Today’s robots can be programmed to do many things – from vacuuming floors to assembling cars. But teaching them to recognize and correct a mistake is much harder to do. A group of scientists, led by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, is trying to solve that problem. VOA’s George Putic has more.
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Today’s robots can be programmed to do many things – from vacuuming floors to assembling cars. But teaching them to recognize and correct a mistake is much harder to do. A group of scientists, led by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, is trying to solve that problem. VOA’s George Putic has more.
…
New York City’s iconic but imperiled yellow cab industry may be getting help from lawmakers who want to pump the brakes on fast-expanding ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft.
In what would be a first-in-the-nation step if passed, the City Council on Wednesday is set to vote on proposals that would cap new licenses for car service drivers for one year while officials study the massive changes rippling through the taxi industry.
Other proposals would set minimum pay levels for all drivers and minimum fares, which are now regulated for traditional cabs but not their multitudes of new competitors.
The legislation is a reaction to stories of financial hardship told by drivers, who complain that there are so many Uber cars on the road now that it is getting hard for anyone to make a decent living.
“There has to be a pause button that’s going to give people some breathing room,” said Bhairavi Desai, of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance.
City Council Speaker Corey Johnson said lawmakers aren’t against the ride-hailing newcomers. “We think they’ve actually filled a need,” he said. “We also believe there needs to be a regulatory framework in place.”
For generations, taxi drivers in New York were protected by rules that restricted competition. Around 13,500 yellow cabs had the special licenses, called medallions, needed to pick up passengers on the street. Several thousand more drivers worked for black car companies that dispatched vehicles by phone, mostly in the outer boroughs of Bronx, Queens, Staten Island and Brooklyn, where yellow cabs generally wouldn’t travel.
That system was smashed when the city began allowing passengers to use smartphone apps to hail cars almost anywhere.
The change kicked off a dizzying increase in the number of car service drivers from about 65,000 in 2015 to 100,000 now.
$1 million taxi medallions
One unforeseen development has been plunging value of the traditional taxi medallions. As recently as four years ago, they were changing hands at prices reaching $1 million. They were considered such a ticket to guaranteed income, banks allowed owners to borrow huge sums against them for home mortgages or school loans.
Now, many of those loans are coming due. Drivers no longer have the income to pay them off. And with medallions now trading at $200,000 or less, owners don’t have the collateral to refinance.
Driver Lal Singh said he owes $312,000 on a medallion he thought would be his ticket to middle-class comfort. But he can’t sell at a price high enough to cover his debt. So at age 62, he’s still driving 14-hour shifts, despite having high blood pressure and diabetes, with every penny going to pay off his debt.
“Everybody say, ‘This is my retirement. Some income will come in from the medallion. We will survive,'” he said. “But now we have no hope and I don’t see any place, which direction I should go.”
Six drivers have taken their own lives in the last year, including one who shot himself in his car in front of City Hall after railing against politicians and Uber in a newsletter column.
“I will not be a slave working for chump change,” Douglas Shifter wrote. “I would rather be dead.”
Drivers previously pushed for a cap on new competition in 2015, but were beaten back by ride-hailing companies. The same companies are now pushing back on the new proposals, saying they would prevent them from replacing drivers who quit and lead to reduced service.
“We’re really concerned about the process and the speed with which the council is trying to ram this through,” said Joseph Okpaku, vice president of public policy at Lyft.
Racial profiling argument
Uber spokesman Josh Gold said a cap on new licenses would reverse the progress made extending service to neighborhoods poorly served by traditional taxis.
That argument has gotten support from some civil rights activists like the Rev. Al Sharpton, who have long criticized the yellow cab industry for discrimination and profiling of minorities.
“They’re talking about putting a cap on Uber, do you know how difficult it is for black people to get a yellow cab in New York City?” Sharpton wrote on Twitter.
The level of upheaval in the industry hasn’t been seen on this scale since the first half of the 20th century, when the medallion system was put in place to deal with issues of competition, said Graham Hodges, a professor at Colgate University.
Flaws in that system, like racial profiling and inadequate demand, “made it easy for Uber, Lyft and the others to come in, say, ‘We’re going to provide a much better service,”‘ he said.
“That doesn’t mean those flaws couldn’t be remedied without destroying the system,” he said.
…
New York City’s iconic but imperiled yellow cab industry may be getting help from lawmakers who want to pump the brakes on fast-expanding ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft.
In what would be a first-in-the-nation step if passed, the City Council on Wednesday is set to vote on proposals that would cap new licenses for car service drivers for one year while officials study the massive changes rippling through the taxi industry.
Other proposals would set minimum pay levels for all drivers and minimum fares, which are now regulated for traditional cabs but not their multitudes of new competitors.
The legislation is a reaction to stories of financial hardship told by drivers, who complain that there are so many Uber cars on the road now that it is getting hard for anyone to make a decent living.
“There has to be a pause button that’s going to give people some breathing room,” said Bhairavi Desai, of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance.
City Council Speaker Corey Johnson said lawmakers aren’t against the ride-hailing newcomers. “We think they’ve actually filled a need,” he said. “We also believe there needs to be a regulatory framework in place.”
For generations, taxi drivers in New York were protected by rules that restricted competition. Around 13,500 yellow cabs had the special licenses, called medallions, needed to pick up passengers on the street. Several thousand more drivers worked for black car companies that dispatched vehicles by phone, mostly in the outer boroughs of Bronx, Queens, Staten Island and Brooklyn, where yellow cabs generally wouldn’t travel.
That system was smashed when the city began allowing passengers to use smartphone apps to hail cars almost anywhere.
The change kicked off a dizzying increase in the number of car service drivers from about 65,000 in 2015 to 100,000 now.
$1 million taxi medallions
One unforeseen development has been plunging value of the traditional taxi medallions. As recently as four years ago, they were changing hands at prices reaching $1 million. They were considered such a ticket to guaranteed income, banks allowed owners to borrow huge sums against them for home mortgages or school loans.
Now, many of those loans are coming due. Drivers no longer have the income to pay them off. And with medallions now trading at $200,000 or less, owners don’t have the collateral to refinance.
Driver Lal Singh said he owes $312,000 on a medallion he thought would be his ticket to middle-class comfort. But he can’t sell at a price high enough to cover his debt. So at age 62, he’s still driving 14-hour shifts, despite having high blood pressure and diabetes, with every penny going to pay off his debt.
“Everybody say, ‘This is my retirement. Some income will come in from the medallion. We will survive,'” he said. “But now we have no hope and I don’t see any place, which direction I should go.”
Six drivers have taken their own lives in the last year, including one who shot himself in his car in front of City Hall after railing against politicians and Uber in a newsletter column.
“I will not be a slave working for chump change,” Douglas Shifter wrote. “I would rather be dead.”
Drivers previously pushed for a cap on new competition in 2015, but were beaten back by ride-hailing companies. The same companies are now pushing back on the new proposals, saying they would prevent them from replacing drivers who quit and lead to reduced service.
“We’re really concerned about the process and the speed with which the council is trying to ram this through,” said Joseph Okpaku, vice president of public policy at Lyft.
Racial profiling argument
Uber spokesman Josh Gold said a cap on new licenses would reverse the progress made extending service to neighborhoods poorly served by traditional taxis.
That argument has gotten support from some civil rights activists like the Rev. Al Sharpton, who have long criticized the yellow cab industry for discrimination and profiling of minorities.
“They’re talking about putting a cap on Uber, do you know how difficult it is for black people to get a yellow cab in New York City?” Sharpton wrote on Twitter.
The level of upheaval in the industry hasn’t been seen on this scale since the first half of the 20th century, when the medallion system was put in place to deal with issues of competition, said Graham Hodges, a professor at Colgate University.
Flaws in that system, like racial profiling and inadequate demand, “made it easy for Uber, Lyft and the others to come in, say, ‘We’re going to provide a much better service,”‘ he said.
“That doesn’t mean those flaws couldn’t be remedied without destroying the system,” he said.
…
Venezuela’s state-run oil company PDVSA has limited the damage from an unprecedented slump in crude exports by transferring oil between tankers at sea and loading vessels in neighboring Cuba to avoid asset seizures.
But the OPEC member nation is still fulfilling less than 60 percent of its obligations under supply deals with customers. Venezuela has been pumping oil this year at the lowest rate in three decades after years of underinvestment and a mass exodus of workers. The state-run firm’s collapse has left the country short of cash to fund its embattled socialist government and triggered an economic crisis.
PDVSA’s problems were compounded in May when U.S. oil firm ConocoPhillips began seizing PDVSA assets in the Caribbean as payment for a $2 billion arbitration award. An arbitration panel at the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) ordered PDVSA to pay the cash to compensate Conoco for expropriating the firm’s Venezuelan assets in 2007.
The seizures left PDVSA without access to facilities such as Isla refinery in Curacao and BOPEC terminal in Bonaire that accounted for almost a quarter of the company’s oil exports. Conoco’s actions also forced PDVSA to stop shipping oil on its own vessels to terminals in the Caribbean, and then onto refineries worldwide, to avoid the risk the cargoes would be seized in international waters or foreign ports.
Instead, PDVSA asked customers to charter tankers to Venezuelan waters and load from the company’s own terminals or from anchored PDVSA vessels acting as floating storage units.
The state-run company told some clients in early June it might impose force majeure, a temporary suspension of export contracts, unless they agreed to such ship-to-ship transfers. PDVSA also requested the customers stop sending vessels to its terminals until it could load those that were already clogging Venezuela’s coastline.
Initially, customers were reluctant to undertake the transfers because of costs, safety concerns and the need for specialist equipment and experienced crew.
But PDVSA has managed to export about 1.3 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil since early July, up from just 765,000 bpd in the first half of June, according to Thomson Reuters data and internal PDVSA shipping data seen by Reuters.
That was still 59 percent of the country’s 2.19 million bpd in contractual obligations to customers for that period, and some vessels are still waiting for weeks in Venezuelan waters to load oil.
There were about two dozen tankers waiting this week to load over 22 million barrels of crude and refined products at the country’s largest ports, according to Reuters data.
“We are not tied to one option or a single loading terminal,” PDVSA President Manuel Quevedo said on Tuesday of the company’s exports. “We have several (terminals) in our country and we have some in the Caribbean, which of course facilitate crude shipping to fulfill our supply contracts.”
Cuban connection
PDVSA has also used a route through Cuba to ease the impact of the Conoco seizures. That route is for fuel rather than crude.
The Venezuelan company has used a terminal at the port of Matanzas as a conduit mostly for exporting fuel oil, according to two people familiar with the operations and Thomson Reuters shipping data. Venezuela’s fuel oil is burned in some countries to generate electricity.
Two tankers set sail from the Matanzas terminal for Singapore between mid-May and early July, Reuters data showed. Each ship carried around 500,000 barrels of Venezuelan fuel, Reuters data shows.
In recent months, Venezuela has been shipping fuel to Matanzas in small batches, according to the data.
PDVSA and Cuba’s state-run oil firm Cupet have used Matanzas to store Venezuelan crude and fuel in the past but exports from the terminal to Asian destinations are rare.
That is in part because vessels that use Cuban ports cannot subsequently dock in the United States due to the U.S. commercial embargo on Cuba.
Cupet did not respond to requests for comment. PDVSA has also used ship-to-ship transfers to fulfill an unusual supply contract it has with Cuba’s Cienfuegos refinery.
The refinery dates from the 1980s — when Cuba was a close ally of the Soviet Union during the Cold War — and the facility was built to process Russian crude.
PDVSA typically uses its own or leased tankers to bring Russian crude from storage in the nearby Dutch Caribbean island of Curacao to Cienfuegos. But it is now discharging the imported Russian oil at sea in Cayman Islands’ waters via these seaborne transfers.
ConocoPhillips last month ratcheted up its collection efforts by moving to depose officials from Citgo Petroleum, PDVSA’s U.S. refining arm, arguing it had improperly claimed ownership of some PDVSA cargoes. Citgo declined to comment.
ConocoPhillips is also preparing new legal actions to get Caribbean courts to recognize its International Chamber of Commerce arbitration award. If it succeeds in those efforts, it would be able to sell the assets to help satisfy the ruling.
…
Venezuela’s state-run oil company PDVSA has limited the damage from an unprecedented slump in crude exports by transferring oil between tankers at sea and loading vessels in neighboring Cuba to avoid asset seizures.
But the OPEC member nation is still fulfilling less than 60 percent of its obligations under supply deals with customers. Venezuela has been pumping oil this year at the lowest rate in three decades after years of underinvestment and a mass exodus of workers. The state-run firm’s collapse has left the country short of cash to fund its embattled socialist government and triggered an economic crisis.
PDVSA’s problems were compounded in May when U.S. oil firm ConocoPhillips began seizing PDVSA assets in the Caribbean as payment for a $2 billion arbitration award. An arbitration panel at the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) ordered PDVSA to pay the cash to compensate Conoco for expropriating the firm’s Venezuelan assets in 2007.
The seizures left PDVSA without access to facilities such as Isla refinery in Curacao and BOPEC terminal in Bonaire that accounted for almost a quarter of the company’s oil exports. Conoco’s actions also forced PDVSA to stop shipping oil on its own vessels to terminals in the Caribbean, and then onto refineries worldwide, to avoid the risk the cargoes would be seized in international waters or foreign ports.
Instead, PDVSA asked customers to charter tankers to Venezuelan waters and load from the company’s own terminals or from anchored PDVSA vessels acting as floating storage units.
The state-run company told some clients in early June it might impose force majeure, a temporary suspension of export contracts, unless they agreed to such ship-to-ship transfers. PDVSA also requested the customers stop sending vessels to its terminals until it could load those that were already clogging Venezuela’s coastline.
Initially, customers were reluctant to undertake the transfers because of costs, safety concerns and the need for specialist equipment and experienced crew.
But PDVSA has managed to export about 1.3 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil since early July, up from just 765,000 bpd in the first half of June, according to Thomson Reuters data and internal PDVSA shipping data seen by Reuters.
That was still 59 percent of the country’s 2.19 million bpd in contractual obligations to customers for that period, and some vessels are still waiting for weeks in Venezuelan waters to load oil.
There were about two dozen tankers waiting this week to load over 22 million barrels of crude and refined products at the country’s largest ports, according to Reuters data.
“We are not tied to one option or a single loading terminal,” PDVSA President Manuel Quevedo said on Tuesday of the company’s exports. “We have several (terminals) in our country and we have some in the Caribbean, which of course facilitate crude shipping to fulfill our supply contracts.”
Cuban connection
PDVSA has also used a route through Cuba to ease the impact of the Conoco seizures. That route is for fuel rather than crude.
The Venezuelan company has used a terminal at the port of Matanzas as a conduit mostly for exporting fuel oil, according to two people familiar with the operations and Thomson Reuters shipping data. Venezuela’s fuel oil is burned in some countries to generate electricity.
Two tankers set sail from the Matanzas terminal for Singapore between mid-May and early July, Reuters data showed. Each ship carried around 500,000 barrels of Venezuelan fuel, Reuters data shows.
In recent months, Venezuela has been shipping fuel to Matanzas in small batches, according to the data.
PDVSA and Cuba’s state-run oil firm Cupet have used Matanzas to store Venezuelan crude and fuel in the past but exports from the terminal to Asian destinations are rare.
That is in part because vessels that use Cuban ports cannot subsequently dock in the United States due to the U.S. commercial embargo on Cuba.
Cupet did not respond to requests for comment. PDVSA has also used ship-to-ship transfers to fulfill an unusual supply contract it has with Cuba’s Cienfuegos refinery.
The refinery dates from the 1980s — when Cuba was a close ally of the Soviet Union during the Cold War — and the facility was built to process Russian crude.
PDVSA typically uses its own or leased tankers to bring Russian crude from storage in the nearby Dutch Caribbean island of Curacao to Cienfuegos. But it is now discharging the imported Russian oil at sea in Cayman Islands’ waters via these seaborne transfers.
ConocoPhillips last month ratcheted up its collection efforts by moving to depose officials from Citgo Petroleum, PDVSA’s U.S. refining arm, arguing it had improperly claimed ownership of some PDVSA cargoes. Citgo declined to comment.
ConocoPhillips is also preparing new legal actions to get Caribbean courts to recognize its International Chamber of Commerce arbitration award. If it succeeds in those efforts, it would be able to sell the assets to help satisfy the ruling.
…
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk is considering leading a buyout of the electric car maker in a stunning move that would end the maverick company’s eight-year history trading on the stock market.
In his typically unorthodox fashion, the eccentric Musk dropped his bombshell on his Twitter account, which he has used as a platform for pranks, vitriol and now for a proposal to pull off one of the biggest buyouts in U.S. history.
Musk got the ball rolling Tuesday after the stock market had already been open more than three hours with a tweet announcing he might buy all of Tesla’s stock at $420 per share with no further details.
At that price, the buyout would cost nearly $72 billion, based on Tesla’s outstanding stock as of July 27, but it’s unlikely the deal would cost that much because Musk owns a roughly 20 percent stake in the Palo Alto, California, company. He also said he intends to give Tesla’s existing shareholders the option of retaining a stake in the company through a special fund, if they want.
“Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured,” Musk wrote in his first tweet, following up with “good morning” and a smiley emoji.
His tweet came hours after the Financial Times reported that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund had built a significant stake in Tesla Inc., but it was unclear if that was the funding Musk was referring to. The Financial Times, citing unnamed people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund had built a stake of between 3 and 5 percent of Telsa’s shares.
Musk’s announcement was initially met with widespread skepticism, with many people connecting the proposed $420-per-share offer with 420 being a common slang term for marijuana.
Musk also previously used his Twitter account to joke that Tesla was going bankrupt in an April Fool’s Day tweet and his stability was called into question last month after he called a British diver who helped rescue children from a Thailand cave a pedophile. That baseless tweet was quickly deleted and Musk apologized to the diver.
The confusion caused by Musk’s Tuesday announcement via Twitter also prompted regulators of the Nasdaq stock market to temporarily suspend trading in Tesla’s stock.
Musk later brought some clarity to the situation in an email to Tesla employees that was also posted on Tesla’s blog. Trading in Tesla’s stock resumed shortly after, and the stock climbed 11 percent to $379.57. Musk’s offer is 9 percent higher than Tesla’s peak closing price of $385 reached nearly a year ago.
By taking Tesla private, Musk believes that the company will be able to sharpen its long-term focus of revolutionizing an automobile industry dominated by fuel-combustion vehicles without having to cater to investors’ fixation on how the business is faring from one quarter to the next.
Making money has proven elusive for Tesla while it has been investing in electric car technology and ramping up production of its vehicle, including a sedan with a starting price of $35,000 to appeal to a broader audience.
The company has only posted a quarterly profit twice in its history and has never made money during an entire calendar year, something that Musk has been trying to change by cutting costs, including recent mass layoffs that trimmed Tesla’s workforce by 9 percent. Tesla lost another $717.5 million in its most recent quarter.
Despite its challenges, Tesla has remained a favorite among many investors, partly because of their faith in Musk, who made his initial fortune as a co-founder of PayPal and also is the CEO of a trail-blazing aerospace company, SpaceX, that’s already private.
But another substantial segment of investors are convinced Tesla is doomed to fail and are betting on the company’s eventual demise by becoming “short sellers” of its stock. Short sellers borrow shares from other investors and then immediately sell them on the premise that they will be able to buy them back at a lower price later to replace they stock they borrowed.
Musk has long raged against short sellers and mentioned his desire to be rid of them as one of his reasons for taking Tesla private. “Being public means that there are large numbers of people who have the incentive to attack the company,” he wrote.
…
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is considering leading a buyout of the electric car maker in a stunning move that would end the maverick company’s eight-year history trading on the stock market.
In his typically unorthodox fashion, the eccentric Musk dropped his bombshell on his Twitter account, which he has used as a platform for pranks, vitriol and now for a proposal to pull off one of the biggest buyouts in U.S. history.
Musk got the ball rolling Tuesday after the stock market had already been open more than three hours with a tweet announcing he might buy all of Tesla’s stock at $420 per share with no further details.
At that price, the buyout would cost nearly $72 billion, based on Tesla’s outstanding stock as of July 27, but it’s unlikely the deal would cost that much because Musk owns a roughly 20 percent stake in the Palo Alto, California, company. He also said he intends to give Tesla’s existing shareholders the option of retaining a stake in the company through a special fund, if they want.
“Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured,” Musk wrote in his first tweet, following up with “good morning” and a smiley emoji.
His tweet came hours after the Financial Times reported that Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund had built a significant stake in Tesla Inc., but it was unclear if that was the funding Musk was referring to. The Financial Times, citing unnamed people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund had built a stake of between 3 and 5 percent of Telsa’s shares.
Musk’s announcement was initially met with widespread skepticism, with many people connecting the proposed $420-per-share offer with 420 being a common slang term for marijuana.
Musk also previously used his Twitter account to joke that Tesla was going bankrupt in an April Fool’s Day tweet and his stability was called into question last month after he called a British diver who helped rescue children from a Thailand cave a pedophile. That baseless tweet was quickly deleted and Musk apologized to the diver.
The confusion caused by Musk’s Tuesday announcement via Twitter also prompted regulators of the Nasdaq stock market to temporarily suspend trading in Tesla’s stock.
Musk later brought some clarity to the situation in an email to Tesla employees that was also posted on Tesla’s blog. Trading in Tesla’s stock resumed shortly after, and the stock climbed 11 percent to $379.57. Musk’s offer is 9 percent higher than Tesla’s peak closing price of $385 reached nearly a year ago.
By taking Tesla private, Musk believes that the company will be able to sharpen its long-term focus of revolutionizing an automobile industry dominated by fuel-combustion vehicles without having to cater to investors’ fixation on how the business is faring from one quarter to the next.
Making money has proven elusive for Tesla while it has been investing in electric car technology and ramping up production of its vehicle, including a sedan with a starting price of $35,000 to appeal to a broader audience.
The company has only posted a quarterly profit twice in its history and has never made money during an entire calendar year, something that Musk has been trying to change by cutting costs, including recent mass layoffs that trimmed Tesla’s workforce by 9 percent. Tesla lost another $717.5 million in its most recent quarter.
Despite its challenges, Tesla has remained a favorite among many investors, partly because of their faith in Musk, who made his initial fortune as a co-founder of PayPal and also is the CEO of a trail-blazing aerospace company, SpaceX, that’s already private.
But another substantial segment of investors are convinced Tesla is doomed to fail and are betting on the company’s eventual demise by becoming “short sellers” of its stock. Short sellers borrow shares from other investors and then immediately sell them on the premise that they will be able to buy them back at a lower price later to replace they stock they borrowed.
Musk has long raged against short sellers and mentioned his desire to be rid of them as one of his reasons for taking Tesla private. “Being public means that there are large numbers of people who have the incentive to attack the company,” he wrote.
…
Already threatened by escalating U.S. taxes on its goods, China is about to find it much harder to invest in U.S. companies or to buy American technology in such cutting-edge areas as robotics, artificial intelligence and virtual reality.
President Donald Trump is expected as early as this week to sign legislation to tighten the U.S. government’s scrutiny of foreign investments and exports of sensitive technology.
The law, which Congress passed in a rare show of unity among Republicans and Democrats, doesn’t single out China. But there’s no doubt the intended target is Beijing. The Trump administration has accused China of using predatory tactics to steal American technology.
“As a policy signal, it speaks with a very loud voice,” said Harry Clark, head of the international trade practice at the law firm Orrick. “Leading decision makers and Congress are very concerned about technology transfer to China.”
The Trump administration has already imposed tariffs on $34 billion in Chinese exports, is preparing taxes on a further $16 billion and has threatened to target an additional $200 billion of Beijing’s exports and maybe still more.
As part of the same punitive campaign, Trump had initially ordered the Treasury Department to draft investment restrictions aimed specifically at China. But in late June, Trump decided instead to back Congress’ effort to tighten existing investment restrictions and export controls on all countries, rather than China alone.
The new law strengthens reviews of foreign investment by the existing Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, which is led by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. The committee can now review any investments that grant foreigners access to a U.S. company’s high-tech trade secrets. Before the change, such reviews were done only when a foreigner gained control of a company.
The new law also gives the committee oversight of real estate deals that are deemed to pose a national security risk by putting foreigners in “close proximity” to government offices and military bases. The legislation will also crack down on deals that appear structured to evade such oversight.
Congress is also directing the committee to go beyond specific cases to identify patterns in foreign investment — if, for example, Chinese companies are acquiring a specific technology — and to work with U.S. allies that share its concerns about Beijing’s high-tech ambitions.
“Treasury can now share information,” said Rod Hunter, a partner at the Baker McKenzie law firm and a former White House economic adviser. “They used to have to do all kinds of backflips and workarounds with allied governments to deal with this sort of issue.”
The new law also strengthens the Commerce Department’s oversight of high-tech exports. Government agencies will identify sensitive “emerging and foundational technologies” that will be subject to tougher export controls.
Hunter said he thought the stricter oversight of high-tech exports could potentially impose a bigger impact on China than the tariffs the Trump administration has imposed on Beijing’s exports to the United States.
Still, the new measures could burden U.S. companies that will find it harder to attract Chinese investment or to share with Chinese partners or customers technology that the U.S. government might deem sensitive.
“It could be that we’re pushing American tech firms out of China,” said Derek Scissors, China specialist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
The crackdown reflects a sharp reversal in U.S. attitudes toward Chinese investment. From virtually nothing in 2000, Chinese direct investment in the United States (including new plants and offices and acquisitions of American companies) reached a record $46 billion in 2016, according to the Rhodium Group research firm.
Chinese investors sank money into U.S. companies involved in artificial intelligence, robotics and blockchain technology, which is used to do business in cryptocurrencies. U.S. policymakers began to worry about what the Chinese were up to, especially after leaders in Beijing made their ambitions clear: They intend to nurture homegrown Chinese companies that will contend for global dominance in such fields as electric cars, robotics and medical devices.
In March, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative reported that Chinese investors were using money provided by Beijing to outbid private companies and pay above-market rates for technology and talent. And last year, a Defense Department report sounded the alarm about China obtaining technology that could have military uses.
“The line demarcating products designed and used for commercial versus military purposes is blurring,” said the report from the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit Experimental.
It noted that virtual-reality gaming was becoming as sophisticated as what the armed forces use for battlefield simulations and that facial recognition technology used in social media can track terrorists.
Even before the new law, U.S. reviews of Chinese investments were becoming stricter. In January, the government effectively blocked the acquisition of the Dallas-based money transfer service MoneyGram by the Chinese firm Ant Financial. Its concern was that the deal would give China access to the financial records of millions of Americans, including members of the military.
The result has been a deepfreeze in direct Chinese investment in the United States: It tumbled 36 percent last year to $29 billion. In the first half of this year, such investment dropped to its lowest level in seven years — $1.8 billion — down 90 percent from the first six months of 2017, according to Rhodium Group.
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Already threatened by escalating U.S. taxes on its goods, China is about to find it much harder to invest in U.S. companies or to buy American technology in such cutting-edge areas as robotics, artificial intelligence and virtual reality.
President Donald Trump is expected as early as this week to sign legislation to tighten the U.S. government’s scrutiny of foreign investments and exports of sensitive technology.
The law, which Congress passed in a rare show of unity among Republicans and Democrats, doesn’t single out China. But there’s no doubt the intended target is Beijing. The Trump administration has accused China of using predatory tactics to steal American technology.
“As a policy signal, it speaks with a very loud voice,” said Harry Clark, head of the international trade practice at the law firm Orrick. “Leading decision makers and Congress are very concerned about technology transfer to China.”
The Trump administration has already imposed tariffs on $34 billion in Chinese exports, is preparing taxes on a further $16 billion and has threatened to target an additional $200 billion of Beijing’s exports and maybe still more.
As part of the same punitive campaign, Trump had initially ordered the Treasury Department to draft investment restrictions aimed specifically at China. But in late June, Trump decided instead to back Congress’ effort to tighten existing investment restrictions and export controls on all countries, rather than China alone.
The new law strengthens reviews of foreign investment by the existing Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, which is led by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. The committee can now review any investments that grant foreigners access to a U.S. company’s high-tech trade secrets. Before the change, such reviews were done only when a foreigner gained control of a company.
The new law also gives the committee oversight of real estate deals that are deemed to pose a national security risk by putting foreigners in “close proximity” to government offices and military bases. The legislation will also crack down on deals that appear structured to evade such oversight.
Congress is also directing the committee to go beyond specific cases to identify patterns in foreign investment — if, for example, Chinese companies are acquiring a specific technology — and to work with U.S. allies that share its concerns about Beijing’s high-tech ambitions.
“Treasury can now share information,” said Rod Hunter, a partner at the Baker McKenzie law firm and a former White House economic adviser. “They used to have to do all kinds of backflips and workarounds with allied governments to deal with this sort of issue.”
The new law also strengthens the Commerce Department’s oversight of high-tech exports. Government agencies will identify sensitive “emerging and foundational technologies” that will be subject to tougher export controls.
Hunter said he thought the stricter oversight of high-tech exports could potentially impose a bigger impact on China than the tariffs the Trump administration has imposed on Beijing’s exports to the United States.
Still, the new measures could burden U.S. companies that will find it harder to attract Chinese investment or to share with Chinese partners or customers technology that the U.S. government might deem sensitive.
“It could be that we’re pushing American tech firms out of China,” said Derek Scissors, China specialist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
The crackdown reflects a sharp reversal in U.S. attitudes toward Chinese investment. From virtually nothing in 2000, Chinese direct investment in the United States (including new plants and offices and acquisitions of American companies) reached a record $46 billion in 2016, according to the Rhodium Group research firm.
Chinese investors sank money into U.S. companies involved in artificial intelligence, robotics and blockchain technology, which is used to do business in cryptocurrencies. U.S. policymakers began to worry about what the Chinese were up to, especially after leaders in Beijing made their ambitions clear: They intend to nurture homegrown Chinese companies that will contend for global dominance in such fields as electric cars, robotics and medical devices.
In March, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative reported that Chinese investors were using money provided by Beijing to outbid private companies and pay above-market rates for technology and talent. And last year, a Defense Department report sounded the alarm about China obtaining technology that could have military uses.
“The line demarcating products designed and used for commercial versus military purposes is blurring,” said the report from the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit Experimental.
It noted that virtual-reality gaming was becoming as sophisticated as what the armed forces use for battlefield simulations and that facial recognition technology used in social media can track terrorists.
Even before the new law, U.S. reviews of Chinese investments were becoming stricter. In January, the government effectively blocked the acquisition of the Dallas-based money transfer service MoneyGram by the Chinese firm Ant Financial. Its concern was that the deal would give China access to the financial records of millions of Americans, including members of the military.
The result has been a deepfreeze in direct Chinese investment in the United States: It tumbled 36 percent last year to $29 billion. In the first half of this year, such investment dropped to its lowest level in seven years — $1.8 billion — down 90 percent from the first six months of 2017, according to Rhodium Group.
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The baobab tree dots the dry African savannah from Senegal to Madagascar. It yields a fruit that’s been described as a superfood popular in the United States and Europe. With an increasing global appeal, local farmers say business is booming… but some worry that worldwide sales of the crop are not sustainable. Arash Arabasadi reports.
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The FBI has started sharing information about online trolls and other suspicious users with top technology companies as part of the bureau’s behind-the-scenes effort to disrupt foreign influence operations aimed at U.S. elections, with officials saying it is the service providers’ responsibility to police malign messaging by Russia and other countries.
“By sharing information with them, especially about who certain users and account holders actually are, we can assist their own, voluntary initiatives to track foreign influence activity and to enforce their own terms of service,” said Adam Dickey, a deputy assistant attorney general.
The information, described as “actionable intelligence,” is funneled through a foreign influence task force FBI Director Christopher Wray set up last fall November as part of a broader government approach to counter foreign influence operations and to prevent a repeat of Russian meddling in the 2018 midterm and the 2020 presidential elections.
The U.S. intelligence community concluded last year that Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 election in part by orchestrating a massive social media campaign aimed at swaying American public opinion and sowing discord.
“Technology companies have a front-line responsibility to secure their own networks, products and platforms,” Wray said. “But we’re doing our part by providing actionable intelligence to better enable them to address abuse of their platforms by foreign actors.”
He said FBI officials have provided top social media and technology companies with several classified briefings so far this year, sharing “specific threat indicators and account information, and a variety of other pieces of information so that they can better monitor their own platforms.”
FBI expertise
The task force works with personnel in all 56 FBI field offices and “brings together the FBI’s expertise across the waterfront — counterintelligence, cyber, criminal and even counterterrorism — to root out and respond to foreign influence operations,” Wray said at a White House briefing.
Adam Hickey, a deputy assistant attorney general, said on Monday that the FBI’s unpublicized sharing of information with the social media companies is a “key component” of the Justice Department’s to counter covert foreign influence efforts.
“It is those providers who bear the primary responsibility for securing their own products and platforms,” Hickey said this week at MisinfoCon, an annual conference on misinformation held in Washington, D.C.
The comments come as top U.S. security officials from Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats on down warned about continued attempts by Russia and potentially others to disrupt the November midterm elections.
Coats said on Friday that U.S. intelligence agencies continue “to see a pervasive message campaign” by Russia, while Wray said Moscow “continues to engage in malign influence operations to this day.”
But the officials and social media company executives say the ongoing misinformation campaign does not reach the unprecedented levels seen during the 2016 election.
Hickey, of the Justice Department’s national security division, said that the agency doesn’t often “expose and attribute” ongoing foreign influence operations partly to protect the investigations, methods and sources, and partly “to avoid even the appearance of partiality.”
Social media, technology companies
Social media and technology companies, widely criticized for their role in allowing Russian operatives to use their platforms during the 2016 election, have taken steps over the past year to crack down on misinformation.
In June, Twitter announced new measures to fight abuse and trolls, saying it is focused on “developing machine learning tools that identify and take action on networks of spammy or automated accounts automatically.”
In April, Facebook announced that it had taken down 135 Facebook and Instagram accounts and 138 Facebook pages linked to the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm indicted in February for orchestrating Russia’s social media operations in 2016.
The company did not say whether it had removed the pages and accounts based on information provided by the FBI.
Monika Bickert, head of Facebook’s product policy and counterterrorism, told an audience at the Aspen Security Forum last month that the social network has moved to shield its users against fake information by deploying artificial intelligence tools that detect fake accounts and instituting transparency in advertising requirements.
Tom Burt, vice president for customer security and trust at Microsoft, speaking at the same event, disclosed that the company had worked with law enforcement earlier this year to foil a Russian attempt to hack the campaigns of three candidates running for office in the midterm elections.
He did not identify the candidates by name but said they “were all people who, because of their positions, might have been interesting targets from an espionage standpoint, as well as an election disruption standpoint.”
Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri confirmed late last month that Russian hackers tried unsuccessfully to infiltrate her Senate computer network, raising questions about the extent to which Russia will try to interfere in the 2018 elections.
Wray stressed that the influence operations are not “an election cycle threat.”
“Our adversaries are trying to undermine our country on a persistent and regular basis, whether it’s election season or not,” he said.
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Modern technology is transporting students back to the 20th century, to the exact moment during World War II when an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. No, it’s not time travel, but with the help of Virtual Reality – students are able to relive the 1945 U.S. attack which devastated the Japanese city, and left more than 140,000 dead. Faith Lapidus reports.
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India’s first disabled dance troupe to perform a lively, foot stomping folk dance popular in the northern state of Punjab is enthralling audiences around the country with their energetic performances. Over the years, the troupe, called Rising Star, has grown from four to 14 members and many are now in their forties and fifties. As Anjana Pasricha reports, their enthusiasm remains undimmed.
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India’s first disabled dance troupe to perform a lively, foot stomping folk dance popular in the northern state of Punjab is enthralling audiences around the country with their energetic performances. Over the years, the troupe, called Rising Star, has grown from four to 14 members and many are now in their forties and fifties. As Anjana Pasricha reports, their enthusiasm remains undimmed.
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President Donald Trump has been busy on the congressional campaign trail lately, eager to tout the strong U.S. economy on behalf of Republican candidates leading up to this year’s midterm elections in November. But the president has also repeatedly launched Twitter attacks over the Russia probe, his border wall, and what he believes is unfair media coverage — attacks Republicans fear will distract from his economic message. VOA national correspondent Jim Malone has more from Washington.
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NASCAR chairman and CEO Brian France announced Monday he was taking an indefinite leave of absence a day after his arrest in New York’s Hamptons on charges of driving while intoxicated and criminal possession of oxycodone.
France had a blood-alcohol content that was more than twice the legal limit, smelled of booze and slurred his words after he was seen blowing through a stop sign in Sag Harbor on Sunday, police said.
“I apologize to our fans, our industry and my family for the impact of my actions last night,” France said in a statement Monday. “Effective immediately, I will be taking an indefinite leave of absence from my position to focus on my personal affairs.”
France has been NASCAR’s chairman and CEO since 2003. His uncle, Jim France, a vice chairman and executive vice president, will take over those roles on an interim basis.
France, 56, was arraigned at Sag Harbor Village Justice Court after spending the night in jail. He was released on his own recognizance and is due back in court Sept 14.
His lawyer referred reporters to a NASCAR statement on the matter. The organization said it takes France’s arrest “as a serious matter and will issue a statement after we have all of the facts.”
France, 56, was pulled over and arrested at about 7:30 p.m. Sunday after police said they saw his 2017 Lexus roll through a stop sign near the Sag Harbor waterfront.
His eyes were red and glassy and he struggled to keep his balance during field sobriety tests, police said. Tests showed France’s blood-alcohol content was 0.18, police said. The legal limit in New York is 0.08.
Officers found five oxycodone pills during a subsequent search, police said.
TMZ first reported the arrest.
France is a third-generation leader of NASCAR. His late grandfather, Bill France Sr., founded the company in 1948.
He’s introduced a playoff system, overhauled the design of its cars, and pushed for diversity within the circuit’s predominantly white, male ranks.
In recent years, he’s been dealing with plunging attendance and TV ratings and departing sponsors, attributing the downturn to the challenge of connecting with a new, younger generation of fans.
France last month characterized as “rumors” reports that his family was looking into selling its racing properties.
“The France family is locked and loaded in its dedication to NASCAR,” France told SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “We’re focused on ruling and managing NASCAR. There’s nothing to report on that. Rumors are always interesting, but they’re seldom right.”
2006 incident
France was involved in a 2006 incident in Daytona Beach, Florida, when a police report stated he crashed his Lexus into a tree after entering a restaurant parking lot.
France later told an officer called to his home that he was drinking a soda and “bumped into something.”
But a witness called 911 and gave police a statement that claimed she saw France driving at a “very reckless speed,” and claimed France’s car hit the tree after hitting a parked car.
She said she also watched as France “fell over his own feet” as he got out of his car.
Her statement was not attached to the police report, and the Daytona Beach police chief later investigated whether France was given special treatment by authorities.
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NASCAR chairman and CEO Brian France announced Monday he was taking an indefinite leave of absence a day after his arrest in New York’s Hamptons on charges of driving while intoxicated and criminal possession of oxycodone.
France had a blood-alcohol content that was more than twice the legal limit, smelled of booze and slurred his words after he was seen blowing through a stop sign in Sag Harbor on Sunday, police said.
“I apologize to our fans, our industry and my family for the impact of my actions last night,” France said in a statement Monday. “Effective immediately, I will be taking an indefinite leave of absence from my position to focus on my personal affairs.”
France has been NASCAR’s chairman and CEO since 2003. His uncle, Jim France, a vice chairman and executive vice president, will take over those roles on an interim basis.
France, 56, was arraigned at Sag Harbor Village Justice Court after spending the night in jail. He was released on his own recognizance and is due back in court Sept 14.
His lawyer referred reporters to a NASCAR statement on the matter. The organization said it takes France’s arrest “as a serious matter and will issue a statement after we have all of the facts.”
France, 56, was pulled over and arrested at about 7:30 p.m. Sunday after police said they saw his 2017 Lexus roll through a stop sign near the Sag Harbor waterfront.
His eyes were red and glassy and he struggled to keep his balance during field sobriety tests, police said. Tests showed France’s blood-alcohol content was 0.18, police said. The legal limit in New York is 0.08.
Officers found five oxycodone pills during a subsequent search, police said.
TMZ first reported the arrest.
France is a third-generation leader of NASCAR. His late grandfather, Bill France Sr., founded the company in 1948.
He’s introduced a playoff system, overhauled the design of its cars, and pushed for diversity within the circuit’s predominantly white, male ranks.
In recent years, he’s been dealing with plunging attendance and TV ratings and departing sponsors, attributing the downturn to the challenge of connecting with a new, younger generation of fans.
France last month characterized as “rumors” reports that his family was looking into selling its racing properties.
“The France family is locked and loaded in its dedication to NASCAR,” France told SiriusXM NASCAR Radio. “We’re focused on ruling and managing NASCAR. There’s nothing to report on that. Rumors are always interesting, but they’re seldom right.”
2006 incident
France was involved in a 2006 incident in Daytona Beach, Florida, when a police report stated he crashed his Lexus into a tree after entering a restaurant parking lot.
France later told an officer called to his home that he was drinking a soda and “bumped into something.”
But a witness called 911 and gave police a statement that claimed she saw France driving at a “very reckless speed,” and claimed France’s car hit the tree after hitting a parked car.
She said she also watched as France “fell over his own feet” as he got out of his car.
Her statement was not attached to the police report, and the Daytona Beach police chief later investigated whether France was given special treatment by authorities.
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