The city of Yanan, a major wind power base in northwest China’s Shaanxi province, has introduced a lottery system to decide which wind projects will go ahead this year, a sign that grid constraints are forcing local governments to restrict capacity.

China has been aggressively developing alternative power as part of its efforts to cut pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Grid-connected wind power reached 163.7 gigawatts (GW) last year, up 10.1 percent on the year and amounting to 9.2 percent of total generating capacity.

But capacity expansion has outpaced grid construction, and large numbers of wind, solar and hydropower plants are unable to deliver all their power to consumers as a result of transmission deficiencies, a problem known as curtailment.

Grid constraints

According to a Yanan planning agency notice seen by Reuters, the city was given permission to build 900 megawatts of wind capacity this year, but 1,300 megawatts (or 1.3 GW) have already been declared eligible for construction, forcing authorities to whittle the total number of projects.

“After study it was decided that the lottery method should be used to determine what plans will be submitted (for approval) to the provincial development and reform commission,” it said.

The authenticity of the document was confirmed by a local municipal government official. He declined to give his name or provide details.

China aims to raise the share of non-fossil fuels in its total energy mix to around 15 percent by the end of the decade, up from 12 percent in 2015.

​Renewable power grows

But while renewable power has grown rapidly, around 80 GW of wind capacity was still unable to transmit electricity to consumers in 2015. Wasted wind power amounted to around 12 percent of total generation in 2017, according to the energy regulator.

An environmental group is suing grid companies in the northwest for failing to fulfill its legal obligation to maximize purchases of local renewable power.

To try to prevent waste, China has drawn up guidelines aimed at preventing new plant construction in regions suffering from surplus capacity.

It also released draft guidelines last month for a new renewable energy certificate system that will force regions to meet mandatory clean electricity utilization targets. The plan is expected to help alleviate curtailment.
…

Americans who waited until the last day to file their federal taxes faced a major hurdle hours before the midnight deadline. 

The Internal Revenue Service website’s “Direct Pay” page, which allows filers to pay their taxes directly from their bank account free of charge, crashed Tuesday. 

The IRS still expects Americans to pay their taxes but U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said extensions would be granted to those affected when the site was up again.

“We’ll make sure taxpayers have extensions once the system comes up to make sure they can use it and it in no way impacts people paying their taxes,” Mnuchin told reporters in New Hampshire. “It was just a technical issue we’re working through — a high-volume technical issue that impacted the system.”

For most of Tuesday, the message on the Direct Pay page described a “Planned Outage: April 17, 2018 – December 31, 9999.”The IRS removed the link to that page later in the day.

Pages on the IRS website used to view account information, make a direct payment or set up a payment plan were all not functioning most of the day Tuesday.

It’s unclear when and why the failure occurred.

President Donald Trump’s top economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, offered a deadpan reaction when asked about the failure.

“The IRS is crashing? Sounds horrible. Really bad,” he said during a briefing with reporters in West Palm Beach, Florida. “I hope it gets fixed.”
…

Concerned by a rise in near misses by unmanned aircraft and commercial jets, the world’s airlines back development of a U.N.-led global registry for drones, an executive of their trade group said Tuesday.

The International Air Transport Association backs efforts by the U.N. aviation agency to develop such a registry, which could also help track the number of incidents involving drones and jets, said Rob Eagles, IATA’s director of air traffic management infrastructure.

IATA would consider collaborating with the International Civil Aviation  Organization (ICAO) with using the registry for data analysis to improve safety.

ICAO is developing the registry as part of broader efforts to come up with common rules for flying and tracking unmanned aircraft.

“One of the important things we would like to see on a registry as well is the compilation of data which would include incident and accident reporting,” Eagles said in an interview on the sidelines of IATA’s Safety and Flight Ops Conference in Montreal.

Airlines and airport operators are looking to drone registries, geo-fencing technology and stiffer penalties for operating drones near airports. They hope these steps will ensure flying remains safe as hobbyists and companies like

Amazon.com use more drones.

More close calls

In Britain, the number of near misses between drones and aircraft more than tripled between 2015 and 2017, with 92 incidents recorded last year, according to the U.K. Airprox Board.

Air New Zealand said last month that a flight from Tokyo with 278 passengers and crew on board encountered a drone estimated to be just 5 meters away from the Boeing 777-200 jet during its descent into Auckland.

A single registry would create a one-stop shop that would allow law enforcement to remotely identify and track unmanned aircraft, along with their operators and owners.

It’s not yet clear what kind of drones would be listed in the registry, although IATA would support inclusion of most drones, including large unmanned aircraft and smaller ones used for commercial and industrial purposes, Eagles said.

“The intention at present is to merge this activity into the ICAO registry for manned aircraft, so that the sector has a single consolidated registry network,” ICAO spokesman Anthony Philbin said by email.
…

Starbucks said Tuesday it will close all of its more than 8,000 company-owned U.S. stores on May 29 to educate employees about racial bias in an attempt to prevent more acts of discrimination.

The announcement was made days after the arrest of two African American men who sat in a Starbucks in the northeastern city of Philadelphia. The arrests were captured on video and widely circulated on social media, triggering protests and calls for a boycott.

“I’ve spent the past few days in Philadelphia with my leadership team listening to the community, learning what we did wrong and the steps we need to take to fix it,” said CEO Kevin Johnson. “Closing our stores for racial bias training is just one step in a journey that requires dedication from every level of our company and partnerships in our local communities.”

The coffeehouse chain, which is also closing its corporate offices on May 29, said a curriculum is being developed for its 175,000 employees, with assistance from several racial bias training experts. They include Equal Justice Initiative executive director Bryan Stevenson, NAACP Legal Defense Education Fund president Sherrilyn Ifill and former attorney general Eric Holder.

The two men who were arrested were later released because of a lack of evidence that a crime had been committed. Philadelphia media reported the men had been waiting for a friend at the time of their arrests.

Starbucks said the employee who called police on the men no longer worked at that location.

Johnson, who met with the men, called the arrests “reprehensible.”
…

Every year when the pastoralist men in Fatima Demba’s Mauritanian village return from their months-long journey to find pastures and water, the women erupt in wild celebrations.

“We draw henna tattoos on our bodies, we braid our hair, we wear our nicest clothes,” she said, re-adjusting her bright yellow and blue robe.

Yet although she longs for her husband to come home, Demba sees one benefit in his absence.

“I am in charge of everything,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, sitting in the shade of a mud-brick hut in Mafoundou village. “Our money, our field of millet — even the village’s borehole is my responsibility.”

Prolonged dry spells in this southern region of Mauritania have depleted grazing land, forcing pastoralists to travel ever longer distances to search for food and water for their herds.

That gives women in these predominantly male-dominated societies newfound power to manage harvests, the family’s remaining animals and household finances, experts say.

“Women pastoralists are the first up in the morning and the last to go to bed at night,” said Aminetou Mint Maouloud, who started the country’s first association of women herders in 2014.

“Whether it’s making butter from cow milk, fetching wood or tending to ill animals, it all comes down to women,” she added.

Worsening Drought

Livestock herding is a traditional way of making a living in West Africa’s Sahel, a semi-arid belt below the Sahara, but herders have become increasingly vulnerable to food insecurity as climate change disrupts rain patterns in the region.

That is particularly true in the impoverished desert nation of Mauritania, according to El Hacen Ould Taleb, head of the Groupement National des Associations Pastorales (GNAP), a charity working with pastoralists.

“Transhumance — the seasonal migration of pastoralists and their herds to neighboring Senegal or Mali — normally starts in October but the rains were so bad last year that people started leaving in August,” he said.

His organization is helping pastoralists find smarter migration routes — with water sources and markets along the way, for example — as part of the British government-funded Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters (BRACED) program.

Demba, whose husband has been gone for seven months, says she does not know when he will return.

“He has no choice, he must save our animals,” she said, pausing to take a sip of a glass of green mint tea.

In the meantime, “the family depends on me,” she added.

Under-recognized

Although women play a crucial role in pastoralism, it is rarely acknowledged, according to Mint Maouloud.

“A man will listen to everything his wife whispers on the pillow, but in the morning she won’t get any credit for it,” she said.

To change that, her association has elected a council of eight women from villages around the country. Together they lobby the country’s government on pastoralism issues.

“We tell them where an animal clinic might be needed, or which markets are best for specific kinds of animals,” she explained.

Their suggestions could find an unusually understanding ear.

Since Mauritania’s livestock ministry was created in 2014, both of its leaders have been women.

Vatma Vall Mint Soueina, the current minister, says women seeking political roles is “extremely encouraging” — and that she has seen women grow in economic clout.

“We are seeing women becoming more independent, by virtue of being so active economically,” she said from her office in Nouakchott, the capital.

Financial Independence

In Hadad village, amid stretches of sand and dirt dotted with the odd wilting tree, a dozen women huddle under a large tent covered with striped rugs.

Mariem Mint Lessiyad, a tiny woman with piercing brown eyes, chats energetically to the group, interrupted only by a bleating baby goat.

She leads a cooperative of 100 pastoralist women from nearby villages who buy chickens and sheep to raise and slaughter, selling affordable portions to local families.

“There is less meat going around, so we need to be clever with how we consume it,” she said.

The women buy a sheep for 12,000 Mauritanian ouguiya ($34), for instance, and make a profit of about 2,000 ouguiya ($6) per animal, she said.

They plan to reinvest the surplus in setting up a leather goods business.

“We can’t rely on our husbands to support us financially. They are too poor, especially now that they have to spend more money on keeping our animals healthy,” Mint Lessiyad said.

Mint Maouloud and her association are trying to persuade financial institutions to make it easier for women to get loans, so groups like Mint Lessiyad’s can get ahead.

Access to finance can be problematic, she said, with some banks outright refusing to lend money to women.

“It’s important to make women herders more independent financially, so they don’t rely on their husbands’ generosity or understanding,” she added.
…

Toyota Motor Corp. plans to start selling U.S. vehicles that can talk to each other using short-range wireless technology in 2021, the Japanese automaker said on Monday, potentially preventing thousands of accidents annually.

The U.S. Transportation Department must decide whether to adopt a pending proposal that would require all future vehicles to have the advanced technology.

Toyota hopes to adopt the dedicated short-range communications systems in the United States across most of its lineup by the mid-2020s. Toyota said it hopes that by announcing its plans, other automakers will follow suit.

The Obama administration in December 2016 proposed requiring the technology and giving automakers at least four years to comply. The proposal requires automakers to ensure all vehicles “speak the same language through a standard technology.”

Automakers were granted a block of spectrum in 1999 in the 5.9 GHz band for “vehicle-to-vehicle” and “vehicle to infrastructure” communications and have studied the technology for more than a decade, but it has gone largely unused. Some in Congress and at the Federal Communications Commission think it should be opened to other uses.

In 2017, General Motors Co began offering vehicle-to-vehicle technologies on its Cadillac CTS model, but it is currently the only commercially available vehicle with the system.

Talking vehicles, which have been tested in pilot projects and by U.S. carmakers for more than a decade, use dedicated short-range communications to transmit data up to 300 meters, including location, direction and speed, to nearby vehicles.

The data is broadcast up to 10 times per second to nearby vehicles, which can identify risks and provide warnings to avoid imminent crashes, especially at intersections.

Toyota has deployed the technology in Japan to more than 100,000 vehicles since 2015.

The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said last year the regulation could eventually cost between $135 and $300 per new vehicle, or up to $5 billion annually but could prevent up to 600,000 crashes and reduce costs by $71 billion annually when fully deployed. 

NHTSA said last year it has “not made any final decision” on requiring the technology, but no decision is expected before December.

Last year, major automakers, state regulators and others urged U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao to finalize standards for the technology and protect the spectrum that has been reserved, saying there is a need to expand deployment and uses of the traffic safety technology.
…

The U.S. Department of Commerce has banned American companies from selling components to Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE for seven years after breaking an agreement reached after it was caught illegally shipping goods to Iran, U.S. officials said Monday.

The U.S. action, first reported by Reuters, could be devastating to ZTE since American companies are estimated to provide 25 percent to 30 percent of the components used in ZTE’s equipment, which includes smartphones and gear to build telecommunications networks.

The ban is the result of ZTE’s failure to comply with an agreement with the U.S. government after it pleaded guilty last year in federal court in Texas to conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions by illegally shipping U.S. goods and technology to Iran, the Commerce Department said.

The Chinese company, which sells smartphones in the United States, paid $890 million in fines and penalties, with an additional penalty of $300 million that could be imposed.

“If the company is not able to resolve it, they may very well be put out of business by this. Many banks and companies even outside the U.S. are not going to want to deal with them,” said Eric Hirschhorn, a former U.S. undersecretary of commerce who was heavily involved in the case.

As part of the agreement, Shenzhen-based ZTE Corp promised to dismiss four senior employees and discipline 35 others by either reducing their bonuses or reprimanding them, senior Commerce Department officials told Reuters. But the Chinese company admitted in March that while it had fired the four senior employees, it had not disciplined or reduced bonuses to the 35 others.

ZTE, whose Hong Kong and Shenzhen shares were suspended on Tuesday, said it was assessing the implications of the U.S. decision and was communicating with “relevant parties.”

 The Commerce Department order quoted a ZTE official’s letter admitting it “had not executed in full” some disciplinary measures and that there were “inaccuracies” in a 2017 letter.

But, the Commerce order said, ZTE “argued that it would have been irrational for ZTE to knowingly or intentionally mislead the U.S. government in light of the seriousness of the suspended sanctions.”

‘Vigilant against Chinese threats’

Under terms of the ban, U.S. companies cannot export prohibited goods, such as chip sets, directly to ZTE or via another country, beginning immediately.

Shares of big U.S. ZTE suppliers fell sharply on the Commerce ban. Optical networking equipment maker Acacia Communications, which got 30 percent of its total 2017 revenue from ZTE, tumbled 35 percent, hitting a near two-year low. Acacia said it was suspending affected transactions and assessing the impact.

Shares of optical component companies including Lumentum Holdings fell 8.9 percent and Finisar dropped 4 percent. Oclaro, which got 18 percent of its fiscal 2017 revenue from ZTE, lost 14.1 percent.

ZTE “provided information back to us basically admitting that they had made these false statements,” said a senior department official. “That was in response to the U.S. asking for the information.”

The ban on supplying ZTE comes two months after two Republican senators introduced legislation to block the U.S. government from buying or leasing telecommunications equipment from ZTE or its Chinese rival Huawei Technologies, citing concern the companies would use their access to spy on U.S. officials.

“China does not play by our rules, and we must be vigilant against Chinese threats to both our economic security and national security,” said Republican Representative Robert Pittenger after the Commerce announcement. Pittenger is sponsoring legislation that would strengthen the U.S. national security review process for foreign investments.

Meanwhile, Britain’s main cybersecurity agency said Monday it has written to organizations in the U.K.’s telecommunications sector warning about using services or equipment from ZTE.

‘Devastating’

Douglas Jacobson, an exports control lawyer who represents suppliers to ZTE, called the ban highly unusual and said it would severely affect the company.

“This will be devastating to the company, given their reliance on U.S. products and software,” said Jacobson. “It’s certainly going to make it very difficult for them to produce and will have a potentially significant short- and long-term negative impact on the company.”

ZTE has sold handset devices to U.S. mobile carriers AT&T, T-Mobile US and Sprint. It has relied on U.S. companies including Qualcomm, Microsoft and Intel for some components.

Shares of Taiwan’s MediaTek, which sells smartphone chips and competes with Qualcomm, were not trading when the announcement was made.

The U.S. action against ZTE is likely to further exacerbate current tensions between Washington and Beijing over trade.

After the U.S. placed export restrictions on ZTE in 2016 for Iran sanctions violations, China’s Ministry of Commerce and Foreign Ministry criticized the decision.

A five-year federal investigation found last year that ZTE had conspired to evade U.S. embargos by buying U.S. components, incorporating them into ZTE equipment and illegally shipping them to Iran.

ZTE, which devised elaborate schemes to hide the illegal activity, agreed to plead guilty after the Commerce Department took actions that threatened to cut off its global supply chain.

The U.S. government had allowed the company continued access to the U.S. market under the 2017 agreement.

The new restrictions stem from a Jan. 16 report by a U.S. monitor appointed by a federal judge in Texas who accepted the guilty plea in March 2017. Although Commerce Department officials would not discuss the report, they said the department followed up in February.

The U.S. government’s investigation into sanctions violations by ZTE followed reports by Reuters in 2012 that the company had signed contracts to ship millions of dollars’ worth of hardware and software from some of the best-known U.S. technology companies to Iran’s largest telecoms carrier.
…

Doug Fabbioli is concerned about the future of the rural economy, as urban sprawl expands from metropolitan areas into farm fields and pastureland. The Virginia winery owner decided to be part of the solution and founded The New AG School. As Faiza Elmasry tells us, the school’s mission is raising the next generation of farmers. Faith Lapidus narrates.
…

The Northern Territory government in Australia says it has been approached by nearly 50 Chinese companies looking to buy land to start donkey farms. Demand for donkey products, especially donkey-hide gelatin is increasing in China, while global supplies are falling.

The Northern Territory government has bought a small herd of wild donkeys for its research station near the outback town of Katherine. Earlier this a month of delegation of Chinese business people visited the facility, and up to 50 companies from China have expressed interest in buying land to set up donkey farms.

It is estimated there are up to 60,000 wild donkeys in the Northern Territory. Donkeys were brought to Australia from Africa as pack animals in the 1860s, and many were released when they were no longer needed. For years feral donkeys have been considered a major pest by farmers.The animals trample native vegetation, spread weeds and compete with domestic cattle for food and water.

Now the authorities believe there are economic benefits in captive donkey herds.

Alister Trier, the head of the Northern Territory’s department of primary industry believes the donkey trade has a bright future.

“My feel[ing] is the industry will develop but it will not displace the cattle industry, for example, I just do not think that will happen.What it will do is add some diversification opportunities for the use of pastoral land and Aboriginal land in the Northern Territory,” said Trier.

In China, donkey skins are boiled down to make gelatin, which is then used in alternative Chinese medicines and cosmetics.

Animal rights campaigners are pressuring the authorities not to allow the live export of donkeys to China, claiming that conditions in transit would be cruel and unacceptable.

Activists also insist that donkeys’ health suffers when they are kept in large herds.

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Australia wants the donkey skin trade stopped altogether because of concerns the animals are being skinned alive overseas and treated with extreme cruelty.
…

Dozens of passengers line up in single file along the platform in the dead of night, ready to gather their luggage and pile into the ageing railway carriages.

At the small railway station in Nampula, in northeastern Mozambique, the 4:00 a.m. train to Cuamba in the north west is more than full, as it is every day, to the detriment of those slow to board and forced to stand.

In recent years, the government in Maputo has made developing the train network a priority as part of its economic plan.

But mounting public debt has meant that authorities had no choice but to cede control of the project to the private sector.

Seconds before the train — six passenger coaches coupled between two elderly US-made locomotives — leaves Nampula station, the platforms are already entirely empty.

No one can afford to be late.

Inside, the carriages remain pitch dark until the sun rises as the operator has not installed any lighting.

A blast of the horn and the sound of grinding metal marks the train’s stately progress along the 350-kilometre (220-mile) line to Cuamba — more than 10 hours away.

Five or six passengers cram onto benches intended for four without a murmur of complaint.

“The train is always full,” said Argentina Armendo, his son kneeling down nearby.

“Lots of people stay standing. Even those who have a ticket can’t be sure of getting on. They should add some coaches!”

‘Enormous growth potential’

“Yes, but it’s not expensive,” insists the conductor Edson Fortes, cooly. “It’s the most competitive means of transport for the poor. With the train, they are able to travel.”

Sitting in a vast, ferociously air-conditioned office Mario Moura da Silva, the rail operations manager for CDN, the company operating the line, appears more concerned about passenger numbers as a measure of success than perhaps their comfort.

In 2017, its trains carried almost 500,000 — a 265-percent increase on a year earlier.

“Passenger traffic isn’t profitable but it’s a requirement of the contract with the government,” said Moura da Silva.

“It’s not that which earns us money, it’s more the retail,” he added, referring to the company’s commercial operation, which has grown by 65 percent in a year.

Brazilian mining giant Vale, which owns CDN along with Japanese conglomerate Mitsui, began its Mozambican rail venture in 2005.

Having won a contract to run the concession from the government, it restored the former colonial line, which linked its inland coal mines with the port at Nacala.

It now operates a network of 1,350 kilometres (840 miles) following an investment of nearly $5 billion (around 4 billion euros).

“The growth potential is enormous,” said Moura da Silva.

Rail corridors

Mozambique’s government is eyeing the project as a bellwether for the industry.

“We have made infrastructure one of our four investment priorities,” said Transport Minister Carlos Fortes Mesquita.

“Thanks to this investment, the country recorded a strong growth in the railway sector.”

Eight new “rail corridor” projects are now under way in Mozambique, all funded with private capital, as the state grapples with a long-standing cash shortage.

The government has been engulfed in a scandal linked to secret borrowing by the treasury, which is juggling debt amounting to 112 percent of GDP.

As a result, a handful of large companies, attracted by Mozambique’s vast mineral wealth, have taken the lead in developing the country’s rail infrastructure.

But it is unclear if their interest in the sector will continue in the long-term.

Until the coal runs out?

“Today the Nacala line only exists because of coal. But once the mine closes, who will be able to justify continuing operations?” asked Benjamin Pequenino, an economist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

“The private sector won’t continue to invest if it knows it will lose money,” he said.

But in the absence of any alternative, former parliament speaker Abdul Carimo accepts that public-private partnerships are the least worst option.

Carimo, who remains close to the ruling party, now heads up the “Zambezi Development Corridor”.

The scheme is managed by Thai group, ITD, and plans to build 480 kilometres of track between Macuse port and the coal mines at Moatize for a price tag of $2.3 billion.

Carimo, who closely follows developments on the project, has vowed that “his” line will not only be used to carry minerals but will stimulate activity across the region it serves.

“I hate coal but I want this infrastructure to relaunch agriculture in Zambezi province,” he said, adding that the region was “one of the richest in the country in the 1970s.”

 
…

U.S. Vice President Mike Pence said Saturday that he was leaving a summit of Latin American countries in Peru very hopeful that the United States, Mexico and Canada were close to a deal on a renegotiated NAFTA trade pact.

Pence told reporters it was possible that a deal would be reached in the next several weeks.

The vice president also said that the topic of funding for U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposed wall on the U.S. border with Mexico did not come up in Pence’s meeting with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto.
…

India’s federal police said Saturday that they had filed a case against a former chairman of state-run UCO Bank and several business executives alleging criminal conspiracy that caused a loss of 6.21 billion rupees ($95.17 million).

Police said officials at the bank had colluded with private infrastructure firm Era Engineering Infra Ltd. and investment banking firm Altius Finserve Pvt. Ltd. to siphon bank loans.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) said in a statement that Arun Kaul, the bank’s chairman from 2010 to 2015, had helped clear the loan.

Kaul did not respond to Reuters’ calls for comment. Era Engineering and Altius Finserve did not respond to calls outside regular business hours.

The case revealed yet another case of alleged bank fraud in India since February, when two jewelry groups were accused of using nearly

$2 billion of fraudulent bank guarantees in what has been dubbed the biggest fraud in India’s banking history.

That case put the banking sector under a cloud, with the CBI unearthing a string of other bank frauds since then.

In the UCO Bank case, it charged Kaul and several officials and accountants at the two companies with criminal conspiracy with intent to defraud the bank of about 6.21 billion rupees by diverting and siphoning loans, according to the

statement.

“The loan was not utilized for the sanctioned purpose and was secured by producing false end use certificates issued by the chartered accountant and by fabricating business data,” the CBI said.

The offices of the companies, accountants and the residences of the accused are being searched, the CBI said.
…

After weeks of railing against online shopping giant Amazon, President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday creating a task force to study the United States Postal System.

In the surprise move, Trump said that USPS is on “an unsustainable financial path” and “must be restructured to prevent a taxpayer-funded bailout.”

The task force will be assigned to study factors including its pricing in the package delivery market and will have 120 days to submit a report with recommendations.

The order does not specifically mention Amazon or it owner, Jeff Bezos. But Trump has been criticizing the company for months, accusing it of not paying its fair share of taxes, harming the postal service, and putting brick-and-mortar stores out of business. Trump has also gone after Bezos personally and accused The Washington Post, which he owns, of being Amazon’s “chief lobbyist.”

The U.S. Postal Service has indeed lost money for years, but package delivery has actually been a bright spot for the service.

Boosted by e-commerce, the Postal Service has enjoyed double-digit revenue increases from delivering packages. That just hasn’t been enough to offset pension and health care costs as well as declines in first-class letters and marketing mail, which together make up more than two-thirds of postal revenue.

Still, Trump’s claim the service could be charging more may not be entirely far-fetched. A 2017 analysis by Citigroup concluded that the Postal Service, which does not use taxpayer money for its operations, was charging below market rates as a whole on parcels. Still, federal regulators have reviewed the Amazon contract with the Postal Service each year, and deemed it to be profitable.

 
…

China’s exports growth unexpectedly fell in March, raising questions about the health of one of the economy’s key growth drivers even as trade tensions rapidly escalate with the United States.

March import growth beat expectations, however, suggesting its domestic demand may still be solid enough to cushion the blow from any trade shocks.

That left China with a rare trade deficit for the month, also the first drop since last February.

The latest readings on the health of China’s trade sector follow weeks of tit-for-tat tariff threats by Washington and Beijing, sparked by U.S. frustration with China’s massive bilateral trade surplus and intellectual property policies, that have fueled fears of a global trade war.

China’s March exports fell 2.7 percent from a year earlier, lagging analysts’ forecasts for a 10 percent increase, and down from a sharper-than-expected 44.5 percent jump in February, which economists believe was heavily distorted by seasonal factors.

For the first quarter as a whole, exports still grew a hefty 14.1 percent.

Stronger currency

Some analysts had expected a pullback in March exports following an unusually strong start to the year, when firms stepped up shipments before the long Lunar New Year holiday in mid-February. That scenario did not alter their view that global demand remains robust.

But a stronger currency could also be starting to erode Chinese exporters’ competitiveness. The yuan appreciated around 3.7 percent against the U.S. dollar in the first quarter this year, on top of a 6.6 percent gain last year.

No hard timeline has been set by either Washington or Beijing for the actual imposition of tariffs, which leaves the door open to negotiations and a possible compromise that could limit the damage to both sides.

But with the threat of tariffs hanging over nearly a third of China’s exports to the United States, analysts say its companies and their U.S. customers may try to front-load shipments before any measures kick in.

China’s exports to the U.S. rose 14.8 percent in the first quarter from a year earlier, while imports rose 8.9 percent.

That sent its quarterly trade surplus with the U.S. surging 19.4 percent to $58.25 billion, though the March reading narrowed to $15.43 billion from $20.96 billion in February.

China’s total aluminum exports in March rose to their highest since June, just as the United States imposed a 10 percent tariff on imports of the metal on March 23 along with a 25 percent duty on steel imports.

Outlook cloudy

China’s exports rode a global trade boom last year, expanding at the fastest pace since 2013 and serving as one of the key drivers behind the economy’s forecast-beating expansion.

But the sudden spike in trade tensions with the United States is clouding the outlook for both China’s “old economy” heavy industries and “new economy” tech firms.

Washington says China’s $375 billion trade surplus with the United States is unacceptable, and has demanded Beijing reduce it by $100 billion immediately.

In a move to further force China to lower the trade surplus running with the U.S., Trump unveiled tariff representing about $50 billion of technology, transport and medical products early this month, drawing an immediate threat of retaliatory action from Beijing.

China’s tech sector, which is key part of Beijing’s longer-term “Made in China 2025” strategy to move from cheap goods to higher-value manufacturing, may be particularly vulnerable.

High-tech products have been among its fastest growing export segments. China exported $137.8 billion worth of high-tech products in the first quarter, up 20.5 percent on-year.
…

U.S. President Donald Trump said Thursday that his administration might  allow the sale of gasoline containing 15 percent ethanol year-round, which could help farmers by firing up corn demand but faces opposition from oil companies.

The proposal marked the latest move by the Trump administration to navigate the rival oil and corn constituencies as they clash over the nation’s biofuels policy. Oil refiners say the Renewable Fuel Standard requiring them to add biofuels into gasoline is costly and displaces petroleum, while the farm sector says the law provides critical support to growers.

The Environmental Protection Agency currently bans the higher ethanol blend, called E15, during summer because of concerns it contributes to smog on hot days — a worry biofuels advocates say is unfounded.

Gasoline typically contains just 10 percent ethanol.

“We’re going to be going probably, probably to 15, and we’re going to be going to a 12-month period,” Trump told reporters during a White House meeting. “We’re going to work out something during the transition period, which is not easy, very complicated.”

Earlier Thursday, EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman said the agency had been “assessing the legal validity of granting an E15 waiver since last summer” and was awaiting an outcome from discussions with the White House, the Department of Agriculture and Congress before making any final decisions.

Monte Shaw, executive director of the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association, said the proposed shift to year-round E15 sales would be “very exciting news.”

“It would be a great morale boost for rural America, and more importantly a real demand boost if it can be moved forward quickly,” he said in an interview.

Annual biofuels figure

Under the RFS, the EPA sets the volume of ethanol and other biofuels that must be mixed into the nation’s fuel supply on a yearly basis — and a move to expand E15 sales could encourage the EPA to set those volumes higher in coming years.

Currently, refiners are required to blend around 15 billion gallons of ethanol into the nation’s fuel annually.

Shares of major biofuels producers rose slightly after the announcement. Archer Daniels Midland Co shares gained 2.7 percent to close at $45.30.

It was unclear, however, whether the move would help the refining sector — which has been lobbying hard instead for a cap on the price of blending credits that refiners must acquire to prove compliance with the RFS.

Greater blending of ethanol through year-round E15 sales would theoretically increase supplies of the tradable credits, and thus reduce prices. But at the same time, more ethanol translates to a smaller share of petroleum-based fuel in American gas tanks, which would hurt refiner sales.

The American Petroleum Institute, which represents big oil companies, issued a statement opposing Trump’s proposal to expand E15 sales, arguing that high-ethanol fuel can damage engines and is incompatible with certain boats, motorcycles and lawn mowers.

“The industry plans to consider all options to prevent such a waiver. The RFS is broken and we continue to believe the best solution is comprehensive legislation,” API Downstream Group Director Frank Macchiarola said in the statement.

Refiners’ shares were mixed after Trump’s comments, with Andeavor closing down 2.6 percent at $110.13 and Valero Energy Corp. up 0.2 percent at $100.53.
…

The European Union executive is seeking to protect farmers by imposing fines on retailers and supermarket chains using unfair trade practices.

EU Farm Commissioner Phil Hogan said Thursday the plan was “about giving voice to the voiceless” as small-scale farmers across the EU have struggled to eke out a living when faced with the negotiating power of major food conglomerates. He didn’t give details.

In recent years milk farmers and others have complained about having to sell below production costs, threatening their livelihood. The EU Commission said farmers are also faced with late payments, last-minute cancellations and unilateral contract changes.

The Copa-Cogeca farm union said that of the value of farm products, farmers now only get 21 percent, with the rest going to processors and retailers.

 
…

The sweaty mechanic tossed aside the used jeans one by one, digging deep through the pile of secondhand clothes that are at the center of another, if little-noticed, Trump administration trade war.

The used clothes cast off by Americans and sold in bulk in African nations, a multimillion-dollar business, have been blamed in part for undermining local textile industries. Now Rwanda has taken action, raising tariffs on the clothing in defiance of U.S. pressure. In response, the U.S. says it will suspend duty-free status for clothing manufactured in Rwanda under the trade program known as the African Growth and Opportunity Act.

President Donald Trump’s decision has not gone down well in Rwanda, a small, largely impoverished East African nation still trying to heal the scars of genocide 24 years ago. Similar U.S. action against neighboring countries could follow; Uganda and Tanzania have pledged to raise tariffs and phase in a ban on used clothing imports by 2019.

The action against Rwanda comes just weeks after Trump met Rwandan President Paul Kagame at the World Economic Forum and proclaimed him a “friend,” as Trump sought to calm anger in Africa over his reported vulgar comments about the continent. Kagame currently chairs the African Union, where heads of state just days after the meeting drafted, but decided against issuing, a blistering statement on Trump.

The U.S. trade action is finding a mixed response in Africa, with some upset at Trump again, while others defend the secondhand clothing as popular, inexpensive and well-made.

The U.S. is a “bully” for retaliating against Rwanda’s efforts to grow its own textile industry, said Dismas Nkuranga, who deals in secondhand footwear in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali.

“The main objective for Rwanda is to see more companies in the country produce clothes here,” said Olivier Nduhungirehe, state minister for foreign affairs. “It’s also about giving Rwandans the dignity they deserve, not wearing secondhand clothes already used by other people.”

But at the sprawling Owino Market in neighboring Uganda’s capital, Kampala, the trade in used clothing continues to crackle, with some sellers shoving merchandise into the arms of shy potential buyers: a pair of jeans for a fraction of a dollar, a T-shirt for even less.

“Affordability is what I want,” said John Ekure, the mechanic who was shopping for jeans.

As some African governments worry that the bulk imports of used clothes constitute dumping, others question the ability of local clothing makers to satisfy appetites for quality goods at rock-bottom prices.

Rwanda has been supporting Chinese investors to set up textile factories in the hopes that the country eventually can produce affordable products and create 350,000 jobs by 2025. But many in Rwanda who praise the government’s decision to raise tariffs as progressive remain concerned about whether that goal can be reached.

In Uganda, where the per capita income is $615, traders and buyers said they hope the government will not move as swiftly as Rwanda in imposing higher tariffs on used clothes.

One trader said he had noticed a rise in the number of Rwandans coming to his stall to check out trench coats and jackets, apparently because such goods have become rare back home.

“If they are telling us they are going to create many industries making clothes, I can tell you they don’t have the capacity to do that,” Muhammad Kiyingi said of Uganda’s government. “Somebody should tell the government to think carefully.”

He predicted that tightening restrictions on imports of used clothing from the U.S. would lead to a spike in imports from places like China and the United Arab Emirates instead.

Following Rwanda’s lead would “cause more harm than good,” said Ramathan Ggoobi, an economist at Uganda’s Makerere University. “We have not yet built capacity to produce new products… so we would be protecting an inefficient producer.”

To satisfy the demand for Western fashion, African governments could offer incentives for Western textile companies to set up factories on the continent, said Uche Igwe, an analyst who advises the government in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country.

“It is nice to grow our domestic industries and create employment,” he said. “However, we must first fix our infrastructural deficits so that local producers will produce at competitive costs.”
…

Thousands of megawatts of wind and solar energy contracts in the Mekong region of Southeast Asia have been signed, seriously challenging the financial viability of major hydropower projects on the river, an energy expert told a water conference last week.

Buoyed by a recent Thai government decision to delay a power purchase deal with a major mainstream Mekong dam, clean-energy proponents and economists told the third Mekong River Commission summit that the regional energy market was on the cusp of a technological revolution.

Brian Eyler, director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Stimson Center, a nonprofit in Washington dedicated to enhancing global peace and security, said 6,000 megawatts’ worth of wind and solar contracts had been signed in Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Laos in the last six months.

He said that in January 2017, he and his colleagues had suggested that more solar and wind energy projects be incorporated into Cambodia’s power development plan, the prospect of which had been “basically off the table” at the time. “In a year’s time, Cambodia has entirely restructured its energy sector” to emphasize solar projects in the country, “and if Cambodia’s doing it, you can bet that the other countries are doing it as well.”

Two gigawatts of wind and solar projects were announced in Vietnam in February and March alone according to a spreadsheet provided by the Stimson Center.

Hyunjung Lee, senior energy economist at the Asian Development Bank’s Southeast Asia Energy Division, said technologies such as wind and solar power were “going to hit the region very significantly, in my view.”

“The atmosphere in the region has been changed,” she said, even in just the past year. “We see a lot of development can happen in solar and wind in the region,” though more integrated approaches were needed.

Lee said the ADB was working to set up a Regional Power Coordination Center that would mimic a highly successful project in southern Africa to create an efficient, integrated regional market.

Impact on river system

A six-year Mekong River Commission Council study on development plans for the Mekong, which was the focus of the summit, suggested catastrophic impacts upon the health of the river system if all planned hydropower dams — 11 mainstream projects and more than 100 on tributaries — were built.

In a January report, the International Renewable Energy Agency found that the cost of electricity generated by solar facilities that supply utilities had fallen by 73 percent from 2010 to 2017, and the cost was forecast to be cut in half again by 2020. 

At that price trajectory, the cost of solar power would fall below that of hydropower by 2020, long before many planned Mekong dams go online.

Global solar capacity grew 32 percent, adding 94 gigawatts in 2017, while renewables across the board increased by 8.3 percent, the IREA survey of 15,000 data points found. Renewables and solar grew faster in Asia than anywhere else in the world, while the amount of hydropower commissioned across the globe was the lowest in a decade.

Wang Wenling, an assistant professor at Yunnan University’s Institute of International Rivers and Eco-Security, said she had just seen firsthand how far the price of solar technology had plummeted on a recent trip to North Carolina in the United States.

“I was super surprised how their solar power production cost per unit is actually cheaper than hydropower. I don’t know how they make it — it’s almost impossible for me — but their cost is only about 15 percent of the cost in China,” she said.

“So I think we have a lot of alternatives and it needs to be considered,” she said.

Some participants, particularly from Laos and Cambodia, remained skeptical of the technology.

“I think we need some more figures,” said a Cambodian member of the audience, raising concerns about stability. “We also think about some figure for the comparison between the occupation of the land of hydropower with solar energy.”

Attractive idea for Cambodia

Jake Brunner, program coordinator for the International Union for Conservation of Nature, said the figures for solar were particularly attractive in Cambodia, where land remained relatively cheap, while energy demand was high in neighboring southern Vietnam.

“We calculated that if you took one 10,000-hectare economic land concession in Cambodia, for example, and you made some very conservative assumptions, you could generate about 3 gigawatts, which is pretty close to Cambodia’s entire national consumption,” he said.

Land is a particularly sensitive issue in Cambodia, where rights group Licadho says more than half a million people have been affected by land conflicts.

Gregory Thomas, executive director of the Natural Heritage Institute, told the summit his organization had researched a solar photo-voltaic alternative for Cambodia that didn’t require any land at all.

Instead of building the massive planned Sambor dam on the Mekong, a “no dam alternative” study commissioned by the Cambodian government had recommended placing solar cells on the existing reservoir of the Lower Sesan II dam in Stung Treng.

“The advantage of integrating solar arrays on a hydropower reservoir that already exists is that you can use the unoccupied space on the reservoir without any land use conflicts whatsoever,” he said. “And, of course, the reservoir storage acts as a battery, essentially, to backstop the intermittent nature of the solar generation.”

Such a project could be cost-competitive and go online much more quickly than a hydropower dam, with 100 megwatts deployable in year, he said.

Floating solar projects are being developed around the world, including in China, where an enormous 150-megawatt installation on a lake that used to be a deserted coal mine is expected to go online in May, powering 15,000 homes.
…

The increasing trade tensions between the United States and China has rattled farmers in the American heartland, the place where many of the products on which China seeks to impose a tariff are produced.  As VOA’s Kane Farabaugh reports, those farmers, once supportive of President Trump, are increasingly wary about his stance on global trade, and ultimately, how it will impact their bottom line.
…

The head of the International Monetary Fund is warning that the global trading system is in danger of being “torn apart.” 

In a speech prepared for delivery in Hong Kong Wednesday, Christine Lagarde urged nations to “steer clear of protectionism.” That may be a reference to Washington’s recent moves to slap large tariffs on imported steel and other products. China responded by raising tariffs on U.S.-made products, beginning a cycle that some experts warn could escalate further into a trade war. 

Lagarde says trade has far more benefits than costs and has credited unfettered global trade for helping drastically cut the number of people around the world living in extreme poverty over the past few decades. Lagarde and other experts say everyone loses trade wars, particularly the 800 million people around the world who, the World Bank says, remain mired in dire poverty. 

While Lagarde’s comments are implied criticism of the Trump administration, she also urged nations, presumably including China, to do a better job of protecting intellectual property. President Trump and many foreign businesses operating in China have complained that they are pressured to turn over technology secrets to Chinese partner companies in exchange for access to the huge Chinese market. She also urged economic reforms, including ending policies that unfairly favor state-owned enterprises.

Lagarde says the global economy is experiencing a strong upswing, and says now is the time for nations to make economic reforms such as opening up the service sector in developing economies, and doing more to use digital technology to improve the way governments deliver public services. She warns that economic reform has new urgency because of the rising uncertainties growing out out trade tensions, uncertain geopolitics and rising fiscal and financial risks. 

Lagarde’s speech comes just before next week’s meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington, where top economic and financial leaders and experts from around the world will gather to seek solutions to problems in banking, trade, deficits and many other topics.
…

Tuesday, April 10, is Equal Pay Day in the United States. Advocates designated the day to mark how much longer women must work, on average, to earn as much as men averaged in the previous year. 

Germany recognized Equal Pay Day on March 10. The Czech Republic will observe it on April 13. While assigning a date to the gender pay gap is a way to make a point, it makes for an easy gauge of whether the pay gap is getting worse or better from one year to the next. In 2017, the U.S. Equal Pay Day was April 4 — meaning the pay gap is slightly worse this year than last.

There are a number of explanations for historic gender gaps in pay.

One of the major ones is known as “occupational segregation,” meaning a particular job is seen as “men’s work” or “women’s work” and is dominated by that gender. In a study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in 2017, among the most common occupations for women and for men in the United States, only six occupations overlap.

In the fields that pay best, men tend to dominate, said the IWPR’s Chandra Childers. She adds that when men start to leave a field and women start to move in, the average pay for that field begins to drop.

Some say the pay gap is due to more women taking time off work or assuming less demanding professional roles so they can care for their families. “Women often choose lower-paying jobs that are closer to home and have better, more flexible hours,” conservative commentator Carrie Lukas said in an April 4 column for Forbes.

Childers says she hears that argument often. But “when you look at the pay gap,” she said, “a lot of it is because women are concentrated in low-wage service jobs. Many of these jobs are not flexible. They’re not family friendly,” and they are less likely to have paid family leave.

The Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank that advocates for low- and middle-income workers, found in April 2017 that women are paid less than their male colleagues in almost every occupation, regardless of whether that occupation is traditionally held by men or women. The average wage for preschool and kindergarten teachers was $16.33 per hour for men, and $14.42 per hour for women. Male nurse practitioners made $42.74 an hour, compared to $37.50 per hour for female nurse practitioners. Male software developers made $38.98 an hour, while women software developers made an average $33.65 an hour.

#MeToo movement

Hollywood has recently gotten much attention for starkly different salaries paid to women and men working on the same project. To highlight this point, several high-profile actresses turned up at this year’s Academy Awards ceremony with women’s rights activists as their dates.

Actress Meryl Streep brought Ai-jen Poo, the executive director of the National Domestic Workers’ Alliance. Poo used the opportunity to talk about how attitudes toward women — including those behind the sexual harassment scandal wracking the entertainment industry — affect pay levels at both the bottom of the income scale and the top.

“Equal Pay Day looks different in the #MeToo moment,” Poo said in a column in In Style magazine on April 4. “Each #MeToo story amplified the voice of a woman who has been underpaid, shut out, harassed, assaulted, undermined, ignored, or threatened. We can see clearly how it is that women are paid less when the gender discrimination that leads to the wage gap is exposed.”

Poo goes on to say that pay inequality and sexual harassment are “inextricably linked. They are both the result of a culture in which women’s lives and contributions are devalued.”

Oscar-winning actress Octavia Spencer recently told People magazine how she and Oscar nominee Jessica Chastain teamed up for a tiny experiment in collective bargaining, a tool activists recommend to fight against unfair compensation practices. The two women told producers that they would only take the roles if they were paid the same amount. Spencer — the Oscar winner — said she ended up making five times the amount she had expected for the film.

Technology sector

Women also face tough hurdles in the technology sector. A survey by the job-hunting website Hired.com showed that 63 percent of the time, men were offered higher salaries than women for the same role at the same company. The differences in starting pay for the same job ranged from 4 percent to 45 percent.

Notably, the Hired survey found that 54 percent of the women it surveyed said they had found out at some point in their careers that they were making less money than a man with the same job. Only 19 percent of men had had the same experience.

Equal-pay supporters say the benefit of equal pay is not just confined to the individual earners; it also benefits the employer and the community in which it is based.

Power to employees

There’s no silver bullet, says Jessica Schieder of the Economic Policy Institute, but an important tool in the fight for equal pay is transparency.

“You can’t know you’re underpaid and have a problem until that information is available,” Schieder said. She also recommends collective bargaining, a higher minimum wage, and any other tools that give employees more power. The social taboo against talking about personal income, she says, is not helpful either.

Jess Morales Rocketto of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and We Belong Together, a feminist campaign for immigration reform, says there is one other idea that can’t be overlooked. “There’s nothing more powerful than women coming together. … In the next 10 years, I want to see us close the pay gap. But also, I want ALL working people to be covered by our labor laws. And I want women at every level of public office.

“Our job is to address all forms of gender inequality to ensure that no woman, regardless of where she’s from, is left behind,” she said.
…

China’s President Xi Jinping did not mention U.S. President Donald Trump by name or speak directly about rising trade frictions with Washington during a closely watched speech at the Boao Forum — China’s version of Davos for Asia.

But the pledges Xi made to press forward with economic reforms had everything to do with the trade dispute and President Trump’s threats to levy heavy tariffs on Chinese goods.

In his speech, Xi mentioned the phrase “opening up” 42 times. One of the key messages of his speech was that China was open for business. It was also an effort, one analyst said, to highlight a contrast between Beijing’s approach and Washington.

“I want to clearly tell everyone, China’s door for opening will not close, but will only open wider,” Xi said. “Cold war mentality and zero sum game are more and more old-fashioned and outdated. Isolationism will only hit walls.”

Car imports

In his speech, Xi said China would launch a number of landmark measures this year, including cutting tariffs on car imports, one key trade barrier President Trump has mentioned repeatedly. China places a 25 percent tariff on automobile imports, while Chinese vehicles exported to the United States are taxed by two and half percent.

Xi re-stated a pledge to open up China’s financial sector — easing restrictions — and accelerate the opening up of the insurance industry.

He also said China would restructure its State Intellectual Property Office this year to step up law enforcement, raise fines for violations and strengthen legal protections.

Xi did not give a specific timeframe, but said the reforms would take place “sooner rather than later, faster rather than slower.”

Some analysts said the pledges were nothing new and unlikely to amount to the type of concessions that the Trump administration is expecting. Others, however, said there might be enough there to at least help the two move toward sitting down to talk.

“President Xi gave the outline and the many details and the concrete measures we are still waiting to see what policies will come up in the following days,” said Zhang Yifan, an associate professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “But he mentioned balanced trade, that means that they will address the trade surplus issue, not just with the U.S., but with all other countries.”

The United States has proposed placing tariffs on about 1,300 Chinese imports, which amounts to about $50 billion in trade. Late last week, even as he disagreed with the characterization of the dispute as a trade war, President Trump upped the stakes by asking for $100 billion more in tariffs.

China has responded with a list of its own, some 106 products that target among other things agricultural production in areas where political support for Trump was strong in the 2016 elections.

Beijing has already put a 25 percent tariff in place on pork products, in response to Trump’s earlier tariffs on steel and aluminum. And if Beijing’s recently announced tariffs go forward, soybean imports from the United States could also face a 25 percent tariff.

The impact that could have on American farmers is already raising concerns. So much so that the White House announced Monday it is drafting up a plan to protect farmers and make sure they don’t bear the brunt of Chinese retaliation.

That is why it is hard to predict just how far Xi’s remarks may go in helping the two sides resolve their differences, said Oliver Rui, a professor of international finance and accounting at the China Europe International Business School.

“The issue is very complicated. It is not just the trade imbalances between the two countries, it is also related to political issues. The mid-term elections will definitely play a role here, the attitude of the EU will also play a role here,” Rui said.

Several days ago the White House chief economic adviser Larry Kudlow said that the Trump administration is building a “coalition of the willing” to jointly take on China over its trade practices. Kudlow has not yet said which countries might be a part of that grouping, but the European Union is one likely partner.

Concern about trade practices

The United States is not the only country concerned about China’s trade practices and increasingly analysts who have been arguing against tariffs have noted that working with other countries could have an even stronger impact.

That is something that President Xi appeared to be hinting at in his speech and that might be a point of concern for Beijing.

“We should pursue the path of dialogue, not conflict, building partnerships and not alliances as we forge new paths in relations between countries,” Xi said.

This story was written by VOA’s William Ide in Beijing. Joyce Huang contributed.
…

In war-torn Afghanistan, honey is regarded as a traditional cure-all but for one schoolgirl, the sticky commodity has also created sweet opportunities to work and own a business in a country where few women do so.

Three years ago, Frozan, now 19 years old, obtained a small loan, bought two beehives and learned about apiculture from Hand in Hand International, a non-governmental organization that focuses on poverty.

The bees collected nectar from flowers growing near her home in the Marmul district in the northern Balkh province. Their first harvest produced about 16kg (35lb) of honey, which enabled Frozan to pay back her loan and still have money left over.

She now has 12 beehives and last year collected 110kg of honey, which earned her 100,000 Afghanis ($1,450) in a country where GDP per capita is only about $600.

“The village I live in is a traditional village and women are not allowed to work outside,” says Frozan, who goes by one name. “But when I started beekeeping I realized that it’s an easy task. I told the people about beekeeping and then they accepted it.”

Since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, the lives and status of women in society have improved significantly. But traditions, insecurity and recently a decline in international donors, have slowed progress.

A Human Rights Watch report, quoting government officials, says 85 percent of the 3.5 million children who don’t go to school are girls. Only 37 percent of adolescent girls are literate compared with 66 percent of adolescent boys.

Frozan is now in her final year of school and would like to study economics and grow her business, goals that may now be possible for her and her three siblings thanks to her income stream.

She says looking after tens of thousands of bees can easily be done between studies and household chores and her father, Ismail, who is a farmer like much of Marmul’s population, supports his daughter’s enterprise.

“It has been my dream to have a daughter who could find a job like this and make a future for herself,” he says.

Every few weeks, Ismail takes the fresh honey to Mazar-i-Sharif, the provincial capital, more than 50km away, where it’s sold to shops and consumed mainly by local customers.

While industry data is scant, local media citing government officials say Afghanistan’s honey production has risen in recent years, hitting 2,000 tons in 2015. Several varieties such as acacia, almond flower, and basil are now available.

However, infrastructure constraints mean most of this honey never leaves Afghanistan.
…

Brazil’s government has been told that development projects, including hydropower dams, in protected areas can no longer go ahead without the prior approval of lawmakers.

Last week’s ruling by the supreme court followed the use by the government in recent years of the controversial “provisional measure”, a legal instrument that allowed the president to approve projects by reducing the size of protected areas.

Campaigners said the decision should ensure the country’s forests and reserves, including the Amazon rainforest, were better protected.

“This decision puts an end to a spree of provisional measures in the name of environmental de-protection,” said Mauricio Guetta, a lawyer at Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), an advocacy group.

In recent years, the government has used the measure to open up protected areas for controversial projects, including building two of Brazil’s largest hydropower dams – the Jirau and Santo Antonio – in the Amazon.

The use of the measure to shrink protected areas with immediate effect had brought “irreversible consequences, irreversible damage to the environment,” Guetta told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

The eight-judge bench ruled unanimously that using the provisional measure to reduce the size of protected areas for any reason was unconstitutional.

It followed a lawsuit in which the court heard the measure had been used in 2012 to allow trees in six protected areas of the Amazon to be felled to make way for five hydropower dams.

“The (provisional measure), later converted into law, reduced the level of environmental protection by deactivating due legislative process,” supreme court justice Alexandre de Moraes said in a statement.

The court said the ruling would not affect the five hydropower plants in question because the provisional measure had already been enacted in law, and some are operating.

Guetta said the ruling meant any changes to protected areas must be first approved by law, and local communities should be properly consulted about projects planned on their land.

“The government has been trying to reduce by more than 1 million hectares the area under conservation in the southern part of Amazonas state. Now this initiative is officially vetoed because of the supreme court’s decision,” he said.

Environmentalists say increasing swaths of land, including the Amazon forest, are being felled for grazing and cropland, and for development projects.

Deforestation in the Amazon fell in the August 2016 to July 2017 monitoring period for the first time in three years, although the 6,624 square kilometers (2,557 square miles) cleared of forest remains well above the low recorded in 2012 and targets for slowing climate change.
…

Apple on Monday said it had achieved its goal of powering all of the company’s facilities with renewable energy, a milestone that includes all of its data centers, offices and retail stores in 43 countries.

The iPhone maker also said nine suppliers had recently committed to running their operations entirely on renewable energy sources like wind and solar, bringing to 23 the total number to make such a pledge.

Major U.S. corporations such as Apple, Wal-Mart and Alphabet have become some of the country’s biggest buyers of renewable forms of energy, driving substantial growth in the wind and solar industries.

Alphabet’s Google last year purchased enough renewable energy to cover all of its electricity consumption worldwide.

Costs for solar and wind are plunging thanks to technological advances and increased global production of panels and turbines, enabling companies seeking to green their images to buy clean power at competitive prices.

“We’re not spending any more than we would have,” Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president for environment, policy and social initiatives, said in an interview. “We’re seeing the benefits of an increasingly competitive clean energy market.”

Renewable energy projects that provide power to Apple facilities range from large wind farms in the United States to clusters of hundreds of rooftop solar systems in Japan and Singapore. The company has also urged utilities to procure renewable energy to help power Apple’s operations.

Encouraging suppliers to follow suit in embracing 100 percent renewable energy is the next step for Apple. The suppliers that pledge to use more clean energy know they will have “a leg up” against competitors for Apple’s business, Jackson said.

“We made it clear that, over time, this will become less of a wish list and more of a requirement,” she said.
…

With the passage of deep tax cuts late last year, annual U.S. budget deficits are expected to balloon over the next decade, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said Monday.

The independent financial scorekeeper said that the long-term U.S. debt, now more than $21 trillion, could soar to more than $33 trillion by 2028, with increasing annual deficits jumping from $804 billion this year to $1.5 trillion in a decade. In the last fiscal year ending last September, the deficit was $665 billion.

The increasing deficits could, over time, make it more difficult for the U.S. government to fund growth of domestic and defense programs. A bigger share of the annual government budgets — now about $4 trillion — would have to be devoted to paying interest charges on the growing debt and could also lead to higher interest charges for U.S. businesses and consumers.

The CBO predicted a 3.3 percent advance this year for the U.S. economy, the world’s largest, but a drop to 2.4 percent in 2019. 

Numerous Republican lawmakers in the past often decried the increasing U.S. debt. But in their quest to pass significant legislation ahead of re-election campaigns later this year, congressional Republicans, with the support of President Donald Trump, adopted the $1.5 trillion tax cut measure that has put more money in the paychecks of a large majority of American workers.

Democratic lawmakers said the tax measure mostly benefited wealthy taxpayers and corporations. No Democrat voted for the legislation.

On a bipartisan vote, Congress more recently approved a $1.3 trillion spending plan running through the end of September that raised caps on military and domestic spending by about $300 billion, also adding to the deficit for 2018.
…

Afghanistan is set to exploit its unique agricultural climate by refining and exporting another kind of flower, orange blossoms! An Afghan investor found a way to extract the citrusy, floral bouquet from the delicate flowers to create perfumes. As VOA’s Zabihullah Ghazi reports in Jalalabad, not only is the perfume diversifying the country’s agricultural output, it’s also providing employment opportunities. Shaista Sadat Lami narrates.
…

U.S. President Donald Trump predicted Sunday there would be a resolution of the U.S.-China standoff on tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of goods the world’s two biggest economies are threatening to impose on each other.

The U.S. leader said, without offering any direct information, that “China will take down its Trade Barriers because it is the right thing to do.”

Trump said that “taxes will become Reciprocal & a deal will be made on Intellectual Property. Great future for both countries!”

Regardless, Trump said that he and Chinese President Xi Jinping “will always be friends, no matter what happens with our dispute on trade.”

The threats Washington and Beijing have lobbed at each other in recent days have rattled world stock markets, with wide swings of hundreds of points in stock indexes.

U.S. stocks plunged more than 2 percent Friday after Trump threatened to impose tariffs on an additional $100 billion worth of Chinese goods beyond the $50 billion worth of products he had already said would be affected.

Beijing responded in kind, saying it would impose tariffs on U.S. goods “until the end at any cost.”

Both countries have published lists of goods they intend to tax, with the U.S. hitting steel and aluminum imports from China, along with aerospace, tech and machinery goods. Other levies would target medical equipment, medicine and educational materials.

China said it would impose tariffs on more than 100 U.S. products, including soybeans, wheat, corn, beef, tobacco, vehicles, plastic products and an array of other items.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told CBS News that the threat of higher tariffs posed the risk of a trade war but that he does not expect one to materialize.

“Our expectation is that we don’t think there will be a trade war. Our objective is to continue to have discussions with China. I don’t expect there will be a trade war. It could be, but I don’t expect it at all,” he said.

Mnuchin said that Trump and Xi have a “very close relationship” and that the two countries would continue to discuss trade issues.

A key U.S. lawmaker, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, told ABC News, that U.S. businesses and consumers could inevitably be hurt if China imposes tariffs on U.S. products.

“There is no way for us to address China without absorbing some pain here,” Graham said. “To those who believe that China is cheating, what idea do you have better than Trump?”
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Taiwan says it regrets that the “one China” policy insisted on by Beijing prevents it from providing much needed development aid to most countries in Africa.

Taiwan was in a relatively good diplomatic position in Africa several years ago. Taiwan’s Deputy Secretary-General for International Cooperation and Development, Pai-po Lee, says this made it possible for those countries that had diplomatic relations with Taiwan to benefit from his agency’s aid projects.

“Previously, we have over nine countries with Taiwan. For instance, Senegal, the Gambia, Chad, Niger, Liberia, Central Africa — also Sao Tome Principe… Six years ago, they still have relations with Taiwan. But, then they shifted to China,” said Pai-po Lee.

Lee says Taiwan had invested a lot in the African region. But, all that is now in the past. He says Taiwan currently maintains diplomatic relations with only two countries — Burkina Faso and Swaziland.

He says Taiwan has been running productive agricultural and livestock, as well as vocational and medical programs in Swaziland since 1975.

As for Burkina Faso, he says a successful irrigation project on the Kou River, which was started in 1967, ended in 1973. That was when Burkina Faso broke off relations with Taiwan in favor of China.

But Lee tells VOA Burkina Faso restored ties with Taiwan in 1994. He suggests the lure of billions of dollars in Chinese aid was not strong enough to keep this impoverished country within Beijing’s diplomatic orbit.

“It is… coming from the Burkina Faso people. To think about the 1967 in Kou River, this 1967. They had quite a good memory of that… So, the people urged the government to restore the relations with Taiwan. So, that pressure comes from the people,” said Lee.

Since resuming development work in Burkina Faso, the Taiwanese development official says the country’s irrigation system has been expanded. He says a program is ongoing to train local nurses and medical doctors and an infant and maternal health program is having great success in reducing both maternal and infant deaths.

 
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