Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia photo

Shark fin backlash hits
major trader Hong Kong


Hong Kong is the world's shark fin capital, where about half of all fins are traded. But a backlash from environmentalists and consumer groups is pressuring restaurants to stop serving dishes containing shark fin.

Harvesting is what fishermen call the brutal act of cutting the fins off of living sharks and throwing the torso back into the ocean. Around 50 percent of all shark fins worldwide are traded through Hong Kong. In 2008 around 10,000 tons of fins from 87 countries passed through the city’s ports, according to the environmental organization Oceana.

For environmentalists like Stanley Shea of French-founded Bloom Association, that must change. He is fighting against finning by raising awareness in Hong Kong.

“We try to understand when we eat the fins and when is the biggest occasions," he said. "Then when we are understanding the theme, then we can start moving on developing a strategy to reduce the demand of shark fins.”

Shea and fellow activists have been quite effective. Over the last two years governments in Hong Kong and mainland China, as well as big corporations and hotel chains, have announced they will take shark fin soup off their menus and banquets.

It is in Hong Kong’s Sheung Wan District where a lot of the shark fin trade happens. Here the local marine-product industry is suffering.

Inside the small shops merchants talk freely about how little shark fin they sell these days. But in front of a camera nobody wants to mention shark fins; it is just too sensitive, they say.

Not far away, at restaurant Lin Heung Kui, shark fin soup is a common dish on the menu. Around lunchtime, it is mostly the elderly and a few tourists who frequent the place.

“We prepare and serve the fins in lots of ways - with a clear soup or with shredded chicken. It is definitely more popular at night. We offer an especially cheap deal at $88 at the moment, but sometimes people come to get more expensive dishes,” said a restaurant employee. The 88 Hong Kong dollars is about $11 U.S.

Shark fin soup has been the food of the rich and wealthy for hundreds of years in China.

But times are slowly changing, said Veronica Mak, an anthropologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who researches eating habits.

“Not consuming shark fins becomes a kind of signifier to show you are a socially responsible person. In the past, when you wanted to show your social status, people made shark fins a signifier in a banquet, but nowadays this signifier changes,” she said.

Shea said young people were increasingly interested in social responsibility. He said that helped make his campaign a success in Hong Kong.

“I can see kids, like students, and whenever I go to talks or seminars about the marine conservation and the shark fin issue, they know about the shark fin issue already. And they are eager to learn more and get more knowledge about the marine species,” said Shea.

The activists in Hong Kong believe that awareness and education is the key to change consumer behavior. And less demand for shark fins will result in fewer sharks finned and fewer left for dead.


U.S. House rejects farm bill
in dispute over food stamps


The U.S. House of Representatives has rejected a $500 million farm bill because of bipartisan opposition to cuts in food stamps.

The bill was defeated Thursday on a vote of 234 to 195, just a week after the Senate passed its own version of the bill.

House Democrats objected to the bill's $2 billion cut in food stamps, which poor people use in supermarkets to help pay for groceries. They said millions of Americans would lose those benefits.

Republicans who voted against the bill said the cuts were not deep enough.

Thursday's defeat means Congress is highly unlikely to reconsider another farm bill before the end of the fiscal year.

The Senate's version of the bill included continuation of an international food aid program and expanded crop insurance to help U.S. farmers survive when grain prices fall.

Farm bills are typically authorized in five-year increments, but an agreement on this latest installation of the legislation has eluded Congress.


Protests continue to grow
among unhappy Brazilians


Brazil's biggest protests in two decades have intensified, despite government concessions meant to quell the demonstrations.

Thursday, 300,000 people took to the streets of Rio de Janeiro and hundreds of thousands more flooded other cities.

Police in Rio cordoned off the area around Maracana Stadium Thursday, worried that protesters would try to disrupt the Confederations Cup soccer match under way inside.

Anti-government protests have spread across Brazil in the past week. Originally triggered by an increase in bus and subway fares, the demonstrations focus on the government's neglect of public services and rampant corruption.

The protests also are targeting the billions of dollars being spent to host the 2016 Summer Games, next year's World Cup and this month's Confederations Cup.

Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have scrapped plans to increase public transportation fees but that has not contained the protests.

The Confederations Cup soccer tournament began June 15 and lasts two weeks. The event that is considered a warm-up for the 2014 World Cup features teams from eight countries, including Brazil.


Twitter lawyer appointed
to White House position


The Obama administration has appointed Twitter lawyer Nicole Wong to a new senior advisory position to focus on Internet and privacy policy, a White House official said Thursday.
 
Ms. Wong will work with federal Chief Technology Officer Todd Park, and will join the White House as Obama focuses more attention and resources on fighting hackers.
 
Her appointment comes as the Obama administration grapples with issues that arose from the U.S. government's surveillance of Internet and phone communications in its anti-terrorism effort.
 
Rick Weiss, a spokesman for the White House Office of Science and Technology, said Ms. Wong is joining as deputy U.S. chief technology officer and will work with Park on Internet, privacy and technology issues.
 
“She has tremendous expertise in these domains and an unrivaled reputation for fairness, and we look forward to having her on our team,” Weiss said.
 
Congress and the White House have been arguing about how best to address cybersecurity for more than a year.
 
Last month, the House of Representatives passed a new cybersecurity bill which will next be considered by the Senate. It is designed to help companies and the government share information on cyber threats, though concerns linger about the amount of protection it offers for private information.
 
Ms. Wong, who was legal director at Twitter, has testified before Congress about her concerns about Internet censorship in countries around the world.
 
In 2010, when she was Google's vice president and deputy general counsel, Ms. Wong told a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that the U.S. government should make Internet freedom a key part of foreign policy.
 
At Google, Ms. Wong was nicknamed “the Decider,” author and law professor Jeffrey Rosen has written, because part of her job was deciding whether to remove content from YouTube and links from Google that governments objected to.


Facebook going video
with Instagram subsidiary


Facebook, Inc., introduced video for its popular photo sharing application Instagram in an attempt to go head-to-head with rival Twitter.
 
The world's No. 1 social network said on Thursday its more than 130 million Instagram users can now record and post 15-second videos on the platform.
 
The move takes aim at Twitter's Vine video platform that allows users to record and share six-second videos.
 
"There's definitely a one-upmanship going on," said Brian Blau, research director at Gartner.
 
Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom were on hand to unveil the offering at Facebook's Menlo Park, California, headquarters.
 
Among the features of Instagram video, which works with Apple's iOS and Google Android operating system, are a video stabilization technology and spate of custom design filters.
 
Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion in April 2012 as a way to keep its users hooked on new features weeks before the social media network became a publicly traded company.
 
Instagram is part of Facebook's mobile strategy as it seeks to get more advertising revenue.
 
More than 60 million people in the United States regularly watched video on their phones last year, according to research firm eMarketer. Almost 75 million are expected to do so this year.


Maduro's rocky honeymoon
shows series of weaknesses


Wearing sports gear in the national colors and sitting on a sofa in a modest family home, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro holds a microphone, chats with locals and expounds on the benefits of socialism.
 
Variations of the scene play daily on national TV as Hugo Chávez's successor makes Gobierno en la Calle, or "Street Government," the chosen slogan of his rule.
 
Almost constantly on the road since being elected in April, Maduro has launched a plethora of new schemes, from raising the minimum wage to sending soldiers into city slums to fight crime.
 
Trumpeting his modest background as a bus driver and union activist, he continually reminds Venezuelans he is the South American nation's first worker president, guaranteed to empathize with the poor and thus continue Chavez's legacy.
 
The avuncular images that Maduro, 50, has been promoting, however, cannot hide the tough realities he has inherited: an economy verging on recession, a ruling socialist party under some strains from within, and an impatient populace.
 
Such pressures make him vulnerable going forward, both to a newly confident opposition and potential rivals inside the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela, though there is no formal mechanism to challenge Maduro before a recall referendum allowed three years into his presidency.
 
"We're behind him, but he has to be behind us, too, like Chávez was," said Eglis Rodriguez, a 39-year-old housewife and mother of three waiting to see Maduro at a street government event in the poor Macarao neighborhood on the edge of Caracas.
 
"He must not forget that he got in thanks to the votes of the poor," she said. "We put him there and we can remove him."
 
Far from enjoying a newly elected president's customary honeymoon, Maduro's ratings have stayed stuck around the level of his April 14 victory — by 50.6 percent to 49.1 against the opposition — or have even dropped, according to some pollsters.
 
He has struggled, sometimes awkwardly, to replicate Chavez's famous charisma and connection with the masses.
 
Maduro argues that his mentor's old foes in the private media and Venezuela's fascist right wing are doing their best to sabotage his government, from plotting to assassinate him to ignoring his flagship policies such as the drive against crime.
 
The opposition, delighted at winning nearly half the votes in April yet bitter at being deprived of the prize by what they claim was electoral fraud, says Maduro's incompetence and illegitimacy are ever more evident to Venezuelans.
 
Yet opposition leader Henrique Capriles' formal challenge to Maduro's election win is running out of steam: The election board ratified his loss after an audit and the supreme court is also likely to give short shrift to his allegations.
 
Though the United States has been lukewarm, Latin American neighbors have embraced Maduro as president.

So Capriles, 40, appears to be biding his time and is casting local elections in December as a referendum on Maduro. Right now, though, most Venezuelans are more concerned with day-to-day economic realities than big-picture politics.
 
Shortages of basic goods ranging from toilet paper to flour have been an embarrassment to the government, while monthly price increases hit a 17-year high in May at more than 6 percent.
 
Growth in the oil producing nation slowed to a paltry 0.7 percent in the first quarter, despite high oil prices. And the local bolivar currency fetches five times more on the black market than at the official, controlled rate.
 
"When you shop now you have to queue for four hours. I never experienced that before. We were better with Chávez ... Maduro needs to get his skates on," said Carmen Natera, 60, another government supporter and mother of four, at the Macarao event.
 
The feistier attitude from grassroots supporters, who worshiped Chávez and would seldom criticize him directly, is reflected at all levels.
 
There is more criticism within the ruling party, where one faction revolves around the powerful congress president and party No. 2, Diosdado Cabello.
 
The president is also sometimes openly challenged by the public at events.
 
And Venezuela's biggest private company, food and drinks maker Polar, which generally kept quiet in confrontations with Chávez, spoke out quickly when criticized by Maduro.
 
Amid it all, Maduro has lurched between fierce Chávez-style rhetoric and the pragmatism that many think comes more naturally to him.
 
In recent days, he has met business and church leaders to try and bury some hatchets from the Chávez era. And authorities have released from house arrest a judge whose detention since 2009 was a cause célèbre for human rights activists.
 
"Chávez was a military man and believed in defeating the enemy. Maduro was a union activist, he believes in negotiating with the enemy," said pollster Luis-Vicente Leon.
 
There has as yet been no rapprochement between Maduro and Capriles, and their bitter attacks on each other illustrate a political polarization as stark as at any time under Chávez.
 
Much now depends on how Maduro is able to handle the economy and whether that will weigh further on his popularity or strengthen the Cabello-led faction within the PSUV.
 
With orthodox socialist heavyweights such as Planning Minister Jorge Giordani still wielding substantial influence while others push for liberalization, Maduro faces hard decisions about currency controls, price caps, and other once sacred cows.
 
The most famous aspect of Chavez's economic policy, nationalizations, appears to have been quietly shelved.
 
But Maduro may balk at the political cost of another devaluation, something many economists see as inevitable, or a loosening of the foreign exchange regime to get more dollars into the hands of importers.
 
Leon, the pollster, said the opposition actually had an interest in keeping Maduro in power until a 2016 referendum as an earlier exit would more likely lead to a replacement from his party.
 
"Their best chance is in three years against a Maduro who is destabilized but still in power," he said.


Batteries the size of sand grain
produced from 3D printers


Scientists using new 3D printing technology have produced lithium-ion batteries the size of a grain of sand. They say the tiny batteries, similar in function to those in cell phones and digital wristwatches, could be used in a new wave of innovative, miniature medical devices.

Teams from Harvard University and the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana used 3D printing techniques to interlace minute battery electrodes, each less wide than a human hair.

“Not only did we demonstrate for the first time that we can 3D-print a battery; we demonstrated it in the most rigorous way,” said Jennifer A. Lewis of Harvard, senior author of the study. Lewis is the Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

The tiny batteries could bode well for medical devices such as implants, minute robots, tiny cameras and microphones, which currently need batteries as large, or larger, than the devices themselves. 

Miniature batteries have traditionally been made of thin films of solid material. Due to the thinness, the batteries were not able to hold enough energy to power devices of the future. The use of 3D printing provided the opportunity to stack layers of materials capable of storing much more power.

The first hurdle to overcome was to develop a specialized ink. The 3D printers, instead of releasing liquid droplets like a typical inkjet printer, release ink through fine nozzles like toothpaste from a tube. The ink also needed to function as electrochemically active material to form the battery’s anodes and cathodes and also to immediately harden.

The printer deposited the inks onto the teeth of two tiny gold combs, creating a tightly interlaced stack of anodes and cathodes. Then the researchers packaged the electrodes into a tiny container and filled it with an electrolyte solution to complete the battery.

“The electrochemical performance is comparable to commercial batteries in terms of charge and discharge rate, cycle life and energy densities. We’re just able to achieve this on a much smaller scale,” said co-author Shen Dillon, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana.

The microbattery ink designs “open up entirely new possibilities for miniaturization of all types of devices, both medical and non-medical,” said Donald Ingber, who is also a professor of bioengineering at Harvard.

The results have been published online in the journal Advanced Materials.
 
 
Russia and China criticize
U.S. trafficking report


China and Russia are criticizing a U.S. report that cited both countries among the world's worst in fighting sex trafficking and forced labor.

In its annual report on human trafficking, released Wednesday, the U.S. State Department dropped Beijing and Moscow to its lowest possible rating, putting them at the same level as North Korea and Iran.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson on Thursday called the report arbitrary, saying Washington should take an objective and impartial view of its efforts to fight human trafficking.

In Moscow, Russia's foreign ministry suggested the State Department was simply ranking countries according to their degree of sympathy with Washington.  It threatened to retaliate against any sanctions that could result from the designation.

The report said an estimated one million people in Russia are exposed to exploitative labor conditions characteristic of trafficking cases, such as non-payment for services, physical abuse and very poor living conditions.

The report described China as a source, transit and destination country for men, women and children subjected to forced labor and sex trafficking.  It also said the Chinese government’s one-child policy has resulted in a ratio of 118 boys to 100 girls, creating a demand for the trafficking of foreign women as brides and for forced prostitution.

Uzbekistan was downgraded to the worst level, known as Tier Three, because of what the report said is its state-sanctioned use of forced labor in its annual cotton harvest.

Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Sudan and Zimbabwe are among the 21 countries rated at the lowest level in terms of human trafficking. The list of Tier Three countries also includes Algeria, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Guinea-Bissau, Kuwait, Libya, Mauritania, Papua New Guinea, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen.

In the report, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the United States has a moral obligation to meet the challenge of ending human trafficking.  He called the practice an assault on freedom and basic human dignity.

President Barack Obama will determine by September whether to order sanctions against China, Russia and Uzbekistan.