‘Appeals Centre’ to referee EU social media disputes

By AFP
October 8, 2024

An out-of-court dispute settlement body, dubbed Appeals Centre Europe, will hear cases related to Facebook, TikTok and YouTube at first - Copyright GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA/AFP Brandon Bell

An independent appeals panel was unveiled Tuesday to decide disputes between social media firms and their users in the European Union over content posted on their platforms.

The out-of-court dispute settlement body, dubbed Appeals Centre Europe and backed by Meta’s own oversight board, will be established in Dublin under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA).

The act polices illegal content like hate speech and disinformation on the biggest online platforms, and allows for outside entities to establish mechanisms to resolve disputes.

“The body will initially decide cases relating to Facebook, TikTok and YouTube, aiming to include more social media platforms over time,” the board said in a statement.

Meta’s oversight board — often described as a top court for the company’s content moderation decisions — is providing a one-time grant for the centre.

Thomas Hughes, former oversight board chief, will be CEO of the new body and said it should begin accepting cases by the end of the year.

He told AFP it was a “game-changing moment” and confirmed users would be able to appeal to the appeals centre for a wide range of disputes under the DSA.

This could be a decision to take down — or leave up — content a user believes is hate speech, incitement to violence or other categories deemed unacceptable.

The DSA aims to force the largest online companies to tackle illegal content or face fines of up to six percent of their global turnover.

The bloc has already used the DSA to probe Facebook and Instagram for failing to tackle election-related disinformation, and has accused X of breaching the rules with its blue-tick “verified” accounts.

Establishing a dispute resolution mechanism is part of the process to make the law fully operational.

– Empowering Europeans –

Meta established the oversight board in 2020 with a non-retractable trust fund of $130 million.

The panel has the power to overrule the company on content moderation decisions with CEO Mark Zuckerberg promising to abide by their rulings.

Hughes explained that the oversight board’s trust had paid for the new appeals centre, but once established it would take payments from users and the companies.

Users, he said, would pay a nominal fee of five euros ($5.50), which would be refunded if they won the appeal. Companies would pay around 100 euros for each case.

“It puts into the hands of individual users the ability to be able to challenge the decisions that are taken about their own content and what other content they see online as well,” he told AFP.

Last month, Margrethe Vestager, the EU’s digital enforcer, explained to reporters that, at its heart, the DSA was about empowering Europeans to hold big tech to account.

“The DSA is not content moderation,” she said on a visit to the United States.

“It is a system to enable you to actually know what is taken down so that you can complain about it.”

Restoration experts piece together silent Sherlock Holmes mystery

By AFP
October 9, 2024

British Film Institute experts have been painstakingly restoring a 100-year-old Sherlock Holmes film 

- Copyright AFP Philip FONG
Joe JACKSON

Sherlock Holmes fans are being promised a most authentic depiction of the fictional detective, with the restoration of a century-old silent film series chronicling the London sleuth’s adventures.

Audiences will be treated to a first glimpse of the restored works from the early 1920s next week at a London Film Festival screening, accompanied by a newly commissioned live score from Royal Academy of Music performers.

The October 16 premiere of just three of the short films, in what is being called “Silent Sherlock: Three Classic Cases”, will take place in the Victorian-era grandeur of the Alexandra Palace Theatre in north London.

A wider release on DVD and Blu-Ray, and encompassing an international tour, will then follow, with the British Film Institute (BFI) restoration team excited to unveil its years-long efforts.

“They’re the last silent Sherlock-related works to be restored,” explained Bryony Dixon, the BFI curator who led the project.

“The other surviving ones have already been done, so these are the things that audiences have been waiting for patiently,” she told AFP at the film charity’s national archive in Berkhamsted, northwest of the UK capital.

“Sherlock Holmes is always popular, and popular all over the world. As they say: you could just write Sherlock Holmes on a cardboard box and sell it.

“So it’s of interest to people and it’s time that it was seen.”

– ‘Authenticity’ –

Produced in 1921-23 by British film company Stoll Pictures, the 45 episodes of “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” and two feature films that are being restored all feature screen star of the era Eille Norwood.

He was author Arthur Conan Doyle’s favourite on-screen Sherlock.

Conan Doyle’s creation has been adapted for the big and small screen hundreds of times, with Guinness World Records hailing him the most portrayed literary human character in film and television history.

Famous faces to have played Sherlock recently include Robert Downey Jr and Benedict Cumberbatch.

But Stoll’s black-and-white adaptations were made with the author’s approval while he was still penning the stories, setting them apart, according to Dixon.

“People will be interested to see a Sherlock Holmes film version… in an early stage of development for the screen,” she said.

“There is a level of authenticity to this character, vis-a-vis the Conan Doyle creation, that you might not get with later Sherlock Holmes.”

– Time-consuming –

Restoring the more than 20 hours of footage — funded through an initiative of data storage and management firm Iron Mountain — began in 2019 at the BFI’s vast archive.

The repository, on a former farm, houses hundreds of thousands of reels dating back decades that are stacked on lofty rows of shelves in refrigerated vaults.

Particularly old footage on nitrate film — like the Stoll series — are also kept at another, even colder, site in western England but brought to Berkhamsted for restoration.

Conservators in white laboratory coats have spent months meticulously checking and cleaning reels of original negatives and copies.

Some were damaged, requiring painstaking repair.

“Despite all the damage, it is in pretty good condition,” said senior conservator Kirsty Shanks, noting that old reels can arrive decomposed into “powdery, sticky, solid messes”.

Many of the Sherlock nitrate prints were mouldy, oily, brittle and fragile, requiring time-consuming cleaning by hand, she added.

Another challenge has been negatives arriving in sections, rather than complete reels, requiring staff to sequence them.

– ‘Special’ –

Down a corridor lined with vintage movie posters and old film equipment on display, Ben Thompson has spent hundreds of hours in a windowless room, working on the endeavour.

The image quality lead has had to ensure the new digital version replicates the 1920s footage in texture, colour palette and other aspects.

He uses software to match the original filmmakers’ use of colour tinges — primarily blue and amber dyes — to parts of the negatives to help denote night, day and flashbacks.

Thompson also has a hand in repairs, noting the beginning and end of reels have often borne the brunt of past use and require the most intensive rehabilitation.

“It’s the starts and ends where you get into the real manual work,” he explained.

He recounted working for days on a single 10-second opening shot of Sherlock’s Baker Street home neighbourhood. In comparison, some mid-reel scenes required just minutes of repair.

BFI veteran Shanks described the project as the most “challenging” restoration of her career but still a labour of love.

Climate change made deadly Hurricane Helene more intense: study


By AFP
October 9, 2024

A recent study found storms as powerful as Hurricane Helene were used to be expected once every 130 years but now occur closer to once every 53 years on average

Lucie AUBOURG

Hurricane Helene’s torrential rain and powerful winds were made about 10 percent more intense due to climate change, according to a study published Wednesday by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group.

Although a 10 percent increase “might seem relatively small… that small change in the hazard really leads to big change in impacts and damage,” said climate scientist Friederike Otto, who heads the research organization.

The study also found that fossil fuels — the primary cause of climate change — have made hurricanes like Helene 2.5 times more likely to occur.

In other words, storms of Helene’s magnitude were formerly anticipated once every 130 years, but now the probability is closer to once every 53 years, on average.

To conduct the study, researchers focused on three aspects of Hurricane Helene: precipitation, winds and the water temperature of the Gulf of Mexico — a key factor in its formation.

“All aspects of this event were amplified by climate change to different degrees,” Ben Clarke, a co-author of the study and researcher at Imperial College London, told a press conference.

“And we’ll see more of the same as the world continues to warm,” he continued.

The research by WWA, an international group of scientists and meteorologists who study the role of climate change in extreme weather events, comes as the southeastern US state of Florida prepares for the arrival of another major hurricane, Milton, just 10 days after it was hit by Helene.



– Destruction –



Helene made landfall in northwestern Florida on September 26 as a Category 4 hurricane with winds up to 140 mph (225 kph).

The storm then moved north, causing heavy rain and devastating floods in several states, including North Carolina, where it claimed the highest death toll.

The authors of the study emphasized that the risk posed by hurricanes has increased in scope beyond coastal areas.

Bernadette Woods Placky, chief meteorologist at NGO Climate Central, said Helene “had so much intensity” that it would take time for it to lose strength, but the “storm was moving fast… so it could go farther inland pretty quickly.”

This study utilized three methodologies to examine the three aspects of the storm, and was conducted by researchers from the US, the UK, Sweden and the Netherlands.

To study its rainfall, researchers used an approach based on both observation and climate models, depending on the two regions involved: one for coastal areas like Florida, and another for inland areas like the Appalachian mountains.

In both cases, the study found precipitation had increased by 10 percent because of global warming, which is currently at 1.3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

To study Helene’s winds, scientists looked at hurricane data dating back as far as 1900.

They determined Helene’s winds were 11 percent stronger, or 13 mph (21 kph), as a result of climate change.

Lastly, the researchers examined the water temperature in the Gulf of Mexico, where Helene formed, finding it was around 2 degrees Celsius above normal.

This record temperature was made 200 to 500 times more likely due to climate change, the study asserts.

Warmer oceans release more water vapor, providing more energy for storms as they form.

“If humans continue to burn fossil fuels, the US will face even more destructive hurricanes,” Clarke warned in a statement.


A US climate scientist sees hurricane Helene’s devastation firsthand


By AFP
October 9, 2024

With at least 230 people killed, Helene is the second deadliest hurricane to hit the continental United States in more than half a century 

Ulysse BELLIER

Carl Schreck spent his career studying tropical storms thousands of miles away from home.

But when Hurricane Helene hit the American climate scientist’s hometown in North Carolina and flooded several of his friends’ homes, the shocking experience made him rethink his research priorities.

“I know how devastating the rainfall in hurricanes can be, but like to actually know people… that are affected by it — it is, it’s really heartbreaking to see,” Schreck told AFP from his home near Ashville, the epicenter of the disaster that ravaged the southeastern United States.

As another major hurricane, Milton, was barrelling toward Florida, a study released Wednesday by the respected World Weather Attribution concluded that Helene’s destructive force was exacerbated by climate change.

Schreck, a scholar at the Institute for Climate Studies at North Carolina State University, and his colleagues had been studying Helene’s formation in the Caribbean for days — until it pummeled Asheville on September 26-27.

Several of Schreck’s friends saw their houses destroyed, while a family he knew died in the flooding.

“It’s been over 100 years since we’ve seen something like this,” said Schreck, whose own house was spared. “So it’s been a very tragic experience for our community.”



– ‘Irony’ –



With at least 230 people killed, Helene is the second deadliest hurricane to hit the continental United States in more than half a century after Katrina, which ravaged the state of Louisiana in 2005, claiming nearly 1,400 lives.

But amid the immense material damage, another misfortune befell the community in Asheville: a major climate data center, which shares the building with Schreck’s facility, lost power in the storm, and its crucial data is currently inaccessible to scientists worldwide.

“That’s one of the real ironies of this event,” said Schreck. “We collect all of the world’s weather and climate data right here in Asheville, going back more than 100 years, and power was cut off to that.”

Emergency workers are having to pump water into the center’s water cooling system from a fire truck to cool down the computers.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which manages the center, says it is working “to minimize the risk of any potential data loss,” but gives no timeline for when the center will resume operations.



– Communicate better? –



As soon as cellphone service was restored in the region following Helene, Schreck and his colleagues got to work.

“There has been a lot of discussion about, like, what does this mean for climate change?” Schreck recalled. “What’s going on with our community? Why was this so severe? How could we have communicated it better?”

Although Helene struck Florida first, it was in the Appalachian mountains more than 500 kilometers from the coast where the vast majority of deaths occurred, mainly due to torrential flooding.

Inland rainfall, “is one of the most dangerous parts of a hurricane that usually doesn’t get enough attention,” he said. “And that’s something that’s… getting worse with climate change.”

“I’ve always been really interested in how hurricanes affect rainfall and flooding,” he added. “So that’s something I’m really gonna be looking at even more going forward.”

Can carbon credits help close coal plants?

By AFP
October 8, 2024

A Manila coal plant could be a model for how developing countries can quit polluting fossil fuel - Copyright AFP JAM STA ROSA

Sara HUSSEIN

A few dozen kilometres from the Philippine capital Manila sits a coal plant that some hope could be a model for how developing countries can quit the polluting fossil fuel.

An alliance led by The Rockefeller Foundation, a philanthropic group, plans to help close the plant 10 years early, avoiding millions of tons of emissions and monetising them as carbon credits.

The idea is “pretty simple”, said Joseph Curtin, managing director of Rockefeller’s power and climate team.

“What if the coal asset owner could, instead of selling this carbon-intensive energy to the grid, they could sell the avoided carbon emissions,” he told AFP.

Carbon credits essentially allow a polluter to “offset” their emissions by paying for “avoided” emissions elsewhere.

They have been issued on everything from electric buses to protected forests, though investigations have found many projects overstating or improperly calculating avoided emissions.

Coal is the largest source of man-made carbon dioxide emissions, according to the International Energy Agency.

And while some developed countries have phased it out, it remains a cheap, reliable resource for rapidly developing economies facing growing energy demand.

Countries including Indonesia and South Africa have been offered billions of dollars in financing to shutter coal plants early, but with little success so far.

“There’s not one coal plant, of all the 4,500 in emerging markets and developing countries, that has been shut down and replaced with clean power,” said Curtin.



– Carbon credit problems –



The problem is complex.

Coal employs millions of people directly and indirectly, as well as offering affordable and reliable baseload power.

Government and industry heavyweights are often invested in coal, and in Asia especially plants tend to be young, meaning years of lost income if they close early.

Renewable energy is now often cheaper than coal, but many plants are protected from competition by long-term contracts.

“There simply is no economically viable off-ramp for these asset owners, and that’s why we have zero retirements,” said Curtin.

Enter the Coal to Clean Credit Initiative (CCCI).

It aims to cover both the cost of closing coal plants and converting them to renewable output, including wind and solar, by generating carbon credits.

And it has a test case: the South Luzon Thermal Energy Corporation (SLTEC).

It was scheduled to operate until at least 2040, but under the CCCI it would close a decade earlier, avoiding up to 19 million tons of CO2 emissions, according to Rockefeller.

Coal-fired operations would be replaced with a mix of renewable generation and battery storage, with workers and the local community compensated.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore — which supports the initiative — is keen on credits, and there is private sector interest too, Curtin said.

The idea has faced criticism however, particularly after revelations about problems with other carbon credit projects.

A recurring issue involves “additionality” — proving that emissions would not have been avoided anyway, even without the carbon credit programme.

This has dogged many forest protection schemes, where developers have failed to show that tracts were at real risk of being chopped down.

Elsewhere, trees that were supposed to be protected have been felled even after credits were sold on protecting them.



– ‘Realistic and pragmatic’ –



As renewables become cheaper, critics argue market forces might force coal plant closures even with carbon credits.

“It’s hard to know what are the forces pushing for and against coal phaseout today,” said Gilles Dufrasne from the Carbon Market Watch think tank.

“These forces, economic and political, can change quite significantly over time,” he told AFP.

Credits risk becoming a way to “reward investors who have ploughed their money into a highly polluting and often doomed technology,” Dufrasne warned.

Other analyses caution that countries could “double count” reduced emissions from coal closures — including them in their national calculations, even though they have been sold to offset emissions elsewhere.

Curtin acknowledges the criticisms, and says CCCI’s methodology is designed to address them.

Only coal projects that are solvent, covered by long-term agreements, and connected to the grid are eligible.

Participating companies must have “no new coal” policies, and closures must involve conversion to renewables, with replacement energy output and provisions to support workers and communities.

“We spent a long time developing what we think is a very, very robust and fairly bulletproof methodology,” he said.

It is being reviewed by Verra, a leading credit verifier that has been criticised for oversight failures in the past.

Curtin is sanguine, and says deals for credits priced in the “tens of dollars” could be signed by mid-2025.

“If we want decision makers to have a financially viable off-ramp… we just have to be realistic and pragmatic about that,” he said.

“And if anyone’s got a better idea, please let us know, because we’re looking for new ways of approaching this problem all the time.”

Pacific island nations swamped by global drug trade


By AFP
October 8, 2024

Police said Wednesday they had seized enough cocaine to supply New Zealand for 30 years, after snaring a massive bundle of drugs floating in the Pacific Ocean

 - Copyright New Zealand Defence Force/AFP Handout

Steven TRASK

A surge of drugs is engulfing the paradisal South Pacific, as cartels and triads use far-flung island nations to channel narcotics across the globe, top police and UN officials have told AFP.

Pacific islands such as Fiji and Tonga sit at the crossroads of largely unpatrolled ocean-trafficking routes used to shift cocaine from Latin America and methamphetamine and opioids from Asia.

This illicit cargo is increasingly spilling over into local hands, feeding drug addiction in communities where serious crime had been rare.

“We’re a victim of our geographical location. An ideal transit point for vessels crossing the Pacific,” Tonga Police Commissioner Shane McLennan told AFP.

“We have a massive ocean territory, and we’ve got 176 islands that, by and large, are unprotected.”

Bricks of drugs are unloaded during stops in sleepy Pacific island ports, where they are repacked en route to lucrative markets elsewhere.

“The information coming our way is that illicit substances are coming through in general cargo that is shipped through Tonga,” said McLennan.

“At the moment it’s mostly methamphetamine.”

Methamphetamine use has become so rampant in Tonga — a deeply Christian nation of 105,000 people — that the Global Organized Crime Index likens it to an “epidemic”.

“It’s a problem here,” taxi driver Latimuli Taliauli, 39, told AFP as he waited for a passenger at the tumbledown Talamahu markets in Tonga’s capital Nuku’alofa.

“There are some people walking around here that are damaged from the methamphetamine,” he added, pointing out a dishevelled man staggering between rows of vegetables and local handicrafts.



– Drug highway –



Data on drug use, addiction and crime is scarce or non-existent in many of the Pacific’s developing nations.

But courthouse records show a Tongan legal system clogged with drug users and dealers, from builders and mechanics to accountants and teachers.

A teenage thief and a 20-year-old accomplice appeared before court this year for ransacking the Tonga National Museum and stealing dozens of prized artefacts, a sentencing report obtained by AFP shows.

These treasures were traded away for a single gram of methamphetamine, the report showed, a hit worth as little as US$100.

Recent busts hint at the size of the so-called “Pacific drug highway”.

Four tonnes of methamphetamine were seized in Fiji this year, concealed in plastic-wrapped packages labelled “universal tile adhesive”.

It put Fiji — a nation far better known for tourism than trafficking — on par with the “biggest” seizures reported in global methamphetamine hubs like Thailand or Hong Kong.

Cocaine started trickling through Pacific island nations at least 20 years ago, as Latin American cartels looked to feed Australia’s hunger for hard drugs.

Although Australia used only two percent of the world’s cocaine by volume, sky-high prices meant that by 2008 it was already the third most lucrative market in the world, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).



– Spreading poison –



The trans-continental cocaine pipeline has in recent years been flooded with synthetic methamphetamine and the Pacific drug trade now follows two distinct routes.

Smugglers from Latin America and the United States sail through the island chains of Polynesia, en route to Tonga, Fiji and sometimes Samoa.

On the other side of the Pacific rim, drugs cooked in the jungle labs of Southeast Asia flow down through Melanesian states like Palau and Papua New Guinea.

While cash-poor Pacific nations were only ever seen as a transit point for expensive cocaine, locals can more readily afford the cheaper, highly addictive meth.

“From what we have been gathering on the ground, it is not just in urban areas but also in villages and rural areas,” Fijian drug outreach worker Kalesi Volatabu told AFP.

“We are seeing lawlessness across the communities, in schools, and the risks and dangers in rural villages where these poisons are being spread.”

Court documents seen by AFP reference the murky presence of “organised and sophisticated drug cartels” in Fiji, and “international drug trafficking syndicates” in Papua New Guinea.

Jeremy Douglas, chief of staff at the UNODC, told AFP: “The Pacific is being used by Latin American cartels, Asian syndicates and Triads, Australian and New Zealand bikers, and US street gangs.”

Global Initiative, a Geneva-based think tank, singled out Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel as “the most prominent in the arena”.



– In plain sight –



US Treasury sanctions meanwhile list the 14K triad — one of Hong Kong’s largest organised crime groups — as a major threat in Palau.

Alongside drugs, the presence of organised crime has spurred money laundering, prostitution, and illegal casinos.

Sometimes, large drug consignments are attached to buoys and left to ride the ocean currents.

New Zealand’s navy last year found a three-tonne raft of cocaine bound together with cargo netting.

Police said it had been dropped at a “floating transit point”, hiding in plain sight until it could be picked up and sailed to Australia.

“For a long time the Pacific has been a region where not too many outsiders have been engaged,” said Australian National University researcher Sinclair Dinnen.

“It’s relatively new in this part of the world. But it seems to be increasing.”

Mozambique elects new president in tense vote


By AFP
October 8, 2024

Supporters of the ruling Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) attend a rally ahead of Wednesday's elections - Copyright AFP Zinyange Auntony

Gersende RAMBOURG

Mozambique votes for a new president, governors and members of parliament on Wednesday as jihadist violence stalls natural gas projects that could bring a major boost to its morose economy.

One of the poorest countries in the world, the discovery in 2010 of vast offshore gas deposits in the north raised hopes of boosting government revenues.

But projects have been stalled since 2021 by an Islamist insurgency in northernmost Cabo Delgado province linked to the Islamic State.

An estimated 17 million people in the southern African nation have registered to vote in polls scheduled to open from 7:00 am to 6:00 pm (0500 GMT to 1600 GMT). Results are expected around two weeks later.

The ruling socialist Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) is expected to win despite disillusionment with the party, which has held on to power since independence from Portugal half a century ago.

If elected, Frelimo’s relatively unknown candidate, 47-year-old Daniel Chapo will replace 65-year-old President Filipe Nyusi, who steps down after his two terms allowed under the constitution.

Chapo, a provincial governor, will compete with three other presidential candidates including Ossufo Momade, 63, an MP and leader of the main opposition party, Renamo.

Another contender is 50-year-old Venancio Mondlane, who lost a mayoral race in 2023 under Renamo’s banner and claimed widespread electoral fraud.

The charismatic Mondlane, popular among young voters, quit the party in June and joined forces with the smaller Optimistic Party for the Development of Mozambique (Podemos).

The other main candidate is Lutero Simango, 64, president of the centre-right Mozambique Democratic Movement and an outspoken critic of Frelimo, whose leaders he describes as “thieves dressed in red”, the party’s colour.

– Fears of manipulation –

Analysts have voiced concerns about the integrity of the election process after claims of widespread manipulation in previous votes.

In 2019, opposition parties disputed the results that gave Frelimo 73 percent, denouncing what they said was electoral fraud.

After municipal elections in 2023 were seen as fraudulent, protests erupted in major cities in which police “accidentally” killed several people.

“Nothing is going to change,” said Domingos Do Rosario, a political science lecturer at Maputo’s Eduardo Mondlane University, pointing to weak institutions and rife political bargaining.

The electoral commission “is a joke”, he said. “It manufactures voters,” he added, expressing doubt over the body’s claim to have registered 17 million voters from a largely young population of 33 million.

“The integrity of the electoral process is a serious problem,” said researcher Borges Nhamirre from Pretoria’s Institute for Security Studies.

Frelimo’s decision to pick the relatively inexperienced Chapo as its candidate could be a strategy to influence his choice of appointees to key government positions, Nhamirre added.

– Poverty, violence –

Chapo’s election would mark a generational change: he would be the first Mozambican president born after independence and the first not to have fought in the devastating 1975-1992 war between Frelimo and Renamo.

Addressing one of the major concerns of Mozambique today, Chapo said Frelimo was determined to end the jihadist attacks that have plagued gas-rich Cabo Delgado province since 2017.

“We will continue to work so Mozambique stays a country of peace, including in Cabo Delgado,” he said at Frelimo’s final campaign rally on Sunday.

“We want to continue fighting against terrorism.”

According to the African Development Bank, 74.5 percent of the population of the Indian Ocean country, battered by cyclones and drought, lived in poverty in 2023.

The US economy is solid: Why are voters gloomy?


By AFP
O ctober 8, 2024

Almost half the respondents of a recent New York Times/Siena College poll rated current economic conditions as "poor." - Copyright AFP/File SAUL LOEB

Beiyi SEOW and Julie CHABANAS

Cooling inflation, low unemployment, robust economic growth and… downbeat voters.

Despite indicators showing the US economy is moving in a healthy direction, many Americans remain pessimistic about business and job prospects — a mood that poses a frustrating problem for Vice President Kamala Harris in her neck-and-neck race with Donald Trump for the White House.

Less than a month before November’s presidential election, the US economy added around 100,000 more jobs than expected in September, saw wages grow further and inflation approach striking distance of policymakers’ two percent target.

Yet, almost half the respondents of a New York Times/Siena College poll released Tuesday rated current economic conditions “poor.”

Poll after poll has also found the economy — particularly inflation — to be a top voter concern by far.

While Harris has narrowed Trump’s lead, polls have suggested voters favor the former president on economic issues.

Economists point to a cumulative rise in costs since the pandemic, still-high home prices and uneven job gains in explaining a seeming disconnect between data and voter sentiment.

“At the same time that they’re aware that inflation has slowed, (consumers) remain frustrated by high prices,” said Joanne Hsu of the University of Michigan.

For politicians, “the low-hanging fruit is trying to take aim at prices that people see on a day-to-day basis,” economist Ryan Sweet of Oxford Economics said, referring to food and gas.

“This election cycle just highlights inflation is extremely unpopular,” he added.



– Price shock –



“Over the last few years, consumers have gone through a period of very large price increases,” Sweet told AFP.

“You’d have to go back to the 1970s and 1980s to see the last time that the US economy had inflation that high.”

Inflation climbed to over 14 percent in 1980.

Consumers again saw price increases soar to a painful 9.1 percent in mid-2022.

“For many voters, that’s the first time they experienced (such) inflation,” Sweet said.

While the Consumer Price Index (CPI) fell to 2.5 percent in August, Sweet said “it’s the price level that matters to the consumer” and not inflation numbers.

The CPI for food has risen 26 percent since February 2020 during the pandemic, he noted.

The cost of gas also increased, while that of new and used vehicles are around 20 percent above 2020 levels.



– Less savings –



Trump appears to be tapping into such sentiment.

“Inflation has devastated our economy,” he told reporters last week.

Trump also linked last week’s dockworkers strike to inflation, saying it badly hit workers.

On Sunday, he charged that “inflation will soar” if Harris took office and promised to “make America affordable again.”

“Just seeing prices increase steadily over time weighs on the collective psyche, particularly for low-, mid-income households,” said Sweet.

Voters’ gloominess come despite the Congressional Budget Office finding in May that purchasing power grew across groups as incomes rose quicker than prices between 2019 and 2023.

It may be true that wages are rising faster than inflation in general, Hsu said, “but that’s not necessarily true for an individual person.”

And it’s hard to shake off memories of the pandemic, said Nationwide chief economist Kathy Bostjancic.

“Those years where income fell short, household income, consumers relied more on credit cards or dipped more into their savings,” added Bostjancic.

This means higher credit card bills and more delinquencies, especially among lower-income or younger people, adding to pressures like student loans, she added.

The pre-pandemic savings rate was over seven percent but currently stands at around five percent.



– Uneven hiring –



Overall hiring numbers also mask large variations across industries, said ZipRecruiter chief economist Julia Pollak.

Job growth has been concentrated in a few industries, with basically all jobs added recently going towards sectors that “only account for 48 percent of employment,” she added.

The other half of US workers have seen “unusually slow growth in their industries,” Pollak said, with hiring sluggish outside sectors like government, health care, and leisure and hospitality.

Although workers had 17 months of positive real wage growth, they experienced a longer period of negative growth previously.

“There are many workers who still feel like their wages need to catch up,” she said.

Taiwan’s Foxconn says building world’s largest ‘superchip’ plant


By AFP
October 8, 2024


Taiwanese tech giant Foxconn says it is building the world's largest production plant for Nvidia's GB200 'superchips' - Copyright AFP WALID BERRAZEG

Taiwanese tech giant Foxconn said on Tuesday it is building the world’s largest production plant for US hardware leader Nvidia’s GB200 “superchips” that power artificial intelligence servers.

Foxconn, also known by its official name Hon Hai Precision Industry, is the world’s biggest contract electronics manufacturer and assembles devices for major tech companies, including Apple.

Ambitious to expand beyond electronics assembly, it has been pushing into areas ranging from electric vehicles to semiconductors and servers.

“We’re building the largest GB200 production facility on the planet,” senior executive Benjamin Ting said at the company’s annual “Hon Hai Tech Day”.

“I don’t think I can say where now, but it’s the largest on the planet,” said Ting, Foxconn’s senior vice president for the cloud enterprise solutions business.

Chairman Young Liu said while opening the two-day event that Foxconn would be “the first to ship these superchips”.

Liu later told reporters the new plant was in Mexico.

Unlike its rivals Intel, Micron and Texas Instruments, Nvidia does not manufacture its own chips but uses subcontractors.

Foxconn also unveiled new electric vehicle prototypes at the tech day — a seven-seater lifestyle multipurpose utility vehicle and a 21-seater bus.

It plans to do with electric vehicles what it did for gadgets — become a go-to contract builder.

Foxconn announced last year that it would team up with Nvidia to create “AI factories” — powerful data-processing centres that would drive the production of next-generation products.

COP29 fight looms over climate funds for developing world

By AFP
October 8, 2024

Poorer countries on the frontlines of climate change will need trillions of dollars in financial aid to install clean energy and adapt to global warming - Copyright AFP LUIS TATO
Nick Perry

The developing world needs trillions of dollars in climate aid, but who should pay for it? Wealthy nations? Big polluters? Countries that got rich burning fossil fuels? All of the above?

A fight over this question looms at crucial negotiations next month as China and other major emerging economies come under pressure to chip in for climate action in poorer countries.

It is hoped a new deal can be struck at the UN COP29 climate conference to greatly lift financial assistance to countries least able to reduce carbon emissions and adapt to global warming.

The present bill of $100 billion a year is footed by a list of countries that were the richest and most industrialised at the time the UN climate convention was written up in 1992.

These donors — including the United States, the European Union, Canada, Japan and others — agree more money is needed, and intend to keep paying “climate finance” where it is needed most.

But they want others to share the burden, specifically developing countries that have become more prosperous and polluting in the decades since the original donor list was drawn up.

China –- today the world’s largest polluter and second-largest economy –- is the obvious target, but Singapore and oil-rich Gulf states like Saudi Arabia could also come under scrutiny.

It is “entirely fair to add new contributing parties, given the ongoing evolution of economic realities and capabilities”, the United States wrote in an August submission to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

– ‘Bad faith’ –

Diplomats from other developed countries have echoed this, arguing that the contributor list is based on outdated notions of rich and poor, and anyone who can pay should pay.

Some have proposed revised criteria against which potential contributors might be judged, such as income levels, purchasing power or their emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases.

Calls to widen the donor base are deeply unpopular and have sparked heated exchanges in the months before COP29, which is being hosted in oil-and-gas-rich Azerbaijan, itself classified as a developing country.

Donors have been accused of forcing the matter onto the negotiating table while refusing to engage on the central question of how much they intend to pay.

For some involved “this was the literal definition of negotiating in bad faith”, said Iskander Erzini Vernoit from the Imal Initiative for Climate and Development, a think tank based in Morocco.

It has “taken up a lot of airtime, and a lot of oxygen”, he told AFP.

“For the sake of all of the poorest, most vulnerable countries of the world, it’s not fair to hold the whole thing hostage.”

Developing countries are pushing for the strongest possible commitment at COP29 to ensure adequate funding for clean energy projects, defensive sea walls and other climate adaptation measures.

Negotiators are nowhere near landing a concrete figure, but some developing countries are calling for over $1 trillion annually.

In a UNFCCC submission in August, the EU warned “the collective goal can only be reached if parties with high GHG-emissions (greenhouse gas) and economic capabilities join the effort”.

– Tough talk –

For developing countries, who pays is non-negotiable: the 2015 Paris climate agreement reaffirmed that developed countries disproportionately responsible for global warming to date pick up the tab.

In a joint statement in July, China, India, Brazil and South Africa strongly rejected “attempts by developed countries to dilute their climate finance legal obligations under international law”.

Azerbaijan’s chief negotiator Yalchin Rafiyev told AFP in September that the gap between the United States and China over the issue was “narrowing”, with a “softening” of stances on both sides.

China, like some other developing countries, actually pays climate finance, it just does so on its own terms.

Between 2013 and 2022, China paid on average $4.5 billion a year to other developing countries, the World Resources Institute (WRI) wrote in a September paper.

This amounted to roughly six percent of what developed countries paid over the same period, said the US-based think tank. China is not required to report this to the UNFCCC, and it is not counted toward the collective target.

Analysts say any formal additions to the donor list at COP29 are very unlikely, though some countries may agree to voluntary contributions in support of the broader goal.

Tragedy of Madrid street sweeper highlights how heatwaves kill


By AFP
October 7, 2024

Miguel Angel Gonzalez holds a pictures of his father, who died from heatstroke

 - Copyright POOL/AFP/File Moritz Frankenberg

Marie GIFFARD

Three hours into his shift as a street sweeper in Madrid on a summer afternoon when temperatures went above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit), Jose Antonio Gonzalez fainted from heatstroke. He died the next day in hospital.

With the Spanish capital on heatwave alert, the 60-year-old had set out for work that day in July 2022 with two two-litre bottles of water and a spray bottle to cool off.

“He knew he had to keep hydrated. But that day, it obviously wasn’t enough,” Gonzalez’s son Miguel Angel told AFP.

Gonzalez had only recently started a one-month contract as a street sweeper. He normally worked the cooler morning shift but had swapped shifts as a favour to a colleague and began at 2 pm, when temperatures were at their highest.

His death made headlines in Spain and thrust the spotlight on the threat posed by scorching temperatures, especially to outdoor workers and the more vulnerable.

– Organs began to fail –

When emergency services arrived in the working-class neighbourhood in southeastern Madrid where Gonzalez had collapsed, they found his body temperature was 41.6 degrees Celsius.

They applied ice to his neck and armpits to try to cool him down, hydrated him with a saline solution and put him under a hypothermic blanket before rushing him to hospital, said a spokeswoman for Madrid’s emergency services.

His liver and kidneys were already failing by the time his family arrived at his bedside and doctors gave them “no hope”, Miguel Angel said.

“His back was purple as if he’d been on the ground for a long time… He had a lot of equipment around him, like an ice shield and several fans. He was lying down with his eyes covered,” he said.

Gonzalez died on July 16, 2022. His death certificate said he suffered fatal organ failure due to high body temperatures. His death was classified as a workplace accident.

“When body temperature rises above 40 degrees Celsius, the defence mechanisms we have to combat heat, such as sweating, stop working,” the spokesman for the Spanish Society of General and Family Physicians (SEMG), Lorenzo Armenteros del Olmo, told AFP.

In scorching temperatures the body pushes blood quickly to the skin where it can release heat, reducing the flow to internal organs.

– ‘Hard to talk’ –

“It affects the whole body and that’s when the organs start to fail,” said Eduard Argudo, an intensive care doctor at Barcelona’s Vall d’Hebron hospital, adding quick medical care is key to avoiding irreversible organ failure.

“Sometimes the damage is such that, even if we manage to control the temperature, we can’t reverse the damage to the organs,” he told AFP.

“Heatstroke is a medical emergency, and these patients always go into intensive care,” he added, warning it has a “high mortality rate”.

With climate change likely to drive temperatures even higher in coming years, the dangers look set to rise even further.

Miguel Angel said that a few days before his father died, he crossed paths with him on the train as Gonzalez was coming home and “he told me it was hard for him to talk because of the heat he was feeling”.

“When he got home, after greeting us, the first thing he would do is go to the swimming pool to cool off,” his son added.

Gonzalez’s death shook up public opinion in Spain and led Madrid city hall to adopt measures halting outdoor work during heatwaves as well as to avoid working in the hottest hours of the day during.

A Madrid park now bears his name.

Miguel Angel said that after his father passed away he was on his computer and saw he had recently done a Google search on “What to do about heatstroke”.