Harry Potter Prequel, Written on a Postcard, Is Stolen
A rare Harry Potter prequel handwritten by author J.K. Rowling on a postcard was stolen during a burglary in central England, police said Friday as they appealed for help from fans of the wizard across the world.
The 800-word story, set three years before Harry Potter is born and which sold for 25,000 pounds ($32,152) at a charity auction in 2008, was stolen from a property in Birmingham between April 13-24.
Appeal to Potter fans
“Please don’t buy this if you’re offered it,” Rowling wrote on Twitter. “Originally auctioned for @englishpen, the owner supported writers’ freedoms by bidding for it.”
The proceeds of the auction were donated to English PEN, an organization that champions freedom of expression, and to Dyslexia Action.
“The only people who will buy this unique piece are true Harry Potter fans. We are appealing to anyone who sees, or is offered this item for sale, to contact police,” said Constable Paul Jauncey from West Midlands Police.
Untitled prequel
Handwritten over two sides of an A5 postcard, the untitled prequel features the characters Sirius Black and Harry’s father, James. It opens with a youthful Sirius and James cornered by two irate policemen at the end of a high-speed motorcycle chase.
After an exchange of words with the policemen, the two teenagers make their escape using a touch of magic. The card concludes with the words “From the prequel I am not working on — but that was fun!”
More than 450 million copies of the seven original Harry Potter books have been sold worldwide in 79 languages. The movie franchise has grossed more than $7 billion worldwide.
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Old Nuclear Technology Giving Way to New Generation of Reactors
After several large-scale incidents at nuclear power plants around the globe, public pressure in some countries led to abandoning the technology. But manufacturers say the new generation reactors are much safer, and their use will dramatically lower the air pollution that causes global warming. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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‘Our Champion’: Bobsledder Steven Holcomb’s Life Celebrated
The sympathy cards came from places like Germany and Italy, where Steven Holcomb was their bobsled enemy. Mourners flew in from all across the country. Generations of Olympians packed a ballroom, sharing in grief.
They wept. They hugged. They laughed.
“Steven Holcomb was like no one else,” Olympic teammate Steven Langton said. “He was one of the finest to wear the red, white and blue.”
Sentiments like those came for hours Thursday in the tiny Olympic town of Lake Placid, New York, when friends and family gathered to celebrate the life of America’s most successful bobsled driver. The 37-year-old Holcomb was found dead in his sleep Saturday at the Olympic Training Center, the dorm where not only many of his teammates live but where the offices for USA Bobsled and Skeleton are housed.
“Steve was, and always will be, our champion,” said Tony Carlino, who manages the Mount Van Hoevenberg track where Holcomb dominated.
The celebration of Holcomb’s life was supposed to last an hour.
That proved impossible. Put simply, there was much to celebrate — including the 2010 Olympic four-man gold medal, which ended a 62-year drought for the U.S. in bobsled’s signature race, and a pair of bronze medals from the 2014 Sochi Games.
“I have no words to describe my sadness,” said International Bobsled and Skeleton Federation President Ivo Ferriani, who called Holcomb a brother in a recorded message. “The sadness is indescribable. We need to remember Stevie for what he gave to us all. … Stevie, you will stay always with us. I will never forget you, my friend.”
For the public memorial, hundreds of people packed a ballroom at a conference center attached the same building where Lake Placid’s signature moment — the “Miracle on Ice” from the 1980 Winter Olympics — happened. Photos of Holcomb played on a loop on the electronic message board outside the arena. Local police officers shooed people away from nearby parking meters near the building, saying no one needed to worry about such things on this day.
“Steve’s one of the most passionate, humble souls I’ve ever known,” said a teary USA Bobsled head coach Brian Shimer, who considered Holcomb the younger brother he never had. “He looked you in the eyes. He engaged you. And he did that with every person who was drawn to him by his charm … and by his greatness.”
The public ceremony was preceded by a private, intimate one for family, teammates and close friends atop the track at Mount Van Hoevenberg, not far from the start line and overlooking the magnificent Adirondack Mountains in the distance. His sleds were displayed on either side of the medal podium, the same one he stood atop of plenty of times in his career.
The U.S. flag — the colors he wore as an Eagle Scout, as a member of the Utah Army National Guard, and as a bobsledder — was at half-staff, rippling in the crisp breeze. Speakers read passages from Winnie The Pooh, from Dr. Seuss, from the Bible. They told stories of how he was the ultimate teammate. They told stories of how he was the ultimate jokester.
His mother, Jean Anne, wore Holcomb’s gold medal from the Vancouver Games. His father, Steve, wore one of the bronze medals from the Sochi Games. His sisters both spoke, one of them wearing his other Olympic bronze from Sochi. Many teammates wore or carried “Superman” shirts, like Holcomb used to wear under his speed suit on race days.
“He was a boy when he came here,” said Holcomb’s father, also named Steve, who thanked Lake Placid for playing such a role in his son’s life. “And he was a man when he left.”
USA Bobsled and Skeleton CEO Darrin Steele has lost count of how many times in recent days he’s been asked about how the team will go on — especially with the 2018 Pyeongchang Games looming in nine months — without Holcomb.
He doesn’t have an answer laden with specifics yet.
“As tough as it is, we have to,” Steele said, as he struggled to get the words out. “We have to continue his legacy and continue the work that he worked so hard to start. We owe it to him. We will push forward. We will find success again. He’s not the pillar of the organization any longer, but we are where we are because of Steven Holcomb.”
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Dutch Inventor Years Ahead in Plan to Clean Up Massive Plastic Patch in Pacific
A Dutch entrepreneur has come up with an invention he says will allow him to start cleaning up a massive floating garbage patch in the Pacific two years ahead of schedule.
“To catch the plastic, act like plastic,” Boyan Slat said Thursday in Utrecht.
Slat’s Ocean Cleanup foundation plans to scoop up most of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch — a gargantuan floating island of plastic between the U.S. states of Hawaii and California.
When he discovered that his original plan of attaching large barriers to the sea floor to trap the plastic would not work, Stal devised a different plan.
The barriers will instead be weighed down by floating anchors and travel in the same sea currents as the garbage, trapping it.
Slat says the new plan will allow him to start collecting the trash within a year — two years ahead of schedule.
The young entrepreneur’s system is making waves among America’s super-rich philanthropists. Last month, his foundation announced it had raised $21.7 million in donations since November, clearing the way for large-scale trials at sea. Among donors were Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.
Nancy Wallace, director of the Marine Debris Program at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said much of the garbage in the world’s oceans is found throughout the water column — at different depths. That would likely put some of it out of reach of Slat’s barriers.
However she applauded The Ocean Cleanup for bringing the issue to a broad public.
“The more people are aware of it, the more they will be concerned about it,” Wallace said. “My hope is that the next step is to say `what can I do to stop it?’ and that’s where prevention comes in.”
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not just an ugly reminder of a throwaway human society — it is also a danger to sea life and humans. Tiny bits of plastic can find their way into the food chain.
Ocean Cleanup says 8 million tons of plastic wind up in the seas every year. One piece of plastic can take decades to break down.
Slat on Thursday brought out an intact plastic crate fished from the Pacific last year. The date 1977 was stamped on it.
Some information for this report from AP.
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Feeling the Magic at Renowned Texas Park
As national parks traveler Mikah Meyer continued exploring the numerous national park sites within the vast state of Texas, he’s been overwhelmed by the beauty of Big Bend National Park and the Rio Grande Wild & Scenic River.
Located in southwestern Texas, on the U.S. border with Mexico, the huge park is larger than Hong Kong. It’s 80 kilometers from east to west, and 200 kilometers of the Rio Grande River form its southern boundary.
Big Bend – named after a big bend in the river – was established as a national park in 1944, preserving the largest tracts of Chihuahuan Desert topography and ecology in the United States. Mikah spent several packed days exploring the vast terrain.
Magical landscape
“I didn’t have a lot of expectations going in, but it’s just kind of this magical landscape,” Mikah observed, one that he learned has evolved greatly over time.
“Over the past two centuries, largely due to a lot of human influence, it used to be a very different climate with grass as high as a horse’s head. And essentially through ranching, through farming, through human interaction, we as humans have taken away a lot of the natural, green growth.”
But despite its harsh desert environment, the park boasts a spectacular landscape that’s home to more than 1,200 species of plants (including 60 types of cactus), 450 species of birds, 56 species of reptiles and 75 species of mammals.
The variety of life is largely due to the diverse ecology and changes in elevation, from the dry, hot desert, to the cool mountains, and the fertile river valley.
Flirting with fossils
Mikah’s first stop was the “incredible dinosaur exhibit” at the newly opened Fossil Discovery Exhibit.
“They had these amazingly huge fossils and did a really top-notch job at showing you the history of the area that is now Big Bend National Park that goes back a hundred million years,” he said.
“This area used to be a shallow ocean, so there were massive gators, large fish with huge teeth that were big enough to eat sharks, and they have fossils of those fish that existed in this area that’s now a desert.”
Also on display at the site is “an insane amount of dinosaur bones,” Mikah added, including a massive T-Rex skeleton and one of the largest flying reptile skeletons in the world.
“It was incredible!” Mikah marveled. “I mean, what little kid doesn’t love dinosaurs and doesn’t geek out and squeal at seeing a giant T-rex skeleton? It really puts it in perspective when you can sit in a giant alligator or T-Rex mouth that they have right on the ground at this exhibit.”
Border beauty
Visitors to Big Bend can also enjoy the many recreational opportunities on and around the Rio Grande, which forms the 1600 kilometer long international boundary between Mexico and the United States.
Mikah immersed himself in nature at Rio Grande Village, the largest campground in the park, on the banks of the Rio Grande.
“The campground is in a little bend of Big Bend National Park that dips down, so basically if I look to my left or to my right I’m looking at Mexico, but straight in front of the United States.”
“There is a little nature trail hike which is right by the campgrounds which is gorgeous and gives you stunning views of the Rio Grande River,” Mikah said.
On day two of his visit, Mikah decided to cross the river into Mexico for lunch in the small border town of Boquillas in the Mexican state of Coahuila. “It’s shallow enough that it only goes up to your knees right now,” he observed as he waded across the warm water.
Once he crossed into Mexico, Mikah headed to town — about a kilometer and a half away down a dusty path — on a horse. It trotted along at a leisurely pace, allowing Mikah to soak up the beauty of the stark desert around him. After checking in with Mexican customs, he stopped for a tasty lunch of tacos and cold drinks at Jose Falcon’s, one of the town’s two restaurants.
While lunch was satisfying, he said the highlight of his little adventure was the sweeping vista around him. “You’re on this horse, so you’re a little higher than you get to be normally, and there’s mountains everywhere and desert trees.”
More to come…
Mikah has many more adventures in Big Bend National Park to share with VOA. They include stops at some of the most remote areas of the park, a surprising canoe ride on the Rio Grande, a visit to the historic hot springs and an exhilarating hike up to the highest peak of Chisos Mountains.
In the meantime the young traveler, who hopes to visit all 400 plus sites within the U.S. National Park Service, invites you to learn more about his journey across the American southwest by visiting his website, Facebook and Instagram.
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Evaluating LA Bid for 2024 Olympics Requires Imagination
Evaluating Los Angeles’ readiness to host the 2024 Olympic Games takes some imagination. That’s because a lot of the pitch still relies on images on a computer screen, or a blueprint of what’s to come on a dusty construction site.
Los Angeles Olympic organizers often say their plan for two weeks of international competition is virtually realized, stressing that it requires no new construction of permanent venues. The concept for the L.A. Games, they say, is ready to go because “it already exists.”
But there is a lot that International Olympic Committee members won’t see as they visit Los Angeles this week in the run-up to a September decision on whether L.A. or Paris will get the 2024 Games.
Some of the opening ceremonies, including the famous Parade of Nations, would take place in a $2.6 billion NFL stadium just outside Los Angeles that today is a gouged, fenced-in lot crisscrossed by tire tracks.
The city notorious for its clotted freeway traffic will make use of a “growing public transit system,” the L.A. proposal boasts. Indeed, Los Angeles has billions of dollars of planned rail lines, but how many will be ready for the Games in seven years is largely a guess, given the uncertainties that come with major construction projects. Some aren’t scheduled to be completed until 2023 and 2024.
City planners describe the Los Angeles International Airport as the “gateway” for the Olympics. But anyone familiar with the airport knows it inflicts daily misery on travelers, including knotted traffic in and out of terminals. An impressive new terminal opened several years ago for international flights, but many others feel like a walk into a grimy past. Billions of dollars in improvements are planned.
‘The ability to deliver’
L.A.’s bid is closer to completion than many in past years, but in many ways it comes down to a promise of what’s to come.
This week, IOC members are looking for “the ability to deliver,” said Chicago-based sports finance consultant Marc Ganis. They want to see “commitment and competence,” he said, not just sketches and mock-ups.
On Thursday, members of the IOC fanned out in several groups to privately tour the proposed venues, including the Rose Bowl, the site for soccer matches.
In the background is a looming question. The IOC is considering awarding two Olympics at its September meeting in Peru, 2024 and 2028, one for each city. Officials from both cities stress they are bidding on 2024.
On Wednesday, Patrick Baumann, chairman of the IOC evaluation committee, didn’t directly address a question about the possibility of awarding the 2024 and 2028 Games at the same time.
“We will be concentrating on the process that has started and these cities have been going through for the purpose of awarding the host of 2024,” Baumann told reporters.
In the Olympics, time is the enemy. As late as March 2000, the IOC considered moving the 2004 Olympics out of Athens, Greece, because of construction delays. Even so, work on the main stadium complex was ongoing just weeks before the Games began.
There are six events planned for Long Beach, a coastal city south of downtown L.A. However, most of them will require temporary facilities that don’t exist today, including a water polo pool.
Projected costs
The cost of making it a reality can be substantial. Erecting and removing the temporary pool and bleachers, for example, is projected at nearly $14 million. A mountain biking track in the hills east of Los Angeles will cost over $13 million. A temporary outdoor stadium would rise next to the famous Santa Monica pier for volleyball. Cost: $23.4 million.
Even sites that do exist, like the iconic Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, home to the 1932 and 1984 Olympics, are works in progress.
It’s slated to have a $270 million renovation completed by 2019, but transforming a football stadium into a venue for Olympic track events, then back again, will cost over $100 million, according to projections.
A little stagecraft can help fill in what’s missing. At the Rose Bowl, organizers emblazoned the field with the Olympic rings for their IOC guests. Hollywood studios were illuminated with the colors of an L.A. sunset and the logo for the city’s bid to mark the arrival of the IOC. Committee members attended a celebrity-studded dinner Wednesday where guests included retired Lakers great Kobe Bryant, Spanish tenor Placido Domingo and actor Sylvester Stallone.
“A lot of the stadiums for the Olympics are being envisioned for the future. They would not even be built if it wasn’t for the Olympics,” said Jules Boykoff, a professor at Pacific University in Oregon who has written widely on the Olympics movement.
“If you have existing venues, you don’t have to envision as much. It still takes some imagination,” he said.
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Coffee Flour, Beer Pizza on Menu as Innovators Fight Food Waste
Beer cookies, coffee flour and bananas that don’t brown are just some of the innovations on offer to fight food waste.
Plus smart scales that measure exactly what chefs chuck then list the deluge of edibles they’ve unknowingly binned.
As the fight against climate change increasingly focuses on food waste as a source of planet-warming emissions, entrepreneurs are coming up with crafty ways to reduce the glut of produce that gets thrown.
About a third of food produced each year is never eaten either because it is spoiled after harvest and during transportation, or thrown away by shops and consumers, according to U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Discarded food ends up in landfills where it rots, releasing harmful greenhouse gasses, while the water, energy and fuel needed to grow, store and transport it is wasted.
Speaking at conference in Milan this week, former U.S. President Barack Obama said innovation was key to reduce emissions from agriculture and achieve “a sustainable food future” with enough for everyone to eat.
“Part of this is also going to be wasting less food … especially when nearly 800 million men, women and children worldwide face the injustice of chronic hunger and malnutrition,” he said.
Obama’s address was the climax of a four-day food industry conference in the Italian city.
Here are some of the best food waste innovations showcased at the event:
Demetra
Produced by Italian biotechnology start-up Green Code, Demetra is a natural post-harvest treatment that extends fruit’s shelf life.
It consists of a mixture of plant extracts that stops fruit from ripening — delaying the rotting process — while retaining its nutrients, said Green Code co-founder Emiliano Gentilini.
“As a consequence food can be kept much longer,” Gentilini told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The mixture is applied on fruit by nebulization or immersion but the company is developing an easier, dry application method for developing countries.
Demetra was awarded a 2017 U.N. award for “Innovative Ideas and Technology on Agribusiness” on Wednesday.
Winnow
British start-up Winnow helps commercial chefs cut waste by measuring just what they throw from the kitchen every day.
It provides them with a smart scale connected to a tablet that weights all waste. Staff tap on the screen what is being thrown and receive detailed reports on waste patterns and costs that allow chefs to make adjustments.
“Chefs systematically under-estimate how much food they waste,” said Marc Zornes, co-founder of Winnow.
On average, he said large kitchens bin between 10 and 20 percent of food they buy. Zornes said restaurants using his technology could save up to eight percent on food costs and cut waste by more than half.
RISE
New York-based food tech startup RISE uses spent barley, a by-product of beer production, to make flour for bread, pizza, cookies and other baked goods.
In the United States currently $1.2 billion a year is spent to send to landfill about 5 million tonnes (5.5 million tons) of grains that are mashed and boiled to make beer, according to the company.
RISE charges a fee to collect spent barley from breweries, which it then processes into flour to sell to commercial bakers, chefs and food manufacturers, said co-founder Jessica Aguirre.
The company currently operates from a Brooklyn kitchen but Aguirre said the model could be easily replicated elsewhere.
“There are breweries everywhere,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “Our technology is very simple and can be easily implemented in developing countries,” she added.
Other firms such as Coffee Flour and Renewal Mill use similar processes to make food from ingredients left over by the industrial production of items such as coffee and soy milk.
your ad hereBrazil Says Its Zika Emergency Over
Brazil declared an end to its public health emergency for the Zika virus on Thursday, 18 months after a surge in cases drew headlines around the world.
The mosquito-borne virus wasn’t considered a major health threat until the 2015 outbreak revealed that Zika can lead to severe birth defects. One of those defects, microcephaly, causes babies to be born with skulls much smaller than expected.
Photos of babies with the defect spread panic around the Western Hemisphere and around the globe, as the virus was reported in dozens of countries. Many would-be travelers canceled their trips to Zika-infected places.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and others recommended that women who were pregnant shouldn’t travel to affected areas. The concern spread even more widely when health officials said it could also be transmitted through sexual contact with an infected person.
The health scare came just as Brazil, the epicenter of the outbreak, was preparing to host the 2016 Olympics, fueling concerns the Games could help spread the virus. One athlete, a Spanish wind surfer, said she got Zika while training in Brazil ahead of the Games.
In response to the outbreak, Brazil launched a mosquito-eradication campaign. The Health Ministry said those efforts have helped to dramatically reduce cases of Zika. From January through mid-April, the Health Ministry recorded 95 percent fewer cases than during the same period last year. The incidence of microcephaly has fallen as well.
The World Health Organization lifted its own international emergency in November, even while saying the virus remained a threat.
“The end of the emergency doesn’t mean the end of surveillance or assistance” to affected families, said Adeilson Cavalcante, the secretary for health surveillance at Brazil’s Health Ministry. “The Health Ministry and other organizations involved in this area will maintain a policy of fighting Zika, dengue and chikungunya.”
All three diseases are carried by the Aedes aegypti mosquito.
But the WHO has warned that Zika is “here to stay,” even when cases of it fall off, and that fighting the disease will be an ongoing battle.
Adriana Melo, the Brazilian doctor who first linked Zika to birth defects, said the lifting of the emergency was expected following the decline in cases.
“The important thing now is that we don’t forget the victims,” said Melo.
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Heroin Epidemic Pushing Up Hepatitis C Infections in US
The heroin epidemic is driving up hepatitis C infections, with the biggest increase in people in their 20s, U.S. health officials said Thursday.
The number of new infections nearly tripled in five years, to about 2,400 in 2015. The virus is spread by sharing needles to inject drugs, and the increase coincided with a surge in heroin use.
But officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention think the reported infections are far fewer than the actual number. Most people don’t get sick for many years, so they aren’t tested and don’t know they are infected. The CDC estimates that the number of infections in 2015 was 34,000, or twice as many as the estimate for 2010.
The biggest jump in new infections is in people ages 20 to 29, the CDC said.
The hepatitis C virus spreads through the blood but does most of its damage by infecting the liver. It can lead to cirrhosis or liver cancer. In recent years, new hepatitis C drugs hit the market that can cure the infection in only a few months. But they are expensive: A course of treatment can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
The CDC also released national hepatitis C death figures: nearly 20,000 in 2015. The number hasn’t changed much recently, but that figure reflects a different group of infected people: baby boomers. The apparent leveling off may be due to a push to test all baby boomers for the virus and the treatment improvements, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin.
Of the 3.5 million Americans living with hepatitis, most were born between 1945 and 1965 and were infected decades ago, according to the CDC.
Before widespread screening of blood donations began in 1992, the virus was also spread through blood transfusions. New cases fell to under 900 nearly 15 years ago and stayed at that level until they rose sharply in 2011. That was around the time heroin use began increasing, as drug abusers caught up in the opioid crisis shifted from prescription painkillers to heroin.
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Scientists Study Ancient Bacteria for Clues to Drug Resistance
Scientists are studying an ancient pathogen for clues as to how to fight a drug-resistant “superbug” in hospitals and other healthcare settings. They’ve found that resistance to modern antibiotics dates back millions of years.
Enterococci are one of a group of six bacteria known as “superbugs,” microbes that infect patients and are resistant to antibiotics, making them potentially lethal.
Scientists studying the enterococcus family found they developed resistance to harsh conditions some 450 million years ago, well before dinosaurs came on the scene.
They say lesser animals deposited feces on land that contained bacteria that learned to survive harsh environmental conditions, such as drying by the sun.
Found in 30,000 year-old ice
The ancient “grandfather” of the bacterium, found frozen in 30,000-year-old ice, can be extracted and revived by modern scientists. That’s how hardy enterococci are, according to Michael Gilmore, an ophthalmologist and microbiologist who heads Harvard University’s extensive program on antibiotic resistance.
“The enterococci are sort of like the cockroach of bacteria. They’re very, very difficult to kill. And so we think it’s the traits that developed in enterococcus in order to survive on the land that are exactly what make them so rugged and able to survive now in hospitals,” said Gilmore.
Gilmore oversaw a team of researchers that sequenced the genomes of 24 members of the enterococci family, finding 45 different properties that make them resistant to antibiotics and disinfectants in modern hospitals.
Their work is described in the journal Cell.
Traced to Cambrian Explosion
By peering back into the bacteria’s genetic material, investigators were able to trace enterococci’s lineage to the Cambrian Explosion 542 million years ago when animals first emerged from the sea.
It was bacteria nestled in the intestines of crawling animals a million years later that developed resistance to their environment.
Gilmore said scientists are studying the pathogen’s genes to identify targets for the development of new weapons to fight the superbug.
Gilmore added by characterizing the ancient DNA of enterococcus, “We can start looking at these different resistances and trying to identify for example new compounds that undermine those. So, those become the target set for the next generation of disinfectants or antibiotics.”
Defenses are developed
Gilmore said enterococci live harmlessly in the digestive tracts of all animals along with thousands of other bacteria. In a hospital setting, people are often treated with antibiotics to prevent infections, but the drugs also kill helpful microorganisms that keep enterococci under control.
Without that check, the superbug, which is not killed off, develops resistance to the antibiotics. Overtime, Gilmore said it and other superbugs have developed defenses, including a tough outer layer, that make it difficult for antibiotics to penetrate.
Unhindered, the drug-resistant bacteria can find their way into the bloodstream or organs through wounds or the use of catheters. Once infected, patients, whose bodies are now overrun by superbugs, do not respond to antibiotics and can die of septic shock and organ failure.
Gilmore said the aim of research that traces enterococcus to its prehistoric origins is to take out this superbug that threatens hospitalized patients.
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Doctors Perform First Clitoral Restorative Surgeries in Kenya
Doctors from the U.S.-based organization Clitoraid are in Nairobi this month performing restorative surgery on women who have undergone female genital mutilation, known as FGM. It’s the first time this procedure has been done in Kenya. From Nairobi, VOA’s Jill Craig has more.
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Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Painting, Watch Head to Auction
A watercolor by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is being auctioned along with a Cartier watch she wore for years.
Christie’s said Thursday that the then-first lady, who painted as a hobby, created the artwork in 1963 as a gift for her brother-in law, Stanislaw Radziwill.
Radziwill gave her the watch.
Both commemorate a 50-mile hike that Radziwill undertook as part of President John F. Kennedy’s physical fitness initiative. The first lady briefly joined the hike.
The painting depicts Radziwill walking with a Kennedy family friend.
The items are being offered as a single lot at a June 21 sale in New York. The presale estimate is $60,000 to $120,000.
The seller is anonymous. Part of the proceeds will benefit the National Endowment for the Arts.
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Sinister Text Messages Reveal High-tech Front in Ukraine War
Television journalist Julia Kirienko was sheltering with Ukrainian soldiers and medics two miles (three kilometers) from the front when their cellphones began buzzing over the noise of the shelling. Everyone got the same text message at the same time.
“Ukrainian soldiers,” it warned, “they’ll find your bodies when the snow melts.”
Text messages like the one Kirienko received have been sent periodically to Ukrainian forces fighting pro-Russian separatists in the eastern part of the country. The threats and disinformation represent a new form of information warfare, the 21st-century equivalent of dropping leaflets on the battlefield.
“This is pinpoint propaganda,” said Nancy Snow, a professor of public diplomacy at the Kyoto University of Foreign Studies.
The Associated Press has found that the messages are almost certainly being sent through cell site simulators, surveillance tools long used by U.S. law enforcement to track suspects’ cellphones. Photos, video, leaked documents and other clues gathered by Ukrainian journalists suggest the equipment may have been supplied by the Kremlin.
The texts have been arriving since 2014, shortly after the fighting erupted. The AP documented nearly four dozen of them, including the one that Kirienko received on Jan. 31 in Avdiivka, a battle-scarred town outside the principal rebel-held city of Donetsk.
The messages typically say things such as “Leave and you will live” or “Nobody needs your kids to become orphans.” Many are disguised to look as if they are coming from fellow soldiers.
Fake towers
In 2015, Ukrainian soldiers defending the railroad town of Debaltseve were sent texts appearing to come from comrades claiming their unit’s commander had deserted. Another set of messages warned that Ukrainian forces were being decimated. “We should run away,” they said.
“They were mostly threatening and demoralizing, saying that our commanders had betrayed us and we were just cannon fodder,” said Roman Chashurin, who served as a tank gunner in Debaltseve.
Ukrainian military and intelligence services had no comment on the phenomenon, but government and telecommunications officials are well aware of what’s going on.
A 2014 investigation by a major Ukrainian cellphone company concluded that cell site simulators were to blame for the rogue messages, according to an information security specialist who worked on the inquiry. He spoke on the condition that neither he nor his former firm be identified, citing a nondisclosure agreement.
Col. Serhiy Demydiuk, the head of Ukraine’s national cyberpolice unit, said in an interview that the country’s intelligence services knew the devices were being used as well.
“Avdiivka showed that the Russian side was using fake towers,” he said. “They are using them constantly.”
Cell site simulators work by impersonating cellphone towers, allowing them to intercept or even fake data. Heath Hardman, a former U.S. Marines signals analyst who operated the devices in Iraq and Afghanistan, said they were routinely used by American military intelligence officers to hunt insurgents.
Sending mass text messages in wartime isn’t entirely new. The Islamic militant group Hamas sent threatening messages to random Israelis during the 2009 conflict over Gaza, for example, though it is not clear how that was done.
Effectiveness of texts
Cell site simulators significantly sharpen the ability of propagandists to tailor their messages to a specific place or situation, according to Snow, the academic.
“There’s just something about viewing a message on your phone that just makes people more susceptible or vulnerable to its impact,” she said.
The type of hardware involved remains a matter of speculation. But last year, the Ukrainian investigative website InformNapalm published a video and photographs appearing to show a LEER-3, a Russian truck-mounted electronic warfare system, in the Donetsk area. InformNapalm also disclosed what it described as leaked Russian military documents discussing the LEER-3’s deployment to the Luhansk area of eastern Ukraine.
A 2015 article in Russia’s Military Review magazine said the LEER-3 has a cell site simulator built into a drone that is capable of acting over a 6-kilometer-wide area and hijacking up to 2,000 cellphone connections at once. That makes it a “pretty plausible” source for the rogue texts in Ukraine, said Hardman, the former signals analyst.
Russia’s Defense Ministry did not return a request for comment. Moscow has long denied any direct role in the fighting in Ukraine, despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary.
The effectiveness of the propaganda texts is an open question. Soldiers say they typically shrug them off.
“I can’t say that it had any influence on us,” said Chashurin, the former tank gunner. “We were even joking that they must be so afraid of us the only thing they can do is to spam us with these texts.”
But Svetlana Andreychuk, a volunteer who has made frequent trips to the front line to distribute food and supplies, said the threats and mockery sometimes hit a nerve in a grinding conflict that has claimed more than 9,900 lives.
“Some people are psychologically influenced,” she said. “It’s coming regularly. People are so tired. You see people dying. And then you face this.”
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What’s Holding Back Self-driving Cars? Human Drivers
In just a few years, well-mannered self-driving robotaxis will share the roads with reckless, law-breaking human drivers. The prospect is causing migraines for the people developing the robotaxis.
A self-driving car would be programmed to drive at the speed limit. Humans routinely exceed it by 10 to 15 mph (16 to 24 kph) — just try entering the New Jersey Turnpike at normal speed. Self-driving cars wouldn’t dare cross a double yellow line; humans do it all the time. And then there are those odd local traffic customs to which humans quickly adapt.
In Los Angeles and other places, for instance, there’s the “California Stop,” where drivers roll through stop signs if no traffic is crossing. In Southwestern Pennsylvania, courteous drivers practice the “Pittsburgh Left,” where it’s customary to let one oncoming car turn left in front of them when a traffic light turns green. The same thing happens in Boston. During rush hours near Ann Arbor, Michigan, drivers regularly cross a double-yellow line to queue up for a left-turn onto a freeway.
“There’s an endless list of these cases where we as humans know the context, we know when to bend the rules and when to break the rules,” said Raj Rajkumar, a computer engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University who leads the school’s autonomous car research.
Although autonomous cars are likely to carry passengers or cargo in limited areas during the next three to five years, experts say it will take many years before robotaxis can coexist with human-piloted vehicles on most side streets, boulevards and freeways. That’s because programmers have to figure out human behavior and local traffic idiosyncrasies. And teaching a car to use that knowledge will require massive amounts of data and big computing power that is prohibitively expensive at the moment.
“Driverless cars are very rule-based, and they don’t understand social graces,” said Missy Cummings, director of Duke University’s Humans and Autonomy Lab.
Driving customs and road conditions are dramatically different across the globe, with narrow, congested lanes in European cities, and anarchy in Beijing’s giant traffic jams. In India’s capital, New Delhi, luxury cars share poorly marked and congested lanes with bicycles, scooters, trucks, and even an occasional cow or elephant.
Then there is the problem of aggressive humans who make dangerous moves such as cutting cars off on freeways or turning left in front of oncoming traffic. In India, for example, even when lanes are marked, drivers swing from lane to lane without hesitation.
Already there have been isolated cases of human drivers pulling into the path of cars such as Teslas, knowing they will stop because they’re equipped with automatic emergency braking.
“It’s hard to program in human stupidity or someone who really tries to game the technology,” says John Hanson, spokesman for Toyota’s autonomous car unit.
Kathy Winter, vice president of automated driving solutions for Intel, is optimistic that the cars will be able to see and think like humans before 2030.
Cars with sensors for driver-assist systems already are gathering data about road signs, lane lines and human driver behavior. Winter hopes auto and tech companies developing autonomous systems and cars will contribute this information to a giant database.
Artificial intelligence developed by Intel and other companies eventually could access the data and make quick decisions similar to humans, Winter says.
Programmers are optimistic that someday the cars will be able to handle even Beijing’s traffic. But the cost could be high, and it might be a decade or more before Chinese regulators deem self-driving cars reliable enough for widespread public use, said John Zeng of LMC Automotive Consulting.
Intel’s Winter expects fully autonomous cars to collect, process and analyze four terabytes of data in 1 { hours of driving, which is the average amount a person spends in a car each day. That’s equal to storing over 1.2 million photos or 2,000 hours of movies. Such computing power now costs over $100,000 per vehicle, Zeng said. But that cost could fall as more cars are built.
Someday autonomous cars will have common sense programmed in so they will cross a double-yellow line when warranted or to speed up and find a gap to enter a freeway. Carnegie Mellon has taught its cars to handle the “Pittsburgh Left” by waiting a full second or longer for an intersection to clear before proceeding at a green light. Sensors also track crossing traffic and can figure out if a driver is going to stop for a sign or red light. Eventually there will be vehicle-to-vehicle communication to avoid crashes.
Still, some skeptics say computerized cars will never be able to think exactly like humans.
“You’ll never be able to make up a person’s ability to perceive what’s the right move at the time, I don’t think,” said New Jersey State Police Sgt. Ed Long, who works in the traffic and public safety office.
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Eurovision: Pop, Politics, Dancing Ape – But No Russia
Sprinkle the sequins, spark up the disco lights and get ready for battle — it’s time for the Eurovision Song Contest , a celebration of kitsch and cheesy pop with an undercurrent of politics and patriotism. More than a singing contest, it’s diplomacy in dancing shoes.
This week musical acts from more than 40 countries are taking the stage in Kyiv to vie for the Eurovision crown, watched by some 200 million television viewers. The 62nd annual contest has clean-cut crooners, electro beats, yodeling Romanians and even a dancing gorilla. But there is also a big absence: Russia, whose participation has been scuttled by the country’s diplomatic and military conflict with neighbor Ukraine.
Russia is one of Eurovision’s heavy hitters, tied with Sweden for the most top-five finishes this century. But this year’s Russian entrant, Yuliya Samoylova, was blocked by host Ukraine because she had toured in Crimea after Russia’s 2014 annexation of the peninsula.
In response, Russia’s state-owned Channel 1 television is refusing to broadcast the contest, replacing Saturday’s final with a screening of the film “Alien.”
Russia has been angry since last year, when Ukrainian singer Jamala won the contest with “1944.” The song described the deportations of Crimean Tatars to Central Asia under Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, but also hinted at their recent treatment under Russian President Vladimir Putin.
As the 2016 winner, Ukraine is this year’s Eurovision host.
John Kennedy O’Connor, author of Eurovision’s official history, said Ukraine has long used Eurovision as a way to annoy Russia.
“Last time the contest was in Kyiv it was a song about the Orange Revolution and it was allowed to compete,” he said. “Ukraine has been needling away for a long time and now the contest is going to be in a real crisis.”
The Moscow-Kyiv split is a headache for Eurovision’s producer, the European Broadcasting Union, which strives mightily to keep pop and politics separate. Overtly political flags and banners are banned, and lyrics are monitored for provocative content. In 2009 the EBU nixed the Georgian entry “We Don’t Wanna Put In,” a dig at Putin. The union has been criticized for not barring “1944” last year, allowing Russia-Ukraine tensions to fester.
The acrimony is ironic, since Eurovision was founded in 1956 to bring the recently warring countries of Europe together. It launched a year before the foundation of the European Economic Community, forerunner of the European Union.
“Eurovision, like the EEC, was born out of this passionate belief that we mustn’t have another war in Europe,” said Chris West, author of “Eurovision!” — a history of the contest and the continent. “Both institutions were driven by this sense of ‘never again.'”
From its launch with seven countries, Eurovision has grown to include more than 40, including non-European nations such as Israel and — somewhat controversially — far-off Australia.
The contest helped launch the careers of Sweden’s ABBA — victors in 1974 with “Waterloo” — Canada’s Celine Dion, who won for Switzerland in 1988, and Irish high-steppers Riverdance, the half-time entertainment in 1994.
Eurovision has a huge gay following and has become a symbol of optimistic liberalism — this year’s motto is “celebrate diversity.” Victories by transgender Israeli singer Dana International in 1998 and bearded Austrian drag queen Conchita Wurst in 2014 were hailed by liberals and condemned by conservatives — notably in Russia, where nationalist politicians cited the contest as evidence of Western degeneracy.
Onstage, many Eurovision-watchers expect this year to bring resurgence for western Europe after years of eastern and Nordic dominance. The bookies’ favorites are Portuguese balladeer Salvador Sobral with the syrupy “Amar Pelos Dois” (”Love For Both of Us”) and Italy’s Francesco Gabbani , who is accompanied by a dancer in a gorilla suit on “Occidentali’s Karma,” (”Westerner’s Karma”), a cheekily sardonic look at human evolution.
O’Connor says the Italian song has the qualities of a Eurovision classic.
“It’s so out there and it’s so outrageous and it’s so silly,” he said. “But it’s also very, very catchy.”
One country not expecting a first-place finish is Britain. The U.K. has not won since 1997, and many Britons suspect politics lies behind the country’s poor showing. Winners are decided by the votes of viewers and national juries, and regional alliances are often evident. Greece and Cyprus routinely give each other maximum points, as do the Nordic and Baltic states.
Britain is seen as having few allies, and some worry the country’s decision to leave the EU may further harm the chances of U.K. contestant Lucie Jones , performing the ballad “Never Give Up On You.”
West says the truth is simpler: Recent British entries just haven’t been very good.
“Bloc voting won’t make a rubbish song win,” he said. “I think a song’s got to be decent in order to win.
“It’ll be helped by bloc voting, and that is a problem for Britain because we don’t really have a bloc. But I think if Adele or Ed Sheeran entered the competition they could still win it.”
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Alaska Natives Look to Arctic Council to Preserve Pristine Region, Way of Life
The foreign ministers of the eight Arctic Council nations will meet to discuss climate change this week, amid news last month that temperatures in the pristine region are warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world.
A high-level meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and his counterparts from Russia, Greenland, Canada, Norway, Finland, Sweden and Iceland begins Thursday in Fairbanks.
As Tillerson joins the talks, the Trump administration has not yet decided whether to remain a party to the 2015 U.N. Paris Agreement on responding to climate change.
Watch: Alaskan Natives Look to Arctic Council to Preserve Waters, Way of Life
Any changes to U.S. climate policy would directly affect the lives of Alaska Natives, who depend on the Arctic Sea to survive.
In recent reports, scientists said the temperatures in the Arctic were warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world, sea ice was at record lows and permafrost was thawing.
If current warming rates hold, the world could see an ice-free Arctic by 2040, researchers said.
Worrisome
The studies have alarmed Alaska Natives.
Gabe Tegoseak spoke to VOA about growing up in an Inuit household.
“To put that in perspective, I grew up with no running water most of my life,” Tegoseak said. “A very old-school tradition, my parents they favored it that way and it humbles me.
“I had to walk to a freshwater lake, break some ice on my sled — and this is a wooden sled I used to pull around and break it up — and then bring it home, and that was our drinking water, this big block of ice,” he said.
As the ice block melted, Tegoseak’s family first used it for drinking water, then to wash their faces and bodies, and then to clean the floor, not wasting a drop, he said.
Many people in Alaska, including indigenous people, depend on the oil and gas industry for a paycheck, he told VOA. But he said he thought an executive order signed this month by President Donald Trump to reverse Obama administration policy and open up Arctic waters to drilling was shortsighted.
“We’re trading our rights and our ability to subsistence hunt and live traditionally, which is over 10,000-plus years old, for a cash economy, which [is a] different mindset. So when we catch a whale, for instance, we share it all,” Tegoseak said.
“Our view is that everybody gets to [have] a piece of whale, and it doesn’t matter, creed or color. Everybody gets a fair share,” he stressed.
Tegoseak said he had asked many Alaska Natives on the North Slope about what they’d do if they had to choose between having their beloved whale meat, called muktuk, or an iPad. They responded that they’d choose muktuk, he said.
Seen as shortsighted
Many environmental experts agree that drilling in the Arctic is risky and shortsighted, including Sally Yozell of the Stimson Center, a nonpartisan research center in Washington.
“I think it’s rather shortsighted for a number of reasons. You know the Arctic waters are cold, and it’s hard to — we have not figured out yet how to address an oil or gas calamity up there at all. I mean, the cold water, all one has to do to is to have witnessed what happened with the Exxon Valdez many years ago to see that that oil stayed in those waters for 20 years,” Yozell said.
The Valdez tanker struck a reef in Prince William Sound on March 24, 1989. Nearly 11 million gallons of oil was spilled.
Experts said the accelerated melting of Arctic Sea ice will most likely lead to more shipping, drilling and other economic activity in the region.
Mark Royce of Conservatives for Responsible Stewardship told VOA he was concerned.
“Unfortunately, the retreating ice, the diminution of the perpetual winters there, and the warming of their environment is giving rise to still more steam for plans for rapacious exploration and exploitative development,” Royce said. “It’s a vicious cycle. But what we’re seeing in the Arctic, in the very seas around Alaska, presents just a particularly virulent form of this at a crucial time.”
Tillerson’s remarks will most likely be followed closely by the other seven Arctic Council partners, who want to make climate change a focus of the final statement when the meeting concludes Thursday.
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Fighting Algae Blooms From the Top of the Food Chain
Algae blooms happen when simple algae plants start growing out of control. The tiny plants are not usually toxic on their own, but the overabundance creates so-called dead zones because they suck all the oxygen out of the water. In Sweden, researchers have enlisted the aid of native fish that can slow down the out of control growth of algae. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Dogs Help Autistic Children at the Dentist’s Office
Autistic children are naturally sensitive to changes in their routines, including visits to the doctor or dentist. They may become agitated and uncooperative. When a dog trainer in Chile tried bringing dogs to the office to help the children relax, the experiment proved so successful that it evolved into a full-scale business. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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China Simulates Extended Moon Stays Amid Space Drive
China is testing the ability for future astronauts to stay on the moon for extended periods, as Beijing accelerates its space program and looks to put people on the surface of the moon within the next two decades.
The official Xinhua news agency said volunteers would live in a “simulated space cabin” for between 60-200 days over the next year helping scientists understand what will be needed for humans to “remain on the moon in the medium and long terms”.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for China to become a global power in space exploration, with plans to send a probe to the dark side of the moon by 2018, the first ever such trip, and to put astronauts on the moon by 2036.
“While it remains unclear exactly how long China’s first lunar explorers will spend on the surface, the country is already planning for longer stays,” Xinhua said.
Two groups of four volunteers will live in the simulated cabin “Yuegong-1” to test how a life-support system works in a moon-like environment. A similar 105-day trial was carried out successfully in 2014.
The system, called the Bioregenerative Life Support System (BLSS), allows water and food to be recycled and is key to any Chinese probes to the moon or beyond.
“The latest test is vital to the future of China’s moon and Mars missions and must be relied upon to guarantee the safety and health of our astronauts,” Liu Zhiheng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences told the news agency.
The Yuegong-1 cabin has a central living space the size of a “very small urban apartment” and two “greenhouses” for plants.
In March, China announced plans to launch a space probe to bring back samples from the moon this year, while the country’s first cargo space craft docked with an orbiting space lab in April, a major step as Beijing looks to establish a permanently manned space station by 2022.
Despite the advances in China’s space program for military, commercial and scientific purposes, China still lags behind the United States and Russia.
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Montenegro’s Historic Town at Risk of Losing UNESCO Status
Montenegro’s historic port city of Kotor has earned the status of UNESCO World Heritage Site for the beauty of its well preserved medieval town. But Kotor’s international fame has become a source of trouble in recent years. Excessive construction is now threatening to diminish the town’s beauty and its reputation as one of the world’s top tourist destinations. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke has more.
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Tesla Selling Solar Tiles, Says They Look Like Traditional Roof
Electric carmaker Tesla has added another product to its lineup: Solar roof tiles.
As of Wednesday, customers worldwide could order a solar roof on Tesla’s website. Installations will begin next month in the U.S., starting with California. Installations outside the U.S. will begin next year, the company said.
The glass tiles were unveiled by Tesla last fall just before the company merged with solar panel maker SolarCity Corp. They’re designed to look like a traditional roof, with options that replicate slate or terracotta tiles. The solar tiles contain photovoltaic cells that are invisible from the street.
Guaranteed for life of home
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said one of the drawbacks to home solar installations has been the solar panels themselves: They’re often awkward, shiny and ugly. Buyers will want Tesla’s roof, he said, because it looks as good or better than a normal roof.
“When you have this installed on your house, you’ll have the best roof in the neighborhood. The aesthetics are that good,” Musk said in a conference call with media.
The roof is guaranteed for the life of the home, which is longer than the 20-year lifespan for a typical, nonsolar roof, Musk said. It has gone through the same hail, fire and wind testing that normal roofs endure.
Tesla’s website includes a calculator where potential buyers can estimate the cost of a solar roof based on the size of their home, the amount of sunlight their neighborhood receives and federal tax credits. They can also put down a refundable $1,000 deposit to reserve a place in line.
$42 per square foot
Tesla said the solar tiles cost $42 per square foot to install, making them far more costly than slate, which costs around $17 per square foot, or asphalt, which costs around $5. But homes would only need between 30 and 40 percent of their roof tiles to be solar; the rest would be Tesla’s cheaper nonsolar tiles, which would blend in with the solar ones.
It would cost $69,100 to install a solar roof with 40-percent solar tiles on a 2,600-square-foot roof in suburban Detroit, according to Tesla’s website. That includes a $7,000 Tesla Powerwall, a battery unit that stores the energy from the solar panels and powers the home. The roof would be eligible for a $15,500 federal tax credit and would generate an estimated $62,100 in electricity over 30 years. Over that time period, Tesla estimates, the homeowner would save $8,500.
Tesla said the typical homeowner can expect to pay $21.85 per square foot for a Tesla solar roof. The cost can be rolled into the homeowner’s mortgage payments and paid for over time, the company said.
Sales to be slow at first
Musk wouldn’t say how many orders the company expects to get this year. He expects the initial ramp-up to be slow.
“It will be very difficult and it will take a long time, and there will be some stumbles along the way. But it’s the only sensible vision of the future,” Musk said.
Palo Alto, California-based Tesla Inc. is making the solar tiles at its Fremont, California, factory initially. But eventually all production will move to a joint Tesla and Panasonic Corp. factory in Buffalo, New York. Panasonic makes the photovoltaic cells used in the solar tiles.
Tesla said it would be installing equipment in the Buffalo factory over the next few months.
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Amazon Trounces Rivals in Battle of the Shopping ‘Bots’
Earlier this year, engineers at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. who track rivals’ prices online got a rude surprise: the technology they were using to check Amazon.com several million times a day suddenly stopped working.
Losing access to Amazon.com Inc.’s data was no small matter. Like most big retailers, Wal-Mart relies on computer programs that scan prices on competitors’ websites so it can adjust its listings accordingly. A difference of even 50 cents can mean losing a sale.
But a new tactic by Amazon to block these programs — known commonly as robots or bots — thwarted the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer.
Its technology unit, @WalmartLabs, was unable to work around the blockade for weeks, forcing it to retrieve Amazon’s data through a secondary source, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The previously unreported incident offers a case study in how Amazon’s technological prowess is helping it dominate the retail competition.
Now the largest online retailer in the world, Amazon is best known by consumers for its fast delivery, huge product catalog and ambitious moves into areas like original TV programming. But its mastery of the complex, behind-the-scenes technologies that power modern e-commerce is just as important to its success.
Dexterity with bots allows Amazon not only to see what its rivals are doing, but increasingly to keep them in the dark when it undercuts them on price or is quietly charging more.
“Benchmarking against Amazon is going to become hard,” said Guru Hariharan, a former Amazon manager who now sells pricing software to retailers as chief executive of Mountain View, California-based Boomerang Commerce.
A Wal-Mart spokesman declined to discuss the January episode but said the company improves its technology regularly and has multiple tools for tracking items. He said the company offers value not only through pricing but from discounts for in-store pickup and other benefits.
A spokeswoman for Amazon said the company is aware of competitors using bots to check its listings and denied any “campaign” to stop them. “Nothing has changed recently in how we manage bots on our site,” she said. Still, she said, “we prioritize humans over bots as needed.”
Bots can slow down a website, a big motivator for retailers to block them.
Reuters interviewed 21 people familiar with bots and how they are deployed, including current and former Wal-Mart employees, former Amazon employees and outside specialists. Many spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issues publicly.
Most pointed to Amazon’s leadership in the burgeoning bot wars.
The company’s technological edge has been good for its profit margin, and it’s proving a winning formula for investors.
Shares of the internet powerhouse have risen about 15-fold since the market’s bottom in March 2009, while the S&P 500 has more than tripled in value. Amazon hit $100 billion in annual sales in 2015 — faster than any company in history, it said.
Brave new world
Bot-driven pricing has represented a massive change for the retail industry since Amazon helped pioneer the practice more than a decade ago.
Traditionally, brick-and-mortar stores changed prices no more than weekly because of the time and expense needed to swap labels by hand.
In the world of e-commerce, though, retailers update prices with ease, sometimes multiple times a day, helped by algorithms that consider inventory levels, sales forecasts and rivals’ pricing data.
To stay in the game, companies such as online wholesaler Boxed, based in New York, depend on a variety of methods including bots to ensure they do not lag others’ price moves for even 20 minutes.
“That’s like a lifetime during Christmas,” said Chief Executive Chieh Huang, whose company sells bulk staples like toilet paper and pet food. “If we’re not decently priced, we’ll see it almost immediately” in sales declines.
Disguised as humans
Using bots to view massive amounts of data on public websites — a process known as crawling or scraping — has many purposes. Alphabet Inc.’s Google, for example, constantly crawls the Web to gather information for its search engine results and to sell ads.
In e-commerce, though, the use of bots has developed into a cat-and-mouse game. Companies try to thwart the practice on their own websites while aiming to penetrate their competitors’ defenses. Third-party services abound to help less-savvy retailers.
To protect data from rivals, some retail websites use what’s known as a “CAPTCHA” — typically a distorted string of letters and numbers that humans can read but most bots can’t. Amazon shies away from the practice because it annoys some customers.
For merchants seeking to evade such defenses, disguising their computer programs as real shoppers is key. Some pricing technology experts have programmed computer cursors to meander through a Web page in the way a person might, instead of going directly to the prized data. Another technique is to use multiple computer addresses so that retailers cannot track a barrage of clicks to a single source.
“It is an arms race,” said Keith Anderson, a senior vice president at e-commerce analytics firm Profitero, based in Ireland. “Every week or every month, there’s some new approach from both sides.”
Amazon’s maneuver that halted Wal-Mart in January took aim at a specialized Web browser called PhantomJS. Unlike, say, Internet Explorer, this browser is designed specifically for programmers — a telltale clue that its users are not typical shoppers. Amazon put up a digital curtain to hide its listings from PhantomJS users, according to three people familiar with the situation.
It was unclear how the move, which was not aimed at Wal-Mart in particular, affected other companies.
Tests conducted in recent weeks for Reuters show that among major U.S. retail chains, Amazon had by far the most sophisticated bot detection in place, both for its home page and for two popular items selected by Reuters because they change price frequently — a De’Longhi coffee maker and a Logitech webcam.
The tests were run by San Francisco-based Distil Networks, which sells anti-bot tools. In one of the tests, Distil programmed bots to hit each retailer’s website 3,000 times, but slowly enough to mimic a person clicking through listings. This tricked most retail behemoths, but not Amazon.
Blocked bots would not have seen, for instance, that Amazon’s price for the De’Longhi espresso machine changed four times in a single 24-hour period starting on the morning of April 25, according to price tracking website camelcamelcamel.com. During that time, the price swung by more than 10 percent, from a low of $80.06 to $88.16.
Swarming with bots
Despite Amazon’s capabilities, the sheer volume of crawling on its site is staggering. At times, as many as 80 percent of the clicks on Amazon product listings have been from bots, people familiar with the matter say, compared with just a third or more of the traffic on other large sites.
In addition to rivals seeking price data, that traffic includes bots from university researchers studying competition, search engines, advertising services and even fraudsters trying to break into Amazon accounts.
For Wal-Mart, a small group in Silicon Valley directs its automated pricing strategy while dozens of engineers in India and around the world handle the code, current and former Wal-Mart employees said.
Amazon had about 40 engineers who would covertly extract and organize rivals’ data with bots as of several years ago, one of the people interviewed said. Amazon did not discuss the size or structure of its teams working with bots.
According to one U.S. patent application, Amazon is working on encryption technology that would force bots, but not humans, to solve a complicated algorithm to gain access to its Web pages.
“Amazon has both the competency to detect bot traffic and the wherewithal to do something about it,” said Scott Jacobson, a former Amazon manager and now managing director of Madrona Venture Group. That “isn’t the case for most retailers.”
your ad hereRascal Flatts Look to Young Songwriters for Big Hits
Early on in their career, the country group Rascal Flatts often dealt with critics of their pop-country sound and being labeled a country music boy band. Bassist and producer Jay DeMarcus noted that one early review referred to their music as “bouncy, bouncy, flop.”
Seventeen years later with the release of their 10th studio album, “Back to Us,” the trio of DeMarcus, Gary LeVox and Joe Don Rooney say they’ve adapted their material to fit their lives.
“As husbands and fathers and everything, you have to write appropriate material and find appropriate material for where you are,” said DeMarcus.
“And not cutting as many songs about kicking at the club with the fellas,” LeVox joked. “One song is called ‘In Bed By 7.”
Still the group that has had several platinum records and No. 1 hits relies on young songwriters and artists to keep their music sounding fresh.
Grammy-winning pop singer Meghan Trainor’s earliest success as a songwriter came when she contributed to two songs on Rascal Flatts’ 2014 album, including the single “I Like the Sound of That.”
“Back to Us,” out May 19, has songs co-written by Shay Mooney of the rising duo Dan + Shay, a duet with 22-year-old “American Idol” alum Lauren Alaina and a song written by powerhouse performer Chris Stapleton.
“I think it’s important for all of us to help a younger generation of country music artists come along,” said DeMarcus. “And I think the more they have success, the more success there is for all of us. It’s really synergistic from that standpoint.”
But he joked that the band’s relationship with Dan + Shay was more like an internship than a mentorship.
“We made an agreement with Shay early on right when they got signed, if they were going to steal our sound, we had to get first pick of the songs he was writing,” DeMarcus said.
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Microsoft Adds Tools to Flag Bad Content in Amazon, Google Faceoff
Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday turned up the heat on other technology giants by launching new image and video recognition products which could help it court businesses worried about running ads next to offensive content.
The Redmond, Washington-based company said its new Video Indexer can identify faces, voices and emotions in moving pictures. Separately, its Custom Vision Search lets companies build apps that recognize images with just a few lines of code.
For brands, knowing what’s in the videos that they sponsor has become a hot-button issue since major companies began canceling ad deals with Alphabet Inc’s Google this year over hate speech playing on its subsidiary YouTube.
Microsoft’s Video Indexer has similarities to a tool Google launched in March; Amazon.com Inc also said last month it could flag insulting images via a cloud-based service.
Microsoft’s latest moves underscore how its focus has evolved from its staple Windows software to the cloud, where it is competing with Amazon to sell data storage and computing power. Extra analytics such as image recognition may prove key to luring Web developers.
“It’s hard to understand what’s in the video” the longer it is, said Irving Kwong, a senior product director at Microsoft, in an interview ahead of the company’s developer conference Build. He said Video Indexer, which analyzes videos far faster than humans can, could help a user “harness and get more out of the video content that you have.”
The tools launched in preview by the Microsoft Cognitive Services unit on Wednesday, including a decision recommendation service, have one aim apart from winning business: data.
Microsoft views the tools as a way to put powerful computing into people’s hands and improve the tools at the same time, because processing more data is key to reaching artificial intelligence. Others including Amazon are pursuing this strategy, with the prize being a new revenue stream.
Research firm International Data Corporation has forecast the market for such tools will balloon to over $47 billion in sales in 2020 from $8 billion in 2016.
Microsoft pulled back the curtain on experiments that are further afield, too. It announced a new Cognitive Labs unit and the so-called Project Prague: technology to allow people to control computers simply with hand gestures.
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