Traditional handicrafts from Pakistan are exported to many countries around the world. One item that appears to be gaining in popularity are the country’s hand-made bamboo curtains. VOA’s Saman Khan has more in this report from Lahore, Pakistan, narrated by Sarah Zaman.
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Category Archives: News
Worldwide news. News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different media: word of mouth, printing, postal systems, broadcasting, electronic communication, or through the testimony of observers and witnesses to events. News is sometimes called “hard news” to differentiate it from soft media
NY’s Immigrant Taxi Drivers Despair as Taxi Industry Slumps
A financially distraught yellow cab driver from Romania recently hanged himself in his New York garage, marking the fourth suicide among city taxi drivers in as many months. In the tragedy’s aftermath, members of New York’s taxicab drivers union are renewing their calls for a cap on the number of app-based for-hire vehicles, such as Uber and Lyft, which they say are driving workers of a once-thriving industry into the ground. VOA’s Ramon Taylor reports.
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Kentucky Teachers Latest to Protest Public Worker Pay, Benefits
Hundreds of Kentucky teachers called in sick Friday to protest last-minute changes to their pension system, forcing nearly two dozen districts to close while angry educators rallied outside the governor’s office to demand he not sign the bill.
With thunderous chants of “shut it down” echoing throughout the Capitol Rotunda, Democratic Attorney General Andy Beshear used a megaphone to announce he would sue to block the bill’s implementation if Republican Gov. Matt Bevin signs it into law.
Bevin had not signed the bill as of Friday afternoon. Thursday night, he tweeted public employees owe lawmakers a “debt of gratitude” for passing the bill.
Growing educator unrest
The show of force comes amid growing unrest among public educators nationwide, led by thousands of West Virginia teachers who walked off the job for nine days earlier this year to secure a 5 percent pay raise. Teacher unrest spread to another deep red state in Oklahoma, where the GOP-led legislature approved money for teacher raises and more school funding. Teachers are mulling whether the current offer from lawmakers is enough to avert a work stoppage.
Kentucky Education Association President Stephanie Winkler said the union did not organize Friday’s school closures, saying “I can’t control what teachers do.”
“I support their right to call in sick if they are ill, and they are sick,” Winkler said during a news conference at KEA headquarters, prompting some teachers in the crowd to begin coughing.
Schools close for the day
Jefferson County officials in Louisville, one of the largest school districts in the country, said they couldn’t get enough substitutes to cover all their classes Friday. In Fayette County, officials said more than a third of school employees in the Lexington district were staying home.
North of Lexington, the Scott County school district called off classes. It said on Facebook that since the bill’s passage, dozens of teachers requested substitutes to fill in for them Friday.
“We can currently only fill 54 of the nearly 150 that we need,” the statement said. “That leaves too many classes not covered, which causes a situation that is unsafe and unproductive for students and staff.”
Winkler said a statewide work stoppage is still an option. The union is planning a rally Monday at the state capitol when much of the state is on spring break and lawmakers are scheduled to reconvene to possibly vote on a two-year operating budget.
“If this budget is not in the best interest of public education students and public service then we will react,” Winkler said.
Pension funding among the worst
Kentucky’s pension system is among the worst-funded in the country. The state is at least $41 billion short of the money it needs to pay retirement benefits over the next 30 years, placing a strain on state and local government finances.
On Thursday night, the state legislature passed a bill that preserves most benefits for current public workers. But it would require all new teachers to use a hybrid plan that does not guarantee them a set pension amount when they retire. Instead, they would live off the money accumulated in their accounts from contributions and investment returns, which would be guaranteed not to lose money.
“Why would anybody go into teaching now in the state of Kentucky,” asked Whitney Walker, a government teacher at Lafayette High School in Fayette County, the state’s second-largest district that was forced to close Friday. “We need good teachers, not just anybody who would walk in the door.”
Beshear, a potential candidate for governor in 2019, said the bill violates the state’s inviolable contract by freezing the accumulation of sick days to boost retirement benefits. Winkler said the KEA supports Beshear and will join him in any potential lawsuit. But Republicans who support the bill noted a proposal the KEA supported included similar language.
Another option would be to challenge the way lawmakers passed the bill. A state law requires the bill to have a financial analysis before passing. But acting House Speaker David Osborne said the Supreme Court has interpreted that law as a House rule, which lawmakers can suspend at any time.
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Border Agency Clarifies Building, Location of Border Wall
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump tweeted: “Great briefing this afternoon on the start of our Southern Border WALL!”
The tweet came amid much reporting about the president’s efforts to get the military to fund construction of the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border because the recent omnibus spending bill did not fully fund the wall.
The result has led to confusion about what is funded and what is actually being built.
Friday, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) provided some answers.
The omnibus spending bill, passed by Congress a week ago, provides funding for approximately 161 kilometers (100 miles) of “border wall system,” CBP Deputy Commissioner Ronald Vitiello told reporters.
Most of this will be used to replace or repair existing barriers along the border. Only a small portion will be used to build new wall.
“As [Department of Homeland Security] Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has pointed out, it does not fully fund our needs in the most critical locations,” Vitiello said.
“Our agents and officers have decades of experience and they know their operational needs. We provided Congress with a fact-based and needs-driven border security improvement plan that clearly sets out the requirements for securing the border.
“The truth is walls work and the data show it and agents know it,” he added.
Vitiello said CPB and its parent agency, DHS, want 10 times the length of wall for which Congress provided funding. The agencies would like to see barriers along 1,609 kilometers (1,000 miles) of the U.S. southern border. Right now, there are walls or fencing along 1,052 kilometers (650 miles).
VOA’s Immigration Unit contributed to this report.
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Poll: Few Blacks Believe US Has Achieved Goals of Civil Rights Movement
A new poll shows that only 1 in 10 African-Americans thinks the United States has achieved all the goals of the civil rights movement, nearly 50 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
The poll by the Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released Friday shows that a majority of African-Americans believe there has been little or no progress on a range of civil rights issues, including fair coverage by the media, political representation and equal economic opportunities.
The poll found that African-Americans were most pessimistic about the criminal justice system, with three-quarters saying there has been little or no progress on fair treatment by police.
It found only one area — voting rights — where majorities of African-Americans believe a lot of progress or some progress has been made for racial equality since the civil rights movement.
Thirty percent of Americans — 35 percent of whites and just 8 percent of blacks — said all or most of the goals of the civil rights movement have been achieved, according to the poll. Most of the remainder said partial progress has been achieved.
The poll shows that whites are more likely than blacks to think there has been progress in every area asked about in the poll.
Seventy-nine percent of African-Americans said blacks continue to face disadvantages to getting ahead in the United States, while only 44 percent of whites said the same.
The poll also broke down the respondents by political party and found that 54 percent of Republicans compared to just 14 percent of Democrats think most or all of the goals of the civil rights movement have been achieved.
King was shot and killed on April 4, 1968, while he was at a motel in Memphis, Tennessee. James Earl Ray, a segregationist, pleaded guilty of the killing and spent his life in prison before his death in 1998.
The AP-NORC poll contacted 1,337 adults for the survey on February 15-19.
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Could Enemies Target Undersea Cables That Link the World?
Russian ships are skulking around underwater communications cables, causing the U.S. and its allies to worry the Kremlin might be taking information warfare to new depths.
Is Moscow interested in cutting or tapping the cables? Does it want the West to worry it might? Is there a more innocent explanation? Unsurprisingly, Russia isn’t saying.
But whatever Moscow’s intentions, U.S. and Western officials are increasingly troubled by their rival’s interest in the 400 fiber-optic cables that carry most of world’s calls, emails and texts, as well as $10 trillion worth of daily financial transactions.
“We’ve seen activity in the Russian navy, and particularly undersea in their submarine activity, that we haven’t seen since the ’80s,” General Curtis Scaparrotti, commander of the U.S. European Command, told Congress this month.
Without undersea cables, a bank in Asian countries couldn’t send money to Saudi Arabia to pay for oil. U.S. military leaders would struggle to communicate with troops fighting extremists in Afghanistan and the Middle East. A student in Europe wouldn’t be able to Skype his parents in the United States.
Small passageways
All this information is transmitted along tiny glass fibers encased in undersea cables that, in some cases, are little bigger than a garden hose. All told, there are 620,000 miles of fiber-optic cable running under the sea, enough to loop around Earth nearly 25 times.
Most lines are owned by private telecommunications companies, including giants like Google and Microsoft. Their locations are easily identified on public maps, with swirling lines that look like spaghetti. While cutting one cable might have limited impact, severing several simultaneously or at choke points could cause a major outage.
The Russians “are doing their homework and, in the event of a crisis or conflict with them, they might do rotten things to us,” said Michael Kofman, a Russian military expert at nonprofit research group CNA Corp.
It’s not Moscow’s warships and submarines that are making NATO and U.S. officials uneasy. It’s Russia’s Main Directorate of Deep Sea Research, whose specialized surface ships, submarines, underwater drones and minisubs conduct reconnaissance, underwater salvage and other work.
One ship run by the directorate is the Yantar. It’s a modest, 354-foot oceanographic vessel that holds a crew of about 60. It most recently was off South America’s coast helping Argentina search for a lost submarine.
Parlamentskaya Gazeta, the Russian parliament’s publication, last October said the Yantar has equipment “designed for deep-sea tracking” and “connecting to top-secret communication cables.” The publication said that in September 2015, the Yantar was near Kings Bay, Georgia, home to a U.S. submarine base, “collecting information about the equipment on American submarines, including underwater sensors and the unified [U.S. military] information network.” Rossiya, a Russian state TV network, has said the Yantar not only can connect to top-secret cables but also can cut them and “jam underwater sensors with a special system.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
Preparing for sabotage
There is no hard evidence that the ship is engaged in nefarious activity, said Steffan Watkins, an information technology security consultant in Canada tracking the ship. But he wonders what the ship is doing when it’s stopped over critical cables or when its Automatic Identification System tracking transponder isn’t on.
Of the Yantar’s crew, he said: “I don’t think these are the actual guys who are doing any sabotage. I think they’re laying the groundwork for future operations.”
Members of Congress are wondering, too.
Representative Joe Courtney, a Connecticut Democrat on a House subcommittee on sea power, said of the Russians, “The mere fact that they are clearly tracking the cables and prowling around the cables shows that they are doing something.”
Democratic Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, an Armed Services Committee member, said Moscow’s goal appears to be to “disrupt the normal channels of communication and create an environment of misinformation and distrust.”
The Yantar’s movements have previously raised eyebrows.
On October 18, 2016, a Syrian telecom company ordered emergency maintenance to repair a cable in the Mediterranean that provides internet connectivity to several countries, including Syria, Libya and Lebanon. The Yantar arrived in the area the day before the four-day maintenance began. It left two days before the maintenance ended. It’s unknown what work it did while there.
Watkins described another episode on November 5, 2016, when a submarine cable linking Persian Gulf nations experienced outages in Iran. Hours later, the Yantar left Oman and headed to an area about 60 miles west of the Iranian port city of Bushehr, where the cable runs ashore. Connectivity was restored just hours before the Yantar arrived on November 9. The boat stayed stationary over the site for several more days.
Undersea cables have been targets before.
At the beginning of World War I, Britain cut a handful of German underwater communications cables and tapped the rerouted traffic for intelligence. In the Cold War, the U.S. Navy sent American divers deep into the Sea of Okhotsk off the Russian coast to install a device to record Soviet communications, hoping to learn more about the U.S.S.R.’s submarine-launched nuclear capability.
Eavesdropping by spies
More recently, British and American intelligence agencies have eavesdropped on fiber-optic cables, according to documents released by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor.
In 2007, Vietnamese authorities confiscated ships carrying miles of fiber-optic cable that thieves salvaged from the sea for profit. The heist disrupted service for several months. And in 2013, Egyptian officials arrested three scuba divers off Alexandria for attempting to cut a cable stretching from France to Singapore. Five years on, questions remain about the attack on a cable responsible for about a third of all internet traffic between Egypt and Europe.
Despite the relatively few publicly known incidents of sabotage, most outages are due to accidents.
Two hundred or so cable-related outages take place each year. Most occur when ship anchors snap cables or commercial fishing equipment snags the lines. Others break during tsunamis, earthquakes and other natural disasters.
But even accidental cuts can harm U.S. military operations.
In 2008 in Iraq, unmanned U.S. surveillance flights nearly screeched to a halt one day at Balad Air Base, not because of enemy mortar attacks or dusty winds. An anchor had snagged a cable hundreds of miles away from the base, situated in the “Sunni Triangle” northwest of Baghdad.
The severed cable had linked controllers based in the United States with unmanned aircraft flying intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions for coalition forces in the skies over Iraq, said retired Air Force Colonel Dave Lujan of Hampton, Virginia.
“Say you’re operating a remote-controlled car and all of a sudden you can’t control it,” said Lujan, who was deputy commander of the 332nd Expeditionary Operations Group at the base when the little-publicized outage lasted for two to three days. “That’s a big impact,” he said, describing how U.S. pilots had to fly the missions instead.
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Trump EPA Expected to Roll Back Auto Gas Mileage Standards
The Trump administration is expected to announce that it will roll back automobile gas mileage and pollution standards that were a pillar in the Obama administration’s plans to combat climate change.
It’s not clear whether the announcement will include a specific number, but current regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency require the fleet of new vehicles to get 36 miles per gallon in real-world driving by 2025. That’s about 10 mpg over the existing standard.
Environmental groups, who predict increased greenhouse gas emissions and more gasoline consumption if the standards are relaxed, say the announcement could come Tuesday at a Virginia car dealership. EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman said in an email Friday that the standards are still being reviewed.
Legal showdown
Any change is likely to set up a lengthy legal showdown with California, which currently has the power to set its own pollution and gas mileage standards and doesn’t want them to change. About a dozen other states follow California’s rules, and together they account for more than one-third of the vehicles sold in the US. Currently the federal and California standards are the same.
Automakers have lobbied to revisit the requirements, saying they’ll have trouble reaching them because people are buying bigger vehicles due to low gas prices. They say the standards will cost the industry billions of dollars and raise vehicle prices due to the cost of developing technology needed to raise mileage.
When the standards were first proposed, the government predicted that two-thirds of new vehicles sold would be cars, with the rest trucks and SUVs, said Gloria Bergquist, spokeswoman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. Now the reverse is true, she said.
Still, environmental groups say the standards save money at the pump, and the technology is available for the industry to comply.
Health risk
They also say burning more gasoline will put people’s health at risk.
“The American public overwhelmingly supports strong vehicle standards because they cut the cost of driving, reduce air pollution, and combat climate change,” said Luke Tonachel, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Clean Vehicles and Fuels Project.
The EPA and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are involved in setting the standards, which would cover the years 2022 through 2025.
Some conservative groups are pressing EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt to revoke a waiver that allows California to set its own rules. They say California shouldn’t be allowed to set policy for the rest of the nation. Pruitt has publicly questioned the veracity of evidence complied by climate scientists, including those in his own agency, that global warming is overwhelmingly caused by man-made carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels.
If the waiver is revoked, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra says the state will resist. “What we’re doing to protect California’s environment isn’t just good for our communities — it’s good for the country,” he said in a statement. “We’re not looking to pick a fight with the Trump administration, but when they threaten our values, we’re ready.”
Huge dilemma
Getting rid of the waiver or having two gas mileage and pollution requirements presents a huge dilemma for automakers: while they would like to avoid fines for failing to meet the standards, they also want the expense of building two versions of cars and trucks, one for the California-led states and another for the rest of the country.
Mark Reuss, a General Motors’ product development chief, said in a recent interview that he would rather have a single nationwide standard, even if it stays the same. He called two standards “just waste,” because they would require different vehicle equipment and costly additional engineering. “I want one good one,” he said. “I could focus all my engineers on one.”
Automakers agreed to the standards in 2012, but lobbied for and received a midterm review in 2018 to account for changes in market conditions. In the waning days of the Obama presidency, the EPA did the review and proclaimed that the standards have enough flexibility and the technology is available to meet them.
Changes would be years away
Janet McCabe, who was acting assistant EPA administrator under Obama when the review was done, said Friday it will take a couple years for the EPA to propose new rules, gather public comment and finalize any changes. Any rollback would likely bring legal challenges, forcing Pruitt’s EPA to defend the science behind the changes.
“This would all take a long time,” said McCabe, now a senior fellow at the Environmental Law and Policy Center.
In the meantime, automakers have to proceed with plans for new cars and trucks under the current gas mileage requirements because it takes years to develop vehicles.
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Facebook ‘Ugly Truth’ Memo Triggers New Firestorm Over Ethics
Was a leaked internal Facebook memo aimed at justifying the social network’s growth-at-any-cost strategy? Or simply a way to open debate on difficult questions over new technologies?
The extraordinarily blunt memo by a high-ranking executive — leaked this week and quickly repudiated by the author and by Facebook — warned that the social network’s goal of connecting the world might have negative consequences, but that these were outweighed by the positives.
“Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies,” the 2016 memo by top executive Andrew “Boz” Bosworth said. “Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools.”
While Bosworth and Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg said the memo was only a way to provoke debate, it created a new firestorm for the social network mired in controversy over the hijacking of personal data by a political consulting firm linked to Donald Trump.
David Carroll, a professor of media design at the New School Parsons, tweeted that the memo highlighted a “reckless hubristic attitude” by the world’s biggest social network.
“What is so striking is that an executive chose to have this conversation on a Facebook wall,” said Jennifer Grygiel, a Syracuse University professor who studies social networks. “He showed poor judgment and poor business communication skills. It speaks to Facebook’s culture.”
Grygiel said these kinds of issues require “thoughtful discussion” and should take place within a context of protecting users. “When these companies build new products and services, their job is to evaluate the risks, and not just know about them, but ensure public safety.”
Bosworth, considered part of chief executive Zuckerberg’s inner circle, wrote: “The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is ‘de facto’ good.”
On Thursday, he said he merely wanted to open a discussion and added that “I don’t agree with the post today and I didn’t agree with it even when I wrote it.”
Zuckerberg responded that he and many others at Facebook “strongly disagreed” with the points raised.
‘Offloading’ ethical questions
Jim Malazita, a professor of science and technology studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, said it was not surprising to see the memo in an industry whose work culture is highly compartmentalized.
Malazita said the memo frames the discussion with the assumption that technology and connecting people is always positive.
“By the assumptions built into that framework they are already shutting down a whole bunch of conversations,” he said.
Malazita added that most people who learn computer science are taught to make these technologies work as well as possible, while “offloading” the question of moral responsibility.
“It’s not that they don’t care, but even when they care about the social impact, there’s a limit to how much they practice that care.”
Joshua Benton, director of Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab, said it may be too easy to blame Facebook for misuse of the platform.
“I’m rarely in a position to defend Facebook,” he said, but the view that a technology is worth spreading even though some people will use it for terrible ends “is something you could have believed about the telegraph, the telephone, email, SMS, the iPhone, etc,” Benton tweeted.
Doing the right thing
Patrick Lin, director of the ethics and emerging sciences group at California Polytechnic State University, said he sees “no evidence that Facebook’s culture is unethical, though just one senior executive in the right place can poison the well.”
“I’d guess that most Facebook employees want to do the right thing and are increasingly uncomfortable with how the proverbial sausage is made,” Lin added.
Copies of internal responses at Facebook published by The Verge website showed many employees were angry or upset over the Bosworth memo but that some defended the executive.
Others said the leaks may suggest Facebook is being targeted by spies or “bad actors” trying to embarrass the company.
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Amid Flood of Chinese Products, India Wants Fairness
Sampad Yadav, who sells electrical goods in a shop in the business hub of Gurugram on the outskirts of New Delhi, says Chinese goods such as LED lamps are popular with customers. “When people make a price comparison, and want to move towards the cheapest goods, those are usually Chinese products.”
As in many other countries, Chinese products such as lamps, electronics, smartphones and engineering goods from the manufacturing giant have flooded Indian markets.
However India has long fretted that areas in which it is strong such as generic drugs and Information Technology services, which make up some of its main exports to Western markets, remain shut out of China. That has made it difficult to bridge a ballooning trade deficit of about $50 billion between the two countries.
But there is optimism this could change following a meeting this week between the commerce ministers of the two countries in New Delhi.
“The Chinese side have agreed to work on the issue, prepare a road map to bring the trade to balanced level over a period of time,” Indian Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu said after discussions with his Chinese counterpart, Zhong Shan.
Trade experts hope the growing tensions on trade issues between the United States and China will prompt Beijing to open up its markets more to Indian exports. “I think China is definitely under pressure now, looking into the kind of initiation which has happened against China,” says Ajay Sahai, who heads the Federation of Indian Exports Organization.
The meeting between the Indian and Chinese commerce ministers this week came amid efforts to deescalate tensions between the Asian neighbors following a period of rocky ties and a tense 70-day face-off between their troops in the Himalayas last year.
Despite a long-lingering boundary dispute and an often-fraught diplomatic relationship, trade ties between the Asian giants have gained significant momentum and China is now India’s largest trading partner. Bilateral trade in 2017 topped $80 billion rising by more than 20 percent over the previous yea.
But worryingly for New Delhi, the trade deficit remains high despite a marginal growth in Indian exports – they add up to about $16 billion versus Chinese imports into India of about $68 billion.
Market access a key issue
India exports mainly raw materials like iron ore, copper and cotton yarn to China. “In whatever value added exports where we are competitive, unfortunately the market is not open for us,” says Sahai.
However China has promised to give greater market access to Indian goods, particularly pharmaceuticals and agricultural goods such as rice, as well as service exports, according to the Indian commerce minister. “They have decided to work in a way that will address security issues from their side as well as introduce Indian companies to those who can buy these products in China,” says Prabhu.
New Delhi, which is trying to ramp up domestic manufacturing, is also urging China to manufacture more goods exported to India within the country.
Whether the promised actions translate into concrete outcomes remains to be seen. But exporters are hopeful. Sahai points out that China has invited Indian traders to what is being billed as the country’s first importers fair to be held in Shanghai later this year – it is being showcased as a measure to further open up China’s market.
The positive tenor of talks between the two countries comes days after U.S. President Donald Trump announced plans to impose tariffs on Chinese imports valued at $60 billion.
New Delhi could also face U.S. ire on trade issues – although its exports to the United States are comparatively small, it has a high trade deficit in its favor and Washington has often complained of protectionist barriers in India. In February, Trump called out India for imposing higher duties on Harley-Davidson motorcycles than the U.S. does on Indian motorbikes.
Amid growing fears that global trade faces uncertain times, analysts have called on countries like India to focus on increasing trade within the region.
India and China also said they will strengthen cooperation in the World Trade Organization and other multilateral and regional frameworks to maintain their common interests.
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Vietnam Stands to See Modest Wins if China, U.S. Start Trade War
A wider Sino-U.S. trade dispute would help export-reliant Vietnam compete against Chinese companies but put the country at risk of any global fallout, analysts say.
The numerous exporters in Vietnam that ship manufactured goods to the United States would save money compared with Chinese peers if not subject to American tariffs, said Dustin Daugherty, senior associate with business consultancy Dezan Shira & Associates in Ho Chi Minh City.
The U.S. government said this month it would develop a list of tariffs on up to $60 billion in Chinese imports. China has threatened to impose its own in response.
“Let’s say (the United States) went the more traditional route, tensions kept escalating and more tariffs are slapped on Chinese products,” Daugherty said. “In that case Vietnam’s export sector definitely benefits. We’re already seeing the U.S. being very warm to Vietnam and U.S. businesses keen on doing business with Vietnam.”
But Chinese firms hit by tariffs might flood Vietnam with raw materials for local manufacturing, while overall world market volatility caused by a Sino-U.S. trade dispute could hamper the country’s trade, said Carl Thayer, emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia.
A tariff-free Vietnam scenario
Vietnamese exporters would save money compared to their Chinese peers if the U.S. government placed tariffs on Chinese firms alone without touching their cross-border supply chains, Daugherty said.
The government of U.S. President Donald Trump calls China unfair in its trade practices, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative says on its website. China enjoys a $375 billion trade surplus with the United States.
Vietnam counts the United States as its top single-country export destination and it shipped $46.484 billion worth of goods to that market last year.
Vietnamese officials have carved out an investment environment since the 1980s that hinges on low costs for manufacturers. American-invested factories such as a Ford Motor plant and an Intel chip factory are among those active in Vietnam today.
Foreign investment contributed to exports worth $155.24 billion in 2017, financial services firm SSI Research in Hanoi says. Vietnam’s economy grew about 7 percent in the first quarter this year, it says.
Attractive investment
Vietnam would be a more attractive investment compared with China under higher U.S. tariffs, analysts say.
Some new investors might be formerly China-based firms hoping to flee the tariffs, said Song Seng Wun, an economist in the private banking unit of CIMB in Singapore.
China itself might offer Vietnam, along with other countries, preferential trade policies or infrastructure help to shore up trade ties, some believe. Stronger trade relations outside the United States would help China offset any tariff damage, Daugherty said.
This week China’s commerce minister pledged to relax trade rules affecting India.
Specter of a broader trade war
U.S. import tariffs that hit China’s extensive cross-border supply chain would hurt Vietnam as a place that finishes Chinese goods for final export, Thayer said. It’s unclear whether Washington would tax Chinese firms alone or their wider supply networks.
Chinese firms already co-invest with Vietnamese partners, Song said, and supply chains for goods such as consumer electronics can net multiple countries, not just China.
More co-investment might follow if Vietnam can offer shelter from tariffs. But Sino-Vietnamese political tension over a maritime dispute risks giving Vietnamese firms a bad name at home if they work too extensively with Chinese partners.
“I would say there will be all kinds of repercussions and implications just because of the very integrated supply chain in the world these days,” Song said. “Take an Apple phone as an example. Parts from here and there are assembled in China.”
Steel, aluminum tariffs
U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs that took effect last week cover much of the world including China and Vietnam. Vietnam exported 380,000 tons of steel, worth $303 million, to the United States in 2017, domestic news website VnExpress International says.
Chinese firms hit by the range of tariffs being mulled now in Washington might boost sales to Vietnam, Thayer said. Chinese sellers of raw materials for Vietnamese exports could dump goods into Vietnam to keep up their own balance sheets as U.S. tariffs hurt them, he added.
Chinese sellers often have an economy of scale that lets them sell for less in Vietnam than local vendors do. Vietnam counts China as its top trading partner.
An escalation of Sino-U.S. trade tensions could also chill global markets or trade as a whole, some analysts fear. That fallout could slow global growth, he said.
“Disruption to trade shouldn’t affect Vietnam overall, but it’s the way the entire globe is reacting to this that I think could affect Vietnam,” he said. “Vietnam is overall heavily committed to global integration with a number of partners, so disruption along that way would have an effect.”
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Rivers and Tides Can Provide Affordable Power
While wind turbines and solar cells generate power only when there is wind and sun, most rivers always flow and most ocean shores always experience tidal currents. At a recent energy summit organized by the U.S. Energy Department, a company from Maine displayed an innovative submersible generator that effectively harvests power from shallow rivers and tidal currents. VOA’s George Putic has more.
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Despite Setbacks, Automakers Move Forward with Electric and Self-Driving Cars
A recent fatality involving one of Uber’s self-driving cars may have created uncertainty and doubt regarding the future of autonomous vehicles, but it’s not stopping automakers who say autonomous and self-driving vehicles are here to stay. At the New York International Auto Show this week, autonomous vehicles and electric cars were increasingly front and center as VOA’s Tina Trinh reports.
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Tech Giants Tackle Online Wildlife Trafficking
A new coalition of tech giants and conservationists is looking to drastically reduce the amount of wild, and often endangered, animals that are trafficked via online services. As Veronica Balderas Iglesias reports, they hope to cut 80 percent of the illegal trade by the end of the decade.
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State Department: Russia Not Justified in Retaliating After Expulsions
The State Department responded swiftly to an announcement by the Kremlin that Russia will retaliate for the expulsions of Russian diplomats from the U.S., Britain and other countries. Moscow announced Thursday it is expelling 60 U.S. diplomats and closing the U.S. consulate in St. Petersburg. State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert told reporters that is not justified and the U.S. reserves the right to respond. VOA’s Diplomatic Correspondent Cindy Saine has more from the State Department.
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Kim Jong Un’s China Visit Exposes Pitfalls for Nuclear Talks
While meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un may have revealed a glimpse of his vision of denuclearization that experts say could conflict with Washington’s expectation of a denuclearized North.
Chinese state news agency Xinhua reported that Kim confirmed his openness to discuss denuclearization during a secretive four-day excursion that began on Sunday with a train trip from Pyongyang to Beijing to meet with Xi.
“It is our consistent stand to be committed to denuclearization on the peninsula,” said Kim on his first foray outside North Korea since inheriting power from his father in 2011.
As reported by Xinhua, Kim’s commitment echoed the message that South Korea envoys conveyed to U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington on March 8, days after meeting with Kim in Pyongyang.
U.S. President Donald Trump, who has agreed to meet with Kim, welcomed this week’s meeting between Kim and Xi in a tweet saying, “Look forward to our meeting.”
What is denuclearization?
But despite Kim’s commitment to denuclearization, many experts are concerned that his vision of denuclearization could complicate the U.S. effort to denuclearize the North.
According to Xinhua, Kim also said the nuclear issue could be resolved through “progressive and synchronous measures” by his regime and the U.S.
Robert Manning, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said Kim’s statement contains “a lot of loaded rhetoric” to “unpack.” Manning said Kim’s statement indicates that he mostly likely will demand the U.S. “remove its hostile policy” or what he perceives as a threat posed to the Kim regime by reducing sanctions, ending U.S.-South Korean military exercises and removing U.S. troops as well as the nuclear umbrella over South Korea and Japan.
Kim expects the U.S. to take “synchronous measures” in providing these concessions as the North agrees to take action-for-action steps, Manning said.
Evans Revere, a former State Department official who has negotiated with North Korea extensively, said these demands are consistent with North Korea’s definition of denuclearization.
“What the North Koreans have done in conveying this to the Chinese is an effort to buy some time by giving a vague reference to some future denuclearization that they are actually not committed to,” Revere said.
Ken Gause, an expert on North Korea and its leadership and a director at research and analysis group CNA said, “[His statement] shows that Kim is looking for a phased process that is conditional on U.S. and [South Korea] providing incentives that meet the requirement of creating an atmosphere of peace and stability.”
Christopher Hill, who negotiated with the North as the head of the U.S. delegation under the George W. Bush administration, believes North Korea needs to demonstrate that it will agree to a verification protocol on denuclearization for diplomatic efforts to advance.
“The issue will come down to whether they are prepared to be serious about this,” Hill said. “By serious, they need to adhere to some international standards of verification.”
Gary Samore, a former White House coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction under the Obama administration, said, “If Trump really believes that he is going to go to this meeting and achieve nuclear disarmament overnight through some process of intimidation and promises, then I think he’s going to leave the meeting very disappointed.”
Inter-Korea summit set
Seoul and Pyongyang held a high-level inter-Korean talks Thursday at the village of Panmunjom on their border and agreed to have the summit between the leaders of the two Koreas on April 27 at the Peace House on the southern side of the Panmunjom.
The prospects for nuclear summits with North Korea opened up when South Korean envoys traveled to Pyongyang at Kim’s invitation. South Korean envoys then traveled to Washington to deliver Kim’s invitation to a U.S.-North Korea summit that Trump has agreed to have by May. There is no official confirmation of the summit from North Korea.
Youngnam Kim contributed to this report, which originated on VOA Korean.
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Pentagon Remains Silent on Transgender Policy
Nearly a week after President Donald Trump issued an order banning some transgender people from serving in the U.S. military, the Pentagon is refusing to provide clarity, citing ongoing legal challenges.
Last Friday, the White House released a memo from Trump to Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, stating the administration concurred with a policy for transgender service members privately recommended by Mattis in late February.
The memo said Mattis and Nielsen “have concluded that the accession or retention of individuals with a history or diagnosis of gender dysphoria — those who may require substantial medical treatment, including through medical drugs or surgery — presents considerable risk to military effectiveness and lethality.”
“Gender dysphoria” (formerly known as gender identity disorder) is defined by strong, persistent feelings of identification with the opposite gender and discomfort with one’s own assigned sex that results in significant distress or impairment.
The memo also granted the secretaries the authority to implement policies as they saw fit.
But since then, the Department of Defense has been silent, refusing to answer questions from reporters seeking clarity on a new policy that could affect nearly 9,000 transgender service members.
The pattern continued Thursday when Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White told reporters, “We will continue to comply with four court orders assessing transgender applicants for military service and retaining current transgender service members.”
White said she is prevented from discussing any aspect of the new policy because of ongoing litigation challenging Trump’s order to ban transgender forces.
The Pentagon said there are 8,980 service members who identify as transgender, but only 937 active-duty service members were diagnosed with gender dysphoria.
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Trump, Pentagon Chief Had ‘Initial Conversation’ About Border Wall
U.S. President Donald Trump has spoken with his top defense official about using military funding to build the border wall with Mexico.
“It’s been an initial conversation,” Chief Pentagon Spokesperson Dana White said Thursday when asked if Trump had broached the subject with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.
“Remember, securing Americans and securing the nation is of paramount importance to the secretary,” White said.
This past Sunday, the president tweeted, “Because of the $700 & $716 Billion Dollars gotten to rebuild our Military, many jobs are created and our Military is again rich.”
He followed that with a second Tweet, saying, “Building a great Border Wall, with drugs (poison) and enemy combatants pouring into our Country, is all about National Defense. Build WALL through M!”
The Pentagon has not provided any details about how much military funding could be used to build the border wall, which has an estimated price tag of more than $20 billion, or what impact that would have on the U.S. military itself.
But the defense appropriations act passed by Congress tells the Pentagon where to spend its money and a change in the budget would need Congressional approval.
“That’s a bridge too far because we don’t have those details,” the Defense Department’s White told reporters Thursday. “It’s been an initial conversation.”
“There’s no daylight between them (Mattis and Trump) with respect to making sure this military stays the most lethal in the world,” White added.
Uber Avoids Legal Battle With Family of Self-Driving Vehicle Victim
The family of a woman killed by an Uber Technologies Inc self-driving vehicle in Arizona has reached a settlement with the ride services company, ending a potential legal battle over the first fatality caused by an autonomous vehicle.
Cristina Perez Hesano, an attorney with the firm of Bellah Perez in Glendale, Arizona, said “the matter has been resolved” between Uber and the daughter and husband of Elaine Herzberg, 49, who died after being hit by an Uber self-driving SUV while walking across a street in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe earlier this month.
Terms of the settlement were not given. The law firm representing Herzberg’s daughter and husband, whose names were not disclosed, said they would have no further comment on the matter as they considered it resolved.
An Uber spokeswoman declined to comment.
The fallout from the accident could stall the development and testing of self-driving vehicles, designed to eventually perform far better than human drivers and to sharply reduce the number of motor vehicle fatalities that occur each year.
Uber has suspended its testing in the wake of the incident. Toyota Motor Corp and chipmaker Nvidia Corp have also suspended self-driving testing on public roads, as they and others await the results of investigations into the Tempe accident, believed to be the first death of a pedestrian struck by a self-driving vehicle.
Nvidia’s chief executive, Jensen Huang, said Uber does not use the chipmaker’s self-driving platform architecture.
Toyota North America Chief Executive Jim Lentz said the company expects to “soon” resume testing of self-driving vehicles, while warning that the ongoing risks will affect the industry’s progress.
“There will be mistakes from vehicles, from systems, and a hundred or 500 or a thousand people could lose their lives in accidents like we’ve seen in Arizona,” Lentz said Thursday at a Reuters Newsmakers event connected with the New York auto show.
“The big question for government is: How much risk are they willing to take? If you can save net 34,000 lives, are you willing to potentially have 10 or 100 or 500 or 1,000 people die?” he said. “And I think the answer to that today is they are not willing to take that risk – and that’s going to really slow down the adoption of autonomous driving.”
The March 18 fatality near downtown Tempe also presents an unprecedented liability challenge because self-driving vehicles, which are still in the development stage, involve a complex system of hardware and software often made by outside suppliers.
Herzberg was pushing a bicycle while walking across a four-lane road outside a crosswalk when she was struck. Video footage from a dash-mounted camera inside the vehicle, released by Tempe police, showed the SUV traveling along a dark street when the headlights suddenly illuminated Herzberg in front of the SUV.
Other footage showed that in the seconds before the accident, the human safety driver behind the wheel was mostly looking down, not at the road.
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Soybean Acres to Exceed Corn for the First Time in 35 Years
Corn has been dethroned as the king of crops as farmers report they intend to plant more soybeans than corn for the first time in 35 years.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture says in its annual prospective planting report released Thursday that farmers intend to plant 89 million acres (36 million hectares) in soybeans and 88 million acres (35.6 million hectares) in corn.
The primary reason is profitability. Corn costs much more to plant because of required demands for pest and disease control and fertilizer. When the profitability of both crops is close, farmers bet on soybeans for a better return.
The only year that soybean acres beat corn in recent memory was 1983, when the government pushed farmers to plant fewer acres to boost prices in the midst of the nation’s worst farm crisis.
Iowa is the top corn-producing state, followed by Illinois, Nebraska and Minnesota. Top soybean states are Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and North Dakota.
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Russia Orders Expulsion of US Diplomats in Tit-for-Tat Move
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says Moscow will expel 60 U.S. diplomats after Washington announced it was ordering the expulsion of dozens of Russian diplomats over the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain.
Lavrov said Thursday Russia will also close the U.S. consulate in the city of St. Petersburg.
The U.S., along with more than 20 other nations, ordered the expulsion of Russian diplomats after Moscow was blamed for the nerve agent attack on former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter earlier this month in the British town of Salisbury.
Russia denies it was responsible for the nerve agent attack and has alleged the it was carried out by British intelligence services in order to make Russia look bad. Britain dismisses that allegation.
In a phone call this week with U.S. President Donald Trump, British Prime Minister Theresa May praised the “very strong response” by the United States in the wake of the poisoning.
The White House said “both leaders agreed on the importance of dismantling Russia’s spy networks in the United Kingdom and the United States to curtail Russian clandestine activities and prevent future chemical weapons attacks on either country’s soil.”
Meanwhile, Skripal’s daughter Yulia is “improving rapidly” after a nerve agent attack earlier this month and is no longer in critical condition, Christine Blanshard, Salisbury District hospital medical director, said.
Sergei Skripal remains in critical condition, Blanshard added.
British police gave an update on the investigation Wednesday, saying that after forensic examinations detectives believe the Skripals first made contact with the toxin at the front door of their home. They cautioned that those living in the neighborhood will see continued searches taking place but that the risk to the public remains low.
So far, police say they have looked through 5,000 hours of security camera footage, examined more than 1,350 other exhibits and interviewed hundreds of witnesses.
National Security correspondent Jeff Seldin and White House correspondent Steve Herman contributed to this article.
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Trump Accuses Amazon of Not Paying Taxes, Putting Retailers Out of Business
U.S. President Donald Trump attacked online tech giant Amazon, accusing the company of paying too little taxes and being responsible for putting retailers out of business.
In a Twitter post early Thursday, Trump blasted the online retail titan, saying “I have stated my concerns with Amazon long before the Election,” adding, “Unlike others, they pay little or no taxes to state & local governments, use our Postal System as their Delivery Boy (causing tremendous loss to the U.S.), and are putting many thousands of retailers out of business!”
Trump has a long history blaming Amazon for hurting traditional brick-and-mortar retailers. He tweeted last August, “Amazon is doing great damage to tax paying retailers. Towns, cities and states throughout the U.S. are being hurt – many jobs being lost!”
For years, Trump has been at odds with Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post newspaper.
In 2015, Trump tweeted, “The @washingtonpost, which loses a fortune, is owned by @JeffBezos for purposes of keeping taxes down at his no profit company, @amazon.”
In response, Bezos joked he would send Trump to space in one of the rockets owned by Blue Origin, a company he separately owns. “Finally trashed by @realDonaldTrump. Will still reserve him a seat on the Blue Origin rocket. #sendDonaldtospace,” Bezos tweeted.
Online news site Axios cited five unnamed sources in a report Wednesday that said Trump wants to “go after” Amazon, is “obsessed” with Amazon, believing Amazon “has gotten a free ride from taxpayers and cushy treatment from the U.S. Postal Service.”
According to the Axios report, the president has “wondered aloud if there may be any way to go after Amazon with antitrust or competition law.”
It quotes another source saying, “It’s been explained to him in multiple meetings that his perception is inaccurate and that the post office actually makes a ton of money from Amazon.”
After Trump’s attacks, Amazon’s stock price took a nose dive on Wednesday, dropping more than four percent, losing more than $30 billion in market value.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said “there aren’t any specific policies on the table” regarding Amazon at this time, but the president is “always looking to create a level playing field for all businesses, and this is no different.”
“As an online retailer, Amazon currently collects taxes in all states that have sales tax, regardless of whether Amazon has a physical presence or not.” It does not collect tax if items were purchased with third party sellers. Critics said this gives Amazon a competitive edge over traditional retailers that collect sales taxes on all purchases.
Amazon, founded in 1994, is the world’s largest Internet retailer measured by revenue and market capitalization. Last year, with over 40 subsidiaries, the company’s revenue exceeded $177 billion.
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Emails Detail Arizona Governor’s Relationship With Uber
Emails released Wednesday between Arizona Governor Doug Ducey’s staff and Uber executives shed new light on the relationship between the first-term Republican and the company whose autonomous vehicle recently was involved in a fatal crash.
Accounts of the previously unseen emails released by the governor’s office were first reported by The Guardian newspaper. which had obtained them through public records requests. They indicate that Ducey’s staff worked closely with the company as it began experimenting with autonomous vehicles that the company began testing on public roads in August 2016 without informing the public.
The governor’s staff pushed back, saying Ducey’s embrace of Uber and autonomous vehicles was one of his administration’s most visible and public initiatives and that there was no secret testing.
“Allegations that any company has secretly tested self-driving cars in Arizona is 100 percent false,” Ducey spokesman Patrick Ptak said. “From the beginning we’ve been very public about the testing and operation of self-driving vehicles, and it has been anything but secret.”
The email exchanges fill in the gaps between what Ducey was saying publicly since taking office in early 2015 and what was happening behind the scenes as his administration helped Uber set up shop in the state and then launch its driverless car testing program.
Frequent boosts
In the earliest days of his administration, Ducey ordered a state agency to stop citing Uber drivers for violating the state’s taxicab laws. He then pushed through a law legalizing ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft, a move his Republican predecessor had vetoed the year before. He then issued an executive order in August 2015 encouraging and allowing self-driving vehicle testing with no reporting requirements.
Over the years since taking office, Ducey took frequent opportunities to boost Uber’s operations, tweeting about the company’s services and welcoming its officials after they pulled their self-driving cars from California in a dispute with that state’s regulators in December 2016 and shipped them to Arizona.
“California may not want you, but Arizona does,” Ducey said when he took the first ride as a passenger in Uber’s self-driving cars in April 2017.
Behind the scenes, Ducey’s staff worked closely with Uber as he championed its regular service and its self-driving vehicles, allowing it to operate without permits and encouraging its testing and operation on public roads.
His staff set up meetings, helped steer Uber executives to Phoenix city officials as they tried to lift an airport ban, and got the governor’s office to tweet its suggested message about a new service called “Uber eats” when it rolled out.
The emails show a top Ducey staffer was invited to use Uber offices for work while in San Francisco, but he didn’t take the company up on the offer.
The governor’s office said it provided the emails to the newspaper in September.
Ptak, Ducey’s spokesman, defended the tweet and other efforts to promote the company.
“We are proud to welcome innovation to Arizona,” he said. “We often promote news of the thousands of jobs and opportunities coming to Arizona. That’s nothing new.”
Democrats critical
The Arizona Democratic Party blasted Ducey after the email revelations.
“Governor Doug Ducey violated the trust of hardworking Arizonans across the state,” the party’s executive director, Herschel Fink, said in a statement. “This bombshell report further exposes the mismanagement by Governor Ducey and his sheer priority to put business relationships ahead of Arizona.”
The governor suspended the company’s testing privileges Monday, citing safety concerns and “disturbing” dashcam footage of the March 18 crash in Tempe that killed a pedestrian as she walked her bike across a darkened road. Experts told The Associated Press that the technology on Uber’s car should have spotted the pedestrian and the failure revealed a serious flaw.
Immediately after the crash, Uber voluntarily suspended its autonomous vehicle testing in Arizona, as well as California, Pittsburgh and Toronto. The company on Tuesday decided not to reapply for the California permit “with the understanding that our self-driving vehicles would not operate in the state in the immediate future.”
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US, Canada Differ on Quick NAFTA Resolution
The Trump administration is hopeful it can reach a deal on a new North American Free Trade Agreement before the July 1 presidential election in Mexico and U.S. midterm congressional elections in November.
“I’d say I’m hopeful — I think we are making progress. I think that all three parties want to move forward. We have a short window, because of elections and things beyond our control,” U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told CNBC television Wednesday.
But Canada’s chief negotiator was far less optimistic.
“We have yet to see exactly what the U.S. means by an agreement in principle,” Steve Verheul told reporters Wednesday in Ottawa. There are still “significant gaps,” Verheul said. “We can accomplish quite a bit between now and then, and we’ve made it clear to the U.S. that we will be prepared to negotiate at any time, any place, for as long as they are prepared to negotiate, but so far we haven’t really seen that process get going,” he said.
Officials from the U.S., Canada and Mexico are supposed to meet in the United States next month for the eighth round of talks, although Washington has not announced dates yet.
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Entrepreuneur: ‘Turning Plastic Waste into Usable Items in the Fight Against Pollution’
A Nigerian entrepreneur is turning plastic waste into rain coats, school bags, car covers and shoes. He says he is doing his part to fight pollution and encourage recycling while making a practical fashion statement. But not everyone is buying into it. VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports.
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