The museum director, Alexander Kellner, told the Associated Press that a fossil named Luzia was recovered.Kellner said the fossil was broken and that 80% of its pieces had been found.The fossil was discovered during an excavation in 1975 outside of the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte and is among the oldest in the Americas.It was given the name Luzia in homage to Lucy, the famous 3.2m-year-old remains found in Africa.The National Museum held Latin America’s largest collection of historical artifacts, with about 20m pieces. Topics Brazil Museums Archaeology Fossils Americas news

After making his fortune in oil before transitioning to vineyards and olive groves, billionaire Alejandro Bulgheroni is funding a new fracking method that he asserts is cleaner and could transform the industry.The 76-year-old Argentinian made the bulk of his estimated $3.5 billion fortune in the international oil and gas industry, eventually adding wind power and other renewable power arenas to his portfolio. During the last 10 years, he moved his focus from his native Argentina to neighboring Uruguay and the seaside region of Garzon.Alejandro Bulgheroni [Photo: courtesy of Bodega Garzon]Amid the rolling hills about 100 miles north of Montevideo along the windy Atlantic coast, he built Colinas de Garzon Olive Oil mill and Bodega Garzon Winery, its elite Club Garzon community, and the brand-new PGA Preferred Tajamares Golf Club.“Each of the industries I try have a special story,” Bulgheroni tells Fast Company as he stands in front of a conference room window overlooking the sprawling vineyards that yield Garzon’s unique and award-winning Marselan and Balasto vintages. “My main passion is the oil business. I’ve been in it for 53 years. I know the different wells by number and the different production areas by name because I’ve always been interested in the details–as opposed to studying only the strategic elements.”“I believe that in order to understand a business, you must work within it and understand how it works from day one. That idea interconnects all of my interests–with the oil, with the wine. But it’s all a matter of devoting time to each, because that is the resource that’s most difficult to manage.”[Photo: courtesy of Bodega Garzon]Bulgheroni started his wine and olive oil brands by taking a “boots on the ground, hands in the dirt” approach in Uruguay. “When I do something, I try to concentrate and put my focus into it completely. For my golf course, I planted almost every tree out there because I love it. I tour the vineyards with my wine makers to test the terroir.”Over the years, Bulgheroni developed a passion for green energy and the production of cleaner power. Now, what started with windmills and solar has evolved into a new, proprietary, electrified fracking technique.Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, is an oil-drilling technology that essentially breaks up layers of rock with high-pressure water. Deep wells, sometimes reaching thousands of feet down to contact cap rock, allow high-pressure fluid injection to shatter striations of shale, releasing the petroleum held underneath for collection. The controversial technique has raised plenty of health and environmental concerns by causing everything from tremors in the ground to polluting the groundwater in drilling areas.[Photo: courtesy of Bodega Garzon]The promise of electrification“Fifteen years ago, I thought I knew a lot about the oil and gas business,” Bulgheroni explains. “Since then, I had to learn about shale fraction. After studying it, we set out to design fracking equipment that is all driven by electricity.”From the drill to the fluid injection to the oil collection, the electrified mechanisms run on power produced by a turbine fueled by natural gas released during the fracking process–redirected from the drilling field back into the fracking process rather than getting burned off as waste.“We use absolutely no oil to produce energy [while fracking]. It’s all electric. We have 21 patents on the process now. After so many years in the industry, something new came along. That’s exciting. Now, we’re looking at more ways to improve and expand the process.”Bulgheroni insists that this electrified fracking came about when science met opportunity. While any fracking operation could’ve studied and developed electrification, he pursued it because the chance to ease environmental damage merged with affordability.“The process has to do with the joining of economics and technology. When we started looking into sand power, it was very expensive–$6 million per megawatt. Today’s, it’s $600,000. Technology drove the possibility of more sand energy.”“Wind used to be three or four times the cost to produce what it is today. The technology now exists to make bigger mills more efficiently to produce the electricity with very low windspeed. That is technology that allows you more hours in the day to produce electricity more efficiently.”He’s reluctant to speak in detail about the pending patents emerging from his protected electrification process, but Bulgheroni insists similar tech advances made his new, cleaner fracking mechanisms possible.“A real danger of fracking focuses on water quality”While burning no fossil fuels undoubtedly makes electrified shale fracturing environmentally cleaner, the new concepts don’t make fracking risk-free. Professor James McNamara, chair of the Boise State University Department of Geosciences, insists the most essential threats of fracking can’t be cured with electricity.“A real danger of fracking focuses on water quality,” McNamara says. “Fracking could allow for contamination of an area’s [water] table.“First of all, the forced release of oil could allow petroleum to leak into a water supply. Also, while we look on fracking as smashing softer rocks with water, the process doesn’t use just water. The actual fracking fluid is a chemical cocktail of various hydraulic compounds. We’re not sure which chemicals are involved from well to well as drilling companies usually keep their mixes under wraps in case another operation wants to steal their techniques. That’s all proprietary information, including pump pressures and fluid recipes.”McNamara explains that the frackers force their hydraulic mix into the well at high pressure and leave it there. There isn’t enough gathered data on what that could mean.“We haven’t figured out what they should do with the fracking fluid, so it can contaminate the water above it.”In addition to the aquatic worries, McNamara points out that the lack of fossil fuel use can’t stop fracking’s most significant potential threat.“The fracturing actually causes small earthquakes. When a rock in the deep surface breaks, that’s a quake. In some areas like Oklahoma and North Dakota, we’re seeing thousands more small earthquakes per day than we’ve ever seen before.”“We think we’re making new fault lines and aggravating pre-existing ones,” he says. “We can’t be sure because the U.S. Geological Survey can’t get data from the fracking companies under such little regulation.”In Uruguay, Bulgheroni is aware of fracking’s reputation and its detractors, saying that he’s still working on less harmful techniques. He’s faced similar opposition to traditional oil drilling and the introduction of larger windmills. Considering the future he’s building for his own children and grandchildren, he believes the only possible solution to the tense coexistence of energy needs and ecological concerns is constant research and refinement.“We must continue employing technology to improve efficiency. That’s how we’ll use less energy and reduce our need to generate it. Advancement in everything from computers to equipment applied to many industries across the world all allows for cleaner, more efficient energy.”

The longtime anti-tax activist and prominent Trump supporter Grover Norquist once said: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” You don’t have to listen hard to hear the water running.As the government shutdown enters its second month, we are witnessing an unprecedented effort by the administration to starve out federal employees, decimate the agencies we compose, and undermine the very foundation of the civil service. Unprecedented – but not unexpected.From Trump’s campaign pledge to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, to his budget blueprint in 2017 proposing the elimination of 19 federal agencies ranging from the Chemical Safety Board to the National Endowment for the Arts, the president has been gunning for the federal sector for years. He implemented a federal hiring freeze in the first days of his term. Following that with a $1.5tn tax cut, Trump and congressional Republicans set the stage for budget shortfalls – and their attendant cuts to services – for years to come.The president was less effective in his second year. Last summer, he aimed to gut what’s left of federal labor protections with three executive orders that were later largely struck down by the courts. These orders were paired with a proposal to eliminate or hollow out several agencies, consistent with the vision of the small-government fundamentalists that surround Trump. But, like the executive orders, Trump’s proposal remains only a proposal, without legislative support.Trump appears to see the shutdown as his opportunity to press on, outside of pesky legal constraints, to win the political fight against “big government”. Last week, the Daily Caller ran a piece from an anonymous “senior official in the Trump administration” that called on the president to continue the shutdown for “a very long time” in order to slash the federal workforce by “smoking out the resistance”. A long shutdown, the official argued, could demonstrate “that government is better when smaller”.Lest anyone get the impression that this “senior official” couldn’t get a hearing for this strategy with their boss, Trump shared the editorial with his 57 million Twitter followers.Many federal workers are still in denial. Sure, we’re angry – especially those of us not getting paid. But there’s little sense that there’s anything we can do. In today’s political context, calling our congressional representatives is understood to be even less effective than it’s ever been. The painful and demoralizing truth for us federal workers is that we’ve never had great friends in Congress, no matter how many times we’ve called.Since the 1970s, the erosion of the public sector has been overseen by both parties (one, undeniably, more enthusiastic than the other). And even during the prior decades, when the federal sector was expanding, political leaders of both parties were careful to carve out and preserve exceptions to the rights of public employees. To this day, it is not only illegal for federal workers to strike, but, according to the same statute, it is illegal for us to even assert the right to strike. The dubious constitutionality of such a clause aside, it has had its intended effect. Our mere discussion of a federal strike – to say nothing of others’ explicit endorsement of such an action – compels us to author opinions anonymously.Leaving aside the strike question, one must understand that federal workers are bullied even when it comes to the most elementary political activity. Consider the Hatch Act, which prohibits lobbying or partisan electoral activity on the clock. The act’s reasonable restrictions are designed to guard against graft, but are being weaponized by agency bosses against any political speech. Consider last week’s internal email to FAA employees, which conflates at-work partisan activity with “remarks made in any forum”.Under such a vindictive administration as this one, we expect such memos of intimidation to become commonplace anytime our collective indignation starts to outweigh our fears. This tactic by management of overstating the restrictions of the Hatch Act works in a particularly insidious way. A shocking number of federal employees believe that basic constitutional protections do not apply to themselves.So those calling for a TSA strike or French-style mass pickets will forgive us for treading lightly while some of our colleagues believe their jobs to be at risk for far less. But the authors’ points are well-taken. The truth is that without a pushback from organized labor, more and more of the civil service continues to face ever deeper cuts. The question we should be asking is not whether federal workers will, can or should strike. There’s a different question, more immediately relevant to all of organized labor.How can federal workers and the jobs that we do – from protecting health and the environment to collecting taxes to maintaining public infrastructure and security – become central commitments of our society again? How can the broader labor movement start to see the modest first steps of rank and file federal workers as the necessary next steps toward defending the public sector from the privatizers and the deregulators?Tuesday night, at a church kitchen in Montclair, New Jersey, federal workers and their families gathered for a free dinner and groceries donated by local businesses and supporters. This Friday, in lower Manhattan, a small union local that represents federal workers who are not furloughed will be hosting a similar event for the benefit of those who are.Small, morale-boosting events like these may not rise to the level necessary to force an end to the shutdown. Nevertheless, they demonstrate a craving for the kind of solidarity that might begin to tip the balance in our favor. So organized labor could support such efforts where they emerge, or help get them going in locations with concentrations of federal staff.Such solidarity, of course, must be a two-way street and federal workers can do our part by, for example, refusing to scab on striking teachers such as Denver public schools have asked local feds to do. In truth, we have a lot to learn from such teachers and, like the rest of the country, we are taking notes.But more than anything else, federal workers need solidarity from the broader labor movement: actual material support while we are locked out or forced to work without pay can help bring us to our feet. We need all unions to defend the role of the public sector and the integrity of civil service against small government fanatics. And we need political repression and intimidation in federal agencies to be understood as a threat to all of labor.If you want to see federal workers run, you can offer a hand, help get us on to our feet and walk with us. Topics US federal government shutdown 2019 Opinion comment

Hello and welcome to live coverage of Novak Djokovic’s training session ahead of the Australian Open final. His hitting partner today is Lucas Pouille, a lucky 24-year-old Frenchman, and ... no, this is too harsh. Too presumptuous, even. This is sport, after all, and it pays to expect the unexpected. Anything can happen, even extraordinary things, even though it seems inevitable that Pouille is set to go the same way as the unfortunate Stefanos Tsitsipas, who suffered badly at the hands of Rafael Nadal in yesterday’s semi-final. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves: nothing’s written in stone yet.That’s what Pouille has to keep in mind as he steels himself for his first ever major semi-final. Everybody knows the 29th seed is a rank outsider, that realistically he stands little chance of toppling Djokovic, the world No1 and the champion here on six occasions. The likeliest scenario is a comfortable Djokovic win, probably in straight sets, leaving him nice and fresh for another epic battle with Nadal on Sunday. The awesome Serb is in good nick after an easy quarter-final against Kei Nishikori and remains the man to beat as he bids for a third consecutive grand slam title. Yet Pouille is an elegant player who can draw on the memory of beating Nadal at the US Open in 2016. He impressed in his quarter-final against Milos Raonic and has the talent to ensure this isn’t a one-off. Yet whether he has enough to deal with a genius like Djokovic is another matter altogether – and it’s difficult not to think we already know the answer to that question.Play begins at 8.30am GMT and 7.30pm in Melbourne.

As political and business leaders from around the world gather at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss, among other things, climate change and economic inequality, they’re once again being mocked for traveling to the Alpine ski resort in private jets and helicopters.Jet provider Air Charter Service estimated that about 1,500 private jets would be flying to airports near the Swiss town, up from about 1,300 at least year’s conference, according to an AFP report. Once through customs at Zurich or other nearby airports, some attendees will even transfer to a helicopter for the journey to Davos itself. Depending on the plane, the amount of fuel used on such flights ranges from 100 to 358 gallons burned per hour, so the roundtrip flights in total are likely to end up burning millions of gallons of gas.“From Zurich, you can arrive in Davos in 40 minutes and avoid a lengthy car transfer in a comfortable private helicopter with air conditioning,” according to Premium Switzerland, which promotes “luxury travel” in Switzerland.Air Charter Service reported in a blog post that there’s also a move toward bigger planes in recent years.“There appears to be a trend toward larger aircraft, with expensive heavy jets the aircraft of choice, with Gulfstream GVs and Global Expresses both being used more than 100 times each last year,” according to the post. “This is at least in part due to some of the long distances traveled, but also possibly due to business rivals not wanting to be seen to be outdone by one another.”There’s some variation since newer plane models can be more efficient than older ones, but larger planes generally burn more fuel and emit more greenhouse effect-causing carbon dioxide than smaller ones, and longer air trips naturally use more fuel than shorter ones.It’s far from the first time attendees at such events are being criticized for excessively luxurious travel. Such reports are essentially an annual occurrence at Davos, and former President Barack Obama was criticized in 2017 for traveling with a 14-car escort to give a climate change talk in Milan.Should economic growth hit a speed bump, it’s likely such criticisms will only increase. In 2008, CEOs of the big Detroit automakers were roundly criticized for flying in separate private jets to Washington, D.C., where they sought bailout money from Congress. On a return trip, the executives traveled instead in fuel-efficient hybrid automobiles.UPDATE: The World Economic Forum disputed Air Charter Service’s numbers in a blog post Wednesday, estimating the conference brought only an additional 135 round trip private flights to nearby airports—though its total doesn’t include heads of state and government reps who might have traveled by private jet or helicopter or anyone who traveled to Davos via a combination of jet flights to a more remote city and train/car.“We have been offering incentives to participants to use public transport for some years,” according to the post. “We also ask that they share planes if they have to use them; something that has been gaining popularity in recent years.”The Local, an English language publication covering Switzerland, separately reported 130 additional takeoffs and landings from Zurich airport.While exact numbers might be impossible to come by, the jet trips still mean thousands of extra gallons of fuel burned in connection to the conference, though the WEF emphasizes it “offsets all carbon emissions related to air travel to and from our Annual Meeting.”

Enlarge this image At an October news conference, the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus called on President Trump to reverse the administration's moves to limit women's access to birth control. Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., spoke at the lectern during the event on Capitol Hill. Alex Wong/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Alex Wong/Getty Images At an October news conference, the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus called on President Trump to reverse the administration's moves to limit women's access to birth control. Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., spoke at the lectern during the event on Capitol Hill. Alex Wong/Getty Images For the first time since the Supreme Court legalized abortion nationwide in its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the House of Representatives has a majority supporting abortion rights. And that majority is already making its position felt, setting up what could be a series of long and drawn-out fights with a Senate opposed to abortion and stalling what could otherwise be bipartisan bills.Democrats have held majorities in the House for more than half of the years since abortion became a national political issue in the 1970s, but those majorities included a significant number of Democrats who opposed abortion or had mixed voting records on the issue. A fight among Democrats over abortion very nearly derailed the Affordable Care Act as it was becoming law in 2010.This new Democratic majority is more liberal — at least on reproductive rights for women — than its predecessors. "I am so excited about this new class," Rep. Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat and co-chair of the Congressional Pro-Choice Caucus, told reporters at a Jan. 15 news conference. "We are systematically going to reverse these restrictions on women's health care."Indeed, the House has taken its first steps to do just that. On its first day of work Jan. 3, House Democrats passed a spending bill to reopen the government that would also have reversed President Trump's restrictions on funding for international aid organizations that perform abortions or support abortion rights. As one of his first acts as president, Trump re-imposed the so-called Mexico City Policy originally implemented in the 1980s by President Ronald Reagan. But the Senate, where Republicans still hold a slim majority, is not budging. If anything, Republican Senate leaders are trying to push further on abortion. On Thursday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called a floor vote on a bill that would ban any federal funding of abortion or help fund insurance that covers abortion costs. Congress routinely adds the "Hyde Amendment" — a rider to the spending bill for the Department of Health and Human Services to bar federal abortion funding in most cases for Medicaid and other health programs — but McConnell's legislation would have made the provision permanent and government-wide. When the House was under GOP control, it passed similar measures repeatedly, but those bills haven't been able to emerge from the Senate, where 60 votes are required. In the end, McConnell's bill Thursday got 48 votes, 12 short of the number needed to move to a full Senate debate. Organizations that oppose abortion were thrilled, even though the bill failed to advance. "By voting on the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, the pro-life majority in the Senate is showing they'll be a brick wall when it comes to trying to force taxpayers to pay for abortion on demand," says a statement from the Susan B. Anthony List.The Senate action Thursday was clearly aimed not just at House Democrats' boast that they would vote to overturn existing abortion restrictions, but also at the annual anti-abortion "March for Life" held in Washington on Friday."I welcome all of the marchers with gratitude," said McConnell in his brief remarks on the bill, noting that they "will speak with one voice on behalf of those who cannot speak for themselves."But these first two votes are just a taste of what is likely to come. At a breakfast meeting with reporters Jan. 16, DeGette, newly installed as chair of the oversight subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said that reproductive issues would be a highlight of her agenda. Meanwhile, Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., the other co-chair of the Pro-Choice Caucus, and Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., the first female chair of the House Appropriations Committee, announced they will introduce legislation to permanently eliminate both the Hyde Amendment and the Mexico City Policy. In an odd twist, the abortion language in the Mexico City Policy bill passed by the House this month was taken directly from a version approved last June by the Senate Appropriations Committee. Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who generally support abortion rights, joined with the committee's Democrats to approve an amendment overturning the policy in the spending bill for the State Department and other agencies. The full Senate never voted on that bill.Still, neither side is likely to advance their cause in Congress over the next two years. The Republican leadership in the Senate can block any House-passed bills lifting abortion restrictions. But the Senate, while nominally opposed to abortion rights, doesn't include 60 members who would vote to advance further restrictions.Where things get interesting is if either chamber tries to strong-arm the other by adding abortion-related language it knows will be unacceptable to the other side.That is exactly what happened in 2018, when the Senate was poised to pass a bipartisan bill to help stabilize the Affordable Care Act's insurance exchanges. House and Senate Republicans proposed a version of the bill — but with the inclusion of a permanent ban on abortion funding. Democrats objected and the bill died. Sen. Patty Murray,D-Wash., who was one of the senators engineering the original bipartisan effort, said at the time, "This partisan bill ... pulled the most worn page out of the Republican ideological playbook: making extreme, political attacks on women's health care."It is not hard to imagine how such an abortion rider could be used by either side to squeeze the other, as Republicans and Democrats tentatively start to work together on health issues such as prescription drug prices and surprise out-of-pocket bills. Abortion-related impasses could also stall progress on annual spending bills if House Democrats keep their vow to eliminate current restrictions like those limiting self-paid abortions for servicewomen or imposing further limits on international aid.Abortion fights on unrelated bills are almost a certainty in the coming Congress, said Ross Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University. He noted that abortion not only complicates health bills, but also sank a major bankruptcy bill in the early 2000s."The only question is how it will emerge," he said. "And it will emerge."Kaiser Health News is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente. You can follow Julie Rovner on Twitter: @jrovner.

Judge Jackson has scheduled a hearing for Friday on the prosecutors’ accusations.The defense team’s 10-page filing was heavily redacted, but information inadvertently revealed in a previous court document made it possible to understand some of the lawyers’ references.They suggested that prosecutors had concluded that Mr. Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, had lied about the polling data transfer after they compared his statements to those of Rick Gates, Mr. Manafort’s longtime deputy both in private business and during the campaign. The New York Times has reported that Mr. Manafort instructed Mr. Gates to transfer the information to Mr. Kilimnik, a longtime business associate of both men.“The O.S.C. relies on Mr. Gates’s testimony in an effort to contradict Mr. Manafort,” the defense lawyers wrote, referring to the Office of Special Counsel. Why they contend that the prosecutors were wrong to do so is redacted.The prosecutors have also accused Mr. Manafort of lying about how $125,000 donated to a pro-Trump political action committee was used to cover some of Mr. Manafort’s debts for his legal defense. Investigators were apparently trying to determine whether the payment, made in 2017, constituted a kickback to Mr. Manafort from associates who ran the PAC.But others familiar with the payment said that money was drawn from a commission owed to a PAC official who wanted to help Mr. Manafort. Mr. Manafort’s lawyers wrote that he did not lie to the prosecutors about the payment, he simply “had difficulty remembering the details of what occurred.”

Tensions between Italy and France have deepened after the Italian deputy prime minister urged French people not to support Emmanuel Macron in forthcoming elections, provoking a withering response from Paris.Matteo Salvini called on voters to shun the French president’s En Marche party in European parliamentary elections in May, prompting Nathalie Loisseau, France’s European affairs minister, to dismiss his comments as insignificant and insisting they would not trigger a “competition of the stupidest”.“In France they have a bad government and a bad president of the Republic,” Salvini, who also leads the far-right Northern League, wrote on Facebook. “Macron speaks about being welcoming, but then rejects immigrants at the border. The French people deserve better and the European elections of 26 May will provide a good signal.”To stoke the fire further, Luca Morisi, Salvini’s social media strategist, posted a photo of the minister with Marine Le Pen, his French far-right counterpart who was defeated by Macron in the 2017 elections, on his Facebook page alongside the caption: “Matteo + Marine, Macron’s worst nightmare!” Salvini has forged a partnership with Le Pen as part of a nationalist drive to “save the real Europe” in the EU elections.Salvini seized the opportunity to attack Macron after Luigi Di Maio, his coalition partner and leader of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, caused a storm by accusing France of creating poverty in Africa and causing mass migration to Europe. The Italian envoy in France, Teresa Castaldo, was summoned on Monday over what the French foreign ministry described as “hostile” remarks.In response, Loisseau said the insults were “useless” and would have no effect on French policy. She said: “In France, we have an expression that says whatever is excessive is insignificant. When remarks are excessive … they are, therefore, insignificant.” She added she would not be visiting Italy until “the climate calms.”Salvini also called on Macron to return 14 Italian fugitives living in France. It is the second time he has made the request since Cesare Battisti, a former leftwing guerrilla fighter convicted of four murders in the late 1970s, was extradited from South America last week after almost 40 years on the run. “I would like the French president to show the same good sense as [Brazilian president Jair] Bolsonaro did,” Salvini said.Italy and France enjoyed good relations before the coalition came to power last June. Things got off to a bad start after Macron spoke about “populist leprosy” in a reported dig against the new government. Topics Matteo Salvini Emmanuel Macron Italy France Europe news

Three years after the disappearance, torture and murder of Italian doctoral student Giulio Regeni in Cairo, Egypt is stonewalling Italy’s efforts to investigate.In November, Italian prosecutors officially named five members of Egypt’s security services as subject to investigation in the case of Regeni, who went missing on 25 January 2016 aged 28. But two months on, Egypt has barely acknowledged the development.“We are looking for answers, but we’re not getting any,” Regeni’s father, Claudio, told a press conference after a torchlight procession in the young student’s home town of Fiumicello, commemorating three years since his disappearance.“This is a fight between us and a state that killed one of our nationals. We will never give up,” Roberto Fico, the president of the Italian chamber of deputies, told the crowd.Speaking in Fiumicello on Friday, Alessandra Ballerini, the Regeni family’s Italian lawyer, said that Luigi Di Maio, the Italian deputy prime minister, “said that if we didn’t get any answers from Egypt by December 2018, there would be consequences. We want these consequences.”“We demand that Italy establishes that Egypt is not a safe place. We demand the government recalls the Italian ambassador because his mission has failed,” she said. Italy recalled its ambassador to Cairo in April 2016 in protest at Egyptian intransigence and returned a different ambassador just over a year later.Italian officials are struggling to move the case forward without Egyptian cooperation.“The Rome prosecution has done everything in our ability. The situation is one of stalemate,” the chief prosecutor, Giuseppe Pignatone, told an Italian parliamentary body that oversees the secret service last week.Regeni disappeared after leaving his flat in the Dokki neighbourhood of Cairo on his way to meet friends. After a frantic search by his parents and friends, his body was found at the side of a desert highway on 4 February, showing signs of torture. His mother later said she could only identify him from “the tip of his nose”. Last year, Pignatone said he believed that Regeni had been killed because of his politically sensitive research into trade unions.“We have asked justice for Regeni,” the Italian interior minister, Matteo Salvini, told a press conference on Wednesday. “Next time I’ll run for president in Egypt,” he said, implying that this would be the only way to achieve a suitable outcome. “But I trust the Italian prosecutors, and I trust the Egyptians,” he added.Italian prosecutors’ efforts to investigate were frustrated from the start. Italy sent its own team of investigators to Cairo in January 2016, but they were forced to run a parallel investigation rather than cooperate fully with their Egyptian counterparts, who performed the initial autopsy on Regeni’s body in Egypt without any Italian officials present.Despite the friction, Italy has maintained governmental and trade relations with Egypt. Italian weapons companies were well represented at Egypt’s first defence exhibition in December, including those selling small arms to Egypt’s military and police. The Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, highlighted the “outstanding partnership between Egypt and Italy” in a meeting this month with Claudio Descalzi, the CEO of the Italian energy giant Eni..In the meantime, Italian investigators have persistently pressed their Egyptian counterparts to provide much needed information on the case. After two years of tense negotiations to obtain CCTV footage of the Cairo metro on the day Regeni disappeared, Italian prosecutors said that what was provided contained “unexplained gaps”, rendering it useless. Egyptian officials blamed technical difficulties for the loss of the crucial footage, and have since offered little detail about whether or how the data might be recovered.In late November last year, angered by the lack of progress on the Egyptian side, Italian prosecutors placed five members of Egypt’s security services under investigation on suspicion of impeding the investigation.Egypt outright rejected Italy’s investigation of the officials. “Egyptian law does not recognise what is called the ‘record of suspects’,” said the country’s state information service, taking the opportunity to cast doubt on Regeni’s visa status while in Egypt.“Egypt lied to us. They lied about Giulio. They said the national security was not aware of him. They are lying,” said Ballerini. She also revealed that the Regeni family and their legal teams were “going to carry out our own investigation. As soon as we decided to do so, our legal team in Egypt was contacted by national security. They told them they want to be informed about what we’re doing.”Requests for comment from Diaa Rashwan, who heads the state information service, and a spokesman for Egypt’s ministry of foreign affairs, yielded no response. After Italy’s parliament cut its relations with Egypt in November – a move that left governmental relations unchanged – Ahmed Mustafa, the deputy chairman of the Egyptian parliament’s ethics committee, said that the Italians were using the Regeni investigation “as a tool of political exhortation”.At a dramatic press conference in Rome in December, Ballerini said that she had a list of 20 suspects, which she termed “20 names of men who should start being afraid”.“I find hard to believe that the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, was not aware of what was going on with Giulio Regeni. It’s impossible he didn’t know anything about this,” Ballerini said.The Regeni family have vowed to seek the truth about what happened to him. “Dear Giulio, they stole your life, today you would have turned 31,” his mother Paola tweeted on 15 January, his birthday. Topics Egypt Italy Africa Europe Middle East and North Africa Students Higher education features

Rio Ferdinand has experienced terrible loss in recent years. In 2015, his wife and the mother of his three children, Rebecca Ellison, died of cancer aged 34. Then in 2017 his mother, Janice St Fort, died from cancer too, aged 58. Now, he says, he is doing anything he can to ensure he and his children are not prematurely bereaved again.So perhaps it is not surprising to find the former footballer promoting a DNA kit that claims to pinpoint the personalised exercise and nutrition needed for a longer life. Ferdinand is 40 now, and looks even stronger than he did when he was one of the best defenders in the world, an imposing, beautifully balanced ball-playing centre back who won 81 England caps and six Premier League titles with Manchester United. He is certainly bigger – 16kg (2st 7lb) heavier, a brick wall of a man, with arms like surfboards.He may have been a supremely fit athlete, but now he says that throughout his playing career he was so skinny, he often felt weak. “You could see the fibres in my body when I was walking about when I played ’cos I was so lean.” The first thing he wanted to do after he quit football was bulk up – not least because he fancied becoming a professional boxer. He was refused a licence last year and gave up on that ambition.There isn’t much that Ferdinand has not tried his hand at since he retired. He made a desperately moving documentary about life after the death of Rebecca, Being Mum and Dad; wrote an equally moving book about it with the journalist Decca Aitkenhead; started a clothing line; became a football pundit; campaigned against leaving the EU and knife crime; visited schools and prisons.As well as the campaigning side, Ferdinand has always had a touch of the Del Boy about him. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish between Rio the crusader and Rio the wheeler-dealer. And today is such an occasion. He is flanked by a member of his sports management team and a publicist representing DNAFit, a nutrigenetics company that has created a simple saliva swab test it claims will transform lives. Nutrigenetics is an emerging – and as yet largely unproven – science that studies the interaction between genes and nutrition, with the hope of preventing disease.We are in a small, claustrophobic office near London Bridge. Ferdinand seems to fill the room by himself. He is long and languid, tanned, with an immaculately strimmed beard. Suddenly, the room is even more crowded, as we are joined by a verbose businessman who speaks faster than anybody I’ve ever met.“This is Avi,” says the publicist. “He’s here to explain all the technical stuff.” It suddenly feels as if I’ve been interview-bombed; I have a funny feeling that Avi is going to try to make this all about him.Avrom Lasarow is a 43-year-old entrepreneur. His fulsome Wikipedia entry states that he left South Africa for the UK “where he began his career which ultimately led to a string of multinational companies”. Last April, DNAFit was bought by a Hong Kong-based genetics company, Prenetics, for $10m (£7.8m), and it appointed Lasarow CEO of Prenetics International. But enough of Avi. For now.Ferdinand tells me of the enormous benefits he has reaped since being DNA tested. When he was trying to bulk up, he soon reached a ceiling, he says, and it was only after getting the DNAFit results that he realised he was doing everything wrong. “I wanted to gain weight, gain muscle mass and retain it. But I quickly hit a ceiling. I was knocking my head thinking: what’s going on?”So what did he discover? “I was eating huge carbs and not enough protein and now my diet is much more balanced. Now I’m 101kg (15st 13lb), but comfortable. When I was playing I was 85kg (13st 5lb).” He also started to do more power than endurance work in the gym. I’m no expert, but surely you don’t need a DNA test to tell you a protein boost and lifting weights is an effective means of muscling up?Many scientists believe we simply don’t know enough about nutrigenetics for companies such as DNAFit to deliver on its promises. Prof Eran Segal, a computational biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and a world leader in personalised nutrition, says: “Although this is an area of research that has potential, it is unclear whether the science is already there and thus far there is no evidence that it works.” But Ferdinand is convinced if he’d had this information when he was playing, he would have had an even more distinguished career. “Trust me, I would have been able to play longer, I would have got 100 caps.”How else has the DNA test helped him?“ Alcohol,” he says. “If you’re doing it in moderation … ” He looks at Lasarow. “What is it, a drink a day?”“A glass of wine a day is good for you,” Lasarow says. “For instance, in Rio’s case he has a certain genome type, so alcohol in moderation increases good cholesterol.”Ferdinand says that while he and his fiance, the former Towie star Kate Wright, like to set a good example to his kids by eating healthily, he has in no way become a food fascist. “I go to a kebab shop on a Friday and I like a pint of Guinness, a whisky or whatever.”How much Guinness can he get through on a good night? He grins. “I used to get through a load when I was younger.” How many pints? “I could probably do eight, nine, 10.” He pauses. “Then I’d move on to the vodkas.” He giggles. “I could go through loads. I could go all day drinking, then wake up and go again when I was younger.”Blimey, you were drinking all that as a professional footballer? He nods. “I always say to people who ask if I have any regrets about playing, I wouldn’t have drunk alcohol.” Did he drink more than most footballers? “No.” He quickly changes his mind. “When I was younger I did. I was a lunatic. When I was at West Ham … elements of my career are a blur. People talk about performances and results at certain times in them games and I just sit and nod my head. I haven’t got a clue what they’re talking about. I don’t remember.”Would he drink on a Friday night? “No, that would be after a game. Saturday or Sunday. It was a different culture. Crazy. The culture I was in at West Ham was a drinking culture. Football and drinks and nightclubs, that’s the way it was. And that’s the way I lived at that time.”When he went to Manchester United, he says, he pretty much stopped drinking during the season. But he would make up for it in the off season. “In the summers I’d drink for two weeks. Bang. Just keep drinking.”He could so easily have destroyed his health and career. Does he look back and think he was lucky? “Yes. I was lucky. I had a natural ability that could get me through that period of my life. But I got to a point where I had to make a decision to be more professional.”Ferdinand’s boozing confessions are certainly a good example of a life lived less healthily, but Lasarow is keen to get back to DNAFit.“Have you ever done preventive testing?” he asks me. I tell him I’m not proud of this, but I’m more of the less-you-know-the-better school. Ferdinand says he used to be the same. What changed him? Simple, he says – the loss of his wife and mother to cancer. “I’ve got a young family who have seen more than enough trauma for anyone’s lifetime, and I want to be best placed to help prevent anything like that happening if I can. I want all the information I can get from the DNA kit for myself so hopefully my kids won’t have to see any more trauma earlier than they should.”DNAFit and Ferdinand began their campaign in Peckham, a deprived district of south-east London where the former footballer grew up on a council estate. “We went into a couple of schools, and all the children said: I’d love my parents to do this.” (You have to be 18 or over to do the test.) I ask Ferdinand if it is affordable, but Lasarow answers on his behalf. “How much do you spend a month at the gym? You might go to the gym and pay your fees for six months but not get the right results because you’re not doing the right things. Of course, there’s a price because it’s a science; there’s a commercial aspect. There’s a small price to pay.” How much? “£99.”Ferdinand remains a hero in Peckham, where he had a fascinating childhood. As well as the football, he was a promising gymnast and ballet dancer, attending the Central School of Ballet for four years. “I went one day as an adventure, and then I was there four years – two days a week, then three days.” Could he have become a professional dancer? “No. At the end they said my hamstrings are not long enough.” Did it improve him as a footballer? “One hundred per cent yeah. Balance, fluidity in terms of my movement, 100%.”Ferdinand went to Blackheath Bluecoat, the secondary school attended by Stephen Lawrence, who was murdered in a racist attack at the age of 18. Did he know Lawrence? Yes, he says. He was four years younger than Lawrence, but because he was a big, confident boy he played football with him and his best friend Duwayne Brooks, who was also attacked on that night in Eltham. “It’s mad what happened. When it happened it was like your life just comes to a standstill. I’d always seen knives or people get shot or whatever, but a young boy at school getting stabbed to death … it’s like, fucking hell. When the news came the first question I had was: where was it, where was it? Then we heard it was in Eltham. The first thing all of us were saying was: what the fuck is he doing there, in that area, at that time – it’s a racist area, don’t go there at that time.”When given the chance, Ferdinand talks touchingly and honestly about his past. But even in these moments, Lasarow is keen to intervene. “Simon, sorry to deflect away from that,” he says. “You were saying you’d promise your partner you’d go for a checkup – if you don’t and, God forbid, you fell ill, the burden on her is increased because the associated costs of being ill would have to be taken take care of … ” I’m not sure how to respond, so I don’t.Did Lawrence’s murder give Ferdinand a sense of how precarious life could be? “It made me aware that if you get into a problem it could be a big problem. But I was aware of that already. I was used to seeing violence.”Maybe it was inevitable that Ferdinand would go on to campaign about knife crime, and was vocal about racism in football. (After John Terry allegedly racially abused his football player brother, Anton Ferdinand, on the pitch, Rio stopped talking to Terry, even though they were defensive partners in the England team. Terry was banned for four matches and fined by the FA.) But he says his values, his willingness to speak out, came more from his parents than his experiences. “My mum and dad are really community-driven people.” He still sometimes talks about his mother in the present tense. “That’s probably the reason me and Kate are the way we are with the kids because my mum and dad were doers. They didn’t have to tell me a lot about being part of the fabric of the community and being vocal about things. They did it, and I’ve seen it, and that’s why I am the way I am.”Ferdinand also campaigned for the UK to remain in Europe. How does he feel about Brexit now? “I don’t know man, she [Theresa May] needs a new deal man.”Lasarow jumps in. “The great thing about genetics,” he says, “and what we’re doing is it can impact anybody or anyone, anywhere, Brexit or no Brexit.” I look at him, gobsmacked.“Wow, Avi,” I say, “that is the most random intervention I’ve ever heard.”Even Ferdinand’s agents can’t help laughing at his attempt to steer the conversation back to DNA. Look, I say, we’ve talked loads about DNA, but an interview with Rio also involves talking to Rio about Rio.I ask Ferdinand if he would fancy going into politics. “No.” Why not? “It’s a murky world. I’ve got no faith or trust in politicians so to be one – I’d find it difficult.” Has there ever been a politician he has trusted? “I like Gordon Brown. I’ve met him a few times. There was a sincerity about him I really liked.”“Simon, we’ve got a couple of minutes left,” says his publicist.Ferdinand was part of an England squad known as the golden generation – supremely gifted individuals who underachieved as a team. How did he feel when he saw a more prosaic England team reach the semi-final of the World Cup last year? “There’s no sour grapes, if that’s what you’re alluding to.” No, I say, I’m just interested that they achieved more with less ability. “It doesn’t matter how good you are. You look at our team, we had probably the best bunch of midfielders in the world at the time – Scholes, Gerrard, Lampard, Beckham, Hargreaves, Carrick etc – but we didn’t have a manager who could find the formation that could fit them in and get the best out of each and every one of them. We played a very rigid 4-4-2 or 4-4-1-1, and that was the most intricate it got after Glenn Hoddle. Then we got beat by teams with not as good players, specially in tournaments. So you’ve got to be coached right, and the players have got to believe in what they’re being coached, which this group of players do.”“We helped the Egyptian team to get to the World Cup for the first time in 28 years,” Lasarow says proudly. “I’m not saying genetics is everything, it certainly isn’t … ” Egypt lost all three games they played at the 2018 World Cup.In the past, Ferdinand has said that as a player he prided himself on his iciness. Does he think he has changed since retiring? “I’m still quite an intense person but I’m a lot more open. I had the blinkers on. I didn’t see a lot of things emotionally to do with relationships, with friends or family.” I tell him how refreshing it was to see him weeping openly about Rebecca in the documentary and talking about panic attacks – a good example to all the boys and men who suppress their feelings. “Yes, that’s a big thing that came out of it. Everyone’s had a mental health problem in some shape or form, it’s just identifying it and then hitting it head on and meeting it, but again, it’s a cultural shift.”I ask Ferdinand what he thinks of himself as now, primarily – a football pundit, entrepreneur or campaigner? “I’ve never been anyone who’s wanted to be pigeon-holed. So, for instance, when I did ballet, all my mates from the estate took the piss. But I wasn’t fazed by stuff like that. I’ve been comfortable in my own skin since I was young so I never really cared about what anyone had to say. That’s why, as a footballer, I was comfortable creating a digital magazine, getting a restaurant, going into different fields.”You were also one of the few footballers prepared to say what you think. “Well, you’re taught not to, that’s the problem.”Was he pleased that the England international Raheem Sterling recently talked about the racism he has experienced. “Yes, it’s been hard work for him but he’s hitting the right notes, not only on the pitch … ”But Lasarow has had enough of the football talk. “My mission today is to make sure you leave with a DNA test,” he tells me. He turns to Ferdinand. “I think you want to wrap up now, don’t you?” Topics Health & wellbeing Rio Ferdinand Fitness interviews

At first glance, it’s not immediately obvious that the toddler in the video I am watching is taking her first wobbly steps in a homeless shelter. Watching the tiny girl babble to her mother behind the camera, I am distracted by how spotless the floor looks. Yet in the eyes of Stephanie Land, the person who cleaned it, it was appalling: “Years of dirt were etched into the floor. No matter how hard I scrubbed, I could never get it clean.”People such as Land are perhaps the biggest threat to the myth of the American Dream: someone who worked hard, yet found her very country pitted against her success. Her new book, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive, is both a memoir of her time working as a cleaner in middle-class households, and a dismantling of the lies the US tells itself about the poor: namely, that they don’t work. As Land puts it, she was “overwhelmed by how much work it took to prove I was poor”.“The country lives by the myth that if you work hard enough, you’ll make it,” she says. “For me, I felt like if I wasn’t making it, I wasn’t working hard enough.”Frighteningly, before she arrived at that homeless shelter, Land’s life was unremarkable. In her 20s, she wandered from low-paid to low-paid job: barista, dog daycare, stalls at farmers’ markets. She had none of the usual factors society would pick out to explain her poverty: no alcohol problems, no history of drug use, a regular, if fractured, family life. At 28, she became pregnant. But the father, she writes, flew into rages, threatened and insulted her. With no family to rely on, Land entered the welfare system, moving to the shelter – where her daughter took her first steps – to transitional housing, to a trailer parked in a driveway, always desperately clinging to stability.Subsidising her meagre income with welfare meant submitting her life to relentless scrutiny: curfews and urine tests at the shelter; welfare officers wanting proof that her car wasn’t too nice; supermarket cashiers silently judging her groceries when she used food stamps. She endured each indignity to look after her daughter, Mia.Searching for work in an economy that was still raw from the global financial crisis, Land began working as a cleaner for a private firm; $6 (£4.65) an hour for tidying up houses she could only dream of affording.Strikingly, all her fellow cleaners were women and a huge proportion were single mums. Now 39, Land’s explanation for this is simple: “It is flexible, most of the cleaning happens during school hours, you can bring your kid, and it is a job no one wants to do. As long as you are willing to get on your knees to scrub a toilet, you will always be able to find work. And no one is as desperate as a single parent.” Eighty percent of the US’s 12m single-parent households are headed by mothers – and 40% live below the poverty line.On such low income, money became a relentless weight: every car journey had to be weighed up against the cost of petrol. Providing food for Mia often meant going without herself, bolstering her stomach with instant coffee and, on the good days, a peanut butter sandwich. She would shop for groceries at night, to avoid the gaze of fellow shoppers; one man, after seeing the food stamps in her hand, shouted: “You’re welcome,” as if he was personally paying for her to eat. In one of their homes, a tiny humid studio in Skagit valley, Washington, a relentless black mould continually resurfaced, making Mia constantly ill; kind hospital nurses tending to Mia gave her a dehumidifier.It is remarkable what a cleaner can learn about your life from the receipts on your fridge, the number of family photos on your walls, the papers on your desk. Going through middle America’s dirty laundry gave Land the time and the perspective to mull over the myth that work always means success. She scrubbed vomit, mould and blood from the homes of people who, despite their 2.5 bathrooms and nice cars, seemed just as unhappy as her. In one house she dubbed the Porn House, she tries to figure out the lives of its owners: the husband with his Hustler magazines and lube always out on display in his bedroom, the wife’s extensive collection of romance novels in hers. Popping ibuprofen to cope with the constant strain that cleaning took on her body, Land gazed longingly at the large opioid stash in the Chef’s House. Wiping down the already spotless surfaces of the Cigarette Lady’s House, she finds connection with the mysterious owner by discovering her secret: a freezer packed with Virginia Slims.After Donald Trump’s election victory in 2016, much was made of the power of the disgruntled working poor. Yet Land encountered the most aggression from those on the other side of the “welfare cliff”: those not quite poor enough to receive benefits. She straddled the line a few times: a few dollars more a month meant she could suddenly lose hundreds in benefits: “I was penalised for working more, for working harder. Why, as an example, do some states require you to have less than $1,000 [£775] in savings? They are actively discouraging people from saving. Some people work really hard and still have no food in the fridge, while the wealthy are just getting wealthier while promoting this rhetoric that poor people are the ones taking all the money. And we still think they’re the ones making the best decisions. Hell, I thought that when I went into their houses.”Later on, when Land “came out” as poor, some of her own friends told her that they were on food stamps or using Medicaid. “I had no idea how many friends were struggling. We need to have an honest conversation about the face of welfare. I think that poor people are scary for a lot of people, because they represent what could happen to them.”In her journalism – spoiler: Maid does have a somewhat happy ending – this anxiety is best reflected in sanctimonious comments left by readers. Strangers demand to know why she has tattoos, a smartphone, why she didn’t get an abortion. “I think they’re trying to reassure themselves that it couldn’t happen to them, that this was all the result of my bad decisions.”Her first paid piece of writing, an essay for Vox about her time working as a cleaner, went viral in the worst way. “My sleepy little website, that usually was only seen by my mum, was getting 5,000 hits an hour. People were calling me a cockroach, vermin, telling me I should be in jail. People with cleaners didn’t like knowing that their cleaners had opinions about them. It was hard for me to even go outside for a couple of weeks.” While Land’s book is set during Barack Obama’s presidency, she is watching Trump’s welfare and tax policies with trepidation. “They are making it harder to be on welfare – raising the age to qualify or allowing states to require more paperwork. They are clinging to this idea that poor people don’t work.” She cried when Trump was elected: “It felt scary. Suddenly, everyone felt emboldened to do whatever they wanted. Trump’s election gave trolls a platform to treat people horribly. That is a scary feeling for a mum of two daughters.”The book ends on a high: with Land moving to Missoula, Montana, a place she had always dreamed of living. She enrolled in university, then navigated support programmes for underprivileged writers, which helped place her pieces in papers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times, as well as providing a stipend.Off paper, however, things didn’t get easier. A month after graduating, she gave birth to a second daughter, Coraline, named after one of Neil Gaiman’s heroines. (Gaiman has been a surprise source of support: “I once sent him a photo of Coraline and we’ve sort of become friends. Every time I get something published, he tweets something like, ‘I am really proud of her’, which is nice.”) She found a new balance with Jamie, Mia’s father, but then married a man who later physically abused her.While Land is no longer on welfare (although she still lives in low-income housing), money has not healed all wounds. The price of poverty – exhaustively self-evaluating herself, in welfare meetings, in supermarket queues, in the aftermath of unexpected costs – was panic attacks, a distrust of happiness and signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. “Right now, my anxiety levels are really high because things are going really well and I am just waiting for the catch.” She looks startled when I ask if she would ever take a holiday. “A vacation is airfares, hotel, food, childcare. Is it really worth it to be on a beach for a week? Exercise, hiking, showers – I don’t have time for that! I have piles of laundry, I have to pick up the kids, I have an overwhelming amount of work to do.”After seeing inside the homes of the better off, Land does not want to be rich. “I’d like to not be in debt, I’d like to own my home, but I still imagine myself living a very simple life. It would be nice to have enough money to put my kids through college, to not worry about money. But that’s about it.”She has considered one indulgence: a cleaner. “It’s been so busy, I’ve been thinking it would be nice for a couple of months. But I could never bring myself to do it. There is no way I could afford it, because I would just want to throw money at them – I’d leave $20 bills in every room.” She laughs, but it is sad. She found it such a demeaning and demoralising job, she says, quietly. “I couldn’t do it to someone else.”• Maid, by Stephanie Land, is published by Orion (£14.99 rrp). To order a copy for £13.99, with free UK p&p, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846 Topics Autobiography and memoir Biography books Inequality interviews

The EU has put further pressure on the Brexit talks by confirming it will enforce a hard border on the island of Ireland in the event of a no-deal outcome, despite the risk this would pose to peace.In comments that proved highly uncomfortable for Dublin, the chief spokesman for Jean-Claude Juncker the European commission president, told reporters in Brussels it was “pretty obvious” border infrastructure would be necessary if the UK were to leave without an agreement.The Irish and British governments have been wary of speculating about the repercussions of the UK leaving the EU with no deal in place.Ireland’s deputy prime minister, Simon Coveney, was caught on tape last week indicating his fellow ministers should not talk about the resumption of border checks publicly for fear of a backlash.In a private conversation, he told the Irish transport minister, Shane Ross, “once you start talking about checks anywhere near the border, people will start delving into that and all of a sudden we’ll be the government that reintroduced a physical border on the island of Ireland”.But the Juncker’s spokesman said on Tuesday the likely enforcement of border checks could not be avoided.“If you were to push me to speculate on what might happen in a no-deal scenario in Ireland, I think it is pretty obvious you will have a hard border, and our commitments to the Good Friday agreement and everything we have been doing for years with our tools, instruments and programmes will have to take inevitably into account this fact,” he said.“So of course we are for peace. Of course we stand behind the Good Friday agreement, but that is what no-deal would entail.”In the Irish parliament, the prime minister, Leo Varadkar, responded by insisting an arrangement similar to the Irish backstop would still have to be negotiated if the Brexit deal failed to get through the UK parliament.“We’d have to negotiate an agreement on customs and regulations so that there would be no hard border,” he said. “We already have that agreement. It is the backstop … We have a proposal that does work. We have to stand by it.”On Tuesday night, the Irish government reiterated that position in a statement that said: “We will not accept a hard border on this island and therefore we are not planning for one. This will be more difficult to achieve without the withdrawal agreement and would require very difficult discussions with our EU partners.“Working out suitable customs and trade arrangements compatible with our EU membership will require detailed discussion with the commission, while the UK will also need to live up to its responsibilities. We are under no illusions about how challenging that would be.” The Democratic Unionist party’s Brexit spokesman, Sammy Wilson, dismissed the remarks by Juncker’s spokesman.In the event of a no-deal Brexit, the UK would leave the customs union and single market, without any transition period, and a range of checks would immediately be required on goods passing through the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.The commission spokesman said a no-deal scenario had become more realistic in recent days and echoed the complaints of many in the House of Commons about Theresa May’s statement on Monday, by claiming “at this stage we have nothing new to say from Brussels because there is nothing new from London”.“We continue to follow very closely the ongoing parliamentary debate in the UK. We urge the UK to clarify its intentions as soon as possible,” the spokesman said.During her appearance in the Commons, May insisted she had listened to the MPs who voted down her deal, but was subsequently accused of failing to offer any new ideas to win round parliament. May’s deal was rejected last week by 230 votes, the heaviest defeat for a sitting British government.There is a growing belief in Brussels that the UK will not leave the EU on 29 March.Giving evidence to the European parliament’s constitutional affairs committee, the chamber’s Brexit coordinator, Guy Verhofstadt, said the EU needed to be “firm and flexible” on extending article 50, as he dropped his previous opposition to prolonging talks beyond the summer.The Liberal MEP said it would be more difficult to prolong article 50 beyond 2 July, the first day of the new parliament. However, he did not rule out an extension beyond the summer, a prospect he described as “unthinkable” six days ago.“We have to be firm and flexible at the same time,” Verhofstadt told MEPs. “Firm on what the treaty is saying, but be flexible on the date, if we are clear what is on the table, that there is a majority for something.”Listing the reasons for extending article 50, he included not only a second referendum, but more time to implement the decision of the House of Commons after a meaningful vote. But he ruled out any changes to the withdrawal agreement, including the backstop. “There are limits on what we can accept; for us the backstop is non-negotiable.,” Verhofstadt said. Topics Brexit Northern Ireland Ireland European Union Europe Foreign policy Jean-Claude Juncker news

The opening to an article David Wallace-Wells wrote in 2017 begins: “It’s worse, much worse, than you think.” Based on the worst-case scenarios foreseen by science, the journalist’s piece portrayed a world of drought, plague and famine, all caused by climate change. Critics called this irresponsibly alarmist. Supporters said it was a long-overdue antidote to climate complacency. It was among the best-read climate articles in US history. Wallace-Wells has now written a book-length follow-up – The Uninhabitable Earth: a Story of the Future. He talks to India Rakusen about why he believes the crisis is happening far faster than any of us realise. Human beings are engineering their own destruction, Wallace-Wells says, pointing to the fact more than half of the carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere was in the past 25 years, a period when we were fully aware of the damage that burning fossil fuels can cause.Also: Japanese car manufacturer Nissan has announced it is withdrawing production of a new model from Sunderland in the north-east of England, saying uncertainty surrounding Brexit is part of its decision. Helen Pidd, the Guardian’s north of England editor, reports on how this might affect the area.

The humble potato shines through in this dish, with a little help from green chillies and fresh coriander. They give the soup not only a beautiful colour, but also a lovely dose of tangy heat.Prep 10 minCook 35 minServes 41 tbsp sunflower oil1 tbsp salted butter4 garlic cloves, peeled and roughly chopped1 small green chilli, finely chopped2 leeks, finely chopped3 carrots, cut into 1cm pieces3 medium potatoes, peeled and cut into 1cm pieces2 vegetable stock cubes850ml boiling water50g fresh coriander, leaves and stems, roughly chopped¼ tsp each salt and black pepper¼ tsp chilli flakesHeat the oil and butter together in a large saucepan over a medium–low heat. Add the garlic and chilli, and cook for two minutes, until they begin to colour and soften. Mix in the leeks and cook for roughly five minutes, until softened. Stir in the carrots and potatoes, increase the heat to medium and cook for five minutes, stirring occasionally, until they begin to soften.Crumble the stock cubes into the saucepan and add the boiling water. Set aside some of the coriander for garnish and stir the rest into the saucepan. Cover the pan and cook for 15–20 minutes, until the potatoes are very tender. Take off the heat, then purée the soup using a hand-held blender. Return the pan to the hob, cook for a final two minutes, then stir in the salt, pepper and chilli flakes. Serve sprinkled with the reserved chopped coriander.You could use ground turmeric for this recipe if you can’t find fresh, but bear in mind its flavour is more powerful than that of fresh.Prep 10 minCook 40 minServes 41 tbsp sunflower oil1 tbsp coriander seeds1 tbsp cumin seeds1 tsp black peppercorns10 curry leaves2 red onions, peeled and roughly chopped50g fresh turmeric, peeled, roughly chopped (or use 1 tbsp ground turmeric)1cm piece fresh root ginger, peeled and roughly chopped4 garlic cloves, peeled and roughly chopped3 tomatoes, roughly chopped40g fresh coriander, leaves and stems roughly chopped, plus extra to garnish1½ tsp salt1 tsp honey400ml boiling water400ml can coconut milk100g red lentils(masoor dal)500g skinless chicken breast fillets, cut into 2.5cm diceHeat the oil in a large saucepan over a medium heat. Add the coriander and cumin seeds and peppercorns, and cook for a few seconds, then add the curry leaves and leave it all to sizzle for a few seconds more.Mix in the onions and turmeric, then reduce the heat to medium–low and cook for 10 minutes, until the onions are lightly golden.Stir in the ginger and garlic, cook for a minute, then add the tomatoes and mix well. Turn up the heat to medium and cook for five minutes, until the tomatoes have softened.Add the fresh coriander and take off the heat. Blend the mixture until smooth, then return the soup to the pan.Put the saucepan back over a medium heat, stir in the salt, honey, boiling water and three-quarters of the coconut milk, then mix in the lentils and chicken. Put a lid on, reduce the heat to low and simmer for 15–20 minutes, until the lentils and chicken are both cooked. Sprinkle over the extra fresh coriander and drizzle with the remaining coconut milk before serving.This hearty soup, with a dollop of natural yogurt on top, will fill you up, but you can serve it over rice if you prefer. The simple flavours come together really well, thanks to the spicing.Prep 10 minCook 50 minServes 41 butternut squash, peeled and cut into 2.5cm dice1 tbsp plus 1 tsp sunflower oil1¼ tsp salt1 onion, peeled and finely chopped1 tsp ground cinnamon1 tsp ground cumin½ tsp chilli powder400g can chopped tomatoes400g can chickpeas100g spinach leaves, finely choppedHeat the oven to 180C (160C fan)(350F)/gas 4. Spread out the squash pieces on a roasting tray. Sprinkle over one teaspoon of the oil and a quarter teaspoon of the salt, then rub the oil over the cubes with your fingers. Bake for 40 minutes, until the squash is soft and starting to brown.Meanwhile, heat the remaining oil in a large saucepan over medium–low heat. Add the onion and cook for five to seven minutes, until it begins to colour.Add the remaining salt to the saucepan, along with the cinnamon, cumin and chilli powder, and mix well. Next, tip in the tomatoes, chickpeas (along with the canning water) and 400ml boiling water. Give everything a good stir, then cover the pan, reduce the heat to low and cook for 30 minutes, until everything is cooked down and well combined.Stir in the roast squash and spinach leaves, cover and cook for a further 10 minutes, until the spinach has wilted. Serve at once.Robust shreds of cavolo nero bring texture to this wonderfully comforting dish, and their earthy flavour complements the equally earthy taste of black eyed beans well. Serve this dish alone as a soup, or with chapatti or rice.Prep + soak 2 hrCook 1 hrServes 4250g dried black-eyed beans1½ tsp salt1 tsp ground turmeric1 tbsp ghee1 tsp cumin seeds1 large onion, peeled and roughly chopped1 small green chilli, finely chopped200g cavolo nero, finely chopped2 tomatoes, roughly chopped1 tsp garam masala½ tsp chilli powderPut the beans and 850ml soaking water into a large saucepan and leave for a couple of hours, until the beans are swollen.Mix one teaspoon of salt and the turmeric into the bean pan and bring to a boil. Cover and simmer for 30 minutes, until there is very little liquid left. Add 850ml boiling water and cook for another 30 minutes, until the beans are cooked. Meanwhile, heat the ghee in a saucepan over a low heat. Add the cumin seeds and let them sizzle for a few seconds, then stir in the onion and green chilli, and cook for five minutes, until the onion is softened.Next, mix in the cavolo nero and tomatoes, then cover the pan and cook for 15 minutes, until the leaves are soft.For a smoother soup, take the pan off the heat, leave the mixture to cool for five minutes, then tip into a blender and blitz coarsely – you don’t want the sauce to be like a puree. Otherwise, leave the cabbage and tomato mix chunky as pictured.Stir in the remaining salt, the garam masala and chilli powder, then add the cooked beans. To finish, simmer over a high heat for two minutes, to ensure everything is warmed through, and serve right away. Topics Food Four favourite recipes Indian food and drink Soup Starter Main course Vegetables Chicken features

Enlarge this image A leopard attacks a man in the northern Indian city of Jalandhar on Thursday. Shammi Mehra/AFP/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Shammi Mehra/AFP/Getty Images A leopard attacks a man in the northern Indian city of Jalandhar on Thursday. Shammi Mehra/AFP/Getty Images A panicked leopard ran through the streets of Jalandhar in northern India on Thursday as residents thronged and scattered, if not to help catch the big cat then to capture a cellphone image of the jarring scene. Video shared on social media shows residents swarming as the leopard darts down alleyways and up over walls. At one point, a man perched atop a barrier attempts to catch the leopard in a net; instead, the animal charges at the man, knocking him off the wall before continuing on its way.The chase reportedly ended hours later when wildlife veterinary experts with a tranquilizer gun managed to sedate the animal and take it to an area zoo. Several people were injured in the chaos, some of them bitten, though none seriously, according to The Tribune. YouTube The Tribune reports the leopard had most likely strayed into town from a nearby rural area.The World Wide Fund for Nature-India says there is no official countrywide estimate of the leopard population, but the federally protected animal occupies a wide habitat. And as human populations grow and cities expand, leopards and people are increasingly crossing paths in sometimes fatal interactions.In 2011, India's Ministry of Environment and Forests issued a report titled Guidelines for Human-Leopard Conflict Management, saying that while leopards are inclined to avoid people, "incidences of leopards 'straying' into settlements causing human casualties, and the retaliatory killing of leopards by the public have been on the rise."The report notes that leopards generally will not attack unprovoked, but are likelier to do so in self-defense. And "attacks by man-eating leopards are deliberate with an intention to kill, and usually result in death."The government advises that residents rely on trained professionals to track and capture the animals.Properly disposing of garbage so as not to attract the feral pigs and dogs favored as food by leopards and locking up livestock in leopardproof sheds might reduce the risk of future attacks, the report says.As for the Jalandhar leopard, The Hindustan Times reports that officials at the Chhatbir Zoo planned to observe it for several days before making a decision about its future. Enlarge this image Some try to catch a leopard running loose in Jalandhar as others run away on Thursday. Shammi Mehra/AFP/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Shammi Mehra/AFP/Getty Images Some try to catch a leopard running loose in Jalandhar as others run away on Thursday. Shammi Mehra/AFP/Getty Images

For 16 years, Paris-based photographer Stephan Zaubitzer has been photographing cinemas around the world. His Cinémas project started in 2003 in Burkina Faso, where he began to shoot open-air cinemas. “With the arrival of video and television, the very existence of these cinemas is under threat,” he says. “The cinema defines the neighbourhood it is in. When a cinema closes, the whole soul of the neighbourhood is lost.” Zaubitzer has visited 15 countries, including the US, Egypt, Morocco and India: what these images have in common is his appreciation of the look and atmosphere of the cinemas. “There is a feel of mystery about these halls: architects crafted them to embody the taste of their time. The show starts on the pavement, when you’re approaching the building.”

TOKYO (Reuters) - The Bank of Japan cut its inflation forecasts on Wednesday but maintained its massive stimulus program, with Governor Haruhiko Kuroda warning of growing risks to the economy from trade protectionism and faltering global demand. Rising pressure from the trade war between China and the United States — Japan’s biggest trading partners — is adding to strains on the world’s third-largest economy and undermining years of efforts by policymakers to foster durable growth. Data earlier in the day showed Japan’s exports in December fell the most in two years. “To be honest, if U.S.-China trade tensions are drawn out, there will be a serious risk to the global economy – first to the two countries’ own economies,” Kuroda told a news conference after the end of the two-day policy review. “For now, that possibility is slim, and I hope they will resolve this soon.” As expected, the BOJ trimmed its inflation forecasts, reinforcing views that it will have to stick with its unprecedented economic support for some time to come. But despite rising risks such as trade disputes and Brexit, the central bank also maintained its view that Japan’s economy will continue to expand at a modest pace. Kuroda struck an optimistic tone, saying the economy would likely continue expanding through fiscal 2020. However, a recent Reuters poll of economists showed external factors have increased the chances of Japan sliding into a recession in the fiscal year starting in April, making it even harder for the BOJ to reach its elusive 2 percent inflation target. China on Monday reported its slowest growth in nearly three decades and it is expected to lose more steam in coming months. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) trimmed its global growth forecasts and a survey showed increasing pessimism among business chiefs amid the trade tensions. “Such downside risks concerning overseas economies are likely to be heightening recently, and it also is necessary to pay close attention to their impact on firms’ and households’ sentiment in Japan,” the BOJ said in a quarterly outlook report released along with the policy decision. The BOJ reiterated a pledge to continue buying Japanese government bonds and left its short-term interest rate target unchanged at minus 0.1 percent. It also said it would keep guiding 10-year government bond yields around zero percent. A security guard walks past in front of the Bank of Japan headquarters in Tokyo, Japan January 23, 2019. REUTERS/Issei Kato“It will be difficult for the BOJ to discuss policy normalization or an exit strategy for the moment as risks from global economies are rising,” said Hiroaki Mutou, chief economist at Tokai Tokyo Research Institute. “The central bank will likely save easing measures for later and it will examine how the Fed policy movement will be and how it will likely impact the yen,” he said. Concerns about a global slowdown and volatile financial markets have prompted the U.S. Federal Reserve to take a more cautious stance on future interest rate increases after four hikes last year, weighing on the dollar. In its outlook report, the BOJ’s nine-member board cut its economic growth projections for the current fiscal year to March but raised its growth forecasts slightly for the fiscal years 2019 and 2020, with government spending expected to offset the pain of a planned sales tax hike this October. The BOJ cut its forecast for core consumer inflation to 0.9 percent in the coming fiscal year from 1.4 percent, reflecting slumping oil prices. It was the fourth downward revision by the central bank to its inflation forecast for fiscal 2019 since it was first issued in April 2017. That was still above a 0.7 percent forecast by analysts polled by Reuters. The central bank also trimmed core consumer inflation view for fiscal 2020 to 1.4 percent, from 1.5 percent forecast in October. Many economists believe the BOJ’s next move will be to start normalizing policy, with steps likely to include expanding its 10-year bond yield fluctuation from 0.2 percent and raising the 10-year yield target from around zero percent. A majority expect that would happen in 2020 or later. As part of efforts to prevent financial institutions from sitting on a huge pile of cash, the central bank decided to extend the deadline by one year for lending schemes aimed at encouraging financial institutions to boost loans and support growth foundations . The BOJ’s radical stimulus program has had some unintended consequences, as years of low rates hurt financial institutions’ profits. Slideshow (2 Images)The central bank has also amassed a mountain of Japanese government bonds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in its marathon asset buying spree, risking distortions in financial markets. Many BOJ policymakers are wary of ramping up stimulus, though external shocks or a sudden spike in the yen could force the central bank to do just that if the economy is at risk of sliding into recession. Reporting by Tetsushi Kajimoto and Daniel Leussink; Additional reporting by Kaori Kaneko and Kiyoshi Takenaka; Editing by Shri Navaratnam & Kim CoghillOur Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

The world is at risk of losing the battle against HIV due to a backlash against aid triggered by a sense that western governments need to solve problems in their own countries, the musician and development campaigner Bono has said.Speaking on a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the U2 singer said populism in the rich north was the result of people being chewed up by capitalism.Bono said 7,000 women a week were being infected by HIV/Aids and called for fresh funding for global health initiatives.“We could lose this thing,” he said. “We were winning. We have been somewhat put on the back foot by the understandable concern in northern economies that we have problems in our own cities. If there are people on the streets in our own cities, why should we care about what’s going on over there?“The answer is that what is going on ‘over there’ affects us. If Africa loses, Europe can’t win. But we have got to get back into the conversation. We need a response to what is going on in our own cities.”Bono, who helped set up the campaign group One, said capitalism had lifted more people out of poverty than “any other ism”, but warned: “It is a wild beast. If it is not tamed it can chew up a lot of people along the way.”Populism was the result of people being chewed up, he added.Failure on the part of governments and businesses to invest in Africa would leave the way open for China to fill the void, Bono said. “China is the elephant in the room.” Young people were asking a question of business and political leaders: “Are you a firefighter or are you an arsonist?”Speaking at the same event, Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said it was simply impossible for poor countries to mobilise enough resources domestically to meet basic development goals for sectors such as health, education, roads and water.To meet UN sustainable development goals by 2030 would mean investment worth an additional 15% of GDP for low income countries.Lagarde said: “That’s monumental. No way can that be done by domestic resource mobilisation. Business has to be part of it.”The IMF said that achieving the 2030 sustainable development goals (SDG) set by the UN would require strong partnerships between the public and the private sectors.Countries needed to take a lead by improving the running of their economies, boosting the capacity to collect taxes, making public spending more efficient and creating business-friendly environments.But hitting the SDG goals also required the support of the private sector, donors, philanthropists, and international financial institutions.Lagarde told developing country leaders that combatting corruption was vital to prevent international investors from being scared off.Bono added that he had once seen the IMF as a “great Satan”, due to its emphasis on structural reforms and bullying of junior economies.Now, though, he says the development community “really values” the tough-mindedness shown by Lagarde – but he’ll still be “on her case”. Topics Aid Global health Aids and HIV Bono Health Davos 2019 news

Let’s face it, the robots are coming for our jobs. Artificial intelligence expert Kai-Fu Lee writes in his recent book AI Superpowers that as many as 40% of professions will be automated in the next 15 years.This change will bring a lot of good. Automation will take over lots of tedious, mind-numbing, or dangerous chores that few people enjoy doing. But the transition will be disruptive and some jobs will be safer than others. Among the safest professions, Lee says, are creative ones.The more creative our children are, the more secure they’ll be in their careers once they enter the workforce. What was once considered a “soft skill,” requiring nothing more than an occasional art class or coloring at the dinner table, has become the skill set that will ultimately differentiate us as humans, enable us to stand out at work, and give us an advantage against the algorithms.That’s because no algorithm can replicate human creativity. In fact, creativity is antithetical to the way artificial intelligence works. We develop machine learning by feeding in data about the way people react in certain situations. The point of algorithms is to predict what most people will do and execute that expected action.But what makes something creative is the unexpected. Creativity is looking at a situation many other people have faced and trying something entirely new. Whether the source of creativity is a mistake of the eye, influences from childhood manifested as counterintuitive insight, or a random mash-up of life experiences, we’ll never fully understand creativity’s origin, which is why we humans will continue to be its only source.So when we talk about the future of labor and job security, we must focus on the opportunity (and responsibility) to help people develop their natural creativity and ensure that they’re equipped to solve problems that machines and algorithms cannot. This effort to build creative literacy–the ability to express your ideas and perspective creatively–starts in schools. And we are failing.Around the world, schools focus too much on feeding students facts so they can pass standardized, multiple-choice tests. In the real world, such input-output tasks will be the domain of artificial intelligence systems. We’re teaching old methods and practices of problem-solving that computers are far better at, rather than developing the confidence and skills required to bring to life what you see in your mind’s eye.We should be outfitting students to do what only humans can do. And I’m not talking just about becoming the next Andy Warhol or directing the next Star Wars. Successful future workers will use their creativity to put together an emotionally compelling video that helps make a sale better than a pricing algorithm ever could. Or brainstorm an employee engagement event that transforms the culture of a team. Or design a novel interface that becomes the next killer mobile app.But we’re not giving teachers or students the necessary resources for developing creative literacy. Our team at Adobe recently surveyed 2,000 educators and policymakers around the world. More than half the teachers we talked to said they don’t have the tools, knowledge, or training to teach creative problem-solving.At Adobe, we’re working with thousands of teachers globally to help. Our Education Exchange program provides free creative lesson plans that have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. We also made Spark, a tool that students can use to easily create videos, web pages, posters, and more, available free to schools. Many teachers are using these and other resources to help students develop creative literacy.Some people believe we have to make a choice between teaching creativity and teaching “the basics” like reading and math. That’s the wrong way to look at education. In the modern classroom, we should develop creativity as a form of problem-solving incorporated throughout the curriculum. “By being creative in the classroom, it allows students to not even realize that they’re focusing on standards of learning that we must meet in a public school system,” said Paige Mitchem, an English teacher in Virginia. “They’re totally focused on this creative, fabulous project and only I, as the teacher, realize what I’m teaching them.”Of course, teaching is a tough profession, and for all the teachers like Paige who have been able to weave creativity throughout their curriculum, there are many others who don’t have the time or knowledge to do the same. That’s why we can’t put the onus of solving this problem on our already overworked teachers. We need school districts, states, provinces, and nations to recognize the importance of teaching creative literacy and make it an important part of their mandated curriculum. Rather than measure teachers and their districts by their compliance to established doctrine and test scores, we should be encouraging creative literacy with new tools, materials, and expectations.Of course, it’s not just the next generation that will be affected by automation. People already in the workplace are being displaced and more will be as artificial intelligence and machine learning gets more and more capable.For workers who are threatened by displacement, developing the ability to express ideas in a creative way can help them evolve from a threatened job title to one with more security. Most of these workers won’t be able to stop working for a year or two to go back to school. They’ll have to pick up new skills at night, on the weekends, and learn on the job.Companies should make training and tuition reimbursement available to help workers through this transition time. If an employee can pick up the skills to move to a position that requires a little more creativity and creative problem-solving, she is more valuable and quickly pays back the cost of her training.But we also need a new generation of creative tools that are accessible to anyone, not just professional designers or video artists. That need has caused us at Adobe to significantly change the way we think about our own products, including how we design them, how customers learn to use them, and how we bring them to market.We’ve started to put much more thought and effort into the experience of people who are new to our tools. If you’re not a designer, but you have an idea for a graphic that will really make your next work presentation pop, what will your experience be when you first open Adobe Illustrator? If you have a story to tell, how can you create a video quickly, without having to go through the steep learning curve required by a pro tool? Much remains to be done in this area, but nothing is more important to me, because to democratize creativity, we have to democratize creative tools.Ultimately, I’m convinced that the development of artificial intelligence will be a good thing for humankind. Automation will liberate us from the mundane and enable us to focus on more engaging, creative, and fulfilling work. We just have to prepare ourselves and our children for the future. And we have to start now.Scott Belsky is Adobe’s chief product officer and executive vice president, Creative Cloud. He is the author of The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture, and he is participating in the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, this week.

When we look back from 2100 at the date on which the cornerstone of an Asian-led world order began, it will be 2017. In May of that year, sixty-eight countries representing two-thirds of the world’s population and half its GDP gathered in Beijing for the first Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) summit. This gathering of Asian, European, and African leaders symbolized the launch of the largest coordinated infrastructure investment plan in human history. Collectively, the assembled governments pledged to spend trillions of dollars in the coming decade to connect the world’s largest population centers in a constellation of commerce and cultural exchange—a new Silk Road era.The Belt and Road Initiative is the most significant diplomatic project of the twenty-first century, the equivalent of the mid-twentieth-century founding of the United Nations and World Bank plus the Marshall Plan all rolled into one. The crucial difference: BRI was conceived in Asia and launched in Asia and will be led by Asians. This is the story of one entire side of the planet—the Asian side—and its impact on the twenty-first-century world.[Image: The Future Is Asian: Commerce, Conflict, And Culture In The 21stCentury(Simon & Schuster / Hachette, February 2019)]Asians once again see themselves as the center of the world—and its future. The Asian economic zone—from the Arabian Peninsula and Turkey in the west to Japan and New Zealand in the east, and from Russia in the north to Australia in the south—now represents 50 percent of global GDP and two-thirds of global economic growth. Of the estimated $30 trillion in middle-class consumption growth estimated between 2015 and 2030, only $1 trillion is expected to come from today’s Western economies. Most of the rest will come from Asia.[Image: The Future Is Asian: Commerce, Conflict, And Culture In The 21stCentury(Simon & Schuster / Hachette, February 2019)]Asia produces and exports, as well as imports and consumes, more goods than any other region, and Asians trade and invest more with one another than they do with Europe or North America. Asia has several of the world’s largest economies, most of the world’s foreign exchange reserves, many of the largest banks and industrial and technology companies, and most of the world’s biggest armies. Asia also accounts for 60 percent of the world’s population. It has ten times as many people as Europe and twelve times as many people as North America. As the world population climbs toward a plateau of around 10 billion people, Asia will forever be home to more people than the rest of the world combined. They are now speaking. Prepare to see the world from the Asian point of view.To see the world from the Asian point of view requires overcoming decades of accumulated—and willfully cultivated—ignorance about Asia. To this day, Asian perspectives are often inflected through Western prisms; they can only color to an unshakable conventional Western narrative, but nothing more. Yet the presumption that today’s Western trends are global quickly falls on its face. The “global financial crisis” was not global: Asian growth rates continued to surge, and almost all the world’s fastest-growing economies are in Asia. In 2018, the world’s highest growth rates were reported in India, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Uzbekistan. Though economic stimulus arrangements and ultralow interest rates have been discontinued in the United States and Europe, they continue in Asia. Similarly, Western populist politics from Brexit to Trump haven’t infected Asia, where pragmatic governments are focused on inclusive growth and social cohesion. Americans and Europeans see walls going up, but across Asia they are coming down.Rather than being backward-looking, navel-gazing, and pessimistic, billions of Asians are forward-looking, outward-oriented, and optimistic.These blind spots are a symptom of a related oversight often found in foreign analyses of Asia, namely that they are actually about the United States. There is a presumption that Asia (and frankly every other region as well) is strategically inert and incapable of making decisions or itself; all it is waiting for is the US leadership to tell them what to do. But from the Asian view, the past two decades have been characterized by President George W. Bush’s incompetence, President Barack Obama’s half-heartedness, and President Donald Trump’s unpredictability.The United States’ laundry list of perceived threats—from ISIS and Iran to North Korea and China—have their locus in Asia, but the United States has developed no comprehensive strategy for addressing them. In Washington it is fashionable to promote an “Indo-Pacific” maritime strategy as an antidote to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, failing to see how in reality Asia’s terrestrial and maritime zones cannot be so neatly separated from each other. For all their differences, Asians have realized that their shared geography is a far more permanent reality than the United States’ unreliable promises. The lesson: the United States is a Pacific power with a potent presence in maritime Asia, but it is not an Asian power.[Image: The Future Is Asian: Commerce, Conflict, And Culture In The 21st Century(Simon & Schuster / Hachette, February 2019)]The most consequential misunderstanding permeating Western thought about Asia is being overly China-centric. Much as geopolitical forecasters have been looking for “number one,” many have fallen into the trap of positing a simplistic “G2” of the United States and China competing to lead the world. But neither the world as a whole nor Asia as a region is headed toward a Chinese tianxia, or harmonious global system guided by Chinese Confucian principles. Though China presently wields more power than its neighbors, its population is plateauing and is expected to peak by 2030. Of Asia’s nearly 5 billion people, 3.5 billion are not Chinese.Asia’s future is thus much more than whatever China wants. China is historically not a colonial power. Unlike the United States, it is deeply cautious about foreign entanglements. China wants foreign resources and markets, not foreign colonies. Its military forays from the South China Sea to Afghanistan to East Africa are premised on protecting its sprawling global supply lines— but its grand strategy of building global infrastructure is aimed at reducing its dependence on any one foreign supplier (as are its robust alternative energy investments).China’s launching the Belt and Road Initiative doesn’t prove that it will rule Asia, but it does remind us that China’s future, much like its past, is deeply embedded in Asia. BRI is widely portrayed in the West as a Chinese hegemonic design, but its paradox is that it is accelerating the modernization and growth of countries much as the United States did with its European and Asian partners during the Cold War. BRI will be instructive in showing everyone, including China, just how quickly colonial logic has expired. By joining BRI, other Asian countries have tacitly recognized China as a global power—but the bar for hegemony is very high. As with US interventions, we should not be too quick to assume that China’s ambitions will succeed unimpeded and that other powers won’t prove sufficiently bold in asserting themselves as well. Nuclear powers India and Russia are on high alert over any Chinese trespassing on their sovereignty and interests, as are regional powers Japan and Australia. Despite spending $50 billion between 2000 and 2016 on infrastructure and humanitarian projects across the region, China has purchased almost no meaningful loyalty. The phrase “China-led Asia” is thus no more acceptable to most Asians than the notion of a “US-led West” is to Europeans.China has a first-mover advantage in such places where other Asian and Western investors have hesitated to go. But one by one, many countries are pushing back and renegotiating Chinese projects and debts. Here, then, is a more likely scenario: China’s forays actually modernize and elevate these countries, helping them gain the confidence to resist future encroachment. Furthermore, China’s moves have inspired an infrastructural “arms race,” with India, Japan, Turkey, South Korea, and others also making major investments that will enable weaker Asian nations to better connect to one another and counter Chinese maneuvers. Ultimately, China’s position will be not of an Asian or global hegemon but rather of the eastern anchor of the Asian—and Eurasian—megasystem.[Image: The Future Is Asian: Commerce, Conflict, And Culture In The 21stCentury(Simon & Schuster / Hachette, February 2019)]The farther one looks into the future, therefore, the more clearly Asia appears to be—as has been the norm for most of its history—a multipolar region with numerous confident civilizations evolving largely independent of Western policies but constructively coexisting with one another. A reawakening of Western confidence and vitality would be very welcome, but it would not blunt Asia’s resurrection. Asia’s rise is structural, not cyclical. There remain pockets of haughty ignorance centered around London and Washington that persist in the belief that Asia will come undone as China’s economy slows or will implode under the strain of nationalist rivalries. These opinions about Asia are irrelevant and inaccurate in equal measure. As Asian countries emulate one another’s successes, they leverage their growing wealth and confidence to extend their influence to all corners of the planet. The Asianization of Asia is just the first step in the Asianization of the world.Excerpt from The Future Is Asian: Commerce, Conflict, and Culture in the 21st Century (Simon & Schuster/Hachette, February 2019) Selected excerpts for private distribution only. No unauthorized reproduction or circulation permitted. For more information, visit: www.paragkhanna.com/ourasianfuture