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Indonesia’s massive August 4 power outage is raising new concerns about the state electricity company, and renewing calls to look at alternative power sources, including geothermal energy, solar photovoltaic and wind. The blackout that hit the state-owned PLN electric company was Indonesia’s worst  since 2005, affecting millions of people in Jakarta and surrounding areas such as West Java and Banten. “By diversifying our energy sources by adding renewables, we may have a backup plan reducing the potential of a total blackout,” Mamit Setiawan, an analyst with Energy Watch, told VOA. Setiawan added that the centralized nature of power plants on the country’s most populated island of Java increases the likelihood of cascading outages similar to Sunday’s incident. The eight-hour blackout began when lines carrying high voltage failed. The disruption caused other parts of the system to crash, which in turn, caused a domino-like series of further problems affecting power plants in the central and western part of Java, including one that covered the capital. The blackout hindered many important services, like traffic lights, subways, cell phones and ATMs. Indonesian President Joko Widodo arrives with Sripeni Inten Cahyani, PLN’s acting CEO, during a visit at PT Perusahaan Listrik Negara (PLN) headquarters, …

Updated: Aug. 6, 2019, 2:49 p.m. VOA’s Mandarin Service contributed to this report. WHITE HOUSE — The White House is signaling it is not seeking to further escalate the trade war with Beijing, after the administration of President Donald Trump took the mostly symbolic action of declaring China a currency manipulator. “We have negotiated in good faith, and we want to continue to negotiate in good faith with the Chinese,” despite disappointment with China’s negotiators not living up to earlier promises and a lack of progress, Larry Kudlow, director of the National Economic Council, told reporters on Tuesday. “The door is open for additional negotiations,” said Kudlow. “We are planning for the Chinese team to come here in September” after the latest round of talks last week in Shanghai did not achieve a breakthrough. Trump — if there’s a deal or progress — may reconsider some of the actions he has taken, such as reversing increased tariffs on Chinese products, added the president’s economic adviser. Kudlow also warned additional punitive action against China could be taken by the president if no progress is achieved. “The president is defending the American economy,” Kudlow emphasized. Earlier in the day on Twitter, Trump …

North Korea launched a fresh round of short-range ballistic missiles into the sea early Tuesday and warned it could take a “new road” in response to U.S-South Korea military exercises that began this week. The launch came as Defense Secretary Mark Esper is in the Asia-Pacific region on his first international trip in his new post. VOA Pentagon correspondent Carla Babb is traveling with Esper as tensions in the region are on the rise …

Trade between the United States and sub-Saharan Africa is in the doldrums despite a 2000 U..S law designed to boost access the American market, a conference in Ivory Coast has been told. The African Growth and Opportunity Act, which in 2015 was extended to 2025, provides tariff-free access on 6,500 products to 39 countries, ranging from oil and agricultural goods to textiles, farm and handicrafts. Trade quadrupled in value from 2002 to 2008, a year when it reached $100 billion, but fell back in 2017 to just $39 billion, according to figures compiled by the U.S. agency USAID. The surplus is widely in Africa’s favor, but most exports to the U.S. are in oil or petroleum-based products, not the industrialized goods that provide a value-added boost to local economies. “I do not think that AGOA has been the game-changer for many countries on the continent that we hoped it would be,” Constance Hamilton, assistant U.S. trade representative for Africa, told the 18th AGOA Forum, ending in the Ivory Coast’s economic capital Abidjan on Tuesday. “AGOA has not led to the trade diversification for which we originally hoped,” she said in remarks on Monday. “Petroleum products continued to account for the …

Israel has advanced plans for more than 2,300 settlement homes in the occupied West Bank, the latest in a surge of such approvals since US President Donald Trump took office, an NGO said Tuesday. A defence ministry planning committee issued the approvals while meeting over the past couple of days, the Peace Now NGO said in a statement. The 2,304 housing units are at various stages in the approval process. “The approval of settlement plans is part of a disastrous government policy designed to prevent the possibility of peace and a two-state solution, and to annex part or all of the West Bank,” said Peace Now, which closely monitors Israeli settlement building. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged before April elections to annex settlements in the West Bank, a move sought by the country’s far-right. Annexing settlements on a large-scale in the West Bank could prove to be a death knell for the two-state solution, long the focus of international efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Last week, Israel’s security cabinet gave rare approval to 700 Palestinian homes in the part of the West Bank under the country’s full control while also approving 6,000 homes for settlers. Details of those …

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, a pioneer and reigning giant of modern literature whose imaginative power in “Beloved,” “Song of Solomon” and other works transformed American letters by dramatizing the pursuit of freedom within the boundaries of race, has died at age 88.   Publisher Alfred A. Knopf announced that Morrison died Monday night at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. Morrison’s family issued a statement through Knopf saying she died after a brief illness.   “Toni Morrison passed away peacefully last night surrounded by family and friends,” the family announced.  “She was an extremely devoted mother, grandmother, and aunt who reveled in being with her family and friends.  The consummate writer who treasured the written word, whether her own, her students or others, she read voraciously and was most at home when writing.”   Few authors rose in such rapid, spectacular style. She was nearly 40 when her first novel, “The Bluest Eye,” was published. By her early 60s, after just six novels, she had become the first black woman to receive the Nobel literature prize, praised in 1993 by the Swedish academy for her “visionary force” and for her delving into “language itself, a language she wants to liberate” …

Deep differences between Turkey and the United States over the scope and command of a planned “safe zone” in northeast Syria raise the prospect of Turkish military action unless the two countries break months of deadlock in talks this week. Turkey has twice sent troops into northern Syria in the last three years and President Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday a third incursion was imminent, targeting Kurdish-controlled territory east of the Euphrates river. Ankara views the Kurdish YPG militia, which plays a leading role in the Syrian Democratic Forces that hold sway over hundreds of miles (km) of Syria’s northeast border region, as terrorists who pose a grave security threat to Turkey, saying they must be driven back from frontier areas. Washington, which armed and backed them in the fight against Islamic State in Syria, wants to protect its military partners and has resisted Turkey’s demands for full control of a long strip of land that would extend 32 km (20 miles) into Syria. Military delegations from both countries are meeting in Ankara this week, the latest attempt in months of talks on setting up the safe zone which they agreed to form as President Donald Trump’s administration reduces troop …

The American creator of the 8chan website linked to deadly U.S. mass shootings said Tuesday he hoped the El Paso carnage would be the “final nail in the coffin” for the forum, which he accused of harboring “domestic terrorists”. Fredrick Brennan told AFP in an interview in Manila that he sometimes regretted setting up the unmoderated message board in 2013 — adding that turning it over to a new owner last year was a mistake. 8chan, which promotes itself as a site devoted to the “darkest reaches of the internet”, is home to posts from right-wing extremists, misogynists and conspiracy theorists. On Saturday, a young white male suspect was believed to have posted on the site a manifesto denouncing a “Hispanic invasion” of El Paso, shortly before going on a shooting spree at a Walmart store in the U.S. border city, killing 22 people. “I think this will be the final nail in the coffin for 8chan,” Brennan said. “Obviously he (the El Paso suspect) is a domestic terrorist. What else can you call him? He killed American citizens, he hates American society as it is set up,” said the 25-year-old. “Is it a cesspool for hate? The site is …

Shortly after Woodstock organizers announced the shambolic 50th anniversary concerts were off after months of setbacks and holdups, Woodstock co-founder Michael Lang summed up the drama in six words: “It’s been a really bizarre trip.” Over the last six months, Lang, 74, moved like a cat using all nine lives to make Woodstock 50 work. The first plan, to have an all-star concert with the likes of Jay-Z, Dead & Company, the Killers and more in Watkins Glen, New York, some 115 miles (185 kilometers) northwest of the original 1969 concert was scuttled after the venue backed out. Then the plan was to have it in Vernon, New York, but organizers couldn’t get a permit. Lang finally found a location that would work all the way in Maryland but artists started to pull out of the festival and he decided to scrap the event and the anniversary concerts altogether. “What can I say?” Lang said in a phone interview with The Associated Press. “It’s not been surprising that we weren’t able to pull this off.” If Lang could go back and do things differently, he says, he would have tried to get permits earlier. And he would have worked with …

A South African group of teenage pilots who flew a self-assembled aircraft across Africa are back in South Africa after tragedy struck the expedition. The two experienced adult pilots manning the support airplane accompanying the teens died in an accident in Tanzania. The group left South Africa in June as part of nonprofit U-Dream Global’s inspirational Cape To Cairo crowdfunded project that saw a group of teens build an aircraft and fly it from South Africa to Egypt and back. Safety has been an extremely high priority since the beginning of the U-Dream Global Cape to Cairo initiative. On the bitterly cold mid-June morning of departure, Des Werner and Werner Froneman made very sure everything was packed. Just over a month and a half later, the two directors of the nonprofit U-Dream Global were killed during the organization’s Cape to Cairo expedition.  Their “Sling 4 plane” reportedly went down shortly after taking off in Tanzania en route to Malawi over the weekend. Athol Franz, editor and owner of the African Pilot magazine, has been following this initiative ever since the founder of U-Dream Global, 17-year-old Megan Werner, pitched the idea of teens building a plane and flying it from Cape …

Lee Juhyun in Seoul and Pentagon correspondent Carla Babb in Tokyo contributed to this report. North Korea launched a fresh round of ballistic missiles into the sea early Tuesday and warned it could take a “new road” in response to U.S.-South Korean military exercises that began this week. The North fired two short-range ballistic missiles from South Hwanghae province in the western part of the country, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said in a statement. The missiles traveled about 450 kilometers and reached a height of about 37 kilometers, it added.  North Korea has conducted four rounds of short-range ballistic missile launches in less than two weeks, raising doubts about working-level nuclear talks that U.S. officials had hoped would begin last month. People watch a TV showing a file image of a North Korea’s missile launch during a news program at the Seoul Railway Station in Seoul, South Korea, Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2019. ‘Flagrant violation’ Minutes before the latest test, North Korea’s foreign ministry released a statement slamming the U.S.-South Korean military drills as a “flagrant violation” of its recent agreements with Washington and Seoul. “We have already warned several times that the joint military exercises would block progress …

School dress codes are legal in America, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. But many students say they discriminate against females and burnish stereotypes. During the 2015-16 school year, 53 percent of public schools compelled students to abide by a dress code, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. But some young women in the United States and around the world are pushing back, saying dress codes unfairly target women more than men. Sahar Majid has more in this report narrated by Kathleen Struck. …

In May a Chinese vessel exploring for oil tried to stop the operations of a Malaysian contract drilling site in the South China Sea, a U.S. think tank says. In June and July, a Chinese boat entered a standoff with Vietnam over exploration in another tract of the disputed waters.  The 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) expressed concern. The bloc, which includes Malaysia and Vietnam, brought up land reclamation plus other activities in the South China Sea, the site of Asia’s biggest maritime sovereignty dispute, saying in a statement those actions could “undermine peace.” China’s reclamation of land in the South China Sea over the past decade makes it easier to launch ships and place oil rigs compared to countries without those resources. Beijing has a military and technological lead over the five other governments with claims to the disputed waters. ASEAN usually takes a more upbeat tone at formal events such as the August 2 East Asia foreign ministers summit that produced the statement. The bloc now wants to show its exasperation with Chinese expansion without angering Beijing, a key ally, experts believe. “It’s an interesting change in wording, probably related to recent events in Vietnam and …

China says it will take “countermeasures” if the United States deploys ground-based intermediate-range missiles in the Asia-Pacific region.   Fu Cong, the director of the Foreign Ministry’s arms control division, told reporters Tuesday that Beijing “will not stand idly by” if Washington follows through on a pledge made last weekend by new Defense Secretary Mark Esper to deploy the missiles in the region “sooner rather than later,” preferably within months.  He urged China’s neighbors, specifically Japan, South Korea and Australia, to “exercise prudence” by refusing to deploy the U.S. missiles, adding that it would serve those countries national security interests.   Fu did not specify what countermeasures China would take, but said “everything is on the table.”  Secretary Esper’s stated goal to deploy ground-based missiles in the region came after the Trump administration formally pulled the U.S. out of the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty last week. The pact, reached with the former Soviet Union, bans ground-based nuclear and conventional ballistic missiles with a range between 500-5,000 kilometers. Washington said it withdrew from the INF because of continued violations by Moscow.   Fu said China had no interest in taking part in trilateral talks with the United States and Russia …

Chinese companies have stopped buying U.S. agricultural products, China’s Commerce Ministry said on Tuesday, a blow to U.S. farmers who have already seen their exports slashed by the more than year-old trade war. China may impose additional tariffs on U.S. farm products bought shortly before the purchase ban took effect, China’s Commerce Ministry said. China also let the yuan weaken past the key 7-per-dollar level on Monday for the first time in more than a decade. Before the trade war started, China bought $19.5 billion worth of farm goods in 2017, mainly soybeans, dairy, sorghum and pork. The trade war reduced those sales to $9.1 billion in 2018, according to the American Farm Bureau. China’s Ministry of Commerce said in a statement it hoped the United States would keep its promises and create the “necessary conditions” for bilateral cooperation. U.S. President Donald Trump said on Thursday that Beijing had not fulfilled a promise to buy large volumes of U.S. farm products and vowed to impose new tariffs on around $300 billion of Chinese goods, abruptly ending a truce in the Sino-U.S. trade war. Earlier, China’s state broadcaster CCTV reported an official from China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) as …

The escalating trade tensions between the United States and China that sent U.S. stock prices plunging Monday continued to reverberate around the globe as Asian stock prices opened sharply lower at the start of Tuesday’s trading session. Both Japan’s benchmark Nikkei and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng indexes both opened less than two percent at the opening bell, while China’s benchmark Shanghai index dropped more than 1.5 percent at the start.  Australia and South Korea also posted sharp losses in their early morning trading. Tuesday’s sell-offs in Asia came hours after Wall Street posted its worst losses of the year, with the S&P 500 index losing three percent on Monday, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq dropped 3.5 percent and Dow Jones losing nearly three percent.  The selloff was triggered by Beijing’s decision to allow its currency to fall to weaken to its lowest point in 11 years, triggering an angry response by U.S. President Donald Trump on Twitter, accusing China of manipulating its currency.   China’s move to devalue its currency gives its exporters a price edge in world markets.   Hours later, the U.S. Treasury Department officially designated China a currency manipulator. The months-long trade war between the world’s two biggest …

First, it lost its internet security provider.  Then, another company cut off its new internet host.  In less than 24 hours, 8chan, the online forum that the suspect in the El Paso mass shooting allegedly used to post some of his extremist thoughts, was struggling to keep its lights on.  8chan’s situation highlights how the technology industry, long touting itself as proponents of free speech, has been reevaluating its approach to extremist content published by users. There are few laws in the U.S. curtailing digital hate speech or incitement to violence online. Social media firms like Facebook, Google’s YouTube and Twitter now routinely revamp their rules and boost new efforts at moderating the content on their sites. Just last month, Twitter said it would use human moderators to evaluate if a post “dehumanizes others on the basis of religion.”  What happened to 8chan in the 24 hours after the El Paso shooting shows how smaller, lesser-known companies that control the pipes of the internet — what sites get seen, whether online traffic is routed correctly and how websites are protected from cyberattacks — are being pressured to set new limits, even though they do not interact directly with people posting …

The children crammed into the bus and sat in two neat lines, poring over notebooks at desks where once there had been passenger seats. From the overhead baggage bins, a teacher hung their exploits: colored alphabet letters, watercolor paintings. In the border city of Tijuana just miles from the U.S. border, in a dirt parking lot adjoining a migrant shelter, that bus is offering a rare chance at school to Central American and Mexican children. For most of the several dozen who have passed through the program since it began in mid-July, education was a distant dream in the weeks or months since their parents decided to uproot and head north to seek refuge or a better life. Estefania Rebellon, director of the program called Yes We Can, said it offers specialized bilingual education for children who tend to have low literacy and struggle with social skills. Migrant children take English lessons at a bus converted in a classroom as part of Schools On Wheels program by California’s ‘Yes We Can’ organization, in Tijuana, Mexico, Aug. 2, 2019. Providing care and security are important too. “These are children from very dangerous areas, where they have very big issues with trust,” …

Ferdinand Magellan set off from Spain 500 years ago on an epoch-making voyage to sail all the way around the globe for the first time. The Portuguese explorer was killed by islanders in the Philippines two years into the adventure, leaving Spaniard Juan Sebastian Elcano to complete the three-year trip. But it is Magellan’s name that is forever associated with the voyage. “Magellan is still an inspiration 500 years on,” said Fabien Cousteau, a French filmmaker and underwater explorer like his grandfather Jacques-Yves Cousteau. “He was a pioneer at a time when explorers who went off into the unknown had a strong habit of not coming back.” Here are five ways in which Magellan’s voyage marked human history and continues to inspire scientists and explorers today. Some of them spoke to AFP at a conference in Lisbon to mark the August 10 fifth centenary. Historical Magellan’s voyage was a turning point in history, as unique as the first manned journey into outer space and the later moon landings, said NASA scientist Alan Stern, leader of its New Horizons interplanetary space probe. “When the first one circled the plant, (that) sort of meant that we now had our arms around the …

Nestled in the foothills of Washington’s Cascade Mountains, the bustling Seattle suburb of Issaquah seems an unlikely candidate for anxiety over wildfires.  The region, famous for its rainfall, has long escaped major burns even as global warming has driven an increase in the size and number of wildfires elsewhere in the American West.  But according to experts, previously too-wet-to-burn parts of the Pacific Northwest face an increasing risk of significant wildfires due to changes in its climate driven by the same phenomenon: Global warming is bringing higher temperatures, lower humidity and longer stretches of drought.   And the region is uniquely exposed to the threat, with property owners who are often less prepared for fire than those in drier places and more homes tucked along forests than any other western state.  In Issaquah and towns like it across the region, that takes a shape familiar from recent destructive California wildfires: heavy vegetation that spills into backyards, often pressing against houses in neighborhoods built along mountains, with strong seasonal winds and few roads leading out.  “The only thing that’s keeping it from going off like a nuclear bomb is the weather,” said Chris Dicus, a professor at California Polytechnic State University, San …

The president of Honduras says that political opposition groups connected to criminal networks are trying to overthrow his government.   President Juan Orlando Hernandez also said Monday that ex-President Manuel Zelaya and former presidential candidate Salvador Nasralla are involved in “a conspiracy” with gangs to usurp him.     He said: “Without a doubt, we are confronting an assault on power by gangs and drug traffickers.”   The president spoke two days after U.S. prosecutors alleged that his government received $1.5 million in drug trafficking proceeds to help secure power in 2013.   Hernandez has denied the accusations.   The allegations were revealed over the weekend in documents related to an upcoming case against the president’s brother, Juan Antonio “Tony” Hernandez, who was arrested last year in Miami on charges of smuggling cocaine into the U.S. …

Deforestation in Brazil’s rainforest has jumped around 67% in the first seven months of the year, according to preliminary data from Brazil’s space research agency, which the government has attacked as misleading and harmful to the national interest. The National Institute for Space Research (INPE) monitoring system registered destruction of 4,699 square kilometers (1,814 square miles) this year compared to 2,810 square kilometers in the previous period monitored, data on the agency’s website showed. In July alone, 2,255 square kilometers of Amazon forest were lost, more than triple July 2018’s 597 square kilometers, according to INPE. That is the largest monthly deforestation registered by the agency in years and nearly the land mass of Luxembourg. The Amazon is the world’s largest tropical rainforest, a bulwark against global warming often called the “lungs of the earth” because of the vast amounts of carbon dioxide it soaks up and recycles into oxygen. Brazil contains roughly 60% of the rainforest. Environmentalists and researchers blame President Jair Bolsonaro’s rhetoric in favor of economic development in the Amazon for emboldening loggers, ranchers and informal miners since he assumed office in January. Bolsonaro has vehemently criticized the data from INPE and fired the head of the …

Emily Seymour contributed to this report.  Many young people reacting to the most recent mass shootings in the U.S. are rejecting the idea that violent video games motivate shooters. And research backs them up. One Twitter user, Scott@Serptentine_Back described his interests as well as the fact he’d been bullied in school, but ended with “NEVER HAVE I ONCE THOUGHT OF SHOOTING INNOCENT PEOPLE.” Dear Pro-Gun people, I’m a white male. I listen to heavy metal music. Play video gamesWear black clothing.Religion is a joke.Plenty of LGBT friends.Bullied in school.Rejected by girls. NEVER HAVE I ONCE THOUGHT OF SHOOTING INNOCENT PEOPLE FILE – A contestant competes during the Fortnite World Cup Duos Finals in the Queens borough of New York, July 27, 2019. “I’ve always felt that it’s a problem for future generations and others,” Representative Kevin McCarthy said on Fox News. “We’ve watched from studies, shown before, what it does to individuals, and you look at these photos of how it took place, you can see the actions within video games and others.” Authors of a new study funded by the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, say four factors motivate shooters:  * Early …

A Florida amateur body builder who admitted sending pipe bombs to prominent Democrats and CNN was sentenced to 20 years in prison Monday by a judge who concluded the bombs purposely were not designed to explode. Cesar Sayoc, 57, wept and crossed himself, appearing relieved, when U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff announced the sentence. Prosecutors had urged a life prison term for Sayoc, who pleaded guilty earlier this year after mailing 16 pipe bombs days before the midterm elections last fall. “He hated his victims, he wished them no good, but he was not so lost as to wish them dead, at least not by his own hand,” the judge said. The one-time stripper and pizza delivery man from Aventura, Florida, apologized to his victims, saying he was “so very sorry for what I did.” His targets included Hillary Clinton, former Vice President Joe Biden, several members of Congress, former President Barack Obama and actor Robert De Niro. Devices were also mailed to CNN offices in New York and Atlanta. Assistant Federal Defender Marcus Amelkin said Sayoc was obsessed with President Donald Trump and grew to believe Democrats were to blame for damage to his van, which was plastered …