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orbemnews · 4 years ago

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'Just don't take my dog': Leawood family in legal battle with city to keep dog LEAWOOD, Kan. — A Leawood family is in the middle of a legal battle with the city to keep their dog. It’s been three years since Kristi Bond first saw a picture of a black and white puppy at the shelter. “They said they had the sweetest dog and she had been really sick and she’s better now,” Bond said. “As soon as I saw her, I had to meet her.” The next day, Bond picked up the puppy and brought her home to live with her and her two daughters in Kansas City. They named her Lucy. “We take her everywhere with us,” Bond said. “She’s just our sweet puppy.” Now Bond said she is forced to either give up Lucy or move away from her home in Leawood. “What kind of decision is that?” Bond said. “We love where we live. We love our neighbors. We have really great neighbors. Our kids’ school is close by.” It all started when Lucy escaped the family’s fence in April 2020. She was picked up a couple doors away by an animal control officer, who identified Lucy as a pit bull in his report. READ | Leawood police report Pit bulls are not allowed in Leawood as part of the city’s “dangerous animals” ban, which was implemented in 2003 after concerns from citizens. However, according to a letter from Bond’s veterinarian, Lucy is a boxer mix. READ | Letter from veterinarian “Two days later we got a letter saying we needed to re-home her,” Bond said. The letter stated Lucy fit the “appearance and characteristics” of a pit bull. READ | Letter from City of Leawood Then, after another couple of days passed, Bond said the family got a knock at the door. “An animal control officer and a policeman with a gun on his hip came to our front door and demanded that we give her to them,” Bond said. The family did not surrender Lucy. Bond took the issue to court, where a judge ruled in favor of the city, even though Bond provided the note from her veterinarian that Lucy is a boxer mix. Bond is now appealing the judge’s ruling. She said her fight with city isn’t just about Lucy. She wants the breed ban to be revoked. Section 2-102 (k) of Chapter 2 of the Leawood City Code, which deals with Animal Control, defines “any pit bull dog, Staffordshire Bull Terrier, American Staffordshire Terrier, American Pit Bull Terrier, or any animal having the appearance or characteristics of being predominantly of the breeds” as a dangerous animal. “I want them to change it so it affects dangerous behavior only,” Bond said. As the law stands, a dog would only need to fit the appearance of a dangerous breed for a family to be issued a citation. “What does a dangerous dog look like?” Bond asked. Since 2018, Leawood has issued four citations in regards to its dangerous breeds ban. Bond is the only one who a judge has ever ruled against. Dr. Saddie Scott, a veterinarian and president of the Kansas City Veterinarian Medical Association, said there’s no premise for breed bans considering the bans don’t make communities safer from dog bites. “We have no researched-based evidence that states that specific legislation decreases the severity of bites,” Scott said In recent years, cities across the metro, including Liberty and Prairie Village have reversed breed bans. Overland Park is considering getting rid of its breed ban. The City of Leawood would not comment on the matter, citing it as pending litigation. Scott referenced a study that shows whether or not a dog is dangerous is determined mostly on three factors. The first, resident dogs in comparison to home dogs. Dogs that are kept outside on a chain, void of love and human interaction, are more likely to pose a threat than dogs that are kept indoors. The second factor, according to the study, is in regards to whether or not a dog is spayed or neutered. “Animals that are not spayed or neutered have a much higher propensity to cause dangerous bites,” Scott said. The third factor comes down to gender. Male dogs are five times more likely to cause fatal bites. None of those factors apply to Lucy. In regards to determining Lucy’s breed based off a visual evaluation, Scott said it’s incredibly difficult to get an accurate analysis. “Most cases, 60% of the time, we’re wrong on pit bull breed,” Scott said. Bond is due back in court for her appeal in May. She’s now questioning whether or not she wants to live in Leawood. “I was like, ‘You know, what, I’d like to move somewhere where our taxpayer dollars are spent more effectively,'” Bond said. “Rather than bullying people who have a friendly family dog who they just don’t like the look of.” Bond’s daughter, Esmae, also wants the city to reconsider. “Don’t take away my dog,” Esmae said. “I love that dog so much.” — window.fbAsyncInit = function() FB.init( appId : '1557642287829215', xfbml : true, version : 'v2.9' ); ; (function(d, s, id) var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js"; js.async = true; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); (document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk')); Source link Orbem News #41ActionNewsI-Team #41ActionNewsInvestigators #41Investigates #ban #Battle #breed #City #dog #dogbreedban #Dont #Family #JessicaMcMaster #KansasCityI-Team #Leawood #leawoodpitbullban #Legal

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techcrunchappcom · 5 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/thai-protesters-rally-to-push-demands-for-democratic-reforms-national-news/

Thai protesters rally to push demands for democratic reforms | National News

BANGKOK (AP) — Thousands of demonstrators defied police warnings and occupied a historic field in Thailand’s capital on Saturday to support the demands of a student-led protest movement for new elections and reform of the monarchy.

Organizers predicted that as many as 50,000 people would take part in the two-day protest in an area of Bangkok historically associated with political protests. A march is planned for Sunday.

The early arrivals at Sanam Luang, a large field that has hosted major political demonstrations for decades, were a disparate batch, several with their own flags. An LGBTQ contingent waved their iconic rainbow banners, while red flags sprouted across the area, representing Thailand’s Red Shirt political movement, which battled the country’s military in Bangkok’s streets 10 years ago.

By the time the main speakers took the stage in the evening, Associated Press reporters estimated that around 20,000 people were present. People were still arriving as the nighttime program continued.

At least 8,000 police officers reportedly were deployed for the event, which attracted the usual scores of food and souvenir vendors.

“The people who came here today came here peacefully and are really calling for democracy,” said Panupong Jadnok, one of the protest leaders. “The police have called in several companies of officers. I believe they can make sure the people are safe.”

Demonstrators wore face masks but ignored a Thursday night plea from Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha to cancel the event, which he said risked spreading the coronavirus and derailing the recovery of Thailand’s battered economy.

The core demands declared by the protesters in July were the dissolution of parliament with fresh elections, a new constitution and an end to intimidation of political activists. They have held a series of rallies since then.

They believe that Prayuth, who as then-army commander led a 2014 coup toppling an elected government, was returned to power unfairly in last year’s general election because the laws had been changed to favor a pro-military party. A constitution promulgated under military rule is likewise undemocratic, they charge.

The activists raised the stakes dramatically at an Aug. 10 rally by issuing a 10-point manifesto calling for reforming the monarchy. Their demands seek to limit the king’s powers, establish tighter controls on palace finances and allow open discussion of the monarchy.

Their boldness was virtually unprecedented, as the monarchy is considered sacrosanct in Thailand. A lese majeste law calls for a prison sentence of three to 15 years for anyone found guilty of defaming the royal institution.

The students are too young to have been caught up in the sometimes violent partisan political battles that roiled Thailand a decade ago, Kevin Hewison, a University of North Carolina professor emeritus and a veteran Thai studies scholar, said in an email interview.

“This is why they look and act differently and why they are so confounding for the regime,” Hewison said. “What the regime and its supporters see is relatively well-off kids turned against them and this confounds them.”

The appearance of the Red Shirts, besides boosting the protesters’ numbers, links the new movement to the political battling that Thailand endured for a large part of the last two decades. The Red Shirts were a movement of mostly poor rural Thais who supported populist billionaire Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra after the army ousted him in a 2006 coup. Thaksin was opposed by the country’s traditional royalist establishment.

The sometimes violent subsequent struggle between Thaksin’s supporters and foes left Thai society polarized. Thaksin, who now lives in exile overseas, noted on Twitter on Saturday that it was the anniversary of his fall from power and posed the rhetorical question of how the nation had fared since then.

“If we had a good government, a democratic government, our politics, our education and our healthcare system would be better than this,” said protester Amorn Panurang. “This is our dream. And we hope that our dream would come true.”

Arrests for earlier actions on charges including sedition have failed to faze the young activists. They had been denied permission to enter the Thammasat University campus and Sanam Luang on Saturday, but when they pushed, the authorities retreated, even though police warned them that they were breaking the law.

Students launched the protest movement in February with rallies at universities around the country in reaction to a court ruling that dissolved the popular Future Forward Party and banned its leaders from political activity for 10 years.

The party won the third-highest number of seats in last year’s general election with an anti-establishment stance that attracted younger voters, and it is widely seen as being targeted for its popularity and for being critical of the government and the military.

Public protests were suspended in March when Thailand had its first major outbreak of the coronavirus and the government declared a state of emergency to cope with the crisis. The emergency decree is still in effect, but critics allege that it is used to curb dissent.

Royalists have expressed shock at the students’ talk about the monarchy, but actual blowback so far has been minor, with only halfhearted organizing efforts by mostly older royalists.

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coinfirst · 5 years ago

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How Market Volatility Is Shining a Light on DeFi’s Structural Vulnerabilities

On March 12, United States President Donald Trump gave a 10-minute speech on COVID-19 that, coupled with the World Health Organization’s official declaration the day before that the outbreak was now a pandemic, sparked panic across global markets.

Investors rushed to the safety of cash, and no cryptocurrency was immune from the mass sell-off. The total market capitalization of the cryptocurrency sector plummeted by over 25% in a span of hours. Bitcoin (BTC), despite its reputation as a safe haven, fell by 48% in a span of 24 hours. Ether’s (ETH) loss of 43% was its worst one-day performance.

While cryptocurrency prices have rebounded in the interim, the decentralized finance sector has continued to feel the repercussions of “Black Thursday.” As a result of ETH’s sudden losses, millions of dollars’ worth of value was liquidated and DeFi applications temporarily stopped functioning.

Price volatility is inherent to cryptocurrency investing, but mass liquidations and faulty applications mustn’t become the norm for DeFi. Its foundational philosophy is the removal of centralized intermediaries in the financial system, but this lofty goal will be unobtainable if the mechanics of DeFi are breakable. Crypto assets will always be volatile, and DeFi’s infrastructure must be shored up to withstand day-to-day price changes, no matter how dramatic.

Related: DeFi Begins to Move From a Niche Market to Mainstream Finance

As a starting point, the DeFi community must address three key pain points that are interconnected:

The DeFi space is overly reliant on Ethereum assets.

Liquidation-based approaches to cross-chain value transfers are dangerous.

Multisignature and multiparty computation mechanisms are insufficient for ensuring liveliness and safety in DeFi environments.

Each of these points warrants deeper analysis.

DeFi’s Ethereum dependence poses systemic risks for the sector

A common mantra in the world of financial advice is to avoid “putting all of your eggs in one basket.” In other words, holding a diversified portfolio ensures that you won’t lose too much money if a particular sector of the economy crashes.

In the DeFi sector, all eggs are in Ethereum, which controls the fortunes of DeFi applications and investors alike. For example, users of popular systems like MakerDAO mostly use Ethereum as collateral. When flash crashes of Ether happen, users scramble to recollateralize and the network becomes congested. This makes the DeFi sector uniquely vulnerable to fluctuations in Ether’s price and network congestion. For DeFi systems to scale, these systems need access to larger market-capitalization assets like Bitcoin, as well as a more diverse range of cryptocurrencies.

For instance, when ETH’s price tanked on Black Thursday, the outcome was predictably dire. Users of MakerDAO lost millions of dollars (more on that shortly), oracle prices lagged and applications like dYdX and Nuo had to alter their fees to force through delayed trades. This sequence of events was not without precedent: Ethereum’s network suffered similar congestion in 2017. Notwithstanding these problems, Ethereum is and should remain an important cog in the DeFi ecosystem, and the protocol’s plans for ETH 2.0 will hopefully help.

Related: Vitalik Buterin Reveals Ethereum 2.0 Roadmap to Cointelegraph

But in order to thrive and scale its community, DeFi applications should look toward cross-chain assets enabled by generic interoperability, which would allow collateralization with any crypto asset in return for any other crypto asset. Generic interoperability will provide greater liquidity for DeFi applications, mitigate ETH price exposure risk and lessen DeFi’s dependence on the Ethereum network.

Broadening DeFi’s range of cross-chain pairs will be especially important for spurring mass adoption. When stablecoins like Libra, Celo and even China’s digital yuan come online, cross-chain liquidity can serve as a bridge that encourages crypto novices to buy their first Bitcoin, Ether or other decentralized assets as a means of taking out stablecoin loans.

A liquidation-based approach to interoperability is dangerous

The Black Thursday experiences of MakerDAO and Compound, two of DeFi’s most popular protocols, offer an instructive case study into why liquidation mechanisms pose risks for DeFi participants.

When ETH’s price began plummeting the evening of March 12, MakerDAO’s oracles — the automated bots that ascertain price information for lenders and borrowers — were unable to cope with the speed and severity of the price crash. MakerDAO’s users were desperate to recollateralize their loans, but severe network congestion and outrageously high gas fees prevented them from both depositing more ETH (to maintain their 150-to-100 collateral-to-loan ratio) and paying back their Dai, resulting in $4.5 million of liquidations at absurdly cheap prices for liquidators. Compound suffered similarly with its highest number of liquidations at over $4 million, mostly in collateralized ETH.

Beyond Ethereum’s role in this debacle, it is worth focusing on this liquidation-based approach to decentralized finance. When network problems arise, liquidation-based mechanisms can wreak havoc on unsuspecting users. Positions cannot be recollateralized in time, loans cannot be repaid, oracles cannot update their prices, oracle prices lag from the true price, and liquidations stop functioning correctly.

This presents a serious challenge for bringing cross-chain assets and liquidity to DeFi. We mustn’t collateralize these assets with ETH or rely on liquidation mechanisms. If we do, DeFi systems might get access to cross-chain assets and liquidity, but we have just moved the risk of dysfunctional liquidation mechanisms somewhere else; we have not actually solved the problem. Worse, if DeFi then goes on to use these cross-chain assets as collateral themselves, then we are compounding liquidation risks. Worse still, the market cap of cross-chain assets becomes restricted by the market cap and volatility of ETH, which defeats much of the point.

Related: How EOS and ETH DeFi Made It Through Market Turmoil

Instead, DeFi needs cross-chain assets that are collateralized by native tokens whose value is derived only from the use of the assets. This way, the stability and market cap of cross-chain assets is not dependent on anything other than those assets being useful. Such systems do not only survive volatility and market panics, but thrive in them. Decentralized exchanges, which saw historic transaction volume and fee returns during Black Thursday, are an example of this type of system. Despite storing lots of ETH collateral, DEXs remain secure and useful in times of high volatility.

Interoperability solutions must go beyond multisigs and MPC

While both multisigs and multiparty computation mechanisms deserve our praise for bolstering crypto custody, neither are currently sufficient for securing the type of decentralized, always-on network that DeFi is striving toward.

Related: Secure Encryption Key Management Modules, Explained

Multisigs, by virtue of requiring multiple signatures to authorize any transaction, are incapable of scaling or enabling autonomous functions in a large decentralized setting. MPC is preferable and is an important technological breakthrough in securing decentralized networks, but state-of-the-art MPC is vulnerable to going offline when just a few nodes fail, and they have long, heavy pre-compute phases that are incompatible with 24/7 decentralized finance systems.

Therefore, to ensure lively and safe decentralized financial services, DeFi protocols must look to novel types of MPC that do not fail when the underlying participants go offline, do not have heavy pre-compute phases, and can remain stable and functional even in times of high market volatility.

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

Loong Wang is the chief technology officer and co-founder of Ren, an open protocol that enables the permissionless and private transfer of value between blockchains. Ren’s core product, RenVM, brings interoperability to DeFi through a decentralized custody solution that allows the seamless movement of assets between blockchains.

The post How Market Volatility Is Shining a Light on DeFi’s Structural Vulnerabilities appeared first on Coin First.

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noisyunknownturtle · 5 years ago

Text

How Market Volatility Is Shining a Light on DeFi’s Structural Vulnerabilities

Related: DeFi Begins to Move From a Niche Market to Mainstream Finance

As a starting point, the DeFi community must address three key pain points that are interconnected:

The DeFi space is overly reliant on Ethereum assets.

Liquidation-based approaches to cross-chain value transfers are dangerous.

Multisignature and multiparty computation mechanisms are insufficient for ensuring liveliness and safety in DeFi environments.

Each of these points warrants deeper analysis.

DeFi’s Ethereum dependence poses systemic risks for the sector

Related: Vitalik Buterin Reveals Ethereum 2.0 Roadmap to Cointelegraph

A liquidation-based approach to interoperability is dangerous

The Black Thursday experiences of MakerDAO and Compound, two of DeFi’s most popular protocols, offer an instructive case study into why liquidation mechanisms pose risks for DeFi participants.

Related: How EOS and ETH DeFi Made It Through Market Turmoil

Interoperability solutions must go beyond multisigs and MPC

Related: Secure Encryption Key Management Modules, Explained

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.

The post How Market Volatility Is Shining a Light on DeFi’s Structural Vulnerabilities appeared first on For Crypto.

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biofunmy · 6 years ago

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Urban Sprawl And Climate Change Are Making Hurricanes More Deadly

Scott Olson / Getty Images

People canoe down a flooded road in Mandeville, Louisiana, on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain in the wake of Tropical Storm Barry on July 13.

Southern Louisiana seems to have dodged a bullet with Tropical Storm Barry. Although heavy rain caused widespread flooding after the storm hit the state Saturday, the region’s two biggest cities, New Orleans and Baton Rouge, were spared the worst.

But nationwide, the threat to lives and property from rain-triggered storm flooding is escalating, with global warming spawning larger, apparently slower-moving storms, and asphalt and concrete covering permeable open ground that would have soaked up rain as cities expand.

Flooding has always posed the main danger when tropical storms come ashore, and historically, the main killer has been storm surge — a sudden rise in sea level caused by low atmospheric pressure and winds blowing onshore. But in the past three years, 75% of the more than 160 deaths from hurricanes making landfall along the US Gulf Coast and Eastern Seaboard have been due to flooding from heavy rain rather than surging seas, according to statistics from the National Hurricane Center.

Several factors are to blame. Because hurricanes gain strength over warm ocean water, and because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, which ultimately gets dumped as rain, global warming is thought to be driving bigger, wetter storms. Before Hurricane Florence made landfall in the Carolinas in September 2018, for instance, researchers estimated that parts of that storm would drop over 50% more rain than it would have in the absence of human-caused climate change.

There’s also some evidence that global warming is weakening the circulation of the atmosphere of the tropics in summer, causing storms to move more slowly — although the idea is still controversial.

And when a slow-moving storm stalls over a city that is largely paved with asphalt and concrete, with few open spaces to soak up the rain, disastrous flooding can result, experts say.

These animated maps, based on satellite image–derived estimates of areas covered by impermeable urban surfaces from the National Land Cover Database, show how urban development in several cities in the direct firing line of Atlantic storms has made those locations increasingly vulnerable to rain-driven flooding.

Impermeable surfaces include rooftops, roads, and parking lots. Areas with low permeability are shown on the maps in pink, with the least permeable areas highlighted in magenta.

1. Houston

Peter Aldhous / BuzzFeed News / Via mrlc.gov

When Hurricane Harvey stalled for days over southern Texas in August 2017, it set US rainfall records — dumping more than 60 inches near the cities of Beaumont and Port Arthur.

“Harvey could be considered a rain bomb,” Eric Tate of the University of Iowa, who studies vulnerability to flooding, told BuzzFeed News.

The storm caused an estimated $125 billion worth of damage and killed 68 people — all but three of them victims of freshwater flooding. Thirty-six of those fatalities were in the Houston metro area — the fifth largest in the US with some 7 million people — which in the preceding two decades had seen a massive growth of paved surfaces, replacing natural prairies and wetlands that used to help soak up heavy rain.

“Houston is an area that has seen a lot of hardening of the watershed,” Mike Beck of the Nature Conservancy — who heads a research group at the University of California, Santa Cruz, that studies the resilience of coastal cities to storms and floods — told BuzzFeed News in the wake of the storm.

A 2015 study from researchers at Texas A&M University found that Harris County, which includes Central Houston and some of its suburbs, lost 29% of its wetlands between 1992 and 2010, largely to urban development.

“Loss of wetlands on this scale means a substantial loss in the ability of the landscape to detain and remove pollutants from stormwater,” the researchers wrote. “The results are increased flooding and degraded fishing grounds in downstream bayous and marshes.”

For Harvey’s victims, the sprawling city became an impermeable death trap, in which urban development compounded the effects of low-lying land and clay-based soils that are bad at soaking up water.

“These physical characteristics make the Houston metropolitan area prone to regular and sometimes catastrophic flooding,” noted a report on urban flooding from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, commissioned by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and published in March.

After visiting the city just before Harvey stuck, the committee that wrote the report concluded that the people most at risk included the “poor elderly, renters, minority, disabled, and non-native English speakers.”

2. New Orleans and Baton Rouge

Peter Aldhous / BuzzFeed News / Via mrlc.gov

Compared with Houston, the metro areas of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, with a combined population of more than 2 million, haven’t seen such explosive development.

New Orleans, hemmed in by its protective levees, has little room to expand — and the population, now at around 400,000 for the city proper, still hasn’t recovered to the level before those levees were breached in August 2005 by the storm surge from Hurricane Katrina. (The city’s population was almost halved in the immediate wake of the storm, with many of those who fled relocating to the Houston area.)

But as a separate downpour in the week before Barry came ashore showed, a dense city like New Orleans remains highly vulnerable to rain-triggered flooding even if levees hold. Hours of heavy rain on July 10 left many streets flooded, causing Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards to declare a state of emergency in advance of Barry’s arrival.

3. Jacksonville, Florida

Peter Aldhous / BuzzFeed News / Via mrlc.gov

In September 2017, Hurricane Irma roared in from the south up the Florida peninsula. Surging seas had been the main concern, but the Jacksonville metro area, home to about 1.5 million people on the Atlantic coast in the north of the state, wasn’t expected to be badly affected by that. Still, the city saw extensive flooding, largely from the St John’s River, which had been swollen by torrential rain.

As this map shows, urban sprawl likely contributed to the extent of the flooding, since paved surfaces had grown significantly in the prior two decades.

4. Tampa Bay, Florida

Peter Aldhous / BuzzFeed News / Via mrlc.gov

With the heaviest rain falling to the east of the storm’s eye, Irma didn’t cause major flooding in the Tampa Bay area, home to more than 3 million people. But again, urban sprawl has increased the amount of impermeable surfaces, making the cities around the bay vulnerable to rain from future storms.

5. Raleigh, Durham, and Greensboro, North Carolina

Peter Aldhous / BuzzFeed News / Via mrlc.gov

Coastal cities aren’t the only ones at risk from flooding caused by major hurricanes.

In September and October 2018, parts of North Carolina twice experienced heavy flooding as first Hurricane Florence headed inland from the Atlantic coast, and then the remnants of Hurricane Michael, which came ashore in the Florida Panhandle, moved north.

Again, some of the state’s major cities — including the Raleigh–Durham–Chapel Hill metro area, which is home to some 2 million people — have seen a big expansion of paved surfaces, making them more vulnerable to flash flooding.

6. New York City

Peter Aldhous / BuzzFeed News / Via mrlc.gov

New York City, part of the largest metro area in the nation, housing more than 20 million people from New Jersey to Long Island, experienced severe flooding in October 2012 from Superstorm Sandy. That was mostly due to storm surge rather than rain. But if a major hurricane were to stall over the area, the highly impermeable surfaces shown on this map in magenta would create a big risk of flash floods.

Tropical cyclones may present the main threat, but climate change is also causing heavier downpours elsewhere. “Across most of the United States, the heaviest rainfall events have become heavier and more frequent,” according to the National Climate Assessment, with the trend being most pronounced in the Northeast and Midwest.

7. Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska

Peter Aldhous / BuzzFeed News / Via mrlc.gov

This year, much of the Midwest, including cities in Iowa and Nebraska, has experienced record flooding. Melting snow was one reason that rivers burst their banks, but heavy rains and the growth of paved surfaces in the region’s cities, shown here in Omaha and Lincoln, home to about 1.3 million people in their wider metro areas, made things worse. As climate change continues to increase the risk of major downpours, urban planners are going to have to think about how to allow excess water to drain away, experts say.

“If you neglect how you build cities, you’re going to be missing a large part of the problem,” Matei Georgescu of Arizona State University, who has studied the threats to the world’s cities posed by climate change, told BuzzFeed News.

When it comes to flooding from major storms, Georgescu said, there’s a simple prescription — albeit a hard one to achieve where space is limited: “More parks, more grass, more permeable surfaces.”

“It’s not just urbanization, it’s how we’re urbanizing and what kind of surfaces we’re putting down,” the University of Iowa’s Tate said.

CORRECTION

Jul. 17, 2019, at 19:05 PM

Hurricane Irma hit Florida in September 2017. An earlier version of this article misstated the year.

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alamante · 7 years ago

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Dee-Ann Kentish-Rogers was hopeful, but she didn’t necessarily expect to win this year’s Miss Universe Great Britain. And she definitely didn’t expect a victory to come with much fanfare. The 25-year-old says her victory still feels surreal ― but the support she’s received from black women all over the world is helping her soak it all in.

“Having mothers asking me to speak to their daughters, just to tell them to be proud of who they are ― that’s when it began to feel real,” she told HuffPost. “I take great pride in that.”

It’s especially inspirational being what she calls “a small-island girl.” And she’s encouraging other small-town girls to dare to dream big. Here are five more things to know about the first black woman to win Miss Universe Great Britain.

She represents two places in the United Kingdom.

Kentish-Rogers was born and raised on the small island of Anguilla, a British territory located in the Caribbean with a population of just 15,000. She credits the close-knit island community with keeping her humble and devoted to high achievement. In 2013, she moved to Birmingham, England, to study law, and quickly realized it felt familiar in some ways. The city is often under-covered in the media, just like her island homeland.

Now, she’s urging women and girls never to limit their worlds to the size of their backyards.

“Too often, when we come from very small communities, we are led to believe that that determines our trajectory,” she said. “I’m here to show young girls that that’s simply not true.”

Photo courtesy of Zuri Wilkes via Dee-Ann Kentish-Rogers

Dee-Ann Kentish-Rogers, 2018’s Miss Universe Great Britain, poses in her homeland of Anguilla. The small island is a British territory in the Caribbean with a population of 15,000.

She didn’t expect her historic win to be a big deal.

“I didn’t win the pageant because I’m black ― it’s because I worked hard and executed my plan,” Kentish-Rogers said. “But after winning the title and getting hundreds of messages from little black girls telling me my win feels like their win, I’ve come to realize it means a lot to me because it meant a lot to everyone else.”

The impact really hits home, she said, when she reflects on the message she’s sending to young women on her own island and throughout the Caribbean.

“It means the world to me to be able to show young Anguillan [girls] or any Caribbean girl that they can go so much further when they embrace their heritage and allow it to propel you forward,” she said. “We’re small, but we’re mighty.”

She originally wanted to represent Great Britain through sports, not pageantry.

“When I was small, I would always tell my mom that I’m going to be an Olympic athlete for Great Britain, and she supported me,” Kentish-Rogers said.

Her athletic prowess allowed her to represent Anguilla on the international stage as a track and field athlete. But just as she seemed destined for athletic greatness, in 2014, a severe knee injury cut her track career short.

“I had to refocus,” she said. “It wasn’t really changing my dreams, but letting them reinvent themselves.”

Cameron Spencer via Getty Images

Kentish-Rogers competes in the Women’s Heptathlon Javelin at Hampden Park during the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games on July 30, 2014.

Kentish-Rogers hasn’t fully given up on athletics. As Miss Universe Great Britain, she plans to incorporate her passion for women’s sports into her platform, helping emerging female athletes with career development and raising awareness of the gender pay gap in sports.

She wants to use her reign as Miss Universe Great Britain to raise awareness about climate change.

Last year’s hurricane season devastated much of the Caribbean, including Anguilla. Hurricane Irma significantly damaged over 90 percent of the island’s infrastructure, a major blow for a territory that relies on tourism from the U.K. and the U.S.

“It’s devastating for an entire community to lose so much so fast, and for much of the Caribbean, it’s becoming an all too familiar part of our realities,” she said. “We first have to acknowledge that climate change is real and will continue to have a catastrophic impact on the region if the entire world doesn’t act.”

With aid from the U.K. government, Anguilla has mostly bounced back. But Kentish-Rogers wants more of the world to know about the disproportionate impact climate change has on the entire Caribbean region.

Too often, when we come from very small communities, we are led to believe that that determines our trajectory. Dee-Ann Kentish-Rogers

“It’s a matter of the safety and longevity of our islands, our homes, in the 21st century,” she said.

Part of her challenge includes educating her fellow Brits about the U.K.’s many overseas territories. As with many Puerto Ricans in the mainland U.S., she often has to explain to her fellow countrymen that being born in Anguilla makes her a U.K. citizen.

“We’re just as part of the United Kingdom as anyone else, and I’m happy to have those conversations introducing my countrymen to their fellow citizens in the territories,” she said.

She just took the bar exam!

Already a beauty queen and a former athlete, Kentish-Rogers hopes to be a lawyer soon. The 2016 University of Birmingham Law School graduate was called on to take the bar late last month, and is eagerly anticipating her results.

She’s interested in becoming a sports attorney, she said, as a way to merge her love of athletics with her passion for law. And she’ll have plenty of time to do that ― after her next hurdle, of course. Kentish-Rogers will compete for the overall title of Miss Universe in November.

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democratsunited-blog · 7 years ago

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Will Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Primary Victory Really Shake Up Party Control?

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=5684

Will Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Primary Victory Really Shake Up Party Control?

A thrilling victory by a young insurgent candidate, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, against a 20-year incumbent and party boss, US Rep. Joseph Crowley, in the June 26 New York primary seems to be reverberating over state and national politics.

Pundits are posing the question of whether a national anti-establishment wave within Democratic Party politics is in the making. Many activists — myself among them — hope so, but don’t shout too soon.

Remember how in 2004 a young upstart, newly-elected senator from Illinois burst onto the scene with a stirring speech at the Democratic National Convention? In 2008, he challenged the Clinton Democratic Party establishment, and with the support of independent voters who were able to participate in open primary/caucus states and the support of the African American and Hispanic communities and young people, Barack Obama became the Democratic Party nominee.

In the general election — again with the support of communities of color, independents, and young voters — he was elected president.

Once President Obama arrived in Washington D.C., he was consumed by the Democratic Party apparatus and leadership — such as House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Leader Harry Reid and others. He was no longer trying to shake up the political establishment; he became part of it.

President Obama did not advocate for any of the political reforms so vital to reforming the American political system such as nonpartisan elections, redistricting reform, or reforms to remove dark money from politics.

Source: Gallup, 7/7/10

“Obama’s misguided view of the independent voter.” The New Republic, 11/17/2010

Source: The New York Times, 1/18/12

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s win and that of Stacey Abrams in Georgia, Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, Kara Eastman in Nebraska and others have brought attention to new women candidates who have won Democratic Primaries around the country.

Many of these nominees like Ocasio-Cortez, are outsiders who ran against the Democratic Party establishment just like Obama. Certainly, such candidacies offer an opportunity to kick open the door for all who have been shut out by machine politics. These insurgent campaigns would be strengthened by forming alliances with voters outside of the parties, with independent, unaffiliated voters, and non-party voters.

When Ocasio-Cortez goes to Washington D.C. as a new congresswoman, (her victory in the general election is virtually certain due to the fact that she is the Democratic Party nominee in Democratic-dominated New York City) she will enter a Congress that is mired in partisan dysfunction and in which the needs of the poor seem never to be prioritized.

In order to make a transformative difference in American politics, there has to be a change in how politics works in America.

Dr. Jessie Fields, National Spokesperson for Open Primaries

This is a Congress that has failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform no matter which party was in the majority. This is a Congress that does not represent the full political diversity of the American people. The majority of policymakers in Congress are still elected — as was Ocasio-Ortiz — from gerrymandered districts and by partisan party primaries that exclude the growing numbers of independent voters and have very low voter turnout.

The state of our democracy is something that Americans across the political spectrum are concerned about. In a recent survey (a major bipartisan poll ), a majority of Americans agreed with the statement that “the laws enacted by our national government these days mostly reflect what powerful special interests and their lobbyists want.” Only 17 % agreed that “The laws enacted by our government these days mostly reflect what the people want.”

Over the past year there has been a steep decline in the level of trust that Americans have in their government and congressional approval ratings remain around 17%. These surveys demonstrate that the American people know that the parties are fighting for their own special interests and not for the people.

The new insurgent women nominees can set an example and lead the way for real change in our democracy by reaching out beyond their own political party and to independent voters in their communities; by reaching out across party lines to people who are denied the right to vote in primary elections.

In order to make a transformative difference in American politics, there has to be a change in how politics works in America — a change that moves politics from top-down to bottom-up. We need to create new ways to bring Americans of different political views together to restructure political life and dialogue.

Studies have found that independents are more comfortable interacting with both Democrats and Republicans than either Democrats or Republicans are with interacting with members of the other party. Independents are more open to differing viewpoints and may be key to bridging the political divide (Hedberg, Eric; Reilly, Thom; Daugherty, David and Garcia, Joseph (April 2017). “Voters, Media, and Social Networks” Morrison Institute for Public Policy. Arizona State University.).

What I find most inspiring about Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s victory is how she won. She won by talking to people in her congressional district, poor and working, people of color, Hispanic, black and white. Congratulations to them all and may she continue even as an elected member of Congress to be independent, to oppose machine politics, and to reach out at the grassroots and include all. I urge her to reach out to other outsiders, and to independents of all colors.

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everettwilkinson · 8 years ago

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Robot growing pains: Two U.S. factories show tensions of going digital

FILE PHOTO: A job seeker departs the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. career fair held by the New York State department of Labor in New York, April 12, 2012. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

December 22, 2017

By Timothy Aeppel

COLUMBUS, Ind. (Reuters) – When Sandy Vierling took a job at a new robot-packed factory her company built just a few miles from an older plant where she made automotive exhaust systems, she crossed into the future of manufacturing in the United States.

She didn’t like it at all.

Auto supplier Faurecia SA’s new plant – dubbed Columbus South to distinguish it from the older operation known as Gladstone – is glistening clean and the physical work is lighter. But the 57-year-old found her new job had long hours and was monotonous – loading parts onto conveyors that fed robots all day. She also missed the interaction with coworkers she had at Gladstone.

Other workers at the new plant complain that they do not get to fix machines when they jam. Technicians swoop in to do that.

“I was stressed all the time,” she said.

President Donald Trump has put bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States at the center of his economic and trade agenda. But when jobs actually come – as they have here in southern Indiana – many factory workers are not prepared for them, and employers are having trouble hiring people with the needed skills.

U.S. manufacturing job openings stand near a 15 year high and factories are hiring workers at the fastest clip since 2014, with many employers saying the hardest-to-fill jobs are those that involve technical skills that command top pay.

In 2000, over half of U.S. manufacturing workers had only high school degrees or less, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Today, 57 percent of manufacturing workers have technical school training, some college or full college degrees, and nearly a third of workers have bachelors or advanced degrees, up from 22 percent in 2000.

(For a graphic, click http://tmsnrt.rs/2z5f84w)

Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said the digitalization sweeping the economy is forcing employers to hunt for a different mix of workers – and pay more in some cases for workers with technical skills.

A new study by Muro found those with the highest digital skills saw average wage growth of 2 percent a year since 2010, while wages for those with medium skills grew by 1.4 percent and those at the bottom by 1.6 percent.

SKILLS MISMATCH

The skills mismatch is playing out at Faurecia’s factories in Columbus.

The company’s older Gladstone plant has 500 production workers and only a handful of robots. The new plant, Columbus South, has about 400 workers and about 100 robots, including 30 automated guided vehicles that move materials instead of human-driven tugs. Both plants make exhaust systems.

Faurecia invested $64 million in its new plant, and invited trained workers from the old plant to apply for jobs in the new one. Many workers, including Vierling, were lured by higher wages. She saw her pay jump from $16.65 an hour to $18.80 at Columbus South. About 150 made the move, according to the union that represents workers in both facilities, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

There’s no plan to shutter the older plant, but rather to introduce automation there in phases as well.

But some said no to the opportunity.

Christina Teltow says she never even considered it. She is 42 years-old, and has spent 22 years at Gladstone. She was recently promoted, but previously worked as “gap leader,” one of the better jobs someone with a high school education can attain at the plant. That job includes overseeing the schedules of workers and monitoring the quality of parts.

The same job at Columbus South requires 16 credit hours from the local technical college in business administration as well as learning to use computers to track production and schedules.

“Here, I get in and work on machinery,” she said. “In South, it’s totally different — it’s all robots.”

The company says one reason the new plant needs a lot of robots is because it produces a different kind of product. Gladstone mostly makes exhaust systems for light vehicles, while Columbus South is dedicated to much beefier commercial exhaust systems used mainly on large trucks. One worker can easily lift most of the parts at Gladstone, while some parts at Columbus South weigh up to 260 pounds.

Without robots, the new plant would need many more workers just to move things around, said managers.

Of course, robots have been in factories for decades. The difference now is that the machines are being linked together in networks that allow more oversight and control. At Columbus South, managers and engineers walk around with iPads that allow them to watch production levels in real time and even less-skilled workers have to know the basics of how to use computer drop down screens and entering data.

Leading the way onto the factory floor, manager Mike Galarno points to the front of one of the long production lines dotted with robots to a large video screen that tracks production in real time.

At the old plant, each part of the operation was like an island. If a problem arose, the people working there could sort it out without ever coming to the attention of managers, he said.

“Here, it’s all data – and everyone is looking and reacting to it,” he said.

This type of work requires some workers with skills normally found in high-tech, not in auto parts factories. Drawing those workers to Columbus – and keeping them – has posed another challenge.

One of the first employees hired for Columbus South last year was Chase Chapman, a mathematician and data-management specialist who was finishing a five-year stint in the Navy. The company moved Chapman and his young family from Florida, so he could become the plant’s head of data analytics – a position that doesn’t exist at Gladstone or at any other Faurecia exhaust system factory.

He left in April after only eight months, citing the desire to be closer to his extended family.

The position has now been empty for months as the company tries to recruit someone new.

Another problem became clear after the new plant was up and running. As a start-up operation—with lots of potential for technical glitches in its highly automated systems—many workers at the new plant work 12 hour shifts, often more than five days a week.

Those long hours have worn on workers like Vierling. “I was making all that money, but I had no time to spend it,” she said.

Workers from Gladstone were required to stay at the new plant a year before seeking a transfer back. Last month, Vierling returned to her old workplace. She gave up most of the $2 an hour raise she got for moving, but does not regret it.

“I feel like I’ve gone back home,” she said.

(Editing by Joe White and Edward Tobin)

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biofunmy · 6 years ago

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Women In Rural India Are Defying Their Communities By Going Undercover On Facebook

Aleesha Nandhra for BuzzFeed News

Seema Sinha never imagined that a Facebook account might ruin her chances at an arranged marriage.

“Do you have a Facebook account?” her would-be mother-in-law asked her, starkly, at her matchmaking ceremony.

Nervously, Sinha — who asked not to be identified by her real name — replied that she did; she used it to keep up with her extended family, to comment on their pictures, and sometimes to post pictures of her own.

Her prospective in-laws said they had no tolerance for such activities. To be considered as a bride for their 25-year-old son, a civil engineer, she would have to delete her Facebook account. “We can’t have a daughter-in-law who makes a public display of herself out there,” she remembered them saying.

Sinha’s parents didn’t want to lose the match. So under pressure from her parents, she buckled and deleted her account. A month later, she was married. And soon after that, she was back on Facebook, this time with a fake name and an image of a clear cerulean sky as her profile photo.

“Nobody knows I’m there,” she said. “Not even my husband.”

“When a girl uses Facebook, our whole village looks at her differently.”

Sinha lives in Charkhi Dadri, a town of 50,000 people 75 miles west of India’s capital, New Delhi, in the state of Haryana, known for having one of the lowest female-to-male ratios in the country due to selective abortion of female fetuses, a culture of gender segregation, and a patriarchal social structure.

For women living in these parts of the country, using social networks like Facebook comes with real risks of being socially outcast. While Facebook may have an image problem in most parts of the world for handling data carelessly, spreading fake news, and inciting violence and genocide, male leaders in these parts of India dislike it for an entirely different reason: It gives young women a platform to post pictures, put themselves out there, and meet young men.

Across rural India, young women are accessing Facebook under false identities, using the names of Bollywood actors or other made-up monikers, and sometimes even posing as men — violating Facebook’s policy against “pretending to be anything or anyone” — as they seek a place in modern digital life. (Facebook declined to comment on such apparent violations.) Their discretion doesn’t stem from an everyday eye for privacy but from a fear of the harsh social consequences of being outed as a woman who uses Facebook.

Pranav Dixit / BuzzFeed News

Bhagwan Das Pradhan, head of Bara village council

“When a girl uses Facebook, our whole village looks at her differently,” said Bhagwan Das Pradhan, council head in Bara, a village of about 4,000 in Uttar Pradesh full of sprawling, sun-baked fields and squat, old-fashioned houses with courtyards in the center. “They think she’s too loose, too forward, for her own good.”

This is a broadly held view in parts of India, and one the reasons Indian Facebook is dominated by men. In fact, 1 in every 4 of Facebook’s 240 million Indian users are women, according to a 2016 report from UK-based consultancy firm We Are Social. And overall, only 3 of every 10 internet users in the country are women, according to data in a report released last year by the Internet and Mobile Association of India, a telecom industry body that counts both Google and Facebook as its members.

“There are multiple factors responsible for the gender divide that we see today, including access to resources and social norms,” a Facebook spokesperson said in an emailed statement that outlined the company’s various initiatives to bring more women online, including #SheMeansBusiness and #SheLeadsTech, and working with NGOs. “The internet is the invisible force driving advancement for women around the world.”

Vidushi Marda, a legal researcher who works with Article 19, a UK-based human rights nonprofit that works on issues of free expression online, said while it’s increasingly difficult to stop women from using social networking and the internet as mobile phones go mainstream, the social taboo keeps these women from using the platforms to their benefit as the rest of the world (and their male peers) does.

“They don’t get the same return on the investment that they put in these platforms that you and I do,” said Marda. “In the short term, at the very least, I think these women are fighting a losing battle.”

Pranav Dixit / BuzzFeed News

The village of Bara, Uttar Pradesh, India

In Bara, a recently married 21-year-old woman who did not want to be named told BuzzFeed News her in-laws made her shut down her four-year-old Facebook account. She was eventually allowed to create a new one, but she cannot post to it without the approval of her husband and her in-laws.

In the village of Salarpur in Uttar Pradesh, home to about 10,000 people where open gutters flow on both sides of narrow, unpaved streets, locals told BuzzFeed News about a 20-year-old couple who met through Facebook and eloped in 2016. The village council ordered villagers to shun them when they returned a year later, and they had to apologize dozens of times before they were forgiven.

And yet more than a dozen girls from villages in Haryana and Uttar Pradesh told BuzzFeed News that they still use Facebook — just not openly.

“Sometimes I think I want to just use it to assert my identity on the internet,” said Manasi Saxena, an undergrad student from the village of Salarpur, Uttar Pradesh. Still, she uses Facebook under a false name, and has a picture of a bright yellow rose as her profile picture. “Mostly, I just want to be there because I’m furious with the double standards: All my male relatives are allowed to use it, and nobody says anything to them.”

“I want to just use it to assert my identity on the internet.”

Saxena uses Facebook the way so many others do: to socialize with friends and relatives, and to keep up with news. She is also part of a couple of dozen study groups to prepare for entrance examinations for higher studies. Her wall is full of generic quizzes (“Which cute animal are you?”) and links to Bollywood stories from the Navbharat Times, a popular Hindi news website.

She follows a now well-established set of unspoken ground rules for using Facebook as an Indian woman from these parts of the country: no full names; no checking in or location sharing; and absolutely no pictures of themselves, anywhere. It’s not for paranoia either.

Juhi Tiwari, a Salarpur resident who recently graduated, told BuzzFeed News when she first opened her Facebook account three years ago and put up a profile picture of herself, a boy from a neighboring village stalked her. “Once he showed up at my college,” he said. “He followed me everywhere for months.” Finally, she deleted her account. A year later, she opened a new one — sans profile picture. “Communities are tight-knit in these parts,” she said. “The last thing you want is everyone in the village knowing that a strange guy is obsessed with you and stalks you on Facebook.”

Other women accessed Facebook from a trusted male cousin or a brother’s phone and limited their activity to lurking on other people’s profiles, and occasionally liking something. Sometimes they created profiles using male names.

Gitesh Jindal, a 20-year-old undergrad student studying business at Charkhi Dadri’s Kedarnath Aggarwal Institute of Management, told BuzzFeed News about a man who once struck up a friendship with him on Facebook. After a month of correspondence, the man revealed his true identity: He was actually a woman from Jindal’s neighborhood. “She wasn’t sure she could trust me to not take screenshots if she put up her real photo and misuse them somehow,” he explained.

Facebook is aware of that for some Indian women, safeguarding their image is a must. Last year, the company rolled out a feature called “profile picture guard” exclusively in India that prevents people from, among other things, screenshotting profile pictures from Android phones, which are the most popular smartphones in India.

“In our research with people and safety organizations in India, we’ve heard that some women choose not to share profile pictures that include their faces anywhere on the internet because they’re concerned about what may happen to their photos,” Facebook wrote in a blog post.

But the profile picture guard works only in Facebook’s mobile app. It doesn’t work in a browser, it doesn’t prevent screenshotting profile pictures from desktop, and it doesn’t protect images posted to a Facebook album or wall. More than a year after Facebook rolled out the feature in the country, none of the women BuzzFeed News interviewed across three villages in two states had heard of it. Facebook did not respond to questions about this feature.

In its statement to BuzzFeed News, Facebook said, “Integral to people’s interest in connecting and sharing, and our mission of giving people the power to build community, is that people, and especially women, feel safe to connect in meaningful and profound ways.”

Pranav Dixit / BuzzFeed News

The town of Charkhi Dadri, Haryana, India

Experts say that the social taboo on women using the internet and Facebook specifically comes down to a single factor: controlling their sexuality.

“What mobile phones and Facebook in particular gives these girls is some space and agency, something that they rarely get in their real lives offline,” said Bishakha Datta, cofounder and CEO of Point of View, a Mumbai-based nonprofit that helps women in rural parts of the country exercise their “right to a voice,” including online. “There is a real fear that social networking will help girls choose who they want to get into a relationship with. It’s a fear of girls turning into independent, sexual women.”

India’s patriarchs cite the “bad influence” of social media and the internet on women’s lives as a reason to keep them away from it.

Raju “Don” Sain, a daily wage laborer from Bara, said that he’s terrified of not finding suitable grooms for his three daughters, ages 16, 18, and 19, if anybody finds out that they talk to men through Facebook. “They can use it after they get married if their husband allows it,” he said. Sain declined to let BuzzFeed News interview his daughters.

“The internet is bad because it has blue films,” a member of the Salarpur village council who is a father to two daughters, 16 and 17, and a son, 14, told BuzzFeed News, using a common Indian phrase to refer to porn. “I see no reason why women should use it.”

“It’s a question of their family’s honor if somebody takes their pictures and misuses them in any way.”

Aakash Tawar, an MBA student from Charkhi Dadri, has more than 500 friends on Facebook, but fewer than 50 of them are women. His Facebook wall is full of selfies and pictures of men. Young girls shouldn’t use Facebook because it invites unwanted male attention, Tawar said, a consequence he described as “just natural.” His classmate Pravin Jangda said it’s riskier for girls to use Facebook because “it’s a question of their family’s honor if somebody takes their pictures and misuses them in any way.”

Even indirect participation by women is frowned upon. Reena Yadav, a high schooler from Bara, told BuzzFeed News that after her brother posted a picture of the two of them together, members of her extended family called to ask him to take it down because she was in the photo.

India’s patriarchs find the idea of young women using the internet unsettling, say experts. “So for them, it’s very much about controlling and supervising young and unmarried women’s internet access,” said Anja Kovacs, director at the New Delhi–based Internet Democracy Project, an organization that works on issues of free speech, democracy, and social justice on the internet. “One of the big things that they’re scared of is seeing how the internet is a tool for empowerment” she said. “And with Facebook, in particular, they are also scared about things like people misusing the pictures of their daughters and sharing them elsewhere.”

A young woman putting herself out there on Facebook, therefore, doesn’t sit right in some parts of states like Haryana, for instance, where women traditionally cover their faces with their saris in front of family elders and male strangers.

Pranav Dixit / BuzzFeed News

This gender divide on the Indian internet is no surprise for big tech companies like Facebook and Google, which have been trying to get millions of people in emerging markets like India online. Google, for instance, runs a program called Internet Saathi in more than 200,000 Indian villages where it trains women to use the internet and smartphones (and, by extension, Google’s products). The women Google trains then go on to train other women in their villages.

“Sociocultural barriers like women not being allowed to use the internet were a key barrier when we started,” Neha Barjatya, who heads the program for Google in India, told BuzzFeed News. “The conventional thinking in these areas was that the internet wasn’t a place meant for women.”

Yet the response rate to the Internet Saathi program was low — women in patriarchal parts of the country weren’t allowed to travel far beyond their homes; some were discouraged from attending. So Google started putting smartphones on handcarts to gently introduce them to the women there.

Things have slowly changed: The share of internet users is now 3 in 10, up from 1 in 10 in 2015. Still, “There’s still a long way to go,” Barjatya admits.

Point of View’s Datta said tech companies need to fix other fundamental issues before they can narrow the gender gap. “Internet culture sucks sometimes,” she said. “There’s trolling, abuse, and harassment, and those aren’t things that people — and especially women — from India who are coming online for the first time in their lives have any experience dealing with. Connecting the next billion doesn’t mean that you just dump them into what can often be this toxic space online.”

Meanwhile, the ever-quickening pace of innovation and globalization means new ways to discreetly socialize are always emerging. “Have you used TikTok?” a smiling Saxena asked BuzzFeed News, referring to the Chinese app that’s sort of a mashup of Vine and Instagram and is becoming a huge hit with young people across India’s smaller towns and villages. “Nobody in my family knows about it yet. I love it!” ●

CORRECTION

Jan. 08, 2019, at 20:03 PM

Haryana has one of the lowest female-to-male ratios in India. An earlier version of this piece reversed the ratio.

CORRECTION

Jan. 13, 2019, at 18:54 PM

Anja Kovacs was misquoted in an earlier version of this post due to a transcription error.

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alamante · 7 years ago

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Joe Raedle via Getty Images

The White House proposed dramatically weakening fuel economy standards on Thursday, reversing the only major federal policy to reduce planet-warming emissions from the nation’s top source of greenhouse gas pollution.

The move would clear the way for vehicles to, by 2030, spew an addition 600 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere ― equivalent to the entire annual emissions of Canada.

The widely anticipated proposal from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation outlines what environmentalists see as a worst-case scenario for vehicle emissions. In April, then–EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt declared a landmark Obama-era regulation bringing U.S. fuel economy rules in line with the rest of the developed world “wrong,” calling the standards “too high.”

The regulation, which automakers agreed to in 2012, required passenger vehicles to average 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 — nearly double today’s standard. If fully implemented, over the course of the program, that rule would have reduced oil consumption by 12 billion barrels, halved tailpipe emissions and doubled fuel efficiency, saving consumers $3,200 to $5,700 in gasoline costs over a vehicle’s lifetime.

Instead, the new Trump administration standard aims to freeze 2020 standards through model year 2026. And in a break with the Republicans’ rhetorical reverence for states’ rights, the proposal would revoke a waiver allowing California to set its own vehicle standards, a longstanding provision in the Clean Air Act that grants special status to the Golden State, which is particularly prone to air quality problems.

The proposal marks a major victory for automakers, which profit handsomely from gas-guzzling vehicles, and oil producers, which risked losing trillions of dollars in revenue to the burgeoning electric car industry.

Automakers had scrambled to distance themselves from the scandal-struck EPA’s decision to reopen the emissions rules, insisting they supported stronger standards. Ford Motor Co.’s top executives had even called for “increasing clean car standards” in a blog post titled “A Measure of Progress.”

But executives from the auto industry’s top three trade associations flanked Pruitt at a press conference in April, praising the decision. For them, the announcement capped more than a year of lobbying.

Carlos Barria / Reuters

President Donald Trump outside the White House in March 2017. Automakers heavily lobbied his administration to roll back passenger vehicle fuel economy standards.

The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers began preparing to demand a break on fuel efficiency standards in the midst of the 2016 presidential election. Last year the group, commonly known as the Auto Alliance, spent $8.1 million on lobbying, a nearly 9 percent increase from the previous year, according to data collated by the Center for Responsive Politics. The other two trade groups that joined Pruitt in April similarly ramped up spending. The National Automobile Dealers Association shelled out a record $4.8 million on lobbying last year, and the Association of Global Automakers increased its lobbying expenditures by nearly 50 percent, to $3.5 million.

The demands showed a marked shift from 2012, when automakers, two of which had just received massive taxpayer-funded federal bailouts, agreed to increase standards after months of negotiations with federal and California regulators. But by 2016, fuel prices had fallen from a record high national average of $3.60 per gallon four years earlier, and Americans were once again buying gas guzzlers. Automakers insisted the landscape had changed. In April the EPA agreed. In a 38-page finding, the agency repudiated the Obama administration’s consideration of the social cost of carbon ― the health and environmental damage caused by emissions ― and energy security valuation.

Trucks and SUVs are more profitable for automakers. General Motors earns $35,000 in profit for each $73,000 Cadillac Escalade it sells, according to The Detroit News. By contrast, electric vehicles are generally half as profitable as cars with combustion engines, a Daimler executive admitted last year.

The auto companies are whistling past the graveyard that is the Chinese auto industry when they cease making efficient cars and switch over to mostly gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks. Daniel Becker, director of the Center for Auto Safety

Three weeks after the EPA said it would revise fuel economy standards, Ford, reporting a $1.7 billion quarterly profit, announced plans to discontinue all but two car models in favor of SUVs and trucks.

The intense focus on large, fuel-hungry vehicles comes amid a rapid shift toward electric and fuel-efficient cars in Japan, the European Union and China, the world’s largest auto market. China’s electric vehicle market is growing twice as fast as the United States’, and regulators in Beijing are considering banning combustion engines.

“The auto companies are whistling past the graveyard that is the Chinese auto industry when they cease making efficient cars and switch over to mostly gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks,” said Daniel Becker, the director of the Washington-based Safe Climate Campaign’s Center for Auto Safety. “It will pose problems for them even in the United States when gas prices do eventually rise.”

He blamed low demand for electric vehicles (EVs) on the auto industry, which spends roughly $15 billion a year on marketing that promotes pickup trucks and SUVs, including coveted and costly Super Bowl time slots. A study published in December in the journal Nature Energy found dealerships “were dismissive of EVs, misinformed shoppers on vehicle specifications, omitted EVs from the sales conversation and strongly oriented customers toward petrol and diesel vehicle options.”

But it’s the oil industry that may stand to gain most from the Trump administration’s new fuel economy rules. Adding 540 million electric vehicles by 2040 would cause oil demand to peak in the mid-2020s, wiping out $19 trillion in possible revenue for oil producers, according to a report released in May by Aurora Energy Research, based in Oxford, England.

“This is one of the most destructive policies in terms of increasing emissions,” said Luke Tonachel, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s director of clean vehicles and fuels. “Rolling back the standards is a giant giveaway to the oil industry at the expense of public health.”

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This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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