In Pictures: International Women’s Day
Today, woman around the world are celebrating International Women’s Day. U.N. agencies are calling for greater efforts to ensure gender equality and end hunger and poverty.
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Silicon Valley Offers Muted Reaction to New Travel Restrictions
When the Trump administration issued its executive order in Janurary restricting travelers from certain countries, many tech companies and their employees were quick to express their objections.
But now, with the new executive order out limiting travel to the U.S. for people from six countries, the response from Silicon Valley has been largely muted.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, Facebook and Microsoft has so far remained quiet.
In reaction to the first travel executive order, the three companies were among 100 U.S. tech firms that filed a legal brief in opposition. At the time, Google said 76 of its employees were affected by the executive order.
Still, some firms, such as Uber, Lyft, Mozilla and Airbnb, were quick to express their objections to Monday’s executive order.
Lyft, the ride-hailing firm, plans to meet with the American Civil Liberties Group this week to discuss how “we can further support their efforts,” Logan Green, Lyft’s CEO, said in a statement. The company gave the civil liberties organization $1 million in January.
“Our sentiment has not changed: President (Donald) Trump’s immigration ban is unjust and wrong,” an Uber spokesperson said. “We will continue to stand up for those in the Uber community affected.”
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff tweeted a tribute to his grandfather, “Thinking of great grandfather Issac Benioff who came to US from Kiev as Refugee. W/O him no @Salesforce (2M jobs/200B GDP) or@GameOfThrones!” (Benioff’s cousin, David, is the co-creator of the hit TV series.)
Tech lobbying group and trade organizations have largely stayed mum about the limited travel ban.
One exception is TechNet, which represents tech firms such as Facebook and Apple. It put out a statement this week saying that “unfortunately, just like the first order, this new policy singles out individuals based on their country of origin and will adversely impact technology workers who live and work in our nation.”
The industry has been anxiously waiting for the Trump administration’s revamp of the H-1B visa program, which Silicon Valley uses to hire skilled workers. Late last week, the administration jettisoned an aspect of the H-1B visa application process called “premium processing,” which allowed companies to pay extra for their visa applications to be expedited.
That change underscored the uncertainty in the industry over how the Trump administration will ultimately handle both work visas and travel restrictions.
“What’s next?” said Evan Engstrom, executive director of Engine, an advocacy and research group focused on tech startups.
“What everyone is concerned about is what anti-immigration policies are going to be more expansive,” Engstrom said.
It’s a point echoed by a Yahoo executive.
“American businesses like Yahoo need certainty, particularly around the ability to hire and retain top talent. A piecemeal approach leaves question marks for companies and employees,” April Boyd, a Yahoo vice president and head of global public policy, said in a statement. “We encourage the administration to work with Congress on a thoughtful, lasting approach to bring positive change to the current immigration system.”
Each April 1, the U.S. holds a lottery for 65,000 H-1B visas and 20,000 additional visas for foreign students with master’s degrees. Last year, there were requests for more than 200,000, a record figure.
But critics say skilled-worker visa programs have hurt American workers. Companies have used them, they say, to hire foreign workers who are not highly skilled and who are paid lower than market rate wages.
The biggest users of the H-1B program have been outsourcing firms that provide IT consulting.
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France Upsets US Women’s Soccer Team in Washington
It’s clear the U.S. women’s long-time reign as the world’s number-one ranked soccer team is being seriously challenged. Number-three France did not just beat the Americans in a friendly tournament hosted by the United States, but did it convincingly.
The French scored twice in the first 10 minutes Tuesday night in Washington in the final game of the SheBelieves Cup, and added a goal in the second half, to blank the U.S. women, 3-0. In the earlier mach at RFK Stadium, Olympic champion and No. 2 Germany edged No. 5 England, 1-0.
The results left the U.S. at the bottom of the table after the four teams all played a challenging schedule of three matches in seven days in the second year of this event. France finished with 7 points, Germany had four, while England and the United States each had three, but England had a better goal differential to finish ahead of the Americans.
“We’re extremely disappointed, obviously,” said U.S. defender Julie Johnston. “But we’re here to grow and learn. You know, we want to have as many tools as we can in order to grow and test ourselves and these are the teams you want to test yourselves with.”
There’s little doubt this was one of the worst defeats in U.S. Women’s Soccer history, and it comes on top of the Americans’ 1-0 loss to England on March 1 in their first match of the tournament.
“We know they’ll come back from this, but it’s certainly disappointing,” U.S. soccer fan Emily Rabinek told VOA. “I think they are just coming back from the hard loss from the Olympics last year, but I think they are going to see a turnaround. I am still feeling positive even after a hard loss tonight.”
It comes as no surprise that some fans are already saying U.S. head coach Jill Ellis should lose her job.
As for the winning French side, it did not take them long to get the advantage against the U.S.Eugenie Le Sommer was taken down in the box in the 8th minute and a penalty kick was awarded. Camile Abily converted to give the French a 1-0 lead.
If that weren’t enough of a shock to the partisan crowd, less than two minutes later Le Sommer scored to make it 2-0. Abily added a second-half goal to make the final 3-0, giving France the title.
“We are really happy because we know it’s really hard to beat the U.S. in the USA.” said Abily. “So it’s a great game we played. But we just want to keep going and it was really important for us to win this tournament.”
“I think for the players it was a very good match, a very good match, in general,” French coach Olivier Echouafni told VOA. “And getting the two goals during the first 10 minutes I think was a great thing for the beginning of the match.”
In the earlier game, the lone goal for Germany came from Anja Mittag in the 44th minute.
“We knew this was going to be a tough tournament,” said German coach Steffi Jones. “There were three great teams that we were playing against. After the first game where we lost against the U.S. team (1-0) and then being so unlucky against France (0-0 draw) was for me, as a head coach, I was wishing for a win tonight. So I am glad that the team finished it finally with a win.”
England coach Mark Sampson said, “I definitely thought we deserved something out of the game, but the margin was just so, so small, and today it didn’t go in our favor. It’s just unfortunate that we didn’t put the ball in the back of the net when we got some good opportunities to score.But we played three games in so short a time against such quality opponents and were in them all for every single second. There was such a small margin between winning and losing.”
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Lightweight Vest Offers Vital Protection For Space Colonists
The Earth’s atmosphere, and magnetic fields protect us from the damaging, and potentially deadly effects of gamma rays. But in space, and in some earthly disaster scenarios like a nuclear meltdown, it takes several feet of concrete or lead to keep us safe. But a new vest of flexible light material might solve the gamma ray problem as we try to figure out ways to set up shop on the Moon, Mars, and beyond. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Latin American Girls Hack Man’s World of Tech, Science
Staying up late into the night, Lilia Lobato Martinez watched endless YouTube videos to teach herself the computer code she used to help build her prize-winning Ool app for volunteers in Guadalajara, Mexico.
In her country, she is usually the only woman in tech competitions, which often hand out men’s T-shirts to the winners.
Now the 18-year-old electrical engineering student is using the $10,000 she won for her app in last year’s international girls-only Technovation competition to further develop Ool, which has so far linked over 1,000 volunteers with 20 non-profit groups in Mexico’s second-biggest city.
“A lot of people were constantly complaining everything’s wrong, but I found that no one was going out to the street to volunteer,” said Lobato. “So I decided to develop an app that’s a compendium of all the non-profit organizations, so we can learn what Mexico is building.”
A male-dominated field
With plans to eventually set up a center to teach children to code, she said many of her female friends shied away from IT development because it was male-dominated. Only four out of 40 students on her degree course are women, she pointed out.
Across Latin America, the participation of girls and women in technology and science has lagged far behind men, experts say.
And while awareness of the need to correct the imbalance is growing, social and economic pressures mean many are still pushed into other areas or expected to start work straight after school rather than going into higher education.
“Boys think it’s easy for them and they expect to be smart in technology … it’s not expected for girls, and that’s reinforced by the education system quite often,” said Gloria Bonder, Buenos Aires-based UNESCO chair on women, science and technology in Latin America.
The portrayal of women in the media, and a lack of role models also contribute to making it a system-wide problem, added Bonder, who is working on a Central American pilot project to incorporate gender equality into science and technology education.
While 44 percent of all science research positions — including social sciences — in the region are held by women, they are under-represented in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM), according to UNESCO.
For example, in Peru and Colombia, around a third of natural science researchers are women, but they account for just a quarter of engineering and technology researchers.
Now a number of projects are striving to improve access for girls and give them the skills and confidence to compete in those jobs.
Developers’ boot camp
One of these is the Laboratoria coding academy in Lima, which spots talent “where no one else is looking,” said its chief executive, Mariana Costa Checa.
More than 1,000 women applied for 70 places at its intensive boot camp where candidates from low-income backgrounds train as front-end web developers.
The application process involves a series of rigorous tests, alongside interviews with candidates’ families to reduce the drop-out rate for the course, which also runs in Santiago, Mexico City and the Peruvian city of Arequipa, and helps participants land jobs with companies such as IBM.
Along with computer programs like JavaScript, it teaches workplace skills that are crucial for women who have little experience of formal-sector employment, said Costa.
She expects some Laboratoria graduates will go on to develop technical solutions for problems in their communities.
“The first thing we look for is a job, because it gives them economic stability, and for our average student, it triples their income,” said Costa.
It also gives them “a new perspective in life,” she added. “It starts changing the way they look at the world — and I think there’s enormous value in then bringing that change to their own communities.”
Many girls are on their own
With many girls from poor families under pressure to start earning as soon as they finish school, Rebeca Vargas, president of the U.S.-Mexico Foundation, said most of those who signed up for the international STEM mentoring program she helped set up in Mexico’s Puebla state did so without telling their parents.
Nearly all are now studying STEM subjects at college or university.
“Some of the girls we worked with last year had to sell bread and food on the street to be able to earn money to eat,” said Vargas, whose foundation developed the program with Mexico’s public education secretariat and the New York Academy of Sciences.
Girls take a different route
Families often expect girls to pay their way at home but not to seek senior positions at corporations or well-paid jobs.
“They’re supposed to work but they’re not supposed to be educated,” Vargas said.
Wendy Arellano Martinez, who won a scholarship to study biotechnology engineering at the prestigious Monterrey Technology Institute after the mentoring program, is now part of a team developing a project to make spectacle frames from recycled plastic bottles for older people on low incomes.
“We’re going to be looking for funds from organizations or foundations to help us distribute our products to people who need them but don’t have the resources,” said the 18-year-old student from Puebla. “I want to give the same support that I received.”
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Researchers Develop Blood Test to Pinpoint Location of Cancer
Researchers are developing a blood test that can tell not only whether someone has cancer, but in what organ the tumors are lurking. The test could mean more prompt, potentially life-saving treatment for patients.
Researchers describe their blood test as a kind of dual authentication process. It is able to detect the presence of dying tumor cells in blood as well as tissue signatures, to signal to clinicians which organ is affected by the cancer.
There already are tests that screen for traces of DNA released by dying cancer cells. Such blood tests show promise in the treatment of patients to see how well anti-cancer therapies are working.
But researchers at the University of California, San Diego discovered a new clue, using organ-specific DNA signatures, that leads them to the particular organ that is affected.
The finding makes the new blood test potentially useful as a screening tool in people suspected of having cancer.
UC-San Diego bioengineering professor Kun Zhang is senior author of a paper in Nature Genetics about the experimental test.
“So when you try to do these kinds of early screening or early detection [tests], these people are healthy. So if you take a blood draw and then you do a test, and you find some signature of cancer, that is not enough because you do not know what to do next,” Zhang said. “And so, in this case, we developed a method where we can say whether there is a cancer growing in the body and if the answer is ‘Yes,’ we can also say something about where does it grow.”
The test screens for a DNA signature called a CpG methylation haplotype, which is unique for each tissue in the body.
When a cancer grows in an organ, it competes with healthy tissue for nutrients and space, killing off healthy cells, which release their DNA into the bloodstream.
The haplotype signatures, identified by the blood test, could tell doctors what cells are being destroyed, and therefore what organ is being invaded by cancer. Zhang says knowing a tumor’s location is especially crucial for early detection and treatment.
Researchers created a database of complete CpG methylation patterns for 10 different normal tissues: the lungs, liver, intestine, colon, brain, pancreas, spleen, stomach, kidney and blood. To put together the genetic marker database, the investigators also analyzed tumor and blood samples of cancer patients.
They screened the blood samples of 59 patients with lung or colorectal cancer, comparing those findings to people without cancer.
“It could be potentially used as a screening test,” Zhang said. “So I think that is the real potential. We need to do a few more rigorous clinical observations before we can get to that point.”
Zhang envisions eventually using the blood test to look for markers of cancer as part of routine blood work.
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Bacon, Sugary Sodas, Too Few Nuts Tied to Big Portion of US Deaths
Gorging on bacon, skimping on nuts? These are among food habits that new research links with deaths from heart disease, strokes and diabetes.
Overeating or not eating enough of 10 specific foods and nutrients contributes to nearly half of U.S. deaths from these causes, the study suggests.
”Good” foods that were undereaten are nuts and seeds; seafood rich in omega-3 fats, including salmon and sardines; fruits and vegetables; and whole grains.
”Bad” foods or nutrients that were overeaten include salt and salty foods; processed meats including bacon, bologna and hot dogs; red meat including steaks and hamburgers; and sugary drinks.
The research is based on U.S. government data showing there were about 700,000 deaths in 2012 from heart disease, strokes and diabetes, and on an analysis of national health surveys that asked participants about their eating habits. Most didn’t eat the recommended amounts of the foods studied.
The 10 ingredients combined contributed to about 45 percent of those deaths, according to the study.
More detail on risks, benefits
It may sound like a familiar attack on the typical American diet, and the research echoes previous studies on the benefits of heart-healthy eating. But the study goes into more detail on specific foods and their risks or benefits, said lead author Renata Micha, a public health researcher and nutritionist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.
The results were published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Micha said the foods and nutrients were singled out because of research linking them with the causes of death studied. For example, studies have shown that excess salt can increase blood pressure, putting stress on arteries and the heart. Nuts contain healthy fats that can improve cholesterol levels, while bacon and other processed meats contain saturated fats that can raise levels of unhealthy LDL cholesterol.
In the study, too much salt was the biggest problem, linked with nearly 10 percent of the deaths. Overeating processed meats and undereating nuts and seeds and seafood each were linked with about 8 percent of the deaths.
The Food and Drug Administration’s recent voluntary sodium reduction guidelines for makers of processed foods is a step in the right direction, as are taxes that some U.S. cities have imposed on sugar-sweetened beverages, Micha said.
A journal editorial said public health policies targeting unhealthy eating could help prevent some deaths, while noting that the study didn’t constitute solid proof that ”suboptimal” diets were deadly.
The study’s recommended amounts, based on U.S. government guidelines, nutrition experts’ advice, and amounts found to be beneficial or harmful in previous research:
‘Good’ ingredients
— Fruits: 3 average-sized fruits daily
— Vegetables: 2 cups cooked or 4 cups raw vegetables daily
— Nuts/seeds: 5 1-ounce servings per week — about 20 nuts per serving
— Whole grains: 2½ daily servings
— Polyunsaturated fats, found in many vegetable oils: 11 percent of daily calories
— Seafood: about 8 ounces weekly
‘Bad’ ingredients
— Red meat: 1 serving weekly — 1 medium steak or the equivalent
— Processed meat: None recommended
— Sugary drinks: None recommended
— Salt: 2,000 milligrams daily — just under a teaspoon.
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Jackie Chan: Hollywood Competition Means Better Chinese Films
Jackie Chan says letting more Hollywood movies into the Chinese market would pressure Chinese filmmakers to make better films.
China sets a quota on the number of foreign movies allowed to be shown in the country, trying to fend off a cinematic wave that could swamp local filmmakers and loosen the ruling Communist Party’s grip on culture.
However, competition can be good, Chan said.
“It is this pressure that makes our filmmakers work harder and shoot better films,” Chan told reporters at a news conference in Beijing on Tuesday. “If we had shot our own films behind closed doors without any competition, we wouldn’t have had the growth in box office we have today.”
The Hong Kong action star is a member of the official advisory body to the national legislature, which is meeting this week in the Chinese capital.
Negotiators from China and the U.S. are expected to reach a new agreement this year on how many foreign films to allow into China, now the world’s the second-biggest movie market after North America. An expanded quota would mean more competition for domestic films, which last year accounted for 58 percent of the total box office, or 26.7 billion yuan ($3.8 billion).
In 2012, then-Vice President Xi Jinping and then-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden negotiated a five-year deal to allow 34 foreign films to be shown in Chinese cinemas each year on a revenue-sharing basis. State media reports have suggested that a new deal could see the quota increased by 10 films or more.
In addition to the quota, a handful of extra Hollywood movies were let in last year to try to boost a disappointing slowdown in box office receipts.
Apart from expanding the quota, Hollywood executives hope to increase their share of ticket sales in China from the current 25 percent. They receive 40 percent of ticket revenues in other markets.
It’s unclear how much effort President Donald Trump’s administration will put into promoting Hollywood’s interests in China. Trump has been criticized by various Hollywood stars and fired off his own insults at others.
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Study: Diabetes Linked to Cancer in Asia
Researchers at New York University’s School of Medicine found that diabetes increased the risk of cancer death among Asians by an average of 26 percent, a statistic similar in the West.
Data for the new study drew on an analysis of 770,000 people with Type 2 diabetes throughout East and South Asia. Diabetics were followed for an average of 13 years to see if they developed cancer and what types. During that time more than 37,300 cancer deaths were identified.
Yu Chen, an epidemiology professor at the NYU School of Medicine’s Department of Population Health who was the study’s lead author, says Asians with Type 2 diabetes are more likely to be diagnosed with rarer cancers than Westerners, including cancers of the liver, thyroid and kidney which was double the risk compared to non-diabetics in Asia.
There was also a 2.7 percent increased risk of cancer of the endometrium and a 1.7 percent higher risk of breast cancer among diabetic Asians compared to those who were not diabetic.
The number of cancers of the gallbladder and bile ducts in Asia were comparable to those in the West, according to Chen. Those sites are closer in the body to the pancreas, where insulin is made.
Chen thinks there may be several mechanisms at work, but data suggests that insulin may in some way stimulate the growth of cancer.
“Patients with diabetes that have high levels of insulin, some cancers are very sensitive to insulin, so it may promote the tumor growing,” she said.
The findings were published in the journal Diabetologia.
Chen said the study was undertaken because there’s been little research on an association between diabetes and cancer in Asia.
She said the research suggests Type 2 diabetes should be added to the list of cancer risk factors, along with diet and cigarette smoking.
“Cancer prevention needs to take into account for diabetes the lifestyles related to diabetes – [which] may reduce the risk of diabetes and also cancer,” she said.
Chen suggested that diabetics should receive more cancer screenings, in addition to medical interventions to reduce the risk of diabetes overall.
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Brazil Launches Database to Fight Illegal Amazon Logging
Brazil’s federal environmental agency, Ibama, launched on Tuesday a centralized database to track timber from source to sale, a vital step in the fight against illegal logging in the Amazon.
The system, known as Sinaflor, allows individual trees to be electronically tagged and monitored as they are cut down and pass through the supply chain, with regulators able to check the database via their cell phones while on patrol.
With built-in satellite mapping, timber being sold as legal can be checked against the exact area of licensed commercial production it is claimed to originate from.
The system marks a step change from the current system, which environmentalists criticize as being open to fraud and human error as databases are isolated, poorly managed and cannot be easily accessed to verify documentation attached to timber.
“The new system offers a much more comprehensive process of control,” Suely Araújo, president of Ibama, said in an interview in her office in Brasilia. “What’s not in Sinaflor will be illegal timber.”
The system is the result of four years of work and was envisioned under the forest code passed into law in 2012, which gave the federal government power to create and manage a national system to regulate the supply chain of timber.
Illegal logging is one of the greatest threats to the preservation of the Amazon. In the year until July 2016, Amazonian rainforest six times the size of Los Angeles was cut down.
That was the second rise in two years, ending a 10-year period in which deforestation was dramatically reduced. Brazil’s Environment Ministry, under which Ibama falls, has vowed to reverse the trend.
Sinaflor has already been piloted in the state of Roraima and is being introduced this week in Rondonia. The states are legally obliged to use the system, and Araújo expects to have it up and running across the country by the end of the year.
“When we manage to implement it in the whole country, I think it will be a step change in terms of control,” Araújo said.
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Report: Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks to Make First Film Together
Two of the most celebrated actors of their generation, Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, will star together for the first time in new Steven Spielberg political drama “The Post,” according to Hollywood trade magazine Variety.
The film will focus on the Washington Post’s publication of the 1971 Pentagon Papers, which made headlines around the world when the newspaper’s editor and publisher challenged the U.S. federal government over their right to publish them.
Twice Oscar winner Hanks will play the editor, Ben Bradlee, while triple Oscar winner Streep will take on the role of the publisher, Kay Graham, according to Variety.
No dates for filming were revealed in the report, with award-laden director Spielberg currently in post-production on science-fiction action movie, “Ready Player One,” which is due to hit theaters in March 2018.
Streep was branded an “overrated actress” by U.S. President Donald Trump after she criticized him for belittling a disabled journalist at the Golden Globes in January.
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African Cinemas Make Comeback With Private Funding
Africa’s largest film festival, Fespaco, recently celebrated its 25th edition. The main venue, as always, was the old and respectable Cine Burkina, in the heart of the capital Ouagadougou. The city used to have at least nine dedicated cinemas — now only two remain.
It is a picture that is repeated across the continent.
In Senegal, don’t go looking for the Cinema de Paris, the old film temple at the Place de l’Independence in downtown Dakar. It’s gone. It was knocked down in 2011, and the hole it left behind was filled with hotels and office blocks.
And in the Cameroonian capital Yaounde, the number of cinemas is …
“Zero. In Yaounde, we’re three million [people] but we don’t have a single functioning cinema,” said Cameroonian culture journalist Parfait Tabapsi.
The arrival of DVDs and the failure of the big cinemas to go digital are two of the reasons for the demise in West Africa.
People can watch the latest Hollywood flicks — often pirated, of course — for a pittance on TVs at little neighborhood viewing spots, but try to find any African films, besides perhaps a bit of Nollywood, and you will be disappointed.
Changing that is at the heart of Tabapsi’s work in Cameroon with an organization called Mobile Digital Cinema.
“Our aim is to bring movies to the places where they cannot go,” he said. “Because there’s no communication means, there’s no electricity, the roads are bad. … But people need to see artists and directors that tell the story of Africa. So we buy the film rights and screen the films for free.”
And now, belatedly, the old-fashioned cinema is catching up.
Fespaco joined the digital age two editions ago, when it announced that directors were no longer required to deliver their films in the expensive and cumbersome 33-mm format.
It’s a shift that can also be seen elsewhere in the industry.
Young Ivorian film director and actress Kadhy Toure has proven that home-grown movies can be made, and can make money.
Her film, L’Interprete, is the biggest box office hit in Ivorian history.
“In Ivory Coast, we only have one big company that has three cinemas,” Toure said. “They were blown away. They kept asking me: How did you do it? This is the first time that they see a line of people just wanting to see an African film.”
The film is about the many twists and turns in the love life of an Abidjan woman who works as an interpreter. It’s a story, Toure says, about us — and that’s why people queue around the block to see it.
Toure says a sequel is on the way. Elsewhere, her fellow African directors are working equally hard to have their films shown — in their countries.
The award-winning Chadian Mahamat-Saleh Haroun single-handedly revived Le Normandie, in the capital N’Djamena. And in Burkina Faso, another mythical cinema, Guimbi, in the country’s second-largest city of Bobo Dioulasso, is under reconstruction, according to the project’s spokeswoman Rosalie Zida.
Reconstruction of the cinema — the only one in the city — started in mid-2015 and is the initiative of local filmmakers, along with the help of friends in Belgium and France. One hall will open later this year, Zida says, and the full complex will be finished in 2018.
And, in Ouagadougou, this year’s Fespaco coincided with the opening of a new screening venue, the Canal Olympia. It is part of a series of multifunctional cultural venues owned by the French chain Canal+ and already present in Conakry, Guinea.
So what is the takeaway, as Fespaco goes into its habitual two-year slumber? That mostly private initiatives are helping to resurrect African cinema, and that this applies to the buildings and to what is shown on the big screens. Produce it — and they will come.
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Malawi Struggles to Retain Nurses in Public Hospitals
In a pediatric ward at Queen Elizabeth Central hospital, the largest referral health facility in Malawi, mothers look frustrated because of a long wait for a nurse to check on their children. A visit to other outpatient wards reveals more packed waiting rooms.
Such is the situation in public hospitals across Malawi where 65 percent of nursing positions remain vacant.
The shortages leave the country’s public health system in dire need of nurses, and recruiting trained staff remains difficult as many registered nurses prefer the higher pay and better working conditions they can find in private hospitals or abroad.
Malawi’s National Association of Nurses and Midwifery president, Dorothy Ngoma, says it’s a matter of economics.
“They quit on us because we cannot pay them well. Most of them are joining the NGOs or to private [hospitals]. So they go where they are paid a bit more money and also where they have more incentives.”
Ngoma said incentives can include housing allowances and overtime pay, and private sector salaries can be double what public hospitals offer.
Health ministry spokesman Adrian Chikumbe says the government cannot afford to pay more.
“The government purse now is constrained, and we have not only health workers to provide for. We also have other cadres in the civil service.”
Well below international standards
Government statistics show that Malawi has three nurses per 10,000 people. That is well below the World Health Organization recommendation of 10 nurses for every 10,000 people.
But efforts are underway to plug the shortage.
To fill vacancies, the health ministry says it has more than tripled the number of students in its nurse training institutions from 40 to 150 per class.
A U.S.-based NGO, the Global AIDS Interfaith Alliance, has also been trying to address the gap. GAIA sponsors education for nursing students in Malawi who commit to work in public hospitals for the first four years after they graduate.
Scholarship program project officer Chimwemwe Mwangonde explains the incentive program.
“Throughout, we support their tuition and also their upkeep. At the end of their program in the fourth year we also pay their license examinations for them to work anywhere in the country, be it in the hospital or in the community.”
The program has supported more than 500 registered nurses since its inception in 2005. GAIA is now seeking funding to double the program’s annual intake to as many as 80 students a year.
Statistics from the recent program evaluation report show that 93 percent of the graduated nurses have honored their public service commitment. And of those nurses who have met the requirement, nearly all of them have continued to work in the public hospitals.
One of them is Patricia Siyabu. She says her decision was driven by a commitment to service.
“Now it is hard to work in government considering the amount of money that we get comparing to the people in NGO’s. But I still love working in the government because it is my desire to serve the government. So I have no dreams of going to the NGOs yet. Not now.”
And it’s the “not now” part that is causing the concern. Recruiting new nurses to work in public hospitals is one challenge, retaining them over the long term is another one entirely.
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German Court Rejects Injunction for Facebook in Syrian Selfie Case
A German court rejected a temporary injunction against Facebook on Tuesday in a case brought by a Syrian refugee who sued the social networking site for failing to remove faked posts linking him to crimes and militant attacks.
The Wuerzburg district court said in a preliminary ruling that Facebook is neither a “perpetrator nor a participant” in what it said was “undisputable defamation” by Facebook users, but simply acting as a hosting provider that is not responsible for preemptively blocking offensive content under European law.
The posts in dispute featured a picture showing Anas Modamani, a 19-year-old from Damascus, taking a selfie with Chancellor Angela Merkel in September 2015 at a refugee shelter in the Berlin district of Spandau.
Modamani’s image was subsequently shared on Facebook on anonymous accounts, alongside posts falsely claiming he was responsible for the Brussels airport bombing of March 2016 and setting on fire a homeless man in December last year by six migrants at an underground station in Berlin.
The court rejected the need for a temporary injunction sought by Modamani to require Facebook to go beyond measures the company had taken to block defamatory images of him for Facebook users in Germany using geo-blocking technology.
In a statement following the decision, Facebook expressed concern for Modamani’s predicament but said the court’s ruling showed the company acted quickly to block access to defamatory postings, once they had been reported by Modamani’s lawyer.
The case has been closely watched as Germany, a frequent critic of Facebook, is preparing legislation to force the social networking website to remove “hate speech” from its web pages within 24 hours or face fines.
After the ruling, Modamani’s lawyer in the case, Chan-jo Jun, told a news conference he was disappointed such imagery continued to circulate online and more must be done to force Facebook to delete hate-filled content on its own accord.
“We have to decide whether we want to accept that Facebook can basically do whatever it wants or whether German law, and above all the removal of illegal contents in Germany, will be enforced. If we want that we need new laws,” Jun said.
Modamani’s complaint maintained that defamatory images based on the selfie posted to Facebook were still viewable online outside of Germany, or by users within Germany using a sophisticated Tor browser.
But the court found that the risk of average German users seeing the illegal content was not sufficiently credible and therefore a temporary injunction was unnecessary at this stage.
The ruling said there remained a legitimate issue over whether it was technically feasible for Facebook to do more to block such images, but this would require testimony by experts.
Tuesday’s decision is subject to appeal within one month of the yet-to-be-published written judgment, a court statement said. Jun declined to say whether an appeal was planned, saying the decision remained up to his client.
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Fredericks Leaves 2024 Olympic Bid Role, Waives Vote
IOC member Frank Fredericks has stepped down from his role overseeing the 2024 Olympic bidding process after a $300,000 payment from a banned track official was revealed.
Fredericks says “Paris and Los Angeles are presenting two fantastic candidatures and I do not wish to become a distraction.”
The Namibian sprinter, a four-time Olympic silver medalist, says stepping aside as IOC evaluation chairman is “in the best interests” of the bidding process.
Fredericks would have led an April 23-25 visit to Los Angeles.
He also will skip the September hosting vote.
Last Friday, Fredericks said he contacted the IOC Ethics Commission ahead of French daily Le Monde reporting that a company linked to him was paid $299,300 on Oct. 2, 2009, the day Rio de Janeiro won 2016 Olympic hosting rights.
Fredericks denies wrongdoing.
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Oklahoma City Bombing Documentary Examines Growth of American Extremism
The Oklahoma City bombing nearly 22 years ago was an act of domestic terror by U.S. military veteran Timothy McVeigh and his accomplice, Terry Nichols. The bombing destroyed one third of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, killing 168 people and injuring 680 others. In his documentary, Oklahoma City, filmmaker Barak Goodman revisits the bombing as the first major domestic terrorist attack in the United States on April 19, 1995.
It was the number of civilians killed – especially the 15 children, four of them infants, crushed inside the building’s day care center – that made this terrorist attack by a massive fertilizer bomb so heinous for many Americans. Many films have recounted the story, but Goodman’s documentary treats the Oklahoma City bombing as a springboard to examine the roots of America’s ultra-right militia and to analyze the makeup of homegrown American terrorism.
History of suspicion
“It goes all the way back to the founding of the Republic,” the filmmaker told VOA. “The Republic was founded on the suspicion of government.” Goodman says many of these extreme separatists believe in white supremacy and in unregulated freedom to keep and bear arms so that they can protect themselves from outsiders and the government.
In the documentary, former militia member Kerry Noble explains the ideology. “The government is an enemy of the people, and in this war it’s an all or nothing. We’re either gonna win as the white race or we’re gonna lose.”
Oklahoma City points to two events in the late 20th century that bolstered separatist ideologies: The Ruby Ridge incident on August 21, 1992, and the Waco siege in Waco, Texas, between February 28 and April 19, 1993. In both cases, federal and local government agents clashed with American separatists. The deadly incidents were fueled by the authorities’ demand to search the premises for illegal firearms.
The Waco siege was particularly deadly. The compound belonged to a group known as the Branch Davidians, led by David Koresh. When federal authorities sent in armed agents and armored vehicles to end the standoff, a fire engulfed the compound, killing 82 people, including David Koresh. Sixty-two of the victims were women and children.
Birth of an extremist
Timothy McVeigh, a Gulf War veteran disillusioned by the government during his tour in Iraq, was among those who went to witness the siege. According to the documentary, McVeigh was radicalized by those events and by an extremist publication called The Turner Diaries.
“It’s a Talisman for the far right, even to this day, but especially back in the ’90s and ’80s it was the ‘Bible’ of this movement,” says Goodman. “It’s a novel about a small group of ‘patriots,’ ‘white patriots’ who retake the government from the Jews and blacks who have infiltrated it, essentially. It’s a racist creed and as I said, it is very poorly done. Intriguingly though, it describes the bombing of the FBI, the culmination of the novel, and it really lays out a recipe on how to build a bomb like this.”
That bomb is very similar to the one McVeigh used in Oklahoma City.
“McVeigh was deeply, deeply influenced by this book,” Goodman adds. “He sold it in gun shows, he quoted it, when he was arrested he had several pages of it in a folder beside him in a car. And it wasn’t just McVeigh, it was all through this movement. People were really exorcised, impassioned, inflamed by this novel.”
The documentary shows McVeigh obsessed with his guns and with the idea that the government was going to take them away. The film also points out that his exposure to the war in Iraq accelerated his feeling of mistrust of the U.S. government.
“The way he put it made it sound he was emphatic towards the dead Iraqi soldiers that he killed. I really don’t think that’s the case,” says Barak Goodman. Instead, says the filmmaker, it was McVeigh’s mistrust of the U.S. government, how it had blundered into Iraq and his idea of the U.S. government as a bully, and McVeigh, says Goodman, hated bullies. The Ruby Ridge and Waco stand-offs reinforced that idea in his mind.
Homegrown extremism
According to the documentary, there are 500 militia organizations in the U.S. today. Goodman believes they are as radicalized as ever. “Some of them have gotten rid of their camouflage outfits and put on suits and ties, but really the rhetoric has been virtually the same for 100 years or more. ‘It’s a whites-only country, it should be a whites-only country, the federal government is in the hands of Jews, blacks, it’s a conspiracy.’”
Goodman says it is a misconception to believe that this is a movement of white poor disenfranchised people. Certainly, he says, many are, but there also many professionals feeling a loss of entitlement, a loss of privilege and power. The filmmaker stresses that these people operate outside political parties and share a deep mistrust of the Washington political establishment.
But Goodman cautions these extremists are not de facto terrorists. He says it takes a confluence of opportunity and a warped personality, often a lone individual, to commit a terrorist act of a scale such as the Oklahoma City bombing.
“McVeigh was a shock to most people in the FBI. It would be less of a shock today. But it’s very hard to prevent these things. One of the takeaways from our film and audiences who have seen it have been amazed at how really easy it was to do this. It cost about $6000, it was one guy, reading some literature,” says the filmmaker.
Goodman says in a politically polarized America, the possibility for future domestic terrorist attacks is high.
“If you talk to people from the Southern Law Poverty Center, which tracks these groups, they are pounding on the wall, they are ringing the bell, they are saying, ‘This is an ongoing threat, it’s threat level midnight, it’s rising, it’s whatever the highest color is on the chart,’” he says.
The SPLC reports, “the number of hate groups in the United States rose for a second year in a row in 2016 as the radical right was energized by the candidacy of Donald Trump.” “The most dramatic growth,” it states, “was the near-tripling of anti-Muslim hate groups – from 34 in 2015 to 101 last year.” Also, a wave of bomb threats and vandalism has rattled Jewish institutions around the country, but especially in the South. “Right now, minorities feel particularly threatened,” says the Oklahoma City filmmaker.
“There is a very big difference between even hard gun rights activists and terrorists. I want to make that clear,” says Goodman. “I would take issue with the idea that they have infiltrated the administration. But it is a little galling to see the really mono focus on terrorists from abroad, terrorists influenced by ideas from abroad, whatever those ideas might be, and not on any real discussion about home-grown terrorism which has always been with us and which is not going away and which is actually — if you look at the numbers of the incidents — rivaling or exceeding those by that other group,” he adds.
Goodman hopes his film, Oklahoma City, will call attention to this rising threat and contribute to the conversation on the inherent dangers of domestic terrorism.
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Alec Baldwin Says Trump Impersonation Revived his Comedy Career
Actor Alec Baldwin said that his impersonation of U.S. President Donald Trump on NBC’s sketch show “Saturday Night Live” has revived his “dead” comedy career after he wrapped up sitcom “30 Rock” in 2012.
“I didn’t realize in the comedy terms that I was dead,” Baldwin told Reuters on Monday when asked if he felt he was entering a new era with his comedy.
“Maybe I was in a coma … now I’m waking up from a coma and now I’m ready to do some comedy.”
The actor was promoting his latest film, DreamWorks’ animated comedy “The Boss Baby,” out in theaters on March 31, in which he voices a suit-wearing baby manager of a corporation for babies who is adopted by a family to undertake a covert mission.
It has been nearly five years since Baldwin, 58, concluded his six-year tenure as the charming corporate boss Jack Donaghy in NBC’s quirky comedy series “30 Rock.”
Since then, he has appeared in a handful of movies in supporting roles, but the actor saw a new surge in popularity when he took over as Trump on “Saturday Night Live” (SNL) last October, ahead of November’s U.S. presidential elections.
Baldwin quipped that his comedy career “did die” but that “I’m being reincarnated. As Trump! Oh God!”
Viewer ratings have soared for “Saturday Night Live” since Baldwin started portraying Trump in a series of skits mocking the billionaire reality TV star-turned-politician as a dim-witted commander-in-chief with a short attention span, an oversized-ego and a Twitter addiction.
Trump criticized the NBC show in December, calling it “totally unwatchable” and a “hit-job.”
Asked whether he felt playing the president took a toll on him, Baldwin said the challenge of the role was that it would “delight some people and offend other people.”
“A large plurality of the country voted for Trump as president, and I think many of them are people that are not fond of the way Trump is treated, not just by ‘Saturday Night Live’ but the comedy cosmos in general,” he said.
“I think for me playing Trump has been, it’s been a fun experience because it’s like going home when I do SNL.”
your ad hereCoroner: Pop Star George Michael Died of Natural Causes
Pop star George Michael died from natural causes, according to a British coroner.
Specifically, the singer died of “dilated cardiomyopathy with myocarditis and fatty liver,” according to Darren Salter senior coroner for Oxfordshire, where Michael died last Christmas at the age of 53.
The heart conditions named interfere with the heart’s ability to pump blood and cause inflammation of the heart muscle.
Since Michael died of natural causes, there will be no investigation.
Michael had a long history of drug and alcohol abuse.
Born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, he once played music on the London underground train system before forming Wham! with Andrew Ridgeley in 1981.
Michael enjoyed immense popularity early in his career as a member of Wham! with hits such as “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” and “Careless Whisper.”
As a solo artist, he developed into a more serious singer and songwriter, lauded by critics for his tremendous vocal range. Some of his solo hits included “Father Figure” and “Freedom.”
In 2011, Michael postponed a series of concerts after being hospitalized with pneumonia. He later said it had been “touch and go” as to whether he lived.
Michael disclosed he was gay in 1998 after being arrested in a public toilet in Beverly Hills, California for engaging in a lewd act.
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Facebook Rolls Out ‘Fake News’ Dispute Tool
Facebook has launched a tool it says will help flag so-called fake news.
The tool adds a “disputed news” flag on stories that have been deemed fake by what Facebook says are third parties, including Snopes, Politifact and Factcheck.org.
Facebook announced the disputed news flag in December, but it appears it only has gone live in the past day or so, according to news reports.
If a story is flagged by some of Facebook’s 1.86 billion users, the company will determine which to send to the third parties. If the story is fake, it will still be on Facebook, but will carry a notice that it was disputed along with an explanation about why.
Disputed stories can still be shared, but users will be warned they are sharing fake news.
According to USA Today, one fake news story about how President Trump’s Android phone was the source of White House leaks came from a fake news site called “The Seattle Tribune.” The story now appears with a disputed flag as well as links to third party explanations as to why.
A May 2016 survey from the Nieman Lab said 44 percent of Americans get their news from Facebook.
your ad hereIn a Robot Future, Humans Are Still Stars, Technophiles Say
From lasers that cut denim at a factory, to drones that irrigate crops, it’s not a new story that machines are doing more work than ever. But people have long feared that robots are coming for their jobs, so technology evangelists now are calling on their peers to build a future in which the impact on human is lessened.
Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media, a technology consulting company, thinks the solution is a “hybrid,” mixing humans and machines. He sees that happening already. O’Reilly says most software, for example, is actually a service that depends on human beings in the background to keep it updated and running.
This could be a paradigm shift for Silicon Valley acolytes. Out with the old: a reputedly cold, relentless push for efficiency through algorithms and automation, no matter the consequences for the working class. In with the new: innovation with a human face.
“It’s so important that we have to think about not using technology to replace people — but to augment them, to do something that was previously impossible,” O’Reilly said last week in Ho Chi Minh City at Apricot, an annual summit organized by the Asia and Pacific Internet Association and APNIC, the regional registry for domain names.
With more skills, people can work alongside robots. Lyft and Uber rely on software that’s intended to make drivers more productive. They’re not completely different from airplanes, which are flown mostly by computers, but there might never be a day when passengers feel comfortable flying without at least one human at the helm.
Jonathan Brewer, a trainer at the nonprofit Network Startup Resource Center, believes the next stage of development should improve on the one before it, when the exploding numbers of factories and machines left so many people with undrinkable water and unbreathable air. Now, he said, technophiles must consider how their inventions help people.
At an Apricot workshop, Brewer described sensors that alert residents an hour before a mudslide will hit, for example, and other “life-saving devices that cost very, very little money.”He says there doesn’t seem much point in having droids to clear tables and dig up copper ore if humans aren’t in a position to use the results of their labor.
O’Reilly illustrated the hybrid approach with the so-called Mechanical Turk. Not Amazon’s tool to outsource small tasks, but the 18th-century machine that seemed to beat humans at chess. In fact, there was a man inside all along, and that is the point. Looking out over an audience of programmers, engineers, and other operators building the internet, O’Reilly compared them to the Mechanical Turk: The world needs workers powered by blood, not just those powered by batteries.
“All of you, in some sense, are inside the internet. You go away, it stops working,” he said. “It’s not like a piece of software in a PC era where if you had a copy of Microsoft Windows running on your personal computer, it would keep running without the original programmers. Almost all of the software we depend on today is a service that depends on the work of people like you.”
There may be some wishful thinking, too, in technologists’ optimism that humans will thrive in the robot future. In 2015, consulting firm McKinsey projected that automation could eliminate 45 percent of today’s occupations. That’s why more people in the technology sector are warming to the idea of a universal basic income, which shares the benefits of innovation by giving each citizen a small monthly check.
But Brewer holds out hope in cooperation between people and machines. Many advancements don’t just make lives easier, such as thermostats that adjust the temperature to a dweller’s liking. He said there is technology, for example, that lets city employees know when street lights go out, or trash cans are full, so they don’t have to drive around checking manually, which many local governments do. But once the notice is sent, a human still needs to respond and ensure services are delivered.
For technology, conference-goers said, early adopters first embraced the inexorable, unsympathetic march of change as an indisputable benefit. But in this next phase, people are rethinking disruption, or at least wondering how to soften the blow on humans.
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Experimental Program Aims to Bridge Generation Gap
The generation gap is being bridged, one relationship at a time, through partnerships in an expiremental program between U.S. universities and retirement homes. Faith Lapidus explains.
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Turning Garbage Into Gas
It’s hard to teach young women about getting ahead through technology when they don’t even have enough light to study. That was the problem facing The Green Girls Project in Cameroon. So project leaders took a break from their lessons and focused on solving that problem. The result is enlightening. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Self-driving Bus With No Back-Up Driver Nears California
A pair of $250,000 autonomous buses began driving around an empty San Francisco Bay Area parking lot on Monday, preparing to move onto a local public road in California’s first pilot program for a self-driving vehicle without steering wheel or human operator.
California and other states are weighing the opportunities of becoming a hub of testing a technology that is seen as the future of transportation and the risks from giving up active control of a large, potentially dangerous vehicle.
In most tests of self-driving cars there is still a person seated at the steering wheel, ready to take over, although Alphabet Inc’s Waymo tested a car with no steering wheel or pedals in Austin, Texas, as early as 2015.
The bus project in San Ramon, at the Bishop Ranch office park complex, involves two 12-passenger shuttle buses from French private company EasyMile.
The project is backed by a combination of private companies and public transit and air quality authorities, with the intention of turning it into a permanent, expanded operation, said Habib Shamskhou, a program manager who strolled in front of a moving bus to show that the vehicle would notice him and react. It stopped.
In a test for reporters, one bus cruised a block-long circuit so consistently that it created a dirt track on the tarmac.
California legislators late last year passed a law to allow slow-speed testing of fully autonomous vehicles without steering wheels or pedals on public roads, with the Bishop Ranch test in mind.
The shuttle buses will test for a few months in the parking lots before operators apply for Department of Motor Vehicles approval under the new law. The vehicles are expected to swing onto the local street late this year or early in 2018.
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Report: Syrian Children Suffering from ‘Toxic Stress’ Due to War
Children in Syria are suffering from “toxic stress,” a severe form of psychological trauma that can cause life-long damage, according to a report released Thursday.
The report by the nonprofit Save the Children paints a horrifying picture of terrified children developing speech disorders and incontinence, and some even losing the capacity to speak. Others attempt self-harm and suicide.
Authors of the study, the largest of its kind to be undertaken during the conflict, warned that the nation’s mental health crisis had reached a tipping point, where “staggering levels” of trauma and distress among children could cause permanent and irreversible damage.
“We are failing children inside Syria, some of whom are being left to cope with harrowing experiences, from witnessing their parents killed in front of them to the horrors of life under siege, without proper support,” said Marcia Brophy, a mental health adviser for Save the Children in the Middle East.
Researchers spoke with 450 children, adolescents and adults in seven of Syria’s 14 governorates.
Adults said the main cause of psychological stress is the constant shelling and bombardment that characterize the war that is nearing its sixth anniversary.
Half the children the researchers talked to said they never or rarely feel safe at school and 40 percent said they don’t feel safe to play outside, even right outside their own home.
More than 70 percent of children interviewed experienced common symptoms of “toxic stress” or post-traumatic stress disorder, such as bedwetting, the study found. Loss of speech, aggression and substance abuse are also commonplace. About 48 percent of adults reported seeing children who have lost the ability to speak or who have developed speech impediments since the war began, according to the report.
More than half of the adults interviewed by Save the Children said they knew of children or adolescents who were recruited into armed groups.
The report called on the combatants to stop using explosives in populated areas, halt attacks on schools and hospitals, and stop recruiting children to fight.
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