Russian lender Sberbank said Monday it was deeply concerned by protests against its Ukrainian subsidiary, which included a nationalist group walling up the entrance to one of its branches in Kyiv with masonry and cement.

Periodic protests have been held against Kremlin-owned banks operating in Ukraine since bilateral ties broke down in 2014 after Russia annexed Crimea and gave its support to the pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Sberbank’s announcement last Tuesday that it would heed a call from President Vladimir Putin to recognize passports issued by separatists in eastern Ukraine has fueled greater discontent.

On Monday, a few dozen members of a new activist group called National Corp blocked off the entrance to Sberbank’s main branch in central Kyiv. The branch temporarily suspended operations and appealed to the police.

“Sberbank is highly concerned about the situation in Ukraine linked to the actions of representatives of nationalist groups,” the bank said in a statement. “Our subsidiary has already appealed to law enforcement bodies and we hope that all necessary steps will be swiftly taken to ensure the safety of our workers and clients and protect property.”

It said over the past week it had recorded over 26 acts of vandalism against Sberbank Ukraine’s branches and bank machines.

Last week, the central bank said it could recommend the introduction of sanctions on Sberbank’s subsidiary for its recognition of separatists’ identity documents.

Five Russian state-owned banks are present in Ukraine, including three in the top 20, and they hold a combined market share of 8.6 percent.

The central bank has been seeking to cut that following the souring of relations between the one-time allies.

It is not yet clear how the other Kremlin-owned banks operating in Ukraine are handling Putin’s order to recognize separatist documents.
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From: MeNeedIt

Madrid’s city government announced plans on Monday to ban the oldest and most polluting vehicles from the city center by 2025 in a bid to crackdown on air pollution.

The local government will prohibit the use within the city’s limits of gasoline cars registered before 2000 and diesel-powered cars registered before 2006, which at the moment account for 20 percent of all those registered.

The ban would lower nitrogen dioxide levels in the city by an estimated 15 percent, a poisonous gas behind respiratory problems, Madrid’s local  government said in a presentation.

Madrid has failed to meet European Union-set limits on air quality for the last eight years. Other European cities such as Paris and Berlin have already put similar plans in place to curb emissions.

“This is plan A for air quality in Madrid. It’s plan A because there can’t be any plan B,” Madrid’s mayor Manuela Carmen said at an event to present the new plan.

Madrid’s local government has allocated 544 million euros ($580.83 million) to completing 30 measures included in the  plan, which also encourages greater use of renewable energy and regenerating urban areas, according to the presentation.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

U.S. President Donald Trump this week will unveil a budget expected to massively increase military spending while slashing other federal programs.

The proposal, set to be released Thursday, will offer the most detailed look yet at how Trump intends to move ahead with his so-called “America First” policy.

The budget will likely face significant opposition in Congress, where lawmakers are already bickering over a plan to overhaul the nation’s health care program.

Many of Trump’s fellow Republicans support his plan for a larger military; but, unlike Trump, some want to pay for it by cutting Social Security and Medicare – the two largest federal programs.

Democrats are alarmed about the entire proposal, particularly his plan to cut domestic government programs aimed at protecting the environment and helping the poor.

State Dept., foreign aid cuts

Lawmakers in both parties have also expressed concerns about Trump’s steep proposed cuts to the State Department and foreign aid budgets – a move they say will reduce U.S. influence abroad.

White House officials point out the president’s proposals are only a blueprint and that ultimately Congress must agree on a final budget, but they insist difficult decisions must be made.

“Unfortunately, we have no alternative but to reinvest in our military and make ourselves a military power once again,” White House National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn told Fox News Sunday.

“It’s no different than every other family in America that has to make the tough decisions when they need to spend money somewhere, they have to cut it from somewhere else,” Cohn said.

Defense spending

In a blueprint released last month, White House officials said Trump intends to boost the military budget by $54 billion – one of the largest ever increases in national defense spending. This week’s proposal will outline how the president intends to pay for it.

According to budget documents leaked to the media, Trump will offset the military costs with far-reaching reductions in discretionary spending — the part of the budget that pays for various federal government agencies.

Trump is reportedly considering slashing up to 25 percent of the Environmental Protection Agency budget, 30 percent of the Energy Department budget, and 37 percent of the State Department and foreign aid budget.

Reduction in federal workforce

If passed, those cuts would result in a massive reduction of the federal government workforce, which Trump and his fellow Republicans have long said is bloated and inefficient. It is not clear, however, whether Trump’s plans would actually fulfill his campaign promise to reduce the national debt.

That won’t be clear until May, when the White House releases its plans to reform the tax code and its proposals for mandatory spending, which covers existing programs like Medicare and Social Security.

Trump has said it is not politically possible to reduce spending on Medicare and Social Security – which together account for nearly 40 percent of the federal budget. He is also considering a $1 trillion infrastructure plan to upgrade the country’s roads, airports and rail lines.

According to most analysts, that means Trump will likely continue to run a budget deficit.

The federal debt is expected to grow by nearly $10 trillion over the next decade, according to a recent projection by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

 
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From: MeNeedIt

The trendsetting South by Southwest music festival is all about the next big thing, but the heated politics of the moment is stealing the show.

Tensions over immigration have put a heavy air over the typically breezy weeklong music bash that begins Monday and includes headliners The Avett Brothers, Weezer and the Wu-Tang Clang dropping into Austin, along with roughly 2,000 other acts from around the world.

It’s more than just promises of bands using SXSW as a stage for politically-charged performances in the wake of President Donald Trump’s executive orders on immigration: The festival has come under fire itself for warning international artists that bad behavior could result in it making a call to U.S. immigration agents.

Unrelated, but still stoking concerns, was the Italian band Soviet Soviet posting on Facebook on Friday that it was denied entry into the U.S. Soviet Soviet claimed U.S. customs officials in Seattle said the band members needed work visas, but the band says it didn’t believe work visas were required for a promotional and unpaid tour.

Trump’s revised travel ban blocks new visas for people from six predominantly Muslim countries including Somalia, Iran, Syria, Sudan, Libya and Yemen. It also temporarily shuts down the U.S. refugee program. Unlike the original order, the new one says current visa holders won’t be affected, and it removes language that would give priority to religious minorities.

Matthew Covey, a New York-based immigration attorney who helps international performers obtain visas to enter the U.S., said the travel ban has unsettled artists who are not even from the impacted countries.

“Everybody is worried now,” Covey said “We’re getting calls from Danish jazz musicians saying, `Am I going to be OK?’ Yeah, probably. You’re a Danish jazz musician. But everybody is on edge.”

Covey is helping put on a SXSW showcase of artists exclusively from the list of banned countries in response to Trump’s order, although none of the performers currently live in those nations.

SXSW organizers had quickly come out against Trump’s travel ban, but later found themselves on the defensive over a contract provision warning that “SXSW will notify the appropriate U.S. immigration authorities” if a performer acts in ways that “adversely affect the viability of their official SXSW showcase.”

The language set off a storm of criticism and at least one performer announced plans to cancel. Organizers said the clause was a safeguard in the event of an artist doing something egregious — such as flouting rules about pyrotechnics or starting a brawl — but pledged to remove it from future contracts.

Zane Lowe, who runs Apple’s Beats 1 Radio and will be a keynote speaker at the festival, said he has taken more notice lately of music reflecting the times. 

“I don’t believe that we’re in an era of a movement,” Lowe said. “But I believe that we’re in an era where, more than it has been in recent times, what’s going on in and around the music is going to have a very direct impact on what’s made.”
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From: MeNeedIt

A researchers suggests that “60 percent of primate species are now threatened with extinction and about 75 percent have declining populations.” The threat has primatologists around the world sounding the alarm about the future of our closest evolutionary cousins. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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From: MeNeedIt

There were startling colors here just a year ago, a dazzling array of life beneath the waves. Now this Maldivian reef is dead, killed by the stress of rising ocean temperatures. What’s left is a haunting expanse of gray, a scene repeated in reefs across the globe in what has fast become a full-blown ecological catastrophe.

The world has lost roughly half its coral reefs in the last 30 years. Scientists are now scrambling to ensure that at least a fraction of these unique ecosystems survives beyond the next three decades. The health of the planet depends on it: Coral reefs support a quarter of all marine species, as well as half a billion people around the world.

“This isn’t something that’s going to happen 100 years from now. We’re losing them right now,” said marine biologist Julia Baum of Canada’s University of Victoria. “We’re losing them really quickly, much more quickly than I think any of us ever could have imagined.”

Even if the world could halt global warming now, scientists still expect that more than 90 percent of corals will die by 2050. Without drastic intervention, we risk losing them all.

“To lose coral reefs is to fundamentally undermine the health of a very large proportion of the human race,” said Ruth Gates, director of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology.

Coral reefs produce some of the oxygen we breathe. Often described as underwater rainforests, they populate a tiny fraction of the ocean but provide habitats for one in four marine species. Reefs also form crucial barriers protecting coastlines from the full force of storms.

They provide billions of dollars in revenue from tourism, fishing and other commerce, and are used in medical research for cures to diseases including cancer, arthritis and bacterial or viral infections.

“Whether you’re living in North America or Europe or Australia, you should be concerned,” said biologist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, director of the Global Change Institute at Australia’s University of Queensland. “This is not just some distant dive destination, a holiday destination. This is the fabric of the ecosystem that supports us.”

And that fabric is being torn apart.

“You couldn’t be more dumb … to erode the very thing that life depends on — the ecosystem — and hope that you’ll get away with it,” Hoegh-Guldberg said. 

Corals are invertebrates, living mostly in tropical waters. They secrete calcium carbonate to build protective skeletons that grow and take on impressive colors, thanks to a symbiotic relationship with algae that live in their tissues and provide them with energy.

But corals are sensitive to temperature fluctuations, and are suffering from rising ocean temperatures and acidification, as well as from overfishing, pollution, coastal development and agricultural runoff.

A temperature change of just 1 to 2 degrees Celsius (1.8 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) can force coral to expel the algae, leaving their white skeletons visible in a process known as “bleaching.”

Bleached coral can recover if the water cools, but if high temperatures persist for months, the coral will die. Eventually the reef will degrade, leaving fish without habitats and coastlines less protected from storm surges. 

The first global bleaching event occurred in 1998, when 16 percent of corals died. The problem spiraled dramatically in 2015-2016 amid an extended El Nino natural weather phenomenon that warmed Pacific waters near the equator and triggered the most widespread bleaching ever documented. This third global bleaching event, as it is known, continues today even after El Nino ended.

Headlines have focused on damage to Australia’s famed Great Barrier Reef, but other reefs have fared just as badly or worse across the world, from Japan to Hawaii to Florida.

Around the islands of the Maldives, an idyllic Indian Ocean tourism destination, some 73 percent of surveyed reefs suffered bleaching between March and May 2016, according to the country’s Marine Research Center.

“This bleaching episode seems to have impacted the entire Maldives, but the severity of bleaching varies” between reefs, according to local conditions, said Nizam Ibrahim, the center’s senior research officer.

Worst hit have been areas in the central Pacific, where the University of Victoria’s Baum has been conducting research on Kiritimati, or Christmas Island, in the Republic of Kiribati. Warmer water temperatures lasted there for 10 months in 2015-2016, killing a staggering 90 percent of the reef.

Baum had never seen anything like it.

“As scientists, we were all on brand new territory,” Baum said, “as were the corals in terms of the thermal stress they were subjected to.”

To make matters worse, scientists are predicting another wave of elevated ocean temperatures starting next month. 

“The models indicate that we will see the return of bleaching in the South Pacific soon, along with a possibility of bleaching in both the eastern and western parts of the Indian Ocean,” said Mark Eakin, coral reef specialist and coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch, which uses satellites to monitor environmental conditions around reefs. It may not be as bad as last year, but could further stress “reefs that are still hurting from the last two years.”

The speed of the destruction is what alarms scientists and conservationists, as damaged coral might not have time to recover before it is hit again by warmer temperatures.

But some may have a chance.

Last month, Hoegh-Guldberg helped launch an initiative called 50 Reefs, aiming to identify those reefs with the best chance of survival in warming oceans and raise public awareness. His project partner is Richard Vevers, who heads the XL Caitlin Seaview Survey, which has been documenting coral reefs worldwide.

“For the reefs that are least vulnerable to climate change, the key will be to protect them from all the other issues they are facing _ pollution, overfishing, coastal development,” said Vevers, who founded The Ocean Agency, an Australian organization seeking new technologies to help mitigate some of the ocean’s greatest challenges. If the reefs remain healthy and resilient, “they can hopefully become the vital seed-centers that can repopulate surrounding reefs.”

Nature itself is providing small glimmers of hope. Some of Kiritimati’s corals, for example, are showing tentative signs of a comeback.

But scientists don’t want to leave it to chance, and are racing ahead with experiments they hope might stave off extinction.

“We’ve lost 50 percent of the reefs, but that means we still have 50 percent left,” said Gates, who is working in Hawaii to breed corals that can better withstand increasing temperatures. “We definitely don’t want to get to the point where we don’t intervene until we have 2 percent left.”

Going a step further, she is also trying to “train” corals to survive rising temperatures, exposing them to sub-lethal heat stress in the hope they can “somehow fix that in their memory” and survive similar stress in the future.

“It’s probably time that we start thinking outside the box,” Gates said. “It’s sort of a no-win game if we do nothing.”
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From: MeNeedIt

The risk of a steep slide in China’s economy has reduced, the head of a government research center said on Sunday, adding the country had moved through an “L-shaped” pattern of slowing to now “horizontal” growth.

China’s economy grew 6.7 percent last year, according to the government, the slowest pace in 26 years. The country met its growth target with support from record bank loans, a speculative housing boom and billions in government investment.

But as Beijing moves to cool the housing market, slow new credit and tighten its purse strings, China will have to depend more on domestic consumption and private investment.

The government last week trimmed its economic growth target to about 6.5 percent for this year. Li Wei, the director of the Development Research Center of the State Council, China’s cabinet, said many positive economic signs were emerging domestically and internationally, and the risk of a large slide in economic growth had “clearly lowered”.

China’s economic development has gone from a “downward stroke in the L-shape to the horizontal stroke,” the official Xinhua news agency said, citing Li’s comments on the sidelines of China’s annual session of parliament.

The horizontal trend points to long-term steady development, but does not eliminate the possibility of short-term fluctuations, or mean the economic transformation is complete, Li said.

“Our economy still has many difficulties to resolve, so we must prepare to respond to the emergence of possibly relatively large risks,” Li said.

Earlier on Sunday, a vice chairman of the state economic planner said China’s industrial output grew more than 6 percent in January and February, and that the survey-based unemployment rate in 31 major cities was about 5 percent for the two months.

National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) Vice Chairman Ning Jizhe gave the approximations, which were in line with expectations for official data set to be issued on Tuesday.

Fixed asset investment growth kept pace with the final few months of last year, Ning said.

“China’s economic growth still mainly relies on domestic demand,” he said.

January and February data will be released together in a bid to smooth out seasonal factors caused by the timing of the long Lunar New Year holidays, which began in late January this year but fell in February last year.

China unexpectedly posted its first trade gap in three years in February as a construction boom pushed imports much higher than expected. That upbeat import reading reinforced the growing view that economic activity in China picked up in the first two months of the year.
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From: MeNeedIt

On Feb. 19, 2016, at a campaign rally in North Charleston, South Carolina, then-candidate Donald Trump gave a stump speech in which he railed against American jobs moving to Mexico: “We lose our jobs, we close our factories, Mexico gets all of the work,” he said. “We get nothing.” 

That same day a law firm in Mexico City quietly filed on behalf of his company for trademarks on his name that would authorize the Trump brand, should it choose, to set up shop in a country with which he has sparred over trade, migration and the planned border wall. 

The Trump trademarks have now been granted by the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI). Records show the last three were approved February 21, just more than a month after Trump took office, and a fourth was granted October 6, about a month before the U.S. election.

Recent trademark approvals

Trump’s company has notched several trademark wins recently. The Associated Press reported Wednesday that the Chinese government recently granted preliminary approval for 38 trademarks to Trump and a related company. 

That sparked outrage from some Democratic senators and critics, who have been pushing Trump to sever financial ties with his global businesses to avoid potential violations of the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution, which bars federal officials from accepting anything of value from foreign governments unless approved by Congress.

The Mexican trademarks cover a broad range of business operations that can roughly be broken down into construction; construction materials; hotels, hospitality and tourism; and real estate, financial services and insurance. They are all valid through 2026.

The same four trademarks were previously held in the name of Donald J. Trump and expired in 2015, a year before the new applications. The new approvals list the trademark owner as the company DTTM Operations LLC, with an address in the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York.

No new deals abroad

As president, Trump has handed management of his business to his two adult sons and vowed to strike no new deals abroad while he is in office. However critics say questions remain about possible conflicts of interest, noting that foreigners could still seek to influence Trump by helping his existing foreign operations or by easing the way for future ones after he leaves the Oval Office.

Trump Organization General Counsel Alan Garten said the Mexican government’s decision was not a special favor to the president.

“We’re not being granted anything we didn’t have before,” he said. The original trademarks came “years before (Trump) even announced his candidacy.”

Garten said the Mexican trademarks originally had two purposes: laying the ground for possible new ventures and keeping other people from using Trump’s name for their own businesses. 

He said the trademarks are wholly defensive now.

“Circumstances have changed,” Garten said. “He’s been elected and we agreed not to do foreign deals.”

Ethical gray area 

Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, said the Mexican grants are in an ethical gray area: defensive in nature now, perhaps, but setting the president up to profit when he leaves office.

“To what extent is this appropriate? I don’t know,” Painter said. “We never had Obama running around the world locking up his name, or Bush.”

Intellectual property lawyer Enrique Alberto Diaz Mucharraz is listed on the trademark filings. A junior partner at the Mexico City law firm Goodrich Riquelme y Asociados, he declined to comment citing client confidentiality rules. Phones rang unanswered at the public relations office of IMPI, and there was no response to an emailed request for comment on a list of questions. 

Trademarks can prove enormously valuable to companies, especially in countries with a growing number of middle class consumers who recognize the brand, said Ashwinpaul C. Sondhi of A.C. Sondhi & Associates, an investment consultancy in Safety Harbor, Florida.

Why do business in Mexico?

Mexican political analyst Alejandro Hope said IMPI is generally considered to be apolitical and the trademark concession was most likely a technical decision. 

More remarkable, Hope said, was that the application was filed during a heated campaign when “he had already started using Mexico as a pinata” for political purposes. 

“What I find striking is that these guys were thinking about doing business in Mexico while they were trashing Mexico on the campaign trail,” Hope added.

Spotty business record

Last decade he and his children aggressively promoted a luxury hotel and condo development with the Trump name on it that was planned for the northern Baja California coast, near Tijuana. In December 2006, 188 units were sold for $122 million during an event at a hotel in San Diego. 

But the Trump Ocean Resort Baja Mexico project collapsed, and dozens of buyers who had lost their 30 percent deposits sued in March 2009. Trump settled out of court in November 2013 for an undisclosed sum; in a separate settlement the previous year, developer Irongate, which had licensed the Trump name, agreed to pay the buyers $7.25 million. 

On the Caribbean island of Cozumel, near Cancun, Trump tried in 2007 to purchase land for a luxury resort complete with an airstrip and golf course, according to Mexican media reports. It met with local and environmental opposition, and never went anywhere. 

Unpopular in Mexico

In all, Trump controls at least 20 trademarks in Mexico, including for Trump Ocean Resort and Trump Isla Cozumel. Others cover activities such as concierge and spa services, alcoholic beverages, golf club operations and home furnishings. For clothing, there’s the Donald J. Trump Signature Collection. 

If there are plans to take the Trump brand to Mexico, it could be tough going because of widespread popular anger toward the president for his comments disparaging Mexican immigrants who come to the United States illegally, his threats to tear up the North American Free Trade Agreement and his vows to make Mexico pay for the border wall. 

Hope said that if a Trump hotel were in the cards, its prospects could depend a lot on location. 

“In Mexico City, I guess they would face a lot of political backlash at this point,” Hope said. Maybe it would fly in more politically insulated areas, like the beach resorts of Cancun or Los Cabos. “But even that would be a hard sell.” 
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From: MeNeedIt

A leopard showed up in London this week, sharing space with the lions of Trafalgar Square. The cat was no more real than the famous bronze lions and was there to point out that big cats like leopards and lions are in trouble all around the world. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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From: MeNeedIt

An emerging foodscape frontier offers opportunity for anyone to grow and eat organic. Brie Arthur shows Maryland residents how to grow food plants alongside flowers and shrubs as a way to increase bio-diversity and feed the community. Bronwyn Benito has the story.
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From: MeNeedIt

Sharing services are a growing trend in 21st economies. In London, the Spacehop website provides a marketplace where people who have unused living spaces can meet those looking for short-term work places. VOA’s Faiza Elmasry has more. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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From: MeNeedIt

Two people are critically sick in San Francisco after drinking tea from the same Chinatown herbalist. 

The tea leaves bought at Sun Wing Wo Trading Company contained the plant-based toxin aconite, the Department of Public Health said Friday. 

A man in his 50s last month and a woman in her 30s this month became critically ill within an hour of drinking the tea, and both remain hospitalized, health officials said. 

Each person grew weak then had life-threatening abnormal heart rhythms that required resuscitation and intensive care. 

Aconite, also known as monkshood, helmet flower and wolfsbane, is used in Asian herbal medicines. But it must be processed properly to be safe. 

Health officials are working to find the original source of the tea leaves, and they are warning others to stop consuming it.

“Anyone who has purchased tea from this location should not consume it and should throw it away immediately,” said Dr. Tomás Aragón, health officer for the city and county of San Francisco. “Aconite poisoning attacks the heart and can be lethal.”
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From: MeNeedIt