The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said on Friday it had awarded $100 million to upgrade Flint, Michigan’s drinking water infrastructure to address a crisis that exposed thousands of children to lead poisoning.

The grant to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality will enable the city to “accelerate and expand” its work to replace lead pipes and make other improvements, according to the EPA. Estimates of the upgrade’s cost range from $200 million to $400 million.

Friday’s announcement made the disbursement official. Last year, Congress passed and former president Barack Obama signed the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act to allocate $100 million to aid Flint.

$31.5 million to be paid immediately

The EPA’s state revolving funds, which Congress can allocate to help with cleanup efforts, were one of the few programs that the Trump administration did not slash in its proposed budget for the agency.

“Flint’s water infrastructure as part of our larger goal of improving America’s water infrastructure,” said a statement from agency Administrator Scott Pruitt.

The EPA will make $31.5 million immediately available for lead pipe replacements and upgrades, and Michigan will provide a $20 million required match.

The remaining $68.5 million will come after the city and Michigan complete additional public comment and technical reviews.

“Today we have good news for families in Flint who have already waited far too long for their water system to be fixed,” said a statement from U.S. Senators Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters, and Congressman Dan Kildee, all Michigan Democrats.

Flint mayor meets Trump

Flint Mayor Karen Weaver, also a Democrat, said the funds would help the city reach its goal of replacing 6,000 pipes this year. She met briefly with President Donald Trump on Wednesday.

In January, 1,700 Flint residents filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court in Michigan, saying the EPA failed to warn them of the dangers of the toxic water or take steps to ensure that state and local authorities were addressing the crisis. The plaintiffs seek $722 million in damages.

Midwestern politicians are worried about the elimination in the proposed U.S. budget of funding for an effort to clean up the Great Lakes, from which some states draw their drinking water.

Flint was under the control of a state-appointed emergency manager when it switched its water source to the Flint River from Lake Huron in April 2014. The more corrosive river water caused lead to leach from pipes and into the drinking water.

The city returned to its original water source in October 2015.
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From: MeNeedIt

Beauty and the Beast is a tale for the ages. Maybe the most memorable version of this classic was the iconic 1991 Disney animation. Now, Disney is reviving its animated version rendition with live action heroes, making this Disney’s latest live action fairytale production, but by no means its last. VOA’s Penelope Poulou has more.
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From: MeNeedIt

Foreign tourism to the United States, which supports millions of American jobs, is slowing, possibly because President Donald Trump sought controversial travel restrictions on some Muslim-majority nations. Online searches for flights to the United States are down in most major nations, not just those hit by restrictions. Jim Randle reports some travel experts say the push to restrict immigration is making some foreign tourists and students wary of visiting.
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From: MeNeedIt

Carmakers and suppliers gave widely differing timelines Thursday for the introduction of self-driving vehicles, showing the uncertainties surrounding the technology as well as a split between cautious established players and bullish new entrants.

Chipmaker Nvidia, facing direct competition with the world’s top chipmaker after Intel’s $15 billion deal to buy Mobileye, an autonomous driving technology firm, this week, gave the most optimistic predictions.

Chief Executive Jens-Hsun Huang said carmakers may speed up their plans in the light of technological advances and that fully self-driving cars could be on the road by 2025.

“Because of deep learning, because of AI [artificial intelligence] computing, we’ve really supercharged our roadmap to autonomous vehicles,” he said in a keynote speech to the Bosch Connected World conference in Berlin.

Germany’s Bosch, however, the world’s biggest automotive supplier, gave a timetable as much as six years longer to get to the final stage before fully autonomous vehicles, and declined even to forecast when a totally self-driving car might take to the streets.

Technology, liability among hurdles

Progress is fraught by issues including who is liable when a self-driving car has an accident, bringing down the costs of sensor technology and guarding against hacking.

“Of course, we still have to prove that an autonomous car does better in driving and has less accidents than a human being,” Bosch CEO Volkmar Denner told a news conference.

Nvidia has applied its market-leading expertise in high-end computer graphics to the intense visualization and simulation needs of autonomous cars, and has been working on artificial intelligence — teaching computers to learn to write their own software code — for a decade.

“No human could write enough code to capture the vast diversity and complexity that we do so easily, called driving,” Huang said.

Together with Bosch executives, Huang presented a prototype AI on-board computer that is expected to go into production by the beginning of the next decade. The computer will use Nvidia’s processing power to interpret data gathered by Bosch sensors.

Degrees of autonomy

On the way to fully self-driving cars, levels of autonomy have been defined, with most cars on the road today at level two, and Tesla ready to switch from level four to five — full autonomy — as soon as it is permitted.

Level three means drivers can turn away in well-understood environments, such as highway driving, but must be ready to take back control, while level four means the automated system can control the vehicle in most environments.

Independent technology analyst Richard Windsor wrote this week that he doubted automakers would have autonomous vehicles leaving factories by a typical self-imposed deadline of 2020, mainly because the liability issue was unresolved.

“This is good news for the automotive industry, which is notoriously slow to adapt to and implement new technology as it will have more time to defend its position against the new entrants,” he wrote.

But Nvidia’s Huang said he expected to have chips available for level three automated driving by the end of this year and in customers’ cars on the road by the end of 2018, with level four chips following the same pattern a year later.

That is at least a year ahead of the plans of most carmakers that have an autonomous-driving strategy.

BMW says market will decide

The head of autonomous driving at BMW told the conference the luxury carmaker was on its way to deliver a level three autonomous car in 2021, but could produce level four or five autonomous cars in the same year.

“We believe we have the chance to make level three, level four and level five doable,” he said. He told Reuters the decision on which levels to release would depend in part on the market, and that cars with more autonomy might first be produced in small batches for single fleets.

Bosch said it saw level three vehicles being released with its on-board computer at the end of the decade, and level four driving not before 2025.

Uber, Baidu and Google spin-off Waymo are testing self-driving taxis, while carmakers including Volvo, Audi and Ford expect to have level four cars on the road by 2020 or 2021.

Nvidia’s Huang predicted those plans would speed up: “In the near future, you’re going to see these schedules pull in.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Britain’s Prince William is taking flak for going on a ski holiday instead of attending a major royal engagement with his family.

Criticism mounted after footage emerged of 34-year-old William busting late-night dance moves in the Verbier, Switzerland, this week.

It has fueled claims from the tabloid press that the second in line to the throne does not work hard enough. The tabloid Sun used the headline “Throne Idle.”

William was skiing while his 90-year-old grandmother Queen Elizabeth II and other senior royals attended a Commonwealth Day service in London on Monday.

An official record of royal engagements says William has carried out royal duties on 13 days this year, compared with 18 for Prince Harry and 24 for the queen.

William also works part-time as an air ambulance pilot.
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From: MeNeedIt

Britain’s Newcastle University says its scientists have received a license to create babies using DNA from three people, the first time such approval has been granted.

The license was granted by the country’s fertility regulator on Thursday, according to the university.

In December, British officials approved the “cautious use” of the techniques, which are intended to prevent women from passing on fatal genetic diseases to their children. The new procedures fix problems linked to mitochondria, the energy-producing structures outside a cell’s nucleus. Faulty mitochondria can result in conditions including muscular dystrophy and major organ failure.

Last year, U.S.-based doctors announced they had created the world’s first baby using such techniques, after traveling to Mexico to perform the methods, which have not been approved in the United States.
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From: MeNeedIt

With uncertainty over economic policy direction in the United States, Southeast Asian economies appear less reliant on U.S. monetary decisions, with analysts saying China’s influence is likely to keep growing in the region.

On Thursday, a sign of the region’s greater financial independence came as most regional markets failed to follow a .25 basis point rise in interests rates set by the U.S. Federal Reserve. But China, Hong Kong and Singapore did raise interest rates.

London based analysts at Capital Economics said for most emerging economies in Asia, local factors rather than the actions of the U.S. central bank will determine interest rate policy.

Beijing’s growing influence has come as Asian economies have stepped up trade with China, whose growing presence was highlighted after the U.S. withdrawal earlier this year by U.S. President Donald Trump from the 12 nation Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP).

The TPP had been a key policy platform under former President Barack Obama’s pivot to Asia to extend U.S. influence in the region.

Thai economist Somphob Manarangsan said China’s One Belt One Road’ policy to boost links with China’s growing economy will increase the momentum of regional economic integration.

“From now on China may move more actively to this region [Southeast Asia]. China is the real sector based economy [of manufacturing] as you know, so they have to have greater integration of the supply chain and value chain, and it can replace the greater uncertainty of the U.S. market,” Somphob told VOA.

Growing regional influence

As China’s economy becomes more influential economically in the region, the country’s social and political influence will also increase, he said.

Uncertainty over U.S. economic policy towards the Asia region, and especially in trade, followed election campaign comments by President Trump, to adopt a tougher stance on trade with China, accusing Beijing of acting as a “currency manipulator.”

Somphob said protectionist U.S. economic policy would result in countries in Asia facing a “tough struggle” with any major fallout in bilateral relations with China having a significant impact across the region.

“It will be relatively serious. As we know that China is one of the major regional supply [chains]. So that means that directly or indirectly it’s going to affect the ASEAN economy considerably,” he said, with the impact also on Japan and South Korea.

Southeast Asia’s trade ties with China have been growing over the past decade, especially intermediate goods to China that are then exported to major international markets, such as the U.S.

In a commentary, Asian Development Bank (ADB) senior economist, Cyn-Young Park, says the growth of emerging East Asian economies’ has been “underpinned by dynamic growth in China.”

Regional impact

A shift in the U.S. market’s role has been evident as Southeast Asia’s exports to the U.S. have fallen from 50 percent of total exports in the 1990s to around less than 29 percent today.

But Park also warned any global shock would have a major impact on the region’s economies.

“Emerging East Asia has become more, not less, integrated with the global economy and as a result the impact of a global shock, whether related to trade or financial markets, has become greater,” he said.

Pavida Pananond, a professor of business studies at Bangkok’s Thammasat University, said steady economic growth over recent decades has strengthened economies due to a growing middle class.

“And that’s why the shifting focus of the regional integration in Asia, or its regional focus, is not solely because of the Trump policies but it is the changing dynamics in the economic power that has been taking place over a few decades,” Pavida said.

“The rising power of the consumer in Asia is becoming more important. China is growing. China is now the major trade and investment destination to and from ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations],” she said.

Protectionism gaining ground

The World Bank, in a report, warned the region’s economies of “heightened policy uncertainty in advanced economies,” especially Europe and the U.S. amid growing support for trade protection.

“Rising political opposition to trade has contributed to a post [2008] crisis high in new trade restrictions in the past year,” the Bank said.

“The imposition of trade barriers by major trading partners would disproportionately affect the relatively more open economies of East Asia and Pacific,” it said.

The bank added that a “faster than expected slowdown in China would have sizable regional spillovers.”

But Capital Economics analysts say the U.S. administration appears less confrontational on the issue of trade relations with China than feared.

“The threat to label China a currency manipulator on [President Trump’s] first day in office failed to materialize, talk of an across the broad tariffs have been dropped, while growing question marks over a proposed border-adjusted corporate tax,” Capital Economics’ Gareth Leather said.
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From: MeNeedIt

Expanding ties between China and the United States form the backdrop of Lisa See’s latest novel, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, a book about China’s growing prosperity, cross-cultural adoption and, the author says, the enduring bond between mothers and daughters.

See chronicled the Chinese experience in California in a 1995 book, On Gold Mountain, and she says the West Coast state remains a cultural crossroads. It is also the source of ideas for fictional stories like that in her new novel.

“My husband and I were walking to the movies,” See said, “and we saw ahead of us an older white couple with their teenaged Chinese adopted daughter walking between them.”

The image of a carefree family, with the daughter’s long pony tail swaying back and forth, would lead to a tale of inter-cultural adoption amid growing commercial ties between the United States and China.

See is the author of such best-selling novels as Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Shanghai Girls.

Precise research

Her books are all based on on-the-ground research. A tea-tasting demonstration in the United States would inspire her to visit Yunnan Province, China, a tea-growing region near the Burmese border, which also led to the writing of this novel.

“They have more varieties of plant life in that one province of China than all together in the rest of the northern hemisphere,” she said. “They have more species of animals in that one province of China, which is only 4 percent of China’s overall land mass.”

The biodiversity also applies to human beings: Yunnan is home of half of China’s 55 ethnic minorities, and includes a tea-growing hill tribe called the Akha. See met an Akha family whose daughter collected stories from village elders, and the writer was fascinated.

“She just told us these unbelievable stories about her family, about the neighbors, about her own experience,” See said. By the end of one day, she knew that she wanted to write about the Akha.

Not ‘precious enough’

See’s novel concerns an Akha woman named Li-yan who gives birth to a daughter out of wedlock. Defying a local custom that calls for the child’s death, she takes the infant to an orphanage, and the girl, renamed Haley, is adopted and raised by an American family. Over time, Haley questions her identity, as do the real-life adoptees that See met in her research.

“There was one girl who summed it up for me when she said, ‘I know I’m lucky and I know my parents love me and I know I’m the most precious person in our family, but I wasn’t precious enough for my birth parents to keep.’”

The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane explores this tension as the story unfolds in both America and China, where Haley’s birth mother rides a wave of prosperity when Chinese products, including a rare local tea, find a worldwide market.

The separate paths of mother and daughter bring both to Los Angeles, where See says she is inspired in her writing by her own family connections and her partial Chinese background.

“I have red hair and freckles,” she said, “but I actually grew up in a very large Chinese American family here in Los Angeles. I have about 400 relatives here,” she said, “about a dozen that look like me. The majority are still full Chinese.”

See’s books tell the stories of Chinese and Chinese Americans, and her fiction focuses on women. The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane follows these themes as it looks at changes that prosperity has brought to one ethnic community in China.
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From: MeNeedIt

McDonald’s has started testing mobile order-and-pay after acknowledging the ordering process in its restaurants can be “stressful.”

The company says it will gather feedback from the test before launching the option nationally toward the end of the year. It says mobile order-and-pay is now available at 29 stores in Monterey and Salinas, California, and will expand to 51 more locations in Spokane, Washington, next week.

The rollout comes as customers increasingly seek out convenience through options like online ordering or delivery. McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook has noted the initial stages of visiting can be “stressful,” and the chain is making changes to improve the overall customer experience. That includes introducing ordering kiosks, which McDonald’s says can help ease lines at the counter and improve the accuracy of orders – another frustration for customers. Easterbrook has also talked about the potential of delivery.

With its mobile order-and-pay option, McDonald’s says customers place an order on its app then go to a restaurant and “check in” to select how they want to get their food. That could be at the counter, in the drive-thru, or with curbside delivery, where an employee brings out orders to a designated space. Orders are prepared once customers check in at the restaurant.

Starbucks has already found success using its mobile app and loyalty program to encourage people to visit more often and spend more when they do. The chain has also said its mobile order-and-pay option was so popular that it caused congestion at pick-up counters last year, leading some customers who walked into stores to leave without buying anything. Starbucks said it is working on fixing those issues.

It’s not clear whether McDonald’s will be able to get the same level of usage for its mobile app and order-and-pay option. Since coffee tends to be more of a daily habit, for instance, people may be more willing to download an app for it on their phones.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

It is tempting, says Godfrey Nwosu, to blame Nigeria’s rising food prices on something as simple as a drought that has battered the Lake Chad basin and sent crop yields tumbling across the region.

If only it were that simple, Nwosu says. As the head of an organization that promotes Nigerian farming, he would be fielding endless calls from young upstarts eager to plant maize and cassava.

Nwosu isn’t, however, and says he worries that the environmental shocks are only a starting point to this ongoing food crisis.

“The younger ones have been encouraged to go into farming, but it is not yet 100 percent because most of them are looking for white-collar jobs,” he told VOA from Abuja.

Nigeria’s high food prices, he says, are also a result of inflation, high oil prices, high import duties on farming equipment, corruption, a lack of strong pro-farming legislation and the declining popularity of farming among young job-seekers.

“And that is why you see, the hike of things, petrol and everything, it has affected everything because it affects the food prices and makes it go high,” he said.

Aid organizations have recently sounded the alarm over a drought that has left 16 million people in East Africa facing hunger. The United Nations has declared a famine in parts of South Sudan and is warning of impending famine in Somalia.

While drought is mostly the culprit for this food crisis, these two nations were already especially vulnerable, says economist Mario Zappacosta of the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.

“The main reasons behind the current crisis, which has a regional characteristic affecting most of the countries in eastern Africa, is the drought,” he said.

“…But in some countries the crisis is even compounded by other factors, such as conflict and violence in South Sudan and Somalia.”

Paul Makube, an agricultural economist with South Africa’s First National Bank, says food prices are finally stabilizing in southern Africa after more than a year of erratic weather, as farmers expect the next harvest to be good; but, he says that while the drought was mostly responsible for the increase in food prices, it has laid bare a lack of development in the agricultural sector.

“So basically it is a supply and demand situation,” he told VOA from Johannesburg. “But the other thing that is related to the erratic nature of production in the region is with regard to the adoption of technology that will sustain or help in, you know, for example, dry conditions. We don’t have that in most of the countries in the region.”

FAO economist Jonathan Pound, who focuses on food prices, says some African governments have made efforts to offset the price increases. Kenya removed duties on imported maize. In Zimbabwe, he says, the government slashed taxes on food staples. And other southern African nations released some of their national reserves of staple foods to increase supply and keep prices stable.

He says, however, that governments need to strike a fine balance.

“There are two different perspectives there; I mean you both want prices to be affordable so people can easily consume foods, but at the same time, you also want to make it attractive to farmers so they can support their production as well, but also their incomes and livelihoods.”

This push-and-pull is what preoccupies Nwosu, the secretary-general of the All Farmers Association of Nigeria, who says his government needs to do more to support and encourage farmers and help lower their costs. He’s encouraged by recent growth in Nigeria’s rice-farming sector but says high prices aren’t enough to lure people into this complicated business — and keep them there, year after year, in good times and bad.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

The U.S. central bank is expected to raise interest rates slightly Wednesday afternoon as the economy nears full employment and inflation rises modestly.

Leaders of the U.S. Federal Reserve have been debating interest rate policy for two days here in Washington, and most analysts predict they will raise rates one quarter of a percentage point (putting the rate in a range between three-quarters of a percent and one percent).

PNC Bank economist Gus Faucher says the consumers who drive most U.S. economic activity are “in good shape” with “more jobs and wages… increasing.”

A recent survey of key financial leaders by the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants shows the highest level of optimism about the economy in a number of years.

The Fed slashed interest rates to record lows during the recession to encourage growth and fight unemployment, but improving economic data apparently have persuaded experts the economy no longer needs such help. This will be the second slight interest rate increase in a couple of months, and analysts will be watching Fed statements closely for clues about how soon and how far rates will go up this year.

Officials use higher interest rates to cool the economy and fend of inflationary spikes that could hurt growth.

Higher interest rates will cost U.S. credit card holders $1.6 billion more in interest expenses this year, according to experts at Wallethub.com. Experts at the website track credit card use and say higher costs will make it harder to pay off these bills, which they expect will reach an all-time high later this year.

Wallethub says it is a little harder to track exactly how much raising the benchmark interest rate will affect home and auto loans, but they say recent experience shows they are likely to become more expensive, as well.

If officials keep interest rates too low for too long, they risk sparking an abrupt inflationary jump that could force the Fed to raise rates high and fast, disrupting the economy. Officials raise interest rates to cool the economy and fend off inflation. Overall, the Fed is trying to guide the economy toward full employment while keeping price increases to about two percent a year.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

The White House has issued a statement saying President Donald Trump made more than $150 million of income in 2005 and paid $38 million in income taxes that year.

Its statement late Tuesday came ahead of a report by MSNBC-TV host Rachel Maddow revealing what she said is part of what was included on Trump’s 2005 tax forms. She said she got the tax return information from David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist and tax analyst.

In its pre-emptive statement, the White House said, “You know you are desperate for ratings when you are willing to violate the law to push a story about two pages of tax returns from over a decade ago.”

It added, “Before being elected president, Mr. Trump was one of the most successful businessmen in the world. It is totally illegal to steal and publish tax returns. The dishonest media can continue to make this part of their agenda, while the president will focus on his.”

Trump has long insisted that the American public is not interested in his returns and has said little can be learned from them. But Trump’s full returns would contain key details about things like his charitable giving and how much he made each year.

This tax issue was a major point of attack from his campaign rival Hillary Clinton, who suggested Trump has something to hide.

The White House has not said whether the president plans to release his returns while he’s in office.
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From: MeNeedIt