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S. Korea Seeks to Boost Slow Olympic Ticket Sales

With five months to go before the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics open, the games are barely an afterthought for most South Koreans, with slow local ticket sales amid the biggest political scandal in years and a torrent of North Korean weapons tests.

South Korea wants more than a million spectators for the games, and it expects 70 percent to be locals. But if South Koreans are excited about the games, they didn’t fully show it during the first phase of ticket sales between February and June. There were 52,000 tickets sold — less than 7 percent of the 750,000 seats organizers aim to sell domestically.

International sales got off to a faster start, with more than half of the targeted 320,000 seats sold. But now there’s fear that an increasingly belligerent North Korea, which has tested two ICBMs and its strongest ever nuclear bomb in recent weeks, might keep foreign fans away from Pyeongchang, a ski resort town about 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of the world’s most heavily armed border.

South Korean Olympic organizers reopened online ticket sales on September 5 and hope for a late surge in domestic sales as the games draw closer. Locals purchased nearly 17,000 tickets on the first two days of resumed sales.

In a recent interview with The Associated Press, Lee Hee-beom, president of Pyeongchang’s organizing committee, said the North is highly unlikely to cause problems during the games because North Korean athletes could compete in the South. This is not yet clear, though. North Korea is traditionally weak at winter sports, though a figure skating pair has a chance to qualify and organizers are looking at ways to arrange special entries for North Korean athletes.

Lee also linked his optimism about ticket sales to South Korean experience in managing past global events, including the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, three Asian Games and the 2002 World Cup soccer tournament.

“This is a country that sold more than 8 million tickets even for the Expo 2012 in Yeosu,” said Lee, 68, a former Cabinet minister and corporate CEO. “We can definitely handle a million tickets.”

Local apathy

Organizers have overcome construction delays, local conflicts over venues, and a slow pace in attracting domestic sponsorships. They must now figure out how to create genuine local excitement for the games and boost ticket sales.

The 1988 Olympics in Seoul were easier. Those games marked South Korea’s arrival on the world stage as a growing industrial power and budding democracy.

In what’s now the world’s 11th-richest nation, there’s no longer an obvious public craving for the global attention brought by hosting a large sports event. There’s also worry over the huge cost of hosting the games and maintaining facilities that might go unused once the party leaves town.

Or perhaps South Koreans, after a whirlwind past year, are simply too tired to be enthusiastic about the Olympics. Millions took to the streets last year and early this year over a corruption scandal that eventually toppled the president from power and landed her in jail, where she remains during an ongoing trial.

It also doesn’t help that South Korea has never really had a strong winter sports culture, said Heejoon Chung, a sports science professor at Busan’s Dong-A University.

“I don’t think there are many people who are willing to stay outdoors in the cold for hours to watch races on snow,” he said.

Lee, the organizing committee president, is, unsurprisingly, more optimistic. Most South Koreans tend to wait until the last minute to buy tickets, and the atmosphere will improve once the Olympic torch relay arrives in South Korea in November, he said.

November is also when organizers will start to sell tickets offline at airports and train stations. Kim Dai-kyun, director general of communications for Pyeongchang’s organizing committee, said strong advertisement campaigns are planned for television, newspapers, movie theaters and on the internet.

Strong ticket sales are critical, because organizers are currently 300 billion won ($267 million) short of the 2.8 trillion won ($2.4 billion) they need to operate the games. Lee expects new sponsors to sign on and help erase the gap.

Organizers also aim to raise 174.6 billion won ($155 million) by selling about 1.07 million tickets, or 90 percent of the 1.18 million available seats. The 229,000 seats sold during the first phase of ticket sales equal about 21 percent of the target. While this might seem modest, Lee said Pyeongchang has been selling tickets at a faster pace than Sochi was at a similar point ahead of the 2014 Winter Olympics.

Cost estimate

 

The Olympics will cost about 14 trillion won ($12.4 billion) for South Korea, including the 11 trillion won ($9.7 billion) being spent to construct roads, railways and stadiums for the games. This is larger than the 8 million to 9 trillion won ($7 billion to $8 billion) Seoul projected as the overall cost when Pyeongchang won the bid in 2011.

Lodging could be another problem as tourists are already complaining about soaring room rates. Officials hope prices will stabilize after five new hotels are built by the end of the year, adding more than 2,000 rooms. The government is also planning to add hundreds of apartment rentals, and a 2,200-room cruise ship will serve as a floating hotel in the nearby port of Sokcho.

Organizers say a new high-speed rail line will link Seoul and Pyeongchang in an hour, starting in December, and will also allow travelers from the Seoul area to visit the games and return home the same day.
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Economy & business
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GOP Lawmakers Push Balanced Budget Mandate in Constitution

Lawmakers from 19 states are trying to develop a plan in Arizona this week for carrying out a growing, but unlikely, national effort to amend the Constitution to require a balanced U.S. budget, a long-held goal of conservatives who believe out-of-control spending is harming the nation.

The plan is to add an amendment to the Constitution through a convention — a longshot effort that has never been successfully done. All 27 amendments that have been adopted were proposed by Congress.

A balanced budget amendment is a core goal of conservative Republicans who have gained control of an increasing number of state Legislatures in recent years, now holding both chambers in 32 states. Backers include groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Koch brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity.

The effort also comes against the backdrop of deep turmoil in Washington over debt spending. Top congressional Democrats last week cut a deal with President Donald Trump to increase the federal debt limit, avoiding for now a fight that commonly causes divisions and threats of a government shutdown.

The goal of amendment backers is to eliminate the federal deficit and drive down the national debt, which is approaching $20 trillion. The current federal budget includes spending of about $4 trillion and has a shortfall of nearly $700 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Congress debated a balanced budget amendment in the early and mid-1990s, but it did not pass.

The lawmakers meeting this week are discussing a process that requires several steps. Thirty-four states must vote to adopt the amendment and convene a convention, but it still must be ratified by three-quarters of the states. Now, 27 states have active requests to convene a convention, all controlled by Republicans.

Arizona is hosting 75 delegates this week, all Republicans. Arizona state Rep. Kelly Townsend said efforts to invite Democratic states have not been successful. Proposed rules say delegates must be approved by both chambers of their state Legislature “so that they can legitimately vote and represent their state,” Townsend said.

Arguments against

Opponents of the amendment argue that a convention could go dangerously off-track and move into wholesale rewrites of other areas of the Constitution, such as gun rights, an abortion ban and term limits. They also say a balanced budget amendment could threaten the economy.

“By requiring a balanced budget every year, no matter the state of the economy, such an amendment would risk tipping weak economies into recession and making recessions longer and deeper, causing very large job losses,” according to a policy paper by the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

That’s because lawmakers would be forced to cut spending during recessions, removing a key way the federal government can boost economic activity.

Townsend said the three-quarters requirement to ratify the amendment limits the chances of a “runaway convention” where delegates could do a wholesale rewrite of the Constitution.

“Whatever we do when we close down and adjourn, our final product has to be viable. It’s not binding yet, and the states have to ratify it — that’s 38 of them,” she said.

Even some conservatives worry about a constitutional convention.

U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs, an Arizona Republican, routinely blocked legislation authorizing a convention during the four years he led the state Senate. He wrote a book in 2015, The Con of the Con Con, laying out his concerns about a convention.

Biggs wrote that if people believe the Constitution is fallible, “how do you know that the remedy you rely on, Article V, is not flawed as well?”
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Silicon Valley & Technology
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US Updates Self-driving Car Guidelines

The Trump administration is updating safety guidelines for self-driving cars in an attempt to clear barriers for automakers and tech companies who want to get test vehicles on the road.

U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao announced the new voluntary guidelines Tuesday during a visit to an autonomous vehicle testing facility at the University of Michigan.

The new guidelines update policies issued last fall by the Obama administration, which were also largely voluntary. Under Obama, automakers were asked to follow a 15-point safety assessment before putting test vehicles on the road. The new guidelines reduce that to a 12-point voluntary assessment and no longer require automakers to consider ethical or privacy issues.

The guidelines also make clear that the federal government, not states, determines whether autonomous vehicles are safe. That is the same guidance the Obama administration gave.

Chao emphasized that the guidelines aren’t meant to force automakers to use certain technology or meet stringent requirements; instead, they’re designed to clarify what autonomous vehicle developers should be considering before they put test cars on the road.

“This is a guidance document,” Chao said. “We want to make sure those who are involved understand how important safety is. We also want to ensure that the innovation and the creativity of our country remain.”

Not a ‘vision for safety’

But critics say the voluntary nature of the guidelines gives the government no authority to prevent dangerous experimental vehicles.

“This isn’t a vision for safety,” said John M. Simpson, head of privacy for a nonprofit progressive group called Consumer Watchdog. “It’s a road map that allows manufacturers to do whatever they want, wherever and whenever they want, turning our roads into private laboratories for robot cars with no regard for our safety.”

Regulators and lawmakers have been struggling to keep up with the pace of self-driving technology. They are wary of burdening automakers and tech companies with regulations that would slow innovation, but they need to ensure that the vehicles are safely deployed. There are no fully self-driving vehicles for sale, but autonomous cars with backup drivers are being tested in numerous states, including California, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

Autonomous vehicle developers, including automakers and tech companies like Google and Uber, say autonomous vehicles could dramatically reduce crashes but complain that the patchwork of state laws passed in recent years could hamper their deployment. Early estimates indicate there were more than 40,000 traffic fatalities in the U.S. last year; the government says 94 percent of crashes involve human error.

But safety advocates say that experimental cars could get on public roads too soon, and accidents could undermine public acceptance of the technology.

Broad safety goals

The new guidelines encourage companies to have processes in place for broad safety goals, such as making sure drivers are paying attention while using advanced assist systems. The systems are expected to detect and respond to people and objects both in and out of its travel path, “including pedestrians, bicyclists, animals and objects that could affect safe operation of the vehicle,” the guidelines say.

Chao said the guidelines will be updated again next year.

“The technology in this field is accelerating at a much faster pace than I think many people expected,” she said. “We want to make sure stakeholders who are developing this have the best information.”

Chao’s appearance came at a time of increased government focus on highly automated cars.

 

Earlier Tuesday, the National Transportation Safety Board was debating whether Tesla Inc.’s partially self-driving Autopilot system shared the blame for the 2016 death of a driver in Florida. The board ultimately said the driver’s inattention and a truck driver who made a left-hand turn in front of the Tesla were at fault for the crash, but it said automakers should incorporate safeguards that limit the use of automated vehicle control systems so drivers don’t rely on them too much.

Last week, the U.S. House voted to give the federal government the authority to exempt automakers from safety standards that don’t apply to the technology. If a company can prove it can make a safe vehicle with no steering wheel, for example, the federal government could approve that. The bill permits the deployment of up to 25,000 vehicles in its first year and 100,000 annually after that.

The Senate is now considering a similar bill.
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Abrams to Write, Direct ‘Star Wars: Episode IX’

J.J. Abrams is returning to Star Wars and will replace Colin Trevorrow as writer and director of Episode IX, pushing the film’s release date back seven months.

Disney announced Abrams’ return on Tuesday, a week after news broke of Trevorrow’s departure. After several high-profile exits by previous Star Wars directors, Lucasfilm is turning to the filmmaker who helped resurrect the franchise in the first place. Abrams will co-write the film with screenwriter Chris Terrio, who won an Oscar for adapting Argo and co-wrote Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

As the director of The Force Awakens, Abrams rebooted Star Wars to largely glowing reviews from fans and more than $2 billion at the box office. Abrams had said that would be his only film for the franchise, but he’s now been pulled back in.

 

Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy said that Abrams “delivered everything we could have possibly hoped for” on The Force Awakens and added, “I am so excited that he is coming back to close out this trilogy.”

This move also means Abrams will be the only director aside from Star Wars creator George Lucas to direct more than one Star Wars film.

Final installment

Star Wars: Episode IX was originally slated to hit theaters in May 2019, but in the wake of the shift it has officially been pushed back to a December 20, 2019, release. It is the final installment in the new “main” Star Wars trilogy that began with Abrams’ The Force Awakens in 2015 and will continue this December with director Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi.

Lucasfilm has had a number of public fallouts with Star Wars directors over the past few years.

 

Earlier this year, the young Han Solo spinoff film parted ways with director Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and swiftly replaced them with Ron Howard deep into production. In 2015, the company fired director Josh Trank from work on another Star Wars spinoff. And extensive reshoots on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story led to widespread speculation that director Gareth Edwards had been unofficially sidelined by Tony Gilroy.

 

News of Abrams’ return was greeted warmly by fans on social media Tuesday. He hasn’t directed or committing to directing another project since The Force Awakens, and instead had been focused on producing.

“I’m very much enjoying taking a moment. Since I’ve done the show Felicity, I’ve gone from project to project. So it’s been 20 years since I haven’t been prepping, casting, shooting, editing something,” Abrams told The Associated Press in March.

 

That moment, however brief, is over. For Abrams, it’s time to go back to the Millennium Falcon and that galaxy far, far away.
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Black-and-white Emmys Reflect TV’s Narrow Ethnic View

When cameras pan across the faces of anxious Emmy Award nominees at Sunday’s ceremony, TV viewers will see a record 12 African-Americans vying for comedy and drama series acting honors. But it’s a lop-sided outcome in the struggle for diversity.

Master of None star Aziz Ansari, who is of Indian heritage, is the sole Asian-American to be nominated for a continuing series lead or supporting role. Not a single Latino is included in the marquee acting categories.

An Emmy version of the 2015-16 #OscarsSoWhite protests would miss the point: Worthy films and performances from people of color were snubbed by movie academy voters, while insiders say the scant Emmy love for non-black minorities largely reflects closed TV industry doors.

“There are a lot of us, but because we haven’t gotten the opportunity to shine, you don’t know we’re around,” said Ren Hanami, an Asian-American actress who’s worked steadily in TV in smaller roles but found substantive, award-worthy parts elusive.

The hard-won progress made by the African-American stars and makers of Emmy-nominated shows including Black-ish and Atlanta has brought them creative influence, visibility and, this year, nearly a quarter (23.5 percent) of series cast nominations.

While that success is cheered by other ethnic groups, they say it illuminates how narrowly the entertainment industry views diversity despite the fact that Latinos and Asian-Americans are America’s first- and third-largest ethnic groups, respectively.

Failure assumed

“TV has never been brown-ish,” said actor-comedian Paul Rodriguez, riffing on the title of the hit African-American family comedy. He starred in the 1984-85 sitcom a.k.a. Pablo, one of the handful of short-lived, Hispanic-centered series, and wrote The Pitch, or How to Pitch a Latino Sitcom that Will Never Air, a 2015 stage show he’s reprising this month in Los Angeles because, he said, little has changed for Hispanics.

“They don’t put us on television enough for them to even know if it’s not working,” Rodriguez said. “They just assume it won’t work. And it goes on year after year. Our population keeps growing, and so does our frustration.”

That frustration is at critical mass, said Alex Nogales, president of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, which has for years pushed for more diversity on television.

“I’m tired of being the nice Mexican. It hasn’t taken us anywhere,” Nogales said. His new plan: Make sure networks and digital platforms such as Netflix know when Latinos — who have an estimated buying power of about $1.5 trillion and growing — are unhappy with their shows.

“Networks have brands that have been around for a very long time. We can damage that brand. We can do it by marching in front of their offices and embarrassing them. We can do it through social media,” Nogales said.

The financial bottom line is key, agreed Gary Mayeda, president of the Japanese American Citizens League that was established in 1929 and focuses on civil rights issues affecting Asian and Pacific Islander Americans and others.

“Diversity is profitable,” Mayeda said. “Cultural diversity takes nothing nor steals from any other group.”

He called for more and better market research about consumers, a point Rodriguez drives home in his play Pitch. In one scene, a network executive character uses a pie chart that purports to show why Latinos are a loser for TV: They don’t watch enough TV.

‘Look a little further’

Dispelling stereotypes and tired assumptions is familiar to Tiffany Smith-Anoa’i, CBS executive vice president for entertainment diversity, a department she created in 2009.

“I’m always saying diversity doesn’t mean black, it means so much more,” Smith-Anoa’i said. She’s used to encountering the industry attitude that casting one minority means the search is over.

” ‘Have your eyes look a little further,’ ” she advises producers. “It might take three phone calls to find an actor, writer or director [of color] instead of the two that you’re used to. But it definitely is worth it when you’re looking for real authenticity and fresh voices, and you get it.”

Brooklyn Nine-Nine actress Stephanie Beatriz knows what can happen when those with power are part of the solution.

The sitcom’s creators, Daniel J. Goor and Michael Schur, assembled people whose stories aren’t part of their own experience, she said, “but they want to help tell them. As straight white men, they are the strongest allies that underrepresented groups could ever have.”

Established actors of color and others with clout also are taking matters into their own hands. African-Americans are well into the ownership game — music star John Legend’s projects include the TV series Underground, Laurence Fishburne is a producer on Black-ish — and, increasingly, they’re not alone.

Daniel Dae Kim (Lost, Hawaii Five-0) started 3AD, a film and production company whose projects include The Good Doctor, a fall drama for ABC about a young surgeon (Freddie Highmore) with autism and savant syndrome. The company has nine other projects in active development, Kim said, aimed at representing the range of the human condition, ethnic and otherwise.

“It’s a conscious effort on my part, because this is the world that I’d like to see reflected,” said the Korean-born actor, who came to America as a child. “If my company can help be one color in the spectrum of the diversity of entertainment, then that’s the place I would like to hold.”
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Russian Director’s Arrest Hampers Premiere of ‘Nureyev’ Ballet

The arrest of prominent Russia’s Kirill Serebrennikov has complicated plans to stage the premiere of a ballet he’s directing about the late Soviet ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev at the Bolshoi Theatre, its director general said Tuesday.

It is also possible that the ballet Nureyev, originally due to premiere on July 11, will be performed in Serebrennikov’s absence, Vladimir Urin said.

Russian authorities detained Serebrennikov in August on charges of embezzling state funds, placing him under house arrest until October 19 pending trial.

Serebrennikov has a history of criticizing the authorities, but President Vladimir Putin denied last week that censorship or political pressure was behind his detention.

“I want to confirm that I strongly hope that we will definitely stage the premiere of Nureyev in the 2017-18 season,” Urin told reporters.

Urin said he had agreed with Serebrennikov before his arrest that they would meet again in September to decide on the time frame of the premiere.

Urin also said he had asked investigators to allow him to meet Serebrennikov while he is under house arrest.

“Now it [the premiere] depends on one person, on what decision Serebrennikov takes — whether he allows us to stage the ballet without him or asks us to wait until his situation has been clarified and that it go ahead in his presence,” Urin said.

The ballet was pulled in July just two days before it had been due to open. Urin said at the time the performers were not ready and that it would instead be staged next May.

Russia’s Investigative Committee has said it suspects Serebrennikov of embezzling at least 68 million rubles ($1.18 million) in state funds earmarked for an art project. Serebrennikov denies the charges.

Nureyev is viewed as one of the world’s most gifted male ballet dancers. His dramatic defection to the West in 1961 was a blow to Soviet prestige. He later served as director of the Paris Opera Ballet and died of AIDS in 1993 aged 54.
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Science & Health
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Former US CDC Director Takes Aim at Outbreaks, Heart Disease

Former U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Tom Frieden on Tuesday announced the start of a new public health initiative funded by private philanthropies to fight heart disease and stroke and shore up infectious disease capabilities around the world.

The new initiative, called Resolve, will be funded by $225 million in backing from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“There are proven strategies every country can use to prevent deaths from heart disease, stroke and epidemics — but progress has been painfully slow,” said Frieden, president and chief executive of Resolve, which will be housed at Vital Strategies, a New York-based global health organization that works in more than 60 countries.

For Frieden, the initiative allows him to take on some unfinished business. As part of the $5.4 billion in Ebola emergency funding for fiscal 2015, the CDC got $1.2 billion for international efforts to bolster countries’ capabilities to identify and fight infectious disease outbreaks.

“Those dollars will expire within the next year or so,” Frieden said in a telephone briefing.

To fight heart disease, the group will invest in efforts to reduce the amount of artery-clogging transfats from their menus, a reprise of Frieden’s efforts in 2006 as New York City health commissioner to ban transfats from restaurants.

They also aim to support countries’ efforts to reduce sodium and increase treatment of high blood pressure, which kills 10 million people every year, more than from all infectious diseases combined.

“If the world is able to increase our blood pressure control rate from the current 14 percent to 50 percent, reduce dietary sodium by 30 percent and get to zero transfats, we can save 100 million lives from cardiovascular disease over the next 30 years,” Frieden told reporters on a conference call.

The effort also continues Frieden’s push at the CDC to bolster global capabilities to identify and respond to infectious disease.

“The Ebola epidemic revealed how vulnerable we are to threats, and was a stark reminder of the human and economic costs caused by the absence of strong public health systems,” he said.

Resolve’s infectious disease arm attempts to plug gaps in low- and middle-income countries’ capabilities to respond to outbreaks. These efforts will focus on building disease tracking systems, laboratory networks and disease detectives “so new threats are identified quickly,” he said.
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UN: More Than a Billion People Live on Degraded Land, At Risk of Hunger

More than 1.3 billion people live on agricultural land that is deteriorating, putting them at risk of worsening hunger, water shortages and poverty, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) said Tuesday.

People’s use of the earth’s natural reserves has doubled in the last 30 years. Now a third of the planet’s land is severely degraded, and every year 15 billion trees and 24 billion tons of fertile soil are lost, UNCCD said.

“The land we live on is being strained to breaking point. Restoration and conservation are key to its survival,” UNCCD said in a report launched in Ordos, China.

UNCCD promotes good land stewardship, and is the only legally binding international agreement on land issues.

As land becomes less productive — which can happen through deforestation, overgrazing, flash floods and drought — people are forced to migrate to cities or abroad, there is greater likelihood of conflict over dwindling resources, and countries’ economies are hit, said UNCCD deputy executive secretary Pradeep Monga.

“If you don’t fix land degradation, we get into a cycle where people are losing their livelihoods, their homes, their fields,” he said.

And if the amount of productive land shrinks, less will be available to feed the world’s population, which is predicted to increase to more than 9 billion people by 2050, up from 7 billion today.

“If we can stop land degradation and green our deserts, we can easily become food secure,” Monga told Reuters.

Small choices, like families cutting back on food waste, as well as improvements to land management, smarter ways to farm, and national policies to stop degradation, can make a lot of difference, he added.

China, which introduced the world’s first law to prevent and control desertification in 2002, has greened hundreds of thousands of hectares of desert in Inner Mongolia resulting in more food, more jobs and a better life for the local people, Monga said.

“People’s confidence in their quality of life is back, and these places become much more habitable,” he said.

Drought degrades land, but if countries have good drought plans in place and act on them, then people can be protected from its worst impacts.

“We cannot prevent drought, but we can prevent the calamity and crisis that comes with that. It’s like facing a hurricane — we have time,” he said. “If we manage the land well, the world will become a much better place to live in every sense.”
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Economy & business
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Syria Signs Aleppo Power Plant Contract With Iran

Syria’s government signed a contract with an Iranian company on Tuesday to import five gas-fired power plants to the war-battered city of Aleppo, in an early sign of the major role Tehran is expected to play in Syria’s reconstruction.

The deal, reported by Syria’s state news agency SANA, is part of a broader understanding reached by Damascus and Tehran promising Iranian companies contracts to restore electrical infrastructure in Syria, Electricity Minister Zuhair Kharboutli said during a visit to Tehran.

The Aleppo contract was awarded to the Iranian firm Mabna and is valued at around 130 million euros, according to a Kharboutli statement carried Sunday by SANA.

Kharboutli also signed memorandums with Iranian Energy Minister Sattar Mahmoudi promising to import five plants to provide 540 megawatts of electricity to the coastal Latakia province, as well as to build wind and solar plants, and to restore plants in Deir el-Zour and Homs.

Iran has been an indispensable ally to President Bashar Assad, organizing militias from Lebanon to Afghanistan to fight for alongside his forces and sending its own Revolutionary Guard Corps to Syria to manage battles. Assad has been battling an uprising against his family’s 47-year dynasty since 2011.

Electricity generation plunges

The fighting has come at a tremendous cost to the nation’s infrastructure. Electricity generation dropped by more than half from 2010 to 2014, according to the latest figures available from the OECD’s International Energy Agency monitoring group.

Syrian troops retook eastern Aleppo at the end of last year with the help of Russian air raids and Iran-backed militias after years of heavy fighting. In the weeks after the fighting ended, electricity was cut off across the entire city, even in government-held neighborhoods, but residents say power has since been restored in some areas.

Most of the city’s power plants were in eastern Aleppo, which was captured by rebels in 2012 and suffered catastrophic destruction during the government’s drive to recapture it.

Assad’s government awarded a concession to Iran to operate a new cellular network for Syria in January. Other concessions signed to Iran include thousands of hectares of land for farming and oil and gas terminals, and the operation of a phosphate mine in central Syria, according to Iran’s official IRNA news agency.
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Science & Health
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Child Heart Patients Treated for Rare Surgical Infection

At least a dozen children who had heart surgery at Children’s Hospital New Orleans between late May and July have infected incisions, apparently from contaminated equipment.

The hospital’s chief medical officer says the infections were linked to a machine that regulates a patient’s temperature during heart surgery.

Dr. John Heaton says the machine was replaced and patients are responding to intravenous antibiotics.

He says a handful who haven’t shown symptoms will see doctors this week, to make sure.

Heaton says the hospital’s paying for treatment and related costs, such as parents’ hotel rooms and meals.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes the bacteria in question as common in water, soil and dust. It says contaminated medical devices can infect the skin and soft tissues under the skin.
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