TOP NEWS- China will never surrender to external pressure

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TOP NEWS China will never surrender to external pressure, the government said, though stopped short of announcing how Beijing will hit back after Washington renewed its threat to impose tariffs on all Chinese imports in an escalating trade dispute. Global equities fell on Monday after their worst week of 2019, as hopes of an imminent U.S.-China trade deal were crushed and neither side showed a willingness to budge, raising fears of a fresh round of tit-for-tat tariffs. Saudi Arabia said that two Saudi oil tankers were attacked off the coast of the United Arab Emirates, condemning it as an attempt to undermine the security of crude supplies amid heightened U.S.-Iranian tensions. The UAE said that four commercial vessels were sabotaged near Fujairah emirate, one of the world’s largest bunkering hubs lying just outside the Strait of Hormuz, but did not say who was behind the attack or describe the nature of it. Sweden’s state prosecutor said she would reopen a rape investigation involving WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and that circumstances now existed to seek his extradition from Britain.Assange was arrested in Britain last month after spending seven years inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London. The United States is also seeking his extradition on charges relating to the public release by Wikileaks of a huge cache of secret documents. Sri Lanka temporarily blocked some social media networks and messaging apps, including Facebook and WhatsApp, after attacks on mosques and Muslim-owned businesses in the worst unrest since Easter bombings by Islamist militants. “Social media blocked again as a temporary measure to maintain peace in the country,” Nalaka Kaluwewa, director general of the government information department, told Reuters. 'It's time to rise up,' Venezuelan general tells military officers in video. Ramon Rangel, who identified himself as an air force general, said the Venezuelan government is being controlled by the “communist dictatorship” in Cuba - a key ally of President Nicolas Maduro. While Rangel’s pronouncement marks another blow to Maduro after a handful of similar defections by senior officers this year, there is little to indicate that he will tip the scales. British Prime Minister Theresa May’s Conservatives have fallen to fifth place in an opinion poll ahead of the May 23 European parliamentary election as pressure grows for her to set a date for her own departure. Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party was in the lead, up four percentage points, on 34% while May’s Conservative Party had just 10%, the YouGov poll for the Times newspaper showed. The opposition Labour Party was down five points on 16%. The European Union fully supports the international nuclear accord with Iran and wants rival powers to avoid any further escalation over the issue, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said. United States Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is also expected to meet EU officials in Brussels on Monday to talk about Iran.

BUSINESS Exclusive: Amazon.com is rolling out machines to automate a job held by thousands of its workers: boxing up customer orders. The company started adding technology to a handful of warehouses in recent years, which scans goods coming down a conveyor belt and packages them seconds later in boxes custom-built for each item, two people who worked on the project told Reuters. Exclusive: Bosch goes for platinum-light fuel cells. The global automotive supplier expects platinum to play only a minor role in its new fuel cells, giving precious metal markets scant benefit even as the technology gains momentum for pollution-free transport. According to Reuters calculations, Bosch would only need a tenth of the platinum used in current fuel cell vehicles. Exclusive: Impossible Foods said it has raised $300 million in the latest round of funding ahead of a possible initial public offering. The company makes a meatless plant-based burger and is backed by celebrities like Serena Williams and Katy Perry. The fundraising underscores the growing appeal in plant-based food that tries to taste like meat with fewer environmental or health risks. Australia’s export earnings are booming as resource prices surge but a statistical quirk means tens of billions of dollars go missing from main measures of growth, making the economy seem weaker than it actually is. Bitcoin hovered above $7,000, close to nine-month highs, as the biggest cryptocurrency’s 2019 rally gathered steam. Bitcoin was last up 1.1% at $7,056 on the Bitstamp exchange after soaring 14% on Saturday - its second largest daily jump this year - to its highest since early August.

POLITICS Trump may provoke U.S. lawmakers to impeach him: senior Democrat Democrats are reluctant to impeach U.S. President Donald Trump, but he may provoke such a move by continuing to obstruct Congress’ efforts to oversee his administration, a senior Democratic lawmaker said. 3 MIN READ Trump's China trade stance has political risks as he seeks re-election When he ran for president in 2016, Donald Trump delighted crowds with his harsh rhetoric on China. As he runs for re-election in 2020, he is likely to keep talking tough, but the reception - at least in some key states - may not be as euphoric. 5 MIN READ U.S. presidential contender Kamala Harris favors look at breaking up Facebook Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris said on Sunday that U.S. officials should consider breaking up Facebook, the world’s largest social media company, saying it is a utility that has gone unregulated. 3 MIN READ

Protecting Buildings From Earthquakes

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Newswise — The most recent major earthquake to hit the United States shook the ground around Anchorage, Alaska on Nov. 30, 2018.

Jovan Tatar, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Delaware and an affiliated faculty in the Center for Composite Materials, recently visited Alaska to study how this magnitude 7.1 earthquake affected buildings with externally bonded fiber-reinforced polymer composite retrofits. By assessing how these buildings held up, Tatar and his collaborators can help other engineers construct buildings that stand up to natural disasters.

The composite retrofits are a promising, relatively inexpensive technology that can strengthen buildings, bridges and other existing structures made of reinforced concrete. Composites are made by combining one or more materials together to create a new material with entirely different properties. The composite materials Tatar is studying are stronger than steel and can be applied to structures in a thin layer, kind of like wallpaper or a bandage to the surface of the building. Other retrofitting methods can be more expensive, more difficult to install, and weighty — putting extra stress on the structure’s foundation.

Several structures in Alaska have the composite retrofits, presenting Tatar and his colleagues the opportunity to be the first research group to test the effectiveness of these materials post-earthquake in the U.S. Through visual inspections and thermal imaging to both the interiors and exteriors of commercial and residential structures, they looked for signs of damage, such as cracks or bubbles, on the retrofits and collected samples for chemical analysis.

Tatar wants to understand how the durability of these retrofits affects the earthquake resilience of structures.  “When engineers design these retrofits, they have to make assumptions of their behavior based on laboratory data and experiments, but there is not much real-world data out there,” said Tatar. “Our analysis will serve as a benchmark to check some of these assumptions against.”

Some retrofits were over 15 years old, allowing the team to analyze the effects of long-term use in a subarctic environment.

Tatar and Shafique Ahmed, a doctoral candidate at UD, worked with colleagues at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Director of Engineering at QuakeWrap, Inc. on this project as part of the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program (NEHRP). NIST promotes U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness by advancing measurement science, standards, and technology in ways that enhance economic security and improve our quality of life. NIST is designated by the U.S. Congress as the statutory Lead Agency for NEHRP, which has four participating agencies: the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), NIST, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Tatar has received a grant from NSF for this project.

Locating a Shooter from the First Shot via Cellphone

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Newswise — WASHINGTON, D.C. May 13, 2019 -- In the past several decades, militaries have worked hard to develop technologies that simultaneously protect infantry soldiers' hearing and aid in battlefield communication. However, these advanced Tactical Communication and Protective Systems, or TCAPS -- earmuffs or earplugs with built-in microphones allowing active hearing protection -- don’t help if a soldier takes them off to assess the location of incoming gunfire. 

Now a French researcher has developed a proof of concept that uses the microphones in a TCAPS system to capture a shooter’s acoustic information and transmit this to a soldier’s smartphone to display shooter location in real time. 

“At the beginning of an ambush, the most important thing for soldiers is to know where the shooting is coming from so that they can hide on the right side of a vehicle or at least aim in the right direction -- and they need this information very fast,” said Sébastien Hengy, a combat acoustics researcher at the French-German Research Institute of Saint-Louis (ISL). 

Hengy will present his TCAPS-based shooter location research at the 177th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, which takes place May 13-17, at the Galt House in Louisville, Kentucky. 

TCAPS have four microphones: two outside the ear canal and two inside it, underneath the hearing protection. In the French case, this is an electronic filter that activates to block out loud noises, such as when a soldier fires his or her own weapon. 

Hengy’s shooter location technology uses the fact that most modern combat weapons fire bullets at supersonic speeds, creating two acoustic waves. The first is a supersonic shock wave (similar to that formed in front of a jet at supersonic speeds) that travels in front of the bullet and propagates outward in a cone shape. The explosion of the bullet in the barrel creates a muzzle wave which radiates out spherically in all directions. 

“Our system uses the microphone underneath the hearing protection in order to detect the shock and muzzle waves generated by supersonic shots and record the time difference of arrival of the Mach wave between the left and right ear. By combining the information sent by all the TCAPS deployed on the field, this gives you the direction of arrival of the waves and thus the direction in which the shooter is,” explained Hengy. 

This information is sent via Bluetooth or USB to a soldier’s smartphone which uses a data fusion algorithm developed by Hengy to calculate the shooter’s position. 

“If it’s a smartphone with a good processor, the computation time to get the complete trajectory is about half a second,” said Hengy, noting that once a soldier begins returning fire, the location system automatically turns off. 

Soldiers in France’s Operation Sentinel domestic anti-terror force are already equipped with smartphones. 

To date, Hengy has successfully demonstrated the system with microphones mounted ear width apart (about 10 centimeters) in a field, and is currently finessing the technology, including integrating head orientation information from tiny compasses mounted in the hearing protection. 

Later this year they’ll begin tests with the system on an artificial head and, if all goes well, deploy the technology as early as 2021. The TCAPS technology is being developed in collaboration with French company Cotral. 

### 

Presentation #1aPA3, "Integrating acoustic shooter detection into a hearing protection device," will be at 9:25 a.m., Monday, May 13, in the Jones room of the Galt House in Louisville, Kentucky.

Nearly all countries agree to stem flow of plastic waste into poor nations

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The Guardian - Back to home  

Almost all the world’s countries have agreed on a deal aimed at restricting shipments of hard-to-recycle plastic waste to poorer countries, the United Nations announced on Friday.

Exporting countries – including the US – now will have to obtain consent from countries receiving contaminated, mixed or unrecyclable plastic waste. Currently, the US and other countries can send lower-quality plastic waste to private entities in developing countries without getting approval from their governments.

Since China stopped accepting recycling from the US, activists say they have observed plastic waste piling up in developing countries. The Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (Gaia), a backer of the deal, says it found villages in Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia that had “turned into dumpsites over the course of a year”.

Runaway consumption: 2tn drinks containers being used every year

 

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“We were finding that there was waste from the US that was just piled up in villages throughout these countries that had once been primarily agricultural communities,” said Claire Arkin, a spokeswoman for Gaia.

The legally binding framework emerged at the end of a two-week meeting of UN-backed conventions on plastic waste and toxic, hazardous chemicals that threaten the planet’s seas and creatures. The pact comes in an amendment to the Basel convention. The US is not a party to that convention so it did not have a vote, but attendees at the meeting said the country argued against the change, saying officials didn’t understand the repercussions it would have on the plastic waste trade.

Plastic debris clutters pristine land, floats in huge masses in oceans and entangles and endangers wildlife. Less valuable and harder to recycle plastic is likely to end up discarded rather than turned into new products. The deal affects products used in a broad array of industries, such as healthcare, technology, aerospace, fashion and food and beverages.

Rolph Payet of the United Nations Environment Program called the agreement – signed by 187 countries in Geneva, Switzerland, under the convention – “historic”, because countries will have to monitor where plastic waste goes when it leaves their borders. Payet said the negotiations, which began 11 days ago and brought together 1,400 delegates, had gone much further than anticipated.

He compared plastic pollution to an “epidemic”, with “an estimated 100m tonnes of plastic [110m US tons] now found in the oceans, 80 to 90% of which comes from land-based sources”.

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 A man carries plastic bottles for recycling in Nairobi, Kenya. Photograph: Ben Curtis/AP

The Basel convention sets rules for first-world countries shipping hazardous waste to less wealthy nations. Backers say the amendment will make the global trade in plastic waste more transparent and better regulated, protecting humans and the environment.

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The US and other countries now will not be able to send the plastic waste to developing countries that are part of the Basel convention and are not part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a press release from major advocacy organizations explained.

Officials attributed the progress partly to growing public awareness – reinforced by documentary films by the British naturalist Sir David Attenborough and others – of the dangers of plastic pollution, especially to marine life.

“It was those iconic images of the dead albatross chicks on the Pacific Islands with their stomachs open and all recognizable plastic items inside it, and most recently, it’s been when we discovered the nano-particles do cross the blood-brain barrier, and we were able to prove that plastic is in us,” said Paul Rose, expedition leader for the National Geographic “pristine seas” expeditions, aimed at protecting the oceans.

Recent images that went viral of dead whales washing up with hundreds of pounds of plastic garbage in their stomachs also widely shocked the public. A new online petition entitled “Stop dumping plastic in paradise!” has attracted almost a million signatures in the past week.

The new rules will take a year to come into force.

Von Hernandez, global coordinator for Break Free from Plastic, said the deal is “a crucial first step towards stopping the use of developing countries as a dumping ground for the world’s plastic waste, especially those coming from rich nations”.

Marco Lambertini, director general of the environmental and wildlife charity WWF International, said the accord is a welcome step and that for too long wealthy countries have abdicated responsibility for enormous quantities of plastic waste.

“However, it only goes part of the way. What we – and the planet – need is a comprehensive treaty to tackle the global plastic crisis,” Lambertini added.

An Urgent Need to Advance Peace

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At the 2018 Stockholm Forum

STOCKHOLM, May 10 2019 (IPS) - Let us be blunt: the world is in crisis. Peace, human rights, our planetary ecosystem, and our systems of conflict management and global governance are under enormous strain.

Global military expenditures reached 1.8 trillion in 2018, their highest level in real terms since the Cold War, driven by great power competition between the US and China. The ‘Doomsday clock’ is now set at 2 minutes to midnight, as the world has moved closer than ever to nuclear self-destruction as a result of US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal(the Joint Common Plan of Action (JPOA)), and withdrawal from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, and uncertainties about North Korea’s nuclear plans.

And, buttressed by regular reports about the growing effects of global warming, rapidly declining biodiversity and theextinction of thousands of species, climate change is now widely acknowledged by citizens and experts in many countries as the world’s biggest threat.

The past decade has seen a reversal of the long-term trend of declining civil wars. According to the UN-World Bank publication Pathways to Peace, the world has seen sharp increases in the number of internal armed conflicts in the world over the past decade, most involving numerous non-state armed groups, and such conflicts are both increasingly internationalized and protracted.

Mostly as a result of conflict, some 68.5 million people are currently displaced, with the overwhelming majority of refugees residing in poor or middle-income countries. While there are often multiple, complex causes of conflict, key structural factors include weak institutions in combination with political and economic exclusion.

In developing and post-industrial states alike, factors such as growing income inequalities and the continued failure of most countries to significantly control corruption are undermining governance and faith in the ability of states and the political class to uphold the public good. Across the world we are witnessing a rise in populism rooted in anti-pluralism and exclusionary nationalist politics, attacks on the basic democratic tenets and a crisis of democracy.

With the global rolling back of human rights, there is a shrinking of civic space and dramatic decline in countries considered safe for journalists and for human rights defenders and women’s rights defenders.

And within the leading global governance bodies, such as the UN Security Council, divisions among major powers and failure in leadership to constructively address current crises in Libya, Sudan, Yemen and Venezuela are calling into question the continued credibility of such arrangements.

Within this fraught context, leading individuals from the humanitarian, development and security fields will be convening in Stockholm next week*. The Stockholm Forum on Peace and Development, cohosted by SIPRI and the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, will discuss how the world can better respond to emergencies and crises, and how it can stabilize and strengthen prospects for peace and longer term development.

By bringing together subject and regional specialists, humanitarian workers, human rights defenders, peace researchers, police and military representatives, political leaders and policy makers, the Forum seeks to stimulate essential, sometimes difficult, conversations among those who are working to support peace, rule of law and development embodied by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

The international and professional diversity of those who will attend reflects the recognition of the need for interdisciplinary understanding of drivers of conflict, coordination across sectors and comprehensive approaches in responding to violence, hunger and injustice.

Substantial participation by representatives from the Global South reflects the need to develop truly people-centred approaches that are context specific, politically informed and locally owned. It embodies the realization that technocratic, template approaches to preventing conflict and assisting shattered states and societies are not acceptable and do not work.

With its commitment to advancing peace through evidence-based data, research and analysis, SIPRI is proud to co-host the Forum and to contribute to global efforts to find solutions to the grave problems that confront us.

*Follow the Forum Plenary live-stream on 14 and 16 May: Opening Session and High-Level Panel on Mediation: https://youtu.be/yaGj1RQOVKY Closing High-Level Panel on Inclusive Peace: https://youtu.be/ks28SC5MWhM

Read more: https://www.sipri.org/events/2019/2019-stockholm-forum-peace-and-development