An award-winning documentary has captured the innovative ways farmers and others are trying to make the planet a greener, more sustainable place.

Winner of the 2016 César for best documentary, the French equivalent of an Oscar, Tomorrow charts a road trip in which co-directors Cyril Dion and Mélanie Laurent roam the globe in search of solutions to environmental problems.

Their journey takes them to Icelandic volcanoes, Indian slums and French farmlands, among other places, to tell the stories of ordinary people fighting climate change.

The decision to steer away from doomsday narratives — most recently seen in Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Before the Flood” — came from the realization that such an approach failed to spur people into action, Dion said.

“When we focus on catastrophe, and on things that raise fear, it triggers mechanisms in the brain of rejection, flight and fear,” the longtime environmental activist said in a phone interview ahead of the film’s U.S. release Friday.

The film begins in the United States, where two California professors discuss their milestone 2012 study concluding climate change may signal a new cycle of mass extinction.

Soon afterward, Dion and Laurent — a French actress known for her role in “Inglourious Basterds” — hit the road.

Public plantings

In Britain, they visit the market town of Todmorden where residents have seized public spaces to plant fruit, vegetables and herbs — which pedestrians are encouraged to pick.

In the French city of Lille, the CEO of an envelope company shows them how bamboo is grown in the factory’s wastewater to feed a wood boiler that powers the unit’s central heating.

And in Copenhagen, local planners explain how building a labyrinth of bike paths is part of efforts to become first carbon-free capital by 2025.

“We don’t make the cities to make the cars happy, to make the modernistic planners and architects happy,” Jan Gehl, a local architect and urban planner, says in the film. “We have to make the cities so that citizens can have a good life and a good time.”

Dion said he was confident the film would appeal to American viewers despite the many U.S. lawmakers who are skeptical about climate change and oppose regulation to combat it.

Since being sworn in January, President Donald Trump has taken several steps to undo climate change regulations put in place by the previous administration.

Trump also promised during his election campaign to pull the United States out of the global climate change pact reached in Paris in 2015.
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From: MeNeedIt

Marijuana enthusiasts in the United States celebrate April 20 — or 4/20 — as an informal holiday, but this year they have something else to get excited about: New polling data show support for legalization of the drug is at an all-time high.

Sixty percent of Americans say they support the legalization of marijuana, according to a poll released Thursday by Quinnipiac University. The same poll taken in December 2012 showed 51 percent of respondents supported legalization.

“From a stigmatized, dangerous drug bought in the shadows, to an accepted treatment for various ills, to a widely accepted recreational outlet, marijuana has made it to the mainstream,” Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll, said in a statement.

According to the poll, an overwhelming 94 percent of respondents said they support the use of marijuana by adults for medicinal purposes — also the highest level of support seen in the poll’s history.

Seventy-three percent of Americans said they oppose enforcement of federal laws against marijuana in states that have legalized medical or recreational marijuana.

Currently, 29 states have legalized marijuana use for medicinal purposes, and eight states and the District of Columbia have legalized recreational use.

Marijuana advocates across the country held events to observe the annual 4/20 quasi-holiday. In Washington, D.C., activists had plans to give free joints to congressional staffers on Capitol Hill, while in California, which voted to legalize marijuana last fall, tens of thousands were expected at events ranging from marijuana cooking classes to a massive party in Golden Gate Park.
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From: MeNeedIt

The head of the International Monetary Fund says she “has every reason to believe” that the global lender can cooperate with the Trump Administration to support and improve global trade.

IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde spoke in Washington as economic and political officials gathered from around the world at this week’s meetings of the IMF and the World Bank.

Candidate Donald Trump blamed what he called unfair trade for the loss of many jobs in the United States, and proposed tax increases for imported goods. President Trump recently signed an order to give U.S. firms a better shot at selling goods to the U.S. government, and has been sharply critical of immigration policies.

Lagarde says trade is one of the “pillars” of prosperity. She vowed to continue to support the growth of trade, seeking ways to make it more efficient and fair, and fight against protectionist measures.

Lagarde said the global economy is “picking up momentum,” because of “sensible” policies in many nations. Speaking a little earlier, World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said he is “encouraged” to see stronger economic prospects after years of “disappointing” global growth. He said growth is hampered by conflict, climate shocks, the worst refugee crisis since World War II, and famine in certain areas.
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From: MeNeedIt

Anti-corruption activists in Nigeria say the president’s suspension of two top officials is only a first step and must be followed up with more action.

On Wednesday, Buhari suspended national intelligence agency chief Ayo Oke, who was linked to more than $40 million found in an empty Lagos apartment, and the secretary of his government, David Babachir Lawal, who allegedly collected money on a phony contract.

Abdulkarim Dayyabu is chairman of the Movement for Justice in Nigeria, a non-governmental organization.  He says the suspensions are overdue.

“This should have been done a long time ago,” Dayyabu told VOA’s Hausa Service on Thursday.  “Someone like Buhari ought to take immediate measures against any official accused of corruption; he should not wait for too long.”

Abdulmajid Dan Bilki Kwamanda is a member of the ruling APC coalition who recommends the president move against other aides.

“Buhari is finally fighting corruption from within.  He must continue to look inwards and confront his senior officials who are accused of corruption head-on,” he said.”

Another activist, Naja’atu Mohammed, is skeptical that the suspended officials will be held accountable, saying the administration shielded Lawal previously when senators accused him of corruption.

“We are looking for results,” she told VOA.

There have been calls, including one from Nigeria’s Senate, for the removal of Lawal over his alleged complicity in the mismanagement of funds meant for a presidential initiative on northeastern Nigeria

Rholavision Engineering, a company owned by Lawal, received payments of about $500,000 from a contract he awarded for the clearing of “invasive plant species” in Yobe state.

Oke, director-general of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), is embroiled in the discovery of $43 million in cash by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC.

So far, no one has claimed ownership of the money, which was in both local and foreign currencies.

Ownership of the apartment complex in which the funds were found, Osborne Towers Lagos, is still unclear, but the building is occupied by many powerful Nigerians including the former chairman of the opposition party, Ahmadu Muazu, whose PDP ruled Nigeria for years under former president Goodluck Jonathan.

Government spokesman Femi Adesina said the government has launched an investigation into the funds.

Another presidential spokesman, Garba Shehu, told VOA’s Umar Farouk Musa in Abuja that Buhari has given two probe panels, headed by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, two weeks to investigate and submit their findings.

The suspensions follow recent discoveries of large amounts of money by the EFCC in strange places, including homes of senior government officials.

Last month, the EFCC found about $1.25 million abandoned in large bags at the Kaduna airport.

Earlier, nearly $10 million was seized from the home of a former head of Nigeria’s National Petroleum Company, NNPC, in the northern state of Kaduna.

The EFCC also uncovered yet another unclaimed $1 million in two shops at a shopping mall in Victoria Island, Lagos.  

A new government initiative to reward whistleblowers is encouraging many Nigerians to reveal the secret locations of money stashed away by corrupt officials. The EFCC, Nigeria’s anti-corruption agency, has offered to give up to 5 percent of amounts recovered to the informants, whose identities it protects.
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From: MeNeedIt

A federal judge in Miami fined Princess Cruise Lines $40 million Wednesday for illegally dumping oil waste into the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, and for falsifying records.

It is the largest such water pollution fine in U.S. history.

The Miami Herald newspaper says the British engineer who reported the dumping to the U.S. Coast Guard will get a $1 million reward.

According to the Herald, engineers aboard the Caribbean Princess in 2012 and 2013 were ordered to dump the oily water straight into the sea and avoid the ship’s filtration system, in order to save money. It said the ship’s two senior engineers falsified the vessel’s records.

The British engineer recorded the dumping on a cellphone.

Four other Princess ships also were involved in the illegal dumping off the East Coast, and near Florida and Texas.
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From: MeNeedIt

Billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates is urging British leaders not to back down from their commitment to foreign aid, saying it could cost lives in Africa.

Gates on Wednesday was in London, where campaigning has started for early elections called by Prime Minister Teresa May.

May has so far declined to say whether she will heed calls by fellow Conservatives to slash British foreign aid as part of her party platform.

Gates told the Guardian newspaper Wednesday that a British refusal to commit itself to targeted spending on foreign aid could hurt efforts to wipe out malaria in Africa.

“The big aid givers now are the U.S., Britain and Germany … and if those three back off, a lot of ambitious things going on with malaria, agriculture and reproductive health simply would not get done,” he said.

Gates said British funding has made an “absolute phenomenal difference” in eradicating tropical diseases that affect more than 1 billion people.

Many conservatives want the government to spend more money at home to combat domestic crises. Some also contend that foreign aid money is frequently squandered.

Gates said as a business executive who spends $5 billion a year helping developing nations, he hates wasting money. But he told an audience of British politicians and diplomats that no country can “build a wall to hold back the next global epidemic,” and that foreign aid combats socioeconomic problems “at the source.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Egypt has unveiled a massive granite statue of Ramses II, the most powerful and celebrated of the ancient Pharaohs, after completing its restoration.

Standing 11 meters (36 feet) tall and weighing 75 tons, the statue was presented in a floodlit ceremony at the Luxor Temple on the banks of the Nile on Tuesday evening. When the statue was discovered between 1958 and 1960, it was in 57 pieces.

Ramses II, also known as Ramses the Great or Ozymandias, reigned more than 3,000 years ago. He led several military expeditions and expanded the Egyptian empire to stretch from Syria in the north to Nubia in the south.

The statue was displayed just hours after archaeologists unveiled the tomb of a nobleman from more than 3,000 years ago, the latest in a series of discoveries that Egypt hopes will revive a tourist business hit by political instability.

“What we’re happy with is that [the kind of tourists drawn to] classical Egypt, Luxor, Aswan, Nile cruises … are back to normal levels again,” said Hisham El Demery, chief of Egypt’s Tourism Development Authority.

However, an attack Tuesday claimed by Islamic State near St. Catherine’s Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula, one of the world’s most important Christian sites, revived fears for the tourist sector there.

The attack left one police officer dead and four others wounded.
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From: MeNeedIt

Peru’s economy will recover in coming years with investment in construction after recent flooding, likely growing 4.5 percent in 2018 and 5 percent in 2019, Finance Minister Alfredo Thorne said on Wednesday.

Previously, the government had expected growth of 4.3 and 4.1 percent for the next two years.

The estimate for 2017 growth was lowered this month to 3 percent from 3.8 percent previously due to flooding.

“The shock will be temporary,” Thorne said in a presentation at Lima’s Chamber of Commerce.

The floods have damaged 6,000 kilometers (3,728 miles) of roads, destroyed thousands of houses and killed 106 people since December.

Peru’s economy, which has also been hurt by paralyzed infrastructure projects due to a corruption investigation involving Brazil’s Odebrecht, grew at its lowest rate in more than two years in February.
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From: MeNeedIt

Komodo dragons, fearsome giant lizards found in Indonesia, may be a source of a potent antibiotic. If so, researchers say the agent could be an answer to the growing, global health problem of antibiotic resistance.  

Huge, toothy and aggressive, Komodo dragons are surrounded by filth in their daily lives. As a result, Barney Bishop, a biochemist at George Mason University near Washington, said Komodo dragons have developed what he called a “robust” immune system.

Bishop studies molecules produced by the immune system as a front-line defense against infection. That, he said, is the reason for the interest in Komodos.

“They are known to eat carrion; they live in an unsanitary environment; they have been recorded to have up to 57 bacterial strains in their mouths,” some of which can cause disease, he said. “Yet the reptiles themselves are not harmed by these bacteria, whether it’s in their mouths or wounds inflicted by other lizards.”

Bishop and his colleagues, working with blood from Komodos, isolated peptides, or small proteins, produced by the reptiles’ immune systems. The peptides, Bishop said, seem to have remarkable anti-bacterial properties.

Artificial version tested

Researchers made artificial versions of these peptides and tested the most promising one — DRGN-1, or DRAGON-1 — in wounded mice and human skin cell cultures. They found the protein molecules exhibited three outstanding properties: They destroyed the outer layer of bacteria, dissolved biofilms — a sticky colony that microbes form to shield against antibiotics — and speeded up healing.

The work with Komodo dragon peptides was published in the journal Biofilms and Microbiomes.

Bishop said, “Their peptides may offer some promise and some new insights or provide new templates for development of new therapeutics to treat infection.”

Bishop said the three-pronged action of DRGN-1, if made into an antibiotic, would make it unlikely that disease-causing bacteria could become drug-resistant.  

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency, an agency of the U.S. Defense Department, paid for the research. The military is interested in the work because it may relate to bioweapons.

Samples of blood for the study were taken from a 45.3-kilogram (100-pound) male Komodo dragon named Tujah who lives at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm and Zoological Park in Florida.

Bishop said only a one-time sample of blood was needed because the peptides were artificially reproduced, so no animal was harmed for the study.
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From: MeNeedIt

[Mining is big business in South Africa. It is the world’s largest producer of chrome and platinum, and the second largest producer of palladium and zirconium. It is also the 5th largest producer of gold. But digging up all those riches is a dirty business, and it has left behind a poisonous legacy.
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From: MeNeedIt

The World Health Organization said Tuesday that unprecedented progress had been made in tackling many of the world’s most disfiguring and disabling neglected tropical diseases over the past 10 years.  

Margaret Chan, WHO director-general, said there has been “record-breaking progress towards bringing ancient scourges like sleeping sickness and elephantiasis to their knees.”

About 1.5 billion people in 149 countries, down from 1.9 billion in 2010, are affected by neglected tropical diseases (NTD), a group of 18 disorders that disproportionately affect the very poor.

In 2007, the WHO and a group of global partners devised a strategy for better tackling and controlling NTDs.  

Five years ago, a group of nongovernmental organizations, private and public partners signed the London Declaration, committing greater support and resources to the elimination or eradication of 10 of the most common NTDs by the end of the decade.

“That has been a game changer in the expansion of NTD interventions worldwide,” said Dirk Engel, director of the WHO’s Department of Control of Neglected Tropical Diseases.

Meeting on Wednesday

The WHO’s fourth report on neglected tropical diseases was launched to coincide with a one-day meeting Wednesday at the agency’s headquarters to take stock of what has been achieved in the fight against NTDs and to explore ways to move the process forward.   

Engel said health ministers, representatives from pharmaceutical companies, academics, donors and philanthropists “will look at the changing landscape of NTDs” and explore better ways of integrating the fight against these diseases into global health and development.    

The report described achievements made in controlling the debilitating diseases. For example, it noted that an estimated 1 billion people received 1.5 billion treatments donated by pharmaceutical companies for one or more NTDs in 2015 alone.

It cited dramatic successes in efforts to eliminate visceral leishmaniasis, a parasitic, disfiguring disease that attacks the internal organs.  

“If you get it, it kills. There is no way out,” said Engel.  

The disease is prevalent in Southeast Asia, particularly in Bangladesh, India and Nepal. Engel said a subregional program was organized to provide early treatment with donated medicines and vector control through indoor residual spraying, similar to that used in malaria control.

“With those two interventions, you reduce the incidence of visceral leishmaniasis almost to nothing,” said Engel. “And the aim was to have less than one case in 10,000 people at the subdistrict level, which is a tough target.”

He noted that the disease had been eliminated in 82 percent of subdistricts in India, 97 percent of subdistricts in Bangladesh, and eliminated entirely in Nepal.

“This is a result that we had not anticipated a few years back,” he said.

While Asia is burdened with the greatest number of NTD cases, Africa has the highest concentration of the diseases. Engel told VOA that between 450,000 and 500,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa were infected by at least one tropical disease — but usually several — at the same time.   

He said Africa was making excellent progress in controlling neglected tropical diseases. African sleeping sickness has been reduced from 37,000 new cases in 1999 to fewer than 3,000 cases in 2015, and Guinea worm disease has gone down “to only 25 human cases, putting eradication within reach,” he said.

Engel noted that lymphatic filariasis, an infection transmitted by mosquitoes, causing enlargement of limbs and genitals, also was being brought under control.

“Some countries are lagging a bit behind. Some countries are actually doing fairly well,” he said. “We have just acknowledged the first African country that has eliminated lymphatic filariasis as a public health problem — Togo.”

He noted that so much progress has been made in the treatment of onchocerciasis, or river blindness, that “we are now thinking of setting a new target of elimination post-2020.”

In another important advance, the report found that trachoma, the world’s leading infectious cause of blindness, “has been eliminated as a public health problem” in Oman, Morocco and Mexico.

Affected areas

Neglected tropical diseases used to be prevalent throughout the world. Now, they are found only in tropical and subtropical regions with unsafe water, bad hygiene and sanitation, and poor housing conditions.  

“Poor people living in remote, rural areas, urban slums or conflict zones are most at risk,” said the report.

The World Health Organization said improving water and sanitation for 2.4 billion people globally who lack these basic facilities was key to making further progress in the fight against neglected tropical diseases.

Christopher Fitzpatrick, health economist in the WHO’s department of tropical diseases, told VOA that the socioeconomic costs in terms of lost productivity and out-of-pocket health expenditures by people infected with NTDs is very high.  

“It has been calculated that for every dollar invested [in improving water and sanitation infrastructure], there will be about $30 of return to affected individuals,” he said.
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From: MeNeedIt

A frog found in India secretes a substance that has been shown to be highly effective at killing influenza viruses.

Researchers at Emory University in Atlanta say the secreted peptide — a subunit of a protein chain — kills dozens of flu strains that plague humans. It is effective against H1 viruses, including ones that could cause pandemics.  

Unlike humans, frogs don’t have an immune system that is capable of protecting them against pathogens like viruses and bacteria. But they do produce a slimy mucus that does the job for them.  

Researchers at Emory screened 32 peptides derived from the mucus of the frog, called Bahuvistara, and found one that was effective against all H1 viruses. The frog is found in the southern Indian province of Kerala.

Joshy Jacob, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Emory’s vaccine center and senior author of the study, describing the peptide in the journal Immunity. He and his colleagues administered the peptide to mice and then exposed them to H1 viruses. He said it protected the animals from infection.

“The beauty of this peptide is that it directly kills the virus. It’s virucidal. So if you put the peptide and the virus together, it actually destroys the virus,” Jacob said.

The researchers named the peptide urumin, after a sword blade that snaps and bends like a whip.

Jacob said the mucus is collected from the frog after exposing it to a mild electric current, which makes the amphibians secrete the antiviral agent.

Three dozen peptides

After identifying the more than three dozen immune peptides in the mucus, the protein building blocks were made synthetically in the lab.

Four emerged as antiviral candidates. But one, urumin, killed all H1 viruses.

Jacob said an flu-fighting peptide could be especially useful when vaccines are not available or when circulating viral strains become resistant to current drugs.

He said one of the next challenges would be turning the effective peptide into a pill or injection to protect humans from viruses.

“It’s like when you get a headache, you take a Motrin [a painkiller]. [The peptide] doesn’t keep you from getting [the flu] again, but it kills the virus. It’s like taking an antibiotic for bacterial infection. You take this for a flu infection,” Jacob said.

Jacob said the peptide was not effective against seasonal flu viruses that mutate rapidly. But researchers plan on testing more of the frog-derived peptides to try to find others that work against other types of influenza virus.
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From: MeNeedIt