Average households use a lot of water that cannot be re-used and it goes to waste. A new project in Sweden is testing a water treatment system that would put to use the nutrients and other useful elements from used water while eliminating the toxic parts. VOA’s Zlatica Hoke has more.
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Day: July 11, 2017
French President Emmanuel Macron expressed “pride, humility and determination” and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti spoke of his city’s proud Olympic past as the rivals to host the 2024 Games met International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach on Monday.
The IOC will hold a meeting on Tuesday where it is expected to ratify an executive board recommendation to award both the 2024 and the 2028 Games at the same time, ensuring both candidates host one Games.
However, the IOC would still have to decide who goes first, and the two candidates are lobbying intensely to try to get the 2024 Games they originally bid for.
Macron’s presence on Tuesday is an unusual move. Heads of state generally turn up only for the host city vote, which this year will take place in Lima, Peru, on Sept. 13.
Garcetti, whose city hosted the 1932 and 1984 Games, supported the IOC’s decision to award both editions at the same time.
“We welcome the decision to look at simultaneous awarding of two summer Games,” he said after meeting the IOC’s Bach at the Olympic museum.
“We are very excited even in that context to share our unique story with the IOC members, the soul of LA, the taste of the city. We have been a transformative partner every time we had the Games.”
Paris is also hoping to stage the Games for a third time, having previously hosted in 1900 and 1924, and Macron said he came with “a sense of pride, determination and humility.”
“I came here for two things: pride, for the candidature and being part of this win-win-win situation, and also to carry the values of Olympism the world over. I support them fully,” Macron said.
“We need multilateralism, the structures that provide agreement among nations … and tolerance, which the Olympic movement illustrates well.”
Paris has already failed in three attempts to land the Olympics, in 1992, 2008 and 2012.
“A unique team in France set up this project,” Macron said. He had already met with the IOC two days after being elected in May.
“The project was built by a team, the national Olympic committee, the city of Paris, and is marked by the complete unity behind this project,” he said.
Bach, whose meeting with Macron lasted close to an hour and a half compared with 40 minutes for the mayor of Los Angeles, said a decision to give the green light on a double allocation would “create a win-win-win situation for LA, Paris and the entire Olympic movement.”
Paris is seen as the frontrunner in the race for the 2024 Games, with Los Angeles having hinted they would accept the Games for 2028.
Four other cities — Hamburg, Rome, Budapest and Boston — were in the running for the 2024 Games before dropping out over cost and size concerns, forcing the IOC to overhaul the bidding with the double awarding to make it more attractive to potential hosts of the Games.
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Insecticides, mosquito nets, and disrupting breeding grounds all reduce mosquito populations and slow the spread of malaria. Now, researchers want to take away the insect’s food to fight the disease that kills a child every two minutes.
Mosquitoes mostly feed on plant sugars that can be hard to find during the dry season in Africa, where 90 percent of malaria cases develop. Researchers thought one potential source of food might be from the flowers on a small type of mesquite tree. The tree, imported from Mexico 40 years ago to provide firewood and shore up irrigation dykes, quickly became invasive and grew out of control.
To test their idea, researchers monitored mosquito populations in six villages in the Bandiagra District of Mali. After a week, they removed the flowers from the mesquite trees in half of the villages.
The report, published in Malaria Journal, found that with less food around, the mosquitoes didn’t live as long and populations dropped 69 percent. This didn’t just mean fewer mosquitoes, it meant fewer old mosquitoes. That’s important because it takes 12 days for the malaria virus to get to the salivary glands of a mosquito where it could infect a human. So if mosquitoes die even a couple of days earlier, that could greatly reduce the number of mosquitoes that pose a threat.
“This suggests that removal of the flowers could be a new way to shift inherently high malaria transmission areas to low transmission areas,” said Gunter Muller, lead author of the study from Hebrew University Hadassah Medical School.
Devil tree
But getting rid of mesquite is easier said than done. It’s not as if people haven’t tried to control the tree before. It encroaches on crop lands, makes areas inaccessible, and can use up what little water there is. It has been known to grow up though the floors of huts. Even getting to the flowers is a challenge, due to the 10-centimeter-long thorns that grow along the branches.
Many refer to it as the devil tree, but Medusa tree may be just as apt a name, since it can grow back from just its roots after it is cut down.
Biologist Dawn Wesson from the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine said this was one of the first attempts she has seen to control mosquito populations by restricting their food source.
Wesson, who was not involved in the research, highlighted that not only were populations depressed, but that the degree of impact varied greatly depending on the species of mosquito. In this case all of the species can carry malaria, but Wesson hopes that in other contexts this could be used to help a benign species of mosquito displace a dangerous species of mosquito. That impact could extend beyond the end of any food control measures.
Approach could backfire
But Wesson also cautioned that removing mesquite might backfire. Without flowers to feed on, these mosquitoes might turn to blood meals. This could lead to more frequent bitings and increased transmission of malaria. “It’s probably unlikely,” she told VOA. “They did show a nice decrease … in the older female mosquitoes. But remember their study only took place over a period of about eight days.”
The next step, she suggests, should be to measure the impact of removing mesquite, not just on mosquito populations, but also on the incidence of malaria.
U.S. President Donald Trump plans to nominate former Treasury official Randal Quarles to be the Federal Reserve’s top banking regulator, the White House said on Monday.
If confirmed by the Senate, Quarles would be the first vice chair of supervision at the Fed, a role created after the 2008 financial crisis but never filled during the Obama administration.
Quarles is viewed as an industry-friendly figure who will likely listen to banks that have complained about the impact of regulations implemented since the financial meltdown. His nomination has been widely expected since April.
Former Fed Governor Daniel Tarullo effectively ran banking supervision until he stepped down in February, overseeing a strict implementation of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law and administering rigorous “stress tests” annually to banks on how prepared they are to withstand unexpected shocks.
Quarles currently runs a private investment firm that he founded, the Cynosure Group, from Salt Lake City, Utah. He was previously a partner at private equity firm the Carlyle Group.
He was also under secretary for domestic finance at the Treasury under President George W. Bush and was the U.S. executive director of the International Monetary Fund.
In an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal in March 2016, Quarles and Lawrence Goodman, another former U.S. Treasury official, argued against breaking up big banks because it would risk damaging the wider economy. He has also talked about refining Obama-era financial rules, introduced after the financial crisis.
Quarles will be a central figure in pushing the Trump administration’s plans to loosen the leash put on Wall Street banks following the crisis.
Trump laid out his plans last month but he needs officials at key regulatory posts to carry out his agenda. He has gradually been nominating heads of financial agencies, but only Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton have been approved by Congress.
Other agencies are either awaiting presidential picks or are operating under “acting” chiefs. Others have leaders appointed by Trump’s Democratic predecessor, President Barack Obama.
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Investigators said Monday that targets of high-tech spying in Mexico included an international group of experts backed by the Organization of American States who had criticized the government’s probe into the disappearance of 43 students.
Previous investigations by the internet watchdog group Citizen Lab found that the spyware had been directed at journalists, activists and opposition politicians in Mexico. But targeting foreign experts operating under the aegis of an international body marks an escalation of the scandal, which so far involves 19 individuals or groups.
“This must be investigated to find out who sent these messages, because they could put at risk a lot of contacts and sources,” said former Colombian prosecutor Angela Buitrago, a member of the group of experts.
Buitrago said she and another expert, Carlos Beristain, received the messages.
“I didn’t open it because I am used to spying,” Buitrago said. “When you work in a prosecutors’ office, a government office, there are strange messages and you pass them on to the analysts.”
Beristain said the spying attempt “may be a more serious crime given the diplomatic protected status that we had in order to carry out our work.”
A report released by the University of Toronto-based cyber-sleuths found that someone sent emails with links to the spyware to the International Group of Independent Experts, named by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. The experts had been critical of the government’s investigation into the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from a rural teachers college in Guerrero state — a politically sensitive incident that deeply embarrassed the government.
Jose Eguiguren Praeli, the president of Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, called the revelations “extremely worrying.”
“There should be an investigation that is completely independent and impartial, to find out who carried out the supposed espionage and who ordered it,” he said.
Cellphone becomes eavesdropper
While the Mexican government bought such software, it’s not clear who used it. Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto last week dismissed allegations that his government was responsible and promised an investigation. Arely Gomez, who was attorney general at the time some of the hacking attempts occurred but now heads the country’s anti-corruption agency, said Thursday that her office had intelligence tools “like any other attorney general’s office in Mexico and anywhere else in the world.”
“During my term, they were always applied in accordance with the legal framework,” Gomez said.
The spyware, known as Pegasus, is made by the Israel-based NSO Group, which says it sells only to government agencies for use against criminals and terrorists. It turns a cellphone into an eavesdropper, giving snoopers the ability to remotely activate its microphone and camera and access its data.
The spyware is uploaded when users click on a link in email messages designed to pique their interest.
Citizen Lab said the spyware attempts against the international experts occurred in March 2016 as the group was preparing its final, critical report on the government investigation into the disappearances.
“In March 2016 a phone belonging to the GIEI group received two messages designed to trick the recipient into clicking. The two messages related to the purported death of a relative,” the group reported.
It was unclear if the link was opened or the phones were compromised.
The 43 students from a rural teachers college in Guerrero state were detained by local police in the city of Iguala on Sept. 26, 2014, and were turned over to a crime gang. After an initial investigation, the government said it had determined the “historical truth:” that all of the students were killed and that their bodies were incinerated at a dump and then tossed into a river.
But only one student’s remains have been identified, with a partial DNA match on another. The experts criticized the government’s conclusions, saying there was no evidence of a fire large enough to incinerate the bodies and that government investigators had not looked into other evidence.
‘Seemingly political ends’
Citizen Lab said it found similarities in the messages on the sender’s phone number with a previous spyware attack. In a June 19 report, the group said at least 76 spyware text messages were sent to 12 prominent journalists and rights activists in Mexico, all of whom were investigating or critical of the government. Some had uncovered corruption.
The conservative National Action Party was also a target.
The investigators said they had no conclusive proof of government involvement in the attacks, but John Scott-Railton of Citizen Lab said National Action case “makes it crystal clear that NSO has been used widely and recklessly across a swath of Mexican civil society and politics. Once again we see ‘government-exclusive’ spyware being used for seemingly political ends.”
“As cases continue to emerge, it is clear that this is not an isolated case of misuse, but a sustained operation that lasted for more than a year and a half,” Scott-Railton said.
The Centro Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez, a human rights group that has investigated a number of high-profile human rights cases, has said its staff members were targeted. Other targets included well-known journalists Carmen Aristegui and Carlos Loret de Mola.
In February, Citizen Lab and its Mexican partners published a report detailing how Mexican food scientists and anti-obesity campaigners who backed Mexico’s soda tax were also targeted with Pegasus.
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