Month: July 2017

Dead Fish Prompt Pakistan Drinking Water Tests

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Authorities in Pakistan’s capital are investigating the water in the city’s main reservoir after tons of dead fish were found in a lake on the city’s outskirts. 

 

Police officer Imran Haider says Saturday samples of water and dead fish from Rawal Lake have been collected and sent for forensic testing after a complaint received from the capital’s fisheries department.

 

According to Haider, Mohammad Sadiq Buzdar of the fisheries department said there has been an increasing number of dead fish in the lake since monsoon rains began three days earlier. 

 

Police and the fisheries department have not yet issued any alert regarding the situation.

 

Rawal Dam is one of two that enable water reservoir lakes for the capital.
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Crowdsourcing App Helps Blind Find Their Bus Stop

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Imagine being lost and unable to find the nearest bus stop.

Now imagine looking for that same bus stop as a person who is blind.

“If there are no sighted people available to guide you,” said Luiza Aguiar, executive director of Perkins Solution. “You are out of luck.”

Someone with blindness typically relies on a smartphone’s voiceover and GPS functions to help them get around, but there’s a big catch: Devices with GPS usually get people within 30 feet of their final destination.

“But that last 30 feet, when you are blind, is the last 30 feet of frustration, because you can’t get to your precise goal,” Aguiar said.

Crowdsourcing the solution

To address the problem, Perkins Solutions, a division of the Boston-based Perkins School for the Blind, has built a technological solution, the BlindWays app, which Aguiar recently showed off at the New York Times’ “Cities for Tomorrow” conference. The iPhone app is assisting the blind and visually impaired in Boston, guiding them to the nearest bus stop.

Crucial to the app’s usefulness is help from the sighted. They are invited to also download the app and become contributors, reporting landmarks near a transit stop — a fire hydrant, a bench, a tree.

The landmarks offer tactile clues for the blind user. For example, they can include specific descriptions such as “thick metal pole” or “thin square pole.”

Through the public crowdsourcing, contributors have provided these sorts of clues for 5,200 of Boston’s 7,800 bus stops.

Expanding to other cities

The app’s creators want to replicate their efforts in other cities with Los Angeles and San Francisco governments having expressed interest, Aguiar said.

The app gives back a degree of independence and autonomy to blind users. 

“Not having to rely on, you know, more segregated types of transportation, that’s really what visually impaired people want,” Aguiar said.

BlindWays’ crowdsourcing model is one that Aguiar believes will be part of a larger trend in technologies that help the blind and visually impaired, especially since almost everyone has a smartphone these days.

“We’re all getting more and more used to living in a mobile world and therefore, we could contribute anywhere and anytime to help a colleague or somebody in our community,” Aguiar said. “It’s a powerful model for us, I think we’re going to see more.”
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Uber, Lyft Bankrupting Cab Drivers and Their Lenders

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Ride-hailing apps such as Uber and Lyft have been so disruptive to New York City’s taxi industry, they are causing lenders to fail.

 

Three New York-based credit unions that specialized in loaning money against taxi cab medallions, the hard-to-get licenses that allow the city’s traditional cab fleet to operate, have been placed into conservatorship as the value of those medallions has plummeted.

 

Just three years ago, cab owners and investors were paying as much as $1.3 million for a medallion. Now they are worth less than half that, and some medallion owners owe more on their loans than the medallions are worth.

Like subprime loans

 

“You’ve got borrowers who are under water. This is just like the subprime loan crisis,” said Keith Leggett, a credit union analyst and former senior economist at the American Bankers Association.

LOMTO Federal Credit Union, which was founded by taxi drivers in 1936 for mutual assistance, was placed into conservatorship by the National Credit Union Administration on June 26 “because of unsafe and unsound practices.”

 

New York City has the nation’s largest taxi industry, with more than 13,000 medallions.

Value went up, then down

 

Marcelino Hervias bought his medallion in 1990 for about $120,000 and thought its value would hit $2 million by the time he was ready to retire.

 

Instead, the 58-year-old said he owes $541,000 and is driving 12 to 16 hours a day to make ends meet.

While some medallions are held by large owners with fleets, owning a single medallion was long seen as a ticket to the middle class for immigrants like Hervias, who is from Peru.

 

Many of them now owe more on their medallion loans than they originally paid for the medallions because they used their equity in the medallion for a home, a child’s education or other expenses.

 

Other medallion owners tell similar stories.

 

Constant Granvil bought his medallion for $102,000 in 1987 and said he now owes more than $300,000 to his lender. He could have sold the medallion for two or three times that a few years ago, “but I said no, I’m not going to sell it,” said Granvil, who is 76. “And then I got caught.”

 

The value of Granvil’s medallion is hard to pinpoint because 2017 sale prices have varied from the $200,000s to the $500,000s depending on whether lenders are willing to finance the purchase. 

 

Meanwhile, Granvil, who no longer drives because of poor health and uses a broker to hire a driver, said he is facing threats from the lender, Melrose Credit Union, to foreclose on not just his medallion, but also his house.

Level playing field

Supporters of the yellow cab industry have sued and pushed for city legislation to try to level the playing field between taxis and ride-hailing apps, which they say enjoy advantages like not paying a public transportation improvement surcharge that’s levied on yellow cabs and not having to outfit a percentage of cars with disabled-access features.

 

City Council member Ydanis Rodriguez, who chairs the council’s transportation committee, called this week for a panel to investigate the fall in medallion values. 

 

According to a Morgan Stanley report, there were 11.1 million yellow cab trips in the city in April 2016, compared with 4.7 million Uber trips and 750,000 Lyft trips. The 11.1 million taxi rides were 9 percent fewer than the April 2015 number.

 

Some observers believe that the yellow cab’s market share will continue to shrink and that the value of a medallion won’t recover.

 

“This is a commodity that has been fundamentally disrupted,” said Leggett, who has written about medallion loans in his online newsletter Credit Union Watch. “I don’t see the value of the medallions getting close to what they were.”
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One More Republican Defection Would Doom Senate Health Care Bill

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President Donald Trump turned up the heat Friday on fellow Republicans in the U.S. Senate to pass a bill dismantling the Obamacare law, but with their retooled health care plan drawing fire within the party even one more defection would doom it.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has planned for a vote next week on revised legislation, unveiled on Thursday, and he has his work cut out for him in the coming days to get the 50 “yes” votes needed for passage. Republicans control the Senate by a 52-48 margin and cannot afford to lose more than two from within their ranks because of united Democratic opposition, but two Republican senators already have declared opposition.

“After all of these years of suffering thru Obamacare, Republican Senators must come through as they have promised,” Trump, who made gutting Obamacare one of his central campaign promises last year, wrote on Twitter from Paris, where he attended Bastille Day celebrations.

The top U.S. doctors’ group, the American Medical Association, on Friday called the new bill inadequate and said more bipartisan collaboration is needed in the months ahead to improve the delivery and financing of health care. Hospital and medical advocacy groups also have criticized the bill.

“The revised bill does not address the key concerns of physicians and patients regarding proposed Medicaid cuts and inadequate subsidies that will result in millions of Americans losing health insurance coverage,” AMA President Dr. David Barbe said, referring to the government insurance program for the poor and disabled.

A major test for McConnell’s legislation expected early next week is an analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which last month forecast that the prior version of the bill would have resulted in 22 million Americans losing insurance over the next decade.

A day after that CBO analysis was issued, McConnell postponed a planned vote on the legislation because of a revolt within his own party, including moderates and hard-line conservatives.

While the bill’s prospects may look precarious, the same could have been said of health care legislation that ultimately was passed by the House of Representatives. Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan called off a vote in March in the face of a rebellion involving the disparate factions of the party, but managed to coax enough lawmakers to back it and engineered narrow approval on May 4.

Vice President Mike Pence sought to shore up support among the nation’s governors at a meeting in Rhode Island, but a key Republican governor, Ohio’s John Kasich, came out strongly against the revised bill, saying its Medicaid cuts were too deep and it does too little to stabilize the insurance market.

Alternative options

If the current Senate legislation collapses, some lawmakers have raised the possibility of seeking bipartisan legislation to fix parts of Obamacare but leaving intact the structure of the Affordable Care Act, Democratic former President Barack Obama’s signature legislative achievement, commonly known as Obamacare. “There are changes that need to be made to the law,” Dick Durbin, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, told MSNBC, citing “a bipartisan appetite to tackle this issue.”

Moderate Susan Collins and conservative Rand Paul already oppose the revised Senate bill. Other Republican senators have either expressed concern or remained noncommittal, including Rob Portman, Mike Lee, Shelley Moore Capito, John McCain, Dean Heller, John Hoeven, Lisa Murkowski, Jeff Flake, Ben Sasse, Cory Gardner, Todd Young and Thom Tillis. Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy floated an alternative plan.

The new version was crafted to satisfy the Republican Party’s various elements, including moderates worried about Americans who would be left without medical coverage and hard-line conservatives who demand less government regulation of health insurance.

Insurance groups balk

A provision championed by Republican Senator Ted Cruz and aimed at attracting conservatives would let insurers sell cheap, bare-bones insurance policies that would not have to cover broad benefits mandated under Obamacare.

But two major health insurance groups, America’s Health Insurance Plans and the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, called on McConnell to drop the Cruz proposal, saying it would undermine protections for pre-existing medical conditions, raise insurance premiums and destabilize the individual insurance market.

The bill retained certain Obamacare taxes on the wealthy that the earlier version would have eliminated, a step moderates could embrace. But it kept the core of the earlier bill, including ending the expansion of Medicaid that was instrumental in enabling Obamacare to expand coverage to 20 million people, and restructuring that social safety-net program.

John Thune, a member of the Senate Republican leadership, said in order to complete work on the bill by the end of next week, Senate leaders would have to try to formally begin debate Tuesday or Wednesday, a move that requires a majority vote.
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Ick-free and Ready for Dip: Portland Touts Revived River

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Portland is well-known as a tree-hugging, outdoorsy city, but the river that powers through its downtown has never been part of that green reputation.  

 

For decades, residents have been repulsed by the idea of swimming in the Willamette River because of weekly sewage overflows that created a bacterial stew.

 

Now, the recent completion of a $1.4 billion sewage pipe has flushed those worries — and the river once shunned by swimmers is enjoying a rapid renaissance.

The city has partnered with a civic group called the Human Access Project to entice residents into the Willamette this summer with a roster of public swimming events and a flood of announcements that the river, finally, is safe for human use. The campaign is aimed at reversing the impact of decades of public health warnings in an eco-savvy city with a hard-earned green reputation.

The push mirrors efforts to revive ailing rivers in other U.S. cities, from the Charles River in Boston — where occasional city-sanctioned swimming started in 2013 — to the concrete-lined Los Angeles River, where efforts have been underway in recent years to reverse decades of environmental damage along an 11-mile (18-kilometer) stretch.

City’s largest public space

 

In Portland, the movement has clearly found its moment.

 

The river is the city’s largest public space, but less than 5 percent of the city’s footprint has access to the waterfront, said Willie Levenson, who heads the Human Access Project and is working closely with Portland to expand swimming options.

 

Beaches in other communities along the river attract crowds, but swimmers in downtown Portland have nowhere to dive in despite increasing demand. Since the completion of the sewage control project in 2011, swimmers have been congregating on a floating esplanade for bikers and runners and sneaking onto city docks reserved for fire boats.

 

“We cannot pretend that swimming isn’t happening in downtown Portland anymore. It’s a livability issue, and Portland cares about livability,” Levenson said. “It’s time for our community to stop making jokes about our river and start digging in and looking to make a difference.”

Mayor a willing partner

The Human Access Project has been working for several years to generate interest in the Willamette and has found a willing partner in new Mayor Ted Wheeler.

This week, a new beach with lifeguards and safety ropes opened on the city’s south waterfront, within walking distance of hipster-friendly cafes and shops.

An inner tube river parade planned by the Human Access Project for this weekend is expected to attract several thousand participants, and members of a river swim group cross the Willamette several times a week in fluorescent green swim caps bearing the name River Huggers.

 

 Wheeler, himself a swimmer, laid out a multipoint plan for increasing access to the river earlier this year and plans to swim the river later this month with 500 residents in the inaugural “mayoral swim.” The city hopes to open two more beaches in coming years, install floating docks along the riverbank and place public restrooms, picnic benches, umbrellas and showers on site.

In a recent state-of-the-city address, Wheeler even spoke of one day eliminating Interstate 5 where it snakes along the Willamette’s east bank to improve river access.

 

“We have a chance to reshape the face of our city,” he said. “I also believe we have a chance to reshape our spirit.”

Warnings are now few, fair between

 Portland’s relationship with the Willamette River hasn’t always been easy to navigate.

 

For decades, the river was considered a watery highway, and industrial pollution severely contaminated its waters. This winter, after a 16-year wait, federal environmental officials released a plan to clean a 10-mile (16-kilometer) stretch near its confluence with the Columbia River in a project that will take decades of work and billions of dollars.

But in the heart of Portland, the primary problem has been human excrement. Residents grew accustomed to seeing near-weekly warnings about water quality during the winter rainy season, where even one-tenth of an inch (2.5 millimeters) of rain could trigger overflows.

Now, the city issues just a handful of warnings in winter and none during the peak swimming months of July and August, said Diane Dulken, spokeswoman for Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services. Testing at sites where people are already using the river show the water is safe, she added.

“We are really making a push to publicize our weekly testing because there is absolutely still a public perception out there, ‘I will not go in the river.’”

Swimmer takes a chance

On a recent blazing afternoon, Portland resident Alex Johnson was ready to take the city at its word.

 

The 24-year-old swim teacher and lifeguard began diving into the Willamette with the River Huggers swim group this month.

 

On this day, he joined 30 others as they swam from the Hawthorne Bridge to the Morrison Bridge — through Portland’s bustling business district — and back in the 70-degree (21 Celsius) water. Teenagers lounged like harbor seals on a nearby dock and jet skis zipped by as the swimmers completed the more than half-mile (0.8-kilometer) journey.

“I’ve heard stories that it’s pretty polluted. It tastes a little funny, but it is river water,” Johnson said. “It’s a huge resource, and we don’t take advantage of it — and it feels great.”

 
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‘Live Aid’ Concert for Ethiopia Marked Use of Celebrity in Responding to World Crisis

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“Don’t go to the pub tonight,” Irish pop musician Bob Geldof pleaded in the months leading up to Live Aid, the world’s biggest concert that took place on two continents, included 72 rock bands, and raised an estimated $125 million to feed starving Ethiopians caught in a historically severe famine.

“Please, stay in and give us the money,” Geldof said 32 years ago. “There are people dying now, so give me the money.”

The pictures of skeletal and dazed, malnourished children gathering in Ethiopian camps set up by aid agencies were alarming. In a 1984 report, BBC broadcaster Michael Buerk described the scene as “the closest thing to hell on Earth.”

​Geldof went to see for himself. In 1984, he organized “Band Aid,” writing and recording the single “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” and ended up raising about $10 million in famine relief.

The song also became a hit in the United States, prompting “We Are the World,” a song written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Ritchie.

Inspired by the success of Band Aid and with no end in sight to the famine, Geldof decided to expand the project, coming up with a total rethink on charitable giving.

Why not, he asked himself, turn to his circle of wealthy rock ‘n’ roll pop stars to perform in a worldwide fundraising concert?

​It was the 1980s; it was the era of cable music channel MTV; digital entertainment didn’t exist. Given all that, Geldof’s vision was astoundingly ambitious — in fact, seemingly impossible.

The event was held on July 13, 1985, simultaneously in London’s Wembley Stadium and Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium, raising more than $104 million that day. According to Billboard, an unprecedented 1.9 billion people watched the event live on television. Among the acts: Queen, Led Zeppelin, The Who, David Bowie, Madonna, Phil Collins, Sting, U2, Dire Straits, The Cars. The list goes on and on.

​Aftermath

The emotional high of Live Aid — its newness, its success in raising so much money to help the starving in Ethiopia — did not come without criticism.

Several reports, including an investigation by Spin magazine and The Daily Mail newspaper, claimed some of the money intended to feed the hungry ended up in the hands of Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam.

Geldof denied all the accounts.

“Produce one shred of evidence, one iota of evidence, and I promise you I will professionally investigate it,” Geldof is quoted in the Mail report. “I will sue the Ethiopian government, who were the rebels at the time, if there is any money missing, for that money back now.”

 
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White House: Budget Deficit to Spike to $702B

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The White House said Friday that worsening tax revenues would cause the budget deficit to jump to $702 billion this year. That’s a $99 billion spike from what was predicted less than two months ago.

The report from the Office of Management and Budget came on the heels of a rival Congressional Budget Office analysis that scuttled White House claims that its May budget, if implemented to the letter, would balance the federal ledger within 10 years. The OMB report doesn’t repeat that claim and instead provides just two years of updated projections.

The White House budget office also said the deficit for the 2018 budget year that starts on October 1 would increase by $149 billion, to $589 billion. But lawmakers are already working on spending bills that promise to boost that number even higher by adding to President Donald Trump’s Pentagon proposal and ignoring many of his cuts to domestic programs.

Last year’s deficit registered $585 billion.

The White House kept the report to a bare-bones minimum and cast blame on “the failed policies of the previous administration.”

“The rising near-term deficits underscore the critical need to restore fiscal discipline to the nation’s finances,” said White House budget director Mick Mulvaney. “Our nation must make substantial changes to the policies and spending priorities of the previous administration if our citizens are to be safe and prosperous in the future.”

In late May, Trump released a budget plan proposing jarring cuts to domestic programs and promising to balance the budget within a decade. But the CBO said Trump relied on rosy predictions of economic growth to promise a slight surplus in 2027.

Trump’s budget left Social Security retirement benefits and Medicare alone, though House Republicans are poised next week to again propose cutting Medicare as they unveil their nonbinding budget outline.

Trump’s budget predicted that the U.S. economy would soon ramp up to annual growth in gross domestic product of 3 percent; CBO’s long-term projections predict annual GDP growth averaging 1.9 percent.
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US Lawmaker Calls for Hearing on Amazon’s Whole Foods Deal

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The top Democrat on the U.S. House of Representatives’ antitrust subcommittee has voiced concerns about Amazon.com Inc.’s $13.7 billion plan to buy Whole Foods Market Inc and is pushing for a hearing to look into the deal’s potential impact on consumers.

The deal announced in June marks the biggest acquisition for the world’s largest online retailer. Amazon has not said what it will do with Whole Foods’ stores and other assets, but analysts and investors worry the move could upend the landscape for grocers, food delivery services and meal-kit companies.

U.S. Representative David Cicilline requested the hearing on Thursday in a letter to the chair of the House Judiciary Committee and the subcommittee chairman. Shares of Amazon were up 0.3 percent in mid-morning trading on Friday.

“Amazon’s proposed purchase of Whole Foods could impact neighborhood grocery stores and hardworking consumers across America,” Cicilline said in a statement. “Congress has a responsibility to fully scrutinize this merger before it goes ahead.”

The deal must be approved by U.S. antitrust enforcers, in this case most likely the Federal Trade Commission. Congress plays no formal role in that process but hearings are often used to highlight the possible impact of deals on consumers. The hearing is unlikely to happen without Republican support.

Amazon and Whole Foods declined to comment.

Also this week, hedge fund manager Douglas Kass from Seabreeze Partners Management Inc. said he was shorting shares of the retailer because of concern about Amazon in Washington.

Kass said he had heard rumblings on Capitol Hill regarding concern about Amazon’s size and clout but did not specify what the concerns were.

“I am shorting Amazon today because I have learned that there are currently early discussions and due diligence being considered in the legislative chambers in Washington, D.C.,” he wrote in a note to investors late on Wednesday. “If I am correct, word of this could lower Amazon’s shares by 10 percent overnight.”

Kass said in emailed comments to Reuters on Friday that he has what he called a “core” short position in Amazon, meaning a sizeable bet based on a long-term outlook.

“This has the potential of being the biggest business news story of [the] year,” he said. Kass declined to comment when asked for more details about pressure from Capitol Hill.

Kass is followed for his bets on declines in companies’ share prices. He shorted Marvel Entertainment in 1992 when its shares were in the high $60s, and the company went bankrupt 1-1/2 years later.

He also bet against big U.S. banks leading into the 2007-2009 financial crisis, shorting Bank of America, MGIC, Citigroup and several other financials that ultimately averaged a 98 percent price decline by the time they bottomed in 2009.

While antitrust experts have said they expect Amazon’s bid to win regulatory approval, some critics argue the deal should be blocked because it gives the retailer a big head start towards domination of online grocery delivery.

They argue the Whole Foods acquisition will give Amazon an unfair advantage over traditional grocers and new players that might emerge in the market, potentially grounds for the deal to be blocked for antitrust reasons.
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Tick-Tock: Christopher Nolan on the Rhythm of ‘Dunkirk’

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A ticking sound runs throughout “Dunkirk” like an omnipresent reminder that time is running out for the 340,000 British and Allied soldiers marooned on the French beach and surrounded by Germans. It’s a tick-tock effect woven into the score that originated, fittingly, from Christopher Nolan’s own stopwatch.

Nolan is cinema’s great watchmaker: a filmmaker of Swiss precision capable of bending and shaping time to suit his grandiose, metronomed movies. Having already reversed time (“Memento”) and warped its fabric (“Interstellar”), Nolan set out to accomplish something different with “Dunkirk,” a movie that crosscuts three story lines (on land, sea and sky) from three different chronologies (one week, one day, one hour) during the famous evacuation. 

“I wanted to experiment with a new rhythm,” said Nolan in a recent interview. “What I wanted to do was take what I call the snowballing effect of the third act of my other films, where parallel story lines start to be more than the sum of their parts, and I wanted to try to make the entire film that way, and strip the film of conventional theatrics.”

When “Dunkirk” hits theaters next Friday, audiences will find a landmark war film but not a traditional one. Shot almost entirely with 70mm IMAX cameras from Nolan’s atypically spare 76-page script, “Dunkirk” is an often wordless, almost purely cinematic experience of dogfights in the air and close scrapes at sea. It’s an all-out assault — of tracking shots and montage — by one of the movies’ most maximal filmmakers. 

“I loved it,” said Nolan of shooting at Dunkirk, where much of the production took place. “The reality of being there, of being in nature, frankly, it frees you up as a filmmaker to just use your eyes, use your ears, and absorb it and try to capture what speaks to you.”

For anyone even vaguely familiar with today’s Hollywood, it’s obvious enough that a silent-movie-inspired epic about the 1940 evacuation of Dunkirk — a seminal moment of retreat and survival for the British but an event not as dearly remembered outside the U.K. — isn’t your standard summer popcorn fare. But Nolan, the “Dark Knight” director, enjoys a rarified position in the industry, and the story of Dunkirk is one he’s wanted to tell since a dramatic sailing excursion across the English Channel in the ’90s .

“We’ve been talking about Dunkirk as a story for a very long time,” said Emma Thomas, Nolan’s wife and producer. “After Interstellar,' we were thinking about what we might do next and I think I reminded him of it and pointed him in the direction of a few books on the subject. He had a number of things that he was entertaining but then he came back to me and said,I think I see a way into this story.”‘

Nolan acknowledges he feels “a massive responsibility” to use his stature to make something unique. Having grown up in awe of big, bold films like “Lawrence of Arabia” and “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Nolan believes that “cinema is working at its absolute best is when it’s a grand-scale film that really works and does something you haven’t seen before. That for me is always the brass ring.”

“Dunkirk” is certainly that, especially when imposingly projected on IMAX screens. But such scale today is usually reserved only for supposedly more bankable franchise films. Such a path no longer holds much interest for Nolan. Though the 46-year-old director grew up a major “Star Wars” devotee, directing one doesn’t interest him. 

“Um, I’m very happy to go watch them,” he said, laughing. “The cinematic landscape has changed since I started making Batman films. When we were doing the `Dark Knight’ trilogy, I think it was easier for a filmmaker in the position I was in to express a more personal vision of what they wanted to do in a franchise property.”

“Dunkirk” might not be an American story, but, Nolan said, “It needed to be made with an American studio budget.” One of the first things he did to prepare was borrow Steven Spielberg’s personal print of “Saving Private Ryan.”   

“You look at the horror that’s presented in that film, and as a filmmaker you go: OK, we don’t want to chase that in any way because he’s done it definitively. You also say to yourself: The tension that I’m feeling watching Saving Private Ryan' is not the tension I want forDunkirk.’ You say: We need this story to be about survival and suspense. What defines suspense is you can’t take your eyes off the screen. But what horror gives you is an aversion. You want to look away.”

Instead, Nolan’s model for sustained suspense was Henri-Georges Clouzet’s “Wages of Fear,” in which four penniless men drive trucks loaded with nitroglycerin through the mountains. George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road,” a virtually perpetual car chase, also strengthened his resolve. “I was in the middle of writing the script when I saw that film and I took confidence from it,” said Nolan. “It’s not dissimilar in terms of the modulation I’m talking about.”

Other things went into making what Nolan called, “a relentlessly suspenseful experience.” He used a Shepard tone, in which ascending notes are subtly cycled to give the impression of a never-ending rise in pitch. He inserted the 50 pound-plus IMAX camera into the cockpit of a fighter plane, and controlled the camera from the ground.

“We just had the idea that we would put cameras where people wouldn’t normally put them,” said cinematographer Hoyt van Hoytema. “Chris always reminds me of some kind of a weird Renaissance genius. He knows so many things so much better than the people who are supposed to know better. He knows everything about film technology, lab technology. He would know your lenses better than you do.”

Viewers may find themselves breathless from the heart-stopping opening sequence only to find that it essentially doesn’t abate until the end credits. The clock — Nolan’s watch — keeps ticking.

“The films I’ve made, I’ve tried to grab ahold of what in most films is a subtlety,” says Nolan of time, which he calls an underappreciated element of the medium. “I’ve tried to take it and use it for the tool that it is.”

And in “Dunkirk,” time flies.
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WHO Warns of Cholera Risk at Haj, Praises Saudi Preparedness

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A cholera epidemic in Yemen, which has infected more than 332,000 people, could spread during the annual haj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia in September, although Saudi authorities are well prepared, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday.

The pilgrimage draws 2-4 million Muslims every year, including 1.5-2 million foreigners, raising the risk from diseases such as dengue, yellow fever, Zika virus and meningococcal disease as well as cholera, the WHO said.

“The current highly spreading outbreak of cholera in Yemen, as well as in some African countries, may represent a serious risk to all pilgrims during the (haj) days and even after returning to their countries,” a WHO bulletin said.

Dominique Legros, a WHO cholera expert, said Saudi Arabia had not had a cholera outbreak in many years thanks to reinforced surveillance and rapid tests to detect cases early.

“Don’t forget that today we are speaking of Yemen but they are receiving pilgrims from a lot of endemic countries, and they managed not to have an outbreak, essentially by making sure that living conditions, access to water in particular, hygienic conditions, are in place,” he told a regular U.N. briefing.

“They are well-prepared in my view.”

The incubation period of the disease, which spreads through ingestion of fecal matter and causes acute watery diarrhea, is a matter of hours. Once symptoms start, cholera can kill within hours if the patient does not get treatment.

But people with symptoms are just the tip of the iceberg because 80 percent of patients show no symptoms, Legros said.

“That’s why we advise countries against airport screening for patients. The Saudis don’t do that. It’s useless, technically speaking.”

The United Nations has blamed the warring sides in Yemen and their international allies, including Saudi Arabia, for fueling the 11-week cholera outbreak, driving millions of people closer to famine, and for hindering aid access.

The WHO has rolled out an emergency treatment program, based on the vestiges of Yemen’s shattered health system, to try and catch new cases early and stop the explosive spread of the disease.

The number of new cases has continued to grow by about 6,000 per day, but the number of deaths appears to have slowed dramatically, according to Reuters analysis of WHO data.

Death rates have slumped from 20-40 in recent weeks to an average of nine per day over the past six days.
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Should Police Be Allowed to Shame Suspects on Facebook?

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A driver mows down six mailboxes, slurs her words and tells police she has a lizard in her bra. Throw in a wisecracking police officer, and what do you get? A flippant post on Facebook, along with photos of the woman, and of course, her lizard.

Not everyone is amused.

Police departments are increasingly using Facebook to inform the community about what they’re doing and who they’re arresting. Some add a little humor to the mix. But civil rights advocates say posting mugshots and written, pejorative descriptions of suspects amounts to public shaming of people who have not yet been convicted.

“It makes them the butt of a joke on what for many people is probably their worst day,” said Arisha Hatch, campaign director of Color of Change, a civil rights advocacy organization that recently got Philadelphia police to stop posting mugshots on its Special Operations Facebook page.

“The impact of having a mugshot posted on social media for all to see can be incredibly damaging for folks that are parents, for folks that have jobs, for folks that have lives they have to come back to,” she said.

In Taunton, a city of 57,000 about 40 miles south of Boston, the police department’s post about the woman with a lizard in her bra was shared around Facebook and got heavy news coverage.

Lt. Paul Roderick wrote that Amy Rebello-McCarthy hit mailboxes, sending some airborne, before her car left the road, tore up a lawn and came to rest among trees. When police arrived, she asked them to call a tow truck so she and a male companion “could be on their way,” Roderick wrote.

“Sorry Amy, we can’t move the car right now. If we do, what will you use to hold yourself up?” he wrote.

Roderick described how she told police she had a lizard.

“Where does one hold a Bearded Dragon Lizard while driving you ask? Answer: In their brassiere of course!!”

Many commenters praised police. “Great job [getting drunks off the road and entertaining us],” one woman wrote.

But others said the tone was inappropriate.

“Hey Taunton Police Department … Your holier than thou attitude is part of the reason why people don’t like/don’t respect police,” one man wrote.

Rebello-McCarthy, who has pleaded not guilty to drunken driving and other charges, did not respond to attempts for comment.

Police have traditionally made mugshots and details on suspects available to journalists for publication. But journalists, for the most part, selectively choose to write stories and use mugshots based on the severity or unusual nature of the crime. Many crimes don’t get any coverage.

Roderick said everything he wrote in the posting about Rebello-McCarthy was true.

“I guess I don’t see a problem with it,” he said in an interview.

“Can you go too far? I guess you could. I don’t think I did. I’m just trying to report what’s happening.”

Still, Roderick did get a mild reprimand from the police chief. “He basically said, `Tone it down a little bit,”‘ Roderick said.

Jaleel Bussey, 24, of Philadelphia, said he nearly got kicked out of a cosmetology school when instructors saw his mugshot on Facebook. Bussey was charged in 2016 after drugs were found during a police search of a house he was visiting to style a client’s hair. Most of the charges were dismissed before trial; he was acquitted of the final charge, according to the Philadelphia public defender’s office.

Bussey said he was allowed to continue school after explaining that he did not have any drugs and that the charges had been dropped. He felt humiliated, he said, when his family and teachers saw his mugshot.

“I was angry at the time,” he said. “I was found not guilty. They’re just putting people’s faces up there like it’s OK.”

In Marietta, Georgia, police poked fun at a man suspected of shoplifting from a pawn shop.

“Sir, you must have forgot that you gave the clerk your driver’s license with ALL of your personal information as well as providing him with your fingerprint when completing the pawn ticket before you stole from him which, by the way was also all on camera. … When you make it this easy it takes all the fun out of chasing bad guys!” police wrote in December.

In some communities, posting mugshots and glib write-ups has created a backlash.

In South Burlington, Vermont, Police Chief Trevor Whipple was in favor of posting mugshots at first, but then he started noticing disparaging comments about everything from suspects’ hairstyles to their intelligence. The department stopped the practice after about a year.

“Do we want to use our Facebook page to shame people?” Whipple said. “Legally, there’s no problem — all mugshots are public — but the question became, is this what we want to do?”
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Germany Checking Daimler Cars Amid Diesel Emissions Probe

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The German Transport Ministry says the country’s motor transport authority will examine cars made by Daimler amid an investigation into suspected manipulation of diesel emissions controls.

Daimler said in May that prosecutors would search several offices in Germany and it was cooperating with the probe.

Company representatives met with a Transport Ministry commission Thursday following a report by the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, citing a search warrant, that over a million vehicles may have had engines whose software manipulated emissions levels. Neither the company nor prosecutors commented on that detail.

Ministry spokesman Ingo Strater said Friday the company “set out its position that Daimler is behaving in accordance with the law.”

Strater said the Federal Motor Transport Authority is examining Daimler cars, as it has in the past other manufacturers’ vehicles.
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Turkish Tech Startups Head to Silicon Valley

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For tech entrepreneurs in Turkey, the unstable situation after last year’s coup attempt has made it harder to get the word out about the country’s tech scene and to solicit outside investment. Some entrepreneurs recently traveled to the United States for Etohum San Francisco, an event bridging the Turkish startup community with Silicon Valley. VOA’s Michelle Quinn reports.
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Spanish Judge Orders Salvador Dali’s Body Exhumed

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A Spanish court has given permission for the remains of famed surrealist painter Salvador Dali to be exhumed as part of a paternity test.

The judge in Catalonia ruled the body will be dug up July 20.

A woman claims Dali was her father. She has given a saliva sample that will be used to compare her DNA with that of Dali’s.

Maria Pilar Abel, 61, alleges her mother and Dali had an affair in the fishing village where he lived.

Abel said she only wants to be recognized as the artist’s daughter and has no interest in collecting any money.

The Salvador Dali Foundation is appealing the exhumation order.

Dali, who died in 1989, is the world’s most renown surrealist painter. His picture melting watches, The Persistence of Memory, is an icon of surrealism.

He is also known for a long pencil-thin moustache and eccentric behavior.
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Spacecraft Reveals Beauty of Solar System’s Biggest Storm

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 A NASA spacecraft circling Jupiter is revealing the up-close beauty of our solar system’s biggest planetary storm.

Juno flew directly over Jupiter’s Great Red Spot on Monday, passing an amazingly close 5,600 miles (9,000 kilometers) above the monster storm. The images snapped by JunoCam were beamed back Tuesday and posted online Wednesday. Then members of the public — so-called citizen scientists — were encouraged to enhance the raw images.

 

Swirling clouds are clearly visible in the 10,000-mile-wide (16,000-kilometer-wide) storm, which is big enough to swallow Earth and has been around for centuries.

​“For hundreds of years scientists have been observing, wondering and theorizing about Jupiter’s Great Red Spot,” said lead researcher Scott Bolton of the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. “Now we have the best pictures ever of this iconic storm.”

Information was still arriving Thursday from Juno’s science instruments. Bolton said it will take time to analyze everything to shed “new light on the past, present and future of the Great Red Spot.”

 

Juno’s next close encounter with the giant gas planet will be in September. The Great Red Spot won’t be in Juno’s scopes then, however.

Launched in 2011, Juno arrived at Jupiter last July. It is only the second spacecraft to orbit the solar system’s largest planet, but is passing much closer than NASA’s Galileo did from 1995 through 2003.

 
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Radio Flyer Marks 100 Years of Wagon Production

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Radio Flyer is rolling its largest “little” red wagon into its hometown of Chicago in celebration of the company’s 100-year anniversary.

Radio Flyer’s gargantuan wagon was the centerpiece for the company’s anniversary event Thursday in the city’s downtown area, the Chicago Tribune  reported. The wagon was created 20 years ago for the brand’s 80th anniversary.

 

Attendees of the event had the opportunity to take a photo with the large wagon and participate in free giveaways. Radio Flyer also will donate 2,000 wagons to children’s hospitals across the country in partnership with Starlight Children’s Foundation.

According to Guinness World Records, the wagon, which is 27 feet (8.23 meters) long and weighs over 15,000 pounds (6803.96 kilograms), is the world’s largest toy wagon. It was inspired by a 1930s statue featured in the World’s Fair in Chicago.

Radio Flyer has locations around the world, but Robert Pasin, chief wagon officer of Radio Flyer, said Chicago is still the company’s home.

“Chicago has so much to do with our heritage and story,” Pasin said. “It’s truly a part of the brand’s DNA.”

The company has evolved since its establishment in 1917 and now offers customizable wagons made of various materials and other products, including tricycles, bicycles and scooters.
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BASF Unveils New Mosquito Net in Battle Against Malaria

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A new mosquito net made by German chemicals company BASF has been given an interim recommendation by the World Health Organization (WHO), containing a new class of insecticide that the company hopes will aid the fight against malaria.

Death rates from malaria have dropped by 60 percent since 2000, according to the WHO, but attempts to end one of the world’s deadliest diseases — which kills around 430,000 people a year — are under threat as mosquitoes become increasingly resistant to measures such as insecticide-treated bed nets and anti-malarial drugs.

BASF’s new net is based on chlorfenapyr, which has been used in agriculture and urban pest control for over two decades, but BASF reworked it to make it effective on mosquito nets and meet targets for the public health market.

It said the net will provide protection for at least three years or 20 washes.

The new Interceptor G2 insecticide-treated net is expected to be available to health ministries and aid organizations beginning toward the end of this year, BASF said.

A WHO spokesman said the Geneva-based organization’s interim recommendation meant it still had to evaluate the net’s public health impact and it was requesting more data from the chemicals company.

BASF is also waiting for the WHO to evaluate another chlorfenapyr product, an indoor spray for walls and ceilings called Sylando 240SC.

“This development breakthrough strengthens my personal belief that we really can be the generation to end malaria for good,” said Egon Weinmueller, head of BASF’s public health business.
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Old Cinemas Become Cultural Centers in Lebanon

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With peeling paint and crumbling plasterwork, an abandoned picture house and its renovation in the northern Lebanese town of Tripoli is more than a dream for Qassem Istanbouli.

The 31-year-old has reopened three such cinemas, two in his home city of Tyre in southern Lebanon, and another in Nabatiyeh, and has transformed them into hubs for film, art and theater.

“When I embarked on this journey, I felt I shared this dream with people in my city who are eager to have a cultural life restored,” said Istanbouli, who shows films by directors such as Woody Allen, Pedro Almodovar, David Lynch and Lars Von Trier.

Istanbouli, who was born in Tyre and studied fine arts and directing at the Lebanese University, initially relied on a bank loan and donations from the public for his projects but now gets financial support from the Lebanese ministry of culture, a Dutch NGO and the United Nations force in Lebanon.

Istanbouli’s dream is also driven by a family connection, his father used to repair cinema projectors, while his grandfather screened movies from Greece and the Palestinian territories, projecting them on a wall.

“This is a way to achieve my father’s dream,” he said.
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Gaza’s Electricity Shortage at Crisis Level

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The electricity supply to Gaza’s 2 million residents has dropped to unprecedented lows, with blackouts lasting for more than 24 hours, the territory’s power distribution company said Thursday, prompting fears of a humanitarian and environmental crisis.

The Palestinian enclave needs at least 400 megawatts of power a day, but only 70 megawatts were available as of late Wednesday, when Gaza’s power plant shut down after fuel shipments from Egypt were interrupted following a militant attack last week.

The Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights said the power cuts have caused a rapid deterioration in basic services, “especially health and environmental services, including water and sewage draining.”

The coastal strip had been experiencing the worst electricity shortage in years, limiting Gazans to about four hours of electricity per day.

​Abbas asks Israel to cut shipments

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas recently asked Israel, the main provider of power to Gaza, to cut shipments as a way of pressuring the Islamic militant group Hamas, which seized power in Gaza a decade ago.

Several neighborhoods were without electricity for more than 24 hours Thursday.

Late Thursday, Hamas said 27 Egyptian trucks with 1.5 million liters of diesel entered Gaza for the power plant. It was unclear when operations would resume.

Diesel fuel from neighboring Egypt had kept the station running at half capacity since June 21, but deliveries were interrupted after a deadly attack on Egyptian soldiers last week near the border. Gaza’s power station has low storage capacity, and requires new fuel shipments on an almost daily basis.

Abbas pressures Hamas

Abbas has tried to squeeze Hamas financially in recent months, hoping to force it to cede power. He slashed salaries of his employees there, stopped payments for ex-prisoners and reinstated heavy taxes on the power plant’s fuel.

Palestinians have been split since 2007, with Hamas ruling Gaza and Abbas governing parts of the West Bank. Repeated reconciliation attempts have failed.

The Egyptian diesel shipments were facilitated by Mohammed Dahlan, a former leading figure in Abbas’ Fatah movement who fell out with the Palestinian president in 2010, went into exile and has since forged strong ties with the United Arab Emirates and Egypt.
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Malaria Genome Study Reveals Savvy Parasite

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The malaria parasite owes its devastating success to a finely tuned genome that can survive attacks and evade human immune defenses because it retains only the bare essential genes it needs to thrive, scientists have found.

In a detailed study analyzing more than half the genes in the genome of Plasmodium, the parasite that causes malaria, researchers found that two-thirds of those genes are essential for survival. This is the largest proportion of essential genes found in any organism studied to date, they said.

The scientists discovered that the parasite often disposes of genes that produce proteins that give its presence away to its host’s immune system. This allows malaria to swiftly change its appearance to the human immune system and hence build up resistance to a vaccine, posing problems for the development of effective shots.

“Our study found that below the surface the parasite is more of a Formula 1 race car than a clunky people carrier: The parasite is fine-tuned and retains the absolute essential genes needed for growth,” said Julian Rayner, who co-led this study at Britain’s Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.

Good and bad

He said this discovery, published Thursday in the journal Cell, had both positive and negative implications.

“The bad news is it can easily get rid of the genes behind the targets we are trying to design vaccines for, but the flip side is there are many more essential gene targets for new drugs than we previously thought,” he said.

Malaria kills about half a million people a year, the vast majority of them children and babies in the poorest parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Beyond that, almost half the world’s population is at risk of becoming infected with malaria, and more than 200 million people fall sick with it each year, according to World Health Organization figures.

Despite decades of scientific endeavor, the genetics of Plasmodium parasites have proved tricky to decipher.

This is partly because they are ancient organisms and about half their genes have no similar genes — homologs — in any other organism, Rayner’s team explained, making it difficult for scientists to find clues to their function.

Francisco Javier Gamo, a malaria expert at GlaxoSmithKline, a British drugmaker active in this field of research, said the highest achievement for malaria scientists would be to discover genes that are essential across all of the parasite life cycle stages.

“If we could target those with drugs, it would leave malaria with nowhere to hide,” he said.
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