Month: August 2017

Notre-Dame’s Crumbling Gargoyles Need Help

The Archbishop of Paris is on a 100 million-euro ($120 million) fundraising drive to save the crumbling gargoyles and gothic arches of the storied Notre-Dame cathedral.

Every year, 12 million to 14 million people visit the 12th-century Parisian landmark on an island in the Seine river. Groundbreaking for the structure occurred in 1163 and construction was completed in 1345. Pollution and exposure to elements over time have resulted in losses of large chunks of stone.

“If we don’t do these restoration works, we’ll risk seeing parts of the exterior structure begin to fall. This is a very serious risk,” said Michel Picaud, president of the Friends of Notre-Dame charity set up by the archbishop.

Church officials, who have created what they are calling a “stone cemetery” from fallen masonry, say the cathedral remains safe to visit.

Entry to the cathedral is free, and the French state, which owns the building, devotes 2 million euros a year to repairs.

But that is not enough to embark on major restoration works, the last of which were carried out during the 1800s, officials at the cathedral and charity said.

Hugo’s book

Notre-Dame has long drawn tourists from around the world.

It is most famous in popular culture as the locale for 19th-century author Victor Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame” and films of the same name, including the 1939 classic with Charles Laughton and the 1996 Disney musical animation.

The latter in particular raised the cathedral’s profile for modern-day tourists from China to the United States.

“It’s the movie for me. I just think of the Hunchback of Notre-Dame, and the book as well. After reading that book, I actually really wanted to come see it,” said U.S tourist Claire Huber as she visited the cathedral.

Church authorities hope the cathedral’s worldwide fame will attract donors, particularly from the United States.

“Gargoyles are what people want to see when they come to Paris. If there are no more gargoyles, what will they see?” Notre-Dame communications chief Andre Finot said.

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Syrian Schools Grow Edible Playgrounds to Boost Diets of Hungry Children

School playgrounds across Syria are being transformed into vegetable gardens where children whose diets have been devastated by six years of war can learn to grow — and then eat — aubergines, lettuces, peppers, cabbages and cucumbers.

Traditional Syrian cuisine is typical of the region, and rich in vegetables. Its mainstays include hummus, minced lamb cooked with pine nuts and spices, varied salads, stews made with green beans, okra or courgettes and tomatoes, stuffed cabbage leaves and artichoke hearts.

But the six-year war has changed that for much of the population, and many now live mainly on bread or food aid.

According to U.N. figures, unemployment now stands at more than 50 percent, and nearly 70 percent of the population is living in extreme poverty, in what was once a relatively wealthy country.

“The ongoing crisis in Syria is having a devastating effect on the health and nutrition of an entire generation of children,” Adam Yao, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) acting representative in Syria, said on Tuesday, ahead of the start of the school year.

FAO is helping some 17 primary schools in both government and opposition-controlled areas to plant up to 500 meter-square fruit and vegetable plots in war-torn areas including Aleppo, Hama, Homs, Idlib and the outskirts of Damascus.

Young children are often the most vulnerable to malnutrition in a crisis, which can have serious and long-lasting effects on their growth and future development.

“Good nutrition is a child’s first defense against common diseases and important for children to be able to lead an active and healthy life,” Yao added.

The primary schools, which began planting in May, have produced 12 tons of fruit and vegetables. Another 35 schools are expected to start transforming their playgrounds soon in Aleppo and in rural areas around Damascus.

Rising prices, falling production

The price of food has risen since the start of the war — agriculture production has plummeted, and the country now relies on food imports to make up the shortfall. Transporting food around the country has also become difficult and costly.

About 13.5 million people in Syria are in need of humanitarian assistance. Of those, 7 million are unable to meet their basic food needs.

Some 5 million people receive international food aid, but not everyone in need can be reached, and the World Food Program says it has had to cut the amount of calories in its family food baskets because of funding shortages.

“The donors are generous, but we don’t know how long they can continue to be generous and rely on taxpayers’ money,” the FAO’s Yao told Reuters.

Vulnerable families are receiving help from FAO to grow food at home, so they can become less reliant on food aid.

“Food aid is very important, but … we should combine both, in a way that people grow their own food and move away from food aid gradually,” he said.

In a country where more than half the population has been forced to flee their homes, many moving several times, investing in agriculture helps people to stay put for as long as it is safe, Yao added.

“Agriculture has become a hope for [many] because they can grow their own food and survive — even in the besieged areas.”

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Kardashian Women Give $500,000 to Help Harvey Victims

Kim Kardashian West and her famous siblings are donating $500,000 to help Harvey victims.

A spokeswoman for the reality star says she and her mother and sisters have given $250,000 to the Red Cross and $250,000 to the Salvation Army.

Kardashian West announced the donation on Twitter on Tuesday, saying, “Houston we are praying for you.” She used the hashtag #HoustonStrong.

They are among several stars who’ve said publicly they are helping hurricane victims. Kevin Hart on Monday announced a $25,000 donation to the Red Cross for storm victims and called on other celebrities to do the same.

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US Gearing Up for Digital Arms Race

In the straight-laced world of the U.S. military, the big room with glossy white paint stands out.

Beyond the desks lined with computer screens, the overhead projectors or the digital clock displaying the time in various world cities, the walls demand your attention.  

 

They are covered from floor to ceiling with questions, equations, sketches and ideas — scribbled frantically or in moments of inspiration — all representing the best thinking of some of the U.S. military’s best analysts.

 

“There are precious few places in this building where you can write on a wall,” said Albert Bolden, not surprisingly given that this is, after all, part of a military base.

But according to Bolden, the director of innovation at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, that’s part of the point for the so-called Innovation Hub, or iHUB.

 

“People from across the agency can come into this space and figure out how to solve our problems,” he said.

 

‘Relevant in this digital age’

 

While all this may sound like a feel-good tale of military structure melding with Silicon Valley ingenuity to make life easier by using technology, it is actually about much more.

 

“If we don’t embrace it, our adversaries will,” said outgoing DIA Director, Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart. “The fight for remaining relevant in this digital age is what keeps me awake.”

 

And Stewart was clear. It is, in many ways, an arms race.

 

“Our adversaries have been modernizing,” he warned, speaking to a small group of reporters in August, as the agency welcomed private companies and academics to the iHub for a series of so-called Industry Days.

 

And it is these encounters between the DIA’s own top thinkers and some of the best outside of government that form a second, crucial component of the iHub strategy. It is a chance to see how off-the-shelf technologies might be able to help solve problems the agency’s analysts have identified.

 

One company making a pitch to be part of this overall effort is an Austin, Texas-based artificial intelligence start-up called SparkCognition.

 

SparkCognition already has attracted interest from the U.S. Air Force. And companies like Verizon and Boeing are now investing more than $30 million in the company’s neural networks, designed to mimic the functionality of a human brain in order to predict likely outcomes.

 

“What we’ve done is automate that research that a data scientist would do,” said SparkCognition’s Sam Septembre following a question-and-answer session at the DIA’s iHub.

 

Instead of taking weeks or days, however, Septembre said SparkCognition’s systems can deliver results in hours or even minutes.

 

“We’re not just a black box,” added the company’s director of business operations, Timothy Stefanick. “We have why the [computer] model thought that.”

 

SparkCognition says its platforms already have succeeded in predicting Brexit, Britain’s decision to leave the European Union. And the company says it nearly correctly predicted President Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 U.S. presidential election by looking at sales of campaign merchandise, like Trump’s “Make America Great Again” baseball caps.

 

“The human factor got involved and skewed it,” said Stefanick, explaining that in the run-up to the election, the company’s analysts didn’t trust the initial prediction of a Trump victory because it differed so much from the polls. He said they then decided to have the computer models take into account additional factors, causing them to predict a Trump loss.

 

AI for video

 

Another company vying for a DIA contract is Percipient.ai, which focuses on applying artificial intelligence to video.

 

“This is a kind of capability that helps you get into productive analytics and helps you protect forces,” said company co-founder, ret. Brig. Gen. Balan Ayyar, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence officer who commanded a task force in Afghanistan.

“You can check any person in any video,” he said.

 

Ayyar and fellow Percipient.ai co-founder Raj Shah, say their platform can save analysts considerable time, for example scouring hundreds of hours of video from the scene of a terror attack to quickly identify if any suspected terrorists were nearby.

 

Even mobile phones could be used to track potential adversaries, programmed to vibrate, for instance, if a person of interest turns up in a “selfie.”

 

“With this kind of system, the [terror] watch list could be much, much bigger,” said Shah, who previously headed up Google Maps.

 

Already, Ayyar and Shah say Percipient.ai’s systems can identify suspicious activity, or tradecraft, like the use of specific getaway vehicles.

Handwriting on the wall

 

For DIA, the early results have been promising.

 

“We’ve seen examples when machines are able to provide insights to the analysts that they haven’t had,” said Randy Soper, a senior DIA analyst for analytics modernization.

 

To speed up the process, DIA even awards seed money — up to about $250,000 — to projects that have shown the most promise.

 

Two have already been approved and another four projects are set to receive funding once the once the money becomes available.

 

More projects could soon be added to the list. DIA’s Innovation Hub is still considering the latest pitches from industry and academia, like those from SparkCognition and Percipient.ai.

 

The agency says that overall, the response has been “overwhelming.”

 

But the success in reaching out to industry and academia also has brought some changes to the program.

 

Last week [August 22], the DIA opened up a new Innovation Hub.

 

At first glance, it looks sleek and modern, a row of screens and a digital world clock etched smoothly into wood-paneled walls, while a large conference table dominates the center of the room.

 

To be sure, it seems like quite a departure from the old iHub, which almost had the feel of a useful but makeshift classroom.

 

Some things, though, have not changed. The wood-paneling only extends so far. Much of the rest of the room is covered in that white, glossy paint.

 

“You can still write on the walls,” said one official.

 

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Houston Native Beyonce Planning to Aid Those Hurt by Harvey

Beyonce says she’s working with her charity to assist those in her hometown affected by Tropical Storm Harvey.

 

The Houston native says in a statement to The Houston Chronicle late Monday that “my heart goes out to my hometown, Houston, and I remain in constant prayer for those affected.”

 

Beyonce, Kelly Rowland and the original members of Destiny’s Child who left the group, LeToya Luckett and LaTavia Roberson, formed as teenagers in Houston.

 

Harvey made landfall four days ago as the fiercest hurricane to hit the U.S. in 13 years.

 

Beyonce said she’s praying “for the rescuers who have been so brave and determined.” The singer said she is working closely with her organization BeyGOOD and her pastor to find ways to help those affected.

 

 

 

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Venice Film Festival Offers Grit, Glamour and George Clooney

The Venice Film Festival is kicking off the fall cinema season with searing drama, serious glamour and a crop of new movies vying for attention, awards and acclaim.

 

Thanks to its late-summer time slot, just ahead of rivals in Telluride and Toronto, the world’s oldest cinema festival has become a key showcase for films hoping to dominate Hollywood’s awards season. In recent years, Venice has been a launch-pad for Oscar winners including “Gravity,” “Birdman,” “Spotlight” and “La La Land.”

 

This year’s edition opens Wednesday with Alexander Payne’s “Downsizing,” a science fiction-tinged drama starring Matt Damon as a man who hopes to minimize his problems by shrinking himself.

 

Other films competing for the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion, include George Clooney-directed heist movie “Suburbicon”; Guillermo del Toro’s fantastical “The Shape of Water”; Darren Aronofsky’s secrecy-shrouded thriller “Mother!”; and Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”

 

Here’s what to watch for at the 74th Venice Film Festival, which runs to September 9:

Glamour galore

 

Unspooling in one of Italy’s most ravishing cities, the festival takes style and celebrity very seriously. Among the stars who will be whisked across the Venice lagoon by boat to walk the Palazzo del Cinema red carpet are Clooney, a festival favorite who has a house on nearby Lake Como.

 

He’ll likely be joined by pal Damon, who stars in both “Suburbicon” and “Downsizing,” which also features Kristen Wiig. Jennifer Lawrence is expected for the much-anticipated “Mother!”, which also stars Javier Bardem. The Spanish star should also be on hand alongside Penelope Cruz for the drug-lord biopic “Loving Pablo.”

 

An older generation of showbiz royalty will be well represented by stars including Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Donald Sutherland and Michael Caine. Jane Fonda and Robert Redford star in the late-life romance “Our Souls at Night” and are being given lifetime-achievement awards by the festival.

 

Global Crises

 

Several films in the lineup tackle the conflicts and divisions convulsing the world.

 

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s documentary “Human Flow” travels to 23 countries as it tries to put a human face on the vast migrations unfolding around the world. Paul Schrader, who wrote “Taxi Driver,” directs “First Reformed,” featuring Ethan Hawke as a minister wrestling with his faith and the specter of environmental catastrophe.

 

Israel’s Samuel Moaz, director of acclaimed war drama “Lebanon,” returns with “Foxtrot,” another story of conflict and loss. From China, Vivian Qu’s “Angels Wear White” centers on sexual assault in a small provincial town.

 

It hasn’t escaped comment that Qu is the only female director among 21 filmmakers in the festival’s main competition. Debates about diversity and inclusion in the movie business are a long way from dying down.

 

Thrills and chills

 

Once considered the preserve of B-movies, thrills have become respectable. The Venice competition brims with films that include elements of sci-fi, action and horror, including “Downsizing,” “The Shape of Water” and “Mother!”

 

Further jolts and shocks are promised by the Italian organized-crime series “Suburra”; S. Craig Zahler’s bloody “Brawl in Cell Block 99,” starring Vince Vaughn; and a 3-D version of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” screening alongside a 25th-anniversary documentary about the landmark video.

 

A changing industry

 

Technology and economics are transforming the film industry, and festivals like Venice are working hard to keep up.

 

Festival director Alberto Barbera has said he wants the lineup to provide “a perception of the future,” rather than “a snapshot of the present or a souvenir selfie of our contemporary cinema.”

 

One big change this year is the festival’s first virtual reality competition, featuring 22 films and installations judged by a jury led by director John Landis. Barbera said VR, until recently considered little more than “the latest technological gimmick,” looked set to “become one of the most colossal investments” for the cultural industry.

 

With the way films are funded, made, distributed and watched all in flux, the taste-maker role played by festivals like Venice makes them more powerful than ever.

 

Schrader, who has been making films since the 1970s, said advances in technology had let him make “First Reformed” twice as fast and at half the cost of a movie made just 10 or 15 years ago.

 

“That’s the upside of the enormous freedom we’ve been given by technology in film,” he said. “The downside is thousands of films are getting made now that no one wants to see.”

 

“The festivals are the new gatekeepers,” he added. “We need these festival structures to process this tsunami of product.”

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Pizza Delivery Without Drivers: Domino’s, Ford Team Up for Test

No ring of the doorbell, just a text. No tip for the driver? No problem in this test, where Domino’s and Ford are teaming up to see if customers will warm to the idea of pizza delivered by driverless cars.

 

Starting Wednesday, some pizzas in Domino’s hometown of Ann Arbor will arrive in a Ford Fusion outfitted with radars and a camera that is used for autonomous testing. A Ford engineer will be at the wheel, but the front windows have been blacked out so customers won’t interact with the driver.

 

Instead, people will have to come out of their homes and type a four-digit code into a keypad mounted on the car. That will open the rear window and let customers retrieve their order from a heated compartment. The compartment can carry up to four pizzas and five sides, Domino’s Pizza Inc. says.

 

The experiment will help Domino’s understand how customers will interact with a self-driving car, says company President Russell Weiner. Will they want the car in their driveway or by the curb? Will they understand how to use the keypad? Will they come outside if it’s raining or snowing? Will they put their pizza boxes on top of the car and threaten to mess up its expensive cameras?

 

“The majority of our questions are about the last 50 feet of the delivery experience,” Weiner told reporters last week.

 

Domino’s, which delivers 1 billion pizzas worldwide each year, needs to stay ahead of emerging trends, Weiner says. The test will last six weeks, and the companies say they’ll decide afterward what to do next. Domino’s is also testing pizza delivery with drones.

 

Weiner said the company has 100,000 drivers in the U.S. In a driverless world, he said, he could see those employees taking on different roles within the company.

 

Ford Motor Co., which wants to develop a fully driverless vehicle by 2021, said it needs to understand the kinds of things companies would use that vehicle for. The experiment is a first for Ford. But other companies have seen the potential for food deliveries. Otto, a startup backed by Uber, delivered 50,000 cans of Budweiser beer from a self-driving truck in Colorado last fall.

 

“We’re developing a self-driving car not just for the sake of technology,” said Sherif Marakby, Ford’s vice president of autonomous and electric vehicles. “There are so many practical things that we need to learn.”

 

Only one car will be deployed in Ann Arbor, and it has a special black-and-white paint job to identify it as a research vehicle.

 

Customers in the test area will be chosen randomly when they order a pizza, and will get a phone call to confirm they want to participate. If they agree, they’ll get a text message letting them know when the vehicle is pulling up and how to retrieve their food.

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Scientists Say Warming Makes Storms, Like Harvey, Wetter

By the time the rain stops, Harvey will have dumped about 1 million gallons of water for every man, woman and child in southeastern Texas – a soggy, record-breaking glimpse of the wet and wild future global warming could bring, scientists say.

While scientists are quick to say climate change didn’t cause Harvey and that they haven’t determined yet whether the storm was made worse by global warming, they do note that warmer air and water mean wetter and possibly more intense hurricanes in the future.

“This is the kind of thing we are going to get more of,” said Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer. “This storm should serve as warning.”

There’s a scientifically accepted method for determining if some wild weather event has the fingerprints of man-made climate change, and it involves intricate calculations. Those could take weeks or months to complete, and then even longer to pass peer review.

In general, though, climate scientists agree that future storms will dump much more rain than the same size storms did in the past.

That’s because warmer air holds more water. With every degree Fahrenheit, the atmosphere can hold and then dump an additional 4 percent of water (7 percent for every degree Celsius), several scientists say.

Global warming also means warmer seas, and warm water is what fuels hurricanes.

When Harvey moved toward Texas, water in the Gulf of Mexico was nearly 2° (1° C) warmer than normal, said Weather Underground meteorology director Jeff Masters. Hurricanes need at least 79° F (26° C) as fuel, and water at least that warm ran more than 300 feet (100 meters) deep in the Gulf, according to University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy.

Several studies show that the top 1 percent of the strongest downpours are already happening much more frequently. Also, calculations done Monday by MIT meteorology professor Kerry Emanuel show that the drenching received by Rockport, Texas, used to be maybe a once-in-1,800-years event for that city, but with warmer air holding more water and changes in storm steering currents since 2010, it is now a once-every-300-years event.

There’s a lot of debate among climate scientists over what role, if any, global warming may have played in causing Harvey to stall over Texas, which was a huge factor in the catastrophic flooding. If the hurricane had moved on like a normal storm, it wouldn’t have dumped as much rain in any one spot.

Harvey stalled because it is sandwiched between two high-pressure fronts that push it in opposite directions, and those fronts are stuck.

Oppenheimer and some others theorize that there’s a connection between melting sea ice in the Arctic and changes in the jet stream and the weather patterns that make these “blocking fronts” more common. Others, like Masters, contend it’s too early to say.

University of Washington atmospheric scientist Cliff Mass said climate change is simply not powerful enough to create off-the-chart events like Harvey’s rainfall.

“You really can’t pin global warming on something this extreme. It has to be natural variability,” Mass said. “It may juice it up slightly but not create this phenomenal anomaly.”

“We’re breaking one record after another with this thing,” Mass said.

Sometime Tuesday or early Wednesday, parts of the Houston region will have broken the nearly 40-year-old U.S. record for the heaviest rainfall from a tropical system – 48 inches (120 centimeters), set by Tropical Storm Amelia in 1978 in Texas, several meteorologists say.

Already 15 (-9.44 Celsius)trillion gallons of rain have fallen on a large area, and an additional 5 trillion or 6 trillion gallons are forecast by the end of Wednesday, meteorologist Ryan Maue of WeatherBell Analytics calculates. That’s enough water to fill all the NFL and Division 1 college football stadiums more than 100 times over.

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The Cost of Clean Water: $150 billion a Year, Says World Bank

Countries need to quadruple spending to $150 billion a year to deliver universal safe water and sanitation, helping to reduce childhood disease and deaths while boosting economic growth, said the World Bank.

Investments should be better coordinated and targeted to ensure services reach the most vulnerable, and governments need to engage the private sector more closely to meet the high costs, said the World Bank in a report released on Monday.

“Millions are currently trapped in poverty by poor water supply and sanitation,” Guangzhe Chen, senior director of the World Bank’s global water practice, said in a statement.

“More resources, targeted to areas of high vulnerability and low access, are needed to close the gaps and improve poor water and sanitation services.”

The high cost of clean water risks jeopardising the ability of countries to meet the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal of providing access to safe and affordable sanitation for all by 2030, said the World Bank.

More than three quarters of those without piped water supplies live in rural areas, where only 20 percent have access to “improved sanitation” said the report. In cities, poor people are up to three times less likely to have piped water than people in better off areas.

The risk of diarrhoeal diseases and malnutrition caused by unsafe water and poor sanitation is creating a “silent emergency”, with stunted growth affecting more than 40 percent of children under five in countries including Guatemala, Niger, Yemen and Bangladesh, said the report.

It said under-nutrition could have long-term effects on children, including poor mental development and reduced ability to work, which would eventually affect economic development.

Some countries fail to maintain infrastructure or struggle to cope with growing populations. Nigeria provided piped water to fewer than 10 percent of city dwellers in 2015, down from 29 percent 25 years earlier. In Haiti, only 7 percent of households have piped water, compared to 15 percent previously.

“Water and sanitation services need to improve dramatically or the consequences on health and well-being will be dire,” said Rachid Benmessaoud, Nigeria country director for the World Bank.

No single solution

In some countries, tap water is even more unsafe than pond water, with around 80 percent of Bangladesh’s piped supplies contaminated by E.coli bacteria, said the report.

It urged governments to better inform people and encourage more household water treatment.

Providing piped water in cities could generate economies of scale, the bank said, urging greater private-sector involvement in urban water provision where recovering costs may be easier.

Researchers, decision makers and aid specialists are meeting in Stockholm for the annual World Water Week where they will focus on how to reduce waste in water use.

Water and sanitation improvements should be linked to health programs to better tackle disease and malnutrition, said the World Bank report.

“Renewed efforts are needed to address those populations at greatest risk of death and disease due to inadequate water supply, sanitation and hygiene, which threatens human capital and economic development,” it said.

 

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Lifeguard in the Sky Soon to Be Monitoring Australian Beaches

It is still true that a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than attacked by a shark; but, that does not matter much to the 150 or so people who experienced what the International Shark Attack File calls “shark-human interaction in 2016. Still, some Australian eyes in the sky are helping lifeguards look out for the predators just offshore. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.

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From Hotel to Beer Factory, Robots Increasingly Used in Japan

Japan leads the world in the number of robots per person that are used in the workplace. Instead of being wary, people apparently like them. VOA’s Deborah Block takes us to a hotel and a beer factory where droids are doing just about everything.

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Sky High Lifeguard Soon to be Monitoring Australian Beaches

It is still true that a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than attacked by a shark; but, that does not matter much to the 150 or so people who experienced what the International Shark Attack File calls “shark-human interaction in 2016. Still, some Australian eyes in the sky are helping lifeguards look out for the predators just offshore. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.

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Prepping for Future With Drought-resistant Wheat

There are two ways to deal with climate change: stop or slow it through controlling emissions, or adapt to it. Chances are we’re going to have to do both. In the dry areas of Texas and California, researchers are getting started on the adapting part. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.

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UN Panel Urges Russia to Fight Racism by neo-Nazis, in Sports

A United Nations human rights panel called on the Russian Federation on Monday to step up prosecutions of racist attacks by ultra-nationalists and neo-Nazis and of hate speech by politicians.

Russian authorities must intensify measures to “vigorously combat racist behavior in sports, particularly in football, and ensure that sports regulatory bodies investigate manifestations of racism, xenophobia and intolerance,” the U.N. Committee against Racial Discrimination (CERD) said.

Fines or administrative sanctions should be imposed for such cases. The panel, referring to “the upcoming (2018) World Cup, expresses its concern that racist displays remain deeply entrenched among football fans, especially against persons belonging to ethnic minorities and people of African descent.”

Russia has pledged to crack down on racism and fan violence as it faces increased scrutiny before hosting the World Cup finals next summer. Russian Premier League champions Spartak Moscow and rivals Dynamo Moscow were each fined 250,000 rubles ($4,250) over fans’ racist behavior, the Russian Football Union (RFU) said last month.

The 18 independent experts, who reviewed Russia’s record and those of seven other countries at a session that ended on Friday, issued their findings on Monday.

Igor Barinov, head of the Federal Agency for Ethnic Affairs of the Russian Federation, told the panel on Aug. 4 that Moscow had taken measures against the propagation of racist ideas.

Russia consistently combats the glorification of Nazism — made a crime in 2014 — the propaganda of Nazi ideas and attempts at racial hatred or discrimination, he said. In 2016, officials had identified 1,450 extremist crimes, 993 had been sent to court and 934 people were found guilty, he said.

The U.N. panel said violent racist attacks had decreased in recent years, but added: “Violent racist attacks undertaken by groups such as neo-Nazi groups and Cossack patrols, targeting particularly people from Central Asia and the Caucasus and persons belonging to ethnic minorities including migrants, the Roma and people of African descent, remain a pressing problem.”

It called for an end to “de facto racial profiling by the police,” decrying arbitrary identity checks and “unnecessary arrests.”

“Racist hate speech is still used by officials and politicians, especially during election campaigns, and remains unpunished,” it said, recommending investigations.

Russia still lacks anti-discrimination legislation and the definition of extremist activity in its federal law “remains vague and broad,” it said.

Regarding Crimea, seized by Russia from Ukraine in 2014, the panel voiced concern at the fate of Crimean Tatar representative institutions, such as the outlawing of the Mejlis, the Crimean Tatar’s semi-official legislature, the closure of several media outlets, and “allegations of disappearances, criminal and administrative prosecutions, mass raids, and interrogations.”

 

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Peru Sees ‘Ambitious’ Trade Deal with Australia as Early as 2018

Peru expects a “very ambitious” free trade deal with Australia that covers goods, services and investments to be implemented as early as next year, Peru’s deputy trade minister said on Monday.

The two countries resumed free trade talks in Australia on Monday following a first round of negotiations in July in which “a lot of progress was made,” said Deputy Trade Minister Edgar Vasquez.

“This is going to be an agreement that we should be able to implement as soon as possible, starting in 2018,” Vasquez said by telephone in Lima. “That’s what we’d like to happen and what we think is viable.”

Peru and Australia are important global producers of minerals and their bilateral trade is relatively small.

Forging a free trade deal so quickly would mark one of the first steps toward reducing trade barriers in the Pacific region after U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, which Australia and Peru had signed onto.

The remaining signatories to the TPP are in Australia this week discussing ways to salvage the deal. The 11 countries, which include Japan, Canada and Mexico, have a combined gross domestic product of $12.4 trillion.

Vasquez said the experience of negotiating the TPP had put Peru and Australia on solid footing for quickly hashing out a bilateral agreement.

“We also both have very open economies, so we’re really going to see a broad inclusion of sectors that will benefit from it – goods as well as services and investments,” Vasquez said.

Peru’s trade ministry said last month that rules of origin, migration and e-commerce were also under discussion and that Peru was eager to increase agricultural exports to Australia while spurring trade of mining and other professional services.

Australian trade officials were not immediately available for comment.

Peru’s exports to Australia amounted to $260 million last year, according to Peru’s trade ministry.

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Mexico President to Visit China to Boost Trade Amid NAFTA Talks

Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto will travel to China next week to discuss trade and investment, as Mexico looks for ways to decrease its dependence on NAFTA, especially trade with neighboring United States.

He will hold a bilateral meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping and participate in a summit of the BRICS nations, a grouping that includes Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, on Sept. 4 and 5, Mexico’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Pena Nieto’s visit comes as U.S., Mexican and Canadian negotiators meet Sept. 1 to 5 in Mexico City for a round of talks to revamp the 23-year-old North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Mexico is trying to increase trade with Latin America and Asia, and on Monday took part in the first of three days of talks in Australia aimed at reviving the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, disrupted by the withdrawal of the United States.

On Sunday, U.S. President Donald Trump renewed his threat to scrap NAFTA, which he has cast as killing jobs and exacerbating the U.S. deficit, and ripped into trading partners Canada and Mexico.

Pena Nieto is scheduled to participate in a dialogue on emerging markets and a BRICS business forum, “where over 800 business leaders are expected to discuss opportunities for investment, trade, connectivity, financial cooperation, development and the blue economy, or sustainable use of marine resources,” said the ministry.

On Sept. 6, Pena Nieto will visit the offices of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, China’s top e-commerce firm and one of Asia’s most valuable companies.

Mexico’s government is working to get Mexican products and services, especially from small- and medium-sized firms, onto Alibaba’s platform.

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Scientists Say Harvey May Be Soggy Sign of Future Storms

By the time the rain stops, Harvey will have dumped about 1 million gallons of water for every man, woman and child in southeastern Texas — a soggy, record-breaking glimpse of the wet and wild future that global warming could bring, scientists say.

While scientists are quick to say that climate change didn’t cause Harvey and that they haven’t determined yet whether the storm was made worse by global warming, they do note that warmer air and water mean wetter and possibly more intense hurricanes in the future.

“This is the kind of thing we are going to get more of,” said Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer. “This storm should serve as warning.”

There’s a scientifically accepted method for determining if some wild weather event has the fingerprints of man-made climate change, and it involves intricate calculations. Those could take weeks or months to complete, and then even longer to pass peer review.

Storms to produce more rain

In general, though, climate scientists agree that future storms will dump much more rain than the same size storms did in the past.

That’s because warmer air holds more water. With every degree Fahrenheit, the atmosphere can hold and then dump an additional 4 percent of water (7 percent for every degree Celsius), several scientists say.

 

Global warming also means warmer seas, and warm water is what fuels hurricanes.

When Harvey moved toward Texas, water in the Gulf of Mexico was nearly 2 degrees (1 degree Celsius) warmer than normal, said Weather Underground meteorology director Jeff Masters. Hurricanes need at least 79 degrees F (26 C) as fuel, and water at least that warm ran more than 300 feet (100 meters) deep in the Gulf, according to University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy.

Downpours on the rise

Several studies show that the top 1 percent of the strongest downpours are already happening much more frequently. Also, calculations done Monday by MIT meteorology professor Kerry Emanuel show that the drenching received by Rockport, Texas, used to be maybe a once-in-1,800-years event for that city, but with warmer air holding more water and changes in storm steering currents since 2010, it is now a once-every-300-years event.

There’s a lot of debate among climate scientists over what role, if any, global warming may have played in causing Harvey to stall over Texas, which was a huge factor in the catastrophic flooding. If the hurricane had moved on like a normal storm, it wouldn’t have dumped as much rain in any one spot.

Harvey stalled because it is sandwiched between two high-pressure fronts that push it in opposite directions, and those fronts are stuck.

Oppenheimer and some others theorize that there’s a connection between melting sea ice in the Arctic and changes in the jet stream and the weather patterns that make these “blocking fronts” more common. Others, like Masters, contend it’s too early to say.

An off-the-chart-event

University of Washington atmospheric scientist Cliff Mass said that climate change is simply not powerful enough to create off-the-chart events like Harvey’s rainfall.

“You really can’t pin global warming on something this extreme. It has to be natural variability,” Mass said. “It may juice it up slightly but not create this phenomenal anomaly.”

“We’re breaking one record after another with this thing,” Mass said.

Closing in on rainfall record

Sometime Tuesday or early Wednesday, parts of the Houston region will have broken the nearly 40-year-old U.S. record for the heaviest rainfall from a tropical system — 48 inches, set by Tropical Storm Amelia in 1978 in Texas, several meteorologists say.

Already 15 trillion gallons of rain have fallen on a large area, and an additional 5 trillion or 6 trillion gallons are forecast by the end of Wednesday, meteorologist Ryan Maue of WeatherBell Analytics calculates. That’s enough water to fill all the NFL and Division 1 college football stadiums more than 100 times over.

 

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Public Health Dangers Loom in Harvey-hit Areas

The muddy floodwaters now soaking through dry wall, carpeting, mattresses and furniture in Houston will pose a massive cleanup challenge with potential public health consequences.

It’s not known yet what kinds or how much sewage, chemicals and waterborne germs are mixed in the water. For now, health officials are more concerned about drownings, carbon monoxide poisoning from generators and hygiene at shelters. In the months and years to come, their worries will turn to the effects of trauma from Hurricane Harvey on mental health.

 

At a shelter set up inside Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center, Dr. David Persse is building a clinic of doctors and nurses and trying to prevent the spread of viruses or having to send people to hospitals already stretched thin.

“This is rapidly evolving,” said Persse, Houston Director of Emergency Medical Services. “I always worry in these large congregations of people about viral outbreaks that cause nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. And we are just getting started.”

Medics have been at the convention center since it started taking in evacuees, along with police and other first responders. Over the last 24 hours, doctors and nurses arrived at the convention center to volunteer.

 

Fewer than 20 people have been hospitalized so far from the convention center.

 

“One of our goals is to appropriately treat people here with minor things so we don’t send everybody off to the hospital,” Persse.

Many of the around 3,000 people who fled from Harvey’s flooding waited hours in water mixed with sewage, oil and gasoline. Some weren’t able to grab their medications or medical devices. Police officers on Monday afternoon were looking for more wheelchairs.

Donors have brought diapers, baby formula and other basic necessities to the convention center. Officials are working with local pharmacies to replace lost medicines and dialysis clinics to serve patients in need of treatment. The Red Cross is arranging to bring in portable showers. A shipment of 50 wheelchairs was on the way Monday afternoon.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will begin sampling the floodwaters as soon as possible, said EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman in an email Monday. EPA teams will also be visiting water and sewage plants to offer help, she said.

EPA helped secure Superfund pollution cleanup sites last week ahead of the storm and is continuing to check with site operators.

 

Floodwater can be dangerous for people with open wounds, particularly if they have other health conditions. After Hurricane Katrina, five people with infected wounds died and health officials believe that exposure to brackish floodwater contributed to the deaths.

Katrina taught other lessons.

 

“In Katrina, a lot of people were concerned about illnesses from contact with the floodwater, but more infectious disease was associated with poor hygiene in overcrowded shelter facilities,” said Karen Levy, associate professor of environmental health at Emory University in Atlanta.

At Houston-area shelters, access to clean water or hand sanitizer and proper disposal of human waste should be stressed, she said.

Any health problems will be more dangerous for the most vulnerable — people with immune disorders, the elderly and the poor, Levy said.

Katrina left a wake of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, said Dr. Pierre Buekens, dean of Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine.  He said their surveys showed roughly 10 percent had PTSD, but also that people were resilient.

“I’m sure this will happen in Houston,” he said.

The most common flood-related deaths occur when people try to drive through flooded areas, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  Carbon monoxide may kill more as people return to homes without electricity and hook up generators, said the CDC’s Renee Funk.

“Any sort of roof over a generator is actually a problem,” Funk said. “When people go in and out to refill the generator they can be overcome. If a structure is attached to the house, the house can fill with fumes.”

Best advice: Use a battery-operated carbon monoxide detector in the house if you’re using a generator for power, she said.

Mold is also a health hazard. The CDC recommends removing and disposing of drywall and insulation that was tainted by floodwater or sewage. Mattresses, pillows, carpeting — even stuffed toys — should be tossed out. Hard surfaces can be disinfected with a solution of one cup of bleach to five gallons of water.

“That little spot of mold can grow in the home especially in the heat of the South,” said Dr. Parham Jaberi of the Louisiana Department of Health.

 

 If mold covers more than 100 square feet, a trained mold remover is recommended, he said.

 

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