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Andrew Choi

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This is the moment an RAF drone stopped a public killing staged by so-called Islamic State in Syria.

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First Australia refugees approved for US resettlement

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First Australia refugees approved for US resettlement

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Naomi Farnum

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-41329452

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Iran Is Smuggling Increasingly Potent Weapons Into Yemen, U.S. Admiral Says

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Iran Is Smuggling Increasingly Potent Weapons Into Yemen, U.S. Admiral Says

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Matthew Epstein
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/world/middleeast/iran-houthis-fifth-fleet-admiral.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fmiddleeast

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Hannah Nitta
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/20/climate/coral-great-barrier-reef.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

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South Carolina 5th Graders Are Asked to Explain K.K.K.'s Thinking

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South Carolina 5th Graders Are Asked to Explain K.K.K.'s Thinking

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Sun Hwang https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/20/us/south-carolina-teacher-kkk.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Feducation&action=click&contentCollection=education&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront

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36 Burundian Refugees Are Shot Dead in Congo

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36 Burundian Refugees Are Shot Dead in Congo

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Joseph Park
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/16/world/africa/burundi-refugees-congo.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fafrica

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‘Narcos’ scout found shot to death while exploring filming sites in Mexico

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‘Narcos’ scout found shot to death while exploring filming sites in Mexico

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Christina Kang

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Carlos Muñoz Portal, a location manager for the popular Netflix series "Narcos," was reportedly fatally shot in rural Mexico last week while scouting filming sites for the show's fourth season, according to Spanish-language news sites.

Muñoz's vehicle was found amid cactuses Monday on a remote, unnamed dirt road in Temascalapa, a town in the state of Mexico; inside the car was Muñoz's body, which had several gunshot wounds, El Pais reported under a headline that translates to " Violence in Mexico surpasses fiction."

A friend of Muñoz told the newspaper the 37-year-old had been driving to the south-central part of the country to photograph possible filming locations. The friend speculated Muñoz might have drawn unwanted attention to himself as a foreigner with a camera. The region is near the border with the state of Hidalgo, known for its high homicide rate - 182 were reported last year, according to El Pais.

Because of the rural area, authorities have had trouble finding witnesses, a spokesman for the attorney general of the state of Mexico told the newspaper.

Netflix released a statement acknowledging Muñoz's death but did not report further details.

"We are aware of the passing of Carlos Muñoz Portal, a well-respected scout, and send our condolences to his family," the company said in a statement to Deadline. "The facts surrounding his death are still unknown as authorities continue to investigate."

"Narcos" debuted on Netflix in 2015, and its first two seasons - following drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, his cocaine empire, and his violent clashes with politicians, criminals and the Drug Enforcement Administration - were set in Colombia. The show's third season, which began airing earlier this month, focuses on the Cali Cartel, also of Colombia.

In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter last September, "Narcos" showrunner Eric Newman hinted strongly the show's fourth season would be moving to Mexico.

"Cali was the cartel that really utilized the smuggling routes through Mexico and the Mexican heroin smugglers who were already incredibly successful," Newman told the entertainment news site then. "They very much got the Mexicans into the cocaine business, so there is sort of a natural evolution there. As to whether I would move directly into Mexico, it's certainly a possibility."

According to his IMDb profile, Muñoz worked in the television and film industry for more than a decade, starting as a location assistant in the mid-2000s for movies including "Man on Fire," "The Legend of Zorro" and "Apocalypto." His social media pages indicated that he attended the University of the Americas in his native Puebla, Mexico, about 80 miles southeast of Mexico City - and, outside of the film industry, that he was an avid tennis and soccer fan and landscape photographer.

Muñoz's last Instagram post was made last Saturday from an open field in Puebla. It was captioned, simply, "Home."

Home 🏡 #home #popocateptl #puebla #nature #mexico #visitmexico #vivemexico #follow #landscapephotography #clouds #happytimes

A post shared by charlesdasecond (@charlesdasecond) on

Read more: In Mexico, the price of America's hunger for heroin A Texas cop took a side gig with drug cartels, feds say Mexican narcos drop bodies, and warnings, from the skies

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'Narcos' scout found shot to death while exploring filming sites in Mexico

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Carlos Muñoz Portal, a location manager for the popular Netflix series "Narcos," was reportedly fatally shot in rural Mexico last week while scouting filming sites for the show's fourth season, according to Spanish-language news sites.

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Julia Huang
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170714-the-jane-austen-novel-you-dont-know

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Genes Color a Butterfly’s Wings. Now Scientists Want to Do It Themselves.

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Genes Color a Butterfly’s Wings. Now Scientists Want to Do It Themselves.

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Jessica Yoon

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The biologists had already suspected that optix played a role in activating the butterfly's brown pigment. But they were surprised that the black pigment was turned on in the absence of optix.

A further surprise came when they turned off the optix gene in a second species, the buckeye. The butterfly's usual browns and yellows disappeared, replaced by scales of a blazing iridescent blue. "That knocked our socks off," Dr. Reed said.

A second group, led by Anyi Mazo-Vargas of Cornell University and Arnaud Martin of George Washington University, has explored the role of a gene called WntA, which plays a powerful role in the patterning of butterflies' wings.

The standard pattern of nymphalid butterflies, a 90-million-year-old family of some 6,000 different species, consists of four bands, parallel to the body, that run between it and the edge of the wings. The second band, called the central symmetry system, contains the pattern in the middle of the wings, and the third band holds the eye spots.

Dr. Martin's team found that when they delete the WntA gene with the Crispr technique, the central symmetry system band disappears entirely from the wings of the speckled wood and buckeye butterflies.

But in other species, the loss of WntA has very different effects, suggesting that the gene has been adapted many times to play different patterning roles as new butterfly species evolved.

In the monarch butterfly, for instance, loss of WntA affects an almost invisible white line that edges the distinctive black lines that delineate the wing's veins. In the absence of WntA, the white lines expand into the areas between the veins, replacing the distinctive orange pigment.

The WntA gene becomes active in the caterpillar stage, impressing its patterning information on the embryonic wing structures. Dr. Martin sees the WntA gene as a sketching tool that defines the outline of the wing design, and the optix gene studied by Dr. Reed's group as a "paintbrush" gene that fills in the color.

Dr. Reed hopes in time to understand the patterning mechanism so well that he will be able to recreate the pattern of one butterfly's wings on those of a second species. But understanding butterfly wing patterning is just a step toward addressing larger questions in evolutionary biology.

One is the knotty question of how the string of information in a DNA molecule specifies the 3-D structures of the body. The butterfly wing presents this problem more tractably, in just two dimensions.

Another is that of how species evolve different forms. The work of these two groups shows that genes like WntA and optix - master genes that control the activity of other genes - can evolve very different roles in different species.

The nymphalid butterflies use WntA one way, the monarch for a quite another. The optix gene controls specialized wing scales in moths, but when butterflies evolved it somehow recruited a quite different set of servant genes, ones involved in generating pigment, not scale type.

"A big question in evolutionary biology is how do you rewire these gene networks," Dr. Reed said.

Both Dr. Reed and Dr. Martin are enthralled by the ease and power of the Crispr gene-editing tool, invented in 2012. Before, they could infer what a gene might do but couldn't prove it.

With Crispr, they can manipulate any gene of choice inside an egg and see exactly what it does.

"These are experiments we could only have dreamed of years ago," Dr. Reed said. "The most challenging task in my career has become an undergraduate project overnight."

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proceedings of the national academy of sciences

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Genes Color a Butterfly's Wings. Now Scientists Want to Do It Themselves.

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The biologists had already suspected that optix played a role in activating the butterfly's brown pigment. But they were surprised that the black pigment was turned on in the absence of optix. A further surprise came when they turned off the optix gene in a second species, the buckeye.

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Haley Lifrieri

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MADRID - Catalan separatists believe they have found a way to win over some of the millions of Spanish-speaking residents who have so far been deaf to their arguments ahead of the October 1 referendum on breaking with Spain.

Determined to test how far Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is willing to go to prevent the vote, which has been banned by the Constitutional Court, they need to make inroads into the roughly half of the Catalan population that is descended from people from other parts of the country and feel emotionally attached to Spain.

Enter Gabriel Rufián.

The 35-year-old Spanish-speaking lawmaker (and avid supporter of the national football team) is the author of tough tweets and viral headlines that have made him a key voice in the campaign.

"I'm the son and grandson of Andalusians who moved to Catalonia from Jaen and Granada 55 years ago ... and I'm pro-independence," Rufián said in his March 2016 maiden speech in the Spanish Congress for the Catalan Republican Left (ERC), one of the two leading pro-independence forces.

Spain can't be reformed to accommodate the aspirations of Catalans who want more autonomy, Rufián says.

"Behold your defeat and behold our victory," he added.

Rufián's speech - delivered in a slow tempo marked by long silences and punchy, short sentences - was an instant hit.

"A star is born," said El País, the national newspaper whose editorials tend to denounce the independence movement. "Spain discovers Gabriel Rufián," said the Catalan newspaper Ara.

Rufián is keen to avoid any suggestion that the secessionist movement is nationalist in the traditional sense. He avoids nativist slogans, and tries to portray independence as a way to get rid of Spain's fascist heritage, to protect social rights and even to act as a trigger for positive reform across the whole country.

"We're doing this for the rest of the state as well ... for Spain, in short," Rufián told POLITICO, arguing that the only way to further "democratize" Spain is for people to vote in the Catalan independence referendum on October 1.

"Francoism didn't die on a bed in Madrid on November 20, 1975; it will die in a ballot box in Catalonia on October 1, 2017," he tweeted this week.

'Rock star'

As someone who grew up in the mostly unionist outskirts of Barcelona, from a family with roots in other regions of Spain, Rufián helps the narrative that the pro-independence movement is plural and inclusive.

Lluis Orriols, a professor at Carlos III University in Madrid, argued that Rufián plays a very important role in the Catalan pro-independence discourse, as a way of saying: "Not only Catalan surnames and the Catalan bourgeoisie is behind this project."

"ERC wants to tell its grassroots in Catalonia's interior, who've been die-hard secessionists for many years, that they're gaining ground in the Spanish-speaking metropolitan area of Barcelona," said Enric Hernández, editor of the Catalan newspaper El Periódico.

"It's not true, but it's very comforting," Hernández added. "Seeing that a guy from Santa Coloma de Gramenet [Rufián's home city] has become pro-independence and, what is more, a rock star ... They love it."

Like Rufián, most people in Catalonia speak both Catalan and Spanish. However, most people use one language more often than the other, which is usually dictated by their parents' birthplace and what language their parents spoke at home.

According to research by the government-funded Centre d'Estudis d'Opinió, around 44 percent of citizens in Catalonia speak mostly Spanish, 40 percent speak mostly Catalan, and 15 percent speak both languages indistinctly.

While it's true that the Catalan secessionist movement has gained ground across the board - growing from 14 percent support in 2006 to 41 percent this year - Spanish-speaking areas of Catalonia, mostly along the coast and around Barcelona, remain the last unconquered frontier.

Support for independence is at 71 percent among those who speak Catalan most often. In contrast, it falls to 17 percent among those who primarily speak Spanish.

One of Rufián's key messages is that Spain can't be reformed to accommodate the aspirations of Catalans who want more autonomy for the region but would like to remain in Spain - a decisive group that could tip the scales for unionists or secessionists.

But Rufián is hardly a one-trick pony in his efforts to win over Spanish speakers in Catalonia. From his position as an antagonist of Rajoy and his Cabinet in weekly question sessions in Congress, Rufián has become the undisputed rock star of the Catalan pro-independence camp and the unionists' bête noire. His unabashed leftism, cheeky style and fresh face provided a much-needed shakeup for the secessionists.

"In any conflict, you need good propagandists and agitators, and Rufián is one of the best," said Nacho Corredor, a political consultant.

Print this

Last week, Rufián took a printer into the national parliament and showed it off during a heated exchange with Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría over the government's attempts to prevent the ballot from going ahead. "This is what you're after," he said. "This is the corpus delicti."

"I hope you won't detain me ... I confess I've got a ballot paper," he added.

Sáenz de Santamaría's response was stern: "You can come wearing a T-shirt with whatever slogan you want, you can summarize your best tweets of the week ... You can even bring the printer to teach us crafts with which to manufacture your home-made referendum."

Rufián considers Twitter an "ego monster" and "a great political tool."

"This government you so criticize, this state that bothers you so much and this democracy that suffocates you, allows you to perform your weekly petty shows," she said.

Joan Tardà, a fellow ERC lawmaker, said Rufián is the pro-independence politician with the greatest impact on young people: "He communicates in a very modern way, he knows how to separate the wheat from the chaff."

People like him because he challenges their preconceptions about the independence movement, Tardà added. Tardà said that when he tells people in the street that he isn't a nationalist, they don't believe him, but "in contrast they do trust Rufián."

Rufián's tweets are some of the most shared, commented on and controversial among Spanish politicians. He said he considers the social network an "ego monster" and "a great political tool," and that he doesn't tweet before consulting with a group of three to five people.

'Fanatical stare'

His media impact has attracted vicious attacks. "His stare ... reminded me vaguely of the stare of an ISIS fanatic, somewhere between languid and drugged up, just before blowing himself up or slicing a hostage's throat," wrote one media commentator after his parliament debut. His surname - which means ruffian in Spanish - has become commonly used to refer to pro-independence forces in general.

Rufián's style is confrontational, and he does not mince his words. After a leftist lawmaker in the Catalan chamber denounced abuses by the separatist majority in approving the referendum law in the Catalan regional parliament earlier this month, Rufián hit back that he was "like the comrades who 40 years ago went to workers' homes with uncalloused hands to tell them they should not strike."

Political consultant Corredor said Rufián is an expert at winding up his opponents to provoke aggressive responses which then serve to underline many Catalans' perception of Spain as intolerant and right-wing.

Professor Orriols said Rufián works well as a polarizing figure who can mobilize his own side, but not as someone who can convince those who are in the middle ground.

With the tension mounting in the run-up to the October referendum, and state pressure against the vote's organizers increasing, fighting between supporters and detractors of Catalan independence is only likely to increase.

"Let people turn off the TV and not read the newspapers until October 1," said Rufián. "It would be highly advisable, because otherwise they're going to experience the dirtiest war in history."

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MADRID - Catalan separatists believe they have found a way to win over some of the millions of Spanish-speaking residents who have so far been deaf to their arguments ahead of the October 1 referendum on breaking with Spain.

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Violence flares after quiet vigil for Georgia Tech student shot by police - Sara Tsugranis

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Violence flares after quiet vigil for Georgia Tech student shot by police - Sara Tsugranis

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http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/18/us/georgia-tech-protest-slain-student/index.html

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Iceland's Government Falls After Letter Asking to Pardon Pedophile 

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Iceland's Government Falls After Letter Asking to Pardon Pedophile 

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June Huang
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/world/europe/iceland-government-collapse.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Feurope

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Amazon ‘Reviewing’ Its Website After It Suggested Bomb-Making Items

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Amazon ‘Reviewing’ Its Website After It Suggested Bomb-Making Items

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Joehyun KIm https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/20/technology/uk-amazon-bomb.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fbusiness&action=click&contentCollection=business&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

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Justice Delayed: 10 Years in Jail, but Still Awaiting Tria

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Justice Delayed: 10 Years in Jail, but Still Awaiting Tria

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Ashley Kim

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In capital murder cases, in which the defendant faces the death penalty, it is not unusual to spend two or three years behind bars awaiting trial if the defendant is not granted bail or is unable to afford it. But a decade is extreme. Mr. Davis's wait is among the most protracted that The New York Times could find.

Mr. Davis's case has suffered from misplaced evidence, conflicts of interest, and restrictions on his ability to review his own legal documents in jail, according to interviews and a review of his case file. His lawyers and prosecutors share the blame for the delay, as does Mr. Davis himself. At a hearing early last year, for instance, Mr. Davis insisted on replacing his second team of court-appointed lawyers, saying he did not trust them, even though the judge warned that doing so would further delay his trial.

"It is impossible to look at it," said Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law expert at George Washington University, of the case, "and not find it deeply, deeply troubling."

Mr. Davis maintains he is innocent and has declined offers of a plea deal. In February, after the election of a new district attorney who had a conflict of interest, the state attorney general took over the prosecution and dropped pursuit of the death penalty. Jury selection in the trial finally began on Monday.

_____

The basic facts of Pete Dwayne Reaves's death are not in dispute. On a Friday night in June 2007, Mr. Davis and two other men drove to his apartment, looking to buy marijuana. The visit quickly went bad: Mr. Reaves was shot twice. He died from the gunshot wounds.

One of Mr. Davis's companions was a childhood friend, Kevin Bernard McCloud, who like Mr. Davis had no prior criminal record. The other was an older man, an acquaintance named Lorenzo Stacey, who had a rap sheet that included burglary and cocaine possession.

All three men were charged with capital murder, but their cases had very different outcomes.

Mr. Stacey, who was acquitted in 2009, maintained that he had stayed in the parking lot, and entered the apartment only after hearing the gunshots.

Mr. McCloud's lawyer said that his client heard Mr. Davis yell at him to get down and then felt a pain in the back of his neck. Mr. McCloud had been shot by a bullet that passed through him and struck Mr. Reaves. In 2011, Mr. McCloud took a plea deal, agreeing to testify against Mr. Davis in exchange for being spared the death penalty. He was sentenced to 99 years.

Prosecutors have said that the three friends were wearing masks and intended to rob Mr. Reaves, and argued that Mr. Davis had fired a stolen 9-millimeter handgun. It was Mr. Stacey who told the police where to find the gun, claiming that Mr. Davis had hidden it behind a Dumpster, but no fingerprints were found on it.

In a letter Mr. McCloud sent to Mr. Davis's mother after he accepted the deal, he assured her that he would not do anything to hurt her son.

The prosecutor at the time, Douglas A. Valeska, wanted him to "get on the stand and lie, and I'm not going to do that," Mr. McCloud wrote. The judge has ordered that Mr. McCloud be transported to court for the trial. Mr. Valeska did not respond to a phone call and email seeking comment.

In the summer of 2015, Mr. Davis's lawyer, Derek Yarbrough, was looking through an evidence box from Mr. Stacey's trial when he found something that could shape the outcome for his client: a forensic kit with the results of a gunshot residue test.

The kit indicated that Mr. Davis had tested positive for residue. But it did not include further analysis needed to determine whether it came directly from a gunshot, or from an indirect source like a car seat. Mr. Davis's current lawyers would not say whether that analysis has since been done.

_____

From the beginning, there was something peculiar about the way the Davis case ground through the legal system. His first lawyer, Benjamin Meredith, was the father of one of the investigating officers, Frank Meredith. At a preliminary hearing, the elder Mr. Meredith cross-examined his son.

But it was four years before anyone raised a concern about the potential conflict of interest. In 2011, Mr. Valeska, the district attorney, finally brought it up. Judge Kevin Moulton, who had taken over the case in 2010, removed Mr. Meredith, who had initially been hired by Mr. Davis's mother, but became a court-appointed lawyer when she could no longer afford the bill.

Mr. Valeska did not respond to inquiries on why he waited so long.

In all that time representing Mr. Davis, Benjamin Meredith had filed only two motions.

More delays followed: Mr. Davis's new lead counsel, Mr. Yarbrough, needed time to finish another murder case. The trial was postponed when the gunshot residue kit was found, and again when Mr. Davis's lawyers said they needed more time. Finally, it was set for April 2016.

Alabama's method of handling indigent defense has long been criticized as deeply flawed, particularly in death penalty cases. It underwent some changes in 2011, but judges still handpick defense lawyers, and they are paid only $70 an hour - less than half the federal pay rate for capital defenders and far too low to attract experienced death penalty lawyers, said Lisa Borden, who oversees pro bono programs at the Baker Donelson law firm in Birmingham. In 2011, former judges on the state's highest courts told the United States Supreme Court that capital defendants in Alabama faced "a lack of qualified counsel at all stages."

Particularly in rural communities like Dothan, the legal community can be small enough to make conflicts hard to avoid. The newly elected district attorney could not prosecute the case because he had previously represented one of the three men accused in the murder.

By August 2015, Mr. Davis had lost faith in his lawyers, complaining of delays. Both Mr. Davis and the lawyers themselves asked that they be removed from the case.

The judge determined that the lawyers were adequately representing Mr. Davis, and warned that new lawyers could delay the trial by another two to three years, but Mr. Davis insisted. His next lead counsel lasted six months before discovering that he had once represented a relative of the victim.

_____

In late 2015, when Mr. Davis had been in jail for eight years, his mother tried to help him herself, hiring a legal document preparation service for $100.

The result, a rambling petition to a federal court, went nowhere. But it was the first filing in Mr. Davis's case to invoke his right to a speedy trial.

The right to a speedy trial does not come with a clear definition of speed. Rather, the Supreme Court established in 1972 a four-part test for whether the right had been violated: the length of the delay, the reasons, the time and manner in which a defendant has asserted the right and the degree to which the defendant's case might be harmed.

Delays can sometimes benefit defendants, who may purposefully try to stall until witnesses die or memories fade. Defendants who cause their own delays may be deemed to have waived their right to a speedy trial.

In Mr. Davis's case, he knowingly delayed his trial by demanding new lawyers, but one of his stated reasons has been their failure to bring the case to trial.

Document: 'Dictators of My Well-Being'

When Mr. Davis's current lawyers, Thomas M. Goggans, Dustin Fowler and Christopher Williams, finally filed their own speedy trial motion, they focused on the four years when he was represented by Mr. Meredith, saying that delay was not their client's fault.

But Judge Moulton said Mr. Davis was entirely to blame: "All delays in this case are attributable to the defendant," he wrote.

He also said the claim was too late. "The defendant has waited 10 years to assert his right to a speedy trial in the form of a motion to dismiss, which comes approximately five months prior to the trial date," he said.

A clerk for Judge Moulton said he would not comment further on an active case.

Judges must try to steer clear of situations that may be grounds for appeal, said William Lee Pfeifer Jr., an appellate lawyer in Alabama. "The judge is in a difficult position because he does not want a defendant going to trial with lawyers he doesn't like or trust, or lawyers who have issues like conflicts of interest."

But ultimately judges, not defendants, control the court calendar.

"The court has to gain control of the case and not let it petrify," said Mr. Turley, the constitutional law expert. "This is like a railroad saying, 'This is an awful train wreck.' Well, the train belongs to the railroad."

_____

The delays have been agonizing not only for Mr. Davis, but for the family of Mr. Reaves.

"You can just imagine losing a child or a brother and then something like this happens, for more than 10 years," said one of his four brothers, Malcolm Reaves. "It's been so long."

Mr. Reaves suggested that the delays might be part of a defense strategy by Mr. Davis. "It's all about buying time," he said.

Mr. Davis, though, insists that he would like nothing more than his day in court. In jail, he has been written up enough times, for offenses that include insulting guards, possessing pornography, and writing in his jail-issued Bible, to be kept in a segregated cell until 2021. "I'm in a position where you have to violate just to stay sane," Mr. Davis wrote in a letter to The New York Times after a request for an interview went unanswered by jail officials.

Ms. Davis contends that her son's treatment has been abusive and that he has not regularly received prescribed medications for depression and anxiety. In 2013, his lawyers filed a motion complaining that the jail was not allowing him to review all his own case files.

"My son has been locked away and kept from me for 10 years like an impounded dog or an unwanted animal," Ms. Davis said.

Houston County Sheriff Donald Valenza, who runs the jail, did not respond to numerous phone calls and emails.

In a letter to his mother in June of last year, Mr. Davis described his treatment as "some type of mockery."

"I feel like a foolish mascot," he wrote, "parading to and from the courthouse."

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murders  attempted murders and homicides

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Justice Delayed: 10 Years in Jail, but Still Awaiting Trial

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In capital murder cases, in which the defendant faces the death penalty, it is not unusual to spend two or three years behind bars awaiting trial if the defendant is not granted bail or is unable to afford it. But a decade is extreme.

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Mexico had two major earthquakes this month. Here's why                     Julian Aguero

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Mexico had two major earthquakes this month. Here's why                     Julian Aguero

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http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/20/americas/mexico-two-earthquakes-in-one-month/index.html

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Grace Joo

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There's an argument to be made that we should cut back on his activities or make him go to bed earlier so that he gets more sleep. Teens aren't wired for that, though. They want to go to bed later and sleep later. It's not the activities that prevent them from getting enough sleep - it's the school start times that require them to wake up so early. More than 90 percent of high schools and more than 80 percent of middle schools start before 8:30 a.m.

Some argue that delaying school start times would just cause teenagers to stay up later. Research doesn't support that idea. A systematic review published a year ago examined how school start delays affect students' sleep and other outcomes. Six studies, two of which were randomized controlled trials, showed that delaying the start of school from 25 to 60 minutes corresponded with increased sleep time of 25 to 77 minutes per week night. In other words, when students were allowed to sleep later in the morning, they still went to bed at the same time, and got more sleep.

There are costs to pushing back the start times of schools, of course. Our local school system, like many others, uses the same buses for elementary, middle and high school. Not wanting to start elementary school too early, it starts high school earlier to save money on transportation. Other costs to delaying start times come after school, when later school end times result in later after-school activities. These can interfere with parents' work schedules and run into evening hours, when it gets dark and additional lighting might be necessary.

A Brookings Institution policy brief investigated the trade-offs between costs and benefits of pushing back the start times of high school in 2011. It estimated that increased transportation costs would most likely be about $150 per student per year. But more sleep has been shown to lead to higher academic achievement. They found that the added academic benefit of later start times would be equivalent to about two additional months of schooling, which they calculated would add about $17,500 to a student's earnings over the course of a lifetime. Thus, the benefits outweighed the costs.

This was a reasonably simple analysis, though, and it did not persuade many schools to change. A recent analysis by the RAND Corporation goes much further.

Marco Hafner, Martin Stepanek and Wendy Troxel conducted analyses to determine the economic implication of a universal shift of middle and high school start times to 8:30 a.m. at the earliest. This study was stronger than the Brookings one in a number of ways. It examined each state individually, because moving to 8:30 would be a bigger change for some than for others. It also looked at changes year by year to see how costs and benefits accrued over time. It examined downstream effects, like car accidents, which can affect lifetime productivity. And it considered multiplier effects, as changes to the lives of individual students might affect others over time.

They found that delaying school start times to 8:30 or later would contribute $83 billion to the economy within a decade. The gains were seen through decreased car crash mortality and increased student lifetime earnings.

Since it would take at least a year for any students affected by changes in start times to enter the labor market, there would be no gains in the first year. Costs, however, would accrue immediately. These included about $150 per student per year in transportation costs and $110,000 per school costs in upfront infrastructure upgrades. Even so, by the second year, the benefits outweighed the costs. By 10 years, the benefits were almost double the costs; by 15 years, they were almost triple.

We'd be remiss if we didn't acknowledge other potential costs not included in this calculation, including parental difficulty in adapting to later school start times. But even in a model where the per-student, per-year cost was increased to $500, which would compensate most parents for delays, and where the upfront per school cost was increased to $330,000, the economic benefits to society would still outweigh the costs in the long run.

Further, it's important to understand that these benefits may actually be underestimates. The researchers were careful to model only outcomes for which they had empirical data from sleep duration, such as car crashes and academic performance. They didn't model other real, but quantifiably unknown, benefits, like improvements in rates of depression, suicide and obesity, or the overall effects on health.

Some schools are beginning to take this seriously, but not enough. When it comes to start times, the growing evidence shows that forcing adolescents to get up so early isn't just a bad health decision; it's a bad economic one, too.

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The Economic Case for Letting Teenagers Sleep a Little Later

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There's an argument to be made that we should cut back on his activities or make him go to bed earlier so that he gets more sleep. Teens aren't wired for that, though. They want to go to bed later and sleep later.

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How Big Business Got Brazil Hooked on Junk Food

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How Big Business Got Brazil Hooked on Junk Food

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Jonathan Sim

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FORTALEZA, Brazil - Children's squeals rang through the muggy morning air as a woman pushed a gleaming white cart along pitted, trash-strewn streets. She was making deliveries to some of the poorest households in this seaside city, bringing pudding, cookies and other packaged foods to the customers on her sales route.

Celene da Silva, 29, is one of thousands of door-to-door vendors for Nestlé, helping the world's largest packaged food conglomerate expand its reach into a quarter-million households in Brazil's farthest-flung corners.

As she dropped off variety packs of Chandelle pudding, Kit-Kats and Mucilon infant cereal, there was something striking about her customers: Many were visibly overweight, even small children.

She gestured to a home along her route and shook her head, recalling how its patriarch, a morbidly obese man, died the previous week. "He ate a piece of cake and died in his sleep," she said.

Mrs. da Silva, who herself weighs more than 200 pounds, recently discovered that she had high blood pressure, a condition she acknowledges is probably tied to her weakness for fried chicken and the Coca-Cola she drinks with every meal, breakfast included.

Nestlé's direct-sales army in Brazil is part of a broader transformation of the food system that is delivering Western-style processed food and sugary drinks to the most isolated pockets of Latin America, Africa and Asia. As their growth slows in the wealthiest countries, multinational food companies like Nestlé, PepsiCo and General Mills have been aggressively expanding their presence in developing nations, unleashing a marketing juggernaut that is upending traditional diets from Brazil to Ghana to India.

A New York Times examination of corporate records, epidemiological studies and government reports - as well as interviews with scores of nutritionists and health experts around the world - reveals a sea change in the way food is produced, distributed and advertised across much of the globe. The shift, many public health experts say, is contributing to a new epidemic of diabetes and heart disease, chronic illnesses that are fed by soaring rates of obesity in places that struggled with hunger and malnutrition just a generation ago.

The new reality is captured by a single, stark fact: Across the world, more people are now obese than underweight. At the same time, scientists say, the growing availability of high-calorie, nutrient-poor foods is generating a new type of malnutrition, one in which a growing number of people are both overweight and undernourished.

"The prevailing story is that this is the best of all possible worlds - cheap food, widely available. If you don't think about it too hard, it makes sense," said Anthony Winson, who studies the political economics of nutrition at the University of Guelph in Ontario. A closer look, however, reveals a much different story, he said. "To put it in stark terms: The diet is killing us."

Even critics of processed food acknowledge that there are multiple factors in the rise of obesity, including genetics, urbanization, growing incomes and more sedentary lives. Nestlé executives say their products have helped alleviate hunger, provided crucial nutrients, and that the company has squeezed salt, fat and sugar from thousands of items to make them healthier. But Sean Westcott, head of food research and development at Nestlé, conceded obesity has been an unexpected side effect of making inexpensive processed food more widely available.

"We didn't expect what the impact would be," he said.

Part of the problem, he added, is a natural tendency for people to overeat as they can afford more food. Nestlé, he said, strives to educate consumers about proper portion size and to make and market foods that balance "pleasure and nutrition."

There are now more than 700 million obese people worldwide, 108 million of them children, according to research published recently in The New England Journal of Medicine. The prevalence of obesity has doubled in 73 countries since 1980, contributing to four million premature deaths, the study found.

The story is as much about economics as it is nutrition. As multinational companies push deeper into the developing world, they are transforming local agriculture, spurring farmers to abandon subsistence crops in favor of cash commodities like sugar cane, corn and soybeans - the building blocks for many industrial food products. It is this economic ecosystem that pulls in mom-and-pop stores, big box retailers, food manufacturers and distributors, and small vendors like Mrs. da Silva.

In places as distant as China, South Africa and Colombia, the rising clout of big food companies also translates into political influence, stymieing public health officials seeking soda taxes or legislation aimed at curbing the health impacts of processed food.

For a growing number of nutritionists, the obesity epidemic is inextricably linked to the sales of packaged foods, which grew 25 percent worldwide from 2011 to 2016, compared with 10 percent in the United States, according to Euromonitor, a market research firm. An even starker shift took place with carbonated soft drinks; sales in Latin America have doubled since 2000, overtaking sales in North America in 2013, the World Health Organization reported.

The same trends are mirrored with fast food, which grew 30 percent worldwide from 2011 to 2016, compared with 21 percent in the United States, according to Euromonitor. Take, for example, Domino's Pizza, which in 2016 added 1,281 stores - one "every seven hours," noted its annual report - all but 171 of them overseas.

"At a time when some of the growth is more subdued in established economies, I think that strong emerging-market posture is going to be a winning position," Mark Schneider, chief executive of Nestlé, recently told investors. Developing markets now provide the company with 42 percent of its sales.

For some companies, that can mean specifically focusing on young people, as Ahmet Bozer, president of Coca-Cola International, described to investors in 2014. "Half the world's population has not had a Coke in the last 30 days," he said. "There's 600 million teenagers who have not had a Coke in the last week. So the opportunity for that is huge."

Industry defenders say that processed foods are essential to feed a growing, urbanizing world of people, many of them with rising incomes, demanding convenience.

"We're not going to get rid of all factories and go back to growing all grain. It's nonsense. It's not going to work," said Mike Gibney, a professor emeritus of food and health at University College Dublin and a consultant to Nestlé. "If I ask 100 Brazilian families to stop eating processed food, I have to ask myself: What will they eat? Who will feed them? How much will it cost?"

In many ways, Brazil is a microcosm of how growing incomes and government policies have led to longer, better lives and largely eradicated hunger. But now the country faces a stark new nutrition challenge: over the last decade, the country's obesity rate has nearly doubled to 20 percent, and the portion of people who are overweight has nearly tripled to 58 percent. Each year, 300,000 people are diagnosed with Type II diabetes, a condition with strong links to obesity.

Brazil also highlights the food industry's political prowess. In 2010, a coalition of Brazilian food and beverage companies torpedoed a raft of measures that sought to limit junk food ads aimed at children. The latest challenge has come from the country's president, Michel Temer, a business-friendly centrist whose conservative allies in Congress are now seeking to chip away at the handful of regulations and laws intended to encourage healthy eating.

"What we have is a war between two food systems, a traditional diet of real food once produced by the farmers around you and the producers of ultra-processed food designed to be over-consumed and which in some cases are addictive," said Carlos A. Monteiro, a professor of nutrition and public health at the University of São Paulo.

"It's a war," he said, "but one food system has disproportionately more power than the other."

Mrs. da Silva reaches customers in Fortaleza's slums, many of whom don't have ready access to a supermarket. She champions the product she sells, exulting in the nutritional claims on the labels that boast of added vitamins and minerals.

"Everyone here knows that Nestlé products are good for you," she said, gesturing to cans of Mucilon, the infant cereal whose label says it is "packed with calcium and niacin," but also Nescau 2.0, a sugar-laden chocolate powder.

She became a Nestlé vendor two years ago, when her family of five was struggling to get by. Though her husband is still unemployed, things are looking up. With the $185 a month she earns selling Nestlé products, she was able to buy a new refrigerator, a television and a gas stove for the family's three-room home at the edge of a fetid tidal marsh.

The company's door-to-door program fulfills a concept that Nestlé articulated in its 1976 annual shareholder report, which noted that "integration with the host country is a basic aim of our company." Started a decade ago in Brazil, the program serves 700,000 "low-income consumers each month," according to its website. Despite the country's continuing economic crisis, the program has been growing 10 percent a year, according to Felipe Barbosa, a company supervisor.

He said sagging incomes among poor and working-class Brazilians had actually been a boon for direct sales. That's because unlike most food retailers, Nestlé gives customers a full month to pay for their purchases. It also helps that saleswomen - the program employs only women - know when their customers receive Bolsa Família, a monthly government subsidy for low-income households.

"The essence of our program is to reach the poor," Mr. Barbosa said. "What makes it work is the personal connection between the vendor and the customer."

Nestlé increasingly also portrays itself as a leader in its commitment to community and health. Two decades ago, it anointed itself a "nutrition health and wellness company." Over the years, the company says it has reformulated nearly 9,000 products to reduce salt, sugar and fat, and it has delivered billions of servings fortified with vitamins and minerals. It emphasizes food safety and the reduction of food waste, and it works with nearly 400,000 farmers around the world to promote sustainable farming.

In an interview at Nestlé's new $50 million campus in suburban Cleveland, Mr. Westcott, head of food research and development, said the door-to-door sales program reflected another of the company's slogans: "Creating shared values."

"We create shared value by creating micro-entrepreneurs - people that can build their own businesses," he said. A company like Nestlé can bolster the well-being of entire communities "by actually sending positive messages around nutrition," he said.

Nestlé's portfolio of foods is vast and different from that of some snack companies, which make little effort to focus on healthy offerings. They include Nesfit, a whole-grain cereal; low-fat yogurts like Molico that contain a relatively modest amount of sugar (six grams); and a range of infant cereals, served with milk or water, that are fortified with vitamins, iron and probiotics.

Dr. Gibney, the nutritionist and Nestlé consultant, said the company deserved credit for reformulating healthier products.

But of the 800 products that Nestlé says are available through its vendors, Mrs. da Silva says her customers are mostly interested in only about two dozen of them, virtually all sugar-sweetened items like Kit-Kats; Nestlé Greek Red Berry, a 3.5-ounce cup of yogurt with 17 grams of sugar; and Chandelle Pacoca, a peanut-flavored pudding in a container the same size as the yogurt that has 20 grams of sugar - nearly the entire World Health Organization's recommended daily limit.

Until recently, Nestlé sponsored a river barge that delivered tens of thousands of cartons of milk powder, yogurt, chocolate pudding, cookies and candy to isolated communities in the Amazon basin. Since the barge was taken out of service in July, private boat owners have stepped in to meet the demand.

"On one hand, Nestlé is a global leader in water and infant formula and a lot of dairy products," said Barry Popkin, professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina. "On the other hand, they are going into the backwoods of Brazil and selling their candy."

Dr. Popkin finds the door-to-door marketing emblematic of an insidious new era in which companies seek to reach every doorstep in an effort to grow and become central to communities in the developing world. "They're not leaving an inch of country left aside," he said.

Public health advocates have criticized the company before. In the 1970s, Nestlé was the target of a boycott in the United States for aggressively marketing infant formula in developing countries, which nutritionists said undermined healthful breast-feeding. In 1978, the president of Nestlé Brazil, Oswaldo Ballarin, was called to testify at highly publicized United States Senate hearings on the infant formula issue, and he declared that criticisms were the work of church activity aimed at "undermining the free enterprise system."

On the streets of Fortaleza, where Nestlé is admired for its Swiss pedigree and perceived high quality, negative sentiments about the company are rarely heard.

The home of Joana D'arc de Vasconcellos, 53, another vendor, is filled with Nestlé-branded stuffed animals and embossed certificates she earned at nutrition classes sponsored by Nestlé. In her living room, pride of place is given to framed photographs of her children at age 2, each posed before a pyramid of empty Nestlé infant formula cans. As her son and daughter grew up, she switched to other Nestlé products for children: Nido Kinder, a toddler milk powder; Chocapic, a chocolate-flavored cereal; and the chocolate milk powder Nescau.

"When he was a baby, my son didn't like to eat - until I started giving him Nestlé foods," she said proudly.

Ms. de Vasconcellos has diabetes and high blood pressure. Her 17-year-old daughter, who weighs more than 250 pounds, has hypertension and polycystic ovary syndrome, a hormonal disorder strongly linked to obesity. Many other relatives have one or more ailments often associated with poor diets: her mother and two sisters (diabetes and hypertension), and her husband (hypertension.) Her father died three years ago after losing his feet to gangrene, a complication of diabetes.

"Every time I go to the public health clinic, the line for diabetics is out the door," she said. "You'd be hard pressed to find a family here that doesn't have it."

Ms. de Vasconcellos previously tried selling Tupperware and Avon products door to door, but many customers failed to pay. Six years ago, after a friend told her about Nestlé's direct sales program, Ms. Vasconcellos jumped at the chance.

She says her customers have never failed to pay her.

"People have to eat," she said.

In May 2000, Denise Coitinho, then director of nutrition for the Ministry of Health, was at a Mother's Day party at her children's school when her mobile phone rang. It was Nestlé's chief of government relations. "He was really upset," she recalled.

The source of Nestlé's concern was a new policy that Brazil had adopted and was pushing at the World Health Organization. If adopted, the policy would have recommended that children around the world breast-feed for six months, rather than the previous recommendation of four to six months, she said.

"Two months may not seem like a lot, but it's a lot of revenue. It's a lot of selling," said Ms. Coitinho, who left her position in 2004 and is now an independent nutrition consultant to, among others, the United Nations. In the end, infant food companies succeeded in stalling the policy for a year, she said. Asked about her story, Nestlé said that it "believes breast milk is the ideal nutrition for babies" and that it supports and promotes the W.H.O. guidelines.

It is hard to overstate the economic power and political access enjoyed by food and beverage conglomerates in Brazil, which are responsible for 10 percent of the nation's economic output and employ 1.6 million people.

In 2014, food companies donated $158 million to members of Brazil's National Congress, a threefold increase over 2010, according to Transparência Brasil. A study the organization released last year found that more than half of Brazil's current federal legislators had been elected with donations from the food industry - before the Supreme Court banned corporate contributions in 2015.

The single largest donor to congressional candidates was the Brazilian meat giant JBS, which gave candidates $112 million in 2014; Coca-Cola gave $6.5 million in campaign contributions that year, and McDonald's donated $561,000.

So the stage was set for a mammoth political battle when, in 2006, the government sought to enact far-reaching food-industry regulations to curb obesity and disease. The measures, growing out of the earlier breast-feeding policy, included advertising alerts to warn consumers about foods high in sugar, salt and saturated fats, as well as marketing restrictions to dampen the lure of highly processed foods and sugary beverages, especially those aimed at children.

Taking a page from the government's successful efforts to limit tobacco marketing, the new rules would have barred brands like Pepsi and KFC from sponsoring sports and cultural events.

"We thought that Brazil could be a model for the rest of the world, a country that puts the well-being of its citizens above all else," said Dirceu Raposo de Mello, then director of the government's health surveillance agency, widely known by the Portuguese acronym Anvisa. "Unfortunately, the food industry did not feel the same way."

The food companies took a low profile, mustering behind the Brazilian Association of Food Industries, a lobbying group whose board of vice presidents included executives from Nestlé; the American meat giant Cargill; and Unilever, the European food conglomerate that owns brands like Hellmann's, Mazola oil and Ben & Jerry's. The association declined to comment for this article.

During the early days of public hearings, the industry seemed to be negotiating the rules in good faith but behind the scenes, health advocates say corporate lawyers and lobbyists were quietly waging a multipronged campaign to derail the process.

Industry-financed academics began appearing on TV to assail the rules as economically ruinous. Other experts wrote newspaper editorial pieces suggesting that exercise and stricter parenting might be more effective than regulations aimed at fighting childhood obesity.

The industry's most potent rallying cry, analysts say, was its strident denunciation of the proposed advertising restrictions as censorship. The accusation had particular resonance given the nearly two decades of military dictatorship that ended in 1985.

At one meeting, a representative from the food industry accused Anvisa of trying to subvert parental authority, saying mothers had the right to decide what to feed their children, recalled Vanessa Schottz, a nutrition advocate. In another meeting, she said, a toy industry representative stood up and assailed the proposed marketing rules, saying they would deprive Brazilian children of the toys that sometimes accompany fast-food meals. "He said we were killing the dreams of children," Ms. Schottz recalled. "We were dumbfounded."

Chastened by the industry criticism, Anvisa in late 2010 withdrew most of the proposed restrictions. What remained was a single proposal requiring that ads include a warning about unhealthy food and beverages.

Then came the lawsuits.

Over the course of several months, a disparate collection of industry groups filed 11 lawsuits against Anvisa. The plaintiffs included the national association of biscuit manufacturers, the corn growers lobby and an alliance of chocolate, cocoa and candy companies. Some of the lawsuits claimed that the regulations violated constitutional protections on free speech, while others said the agency did not have the standing to regulate the food and advertising industries.

Although health advocates say the litigation was not entirely unexpected, they were blindsided by the response of the federal government's top lawyer, Attorney General Luís Inácio Adams, a presidential appointee. Shortly after the proposed rules were officially published in June 2010, Mr. Adams sided with the industry. A few weeks later, a federal court suspended the regulations, citing his written opinion, which suggested that Anvisa did not have the authority to regulate the food and advertising industries. Mr. Adams declined to comment for this article.

Mr. Raposo de Mello, the former Anvisa president, says he was stunned by Mr. Adam's change of heart, given the attorney general office's longstanding support for Anvisa. Seven years later, with most of the 11 lawsuits still unresolved, the regulations remain frozen.

"The industry," Mr. Raposo de Mello said, "did an end run around the system."

In the meantime, the food and beverage industry became more aggressive as it sought to neutralize Anvisa, which it viewed as its greatest adversary.

In 2010, in the midst of the battle against the agency's proposed regulations, a group of 156 business executives took its grievances to the campaign of Dilma Rousseff, who was running for president.

Marcello Fragano Baird, a political scientist in São Paulo who has studied the food lobby's campaign against the nutrition regulations, said Ms. Rousseff assured the executives she would shake up Anvisa. "She promised them she would 'clean house' once elected," he said, adding that he learned about the encounter through interviews with participants.

Ms. Rouseff won, and soon after her inauguration, she replaced Mr. Raposo de Mello with Jaime César de Moura Oliveira, a longtime political ally and a former lawyer for the Brazilian subsidiary of the food giant Unilever.

A spokesman for Ms. Rouseff declined to make her available for an interview.

In 2012, Anvisa hosted a traveling anti-obesity exhibit at its offices. Titled "Lose Weight Brazil," the exhibit extolled exercise and moderation as the keys to tackling obesity, but largely ignored mainstream scientific evidence about the dangers of consuming too much sugar, soda and processed food.

The exhibition's sponsor? Coca-Cola.

More than 1,000 miles south of Fortaleza, the effects of changing eating habits are evident at a brightly painted day care center in São Paulo, Brazil's largest city. Each day, more than a hundred children pack classrooms, singing the alphabet, playing and taking group naps.

When it was started in the early 1990s, the program, run by a Brazilian nonprofit group, had a straightforward mission: to alleviate undernutrition among children who were not getting enough to eat in the city's most impoverished neighborhoods.

These days many of those who attend are noticeably pudgy and, the staff nutritionists note, some are worryingly short for their age, the result of diets heavy in salt, fat and sugar but lacking in the nourishment needed for healthy development.

The program, run by the Center for Nutritional Recovery and Education, includes prediabetic 10-year-olds with dangerously fatty livers, adolescents with hypertension and toddlers so poorly nourished they have trouble walking.

"We are even getting babies, which is something we never saw before," said Giuliano Giovanetti, who does outreach and communications for the center. "It's a crisis for our society because we are producing a generation of children with impaired cognitive abilities who will not reach their full potential."

Nearly 9 percent of Brazilian children were obese in 2015, more than a 270 percent increase since 1980, according to a recent study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. That puts it in striking distance of the United States, where 12.7 percent of children were obese in 2015.

The figures are even more alarming in the communities served by the center: In some neighborhoods, 30 percent of the children are obese and another 30 percent malnourished, according to the organization's own data, which found that 6 percent of obese children were also malnourished.

The rising obesity rates are largely associated with improved economics, as families with increasing incomes embrace the convenience, status and flavors offered by packaged foods.

Busy parents ply their toddlers with instant noodles and frozen chicken nuggets, meals that are often accompanied by soda. Rice, beans, salad and grilled meats - building blocks of the traditional Brazilian diet - are falling by the wayside, studies have found.

Compounding the problem is the rampant street violence that keeps young children cooped up indoors.

"It's just too dangerous to let my kids play outside, so they spend all their free time sitting on the couch playing video games and watching TV," said Elaine Pereira dos Santos, 35, the mother of two children, 9 and 4 years old, both overweight.

Isaac, the 9-year-old, weighs 138 pounds and can wear only clothing intended for adolescents. Ms. dos Santos, who works at a hospital pharmacy, shortens the pants legs for him.

Like many Brazilian mothers, she was pleased when Isaac began to gain weight as a toddler, not long after he tasted his first McDonald's French fry. "I always thought fatter is better when it comes to babies," she said. She happily indulged his eating habits, which included frequent trips to fast-food outlets and almost no fruits and vegetables.

But when he began having trouble running and complained about achy knees, Ms. dos Santos knew something was wrong. "The hardest part is the ridicule he gets from other children," she said. "When we go out shopping, even adults point and stare" or call him gordinho, roughly translated to "little fatty."

At the São Paulo nursery, health care workers keep tabs on the children's physical and cognitive development, while nutritionists teach parents how to prepare inexpensive, healthy meals. For some children, the center's test kitchen provides their first introduction to cabbage, plums and mangos.

One of the fundamental challenges is persuading parents that their children are sick. "Unlike cancer or other illnesses, this is a disability you can't see," said Juliana Dellare Calia, 42, a nutritionist with the organization.

Although staff members say the program has made significant strides in changing the way families eat, many children will nonetheless face a lifelong battle with obesity. That's because a growing body of research suggests that childhood malnutrition can lead to permanent metabolic changes, reprogramming the body so that it more readily turns excess calories into body fat.

"It's the body's response to what's perceived as starvation," Ms. Dellare Calia said.

Even as nutrition experts bemoan the growing obesity crisis - and the potential long-term medical costs - one aspect of Brazil's processed food revolution is undeniable: The industry's expansion provides economic benefits to people up and down the ladder. Nestlé, which says it employs 21,000 people in Brazil, two years ago started an apprenticeship program that has trained 7,000 people under 30.

Near the bottom of the food chain is Mrs. da Silva, the vendor in Fortaleza, who feels optimistic about the future despite her mounting health woes. Life has been a struggle since she dropped out of school at 14 when she became pregnant with her first child. Now she talks about fixing the missing teeth that mar her tentative smile and buying a proper home, one that does not leak during heavy rains.

She has Nestlé to thank.

"For the first time in my life, I feel a sense of hope and independence," she said.

She is aware of the connection between her diet and her persistent health problems, but insists that her children are well nourished, gesturing to the Nestlé products in her living room. Being a Nestlé vendor has another advantage: the cookies, chocolate and puddings that often sustain her family are bought wholesale.

With an expanding roster of customers, Mrs. da Silva has set her sights on a new goal, one she says will increase business even more.

"I want to buy a bigger refrigerator."

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How Big Business Got Brazil Hooked on Junk Food

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FORTALEZA, Brazil - Children's squeals rang through the muggy morning air as a woman pushed a gleaming white cart along pitted, trash-strewn streets. She was making deliveries to some of the poorest households in this seaside city, bringing pudding, cookies and other packaged foods to the customers on her sales route.

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How flying seriously messes with your mind

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How flying seriously messes with your mind

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Mariajose Ortiz

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Mexico Earthquake leaves more than 200 dead.

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Mexico Earthquake leaves more than 200 dead.

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Andrew Choi

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A strong earthquake has struck central Mexico, killing more than 200 people and toppling dozens of buildings in the capital, Mexico City.

At least 30 people, mostly children, died after a school collapsed in the capital, local media report.

The 7.1 magnitude quake also caused major damage in neighbouring states.

It struck shortly after many people had taken part in an earthquake drill, exactly 32 years after a quake killed thousands in Mexico City.

The country is prone to earthquakes and earlier this month an 8.1 magnitude tremor in the south left at least 90 people dead.

Though it struck a similar region, Tuesday's earthquake does not appear to be connected with the quake on 7 September, which was at least 30 times more energetic, the BBC's Jonathan Amos writes.

Where was worst hit?

The epicentre of the latest quake was near Atencingo in Puebla state, about 120km (75 miles) from Mexico City, with a depth of 51km, the US Geological Survey says.

The prolonged tremor hit at 13:14 local time (18:14 GMT) on Tuesday and sent thousands of residents into the streets.

Why did only some buildings collapse?

The race to help after the quake

An earlier death toll of nearly 250 was lowered to 217 by the country's national co-ordinator for civil protection:

Morelos state: 71 dead

Puebla state: 43 dead

Mexico City: 86 dead

Mexico state: 12 dead

Guerrero: 4 dead

Oaxaca: 1

As many as 37 people - 32 children and five adults - died when the Enrique Rébsamen elementary school collapsed in Mexico City's southern Coapa district, Efe news agency reports, quoting local media.

According to Mexican news site Reforma, 30 bodies have been found at the school and 22 people are missing.

Elsewhere, 15 people were killed when a church near Mexico's Popocatepetl volcano collapsed during Mass, Puebla's governor is quoted by Reuters news agency as saying. The volcano itself had a small eruption as a result of the tremor.

Alfredo del Mazo Maza, governor of the State of Mexico, said schools would be closed on Wednesday. He also ordered all public transport to operate services for free so that people could travel home.

What about survivors?

Emergency workers, aided by military personnel and volunteers, have been working through the night in the search for people trapped under the rubble of collapsed buildings.

At the Enrique Rébsamen school, three people were rescued at about midnight, Reuters reports, adding that one child trapped under the debris was saved after oxygen was supplied through a tube.

At least 209 schools were affected by the quake, 15 of which have suffered severe damage, Mexico's Secretariat of Public Education says.

Buildings at 44 locations collapsed or were badly damaged, Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera told TV network Televisa. These are said to include a six-storey block of flats, a supermarket and a factory.

About two million people in the capital were left without electricity and phone lines were down. Officials warned residents not to smoke on the streets as gas mains could have been ruptured.

Some 70% of the electricity supply which went down has now been restored, Mexico's Federal Electricity Commission said.

Live updates

In pictures: Huge earthquake

Are Mexico's two earthquakes connected?

In a televised address, the president said an emergency had been declared for the affected areas and the military had been drafted in to help with the response.

He also urged residents whose properties were structurally sound to remain in their homes where possible to allow emergency services and those helping with rescue efforts to clear the streets.

Across Mexico City, teams of rescue workers and volunteers clawed through the rubble with picks, shovels and their bare hands.

"My wife is there. I haven't been able to communicate with her," Juan Jesus Garcia, 33, told Reuters, choking back tears next to a collapsed building.

"She is not answering and now they are telling us we have to turn off our mobile phones because there is a gas leak."
Have you been affected by the earthquake? If it is safe to do so you can email your story to haveyoursay@bbc.co.uk

Jennifer Swaddle, a teacher at the British International School in Mexico City, told the BBC that part of her classroom had collapsed.

"As we were leaving, the outside of my classroom wall fell, so there was a big pile of rubble. Luckily, fantastically, nobody was hurt, but it was incredibly frightening," she said.

History of deadly earthquakes

Can earthquakes be predicted?

What happened in 1985?

An earthquake drill was being held in Mexico City on Tuesday to mark the 32nd anniversary of a magnitude 8 quake that killed up to 10,000 people and left 30,000 others injured.

The severe tremor caused serious damage to Mexico City and its surrounding areas, with more than 400 buildings collapsed and thousands more damaged.

Correspondents say that residents may have mistaken earthquake alarms for part of the day of drills in the wake of the 1985 quake.

Mexico City is one of the most densely populated cities in the world, with more than 20 million people living in the metropolitan area.

Why is Mexico so prone to earthquakes?

Mexico is one of the most seismically active regions in the world, sitting on top of three of the Earth's largest tectonic plates - the North American, Cocos and Pacific plates.

The latest tremor occurred near the boundary between the North American and Cocos plates, where the latter slides beneath the former.

According to the US Geological Survey, the country has seen 19 earthquakes of at least 6.5 magnitude within 155 miles of the epicentre of Tuesday's quake over the past century.

How has the world reacted?

Foreign leaders sent messages of support to Mexico as the scale of the disaster became clear:

US President Donald Trump, who has courted controversy with his plans for a border wall with Mexico, tweeted: "God bless the people of Mexico City. We are with you and will be there for you"

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau also tweeted his support following the "devastating news"

Costa Rican President Luis Guillermo Solis, in New York for the UN General Assembly, expressed his "solidarity" with the Mexican people

Pope Francis said his thoughts and prayers were with the families of those who had lost loved ones in the "devastating" quake. "In this moment of pain I want to express my closeness and my prayer to all of the beloved Mexican population," the pontiff said at the Vatican

The Mexican government earlier issued the following guidance on what to do if a quake strikes in the country:

stay calm

find the evacuation route and meeting point

stay away from windows and objects that may fall

in case of emergency call 911

do not use lifts

The UK Foreign Office has said that those travelling to Mexico should follow the advice of the local authorities.

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Huge quake kills more than 200 in Mexico

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A strong earthquake has struck central Mexico, killing more than 200 people and toppling dozens of buildings in the capital, Mexico City. At least 30 people, mostly children, died after a school collapsed in the capital, local media report. The 7.1 magnitude quake also caused major damage in neighbouring states.

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A Female Viking Warrior? Tomb Study Yields Clues

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A Female Viking Warrior? Tomb Study Yields Clues

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Noah Cho

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The tomb at the center of the debate is known as Bj 581, after its location when it was excavated at the Birka settlement on the island of Bjorko, which is west of Stockholm, with easy access to the Baltic Sea. (Unesco designated the settlement a World Heritage Site in 1993.)

The grave was one of 1,100 excavated at the site, but it was immediately recognized as important because it was so well-furnished and intact. Situated on an elevated terrace next to a military garrison, the grave included a sword, an ax, a spear, armor-piercing arrows, a battle knife, two shields and two horses - "the complete equipment of a professional warrior," as the team of scholars put it.

The tomb was quickly identified as that of a high-ranking warrior - who was presumed to have been male.

As early as the 1970s, scholars began to question that assumption. A bone analysis in 2013 suggested that the skeleton was that of a woman, although the evidence remained inconclusive.

In the new study, published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, the scholars say their analysis - based on analysis of DNA and of isotopes of strontium, an element found in human bones - showed that the skeleton was that of a woman, and that contextual evidence suggested she had been a high-status warrior.

Not only was her body surrounded by armaments, but on her lap was a chesslike board game known as hnefatafl, or King's Table. Its placement suggested "that she also made strategic decisions, that she was in command," Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, the lead author of the paper, said in an interview in her office at the Swedish History Museum.

Viking society was patriarchal, but women were not closed off uniformly from power. "They could own property," Dr. Hedenstierna-Jonson said. "They could inherit. They could become powerful merchants. That of course gave security and a level of independence."

At the Birka settlement, which was most active in the ninth and 10th centuries, the Vikings created a commercial center where goods were brought from as far away as China. The Vikings there had close contacts with marketplaces in the Muslim world, evidenced by the many silver coins coming in from the caliphates, Dr. Hedenstierna-Jonson said.

"We can see that it's a great melting pot," she said. "They would have heard different languages and met people from other parts of the world with different religious beliefs."

About 1,000 people lived in Birka until the 11th century, when the inhabitants moved away for reasons that are not clear.

The warrior grave at Birka is not the first to belong to a woman. Two warrior graves in Norway are also believed to be those of women. "We are hoping to do DNA studies from the ones in Norway," Dr. Hedenstierna-Jonson said.

She acknowledged that her findings had resonated on social media, where some treated them as a sensation. "Maybe it's empowering to some extent," she said. "There is always this hope that there were female warriors."

However, the study has drawn a detailed rebuttal from Judith Jesch, a Viking studies professor at the University of Nottingham in England.

"The emotional lure of the woman warrior, especially in the Viking Age, is too strong for reasoned argument," she wrote in a blog post on Saturday. "They want the woman to be a warrior, so the scientific analysis makes her a woman and her 'archaeological context' makes her a warrior."

Among her criticisms: bones of various people might have gotten mixed together given that 130 years have passed since the original excavation; the inference that the board-game pieces suggest a high-status female warrior is too speculative; and alternative explanations for why a female body might have ended up in a warrior's tomb were not considered.

The scholars behind the paper rejected the criticism.

"We are preparing a point-by-point response," said Mattias Jakobsson, a geneticist at Uppsala University and a co-author of the paper, adding: "We would like to urge her to send her critique to a peer-reviewed journal." Dr. Hedenstierna-Jonson said she was confident about the findings.

"We know these are the right bones, that they are a woman's bones and that they were in that grave," she said, adding that the positioning of clothing and weapons around the body suggested that the woman had authority.

The study had considered alternative explanations - maybe the weapons were heirlooms or symbolic items rather than actual weapons, or reflected the status of the family rather than the individual - but concluded: "Male individuals in burials with a similar material record are not questioned in the same way."

The study did acknowledge that the grave might originally have belonged to another - now missing - individual.

"However, the distribution of the grave goods within the grave, their spatial relation to the female individual and the total lack of any typically female-attributed grave artifacts disputes this possibility," the study found. Dr. Hedenstierna-Jonson added: "If it was a man, I would say it's no question that he was a military leader."

Dick Harrison, a historian at Lund University, called the discovery "the latest chapter of a major wave of rethinking of the Viking age from a female point of view."

Dr. Harrison, who was not involved in the study, said many preconceptions about the Vikings had been formed in the 19th century. "What has happened in the past 40 years through archaeological research, partly fueled by feminist research, is that women have been found to be priestesses and leaders, too," he said. "This has forced us to rewrite history."

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A Female Viking Warrior? Tomb Study Yields Clues

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The tomb at the center of the debate is known as Bj 581, after its location when it was excavated at the Birka settlement on the island of Bjorko, which is west of Stockholm, with easy access to the Baltic Sea. (Unesco designated the settlement a World Heritage Site in 1993.)

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Baby names: Olivia top for girls as William makes way for Muhammad

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Baby names: Olivia top for girls as William makes way for Muhammad

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-Diego

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Olivia has replaced Amelia as the most popular baby girls' name in England and Wales, while Muhammad has entered the top 10 most popular boys' names.

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said Olivia had reclaimed the top spot it previously held between 2008 and 2010.

Harper has seen the biggest rise in popularity for girls while Jaxon is growing among boys.

Results were based on names given on birth certificates, the ONS said.

Oliver was still the most popular boys' name across most of England and Wales, apart from in the North East where it was Harry, and in London and the West Midlands, where it was Muhammad.

*The ONS figures do not include names given to fewer than three babies in England and Wales as a whole in order to protect the confidentiality of individuals.
Do we judge people by their name? Fifth of parents regret their child's name
Harper, the name given by David and Victoria Beckham to their daughter, has seen the biggest growth in popularity.

In 2011, the year she was born, there were 42 girls with the name in England and Wales. By 2016 it was the 44th most popular girls' name, given to 1,256 babies.

Muhammad replaced William in the top 10 names for boys, while Poppy dropped out of the top 10 for girls, making way for Lily.

Jaxon is now the 51st most popular boys' name, with 1,161 babies in 2016, rising 682 places in the past decade.

Arlo was the biggest climber among boys in the past year, rising 53 places to number 49.

And Luna climbed 52 places to number 78 for girls.

Top 10 girls' names in England and Wales

1. Olivia - 5,017

2. Amelia - 4,777

3. Emily - 3,551

4. Isla - 3,476

5. Ava - 3,285

6. Isabella - 2,729

7. Lily - 2,722

8. Jessica - 2,703

9. Ella - 2,702

10. Mia - 2,662

Top 10 boys' names in England and Wales

1. Oliver - 6,623

2. Harry - 5,284

3. George - 5,263

4. Jack -4,751

5. Jacob - 4,485

6. Noah - 4,305

7. Charlie - 4,190

8. Muhammad -3,908

9. Thomas - 3,898

10. Oscar - 3,894
Why it's hard to be a Kevin in France For more stories from the BBC England Data Unit visit our Pinterest board
Charlotte was the 12th most popular name for girls, with 2,596 babies given the name. This is up 13 places on 2015 when Princess Charlotte, now the fourth in line to the throne, was born.

Her brother Prince George's birth appears to have had a positive effect on the popularity of his name as well.

George was the 10th most popular name for boys in 2013, the year he was born, rising to seventh in 2014 and fourth in 2015.

In 2016 5,263 boys were named George, making it the third most popular.

And on the subject of thrones, there were 69 baby girls named Khaleesi, the name for a queen invented by George R R Martin in his Game of Thrones series.

This was one more than 2015. A further seven were named Kaleesi, while four were called Daenerys, the birth name of the character known as Khaleesi and played in the television adaption by Emilia Clarke. Khaleesi first appeared in the list in 2011, the year the TV series started, when there were nine girls with the name.

The ONS said the statistics were compiled based on the exact spellings given on birth certificates, but did not take into account babies that were stillborn.

Spokesman Nick Stripe said: "With over 696,000 babies born in England and Wales in 2016, and nearly 64,000 different names chosen for them, it's interesting how relatively stable the top 10 names have been over recent years.

"It is as you move down the rankings that you begin to notice social and cultural changes being reflected in name choices. Harper was the girls' name in the top 100 in 2016 with the biggest rise in popularity over the previous 10 years, whilst for boys it was Jaxon."

*The Office for National Statistics does not include names given to fewer than three babies in England and Wales as a whole in order to protect the confidentiality of individuals.
Report by Daniel Wainwright. Interactive tool by William Dahlgreen.
What's in a name?

Do you have a story about your name or your baby's name?

Tell us your thoughts and experiences using the form below and we could be in touch.

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Olivia has replaced Amelia as the most popular baby girls' name in England and Wales, while Muhammad has entered the top 10 most popular boys' names. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) said Olivia had reclaimed the top spot it previously held between 2008 and 2010.

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'Grey's Anatomy' actress reveals brain tumor diagnosis 

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'Grey's Anatomy' actress reveals brain tumor diagnosis 

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Jenise Chung

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"I was shocked," Walsh said of the moment doctors revealed her MRI results. "It was not what I expected."

Walsh was diagnosed with a meningioma: a tumor arising from the lining that surrounds the brain and spinal cord. Within three days, she underwent surgery to have it removed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. After removing the tumor, doctors confirmed that it was benign.

In January 2015, Walsh initially wrote off symptoms as exhaustion, having just executive produced and starred in the NBC series "Bad Judge."

"I could drink five cups of coffee and not wake up," she said.

She found it hard to concentrate. Her balance was off, and she developed shooting headaches. Her Pilates instructor also noticed that she would dip on her right side.

Exercise is "typically when people will see subtle motor changes, because they're really comparing both sides of their body," CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta said.

Her cognitive issues became severe enough that her then-boyfriend urged her to see a neurologist.

"I would reach for words or thoughts, and I just couldn't finish them," Walsh said.

By the time she made it to the doctor in June 2015, he even noticed that the right side of her face was drooping slightly. It was then that doctors found the benign tumor, which was just over 5 centimeters long, pushing on her left frontal lobe.

Doctors put Walsh on a precautionary antiseizure medication before she went under the knife. With a tumor that size pressing on her brain, they told her she was lucky to have had no seizures.

Despite having played Dr. Addison Montgomery on "Grey's Anatomy" and the spinoff "Private Practice," she was blindsided by the diagnosis and her sudden role as the patient. For all the medical jargon she delivered as a TV doctor, she hadn't heard of meningiomas.

"How meta," Walsh said of her transition from onscreen doctor to real-life patient.

Meningiomas, which are more likely to occur in women, are usually benign and slow-growing. Doctors told Walsh that the tumor may have been there for a while -- but that could mean two years or 10 years, she was told.

Most meningiomas arise close to the skull, but in some cases, a tumor can form as far down as the spinal cord.

These tumors differ greatly from aggressive brain cancers like glioblastoma, which may originate deeper in the brain and can "double in size every couple of weeks," Gupta said. Sen. John McCain was diagnosed with glioblastoma in July.

Meningiomas are the most common tumors that originate in the central nervous system, numbering about 27,000 cases per year, based on 2009-13 data from the Central Brain Tumor Registry in the United States.

Some are removed surgically without further treatment, as Walsh's was. However, in some cases in which the tumor is very small and causes no symptoms, doctors may simply watch and wait, Gupta said. In less common cases in which malignant cells are found in the tumor or when the tumor is next to delicate structures like the brain stem, doctors may also opt for radiation, Gupta added.

Other celebrities have gone public with their own meningioma diagnoses -- including Sheryl Crow, Elizabeth Taylor, Mary Tyler Moore and recently Maria Menounos.

Immediately after her surgery, Walsh said, she noticed a difference.

"The fog had lifted," she said.

Walsh said that her decision to go public was intended to help raise awareness, especially of a type of tumor that affects mostly women. She joined "Grey's" co-star Patrick Dempsey and other TV doctors in a campaign launched by Cigna that encourages people to get annual checkups.

"I was so relieved to know that it was something" that could be fixed, Walsh said of the tumor. Her advice: "Trust your instincts. Trust your body."

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'grey's anatomy' actress reveals brain tumor diagnosis - cnn

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'Grey's Anatomy' actress reveals brain tumor diagnosis

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"I was shocked," Walsh said of the moment doctors revealed her MRI results. "It was not what I expected." Walsh was diagnosed with a meningioma: a tumor arising from the lining that surrounds the brain and spinal cord. Within three days, she underwent surgery to have it removed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

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Amateur U.K. Archaeologists Stumble on a Roman Masterpiece

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Amateur U.K. Archaeologists Stumble on a Roman Masterpiece

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Sumin Kim

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The surprise discovery came at the conclusion of a project that was spread over three years and a hectic two weeks - necessitated by limited financing and availability.

Among the first to spot it was Joy Appleton, who leads the Boxford History Project and who was a driving force behind the excavation.

"I was stunned into silence," Ms. Appleton recalled of her first sight of the small red tiles, each the size of her fingernail. "Which is unusual."

The expert on site, Matt Nichol, was equally surprised. "I will never forget that moment," said Mr. Nichol, a professional archaeologist who was supervising the dig.

"It was down to the volunteers, it really was. I get quite emotional about it; it was something to see their drive," added Mr. Nichol, project officer for Cotswold Archaeology, a company whose normal work includes helping real estate developers preserve archaeological finds.

Experts say the mosaic at what is now called Boxford villa depicts Bellerophon, a hero of Greek mythology who was sent to kill the chimera, a fire-breathing monster with the head of a lion, the torso of a goat and the tail of a serpent. Hercules is also thought to be featured, fighting a centaur, and so is Cupid.

According to Anthony Beeson, a specialist in classical art and member of the board of the Association for Roman Archaeology, the discovery is important for several reasons.

"It is so unusual because it has all sorts of quirks which you don't expect, and it has subjects on it that are completely alien to mosaics in this country," he said.

Some figures breach geometric borders and there seems to be a trompe l'oeil effect. Mr. Beeson added that he could not think "of another Roman mosaic in this country that is as creative as this one." There are inscriptions, too, though only about one-third of the mosaic was excavated and the full text was not uncovered.

The execution is uneven, Mr. Beeson said, suggesting that the "mosaicist has had ideas above his technical ability," producing what he called a "very sophisticated design done in a slightly naïve manner."

Boxford villa had been marked - inaccurately, as it turned out - on an old map. (It later turned out that the site was disturbed in the 19th century, when the installation of a land drainage pipe damaged part of the mosaic.)

With much to be revealed, there is still a lot to learn about life at Boxford villa, though its owner must have been affluent and cultured, and clearly wanted to show off a broad knowledge of mythology to guests.

Mr. Beeson says he believes that it is "really vital that we at least see what the other part of the mosaic is like; it's too important not to investigate."

For Ms. Appleton, the discovery has filled in part of a missing link in the history of Boxford, a village of around 300 inhabitants. Evidence of Stone, Bronze and Iron Age life had been discovered, and there is a Saxon window in the local church that dates to the period before the Norman invasion of 1066.

Given the geographical location, and the quality of the agricultural land, Ms. Appleton was confident that this was also the site of a Roman settlement, a conviction reinforced by the discovery of several artifacts from that period.

So Ms. Appleton and her group pressed ahead. Survey work began in 2012, and there were discoveries at two nearby sites during digs in 2015 and 2016.

Without expert archaeological knowledge, the Boxford History Project secured help from the Heritage Lottery Fund, a national charity funded by lottery receipts, to pay for professional supervision during a project made up of short excavations conducted on three sites in three consecutive years.

By chance, Mr. Nichol, who supervised the dig, does not live far away, an irony that is not lost on an archaeologist who has traveled to the Western Sahara, Macedonia and Serbia in search of antiquities, only to discover something so spectacular so close to home.

"I never believed it could have been in Boxford, 30 minutes drive from home," he said.

What happens to the site into the future remains unclear because, once exposed to the atmosphere, a mosaic deteriorates quickly unless it is preserved.

Ms. Appleton and Mr. Nichol hope to uncover the rest of it next year, though that will depend on whether funding can be raised.

But even if they do, making it available for public view would be costly. Just lifting it and removing it from the site would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds.

In fact, there was little choice about an immediate solution - which was to bury it in the earth that had protected it for so long because the farmer needed his land back to plant his wheat crop.

Even that step proved nerve-racking because there was no money to pay for security to prevent treasure hunters from damaging or destroying the mosaic.

The risks increased when, the day before the mosaic was covered over, the site was opened to friends and families of the volunteers who had worked there, increasing the number of people who knew the location.

So for the organizers, it was a relief, rather than a disappointment, when the earth was pushed back to conceal their discovery.

The night before that was done, Mr. Nichol decided to keep watch over the site from his S.U.V. with a supply of food, a sleeping bag and a bottle of red wine, all donated by volunteers.

The Roman owner of the villa would have invited guests to eat and drink on this spot, using the mosaic as a talking point, so a mildly bacchanalian vigil did not seem out of place.

"I was on my own in the field; it was incredible," Mr. Nichol said. He described how, in the solitude, he felt drawn back across the centuries to experience a unique connection to the more-than-1,600-year-old archaeological site, and to the mythological images of its extraordinary, colorful mosaic.

"The wine did help," he added.

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Amateur U.K. Archaeologists Stumble on a Roman Masterpiece

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The surprise discovery came at the conclusion of a project that was spread over three years and a hectic two weeks - necessitated by limited financing and availability. Among the first to spot it was Joy Appleton, who leads the Boxford History Project and who was a driving force behind the excavation.

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Senator wants to expel North Korea from the UN

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Senator wants to expel North Korea from the UN

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Thomas Hum

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Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado, who chairs the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asia, is asking 21 countries with embassies in Pyongyang to cut economic and diplomatic ties and support an expulsion of North Korea from the United Nations.

He says the "nefarious behavior" of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, including nuclear tests and missile launches in defiance of UN resolutions, violated the UN's principles.

"Now is the time to diplomatically and economically isolate this regime, until it fully and irreversibly commits to peaceful denuclearization," he says in his letter.

In an interview with CNN, Gardner laid out his rationale. "We have to make it clear, if he wants to be part of a global environment of leadership, then he needs to back away, drop the nuclear program, and then he can be welcomed once again."

Four nations have expelled their ambassadors from North Korea since the country's latest nuclear test September 3: Spain, Mexico, Peru and Kuwait. In addition, Egypt and the Philippines dialed back their ties.

The Trump administration has been pushing countries to sever relations with the regime, including Vice President Mike Pence, who brought it up during his trip to Latin America last month.

"The United States places great importance on the ongoing diplomatic isolation of the Kim regime," he said during a visit to Chile. "We strongly urged Chile today, and we urge Brazil Mexico and Peru, to break all diplomatic and commercial ties to North Korea."

The United States, like at least two dozen countries, already has no diplomatic relations with North Korea.

The United Nations has backed some of the Trump administration's efforts to sanction North Korea, including new sanctions banning coal exports and capping oil imports.

But one former Obama administration State Department adviser warns that expelling North Korea from the UN could have drawbacks.

"If you were to expel North Korea completely out of the international community, then what kind of channels of communication or leverage to you have?" said Vali Nasr, the dean of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. "What sort of incentive would North Korea have in order to even engage in a conversation about denuclearization?"

He also raised other concerns: nations would not want to start a trend of blackballing each other; a potential backchannel for talks with North Korea would be lost; and Kim Jong Un's regime would react negatively.

"More than likely it will act even more erratically, because there are no relationships out there that he would preserve by acting better," he said. "And we will have even less knowledge of what's going on inside North Korea than we currently do."

But Gardner told CNN that a UN expulsion would incentivize the North Korean leader to reverse his weapons program.

"If Kim Jong Un wants to have legitimacy at the UN, if he wants to have legitimacy around the globe," said Gardner, "then he should know that we expect him to live up to the promises that he made over the last 20 years -- he and his father and grandfather made. And that is, denuclearization."

For a country to be expelled, a majority of the members of the UN general assembly would have to vote for it, according to a UN spokesman. A country has never been expelled, although Yugoslavia was suspended in the 1990s.

A spokesman for the American representative to the UN declined to comment. The National Security Council at the White House did not return CNN's calls or emails.

The North Korean delegation to the UN, which on Tuesday walked out of the chamber before President Donald Trump gave his speech, could not immediately be reached for comment. But North Korean state media has vowed that no sanctions will stop its nuclear and missile programs, and on Monday the country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the latest UN sanctions a "vicious, unethical and inhumane act of hostility to physically exterminate the people of" North Korea.

As to Gardner, North Korean state media has previously called him "human dirt ... who has lost basic judgment, and body hair," after the senator in May referred to Kim a "wack job."

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cory gardner launches push to expel north korea from un - cnnpolitics

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Senator wants to expel North Korea from UN

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Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado, who chairs the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asia, is asking 21 countries with embassies in Pyongyang to cut economic and diplomatic ties and support an expulsion of North Korea from the United Nations.

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At U.N., Global Leaders to Speak After Trump Takes Center Stage - Jung Yun

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At U.N., Global Leaders to Speak After Trump Takes Center Stage - Jung Yun

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/20/world/united-nations-general-assembly.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fworld&action=click&contentCollection=world&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

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Number of Fatal Shootings by Police is Nearly Identical to Last Year (Hae Lim Park) 

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Number of Fatal Shootings by Police is Nearly Identical to Last Year (Hae Lim Park) 

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Police nationwide shot and killed 492 people in the first six months of this year, a number nearly identical to the count for the same period in each of the prior two years.

Fatal shootings by police in 2017 have so closely tracked last year's numbers that on June 16, the tally was the same. Although the number of unarmed people killed by police dropped slightly, the overall pace for 2017 through Friday was on track to approach 1,000 killed for a third year in a row.

The Washington Post began tracking all fatal shootings by on-duty police in 2015 in the aftermath of the 2014 killing in Ferguson, Mo., of Michael Brown, who was unarmed and had an altercation with the officer who shot him. The ongoing Post project has documented twice as many shootings by police in 2015 and 2016 as ever recorded in a single year by the FBI's tracking of such shootings, a pattern that is emerging again in 2017.

Since Brown's killing in Ferguson, other fatal shootings by police, many captured on video, have fueled protests and calls for reform. Some police chiefs have taken steps in their departments to reduce the number of fatal encounters, yet the overall numbers remain unchanged.

Academics who study shootings give weight to The Post's accounting.

"These numbers show us that officer-involved shootings are constant over time," said Geoffrey Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina who has studied police use of force. "Some places go up, some go down, but it's averaging out. This is our society in the 21st century."

As in previous years, the data gathered by The Post showed that police most frequently killed white males who were armed with guns or other kinds of weapons. One in four people killed this year were mentally ill. And police have continued to shoot and kill a disproportionately large number of black males, who account for nearly a quarter of the deaths, yet are only 6 percent of the nation's population.

This year, fatal shootings of unarmed people have declined, continuing a trend over the past two years. In the first six months of this year, 27 unarmed people were fatally shot, compared with 34 for the same period in 2016 and 50 in the first six months of 2015.

Black males continued to represent a disproportionately large share of unarmed people killed, although their share has dropped slightly: from 32 percent of all unarmed killings during the first six months of last year to 26 percent for the same period this year.

One of those seven unarmed black males killed was Jordan Edwards, a 15-year-old high school freshman who was shot in April by a police officer in a Dallas suburb. An officer in Balch Springs opened fire with an AR-15 rifle on Edwards and his friends as they drove away from a party, according to news reports. The department initially said the teens tried to back over the officer but retracted the statement after officials reviewed video of the shooting. The officer, who is white, has been fired and charged with murder.

Mental illness has remained a factor in fatal police shootings, as a quarter of those killed were struggling with some form of mental illness. Last month, Seattle police shot and killed Charleena Lyles, 30, a pregnant woman suffering from mental illness, after she called 911 to report an attempted burglary at her home. Police said Lyles pulled a knife on two officers, who both shot her. The Seattle Times reported that one of the officers, trained to use a Taser, was not carrying it, a violation of the department's policy.

Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, which develops training programs and advises police chiefs around the country on policy, said some fatal shootings can be eliminated.

"We know we can make a difference in cases where the person is mentally ill and in cases where someone is not armed with a gun," Wexler said.

The study by The Post has found that about 8 percent of the nation's police departments have had at least one fatal shooting since 2015. Of those, most had only one.

"All deadly force scenarios are different, and you could have five in a week and then not have any for a year," said Rodolfo Llanes, chief of the Miami Police Department.

Llanes noted that his department of 1,250 officers has gone as long as a year without firing a single bullet. "[But] there will be that situation where there is a confrontation and deadly force is used. Police work is inherently ugly," he said.

The pace at which officers have been killed in the line of duty has held steady over the past two years.

According to the FBI, 21 police officers were killed from January to June 29, two fewer than in the same period last year. The 2016 year ended with 66 officers killed, not including accidental deaths. Since January 2015, according to the FBI, 128 police officers have been killed in the line of duty.

Since 2015, The Post has created a database cataloging every fatal shooting nationwide by a police officer in the line of duty. View Graphic

In Tulsa, police shot and killed one person in an 18-month stretch, and then, in the second half of 2016, officers shot and killed six, including Terence Crutcher, an unarmed black man whose death led to criminal charges against an officer. Last month, that officer was acquitted of a charge of first-degree manslaughter.

This year, Tulsa officers have fatally shot four people.

Tulsa Police Chief Chuck Jordan said that his agency reviewed its use-of-force policy after the surge in shootings in 2016 but that there was not much the department could change.

"We're a reflection of the society we live in," Jordan said.

In Los Angeles from January 2015 to the end of last month, city police officers shot and killed 47 people, the most for any U.S. police department in the period.

Officials with the Los Angeles Police Department said they have been working to reduce the number of deadly encounters. In the past two years, the department extensively tracked use of force, added training and updated its use-of-force policy, which now requires officers to "de-escalate" confrontations before firing their guns.

This year in Los Angeles, fatal shootings are down to seven, which Matthew Johnson, president of the Los Angeles Police Commission, considers a small victory.

"All these things in concert are going to have an impact on the need to use deadly force, but that's not to say we're not going to have a bad quarter or a bad year," said Johnson, who made reducing the number of fatal shootings a priority when he took over as president of the commission in 2015.

About 360 miles away, Phoenix police have emphasized reforms but are leading the nation in fatal shootings in 2017. Officers there have fatally shot eight people, more than any other department.

The reforms began in 2014, after a year in which the Phoenix Police Department said it experienced an unusually high number of fatal and nonfatal shootings by its officers. The agency began an unprecedented review of those violent confrontations, modeling some of its reforms on those used in Las Vegas, where police reduced shootings from 11 in 2015 to three in 2016. This year, Las Vegas has had five fatal shootings by police.

Phoenix police were retrained in tactics to de-escalate encounters and avoid resorting to deadly force.

On June 23, a Phoenix police officer fatally shot a motorist when the driver accelerated toward him as the officer approached the car on foot. Two days later, police killed a man who fired a rifle at a police helicopter and pointed the weapon toward officers.

In February, Phoenix Police Chief Jeri Williams defended her department in an op-ed for the Arizona Republic: "None of our officers wanted to be put into a position where they felt they had no other choice but to use deadly force." She wrote that in each shooting, her officers had exhausted other options. "It was their last resort."

There is no comprehensive government data source that tracks fatal shootings by police officers. The Post database relies on local news coverage, public records and social-media reports to identify fatal shootings by police.

Academics caution that fatal shootings are rare events in the universe of police-civilian interactions and say that more-complete data is needed about all police use of force.

"What we really need to know is how many times police shoot people, not just how many of those people die," said David A. Klinger, a criminal justice professor at the University of Missouri in St. Louis who studies police use of force.

The FBI gathers information on fatal police shootings, but that program is based on voluntary reporting by police agencies and covers only cases inwhich police fatally shoot people who are committing felonies. The Post's data has revealed a dramatic undercount by the FBI.

The Post's project, and a similar counting effort by the Guardian newspaper in 2015, prompted now-fired FBI director James B. Comey to call his own agency's system"embarrassing and ridiculous." In October 2016, the Justice Department announced that it would move forward with plans to collect better data about officer-involved shootings.

The FBI said it would launch Saturday a pilot study of that data collection program that will gather a broad range of information on use of force from about 50 local and federal law enforcement agencies. The FBI said it intends to begin nationwide collection of the data in 2018.

"When a police officer takes a life, that's a significant event," said Darrel Stephens, the executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association. The group, which includes 80 police chiefs and sheriffs, helped advise the FBI on the pilot program. "We should know on a national basis how many times that happens and under what circumstances."

Samuel Walker, an expert on police accountability and a criminal justice professor at the University of Nebraska in Omaha, said that because of the large number of U.S. police agencies, years of reforms may be required before the number of shootings declines.

"There is no single quick fix," Walker said. "You have to have a really systemic approach."

Ted Mellnik, Steven Rich, Jerrel Floyd and Catherine York contributed to this report. This article was produced in partnership with the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, where Thebault, York and Floyd are students.

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Number of fatal shootings by police is nearly identical to last year

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Police nationwide shot and killed 492 people in the first six months of this year, a number nearly identical to the count for the same period in each of the prior two years. Fatal shootings by police in 2017 have so closely tracked last year's numbers that on June 16, the tally was the same.

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Hurricane Maria Slams Puerto Rico with force not seen in ‘modern history’           Natalie Elmers

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Hurricane Maria Slams Puerto Rico with force not seen in ‘modern history’           Natalie Elmers

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/09/20/hurricane-maria-takes-aim-at-puerto-rico-with-force-not-seen-in-modern-history/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_maria-655a%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.3c235c6efb96

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How the Internet Kept Humming During 2 Hurricanes

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How the Internet Kept Humming During 2 Hurricanes

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Sergey Petrushkevich

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Yet even as millions of people lost power across Florida, and thousands of homes and businesses were flooded out in Miami and Texas, the heavy digital machinery at the heart of the internet and the cloud held firm.

Though the storm disabled some cellphone towers and local connections, Jeff Eassey, a manager for Digital Realty who hunkered down in the Miami building, said the center never stopped processing and transmitting data. It lost utility power around 8:30 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 10, but supplied its own electricity with the generators.

When the storm eased and he walked outside, Mr. Eassey said, he immediately saw the effect that Digital Realty and other data centers had by keeping the servers going. "Everyone was talking on their phones, searching on their phones, and commerce that uses the internet to do their business was up and running," he said.

A list of Digital Realty's top customers shows why those operations are so important: Clients include IBM, Facebook, CenturyLink, Oracle, Yahoo, Morgan Stanley, AT&T and JPMorgan Chase, among others.

Inside the centers, the drill during a natural disaster can be overwhelming. One company, EdgeConneX, lost utility power for three days at a Miami data center, two days at a center in Jacksonville, Fla., and two days at an Atlanta location. But Rich Werner, director of operations at the company, said that backup generators turned on and service was never interrupted.

"Data center operations, to me, is 362 days of boredom," Mr. Werner said. "And then you get these hurricanes coming through, and it's three days of pulling your hair out."

There are no legal standards for data centers unless they house servers for clients like government agencies, which require special protections.

But a professional organization, the Seattle-based Uptime Institute, rates the facilities on four tiers of resiliency for events like storms, earthquakes and run-of-the-mill power failures - possibly one reason the internet performed creditably during the hurricanes. The institute's engineers "go to the site and pull the plug," said Mark Harris, senior vice president of marketing, "and to be certified, it has to keep running."

"So when a hurricane or a tornado or an ice storm happens, the entire data center has been designed to withstand these external factors," he said.

During Harvey and Irma, those measures seemed to work, said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at Dyn, a web performance company with servers at a Miami data center. "I'm not aware of any core internet services going down," he said.

One necessity is building above the 500-year floodplain, according to Gary Wojtaszek, president of CyrusOne, whose facilities include a data center in the mostly flooded Galleria area of Houston. The water stopped a few feet short of the building, which ran on backup power for several hours, Mr. Wojtaszek said. He added that "practically every single large oil and gas company in the world" operates servers in its data centers - an indication of how commerce of all kind relies on the facilities.

Depending on local conditions, some centers got off easier than others. In Houston facilities run by Data Foundry, automated systems worked so well that employees pooled resources and watched the Floyd Mayweather-Conor McGregor fight on pay-per-view, said Edward Henigin, the company's chief technology officer. When everything is working, he said, "what else are they going to do?"

Everyone in the business says that extensive preparation is critical. James M. Palmieri, Digital Realty's vice president for data center operations, said that as Irma approached the building in Miami, engineers topped off diesel generators, called Mr. Eassey down from Atlanta to direct operations and waited to see how strong the hurricane would become.

"The storm got worse," Mr. Palmieri said, adding that at that point, "the real issue is, how do we make sure that our employees are protected?"

Mr. Eassey said that about 14 people in the building - including employees, customers and security personnel - met in a sixth-floor conference room that Friday morning and realized that the worsening conditions, heavy traffic and overcrowded shelters in the area meant it was too late to leave. With reinforced concrete walls and heavy glass, the building was the safest place to be, they decided. The mood was calm.

"Most of these guys are seasoned Miamians," Mr. Eassey said. "I was the out-of-towner. I would be exaggerating if I said anyone was nervous or panicked."

The peak of the storm passed over the weekend, and when the power went out, the center was ready with diesel generators and a 10,500-gallon diesel tank on the site.

In Houston's so-called energy corridor, the Skybox campus stayed above water, Mr. Morris said. Utility power never went down. But the site was stocked with thousands of gallons of diesel fuel, as well as food and water, emergency medical kits, showers, bunk rooms and flares.

The site, which Mr. Morris calls a "modern-day fortress," began hosting not only employees but several of their families, whose houses were flooded. Then, Mr. Morris said, the building doubled as an emergency response center for the United States marshals. He said that roughly 50 people used or stayed on the campus at one point or another during the storm.

Asked if there were anything in his operations that he would change before the next storm hit, Mr. Morris did not hesitate. "We've decided to purchase a washer and dryer to keep on site," he said.

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How the Internet Kept Humming During 2 Hurricanes

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Yet even as millions of people lost power across Florida, and thousands of homes and businesses were flooded out in Miami and Texas, the heavy digital machinery at the heart of the internet and the cloud held firm.

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When will Black Lives Matter in St. Louis?

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When will Black Lives Matter in St. Louis?

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-Eurah Chung
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/20/opinion/when-will-black-lives-matter-in-st-louis.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

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Genes Color A Butterfly's Wings. Now Scientists Want to Do I Themselves.

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Genes Color A Butterfly's Wings. Now Scientists Want to Do I Themselves.

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Eric Li

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The biologists had already suspected that optix played a role in activating the butterfly's brown pigment. But they were surprised that the black pigment was turned on in the absence of optix.

A further surprise came when they turned off the optix gene in a second species, the buckeye. The butterfly's usual browns and yellows disappeared, replaced by scales of a blazing iridescent blue. "That knocked our socks off," Dr. Reed said.

A second group, led by Anyi Mazo-Vargas of Cornell University and Arnaud Martin of George Washington University, has explored the role of a gene called WntA, which plays a powerful role in the patterning of butterflies' wings.

The standard pattern of nymphalid butterflies, a 90-million-year-old family of some 6,000 different species, consists of four bands, parallel to the body, that run between it and the edge of the wings. The second band, called the central symmetry system, contains the pattern in the middle of the wings, and the third band holds the eye spots.

Dr. Martin's team found that when they delete the WntA gene with the Crispr technique, the central symmetry system band disappears entirely from the wings of the speckled wood and buckeye butterflies.

But in other species, the loss of WntA has very different effects, suggesting that the gene has been adapted many times to play different patterning roles as new butterfly species evolved.

In the monarch butterfly, for instance, loss of WntA affects an almost invisible white line that edges the distinctive black lines that delineate the wing's veins. In the absence of WntA, the white lines expand into the areas between the veins, replacing the distinctive orange pigment.

The WntA gene becomes active in the caterpillar stage, impressing its patterning information on the embryonic wing structures. Dr. Martin sees the WntA gene as a sketching tool that defines the outline of the wing design, and the optix gene studied by Dr. Reed's group as a "paintbrush" gene that fills in the color.

Dr. Reed hopes in time to understand the patterning mechanism so well that he will be able to recreate the pattern of one butterfly's wings on those of a second species. But understanding butterfly wing patterning is just a step toward addressing larger questions in evolutionary biology.

One is the knotty question of how the string of information in a DNA molecule specifies the 3-D structures of the body. The butterfly wing presents this problem more tractably, in just two dimensions.

Another is that of how species evolve different forms. The work of these two groups shows that genes like WntA and optix - master genes that control the activity of other genes - can evolve very different roles in different species.

The nymphalid butterflies use WntA one way, the monarch for a quite another. The optix gene controls specialized wing scales in moths, but when butterflies evolved it somehow recruited a quite different set of servant genes, ones involved in generating pigment, not scale type.

"A big question in evolutionary biology is how do you rewire these gene networks," Dr. Reed said.

Both Dr. Reed and Dr. Martin are enthralled by the ease and power of the Crispr gene-editing tool, invented in 2012. Before, they could infer what a gene might do but couldn't prove it.

With Crispr, they can manipulate any gene of choice inside an egg and see exactly what it does.

"These are experiments we could only have dreamed of years ago," Dr. Reed said. "The most challenging task in my career has become an undergraduate project overnight."

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proceedings of the national academy of sciences

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Genes Color a Butterfly's Wings. Now Scientists Want to Do It Themselves.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The biologists had already suspected that optix played a role in activating the butterfly's brown pigment. But they were surprised that the black pigment was turned on in the absence of optix. A further surprise came when they turned off the optix gene in a second species, the buckeye.