Bird songs may help people with speech loss regain their voice, study says. Here’s how



Katie Camero
Mon, June 21, 2021

Spending time in nature and listening to birds sing can be a relaxing way to enjoy free time. But for researchers at the University of California, San Diego, the hobby means business.

In a proof-of-concept study, a team of engineers and neuroscientists implanted silicon electrodes into zebra finches’ brains that recorded neural activity as they chirped away. With the help of artificial intelligence, the researchers were able to reproduce the pitch, volume and quality of the birds’ songs by translating their brain activity.

The computer-generated copies of the melodies may help inspire new types of vocal prosthetics that could translate the brain activity of people who have lost the ability to speak into any sound or word they think of, “freeing them to communicate whatever they wish,” according to a statement from Timothy Gentner, senior author of the study and a professor of psychology and neurobiology at UC San Diego.


Now, the team has to work on showing its translation system can do the job in real-time to prove it can accommodate the complexity of human speech. The study was published June 16 in the journal Current Biology.

“In many people’s minds, going from a songbird model to a system that will eventually go into humans is a pretty big evolutionary jump,” study co-author Vikash Gilja, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC San Diego, said in the statement. “But it’s a model that gives us a complex behavior that we don’t have access to in typical primate models that are commonly used for neural prosthesis research.”

UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering · Researchers re-create a bird's song by reading its brain activity

The system was able to reproduce zebra finches’ songs with the help of mathematical equations that modeled the physical changes, such as pressure and tension, that occur in the birds’ vocal organ when they sing. The researchers then trained machine learning algorithms to connect the neural activity recorded with electrodes to these “representations” of the songs, instead of the actual songs themselves.

“If you need to model every little nuance, every little detail of the underlying sound, then the mapping problem becomes a lot more challenging,” Gilja said. “By having this simple representation of the songbirds’ complex vocal behavior, our system can learn mappings that are more robust and more generalizable to a wider range of conditions and behaviors.”

Some of the most advanced communication prosthetics for those who have lost their ability to speak include implantable devices that can use people’s brain activity to generate “textual output, writing up to 20 words per minute,” Gentner said.

Other more common prosthetics are valves placed in small openings between the trachea and esophagus that allow people to make sounds by pushing air through it and up into their mouth.

But a more successful device would need to be fast and intricate enough to keep up with people’s constant changes in speech and thinking that occurs while communicating.

“Imagine a vocal prosthesis that enables you to communicate naturally with speech, saying out loud what you’re thinking nearly as you’re thinking it,” Gentner said. “That is our ultimate goal, and it is the next frontier in functional recovery.”

The device could help the roughly 1 million Americans who have aphasia — the loss of ability to speak or understand speech because of brain damage — and the up to 10% with communication disorders.

NO EVICTIONS!

California to pay off unpaid rent accrued during COVID-19 pandemic



Ivana Saric
Mon, June 21, 2021

California will pay off the accumulated unpaid rent that has piled up during the COVID-19 pandemic, the AP reports.

Why it matters: The move would fulfill a promise to landlords to help them to break even, while giving renters relief, the AP writes.

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The big picture: A little over 2% of people in California who have applied for rent relief during the pandemic have received it, KQED reports.


The state has accrued $5.2 billion from various federal aid packages to pay off people's rent, which should be enough to get the job done, Jason Elliott, senior counselor to Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) on housing and homelessness, told AP.


California has been slow to distribute the funds. The state has received $490 million in rental aid requests through May 31, but only $32 million has been paid out, when not including the 12 cities and 10 counties that run independent rental assistance programs, per AP.

But, but, but: State officials also haven't yet decided whether they'll extend California's eviction moratorium, which is set to expire on June 30.


Newsom and lawmakers are "meeting privately" about the issue, but there are disagreements as to how long the moratorium should last, AP reports.


Extending the moratorium would give the state enough time to distribute the funds to pay off unpaid rents, which might not be possible to do by June 30, the AP notes.

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Associated Press
California weighs extending eviction protections past June

Gov. Gavin Newsom says California will pay off all the past-due rent that accumulated in the nation's most populated state because of the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, a promise to make landlords whole while giving renters a clean slate. Left unsettled is whether California will continue to ban evictions for unpaid rent beyond June 30, a pandemic-related order that was meant to be temporary but is proving difficult to undo. Federal eviction protections also are set to expire on June 30.
1d ago.


Los Angeles Times Opinion
Editorial: Now is not the time for California's landlords to resume evictions
We shouldn't let tenants get evicted while the state sits on billions of dollars in federal rental assistance. A moratorium on evictions needs to be extended.
1d ago

Nuclear bomb sensor exposes hidden population of blue whales



Embedded content: https://players.brightcove.net/1942203455001/B1CSR9sVf_default/index.html?videoId=6259740278001

Blue whales are known for their massive size, but somehow a new population of pygmies went undetected in the Indian Ocean for nearly 20 years.

How were they discovered? Scientists combing through acoustic data obtained by an underwater nuclear bomb detection array, according to a study published earlier this year. The data collected also included sound recordings that revealed a never-before-heard song dating back almost two decades.

The new group of pygmy blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus brevicauda) is considered to be a smaller subspecies of blue whale that can grow to a maximum length of 79 feet (24 metres). They are known as the Chagos population, named after a chain of islands in the Indian Ocean near the group's home.


© Provided by The Weather NetworkNuclear bomb sensor exposes hidden population of blue whales(YouTube/Todd Chandler, Oregon State University)

"We are still discovering missing populations of the largest animal that has ever lived," senior author Tracey Rogers, a marine ecologist at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia, told Live Science. "It's a testament to the difficulty of studying life in the ocean."

Because there are a finite number of scientific acoustic arrays established in the Indian Ocean, a group of scientists utilized underwater nuclear bomb detectors that belong to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO). Researchers were then able to access a long-term database of noises encompassing the Indian Ocean.

"The CTBTO data is an important international asset," Rogers said. "I think it's cool that the same system that keeps the world safe from nuclear bombs is available to researchers, and allows a host of scientists, including us, to do marine science that would not be possible without such sophisticated hydroacoustic arrays."
EACH SUBSPECIES HAS UNIQUE SONG TYPE

Once the data was examined, scientists found a specific blue whale song that hadn't been heard before. Typically, blue whale songs are lengthy, consist of a low frequency, sometimes below the range that humans can hear (under 20 hertz), are of high intensity and replicated at regular intervals.

However, different groups of whales have calls that deviate in duration, structure and the quantity of defined sections.

Embedded content: https://twitter.com/WhaleTalesOrg/status/1218219946959953920?s=20

"Blue whale songs are very simple in the way that they are the repetition of the same pattern," lead author Emmanuelle Leroy, a post-doctoral fellow at UNSW, told Live Science. "But each blue whale subspecies and population has a different song type."

The song that is from the new pygmy population contains three sections. The first is the most complex, with two basic parts that follow it.

"This new whale song has been a dominant part of the soundscape in the Central Equatorial Indian Ocean for the past nearly 18 years," Rogers said.

Due to the song's abundance, scientists are certain it belongs to an entirely new population and not just a few single individuals. But the precise size of the group is still unknown.

Visual identification is still needed to confirm their presence, but scientists believe it’s only a matter of time before it is.

According to the Center for Biological Diversity, there are approximately 5,000 to 10,000 blue whales currently in the Southern Hemisphere -- considerably lower than the pre-whaling population of about 350,000 there.

The study was published in April in the journal Scientific Reports.

The US’s greatest danger isn’t China. It’s much closer to home


Robert Reich
Sun, June 20, 2021

THE GUARDIAN



Photograph: AP

China’s increasingly aggressive geopolitical and economic stance in the world is unleashing a fierce bipartisan backlash in America. That’s fine if it leads to more public investment in basic research, education, and infrastructure – as did the Sputnik shock of the late 1950s. But it poses dangers as well.

More than 60 years ago, the sudden and palpable fear that the Soviet Union was lurching ahead of us shook America out of a postwar complacency and caused the nation to do what it should have been doing for many years. Even though we did it under the pretext of national defense – we called it the National Defense Education Act and the National Defense Highway Act and relied on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration for basic research leading to semiconductors, satellite technology, and the Internet – the result was to boost US productivity and American wages for a generation.

When the Soviet Union began to implode, America found its next foil in Japan. Japanese-made cars were taking market share away from the Big Three automakers. Meanwhile, Mitsubishi bought a substantial interest in the Rockefeller Center, Sony purchased Columbia Pictures, and Nintendo considered buying the Seattle Mariners. By the late 1980s and start of the 1990s, countless congressional hearings were held on the Japanese “challenge” to American competitiveness and the Japanese “threat” to American jobs.


A tide of books demonized Japan – Pat Choate’s Agents of Influence alleged Tokyo’s alleged payoffs to influential Americans were designed to achieve “effective political domination over the United States”. Clyde Prestowitz’s Trading Places argued that because of our failure to respond adequately to the Japanese challenge “the power of the United States and the quality of American life is diminishing rapidly in every respect”. William S Dietrich’s In the Shadow of the Rising Sun claimed Japan “threatens our way of life and ultimately our freedoms as much as past dangers from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union”.

Robert Zielinski and Nigel Holloway’s Unequal Equities argued that Japan rigged its capital markets to undermine American corporations. Daniel Burstein’s Yen! Japan’s New Financial Empire and Its Threat to America asserted that Japan’s growing power put the United States at risk of falling prey to a “hostile Japanese ... world order”.

And on it went: The Japanese Power Game,The Coming War with Japan, Zaibatsu America: How Japanese Firms are Colonizing Vital US Industries, The Silent War, Trade Wars.

But there was no vicious plot. We failed to notice that Japan had invested heavily in its own education and infrastructure – which enabled it to make high-quality products that American consumers wanted to buy. We didn’t see that our own financial system resembled a casino and demanded immediate profits. We overlooked that our educational system left almost 80% of our young people unable to comprehend a news magazine and many others unprepared for work. And our infrastructure of unsafe bridges and potholed roads were draining our productivity.

In the present case of China, the geopolitical rivalry is palpable. Yet at the same time, American corporations and investors are quietly making bundles by running low-wage factories there and selling technology to their Chinese “partners”. And American banks and venture capitalists are busily underwriting deals in China.

I don’t mean to downplay the challenge China represents to the United States. But throughout America’s postwar history it has been easier to blame others than to blame ourselves.

The greatest danger we face today is not coming from China. It is our drift toward proto-fascism. We must be careful not to demonize China so much that we encourage a new paranoia that further distorts our priorities, encourages nativism and xenophobia, and leads to larger military outlays rather than public investments in education, infrastructure, and basic research on which America’s future prosperity and security critically depend.

The central question for America – an ever more diverse America, whose economy and culture are rapidly fusing with the economies and cultures of the rest of the globe – is whether it is possible to rediscover our identity and our mutual responsibility without creating another enemy.

PUTIN'S HOMOPHOBIC LAWS SPREAD

'Grotesque': EU countries condemn Hungary over anti-LGBTQ law

By Sabine Siebold and Gabriela Baczynska

© Reuters/MARTON MONUS Protest against latest anti-LGBTQ law in Budapest

BRUSSELS (Reuters) -Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, France and Ireland were among European Union countries condemning their peer Hungary on Tuesday for a new anti-LGBTQ law as the bloc zeroed in again on democratic failings in Budapest and its nationalist ally Warsaw.

The new law banning the "display and promotion of homosexuality" among under-18s clearly violates European Union values, Germany's European affairs minister said ahead of talks with his 27 EU counterparts about deep concerns that Hungary and Poland violate the rule of law by trampling the freedoms of courts, academics and media, as well as restricting the rights of women, migrants and minorities.

© Reuters/POOL FILE PHOTO: European Affairs ministers meet in Brussels

"The European Union is not primarily a single market or a currency union. We are a community of values, these values bind us all," Roth told reporters ahead of the meeting in Luxembourg.

"There should be absolutely no doubt that minorities, sexual minorities too, must be treated respectfully."

Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg authored a joint declaration condemning the latest legal changes under Prime Minister Viktor Orban as violating the right to freedom of expression and a "flagrant form of discrimination based on sexual orientation."

The Swedish minister said the Hungarian law was "grotesque", his Dutch colleague called on Budapest to undo it while their Irish counterpart said the bloc's executive should sue it at the top EU court. Austria said it was wrong to park the anti-LGBTQ provisions in a bill penalising paedophilia.

"I am very concerned... It is wrong what has happened there and has to stop," said Ireland's Thomas Byrne. " It's a very very dangerous moment for Hungary, and for the EU as well."

Facing an election next year, Orban has grown increasingly radical on social policy in a self-proclaimed fight to safeguard what he says are traditional Christian values from the Western liberalism.

Arriving to the same meeting on Tuesday, Hungary's Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said the law was only aimed at paedophiles.

"The law protects the children in a way that it makes it an exclusive right of the parents to educate their kids regarding sexual orientation until the age of 18," he said. "This law doesn't say anything about sexual orientation of adults."

The other ministers also spoke of worries about media freedom in Hungary, as well as concerns over Poland's ongoing overhaul of the judiciary.

Saying that Polish courts need reforming, the ruling Law and Justice party has pushed out many critical judges across the judiciary, introduced more pliant replacements.

It most recently ignored an order from the top EU court to halt mining at its Turow plant on the Czech border for as long as a case Prague brought about it against Warsaw is not settled.

"We have to get assurances from Poland and Hungary that they are really going to follow what the EU court says in the future," said Sweden's Hans Dahlgren.

(Additional reporting by Marine Strauss, Philip Blenkinsop and Simon Johnson, Writing by Gabriela Baczynska, Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)

Leader behind bleach ‘miracle cure’ claims Trump consumed his product

Ed Pilkington

THE GUARDIAN

The leader of a spurious church which peddled industrial bleach as a “miracle cure” for Covid-19 is claiming that he provided Donald Trump with the product in the White House shortly before the former president made his notorious remarks about using “disinfectant” to treat the disease.

© Provided by The Guardian Photograph: Juan Karita/AP

 At the press conference on 23 April 2020 Trump hailed chlorine dioxide as a potential cure for Covid, saying it ‘knocks it out in a minute, one minute’.

Mark Grenon, the self-styled “archbishop” of the Genesis II “church”, has given an interview from his prison cell in Colombia as he awaits extradition to the US to face criminal charges that he fraudulently sold bleach as a Covid cure. In the 90-minute interview he effectively presents himself as the source of Trump’s fixation with the healing powers of disinfectant.

“We were able to give through a contact with Trump’s family – a family member – the bottles in my book,” Grenon says. “And he mentioned it on TV: ‘I found this disinfectant’.”

Grenon had previously revealed that he had written to Trump in the White House in the days leading up to the disinfectant episode, urging him to promote the healing powers of chlorine dioxide. But in the new interview Grenon goes considerably further, claiming that the bleach, which carries serious health warnings from federal agencies, was actually put into the hands of the then president who consumed it

Trump’s comments about disinfectant, made at the White House on 23 April 2020 as coronavirus was tearing through the US, reverberated around the world. They caused astonishment in scientific circles, attracted widespread ridicule, and have come to symbolize the maverick response of the Trump administration towards the pandemic.

At the press conference Trump hailed disinfectant as a potential cure for Covid, saying it “knocks it out in a minute, one minute”. He went on to muse whether “we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning”.

Why Trump suddenly embraced bleach as a possible Covid treatment has remained one of the mysteries of his presidency. Now Grenon claims that it was his product, marketed as Miracle Mineral Solution or “MMS”, that lay behind it.

The Guardian asked Trump’s office to clarify whether he had received and drank “MMS” bleach while in the White House, but received no immediate response.

Grenon made his claim that he supplied Trump with bleach solution to Zakariya Adeel, a London-based astrologer and psychic. The interview was conducted apparently over a prison telephone line.

Grenon and his son Joseph are both being held in Colombia as they await extradition. In April a federal grand jury sitting in Miami indicted them, along with two other sons, Jonathan and Jordan who are also in jail in Miami.

The four Grenon family members face charges of fraudulently marketing and selling industrial bleach as a cure for Covid, cancer, malaria and a host of other serious medical conditions. A criminal trial is expected in Miami later this year.

The US Food and Drug Administration has made it clear that drinking MMS is the same as drinking bleach. It warns that consumption can cause severe vomiting, diarrhea and low-blood pressure that can be life-threatening.

The FDA describes MMS as a “powerful bleach typically used for industrial water treatment or bleaching textiles, pulp and paper”.

In the video, Grenon repeats false claims that chlorine dioxide solution cures Covid. “We tried it with Covid – six drops every two hours for the first and second day. Boom! Gone, negative. You’re feeling great from feeling like you’re going to die – it works great,” he says.

Use of bleach as a miracle cure has proliferated across Latin America during the pandemic. Fiona O’Leary, a campaigner against pseudoscience, told the Guardian that MMS peddlers were using Trump’s comments on disinfectant as a marketing tool.

“You have the president of the United States telling people they can ingest bleach to treat Covid – so the response is hardly surprising. There’s been a dramatic increase in the use of the product in several Latin American countries after he made those comments,” she said.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M DRUG DEALERS
Former CannTrust execs charged after alleged illegal growing at Ont. facility

VAUGHAN, Ont. — Three former directors and officers at cannabis company CannTrust Holdings Inc. have been charged with several offences under the Securities Act

.

© Provided by The Canadian Press

The Ontario Securities Commission and Royal Canadian Mounted Police say they have charged former vice-chairman Mark Litwin, former chairman Eric Paul and former chief executive Paul Aceto.

Each is facing charges of fraud, making false or misleading statements to the OSC and the market and authorizing, permitting or acquiescing in the commission of an offence.

Litwin and Paul also face insider trading charges and Litwin and Aceto are charged with making a false prospectus and false preliminary prospectus.

The charges come after CannTrust's licences were suspended for illegally growing thousands of kilograms of dried cannabis in unlicensed rooms in 2018 and 2019.

The OSC and RCMP allege the accused did not disclose to investors that about 50 per cent of the growing space at CannTrust’s Pelham, Ont. facility was not licensed by Health Canada and they allegedly used corporate disclosures to assert that they were compliant with regulatory approvals.

They also allege Litwin and Aceto signed off on prospectuses used to raise money in the U.S., which stated that CannTrust was fully licensed and compliant with regulatory requirements, and Litwin and Paul traded shares of CannTrust while in possession of material, undisclosed information regarding the unlicensed growing.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 22, 2021.

'Harder than Everest': record-breaking female climber stranded in Nepal amid COVID crisis
By Gopal Sharma

Reuters/NAVESH CHITRAKAR Chinese climbers stranded in Kathmandu due to COVID-19 restrictions

KATHMANDU (Reuters) - Hong Kong resident Tsang Yin-Hung, who made the fastest ascent of Mount Everest by any woman, and dozens of other mountaineers from China are unable to get out of Nepal because of COVID-19 restrictions imposed by Beijing, they said.

© Reuters/NAVESH CHITRAKAR Chinese climbers stranded in Kathmandu due to COVID-19 restrictions

Nepal has had a surge of infections including at the base camp of Everest, prompting several countries to block travel from there. The daily positive rate of infections in Nepal stands at more than 24%, among the highest in the world at this time.

The travel restriction was imposed after the climbing season began and there were fresh outbreaks in Nepal.

Tsang, 44, who climbed Mount Everest in 25 hours and 50 minutes last month, said getting back home appeared harder than her ascent to the 8,848.86 metre (29,032 feet) peak.

“I think the summit climb for me was possible and achievable,” she told Reuters at her hotel in Kathmandu. “But going back home (looks) hopeless. There is no way to go back.”

Video: Nepal official says climbing on Everest continued amid outbreak (Daily Mail)

Nepal officials say they have allowed two weekly flights from China, but these were not operational.

The Chinese embassy in Kathmandu did not immediately respond to a Reuters email on the lack of flights.

"There are no flights (from Nepal) to any place in China or Hong Kong,” she said.

Climbers from other countries have already returned on mainly chartered flights.

China's Sun Yi Quan, 34, who climbed Everest thrice before but gave up on his fourth attempt in May due to a coronavirus outbreak at base camp, said his team of 13 climbers too had failed to get a flight back home.

Kathmandu has been partially shut down since May due to the surge in COVID-19 with 622,640 infections and 8,772 deaths in he nation so far.

Tashi Lakpa Sherpa, a senior official at the Seven Summit Treks company said more than 30 Chinese climbers were stranded in Kathmandu.

(Reporting by Gopal Sharma; Editing by Michael Perry)

SINISTER SUCCESS ON DED WED NIGHT TV

'Loki' is the biggest TV series in the world - and it reached the top faster than Disney+'s other Marvel shows


Travis Clark
Mon, June 21, 2021

Tom Hiddleston stars in "Loki." Courtesy of Marvel Studios


"Loki" is the most popular series in the world across all platforms, according to Parrot Analytics.

It rose in audience demand faster than Disney+'s other Marvel shows.

Disney+ is moving its future original shows from Fridays to Wednesdays after "Loki's" success.

Disney+'s latest Marvel series, "Loki," is the biggest show in the world.

"Loki" became the most in-demand series in the world across all platforms faster than Disney's other Marvel Cinematic Universe shows, including "WandaVision" and "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier," according to the research company Parrot Analytics. The company measures "audience demand," which reflects the desire of and engagement with, or overall popularity, of a series.

The data suggests that Disney+'s Marvel shows are growing in popularity with each new series.

By June 16, seven days after it debuted, "Loki" was 89.9 times more in demand than the average show worldwide, lifting it to the top. It took "WandaVision" 14 days after its premiere to become the most in-demand global series and "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" eight days.

Disney CEO Bob Chapek said last week that "Loki" was Disney+'s biggest premiere yet (Disney did not release viewership numbers and did not respond to a request from Insider on how it counts a view).

With "Loki's" success, Disney is moving its future original shows from Fridays to Wednesdays, including upcoming Marvel and "Star Wars" series. Shows like "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" and "The Mandalorian" found success with Friday debuts, but "Loki" debuts weekly on Wednesdays.

The shift means that Disney won't be competing with Netflix, which typically releases new seasons all at once on Fridays.

Parrot Analytics said that it expects demand to build for "Loki" week over week as new episodes are released.

LOKI, LUCIFER, 

DO I DEDECT A LEFT HAND PATH ON TV 

Even after Biden tax hike, U.S. firms would pay less than foreign rivals

On average, the 52 U.S.-based companies had profit margins of 24%, well above than the average margin of 14% among their 200 foreign competitors

By Tom Bergin

© Reuters/Carlos Barria U.S. President Biden delivers update on administration's coronavirus response from the White House in Washington

(Reuters) - U.S. companies pay less income tax than their overseas competitors and would likely continue to do so under a tax hike proposed by President Joe Biden, according to a Reuters analysis of filings by hundreds of U.S. and international firms.

The analysis undercuts arguments by some company executives and trade groups that Biden's plan would leave U.S. firms paying some of the world’s highest taxes and struggling to compete against foreign rivals. Industry representatives have aggressively lobbied against the proposal, which would increase the corporate tax rate to 28%, from the current 21%. The president also wants a minimum tax of 21% on overseas income, up from 10.5%.

U.S. corporations typically pay less - sometimes much less - than those statutory rates because the U.S. tax code is unusually generous with tax breaks and deductions, and in allowing overseas tax planning, according to the Reuters analysis. The analysis was reviewed by four academics with experience in measuring corporate tax payments.

Reuters examined the effective tax rates – reflecting the actual tax payments companies reported – of 52 of the largest U.S.-based multinational firms, and then compared them to the rates paid by these companies’ main overseas competitors. The U.S. companies paid an average effective tax rate of 16% in 2020 compared to an average rate of 24% paid by 200 foreign companies that the U.S. firms named as their competitors in filings.

If Biden’s proposed tax rates were applied to the U.S. firms’ 2020 earnings, the companies would have paid effective rates averaging about five percentage points higher, or 21%, the Reuters analysis found.

That’s still lower than the average rate paid by their overseas competitors. Moreover, U.S. firms would likely retain a bigger tax advantage over their foreign rivals than the analysis shows, for two reasons. First, the Reuters calculations do not account for the impact of new tax breaks for U.S. firms that Biden proposes to encourage domestic manufacturing and clean-energy investments. Second, the Biden plan would also require foreign companies with U.S. operations to pay higher taxes on their U.S. income.

Business lobby groups have argued that the Biden proposal, which requires congressional approval, would leave domestic firms at the mercy of their foreign rivals.

“Such tax increases would make the United States uncompetitive as a place to do business and make U.S. companies uncompetitive globally,” said Joshua Bolten, chief executive of the Business Roundtable, which represents about 200 large U.S. companies, when the measures were first announced on March 31.

The trade group said comparisons of effective tax rates, as in the Reuters analysis, can be “informative” but are only one of many valid ways to analyze how taxes impact the global competitiveness of U.S. firms. The organization said that simpler comparisons of statutory tax rates among nations - without considering deductions, credits and overseas tax planning - also accurately reflect the incentives for firms to locate in one nation versus another.

Neil Bradley, chief policy officer at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, declined to comment on Reuters’ findings but said: “Higher taxes will hinder investment and competitiveness for U.S. businesses, ultimately hurting U.S. workers.”

Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and chairman of the Senate finance committee, dismissed such arguments. “The data are clear: U.S. mega-corporations are contributing far too little to federal revenues, particularly in comparison to foreign counterparts,” Wyden told Reuters.

Reuters ran its findings by Biden’s Treasury Department and the White House. The White House said in a statement: “This reporting highlights that the corporate tax code is broken. The largest corporations don’t pay their fair share in the United States, and pay less in other competitor countries.” Biden’s proposal, the White House said, is designed to address “the tax games and giveaways that underlie the rock-bottom tax rates described by this reporting.”

Republican leaders who have said the proposed hikes will damage U.S. firms’ competitiveness, including Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Congressman Kevin Brady of Texas, declined to comment on the Reuters analysis. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, did not respond to requests for comment.

Democrats in Congress are pushing a bill to implement Biden’s plan. It could come up for a vote any time in the divided Senate. Its success may rely on the support of one Democrat Senator, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who has pushed for lower tax rates than Biden wants. All Republican senators are expected to oppose it.

All of the 52 U.S. firms Reuters examined, and in most cases their overseas rivals, published detailed reconciliations explaining the deviation between their actual tax bill and the statutory tax rate in their home countries. These disclosures show that the U.S. firms’ relatively low effective tax rates stem from business-friendly provisions unique to the United States.

For example, U.S. tax breaks to encourage research and other activities generate bigger savings than similar breaks in other nations. The U.S. allows tax deductions for many expenses - such as client entertainment, stock-based compensation and certain legal costs - that are not typically deductible elsewhere. And U.S. companies can save far more money by shifting profits into tax-haven nations than, for instance, their rivals in Japan, Germany or France, whose governments limit such maneuvers.

RIDDLED WITH LOOPHOLES

Analyses cited by several business groups have said U.S. businesses currently face an average combined state and federal statutory tax rate of nearly 26% and that Biden’s plan would raise their rates to 32%.

Consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers noted the average nominal tax rate among developed countries was 23% - lower than Biden’s proposed rate of 28% - and urged companies to lobby against the increases. Johnson & Johnson’s Chief Financial Officer Joseph Wolk told analysts in April that Biden’s plan would make the U.S. rate the highest among developed countries.

Such simplified comparisons, however, do not reflect actual taxes paid after deductions, credits and other advantages enjoyed by U.S. firms. Johnson & Johnson, for instance, paid an effective tax rate of less than 11% in 2020, according to the company’s annual report. The pharmaceutical giant did not comment on Reuters findings but said tax policy should create a “level playing field” for U.S. firms internationally.

PricewaterhouseCoopers declined to comment.

In another typical example, Activision Blizzard Inc – the California-based publisher of hit video games such as Call of Duty and World of Warcraft – reported paying an effective tax rate of 16% last year. Two of its main competitors, Sony Corporation and Nintendo Co Ltd, are based in Japan and paid effective tax rates of 22% and 28%, respectively, according to their annual reports.

Activision declined to comment for this story.

The company slashed its tax payments through tax breaks and deductions and by operating subsidiaries in tax-haven nations. Activision has, for instance, saved hundreds of millions in taxes over the past decade, company filings show, by reporting billions of dollars in profits through a subsidiary based in Bermuda, an island with no corporate tax. Activision reported that it reduced its overall effective tax rate in 2020 by 4 percentage points because of the low tax rates paid by its foreign subsidiaries.

Activision rivals Sony and Nintendo each generate about three-fourths of their revenues outside of Japan, compared to about half for Activision. And yet Nintendo reported that taxes on overseas income reduced its effective tax rate by just 0.6 percentage points, while Sony reported a decrease of 2.4 percentage points.

Tax havens such as Bermuda don’t provide the same benefit to Japanese firms. Japan has a law that allows authorities to levy Japanese corporate taxes of about 30% on any income reported from operations in foreign jurisdictions with a tax rate of less than 20%. Similar rules are common in industrialized nations other than the United States.

STATE TAX BREAKS

Another reason Activision paid a relatively low effective tax rate is that its tax payments to U.S. states only increased the company’s total rate by 2 percentage points. That’s typical: On average, the effective rates of the 52 U.S. multinationals examined by Reuters were raised by just 1 percentage point by state tax payments. Business groups often cite 4% or 5% as the typical state tax burden, based on averages of statutory state rates that usually do not equate to actual taxes paid.

A host of factors lower companies’ state tax payments. States often lure companies with tax breaks, and compete with one another to offer the most generous incentives. Also, companies only pay state taxes on their U.S.-based income. And they can lower the bill further by apportioning earnings to relatively low-tax states.

At the federal level, companies drive down their tax bill through a host of deductions or credits that are often unavailable or limited in other nations. U.S. firms, for instance, can deduct the cost of share grants as compensation to executives and staff. Activision reported lowering its effective tax rate by 1 percentage point through such deductions. On average, the U.S. firms examined by Reuters reduced achieved savings of 2.6% from that provision.

The video game firm shaved an additional 3 percentage points off its tax bill by collecting tax credits for research and development spending. Its competitors Nintendo and Sony reported smaller tax savings from research credits.

Such credits are available to an array of U.S. firms, and not just in research-intensive sectors such as pharmaceuticals. Sport apparel giant Nike Inc, for instance, lowered its effective tax rate by 2 percentage points in 2020 through R&D credits. Two-thirds of the 52 U.S. companies Reuters examined reported similar benefits, with an average tax reduction of about 3 percentage points.

Research tax credits are common outside the United States, but typically worth less, often not enough to warrant company disclosure. Just 18 firms of the 200 foreign competitors to U.S. firms examined by Reuters reported benefits from research or other tax credits.

Some U.S. companies, to be sure, will take a bigger hit than others from Biden’s tax plan. But even if U.S. companies collectively sustain a bigger tax hit than foreseen, they would still be well-placed to compete, the analysis shows. On average, the 52 U.S.-based companies examined by Reuters had profit margins of 24%, well above than the average margin of 14% among their 200 foreign competitors.

“The argument on ‘competitiveness’ is code for ‘corporations should pay no taxes’,” said Senator Wyden, “and it doesn’t hold water.”

(Reporting by Tom Bergin; editing by Brian Thevenot)