Facebook CEO to Testify Before Congressional Committee

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before a congressional committee about the privacy scandal that has rocked the social media company. The House and Energy and Commerce Committee announced Wednesday Zuckerberg will testify on April 11 about the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which obtained data on tens of millions of Facebook users that could be used to influence voters in U.S. elections. The firm was hired by U.S. President Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, which paid the firm nearly $6 million. Committee chairman Greg Walden and ranking Democrat Frank Pallone said the hearing hopes to "shed light on critical consumer data privacy issues and help all Americans better understand what happens to their personal information online." The panel is the first of three congressional committees that have asked Zuckerberg…


Closure of Top Philippine Resort Island Would Shake up Business to Cut Pollution

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The possible closure of a major coastal tourism magnet in the Philippines for environmental cleanup will hurt business, but for a cause that helps everyone longer term, experts say. President Rodrigo Duterte said via the presidential website in March he would place Boracay Island under a “state of calamity.” The island may be shut down for two to 12 months, Philippine media reports say, citing other statements from Duterte and cabinet members. The government is “addressing wastewater issues through an improved sewerage system,” the country’s environment minister Roy Cimatu said in a March 27 statement. Boracay, a 10.3-square-kilometer feature in the central Philippines, has been compared to Bali and other Asian beach resort hot spots. Its main white sand beach runs four kilometers, paralleled by a strip of at least…


China Announces $50 Billion in Retaliatory Tariffs on US Goods

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China announced Wednesday it plans to impose tariffs on $50 billion worth of U.S. goods in response to a similar package announced by the United States. The Chinese measures would boost tariffs by 25 percent on 106 U.S. products, including soybeans, aircraft and cars. China's commerce ministry responded with its own measures less than 11 hours after the U.S. issued a proposed list of Chinese goods. The ministry said the question of when the measures will go into effect will depend on when the U.S. tariffs become active. U.S. President Donald Trump announced his intention to impose $50 billion in increased tariffs on Chinese products last month, and on Tuesday the U.S. Trade Representative released a proposed list of 1,300 goods including aerospace, medical and information technology products. Subject to…


Zuckerberg: Facebook Deleted Posts Linked to Russian ‘Troll Factory’ 

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Facebook, expanding its response to people using the platform improperly, said Tuesday that it had deleted hundreds of Russian accounts and pages associated with a "troll factory" indicted by U.S. prosecutors for fake activist and political posts in the 2016 U.S. election campaign. Facebook said many of the deleted articles and pages came from Russia-based Federal News Agency, known as FAN, and that the social media company's security team had concluded that the agency was technologically and structurally intertwined with the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency. Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg told Reuters in an exclusive interview that the agency "has repeatedly acted to deceive people and manipulate people around the world, and we don't want them on Facebook anywhere." Massive data collection The world's largest social media company is under pressure to improve its handling of data after disclosing that information about…


US Unveils Tariffs on $50 Billion Worth of Chinese Imports

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The Trump administration on Tuesday raised the stakes in a growing trade showdown with China, announcing 25 percent tariffs on some 1,300 industrial technology, transport and medical products to try to force changes in Beijing's intellectual property practices. The U.S. Trade Representative's office unveiled a list of mainly non-consumer products representing about $50 billion of annual imports that would nonetheless hit supply chains for many U.S. manufacturers. The list ranges from chemicals to light-emitting diodes, motorcycles and dental devices. Publication of the tariff list starts a public comment and consultation period expected to last around two months, after which USTR said it would issue a "final determination" on the product list. It has scheduled a May 15 public hearing on the tariffs. USTR said the tariffs were proposed "in response…


US States Vow to Defend Auto Fuel Efficiency Standards

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Nearly a dozen U.S. states and Washington, D.C., on Tuesday promised to defend federal automobile efficiency standards against a rollback proposed this week by Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. "All Americans ... deserve to enjoy fuel-efficient, low-emission cars and light trucks that save money on gas, improve our health and support American jobs," the attorneys general from 11 states said in a statement responding to Pruitt's proposal on Monday to ease the Obama-era standards. The standards called for roughly doubling by 2025 the average fuel efficiency of new vehicles sold in the United States to about 50 miles (80 kilometers) per gallon. Proponents say such standards help spur innovation in clean technologies and cut emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. California has long been allowed by an EPA waiver to impose stricter standards than Washington…


IMF: As Myanmar Economy Rebounds, Sanctions Risk Gives Some Investors Pause

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The government of Aung San Suu Kyi is opening the economy and growth is rebounding in Myanmar, though the possibility of broader Western sanctions over the Rohingya refugee crisis is nevertheless giving some foreign investors pause, according to a senior IMF official. Shanaka Jay Peiris, the International Monetary Fund's (IMF) mission chief to Myanmar, said in a recent interview that initial data reviewed by the IMF indicated that some foreign investors were delaying final approval of projects until there was clarity about how the situation may unfold. "The numbers we have for FDI [foreign direct investment] aren't showing it yet ... but foreign investment approvals are slowing down, so there is some indicator that going forward FDI may be weaker," Peiris told Reuters following the publication last week of the…


Experts: In Self-Driving Cars, Human Drivers and Standards Come Up Short

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Autonomous cars should be required to meet standards on their ability to detect potential hazards, and better ways are needed to keep their human drivers ready to assume control, U.S. auto safety and technology experts said after fatal crashes involving Uber Technologies and Tesla vehicles. Automakers and tech companies rely on human drivers to step in when necessary with self-driving technology. But in the two recent crashes, which involved vehicles using different kinds of technologies, neither of the human drivers took any action before the accidents. Driverless cars rely on lidar, which uses laser light pulses to detect road hazards, as well as sensors such as radar and cameras. There are not, however, any standards on the systems, nor do all companies use the same combination of sensors, and some…


New Gene Editing Tool May Yield Bigger Harvests

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Bread and chocolate are staples of the American diet. And a scientific team in California is working hard to make sure the plants they’re made from are as robust as possible. They’re using a recently discovered bacterial gene-editing tool called CRISPR to create more pest-resistant crops. CRISPR is a feature of the bacterial defense system. The microbes use it like a molecular pair of scissors, to precisely snip out viral infections in their DNA. Scientists at the Innovative Genomics Institute in Berkeley, California, are using CRISPR to manipulate plant DNA. Managing director, Susan Jenkins, says the technique is so much faster and precise than other plant transformation methods, it will likely increase the speed of creating new plant varieties by years, if not decades. “What CRISPR is going to allow,”…


Asian Markets Move Lower After US Stock Plunge

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Stock markets in Asia fell Tuesday, but did not suffer losses as steep as those Monday in U.S. markets where continued fears about a U.S.-China trade war and a verbal attack on an online retailer by President Donald Trump sent stocks lower. Markets in Japan and Hong Kong fell by more than one percent in early trading, but by midday had rebounded to make back half the losses. The U.S. Down Jones Industrial Average closed down 1.9 percent Monday, while the Standard & Poor's 500 dropped 2.3 percent and the NASDAQ fell nearly three percent. Trump has strongly criticized online giant Amazon three times in the last few days. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos also owns The Washington Post, whose revelatory stories on Trump and his administration frequently draw the president's…


US vs. China: a ‘Slap-Fight,’ Not a Trade War — So Far

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First, the United States imposed a tax on Chinese steel and aluminum. Then, China counterpunched Monday with tariffs on a host of U.S. products, including apples, pork and ginseng.  On Wall Street, the stock market buckled on the prospect of an all-out trade war between the world's two biggest economies. But it hasn't come to that - not yet, anyway. "We're in a trade slap-fight right now,'' not a trade war, said Derek Scissors, resident scholar and China specialist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. China is a relatively insignificant supplier of steel and aluminum to the United States. And the $3 billion in U.S. products that Beijing targeted Monday amount to barely 2 percent of American goods exported to China. But the dispute could escalate, and quickly. Already, in…


Library Helps ‘Left-behind’ Nepali Women Gain Cash, Confidence

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For farmers trying to figure out how to heal a sick cow or grow tomatoes commercially in this Himalayan community, help is at hand in the form of a crumbling, earthquake-scarred library. In a rural area where searching for information online or paying for expert advice is rarely an option, the library is a first stop for female farmers daunted by their new role: running the family farm while their husbands are away looking for work. "Most of the men have migrated for money now in Nepal. It's a very huge problem," said Meera Marahattha, the "human Google" who runs the library. But there's an upside. "Because of this male migration, females have the opportunity to lead," she added - sometimes for the first time. Migration is growing around the…


Facebook Faces Calls to Further Protect User Privacy

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Facebook is a company in a hurry.   Since the world learned about the latest customer data controversy at Facebook, the social media network has unleashed a swarm of changes. But it’s unclear whether Facebook’s own reckoning will be enough to satisfy regulators and lawmakers.   “We've reached a tipping point with Facebook and privacy,” said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest advocacy group. “What's most interesting at this moment are the number of forces — political, economic and social — that are converging. And I think the practical consequences is that something big will change.”   With more than 2 billion customers, Facebook has been in the hot seat in recent weeks over how an outside researcher gave the data of 50 million users to…


Amazon Shares Fall 4 Percent as Trump Renews Attack

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Shares of Amazon.com Inc fell 4 percent on Monday after U.S. President Donald Trump again attacked the online retailer over the pricing of its deliveries through the United States Postal Service and promised unspecified changes. "Only fools, or worse, are saying that our money losing Post Office makes money with Amazon," Trump tweeted. "They lose a fortune, and this will be changed. Also, our fully tax paying retailers are closing stores all over the country ... not a level playing field!" Trump has been vocal about his opposition to Amazon's use of the postal service and Monday's tweet adds to investor worries that the company could see more regulation. Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for a comment. Details of Amazon's payments to the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) are…


Promises, Promises: Facebook’s History with Privacy

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"We've made a bunch of mistakes." "Everyone needs complete control over who they share with at all times." "Not one day goes by when I don't think about what it means for us to be the stewards of this community and their trust."   Sound familiar? It's Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg addressing a major privacy breach — seven years ago.   Lawmakers in many countries may be focused on Cambridge Analytica's alleged improper use of Facebook data, but the social network's privacy problems back more than a decade. Here are some of the company's most notable missteps and promises around privacy. 2007   The social media darling unveils its Facebook Platform to great fanfare. Zuckerberg says app developers can now access the web of connections between users and their friends,…


China Raises Tariffs on US Pork, Fruit in Trade Dispute

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China raised import duties on a $3 billion list of U.S. pork, fruit and other products Monday in an escalating tariff dispute with President Donald Trump that companies worry might depress global commerce. The Finance Ministry said it was responding to a U.S. tariff hike on steel and aluminum that took effect March 23. But a bigger clash looms over Trump's approval of possible higher duties on nearly $50 billion of Chinese goods in a separate argument over technology policy. The tariff spat is one aspect of wide-ranging tensions between Washington and Beijing over China's multibillion-dollar trade surplus with the United States and its policies on technology, industry development and access to its state-dominated economy. Forecasters say the immediate impact should be limited, but investors worry the global recovery might…


Coral Farms Revive the Reefs

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Coral reefs cover less than one percent of the world's ocean beds, yet they are home to a quarter of all marine life on the planet. But they are facing serious challenges that threaten their survival. As Faiza Elmasry tells us, beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean island nation of the Seychelles, conservationists are coming up with new ways to save the reefs. VOA's Faith Lapidus narrates. ...


Facebook Faces Calls for Change

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The fallout continues for Facebook over how it handles user data and privacy. U.S. and European lawmakers are calling for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify, and regulators have opened investigations. Michelle Quinn reports on how the social media giant is facing a tipping point when it comes to dealing with user privacy. ...


Tesla Says Vehicle in Deadly Crash Was on Autopilot 

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A vehicle in a fatal crash last week in California was operating on Autopilot, making it the latest accident to involve a self-driving vehicle, Tesla has confirmed. The electric car maker said the driver, who was killed in the accident, did not have his hands on the steering wheel for six seconds before the crash, despite several warnings from the vehicle. Tesla Inc. tells drivers that its Autopilot system, which can maintain speed, change lanes and self-park, requires drivers to keep their eyes on the road and hands on the wheel in order to take control of the vehicle to avoid accidents.  Tesla said its vehicle logs show the driver took no action to stop the Model X SUV from crashing into a concrete lane divider. Photographs of the SUV…


AP Analysis: Blacks Largely Missing From High-Salary Positions

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Jonathan Garland's fascination with architecture started early: He spent much of his childhood designing Lego houses and gazing at Boston buildings on rides with his father away from their largely minority neighborhood.  But when Garland looked around at his architectural college, he didn't see many who looked like him. There were few black faces among students, and fewer teaching skills or giving lectures.    "If you do something simple like Google 'architects' and you go to the images tab, you're primarily going to see white males," said Garland, 35, who's worked at Boston and New York architectural firms. "That's the image, that's the brand, that's the look of an architect." And that's not uncommon in other lucrative fields, 50 years after the Reverend Martin Luther King, a leader in the fight…


These Burgers Are Better for the Planet, but You’d Never Know It

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As the world's population heads toward 10 billion by midcentury, experts are wrestling with how to feed the world without wrecking the planet. It's not easy to find foods with lower environmental impact that still taste as good as the ones they are intended to replace. But chefs and environmentalists are both cheering one new menu item: the mushroom-blended burger. VOA's Steve Baragona has more. ...


NY’s Immigrant Taxi Drivers Despair as Taxi Industry Slumps

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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. ...


Could Enemies Target Undersea Cables That Link the World?

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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,…


Trump EPA Expected to Roll Back Auto Gas Mileage Standards 

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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…


Facebook ‘Ugly Truth’ Memo Triggers New Firestorm Over Ethics

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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…