Taking a data-driven approach to disaster preparedness can help cities at risk bounce back after earthquakes. Faith Lapidus explains.
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From: MeNeedIt

FIFA has finally and fully approved video review to help referees at the World Cup.

Also Friday, the world soccer body lifted its three-decade ban on Iraq’s hosting of international events. The cities of Irbil, Basra and Karbala were given the go-ahead to stage official matches.

The last step toward giving match officials high-tech help in Russia was agreed to by FIFA’s ruling council, chaired by President Gianni Infantino.

“We are extremely happy with that decision,” Infantino said at a news conference in Bogota, adding it would lead to “a more transparent and fairer sport. We need to live with our times.”

FIFA will now look to sign a World Cup sponsor for video assistant referees (VAR) at the June 14-July 15 tournament.

The landmark decision on using technology came two weeks after FIFA’s rule-making panel, known as IFAB, voted to write VAR into the laws of soccer.

That move still left competition organizers to opt to use video review in their games, and FIFA’s ruling committee had to sign off on the World Cup decision.

FIFA council member Reinhard Grindel wrote on his Twitter account that clear communication would be important to make the system a success — and was promised on Friday by Infantino.

Referees can call on VAR to review and overturn “clear and obvious errors” plus “serious missed incidents” involving goals, penalty awards, red cards and mistaken identity.

Reviews lag

In 18 months of trials worldwide, reviews have often been slower than promised and communication has been unclear in the stadium.

“Obviously it is not perfect and we are not going to reach 100 percent perfection,” Infantino acknowledged. “What we definitely want to do is help.”

Controversy has been stirred even by the most experienced VAR officials who have handled many more games than most referees who will work at the 64-game World Cup.

Thirty-six referees, plus their teams of assistants, are being trained by FIFA for World Cup duty and many come from countries that do not use video review in domestic games.

The three Iraqi cities that got the go-ahead Friday to host official matches had been allowed to organize friendlies in the last year, provided the security situation was “stable.”

Iraq will host Qatar and Syria for a friendly tournament starting on March 21 in Basra.

“FIFA has given the green light for the resumption, but the organizers of the championship must take the final decision,” added Infantino.

‘No’ to Baghdad, for now

FIFA added that it could not “yet” agree to a request from the Iraqi authorities to organize matches in Baghdad, but Infantino promised that the city’s application would continue to be studied.

Iraq has not played full internationals on home turf since its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

The ban, covering all but domestic matches, stayed in place after the U.S.-led invasion of 2003 toppled dictator Saddam Hussein.

It was briefly lifted in 2012, but a power outage during an Iraq-Jordan match in Irbil led FIFA to promptly reinstate it.

Also Friday:

— FIFA reported a $192 million loss in its published accounts for 2017, after another year of stalled sponsor sales. But that was less than half of the $369 million deficit in 2016.

FIFA has backloaded more than $2 billion worth of broadcasting deals into the 2018 accounts and expects to exceed its revenue target of $5.6 billion and show a profit for the 2015-18 financial cycle.

—  The soccer body agreed to publish the voting choices of member federations in the 2026 World Cup bidding contest on June 13 in Moscow.

A North American bid combining the United States, Canada and Mexico is competing with Morocco for the right to host the first 48-team tournament in eight years’ time. Up to 207 FIFA members will vote, with the four bidding nations excluded.

— Infantino also answered with a firm “no” when asked whether Russia’s current political tensions with Britain could affect its hosting of the World Cup.

— FIFA failed to make progress on revamping national team competitions for women and youth squads. Discussions had begun on creating a global women’s league, and merging Under-17 and Under-20 World Cups staged every two years into single, annual Under-18 competitions.

Some information for this report came from AFP.
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From: MeNeedIt

The world’s most expensive chocolate went on display Friday at a chocolate fair in Obidos in Portugal.

Priced at 7,728 euros ($9,489) and covered in edible gold, the chocolate is part of a limited edition of 1,000 bonbons. It has a filling of saffron threads, white truffle, vanilla from Madagascar and gold flakes.

It was guarded by two uniformed men.

Its creator, Portuguese chocolatier Daniel Gomes, said the diamond-shaped chocolate was certified as the world’s most expensive by the Guinness Book of Records, which in 2017 listed $250 La Madeline au Truffe made by Danish artisan chocolate-maker Fritz Knipschildt’s as the record holder.

Its crown-shaped box is decorated with 5,500 Swarovksi crystals and also carries personalized pincers.
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From: MeNeedIt

Capturing snowflakes isn’t as easy as sticking out your tongue.

At least not when you’re trying to capture them for scientific study, which involves isolating the tiniest of crystals on a metal card printed with grid lines and quickly placing them under a microscope to be photographed.

“They are very tiny and they are close to the melting point,” Marco Tedesco of Columbia University said as he set up his microscope beside a snowy field. “So as soon as they fall, they will melt.”

Tedesco recently led a team of three researchers who trudged through the snowy hills of New York’s Catskill Mountains with cameras, brushes, shovels, a drone and a spectrometer to collect the most fine-grained details about freshly fallen snowflakes and how they evolve once they settle to the ground.

That data could be used to provide clues to the changing climate and validate the satellite models used for weather predictions. It also could provide additional information on the snow that falls into New York’s City’s upstate watershed, flows into reservoirs and fills the faucets of some 9 million people.

“We’re talking about sub-millimeter objects,” Tedesco said as he stood in shin-deep snow. “Once they get together, they have the power, really, to shape our planet.”

This is the pilot stage of the “X-Snow” project, which organizers hope will involve dozens of volunteers collecting snowflake samples next winter. The specimens Tedesco spied under his microscope on a recent snowy day displayed more rounded edges and irregularities than the classic crystalline forms. This is characteristic of flakes formed up high in warmer air.

Pictures and video from the drone will be used to create a three-dimensional model of the snow’s surface. Postdoctoral researcher Patrick Alexander trudged though the snow with a wand attached to a backpack spectrometer that measured how much sunlight the snow on the ground is reflecting — a factor determining how fast it will melt. Later, Alexander got down on his belly in the field to take infrared pictures of the snow’s layers and its grain size.

“There are a lot of things that happen that we can’t see with our eyes,” said Tedesco, a snow and ice scientist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “When snow melts and re-freezes, the grains get bigger. And as the grains get bigger the snow absorbs more solar radiation.”

Tedesco grew up in southern Italy near Naples and never even saw snow until he was 6 years old. But as a scientist, he has logged time studying ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica and has studied snow hydrology in the Rockies and the Dolomites. He said snow in the Eastern U.S. has its own character. It tends to be moister than the powdery snow that falls in higher elevation in the West.

Tedesco hopes that a cadre of committed volunteers in the Catskills and the New York City area can take snowflake and snow depth samples next winter. Volunteers won’t need an expensive backpack spectrometer, but he recommends a $17 magnifying lens that clips onto their phone, a ruler, a GPS application and a print-out version of the postcard-sized metal card Tedesco uses to examine fresh snowflakes.

Enlisting volunteers to take snowflake photos is novel and potentially useful, said Noah Molotch, director of The Center for Water, Earth Science and Technology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Molotch, who is not involved in the project, said the pictures will give information about atmospheric conditions and could be useful in the study of climate change.

“Snowflakes are among the most beautiful things in nature,” he said. “And the more we can do to document that and get people interested and excited about that, I think is great.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people flock to Washington in the spring to see the cherry blossoms bloom. The buds on the trees can survive chilly temperatures but need warm days to burst open with their white or pink flowers. But because of fluctuating spring temperatures, it is not always easy to predict when the trees will bloom. As we hear from VOA’s Deborah Block, it appears this year’s flowers may come out a bit earlier than usual.
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From: MeNeedIt

Cigarette smoking kills nearly a half-million Americans every year and costs the U.S. economy $300 billion in health care and lost productivity, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

To help smokers kick the deadly habit and stop kids from starting, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration proposed rules Thursday to cut the nicotine in cigarettes to minimal or nonaddictive levels.

“This milestone places us squarely on the road toward achieving one of the biggest public health victories in modern history and saving millions of lives in the process,” FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said Thursday.

He said the FDA has a “vision of a world where combustible cigarettes would no longer create or sustain addiction.”

Legal authority

The FDA has the legal authority to regulate nicotine levels in cigarettes, but has always been met by court challenges from tobacco companies.

Nicotine naturally occurs in tobacco. It is not deadly but is a highly addictive drug that helps make cigarettes so pleasurable to smokers.

It is the burning tobacco leaf and the numerous additives used in cigarettes that lead to lung cancer, emphysema, and other deadly diseases and cancers.

Secondhand smoke from cigarettes is also harmful to children and potentially lethal to adults.

Public comment

Gottlieb says the FDA is giving the public time to comment on the proposed mandated cuts in nicotine. He says it will help regulators answer such questions as what an acceptable level of nicotine is, whether the cuts should be introduced gradually or immediately, whether weaker cigarettes will bring on a black market for stronger smokes, and whether smokers will smoke more to compensate for the lower levels of the drug.

The New England Journal of Medicine reports that if the FDA cuts the nicotine to what it regards as a nonaddictive level, 5 million smokers would quit within one year. The Journal says by the turn of the century, the number of American adults who smoke cigarettes would plummet from the current 15 percent to a minuscule 1.4 percent, saving 8 million lives.
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From: MeNeedIt

A former midlevel employee of German industrial giant Siemens pleaded guilty Thursday of conspiring to pay tens of millions of dollars to Argentine officials to win a $1 billion contract to create national ID cards.

Eberhard Reichart, 78, who worked for Siemens from 1964 to 2001, appeared in federal court in New York to plead guilty to one count of conspiring to violate the anti-bribery Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and to commit wire fraud.

Reichart was arraigned last December in a three-count indictment filed in December 2011 charging him and seven other Siemens executives and agents with participating in the decadelong scheme, the Justice Department said Thursday. 

The men were accused of conspiring to pay more than $100 million in bribes to high-level Argentine officials to win the contract in 1998. 

As part of his guilty plea, Reichart admitted in court that he engaged in the bribery conspiracy and that he and his co-conspirators used shell companies to conceal the illicit payments to Argentine officials.

The Argentine government terminated the contract in 2001, but the Siemens executives “sought to recover the profits they would have reaped” through an illicitly obtained contract, said Preet Bharara, former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, in 2011. 

“Far too often, companies pay bribes as part of their business plan, upsetting what should be a level playing field and harming companies that play by the rules,” acting Assistant Attorney General John Cronan said Thursday.

In 2008, Siemens pleaded guilty of violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in connection with the Argentine bribery scheme, agreeing to pay the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission $800 million in criminal and civil penalties.

The company paid the German government another $800 million to settle similar charges brought by the Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office.

The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act bars U.S. companies and foreign firms with a presence in the U.S. from paying bribes to foreign officials.

Last year, 11 companies paid just over $1.92 billion to resolve charges brought under the anti-bribery law, according to data compiled by the FCPA Blog.
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From: MeNeedIt

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said Thursday that President Donald Trump would soon consider new punitive measures against China for its alleged “theft” of intellectual property.

U.S. officials, according to news accounts, are considering imposing as much as $60 billion in annual tariffs against Chinese information technology, telecommunications and consumer exports to the U.S. in an effort to trim its chronic annual trade deficit with Beijing by $100 billion. Last year, the U.S. says it imported Chinese goods worth $375 billion more than it exported to China.

“In the coming weeks, President Trump is going to have on his desk some recommendations,” Navarro told CNBC. “This will be one of the many steps the president is going to courageously take in order to address unfair trade practices.

“I don’t think there’s a single person … on Wall Street that will oppose cracking down on China’s theft of our intellectual property or their forced transfer,” Navarro said.

The new tariffs and other measures would be in addition to the 25 percent tariff on steel imports to the U.S. and 10 percent levy on aluminum that Trump announced last week, some of which affect China.

​At a political fundraiser Wednesday, Trump attacked several trading partners for the billions of dollars in trade surpluses they have built up against the U.S. He contended that China had become an economic power — the world’s second biggest economy — because of its trade surplus with the United States.

China warned it would likely retaliate against any new tariffs the U.S. imposes.

Foreign minister spokesman Lu Kang said, “History has proven that a trade war is in no one’s interest.”

He said that “if an undesirable situation arises, China has the intention of safeguarding its legitimate rights.”

Trump’s new tariffs on metal imports have led in recent days to volatility on U.S. stock exchanges, with wide day-to-day swings of hundreds of points in stock indexes. 

But Navarro said the U.S. can impose the tariffs in a way that can be good for the American people and good for the global trading system. We can do this in a way that is peaceful and will improve and strengthen the trading system. … Everybody on Wall Street needs to understand: Just relax.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Cooking is Chris Spear’s passion. He’s been professionally cooking since he was 16. Over the years, he worked for big restaurants and reached a point where he had almost 100 employees reporting to him. That’s when he missed flexibility and wanted to be more creative. So, he quit working for restaurants and founded his own catering company, Perfect Little Bites in Frederick, Maryland.

“Not that having your business is easy, but I want to have the flexibility to say, ‘It’s Valentine’s Day, and it’s more important to me to stay home with my wife,’ or to be home cooking for someone. I really wanted something that I felt was mine,” Spear explained.

Spending long hours in the kitchen doesn’t tire Spear, but he had often been concerned that becoming an independent chef would make him feel lonely. That inspired him to found Chefs Without Restaurants, an online resource for chefs. 

“I’ve been thinking about the Chefs Without Restaurants for about five years now, even before I took Perfect Little Bites full time, because I kept thinking about, ‘Well, when I do this full time, who are going to be my colleagues? Who are going to be the people who I can bounce ideas off? Who am I going to be able to [get to] do things like cater an event that’s maybe outside my range of 30 people? Like, do I have a resource where I can pull in one or two other people?’ ” he said. ” … And what I started to see was other independent chefs were referring customers to me, [and] I started to do that back to them. I kind of thought, ‘There’s got to be an easier way to do this.’ ”

Dozens have joined

Since the group started last January around 100 chefs have joined it.

“We’re caterers,” he said. “We’re personal chefs. We run food trucks. We have awesome food specialty shops.” Spear said he wanted to find an arrangement that would be beneficial to all such groups but didn’t cost them any money. 

So now he has a Facebook group where he can post information about, for instance, a potential customer who wants to arrange a dinner in a given location and within a certain price range, and he can offer interested chefs more information.

Customers can also benefit from this network. Spear said he’s building a website where customers will be able to check out profiles of the Chefs Without Restaurants members, learn about their specialties and see what kinds of events they can cater, large or small.

Lana and Bobby Browner are a wife-and-husband team who own their own catering company, Bent and Bent Events, in Frederick.

“We’ve been doing this for five years, since he graduated from a culinary school,” Lana Browner said.

“We specialize in Creole cuisine, Caribbean cuisine. So we blend flavors and bring a nice flavor, a different flavor in the field of food in Frederick County,” Bobby Browner said.

When the Browners heard about Spear’s group, they decided to become members. 

“I think the biggest hurdle for a lot of chefs is that they don’t really form an alliance because they’re all kind of competing with each other, but you don’t have that in this group,” Lana Browner said. “What we’ve experienced so far is a lot of learning about different chefs in the area. It’s even been interesting to get feedback from chefs that are not in this immediate area.”

Her husband added, “It’s a really competitive field,” but there’s “a lot of camaraderie, a lot of openness and a lot of sharing” within the group.

Shared kitchen

The group is also bringing more business to local facilities, like a shared kitchen called Maryland Bakes where members often meet and work. Terri Rowe, a food entrepreneur and owner of Maryland Bakes, said the group brings more energy to the small food businesses in the area.

“They bring connections,” she said. “They bring a variety of talents and gifts. They bring creative ideas and just the whole network of independent people joining together. So it’s a big community.”

The whole local food community seems to embrace Chefs Without Restaurants.

Oil & Vinegar Frederick is one of the local shops Spear likes. The place often hosts events to introduce cooking ideas and chefs to their customers.

Store owner Sharon Streb said small businesses should help one another succeed. 

When other chefs and businesses come to her store, “they get in front of our customers and hopefully we get in front of their customers. That’s a win-win for both of us,” she said. “It’s tough out there for a small business, and not a lot of small businesses succeed. It’s important that we can work together and be successful, both of us.”

That’s the goal for Spear, who wants to carve out a space for independent chefs on the food map in the area.
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From: MeNeedIt

President Donald Trump freestyled with the facts when talking trade with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

The Republican described the discussion during a fundraising speech in St. Louis on Wednesday.

According to audio obtained by The Washington Post, Trump insisted that the United States runs a trade deficit with Canada.

Trump said Trudeau told him there was no trade deficit. Trump said he replied, “‘Wrong, Justin, you do.’ I didn’t even know. … I had no idea. I just said, ‘You’re wrong.’”

Trump claimed the figures don’t include timber and energy.

However, the Office of the United States Trade Representative says the United States has a trade surplus with Canada.
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From: MeNeedIt

President Donald Trump’s recently proposed tariffs on steel and aluminum have spurred a hot debate in the U.S. that doesn’t adhere to traditional party lines. Is the administration’s move a boon to American workers or the beginning of a trade war? VOA’s Plugged In with Greta Van Susteren examines the pros, cons, impact and history of tariffs on goods imported to the United States. VOA’s Joan DeLuca reports:
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From: MeNeedIt

Amazon.com Inc.’s top television shows drew more than 5 million people worldwide to its Prime shopping club by early 2017, according to company documents, revealing for the first time how the retailer’s bet on original video is paying off.

The documents also show that Amazon’s U.S. audience for all video programming on Prime, including films and TV shows it licenses from other companies, was about 26 million customers.

Amazon has never released figures for its total audience.

The internal documents compare metrics that have never been reported for 19 shows exclusive to Amazon: their cost, their viewership and the number of people they helped lure to Prime.

Known as Prime Originals, the shows account for as much as a quarter of what analysts estimate to be total Prime sign-ups from late 2014 to early 2017, the period covered by the documents.

Viewers to shoppers

Core to Amazon’s strategy is the use of video to convert viewers into shoppers. Fans access Amazon’s lineup by joining Prime, a club that includes two-day package delivery and other perks, for an annual fee.

The company declined to comment on the documents seen by Reuters. But Chief Executive Jeff Bezos has been upfront about the company’s use of entertainment to drive merchandise sales.

The world’s biggest online retailer launched Amazon Studios in 2010 to develop original programs that have since grabbed awards and Hollywood buzz.

“When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes,” Bezos said at a 2016 technology conference near Los Angeles. He said film and TV customers renew their subscriptions “at higher rates, and they convert from free trials at higher rates” than members who do not stream videos on Prime.

​$5 billion in video

Video has grown to be one of Amazon’s biggest expenditures at $5 billion per year for original and licensed content, two people familiar with the matter said. The company has never disclosed how many subscribers it won as a result, making it hard for investors to evaluate its programming decisions.

The internal documents show what Amazon considers to be the financial logic of its strategy, and why the company is now making more commercial projects in addition to shows aimed at winning awards, the people said.

For example, the first season of the popular drama The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history depicting Germany as the victor of World War II, had 8 million U.S. viewers as of early 2017, according to the documents. The program cost $72 million in production and marketing and attracted 1.15 million new subscribers worldwide based on Amazon’s accounting, the documents showed.

Amazon calculated that the show drew new Prime members at an average cost of $63 per subscriber.

That is far less than the $99 that subscribers pay in the United States for Prime; the company charges similar fees abroad. Prime members also buy more goods from Amazon than non-members, Bezos has said, further boosting profit.

Amazon’s secret math

Precisely how Amazon determines a customer’s motivation for joining its Prime club is not clear from the documents viewed by Reuters.

But a person familiar with its strategy said the company credits a specific show for luring someone to start or extend a Prime subscription if that program is the first one a customer streams after signing up. That metric, referenced throughout the documents, is known as a “first stream.”

The company then calculates how expensive the viewer was to acquire by dividing the show’s costs by the number of first streams it had. The lower that figure, the better.

The internal documents do not show how long subscribers stayed with Prime, nor do they indicate how much shopping they do on Amazon. The company reviews other metrics for its programs as well. Consequently, the documents do not provide enough information to determine the overall profitability of Amazon’s Hollywood endeavor.

Still, the numbers indicate that broad-interest shows can lure Prime members cheaply by Amazon’s calculations. One big winner was the motoring series The Grand Tour, which stars the former presenters of BBC’s Top Gear. The show had more than 1.5 million first streams from Prime members worldwide, at a cost of $49 per subscriber in its first season.

The documents seen by Reuters reflect Prime subscribers in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Austria and Japan, where Amazon’s programs were available before Prime Video rolled out globally in December 2016.

Analysts estimate that 75 million or more customers have Prime subscriptions worldwide, including about half of all households in the United States.

Bigger bets

About 26 million U.S. Prime members watched television and movies on Amazon as of early 2017. Reuters calculated this number from the documents, which showed how many viewers a TV series had as a percentage of total Prime Video customers.

Rival Netflix Inc had twice that many U.S. subscribers in the first quarter of last year. It does not disclose how many were active viewers.

For years, Amazon Studios aimed to win credibility in Hollywood with sophisticated shows beloved by critics. Its marquee series Transparent, about a transgender father and his family, won eight Primetime Emmy Awards and created the buzz Amazon wanted to attract top producers and actors.

Yet Transparent lagged Amazon’s top shows in viewership.

Its first season drew a U.S. audience half as large as that of The Man in the High Castle, and it fell to 1.3 million viewers for its third season, according to the documents.

Similarly, Good Girls Revolt, a critically acclaimed show about gender inequality in a New York newsroom, had total U.S. viewership of 1.6 million but cost $81 million, with only 52,000 first streams worldwide by Prime members.

The program’s cost per new customer was about $1,560, according to the documents. Amazon canceled it after one season.

Amazon is now working on more commercial dramas and spin-offs with appeal outside the United States, where Prime membership has far more room to grow, people familiar with the matter said.

The effort to broaden Amazon’s lineup, long in the works, will be in the hands of Jennifer Salke, NBC Entertainment’s president whom Amazon hired last month as its studio chief.

Amazon’s Bezos has wanted a drama to rival HBO’s global hit Game of Thrones, according to the people.

In November, Amazon announced it will make a prequel to the fantasy hit The Lord of the Rings. The company had offered $250 million for the rights alone; production and marketing could raise costs to $500 million or more for two seasons, one of the people said.

At half a billion dollars, the prequel would cost triple what Amazon paid for The Man in the High Castle seasons one and two, the documents show. That means it would need to draw three times the number of Prime members as The Man in the High Castle for an equal payoff.
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From: MeNeedIt