TIJUANA, Mexico: As the US government built its latest stretch of border wall, Mexico made a statement of its own by laying remains of the Berlin Wall a few steps away.
The 3-ton pockmarked, gray concrete slab sits between a bullring, a lighthouse and the border wall, which extends into the Pacific Ocean.
“May this be a lesson to build a society that knocks down walls and builds bridges,” reads the inscription below the towering Cold War relic, attributed to Tijuana Mayor Montserrat Caballero and titled, “A World Without Walls.”
For Caballero, like many of Tijuana’s 2 million residents, the US wall is personal and political, a part of the city’s fabric and a fact of life. She considers herself a migrant, having moved from the southern Mexico city of Oaxaca when she was 2 with her mother, who fled “the vicious cycle of poverty, physical abuse and illiteracy.”
The installation opened Aug. 13 at a ceremony with Caballero and Marcelo Ebrard, Mexico’s former foreign secretary who is now a leading presidential candidate.
Caballero, 41, is married to an Iranian man who became a US citizen and lives in the United States. She and their 9-year-old son used to cross the border between Tijuana and San Diego.
Since June, Caballero has lived in a military barracks in Tijuana, saying she acted on credible threats against her brought to her attention by US intelligence officials and a recommendation by Mexico’s federal government. Weeks earlier, her bodyguard survived an assassination attempt.
Caballero said that she does not know who wants to kill her but suspects payback for having seized arms from violent criminals who plague her city. “Someone is probably upset with me,” she said in her spacious City Hall office.
Shards of the Berlin Wall scattered worldwide after it crumbled in 1989, with collectors putting them in hotels, schools, transit stations and parks. Marcos Cline, who makes commercials and other digital productions in Los Angeles, needed a home for his artifact and found an ally in Tijuana’s mayor.
“Why in Tijuana?” Caballero said. “How many families have shed blood, labor and their lives to get past the wall? The social and political conflict is different than the Berlin Wall, but it’s a wall at the end of the day. And a wall is always a sphinx that divides and bloodies nations.”
President Joe Biden issued an executive order his first day in office to halt wall construction, ending a signature effort by his predecessor, Donald Trump. But his administration has moved ahead with small, already-contracted projects, including replacing a two-layered wall in San Diego standing 5.5 meters high with one rising 9.1 meters and stretching one kilometer to the ocean.
The wall slices through Friendship Park, a cross-border site inaugurated by then-US first lady Pat Nixon in 1971 to symbolize binational ties. For decades, families separated by immigration status met through barbed wire and, later, a chain-link fence. It is a cherished, festive destination for tourists and residents in Mexico.
At an arts festival in 2005, David “The Human Cannonball” Smith Jr. flashed his passport in Tijuana as he lowered himself into a barrel and was shot over the wall, landing on a net on the beach with US border agents nearby. In 2019, artist Lizbeth De La Cruz Santana covered the Tijuana side of the wall with paintings of adults who moved to the US illegally as young children and were deported. Visitors who held up their phones to bar codes were taken to a website that voiced their first-person narratives.
Cline said he was turned away at the White House when he tried delivering the Berlin Wall relic to Trump and then trucked it across the country to find a suitable home. He said the piece has found “its second life” at the Tijuana park alongside the colorful paintings on the border wall that express views on politics and immigration.
The US government has gradually restricted park access from San Diego over the last 15 years in a state park that once allowed cross-border yoga classes, religious services and music festivals. After lengthy consideration, the Biden administration agreed to keep the wall at 18 feet for a small section where some access will be allowed.
Dan Watman of Friends of Friendship Park, which advocates for cross-border park access, said the 18.3-meter section that will remain at the lower height is only a token gesture. “The park on the Mexican side has become sort of a one-sided party,” he said.
US Customs and Border Protection said that it anticipates replacing the “deteriorated” two-layer barrier by November and that the higher one under construction “will provide much needed improvements.”
Tijuana’s mayor said she understands the need for the US to enforce borders and she has warm relations with US officials, including Ken Salazar, the ambassador to Mexico. She said Salazar asked her to evict migrants who camped with hopes of getting asylum in the US and blocked access to a US border crossing in 2022. She heeded his recommendation.
Any failures at the border are a collective responsibility of governing nations, the mayor said.
“We are against violence, we are against family separation, we are against division, and that’s what the wall represents,” she said.
Berlin Wall relic gets a ‘second life’ on US-Mexico border as Joe Biden adds barriers
https://arab.news/9ahk9
Berlin Wall relic gets a ‘second life’ on US-Mexico border as Joe Biden adds barriers
- Shards of the Berlin Wall scattered worldwide after it crumbled in 1989, with collectors putting them in hotels, schools, transit stations and parks
NASA powers down two instruments on twin Voyager spacecraft to save power
NEW YORK: NASA is switching off two science instruments on its long-running twin Voyager spacecraft to save power.
The space agency said Wednesday an instrument on Voyager 2 that measures charged particles and cosmic rays will shut off later this month. Last week, NASA powered down an instrument on Voyager 1 designed to study cosmic rays.
The energy-saving moves were necessary to extend their missions, Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement.
The twin spacecraft launched in 1977 and are currently in interstellar space, or the space between stars. Voyager 1 discovered a thin ring around Jupiter and several of Saturn’s moons, and Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to visit Uranus and Neptune.
Each spacecraft still has three instruments apiece to study the sun’s protective bubble and the swath of space beyond.
Voyager 1 is over 15 billion miles (24.14 billion kilometers) from Earth and Voyager 2 is over 13 billion miles (20.92 billion kilometers) away.
X-ray shows diamond earrings swallowed by theft suspect during arrest, police say
- An X-ray of the suspect’s torso showed what the Orlando Police Department believed to be the diamond earrings
- “These foreign objects are suspected to be the Tiffany & Co earrings taken in the robbery but will need to be collected ... after they are passed,” the department's arrest report said
FLORIDA: A suspected thief gulped down two pairs of diamond earrings during his arrest on the side of a Florida Panhandle highway last week, detectives say, leaving them with the unenviable task of waiting to “collect” the Tiffany & Co. jewelry worth nearly $770,000.
An X-ray of the suspect’s torso showed what the Orlando Police Department believed to be the diamond earrings — a white mass shining brightly against the grey backdrop of his digestive tract.
“These foreign objects are suspected to be the Tiffany & Co. earrings taken in the robbery but will need to be collected ... after they are passed,” the department’s arrest report said. Handwriting on an order of commitment document filed Monday said “outside medical,” suggesting he was at a medical facility.
The 32-year-old man from Texas is accused of forcibly stealing the earrings from an upscale Orlando shopping center last Wednesday.
Orlando police spokeswoman Kaylee Bishop said Wednesday she was checking with the lead detective on whether the earrings had been recovered yet. The earrings’ status also wasn’t known to a deputy who answered the phone but wouldn’t give his name in the rural Panhandle county where the suspect was arrested near Chipley, Florida.
During the theft, the man allegedly told Tiffany sales associates he was interested in purchasing diamond earrings and a diamond ring on behalf of an Orlando Magic basketball player. Sales associates escorted the man to a VIP room where he could view the jewelry. A short time later, he jumped out of his chair, grabbed the jewelry and tried to force his way out of the door.
One of the sales associates was injured trying to block him but managed to knock the diamond ring, valued at $587,000, out of his hands.
Detectives obtained the license plate of the suspect’s car through shopping mall security footage and believe he was driving back to Texas. State troopers tracked the car from tag readers on the Florida Turnpike and Interstate 10 until he was pulled over for driving without rear lights in Washington County, almost 340 miles (550 kilometers) away, the Orlando police report said.
As he was being taken into custody, he swallowed several items troopers believed were the earrings.
The suspect was charged with first-degree felony grand theft and robbery with a mask, a third-degree felony. Court records showed no attorney for him, and he was listed as being in police custody in Orange County Florida, which is home to Orlando, as of Wednesday morning.
Scientists genetically engineer mice with thick hair like the extinct woolly mammoth
- Scientists have been genetically engineering mice since the 1970s, but new technologies like CRISPR “make it a lot more efficient and easier,” said Lynch
WASHINGTON: Extinction is still forever, but scientists at the biotech company Colossal Biosciences are trying what they say is the next best thing to restoring ancient beasts — genetically engineering living animals with qualities to resemble extinct species like the woolly mammoth.
Woolly mammoths roamed the frozen tundras of Europe, Asia and North America until they went extinct around 4,000 years ago.
Colossal made a splash in 2021 when it unveiled an ambitious plan to revive the woolly mammoth and later the dodo bird. Since then, the company has focused on identifying key traits of extinct animals by studying ancient DNA, with a goal to genetically “engineer them into living animals,” said CEO Ben Lamm.
Outside scientists have mixed views about whether this strategy will be helpful for conservation.
“You’re not actually resurrecting anything — you’re not bringing back the ancient past,” said Christopher Preston, a wildlife and environment expert at the University of Montana, who was not involved in the research.
On Tuesday, Colossal announced that its scientists have simultaneously edited seven genes in mice embryos to create mice with long, thick, woolly hair. They nicknamed the extra-furry rodents as the “Colossal woolly mouse.”
Results were posted online, but they have not yet been published in a journal or vetted by independent scientists.
The feat “is technologically pretty cool,” said Vincent Lynch, a biologist at the University of Buffalo, who was not involved in the research.
Scientists have been genetically engineering mice since the 1970s, but new technologies like CRISPR “make it a lot more efficient and easier,” said Lynch.
The Colossal scientists reviewed DNA databases of mouse genes to identify genes related to hair texture and fat metabolism. Each of these genetic variations are “present already in some living mice,” said Colossal’s chief scientist Beth Shapiro, but “we put them all together in a single mouse.”
They picked the two traits because these mutations are likely related to cold tolerance — a quality that woolly mammoths must have had to survive on the prehistoric Arctic steppe.
Colossal said it focused on mice first to confirm if the process works before potentially moving on to edit the embryos of Asian elephants, the closest living relatives to woolly mammoths.
However, because Asian elephants are an endangered species, there will be “a lot of processes and red tape” before any plan can move forward, said Colossal’s Lamm, whose company has raised over $400 million in funding.
Independent experts are skeptical about the idea of “de-extinction.”
“You might be able to alter the hair pattern of an Asian elephant or adapt it to the cold, but it’s not bringing back a woolly mammoth. It’s changing an Asian elephant,” said University of Montana’s Preston.
Still, the refinement of precision gene-editing in animals could have other uses for conservation or animal agriculture, said Bhanu Telugu, who studies animal biotechnology at the University of Missouri and was not involved in the new research.
Telugu said he was impressed by Colossal’s technology advances that enabled scientists to pinpoint which genes to target.
The same approach might one day help fight diseases in people, said Lamm. So far, the company has spun off two health care companies.
“It’s part of how we monetize our business,” said Lamm.
60% of adults will be overweight or obese by 2050: study
- Number of overweight or obese people worldwide rose to 2.6 billion in 2021 from 929 million in 1990
- More than half the world’s overweight or obese adults already live in just eight countries
PARIS: Nearly 60 percent of all adults and a third of all children in the world will be overweight or obese by 2050 unless governments take action, a large new study said Tuesday.
The research published in the Lancet medical journal used data from 204 countries to paint a grim picture of what it described as one of the great health challenges of the century.
“The unprecedented global epidemic of overweight and obesity is a profound tragedy and a monumental societal failure,” lead author Emmanuela Gakidou, from the US-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), said in a statement.
The number of overweight or obese people worldwide rose from 929 million in 1990 to 2.6 billion in 2021, the study found.
Without a serious change, the researchers estimate that 3.8 billion adults will be overweight or obese in 15 years – or around 60 percent of the global adult population in 2050.
The world’s health systems will come under crippling pressure, the researchers warned, with around a quarter of the world’s obese expected to be aged over 65 by that time.
They also predicted a 121-percent increase in obesity among children and adolescents around the world.
A third of all obese young people will be living in two regions – North Africa and the Middle East, and Latin America and the Caribbean – by 2050, the researchers warned.
But it is not too late to act, said study co-author Jessica Kerr from Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Australia.
“Much stronger political commitment is needed to transform diets within sustainable global food systems,” she said.
That commitment was also needed for strategies “that improve people’s nutrition, physical activity and living environments, whether it’s too much processed food or not enough parks,” Kerr said.
More than half the world’s overweight or obese adults already live in just eight countries – China, India, the United States, Brazil, Russia, Mexico, Indonesia and Egypt, the study said.
While poor diet and sedentary lifestyles are clearly drivers of the obesity epidemic, “there remains doubt” about the underlying causes for this, said Thorkild Sorensen, a researcher at the University of Copenhagen not involved in the study.
For example, socially deprived groups have a “consistent and unexplained tendency” toward obesity, he said in a linked comment in The Lancet.
The research is based on figures from the Global Burden of Disease study from the IHME, which brings together thousands of researchers across the world and is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
As warming climate hammers coffee crops, this rare bean may someday be your brew
- The tree’s deep roots, thick leaves and big trunk help it thrive in extreme conditions where other coffees cannot
- Earth’s warming climate is causing problems for big coffee producers everywhere and some are looking to a rarely cultivated species that may stand up better to drought and heat
NZARA COUNTY: Catherine Bashiama runs her fingers along the branches of the coffee tree she’s raised from a seedling, searching anxiously for its first fruit buds since she planted it three years ago. When she grasps the small cherries, Bashiama beams.
The farmer had never grown coffee in her village in western South Sudan, but now hopes a rare, climate-resistant species will help pull her family from poverty. “I want to send my children to school so they can be the future generation,” said Bashiama, a mother of 12.
Discovered more than a century ago in South Sudan, excelsa coffee is exciting cash-strapped locals and drawing interest from the international community amid a global coffee crisis caused mainly by climate change. As leading coffee-producing countries struggle to grow crops in drier, less reliable weather, prices have soared to the highest in decades and the industry is scrambling for solutions.
Experts say estimates from drought-stricken Brazil, the world’s top coffee grower, are that this year’s harvest could be down by some 12 percent.
“What history shows us is that sometimes the world doesn’t give you a choice, and right now there are many coffee farmers suffering from climate change that are facing this predicament,” said Aaron Davis, head of coffee research at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London.
Excelsa could play a key role in adapting.
Native to South Sudan and a handful of other African countries, including Congo, Central African Republic and Uganda, excelsa is also farmed in India, Indonesia and Vietnam. The tree’s deep roots, thick leathery leaves and big trunk allow it to thrive in extreme conditions such as drought and heat where other coffees cannot. It’s also resistant to many common coffee pests and diseases.
Yet it comprises less than 1 percent of the global market, well behind the arabica and robusta species that are the most consumed coffees in the world. Experts say excelsa will have to be shown to be practical at a much larger scale to bridge the gap in the market caused by climate change.
Coffee’s history in South Sudan
Unlike neighboring Ethiopia or Uganda, oil-rich South Sudan has never been known as a coffee-producing nation.
Its British colonizers grew robusta and arabica, but much of that stopped during decades of conflict that forced people from their homes and made it hard to farm. Coffee trees require regular care such as pruning and weeding and take at least three years to yield fruit.
During a visit earlier this month to Nzara County in Western Equatoria state — regarded as the country’s breadbasket — residents reminisced to Associated Press reporters about their parents and grandparents growing coffee, yet much of the younger generation hadn’t done it themselves.
Many were familiar with excelsa, but didn’t realize how unique it was, or what it was called, referring to it as the big tree, typically taller than the arabica and robusta species that are usually pruned to be bush- or hedge-like. The excelsa trees can reach 15 meters (about 49 feet) in height, but may also be pruned much shorter for ease of harvesting.
Coffee made from excelsa tastes sweet — unlike robusta — with notes of chocolate, dark fruits and hazelnut. It’s more similar to arabica, but generally less bitter and may have less body.
“There’s so little known about this coffee, that we feel at the forefront to trying to unravel it and we’re learning every day,” said Ian Paterson, managing director of Equatoria Teak, a sustainable agro-forestry company that’s been operating in the country for more than a decade.
The company’s been doing trials on excelsa for years. Initial results are promising, with the trees able to withstand heat much better than other species, the company said. It’s also working with communities to revive the coffee industry and scale up production. Three years ago it gave seedlings and training to about 1,500 farmers, including Bashiama, to help them grow the coffee. The farmers can sell back to the company for processing and export.
Many of the trees started producing for the first time this year, and Paterson said he hopes to export the first batch of some 7 tons to specialty shops in Europe. By 2027, the coffee could inject some $2 million into the economy, with big buyers such as Nespresso expressing interest. But production needs to triple for it to be worthwhile for large buyers to invest, he said.
Challenges of growing an industry amid South Sudan’s instability
That could be challenging in South Sudan, where lack of infrastructure and insecurity make it hard to get the coffee out.
One truck of 30 tons of coffee has to travel some 1,800 miles (3,000 kilometers) to reach the port in Kenya to be shipped. The cost for the first leg of that trip, through Uganda, is more than $7,500, which is up to five times the cost in neighboring countries.
It’s also hard to attract investors.
Despite a peace deal in 2018 that ended a five-year civil war, pockets of fighting persist. Tensions in Western Equatoria are especially high after the president removed the governor in February, sparking anger among his supporters. When AP reporters visited Nzara, the main road to town was cut off one day because of gunshots and people were fleeing their villages, fearful of further violence.
The government says companies can operate safely, but warned them to focus on business.
“If I’m a businessman, dealing with my business, let me not mix with politics. Once you start mixing your business with politics, definitely you will end up in chaos,” said Alison Barnaba, the state’s minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Environment.
Barnaba said there are plans to rehabilitate old coffee plantations and build an agriculture school, but details are murky, including where the money will come from. South Sudan hasn’t paid its civil servants in more than a year, and a rupture of a crucial oil pipeline through neighboring Sudan has tanked oil revenue.
Growing the coffee isn’t always easy, either. Farmers have to contend with fires that spread quickly in the dry season and decimate their crops. Hunters use fires to scare and kill animals and residents use it to clear land for cultivation. But the fires can get out of control and there are few measures in place to hold people accountable, say residents.
Coffee as a way out of poverty
Still, for locals, the coffee represents a chance at a better future.
Bashiama said she started planting coffee after her husband was injured and unable to help cultivate enough of the maize and ground nuts that the family had lived on. Since his accident she hasn’t been able to send her children to school or buy enough food, she said.
Another farmer, 37-year-old Taban John, wants to use his coffee earnings to buy a bicycle so he can more easily sell his other crops, ground nuts and cassava, and other goods in town. He also wants to be able to afford school uniforms for his children.
Excelsa is an opportunity for the community to become more financially independent, say community leaders. People rely on the government or foreign aid, but when that doesn’t come through they’re not able to take care of their families, they say.
But for coffee to thrive in South Sudan, locals say there needs to be a long-term mentality, and that requires stability.
Elia Box lost half of his coffee crop to fire in early February. He plans to replace it, but was dispirited at the work it will require and the lack of law and order to hold people accountable.
“People aren’t thinking long-term like coffee crops, during war,” he said. “Coffee needs peace.”
