Day: September 3, 2019

A Tunisian appeals court on Tuesday upheld the detention of media magnate Nabil Karoui, a candidate in this month’s presidential election, on suspicion of tax fraud and money laundering, his lawyer said.

Karoui, who denies any wrongdoing, had sought to be freed, but the court rejected the demand to release him, lawyer Kamel Ben Massoud told Reuters without giving details or further comment.

Karoui, the owner of Nesma TV channel, is one of the most prominent candidates in the Sept. 15  election along with current and past prime ministers, a former president, the defense minister and the representative of a major Islamist party.

He is running as a campaigner against poverty in a country where economic troubles have caused widespread frustration despite the transition to democracy since a 2011 revolution.

Karoui founded a charity to combat poverty in 2017 and then set up a political party, leading his critics to accuse him of using his foundation to advance his political ambitions, which he denies.

In June, parliament passed an amendment to the electoral law forbidding candidates who benefited from “charitable associations” or foreign funding in the year before an election, which would have banned him from the race.

However, the late president Beji Caid Essebsi died in July without having signed the law, meaning Karoui was free to enter the election.

His political party has called his detention a politically motivated attempt to bar him from the race, though government officials have said it is a purely judicial matter.

Tunisia’s electoral commission kept him on the list of eligible candidates after his arrest last month on a court order.

The president is responsible for foreign and defense policy in Tunisia, while most decision-making powers rest with a prime minister who is chosen by parliament. A parliamentary election will also take place on Oct. 6.

Despite Karoui still being in detention, his party launched his presidential campaign with a rally on Monday night. On Tuesday, supporters gathered outside the court to demand he be
freed.

…

As evening falls over their Amazon home, the hunter gatherers of the Uru-eu-wau-wau people extract bamboo arrows from the flank of a wild pig and begin roasting it.

A few miles — and a world — away on the opposite side of the rainforest’s delicate existential divide, cowboys on horseback round up cattle at the outer reaches of a vast ranch.

“We have no problem with them,” said Awapy Uru-eu-wau-wau, the young chief of the 19-person forest community in central Rondonia state.

It’s an uncommon expression of goodwill in an area where the worlds of rich landowners and indigenous tribes collide and jostle over the future of the planet’s largest rainforest.

The tribe’s resource-rich 1.8 million hectare native reserve — an area nearly twice the size of Lebanon — is under constant siege from landlords, timber traders, landowners and miners who rely on deforestation to exploit its bounty.

“I’ve been facing this invasion since I was 19 or 20, and these guys are threatenings because we’re standing up to them,” says Awapy, 38. “I’m not afraid of risking my life. It’s the only way.”

The few hundred inhabitants of the reserve, divided into seven hamlets, have a long history of resistance. To help surveil the forest and protect themselves, the self-styled guardians of nature mostly live along the boundaries of their territory, demarcated in the early 1990s.

Awapy’s village comprises half a dozen small dwellings, some of wood with a straw roof, others of cement with roofs of tile. The five families here live almost entirely off the jungle, where they venture daily to hunt and when necessary, to see off invaders — often organized groups — in confrontations that often turn violent, he says.

‘They deforest everything’

In this area south of the town of Porto Velho, fresh clearings and grasslands are evident from the air, signs of ever-advancing deforestation often heralded by the wildfires which have reverberated on a global scale in recent weeks.

The state’s absence from the ground has made areas like this a breeding ground for gangs and encourages occupation of land which often ends up being integrated into cattle farms, NGOs say.

Prosecutors have filed complaints against rural producers for having occupied, parcelled and sold land on this reserve and in other places.

The Uru-eu-wau-wau argue that the invaders feel protected since the arrival in power in January of President Jair Bolsonaro, who has supported the opening up of protected lands to agriculture and mining activities. He said at his inauguration that indigenous people needed to be integrated into society and not live in reserves “as if they were animals in a zoo.”

“It wasn’t like that in the past, but today they are deforesting everything,” said Awapy, in his “oca” or room used for family gatherings, surrounded by villagers lying in hammocks.

‘Beef, bible and bullets’

An hour-and-a-half away along a forest road, in the small town of Monte Negro, the agribusiness sector shows its muscle at a rodeo where around 20 cowboys display their talent by riding bulls for as many seconds as they can.

Dressed in Stetson hats, blue jeans and cowboy boots, they work at some of the area’s vast cattle ranches that have cut into the forest over decades. 

The spectators enjoy the show and laugh loudly at an interlude sketch in which a clown chases a deer — a “veado” in Portuguese, which is also a disparaging term for homosexuals.

This is rural, conservative Brazil, a fiefdom of Bolsonarism, whose inhabitants belong to the “BBB” demographic. The “Beef, Bible and Bullet” set is the triumverate of powerful interests that helped sweep Boslonaro to power — the agribusiness sector, Evangelical churches, and the pro-arms lobby in Congress.

The landowners, arrogant and circumspect to outsiders, are accused by environmental activists of being partly responsible for spreading ruin in the Amazon, profiteering to the detriment of public lands and indigenous reserves.

They maintain they respect the boundaries of their lands, claim their right to develop it and recall the importance of agricultural expansion for the Brazilian economy.

‘The Amazon is ours’

“People have to respect the fact that what is reserve is reserve, what is indigenous is indigenous,” said Marconi Silvestre, owner of a farm in Monte Negro and organizer of the rodeo.

Another owner who came to the show to sell breeding bulls says privately that the indigenous people themselves deforest and sell wood and land.

“They are doing the same thing that Pedro Alvares Cabral did when he arrived,” he said, referring to the Portuguese pioneer who, in 1500, landed on the coast of the future Brazil. “They are exchanging wealth for mirrors.”

Several landowners here claimed the media exaggerated the reach of the wildfires and mocked French President Emmanuel Macron, who last month called for “internationalizing” protection of the Amazon rainforest.

One of the landowners said: “The Amazon is ours. Tell that to Macron!”

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US officials on Tuesday declared New York’s worst measles epidemic in nearly 30 years officially over after months of emergency measures that included mandatory vaccinations.

About 654 people, many in areas with large Orthodox Jewish communities, were infected since October last year but there have been no new cases since mid-July, the city government said.

The official end of the outbreak, 42 days since the last reported case, comes before the start of the US financial capital’s new school year Thursday.

Schools and nurseries were the focal points of government efforts to stop the spread of the disease.

“To keep our children and communities safe, I urge all New Yorkers to get vaccinated. It’s the best defense we have,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a statement.

Authorities declared measles eliminated in the United States in 2000 but there have been 1,234 cases of the potentially deadly disease reported in the country this year, the worst since 1992 according to the Center for Disease Control.

The rise comes as a growing anti-vaccine movement gains steam around the world, driven by fraudulent claims linking the MMR vaccine against measles, mumps and rubella, to a risk of autism in children.

New York city officials made vaccinations mandatory in the worst affected areas in April to help stem the epidemic. Schools were also allowed to turn away children who had not been vaccinated.

Those measures have been lifted, but a New York state law passed in June outlawing religious exemptions that had allowed parents to circumvent school-mandated vaccination remains in place.

“There may no longer be local transmission of measles in New York City, but the threat remains given other outbreaks in the US and around the world,” said New York’s health commissioner Oxiris Barbot.

The city government spent over $6 million and mobilized more than 500 employees to fight the outbreak.

Last month, the World Health Organization said there were 89,994 cases of measles in 48 European countries in the first six months of 2019.

That was more than double the number in the same period in 2018 when there were 44,175 cases, and already more than the 84,462 cases reported for all of 2018.

…

A convicted hacker who’s serving 10 years in prison for breaking into computer systems of security firms and law-enforcement agencies has been called to testify to a federal grand jury in Virginia.

Supporters of Jeremy Hammond, part of the Anonymous hacking group, say he’s been summoned to testify against his will to a grand jury in Alexandria on Tuesday. Hammond, who admitted leaking hacked data to WikiLeaks, believes the subpoena is related to the investigation of WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange. Assange is under indictment in Alexandria and the U.S. is seeking extradition.

Prosecutors declined comment.

Former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning was also called to testify to the WikiLeaks grand jury. She refused and is now serving a jail sentence of up to 18 months for civil contempt.

Hammond’s supports say he’ll also refuse to testify.

Hammond was sentenced in 2013 to 10 years in prison for carrying out cyberattacks that targeted Texas-based Strategic Forecasting Inc., known as Stratfor, as well as the FBI’s Virtual Academy, the Arizona Department of Public Safety, the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association, and the Jefferson County, Alabama, Sheriff’s Office.

He argued at his sentencing that the hacks were civil disobedience to expose the pervasiveness of government and private surveillance.

Hammond’s supporters, the Jeremy Hammond Support Committee, say he was scheduled to be released at the end of the year after receiving credit for ongoing participation in a drug-abuse program. That participation has now been disrupted and his supporters worry his incarceration could now be extended by more than two years.

“The government’s effort to try to compel Jeremy to testify is punitive and mean-spirited. Jeremy has spent nearly 10 years in prison because of his commitment to his firmly held beliefs. There is no way that he would ever testify before a grand jury,” the group said in its statement.

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Five years ago, for her 27th birthday, Lorelei Bandrovschi gave up drinking for a month on a dare. She was a casual drinker and figured it would be easy. It was, but she hadn’t banked on learning so much about herself in the process.

“I realized that going out without drinking was something that I really enjoyed and that I was very well suited for,” she told The Associated Press. “I realized I’m a pretty extroverted, spontaneous, uninhibited person.”

And that’s how Listen Bar was born on Bleecker Street downtown. At just under a year old, the bar Bandrovschi opens once a month is alcohol-free, one of a growing number of sober bars popping up around the country.

Booze-free bars serving elevated “mocktails” are attracting more young people than ever before, especially women. The uptick comes as fewer people overall are drinking away from home and the #MeToo movement has women seeking a more comfortable bar environment, said Amanda Topper, associate director of food-service research for the global market research firm Mintel.

Mocktails aren’t just proliferating at sober bars. Regular bars and restaurants are cluing into the idea that alcohol-free customers want more than a Shirley Temple or a splash of cranberry with a spritz.

Alcohol-free mixed drinks grew 35 percent as a beverage type on the menus of bars and restaurants from 2016 to this year, according to Mintel. Topper said 17 percent of 1,288 people surveyed between the ages of 22 to 24 who drink away from home said they’re interested in mocktails.

The interest, she said, is also driven in part by the health and wellness movement, and higher quality ingredients as bartenders take mocktails more seriously.

“It really started a few years ago with the whole idea of dry January, when consumers cut out alcohol for that month,” Topper said. “It’s shifted to a long-term movement and lifestyle choice.”

Listen Bar recently hosted a mocktail competition for mixologists, who whipped up drinks that included The Holy Would, comprised of citrusy, distilled, non-alcoholic Seedlip Grove 42, palo santo syrup, low-acid apple juice, lemon and lime bitters produced with glycerin, and verjus, the pressed juice of unripened grapes. The drink is the brainchild of Fred Beebe, a bartender at Sunday in Brooklyn. The restaurant isn’t alcohol-free, but Beebe helped create an extensive mocktail menu that goes well beyond the sugary choices of yore, using unique ingredients.

Palo santo, for instance, is a tree native to Peru, Venezuela and Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula that loosely translates to “holy wood” and is widely used in folk remedies.

“Everybody should be able to have a delicious drink at a bar,” Beebe said. “Hospitality is making sure everybody has a good time. Alcohol, for me, is not the most important part of a cocktail anymore. The cool juices and syrups and tinctures and mixtures and all that stuff makes a lot of the fun.”

Listen Bar has enjoyed packed houses every month. Photographer Zach Hilty, 40, was a first-time customer on competition night. He said he drinks alcohol occasionally.

“My girlfriend and I are interested in the health benefits of different botanicals and such,” he said.

Cat Tjan, 27, of Jersey City, New Jersey, was also on hand and brought a colleague, Ammar Farooqi, 26, from Williamstown in southern New Jersey. Neither drinks alcohol. Tjan said Listen Bar is the only sober bar she could find in Manhattan, where she works for a drug company.

“I have no interest in it,” she said of booze. “It’s not particularly fun. It’s very expensive. There are better ways to have a good night out.”

Many bartenders will mix up regular cocktails and just leave out the alcohol if you ask, but that’s different than choosing something conceived as virgin from a separate menu, Farooqi said. Mocktails generally cost a few dollars less than cocktails, but separate menus are still hard to find.

At the sober bar Getaway in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, mocktails go for $13 a pop. There’s the Paper Train, with lemon juice, tobacco syrup (from the leaf and containing no nicotine), vanilla and San Pellegrino Chinotto. And there’s A Trip to Ikea, a mix of lingonberry, lemon, vanilla, cardamom and cream. Getaway opened in April in a permanent space.

“Weekends are generally really busy,” said co-owner Regina Dellea. “My business partner’s brother is in recovery, and when he first got sober they missed having a space to hang out in at night, where you can meet up and just talk.”

Mainstream suppliers are catching on. Beer companies are experimenting with alcohol-free selections, and Coca-Cola North America gobbled up the popular Topo Chico premium sparkling mineral water. The U.K.’s Seedlip brand bills itself as the world’s first non-alcoholic spirits. It comes in three flavor profiles with ingredients like hand-picked peas from founder Ben Branson’s farm in the English countryside.

At Listen Bar, Tjan and Farooqi sipped on a mocktail dubbed Me, A Houseplant, a green concoction comprised of Seedlip’s Garden 108 variety (the one with the peas), cucumber, lemon and elderflower. Each glass was garnished with a hefty cucumber slice. It was thought up by Jack McGarry, co-founder of the booze-serving Dead Rabbit bar in lower Manhattan and a well-known mixologist.

McGarry is also three years sober. At Listen Bar’s “Good AF Awards,” he was one of the judges, clipboard in hand.

“Alcohol-free used to be very simplistic with, like, homemade lemonades and ginger ales. People are wanting more diverse offerings,” he said. “I’m intrigued at how it will all shake out. I’ve seen lots of trends come and go. When people come in asking for non-alcoholic drinks, we have a bunch of drinks that have been thought out.”

Chris Marshall in Austin, Texas, has been sober since 2007. He was once a drug and alcohol counselor whose clients often shared their frustration at not having an alcohol-free nightspot to frequent. They were his motivation for founding Sans Bar in Austin, with pop-ups all over the country, including Anchorage, Kansas City, Washington, D.C., Portland, Seattle, New York, Nashville and St. Louis.

“The response is just overwhelming,” he said. “We’re taking out community spaces, coffee shops and places like that. The lack of a social circle is the one thing so many of my clients lacked after treatment.”

Marnie Rae Clark, who lives outside Seattle, is also a recovering alcoholic. She’s experienced the struggle of socializing while sober and started a blog about the sober lifestyle in 2017. She founded National Mocktail Week this year. Part of her mission is to encourage bars and restaurants to up their mocktail games.

“I just want to be able to go out with my friends and have a nice grown-up sophisticated cocktail,” said the 51-year-old Clark. “It’s really about promoting inclusion and connection in the hospitality industry.”

…

When Maria Augusta Almeida, 45, heard her grandson cough incessantly, she knew what was to blame: the fires raging in the Amazon forest, some of them more than 200 miles (322 km) away from Porto Velho.

The smoke permeating the city, the capital of Brazil’s northwestern state of Rondonia, is leading concerned parents to wait for hours in line at local hospitals to get help for their children who are struggling to breathe.

The Thomson Reuters Foundation visited four health centers in the city, one of the hardest hit by smoke from the burning rainforest. In all, there were reports of children, some of them infants, seeking medical care due to smoke inhalation.

Last month, Brazil’s space research agency, INPE, revealed the number of fires in the Amazon was the highest since 2010. 

That sparked international calls for the country to do more to protect the world’s largest tropical rainforest — key to curbing climate change — from deforestation and other threats.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro authorized the military to fight the fires after several days of public protests and criticism from world leaders.

In Porto Velho, residents said the Cosme e Damiao Children’s Hospital, run by the Rondonia state government, had become the epicenter for children with breathing difficulties.

The symptoms from outdoor smoke inhalation have evolved into a full-blown crisis for some parents, as they do not know how to protect their children from what is in the air.

The daughter of local salesman Mauro Ribeiro do Nascimento, almost two years old, has asthma and could not stop coughing.

“I have taken her to Cosme e Damiao three times already,” her father said. “They were doing nothing but putting her on a nebulizer.”

The device helps patients breathe in medicine as a mist through a mask or a mouthpiece, to treat respiratory problems.

Worried about the strain on her lungs, do Nascimento took his daughter to a different center for an X-ray, which showed her lungs were “congested” due to irritation caused by smoke.

Staff at Cosme e Damiao were not authorized to say how many children they had attended since the fires escalated, and did not respond to requests for comment.

But volunteers and locals said the lines grew much longer about a month ago, when smoke began choking the city streets.

“The city was so filled with smoke you did not know if you should keep the windows open to maybe get some fresh air, or close them to stop more smoke from getting in,” said Sara Albino, a nursing student who volunteers at the hospital.

At her worst, Albino’s 20-month-old daughter had to use a nebulizer five times a day, which she has at home.

Eye drops had to be applied constantly to ease the burning sensation in the child’s eyes, her mother said. 

“Her eyes would not stop tearing up … they were almost glued shut; it was like conjunctivitis,” she said.

Urban fires

According to the World Health Organization, fires in the Amazon pose a risk to health including from respiratory diseases, especially in children.

But not all fires affecting Porto Velho are far away in the jungle, as they have become a cheap way to clear vegetation from urban areas for construction purposes, according to residents.

Last week, the city’s airport had to shut down after smoke from an urban fire got out of control. The vegetation on the roadsides leading to the airport was burned to a crisp.

The fires in Brazil’s sprawling Amazon rainforest have receded slightly since Bolsonaro sent in the military to help battle the blazes last week.

Meanwhile, families do what they can at home.

“I bought a humidifier … we keep it in my granddaughter’s room,” said Raimundo dos Santos, 71, who was selling water to people waiting in line at a Porto Velho health center.

The machine, which increases moisture in the air, has helped his eight-year-old granddaughter breathe. But the rest of the family is still struggling.

“I myself have already been to the hospital since the fires started,” dos Santos said, adding that he was treated for smoke inhalation.

…

Few in the Bahamas will be able to sleep tonight with Hurricane Dorian stalled over Grand Bahama Island, pounding it overnight with fierce winds and massive rainfall.

Prime Minister Hubert Minnis has confirmed at least five deaths on the Bahamas’ Abaco Island, calling the destruction in the northern Bahamas “unprecedented and extensive.”

Dorian is the strongest Atlantic hurricane to strike land in 84 years and the worst ever to hit the Bahamas.

“The images and videos we are seeing are heartbreaking,” he said at a news conference in Nassau. “Many homes, businesses, and other buildings have been completely or partially destroyed. There is an extraordinary amount of flooding and damage to infrastructure.”

Minnis says the U.S. National Guard is on Abaco to help with rescues, but the major rescue efforts will have to wait until the storm eases.

“I ask Bahamians and residents on islands not devastated by this monster storm to open their homes to friends, families, and others who may be in need. This is the time for us as Bahamians to show our love, our care, and our compassion for our fellow brothers and sisters.”

Dorian is a Category 4 hurricane with top sustained winds downgraded slightly late Monday to 225 kilometers per hour.

Meteorologists say the wind currents high in the atmosphere that dictate the direction a hurricane will move have been completely calm above Dorian, keeping the storm parked over the Bahamas.

But forecasters predict Dorian will remain a Category 4 as drifts “dangerously close” to the east coast of Florida late Tuesday and Georgia and South Carolina coasts Wednesday and Thursday.

Hurricane warnings are posted from just north of Miami to the Florida-Georgia border. Millions from Florida to South Carolina have been ordered to evacuate.

A National Guard spokesman says there has been almost no resistance from people being told they have to get out.

“People do understand that Dorian is nothing to mess around with,” he said.

Even if Dorian does not make landfall on the Atlantic Coast, the storm’s hurricane-force winds extend 56 kilometers to the west. Towns and cities can still expect up to 25 centimeters of rain, life-threatening flash floods, and some tornadoes.

Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, Jared Moskowitz says “Hurricane Dorian is the strongest storm to ever threaten the state of Florida on the East Coast. No matter what path this storm takes, our state will be impacted.

Forecasters predict Dorian will remain a hurricane as it moves up the Atlantic seaboard this week. Forecast maps show the storm reaching an area off Nova Scotia, Canada by Saturday.

…