G7 Culture Ministers Discuss Threat of Cultural Trafficking
During their first-ever formal meeting, culture ministers representing Group of Seven industrialized nations on Thursday decried the looting and trafficking of cultural treasures by terror groups while experts acknowledged that objects believed looted by extremists are starting to surface in the marketplace.
The topic was on the table both during technical sessions by experts and law enforcement and during the afternoon meeting of G-7 cultural ministers and top officials. The gathering in Florence came a week after the U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution co-authored by Italy and France warning that the destruction of cultural treasures may constitute war crimes.
Now, the discussion is turning not just to the destruction of cultural treasures, as seen in Syria and Afghanistan, but also to their trafficking as a source of funding to support the activities of extremist groups.
Heritage sites included
U.S. Ambassador Bruce Wharton, acting undersecretary for public diplomacy, told reporters that the ministers discussed the grave risk posed by “looting and trafficking at the hands of terrorist organizations and criminal networks.”
He cited the pillaging of heritage sites in Timbuktu in Mali, Palmyra in Syria and the Mosul museum in Iraq, which experts are just beginning to assess after 2 years being under control of Islamic State group extremists.
“Looting, trafficking and the illicit sale of cultural heritage objects have helped ISIS-Daesh finance its operations, along with trafficking in drugs, weapons and people,” Wharton said.
German Minister of State Maria Boehmer said “terrorism feeds on illegal trafficking of cultural treasures” and applauded moves by the International Criminal Court to make “the targeted destruction of cultural property a war crime.”
“’The barbaric destruction by terrorist groups is targeting people’s identity,” she said.
Details are few
U.S. Department of Homeland Security Deputy Assistant Director Ray Villanueva said developments in identifying artifacts looted by extremists “are very fresh … happening as we speak.” Villanueva said providing details, including of the countries of origin of looted objects, could compromise the ongoing investigations.
“However, I can tell you in general that [through the] internet [and] art dealers we are seeing artifacts coming up from different places,” Villanueva said, adding that the public, museums and art dealers were key to providing law enforcement with information.
Milan lawyer Manlio Frigo, who represents museums and art dealers, acknowledged that not all the trafficking in war zones was at the hands of extremists. Refugees crossing the border from Syria have been seen with plastic bags containing artifacts, Frigo said.
Looting for profit
Director-General Irina Bokova of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization said there is plenty of evidence that extremists are looting for profit.
A group of partners that includes Interpol and the world customs organization are creating a common database and sharing information in a bid to recover the treasures, Bokova said.
“Every single day something happens somewhere that testifies to the fact that it is a systematic, I would say, looting of sites to engage with the illicit trafficking,” she said.
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Study: Solar Wind Turned Mars into Dry, Cold Planet
Particles blasting out from the sun stripped away what was once a thick, Earth-like atmosphere on Mars, leaving behind a dry and cold world inhospitable to life, researchers said in a study released Thursday.
About 4 billion years ago when life was starting on Earth, Mars also had a dense atmosphere, which kept the planet warm and wet, according to the study in this week’s issue of the journal Science.
Over time, energized particles in the solar wind stripped off Mars’ atmosphere, leaving a thin and still-shrinking envelope of gases around the planet, measurements by one of NASA’s Mars-orbiting spacecraft show.
“The lines of evidence point to the period between about 3.7 billion years ago and 4 billion years ago as when Mars went bad,” lead researcher Bruce Jakosky, with the University of Colorado in Boulder, said by phone.
Conditions on early Mars could have supported microbes, Jakosky said, but as the thick atmosphere around the planet disappeared, “it went from a wet planet that could support life at the surface to the cold, dry planet we see today.”
The findings offer insight into why a planet that started off similar to Earth ended up so different and what conditions could make planets beyond the solar system suitable for life.
The data was collected by the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, or MAVEN, spacecraft, one of eight satellites and rovers currently operating around or on Mars.
Scientists are not sure why Mars’ atmosphere became vulnerable to the solar wind, but suspect it had to do with the loss of the planet’s magnetic field.
Earth, by contrast, has a liquid metal core that generates a protective magnetic shield that deflects the solar wind.
The research, sponsored by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is based on measurements of the chemical element argon at different altitudes in the thinning atmosphere around Mars, which MAVEN has been assessing since October 2015.
The measurements show that Mars has lost 66 percent of its argon since the planet formed some 4.6 billion years ago.
Jakosky and colleagues extrapolated from that figure to estimate the loss rate of other atmospheric gases, including water vapor.
Mars’ atmosphere was and is dominated by carbon dioxide.
“It is the answer we expected in some ways,” Jakosky said. “It meshes well with everything else that’s going on on Mars.”
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Twitter Eases 140-character Limit in Replies
Twitter has found more creative ways to ease its 140-character limit without officially raising it.
Now, the company says that when you reply to someone – or to a group – usernames will no longer count toward those 140 characters. This will be especially helpful with group conversations, where replying to two, three or more users at a time could be especially difficult with the character constraints.
When users reply, the names of the people they are replying to will be on top of the text of the actual tweet, rather than a part of it.
Last year, Twitter said it would stop counting photos, videos, quote tweets, polls and GIF animations toward the character limit. Twitter also said it would stop counting usernames, but the change did not go into effect until now.
Twitter, which has been struggling to attract new users, has been trying to appeal to both proponents and opponents by sticking to the current limit while allowing more freedom to express thoughts, or rants, through images and other media.
Twitter’s character limit was created so that tweets could fit into a single text message, back in the heyday of SMS messaging. But now, most people use Twitter through its mobile app. There isn’t the same technical constraint, just a desire on Twitter’s part to stay true to its roots.
Of course, there are ways to get around the limit , such as sending out multi-part tweets, or taking screenshots of text typed elsewhere.
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Space Station Debris Shield Floats Away During Spacewalk
A 5-foot (1.5-meter) debris shield being installed on the International Space Station floated away Thursday during a spacewalk by two veteran U.S. astronauts, a NASA TV broadcast showed.
Peggy Whitson, who became the world’s most experienced female spacewalker during the outing, told ground control teams that a bag containing the debris shield floated away at about 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT).
At the time, Whitson, 57, and station commander Shane Kimbrough, 49, were about midway through a planned 6.5-hour spacewalk to prepare a docking port for upcoming commercial space taxis and to tackle other maintenance tasks.
It was the eighth spacewalk for Whitson, who surpassed the 50-hour, 40-minute record total cumulative spacewalk time by a female astronaut previously held by NASA astronaut Sunita Williams.
Cameras on the station tracked the debris shield bag as it sailed into the distance. NASA said engineers determined it posed no safety threat to the astronauts or to the facility, a $100 billion research laboratory that flies about 250 miles (402 kilometers) above Earth.
Review planned later
No other details were immediately available about how the shield, which weighs 18 pounds (8 kilograms) and measures 63.6 by 23.4 by 2.6 inches (162 by 59 by 7 centimeters) was lost.
“Teams are focused on completing the [spacewalk] and will review the events as they unfolded after it is completed,” NASA spokesman Dan Huot wrote in an email.
Whitson and Kimbrough were working on a docking port that will eventually be used by space taxis being developed by Boeing and privately owned Space Exploration Technologies.
The pair installed three other debris shields during their spacewalk and fitted a temporary cover over the docking port where the lost shield would have gone. While not a perfect fit, the cover will help protect the station from impacts and provide thermal shielding, NASA said.
Spacewalkers occasionally lose small items like nuts and screws, but rarely do large objects slip away. The last such occasion was in 2008, when an astronaut lost hold of her tool bag while struggling with a jammed solar panel.
The lost debris shield will eventually be pulled back into Earth’s atmosphere and burn up. Until then, it joins more than 21,000 other pieces of orbiting trash and debris that are big enough to be tracked by radar and cameras on Earth.
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Study: Prior Dengue Infection May Make Zika Worse
Zika, like dengue fever and West Nile virus, is in a family of mosquito-borne viruses called flaviviruses. A new study suggests that Zika can be much worse for people previously infected with another flavivirus. In pregnant women, it may put their babies at higher risk for serious birth defects, including microcephaly, a condition in which infants are born with abnormally small heads.
The study highlights the potentially deadly effects of a phenomenon called antibody dependent enhancement, or ADE.
In the study of mice, researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York gave the rodents human antibodies to dengue virus from 141 infected individuals. Another group of animals received antibodies from 146 individuals with West Nile virus. The mice were then exposed to Zika virus.
Only 21 percent of mice with the antibodies from dengue patients survived being infected with Zika. Similar results were reported in mice that received antibodies from West Nile patients.
Those results were compared to mice that received human antibodies that were not in the family of flaviviruses that includes Zika, dengue and West Nile. All of those animals lived. Another group of mice with no human antibodies also were able to fight off the illness when they were infected with Zika.
Virologist Jean Lim, a co-author of the study published in the magazine Science, said “Our studies may help to explain the severe Zika manifestations that we observed in the recent Zika-infected areas such as South America, where dengue virus is endemic.”
The study also found that injecting the mice with high doses of dengue survivor antibodies made Zika less severe. It was the mice that were given smaller doses of antibodies that became sicker and died of the mosquito-borne illness.
Lim said she thinks that is because more potent flavivirus antibodies are protective against Zika. She believes weaker flavivirus antibodies interact with Zika, helping to infect vulnerable cells.
Fewer antibodies seem to act in the same way that an original mild case of dengue can make a second infection much worse.
Zika virus is not confined to the Americas. It originated in Africa, but has spread to India and parts of Asia.
More than one-third of the world’s population lives in areas where dengue in endemic. As Zika virus spreads, so does the fear of more serious infections.
Lim told VOA it is possible that ADE — antibody dependent enhancement — could be happening in humans.
“I think in a subset of humans, yes, ” she said. “Does it explain all the cases of microcephaly? I really can’t answer that.”
Lim is looking to explore the possible connection between ADE and severe birth defects.
There are already vaccines against dengue, and Lim says one possibility to prevent Zika’s serious complications would be to develop a dengue vaccine that also protects against Zika.
Vaccines against Zika virus are now in clinical trials.
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The Long Now Thinks Very Far Ahead
In the U.S., people often measure “success” as fifteen minutes of fame, or a blockbuster financial quarter. This focus on short term results doesn’t always build the skills needed to solve long-term problems, such as reducing disease outbreaks or maintaining species diversity. Concerns about the nation’s short attention span have prompted some visionaries to create a playfully serious way to think ahead. From San Francisco, Shelley Schlender reports about the Long Now Foundation.
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First Afghan Women’s Orchestra Tries to Change Attitudes
Afghanistan’s first – and only – all-female symphony is trying to change attitudes in a deeply conservative country where many see music as immoral, especially for women.
The symphony’s two conductors show how difficult that can be, but also how satisfying success is.
One of them, Negin Khpolwak, was supported by her father when she joined the Afghanistan National Institute of Music and then became part of its girls’ orchestra, called Zohra. But the rest of her family was deeply against it. Her uncles cut off ties with her father.
“They told him he is not their brother anymore,” said Khpolwak, now 20. “Even my grand-mother disowned my father.”
Khwolpak had learned about the music institute at the orphanage in Kabul where she spent most of her life. Her father sent her to the orphanage because he was afraid for her safety in their home province of Kunar in eastern Afghanistan, an area where Taliban militants are active.
The institute is one of the only schools in Afghanistan where girls and boys share classrooms, and it draws its students from the ranks of orphanages and street children, giving them a chance at a new life. Khpolwak studied piano and drums before becoming the orchestra’s conductor.
First international tour
More than 30 girls aged 12 to 20 play in Zohra, which is named after a goddess of music in Persian literature. In January, the orchestra, which performs traditional Afghan and Western Classical music, had its first international tour, appearing at the World Economic Forum in Davos and four other cities in Switzerland and Germany.
“The formation of the orchestra is aimed at sending a positive message to the community, to send a positive message to the girls, to encourage families and girls to join the music scene of the country,” said Ahmad Naser Sarmast, the institute’s founder and director.
Sarmast has experienced firsthand the militants’ hatred of music. In 2014, a Taliban suicide bomber blew himself up at a concert Sarmast was attending. He was wounded and a German man in the audience died.
The Zohra orchestra was created in 2014 when one of the institute’s students, a girl named Meena, asked Sarmast if there could be a group where girls could play together. Sarmast leaped at the idea.
Since then, Meena has disappeared. Last year, the 7th grader told the school she had to attend her sister’s wedding in her family’s village in eastern Nangarhar province. She never returned, a sign of how tenuous people’s situation is in a country where war rages, communications are poor and poverty is rife. Sarmast said the school has not been in contact with her, but he’s hopeful she’ll return to the school and Zohra.
The orchestra’s other conductor, 18-year-old Zarifa Adiba, faced resistance from her family just as Khpolwak did.
Societal barriers
When she joined the school in 2014, she only told her mother and step-father, not her four brothers and her uncles, because she knew they would disapprove. Her mother and step-father tried to tell them about the importance of music – without mentioning Adiba – but they weren’t convinced.
“If my brothers and uncles had known about me learning or playing music, they 100 percent would have stopped me because they had a very negative view toward music,” Adiba said.
Her family’s opposition to music was so intense she hesitated to join the orchestra’s trip to Davos. But she ended up going, and as one of the conductors she was widely interviewed in the media there and appeared on TV.
When she returned, her uncles were the first to congratulate her. Two of her brothers are still not happy about her involvement with music but now she has the support of the rest of the family, she has more courage, and she said she is sure her brothers will eventually come around.
“I changed my family, now it is time for other girls to change their families because I am sure that slowly all Afghanistan will change,” she said.
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Trove of Susan B. Anthony Letters Lands at New York College
A college in Susan B. Anthony’s western New York hometown has acquired a trove of 19th-century letters she wrote to a fellow leader in the women’s rights movement.
The University of Rochester says the collection originally owned by Isabella Beecher Hooker includes dozens of letters from fellow suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The collection is now housed in the university’s Department of Rare Books, Special Collections and Preservation.
The letters were written between 1869 and 1880 to Hooker, a member of a prominent Connecticut family.
The letters were found last year in a wooden box stored at the Bloomfield, Connecticut, home of George and Libbie Merrow. The letters were passed down through the family of George Merrow, whose grandfather owned the former Hooker house in Hartford.
your ad hereFollowing the Footsteps of Generations Along Natchez Trace
In addition to visiting the hallowed battlesite grounds at Vicksburg National Military Park, national parks traveler Mikah Meyer also had the chance to visit several other national park sites in Mississippi, each with its own unique history.
Natchez National Historical Park
Natchez National Historical Park, in the southern part of the state, protects the sites and structures associated with the people of Natchez and its surrounding area — from its earliest inhabitants through the modern era.
The name is derived from the Natchez American Indians who lived along the Mississippi River at the time of European exploration.
But the area is also known for its pre-Civil War history.
Pre-Civil War South
Mikah, who’s on a mission to visit all of the more than 400 national parks, was able to learn about that history and other aspects of life in the antebellum South through many of the city’s preserved properties.
“It’s a historical park, so it’s kind of like the other historical parks in that it’s basically the old portion of the town of Natchez and a bunch of various sites,” he explained.
William Johnson House
Among those sites is the home of William Johnson, who was a free black barber.
“It was interesting to learn about his story,” Mikah recounted. “He lived in Natchez before the Civil War as a free black man and had his own house and his own business as a barber.”
According to the National Park Service, Johnson used bricks from buildings destroyed in the infamous tornado of 1840 to construct the State Street estate and commercial business area. The family lived in the upper stories of the house, while the first floor was rented out to merchants. The house allows visitors to learn more about the life of free African Americans in the pre-Civil War South.
After the fall of Vicksburg in 1863, the Union Army occupied the city of Natchez, enforced the Emancipation Proclamation – which freed all slaves in the rebellious states, and put an end to the tragic sale of enslaved people at the Forks of the Road, one of the largest slave markets in the South.
Subsequently, thousands of formerly enslaved men from the Natchez area joined the U.S. Army and Navy.
Driving through history
It would seem unlikely that a modern-looking expressway would be considered a site worth preserving, but that’s exactly what the National Park Service has done with Natchez Trace Parkway. The 715-kilometer roadway once was the main way settlers and travelers reached Natchez from the Tennessee area.
Driving north on that scenic parkway, Mikah said he understood why the Park Service had chosen to preserve it.
“I drove mile zero of that, all the way up to mile 15, just to get a taste of what that was like,” Mikah recounted. “It’s what a highway in America would look like if there were no Dairy Queens or gas stations on it. It’s just the road, grass and trees, so it’s really pretty — a really beautiful driving experience.”
While it was cold and wintry up north, the grass along the parkway was a vibrant green. “The trees were starting to bloom, so I can only imagine it in peak spring,” Mikah added.
Alongside much of the parkway is the Natchez Trace National Scenic Trail, a historic forest trail that roughly follows sections of the paved road through the states of Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee.
Also known as the “Old Natchez Trace,” the trail was created and used for centuries by Native Americans, and later, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, by European and American explorers, traders and emigrants.
Today, visitors like Mikah can still walk those trails and experience the area’s natural beauty.
The “Sunken Trace”
Picturesque land and waterscapes near the trail offer visitors recreational opportunities like hiking, biking, horseback riding and camping.
And Mikah said you can literally see history when you walk the trail, worn down by hundreds of thousands, even millions, of footsteps.
“One of the ways that distinguishes this is there are paths that are very clearly beaten down in that you have essentially a wall on either side of you.”
In the space of a few days, Mikah immersed himself in several fascinating aspects of his country’s history. He says he looks forward to exploring more of it when he visits two more national park sites in the northern part of Mississippi sometime in the near future.
In the meantime, he invites you to learn more about his travels across America by visiting his website, Facebook and Instagram.
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Vote to Repeal US Broadband Privacy Rules Sparks Interest in VPNs
The vote by the U.S. Congress to repeal rules that limit how internet service providers can use customer data has generated renewed interest in an old internet technology: virtual private networks, or VPNs.
VPNs cloak a customer’s web-surfing history by making an encrypted connection to a private server, which then searches the Web on the customer’s behalf without revealing the destination addresses. VPNs are often used to connect to a secure business network, or in countries such as China and
Turkey to bypass government restrictions on Web surfing.
Privacy-conscious techies are now talking of using VPNs as a matter of course to guard against broadband providers collecting data about which internet sites and services they are using.
“Time to start using a VPN at home,” Vijaya Gadde, general counsel of Twitter Inc, said in a tweet on Tuesday that was retweeted by Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey.
Gadde was not immediately available for comment. Twitter said she was commenting in her personal capacity and not on behalf of the company.
The Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives voted 215-205 on Tuesday to repeal rules adopted last year by the Federal Communications Commission under then-President Barack Obama to require broadband providers to obtain consumer consent before using their data for advertising or marketing.
The U.S. Senate, also controlled by Republicans, voted 50-48 last week to reverse the rules. The White House said President Donald Trump supported the repeal measure.
Supporters of the repeal said the FCC unfairly required internet service providers like AT&T Inc, Comcast Corp and Verizon Communications Inc to do more to protect customers’ privacy than websites like Alphabet Inc’s
Google or Facebook Inc.
Critics said the repeal would weaken consumers’ privacy protections.
VPN advantages, drawbacks
Protected data includes a customer’s web-browsing history, which in turn can be used to discover other types of information, including health and financial data.
Some smaller broadband providers are now seizing on privacy as a competitive advantage. Sonic, a California-based broadband provider, offers a free VPN service to its customers so they can connect to its network when they are not home. That ensures that when Sonic users log on to wi-fi at a coffee shop or hotel, for example, their data is not collected by that establishment’s
broadband provider.
“We see VPN as being important for our customers when they’re not on our network. They can take it with them on the road,” CEO Dane Jasper said.
In many areas of the country, there is no option to choose an independent broadband provider and consumers will have to pay for a VPN service to shield their browsing habits.
Private Internet Access, a VPN provider, took a visible stand against the repeal measure when it bought a full-page ad in the New York Times on Sunday. But the company, which boasts about a million subscribers, potentially stands to benefit from the legislation, acknowledged marketing director Caleb Chen.
VPNs have drawbacks. They funnel all user traffic through one point, so they are an attractive target for hackers and spies. The biggest obstacle to their routine use as a privacy safeguard is that they can be too much of a hassle to set up for many customers. They also cost money.
“The further along toward being a computer scientist you have to be to use a VPN, the smaller a portion of the population we’re talking about that can use it,” said Ernesto Falcon, a legislative counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which opposed the bill.
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The High Cost of Incivility at Work
Workplaces have become less civil spaces than they once were. People don’t say please and thank you. Employees send e-mails and texts during meetings, ignoring the speaker and tuning out of the discussion. Others take too much credit for collaborative work.
The nasty looks and belittling comments reached a point at law firm Bryan Cave, in Irvine, California, that the partners held a civility workshop.
Managing partner Stuart Price says working together toward a common goal set the right tone for the workshop, as the employees set up a code of civil behavior. The firm has the 10 points of the code displayed on a granite block in the lobby.
“I think two items in the code really stand out for me,” Price said. “No. 3 is we treat each other equally and with respect, even if the conditions are very difficult. Then the last item in our code is we address incivility. If you don’t address incivility, then the plaque just becomes a piece of granite, but it doesn’t have life.”
He says they no longer let uncivil behavior slide.
“The first step for us along the way is to address it with the person, privately, just talk about what happened,” he said. “If the pattern continues with that specific person, we will have further conversations and if it’s particularly problematic, we might terminate them.”
Creating a civil work environment has impacted the firm in many positive ways.
“A year after we had this workshop, we won Best Place to Work in Orange County in the large company category,” Price said. “In terms of performance, it seems to me that when we’re most focused on how we treat each other, when were we’re most focused on civility, the financial performance is at its best.”
The High Cost of Incivility
A culture of civility helps employees feel safer, happier and better, said Georgetown University management professor Christine Porath. She incorporated results of her research and personal experiences in a new book, Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace.
She told VOA she witnessed the consequences of incivility years before she started studying it.
“I thought I scored my dream job after my graduating from college,” she said. “I got to work at one of the largest sports marketing organization in the world. When I took the full-time job, I learned that it was a very toxic culture. The top leaders had a bad behavior, narcissism. And they had a tendency to belittle and demean people in front of others.”
Then it became clear to her the negative effect incivility had on people.
“It was contagious, too,” she said. “It affected their performance and motivation and mood throughout the day, but they took that into their relationships with others; clients, customers and that kind of thing. And I just saw that it was hurting the organization. And it was also hurting employees, not only their work life, but they were taking it home with them.”
And, she discovered, incivility had a physical impact.
“Then the second thing was my dad. (He) had had two toxic bosses. Even though he tried to protect me from learning about how bad that was, he ended up in the hospital with a heart attack scare,” she said.
More Rudeness
Porath notes that civility has been declining for years.
“When I started studying it in about 1998, it was less than 25 percent (people) were affected by this on a weekly basis, and those numbers most recently hovered over 50 percent — meaning more people are experiencing or witnessing disrespectful, rude behavior in the workplace these days.”
She conducted surveys, asking people “Why are you uncivil?”
“Over 60 percent of people say, ‘Because I’m overwhelmed or stressed.’ People are asked to do more with less resources. The other thing is technology. The fact that people communicate so often now with e-mails and other forms of technology, it makes being civil tougher in a sense that you don’t have the nonverbal (cues), you don’t have the tone of voice. So typically there are more misunderstandings with technological communication,” she said.
Let’s be e-Civil
To avoid those sorts of misunderstandings, Porath recommends that you do not send an email if you’re feeling very stressed, angry or can’t solve a disagreement. If you’re not sure how your humor, sarcasm or criticism will be received, reread, rethink and resist the temptation to hit Send. And if you are uncertain about your tone, save the message and review it later with a fresh perspective before sending it. If you have to get something off your chest, write your note now but maybe send it later using delayed delivery. Finally, she suggests trying to have a phone call, or Skype, or meet face to face under those circumstances.
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Older Women May Be Predisposed To Be Less Active
Pushing yourself is harder if you are a woman older than 50. Just ask Meschelle Sevier.
“I would rather sit on the couch at home and watch re-runs,” Sevier says.
Annie Green also has noticed that it’s harder for her to exercise than it used to be.
“I would probably run on the treadmill two to three minutes and then walk. Now it’s down to one or two minutes.”
Staying active is harder
As women age, it seems to become more challenging to stay active, and this inactivity could lead to weight gain and a host of health problems, such as cardiovascular disease and Type-2 diabetes. The rate of some chronic diseases increases around the time a woman goes through menopause.
Scientists, including Victoria Vieira-Potter at the University of Missouri, are trying to figure out why women become less active as they age and what can be done to promote physical activity.
Vieira-Potter noticed a link between weight gain and the loss of estrogen in lab rats after their ovaries were removed.
However, she also noted that the female rats that exercised and were fit before their ovaries were removed did not gain weight. Vieira-Potter theorized that healthy exercise regimens might protect postmenopausal women from weight gain and its health complications.
Be aware and adjust
Vieira-Potter also theorized that a drop in estrogen leads to a drop in the chemical dopamine that sends signals to the pleasure or reward center in the brain, so women get less pleasure from exercising, and they put on weight.
The key, she said, is for older women to be aware of these changes and to adjust their lifestyles accordingly.
“We don’t need a lot of activity,” she said, “Women don’t need to take up marathon running because they’re going through menopause.”
Although the research did not involve humans, scientists say animal models are useful.
A different theory
Dawn Lowe studies aging and exercise at the University of Minnesota. She is involved in a large study of premenopausal and postmenopausal women that includes researchers from a spectrum of disciplines.
These scientists are looking at activity in older women from a different angle. They want to see how women’s health influences physical activity. As women age, they can lose control of their bladders. That lack of control at unexpected moments causes some women to stop exercising because exercise can be one of the causes of incontinence.
“The pelvic floor is composed of muscles. We think about leg muscles becoming weaker with age in men and women, but the pelvic floor is also a muscle. There is growing evidence that that muscle becomes weak with age as well,” Lowe told VOA in a Skype interview.
The result can be involuntary urinary or fecal incontinence, especially during exercise. Nearly 40 percent of the women in the study experienced incontinence. Lowe said there’s growing evidence, particularly for women, that estrogen affects how that muscle works.
Lowe says over the next several years, we can expect to learn a lot about women’s health and how it changes through the menopausal years, with the hope of keeping women active and healthy.
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The Brain and Muscles May Predispose Older Women to Be Less Active
Why does physical activity become harder for some older women? Researchers are studying that very question to help women stay active and healthy as they age. VOA’s Carol Pearson has more.
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Advanced Trash-to-Fuel Plant Goes Online in Israel
While President Trump’s latest executive order gives renewed life to power plants that burn coal, energy companies continue to seek and find alternative, less expensive and cleaner sources of fuel. One possibility is turning trash into fuel in an environmentally responsible way. VOA’s George Putic reports that authorities in Tel Aviv say their new garbage processing plant is on track to produce as much as 500 tons of fuel daily.
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Bob Dylan Archives Open in Oklahoma; Public Center Planned
Part of music icon Bob Dylan’s once-secret 6,000-piece archive, including thousands of hours of studio sessions, film reels and caches of unpublished lyrics, has opened in Oklahoma.
More than 1,000 pieces of the collection spanning Dylan’s six-decade career are available to scholars at the Gilcrease Museum’s Helmerich Center for American Research in Tulsa.
The opening comes a year after the George Kaiser Family Foundation and the University of Tulsa acquired the collection for an estimated $15 million to $20 million.
The public will get a glimpse of some of the material when the Bob Dylan Center opens in downtown Tulsa’s Brady Arts District in about two years.
The center will occupy the opposite side of a building that houses a center devoted to Woody Guthrie, one of Dylan’s major influences.
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Cruise Digs Up a Monster in ‘The Mummy’
Universal Pictures is going back to its roots — monsters.
The studio Wednesday debuted footage from its upcoming adventure film The Mummy, which opens a monster universe drawing on Universal’s vault of classic properties like Bride of Frankenstein, Invisible Man and Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Tom Cruise stars in the Alex Kurtzman-directed The Mummy, which is equal parts action and horror as Cruise’s explorer Nick Morton attempts to combat an ancient evil that has been unlocked and threatens to destroy the world.
Sofia Boutella is the Mummy, once an Egyptian princess who turned to the dark side when denied the throne.
Kurtzman and the cast, including Boutella, Annabelle Wallis and Jake Johnson, discussed Cruise’s famous commitment to eye-popping stunts.
“I think I was brought onto this movie to be afraid to do stunts with Tom Cruise,” Johnson said. “Tom does it all and he makes his co-stars do it, too. And I do mean ‘make.”’
Johnson laughed that when he would complain when he got hurt or bruised, Cruise would quip back: “Yeah, we jumped off a building dummy. It hurts!”
Cruise, who is on location for another filming, delivered a video message to the audience.
“My love for this began with universal classic films,” Cruise said. “To usher in a new age of gods and monsters is something that makes me very proud and excited.”
Audiences can meet “the original monster” June 9.
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Study Finds Correlation Between Good Health, Economic Prospects
A study by U.S. economic experts and a major health insurance company says a healthy population is a key ingredient in a healthy and growing economy.
Blue Cross and Moody’s Analytics used data from millions of insurance customers to draw a statistical relationship between health and prosperity in the United States.
In counties throughout the 50 states where the population had top health scores, per capita incomes were nearly $4,000 a year higher than in counties where people had just average health scores.
Unemployment showed a similar pattern: The healthiest counties had a jobless rate eight-tenths of a percent better than communities where health was average. Economic growth also was measurably stronger in the healthiest areas.
The report’s authors cautioned that the statistical correlation did not prove that healthier people cause a stronger economy, but it did make researchers suspect that such a relationship exists. The report also noted that healthier people lose less time from work and bring better skills to the job, because they didn’t miss school lessons.
Obamacare debate
The report came in the midst of a long-running national debate among American lawmakers about how to devise and pay for a system of health insurance.
Since President Donald Trump took office, his Republican Party has been planning to repeal the Affordable Care Act that former President Barack Obama signed into law seven years ago, claiming it is ineffective and financially ruinous.
The sentiment among lawmakers in Congress conflicted with many American families’ feelings about the value of the ACA, also known as Obamacare, and a divided Republican majority in Congress proved unable to repeal or replace the law.
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Meningitis Outbreak Kills 269 in Nigeria
Meningitis has killed 269 people in Nigeria in recent weeks, the country’s Center for Disease Control said, as Africa’s most populous country and aid organizations try to tackle the surge in infections.
As of Monday, 1,828 suspected cases of meningitis had been reported, with deaths recorded in 15 of the country’s 36 states, the center said late Tuesday on Twitter.
The center said on its website that 33 people died of meningitis in 2016.
More than 2,000 people died from an outbreak of the disease in Nigeria in 2009, with basic health care limited in rural parts of the country. Most rural residents live on less than $2 a day, despite the country’s huge oil resources.
Meningitis is the inflammation of tissue surrounding the brain and spinal cord, which can be caused by viral or bacterial infections. It spreads mainly through kisses, sneezes and coughs, and in close living quarters.
The center said it was working with the World Health Organization, the U.N. children’s fund and Doctors Without Borders to try to control the outbreak.
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Rare Image of Harriet Tubman to Be Auctioned in New York
A photograph of Harriet Tubman, believed to be the earliest-known image of the anti-slavery crusader and showing her as younger than she is normally depicted, will go up for auction Thursday in New York.
The photograph, previously unseen by scholars, shows Tubman in her late 40s, wearing an intricately decorated blouse and voluminous skirt, and sitting in a chair, leaning one arm on its back.
“It’s quite remarkable: This is what she looked like in her prime Civil War period when she was working as a spy for Lincoln,” Wyatt Day, the specialist organizing the sale at Swann Auction Galleries, said in a telephone interview.
He noted the photograph was taken about three years after the American Civil War ended in 1865. “All of the images show her as an older woman, maybe in her 70s. She looks a bit tired, and here she looks vibrant and strong.”
Kate Clifford Larson, a historian and Tubman biographer, said the photograph, which was brought to Swann last year after being purchased at auction by a collector of vintage photos about 10 years ago, could help the public “reimagine” Tubman.
“There are so many details about it that are thrilling,” she said in a phone interview. “She’s so much younger and she’s dressed so beautifully, so it helps us look at her in a different way.”
Tubman, who escaped from slavery in Maryland when she was in her 20s, later led dozens of black slaves to freedom using the Underground Railroad and became a Union Army spy during the Civil War and women’s suffragist.
The U.S. Treasury Department said last year it planned to put her on the face of the $20 bill, replacing former President Andrew Jackson, making her the first African-American so honored.
The photograph for auction is in the form of a carte de visite, a 19th-century custom in which people would leave photos of themselves as a calling card.
It appears in a carte-de-visite album compiled by the Quaker abolitionist Emily Howland. The album is estimated to sell for $20,000 to $30,000, the gallery said.
Day said research had shown the photographer Benjamin F. Powelson, who made Tubman’s carte de visite, only spent time near Tubman’s home in Auburn in upstate New York from 1868 to 1869, when Tubman was about 48.
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Vice Media Hopes Its Edgy Journalism Will Play Well in Mideast
Vice Media is bringing its edgy style of journalism to the Middle East to tap what it thinks is an underserved market of young, digital-hungry consumers.
Vice announced its arrival with a party Wednesday at the glitzy Armani Hotel in the world’s tallest tower, the Burj Khalifa, in Dubai, the global trade hub where the New York-based company will set up its regional headquarters.
Vice reckons the region’s youthful population coupled with some of the highest smartphone penetration rates in the world in countries such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates make it an ideal market to expand into.
“We think that this is the time that we come in and steal a lot of market share,” Vice Chief Executive Shane Smith told Reuters in an interview Wednesday.
Vice, which is aiming for 50 staff members in Dubai by the end of the year, will launch a website and digital channel this summer and is discussing a 24-hour regional cable channel to be broadcast from the emirate. The company will produce news and lifestyle content in multiple languages including Arabic, English, Farsi, Turkish and Urdu.
Vice has documented migrant worker abuses in Dubai, won acclaim for a documentary while embedded with Islamic State and garnered widespread attention when it took former National Basketball Association star Dennis Rodman to North Korea.
‘Right side of history’
“We’re always going to be looking at social justice, we’re always going to be looking at environmental justice, we’re always going to be looking at being on the right side of history, especially with millennials and our audience,” Smith said.
Vice is likely to run into the same obstacles it has faced elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa, “where journalists are most subjected to constraints of every kind,” according to global media watchdog Reporters Without Borders.
Worth $4.2 billion at its last valuation, Vice has transformed in 23 years from a punk magazine in Montreal, Quebec, into a global multimedia brand.
Its regional partner is Afghan media company Moby Group, whose Dubai offices are a few kilometres from the Trump International Golf Club, which was featured in a 2016 Vice episode on U.S. cable channel HBO about migrant worker exploitation.
Vice and Moby share a common shareholder in 21st Century Fox, and the Afghan company holds a license from the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, allowing it to expand into Iran — a market Vice wants to tap.
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Tackling Global Health Care: Tips for Aspiring Entrepreneurs
Imagine a vaccine vial with a temperature-sensitive label that changes colors when exposed to excessive heat.
That’s the sort of technology that can make a huge difference for doctors working in challenging conditions, allowing them to determine at-a-glance whether heat-sensitive vaccines are viable.
The vaccine vial monitor is one of the projects at the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH), an international nonprofit based in Seattle with more than 22 offices around the world, including sub-Saharan Africa, India and Southeast Asia.
The organization partners with foundations, non-governmental organizations and governments to expedite the development of global health solutions such as vaccines, drugs and medical devices. PATH’s aim is to help deliver breakthroughs in drug and medical devices on a global scale.
Tribendimidine (TrBD) is one of those potential breakthroughs — a drug treatment for soil-transmitted helminths, or intestinal worm infections.
According to the World Health Organization, over 1.5 billion people, or 24 percent of the global population, have acquired soil-transmitted helminths infections. Tropical and subtropical regions of the world are most affected, with the highest rates of incidences in sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, China and East Asia.
The development of new drugs like TrBD helps deter increasing resistance to existing drugs, when used in tandem with or as a replacement for these drugs.
Advice for entrepreneurs
David Shoultz, program leader for drug development at PATH, considers three factors essential to the long-term success of health care solutions, and advises aspiring entrepreneurs to keep them in mind: demand, cost and consumer-oriented product design.
“Unless we understand what the user is looking for and if we can then actually project what the demand will be … any technology, no matter how good it is, is likely to fall flat,” he said.
Shoultz recommends entrepreneurs find partners who can be a bridge into the global health arena.
“It may be that the entrepreneur truly does have a brilliant idea and it’s already available in a different setting,” he said. Organizations like PATH and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation can help filter and shape ideas, along with facilitating important industry connections.
Cost is another important consideration for entrepreneurs. Medical technologies developed in high-income countries can be less accessible to those in middle- or low-income countries, which is why Shoultz advises entrepreneurs to keep prices as low as possible.
For example, PATH’s drug for soil-transmitted helminths will sell for $0.06 to $0.07 cents a tablet.
“To be honest, there are comparable drugs that are even a little bit less expensive than that,” noted Shoultz, “We’re constantly trying to think of, OK, how could we make it even a little bit less expensive.'”
WATCH: Shoultz Talks about Common Mistakes by Entrepreneurs
Ultra Rice
Global entrepreneurs should also consider end-users not just as patients, but as consumers, Shoultz said.
“Sometimes we think about consumers or users in low-income settings as being very utilitarian, and in fact, my experience … is that they’re looking for the same thing that all of us are looking for in consumer goods — they do want to be excited and delighted,” he said.
To that end, PATH developed a rice fortification technology called Ultra Rice in which grains made from rice flour are fortified with vitamins and minerals and produced to resemble real rice grains. The Ultra Rice grains are then mixed with local, natural rice supplies to significantly boost their nutritional value.
The product aids those around the world suffering from micronutrient deficiencies, of which the United Nations World Food Program says there are 2 billion.
“I think really understanding the consumer impulse … is critically important, rather than just imagining that we’re going to build drab or utilitarian tools, because that’s not very exciting to consumers, regardless of their income level,” Shoultz said.
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At Last: Bob Dylan to Receive Nobel Prize in Stockholm
Singer-songwriter Bob Dylan will receive his Nobel Literature Prize diploma and medal in the next few days in Stockholm, where is he due to perform this weekend, the secretary of the Swedish Academy said on Wednesday.
The Academy’s decision to give the bard of “Blowin’ in the Wind” the literature prize caused controversy, only deepened by Dylan’s silence about the award for weeks afterwards and his no-show at the annual banquet in December.
“The good news is that the Swedish Academy and Bob Dylan have decided to meet this weekend,” Sara Danius said in a blog post. “The Academy will then hand over Dylan’s Nobel diploma and the Nobel medal, and congratulate him on the Nobel Prize in Literature.”
The 75-year-old Dylan is due to give concerts in Stockholm on April 1 and the following day and then another in the southern Swedish city of Lund on April 9.
Danius said that the notoriously media-shy Dylan would not hold the traditional Nobel lecture at this point.
“The Swedish Academy is very much looking forward to the weekend and will show up at one of the performances. Please note that no Nobel Lecture will be held,” Danius wrote.
“The Academy has reason to believe that a taped version will be sent at a later point,” she added.
In order to receive 8 million Swedish crown ($903,000) prize, Dylan needs to give a lecture within six months from December 10. It does not necessarily need not be delivered in Stockholm.
The decision to award the prize to Dylan, whom the Academy said had “created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition,” was seen by some as slap in the face to mainstream writers of poetry and prose.
But the Academy has a tradition of stepping outside the traditional boundaries of literary form, awarding the 1953 prize to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in part for his “brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.”
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Silicon Valley Experts Help International Startups Struggling With Growth
When he was growing up in Hyderabad, India, Ravindra Sunku, 52, could see and smell the burning kerosene and wood his neighbors used to cook.
It stuck in his memory people he knew might have suffered from lung disease caused from what they inhaled by doing something as simple as cooking dinner.
Now a tech executive in Silicon Valley, Sunku recently was able to use his professional skills to help a Kenyan organization that makes clean cook stoves that promise to save lives and reduce deforestation.
“I’ve grown up in India. I’ve seen the hardship,” he said. “This could have saved someone in my childhood.”
Sunku volunteered through RippleWorks, a unique mentorship program in Silicon Valley that connects tech professionals with startups around the world that have a social mission.
RippleWorks has helped 28 projects and plans to help 40 more this year. It picks firms that are focused improving education, healthcare, clean energy technology and financial access.
The companies helped include NeoGrowth, a firm in Mumbai, India, that provides access to short-term loans for small businesses. Another is Zoona, which uses technology to provide financial services for people in places such as Malawi and Zambia. In Mexico City, RippleWorks has connected a tech marketing expert with Cignifi, which provides credit to customers via mobile phones.
There are many global mentorship programs and startup incubators bringing together tech experts with entrepreneurs in developing countries. But RippleWorks focuses on advising firms that have already launched and have found their niche.
It offers what its founder calls “mentorship in a box.” The organization identifies a key problem for the companies and pairs them with an expert who has done the job before. Then RippleWorks manages the project, setting up weekly video-conference meetings.
Doug Galen, RippleWorks co-founder and CEO, says the organization’s “secret sauce” is “project management to keep everyone on task.”
Tech Veterans Helping With Growth Hurdles
Sunku’s life took him from Hyderabad to Oklahoma, where he received a masters degree in industrial engineering. He worked in a sheet metal factory near Los Angeles before heading to the San Francisco Bay Area where he worked in software.
As he juggled work and family, Sunku did volunteer stints in his community – all involving physical labor, such as building a playground or stuffing grocery bags for a food bank.
He had not considered that his job skills would be useful as well to a non-profit until he met RippleWorks and began his six-month volunteer stint with Burn Manufacturing in Nairobi, Kenya. Since 2013, Burn has distributed 250,000 clean cook stoves.
Since its launch, Burn had grown big fast, with a factory, employees, products and customers. It needed technology to track and manage everything from sales to payroll to supplies.
That’s where Sunku came in.
Once a week, Sunku arrived at work in San Francisco at 7 a.m. to video conference with the chief financial officer and general manager at Burn. He also worked an additional two hours on the weekend on Burn-related projects and put in an additional hour working with the RippleWorks project manager.
Sunku is director of IT at StitchFix, a digital personalized fashion company. He worked with the Burn team on its needs before acquiring a software system that would enable the organization to run more smoothly. He also helped them create criteria for hiring technical help in Nairobi.
“It took me a bit to get comfortable,” he said. “But once I could see that they were taking to what I was saying, it felt gratifying.”
Sunku’s experience culminated with a trip to Nairobi to work with Burn, which he was able to do because his firm, StitchFix, gives workers unlimited time off.
For Sunku, the experience was eye-opening.
“I never thought someone like me, originally from India who moved to the U.S. and has been in this country for more than 30 years, would make a contribution to Africa.”
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For West Virginia Town, No Wi-Fi, No Problem
Broadband access in the U.S. is not universal. There has long been a digital divide between urban and rural areas. But in one small town just four hours from Washington, D.C., there’s no Wi-Fi internet service at all. The town of Green Bank, West Virginia, is the site of the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world, so Wi-Fi Internet connections and anything else that can create electromagnetic waves, such as microwave ovens, are banned. VOA’s Lesya Bakalets reports.
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