations, such issues as the environment, economic development and the well-being of societies suffer. VOA’s Daniel Schearf reports from New York. …

US Central Bank Keeps Rates Unchanged but Who Will Lead the Fed in 2018?