Month: August 2018

The Democratic Republic of the Congo has started using the experimental mAb114 Ebola treatment to counter the latest flare-up of the virus, health officials said Tuesday, the first time it has been deployed against an active outbreak. Forty-two people are believed to have died from the hemorrhagic fever in Congo’s 10th Ebola outbreak since the disease was discovered in the 1970s. In all, there have been 66 cases to date, including 39 confirmed and 27 probable, the health ministry said Tuesday evening, an increase of nine confirmed cases since Monday. The outbreak has spread from its epicenter in North Kivu province to neighboring Ituri province after an infected person returned home, Congo’s health ministry said, complicating containment in a region beset by militia violence. Testing ground Ebola, which causes fever, vomiting and diarrhea, finds a natural home in Congo’s vast equatorial forests. Continuing flare-ups have made the central African country a testing ground for new treatments against a virus that between 2013 and 2016 killed more than 11,300 people in a West African epidemic. In an outbreak in western Congo that began in April and was declared over in July, an experimental vaccine manufactured by Merck & Co. Inc. was given to 3,300 people and was considered central in containing the virus when it reached a city. The mAb114 treatment was developed in the United States by the National Institutes of Health using the antibodies of the survivor of an Ebola outbreak in the western Congolese city of Kikwit in 1995. World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news conference in Geneva that medics were already treating five patients with mAb114 and that …

Royal Bank of Scotland Pays $4.9B for Crisis-era Misconduct

Royal Bank of Scotland will pay $4.9 billion to settle U.S. claims that it misled investors on residential mortgage-backed securities between 2005 and 2008, the U.S. Justice Department said Tuesday. The Justice Department said the penalty was the largest ever imposed on a bank for misconduct leading up to the financial crisis. The bank announced in May that it had reached the settlement in principle. The government alleges RBS misled investors in underwriting and issuing residential mortgage-backed securities, understating the risks behind many of the loans and providing inaccurate data. “Despite assurances by RBS to its investors, RBS’s deals were backed by mortgage loans with a high risk of default,” Andrew E. Lelling, U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, said in a statement. The Justice Department said that RBS disputes the allegations and does not admit wrongdoing, although the bank said in a statement it was happy to move on. “There is no place for the sort of unacceptable behavior alleged by the DoJ at the bank we are building today,” RBS Chief Executive Ross McEwan said. Dividend In conjunction with the settlement, the bank also said it would be paying out an interim ordinary dividend of 2 pence per share on October 12 to shareholders. The dividend is the bank’s first since its near-collapse and 45.5 billion-pound ($58 billion) state bailout in 2008. The DOJ settlement and the resumption of dividends were two of the last big milestones in RBS’s decade-long journey back to normality. The looming Justice …

Ruble Slump Hits Russians’ Wallets, Not Their Support for Putin

Alexei Nikolayev, one of more than 56 million Russians who re-elected President Vladimir Putin in March, is already counting the likely cost of a weaker ruble: less spending power abroad, higher prices at home and another round of belt tightening. But Nikolayev, 56, a graphic designer who enjoys foreign travel and imported wine, blames the West, not Putin, for the pain and has no regrets about voting for a politician he sees as the right man to guide Russia through trubled times. “It’s painful and it’s unpleasant, but it won’t change my politics,” Nikolayev said of the ruble shedding 10 percent of its value against the dollar since the end of July, driven down largely by new U.S. sanctions on Russia. “In fact, as strange as it may sound, it will only strengthen my convictions. They [the West] are trying to break Russia.” Nikolayev’s view that Putin is not to blame is held widely among Russians, according to Stepan Goncharov, a sociologist at the Levada Center pollster. “People don’t really understand the dynamics behind it and the president, traditionally, is safe from criticism,” Goncharov told Reuters. The narrative in Russia that the ruble’s slide is the result of a Western plot has direct echoes with Russian ally Turkey, whose lira currency slid to a record low Monday. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that his country is the target of an economic war and that Turkey will boycott some U.S. imports in retaliation. In Russia, the falling ruble causes pain for some. The price of imported goods is likely to rise. Foreign vacations have also become more expensive. Irina Turina, a …

Sprint Partners with LG to Launch 5G Smartphone in 2019

Sprint said Tuesday it has partnered with phone manufacturer LG Electronics to launch a 5G smartphone in the first half of next year, marking the first 5G device deal for the No. 4 U.S. wireless carrier. Sprint is working to persuade antitrust regulators to approve its merger with larger rival T-Mobile US Inc in a $26 billion deal, which the companies say will help them more quickly build the next-generation wireless network. That network is expected to eventually pave the way for new technologies like autonomous cars. The LG phone will be customized to Sprint’s planned 5G network, and will be compatible with T-Mobile only on that carrier’s existing 4G network, John Tudhope, Sprint director of product development, said in an interview. The price of the phone and exact launch date will be announced later, Sprint said in a news release. Last month, Sprint introduced new unlimited wireless plans bundled with video streaming platform Hulu and music streaming service Tidal, in an effort to attract more customers with media content. Tudhope said Sprint will continue to use content as a way to “bring to life the value of 5G,” as one of the benefits of the 5G network will be faster download times of video content on smartphones. The company had previously announced it would initially launch its 5G network in nine cities in 2019, including New York City and Los Angeles. Sprint is the fourth-largest cellphone service provider in terms of number of customers, after Verizon Communications, AT&T and …

Indian Rupee Falls to All-time Low Against Dollar

The Indian rupee fell to an all-time low Tuesday against the U.S. dollar amid worries that Turkey’s growing financial crisis could spread to other developing-world economies. Indian Economic Affairs Secretary Subhash Chander Garg told reporters that there was “nothing at this stage to worry” about after the rupee reached 70.1 to the dollar earlier in the day. He said the dip resulted from “external factors.” The rupee ended the day at 69.93 per dollar, down 110 paise or 1.6 percent. It was the currency’s biggest one-day drop in five years. The rupee has lost about 8 percent of its value this year. Garg said the country had sufficient foreign exchange reserves to weather the downturn. Turkey’s central bank has been unable to stop a sharp plunge in the lira, pushing the value of the dollar higher and driving down emerging-market currencies from South Africa to Mexico. Rajnish Kumar, chairman of the State Bank of India, said he believed the rupee would stabilize at around 69-70 to the dollar, the Press Trust of India news agency reported. Turkey’s economy has been troubled for years, but the latest crisis was set off by worries over President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s economic policies and a trade dispute with the United States. Turkey’s government has so far refused to raise interest rates to prop up the currency, fearing a political backlash if it causes the economy to slow. The falling rupee, which will make Indian exports cheaper on overseas markets, was welcomed by one of …

Sudanese Hit by Bread Shortages as Currency Crunch Escalates

Bread shortages have hit Sudan, with wheat traders blaming a foreign currency crisis for shortages of the staple that have left people lining up for hours outside bakeries. Sudan’s economy has been struggling since the south seceded in 2011, taking with it three-quarters of its oil output and depriving it of a crucial source of foreign currency. The crisis has deepened over the past year as a black market for U.S. dollars has effectively replaced the formal banking system after the Sudanese pound was devalued, making it more difficult to import essential supplies such as wheat. A doubling of the price of bread in January triggered demonstrations after the government eliminated subsidies, although so far there was no sign of protests this time. At Banet neighborhood in the town of Omdurman, in Khartoum, dozens of people stood in a long line outside the Modern Bakery. “This is unbearable,” said 53-year-old Abdullah Mahmoud, a day laborer, who said he had been lining up for two hours for bread. “I had been here since the morning and I still don’t have any bread.” Fatima Yassin, 36, in a queue for women, said: “Everything is expensive and bread is not available. We have a difficult life and the government doesn’t care about us.” Similar queues were seen in other cities near the capital. Sudan imported 2 million tons of wheat in 2017, the government said in December, compared with 445,000 tons produced locally. One Khartoum bakery owner, Ahmed Saleh, said he had had …

Омелян оприлюднив рейтинг найпунктуальніших авіаперевізників липня

Міністр інфраструктури Володимир Омелян оприлюднив рейтинг найбільш пунктуальних авіакомпаній липня. Про це він написав на своїй Facebook-сторінці. Всього, за даними міністра, з аеропортів України українськими перевізниками за місяць було здійснено понад 5,2 тисячі рейсів, а іноземними – 2,3 тисячі. Раніше на сайті міністерства оприлюднювали аналогічний рейтинг перевізників за червень. Від кінця червня сотні українських туристів були заблоковані в аеропортах кількох країн. По кілька годин, а то й діб, люди чекали, зокрема в аеропортах Тунісу, Албанії, Грузії, а також в аеропорту «Київ». Авіакомпанія Bravo Airways пояснила затримки рейсів на кілька діб невиплатою коштів туроператором «Оазис тревел Україна». Останній свою провину не визнає. …

На сайті Конгресу США опублікували законопроект про нові санкції щодо Росії

У законопроекті йдеться, що США не визнають анексії Росією Криму – за зразком Декларації 1940 року про невизнання анексії Радянським Союзом країн Балтії …

Ebola Outbreak in Eastern DR Congo Potentially More Dangerous Than West African Epidemic

World Health Organization chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says the raging conflict in North Kivu makes the Ebola outbreak in eastern DR Congo more dangerous than the historic 2014-2015 epidemic in West Africa. More than 11,000 people died from the Ebola virus by the time it was contained in 2016. WHO Director-General Tedros returned Sunday from a visit to Beni and Mangina, the epicenters of the Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. He says he was worried before he went on this mission, but he is more worried now after having observed first-hand the dangers and difficulties posed by the active conflict in North Kivu. He says more than 100 armed groups operate in the region. He says there have been 120 violent incidents this year involving killings, kidnappings, rapes and other atrocities. “That environment is really conducive for Ebola actually to transmit freely because in that area there are places called Red Zones, inaccessible areas because there are many armed groups that operate in that region … And, these Red Zones could be hiding places for Ebola,” said Tedros. Tedros is calling on the warring parties for a cessation of hostilities, warning this extremely contagious virus is dangerous for everyone. Despite the many concerns, he says WHO and partners are moving ahead aggressively with the operation to contain this deadly virus. He says more than 216 health workers and 20 people from the community have been vaccinated against Ebola. He says more vaccinators have been deployed from …

Євросоюз надасть Україні 15,5 мільйонів євро на реформу держуправління

Євросоюз погодив переказ до державного бюджету України 15,5 мільйонів євро. Призначення грошей – фінансування реформи державного управління. Про це повідомляє Представництво ЄС в Україні. Загальна сума зобов’язань ЄС щодо підтримки цієї реформи – 90 мільйонів євро. Ще 14 мільйонів мають піти на технічну допомогу. Попередній транш Євросоюз здійснив у травні 2017 року, він становив 10 мільйонів. Згідно з заявою Представництва, таке рішення базується на результатах, яких Україна вже досягла в реформуванні держуправління. Читайте також: «ЄС продовжив «кримські санкції», Київ закликає переходити «від невизнання до деокупації» «Передусім, мова йде про створення дієвого координаційного механізму цієї реформи на політичному та вищому адміністративному рівнях, прозорий та конкурсний відбір на посади фахівців із питань реформ, старт пілотної фази реорганізації 10-и міністерств та започатковану роботу над удосконаленням процедур формування державної політики та розробкою законопроекту про загальну адміністративну процедуру», – наводить прес-служба слова тимчасово повірений у справах ЄС в Україні Томаса Фрелесена. Водночас у Представництві наголошують, що перед українським урядом досі стоїть низка задач із реформування державного управління. Зокрема йдеться про оновлення регламенту Кабміну, впровадження плану оптимізації чисельності працівників та структури центральних органів виконавчої влади, вдосконалення системи оплати праці в державних органах. …

Ebola Death Toll in DRC at 41 as New Drug in Use

Forty-one people have died in the latest outbreak of Ebola in DRC, health authorities said on Tuesday, adding that doctors were using a novel drug to treat patients. Out of 57 recorded cases as of Monday, 41 were fatal, the Congolese Health Ministry and UN’s World Health Organization (WHO) said. Fourteen of the deaths had been confirmed by lab tests, the ministry said. Last Friday, the ministry put the tally at 37 deaths, either confirmed or suspected. The outbreak is the country’s 10th since 1976, when the disease was first identified in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) near the Ebola River, a tributary of the Congo. Its epicenter is Mangina in the region of Beni, in the strife-torn eastern province of North Kivu. For the first time since the outbreak was announced on August 1, one fatality was recorded outside of North Kivu — in the neighboring province of Ituri, the ministry’s directorate for disease control said. It added that doctors in Beni had started to use a novel treatment called mAb114 to treat patients with Ebola. The treatment is “the first therapeutic drug against the virus to be used in an active Ebola epidemic in the DRC,” it said. Developed in the United States, the prototype drug is a so-called single monoclonal antibody — a protein that binds on to a specific target of the virus and triggers the body’s immune system to destroy the invader. The antibody was isolated from a survivor of an Ebola outbreak in the western …

ДБР відібрало 180 людей для роботи у центральному апараті

Державне бюро розслідувань обрало 180 осіб серед більш ніж 1,5 тисяч кандидатів для роботи у центральному апараті: 126 слідчих та 54 державних службовців. «До першого управління — з розслідування злочинів у сфері службової діяльності та корупції — оголошено конкурс на 57 посад, обрано – 48 осіб. До другого – з розслідування злочинів, вчинених працівниками правоохоронних органів та у сфері правосуддя: оголошено – конкурс на 57 посад, обрано – 47 осіб. До третього – управління з розслідування військових злочинів за результатами конкурсу – заповнено 31 з 38 вакансій», – зазначають у ДБР. Водночас, як мовиться на сайті установи, ще 39 посад залишаються вакантними, для них планується оголосити повторний конкурс. Загалом, за даними ДБР, у центральному та семи територіальних управліннях відомства передбачено 383 посади слідчих: 152 посади в центральному апараті та 231 посада – у територіальних органах. Згідно зі встановленими законом квотами, 48,6% слідчих ДБР обираються з тих, хто працює на посадах слідчих правоохоронних органах, 51,4% – з тих, хто не працює на посаді слідчого. 18 липня зовнішня комісія оголосила переможців конкурсу на 27 керівних посад у ДБР. Читайте також: Переможці конкурсу на керівні посади в ДБР: скільки з них доброчесних Державне бюро розслідувань – новий правоохоронний орган, створений для розслідування злочинів (у тому числі корупційних, не підслідних НАБУ) високопосадовців, суддів, співробітників Національного антикорупційного бюро і Спеціалізованої антикорупційної прокуратури, екс-президентів та членів уряду. …

Survey: Vienna Tops Melbourne as World’s Most Liveable City

Vienna has dislodged Melbourne for the first time at the top of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Liveability Index, strengthening the Austrian capital’s claim to being the world’s most pleasant city to live in. The two metropolises have been neck and neck in the annual survey of 140 urban centers for years, with Melbourne clinching the title for the past seven editions. This year, a downgraded threat of militant attacks in western Europe as well as the city’s low crime rate helped nudge Vienna into first place. Vienna regularly tops a larger ranking of cities by quality of life compiled by consulting firm Mercer. It is the first time it has topped the EIU survey, which began in its current form in 2004. At the other end of the table, Damascus retained last place, followed by the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, and Lagos in Nigeria. The survey does not include several of the world’s most dangerous capitals, such as Baghdad and Kabul. “While in the past couple of years cities in Europe were affected by the spreading perceived threat of terrorism in the region, which caused heightened security measures, the past year has seen a return to normalcy,” the EIU said in a statement about the report published on Tuesday. “A long-running contender to the title, Vienna has succeeded in displacing Melbourne from the top spot due to increases in the Austrian capital’s stability category ratings,” it said, referring to one of the index’s five headline components. Vienna and Melbourne scored …

Maduro: Venezuela Gasoline Prices Should Rise to International Levels

Venezuela’s heavily subsidized domestic gasoline prices should rise to international levels to avoid billions of dollars in annual losses due to fuel smuggling, President Nicolas Maduro said in a televised address on Monday. “Gasoline must be sold at an international price to stop smuggling to Colombia and the Caribbean,” Maduro said in a televised address. Venezuela, like most oil-producing countries, has for decades subsidized fuel as a benefit to consumers. But its fuel prices have remained nearly flat for years despite hyperinflation that the International Monetary Fund has projected would reach 1,000,000 percent this year. That means that for the price of a cup of coffee, a driver can now fill the tank of a small SUV nearly 9,000 times. Recently, the average price of a coffee with milk was 2.2 million bolivars, or about 50 cents, local media has reported. Smugglers do brisk business reselling fuel in neighboring countries. Maduro said the government would still provide “direct subsidies” to citizens holding the “fatherland card,” a state-issued identification card that the government uses to provide bonuses and track use of social services. He said the subsidy was only available to those who registered their cars in a vehicle census being conducted by the state. …

Mexico’s Lopez Obrador Pledges More Than $11B for Refineries

Mexican President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Monday his administration will invest more than $11 billion to boost refining capacity in order to curb growing fuel imports. Lopez Obrador, who will take office on Dec. 1, told reporters his government plans to invest $2.6 billion to modernize existing domestic refineries owned and operated by national oil company Pemex, and spend another $8.4 billion to build a new one within three years. The $8.4-billion figure is higher than a $6 billion estimate provided by a key energy advisor during the campaign. Lopez Obrador, set to become Mexico’s first leftist president in decades, did not detail how the projects would be financed or whether private capital would be involved, but he has often said he will not raise taxes or grow government debt. Mexico is among Latin America’s largest crude exporters, but is also the biggest importer of U.S. refined products. The country’s next president has pledged to lift refining capacity, which he says has declined due to corruption and neglect. Pemex, formally known as Petroleos Mexicanos, has six domestic refineries with a total processing capacity of some 1.6 million barrels per day (bpd), but the facilities are only operating at about 40 percent of capacity so far this year. Meanwhile, gasoline and diesel imports have sky-rocketed in recent months amid planned and unplanned refinery stoppages. Pemex has posted losses in its refining division for years but Lopez Obrador aims to boost crude processing enough to halt imports within three years. …

Global Concerns Rise as Turkey’s Lira Dips Again

Turkey’s currency, the lira, continues to slide as the country’s central bank failed to halt the decline Monday. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has accused the United States of purposely trying to damage his country’s economy. More from VOA’s Bill Gallo. …

People Unburden Stress with Beasts of Burden

Animal-assisted therapy is a growing field that uses animals to help people recover from or better cope with health problems, such as heart disease, cancer and mental health disorders. While the most common therapy animal is dogs, the use of other creatures is on the rise. More from Faith Lapidus. …

Tesla’s Slow Disclosure Raises Governance, Social Media Concerns