A remote Iranian desert city, Ice Age-era caves in Germany and a stone wharf in Brazil built for arriving African slave ships are three new additions to UNESCO’s list of World Heritage sites.

The World Heritage Committee spent a week meeting in Kraków, Poland, to consider 34 significant historical and cultural sites to add to the list.

This year’s selections include the Iranian city of Yazd, which UNESCO describes as a “living testimony to the use of limited resources for survival in the desert.”

The city has managed to avoid so-called modernization that destroyed many similar Iranian towns, and has preserved its traditional homes, bazaars, mosques and synagogues.

Another site UNESCO added to the list is in the Swabian Jura in southern Germany, one of the areas in Europe where humans first arrived more than 40,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age. They settled in caves, first discovered in the 1860s, and where they created some of the oldest known figurative art.

The U.N. cultural organization said the ancient musical instruments and prehistoric carved figures of animals and humans found in the caves help shed light on the origins of human artistic development

UNESCO also placed the Valongo Wharf in central Rio de Janeiro on the World Heritage List. The stone wharves were built in the early 1800s for slave ships sailing from Africa to Brazil. UNESCO called the wharves “the most important physical trace of the arrival of African slaves on the American continent.”

UNESCO added the World Heritage designation to more than 22 sites during its weeklong meeting in Poland, including choices that were controversial.

They include the Hoh Xil area in the China’s Qinghai province, a traditionally Tibetan area. By designating this a World Heritage site, the International Camnpaign for Tibet, an advocacy group critical of China’s administration there, said UNESCO endorses the forced relocation of Tibetan nomads by Chinese authorities.

China has promised to preserve the traditions and cultural heritage of the Tibetan region.

UNESCO also designated the Old City and Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron as a Palestinian World Heritage Site, angering Israel.

The city is split between Israeli and Palestinian control with the Old City and tomb in the Israeli sector. The tomb is sacred to Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Israel accuses UNESCO of trying to hide Jewish ties to Hebron, while Palestinians contend Israel is seeking to undermine their history.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

The IOC has balked at helping Rio Olympic organizers pay a debt estimated at $35-40 million.

The executive board of the International Olympic Committee, meeting Sunday in Lausanne, Switzerland, said it had already contributed a “record” $1.53 billion to last year’s Olympics, and questioned giving more after meeting with organizing committee President Carlos Nuzman.

In a statement, the IOC said “more detailed information” was needed and said it “deferred any further consideration at this stage.” It added that it “has closed all its obligations with the organizing committee.”

Contractually, host cities and countries are obligated to pay Olympic debts.

In Rio’s case, if governments step in to help pay creditors, it is sure to anger police, teachers, and other public employees who are getting paid late – caught up in Brazil’s deepest recession in decades.

The IOC, trying to move on to future games including the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in seven months, said in addition to record help for Rio, there had been “an exceptional effort to significant cost savings and additional financial undertakings by all the Olympic stakeholders, which amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars.”

The Rio Olympics opened just under a year ago and were plagued by organizational problems, spotty attendance, corruption scandals, and Brazil’s worst recession in decades. At the last minute, organizers needed millions in a government bailout to hold the Paralympic Games.

Some infrastructure built for the Olympics has found uses – a subway line, a renovated port, and high-speed bus lines. But sporting venues are mostly vacant, a $20 million Olympic golf course is struggling to find players, and fewer than 10 percent of the apartments in the 3,600-unit Athletes Village are reported to have found buyers.

Last month, an AP analysis – supported by city, state and federal data – put the cost of the Olympics at $13.1 billion, a mix of public and private money. However, the exact figure is likely larger and may never be known.
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From: MeNeedIt

Deploying poems, paintings and posters, opposition-minded artists in Venezuela are expanding their anti-government protests, offering a peaceful alternative to the violent political unrest costing at least 90 lives in three months.

“We don’t want to confront passers-by but to encourage reflection,” said Teresa Mulet, 46, a designer who joined a recent flash protest in a Caracas boulevard, lying with two dozen people as if dead before jumping up to deliver their message.

At the event, lasting just minutes, some shouted phrases lauding peaceful resistance, while others held letters of the alphabet drawn on cardboard which, when joined, spelled a line from a Venezuelan poem: “Those who kill in reality have not lived.”

Such surprise demonstrations are organized by a group of intellectuals and artistic creators – from historians to film directors – meeting discreetly since May, sometimes in bookshops, to design different strategies of protests to the traditional street marches.

The organizers break into small groups and appear suddenly at opposition marches or public spaces, including some areas dominated by government supporters, to leave messages that later go viral on social networks.

Near-daily opposition rallies have brought chaos to Venezuelan streets since April as protesters demand elections, solutions to an economic crisis and a suspension of leftist President Nicolas Maduro’s plan to rewrite the constitution.

Many have descended into battles between masked youths and security forces, with thousands of injuries and arrests on top of the fatalities. Maduro says the protesters are seeking a violent coup with U.S. encouragement.

Seeking to create arresting images, artists have sometimes turned to gargantuan projects.

In the Venezuelan capital Caracas’ largest slum, Petare, they recently unfurled a 25-meter- (82-foot-) wide poster made from 3,000 two bolivar currency notes – worth less than $1 at the street rate – to denounce roaring inflation and economic hardship.

Sometimes, peaceful protesters have been holding up signs, like “Ceasefire!” or “No To Violence!,” just meters (yards) from where young men hurl stones and Molotov cocktails against National Guard soldiers using tear gas and water cannons.

At times, the security forces have fired tear gas canisters directly at the peaceful art-themed protest gatherings.

In Barinas, the rural home state of Maduro’s predecessor and mentor Hugo Chavez, one painter depicted a pregnant mother with a baby inside her wearing a gas mask – in honor of Venezuela’s new generation of young protesters.

Oscar Olivares, a painter and friend of slain student protester Juan Pernalete, mixes the faces of victims with religious images in his protest-themed designs.

“All of us, with our gifts and talents, can build a better Venezuela,” said Olivares, some of whose images have been featured on the makeshift shields of young demonstrators. “I’m happy to know my art can provide hope and protection.”

The artists, some of whom draw inspiration from Spain’s anti-austerity protesters known as “Indignados” (“The Indignant Ones”), are convinced their methods will be more successful than violent protests.

“We’re trying to reflect what common people feel,” said Mariela Ramirez, 52, an architect.
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From: MeNeedIt

Invasive species are wreaking havoc in waters around the world — from Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades, to Asian carp in the Mississippi River, to turtles native to the US on every continent except Antarctica. Faith Lapidus reports on efforts to control the reptile in Poland.
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From: MeNeedIt

In 28 years in India’s pharmaceuticals sector, Rajiv Desai has never been busier.

Most of the last six months on his desk calendar is marked green, indicating visits to the 12 plants of Lupin, India’s No. 2 drugmaker, where Desai is a senior quality control executive. Only one day is red — a day off.

That’s what is needed these days to satisfy the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that standards are being met.

“In this sector, you’re only as good as your last inspection,” Desai said in his office in suburban Mumbai.

Often dubbed “the pharmacy of the world,” India is home to the most FDA-approved plants outside of the United States and supplies about 40 percent of the $70 billion worth of generic drugs sold in the country.

Damaged reputation

But sanctions and bans have badly damaged India’s reputation and slowed growth in the $16 billion sector. Drug exports fell in the fiscal year ending in March 2017.

More than 40 plants have been banned by the FDA for issues ranging from data fraud to hygiene since India’s then-largest drugmaker Ranbaxy was pulled up for serious violations in 2008.

Drug companies have spent millions of dollars on training, new equipment and foreign consultants. Yet the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance of the top 20 firms says its members still need at least five more years to get manufacturing standards and data reliability up to scratch.

The case of Lupin shows why.

In the next few months, the FDA is expected to clear Lupin’s Goa plant of problems found in 2015, Desai said.

However, the agency also published a notice last week citing issues with data storage at its plant in Pithampur, central India.

If companies want to continue to sell into the world’s biggest health care market, they must keep constant vigilance.

Asked about Lupin’s case, the FDA said in a statement it did not “comment on compliance matters,” but said generally: “India’s regulatory infrastructure must keep pace to ensure that relevant quality and safety standards are met.”

Form 483

India has its own standards body, the Central Drug Standard Control Organization (CDSCO), which maintains that its quality controls are stringent enough to ensure drugs are safe.

The FDA has taken matters into its own hands and gradually expanded in India to more than a dozen full-time staff.

Inspections are frequent and increasingly unannounced. If the agency finds problems, it issues a Form 483, a notice outlining the violations, which if not resolved can lead to a warning letter and in worst case, a ban.

Violations range from hygiene, such as rat traps and dirty laboratories, to inadequate controls on systems that store data, leaving it open to tampering.

None of the violations the FDA has cited in India have explicitly said the drugs are unsafe, and when companies are banned by the FDA they can sell into other markets, including in the developing world, until the bans are lifted.

There are also no studies showing that the drugs have harmed anyone in the world. But by definition, the notices are issued when the FDA finds conditions that might harm public health.

​Don’t tell anyone

Industry watchers say Lupin, which specializes in oral contraceptives and drugs for diabetes and hypertension, is doing better than most. So far none of its infractions have extended to a ban.

On a recent visit by Reuters to its Goa plant, blue-uniformed employees could be seen working on giant machines, then making notes in hardbound registers. These are being phased out as Lupin transitions to more secure e-files.

Employees are often videotaped to ensure they follow standard operating procedure. Manufacturers have cut back to focus on quality over quantity: five years ago, Lupin was making 1 billion pills a month at one of its Goa plants. Now it makes 450 million.

Both the company and employees needed to be willing to acknowledge errors, Desai said. The first impulse in the past was often “don’t tell anyone,” he said.

“We’re humans after all, not robots. We make mistakes,” said Amol Kolatkar, a production head at the Goa site.

As recently as three years ago, training was a formality, Desai said. Now, when an error is traced to an employee, the entire team undergoes fresh training.

“I have worked at a pharma company before, but this is the first time I went through such a training,” said another Lupin quality control officer, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media.

The quality control role is key.

“They (Lupin) have had a practice where company quality heads report directly to Nilesh Gupta (the managing director),” said Amey Chalke, an analyst at HDFC Securities. “Some other companies have also started doing that now.”

The companies also have to be willing to spend big. Lachman, PwC and Boston Consulting conduct mock audits at the Goa plant every three to six months, at a cost of up to $400 an hour.

“These days the FDA is giving us 483 on small, small things,” a third quality control officer said. “So we are always auditing.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Canadian lender Desjardins is considering no longer funding energy pipelines, a spokesman said Saturday, citing concerns about the impact such projects may have on the environment.

Desjardins, the largest association of credit unions in North America, Friday temporarily suspended lending for such projects and may make the decision permanent, spokesman Jacques Bouchard told Reuters by telephone.

He said the lender would make a final decision in September.

Following ING

Desjardins, a backer of Kinder Morgan Canada Ltd’s high-profile expansion of its Trans Mountain pipeline, has been evaluating its policy for such lending for months, Bouchard said.

If it makes the decision permanent, that would likely mean Desjardins would not help finance other major Canadian pipelines projects, including TransCanada Corp’s Keystone XL and Energy East and Enbridge Inc’s Line 3.

Such a move would follow that of Dutch lender ING Groep NV, which has a long-standing policy of not funding projects directly related to oil sands, and is the latest sign that pipelines could have a harder time getting funding as banks face increasing pressure to back away.

Patrick Bonin, a campaigner with the environmental group Greenpeace, praised Desjardins for temporarily halting pipeline funding, but called on the lender to make it permanent and reconsider its C$145 million ($113 million) commitment to Trans Mountain.

Indigenous, environmental groups

Desjardins is among 24 financial institutions that agreed to lend money to a subsidiary of Kinder Morgan Canada, majority owned by Kinder Morgan Inc of Houston, according to regulatory filings.

A coalition of more than 20 indigenous and environmental groups, including Greenpeace, in June called on 28 major banks to pull funding for Trans Mountain, citing the risk of pipeline spills and their potential contribution to climate change.

ING, which was targeted by the coalition, said it will not fund any of the major Canadian pipelines.

The same month, Sweden’s largest national pension fund, AP7, sold investments in six companies that it says violate the Paris climate agreement, including TransCanada, in a decision environmentalists believe is the first of its kind.
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From: MeNeedIt

After 1,400 kilometers (nearly 900 miles) in eight days of racing, the suffer-fest Tour de France now turns the pain dial up a notch or five. How does scaling half the height of Everest in one day sound?

That’s the monstrous challenge lurking Sunday for the 193 tired, sunbaked riders who have made it this far.

For the moment, when race leader Chris Froome looks over his shoulder, he sees a gaggle of challengers hot on his heels. Just 61 seconds separate him from 10th-placed Rafal Majka of Poland. More dangerous contenders are closer still to the three-time Tour champion.

Climbs defy categorization

All that will likely change on the succession of seven climbs in eastern France’s Jura mountains Sunday — three of them so tough they defy categorization on cycling’s sliding scale of climbing toughness. “A monster stage” is how Froome described it, predicting the race standings will “get blown to pieces.”

Total elevation, when all the ascents are added together: 4,600 meters (15,000 feet). That’s just shy of the height of western Europe’s highest peak, Mont Blanc, and about belly button-height on Everest.

The last “hors categorie” climb, Mont du Chat, may be named after a cat but looks on Tour maps like a lion’s fang. With an average 10 percent gradient, and even steeper than that in parts, it will push riders already exhausted by the previous six climbs to the very limit. Hearts pounding, legs burning, they will have no time to recover from its hairpin bends before plunging into more fast, twisting bends on the descent. Clear heads and quick reactions are a must: Not easy when body and brain are screaming for rest.

“That climb is savage,” Froome said. “I imagine it’s going to blow the general classification right open.”

Tired legs

Complicating matters: Saturday’s stage, also in the Jura mountains, was far from easy.

Froome’s teammates at Sky had to ride hard to make sure that riders who rode off at the front of the race, chasing the stage victory, didn’t get too far ahead and take the overall lead away from him. The question now is whether Sky will pay for the effort Sunday and run out of juice on the 181.5-kilometer (112-mile) Stage 9 from Nantua to Chambery in the Alps, arguably the most grueling of this Tour’s 21 stages.

“It was good to see them pull on the front,” said Australian Richie Porte of the rival BMC team, who is 39 seconds behind Froome overall, in fifth place. “I hope there’s some tired legs among them tomorrow.”

Grinding away from pursuers on a small mountain road more suited to goats than riders, Lilian Calmejane won Stage 8 to the Rousses ski station, for his first victory in his first Tour.

Calmejane, riding for French team Direct Energie, fought cramps after breaking away on the final climb and hung on, tongue lolling, for victory in only the second visit by the Tour to the Rousses, with its cross-country ski trails through dense forests.

It was the second win at this Tour for a French rider, after Arnaud Demare’s on Stage 4.

Froome rode in 50 seconds after Calmejane — plenty close enough to retain the yellow jersey — in a group with all of the other top contenders for overall victory in Paris on July 23.

Saturday frights

Froome’s day wasn’t without incident: On a downhill, right-hand bend after the second of three rated climbs on the 187.5 kilometer (116-mile) stage from Dole, the Briton went into roadside gravel instead of cornering. Froome stayed on his bike and quickly recovered. But teammate Geraint Thomas went over roadside barriers. Thomas quickly rejoined the race, and Froome said his teammate was uninjured.

The corner “sprang up on us a little bit,” Froome said. “One moment you’re in control, the next thing you’re in a ditch.”

Calmejane held off Dutch rider Robert Gesink, hot on his heels, on the final climb and rolling finish. Cramping from his effort, Calmejane had to slow and rise off his saddle to stretch his legs in the final section and then gritted his teeth and pedaled onward to the line.

“I gave myself a huge fright,” Calmejane said of his cramps. “It would have been so sad to lose the stage like that.”

Gesink, of the Netherlands’ Lotto-Jumbo team, rode in 37 seconds after Calmejane. French rider Guillaume Martin placed third on the stage, another 13 seconds back.

By being the first rider to scale the day’s last climb, Calmejane enjoyed the added bonus of picking up enough points to take the polka-dot jersey, awarded for points collected on climbs, off the shoulders of Italian Fabio Aru.

“Winning alone like that is incredible,” said Calmejane, who also won a stage at his first Grand Tour, the Spanish Vuelta, last year. “It’s everything I dreamed of.”
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From: MeNeedIt

Visiting Poland this week, U.S. President Donald Trump pledged to boost exports of American liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Central Europe and take on Russia’s stranglehold on energy supplies.

“America stands ready to help Poland and other European nations diversify their energy supplies so that you can never be held hostage to a single supplier,” Trump told reporters after talks with his Polish counterpart Thursday.

Up to now, that supplier has been Russia. It supplied around a third of Europe’s gas demand in 2016, with an even greater share in many of the former Soviet states in Central and Eastern Europe.

Watch: US, Russia on Collision Course in Competition for European Gas Market

Natural gas and dominance

Russian state-owned firm Gazprom shut off pipelines to Ukraine in 2015, depriving Kyiv of a major source of revenue and disrupting supplies to Eastern Europe.

“It’s a key pillar of Russian foreign policy: of using gas and energy as a means of asserting dominance over Central Europe,” said Marek Matraszek, founder of the lobby firm CEC Government Relations, who played a major role in the Polish government’s acquisition of U.S.-built F-16 fighter planes.

The first shipment of American liquefied natural gas arrived at the port of Swinoujscie on Poland’s Baltic coast last month. The port facility and liquefaction plant were finished in 2015, aimed at diversifying the country’s energy sources and enabling Poland to become a hub supplying imported gas across Central and Eastern Europe.

With that in mind, the Three Seas Initiative Summit in Warsaw Thursday brought together leaders from a dozen Eastern European nations, plus Trump. He pledged the United States will never use energy as a political tool. 

Russia’s pipeline

Energy analyst Grzegorz Malecki, a former head of Poland’s Foreign Intelligence Agency says Russia will be watching with interest.

“If this new source of gas supplies is moved forward and the infrastructure built, it may cause Russia to change its approach. The Polish government is probably counting on it. Russia may change its politics towards Poland regarding energy,” Malecki told VOA in an interview this week.

Russia has plans of its own to boost exports. Initially scheduled to open in 2019, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline would double its capacity to export gas directly to Germany beneath the Baltic Sea, bypassing Ukraine. Eastern European states want the project blocked.

“If we want to have United States’ LNG supplies in Central Europe, we also want to see the United States getting tough on Nord Stream 2, which means getting tough on Russia,” Matraszek said.

American LNG and the Nord Stream 2 project are on a collision course, with Poland stuck in the middle, Malecki said.

“It’s hard to hide the fact that these two projects compete with each other. The odds are that there will be a clash of these energy giants in Europe,” he said.

Three-hundred kilometers west along the Baltic coast from where the existing Nord Stream pipeline comes ashore in Germany, Trump and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin held their first face-to-face meeting at the G-20 Summit in Hamburg Friday.

If the American LNG deal goes through, it could have a broader impact on U.S.-Russia relations, said John Hannah of the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

“I think it could all happen relatively quickly and in a way that will give us much stronger leverage over Putin and the Russians to begin pushing back against some of the more aggressive activities that we’ve seen, not only in Europe but against the United States as well,” Hannah said.

Trump remains upbeat about his relationship with Putin, but the evolving energy policies in Europe will likely remain a source of friction.
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From: MeNeedIt

Each year, wildfires around the world devastate thousands of square kilometers of forests and grasslands and make many people homeless. Some plants recover faster from fire than others, and scientists would like to know why. In Australia, they are experimenting with a simple monitoring device relying on fiber optics. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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From: MeNeedIt

Microplastics are pieces of plastic less than 5 millimeters in size. They make up part of the estimated tens of millions of tons of plastic that gets washed into the ocean every year. That could be hurting fish that eat plastic, and humans, when we eat fish. But help may be on the way. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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From: MeNeedIt

London is a hotspot of modern slavery, with workers in hotels, restaurants and on construction sites at particular risk of exploitation, said the head of the Metropolitan police’s anti-slavery unit.

Modern slavery cases surged in the first half of this year to about 820 by the end of June, compared to about 1,013 in the whole of 2016, Detective Inspector Phil Brewer told Reuters.

The growth in cases is partly due to increased awareness about slavery, and as police and local authorities are now more often considering whether those involved in potential slavery crimes are victims rather than suspects, said Brewer.

The Metropolitan police is working closely with charities and frontline workers to ensure victims are more easily identified and helped faster.

“Everyone realizes now we’re never going to police our way out of this,” Brewer said in an interview this week.

Government departments, local authorities and police are investigating whether people in the construction and hospitality industries are being held against their will, working under threat, for no pay or in dangerous conditions, Brewer said.

Some government departments already have systems in place — on health and safety rules and the enforcement of minimum wages, for example — to lead the battle against modern slavery in construction and hospitality, he added.

Britain passed tough anti-slavery legislation in 2015, introducing life sentences for traffickers and forcing companies to disclose what they are doing to make sure their supply chains are free from slavery.

There are an estimated 13,000 victims of forced labor, sexual exploitation and domestic servitude in Britain, according to government data.

Domestic servitude and slavery in supply chains are also major concerns for the Metropolitan police, said Brewer.

As paperwork is often only processed through embassies, police only hear about mistreatment if domestic workers come into contact with officers for other reasons, he said.

Domestic servitude is also fueled by cultural factors that might make it acceptable in some sections of London’s population to have a worker from a lower social group working as a domestic slave even though it is against the law.

“Labor exploitation in London is really misunderstood or not understood, it’s quite clear that it’s about what we don’t know rather than what we know,” Brewer said.

Victims, not suspects

One of the biggest challenges for the Metropolitan police is to make sure every officer in the force of 30,000 understands and reacts appropriately to modern slavery cases, said Brewer.

He said the police had faced criticism because officers had treated potential victims as suspects, so London’s police now “massively relies” on relationships with charities and advocacy organizations to ensure swift support for victims.

Under the “county lines” crime model, for example, young urban gang members are compelled and threatened to deal drugs in more rural areas. Some of these young people are now being referred as victims — a number that Brewer expects to grow.

Police also needed to have much more “grown-up conversations” with companies that find modern slavery in their supply chains, to calm their fears that reporting cases would result in them being prosecuted.

“There’s not really been any conversation about how companies can actually interact with policing. There’s probably some reassurance that we need to do, that if you come to us and say we found this, it won’t compromise your position,” he said.
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From: MeNeedIt

Georgia’s health commissioner was named Friday to lead the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the federal government’s top public health agency.

Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald is an OB-GYN and has been head of the Georgia Department of Public Health since 2011. She succeeds Dr. Tom Frieden, who resigned as CDC director in January at the end of the Obama administration.

Fitzgerald was appointed by Dr. Tom Price, who was a congressman from Georgia before he was named head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services by President Donald Trump.

“Having known Dr. Fitzgerald for many years, I know that she has a deep appreciation and understanding of medicine, public health, policy and leadership — all qualities that will prove vital as she leads the CDC in its work to protect America’s health 24/7,” Price said in a statement.

Fitzgerald, 70, has had strong ties to the Republican Party. She was a GOP candidate for Congress twice in the 1990s. She was also a health care policy adviser to Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker, and the late Sen. Paul Coverdell.

Fitzgerald is respected in the public health community, and her choice drew praise from Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.

“From her work as a practicing obstetrician-gynecologist to her recent service as the commissioner of the Georgia Department of Public Health, Dr. Fitzgerald is more than prepared to face the health challenges of our time, including climate change, Zika, Ebola, and our growing burden of chronic disease,” Benjamin said in a statement.

The CDC investigates disease outbreaks, researches the cause and frequency of health problems and promotes prevention efforts. It is the only federal agency headquartered outside of Washington, D.C. It has nearly 12,000 employees and 10,000 contractors worldwide.

Her first day at CDC was Friday. A CDC spokeswoman said Fitzgerald would not be available for interviews.
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From: MeNeedIt