Category: General

Yiwu, a city in China’s Zhejiang province, produces more than half the world’s Christmas ornaments purchased by the billions of people who celebrate the holiday.
China’s “zero-COVID” policy, coupled with global pandemic fears, dulled the local export-fueled year-round glitterfest. Christmas orders fell by 50% in 2020, according to the official Global Times with raw material costs and labor shortages hindering a recovery in 2021, which saw only a 10% to 20% increase in sales over the previous year.
Then, faster than elves could hitch those nine reindeer to Santa’s sleigh, a day after Beijing began lifting zero-COVID restrictions on December 3, a Zhejiang trade delegation departed for Germany and France to launch the “Thousand Missions and Ten Thousand Enterprises to Expand the Market and Grab Orders Action.” The goal: Sell enough stuff to help spark China’s economy back to pre-pandemic growth.

They hit a snag. “It seems like the Europeans’ and Americans’ purchasing power is so weak now. If the markets there are weak, China’s economy is definitely suffering too,” said Steven Gao, a businessman in Zhejiang province who exports Christmas ornaments and other trinkets to Europe and the U.S.
Beyond pandemic aftereffects such as not-yet-normal supply chains, Gao blames the bleak economic prospect on President Xi Jinping’s recent policies, particularly his focus on “common prosperity” during the 20th party congress, which met in October in Beijing and gave him a third term. The phrase refers to an official effort to address income inequality, a push often linked to personal wealth accumulated by founders and executives in sectors such as tech.

“Many of my rich friends are thinking about moving to other countries,” said Gao, 45, who asked to use a pseudonym to avoid attracting official attention when he spoke with VOA Mandarin on Tuesday. “They are afraid their wealth will be seized. This lack of faith, combined with pandemic control, led to the slide of economic growth.”
According to a CNBC report on December 4, U.S. manufacturing orders in China are down 40%, according to the latest CNBC Supply Chain Heat Map data, and Chinese factories are expected to shut down two weeks earlier than usual for the Lunar New Year that falls on January 22, 2023.

When Xi presided over a December 6 meeting of the Politburo of the Communist Party, China’s second-highest decision-making body, he emphasized the need to stabilize the economy and to attract foreign investment.
After the gathering, the official Securities Times reported on December 7 that the Suzhou Bureau of Commerce planned to charter flights to France and Germany after a “successful trip” to Japan returned with guaranteed orders worth more than 1 billion yuan, or $142 million.
A similar flight organized by the Suzhou province government took off for Europe on December 9. “Racing against time, grabbing more orders and opportunities … these are the most crucial tasks the Chinese companies took on when boarding the plane,” editorialized the official Global Times news outlet which pointed out “Yiwu… has been the starting point of numerous international trade channels linking the entire world.”
Alibaba, China’s biggest e-commerce platform, recently launched a special operation code-named “Digital Hybrid Trade Show” to start at least 100 overseas exhibitions in the near future, Securities Times reported on December 12. The exhibitions cover more than 10 important foreign trade target markets, including the United States, Germany, Britain, Japan, Singapore and Australia.
Some analysts, however, believe that China’s response to the pandemic may have made it less attractive to foreign businesses for manufacturing and investing.
The state news agency Xinhua reported that those in the December 6 meeting stressed that stability is Beijing’s top priority in an international economic environment marked by “high winds and waves.”
Zhao Chunshan, chief adviser of the Asia-Pacific Peace Research Foundation, a private think tank in Taiwan, told VOA Mandarin that “Capitalists are running away. No one dares to invest, causing economic instability. If there is a problem in the economy there is no way to stabilize.”

Zhao says that local governments with high debt loads must look outside China rather than to the central government for stability.
“China’s central government has no way to solve local debts,” he said. “The central government’s allocation alone is not enough. They have to attract foreign investment and business on their own. To some extent, the central government also gives localities such authority.”
In an interview with VOA Mandarin, Lai Rongwei, an assistant professor at the Center for Liberal Studies at Taiwan’s Longhua University of Science and Technology, said the fact that provinces and cities are scrambling to form groups to go abroad reflects the fears of local officials.
“China’s measures to seal off cities have led to a severe shortage of supplies, including medicine,” Lai said. “The debt of local governments is already huge, and the lack of revenue in the past years has made the situation even worse. People actively going abroad shows a great deal of panic, fearing that the economic downturn can’t be alleviated, and the risks are becoming bigger.”

But Lai said that after the pandemic lockdowns, China is no longer as attractive to foreign investors as it used to be.
“Foreign investors must take into account the cost of investment,” Lai said. “Cities could be shut down and power cut off any time when there’s an order from higher authorities. … Private enterprises find it hard to survive, and now the governments are looking for solutions from foreign investors.”

Source: Voice of America

Law enforcement officials and financial services regulators have filed a raft of criminal and civil charges against Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange company FTX, alleging wide-ranging fraud that eventually brought down the company, which was valued at $32 billion earlier this year.

The Department of Justice on Tuesday morning unsealed an indictment charging Bankman-Fried with eight criminal counts, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud, actual wire fraud, money laundering, and violation of laws governing donations to politicians and political parties.

At the request of U.S. prosecutors, Bankman-Fried, 30, was arrested on Monday evening at his home in the Bahamas, where the headquarters of FTX is located. The U.S. and the Bahamas have an extradition treaty, and Bankman-Fried is expected to be transferred to U.S. custody in the near future. ‘House of cards’

Earlier Tuesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission issued its own set of civil charges, also accusing Bankman-Fried of “years-long fraud” that included hiding information from investors, diverting customer funds to a hedge fund he owned, using other customer funds to make political donations, and to purchase hundreds of millions of dollars in real estate.

“We allege that Sam Bankman-Fried built a house of cards on a foundation of deception while telling investors that it was one of the safest buildings in crypto,” said SEC Chair Gary Gensler. “The alleged fraud committed by Mr. Bankman-Fried is a clarion call to crypto platforms that they need to come into compliance with our laws.”

Also on Tuesday, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed a lawsuit against Bankman-Fried.

Rapid rise, rapid fall
In the short time since its founding in 2019, FTX grew to be one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, and Sam Bankman-Fried — often referred to as “SBF” — became one of the industry’s most recognizable figures. He was a regular speaker at business conferences, gave testimony before Congress, and was seen by many as a model cryptocurrency executive.

The list of investors who plowed billions of dollars into FTX is long and distinguished, including Sequoia Capital, SoftBank Group, Tiger Global Management, and Third Point Ventures.

Earlier this year, Bankman-Fried positioned his company as a savior for the broader crypto industry when a broad selloff of cryptocurrencies left many firms in the space reeling. FTX extended lines of credit to crypto lender BlockFi and crypto broker Voyager Digital in an effort to help them weather the storm. Both BlockFi and Voyager eventually filed for bankruptcy protection.

Signs of trouble
In September, news reports began raising questions about the relationship between FTX and Alameda Research, a hedge fund owned by Bankman-Fried which was supposed to be a completely separate corporate entity from FTX.

However, it gradually became clear that the two companies were actually closely connected. Media reports began to reveal that a large share of Alameda’s assets was tied up in an illiquid crypto token called FTT, which was issued by FTX. Over several days in early November, customers rushed to pull their money from accounts with FTX, sending the company into a massive liquidity crisis and forcing it to stop processing customer withdrawals.

After several days of attempts to arrange a rescue package, including a briefly considered sale of FTX to Binance, its largest competitor, FTX, Alameda, and more than 100 affiliated companies filed for bankruptcy.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department and the SEC alleged that Alameda actually had “virtually unlimited” access to funds held by FTX on behalf of its customers.

The charges against Bankman-Fried claim that Alameda illegally used those funds to invest in highly illiquid cryptocurrency tokens, as well as to make “undisclosed venture investments, lavish real estate purchases, and large political donations.”

Before its collapse, cryptocurrency investors around the world had placed billions of dollars in their accounts with FTX. In large part because of transfers to Alameda, FTX is facing an estimated shortfall of $8 billion.

‘I made a lot of mistakes’
Against the advice of his attorneys, Bankman-Fried has given a number of interviews to news organizations since his company declared bankruptcy. His contention has been that, while he may have made mistakes, he never intended to defraud anyone.

In early December, Bankman-Fried told The Wall Street Journal that he could not account for money that FTX customers transferred to Alameda Research.

In an appearance at a conference sponsored by The New York Times, he said, “Clearly I made a lot of mistakes. There are things I would give anything to be able to do over again. I did not ever try to commit fraud on anyone. I was excited about the prospects of FTX a month ago. I saw it as a thriving, growing business. I was shocked by what happened [in November.]”

His claims contradict the allegations leveled by prosecutors in the indictment unsealed Tuesday, which accuse Bankman-Fried of “willfully and knowingly” defrauding investors and customers.

‘Utter failure’ of controls
Last month, control of FTX and its constituent companies was turned over to John Ray III, an attorney and corporate insolvency specialist who has been brought on to manage multiple companies facing bankruptcy, including the failed energy giant Enron in the early 2000s. His primary task will be to assemble all the remaining assets of FTX in an effort to recover some of the money its customers lost in the exchange’s collapse.

Ray appeared at a hearing held by the House Financial Services Committee on Tuesday, during which he described a company that lacked even the most basic corporate governance structures and was run by a small cabal ill-equipped for the job of running a multi-billion dollar corporation.

In prepared testimony, Ray said, “[N]ever in my career have I seen such an utter failure of corporate controls at every level of an organization, from the lack of financial statements to a complete failure of any internal controls or governance whatsoever.”

In the broadest sense, Ray said, the company’s failure was the result of the “absolute concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of grossly inexperienced and unsophisticated individuals who failed to implement virtually any of the systems or controls that are necessary for a company that is entrusted with other people’s money or assets.”

Under questioning, Ray said that the asset recovery process will take months to complete, and will not make FTX customers whole. “At the end of the day, we’re not going to be able to recover all the losses here,” he said.

The committee had also expected to hear from Bankman-Fried on Tuesday, but the FTX founder’s arrest on Monday made that impossible.

Lawmakers angry
The allegations of fraud and mismanagement at FTX have raised calls in Washington for action by Congress to rein in the cryptocurrency industry, which operates under a poorly defined set of regulatory rules.

House Financial Services Committee Chair Maxine Waters on Tuesday said that she was “deeply troubled” by the revelations coming out about FTX. At the same hearing, U.S. Representative Patrick McHenry, who will take over the chairmanship when Republicans assume control of the House next month, criticized Bankman-Fried but said that he still sees “promise” in digital assets.

Others were less tolerant of the industry, with Representative Brad Sherman, a Democrat, calling the entire industry “a garden of snakes.”

Industry representatives urged lawmakers to tread carefully when it comes to establishing new rules for cryptocurrencies.

“Following the failure of FTX International, it’s understandable that lawmakers want to do something, but they should be wary of passing legislation in haste that would do more harm than good,” Kristin Smith, executive director of the Blockchain Association, wrote on Monday. “Instead, Congress should take its time to investigate the issues we’ve seen and work closely with the crypto industry to find solutions that benefit everyone.”

Source: Voice of America

Industry executives have joined activists and negotiators from nearly 200 countries at this month’s U.N. nature summit in Montreal, where negotiations on a global pact to protect nature could lead to tougher disclosure requirements for businesses.
Sectors such as mining, agriculture, oil and fashion are under scrutiny at the COP15 talks, due to their heavy impact on nature with activities that can contaminate soil, foul waterways or pollute the air.
As negotiators work to agree on conservation targets by the summit’s scheduled end on December 19, momentum is building for a measure to require businesses to disclose their harm to the environment.
The measure, as currently drafted, would also ask companies to halve those negative impacts by 2030, which could mean additional costs for businesses, said Franck Gbaguidi, senior analyst for energy, climate and resources at the Eurasia Group risk advisory.
But a weak deal without global agreement on how businesses should behave could also raise company costs — by opening the door to a global patchwork of different biodiversity regulations and requirements that makes compliance more difficult, Eurasia Group said in a policy statement.

Here is a look at how key sectors could be affected by the COP15 talks:
Fashion/Retail
Fashion and retail are facing pressure from consumers and governments to reduce waste and emissions throughout their operations.
For them, a strong deal that forces all companies to report any harm would work toward assuaging some consumer concerns.
In a letter to world governments in October, more than 330 companies including Swedish fashion giant H&M Group, furniture maker IKEA, British pharmaceutical and biotech company GSK and Switzerland’s Nestle came out in support of a COP15 deal that includes mandatory disclosure of companies’ environmental impacts by 2030.
Smaller companies with limited resources for monitoring and accounting could find a disclosure requirement more challenging.
Mining
For companies mining metals and coal, an environmental disclosure requirement could force companies to reveal the impacts not just from the blasting and drilling they do on site, but also from the logging and deforestation carried out in creating access roads.
Mining companies are also concerned about the central goal of the COP15 talks — to set aside 30% of Earth’s land and ocean areas for conservation by 2030. That could cut into areas rich with resources for extraction.
“There are going to be some places which are just going to be ‘no go areas’, and that can be hard for the mining sector,” said Aimee Boulanger, executive director of the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance.
The International Council on Mining and Metals, which represents 26 of the world’s largest mining companies, would back a deal that sets “a level playing field” with uniform rules in all regions, said the group’s chief executive, Rohitesh Dhawan.
Agriculture
With new disclosure rules, the farming sector would face an increased burden of reporting on activities like land clearing and pesticide use.
Hefty reporting obligations could burden smaller farms and ranches, some industry groups warned.
“A lot of our producers are family businesses,” said Larry Thomas, manager environment and sustainability with the Canadian Cattle Association.
The agriculture sector will likely escape a separate proposed goal to slash pesticide in half, said the Eurasia Group analyst Gbaguidi, following opposition from developing countries like Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay due to food shortages and higher prices.
“Because of the food crisis, a lot of emerging markets are just not as open as they would have been on setting bold targets related to the agricultural sector,” Gbaguidi said.
Oil
Following COP15, oil companies are expected to ramp up their internal resources for reporting on and disclosing how oil drilling and exploration activities impact nature as well, Gbaguidi said.
The American Petroleum Institute did not respond to a request for comment on the COP15 talks.
The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers said the country’s oil and natural gas industry wants to minimize marine and land disturbances, while also quickly restoring lands degraded by their operations to natural landscapes, CAPP spokesperson Jay Averill said.

Source: Voice of America

The United States Department of Energy on Tuesday is expected to announce that its scientists have been able to engineer a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than it consumed, a landmark achievement in a decadeslong search for a way to generate clean and waste-free nuclear power.

The pending announcement, first reported by the Financial Times and subsequently confirmed by other media organizations, will identify the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California as the site of the experiment.
On Monday, the department announced that Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm would announce “a major scientific breakthrough” at a news conference Tuesday.

The announcement comes at a time when the Biden administration has directed renewed effort and funding to the development of clean power generation, with a particular emphasis on fusion energy. The recently passed Inflation Reduction Act contained significant funding for research in the field.

Just because scientists have been able to engineer an energy-positive fusion reaction does not mean that any meaningful changes to the way humans generate power are on the horizon. Experts said that while the work is important, daunting technological barriers remain in the way of systems that could deploy fusion energy at scale.

A long journey
Scientists have long known that when two atoms are fused together to form a new element, large amounts of energy are released. The sun, for example, is essentially an enormous fusion reactor in which superheated particles come together with tremendous force, forming new particles and releasing excess energy as heat.

As long ago as the 1940s, scientists began experimenting with fusion reactors. While they have long been able to generate fusion reactions, until now, those reactions have always required inputs of energy that exceeded the amount they ultimately produced.

The reason a net-positive fusion reaction has been so elusive is in large part because scientists have to generate extreme conditions in the laboratory in order to make the reactions occur. Typically, enormous lasers are used to heat isotopes of hydrogen to temperatures in the millions of degrees Celsius. The resulting plasma is then confined under extremely high pressure, causing the isotopes to come together with enough force that they fuse into a different element, releasing energy as heat when they do.

An important element of the announcement on Tuesday will be the way in which the government defines a “net positive” energy result. Typically, that means that the reaction being measured produced more energy than the laser beams directed at the hydrogen. However, the lasers used in the experiment are far from perfectly efficient, meaning that it takes more energy to power them than they ultimately bring to bear on their targets.

For a fusion reaction to be “net positive” in the sense of generating more energy than the total energy put into the experiment — including waste — the reaction would have to produce substantially more energy than that consumed by the laser beams directed at the hydrogen.

Enormous engineering challenges
Maintaining equipment that can tolerate such extreme temperatures is extraordinarily difficult, and finding a way to create reactors that can tolerate the stresses involved in the process for long periods of time is one of the many challenges facing researchers in the field.

Ian H. Hutchinson, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology said that it was important not to read too much into preliminary reports, noting that prior to the official announcement few details of what, precisely, the scientists at the NIF have achieved was known.

“It seems an important scientific confirmation of inertial fusion ignition, but I would hesitate to call it a ‘breakthrough,’” Hutchinson said in an email exchange with VOA. “The NIF program is not aimed at fusion energy production but at understanding fusion explosions. Useful energy production from miniature fusion explosions still faces enormous engineering challenges, and we don’t know if those challenges can be overcome.”

The NIF is most closely associated with the United States’ nuclear weapons program, and its primary purpose is to recreate nuclear explosions on a small and controllable scale, allowing for the maintenance of the country’s nuclear arsenal without the need for destructive full-scale testing.

Benefits of fusion
There are several reasons why scientists have spent so many years in search of a means of making fusion reactors viable sources of energy.

If fusion reactors were to replace fossil fuels as an energy source, it would dramatically reduce the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere, reducing one source of global warming.

Unlike fission reactors, which use highly enriched radioactive materials like uranium and plutonium as fuel, fusion reactors can theoretically be fueled by hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe, meaning that the fuel supply for a fusion reactor is essentially infinite.

Also, unlike fission reactors, fusion reactors do not produce highly radioactive waste, eliminating the need to safely store materials that will continue to be dangerous, in some cases, for thousands of years.

Finally, despite the extreme conditions under which fusion occurs, fusion reactors are considered to be safer to operate than fission reactors, which must be constantly monitored in order to avoid conditions leading to destabilization and explosion. In the two worst nuclear disasters in history, explosions at nuclear facilities at Chernobyl in the Soviet Union in 1986 and at Fukushima in Japan in 2011 forced the evacuation of thousands of people and rendered vast expanses of both countries uninhabitable.

Source: Voice of America

A Japanese space startup launched a spacecraft to the moon Sunday after several delays, a step toward what would be a first for the nation and for a private company.
Ispace Inc’s HAKUTO-R mission took off without incident from Cape Canaveral, Florida, after two postponements caused by inspections of its SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
More than a hundred people at a viewing party in Tokyo roared in applause when the rocket fired and lifted into the dark skies.
“I’m so happy. After repeated delays, it’s good that we had a proper launch today,” said Yuriko Takeda, a 28-year-old worker at an electronics company who joined the gathering.
“I have this image of the American flag from the Apollo landing, so while this is just the launch, the fact that it’s a private company going there with a rover is a really meaningful step.”
The national space agencies of the United States, Russia and China have achieved soft landings on Earth’s nearest neighbor in the past half century, but no companies have.
Mission success would also be a milestone in space cooperation between Japan and the United States at a time when China is becoming increasingly competitive and rides on Russian rockets are no longer available in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
It would also cap a space-filled few days for Japan, after billionaire Yusaku Maezawa revealed on Friday the eight crew members he hopes to take on a SpaceX flyby of the moon as soon as next year.
The name HAKUTO refers to the white rabbit that lives on the moon in Japanese folklore, in contrast to the Western idea of a man in the moon. The project was a finalist in the Google Lunar XPRIZE before being revived as a commercial venture.
Next year is the Year of the Rabbit in the Asian calendar.
The craft, assembled in Germany, is expected to land on the moon in late April.
The company hopes this will be the first of many deliveries of government and commercial payloads. The ispace craft aims to put a small NASA satellite into lunar orbit to search for water deposits before touching down in the Atlas Crater.
The M1 lander will deploy two robotic rovers, a two-wheeled, baseball-sized device from Japan’s JAXA space agency and the four-wheeled Rashid explorer made by the United Arab Emirates.
It will also be carrying an experimental solid-state battery made by NGK Spark Plug Co.
“The Rashid rover is part of the United Arab Emirates ambitious space program,” said Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, who is also vice president of the United Arab Emirates and who watched the launch at the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre.
“Our aim is knowledge transfer and developing our capabilities and to add a scientific imprint in the history of humanity,” he tweeted.
Privately funded ispace has a contract with NASA to ferry payloads to the moon from 2025 and is aiming to build a permanently staffed lunar colony by 2040.

Source: Voice of America

After making a close pass at the moon and venturing further into space than any previous habitable spacecraft, NASA’s Orion capsule is due to splash down Sunday in the final test of a high-stakes mission called Artemis.
As it hurtles into Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of 40,000 kph, the gumdrop-shaped traveler will have to withstand a temperature of 2,800 degrees Celsius — about half that of the surface of the sun.
Splashdown in the Pacific off the Mexican island of Guadalupe is scheduled for 1739 GMT (9:39 am local time).
Achieving success in this mission of just over 25 days is key for NASA, which has invested tens of billions of dollars in the Artemis program due to take people back to the moon and prepare for an onward trip, someday, to Mars.
So far, the first test of this uncrewed spacecraft has gone very well.
But it is only in the final minutes of this voyage that the true challenge comes: seeing if Orion’s heat shield, the biggest ever built, actually holds up.
“It is a safety-critical piece of equipment. It is designed to protect the spacecraft and the passengers, the astronauts on board. So the heat shield needs to work,” said Artemis mission manager Mike Sarafin.
A first test of the capsule was carried out in 2014 but that time the capsule stayed in Earth’s orbit, so it came back into the atmosphere at a slower speed of around 32,000 kph.
Choppers, divers and boats
A U.S. Navy ship, the USS Portland, has been positioned in the Pacific to recover the Orion capsule in an exercise that NASA has been rehearsing for years. Helicopters and inflatable boats will also be deployed for this task.
The falling spacecraft will be slowed first by the Earth’s atmosphere and then a web of 11 parachutes until it eases to a speed of 30 kph when it finally hits the Pacific.
Once it is there, NASA will let Orion float for two hours — a lot longer than if astronauts were inside — to collect data.
“We’ll see how the heat soaks back into the crew module and how that affects the temperature inside,” said Jim Geffre, NASA’s Orion vehicle integration manager.
Divers will then attach cables to Orion to hoist it onto the USS Portland, which is an amphibious transport dock vessel, the rear of which will be partly submerged. This water will be pumped out slowly so the spacecraft can rest on a platform designed to hold it.
This should all take about four to six hours from the time the vessel first splashes down.
The Navy ship will then head for San Diego, California, where the spacecraft will be unloaded a few days later.
When it returns to Earth, the spacecraft will have traveled more than 2 million kilometers since it took off Nov. 16 with the help of a monstrous rocket called SLS.
At its nearest point to the moon, it flew less than 130 kilometers from the surface. And it broke the distance record for a habitable capsule, venturing 432,000 kilometers from our planet.
Artemis 2 and 3
Recovering the spacecraft will allow NASA to gather data that is crucial for future missions.
This includes information on the condition of the vessel after its flight, data from monitors that measure acceleration and vibration, and the performance of a special vest put on a mannequin in the capsule to test how to protect people from radiation while flying through space.
Some components of the capsule should be good for reuse in the Artemis 2 mission, which is already in advanced stages of planning.
This next mission planned for 2024 will take a crew toward the moon but still without landing on it. NASA is expected to name the astronauts selected for this trip soon.
Artemis 3, scheduled for 2025, will see a spacecraft land for the first time on the south pole of the moon, which features water in the form of ice.
Only 12 people — all of them white men — have set foot on the moon. They did this during the Apollo missions, the last of which was in 1972.
Artemis is scheduled to send a woman and a person of color to the moon for the first time.
NASA’s goal is to establish a lasting human presence on the moon, through a base on its surface and a space station circling around it. Having people learn to live on the moon should help engineers develop technologies for a years-long trip to Mars, maybe in the late 2030s.

Source: Voice of America