Both local, foreign industrial boats are blamed for Senegalese fishing industry’s continued problems. The U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization says more than half of West Africa’s fisheries are dangerously depleted.
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Month: June 2017
Tenzin Paldon, 21, emerged from the largest ever field of contestants — nine — to take the title of Miss Tibet at the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA) in McLeod Ganj in Dharamshala, the city that is home to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile.
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Colombia will raise the salaries of public employees by 6.75 percent this year, President Juan Manuel Santos said on Wednesday, a move which may help end a more than three-week-long teachers strike.
The deal with seven public employee unions, which will increase the wages of 1.2 million workers, including educators, doctors, judges and members of the police and military, comes amid the teachers strike and various other walkout actions by public workers.
The increase is 1 percent above the 2016 inflation figure and will be retroactive, applicable from Jan. 1 of this year.
“This government prides itself on listening and looking for solutions through dialogue, without sacrificing the principles of authority and responsibility in the management of the budget,” Santos said in a televised address.
The government also reached a deal this week to end a 21-day civil protest in the Pacific port city of Buenaventura which stymied exports, especially of coffee.
The powerful Colombian Federation of Education Workers (Fecode) union, which represents some 350,000 teachers, has not yet backed down from its strike, which has kept 8 million public school students out of classes since mid-May.
Despite salary increases in recent years, many teachers say their salaries are not adequate compensation for work which often requires extensive and expensive higher education and training.
“I call on all the teachers of this country to return to classes and together we can guarantee the education of Colombia’s children and young people,” Santos said.
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The 2017 CMT Music Awards will honor the top acts in country music as well as lend its stage to pop, rock and R&B performers and Hollywood stars.
Ashton Kutcher, Jada Pinkett Smith and Katherine Heigl will be among the presenters at the awards show Wednesday night in Nashville, Tennesssee, where performers will include Earth, Wind & Fire, Peter Frampton and the Chainsmokers, who pre-taped their set with Florida Georgia Line on Tuesday night.
The EDM duo and the country duo sang together on a song called “Last Day Alive,” off the Chainsmokers’ album “Memories … Do Not Open,” which came out earlier this year.
“It was a fun challenge,” Florida Georgia Line’s Tyler Hubbard said Tuesday of working with the Chainsmokers. “We pushed ourselves. There’s a lot of different aspects of this song that we haven’t done before, like different harmonies. We love these guys and we love what they are doing.”
Keith Urban, nominated for four awards, is the leading nominee at the fan-voted show airing live on CMT at 8 p.m. Eastern. His clip for the slow groove “Blue Ain’t Your Color” is nominated for the night’s biggest award — video of the year — along with music videos by Carrie Underwood, Luke Bryan, Miranda Lambert, Florida Georgia Line and Cole Swindell. The seventh nominee is “Forever Country,” the medley song and video celebrating the Country Music Association Awards’ 50th anniversary featuring Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson and others.
Blake Shelton, Thomas Rhett, Little Big Town, Brett Eldredge, Underwood and Urban are set to perform. Bryan will sing with Jason Derulo, while Earth, Wind & Fire will join Lady Antebellum and Frampton will perform with Brothers Osborne.
Jason Aldean, Darius Rucker, Charles Kelley of Lady A and Derek Trucks will pay tribute to southern rocker Gregg Allman, who died last month at age 69.
Underwood, who has won video of the year six times, is also nominated for collaboration of the year (“The Fighter” with Urban) and female video of the year (“Church Bells”). Her competition in the latter category includes Lambert, Maren Morris, Reba McEntire, Lauren Alaina and Kelsea Ballerini.
Nominees for male video of the year include Shelton, Aldean, Urban, Bryan, Rhett and Eric Church.
The CMT Music Awards will be hosted by “Nashville” actor Charles Esten. Presenters include Kid Rock, Johnny Galecki, Rachel Bilson and Josh Henderson. Rising acts will perform on the Firestone Stage, including Alaina, Brett Young, Chris Lane, Jon Pardi and Midland.
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The momentum of climate change efforts and the affordability of cleaner fuels will keep the United States moving toward its goals of cutting emissions despite the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Paris global accord, business and government leaders in a growing alliance said.
New York, California and 11 other states representing nearly 40 percent of the U.S. economy, mayors of about 200 cities, and leaders of business giants including Amazon, Apple and Target have signed pledges to keep reducing their fossil-fuel emissions after President Donald Trump announced he would withdraw the U.S. from the 2015 Paris climate accord.
“Our coalition wants to let the world know that absent leadership from our federal government,” the country will keep cutting its emissions from fossil fuels, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown told reporters Tuesday.
California, New York, Virginia, Connecticut, North Carolina, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Washington state, Vermont, Massachusetts, Delaware, Oregon and Washington, D.C., have signed pledges. The states, most led by Democrats, represent $7 trillion of the U.S. gross domestic product, or 38 percent.
Texas absent from alliance
Texas, the largest producer of climate-changing carbon dioxide in the U.S. and the biggest state economy after California, is a key figure absent from the list. More than two dozen other states, mostly in the country’s middle, already had been fighting stepped-up federal emissions-cutting programs before Trump’s announcement.
Top Texas leaders have had little public comment on the withdrawal from the global accord, although the state’s attorney general praised the move.
New York and California are the only states in the country’s top 10 list of carbon emitters to sign pledges.
Salt Lake City Mayor Jackie Biskupsi, who joined former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “We Are Still In” campaign, along with mayors of Houston, Atlanta and hundreds of other local leaders, cited the economics for her state: Utah has a $1 billion skiing industry threatened by climate change and marked 65 percent growth last year alone in solar power, as one of the country’s sunniest states.
“Utah is warming at twice the global average, and our drinking water is at risk,” said Biskupsi, saying she was acting “for the well-being of the planet I’m leaving to my sons and your children.”
Court battles ahead
Undoing most existing U.S. programs that curb car pollution and other climate-changing emissions would probably take years and court battles if Trump tries, climate experts say. A few efforts, such as a reduction on methane emissions introduced by the Obama administration, could be overturned more easily.
The momentum of existing climate-change efforts and the availability natural gas, wind and solar power mean those loyal to the Paris accord in the U.S. will have an easier time, with emissions expected to fall overall for years, said Robert Perciasepe with the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, who worked with Bloomberg’s group on the climate pledge.
Some studies suggest the United States will cut emissions as much as 19 percent by 2025 if it simply moves forward as is, he said. That’s not far from former President Barack Obama’s goals for a reduction of 25 to 28 percent as part of the Paris accord, Perciasepe said.
Interest leads to website
Since Thursday, commitments from cities, universities and businesses were happening so fast that organizers had to set up a website where they could sign up automatically, Perciasepe said.
The support from local governments, public institutions and businesses show that climate change efforts are getting something they have long lacked in the U.S. — vocal and enthusiastic support, said William K. Reilly, a former chief of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, who is not involved in the alliances.
“It does perhaps reflect an increasing activism on the part of the public at large” on climate change, Reilly said. “Trump can take some perverse credit for that.”
Facebook is working with three global relief organizations to provide disaster maps — close to real-time data about where people are, where they are moving, and whether they are in danger in the hours and days after a flood, fire or earthquake.
The social networking giant — with nearly 2 billion users, or about 25 percent of the world’s population — said it has agreed to provide maps to UNICEF, the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and the World Food Program, the food-assistance branch of the United Nations.
“We are excited about this,” said Toby Wicks, a data strategist at UNICEF. “Facebook has vast amounts of data.”
The company will provide maps of data in the aggregate. No Facebook user will be identified, the firm said.
After a disaster, “the first thing you need is data, which is extremely scarce and perishable,” said Molly Jackman, a public policy manager at Facebook. But Facebook, particularly in areas with a high concentration of users, can “present a more complete picture of where people are,” she said.
Types of maps
Facebook will offer the organizations three types of disaster maps that will be updated as frequently as possible.
Facebook’s location density maps show where people are located before, during and after a disaster. In addition to using satellite images and population estimates, these maps also draw from Facebook users who have their location data setting turned on.
Facebook’s movement maps show how people move during and after a disaster, and can help organizations with directing resources. For example, Facebook created maps after the 7.8-magnitude earthquake in Kaikoura, New Zealand, last year to show where people were going in the days after the quake struck.
Facebook’s Safety Check maps are based on where Facebook users are when they use the firm’s Safety Check service to tell friends and family they are safe. Facebook will create maps showing areas where people are declaring themselves safe and where help may be needed.
For example, after a disaster, “we might know where the house is, but we don’t know where the people are,” said Dale Kunce, global lead for information communication technology and analytics for the American Red Cross.
“Our first reaction may be to go to where the devastation happened,” Kunce said. “But maybe most people are 10 miles away, staying with families when they reported they were safe. So the place to go may be where they are. We’re excited to see what the possibilities and potential are.”
Snapshots
Wicks, of UNICEF, said the partnership is at the beginning stages, but daily snapshots of where populations are have the potential to help his organization with disaster planning. For example, knowing how close people are to a health facility and how long it takes for them to travel to a medical clinic can help with decisions such as where to deploy medical services in case of a disaster.
The data maps will be most helpful in places where internet connectivity is high and in regions with a lot of Facebook users, Wicks said.
“Are these data representative of the populations we are trying to serve?” Wicks asked. “That’s the key question.”
Facebook said that it intends to make it possible for other organizations and governments, including local organizations, to be part of the program.
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A strong network of friends and family has long been seen as a key component of happiness, but a new study suggests friends may be more important than family.
Researchers at Michigan State University also found the importance of friendship on health and happiness grows as people get older.
“Friendships become even more important as we age,” said William Chopik, assistant professor of psychology at MSU. “Keeping a few really good friends around can make a world of difference for our health and well-being. So it’s smart to invest in the friendships that make you happiest.”
To reach their conclusions, the researchers looked at just over 271,000 participants in a health and happiness survey as well as nearly 7,500 participants in a survey about “relationship support” in older adults suffering chronic illness.
In the first group, both family and friendships were influential in overall health and happiness, but in the second group, friendships “became a stronger predictor of health and happiness at advanced ages.”
Furthermore, in the second group, researchers said strained friendships led to increased chronic illness, but with supportive friends, respondents reported being happier.
One reason, according to Chopik, is that relationships are optional in that we can maintain them with people who make us feel good and discard those who don’t. Family, on the other hand, are not normally optional and while often enjoyable, can also involve negative feelings.
“There are now a few studies starting to show just how important friendships can be for older adults. Summaries of these studies show that friendships predict day-to-day happiness more and ultimately how long we’ll live, more so than spousal and family relationships,” he said.
“Friendships help us stave off loneliness, but are often harder to maintain across the life span,” he added. “If a friendship has survived the test of time, you know it must be a good one, a person you turn to for help and advice often and a person you wanted in your life.”
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Cancer patients are being urged to speak up about their experiences with side-effects from chemotherapy. This, following a new study that shows reporting symptoms can improve their chances of survival. Faith Lapidus reports.
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The United Nations Ocean Conference opens next week in New York and is to call for action to help protect marine life from the threats of global warming, over-fishing and pollution. But in some cases, climate change is already affecting some of the ocean’s iconic species. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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President Donald Trump has chosen a regional banker as his nominee for a key government position in bank regulation.
Trump announced late Monday he is naming Joseph Otting as comptroller of the currency, heading a Treasury Department agency that is the chief overseer for federally chartered banks. If confirmed by the Senate, Otting will play a role in the Trump administration’s efforts to ease rules written under the Dodd-Frank law that stiffened financial regulation after the 2008-09 crisis.
The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency charters and supervises national banks and savings and loans. The agency has hundreds of bank examiners, many of them working inside the nation’s largest financial institutions, who focus closely on lending practices.
Otting was CEO from 2010 to 2015 of OneWest Bank, where he worked with then-chairman Steven Mnuchin, who is now Treasury secretary. Democrats who objected to Mnuchin’s appointment as Treasury chief accused him of running a “foreclosure machine” when he headed the big California-based bank. The bank foreclosed on thousands of homeowners in the aftermath of the housing crisis caused by high-risk mortgages.
Mnuchin, who led an investor group that bought the failed IndyMac bank in 2009 and turned it into a profitable OneWest, has defended his actions as the bank’s chairman. He has said he worked hard during the financial crisis to help homeowners with refinancing mortgages so they could remain in their homes.
OneWest was among a number of big banks that signed consent orders with the OCC over alleged mortgage servicing abuses. The bank didn’t admit or deny wrongdoing under the 2011 order but agreed to undertake a plan to correct problems.
“If Mr. Otting didn’t deal fairly with the customers at his own bank, it’s difficult to see why he’s the best choice to look out for the interests of customers at more than 1,400 banks and thrifts across the country,” Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, senior Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee, said in a statement.
Before he worked at OneWest, Otting was vice chairman of U.S. Bancorp, parent of Minneapolis-based U.S. Bank, one of the largest banks in the country.
With Otting’s appointment, Trump continues to fill out his key team of financial regulators, as his administration looks to easing rules and meet his campaign promises. Republicans have long complained that regulations were made too restrictive following the financial meltdown and have hampered economic growth by making it harder for banks to lend.
Jay Clayton, a Wall Street lawyer with ties to Goldman Sachs, is now chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Trump has three vacancies to fill on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, including the key slot that holds the portfolio of bank supervision.
Otting would replace Keith Noreika, a financial services lawyer who was installed last month as acting comptroller in an unusual move apparently aimed at avoiding Senate confirmation and normal ethics requirements.
Noreika succeeded Thomas Curry, an Obama appointee, who had been comptroller since 2012 and leaned toward strict bank oversight.
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Chuck Berry did things his own way, right up to his final album, a 10-song set nearly four decades in the making.
The St. Louis native widely hailed as the father of rock ‘n’ roll announced plans for the album “CHUCK” in October on his 90th birthday. The music took on added poignancy when Berry died in March. The album will be released Friday.
It’s a fitting finale from the guitar master who melded blues, R&B and Country music into a sound that took over the 1950s, forever changing the cultural landscape. Some of the new songs, like “Wonderful Woman” and “Big Boys,” feature the same driving rhythm of his earliest hits like “Maybellene” and “Roll Over Beethoven.” In fact, one of the new songs, “Lady B. Goode,” offers the perspective of the woman left behind by his legendary “Johnny B. Goode.”
But Berry’s son, Charles Berry Jr., said his father did not set out to make a legacy album.
“I think this was just his next body of work, and it just took a lot longer than the other albums to get released,” Charles Berry Jr., 55, said in an interview with The Associated Press.
That’s an understatement. Jim Marsala, who played bass guitar in Berry’s band for 41 years, said Berry began working on new material soon after the release of his previous album, “Rock It,” in 1979.
Always marching to his own beat, Berry was in no particular hurry. For 10 years, he recorded songs, or riffs for songs, or whatever came to mind. All of the tracks were destroyed in a 1989 fire at a studio near his home in Wentzville, Missouri, a St. Louis suburb.
At that point, “he has nothing,” Charles Berry Jr. said. “So, he builds another studio and goes back to work, re-creating and creating new music.”
In the meantime, Berry continued to perform, including monthly shows for nearly two decades at Blueberry Hill, a venue in another St. Louis suburb, University City, until age 88. Marsala directed the band, Charles Berry Jr. played guitar, and the always unpredictable frontman commanded the stage, taking his bandmates on a nightly trip they could never anticipate.
“The show was completely ad-libbed,” Marsala said. “You never knew what was coming next. We usually started out with ‘Roll Over Beethoven,’ ‘School Days,’ and then ‘Sweet Little Sixteen,’ and then from there it was whatever he felt like playing.”
Marsala made sure he stood to Berry’s left, better to see where Berry’s hands were on the neck of his guitar “so I knew what key he was in. So when he would do his four-bar intro I had hand signals. I would flash to the keyboard player so he would know what key we were in. And we’d come in on the fifth bar. It worked great.”
Charles Berry Jr. smiled as he recalled those shows.
“He’d be up onstage and just start doing stuff,” he said. “And it’d be, ‘OK, let’s just follow him wherever he’s going.”’
“CHUCK” was a family affair. Charles Berry Jr. plays guitar, as does his own son, Charles Edward Berry III, who turns 23 this week. Ingrid Berry-Clay, one of Chuck’s three daughters, sings and plays harmonica.
She sings along with her dad on “Darlin’,” a Country-tinged ballad that resonates as a final message to his children.
“Darlin’, your father’s growing older each year,” Berry sings. “Strands of gray are showing bolder/Come here and lay your head upon my shoulder/My dear, the time is passing fast away.”
Typical of Berry, the lyrics of “CHUCK” are at times poetic, at other times playful. “Big Boys” harkens to his earlier odes to teenage cravings. “The girls wanna stay and the boys wanna play/So let’s rock ‘n’ roll `til the break of day,” he sings.
But in the closing song, “Eyes of Man,” Berry warns philosophically of worshipping false idols.
“So be the temples men have cherished/Crumble in ruins to rot and rust/Low lies each pillar and arch to perish/Doomed to decay and rot to dust.”
Berry’s impact on music was evident, said Joe Edwards, the owner of Blueberry Hill and a close friend of Berry’s.
“But the fact that he changed culture around the world by bringing black kids and white kids together through music was an even greater accomplishment, perhaps,” Edwards said. “It was just unbelievable the influence he had.”
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A decade ago, the first inklings of the coming recession emerged as a housing bubble fueled by scant regulation, low interest rates and easy credit gradually began to crater and soon would take the rest of the economy along for the painful ride.
By the time the Great Recession ended in June 2009, almost no one was spared.
Home prices fell 30 percent on average, the unemployment rate nearly doubled and the S&P 500 lost about half its value. The net worth of U.S. households and nonprofit organizations fell by nearly $14 trillion, about 20 percent.
In the midst of a presidential election, Washington struggled in its response. The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the takeover of Merrill Lynch turned the spotlight on Democratic Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and Republican Senator John McCain even brighter, with McCain’s assertion that the “the fundamentals of our economy are strong” used to depict him as out of touch.
After the economy stabilized, Congress shifted from economic stimulus and bailouts to establishing the kind of regulatory framework that might keep another Great Recession from happening. The result was the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010.
This week, House Republicans will vote on legislation to gut Dodd-Frank and replace it with their own version. A look at the background of the legislation and the GOP plan.
Passed with little GOP support
In June 2010, the House passed the financial regulatory overhaul 237-192. Only three Republicans sided with the vast majority of Democratic members in support of the bill.
Two weeks later, the Senate passed the bill 60-39. This time, only two Republicans voted for the bill, Olympia Snowe of Maine and Scott Brown of Massachusetts. But that was just enough to overcome procedural hurdles that can stop major legislation in the Senate.
Obama signed Dodd-Frank into law on July 21, 2010: “In the end, our financial system only works — our market is only free — when there are clear rules and basic safeguards that prevent abuse, that check excess, that ensure that it is more profitable to play by the rules than to game the system,” Obama said. “And that’s what these reforms are designed to achieve — no more, no less.”
What does it do?
Under the act, large banks undergo “stress tests” to ensure they have enough capital necessary to absorb losses during an economic crisis. The law also put into place strict limits on how commercial banks could invest capital in speculative investments.
Dodd-Frank also established a process by which the federal government could break up and wind down a failing financial company whose failure threatened financial stability in the United States. And it established a new agency with a mission of ensuring that banks and other financial companies don’t abuse consumers.
That’s just a small snapshot of the changes put into place through the nearly 2,300-page bill.
Who were Dodd and Frank?
Representative Barney Frank was the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee. When the financial crisis hit, the Massachusetts lawmaker worked closely with the Bush administration to enact a historic bailout of the nation’s financial system so that the government could purchase as much as $700 billion in troubled assets to stabilize banks and get them lending again. Once the crisis began to subside, he turned his attention to an overhaul of the entire financial services industry. Frank was renowned for his knowledge of public policy and parliamentary rules, but also for his gruff, piercing criticism of those who disagreed with him. He declined to seek re-election in 2012 after serving 16 terms.
Senator Christopher Dodd was the chairman of the Senate’s Banking Committee. He announced in January 2010 that he would not seek re-election once his term ended, and he led the debate on the Senate side without fear of how it would harm his political standing. His home state of Connecticut counts several of the insurance companies that were shaken in the crisis.
Republican replacement
Republicans, most notably President Donald Trump, view the regulations associated with Dodd-Frank as increasing compliance costs for financial companies and making it harder to lend money and spur economic growth. Trump calls the law a “disaster.”
The replacement in the House has been authored by Texas Representative Jeb Hensarling, the chairman of the Financial Services Committee. At its core, the Financial Choice Act would give banks regulatory relief so long as they meet a strict basic requirement for the capital they build to cover unexpected big losses.
Federal regulators would also lose the power to dismantle a failing financial firm and sell off the pieces if they decide its collapse could endanger the system. The legislation also paints a bull’s eye on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which gained powers to scrutinize the practices of virtually any business selling financial products and services, such as credit card companies, payday lenders, mortgage servicers and debt collectors. Hensarling’s bill would eliminate those powers.
It would allow the president to remove the CFPB director at will, without needing a specific cause. Hensarling is backing off one provision, though, in the face of Republican division: He has promised to pull a provision that eliminates the cap on fees that banks can charge retailers when customers use a debit card.
What people are saying about the bill
House Republicans frequently speak about the need for economic growth.
“This is the Republican plan to reform Wall Street and revitalize Main Street — all while protecting the financial futures of Americans,” House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, said in a statement Monday.
No Democratic lawmaker voted for the bill when it was approved by the Financial Services Committee, saying it would allow a return to the kind of risky practices that crashed the economy nearly 10 years ago.
“It’s an invitation for another Great Recession, or worse,” said Representative Maxine Waters of California, the ranking Democratic member of the committee.
While the bill is expected to pass the House, its prospects are uncertain in the Senate, where Democrats have the votes to block it.
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A rusted fragment of the battleship USS Arizona sunk at Pearl Harbor, a woman’s munitions plant uniform and ration books all tell the complex story of life on the homefront in a new exhibit at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans.
“Salute to the Home Front,” which opens Saturday, explores the bitter fight about entering the war, racial and gender prejudice, and the development of the atomic bomb.
Museum President and CEO Nick Mueller said most of the museum’s 6-acre campus shows how the war was won on the battlefield but the new permanent exhibit explains “why it was fought and how it was won on the homefront.”
The 10,000-square-foot exhibit begins with the years after World War I. The peace treaty that ended the war in 1918 was “punitive and did not really solve the social and cultural ills” that led to the war, according Owen Glendening, the museum’s associate vice president for education and access.
“With democracy and capitalism under question, the rise of authoritarian regimes really shook the world,” he said.
Gas masks for children
Among the artifacts are British gas masks for children — one that might fit a 5-year-old and a much bigger one designed to hold an infant from head to waist. Gas had been a major weapon of World War I, and people feared that gas bombs might be dropped in civilian areas.
“Fortunately, it never happened, but the population was scared stiff,” Glendenning said.
Headlines and newsreels show the strident debate between U.S. isolationists and internationalists, which ended when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.
Survivors’ accounts of that attack are among more than 50 videotaped oral histories interspersed throughout the exhibit.
“The signature of this museum is to engage people in personal stories. … We hear from survivors of Pearl Harbor, people on Main Street USA. … We hear first-hand stories about people who went into factories or into the service to fight,” Mueller said.
‘Victory Begins at Home’
The exhibit’s Main Street USA has a newsstand, a theater marquee and a store window filled with propagandistic wares such as Victory bobby pins and a charm bracelet of military service insignia.
Within the picket fence outside two rooms representing a 1940s-style home, one wall is covered with a photo of a victory garden. Nearby are a real hubcap and other metal items for a scrap drive.
Inside the kitchen, the shelves display pamphlets with titles such as “Victory Begins at Home!: Recipes to Match Your Sugar Ration” and “Health for Victory Club Meal-Planning Guide.” Pull open kitchen drawers and you see items including ration books, matchbooks and an icebag.
Map of the war
A living-room wall displays a framed map: “Esso War Map II: Invasion Edition.” It’s designed, an introductory statement says, so people can “follow the strategy of the Allies as it develops from day to day.” An open closet in the same room displays children’s military dolls, toy guns and dress-up uniforms.
Glendenning said the gallery on the rush to turn from a peacetime economy to a wartime one holds two of his favorite artifacts: a cutaway ship model from the Higgins boat-building plant in New Orleans, built as a reference to show workers how everything fit together, and the overalls and cap worn by a female munitions factory worker.
“It has such a ’40s sense of style,” he said. “I love the big red buttons at the hip.”
Toni Kiser, assistant director for collections management, said one of her favorite pieces is at the bottom right corner of the living room’s display cabinet: a statuette of Hitler bending over, with a pincushion as his rear end.
With Wonder Woman blazing a trail at theaters across the United States, the female superhero is being hailed as a powerful new role model for girls and a break away from sexism in Hollywood.
The film, starring Israeli actress Gal Gadot, smashed box-office records on its opening weekend, raking in more than $103 million in the United States — a record for a movie directed by a woman, Patty Jenkins. The previous record holder was Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Fifty Shades of Grey.
Online debates ahead of the film’s release about the Amazonian superhero’s lack of armpit hair and the furor surrounding her selection last year as a U.N. honorary ambassador have only served to boost box-office takings.
But it is above all the depiction of the sword-wielding, lasso-tossing character as an empowered woman that accounts for the film’s triumph, said Melissa Silverstein, founder of the Women and Hollywood blog and co-founder of the women-focused Athena Film Festival.
‘Our stories matter’
“It’s almost an exclamation point on what women have been saying for a long time, in the industry, outside the industry — that our stories matter, we are the heroes of the stories, we can kick butt as well as anyone else and we’re equal,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview.
Wonder Woman was first imagined in 1941 as an icon of female empowerment — even appearing on the inaugural cover of the flagship feminist publication Ms. magazine three decades later.
But her modern portrayal has been criticized for shifting to a sexualized buxom character, typically clad in a red-white-and-blue body suit.
The United Nations dumped Wonder Woman less than two months after naming her as an ambassador for women’s and girls’ empowerment amid criticism that her pin-up image sent the wrong message.
The film reverts to her original incarnation.
“Wonder Woman” is one of three comic-book superheroes from the 1930s and 1940s whose stories have been published almost without interruption — alongside Batman and Superman — according to Harvard history professor Jill Lepore.
Debut sparks celebrations
Yet, Jenkins’ film is the first theatrical release starring the Princess of the Amazons. Her debut on the silver screen has prompted a host of celebratory initiatives.
In New York, Wonder Woman enthusiasts have raised more than $8,000 in six days to send high school girls to a screening in Washington, D.C.
And female-only showings by the cinema chain Alamo Drafthouse have sold out from Austin, Texas, to New York, with promises of proceeds going to Planned Parenthood, a women’s health care provider.
Silverstein said the blockbuster should herald a new era in a Hollywood film industry skewed in favor of male characters and filmmakers.
Last year, females made up just 29 percent of protagonists among the 100 top-grossing U.S. films, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University in California.
Behind the scenes, women made up just 7 percent of directors working on the top 250 domestic grossing films in 2016, a study by the same center showed.
“The bigger picture is, for me, that women stories are as valid as male stories,” said Silverstein.
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A study gives reassuring news for breast cancer survivors who want to have children. Those who later became pregnant were no more likely to have their cancer come back than those who did not have a baby.
It’s a big issue — the average age of moms has been rising in the United States, and more women are being diagnosed with breast cancer in their childbearing years. About 11 percent of new breast cancer cases in the U.S. are in women under 45.
The study, done in Europe, is the largest so far on women whose cancers were fueled by hormones, which rise in pregnancy and, theoretically, might spur a recurrence.
“Having a family is one of the most important achievements in a person’s life,” said study leader Dr. Matteo Lambertini of the Jules Bordet Institute in Brussels, Belgium. These results show that “pregnancy after breast cancer can be considered safe.”
The research involved more than 1,200 breast cancer survivors. More than half had tumors whose growth was fueled by estrogen. After treatment, 333 became pregnant, about two and a half years after their cancer diagnosis, on average. Researchers compared them to 874 other survivors, matched for tumor type and other things, who did not.
More than 12 years after conception, recurrence rates were similar in both groups. Abortion had no impact on the rates either.
There was information on breast-feeding for 64 of the moms, with 25 reporting doing so successfully, suggesting it’s possible for some women even after breast surgery.
The results show “fairly convincingly” that women don’t have to worry, said Dr. Richard Schilsky, chief medical officer for the American Society of Clinical Oncology. The group featured the study at its annual conference that ended Tuesday in Chicago.
A big study under way in the U.S. and other countries is taking this research one step further, testing whether it’s safe for breast cancer survivors who want to get pregnant to temporarily suspend taking the hormone-blocking drugs like tamoxifen usually recommended for five years after initial treatment.
If they wait until all five years are past, they might be too old to have a baby, said Dr. Ann Partridge, who specializes in treating young women with breast cancer at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. She is helping enroll patients in the study, called POSITIVE.
Participants must have used the hormone blockers for at least 18 months before stopping, and can suspend treatment for up to two years to enable pregnancy, delivery and breast-feeding.
Sarah Murray of Bridgeport, Connecticut, is the first U.S. woman in the study to have had a baby. She was 29 and planning her wedding when her breast cancer was found in 2013.
“We had just set the date when I got diagnosed, the same week. So obviously, children was on our minds,” she said.
Worries about triggering a recurrence if she got pregnant “did weigh on me quite a bit,” she said, but “I didn’t want the fear to have power over a decision that would bring so much joy.”
Her son, Owen, was born in December.
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Drinking even moderate amounts of alcohol is linked to changes in brain structure and an increased risk of worsening brain function, scientists said Tuesday.
In a 30-year study that looked at the brains of 550 middle-aged heavy drinkers, moderate drinkers and teetotalers, the researchers found people who drank more alcohol had a greater risk of hippocampal atrophy — a form of brain damage that affects memory and spatial navigation.
People who drank more than 30 units a week on average had the highest risk, but even those who drank moderately — between 14 and 21 units a week — were far more likely than abstainers to have hippocampal atrophy, the scientists said.
“And we found no support for a protective effect of light consumption on brain structure,” they added.
The research team — from the University of Oxford and University College London — said their results supported a recent lowering of drinking limit guidelines in Britain, but posed questions about limits recommended in the United States.
U.S. guidelines suggest that up to 24.5 units of alcohol a week is safe for men, but the study found increased risk of brain structure changes at just 14 to 21 units a week.
A unit is defined as 10 milliliters (ml) of pure alcohol. There are roughly two in a large beer, nine in a bottle of wine and one in a 25 ml spirit shot.
Harder to justify
Killian Welch, a Royal Edinburgh Hospital neuropsychiatrist who was not directly involved in the study, said the results, published in the BMJ British Medical Journal, underlined “the argument that drinking habits many regard as normal have adverse consequences for health.”
“We all use rationalizations to justify persistence with behaviors not in our long-term interest. With [these results], justification of ‘moderate’ drinking on the grounds of brain health becomes a little harder,” he said.
The study analyzed data on weekly alcohol intake and cognitive performance measured repeatedly over 30 years between 1985 and 2015 for 550 healthy men and women with an average age of 43 at the start of the study. Brain function tests were carried out at regular intervals, and at the end of the study participants were given an MRI brain scan.
After adjusting for several important potential confounders such as gender, education, social class, physical and social activity, smoking, stroke risk and medical history, the scientists found that higher alcohol consumption was associated with increased risk of brain function decline.
Drinking more was also linked to poorer “white matter integrity” — a factor they described as critical when it comes to cognitive functioning.
The researchers noted that with an observational study like this, no firm conclusions can be drawn about cause and effect.
They added, however, that the findings could have important public health implications for a large sector of the population.
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The World Health Organization published a new classification of antibiotics Tuesday that aims to fight drug resistance, with penicillin-type drugs recommended as the first line of defense and others for use only when absolutely necessary.
The new “essential medicines list” includes 39 antibiotics for 21 common syndromes, categorized into three groups: “Access,” “Watch” and “Reserve.”
Drugs on the “Access” list have lower resistance potential and include the widely used amoxicillin.
The “Watch” list includes ciprofloxacin, which is commonly prescribed for cystitis and strep throat but “not that effective,” Marie-Paule Kieny, WHO assistant director-general for health systems and innovation, told reporters.
Its use should be “dramatically reduced,” the WHO said.
“We think that the political will is there, but this needs to be followed by strong policies,” Kieny said.
The “Reserve” category antibiotics such as colistin should be seen as a last resort. That prompts questions about how producers of such antibiotics could make money, said Suzanne Hill, WHO’s director of essential medicines and health products.
‘Keep it in reserve’
“What we need to do is stop paying for antibiotics based on how many times they are prescribed, to discourage use. We don’t want colistin used very frequently. In fact, we don’t want it used at all,” Hill said. “What we need to do as a global community is work out how we pay the company not to market colistin and not to promote it and to keep it in reserve.”
The WHO classification takes into account the use of antibiotics for animal health use, and was developed together with the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Organization for Animal Health.
Other changes to the list included the addition of two oral cancer treatments, a new pill for hepatitis C that combines two medicines, a more effective treatment for HIV, and new pediatric formulations of medicines for tuberculosis.
But the WHO also said Roche’s well-known flu drug oseltamivir, marketed as Tamiflu, may be removed from the list unless new information supports its use in seasonal and pandemic influenza outbreaks.
“There is an updated data set compared to when the committee evaluated this product last, and what that suggests is that the size of the effect of oseltamivir in the context of pandemic influenza is less than previously thought,” Hill said.
But oseltamivir was the only listed antiviral, and was still useful for pregnant women and patients with complications, so the drug should be restricted to the most critical patients, she added.
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The U.S. and Mexican governments reached a new agreement to significantly shift their sugar trade mix, but U.S. sugar producers have failed to endorse the deal, leaving question marks over whether it could still sour broader trade relations.
U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the “agreement in principle” with Mexican Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo calls for Mexico to reduce the share of refined sugar in its exports to the United States, while increasing the share of raw sugar.
He said Mexico met nearly every request by the U.S. sugar industry to fix problems with a 2014 sugar trade agreement.
“Unfortunately, despite all of these gains, the U.S. sugar industry has said it is unable to support the agreement in its present form,” Ross said without elaborating on their objections.
He added that the agreement would go through a final drafting stage in which he hoped that the U.S. producers could come on board with it.
Asked how long this would take, Ross said, “It should be days, not weeks or months.”
The deal cut by Ross and Guajardo leaves Mexico’s overall access to the U.S. sugar market unchanged but refined sugar must fall to 30 percent of overall imports from Mexico from a previous limit 53 percent.
It also lifts the U.S. price paid for Mexican raw sugar to 23 cents per pound from 22.25 cents, while, the price for refined sugar will rise to 28 cents per pound from 26 cents.
These prices exclude shipping and packaging costs, the Commerce Department said in a summary.
An agreement was expected to help avoid potential retaliation from Mexico on imports of U.S. high-fructose corn syrup, a trade battle that would heighten U.S.-Mexico tensions as both countries along with Canada prepare to begin renegotiating the 23-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement in August.
Ross on Monday extended the deadline for the negotiations by 24 hours to complete what he called “final technical consultations” for a deal.
Sources on both sides of the border said on Monday that the U.S. sugar industry had added new demands outside of the terms agreed on earlier in the day by the two governments.
U.S. refiners have complained that high-quality Mexican raw sugar was going straight to sugar consumers, rather than passing through U.S. refineries.
The deal would mark the culmination of a years-long dispute between the countries over sugar, after U.S. groups three years ago asked the government for protection from dumping of subsidized imports from Mexico.
In 2014, the U.S. government slapped large duties on Mexican sugar but hammered out a deal with Mexico that suspended those levies. Factions of the U.S. industry have said that the deal has failed to eliminate harm from Mexican imports.
The U.S. industry involved in the dispute include a coalition of cane and beet farming groups as well as ASR Group, the maker of Domino Sugar that is owned by the politically connected Fanjul family.
ASR and fellow cane refiner Imperial Sugar, owned by commodities firm Louis Dreyfus Company BV, have said they are being starved of raw supplies under the current deal.
They have asked the U.S. government to terminate the pact.
The latest talks began in March, two months after U.S. President Donald Trump took office vowing a tougher line on trade to protect U.S. industry and jobs.
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