Month: March 2018

Jason Aldean, Bebe Rexha, Florida Georgia Line Get ACM Slots

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Jason Aldean, Luke Bryan, Miranda Lambert and pop singer Bebe Rexha with Florida Georgia Line will be performing at the Academy of Country Music Awards in April.

The ACMs announced the first round of performers Wednesday, which also included Kelsea Ballerini, Dierks Bentley, Maren Morris and Thomas Rhett.

Rexha and Florida Georgia Line will be performing their hit crossover duet “Meant to Be,” which has been a top hit on Billboard’s Hot Country chart for 14 weeks straight.

The leading nominees this year include Chris Stapleton with eight nominations and Rhett with six nominations.

The 53rd ACM Awards will be broadcast live on CBS from the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas on April 15.
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Indian Architect Wins Prestigious Pritzker Prize

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Architect and educator Balkrishna Doshi, best-known for his innovative work designing low-cost housing, has been awarded the 2018 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the first Indian to win architecture’s highest honor in its 40-year history.

The award was announced Wednesday by Tom Pritzker of the Chicago-based Hyatt Foundation.

Doshi has been an architect, urban planner, and educator for 70 years. The foundation called the 90-year-old’s work “poetic and functional,” and noted his ability to create works that both respect eastern culture and enhance quality of life in India.

Among Doshi’s achievements: the Aranya low-cost housing project in Indore, which accommodates over 80,000 people, many of them poor, through a system of houses, courtyards and internal pathways.

Reached at home in the western city of Ahmedabad, Doshi said his life’s work has been “to empower the have-nots, the people who have nothing.”

The housing itself, he said, can transform how residents see their world. “Now, their life has changed. They feel hopeful,” he said. “They have ownership of something.”

He called the prize an honor both for for himself and for India.

“What I have done for close to the last 60 years, working in rural areas, working in low-cost housing, worrying about India’s future. Now all this comes together and gives me a chance to say “Here we are!” he said.

Doshi was influenced early by two of the great 20th-century architects, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier, and Louis Kahn.

The prize citation noted how their influence “can be seen in the robust forms of concrete which he employed.”

But he grew into his own. “With an understanding and appreciation of the deep traditions of India’s architecture, he united prefabrication and local craft and developed a vocabulary in harmony with the history, culture, local traditions and the changing times of his home country India,” the citation read.

Doshi’s work ranges from the blocky, concrete Life Insurance Corporation Housing buildings in Ahmedabad to the naturalist curves of that city’s Amdavad ni Gufa underground art gallery.

“My work is the story of my life, continuously evolving, changing and searching . searching to take away the role of architecture, and look only at life,” the prize announcement quoted him as saying.

While the work of Pritzker winners are often scattered across the globe, Doshi is known for working almost completely in his homeland, designing buildings for government offices, companies and universities.

Born in 1927 in the city of Pune, Doshi studied architecture in Mumbai and later worked under Le Corbusier, overseeing his projects in the cities of Chandigarh and Ahmedabad. He was the founding director of Ahmedabad’s School of Architecture and Planning, which is now known as CEPT University.

He founded his own practice in 1956, and lives and works in Ahmedabad.

Doshi will be formally awarded the prize in a May ceremony at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto.
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FOMO at SXSW: How to Conquer Fear of Missing Out in Austin

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The South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, starts Friday. It’s grown from a grassroots event to a phenomenon that attracts 400,000 people.

For attendees, it can feel overwhelming. What’s worth your time? Where’s the buzz?

 

The latest AP Travel “Get Outta Here” podcast offers strategies for conquering FOMO (fear of missing out) at SXSW.

 

One approach is to let the nostalgia acts go – the former big-name bands promoting comebacks. Instead, pack your schedule with artists that have their best years ahead of them.

 

And you need a plan. You can’t just wing it. Be ready for long lines. But have some backups. Consider less-crowded venues outside downtown. Film screenings take place at theaters all over, and up-and-coming bands play a lot of shows.
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Repairs Completed on Lowell Observatory’s Pluto Telescope

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An observatory telescope in Arizona used to discover the distant Pluto nearly 90 years ago will reopen for business on Saturday after a year of extensive restoration work.

Nearly every part of Lowell Observatory’s Pluto Discovery Telescope and accompanying dome near Flagstaff has been refurbished, from the trio of lenses to historic wooden shutters that open up to the stars, the Arizona Daily Sun reported.

“It’s a beautiful telescope,” said Ralph Nye, part of the restoration team. “This is the way it should look.”

The team removed, cleaned and reused everything down to the nuts, bolts and screws – almost nothing needed to be replaced, said Peter Rosenthal, who also worked on the telescope.

The observatory said the nearly 90-year-old telescope is working as well and is looking even better than it did when Clyde Tombaugh used the instrument to pick out distant Pluto 88 years ago.

Known as an astrographic camera, the telescope’s three lenses focus light onto a single glass photographic plate.

Each image requires an exposure time of almost an hour, which would have been a chilly experience for Tombaugh on winter nights because the dome’s shutters have to be open to the sky, Rosenthal said.

As a young observatory assistant, Tombaugh took the exposures and then scrutinized the glass negatives using a Zeiss blink comparator. On Feb. 18, 1930, he pinpointed Pluto.

Nye said the repairs came in on time and met the project’s $155,000 budget with a few bucks to spare.
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Cambodia Celebrates Hei Neak Ta Festival

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After Chinese New Year in Cambodia, Cambodians believe powerful spirits ascend to possess the living.
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Non-profit Health Center Cares for Uninsured People

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With the rising cost of healthcare in the U.S., and the growing demand for services by those who can least afford them, two doctors in Clarkston, Georgia, made a commitment to do something about it. Founded five years ago, the non-profit Clarkston Community Health Center wanted to make a difference – by providing free treatments and services for lower-income residents in the city of Clarkston and its surrounding communities. Saleh Damiger from VOA’s Kurdish Service filed this report.
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UK Researchers Building 3D Visualizations of Classic Children’s Books

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Classic children’s books are getting a 21st century upgrade, as British researchers have begun testing a project that would bring 3D versions of children’s stories to life on gaming platforms. VOA’s Elizabeth Cherneff reports.
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Drought-hit Kenyans Find Gold in Tea Trees – But for How Long?

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At Sweet Waters, a village in central Kenya, Veronicah Nyambura stands under the hot sun between two fields. One is full of lush plants – but the other has crops so wilted that their leaves have curled up.

The green land is planted with tea tree, an Australian native that thrives in this semi-arid part of Kenya. Opposite is a field of maize, which suffers in years of poor rains and high temperatures.

“Maize is very disappointing. You plant but you’re never sure whether you’ll harvest anything,” said Nyambura, who has planted a quarter-acre of tea trees.

The 65-year-old said she harvests 900 kg of tea tree branches every six months from that bit of land. When it was planted to maize, she got about 270 kg of grain every nine months, she said.

Many farmers in this part of Laikipia County – like farmers in many parts of the world – cannot afford to buy seeds for alternative crops better suited to drought, so keep planting maize.

But Nyambura and about 800 other small-scale farmers were sold tea tree seedlings on credit by a company called Earthoil that also guaranteed to buy their harvest. Each seedling cost 3.5 Kenyan shillings, or about 3 cents.

Earthoil, which buys the branches for between 17 Kenyan shillings ($0.17) and 19 Kenyan shillings ($0.19) a kilogram, extracts the tea tree oil at its local distillery and exports it to British skin-care company, The Body Shop.

Dairy cows and a TV

To meet the demands of buyers, Martin Thogoto Mwambia, 68, uses mulch – not chemical fertilizers or pesticides – on his 1.75-acre tea tree farm in Ngarariga village, in neighboring Nyeri county.

“I am mulching them with cow-dung and dried leftovers of tea tree,” he said with a smile while rubbing the dirt off his hands.

The farmer said he has reaped a fortune from the crop, which means he does not have to spend his old age working in menial jobs.

“Handling 50,000 Kenyan shillings ($490) and sometimes 100,000 Kenyan shillings ($990) is a miracle to me. Tea tree has given me that privilege,” said Mwambia, who worked as a guard in a local firm before he began growing tea trees.

Prior to tea tree he grew maize – but even in good years he earned far less, he said.

“Sometimes when the drought is at its worst I would harvest a tin (a kilogram) or two,” said Mwambia who is now harvesting an average of 10,000 kgs of tea tree branches annually from his farm.

The proceeds have enabled him to buy two dairy cows, get connected to electricity and buy a television set.

“Life is better for us now. I am happy,” said his wife, Jane Gathigia.

The drought-tolerant tea trees come with the advantage of a ready market, the farmers said.

“Marketing maize is a headache. The prices fluctuate from time to time and farmers end up making losses,” said Alice Wanja, 42, at her quarter-acre tea tree farm at Sweet Waters, about 1.5 km from Nyambura’s home.

“There is nothing like that with tea tree. The buyer is already at the waiting end and the buying price is good,” she said.

Long-term risks

The Laikipia County project came about through a grant from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), administered by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and implemented by a local charity, Kenya Organic Agriculture Network (KOAN), which partnered with Earthoil.

Although projects of this kind guarantee farmers a reliable buyer, they do not necessarily offer security in the longterm since the buyer may go out of business or move elsewhere, warned Tom Nyamache, professor of economics at Turkana University College.

On the flip side, the buyer is also at risk of closing shop if the farmers’ productivity falls or fails completely, he said.

It is important that farmers plant an alternative crop that also can thrive in the changed climate conditions to serve as a fallback should their tea tree ventures fail, he said.

Earthoil’s project manager, Martin Wainaina, said there is such a big demand for tea tree oil that they are making aggressive plans to expand production.

The Body Shop wants 30 tons of oil from the firm each year, but Earthoil can currently only supply 8 tons, he said.

Expanding the pool of farmers is a challenge. The plants have to be grown near the distillery, as tea tree branches are bulky and difficult to transport, he said.

The tea tree thrives in the volcanic soil and high altitudes in this region near Mount Kenya, Wainaina said.

Expanding production to other parts of Kenya with similar arid and semi-arid climates will only be possible through research and investment in more tea tree processing, analysts say.

Nancy Chege, country program manager at GEF-UNDP, Kenya, said scaling up tea tree farming also would depend on continuing to look for new markets, both locally and internationally.

But “most (such) community projects … are usually sustainable because trade goes on even after the project (ends),” she said.

($1 = 101.1700 Kenyan shillings)
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Products Take On Microfiber Pollution, a Laundry Room at a Time

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The fight to keep tiny pollutants from reaching the dinner plate might start in the laundry room.

Innovators are coming up with tools to keep tiny pieces of thread that are discharged with washing machine effluent from reaching marine life. Such “microfibers” are too small to be caught in conventional filters, so they eventually pass through sewage plants, wash out to waterways, and can be eaten or absorbed by marine animals, some later served up as seafood.

So far there are at least four products, with names such as Guppyfriend and Cora Ball, aimed at curbing microfibers.

The developers are taking the war on pollution to a microscopic level after the fight against microbeads — tiny plastic beads found in some beauty products that were banned nationally in 2015.

“Blaming industry or government won’t solve the problems,” said Alexander Nolte, co-founder of Guppyfriend, a polyamide washing bag designed to prevent tiny threads from escaping. “Buy less and better; wash less and better.”

How harmful are they?

The issue has become an increasing focus of environmental scientists seeking to find out just how harmful microfibers are to coastal ecosystems, oceans and marine life and whether they affect human health. One study from 2011, led by Australian ecotoxicologist Mark Browne, found that microfibers made up 85 percent of man-caused shoreline debris.

Exactly how much microfiber pollution exists in the environment is a subject of research and debate. The United Nations has identified microfiber pollution as a key outgrowth of the 300 million tons of plastic produced annually. And a 2016 study in the journal Environmental Science & Technology found that more than a gram of microfibers is released every time synthetic jackets are washed and that as much as 40 percent of those microfibers eventually enter waterways. 

While there’s no question microfibers are escaping into the environment, it’s unclear how harmful they are, said Chelsea Rochman, an ecology professor at the University of Toronto who plans a study at the end of the year.

One of the questions, she said, is whether the problem is the fibers themselves or dyes in them, and whether natural microfibers such as wool and cotton are less harmful than plastic microfibers.

The microfiber trappers take various forms.

Guppyfriend, the laundry bag, is sold by clothing company Patagonia for $29.75. Cora Ball retails at $29.99 and is a multicolored ball designed to bounce around the washing machine, trapping microfibers in appendages that resemble coral. Lint LUV-R costs $140 or more and is a filter that attaches to a laundry water discharge hose.

New items

While the U.S. Census has found more than 85 percent of U.S. households have a washing machine, the items are new to the market and not familiar to most consumers. About 50,000 households use the Guppyfriend bag, Nolte said, and it might be the best known of the bunch.

Exactly how much these nascent products can help reduce microfiber pollution is not yet known, experts say, and it’s important to find out which products best succeed in reducing emissions of microfibers, Rochman said.

The inventor of the Cora Ball is the nonprofit environmental group Rozalia Project, headquartered in Granville, Vermont. Its co-founder says it had its product independently studied and found it can cut the amount of microfibers released through the wash by more than 25 percent. An independent review by a German research institute found that Guppyfriend caused textiles to shed 75 to 86 percent fewer fibers. 

“This is a consumer solution for people to be part of by throwing it in their washing machine,” said Rachael Miller, co-founder of Rozalia Project. 

The products serve to bring attention to a form of pollution unknown to most people, said Kirsten Kapp, a biology professor at Central Wyoming College, who has studied microfiber pollution on the Snake River in the Pacific Northwest.

“We are learning more and more every day about the risk that microfibers and microplastics have in our aquatic habitats and wildlife species,” Kapp said. “I think it’s something people should be aware of.”
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Look at Consumption When Assigning Blame for Global Warming, Study Says

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Wealthy cities are responsible for a huge share of greenhouse-gas emissions when calculations include goods they consume from developing countries, researchers said on Tuesday, challenging traditional estimates that put blame on manufacturing nations.

Looking at emissions based on consumption, affluent cities, mostly in North America and Europe, emit 60 percent more greenhouse gases than they do using traditional calculations, researchers said at a United Nations-backed climate summit.

Calculating emissions of greenhouse gases, which are blamed for global warming, traditionally looks at where goods such as cellular phones or plastic cups are produced, they said.

But consumption-based emissions presents a fuller picture by attributing emissions to the consumers rather than the manufacturers, said Mark Watts, head of C40, an alliance of more than 90 global cities.

The newer method of calculation puts the responsibility on richer consumers and “increases the scope of things that policy makers in cities can address to reduce emissions,” Watts said.

Cities account for an estimated 75 percent of carbon emissions, according to U.N. figures used at the summit.

Big cities, big problem

The estimate by C40 comes amid concern that national governments are not on track to meet the pledges they made in 2015 in Paris to reduce greenhouse gases and curb climate change.

Traditional calculations put manufacturing countries such as China and India amid the lead emitters of greenhouse gases.

Using consumption-based calculations, emissions in 15 affluent cities were three times more than they were with traditional figuring, the researchers said.

Using consumption-based emissions is “revolutionary” although still “on the periphery,” said Debra Roberts, a co-chairwoman on the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“But … these are ideas whose time is probably almost imminent,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on the sidelines of the Edmonton summit.

The researchers used trade and household data from 79 cities that are members of C40.

Some 750 climate scientists and city planners from 80 countries are gathered in the western Canadian city to help chart a global roadmap for cities to battle climate change.
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Ava DuVernay’s Unprecedented Journey to ‘A Wrinkle in Time’

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Ava DuVernay didn’t pick up a camera until the age of 32.

It’s an extraordinary fact, considering the trajectories of most Hollywood directors. Orson Welles filmed Citizen Kane at 25. Steven Spielberg was 27 when he made Jaws. A 23-year-old John Singleton directed Boyz N the Hood.

It was already doubtful that DuVernay could jump from a career in film marketing and publicity so late and without even a film degree to back her up. That she is also a black woman made it even more unlikely.

But in just 13 years, DuVernay has successfully and improbably risen to the upper echelons of the entertainment industry, as a filmmaker, producer and agent of change, breaking down barriers and smashing ceilings wherever she sets her sights. 

Now, at 45, she has an Oscar-nomination (for the documentary The 13th), a historic Golden Globe nomination (for Selma, she was the first black female director to get that recognition) and has also become the first woman of color to get over $100 million to make a live-action movie. That film, A Wrinkle in Time, with its $103 million production budget, opens nationwide Friday.

The Walt Disney Co. acquired the rights to Madeleine L’Engle’s Newbery Medal-winning 1962 novel in 2010, and it went through various writers and budget points. The story about an awkward 13-year-old girl, Meg Murry, who travels through time and space, was a notoriously unwieldy one that carried the dreaded “un-filmable” stigma.

“I was shocked that they called me,” says DuVernay. “I’d done Selma and The 13th. How did they even think that would work? But they did. And when they said I could make her a girl of color, it just grabbed my whole heart.”

DuVernay set off to do the impossible — make a big budget, kids-targeted sci-fi blockbuster with an unknown 13-year-old black actress (Storm Reid, now 14) as the lead.

“I think it’s incredible that Disney made the decision to hire Ava on this and gave her the creative control to cast whoever she wanted,” says Reese Witherspoon, who co-stars in the film as one of the mystical “Mrs.” alongside Oprah Winfrey and Mindy Kaling.

‘Film is forever’

Winfrey, Witherspoon and Kaling, all hardworking multi-hyphenates themselves, marveled at DuVernay’s tireless work ethic and attention to detail. Once she even sent costume designer Paco Delgado back to hand paint hundreds of eyes on one of Winfrey’s costumes because that’s what she had seen in the concept drawing.

“I was like, ‘I think it’s fine without the eyes? I think it’s OK!’ Winfrey recalled.

DuVernay laughed that Winfrey recounted that moment.

“She came out and everyone applauded for the dress and it was extraordinary,” DuVernay explains. “But I looked and I said, ‘Well on the sketch there were little eyes. Where are those?’ And he was like, ‘Well this looks good too.’ And I’m like, ‘Well let’s go take a look at that anyway.”

Asking for what she needs, and wants, is something DuVernay has learned as she’s gotten older.

“Film is forever,” she says. “It’s cemented. You’ve got to do it right now and it’s got to be the best it can be. So, let’s go back and put the eyes on the dress.”

Witherspoon says she has never met a director who spends so much time talking about others: Acknowledging everyone’s contributions in a cast and crew of hundreds, and then spending weekends talking about other people’s work too, from Patty Jenkins to Ryan Coogler.

DuVernay always has something in the works. She’s afraid if she slows down, it might all go away.

“I just feel like I have a short window in this industry. There is no precedent for a black woman making films consistently. There are beautiful black women directors but there are seven-year, six-year gaps between them,” she says. “Even though people tell me it’s OK, I think it’s all going to stop tomorrow. I want to do as much as I can do when I can. It’s not unreasonable, you know? Tomorrow they can say, ‘No we don’t want you to make movies anymore.”‘

And, indeed, there is still that idea that female filmmakers are not given second chances, even when they succeed. It’s something DuVernay thinks about often.

“I look at Guy Ritchie. That guy is bulletproof,” she says. “He can make something that doesn’t work. The next week he’s the director of another thing. I look at him and I’m like, ‘Wow, that’s fantastic.’ But that wouldn’t have been Patty Jenkins and it won’t be me.”

Planting a seed

Initial tracking suggests that A Wrinkle in Time may open in the mid-$30 million range, which might not even be enough to unseat Disney’s “Black Panther” (which DuVernay passed on directing) from the No. 1 spot.

Wrinkle, however, is film that is first and foremost for children ages 8 to 12, DuVernay says. Before a screening she asked the audience to try to watch it through the eyes of a child — an unusual request for something from an already very kid-friendly studio like Disney which makes films for the younger set that nonetheless appeal to a wide swath of ages.

Critics reviews are under embargo until Wednesday, and social media reactions so far have been unusually sparse for a film this big. DuVernay says of the critics that, “Some of them will see what we tried to do. Some of them, it’s not [going to be] for them. It is what it is.”

And it’s the film she wanted to make, for the 12-year-old her, and for someone like Kaling, who says that she always loved sci-fi but that it never loved her back.

“I’ll always direct things but who knows if that price point ever comes again. I’m OK with that. This is a big swing,” DuVernay says. “But the chance to put a black girl in flight? I will risk it. I risk it for those images. It may not hit now, but somewhere a Mindy Kaling, a chubby girl with glasses and brown skin will see it and it will mean something. Or, a Caucasian boy will see how a black girl says, ‘Do you trust me’ and the Caucasian boy says, ‘I trust you,’ and he follows her. Just to plant that seed and say that’s OK, you can follow a girl? Those images? I’ll risk it. I’ll risk it for that.”
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White House Wants User-friendly Electronic Health Records

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The Trump administration Tuesday launched a new effort under the direction of presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner to overcome years of problems with electronic medical records and make them easier for patients to use.

 

Medicare will play a key role, eventually enabling nearly 60 million beneficiaries to securely access claims data and share that information with their doctors.

 

Electronic medical records were ushered in with great fanfare but it’s generally acknowledged they’ve fallen short. Different systems don’t communicate. Patient portals can be clunky to navigate. Some hospitals still provide records on compact discs that newer computers can’t read.

 

The government has already spent about $30 billion to subsidize the adoption of digital records by hospitals and doctors. It’s unclear how much difference the Trump effort will make. No timetables were announced Tuesday.

 

The government-wide MyHealthEData initiative will be overseen by the White House Office of American Innovation, which is headed by Kushner. His stewardship of a broad portfolio of domestic and foreign policy duties has recently been called into question due to his inability to obtain a permanent security clearance.

 

Medicare administrator Seema Verma said her agency is working on a program called Blue Button 2.0, with the goal of providing beneficiaries with secure access to their claims data, shareable with their doctors. Software developers are already working on apps, using mock patient data.

 

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is also reviewing its requirements for insurers, so that government policy will encourage the companies to provide patients with access to their records.

 

“It’s our data, it’s our personal health information, and we should control it,” Verma said, making her announcement at a health care tech conference in Las Vegas.

 

The longstanding bipartisan goal of paying for health care value — not sheer volume of services — will not be achieved until patients are able to use their data to make informed decisions about their treatment, Verma added.

Independent experts said the administration has identified a key problem in the health care system.

 

“This is a good first step, but several key challenges need to be addressed,” said Ben Moscovitch, a health care technology expert with the Pew Charitable Trusts.

 

For example, the claims data that Medicare wants to put in the hands of patients sometimes lacks key clinical details, said Moscovitch. If the patient had a hip replacement, claims data may not indicate what model of artificial hip the surgeon used.

 

“Claims data alone are insufficient,” said Moscovitch. “They are incomplete, and they lack key data.”

The administration could address that by adding needed information to the claims data, he explained.
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EU Tax Haven Blacklist Set to Shrink Further

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European Union states are set to remove Bahrain, the Marshall Islands and Saint Lucia from a list of tax havens next week, leaving only six jurisdictions on it, an EU document shows.

The planned removals from the EU list drew criticism from an anti-corruption watchdog on Tuesday. The decision is also likely to bring more disapproval from lawmakers and activists who had strongly criticized a first delisting in January that cut the number of jurisdictions named to nine from 17.

The latest decision was taken by the EU Code of Conduct Group, which includes tax experts from the 28 member states, according to an EU document seen by Reuters.

EU finance ministers are expected to endorse the proposal at their regular monthly meeting in Brussels on March 13.

The jurisdictions that remain on the blacklist are American Samoa, Guam, Namibia, Palau, Samoa and Trinidad and Tobago.

Bahrain, the Marshall Islands and Saint Lucia are to be delisted after they made “specific commitments” to adapt their tax rules and practices to EU standards, the document says.

Those commitments are not public.

“This ever-decreasing list of tax havens will soon be so short it will be able to fit on a Post-it. It’s time for the EU to publish how it chooses which countries go on the list and why,” said Elena Gaita, of Transparency International EU, an anti-corruption watchdog.

Panama

In the last cut, EU governments decided to remove Barbados, Grenada, South Korea, Macau, Mongolia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Panama.

Panama’s delisting caused particular outcry. The EU process to set up a tax-haven blacklist was triggered by publication of the Panama Papers, documents that showed how wealthy individuals and multinational corporations use offshore schemes to reduce their tax bills.

Ministers said January’s delisting signaled that the process was working as countries around the world were agreeing to adopt EU standards on tax transparency.

All delisted countries have been moved to a “gray list,” which includes dozens of jurisdictions that are not in line with EU standards against tax avoidance but have committed to change their rules and practices.

These countries can be moved back to the blacklist if they fail to respect their undertakings.

Blacklist

Blacklisted jurisdictions could face reputational damage and stricter controls on their financial transactions with the EU, although no sanctions have been agreed by member states yet.

The blacklist was set up to discourage the use of shell structures abroad, which in many cases are legal but may hide illicit activities.

It took nearly a year for EU experts to screen an initial 92 jurisdictions around the world before identifying 17 in December that could favor tax avoidance.

EU countries were not screened. They were deemed to be already in line with EU standards against tax avoidance, although anti-corruption activists and lawmakers have repeatedly asked for some EU members such as Malta and Luxembourg to be blacklisted.
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Mexico Foreign Minister Looks for More Jamaican Oil Ties

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Mexico is looking into ways to deepen energy cooperation with Jamaica, Foreign Minister Luis Videgaray said on Tuesday on a Caribbean trip to promote U.S.-backed efforts to erode Venezuela’s diplomatic influence.

Videgaray said he was hoping to get more Mexican firms to come to Jamaica as suppliers of oil and as potential investors in developing Jamaican oil resources.

Last month, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced that Mexico, Canada and the United States were looking at how to mitigate the effect sanctions on OPEC-member Venezuela would have in the Caribbean.

Videgaray, who visited St. Lucia before Jamaica, said deeper Mexican-Jamaican energy ties could serve as a model elsewhere in the island region.

“Whatever we do in Jamaica can be a learning experience for what we do with other Caribbean countries,” he said, without directly mentioning efforts to weaken Venezuela’s support among countries grateful for past oil largesse.

While Jamaica no longer imports Venezuelan crude, it was a founding member of the South American nation’s Petrocaribe program that provided cheap loans for oil to Caribbean nations.

The legacy of the program has helped Venezuela win votes in the Organization of American States to defeat motions against President Nicolas Maduro, whose socialist government has overseen an economic crisis in Venezuela.

Mexico’s oil output has fallen sharply and the energy ministry has said it would be difficult for the country to replace Petrocaribe. 

“We are a market-based economy and any kind of cooperation that we do, and any business that we foster, is according to market principles,” said Videgaray, standing next to his Jamaican counterpart Kamina Johnson Smith.

He added Mexico would be signing a memorandum of understanding to provide technical support to Jamaica’s oil refinery, Petrojam, which is jointly owned by a unit of Venezuelan national oil company PDVSA.

Jamaica already buys spot cargos of crude from Mexico, a major oil supplier to the United States.

Mexico has been gradually opening up its oil sector following a constitutional reform in 2013 that ended decades of monopoly control by national oil company Pemex. Its ability to maximize crude processing has been hobbled, however, by little new investment, accidents and natural disasters.
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Boston Pays Tribute to Immigrant Grandmothers

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She is known as “nonna” in Italian, “abuelita” in Spanish and “Grandma” in English. But across cultures, the grandmother is the matriarch and foundation on which the family unit is built.

In ethnically diverse East Boston, home to a large immigrant community, a new mural serves as a visual tribute to grandmothers and the values that residents of what is known as “Eastie” share across ethnic lines.

“It makes me feel identified,” Salvadoran-native Guadalupe Gonzalez said of the mural, known as “Immigrant Grandmothers,” which stands tall underneath an overpass along a park known as the East Boston Greenway.

“I identify with these grandmothers that came with nothing, [like me], that came with a dream,” said Gonzalez, a 59-year-old mother of two and grandmother of four. She shares a powder-blue, triple-decker home with two other immigrant families from El Salvador in what is now an area comprising mainly immigrants from Latin America.

Gonzalez’s East Boston neighborhood, located about a kilometer from the mural, reflects the changing demographics throughout the port city’s history. 

Heidi Schork, director of the Mayor’s Mural Crew of the City of Boston, conceived of the idea for the mural after noticing more elderly women on the streets than in other areas of the city — “going to market, sweeping the sidewalks and going to medical appointments.”

“I noticed, in looking over a lot of reference photos, that the posture of making tortillas and making pasta is exactly the same,” Schork said, an example that transpired into three centerpiece grandmothers.

Among other motifs are local churches, a topic Schork said “broke the ice immediately” among Italian and Central American grandmothers, along with polka-dotted dresses — “the international grandmother outfit.”

Left of the mural’s center, one such immaculately dressed older woman stands proudly beside her young granddaughter, who is wearing an organza dress to celebrate the Sacrament of Confirmation, a rite of passage in the Catholic Church.

“It had these little pleats in the front of it, and you had the little white gloves,” Diane Modica, an East Boston-based lawyer, said of an outfit she once wore when she was a child, in the company of her grandmother. “My grandmother standing next to me, it evokes such memories.”

WATCH: Women with Ties to Mural Discuss its Significance

​United by purpose

Modica, the granddaughter of early 20th-century Sicilian immigrants, lives in the same house that her family bought in 1922. Although the immigrants of her diverse neighborhood come from vastly different origins than a century ago, Modica says they are united by their reasons for settling.

“They’re not doing anything different than what we did,” Modica said, “which is come over, work hard, raise their family, take care of their family and hope for a better future.”

The completed artwork presents typical East Boston homes, together with villages of southern Italy and Central America. It is one of a series of City of Boston mural projects inspired by a larger national campaign “To Immigrants With Love.”

“People here are really linked to where they came from, even if it was generations ago,” Celina Barrios-Millner, Immigration Integration Fellow at the Mayor’s Office for Immigrant Advancement, told VOA.

“We want to connect that pride and that love for today’s immigrants, as well.”

Like the women in the mural and near her Boston home, Gonzalez believes in the value of hard work, and looks up to labor leaders and civil rights activists such as Dolores Huerta and the late Cesar Chavez.

She credits her achievements as a house cleaner to provide for her youngest son’s education in El Salvador, and now — she hopes — the next generation, too.

But for those achievements to be possible, she counts longevity among her blessings.

“[Life] doesn’t take years away,” Gonzalez said. “The years give you life!”
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Israeli Shepherdess Uses Modern Sheep Breed to Revive Ancient Shofar Sound

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The piercing note of a shofar – a ram’s horn used in Jewish religious ceremonies – cuts through the mountain air of the Galilee.

Here in northern Israel, shepherdess Jenna Lewinsky is raising a flock of Jacob Sheep, pictured here, as a religious calling.

With anything up to six horns on each animal, the breed is ideally suited for the manufacture of the horn traditionally blown during the Jewish New Year and the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

The spotted breed of Jacob Sheep was bred in England in the 17th and 18th centuries, and this flock was brought to Israel from Canada by Lewinsky in 2016.

But sheep have been recorded since antiquity across the Middle East, and the modern breed’s name echoes the ancient Biblical story from Genesis in which the patriarch Jacob took “every speckled and spotted sheep” as wages from his father-in-law, Laban.

Turning her flock’s horns into shofars is part of God’s plan, says Lewinsky, who calls herself a “traditional and God-fearing Jew.”

“The Jacob Sheep horns can probably be processed anywhere in the world but what makes the horns special is that we are processing them in Israel, which gives them a holiness,” she said.

Robert Weinger, a shofar-maker who works with the horns from Lewinsky’s farm, said that a ram’s horn made from the breed can sell for $500 to $20,000 or more, depending on its sound quality, as it produces a wider range of musical notes than other shofars.
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Facebook, Twitter Urged to Do More to Police Hate on Sites

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Tech giants Facebook, Twitter and Google are taking steps to police terrorists and hate groups on their sites, but more work needs to be done, the Simon Wiesenthal Center said Tuesday.

The organization released its annual digital terrorism and hate report card and gave a B-plus to Facebook, a B-minus to Twitter and a C-plus to Google.

Facebook spokeswoman Christine Chen said the company had no comment on the report. Representatives for Google and Twitter did not immediately return emails seeking comment.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the Wiesenthal Center’s associate dean, said Facebook in particular built “a recognition that bad folks might try to use their platform” into its business model. “There is plenty of material they haven’t dealt with to our satisfaction, but overall, especially in terms of hate, there’s zero tolerance,” Cooper said at a New York City news conference.

Rick Eaton, a senior researcher at the Wiesenthal Center, said hateful and violent posts on Instagram, which is part of Facebook, are quickly removed, but not before they can be widely shared.

He pointed to Instagram posts threatening terror attacks at the upcoming World Cup in Moscow. Another post promoted suicide attacks with the message, “You only die once. Why not make it martyrdom.”

Cooper said Twitter used to merit an F rating before it started cracking down on Islamic State tweets in 2016. He said the move came after testimony before a congressional committee revealed that “ISIS was delivering 200,000 tweets a day.”

Cooper and Eaton said that as the big tech companies have gotten more aggressive in shutting down accounts that promote terrorism, racism and anti-Semitism, promoters of terrorism and hate have migrated to other sites such as VK.com, a Facebook lookalike that’s based in Russia.

There also are “alt-tech” sites like GoyFundMe, an alternative to GoFundMe, and BitChute, an alternative to Google-owned YouTube, Cooper said.

“If there’s an existing company that will give them a platform without looking too much at the content, they’ll use it,” he said. “But if not, they are attracted to those platforms that have basically no rules.”

The Los Angeles-based Wiesenthal Center is dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism, hate and terrorism.
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Porsche Says Flying Cab Technology Could Be Ready Within Decade

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Porsche is studying flying passenger vehicles but expects it could take up to a decade to finalize technology before they can launch in real traffic, its head of development said Tuesday.

Volkswagen’s sports car division is in the early stages of drawing up a blueprint of a flying taxi as it ponders new mobility solutions for congested urban areas, Porsche R&D chief Michael Steiner said at the Geneva auto show.

The maker of the 911 sports car would join a raft of companies working on designs for flying cars in anticipation of a shift in the transport market toward self-driving vehicles and on-demand digital mobility services.

“We are looking into how individual mobility can take place in congested areas where today and in the future it is unlikely that everyone can drive the way he wants,” Steiner said in an interview.

VW’s auto designer Italdesign and Airbus exhibited an evolved version of the two-seater flying car called Pop.Up at the Geneva show. It is designed to avoid gridlock on city roads and premiered at the annual industry gathering a year ago.

Separately, Porsche expects the cross-utility variant of its all-electric Mission E sports car to attract at least 20,000 buyers if it gets approved for production, Steiner said.

Porsche will decide later this year whether to build the Mission E Cross Turismo concept, which surges to 100 kph (62 mph) in less than 3.5 seconds, he said.
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Wind-Up Radio Inventor Dies

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British inventor Trevor Baylis, the creator of the wind-up radio, died Monday at the age of 80.

Acquaintances say Baylis died of natural causes after a lengthy illness.

Baylis developed the BayGen radio in the early 1990s after seeing a television program about the spread of AIDS in Africa and the need to get lifesaving information to people who did not have electricity and could not afford batteries.

Inspired by old-fashioned gramophones, the wind-up radio functioned with an internal generator, doing away with the need for batteries or access to electricity. The invention won Baylis international acclaim.

The earliest version ran for 14 minutes at a time, and production facilities were located in South Africa.
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Kenyan Coffee Risks Losing Significance as Production Struggles

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Kenyan coffee has an international reputation for good quality. But Kenya’s coffee industry is struggling as production levels have dropped and a younger generation shows little interest in farming. VOA’s Daniel Schearf reports from Kirinyaga County, Kenya.
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