Kenya has become the latest African country to introduce HIV self-testing kits in a bid to get more people to know their status and seek treatment. The government estimates that there are as many as half a million people in Kenya who are HIV-positive but don’t know it. Lenny Ruvaga reports for VOA from Nairobi.
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Month: June 2017
From a Peruvian trout farm manager to the head of an Indonesian meatball company, a list of 500 women entrepreneurs in emerging markets was launched Thursday to challenge the stereotype of a typical company boss and inspire women globally.
The “Foundation 500” list features the portraits and careers of 500 female entrepreneurs in 11 emerging markets where women are often refused the same access to education, financial services and bank loans as men.
The list, an initiative of humanitarian agency CARE and the nonprofit H&M Foundation, mirrors the Fortune 500 list of U.S. companies but highlights unusual chief executives, ranging from a Zambian woman who set up a mobile drug store to a woman in Jordan who set up a temporary tattoo studio.
Create role models
Karl-Johan Persson, CEO of Swedish retailer H&M, said the project was designed to create role models for women in emerging markets and challenging perceptions in developed countries of business leaders.
“The entrepreneur is our time’s hero and a role model for many young but the picture given of who is an entrepreneur is still very homogenous and many probably associate it to men from the startup world,” Persson said in an email.
He said all the women in the list had made an incredible effort.
“But one that stands out to me is Philomene Tia, a multi-entrepreneur from the Ivory Coast who has overcome setbacks such as war and being a refugee, and who has, in spite of it, always returned to the entrepreneurship to create a better future and a strong voice in society.”
Buses, fish and tattoos
Tia is the owner of a bus company in the Ivory Coast, a chain of beverage stores, a hotel complex, and a cattle breeding operation.
“I often tell other women that it is the force inside you and your brains that will bring you wherever you want to go. I mean, I started with nothing and I don’t even speak proper French, but look at me now,” she was quoted on the project’s website www.foundation500.com.
The women featured are from Indonesia, the Philippines, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Peru, Guatemala, Jordan, Zambia, Burundi, the Ivory Coast and Yemen.
One of the women portrayed is Andrea Gala, 20, a trout farm manager in Peru and president of the women-only Trout Producers Association.
“This business has worked out so well for us now we don’t depend on our fields anymore, which is hard work and often badly paid,” Gala said in a report on the project.
“With the association we want to open a restaurant one day, next to the trout farm, so we can attract more visitors. We want to turn the area into a tourist zone, where people can come and relax and enjoy our restaurant with trout-based dishes.”
The H&M Foundation, privately funded by the Persson family that founded retailer H&M, said this was part of a women’s empowerment program started with CARE in 2014 in Latin America, Asia and Africa.
As part of this project H&M Foundation Manager Diana Amini said about 100,000 women in 20 countries had received between 2,000-15,000 euros in seed capital and skills training to start and expand businesses.
In Burundi, the average rate of increase in income among women in the program was 203 percent in the three years to the end of 2016, she said.
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For a country that takes pride in even the smallest successes of its international celebrities, the debut of Wonder Woman has sparked an Israeli lovefest for homegrown hero Gal Gadot.
A huge billboard overlooking Tel Aviv’s main highway is tagged with a provincial “we love you” greeting, her Hebrew-accented appearances in the international media are reported upon daily and throngs of fans cheer wildly upon seeing her on the big screen. Even Lebanon’s ban of the film hasn’t dampened the mood in Israel, where Gadot’s superhero status has been embraced as a national treasure.
“It’s so cool that someone from here is succeeding and is famous overseas. Everyone in the theater was so excited,” said 20-year-old Ela Hofshi of Jerusalem, who watched the movie on opening night. “I think all the enthusiasm here is very supportive and encourages her to keep growing in the world and representing us.”
Eager for diversions from politics and conflict with the Palestinians, Israelis often rejoice when one of their own breaks through on the international stage, whether it’s Omri Casspi in the NBA, medal-winning Olympic athletes or big-name model Bar Refaeli. But Gadot’s ascendance to stardom has entered a whole new stratosphere as she has assumed the identity of Wonder Woman in a box-office smash that raked in more than $100 million in its first weekend in theaters.
The role has instantly transformed Gadot into arguably the world’s most famous Israeli and the country’s most high-profile ambassador. In contrast to Refaeli, whose aloof demeanor, refusal to perform her compulsory military service and a tax-dodging scandal have alienated many Israelis, Gadot has been widely embraced. In interviews, she often speaks in accented English of her military service, a rite of passage for most Israeli Jews, which has made her even more beloved at home.
“She bears the burden of being Israeli with grace and you can see that fame hasn’t changed her,” said Ariel Oseran, 27. “She represents the `good Israeli’ and does us a great service. When she talks about the army, it shows that serving in the military is not a bad thing. It’s something inspiring. It makes every one of our female soldiers seem like Wonder Woman.”
Gadot grew up in the Tel Aviv suburb of Rosh Haayin and somehow stumbled into stardom. She was chosen Miss Israel in 2004 at the age of 18 and represented the country in the Miss Universe pageant that year. She then put off her modeling career to enlist in the military, where she served two years as a combat fitness instructor. In 2007, she took a part in the Maxim photo shoot “Women of the Israeli Army.”
After a year of law school, a casting director invited her to audition for a James Bond movie. She didn’t get the part, but it led to her big Hollywood break in 2008 when she was cast in the “Fast & Furious” movie franchise as Gisele Yashar, an ex-Mossad agent.
She first portrayed Wonder Woman in last year’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” before headlining this weekend’s release of “Wonder Woman,” the first Hollywood film exclusively devoted to the DC Comics heroine.
In promoting the film, Gadot made the rounds of American talk and late night shows, charming the hosts with her down-to-earth personality. In an interview with ABC’s morning show, Gadot, who recently gave birth to her second child, joked that being pregnant as Wonder Woman was harder than being a soldier in the Israeli army.
Gadot, who performs her own stunts, has attracted fans with a public image that empowers women. For the film’s Los Angeles premiere, she showed up in $50 flats from Aldo rather than pricey heels. When asked, she responded “it’s more comfortable.”
Her mother, Irit Gadot, a former gym teacher, said that’s just who her daughter is.
“She has a certain personal charm, a certain simplicity,” she told Israel’s Channel 10 TV. “What she is is what you see.”
In Israel, she has avoided the types of scandals that often plague celebrities and has been showered with love. Theaters have erupted into cheers when she appears on screen, and some fans even broke into tears of joy on opening weekend.
Locals excitedly noted how Gadot’s Israeli accent was mimicked by her co-stars as the supposed dialect of Wonder Woman’s idyllic Amazonian island of Themyscira.
Haaretz film critic Uri Klein praised her performance, which he said was “likely to contribute to the pleasure for those who want to envelop the viewing experience in national Israeli pride.”
Her identity has also made her a target of anti-Israel boycott activists who attacked her on Twitter as a “Zionist” and pushed to have the film banned in Lebanon. Opponents noted Gadot had praised Israel’s military on Facebook during the 2014 Israel-Gaza war, sending prayers to soldiers “who are risking their lives protecting my country against the horrific acts conducted by Hamas.” The military, while defending its actions as a response to Hamas rocket fire, nonetheless draw heavy international criticism for the heavy Palestinian civilian death toll.
Michal Kleinberg argued in a column on the Nana10 website that Gadot represented far more than mere national pride.
“This is not one of ours who managed to squeeze into a fashion show or an important competition, it’s one of ours in the most leading role a woman can get in a Hollywood film,” she wrote. “Gadot is objectively [really!] perfectly cast for the role. It’s not that Hollywood has a shortage of beautiful, fit, athletic brunettes, but an Israeli actress has something a Hollywood one doesn’t. As much as it sounds cliche, she offers a sort of chutzpah, spice and relatability.”
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Of all the supernatural forces slung in Alex Kurtzman’s The Mummy (and, believe me, there are a lot), none can compete with the spectacle of Tom Cruise, at 54.
He and his abs are almost creepily ageless. So it’s almost fitting that in one of the typically bonkers scenes in The Mummy, Cruise awakes naked and unscathed alongside cadavers in a morgue, where he bewilderedly removes the tag attached to his toe. Indefatigable and un-killable, Cruise really is the undead. He’s like the anti-Steve Buscemi.
Yet Cruise and The Mummy — the opening salvo in Universal’s bid to birth its Dark Universe monster movie franchise — are a poor fit, and not the good kind, like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
There’s plenty of standard, cocky Tom Cruise leading-man stuff here: running, swimming, daredevil airplane acrobatics, more running. But his relentless forward momentum is sapped by the convoluted monster mishmash that engulfs The Mummy, a movie conceived and plotted like the monster version of Marvel. Increasingly, Cruise — like big-budget movies, themselves — is running in circles.
Tomb unearthed
He plays Nick Morton, a roguish Army sergeant who plunders antiquities from Iraq with his partner Chris Vail (Jake Johnson). In a remote village they, along with archaeologist Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis), unearth a giant Egyptian tomb bathed in mercury.
In it lies the Egyptian princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), who was mummified alive (imagine that wrapping job) after trying to unleash the evil Egyptian god of Set while killing her Pharaoh father, his second wife and the newborn baby that would deny her the throne. Naturally, she’s going to get loose.
Hers and other backstories are shown as The Mummy stumbles out of its grave, vainly trying to organize the story around two burial sites (the other is in London), the strange visions that begin plaguing Morton, and a quixotic (or merely capitalistic) gambit to stitch together a unifying principle for the Dark Universe. Mysterious apocalyptic happenings (a swarm of crows, a horde of rats, occasional ghouls) prompt a series of helter-skelter chase scenes that eventually lead Morton and Halsey to Prodigium, a stealth organization led by the dapper Dr. Henry Jekyll (Russell Crowe) that controls monstrous outbreaks, including those of its schizophrenic leader.
Prodigium would seem to be the connecting tissue for Universal’s shared universe, with plans for Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, The Creature From the Black Lagoon and more in the works. Much of The Mummy hinges on Boutella’s vengeful and vaguely misogynistic monster (she for some reason needs a man — Morton, it turns out — to really do damage). But much of the film endeavors to set up the characters — maybe even famous phantoms — to come.
Why the universe?
Where these films could be fun is in seeing a talented star play a big, theatrical character that would honor the ghosts of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Javier Bardem and Johnny Depp are already lined up, so who knows? But the desperate need to graft them into a larger comic-book-like “world” — and a thinly conceived one, at that — suggests there won’t be much room for any actor to breathe.
For now we’re cursed with The Mummy, a messy and muddled product lacking even the carefree spirit of the Brendan Fraser Mummy trilogy. There are moments of humor in the script by David Koepp, Christopher McQuarrie, and Dylan Kussman, but Cruise isn’t the one (maybe Chris Pratt?) to pull off aloofly referring to the mummy as “the chick in the box.”
Almost to the degree that he was in The Edge of Tomorrow, Cruise is put through the ringer. A spiraling cargo plane spins him like laundry. He careens through a double-decker bus. His rib cage is yanked. Cruise remains, as ever, eminently game. But he, like us moviegoers, might have to start wondering: What god have we angered?
The Mummy, a Universal Pictures release, is rated PG-13.
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The remains of a major Aztec temple and a ceremonial ball court have been discovered in downtown Mexico City, shedding new light on the sacred spaces of the metropolis that Spanish conquerors overran five centuries ago, archaeologists said on Wednesday.
The discoveries were made on a nondescript side street just behind the city’s colonial-era Roman Catholic cathedral off the main Zocalo plaza on the grounds of a 1950s-era hotel.
The underground excavations reveal a section of what was the foundation of a massive, circular-shaped temple dedicated to the Aztec wind god Ehecatl and a smaller part of a ritual ball court, confirming accounts of the first Spanish chroniclers to visit the Aztec imperial capital, Tenochtitlan.
“Due to finds like these, we can show actual locations, the positioning and dimensions of each one of the structures first described in the chronicles,” said Diego Prieto, head of Mexico’s main anthropology and history institute.
Archaeologists also detailed a grisly offering of 32 severed male neck vertebrae discovered in a pile just off the court.
“It was an offering associated with the ball game, just off the stairway,” said archaeologist Raul Barrera. “The vertebrae, or necks, surely came from victims who were sacrificed or decapitated.”
Some of the original white stucco remains visible on parts of the temple, built during the 1486-1502 reign of Aztec Emperor Ahuizotl, predecessor of Moctezuma, who conquistador Hernan Cortes toppled during the Spanish conquest of Mexico.
Early Spanish accounts relate how a young Moctezuma played against an elderly allied king on the court and lost, which was taken as sign that the Aztec Empire’s days were numbered.
The building would have stood out because of its round shape among the several dozen other square temples that dominated the Aztecs’ most sacred ceremonial space before the 1521 conquest.
Aztec archaeologist Eduardo Matos said the top of the temple was likely built to resemble a coiled snake, with priests entering though a doorway made to look like a serpent’s nose.
Once excavations finish, a museum will be built on the site, rubbing shoulders with modern buildings in the capital.
Mexico City, including its many colonial-era structures with their own protections, was built above the razed ruins of the Aztec capital, and more discoveries are likely, Matos said.
“We’ve been working this area for nearly 40 years, and there’s always construction of some kind … and so we take advantage of that and get involved,” he said.
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The understanding of human origins was turned on its head on Wednesday with the announcement of the discovery of fossils unearthed on a Moroccan hillside that are about 100,000 years older than any other known remains of our species, Homo sapiens.
Scientists determined that skulls, limb bones and teeth representing at least five individuals were about 300,000 years old, a blockbuster discovery in the field of anthropology.
The antiquity of the fossils was startling – a “big wow,” as one of the researchers called it. But their discovery in North Africa, not East or even sub-Saharan Africa, also defied expectations. And the skulls, with faces and teeth matching people today but with archaic and elongated braincases, showed our brain needed more time to evolve its current form.
“This material represents the very root of our species,” said paleoanthropologist Jean-Jacques Hublin of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, who helped lead the research published in the journal Nature.
Before the discovery at the site called Jebel Irhoud, located between Marrakech and Morocco’s Atlantic coast, the oldest Homo sapiens fossils were known from an Ethiopian site called Omo Kibish, dated to 195,000 years ago.
“The message we would like to convey is that our species is much older than we thought and that it did not emerge in an Adamic way in a small ‘Garden of Eden’ somewhere in East Africa. It is a pan-African process and more complex scenario than what has been envisioned so far,” Hublin said.
The Moroccan fossils, found in what was a cave setting, represented three adults, one adolescent and one child roughly age 8, thought to have lived a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
These were found alongside bones of animals including gazelles and zebras that they hunted, stone tools perhaps used as spearheads and knives, and evidence of extensive fire use.
An analysis of stone flints heated up in the ancient fires let the scientists calculate the age of the adjacent human fossils, Max Planck Institute archaeologist Shannon McPherron said.
There is broad agreement among scientists that Homo sapiens originated in Africa. These findings suggest a complex evolutionary history probably involving the entire continent, with Homo sapiens by 300,000 years ago dispersed all over Africa.
Morocco was an unexpected place for such old fossils considering the location of other early human remains. Based on the shape and age of the Moroccan fossils, the researchers concluded that a mysterious, previously discovered 260,000-year-old partial cranium from Florisbad, South Africa also represented Homo sapiens.
The Jebel Irhoud people had large braincases that lacked the globular shape of those today. Max Planck Institute paleoanthropologist Philipp Gunz said the findings indicate the shape of the face was established early in the history of Homo sapiens, but brain shape, and perhaps brain function, evolved later.
But given their modern-looking face and teeth, Hublin said, these people may have blended in today if they simply wore a hat.
Homo sapiens is now the only human species, but 300,000 years ago it would have shared the planet with several now-extinct cousins in Eurasia – Neanderthals in the west and Denisovans in the east – and others in Africa.
Hublin did not hazard a guess as to how long ago the very first members of our species appeared, but said it could not have been more than 650,000 years ago, when the evolutionary lineage that led to Homo sapiens split from the one that led to the Neanderthals.
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Mexican sugar producers want an investigation into suspected dumping in Mexico by U.S. fructose producers even after a U.S.-Mexico deal on access to the U.S. sugar market, the head of the Mexican sugar industry group said Wednesday.
The sugar lobby last month said it had asked the Mexican economy ministry to investigate U.S. high-fructose corn syrup imports, saying there was evidence of dumping.
Mexico Tuesday conceded to U.S. demands for changes in the terms of Mexican access to the lucrative U.S. sugar market, but U.S. sugar producers refused to endorse the deal.
The agreement would avert possible steep U.S. import duties on Mexican sugar and had been seen as lowering the risk of Mexico slapping its own import duties on U.S. high-fructose corn syrup as a retaliatory measure.
“This issue with the U.S. sugar industry is not over,” Juan Cortina, the head of Mexican sugar industry group (CNIAA), told reporters at an event in Mexico City where he said the group would keep pressing for a fructose probe in Mexico.
The sweetener trade has been a longstanding source of disputes between the two countries that are preparing to start talks with Canada to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo on June 1 said he was reviewing the request by the Mexican sugar lobby to initiate the investigation.
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Small-business owners who install solar panels or help customers use clean energy don’t seem fazed by President Donald Trump’s plan to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate accord, saying they expect demand for their services will still keep growing.
They’re confident in two trends they see: A growing awareness and concern about the environment, and a desire by consumers and businesses to lower their energy costs.
“It’s an economic decision people are making, although it also makes environmental sense,” said Suvi Sharma, CEO of Solaria, a Fremont, California-based company that designs and sells solar energy panel systems.
Trump said he was putting U.S. interests ahead of international priorities in leaving the agreement that would, among other things, require the U.S. and other countries to report greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S. is the world’s second-largest emitter of carbon after China, and carbon is one of the gases that scientists cite as a key factor in global warming.
Reaction to withdrawal split
Many of the nation’s largest companies opposed Trump’s move, and some have already committed to reducing emissions and are spending billions to do it.
Small business advocacy groups are split over the impact of a U.S. withdrawal. The Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council doesn’t believe Trump’s action will hurt the United States.
“Even without the U.S.’s formal participation in the pact, we believe our nation will continue to lead in carbon reduction and clean energy,” said Karen Kerrigan, CEO of the group. “The market is demanding as much and the private sector and investment are responding.”
But the Small Business Majority, which has supported limits on greenhouse gas emissions as a way to help the environment and the economy, said the U.S. needs government policies that “promote the development of renewable energy and the implementation of energy efficiency standards.”
“America’s entrepreneurs understand that the future of our economy and the job growth associated therewith depends upon policies that move us forward, not backward,” said John Arensmeyer, the group’s CEO.
The American Sustainable Business Council also warned that global warming would hurt companies, giving them “a chaotic and unsustainable future of business disruptions from rising seas and changing weather patterns.”
Whether business owners outside energy-related industries are likely to support the Paris accord may depend on how much they’re worried about climate change, and whether they’re concerned about saving on energy bills.
Demand, awareness growing
A private equity firm that invests in clean energy companies doesn’t expect Trump’s action to have much impact on U.S. companies whose business is reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Neil Auerbach, CEO of Hudson Clean Energy in Teaneck, New Jersey, said the U.S. has been able to move away from carbon fuels with more use of natural gas and renewables.
Arcadia Power, which helps consumers and companies switch to wind and solar power for their electricity, has seen orders rise 5 percent from its usual pace since Trump’s announcement last week, says Ryan Nesbitt, president of the Washington, D.C.-based company. Demand was particularly strong for the electricity supply plans the company offers through solar power producers.
“They sold out over the weekend. We’re scrambling to get more,” Nesbitt said. Some customers who signed up for Arcadia’s service said they were doing so in response to Trump’s announcement, Nesbitt says.
State and local environmental laws, which can be tougher than federal statutes and regulations, have contributed to the growth of small businesses in the energy sector. So companies that help businesses track and report their carbon and other emissions shouldn’t see their business disappear if the U.S. isn’t part of the Paris accord.
At ERA Environmental Management Solutions, whose customers include companies that use paints and other chemicals, “nobody’s coming out and telling us they’re going to stop doing a project,” owner Gary Vegh said.
But Vegh, whose company is based in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, says companies are also reacting to changing perspectives.
“Each generation is getting more educated about the environment,” Vegh said. “Even preschool and elementary children — the new generation is already aware.”
Barry Cinnamon’s homeowner customers buy solar panels because they believe the climate is in trouble. “They understand from a science and engineering perspective that there’s a problem and there’s a solution,” said Cinnamon, the owner of Cinnamon Solar in Campbell, California.
Installing solar panels on a home can run into the tens of thousands of dollars, so owners aren’t expecting an immediate windfall from lower energy prices — they’re willing to wait five or 10 years for their investment to pay off, Cinnamon says.
For some owners, it’s the “what ifs” that are worrisome. Many business customers at Vitaliy Vinogradov’s lighting business base their buying decisions on tax rebates for green LED fixtures.
“What I am afraid of is that this may be a slippery slope — where eventually green technology loses subsidies, rebates, or gets taxed,” said Vinogradov, whose Modern Place Lighting is located in Pensacola, Florida.
Saagar Govil, CEO of Cemtrex Inc., an environmental technology company, fears it will lose business in the U.S. because there may be less need for his equipment that monitors and destroys greenhouse gases. He hopes the Farmingdale, New York-based company will be able to sell those products overseas, and in states that have pledged to follow the Paris accord.
“But until we start to see something concrete, it’s unclear how that will fly,” he said.
Some business owners, however, think Trump’s action will ultimately help their companies. John-Paul Maxfield, whose Denver-based Waste Farmers sells agricultural products and technology to greenhouse operators, believes it will raise awareness of global warming.
“It reinforces the need for alternative systems in the face of climate change,” Maxfield said.
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Nearly 16,000 young children die every day around the world, says researcher Sue Grady, citing U.N. figures. The Michigan State University medical geographer says newborns account for about half of the deaths.
A U.N. study of neonatal mortality around the world found that Africa has the highest rate, at 28 deaths for every 1,000 live births. In a study pertaining to 14 sub-Saharan African countries, Grady and her student investigators found that neonatal mortality was significantly associated with, among other factors, home births, where babies are delivered without the supervision of a trained professional.
Grady said many of the newborns succumbed immediately after birth to asphyxiation or an inability to take their first breath. Other common causes of death were infection and diarrhea from unclean water.
Grady said newborn deaths in East and West Africa could be dramatically reduced if babies were delivered in medical facilities with trained personnel standing by.
“Focusing on real hygienic conditions as the baby is being delivered, really cleaning the umbilical cord well [and] being very, very careful as far as the water the baby receives after birth” are critical, she added.
Targeting resources
The study conducted by Grady and colleagues is aimed at informing the United Nations in its global efforts to reduce infant mortality by targeting resources where they are most needed.
Since 1990, when the U.N. Millennium Development Goals were adopted, infant mortality has decreased 53 percent, from nearly 12 million deaths a year to about 6 million.
Those goals have been replaced by the Sustainable Development Goals, a universal call to action to reduce scourges of poverty.
In Africa, Grady said, many women can not afford or access medical care or prefer to deliver their babies at home, surrounded by family and community. Newborn mortality also increases with the age of the mother, she noted.
And a disturbing trend also was found: More female babies were dying than male infants. Grady’s study, which looked at more than 344,000 births in East and West Africa, did not identify the possible causes for that, but “we do know there is some bias, so we would want to better understand why female infants were less likely to survive.”
The findings were published in the journal Geospatial Health.
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A new report submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council has called for the urgent retooling of what it calls an outdated mental health care system. The report contends the current system is injurious to mental well-being and violates the human rights of patients.
Dainius Puras is the author of the report and special investigator on the right to physical and mental health. His work found that mental health was grossly neglected within systems around the world and where they exist, “they do so in isolation, segregated from regular health care despite the intimate relationship between physical and mental health.”
He said there is a harmful overreliance on biological factors in the treatment of mental illness to the exclusion of psychological, environmental and social influences.
“Today, there is unequivocal evidence that the…excessive use of psychotropic medicines is a failure,” he said. “Yet, around the world, biomedical interventions dominate mental health investment and services.”
He said people with mild and moderate forms of depression too often are encouraged to use psychotropic medications “despite clear evidence that they should not.”
Worldwide problem
The World Health Organization reports nearly one in four people in the world will be affected by mental or neurological disorders at some point in their lives. Currently, it estimates around 450 million people suffer from such conditions. It notes depression is the leading cause of ill health and disability worldwide, affecting more than 300 million people.
Despite the enormity of the problem, Puras said things have barely changed regarding the treatment of mentally ill people. He said governments worldwide continued to favor institutional care, a system he called outdated and open to human rights abuses.
He told VOA that the warehousing of people with mental disabilities in large institutions should stop and be replaced by community-based health care systems.
“The West investment is to invest in institutional care and I am very openly advocating to stop investing in institutional care. It is against human rights and it is the most expensive way of caring for people because it is 24-hour service.”
While community-based services may not be cheap, Puras said they respect the dignity of people with psychosocial, intellectual or other forms of mental disabilities. Unlike institutions, he said community systems do not “breed human rights violations, hopelessness and social exclusion.”
Outdated concepts
He said the entire mental health field has to be liberated from outdated and scientifically unsound concepts that undermine the human rights of people with mental disabilities.
For example, he said people who are diagnosed as having mental health conditions may be considered dangerous “and that is why they are often deprived of their liberty.”
He said another outdated, and seriously misused belief is that people who are diagnosed with a mental condition need some form of medical intervention.
“If they do not agree,” he said, “quite often force is used to provide treatment,” which research now shows “is not necessarily effective.”
Parus is a child and adolescent psychiatrist and professor at Vilnius University in Lithuania. He is particularly incensed at the thought that eight million children globally are living in institutional care, even though some of them have one or both parents.
“But, for some reason the State decides that they are better parents. So, instead of empowering parents, we enclose children into institutional care. This is a very bad investment,” he said.
Parus recommends that children without parental care be placed in a family setting instead. He said treating the mentally ill within communities breaks down dangerous and erroneous myths and lessens discrimination against them.
“If you have never seen and do not know a person with a psycho-social disability, your mind will be occupied by all these stigmatizing myths, that they are dangerous, they are hopeless and so on,” he said. “So, this integration of children and adults into society is very helpful. It brings about tolerance.”
“The biggest problems I see are not on the side of persons with disabilities, but on the side of so-called normal society, which is very seriously biased by all these outdated concepts,” he added.
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It was almost sunset as fishermen guided their boats back onto the beach at Joal, Senegal, after a long day at sea.
At first glance, it looks as though they’d collected a good day’s haul, but their nets were full of small sardinella, known locally as yaabooy.
Fisherman Mamdou Lamine had caught just one bucket of mackerel. He held one up next to a yaabooy to show how much bigger it was — and there are many more yaabooy than mackerel these days, he said. Furthermore, A local favorite, grouper, called thiof in Senegal, is getting harder to find.
The U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization says more than half of West Africa’s fisheries are dangerously depleted. Local officials in Senegal say it’s the foreign-owned industrial boats that have depleted fish stocks and destroyed marine habitats.
When fishermen at Joal set off on trips, they have to carry more fuel to reach waters farther away, and the added fuel costs cut into their earnings.
Longer trips, more fuel
Saff Sall was heading to Guinea-Bissau, about 200 kilometers south, in search of the elusive thiof. He said the fish are found among rocks, but that there are no more rocks because they have all been destroyed by the big industrial boats. That’s why they have to go to Guinea-Bissau to search for fish.
Before, Senegalese fishermen had to spend only a week at sea to have all the fish they needed, he said, but now they have to spend twice as long to catch what they need.
Under-regulated fishing by locals has also contributed to the problem, said Joal Fishing Wharf chief of operations El Hadji Faye.
He said the government was making an effort, but the situation was very complicated. He said that in the Senegalese city of Saint Louis, for example, each neighborhood has a designated day it can fish. But in Joal, they do not do that yet. Every day, he said, all the fishermen go to sea. Sometimes when a lot of them go, they bring back a lot of fish and the price is not good.
Economic staple
Fish are the backbone of the town’s economy. The day’s catch is taken to the local smokehouse, turned into fish meal for export abroad or sold fresh at the market, where knife-wielding female vendors prep the fish for sale.
Business is tough even for vendors with the rare large fish. Scarcity has driven up the prices. The price of thiof per kilogram has doubled in the past five years, local officials said.
Fish vendor Rose Ndour said that maybe those in the industry would do other work — if there were better jobs available.
The impact of overfishing is felt in households. The wife of the fishing wharf manager, Coumba Ndiaye, said that for the family’s evening Ramadan meal, she had to make due with sardinella because she could not get an affordable thiof at the market.
She made thieboudienne, Senegal’s national dish. Its name literally translates to “fish and rice.” But for a good thieboudienne, you need good fish like dorade or thiof.
The fish are a part of Senegal’s culture. Ndiaye said that “when someone says your husband is ‘thiofee,’ they are comparing him to thiof. The thiof is beautiful and noble. The thiof is classy.”
IN PHOTOS: No Good Fish in the Sea: Overfishing in Senegal
The children sat on their parents’ knees as the family ate around the large shared bowl of thieboudienne.
The fishermen would return to the sea the next day to try their luck again.
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India is likely to experience deadly heat waves more frequently in the years ahead, even though there only has been a slight increase in human-driven warming over the past few decades, according to a study released Wednesday.
“It’s getting hotter, and of course more heat waves are going to kill more people,” said climatologist Omid Mazdiyasni of the University of California, Irvine, who led an international team of scientists analyzing a half-century of data collected by the Indian Meteorological Department.
After tracking temperature, heat waves and heat-related mortality, Mazdiyasni said, “We knew there was going to be an impact, but we didn’t expect it to be this big.” The findings are especially sobering considering the average temperature in India rose about one-half of one degree Celsius over 49 years.
The unveiling of the study, published in the journal Science Advances, follows President Donald Trump’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, which aims to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels during this century.
The scientists said that, even despite the relatively slight rise in mean temperatures in India between 1960 and 2009, the probability of India experiencing a massive heat-related mortality event – defined by more than 100 deaths – has shot up by 146 percent. Roughly speaking, that means dying in a heat wave in India is now about two and one-half times as likely as it was in the mid-20th century.
Country mostly unprepared
Most of India has experienced a 25 percent rise in the number of heat-wave days during that period. The study’s authors said the vast majority of the country’s cities and states are not prepared to handle such heat crises, even if they understand the devastation they can wreak.
In 2010, 1,200 people died from heat-related causes in the western city of Ahmedabad, prompting city officials to introduce seven-day weather forecasts and warnings, extra water supplies and cool-air shelters in the summer.
After more than 2,500 people were killed by heat in ravaged areas of India in 2015, nine other cities rolled out a plan to educate children about heat risk, stock hospitals with ice packs and extra water, and train medical workers to identify heat stress, dehydration and heat stroke.
But those nine cities have only about 11 million people, not even 1 percent of the country’s population.
The same methodology can be applied in any region to get a sense of how vulnerable a country or population might be, the authors said. Recent events underscore years of warnings by scientists that climate change will make future heat waves more intense, more frequent and longer lasting.
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Facebook announced three new features Wednesday that are intended to boost civic engagement among users in the United States on its platform by connecting them more easily with their elected representatives.
The new offerings come as the social media juggernaut has sought to rehabilitate its image as a credible source of information following a wave of criticism after last November’s presidential election that the company did too little to combat misleading or wholly fabricated political news stories during the campaign.
Among the features, Facebook will now allow a user to turn on a “Constituent Badge” to identify himself as living in his elected official’s district. The opt-in badge will be visible when a user comments on content shared by his federal, state and local representatives.
Facebook also announced “Constituent Insights,” which allows elected officials and other users to find local news stories that are popular in their districts.
“District Targeting” creates a new preset audience selection that lets politicians’ pages target posts to people likely to be their constituents.
Facebook has continued to come under attack from prominent Democrats and some technology experts despite a raft of changes it has made in recent months that seek to help users consume more legitimate political news.
Hillary Clinton, who ran for president as a Democrat last year but lost to President Donald Trump, a Republican, said last week that Facebook was flooded with false information about her during the campaign and that people were understandably misled.
She said she wanted Facebook to curate its network more aggressively.
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While it’s unclear how much the rest of the country is eagerly awaiting Thursday’s testimony from former FBI Director James Comey, for Washingtonians, the event is must-see TV, prompting some bars to open as early to host viewing parties.
And yes, one bar, Shaw’s Tavern, will be serving a special “covfefe” cocktail, named after President Donald Trump’s mysterious Twitter typo.
Rob Heim, general manager of Shaw’s Tavern, told People magazine that he got the idea after a friend invited him over to watch the testimony. Since he had to work, he thought why not host a viewing party at the bar.
“I remember I was visiting my mom at the time and she said, ‘Who would watch that?’ And I said, ‘In D.C., people would watch it.’ But I was shocked by how much interest we got in just a couple hours.”
The bar will also offer FBI-themed food such as the FBI sandwich (fried chicken, bacon and iceberg lettuce) and the FBI breakfast (French toast, bacon and ice cream).
Another bar, aptly called The Partisan, will open early and offer themed cocktails, including “The Last Word” and “Drop the Bomb.”
Duffy’s Irish Pub will have another version of the “Covfefe cocktail.”
The Capital Lounge, which normally opens at 4 p.m., will open at 9 a.m. so that Comey watchers can get an early start.
Comey’s hearing is set to start at 10 a.m. local time and is expected to cover conversations between Comey and President Trump about Russia’s meddling in the election and what, if any, role was played by former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.
If you don’t want to wait, Comey released his prepared remarks Wednesday.
Of course, not everyone is interested in the event, prompting one bar, The Pug, to host a party free of news about the testimony.
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Peru joined Indonesia Wednesday as the only two countries worldwide to make their fishing boat tracking data available to the public.
Such access will give conservationists, along with those who buy, sell and eat seafood, a clearer picture where their favorite dishes come from.
Officials from both countries made their announcements Wednesday at the United Nations Ocean Conference in New York.
Indonesia said its data is available now, while Peru promised to follow suit.
“This is another demonstration of the Peruvian government’s commitment to fight illegal activities at sea,” fisheries vice minister Hector Soldi said. “The Peruvian government intends to make the utmost effort to achieve sustainable management of our fisheries in order to increase its contribution to nutrition and global food security.”
The independent Global Fishing Watch uses satellites and terrestrial receivers to track the activities of 60,000 commercial and private fishing boats across the globe.
Global Fishing Watch is not an enforcement agency but a tool for environmentalists and conservationists, and not available to private citizens.
Jackie Savitz, senior vice president of the Oceana conservation group, tells VOA that once a fishing boat leaves port and disappears over the horizon, it’s hard to monitor the vessels. For example, she says, are they fishing in protected parts of the sea or encroaching into another country’s exclusive economic zone?
Savitz says she applauds the very strong leadership by Indonesia and Peru in allowing anyone to monitor their fishing boats at any time.
“With more eyes on the ocean, there are fewer places for illegal fishers to hide,” she said.
Savitz says she hopes other countries will follow Indonesia and Peru in helping to ensure the sustainability and health of one of the world’s most valuable resources.
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NASA chose 12 new astronauts Wednesday from its biggest pool of applicants ever, selecting seven men and five women who could one day fly aboard the nation’s next generation of spacecraft.
The astronaut class of 2017 includes doctors, scientists, engineers, pilots and military officers from Anchorage to Miami and points in between. They’ve worked in submarines, emergency rooms, university lecture halls, jet cockpits and battleships. They range in age from 29 to 42, and they typically led the pack.
“It makes me personally feel very inadequate when you read what these folks have done,” said NASA’s acting administrator, Robert Lightfoot.
Vice President Mike Pence welcomed the group during a televised ceremony at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. He offered President Donald Trump’s congratulations and noted that the president was “firmly committed to NASA’s noble mission, leading America in space.”
Pence assured the crowd that NASA would have the resources and support necessary to continue to make history.
“Under President Donald Trump, America will lead in space once again, and the world will marvel,” he said.
More than 18,300 people threw their hats into the space ring during a brief application period 1½ years ago. That’s more than double the previous record of 8,000, set in 1978 when the space shuttles were close to launching.
The 12 selected Wednesday will join 44 astronauts already in the NASA corps. U.S. astronauts have not launched from home soil since 2011, thus the low head count. But that could change next year.
After two years of training, the newbies may end up riding commercial rockets to the International Space Station or flying beyond the moon in NASA’s Orion spacecraft. Their ultimate destination could be Mars.
SpaceX and Boeing are building capsules capable of carrying astronauts to the space station and back, as soon as next year. A launch engineer and senior manager for SpaceX, Robb Kulin, is among the new astronauts. He’s also worked as an ice driller in Antarctica and a commercial fisherman in Alaska.
“Hopefully, one day, I actually fly on a vehicle that … I got to design,” Kulin said.
Kulin and his classmates may be in for a long wait for space.
Some members of the class of 2009 have yet to launch. Jack Fischer, who was in that group, just got to the space station in April, but he said he couldn’t be happier as he showed the latest hires their “new office” in a video.
“It’s a little bit cramped,” he said. “The desk is kind of small. But the view. Oh, the view.”
This is NASA’s 22nd group of astronauts. The first group, the original Mercury 7 astronauts, was chosen in 1959.
Altogether, 350 Americans have now been selected to become astronauts. Requirements include U.S. citizenship; degrees in science, technology, engineering or math; and at least three years of experience or 1,000 hours of piloting jets.
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A replica of an Assyrian statue destroyed by Islamic State militants in Iraq in 2014 will soar over tourists in London’s Trafalgar Square beginning in March, courtesy of a vision from American artist Michael Rakowitz.
The 15-foot high statue of an lamassu — a human-headed winged bull — reflects the “mass migration that’s happened out of Iraq and Syria in the past few years,” and is a “kind of placeholder for those lives that can’t be reconstructed and for those people who have not yet found refuge,” Rakowitz said in an interview at his Evanston, Illinois, studio.
His sculpture is a continuation of “The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist” series, a decade-long recreation of nearly 700 of the over 7,000 archaeological artifacts still missing after being looted, stolen or declared missing from the National Museum of Iraq. It’s a project Rakowitz predicts will outlive him and his studio, as thousands of artifacts are still missing and more are being lost every day in archaeological sites throughout Iraq and Syria.
Using databases from the University of Chicago and Interpol to get exact dimensions of missing works, he and his team work with recycled Middle Eastern food packaging and Arabic newspapers to create versions of the original pieces.
Rakowitz, one of two winners of the Fourth Plinth competition that grants winning artists the right to exhibit a contemporary art work in Trafalgar Square for about 18 months, says he hopes his lamassu sculpture will draw attention to some of the staggering human and cultural costs of ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Syria.
London’s Fourth Plinth was erected in Trafalgar Square 1841 in for a never-completed equestrian statue. Since 1999, it has been occupied by a series of modern artworks.
Rakowitz felt fate intervened as he was putting together his submission.
“When the City of London sent out its prompt inviting me to propose something, it said that the plinth itself measured 14 feet in length and I was simultaneously doing research on the lamassu that had been destroyed by ISIS in Nineveh and that was exactly 14 feet. So, it seemed as though that is what had to go there,” said Rakowitz, a professor of art at Northwestern University.
His latter-day lamassu will be created out of between 3,000 and 4,000 pressed empty Iraqi date syrup cans, highlighting the once-thriving Iraqi date industry that’s been decimated by decades of war.
Lost art works, along with the cultures they represent, are a life-long obsession for the 43-year-old grandson of Iraqi Jewish emigres. Generations of Rakowitz’s family embraced their cultural identity even after being forced to flee Baghdad in the 1940s. Being an Iraqi Jew was presented to Rakowitz as “something normal, but [also] something that had tragically disappeared.”
Rakowitz felt as if his “entire art history had collapsed,” after hearing that the Taliban destroyed Afghanistan’s Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001. That sense of loss was further compounded two years later when watching video of the looting of Baghdad’s Museum of Iraq.
“It didn’t matter if you were for the war or against the war,” he said. “This was something that everyone could agree upon was unacceptable and tragic and it was a problem for all humanity, not just for Iraq.”
Claire Davies, the Metropolitan Museum’s assistant curator for modern and contemporary art from the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey, said Rakowitz’s work connects the destruction “to what is happening outside of that space and to the people around that work of art.”
Rakowitz’s replica pieces have been acquired by major museums from around the world, including the British Museum, Davies said. The Metropolitan Museum currently has nine pieces from “The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist.” His work has also been widely exhibited in the Middle East.
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With large murals of black cats and colorful grotesque faces, a group of traveling international artists are bringing a splash of colorful street art to towns in Israel and Jordan.
The eye-catching works, including large portraits and spying eyes, are produced under the banner of the international POW! WOW! event, a week-long culture festival which aims to “contribute, share culture and beautify communities with art.”
Having produced pieces at the Dead Sea and Petra in Jordan, the small group of artists, from Hawaii, Tel Aviv and Los Angeles, traveled to the southern Israeli city of Arad, a town in the Negev desert not often touched by street art.
“I came to the artist quarter in Arad to paint some walls, to give some colors and beauty to the place and to the people,” Tel Aviv street artist Dioz said on Wednesday as he finished his piece of the large faces.
The artists will next head to Tel Aviv to continue their art pilgrimage on Thursday for the final stages of the two-week festival.
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