Latin American countries have sprung a World Cup surprise by filling Russia’s 11 host cities with tens of thousands of fans from Mexico and Colombia to Peru and Argentina.

And some of the Europeans who did show up said their friends back home told them they were crazy to go.

The contrasting cast of supporters at the biggest event in sport reflects Russia’s progressive creep away from Europe in the 18 years of President Vladimir Putin’s rule.

Moscow is now embracing new allies that happen to worship football and where damning — and often exaggerated — media stories about Russian hooligans and poisoning cases are rare.

This mix and the added ingredient of a more evenly spread-out global middle-class with the means to travel the world has the streets of Russia dancing to a decidedly Latin beat.

“We didn’t expect it to be this beautiful and the people are amazing,” Mauricio Miranda said as she waved a Colombian flag on the edge of Red Square in Moscow.

“We will definitely come back,” said the 30-year-old.

Belgian public relations consultant Jo De Munter does not necessarily disagree. It is his friends who do.

“I think Europeans are a bit afraid,” the 46-year-old said while staring in the direction of Lenin’s Mausoleum.

“In Belgium, everybody told me I was crazy to go to the football.”

By the numbers

World Cups come in all shapes and sizes and comparing ticket sales rarely tells the whole tale.

Europeans and Latin Americans are naturally more inclined to attend World Cups held in their regions because of the easier travel arrangements and familiarity.

South Africa in 2010 may provide a better example because it was a frontier football country with specific security and logistical risks.

Yet FIFA figures showed almost 50 percent more Britons bought tickets for the African continent’s first World Cup than this maiden one in eastern Europe.

Australians were in third place then but are just ninth in Russia.

Germany and England bought the fourth- and fifth-most number of tickets. France was ninth.

But France dropped out of the top 10 in Russia while Britain slipped down to last place. Germany remained fourth.

The United States has long led purchases among non-hosting countries because of its massive economy and large communities from football-mad Mexico and other Central American communities.

Taking the US out of the equation leaves Latin Americans accounting for two-thirds of the top 10 countries that have bought tickets for Russia.

Safety net

Fans banging Mexican drums and sporting the red-and-white bodypaint of the Peruvian flag encountered on a Moscow summer’s day were almost all big city office workers.

Colombia’s Miranda is an urban planner with a new job in Canada.

Alexandro Grado is a former financial consultant with Mexico’s Citibanamex who now owns a plastics recycling firm.

“Going to Russia is not expensive if you buy everything ahead of time,” Grado said.

Yet not all fans can afford to go bar hopping near the Kremlin and sociologists who study the sport say this is where Latin American football federations come in.

“There are national teams which have very strong organizational support behind them. Argentina in 2010 was one example,” said Ludovic Lestrelin of France’s Universite de Caen in Normandy.

Lestrelin said less well-off fans in Europe get far less travel and accommodation assistance from state agencies and are increasingly more likely to stay home and watch on TV.

This means Europeans attending World Cups tend to be richer than the average football fan. The traveling Latin Americans are more likely to come from all types of backgrounds.

“Those who travel to Russia and other places do not reflect the social makeup of French stadiums,” said Lestrelin.

“Those (in France) are more diverse, with a central core of lower and middle class workers.”

Zbigniew Iwanowski of the Institute of Latin American Studies in Moscow said Russia is further reaping the rewards of a “pink tide” that brought anti-US leaders power across the continent.

“The pendulum has swung back to the right but they still have (Russian state media) like Sputnik and RT,” Iwanowski said.

“Russia’s image is better in Latin America than it is in Europe and US.”

‘Not properly European’

Few would argue that Russia generates a lot of negative headlines in Europe in general and Britain in particular.

But the media’s role in shaping public opinion — and the reverse — is all but impossible to gauge.

What is clear is that at least some of the Europeans who ventured to Moscow and beyond did so with a degree of trepidation the voyagers from Latin America lacked.

De Munter said he often travels to watch Belgium play abroad. Rarely has he seen the national team’s support so small.

“We are expecting 4,000 Belgian people, which is not that much. Especially now because the Red Devils are doing very well.”

Gherardo Drardanelli flew in from Italy to take part in one of the fan tournaments organised alongside the World Cup.

“I think our concept of Russia — we feel that Russia is far away, that it’s not a properly European country,” the 28-year-old said. 
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From: MeNeedIt

Donald Hall, a prolific, award-winning poet and man of letters widely admired for his sharp humor and painful candor about nature, mortality, baseball and the distant past, has died at age 89.

Hall’s daughter, Philippa Smith, confirmed Sunday that her father died Saturday at his home in Wilmot, New Hampshire, after being in hospice care for some time. 

“He’s really quite amazingly versatile,” said Hall’s long-time friend Mike Pride, the editor emeritus of the Concord Monitor newspaper and a retired administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes. He said Hall would occasionally speak to reporters at the Monitor about the importance of words. 

Hall was the nation’s 2006-2007 poet laureate.

Starting in the 1950s, Hall published more than 50 books, from poetry and drama to biography and memoirs, and edited a pair of influential anthologies. He was an avid baseball fan who wrote odes to his beloved Boston Red Sox, completed a book on pitcher Dock Ellis and contributed to Sports Illustrated. He wrote a prize-winning children’s book, “Ox-Cart Man,” and even attempted a biography of Charles Laughton, only to have his actor’s widow, Elsa Lanchester, kill the project. 

But the greatest acclaim came for his poetry, for which his honors included a National Book Critics Circle prize, membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a National Medal of Arts. Although his style varied from haikus to blank verse, he returned repeatedly to a handful of themes: his childhood, the death of his parents and grandparents and the loss of his second wife and fellow poet, Jane Kenyon. 

“Much of my poetry has been elegiac, even morbid, beginning with laments over New Hampshire farms and extending to the death of my wife,” he wrote in the memoir “Packing the Boxes,” published in 2008. 

In person, he at times resembled a 19th century rustic with his untrimmed beard and ragged hair. And his work reached back to timeless images of his beloved, ancestral New Hampshire home, Eagle Pond Farm, built in 1803 and belonging to his family since the 1860s. He kept country hours for much of his working life, rising at 6 and writing for two hours. 

For Hall, the industrialized, commercialized world often seemed an intrusion, like a neon sign along a dirt road. In the tradition of T.S. Eliot and other modernists, he juxtaposed classical and historical references with contemporary slang and brand names. In “Building a House,” he begins with the drafters of the U.S. Constitution leaving Philadelphia, then shifts the setting to the 20th century. 

___ 

Some delegates hitched rides chatting with teamsters 

some flew standby and wandered stoned in O’Hare 

or borrowed from King Alexander’s National Bank. 

____ 

An opponent of the Vietnam War whose taxes were audited year after year, he was also ruthlessly self-critical. Nakedly, even abjectly, he recorded his failures and shortcomings and disappointments, whether his infidelities or his struggles with alcoholism. 

The joy and tragedy of his life were his years with Kenyon, his second wife. They met in 1969, when she was his student at the University of Michigan. By the mid-70s, they were married and living together at Eagle Creek, fellow poets enjoying a fantasy of mind and body – of sex, work and homemaking. 

“We sleep, we make love, we plant a tree, we walk up and down/eating lunch,” he wrote. 

But Kenyon was diagnosed with leukemia and died 18 months later, in 1995, when she was only 47. Even as he found new lovers – and sought them compulsively – Hall never stopped mourning her and arranged to be buried next to her, beneath a headstone inscribed with lines from one of her poems: “I BELIEVE IN THE MIRACLES OF ART, BUT WHAT PRODIGY WILL KEEP YOU BESIDE ME?” 

In the 1998 collection “Without,” and in many poems after, he reflected on her dying days, on the shock of outliving a woman so many years younger, and the lasting bewilderment of their dog Gus, who years later was still looking for her. In “Rain,” he bitterly summarized his efforts to help her. 

___ 

I never belittled her sorrows or joshed at her dreads and miseries 

How admirable I found myself. 

____ 

Hall was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1928, but soon favored Eagle Pond to the “blocks of six-room houses” back home. By age 14, he had decided to become a poet, inspired after a conversation with a fellow teen versifier who declared, “It is my profession.” 

“I had never heard anyone speak so thrilling a sentence,” Hall remembered. 

He published poetry while a struggling student at Phillips Exeter Academy and formed many lasting literary friendships at Harvard University, including with fellow poets Robert Bly and Adrienne Rich and with George Plimpton, for whom he later served as the first poetry editor at The Paris Review. He also met Daniel Ellsberg and would suspect well before others that the anonymous leaker of the Vietnam War documents known as the Pentagon Papers was his old college friend. 

After graduating from Harvard, Hall studied at the University of Oxford and became one of the few Americans to win the Newdigate Prize, a poetry honor founded at Oxford and previously given to Oscar Wilde, John Ruskin and other British writers. He returned to the states in the mid-1950s and taught at several schools, including Stanford University at Bennington College. He was married to Kirby Thompson from 1952-69, and they had two children. 

Hall’s first literary hero was Edgar Allan Poe and death was an early subject. He completed his debut collection, “Exiles and Marriages,” between visits to his ailing father, who died at the end of 1955. In the poem “Snow,” Hall confesses, “Like an old man/whatever I touch I turn/to the story of death.” 

In recent years, as Hall entered the “planet of antiquity,” many of his elegies were for himself. He worried that “anthologies dropped him out/Poetry festivals never invited him.” He pictured himself awaking “mournful,” dressed in black pajamas. He warned that a story with a happy ending had not really ended, but advised that we leave behind a story to tell. 

“Work, love, build a house, and die,” he wrote. “But build a house.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Hand washing is one of the easiest ways to prevent some diseases. But in refugee camps and temporary shelters, providing access to soap, clean water and sanitation can put increased strain on resources. Officials at the global aid agency Oxfam say they have a solution that may overcome some of those challenges. Faith Lapidus reports.
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From: MeNeedIt

A British minister accused Airbus and other major companies of issuing “completely inappropriate” threats and undermining Prime Minister Theresa May in a sign of growing tensions with businesses leaders over Brexit.

Aircraft manufacturer Airbus last week issued its strongest warning over the impact of Britain’s departure from the European Union, saying a withdrawal without a deal would force it to reconsider its long-term position and put thousands of British jobs at risk.

Other European companies with major operations in Britain have also started to speak out two years on from the Brexit vote, voicing concerns over a lack of clarity on the terms of trade when Britain leaves next March.

“It was completely inappropriate for businesses to be making these kinds of threats for one very simple reason — we are in an absolutely critical moment in the Brexit discussions and what that means is that we need to get behind Theresa May,” Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt told the BBC.

“The more that we undermine Theresa May the more likely we to end up with a fudge which will be absolute disaster for everyone,” he added.

German carmaker BMW has warned the company would have to make contingency plans within months if the government did not soon clarify its post-Brexit position and German

industrial group Siemens said it urgently needs clarity on how its operations would have to be organized.

The leaders of five major business lobby groups also warned the prime minister over the weekend that the ongoing uncertainty about Brexit could cost the economy billions of pounds.

Hunt, a senior figure in the government who is viewed as a potential future prime minister, dismissed “siren voices” who say Brexit negotiations are not going well and said people should ignore them.

With only nine months until Britain is due to leave the EU on March 29, little is clear about how trade will flow as May, who is grappling with a divided party, is still trying to strike a deal with the bloc.

Business leaders are increasingly concerned that their concerns are being ignored and are stepping up their contingency plans in case Britain crashes out of the EU without a deal.

The foreign minister Boris Johnson was quoted in the Telegraph newspaper by two sources over the weekend as dismissing business leaders’ concerns about the impact of Brexit, using foul language in a meeting with EU diplomats.

A spokesperson for the foreign office disputed whether Johnson had used bad language and said he had been attacking business lobbyists.

Around 100,000 supporters of the EU marched through central London on Saturday to demand that the government hold a final public vote on the terms of Brexit, organizers said.
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From: MeNeedIt

Languishing with fever and frustrated by delays in diagnosing his illness, Brian Gitta came up with a bright idea: a malaria test that would not need blood samples or specialized laboratory technicians.

That inspiration has won the 25-year-old Ugandan computer scientist a prestigious engineering prize for a noninvasive malaria test kit that he hopes will be widely used across Africa. 

For developing the reusable test kit known as Matibabu, Gitta this month was awarded the Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation. The award by the Royal Academy of Engineering in Britain comes with $32,940.

Malaria is the biggest killer in Africa, and the sub-Saharan region accounts for about 80 percent of the world’s malaria cases and deaths. Cases rose to 216 million in 2016, up from 211 million cases in 2015, according to the latest World Malaria Report, released late last year. Malaria deaths fell by 1,000, to 445,000.

The mosquito-borne disease is a challenge to prevent, with increasing resistance reported to both drugs and insecticides.

No needles

The new malaria test kit works by shining a red beam of light onto a finger to detect changes in the shape, color and concentration of red blood cells, all of which are affected by malaria. The results are sent within a minute to a computer or mobile phone linked to the device. 

A Portugal-based firm has been contracted to produce the components for Matibabu, the Swahili word for “treatment.”

“It’s a perfect example of how engineering can unlock development, in this case by improving health care,” Rebecca Enonchong, Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation judge, said in a statement. “Matibabu is simply a game changer.” 

Gitta and five colleagues, all trained in computer science or engineering, developed an affordable, bloodless test that does not need a specialist to operate. The new test will be suitable for use in Africa’s rural areas, where most cases of malaria occur, because it will not depend on sending blood samples to a distant laboratory.

Others are also working to fill the need for quicker, easier malaria tests. There are more than 200 rapid diagnostic test products for malaria on the market, according to the WHO. 

80 percent accurate now

The fifth-generation prototype of Matibabu, with an accuracy rate of 80 percent, is still a work in process. Gitta and his group aim to refine the device until it achieves an accuracy rate exceeding 90 percent. 

Matibabu has yet to be formally subjected to all the necessary clinical trials under Ugandan safety and ethics regulations.

“It excites me as a clinician,” said Medard Bitekyerezo, a Ugandan physician who chairs the National Drug Authority. “I think the National Drug Authority will approve it.”

The government should invest in the project so that its developers don’t struggle financially, he added. The unit cost of the latest prototype is about $100.

Despite the optimism, Gitta has found a hurdle he didn’t anticipate: Some patients are skeptical of unfamiliar technology.

“The doctors will tell you that some people will not leave the hospital until their children have been pricked, and until they have been given anti-malaria drugs and painkillers, even if the kid is not sick,” he said. 

“We think we are developing for hospitals first, so that people can first get attached to the brand, and gain the trust of patients over time.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Before it became one of the venues for the World Cup, the city of Volgograd in southwest Russia was famous for an overabundance of small, annoying flies called midges. While the small two-winged flies don’t bite, soccer fans are finding that they don’t leave you alone either. VOA’s Mariama Diallo takes a look at what Russian officials are doing to make the sporting life more comfortable for World Cup fans and players.
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From: MeNeedIt

Jehovah’s Witnesses have a long history of being persecuted around the world. Their activities are banned or restricted in several countries. They are considered an extremist organization in Russia, while their members are imprisoned in South Korea and Eritrea. Even near their main headquarters and publishing house in New York state, Jehovah’s Witnesses lead a somewhat secluded life. VOA’s Anush Avetisyan has the story.
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From: MeNeedIt

Globalization in the 20th century facilitated the exchange of goods, ideas and technology. But it also helped spread deadly germs and viruses around the world. A new exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History illustrates the impact of these sometimes lethal biological linkages and looks back at the deadliest and scariest epidemics throughout history. Maxim Moskalkov has more.
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From: MeNeedIt

In New York, Auxiliary Police Officers act as liaison between communities and the police department. Recently, Gursoch Kaur made headlines when she became the first female Sikh officer to serve in the Auxiliary Unit wearing a dastar, the traditional Sikh turban. Usually dastars are worn by Sikh men, but some women choose to wear them to raise awareness about their religion. VOA reporter Aunshuman Apte spoke to Gursoch Kaur to learn why she made that choice and how the community is reacting.
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From: MeNeedIt

President Trump signed an executive order Wednesday to keep migrant children with their parents at the southwestern U.S. border, but more than 2,000 children are living in shelters without their families. Doctors and mental health workers are concerned that some of these children will suffer permanent damage. VOA’s Carol Pearson has more.
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From: MeNeedIt

U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry will meet Russia’s energy minister next week in Washington, a person familiar with the situation said Friday, as the two countries compete to supply global markets with natural gas and crude.

Perry will meet Russia’s Energy Minister Alexander Novak on Tuesday, in the context of the World Gas Conference in Washington, the source said.

Meetings between top energy officials from Russia and the United States, two of the world’s largest oil and gas producers, have been rare in recent years.

Relations between Moscow and Washington have cooled over Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and as the Trump administration blames the Russian government for cyber attacks that targeted the U.S. power grid over the last two years.

The two countries are competing to sell natural gas to Europe. Russia’s Gazprom, the European Union’s biggest gas supplier, and several Western energy companies hope to open Nord Stream 2, a pipeline to bring Russian gas under the Baltic Sea to Germany.

The United States, meanwhile, has begun some sales of liquefied natural gas, or LNG, to Poland and Lithuania, though LNG shipments can be more expensive than gas sent via pipeline.

The United States says the advantage of its LNG is dependability and stable pricing.

The administration of U.S. President Donald Trump opposes the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, as did the administration of former President Barack Obama. Washington believes that the pipeline would give Russia, which has at times frozen deliveries to parts of Europe over pricing disputes, more power over the region.

The meeting comes as U.S. national security adviser John Bolton plans to visit Moscow next week to prepare for a possible meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Perry and Novak will also likely talk about oil markets. On Friday, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries agreed in Vienna to raise oil output by a modest amount after consumers had called for producers to curb rising fuel prices.

Russia, which is not an OPEC member, began cooperating last year with the group for the first time, holding back production to support global oil prices. Before the Vienna OPEC meeting, Novak said Moscow would propose a gradual increase in output from oil-producing countries, starting in July.
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From: MeNeedIt

Tracking wildlife migration has been historically difficult in the rugged terrain of Alaska. Researchers primarily rely on either surveys or GPS tracking to understand bird migration patterns. Both methods are expensive, either in terms of time or money. And the trackers are often too large or heavy. 

One way to sidestep these common issues is to record audio from frequently used nesting grounds. Using birdsong allows researchers to unobtrusively study the animals, although there’s a downside. Each day produces a flood of audio recordings from multiple microphones placed around nesting grounds. It takes trained listeners endless hours to search the noisy soundscape for birdsong.

In a recently published paper in the journal Science Advances, U.S. researchers explain how they got around these tracking troubles. Columbia University ecologist Ruth Oliver and her fellow collaborators replaced the human ears with machine learning algorithms to listen to birdsong.

Costly proposition

Oliver told VOA News, “Arrival times of migratory song birds is really important for their reproductive success. And obviously sending people to the Arctic to do field work is very expensive and takes a lot of time” — hence, the scientists’ interest in creating an automated method for tracking bird species.

Oliver and her colleagues focused on migratory songbirds who fly to northern Alaska during their mating season. These birds tend to chirp more frequently as soon as they reach the breeding grounds to attract a mate. Spring is short in Alaska and the birds must breed and hatch their clutch before winter.

The team of researchers recorded the springtime soundscape of northern Alaska for five sequential years. They placed microphones at four sites in the foothills of the Brooks Range, which recorded 1,200 audio hours.

However, Oliver admitted the recordings weren’t always perfect. “There’s a lot of other noise in these recordings” Oliver said. “Even in May in northern Alaska there’s lots of wind, lots of rain, and all of that is confounding when you’re listening to birds.”

The scientists fed hours of audio into two types of machine learning algorithms — one that used human expertise to help train it and one that relied solely on the collected audio. Both algorithms were based on the same model that’s used by applications like Siri and Alexa.

Oliver told VOA that in creating the human-supervised algorithm, she “wrote a little program to randomly sample about 1 percent of the data set” and then listened to 4-second clips. She scored these clips as either containing or not containing songbird vocalizations and then fed this information into the program.

Both algorithms were fairly accurate at estimating when the avian commuters arrived in the foothills. The models showed the importance of snowmelt for the arrival of the traveling birds. The human-trained model was slightly better at recognizing the relationship between weather conditions and bird calls, although neither model specifically tracked individual species.

This technique has great potential according to Emily Jo Williams, vice president of migratory birds and habitat at the American Bird Conservancy, “This kind of technique that allows you to survey populations in those remote areas is really exciting and could allow us to even discover new places where protection and conservation efforts are needed,” she said.

This study looked at nesting grounds near the Alaskan Arctic Refuge, which is a summer home for birds from nearly every continent. For example, the Northern Wheatear travels approximately 21,000 kilometers (13,000 miles) from Africa to summer in the refuge.

Climate change

Williams told VOA, “We know from some research that some birds’ ranges have actually changed, and they’ve moved in response to what we think is a warming climate.” She went on to explain that “the timing of that migration has evolved over eons, and in large part it’s relative to what food sources are available over a particular time, what weather patterns are or aren’t favorable. So you could end up with bird migration out of sync with insect hatches or the phenology of plants that birds have a relationship to.”

Tools like the algorithm created in this study could be used to track how migratory patterns of many species may shift in response to climate change. Using machine learning is a new way to follow these shifting patterns in birds, insects and other animals.
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From: MeNeedIt