A railway stretching over 850 miles (1,400 km) along the Nigerian coast is being taken on by China. Chinese officials announced this week that the $12bn contract was China’s biggest ever overseas contract.
The project is being undertaken by China Civil Engineering Group Co., Ltd. (CCECC), a subsidiary of China Railway Construction Corporation Limited. The railway will cross 10 Nigerian states, including NIgeria’s oil-producing delta, and will include 22 railway stations. The train will be designed for speeds of 120 km/h.
Officials at CCECC have said that the line could eventually be included in the proposed ECOWAS Railway, that would link the entire economic community of western African states.
Africa has seen uninterrupted growth for almost two decades. China, with a cooling domestic economy, is taking on infrastructure in Africa’s developing regions. In order to help African nations pay for the projects, China is launching new financing plans.
Transportation projects are among the biggest sectors for Chinese investment, although well below energy projects.
Analysts have noted that these transportation projects often connect inland regions to the coast, drawing obvious comparisons to China’s own three-decade growth boom, which began with the development of coastal manufacturing hubs served by ports that transported goods between China and the rest of the world.
The massive reserves accumulated by China during its growth are now being used to bankroll similar development outside its borders.
While economic expansion in the developing world is increasing demand for infrastructure–the value of which has been estimated as high as $78 trillion by 2025–this growth is expected to be funded by public finance groups such as the World Bank and its upstart rival the Asian Development Bank, as well as by private investment.
China announced last month that it would join BRICS countries to form the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which will serve 20 other Asian countries. Chinese officials said that China would pay half of the funding for the bank’s $50 billion start.
China also announced this month $40 billion in funding for the Silk Road project that will connect major Asian cities and break the “connectivity bottleneck” in the region.
Nearly five million people living illegally in the United States will be able to avoid deportation under reforms on immigration policy declared by US President Barack Obama this week. According to the president’s announcement, unregistered parents of American citizens will be granted legal residency as well as the ability to work in the US for three years. This move will affect parents who have lived in the United States for at least five years–an estimated 4.4 million people–although it will not permit them US citizenship.
In a televised speech, Obama invited illegal immigrants to come out of the shadows and receive legal rights. The move was immediately challenged by Republicans, who alleged that taking such step without congressional endorsement exceeded the presidential authority.
Speaker John Boehner warned that Obama would exceed his powers if he went ahead with his plans on immigration, and Texas Governor Rick Perry (R) said the measures would aggravate the problem of illegal immigration in the US.
US president also vowed to take resolute action to combat illegal immigration at the border. He emphasized the necessity to check undocumented migrants for criminality, and to make sure migrants payed taxes. He stated that deportations would focus on criminals, not families or kids, gang members and not mothers who were trying to help their children.
Obama Said, “If you are a criminal, you will be deported. If you are planning to enter the United States illegally, opportunities to catch you and deportations back to your country have increased.”
A top official in US Administration pointed that the plan reflects the recommendations of the Internal Security Minister and Justice Minister on what the president could do under current US laws. Obama had vowed for months to take action on immigration after Congress hampered his comprehensive immigration in 2013. The bill passed the Senate but died in the House.
There are currently about 11 million undocumented illegal immigrants residing in the United States. Obama commented on this group, saying that trying to deport all 11 million was not realistic. The president commented on the struggle of the illegals to avoid deportation.
“I’ve seen the heartbreak and anxiety of children whose mothers might be taken away from them just because they didn’t have the right papers,” said Obama.
The president said that he would sign the bill, however, to ensure a compromise on the contentious issue of immigration. Obama addressed his detractors by stating, “And to those members of Congress who question my authority to make our immigration system work better, or question the wisdom of me acting where Congress has failed, I have one answer: Pass a bill.”
Engineer Alain Thebault is aiming at a new record. The sailboat designer, who began his career as a teenager wanting to build a boat that would fly, has previously set the sailing speed record with his Hydrofoil, which achieved 50 knots average speed (95km/h) in 2009. Thebault is aiming for a much higher sail speed, and he aims to do it by sailing at four times the speed of wind–something that has never been done before.
Thebault’s new project is the Hydroptere Rocket. Thebault teamed with an Aeronautics engineer-led group under Philippe Perrier of Dassault Aviation and Maurice Prat of Airbus to launch the iDroptere, a glider boat which aims to push the absolute sailing speed record to 80 knots (150 km/h).
Assembly of the iDroptere Rocket has begun in the Gulf of Saint-Tropez.
“This is great news!” said Thebault. “We look forward to attending the launch of Hydroptere Rocket in the Mediterranean. Our first objective will be sailing between Lausanne and Geneva for Syz and Co Sailing Speed Records, and between Hyères and La Ciotat to climb the wall of 80 knots under sail!”
“My interest in this is to do some things that nobody has done before,” said Perrier. “Basically, hydrodynamics and aerodynamics are quite the same. The main difference is density of water, which is 800 time the one of air. But, when you go to high speed, some differences may appear.”
“In the air, you have the speed of sound, which is the sound barrier, and this creates different phenomena as the plane is pushing its noise and its perturbation in front of it. This changes completely the way it behaves.”
“The speed of sound in water is very high, so nobody will ever get it.”
“But there is another phenomenon, which is called ‘cavitation.’ At the upper side of the foil in the water you get such low pressure that the water starts to uprise, and when this starts to occur–it starts around 40-45 knots, it takes place more around 50 knots, and when you up to 55 knots, you can consider that all the upper side of the foil doesn’t work anymore in the water, but it works in the vapor of water.”
“And this changes completely the behavior in a way that is comparable to sonic and supersonic differences in aerodynamics.”
“We consider that in order to go at more than 65 knots, we must try to do it with a lower speed of wind. That means that our goal is to get 80 knots with only 20 knots of wind.”
“That means that the speed of the boat is four times the speed of the wind. This has never been done before.”
A foil that is capable of working efficiently at over 80 knots is one of the challenges the team faces, Perrault said, and referred to technical engineering partnerships the group has made, which has given them confidence that the goal is achievable.
“Tonight I can finally get back to my palace,” said Claudia Machado with an ironic smile, standing on the back of a Uruguayan Army truck. She is a victim of a flood that forced more than 150 people to evacuate Oct. 29 in Colonia del Sacramento, a city by the Río de la Plata in southern Uruguay.
Claudia was among last of the evacuees returning to her home in Villa Ferrando, a squatter settlement in the suburbs of Colonia. This area was one of the most damaged by the rains due to the swelling of La Caballada, a stream close by the place where the houses were built.
Most of the residents in Villa Ferrando found shelter in the Campus Municipal, the sports center in Colonia. Two days later, in the early morning, they returned to their houses under a darkened sky reflecting the threat of another storm.
The houses were not in proper condition, so no one should have spend another night there. However, the residents had been asked to leave their temporary refuge in the sports center. Some of them were happy to be back home, and others guessed that they had been forced to go because there was a football match that day and the visitor’s team needed the Campus Municipal to sleep.
Many of the people in Villa Fernando had to face the heavy damage caused by the storm when they arrived home: destroyed ceilings, houses flooded with mud, moldy walls, unusable furniture and appliances… Dripping clothes and drenched mattresses were hanging on ropes to dry in the sun.
By the door of her empty place, one of the closest houses to the river, Marta explained how the stream reached the two-room house where she lived with her whole family. “It was all under water–you couldn’t see that curve on the river there, it was all covered with water. The house started to get flooded and we all had to get away,” she said.
Neighbors made an inventory of losses and recalculated how long it will take them to recover what had been damaged. “At home we had a fridge, a washing-machine… My husband and I are working, and it takes us more than one year to pay the fees on everything,” explained Ana Acosta, spokeswoman of the slum. “Our appliances are ruined and no one is accepting that responsibility. We have to start again, and again, and again… because this is not the first flood we are suffering.”
Acosta works in a retirement home in the city, but most of her neighbors confess that they live off “changas”–irregular, sporadic jobs–just to survive. “It’s really hard to get regular employment, because when you say you live in Villa Ferrando, you are automatically discriminated and employers don’t call you anymore,” she revealed.
Her parents, who are already retired, have been living in this very same place for decades. They remember at least one similar flood in 2007, although they state it did not damage as many houses as this last one did. “The stream was huge. It was just impressive,” said Acosta.
According to Omar Espinosa, another resident, recent swells had been caused by the work on the upper side of the river course, destined to create a new quarry for the company Arenera Colonia. Curiously enough, the neighborhood was named after the founder of this enterprise, Santiago Ferrando, who had been dedicated to sand extraction in the area.
“When they started the excavations to extract more sand in the upper part of the stream, a wider water flow began to go down the river, so this area is now more likely to get flooded,” warned Espinosa. “If the lower part of the stream would get drained, the river would get deeper and be less likely to overflow,” he thought.
Omar, a 60-year-old evangelical priest, works in the building sector. He has lived in the shanty town of Villa Ferrando for more than twenty years with his wife, Suly Roldán, and their offspring, which includes 27 grandchildren. As a missionary, he had traveled to faraway places: Peru, Southern Korea, Angola… until he settled down in Colonia to go on with his preachment. To him, successive floods are “God’s challenges,” and he faces them with faith and a fighting spirit. He himself built up the walls of his precarious home, which has electricity and is open to everyone else in the neighborhood.
Outside, in the huge puddle that grows with every new rainfall, one of Omar’s grandchildren played in the silt wearing big rubber boots. Behind the house, survivors of the disaster were looking for shelter: some hens, some dogs, but no pigs. In addition to the objects and the scarce goods in the houses, the rains had taken a big part of the food and the livelihood of the slum inhabitants.
“If your house gets flooded, you have to run away. You resist until the last moment, trying to save some of your things, but when you are up to your neck in water, material things are not so important,” explained Alba Machado while cleaning her muddy home in the dark, suddenly brightened by lightning. She was so convinced of her indifference toward material goods that some years ago she moved from her house to the slum, following her partner. He died some time ago, a victim of a lung disease. Obviously life conditions at the slum would not have contributed to his recovery.
Waiting for a place to call home
Villa Ferrando’s inhabitants have been waiting for some years for their relocation, given that they occupy a zone close to a stream, and that the authorities are trying to finish with shanty towns in the area. Uruguay’s Housing Ministry (MVOTMA) and Social Development Ministry (Mides), in collaboration with Colonia’s local government, are working together to provide the 270 slum families with safe houses equipped with all supplies.
The aim is to relocate the families in different areas in the city in order to make the community become more “integrated into society,” according to public servants in the MVOTMA headquarters in Colonia.
One of these areas would be the neighborhood built three years ago by the Chilean-Finnish paper company Montes del Plata to host the employees working on the construction of the plant destined to become a paper mill. Now that the job is finished, furniture and other comfort supplies are being removed in order to “make houses match with the families’ profiles,” explained staff at MVOTMA.
The local government wants to give the houses to all their occupants at the same time, but Villa Ferrando’s inhabitants are not satisfied with this measure. “Here we have some families with children, with elderly people…Families who live at the river bank and have to deal with the risk of a new flooding… And we want these families to be relocated first, because their situation is much more urgent. The houses are already built, but they remain empty,” Ana Acosta stated.
It never rains but it pours inside the houses, and people in the slum calculate how many spring and summer weeks are left. They do not talk about seasons anymore, but about chance of rain. Resignation sticks out. “We have no more hope to have a home,” says Amelio, another neighbor. “All politicians came here before election day to ask for our votes. That is when they care about us). They all make promises, but then they never keep their word,” he complains.
According to Uruguay’s National Statistical Institute (INE), in 2011 there were 165.271 people living in slums in the country, the global population of which is just over three million inhabitants. The number of people living in slums lowered 8 percent between 2006 and 2011, and the total of irregular housing settlements reported around the country fell 11 percent, according to the data provided by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
It is considered that 5 percent of Uruguayans currently live in shanty towns, while more than 30 percent of the houses in the country do not have access to water and sewerage. The Frente Amplio, a left-wing political party which has governed the country since 2005 and represents the option with more chances to win the upcoming November 30th elections, stated that more than 400 million Uruguayan pesos (approximately 13.28 million euros) would be invested in 2014 in a special program for informal housing settlements.
At the same time, the opposition party, the Partido Nacional, second in number of votes in the first-round elections day held on October 26th, has proposed a strategy to achieve the goal of a country without slums. They promise to “relocate people living in slums, especially those groups located in highly polluted areas or in zones that are more likely to be flooded.”
What Villa Ferrando is asking the candidates of any party for is support before they become abandoned and forgotten. “We want them to be a little bit more concerned about us. We are not here in the slum by choice, but because we are needy people,” said a neighbor while she walked by. But her voice was lost in the sounds of the thunderstorm that was getting ever closer.
César Dezfuli and María Sanz
César Dezfuli is a Spanish photojournalist based in Buenos Aires. During the last week he was in Uruguay with a journalist colleague, María Sanz, covering the floods that took place in the southern part of Uruguay, specifically in the city of Colonia del Sacramento, where 150 families had to be evacuated. The area suffers flooding regularly, involving people in social exclusion who are waiting to be relocated by the local government to houses which are owned by a Finnish paper company, but since three years ago when they were promised that they would be moved to the houses nothing has happened, even though the government knows they are living in a flooded area.
This story, beyond being a natural disaster, illustrates a particular case of exclusion of the right to housing, the reporters felt.
In this captivating first hand account of the situation in South Sudan’s IDP camps, South Sudanese Assistant Director for Information and Media at the Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, Afayoa Richard Metaloro, details the actuality of life in the camps, their problems, and some of the measures currently being taken and proposed as solutions for the gender based violence and other issues that plague the lives of residents there.
The camps were set up by the United Nations and other international aid groups to shelter and provide basic human requirements to South Sudanese and others who were displaced by the civil conflict that has raged in the country since Dec. 2013.
Some 30,000 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) are being protected by the United Nations in the nations capital, Juba, and 100,000 live in Protection of Civilians (PoC) camps nationwide.
The humanitarian situation across the entire nation of South Sudan remains “dire,” according to the UN. To date, almost 2 million people have been displaced in a nation of 11.3 million. Of those, 1.35 have been displaced internally, while approximately 500,000 have relocated to neighboring countries.
We want to go home whether there is peace or not in South Sudan. The government and rebels must know that they are also citizens of South Sudan, thus deserve equal rights. South Sudanese IDPs are in despair!
In my visit to the IDP camps in Juba–Protection of Civilians (PoC) camps–the IDPs there expressed the bitterness of their situations living in the PoCs, saying that whether there is peace or not, they are eager to move out of the Pocs! To where? Is it safe out there? And who to depend on remained a big and challenging question to all the humanitarian actors working in South Sudan. The living conditions of the IDP’s living in the camps has remained a very big challenge, as the situation has pushed them deep into the misery from where recovery is difficult if not impossible. They are cut off from carrying out livelihood activities, despite the efforts of the humanitarian community in the emergency response to attempt to save lives.
This however, came after several clashes that occurred between the IDP communities within the PoCs, shortages of funding from the donors to the NGOs that led to the cut off of some services, denial by agencies to register new arrivals, incidents of sexual harassment of women and girls by members of various groups such as the UN and and other NGOs, armed groups and the IDP communities within the camps, lack of effective representation for the voice of the voiceless, etc.
The government, since the fighting broke out in South Sudan on Dec.15, 2013, payed little attention to the needs of the IDPs living in camps, yet it is a constitutional mandate that a sovereign state ensures the protection and service provision of the affected population in times of civil conflict. Surprisingly, little was done by the government, which pretends to implementing the international humanitarian law despite the huge challenges encountered by humanitarian agencies in delivering humanitarian assistance to needy people. These barriers to assistance include impediments to access the target people, road blocks that charge huge amounts of cash, rape cases, ill treatment and detentions, and kidnapping and looting of humanitarian items. It is not as if these problems make up the only observations in the humanitarian intervention; the worst case scenarios have been practiced by the rebel side, where there has been a very large number of children abducted for child-soldier recruitment, as well as massacres of innocent lives, arbitrary arrests, detentions, etc.
Many of the threats to women and girls highlighted by assessment participants can and should be mitigated by the humanitarian response. It is the obligation of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) and other humanitarian actors to ensure that relief services are not only not harmful, but are also proactive in their interventions to alleviate risks and make the camps a safer environment for women, girls, boys and men.
As the cooks, cleaners, and caretakers of the family, women and girls ensure lifesaving relief services are used at the household level. The humanitarian community is doing a disservice to families, if relief interventions do not fully incorporate in their lifesaving activities the safety issues that women and girls face as they carry out their essential contribution to their family’s well-being and health.
To overcome barriers in the community that prevent survivors from seeking services and to ensure that survivors feel welcome to seek assistance from the available services, outreach and awareness is important.
Awareness, however, is not enough to encourage survivors to report. GBV and health service providers need to build trust, and therefore must demonstrate that they support the interests of survivors. It is essential that they make concerted efforts to respect survivors by talking with them and listening to their needs and wishes. Confidentiality must be respected. All efforts should be made to ascertain the safest options for survivors before and during interventions to meet their needs for protection and efforts to access justice. Simultaneously, it is necessary to work with the community to change attitudes and practices that stigmatize survivors and create barriers for them to seek help and justice through extended social mobilization and awareness campaigns.
Read more: South Sudanese Propose “Reconciling Many Truths” to End Crisis, Form One Acceptable Narrative
Change has started but vigilance needs to be sustained
According to the camp managers, an assessment was conducted, and the humanitarian response began to mitigate some risks in ways that will have a positive impact on the safety of women and girls. A new extension has been opened and two-thirds of the population has moved to new residential areas that have been designed to be less congested and to ensure that access to essential infrastructures is more evenly balanced. Congestion and overcrowding has been the underlying factor in many of the risks of gender based violence (GBV) in the original PoC (tight alleys, hidden dark spaces, difficult access to latrines and water, crowded markets, etc).
Other improvements that can potentially lower risks of GBV have also started, according to the camps’ managers. The structures of the latrines in the new site are more private and safe. A water pipeline is being constructed to provide clean water directly to the site, which will mean that women do not have to take risks when getting water, because there will better quantity and reliable schedules. Handheld torches have been distributed to all households and streetlights are being purchased for installation. Activities targeting adolescent boys and girls are starting. A women’s committee has been formed. United Nations Police (UNPOL) conducts daily patrols and investigates offences agsinst the general public. A holding center is now operational to separate offenders of major public offences, such as rape, according to camp managers in the PoCs. Despite all these improvements claimed by the camp managers, it still has not restored the hope of the IDP community to believe that they can live in safety and move out of the PoCs to their desired locations.
By Afayoa Richard Metaloro
Photos: European Commission DG ECHO, United Nations Photo, Oxfam East Africa, Arsenie Coseac
Afayoa Richard Metaloro is the assistant director for Information and Media in the Relief and Rehabilitation Commission. He was born in South Sudan in 1986 and lived with his family in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia as refugees of the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983-2005). Metaloro completed his education in Mass Communication in Kampala and worked as editor and administrator at South Sudan’s electronic news portal, Sudan Tribune.
In April this year the EU passed a new piece of legislation aiming to halve use of thin plastic bags in the EU by 2017, compared to 2010 levels, with a further reduction target of 80% by 2019. In implementing the directive, member states are given the flexibility to decide whether to ban, tax or charge for thin plastic bags in order to achieve the targets.
The law only applies to thin, mostly single-use bags, with the ticker, sturdier plastic bags, which shops normally charge for, not currently being affected. However, a bone of contention at the moment is the use of Oxo-biodegradable bags. The issue revolves around their real versus claimed biodegradability, and therefore environmental impact, and whether they should be part of the accepted mix or just banned outright.
Oxo-biodegradable is used to describe bags made of a type of plastic containing specific oxidizing additives which cause it to fragment into tiny particles. The term however suggests that such plastic bio-degrades, when in reality it just breaks down into smaller fragments which still remain in the environment, albeit invisibly.
Some member states, notably Italy, want to see their outright ban, while others, notably Britain, are not so keen. Here such bags are marketed by UK Symphony Environmental, which says they are safe. The Oxo-biodegradable Plastics Association (OPA), speaking on behalf of Symphony Environmental, claims that a proposed ban on Oxo-biodegradable plastic is the result of lobbying by an Italian company with links to the Italian government, and that such a company has a completely bio-degradable alternative on the market, which they are keen to promote.
Clearly many interests are at stake here. It remains to be seen whether science will prevail in the negotiations.
In the meantime, some member states have already been proactive on this plastic bag matter for some time. In Ireland a 15 cent tax on plastic bags was introduced in 2002, and saw plastic bag usage decrease from an estimated 328 to 21 per head almost overnight. The current levy stands at 22 cent per bag, and was introduced in 2007 to bring usage down again after it had raised to 31 bags per head.
Denmark introduced a tax in 2004 on retailers giving out plastic bags, to encourage their charging customers for it, and promote reusable bags. At four bags per head per year as of 2014 (versus 466 in Portugal, Slovakia, Poland and Denmark) has the lowest per head plastic bag use compared to any other country in Europe.
France also recently followed suit, with a proposed ban of all thin, single use non-biodegradable plastic bags from supermarkets from 2016, and a proposed use of thicker reusable or paper bags being debated in Parliament this year. The measure is an evolution from a previous voluntary scheme that saw the number of plastic bags distributed by supermarkets drop from 10.5bn to 700m between 2002 and 2011. . If approved, the legislation could go even further with a ban on disposable plastic cutlery and crockery also, by 2020.
After investigating the eating habits of thousands of Americans, one factor was found to account for a significant difference in the healthiness of Americans: cooking meals at home. In a recent study from Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, people who cooked meals at home were found to eat consume fewer calories, fat, sugar and carbohydrates.
Julia Wolfson, MPP
“A difference of 150 calories per day over time can make a significant difference in dietary intake and health,” Julia Wolfson, MPP, PhD Candidate Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future-Lerner Fellow, and one of the authors of the study, told The Speaker.
And a difference of 150 calories per day was the finding. After analyzing data from over 9,000 participants aged 20 and older, the researchers found that when adults who cooked dinner once or less a week were compared with adults who cooked six to seven times a week, the people who cooked at home were eating a lot healthier. Those who cooked at home consumed 2,164 calories, 81 grams of fat and 119 grams of suger on average daily, while those who more often ate out consumed an average of 2,301 calories, 84 grams of fat and 135 grams of sugar.
“This difference indicates that a person who starts cooking more does not need to make drastic changes to their diet in order to see a beneficial impact, Wolfson told us. “These results show that just the act of cooking more frequently is associated with reduced intake of calories, fat, sugar and carbohydrates.”
The researchers also made other significant findings. Blacks were found to be more likely than whites to live in households where there was less home cooking, and individuals who worked over 35 hours per week outside the home were also found to cook less often at home.
“There are very real barriers to frequent cooking,” explained Wolfson. “Time constraints, cost of ingredients, resources and equipment to cook, and lack of access to fresh, healthy, and affordable ingredients. These barriers are more likely to impact lower-income populations, who… are more likely to be black.”
“Long work hours, inflexible schedules definitely make cooking very frequently more difficult for many people,” Wolfson told us. “Because encouraging more cooking at home has the potential to have a positive impact on obesity rates and diet quality, we need to find ways to support more frequent cooking at home. However, for those individuals for whom cooking at home is not feasible, we also need to invest in ways to make eating healthfully outside the home easier and more affordable.
“The most important takeaway is that more frequent cooking at home is associated with a healthier diet, regardless of whether one is trying to lose weight. If a person starts cooking more meals at home, they will be eating healthier by default.”
The report, “Is cooking at home associated with better diet quality or weight-loss intention?” was authored by Julia A. Wolfson and Dr Sara N. Bleich, an associate professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Bloomberg School, was supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and was published in the journal Public Health Nutrition.
