Russian ballet and its dancers are famous the world over and inspire many Russians to pursue a career in the classical dance. But to break into ballet, dancers have to struggle through a brutal training regime and gender stereotypes. VOA Moscow videographer Ricardo Marquina Montanana talked to an aspiring ballerina and a successful ballet dancer whose father wanted him to follow in his footsteps and be a boxer.
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From: MeNeedIt
The global fight over land and resources is getting increasingly bloody and the race for control of valuable assets is expanding from forests and indigenous territories to the seas, space and databanks.
Here are five hotspots for property rights in 2018:
1. Rising violence: From Peru to the Philippines, land rights defenders are under increasing threat of harassment and attack from governments and corporations.
At least 208 people have been killed so far this year defending their homes, lands and forests from mining, dams and agricultural projects, advocacy group Frontline Defenders says.
The tally has exceeded that of 2016, which was already the deadliest year on record, and “it is likely that we will see numbers continue to rise”, a spokeswoman told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
2. Demand for affordable housing: Governments are under increasing pressure to recognize the right to housing, as Smart Cities projects and rapid gentrification push more people on to the streets, from Mumbai to Rio de Janeiro.
India has committed to providing Housing for All by 2022, while Canada’s recognition of housing as a fundamental right could help eliminate homelessness in the country.
“We need our governments to respond to this crisis and recognize that homelessness is a matter of life and death and dignity,” said Leilani Farha, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to housing.
3. Takeover of public lands: From the shrinking of wilderness national monuments in Utah to the felling of rainforests for palm plantations in Indonesia, public lands risk being rescinded or resized by governments in favor of business interests.
Governments are also likely to be hit by more lawsuits from indigenous communities fighting to protect their lands, as well as the environment.
4. Fight over space and sea: A race to explore and extract resources from the moon, asteroids and other celestial bodies is underway, with China, Luxembourg, the United States and others vying for materials ranging from ice to precious metals.
The latest space race targets a multi-trillion dollar industry.
Expect more debate over the 50-year-old U.N. Outer Space Treaty, which declares “the exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries and shall be the province of all mankind.”
On Earth, the fight over the seas is intensifying, particularly in the Arctic. Melting ice caps have triggered a fierce contest between energy companies in the United States, Russia, Canada, and Norway over drilling rights.
5. Debate over data: As more countries move towards digital citizen IDs, there are growing concerns about privacy and safety of the data, the ethics of biometrics, and the misuse of data for profiling or increased surveillance.
Campaigners are pushing for “informational privacy” to be part of the right to privacy, and for governments to treat the right to data as an inalienable right, like the right to dignity.
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From: MeNeedIt
There’s a good chance that 2017 will go down in the history of medicine as a year when genetic engineering finally started moving from research labs to clinics. Several successful stories coming from different parts of the world promise that hereditary diseases and cancers may soon be conquered. VOA’s George Putic looks back at a few of these cases.
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From: MeNeedIt
At the age of 5, Maame Biney immigrated to the U.S. from Ghana to live with her father. She was an energetic child, and her father wanted to channel that energy into a sport. One day, they drove by a local ice rink in Reston, Virginia, where a sign in front read “Learn to Skate.”
Biney’s father asked if she wanted to give it a try.
“I brought her here, in this particular rink, and she just tried it,” her father, Kweku Biney, said. “And the first day she got on the ice I was scared, you know. I thought she was going to break her head open, so I said, ‘What did I get myself into? This is risky.’”
But Biney was a natural. “She took that thing in stride, and I was just surprised, you know, the way she was skating,” he said. “And she just looked like somebody who’s been doing it for probably a few months prior to that day.
Biney was hooked. Every morning she would bounce out of bed to wake up her father for the early morning practices. She tried figure skating first, but a coach noticed how fast she was and encouraged her to take up speedskating. She competed in local events before moving up to the U.S. Junior Championships, where she won a bronze medal.
This month, she qualified for the U.S. Olympic Team after finishing first in the women’s 500-meter trial in Kearns, Utah. At age 17, she is the youngest speedskater on the U.S. team and the first African American woman to represent the country as a speedskater.
“First time I met Maame, she was 9,” said Sooan Yoo, Biney’s coach in Reston. “Now she’s almost my height as she’s gaining age, and she’s representing the USA team.”
Despite her accomplishments, the high schooler doesn’t take herself too seriously.
“I just hope that everyone sees how fun the sport is when you can just go fast and just be awesome. Not that I am awesome or anything, but just — you feel good about yourself, so yeah. Be proud of yourself. That’s it,” she said.
Biney’s achievements have earned her fans around the world, particularly in West Africa, where skating isn’t common. She hopes girls watch her and become inspired to pursue their own dreams.
“Since speedskating or any ice sport isn’t really an option back in Africa, I would just tell all the little kids back there just to find something that you love, and be happy,” she said. “And just have fun with it. Because why are you going to do something if you don’t have fun?”
Biney hopes to do more than just have fun when she competes at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, in February. Her event, the 500 meter, is the shortest and requires intense sprinting ability. She said her strategy is simple: “Go fast and don’t fall.”
Her teammates say her easygoing attitude belies her hard work and competitive spirit. Her team, Dominion Speedskating, practices six to seven days a week.
“She is really kind and everything. She’s really caring,” said 15-year-old Dominion teammate Joonsuh Oh. “Everyone loves her when you first see her. She seems kind of intimidating because you just never know her. But if you actually meet her, she’s really friendly, and when she skates, she’s amazing.”
Despite intense pressure, Biney’s father hopes she can just soak up the moment and have fun. He said seeing her walk with Team USA during the opening ceremony will be enough of a reward. Anything more will be a bonus, he said.
“Once you stay focused, everything will fall in place” he said. “That’s it. That’s all I got for her. She doesn’t need to be afraid of anything, and I don’t think she is.”
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From: MeNeedIt
When schoolchildren in Washington, D.C. are asked to say the first thing that comes to mind about Africa, they use words like hot, desert, sand, poverty, hunger, war and Ebola.
These are all accurate things to say about that part or the world — but they reflect an “incomplete” picture, says writer Austin Merrill, who together with photojournalist Peter DiCampo has set out to document African reality beyond common stereotypes.
They are the founders of Every Day Africa, an Instagram community of photographers who strive to capture ordinary moments of life, such as children picking flowers in a field, or girlfriends chatting at a coffee shop. Their Instagram following has topped 370,000.
In addition to the Instagram feed, the book “Every Day Africa, 30 Photographers Re-Picturing the Continent,” recently hit bookstores in Europe, the United States and certain countries on the African continent. The book is filled with images documenting life in Africa that aim to shatter misconceptions often found in Western media.
Readers see a teenager rollerblading in the streets of Dakar, a DJ playing music in Lagos, a couple looking at the Atlantic Ocean in Cape Town. The book displays the full diversity and visual richness of African life.
Both DiCampo and Merrill invited a diverse “community of photographers” from all over the continent to contribute to the Instagram project and the book. Some are professionals, while others are skilled amateurs.
Ethiopian-American writer Maaza Mengiste prologues the book in an essay focusing on the power of the ordinary. “We sometimes forget that no matter what is happening in our lives, ordinary moments find a way to move forward,” Mengiste writes.
Normality
Peter DiCampo and Austin Merrill, both Americans, met while serving with the Peace Corps in Ivory Coast. In 2012, they received a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in Washington to cover the aftermath of Ivory Coast’s civil war.
While they were interviewing refugees and soldiers, Merrill remembers that around them “the vast majority of life was pretty normal, but that wasn’t coming through in the story that we were trying to put together.”
“We were seeing all these other moments, that were much sort of truer to our daily life experience in that part of the world,” says DiCampo.
So, they took their cellphones and started to photograph what was around them. They felt, says Merrill, that the normal, everyday scenes of life “might be the most important thing we had to tell about that place, about that moment, instead of the crisis story.”
Media organizations tend to focus on breaking news, often triggered by an evolving crisis. Africa has many of those; but, as Di Campo puts it, “It’s quite difficult to have a global understanding when all you see of other parts of the world are really extreme stories.”
This is the gap that the “Everyday Africa” book is trying to fill; to look at the continent from the inside and from different perspectives.
DiCampo and Merrill, with the support of the Pulitzer Center, have also created media workshops that train elementary school students in the United States on how to document their lives and recognize stereotypes.
“We use the story of how we we created Every Day Africa,” said DiCampo, “to engage the students in a discussion of how media representation affects them, their lives and their communities and we use our photography to teach basic photography lessons, so that by the end of the workshop, they have an everyday project for their own school or community.”
This social media model has hit a nerve. “The Every Africa platform on Instagram may very well be the biggest visual library of the continent,” writes Ghanaian photographer Nana Kofi Acquah.
“To task African photographers with the burden of changing how the continent is perceived, might be overwhelming,” writes Acquah; but, he adds, “a picture of the real Africa” is slowly emerging.
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From: MeNeedIt
Authorities in eastern Libya have announced a conference in March to drum up support to rebuild the country’s second-largest city Benghazi heavily damaged during three years of fighting between military forces and Islamist fighters.
The announcement signals a desire to demonstrate a return to normality in the port, where top military commander Khalifa Haftar declared the end of a campaign to oust Islamist fighters in July.
Clashes have sporadically continued in some isolated areas, while life has returned in the rest of the city, though some districts were almost completely destroyed by shelling and air strikes.
A forum titled “International Conference and Exhibition for rebuilding Benghazi city” will be held from March 19-21, the organizers said in an invitation posted online, adding that a six-day exhibition would be held the same month.
Haftar is aligned with a government and parliament in eastern Libya which was listed as the conference’s sponsor.
He has rejected a U.N.-backed government based in the capital, Tripoli, as he has gradually strengthened his position on the ground.
The United Nations has sought to bridge differences between the two sides, part of a conflict since Muammar Gadhafi was toppled in 2011. Talks were suspended in October.
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From: MeNeedIt
Oil moved higher above $65 a barrel on Tuesday, within sight of its highest since mid-2015, supported by an explosion on a crude pipeline in Libya and voluntary OPEC-led supply cuts.
The move towards restart of a key North Sea pipeline, Forties, capped the rally. The pipeline is being tested after repairs and full flows should resume in early January, its operator said on Monday.
Brent crude, the international benchmark for oil prices, rose 19 cents to $65.44 a barrel at 1447 GMT. Prices hit $65.83 on December 12, the highest since June 2015. U.S. crude added 24 cents to $58.71.
“The confirmation that Forties is coming back … has the potential for capping Brent,” said Olivier Jakob, analyst at Petromatrix.
Trading activity was thin due to the Christmas holiday in many countries.
Oil turned positive following the explosion at the Libyan pipeline, which feeds the Es Sider terminal. It was not immediately clear what impact the blast will have on Libyan output, which has been recovering in recent months after being hampered for years by conflict and unrest.
Brent has risen 17 percent in 2017. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, plus Russia and other non-members, have been withholding output since January 1 to get rid of a glut.
The producers have extended the supply cut agreement to cover all of 2018.
Iraq’s oil minister said on Monday there would be a balance between supply and demand by the first quarter, leading to a boost in prices. Global oil inventories have decreased to an acceptable level, he added.
That is earlier than predicted in OPEC’s latest official forecast, which calls for a balanced market by late 2018.
While the OPEC action has lent support to prices all year, the unplanned shutdown of the Forties pipeline on December 11 pushed Brent to its mid-2015 high.
Forties plays an important role in the global market as it is the biggest of the five North Sea crude streams underpinning Brent, the benchmark for oil trading in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
Rising production in the United States is offsetting some of the OPEC-led cuts.
The U.S. rig count, RIG-OL-USA-BHI, an early indicator of future output, held at 747 in the week to December 22, according to the latest weekly report by Baker Hughes.
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From: MeNeedIt
Sudan is to devalue its currency to 18 Sudanese pounds per dollar in January from the current exchange rate of 6.7, the finance minister said on Tuesday.
The International Monetary Fund urged Sudan earlier this month to float its currency to boost growth and investment, but the government has ruled out a market-determined exchange rate.
The devaluation which includes the customs exchange rate — the rate used to calculate customs duties — is timed to take place when the 2018 budget begins, in the first week of January, Finance Minister Mohamed Othman Rukabi told Reuters.
Traders said the black market rate jumped to 27 SDG per dollar from 25 SDG per dollar on Tuesday after the devaluation was announced.
“The whole budget for the new year is based on a an official rate of 18 SDG per dollar. We expect the results of this policy to be positive for the Sudanese economy,” he said.
The Sudanese pound has weakened sharply against the dollar since Washington lifted 20-year-old economic sanctions in October, encouraging traders to step up imports and putting pressure on scarce hard currency.
Businesses are unable to secure their hard currency needs at the official peg of 6.7 pounds to the dollar and are forced to resort to a parallel market.
To stem the flow of scarce currency out of the banking system, Sudan announced emergency measures last month after the pound fell to a record low of 27 against the dollar on the black market.
The country also imposed tight restrictions on imports of luxury goods, directing remaining liquidity toward “sectors that boost growth,” the central bank said.
The import-dependent country has suffered both from the sanctions and from the secession of the south in 2011, when it lost three-quarters of its oil output, its main source of foreign currency.
The IMF last year agreed to loan Sudan’s neighbur Egypt $12 billion if it implemented tough fiscal reforms.
Reporting by Khalid Abdelaziz; Writing by Nadine Awadalla and John Davison; Editing by Robin Pomeroy.
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From: MeNeedIt
Actress Heather Menzies-Urich, who played one of the singing von Trapp children in the 1965 hit film, “The Sound of Music,” has died. She was 68.
Her son, actor Ryan Urich, told Variety that his mother died late Sunday in Frankford, Ontario, Canada. She had been diagnosed with brain cancer.
Menzies-Urich played Louisa von Trapp, the third-oldest of the seven von Trapp children in the film adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that starred Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer.
“The Sound of Music” captured five Academy Awards, including best picture.
Variety reports that Menzies-Urich is survived by two other children, several grandchildren and a great grandchild.
Her husband, actor Robert Urich, died in 2002.
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From: MeNeedIt
Israel’s markets regulator said on Monday he will propose regulation to ban companies based on bitcoin and other digital currencies from trading on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE).
Shmuel Hauser, the chairman of the Israel Securities Authority (ISA), told the Calcalist business conference he will bring the proposal to the ISA board next week. If approved, it would be subject to a public hearing and then the TASE bylaws would need to be amended.
“If we have a company that their main business is digital currencies we would not allow it. If already listed, its trading will be suspended,” Hauser said, adding the ISA must find the appropriate regulation for such companies.
Bitcoin plunged by 30 percent to below $12,000 on Friday as investors dumped the cryptocurrency after its sharp rise to nearly $20,000. It recouped some losses to trade above $14,000 on the Bitstamp platform, down 9 percent on the day.
“We feel that the prices of bitcoin behave like bubbles and we don’t want investors to be subject to that volatility and uncertainty,” Hauser said. “There is an importance to signal to the market where things are… Investors should know where we stand.”
Earlier this month, Hauser had said bitcoin-based companies would not be included in TASE indexes and that there was a need for a suitable regulatory framework for such instruments given that the global market value of all digital currencies grew in 2017 to $300 billion from $18 billion.
The proposal will likely be the last for Hauser, who will step down next month after 6-1/2 years as ISA chief.
“But once it’s on its way it will continue to be pursued,” said Hauser, who will be replaced by Anat Guetta.
He said he hopes she will promote easing capital gains taxes and focus on regulatory enforcement.
From: MeNeedIt