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Venezuelans seek joy amid the chaos

April 23, 2019

The Wider Image: Venezuelans seek joy amid the chaos
Children walk along a breakwater at Coral beach in La Guaira near Caracas, Venezuela, March 23, 2019. “A person who has a minimum wage can’t come [to the beach]. The anguish that has all Venezuelans is food. First the flour and the rice.” said Carla Cordova. REUTERS/Ivan Alvarado

April 23, 2019

By Shaylim Valderrama and Ivan Alvarado

CARACAS (Reuters) – A night at a bar is interrupted by a power outage, going to a baseball game is prohibitively expensive, and a trip to a nearby beach requires months of savings. But many Venezuelans have not given up on finding ways to smile.

Despite an economic crisis that has led to shortages of food and medicine and has prompted more than three million to emigrate, Venezuelans are seeking ways to have fun and spend time with family in the hope of easing their discomfort.

Still, the increased frequency of blackouts and a political showdown between the socialist government and the opposition has cast a cloud of uncertainty, leaving many Venezuelans bereft of simple pleasures.

Venezuela fell to the 108th place in the 2019 World Happiness Report prepared by the United Nations, down from 102nd place in 2018. In the Western hemisphere, only Haiti was below the oil-rich nation, ranking 147th out of 156 countries studied by the U.N.

The happiness report – which in its first edition in 2012 placed Venezuela in the 19th position – is based on indicators such as gross domestic product per capita, generosity, life expectancy, social freedom and absence of corruption.

Venezuela was plunged into darkness with two massive blackouts in March, generating water shortages and prompting the government to suspend work and school. Earlier this month, the government launched a power rationing plan, and electricity remains intermittent in many parts of the country.

In search of distraction, Venezuelans from the country’s capital of Caracas have long taken to the nearby seaside state of Vargas to spend weekends with family and friends on the shores of the Caribbean.

“You put your mind in another place,” said Leonel Martinez, a 26-year-old soldier while relaxing on the sand with his girlfriend while her nephews played nearby. “It’s a way to think about something besides what is happening in the country.”

But in a country where the monthly minimum wage amounts to just $6 per month, the $15-$20 a day trip to the beach can require months of savings and advance planning.

Martinez, who said he used to take the 40-kilometer (25 mile) trip to the beach frequently, said it was the first time he had gone in a year.

“It’s not something you can do every day, because of the situation in the country,” said Martinez.

        

‘IN THIS WORLD THERE IS NO CRISIS’

For Venezuelans, queuing for food is a daily ordeal. They also are used to trying multiple pharmacies and hospitals in search of the medicines they need, and more recently have grown accustomed to collecting water from streams.

But that has not stopped Joaquin Nino, a cash-strapped 35-year-old father of two, from taking his kids to an amusement park in southern Caracas.

“We have to work miracles just to have some fun,” Nino said.

At a parade in eastern Caracas celebrating Holy Week, revelers dressed in straw hats topped with flowers sang, banged drums and blew trumpets to tropical beats. With the sun beating down, one marcher who gave his name as Carlos remembers how in past years onlookers would douse those marching with water to cool them down.

“Now, because of the problems with the water, that probably will not happen,” he said.

In central Caracas, a group of men of all ages meet every Sunday to play softball while a handful of their relatives watch. The wire fence that once surrounded the field was long ago stolen. The lights, which once allowed the group to play at night, were also pilfered.

“I always come because my husband plays,” said Delia Jimenez, a 62-year-old industrial designer who jumps up from the stands whenever her husband comes up to bat. “We have fun and we shake off our stress.”

A few blocks away, groups of young people come together to break-dance, which they say is a way to disconnect. But some admitted that they had not been eating enough recently to be able to spend as much time dancing as they used to.

“When we’re out here dancing, we don’t think about the state of the country,” said Yeafersonth Manrique, a 24-year-old drenched in sweat after a long practice. “In this world there is no crisis.”

(See related photo essay here: https://reut.rs/2vcGsOS)

(Editing by Vivian Sequera, Pablo Garibian and Diane Craft)

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Factbox: Key facts about Japan’s imperial system

April 22, 2019

FILE PHOTO: Japan's Emperor Akihito, flanked by Imperial Household Agency officials carrying two of the so-called Three Sacred Treasures of Japan, leaves the main sanctuary as he visits the Inner shrine of the Ise Jingu shrine in Ise, Japan
FILE PHOTO: Japan’s Emperor Akihito, flanked by Imperial Household Agency officials carrying two of the so-called Three Sacred Treasures of Japan, leaves the main sanctuary as he visits the Inner shrine of the Ise Jingu shrine, ahead of his April 30, 2019 abdication, in Ise, Japan, April 18, 2019. REUTERS/Issei Kato/File Photo

April 22, 2019

By Linda Sieg

TOKYO (Reuters) – Japanese Emperor Akihito, 85, will abdicate on April 30, the first Japanese monarch to do so in about two centuries. He will be succeeded by Crown Prince Naruhito, 59.

Here are some key facts about Japan’s monarchy.

– Traditionalists believe Japan’s imperial institution is the world’s oldest hereditary monarchy. Eighth-century chronicles say the sun goddess Amaterasu Omikami bequeathed her grandson a mirror, jewels and a sword, which he gave to the first emperor, Jimmu. The chronicles give Jimmu’s reign as 660 B.C.-585 B.C., but there is doubt as to whether he ever existed.

– For most of the imperial institution’s history, the emperor lacked direct political power and was primarily a symbolic and religious figure. Under the Meiji constitution, promulgated in 1889, the emperor became a constitutional monarch as well as a divine sovereign who was the focus of loyalty for his subjects.

– Japanese wartime leaders used a state Shinto religious ideology to mobilize the masses to fight World War Two in the name of a divine emperor, but Japan’s post-war constitution established the separation of church and state. State Shinto was abolished. The emperor performs about 20 Shinto rituals each year as private acts, separate from his official duties

– Emperor Akihito, born in 1933, has made efforts throughout his reign to reconcile Japan with its former colonies in Asia and to help it project an image as a peace-loving nation. He and Empress Michiko modernized the royal family, bringing it closer to ordinary people.

– Akihito’s father, Hirohito, known posthumously as the Emperor Showa, was treated as a god but renounced his divine status after Japan’s World War Two defeat in 1945. Under the constitution, drafted by U.S. occupation forces, the emperor became the “symbol of the state and the unity of the people.”

– Women may not take the throne, although historically females have acted as place-holders who could not pass the throne to their offspring. Crown Prince Naruhito has a daughter, Princess Aiko. Upon Naruhito’s death the throne will pass to his younger brother, Prince Akishino, then to Akishino’s son Prince Hisahito. Prince Hitachi, 83, Akihito’s younger brother, is next in line.

– Akihito, who has had treatment for prostate cancer and heart surgery, said in 2016 that he feared increasing age would make it hard to carry out his duties. A year later, parliament enacted a law making his abdication possible – the first since Emperor Kokaku stepped down in 1817.

(Reporting and writing by Linda Sieg; Edited by Malcolm Foster and Gerry Doyle)

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Five planets revealed after 20 years of observation

April 22, 2019

Over 4000 exoplanets have been discovered since the first one in 1995, but the vast majority of them orbit their stars with relatively short periods of revolution.

Indeed, to confirm the presence of a planet, it is necessary to wait until it has made one or more revolutions around its star.

This can take from a few days for the closest to the star to decades for the furthest away: Jupiter for example takes 11 years to go around the sun.

Only a telescope dedicated to the search for exoplanets can carry out such measurements over such long periods of time, which is the case of the EULER telescope of the Geneva University (UNIGE), Switzerland, located at the Silla Observatory in Chile.

These planets with long periods of revolution are of particular interest to astronomers because they are part of a poorly known but unavoidable population to explain the formation and evolution of planets. An article published by the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

“It took 20 years and many more observers,” says Emily Rickman, first author of the study and a researcher in the Astronomy Department of the UNIGE Faculty of Science. “This result would have been impossible without the availability and reliability of the CORALIE spectrograph installed on the EULER telescope, a unique instrument in the world.”

Since 1995, when the first exoplanet was discovered, about 4000 planets have been found.

The vast majority of them are massive planets close to their stars which are the easiest to detect relying on the current technology. However, planets with long periods of revolution are of great interest to astronomers.

Being farther away from their stars, they can be observed using direct imaging techniques.

Indeed, to date, almost all planets have been discovered using the two main indirect methods: radial velocities, which measure the gravitational influence of a planet on its star, and transits, which detect the mini eclipse caused by a planet passing in front of its star.

Planets directly observed

The EULER telescope is mainly dedicated to the study of exoplanets.

Since its commissioning in 1998, it has been equipped with the CORALIE spectrograph, which allows astronomers to measure radial velocities with an accuracy of a few meters per second for the detection of planets with a mass as small as Neptune’s.

“As early as 1998, a planetary monitoring programme was set up and carried out scrupulously by the many UNIGE observers who took turn every two weeks in La Silla for 20 years,” says Emily Rickman.

The result is remarkable: Five new planets have been discovered, and the orbits of four others have been precisely defined.

All these planets have periods of revolution between 15.6 and 40.4 years, with masses ranging approximately from 3 to 27 times that of Jupiter.

This study contributes to increasing the list of 26 planets with a rotation period greater than 15 years, “but above all, it provides us with new targets for direct imaging,” concludes the Geneva researcher.

What can we learn from the ancient Greeks that we can apply today?

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Huawei says launches ‘world’s first’ 5G communications hardware for autos

April 22, 2019

FILE PHOTO: Small toy figures are seen in front of a displayed Huawei and 5G network logo in this illustration picture
FILE PHOTO: Small toy figures are seen in front of a displayed Huawei and 5G network logo in this illustration picture, March 30, 2019. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

April 22, 2019

BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s Huawei Technologies launched on Monday what it said was the world’s first 5G communications hardware for the automotive industry, in a sign of its growing ambitions to become a key supplier to the sector for self-driving technology.

Huawei said in a statement that the so-called MH5000 module is based on the Balong 5000 5G chip which it launched in January. “Based on this chip, Huawei has developed the world’s first 5G car module with high speed and high quality,” it said.

It launched the module at the Shanghai Autoshow, which began last week and runs until Thursday.

“As an important communication product for future intelligent car transportation, this 5G car module will promote the automotive industry to move towards the 5G era,” Huawei said.

It said the module will aid its plans to start commercializing 5G network technology for the automotive sector in the second half of this year.

Huawei has in recent years been testing technology for intelligent connected cars in Chinese cities such as Shanghai, Shenzhen and Wuxi and has signed cooperation deals with a swathe of car makers including FAW, Dongfeng and Changan.

The company, which is also the world’s biggest telecoms equipment maker, is striving to lead the global race for next-generation 5G networks but has come under increasing scrutiny from Washington which alleges that its equipment could be used for espionage. Huawei has repeatedly denied the allegations.

(Reporting by Yilei Sun in Beijing and Brenda Goh in Shanghai; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)

Source: OANN

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Solar Storm Alert: Earth To Be Bombarded By Solar Particles In A Few Days

April 19, 2019

There is an upcoming solar storm expected this weekend. Researchers have noticed a sunspot that will bombard the Earth with solar particles on Monday.

Sunspots are patches of darkness on the Sun which are caused by an underlying magnetism beneath the surface. A solar storm occurs when that magnetism bubbles up and is released in the form of solar flares, which spew cosmic particles into space. Earth is in the path of these particles, so we can expect an exceptional aural display at the poles soon!

Auroras are caused when solar particles hit the atmosphere. These include the northern lights, or aurora borealis and southern lights, or aurora australis. Both are expected to put on incredible shows thanks to this solar storm. The light show will appear when the magnetosphere gets bombarded by solar winds and that layer of the atmosphere deflects the particles.

According to the Express, a cosmic forecasting website called Space Weather said:

“A minor hole in the sun’s atmosphere is turning toward Earth and spewing a stream of solar wind in our direction. The estimated time of arrival is April 22nd. Geomagnetic unrest and polar auroras are possible when the gaseous material arrives.”

Solar particles have been responsible for power grid failures and disruption in communications systems on Earth when they’ve been strong enough. A surge of particles can lead to high currents in the magnetosphere, which can cause a higher than normal level of electricity in power lines. The results could be devastating, especially considering Earth’s magnetic field is weakening. Eventually, as a solar storm could cause electrical transformers and power stations blowouts and a loss of power. Solar storms can also affect satellites in orbit, potentially leading to a lack of GPS navigation, mobile phone signals, and satellite TV.

Earth’s magnetic field is getting significantly weaker, the magnetic north pole is shifting at an accelerating pace, and scientists readily admit that a sudden pole shift could potentially cause “trillions of dollars” in damage. Today, most of us take the protection provided by Earth’s magnetic field completely for granted. It is essentially a colossal force field which surrounds our planet and makes life possible. And even with such protection, a giant solar storm could still potentially hit our planet and completely fry our power grid. But as our magnetic field continues to get weaker and weaker, even much smaller solar storms will have the potential to be cataclysmic. And once the magnetic field gets weak enough, we will be facing much bigger problems. As you will see below, if enough solar radiation starts reaching our planet none of us will survive. -Michael Snyder, The Economic Collapse Blog

The weakening magnetic field could have apocalyptic implications for all of us. Increased cancer rates will occur and there will be increasingly dangerous outcomes of fairly minor solar storms such as the one expected on Monday.

Alex Jones talks over the phone with callers and gauges their reactions to AG Barr discussing the redacted first part of Mueller’s report.

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Explosion on Jupiter-sized star 10 times more powerful than ever seen on the sun

April 18, 2019

A stellar flare ten times more powerful than anything seen on our sun has burst from an ultracool star almost the same size as Jupiter.

The star is the coolest and smallest to give off a rare white-light superflare, and by some definitions could be too small be considered a star.

The discovery, funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council, is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters as the version of record today (17 April) and sheds light on the question of how small a star can be and still display flaring activity in its atmosphere. Flares are thought to be driven by a sudden release of magnetic energy generated in the star’s interior. This causes charged particles to heat plasma on the stellar surface, releasing vast amounts of optical, UV and X-ray radiation.

Lead author James Jackman, a Ph.D. student in the University of Warwick’s Department of Physics, said: “The activity of low mass stars decreases as you go to lower and lower masses and we expect the chromosphere (a region of the star which support flares) to get cooler or weaker. The fact that we’ve observed this incredibly low mass star, where the chromosphere should be almost at its weakest, but we have a white-light flare occurring shows that strong magnetic activity can still persist down to this level.

“It’s right on the boundary between being a star and a brown dwarf, a very low mass, substellar object. Any lower in mass and it would definitely be a brown dwarf. By pushing this boundary we can see whether these type of flares are limited to stars and if so, when does this activity stop? This result takes us a long way to answering these questions.”

The L dwarf star located 250 light years away, named ULAS J224940.13-011236.9, is only a tenth of the radius of our own sun, almost the same size as Jupiter in our solar system. It was too faint for most telescopes to observe until the researchers, led by the University of Warwick, spotted the massive stellar explosion in its chromosphere in an optical survey of the surrounding stars.

Using the Next Generation Transit Survey (NGTS) facility at the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory, with additional data from the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) and Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), they observed the brightness of the star over 146 nights.

The flare occurred on the night of 13 August 2017 and gave off energy equivalent to 80 billion megatonnes of TNT, ten times as much energy as the Carrington event in 1859, the highest energy event observed on our sun. Solar flares occur on our Sun on a regular basis, but if the Sun were to superflare like this star the Earth’s communications and energy systems could be at serious risk of failing.

It is one of the largest flares ever seen on an L dwarf star, making the star appear 10,000 times brighter than normal.

James adds: “We knew from other surveys that this kind of star was there and we knew from previous work that these kinds of stars can show incredible flares. However, the quiescent star was too faint for our telescopes to see normally – we wouldn’t receive enough light for the star to appear above the background from the sky. Only when it flared did it become bright enough for us to detect it with our telescopes.”

James’s Ph.D. supervisor Professor Peter Wheatley said: “Our twelve NGTS telescopes are normally used to search for planets around bright stars, so it is exciting to find that we can also use them to find giant explosions on tiny, faint stars. It is particularly pleasing that detecting these flares may help us to understand the origin of life on planets.”

L dwarfs are among the lowest mass objects that could still be considered to be a star, lying in the transition region between stars and brown dwarfs. Brown dwarfs are not massive enough to fuse hydrogen into helium as stars do. L dwarfs are also very cool compared to the more common main sequence stars, such as red dwarfs, and emit radiation mostly in the infra-red, which may affect their ability to support the creation of life.

James adds: “Hotter stars will emit more in the optical spectrum, especially towards the UV. Because this star is cooler, around 2000 kelvin, and most of its light is towards the infra-red, when it flares you get a burst of UV radiation that you wouldn’t normally see.

“To get chemical reactions going on any orbiting planets and to form amino acids that form the basis of life, you would need a certain level of UV radiation. These stars don’t normally have that because they emit mostly in the infra-red. But if they produced a large flare such as this one that might kickstart some reactions.”

Professor Wheatley adds: “It is amazing that such a puny star can produce such a powerful explosion. This discovery is going to force us to think again about how small stars can store energy in magnetic fields. We are now searching giant flares from other tiny stars and push the limits on our understanding of stellar activity.”

Alex Jones presents a video of Lou Dobbs during his Fox program where he warns his viewers that the French investigation into what exactly started the Notre Dame fire may be covering up the very realistic possibility of arson for what he calls “political reasons.”

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Brexit stalls investments by sovereign wealth funds in Britain

April 18, 2019

FILE PHOTO: People walk alongside the Thames as the sun sets behind The Shard in London
FILE PHOTO: People walk alongside the Thames as the sun sets behind The Shard in London, Britain, December 3, 2018. REUTERS/Simon Dawson/File Photo

April 18, 2019

By Tom Arnold

LONDON (Reuters) – Britain has long been a favored playground for sovereign wealth funds from around the world to snap up glitzy skyscrapers, banking stakes and posh department stores.

However, uncertainty over Britain’s tortuous exit from the European Union has put many new investments on ice, say sources close to the funds.

Last year, there was a sharp drop in investments by wealth funds via private equity, with deals falling more than two-thirds from 2017 to $3.82 billion, according to PitchBook, a data and research firm.

“A lot of funds are simply not pursuing deals (due to Brexit), while they wait for certainty,” said Tihir Sarkar, London-based partner at Cleary Gottlieb, which counts several prominent sovereign funds as clients.

Brexit has now been postponed until Oct 31 so parliament can agree terms. While that prevents Britain from crashing out without a transition period in place, it also prolongs political and economic uncertainty.

At least Britain managed to draw a vote of confidence in February when Norway’s $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund, the world’s biggest, said it planned to keep increasing UK investments.

Most large sovereign funds contacted by Reuters did not respond or declined to provide comment, but several said their commitment to Britain remained unchanged while a couple acknowledged a pause in investments.

Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment, which has its largest exposure to UK real estate and financial services and whose unit Masdar owns 20 percent of the London Array offshore wind farm, has not made any changes to its investment strategy or portfolio in anticipation of Brexit, spokesman Brian Lott said.

“Our long-term strategy is opportunistic, so we will weigh the investment climate either way,” he said.

A spokesperson for the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, which has investment portfolio assets estimated at $509.4 billion, said it was watching the Brexit situation and “keeps under constant review the need to adjust the Exchange Fund’s investment strategies accordingly.”

But sources close to two other funds, who requested anonymity, said they were freezing investments until there was greater clarity on Brexit.

British authorities may be getting concerned: two sources close to the sovereign fund industry said several funds had been asked by British officials, including ministers, for assurances they would remain committed to existing investments.

LONG FAVORED

There are some bright spots.

PitchBook data shows venture capital deal flow with sovereign fund participation in Britain rose 70 percent last year to $1.28 billion. And the pound’s drop in value against the dollar since June 2016 appeared to have boosted allocations to external fund managers based in London, Sarkar said.

“We’ve been really busy,” he added. “That’s not small amounts, so £500 million ($651 million) at a time, and those allocations have increased [since Brexit].”

Britain still ranks joint-third along with India, for investments by sovereign wealth funds in 2017 and 2018, behind the United States and China, according to a report by Spain’s IE University and ICEX. But it dropped out of the top five country destinations as a percentage of total deal volume in 2018, the report noted.

Examples abound of the kind of uncertainties Brexit has created for sovereign funds’ British holdings.

China Investment Corp’s 2017 acquisition of European warehouse firm Logicor was one such case, said Javier Capapé, director of sovereign wealth research at IE University.

“Most of the warehouses are not in the UK but in the EU, bringing potential issues in the case of a hard Brexit,” he said, noting also risks to businesses such as airports and financial services, where sovereign investors are heavily involved.

London’s Heathrow Airport is partly owned by Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) and China Investment Corp, while QIA and Singapore’s Temasek Holdings own stakes in Barclays and Standard Chartered, respectively.

Brexit has contributed to hastening a shift away from real estate, traditionally a favored choice for investment in Britain, to technology.

“I see a structural shift as with real estate you’re a little bit more exposed if you have a low-growth UK which is the expectation with Brexit scenarios,” said Elliot Hentov, head of policy and research at the official institutions group of State Street Global Advisors.

“But that won’t affect your high-value add technology and export sectors which will thrive regardless of Brexit, so you see a focus on sectors kind of independent of the uncertainty.”

QIA, one of the funds most active in Britain, particularly in real estate, is also diversifying its focus after amassing several London trophy assets, such as The Shard, Savoy and Connaught hotels and the high-end Harrods store. It agreed to buy another hotel, the Grosvenor House, Reuters reported in November.

“We’ve seen a decline (in British investment) in the past year or two. Real estate investment is definitely declining,” said a source familiar with QIA’s thinking, adding that it was looking more towards the Americas.

(Additional reporting by Alun John in Hong Kong; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)

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China EV maker Byton says business as usual despite management upheaval

April 18, 2019

FILE PHOTO: A man checks a Byton Concept T car at the Auto China 2018 motor show in Beijing
FILE PHOTO: A man checks a Byton Concept T car during a media preview at the Auto China 2018 motor show in Beijing, China April 25, 2018. REUTERS/Jason Lee

April 18, 2019

By Yilei Sun and Brenda Goh

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – Chinese electric vehicle (EV) maker Byton, which is facing a management shake-up and questions about funding an expansion, said it has received over 50,000 orders globally for its new SUV model and plans to start production at the end of this year.

“We plan to launch our first production car this July,” Daniel Kirchert, Byton’s co-founder and CEO told Reuters in an interview on Thursday, adding that the company aims to manufacture 10,000 units by the first half of 2020.

Byton’s backers include Chinese retailer Suning, automaker FAW and Contemporary Amperex Technology Co.

Kirchert’s comments, coinciding with the Shanghai Autoshow, come just days after chairman and co-founder Carsten Breitfeld quit Byton.

German daily Handelsblatt said Breitfeld is joining Byton’s domestic rival Iconiq. Another German publication, Manager Magazin, said earlier that Breitfeld’s looming departure was due to trouble funding its planned expansion in the Chinese market, causing tensions inside the company.

Kirchert confirmed the former chairman’s departure and said: “Byton has already got very strong resources, and there are 1,800 employees working on different areas including internet connectivity, engineering research and development.

“We are in the middle of a new round of fundraising, which will be of similar amount to B round. We aim to finish C round around the middle of this year.” Byton had raised $500 million in the series B round last year.

Byton, which runs offices in China, the United States and Germany, is one of several largely Chinese-funded EV startups betting on the benefits of local production to compete with Tesla Inc and other auto giants.

Its local rivals include Nasdaq-listed NIO Inc and Xpeng Motors, backed by Alibaba Group.

Byton aims to hit the 100,000 unit production level around 2021-2022, he said. The 10,000 and 100,000 unit marks are widely regarded as key production milestones for electric vehicle makers.

“Only by large-scale production can we reduce costs and provide affordable prices” he said.

Byton is building its first plant in Nanjing in eastern China with a planned annual capacity of 150,000 units in its initial phase.

China’s auto sales contracted for the first time last year since the 1990s amid a broader economic slowdown but sales of new energy vehicles (NEVs), which include electric vehicles, have remained a bright spot. In March, NEV sales rose 85.4 percent.

(Reporting by Yilei Sun and Brenda Goh; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)

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Cheap solar panels power consumer appliance boom in North Korea

April 17, 2019

FILE PHOTO: Solar panels face the sun from balconies of an apartment building in Pyongyang
FILE PHOTO: Solar panels face the sun from balconies of an apartment building in Mangyongdae District, Pyongyang August 27, 2014. REUTERS/Staff/File Photo

April 17, 2019

By Hyonhee Shin

SEOUL (Reuters) – Years after they first appeared in North Korea, increasingly cheap and available solar panels are giving a boost to consumer consumption and industry as Pyongyang tries to limit the impact of tough international sanctions.

Electricity shortages have been a perennial concern for North Korea, and leader Kim Jong Un has called for greater use of renewable energy as part of his drive for self-sufficiency as sanctions have ratcheted higher in response to the country’s nuclear and missile programs.

Now ever more households, factories and businesses are equipped with solar panels, leading to a greater variety of home electronics products available in increasingly common private markets known as jangmadang, defectors and recent visitors say.

Among the hottest selling items are water purifiers, hair straighteners and electric bicycles, mostly from China but some made in North Korea or even smuggled in from South Korea.

“A few years ago, such things as water purifiers, mixers and rice cookers were only seen at some restaurants and rich households, but they are becoming commonplace, especially in cities,” said Kang Mi-jin, an economic expert who regularly speaks with North Koreans for Daily NK, a website run by defectors.

“Some would look just like an ordinary middle-class South Korean home, with a wall-hanging LED TV, multiple laptops and electric mini cars for babies.”

CONSUMER CULTURE

North Koreans started using solar panels several years ago, mostly to charge mobile phones and light their homes as a backup to the unstable, mostly hydro and coal-fired national grid.

As well as markets brimming with electronics products, there are more teahouses, computer games rooms, karaoke bars and billiard halls open longer after switching to solar from diesel generators, according to recent visitors and defectors.

Such entertainment venues are becoming more widespread, not only in cities, but also the countryside, where grid power is even less reliable.

“At night, often it is only those places that have solar panels and batteries that have lights on,” a source with knowledge of the issue told Reuters on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of North Korea affairs.

Use of the panels spread after they were used at a now-closed inter-Korean factory park in the North’s border city of Kaesong that opened in 2004.

“Now many apartment balconies have them out in the sun during the day collecting energy so they are readily visible, the source said.

Private use of solar panels has gone from being officially banned, to tolerated, to encouraged by the ruling Workers’ Party, which keeps a tight rein on the economy and the populace.

Early this month, the official Rodong Sinmun ran an article about a team of laborers at a cooperative farm who earned solar panels and LED TVs as a reward from the Party for surpassing a production goal.

State television has also aired a series of reports on the growing use of solar energy over the past year, including a 17-minute documentary from October introducing locally made devices, such as high-voltage inverters and even a portable charger for electric bicycles.

Kim Yun-soung, a research fellow at the Green Energy Strategy Institute in Seoul, said the North’s push for domestic production of solar equipment was spurred by sanctions banning imports of metal products.

“Electricity was the biggest problem but we achieved such a highly advanced, cutting-edge technology ourselves from scratch, which was once monopolized by developed nations,” the film’s narrator said, referring to the inverters.

State media has listed the central bank, schools, factories, and even ferries as entirely powered by solar panels.

“A solar panel gives you ‘free’ power once it is installed,” said Kim Young Hui, a defector and an economist at the South’s state-run Korea Development Bank.

“So the nature of the panels perfectly fits Kim Jong Un’s mantra of self-reliance – or in other words, creating something out of nothing.”

‘FREE POWER’

Most of the panels sold in markets were brought in from China, and prices have dropped by up to 40 percent over the last few years amid a global glut and rising North Korean production, defectors and experts said.

In 2015, sources told Reuters a small 20-watt panel was sold at about $44. These days a 30-watt panel – a more widely used model – costs only about $15, Kang said.

Pyongyang does not provide data on its use of solar power, but Kang said about 55 percent of North Korean households are equipped with the panels. The ratio is higher in Pyongyang and other cities, as well as border regions where Chinese goods are widely available, she said.

David von Hippel, an Oregon-based senior associate at the Nautilus Institute, a U.S. think tank, said North Korea has imported a total of 29 megawatts of solar panels from China through 2017, citing Beijing’s custom data.

Experts say solar energy still account for less than 0.1 percent of the country’s generation capacity, estimated by South Korea’s statistics agency at some 7,700 megawatts as of 2017.

Pyongyang aims to boost its renewable capacity to 5,000 megawatts by 2044, with a focus on wind power, according to state media.

Panels play a key role in soothing public discontent toward the Kim regime over chronic power shortages and sanctions, defectors and observers say.

“Kim Jong Un appears to be committed to economic reform,” von Hippel said. “So the increased access to energy in some ways relieves the government from having to supply its citizens with energy.”

(Reporting by Hyonhee Shin. Editing by Lincoln Feast.)

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Mercury’s Spin Reveals Planet’s Solid Core

April 17, 2019

How do you explore the interior of a planet without ever touching down on it? Start by watching the way the planet spins, then measure how your spacecraft orbits it — very, very carefully. This is exactly what NASA planetary scientists did, using data from the agency’s former mission to Mercury.

It has long been known that Mercury and the Earth have metallic cores. Like Earth, Mercury’s outer core is composed of liquid metal, but there have only been hints that Mercury’s innermost core is solid. Now, in a new study, scientists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland have found evidence that Mercury’s inner core is indeed solid and that it is very nearly the same size as Earth’s inner core.

Some scientists compare Mercury to a cannonball because its metal core fills nearly 85 percent of the volume of the planet. This large core — huge compared to the other rocky planets in our solar system — has long been one of the most intriguing mysteries about Mercury. Scientists had also wondered whether Mercury might have a solid inner core.

The findings of Mercury’s solid inner core, described in Geophysical Research Letters, certainly adds to a better understanding of Mercury, but there are larger ramifications. Just how similar, and how different, the cores of the planets are may give us clues about how the solar system formed and how rocky planets change over time.

“Mercury’s interior is still active, due to the molten core that powers the planet’s weak magnetic field, relative to Earth’s,” said Antonio Genova, an assistant professor at the Sapienza University of Rome who led the research while at NASA Goddard. “Mercury’s interior has cooled more rapidly than our planet’s. Mercury may help us predict how Earth’s magnetic field will change as the core cools.”

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To figure out what the core of Mercury is made of, Genova and his colleagues had to get, figuratively, closer. The team used several observations from the MESSENGER (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, GEochemistry and Ranging) mission to probe the interior of Mercury. The researchers looked, most importantly, at the planet’s spin and gravity.

The MESSENGER spacecraft entered orbit around Mercury in March 2011, and spent four years observing this nearest planet to our Sun until it was deliberately brought down to the planet’s surface in April 2015.

Radio observations from MESSENGER were used to determine the gravitational anomalies (areas of local increases or decreases in mass) and the location of its rotational pole, which allowed scientists to understand the orientation of the planet.

Each planet spins on an axis, also known as the pole. Mercury spins much more slowly than Earth, with its day lasting about 58 Earth days. Scientists often use tiny variations in the way an object spins to reveal clues about its internal structure. In 2007, radar observations made from Earth revealed small shifts in the spin of Mercury, called librations, that proved some of Mercury’s core must be liquid-molten metal. But observations of the spin rate alone were not sufficient to give a clear measurement of what the inner core was like. Could there be a solid core lurking underneath, scientists wondered?

Gravity can help answer that question. “Gravity is a powerful tool to look at the deep interior of a planet because it depends on the planet’s density structure,” said Sander Goossens, a Goddard researcher who worked with Genova on this study.

(Photo by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Flickr)

As MESSENGER orbited Mercury over the course of its mission, and got closer and closer to the surface, scientists recorded how the spacecraft accelerated under the influence of the planet’s gravity. The density structure of a planet can create subtle changes in a spacecraft’s orbit. In the later parts of the mission, MESSENGER flew about 120 miles above the surface, and less than 65 miles during its last year. The final low-altitude orbits provided the best data yet, and allowed for Genova and his team to make the most accurate measurements about the internal structure of Mercury yet taken.

Genova and his team put data from MESSENGER into a sophisticated computer program that allowed them to adjust parameters and figure out what the interior composition of Mercury must be like to match the way it spins and the way the spacecraft accelerated around it. The results showed that for the best match, Mercury must have a large, solid inner core. They estimated that the solid, iron core is about 1,260 miles (about 2,000 kilometers) wide and makes up about half of Mercury’s entire core (about 2,440 miles, or nearly 4,000 kilometers, wide). In contrast, Earth’s solid core is about 1,500 miles (2,400 kilometers) across, taking up a little more than a third of this planet’s entire core.

“We had to pull together information from many fields: geodesy, geochemistry, orbital mechanics and gravity to find out what Mercury’s internal structure must be,” said Goddard planetary scientist Erwan Mazarico, who also helped Genova reveal Mercury’s solid core.

The fact that scientists needed to get close to Mercury to find out more about its interior highlights the power of sending spacecraft to other worlds. Such accurate measurements of Mercury’s spin and gravity were simply not possible to make from Earth. Additionally, this result used data collected by MESSENGER over several years, information that’s available for all scientists to use. New discoveries about Mercury are practically guaranteed to be waiting in MESSENGER’s archives, with each discovery about our local planetary neighborhood giving us a better understanding of what lies beyond.

“Every new bit of information about our solar system helps us understand the larger universe,” said Genova.

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Source: InfoWars

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