Silicon valley & technology news. Technology is the application of conceptual knowledge to achieve practical goals, especially in a reproducible way. The word technology can also mean the products resulting from such efforts, including both tangible tools such as utensils or machines, and intangible ones such as software. Technology plays a critical role in science, engineering, and everyday life
Buckingham Palace says that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex will not reveal the names of the godparents of their son Archie when he is christened this weekend.
The palace said in a statement Wednesday that the christening at Windsor Castle on Saturday will be private and that “the godparents, in keeping with their wishes, will remain private.”
The decision sparked controversy in Britain’s media on Thursday, in part because the royal couple’s home was renovated with 2.4 million pounds ($3.06 million) of taxpayer money. Anti-monarchy campaign group Republic questioned why so much money was spent at a time when public services are under financial pressure.
Critics suggest that occasions like christenings should be public, but Prince Harry and his wife Meghan have repeatedly signaled that they’re entitled to privacy.
The White House is blasting a Seattle judge’s ruling that says the Trump administration can’t indefinitely lock up migrants who are seeking asylum without giving them a chance to be released on bond.
U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman on Tuesday blocked a new administration policy saying that asylum-seekers will no longer get bond hearings but instead must remain in custody as they pursue their claims.
She said it’s unconstitutional for the government to detain people without demonstrating it’s necessary.
White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham issued a statement Wednesday calling the ruling “at war with the rule of law.” She says it “only incentivizes smugglers and traffickers.”
American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Michael Tan says the ruling “upholds the law against this administration’s ongoing attempts to violate it.”
A spate of GPS disruptions at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport has confirmed what several prominent tech analysts have long feared: that Western nations, and the U.S. in particular, are unusually vulnerable to foreign meddling with location-based technology.
Most location-based software programs, such as the U.S.’s Global Positioning System (GPS), the European Union’s Galileo, China’s BeiDou and Russia’s Glonass, depend on the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), the vast network of international satellites orbiting the Earth.
The technology plays an integral part in our everyday lives, affecting such things as personal phone use, car navigation, international shipping, air travel, power grids, financial markets, and law enforcement and emergency response services. It’s also vital to military operations.
So it is no surprise that authorities were alarmed last week when several aircraft flying near Ben Gurion reported disruption to their satellite navigation systems. Officials said they thought the disruptions were caused by signals emanating from Syria, where Russian forces are involved in that nation’s long-running civil war.
FILE – A U.S. soldier in Kuwait holds a GPS navigation device.
Russian diplomats ridiculed the claim, but it was not the first time their country has been singled out. A report issued in March by the Washington-based Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS) charged that Russia has been hacking non-Russian navigation systems on an extraordinary scale.
Since February 2016, C4ADS analysts reported, Russian intelligence had meddled with GPS equipment aboard 1,311 civilian ships. The report said 9,883 hacking incidents were reported or detected by maritime vessels or aircraft in 2017, with most of the incidents involving planes and ships near the Black Sea, Russia and Syria.
Beyond pinpointing geographic coordinates, GNSS is also used for precision timing, a feature that can also be hacked and manipulated. Various cybersecurity and automotive trade journals reported in March that an unknown entity hacked the GPS systems in a range of high-end cars featured at the annual Geneva Motor Show, programming the cars to report a location of Buckingham, England, in the year 2036.
How it works
GPS spoofing is an attack in which a radio transmitter located near the target is used to send out false GPS signals. Using tools that are cheap and easily accessible online, the attacker can transmit inaccurate coordinates or no data at all.
Russia has been known to protectively scramble radio signal devices near sensitive state facilities or along routes traveled by VIPs. For example, multiple ships reported phony geographic coordinates in the Kerch Strait on the day that Russian President Vladimir Putin drove a truck across a newly completed bridge to Russian-annexed Crimea.
But some analysts say the scale of recent disruptions indicates that Russia is taking its coordinates-spoofing game to another level, methodically calculating the damage it can inflict on unprotected systems in case of conflict.
FILE – A Ukrainian sailor, right, is escorted by a Russian FSB officer to a courtroom in Simferopol, Crimea, Nov. 27, 2018. Russians captured Ukrainian seamen and their vessels two days earlier as they were about to transit the Kerch Strait.
“A ship that has falsified information navigating through the Kerch Strait, for instance, would be at a much greater risk of colliding with another ship or of potentially violating some sort of territorial water regime,” said Thomas Ewing, C4ADS chief analyst, referring to a Nov. 25 incident in which Russia seized three Ukrainian navy vessels near the Kerch Strait and detained their crews.
Ewing also said evidence of spoofed coordinates had been recorded by U.S. forces in Syria, suggesting that Russia may be hacking satellite networks as part of its electronic warfare campaigns. There have also been reports of Russian spoofing of GPS signals during the Russian military training exercise Zapad in 2017 and NATO’s Trident Juncture in 2018.
“Our report details a number of Russian assets that are designed to interfere with GNSS as part of a general electronic warfare capability,” Ewing told VOA.
Others, however, say formal attribution to a malign state actor is beside the point.
“The basic danger is that when your positioning, navigation or timing information is falsified, you could make a decision based on information that doesn’t correspond to reality,” said Ewing, explaining that spoofed coordinates could easily spark an international dispute.
Dana Goward, president of the U.S. Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, said the U.S. remains particularly vulnerable.
Because American engineers designed GPS to be used by everyone, its signal characteristics are routinely published and easily accessible. That makes them easier to imitate than signals relayed by mainly ground-based positioning systems in China and Russia.
America’s ‘gift to the world’
“I think that European countries and the United States are especially vulnerable because Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and South Korea have alternate navigation systems that transmit from the ground,” Goward told VOA’s Ukrainian service. He said those systems “have very high power and are very difficult to disrupt. So those countries are not nearly as dependent upon satellite navigation as Europe and the United States.”
Asked about the erroneous coordinates reported by vessels in the Kerch Strait and along the Syrian coast, Goward said he thought Russia was using the vulnerabilities of the technology to demonstrate its power.
FILE – A GPS station is seen in the Inyo Mountains of California. (S. Lawrence/UNAVCO)
“America likes to think of GPS as its gift to the world,” he said. “But by doing this, Russia is saying to the whole world that ‘we can take that away from you with a flip of a switch, so America’s gift is not so great.’ So they’re certainly using it as an instrument of strategic state power as well.”
To protect itself, Goward said, the United States should increase its protection of GPS frequencies, use only high-quality receivers that can resist jamming and spoofing, and augment the GPSS with a ground-based system that would be harder to disrupt.
The incident in Ben Gurion again attracted attention to the need to create a fully functional backup system for GPS, Goward said. “It is fortunate that aviation has a terrestrial electronic navigation system it can rely upon when GPS is not available,” Goward said. He praised the 2001 U.S. Department of Transportation decision not to give up the terrestrial system completely in favor of the GPS-based one.
U.S. policy has called for maintaining an effective backup system since 2004, but experts say its full implementation is still in the works both in the United States and Europe.
According to the Military Times newspaper, the U.S. Army’s 2nd Cavalry Regiment in Germany will field test jam-resistant positioning, navigation and timing gear in September, including a Selective Availability Anti-Spoofing Module in some vehicles.
One of a half-dozen men who have accused the Vatican’s ambassador to France of groping them said Wednesday he plans to take his legal complaint directly to the Vatican, alleging the Holy See had invoked diplomatic immunity for the high-ranking churchman in a French criminal probe.
Mathieu De La Souchere filed a police report in Paris earlier this year accusing Archbishop Luigi Ventura of touching his buttocks repeatedly during a Jan. 17 reception at Paris City Hall. De La Souchere met with one of Pope Francis’ sex abuse advisers about the allegations Wednesday.
The Paris prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation into alleged sexual aggression. The Vatican said Ventura was cooperating with the investigation. But De La Souchere said the French case was essentially stalled over the immunity question.
“The French government’s request to the Vatican to lift the diplomatic immunity remained unanswered,” he told The Associated Press.
De La Souchere said his lawyer plans to file a complaint with the Vatican City State’s criminal tribunal next week. The tribunal largely follows the Italian penal code and is separate from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which handles sex abuse-related crimes under the Catholic Church’s canon law.
“This new judicial step here in the Vatican, we hope, will be one more step toward the trial that we all the victims in France are waiting for,” De La Souchere said after meeting with the Rev. Hans Zollner, a founding member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.
De La Souchere met with Zollner and another man who has accused Ventura. Catholic online site Crux has said as many as a half-dozen men have accused Ventura of unwanted groping over the course of his diplomatic postings, which have included Canada and Chile.
Ventura has repeatedly denied wrongdoing. His French lawyer, Bertrand Ollivier, did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday.
The archbishop’s whereabouts are unknown, but he attended a meeting at the Vatican last month of all the Holy See’s apostolic nuncios, or ambassadors.
Vatican spokesman Alessandro Gisotti said Ventura “has fully and voluntarily cooperated with French judicial authorities who are in charge of his case, and will continue to do so.” He didn’t immediately respond when asked about the status of Ventura’s immunity.
Ventura did agree to investigators’ request to take part in a “confrontation” with his accusers in May, according to French media reports. All accused him of putting his hands on their buttocks, sometimes repeatedly, or making other inappropriate gestures.
Speaking to one alleged victim, identified as Benjamin G., Ventura first claimed he didn’t remember the incidents in question and then said Benjamin misinterpreted his actions, according to French newspaper Le Monde.
The Vatican has previously recalled its diplomats when they get into trouble during overseas postings, as is common for governments with diplomats serving abroad.
In the most high-profile case, the Vatican recalled its ambassador to the Dominican Republic and prepared to put him on trial in the city state’s criminal tribunal for allegedly sexually abusing young boys. But he died before trial started.
More recently, the Vatican convicted a diplomat from its U.S. embassy for possession and distribution of child pornography and sentenced him to five years in prison.
The Vatican also invoked immunity during the recently-concluded trial in France that convicted French Cardinal Philippe Barbarin of failing to report an admitted pedophile to police. Also accused in the case was a Vatican official, Cardinal Luis Ladaria, who now heads the Vatican office in charge of handling sex abuse cases.
The Vatican invoked Ladaria’s immunity as a public official of a foreign sovereign — the Holy See — and he was not prosecuted. Barbarin enjoyed no such immunity as the archbishop of Lyon and was convicted and given a six-month suspended sentence.
Francis recently named a temporary administrator to run the Lyon archdiocese after Barbarin stepped aside pending his appeal.
Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido said on Tuesday that there would “never” be a good moment to negotiate with President Nicolas Maduro’s “dictatorship,” ruling out an expected new round of talks to find an exit from the country’s crisis.
Guaido and Maduro had both sent representatives to Oslo in May for discussions that Norway’s government had encouraged, but they were unable to reach any agreement. On Saturday, people familiar with the talks told Reuters that talks would restart this week.
Guaido on Tuesday said there had been “no official statement that we would attend a new round” of dialogue.
“It is never going to be a good moment to mediate… with kidnappers, human rights violators, and a dictatorship,” Guaido told reporters at the opposition-controlled National Assembly legislature, which he heads.
Few details have been released about the talks in Oslo between representatives of Maduro and Guaido, who assumed a rival presidency in January and denounces Maduro as an illegitimate usurper who has overseen a five-year recession.
Guaido’s comments came as the opposition expressed outrage over the death last week of Venezuelan navy captain Rafael Acosta in military custody. The captain’s wife and rights groups accuse Maduro’s government of torturing Acosta and refusing to clarify the circumstances of his death.
Venezuela’s chief prosecutor on Monday charged two intelligence officials with homicide in connection with Acosta’s death, without explaining how he was killed.
Tesla set a record for quarterly vehicle deliveries in a triumphant response to months of questions about demand for its luxury electric cars, sending shares up 7% after hours Tuesday.
Tesla did not comment on profit — which is still elusive — but the robust deliveries could help jumpstart investor sentiment on Tesla, which has been challenged in recent months.
Before Tuesday’s after-hours spike, Tesla shares were down about a third from the beginning of the year.
Brushing aside concerns about demand that have dogged the company all year, Tesla said orders during the second quarter exceeded deliveries, despite buyers getting a smaller tax credit.
A $7,500 U.S. federal tax credit was cut in half at the end of last year, fell to $1,875 on Monday and expires at the end of the year.
“We believe we are well positioned to continue growing total production and deliveries in Q3,” the company said in a statement.
Tesla delivered 77,550 Model 3s in the quarter, the company’s latest sedan and linchpin of the company’s growth strategy. That compared with analysts’ average estimate of 73,144, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.
Deliveries of all models rose 51% from the first quarter to 95,200 vehicles, including 17,650 Model S and X. Analysts on average were expecting total deliveries of 89,084.
FILE – Tesla CEO Elon Musk speaks before unveiling the Model Y at the company’s design studio in Hawthorne, California, March 14, 2019.
Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has repeatedly said Tesla could deliver a record number of cars in the second quarter, beating the 90,700 it sent to customers in the final quarter of last year.
Wall Street ‘skeptical’
Tuesday’s numbers helped take the sting off a difficult first quarter, in which deliveries plunged and the company lost $702 million.
That fraught quarter — hurt by logistics issues at Tesla’s international ports and a drop-off in U.S. orders after the tax credit was halved — spurred worries that Tesla may have tapped a limited market for electric cars at premium prices.
Despite the positive second-quarter delivery numbers, Wedbush analyst Dan Ives cautioned that “the Street remains skeptical.”
Demand and profitability will remain the two main drivers to buoy Tesla shares in coming quarters, Ives told Reuters, signaling that Tesla’s challenges are far from over.
Garrett Nelson of CFRA Research noted that second-quarter deliveries were likely artificially boosted by customers pulling forward their vehicle purchases before the July 1 tax credit cut, warning that could result in a “significant retracement” in deliveries in the third quarter.
Tesla did not repeat its prior forecast that it would post a second-quarter loss but return to profit in the third quarter.
Delivery challenge
A big challenge for Tesla has been how to deliver its vehicles efficiently and swiftly to customers around the world.
An improved system for logistics helped in the second quarter, Tesla said, without providing more detail.
In prior quarters, Tesla has diverted employees from all parts of the company to help with deliveries in an all-hands-on-deck effort to meet delivery goals. That has proved to be an expensive and inefficient way to meet targets, which reduces potential profit margins on each vehicle.
The delivery numbers included 10,600 vehicles that had been in transit at the end of the first quarter.
The company has pledged to deliver 360,000 to 400,000 vehicles in 2019, a goal many analysts predict will be difficult to meet.
Overall, total production rose 13% to 87,048 vehicles compared with the first quarter. The company churned out 72,531 Model 3s in the second quarter, up from a total of 62,950 Model 3s in the preceding quarter.
Tesla said that going forward, it would no longer disclose how many vehicles were in transit at the end of each quarter due to production changes that made the number less relevant. At the end of the second quarter, over 7,400 vehicles were in transit.
Brazil’s foreign minister said Tuesday that protecting the environment “is not only a European interest” after France said it would ratify a free-trade deal between the European Union and the South American bloc Mercosur only if Brazil respects its commitment to reduce deforestation.
The EU and Mercosur last Friday finalized, after two decades of negotiations, an agreement that would integrate the blocs into a market of 800 million people. But the deal must still be ratified by the legislatures of the countries involved.
The French government said Tuesday that it was yet not ready to ratify the pact, saying Brazil must “respect its commitments” to protecting its rainforest. Before the deal was finalized, French President Emmanuel Macron had said France would not sign if Brazil did not continue within the Paris climate agreement.
Brazilian foreign minister Ernesto Araujo responded to France’s comments by saying: “No country is ready to ratify (the agreement) from the constitutional point of view. It must be still submitted to parliament and approved.”
“Most European countries use more agrotoxins per hectare then Brazil. The agricultural health crisis of mad cow disease began in Europe because of the poor feeding of livestock,” Araujo said at a news conference in the capital, Brasilia. “This issue is not only a European interest, but ours” as well.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has raised fears among environmentalists by promising to open up the Amazon to further development and because of his close ties to the country’s agro-industry lobby.
FILE – In the Atlantic Forest in Bahia, fire and deforestation of hill slopes are forbidden by Brazilian law, but law enforcement is ineffective. (Credit: IESB archive)
A survey by the National Institute of Space Research that was published Tuesday showed that Amazon deforestation grew 60% in June compared to the same month last year, the worst data since 2016.
Mercosur is made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.
In Malawi, a young albino man is using music to fight discrimination and misconceptions about the genetic condition in a country where more than 100 people with albinism have been attacked since 2014. Lazarus Chigwandali has long been performing on the streets of Lilongwe. But after catching the eye of a Swedish producer, he began work on an album that is due out in August. He’s also about to embark on a nationwide tour to promote a documentary, produced by American pop star Madonna, about the plight of albinos in Malawi. Lameck Masina reports from Lilongwe.
In Malawi, a young albino man is using music to fight discrimination and misconceptions about the genetic condition in a country where more than 100 people with albinism have been attacked since 2014.
As teens, Lazarus Chigwandali and his late brother, who also had albinism, played on the streets of Lilongwe, mostly to raise money to buy protective skin lotion.
He says in those days it was difficult to find skin lotion that would protect them from the sun, so they had sores all over their bodies. As a result many people discriminated against them because of the way their bodies looked.
Attacks continue
Discrimination and attacks against albinos like Chigwandali continue. Some Africans believe their body parts, used in so-called magic potions, will bring good luck.
At 39, Chigwandali began composing songs about the myths and misperceptions about people with albinism.
Then he heard music producers from abroad wanted to meet him at his home village to record his music, something that worried his wife, Gertrude Levison.
She says she was afraid that maybe they wanted to kidnap them all. But she realized that it was a peaceful move when she heard her husband talking with a friend of his on the phone.
The recording deal enabled Chigwandali to produce a 30-track music album, Stomp on the Devil, which denounces attacks on albinos. It is due out in August
Esau Mwamwaya, is Chigwandali’s manager.
“With the challenge which people with albinism face in Malawi we felt like, with his powerful voice, he can be an instrument to send the message across the world that you know, people born with albinism, are just like anybody else,” Mwamwaya said.
Much work to be done
While some of his songs are playing on local radio stations, Chigwandali says there is still a long way to go before the attacks end.
He says there are still others who ignore the messages in his songs. This means a lot of work. But, he says, “We will soon start a nationwide tour to screen my documentary which shows attacks on people with albinism in Malawi.”
The documentary, produced by American pop star Madonna, is about the plight of albinos in Malawi.
His wife worries that Chigwandali’s growing fame could expose him and their two albino sons to potential attackers.
To ease their concerns, Chigwandali’s managers have launched a fundraising initiative to build a house for the family that will provide greater security.
Iran announced Monday that it has exceeded its low-enriched uranium stockpile limit, violating the amount it agreed to hold in the 2015 international deal. The move is aimed at forcing the signatories of the nuclear deal to give Iran relief from U.S. sanctions. VOA’s Kurdish Service discussed the consequences of Iran’s action with two experts on Iranian issues. Zlatica Hoke has a summary of what they said.
The latest meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has drawn criticism from a wide range of voices in Washington DC. Some say it amounted to little more than reality television. Others complained it conferred legitimacy on a brutal dictator. But many in South Korea, where the summit was held, view the meeting positively, as VOA’s Bill Gallo reports from Seoul.
The U.S. military says it has struck an al-Qaida leadership and training facility in northern Syria where attacks threatening Americans and others were being planned.
The U.S. Central Command said in a statement that the strike occurred on Sunday near the northern province of Aleppo.
The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition-linked war monitor, said Monday that the strike killed eight members of the al-Qaida-linked Horas al-Din, which is Arabic for “Guardians of Religion.”
The Observatory says the dead included six commanders: two Algerians, two Tunisians, an Egyptian and a Syrian.
Al-Qaida-linked militants control wide parts of northern Syria, mostly in Idlib province, the last major rebel stronghold in the war-torn country.
India spends billions of dollars on social welfare support for the poor but corruption, fraud and inefficiencies often prevent the benefits from reaching them. But now, the government is starting to transform the way it gets welfare to the poor by linking welfare programs to the world’s biggest biometric identity project under which more than one billion people have been given biometric cards. Anjana Pasricha reports on how residents of a rural hamlet in the northern Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh are benefiting after it switched from cash to digital payments.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres took his global message urging immediate climate action to officials gathered in the United Arab Emirates on Sunday, where production of hydrocarbons remains a key driver of the economy.
Guterres is calling on governments to stop building new coal plants by 2020, cut greenhouse emissions by 45% over the next decade and overhauling fossil fuel-driven economies with new technologies like solar and wind. The world, he said, is facing a grave climate emergency.''<br />
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In remarks at a summit in Abu Dhabi, he painted a grim picture of how rapidly climate change is advancing, saying it is outpacing efforts to address it.<br />
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He lauded the Paris climate accord, but said even if its promises are fully met, the world still faces what he described as a catastrophic three-degree temperature rise by the end of the century.<br />
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Arctic permafrost is melting decades earlier than even worst-case scenarios, he said, threatening to unlock vast amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas.<br />
<br />It is plain to me that we have no time to lose,” Guterres said. Sadly, it is not yet plain to all the decision makers that run our world.''<br />
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He spoke at the opulent Emirates Palace, where Abu Dhabi was hosting a preparatory meeting for the U.N. Climate Action Summit in September. Guterres was expected to later take a helicopter ride to view Abu Dhabi's Noor solar power plant.<br />
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When asked, U.N. representatives said the lavish Abu Dhabi summit and his planned helicopter ride would be carbon neutral, meaning their effects would be balanced by efforts like planting trees and sequestering emissions. The U.N. says carbon dioxide emissions account for around 80% of global warming.<br />
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Guterres was in Abu Dhabi fresh off meetings with The Group of 20 leaders in Osaka, Japan. There, he appealed directly to heads of state of the world's main emitters to step up their efforts. The countries of the G-20 represent 80% of world emissions of greenhouse gases, he said.<br />
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At the G-20 meeting, 19 countries expressed their commitment to the Paris agreement, with the only the United States dissenting.<br />
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In 2017, President Donald Trump pledged to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate agreement as soon as 2020, arguing it disadvantages American workers and taxpayers. Trump has also moved steadily to dismantle Obama administration efforts to rein in coal, oil and gas emissions. His position has been that these efforts also hurt the U.S. economy.<br />
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The secretary-general's special envoy for the climate summit, Ambassador Luis Alfonso de Alba, told The Associated Press it was disappointing that the U.S. has pulled out from the accord. However, he said there are many examples of efforts at the local and state level in the United States to combat climate change.<br />
<br />I think it is very important to have all countries committing to this cause… even more when we are talking about the country of the importance and the size – not only in terms of the economy but also the emissions – of the United States,” he said.
Guterres is urging business leaders and politicians to come to the Climate Action Summit later this year with their plans ready to nearly halve greenhouse emissions by 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2050.
He suggested taxing major carbon-emitting industries and polluters, ending the subsidization of oil and gas, and halting the building of all new coal plants by next year.
We are in a battle for our lives,'' he said.But it is a battle we can win.”
Tens of thousands of protesters rallied across Sudan on Sunday against the ruling generals, calling for a civilian government nearly three months after the army forced out the long-ruling autocrat Omar al-Bashir.
The mass protests, centered in the capital, Khartoum, were the first since a June 3 crackdown when security forces violently broke up a protest camp. In that confrontation, dozens were killed, with protest organizers saying the death toll was at least 128, while authorities claim it was 61, including three security personnel.
Sunday’s demonstrators gathered at several points across Khartoum and in the sister city of Omdurman, then marching to the homes of those killed in previous protests.
The protesters, some of them waving Sudanese flags, chanted “Civilian rule! Civilian rule!” and “Burhan’s council, just fall,” targeting Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan, the head of the military council. Security forces fired tear gas at the demonstrators.
Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, deputy head of the military council, said the generals want to reach an “urgent and comprehensive agreement with no exclusion. We in the military council are totally neutral. We are the guardians of the revolution. We do not want to be part of the dispute.”
The European Union and several Western countries have called on the generals to avoid bloodshed.
The June 3 raid followed the collapse of talks on a new government, whether it should be led by a civilian or soldier.
Ethiopia and the African Union have offered a plan for a civilian-majority body, which the generals say could be the basis for new negotiations.
Sometimes, modern problems require ancient solutions.
A 1,400-year-old Peruvian water-diverting method could supply up to 40,000 Olympic-size swimming pools’ worth of water to present-day Lima each year, according to new research published in Nature Sustainability.
It’s one example of how indigenous methods could supplement existing modern infrastructure in water-scarce countries worldwide.
More than a billion people across the world face water scarcity. Artificial reservoirs store rainwater and runoff for use during drier times, but reservoirs are costly, require years to plan and can still fail to meet water needs. Just last week, the reservoirs in Chennai, India, ran nearly dry, forcing its 4 million residents to rely on government water tankers.
Animation showing monthly rainfall in the tropical Andes. Humid air transports water vapor from the Amazon and is blocked by the Andean mountain barrier, producing extreme differences between the eastern and western slopes. (B. Ochoa-Tocachi, 2019)
Peru’s capital, Lima, depends on water from rivers high in the Andes. It takes only a few days for water to flow down to Lima, so when the dry season begins in the mountains, the water supply rapidly vanishes. The city suffers water deficit of 43 million cubic meters during the dry season, which it alleviates with modern infrastructure such as artificial reservoirs.
Panoramic view of the Andean highlands in the Chillon river basin where Huamantanga is located. The city of Lima would be located downstream in the horizon background. (S. Grainger, Imperial College London, 2015)
Artificial reservoirs aren’t the only solution, however. Over a thousand years ago, indigenous people developed another way of dealing with water shortages. Boris Ochoa-Tocachi, a postdoctoral researcher at Imperial College London and lead author of the study, saw firsthand one of the last remaining pre-Inca water-harvesting systems in the small highland community of Huamantanga, Peru.
Water diverted, delayed
The 1,400-year-old system is designed to increase the water supply during the dry season by diverting and delaying water as it travels down from the mountains. This nature-based “green” infrastructure consists of stone canals that guide water from its source to a network of earthen canals, ponds, springs and rocky hillsides, which encourage water to seep into the ground. It then slowly trickles downhill through the soil and resurfaces in streams near the community.
Ideally, the system should be able to increase the water’s travel time from days to months in order to provide water throughout the dry season, “but there was no evidence at all to quantify what is the water volume that they can harvest from these practices, or really if the practices were actually increasing the yields of these springs that they used during the dry season,” said Ochoa-Tocachi.
A diversion canal as part of the pre-Inca infiltration system during the wet season. Canals like this divert water during the wet season to zones of high permeability. (M. Briceño, CONDESAN, 2012)
To assess the system’s capabilities, the researchers measured how much it slowed the flow of water by injecting a dye tracer high upstream and noting when it resurfaced downstream. The water started to emerge two weeks later and continued flowing for eight months — a huge improvement over the hours or days it would normally take.
“I think probably the most exciting result is that we actually confirmed that this system works,” Ochoa-Tocachi added. “It’s not only trusting that, yeah, we know that there are traditional practices, we know that indigenous knowledge is very useful. I think that we proved that it is still relevant today. It is still a tool that we can use and we can replicate to solve modern problems.”
Considerable increase in supply
The researchers next considered how implementing a scaled-up version of the system could benefit Lima. Combining what they learned from the existing setup in Huamantanga with the physical characteristics of Lima’s surroundings, they estimated that the system could increase Lima’s dry-season water supply by 7.5% on average, and up to 33% at the beginning of the dry season. This amounts to nearly 100 million cubic meters of water per year — the equivalent of 40,000 Olympic-size swimming pools.
Todd Gartner, director of the World Resources Institute Natural Infrastructure for Water project, noted that this study “takes what we often just talk about — that ‘green [infrastructure] is as good as grey’ — and it puts this into practice and does a lot of evaluation and monitoring and puts real numbers behind it.”
Another benefit of the system is the cost. Ochoa-Tocachi estimated that building a series of canals similar to what exists in Huamantanga would cost 10 times less than building a reservoir of the same volume. He also noted that many highland societies elsewhere in the world have developed ways of diverting and delaying water in the past and could implement them today to supplement their more expensive modern counterparts.
“I think there is a lot of potential in revaluing these water-harvesting practices that have a very long history,” Ochoa-Tocachi said. “There are a lot of these practices that still now could be rescued and could be replicated, even though probably the actual mechanics or the actual process is different than the one that we studied. But the concept of using indigenous knowledge for solving modern engineering problems, I think that is probably very valuable today.”
Rest assured, British fans: Most baseball games are not like the one played Saturday in London, not even the crazy ones between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox.
Each team scored six runs in a first inning that lasted nearly an hour, with Aaron Hicks hitting the first European homer. Brett Gardner had a tiebreaking, two-run drive in the third, Aaron Judge went deep to cap a six-run fourth and the Yankees outlasted their rivals 17-13 in a game that stretched for 4 hours, 42 minutes — 3 minutes shy of the record for a nine-inning game.
“Well, cricket takes like all weekend to play, right? So, I’m sure a lot of people are used to it,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “We should remind them there’s not 30 runs every game.”
Britain’s Prince Harry, top left, and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, watch during the first inning of a baseball game between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees, June 29, 2019, in London.
The game was played before a sellout crowd of 59,659 that included supporters from Britain, Beantown and the Big Apple plus royalty, and America’s national pastime seemed to make a positive impression on British fans.
“I think we’re getting as good a reception as football has for the last couple years,” Yankees first baseman Luke Voit said.
Great weather
The weather helped. It was a warm, picture-perfect day in often overcast London — baseball weather at its best, played on a midsummer’s eve with sunlight that seemed to never fade.
Things American fans take for granted, like standing for the national anthem, or joshing rival fans without getting overly crude, struck many Brits in London Stadium as a refreshing change.
“It’s brilliant, it’s amazing, it’s so American as well,” said Jack Lockwood, a 23-year-old who pitches and plays catcher in an amateur baseball league in the city of Sheffield. “I’ve been to hundreds of football (soccer) games and it’s just such a different atmosphere. I just like the American positivity.”
Lockwood spent about six hours on a train to get to and from London for the game, but he considered the trip well worth it, even though his favorite team — the Los Angeles Dodgers — wasn’t playing.
He said it would be impossible to have fans from two rival English soccer teams sit in the same stands — intermingled as Yankee and Red Sox fans were Saturday — without violent scenes.
“You put two rival football teams’ fans in the same stands, you’ll get a fight,” he said. “In baseball, you can put the fans together and you can have a laugh with anyone.”
Fans arrive before a baseball game between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees, June 29, 2019, in London. Major League Baseball was making its European debut with the game at London Stadium.
British touches
There were some British touches at the game, like the roaming vendors selling Pimm’s cocktails and gin and tonics, but the focus was generally on typical American ballpark fare: hot dogs, nachos, burgers and beer. There were even supersized hot dogs, checking in at 2 feet long.
“It’s the way the Americans do sports,” said pleased British fan Stuart Graham, 45. “The way they have the spectator in mind. You know, you’re sitting there and the man comes around with your beer and your hot dogs, and you can relax and enjoy the game. It’s really very different to what we’re used to.”
He and Ian Muggridge bought the tickets months ago, spurred in part by the storied Red Sox-Yankees rivalry, which promised to bring top talent to the British capital.
“Two big heavyweights of U.S. baseball, sort of like Manchester United playing Liverpool in the UK,” he said, referring to British soccer rivals. “Great spectacle to come and see.”
He did find one disappointment to baseball in Britain: The hot dogs weren’t as good as the ones he’d enjoyed at an American park.
Muggridge appreciated the mood in the park, with the playing of the U.S. and British national anthems before the game.
A fan makes a diving catch in the “fan zone” before the game between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankies at London Stadium, Jun 29, 2019. ( S. Flynn/USA Today Sports)
‘Patriotic feel’
“I like the fact that it’s got quite a patriotic feel about it,” he said. “You don’t often get that in British sports. We tend to avoid that, whereas in America you just put it out there.”
While many British fans only had to jump a Tube train to get to the park, thousands of American fans flew across the Atlantic at considerable expense to catch the historic games.
Yankees fan Danielle McCauley of Clifton, N.J., built a weeklong British holiday around Saturday’s game.
“It’s been fun. The whole thing has been really cool,” she said, although she found the crowd far less raucous than those she had been part of in Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park. Call it British reserve.
“It’s quiet,” she said. “It’s the quietest sporting event I’ve ever been to.”
Tens of thousands of people turned out for gay pride celebrations around the world on Saturday, including a boisterous party in Mexico and the first pride march in North Macedonia’s capital.
Rainbow flags and umbrellas swayed and music pounded as the march along Mexico City’s Paseo de la Reforma avenue got underway, with couples, families and activists seeking to raise visibility for sexual diversity in the country.
Same-sex civil unions have been legal in Mexico City since 2007, and gay marriage since 2009. A handful of Mexican states have also legalized same-sex unions, which are supposed to be recognized nationwide. But pride participants said Mexico has a long way to go in becoming a more tolerant and accepting place for LGBTQ individuals.
Revelers attend the gay pride parade in Quito, Ecuador, June 29, 2019.
“There’s a lot of machismo, a lot of ignorance still,” said Monica Nochebuena, who identifies as bisexual.
Nochebuena, 28, attended the Mexico City march for the first time with her mother and sister on Saturday, wearing a shirt that said: “My mama already knows.” Her mother’s shirt read: “My daughter already told me.”
Human rights activist Jose Luis Gutierrez, 43, said the march is about visibility, and rights, especially for Mexico’s vulnerable transgender population. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights says that poverty, exclusion and violence reduce life expectancy for trans women in the Americas to 35 years.
In New York City, Friday marked the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, when a police raid on a gay bar in Manhattan led to a riot and days of demonstrations that morphed into a sustained LGBTQ liberation movement. The city’s huge Pride parade on Sunday will swing past the bar.
Other LGBTQ celebrations took place from India to Europe, with more events planned for Sunday.
People take part in the first gay pride parade in Skopje, North Macedonia, June 29, 2019.
In the North Macedonian capital of Skopje, U.S. Charge d’Affaires Micaela Schweitzer-Bluhm attended the first pride march there in a festive and incident-free atmosphere despite a countermarch organized by religious and “pro-family” organizations.
People from across Macedonia took part, along with marchers from neighboring Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia and other countries.
“This year Skopje joined more than 70 Pride [marches] and the USA are very proud to be part of this,” Schweitzer-Bluhm told reporters. “There is a lot of progress here in North Macedonia but still a lot has to be done.”
Thousands marched through Madrid on Saturday to ask the Spanish capital’s new mayor not to ditch ambitious traffic restrictions in the center only recently set up to improve air quality.
“Madrid Central,” as it is called, was one of the measures that persuaded the European Commission not to take Spain to court last year over its bad air pollution in the capital and Barcelona, as it did with France, Germany and the United Kingdom.
“Fewer cars, better air” and “The new city hall seriously harms your health” were the messages on banners as protesters walked through the city’s center in 40-degree-Celsius heat.
The capital’s new conservative mayor, Jose Luis Martinez-Almeida, made ditching “Madrid Central” a priority during his campaign, saying it had done nothing to ease pollution and only caused a nuisance for locals.
But since he has taken power as part of a coalition with center-right party Ciudadanos, city officials have toned this down, saying the government is merely seeking to reform a system that does not work properly, having mistakingly handed out some fines.
When the system was launched in November, Madrid followed in the steps of other European cities such as London, Stockholm and Milan that have restricted traffic in their centers.
A woman takes part in a protest against Madrid’s new conservative People’s Party municipal government plans to suspend some anti-car emissions policies in the city center, June 29, 2019.
But while in these cases drivers can pay to enter such zones, Madrid went a step further, banning many vehicles from accessing the center altogether and fining them if they did.
These fines will be suspended from July 1 to the end of September as the new city hall team audits the system.
For Beatriz Navarro, 44, a university biochemistry professor who took part in the march, the system is working fine.
“It’s a small seed … among everything that has to be done to slow down climate change,” she said.
In a statement, environmental group Ecologistas en Accion said “the levels of pollution from nitrogen dioxide (NO2) registered during May this year were lower than those of 2018 in all the [measuring] stations in the system.”
“In 14 of the 24 stations [in Madrid], the value registered in May 2019 was the lowest in the last 10 years.”
Mexico and the United States are scrambling to address rising numbers of immigrants arriving at their shared border. Mexican border guards are stepping up raids against immigrants traveling north. In the United States, an uproar over the treatment of children in U.S. detention facilities led American lawmakers to approve a $4.6 billion emergency bill. VOA’s Jesusemen Oni has more.
A group of New York bikers has set out to save the environment by starting a bike-powered composting service. They collect food waste from restaurants and households for composting, and then use that compost as fertilizer to grow vegetables. In a city with a population of 8.5 million people, this might seem like a drop in the bucket, but while the scope might be small now, the organizers have big and green plans for the project. Nina Vishneva has the story narrated by Anna Rice.
The desktop personal computer changed the world when it was introduced back in the 1970s. But lately laptops and phones have slowly eaten away at that market. But the creators of a new PC that costs less than a trip to the grocery store are hoping their little PC can change that. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
Bahrain on Friday summoned an Iraqi diplomat in the kingdom over an attack the previous evening on its embassy in Baghdad, condemning the protesters who stormed the mission and urging Iraqi authorities to protect the diplomatic compound, Bahrain’s state-run news agency reported.
According to the report, the Iraqi diplomat was told the attack by Iraqi protesters on the Bahraini Embassy in Baghdad was “an irresponsible behavior that is strongly rejected.”
The attack, apparently carried out by supporters of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias, is unlikely to mar relations between Iraq and Gulf Arab nations, which have steadily been improving since Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi took office.
Also, Iraqi President Barham Saleh received a call Friday from the king of Bahrain. King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa praised the relations between the two counties and ways of “boosting them, for the good of the two peoples,” Saleh’s office said.
The embassy attack sought to denounce a conference held in Bahrain to promote peace between Arabs and Israelis. The protesters broke through the main gate, took down Bahrain’s flag and replaced it with a Palestinian one.
No one was hurt in the incident. Iraqi security officials said 54 people have been detained for taking part in the attack.
Bahrain’s Foreign Ministry said those behind the assault “should be brought to justice.”
An Iraqi security official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations, said precautionary measures have been taken in Baghdad to protect diplomatic missions. Bahrain’s flag was raised again at the embassy on Friday.
Iraq is home to Iran-backed militias and the embassy attack comes amid tensions between the United States and Iran. Iraq has close relations with both Washington and Tehran and has been trying to ease tensions between them.
The crisis gripping the Mideast stems from President Donald Trump’s withdrawal of the U.S. last year from the nuclear deal between Iran and other world powers and his imposing of crippling new sanctions on Tehran.
The Holy See on Friday instructed Catholic clergy in China to profess loyalty to Catholic doctrine when signing a document, required by a new Chinese law, which obliges them to accept the principle of a state-sanctioned Catholic church that doesn’t recognize supreme papal authority to appoint bishops.
China’s estimated 12 million Catholics are split between those belonging to the official church and an underground church loyal to the pope.
Pope Francis is seeking to heal decades of estrangement between the Vatican and China’s Communist authorities. Beijing has insisted it, and not the pope, has final say over appointment bishops.
Friday’s guidelines noted that many Catholic pastors are “deeply disturbed” by China’s insistence that bishops and priests civilly register in order to carry out pastoral duties and that some had asked the Holy See to indicate a “concrete” approach to their dilemma.
But the Vatican guidelines also recognize some of the clergy loyal to the pontiff don’t want to register at all, saying, “the Holy See does not intend to force anyone’s conscience.”
”On the other hand, it considers that the experience of being clandestine is not a normal feature of the church’s life and that history has shown that pastors and faithful have recourse to it only amid suffering, in the desire to maintain the integrity of their faith.”
So the guidelines spell out how priests and bishops can register while making plain their loyalty to the Vatican doctrine. According to the Vatican, the registration almost always requires declaring “acceptance, among other things, of the principle of independence, autonomy and self-administration” of the church in China.
The Vatican instructed clergy to specify in writing, or, when that’s not possible, orally, preferably before a witness, that despite registering, they remain “faithful to the principles of Catholic doctrine.”
Some conservative Roman Catholic prelates have criticized Francis’ drive to resolve the Chinese dilemma in general. They insist that strict loyalty to Rome, even at the price of imprisonment and other persecution, is the only possible approach.
In past decades, many bishops and priests were imprisoned for years by Chinese authorities in retaliation for their unwavering support for the Vatican.
But the guidelines stressed recent “consolidated dialogue” between Beijing and the Vatican, asserting that current relations differ from the tensions of the 1950s, when Communist authorities sanctioned the so-called official Patriotic Church for Chinese Catholics.
