Day: February 20, 2018

Brazil’s ‘What a Shot’ Music Video Stirs Debate Amid Violent Crime Wave

A viral music video called “What a shot” is stirring debate in Brazil about the glamorization of crime and freedom of expression, as surging crime in Rio de Janeiro has led the government to put troops in charge of security in the tourist city.

The hit by Jordana Gleise de Jesus Menezes — known as JoJo Todynho — has spawned myriad parody videos on YouTube since it was released in December.

The clips often show children and adults collapsing to the ground as a shot rings out following the lyrics “What a shot,” before the person stands up and begins to dance as the music picks up.

The spoofs have revived debate about whether the popular dance music genre from Rio de Janeiro, known as funk, glamorizes violence. On Friday, Brazil’s government ordered the army to take over command of police forces in Rio de Janeiro state to curb violence after killings increased by nearly 8 percent last year to 6,731.

A petition to outlaw funk music because of its explicit treatment of violence, sex and drugs gained more than 20,000 signatures last year but has failed to gain traction in Congress. In a population of around 210 million people, the government recorded 59,080 gun deaths in 2015, putting it in the top 10 World Bank list of the most murderous countries.

In a music video featuring images of coffins and the faces of young children killed by stray bullets in Rio, rapper Gabriel O Pensador, also from Rio, Brazil’s second-largest city, objected to the parodies.

“What a shot? No, I’m not going to fall to the floor … I’m a joker too, but joking has a time and a place,” he raps. “The Rio that we love celebrates carnival and this violence is terrifying.”

A city in the northeastern state of Alagoas tried to ban the song being played during Carnival this month, arguing it incited violence. Authorities sought to impose a fine of 2,000 reais ($616) for each violation, but a court stopped the city from punishing musicians before a final ruling is reached, media reports said.

Todynho, 21, whose artistic name refers to a popular brand of chocolate milk, is from Rio’s tough western neighborhood of Bangu. She said the phrase is used to mean “how cool,” in a song mostly about sambaing with your girlfriends.

The official music video, with over 136 million views, made the rounds as national attention was focused on violence during the Carnival festivities in Rio, with images of gangs robbing tourists en masse repeatedly broadcast on national TV.

Performers of funk music often say they are only reflecting the harsh reality of Rio de Janeiro and the country at large.

The music has also been toned down as it has moved from the favelas to the mainstream. Todynho herself has lashed back at her detractors.

“First of all, don’t talk about what you haven’t lived through,” she said on Instagram, referring to rampant violence in the shanty towns of the city of six million people. “I would never make music encouraging violence.”

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Filmmaker Ford Dares Viewers to Analyze Their Own Biases, Fears, Tolerance

In the Oscar-nominated documentary Strong Island, Yance Ford stares back at the camera with profound sorrow and unshakable resilience.

Strong Island, a Netflix release, is Ford’s investigation into the killing of his brother, William Ford, in 1992 in Central Islip, New York. Ford, a 22-year-old black man, was shot and killed by a 19-year-old white mechanic Mark Reilly after a verbal altercation. But an all-white grand jury declined to indict Reilly and the investigation has remained sealed.

“I’m not angry,” Yance Ford says into the camera. “I’m also not willing to accept that someone else gets to say who William was. And if you’re uncomfortable with me asking these questions, you should probably get up and go.”

Ford’s film is a kind of investigative memoir that burrows into not only the justice of his brother’s death but also the still-quaking reverberations that William’s loss has had on their family, one that moved from South Carolina to Brooklyn before settling in the suburbs of Long Island.

Much of the film’s power comes from the raw, emotional first-person filmmaking of Ford, 44, a former producer for the PBS documentary program POV, making his feature film debut. By framing himself in searing close-ups, Ford dares viewers to analyze their own biases, fears and tolerance for injustice.

On a recent winter day, Ford spoke about making Strong Island and making Oscar history. Ford is the first transgender filmmaker nominated by the Academy Awards. “I am as proud of my occupying this place as the first transgender director,” said Ford, “as I am of the nomination itself.” 

 

Associated Press: Did you always know that you would take this deeply personal approach in Strong Island?

Ford: It turned into this realm of a personal film because in the absence of due process, in the absence of justice, the personal film is the only thing that you have left. My producer Joslyn Barnes says it really well when she says personal filmmaking is the language of the dispossessed. Yes, it was a film based in personal experience but it’s not really personal. It’s just an illustration of what many, many people have gone through.

​AP: Tell me about your brother.

Ford: The funny thing about answering that question, now, 25 years later, what you see in the film is my character attempting to get to know William better. So my answer has to be tempered with what I remember of my brother. The cruel thing about time is that it does things like: I’ve forgotten what his voice sounds like. Thankfully my sister and I have his diaries. I can tell you that he was a kind, compassionate, loyal person, that he believed in defending his family but also he had aspiration of being a law enforcement officer. He was a young man who was trying.

AP: Your film does much to reclaim his story from the narrative described by investigators. Has there been any catharsis for you in making the documentary?

Ford: Grief is a very complicated monster. There’s no real exorcising of it. It has a different form every day. But one of the things that I am really happy about is Strong Island has pushed something that is consistently sidelined back into our conversation, which is: why it’s so easy to take the life of black people in the United States and be unpunished for it. What systemic bias looks like when it’s lived by ordinary people is this. It looks like my family.

AP: Your film very directly asks the audience to question itself.

Ford: Someone pointed out — Scott MacDonald, the film theorist — that I’ve brought the audience closer to my face than anyone can actually get with the human eye. So you really do have to confront blackness. And for some people it’s a foreign experience. And for some people it’s a familiar experience. That proximity puts me into direct conversation with you. I’m speaking directly to you. I wanted to be talking to each individual in the audience.

AP: Have you heard from any of the authorities?

Ford: (Laughs.) No. No, and I don’t expect to. (The) Suffolk County criminal justice system is in trouble right now. The police chief was arrested — I won’t even list what he was arrested for. But the DA was also arrested. The Suffolk County criminal justice system is broken right now.

​AP: A video captured your excitement on Oscar morning. What was that moment like?

Ford: That moment was brought to you by my social media consultant, a millennial who — I essentially do whatever she tells me and then it winds up on the 5 o’clock news. I had absolutely no idea I would have the reaction I did. But to have that kind of once-in-a-lifetime thing happen, it was just incredible.

AP: You made history that day as the first trans filmmaker ever nominated for an Oscar. What did that mean to you?

Ford: My transgender identity is new to you because I don’t live a public life. It’s not new in my life but it’s new publicly. I’m incredibly proud to be the first trans director to be nominated for an Oscar. I’m also incredibly proud to occupy a place in what is actually a historic class of nominees for many reasons — to share the space with Daniela Vega, (a trans actress whose A Fantastic Woman is nominated for best foreign language film), the oldest woman to be nominated (Agnes Varda) and the first woman to be nominated in cinematography (Rachel Morrison). Steve James’ nomination is historic. Firas Fayyad with Last Men in Aleppo, his nomination is historic. So much that cracked open this year.

AP: What kind of reactions to the film and your nomination have you experienced?

Ford: At every screening since we premiered, at least one person identifies as having survived homicide. And that’s been happening for a year. The thing that tells me is that we are a culture awash in violence. We need to look at how to fix, once and for all, the systemic brokenness of our criminal justice system.

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With Medicine Running Out, Venezuelans With Transplants Live in Fear

Yasmira Castano felt she had a fresh chance at life when she received a kidney transplant almost two decades ago. The young Venezuelan was able to finish high school and went on to work as a manicurist.

But late last year, Castano, now 40, was unable to find the drugs needed to keep her body from rejecting the organ, as Venezuela’s health care system slid deeper into crisis following years of economic turmoil.

On Christmas Eve, weak and frail, Castano was rushed to a crumbling state hospital in Venezuela’s teeming capital, Caracas. Her immune system had attacked the foreign organ and she lost her kidney shortly afterward.

Now, Castano needs dialysis three times a week to filter her blood. But the hospital attached to Venezuela’s Central University, once one of South America’s top institutions, frequently suffers water outages and lacks materials for dialysis.

“I spend nights not sleeping, just worrying,” said Castano, who weighs around 77 pounds (35 kg), as she lay on an old bed in a bleak hospital room, its bare walls unadorned by a television or pictures.

Her roommate Lismar Castellanos, who just turned 21, put it more bluntly.

“Unfortunately, I could die,” said Castellanos, who lost her transplanted kidney last year and is struggling to get the dialysis she needs to keep her body functioning.

The women are among Venezuela’s roughly 3,500 transplant recipients. After years leading normal lives, they now live in fear as Venezuela’s economic collapse under President Nicolas Maduro has left the once-prosperous OPEC nation unable to purchase sufficient foreign medicine or produce enough of its own.

Some 31 Venezuelans have seen their bodies start to reject their transplanted organs in the last month due to lack of medicine, according to umbrella health group Codevida, a nongovernmental organization.

At least seven have died due to complications stemming from organ failure in the last three months.

A further 16,000 Venezuelans, many hoping for an elusive transplant, are dependent on dialysis to clean their blood — but here, too, resources and materials are sorely lacking.

Nearly half of the country’s dialysis units are out of service, according to opposition lawmaker and oncologist Jose Manuel Olivares, a leading voice on the health crisis who has toured dialysis centers to assess the scale of the problem.

‘Straight to the cemetery’

In the last three weeks alone, seven people have died due to lack of dialysis, according to Codevida, which staged a protest to decry the critical drug shortages.

Once-controlled diseases like diphtheria and measles have returned, due partly to insufficient vaccines and antibiotics, while Venezuelans suffering chronic illnesses like cancer or diabetes often have to forgo treatment.

Hundreds of thousands of desperate Venezuelans, meanwhile, have fled the country over the past year, including many medical professionals.

Amid a lack of basics like catheters and crumbling hospital infrastructure, doctors who remain struggle to cope with ever scarcer resources.

“It’s incredibly stressful. We request supplies; they don’t arrive. We call again and they still don’t arrive. Then we realize it’s because there aren’t any,” said a kidney specialist at a public hospital, asking to remain anonymous because health workers are not allowed to speak publicly about the situation.

Venezuela’s Social Security Institute, tasked with providing patients with drugs for chronic conditions, did not respond to a request for comment.

Terrified transplant patients are indebting themselves to buy pricey medicine on the black market, begging relatives abroad to funnel drugs into the country or dangerously reducing their daily intake of pills to stretch out stock.

Larry Zambrano, a 45-year-old father of two with a kidney transplant, resorted to taking immunosuppressants designed for animals last year.

Guillermo Habanero and his brother Emerson both underwent kidney transplants after suffering polycystic kidney disease.

Emerson, a healthy 53-year-old former police officer, died in November after a month without immunosuppressants.

“If you lose your kidney, you go to dialysis but there are no materials. So you go straight to the cemetery,” said Habanero, 56, who runs a small computer repair shop in the poor hillside neighborhood of Catia.

Blaming Maduro, who blames sanctions

A Reuters reporter went to the Health Ministry to request an interview, but was asked at the entrance to give her contact details instead. No one called or emailed.

Reuters was also unable to contact the Health Ministry unit in charge of transplants, Fundavene, for comment. Its website was unavailable. Multiple calls to different phone numbers went unanswered. An email bounced back and no one answered a message on the unit’s Facebook page.

Maduro’s government has said the real culprit is an alleged U.S.-led business elite seeking to sabotage its socialist agenda by hoarding medicine and imposing sanctions.

“I see the cynicism of the right-wing, worried about people who cannot get dialysis treatment, but it’s their fault: They’ve asked for sanctions and a blockade against Venezuela,” Socialist Party heavyweight Diosdado Cabello said in recent comments on his weekly television program.

Health activists blame what they see as Maduro’s inefficient and corrupt government for the medical crisis and contend that government announcements of more imports for dialysis are totally insufficient.

Despite his unpopularity, Maduro is expected to win a new six-year term in an April 22 presidential election. The opposition is likely to boycott the vote, which it has already denounced as rigged in favor of the government.

Maduro has refused to accept food and medicine donations, despite the deepening health care crisis. Health activists and doctors smuggle in medicines, often donated by the growing Venezuelan diaspora, in their suitcases, but it is far from enough.

In the decaying hospital and dialysis center visited by Reuters, patients clamored for humanitarian aid.

Dolled up for her birthday and surrounded by cakes, the 21-year-old Castellanos took selfies with her friends and spoke excitedly about one day returning to dance, one of her passions.

But fears for her future permeated the room. A hospital worker stopped by to wish Castellanos many more birthday celebrations, but her worried face betrayed doubts.

“Other countries need to help us,” Castellanos said.

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Illicit Financial Flows Outpace Development in Africa, OECD Says

Through medication and narcotics smuggling, ivory and people trafficking, oil theft and piracy, Africa is, by conservative estimates, losing about $50 billion a year in illicit financial flows — more, in fact, than it receives in official development assistance. 

A report by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development offers a bigger look at the illegal economy behind the losses and how African and richer nations can fight it.

The OECD report zooms in on West Africa, and one sector in particular stands out. Catherine Anderson, who heads governance issues as the OECD, said 80 percent of illicit financial flows from West Africa are generated from the theft of natural resouces, principally oil.

But West African countries aren’t the only ones losing out from illicit flows, Anderson said. So are developed nations. Migrant trafficking, a hot-button issue in Europe, is a case in point.

“One of our case studies is on al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, which is benefiting from the kidnap-for-ransom activities,” she said. “They are interdicting the trade and passage of goods across the Sahel, levying protection fees and revenues from the population. These have significant implications, not just for West African populations but for OECD countries, for Europe, in terms of insecurity and instability.”

She said illegal resource flows need to be tackled holistically — not only by the countries of origin, but also by those where the finances are transiting, and those where they finally end up, including developed countries. Doing so can be particularly tricky in West Africa, where a huge informal economy blurs the boundary of what is legal and what isn’t.

Ambassador Según Apata of Nigeria is a member of a U.N. high-level panel looking into illicit financial flows from Africa. He said some African governments are beginning to tackle the problem, but they don’t always have the capacity to do so.

“We have not made giant strides yet,” Apata said. “We are still at the elementary, at the mundane level of implementation.”

Apata said that if the $50 billion in losses from illegal activities were channeled into development in West Africa, it could help check the illegal migration that European countries worry about.

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Fearing Tourist Drought, Cape Town Charts a New Relationship with Water

When Markus Rohner flew into Cape Town’s airport this month, he found an unexpected line at the men’s washroom.

With the city facing an unprecedented water shortage, airport authorities had turned off all the sink taps but one, leaving visitors to wait in line to wash their hands, under the watchful eye of a bathroom attendant.

“In Johannesburg, there were a lot of jokes about the situation. People were saying to each other: ‘Let’s go to Cape Town for a dirty weekend,'” said Rohner, who visited both cities recently for his job as a sales and marketing director for a Swiss machinery manufacturer.

Cape Town, which is battling to keep its taps flowing as reservoirs run close to dry following a three-year drought, declared a national disaster this month. Without rain, Cape Town could run out of water by July 9, city authorities predict.

For visitors thinking of flying into one of the world’s tourism hotspots, threats of a water “Day Zero” raise a range of questions: Will a visit waste scarce water local people need? Will I be able to flush my hotel toilet and have a shower? Should I come at all?

Sisa Ntshona, who heads the tourism marketing arm of South Africa’s government, has the answer you’d expect: Tourists — who support an estimated 300,000 jobs in South Africa’s Western Cape province — should come but they should be prepared to help out and “Save like a local,” as the slogan goes.

In a city where residents now are expected to use no more than 50 liters of water a day — enough to drink, have a 90-second shower, flush the toilet at least once and wash a few clothes or dishes — tourists “don’t have special privileges,” he said.

That means no baths, swimming pools now sporting salt water instead of fresh, sheets and towels changed less regularly, and signs urging visitors to flush toilets as infrequently as possible.

At one Cape Town hotel, visitors who insist on a bath — which takes 80 liters of water — now have to conspicuously carry a large rubber duck placed in their bathtub to reception to exchange it for a bath plug.

With climate change expected to bring worsening water shortages to cities around the world — from Sao Paulo to Los Angeles to Jakarta — such changes are going to be needed in many places in years to come, said Ntshona, the CEO of South African Tourism.

“How do we recalibrate the norm for global tourism?” he asked, on a visit to London to reassure potential visitors. “Tourists are aware of recycling, carbon emissions. But now it’s water.”

“This is the new norm,” he said. “Even if it rains tomorrow, we can never go back to the old way of consuming water.”

Tourist cash

For Cape Town, keeping tourists flowing through the city is an urgent priority.

Foreign tourists represent only about 1 percent of the people in the city even at peak times, but tourism — foreign and South African — contributes $3.4 billion to the province’s economy each year, said Ravi Nadasen, deputy chair of the Tourism Business Council of South Africa.

Any tourism drop-off in Cape Town also hits the rest of the country, Ntshona said. With many visitors booking itineraries that start in Cape Town and move east, he said, a loss of visitors to Table Mountain also means fewer people at the country’s game parks, vineyards and beaches.

“If South Africa falls off the tourism radar screen globally, to get it back on will take so much attention and focus,” he said.

Bookings for the first quarter of the year have so far not fallen, Ntshona and Nadasen say, though they have been fielding inquiries from worried potential visitors.

“We’ll get a better sense by the end of March, when we look at forward bookings for the next six months,” Ntshona said.

Tourism officials are well aware of the potential threat, however. In 2014, an Ebola crisis in West Africa — a six-hour plane flight away — led to a 23 percent drop in visitors to Ebola-free South Africa as tourists shunned African destinations, Ntshona said.

To try to prevent a repeat of that disaster, government and business leaders are rushing to shore up water supplies — and confidence.

Organizers of dozens of big conferences held in Cape Town each year are making plans to ship in water from other less thirsty parts of the country, Ntshona said.

Hotels have installed low-flow showerheads, turned off fountains and replaced cloth napkins with paper ones.

A Cape Town subsidiary of leading hotel chain Tsogo Sun is this week taking delivery of a pioneering desalination plant, to suck seawater from Cape Town’s harbor and churn out enough fresh water for the chain’s 1,400 Cape Town hotel rooms.

Cape Town itself is also making plans to bring in desalination plants — though not quickly enough to deal with the impending “Day Zero,” now pushed back to July after a successful campaign to cut the city’s water consumption by half.

Political obstacles

Experts have warned of water risks in Cape Town for years, but political infighting has gotten in the way of action, Ntshona admits.

Cape Town is run by an opposition party to the ruling African National Congress — and even the ANC saw its embattled leader, President Jacob Zuma, pushed out of office last week.

“Part of the lesson we’re learning as a country is that when you have a crisis, stop bickering and focus on the issues,” Ntshona said.

Another lesson, he said, is that water shortages — predicted to become longer and deeper across southern Africa as climate change strengthens droughts — cannot be seen as a passing problem.

Winter rains are expected in Cape Town starting in May or June. If they arrive, the current crisis will ease, officials predict.

But, regardless, “we need to recalibrate our relationship with water as a country,” Ntshona said.

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Off-grid Power Pioneers Pour Into West Africa

Standing by a towering equatorial forest, Jean-Noel Kouame’s new breeze-block house may be beyond the reach of Ivory Coast’s power grid, but it’s perfectly located for solar power entrepreneurs.

Buoyed by success in East Africa, off-grid solar power startups are pouring into West Africa, offering pay-as-you-go kits in a race to claim tens of millions of customers who lack reliable access to electricity.

At least 11 companies, including leading East African players such as Greenlight Planet, d.light, Off-Grid Electric (OGE), M-KOPE Solar, Fenix International and BBOXX, have moved into the region, most within the last two years.

With a potential market worth billions of dollars, major European energy companies such as French utilities EDF and Engie are taking notice too.

“It’s important to be there now, because the race has already started,” said Marianne Laigneau, senior executive vice president of EDF’s international division.

The main challenge facing smaller companies now is how to raise enough capital to supply the expensive solar kits in return for small upfront payments from customers.

Mobilizing funding for firms providing home solar systems is also part of the U.S. government’s Power Africa initiative.

Major power generation projects have been slow to get off the ground so Power Africa has partnered with startups such as OGE, M-KOPE and d.light, among others, to accelerate off-grid access.

In Abidjan, Kouame doesn’t know when, or if, the national grid will reach the outer edge of the urban sprawl, but thanks to his new solar panel kit he has indoor lighting, an electric fan and a television.

But it’s the light bulb hanging outside his front door that he values the most.

“At night we were scared to go outside,” the 31-year-old taxi driver says as his pregnant wife watches a dubbed Brazilian soap opera. “Where there is light there is safety.”

Some 1.2 billion people around the world have no access to a power grid, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Lighting and phone charging alone costs them about $27 billion a year and some estimates put their total annual energy costs at more than $60 billion.

While governments in much of the developing world are extending access to national networks, Africa is lagging, with less than 40 percent of African households connected, IEA figures show.

But what has long been decried as a major obstacle to Africa’s development is viewed as an opportunity by entrepreneurs such as Nir Marom, co-founder of Lumos Global, the Dutch startup that built and sold Kouame his kit.

“I read an article about people paying 50 cents a day for kerosene and candles, and that just didn’t make sense,” said Marom. “I said I can give them four kilowatt hours for the price of kerosene. And that started everything.”

Off-grid expansion

Lumos Global’s kits, which cost about $600, include a solar panel linked to a battery that supports power sockets, a mobile phone adapter and LED light bulbs.

Kouame, who paid 30,000 CFA francs ($57) upfront for his kit, is now leasing-to-own. A digital counter on the yellow battery pack tells him when he needs to top up his account using his mobile phone.

If he doesn’t pay, the kit, which also houses a global positioning system, shuts down. But in five years, he’ll own it outright and his solar power will be free.

“Five years is nothing,” he says, already weighing the option of another system to run a large freezer sitting empty and unplugged in the corner of his living room. “So my wife can do a little business.”

Pay-as-you-go solar home systems (SHS) like Kouame’s have been the main driver of off-grid power expansion in Africa.

In 2010, when most purchases were limited to simple lighting systems, customers spent $30 to $80 on average over a product’s lifetime, according to GOGLA, an independent off-grid industry association.

Now it’s $370 to $1,120.

Global revenues from the pay-as-you-go SHS sector were $150 million to $200 million in 2016, GOGLA estimates. That should jump to $6 billion to $7 billion in 2022.

Most of the main players in West Africa cut their teeth in East Africa, drawn by the widespread use of mobile money transfers, a key element of the pay-as-you-go off-grid model.

Success there drove annual sector-wide growth of about 140 percent from 2013 to 2016. But as the East African market becomes more crowded and mobile money services spread across the continent, many are now heading west.

“I remember doing a market sizing very early on and from a number of metrics West Africa was a better market,” said Xavier Helgesen, CEO of Tanzania-based Off-Grid Electric (OGE), one of the sector leaders.

About half of the overall African off-grid population are in West and Central Africa, according to the IEA. Nigeria, sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest economy and most populous nation, is  alone home to roughly 90 million people with no grid access.

Lumos is an outlier to the extent it picked West Africa as its first market. It launched in Nigeria in 2016 and by the end of 2017 had sold 73,000 kits and was averaging 16 percent month-on-month revenue growth. Late last year, it expanded into Ivory Coast, French-speaking West Africa’s largest economy.

Still, despite the rapid growth to date, off-grid solar startups say more must be done to improve the capacity of solar home systems and to bring down their cost so the sector can reach its full potential.

“I don’t believe off-grid electrification is a stop-gap,” said Jamie Evans, director of partnerships with d.light.

“I believe it’s here to stay. If the price of batteries starts dropping precipitously, then it will almost certainly change the face of the industry,” he said.

Capital  intensive

The need to provide consumer financing for the relatively expensive kits means expansion requires significant capital.

But banks, lacking expertise in the new sector, often shy away from lending to off-grid companies, said Rolake Akinkugbe, head of energy at Nigeria’s FBNQuest Merchant Bank.

“There’s also a size issue. Most of the off-grid solutions, particularly those that deal with pay-as-you-go, from a funding perspective, are not within the threshold for banks,” she said.

That means startups have largely relied on venture capital, impact investors looking to generate social benefits as well as a profit, and development finance institutions. But the model has its drawbacks.

“Right now off-grid companies are having to constantly fundraise,” said Lyndsay Handler, CEO of Uganda-based Fenix International.

In what was considered a milestone in the African off-grid sector, Engie bought Fenix in October.

With access to Engie’s capital, Handler says Fenix aims to become a pan-African off-grid leader, serving millions in the near term and tens of millions further down the road.

“Hundreds of millions of dollars of investment are needed to have the impact we want to have,” she said.

Facing stagnating customer growth in their home markets, European energy companies such as Engie are increasingly looking abroad. Africa’s underserved, growing population is seen by many as the future.

The number of Africans without grid access actually increased by nearly 14 percent between 2000 and 2016 to 588 million people. By 2030, the IEA estimates that some 80 percent of the global off-grid population will be in sub-Saharan Africa.

Raphael Tilot, Engie Africa’s head of customer solutions, likens off-grid solar to the rise of the mobile phone, which leap-frogged landline networks on the continent.

“Today, no one is thinking about putting telecom wires to individual houses in these places. You can look at energy in the same way today,” he said. “Mini-grids or solar home systems are a far better solution.”

In addition to Engie, French giants Total and EDF also hold stakes in off-grid startups, or are partnering with them. Italian utility Enel and Germany’s E.ON are investing in solar mini-grid companies.

Evidence of the market growth is on exhibit on Kouame’s hillside in Abidjan, where several rooftops, including his neighbor’s, are now crowned with solar panels.

“He asked me how it worked,” Kouame smiles. “Then he went and bought one of his own.”

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Polish Minister Backs Idea to Create ‘Polocaust’ Museum

Polish Deputy Culture Minister Jaroslaw Sellin on Tuesday backed a call for building a “Polokaust” museum to commemorate Poles killed by the Nazis during World War II.

This month Poland sparked international criticism, including from Israel and the United States, when it approved a law that imposes jail terms for suggesting the country was complicit in the Holocaust.

Some three million Jews who lived in pre-war Poland were murdered by the Nazis during their occupation of the country.

They accounted for about half of all Jews killed in the Holocaust.

Poland’s nationalist ruling party says the new law is needed to ensure that Poles are also recognized as victims, not perpetrators, of Nazi aggression. It notes that the Nazis also viewed Slavs as racially inferior and that many Poles were killed or forced into slave labor during the German occupation.

“I think the story of how the fate of Poles during World War II looked like … deserves to be told and shown in this way [in a museum] …,” Sellin was quoted by state media as saying.

“It is enough to read official German documents from these times or Hitler’s book to know that after the Jews, whom he wanted to completely erase from Europe …, the next [target] was generally Slavic people, especially Poles.”

Sellin was responding to a suggestion made by Marek Kochan, a writer and academic, in Polish daily Rzeczpospolita for what he called a “Polokaust” museum. It was unclear from Sellin’s comments whether the museum would be built.

Disturbing revelations

Many Poles believe their nation behaved honorably for the most part during the Holocaust. But research published since 1989 has sparked a painful debate about responsibility and reconciliation.

A 2000-2004 inquiry by Poland’s state Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) found that on July 10, 1941, Nazi occupiers and local inhabitants colluded in a massacre of at least 340 Jews at Jedwabne. Some victims were burned alive after being locked inside a barn.

The revelation disturbed the Poles’ belief that, with a few exceptions, they conducted themselves honorably during a vicious war in which a fifth of the nation perished. Some Poles still refuse to acknowledge the IPN’s findings.

Anti-Semitism was common in Poland in the run-up to World War II. After the war, a pogrom in the town of Kielce and a bout of anti-Semitism in 1968 sponsored by the communist authorities forced many survivors who had stayed in Poland to flee.

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Study: Seas to Rise About a Meter Even If Climate Goals Met

Sea levels will rise between 0.7 and 1.2 meters (27-47 inches) in the next two centuries even if governments end the fossil fuel era as promised under the Paris climate agreement, scientists said Tuesday.

Early action to cut greenhouse gas emissions would limit the long-term rise, driven by a thaw of ice from Greenland to Antarctica that will re-draw global coastlines, a German-led team wrote in the journal Nature Communications.

Sea-level rise is a threat to cities from Shanghai to London, to low-lying swaths of Florida or Bangladesh, and to entire nations such as the Maldives in the Indian Ocean or Kiribati in the Pacific.

By 2300, the report projected that sea levels would gain by 0.7-1.2 meters, even if almost 200 nations fully meet goals under the 2015 Paris Agreement, which include cutting greenhouse gas emissions to net zero in the second half of this century.

Ocean levels will rise inexorably because heat-trapping industrial gases already emitted will linger in the atmosphere, melting more ice, it said. In addition, water naturally expands as it warms above four degrees Celsius (39.2°F).

The report also found that every five years of delay beyond 2020 in peaking global emissions would mean an extra 20 centimeters (8 inches) of sea-level rise by 2300.

“Sea level is often communicated as a really slow process that you can’t do much about … but the next 30 years really matter,” lead author Matthias Mengel, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told Reuters.

Governments are not on track to meet the Paris pledges.

Global emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas emitted by burning fossil fuels, rose last year after a three-year plateau.

And U.S. President Donald Trump, who doubts that human activities are the prime cause of warming, plans to quit the Paris deal and instead promote U.S. coal, oil and natural gas.

‘Brink of inundation’

Maldives Environment Minister Thoriq Ibrahim, who chairs the 44-member Alliance of Small Island States, said Tuesday’s findings showed a need for faster action to cut emissions, especially by rich nations.

“Unfortunately, the study confirms what small island nations have been saying for years: Decades of procrastination on climate change have brought many of us to the brink of inundation,” he told Reuters.

Professor John Church, of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales, who was not involved in the study, said 100 million people now live within one meter of the high tide mark.

“More people are moving to live within the coastal zone, increasing the vulnerable population and infrastructure,” he said in a statement. “Adaptation to sea-level rise will be essential.”

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Curling Ready to Rock the Strip in Las Vegas

They say what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas but when the world’s best curlers sweep into Sin City in April, the sport’s officials want the world to know.

With the world curling championships coming to the city, the World Curling Federation (WCF) will be doubling down on the spike in popularity the sport will enjoy coming out of the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.

In contrast to the Olympic youth movement’s march toward adrenaline-fueled extreme sports, curling, long the domain of moms and pops and Saturday beer-league tournaments, is suddenly cool.

Mr. T, of Rocky and A-Team fame, has been tweeting throughout the Pyeongchang Olympics with the hashtag #curlingiscoolfool. Rockers Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen are rumored to have picked up a curling broom from time to time, bringing new meaning to the term rock ‘n’ roll.

​More TV viewers

And over the last decade, the WCF has watched television viewership trend upward, with a surge during Olympic years, which has helped to pull in new sponsors, new events and new countries.

In order to be included on the full program at the 1998 Nagano Olympics, curling needed to have 30 member nations. Twenty years later, there are 60, including Qatar and Saudi Arabia, with more to come and a growth explosion predicted.

Even the clothing is popular. Sports e-commerce company Fanatics, which handles merchandising for the U.S. Olympic Committee, said that for a few days, sales of shirts with the Team USA curling logo ranked second in sales, behind those of ice hockey.

Some brands such as Cheetos latched onto curling ahead of the games, running a whole campaign around “Do the Curl.”

“Instead of us having to chase after sponsors, we’re finding, at long last, that sponsors are coming to us, which is great,” Kate Caithness, the Scottish head of World Curling, told Reuters. “We are the fastest-growing winter sport and we’re just in a great place.”

Like every other sport’s boss, Caithness has her sights set on China and 1.3 billion potential curlers. Having already established a firm foothold in South Korea and Japan, the WCF will soon begin a major push into China in the runup to the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.

​Televised World Cup

Part of that effort will be helped along by a $13.4 million sponsorship deal the WCF has signed with Kingdomway Sports to develop a made-for-television World Cup featuring the top men’s, women’s and mixed-doubles teams that will have four major events, two in China, one in North America and one in Europe.

“We must get visibility. We’re just really pushing now,” said Caithness. “China is such a huge market for us. I’m on the coordination commission for 2022 and they are putting 300 million people into winter sports between now and 2022.

“They are building 500 ice rinks, which will be for all sports, but there is a big, big focus on curling in China because they have a realistic chance at a medal.”

The other market the WCF is keen to crack is the United States, which has not embraced curling’s charms the way its neighbor to the north has.

With more than 1 million registered curlers, Canada has more people playing the game than the rest of the world combined.

Names such as Eddie “The Wrench” Werenich and Sandra Schmirler (“Schmirler the Curler”) are as familiar to Canadians as those of hockey players.

When Brad Gushue’s foursome took gold at the 2006 Turin Olympics, the Newfoundland group returned home to a heroes’ welcome and the new Team Gushue Highway.

​Past and future

The venues for this year’s world championships give a snapshot of curling’s past as well as a glimpse of its future: The women played in North Bay, a snowy hamlet in northern Ontario, while the men are taking their act to Vegas.

Since becoming part of the Olympic program in 1998, curling has worked hard to shed its image as a game played on weekends by unfit men and women.

Curlers going for gold in Pyeongchang are far more athletic than earlier generations. At the 1988 Calgary Winter Games, when curling was a demonstration sport, Canadian skip Werenich was told by the Canadian Curling Association to shed weight so as not to embarrass the country and the Olympics.

It is, though, exactly that everyman element that is part of curling’s allure.

Olympic medalists with a hint of middle-age spread who have day jobs as firefighters, police officers and cooks do not look so different from many viewers who can convince themselves that if they, too, played enough, they could get that good.

“We could take anybody off the street and bring them in here and show them how to curl and very quickly they can participate,” boasted Caithness. “To get to this level, of course, takes a long time, but it is a sport for all. We have juniors and a 90-plus league in Canada.”

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Ebola’s Impact Reached Beyond Death Toll to Basic Health Care

More than 100,000 malaria cases went untreated when Liberia’s health care system buckled under the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak, according to a new study.

The research, published in the journal PLOS Medicine, shows how the toll of the Ebola outbreak goes beyond the 11,000 killed in West Africa by the virus itself. Basic health care took a major hit as well.

Ebola kills about half of the people it infects. It causes flu-like symptoms, followed by vomiting and diarrhea, and can lead to internal and external hemorrhaging. The disease spreads through contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids. 

The countries of West Africa were ill-equipped to deal with the 2014-15 outbreak. Many clinics lacked the most basic tools for dealing with the disease, including latex gloves and face masks. 

“Rightfully so, people were afraid to go to the clinic because they might get Ebola when they’re at the clinic,” said study lead author Brad Wagenaar at the University of Washington.

Wagenaar and colleagues found that by four months into the epidemic, clinics were delivering one-third to two-thirds fewer basic services, which he described as a “huge, dramatic decrease.” 

‘Huge, dramatic decrease’

The researchers studied monthly data on health visits from 379 clinics outside the capital, Monrovia, from 2010 through 2016. 

They found measles vaccinations dropped by 67 percent. Anti-malarial treatment fell by 61 percent. Thirty-five percent fewer pregnant women came in for their first pre-natal visits.

It took more than a year-and-a-half for all services to return to pre-outbreak levels. 

Lost opportunities

In that time, more than three-quarters of a million clinic visits were lost, the researchers estimate, based on extrapolations from pre-outbreak trends. 

That includes more than 5,000 births at health care facilities, in a country with one of the world’s highest rates of maternal death, along with a loss of 100, 000 malaria treatments. These figures, Wagenaar adds, suggest a loss of other services that may have a long-term impact, such as distributing bed nets and spraying houses with insecticides.

“Some of these other things didn’t happen during the Ebola outbreak because the health system and other partners were busy with other issues,” he said. “And now, the cases have been increasing.”

Malaria cases were 50 percent higher in December of 2017 than they were before the Ebola epidemic.

Wagenaar says the research highlights how more attention must be devoted to maintaining basic services during a health emergency. The data his group analyzed could be used in other outbreaks to prioritize services that have been overlooked. 

Funding for public health systems

And after the emergency, funding should focus on strengthening public health systems. 

“We know that this epidemic happened in Liberia due to multiple factors, but one being the public sector ministry of health system has been underfunded,” he said, adding that remains the case.

Donors earmarked funds for strengthening the health system, he said. But, “that money never really materialized,” he added.

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Latvian Central Bank Chief Suspended, Says Victim of Smear Campaign

Latvia’s central bank chief was suspended on Tuesday pending an investigation into whether he solicited a bribe, as corruption allegations and counter accusations rocked the financial sector of the eurozone country with close ties to neighboring Russia.

The prime minister’s office said Ilmars Rimsevics had been suspended from his role as the anti-corruption agency investigates allegations he asked for a 100,000 euro bribe.

Rimsevics, who was held in custody over the weekend, had earlier told a news conference he was the victim of a smear campaign because he has been leading a drive to clean up corruption in the Baltic country’s banking sector.

He said he would not resign.

“I have not demanded or received any bribes,” Rimsevics told the news conference. “I have become the target of some Latvian commercial banks to destroy Latvia’s reputation.”

U.S. allegations that a leading bank engaged in money laundering and helped breach North Korean sanctions have also turned a spotlight on Latvia’s financial system in recent days.

Prime Minister Maris Kucinskis said earlier on Tuesday that the complaint against Rimsevics was made by small Latvian lender Norvik Bank. Its owner, Grigory Guselnikov, a Russian based in Britain, had not provided evidence of wrongdoing despite being “repeatedly asked,” he added.

Norvik Bank did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Rimsevics said he was a victim of “a coordinated attack by a few Latvian commercial banks” who believed he was behind tough actions by the anti-corruption agency. It has handed out fines in recent years over breaches in money-laundering rules and laws aimed at closing off funding for terrorism.

Rimsevics said the banks wanted to see him replaced with someone more compliant.

Candidates to head the anti-corruption authority are selected by the central bank governor and the finance minister.

Kucinskis said he could not rule out that the bribery allegations against Rimsevics, no details of which have been given by police or the anti-corruption authority, were an attempt to damage the reputation of Latvian authorities.

It was not immediately clear whether Rimsevics could continue to represent Latvia on the European Central Bank’s Governing Council, which sets interest rates for the eurozone.

A Bank of Latvia spokesman said deputy governor Zoja Razmusa would attend a non-policy ECB meeting on Wednesday.

Lack of transparency

The confusing, rival claims of wrongdoing will deepen worries about the transparency of parts of Latvia’s banking sector, which have close financial links to former colonial master Russia.

The biggest banks, subsidiaries of Nordic giants like Swedbank and SEB focus on domestic lending, but there are also a number of small banks who handle mainly overseas client money.

The International Monetary Fund has repeatedly urged Latvia to be vigilant over non-resident deposits — mostly held for clients in Russia and the CIS — and strengthen the enforcement of rules to combat terrorism funding and money laundering.

The U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has said non-resident banking in Latvia increases the risk that criminals and shell companies could conduct fraudulent transactions or hide their financial dealings.

It called on February 13 for sanctions on Latvia’s third-biggest lender, ABLV Bank, which it said had “institutionalized money laundering” and helped clients avoid sanctions on North Korea.

The ECB suspended payments by ABLV this week citing liquidity concerns. ABLV, which has rejected FinCEN’s allegations, sought emergency funding from the Latvian central bank, which bought 13 million euros in bonds and has agreed to provide 97.5 million euros in loans.

ABLV managers were meeting ECB supervisors on Tuesday to outline a survival plan, a key step in removing the payment moratorium.

Around 600 million euros worth of deposits — around 22 percent of all deposits — have left the bank since FinCEN made its allegations. While the freeze has halted those outflows, sources close to the discussion said ABLV would be given just days to come up with a credible plan.

If supervisors do not find its plans realistic and rule that it is likely to fall short of its financial obligations, they could declare the bank failing or likely to fail and hand the case over to the Single Resolution Board.

A number of other small Latvian banks have been fined in recent years for breaching money laundering rules and terrorism funding legislation, including Norvik Bank.

It was one of two lenders fined more than 2.8 million euros ($3.26 million) by Latvia’s Financial and Capital Market Commission (FKTK) for allowing clients to violate European Union and United Nations sanctions on North Korea. Three others received smaller fines.

Another, Rietumu Banka, was fined in France for aiding tax avoidance and money laundering, while the European Central Bank withdrew Trasta Komercbanka’s license in 2016 at FKTK’s request.

The FKTK said Trasta had breached capital rules and broken anti-money laundering and terrorism financing regulations. The bank was then wound up.

On Tuesday, European Commission Vice President Valdis Dombrovskis, a former Latvian prime minister, warned that the allegations of corruption and money-laundering damaging Latvia’s reputation.

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BP Sees Self-driving Electric Vehicles Crimping Oil Demand by 2040

The emergence of self-driving electric cars and travel sharing are set to dent oil consumption by 2040, oil and gas giant BP said, forecasting a peak in demand for the first time.

In its benchmark annual Energy Outlook, BP forecast a 100-fold growth in electric vehicles by 2040, with its chief economist Spencer Dale painting a world in which we travel much more but instead of using private cars, we increasingly share trips in autonomous vehicles.

While travel demand more than doubles over the period as economies in countries such as China and India grow, higher oil demand will be more than offset by increased engine efficiency standards as well as the larger number of EVs and shared traveling.

Unlike many other forecasts, including previous BP Energy Outlooks, which looked solely at the growing share of EVs in the car fleet, BP this year focused on the share of vehicles kilometers powered by electricity.

Under BP’s Evolving Transition scenario, which assumes that policies and technology continue to evolve at a speed similar to that seen in the recent past, some 30 percent of car kilometers are powered by electricity by 2040 from almost zero in 2016.

At the same time, the number of EVs is set to increase from 3 million today to over 320 million by 2040, representing roughly 15 percent out of a total car fleet of 2 billion.

The gap between the increasing number of EVs on the road and the kilometers powered by electricity is due to the expected growth in so-called shared mobility by EVs, Dale said.

“Cars will be used much more intensely over time,” Dale told reporters in a briefing on Monday ahead of the release of the report on Tuesday.

As a result, fuel demand from the car fleet is forecast to dip to 18.6 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2040 from 18.7 million bpd in 2016, when it represented around one fifth of total oil demand, according to BP.

Cheaper rides

BP expects autonomous vehicles to become available in the early 2020s. Their initial high cost means the vast majority of the cars will be bought by fleets offering shared mobility services.

The average electric car is expected to be driven about two-and-a-half times more than an internal combustion car, according to Dale.

“What we expect to see in the 2030s is a huge growth in shared mobility autonomous cars … Once you don’t have to pay for a driver, the cost of taking one of those share mobility fleets services will fall by about 40 or 50 percent,” Dale said.

The vast majority of the shared mobility is expected to be EVs because of their lower maintenance costs.

Car makers including General Motors and high-tech giants such as Google Waymo and Uber Technologies have poured billions into the autonomous vehicles industry hoping gain a first-mover advantage. Robo-taxi services are seen as the main use for most self-driving vehicles.

BP sharply raised its estimate of growth in electric vehicles in the coming decades from last year’s forecast that EVs would reach 100 million by 2035. The big upwards revision is due to an increase in hybrid cars and an expected sharp growth in EV purchases in the second half of the 2030s, Dale said.

Peak oil

London-based BP joined other oil companies such as Royal Dutch Shell in forecasting a peak for oil demand in the late 2030s, when it is expected to slightly decline at around 110 million bpd.

It did not foresee a peak in demand in its previous outlooks that stretched into 2035.

While the transportation sector will continue to dominate the growth in oil consumption, demand for plastic manufacturing will become the main source of growth in the 2030s.

Oil companies such as BP, Shell and France’s Total are betting on growing demand from the petrochemical sector in the coming decades.

Dale however said changes in regulations for plastics consumption such as stringent policies on plastic bags and packaging could dent oil demand by as much as 2 million bpd, roughly the same as the impact of EVs.

Overall energy demand will continue to grow in the coming decades, rising by a third into 2040, or roughly 1.3 percent per year, driven by growth in China and India, but the world is learning to “do more with less energy” as economies become more efficient, Dale said.

For example, the European Union’s gross domestic product is set to treble in 2040 from 1975 but the level of energy demand will be the same.

China’s energy demand will continue to grow but at a slower pace by the 2030s, when India will become the main driver of growth.

BP once again revised upwards its forecast for growth in renewable power, which is set to grow by 40 percent by 2040, with its share in the energy mix increasing from 4 percent to 14 percent.

The revision is due to technological gains as well as more aggressive government policies, particularly in India and China.

“There is plenty of scope for policy to continue to surprise us” to further boost the growth in the renewables, Dale said.

 

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Macron’s State Reform Tsar Looks to Technology to Cut Red-Tape

France is ready to invest in artificial intelligence, blockchain and data mining to “transform” its sprawling bureaucracy instead of simply trimming budgets and jobs, its administration reform tsar said.

The 39-year old former telecoms executive whom President Emmanuel Macron has charged with reforming the public sector said he believed technology would win support from government employees and in the end produce less costly public services.

Macron himself is coming under pressure from budget watchdogs and Brussels to spell out how he plans to cut 60 billion euros ($74 billion) in public spending and 120,000 public sector jobs to fulfill pledges made in his election campaign.

Chatbots – software that can answer users’ questions with a conversational approach – or algorithms helping the taxman to target potential tax evaders, were some of the possibilities offered by technology, Thomas Cazenave told Reuters in an interview.

“The state … must not fall behind, get ‘uberized’ and shrivel up,” Cazenave said.

“The potential created by digitalization, data and artificial intelligence will help put fewer employees on some tasks, while reinvesting in others,” he added.

A 700-million-euro ($864-million) fund will help invest in IT projects over the next five years to help modernize administration in the highly centralized country and automate some activities.

‘Macron boy’

Cazenave is one of the ‘Macron boys’ whose mix of top civil service pedigree and private sector experience is being used to shake up France’s 5.5 million-strong army of government employees and cut one of the highest public spending ratios in the world.

Only two months younger than Macron, the two met over 10 years ago when they joined the highly selective corps of finance civil servants after graduating from ENA, a graduate school of public administration for the French elite.

Cazenave then became the number 2 human resources executive at telecoms firm Orange, a company which transitioned from government monopoly to globalized private champion. In 2016, Macron prefaced Cazenave’s book, “The State in Start-Up Mode.”

“Like me, the president feels very deeply that these are no longer times where public services can be reformed with small tweaks. Major transformations are needed,” Cazenave said.

Sensitive subject

However, despite frequently referring to transformation and revolution, Macron has taken a cautious approach on belt-tightening measures, with very few details given so far on where the ax will fall.

His budget minister said this month a voluntary redundancy plan could be on the cards, but did not elaborate. More details are expected to be announced in March/April but legislation is not expected before early 2019.

Cazenave said taking time to consult employees was necessary to get government employees on board and to review which public services still need to be ran by government, and which can be outsourced or even abandoned.

He also said previous spending cut plans, such as former conservative leader Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision not to fill one in two vacancies left by retiring baby-boomers had failed to curb spending because the state’s remit had not been changed.

Outsourcing some public services is currently being considered, he said, but the example of British outsourcing firm Carillion’s collapse showed it could not be replicated everywhere.

“There is no place for ideology on the outsourcing debate, in one way or another. The private sector doesn’t have a definitive superiority to the public sector,” he said.

 

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Carbs, Fat, DNA? Weight Loss Finicky, New Study Shows

A precision nutrition approach to weight loss didn’t hold up in a study testing low fat versus low carb depending on dieters’ DNA profiles.

Previous research has suggested that a person’s insulin levels or certain genes could interact with different types of diets to influence weight loss.

 

Stanford University researchers examined this idea with 600 overweight adults who underwent genetic and insulin testing before being randomly assigned to reduce fat or carbohydrate intake.  

Gene analyses identified variations linked with how the body processes fats or carbohydrates, which the researchers thought would make them more likely to lose weight on a low-fat or low-carb diet.    

 

But weight loss averaged about 13 pounds over a year, regardless of genes, insulin levels or diet type. Also, some people lost as much as 60 pounds and others gained 15 pounds – more evidence that genetic characteristics and diet type appeared to make no difference.

What seemed to make a difference was healthful eating. Participants on both diets who consumed the fewest processed foods, sugary drinks, unhealthy fats and ate the most vegetables lost the most weight.

The results suggest that “precision medicine is not as important as eating mindfully, getting rid of packaged, processed food” and avoiding unhealthy habits like eating while watching television, said lead author Christopher Gardner.

 

The study was published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

 

Participants had 22 health education classes during the study and were encouraged to be physically active, but the focus was on what they ate. They were advised to choose high-quality foods but were not given suggested calorie limits nor were they provided with specific foods. Results are based on what they reported eating.

During the first two months, dieters in each group were told to limit carbohydrates or fats to 20 grams daily, about the amount that’s in 1 1/2 slices of whole wheat bread and a handful of nuts respectively. They were allowed to increase that to more manageable levels during the rest of the study.

Fat intake in the low-fat group averaged 57 grams during the study versus 87 grams beforehand; carb intake in the low-carb group averaged 132 grams versus 247 grams previously. Both groups reduced their daily calorie intake by an average of about 500 calories.

 

The study was well-conducted but because participants were not provided with specific foods and self-reported their food choices, it wasn’t rigorous enough to disprove the idea that certain genes and insulin levels may affect which types of diets lead to weight loss, said Dr. David Ludwig, a Boston Children’s Hospital obesity researcher.

Dr. Frank Hu, nutrition chief at Harvard’s School of Public Health, has called precision nutrition a promising approach and said the study wasn’t a comprehensive test of all gene variations that might affect individual responses to weight loss diets.

 

“In any weight loss diets, adherence to the diet and the overall quality of the diet are probably more important than any other factors,” Hu said.

 

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Preventive Treatment for Peanut Allergies Succeeds in Study

The first treatment to help prevent serious allergic reactions to peanuts may be on the way. A company said Tuesday that its daily capsules of peanut powder helped children build tolerance in a major study.

Millions of children are allergic to peanuts, and some may have life-threatening reactions if accidentally exposed to them. Doctors have been testing daily doses of peanut, contained in a capsule and sprinkled over food, as a way to prevent that by gradually getting them used to very small amounts.

California-based Aimmune Therapeutics said 67 percent of kids who had its experimental treatment were able to tolerate the equivalent of roughly two peanuts at the end of the study, compared to only 4 percent of others given a dummy powder.

But a big warning: Don’t try this at home.

“It’s potentially dangerous,” said Dr. Stacie Jones, a University of Arkansas allergy specialist. “This is investigational. It has to be done in a very safe setting” to make sure kids can be treated fast for any bad reactions that occur, she said.

Jones helped lead the study, consults for the company, and will give the results at an allergy conference next month. The results have not yet been reviewed by independent experts.

The study involved nearly 500 kids ages 4 to 17 with allergies so severe that they had reactions to as little as a tenth of a peanut. They were given either capsules of peanut or a dummy powder in gradually increasing amounts for six months, then continued on that final level for another six months. Neither the participants nor their doctors knew who was getting what until the study ended.

About 20 percent of kids getting the peanut powder dropped out of the study, 12 percent due to reactions or other problems. The product showed “overall good safety,” Jones said.

Dr. Andrew Bird, an allergy specialist at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, also consults for the company and had patients in the study. The treatment doesn’t allow kids to eat peanuts as if they had no allergy, but research suggests that being able to tolerate at least one peanut should protect 95 percent of them from having a reaction if they are exposed to peanuts, he said.

That would be a relief to Cathy Heald, a Dallas mom whose 10-year-old son, Charlie, was in the study.

“We had to teach him that he has to ask about everything he eats from a very early age,” she said. “He’s described it as living in a cage, watching other people get to eat what they want.”

Charlie was assigned to the group given fake peanut powder but has been able to get the real thing since the study ended, she said.

Aimmune plans to seek U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for the treatment later this year and in Europe early next year.

The company’s chief executive has said he expects the first six months of treatment to cost $5,000 to $10,000, and $300 to $400 a month after that.

The thinking about peanut allergies has changed in recent years, and experts now think early exposure helps prevent them from forming. Last year, the National Institutes of Health issued new advice, saying most babies should get peanut-containing foods starting around 6 months, in age-appropriate forms like watered-down peanut butter or peanut puffs — not whole peanuts because those are a choking hazard.

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Ceramic Body Armor Stronger Than Steel

Kevlar body armor saves lives, and the high end vests can even stop armor piercing rounds. But that kind of protection comes at the cost of added heavy weight. A Czech Republic university is using ceramics that bring the weight of safety way down. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.

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Afghanistan’s ArtLords Daub Walls With Messages of Defiance, Hope

Activists in Afghanistan are speaking out against corruption and spreading messages of peace and social justice with murals, many painted on concrete blast walls that have risen to ward off militant bombs.

The activists call themselves the ArtLords, as opposed to the warlords and drug lords who have brought so much strife and misery to Afghanistan, and say their art is a tool for social change.

“We’re painting against corruption, we’re painting against the injustices that are happening in society, for women’s rights,” said the group’s co-founder, Omaid Sharifi. “We’re encouraging people to come and join us, let’s raise our voices against all this nonsense.”

Blast walls have gone up along Kabul’s streets over the years, against a tide of violence as Taliban and other militants battle the government and U.S.-led forces, nearly 17 years after Afghanistan’s latest phase of war began.

Some city streets have been turned into concrete canyons, the walls shielding embassies, military camps, government offices and the homes of the rich.

On many of these grey slabs, the ArtLords have their say.

Watchful eyes peer from a wall protecting the headquarters of the main security agency.

“I can’t go to school because of your corruption. I can see you,” is the message on a mural of a girl on blast walls near the interior ministry.

Another mural, of a black SUV with its windows tinted, takes a dig at the powerful and privileged.

“What are you carrying, that your windows are black?” reads the message. “You don’t have a license plate and don’t stop for searches.”

A painting of a shoeshine boy says: “Don’t set off an explosion here, innocent people get killed.”

Other murals extol the city’s street-sweeper “heroes,” encourage anti-polio efforts, and call for women’s rights.

Sharifi says he always gets permission for his work, though it can be a struggle. The group gets commissions from Afghan and international groups for “awareness raising and advocacy” and sells smaller artworks.

Recently, on a cold, grey morning, the ArtLords were at the American University of Afghanistan, working on a mural on the tightly guarded campus to highlight resilience against violence.

A 2016 militant attack on the university killed 16 people and shattered its image as an island of liberalism and learning.

Students came to help paint a picture of a young man and woman picking up their books, with a phoenix rising and the words: “I am back because education prevails.”

“Kabul has been surrounded with blast walls which infuriate people but this art has a message of hope,” said student Faisal Imran, who took his turn with a brush.

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Experts: Underwater Archaeology Site Imperiled in Mexico

Pollution is threatening the recently mapped Sac Actun cave system in the Yucatan Peninsula, a vast underground network that experts in Mexico say could be the most important underwater archaeological site in the world.

 

Subaquatic archaeologist Guillermo de Anda said the cave system’s historical span is likely unrivaled. Some of the oldest human remains on the continent have been found there, dating back more than 12,000 years, and now-extinct animal remains push the horizon back to 15,000 years.

 

He said researchers found a human skull that was already covered in rainwater limestone deposits long before the cave system flooded around 9,000 years ago.

 

De Anda said over 120 sites with Maya-era pottery and bones in the caves suggest water levels may have briefly dropped in the 216-mile (347-kilometer) -long system during a drought about 1,000 A.D. And some artifacts have been found dating to the 1847-1901 Maya uprising known as the War of the Castes.

 

Humans there probably didn’t live in the caves, de Anda said, but rather went down to them “during periods of great climate stress, to look for water.”

 

Sac Actun is “probably the most important underwater archaeological site in the world,” he said.

 

But de Anda said pollution and development may threaten the caves’ crystalline water.

Some of the sinkhole lakes that today serve as entrances to the cave system are used by tourists to snorkel and swim. And the main highway in the Caribbean coast state of Quintana Roo runs right over some parts of cave network. That roadway has been known to collapse into sinkholes.

 

Also, the cave with the stone-encased skull has high acidity levels, suggesting acidic runoff from a nearby open-air dump could damage skeletal remains.

 

The world’s other great underwater site, the sunken Egyptian city of Alexandria, is also threatened by pollution.

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