Angelina Jolie Appeals for Commitment to ‘Imperfect’ UN
U.N. refugee agency special envoy Angelina Jolie made an impassioned plea Wednesday for internationalism in the face of wars driving people from their homes and a “rising tide of nationalism masquerading as patriotism.”
The Hollywood actress, speaking at the United Nations in Geneva, called for a renewed commitment to the “imperfect” world body and to diplomacy to settle conflicts.
“If governments and leaders are not keeping that flame of internationalism alive today, then we as citizens must,” Jolie said in the annual Sergio Vieira de Mello lecture honoring the veteran U.N. aid worker killed in a Baghdad bombing in 2003.
“We see a rising tide of nationalism, masquerading as patriotism, and the re-emergence of policies encouraging fear and hatred of others,” she warned.
Jolie did not refer directly to U.S. President Donald Trump, whose administration is reviewing its funding of the United Nations and its participation in the U.N. Human Rights Council.
“A lot of the fear we observe today of refugees, of foreigners, is produced by ignorance, often fueling politicians as well,” she said in response to a question.
“We have to recognize the damage we do when we undermine the U.N. or use it selectively — or not at all — or when we rely on aid to do the job of diplomacy, or give the U.N. impossible tasks and then underfund it.”
Not a single humanitarian appeal to donor governments worldwide has received even half the amount needed, she said.
Operations in four countries where 20 million people are on the brink of death from starvation — Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan and Nigeria — are severely underfunded.
Jolie, who described herself as “a proud American” and “an internationalist,” has worked since 2001 for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), visiting uprooted civilians from Iraq to Cambodia and Kenya.
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Film Looks at Idea of Hunting Animals to Save Them in Africa
The new documentary Trophy opens in a sprawling corner of South Africa run by John Hume, who is praised by some as protecting the continent’s rhinos from extinction and vilified by others for trying to turn the animals into cash spinners.
Trophy, shown this week at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, examines how efforts to commercialize wild animals and encourage big-game hunting in Africa can generate funds for conservation, while also arousing criticism.
“We want the viewer to go through a roller coaster of being challenged and being confused,” filmmaker Shaul Schwarz said in an interview, adding there were no easy answers for protecting Africa’s big game.
How to protect wildlife
Trophy looks at people like Hume, the world’s largest private rhino breeder, who has spent large sums to protect the animals from poachers seeking to kill them for their horns.
Hume trims the tips of the horns from his 1,500 rhinos every two years, building a stockpile worth tens of millions of dollars that he wants to sell. He is lobbying to make the trade legal and use proceeds to protect more rhinos.
Some conservationists criticize him for wanting to turn a wild animal into a commodity, similar to the treatment of livestock.
Rhino horns, which can grow back, sell for prices higher than gold in parts of Asia where there is a belief, unfounded by science, that they can cure cancer.
Because of Asian demand, rhino poaching in South Africa surged to a record 1,215 animals in 2014. South Africa has about 20,000 rhinos, or about 80 percent of the world’s rhino population.
Game resorts and hunting
The film also asks questions about the role of game resorts sustained by hunting that can restore African ecosystems.
Tourists on photo safaris may spend a few hundred dollars a night to stay at an African game lodge, while a hunter can be paying several thousand dollars a night to kill game.
Data is scarce on how much money hunting generates across Africa. But in South Africa, the Environment Ministry has said the hunting industry is worth about 6.2 billion rand ($485 million) a year.
A license to hunt a lion in southern Africa can go for about $50,000. International agencies regulate some of the hunts and direct that proceeds be used to support conservation efforts in impoverished parts of the continent.
During filming, hunting became a global issue after an American trophy hunter in 2015 killed a lion named Cecil, provoking an international outcry.
After that, Schwarz and fellow filmmaker Christina Clusiau lost access to some sources who feared backlash.
“It is hard to wrap your head around the idea that to conserve something, sometimes we may have to kill,” Clusiau said.
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Ivana Trump Writing Memoir About Her Children with Donald Trump
Ivana Trump, the first wife of President Donald Trump, is writing a memoir that will focus on the couple’s three children.
Raising Trump will be published Sept. 12, Gallery Books told The Associated Press on Wednesday. According to Gallery, Ivana Trump is writing a story of “motherhood, strength and resilience” and also will reflect on her “childhood in communist Czechoslovakia, her escape from the regime and relocation to New York, her whirlwind romance, and her great success as a businesswoman.”
“As her former husband takes his place as the 45th president of the United States, his children have also been thrust into the media spotlight — but it is Ivana who raised them and proudly instilled in them what she believes to be the most important life lessons: loyalty, honesty, integrity and drive,” the statement reads.
Donald and Ivana Trump divorced in 1992 amid revelations that Donald Trump had been having an affair with Marla Maples, who became his second wife. (They divorced in 1999 and six years later Donald Trump married Melania Knauss.) Gallery is calling the book “non-political,” and it’s also unlikely to be critical of the president, whose candidacy Ivana Trump supported. Her divorce from him included a nondisclosure agreement, and her children with him — Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric — are close to their father and are contributing memories to the book.
The three younger Trumps said in a statement that they were “excited” about Raising Trump and called Ivana an “amazing mom, teacher and inspiration to all of us.” Ivana Trump said in a statement that Raising Trump was, in part, a response to compliments she receives about her children.
“I was a tough and loving mother who taught them the value of a dollar, not to lie, cheat or steal, respect for others, and other life lessons that I’ll share now in Raising Trump, along with unfiltered personal stories about Don, Eric, and Ivanka from their early childhood to becoming the `first sons and daughter,”‘ she said.
Ivana Trump has written books before, including The Best Is Yet to Come: Coping with Divorce and Enjoying Life Again and the novel For Love Alone, which led to a legal battle with her ex-husband. In 1992, Donald Trump sued Ivana for $25 million, claiming the novel was based on their marriage and violated the nondisclosure portion of the divorce decree. Ivana Trump countersued over other parts of the divorce agreement and, in 1993, the two settled their differences.
Gallery is part of Simon & Schuster, which under its Threshold Editions imprint published Donald Trump’s campaign book Crippled America, released in paperback as Great Again.
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Number of Zika, Dengue and Chikungunya Cases Drop in Brazil
The number of cases of Zika, dengue and chikungunya reported in Brazil during the first 6 weeks of the year is nearly 90 percent less than in the same period in 2016, the Health Ministry said Wednesday.
The ministry said in an email that 60,124 cases of the three diseases were reported between Jan. 1 and Feb. 18, against 549,510 cases one year earlier.
The ministry attributed the drop to increased efforts to eradicate the Aedes aegypti mosquito that carries the three diseases. Well-adapted to humans, it lives largely inside homes and can lay eggs in even a bottle-cap’s worth of stagnant water.
Brazil is also battling an outbreak of yellow fever, with Rio de Janeiro state’s Health Department confirming the first two cases of the disease in the state. It said that one of the patients died and the other is hospitalized.
More than 370 cases of yellow fever have been confirmed since the beginning of this outbreak, the Health Ministry has said. Of those, more than 130 have died.
Even before it had confirmed its first case, Rio’s Health Department announced that it planned to vaccinate its entire population as a preventative measure. The state said it will need 12 million doses to reach a 90 percent vaccination rate by the end of the year.
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Yoga Pants, Cozy Clothes May Be Key Source of Sea Pollution
Comfortable clothes are emerging as a source of plastic that’s increasingly ending up in the oceans and potentially contaminating seafood, according to Gulf Coast researchers launching a two-year study of microscopic plastics in the waters from south Texas to the Florida Keys.
The project , led by the Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium, will rely partly on volunteers in coastal cleanup events. It also will expand a year’s worth of data collected around Florida that predominantly found microfibers — shreds of plastic even smaller than microbeads flowing down bathroom sinks and shower drains.
Yoga pants, fleece jackets, sweat-wicking athletic wear and other garments made from synthetic materials shed microscopic plastic fibers — called “microfibers” — when laundered. Wastewater systems flush the microfibers into natural waterways, eventually reaching the sea.
“Anything that’s nylon or polyester, like the fleece-type jackets,” University of Florida researcher Maia McGuire said.
When McGuire set out to study the kinds of plastic found in Florida waters, she expected to mostly find microbeads — the brightly-colored plastic spheres the U.S. government banned from rinse-off cosmetic products in 2015 because of the potential threat to fish and other wildlife.
Instead, McGuire predominantly found microfibers, even smaller than microbeads and coming from places most people don’t consider dangerous to marine life: their closets.
“I totally thought we were going to be finding microbeads and [bigger] fragments,” McGuire said. “What do we do about it is the multimillion-dollar question. The consensus seems to be that we need improvement in technology in washing machines and wastewater treatment plants in combination in order to try and filter out these fibers. There’s just so much we don’t know.”
Studies of the Great Lakes and New York Harbor and surrounding waterways found high concentrations of plastics pollution, including microbeads. McGuire’s data from Florida waters, compiled from 1-liter samples run through filters fine enough to catch microfibers missed by the trawls used in the larger studies, adds to the growing research focused on plastic pieces that degrade but never disappear.
Dangers of microfibers unknown
Other recent studies show that microfibers can end up in the stomachs of marine animals, including seafood such as oysters. Experts increasingly suggest that manufacturers of washing machines — not just body washes or scrubbing detergents — may need to be targeted next in efforts to reduce plastic waste in oceans.
The Gulf Coast study will use McGuire’s methodology to determine the prevalence of microfibers and other microscopic plastics.
A plastic “garbage patch” like one circulating in the Pacific Ocean is unlikely in the Gulf of Mexico, but the regional study may reveal areas particularly prone to the accumulation of plastics, said Caitlin Wessel, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Debris Program.
“There hasn’t been a lot of baseline study covering microplastics, and the studies that have been done haven’t been as wide-reaching,” Wessel said. “We’re hoping to use the data as a baseline but also find sources of microplastics and find out what types of microplastics are the biggest issue in the Gulf.”
It’s not yet known how much microfibers hurt the health of marine animals that ingest them, or whether their accumulation up the food chain is harmful.
“The big concern is we know the amount of plastic in the ocean is increasing, and increasing somewhat exponentially at this point. It’s got chemicals in it, chemicals stick to it, animals eat it. We know a lot of the larger animals have impacts from larger plastics, so we think there’s an effect on smaller animals [from microplastics],” McGuire said.
Companies respond
The emerging data has prompted clothing company Patagonia — which makes fleece jackets and other apparel from synthetic materials — to support research into the prevalence of microfiber pollution and promote information for consumers about ways to minimize microfiber shedding in laundry.
Consumer-focused efforts such as Patagonia’s outreach, liquor giant Bacardi’s decision to stop adding plastic straws and stirrers to cocktails at company events, Miami Beach’s ban on Styrofoam containers or the federal microbeads ban can help slow the rate of microfibers and other plastics adding up in the oceans, but the pollution also needs to be addressed at its source and at wastewater treatment plants, Wessel said.
“It would be really great if the washing machine companies would get on board and come up with a filter to trap these microfibers,” Wessel said. “I think there’s a big push right now — nobody really disagrees that marine debris is an issue that needs to be addressed.”
Details from the study
McGuire’s Florida Microplastic Awareness Project from September 2015 to August 2016 analyzed samples collected by volunteers from 256 sites around the state’s peninsula and the Florida Keys. Eighty-nine percent contained at least one piece of plastic.
Microfibers comprised the vast majority of plastic found — 82 percent. Only 7 percent were the microbeads in personal products targeted by the federal ban, which doesn’t limit the use of the same plastic spheres in other products.
The samples sent to McGuire were similar to one collected in early February by Sarah Egner, director of research and curriculum development at MarineLab in Key Largo. She waded knee-deep off a boat ramp into Largo Sound, and on a sunny day the water seemed clear in her white plastic bottle. Under a microscope in her laboratory, however, two dark threads seemed to swim among red and green plankton — two microfibers.
Egner has committed to reading product labels to avoid those containing plastic ingredients. That’s easy compared with the daunting task of reducing the amount of microfibers potentially coming from the boating attire and moisture-wicking clothes that make it easier to work outside in Florida.
“I look in my closet, and I’m like, `Man, I’ve got a lot of synthetic material in here,”‘ Egner said. “Look on your tags: If you have something that’s 100 percent cotton, you’re good right there. But generally, it’s a mix of things, which is not so good.”
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Whole-body Vibration May Improve Diabetes Control, Study Finds
Researchers have found that a less strenuous form of exercise known as whole-body vibration may work just as well as regular exercise in helping to control diabetes. WBV, as it’s called, could also benefit people who find it difficult to exercise.
Scientists say WBV transmits energy through the body when someone is standing, sitting or lying on a gently vibrating device, causing muscles to contract and relax many times each second.
The effect may be to strengthen and increase muscle mass, improving blood sugar control along with other problems seen in diabetes. At least, that’s what studies in mice suggest.
Bearing in mind that exercise is good for everyone, including people with diabetes, researchers at Augusta University in Augusta, Georgia, studied five-week-old male rodents, comparing the effects of whole-body vibration to that of running on a treadmill.
Vibrating platform
A cage containing both normal and specially bred obese, diabetic mice was placed on a gently vibrating platform for 20 minutes per day for 12 weeks.
Another group of rodents — both diabetic and healthy mice — was trained to run on a treadmill for 45 minutes a day for the same period of time.
A third group of diabetic and healthy mice remained sedentary and were used for comparison.
Investigators saw similar health benefits in the diabetic mice that ran on the treadmill and those exposed to whole-body vibration.
Meghan McGee-Lawrence, an assistant professor in the Department of Cellular Biology and Anatomy at the Medical College of Georgia, said the results of the study showed that “vibration may be just as effective as exercise at combating some of the negative consequences of obesity and diabetes.”
Biomarker improvements
McGee-Lawrence said mice subjected to whole-body vibration and those that ran on the treadmill were both able to decrease fat in the liver, improve insulin sensitivity and increase muscle fiber.
While there was improvement in the biomarkers of diabetic WBV mice and treadmill mice, they never became as healthy as the normal animals.
During the study, the mice were weighed weekly. Researchers found that the diabetic mice subjected to vibration and the treadmill gained less weight after the study was over than the sedentary rodents.
There was also evidence that whole-body vibration might improve the bone strength of diabetics.
The study was published in the journal Endocrinology.
McGee-Lawrence said researchers are now trying to determine the mechanisms that underlie improved diabetes control in both exercise and whole-body vibration mice.
More study urged
There are vibrating chairs and beds available on the market, but McGee-Lawrence cautioned people against starting a routine of whole-body vibration and thinking they are controlling their diabetes.
“We know that some whole-body vibration … seems to be good for the body, but too much can be a bad thing,” she said. “And in terms of finding ways to apply that [to humans] … I think we need some more studies to guide us on that so that when folks start doing this, we get the best beneficial effects we can without running the risk of having any potential side effects.”
One potential harm of too much vibration, often seen heavy-machine operators, is tissue inflammation.
If researchers are able to repeat the results in humans, McGee-Lawrence said, whole-body vibration could be a useful add-on to the treatment of diabetes.
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Experts Say Chronic Kidney Disease in Sub-Saharan Africa on Rise
Amid rapid urbanization, the HIV epidemic and increasing rates of non-communicable diseases, people in sub-Saharan Africa are especially vulnerable to kidney disease. Medical experts are meeting in Cameroon to examine ways of reducing the rising incidents of chronic kidney disease.
A dialysis machine at the hemodialysis center in Cameroon’s capital city, Yaounde, extracts blood from kidney patients, then filters and measures it before it is returned to the body.
Among the hundreds of dialysis patients at at the center is Ngalla Priscilia.
“I started dialysis in 2002. What damaged my kidney was high blood pressure. The dialysis itself is not expensive. What is killing us here is the drugs and the [laboratory] tests that we have to do,” she said.
Priscilia says her condition was detected early enough, thanks to her cousin, who is a nurse.
Cameroon’s Kidney Foundation reports a majority of kidney patients in the country go to the hospital when the disease is at an advanced stage. Many others die without ever being diagnosed.
Maintenance issues
Bertrand Balagock, president of the Yaounde Association of People Living with Kidney Defects in Yaounde, says regular treatment is not always possible because most of the machines are not maintained properly. He says instead of the four hours of treatment, patients may undergo just three hours of dialysis.
He says only seven of the 20 machines at the center are functioning and that is greatly destabilizing patients. He says a patient who had to be treated on Monday is treated on Wednesday or Thursday and the water room that is very vital in dialysis treatment is not functioning regularly and people can not be treated effectively for dialysis.
Cameroon has about 2,000 patients with acute kidney infections, up from 400 in 2012.
Gloria Ashungtantang, an official of the dialysis center, says the number of people with kidney problems is growing.
“Any severe infection would cause the kidney to shutdown,” she said. “Acute kidney failure linked to pregnancy is a major cause in our environment. Chronic kidney failure, what are the causes? Diabetes, hypertension and chronic infections. Avoid obesity. Exercise to lose weight. Avoid smoking, avoid taking non-prescribed drugs. Sugary drinks are very dangerous.”
Lack of access
According to the U.S.-based National Kidney Foundation, 10 percent of the world’s population is affected by chronic kidney disease and millions die each year because they do not have access to affordable treatment.
Kitty Jager, a nephrologist from the Netherlands, says another contributing factor to the increase in kidney disease is that most medical staff, especially in developing countries, are not learning new treatment methods.
“Many doctors have been trained by universities and end up at a particular level of medical knowledge, but then all the new knowledge that they will gain after their graduation will be from reading the literature, listening to presentations where people report on their scientific data,” said Jager. “They need to know very well how they should interpret results of particular studies so that they can use this for their medical work.”
Jager says one of goals at the meeting in Yaounde is to find ways of training as many nephrologists as possible to enable them to do scientific research and be able to read scientific publications so that they can interpret the data.
Experts are calling on the population to encourage early screening, saying that kidney disease often has no symptoms, and can go undetected until very advanced. But a simple urine test can detect the disease.
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‘Vogue’ Launches in the Arab World With Bold Mission, Style
Vogue launched its newest international edition this month, targeting a niche audience in the Middle East that is fashion conscious, style-driven and wealthy. If its debut is anything to go by, the magazine promises to be bold, representative and deferential.
The 22nd international edition of Vogue featured on its cover American supermodel Gigi Hadid, whose father is Palestinian, wearing an embellished, mesh veil covering half her face. With one eye peering out from beneath the veil, the magazine’s cover words aimed readers directly at its mission: “Reorienting perceptions.”
At the helm of Vogue’s nascent project is Deena Aljuhani Abdulaziz; a fashion-forward mother of three and Saudi royal who describes herself as “ambitious”.
“I don’t want Vogue Arabia to just be another regional magazine. I definitely want it to be a global one as well, especially in this political climate. I think it’s very important,” she told The Associated Press from her office in Dubai’s Design District.
Through its range of features and shoots, the magazine attempts to cater to a wide and diverse audience of Arab women, whose varying takes on personal style and modesty cannot be defined by one trope or fashion statement.
While not intentionally provocative, there are images of women in backless gowns and skirts that end above the knee. There are also artful shots of women in headscarves, though not necessarily worn in the parameters of the Islamic hijab.
In Hadid’s cover shot, for example, the veil reveals a hint of bronzed shoulder.
“We aren’t trying to make a giant political statement but we do think that we can help contribute to conversation” said Shashi Menon, founder of Nervora, which published Vogue Arabia in partnership with Conde Naste.
“We want to be – delicate is the wrong word, but we want to be cognizant on how we are speaking to and with women from this region and that means being understanding,” he said.
Vogue Arabia’s strongest foothold is – as its name suggests- in the oil-rich countries of the Arabian Peninsula, where modern malls and a growing art scene are part of a wider push to get in on the multi-billion-dollar-a-year global fashion industry, which is currently dominated by the U.S., Europe and Japan.
Vogue Arabia’s target audience is well-traveled and has long had access to fashion magazines, both local and international, including of course American Vogue.
Vogue Arabia launched digitally first last fall, but its print edition went out this month with 35,000 copies distributed across the major cities of the Gulf, as well as in Cairo, Beirut and select salons and hotels in North Africa. It was not, however, in newsstands in conservative Saudi Arabia.
Menon says the expectation isn’t that Vogue Arabia will somehow replace American Vogue or Vogue Paris, but that it will provide for the first time an edition that directly speaks to a Middle Eastern audience in a local voice. It’s also the first Vogue edition for an entire region, rather than for a single country.
Inside its glossy pages, Vogue Arabia capitalizes on the breadth of culture and character of the Middle East’s 22 Arabic-speaking countries. For its March issue, that meant features on an arts initiative in the Saudi coastal city of Jeddah, an interview with the Egyptian sisters behind the purse brand Okhtein and a high-glamour shoot in Paris by Sudanese stylist Azza Yousif.
Bold colors are prominent throughout the layout, not just on the clothes, but in the makeup and accessories too. Advertisers include powerhouses like Dior and Cartier, as well as the local outlets that carry them.
The March arrival of the magazine also had a section entirely in Arabic.
Calligrapher Wissam Shawkat produced the Arabic typography for the various sections of the issue. He’s also been featured in the digital edition.
The Iraqi-born calligrapher, whose Arabic artwork has debuted on Rolex watches and in the logos of brands like Tiffany & Co., says he had total freedom of design when working with Vogue Arabia.
“Calligraphy is usually not something featured with something like a magazine like Vogue,” he said.
But by featuring culture and art from the Middle East, he says the magazine spreads an important message.
“It shows there’s still beauty and hope in the region whatever is happening. This is hope,” he said.
your ad hereMcDonald’s Tests Mobile Ordering Before National Rollout
McDonald’s has started testing mobile order-and-pay after acknowledging the ordering process in its restaurants can be “stressful.”
The company says it will gather feedback from the test before launching the option nationally toward the end of the year. It says mobile order-and-pay is now available at 29 stores in Monterey and Salinas, California, and will expand to 51 more locations in Spokane, Washington, next week.
The rollout comes as customers increasingly seek out convenience through options like online ordering or delivery. McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook has noted the initial stages of visiting can be “stressful,” and the chain is making changes to improve the overall customer experience. That includes introducing ordering kiosks, which McDonald’s says can help ease lines at the counter and improve the accuracy of orders – another frustration for customers. Easterbrook has also talked about the potential of delivery.
With its mobile order-and-pay option, McDonald’s says customers place an order on its app then go to a restaurant and “check in” to select how they want to get their food. That could be at the counter, in the drive-thru, or with curbside delivery, where an employee brings out orders to a designated space. Orders are prepared once customers check in at the restaurant.
Starbucks has already found success using its mobile app and loyalty program to encourage people to visit more often and spend more when they do. The chain has also said its mobile order-and-pay option was so popular that it caused congestion at pick-up counters last year, leading some customers who walked into stores to leave without buying anything. Starbucks said it is working on fixing those issues.
It’s not clear whether McDonald’s will be able to get the same level of usage for its mobile app and order-and-pay option. Since coffee tends to be more of a daily habit, for instance, people may be more willing to download an app for it on their phones.
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2 Popular Messaging Apps Vulnerable to Hackers
Those encrypted messaging apps you may have been using to avoid prying eyes had a major flaw that could have allowed access to hackers, according to a cybersecurity firm.
According to Check Point Software Technologies, both Telegram and WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, were vulnerable.
The company said it withheld the information until the security holes were patched, saying “hundreds of millions” of users could have been compromised.
The vulnerability involved infecting digital images with malicious code that would have been activated upon clicking the pic. That, according to Check Point, could have made accounts susceptible to hijacking.
“This new vulnerability put hundreds of millions of WhatsApp Web and Telegram Web users at risk of complete account take over,” Check Point head of product vulnerability Oded Vanunu said in a news release. “By simply sending an innocent looking photo, an attacker could gain control over the account, access message history, all photos that were ever shared, and send messages on behalf of the user.”
Both apps tout so-called end-to-end encryption to ensure privacy, but according to Check Point, that made it hard to spot malicious code.
Patching the vulnerability involved blocking the code before the messages were encrypted.
WhatsApp claims to have more than one billion users, while Telegram has more than 100 million.
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Study Ties Premature Death to Air Pollution
The Trump administration may be ready to roll back some regulations covered by the Clean Air Act limiting some pollutants that contributed to smog-choked American cities in the 1970s.
But new research from China suggests clean air can save millions of lives.
More pollution, more deaths
Researchers at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention compared the levels of particulate air pollution in 38 of China’s largest cities.
The pollution they studied is tiny, less than 10 microns. That’s smaller than the width of a human hair.
Over a three-and-a-half-year period from 2010 to 2013, the researchers recorded more than 350,000 deaths.
Examining those deaths, the researchers found that 87 percent of them could be tied to high levels of particulate matter in the air.
And the more research they did they discovered that air pollution “appeared to have a much greater impact on deaths due to cardiorespiratory diseases,” the researchers said in a press release, “such as asthma and chronic lung disease (COPD), than it did on deaths due to other causes.”
They also found that air pollution seems to have a larger effect on women and older people than on men or younger people.
The researchers predict that just lowering air pollution to the standards suggested by the World Health Organization could prevent “3 million premature deaths each year.”
The research is published in the journal BMJ.
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Hacker Spaces Offer More Than the Sum of Their Tools
Hacking means tinkering, whether with computers, woodworking or really anything. Tinkerers around the world come together at hacker-spaces, to share tools, camaraderie and expertise. Shelley Schlender takes us to a hacker space in Oakland, California, called Ace Monster Toys, where members lend each other a “hacking” hand.
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Mitch Seavey Becomes Oldest, Fastest Musher to Win Iditarod
Mitch Seavey won his third Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race on Tuesday, becoming the fastest and oldest champion at age 57 and helping cement his family’s position as mushing royalty.
The Seward, Alaska, musher brought his dogs off the frozen Bering Sea and onto Front Street in the Gold Rush town of Nome after crossing nearly 1,000 miles of Alaska wilderness.
He outran his son, defending champion Dallas Seavey, and lapped the oldest musher record that he set at age 53 in 2013. He previously won the race in 2013 and 2004.
Seavey also set a time record of 8 days, 3 hours, 40 minutes and 13 seconds, the Iditarod said. That shaved several hours off the record his son set last year: 8 days, 11 hours, 20 minutes and 16 seconds.
“Sweet” was the first thing Mitch Seavey said after getting off the sled at the finish line under the famed burled arch. It was broadcast live statewide.
His wife, Janine, greeted him with a hug. “Oh, my gosh, look at what you’ve just done,” she told him. “You’ve changed the sport.”
After talking to his wife, Seavey greeted each of his dogs and thanked them with a frozen snack. He later posed with his two lead dogs, Pilot and Crisp.
“They get frustrated when they go too slow, so I just let them roll, which was scary because I’ve never gone that fast, that far ever, but that’s what they wanted to do,” he said.
Seavey said the dogs know only one thing — 9 to 10 mph.
“They hit their peak, they hit their speed, and that’s what they do,” Seavey said at the finish line. “They trusted me to stop them when they needed to stop and feed them, and I did that, and they gave me all they could.”
Seavey picked up $75,000 and the keys to a new pickup truck for winning the world’s most famous sled dog race.
The Seaveys have now won the last six races. Dallas Seavey won four, and his father finished second the last two years. The two are close but competitive.
“He and I have such a great relationship,” Mitch Seavey said. “There’s no malice, we just love running sled dogs. No question.”
Dallas Seavey finished in second place, five minutes ahead of France native Nicolas Petit.
The family’s ties to the race go back to the first Iditarod, held in 1973, when Mitch Seavey’s dad, Dan, mushed in the event. The younger Seavey, who is 30, had wins in 2012 and from 2014 to 2016.
The race started March 6 in Fairbanks, with 71 teams. Five mushers scratched.
Fans lined the finish, clapping and cheering on Seavey. As his team finished the last few blocks of the race, Seavey yelled, “Good boys! Hep!”
Just before reaching the chute, he got off his sled and ran with the dogs a bit.
Four dogs associated with the race have died this year, including a 4-year-old male named Flash who collapsed on the trail early Tuesday when his musher, Katherine Keith, was about 10 miles outside the checkpoint in Koyuk.
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UN Pushes ‘Smart Crops’ as Rice Alternative to Tackle Hunger in Asia
Asia needs to make extra efforts to defeat hunger after progress has slowed in the last five years, including promoting so-called “smart crops” as an alternative to rice, the head of the U.N. food agency in the region said.
Kundhavi Kadiresan, representative of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Asia, said the region needs to focus on reaching the most marginalized people, such as the very poor or those living in mountainous areas.
The Asia-Pacific region halved the number of hungry people from 1990 to 2015 but the rate of progress slowed in many countries – such as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India and Cambodia – in the last five years, according to a December FAO report.
“The last mile is always difficult.. so extra efforts, extra resources and more targeted interventions are needed,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on the sidelines of a business forum on food security in Jakarta on Tuesday.
She said government and businesses needed to develop policies to help make food more affordable, while changing Asians’ diets that rely heavily on rice.
“We have focused so much on rice that we haven’t really looked at some of those crops like millets, sorghum and beans,” she said.
A campaign is underway to promote these alternatives as “smart crops” to make them more attractive, Kadiresan said.
“We are calling them smart crops to get people not to think about them as poor people’s food but smart people’s food,” she said, adding that they are not only nutritious but also more adaptable to climate change.
Soaring rice prices, slowing economic expansion and poorer growth in agricultural productivity have been blamed for the slowdown in efforts to tackle hunger.
More than 60 percent of the world’s hungry are in Asia-Pacific, while nearly one out of three children in the region suffers from stunting, according to the FAO.
Achieving zero hunger by 2030 is one of the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals adopted by member states in 2015.
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A Barrel of Fun: Niagara Falls Touts Thrills in Rebranding
Niagara Falls, whose most famous thrill-seekers have gone over the brink in barrels, wants to be the place the rest of us go for outdoor adventure, too.
A new marketing effort launched Tuesday rebrands the American shore of the falls as a natural playground to be explored on foot, bike, boat or helicopter.
U.S. tourism officials, ever in competition with their counterparts on the heavily developed Canadian side of the binational attraction, say their new focus embraces the American side’s less commercial feel in a way they hope will attract more visitors for longer stays.
“What people are wanting to have on a getaway or a vacation is a time of experience and not just to come and witness or see and hear, but actually experience and touch and feel and do,” said John Percy, president and chief executive of Niagara Tourism & Convention Corp., which has been renamed Destination Niagara USA.
“Niagara Falls is the embodiment of America’s adventurous spirit,” he said.
The refocusing, coming just in time for the busy season, followed interviews, focus groups and visitor surveys that found that those who visit and live in the region most value its scenic, historical and natural attributes and are drawn to outdoor adventure, officials said.
The findings align with support in recent years for the ongoing removal of a highway that was built along the Niagara River, which will increase access to the water’s edge, as well as strong opposition to a proposal to build a lodge on rustic Goat Island inside Niagara Falls State Park. Opponents of the lodge cite renowned landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted’s declaration more than 100 years ago that the area should be off-limits to developers.
It’s a marked contrast to Niagara Falls, Ontario, where neon-lit museums, rides and restaurants offer a carnival-like atmosphere at the water’s edge.
Niagara Falls State Park sees about 8 million visitors every year from all over the world, a number that has been steadily rising, Percy said, along with hotel visits and dollars spent.
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Netflix to Finish and Release Orson Welles’ Final Film
Orson Welles’ last film finally has a home.
Netflix has acquired the global rights to Welles’ “The Other Side of the Wind” and will finance its completion and restoration.
Netflix’s announcement Tuesday brings to a close the decades-long mystery surrounding one of cinema’s greatest filmmakers. Welles began shooting the film in 1970 but never completed it.
The “Citizen Kane” director died in 1985.
“The Other Side of the Wind” is a Hollywood satire about a filmmaker attempting a comeback. Its stars include John Huston, Dennis Hopper and Peter Bogdanovich, who has helped in its editing.
Producer Frank Marshall will oversee the film’s completion.
Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos says he grew up worshipping Welles so releasing Welles’ last film “is a point of pride” for him and for Netflix.
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Why Bangalore Doesn’t Need Silicon Valley
Visitors to Bangalore, India, these days can see street art, have beer at local microbreweries or take an Uber ride to a distant neighborhood to meet with venture capitalists about a recent startup that grabbed their attention.
Gone are the days of a city dominated by call centers and American visa seekers.
“There’s an artisanal hot dog place there,” Sean Blagsvedt, founder of online job portal Babajob, said of a nearby neighborhood, speaking over his plate of salmon sashimi. “You have a bazillion 20-something tech people who don’t like to cook and suddenly have a [large amount] of money to start paying for interesting food. … You saw the same things in San Francisco.”
A wide variety of dining options, nightlife and other activities has blossomed alongside the tech industry in “India’s Silicon Valley.”
Bangalore was rated the most dynamic city in the world, two spots ahead of California’s Silicon Valley — which isn’t a city but was ranked as one — by the JLL City Momentum Index this year. The index looks at more than 100 cities around the world, rated by their “ability to embrace technological change, absorb rapid population growth and strengthen global connectivity.”
Not looking abroad
Call centers and outsourced IT workers still make up a part of Bangalore, but a vibrant crowd of modern, enthusiastic, tech-minded people has grown to dominate the city — and for most of them, the promise of “a better life” abroad is not on their radar.
Bangalore, however, has been attracting Americans and Europeans to start companies in India for Indians. And this phenomenon is hardly new.
Blagsvedt, who is also Babajob’s CEO, moved to Bangalore from his hometown of Seattle, Washington, when he was 28 to work with Microsoft. Although Blagsvedt enjoyed his work, he felt compelled to work more directly with Indians, for Indians.
“I always had this nagging thing, like, am I doing enough to address the inequity that I saw, am I doing enough to make the best use of my skills, to try to do something important to make a difference?” he said.
After reading a study that said to get out of poverty, one needed to either change jobs or start a successful business, Blagsvedt was inspired to change how people found those positions.
“If only we could find a way to digitize all the jobs, make it accessible to people who don’t use computers, and digitize the social network, then we might be able to catalyze the escape from poverty for a lot of people,” he said.
Twelve years, a successful company and a family later, Blagsvedt is “more Bangalorean than me!” according to an Indian on his team, Akshay Chaturvedi.
In the past 10 years, however, it’s not just Americans and Europeans with humanitarian motivations who are starting companies in Bangalore.
Indians, even those who paid for American educations and planned to pay off those debts with American jobs, have seen the increasing opportunity back home.
‘A lot of vibrancy’
“[There is] a lot of young talent trying to build solutions that are uniquely India on almost every sector, whether that’s health services, education, digital media, even financial inclusion,” said Vani Kola, a venture capitalist who has been in Bangalore for 10 years after working in Silicon Valley. “I see a lot of vibrancy with respect to opportunity for building unique companies with unique solutions for India.”
And Indians have taken advantage of that opportunity. The number of startups in Bangalore rivals those in the top tech cities around the world. In 2015, San Francisco research firm Compass rated Bangalore as the second fastest-growing startup ecosystem in the world, and it was the only Asian city besides Singapore to place in the top 20 startup ecosystems.
Chaturvedi is one such person who, after completing a fellowship in the United States, returned to India, specifically Bangalore, to join the world of unique Indian startups.
“I can’t imagine my life without startups,” Chaturvedi told VOA. “Everything I do — I’m touched by a startup at least 20 times a day. Every single dinner I order by some food tech startup.”
In the days after we spoke with him at Babajob, Chaturvedi quit to work on his own startup — Leverage, an online platform for higher education services.
Although the question of the future of H1-B visas, a visa most often granted to IT workers from India, is on the minds of American companies that employ them, Bangalore seems less concerned.
“When students studied there, I said, ‘Look, there’s a lot of opportunity calling in India — can’t I do something here?’ That, I think, was a trend that was already there for the last few years,” Chaturvedi said. “And now [the] Indian economy seems to be strong and the opportunity from startups seems very viable in India.”
Fewer seeking H1-Bs
Blagsvedt holds a stronger opinion, saying that H1-B visas are exploitative, and that the rise of opportunity in Bangalore has limited the number of people desperate for those options.
“They haven’t raised that minimum salary in 22 years,” Blagsvedt said. “Now you tell me where you can hire a five-year programmer in Silicon Valley for $65,000 [a year]. You just can’t. And what does that guy have as recourse? If he doesn’t like the job, his visa is sponsored fully … he can’t complain, he can’t even switch jobs!”
Blagsvedt and Chaturvedi both said that in the Bangalore startup ecosystem, they had heard no talk, or worry, about the proposed changes to the U.S. visa program.
Chaturvedi did admit, however, that any threats to the H1-B program “would have been far scarier 10 years back.”
In today’s Bangalore, any widespread panic that Silicon Valley might imagine simply hasn’t taken hold.
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Unusual Fog-clearing Apparatus Keeps Airline Passengers Moving
Make-believe fog is a frequent special effect used in the theater and at rock concerts. Usually created with dry ice, frozen carbon dioxide crystals, the smokey mist rolling across the stage creates a sense of mystery and suspense. But when real fog settles over an airfield, it creates delays or even danger.
At an airport in the western state of Oregon, ground crews take matters in their own hands when freezing fog threatens to delay takeoffs and landings. And they use the same substance to clear the fog that’s used to create it – dry ice.
“The dry ice collects the moisture [in the air] and it falls to the ground as basically just snow or ice,” explains Howard Volkman, the operations and maintenance supervisor at Rogue Valley International-Medford Airport.
When Mother Nature throws travelers a curve ball and freezing fog descends over the airport, he and his co-workers jump into action. First, they load crushed dry ice into a hopper suspended under a big helium balloon.
The five-and-a-half-meter-diameter balloon is tethered with a winch cable to an airport pickup truck. The crew lets it rise to 152 meters, then, with a remote control, turns on the dry ice spreader.
A driver and an operator make slow loops around the runway with the balloon and its dry ice spreader in tow, scattering the crystals into the mist.
“We’re clearing a hole in the fog,” Volkman says, “just for the airplanes to be able to see the runway.”
A friendly ghost
The staff nicknamed their white balloon CASPER, after the friendly cartoon ghost. Then they came up with an acronym that fit: Cable Attached System Providing Effective Release.
CASPER first took to the air in 2010, and has deployed 14 times this winter.
Medford Airport Director Bern Case says it is “very effective,” reducing flight cancellations to near zero.
“It’s all about dollars. Cancellations and diversions for airlines are very expensive, not only to the airlines, but if a person is trying to get to Tokyo and they can’t get out of here, it can ruin an entire trip,” he said.
This fog-busting method only works at temperatures of zero Celsius and below. So it is not that useful for airports in coastal cities where it’s usually warmer when fog forms.
Case says the Medford airport provided the blueprints for the one-of-a-kind balloon system to the airport authorities in Spokane, Washington and Anchorage, Alaska.
International inquiries about Medford, Oregon’s fog-clearing technology have come from Russia, South Africa and Scotland.
While fog-clearing operations are still necessary for private planes and older aircraft, recent advances in precision navigation technology mean newer jets can take off and land with barely any visibility.
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Fossils From 1.6 Billion Years Ago May Be Oldest-known Plants
Fossils unearthed in India that are 1.6 billion years old and look like red algae may represent the earliest-known plants, a discovery that could force scientists to reassess the timing of when major lineages in the tree of life first appeared on Earth.
Researchers on Tuesday described the tiny, multi-cellular fossils as two types of red algae, one thread-like and the other bulbous, that lived in a shallow marine environment alongside mats of bacteria. Until now, the oldest-known plants were 1.2-billion-year-old red algae fossils from the Canadian Arctic.
The researchers said cellular structures preserved in the fossils and their overall shape match red algae, a primitive kind of plant that today thrives in marine settings such as coral reefs but also can be found in freshwater environments. A type of red algae known as nori is a common sushi ingredient.
“We almost coul have had sushi 1.6 billion years ago,” joked Swedish Museum of Natural History geobiologist Therese Sallstedt, who helped lead the study published in the journal PLOS Biology.
Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago. There is evidence indicating life first appeared in the form of marine bacteria roughly 3.7 to 4.2 billion years ago. Only much later did plants and subsequently animals appear in the primordial seas.
“Plants have a key role for life on Earth, and we show here that they were considerably older than what we knew, which has a ripple effect on our appreciation of when advanced life forms appeared on the evolutionary scene,” Sallstedt said.
The fossils were found in phosphate-rich sedimentary rocks from Chitrakoot in central India. The thread-like fossils contained internal cellular features including structures that appear to be part of the machinery of photosynthesis, the process used by plants to convert sunlight into chemical energy.
Oxygen is a byproduct of photosynthesis and the advent of plants helped build the atmosphere’s oxygen content.
The fossils also contained structures at the center of each cell wall typical of red algae.
At the time, Earth’s land surfaces were largely barren, life was mainly microbial and atmospheric oxygen was at 1 to 10 percent of current levels, said study co-leader Stefan Bengtson, a Swedish Museum of Natural History paleobiologist.
The fossils also represent the oldest-known advanced multi-cellular organisms in the broad category called eukaryotes that includes plants, fungi and animals, indicating complex life flourished much earlier than previously assumed, the researchers said.
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Peru Startup Founders Discuss Business Challenges in Developing Countries
Mariana Costa Checa, a Peruvian entrepreneur, runs a coding boot camp for women in Peru, many of whom have no formal education.
She attended the South by Southwest conference and festivals in Austin, Texas, as part of a Peruvian contingent showing its work and sharing the challenges of starting an enterprise.
Entrepreneurship is one of the main themes at South by Southwest, which also includes artists, musicians, elected officials and company representatives.
Costa Checa spoke to VOA about overcoming challenges, including misconceptions of poverty.
“I grew up with a whole set of concepts around what getting a job entails, how to behave at work,” she said. “I realized if you grow up in a context where you’ve never seen someone working in an office, in a formal sector, then you don’t have that basis. … That entails a series of challenges in how to prepare someone to not only get a job, but be able to sustain a career.”
But helping underserved communities means truly understanding their conditions, she said.
“Much more goes into making a decision than just the sort of consumer aspect,” Costa Checa said. “A lot of it is the stress of poverty.”
Costa Checa was joined by Vania Masias, founder of D1 Asociacion Cultural, a dance program for at-risk youth in Lima.
Also attending was Isabel Medem, whose startup provides and services portable toilets in Peru’s poorest households.
Like other entrepreneurs here, she took a gamble.
“We didn’t know how long we would be around,” said Medem. “We didn’t know whether the model would be successful. So it was really, like, ‘Six months — we’ll just try and see.’ ”
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Teen Pregnancies Create Health Challenges in Cameroon
Two-month-old Pride Nalova cries as her mother slaughters and roasts chicken in a restaurant in Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde. Beatrice Nalova, the baby’s 15-year-old mother, says she was forced to drop out of school when her mother found out that she was pregnant.
“When she took me to a nearby hospital, the doctor found out that I was six months pregnant,” Beatrice said. “My mother hid it from my father and tried to evacuate the pregnancy. It did not work. At last I gave birth, and my father was surprised that I was pregnant and drove me out of the house. He said it was something like bad luck in the family. I left and stayed with my aunt.”
Beatrice was a student at Government Bilingual High School Nkol Eton in Yaounde. Philemon Enonchong, the vice principal, said the school does not allow pregnant girls to study alongside their peers in the school.
“When we discover that a student is pregnant, we advise the parents to come and take the child back home,” Enonchong said. “We would not just drive the child away or create a scene. When it is time for exams, then this child can come and write.”
Teen pregnancy abounds
The Cameroon Medical Council reports that 25 percent of pregnancies occur in girls of school age, and 20 percent of pregnant teens do not return to school.
Dr. Ndansi Elvis Noka of the Unite for Health Foundation, a group that strives to prevent unwanted pregnancies and abortions, said the council’s figures might be low, because less than 30 percent of the population visits conventional health services.
“Their fear is that of parental ostracization, like, ‘My mom is going to kill me, my dad is going to slaughter me. What are my friends going to think about me?’ The 25 percent is what government has identified based on those who have already overcome the fear of parents, the fear of friends, the fear of teachers.”
Contraceptives are still taboo in most communities, and poverty levels are still very high, forcing many girls into prostitution. The country’s demographic health survey adds that traditional practices that encourage early marriages, especially in the Muslim-dominated northern regions, are also responsible for teenage pregnancies.
Psychologist Mireille Ndje Ndje said the increase in teenage pregnancies also is linked to increased communication and interaction between people. This is a period, she said, when the world is a global village and people can communicate at all moments, wherever they are. She sad adolescent girls have a greater challenge because they are exposed to the Internet and social media, which have videos that entice them to try having sexual relations.
Childbirth complications
Gynecologist Vivian Verbe Sale of Cameroon’s Ministry of Health said severe bleeding, infections and high blood pressure before and after birth are some complications that cause death during childbirth among girls under age 15. She did not have statistics on how many teenagers die while giving birth.
“When a little girl gets pregnant at that age,” Sale said, “she is likely to have what we call an obstructed labor because of the small pelvis. And because of that, if she is not having the baby in a center where the staff is qualified to identify that on time to do a C-section to save the baby, she will likely have what we call vesicovaginal fistula” — a resulting abnormal passage between the bladder and vagina that allows continuous involuntary discharge of urine into the vaginal vault.
The World Health Organization says teenage pregnancies constitute a serious health and social problem worldwide, with most of them occurring in low- and middle-income countries.
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Now Hear This: Loud Sound May Pose More Harm Than We Thought
Matt Garlock has trouble making out what his friends say in loud bars, but when he got a hearing test, the result was normal. Recent research may have found an explanation for problems like his, something called “hidden hearing loss.”
Scientists have been finding evidence that loud noise – from rock concerts, leaf blowers, power tools and the like – damages our hearing in a previously unsuspected way. It may not be immediately noticeable, and it does not show up in standard hearing tests.
But over time, Harvard researcher M. Charles Liberman says, it can rob our ability to understand conversation in a noisy setting. It may also help explain why people have more trouble doing that as they age. And it may lead to persistent ringing in the ears.
The bottom line: “Noise is more dangerous than we thought.”
His work has been done almost exclusively in animals. Nobody knows how much it explains hearing loss in people or how widespread it may be in the population. But he and others are already working on potential treatments.
To understand Liberman’s research, it helps to know just how we hear. When sound enters our ears, it’s picked up by so-called hair cells. They convert sound waves to signals that are carried by nerves to the brain. People can lose hair cells for a number of reasons – from loud noise or some drugs, or simple aging – and our hearing degrades as those sensors are lost. That loss is what is picked up by a standard test called an audiogram that measures how soft a noise we can hear in a quiet environment.
Liberman’s work suggests that there’s another kind of damage that doesn’t kill off hair cells, but which leads to experiences like Garlock’s.
A 29-year-old systems engineer who lives near Boston, Garlock is a veteran of rock concerts.
“You come home and you get that ringing in your ears that lasts for a few days and then it goes away,” he said.
But after he went to Las Vegas for a friend’s birthday, and visited a couple of dance clubs, it didn’t go away. So he had the audiogram done, in 2015, and his score was normal.
Last fall, he came across a news story about a study co-authored by Liberman. It was a follow-up to Libermans’ earlier work that suggests loud noise damages the delicate connections between hair cells and the nerves that carry the hearing signal to the brain.
The news story said this can cause not only persistent ringing in the ears, but also a lingering difficulty in understanding conversations in background noise. After the Vegas trip, Garlock sensed he had that problem himself.
“I notice myself leaning in and asking people to repeat themselves, but I don’t notice anybody else doing that,” he said.
Garlock emailed one of Liberman’s colleagues and volunteered for any follow-up studies.
It’s hard to be sure that Garlock’s situation can be explained by the research. But the seeming contradiction of hearing problems in people with perfect hearing tests has puzzled experts for years, says Robert Fifer of the University of Miami’s Mailman Center for Child Development.
He’s seen it in Air Force personnel who worked around airplanes and in a few music-blasting adolescents.
“We didn’t have a really good explanation for it,” said Fifer, who’s an official of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.
But the work by Liberman and others helps solve the mystery, he said.
The connections between hair cells are called synapses, and a given hair cell has many of them. Animal studies suggest you could lose more than half of your synapses without any effect on how you score on an audiogram.
But it turns out, Liberman says, that losing enough synapses erodes the message the nerves deliver to the brain, wiping out details that are crucial for sifting conversation out from background noise. It’s as if there’s a big Jumbotron showing a picture, he says, but as more and more of its bulbs go black, it gets harder and harder to realize what the picture shows.
The study Garlock noticed is one of the few explorations of the idea in people. Researchers rounded up 34 college students between ages 18 and 41 who had normal scores on a standard hearing test. The volunteers were designated high-risk or low-risk for hidden hearing loss, based on what they said about their past exposure to loud noise and what steps they took to protect their hearing,
The higher-risk group reported more difficulty understanding speech in noisy situations, and they scored more poorly on a lab test of that ability. They also showed evidence of reduced function for hearing-related nerves.
It’s a small study that must be repeated, Liberman says, but it adds to evidence for the idea.
One encouraging indication from the animal studies is that a drug might be able to spur nerves to regrow the lost synapses, said Liberman, who holds a financial stake in a company that is trying to develop such treatments.
In the meantime, he says, the work lends a new urgency to the standard advice about protecting the ears in loud places.
“It isn’t awesome to have your ears ringing. It’s telling you (that) you did some damage,” he said.
Liberman’s own hearing scores are pretty good, but at age 65, he sometimes can’t understand his kids in a loud setting. He figures some of that may be from his years of handyman chores, like using a belt sander or a table saw.
“I wear earplugs when I mow the lawn now.”
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Trudeau in New York for Broadway Play About Canada on 9/11
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau plans to be in New York on Wednesday for a Broadway play about Newfoundlanders who opened their doors to thousands of passengers who descended on the town of Gander the day U.S. airspace was shut on 9/11.
More than 200 flights were diverted to Canada. Little-used Gander became the second busiest airport, taking in 38 flights. The 6,600 passengers arrived without warning on the town of 10,000.
Canadians took care of the stranded passengers for days. Americans say they experienced overwhelming kindness.
It’s now a musical called “Come From Away” that has won critical raves. It opened Sunday at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater.
Trudeau spokeswoman Andree-Lyne Halle said Tuesday the prime minister and his wife look forward to showing New Yorkers “Canada at its best.”
“We embrace the opportunity to highlight how we are there for each other in times of need,” she said.
Flight crews quickly filled Gander’s hotels, so passengers were taken to schools, fire stations and church halls. The Canadian military flew in 5,000 cots. Stores donated blankets, coffee machines, barbecue grills. Unable to retrieve their luggage, passengers became dependent on the kindness of strangers, and it came in the shape of clothes, showers, toys, banks of phones to call home free of charge, an arena that became a giant walk-in fridge full of donated food.
Once all the planes had landed or turned back to Europe, Gander’s air traffic controllers switched to cooking meals in the building nonstop for three days.
Years later, that huge, comforting hug of Gander still warms the memories of the passengers.
your ad herePlaywright Uses Art to Help France Fight Radical Islam
As France wrestles with questions of security and immigration during its presidential election campaign, a Belgian playwright is using his art as a weapon in the fight against radicalization.
Ismael Saidi, 40, has an unexpected hit with his dark comedy “Jihad”, which follows three men on their hapless journey from Brussels’ Schaerbeek district to Homs in Syria.
“I’ve written this play to say ‘That’s enough, it has to stop’,” says Saidi, a Muslim. “It’s now become more than a play, it’s become a real social issue.”
France was traumatized by violence including a truck attack that killed 86 people in Nice last July and coordinated attacks in Paris in November 2015 when 130 people died.
Saidi says writing was a way to “free himself” of the guilt he felt, having dodged the trap some of his acquaintances fell into.
He says militants recruited boys like him to fight in Afghanistan when he was a teenager living in Schaerbeek and years later, in 2014, a former classmate posted a photo on Facebook holding a rifle in Syria.
The departure of about 700 French citizens to fight for Islamic State in Syria and Iraq has also made terrorism and immigration important issues in France’s presidential race.
Centrist Emmanuel Macron, the front-runner, has proposed setting up detention centers to “re-socialize” jihadists returning from Syria and Iraq.
Far-right National Front leader Marine Le Pen would expel all foreigners linked to Islamist fundamentalism, while conservative Francois Fillon has repeatedly warned of the risk of French Muslims being radicalized.
The government, which estimates 11,500 people are radicalized in France, plans to spend 15 million euros ($19 million) this year on preventing radicalization, up from around one million euros in 2014. It’s unclear if those funds will remain in place after the presidential election.
The current campaign includes websites to raise awareness of recruitment techniques.
Critics say the government has not delivered a coherent strategy to counter radicalization among France’s five-million Muslims.
But government officials say state-sponsored programs must be supplemented by private projects, such as Saidi’s play, which has drawn large crowds in its two-year tour of France and Belgium.
More than 700 secondary-school students saw it recently in the northern French city of Valenciennes.
“With plays like that, we can really make change happen,” said 16-year-old Sarah Moussaddak.
Muriel Domenach, who leads government efforts to prevent radicalization, supports the initiative.
“Making Daesh [Islamic State] uncool is very important,” she said.
Some experts argue former jihadists are the only ones who can reach people at risk.
“They have lived it from the inside, they know the invisible threads of jihadi utopia,” says French anthropologist Dounia Bouzar, who until last year helped the government train local authorities to fight radicalization.
David Vallat, who appears in one government online counter-radicalization campaign, was jailed for five years in the 1990s for joining networks linked to Algeria’s Armed Islamic Group.
He had previously traveled to Bosnia and Afghanistan. Now, the 45-year-old project manager from Lyon wants to spend all his time telling his story. But Vallat says that without public funding, he cannot make his voice heard.
French authorities are reluctant to work closely with former jihadists, wary about whether their reform is sincere.
Last year, Bouzar tried to persuade the government to work with Farid Benyettou, the infamous ex-mentor of the Kouachi brothers, who attacked satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, killing 12 people. Her proposal was rejected.
“The government is too timid,” says Bouzar. “Even the best imam, the best psychologist or the best teacher cannot instill doubts about something he hasn’t lived.”
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