Parts of the Amazon previously thought to have been almost uninhabited were really home to thriving populations of up to a million people, new research shows.

Archaeologists have uncovered evidence that there were hundreds of villages in the rainforest away from major rivers, and they were home to different communities speaking varied languages who had an impact on the environment around them.

Huge parts of the Amazon are still unexplored by archaeologists, particularly areas away from major rivers. People had assumed ancient communities had preferred to live near these waterways, but the new evidence shows this was not the case.

The discovery fills a major gap in the history of the Amazon, and provides further evidence that the rainforest — once thought to be untouched by human farming or occupation — has in fact been heavily influenced by those who lived in it.

Archaeologists from the University of Exeter found the remains of fortified villages and mysterious earthworks called geoglyphs — man-made ditches with strange square, circular or hexagonal shapes. Experts still don’t know the purpose of these earthworks, as some show no evidence of being occupied. It is possible they were used as part of ceremonial rituals.

Archaeologists uncovered the remains in the current Brazillian state of Mato Grosso. By analysing charcoal remains and excavated pottery they have found a 1,800 km stretch of southern Amazonia was continuously occupied from 1250 until 1500 by people living in fortified villages. The experts estimate that there would have been between 1,000 and 1,500 enclosed villages, and two-thirds of these sites are yet to be found.

The new study shows there are an estimated 1,300 geoglyphs across 400,000km2 of Southern Amazonia, with 81 found in the area surveyed as part of this research. Villages are often found nearby, or inside the geoglyphs. They are connected through a network of causeways and some have been elaborately constructed over many years.

The earthworks were probably made during seasonal droughts, which allowed forests to be cleared. Drier areas still had fertile soils, where farmers would have been able to grow crops and fruit trees like Brazil nuts.

Dr Jonas Gregorio de Souza, from the University of Exeter’s Department of Archaeology, a member of the research team said: “There is a common misconception that the Amazon is an untouched landscape, home to scattered, nomadic communities. This is not the case. We have found that some populations away from the major rivers are much larger than previously thought, and these people had an impact on the environment which we can still find today.

“The Amazon is crucial to regulating the Earth’s climate, and knowing more about its history will help everyone make informed decisions about how it should be cared for in the future.”

Professor José Iriarte, from the University of Exeter, another member of the research team, said: “We are so excited to have found such a wealth of evidence. Most of the Amazon hasn’t been excavated yet, but studies such as ours mean we are gradually piecing together more and more information about the history of the largest rainforest on the planet

“Our research shows we need to re-evaluate the history of the Amazon. It certainly wasn’t an area populated only near the banks of large rivers, and the people who lived there did change the landscape. The area we surveyed had a population of at least tens of thousands.”

By Umar Manzoor Shah

As India’s government continues efforts to bring back the remains of 39 Indians killed in Iraq by the so-called Islamic State, religious leaders have condemned terror in the name of religion.

The remains of the migrant laborers are expected to arrive in India by the end of March as the legal process may take up to 10 days, V.K. Singh, junior external affairs minister, told media soon after the deaths were confirmed.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj confirmed the deaths to media on March 20 and said DNA tests had identified 38 of the 39 victims, kidnapped in Mosul four years ago.

Soon after Mosul was freed last year from Islamic State, the Iraqi government began search operations. DNA samples from a mound with several bodies matched some of the missing laborers, Swaraj told parliament.

Bishop Theodore Mascarenhas, secretary-general of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India, said the news about the murders was tragic.

“No religion in the world teaches its followers to kill others and if there is a religion that teaches to kill others, it is not a religion as such,” he told ucanews.com on March 26.

Indian news reports said 40 laborers were kidnapped but one escaped.

Manish Sharma, a rights activist in New Delhi, said the man faked his identity and told his captors that his name was Ali and he was a Muslim. They let him go.

Sharma said the case “opens the whole Pandora’s box that the killings were done in the name of religion.”

Indian media or officials have not revealed the religious identity of the missing, but speculation is rife that most of the dead were Hindus, or at least non-Muslims in view of the claim of the escaped man that his Islamic identity helped him win his freedom.

Molvi Azhar Amin, a religious scholar and member of Noor-e-Islam, told ucanews.com that the news of the killings had come as a shock to the entire Muslim world.

“These fringe groups like Islamic State have defamed Islam, which teaches tolerance, brotherhood and unity among the human beings of all religions. Muslims are saddened by such sadistic and inhuman acts and condemn them at all levels,” the cleric said.

Molvi Ghulam Ali Gulzar, an Islamic preacher based in Kashmir, said the killings have shown the inhuman face of Islamic State and stirred the conscience of all Muslims.

“How could such brutal acts be justified? Not even a word in Islam advocates killing innocent human beings. What Islamic State is doing is to do harm Islam in every possible way it can,” he said.

He said Islam’s prophet had already predicted there would be young people who recite the Quran but would be brainwashed.

“The prophet stated that these people will kill human beings in the name of Islam. Islamic State is doing exactly the same,” Molvi Gulzar told ucanews.com.

By Marine Corps Sgt. David Staten

The Defense Department’s best budget predictability in more than a decade shows that Congress and the executive branch are aligned in terms of the threats to the nation and current and future military readiness, Defense Secretary James N. Mattis said Tuesday.

“We are aligning that money on current readiness, but also with future readiness,” the secretary told reporters at the Pentagon. “You will see more money going into research and engineering about future protection and future readiness.”

The National Defense Strategy says America faces an ever more lethal and disruptive battlefield — combined across domains and conducted at increasing speed and reach, from close combat, throughout overseas theaters and reaching to the homeland.

“It’s not the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy, its America’s National Defense Strategy,” the secretary said, adding that it’s contingent on him and his team talking to people and making certain they have their ears open to criticism and the ideas of the people.

Expulsion of Russian Diplomats

Mattis also talked about governments in Europe, the United States and beyond expelling Russian diplomats in response to an attack on a former Russian spy and his daughter in Britain.

“NATO’s expulsion of Russian diplomats showed the alliance was still relevant,” Mattis told reporters. Russia has the potential to be a partner with Europe, but Russia has chosen to seek a different relationship with the NATO nations, he said.

Russia’s actions have been a threat to democracy, seeking to break the Western alliance, Mattis said, not only with its recent attack on the Russian spy and his daughter, but also with its 2014 annexation of Crimea, military intervention in eastern Ukraine, and its interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

By Army Sgt. 1st Class Jose Ibarra

Airpower has been a key factor as Operation Inherent Resolve continues to achieve milestones in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, a senior OIR officer told Pentagon reporters via satellite from Baghdad Tuesday.

“Coalition airpower in support of the Iraqi security forces has been extremely successful in the destruction of ISIS in Iraq,” said Air Force Brig. Gen. Andrew A. Croft, deputy commander for air in OIR’s Combined Joint Forces Land Component Command. “From the herculean effort in Mosul to the rapid victories in Tal Afar, Hawaijah and westward through the Euphrates River valley, the coalition supported the Iraqis by, with and through strategy,” Croft said.

The strategy has been “wildly successful,” he added, enabling Iraqi security forces to reclaim their territory from a “barbaric enemy” and allowing coalition forces to minimize their footprint in Iraq.

Coalition bombs dropped in Iraq and Syria last week were the lowest total since the beginning of OIR in 2014, an indication that ISIS is totally fragmented, Croft said, though some ISIS remnants are still in Iraq.

Train, Advise, Assist

The coalition’s job now is to enhance these capabilities within the Iraqi aviation enterprise through its train, advise and assist mission,” Croft said. A coalition aviation and training team, or CAAT, stood up in February to leverage the U.S. and coalition forces already deployed to Iraq, the general told reporters.

“We will do this by working with pilots, technicians and planers to increase the effectiveness in areas such as basic and advance flight training support to Iraqi ground forces, medical evacuation, aircraft maintenance and logistics,” he explained.

The Iraqis already have achieved several milestones since the CAAT stood up, Croft said, including reopening their air force academy in late February. Iraqi forward air controllers conducted a live-fire exercise in early March, he added, calling in training airstrikes from coalition aircraft for the first time.

By midsummer, he said, the CAAT will be an air force wing manned by about 350 U.S. members and 100 to 120 coalition members.

“Instead of bringing people in, we repurpose current airmen that are doing jobs in support of combat operations,” the general said. “As those combat operations drop off, we repurpose those airmen into that training environment.”

Structured music lessons significantly enhance children’s cognitive abilities — including language-based reasoning, short-term memory, planning and inhibition — which lead to improved academic performance. Published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, the research is the first large-scale, longitudinal study to be adapted into the regular school curriculum. Visual arts lessons were also found to significantly improve children’s visual and spatial memory.

Music education has been decimated in schools around the globe, due to competition with academic subjects and an increasing lack of funding. These days, the opportunity to learn an instrument is seen as more of a luxury than a necessary part of education.

“Despite indications that music has beneficial effects on cognition, music is disappearing from general education curricula,” said Dr Artur Jaschke, from VU University of Amsterdam, who led the study with Dr Henkjan Honing and Dr Erik Scherder. “This inspired us to initiate a long-term study on the possible effects of music education on cognitive skills that may underlie academic achievement.”

The researchers conducted the study with 147 children across multiple Dutch schools, using a structured musical method developed by the Ministry of Research and Education in the Netherlands together with an expert centre for arts education. All schools followed the regular primary school curriculum, with some providing supplementary music or visual arts classes. In these, the children were given both theoretical and practical lessons.

After 2.5 years, the children’s academic performance was assessed, as well as various cognitive skills including planning, inhibition and memory skills.

The researchers found that children who received music lessons had significant cognitive improvements compared to all other children in the study. Visual arts classes also showed a benefit: children in these classes had significantly improved visual and spatial short-term memory compared to students who had not received any supplementary lessons.

“Children who received music lessons showed improved language-based reasoning and the ability to plan, organize and complete tasks, as well as improved academic achievement,” said Dr Jaschke. “This suggests that the cognitive skills developed during music lessons can influence children’s cognitive abilities in completely unrelated subjects, leading to overall improved academic performance.

The researchers hope their work will contribute to highlighting the importance of the music and arts in human culture and cognitive development.

“Both music and arts classes are supposed to be applied throughout all Dutch primary schools by the year 2020,” said Dr Jaschke. “But considering our results, we hope that this study will support political developments to reintegrate music and arts education into schools around the world.”

Computer users — at home and at work — often engage in behaviors that create security risks and privacy threats, despite having a variety of security options available.

Clicking on unfamiliar links, choosing weak passwords and sharing personal information can leave a user’s computer or employer open to having information stolen.

For businesses, this is especially concerning because employees who engage in risky behaviors at home may carry those habits into the workplace, putting the company, fellow employees and customers at risk. According to IBM and the Ponemon Institute, the average cost of a data breach for companies in 2017 was more than $3.5 million.

Give employees a reason to care

A recent study published in the Journal of Management Information Systems suggests information security managers and supervisors could have greater success in motivating employees to act more securely by avoiding cold, authoritative commands, and instead create security messages that are relatable and provide options for how employees can better protect information and respond to threats.

According to Washington State University researcher and co-author Rob Crossler, Carson College of Business assistant professor of information systems, employees may fail to realize they are putting company data at risk or have less of an interest in taking steps to ensure security because it’s not their personal data.

“If you want people inside an organization to truly change their security behaviors, you have to give them a reason to care,” said Crossler. “You have to get them motivated in order to be effective at changing behaviors.”

Choices not mandates

According to Crossler, when employees feel they have a choice in their response in what works best for them, they tend to take actions that are more secure.

He recommends information systems managers avoid messaging that is too rigid in its instruction, and instead focuses on different strategies for protecting information and responding to threats. For example:

Your passwords are the keys to your digital life, and your online accounts are a proverbial gold mine for someone looking to steal your identity. Hackers often accomplish identity theft by figuring out online passwords. Regardless of how confident you are in your computer skills, you can learn how to create strong passwords and manage them using a password manager. A password manager is software that aids in keeping track of multiple passwords. We recommend using Dashlane, 1Password, KeePass or LastPass. Each of these is an adequate solution, so feel free to choose the software you like the best as your password manager.

The goal is “changing the conversation to be about a partnership,” Crossler said. “The focus should be ‘We are in this together, and you have options on what you can do to help,’ as opposed to ‘You have to do this or that.'”

Better security not perfection

“When it comes to securing what you are doing, we are all going to fail. We are not going to be perfect. Phishing attacks are getting so good that even the most alert individual is going to make a mistake,” he said. “If they fail in their actions, employees should be encouraged to immediately report it and do the right thing without fear of being reprimanded.”

Organizations can work to safeguard against security threats and encourage their employees to make better decisions by providing information and security training on a more frequent, year-round basis, said Crossler. Managers and supervisors also can find the latest information on security issues and threats, as well as access up-to-date education and training resources, on the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team website (http://www.us-cert.gov).

In advance of Major League Baseball’s opening day on Thursday, new research from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business suggests that the risk of fans being hit by a foul ball or errant bat at games has increased in recent years.

The research, accepted for publication by William & Mary Law Review, also argues that it is time to abolish the so-called “Baseball Rule,” a legal doctrine established in 1913 to immunize baseball teams from liability.

“The professional baseball industry is radically different today than it was a century ago,” wrote Nathaniel Grow, an associate professor of business law and ethics at Kelley. “Nevertheless, courts continue to rely on 100-year-old legal doctrine when determining whether to hold teams liable for spectator injuries resulting from errant balls or bats.”

About 1,750 fans are hurt each year by foul balls at MLB games. That’s about two injuries for every three games, and that’s more common than a batter being hit by a pitch, according to a Bloomberg report. This estimate does not include injuries sustained among the more than 40 million fans who attend minor league games.

Further analysis by Grow and Zachary Flagel, a student at the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia, found that fans’ risk of being hit by a flying object at MLB games has increased with the construction of nearly two dozen stadiums since 1992.

“Fans today frequently sit more than 20 percent closer to home plate than was the case throughout most of the 20th century,” Grow said. “When you combine that with an increase in the speed with which baseballs are being hit into the stands, fans have less time to avoid errant balls or bats heading in their direction.”

Today, the typical foul ball enters the stands at speeds between 100 and 110 miles per hour. At that rate, a fan seated 60 feet from home plate has four-tenths of a second to react, if they are paying close attention to the action.

The “Baseball Rule” has come under increased scrutiny after a series of high-profile fan injuries in recent seasons. Despite criticism from academic and media commentators, courts have almost uniformly continued to apply the Baseball Rule to spectator-injury lawsuits. Grow believes that the Baseball Rule should no longer be applied in these cases.

“Although MLB has taken steps to increase the levels of fan protection in recent years, the time has come for courts to dispense with the Baseball Rule, and instead hold professional teams strictly liable for their fans’ injuries, forcing teams to fully internalize the cost of the accidents their games produce,” he said.

“Many foul-ball-related injuries could easily be avoided through the installation of additional safety netting at little cost to the team,” the authors conclude. “Considering that MLB is a $10 billion per year organization, such a cost is a drop in the bucket for major-league teams, one that would almost immediately be recouped once the expanded screen prevented even just a single serious injury.”

The U.S. should take bold steps to improve measurement, monitoring, and inventories of methane emissions caused by human activities, says a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Better data on methane — a greenhouse gas that contributes to air pollution and threatens public and worker safety — would help inform decisions related to climate, economics, and human health.

“Methane is getting more attention because it is a potent, short-lived greenhouse gas that is increasing,” said James W.C. White, professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and chair of the committee that conducted the study and wrote the report. “There have been recent advances in our abilities to measure and monitor methane from its many sources, and now we need to strengthen and interlink these different approaches.”

Anthropogenic sources of methane emissions span various sectors of the economy such as energy, agriculture, and waste disposal. There are a variety of reasons, beyond climate change, to measure, monitor, and track methane emissions. For example, monitoring of methane emissions is important to protecting the health and safety of workers in industries such as coal mining, and recovery of methane can have an economic benefit as a source of energy.

In general, there are two approaches to estimate these emissions. The top-down approach estimates emissions using observations of atmospheric methane concentrations and models that simulate their transport from the source to the observation location. The bottom-up approach measures emissions at the scale of individual methane emitters, such as natural gas wells or cattle farms, and uses those results to extrapolate emissions at regional and national scales.

In some cases, the estimates produced by these two methods differ significantly, potentially revealing missing emission sources, for example, or problems with the atmospheric sampling. To address such discrepancies, the report recommends a national research effort to strengthen the two methods to improve accuracy, better attribute emissions to specific sectors and processes, and detect trends.

Currently, the Greenhouse Gases Inventory (GHGI) serves as the main source of information for emissions in the U.S., with emissions reported at national, annual scales. As a complement to the GHGI, the report says the U.S. should establish and maintain a gridded inventory that presents data at finer spatial (i.e. size and distance) and temporal (i.e. time) scales. Such an inventory, with values for major sources of emissions within the grid of a location, is necessary for scientists to make detailed comparisons between the top-down and bottom-up estimates of methane emissions, and would address the needs of state and local policymakers who require more detailed information than currently available.

Numerous inventories that track methane emissions over time and link them to their specific source have been developed to address specific needs. The GHGI trends in the data help policymakers assess the effectiveness of national-scale policy initiatives. State-level inventories are more detailed than the GHGI, allowing for tailoring of state policy. Individual facilities or companies use inventories for corporate sustainability reporting and to make informed investment and risk decisions.

As the science evolves and methodologies to estimate emissions become outdated, the report stresses it is important to keep practices consistent with the best scientific understanding and current engineering practice. An advisory group should be established to guide how new science can be incorporated into improving the GHGI. The group could be facilitated by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and should include experts from academia, industry, policymaking, other federal agencies, and nongovernmental organizations. Any changes to the GHGI resulting from these activities should be clearly communicated to the public, the committee said.

About one third of cancer cases are estimated to be linked to dietary and other modifiable risk factors, especially for obesity-related cancers such as breast, colorectal, ovarian, endometrial, kidney, gallbladder, esophageal, and pancreatic cancers.

In this special theme issue of the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, food and nutrition practitioners and other health professionals take an in-depth look at the relationship between nutrition, obesity, and cancer prevention, treatment, and survival and identify research gaps for future prevention research efforts.

The United States has a high burden of cancer. The American Cancer Society estimates there will be more than 1.7 million new cases diagnosed in 2018 and around 610,000 cancer deaths. Studies strongly suggest that diet is associated with cancer and that obesity increases the risk of many types of cancer as well as several chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, and chronic inflammation.

Key issue highlights:

Obesity prevalence in the US has tripled over the last 50 years. In 2016, a report by the International Agency for Research on Cancer highlighted that excess body fatness increases the risk for 13 types of cancer. Lead investigator Stephen D. Hursting, PhD, MPH, professor, Department of Nutrition, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and colleagues review the multiple mechanisms underlying the obesity-cancer link. Their detailed review also assesses the dietary interventions that are being implemented in preclinical and clinical trials.

“Obesity-associated metabolic perturbations are emerging as major drivers of obesity-related cancer, including alterations in growth factor signaling, inflammation, and angiogenesis,” explained Dr. Hursting. “Preclinical evidence suggests that dietary interventions, such as calorie restriction, intermittent fasting, low-fat diet and the ketogenic diet, have the potential to reverse some of these obesity-associated alterations; however, more clinical data are needed to confirm translation to human subjects.”

A group led by Guido Eibl, MD, from the Department of Surgery, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, on behalf of the Consortium for the Study of Chronic Pancreatitis, Diabetes, and Pancreatic Cancer, reviews the current knowledge pertaining to obesity and type 2 diabetes as risk factors for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), one of the deadliest cancers. Although the risk factors promoting PDAC development have been known for several decades, their underlying molecular mechanisms and interactions have just recently begun to be explored. The article highlights the risk factors for PDAC development and progression, their interplay and underlying mechanisms, and the relation to diet, and outlines research gaps and opportunities.

High quality epidemiologic studies associate obesity with an increased risk of PDAC, however, there are many unanswered questions. For example, the beneficial effects of weight reduction and bariatric surgery on improving insulin resistance are known, but their role in decreasing PDAC incidence is still essentially unknown.

“Altogether, given the high mortality of PDAC and the expected increase in obesity and diabetes over the next few decades, efforts should be undertaken to mechanistically understand the link between obesity, diabetes, and PDAC. Preclinical animal models are available that will facilitate the study of these important interactions to advance our knowledge, so that the obesity- and diabetes-driven burden of PDAC can be curbed,” commented Dr. Eibl.

Consumption of dietary energy density (DED) has been associated with weight gain in adults. DED is the ratio of energy (kilocalories or kilojoules) intake to food weight (grams) and is a measure of diet quality. Cynthia A. Thomson, PhD, RD, professor, Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, The University of Arizona, and colleagues present results of an investigation into the association between baseline DED and obesity-associated cancers in over 90,000 postmenopausal women enrolled in the observational study or the calcium and vitamin D trial and hormone replacement therapy trials of the Women’s Health Initiative. Investigators found that DED was associated with higher risk of any obesity-related cancer. Of note, the higher risk was restricted to women with normal BMI.

“The demonstrated effect in normal-weight women in relation to risk for obesity-related cancers is novel and contrary to our hypothesis,” remarked Dr. Thomson. “This finding suggests that weight management alone may not protect against obesity-related cancers if women favor a diet pattern indicative of high energy density. Higher DED in normal-weight women may promote metabolic dysregulation independent of body weight, an exposure known to increase cancer risk.

DED is a modifiable risk factor. Nutrition interventions targeting energy density as well as other diet-related cancer preventive approaches are warranted to reduce cancer burden among postmenopausal women.

In a pilot intervention among 46 cancer survivors aged 60 years or older, Wendy Demark-Wahnefried, PhD, RD, professor of Nutrition Science, University of Alabama at Birmingham, and colleagues, posed the question of whether a home vegetable gardening intervention was feasible among older cancer survivors, and whether it was associated with improvements in diet and other health-related outcomes. Participants were randomized to receive a year-long vegetable gardening intervention immediately or to a wait-list control arm.

Investigators found the gardening intervention was well accepted, safe, and feasible and also significantly improved reassurance of worth and reduced gains in central adiposity. Data also suggested that it increased vegetable and fruit consumption by approximately one serving per day.

“Results suggest that future larger studies are warranted. A fully powered randomized controlled trial is currently underway and recruiting 426 older cancer survivors across Alabama,” noted Dr. Demark-Wahnefried.

Nancy J. Emenaker, PhD, MEd, RDN, LD, and Ashley J. Vargas, PhD, MPH, RDN, both registered dietitian nutritionists from the National Institutes of Health, review the scientific evidence linking diet and cancer. They explain the inconsistencies in the nutrition and cancer scientific literature and the issues that registered dietitian nutritionists (RDNs) face when translating this complex information for patients.

“RDNs are uniquely positioned to provide balanced, evidence-based information from peer-reviewed literature to help at-risk and cancer patients understand the strength of the evidence guiding individual health decisions,” observed Dr. Emenaker and Dr. Vargas. “Despite the best efforts of nutrition science researchers, inconsistencies exist across the diet-cancer prevention scientific literature. Clinical trials are the gold standard of research, but the body of scientific data should be compelling before translating scientific findings to our at-risk, presumed healthy patients for disease prevention and patients with a good prognosis undergoing treatment.”

“RDNs play such an important role in both cancer prevention and cancer care. Our profession is involved in research to investigate diet-cancer relationships, as well as supporting individuals and communities in making lifestyle changes for cancer prevention and treatment. RDNs are integral in providing quality care by implementing evidence-based interventions,” added Linda Snetselaar, PhD, RDN, LD, endowed chair and professor, Department of Epidemiology, College of Public Health, University of Iowa, and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

As society faces the challenge of limiting warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius, new research finds an apparent contradiction: Achieving that goal doesn’t necessarily require cutting greenhouse gas emissions to zero, as called for in the Paris Agreement. But under certain conditions, even zero emissions might not be enough.

The Paris Agreement, a global effort to respond to the threats of human-caused climate change, stipulates that warming be limited to between 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) and 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F). It also stipulates that countries achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions in the second half of this century. But the relationship between the two — is the emissions goal sufficient or even necessary to meet the temperature goal? — has not been well understood.

In a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, scientists used a computer model to analyze a variety of possible future scenarios to better understand how emissions reductions and temperature targets are connected. The study, published March 26, was led by Katsumasa Tanaka at the National Institute for Environmental Studies in Japan and co-authored by Brian O’Neill at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research.

“What we found is that the two goals do not always go hand in hand,” Tanaka said. “If we meet temperature targets without first overshooting them, we don’t have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero. But if we do reduce emissions to zero, we still might not meet the temperature targets if we don’t reduce emissions quickly enough.”

The team also found that whether temperatures overshoot the target temporarily has a critical impact on the scale of emissions reductions needed.

“If we overshoot the temperature target, we do have to reduce emissions to zero. But that won’t be enough,” Tanaka said. “We’ll have to go further and make emissions significantly negative to bring temperatures back down to the target by the end of the century.”

The research was supported by the Environment Research and Technology Development Fund (2-1702) of the Environmental Restoration and Conservation Agency in Japan and by the U.S. National Science Foundation, NCAR’s sponsor.

Drafted in 2015, the Paris Agreement has been ratified by more than 170 countries. President Donald Trump announced last year the intention to withdraw the United States from the agreement.

Modeling the problem from both sides

For the study, the researchers used a simplified integrated assessment model that takes into account the physical connections between greenhouse gases and global mean temperature in the climate as well as the economic costs of emissions reductions.

“We investigated the consistency between the Paris targets in two ways. First we asked, what happens if you just meet the temperature target in a least-cost way? What would emissions look like?” said O’Neill, an NCAR senior scientist. “Then we said, let’s just meet the emissions goal and see what kind of temperatures you get.”

The team generated 10 different scenarios. They found that Earth’s warming could be stabilized at 1.5 or 2 degrees C — without overshooting the goal — by drastically cutting emissions in the short term. For example, total greenhouse gas emissions would need to be slashed by about 80 percent by 2033 to hit the 1.5-degree target or by about two-thirds by 2060 to meet the 2-degree target. In both these cases, emissions could then flatten out without ever falling to zero.

Due to the difficulty of making such steep cuts, the scientists also looked at scenarios in which the temperature was allowed to temporarily overshoot the targets, returning to 1.5 or 2 degrees by the end of the century. In the 1.5-degree overshoot scenario, emissions fall to zero by 2070 and then stay negative for the rest of the century. (Negative emissions require activities that draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.) For the 2-degree temporary overshoot scenario, emissions fall to zero in 2085 and also become negative, but for a shorter period of time.

On the flip side, the scientists also looked at scenarios where they set the emissions levels instead of the temperature. In those cases, they analyzed what would happen if emissions were reduced to zero around mid-century (2060) or at the end of the century (2100). In the first case, the global temperature peaked around the 2-degree target and then declined. But in the second case, the temperature rose above 2 degrees around 2043 and stayed there for a century or more.

“The timing of when emissions are reduced really matters,” O’Neill said. “We could meet the goal set out in the Paris Agreement of reducing emissions to zero in the second half of the century and still wildly miss the temperature targets in the same agreement if we wait to take action.”

The new study is part of a growing body of research that seeks to better understand and define what it will take to comply with the Paris Agreement. For example, another recent study — led by Tom Wigley, a climate scientist at the University of Adelaide who holds an honorary appointment at NCAR — also looks at the quantity and timing of emissions cuts needed to stabilize global temperature rise at 1.5 or 2 degrees above preindustrial levels. This work focuses in particular on implications for emissions of carbon dioxide, the main component of the broader greenhouse gas emissions category that makes up the Paris emissions target.

O’Neill and Tanaka believe their work might be useful as countries begin to report the progress they’ve made reducing their emissions and adjust their goals. These periods of reporting and readjusting, known as global stocktakes, are formalized as part of the Paris Agreement and occur every five years.

“Our study and others may help provide countries with a clearer understanding of what work needs to be done to meet the goals laid out in the agreement. We believe that the Paris Agreement needs this level of scientific interpretation,” Tanaka said.

The foreign ministers of Malaysia and Indonesia met separately with senior U.S. government officials in Washington this week to discuss security-related issues including the South China Sea and efforts to counter the terrorist threat from Islamic State (IS), officials said.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan held individual meetings on Monday with Malaysian Foreign Minister Anifah Aman and Indonesian Minister of Foreign Affairs Retno Marsudi. Indonesia’s top diplomat also met with U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis at the Pentagon.

During Sullivan’s meeting with Anifah, the two diplomats talked about strengthening bilateral ties in key security areas in light of a “growing threat” posed by IS and the need to ensure freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement.

Nauert said Sullivan and Anifah “discussed the South China Sea, to include ensuring freedom of navigation and over-flights, as well as upholding a rules-based maritime order.”

The meeting took place as Chinese naval vessels were exercising this week with an aircraft carrier in a show of force involving at least 40 ships and submarines off Hainan Island in the South China Sea, Reuters news service reported Tuesday.

“The two leaders also pledged to strengthen cooperation to counter the growing threat of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” Nauert said, referring to the other name of IS.

It was not immediately clear if Nauert was referring to the IS threat in Southeast Asia, which has experienced militant attacks in recent years, including vicious fighting during a five-month siege by IS-linked militants in the southern Philippine city of Marawi last year.

Regarding Sullivan’s meeting with Retno, Nauert said they agreed to deepen “cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region for the benefit of regional security, prosperity, and a rules-based international order.”

Meeting at Pentagon

Earlier in the day, Retno met with Mattis, who described Indonesia as a “geographic and diplomatic fulcrum for the Indo-Pacific region” that had the ability to build consensus within the ASEAN regional bloc.

Mattis said this was “a very important factor as we seek to expand counterterrorism, to bolster maritime cooperation and to promote collective security,” according to a transcript released by the Pentagon.

“We welcome greater Indonesia leadership and training and interoperability with your neighbors. We believe it is a stabilizing factor, what you are doing,” Mattis said.

As an example, he cited an agreement between Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines to launch joint maritime patrols in their common sea lanes.

“Your trilateral cooperation agreement with Malaysia and the Philippines serves as a good model from the North Natuna Sea, to the Sulu Sea and beyond,” the American defense chief said.

The three countries launched joint maritime patrols in June 2017. Four months later, as the battle of Marawi was nearing its end, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur and Manila began joint air patrols to bolster their coordinated maritime efforts. These were aimed at preventing cross-border movements of IS extremists to and from the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, among other common security concerns, officials from those countries said at the time.

Security analysts said the poorly-secured waterways separating Malaysia from the southern Philippines were a haven for pirates and militants, and may have been the route used by foreign fighters, including Malaysians and Indonesians, as they penetrated Mindanao and joined pro-IS militants in Marawi.

At least 1,200 people, mostly militants, were killed during five months of fighting in Marawi, according to Philippine military officials.

Chinese naval movements

Meanwhile, in developments related to territorial tensions in the South China Sea, satellite images provided by Planet Labs Inc. confirmed that a Chinese carrier group had entered the sea region as part of what the Chinese navy had earlier described as combat drills that were part of routine annual exercises, according to Reuters.

The sea is a vital waterway through which about U.S. $5 trillion in international trade passes annually. It was unclear where the flotilla was headed or how long operations would last, the report said.

China claims most of the mineral and resource-rich South China Sea, which is also claimed by Malaysia Brunei, the Philippines, Vietnam and Taiwan.

Sullivan’s meeting with the Indonesian and Malaysian foreign ministers took place just days before April 1, when he is expected to step in as acting U.S. Secretary of State, following Rex Tillerson’s dismissal earlier this month.

When it comes to the special sauce of batteries, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have discovered it’s all about the salt concentration. By getting the right amount of salt, right where they want it, they’ve demonstrated a small lithium-metal battery can re-charge about seven times more than batteries with conventional electrolytes.

A battery’s electrolyte solution shuttles charged atoms between electrodes to generate electricity. Finding an electrolyte solution that doesn’t corrode the electrodes in a lithium-metal battery is a challenge but the PNNL approach, published online in Advanced Materials, successfully creates a protective layer around the electrodes and achieves significantly increased charge/discharge cycles.

Conventional electrolytes used in lithium-ion batteries, which power household electronics like computers and cell phones, are not suitable for lithium-metal batteries. Lithium-metal batteries that replace a graphite electrode with a lithium electrode are the ‘holy grail’ of energy storage systems because lithium has a greater storage capacity and, therefore, a lithium-metal battery has double or triple the storage capacity. That extra power enables electric vehicles to drive more than two times longer between charges.

Adding more lithium-based salt to the liquid electrolyte mix creates a more stable interface between the electrolyte and the electrodes which, in turn, affects the life of the battery. But that high concentration of salt comes with distinct downsides — including the high cost of lithium salt. The high concentration also increases viscosity and lowers conductivity of the ions through the electrolyte.

“We were trying to preserve the advantage of the high concentration of salt, but offset the disadvantages,” said Ji-Guang “Jason” Zhang, a senior battery researcher at PNNL. “By combining a fluorine-based solvent to dilute the high concentration electrolyte, our team was able to significantly lower the total lithium salt concentration yet keep its benefits.”

In this process, they were able to localize the high concentrations of lithium-based salt into “clusters” which are able to still form protective barriers on the electrode and prevent the growth of dendrites — microscopic, pin-like fibers — that cause rechargeable batteries to short circuit and limit their life span.

PNNL’s patent-pending electrolyte was tested in PNNL’s Advanced Battery Facility on an experimental battery cell similar in size to a watch battery. It was able to retain 80 percent of its initial charge after 700 cycles of discharging and recharging. A battery using a standard electrolyte can only maintain its charge for about 100 cycles.

Researchers will test this localized high concentration electrolyte on ‘pouch’ batteries developed at the lab, which are the size and power of a cell phone battery, to see how it performs at that scale. They say the concept of using this novel fluorine-based diluent to manipulate salt concentration also works well for sodium-metal batteries and other metal batteries.

This research is part of the Battery500 Consortium led by PNNL which aims to develop smaller, lighter, and less expensive batteries that nearly triple the specific energy found in batteries that power today’s electric cars. Specific energy measures the amount of energy packed into a battery based on its weight.

In the fight against an invasive plant colonizing portions of the state, a Montana State University doctoral student is luring shrub-munching beetles with an odor as tantalizing to them as the smell of bacon and pancakes, or perhaps a barbecue, is to humans.

“It communicates that it’s a safe area, that there’s lots of food,” researcher Alex Gaffke said of the scent, which is a synthetic version of a pheromone that northern tamarisk beetles release to alert others to feeding areas.

“The beetles are very eager, very gregarious,” Gaffke said. “They all want to be where the party is.”

According to Gaffke, scientists have known about the beetle pheromone for a decade or more. But for the first time, his research team has demonstrated the potential for using the odor as a tool for combating the spread of tamarisk — the non-native shrub that the beetles feed on.

By attaching small dollops of a waxy, putty-like substance containing the pheromone, the researchers found that they could more than double the number of tamarisk beetles congregating on the bushes, which often doubled the die-back of the plants as the beetles consumed the leaves and twigs.

“We did not expect to see this level of impact,” Gaffke said. “We really had no idea whether it would work or not.”

The researchers published the results of their multi-year study, which took place along the Bighorn River in Wyoming, in the journal Pest Management Science in January.

“This paper is something pretty special, because it really shows a proof of the concept,” said David Weaver, a member of the research team and a professor in the Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences in MSU’s College of Agriculture.

Weaver said the research has already generated “great interest” among land managers tasked with controlling tamarisk, which has gained a foothold along waterways in eastern Montana. The invasive shrub — also called saltcedar — crowds out cottonwoods and other native vegetation, consumes inordinate amounts of water and forms thickets so dense they contribute to flooding.

Starting in 1999, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released northern tamarisk beetles from Kazakhstan and China as a form of biocontrol at the Wyoming study site and across the western U.S. But in areas of Wyoming and Montana, where tamarisk is spread more thinly on the landscape, the beetles — which eat only tamarisk — struggled to reproduce and achieve a density that could have a significant impact on tamarisk, according to study co-author Sharlene Sing, a research entomologist at the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Bozeman, which is operated by the USDA’s Forest Service.

That makes the results of the study particularly important for Montana, said Sing, who earned her doctorate in land resources and environmental sciences from MSU. The findings suggest that the pheromone could be used to concentrate migrating beetles in areas that are priorities for tamarisk control. By congregating in greater densities, the beetles are also more likely to reproduce and grow their numbers, she said.

Compared to other methods of battling tamarisk, which include herbicides and mechanical removal, the synthetic pheromone would be a more precise, lower-cost method to use in areas where tamarisk is starting to colonize but hasn’t yet dominated, such as along the Yellowstone River near Billings, Sing said.

Gaffke, a Bozeman-area native who earned his bachelor’s in environmental biology from MSU before starting his doctoral research with Weaver, is working on another paper that will make practical recommendations to land managers about how to use the beetle odor.

“I like working on taking science … and developing tools to apply it in the field,” he said.

A senior official at the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) on Tuesday rejected Saudi allegations that Iran has supplied missiles to Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement, saying Riyadh is trying to divert public attention from its crimes in the Arabian Peninsula country.

“Everyone knows that all routes to send arms to Yemen are blocked and that Saudi Arabia has imposed a complete siege on the oppressed nation of Yemen,” Lieutenant Commander of the IRGC for Political Affairs Brigadier General Yadollah Javani told the Tasnim News Agency.

The objective behind Saudi Arabia’s claim that Iran has provided Yemenis with missiles is to divert public attention from war crimes that it is committing in the impoverished country, the commander said.

By raising such claims, the Riyadh regime is also seeking to cover up its defeats in Yemen, he added.

The reality is that the Yemeni nation has reached the capability to produce their own defensive weapons including missiles, an achievement that had been inconceivable to Saudis, Javani went on to say.

The remarks came after Yemeni forces fired seven ballistic missiles into Saudi Arabia in retaliation for the continued massacre of civilians by the Saudi-led coalition.

The missile unit of the Yemeni army announced on Monday that in keeping with the promise of the leader of Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement, the unit had fired seven ballistic missiles at Saudi targets the night before.

Yemen’s defenseless people have been under massive attacks by the Saudi-led coalition for three years but Riyadh has reached none of its objectives in Yemen so far.

Since March 2015, Saudi Arabia and some of its Arab allies have been carrying out deadly airstrikes against the Houthi Ansarullah movement in an attempt to restore power to fugitive former president Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, a close ally of Riyadh.

Over 14,000 Yemenis, including thousands of women and children, have lost their lives in the deadly military campaign.

The UK cut its emissions from electricity production by 25% in 2016, using a strategy many countries could adopt to quickly lower carbon emissions.

The UK achieved an unprecedented drop in carbon emissions in 2016 by making full use of natural gas over coal. Changes in the way electricity is generated meant the average Briton saved 400 kg of carbon dioxide – equivalent to taking 1 in 3 of the country’s cars off the road.

This saving came from using natural gas in preference to coal in power stations. Natural gas produces less than half the carbon dioxide of coal when burned. The UK has switched off many of its older coal plants, and government policy means it is now cheaper to burn gas than coal.

A new report published today by researchers from Imperial College London and the University of Sheffield shows that global carbon emissions could be cut by one gigatonne per year (3% of global emissions) in less than five years if other countries followed the same strategy.

Crucially, the strategy does not rely on building new gas infrastructure or increasing supply; only using existing infrastructure to its full capacity.

Co-author of the new report, Dr Iain Staffell from the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial, said: “Switching from coal to gas is not a long-term solution, but it is an important step to start reducing emissions quickly and at minimal cost. This will give us time to build up the required renewable energy capacity to permanently cut global carbon emissions.”

Co-author Dr Grant Wilson, from Energy2050 at the University of Sheffield, said: “Having a longer-term view, it is likely to prove vastly cheaper not to emit a tonne of CO2 into the atmosphere over the near-term, rather than to have to take it back out of the atmosphere after 2050.

“This is especially the case if the infrastructure has already been built but is underutilised. This report suggests that the option of fuel switching in the power sector deserves greater consideration to reduce emissions.”

The study found that the UK’s success was based partly on having the capacity and supply chain available to allow the switch from coal to gas, but that the government’s carbon pricing policy was the biggest driver.

In the UK, carbon pricing – charging those who emit carbon dioxide – has become much stronger in recent years, making it more profitable for power companies to use natural gas generation rather than coal. This is helping the UK meet its commitment to be the world’s first country to transition completely from coal generation by 2025, and to keep its coal resources unburnt in the ground.

The researchers looked at the 30 largest coal consuming countries to see if these savings could be mirrored abroad. Initial top-level analysis based purely on existing underused capacity, without building new infrastructure, they estimate that annual emissions could fall by 0.8-1.2 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide if natural gas was burned in preference to coal.

Dr Staffell said: “To avoid the worst impacts of climate change we cannot afford to build new fossil-fuel power stations. Building high-carbon infrastructure, such as new gas power plants, is at least a 30-year commitment, which will further lock countries into dependence on carbon.

“The UK is leading by example. In the last year all new power stations were renewable; powered by the wind and sun. With the cost of these new technologies coming down rapidly, the economic case for eliminating carbon-based electricity is very strong, but there are still difficult political issues to tackle.”

Several countries in Europe have committed to phasing out coal in the next ten years, including the UK, France, Italy, Sweden and Austria. The report finds these countries all have the technical potential to swap all their coal with existing gas power stations, meaning their pledges could become a reality soon.

The report examined some of the largest coal consuming countries in more detail, to assess the reality of such a global switch. Germany, alongside the UK, has been a leader in developing renewable energy. The continued reliance on coal and lignite, however, means Germany has failed to reduce its carbon emissions, and is due miss its 2020 carbon targets.

The analysis shows that while the existing infrastructure in Germany could support rapid switching from coal to gas, there is a lack of political will to switch from coal to gas imports. Importing gas from Russia poses security risks for the country, and the government is unwilling to take unpopular decisions to shut down German coal mines and threaten jobs.

Coal was a major talking point in the last US election, as for years American coal mines had been in decline. The USA is gradually switching from coal to gas as low gas prices make it favourable to burn, and it could make stronger use of particularly cheap gas since a great deal is produced within the country, but political will at present is still focused on retaining the use of coal.

Although the potential for emissions reductions is great, there are several problems countries may face in switching from coal to gas. For many countries it would require an increased dependency on gas imports, which raises concerns about energy security.

Although natural gas releases less carbon dioxide when burned, there is a concern about the possibility of leakages along the supply chain. Since methane, the main molecule in natural gas, is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, these leakages may contribute significantly to the greenhouse effect and climate change.

Dr Staffell said: “Fuel switching is no silver bullet, but any opportunity to reduce emissions in years rather than decades deserves attention.”

The first interstellar object ever seen in our solar system, named ‘Oumuamua, is giving scientists a fresh perspective on the development of planetary systems. A new study by a team including astrophysicists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, calculated how this visitor from outside our solar system fits into what we know about how planets, asteroids and comets form.

On Oct. 19, 2017, astronomers working with the NASA-funded Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS1) at the University of Hawaii spotted an object zipping through our solar system at a very high speed. Scientists at the Minor Planet Center, funded by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations Program, confirmed it was the first object of interstellar origin that we’ve seen. The team dubbed it ‘Oumuamua (pronounced oh-MOO-ah-MOO-ah), which means “a messenger from afar arriving first” in Hawaiian — and it’s already living up to its name.

“This object was likely ejected from a distant star system,” said Elisa Quintana, an astrophysicist at Goddard. “What’s interesting is that just this one object flying by so quickly can help us constrain some of our planet formation models.”

On Sept. 19, ‘Oumuamua sped past the Sun at about 196,000 mph (315,400 km/h), fast enough to escape the Sun’s gravitational pull and break free of the solar system, never to return. Usually, an object traveling at a similar speed would be a comet falling sunward from the outer solar system. Comets are icy objects that range between house-sized to many miles across. But they usually shed gas and dust as they approach the Sun and warm up. ‘Oumuamua didn’t. Some scientists interpreted this to mean that ‘Oumuamua was a dry asteroid.

Planets and planetesimals, smaller objects that include comets and asteroids, condense out of disks of dust, gas and ice around young stars. Smaller objects that form closer to their stars are too hot to have stable surface ice and become asteroids. Those that form farther away use ice as a building block and become comets. The region where asteroids develop is relatively small.

“The total real estate that’s hot enough for that is almost zero,” said lead author Sean Raymond, an astrophysicist at the French National Center for Scientific Research and the University of Bordeaux. “It’s these tiny little circular regions around stars. It’s harder for that stuff to get ejected because it’s more gravitationally bound to the star. It’s hard to imagine how ‘Oumuamua could have gotten kicked out of its system if it started off as an asteroid.”

The distance from a star beyond which water stays ice, even if it’s exposed to sunlight, is called the snow line or ice line. In our own solar system, for example, objects that developed within three times the distance between the Sun and Earth would have been so hot that they lost all their water. That snow line contracted a little as the Sun shrank and cooled over time, but our main belt asteroids are located within or near our snow line — close enough to the Sun that it would be difficult to be ejected.

“If we understand planet formation correctly, ejected material like ‘Oumuamua should be predominantly icy,” said Thomas Barclay, an astrophysicist at Goddard and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “If we see populations of these objects that are predominantly rocky, it tells us we’ve got something wrong in our models.”

Scientists suspect most ejected planetesimals come from systems with giant gas planets. The gravitational pull of these massive planets can fling objects out of their system and into interstellar space. Systems with giant planets in unstable orbits are the most efficient at ejecting these smaller bodies because as the giants shift around, they come into contact with more material. Systems that do not form giant planets rarely eject material.

Using simulations from previous research, Raymond and colleagues showed that a small percentage of objects get so close to gas giants as they’re ejected that they should be torn into pieces. The researchers believe the strong gravitational stretching that occurs in these scenarios could explain ‘Oumuamua’s long, thin cigar-like shape.

The researchers calculated the number of interstellar objects we should see, based on estimates that a star system likely ejects a couple of Earth-masses of material during planet formation. They estimated that a few large planetesimals will hold most of that mass but will be outnumbered by smaller fragments like ‘Oumuamua. The results were published March 27 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The findings have already been partially confirmed by observations of the object’s color. Other studies have also noted that star systems like our own would be more likely to eject comets than asteroids. Future observatories like the National Science Foundation-funded Large Synoptic Survey Telescope could help scientists spot more of these objects and improve our statistical understanding of planet and planetesimal formation — even beyond our solar system.

“Even though this object was flying through our solar system, it does have implications for extrasolar planets and finding other Earths,” Quintana said.

By Ronald Joshua

Fatou Dembele is a farmer in landlocked Mali, where half of the population engaged in agriculture are women. Agriculture is a key sector to lift women out of poverty. But the increasing degradation of land and natural resources caused by climate change is making women more vulnerable.

Therefore when Dembele’s plants first started dying, she thought the plot of land was ruined, and her livelihood was at risk. “We thought the land was sick. We didn’t know that there were live parasites that attacked the roots of the plants and could kill them,” says Dembele.

The increased number of parasites, because of rising temperatures and humidity, is just one of the many side effects of climate change Dembele and other women farmers are faced with.

To combat the negative impact of climate change on women’s livelihoods, a new UN Women programme known as Agriculture Femmes et Développement Durable (AgriFed), implemented by the local non-governmental organization Groupe d’Animation Action au Sahel (GAAS) Mali, is helping local producers adapt to these new challenges.

The programme works with farmers to modernize their techniques, enables their access to information on latest advances in agriculture and increases the value of their products by improving their conservation methods.

“The effects of climate change are not sparing Mali, and are hitting this country hard, an additional challenge in an extremely fragile security context in the Sahel region,” Maxime Houinato, UN Women Country Representative in Mali, said at a side event co-organized by UN Women on March 14 at the 62nd session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW62).

“And yet, Mali, although a low contributor to the global emission of greenhouse gases, is no less committed to the race to adapt to the effects of climate change,” she added.

To restore Dembele’s production, the programme taught her how to use locally available biopesticides to eliminate the parasites. “Thank goodness, we learned that there are local plants whose extracts can fight this disease,” says Dembele.

AgriFed started its activities in 2017 in the Segou region, over 200 kilometres northeast of Bamako, the capital of Mali. Training on sustainable agriculture techniques reached 247 women and 66 men. The training helped farmers improve water usage, crop scheduling, pesticide and fertilizer use, and cultivation techniques.

In the towns of Boidié and Sécoro, and Cercle de Tominan, women have improved and increased production of shallots thanks to the training. But during harvest, it became clear that the women needed to learn how to conserve their produce better.

“We grow shallots and onions because of their long shelf-life, but we did not know conservation techniques [before],” explained Hayèrè Keita, a shallot producer and seller in Sécoro. “Following our traditional methods, the rates of loss can be very high.”

UN Women supported further training sessions that showed the farmers how to preserve products like shallots, onions and potatoes. Around 110 women producers have managed to increase their revenues using these modern production and preservation techniques.

“I have been growing vegetables and fruits for 20 years, but I only knew the traditional way of doing it,” says Alphonsine Dembele, another farmer.

“AgriFeD taught us to diversify the products we grow, with the introduction of the potatoes, tomatoes and peppers. They not only bring additional income, but also help improve nutrition at home and reduce malnourishment in our children. says Dembele, the other farmer.

She adds: “It has had a positive influence on social cohesion, because women [from different ethnic communities] now meet and have dialogues during the training sessions in the fields.”

The programme, funded by the Government of Luxembourg, will run for five years and is expected to be replicated in other areas of the country.

The programme was launched on December 12, 2017 with a view to building the resilience of a million women and youth in the Sahel to climate impacts through smart agriculture at the One Planet Summit. The launch coincided with a gathering of world leaders in the French capital to mark the anniversary of the landmark Paris Climate Change Agreement.

The One Planet Summit, co-hosted by the President of France, Emmanuel Macron, UN Secretary-General António Guterres, and the President of the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim, aimed at supporting the formal UN process on climate action as nations look to raise climate ambition in the run up to 2020.

The initiative is a programme of the United Nations Integrated Strategy for the Sahel (UNISS) and the G5 Secretariat. The G5 Sahel, the institutional framework for development coordination among the five countries in the region – Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger – has identified combatting climate change and environmental degradation, along with their effects on rural populations, as a priority.

At the national level, governments are working on adaptation strategies; the new initiative is designed to support those efforts. UN Women presented the programme, which is among some 12 showcased at the Summit, on behalf of the UN system.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, have held talks in Beijing, in Kim’s first foreign trip since taking office. Kim’s wife reportedly accompanied him.

Both Chinese and North Korean state media have confirmed that Kim is on a state visit to China. Kim arrived at the invitation of the Chinese president, and stayed for an unofficial four-day visit.

The visit comes ahead of the highly anticipated talks between Kim and US President Donald Trump, which are expected to be held by the end of May. The exact date has not been set yet, and it was feared that the denuclearization issue, a long-standing stumbling block in US-North Korea relations, will be an unsurmountable obstacle on the way to a potential breakthrough.

However, following the negotiations with Xi, Kim indicated that Pyongyang may be ready for compromise.

“It is our consistent stand to be committed to denuclearization on the peninsula, in accordance with the will of late President Kim Il Sung and late General Secretary Kim Jong Il,” he said in a stark contrast to some of North Korea’s previous statements, as cited by Xinhua.

He went on to imply that North Korea will be poised to get rid of its own nuclear arsenal, provided the US and its ally, South Korea, cooperate.

“The issue of denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula can be resolved, if South Korea and the United States respond to our efforts with goodwill, create an atmosphere of peace and stability while taking progressive and synchronous measures for the realization of peace,” he said.

With his outstanding electoral win as President for the fourth term in modern Russia in a highly dramatic manner unheard in democratic poll history, President Putin would now feel in total control of the country’s system and opposition.

At the very outset it needs to be stressed that Putin does not believe in western ideas of democracy of ruling a nation for maximum of two terms and stand down thereafter from entertaining further political ambitions.

Unless the previous Presidency polls in Russia, the election this time around was fairly predictable as people longed to see Putin making Russian presidency stronger. Unlike the self-boast claims of highly inflammable and erratic US President Donald Trump about “USA first” – as if USA had never pursed that policy before him and advanced interests of the world, Putin never made such foolish statements but strictly pursued “Russia first” policy vehemently. One achievement is the recovering the Crimea region from Ukraine by ignoring all objections of USA and allies. Now Russia dictates terms to USA in Syria.

Putin could claim that he is fulfilling the demands of the people wanting a strong presidency that only he can provide. Like in Saudi Arabia the rulers just do not en-train extreme experiments to make a sea change in the system for the anti-royal fringes to remove the kingdom and establish their own dictatorship with US-Israeli backing in the name of so-called democracy, Russia also is keen their system is not dismantled as per the designs of anti-Islamic forces. Moreover, the West suspects President Putin might revert Russia back to Soviet era system that would upset entire agenda of the West that after having succeeded in a big way, into eventual jeopardy. They keep calculating the post-Putin Russia but Putin still remains in full control.

A lively debate is on in the West and elsewhere about Putin’s’ new foreign policy if any. Obviously, President Putin would choose his course very carefully and he is quite capable of that.

Russia, like any other big nation, has its own fancies about its place in the world but the world turned out to be more unpredictable and complicated than many Russians thought.

True, Russian economy received a jolt in the form of economic terrorism from USA and EU known as “sanctions” on account of Crimea annexation.

Apparently, Russian leadership did not expect the West to introduce strong sanctions after Crimea and to stick with them for years though Russian action is final. However, China compensated the Kremlin for the huge economic loss in Western investments and trade deficits.

President Putin may have expected Hillary Clinton to win the US elections and become a tough anti-Russian president but the election of Donald Trump gave some hope so improvement in bilateral ties. Russia expected fanatic Donald Trump to become a soft Russia-friendly president. Russia did not expect the EU to sudden collapse under the weight of its own in internal contradictions at the wake of Brexit.

Arguably Trump has an unshakeable belief that he is uniquely positioned to defuse a dangerous standoff with Moscow by courting Putin.

Trump congratulated Putin on his election victory, and spoke in an upbeat manner about talks he hoped to hold with him soon, billing their meeting rather like a Reagan-Gorbachev summit from the 1980s. This is the latest example of his unusual deference to Putin, following the 2016 election in which US intelligence agencies assessed the Russians intervened on his behalf. But the White House says that Russia assaulted American democracy, used a nerve agent in an attack on the soil of its closest ally, Britain, and just held an election that cannot be judged free and fair. Yet the President did not bring up any of those issues during a telephone chat with Putin, White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said.

An innocent looking Barack Obama did it in 2012 by greeting Putin, as he tried to keep his Russia “reset” strategy alive. But any interactions between Trump and Putin are closely watched given the special counsel investigation into Russian election meddling.

Putin meanwhile is one of the groups of autocrats and global strongmen that Trump seems to admire — an odd quirk in an American President who often appears tougher on allies than US foes, except that he promotes aggressively the Zionist expansionist agenda in Palestine against the UN demand to promote Palestine and International Law condemning all Zionist crimes against humanity.

Russia expects Ukraine to collapse under the weight of its unreformed economy, corruption and unruly political passions because US support for East European nation with communist background is not genuine.

Putin expects the settlement in Syria, where Russian military plays important role to help Assad stay alive and kicking while Syrians keep dying for him, to be a lot easier now.

Russian foreign policy predictions have occasioned a lively foreign policy debate in Moscow as well – on the meaning of Donald Trump, on the fate of the European Union, on what to expect from China, from Near Abroad, on what next in Syria and Donbas.

There has been a constant demand from liberals – both foreign policy thinkers and economic technocrats – to improve the relations with the West for purposefully advancing its national interest, starting possibly from stabilizing the situation in Donbas. They fail to recognize the fact the USA opposes any better ties with Russia and China. The processes of dismantling of mighty Soviet Union and Socialist system in the entire east Europe, braking down of Berlin Wall, etc were enacted by Michael Gorbachev in order to improve relationship with USA and Europe but alas only USA won the Cold war and Eastern Europe and made Russia feel for the loss of great nation status.

Yet, former finance minister Alexei Kudrin succinctly argues, “if we want our economy to grow, and grow smartly, we need to improve the relations with the West.” The West remains the best source for modernisation. The need for technocratic modernisation – the need to master the world of artificial intelligence, blockchains and other 21st century wonders – seems to be understood also by President Putin, at least intellectually, if not passionately.

Stabilization in Donbas, according to this camp, is the best place to start. Progress there would help to restart the relations with the European Union, and that might be of help at a time when the relations with the US are deadlocked because Russia has become a domestic issue in the US.

However, most of Russians see though the American-Israeli straggles to belittle Russia and simply oppose and even hate USA ad Western civilization. Then this dovetails with a foreign policy argument that holds that Russian foreign policy is overstretched and would benefit from ending a few conflicts.

The other camp in Moscow, thus, remains skeptical. They fear the West will view ‘concessions’ from Russia as a sign of weakness; or that rapprochement with the West would make Russia’s non-Western allies – from Iran to China – fear Russian ‘betrayal’.

Iran has already experienced such treatment in its relations with Russia in the 1990s and early 2000s, when Moscow used Tehran as a mere bargaining chip in its relationship with the USA. The same way USA used Pakistan a tool to improve relations with China after its success in misusing Islamabad to gain access to petrodollars n Arab world.

However, the sceptical camp is being advised by the West to agree on one crucial point: foreign policy indeed needs to change. Saudi Arabia is also following their footsteps without having any idea about the long term outcomes

Anti-Russia rhetoric and tactics continue to work in the west. They also work in the Middle East, where Russia now effectively owns the conflict in Syria and, to stay on top of the diplomatic process, it needs effective relations with all regional powers. They do not work in the West, because there, Donald Trump is now the disruptor-in-chief; and an unpredictable one at that. But USA is keen to see that the primitively anti-Western rhetoric and tactics that centre on disruption do not work anymore in Moscow. This requires predictable behavior. Surprise invasions have done their job, done it well in Moscow’s eyes – but their time seems to be far from over.

Such was the state of the debate when, in the afternoon of March 4, a former GRU employee and British double agent Sergei Skripal was found unconscious on the bench in Salisbury, poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok, the only known earlier producer of which was USSR/Russia. But now any country could produce and sell.

UK quickly blames on Russia and personally on Putin as their usual strategy. This crime remains puzzling. Murders of exchanged spies – as Skripal was – have not been part of Moscow’s behavior so far. Was the only aim to kill a traitor? In that case, most other means would have been simpler than nerve agent.

UK might have expected a poor show by Putin in the presidency poll. The domestic political incentives are likely. Could it have been indeed ordered by President Putin – with full knowledge of international implications? Or was it the job of some powerful Russian agencies without Putin’s knowledge, or maybe sanctioned only in very broad terms? In that case, will the Kremlin manage to distance itself from them, and do so with the level of publicity that would satisfy the West?

Such questions are raised in the West. No one knows for sure who does what.

Of course the issue is just starting point for Putin to just ignore and move on further with prudent foreign policy goals to remobilize entire anti-West and anti-West world to fight colonialism capitalism, imperialism, fascism and US brand Zionism.

The inconsistency in the Trump regime’s approach to Russia adds to uncertainty about how the West will respond to Putin’s growing willingness to exercise power beyond his borders.

Western policy toward Russia is not going to change dramatically for years.

By shuffling the team members, Trump looks for opportunities to advance the unilateral America to impose its military prowess on the world stage.

Russian voters are right: President Putin alone can do that and assure peace prosperity for entire world.

(RFE/RL) — Spanish authorities have broken up a cybercrime syndicate of Ukrainian and Russian nationals that allegedly stole more than 1 billion euros ($1.24 billion) from bank accounts over more than four years.

The Interior Ministry on March 26 said the gang’s alleged mastermind, identified as a Ukrainian and named only as “Denis K.,” was arrested in the coastal city of Alicante, along with three accomplices who it said were Russian and Ukrainian citizens.

In a statement, the ministry said the group “infected with malicious software the computer systems of banks, mainly in Russia, but also in Belarus, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Taiwan, taking control of critical systems that allowed them to empty ATMs remotely, alter balances, or modify accounts.”

Since it began operating in 2013, the group “managed to gain access to practically all of Russia’s banks and make withdrawals from ATMs in Madrid for half a million euros,” the statement also said.

Earlier on March 26, Europe’s law enforcement agency announced that the cybercrime group’s suspected mastermind was arrested in Alicante following an investigation conducted by the Spanish National Police with the support of Europol, the U.S. FBI, Romanian, Belarusian, and Taiwanese authorities, as well as private cybersecurity companies. Europol did not disclose the person’s name or nationality.

It said in a statement that the gang used malware known as Carbanak and Cobalt to target more than 100 banks in more than 40 countries since late 2013.

Europol said the group distributed the malware as e-mail attachments sent out to bank workers. The software gave the cybercriminals remote control of infected machines, providing them with access to the internal banking network and infecting servers controlling ATMs.

According to the Spanish Interior Ministry, the criminals relied first on individuals linked first with Russian and then later with Moldovan organized crime to extract money from cash machines that had been targeted with the malware.

The earnings were converted into Bitcoin at exchange houses in Russia and Ukraine, the ministry said. Financial platforms in Gibraltar and Britain were then used to “load prepaid cards with this cryptocurrency and spend them in Spain on all kinds of goods and services,” including cars and homes.

The Interior Ministry said that police seized jewels worth 500,000 euros and two luxury cars during the raid in Alicante. Bank accounts and two homes valued at about 1 million euros were also blocked.