Day: December 12, 2017

Smaller Farms Can Cope Better With Climate Change in India, Say Analysts

India’s small farmers are better equipped than large landowners to deal with climate change, but need more support to find innovative ways to minimize the impacts of higher temperatures, uneven rainfall, floods and droughts, analysts said.

About 60 percent of India’s population of 1.3 billion depends on agriculture for a living. More than three quarters of farmers cultivate than 2 hectares (5 acres) of land each.

While the small size of the land holding is often seen as a challenge to raising incomes, it is an advantage when it comes to tackling extreme weather and rising temperatures, said Arindom Datta, Asia head of sustainability banking at Rabobank.

Mono cropping

“Large farmers tend to do mono cropping, which is far more vulnerable to climate change, and more difficult to change and adapt as the situation demands. Plus they need more water, another resource under threat from warmer weather,” he said.

“Small farmers are far more versatile; they usually plant multiple varieties of crops, so they are more flexible and better able to adjust and adapt,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised to double farmers’ incomes over the next five years, with reforms including better irrigation, crop insurance and higher prices for crops.

​Size of land holdings drop 

Poor prices for grains and cereal have led to mounting piles of debt for Indian farmers, triggering thousands of suicides every year. More than two-thirds of farmers who committed suicide were small and marginal farmers, data show.

The average size of land holdings in rural India has halved over the past two decades as land is passed down from father to son, and as more land is surrendered for development projects.

While a law caps the amount of land that can be owned by individual farmers, several states have introduced leasing laws to enable farmers to increase the land under cultivation.

Training for women farmers

But smaller land holdings are better suited if the government invests in training — particularly for women — on topics such as traditional grains such as millets, said Ishira Mehta, founder of CropConnect Enterprises, which links farmers to markets.

“With rising temperatures, we may not be able to grow basmati rice or wheat 20 years from now; we need to revive traditional grains that are more climate resilient,” she said.

“Women farmers in particular are more adaptable, more willing to learn about new harvest and marketing methods. But they cannot tackle the problem on their own.”

Farmers in the southern state of Tamil Nadu are already returning to indigenous varieties of rice and traditional seeds as the region suffers more frequent droughts.

more

US Retailer Aims to Give Tech Experience to Immigrant Teens

A major U.S. electronic retailer says it wants to help immigrant and underprivileged teens gain the technology skills they’ll need for the job market.

Best Buy, in partnership with a local nongovernmental organization known as the Brian Coyle Center, has opened a tech center in Minneapolis’ Cedar-Riverside area. The center provides after-school computer classes for teens in the area, many of whom come from East African immigrant families.

The company plans to open 60 such centers nationwide by 2020. Trish Walker, the president of service for Best Buy, said the aim is to train a million teens each year to help them be prepared for tech-related jobs.

“Here, teens can learn so many skills, from coding to web programming, music production, 3-D design, editing, fashion design, getting leadership skills, entrepreneurship, mentoring from others,” Walker said at the opening ceremony for the center. “Great stuff to be able to prepare the teens for workforce for the future. Eighty percent of the future [jobs] are tech-related.”

Hamza Nur is a Somali youth who spent four years learning at the first Minneapolis-area Best Buy tech center, where he learned how to digitally edit and draw.

“I learned so much, and am grateful,” Nur said at the ceremony. “I think this is a great idea that we can all learn from. I think the idea of tech center is pretty great one, because it lets all the youth of Cedar have a great experience with technology.”

Abdirahman Mukhtar, the youth program director at the Brian Coyle Center, says the center gives young people a positive outlet through which to channel their energy, and it helps to keep them away from drugs and gangs, which have been recurring problems in the area.

“The time of the program is after-school time, and it’s [then] that a youth has free time and can commit negative habits,” he told VOA’s Somali service.

Minneapolis is home to the United States’ largest communities of Somali and East African immigrants, most of whom came to the U.S. because of armed conflicts in their home countries.

more

‘Integrity Idol’ Celebrates Honest Civil Servants in West Africa

A reality TV show that celebrates honest civil servants in corruption-plagued countries has grown to reach new audiences in Mali and Liberia and aims to enlist the public’s help in fighting graft, the organizers said.

Integrity Idol asks the public to nominate model civil servants and then vote for their favorite by text message after the finalists appear on national TV and radio.

The show launched in Nepal in 2014 and has since spread to Pakistan, Nigeria, Mali and Liberia.

In finals this weekend in the West African nations of Liberia and Mali, a nursing instructor and a teacher were voted the winners from among thousands of nominees.

“There are lots of challenges to being a person of integrity in Liberia,” said winner Rebecca Scotland, a nursing teacher in Liberia’s capital Monrovia.

Corruption is so common in Liberia and across the region that patients even bribe nurses to ensure they receive the proper medicine and care, she said.

“Sometimes my colleagues push me away because I have integrity. They say I am hard to deal with, that I won’t change,” she said in an interview with Integrity Idol.

She plans to create a network with other winners to boost honesty and transparency in the public sector, she told Reuters following the award.

Liberia is in the midst of an election to replace President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf that has been delayed by allegations of fraud. The Supreme Court cleared it for a runoff last week.

The country ranked 90th out of 176 countries on watchdog Transparency International’s global corruption perception index last year, while Mali ranked 116th.

In Mali, politicians are sometimes arrested for graft but avoid penalties because the judges are also corrupt, said Moussa Kondo, who launched Integrity Idol there last year.

“We want to show young generations that there’s another way to become famous, without getting rich,” he told Reuters.

Mali’s winner Mahamane Mahamane Baba teaches at a public high school in Timbuktu and organizes literacy classes in his free time.

The show has grown quickly in both countries, said its organizers at U.S.-based organization Accountability Lab.

In Mali, people made 3,011 nominations for Integrity Idol this year compared to 2,850 last year, said Kondo.

Liberians submitted 4,689 nominations this year, more than three times the number when the show started in 2015, while the reach of the campaign through radio and TV stations has grown eight-fold to over 4 million people.

“Especially given the difficult situation with electoral politics at the moment, it is inspiring to see so many people discussing and voting for government officials with integrity,” said Lawrence Yealue, director of Liberia’s Accountability Lab.

more

Arctic Report Card: Permafrost Thawing Faster Than Before

Permafrost in the Arctic is thawing at a faster clip, according to a new report released Tuesday.

 

Water is also warming and sea ice is melting at the fastest pace in 1,500 years at the top of the world.

 

The annual report released Tuesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration showed slightly less warming in many measurements than a record hot 2016. But scientists remain concerned because the far northern region is warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe and has reached a level of warming that’s unprecedented in modern times.

 

“2017 continued to show us we are on this deepening trend where the Arctic is a very different place than it was even a decade ago,” said Jeremy Mathis, head of NOAA’s Arctic research program and co-author of the 93-page report.

 

Findings were discussed at the American Geophysical Union meeting in New Orleans.

 

“What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic; it affects the rest of the planet,” said acting NOAA chief Timothy Gallaudet. “The Arctic has huge influence on the world at large.”

 

Permafrost is the permanently frozen layer below the Earth’s surface in frigid areas. Records show the frozen ground that many buildings, roads and pipelines are built on reached record warm temperatures last year nearing and sometimes exceeding the thawing point. That could make them vulnerable when the ground melts and shifts, the report said. Unlike other readings, permafrost data tend to lag a year.

 

Preliminary reports from the U.S. and Canada in 2017 showed permafrost temperatures are “again the warmest for all sites” measured in North America, said study co-author Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.

 

Arctic sea ice usually shrinks in September and this year it was only the eighth lowest on record for the melting season. But scientists said they were most concerned about what happens in the winter — especially March — when sea ice is supposed to be building to its highest levels.

 

Arctic winter sea ice maximum levels in 2017 were the smallest they’ve ever been for the season when ice normally grows. It was the third straight year of record low winter sea ice recovery. Records go back to 1979.

 

About 79 percent of the Arctic sea ice is thin and only a year old. In 1985, 45 percent of the sea ice in the Arctic was thick, older ice, said NOAA Arctic scientist Emily Osborne.

 

New research looking into the Arctic’s past using ice cores, fossils, corals and shells as stand-ins for temperature measurements show that Arctic ocean temperatures are rising and sea ice levels are falling at rates not seen in the 1,500 years. And those dramatic changes coincide with the large increase in carbon dioxide levels in the air from the burning of oil, gas and coal, the report said.

 

This isn’t just a concern for the few people who live north of the Arctic Circle. Changes in the Arctic can alter fish supply. And more ice-free Arctic summers can lead to countries competing to exploit new areas for resources. Research also shows changes in Arctic sea ice and temperature can alter the jet stream, which is a major factor in U.S. weather.

 

This is probably partly responsible for the current unusual weather in the United States that brought destructive wildfires to California and a sharp cold snap to the South and East, according to NOAA scientist James Overland and private meteorologist expert Judah Cohen.

 

“The Arctic has traditionally been the refrigerator to the planet, but the door of the refrigerator has been left open,” Mathis said.

 

Outside scientists praised the report card.

 

“Overall, the new data fit with the long-term trends, showing the clear evidence of warming causing major changes,” in the Arctic, said Pennsylvania State University ice scientist Richard Alley.

more

Facebook to Book Advertising Revenue Locally Amid Political Pressure

Social media giant Facebook said on Tuesday it would start booking advertising revenue locally instead of re-routing it via its international headquarters in Dublin although the move is unlikely to result in it paying much more tax.

Corporate taxation has become a hot-button topic in the wake of revelations of tax avoidance schemes by multinationals which have led to calls for companies to pay more tax while Europe has begun exploring options for taxing digital giants.

Facebook Chief Financial Officer Dave Wehner said the company had decided to move to a local selling structure in countries where it has an office to support sales to local advertisers.

“In simple terms, this means that advertising revenue supported by our local teams will no longer be recorded by our international headquarters in Dublin, but will instead be recorded by our local company in that country,” Wehner said in a blog post.

Tuesday’s announcement follows Facebook’s April 2016 shift to recording revenues from its large U.K. sales customers in Britain which resulted in an increase in the tax it paid.

“We believe that moving to a local selling structure will provide more transparency to governments and policy makers around the world who have called for greater visibility over the revenue associated with locally-supported sales in their countries,” Wehner said.

The European Commission is working on legislative proposals, expected in March, to increase taxes on multinational digital companies, who are accused of paying too little in the EU by booking profits in low-tax countries where they have their EU headquarters, like Ireland and Luxembourg.

Among the options the EU executive is considering to raise taxes quickly on tech giants is a levy on revenues from advertising, according to an EU document published in September.

Other short-term options are a tax on turnovers of digital firms and a withholding tax on electronic transactions. Wehner said Facebook would implement the change throughout 2018 and aim to complete it by the first half of 2019.

Facebook’s recent experience in Britain suggests that the move will not lead to the company paying significantly more in tax.

Facebook reported a dramatic rise in revenues and profits reported in the UK for 2016 and had a 2.5 million pound ($3.34 million) tax bill against racking up tax credits in previous years.

However, while the change did lead to an increase in the tax it paid, Facebook still enjoyed a low effective tax rate.

That’s because, even with this measure, Facebook declares relatively little profit in Britain. It reported a profit margin of under 7 percent for 2016 in Britain, compared to a group wide margin of around 45 percent for the year.

Much of the profit linked to U.K. sales is reported elsewhere are a result of inter-group transactions worth hundreds of millions of pounds.

($1 = 0.7491 pounds)

more

Spacex Delivery Delayed a Day; 1st Reused Rocket for NASA

SpaceX has delayed its latest grocery run for the International Space Station for at least a day.

 

The company now aims to launch its first recycled rocket for NASA on Wednesday.

 

The unmanned Falcon originally flew in June. The Dragon capsule, meanwhile, made a space station shipment in 2015.

 

This will be the first launch in more than a year from this Florida pad, the scene of a rocket explosion in 2016. SpaceX says it needs more time for checks. Liftoff time is 11:24 a.m.

 

As before, SpaceX will attempt to land the first-stage booster back at Cape Canaveral. SpaceX chief Elon Musk is pushing to lower launch costs by reusing the most expensive rocket parts.

 

The Dragon holds nearly 5,000 pounds of supplies, including a barley experiment for Budweiser.

 

more

Paris Summit Focused on Boosting Funding for Climate Change Fight

French President Emmanuel Macron gathered business leaders and 50 world leaders in Paris for a summit Tuesday focused on boosting funding to fight climate change.

The summit comes two years after nearly 200 nations agreed to the Paris climate accord, which calls for nations to limit greenhouse gas emissions and for rich countries to help developing countries deal with the impacts of climate change.

U.S. President Donald Trump was not among those invited to take part in the conference. Last year, Trump announced was pulling out of the accord saying it “disadvantages the United States to the exclusive benefit of other countries.”

While the U.S. federal government stepped back from the global effort, many of the country’s states and some cities have pledged to move forward with steps consistent with the agreement.

“We have 38 states that have renewable portfolio standard laws,” said former Secretary of State John Kerry, who is attending the summit. “We have 90 cities, the major cities in America, their mayors all committed to meeting Paris. So 80 percent of the population of American is in those 38 states that are committed, and we are going to stay on track.”

The European Union announced a new investment plan aimed at supporting renewable energy production, climate-friendly transportation, sustainable water and sanitation systems, as well as growth in sustainable agriculture.

EU Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy Miguel Arias Canete also urged contributors to fulfill their commitments to provide $100 billion a year by 2020 to developing nations to help them utilize renewable energy sources instead of fossil fuels that boost carbon levels in the atmosphere.

Also Tuesday, a group of 225 investors launched an initiative to push 100 of the world’s largest greenhouse gas-emitting companies to align their business plans with the goals of the Paris climate agreement.

“In few short months a substantial community of institutional investors have coalesced around this initiative because they want to send an unequivocal signal directly to companies that they will be holding them accountable in order to secure nothing less than bold corporate action to improve governance, curb emissions, and increase disclosure to swiftly address the greatest challenge of our time,” said Andrew Gray, senior manager of investments governance at Australian Super.

Ahead of Tuesday’s summit, Macron awarded 18 scientists, including 13 from the United States, grants to relocate to France and carry out climate change research. He announced the initiative after Trump said the United States was withdrawing from the global accord, and the French leader played on Trump’s campaign slogan by naming his own program “Make Our Planet Great Again.”

“I refuse this double fatality, the one that says that there is this global warming that we can do nothing against and the one that says that this world is forced onto us and we cannot make profound changes,” Macron said. “But what you are showing here tonight, through your commitment, these projects that have been selected through your commitment on a daily basis is the exact opposite. We don’t want climate change and we want to produce and create jobs and do things differently if we decide so. There is no fatality.”

more

China Displays Clout at Internet Conference But Some Doubts Remain

China made an impressive display of its clout in the digital economy during a three-day internet conference in Beijing last week by pulling together the participation of U.N. agencies, the World Telecom Union and CEOs of major US based IT companies like Google, Apple and Cisco System.

The conference started with a message from Chinese president Xi Jinping who said, “China would never close its doors. They will only be open wider and wider going forward.”

But at the same time, Xi and Wang Huning, one of the ruling Communist Party’s seven most powerful men, emphasized the need for “cyber sovereignty,” which allows individual countries to establish cyber boundaries to protect their respective sovereign interests.

Xi said that besides benefits, “the internet has also brought many new challenges to the sovereignty, security and development interests of nations across the world.”

The Cyber Administration of China, which organized the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen city, was trying to obtain public confirmation about its Internet policies. This was also the first time the annual conference, which started in 2014, had attracted a high-profile attendance from heads of major international companies and agencies.

Analysts are skeptical the conference helped to boost China’s quest to influence rulemaking in the digital world. Many have noted that none of the foreign speakers specifically referred to Internet controls in China, which include bans on U.S. based services like Google, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

“I certainly don’t see (this) as China’s role as a rule setting has expanded. The regulatory bodies and standards actually usually doesn’t apply to China,” Jacob Cooke, CEO of consulting firm, Web Presence in China told VOA. “There is actually a noticeable lack of Chinese presence… And, likewise here there is no international presence in terms of regulatory body or rules and regulations.”

 Apple’s challenge

Apple recently removed hundreds of apps from its app store in China to adhere to the Chinese great firewall of censorship. Apple CEO Tim Cook did not mention that at the conference but said Apple shared the same vision with China on open Internet.

“The theme of this conference—developing a digital economy for openness and shared benefits—is a vision we at Apple share,” Cook said adding, “We are proud to have worked alongside many of our partners in China to help build a community that will join a common future in cyberspace.”

But in the wake of Apple’s decisions to remove APPS and similar moves, questions have surfaced about whether American CEOs are indirectly endorsing China’s censorship methods in their eagerness to obtain a larger slice of the country’s lucrative market.

Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy specifically targeted the Apple chief for failing to promote freedom of expression. “Apple is clearly a force for good in China, but I also believe it and other tech companies must continue to push back on Chinese suppression of free expression,” Leahy said.

Cook responded with a statement saying, “Each country in the world decides their laws and their regulations, and so your choice is do you participate or stand on the sideline and yell at how things should be…. And my own view, very strongly, is that you show up and you participate, you go in the arena. Because nothing changes from sideline.”

Cooke of Web Presence in China agrees, adding that such questions are not Apple’s responsibility.

“If you want do to business in a country you got to obey rules and laws of that country. That’s with any business. I mean it is not up to you to criticize or change the laws that serve the politicians,” Cooke said.

Robert Elliot Kahn, regarded by many as father of the Internet for co-inventing Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and Internet Protocol (IP) views the controversy over China’s internet restrictions in a somewhat different light.

“Governments are going to impose their own rules and regulations; that’s the way the world works,” he told VOA on the sidelines of the conference. “But if we can make it easier for people to build better products and services, to get more services to the public and is supported by people and governments around the world, I think that’s progress for humanity.”

Seeking business

It was apparent from the meeting that western businessmen, including Cook and Google CEO Sudar Pichai, were doing what they can to expand in the Chinese market. Although Google’s browser and Gmail is banned in China and the company left China more than seven years ago, Bloomberg recently reported that the company was making a comeback investing artificial intelligence. 

“A lot of work Google does is to help Chinese companies. Many small and medium-sized businesses in China take advantage of Google to get their products to many other countries outside of China,” Pichai said.

Cook pointed out that Apple’s app store has helped give China’s 1.8 million developers total earnings worth $16.9 billion, which is the highest earned by developers in any country.

In a quote widely used in state media Cook said, “many people see China as a big market, but for us the main attraction is the quality of the people.”

But in the end, analysts note that China’s influence remains limited to the extent of the market it can offer to foreign companies and this is limited by the fact that several giant Chinese companies are jostling to fill every inch of the space.

more

Researchers Test Cannabis Drug for Dogs’ Pain, Seizures

Medical marijuana has been used to treat epilepsy in patients for years, and this month, U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams said it should be studied and treated like other pain relief drugs. A growing body of scientific evidence is leading the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to do that. Meanwhile, researchers at Colorado State University are examining the benefits of cannabidiol, a non-psychoactive byproduct of marijuana, for treating dogs with epilepsy and arthritis. Faith Lapidus reports.

more

Language of ‘First They Killed My Father’ Resonates With Cambodian-Americans

Propelled by the power of hearing their stories in their own language, some Cambodian American audience members fled in tears from a screening of First They Killed My Father, the Angelina Jolie film adaptation of an English-language memoir of a 5-year-old girl who witnessed the Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia in 1975.

The movie uses the Khmer word “pa” for “father” a word the Khmer Rouge banned as foreign-sounding and elitist and replaced with “puk,” which the regime preferred as a purer Khmer word for “father.”

Other words recalled other horrors —“-srek khlean” “ohh sangkhoeum” and “kosang” are Khmer words which mean “hungry” “hopeless” and “build or rebuild” in Khmer, the language of Cambodia. During the Khmer Rouge era, the first two carried the weight of a brutal social transformation that killed an estimated 2 million. “Kosang” in the black-is-white world of dictator Pol Pot meant near-certain “execution.”

​“When Cambodians hear these phrases they will just cry because it is our story,” said Panha Nith, a 45-year-old Battambang native who now works as a cosmetologist in Leesburg, Virginia, some 70 kilometers from a screening of the film based on the memoir by Cambodian-American Loung Ung. “They forced us to change from ‘pa’ and ‘mak’ to ‘puk’ and ‘mae.’ It took a while to get used to that.” 

Jolie attended the first screening, which was in Cambodia in February, and Netflix began streaming its production in September. Panha Nith decided to wait for a traditional theater screening, where other people would also attend. She saw the film in October at Montgomery College, just outside Washington, D.C. at a community screening and panel discussion designed to bring first and second generation Cambodians together to revisit the Khmer Rouge era, the first chapter in the refugee stories of many Cambodian-Americans. Many who attended the screening came as a family. The most recent screening was on Dec. 9 in Lowell, Massachusetts, home to the second largest Cambodian community in the United States outside California. 

If the movie, the first major Khmer-language Hollywood-standard movie with English subtitles, had been in English, Cambodians would “still understand the story but some meaning and nuances will get lost and it may not feel as tragic,” said Panha Nith, whose own story of childhood survival and a father who disappeared mirrors that of Loung Ung’s. 

Other movies, The Killing Fields  (1984), andThe Missing Picture (2013) have focused on the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge era, but not completely in Khmer. 

About thirty minutes into the screening of the Oscar-submitted Jolie film, Panha Nith left, crying. “At the scene where the children were given porridge, and it was so little … it reminded me of our situation where there was barely any rice in the porridge,” she said. “I can’t even describe it — I had to add leaves and gave it to my younger siblings, willing to starve myself.” 

Panha Nith’s 10-year-old daughter Beaunita Nith attended the screening with her mother even though she has watched the film three times on Netflix. She said her mother, whom she calls “mak” at home, had prepared her for a possibly traumatic experience.

“She always kept on telling me” that her father was a teacher, “and that they didn’t find him and that my grandma almost died, too, like a lot of people almost died,” said Beaunita Nith, a fifth-grader who can speak some Khmer. 

She liked hearing the language as she followed Loung Ung’s experience because the story felt closer to her mother’s experience. “This is a story of a Cambodian but if it is (told) in a voice of an American, that won’t make any sense,” said Beaunita Nith. 

Cambodian-American Sarah Kith, 46, is a convener at the Library of Congress who lives in northern Virginia. She had not read or streamed First They Killed My Father because the story too closely parallels her own, rekindling difficult memories. 

Sarah Kith attended the screening with three generations of her family, including her grandmother who barely speaks English. Hearing Khmer words such as “srek khlean” (hungry) and “ohh sangkhoeum” (hopeless) triggered vivid memories of Sarah Kitch’s five-year-old self.

“While (the book) was written in English, the way it is played out in the movie is … very culturally appropriate,” said Sarah Kith. It was written “from the perspective of a young girl so there are many lenses that are superimposed or rather filtered through. But it quite accurately captured (events), so we get to re-experience it in a way that helps us heal.” 

For Heng Kim, 81, of Arlington, Virginia, the Khmer words in the film such as “kosang” (rebuild/reeducation) brought back memories of his near execution in the Ba Phnom district of his native Prey Veng province. If he hadn’t escaped to Vietnam, his daughter’s story would have echoed that of Loung Ung.

Many of the Khmer words would be difficult to express in English because of what was happening at the time; “kosang” carried the connotation of “execution.”

“As Cambodians, these words hit us hard,” said Kim Heng. “I understood parts of The Killing Fields, and had to rely on translation for some parts. But for this movie, the Khmer-language is so real I couldn’t bear it. It gave me headaches.” 

The Killing Fields, the first Khmer Rouge-themed movie to attract international acclaim —including Oscars for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for the late Cambodian Haing S. Ngor, and best cinematography and best film editing — was shot mainly in English on locations outside Cambodia, which was still engulfed in civil war. First They Killed My Father featured an all-Cambodian crew of over 3,500 actors and was also filmed completely in Cambodia’s Siem Reap and Battambang provinces.

Visal Sam, 45, was born in Battambang city, one of the First They Killed My Father locations. Like Loung Ung, in the movie, she too lost her father who was a former military official during the Lon Nol regime. 

Visal watched the movie with her husband and her four children.

Her daughter, Vichethyda Sam, 19, and the oldest of her children said that although she understood the film without reading the English subtitles, the movie made her want to learn more Khmer and connect with Cambodian-Americans her age.

“I’m glad that the movie was in Khmer,” she said. 

Building a sense of family and community were the main goals of Kunthary de Gaiffier, 61, one of the event organizers. 

She was pleased that more than 200 people came to the Friday night screening, and that many were second-generation Cambodian-Americans with their parents.

Kunthary de Gaiffier said that she believed the film may open intergenerational dialogue among Cambodian-American families, conversations that may help with trauma healing.

“After the screening of this movie, they start to open up, at least those who dare not discuss in the past now at least dare to ask,” she said.” 

Kunthary de Gaiffier, who was in France during the Khmer Rouge era and has two adult Cambodian-American children, says the film may prompt second-generation Cambodian-Americans to learn more about Cambodian history, language and culture.  “They can relate to family experience and can become more curious to learn more and ask more questions that they dared not ask for many years.” 

more

‘Groundbreaking’ New Drug Gives Hope in Huntington’s Disease

Scientists have for the first time fixed a protein defect that causes Huntington’s disease by injecting a drug from Ionis Pharmaceuticals into the spine, offering new hope for patients with the devastating genetic disease.

The success in the early-stage clinical trial has prompted Roche to exercise its option to license the product, called IONIS-HTT(Rx), at a cost of $45 million.

Lead researcher Sarah Tabrizi, professor of clinical neurology at University College London, said the ability of the drug to tackle the underlying cause of Huntington’s by lowering levels of a toxic protein was “groundbreaking.”

“The key now is to move quickly to a larger trial to test whether IONIS-HTT(Rx) slows disease progression,” she said in a statement Monday.

Ionis senior vice president of research Frank Bennett said the protein reductions observed in the study “substantially exceeded our expectations” and that the drug was also well tolerated.

However, experts cautioned that the results were still early and the ability of the new medicine to improve clinical outcomes for patients had yet to be demonstrated.

“The question is whether this is enough to make a difference to patients and their clinical course, and for that we will have to wait for bigger trials,” said Roger Barker of the University of Cambridge, who was also involved in the research.

Huntington’s is a progressive neurodegenerative disease affecting mental abilities and physical control that normally hits sufferers between the ages of 30 and 50 years before continually worsening over a 10- to 25-year period.

There is currently no effective disease-modifying treatment for the condition, with existing medicines focused only on managing disease symptoms.

Ionis said Roche would now be responsible for all IONIS-HTT(Rx) development, regulatory and commercialization activities and costs.

The drug uses an approach called antisense to stop a gene producing a particular protein. The technique has already led to a drug for spinal muscular atrophy that was approved last year.

Shares in Ionis rose around 2 percent in early Nasdaq trade as did those in Wave Life Sciences, which is also working on antisense medicine.

more

Female Directors Snubbed, Plummer Surprises at Golden Globe Nominations

Women were shut out of the directors race at the 2018 Golden Globe nominations Monday, while Ridley Scott’s scramble to reshoot All the Money in the World led to a surprise nod for actor Christopher Plummer, who replaced Kevin Spacey.

Greta Gerwig, who made her solo directorial debut with the warmly reviewed coming-of-age tale Lady Bird, was snubbed in a category in which Scott, Guillermo del Toro, Martin McDonagh, Christopher Nolan and Steven Spielberg were nominated.

Patty Jenkins, who delivered box office superhero smash Wonder Woman, was also left out, along with directors Dee Rees, of Netflix Inc’s racial period drama Mudbound, and Kathryn Bigelow, of the racially charged drama Detroit.

“It’s a terrible shame, to be honest,” said McDonagh, who wrote and directed small-town drama Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. “I know there have been great screenplays by women recognized this year but not directing, and maybe that will change in the Oscars.”

Gerwig, 34, was nominated for best screenplay for writing Lady Bird, which also landed two acting nods for its star, Saoirse Ronan, and supporting actress, Laurie Metcalf.

Metcalf told Reuters that Gerwig’s Lady Bird set was collaborative and stress-free.

“I’m spoiled rotten,” Metcalf said. “She just made it a beautiful and personal experience for the entire cast and crew.”

Scott’s All the Money in the World received nominations for supporting actor Plummer and lead actress Michelle Williams in the drama about the 1973 kidnapping of oil heir John Paul Getty III.

Plummer replaced Spacey last month in the role of Jean Paul Getty after Spacey was cut because of multiple sexual misconduct allegations against him.

Spacey issued an apology for the first reported incident, involving actor Anthony Rapp. Reuters could not independently confirm the allegations.

Scott did last-minute reshoots to have the Sony Pictures film completed in time for its Dec. 25 release.

“I am especially proud that the beautiful performances of Michelle and Chris were celebrated today,” Scott said in an emailed statement. “Despite the unexpected challenges we encountered after shooting was completed, we were determined that audiences around the world would be able to see our film.”

Other surprises included Vietnamese-American actress Hong Chau for her breakout role in the best supporting actress race for futuristic comedy Downsizing.

Other key snubs included Amazon’s interracial romantic comedy The Big Sick, which failed to land any nominations, especially for its star Kumail Nanjiani, who wrote the film with his real-life wife on the circumstances that brought them together.

more