Advertising and marketing. Advertising is the practice and techniques employed to bring attention to a product or service. Advertising aims to put a product or service in the spotlight in hopes of drawing it attention from consumers
Humans have always wondered why certain animals, such as tigers or pandas, have such unusual color patterns. Folklore usually explained it as a consequence of some dramatic event. But scientists say it has to do with the animal’s natural habitat, which is also the answer for panda’s black and white fur. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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From: MeNeedIt
Investors are plowing ever more into ethical funds to back their views on issues such as global warming and gender equality, but such investments can be confusingly similar to standard funds, except for higher fees and “green halo” marketing.
The $23 trillion “sustainable, responsible and impact” (SRI) investment sector has received a rush of money since the Paris climate agreement and, more recently, in protest against U.S. President Donald Trump’s plans to slash environmental regulations.
Europe is the dominant region for such investments, with $12.04 trillion, followed by the United States, with $8.72 trillion, while Asia lags some way behind.
U.S. investors have poured $1.8 billion into actively managed U.S. equity funds in the socially responsible category from November to January, according to Lipper data, while other funds saw a net outflow of $133 billion.
Even in fossil-fuel-rich Australia and New Zealand, SRI investment rose from $148 billion to $516 billion between 2014 and 2016, and from $729 billion to $1.09 trillion in oil-rich Canada, according to the Global Sustainable Investment Review released Monday.
Gavin Goodhand, a portfolio manager at Sydney-based Altius Asset Management, said the company’s sustainable bond fund tripled shortly after the 2015 climate accord, where nearly 200 countries signed up to measures designed to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
“The Paris conference was the line in the sand for many of our retail customers, particularly the millennial generation, who want to do the right thing for the environment,” Goodhand said.
Green funds may be not so green
Governments are also tapping the trend, selling green bonds to fund projects such as wind farms or low-carbon transport, with Poland, France and Nigeria making their debut this year.
Some managers, however, are skeptical.
“While environmental, social and governance factors should always factor into investment decisions, this is largely a marketing exercise,” said Steve Goldman, a global portfolio manager at Sydney-based Kapstream Capital, which has A$10 billion ($7.6 billion) of fixed-income assets.
Goldman said Kapstream did not have a responsible investment fund because its clients had not asked for it.
The bond market does not have commonly agreed standards or criteria for what constitutes a green bond, and there is no guarantee the proceeds go to the low-carbon project as claimed.
There are similar concerns over equity products.
Stuart Palmer, head of ethics research at Australian Ethical Investment, said there was a danger that some marketing departments would “greenwash” their products to lure investors into funds that were little different to standard products.
Higher fees
There are no agreed definitions on what is considered ethical, sustainable and socially responsible, but ethical investors are typically expected to cough up higher fees.
For example, retail investors pay more than a third higher fees for the sustainability and ethical funds at Sydney-based BT Investment Management (BTIM) than for its standard share fund equivalent.
The three funds hold six or seven of their top-weighted stocks in common, including major banks Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, Westpac Banking Corp, National Australia Bank and miner BHP Billiton , according to December filings.
A BT spokeswoman did not return requests for comment.
Due diligence difficult
For investors, it can be a minefield.
“I find it difficult as a consumer to do the due diligence I would like to do because even the ethical funds are not always totally transparent about what they define as ethical,” said retail investor Meraiah Foley, a Sydney academic.
“One of the ethical funds I have invests very heavily in retail banks in Australia, and those banks themselves may be underwriting projects that the fund itself would not invest in.”
There is also no standard practice on what to do when an existing fund stock breaches a manager’s policies. Some investment managers will sell, but others argue they can influence behavior by retaining their shareholding.
“We believe in engagement rather than divestment,” said Sam Sicilia, chief financial officer at the A$22 billion pension fund Hostplus. “When you sell a share in a ‘bad’ company, it’s a transfer of ownership and does nothing to the company that’s causing the issue, so divestment does not really work.”
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From: MeNeedIt
Acclaimed Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose work focused on war atrocities and denounced anti-Semitism and tyrannical dictators, has died. He was 84.
Ginny Hensley, a spokeswoman for Hillcrest Medical Center in Tulsa, confirmed Yevtushenko’s death. Roger Blais, provost at the University of Tulsa, where Yevtushenko was a longtime faculty member, said he was told Yevtushenko had died Saturday morning.
“He died a few minutes ago surrounded by relatives and close friends,” his widow, Maria Novikova, was quoted as saying by the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti. She said he’d died peacefully in his sleep of heart failure.
Yevtushenko gained notoriety in the former Soviet Union while in his 20s, with poetry denouncing Josef Stalin. He gained international acclaim as a young revolutionary with “Babi Yar,” the unflinching 1961 poem that told of the slaughter of nearly 34,000 Jews by the Nazis and denounced the anti-Semitism that had spread throughout the Soviet Union.
Heard by huge crowds
At the height of his fame, Yevtushenko read his works in packed soccer stadiums and arenas, including to a crowd of 200,000 in 1991 that came to listen during a failed coup attempt in Russia. He also attracted large audiences on tours of the West.
With his tall, rangy body, chiseled visage and declaratory style, he was a compelling presence on stages when reading his works.
“He’s more like a rock star than some sort of bespectacled, quiet poet,” said former University of Tulsa President Robert Donaldson, who specialized in Soviet policy during his academic years at Harvard.
Until “Babi Yar” was published, the history of the massacre was shrouded in the fog of the Cold War.
“I don’t call it political poetry, I call it human rights poetry, the poetry which defends human conscience as the greatest spiritual value,” Yevtushenko, who had been splitting his time between Oklahoma and Moscow, said during a 2007 interview with The Associated Press at his home in Tulsa.
Yevtushenko said he wrote the poem after visiting the site of the mass killings in Kyiv, Ukraine, and searching for something memorializing what happened there — a sign, a tombstone, some kind of historical marker — but finding nothing.
“I was so shocked. I was absolutely shocked when I saw it, that people didn’t keep a memory about it,” he said.
It took him two hours to write the poem that begins, “No monument stands over Babi Yar. A drop sheer as a crude gravestone. I am afraid.”
Native of Zima
Yevtushenko was born in the Siberian town of Zima, a name that translates to winter. He rose to prominence during Nikita Khrushchev’s rule.
His poetry was outspoken and drew on the passion for poetry that is characteristic of Russia, where poetry is more widely revered than in the West. Some considered it risky, though others said he was only a showpiece dissident whose public views never went beyond the limits of what officials would permit.
Dissident exile poet Joseph Brodsky was especially critical, saying, “He throws stones only in directions that are officially sanctioned and approved.” Brodsky resigned from the American Academy of Arts and Letters when Yevtushenko was made an honorary member.
Donaldson invited Yevtushenko to teach at the university in 1992.
“I like very much the University of Tulsa,” Yevtushenko said in a 1995 interview with the AP. “My students are sons of ranchers, even cowboys, oil engineers. They are different people, but they are very gifted. They are closer to Mother Nature than the big city. They are more sensitive.”
He was also touched after the 1995 bombing of a federal government building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. He recalled one woman in his class who lost a relative in the blast, then commented that Russian women must have endured such suffering all their lives.
“This was the greatest compliment for me,” he said.
Blais, the university provost, said Yevtushenko remained an active professor at the time of his death. His poetry classes were perennially popular and featured football players and teenagers from small towns reading from the stage.
“He had a hard time giving bad grades to students because he liked the students so much,” Blais said.
Lauded in Russia
Yevtushenko’s death inspired tributes from his homeland.
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said on the Russian social media site Vkontakte: “He knew how to find the key to the souls of people, to find surprisingly accurate words that were in harmony with many.”
A spokesman for President Vladimir Putin said the poet’s legacy would remain “part of Russian culture.”
Natalia Solzhenitsyna, widow of the novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, said on Russian state television that Yevtushenko “lived by his own formula.”
“A poet in Russia is more than a poet,” she said. “And he really was more than a poet — he was a citizen with a pronounced civic position.”
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From: MeNeedIt
President Donald Trump doubled down on his tough talk on trade with a pair of executive orders Friday, which he says are designed to level the playing field and reduce the $500 billion US trade deficit, more than half of which is with China. As Mil Arcega reports, the issue of unfair trade is likely to come up when the U.S. president meets with Chinese leader Xi Jinping next week.
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From: MeNeedIt
If you were a casual observer watching Argonne National Laboratory scientist Seth Darling work, it would be easy to miss the low-tech but groundbreaking invention he’s concocted in his brightly lit workspace.
It doesn’t have wires or circuitry, it doesn’t move, it doesn’t do much of anything. It is in fact, at least at first glance, simply a sponge.
“It looks real simple when you demonstrate it, right?” Darling explained as he lowered the small, dark-colored foam sponges into a bowl of water mixed with blue oil. “I mean, you just stick it down there and it works. But behind that is a lot of work.”
Darling explains that what we can see with the human eye — these dark-colored pieces of foam, or sponges — isn’t the major breakthrough.
It’s what’s in, and on, the sponges that is revolutionary.
“After we do our treatment to it, and we create this Oleo Sponge, you put it on there and it’s got a voracious appetite for oil. It just soaks that oil right up,” he said.
Cleaning, saving oil
While the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory in suburban Chicago is best known for its contributions to nuclear energy development, it is also an incubator for technological innovation and discovery, the very environment where Darling created the Oleo Sponge.
“So we’ve been working on this Oleo Sponge project for almost two years,” Darling told VOA. “The underlying technology is something that we’ve been working on for much longer.”
He explains the treatment that gives the Oleo Sponge that “voracious appetite” is the real innovation developed at Argonne — something Darling and his associates call Sequential Infiltration Synthesis, or SIS.
“It was just a new way to make materials,” Darling said.
SIS works at the nano level. When hard metal oxide atoms “with complicated nanostructures” are infused throughout the fibers of the foam, it gives it the extremely effective quality of allowing the foam to bind with the oil in the water, essentially separating the two liquids.
The breakthrough could dramatically change cleanup of oil spills, particularly the more difficult task of retrieving oil below the surface of the water.
“Once it all goes down below the surface of the water and you have clouds of droplets under the surface, I’m not aware of any technology today that can actually clean those up. And Oleo Sponge can,” Darling said.
But the Oleo Sponge doesn’t just clean up the oil — it saves it.
Oil spilled into water is usually burned off or unusable after cleanup efforts, but the Oleo Sponge can collect, separate and deposit the oil for further use.
Flood of interest
The sponge itself can also be re-used and recycled, all qualities that have brought a flood of interest to Argonne’s doors.
“It’s a wide variety of companies that are interested in it,” said Hemant Bhimnathwala, with Argonne Laboratory’s Business Development Group. “We’ve got inquiries from about 100-plus companies in the last few days … who want to be partners in a slew of things from manufacturing the foam to distribution.”
While oil spill cleanup in bodies of water is the most clearly identifiable use for the Oleo Sponge, the SIS technology behind it could offer breakthroughs in a variety of other ways, yet to be discovered.
“This application is just the tip of the iceberg,” Bhimnathwala said.
It is an iceberg Seth Darling and other scientists at Argonne are still delving into, while the Oleo Sponge continues to make its journey into the wider market — and hopefully the world’s bodies of water — in the coming years.
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From: MeNeedIt
Hotels offer congee and other Chinese staples for room service. Casinos train staff members on Chinese etiquette. Restaurants, tourist sights and shopping malls translate signs, menus and information booklets into Mandarin.
The American hospitality industry is stepping up efforts to make Chinese visitors feel more welcome, since they are projected to soon surpass travelers from the United Kingdom and Japan as the single largest overseas demographic.
And it’s not just the typical tourist hubs of New York and Los Angeles, where such efforts have long been commonplace. Smaller cities like Boston, Las Vegas, Seattle and Washington, D.C., are increasingly getting into the act, industry officials say.
“Americans traditionally lag behind what other international designations do for different cultures,” said Elliott Ferguson, CEO of Destination DC, the city’s convention and tourism organization, which last year launched “Welcome China,” a certification program for local businesses. “We just kind of assume that one size fits all. Quite frankly, that’s just not welcoming.”
Local tourism associations in those and other cities have recently launched campaigns aimed at getting their member hotels, restaurants and tourism companies to better incorporate Chinese language and customs into their offerings. They’re also embarking on tourism-focused sales missions to China and opening satellite offices in Chinese cities to strengthen ties and sell their city to trendsetters.
Sheraton Boston offers creature comforts
Some companies have already embraced the message.
The Sheraton Boston in the Back Bay neighborhood started offering in 2013 simple creature comforts many Chinese travelers expect, including slippers, robes, instant noodles, an electric kettle and green tea, and have since taken other steps to cater to Chinese guests, said Angela Vento, the hotel’s general manager.
The Four Seasons in D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood makes similar gestures, as well as offering Chinese-language television and newspapers. It’s also working on offering more traditional Chinese dishes on its room service and restaurant menus, said Liliana Baldassari, a hotel spokeswoman.
In Las Vegas, Caesars Entertainment last year started offering guests at some of its affiliated resorts the option to book and pay for hotel rooms using WeChat, China’s most popular social media app.
“It’s made a really strong statement to the Chinese that these people really welcome us and understand us,” said Bruce Bommarito, the company’s vice president for international marketing, noting the Roman-themed casino has rolled out other China-focused initiatives in recent years, including training programs for staff on basic cultural etiquette for serving Chinese guests.
Those and other small touches are a step in the right direction, but more companies need to make an effort to recognize the growing importance of the Chinese market, said Justin Minggan Wei, a 27-year-old from Beijing who came to Boston in 2008 for college, an experience that inspired him to launch a consulting company helping local restaurants and businesses better serve Chinese customers.
Chicago Hilton reaches out
Zeng Wen, a 24-year-old who works part-time as a tour guide for Chinese-speakers in Chicago, said she has noticed recent efforts to reach out to Chinese tourists, like the Hilton hotel chain’s “Hilton Huanying” program, which derives its name from the Chinese words for “welcome.”
But Zhe Zhang, a 36-year-old from Guangzhou who visited Los Angeles this year, said he didn’t see any obvious outreach to Chinese visitors, outside of Chinese-run establishments. The most intimidating part, he said, was ordering food with his basic grasp of English.
“If possible, restaurants could provide a simple Chinese menu or pictured menu,” Zhang suggested.
Cities can’t afford to be caught flat-footed as China’s growing middle class — almost nonexistent two decades ago — flexes its spending power, industry experts say.
Chinese visitors already spend more in the U.S. than other international visitors, at roughly $7,200 per person, according to the U.S. Travel Association, an industry trade group. Travelers from the country are expected to more than double from about 2.6 million visitors in 2015 to nearly 6 million by 2021, the association said.
More direct flights from China to a wider range of U.S. cities in recent years is partly fueling the boom.
10-year visa a plus
Creation of a 10-year visa between the U.S. and China in 2014 has also made it easier for Chinese to travel more frequently to the U.S. That has allowed them to venture beyond must-see destinations like New York and Los Angeles to smaller and mid-size destinations and even the national parks, said Scott Johnson, a New York consultant working with Boston and other cities to grow their international presence.
The growing ranks of affluent Chinese are also staying longer and visiting more locations in the U.S. as they plan for their children’s college education or seek real estate and other investment opportunities.
U.S. tourism officials are working to assure partners in China that they remain welcoming even as the administration of Republican President Donald Trump tightens international travel policies and promises fundamental changes in the U.S.-China trade relationship, said Tom Norwalk, CEO of Visit Seattle, the city’s tourism organization.
“Security and travel don’t have to be mutually exclusive,” he said. “We’d hate to see us roll back the clock. We’ve been pretty loud and clear about that.”
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From: MeNeedIt
Rodney Crowell’s tender lyrics about a woman with “hair two shades of foxtail red” in a song that features ex-wife Rosanne Cash makes it an easy leap to assume that he’s singing about her. It’s not like the thought didn’t cross her mind.
“If I’m totally honest,” she said. “Yeah, a little bit.”
But Crowell, whose new album “Close Ties” is sure to be one of the year’s cornerstone releases in the Americana genre, insists he had others in mind while writing “It Ain’t Over Yet.” He was thinking about old friends Susanna and Guy Clark, who both died in recent years.
That’s fortunate, since he sings: “Takes the right kind of woman to help you put it all in place. It only happened once in my life, but man you should have seen.” It might have made for awkward dinner conversation with Crowell’s current wife, Claudia Church.
“Rosanne was a wonderful period in my life,” Crowell said, “but the ‘one’ woman is the one I’m with now.”
Susanna Clark was a straight-talking muse for many aspiring Nashville songwriters in the 1970s who figured if she liked one of their songs, they must be on to something, Crowell explained.
Crowell understands why people might think he was talking about Cash, who appears on record with her for only the second time since their 12-year marriage broke up in 1992 (he sang backup on a song on her most recent album). They were once Country music’s First Couple, taking turns at the top of the charts, and for both their artistry has deepened as the spotlight moved on.
They’re both also of the school that appreciate listeners who can take their own meanings from songs.
Another song on “Close Ties,” out Friday, was actually written with Cash in mind. More specifically, “Forgive Me Annabelle” is about Crowell’s own actions during their breakup. After an inevitably bitter period, they’re friends now.
“I passed through a period where I simply did not like myself,” Crowell said. “If you don’t like yourself, you’re not liking anybody else. You’re pretty miserable. And that’s what the narrator is apologizing for. It’s saying, ‘Forgive me for who I was then.’ But, of course, I was already forgiven.”
Crowell recalls pawing through some albums at home and coming upon his own “Diamonds and Dirt” from 1988, which yielded five No. 1 Country singles. He and his wife laughed at the mullet-haired guy on the cover.
“I wanted to be like Dwight Yoakam,” he said. “He definitely owned ‘cool’ at that moment.”
He’s fueled by a “look back with bemusement” attitude now. After taking five years off at the turn of the century, Crowell returned as a focused writer, digging deep into his heart and leaving few wasted words. He learned to take his art more seriously than himself. In “I Don’t Care Anymore” he sings: “All those party dolls and favors that I savored from day one add up to next to nothing after all is said and done.”
The funny “Nashville 1972” recalls his first meeting, at age 22, with Willie Nelson. At a party, of course. “There was hippies and reefer and God knows what all, I was drinking pretty hard,” he sings. “I played him this shitty song I wrote and puked out in the yard.”
Like most people his age, 66, Crowell is affected by loved ones lost — the Clarks, Townes Van Zandt, Leonard Cohen — and it’s reflected in his music. He’s also recently rewritten some of his old songs, notably “Shame on the Moon,” a 1982 hit for Bob Seger, where he wanted another crack at a verse he didn’t like.
“He’s actually writing the best songs of his life after 45 years, or however long it is,” Cash said. “His level of commitment has deepened, and as his level of commitment has deepened, his songs have gotten better. That’s very inspiring. He’s not a dilettante. He’s not just out there showing up at the next gig. He’s completely devoted to his work and his songwriting and it shows.
“As Leonard Cohen said, he’s completely employed in the tower of song.”
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From: MeNeedIt
President Donald Trump talked tough on trade on the campaign trail, vowing to renegotiate a slew of major deals and to label China a currency manipulator on “Day One.”
Now his administration appears to be taking a more cautious approach.
On Friday, the president will sign a pair of executive orders aimed at cracking down on trade abuses, according to top administration officials. The first calls for the completion of a large-scale report to identify “every form of trade abuse and every non-reciprocal practice that now contributes to the U.S. trade deficit,” said Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross.
Officials will have 90 days to produce a country-by-country, product-by-product report that will serve as the basis of future decision-making by the administration on trade-related issues, Ross told reporters at a Thursday night briefing.
“It will demonstrate the administration’s intention not to hip-shoot, not to do anything casual, not to do anything abruptly, but to take a very measured and analytical approach, both to analyzing the problem and therefore to developing the solutions for it,” he said.
While Trump has long argued that trade deficits imperil U.S. workers, Ross cautioned that they aren’t necessarily all bad. In some cases, for instance, the U.S. simply can’t produce enough of a product to meet domestic demand. In others, foreign countries may make products substantially cheaper or better than in the U.S. Deficits in trade can also mean that foreign countries and entities are investing in U.S. assets.
Still, Ross argued, the U.S. has the lowest tariff rates of any developed country. The report, he said, will examine whether deficits are being driven by things like cheating, specific trade obligations, lax enforcement and World Trade Organization rules.
Ross said the report would not focus extensively on currency manipulation, which is under the purview of the U.S. Treasury Department, despite Trump’s campaign rhetoric.
The second order will focus on stepping up the collection of anti-dumping and countervailing duties, which are levied against foreign governments that subsidize products so they can be sold below cost.
Peter Navarro, director of the White House National Trade Council, said the U.S. is leaving billions of dollars on the table as a result of lax enforcement of commitments in trade pacts. The order will establish more effective bonding requirements, among other measures.
The orders come a week before the president is scheduled to host Chinese President Xi Jinping for talks at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Trump tweeted Thursday evening that his first meeting with the Chinese leader would “be a very difficult one in that we can no longer have massive trade deficits … and job losses.”
“American companies must be prepared to look at other alternatives,” he wrote. The U.S. deficit with China was $347 billion last year.
But Navarro insisted the orders had nothing to do with the visit or sending a message to China.
“Nothing we’re saying tonight is about China. Let’s not make this a China story. This is a story about trade abuses, this is a story about an under-collection of duties,” he said, later adding: “We’re not here for tweets.”
The U.S. trade deficit totaled $502.3 billion last year, a slight increase from 2015, according to the Commerce Department. The trade gap rose to its highest level since 2012 last year, though the imbalance remains below its 2006 high, shortly before the Great Recession struck.
Trump has portrayed trade deficits as strangling economic growth and devastating factory jobs at home. Research last year by academic economists, including David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that China’s emergence hurt some communities and they have yet to fully recover.
But foreign trade has also helped reduce prices for clothing, cars and furniture, among other items. This has created savings for U.S. consumers.
While economists concede the benefits of trade can be uneven, they argue the job losses that Trump blames on trade pacts can largely be attributed to automation. A study released this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research estimates that robots account for up to 670,000 lost factory jobs between 1990 and 2007.
Both exports abroad and imports into the United States fell in 2016, but exports declined by a greater sum in part due to a stronger dollar making American-made goods and services more expensive overseas.
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From: MeNeedIt
Rain-fed wildflowers have been sprouting from California’s desert sands after lying dormant for years — producing a spectacular display that has drawn record crowds and traffic jams to tiny towns like Borrego Springs.
An estimated 150,000 people in the past month have converged on this town of about 3,500, roughly 85 miles (135 kilometers) northeast of San Diego, for the so-called super bloom.
Wildflowers are springing up in different landscapes across the state and the western United States thanks to a wet winter. In the Antelope Valley, an arid plateau northeast of Los Angeles, blazing orange poppies are lighting up the ground.
What is a super bloom?
But a “super bloom” is a term for when a mass amount of desert plants bloom at one time. In California, that happens about once in a decade in a given area. It has been occurring less frequently with the drought. Last year, the right amount of rainfall and warm temperatures produced carpets of flowers in Death Valley.
So far this year, the natural show has been concentrated in the 640,000-acre (1,000-square-mile) Anza Borrego State Park that abuts Borrego Springs.
It is expected to roll along through May, with different species blooming at different elevations and in different areas of the park. Anza Borrego is California’s largest state park with hundreds of species of plants, including desert lilies, blazing stars and the flaming tall, spiny Ocotillo.
‘Flowergeddon’
Deputies were brought in to handle the traffic jams as Borrego Springs saw its population triple in a single day.
On one particularly packed weekend in mid-March, motorists were stuck in traffic for five hours, restaurants ran out of food, and some visitors relieved themselves in the fields. Officials have since set up an army of Port-A-Pottys, and eateries have stocked up. The craze has been dubbed “Flowergeddon.”
Locals call those who view the tiny wildflowers from their cars “flower peepers.” Thousands of others have left their vehicles to traipse across the desert and analyze the array of delicate yellow, orange, purple and magenta blooms up close in the park. Many carting cameras have taken care to step around the plants.
Tour groups from as far as Japan and Hong Kong have flown in to catch the display before it fades away with the rising temperatures.
Rare sightings tracked
Wildflower enthusiasts worldwide track the blooms online and arrive for rare sightings like this year’s Bigelow’s Monkey flower, some of which have grown to 8 inches (203 millimeters) in height. The National Park Service has even pitched in with a 24-hour wildflower hotline to find the best spots at the state park.
“We’ve seen everything from people in normal hiking attire to people in designer flip-flops to women in sundresses and strappy heels hike out there to get their picture. When I saw that, I thought, ‘Oh no. Please don’t go out there with those shoes on,’” laughed Linda Haddock, head of the Borrego Springs Chamber of Commerce.
On a recent day, a young woman sat among knee-high desert sunflowers and shot selfies against the backdrop of yellow blooms that looked almost neon in contrast to the brown landscape. A mother jumped in the air as her daughter snapped her photo among yellow brittlebushes.
Blooms draw insects, birds
The blooms are attracting hungry sphinx moth caterpillars that munch through acres. The caterpillars in turn are attracting droves of Swainson hawks on their annual 6,000-mile (9,656-kilometer) migration from Argentina.
“It’s an amazing burst in the cycle of life in the desert that has come because of a freakish event like a super bloom,” Haddock said. “It’s exciting. This is going to be so huge for our economy.”
Desert super blooms always draw crowds, but lifetime residents said they’ve never seen the natural wonder attract tens of thousands like this time. The park is about a two-hour drive from San Diego and three hours from Los Angeles.
A lot of rain, a lot of blooms
This year’s display has been especially stunning, experts say. The region received 6½ inches (165 millimeters) of rain from December to February, followed by almost two weeks of 90-degree temperatures, setting the conditions for the super bloom. Five years of drought made the seeds ready to pop.
Humans also helped. Park staff, volunteers and female prisoners have been removing the Saharan Mustard plant, an invasive species believed brought to California in the 1920s with another plant, the date palm. Saharan Mustard stole the thunder of another super bloom six years ago, said Jim Dice, research manager at the Anza-Borrego Desert Research Center.
“It completely took over the usual wildflower fields and starved out the wildflowers so what we had were giant fields of ugly mustard plant,” Dice said. “That galvanized the community, which depends on tourism largely brought in during the good wildflower years.”
Lia Wathen, a 35-year-old investigator in San Diego, took a Monday off from work so she wouldn’t miss the desert flowers.
“Any single color that you can think of, you’re going to find it right here,” said Wathen, walking with her Maltese dogs, Romeo and Roxy, before stopping to examine a magenta bloom on a spikey Cholla cactus.
Sandra Reel and her husband drove hundreds of miles out of their way when they heard about the super bloom.
“It is absolutely phenomenal to see this many blooming desert plants all at the same time,” she said. “I think it’s probably a once-in-a-lifetime thing.”
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From: MeNeedIt
Hundreds of ships are switching off their tracking devices and taking unexplained routes, raising concern the trafficking of arms, migrants and drugs is going undetected.
Ninety percent of the world’s trade is carried by sea. Every vessel has an identification number administered by the United Nations’ International Maritime Organization or IMO. But crews are able to change the digital identity of their ship, making it possible to conceal previous journeys.
The Israeli firm Windward has developed software to track the changes. Its CEO, Ami Daniel, showed VOA several examples of suspicious shipping activity, including one vessel that changed its entire identity in the middle of a voyage from a Chinese port to North Korea.
“It’s intentionally changing all of identification numbers. Also its name, and its size, and its flag and its owner. Everything that’s recognizable in its digital footprint. This is obviously someone who is trying to circumvent sanctions [on North Korea],” says Daniel.
Transfers at sea
In a joint investigation with the Times of London newspaper, Windward showed that in January and February more than 1,000 cargo transfers took place at sea. Security experts fear traffickers are transporting drugs, weapons, and even people.
Suspicious activity can be highlighted by comparing a vessel’s journey with all its previous voyages. In mid-January a Cyprus-flagged ship designed to carry fish deviated from its usual route between West Africa and northern Europe to visit Ukraine, deactivating its tracking system on several occasions.
“It’s leaving Ukraine, transiting all through the Bosphorus Straits into Europe, then drifting off Malta,” explains Daniel, as the Windward system plots the route of the reefer [refrigerated] vessel on the screen. “On the way it turns off transmission a few times … then it comes into this place east of Gibraltar. This area is known for ship-to-ship transfers and smuggling, because of the proximity to North Africa.”
Under global regulations all vessels must report their last port of call when arriving in a new port.
“But as you can understand, when it does ship-to-ship transfers here, it doesn’t actually call into any port, right, because it’s the middle of the ocean. So it’s finding a way to bypass what it already has to report to the authorities,” Daniel said.
Finally the vessel sails to a remote Scottish island called Islay, but again it anchors around 400 meters off a tiny deserted bay. The specific purpose of this voyage hasn’t yet been identified.
Lack of political will
Daniel shows another example of a vessel leaving the Libyan port of Tobruk before drifting just off the Greek island of Crete, raising suspicions that it is involved in people smuggling.
But he says using information like this to investigate suspicious shipping activities requires political will as well as technological advances.
“Regulation, coordination, legislation. And then proof in the court of law. And not all of this necessarily exists. The high seas, which means 200 nautical miles onwards by definition, are not regulated right now. The U.N. is still working on it.”
Meanwhile the scale of smuggling around the United States’ coastline was underlined this month, as the Coast Guard intercepted 660 kilos of cocaine off the coast of Florida, with a street value of an estimated $420 million.
From: MeNeedIt
Hundreds of ships are switching off their tracking devices and taking unexplained routes, raising concern that the trafficking of arms, migrants and drugs is going undetected. New technology enables authorities to follow the routes of suspect vessels, but security experts say taking on the smugglers will require greater coordination. Henry Ridgwell reports.
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From: MeNeedIt