The airlines are getting better at sticking to their schedules and are losing fewer bags. Their customers seem to be complaining less often.

Those are the findings of an annual report on airline quality being released Monday by researchers at Wichita State University and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

The researchers use information compiled by the U.S. Department of Transportation to rate the airlines for on-time performance, baggage handling, bumping passengers off oversold flights, and complaints filed with the government.

They planned to release their list of the best airlines later Monday.

The report’s general observations:

On time performance: The percentage of flights that arrived on time or close enough rose to 81.4 percent in 2016 from 79.9 percent in 2015. Of 12 leading U.S. carriers, only American, JetBlue and Virgin America got worse.

Lost bags: The rate of bags being lost, stolen or delayed fell 17 percent.

Bumping passengers: Your chances of getting bumped by the airline dropped 18 percent, which doesn’t include people who voluntarily gave up their seat for money or a travel voucher.

Fewer complaints: The rate of complaints filed with the government dropped about one-fifth, with complaints rising only for Hawaiian and Virgin America.

The official complaint rates don’t include the larger number of complaints that passengers file directly with the airline. The airlines are not required to report those figures.

Clearly, however, airlines still have a perception problem. It’s not hard to find passengers who complain about a miserable flight, a missed connection, or shabby treatment by airline employees. Comments like that abound on Twitter.

“People don’t look at the numbers,” said Dean Headley, a marketing professor at Wichita State and co-author of Monday’s report. “They just know what happened to them, or they hear what happened to other people.”

The Wichita State and Embry-Riddle researchers have been doing their report for more than 25 years, making it useful for comparing airlines. But some observers of the airline industry dismiss their number-crunching approach, and there are many other surveys that purport to rank the airlines.

The Transportation Department counts a flight as being on time even if it arrives up to 14 minutes late. “Airlines are happy with that (grace period) because it makes them look better and misleads the passenger,” said aviation consultant Michael Baiada. He said airlines can do better, and besides, travelers pay to be on time — not 14 minutes late.

TripAdvisor releases rankings

More broadly, a statistical analysis of government data “really doesn’t take into consideration how the customer is treated,” said Bryan Saltzburg, an executive with travel site TripAdvisor LLC. “`How comfortable are they on the plane? How helpful is the staff? What’s the value for what the customer paid?”

TripAdvisor released its own airline rankings Monday, which it said were based on analysis of “hundreds of thousands” of reviews posted by users. It placed JetBlue and Alaska Airlines among the top 10 in the world, and it rated Delta ahead of American and United among the largest U.S. carriers.

Other outfits including J.D. Power and Skytrax also put out ratings. Airlines boast when they win. Recently, American Airlines started putting stickers on all 968 of its planes to note that a trade publication, Air Transport World, named it airline of the year.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

A cyclone that left a trail of destruction in northeast Australia and New Zealand has also damaged one of the few healthy sections of the Great Barrier Reef to have escaped large-scale bleaching, scientists said on Monday.

The natural devastation adds to the human and economic toll of Cyclone Debbie, which killed at least six people in recent weeks and severed rail transport lines in one of the world’s biggest coal precincts.

The damage caused when the intense, slow-moving cyclone system struck a healthier section of the reef outweighed any potential beneficial cooling effect, scientists from the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies said.

“Any cooling effects related to the cyclone are likely to be negligible in relation to the damage it caused, which unfortunately struck a section of the reef that had largely escaped the worst of the bleaching,” ARC said in a statement.

The World Heritage site has suffered a second bleaching event in 12 months, triggered by unseasonably warm waters, ARC added. Higher temperatures force coral to expel living algae and turn white as it calcifies.

Mildly bleached coral can recover if the temperature drops, and an ARC survey found this happened in southern parts of the reef, where coral mortality was much lower, though scientists said much of the Great Barrier Reef was unlikely to recover.

“It takes at least a decade for a full recovery of even the fastest-growing corals, so mass bleaching events 12 months apart offers zero prospect of recovery for reefs damaged in 2016,” said James Kerry, a senior research officer at the ARC.

Repeated damage could prompt UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee to reconsider a 2015 decision not to put the Great Barrier Reef on its “in danger” list.

Tourists drawn to the unique attraction spend A$5.2 billion ($3.9 billion) each year, a 2013 Deloitte Access Economics report estimated.
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From: MeNeedIt

Veteran Spanish golfer Sergio Garcia finally captured his first major title, winning Sunday’s Masters championship in Augusta, Georgia, in a sudden death playoff over Britain’s Justin Rose.

The two players are long-time friends and they both finished regulation at 9-under-par. On the first extra hole, where they again played the par-4 18th, Rose hit his shot off the tee into the rough and was unable to reach the green in two shots. He made a bogie 5.

Needing only to two-putt the hole to win, Garcia finished in style by sinking his 12-foot (4m) putt for a birdie 3. He had missed a putt from about the same distance on the same hole that would have given him the win in regulation.

After he hugged his caddie, the crowd loudly chanted “Sergio, Sergio, Sergio!” Garcia pumped his arms and pounded his fist into the grass in elation, and then his fiancee joined him on the green for a tight hug and kisses.

“It’s been such a long time coming,” said the 37-year-old Garcia, after a two decade wait in which he played 73 majors. “I thought I had it on 18 (in regulation). I felt today the calmness I have never felt in a major on a Sunday. Even after making a couple bogies, I felt very positive.”

Sunday’s win has added meaning

“Disappointed,” said Rose, last year’s Rio Olympics gold medalist and 2013 U.S. Open champion. “I lost a wonderful battle with Sergio. But he deserves it. He’s had his fair share of heartbreak. I played well, but he rallied.”

It was a fairy tale-like story, because Garcia’s first major golf championship came on what would have been the 60th birthday of his idol Seve Ballesteros, his fellow Spaniard and former world No. 1 who won five major championships, including Masters victories in 1980 and 1983. Ballesteros died six years ago from brain cancer.

“It’s amazing,” said Garcia. “To do it on his 60th birthday and join him and José María Olazábal, my two idols.”

Like Ballesteros, the Spaniard Olazábal won two Masters championships, in 1994 and 1999. Garcia said Olazábal sent him a text message before the Masters began, telling him what he needed to do and that he believed in him.

Tight battle

The 36-year-old Rose and Garcia were co-leaders to start the fourth and final round Sunday at six-under-par, and both played the first nine holes at two-under-par. Garcia fell two shots behind after bogies at the 10th and 11th holes, but got one back with a birdie on the 14th. He tied Rose with an eagle 3 on the 15th while Rose had a birdie 4.

Rose went back ahead with a birdie on the 16th, but fell back into a tie with a bogie on the 17th, setting up the dramatic finish.

Throughout the final day, the two golfers acknowledged one another’s well-played shots.

“I think at the end of the day we’re both trying to win, but we’re both people and we both have to represent the game the way we should,” said Garcia. “We’re good friends so we were respectful of one another and cheering each other on. We wanted to win, but we didn’t want the other to make mistakes.”

“I think it will be a tournament I will win one day,” said Rose. “It’s my favorite tournament of the year. I have a bunch of years left in my tank, and I think this is one I will knock off.”

 
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From: MeNeedIt

More and more Americans are interested in consuming healthy food and products. Retailers are feeding this growing demand by offering new products or introducing old ones in brand new ways. Coconut is currently one of the hottest trends in the U.S. food market. VOA’s Faiza Elmasry has more. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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From: MeNeedIt

Chuck Berry fans are getting their chance to pay their respects to the rock ’n’ roll visionary, roughly three weeks after his death at age 90 near his hometown of St. Louis.

Fans of the legend behind such classics as Johnny B. Goode, Sweet Little Sixteen and Roll Over Beethoven can file past his casket Sunday at The Pageant, a St. Louis club where he frequently performed. The public viewing will be followed by a private service for family and friends, including those in the music industry.

Charles Edward Anderson Berry, who died March 18, was the first artist in the inaugural 1986 class to go into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and he closed out its concert in 1995 to celebrate that Cleveland building’s opening. The Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards said at Berry’s induction ceremony that Berry was the one who started it all.

Berry, whose core repertoire included about three dozen songs, had a profound influence on rock ’n’ roll, from garage bands all the way up to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

Well before the rise of Bob Dylan, Berry wedded social commentary to the beat and rush of popular music.

“He was singing good lyrics, and intelligent lyrics, in the ’50s when people were singing, ‘Oh, baby, I love you so,’” John Lennon once observed.

“Everything I wrote about wasn’t about me, but about the people listening,” Berry once said.
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From: MeNeedIt

Most people have likely heard about the dangers of microplastics, the particles less than 5 millimeters in size that deteriorate from larger plastic pieces that have entered the oceans. Scientists are beginning to realize the effect this plastic is having on all kinds of sea life, from the smallest to the largest, and even those that live in the deepest darkest parts of the Mariana Trench. VOA’s Kevin Enochs has details.
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From: MeNeedIt

A relatively large asteroid will cross Earth’s orbit around the sun this month. Astrophysicists and astronomers say there is no chance of a collision, but it will be the closest flyby of an asteroid that large for at least another 10 years.

Asteroid 2014 JO25, discovered three years ago, is about 650 meters (2,100 feet) in diameter, 60 times as large as the small asteroid that plunged into our atmosphere as a meteor and exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013. That blast was felt thousands of kilometers away and caused havoc on the ground, damaging more than 7,000 homes and offices and injuring 1,500 people.

Asteroid 2014 JO25’s pass by Earth on April 19 will be a near miss, cosmically speaking. The U.S. space agency NASA said no one should worry: “There is no possibility for the asteroid to collide with our planet, [but] this will be a very close approach for an asteroid of this size.”

The Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union classifies 2014 JO25 as a “potentially hazardous asteroid.” (Astronomers classify asteroids as “minor planets”; when they pass close to Earth they are termed “near Earth objects.”)

WATCH: NASA Animation: Asteroid 2014 JO25’s Orbit

An animation of the intersection of Earth’s orbit and that of 2014 JO25, prepared by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a unit of the California Institute of Technology, makes it look like an awfully close call, but the hard facts are more reassuring: At its closest point, the asteroid will be about five times as far from Earth as the moon is, more than 1.75 million kilometers away (1,087,400 miles).

Although the asteroid is expected to be twice as reflective as our moon, it will be difficult to spot in a night sky filled with stars, and certainly not without help. Scientists say the sort of telescope amateur astronomers use should be adequate to pick out the space rock as it whizzes across the sky at 120,000 kilometers per hour (74,500 mph).

EarthSky.org, a website that follows developments in the cosmos and throughout nature in general, has posted an article with detailed information to help sky-watchers find the asteroid on April 19, and for a day or two afterward.

Professional astronomers also will be tracking 2014 JO25 closely. Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory, an extremely powerful radio telescope center, will study the asteroid for five days.

After all, it’s not often that something as big as this comes along, even a couple of million kilometers from home. NASA says 2014 JO25 hasn’t been this close to Earth in the past 400 years, and it will be at least 500 years before it comes back for a repeat close encounter with our planet.

Asteroids actually pass close to Earth fairly often, but it’s their size that matters. Asteroid 2017 GM made one of the closest passes by Earth ever seen — 16,000 kilometers (9,900 miles) above sea level — less than a week ago, on April 4. Little notice was taken, however, because that chunk of space rock was about the size of a small car.
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From: MeNeedIt

India and Bangladesh signaled deepening ties Saturday as New Delhi committed a $4.5-billion line of credit to Dhaka for development projects, and the two countries signed their first-ever pact on defense cooperation. 

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced an additional $500 million in credit for Bangladesh to buy military equipment from India during the visit to New Delhi by Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

Calling India a “long standing and trusted development partner,” Modi said that the new credit lines “bring our resources allocation to Bangladesh to more than $8 billion over the past six years.” 

Both leaders reaffirmed their close ties during the Bangladeshi prime minister’s first visit to India in seven years, with Modi speaking of a “golden era” in their friendship and Hasina saying their friendly ties would benefit South Asia.

The two countries signed 22 agreements, including one on civil nuclear cooperation that aims to help Bangladesh develop its civilian nuclear program.

Many in New Delhi see the deal for defense cooperation over the next five years as the key breakthrough that will help reduce Bangladesh’s reliance on China for its military needs.

Worried by the growing Chinese influence in its neighborhood, New Delhi has made a concerted push in recent years to grow strategic ties with neighboring countries. Bangladesh’s purchase of two submarines from China last year deepened those concerns in India.

Calling the defense pact a feather in India’s cap, Sukh Deo Muni, a South Asia expert at New Delhi’s Institute of Defense Studies and Analyses, said,“India does not want China to consolidate defense ties just next to its belly, that is true.”

Although the political opposition in Bangladesh has denounced the pact, independent analysts in Dhaka was optimistic that it will help achieve balance.

“Approximately 80 percent dependency at this moment you see on China, so it should be brought down. That actually reduces our vulnerability,” said Abdur Rashid, Executive Director of the Institute of Conflict, Law and Development Studies in Dhaka. “If one is interrupted we can depend on the other.”

 A new rail link between the Indian city of Kolkata and Khulna in Bangladesh, and a bus link between Kolkata and Dhaka also were inaugurated, while another old rail link was restored to coincide with Hasina’s visit. The Bangladeshi leader said the greater connectivity is vital for the region’s development.

A key water-sharing agreement that Dhaka has long pushed for, however, eluded Hasina.

Although New Delhi favors such an arrangement, opposition from West Bengal state in India, through which the Teesta River flows into Bangladesh, has prevented the two countries from clinching a deal.

As Modi assured her of his commitment to conclude a deal, the Bangladeshi leader sounded a note of optimism. “I believe we shall be able to get India’s support in resolving these issues expeditiously,” said Hasina.

The two countries have had a close relationship since 1971, when India helped Bangladesh gain independence from Pakistan following a bloody nine-month war.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

March was a disappointing month for job seekers, with the U.S. Labor Department reporting that the private sector added only 98,000 jobs last month. But one industry is looking beyond the job numbers and toward distant shores as President Donald Trump meets for the first time with Chinese President Xi Jinping to talk about trade. Mil Arcega reports.
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From: MeNeedIt

When Arnaud Laillou, a nutrition specialist with UNICEF, led a salt iodization study in 2014, he wanted to be sure that salt producers were not adding too much iodine.

Just four years earlier, UNICEF had stopped providing iodine to salt producers at the end of a decade-long, largely successful government-run iodization program.

Laillou was stunned to find that 90 percent of coarse salt and 40-50 percent of fine salt was now not iodized. And all of it was labeled as iodized.

“It was a real shock for us,” says Laillou of the findings of the paper that was published last year in the online journal Nutrients.

Serious public health problem

That paper said iodine deficiency in Cambodia had become “a serious public health problem” just years after the issue had largely been dealt with, and warned that poorer families and rural families were worst affected.

That was at odds with a study carried out three years earlier that showed salt producers were adding iodine, and that authorities were enforcing a 2003 subdecree that mandated iodization.

Iodine is essential to brain development and hormonal functions. If a pregnant woman is iodine-deficient, for example, her baby’s brain will not develop properly. The mineral is vital for brain development in children, too, and for proper hormone functioning in all ages. Iodine is so important that the World Health Organization has described iodine-deficiency as “the [world’s] single greatest preventable cause of mental retardation.”

Iodizing salt is widely regarded as one of the cheapest and most effective public health measures: it costs 2 cents per kilogram of salt.

Children hurt most

Iodine-deficiency, Laillou said, is particularly damaging for children.

“For example, Cambodia is investing a lot of money at the level of the Ministry of Education to improve the education of their children,” he said. “But having a lack of iodine in the brain, it decreases [their] IQ by 13 points.”

That, he points out, compares with the loss of three IQ points for a child who is not breastfed for the first six months of life.

Wholesale failure

In theory, adding iodine to Cambodia’s annual output of 80-100,000 tons of salt should be simple: close to 100 percent is produced by the SPCKK cooperative in the southern province of Kampot. SPCKK produces coarse salt, which it sells in bulk to middlemen who operate boilers that refine that into fine salt.

By law, SPCKK must iodize all of its salt output. But over the years several of the iodizing machines it was given have broken down, and SPCKK has not sourced spare parts. Now it has four working machines and that’s not enough.

And so, as SPCKK’s technical chief, Bun Narin told VOA, its workers often spray iodine by hand, a method that is at best imprecise.

“Large companies [outside Cambodia] use machines to monitor, whereas we are still using labor and so it’s not always accurate,” he said.

That is putting it mildly, given that Laillou’s research found 90 percent of the country’s coarse salt lacks any iodine. Despite that, SPCKK’s output is labeled as containing the mandated amount of iodine.

If boilers don’t test for the concentration of iodine in the coarse salt that they buy, and if, further along the production line, salt repackagers, like 57-year-old Koy Rithiya, don’t test for the concentration in the fine salt that they buy from the boilers and then add iodine where needed, the result is noniodized salt.

Which is exactly what has happened.

Routine testing

When Rithiya set up his business in Phnom Penh 15 years ago, he didn’t know he needed to add iodine; he started doing that a decade ago after being advised by UNICEF.

These days he uses an electronic monitor to test the concentration of iodine in the 500 kilograms of fine salt that he repackages each day, and adds iodine where needed to meet the mandated standard of 30-60 parts per million.

He doesn’t yet use the monitor to test his daily output of 400 kilograms of coarse salt; instead he relies on a test that merely shows whether iodine is present or not. That test, however, does not measure the concentration.

Rithiya reckons the problem of iodine-deficiency has emerged in part because some producers use expired iodine, “but also because some producers combine salt with iodine without correctly balancing it.”

“And some don’t bother to use it correctly,” he said.

A lack of enforcement

The report makes clear where the problem lies: on the production side is SPCKK, as well as some boilers and salt repackagers; on the enforcement side are the authorities for failing to ensure that producers follow the law.

The irony is that by 2010, the government’s program meant the health problems associated with iodine deficiency in Cambodia were largely a thing of the past. A decade earlier, nearly 1 in 5 primary school children had goiters, a condition where the thyroid in the neck swells up. Many adults did, too. By 2010, that was no longer the case.

But when iodine prices tripled after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, many salt producers in Cambodia stopped buying the additive, and the authorities failed to make sure they were iodizing. The result: a re-emergent public health issue that has, to date, remained largely invisible.

The situation, though bad, should start to improve. UNICEF is working with a government subcommittee to devise a certification standard for all producers, although that could take two years to implement.

Ven Keahak, who heads the subcommittee on salt iodization, says the new licensing system will mean producers “have to have a machine, iodine powder [in stock], a brand name, and salt with proper quality in order to get a license.”

“It’s a legal enforcement that the ministry has to conduct,” he said.

A lack of enforcement has been part of the problem, but Keahak would not comment on the failure of government agencies to apply the current law. He did confirm that no one has been prosecuted for failing to add iodine or for failing to monitor the system.

The difficulty for concerned Cambodians is that every bag of salt carries the logo stating that it is iodized. To deal with that, the Ministry of Planning will now test all salt brands and will place advertisements in newspapers to tell people which brands they can trust.

Until then, the failure to police the country’s salt output will keep damaging lives in what experts say was an entirely avoidable public health issue.
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From: MeNeedIt

President Donald Trump on Friday chose Kevin Hassett, an economics adviser to past Republican presidential candidates, to be chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. Hassett will play a critical role in analyzing the performance of the economy and impact of policy changes.

Hassett is the research director for domestic policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank that he joined in 1997. He has provided economic advice to the presidential campaigns of John McCain, George W. Bush and Mitt Romney. With a doctorate in economics from the University of Pennsylvania, Hassett has worked as a senior economist at the Federal Reserve and taught at Columbia University’s business school.

Jason Furman, the CEA chair under former President Barack Obama, hailed Hassett as an “excellent pick” on Twitter.

“He is serious about substance, committed to dialogue, & knows how to navigate DC,” Furman wrote.

An expert on taxes and budget policy, Hassett also co-wrote a paper challenging the National Football League conclusions about the New England Patriots using underinflated footballs to gain an advantage against the Indianapolis Colts in a 2015 playoff game.

Not all of Hassett’s analysis has been prescient. He has faced criticism for co-writing the 1999 book “Dow 36,000,” which predicted a rising stock market shortly before the tech bubble burst and the Dow Jones industrial average tumbled.

The CEA has routinely been filled by leading academic economists and was among the most prominent vacant posts during the early months of the Trump presidency.

Formed in 1946, the CEA is responsible for giving the president economic guidance on domestic and international policy. The post has also been a launching pad for leading monetary policy at the Fed. Previous CEA chairs — Janet Yellen, Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan — have served as the past three Fed chairs.
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From: MeNeedIt

Pearl Jam, Tupac Shakur, Joan Baez, Electric Light Orchestra, Journey and Yes will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on Friday night.

Nile Rodgers will receive a special honor at the event held at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.

Presenters inducting the 2017 class include David Letterman, Snoop Dogg, Pharrell Williams, Dhani Harrison, Pat Monahan, Jackson Browne and Alex Lifeson of Rush.

Shakur, the prolific rapper, was shot and killed at his peak in 1996. “Keep Ya Head Up,” “Life Goes On,” “Ambitionz Az a Ridah” and “Changes” are among his best-known songs.

After Nirvana just three years ago, Pearl Jam is the second band with roots in Seattle’s grunge rock scene to make it into the Rock Hall. The band exploded in popularity from the start in the early 1990s behind songs like “Alive,” “Jeremy” and “Even Flow.”

Shakur, Baez, Pearl Jam and ELO were all elected in their first year as nominees.

To be eligible, all of the nominees had to have released their first recording no later than 1991. Inductees will eventually be enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame museum in Cleveland.
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From: MeNeedIt