U.S. officials expect a visit from China’s top trade negotiator this month in Washington, signaling that higher-level discussions are likely to follow this week’s talks with midlevel officials in Beijing as the world’s two largest economies try to reach a deal to end a tit-for-tat tariff war.

“The current intent is that the Vice Premier Liu He will most likely come and visit us later in the month and I would expect the government shutdown would have no impact,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told reporters Thursday in Washington. “We will continue with those meetings just as we sent a delegation to China.”

The U.S. government is in the 20th day of a partial shutdown with President Donald Trump, a Republican, and congressional Democrats feuding over funding and Trump’s desire for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.

People familiar with the talks in Beijing said Thursday that hopes were mounting that Liu would continue talks with U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Mnuchin.

Higher level, key decisions

Talks at that level are viewed as important for making the key decisions to ease a festering trade war, which has disrupted trade flows for hundreds of billions of dollars worth of goods and roiled global markets.

Trump has demanded better terms of trade with China, with the United States pressing Beijing to address issues that would require structural change such as intellectual property theft, forced technology transfers and other non-tariff barriers.

On Thursday Trump said the United States was having “tremendous success” in its trade negotiations with China. A spokeswoman for Lighthizer’s office declined to comment.

​Few details on progress

More than halfway through a 90-day truce in the U.S.-China trade war agreed on Dec. 1 when Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping met at the G20 summit in Argentina, there have been few details provided of any progress made.

Trump has vowed to increase tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese imports March 2 if China fails to take steps to protect U.S. intellectual property, end policies that force American companies to turn over technology to a Chinese partner, allow more market access for U.S. businesses and reduce other non-tariff barriers to American products.

Ambitious timeline and hope

The timeline is seen as ambitious, but the resumption of face-to-face negotiations has bolstered hopes of a deal.

“We have the two sides back at the table. That’s encouraging,” said Myron Brilliant, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s head of international affairs, while speaking to reporters at an event Thursday.

China’s commerce ministry said Thursday that additional consultations with the United States were being arranged after the Beijing talks addressed structural issues and helped establish a foundation to resolve U.S. and Chinese concerns.

Commerce ministry spokesman Gao Feng told reporters the two sides were “serious” and “honest.”

Asked about China’s stance on issues such as forced technology transfers, intellectual property rights, non-tariff barriers and cyber attacks, and whether China was confident it could reach agreement with the United States, Gao said these issues were “an important part” of the Beijing talks.

“There has been progress in these areas,” he said without elaborating.

China has repeatedly played down complaints about intellectual property abuses, and has rejected accusations that foreign companies face forced technology transfers.

‘Cordial standoff’

Discussions on those issues were an extensive part of the talks, said people in Washington familiar with the discussions.

Chinese officials listened “politely” to U.S. grievances, they said, but responded by saying that the Americans had some issues wrong and misunderstood others, but that some other issues could be addressed.

“It was a cordial standoff,” said one person familiar with the discussions. China has said it will not give ground on issues that it perceives as core.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Trade Representative’s office said officials from the two sides discussed “ways to achieve fairness, reciprocity and balance in trade relations,” and focused on China’s pledge to buy a substantial amount of agricultural, energy, manufactured, and other products and services from the United States.”

The U.S. trade agency said the talks also focused on ways to ensure enforcement and verification of Chinese follow-through on any commitments it makes to the United States.

Steps taken

U.S. and Chinese officials made more progress on straightforward issues such as working out the details of Chinese pledges to buy a “substantial amount” of U.S. agricultural, energy and manufactured goods and services, sources said.

Since the Trump-Xi meeting, China has resumed purchases of U.S. soybeans. Buying had slumped after China imposed a 25 percent import duty on U.S. shipments of the oilseed on July 6 in response to U.S. tariffs.

China has also cut tariffs on U.S. cars, dialed back on an industrial development plan known as “Made in China 2025” and told its state refiners to buy more U.S. oil.

Earlier this week, China approved five genetically modified crops for import, the first in about 18 months, which could boost its overseas grains purchases and ease U.S. pressure to open its markets to more farm goods.
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From: MeNeedIt

This week, visitors to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas are getting a look at the latest technology in TVs, computers, smartwatches and drones. But they are also seeing examples of how tech can be used to help people around the world become more resilient. Michelle Quinn reports.
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From: MeNeedIt

The annual Consumer Electronics Show is underway in Las Vegas. The massive exhibition highlights trends and new products that should change the way we live — in some cases as early as next week, and in others, years in the future. VOA’s Kevin Enochs looks at a few of the new technologies that will change the way we drive.
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From: MeNeedIt

It has GPS, lasers, computer vision, and uses machine learning and sensors to be more efficient. This is the new high-tech farm equipment from John Deere, which made its first Consumer Electronics Show appearance this week to highlight the importance of tech in farming. 

Deere brought its massive agricultural combine and GPS-guided tractor to the Las Vegas technology event, making the point that farming is more than sticking a finger up in the air to gauge the weather. 

The machines are guided by enhanced GPS data that, according to the company, is accurate to 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) — compared with 3 meters (10 feet) for conventional GPS. 

As they work the fields, the machines gather data about soil conditions and monitor how corn and other crops are being harvested to reduce waste and improve efficiency. 

“We want consumers to understand how food is grown,” said Deere marketing executive Deanna Kovar. “Not only is this machine harvesting the grain, it’s harvesting the data, which helps farmers make decisions for next year.” 

Kovar said the extra electronics add about $10,000 to the cost of the combine, which sells for close to $500,000, and that most buyers take the option. 

“You can get a savings of about one to three bushels per acre, so it pays for itself very quickly,” she said.
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From: MeNeedIt

Astronomers in Canada have detected a mysterious volley of radio waves from far outside our galaxy, according to two studies published Wednesday in Nature.

What corner of the universe these powerful waves come from and the forces that produced them remain unknown.

The so-called repeating fast radio bursts were identified during the trial run last summer of a built-for-purpose telescope running at only a fraction of its capacity.

Known by its acronym CHIME, the world’s most powerful radio telescope, spread across an area as big as a football pitch, is poised to detect many more of the enigmatic pulses now that it is fully operational.

“At the end of the year, we may have found 1,000 bursts,” said Deborah Good, a PhD student at the University of British Columbia and one of 50 scientists from five institutions involved in the research.

High energy bursts

Fast radio bursts (FRBs) flash only for a micro-instant, but can emit as much energy as the sun does in 10,000 years.

Exactly what causes these high-energy surges of long waves at the far end of the electromagnetic spectrum remains the subject of intense debate.

More than 60 bursts have been cataloged since 2007, but only one other, observed in 2012 at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, was a repeater.

“FRBs, it seems, are likely generated in dense, turbulent regions of host galaxies,” Shriharsh Tendulkar, a corresponding author for both studies and an astronomer at McGill University, told AFP.

Cosmic convulsions created by the turbulent gas clouds that give rise to stars, or stellar explosions such a supernovae, are both possible incubators.

But consecutive radio bursts are a special case.

​No little green men

“The fact that the bursts are repeated rules out any cataclysmic models in which the source is destroyed while generating the burst,” Tendulkar added.

“An FRB emitted from a merger of two neutron stars, or a neutron star and a black hole, for example, cannot repeat.”

It is not yet clear whether the breeding grounds of repeating bursts are different from those that produce only a single radio pulse.

Significantly, the 2012 and 2018 “repeaters” have strikingly similar properties.

CHIME (Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment) also spotted a dozen single burst radio waves, but with an unusual profile.

Most FRBs spotted so far have wavelengths of a few centimeters, but these had intervals of nearly a meter, opening up a whole new line of inquiry for astronomers.

Could these enigmatic radio pulses point to intelligence elsewhere in the Universe? Might they be messages in a bottle?

“It is extremely, extremely unlikely,” Tendulkar said.

“As a scientist I can’t rule it out 100 percent. But intelligent life is not on the minds of any astronomer as a source of these FRBs.”

Constructed in British Columbia, CHIME is composed of four, 100-meter long half-pipe cylinders of metal mesh, which reconstruct images of the sky by processing the radio signals recorded by more than a thousand antennas.

“This signal processing system is the largest of any telescope on Earth,” the researchers said in a communique.

The other institutions with leading roles are the University of Toronto, the National Research Council of Canada, and the Perimeter Institute.
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From: MeNeedIt

Three days of trade talks in Beijing between the United States and China ended Wednesday with the White House expressing optimism.

“We expect something will come out of this,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told the Fox Business Network. “We are moving towards a more balanced and reciprocal trade agreement with China.”

But Sanders said no one knows yet what that agreement will look like or when it will be ready.

The U.S. Trade Representative’s office gave no details on the talks in Beijing other than saying they are “focused on China’s pledge to purchase a substantial amount of agricultural, energy, manufactured goods, and other products and services from the United States.”

But it also said any deal with China must be followed up with ongoing verification and enforcement.

There was no comment from Beijing on the talks, which were supposed to last just two days, but were extended for a third day after progress was apparently being made.

These were the first direct talks between U.S. and Chinese officials since Presidents Donald Trump and Xi Jinping met in December in Argentina and agreed to a 90-day truce in their trade war.

Both sides imposed heavy tariffs on each others’ exports last year after Trump complained about China’s theft of U.S. technology and pressure on U.S. companies doing business there to hand over such information.

The U.S. has also long complained about China’s government subsidies that make Chinese products cheaper than U.S. goods on the world market.

China says it is trying to protect its own economic interests and has accused the U.S. of violating international trading rules.

Asian stocks surged at the conclusion of the trade negotiations. Hong Kong was up 2.1 percent and Tokyo up more than 1 percent.

But U.S. indexes posted modest gains.
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From: MeNeedIt

Wickedly funny royal comedy-drama The Favourite lived up to its name Wednesday, leading the race for the British Academy Film Awards.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ film received 12 nominations for the U.K. equivalent of the Oscars, including best film, best director and best actress, for Olivia Colman. Colman won a Golden Globe on Sunday for her performance as Britain’s 18th-century Queen Anne.

Colman’s co-stars, Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz, received supporting-actress nominations as the two women competing for the monarch’s patronage.

Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, lunar drama First Man, autobiographical Mexican story Roma and musical melodrama A Star Is Born each received seven nominations for the prizes, considered an indicator of likely success at Hollywood’s Academy Awards in what’s shaping up to be an unpredictable awards season.

Best-picture nominees for the British awards, known as BAFTAs, are BlacKkKlansman, The Favourite, Green Book, Roma and A Star is Born.

Nominees for best British film — a separate category — are Channel Islands thriller Beast, Bohemian Rhapsody, The Favourite, fashion documentary McQueen, Laurel and Hardy biopic Stan and Ollie and crime thriller You Were Never Really Here.

Best-actress nominees are Colman, Glenn Close for The Wife, Lady Gaga for A Star is Born, Melissa McCarthy for Can You Ever Forgive Me? and Viola Davis for Widows.

Best-actor contenders are Bradley Cooper for A Star is Born, Christian Bale for Vice, Rami Malek for Bohemian Rhapsody, Steve Coogan for Stan and Ollie and Viggo Mortensen for Green Book.

The winners will be announced Feb. 10 at a ceremony in London hosted by Absolutely Fabulous star Joanna Lumley.
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From: MeNeedIt

A Georgia man involved with a recent documentary detailing abuse allegations against R. Kelly told police the singer’s manager threatened him.

Timothy Savage told an officer on Jan. 3 that Don Russell had texted him saying it would be best for him and his family if the documentary didn’t air, according to a Henry County police report.

Savage said he and his wife were involved with Lifetime’s “Surviving R. Kelly” series. The series, which aired earlier this month, looks at the singer’s history and allegations that he has sexually abused women and girls. Kelly, who turned 52 on Tuesday, has denied wrongdoing.

Russell called Savage while the officer was there and Savage put the phone on speaker so the officer could listen, the police report says. It went on to say that Russell accused Savage of lying to Lifetime and said that if Savage continued to support the series, Russell and Kelly would be forced to release information that would show Savage was a liar and that would ruin him, his reputation, his business and his family.

Contact information for Russell could not be immediately found.

The report says the case is being forwarded to the criminal investigations division for review.

In Kelly’s hometown Chicago, Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx addressed reporters Tuesday afternoon after her office had been inundated with calls about the allegations in the documentary, some tied to his Chicago-area home.

Foxx watched the series herself and said she found it “deeply, deeply disturbing.”

“I was sickened by the allegations. I was sickened as a survivor. I was sickened as a mother. I was sickened as a prosecutor,” she said.

But Foxx also said there’s no active investigation of Kelly and launching one would require victims and witnesses.

A Cook County jury acquitted Kelly of all 14 counts of child pornography in 2008. Prosecutors had argued a videotape showed him engaged in graphic sex acts with a girl as young as 13. Kelly and the alleged victim, in her 20s at the time of the trial, denied it was them in the video.

Kelly’s Chicago attorney, Steve Greenberg, said in a phone interview Tuesday evening that the allegations in the Lifetime documentary were false.

“Ten and a half years after he was found innocent [at trial of child pornography charges] and to fill reality TV time — someone comes up with another round of stories,” he said. “No one has found any sex slaves or underage girls because there aren’t any.”

Greenberg also said it was inappropriate for a state’s attorney to characterize allegations she’d seen on TV, prior to charges or even an investigation.

“Who makes their assessment of the evidence based on reality TV?” he said.

Kelly rose from poverty on Chicago’s South Side to become a star singer, songwriter and producer. Despite his legal troubles a decade ago, he still retains a following.

Kelly won a Grammy in 1997 for “I Believe I Can Fly,” and is known for such raunchy hits as “Bump N’ Grind” and “Ignition.”

 
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From: MeNeedIt

A group of concerned Zimbabweans has started an anti-alcohol and drug campaign, targeting communities in which unemployed young people resort to drinking and using narcotics to alleviate the stress of not having work. Those involved in the campaign say the solution lies largely with improving the country’s moribund economy.

Fewer than three in 10 young Zimbabweans have steady jobs. Many are idle and see no economic opportunity. For some, that leads to problems with alcohol and drugs. 

Church leaders, community leaders, and government officials have started warning youths of the impact of drug and alcohol abuse in Zimbabwe and its effect on their physical wellbeing and mental health.

With drug use growing in Zimbabwe, President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government has called for an all-stakeholders meeting on February 1 to come up with possible solutions.

Zimbabwe’s deputy director of Mental Health Services, Dr. Chido Rwafa, says the government cannot deal with the problem of substance abuse alone.

“Alcohol and substance use is a rising problem in all of Africa, and also in Zimbabwe, and it has become one of our top three diagnoses that we are seeing in our mental health unit, so it is becoming a problem. We need a coordinated approach to this problem. It is a multi-sectorial problem. We need a combined effort between government, between non-governmental organizations, with the community itself,” Rwafa said.

Youths are susceptible to peer pressure and can easily gain access to drugs, says Dr. Rwafa. Once hooked on drugs, they also become more likely to engage in criminal activities. 

This 20-year-old asked us not to film him when he was smoking cannabis. He says drug use would fall if more people could find employment. 

“The best way is just to improve our country economically such that all those people loitering in the streets will find jobs and will be focused. We are going nowhere. Even if you are to look (in the streets), there are some other people damaged (by drugs). Fifty percent of youths in the streets, they can not even work. Their life has been destructed by drugs etc. It is not that they want drug abuse,” Mandizha said.

Roman Catholic Priest Cloudy Maganga is trying to reduce substance abuse by youths by keeping them busy and offering counseling. 

“Within our hall, upstairs we are creating what we call a study center for the young people. We will have computers… We have also started what we call the sports for the young people. We have created a volleyball pitch, we have created also a netball pitch for the young people so that when they are free, during their free time, they can be engaged in sports, everyone here. So at least with that we are removing them from being just idle,” Maganga said.

While that may help, when young people have finished playing, they still find themselves unemployed and in the same conditions youths like Takudzwa Mandizha say make them turn to drugs.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

A group of concerned Zimbabweans has started an anti-alcohol and drug campaign, targeting communities in which unemployed young people resort to drinking and using narcotics to alleviate the stress of not having work. As Columbus Mavhunga reports from Harare, those involved in the campaign say the solution lies largely with improving the country’s moribund economy.
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From: MeNeedIt

The CES 2019 gadget show opened its doors Tuesday, with tech companies from giants to tiny startups showing off their latest products and services.

In recent years, CES’s influence has declined as Apple, Google and other major companies throw their own events to launch new wares. Still, more than 180,000 people from about 150 countries are expected to attend. The sprawling event spans 11 official venues, plus scores of unofficial ones throughout Las Vegas. The four-day show in Las Vegas opened after two days of media previews. 

Here are the latest findings and observations from Associated Press reporters on the ground.

Cutting through the babel

Google has transformed CES into a Disney-like theme park – complete with singing animatronic macarons – to showcase new features of its voice-enabled digital assistant.

This includes an “interpreter mode” that enables some of Google’s smart home devices to work as a translator. It’s being piloted at a hotel concierge desk near the Las Vegas tech conference and rolls out to consumer devices in several weeks. 

Voice assistants are getting pretty good at translating speech into text, but it’s a thornier challenge in artificial intelligence to enable real-time translation across different languages. Google’s new feature expands upon real-time translation services it’s rolled out to Android phones and headphones over the past year.

This is the second year that Google Assistant had made a huge splash at CES in an effort to outbid Amazon’s Alexa as the voice assistant of choice. 

Google this year has an amusement park ride that resembles Disney’s “It’s a Small World,” though on a roller-coaster-like train at slow speeds. Talking and singing characters showcase Google’s various voice-assistant features as visitors ride along.

Google isn’t the only CES exhibitor promising the next generation of instant translation. Chinese AI firm iFlytek has been showing of its translation apps and devices that are already popular among Chinese travelers. And at least two startups, New York-based Waverly Labs and China-based TimeKettle, are promoting their earbuds that work as in-ear translation devices.

Bring that umbrella

IBM is expanding its side job as the world’s meteorologist.

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty used a keynote address Tuesday to unveil a new global forecasting system that promises more accurate local weather reports in places that never had them before.

The computing giant owns The Weather Company, which runs popular weather services including weather.com and the Weather Channel and Weather Underground apps (though not the Weather Channel television network). Those apps provide precise and constantly updating forecasts in places like the U.S. and parts of Europe and Japan, but not in most of the world.

IBM says its new forecasting model relies in part on “crowd-sourced” data – barometric pressure readings from millions of smartphones and sensor readings from passing airplanes. 

Weather Company CEO Cameron Clayton says the new system is intended to aid IBM’s business providing critical weather data to airlines, energy firms and other industries. But he says it will also have societal benefits, such as helping small farmers in India or parts of Africa yield better crops. 

IBM may have trouble persuading some users to agree to transmit atmospheric data to IBM after the city of Los Angeles sued last week to stop the Weather Channel’s data-collection practices. The lawsuit alleges that the company uses location information not just to personalize weather but also to track users’ every step and profit off that information. The company has denied any impropriety with sharing location data collected from users, saying it does disclose what it does.

Samsung wants to bring robots home

Up next for Samsung: a robot that can keep its eye on grandma and grandpa.

The rolling robot, which talks and has two digital eyes on a black screen, can track medicines they take, measure blood pressure and call 911 if it detects a fall.

The company didn’t not say when Samsung Bot Care would be available, but brought the robot out on stage Monday at a presentation at CES. Samsung also said it is working on a robot for stores and another for testing and purifying the air in homes.

Samsung also unveiled TVs, appliances and other high-tech gizmos – but not a foldable phone it hinted at in November. But a startup called Royole did. The Royole FlexPai smartphone was first shown in November but the California-based company has more details. The phone will have a 7.8-inch display that can be folded like a wallet, priced at more than $1,300.

Star delight

Sony brought some star power to CES with a visit from musician Pharrell Williams, straight from trip to Anguilla.

The star of hit songs such as “Happy” came to talk about a mostly secret project that he and Sony are supposedly undertaking. But in the end, it was clearly an attempt by Sony to sprinkle some stardust on launches for TVs and other products.

“I was a little bit worried that he was still on holiday, but he is here,” Sony Music head Rob Stringer told the crowd.
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From: MeNeedIt

The trappings of success continue to arrive for K-pop sensation BTS, the latest a contract with the toy company Mattel which secured rights to produce dolls of the boy band.

And Mattel is not beyond riding those K-pop coattails. Shares of Mattel Inc. spiked almost 9 percent Monday, a day after the toymaker announced a global licensing agreement that also includes collectible figures and games.

The South Korean boy band, made up of members RM, Jin, SUGA, j-hope, Jimin, V and Jung Kook, last year became the first Korean pop group to reach No. 1 on the Billboard top 200.

BTS is an acronym of Bangtan Sonyeondan or “Beyond the Scene.” The band debuted in June 2013.
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From: MeNeedIt