Category: General

U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and the head of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Friday asked AT&T and Verizon Communications to delay the planned Jan. 5 introduction of new 5G wireless service over aviation safety concerns.

In a letter Friday seen by Reuters, Buttigieg and FAA Administrator Steve Dickson asked AT&T Chief Executive John Stankey and Verizon Chief Executive Hans Vestberg for a delay of no more than two weeks as part of a “proposal as a near-term solution for advancing the co-existence of 5G deployment in the C-Band and safe flight operations.”

The aviation industry and FAA have raised concerns about potential interference of 5G with sensitive aircraft electronics like radio altimeters that could disrupt flights.

“We ask that your companies continue to pause introducing commercial C-Band service for an additional short period of no more than two weeks beyond the currently scheduled deployment date of January 5,” the letter says.

Verizon and AT&T both said they received the letter and were reviewing it. Earlier Friday the two companies accused the aerospace industry of seeking to hold C-Band spectrum deployment “hostage until the wireless industry agrees to cover the costs of upgrading any obsolete altimeters.”

Buttigieg and Dickson said under the framework “commercial C-band service would begin as planned in January with certain exceptions around priority airports.”

The FAA and the aviation industry would identify priority airports “where a buffer zone would permit aviation operations to continue safely while the FAA completes its assessments of the interference potential.”

The government would work to identify “mitigations for all priority airports” to enable most “large commercial aircraft to operate safely in all conditions.” That would allow deployment around “priority airports on a rolling basis,” aiming to ensure activation by March 31 barring unforeseen issues.

The carriers, which won the spectrum in an $80 billion government auction, previously agreed to precautionary measures for six months to limit interference.

On Thursday, trade group Airlines for America asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to halt deployment of new 5G wireless service around many airports, warning thousands of flights could be disrupted.

Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, representing 50,000 flight attendants at 17 airlines, called the Transportation Department proposal “the right move to successfully implement 5G without using the traveling public (and the crews on their flights) as guinea pigs for two systems that need to coexist without questions for safety.”

Wireless industry group CTIA said 5G is safe and spectrum is being used in about 40 other countries.

House Transportation Committee chair Peter DeFazio on Friday backed the airline group petition warning “we can’t afford to experiment with aviation safety.”

Source: Voice of America

This year’s Consumer Electronics Show will end a day earlier than planned, the organizer of the global technology and gadget show said, after companies including Amazon and General Motors dropped out of attending the Las Vegas event in person because of omicron concerns.

“The step was taken as an additional safety measure to the current health protocols that have been put in place for CES,” event organizer Consumer Technology Association said on Friday, announcing the event will now end on January 7.

The spread of the omicron variant has led to a sharp jump in COVID-19 infections across the world, making many reconsider their travel plans and leading to thousands of flight cancellations.

The number of new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. has doubled in eight days to a record of 587,143 new cases on Thursday, according to a Reuters tally.

As worries over the new variant loom, many companies have withdrawn from presenting in-person at the event, planned both virtually and in-person, that begins on January 5 with more than 2,200 exhibitors.

Over the last few days, a host of firms including Advanced Micro Devices, Proctor & Gamble, Google, and Facebook parent Meta Platforms have also dropped their in-person plans.

Sony Group’s Sony Electronics has said it will have limited staffing and attendees at the event.

All attendees in Las Vegas will be required to be fully vaccinated and masked. COVID-19 test kits will also be provided at the venue, according to CTA’s statement.

Source: Voice of America

Record snowfalls in the western United States that closed roads and caused flight delays also brought some good news for drought-hit California on Thursday, with officials saying the state’s snowpack is now well above normal.

After a string of mountain blizzards, snowpack measured at Phillips Station in the Sierra Nevada stands at more than 200% of its average for this date, according to the first measurement of the season by California’s Department of Water Resources (DWR). The Sierra Nevada supplies almost a third of the state’s water needs, once the snow runs off to reservoirs and aqueducts.

Statewide, snowpack is 160% of its average, the DWR said.

“We could not have asked for a better December in terms of Sierra snow and rain,” said Karla Nemeth, the director of the DWR.

Droughts in California are growing more frequent and intense with climate change, according to scientists, threatening the state’s already tenuous water supply and creating conditions for dangerous wildfires.

Despite the precipitation-heavy end to 2021, the DWR warned against complacency.

The state would still have to see “significant” precipitation in January and February to make up for the two previous winters, the state’s fifth- and second-driest water years on record, the DWR said.

“California continues to experience evidence of climate change with bigger swings between wet and dry years and even extreme variability within a season,” said Sean de Guzman, manager of DWR’s Snow Surveys and Water Supply Forecasting Unit.

He added that a wet start to the winter season did not necessarily mean precipitation in 2022 would end above average.

Source: Voice of America

South Africa has lifted a midnight-to-4 a.m. curfew on people’s movement, effective immediately, saying the country has passed the peak of its fourth COVID-19 wave driven by the omicron variant, a government statement said Thursday.

However, wearing a face mask in public places remains mandatory. Failure to wear a mask in South Africa when required is a criminal offense.

The country made the curfew and other changes based on the trajectory of the pandemic, levels of vaccination in the country and available capacity in the health sector, according to a press release issued by Mondli Gungubele, a minister in the presidency.

South Africa is at the lowest of its five-stage COVID-19 alert levels.

“All indicators suggest the country may have passed the peak of the fourth wave at a national level,” a statement from the special cabinet meeting held earlier Thursday said.

Data from the Department of Health showed a 29.7% decrease in the number of new cases detected in the week ending December 25 compared with the number of cases found in the previous week, at 127,753, the government said.

South Africa, with close to 3.5 million infections and 91,000 deaths, has been the worst-hit country in Africa during the pandemic on both counts.

Besides lifting the restrictions on public movement, the government also ruled that alcohol shops with licenses to operate after 11 p.m. local time may revert to full license conditions, a welcome boon for traders and businesses hard hit by the pandemic and looking to recover during the festive season.

“While the omicron variant is highly transmissible, there have been lower rates of hospitalization than in previous waves,” the statement said.

Source: Voice of America

The World Health Organization is warning that the rapid circulation of the omicron and delta variants of the coronavirus is leading to a tsunami of cases, severe disease and surging deaths among the unvaccinated.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Wednesday that while science had led to the development of COVID-19 vaccines, the global death toll from the disease has kept rising.

In 2020, the World Health Organization reported 1.8 million deaths globally, a number that pales in comparison to the additional 3.5 million deaths reported in 2021.

Tedros said the reason for the climb was that politics has too often trumped the need to work together to defeat this pandemic.

“Populism, narrow nationalism and hoarding of health tools, including masks, therapeutics, diagnostics and vaccines, by a small number of countries undermined equity and created the ideal conditions for the emergence of new variants,” he said.

Tedros condemned the misinformation and disinformation that often has been spread by a small number of people for undermining science and trust in lifesaving health tools. He said these twin evils have driven vaccine hesitancy and are to blame for the disproportionately large number of unvaccinated people dying from the delta and omicron strains of the coronavirus.

He warned that the virus that causes COVID-19 would continue to evolve and threaten the health system if nations did not improve their collective response. He said it was time to rise above short-term nationalism and protect populations and economies against future variants by addressing global vaccine inequity.

“Ending health inequity remains the key to ending the pandemic,” Tedros said. “As this pandemic drags on, it is possible that new variants could evade our countermeasures and become fully resistant to current vaccines or past infection, necessitating vaccine adaptations.”

The WHO chief said it was time to banish the politics of populism and self-interests that have been derailing the global response to the pandemic. He asked everyone to make a New Year’s resolution to get behind WHO’s campaign to vaccinate 70 percent of the world’s population by the middle of 2022.

Source: Voice of America

The U.S. trade deficit in goods mushroomed to the widest ever in November as imports of consumer goods shot to a record ahead of the second straight COVID-19-distorted holiday shopping season along with industrial supplies, while exports slipped after a historic gain a month earlier.

The goods trade gap reported Wednesday by the Commerce Department is likely to remain historically high as long as the coronavirus pandemic continues, economists said. The emergence of the fast-spreading omicron variant of COVID-19 that has driven U.S. and global caseloads to a record this week may exacerbate it further in the near term if it limits American consumers’ spending on services and restokes demand for imported goods.

Omicron also stands as a downside risk in the housing market. A reading of pending home sales also out Wednesday showed an unexpected drop in November, and while that data largely predated omicron’s ascendance in the United States, the highly contagious new variant could further limit home sales in the near term, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) said.

The goods trade deficit widened last month by 17.5% to $97.8 billion from $83.2 billion in October, Census Bureau data showed. That exceeds the previous record deficit set in September of $97 billion and may damp optimism that trade might finally add to U.S. economic growth this quarter for the first time in more than a year.

Imports rose by 4.7% with industrial supplies leading the way with an increase of $5.7 billion to $63.2 billion, followed by consumer goods rising by $2.9 billion to just shy of $67 billion as retailers rushed to fill store shelves ahead of Christmas. Both were record highs.

“The emergence of the omicron variant may further ignite demand for imported goods if services activity is restricted” in the first quarter of 2022, Nancy Vanden Houten, lead economist at Oxford Economics, wrote after Wednesday’s report.

Goods exports, meanwhile, declined 2.1%, with weakness across the board outside of a 4.3% increase in food exports. The drop was led by declines of $1.4 billion in industrial supplies and $1.3 billion in capital goods.

The worldwide surge of coronoavirus cases to a record in recent days – including a record U.S. caseload – may weigh on global demand in the months ahead, risking an even wider trade gap, Vanden Houten said.

The so-called Advance Indicators report also showed wholesale inventories climbed 1.2% last month, while retail inventories increased 2.0%. Retail inventories, excluding autos, which go into the calculation of gross domestic product, edged up by 1.3% to $465.2 billion, the latest in a string of record-high readings.

The economy grew at a 2.3% annualized rate in the third quarter, a step-down from earlier in the year, but activity has rebounded in the fourth quarter with a consensus among economists building around a growth rate of 6% to 7% in the final three months of 2021.

Trade has been a drag on gross domestic product growth for five straight quarters, while inventories added to output in the third quarter.

Earlier this month, the Commerce Department reported a sharp reduction in the overall trade deficit – including services – for October, which had generated some optimism that trade may contribute to the improvement in output in the final quarter of the year. The big reversal to a record goods trade gap in November may prompt a rethinking of that.

Economists at Action Economics have dialed back their fourth-quarter GDP growth estimate to 6.5% from 7.0%, with exports now seen subtracting from growth rather than adding to it as had been previously expected. Economists at JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, meanwhile, left their estimates intact at 7%.

Meanwhile, contracts to buy U.S. previously owned homes fell unexpectedly in November as limited housing stock and lofty prices crimped activity, and the explosion of new coronavirus cases poses a risk to the housing market headed into 2022.

NAR said its Pending Home Sales Index, based on signed contracts, fell 2.2% last month to 122.4. Pending home sales were lower in all four regions.

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast contracts, which typically become final sales after a month or two, would rise 0.5% in November.

“There was less pending home sales action this time around, which I would ascribe to low housing supply, but also to buyers being hesitant about home prices,” said Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist.

Looking ahead, Yun said Omicron poses a risk to the housing market’s performance, as buyers and sellers are sidelined, and home construction is delayed.

Source: Voice of America