A new visitors’ center on the Eastern Shore explores the history of one of Maryland’s most famous figures, the Underground Railroad conductor, abolitionist and Civil War spy Harriet Tubman.

The $21 million Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center is in Church Creek, about a two-hour drive from Baltimore. It opens Saturday to the public, four years after its groundbreaking.

Free events scheduled for the grand opening weekend include children’s activities, presentations by a Tubman re-enactor, tours of a legacy garden that will discuss escape methods used by Tubman, and talks by rangers and others.

A ribbon-cutting was held at the site on Friday, designated by the U.S. Congress in 1990 as Harriet Tubman Day. Tubman died on March 10, 1913, at a home for the elderly she founded in Auburn, New York.

Tubman’s great-great-niece, Valerie Manokey, attended the ribbon-cutting and said she feels “pride, honor, love and resolution,” now that the center is opening.

“We made it,” said Manokey, who is 81 and lives in nearby Cambridge, Maryland. “And I am truly proud to say: ‘Yes, I am the niece of Harriet Tubman.”

History

Visitors will see a short video introduction to Tubman’s life and her formative years in Maryland. A permanent exhibit focuses on Tubman and the Underground Railroad resistance movement in Maryland, including Tubman’s brutal treatment at the hands of slave owners, her escape to freedom, and her later rescues of hundreds of slaves.

The center consists of four connected buildings depicting Tubman in sculpture during different stages of life, from her youth to her work on the Underground Railroad. Videos and panel illustrations on the walls tell of her strong sense of family, community and religious faith. Her roles in the Civil War as a nurse, scout and spy are represented. The center also has a shop and a research library.

Looking at Tubman

The center includes a new bronze bust of a youthful Tubman, who was born as a slave named Araminta Ross in 1822 in Madison, about 10 miles away. The bust is displayed on a pedestal so that the top of the head reaches her height – just 5 feet tall. The base includes wood from a former Maryland landmark – the 460-year-old Wye Oak – and a cedar tree.

The bust was made by Eastern Shore artist Brendan Thorpe O’Neill, who studied photos of Tubman in her 60s, then sought to show how she would have appeared when younger. Thorpe sculpted another bust of Tubman in 2014 for display at Government House, the governor’s mansion in Annapolis.

What She Saw

The visitor center is on a 17-acre site next to the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge . It includes sweeping views of the marshy refuge, and paths through a landscape that has changed little since Tubman’s time in the early to mid-1800s. It preserves routes she likely would have navigated as an adult leading other slaves to freedom.

Journeys, Old and New

The visitor center is a gateway to the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Byway, a self-guided driving tour. The route includes 125 miles of countryside and shoreline in Maryland’s Dorchester and Caroline counties. It offers 36 points of interest, including places where Tubman lived and historically significant sites related to the Underground Railroad.

Visiting

The center is managed in a partnership of the Maryland Park Service and the National Park Service, and is a sister park to the Harriet Tubman National Historical Park in Auburn.

This new center includes environmentally friendly elements, such as rain barrels, vegetative roofs and bio-retention ponds. A 2,600-square-foot pavilion outside has a stone fireplace and picnic tables. It’s open daily from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., except on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day. There is no entry fee. A park website says there are no food or drink options at the site, but visitors are welcome to pack lunch or snacks and use the water fountains.
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From: MeNeedIt

U.S. employers are thought to have hired at a brisk pace in February, and the unemployment rate is expected to stay low, a result that would provide further evidence of a consistently solid job market.

Economists have forecast a job gain of 186,000 and a decline of one-tenth of a percentage point in unemployment to 4.7 percent, according to data provider FactSet. With employers competing to hire a dwindling supply of applicants and higher minimum wages taking effect in some states, average pay is also thought to have risen.

The Labor Department will release the February jobs report at 8:30 a.m. Eastern time.

If the economists’ forecasts prove roughly correct, the Federal Reserve will almost surely feel confident enough to resume raising interest rates when it meets next week. It would mark the Fed’s third rate hike in 15 months, a reflection of how far the economy has come since the Great Recession ended nearly eight years ago.

Jobs report for Trump

Friday’s report will also be the first to cover a full month under President Donald Trump. Trump has tweeted cheerfully about a survey of private-sector hiring released earlier this week that suggested a robust job gain in February. 

That survey, by payroll provider ADP, concluded that private employers added 298,000 jobs in February, the biggest monthly gain in three years. Construction companies hired the most workers in 11 years and manufacturers the most in five, ADP found. 

The surge in construction jobs likely reflected unseasonably warm February weather, particularly in the North, which kept job sites open that would otherwise have been shut down by winter weather. If warm weather boosted the pace of construction hiring in Friday’s government report, other weather-sensitive industries, like retail and restaurants, will likely also show sharp job gains. 

Jobs market healthy

Apart from any effects of unusual weather, much evidence suggests that the U.S. job market is fundamentally healthy or nearly so. The number of people seeking first-time unemployment benefits, a rough proxy for the pace of layoffs, reached a 44-year low two weeks ago. 

And in January, employers added a vigorous 227,000 jobs, according to the government’s figures, higher than last year’s monthly average of 187,000.

Business and consumer confidence has soared since the presidential election, with many business executives saying they expect faster economic growth to result from Trump’s promised tax cuts, deregulation and infrastructure spending. 

The U.S. economy is also benefiting from steadier economies overseas. Growth is picking up or stabilizing in most European countries as well as in China and Japan. The 19-nation alliance that uses the euro currency expanded 1.7 percent in 2016, an improvement from years of recession and anemic growth. Germany’s unemployment rate has fallen to 3.9 percent, although in crisis-stricken Greece, unemployment remains a painful 23 percent.

Wages rising

In the United States, employers have been hiring solidly for so long that in some industries, they’re being compelled to raise pay. Hourly wages for the typical worker rose 3.1 percent in 2016, according to a report Thursday by the Economic Policy Institute. That’s much higher than the 0.3 percent average annual pay gain, adjusted for inflation, since 2007, the EPI said. 

Minimum wage increases last year in 17 states and Washington, D.C., helped raise pay among the lowest-paid workers, the EPI found. Pay increases for the poorest 10 percent of workers were more than twice as high in states where the minimum wage rose as in states where it did not. 

U.S. builders are breaking ground on more homes, and factory production has recovered from an 18-month slump, fueling growth and hiring. In February, manufacturing expanded at the fastest pace in more than two years, according to a trade group. Businesses have stepped up their purchases of industrial equipment, steel and other metals, and computers.

And in January, Americans bought homes at the fastest pace in a decade despite higher mortgage rates. That demand has spurred a 10.5 percent increase in home construction in the past 12 months. 
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From: MeNeedIt

If this week’s WikiLeaks document dump is genuine, it includes a CIA list of the many and varied ways the electronic device in your hand, in your car, and in your home can be used to hack your life.

It’s simply more proof that, “it’s not a matter of if you’ll get hacked, but when you’ll get hacked.” That may be every security expert’s favorite quote, and unfortunately they say it’s true. The WikiLeaks releases include confidential documents the group says exposes “the entire hacking capacity of the CIA.”

The CIA has refused to confirm the authenticity of the documents, which allege the agency has the tools to hack into smartphones and some televisions, allowing it to remotely spy on people through microphones on the devices.

Watch: New Generation of Hackable Internet Devices May Always Be Listening

WikiLeaks also claimed the CIA managed to compromise both Apple and Android smartphones, allowing their officers to bypass the encryption on popular services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram.

For some of the regular tech users, news of the leaks and the hacking techniques just confirms what they already knew. When we’re wired 24-7, we are vulnerable.

“The expectation for privacy has been reduced, I think,” Chris Coletta said, “… in society, with things like WikiLeaks, the Snowden revelations … I don’t know, maybe I’m cynical and just consider it to be inevitable, but that’s really the direction things are going.”

The internet of things

The problem is becoming even more dangerous as new, wired gadgets find their way into our homes, equipped with microphones and cameras that may always be listening and watching.

One of the WikiLeaks documents suggests the microphones in Samsung smart TV’s can be hacked and used to listen in on conversations, even when the TV is turned off.

Security experts say it is important to understand that in many cases, the growing number of wired devices in your home may be listening all the time.

“We have sensors in our phones, in our televisions, in Amazon Echo devices, in our vehicles,” said Clifford Neuman, the director of the Center for Computer Systems Security, at the University of Southern California. “And really almost all of these attacks are things that are modifying the software that has access to those sensors, so that the information is directed to other locations. Security practitioners have known that this is a problem for a long time.”

Neuman says hackers are using the things that make our tech so convenient against us.

“Certain pieces of software and certain pieces of hardware have been criticized because, for example, microphones might be always on,” he said. “But it is the kind of thing that we’re demanding as consumers, and we just need to be more aware that the information that is collected for one purpose can very easily be redirected for others.”

Tools of the espionage trade

The WikiLeaks release is especially damaging because it may have laid bare a number of U.S. surveillance techniques. The New York Times says the documents it examined lay out programs called “Wrecking Crew” for instance, which “explains how to crash a targeted computer, and another tells how to steal passwords using the autocomplete function on Internet Explorer.”

Steve Grobman, chief of the Intel Security Group, says that’s bad not only because it can be done, but also because so-called “bad actors” now know it can be done. Soon enough, he warns, we could find our own espionage tools being used against us.

“We also do need to recognize the precedents we set, so, as offensive cyber capabilities are used … they do give the blueprint for how that attack took place. And bad actors can then learn from that,” he said.

So how can tech-savvy consumers remain safe? Security experts say they can’t, and to remember the “it’s not if, but when” rule of hacking.

The best bet is to always be aware that if you’re online, you’re vulnerable.
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From: MeNeedIt

It’s not a matter of “if” you’ll be hacked, but “when” you’ll be hacked. That may be every security expert’s favorite quote, and unfortunately they say it’s true. A Wikileaks dump of alleged CIA documents that includes electronic hacking techniques makes it abundantly clear that no one is safe. The leaks and the revealing CIA techniques reinforce the notion that when we’re wired 24-7, we are vulnerable. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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From: MeNeedIt

Twelve-year-old Janet Sylva of Gambia wants to be a doctor when she grows up, she says with a broad grin — one that surgeons in New York gave back to her after removing from her mouth one of the largest tumors they’d ever seen.

The 6-pound benign tumor was about the size of a cantaloupe. It prevented Janet from eating, and her breathing had become so difficult that doctors were afraid she might die within a year if nothing was done. 

“It made her a prisoner in her own body,” said Dr. David Hoffman, a Staten Island surgeon who became aware of Janet’s plight last year after doctors in the neighboring west African nation of Senegal reached out to international health groups for assistance. She had stopped going to school and wore a scarf around her face to hide the massive tumor.

Hoffman coordinated with the Global Medical Relief Fund and a team of volunteer surgeons and other medical staff at Cohen Children’s Medical Center in New Hyde Park on Long Island to arrange for Janet to have the surgery, which was performed for free in January.

Dr. Armen Kasabian, chief of plastic surgery at North Shore University Hospital, led the team in performing the delicate operation, which not only involved removing the tumor but also rebuilding her jaw by using part of a bone from her leg. Kasabian said the team knew they had to get it right the first time because Janet and her mother, Philomena, would only be in the U.S. for a short time.

“We don’t have the luxury of operating on her 10 times,” he said. “We have to try and get the most that we can out of just one operation.”

He and Hoffman said they employed 3-D imaging to build models of the child’s mouth, including the tumor, and were able to use the virtual modeling techniques to practice for the procedure before the actual 12-hour surgery took place January 16.

Both physicians said the tumor wouldn’t have grown so large if Janet had lived in the U.S.

“It would never get to this,” Kasabian said. “This grew over the course of three years, and she had no one to take care of it there. Here, it would have been treated when it was smaller and more manageable.” 

Janet and her mother are preparing to return to Gambia next week, said Elissa Montanti of the Global Medical Relief Fund, the Staten-Island based charity that arranged for transportation, housing and travel visas for Janet and her mother.

Before heading home, the pair returned Thursday to Cohen Children’s hospital.

Through an interpreter speaking their native language of Wolof, the mother and daughter shyly thanked the medical staff.

“I’m very happy and grateful because I have my daughter back,” Philomena Sylva said.

Janet smiled and said the scarf she had worn to hide her face has been thrown away. 
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From: MeNeedIt

Air pollution takes the lives of more than half a million young children every year, according to the World Health Organization. An entrepreneur in London has come up pollution-busting face masks to protect kids from toxic air.
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From: MeNeedIt

Nigerian Abdulhakim Mohammed has just graduated in architecture but, like many people ranging from unemployed locals to foreign investors and Africa’s richest man, he has decided the future lies in rice farming.

The reason is that domestic rice prices have more than doubled in the last two years due to an import ban and a dive in the Nigerian currency. At the same time, the government is subsidizing tractors, mills and fertilizers as well as arranging cheaper loans to boost production – with considerable success.

And yet the drive to cut an annual food import bill of $20 billion has run into the kind of problems that have long bedeviled Nigeria’s efforts to build up an economy outside its dominant the oil industry.

Despite rice growing being a government priority, many farmers still work with their bare hands in fields lacking irrigation channels. Mills are often ramshackle while poor roads make getting the crop from the main growing areas in northern Nigeria to consumers in the south difficult and costly.

As a result, the industry has so far failed to fill a supply shortfall amounting to about 3 million tonnes of milled rice created by the import ban. In the commercial capital of Lagos, supermarkets mainly sell rice from India or Thailand.

Mohammed took up growing rice three years ago to help fund his university studies in the northern state of Bauchi. When he finished last year, he opted for a career in the fields around the town of Gadau, rather than in architecture.

“My advice to the youth is to join rice farming,” said Mohammed, who is expanding his own area from 1.5 to 2 hectares (3.7 to 5 acres) as well as working as a supervisor on a new farm that workers are preparing nearby.

“One bag of rice sells for 10,000 to 11,000 (naira). Two years ago I was selling for 4,500,” he told Reuters.

That makes a bag worth almost $25 at the exchange rate on the black market, where many Nigerians go due to restrictions and dollar shortages in the official banking system. In Bauchi state, hundreds of farmers are busy expanding, preparing new fields and drilling water holes for irrigation.

Farms have been opening across much of the country, lifting output of unmilled rice to 7.85 million tons in 2016 – a 17.4 percent jump from 2014, the National Bureau of Statistics told Reuters. That compares with just 4.54 million in 2010, before the campaign began.

Talking vs Implementing

Until 2015, Nigeria imported up to 4 million tons of rice annually, much of which was smuggled from the western neighbor Benin Republic. But this has fallen to about 700,000 tons as authorities now monitor the border, industry players say.

That lifted prices for the staple, along with currency curbs imposed to prop up the naira which has been hit by a fall in revenues from Nigeria’s oil exports.

Part of the rise is because farmers are passing on higher costs, saying the government subsidies are not enough. Importers have to pay a premium of 30 percent over the official rate to get dollars on the black market for buying the foreign-made machinery and fertilizers that growers need.

On top of this, farmers complain that endemic corruption means the government help doesn’t always reach the right people.

“Some people who got fertilizers were not even farmers. They sell it then,” said Mohammed Tafida, the local head of a rice farmers’ association, who is also expanding his own fields.

“Fertilizers are very expensive,” he told Reuters, standing by a new paddy field being prepared. “Our production costs are very high. You now pay workers 500 to 700 naira a day; before it was 200 naira.”

President Muhammadu Buhari has made fighting graft a priority since coming to power two years ago. But he has to work with Nigeria’s 36 states where officials executing the federal programs often help out supporters or relatives.

Farmers and food producers can get subsidized loans well below the benchmark interest rate of 14 percent. But one processor of garri – another local staple, made from cassava – said he had waited six months to get his loan approved as banks are new to the farming business.

“In Nigeria talking is one thing and implementing plans another,” said Idris Salihu, another rice farmer in Bauchi. “We need more support.”

Pot-holed roads

The rice boom has also drawn large scale investment from Africa’s richest man, Nigerian Aliko Dangote, and foreign firms to supply the huge market of 190 million people.

Dangote Group said last month it planned to launch a rice mill with a farm scheme which will produce 225,000 tons of parboiled, milled rice by the year-end.

Wacot Rice, part of Lagos-based food and farming conglomerate TGI, will open a rice mill next month with a capacity of 100,000 tons annually. It works with rice farmers on 15,000 hectares and plans to expand to 165,000 hectares within 10 years.

Abroad, Singapore-based Olam plans to increase its Nigerian rice farming to 6,000 hectares from 4,300 hectares “in a couple of years or so”, a spokesman said.

Nigeria hopes such large-scale investors will improve rice yields, measuring output per hectare. These are among the lowest in Africa as the market is dominated by relatively inefficient farmers running fields of two to five hectares.

The lack of good roads also means that rice from the north hardly reaches Lagos, Nigeria’s biggest city. The government plans to increase capital spending by nearly a quarter in 2017 to fix pot-holed routes and help trade. However, a collapse in oil revenues due to low world prices has slowed many projects.

Nigerian growers also struggle to meet quality standards set by foreign agri-businesses, with consumers complaining about having to extract grit from the rice.

“I like better the taste of the local rice. The only problem is the stones in it,” said Samuel Ativ, 38, as he shopped in the busy Bauchi market. “If I am in hurry I prefer the foreign rice because there are no stones.”

Nigeria has imported 110 mills which remove grit in the process but most farmers still go to villagers to handle their rice with home-made machines.

Larger investors hope Nigeria will not repeat the mistakes of the past by losing interest in domestic food production if and when global oil prices pick up again, helping the naira to recover and making imports cheaper.

“Important is that they started the journey to become food self-sufficient,” said Rahul Savara, TGI Group Managing Director. “They are going on the right track, and the government has to continue the same policies it is doing now.”

 
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From: MeNeedIt

Iran’s supreme leader criticized the country’s slow pace of economic recovery on Thursday despite the lifting of sanctions and called on President Hassan

Rouhani’s government to champion greater self-sufficiency, state TV reported.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s criticism comes ahead of Iran’s presidential election in May, when the pragmatist president is expected to seek re-election.

“Of course the government has taken remarkable steps but if the resistance economy had been implemented fully and widely, we could witness a tangible difference in people’s lives,” state TV reported Khamenei as saying.

The “resistance economy” promoted by Khamenei is aimed at making Iran’ economy more self-sufficient.

Rouhani’s popularity and his efforts to end Iran’s economic and political isolation have panicked hardline allies of Khamenei, who fear losing power and aim to reclaim the presidency for their faction.

Most sanctions imposed on Iran over its disputed nuclear program were lifted in 2016, in exchange for Iran curbing its nuclear work under a deal with six major powers in 2015.

Khamenei and his allies have criticized Rouhani’s government for failure to bolster the economy since the sanctions imposed on Iran were lifted a year ago.

“We receive complaints from people … People should feel improvements regarding creation of jobs and manufacturing. It is not the case now,” he said.

Rouhani and his ministers have defended the government’s record, citing economic reports and figures pointing to improvements.

“Presenting reports and figures is good but will not impact people’s lives in mid and long-term,” Khamenei said.

Hit hard by the double hammer blows of years of embargo and the plunge in oil prices since the middle of 2014, Iran’s economy has slowly recovered since the lifting of sanctions but deals with Western investors are few and far between.

Foreign investors are cautious about trading with or investing in Iran, fearing penalties from remaining unilateral U.S. sanctions and U.S. President Donald Trump’s tough approach to the Islamic Republic.

“Attracting foreign investment is a positive measure but so far a very limited of foreign contracts have been materialized,” Khamenei said. Iran needs foreign capital to modernize its key oil and gas sectors.
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From: MeNeedIt

Since January of this year, thousands of school children in India’s northeastern state of Assam have pored over an illustrated story of how two young girls from a relief camp were lured by a man who told them of the good life they could lead in a big city, home to swanky buildings and flashy cars. It sounded attractive to the poor youngsters who could only visualize a bleak life ahead.

Fortunately spotted by a policeman as they waited for the man at a railway station to head to the city, the story goes on to relate what their future could have been like when they were sold to work as poorly paid domestic employees, sex workers or laborers.

The comic in the Assamese language aims to raise awareness among children about trafficking rings that lure young girls and boys from villages into India’s booming cities with the promise of good jobs.

The most vulnerable to human traffickers are states such as Assam, where a violent ethnic conflict has displaced many families, and the country’s poorer, underdeveloped states such as West Bengal, Telengana, and Andhra Pradesh.

As child rights campaigners stress prevention as key to addressing the problem, comic books have emerged as an effective tool to empower children to protect themselves in these areas. Children being sold accounted for nearly half of the human trafficking cases in India in 2015.

“There are more colors, more expressions, its an effective means of communication, especially for children,” says Miguel Queah at Assam-based non-profit Utsah, who wrote the story and helps organize reading sessions in vulnerable and displaced communities such as relief camps, children’s homes and government schools in Assam. “Children love reading the stories, discussing among their friends, we could see that response taking place” he says.

Orders to print more comics have gone out with the initial stock of 800 copies having run out and there is a proposal to incorporate it in school curriculums.

The non-profit My Choices Foundation began reaching out to rural communities a little over a year ago with its comic book, The Light of Safe Villages to educate children about threats such as trafficking and other social problems such as child marriage.

Hannah Norling who heads communications at the My Choices Foundation is confident that the colorful books and simple stories in local languages are effectively spreading the message of how traffickers trap young children. “We are in the right place,” she said.

It is distributed to students across more than 500 Indian villages.

She points out that while it is sometimes difficult to reach out to parents, who are busy working, children are more of a captive audience and the idea was to give them an illustrated book that could serve as a complete educational tool which they could share with their parents.

“We had to leave something behind that would be a long term reminder. If something happens a year from now, a physical frame of reference for them to revert back to ‘OK now what do I do?” said Norling.

One of the stories in the comic is of a guardian girl on a mission to save others and another of a vigilant boy.

Growing awareness among children has made them more alert to threats from traffickers and some have reported to village council or others if they noticed a friend missing, according to Norling. She said that helped in the rescue of three girls in the past year who had left their village.

The comic book initiative is among several efforts to prevent trafficking in rural areas. One of them by Save the Children spreads the message in local communities through children who have been rescued.

India honored a woman on Wednesday when 21-year-old Anoyara Khatun, who was trafficked from West Bengal state, received the “Women Power” award from the president for stopping hundreds of other children from being forced into labor or married off.

Khatun was brought to Delhi when she was 12 years old and forced to work as a house maid, but managed to escape after six months. With the help of child rights advocates, she returned home and is part of a network of children’s groups in 80 villages where young people are taught about their rights.

Manab Ray at Save the Children in New Delhi points out that once trafficking has happened, there is little that can be done to help the victims, so the key is to stop it in villages. And at the heart of the effort to engage local communities are the children themselves. “Children we found are the best informers, in terms of knowing the issues, because they face it themselves, they can have the natural ability of identifying the traffickers and all,” said Ray.
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From: MeNeedIt

Before leaving her home each day to teach art to children, Mariluce Maria de Souza must factor in extra time to account for the shootings and other eruptions of violence that occur daily in Alemao, Rio de Janeiro’s largest complex of slums, or favelas.

The 35-year-old mother sometimes has to cancel a session teaching painting to children because the journey to class is just too dangerous. Through the project called Favela Art, the self-taught artist requires that her students attend school and study hard in return.

Souza has become an example of empowerment for girls and women in the slum, who often face domestic violence and workplace discrimination.

“Sometimes the mothers, who are mother and father at the same time, don’t have the time to give the kind of attention that five, six or seven children need,” Souza said.

Like many Latin American countries, Brazil has deep problems with gender-specific violence. The Brazilian nonprofit Mapa da Violencia says nearly five in 100,000 women are killed each year, giving the country one of the world’s highest homicide rates for women.

The situation is even worse for black women, many of whom live in slums. Between 2003 and 2013, the annual number homicides of black women jumped 54 percent, according to Mapa da Violencia.

“We use the graffiti to demand the end of violence against women,” said Maiara Viana Rodrigues, a 25-year-old who said that as a teen she was sexually abused by a man in her neighborhood.

To make her point, the member of Afrograffitteiras, a group working to empower black women, on one recent afternoon painted graffiti exhorting: “Viva! You, Woman!” on a wall in a Rio suburb.

Along with rejecting physical violence, the female artists say they also want to shine a light on psychological abuse, unequal access to education and health care, and less pay for women doing the same job as men. 

Lya Alves, who recently painted a mural of a black woman on a wall in Rio’s renovated port area, says feminism has lost much of its meaning since the 1970s, when women fought against being considered sexual objects.

“Nowadays the media promotes” the sexual objectification of women, she said. “Is that helping to obtain a better education, a better salary?”
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From: MeNeedIt

Ancient DNA from dental plaque is revealing intriguing new information about Neanderthals, including specific menu items in their diet such as woolly rhinoceros and wild mushrooms, as well as their use of plant-based medicine to cope with pain and illness.

Scientists said on Wednesday they genetically analyzed plaque from 48,000-year-old Neanderthal remains from Spain and 36,000-year-old remains from Belgium. The plaque, material that forms on and between teeth, contained food particles as well as microbes from the mouth and the respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts.

At Belgium’s Spy Cave site, which at the time was a hilly grassy environment home to big game, the Neanderthal diet was meat-based with woolly rhinoceros and wild sheep, along with wild mushrooms. Some 12,000 years earlier, at Spain’s El Sidron Cave site, which was a densely forested environment likely lacking large animals, the diet was wild mushrooms, pine nuts, moss and tree bark, with no sign of meat.

The two populations apparently lived different lifestyles shaped by their environments, the researchers said.

The researchers found that an adolescent male from the Spanish site had a painful dental abscess and an intestinal parasite that causes severe diarrhea. The plaque DNA showed he had consumed poplar bark, containing the pain-killing active ingredient of aspirin, and a natural antibiotic mold.

“This study really gives us a glimpse of what was in a Neanderthal’s medicine cabinet,” said paleomicrobiologist Laura Weyrich of Australia’s University of Adelaide, lead author of the study published in the journal Nature.

The findings added to the growing body of knowledge about Neanderthals, the closest extinct relative of our species, Homo Sapiens, and further debunked the outdated notion of them as humankind’s dimwitted cousins.

“I definitely believe our research suggests Neanderthals were highly capable, intelligent, likely friendly beings. We really need to rewrite the history books about their ‘caveman-like’ behaviors. They were very human-like behaviors,” Weyrich said.

The robust, large-browed Neanderthals prospered across Europe and Asia from about 350,000 years ago until going extinct roughly 35,000 years ago after our species, which first appeared in Africa 200,000 years ago, established itself in regions where Neanderthals lived.

Scientists say Neanderthals were intelligent, with complex hunting methods, probable use of spoken language and symbolic objects, and sophisticated fire usage.

The researchers also reconstructed the genome of a 48,000-year-old oral bacterium from one of the Neanderthals.

“This is the oldest microbial genome to date, by about 43,000 years,” Weyrich said.
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From: MeNeedIt

U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said on Wednesday that substantial negotiations to revamp the North American Free Trade Agreement likely will not get started until the latter part of this year and could take a year to complete.

Ross, speaking to Bloomberg Television, said U.S. legal notification requirements with partners Mexico and Canada create some built-in delays to the start of substantial discussions.

“You’re talking probably the latter part of this year before the real negotiations get underway,” Ross said.

NAFTA renegotiation ‘complex’

The 79-year-old billionaire investor, who was sworn into his job just last week, said he hoped the renegotiations could be completed within a year, but it was unclear how long it would take to see benefits like a smaller U.S. trade deficit with Mexico.

He said the NAFTA renegotiation would be “complex,” with more than 20 chapters in the 23-year-old agreement that needed to be modernized, along with new chapters such as those covering the digital economy and other sectors that did not exist in the early 1990s.

Without a U.S. Trade Representative in office, Ross is taking the lead on trade negotiation issues in the early weeks of the Trump administration.

Agreement needs to be updated

In Detroit last week, Mexican economy minister Ildefonso Guajardo said he was hopeful that Mexico, Canada and the United States could begin discussions in June to “modernize” NAFTA, stressing that Mexico would not accept tariffs.

A less belligerent U.S. tone towards Mexican trade in recent weeks has lifted the Mexican peso from historic lows of about 22 to the dollar in January to about 19.6.

But Ross said on Wednesday that Mexico would have to make some  concessions to the United States.

Trump to study House proposal

President Donald Trump during his election campaign threatened to slap 35 percent tariffs on Mexican imports. He is studying a House Republican proposal for a border tax adjustment system that would levy a 20 percent tax on all imports while exempting exports. The plan is partly aimed at offsetting value-added taxes charged on imports by Mexico and many other countries.

Ross said Trump “has made my job a lot easier by softening up the adverse parties. What could be better than going into a negotiation where the fellow on the other side knows he has to make concessions?”

The new Commerce secretary also said he was not concerned about starting trade wars, because the United States was already fighting one.

“We’ve been in a trade war for decades,” he said. “The difference is now our troops are coming to the ramparts.”
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From: MeNeedIt